Future Worlds Prize 2024 Open for Entries, Announces Judging Panel

The Future Worlds Prize for Fantasy and Science Fiction Writers of Colour is now open for submissions from unpublished writers of colour living in the UK and Ireland.

The prize aims to find new talent based in the UK writing in the SFF space, from magical realism and space operas to dystopia and more. The prize is funded by author Ben Aaronovitch and actor Adjoa Andoh.

This year the Future Worlds Prize is also increasing its prize money for all those shortlisted. The winner will now receive £4,500, up from £4,000 in previous years, while the runner-up’s prize money increases from £2,000 to £2,500. The remaining six shortlisted writers will each receive £850, up from £800.

All eight writers also receive mentoring from one of the prize’s publishing partners: Bloomsbury, Gollancz, Hodderscape, Orbit and Tor.

The Future Worlds Prize closes for entries at 23:59 GMT on Monday, January 29, 2024.

This year’s judges are:

  • 2021 winner M. H. Ayinde
  • Novelist Isabelle Dupuy
  • Quantum physicist turned best-selling author Femi Fadugba,
  • Literary agent and founder of Originate Literary Agency, Natalie Jerome
  • Arthur C. Clarke Award winner Tade Thompson.

M. H. Ayinde was the 2021 winner of the Future Worlds Prize. Her debut epic fantasy trilogy will be published by Orbit Books, beginning in spring 2025 with A Song of Legends Lost. Her short fiction has appeared in FIYAH Literary Magazine, F&SF, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and elsewhere. She is a runner, a lapsed martial artist, and a screen time enthusiast. She lives in London with three generations of her family and their Studio Ghibli obsession.

Isabelle Dupuy’s first novel Living the Dream was shortlisted for the Diverse Book Awards and was recommended in the Guardian as a summer read 2021. Isabelle has written on topics ranging from motherhood to becoming a writer and a British national and has been published in the New York Times, Bad Form Review, The Big Issue North, On the Hill, Black Ballad, the Bookseller and more. She was a reader for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2021 and was the chairwoman for the London Library’s Emerging Writers’ Competition 2020. Isabelle is currently writing her second book, Maker of Men, a historical novel based on the true life of Haitian politician and ultimate survivor Joute Lachenais.

Femi Fadugba is a quantum physicist turned BCG consultant turned best-selling author of The Upper World, soon to be on Netflix, with a long-standing passion for STEM education. A sequel to The Upper World, titled The Mirror World, will be released in 2025.

Natalie Jerome is the founder of Originate Literary Agency (OLA), a multi-media agency representing a diverse range of writers, creatives and original content creators making change through storytelling. Clients include the actor David Harewood; comedian, writer, actor, philanthropist and co-founder of Comic Relief, Sir Lenny Henry; World Boxing Champion and Britain’s youngest Olympic medallist Amir Khan; and venture capitalist, entrepreneur and technology executive Eric Collins.

Tade Thompson is best known for Rosewater, The Murders of Molly Southbourne, and Far from the Light of Heaven. He writes books, short stories, and screenplays. He is a winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Nommo Award, among others, and finalist for the Hugo, Shirley Jackson, Theodore Sturgeon Award, among others. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He lives and works in the UK. His background is in medicine, psychiatry, and anthropology. He is an occasional visual artist.


The Future World Prize’s most recent winner is Mahmud El Sayed, with his novel What the Crew Wants, set on the city-ship Safina, 200 years into its journey to establish a new home for humanity. When the generation ship unexpectedly crashes out of warp, the crew faces their biggest test yet.

Inaugural winner Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson’s first novel The Principle of Moments is published this month by Gollancz, while Ayinde’s debut A Song of Legends Lost, which won the 2021 prize under its former title A Shadow in Chains, will be published in 2025 by Orbit.

Future Worlds Prize was founded by bestselling author Ben Aaronovitch in 2020, and was previously named the Gollancz and Rivers of London BAME SFF Award. The prize is financially supported by Aaronovitch and Bridgerton actor Andoh, with additional support from its publishing partners. It is administered by Future Worlds Prize CIC, a not-for-profit organization.

For submission details and more on the prize, visit the Future Worlds Prize website, or its social media on Twitter, or Instagram

[Based on a press release.]

Pixel Scroll 11/22/23 All Right, Mr. Pixelle, I’m Ready For My Scroll-Up

(1) LOSCON THIS WEEKEND. Loscon 49, a gathering of writers and fans of all ages, with common interests in Fantasy, Science Fiction, Cosplay, Film, Art and Music takes place this Thanksgiving weekend, November 24-26, at the Los Angeles Airport Marriott on Century Blvd.

Author and screenwriter Peter S. Beagle is the Writer Guest of Honor. Generations of readers have enjoyed his magic of unicorns, haunted cemeteries, lascivious trees and disgruntled gods. His best-known work is “The Last Unicorn”

Echo Chernik, the Artist Guest of Honor, is commercial artist and instructor of digital media, specializing in art nouveau-influenced design art and illustration.

Fan Guest of Honor is Elayne Pelz. She has worked at Worldcons, Loscon, Gallifrey One, Anime cons, SFWA Nebula Conference, and many more, as an essential staff member for decades.

Loscon will partner with Nerd Mafia Group for a cosplay contest on Saturday evening.

Submissions will be accepted for the Losconzine49 onsite, at a fan table stocked with paper and various writing implements. They will also take emailed submissions until Dec 3rd via [email protected] These will be compiled and shared electronically with all those who submit and an online post will be shared with the public.

Weekend passes are $75, day rate is $40. Parking with validation is $20 per day.

For more information, check out Loscon 49.

Peter S. Beagle. Photo by Krystal Rains.

(2) FOR YOUR EARS. Audible.com has posted 20 books on its list of The Best Audiobooks of 2023, two of them of genre interest. And there are additional lists of —

(3) YOUR FAVORITE BOOK MAY ALREADY HAVE WON – IT’S UP TO YOU. Christopher Ruz has a solution to the surfeit of literary awards – make it bigger! “Announcing the 2023 Rando Awards”.

The Randos are a highly prestigious* genre fiction award, judged by a team with over a century of combined experience** in fantasy, science fiction, horror, crime, and more. Founded by me, because I felt like it, the Randos is a way of sharing our love of genre fiction and recognising the authors who made our year great. Our judging panel of Randos will come together at the end of the year to decide on their favourite reads of 2023. Each winning author—one per judge—will be awarded a coveted Rando trophy***.

*this is a lie

**if you add up the time we’ve all spent reading then it’s probably a hundred years? Maybe?

***I mean, I’d covet them pretty hard

Can I Be a Judge?

Here’s the thing about the Randos: anyone can be a Rando, and find some way to recognise and appreciate their favourite authors. You can shoot me a message and join our team in time for the 2023 awards! All you need is to cover the costs of the trophy and international postage for your chosen winner. Or, you can find your own way to let your fave author know that you appreciated their work and that they enriched your life with their stories.

There are no downsides to sharing that love….

(4) TOO CLOSE TO HOME. Author Max Florschutz says his mother survived the mudslide in his hometown of Wrangell, Alaska but his father is still missing: “It’s All Gone”. Sad and alarming news.

Guys, I … I barely know how to write this. The last thirty-six hours have been a nightmare that is still ongoing.

If you’ve seen the news and heard a story about Wrangell Alaska, then you’ve heard part of what I’m about to tell you.

Monday night at 9 PM, a landslide hit my hometown. It was 450 feet across by the time it hit the highway, after it completely demolished my parent’s property and home (here’s a picture of the size of the slide).

It continued down across the highway and into the bay, destroying another home along the way before ending up in the bay.

My mother pulled herself from the wreckage of her home and walked to the search and rescue teams across a still-shifting mudslide.

My father is still missing, and just typing this hurts. Search and rescue teams are trying to get to what’s left of their home to locate him. We have no idea if he’s alive or dead. Everything that can be done is being done….

(5) INDOPANTHEOLOGY OPENS TO SUBMISSIONS. Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki has put out a call for “Indopantheology: Stories from the Spiritual Margins” at OD Ekpeki Presents. Deadline to submit is March 31, 2024. Full details at the link.

Do you have stories that go beyond the realms of the physical world? We, the editors, are asking for your spirit-fiction.

This volume will explore the theme of Indopantheology, analogous to the Afropantheology of Oghenechovwe Ekpeki’s Between Dystopias: The Road to Afropantheology, published October 2023 by OD Ekpeki Presents, as an installment of the Pantheology projects

For us, Indopantheology maps the realm of the spiritual imagination, comprising all soul-matters from the most worldly of dreams to the most numinous of visions. If that is what you wish to explore, then this call is for you. We want stories from the wilder thickets of the spiritual world, the old places, the cultures and peoples that have been looted, disrespected and forgotten.

We want tales of the vast borderlands between life and death, where dreamers walk and ghosts and gods converse. Too often it seems that, in our current age of bigotry, exploitation and violence, the ‘spiritual’ is wielded as a weapon, designed to shame and exclude anyone of whom the wielder does not approve. We want to showcase stories that stand against this trend, and that go beyond the traditional binaries into the slippery truths of the shadow realms.

While the focus of this volume will be on South Asia and its many spiritual streams that defy the categories of organised religion, we are willing to accept spirit-stories from anyone in the wider Indoasian world. Please note that there are volumes currently in progress for other geographical regions with relations to South Asia, such as Africa, the Caribbean, etc.

We see this as a decolonising project, since the spirit world has historically been hijacked and weaponised by oppressors of various hue. We believe that new storytelling can cure this wound. And we especially want stories from, and about, people who are on the various spectrums: gender, neurological, mental and physical….

(6) RED WOMBAT DEAL. Orbit Books has acquired T. Kingfisher’s Saint of Steel series and Swordheart. Four of these were self-published, and now will get tradpub reprints.

Helen Breitwieser at Cornerstone Literary Agency sold UK and Commonwealth rights in five of T. Kingfisher’s books to Nadia Saward, Commissioning Editor at Orbit. The ebooks of Paladin’s GracePaladin’s StrengthPaladin’s Hope and Swordheart are on sale now from Orbit, with Paladin’s Faith publishing in early December. Orbit will be redesigning the covers and will be releasing paperbacks of all five books in Spring 2025.

(7) VARIABLE GOALS. We’ve heard a thousand times about AUTHORS GETTING PAID, but publisher Steven Radecki tells readers of the SFWA Blog that’s not the only way to keep score: “The INDIE FILES: Measuring Your Success As an Author”.

During the more than a decade that I have been involved in indie publishing, I have worked with more than three hundred authors. One thing I have discovered is that, just as publishing is not a one-size-fits-all process, neither is how individual writers conceive of their success. Managing your own goals and expectations and why you have them can go a long way toward understanding your feelings of success as an indie author.

Just getting your work published is probably your primary goal—whether it be a short story, novella, or epic trilogy. Few writers, particularly newly published ones, give much advance thought to what happens after they achieve that goal: what it will mean to feel successful as an author once their work has been published.

Having clear goals helps you in the effective promotion of your work. Discussing your goals early in your relationship with your agent or publisher can help you determine whether you are the right fit for each other in helping you achieve your goals. Defining goals will also help you in your decision on whether to go the traditional publishing, small publishing, or self-publishing route.

Some of the ways you might measure your success as an author include:

  • income earned
  • number of books or stories sold
  • number of engaged readers
  • public displays of your work

(8) PLAINTIFF HITS STUMBLING BLOCK IN AI LAWSUIT. [Item by Nina Shepardson.] The Hollywood Reporter has a new article out on Sarah Silverman’s lawsuit against Meta alleging that its generative AI program infringes her copyright as an author. “Sarah Silverman Hits Stumbling Block in AI Lawsuit Against Meta”.

A judge has dismissed most of the claims in Silverman’s lawsuit. He called the claim that the AI model itself is an infringing derivative work “nonsensical.” He also found that Silverman didn’t provide sufficient evidence that the outputs of the model are “recasting, transforming, or adapting” her books. He said that, “To prevail on a theory that LLaMA’s outputs constitute derivative infringement, the plaintiffs would indeed need to allege and ultimately prove that the outputs ‘incorporate in some form a portion of’ the plaintiffs’ books.” Apparently, there’s a “test of substantial similarity” that’s used in copyright cases to determine whether a work is similar enough to the original to likely be infringing. It sounds like the judge doesn’t think Silverman has provided evidence that the outputs of Meta’s AI program are substantially similar to her original work.

(9) MEMORY LANE.

1987 [Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Emma Bull’s War for The Oaks is a lovely novel. So we take our Beginning from it this time.

Since some of you might because of your extreme poor fortune not have read it yet so I’ll talk not about it and spoil it for you. Well I’ll at least put SPOILER ALERT up if I do. 

War for The Oaks was first published by Ace in softcover in 1987 with the first cover art below by Pamela Patrick. The novel’s setting is based upon Minneapolis where she and her husband Will Shetterly were living at the time. 

The novel was, by Ace, printed once and declared out of print. It took Emma almost a decade-and-a-half to get back rights to the novel from Ace. Tor then printed a hardcover edition which never officially got released. It got released in a trade paper edition that had exactly the same cover. I like the Tor art by Jane Adele Regina as shown in the second cover image better than the Ace illustration as I think it captures the darker aspect of the novel. 

SPOILER ALERT FOR A MINUTE.

Eddi also plays songs written by herself – in actuality of course, written by the author, Emma Bull. Some of these (including “Wear My Face” and “For It All”) were performed by the band Cats Laughing (of which Emma Bull is a member), and are on their second album Another Way To Travel whose cover art is by Terri Windling of a hearse and the band in front of it.

When the trailer for War for The Oaks was filmed with funding meant first Will’s run for the Governorship of Minnesota, this music was supplemented by some by Boiled in Lead as well. In the trailer, Emma plays the Fairy Queen and a fine one she does make! 

That trailer is here. Don’t watch it if you’ve not read the novel. Really don’t or the Unseelie Queen will curse you. If you do and you were in Minneapolis in the large Eighties, let be note that a lot of the actors are from fandom. 

END OF SPOILER ALERTS

And now our Beginning…

Prologue

By day, the Nicollet Mall winds through Minneapolis like a paved canal. People flow between its banks, eddying at the doors of office towers and department stores. The big red-and-white city buses roar at every corner. On the many-globed lampposts, banners advertising a museum exhibit flap in the wind that the tallest buildings snatch out of the sky. The skyway system vaults the mall with its covered bridges of steel and glass, and they, too, are full of people, color, motion.

But late at night, there’s a change in the Nicollet Mall.

The street lamp globes hang like myriad moons, and light glows in the empty bus shelters like nebulae. Down through the silent business district the mall twists, the silver zipper in a patchwork coat of many dark colors. The sound of traffic from Hennepin Avenue, one block over, might be the grating of the World-Worm’s scales over stone.

Near the south end of the mall, in front of Orchestra Hall, Peavey Plaza beckons: a reflecting pool, and a cascade that descends from towering chrome cylinders to a sunken walk-in maze of stone blocks and pillars for which “fountain” is an inadequate name. In the moonlight, it is black and silver, gray and white, full of an elusive play of shape and contrast.

On that night, there were voices in Peavey Plaza. One was like the susurrus of the fountain itself, sometimes hissing, sometimes with the little-bell sound of a water drop striking. The other was deep and rough; if the concrete were an animal, it would have this voice.

“Tell me,” said the water voice, “what you have found.”

The deep voice replied. “There is a woman who will do, I think.”

When water hits a hot griddle, it sizzles; the water-voice sounded like that. “You are our eyes and legs in this, Dog. That should not interfere with your tongue. Tell me!”

A low, growling laugh, then: “She makes music, the kind that moves heart and body. In another time, we would have found her long before, for that alone. We grow fat and slow in this easy life,” the rough voice said, as if it meant to say something very different.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born November 22, 1918 Walter Kubilius. Quoting John Clute in SFE, “US editor and author involved in American Fandom from as early as 1932, when he was a founder member of the Edison Science Club; by the end of the 1930s, after serving on the committee that created the first Worldcon in 1939, he helped form the Futurians.”  He wrote a fair amount of short fiction but it’s never been collected as near as I can tell. (Died 1993.)
  • Born November 22, 1925 Arthur Richard Mather.  Australian cartoonist, illustrator, and novelist. He was the artist who and later wrote of one of Australia’s most successful comics series, Captain Atom. It was published from 1948 to 1954, with 64 issues. No relation to the by Charlton Comics character of that name who became the DC Comics character. After the Australian comics business declined in the Fifties, we become a writer and churned out seven works, all  thrillers and crime novels with elements of science fiction.  (Died 2017.)
  • Born November 22, 1938 William Kotzwinkle, 85. Fata Morgana might be his best novel though Doctor Rat which he won the World Fantasy Award for is in the running for that honor as well. Did you know Kotzwinkle wrote the novelization of the screenplay for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial? And his short stories are quite excellent too.  The usual digital suspects are well stocked with his books now, a change from five years ago.
  • Born November 22, 1940 Terry Gilliam, 83. He’s directed many films of which the vast majority are firmly genre. I think I’ve seen most of them though I though I’ve not seen The Man Who Killed Don QuixoteTidelandThe Zero Theorem or The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. I’ve seen everything else. Yes, I skipped past his start as the animator for Monty Python’s Flying Circus which grew out of his for the children’s series Do Not Adjust Your Set which had staff of Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin.  Though he largely was the animator in the series and the films, he did occasionally take acting roles according to his autobiography, particularly roles no one else wanted such those requiring extensive makeup.  He’s also co-directed a number of scenes.  Awards? Of course. Twelve Monkeys is the most decorated followed by Brazil with two and Time Bandits and The Fisher King which each have but one.  My favorite films by him? Oh, the one I’ve watched the most is The Adventures of Baron Munchausen followed by Time Bandits.
  • Born November 22, 1949 John Grant. He’d make the Birthday list solely for being involved in the stellar Hugo Award winning Encyclopedia of Fantasy which also won a Mythopoeic Award.  And he did win another well-deserved Hugo Award for Best Related Work for The Chesley Awards for Science Fiction and Fantasy Art: A Retrospective.  Most of his short fiction has been set in the Lone Wolf universe, though I see that he did a Judge Dredd novel too. (Died 2020.)
  • Born November 22, 1957 Kim Yale. She was a writer whose first work was in the New America series, a spin-off of Truman’s Scout series. With Truman, she developed the Barbara Gordon Oracle character, created the superb Manhunter series, worked on Suicide Squad, and was an editor at D.C. where she oversaw such licenses as Star Trek: The Next Generation. Married to John Ostrander until 1993 when she died of breast cancer. For First Comics, she co-wrote much of Grimjack with her husband. (Died 1997.)

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • Eek! shows someone big and green bringing a veggie to the Thanksgiving feast. No, not the jolly one.
  • Tom Gauld thinks about silencing the feedback.
  • Elsewhere, Tom Gauld teases scientists.

(12) DOCTOR WHO MEMORIES. “’John Hurt and I swapped wine tips’: stars share their best Doctor Who moments – part three” in the Guardian.

Ben Aaronovitch (writer of episodes featuring the Seventh Doctor, 1988-1989)

My first real memory of a complete story is The Green Death, and my favourite memory is of this large slug sneaking up on Jo Grant. I was literally watching it from behind the sofa. From working on the show, I remember that the anti-terrorist squad in Remembrance of the Daleks was scrambled to Waterloo station because we’d blown a great big hole in it. I used to have a photo of a group of Daleks with fire engines coming down and stopping and looking at the road blocked by a group of Daleks. God knows what they thought!

(13) COSMIC INSIGHT. Adam Roberts after reading the science news….

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George is “Talking About The Apocalypse In 2023”. What, him worry?

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Nina Shepardson, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jayn.]

Pixel Scroll 4/13/23 Scrolling To Filezantium

(1) INFLUENCERS. TIME Magazine today posted “TIME100: The Most Influential People of 2023”. Listed actors, icons, and titans with genre connections include Ke Huy Quan, Pedro Pascal, Salman Rushdie, Angela Bassett, Bob Iger. And writer Neil Gaiman, whose tribute was written by actor James McAvoy:

What I admire most about Neil Gaiman is his belief in the necessity of storytelling: it’s something we need on a DNA level.

I first read a book by Neil when I was 14 years old. It was Good Omens, his brilliant 1990 collaboration with Terry Pratchett. Two decades later, I got the opportunity to star in the 2013 BBC radio adaptation of Neverwhere. I remember feeling so excited that I was being inducted into his sphere of influence—one that has only grown. It’s fantastic to see Neil’s work gain new fans, most recently with the Netflix adaptation of his award-winning comic-book series The Sandman.

Neil’s point of entry into the storytelling realm is darkly fantastical and occultish. The way he writes makes you feel like you’re being let in on a massive secret. His worlds are hidden, shrouded in mystery, yet they’re never that far removed from ours. They’re always just barely within your peripheral vision—under the street or in a dark building or at the end of a lane. He brings dreamscapes to life.

(2) PITCH: A CROSS BETWEEN SURVIVOR AND THE MARTIAN. Plus Shat! “Fox Orders ‘Stars on Mars’ Reality Show With William Shatner” reports Variety.

Fox has ordered the reality series “Stars on Mars,” a new celebrity unscripted series featuring “Star Trek” star William Shatner in a host-like role. The series, set to air this summer, will follow stars as they are suited up to live in a colony set up to simulate what it might be like to be an astronaut on Mars.

“Stars on Mars” premieres on Monday, June 5, at 8 p.m. on Fox. The show comes from Fremantle’s Eureka Productions. The idea centers on the celebrity contestants competing in the Mars-like surroundings until there is just one “celebronaut” left standing. Shatner will deliver tasks to the celebs as “Mission Control.”

… Shatner, in a quippy quote, added: “Thanks to lower gravity on Mars, you’ll weigh 62% less. Bad news: the air is unbreathable, so if you’re from LA, it’ll remind you of home.”

The show will open with the celebrities living together as they “live, eat, sleep, strategize, and bond with each other in the same space station,” according to the network.

Here’s more from the show description: “During their stay, they will be faced with authentic conditions that simulate life on Mars, and they must use their brains and brawn – or maybe just their stellar social skills – to outlast the competition and claim the title of brightest star in the galaxy. The celebrities will compete in missions and will vote to eliminate one of their crewmates each week, sending them back to Earth. Cue the intergalactic alliances and rivalries. ‘Stars on Mars’ will send these famous rookie space travelers where no one has gone before and reveal who has what it takes to survive life on ‘Mars.’”…

(3) IS THIS THE CRÈME DE LA CRÈME? Earlier this week the LA Times rolled out The Ultimate L.A. Bookshelf, devoting one of the shelves to 13 works of Speculative Fiction.

For our Ultimate L.A. Bookshelf, we asked writers with deep ties to the city to name their favorite Los Angeles books across eight categories or genres. Based on 95 responses, here are the 13 most essential works of speculative fiction, from Octavia Butler, Philip K. Dick, Aldous Huxley, Salvador Plascencia and many more….

Although these are all books, since two of them are collections of short fiction – Dangerous Visions (1967) and Speculative Los Angeles (2021) – it seems to me there should have been a way to get quintessential LA stories like Heinlein’s “And He Built A Crooked House”, and Niven’s “Inconstant Moon” into the mix. I’ll leave aside Bradbury’s “The Pedestrian” which doesn’t actually say what city it takes place in, though no one has ever had any doubt…

(4) CLI-FI CONTEST. Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors submissions will be accepted up to the June 13 deadline.

Imagine 2200 challenges entrants to write stories that help envision the next 180 years of climate progress. Whether built on abundance or adaptation, reform or a new understanding of survival, the contest celebrates stories that provide flickers of hope, even joy, and serve as a springboard for exploring how fiction can help create a better reality.

Stories will be judged by a panel of literary experts, including acclaimed authors Paolo Bacigalupi, Nalo Hopkinson, and Sam J. Miller. 

The winning writer will be awarded $3,000, with the second- and third-place winners receiving $2,000 and $1,000, respectively. Nine additional finalists will each receive $300. All winners and finalists’ stories will be published in an immersive collection on Grist’s website. 

Read more and find out how to submit a story here.

(5) FAN HISTORY ZOOM. Fanac.org’s program on “Researching (& Saving) Fan History” with Rob Hansen, Andy Hooper, Mark Olson and Joe Siclari can be viewed online April 22, 2023 beginning at 4 pm EDT, 1 pm PDT, 9 pm BST London, 6 am Sunday in Melbourne, AU. See the details in the poster. To get a link to the program, write to [email protected].

Past sessions are all available on Fanac.org’s YouTube channel

(6) NPR LEAVES TWITTER. AP News reported on April 12“NPR quits Elon Musk’s Twitter over ‘government-funded’ label”. They obviously meant it – NPR usually tweets prolifically every day, but there were no new tweets from NPR today, April 13.

National Public Radio is quitting Twitter after the social media platform owned by Elon Musk stamped NPR’s account with labels the news organization says are intended to undermine its credibility.

Twitter labeled NPR’s main account last week as “state-affiliated media, ” a term also used to identify media outlets controlled or heavily influenced by authoritarian governments, such as Russia and China. Twitter later changed the label to “government-funded media,” but to NPR — which relies on the government for a tiny fraction of its funding — it’s still misleading.

NPR said in a statement Wednesday that it “will no longer be active on Twitter because the platform is taking actions that undermine our credibility by falsely implying that we are not editorially independent.”…

(7) GATEWAY TO ORSON WELLES. [Item by Steve Vertlieb.] Celebrating the genius of this extraordinary artist with my published look at the turbulent life and career of Orson Welles, the fabulous, visionary film maker whose personal demons sadly overshadowed his staggering talent, and finally, tragically destroyed him.

Yet, in spite of his personal failings or, perhaps, because of them, Welles rose to become one of the most remarkable film makers of his, or any other generation.

From his groundbreaking first feature length motion picture Citizen Kane, regarded by many still as the greatest single film in motion picture history, to Touch Of Evil, his remarkable “Cinema Noir” tale of a squandered life and legacy corrupted by bribery and temptation, Welles remains one of the most extraordinary directors in the history of film.

His is a story of unwitting sabotaged achievement and haunting, incomparable genius.

Here, then, is “Xanadu: A Castle in the Clouds: The Life of Orson Welles” at The Thunderchild.

(8) OCTOTHORPE. Episode 81 of the Octothorpe podcast, “It Wasn’t an Interjection From the Room, It Was My Face”, is available.

Alison, Liz, John and Alison are live from Conversation! We talk about the convention, in a rather more haphazard way than normal. Art by the amazing Sue Mason.

(9) MORE WRITERS’ RESPONSES TO AI. The SFWA Blog has updated its webpage and now has over 50 SFWA members’ writing and thoughts on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications and considerations. “SFWA Members Weigh in on AI & Machine Learning Applications & Considerations”. In case you looked at the original version, the additions are designated “NEW” to make them easy to find.

SFWA also focused attention on a video is now available from the AI/ML Media Advocacy Summit, a free online event last month that brought together experts and creators to discuss the creative community’s response to AI/ML media generators. SFWA Vice President John Murphy served as a panelist for the writers’ forum, along with moderator Donna Comeaux, Ed Hasbrouck of the National Writers Union, and Mary Rasenberger of the Authors Guild.

With our discipline specific panels we will be talking to a variety of individuals from across the creative industries including visual artists, voice actors, musicians, animators, photographers and writers on the different types of AI media generators and the unique challenges they pose.

(10) VIRGINIA NORWOOD (1927-2023). Physicist and inventor Virginia Norwood, who devised the scanner that has been used to map and study the earth from space for more than 50 years, died March 27. The New York Times obituary detailed the unexpected triumph of her contribution to the first Landsat.

…In the late 1960s, after NASA’s lunar missions sent back spectacular pictures of Earth, the director of the Geological Survey thought that photographs of the planet from space could help the agency manage land resources. The agency would partner with NASA, which would send satellites into space to take the pictures.

Ms. Norwood, who was part of an advanced design group in the space and communications division at Hughes, canvassed scientists who specialized in agriculture, meteorology, pollution and geology. She concluded that a scanner that recorded multiple spectra of light and energy, like one that had been used for local agricultural observations, could be modified for the planetary project that the Geological Survey and NASA had in mind.

The Geological Survey and NASA planned to use a giant three-camera system designed by RCA, based on television tube technology, that had been used to map the moon. The bulk of the 4,000-pound payload on NASA’s first Landsat satellite was reserved for the RCA equipment.

Ms. Norwood and Hughes were told that their multispectral scanner system, or M.S.S., could be included if it weighed no more than 100 pounds.

Ms. Norwood had to scale back her scanner to record just four bands of energy in the electromagnetic spectrum instead of seven, as she had planned. The scanner also had to be high precision. In her first design, each pixel represented 80 meters.

The device had a 9-by-13-inch mirror that banged back and forth noisily in the scanner 13 times a second. The scientists at the Geological Survey and NASA were skeptical.

A senior engineer from Hughes took the device out on a truck and drove around California to test it and convince the doubters that it would work. It did — spectacularly. Ms. Norwood hung one of the images, of Yosemite National Park’s Half Dome, on the wall of her house for the rest of her life.

The first Landsat blasted into space on July 23, 1972. Two days later, the scanner sent back the first images, of the Ouachita Mountains in Oklahoma; they were astounding. According to a 2021 article in MIT Technology Review, one geologist teared up. Another, who had been skeptical about the scanner, said, “I was so wrong about this. I’m not going to eat crow. Not big enough. I’m going to eat raven.”

The RCA system was supposed to be the primary recording instrument aboard the satellite, and the M.S.S. a secondary experiment.

“But once we looked at the data, the roles switched,” Stan Freden, the Landsat 1 project scientist, said in a NASA report.

The M.S.S. proved not only better, but also more reliable. Two weeks after liftoff, power surges in the RCA camera-based system endangered the satellite and the camera had to be shut down….

(11) MEMORY LANE.

1945[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

August Derleth’s “A Word From Dr. Lyndon Parker”

Sherlock Holmes pastiches must be almost as old as the stories themselves. The first credited one was sixteen years after the first Holmes story and was in Greek, Sherlock Holmes saving Mr. Venizelos (Ο Σέρλοκ Χολμς σώζων τον κ. Βενιζέλον).  Our Beginning tonight isn’t from a work that old as it’s taken from August Derleth’s In Re: Sherlock Holmes.

It came from the collection of short stories, In Re: Sherlock Holmes, first published seventy-eight years ago in the US by Mycroft & Moran which was an imprint of Arkham House. The imprint was in part created for these stories. Wise choice I’d say.

Pons, a Consulting Detective in the mold of Holmes, exists because Derleth desired so much to do Holmes stories after Doyle ceased that he wrote him and asked if he could. Doyle unsurprisingly said no. The Solar Pons name is supposedly syllabically similar to Sherlock Holmes. Huh.

I like them because Derleth is obviously a fanboy of Holmes and his detective. Pons isn’t Holmes but is what a fan would write if he was creating his own loving version of Holmes. 

And now for our very British Beginning…

A Word From Dr. Lyndon Parker

The way in which I first made the acquaintance of Mr. Solar Pons, who was destined to introduce me to many interesting adventures in crime detection, was exceedingly prosaic. Yet it was not without those elements suggestive of what was to come. Though it took place almost thirty years ago, the memory of that meeting is as clear in mind as if it had taken place yesterday.

I had been sitting for some time in a pub not far from Paddington Station, ruefully reflecting that the London to which I had returned after the first World War was not the city I had left, when a tall; thin gentleman wearing an Inverness cape and a rakish cap with a visor on it, strode casually into the place. I was struck at once by his appearance: the thin, almost feral face; the sharp, keen dark eyes with their heavy, but not bushy brows; the thin lips and the leanness of the face in general–all these things interested me both from a personal and a medical standpoint, and I looked up from the envelope upon which I had been writing to follow the fellow with my eyes across the floor to the bar.

A waiter, who was wiping tables next to me, noticed my interest and came over. “Sherlock Holmes’,” he said. “That’s who he is. The Sherlock Holmes of Praed Street,’ is what the papers call him. His real name’s Solar Pons. Ain’t much choice between the two, eh?” 

Pons had had a few words with the man behind the bar and now turned to look idly over the room. I looked away as I saw that his glance was about to fall on me, and I felt him examining me from head to toe. I felt, rather than saw, that he was walking over toward my table, and in a few moments he came to stand beside my bag on the floor next to my chair. 

“Fine color,” he said crisply. “Not long back from Africa, I see. “Two days.”

“Your scarab pin suggests Egypt and, if I’m not mistaken, the envelope on which you have been writing is one of Shepheard’s. From Cairo, then.” 

“On the ship Ishtar.” 

“At the East India Docks.” 

I looked up and he smiled genially. “But, really, you know, my dear fellow–London is not as bad as all that.” 

“I should not like to think so,” I answered him, without at once realizing that I had given him no clue to my thoughts. “Obviously you have been walking.”

(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born April 13, 1931 Beverly Cross. English playwright, librettist, and screenwriter. Yes librettist. He’s here because he wrote the screenplays for Sinbad and the Eye of the TigerJason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans. Not remotely genre related but worth mentioning, is that he worked uncredited on the script for Lawrence of Arabia although it is unknown if any of his material made it to the film we see. (Died 1998.)
  • Born April 13, 1943 Bill Pronzini, 80. Mystery writer whose Nameless Detective has one genre adventure in A Killing in Xanadu. Genre anthologist, often with Barry N Malzberg, covering such varied and wide-ranging themes as Bug-Eyed Monsters (with Malzberg), Arbor House Treasury of Horror and the Supernatural (with Greenberg and Malzberg) and Arbor House Necropolis. As Robert Hart Davis, he wrote “The Pillars of Salt Affair”, a Man from U.N.C.L.E. novella that ran in the The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Magazine.
  • Born April 13, 1950 Ron Perlman, 73. Hellboy in a total of five films including three animated films (Hellboy: Sword of StormsHellboy: Blood and Iron and the Redcap short which is elusive to find unfortunately). Still by far the best Hellboy. He’s got a very long association with the genre as his very first film was Quest for Fire in which he was Amoukar. The Ice Pirates and being Zeno was followed quickly by being Captain Soames in Sleepwalkers and Angel De La Guardia in the Mexican horror film Cronos. Several years later, I see he’s Boltar in Prince Valiant, followed by the hard SF of being Johnher in Alien Resurrection and Reman Viceroy in Star Trek: Nemesis. And I should note he was in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them as Gnarlack, a goblin gangster if I read the Cliff Notes to that correctly. No, I’m not forgetting about his most amazing role of all, Vincent in Beauty and The Beast. (Having not rewatched for fear of the Suck Fairy having come down hard on it. So who has watched it lately?) At the time, I thought it was the most awesome practical makeup I’d ever seen. And the costume just made look him even still more amazing. 
  • Born April 13, 1951 Peter Davison, 72. The Fifth Doctor that I came to be very fond of. For twenty years now, he has reprised his role as the Fifth Doctor in myriad Doctor Who audio dramas for Big Finish. And he put a lot of gravitas into the voice of Mole he did for The Wind in the Willows animated special Mole’s Christmas. And let’s not forget he showed up in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as the Dish of the Day. I’m going to note that I first saw him in Tristan Farnon in the BBC’s adaptation of James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small stories, a lovely role indeed. And I’m very fond of The Last Detective series where he played DC ‘Dangerous’ Davies. 
  • Born April 13, 1954 Michael Cassutt, 69. Producer, screenwriter, and author. His notable TV work includes work for the animated Dungeons & DragonsMax HeadroomThe Outer LimitsBeauty and The BeastSeaQuestFarscape, Eerie, Indiana and The Twilight Zone. He’s also written genre works including the Heaven’s Shadow series that was co-written with David S. Goyer. His latest piece of fiction was the “Aurora” novelette published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, March/April 2022. 
  • Born April 13, 1954 Glen Keane, 69. He’s responsible for all of the layout work on Star Trek: The Animated Series and also My Favorite Martians which I can’t say I recognize. As a character animator at Walt Disney Animation Studios, he worked on Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid and Pocahontas
  • Born April 13, 1959 Brian Thomsen. Editor, writer and anthologist. He was founding editor of Warner Books’ Questar Science Fiction, and later served as managing fiction editor at TSR. He co-wrote the autobiography of Julius Schwartz. And yes I’ve actually read one of his anthologies, A Yuletide Universe, as I remember it from the cover art. (Died 2008.)
  • April 13, 1967 — Rogers Cadenhead, 56. This Filer is a computer book author and web publisher who served once as chairman of the RSS Advisory Board, a group that publishes the RSS 2.0 specification. Very, very impressive. He also gained infamy for claiming drudge.com before a certain muckraker could, and still holds on to it.

(13) COMICS SECTION.

(14) RIVERS OF LONDON. Titan Comics has revealed the covers for Here Be Dragons – the next phase of Rivers of London comics, set in the world of the bestselling novel series. For this upcoming series, comic series writers Ben Aaronovitch (Rivers of London) and Andrew Cartmel (The Vinyl Detective) are joined by BAFTA-nominated scriptwriter, and award-winning New York Times bestselling author James Swallow, with artwork by José María Beroy

This cover preview shows the first look at a dangerous monster at large above the streets of London. After a Met Police helicopter on night patrol is attacked by an unidentified aerial phenomena, the Met’s only sanctioned wizard, Peter Grant, and his mentor, Thomas Nightingale, are called to investigate.
 
Rivers of London: Here Be Dragons issue #1 (on sale in comic shops and digital July 12th, 2023) features covers by series artist José María Beroy, alongside David M. Buisan and V.V. Glass. 

(15) SMITHSONIAN OPEN ACCESS. “The Smithsonian Puts 4.5 Million High-Res Images Online and Into the Public Domain, Making Them Free to Use” at Open Culture. And more items are being added to Smithsonian Open Access all the time,

That vast repository of American history that is the Smithsonian Institution evolved from an organization founded in 1816 called the Columbian Institute for the Promotion of Arts and Sciences. Its mandate, the collection and dissemination of useful knowledge, now sounds very much of the nineteenth century — but then, so does its name. Columbia, the goddess-like symbolic personification of the United States of America, is seldom directly referenced today, having been superseded by Lady Liberty. Traits of both figures appear in the depiction on the nineteenth-century fireman’s hat above, about which you can learn more at Smithsonian Open Access, a digital archive that now contains some 4.5 million images.

Just for practice I searched “science fiction” and one of the images that returned was Octavia Butler’s typewriter.

This Olivetti Studio 46 Typewriter belonged to Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006), who wrote science fiction when few black writers did. Butler began writing at age 10 and eventually used a computer to compose, but noted, “I didn’t always. I wrote my first ten books on a manual typewriter of one kind or another….She [my mother] did day work; she made not very much money….here she had a daughter begging for a typewriter.” Butler’s blue typewriter dates to the 1970s….

(16) VONNEGUT SPEAKS. At Euronews:“Culture Re-View: Kurt Vonnegut’s five best quotes”.

…Over the following five decades, Vonnegut established himself as one of the most creative and humorous voices in science-fiction. Like an American Douglas Adams, his books would frequently deal with aliens, time travel, and metafiction, but always with the intent of getting to the heart of human nature itself….

The first example on their list is:

1. “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

From Vonnegut’s third novel ‘Mother Night’, it’s a beautiful and quick summation of an appreciation of the stark importance as well as the flimsiness of human identity.

(17) DAY FOR KNIGHT. “’Game of Thrones’ Prequel Based on Dunk and Egg Books Series Order”TVLine has details.

Despite Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin once plainly stating that HBO was not going to make a TV show out of his Dunk and Egg novellas, those characters will be central in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight, a Thrones prequel series that HBO greenlit Wednesday during Warner Bros. Discovery’s unveiling of its Max streaming service.

The series will be written and executive-produced by Martin and Ira Parker. Ryan Condal, who currently serves as House of the Dragon‘s showrunner, and Vince Gerardis also will be EPs.

“A century before the events of Game of Thrones, two unlikely heroes wandered Westeros,” the official logline reads. “A young, naive but courageous knight, Ser Duncan the Tall” (aka Dunk) “and his diminutive squire, Egg. Set in an age when the Targaryen line still holds the Iron Throne and the memory of the last dragon has not yet passed from living memory, great destinies, powerful foes and dangerous exploits all await these improbable and incomparable friends.”…

(18) A FROZEN FLAME. And if you’d like to see George R.R. Martin posing with his Dragon Award from last year, click on this link to his March 29 blog entry.

My thanks to all of the attendees of last year’s Dragoncon, and to all the Dragon Award voters who chose ELDEN RING as the best game of the year.   Like all my friends at From Software, I am thrilled that you enjoyed the play… as challenging as it can be.

(19) VIDEO OF THE DAY. PBS Space-Time’s Matt O’Dowd wonders “How Far Beyond Earth Could Humanity Expand?”

We humans have always been explorers. The great civilizations that have arisen across the world are owed to our restless ancestors. These days, there’s not much of Earth left to explore. But if we look up, there’s a whole universe out there waiting for us. Future generations may one day explore the cosmos and even settle entire other galaxies. But there is a hard limit to how much of the universe we can expand into. So, how big can humanity get?

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steve Vertlieb, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]

Lis Carey Review: The Hanging Tree

Peter Grant is back in London, and instead of welcome peace and recovery from his encounter with the Faerie Queen, he’s got a phone call from Lady Tyburn, calling in a favor. Her daughter was at the scene of a death, apparently an accidental overdose, and Lady Ty tells Peter to keep her out of it. Getting involved in this case that didn’t look at all like Folly business leads to quite exciting, and, oops, dangerous encounters with both Lesley May, and the Faceless Man.

The Hanging Tree (Rivers of London #6), by Ben Aaronovitch. DAW, January 2017

Review by Lis Carey: Apprentice wizard PC Peter Grant gets a call on a case that at first doesn’t appear to be Folly business. A young woman has died of a probably accidental overdose, during a party at a very fancy address. No apparent magical involvement.

But Lady Tyburn’s daughter was also at this party, and she wants her daughter kept out of the case. Peter owes her a big favor, and Lady Ty is calling in the favor.

All is looking good for keeping the daughter out of the case, until she says, in the middle of an intentionally low-key interview, with Peter and others, that she supplied the drugs.

But it’s clear she didn’t intend any deaths. There’s also something very odd about the high-end flat where the party and the death occurred, starting with how they had access.

Dr. Walid’s examination of the body, in particular the brain, suggests what sort of “something odd” they should be looking for.

Peter, with DC Sahra Guleed, of the Major Investigations Team, investigate the dead girl, her friends, and the families. What they find isn’t just concerning. Highlights, if that’s the right word, include an underground pool collapsing on Peter and one of the dead girl’s friends, a very destructive confrontation with Lesley May at Harrods, and another showdown with the Faceless Man. Festivities are further enlivened by teams (yes, more than one) of US intelligence contractors attempting to get hold of very valuable magical, or magic-related, artifacts that the Folly sees itself as the rightful owners of.

And right through the book, Beverly Brook is present, and Peter and Beverly’s relationship is progressing. Peter’s mother likes her, a fact which Peter finds terrifying.

It’s a lot of fun, along with being terrifying and exciting.

I received this book as a gift.

Lis Carey Review: Foxglove Summer

Peter was just taking a quick trip to Herefordshire to interview a retired wizard who’s a fellow veteran of Nightingale’s unit in WWII, in regards to a case he most likely has no involvement with anyway—two missing 11-year-old girls. He’s quickly satisfied the elderly, frail man has no connection to the case, but he can’t walk away from two missing children. He asks to be assigned to the case in any capacity in which he can be useful. Which is how he winds up confronting carnivorous unicorns, ghost trees, bees, and faeries who aren’t at all nice or friendly. Oh, and inseminating a river with Beverly Brook. Yes, their relationship has progressed a bit!

Foxglove Summer (Rivers of London #5), by Ben Aaronovitch
DAW, January 2015 (original publication November 2014)

Review by Lis Carey: Two children have gone missing in Herefordshire, and Peter Grant is sent out to check on a retired old wizard in the area, just in case he might be involved, or aware of something the regular police won’t ask him about. He finds Hugh Oswald, but he’s old, frail, and falls asleep very easily. He’s not aware of anything, and is a seriously poor candidate to have done anything. His granddaughter, Mellissa, is a beekeeper in a fairly big way, and there’s definitely something odd about her, but she doesn’t seem at all a likely suspect, either.

So, back home to London? No, with two children missing, Peter doesn’t want to walk away. He calls Nightingale to report, and also to ask permission to go offer his services to the local police.

The local police are not inclined to refuse an extra officer on the case, but they do have concerns. Does PC Grant have any reason to think there is any of That Weird Stuff involved? No, he just doesn’t two children being missing, and he doesn’t have any pressing cases waiting for him in London. They go around the question a few different ways, but Peter assures them that he expects this to be as routine as a missing-children case can be, and he’s happy to do any job that will make him useful. He gets tagged as the assistant Family Liaison Officer for one of the families, freeing up an experienced local officer for the search for the missing girls.

But of course Peter’s venture out of London can’t be smooth and uneventful — or unmagical. He starts to notice signs of odd things going on with this case. The girls were in the habit of taking “night walks” when conditions suited. One of the girls had an “invisible friend,” a unicorn called Princess Luna. One of their cellphones is found, but it’s dead. Battery dead, is what the local authorities conclude. Peter asks to examine the phone, and it’s dead from the effects of magic performed nearby. The other girl, not the one with the unicorn friend, has an older half-sister who ran away years earlier, taking her baby sister with her — and something strange happened, that she can’t quite recall, but she went home taking her baby sister with her.

Beverly Brook, who should be in London, comes to Herefordshire–and gets kidnapped by a couple of local river goddesses, because she thought it would be simpler to swim, and trespassed in the process. Peter has to come and make nice to the river goddesses to get her out. Their relationship seems to have taken another step forward, and Peter is happy about that.

He’s not so happy that Lesley May has started calling him. They’re quick calls, from a burner. He has to log and report every contact, and his superiors have some hope of getting her to turn herself in. Peter doesn’t share that optimism, He’s soon using a burner phone for the unavoidable contact with her.

Meanwhile, the missing girls case keeps getting weirder and weirder. There are carnivorous unicorns, a changeling, ghost trees, a forest with a convoluted history where strange things happen, and a faerie queen who is, well, think all your images of wicked elves rather than nice ones. There’s Harold Oswald, who though elderly, frail, and inclined to sleep a good deal, is more on the ball that Peter initially thought.

Peter learns some interesting things about Nightingale’s past.

And there is a major, and dangerous clash in the forest.

Peter’s life is not going to be the same again.

There’s fun and humorous moments, too, but this is a book with emotional depth and major challenges for Peter.

Recommended.

I received this book as a gift.

Review: Broken Homes (Rivers of London #4)

A dead woman with no ID, her face shot off, and DNA that appears to come from what Peter, Nightingale, and the team refer to as “The Strip Club of Dr. Moreau.” A city planner who turns around to go back down to the underground tracks, and inexplicably appears to commit suicide. A burglar found dead, burned from the inside. A stolen grimoire of industrial magic, which is traced back to a deceased crazy architect who built the SkyGardens council housing estate, where very odd things seem to be happening. Is Peter headed for another confrontation with the Faceless Man?

Broken Homes (Rivers of London #4), by Ben Aaronovitch (author), Kobna Holdbrook-Smith (narrator)
Penguin Audio, ISBN 9780756409937, February 2014 (original publication February 2013)

By Lis Carey: Peter Grant and partner Lesley May are at the Folly practicing their magic skills and researching an Oxford dining club called the Little Crocodiles. Magic — Lesley is doing more careful, disciplined, and therefore somewhat more skilled work than Peter. Little Crocodiles — their professor was illicitly teaching them Newtonian magic.

They’re interrupted by a call to an auto accident, with the drunk driver dead and the other driver, who was speeding, not badly hurt. And yet there’s blood in the car. Turns out it’s not the driver’s blood. Whose is it?

Oh, and the driver, Robert Weil, is connected to the Little Crocodiles.

When they find a body, a woman whose face has apparently been shot off with a shotgun, Dr. Walid reaches the disturbing conclusion that her DNA suggests she’s a product of what they’ve come to call “the strip club of Dr. Moreau,” which featured human-animal chimeras. That’s an alarming situation to be facing.

But a policeman, even one dealing in magic, rarely has just one case on his plate. Sgt, Jaget Kumar of the British Transportation Police alerts Peter to the very odd apparent suicide of Richard Lewis, a city planner for the Southwark Council, on the tracks of an underground station. The body of a burglar is found in Bromley, burnt from the inside. A young and apparently healthy real estate auditor dies of a heart attack. A stolen German grimoire is found and traced to the late architect Eric Stromberg, who built Skygardens, a council housing estate where there’s conflict between developers and residents.

What’s the chance all these cases and weird events are unrelated?

Peter and Lesley suspect the Faceless Man, who has been a growing threat. They move into a flat in the Skygardens, undercover, and start quietly investigating. This is also how Peter learns that off-duty, Lesley is spending a lot of time with Zach Palmer, which strikes him as really odd, but not really a concern. She’s an adult and a good police officer, right?

In the course of all this, Peter is in the midst of his mandatory safety training, and has to make those classes, and with multiple dead bodies, he’s also doing a lot of relatively routine police procedural stuff, which he hates, but agrees is necessary. Lesley is better at this, too.

When Peter figures out what’s really going on at Skygardens, he finds disaster about to break out, and no time left to prevent it.

I’ve barely scratched the surface of what happens. Have I mentioned the Russian nightwitch? Beverly Brook’s return from up north? Peter’s scientific experiments in magic detection? Nightingale’s demonstration of the fact that his fussy manner doesn’t interfere with him being a very effective practitioner of magic, in what might be the book’s best scene?

There’s also another rooftop confrontation, just Peter and the Faceless Man, in the course of which Peter gets a heartbreaking surprise.

It’s altogether a well-written book, with well-written, emotionally complex characters, and it’s done with a light hand. We get the message; we don’t get pounded on the head with it. It’s leavened with a good deal of subtle humor, too, even after it takes a more serious tone in the second half of the book. It’s also a book that takes seriously the problems and complexities of the lower economic strata of society, again, without being too heavy-handed.

Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, as usual, does an excellent job with the narration.

Highly recommended.

I bought this audiobook.

Review: Tales from the Folly: A Rivers of London Short Story Collection by Ben Aaronovitch

Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London world includes more characters than Peter Grant and his coworkers, and more places than just the neighborhoods and suburbs of London. In this collection, we meet a very odd book with a mind of its own, a drug dealer with a taste for fine cloth who meets an infant river goddess, and a “favourite uncle” whom one of the teens becomes very concerned about when she realizes he’s not on the family tree and has been visiting at Christmas for generations. And more.

Tales from the Folly: A Rivers of London Short Story Collection (Rivers of London #1.5, 1.6, 2.5, 3.5, 4.6, 5.1).  By Ben Aaronovitch (JABberwocky Literary Agency, July 2020)

By Lis Carey: This is a collection of short stories, including some “moments,” short pieces that Aaronovitch doesn’t want to call stories, set in the Rivers of London world. Not all of these stories feature the major characters in the novels. Several feature side characters, and characters whose stories were intended to be one-offs, but perhaps won’t be.

Well, in at least two cases, clearly won’t be. Tobias Winter and Vanessa Sommer, two young German police officers, met in The October Man. In Tales From the Folly, Tobias has a Moment in which he first learned disturbing news about the UK’s magical establishment. Vanessa has a short story in which, with her new knowledge, she returns home at Christmas time, intending to check out some of the peculiar features of her childhood community.

We also have Peter Grant going to the British Library to spend a night with the Folly’s own archivist, Professor Harold Postmartin, and the Library’s Special Collections Manager, Elise Winstanley, who turns out to be an old acquaintance of his mother’s. How old? She attended Peter’s christening, and knows his mother by her Sierra Leonean name. Ms. Whinstanley thinks the library has a poltergeist in Rare Books. It turns out to be something far more interesting.

There’s Abigail’s old school friend’s “favourite uncle,” who turns out not to be anywhere in the family tree and to have been visiting the family at Christmas for a very long time. The drug dealer and fashion connoisseur who needs to hide in a rundown house near a river when a deal goes wrong, and has a very unexpected experience. There’s a domestic quarrel which turns out to be the business of the Folly, and a happily married couple, a farmer and his former London police officer husband, who are congratulated by the local talking foxes on a blessing they haven’t yet received.

And more. It’s fun, interesting, and rounds out the world Peter, Nightingale, and the Folly operate in.

Recommended.

I received this book as a gift, and am reviewing it voluntarily.

Future Worlds Prize for Fantasy and Science Fiction Writers of Colour Taking Entries

The Future Worlds Prize for Fantasy and Science Fiction Writers of Colour is now open for submissions from unpublished writers of colour based in the UK and Ireland.

The prize is now in its third year, and is funded by author Ben Aaronovitch and Bridgerton actor Adjoa Andoh. 

Future Worlds Prize for Fantasy and Science Fiction Writers of Colour aims to find new talent writing in the SFF space, from magical realism and space operas to dystopia and more. The winner will receive a prize of £4,000, the runner-up £2,000 and up to six additional shortlisted authors will each receive £800. All shortlisted writers, the runner-up and the winner will also receive mentoring from one of the prize’s publishing partners.

Submission will be taken until 23:59 GMT on Monday, February 6, 2023.

The 2021 prize was won by M. H. Ayinde, for her story A Shadow in Chains. The runner-up was Salma Ibrahim for her story Frankincense.

The prize began taking entries today, the day before NaNoWriMo begins. Throughout November, to mark NaNoWriMo and inspire writers, the Future Worlds Prize will be sharing writing tips and advice on its social media from authors of colour in the SFF space. These authors include Tade Thompson, Vaishnavi Patel, Sue Lynn Tan and Saara El-Arifi, as well as previous shortlistees of the prize.

Ben Aaronovitch said: “It is hugely satisfying to see Future Worlds Prize going into its third year and settling into its place in the busy literary awards scene. Since we launched in 2020, we’ve been blown away by the imagination and storytelling powers of all of our entrants, and delighted to see our shortlisted writers working with their publishing mentors and going on to secure agents. We knew when we started that there would be some undiscovered gems, but were truly unprepared for the rich seam of talent from writers of colour that we’ve struck.  

“None of this would be possible, of course, without our amazing publishing partners, and we’re looking forward to working with even more of them this time, but I don’t think I’m allowed to talk about this yet…”

Adjoa Andoh said: “In the third year of Future Worlds Prize we hope to further increase the pool of writers of colour choosing to work in science fiction and fantasy. We encourage those on the journey to first publication to bring their work to us, to apply for this prize, receive expert support and advice and flourish in their chosen field to the great benefit of all of the readership.”

The prize was founded in 2020 by Ben Aaronovitch and Gollancz. The 2020 prize was won by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson for The Principle of Moments, a space-based adventure story. Jikiemi-Pearson has since secured a publishing deal with Gollancz, and her debut novel will be released in 2023.

In 2021 it was rebranded as Future Worlds Prize for Fantasy and Science Fiction Writers of Colour, and became a community interest company in 2022, co-directed by Sarah Shaffi and Andy Ryan.

For more on the prize, see http://www.futureworldsprize.co.uk/, or follow them on Twitter, and Instagram.

[Based on a press release.]

Review: The October Man by Ben Aaronovitch

The October Man (Rivers of London #7.5), by Ben Aaronovitch, Subterranean Press, May 2019

By Lis Carey: This entry in Rivers of London is, for variety, set in Germany, and involves a German river. Or two. And river goddesses.

Tobias Winter is an investigator for Abteilung KDA, the German version of Britain’s Folly. He’s on leave when he gets summoned to Trier, to investigate a possible “infraction.” A man has been found dead, his body completely covered by a strange fungus, which has also invaded his lungs, causing his death.

(Tobias is Germany’s equivalent of Peter Grant, not Thomas Nightingale; he’s the relatively new practitioner recruited because “you can’t trust the British to keep an agreement over the long term.” Yes, there’s competition and distrust between the magical law enforcement operations of Britain and Germany.)

Tobias Winter’s liaison with the Trier police is Vanessa Sommer, who is intelligent, ambitious, and very interested when she learns that Tobi can actually do magic.

Sommer is also her unit’s expert on wine and the local wine industry, more by accident than intention, and the dead man was found near a winery, and was a member of a social group called The Good Wine Drinking Association — half a dozen middle-aged men whose lives were at a standstill in various ways. The fungus is one that is sometimes used in the wine industry.

Winter and Sommer are soon visiting the winery. The owner is the granddaughter of the last man to run it as a working winery, and has spent years in California learning the ways of the California wine industry. This doesn’t include her grandfather’s annual gift of wine to the local river goddess, Kelly, goddess of the River Kyll.

Investigation includes talking to Kelly, to the kindergarten-age new goddess of another river, to every surviving member of the Good Wine Drinking Association — and investigating a court scandal from more than a thousand years ago, when Kelly had taken a mortal lover.

There are more deaths, and the deaths have the inconvenient effect of eliminating suspects while not helping them zero in on the real killer, who might be an illegal practitioner, or something more frightening.

I like the characters, the story is interesting, intricate and satisfying. It’s also quite fun to get the German perspective on the British and the Folly, including Tobias’ study of every detail the Germans have on Detective Constable Peter Grant. It seems there’s a lot of possibility for both rivalry and cooperation between the two magical law enforcement organizations. I’d really like to see some of that.

Recommended.

I received this book as a gift and am reviewing it voluntarily.

The Furthest Station (Rivers of London #5.5), by Ben Aaronovitch

By Lis Carey: The London Underground has ghosts. Well, the London Underground always has ghosts, but usually they’re gentle, sad creatures. Lately there’s been an outbreak of more aggressive ghosts. Groping, shoving, insults that are racist and/or misogynistic–offensive and provocative. Victims of the assault report them, but have completely forgotten them by the time Transport Police get back to them to follow up.

Jaget, the member of the Transport Police most adept at seeing ghosts, calls in Peter Grant, Patrol Constable and Apprentice Wizard, part of the only unit of the Metropolitan Police that deals with ghosts and other spooky stuff. He in turn brings along Abigail, who, yes, is only a teenager, but as someone, perhaps Nightingale, says, she sees ghosts when she’s on her own. Just as well to have her supervised and learning how a proper investigation is run.

They start by trying to find a pattern, and by trying to interview new targets of the ghosts quickly enough that they get some information before the memory fades. When they encounter some ghosts, a strange thing happens. Or, another strange thing. They can interact with these ghosts, to the extent the ghosts are able to interact, for a few minutes. Then the ghost doesn’t leave, or fade. It shatters. That is not previously documented ghost behavior.

Abigail, having had great success in her Latin studies, is allowed to read books in the Folly’s library that Peter is not yet authorized for. This annoys Peter in two ways. One, she’s very much his junior. Two, he promised Abigail he would teach her Latin if she learned Latin. She’s now better at Latin than he is. Abigail also finds what might be a clue, an account of a house at the end of the Underground line where the strange ghosts have been appearing, where a magician of some kind lived.

Peter, meanwhile, meets a toddler river god living with an older, childless couple. Nothing to see here, look away, look away…

It’s not long before they’re tracking a kidnapped commuter, and learning strange things about the uses of trapped ghosts.

Oh, and Peter and Nightingale are worrying about how they’re going to talk to Abigail’s parents about her need to be trained as a wizard.

It’s a lot of fun. Highly recommended.

I received a free copy of this book, and am reviewing it voluntarily.

  • The Furthest Station (Rivers of London #5.5) by Ben Aaronovitch. Subterranean Press, ISBN 9781596068346, June 2017