The 2011 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards were announced at Comic-Con International in San Diego, July 22, 2011. Some awards of particular interest to SF/fantasy fans follow: Best Single Issue (or One-Shot): Hellboy: Double Feature of Evil, by Mike Mignola & Richard Corben (Dark Horse) Best New Series: American Vampire, by Scott Snyder, Stephen King, [...]

Japanese science fiction writer, screenwriter, and essayist “Sakyo Komatsu”, (Minoru Komatsu), 80, died in Osaka of pneumonia on Tuesday July 26, 2011. Komatsu authored the disaster novel Japan Sinks! (1973), which inspired two live-action movies and a television series. The Komatsu Sakyo Anime Gekijo anime TV series was also inspired by his stories. Komatsu’s work [...]

The World Fantasy Awards Lifetime Achievement Winners for 2011 are Peter S. Beagle and Angélica Gorodischer. The awards are presented annually to individuals who have demonstrated outstanding service to the fantasy field. The World Fantasy Awards nomination ballot has also been announced. Winners will be announced at this year’s World Fantasy Convention, to be held [...]

Publisher Philip Rahman, 59, died July 23, 2011 after years of declining health and personal difficulties. Rahman co-founded weird fiction publisher Fedogan & Bremer with his friend Dennis Weiler in 1989. Their first book was Colossus: The Collected Science Fiction of Donald Wandrei, and they went on to publish books by Robert M. Price, Basil [...]

The James White Award Short Story competition has announced that Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Juliet E. McKenna, and Andy Cox will judge the 2011 competition. Story submissions must be original and previously unpublished, and entry is free and open to non-professional writers. The deadline for the competition is January 31, 2012. The prize is £200 plus [...]

The Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society has purchased a new building to store its library and hold meetings and activities, at 6012 Tyrone, Van Nuys, CA 91401. The new building replaces a building half the size, acquired in 1977, which in turn had replaced a meeting place bought in 1973; previously it met in public [...]

The New York Comic Con is close to selling out. According to show manager Lance Fensterman, all of the “Special Access VIP tickets are sold out, and we’ve only got a small number of Anime Access and Ultimate Access tickets remaining…. And last year, we sold out of weekend and Saturday tickets before the show.” [...]

This post has been revised from the original announcement. The Science Fiction Poetry Association has re-announced winners of the 2011 Rhysling Awards, originally presented on July 16, 2011, during Readercon 23 and corrected on July 23, 2011. According to Mike Allen’s blog, “the original first and second place winners in the short category were both [...]

Katherine MacLean is the winner of the 2011 Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award, intended to bring attention to lesser-known science fiction and fantasy authors. The award was announced at Readercon 23, held July 12-15, 2011 in Burlington MA. MacLean accepted the award in person. She is best known for Nebula Award-winning novella “The Missing Man” and [...]

The long-time home of author J.G. Ballard (1930-2009) in Shepperton, UK, has gone on the market. The asking price for the house is just under £320,000.  Ballard lived in the small, suburban residence for 49 years, and wrote many of his most famous works there, including Crash and Cocaine Nights. According to reporter Rob Sharp, it [...]