Nebula Award Winners
Congrats to Ted Chiang, whose F&SF story "The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate" has won the Nebula Award for best novelette! Kudos, Ted–well deserved! If you haven’t read it yet, it’s still available on our website (and is still currently a finalist for the Hugo Award).
Here’s the full list of winners:
Novel: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon
Novella: "Fountain of Age" by Nancy Kress
Novelette: "The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate" by Ted Chiang
Short Story: "Always" by Karen Joy Fowler
Script: Pan’s Labyrinth by Guillermo del Toro
Andre Norton Award: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling
Author Emeritus: Ardath Mayhar
Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award: Michael Moorcock
Mar. 2008 Favorite Story Poll
March Acquistions
Here’s a list of the stories we acquired in March:
- Stratosphere by Henry Garfield (3000 words)
- Pump Six by Paolo Bacigalupi (13,000 words, 2nd serial)
- The Unstrung Zither by Yoon Ha Lee (8,200 words)
- The Price of Silence by Deborah J. Ross (9,200 words)
- Falling Angel by Eugene Mirabelli (3250 words)
- Run! Run! by Jim Aikin (3,250 words)
- How the Day Runs Down by John Langan (16,200 words)
Free Fiction Friday: Lucius Shepard
Lucius Shepard is the award-winning author of innumerable classics, many of which have appeared in the pages of F&SF such as “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule” and “The Jaguar Hunter” (which you can read online at Infinity Plus). And, of course, he’s currently up for the Hugo Award, Nebula Award, and Locus Award for best novella, for his F&SF story, “Stars Seen Through Stone.”
Interview: Alex Jeffers on “Firooz and His Brother”
Alex Jeffers–author of “Firooz and His Brother,” which appears in our May 2008 issue–said in an interview that the story is about Firooz, a young merchant traveling between Samarkand and Baghdad, who encounters a young dog where no dog should be. “After his own hound fatally wounds the puppy, Firooz discovers she had been guarding a baby abandoned in the wilderness,†Jeffers said. “Firooz accepts the baby as a gift from God, names him Haider, and raises him as his younger brother.â€
The story came about as the result of a novel Jeffers has been working on for a long time. “For longer than I like to think about, off and on, I’ve been working on a big book called Dreamherder, a work of high fantasy that alternates settings between this world here/now and another,†he said. “At various points in the narrative, when the water needs muddying, the protagonist’s best friend tells an emblematic story from the life of his many-times-great grandparent, Haider. ‘Firooz and His Brother’ is the first: Haider’s origin story. Novelistic logic required brothers with benefits; the dog; Haider’s ability to change gender and his origin in the other world. The storyteller, a Pakistani of proud Mughal ancestry, gave me the setting. Those givens in place, I made a pot of Turkish coffee (not really — it was espresso), put on a CD of eighteenth-century Ottoman art songs, and the story wrote itself.†Read more
