Tuesday, July 23, 2013

All Best

Published today, the 30th volume of Gardner Dozois' annual selection of the year's best science fiction stories.  It includes two stories by me, but don't let that put you off.  Gardner says: 'Every year is special, because every year good new writers come along, and every year the older writers continue to do really good work. It's exciting to watch the field evolve, and I don't think the overall level of literary quality in science fiction has ever been higher-and I've been watching the field for a long time.'

Some fun facts:
Annual editions of this anthology have been published continuously since 1984. At a rough count, the series as a whole has contained about 9,500,000 words of fiction, by hundreds of different authors. It has won the Locus Award for Best Anthology seventeen times, more than any other anthology series in history. Gardner Dozois has won fifteen Hugo Awards as Year's Best Editor, and has been inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Robert Silverberg said of the series 'The Dozois book is the definitive historical record of the history of the science-fiction short story' and called it "a wondrous treasure trove of great stories and an archive that has immeasurable historical significance." George R.R. Martin said 'The best that science fiction has to offer, chosen by the most respected editor in the field.  A copy belongs on the shelf of every SF reader.'

 The table of contents can be found here.



Also out today from Infinivox, the fifth edition of Allan Kaster's audiobook anthology, The Year's Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction. Which, yes, includes one of my stories. More details about the anthology and its contents here. Oh, and it's also available as an ebook on Kindle and Nook.

6 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Maybe add a zero to that total word count? I have a shelf of these (only missing #1), and it looks like about 20 tolstoys worth of book.

July 23, 2013 2:32 pm  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Yeah, I think you dropped a decimal - the individual volumes generally claim to have more than 250,000 or even 300,000 words (I've got all but the first 2).

July 24, 2013 7:44 am  
Blogger Paul McAuley said...

Good catch, will check count with Gardner as to exactly how many tolstoys the series weighs in at.

July 24, 2013 9:20 am  
Blogger Paul McAuley said...

Update - Gardner confirms there's a zero missing. So almost ten million words.

Thanks again, and well spotted.

July 24, 2013 4:56 pm  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Does this mean the tolstoy has been established as a unit of book length, equal to half a million words?

July 24, 2013 8:15 pm  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Cheers!

July 25, 2013 5:03 am  

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