Science fiction authors have long been outcasts from the literary world, in some cases critics using the worst examples of the genre as ammunition against it. Unfortunately though, at times even science fiction authors themselves can turn on their own kind: "Science fiction is rockets, chemicals and talking squids in outer space,” mocked Margaret Atwood (The Guardian, 28 January 2009), one of her many attempts to convince people that she is not a science fiction author, even though one of her most famous novels, A Handmaid's Tale, is exactly that.

There’s a better than average chance that you’re asking yourself two questions right now: who the hell is Chris Beckett and what is the Edge Hill Short Story Prize? Until we received the press release announcing Chris’ win, I must confess I’d not heard of the author or the competition. So now you’re probably asking a third question: why announce this win at all?

All good questions and worthy of an answer!

The 68th World Science Fiction Convention (Aussiecon 4) will be held in Melbourne, Australia from 2 to 6 September 2010. The acclaimed US science fiction writer, Kim Stanley Robinson, most famous for his Mars novels, will be the Guest of Honour. Kim Stanley Robinson won a Nebula Award for Red Mars in 1993 and Hugo Awards for Green Mars in 1994 and Blue Mars in 1997.

If there's a god watching over the universe in which James Murdoch wrote Gray Apocalypse, his debut novel of men in black and alien conspiracy, I suspect that god looks a lot like author Matthew Reilly (Ice Station, Area 7, Temple). I have to say it's only a suspicion as I've only ever managed to get through a couple of paragraphs of Reilly’s popular potboilers. Reilly is an amiable author with no illusions about the literary merit of his fiction and a confidence born of hard won success to care less about such trivial considerations as literary merit. But in the end it's a matter of taste and conspiracy theories, alien or otherwise, simply ain’t mine.

More successfully than any other novel I've read recently, Bernard Beckett's Genesis epitomises the investigative ideal of science fiction. By any standards it's a short novel and at 150 pages is perhaps more truly a novella, but in a genre given to overinflated, ponderous tomes screaming out for an editor wielding a samurai sword, there's a refreshing efficiency to Beckett’s writing. Nothing is superfluous, nothing wasted.

On balance it’s difficult not to recommend Nick Harkaway’s debut novel, The Gone-Away World, as its one significant flaw is outweighed by its many virtues. Here is a novel bursting with originality and deserving of praise for its ambitious scope. Harkaway writes with an obvious delight in the English language and the courage and mastery to bend the written word to his will. Unafraid to take risks, the risks pay off more often than not.

Earlier this year we chatted with Philip K. Dick’s fifth wife, Tessa, about the forthcoming biopic of her husband. Starring Paul Giamatti in the role of Phil Dick and with a screenplay by Tony Grisoni (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), The Owl in Daylight promises to interweave an account of Dick’s life with elements of his fiction. By all accounts the movie will focus on events in the 1970s, in particular Dick’s infamous visionary experiences of March 1974 when he claimed to have been contacted by an extraterrestrial force called VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligence System) via a beam of pink light.

Just when you thought it was safe to visit your local bookstore, a sixth book from Douglas Adam’s The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series is being released. Titled “And another thing…” the new book will be published by Penguin in October 2009.

Before you get too exited though, there are a couple of things you need to know: Douglas Adams hasn't miraculously come back to life after dying from a heart attack in 2001 and decided to continue the series;

I've just finished reading William Gibson's latest novel Spook Country, a fragmented, leisurely paced, ultimately unsatisfying intelligence thriller about a group of disparate characters searching for a mysterious cargo container from Iraq. While it does feature present day virtual reality technology and GPS, there's not an ounce of real science fiction in it - no matter what William Gibson would have you believe.

Robert Charles Wilson’s Darwinia is as near perfect as fiction comes. It’s literary, intelligent and entertaining in equal measure. Rarely does a writer get it this right. Wilson’s characters are complex and believable, the prose is frequently beautiful, and he has an eye for original imagery wrapped up in an exquisitely apt turn of phrase: consider how the urbane but amoral Timothy Crane slides into the ranks of Washington’s elite “like a gilded suppository”.