I’m not great at self-promotion, but self-promotion is necessary these days, and this time it’s not all about me. I want to let people know that the site I review for, Fantasy Literature, is eligible to be nominated (and even win!) a Hugo Award. We qualify in the category of Best Fanzine.
There are 20 of us on Fantasy Literature’s staff. We live in the USA, Canada, Australia (our Australian reviewer won that country’s Best Fan Writer Award last years), the UK, Japan and Portugal. We have a handful – wait, a double handful! — of professionals; three lawyers, five academics and two editors. We are a smart, hard-working, irreverent bunch who love speculative fiction – we love reading it, playing games about it, watching movies and TV about it. And we love discussing it.
One thing that is special about us is our consistent review of audiobooks. With smart phones and apps like Audible from Amazon, many people have added books to their inventory along with podcasts and music. There are sites like The Guilded Earlobe (yes, I did spell it correctly) that only review audiobooks; we review both.
What I’ve liked best about the site, recently, is the number of author interviews we are doing; we’ve got in interview coming up with Robert Jackson Bennett, we just interviewed Daniel Jose Older about his wonderful new urban fantasy series. We’ve talked to Ann Leckie, Scott Hawkins and Liu Cixin. And that’s just a sampler.
What do I love most about our site? Other than the wealth of books that come to my attention (and that’s kind of a love/hate thing, actually… so many books!) I love this wild, zany, smart, thoughtful, caring group of people. We read broadly and deeply; we read closely; we debate passionately and we write thoughtfully.
Bottom line, we have created an awesome website that is a genuine resource for people interested in speculative fiction. If you’re voting for the Hugos this year, keep us in mind.