I’m delighted to announce that my story for Interzone #254, ‘Marielena’, forms part of the selection for Allan Kaster’s The Year’s Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction 7. Here’s the rather wonderful line-up:
1. “Marielena” by Nina Allan
2. “Covenant” by Elizabeth Bear
3. “The Magician and LaPlace’s Demon” by Tom Crosshill
4. “Sadness” by Timon Esaias
5. “Amicae Aeternum” by Ellen Klages
6. “Red Light, and Rain” by Gareth L. Powell
7. “The Sarcophagus” by Robert Reed
8. “In Babelsberg” by Alastair Reynolds
9. “Passage of Earth” by Michael Swanwick
10. “The Colonel” by Peter Watts
What makes this anthology especially interesting and special for me is that it is an audio collection, bringing back happy memories of an old ‘Best Science Fiction Stories’ I had on tape some many years ago. The percentage of fiction I ‘read’ on audio is relatively small, but I love being read to, and so I tend to listen to those audio books I do have many times over – I know sections of Dolores Claiborne and Rose Madder (I adore Stephen King on audio best of all, for some reason, especially when King himself is the reader) more or less by heart. It’s the same with those old SF stories – Karen Joy Fowler’s ‘The Poplar Street Study’, Roger Zelazny’s ‘Permafrost’, John Varley’s ‘Options’, and a story by Joe Halderman about a painter and a law student (Rhonda?) and a murderous businessman whose title I can’t remember, though Halderman’s expert rendition of watercolour technique remains with me still.
There’s something deeply compelling about hearing a story read aloud, and I look forward to the release of this anthology with great anticipation.