Monthly Archives: November 2014

Kushner and Sherman at NYRSF Reading 12/2

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The New York Review of SF Readings continues its annual tradition of Family Night with Delia Sherman and Ellen Kushner on December 2.

Delia Sherman

Delia Sherman

Delia Sherman’s most recent short stories have appeared in the young adult anthology Steampunk! and in Ellen Datlow’s Naked City. She’s written three novels for adults: Through a Brazen Mirror, The Porcelain Dove, and The Fall of the Kings (with Ellen Kushner).She’s now turned her hand to novels for younger readers. Changeling and The Magic Mirror of the Mermaid Queen are both set in the magical world of New York Between.  The Freedom Maze is a time-travel historical about antebellum Louisiana which won the 2012 Prometheus Award and the Andre Norton Award. Her recent collection of short fiction, Young Woman in a Garden, has appeared on PW’s list of Best SF of 2014.

She has worked as a contributing editor for Tor Books and has co-edited the fantasy anthology The Horns of Elfland with Ellen Kushner and Donald G. Keller, as well as The Essential Bordertown with Terri Windling, as well as two anthologies of interstitial fiction, Interfictions 1, with Theodora Goss and Interfictions 2, with Christopher Barzak. When she’s not writing, Sherman is teaching, editing, knitting, and cooking. Although she’s frequently on the road, she actually lives in a rambling apartment in New York City with partner Ellen Kushner and far too many pieces of paper.

Ellen Kushner

Ellen Kushner

Ellen Kushner’s cult classic novel Swordspoint introduced readers to the setting to which she has since returned in The Privilege of the Sword (Locus Award, Nebula nominee), The Fall of the Kings (written with Delia Sherman), and a growing handful of related short stories.  She recently recorded all three novels in audiobook form for Neil Gaiman Presents/Audible.com, and Swordspoint won both a 2012 Audie and Audiofile Earphones Award.  With Holly Black, she co-edited Welcome to Bordertown, a revival of the original urban fantasy shared world series created by Terri Windling, and oversaw the 2013 Brilliance Audio audiobook production with original music by Drew Miller of Boiled in Lead.

A co-founder of the Interstitial Arts Foundation, Ellen Kushner was also the longtime host of the national public radio show Sound & Spirit, and created several one-woman shows for it, including The Klezmer Nutcracker, which she then adapted for New York’s Vital Theater. She is currently working on a new novel in the Swordspoint?series. She recently served as guest host for Fantasy Magazine’s Women Destroy Fantasy podcasts. She lives in New York City with Delia Sherman. They have no cats, and she does not like to write in cafes. She loves to read aloud.

The NYRSF Readings will take place Tuesday, December 2 at The Brooklyn Commons, 388 Atlantic Avenue. Doors open at 6:30 — event begins at 7

The full press release follows the jump.

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Voting Open for 2015 FFANZ Delegate

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The choice is clear-cut: Melbourne’s David McDonald is the only candidate in the race for the 2015 Fan Fund of New Zealand and Australia. Just the same, he needs your vote and your donation to make the trip to New Zealand for Reconnaissance, Easter 2015.

David McDonald is a Melbourne based writer who edits a magazine for an international welfare organisation. When not on a computer or reading a book, he divides his time between helping run a local cricket club and working on his novel. In 2013 he won the Ditmar Award for Best New Talent, and in 2014 won the William J. Atheling Jr. Award for Criticism or Review and was shortlisted for the WSFA Small Press Award. His short fiction has appeared in anthologies such as The Lone Ranger Chronicles from Moonstone Books and Epilogue from Fablecroft Publishing. David is a member of the Australian Horror Writers Association, The International Association of Media Tie-In Writers, and of the Melbourne based writers group, SuperNOVA.

David has been in fandom for a number of years, and has been nominated for a number of awards for his fan writing on Doctor Who and for his participation in the Aussie Snapshot – a comprehensive overview of the Aussie spec fic scene.

McDonald’s nominators are Norman Cates of New Zealand and Cat Sparks of Australia.

The voting deadline is December 15. Click the link for the FFANZ 2015 Voting Form (.pdf)

Stan Lee Takes a Bath

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stan-lee-new-superhero-movieMarvel’s Stan Lee has sold his Hollywood Hills West home for $2.8 million, which is $799,000 less than he bought it for in 2006.

And it’s a huge markdown from the original $3.75 million asking price reported in the media just a month ago.

However, the property was being marketed as a “build/develop opportunity” — it wasn’t really expected a buyer would acquire the house to live in, but to tear down and replace with something else.

Lee, 92, paid $3.599 million for the house in 2006, the same year he celebrated 65 years working for Marvel and made his trademark cameo in X-Men: The Last Stand.

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Pool area of Stan Lee’s Hollywood Hills West home.

Chicagoans Get First Look at Lucas Museum

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lucas-museum-1_600xx2833-1895-1662-0The proposed design for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art looks more like the architect was told to plan the Gort Klaatu Art Museum. All it needs is an exit ramp and a giant statue of Michael Rennie.

The initial reaction in Chicago is far from enthusiastic. Says a report in the Chicago Business Journal:

Crain’s Chicago Business columnist Greg Hinz, who normally doesn’t identify as an architecture critic, promptly let it be known he didn’t care for the initial design, which resembles a giant snow-covered undulating mound with a glass spaceship perched above it.

But it appeared the main reason for Hinz’s chiming in was to reveal that Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his minions in City Hall also found [architect Ma] Yansong’s first effort at a building design to be lacking….

Hinz aside, even the Chicago Tribune’s Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture writer Blair Kamin seemed to be, at best, lukewarm about what he saw in the first renderings….

Kamin merely called the design “unexpected” and “ambitious.” Which, I suppose, might be described as damning with faint praise.

Whether this or any other design can ever be built at the projected Lakefront location has been called into doubt by the Chicago group Friends of the Parks which has said it will do anything necessary to stop the development, including a possible lawsuit.

[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster for the story.]

Alamagordo Garbage Turns to Gold on eBay

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atariDespite all doubt the legend proved true: in the 1980s Atari dumped a bunch of its unsold game cartridges in the Alamagordo, NM landfill, including copies of E.T. the Extraterrestrial, reputed to be the worst video game ever made.

The city authorized a dig earlier this year and recovered hundreds of cartridges, including 100 copies of E.T., and has started selling them online. The first 20 grubby, dirt-smudged copies, worthless when they were new, went for as much as $1,537.

Also on the block were copies of Asteroids, Missile Command, Warlords, Defender, Star Raiders, Swordquest, Phoenix and Centipede. The initial auction yielded $37,000 for the city.

The publicity surrounding the dig prompted a museum in Rome to open the very first Atari dig exhibit. On display are games unearthed from the landfill, a certificate of authenticity and even dirt from the New Mexico dumping ground.

Another 700 of the Atari dig games are being auctioned on eBay, with the money going to the city and the Tularosa Basin Historical Society.

In addition, Atari Game Over, a documentary about the dig, has been released through the X-box.

It’s easy to rag on the dig itself. “Why bother digging up trash? Who even cares if the games are buried there?” But trust me, watch the film and watch Howard Scott Warshaw. This isn’t a story about a trash heap, really. This is a story about a guy whose career was ruined by one stupid mistake of a game, and watching him come to grips with it three decades later.

 

Madhvi Ramani Receives SLF Grants

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The Speculative Literature Foundation announced on Facebook that Madhvi Ramani is the winner of the inaugural Diverse Writers Grant and Diverse Worlds Grant. Her successful application included her short story “Zafir, the Saudi Superhero.”

Evidently, both grants were made to the same person.

The Diverse Writer Grant is intended to support new and emerging writers from underrepresented and underprivileged groups, including writers of color, women, queer writers, disabled writers, working-class writers, and those whose marginalized identities may present additional obstacles in the writing and/or publishing process.

The Diverse Worlds Grant is intended for work that best presents a diverse world, regardless of the writer’s background.

Each grant is worth $500.

The application period for the 2015 grant will open May 1.

The press release follows the jump

Update 12/08/2014: The SLF issued its press release on December 8, which has been added below.

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A Couple of Technologies Ago

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Last week’s New York Times obit Carl Schlesinger, 88, Dies; Helped Usher Our Hot Type told about the passing of a former Times typesetter who helped make an award-winning film about the night in 1978 when the paper was produced with hot-metal type for the last time. Reading it prompted Andrew Porter to muse about the rapid technological advances he experienced in his own career:

When I started in publishing, everything was done in hot type. Eventually, the switch was made to cold type. How ironic that when I was working at Cahners Publishing in the late 1960s, we used a cold-type company that workers told me had “strange paintings” on the walls. They were working in the former office of Galaxy Magazine, whose owner had become a printing broker. Everything I learned about printing — quoins, Linotype, Monotype, sheet-fed printing presses, color separations, press impositions, so much more — gradually became obsolete. When I started, it took a tractor-trailer to hold the type and printing plates used in a magazine issue. By the end of the 20th century, an armful of negatives would do the job. And now, even negatives are obsolete.

Trial By Jury

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Orange Mike Lowrey and James Nicoll have been selected as jurors for the 2015 Speculative Literature Foundation’s Working Class/Impoverished Writers Grant.

This year’s SLF Working Class grant jury had six members, so expect additional names to be announced.

SLF chooses jurors who are writers/editors /teachers /etc. and capable of judging literary quality in a work. Their duties include reading roughly 75-100 applications (a few pages each, including application writing sample) in about a month’s time prior to awarding the grant.

[Thanks to Mike Lowrey for the story.]