Nine Authors Selected for Worlds of Speculative Fiction 2020

Year 5 of my monthly talk series - Worlds of Speculative Fiction - starts in January, and I already have nine of the twelve authors we'll be reading and discussing picked out.  I had selected seven of them by the time I arrived at our session last week to discuss Bram Stoker.  Two of the regular participants in the discussions contributed two other excellent suggestions.

Next week, I'll start soliciting more suggestions about the remaining three slots for 2020.  I'll create a video, and likely a blog post, and then use the comments on those - and on social media posts - to come up with a list of the top 6 or so choices, and then we'll do an actual vote. That's how we wound up with Aldous Huxley, Bram Stoker, and R Scott Bakker for the 2019 series.

We have quite an interesting mix of speculative fiction authors, series, and narrative worlds for 2020.  Here they are:

• January - Mary Shelley's Modern Worlds (Frankenstein, The Last Man)
  
• February - China Mielville's Bas-Lag Novels
  
• March - Stephen Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant
  
• April - Liu-Cixin's Rememberance of Earth's Past Series
  
• May - Veronica Roth's Carve The Mark Universe
  
• June - Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality of Mankind
  
• July - Margaret Atwood's Gilead Dystopia
  
• August - Larry Niven's Ringworld Series
  
• September - Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover Series

If you've got ideas about what other authors you'd like me to consider for the 2020 series, don't post them quite yet - keep them for next week.  

Here are the authors we've done already (or will have done by the end of this year:  J. R. R. Tolkein, A. E. Van Vogt, C. S. Lewis, Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, Roger Zelazny, Ursula K. Leguin, Michael Moorcock, Philip K. Dick, Mervyn Peake, George R.R. Martin, Philip Jose Farmer, Madeline L'Engle, Douglas Adams, Anne McCaffrey, Orson Scott Card, Iain Banks, H. P. Lovecraft, William Gibson, C. L. Moore, Octavia Butler, Jorge Luis Borges, Fritz Leiber, Robert Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp, Andre Norton, Arthur Clarke, Robert Howard, Gene Wolfe, C. J. Cherryh, Jack Vance, Edgar Allan Poe, G. K. Chesterton, Mary Shelly, Lewis Carroll, Tanith Lee, Piers Anthony, Gordon Dickson, August Derleth, Karl Edward Wagner, Aldous Huxley, Bram Stoker, and R. Scott Bakker.

If you'd like to watch any of the videorecordings of the sessions so far, here's the playlist.