Eurocon 2024 Site Picked

2024. The 2024 Eurocon will take place in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. The site was confirmed during this year’s Eurocon in Luxembourg. The con will be held in August 2024, but the dates have not yet been announced.

Follow the con on social media:

2023. Eurcon 2023 will be held in Uppsala, Sweden in conjunction with Konflikt 2023.

The guests of honor will be Johan Egerkrans (SE), Merja Polvinen (FI), Francesco Verso (IT) and Martha Wells (US).

Follow the con on social media:

BIDS FOR FUTURE EURCONS. The following bid announcements for upcoming Eurocons were made this weekend at Eurocon 2022. Bids may also email contact_esfs (at) esfs (dot) info to make their intentions known.

  • 2025 Åland, Finland
  • 2026 Berlin, Germany
  • 2028 Zagreb, Croatia

2022 ESFS Awards

The European Science Fiction Society named the 2022 winners of the ESFS Achievement Awards and the ESFS Hall of Fame Awards on April 9 during Eurocon / Luxcon 2022 held in Dudelange, Luxembourg.

ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS

AwardWinnerCountry
Best Dramatic PresentationWill Sliney’s StorytellersIreland
Best FanzinePrésences d’esprit 105France
Best Internet PublicationThe National Leprechaun Museum Talking Stories podcastIreland
Best Work for ChildrenMarta Ignerska “Swiat Lema” (The world of Lem)Poland
Best Work of ArtCover art by Sparth, for La Dernière Emperox by ScalziFrance
Best Written Work of FictionFuturespotting by Francesco VersoItaly

HALL OF FAME AWARDS

AwardWinnerCountry
Best ArtistIgor Kordej
(Joint winner)
Croatia
Best ArtistRoch Urbaniak
(Joint winner)
Poland
Best AuthorFrancesco VersoItaly
Best MagazineSci Phi Journal – A Universe of WonderBelgium
Best PromoterYuri ShevelaUkraine
Best PublisherHangar 7
(Joint winner)
Croatia
Best PublisherCopernicus Corporation
(Joint winner)
Poland
Best TranslatorJack FennellIreland

European Science Fiction Society Disallows Award Nominations and Delegates from Russia and Belarus

This week European Science Fiction Society delegates created a rule authorizing them to disallow award nominations and delegates from a country, then immediately voted to apply the new provisions to exclude Russia and Belarus for 2022.

The ESFS is meeting at Eurocon, being held concurrently with LuxCon from April 7-10 in Dudelange, Luxembourg. The full text of the original proposal was quoted by File 770 here.

Filer JVjr attended the meeting and reports in comments that the new rule was passed after being modified to require a 75% supermajority (instead of the proposed simple majority). “Afterwards, there was some amount of confusion about the number of delegates present and quora required, but in the end both Russia (19 of 21, 1 abstention?) and Belarus (17, 2 against, 1 abstention) were added to the sanctions list [Appendix 5].”

For future reference, ESFS Award Administrator Carol Connolly explained on Facebook how the new Appendix 5 will operate.

Let’s say in 2023 I am the Irish delegate. At the very start of the 2023 GM [General Meeting], someone proposes Ireland be added to Appendix 5. We all vote on that (including me as one of the Irish delegates), the motion passes and Ireland is added to Appendix 5. The Irish nominations are removed from the 2023 Awards ballot which will be given to the delegates at the end of the GM. I am no longer a delegate so I cannot vote on other motions at the 2023 GM. (I am still a member of the ESFS, like every other 2023 Eurocon attendee, so along with every member I can vote in the site selection that will choose the 2025 Eurocon.)

Ireland has no nominations on the 2024 ESFS Awards ballot.

I choose to attend the 2024 Eurocon. I go the to GM and when the GM begins Appendix 5 is officially empty again, so I one of the Irish delegates. The first item on the Agenda is the addition of countries to Appendix 5. If no-one proposes Ireland, I remain the Irish delegate (there are still no Irish nominations on the 2024 ESFS Awards ballot). If someone does propose Ireland again, I can vote on that motion as a delegate. If it passes, I can no longer vote on other motions. If it fails, I can vote on other motions.

There is also an early removal mechanism so that if in late 2023/2024 it was felt that Ireland should be removed early from Appendix 5 so that we could have the chance to nominate for the 2024 ESFS Awards, an EGM [Extraordinary General Meeting] could be called and if the motion to remove Ireland passed we could send in nominations.

Update: The organization made a statement about the “ESFS AGM Decision – 2022” on April 8 after this post was published.

War is against the very values on which the ESFS was founded. 50 years ago the ESFS was created during the Cold War to promote understanding between people of different racial, political and religious grounds.. The recent military invasion of Ukraine by the government of Russia supported by the government of Belarus goes against everything that ESFS and European fandom stands for. This invasion is also directly responsible for preventing Ukrainian delegates from attending this year’s Eurocon.

In light of these unprecedented events, which are due to government decisions & actions, at the ESFS general meeting in Dudelange a motion was passed to allow the ESFS delegates to remove the delegate voting, award nomination rights and convention bids of countries. These rights were then removed from Russia and Belarus until the opening of the next general meeting of the ESFS in June 2023. This includes any votes of the ESFS until that general meeting, and the rights to nominate any people or works for the 2022 and 2023 ESFS Awards. This took effect immediately. Furthermore the Board and the Delegates stated that Russian and Belarusian fans remain part of the European science fiction community and ESFS members.

We look forward to Ukrainian fans being able to travel to Eurocon in 2023 and hope to share the joy of that event with all members of the ESFS family.

European Science Fiction Society Board Makes Statement on Russia-Ukraine War

The European Science Fiction Society Board today responded to Ukrainian calls for action in a statement about the Russia-Ukraine war on the ESFS website.

ESFS is an international organization of fans and professionals that promotes sff, administers the ESFS Awards, and determines the site of the Eurocon.

The Board said:

War is against the very values on which the ESFS was founded. 50 years ago the ESFS was created during the Cold War to promote understanding between people of different racial, political and religious grounds.

We have received a number of suggestions for actions the society should take in relation to the Russia-Ukraine war. We the Board think that it is important that these decisions are not made solely by the Board, but rather by the mechanisms enshrined in the society constitution.

We propose a motion trying to encapsulate the views expressed to us directly and on our public forums, which will be voted on at the start of the general meeting at Luxcon. However the Board thinks it is important to remember that the ESFS was founded to keep channels open between the borders of our countries, in the belief that the cultural exchange of ideas is a road to peace.

We have received requests for the ESFS Board to make a statement on the Russia-Ukraine war, however the ESFS was founded as a non-political organisation so the Board do not believe that would be appropriate. However, as individuals we may express our own personal opinions on the war.

We condemn the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine by the Russian government. We stand with Ukraine – Carolina Gomez Lagerlöf, Saija Kyllönen, Anouk Arnal, Carol Connolly, Fionna O’Sullivan

They have also authored a proposed change to the ESFS rules that, if passed, would permit the group’s general meeting to vote to disqualify a country from participation in ESFS governance or its awards.

Proposal to Change ESFS Statutes – TO DISALLOW AWARD NOMINATIONS, BIDS, AND DELEGATES FROM A COUNTRY

Proposed by: Carolina Gomez Lagerlöf (ESFS Board)

Purpose: This amendment to the Constitution of the ESFS adds an additional section to define a mechanism by which, in exceptional circumstances, the ESFS will not accept ESFS Award nominations, Eurocon or Euroconference bids, or delegates, from a country.

Addition:

Section 17: Disallowing nominations, bids & delegates from a country

ESFS will not accept ESFS Award nominations, Eurocon or Euroconference bids, or delegates, from the countries listed in Appendix 5. The addition of a country to Appendix 5 is by a simple majority vote of the delegates at the general meeting and takes effect immediately. Countries in Appendix 5 are removed at the opening of the next general meeting, or by the simple majority decision of an EGM.

The proposal will be considered at the organization’s next meeting during Eurocon 2022, which will be held concurrently with LuxCon from April 7-10 in Dudelange, Luxembourg.

Ukraine SFF Community Calls for Russia and Belarus To Be Excluded from European Science Fiction Society

Ukranian fan Borys Sydiuk has released the text of a letter to the European Science Fiction Society (ESFS) board asking for an emergency general meeting to be run online “to review the questions about formal[ly] excluding Russia and Belarus from the list of ESFS members until the war is over taking into consideration the principle of zero-tolerance of any aggression [that] European nations follow.”

ESFS, founded in 1972, is an international organization of fans and professionals that promotes sff, administers the ESFS Awards, and determines the site of the Eurocon.

The Ukranian sff community in its letter also demands that ESFS Awards nominations submitted by Russia and Belarus be investigated to determine whether any of their nominees support the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Those who do must be disqualified. Then, any remaining nominees from Russia and Belarus may not be identified with those countries but must be identified as nominees of ESFS or another sponsoring nation, following the Olympic Games’ example for handling entrants from banned countries.   

If an emergency meeting cannot be held, the letter calls for these points to be discussed at the first session of the ESFS meeting at Eurocon 2022, which will be held next week concurrently with LuxCon from April 7-10 in Dudelange, Luxembourg.

If the ESFS does not adopt these proposals, the Ukrainian sff community will officially quit ESFS, withdraw its 2022 ESFS Awards nominations, and not take part in any further ESFS activities until the war is over.

The complete text of the letter follows. (The English rendering may have been produced by Google Translate.)

For immediate release

To ESFS board

The algorithm we expected from the board and GM of ESFS

1. Call an EGM (emergency general meeting to be run online) to review the questions about formal excluding Russia and Belarus from the list of ESFS members until the war is over taking into consideration the principle of zero-tolerance of any aggression European nations follow.

2. Nominations accepted from Russia and Belarus to be subject to investigation if any of the nominees supports the Russian invasion of Ukraine. If so it should lead to immediate disqualification of such nominees.

3. Accepted and non-disqualified nominations should go under ESFS nominations or a sponsoring country, not Russia or Belarus using Olympic principle – Olympic flag, sponsoring country flag, not embargoed country flag.

4. These should be voted during the EGM.

5. If EGM is not possible, pp 1 to 4 should be discussed at the first at the scheduled first ESFS General business meeting in Luxembourg.

6. In the case Russia and Belarus remain in ESFS member list and/or Russian and Belarusian nominations will go as Russian and Belarusian, not under ESFS or a sponsoring country title, after EGM or the first General business meeting in Luxembourg, Ukraine officially quits ESFS and withdraws all Ukrainian nominations for ESFS 2022 Awards. In this case Ukrainian delegates or their proxy representatives will not take part in the second business meeting, ESFS Award voting and any further ESFS activities until the war is over.

Ukrainian SF&F Community

Pixel Scroll 3/21/22 Go Strider In The Sky 

(1) BALTICON GUEST NEWS. Balticon 56 announced that Odera Igbokwe has had to withdraw as Artist Guest of Honor due to personal reasons.

They followed up by naming two special guests: Kevin Roche, a costumer, conrunner, and quantum scientist and his husband Andy Trembley, a filker, costumer, and conrunner.

Balticon, which takes place May 27-30, also confirmed they will be streaming their most popular program tracks, and hosting virtual panels, kaffeeklatsches, author readings and more.

Virtual pricing for the whole weekend is $30 for adults and $20 for young adults. Virtual membership is automatically included with any in-person membership purchase. (Full rate information is here.)

(2) ESFS AWARDS NOMINEES. The European Science Fiction Society has released the nominations for the 2022 Achievement Awards, Hall of Fame Awards, and Chrysalis Awards.

The winners of these awards will be selected at the next general meeting of the ESFS, which will take place at Luxcon 2022, which takes place from 7th to 10th April, 2022 in Dudelange, Luxembourg.

(3) GRRM-CONNECTED GAME SUCCESS. Yahoo! reports “’Elden Ring’ Sells Over 12 Million Copies Worldwide”  — “Almost as many as PacMan,” teases John King Tarpinian.

While publisher Bandai Namco initially predicted that FromSoftware‘s Elden Ring would sell around 4 million units, the game has more than surpassed expectations. In the 18 days following its release, over 12 million copies of Elden Ring have been sold worldwide, the two companies announced on Monday.

According to the press release, the game was released throughout North America, Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. 1 million units were sold in Japan alone.

Created in collaboration with novelist George R. R. Martin, who is best known for writing the series behind Game of Thrones, Elden Ring is an open-world action RPG that entered development in 2017. Players begin with a linear opening but are gradually enabled to explore the mythical Lands Between….

And George R.R. Martin recently took a moment to deny a story about the game.

…Oh, and as long as I am setting stuff straight, there’s a weird story all over the internet about how I “hid” my initials in ELDEN RING because… ah.. some of the characters have names beginning with R, or G, or M.   To which I say, “Eh?  What?  Really?”   This was news to me.    I have been writing and publishing stories since 1971, and I suspect that I have been giving characters names beginning with R and G and M since the start.   Along with the other twenty-three letters of the alphabet as well…  

(4) WHAT WOULD IT LOOK LIKE IF THE MANDALORIAN WAS INDIGENOUS? [Item by Olav Rokne.] Pretty cool Star-Wars-Inspired works by Canadian artist Christal Ratt got featured on the CBC News this weekend. Ratt, a member of the Barriere Lake Algonquin Nation in Quebec, used traditional techniques to create birch-bark armour modelled after the Mandalorian’s beskar armour. “What if the Mandalorian’s armour was birch bark instead of beskar? An Algonquin artist brings that to life”.

…And while it may not be able to stop lightsabers, the wearable piece of art also includes a birch bark helmet, with quilled Woodland florals and different shades of orange to honour residential school survivors from her community. 

The piece is called Shemaginish, which means warrior….

Personally, I find it really interesting to note that several artists of Indigenous Canadian descent are reinterpreting Star Wars iconography through traditional Indigenous styles. In addition to Ratt, there are several examples I can think of this, including well-known Canadian artists Andy Everson (a member of the Comox First Nation), and Aaron Paquette (a member of the Métis community in Edmonton) have found inspiration in mixing Star Wars with styles drawn from their respective Indigenous communities.

(5) AUTHOR’S GUILD SUPPORTS SMART COPYRIGHT ACT. The Author’s Guild announced, “AG Supports Introduction and Passage of the SMART Copyright Act of 2022”.

Why the Smart Copyright Act Is Necessary

The safe harbors for internet platforms in the Copyright Act are conditioned on the platforms’ cooperation to remove pirated content. The law has not worked as intended by Congress to encourage that cooperation, however, because the courts resisted enforcing the loss of safe harbors. In doing so, they took the teeth out of the law. As a result, piracy is out of control today, and the only mechanism that creators have to combat piracy is to send continuous takedown notices to the platforms, which is not only costly and time-consuming—for both the creators and platforms—but it is also ineffective because pirates often repost the infringing material. Online piracy harms the entire publishing and other creative ecosystems, leaving creators, who are usually at the bottom of the food chain, with only crumbs. Writers and other creators have no recourse except to watch the income from legitimate sales of their works dwindle while e-book pirates line their coffers.

The best way to curb piracy is for service providers to adopt STMs that automatically limit the amount of piracy on their services. These technologies already exist, and many platforms already use them effectively for certain types of works. The Authors Guild and other organizations representing creators have asked Congress to require all the major user-generated content sites to use such technologies to prevent or curb piracy. While the current law contemplates voluntary multi-industry convenings to create and adopt STMs, there has been no incentive for online providers to do so. As a result, no STMs have been formally recognized in the 23 years since the law was passed.

Bill co-sponsor Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) says on his site:

…Online service providers struck a deal with Congress twenty years ago—they wouldn’t have to pay for copyright theft facilitated by their systems if they worked with copyright owners to create effective standardized technical measures (STMs) to identify and protect against distribution of stolen content. In enacting this grand bargain, Congress clearly envisioned this safe harbor immunity would act as an incentive for platforms and rights holders to collaborate on developing effective measures to combat copyright theft, lower transaction costs, accelerate information sharing, and create a healthy internet for everyone. 

Yet rather than incentivizing collaboration, the law actually inhibits it because service providers cannot risk losing their valuable safe harbors if an STM is created. In addition, the current statute provides only one path to establish that a technological measure is a consensus-based STM that must be available to all. As a result, no STMs have been identified since the law took effect.  The issue isn’t whether technical measures to combat rampant copyright infringement exist—plenty do—but rather how to encourage service providers to adopt technical measures to combat stealing and facilitate sharing of critical copyright data.   

The Strengthening Measures to Advance Rights Technologies (SMART) Copyright Act of 2022 takes a measured approach to addressing these barriers in two ways. It creates flexibility so that more existing measures could be eligible for consensus created STMs and it addresses the incentive issue by authorizing the Librarian of Congress to designate through an open, public rulemaking process technical measures identified by stakeholders that certain service providers must accommodate and not interfere with. Instead of “bet the company” loss of safe harbors, violations involving designated technical measures (DTMs) risk only actual or statutory damages, from which innocent violators can be exempt.

Read a one-pager of the bill HERE and myth vs. fact HERE.

(6) LISTEN IN. Cora Buhlert is interviewed by Oliver Brackenbury in episode 36 of the So I’m Writing a Novel podcast: “Interview with Cora Buhlert”.

Cora Buhlert is a Hugo-nominated author and genre scholar who Oliver was lucky enough to meet through his research for the novel, and he’d love for you to meet her too!

Oliver and Cora discuss her falling in love with the very American body of work known as pulp fiction while she grew up travelling the world, the survival of dime novels in modern Germany, the irresistible pull of forbidden fiction, Thundarr and He-Man, “the best thing that happened in Germany in 1989”…

(7) SLICE OF LIFE. Did you ever want to know what H.P. Lovecraft thought of Gustav Meyrink’s The Golem and its silent film adaptations? If yes, Bobby Derie has you covered: “The Golem (1928) by Gustav Meyrink” at Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein.

Der Golem (“The Golem”) was a silent film directed by and starring Paul Wegener with German intertitles released in 1915. The film is now believed to be lost, aside from some fragments. This film was followed by two more: Der Golem und die Tänzerin (“The Golem and the Dancing Girl”) in 1917, and Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (“The Golem: How He Came Into The World”) in 1920, both of which were also directed by and starring Paul Wegener as the golem. So it isn’t clear which film Lovecraft actually saw. The 1920 film survives and is in the public domain.

Lovecraft claimed in most of his letters to have caught a showing of it in 1921, and like many an English student of the VHS era who needed to write a book report, he assumed somewhat erroneously that it was faithful to the plot of the book….

(8) ONCE UPON A NEWSSTAND. [Item by Cora Buhlert.] At Dark Worlds Quarterly, G.W. Thomas takes a look at Weird Tales’ shortlived sister magazine Oriental Stories a.k.a. Magic Carpet Tales: “Magic Carpet Tales: The Other Weird Tales” I’ve read some of Robert E. Howard’s contributions to Oriental Stories/Magic Carpet Tales and they were very good.

… Exotic locales, sexy seductresses and plotting agents aside, much of what appeared was a type of Horror fiction. Not always supernatural, torture tales, conte cruels but not your run-of-the-mill werewolf and vampire stories. For those who love Robert E. Howard and other WT authors, this is a bonanza of secondary tales….

(9) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.

1968 [Item by Cat Eldridge.] On this day in the United Kingdom fifty-four years ago, Planet of The Apes premiered. It was directed by Franklin J. Schaffner. The screenplay was by Michael Wilson and Rod Serling, and was based loosely upon Pierre Boulle‘s La Planète des Singes

It starred Charlton Heston, Roddy McDowall, Kim Hunter, Maurice Evans, James Whitmore, James Daly and Linda Harrison. Roddy McDowall had a long-running relationship with this series, appearing in four of the original five films (absent only from the second film of the series, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, in which he was replaced by David Watson in the role of Cornelius), and also in the television series.

It was met with critical acclaim and is widely regarded as a classic film and one of the best films of that year.  Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times said that it was “much better than I expected it to be. It is quickly paced, completely entertaining, and its philosophical pretensions don’t get in the way.” And Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times exclaimed that it was, “A triumph of artistry and imagination, it is at once a timely parable and a grand adventure on an epic scale.” 

It did exceedingly well at the box office costing less than six million to make and making more than thirty million in its first year of screening.

Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes give it an eighty-seven percent rating with over a hundred thousand reviewers having expressed an opinion!

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born March 21, 1931 Al Williamson. Cartoonist who was best known for his work for EC Comics in the ’50s, including titles like Weird Science and Weird Fantasy, and for his work on Flash Gordon in the Sixties. He won eight Harvey Awards, and an Eisner Hall of Fame Award.  (Died 2010.)
  • Born March 21, 1944 Lorene Yarnell Jansson. Yarnell played Dot Matrix (body acting, with Joan Rivers performing the voice) in Spaceballs. She was Sonia in The Wild Wild West Revisted, Formicida / Dr. Irene Janis in Wonder Woman’s “Formicida” episode and on the Muppet Show in season four episode, “Shields And Yarnell”. (Died 2010.)
  • Born March 21, 1946 Terry Dowling, 76. I was trying to remember exactly what it was by him that I read and it turned out to be Amberjack: Tales of Fear and Wonder, an offering from Subterranean Press a decade ago. Oh, it was tasty! If it’s at all representative of his other short stories, he’s a master at them. And I see he’s got just one novel, Clowns at Midnight which I’ve not read but really should. He’s not at all deeply stocked at the usual digital suspects but they do have this plus several story collections. He’s won ten Ditmars, very impressive indeed, and quite a few other Awards as well.
  • Born March 21, 1946 Timothy Dalton, 76. He is best known for portraying James Bond in The Living Daylights and Licence to Kill but is currently in The Doom Patrol as Niles Caulder, The Chief. As I’ve said before, go watch it now! He also was Damian Drake in Looney Tunes: Back in Action, Sir Malcolm on the Penny Dreadful series and Lord President of the Time Lords (Rassilon) during the Time of Tenth and Eleventh Doctors. He went to theatre to play Lord Asriel in the stage version of His Dark Materials.
  • Born March 21, 1956 Teresa Nielsen Hayden, 66. She is a consulting editor for Tor Books and is well known for her and husband, Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s superb weblog Making Light, and back in the Eighties, they published the Izzard fanzine. And she has three fascinating framing pieces in The Essential Bordertown, edited by Delia Sherman and Terri Windling. 
  • Born March 21, 1958 Gary Oldman, 64. First genre film role was as Rosencrantz in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. Next up is the lead role in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. And of course he was Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg in Fifth Element, followed by being Lost in Space‘s Dr. Zachary Smith, which in turn led to Harry Potter’s Sirius Black, and that begat James Gordon in the Batman filmsAlthough some reviewers give him accolades for us as role as Dr. Dennett Norton in the insipid Robocop remake, I will not. Having not seen Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, I can’t say how he is as Dreyfus in it.
  • Born March 21, 1965 Cynthia Geary, 57. Best remembered as Shelly Tambo on Northern Exposure. It’s genre, isn’t it? If that’s not enough, she’s got a prime genre role in The Outer Limits episode “Mary 25” in which she plays Teryl who is not what she seems. And she shows up on Fantady Island in the “Dying to Dance” as Pamela Lewis.
  • Born March 21, 1970 Chris Chibnall, 52. Current showrunner for Doctor Who and the head writer for the first two (and I think) best series of Torchwood. He first showed up in the Whoverse when he penned the Tenth Doctor story, “42”.  He also wrote several episodes of Life on Mars. He’s been nominated for a Hugo three times for work on Doctor Who, “Rosa” at Dublin 2019, “Resolution” CoNZealand and for “Fugitive of the Judoon” at DisCon III.
  • Born March 21, 1985 Sonequa Martin-Green, 37. She currently plays Michael Burnham on Discovery which is now In its fourth series. She had a brief recurring role as Tamara in Once Upon a Time, and a much longer recurring role on The Walking Dead as Sasha Williams but I’ve never seen her there as zombies hold absolutely no interest to me. Well Solomon Grundy does…  And she was in the Shockwave, Darkside film.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • The Duplex shows the history you learn from watching movies.
  • Lise Andreasen says these are “Exactly the same things I would do!”

(12) OUTFOXED. Arturo Serrano reviews the new Pixar film for Nerds of a Feather in “’Turning Red’ finds joy in the scary messiness of puberty”.

…Disney/Pixar’s new animated movie Turning Red takes this metaphor of puberty as transformation and situates it in the no less stressful context of the immigrant experience during the rise of digital mass media. If being a teenager is hard, it’s almost unbearably so when inherited traditions and expectations conflict with multicultural openness and pop culture sex symbols. When protagonist Meilin Lee learns that the women of her family have the power to transform into enormous red pandas, it feels like it couldn’t have come at a worse time: she’s busy enough pleasing her parents and excelling at school and daydreaming about boy bands without going all Katie Ka-Boom every time she gets emotional. So she panics, and tries to hide what’s happening to her, and pretends to be in full command of her feelings—but her inner animal won’t be tamed. There’s no denying the call of nature….

(13) EFF ME. That was my reaction to the headline “Hugh Grant ‘in conversation’ to replace Jodie Whittaker as Doctor Who” at Metro News.

…Well, rumour has it the Love Actually star could be taking over from Jodie Whittaker as the Time Lord.

According to The Mirror, the BBC series could be heading for a Marvel-style makeover, with Hugh at the helm….

(14) WIN BY LOSING. “Loki Award Show Lost Saves Universe, According to Miss Minutes”Gizmodo has the story.

Awards season hit a high note this weekend as multiple guilds and groups gave awards leading up to the grand finale, the Oscars, which happen this coming Sunday. One of the biggest to do so was the Writers Guild of America—and apparently one specific category literally saved the world, at least according to a certain animated talking clock from the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

… In the Drama category, Succession was up against The Handmaid’s Tale, The Morning Show, Yellowjackets, and Marvel’s Loki. And it’s that last one we’re going to concentrate on. Showrunner and head writer Michael Waldron revealed on Twitter that, had Loki won, this is the acceptance speech the writers submitted to air.

(15) REGENCY TEA TIME. [Item by Cora Buhlert.] Aja Romano shares her appreciation for the works of Georgette Heyer and wonders why Heyer is not a household name and has never had a film or TV adaptation: “When will Hollywood discover Georgette Heyer?” at Vox. I’d say that Georgette Heyer is at least genre-adjacent, since a lot of SFF fans seem to like her and Regency romance in general. Plus, Regency dancing is a thing at many cons.

…[Jane] Austen’s relative lack of sentiment also helped her gain popularity and respect as a writer in a male-dominated century of literature. While other women writers of her time like Fanny Burney were reviled as trashy, Austen’s lack of interest in high drama and romance made her work acceptable to male readers as well as to women. One 19th-century critic wrote approvingly that “she sets her face zealously against romantic attachments.”

That patriarchal lack of respect for the art of writing about love may also explain why few outside of romance fans have ever heard of Austen’s primary successor: Georgette Heyer. Despite singlehandedly creating the modern romance, Heyer is still a niche author. And though she has nearly 10 times as many books available for cinematic adaptation as Austen, Hollywood has yet to discover her….

(16) PARALLAX VIEWS OF WESTEROS. George R.R. Martin introduces The Rise Of The Dragon” at Not A Blog and explains how it complements Fire & Blood. Sample art at the link.

We’re so excited to announce The Rise of The Dragon, a lavish visual history of House Targaryen – the iconic family at the heart of HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel series, House of the Dragon – featuring over 180 all-new illustrations!

For those of you who are wondering: What’s the difference between The Rise of the Dragon and Fire & Blood? Think of The Rise of the Dragon as a deluxe reference book, in which Westeros’ most infamous family – and their dragons – come to life in partnership with some truly incredible artists.

Fire & Blood was scribed as a grandmaesters’ account of events from Aegon Targaryen’s conquest of Westeros through to the infamous Dance of the Dragons, the civil war that nearly undid the Targaryen rule. The Rise of the Dragon will cover the same time period, but is written in a more encyclopedic style similar to The World of Ice and Fire. In fact, The World of Ice and Fire authors Elio M. García, Jr. and Linda Antonsson have returned to help with this tome. …

(17) AIRING ON THE SIDE OF CAUTION. [Item by Daniel Dern.] From the “By The Book” weekly interview in the NY Times (Sunday) Book Review section, 3/20/22, with Jeremy Denk, a question that IIRC is part of every interview:

Q: What books are on your night stand.

A: In Manhattan, my night stand has become commandeered by a CPAP machine. I chose breathing over reading.

He then goes on to list books elsewhere in his domicile(s).

(18) IT’S FOR YOU. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] The BBC shows it’s possible to walk outside with a mobile phone “as big as a walkie talkie” and make a phone call in this clip from a 1974 episode of Blue Peter.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, Lise Andreasen, Olav Rokne, Daniel Dern, Cora Buhlert, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, and JJ for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern, who calls it his Tolkien cowboy title.]

ESFS Awards Nominations for 2021

The European Science Fiction Association released the 2021 nominees for the ESFS Achievement Awards and the ESFS Hall of Fame Awards on June 29.

The Hall of Fame award celebrates lifetime contributions.

The winners of these awards will be selected at the next general meeting of the ESFS, which will take place at Eurocon 2021 which takes place from July 15-18 in Fiuggi, Italy.

Note: The nominating country is listed, which in some cases is not the country associated with the work. For links related to each nominee, see here. Some names have been done as screencaps to work around WordPress’ failure to support certain special characters.

The nominations for the ESFS Achievement Awards and ESFS Hall of Fame Awards follow the jump. There is also a link to the ESFS Awards website for each award, which has links to additional resources about the nominees.

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ESFS Nominations 2019

The European Science Fiction Society has released the 2019 nominees for its Achievement, Hall of Fame and Chrysalis awards.

The winners of these awards will be selected at the next general meeting of the ESFS, which will take place at the 41st Eurocon /Titancon in Belfast from August 22-25.

The nominees in the various categories are contained in the following Dropbox documents.

(I would run the lists here, unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t support all of the characters, nor can I work around that by substituting code.)