(1) Today’s birthday girl —
Born September 10, 1953 – Pat Cadigan
She had a good day – “My Birthday Wasn’t All About Cancer”
Even though it started with a blood test at the Macmillan Centre, my birthday was all about Chris, and sushi and sake. It was all about my weight-loss making more clothes fit better. It was all about walking all over central London without worrying about having to find a place to sit. Well, until after I drank most of a small(-ish) bottle of sake. My back became a bit less tractable for a while but it had shaped up pretty well after the bus ride home.
(2) Europa SF has a great feature on the Tblisi, Georgia sf club “Fantasti” by Irakli Lomouri.
The first issue of “Fantasti“, The Georgian Science Fiction Magazine , is dedicated to Ray Bradbury.
Our SF and Fantasy Club “Fantasti” was officially registered in Tbilisi (Georgia) on March 18th, 2015, but its history began in August 2014, when I had a holiday – a free month – and lay down on the couch reading SF stories by means of my new tablet via internet. I love SF from my childhood, so I had to recall my favorite stories, and read many new ones – nearly 150.
I got so much pleasure, that I decided to offer it to others.
I wrote in a Facebook: Dear friends, let’s create a SF and Fantasy Club and publish a special dedicated magazine.
In Georgia SF is not popular, so I had no hope I could find real supporters of my idea, but fortunately I found them, so we met and started our club.
Since September 2014 we are having our biweekly meetings at my flat or in the House of Georgian Writers. In our club there are people of all ages, most of them write SF and fantasy themselves, so our club plays the role of literary studio, we read aloud our new stories and discuss them.
In our group on FB we have nearly 500 members (but not all are active)…
(3) Here’s something new to remember: the “t” in Voldemort is silent.
… but I'm pretty sure I'm the only person who pronounces it that way. https://t.co/HxhJ5XY5HP
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) September 9, 2015
(4) National Geographic has a big article about the discovery of a new species of human ancestor in a South African cave.
A trove of bones hidden deep within a South African cave represents a new species of human ancestor, scientists announced Thursday in the journal eLife. Homo naledi, as they call it, appears very primitive in some respects—it had a tiny brain, for instance, and apelike shoulders for climbing. But in other ways it looks remarkably like modern humans. When did it live? Where does it fit in the human family tree? And how did its bones get into the deepest hidden chamber of the cave—could such a primitive creature have been disposing of its dead intentionally?…
The same schizoid pattern was popping up at the other tables. A fully modern hand sported wackily curved fingers, fit for a creature climbing trees. The shoulders were apish too, and the widely flaring blades of the pelvis were as primitive as Lucy’s—but the bottom of the same pelvis looked like a modern human’s. The leg bones started out shaped like an australopithecine’s but gathered modernity as they descended toward the ground. The feet were virtually indistinguishable from our own.
“You could almost draw a line through the hips—primitive above, modern below,” said Steve Churchill, a paleontologist from Duke University. “If you’d found the foot by itself, you’d think some Bushman had died.”
But then there was the head. Four partial skulls had been found—two were likely male, two female. In their general morphology they clearly looked advanced enough to be called Homo. But the braincases were tiny—a mere 560 cubic centimeters for the males and 465 for the females, far less than H. erectus’s average of 900 cubic centimeters, and well under half the size of our own. A large brain is the sine qua non of humanness, the hallmark of a species that has evolved to live by its wits. These were not human beings. These were pinheads, with some humanlike body parts.
(5) And at the other end of the timescale, NASA is busy today downloading and interpreting photos of Pluto taken by New Horizons.
New Horizons photo of chaos region on Pluto.
New close-up images of Pluto from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft reveal a bewildering variety of surface features that have scientists reeling because of their range and complexity.
“Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms and complexity of processes that rival anything we’ve seen in the solar system,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado. “If an artist had painted this Pluto before our flyby, I probably would have called it over the top — but that’s what is actually there.”
New Horizons began its yearlong download of new images and other data over the Labor Day weekend. Images downlinked in the past few days have more than doubled the amount of Pluto’s surface seen at resolutions as good as 400 meters (440 yards) per pixel. They reveal new features as diverse as possible dunes, nitrogen ice flows that apparently oozed out of mountainous regions onto plains, and even networks of valleys that may have been carved by material flowing over Pluto’s surface. They also show large regions that display chaotically jumbled mountains reminiscent of disrupted terrains on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa. “The surface of Pluto is every bit as complex as that of Mars,” said Jeff Moore, leader of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging (GGI) team at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. “The randomly jumbled mountains might be huge blocks of hard water ice floating within a vast, denser, softer deposit of frozen nitrogen within the region informally named Sputnik Planum.”
In the center of this 300-mile (470-kilometer) wide image of Pluto from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is a large region of jumbled, broken terrain on the northwestern edge of the vast, icy plain informally called Sputnik Planum, to the right. The smallest visible features are 0.5 miles (0.8 kilometers) in size. This image was taken as New Horizons flew past Pluto on July 14, 2015, from a distance of 50,000 miles (80,000 kilometers).
(6) Huffington Post asked 13 top scientists to name their favorite books and movies.
Jane Goodall
Primatologist, founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and UN Messenger of Peace
“Three books of my childhood probably had the greatest impact on my life. The Story of Doctor Dolittle’ (by Hugh Lofting) and ‘Tarzan of the Apes’ (by Edgar Rice Burroughs) inspired me to understand what animals were trying to tell us and instilled within me an equally strong determination to travel to Africa, live with animals, and write books about them. ‘The Miracle of Life’ was a large book my grandmother got for free by saving up coupons from cereal packets. It was by no means a book intended for children.”
(7) Connie Willis is interviewed by Colorado Public Radio in “Hugos Battle: Both Sides Claim Sci-Fi Is Being Ruined By Politics”. Via Kevin Standlee.
(8) Chuck Wendig has some good news about his new novel.
I kinda didn’t think Star Wars: Aftermath was going to make list. In part because why would I assume that, and also in part because most books come out on Tuesday and this book came out on Friday and it was also a holiday weekend and, and, and.
Apparently, that was wrongo of me.
Because Aftermath debuted on both the New York Times list and the USA Today list at number four. Which is extra funny because it’s a pair of fours which is like Force and because my tweet wanting to be hired to write Star Wars in the first place was on September 4th and because the book then came out exactly one year later on September 4th and also because I actually apparently have the Force. *shoots lightning into the sky*
Of course, if instead of all 4’s it had been all 5’s we could have had a field day on File 770….
(9) And maybe Chuck can sign his next book contract with one of these Star Wars themed pens from Cross.
(10) Science fiction has an advocate in Malaysia.
KUSHAIRI ZURADI discovered late last year that not many publishers were keen to publish Malay science fiction books when he offered his collection of short stories to them.
The 25-year-old author and medical school graduate recalls: “Some publishers believe the readership for Malay science fiction is too small [for them] to make a decent profit and they do not want to take a chance on these novels.”
Realising this, in August last year, Kushairi decided to found his own publishing company, Simptomatik Press, to self-publish his first book, Biohazard, featuring 14 of his short stories. All 14 stories dealt with microorganisms.
“In my final year in medical school, I studied microorganisms and I was fascinated by their life-cycles,” says Kushairi, who is currently waiting to start his housemanship.
“You cannot see them but they are everywhere. We have been taught that 90% of [the cells in the human body are actually] organisms ranging from bacteria to parasites.”
[Thanks to David Doering and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Brian Z.]
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A Kickstarter some of you might be interested in supporting: Hugo 2015 Long List Anthology
David Steffen is hoping to include as many of the Short Stories, Novellas, and Novelettes which didn’t make it on the ballot.
Toad World by Ursala shows on the list. 😀
The more funding the more that can be included/in the print version. I also suspect with more funding there might be more money to authors and more illustrations (something I always press for once significantantly pass stretch goals).
RedWombat: Just so long as we don’t start having people talk about “tea-punk” as a genre.
Finished “The Gracekeepers”. Liked it a good deal. Definitely in consideration for a Hugo nomination, although something that Totally Blows My Mind could nudge it off.
I am continuing Scottish Author Week by moving on to “The Need for Better Regulation of Outer Space” by Pippa Goldschmidt.
@RedWombat, you did already. Sings-to-Trees made tea for the goblins. Herbs in water, anyway…
I’m off for Shabbat. Many hours of peace to continue reading Tanya Huff’s Confederation series. I’ll try to catch up later. Have a good one all.
“Here’s something new to remember: the “t” in Voldemort is silent.”
Wait, Voldemort is t-less? Why that must mean he’s not Raadchaai*, which means something something SJW!
Aristotle!
*Clearly a part of the T conspiracy; they even have it in their name! (Stealthy but not stealthy enough. Chaai? Hah! I see what they did.)
Backed.
So Jonathan Jones has now apparently “read” some Terry Pratchett and still dismisses it as being pedestrian and not engaged with the real world. Then again, he also says
which suggests to me that he hasn’t read Tolkien thoroughly at all, so I am not entirely sure that I am willing to trust his assessment of Pratchett.
Kyra, Lori Coulson —
Thanks for the confirmation. I may come back to it, it’s just not what I want right now.
Besides, Seveneves just came in at the library! Heh. Thanks to everyone who used rot13 to hide spoilers. Your consideration will repay you in either the afterlife or the next turn of the wheel.
For the fantasy List
Privilege of the Sword 2006 by Ellen Kushner
Abercrombie and Erikson as well
Obviously PC Hodgell
Pratchett ?
Pratchett? Gotta be “Nightwatch” surely?
I really like Liz Williams’ Detective Inspector Chen novels but that’s more about love of the series/writer excellence than any individual volume (maybe “Snake Agent”, the first volume?). I love the badger/tea-kettle*.
I have similar feelings about Kage Baker, who though most famous for her Company novels, was equally adept at fantasy. “Anvil of the World” features Ermenwyr who is a mutant bastard son of the gods, and also a complete wastrel.
And +1 for Mary Gentle’s “Ash”.
*All these references. Is there a tea cabal brewing?
Hugo 2015 Long List Anthology
Also backed. I hope it gets to the longer fiction, but even the short story line up is a good one (and it’s a few pennies to good authors too).
IIRC he tried to launch this a few months ago, then sensibly realised he’d better have the stories lined up before he took people’s money.
@Kyra
Gracekeepers looks interesting.
Tea? We have a whole shelf for it in our kitchen! And it’s overflowing up on to the dried fruit and the hot chocolates…
@Soon Lee — The tea cabal is always brewing. Must always have fresh, hot tea.
Oh, and Ash gets a + several thousand here (and the related Carthage novella that was published by PS)
When he made such a public show of hating Pratchett without ever reading Pratchett, I don’t see how his ego would ever let him admit he’s good. It would be a confirmation he was a massive nincompoop to declare him a hack sight unseen.
Amazing Stories is very usefully running a series on the Retro Hugo. Part 1 is the magazines for editor short form.
I am way, way too underslept to be typing (the Best Six Year Old just had her second day of Real School), or even really reading, but it’s shaping up to be a busy weekend, and I would not forgive myself if I didn’t say:
MARGO LANAGAN, people! Sea Hearts / The Brides of Rollrock Island, if I have to pick one, but really any Lanagan, anytime. Unless it’s one of those times when you can’t be having your heart broken (gloriously and beautifully).
I also prefer Shadow in Summer to Dragon’s Path. I have a hard time not thinking of that series as a series, though. Series bracket? (did it happen already?)
And, one more before I collapse, one of my favorite YAs of this decade: The Scorpio Races, Maggie Stiefvater. It’s a quiet kind of book (for a book with killer horses from the sea, that is), and just perfect.
Hearts. HEARTS IN MY EYES RIGHT NOW.
And here. I am particularly proud that my UK copy contains an apology from Mary that since Pierce Ratcliff wasn’t available to sign it, she would have to do…
A useful retro Hugo resource might be the old DAW anthology “Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 2(1940)”, edited by Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg.
“Trouble Brewing” is the name of my new tea-punk story.
(That or “The Strain”)
“And last on our show tonight, we have The Shepherd’s Pie.”
“Crown, Philip.”
“Sorry. The Crown’s Pie, by Terry Pratchett. What did you think, Jeremy?”
“Well, I have to give it a thumb’s down. I read a few pages of another work by Pratchett called The Unadulterated Cat, and I have to say I didn’t see any of these deeps themes everyone prattles on about. Apparently the man just writes about cats.”
“Well, that’s a very fair assessment, but I have to disagree. I asked a man down at the pub, and he said he thought The Pie and the Crown sounded like a wonderful title for a fantasy book. So I’m giving it a big thumbs up.”
“A good point, but I think we’ll just have to agree to disagree on this one. And that’s all the time we have.”
“Catch us next week for another episode of Sandifer & Jones, On Books.”
@Mark But mine shall be called ‘If You Were a Tea-rex, My Love’.
There’s so much tea-punk now I’m crowdsourcing funds for an anthology: Read It and Steep.
Oh, Snake Agent, absolutely, yes.
How about my cross-genre teapunk romance, “Dark Oolongings”?
Teapunk? If You were a Dianhong Store, My Love.
Oh no, we’ve crossed the meme-streams.
The sky above the port was the color of turbinado sugar, spooned into a weak camomile.
“It’s not like I’m brewing,” Case heard someone say, as he shouldered his way through the crowd around the door of the Chai. “It’s like my body’s developed this massive tea deficiency.”
You are Lapsang into dark waters…
I might have been one of the few people to read The Scar before Perdido Street Station. To be honest, I would have difficulty choosing which one I like best. I could easily make an argument for The Scar on originality, though. The Iron Council was a disappointment on the other hand. Have folks read Mendlesohn’s Rhetorics of Fantasy? I thought her reading of Mieville was really interesting.
@Kyra
Kindly take possession of this series of tubes
The role of environmental activism in the political development of Guy Fawkes is often underestimated. Once you understand this it becomes clear it was always the gunpowder green plot…
Oolong Hidden is a great tea-punk anthology.
If they served you coffee, I’d soon notice how you took your morning brew, a splash of milk, a spoon of sugar, then two. You’d stir, and the spice trade would collapse overnight. Sellers of cinnamon would sigh, while knobby roots of ginger sat unsold in the market. I wouldn’t care. I’d watch as you percolated your java — the flood of rich brown, the hiss of a splash on electric coils — and I’d breathe deep, deep, deep.
If you drank chai no more, my love.
Fantasy list 2000-2009
The alchemy of stone by sedia
The baroque cycle by Stephenson
Jonathon Strange & Mr Norrell by Clarke
Perdido Street Station by Mieville
Tooth and Claw by Walton
Shadow in Summer by Abraham
Point of Hopes by Barnett
Kushiel Legacy by Carey
Dead house Gates by Erikson
American Gods by Gaimen
Graveyard Book by Gaimen
Storm of Sword by Martin
Lies of Locke Lamora by Lynch
Shadow of the Wind by Zafn
Heros by Ambercrombie
Night Watch by Pratchett
Earth by Marks
Ride a Rathon by Hodgell
Mistborn by Sanderson
Curse of Chalion by Bujold
Steel Remains by Morgan
His Majesty’s Dragon by Novik
The Magicians by Grossman
Fools Errand by Hobb
Under Heaven by Kay
Warded Man by Brett
Furies of Calderon by Butcher
Sunshine by McKinley
Privilege of the Sword by Kushner
Ash by Gentle
House of Many Ways by Jones
Priestess of the White by Canavan
“Galveston” by Sean Stewart (or his “Perfect Circle”
“Fudoki” by Kij Johnson
“The Tiger’s Wife” by Tea Obrecht
Are serieses allowed? Because then one could nominate “Shades of Milk and Honey” and the 4 subsequent novels as the finished series of “The Glamourist Chronicles”. It’s got magic in, it’s fantasy!
Would also support any or all “Rivers of London” books.
Tea? I’m drinking it right now. I can feel the revenge coiling, flowing through me like a Dark Jedi’s hate. I remembered those immortal words, that no one here needs me to repeat, and I realized: “if you were a chai to pour, my love”, then my life would be God Stalking complete.
@Kyra: I think that are scenes in which Hild experiences something that I’d agree can be defined as a magical power although I don’t think she always herself sees it that way (getting complicated, but don’t want to spoil). I think it definitely blurs the boundaries, but then I’m all about the liminal spaces and borderlands and wobbling around. My medieval historian friend is a bit grumpy about the tendency amongst sff/lit types to wobble around. I did write about the novel in the genre context of historical novels because so much of it fit those conventions (and turns out there’s a long and major history of historical novels by women doing all sorts of interesting stuff which reminded me how much I loved/read historical novels in the past!).
@Rick K: A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness and romance.
I gave up in disgust because a certain set of romance conventions that I loathe became so overwhelming (I’m all for a bit of romance, but certain tropes drive me out of books or shows damn fast). If I wasn’t so brainfried I might try to list them but I’d best not.
David Brain quoting Jonathan JOnes: Even Tolkien himself – and yes, I have read him thoroughly – wrote an ordinary, flat, Hobbitish prose.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!
Put Jonathan Jones’ name up next to those of Burton Raffell and Harold Bloom for pompous pronouncements that reveal total and absolute ignorance of Tolkien’s work and the multiplicity of discourses and styles within.
Michael D. C. Drout has a lovely stylistic analysis of the Shakespearean elements in several key scenes in Tolkien’s work–Denethor’s death scene, and Eowyn’s killing of the Witch King compared to LEAR.
For years friends have told me how great Pratchett was, and I tried to read him and just bounced off. Then I discovered the audiobooks and I was hooked. I still find him hard to read, but his books are great listening.
Melissa Scott and Amy Griswold’s Death by Silver
Strange HOrizons review
Lovely fantasy-mystery, set in Victorian alternate world with MAGIC, and a whole lot of Holmes/Watson echoes/resonances although the two main characters were boyhood friends and lovers at school and are now trying to negotiate adulthood.
It took me a long time to appreciate Pratchett — I think I read Strata and maybe one or two early Discworld books back in the 80s, but they never really clicked. It was the Granny Weatherwax story in Robert Silverberg’s Legends that convinced me to go back. (And then I think I read 20 books in 21 days, in a weird mishmash of American paperbacks, American hardcovers (from the library) and imported British paperbacks because those were the Dark Days when not all of the books were in print in the US.)
@Joe H.
Funny coincidence: I’d never read any of the Witches sub-series (only the City Watch series, Small Gods, and a number of others), but then read “The Sea and Little Fishes” in Legends and immediately decided Esmerelda ‘Granny’ Weatherwax was exactly my kind of stubborn. So, basically, same here. Best Witch Ever.
And yes, I’ve now read that bit in The Shepherd’s Crown. A loss and a stand-in for a much greater loss, but, as Death said, ‘YOUR CANDLE WILL FLICKER FOR SOME TIME BEFORE IT GOES OUT – A LITTLE REWARD FOR A LIFE WELL LIVED. FOR I CAN SEE THE BALANCE AND YOU HAVE LEFT THE WORLD MUCH BETTER THAN YOU FOUND IT, AND IF YOU ASK ME, said Death, NOBODY COULD DO ANY BETTER THAN THAT . . .’
How would people classify Shelby’s Across a Jade Sea?
Briefly noted 2016 nomination fodder: Beyond Redemption, by Michael R. Fletcher. I gave up about 20% in, and I feel bad about it. The world is fascinating: it’s a classic dark fantasy/swords & sorcery kind of place, where belief does shape reality, with consequences worked out from there. The old gods long ago went nuts and did Bad things to the world. Now someone’s trying to make a new god, when he’s not busy with the multiplying doppelgangers sprung from his own subconscious. Sufficiently strong belief is pretty much always a matter of delusion. His plans for build-your-own divinity are inevitably going to run afoul of a trio of drifters who are thinking about money-making schemes like kidnapping the god-designate and ransoming him back to his church.
The problem for me is that the characters were all, without exception, sucking moral black holes without actually being very interesting. It had, for me, the enervating, exhausting, demoralizing feel of reading accounts of the US’s torture regimen or something equally vile, without much in the way of insight or whatever to offset it.
I might try it again later, or might not, but it’s gonna be history reading tonight, and maybe Chuck Wendig’s Star Wars novel on the weekend.
re brackets;
2014 The March North
2015 A Succession of Bad Days
by Graydon Saunders
Kyra on September 11, 2015 at 3:03 pm said:
And my reason for classifying it as mainstream historical fiction is, I think, equally simple: Griffith seems to go out of her way to explain the details of the non-magical thinking and deductions behind all of Hild’s “predictions”.
When the kid comes home from the other side of the world for Christmas, there is her very own collection of ALL of pterry i(admittedly mostly good condition used) lying in wait for her up in her room.
She’s an adult now, and needs her own.