(1) RAISE YOUR HAND IF YOU’RE A GREAT WRITER. Photos from George R.R. Martin’s sit-down with Stephen King last night in Albuquerque, in “The King and I” at Not a Blog.
(2) NON-ENGLISH SCHOLARSHIP AWARD. Through September 1, the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts is taking entries for the 10th annual Jamie Bishop Memorial Award for a critical essay on the fantastic written in a language other than English.
The IAFA defines the fantastic to include science fiction, folklore, and related genres in literature, drama, film, art and graphic design, and related disciplines.
The prize is $250 U.S. and one year’s free membership in the IAFA.
(3) FUTURE IAFA. In 2017, “Fantastic Epics” will be the theme of the 38th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, to be held March 22-26 in Orlando, Florida. Guests of Honor: Steven Erikson and N.K. Jemisin; Guest Scholar: Edward James; and Special Guest Emeritus: Brian Aldiss.
(4) INVENTIVE SF WRITER. Mike Chomko salutes “120 Years of Murray Leinster” at the Pulpfest website.
Although magazines have been around since the seventeenth century, it wasn’t until the last month of 1896 that the pulp magazine was born. It was left to Frank A. Munsey – a man about whom it has been suggested, “contributed to the journalism of his day the talent of a meat packer, the morals of a money changer and the manner of an undertaker” – to deliver the first American periodical specifically intended for the common man — THE ARGOSY. In his own words, Munsey decided to create “a magazine of the people and for the people, with pictures and art and good cheer and human interest throughout.”
That same year, on June 16, a child was born who would become one of THE ARGOSY’s regular writers for nearly four decades — William Fitzgerald Jenkins. Best known and remembered under his pseudonym of Murray Leinster, Jenkins wrote and published more than 1,500 short stories and articles, fourteen movie scripts, and hundreds of radio scripts and television plays. Active as a writer for nearly seven decades, Jenkins’ writing career began in early 1916 when his work began to be featured in H. L. Mencken’s and George Jean Nathan’s THE SMART SET.
(5) JEMISIN INTERVIEWED BY WIRED. “Wired Book Club: Fantasy Writer N.K. Jemisin on the Weird Dreams That Fuel Her Stories”.
We asked readers to submit questions. Here’s one: “I love how this storyline seemed to play with the idea that a person is fluid rather than static, especially when discussing the concept of mothering. Women tend to be judged very harshly on whether or not they want a family, and on the decisions they make when they do have a family. To see one person travel along all different points of the mother spectrum was very interesting. Am I reading too much into this?”
No! I’m glad that reader saw that. I tend to like writing characters that are not typical heroes. I have seen mothers as heroes in fiction lots of time, but they tend to be one-note. You don’t often see that they weren’t always that interested in having kids. They weren’t always great moms. You don’t often see that they are people beyond being mothers, that motherhood is just one aspect of their life and not the totality of their being. I had some concern about the fact that I am not a mother. It’s entirely possible that I made some mistakes in the way that I chose to render that complexity. But it’s something I wanted to explore.
(6) YOU CAN SAY THAT AGAIN. In fact, they have.
https://twitter.com/DailyPratchett/status/743858165213691904
(7) JUDGING A BOOK BY ITS COVER. Joe Zieja, gaining fame as a genre humorist, proves his mettle in “Five Books I Haven’t Read But Want To and Am Going to Summarize Anyway Based on Their Titles and Covers” at Tor.com.
The Grace of Kings—Ken Liu
The year is 2256. The Earth is a barren wasteland of oatmeal raisin cookies and hyper-intelligent cockroaches Everything is pretty much firmly settled in a dystopian, post-apocalpytic mess, and nobody can grow any plants. Except one girl: Grace King. This is the story of one girl’s attempt to grow a dandelion out of a really fancy upside-down ladle. As she struggles to find the courage inside herself—and maybe some water or fertilizer, or something—we recognize that her quest for the ladle is not unlike our own, deeply personal quest for soup.
This game sounds tailor made for Filers…
(8) FATHERS DAY READS. The B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog comes up with “5 Great Dad Moments in Science Fiction & Fantasy History”.
Aral Vorkosigan Saves His Son (The Warrior’s Apprentice, by Lois McMaster Bujold) Aral Vorkosigan is not a man who easily bends his principles or behaves counter to his beliefs; you can probably count the number of times he’s actually used his power and influence for personal gain on one hand—remarkable considering how much power he wields at various times in his career. At the end of the second book in Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga, his son Miles stands accused of raising a private army and is poised to be drummed out of the military and executed, but Aral influences the proceedings so that Miles is charged instead with the equally serious crime of treason. Why is having your son accused of treason a grand Dad Moment? Because Aral knew treason could never be proved—while it was pretty clear that Miles had indeed raised a private army (even if he had a really good reason). It’s a neat way for Aral to demonstrate his loyalty to his son without, technically, violating his own moral code.
(9) NOW WE HAVE FACES. Yahoo! News brings word that Supergirl has cast its Superman.
For Season 2, though, the Last Son of Krypton will finally have a face, and he’ll look a lot like Tyler Hoechlin. The Teen Wolf star takes flight in a role previously played on The CW by Smallville’s Tom Welling, who portrayed a pre-Superman Clark Kent for 10 seasons.
Hoechlin actually has comic book roots that pre-date his Supergirl assignment. At the age of 14, he won the coveted role of Tom Hanks’s son in Road to Perdition, the Sam Mendes-directed adaptation of an acclaimed graphic novel. In addition to his role as Derek Hale on Teen Wolf, the actor will also appear in the upcoming Fifty Shades of Grey sequels, Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed.
(10) QUALITY EMERGENT. At Amazing Stories, MD Jackson continues the series: “Why Was Early Comic Book Art so Crude? (Part Two)”.
His talents did not go unnoticed. Everett M. “Busy” Arnold, publisher of Quality Comics, wanted to integrate the comic book format into the more prestigious world of the Sunday Funnies. He lured Eisner away from the studio to create a weekly comic book that would be distributed by a newspaper syndicate. Eisner agreed and came up with his most famous creation, The Spirit, which would continue to break new ground artistically, but also in the comic book business. Eisner insisted on owning the copyright to his new creation, a situation almost without parallel in comics at that time and almost without parallel on any popular basis for several decades to come. “Since I knew I would be in comics for life, I felt I had every right to own what I created. It was my future, my product and my property, and by God, I was going to fight to own it.” Eisner said. That was a watershed moment in terms of the artist being acknowledged as a creator of comics rather than just part of an assembly line.
(11) A LOONEY IDEA. A BBC video explains why Earth probably has more than one moon a lot of the time.
Or, as JPL explains it:
As it orbits the sun, this new asteroid, designated 2016 HO3, appears to circle around Earth as well. It is too distant to be considered a true satellite of our planet, but it is the best and most stable example to date of a near-Earth companion, or “quasi-satellite.”
“Since 2016 HO3 loops around our planet, but never ventures very far away as we both go around the sun, we refer to it as a quasi-satellite of Earth,” said Paul Chodas, manager of NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object (NEO) Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “One other asteroid — 2003 YN107 — followed a similar orbital pattern for a while over 10 years ago, but it has since departed our vicinity. This new asteroid is much more locked onto us. Our calculations indicate 2016 HO3 has been a stable quasi-satellite of Earth for almost a century, and it will continue to follow this pattern as Earth’s companion for centuries to come.”
(12) IT’S A THEORY.
https://twitter.com/historylvrsclub/status/739853751155085312
(13) A DOCTOR ON DYING. Rudy Rucker Podcast #95 shares with listeners an essay/memoir by Michael Blumlein called “Unrestrained and Indiscreet” originally read at the SF in SF series in San Francisco.
And then all at once Blumlein … tells about learning that he himself has lung cancer, about having large sections of his lungs removed, and about learning that the treatments have failed and that he’s approaching death. Blumlein is a doctor as well as as science-fiction author, and he ends with a profound meditation on the process and experience of death…
(14) SCALES AND TALES. William Wu has released the final cover for Scales and Tales, the anthology created to benefit three different animal adoption programs in the LA area.
Wu’s small press is printing 500 copies. An e-version will follow.
There will be a signing at the San Diego Comic-Con in July, and another at Dark Delicacies bookstore in Burbank on August 28 at 2 p.m.
(15) SIXTIES HUGO WINNER. Nawfalaq at AQ’s Reviews is not the least blown away by Clifford D. Simak’s Way Station, a book that was at the very top of my list of favorite sf novels for a number of years.
Way Station by Clifford D. Simak (1904 – 1988) is the third novel by the author that I have read. It was published in 1963 and won the 1964 Hugo Award for best novel. Off the bat, I have to say that this is the most polished of the three novels by Simak that I have read. Nevertheless, I admit that this was not an easy read for me to get through. The setting and the tone really caused the big slowdown with my reading of this novel.
The review makes me want to “revenge read” Way Station to prove to myself it is as wonderful as I remember. But what if it’s not…?
(16) SECURITY THEATRE? JJ calls this a “replicant check.”
https://twitter.com/J0hnnyXm4s/status/743465789081157634
(17) IT PAYS TO BE A GENIUS OF COURSE. In this installment of Whatever’s “The Big Idea” series, Yoon Ha Lee reveals the thinking behind Ninefox Gambit.
Not so fast. Both of them were also supposed to be geniuses: Jedao at tactics and psychological warfare, Cheris at math. It’s possible that writing geniuses is easy when one is a genius oneself; I wouldn’t know, because I’m definitely not a genius. (I have since sworn that maybe the next thing I should do is write slapstick comedy about stupid-ass generals, not brilliant tacticians.)
So I cheated. A lot. One of the first things I did was to reread James Dunnigan & Albert A. Nofi’s Victory and Deceit: Dirty Tricks at War. I wrote down all the stratagems I liked, then tried to shove all of them into the rough draft. (And then there was too much plot so I had to take some of them out.) And of course, their opponent also had to be smart. I’d learned this from reading Gordon R. Dickson’s Tactics of Mistake, a novel I found infuriating because the “tactical genius” mainly geniused by virtue of the opponent being stupid, which I’m sure happens all the time in real life but makes for unsatisfying narrative. Besides all the military reading I did, I also hit up social engineering and security engineering.
(18) TODAY IN HISTORY
- June 17, 1955 — Bert I. Gordon’s King Dinosaur premieres in theaters.
(19) MONSTERKID. Rondo Award emcee David Colton presents Steve Vertlieb with the Lifetime Achievement, Rondo Award “Hall Of Fame” plaque at the Wonderfest film conference on June 4.
(20) STAR WARS 8 FINISHES SHOOTING IN IRELAND. Post-Star Wars filming in Ireland, the studio put an ad in a local Kerry newspaper complete with Gaelic translation of may the force be with you. The commenters tried to make it look like the translation was wrong. All I can say is Google Translate made nonsense of it.
Then local Credit Union decided to capitalize on the zeitgeist with Darth Vader as Gaeilgoir (Irish speaker).
(21) FURNISHING THE FUTURE. Stelios Mousarris is a designer with a fantastic imagination.
A Glass Coffee Table propelled by a team of rockets makes a nice Father’s Day gift.
Ever since I was a little boy, I loved playing with action figures and spent my weekend mornings watching cartoons on the TV. I have been collecting toys and action figures and anything nostalgic from my childhood until this day.
Every time I take a look at my collectibles I remember my childhood, when I used to play for hours on end without a care in the world.
I wanted to recreate that feeling of carefreeness and nostalgia with the Rocket Coffee Table. The design is visually playful bringing cartoon-like clouds and aerial rockets from a personal toy collection to life, in the form of a table.
Combining various techniques from lathe to 3d printing, resin casting and traditional hand curved pieces, this table is fashioned to draw a smile on the face of nostalgic adults, children, and children trapped in adult bodies.
The rockets are not attached to the glass giving the opportunity to each owner to form their own desired structure of the table.
Price: €5000
Or look at the Wave City Coffee Table:
Inspired by a film this table is a well balanced mixture of wood, steel and 3D printed technology.
Price: €8500
[Thanks to Nigel, JJ, Andrew Porter, Chip Hitchcock, John King Tarpinian, and robinareid for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kip W.]
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Hattrick firfth?
ETA: Nope, only a deuce…
(#1) George R.R. Martin and Stephen King strike me similarly in some ways. I heartily admire their works that are under (about) 25,000 words.
I’m pretty sure Way Station is on my electronic TBR mountain range. Maybe I’ll take a break from Seveneves and try it out.
Fifth?
Some Low Ordinal Numberth!
ETA: Five, baby!
King and GRRM. One writes five books a year. The other takes five years to write one book.
(10) QUALITY EMERGENT. The odd thing about Eisner is on the one hand he’s lauded as pioneer for creative rights in comics for securing the rights to his own creation, the Spirit. But on the other hand, didn’t he himself run a studio/packaging house where he employed a whole roomful of artists on a work-for-hire basis? I’ve never seen anyone discuss this apparent irony.
In the future, everyone will be fifth for one pixel scroll.
(12) IT’S A THEORY.
I buy it.
(16) SECURITY THEATRE?
LOL. It’s a Voight-Kampff Captcha!
(7) JUDGING A BOOK BY ITS COVER.
The Dark Forest, by Cixin Liu, translated by Joel Martinsen.
The destiny of humankind changes forever when some kind of weirdass fucking train appears above the Earth. The front of the engine is like if only death-metal fans were into steampunk. In Norway, death-metal fan and wannabe bassist Larch Umber is inspired by the appearance of the alien conveyance to feverishly compose a song cycle he calls “The Dark Forest” because he thinks it sounds cool and, really, all the forests are dark now what with the weirdass fucking alien train blotting out the sun. Larch’s race against time to recruit a band to record his masterpiece reaches a crisis point when his guitarist refuses to play anything in E♭. Then the aliens alight, and turn out to be fans of an ever-so-slightly different subgenre of metal, and discord reigns throughout the solar system.
(5) Lovely interview from N.K. Jemisin.
(But man, I hate Wired as a site, with their idiotic “Here’s the Thing With Ad Blockers” demanding payment. I’ve found you can get around it though by not scrolling down, saving the whole article as a webpage, and reading it on Chrome or another browser.)
@Jim Henley
That sounds a helluva lot better than the actual book.
(7) JUDGING A BOOK BY ITS COVER.
Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel.
People unclear on the concept decide to be ghosts for Halloween, but the tents they choose to drape themselves in are much too large, and also, you’re not supposed to set them up. They nevertheless make it partway across the field between their village and the one with the Halloween party, albeit slowly, when they hit the wall. And behind that wall, a pile of rocks has been awaiting its chance at revenge…
@Bonnie McDaniel: 😀
I’m trying to play fair by picking books I really haven’t read. Which does give me a lot of choices. Kyra wouldn’t be able to hack this restriction…
(7) JUDGING A BOOK BY ITS COVER.
Space Raptor Butt Invasion, by Chuck Tingle.
In the post-singularity future, stock photos have gained sentience. Hijinx ensue.
Maybe they’ll collaborate on that last installment of ASOIAF. Throw in some Dark Tower crossover. A superflu outbreak just to keep things interesting.
The movie of Jim Henley’s “Dark Forest” will star or co-star Jack Black.
At one time ( we’ll just refer to that time as ‘The Seventies’ ), I knew that Murray Leinster and I shared a birthday, but it’s now The Future, and I’m old now, as old as Paul McCartney sang in his song “When I’m Six Feet Four”, as I recollect and I have rediscovered that we were both born on June 16th. If anyone feels the need to buy me a birthday gift, I have to say that my wife and I really like the Inception table.
Damn, I’m old. When did that happen?
Happy birthday, David Stever
The End of All Things by John Scalzi
In a dystopian nanny states, cigarette smokers have been banished to live in giant flying aircraft carriers. In a bizarre twist only they can save humanity from global catastrophe. But can they generate enough secondhand smoke before disaster engulfs the Earth?
Saturn Run
The UNSS Wolverine returns from the first expedition to the sixth planet. Celebration soon turns to horror though as an extraterrestrial virus escapes quarantine mutating into a human infectious disease causing severe gastrointestinal distress. Doctor Cronos Romano of the International CDC discovers not only a cure but a government conspiracy to use the disease to assume dictatorship of Earth. On the lam he tries to reach the resistance and distribute the formula for the cure to the general populace.
FREE BOOK TODAY: If you have a Nook or use the Nook app, B&N has a “Free Friday” offering every week. Usually, my reaction is “meh”, but there are occasional exceptions. Like this week’s:
NO DAWN FOR MEN is a thriller by James Lepore, distinguished because the two men who go undercover in 1938 Nazi Germany for British Intelligence are J.R.R. Tolkien and Ian Fleming.
Link: NO DAWN FOR MEN
(Despite the “Free Fridays” moniker, in my experience the weekly offerings are usually available until the following Friday’s offer. Still, best to act fast.)
The Monster Kid Hall of Fame Award plaque is nearly as ugly as the old World Fantasy Award trophy.
@Stoic Cynic: What cover are you basing yours on? I don’t get it.
@Bruce Arthurs: They’ve been really tightening up how long the free stuff lasts lately. Should be good all weekend, though. Note it isn’t free on any other platform.
lurkertype: Stoic Cynic: What cover are you basing yours on? I don’t get it.
Maybe this one?
The Roman Objekt! Archeological mystery….
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/42/Rsg48hc.jpg
Rocket Ship Galileo – Robert Heinlein
On a cold winter’s day, in a small village far from the hustle and bustle of the capitol and its bickering courtiers, a group of adventurers meet at their old stomping ground and favorite inn, the Rusty Bearclaw, to discuss what they’ve found about the goings-on of the self-proclaimed High King Lordibadman and his minions. To nobody’s surprise (except Glinliadiel, the morose high elf who would rather be off on an entirely different and golden-glowier continent, to be completely honest, and who’d just basically skulked around town for the past year trying to pick up the local milkmaids by flashing his pointing ears seductively toward them), there are reports throughout the land of ork sightings, and rumors of dragons terrorizing the more remote mountain villages. Dirk “Rocket Ship” Galileo and his brooding, whiny, master necromancer brother, “Doctor” Smith, have come up with a plan to stop Lordibadman, but is it too late?
Ancillary Justice
Colt McCartney, better known to the galaxy as the Red Baron, has made a name as one of the Company’s best star pilots, turning the tide in countless battles across the Thousand Systems against the nefarious White Tide syndicate. However, when the White Tide score a victory against one of the Company’s core world’s, wiping out an entire city in a single strike, Colt finds himself implicated in a terrible conspiracy which seems to go to the very top.
Disgraced and cast out from the company’s fighter squadron, the Red Baron is finally offered a position in the Company’s mysterious legal support wing. But will completing his assignments lead him to the answers about what really happened on Tavany Snoe, and allow Colt to clear his name for good?
Dhalgren [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/ac/Dhalgren-bantam-cover.jpg ]
After finding a genie in a bottle, Bob Biscuit wishes that he wants to ‘paint the town red’. To his horror, his wish comes true and now he and his friend have to paint it back a normal colour before anybody notices. Hilarity ensues.
God Stalk [http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1287523762l/69169.jpg ]
She came from the haunted lands to work as a gargoyle repair service operator only to find that eccentric fishermen keep ruining her work.
I did just reread Way Station, within the last couple of months, and I thought it held up quite well. The writing is…well, it’s of the era, i.e. a tad pulpish, but if you’re comparing it to other things of that era, that’s not a big deal. And the story remains the sort of thing that Simak did so well. His unique blend of quiet pastoralism and wild SF ideas remains, well, unique. And it’s a style that seems to resist the attacks of the suck fairy quite well.
Definitely made me want to track down City again, which used to be my favorite of his.
On the topic of revisiting unique voices in SF, I also reread Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men and Starmaker recently. I had absolutely no idea how they would hold up after all this time, but they were mostly as I remembered—a non-stop wave of extremely wild ideas, pasted together with an occasional small dab of story. There’s still material in there which could be used to generate approximately 6,428 epic space operas! 🙂
Uprooted
A young person has to leave the city for the countryside, where the only mystery she has to solve is why this small landlocked village needs a lighthouse.
Gentleman Jole and The Red Queen
In this gender-swapped retelling of the Alice stories, Jole demonstrates that all you need to make your way through a psychotropic landscape is good manners.
Also re-read Way Station and City fairly recently, and I think they both hold up fairly well, although I cannot work out why City is so titled… the very first story details how cities have become economically unnecessary and will soon be abandoned, and the book centres around the Websters’ country estate. But that’s a small quibble, really.
@Jim Henley
Excerpt from your version of The Dark Forest (actually from Huxley’s 1920 novel Limbo):
“I entered the room with my hands over my ears. ‘For God’s sake–‘ I implored. Through the open window, [Larch] was shouting a deep E flat, with a spread chord of under- and over-tones, while the guitar gibbered shrilly and hysterically in D natural. [The guitarist] laughed, banged his guitar on to the sofa with such violence that it gave forth a trembling groan from all its strings, and ran forth to meet me.”
Sounds as if you’ve been in this rehearsal, too, Jim.
On a tangent, with regard to the Uprooted cover: the other night whilst browsing Overdrive, I saw one I’d never seen before.
And this is this only place I’ve seen such a lovely, vivid version of the cover to which Mark-kitteh linked.
Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross.
[This plot description has been removed for the sake of any children that might happen to be in the audience.]
😀
The Stars My Destination Alfred Bester
Gully and Jisbella were young, beautiful, and talented. They dreamed of stardom. But after that fateful night in Tijuana, it all came crashing down for Gully. Jiz woke up with a tasteful crescent moon discreetly placed on one shoulder, but Gully . . . . “I told you to put those damn tats on your back, not your face, Gul,” she insisted. “Now you’ll never be a leading man.” Gully is left without his girl, his looks, and the Hollywood future he’d imagined. Can he reclaim his tattered hopes, or will he be forever relegated to supporting roles? Can he still get that house in the Hollywood Hills, or at least Bel Air? Can he find a laser surgeon willing to take on his case? You’ll be on the edge of your La-Z-Boy, cheering him on!
https://www.amazon.com/Stars-My-Destination-Alfred-Bester/dp/1876963468
@Xtifr you’re supposed to make up a plot not use the real one 😛
Good morning.
In some slightly better news from the UK, the album chart has been Rickrolled
Bridge of Birds, Barry Hughart
A daring use of non-standard materials ends in catastrophe for a young architect.
@Xtifr. Definitely re-read City. I just did, and fell into the charms and writing of Simak all over again. In a cross-over sort of way, I want to re-read WAY STATION and a couple of others of his, too. In my copious free time…
I love the book cover game, even though I’m not feeling creative enough to participate at the moment! We are always talking about covers and marketing at work, so these fun new plots make me very happy.
@lurkertype
It was a fairly generic spaceship cover so the summary is all references to the name (and a semi reference to an unrelated movie). It may not be worth decoding though. So not entirely in the spirit of the rules in any case.
@Mike Glyer
That would be one of them 🙂
Thanks for posting the “Moria Door” picture.
Speaking of covers begging to be given a story:
http://www.goodshowsir.co.uk/
(I believe I got this link originally from someone else on File 770. If so, Thanks(!) to whoever it was)
The Gates of Eden, by Brian Stableford.
She longed to work at the biosphere project. She’d brought her own overalls and everything. But they refused to let her anywhere near the dome until she did something about that rampant athlete’s foot.
@Hal Winslow’s Old Buddy: Guitarists, amirite?
(Note to guitarists: We kid because we love. But really, the flat keys aren’t so bad!)
@Jim Henley
Indeed–where would rock (etc.) be without them?
But it took me a long while when young to figure out why all these songs recorded in E flat were being performed in D or E. Hendrix, of course, had his solution: Just tune to E flat, baby!