The finalists for the 2014 Locus Awards have been announced and I’m incredibly honored to see that my novel Homeland made the final five in the Young Adult category. The competition in that category is remarkably good company: Zombie Baseball Beatdown by Paolo Bacigalupi; Holly Black’s Coldest Girl in Coldtown, Cat Valente’s The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two (part of her wonderful Fairyland series) and The Summer Prince by Alaya Dawn Johnson.

As always, the Locus list is a great guide to the best sf/f published in the previous year. On this year’s list are some books I really enjoyed (like Stross’s Neptune’s Brood) and others I’ve got in my high-priority to-be-read pile, like Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane.

My sincere thanks to everyone who nominated Homeland for the prize; I couldn’t be more delighted!

2014 Locus Awards Finalists

For those of you who missed the audiobook in which Wil Wheaton reads my novel Homeland in the Humble Ebook Bundle, despair no longer! You can buy it DRM-free on the excellent Downpour.com, a site with many DRM-free audio titles.

Homeland (audiobook)

Chapter nine of Homeland opens with about 400 digits of Pi. When Wil Wheaton read the chapter, he soldiered through it, reading out Pi for a whopping four minutes! Here’s the raw studio audio (MP3) of Wil and director Gabrielle De Cuir playing numbers station.

There’s less than a week left during which you can get the independently produced Homeland audiobook through the Humble Ebook Bundle!

Before he died, Aaron Swartz wrote a tremendous afterword for my novel Homeland — Aaron also really helped with the core plot, devising an ingenious system for helping independent candidates get the vote out that he went on to work on. When I commissioned the indie audiobook of Homeland (now available in the Humble Ebook Bundle, I knew I wanted to have Aaron’s brother, Noah, read Aaron’s afterword, and Noah was kind enough to do so, going into a studio in Seattle to record a tremendous reading.

Here is Noah’s reading (MP3), released as a CC0 file that you can share without any restrictions. I hope you’ll give it a listen.

And a reminder that the complete Humble Ebook Bundle lineup is now available, including work from John Scalzi, Mercedes Lackey, and Ryan North, as well as the core bundle, which features Wil Wheaton, Holly Black, Steven Gould, and Scott Westerfeld!

I’m immensely proud and honored to once again be shortlisted for the Prometheus Award, for my novel Homeland. The Prometheus is given by the Libertarian Futurist Society, and I’ve won it for my books Little Brother and Pirate Cinema. As always, the Prometheus shortlist is full of great work, including both of Ramez Naam’s novels Crux and Nexus, both of which I enjoyed enormously. My thanks to the Libertarian Futurist Society and my congratulations to my fellow nominees! See you at the World Science Fiction convention in London this summer!

When Wil Wheaton was reading the audiobook for my novel Homeland (exclusively available through the Humble Ebook Bundle for the next nine days!), I had the great pleasure of listening to the raw, unedited studio recordings before they were mastered. Together with editor John Taylor Williams, we collected some of the best outtakes, which I’ve been posting here all week. Here’s the last one (MP3), in which Wil’s subconscious supposes that Marcus Yallow has a hankering to “melt some camels.”