By Cora Buhlert: Here are my
pics of the Raksura Colony Tree project at the Dublin 2019 Worldcon.
The pictures are mostly pretty self-explanatory. There is a before
picture, several pictures of people working on the tree in the craft area, a
photo of the table where the finished components were collected and finally the
finished tree from several angles.
There is also a group photo of many of the people who contributed
to the tree. The lady with the short hair in the Dublin volunteer t-shirt
standing to the left of the model is Constanze Hofmann, display area head for
Dublin 2019 and the person who initiated the project. The first person from the
right kneeling in the front row and wearing a Dublin 2019 t-shirt is Jan Bass,
wife of Filer David Wallace. I’m in the back row, the third person from the
right.
I’ve also included a photo of a Bayeux style tapestry with added
TARDIS that was displayed in the Warehouse at the Point at Dublin 2019, simply
because it’s very cool.
(1) OVERVIEW. Neil Clarke’s “A State of the Short SF
Field in 2018” from The Best Science Fiction
of the Year: Volume 4 can be read by
clicking Amazon’s “Look Inside the Book” feature here. The free preview
contains the whole of Neil’s summary of the short SF field. Gardner Dozois used
to write something similar in his annual anthologies, and it’s nice to see Neil
stepping up here. Plenty of interesting analysis and opinions.
(2) KNITTING TOGETHER A COMMUNITY. “The Raksura Colony Tree” is a
project to be presented at Dublin 2019, inspired by Martha Wells’ previously Hugo-nominated
series Books of the Raksura.
If you’re coming to Dublin to join in the fun and are interested in creating things with needle and thread, this is your chance to be an active part in a community art project.
Cora Buhlert recently posted something
she was inspired to do:
There are examples of many different
types of foliage that people have come up with here.
The eponymous station in Richard C. Meredith’s We All Died At Breakaway Station is a vital link in humanity’s communications network. It’s the facility through which hard-won information about the genocidal alien Jillies must pass. Therefore, the Jillies plan to destroy it. Absalom Bracer’s convoy is determined to defend it, despite the notable disadvantage that said convoy consists of a hospital ship and two escorts crewed by the walking wounded. The prose goes beyond purple into ultraviolet, but the novel delivers on its title with grand explosions and heroic sacrifices.
Scottish author Iain M. Banks populated his sci-fi Culture book series with humanoid robots, alien races, and artificially intelligent spaceships that chose their own names.
So: Research scientist Janelle Shane thought it would be fun to use those ship names to train a real neural network to — what else? — conjure up new names for self-aware spaceships. The results? Hilarious. Puzzling. Generally? Great.
(5) SPECULATIVE COLLECTIVE. The kickoff event of the Speculative Collective Salon on
July 11 will feature best-selling authors Jennifer Brody, Rachel A. Marks, and
Neo Edmund.
Join us to launch the SPECULATIVE COLLECTIVE Salon, a new quarterly gathering of SoCal’s growing speculative fiction community. The program will include a reading and conversation with best-selling authors Jennifer Brody, Rachel A. Marks, and Neo Edmund. The authors will have books to sell and sign, and time will be set aside to network and chat with likeminded fans of the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres. The event will take place at 1888 Center, 115 N. Orange St., Orange, CA. Admission is free. Come early to enjoy the venue’s art gallery and bookstore or pick up something to drink from the in-house Contra Coffee & Tea shop.
Their next event is:
October 10, 2019: The SPECULATIVE COLLECTIVE Salon, featuring USA Today best-selling author Russell Nohelty, YA science fiction author Merrie Destefano, and Dr. David Sandner, an English professor at California State University, Fullerton, who also publishes speculative fiction and non-fiction.
(6)
FUTURE TENSE. This month’s
entry in our Future Tense Fiction series is “Space Leek,”
by Chen Qiufan/Stanley Chen.
I blinked. The walls and floors of the cabin vibrated as the spaceship adjusted its docking position, waking me up from my nap. My partner, Jing, was busily checking the dashboard.
“Are we there yet?” I mumbled.
“Look, it’s the Roast Garlic. Your favorite.” She pointed to the porthole.
The floating Yutu-3 space station gradually enlarged in my sight as I gazed out the porthole. I smiled. This was my third time up here, yet my eyes still widened when I saw it.
“Roast Garlic” was the nickname I had given the space station….
…The 1975 study was on the design of large-scale space settlements. These would be located, like the Yutu-3 space station in Chen Qiufan’s story, at the Earth-moon Lagrangian points where gravity between these two bodies allows for stable orbits. Unlike the Yutu-3 (or as the characters in the story call it, the Roast Garlic), these were not intended to be purely research stations. They would be home to about 10,000 people engaged in the work of building solar-powered satellites.
The team realized that these people would need to bring, or make, all of the things they needed themselves….
(7)
TODAY IN HISTORY.
July 2, 1939 — The first Worldcon begins in New York, continuing to July 4. Attendance is approximately 200.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born July 2, 1914 — Hannes Bok. He’s a writer, artist and illustrator who created nearly one hundred and fifty covers for various detective, fantasy and sf fiction magazines. He shared one of the inaugural 1953 Hugo Awards for science fiction achievement for Best Cover Artist with Ed Emshwiller. He also wrote a handful of novels, the best known being The Sorcerer’s Ship, The Blue Flamingo and Beyond the Golden Stair. (Died 1964.)
Born July 2, 1933 — Gloria Castillo. She first shows up in a genre role in Invasion of the Saucer Men (which also bore the title of Invasion of the Hell Creatures). Later she would be in Teenage Monster, and had an appearance on Alfred Hitchcock Presents. (Died 1978.)
Born July 2, 1948 — Saul Rubinek, 71. Primarily of interest for being on Warehouse 13 as Artie Nielsen, but he does show rather often else on genre series and films including going on Eureka, Masters of Horror, Person of Interest, Beauty & the Beast, Stargate SG-1, The Outer Limits and Star Trek: The Next Generation. Memory Run and Death Ship are seeming to be his only only genre films.
Born July 2, 1950 — Stephen R. Lawhead, 69. I personally think that The Pendragon Cycle is by far his best work though the King Raven Trilogy with its revisionist take on Robin Hood is intriguing. And I read the first two of the Bright Empires series which very much worth reading.
Born July 2, 1951 — Elisabeth Brooks. She is no doubt best remembered for her role as the evil, leather-clad siren Marsha Quist in The Howling. Her other genre appearances included Deep Space, The Six Million Dollar Man, Kolchak: The Night Stalker and The Forgotten One. (Died 1997.)
Born July 2, 1956 — Kay Kenyon, 63. Writer of the truly awesome The Entire and the Rose series which I enjoyed immensely. I’ve not read her Dark Talents series, so opinions please.
Born July 2, 1965 — Jerry Hall, 54. She seems to wandered into a number of films down the years such as Alicia in Batman and Newswoman in Freejack, not to Woman in Park in Vampire in Brooklyn. Not real roles, just there.
Born July 2, 1970 — Yancy Butler, 49. Detective Sara Pezzini on the Witchblade series which would’ve been awesome with current CGI. She was later Avedon Hammond in Ravager, Captain Kate Roebuck in Doomsday Man, Angie D’Amico in Kick-Ass and Kick-Ass 2, Reba in Lake Placid 3 and Lake Placid: The Final Chapter, Officer Hart in Hansel & Gretel Get Baked (also known as Black Forest: Hansel and Gretel and the 420 Witch) (given the latter, a career low for her) and Alexis Hamilton in Death Race 2050. Series work other than Witchblade wasa recurring role as Sgt. Eve Edison in Mann & Machine inher first genre role.
Born July 2, 1990 — Margot Robbie, 29. Harley Quinn in what I consider the second best Suicide Squad film, the best being the animated Assault on Arkham Asylum which also has a better Harley Quinn in it. Just saying. She both acting and producing the forthcoming Birds of Prey film. She has since played Jane Porter in The Legend of Tarzan, and voiced Flopsy Rabbit in Peter Rabbit.
(9) COMICS SECTION.
Non Sequitur shows how to get mundanes to respect SF.
(10) SAD STORY. Rachel
Weiner in the Washington Post reports that Pankaj Bashin pleaded not
guilty by reason of insanity in his murder of Bradford Jackson. Bashin
claimed that Jackson was turning into a werewolf and had to be killed to
“save 99 percent of the moon and planets.” “Man
who thought he killed werewolf in Alexandria pleads not guilty by reason of
insanity”.
Foreigners crossing certain Chinese borders into the Xinjiang region, where authorities are conducting a massive campaign of surveillance and oppression against the local Muslim population, are being forced to install a piece of malware on their phones that gives all of their text messages as well as other pieces of data to the authorities, a collaboration by Motherboard, Süddeutsche Zeitung, the Guardian, the New York Times, and the German public broadcaster NDR has found.
If customers fear their neighbors, and fear they might steal a package, customers are less likely to be mad at Amazon if they don’t get a package they ordered. They’re also more likely to buy an Amazon-owned Ring doorbell camera, which is marketed as way of surveilling your stoop for package deliveries and package thieves—especially on Neighbors, the Ring-owned “neighborhood watch” app.
(13) DEEP DIVE. Doris V. Sutherland has a set of “2019 Hugo Award Reviews: Novelettes” at Women Write About Comics. Here’s an excerpt from the review of Brooke Bolander’s story:
Parts of The Only Harmless Great Thing are written from the perspective of elephant-kind. These are framed as tales told by a mother elephant to her calves, recalling certain sequences from Bolander’s other Hugo finalist of the year, “The Tale of the Three Beautiful Raptor Sisters, and the Prince Who Was Made of Meat” – as with that story there is a distinct Kipling influence, complete with the occasional “best beloved”. Storytelling is important to elephants, we are told: “Without stories there is no past, no future, not We. There is Death. There is Nothing, a night without moon or stars.”
A young Arctic fox has walked across the ice from Norway’s Svalbard islands to northern Canada in an epic journey, covering 3,506 km (2,176 miles) in 76 days.
“The fox’s journey has left scientists speechless,” according to Greenland’s Sermitsiaq newspaper.
Researchers at Norway’s Polar Institute fitted the young female with a GPS tracking device and freed her into the wild in late March last year on the east coast of Spitsbergen, the Svalbard archipelago’s main island.
The fox was under a year old when she set off west in search of food, reaching Greenland just 21 days later – a journey of 1,512 km – before trudging forward on the second leg of her trek.
She was tracked to Canada’s Ellesmere Island, nearly 2,000 km further, just 76 days after leaving Svalbard.
What amazed the researchers was not so much the length of the journey as the speed with which the fox had covered it – averaging just over 46 km (28.5 miles) a day and sometimes reaching 155 km.
Fifty years after the first moon landing, a small Icelandic town celebrates its pivotal role in propelling humankind into space.
…Yet few people realise that this triumphant leap for mankind was propelled in part from an unlikely place: Iceland. In the years preceding the Apollo 11 mission, Nasa believed it was essential for its astronauts to prepare for their intragalactic journey by training in the most otherworldly terrain on Earth. After scouring the globe, officials determined that the moon’s lunar landscape was strikingly similar to that just outside Húsavík, a quiet 2,300-person fishing community on Iceland’s northern coast. Nasa sent 32 astronauts to train in its crater-filled terrain in 1965 and 1967. Incredibly, of the 12 humans who have ever walked on the moon, nine first touched down in Húsavík – including Armstrong himself.
…Next stop: Mars
For several years, Nasa has been studying geothermal sites in Iceland as a way to prepare for its ambitious plans to send a rover to Mars in 2020. According to planetary scientists, Iceland’s glaciers, volcanoes and hot springs are eerily similar to how Mars looked billions of years ago, and by studying subtle marks in Iceland’s iron-rich rocks, scientists are able to detect clues indicating where water once flowed.
“The Apollo astronauts I have met have told me that Iceland [is] an even better place to train astronauts to visit Mars than it was for the Moon,” Örlygsson said. “We know a lot about the geology of Mars because rovers have been studying the surface of Mars for some time. What they have discovered is that there are many more similarities between the geology here in Iceland and the geology of Mars.”
(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Wet Book Rescue” on YouTube
offers practical advice on rescuing wet books from the Syracuse University
Libraries.
[Thanks to James Davis Nicoll, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Joey
Eschrich, Cat Eldridge, Chip Hitchcock, Mike Kennedy, Darrah Chavey, Greg
Hullender, Martin Morse Wooster, Carl Slaughter, and Andrew Porter for some of
these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cliff.]