HWA Lifetime Achievement & Specialty Press Winners

The 2009 Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement winners are Brian Lumley and William F. Nolan. The award is presented to an individual or individuals whose work has "substantially influenced the horror genre."

The winner of the 2009 HWA Specialty Press Award is Tartarus Press. The award is presented to "a specialty publisher whose work has contributed substantially to the horror genre, whose publications display general excellence, and whose dealings with writers have been fair and exemplary."

The awards will be presented at the World Horror Convention, to be held March 25-28, 2010, in Brighton, England.

Philip Klass (William Tenn) 1920-2010

Philip Klass, who wrote SF as William Tenn, 89, died February 7, 2010 of congestive heart failure.

Klass is best known for his satirical, humorous SF work. His first SF story was "Alexander the Bait" in Astounding (1946). Klass also wrote two novels, Of Men and Monsters (1968) and short novel A Lamp for Medusa (1968), and numerous non-fiction articles and essays, some of which were gathered in Hugo finalist Dancing Naked: The Unexpurgated William Tenn (2004). Klass was named SFWA Author Emeritus in 1999, and was Guest of Honor at the 2004 Worldcon.

Philip Klass was born May 9, 1920 in London. His family moved to New York when he was still a baby, and he grew up in Brooklyn. He served in the US Army during WWII as a combat engineer, and began writing in 1945 following his discharge. He taught English and comparative literature at Penn State for almost 25 years, retiring as professor emeritus. He is survived by wife Fruma and a daughter, Adina.

See the March issue of Locus for a complete obituary.
Photo credit Charles N. Brown 2001.

Fill out the Locus Poll and Survey

The Locus Poll & Survey is live!

Use this online form to cast your votes in the 40th Annual Locus Awards.

The deadline for voting is April 1, 2010. Winners will be announced at the Locus Awards Ceremony this June in Seattle.

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HarperCollins & Hachette Join Macmillan

Following the ongoing Amazon/Macmillan conflict, HarperCollins and Hachette have now joined Macmillan. These publishers want to renegotiate Kindle e-book prices on the so-called Agency Model, in which publishers set prices and retailers keep 30% of the sales price. Under this plan, publishers will be able to offer a higher price for books when they're first published, and reduce the prices over time, probably in a range from $14.99 to $5.99. Amazon prefers to price new bestsellers at $9.99, a price many publishers feel is unreasonably low.

A Hachette spokesman notes that the agency model isn't "a way to make more money on e-books. In fact, we make less on each e-book sale under the new model; the author will continue to be fairly compensated and our e-book agents will make money on every digital sale."

On January 31, 2010, in a public post, the Amazon Kindle team wrote, "We don't believe that all of the major publishers will take the same route as Macmillan." However, now three of the "big six" publishers are asking for agency-model pricing.

Macmillan titles are still not available for sale at Amazon, except through third-party vendors.

2009 Stoker Awards Preliminary Ballot

The 2009 Stoker Awards Preliminary Ballot has been released:

Superior Achievement in a Novel

• As Fate Would Have It, Michael Louis Calvillo (Bad Moon)

• Sacrifice, John Everson (Leisure)

• Eternal Vigilance II: Death of Illusions, Gabrielle Faust (Immanion)

• Twisted Ladder, Rhodi Hawk (Tor)

• Voracious, Alice Henderson (Jove)

• The Bone Factory, Nate Kenyon (Leisure)

• Audrey's Door, Sarah Langan (Harper)

• Patient Zero, Jonathan Maberry (St. Martin's Griffin)

• Quarantined, Joe McKinney (Lachesis)

• Cursed, Jeremy Shipp (Raw Dog Screaming Press)

Superior Achievement in a First Novel

• The Black Act, Louise Bohmer (Library of Horror)

• Breathers, S. G. Browne (Broadway Books)

• Slaughter!, Marcus Griffin (Alexandrian Archives)

• The Dead Path, Stephen M. Irwin (Hachette Australia)

• Solomon’s Grave, Daniel G. Keohane (Dragon Moon Press)

• Dismember, Daniel Pyle (Wild Child)

• The Forest of Hands and Teeth, Carrie Ryan (Delacorte

• Damnable, Hank Schwaeble (Jove)

• The Little Sleep, Paul Tremblay (Henry Holt)

• Slights, Kaaron Warren (Angry Robot)

Superior Achievement in Long Fiction

• Dreaming Robot Monster, Mort Castle (Mighty Unclean)

• The Hunger of Empty Vessels, Scott Edelman (Bad Moon)

• Rot, Michelle Lee (Skullvines)

• The Gray Zone, John R. Little (Bad Moon)

• "Diana and the Goong-Si", Lisa Morton (Midnight Walk)

• The Lucid Dreaming, Lisa Morton (Bad Moon)

• Black Butterflies, Kurt Newton (Sideshow)

• Doc Good's Traveling Show, Gene O’Neill (Bad Moon)

• Little Graveyard on the Prairie, Steven E. Wedel (Bad Moon)

• Mama Fish, Rio Youers (Shroud)

Superior Achievement in Short Fiction

• "Nub Hut", Kurt Dinan (Chizine 1/09)

• "One More Day", Brian Freeman (Shivers V)

• "Where Sunlight Sleeps", Brian Freeman (Horror Drive-In 4/16/09)

• "Blanket of White", Amy Grech (Blanket of White)

• "Keeping Watch", Nate Kenyon (Monstrous: 20 Tales of Giant Creature Terror)

• "Plague Dogs", Joe McKinney (Potters Field 3)

• "The Crossing of Aldo Ray", Weston Ochse (The Dead That Walk)

• "The Outlaws of Hill County", John Palisano (Harvest Hill)

• "In the Porches of My Ears", Norman Prentiss (Postscripts 18)

• "The Night Nurse", Harry Shannon (Horror Drive-In 7/15/09)

Superior Achievement in an Anthology

• Harlan County Horrors, Mari Adkins, ed. (Apex)

• He Is Legend: An Anthology Celebrating Richard Matheson, Christopher Conlon, ed. (Gauntlet)

• Mighty Unclean, Bill Breedlove, ed. (Dark Arts)

• Lovecraft Unbound, Ellen Datlow, ed. (Dark Horse)

• Poe, Ellen Datlow, ed. (Solaris)

• Dark Delicacies 3: Haunted, Del Howison & Jeff Gelb, eds. (Running Press)

• Butcher Shop Quartet 2, Frank J. Hutton, ed. (Cutting Block)

• British Invasion, Chris Golden, Tim Lebbon & James Moore, eds. (Cemetery Dance)

• Midnight Walk, Lisa Morton, ed. (Dark House)

• Grants Pass, Amanda Pillar & Jennifer Brozek, eds. (Morrigan)

Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection

• Shards, Shane Jiraiya Cummings (Brimstone)

• Martyrs and Monsters, Robert Dunbar (DarkHart)

• Dark Entities, David Dunwoody (Dark Regions)

• Got to Kill Them All and Other Stories, Dennis Etchison (Cemetery Dance)

• Shades of Blood and Shadow, Angeline Hawkes (Dark Regions)

• Unhappy Endings, Brian Keene (Delirium)

• You Might Sleep..., Nick Mamatas (Prime)

• A Little Help from my Fiends, Michael McCarty (Sam's Dot)

• A Taste of Tenderloin, Gene O'Neill (Apex)

• In the Closet, Under the Bed, Lee Thomas (Dark Scribe)

Superior Achievement in Non-fiction

• Writers Workshop of Horror, Michael Knost (Woodland)

• Esoteria-Land, Michael McCarty (BearManor Media)

• Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues, Loren Rhoads, ed. (Simon & Schuster)

• Cinema Knife Fight, L.L. Soares & Michael Arruda (Fearzone)

• The Stephen King Illustrated Companion, Bev Vincent (Fall River)

• Stephen King: The Non-Fiction, Rocky Wood & Justin Brook (Cemetery Dance)

Superior Achievement in a Poetry Collection

• Double Visions, Bruce Boston (Dark Regions)

• North Left of Earth, Bruce Boston (Sam's Dot)

• Mortician's Tea, G. O. Clark (Sam's Dot)

• Starkweather Dreams, Christopher Conlon (Creative Guy Publishing)

• Voices from the Dark, Gary William Crawford (Dark Regions)

• Barfodder, Rain Graves (Cemetery Dance)

• Grave Bits, Todd Hanks (Skullvines)

• Toward Absolute Zero, Karen L. Newman (Sam's Dot)

• Chimeric Machines, Lucy A. Snyder (Creative Guy)

Horror Writers Association members will vote to choose final nominees from this list, and then vote again to determine winners. Winning titles will be announced at the World Horror Convention, March 25-28 2010, in Brighton, England.

Pratchett Promotes Voluntary Euthanasia

Sir Terry Pratchett, who was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's in 2007, is arguing for the legalization of assisted suicide in the UK. Pratchett says Alzheimer's "is not nice and I do not wish to be there for the endgame."

Pratchett, the first novelist to deliver the annual BBC Dimbleby lecture, used his speech, "Shaking Hands with Death," to advocate for the rights of the terminally ill, and even volunteered to be a test case before a euthanasia tribunal.

Says Pratchett: "If granny walks up to the tribunal and bangs her walking stick on the table and says 'Look, I've really had enough, I hate this bloody disease, and I'd like to die thank you very much young man', I don't see why anyone should stand in her way."

Full story at the Guardian.

2009 Locus Recommended Reading List

The 2009 Locus Recommended Reading List is now available online. The list is published as part of the 2009 Year in Review issue of Locus (February 2010). An extensive survey of SF publishing for 2009, the issue includes year-end essays by Locus reviewers discussing recommended titles; the Magazine Summary, which covers all the major print and online magazines and tracks numbers of stories published; the Book Summary, which looks at publisher reorganizations, imprint changes and new imprints, and charts all of the genre books seen, breaking them down by format, publisher, imprint, category, etc. It also includes the pull-out ballot for the Locus Poll and Survey.