The BSFA Awards have been presented annually since 1970. The awards are voted on by members of the British Science Fiction Association and by the members of the year’s Eastercon, the national science fiction convention, held since 1955. The winners will be announced at this year’s Eastercon, ConFusion, which will be held online 2-5th April 2021,
Best Artwork
Iain Clarke, Shipbuilding Over the Clyde, Art for Glasgow in 2024 WorldCon bid.
Fangorn, Covers of Robot Dreams series.
Ruby Gloom, Cover of Nikhil Singh’s Club Ded, Luna Press Publishing.
Sinjin Li, Cover of Eli Lee’s, A Strange and Brilliant Light, Jo Fletcher Books.
Nani Walker, Four Black Lives Matter Murals in AR. Using drone photogrammetry, Nani Sahra Walker produced 3-D models of four Black Lives Matter murals as memorials to George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others killed by police. Published by the Los Angeles Times in collaboration with RYOT and reported by Dorany Pineda.
Anne Charnock, ‘All I Asked For’, Fictions, Healthcare and Care Re-Imagined. Edited by Keith Brookes, at Future Care Capital.
Dilman Dila, ‘Red_Bati’, Dominion: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction From Africa and the African Diaspora, AURELIA LEO. Edited by Zelda Knight and Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki.
Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, ‘Ife-Iyoku, the Tale of Imadeyunuagbon’, Dominion: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction From Africa and the African Diaspora, AURELIA LEO. Edited by Zelda Knight and Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki.
Ida Keogh, ‘Infinite Tea in the Demara Cafe’, Londoncentric, Newcon Press. Edited by Ian Whates.
Tobi Ogundiran, ‘Isn’t Your Daughter Such a Doll’, Shoreline of Infinity.
Best Non-Fiction
Francesca T Barbini (ed.), Ties That Bind: Love in Science Fiction and Fantasy, Luna Press.
Paul Kincaid, The Unstable Realities of Christopher Priest, Gylphi Press.
Andrew Milner and J.R. Burgmann, Science Fiction and Climate Change, Liverpool University Press.’
Adam Roberts, It’s the End of the World: But What Are We Really Afraid Of?, Elliot & Thompson.
Jo Lindsay Walton, ‘Estranged Entrepreneurs’, Foundation: the International Review of Science Fiction.
Jo Walton, ‘Books in Which No Bad Things Happen’, Tor.com.
Note: The two non-fiction nominees with similar names, Jo Walton and Jo Lindsay Walton, are two different people.
Best Novel
Tiffani Angus, Threading the Labyrinth, Unsung Stories.
Susanna Clarke, Piranesi, Bloomsbury.
M. John Harrison, The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, Gollancz.
N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became, Orbit.
Gareth L. Powell, Light of Impossible Stars, Titan Books.
Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, Orbit.
Nikhil Singh, Club Ded, Luna Press.
Adrian Tchaikovsky, The Doors of Eden, Tor.
Liz Williams, Comet Weather, Newcon Press.
Nick Wood, Water Must Fall, Newcon Press.
There was a multiple tie for fifth place this year. The committee decided that instead of abbreviating the shortlist, all nominees would be included.
British Science Fiction Association members will have from January 18 until February 5 to help choose the BSFA Awards shortlists for works published in 2020. The voting form is available to BSFA members here.
In the first round, members nominated a longlist of 46 novels, 43 works of short fiction, 19 items of nonfiction, and 27 artworks.
Once voters have determined the shortlist, BSFA members and members of the British national science fiction convention Eastercon will vote for the winners.
The full longlists are as follows:
BEST NOVEL
88 Names by Matt Ruff (HarperCollins)
Afterland by Lauren Beukes (Mulholland Books)
Analogue/Virtual by Lavanya Lakshminarayan (Hachette)
Attack Surface by Cory Doctorow (Tor)
Axiom’s End by Lindsay Ellis (St Martin’s Press)
Beneath The Rising by Premee Mohamed (Solaris)
Bridge 108 by Anne Charnock (47North)
Burn by Patrick Ness (Quill Tree)
Chosen Spirits by Samit Basu (Simon & Schuster)
Club Ded by Nikhil Singh (Luna Press)
Comet Weather by Liz Williams (NewCon)
Dark Angels Rising by Ian Whates (Newcon Press)
Earthlings by Sayaka Murata (Granta)
Fearless by Allen Stroud (Flame Tree Publishing)
Ghost Species by James Bradley (Hodder & Stoughton)
Greensmith by Aliya Whiteley (Unsung Stories)
Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir (Tor.com)
Ivory’s Story by Eugen Bacon (NewCon Press)
King of the Rising by Kacen Callender (Orbit)
Light of Impossible Stars by Gareth L. Powell (Titan)
Liquid Crystal Nightingale by Eeleen Lee (Abaddon)
Little Eyes by Samanta Schweblin (Oneworld)
Master of Poisons by Andrea Hairston (Tor.com)
Mordew by Alex Pheby (Galley Beggar)
Network Effect by Martha Wells (Tor.com)
Nophek Gloss by Essa Hansen (Orbit)
Noumenon Ultra by Marina J. Lostetter (Harper Voyager)
People of the Canyons by Kathleen O’Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear (Forge Books)
Picard: Last Best Hope by Una McCormack (Simon & Schuster)
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury)
Saints of Salvation by Peter F Hamilton (Del Rey)
Saving Lucia by Anna Vaught (Bluemoose)
Space Station Down by Ben Bova & Doug Beason (Tor Books)
Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang (Head of Zeus)
The Book of Koli by M.R. Carey (Orbit)
The Breach by M.T. Hill (Titan)
The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin (Orbit)
The Doors of Eden by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor)
The Empire of Gold by S.A. Chakraborty (Harper Voyager)
The Evidence by Christopher Priest (Gollancz)
The God Game by Danny Tobey (St. Martin’s Press)
The Last Human by Zack Jordan (Del Rey)
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit)
The New Wilderness by Diane Cook (Oneworld)
The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow (Hachette)
The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones (Saga)
The Relentless Moon by Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor)
The Silence by Don DeLillo (Picador)
The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M. John Harrison (Gollancz)
The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez (Titan)
Threading the Labyrinth by Tiffani Angus (Unsung Stories)
To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini (Tor)
Unconquerable Sun by Kate Elliott (Tor)
Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell (Sceptre)
War of the Maps by Paul McAuley (Gollancz)
Water Must Fall by Nick Wood (NewCon Press)
SHORT FICTION
A Voyage to Queensthroat by Anya Johanna DeNiro (Strange Horizons)
All I Asked For by Anne Charnock (Future Care Capital)
All Your Bases, Yada-Yada by Paula Hammond (Third_Flatiron)
Always Forever Today, Andrew Hook (Frequencies of Existence)
Burn or the Episodic Life of Sam Wells as a Super, by A.T. Greenblatt (UncannyMagazine)
Carnival by Milton Davis (Hadithi and the State of Black Speculative Fiction)
Cofiwch Aberystwyth by Val Nolan (Interzone, TTA Press)
Convergence in Chorus Architecture by Dare Segun Falowo (Dominion: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction From Africa and the African Diaspora)
Devil’s Road by Gary Gibson (NewCon)
Fairy Tales for Robots by Sofia Samatar (Made to Order)
Firewalkers by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Solaris)
Flight by Claire Wrenwood (Tor.com)
Fog and Pearls at the King’s Cross Junction by Aliya Whiteley (LondonCentric)
Georgie in the Sun by Natalia Theodoridou (UncannyMagazine)
Give Me My Wings by Eneasz Brodski (Gotta Wear Eclipse Glasses)
Grubane by Karl Drinkwater (Organic Apocalypse)
Honeybones by Georgina Bruce (TTA Press)
Ife-Iyoku, Tale of Imadeyunuagbon by Oghenechovwe Ekpeki (Dominion: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction From Africa and the African Diaspora)
In the Storm, a Fire by Andrew Dana Hudson and Jay Springett (And Lately, The Sun)
Infinite Tea in the Demara Cafe by Ida Keogh (LondonCentric)
Isn’t Your Daughter Such a Doll by Tobi Ogundiran (Shoreline of Infinity)
Ivory’s Story by Eugen M. Bacon (NewCon)
Make America Great Again by Val Nolan (Interzone, TTA Press)
Mist Songs of Delhi by Sid Jain (PodCastle)
Odette by Zen Cho (Shoreline of Infinity)
Paper Hearts by Justina Robson (NewCon)
Placed into Abyss (Mise en Abyse) by Rachel Swirsky (Tor.com)
Rat and Finch are Friends, by Innocent Chizaram Ilo (Strange Horizons)
Red_Bati by Dilman Dila (Dominion: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction From Africa and the African Diaspora)
Rocket Man by Louis Evans (Interzone, TTA Press)
Saving Simon by Allen Stroud (Forgotten Sidekicks, Kristell Ink)
Selkie Summer by Ken McLeod (NewCon)
Seven Days in Geocenter by Yu Yu (no publisher information)
Seven Dreams of a Valley by Prashanth Srivatsa (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
Sin Eater by Ian R. MacLeod (Made to Order)
Singularity by Davide Mana (Shoreline of Infinity)
Soaring, the World on their Shoulders by Cécile Cristofari (Interzone, TTA Press)
SoulShine by Koji A. Dae (Gotta Wear Eclipse Glasses)
The Abduction of Europe, Andrew Hook, in Frequencies of Existence (NewCon)
The Continuity by Philip Berry (And Lately, The Sun)
The Good Shepherd by Stewart Hotson (LondonCentric)
The Menace from Farside by Ian McDonald (Tor.com)
The Road to Woop Woop by Eugen Bacon (The Road to Woop Woop and Other Stories)
The Roman Road by Vajra Chandrasekera (Fireside)
The Thirteenth Floor by Robert Bagnall (Gotta Wear Eclipse Glasses)
The Torch by Samantha Walton (Gutter Magazine)
The Translator, at Low Tide by Vajra Chandrasekera (Clarkesworld Magazine)
The Unclean by Nuzo Onoh (Dominion: An Anthology of Black Speculative Fiction)
Time’s Own Gravity by Alexander Glass (Interzone, TTA Press)
To Set at Twilight in a Land of Reeds by Natalia Theodoridou (Clarkesworld Magazine)
Warsuit by Gary Gibson (Interzone, TTA Press)
We are Still Here by Anya Ow (Shoreline of Infinity)
We Will Become as Monsters by Benjanun Sriduangkaew (Future Fire)
Yellow and the Perception of Reality by Maureen McHugh (Tor.com)
You Brought Me the Ocean by Alex Sanchez and Julie Maroh (DC Comics)
You Will Never Be Forgotten by Mary South (Fsg Originals)
BEST ARTWORK
Art for Glasgow in 2024 WorldCon bid by Iain Clarke (Shipbuilding Over the Clyde)
Cityscape by Myriam Wares
Cover of Aliya Whiteley’s Greensmith
Cover of Dark River by Rym Kechacha
Cover of Eli Li’s A Strange and Brilliant Light by Sinjin Li
Cover of Hag: Forgotten Tales Retold
Cover of Hao Jingfang’s Vagabonds
Cover of Ian Whates’s Dark Angels Rising by Jim Burns
Cover of Judge DreddMegazine #426 by Tim Napper
Cover of Juliana Rew’s (ed.) Gotta Wear Eclipse Glasses by Keely Rew
Cover of M. John Harrison’s The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by Micaela Alcaino
Cover of Mary South’s You Will Never Be Forgotten by Jamie Keenan
Cover of Nature 22 October 2020 by Paul Klee (‘Vaccine Design’)
Cover of Neal Asher’s Lockdown Tales by Vincent Sammy
Cover of Nick Wood’s Water Must Fall by Vincent Sammy
Cover of Nikhil Singh’s Club Ded by Ruby Gloom
Cover of Patrick Ness’s Burn by Alejandro Colucci
Cover of Robot Dreams series by Fangorn (NewCon)
Cover of Sayaka Murata’s Earthlings
Cover of Shoreline of Infinity 17 by Siobhan McDonald
Cover of Shoreline of Infinity 18 by Jackie Duckworth
Cover of Shoreline of Infinity 19 by Stephen Daly
Cover of Storm Constantine and Wendy Darling’s (eds) Para Mort by Ruby
Cover of The Breach by M.T. Hill
Four Black Lives Matter murals from LA rendered in VR/AR by multiple artists
Illustration for Val Nolan’s ‘Make America Great Again’ by Richard Wagner
Ponte La Mascara! by Noe Leyva (interior art for Cortex Prime RPG rulebook)
Samraaji Skyhavens by Steven Sanders (interior art for Terra Oblivion RPG rulebook, p. 42)
Shing Yin Khor’s series of famous artworks re-created in Animal Crossing.
BEST NON-FICTION
At the Brink: Electronic Literature, Technology, and the Peripheral Imagination at the Atlantic Edge by Anne Karhio (Electronic Book Review)
Beachcombing: And other oddments by David Langford (Ansible Editions)
Big Echo Interviews ed. Robert G Penner (Big Echo)
‘Books in Which No Bad Things Happen’ by Jo Walton (Tor.com)
Diseases of the Head: Essays on the Horrors of Speculative Philosophy ed. Matt Rosen (Punctum)
‘Estranged Entrepreneurs’ by Jo Lindsay Walton (Foundation)
‘How Science Fiction Imagined the 2020s’ by Tim Maughan (OneZero)
‘How the Federation Overcame its Shipbuilding Gap for the defense of Coppelius in Star Trek: Picard‘ by Claude Berube (NavyCon)
It’s the End of the World: But what are we afraid of? by Adam Roberts (Elliott & Thompson)
‘Review of M. John Harrison’s Settling the World‘ by Martin Petto (Strange Horizons)
Science Fiction and Climate Change by Andrew Milner and JR Burgmann (Liverpool University Press)
‘The 2020 Arthur C. Clarke Award Shortlist’ by Nandini Ramachandran (Strange Horizons)
The Jonbar Point: Essays from SF Horizons by Brian Aldiss, with an introduction by Christopher Priest (Ansible Editions)
The Unstable Realities of Christopher Priest by Paul Kincaid (Gylphi)
Ties That Bind: Love in Fantasy and Science Fiction ed. Francesca T. Barbini (Luna Press)
‘Zones of Possibility: Science Fiction and the Coronavirus’ by Rob Latham (Los Angeles Review of Books)
The British Science Fiction Association presented the 2019 BSFA Awards in a video ceremony on YouTube today.
The results ordinarily would have been announced at the 2020 Eastercon, Concentric, in April, but the convention was cancelled due to the coronavirus outbreak.
The winners are:
Best Novel
Adrian Tchaikovsky – Children of Ruin (Tor)
Best Shorter Fiction
Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone – This is How You Lose the Time War (Jo Fletcher Books)
Best Non-Fiction
Farah Mendlesohn – The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein (Unbound)
Best Artwork
Chris Baker (Fangorn) – Cover for ‘Wourism and Other Stories’ by Ian Whates (Luna Press)
(1) BEST TRANSLATED BOOK AWARDS FICTION FINALISTS. One work of genre interest survived the cut to make the finals for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards, The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder (Japan, Pantheon). The complete shortlist is at the link.
The award, founded by Three Percent at the University of Rochester, comes with $10,000 in prizes from the Amazon Literary Partnership. The prize will be split evenly between the winning authors and translators. The winners will be announced on May 27.
(2) SFWA REFERENDUM. An overwhelming majority of SFWA members favor including authorship of sff/h graphic novels and comics as qualifications for membership according to the ”2020 Election Question Results” posted today on the SFWA Blog.
During the recent SFWA elections… the voting members of the organization also voted on two questions.
Question: Should SFWA allow writing of graphic novels and comics in science fiction, fantasy, horror, and related genres to be used as qualification for membership?
Yes 95.18%
No 4.82%
Question: As noted in the January 31st email to members, “active members” has a specific meaning, thus leading to our need to change our membership class name for Active members. Which name would you prefer to be called?
Full Member 47.19% General Member 11.99% Regular Member 6.89% Voting Member 33.93%
In the coming weeks, the board will be discussing the implementation of the graphic novel question and will make an announcement when the rules for admittance under the new rules are open.
(3) BSFA AWARDS STREAMING SCHEDULE. BSFA, the British Science Fiction Association, invites fans to attend their award ceremony for works published in 2019 on YouTubehere on Sunday May 17. They will be announcing the winners of Best Novel, Best Shorter Fiction, Best Non-Fiction, and Best Artwork from 7 p.m. BST.
Sometimes you’re watching a lot of Clone Wars, and sometimes your brain points out little innocuous things to you… like the fact that Jedi never seem to have luggage.
So, during the Clone Wars, Jedi are dispatched across the galaxy constantly to handle various galactic disputes, battles, and diplomatic messes. Often, they take Jedi starfighters and land them on big Republic cruisers, giving them flexibility to come and go as they need to. When they sleep, it’s typically on planets during missions, or it’s in quarters on the bigger ships. Sometimes there’s a chance to get back to the Jedi Temple and sleep in quarters there, but generally, they’re on the go all the time.
Yet you’ll never find them slinging a weekender over their shoulder, or dragging a little rolly carry-on bag behind them….
Micrashell was born as a socially responsible solution to safely allow people to interact in close proximity. Specifically designed to satisfy the needs of nightlife, live events and entertainment industries, Micrashell is a virus-shielded, easy to control, fun to wear, disinfectable, fast to deploy personal protective equipment (PPE) that allows socializing without distancing….
LA-based creative studio Production Club has designed a hazmat suit called Micrashell that caters to the decadent needs of party-goers in the age of coronavirus.https://t.co/wEtggfWPCS
BASIC NEEDS & SUIT HANDLING • “Top only” suit design allows the user to wear their normal clothes, use the toilet and engage in intercourse without being exposed to respiratory risks • Hand latch system to facilitate dressing and undressing the suit
…Postal leaders and their allies have made unusually blunt appeals for support in recent weeks, running advertisements on President Trump’s favorite Fox News programs and laying out an urgent account of how the pandemic has had a “devastating effect” on the U.S. mail service. Without a financial rescue from Congress, they have warned, an agency that normally runs without taxpayer funds could run out of cash as soon as late September, raising the specter of bankruptcy and an interruption in regular delivery for millions of Americans.
But after nearly reaching a bipartisan deal for a multibillion dollar bailout in the last coronavirus rescue package in late March, Republicans and Democrats have sharply diverged over whether to provide a lifeline. Now, the fight over the future of the Postal Service has spilled onto the campaign trail, increasingly freighted by deeply held disagreements about labor rights, the role of government versus private enterprise in providing basic services, and voting access.
(7) NIGHT AFTER NIGHT. “Travelling Text”: The London Review of Books’ Marina Warner discurses on The Arabian Nights and a book of essays about them.
Like a dance craze or a charismatic cult, The Arabian Nights seized readers’ imaginations as soon as translations first appeared – in French between 1704 and 1717, and in English from 1708. Oriental fever swept through salons and coffee-houses, the offices of broadsheet publishers and theatrical impresarios; the book fired a train of imitations, spoofs, turqueries, Oriental tales, extravaganzas. It changed tastes in dress and furniture – the sofa, the brocade dressing-gown – and even enhanced the taste of coffee. In fact its diaspora almost mimics the triumphant progress of coffee, as it metamorphosed from the thimbles of thick dark syrup drunk in Damascus and Istanbul and Cairo to today’s skinny latte, macchiato et al. Antoine Galland, the French savant and explorer who discovered and translated the earliest manuscript in Syria in the late 17th century, also published a translation of an Arabic treatise in praise of coffee, one of the first if not the first of its kind. It is his bowdlerised version of the stories that dominated their diaspora, from the ‘Arabian Nights’ Entertainments’, serialised in 445 instalments over three years in the London News, to the fantasies of the Ballets Russes, to the 1924 Thief of Baghdad, to Disney’s Aladdin and Sinbad.
In the countries of the book’s origin, the stories were considered popular trash, and excluded from the canon. In Europe, a similar sense that they had negligible status as literature came about because so many of their early enthusiasts were women. The Earl of Shaftesbury, writing in 1711, three years after the book’s first appearance in English, denounced the Desdemona tendency, claiming that the tales ‘excite’ in women ‘a passion for a mysterious Race of black Enchanters: such as of old were said to creep into Houses, and lead captive silly Women’. It’s significant, in the history of East-West relations, that Shaftesbury could only understand the alien bogeys in terms of beliefs rather closer to home than Baghdad or Cairo.
Another reason the work wasn’t taken seriously was that it eluded concepts of authorship: the stories were anonymous and composed at different periods in different places. The architecture of the frame story – Scheherazade telling stories to the sultan every night till dawn to save her life – insisted on the oral, collective, immemorial character of the tales, presenting them as a compendium of collective wisdom, or at least as literature with a thousand and one owners and users. Madeleine Dobie, in the opening essay of ‘The Arabian Nights’ in Historical Context, a collection edited by Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum, shows how Galland’s work set the trend. A brilliant linguist, antiquarian and Orientalist, Galland began the process of treating the book as something that could be altered and made to express fantasy. The most popular tales of all, the ones that have become synonymous with The Arabian Nights and have been retold in children’s books and films (‘Aladdin’, ‘Ali Baba’, ‘The Ebony Horse’, ‘Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Peri Banou’), are probably Galland’s invention, concocted of pomegranates and ebony, damask and jasmine, in tribute to the style of the original stories.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
Born May 11, 1899 — E. B. White. He’s a co-author with William Strunk Jr. of The Elements of Style. In addition, he wrote Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web. (Died 1985.) (CE)
Born May 11, 1904 – Salvador Dalí. Two Basket of Bread paintings twenty years apart – The Persistence of Memory between them – show he could be realistic if he felt like it. Having said “The difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad,” he told a group of Surrealists “The difference between me and the Surrealists is that I am a Surrealist.” He put an unfolded tesseract in Crucifixion; created in 1950 a Costume for 2045 with Christian Dior; drew, etched, sculpted; illustrated The Divine Comedy and The Arabian Nights. Memoir, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí. (Died 1989) [JH
Born May 11, 1916 — Maurice Nahum. ISFDB credits him with being editor in the Fifties of the Futuristic Science Stories, Out of This World Magazine, Supernatural Stories and several other publications. Langford at the usual source says of them that ‘All were juvenile, undated and of poor quality.’ (Died 1994.) (CE)
Born May 11, 1918 – Sheila Burnford. In The Incredible Journey a Bull Terrier, a Siamese cat, and a Labrador Retriever travel 300 miles (480 km) through the Canadian wilderness to find their humans; a Disney film was made. Later Burnford spent two summers on Baffin Island, traveling by komatik (a dog sled) and seeing the narwhals migrate. “Poor Albert Floated When He Died” was in Women of the Weird with a Gorey cover. (Died 1984) [JH]
Born May 11, 1918 – Richard Feynman. He had a gift for looking from the abstract to the concrete: hence Feynman diagrams; plunging a piece of O-ring material into ice water at a hearing on the Challenger disaster; winning a Nobel Prize and teaching undergraduates. Kept a notebook Things I Don’t Know About. A curved-space lecture handout had a bug on a sphere: “the bug and any rulers he uses are all made of the same material which expands when it is heated.” Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman reviewed by Alma Jo Williams in Science Fiction Review. (Died 1988) [JH]
Born May 11, 1920 — Denver Pyle. His first genre performance is in The Flying Saucer way back in 1950 where he was a character named Turner. Escape to Witch Mountain as Uncle Bené is his best known genre role. He’s also showed up on the Fifties Adventures of Superman, Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe, Men Into Space, Twilight Zone and his final role was apparently in How Bugs Bunny Won the West as the Narrator. (Died 1997.) (CE)
Born May 11, 1927 – Zilpha Keatley Snyder. Three fantasies won the Newbery Honor; a score of books for us, four dozen in all. Below the Root is the first of her Green Sky trilogy; after the third, she worked closely with a programmer and a graphic artist on a Below the Root computer game. Cover for Song of the Gargoyle by Jody Lee, who was Graphic Artist Guest of Honor when I was Fan GoH at Lunacon XLIV. (Died 2014) [JH]
Born May 11, 1936 — Gordon Benson Jr. Publisher and bibliographer who released the first of his many SF bibliographies around the early Eighties. Writers such as Anderson, Lieber and Wellman were covered. Early bibliographies written solo were revised for the Galactic Central Bibliographies for the Avid Reader series, are listed jointly with Phil Stephensen-Payne as later ones. (Died 1996.) (CE)
Born May 11, 1952 — Frances Fisher, 67. Angie on Strange Luck and a recurring role as Eva Thorne on Eureka. Have I mentioned how I love the latter series? Well I do! She’s also shown up on Medium, X-Files, Outer Limits, Resurrection, The Expanse and has some role in the forthcoming Watchmen series. (CE)
(9) COMICS SECTION.
Free Range finds a UFO that may be unidentified but does not look unfamiliar.
…Peter Costanzo, specialist at Doyle Auctions, said: ‘Part of the charm of this early period is that Potter apparently did not intend to publish books for children.
‘She simply sought a simple and affectionate way to communicate with them, and in combining an early mastery of the drawing of animals and a playful love of verse, Potter created a style all her own.
‘This was truly an insightful, important and whimsical group, one of the finest collections of early Beatrix Potter artwork and it represented a rare opportunity for collectors and institutions alike.’
…Her most famous book, The Tale of Petter Rabbit (1901), has been translated into 36 languages and sold 45 million copies.
Modern humans began to edge out the Neanderthals in Europe earlier than previously thought, a new study shows.
Tests on remains from a cave in northern Bulgaria suggest Homo sapiens was there as early as 46,000 years ago.
This is up to 2,000 years older than evidence from Italy and the UK.
Around this time, Europe was populated by sparse groups of Neanderthals – a distinct type of human that vanished shortly after modern humans appeared on the scene.
There’s considerable debate about the length of time that modern humans overlapped with Neanderthals in Europe and other parts of Eurasia.
This has implications for the nature of contact between the two groups – and perhaps clues to why Neanderthals went extinct.
(14) KEEPS ON TICKING. Quanta Magazine’s “Arrows of Time” infographic tracks the development of human ideas about the concept of time.
The human mind has long grappled with the elusive nature of time: what it is, how to record it, how it regulates life, and whether it exists as a fundamental building block of the universe. This timeline traces our evolving understanding of time through a history of observations in CULTURE, PHYSICS, TIMEKEEPING and BIOLOGY.
It begins with —
c. 50,000 BCE
Australia’s first inhabitants, the ancestors of today’s aboriginal peoples, are believed to have embraced a timeless view of nature, in which the present and past are intimately connected. The spirits of long-dead ancestors, for example, were believed to inhabit the living. These spirits reflected a long-ago golden age sometimes known as the Dreamtime.
Officially named C/2020 F8 (SWAN), the comet, which is technically an “outgassing interplanetary iceberg,” will be closest to Earth on May 13, and nearest to the sun May 27, according to NASA. (The warmth of the sun causes comets to vaporize.) Right now, it’s only visible to individuals in the Southern hemisphere, including those in Australia, Chile, and New Zealand, but if it continues to brighten along its journey, those of us in the Northern hemisphere could see it soon. NASA reports that people might be able to see it with the naked eye in June. Space.com notes the best times to see it will be in the West-Northwest sky after sunset, and in the East-Northeast sky before sunrise.
However, just because it’s visible now, doesn’t mean it will stay that way….
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, John Hertz, JJ, Chip Hitchcock, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, John King Tarpinian, Michael Toman, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew.]
British Science
Fiction Association members have until January 31 to help choose the BSFA
Awards shortlists for works published in 2019. The voting form is available to BSFA members here.
In the first round, members
nominated a longlist of
46 novels, 43 works of short fiction, 19 items of nonfiction, and 27 artworks.
Once voters have determined the shortlist, BSFA members and
members of the British national science fiction convention Eastercon will vote
for the winners.
The
full longlists are as follows:
Best Novel
Margaret
Atwood – The Testaments (Chatto & Windus)
Jesse
Ball – The Divers’ Game (Ecco Press)
Laura
Beatty – Lost Property (Atlantic Books)
Chris
Beckett – Beneath the World, A Sea (Corvus)
Season
Butler – Cygnet (Dialogue Books)
Zen
Cho – The True Queen (Ace Books)
Genevieve
Cogman – The Secret Chapter (Pan)
Aliette
de Bodard – The House of Sundering Flames (Gollancz)
W.
Michael Gear and Kathleen O’Neal Gear – Star Path (Forge)
Becky
Chambers – To Be Taught, If Fortunate (Hodder & Stoughton)
Ted
Chiang – Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom (Exhalation, Knopf)
David
L Clements – Sailors of the Second Sun (Analog July/August issue)
Vida
Cruz – In the Shadow of the Typhoon, Humans and Mahiwaga Cooperate for Survival
(An Invite to Eternity, ed. Gary Budden & Marian Womack, Calque Press)
Mill
& Jones – Exile’s Letter in _Gross Ideals: Tales of Tomorrow’s
Architecture_ anthology (The Architecture Foundation) – https://tinyurl.com/ydnej332
SinJin
Li Studio – Artwork for ‘Productive Futures’ conference (London Science Fiction
Research Community) – https://tinyurl.com/yffba44z
SinJin
Li Studio – Cover for ‘Science Fiction and Catholicism: The Rise and Fall of
the Robot Papacy’ by Jim Clarke (Gylphi) – https://tinyurl.com/yzxygob7
Charlotte
Stroomer – Cover for ‘The Rosewater Redemption’ by Tade Thompson (Orbit) – https://tinyurl.com/yzhlscol
In last week’s poll (“Which of
These Are the Top 5 Awards in SFF?”) I invited File 770 readers to tell me which of the field’s awards mean the
most to them. Ninety-two participants here and on Facebook picked up to six from
a list of 31 suggested awards (write-ins were also accepted).
The Hugo and Nebula Awards proved near-unanimous choices. The World
Fantasy Awards and Locus Awards were named by almost three-quarters of the
voters. And BSFA Awards, James Tiptree Jr. Award, and Arthur C. Clarke Award were
the next three awards with the greatest support.
Here for your entertainment is the complete list. (Apologies for a little formatting problem I was unable to overcome.)
Aliette de Bodard – On
motherhood and erasure: people-shaped holes, hollow characters and the illusion
of impossible adventures (Intellectus Speculativus
blog)
Best Artwork
Likhain – In the Vanishers’
Palace: Dragon I and II (Inprnt)
Nina
Allan – The Gift of Angels: an
Introduction (Clarkesworld)
Malcolm
Devlin – The Purpose of the Dodo is to be Extinct (Interzone #275)
Hal
Duncan – The Land of Somewhere Safe
(NewCon Press)
Ian
McDonald – Time Was (Tor.com)
Martha
Wells – Exit Strategy (Tor.com)
Liz
Williams – Phosphorus (NewCon Press)
Marian
Womack – Kingfisher (Lost Objects, Luna Press)
Best
Non-Fiction
Nina
Allan – Time Pieces column 2018
articles (Interzone)
Ruth
EJ Booth – Noise and Sparks column
2018 articles (Shoreline of Infinity)
Liz
Bourke – Sleeps With Monsters column
2018 articles (Tor.com)
Aliette
de Bodard – On motherhood and erasure: people-shaped holes, hollow characters
and the illusion of impossible adventures (Intellectus
Speculativus blog)
Adam
Roberts – Publishing the Science Fiction
Canon: The Case of Scientific Romance (Cambridge University Press)
Best
Artwork
Ben
Baldwin – wraparound cover for ‘Strange Tales’ slipcase set (NewCon Press)
Joey
Hi-Fi – cover for ‘Paris Adrift’ by EJ Swift (Solaris)
Sarah
Anne Langton – cover for ‘Unholy Land’ by Lavie Tidhar (Tachyon Publications)
Sing
Yun Lee and Morris Wild – artwork for ‘Sublime Cognition’ conference (London
Science Fiction Research Community)
Likhain
– In the Vanishers’ Palace: Dragon I and II (Inprnt)
Bede
Rogerson – cover for ‘Concrete Faery’ by Elizabeth Priest (Luna Press)
Del
Samatar – artwork for ‘Monster Portraits’ by Sofia and Del Samatar (Rose Metal
Press)
Charlotte
Stroomer – cover for ‘Rosewater’ by Tade Thompson (Orbit)