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The 2011 Locus award winners have been announced: Science Fiction Novel Blackout/All Clear, by Connie Willis Fantasy Novel Kraken, by China Miéville First Novel The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, by N.K. Jemisin Young Adult Novel Ship Breaker, by Paolo Bacigalupi Novella The Lifecycle of Software Objects, by Ted Chiang Anthology Warriors, edited by George R.R. Martin [...]

You might have read that Carrie, Brian De Palma’s excellent 1976 movie based on Stephen King’s first novel, is being remade…or rebooted…resomethinged, anyway. (See this Hollywood Reporter story, for example.) Do we need it? Sure, De Palma’s movie isn’t exactly 100% faithful to the book, but it’s chilling and memorable. It also has the best [...]

There are five contenders in the Fantasy novel category for the 2011 Locus Awards presented by the  Locus Science Fiction Foundation: Under Heaven, by Guy Gavriel Kay Kraken, by China Miéville Who Fears Death, by Nnedi Okorafor The Fuller Memorandum, by Charles Stross The Sorcerer’s House, by Gene Wolfe Winners in fifteen categories, including science [...]

My new year’s resolution was to read more widely, even wildly; I asked REaD ALERT subscribers what I should read and received many strong suggestions. From these suggestions I created a short list. Given my reviewing duties at Booklist, I was sure it had to be a short list, and I was right; it wasn’t until my [...]

Most of the awards we post here on Likely Stories are for book-length works of fiction and nonfiction—and most of the winners are not first-time authors. But there are some contests for beginners, too. The L. Ron Hubbard Writers and Illustrators of the Future contest is designed to give an early-career boost to aspiring sf authors [...]

Well, I finally had a chance to see Repo Men, the movie based on Eric Garcia’s novel The Repossession Mambo. I talked about the book here, calling it “a gritty near-future thriller with comic overtones [and] a Blade Runnerish feel to it,” and the movie is exactly the same. The performances by Jude Law, Forest [...]

In Michael Crichton’s Timeline (1999), a trio of graduate students travel back in time to medieval France to bring back their professor, who’s stranded in the year 1357. It’s not Crichton’s best novel — he has to work uncharacteristically hard to sell the scientific premise of the story — but it’s exciting, well written, and, as usual, [...]

According to this article at The Hollywood Reporter, Stephen King’s 1978 post-apocalyptic plague novel The Stand is coming to a movie theater near you. The Stand, which was more than 800 pages long in its original incarnation, and more than 1000 in its 1990 “complete and uncut” reissue, is one of King’s best novels. Rich [...]

I finally had a chance to catch the first season of The Walking Dead on AMC. Engineered by three-time Academy Award nominee Frank Darabont, the series is based on the comic book series created by Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore. The Walking Dead, if you’re not familiar with it, follows Kentucky deputy sheriff Rick Grimes [...]

So I caught a rerun of the SyFy Channel’s 2010 adaptation — true fans of the novel might use the word “desecration” — of the first two Riverworld novels by Philip Jose Farmer. To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971) and The Fabulous Riverboat (also ’71) are set in the same world, but they’re not especially [...]