“Some of them Closer” by Marissa Lingen will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy: 2012 edited by Rich Horton. Jennifer Konieczny interviews Lingen on the story.

When Mireille retrieves the three boxes she saved before leaving, she reflects, “Once you do the math on what will keep for a hundred years, it’s a lot easier to give away the things you can’t take with you.” What would you store for a hundred years?

I have here on my desk a little cup that glows sparklies when you shine ultraviolet light into it, and I put my late grandfather’s jewelry into it and my late great-grandmother’s jewelry. That would definitely go in the box, and depending on which relatives had gone before me, there might be a few more family pieces in it by then. A lot of what I’m emotionally attached to is either really easy to preserve digitally and recopy–this person’s books, that person’s photos–or very difficult to store for a hundred years intact. I have in my house my great-grandmother’s piano. If I do the math, it’s nearing a hundred years in the family already, and I have no intention of getting rid of it any time soon, but if I was going to be gone for a hundred years, could I store it? I don’t know. I don’t know if we could preserve my great-grandfather’s Kipling, but I’d sure try.

MORE: Read the whole story here!

Congratulations to Genevieve Valentine on her Locus Award nomination in the First Novel category for Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti.

And congratulations to future Prime author Robert Reed whose novella, The Ants of Flanders (F&SF 7-8/11), was also nominated. Prime Books will be publishing the first two volumes of his Diamond trilogy in 2013.

And congratulations to our own Sean Wallace for the nomination of Clarkesworld Magazine, in the Magazine category!

“Canterbury Hollow” by Chris Lawson will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy: 2012 edited by Rich Horton. Jennifer Konieczny interviews Lawson on the story.

How does your work as a family physician impact your writing?

For one thing, I’m much more familiar with biomedicine than other branches of science. Some of the stories I’ve written would never have occurred to me if I had no background in medicine. At least two of my stories were triggered by reading specific papers and wanting to explore the ideas raised (“Screening Test” and “Empathy” if anyone’s interested).

What a career in medicine gives a writer is an understanding of how people react to major life events. Not only have I seen people deal with terrible situations, I’ve seen lots of people do so with a wide range of responses. Much of the daily work of medicine is as mundane as any other job, of course. I have yet to see a trolley burst through the doors of an Emergency Department with a phalanx of people in blue scrubs yelling “STAT!”, although according to television it’s an hourly event. The real drama in medicine is slow, unfolding over months or years.

MORE: Read the whole story here!

“Rampion” by Alexandra Duncan will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy: 2012 edited by Rich Horton. Andrew Liptak interviews DeNiro on the story.

Your story is set at a time of growing religious strife: What lessons do you think carry over from this time period to the present day?

Unfortunately, I don’t think human beings have changed very much in the last millennium. We’re just as fractious, corrupt, and stubborn as we were at the turn of the 11^th century, and just as certain that our religion or political philosophy is the only correct one. Part of what I wanted to explore in “Rampion” was the damage fundamentalism can do to individual people and to a culture as a whole. However, I also wanted to discuss what a murky force it is. In my experience, fundamentalism often doesn’t come from one side alone – it’s an accumulation of fear, hate, and confusion from many vantage points, and it eventually grows to the point that it blinds us to the possibility of a third way.

MORE: Read the whole story here!