2019 Inky Awards

The 2019 Inky Award winners were announced September 4. The award recognizes achievement in young adult literature – the Gold Inky given for Australian titles, and the Silver Inky for international titles.

The Inky Awards are selected by teenagers, with the shortlist created by a team of teen Inky Awards judges, and the winners voted on by Australian teenagers aged 12-19.

Gold Inky Award – Australian title

  • Whisper by Lynette Noni

Silver Inky Award – International title

  • The Cruel Prince by Holly Black

[Via Locus Online.]

2019 Inky Awards Shortlists

The 2019 Inky Awards shortlists were announced July 19 – the Gold Inky for Australian titles, and the Silver Inky for international titles. The award recognizes achievement in young adult literature, with nominees and winners selected by voters under the age of 20. Some of these titles are of genre interest.

These titles were selected from a longlist by a panel of young readers aged between 12 and 20 years.

Gold Inky Award

  • Hive by A. J. Betts
  • A Thousand Perfect Notes by C.G. Drews
  • Amelia Westlake by Erin Gough
  • Whisper by Lynette Noni
  • After the Lights Go Out by Lili Wilkinson

Silver Inky Award

  • The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo
  • The Cruel Prince by Holly Black
  • The Belles by Dhonielle Clayton
  • The Astonishing Colour of After by Emily X.R. Pan
  • Scythe by Neal Shusterman

[Via Locus Online.]

2019 Inky Awards Longlists

The 2019 Inky Awards longlists were announced March 4 – the Gold Inky for Australian titles, and the Silver Inky for international titles. The award recognizes achievement in young adult literature, with nominees and winners selected by voters under the age of 20.

Works of genre interest include Hive by A.J. Betts, Ice Wolves by Amie Kaufman, Lifel1k3 by Jay Kristoff, Whisper by Lynette Noni, Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi, The Cruel Prince by Holly Black, The Belles by Dhonielle Clayton, Between the Blade and the Heart by Amanda Hocking, Scythe by Neal Shusterman, and Navigating the Stars by Maria V. Snyder

Gold Inky Award – Australian Titles

Silver Inky Award – International Titles

2018 Inky Awards

The 2018 Inky Award winners were announced October 2. The award recognizes achievement in young adult literature – the Gold Inky given for Australian titles, and the Silver Inky for international titles.

The Inky Awards are selected by teenagers, with the shortlist created by a team of teen Inky Awards judges, and the winners voted on by Australian teenagers aged 12-19.

Gold Inky Award – Australian title

  • Paper Cranes Don’t Fly by Peter Vu

Silver Inky Award – International title

  • The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

2018 Inky Awards Shortlists

The 2018 Inky Awards shortlists were announced August 10 – the Gold Inky for Australian titles, and the Silver Inky for international titles. The award recognizes achievement in young adult literature, with nominees and winners selected by voters under the age of 20. Some of these titles are of genre interest.

The titles were selected by a panel of past Inky Awards judges, the Dog’s Advisory Board and Inside a Dog alumni, all young readers aged between 12 and 20 years.

Gold Inky Award – Australian titles

  • Begin, End, Begin: A #LoveOzYA Anthology edited by Danielle Binks
  • Take Three Girls by Cath Crowley, Simmone Howell & Fiona Wood
  • Beautiful Mess by Claire Christian
  • In the Dark Spaces by Cally Black
  • Paper Cranes Don’t Fly by Peter Vu

Silver Inky Award – International titles

  • Still Life with Tornado by A.S. King
  • The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee
  • Warcross by Marie Lu
  • Release by Patrick Ness
  • The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

Voting is open for the 2018 Inky Awards from August 10 – September 16.

Winners will be announced October 2 at the State Library Victoria.

2018 Inky Awards Longlists

The 2018 Inky Awards longlists were announced March 1 – the Gold Inky for Australian titles, and the Silver Inky for international titles. The award recognizes achievement in young adult literature, with nominees and winners selected by voters under the age of 20. Some of these titles are of genre interest.

The titles were selected by a panel of past Inky Awards judges, the Dog’s Advisory Board and Inside a Dog alumni, all young readers aged between 12 and 20 years.

Gold Inky Award – Australian titles

  • Begin, End, Begin: A #LoveOzYA Anthology edited by Danielle Binks
  • In the Dark Spaces by Cally Black
  • Take Three Girls by Cath Crowley, Simmone Howell & Fiona Wood
  • Beautiful Mess by Claire Christian
  • Ida by Alison Evans
  • Wreck by Fleur Ferris
  • A Shadow’s Breath by Nicole Hayes
  • Remind Me How This Ends by Gabrielle Tozer
  • Paper Cranes Don’t Fly by Peter Vu
  • Ballad for a Mad Girl by Vikki Wakefield

Silver Inky Award – International titles

  • The Upside of Unrequited by Becky Albertalli
  • Turtles All The Way Down by John Green
  • The Loneliest Girl in the Universe by Lauren James
  • Still Life with Tornado by A.S. King
  • The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee
  • Genuine Fraud by E. Lockhart
  • Warcross by Marie Lu
  • One of Us is Lying by Karen M. McManus
  • Release by Patrick Ness
  • The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

Pixel Scroll 10/2/17 The World Will Always Welcome Pixels As Time Scrolls By

(1) HERALDRY. The former astronaut, now Governor General of Canada Her Excellency the Right Honourable Julie Payette, has an official Coat of Arms.

Arms

A symbol of exploration and liberty, an open wing embodies our desire to reach higher and expand our horizons. As with birds protecting their young, the wing also conveys the strength and safety of family ties. Moreover, it represents Ms. Payette’s career as an aviator and astronaut. The Royal Crown symbolizes the viceregal office and service to all Canadians.

The astronaut’s helmet represents the never-ending quest for knowledge, a quest that extends beyond the frontiers of the known world.

(2) FEATHERED FRIGHT. Chloe N. Clark begins a new series of posts for Nerds of a Feather with “HORROR 101: An Introduction to Fear”.

Welcome to Horror 101. This will be an ongoing series of essays about the horror genre: from analysis about the elements of horror to using monster theory to in-depth looks at individual works of horror….

So as a writer and reader I loved what horror could give me. As a teacher and scholar, though, I wanted to look under the hood. I became interested in exploring how horror operates on a level of mechanics as well as how it operates as a means of communicating ideas. What was the rhetorical value of horror? After studying monster theory, a fairly new form of critical study that looks into monsters and horror from the analytical perspective, I began to think even more deeply about the value of monsters and using them both in writing and in teaching. I’m lucky to teach at a university that allows me to shape my composition courses and this allowed me to create a class that teaches multimodal composition and communication through the theme of Monsters. Monsters are a fun way to get students thinking about much deeper issues. By exploring the ideas of monstrosity, we’re able to look at acts of othering and monstering that permeate history: racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, and the list goes on. My students began to pick up on these ideas and tropes in various media they consumed. They realized it wasn’t just a “genre” thing as they could point to the language of othering and monstering in the speeches of politicians.

(3) INKY AWARDS. The winners of the 2017 Inky Awards were announced October 2. The award recognizes achievement in young adult literature, with nominees and winners selected by voters under the age of 20. Some of the shortlisted titles were of genre interest, though it’d be a stretch to say that about either winner.

The Gold Inky for Australian titles went to Words in Deep Blue, and the Silver Inky for international titles to Radio Silence..

(4) WHAT A LOAD OF BOVRIL. The Royal Albert Hall website, in a 2016 post, claimed to have hosted the first sff convention in 1891 — “5-10 March 1891: Bovril and the first ever Sci-Fi convention, at the Royal Albert Hall”. It was a fancy-dress ball for charity, that’s all.

Widely regarded as the first ever sci-fi convention, the ‘The Coming Race’ and ‘Vril-Ya’ Bazaar and Fete was held at the Royal Albert Hall on 5-10 March 1891.

This costumed fund-raiser was themed on a 1871 science fiction novel, The Coming Race by Baron Edward Bulwer-Lytton, in which the Earth is threatened by the ‘Vril-ya’. This superior and winged master race find the source of their power in ‘Vril’ – a latent source of energy akin to electricity. The Coming Race was a pioneering publication of the sci-fi genre, and extremely popular in popular culture in the 1890s.

In the model of modern comic-cons, visitors were encouraged to come in fancy dress, filling the Hall with various ‘Coming Race’ characters and generally ‘exotically’ costumed fans of the book; many donned wings. The character of Princess Zee, from the novel, was played by a young lady wearing a black satin dress and silver flower tiara that glowed with electric lights.

With Vril-ya architecture having been described as similar to that of ancient Egypt, Sumeria and India, the Hall was bedecked in flowers, palm leaves and ferns. A grand ‘Pillar of the Vril-ya’ was erected in the arena, modeled on Cleopatra’s Needle. Vril-themed magic shows, a fortune telling dog, musical entertainment and grand feasts were held in the auditorium, while winged Vril-ya mannequins flew above….

(5) DIEHL OBIT. The founding editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Digby Diehl, died September 26. With many publishing credits as a reviewer, he also wrote celebrity bios and a history of EC Horror Comics series Tales from the Crypt. He was 76.

(6) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • October 2, 1959The Twilight Zone premiered.
  • October 2, 1976 Ark II aired “The Robot.”

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOYS

  • Born October 2, 1895 – Bud Abbott, whose resume includes Abbott and Costello Go To Mars (1953).
  • Born October 2, 1906 – Willy Ley

(8) COMICS SECTION.

This is sick humor I tell you, John King Tarpinian — today’s Off the Mark.

(9) PRAISE FOR BARDUGO. NPR’s Jason Sheehan approves of Leigh Bardugo’s The Language of Thorns: “‘The Language Of Thorns’ Will Ensnare You With Dark Magic”.

Good fairy tales balance sweetness and nightmares. They are candy apples with razorblades inside; kisses touched with poison. Bad ones are nothing but sweet. They coddle and muffle and take all the sharp, dangerous edges off of the dirty business of learning important lessons in a world that’s rarely as nice as we want it to be. The bad ones sing Careful what you wish for and Sometimes pretty isn’t as important as smart with choruses of cute mice and bluebirds. But the good ones don’t end before there’s blood on the knife.

The good ones understand that scars are the best teachers.

(10) CURRENT EVENTS. NPR considers, “Winter Is Coming. What If Roads And Runways Could De-Ice Themselves?”.

Starting in 2002 and working with the Nebraska Department of Transportation, he ran a five-year test on a 150-foot-long bridge near Lincoln, Neb. He says a 208-volt current running through electrodes kept the bridge free of ice during 15 major snowstorms at the “amazingly low” operating cost of about $250 per storm.

The conductive concrete involves adding steel fiber and carbon to the concrete mix, he says. While regular concrete costs $120 per cubic yard, the conductive concrete costs $350-$400 per cubic yard. But in the long term, Tuan says the conductive concrete means fewer de-icing chemicals in the ecosystem, and concrete that lasts longer and costs less to maintain.

(11) FAST FORENSICS. A practictioner discusses the “The computers being trained to beat you in an argument”

It has long been the case that machines can beat us in games of strategy like chess.

And we have come to accept that artificial intelligence is best at analysing huge amounts of data – sifting through the supermarket receipts of millions of shoppers to work out who might be tempted by some vouchers for washing powder.

But what if AI were able to handle the most human of tasks – navigating the minefield of subtle nuance, rhetoric and even emotions to take us on in an argument?

It is a possibility that could help humans make better decisions and one which growing numbers of researchers are working on.

The next thing they’ll need after that is a computer that knows what to do when humans ignore their superior arguments – Facebook should give them lots of practice.

(12) STILL NEWS TO THEM. Geek Girl Con managed to produce a bubble in time – Galactic Journey filled it — “[Oct. 2, 1962] Women of Washington, Unite!  (The Seventh Geek Girl Con in Seattle)”.

Ah, Geek Girl Con.  Every year, Seattle’s clarion call of intellectual feminine fandom calls us to attend Washington’s signature science fiction/fantasy event.  It is an intimate (but growing) gathering of sff devotees with a fascination for things both creative and technical.

This year, as with last year, the Journey was invited to speak on the last 12 months in fandom, and boy did we have a lot to relate.  From coverage of Marvel Comics’ slew of new superheroes to a report on this year’s Hugo winners, and with a special piece on the woman pioneers of space exploration, our four panelists ensured that our several dozen attendees left educated and excited.

(13) CUFF INFO. Kent Pollard tells his plans for moving the Canadian Unity Fan Fund history to a new home.

The cometedust.ca website hasn’t been used for anything else in half a decade, and the hosting has become pointless for me. rather than have it drop off the net completely, I’m going to transition the pages into a blogger account. the domain name itself is sufficiently inexpensive that I will retain it and point it that blog when I can (The Canadian Internet Registration Authority being privacy-aware requires all .ca domains to have private whois information, which must be manually removed before Google will accept a transfer of the name control.) The existing site will function for an un-defined period. Eventually (I hope), cuff.cometdust.ca will point to cufffanfundery.blogspot.ca. for the moment, users can go directly to that blog if they are seeking old info about the Canadian Unity Fan Fund.

(14) DIVING AGAIN. Kristine Kathryn Rusch told fans today that WMG just published the latest Diving novel, The Runabout. “Also, I finished the next novel in the series. That’ll appear next year, but bits and pieces of it (as well as a standalone novella) will start appearing in Asimov’s in 2018.”

The Runabout

A Diving Novel

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

A graveyard of spaceships, abandoned by the mysterious Fleet thousands of years earlier. Boss calls it “the Boneyard.” She needs the ships inside to expand her work for Lost Souls Corporation. Yash Zarlengo thinks the Boneyard will help her discover if the Fleet still exists.

Boss and Yash, while exploring the Boneyard, discover a small ship with a powerful and dangerous problem: the ship’s active anacapa drive.

To escape the Boneyard, Boss must deal with the drive. Which means she’ll have to dive the ship on limited time and under extremely dangerous conditions. And she can’t go alone.

(15) FISHLIPS. Is this a threat or a promise? The Verge reports “Big Mouth Billy Bass will soon work with Amazon Alexa”.

The tacky-but-classic Big Mouth Billy Bass will soon be compatible with Amazon’s Alexa assistant, according to Business Insider. This means the fish will be able to pair over Bluetooth and then lip sync and dance when music plays. I’m sure this is just what you all wanted: a connected, dancing silicon fish.

In case you didn’t know —

The Big Mouth Billy Bass is a classic of novelty shops and Wal-Marts, designed to sing “Take Me To The River” or “Don’t Worry Be Happy” when its motion sensor is activated. There’s no built-in microphone, so presumably Billy is running off some off-camera offboard microphone.

 

[Thanks to Chip Hitchcock, John King Tarpinian, James Davis Nicoll, Andrew Porter, and Michael J. Walsh for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jack Lint.]

Pixel Scroll 8/24/17 Is The Grisly Pixel Scrolling?

(1) THE GREAT UNREAD. James Davis Nicoll fesses up – now you can, too: “Twenty Core Speculative Fiction Works It May Surprise You To Learn I Have Not Yet Read Every True SF Fan Should Have On Their Shelves”. Who knew there were 20 sff books altogether than he hadn’t read, much less ones not by Castalia House authors? Here are a few examples:

  • Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta by Doris Lessing
  • The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu
  • England Swings SF edited by Judith Merril

(2) MOVING DAY. Meanwhile, at another of his platforms, James Davis Nicoll has gone silent while he works on moving that website.

Why was my site down? Because it turns out the soft-on-Nazis fuckwits running DreamHost thought it would be a good idea to host the Daily Stormer. My site will be moving. Until it has been moved, I won’t be updating it; I will go back to posting reviews on DW.

(3) GENRE TENSIONS. Here’s what Teleread’s Paul St. John Mackintosh deemed to be the takeaway from an all-star panel at Helsinki: “Worldcon 75: Horror and the World Fantasy Award”.

[Stephen] Jones pointed to the origins of the WFA Awards and their parent convention, the World Fantasy Convention, during the horror boom of the mid-1970s. The first WFC, held in Providence, RI in 1975, had as its theme “The Lovecraft Circle,” and that Lovecraftian association has persisted ever since, despite the name on the billboard. Jones attributed the perceived bias towards horror at fantasy and other conventions to the view that “the horror guys the people who go to all the fun conventions.” [Ellen] Datlow, conversely, reported that “from the horror people’s point of view, in the past ten years, they always feel there’s a bias towards fantasy.” Her analysis of actual awards and nominations showed no bias either way, and she saw this as “all perception,” depending on which end of the imaginative literature spectrum it’s seen from. [John] Clute described the situation as “pretty deeply confusing altogether,” given that the WFC externally was intended as a fantasy convention, and the final result has become “terminologically inexact,” though Jones pointed out that “the community itself has changed and mutated, as has the genre.”

(4) VOICE OF EXPERIENCE. Simon Owens reveals “What’s behind the meteoric rise of science fiction podcasts?” – and these are just the drama podcasts, never mind all the nonfiction ones…

According to Valenti, a serialized fiction podcast is an inexpensive way for aspiring filmmakers to gain recognition in the industry. “The reason you’re seeing all these shows crop up is because it’s so much less expensive to experiment and prove yourself as a storyteller in this medium, more than any other,” he said. It used to be that Hollywood directors got their foot in the door with short, independent films, but even those kinds of projects require significant resources. “With podcasts, you don’t have to spend any money on locations,” he explained. “You don’t have to spend any money on cameras, hardware, or hiring a cinematographer. And even if you have the footage, and you had a decent camera, which you probably had to rent because they cost thousands of dollars a day, you’re getting someone to color grade everything after it’s over.” Podcasts rarely require anything more than decent mics, actors, and audio mixing technology. And speaking of actors, your average voiceover performer costs much less to hire than a SAG member.

(5) INKY AWARDS. The shortlists for the 2017 Inky Awards were announced August 15 – the Gold Inky for Australia titles, and the Silver Inky for international titles. The award recognises achievement in young adult literature, with nominees and winners selected by voters under the age of 20. Some of these titles are of genre interest. Voting is currently open for the winners. [H/T Earl Grey Editing Services.]

(6) MORE WORLDCON WRITEUPS. The conreports keep on coming.

Kelly Robson: “What it’s like to lose a Hugo Award”

The Campbell was the second-to-last award, and sure, I was disappointed not to win, but not horribly. On a scale of one to ten, it was about a three at the time and now is zero. I’m very happy for Ada. She deserves every success.

However, I did feel foolish for thinking I could win, which was painful but mostly dispersed by morning. Being a finalist is wonderful. Winning would have been amazing, but it does come with a certain amount of pressure. So maybe — just maybe — being a finalist is the best of both worlds. And that lovely pin in the first picture is mine forever.

Ian Sales: “Kiitos, Helsinki”

My second panel of the con was at noon on the Saturday, Mighty space fleets of war. When I’d registered at the con, I’d discovered I was moderating the panel, which I hadn’t known. I checked back over the emails I’d been sent by the con’s programming team. Oops. I was the moderator. The other two panellists were Jack Campbell and Chris Gerrib. As we took our seats on the stage, Mary Robinette Kowal was gathering her stuff from the previous panel. I jokingly asked if she wanted to join our panel. And then asked if she’d moderate it. She said she was happy to moderate if we wanted her to, but we decided to muddle through ourselves. The panel went quite well, I thought. We got a bit of disagreement going – well, me versus the other two, both of whom admitted to having been USN in the past. I got a wave of applause for a crack about Brexit, and we managed to stay on topic – realistic space combat – for the entire time. I’d prepared a bunch of notes, but by fifteen minutes in, I’d used up all my points. In future, I’ll take in paper and pencil so I can jot stuff down as other members of the panel speak.

Marzie: “The Long Overdue WorldCon Recap!”

This was the first WorldCon I’ve attended and while I had voted in previous Hugo Awards, and attended other Cons (for instance NYCC) I was kind of taken aback by how non-commercial WorldCon is. A case is point is that there are no publishers hawking books at WorldCon, which, on the one hand is great because you don’t get tempted to buy a bunch of stuff and spend a fortune shipping it home and on the other hand is bad because if you’ve travelled a long way with a carry-on only bag, you’re probably packing clothes, not books for your favorite author to sign. Some authors take it all in stride, bringing their own small promotional items they can sign (Fran Wilde, Carrie Vaughn) or will happily sign anything that you set in front of them (Max Gladstone kindly signed a WorldCon postcard for my friend and fellow blogger Alex, who couldn’t come to WorldCon because of Fiscal Realities of New Home vs. Sincere Desire. So other than some interesting panels (climate change in science fiction and fantasy, readings by Amal El-Mohtar and Annalee Newitz, while I can say that pigeonholing fantasy genres is not for me!) the author signings and beloved kaffeeklatsches, the latter limited to ten people, are the definitely the most exciting thing about WorldCon.

Ian Moore: “Helsinki Worldcon write-up Part 1: estrangement, We3, crowds”

Tomi Huttunen introduced the concept of Estrangement, which derives from Russian art theorist Viktor Shklovsky who discussed the topic (Ostrananie) in an article in 1917. Huttunen and others on the academic track offered varying definitions of the concept, noting that different people in the past had come at this in a different way. For all that he was someone primarily associated with the avant-garde, Shklovsky’s own definition appeared to imply that all art involved a process of estrangement because of the difference between an actual thing and its artistic representation. Brecht later attempted his own definition, which appeared to be more about uncanny valley or the German concept of the unheimlich, which I found interesting as for all his ground-breaking approach to theatre Brecht had not particularly involved himself in work that strayed into non-realistic territory.

“Helsinki Worldcon write-up Part 2: Saunas, Robert Silverberg & Tanith Lee #Worldcon75”

On Thursday I did not quite get up in time to make it from where I was staying to the convention centre in time for the presentation on Tove Jansson’s illustrations for The Hobbit (which apparently appear only in Scandinavian editions of the book for Tolkien-estate reasons). I did make it to a panel on Bland Protagonists. One of the panelists was Robert Silverberg, a star of Worldcon and a living link to the heroic age of Science Fiction. He is a great raconteur and such an entertaining panelist that I wonder whether people do not want to appear on panels with him for fear of being overshadowed.

“Helsinki Worldcon write-up Part 3: Moomins, Clipping #Worldcon75”

After the Tanith Lee discussion there were a lot of potentially interesting things happening but we felt that we had to go to a session on the Moomins (entitled Moomins!). As you know, these are character that appeared in books written and illustrated by Tove Jansson of Finland. They started life in books and then progressed to comics and subsequently to a succession of animated TV series. If you’ve never heard of them, the Moomins are vaguely hippopotamus shaped creatures that live in a house in Moominvalley and have a variety of strange friends and adopted family members. Moomin stories are pretty cute but also deal with subjects a bit darker and more existential than is normally expected in children’s books.

(7) ROBOCRIMEVICTIM. It is a lawless country out there: “Popular Robots are Dangerously Easy to Hack, Cybersecurity Firm Says”.

The Seattle-based cybersecurity firm found major security flaws in industrial models sold by Universal Robots, a division of U.S. technology company Teradyne Inc. It also cited issues with consumer robots Pepper and NAO, which are manufactured by Japan’s Softbank Group Corp., and the Alpha 1 and Alpha 2 made by China-based UBTech Robotics.

These vulnerabilities could allow the robots to be turned into surveillance devices, surreptitiously spying on their owners, or let them to be hijacked and used to physically harm people or damage property, the researchers wrote in a report released Tuesday.

(8) TODAY’S DAY

Pluto Demoted Day

Many of us are fascinated by outer space and its many mysteries. Our own solar system went through a change in classification on 2006, when Pluto was demoted from a planet to a dwarf planet. Pluto Demoted Day now takes place every year to mark that very occasion. While sad for fans of the former ninth planet of the solar system, Pluto Demoted Day is an important day for our scientific history and is important to remember.

(9) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • August 24, 1966 Fantastic Voyage premiered theatrically on this day.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY

  • Born August 24, 1951 – Orson Scott Card

(11) COMIC SECTION. Finnish comic  Fingerpori has a joke about the George R.R. Martin signing at W75. Tehri says it translates something like this (with the third frame being a sight gag):

First panel: (The guy’s name is Heimo Vesa) “What’s going on?”

“George R.R. Martin’s signing queue.”

Middle panel: “Well, I must experience this”.

(As in once in a lifetime thing.)

And Mike Kennedy says today’s Dilbert Classic confirms that publishers exist in order to stomp on potential author’s dreams.

(12) SHE HAS A LITTLE LIST. Kayleigh Donaldson asks “Did This Book Buy Its Way Onto The New York Times Bestseller List?” at Pajiba.

Nowadays, you can make the bestseller list with about 5,000 sales. That’s not the heights of publishing’s heyday but it’s still harder to get than you’d think. Some publishers spend thousands of dollars on advertising and blogger outreach to get that number. Everyone’s looking for the next big thing and that costs a lot of cash. For the past 25 weeks, that big book in the YA world has been The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, a searing politically charged drama about a young black girl who sees a police officer kill her friend, and the fallout it causes in her community. Through publisher buzz and exceedingly strong word of mouth, the novel has stormed to the forefront of the YA world and found thousands of fans, with a film on the way. Knocking that from the top of the NYT YA list would be a major deal, and this week it’s going to happen. But something’s not right.

Handbook For Mortals by Lani Sarem is the debut novel from the publishing arm of website GeekNation. The site announced this news only last week, through a press release that can be read on places like The Hollywood Reporter, not a site known for extensive YA coverage. Sarem has an IMDb page with some very minor acting roles, several of which are uncredited, but details on the book are scanter to find. Googling it leads to several other books with the same title, but most of the coverage for it is press release based. There’s little real excitement or details on it coming from the YA blogging world, which is a mighty community who are not quiet about the things they’re passionate about (believe me, first hand experience here).

YA writer and publisher Phil Stamper raised the alarm bells on this novel’s sudden success through a series of tweets, noting GeekNation’s own low traffic, the inability to even buy it on Amazon or Barnes & Noble, and its out-of-nowhere relevance…

(13) AMAZONIAN BOGOSITY. While reporters are dissecting the bestseller list, Camestros Felapton turns his attention to Amazon and the subject of “Spotting Fakery?”

One thing new to me from those articles was this site: http://fakespot.com/about It claims to be a site that will analyse reviews on sites like Amazon and Yelp and then rate the reviews in terms of how “fake” they seem to be. The mechanism looks at reviewers and review content and looks for relations with other reviews, and also rates reviewers who only ever give positive reviews lower. Now, I don’t know if their methods are sound or reliable, so take the rest of this with a pinch of salt for the time being.

Time to plug some things into their machine but what! Steve J No-Relation Wright has very bravely volunteered to start reading Vox Day’s epic fantasy book because it was available for $0 ( https://stevejwright.wordpress.com/2017/08/23/a-throne-of-bones-by-vox-day-preamble-on-managing-expectations/ ) and so why not see what Fakespot has to say about “Throne of Bones” http://fakespot.com/product/a-throne-of-bones-arts-of-dark-and-light

(14) WORLD DOESN’T END, FILM AT ELEVEN. Kristine Kathryn Rusch got a column out of the eclipse – “Eclipse Expectations”.

The idea for the post? Much of what occurred around the eclipse in my small town happens in publishing all the time. Let me lay out my thinking.

First, what happened in Lincoln City this weekend:

Damn near nothing. Yeah, I was surprised. Yeah, we all were surprised.

Because for the past 18 months, all we heard about the eclipse was what a mini-disaster it would be for our small town. We expected 100,000 visitors minimum. Hotel rooms were booked more than a year in advance—all of them. Which, the planners told us, meant that we would have at least that many people camping roadside as well.

The airlines had to add extra flights into Portland (the nearest major airport). One million additional people were flooding into Oregon for the five days around the eclipse. Rental cars were booked months in advance. (One woman found an available car for Thursday only and the rental car company had slapped a one-day rate on the car of $850. Yeah, no.)

The state, local, and regional governments were planning for disaster. We were warned that electricity might go down, especially if the temperature in the valley (away from us, but near the big power grids) soared over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.7 Celsius). Our internet connection would probably go down, they said. (Great, we said. Our business is on the internet. Phooey!) Our cell phones would definitely go down.

The state called out the National Guard, expecting all the trouble you get when you cram too many people in a small space. The hospitals staffed up. We were told that traffic would be in gridlock for four days, so plan travel accordingly. Dean and I own three retail stores in the area, so we spent weeks discussing scheduling—who could walk to work, who couldn’t, who might stay overnight if need be. Right now, as I write this, Dean is working our new bookstore, because the bookstore employees live 6 miles away, and couldn’t walk if there was gridlock. The schedule was set in stone; no gridlock, but Dean was scheduled, not the usual employee, so Dean is guarding the fort (so to speak).

(15) MAKING BOOKINGS. Website Focus on Travel News has made note of the Dublin win: “Dublin to host the 77th Annual World Science Fiction Convention”.

The successful Dublin bid was led by James Bacon, with support and guidance from the bid committee, Fáilte Ireland, Dublin Convention Bureau (DCB) and The CCD. Dublin was confirmed as the 2019 location by site selection voters at Worldcon 75 in Helsinki where 1,227 votes were received, of which Dublin won 1,160 votes.

“It’s fantastic that we had such a large turnout, indicating strong support for the bid,” said James Bacon, Dublin 2019 chair. “Voting is a vital part of the process so twelve hundred votes is a great endorsement and I’m very pleased it’s a new record for an uncontested bid. Given New Orleans and Nice have declared for 2023 and Perth and Seattle for 2025, that we remained unopposed is indicative of the enthusiasm, strategic determination and commitment from all involved with the bid. It’s absolutely magnificent to be able to say we are bringing the Worldcon to Ireland and we cannot wait now for 2019.”

(16) HELP IS COMING. Drones at serious work: “Tanzania Gears Up To Become A Nation Of Medical Drones”

Entries like these popped up as Keller Rinaudo browsed a database of health emergencies during a 2014 visit to Tanzania. It was “a lightbulb moment,” says the CEO and co-founder of the California drone startup Zipline.

Rinaudo was visiting a scientist at Ifakara Health Institute who had created the database to track nationwide medical emergencies. Using cellphones, health workers would send a text message whenever a patient needed blood or other critical supplies. Trouble is, while the system collected real-time information about dying patients, the east African country’s rough terrain and poor supply chain often kept them from getting timely help. “We were essentially looking at a database of death,” Rinaudo says.

That Tanzania trip motivated his company to spend the next three years building what they envisioned as “the other half of that system — where you know a patient is having a medical emergency and can immediately send the product needed to save that person’s life,” Rinaudo says.

(17) ROBOPRIEST. St Aquin? Not yet: “Robot priest: the future of funerals?” BBC video at the link.

Developers in Japan are offering a robot “priest” to conduct Buddhist funeral rites complete with chanted sutras and drum tapping – all at a fraction of the cost of a human.

It is the latest use of Softbank’s humanoid robot Pepper.

(18) UNDERSEA DRIVING. Call these “tunnel pipe-dreams”: “The Channel tunnel that was never built”.

The Channel Tunnel linking Britain and France holds the record for the longest undersea tunnel in the world – 50km (31 miles) long. More than 20 years after its opening, it carries more than 10 million passengers a year – and more than 1.6 million lorries – via its rail-based shuttle service.

What many people don’t know, however, is that when owner Eurotunnel won the contract to build its undersea connection, the firm was obliged to come up with plans for a second Channel Tunnel… by the year 2000. Although those plans were published the same year, the tunnel still has not gone ahead.

The second ‘Chunnel’ isn’t the only underwater tunnel to remain a possibility. For centuries, there have been discussions about other potential tunnelling projects around the British Isles, too. These include a link between the island of Orkney and the Scottish mainland, a tunnel between the Republic of Ireland and Wales and one between Northern Ireland and Scotland.

[Thanks to JJ, James Davis Nicoll, Hampus Eckerman, Cat Eldridge, lauowolf, Chip Hitchcock, John King Tarpinian, Mike Kennedy, and Robot Archie for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day rcade.]