In the second half of the year I’m again involved in the organization of a number of events which all will be announced in detail here later. Here’s an overview:

On June 14th and 15th writers, artists, editors and readers of the German sf magazine Nova, that I edit in collaboration with Olaf G. Hilscher and assistant editor Sven Klöpping, will celebrate the magazine’s ten year anniversary with a number of events in Wuppertal. It will start on Friday 14th with a reading from Nova‘s international sister magazine InterNova. Thorsten Küper, Sven Klöpping and Uwe Post will each read an own story and a story from a foreign colleague published in InterNova. On Saturday, starting at 19:00, a Nova anniversary party will take place in Culture Club Barmen, the home base of longtime Nova co-editor Ronald M. Hahn’s band Wupperkrampen.

On Saturday, July 13th we will repeat the well-received Science Fiction Ladies Night in Wuppertal, a group-reading of female German sf writers, this time with Gabriele Behrend and Gloria Manderfeld, already present in the successful premiere in 2012, and newcomer Jacqueline Montemurri from Velbert, probably again in Udo Hösterey’s popular second hand bookshop.

The next Second Life event after the Mumtaz Ambient Music Night that I plan will be a literary evening in the Kaishi Chou Okiya, a beautiful recreation of a classical Japanese village. It will be dedicated to the famous Japanese writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa, best known for the story on which Akira Kurosawa‘s classic movie Rashomon is based, with an introduction to the life and work of the writer and a reading of several of his stories. It is scheduled for early August. More news soon.

Despite some discouraging recent developments that my fellow Thorsten Küper aka Kueperpunk Korhonen reported about in his blog, cultural events in the 3d Internet world of Second Life continue. On Saturday, May 25th I will be for the second time this year host of an event in the beautiful Mumtaz Taj Mahal. This time I will present atmospheric live electronic music by Jana Kyomoon and Automatic Quandry. Yours truly will also play a few pieces. The long music night will start at 12:00 Second Life Time resp . 21:00 Central European Time. The location is at http://slurl.com/secondlife/danbi/118/168/28

Thanks to the invited musicians, to Freya Beresford and Voodoo Spyker  – builders and owners of the Mumtaz – and as always to Christian Günther for creating the attached flyer that may be used for announcing the event (please with a note to Christian or me).

No less than four works from the anniversary issue 20 of the German sf magazine Nova that I edit with Olaf G. Hilscher have been nominated for the Kurd Laßwitz Preis, the most important German science fiction prize. Apart from the stories by Karstel Kruschel, Thorsten Küper and Michael Marrak cover illustrator Timo Kümmel has been nominated for his first work for Nova. Matthias Falke’s story “Der Bruch der nordwestlichen Stelze” from Nova 19 and my own novella “Zur Feier meines Todes” (included in my collection Die letzten Tage der Ewigkeit) are also nominated in the category best story of the year.

After all my previous novellas have won German sf awards I don’t expect too much this time, especially considering some very strong stories by my Nova fellows. But who knows -

After moving to a new place – with thousands of books and stacks of unsorted papers a mess of biblical proportion that I don’t intend to repeat in this life – I’m back at work and it’s time to catch up with what has been left undone and to update my homepage.

At the Dortcon in March – one of the largest science fiction conventions in Germany –  editors Frank Hebben and André Skora introduced their anthology Fieberglasträume (sic!), published by Begedia Verlag, a selection of new cyberpunk stories by well and lesser known German writers, illustrated by German sf artists. I’m included with my short story “Der Sturz” and I’ve also translated the foreword by Rob Boyle. One of the highlights of the book – and one of the best German sf stories of recent years – is surely “Demeters Garten” by my regular brother-in-arms Thorsten Küper.

A first review of the book can be found here.

I’ve just uploaded the following stories at the international sf e-zine InterNova that I edit in collaboration with Fran Ontanaya and Sven Klöpping:

In the fiction section

Gustavo Bondoni (Argentina): An Elephant of a Different Color 

Ahmed A. Khan (Canada): The Presonic Man

Shweta Narayan (India): Kohl-lined

Aleksandar Žiljak (Croatia): Sex and the Deap-Sea Anglerfish

And for the first time several Spanish originals:

Luis Ángel Cofiño (Spain): La manzana de Newton

Víctor Miguel Gallardo Barragán (Spain): Lo que significa tu nombre

José Antonio Suárez (Spain): La Jaula

Each issue of the relaunched InterNova that we plan to start in March will include one Spanish original and occassionally French and German originals as well.

Small publisher Dieter von Reeken recently published Im Labor der Visionen, a collection of essays and lectures about science fiction and fantasy written between 2000 and 2012 by renowned Austrian critic and editor Franz Rottensteiner. It includes an essay on my short fiction that was initially published as an introduction to my first story collection Die letzten Tage der Ewigkeit at Wurdack Verlag.

I’m becoming notorious for my length miscalculations. After a slight systematic error when compiling stories for Nova 20 forced us to postpone two stories to the next issue and after I overrun my 30 minute reading at the Festival der Liebe by mere 50 %, I managed to even top this during the Science Fiction Night in the beautiful Mumtaz Taj Mahal in Second Life. A little too eager to read my novelette “The Spirts” completely I almost overstretched the patience of my partner of the evening. ambient musician Jan Pulsford aka Jana Kyomoon. Well, almost. After playing a short intermezzo between the two parts of my reading, she was still in good mood enough to play another set of 40 minutes after I was finally finished. Thanks for that, Jana! In the end, I think, all were satisfied and the event was well-received by about 30 visitors in the course of the night. Above avarage for cultural events in SL! Freya and Voodoo. the builders and owners of the Mumtaz, are interested in further events.

To all those whose patience I’ve stretched in recent events: I pledge to make it better next time. There are ideas to organize a music night in the Mumtaz on Friday, March 22nd. This time Jana will be the main and the starting act and I will wait very, very patiently. Promised! More news here soon.

Below some impressions of the evening as I experienced it.