Yesterday, July 10, 2011, the eminent SF and fantasy editor and sartorialist David G. Hartwell turned 70. At a party at his home in Pleasantville, New York, literary entrepeneur Henry Wessells surprised David with a beautifully-bound book entitled A Festschrift for David Hartwell On The Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, “Printed not Published in an edition of one copy” and featuring original fiction and nonfiction in David’s honor by Brian Aldiss, Rudy Rucker, Michael Bishop, Eileen Gunn, Michael Swanwick, and the mysterious “Shirley U. Jestson.”

Tor.com is pleased to present what may or may not be a “reprint” from that unique volume, depending on whether you consider an edition of one copy to constitute “publishing”—a 2500-word symmetrina by Michael Bishop, entitled “Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes.”

Welcome news from Gollancz, that most distinguished of SF publishers:

The third edition of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, the definitive reference work in the field, will be released online later this year by the newly-formed ESF, Ltd, in association with Victor Gollancz, the SF & Fantasy imprint of the Orion Publishing Group, whose support will enable the text to be available free to all users. This initial “beta” version, containing about three-quarters of the total projected content, will be unveiled in conjunction with Gollancz’s celebrations of its 50th anniversary as a science fiction publisher.

The first edition of the Encyclopedia, whose founder and general editor was Peter Nicholls, appeared in 1979, and contained over 700,000 words. A second edition, edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls, appeared in 1993 and contained over 1.3 million words. Both editions won the Hugo Award from the World Science Fiction Convention, in addition to numerous other honours. The beta version of the third edition will contain some 3 million words, including about 12,000 entries and well over 100,000 internal links. The entries cover every area of science fiction, including authors, illustrators, movies, music, games, and fanzines. The text will be completed, through monthly updates, by the end of 2012.

The third edition has been overseen by John Clute and David Langford, along with editor emeritus Peter Nicholls and managing editor Graham Sleight, plus a cast of thousands, ranging from contributing editors wrangling entire categories to experts writing a few entries on people, stories, and subjects of their particular speciality. Both previous editions of the Encyclopedia Galactica of SF were outstanding (and immeasurably useful!) works of scholarship, so it’s great to hear that most of the third edition will be available soon, and for free.

As Irene said, congrats to all of last night's Nebula Award winners—but a special, brief, highly partisan WOO HOO to Kij Johnson, whose “Ponies” is the first story from Tor.com to win a major award. You can read it here.

The finalists for the 2011 Hugo Awards have been announced.

The Hugo Awards have been given since 1953, and every year since 1955, by the annual World Science Fiction Convention (the “Worldcon”). The first Worldcon occurred in New York City in 1939, and Worldcons have been held annually since then except during World War II. This year’s Worldcon, Renovation, will be held in Reno, Nevada from August 17 through 21, 2011; its Guests of Honor will be Ellen Asher, Charles N. Brown (in memoriam), Tim Powers, and Boris Vallejo.

Hugo Award finalists are selected by members of the previous Worldcon and of the upcoming one; winners are selected by members of the upcoming one. All Attending, Young Adult, and Supporting members of Renovation can vote on the final ballot.  For more information about voting in the Hugo Awards, or becoming a member of Renovation, please click here.

The winners will be announced Saturday, August 20th, 2011, during the Hugo Awards Ceremony at Renovation in Reno, Nevada.

The nominees for the 2011 Hugo Awards are:

[Nominees below the cut]

Once again, a pile of Tor.com's original stories are becoming available as 99-cent digital chapbooks on various e-book platforms, including the Kindle store, Apple’s iBooks store, Barnes & Noble’s e-bookstore, the Google Books store, the Kobo store, and the Sony Reader store.

As a result, almost every original story published on Tor.com, from our mid-2008 launch up until today, is now available through these e-book channels, complete with the original Tor.com art on their “covers.” Going forward, new original Tor.com fiction will appear simultaneously on the site (in inline HTML and audio, both free) and from the major e-book retailers (in versions designed for the current generation of e-readers and reader programs). In other words, you can read it for free here and you can buy a handsome edition for your e-book reader. Or both!

As a senior editor at Tor Books and the manager of our science fiction and fantasy line, I rarely blog to promote specific projects I’m involved with, for reasons that probably don’t need a lot of explanation. But every so often a book compels me to break my own rule. And Among Others by Jo Walton, officially published today, is such a book.

[Read more]

Mr. Michael Swanwick, of the Philadephia Swanwicks, deals out the scoop on “How to Write a Collaborative Story,” sharing the tale of how Tor.com’s 2010 winter holiday tale “The Trains That Climb the Winter Tree” came to be written by Mr. Swanwick with Ms. Eileen Gunn (late of the East Cambridge Ostrogoths), and later published by Tor.com. Like everything ever posted to a blog by a professional science fiction writer, Mr. Swanwick’s narrative is 100% true. Because they wouldn’t let it go on the Internet if it wasn’t true.

Our Christmas story for 2010, “The Trains that Climb the Winter Tree” by Michael Swanwick and Eileen Gunn, is shocking, lyrical, inventive, and as you might guess, a little mad. It will appear on Tor.com on Tuesday, December 21, but if you’re a registered member of the site you’ll be getting it tomorrow—a week early—personally emailed to you by the elves and wood sprites who labor in our vast network operations center deep beneath the sub-basement of the Flatiron Building.

Becoming a member of Tor.com costs nothing and confers upon you a long and impressive list of powers and privileges. Young John W. “Biff” Scalzi joined Tor.com in July 2008 and now he is a full-time novelist with an attractive family, a large house, a popular weblog, and dictatorial command over the armies of the Science Fiction Writers of America. Coincidence? We think not. Aren’t you sorry you still aren’t a member? Sign up or log in to view the story at this link.

It’s the time of year when news of the contents of various annual Year’s Best short-fiction collection begins to emerge. So far, we’ve heard word of three Tor.com stories appearing in three different annuals:

Charlie Jane Anders’ “The Fermi Paradox Is Our Business Model” will appear in The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2011 (Prime), edited by Rich Horton.

Jay Lake & Ken Scholes’ “The Starship Mechanic” will appear in The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Volume 28 (St. Martin’s Press), edited by Gardner Dozois.

And “The Man with the Knives,” by Ellen Kushner, originally published as a stand-alone chapbook and reprinted on Tor.com on December 1, will appear in The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Five (Night Shade Books), edited by Jonathan Strahan.

Congratulations to all the authors involved!

Patrick Nielsen Hayden is a senior editor at Tor Books and, with Liz Gorinsky, one of the two fiction editors of Tor.com. Read more about him on the Tor.com About Us page.

On August 17, Tor Books will publish the first half of William H. Patterson Jr.’s two-volume authorized biography of Robert A. Heinlein, Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century: Volume 1, 1907-1948: Learning Curve. In commemoration of this, we’ve convened a kind of online panel discussion of Heinlein and of the biography—of his work, his methods, and his legacy, and of what light the biography sheds on all of those.

[Read more]

Starting tomorrow, twelve of the first thirteen original stories published on Tor.com will be available on a bunch of e-book platforms, including the Kindle store, Apple’s iBooks store, Barnes & Noble’s e-bookstore, the Kobo store, and the Sony Reader store, for 99 cents each. These are in effect little e-chapbooks, complete with the original Tor.com art on their “covers,” designed to work properly with the current generation of e-book devices and reading programs.

The stories going up are:

• “After the Coup” by John Scalzi
• “Down on the Farm” by Charles Stross
• “Shade” by Steven Gould
• “The Girl Who Sang Rose Madder” by Elizabeth Bear
• “Catch ’Em in the Act” by Terry Bisson
• “Jack and the Aktuals, Or, Physical Applications of Transfinite Set Theory” by Rudy Rucker
• “A Water Matter” by Jay Lake
• “The Film-makers of Mars” by Geoff Ryman
• “Firstborn” by Brandon Sanderson
• “Errata” by Jeff VanderMeer
• “Escape to Other Worlds with Science Fiction” by Jo Walton
• “A Weeping Czar Beholds the Fallen Moon” by Ken Scholes

A thirteenth story, Cory Doctorow’s “The Things That Make Me Weak And Strange Get Engineered Away,” will join these soon on several of these platforms.

As these stories become available for sale, they’ll remain freely available on Tor.com. We’ll be taking down the downloadable versions—the ePub and PDF files, and so forth—but the stories will still be complete on the site, along with their downloadable audio. This is all an experiment on everybody’s part, Amazon’s and Apple’s and B&N’s and everyone else’s, and ours as well. So bear with us as we fire up the Tesla coils in the sub-basement of the Flatiron Building. (Distant thuds, screams, the sound of enormous wings...)

On August 17, Tor Books will publish the first half of William H. Patterson’s much-anticipated two-volume authorized biography of Robert A. Heinlein, Robert A. Heinlein In Dialogue with His Century: Volume I, Learning Curve, 1907-1948. In commemoration of this, Tor editor Stacy Hague-Hill has asked several of the great and the good of modern SF to identify their own favorite Heinlein novel and explain why. I’ve read all the pieces she got back, and they may intrigue and surprise you. They’re going up on the Tor/Forge blog, one a week, beginning with David Brin’s.

Wait, “Tor/Forge blog”? Then what are you reading right now, you very reasonably ask? What you’re reading is Tor.com, a unit of Macmillan USA set up to be a venue for original fiction, comics, and discussion of the entire field of SF and fantasy, in all media and from all sources. Tor.com is run by a small group of Macmillan employees, not all of whom work for Tor Books. Tor/Forge’s blog is run entirely by Tor employees, and it exists to unabashedly promote and draw attention to books published by Tor, Forge, and other imprints of the Macmillan-owned-publishing-company-known-officially-as-Tom-Doherty-Associates-LLC-but-unofficially-to-most-people-as-just-plain-Tor-Books. (Say that fast six times while standing on your head.) A lot of the Tor/Forge blog’s content is mirrored from the monthly Tor Books email newsletter (which you can subscribe to here), but it also features material, such as the pieces making up Stacy’s weekly Heinlein series, that’s unique to the blog itself.

Meanwhile, you ask, isn’t Tor.com planning to do something of its own to tie in with the imminent publication of Patterson’s massive Heinlein biography? Why yes, in fact, we are. And we’ll tell you about it as the book’s release approaches. Watch the skies.

Rachel Swirsky, whose Tor.com stories from 2009 wound up as finalists for (variously) the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards, is attending Launch Pad, a NASA-funded workshop in which SF writers get a crash course in modern astronomy, via guest lectures from working scientists and also via hands-on use of the University of Wyoming’s telescopes. And she’s live-blogging the experience in a series of fascinatingly detailed guest posts to Jeff VanderMeer’s blog

Tor.com has covered Launch Pad before—David Levine wrote up his experience attending the workshop in 2008.

(But are there really people who think the moon isn’t visible during the day? What, do they never look up? Oy.)

Patrick Nielsen Hayden is a senior editor at Tor Books and, with Liz Gorinsky, one of the two fiction editors of Tor.com. Read more about him on the Tor.com About Us page.

To commemorate our upcoming second birthday, John Scalzi has written an original short story which will go public on Tor.com on our actual anniversary, July 20. But! If you’re already a registered member of Tor.com, this morning we’re emailing you this new Scalzi opus directly, a week in advance of its general availability. Call it our “thank you” for being part of Tor.com. And if you’re not a member but are now saying to yourself “Drat! I'd better go become a member!”, once you sign up (it’s free) and log in, you’ll be able to follow this link to the Scalzi tale.

And why wouldn’t you want to become a member? Membership in Tor.com gives you powers on the site unavailable to the common horde. It makes you more attractive to members of the appropriate sex, and it builds strong bones and a glossy coat. Tor.com members include writers, agents, rocket scientists, ballerinas, astronauts, and international men and women of mystery. Act now, act without thinking, sign up today.

Moreover, to answer the question that you were surely about to ask, Mr. Scalzi’s new narrative is, as you would expect, a very serious, deeply rigorous, and morally earnest work that will bring us all face to face with some of the most salient issues of our time. Called “The President’s Brain Is Missing.”

The Mythopoeic Society has announced the winners of the 2010 Mythopoeic Fantasy Awards. Congratulations to the winners, and particular congratulations to our own Jo Walton!

Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature

Jo Walton, Lifelode (NESFA Press)

Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature

Grace Lin, Where the Mountain Meets the Moon (Little, Brown)

Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies

Dimitra Fimi, Tolkien, Race, and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)

Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Myth and Fantasy Studies

Marek Oziewicz, One Earth, One People: The Mythopoeic Fantasy Series of Ursula K. Le Guin, Lloyd Alexander, Madeleine L’Engle and Orson Scott Card (McFarland, 2008)

Today is the birthday of one of the towering figures of twentieth-century science fiction, Robert A. Heinlein, famously born on 7/7/07.

Today is also the seventieth birthday of Ringo Starr.

Let the numerology commence!

The 2010 Locus awards, voted on by the readers of Locus, the magazine of the professional science fiction and fantasy field, were announced today in Seattle, Washington. Congratulations to the winners!

[Click for the winners!]

Now free on the US version of Apple’s “iBooks” store: Tor.com’s four major award finalists from 2009, nicely done up as elegant ePub files for your iPad (and, once iOS 4 ships on June 21, your iPhone).

• “Eros, Philia, Agape” by Rachel Swirsky, Hugo and Locus Award finalist
• “A Memory of Wind” by Rachel Swirsky, Nebula Award finalist
• “First Flight” by Mary Robinette Kowal, Locus Award finalist
• “Overtime” by Charles Stross, Hugo Award finalist

All four are also available for free in Amazon’s Kindle Store and the Sony Reader store; they’ll appear soon in some other channels as well. They’ll stay free until after the Hugo Awards are announced at Aussiecon 4 in Melbourne, Australia, over Labor Day Weekend.

wooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Thanks to NASA for making it possible for a bunch of SF writers and editors, here in Florida for the Nebula Awards weekend, to watch a rocketship take off. Also: woo.