The Australian Romance Readers Association announced the 2023 Australian Romance Readers Award winners on March 8.
The categories of genre interest are shown below. The complete list of winners is on Facebook.
The Australian Romance Readers Association announced the 2023 Australian Romance Readers Award winners on March 8.
The categories of genre interest are shown below. The complete list of winners is on Facebook.
The Australian Romance Readers Association announced the 2022 Australian Romance Readers Award winners on March 25.
The categories of genre interest are shown below. The complete list of winners is here.
Favourite Paranormal Romance 2022
(Runners-up: A Relic of Magic and Gold by HM Hodgson and Keeper of My Desire by HM Hodgson.)
Favourite Sci Fi, Fantasy or Futuristic Romance 2022
(Runner-up: Wicked Nights by MJ Scott.)
The Australian Romance Readers Association announced the 2022 Australian Romance Readers Award nominees on February 15.
The categories of genre interest are shown below. The complete list of nominees is here. The winners will be announced March 25.
Favourite Paranormal Romance 2022
Favourite Sci Fi, Fantasy or Futuristic Romance 2022
The finalists for the 2021 Australian Romance Readers Awards were revealed on March 14.
ARRA members will now vote for their favorite in each category. The winners will be announced at an online awards ceremony on April 30.
Here are the finalists of genre interest. The complete list of finalists is here.
FAVOURITE PARANORMAL ROMANCE 2021
FAVOURITE SCI FI, FANTASY OR FUTURISTIC ROMANCE 2021
The 2020 Australian Romance Readers Awards winners were named on March 20.
The winners in the categories of genre interest are:
Favourite Paranormal Romance 2020
Favourite Sci Fi, Fantasy or Futuristic Romance 2020
The complete list of winners is at the link.
The finalists for the 2020 Australian Romance Readers Awards were revealed on February 15.
ARRA members will now vote for their favorite in each category. The winners will be announced at an online awards ceremony on March 20.
Here are the finalists of genre interest:
Favourite Paranormal Romance 2020
Favourite Sci Fi, Fantasy or Futuristic Romance 2020
The complete list of finalists is at the link.
The 2019 Australian Romance Readers Awards were presented March 7 in Sydney.
The winners in the categories of genre interest were:
Favourite Paranormal Romance 2019
Favourite Sci Fi, Fantasy or Futuristic Romance 2019
The rest of the winners were —
MEMBERS’ CHOICE AWARDS
Favourite small-town romance 2019
Favourite couple in a 2019 romance
Favourite 2019 romance cover
MAIN CATEGORIES
Favourite Historical Romance 2019
Favourite Contemporary Romance 2019
Favourite Short or Category Romance 2019
Favourite Romantic Suspense 2019
Favourite Continuing Romance Series 2019
Favourite Debut Romance Author of 2019
Favourite Australian Romance Author 2019
The finalists for the 2019 Australian Romance Readers Awards were announced January 15.
ARRA members will now vote for their favourite in each category. Winners will be announced in Sydney on March 7.
Here are the finalists of genre interest:
Favourite Paranormal Romance 2019
Favourite Sci Fi, Fantasy or Futuristic Romance 2019
The complete list of finalists is at the link.
(1) HIDDEN FIGURE HONORED. A NASA facility has a new name: “NASA Renames Facility in Honor of ‘Hidden Figure’ Katherine Johnson”.
NASA has redesignated its Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) Facility in Fairmont, West Virginia, as the Katherine Johnson Independent Verification and Validation Facility, in honor of the West Virginia native and NASA “hidden figure.”
“I am thrilled we are honoring Katherine Johnson in this way as she is a true American icon who overcame incredible obstacles and inspired so many,” said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. “It’s a fitting tribute to name the facility that carries on her legacy of mission-critical computations in her honor.”… Born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, in 1918, Johnson’s intense curiosity and brilliance with numbers led her to a distinguished career — spanning more than three decades — with NASA and its predecessor agency, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Among her professional accomplishments, Johnson calculated the trajectory for Alan Shepard’s Freedom 7 mission in 1961. The following year, Johnson performed the work for which she would become best known when she was asked to verify the results made by electronic computers to calculate the orbit for John Glenn’s Friendship 7 mission. She went on to provide calculations for NASA throughout her career, including for several Apollo missions.
At a time when racial segregation was prevalent throughout the southern United States, Johnson and fellow African American mathematicians Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson — who was later promoted to engineer — broke through racial barriers to achieve success in their careers at NASA and helped pave the way for the diversity that currently extends across all levels of agency’s workforce and leadership. Their story became the basis of the 2017 film “Hidden Figures,” based on the book by Margot Lee Shetterly.
(2) THE ART OF SIGNING. CoNZealand (2020 Worldcon) GoH Larry Dixon shares some wisdom in a Twitter thread that begins here.
(3) A GHOST SPEAKS. Sean McLachlan rises “In Defense of Professional Ghostwriting” at Black Gate.
…I’m acquainted with Cristiane Serruya. She was part of the Kindle Scout program, having won an advance, 50% royalties, and publication for at least one of her works from Amazon’s imprint Kindle Press. Two of my books are also in the program. We chatted numerous times on the Kindle Scout Winners Facebook group and we even traded critiques. She read the first two books in my Masked Man of Cairo mystery series and I read Damaged Love, which turns out to contain plagiarized passages too. At the time I was surprised she would want me to be a beta reader on a romance novel, a genre she knew I didn’t read and knew nothing about. Now I know why.
…It’s true that some unscrupulous people are hiring teams of underpaid ghostwriters to churn out dreck in order to game Amazon’s algorithms, which tilt in favor of newly publishing titles and prolific authors.
Unfortunately, professional ghostwriters like me are being lumped in with the hacks. There is a place for a professional ghostwriter in indie publishing, and it is a valid one.
Ghostwriting has been around since the days of the dime novel. It was strong throughout the pulp era and the post-war paperback boom. In the modern world, house names such as Don Pendleton (The Executioner) and Carolyn Keene (Nancy Drew) have been used by pools of ghostwriters to make some of the most popular series around.
Ghostwriting is my day job. To date, I have ghostwritten 18 novels, 7 novellas, and one short story for various clients, and am currently contracted for another series of novels. The clients are generally independent publishers who put out work under a variety of pen names. I get one or two pen names, and other ghostwriters get other ones. Thus each pen name keeps the specific tone of a particular writer. I have worked for one guy who used several ghostwriters writing for the same house name, but we all were given strict instructions as to tone, style, etc. None of my clients put their real name on their books, and all of them were looking for quality work….
(4) UP THE AMAZON. Nora Roberts expands on what she’s been learning about the environment for indie authors at Amazon: “Let Me Address This”.
A Broken System. Then came the scammers, and with the methods discussed in previous blogs, who flooded the market with 99 cent books. What a bargain! Readers couldn’t know these books were stolen or copied or written by ghostfarms. Couldn’t know about the clickfarms, the scam reviews.
At this price, the author receives only 30% (there’s a price point cut off on royalty rate). So all those out of pocket expenses may or may not be covered.
The legit indie saw her sales suffer, her numbers tank, her placement on lists vanish. To try to compete, many had to struggle to write faster, to heavily discount their work. Some had to give up writing altogether.
One other scamming method is to list a book–forever–as free. Not as a promotion, or incentive, but to toss up hordes or free books, so the reader wants–and often demands–free. They make their money off the scores of cheap and stolen books, and destroy the legit writer. Why pay when there are scores of free books at your fingertips?
(5) SFF ROMANCE AWARDS. The winners of genre interest for the 2018 Australian Romance Readers Awards are:
Favourite Paranormal Romance
Favourite Sci-Fi, Fantasy or Futuristic Romance
(6) FANHISTORY. Here’s a link to Archive.org footage from the 1975 Star Trek convention in New York. William Shatner’s appearance takes up the first few minutes – you can see Ben Yalow among his escorts at the 30-second mark. The latter half of the film shows a woman in front of art show panels – I think I should recognize her, but I can’t come up with a name. Maybe you can. [Update: Adrienne Martine-Barnes, maybe?] [Now identified as Jacqueline Lichtenberg.]
(7) TRIVIAL TRIVIA.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
(9) COMICS SECTION.
(10) LEGAL EAGLE. John Scalzi has been doing his due diligence this afternoon.
(11) ROLE OF A LIFETIME. Cleveland.com has a conversation with the actor: “Wil Wheaton wraps up run as Wil Wheaton on ‘Big Bang Theory’”.
…Then “Big Bang” executive producer and co-creator Bill Prady offered him the ideal role. Would he be interested in playing, well, Wil Wheaton . . . an evil Wil Wheaton?
“If they had actually wanted me to play myself, I don’t think I would have been interested,” he said. “First, it would have felt like a cheat. So what? Show up and be yourself? There’s no challenge in that. But when Bill said, ‘We want you to play an evil version of yourself,’ I immediately got and loved that idea.”
(12) PAPERS PLEASE. Spikecon has put out a “Call for Academic Submissions”:
Westercon 72, NAFIC 2019, 1632 Minicon, and Manticon 2019 are together inviting submissions of academic papers for presentation at Spikecon to be held on July 4th-7th, 2019 in Layton, Utah. We are seeking 30 minute papers which raise the level of dialogue and discussion in the Science Fiction/Fantasy community and seek to empower fans as well as creators.
Topics of Interest Include:
(13) PLAY BY MALE. NPR’s Etelka Lehoczky says “Chronin’s Elegant, Minimalist Samurai Adventure Is – Literally – Timeless”.
Let’s hear it for cleverness! Sometimes a few modest, well-thought-out ideas can add up to an artistic creation as impactful as — and even more appealing than — the weightiest projects. That’s the case with Chronin, Alison Wilgus’ new graphic novel. Like a miniaturist or scrimshaw engraver, Wilgus has a keen appreciation for the power of constraints. By setting careful limits on what her book will look like and what kind of story it will tell, she’s achieved an aesthetic balance that’s a thing of beauty in itself.
Chronin is lighthearted but not frivolous, simple but not simplistic. Since it’s set in 19th-century Japan, you could compare it to a netsuke: A tiny sculpture whose beauty lies in what it does with so little. Chronin’s narrative and visual themes are rather basic, but it explores them in a way that’s precise, insightful — and supremely clever.
Wilgus has experimented with artistic constraints before. A Stray in the Woods, published in 2013, originated as a Tumblr webcomic driven by suggestions from readers. And, of course, much of her work has been shaped by the will of her employers, including DC and the Cartoon Network. Plenty of creators try to blow the doors off with their first solo graphic novels, but Wilgus takes the opportunity to go small. Chronin’s story of a time-travel screw-up is familiar, even a bit of a chestnut. Protagonist Mirai Yoshida, a New York City college student in 2042, travels with some classmates back to 1864 Japan to conduct research. An accident leaves her trapped there, so she masquerades as a male — and as a member of the warrior class — for safety while she tries to figure out a way back.
(14) SURVEYING THE FIELD. Rich Horton winds up his Hugo discussion with “Hugo Nomination Thoughts, 2019: Summary Post”. One item he touches on is —
Best Series
Here’s JJ’s list of eligible series posted at File 770: https://file770.com/best-series-hugo-eligible-series-from-2018/. Much props to JJ for the tireless work of maintain this list, but … I think the list itself speaks to problems with the whole concept of this award.
I was skeptical about this award from the start, and I don’t think its history helps it. I’m really bothered by the way adding one short story to a very old series, for example, makes it again eligible (as with Earthsea, objectively by far the most worthy and influential eligible series, but does “Firelight”, beautiful as it absolutely is, really mean we should give it an award now?) Also, the endless parsing of “series” vs. “sub-series”. The way an award can be for, really, semi-random assemblages of related works. I could go on and on.
(15) TWEETING HISTORY. Myke Cole is running a giveaway, and has been retweeting some of the choicer quotes people are submitting. For example:
(16) BACKING UP TO THE MOON. CNET: “Thirty-million-page backup of humanity headed to moon aboard Israeli lander”.
If the apocalypse strikes, the Arch Mission Foundation wants to be sure all the knowledge we’ve accumulated doesn’t disappear.
On Thursday night, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carried an Israeli-made spacecraft named Beresheet beyond the grasp of Earth’s gravity and sent it on its way to the surface of the moon. On board Beresheet is a specially designed disc encoded with a 30-million-page archive of human civilization built to last billions of years into the future.
The backup for humanity has been dubbed “The Lunar Library” by its creator, the Arch Mission Foundation (AMF).
“The idea is to place enough backups in enough places around the solar system, on an ongoing basis, that our precious knowledge and biological heritage can never be lost,” the nonprofit’s co-founder Nova Spivack told [CNET] via email.
(17) THE FLYING DEAD. Salon: “Zombie stars shine on after mystery detonations”.
It should have been physically impossible. Millions of years ago, a white dwarf—the fading cinder of a sunlike star—was locked in a dizzying dance with a bright companion star. The two had circled each other for eons, connected by a bridge of gas that flowed from the companion onto the white dwarf allowing it to grow heavier and heavier until it could no longer support the extra weight. At this point, the white dwarf should have exploded—blowing itself to smithereens and producing a supernova that briefly shone brighter than all the stars in the Milky Way combined. Then once the supernova faded and the white dwarf’s innards were dispersed across the galaxy, there would quite literally be nothing left save for its companion star. But against all odds, the explosion did not fully rupture the white dwarf. Instead, it survived.
…Raddi’s team made these discoveries after combing through data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft, which is particularly well suited for finding high-speed stars—an important characteristic of ones like LP 40-365 (because a supernova explosion has the power to slingshot stars across the galaxy). Two are destined to escape the Milky Way entirely, and one is orbiting “backward” against the usual rotation of stars in our galaxy. Additionally they all boast large radii, presumably because they were puffed up by the extra energy they received from the failed explosion. And yet they possess relatively small masses, likely due to the loss of much of their material during the explosion. But perhaps the most compelling evidence these stars are supernova survivors is that they brim with heavier elements. Whereas typical white dwarfs comprise carbon and oxygen, these stars are mostly composed of neon. “That’s absurd,” Hermes says. “That’s like some barroom beer sign just flying through the galaxy.” The stars’ second-most common element is oxygen, followed by a sprinkling of even heavier elements such as magnesium, sodium and aluminum. “This is about as weird as it gets,” Hermes says…
(18) IT’S A THEORY. Orville’s season 1 Rotten Tomatoes critics score was 23%. Season 2 is holding at 100%. Nerdrotic theorizes that the explanation is Disney’s purchase of Fox.
(19) BLADE RUNNER COMICS. Launching this summer, Titan Comics’ new Blade Runner 2019 series will be set
during the exact timeframe of the original Blade Runner film, and feature a (mostly) new set of
characters and situations.
Titan also confirmed that noted artist Andres
Guinaldo (Justice
League Dark, Captain America)
will be joining acclaimed Blade
Runner 2049 screenwriter
Michael Green (Logan) and veteran collaborator Mike Johnson (Star Trek,
Superman/Batman)
to breathe life into their all-new Blade Runner comic books.
(20) AND HE’S NOT EVEN WELSH! CBR.com checks out “Superman’s Less Legendary LL’s!”.
In Drawing Crazy Patterns, I spotlight at least five scenes/moments from within comic book stories that fit under a specific theme (basically, stuff that happens frequently in comics). Note that these lists are inherently not exhaustive. They are a list of five examples (occasionally I’ll be nice and toss in a sixth). So no instance is “missing” if it is not listed. It’s just not one of the five examples that I chose.
Today, we look at the less legendary LLs in Superman’s life.
Unless you hate me and all that I stand for, you know that Superman has an inordinate amount of notable people in his life whose names are double Ls.
Names (etc.) mentioned in the 2-page article include:
* Lori Lemaris
* Lightning Lad
* Little League (seriously)
* Lita Laverne
* Lester Link
* Liza Landis
* Lyrica Lloyd
* Lorraine Lewis
(21) CLOUDY, WITH A CHANCE OF DRAGONS. HBO puts out mashup trailer to coincide with the Oscars — SYFY Wire: “Arya Stark beholds dragon for first time in HBO mashup trailer; new Watchmen footage also included”.
Just like it did during the Golden Globes, HBO has released another mega-trailer featuring new footage from all of its new and returning shows airing this year. Of course, the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones was among the shows included in the tantalizing teaser.
[…] Game of Thrones Season 8 debuts on HBO Sunday, April 14. There’s no set premiere date for Watchmen just yet, but it will arrive sometime this year.
(22) FROM THE BEEB TO THE BO. BBC released a trailer of His Dark Materials, which will air on HBO in the U.S.
We’re keeping our daemons close. Here’s an early sneak peek of His Dark Materials. Dafne Keen, Ruth Wilson, James McAvoy, Clarke Peters and Lin-Manuel Miranda star in this thrilling new series. Adaptation of Sir Philip Pullman’s acclaimed series of novels.
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Cat Eldridge, Your Supreme Awesome Royal Majesty Highnessness JJ, John King Tarpinian, Chip Hitchcock, Martin Morse Wooster, Carl Slaughter, and Andrew Porter. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew.]
(1) “TOO LAZY TO FAIL.” WIRED Magazine interviewed Gregory Benford about his new book, in which a familiar sff figure is a character: “Sci-Fi Author Robert Heinlein Was Basically MacGyver”. Benford also talks about several other subjects, including Philip K. Dick.
Robert Heinlein is the legendary author of such classic works as Starship Troopers, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, and Stranger in a Strange Land. His books have influenced generations of artists and scientists, including physicist and science fiction writer Gregory Benford.
“He was one of the people who propelled me forward to go into the sciences,” Benford says in Episode 348 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “Because his depiction of the prospect of the future of science, engineering—everything—was so enticing. He was my favorite science fiction writer.”
Heinlein appears as a character in Benford’s new novel, a time travel thriller called Rewrite. The novel depicts Heinlein as a MacGyver-esque man of action who dispatches his enemies with the aid of improvised traps. Benford, who met Heinlein in the late 1960s and knew him throughout his life, says this is an extremely accurate portrayal.
“He had a degree in engineering from Annapolis, and he liked doing things himself,” Benford says. “You can certainly see it in his novels, which are full of people rigging stuff up and making it work. He loved that kind of thing.”
(Note: The item’s subtitle references a Heinlein character in Time Enough for Love who also had some things in common with the author.)
(2) IT PAYS TO BE LAZY. Hey, there’s even research behind this – at CNBC, “Science: Lazy people are likely to be smarter, more successful, and better employees. Who knew?”
Are lazy people really smarter and more successful?
That certainly doesn’t add up. But part of the problem might have to do with how we view laziness itself; it’s very possible that the things we associate with laziness are actually not so indicative of laziness at all.
Bill Gates has often been quoted as saying, “I always choose a lazy person to do a hard job, because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.” Whether Gates even said that in the first place is questionable, but the quote still gets repeated — and that’s because there’s some truth in it.
Many obsessively critical thinkers (a.k.a. people with a high “need for cognition”) are concerned with reducing wasteful actions, and instead prefer to use efficient processes….
(3) ZONE TRANSFERS TO WEST END. The Twilight Zone is coming to the West End at London’s Ambassadors Theatre March 4, 2019 after its initial run elsewhere. Poster photos by Steve Green.
The 1960s CBS series has been adapted for the stage by Anne Washburn (Mr. Burns: A Post Electric Play) as eight stories from original writers Rod Serling, Charles Beaumont, and Richard Matheson unfold. Richard Jones directs.
(4) SFF ROMANCE HONORED. The finalists of genre interest for the 2018 Australian Romance Readers Awards are:
Favourite Paranormal Romance
Favourite Sci Fi, Fantasy or Futuristic Romance
(5) BERLIN FILM FESTIVAL. [Item by Cora Buhlert.] The Berlin film festival ended tonight with various awards being handed out (and there are a lot of awards). The full list is here in a lengthy PDF document. Most of the winners are not genre.
Two winners are genre interest. The Teddy Award for the best LGBT feature film as well as the Teddy Readers Award, awarded by the readers of the website queer.de went to Breve Historia Del Planeta Verde (A Brief Story from the Green Planet), an Argentinian movie about a transwoman taking a road trip with a purple alien through rural Argentina, which sounds pretty fabulous. Here is the Teddy Award website and here is a bit more about the movie from the official Berlin film festival website.
And this year’s honorary Golden Bear was awarded to Charlotte Rampling, whose genre roles include Zardoz and the upcoming Dune adaptation by Denis Villeneuve. More here.
(6) THE GAME’S AFOOT. Cheryl Morgan tweeted photos of her walking tour of Dublin, especially the vicinity where the Worldcon will be held. The thread starts here.
(7) SMITH OBIT. Disney archivist Dave Smith died February 15. Disney Parks Blog profiles him in “Remembering Dave Smith” .
Walt Disney Archives founder Dave Smith passed away in Burbank, California, on February 15, 2019. He was 78. Dave dedicated his four-decade career at The Walt Disney Company to preserving Disney’s precious treasures from film, television, theme parks, and beyond. Named a Disney Legend in 2007, Dave was beloved by fans around the world for his wide knowledge of the Company’s rich history, which he shared in books and through his popular magazine column “Ask Dave.”
(8) GANZ OBIT. Swiss actor Bruno Ganz died today. Cora Buhlert recollects: “Genre roles include Werner Herzog’s take on Nosferatu, Wim Wenders’ Der Himmel über Berlin/Wings of Desire and its sequel Faraway, So Close, and The Boys From Brazil, which I’ve totally forgotten he was in. Oh, yes, and he gave the best ever portrayal of Adolf Hitler in Downfall, i.e. the movie all of those subtitled ranting Hitler videos on YouTube were taken from. My parents actually saw him on stage in the 1960s, when he played at the Bremen theatre early in his career.”
The New York Times has the story — “Bruno Ganz, Who Played an Angel and Hitler, Is Dead at 77”.
By many standards, the greatest honor Mr. Ganz received was possession of the Iffland-Ring, a diamond-studded piece of jewelry named for an 18th-century German actor and given to the “most significant and most worthy actor of the German-speaking theater.” When he received it in 1996, as a bequest from his predecessor, Josef Meinrad, he was only the fifth actor to have held it since the 1870s.
Mr. Ganz admitted that his convincing performances seemed to transcend reality for some fans. “People really seemed to think of me as a guardian angel” after “Wings of Desire,” he told The Irish Times in 2005. “People would bring their children before me for a blessing or something.”
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
(10) HEARTS & RUBBISH. Valentine’s Day is past—thankfully so for some people. Now Tim Surette, writing for TV Guide, wants to serve up “10 Terrible TV Couples Who Will Remind You Valentine’s Day Is Trash.” Genre shows figure prominently.
Valentine’s Day is the perfect day to sit your special someone down, look deep into their eyes, and coo, “Why the hell did Rory ever go out with Dean?” Love is all over television, but sometimes television gets love W-R-O-N-G.
We’re looking at 10 instances of bad love from some of our favorite television shows. Some of these scarred us in the past, some are still going, but all of them are relationships that were doomed from the beginning despite the shows’ best efforts to make us swoon and ship. Nice try, TV!
While Surette has plenty to say about each couple, the list looks like this:
(11) THE HERMITAGE. Fanzine fans may be interested to know that Harry Warner Jr.’s old home in Hagerstown, MD is up for sale. I sent many an issue of File 770 to the Hermit of Hagerstown at 423 Summit Ave., and looked forward to letters of comment with that return address.
(12) ICE PIRATES! BBC News: “Vodka firm loses valuable iceberg water in apparent heist”.
A Canadian vodka distiller has lost 30,000 litres of valuable iceberg water in what appears to be a heist.
Iceberg Vodka CEO David Meyers says he is mystified as to who – or why – someone would have stolen the water.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police say someone made away with the liquid – enough to fill a tractor-trailer tanker – from a warehouse in the historic community of Port Union, Newfoundland.
The water is valued at between C$9,000 ($6,775; £5,200) and C$12,000.
[…] The water is insured but the company is only able to harvest it in the spring from the ice giants that appear annually on Newfoundland and Labrador’s coast along the famed “iceberg alley”.
(13) STAY FROSTY. Paul Weimer has good things to say about this northern tale: “Microreview [book]: The Song of All, by Tina LeCount Myers”.
The Song of All uses Saami culture and mythology, as well as a crunchy set of characters and motivations to portray a frozen and bloody tale.
…This is a novel that reads much more like a saga than an epic fantasy novel, and a saga told to locals more than a secondary fantasy novel in typical fashion trying to build that out. One could imagine Irjan’s story, as written here, being presented for the benefit of the inhabitants of that world, who would already know what, for instance, a duollji is. The novel is far more interested in actions, and the consequences of those actions. So while the novel is light on traditional worldbuilding, it is very strong on plot. There is a rich tapestry of character stories and motivations here that, when the novel gets out of that early roughness, propels the narratives of the characters forward in a very readable fashion…
(14) A MONTH’S WORTH OF GOOD STUFF. Lady Business chronicles “Our Favourite Media of January 2019”. For example, Susan praises this book:
Witchmark by C. L. Polk — Oh no, I loved it. Miles Singer, an army doctor turned psychiatrist is treating returned soldiers with PTSD – until a dying man charges him with solving his murder. It’s so satisfying – the mystery is compelling, like full on “I just lost three days of my life and immediately started rereading the book to pick up the clues better” levels of compelling, and I may have raptor screeched about both the romance and the sibling relationships that we get to see here. The world-building is superb, and the way it gets revealed and built up made me so happy! … Plus, I spent most of the book viscerally angry at the secondary characters, and I was supposed to be! It’s been so long since I got to be angry at a book for the reasons that the author wanted me to be angry, and I’m so glad C. L. Polk brought that joy back to me. Basically, I adored it, and I am desperate for the sequel to come out now!
(15) WILL YOU SHELL OUT FOR THIS? Exciting is not the word I would choose. (GeekTyrant: “New Image Released For Batman vs. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”).
Earlier this week it was announced that DC Entertainment and Nickelodeon were teaming up to produce an animated film called Batman Vs. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Today we’ve got a new image from this exciting crossover film and it features the Ninja Turtles coming in contact with The Dark Knight.
The film is based on the Batman/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics miniseries by James Tynion IV and Freddie Williams II. The story “will see the turtles meeting Batman via a transdimensional encounter, and feature our heroes teaming up to face Batman’s deadly rogues gallery.”
(16) IT BARS MY DESTINATION. The proposed route of the US border fence (or wall or whatever it’s currently called) with Mexico cuts right through a spaceport under construction (Bloomberg: “SpaceX Texas Launch Site Risks Being Split in Two by Border Wall”), which seems to be an odd definition of “border.”
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has a big stake in the battle over border security being waged in Congress: a launchpad on the U.S.-Mexico border that it plans to use for rockets carrying humans around the world and eventually to Mars.
Democratic lawmakers have taken up the cause of Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and are trying to thwart the Trump administration’s efforts to build a border barrier that could cut across the company’s facility in Boca Chica, Texas, on the Gulf of Mexico coast near Brownsville.
[…] Representative Filemon Vela, a Democrat whose district includes the SpaceX facility, said the company isn’t happy about the plans, though it hasn’t publicly raised objections.
“They are way behind the scenes on this, they are lying pretty low,” said Vela, citing information he was given by local officials. “SpaceX doesn’t want to offend DHS.”
(17) DELVING INTO EARTH’S PAST. The “Dinosaur Pictures and Facts” site allows you to see the shape of the continents and oceans at many times in Earth’s past. You can enter an address to locate it on past landmasses (or ocean depths) from the present back to 750 million years ago. Each selection also comes with a blurb about the diversity of life at that time.
Here’s the entry for 240 million years ago.
Early Triassic. Oxygen levels are significantly lower due to the extinction of many land plants. Many corals went extinct, with reefs taking millions of years to re-form. Small ancestors to birds, mammals, and dinosaurs survive.
(18) FLYING STANDBY. Reuters: “NASA mulls buying new rides to space from Russia amid programme delays”.
NASA said on Friday it was weighing an option to buy two additional astronaut seats aboard a Russian rocket as a contingency plan against further delays in the launch systems being developed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Boeing Co.
A possible purchase “provides flexibility and back-up capability” as the companies build rocket-and-capsule launch systems to return astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) from U.S. soil for the first time since NASA’s Space Shuttle program went dark in 2011.
(19) TITLE TUNE. Anna Nimmhaus penned a verse to go along with today’s title —
[Thanks to JJ, Mike Kennedy, Cora Buhlert, Chip Hitchcock, Cat Eldridge, Gregory Benford, John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, Carl Slaughter, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Anna Nimmhaus.]