It’s been suggested to me (by my friend Dominik Parisien, to give credit where it’s due) that I ought to do a summary of all the award nominations and other honors that the stories in Clockwork Phoenix 4 have accumulated so far. I think, for a book started from scratch via Kickstarter and unavailable in most brick-and-mortar stores, we’ve done astonishingly well. See what you think:
 
• “Selected Program Notes from the Retrospective Exhibition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer” by Kenneth Schneyer is a Nebula Award finalist, a Theodore Sturgeon Award finalist, and made the 2013 Locus Recommended Reading List.
 
• “A Little of the Night” by Tanith Lee is a Shirley Jackson Award finalist, and was selected for Paula Guran’s The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2014.
 
• “The Bees Her Heart, the Hive Her Belly” by Benjanun Sriduangkaew was selected for Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2014, made the 2013 Locus Recommended Reading List, and Benjanun herself is a finalist for the 2014 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.
 
• “On the Leitmotif of the Trickster Constellation in Northern Hemispheric Star Charts, Post-Apocalypse” by Nicole Kornher-Stace was selected by Alex Dally MacFarlane for her forthcoming anthology The Mammoth Book of SF by Women.
 
• “The Canal Barge Magician’s Number Nine Daughter” by Ian McHugh made the 2013 Locus Recommended Reading List.
 
• Locus Online short fiction reviewer Lois Tilton named Clockwork Phoenix 4 her favorite anthology of 2013, giving special commendation to the stories by Ken, Tanith, Benjanun and Nicole.
 
• Short fiction review site Tangent Online included 13 of the 18 stories on their own 2013 Recommended Reading List.
 
Not bad, eh?
 
But please note: It’s often the case that awards season focuses on one or a few stories, but Anita and I always intend our books to work as ensembles. That’s why it’s gratifying to be able to point to reviews like these as testimonials that these stories are consistent through and through:
 
• “Clockwork Phoenix 4 is a continuation of a first rate series of anthologies … The book is stylistically of a piece with its predecessors – a set of well-written stories occupying multiple subgenres, usually in the same story, often ambiguously.” — Locus
 
• “Clockwork Phoenix 4, much like its predecessors, is a high quality, well-organized, engaging anthology.” — Tor.com
 
• “This 4th volume of Clockwork Phoenix contains an excellent diversity of speculative fiction ranging from cold and hopeless to harsh but victorious and warm and fulfilling. It was a pleasure to read.” — Tangent Online
 
• “It’s good to see that a community can come together and support an original endeavor of this kind, and delightful to see how well the results have turned out.” — Strange Horizons
 
#SFWApro