We are delighted to announce that our 2012 Artist Guest of Honour, Anne Sudworth, is a finalist for this year’s British Science Fiction Association Awards. Anne is on the short list in the Best Art category for the cover that she provided for Somerset writer, Liz Williams’, short fiction collection, A Glass of Shadow.

Also on the short lists are regular BristolCon attendees, Kim Lakin Smith (in Novel for Cyber Circus) and Paul Cornell (in Short Fiction for “The Copenhagen Interpretation”). You can find the full lists at the BSFA website.

Here’s Anne’s short-listed cover.

We are delighted to be able to report that the latest novel by our 2012 Guest of Honour, John Meaney, is now available in good bookstores everywhere. It is called Transmission, and is the second book in John’s current space opera series. The book is available in hardcover, trade paperback and ebook. You can learn more about John and his books at his website.

While we are on the subject, January is proving to be a fantastic month for space opera in the UK. As well as John’s new book we have two other releases from good friends of BristolCon. Blue Remembered Earth by Alastair Reynolds is already in the shops, while In the Mouth of the Whale by Paul McAuley is also released today.

May 26th sees a comics convention in the town of Melksham in Wiltshire. Our good friend Paul Cornell is going to be there, as will several other comics luminaries. Tickets are now available, and you can buy them here.

BristolCon committee member, Cheryl Morgan, will be giving a talk in the city as part of LGBT History Month. The talk is titled “Changing Images of Trans People in Speculative Literature” and will take place at 7:00pm on Thursday February 2nd at Hydra Books in Old Market. Further details are available at the Out Stories Bristol website. Cheryl will also be appearing on Shout Out, Bristol Community Radio’s LGBT programme, tomorrow night (January 19th). The programme should be available as a podcast later.

Local author and BristolCon ’12 Guest of Honour, Gareth L. Powell, will be reading from his novel, The Recollection, at the Oxfam Bookshop on Cotham Hill next week. The event takes place at the store starting at 7:30pm on Wednesday, January 25th. Further details are available at the store’s website. For more details of Gareth’s public appearances this year, see his blog.

As you probably know, George R.R. Martin is one of the Guests of Honour at Eastercon this year. But what if you can’t make it to the convention? Well, thanks to our friends at Toppings Books and SFX Magazine, George is coming to see us. He’ll be appearing at St. Michael’s Church on the evening of April 4th. Further details here. Tickets are £15, but you get that discount off a hardback Song of Ice & Fire book, so free for crazy book collectors.

Tickets can be purchased over the phone (you’ll need a credit card) or in person in the store. They will probably sell out fairly quickly.

SFX Magazine ran a report on the 2011 BristolCon. It was only in the magazine (issue #216), so we haven’t been able to link to it, but they have kindly sent us a scan we can post here. Our thanks to Guy Haley for such a kind write-up, and to SFX for allowing us to post it.

Double click for full size.

The website for the 2012 Bristol Comics Expo is now online and ticket purchase is open. The dates of the event at May 12/13, and individual tickets are available for an early bird price of £10 until the end of January. We note that our good friend Paul Cornell is already listed amongst the expected guests.

One of the things we did at our committee meeting last Saturday was persuade Andy Bigwood to make merchandise with the BristolCon artwork available so that we could buy some of it. We thought you might like to buy some too. There are mugs, coasters, mouse pads and so on available, with both the BristolCon ’10 and BristolCon ’11 artwork.

Our good friend Harriet Castor will be at the new Foyles store in Cabot Circus on Saturday to read from and talk about her new book, VIII. The event is free, though Foyles do ask that they let you know if you are coming so that they know how many people to expect. Harriet will be in event space upstairs at the store from 2pm to 3pm. We hope to see some of you there. Further details here.