The Baltimore Science Fiction Society (BSFS) released the names of the five finalists for its 2019 Compton Crook Award for best first novel in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres. The finalists are:
Mike Chen – Here and Now and Then
Alix Harrow – The Ten Thousand Doors of
January
Ada Hoffman – The Outside
Arkady Martine – A Memory Called Empire
Sarah Pinsker – A Song for a New Day
The award includes a
framed award document and, for the novel’s author, a check for $1,000 and an
invitation to be the Compton Crook Guest at Balticon, the BSFS annual
convention, for this year and the following year.
The 2020 Balticon will
be held May 22-25, 2020 at the Renaissance Baltimore Harborplace Hotel.
Baltimore, Maryland. For more information visit www.balticon.org.
Members of BSFS selected the finalists by reading and rating debut novels
published between Nov 1, 2018 and October 31, 2019. The Compton Crook Committee
examined nearly 80 debut novels and BSFS members read and rated over 40 books.
The finalist round of reading and rating will close April 10th and
the winner will be notified on Sunday, April 12th and announced to
the public on Monday, April 13th.
The Baltimore Science
Fiction Society (BSFS) has been giving out the Compton Crook Award for best
first novel since 1983. Past winners have included Donald Kingsbury, Elizabeth
Moon, Michael Flynn, Wen Spencer, Maria Snyder, Naomi Novik, Paolo Bacigalupi,
Myke Cole, Charles Gannon, Ada Palmer, and Nicky Drayden. Last year’s winner
was R.F. Kuang for The Poppy War.
BSFS named the award
in memory of Towson State College Professor of Natural Sciences Compton Crook,
who wrote under the name Stephen Tall, and who died in 1981. Professor Crook
was active for many years in the Baltimore Science Fiction Society and was a
staunch champion of new works in the fields eligible for the award.
Jude Owusu narrates a vibrant nautical fantasy featuring a ship made from the bones of dragons and populated with criminals. Centuries after the total disappearance of dragons, the sighting of one lone creature propels two nations into a race to capture it….
THE OUTSIDE by Ada Hoffmann | Read by Nancy Wu (Earphones Award Winner)
Nancy Wu captures the essence of Yasira Shien from this audiobook’s opening scenes. Shien is an autistic math and physics prodigy who has designed a new generation reactor to power a space station in the 28th century….
TRINITY SIGHT by Jennifer Givhan | Read by January LaVoy (Earphones Award Winner)
January Lavoy narrates a powerful dystopian saga that merges science and religion. After a bright flash, Calliope Santiago is one of only a handful of survivors in a seemingly postapocalyptic wasteland….
THE WILL AND THE WILDS by Charlie N. Holmberg | Read by Angela Dawe (Earphones Award Winner)
In a story full of myth and magic flawlessly narrated by Angela Dawe, a young woman puts her soul at risk by bargaining with a monster. As the creature, Maekallus, becomes more human, Enna struggles to release the curse connecting them and let go of her changing feelings toward him….
Narrator Johnny Heller’s pitch-perfect timing and thoughtful characterizations make the action and humor pop in this very adult contemporary fantasy. The setting is a Louisiana bayou; characters include the last of the dragons, an opportunistic teenager, and a dirty constable….
ANYONE by Charles Soule | Read by Emily
Woo Zeller
Emily Woo Zeller’s fast-paced narration underscores the life-and-death stakes in this speculative sci-fi thriller, which traverses two near-future timeframes. Scientist Gabrielle White accidentally discovers an astonishing technology for transferring consciousness into the body of another person. Fast-forward 25 years, and a young woman, Annami, navigates a disturbing future in which Gabrielle’s technology allows bodies to be rented and abused….
************************
YA FANTASY
CHILDREN OF VIRTUE AND VENGEANCE by Tomi Adeyemi | Read by Bahni Turpin (Earphones Award Winner)
Bahni Turpin exquisitely narrates the second book in this fantasy series, Legacy of Orïsha. Her steady pace and West African accent draw us into the story of Zélie, a Maji warrior, and Princess Amari– both of whom fight against a monarchy that threatens to destroy the people of Orïsha….
The
judges of the 2020 Philip K. Dick Award and the Philadelphia Science Fiction
Society, along with the Philip K. Dick Trust, have announced the six nominated
works on the final ballot for the award:
The Outside by Ada Hoffmann (Angry Robot)
Velocity Weapon Megan E. O’Keefe (Orbit)
All Worlds Are Real: Short Fictions by Susan Palwick (Fairwood Press)
Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea: Stories by Sarah Pinsker (Small Beer Press)
The Little Animals by Sarah Tolmie (Aqueduct Press)
The Rosewater Redemption by Tade Thompson (Orbit)
First
prize and any special citations will be announced on Friday, April 10, 2020 at
Norwescon 43 at the DoubleTree by Hilton Seattle Airport, SeaTac, Washington.
The
Philip K. Dick Award is presented annually with the support of the Philip K.
Dick Trust for distinguished science fiction published in paperback original
form in the United States during the previous calendar year. The award is
sponsored by the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society and the Philip K. Dick
Trust and the award ceremony is sponsored by the Northwest Science Fiction
Society.
Last
year’s winner was Theory of Bastards by Audrey Schulman (Europa
Editions) with a special citation to 84K by Claire North (Orbit).
The award
judges are Thomas A. Easton, Karen Heuler, Mur Lafferty, Patricia MacEwen
(chair), and James Sallis.
…Despite the good moments, I did have a very strong flash of “What am I doing here?” when I awoke on each of my three mornings at the con. It’s usually like that. And then I feel guilty and ungrateful for tiring of these dear and all-too-human souls. This annual event is their source of joy, their gay holiday of fun and magic, and they look forward to it, and work on it, and plan for it, and make all the pieces come together, and I, the aloof interloper, I have grave doubts. So I’m a horrible person. What a payoff.
“Why can’t you just relax, Rudy?” says my wife’s voice in my head. “Be happy for them that they’re having fun. They’re touching. Love them.” Well, maybe my wife wouldn’t go that far. Maybe that’s Jesus’s voice, or the Buddha’s, or the White Light’s…
…Well, okay, I was nice to everyone except for a fellow panelist on a “What are your fave books? panel. It was all the GoHs on the panel: GoHs for science, art, videogames, writing, cosplay, and signing (in the sense of translating talks into sign language in real time).
The panelist sitting next to me wouldn’t shut up about some dipshit fantasy books, lavishing cliché praises upon them, trading heartfelt hosannahs with a another motor-mouthed fellow panelist, who claimed to be the “moderator.” And they get onto William Goldman’s Princess Bride (a fine work but, I would humbly submit, not the greatest novel ever written).
And I manage to break in and mention that Goldman wrote a good coming-of-age novel called The Temple of Gold and that it was, in a way, a bit like Catcher in the Rye. And the panelist next to me cries: “The Temple of Gold is SO much better than Catcher in the Rye!” And I’m like, “Well, they’re different.” And the panelist is like “No, Catcher in the Rye is whiny garbage!” And, without turning my head, I deliver what is, for me, the mild-mannered math prof / SF writer, a withering put-down. “And you’re an…English teacher? Hm.”
(2) SEEKING AUTHENTICITY. The Washington Post’s Michael Cavna, in “How Pixar’s ‘Coco’ became a huge box-office hit”, looks at the ways that Disney/Pixar worked with Mexican consultants on Coco, which not only solved cultural sensitivity problems, but made for a better story.
The company was about two years into the making of “Coco” when it committed a significant PR blunder. For its marketing, Disney in 2013 applied to trademark “Día de los Muertos” — the Mexican holiday the movie centers on — sparking a backlash from prominent Latino voices.
Mexican American cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz (“La Cucaracha”) helped give image to the outcry. Alcaraz, who had tweeted that trying to brand the holiday came across as “awful and crass,” created the Mickey Mouse-spoofing cartoon “Muerto Mouse,” with the caption: “It’s coming to trademark your cultura.”
According to Jason Katz, the story supervisor on “Coco,” the backlash to the Southern California parent company’s trademark attempt was tough to take in the Bay Area, where Pixar’s Emeryville studio is located.
“Working at Pixar, you’re in a little bit of a bubble. We’re removed from the machine to a certain extent,” Katz told The Post’s Comic Riffs while in Washington. “[We were] trying to be as genuine and authentic as you can. It wasn’t something we were expecting. We were all just disappointed and sad.”
The incident, though, led to a realization. “We needed to make sure that even though we were reaching out to folks, we needed to make this movie differently than any other movie we’d made…”
(3) BY DESIGN. Ada Hoffman’s series of tweets begins with a swing at Rocket Stack Rank, but it’s also a thought experiment about building an sff review site:
(4) EVERYONE’S A CRITIC (OR COULD BE). Likewise, Vajra Chandrasekera — critic, author, fiction editor at Strange Horizons, and one of this year’s Shadow Clarke jurors – blasts away at Rocket Stack Rank in a set of tweets you enter here. Apart from that, he is thought-provoking on the issue of awards-driven reviews and criticism.
This is almost too obvious a thing to have to say but: there is no such thing as "the best" stories in real life. Popular awards measure voters; juried awards measure juries. They are at most arguments, not facts.
The role of a critic is not to choose on behalf of readers; a critic is not a person inefficiently standing in for a shopping algorithm. The role of critics is to read stories in public, to show how stories might be read. To offer insight. To think out loud.
Anyway, the meaningfulness-or-otherwise of awards is what I like to think of as somebody else's problem. What I want to see: more individual critics who read well and read widely, and who pursue what matters to them rather than subordinate their reading to awards recommendations.
For a while, Tom Colella had found his escape at the bottom of a bag of crunchy corn snacks. But it was not to last.
Earlier this month in western Australia, the Fair Work Commission, a workplace tribunal, found that the electrician — who was fired last year — had indeed been fired for good cause: He had been ditching work while on the clock, the commission concluded, and had hidden his whereabouts from his employer by MacGyvering a Faraday cage out of an empty bag of Twisties.
But let’s back up a step: A Faraday cage, named for 19th century scientist Michael Faraday, blocks electromagnetic fields. Faraday found that an enclosure — or, in this case, the foil-lined interior of the cheesy corn snack bag — can keep these charges out if there’s enough conductive material.
It appears Colella, 60, had slipped his company-mandated, GPS-enabled personal digital assistant into the bag to block the signals that enabled the device to track his movements.
The idea that clandestine Illuminati gatherings could be taking place in the small Bavarian city may seem far-fetched, but Ingolstadt does have a history of them. The city is the birthplace of the infamous secret society that has become part myth, part historical truth, and the foundation of countless conspiracy theories.
(8) GROUND SHORTAGE. “The buildings designed to house the dead” — Chip Hitchcock says, “Not exactly Silverberg’s urban monads, but a vertical solution to a different kind of population problem.”
In the last 50,000 years, it’s been estimated that around 101 billion people have lived and died on planet Earth. Like it or not, everyone alive today – and that’s more than seven billion of us – is likely to join them within the next century. So what will we do with all the bodies?
As human populations continue to expand and flood into crowded cities, traditional methods of handling bodies after death are coming unstuck. The issues range from a shortage of vultures in India – which has led the Zoroastrian community to abandon the ancient practice of sky burials in favour of dystopian “solar concentrators” instead – to the 40-year old corpses in Germany that remain mysteriously fresh after decades in the ground. In many European countries, it’s normal to re-use graves after 15-20 years. But recently some of their inhabitants have been refusing to rot.
The tron light cycle is based on the Disney : Tron Legacy film and consists of a tron light cycle with a user minifigure Sam Flynn it also comes with a Grid base to mount the light cycle on for display.
The light cycle allows a minifigure to easily fit into and clip onto the handles, the light cycle its self has a console in front of the user, two handle bars and detailing down the sides, there is also a power stream behind connected to the light cycle. The Sam Flynn minifigure comes in a tron suit with helmet and disc connected on the back of the minifigure for added detail. The light cycle can easily be mounted on to the Grid base with two connection points and the base has the Grid effect with black and trans-blue tiles creating a tron feel and has a medium azure trim for finish.
Vox is engaged in a similar exercise in extreme ontology to divide each and every fuss about something into either an example of
whiny SJWs being whiny and destroying civilisation because they are so evil and lefty…or….
a valiant struggle of brave souls against the forces of SJWs even if it doesn’t seem much to do with them.
Unhappy with how Marvel is directing it’s comic books? Well, the great fascist sorting hat says that is an anti-SJW crusade regardless of what your opinion is or that you are objecting to how a major corporation is acting.
Unhappy with the choice of coach for a college football team because of his past association with a convicted child abuser? Well, the great fascist sorting hat says that is lunacy and you must be one of them evil SJWs.
You can retrospectively sort of work out why one and not the other but it is hard to spot in advance.
You can let fellow Constant Readers know you’re a fan in a low key kind of way (pun intended) with these cool, retro-looking keychains inspired by various locations in King’s novels. Places like the Overlook Hotel in “The Shining,” Room 1408 in the Dolphin Hotel in New York, and a keychain from Darnell’s Auto Repair from “Christine.” Speaking of “Christine,” how about this fun replica of the famed 1958 Plymouth Fury from both the book and the movie?
(12) LEIVA. In 2010, Steven Paul Leiva created and organized Ray Bradbury Week in Los Angeles. Steven’s novel Made on the Moon has just been published as an ebook by Crossroad Press. For $3.99 you, too, can be made on the moon. Find it on Amazon here.
(13) BRADBURY PRESERVED. The Indiana University Foundation wants to crowdfund $5,000 for the work done by “Students Preserving the World of Ray Bradbury”. They’ve raised $1,139, with 32 days left in the campaign.
Students help preserve over 100,000 papers of correspondence, documents, and photographs in the collection at the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies. Their work has just begun and we need your support.
…Graduate interns and research assistants are important to helping preserve Bradbury’s collection of books, literary works, artifacts, correspondence, manuscripts, photographs, and so much more. Hear these students tell what they do in the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies and what this work means to them.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, JJ, Carl Slaughter, Martin Morse Wooster, Chip Hitchcock, Hampus Eckerman, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Steve Davidson.]