(1) AMAZING STORIES
BUS STOP AD. Seen in New
York City. Photo courtesy of von DImpleheimer.
(2) ON THE AIR. And the show is now with us. Steve Davidson’s
post “Amazing
Stories TV Show Debuts” (BEWARE SPOILERS) delivers this
assessment:
…All in all – production values are what you would expect, the story is in line with the target the show has always sought (families watching and sharing together) and the theme is marginally SFnal, (though time travel afficianados will have plenty to talk about) and my overall conclusions are: time was not wasted watching this episode and we ought to stick with the show to see how it develops.
(3) IAFA SAYS IT MUST MEET TO SURVIVE. International
Association for the Fantastic in the Arts 41 will be held March 18-21, however,
the organizers are making some new options available: “ICFA
41: COVID-19, Cancellations, and Credits/Refunds”.
As a result of the ongoing uncertainty surrounding the news about COVID-19, the IAFA board would like to take this opportunity to issue an update on ICFA 41.
The conference will meet.
We have to meet certain guaranteed minimums for room occupancy, food and beverage expenditures, etc., specified in our contract with the hotel, or pay out of pocket. It is not an exaggeration to say that cancellation would jeopardize the very existence of the IAFA.
The first concern of the board members is members’ safety and well-being. We urge IAFA members to proactively research COVID-19 and consult status reports through reputable sources such as the World Health Organization (https://www.who.int/), the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (https://www.cdc.gov/), and the Florida department of health (http://www.floridahealth.gov/), whose websites are continually updated. We would also advise checking for updates with your travel provider and travel insurer.
…Because of the extraordinary circumstances, we are crediting registration for those who cancel as a result of the outbreak. This credit must be used within 2 years. We will provide refunds to people from countries under travel restrictions. Because we are required to have final numbers for rooms and meals to the hotel a week before the conference, we will provide credits or refunds only to people who cancel by 5p EST on March 9, 2020.
…The board is discussing a number of ways to make it possible for people not able to attend physically but who wish to have their work included in some way to do so. We will make an official announcement before the March 9 deadline.
More
details at the link.
(4) FRANK HERBERT ON CORONAVIRUS. Or so the people tweeting
it around have captioned this rewritten chart —
Like the best Pixar and Disney animated films, this one supplies rooting interest in its heroes from the very start. We want them to succeed because we care about them and their quest. Who wouldn’t want to be reunited with a loved one, especially when his absence has left a void in their lives?
In the opening minutes of Disney/Pixar’s Onward, we are met with various manifestations of loss.
There’s the film’s setting, a world where magic once flourished, and with it, pixies, unicorns, pegasi, elves, ogres, centaurs, mermaids — your standard-issue high-fantasy mythofaunic biome. But even here, in a gimmick the film leans into juuuuust enough, the Industrial Revolution arrived. As automation increased, magic faded. Elves still live in giant toadstools, but said toadstools are now rigidly apportioned into vast, Spielberg-suburban subdivisions and cul-de-sacs. Once-splendid unicorns have gone feral, raiding raid trash cans and hissing at passers-by like peculiarly horsey raccoons. If Middle-Earth had more strip-malls, it’d look something like this.
There’s also the loss experienced by the elf-family at the film’s center: mom Laurel (voiced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and her two sons — the younger, anxious Ian (voiced by Tom Holland) and his older, buff, RPG-obsessed brother Barley (Chris Pratt, squarely back in Andy Dwyer mode). It’s Ian’s 16th birthday, and he’s given a gift left to him by his late father, who passed away when Ian was too young to remember him: A wizard’s staff.
Finally, in these opening minutes, there’s still another feeling of loss that manifests in the viewer — that of lost opportunity.
The jokes are glib and smarmy, the family dynamics achingly familiar, and as we follow Ian to high school, his every encounter and interaction feels less Disney/Pixar and more Disney Channel — which is to say, too sweet, too cornball, too affected, too faux-contemporary. The average very young child in the audience won’t notice; the average parent will start checking the theater’s exits.
But!
On or about the 20-minute mark — not coincidentally, upon the arrival of a manticore called Corey, voiced by Octavia Spencer — the film seems to discover what it is: A testament to the remarkable degree of emotional expressiveness that Pixar’s character-animators can imbue into a story….
NPR hosts a 4-way discussion (audio,
no transcript yet) here.
The American space agency (Nasa) says it will send its 2020 Mars rover to a location known as Jezero Crater.
Nasa believes the rocks in this nearly 50km-wide bowl could conceivably hold a record of ancient life on the planet.
Satellite images of Jezero point to river water having once cut through its rim and flowed via a delta system into a big lake.
It is the kind of environment that might just have supported microbes some 3.5-3.9 billion years ago.
This was a period when Mars was much warmer and wetter than it is today.
What is so special about Jezero?
Evidence for the past presence of a lake is obviously a draw, but Ken Farley, the Nasa project scientist on the mission, said the delta traces were also a major attraction.
“A delta is extremely good at preserving bio-signatures – any evidence of life that might have existed in the lake water, or at the interface of the sediment and the lake water, or possibly things that lived in the headwaters region that were swept in by the river and deposited in the delta,” he told reporters.
Jezero’s multiple rock types, including clays and carbonates, have high potential to preserve the organic molecules that would hint at life’s bygone existence.
March 6, 1936 — The “Income from Immigrants” episode of the Green Hornet radio show originated from WXYZ in Detroit. (It is also called “Ligget’s Citizenship Racket”.) The show was created by Fran Striker & George W. Trendle, and starred Al Hodge as the Green Hornet at this point, and Tokutaro Hayashi who had renamed Raymond Toyo by initial series director James Jewell. You can download the episode here.
March 6, 1938 — RKO first aired “The Bride of Death” with Orson Welles as The Shadow. Welles prior to his War of The Worlds broadcast would play the role for thirty three episodes in 1937 and 1938 with Blue Coal being the sponsor. You can download it here.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born March 6, 1918 — Marjii Ellers. Longtime L.A. fan active in the LASFS. Her offices in the LASFS included Registrar and Scribe. She is known as well for her costumes at cons. Indeed, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1990 from the International Costumers Guild. An avid fanzine publisher and writer, some of the fanzines she edited were Masqueraders’ Guide, More Lives Than One, Nexterday, One Equal Temper, Thousands of Thursdays, and Judges’ Guide. (Died 1999.)
Born March 6, 1928 — William F. Nolan, 92. Author of the long running Logan’s Run series (only the first was written with George Clayton Johnson). He started out in fandom in the Fifties publishing several zines including one dedicated to Bradbury. In May 2014, Nolan was presented with another Bram Stoker Award, for Superior Achievement in Nonfiction; this was for his collection about his late friend Ray Bradbury, called Nolan on Bradbury: Sixty Years of Writing about the Master of Science Fiction. He’s done far too much writing-wise for me to sum it him up.
Born March 6, 1930 — Allison Hayes. She was Nancy Fowler Archer, the lead role, in The Attack of The 50 Foot Woman. Her first SF role was the year as Grace Thomas in The Unearthly. She’d be Donna in The Crawling Hand shortly thereafter. She died at age forty-seven from the result of injuries sustained from early on Foxfire, a mid Fifties Western that’s she’s actually in. That she made three SF films while in severe pain is amazing. (Died 1977.)
Born March 6, 1937 — Edward L. Ferman, 83. Editor and publisher who’s best known as the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction from 1966 to 1991. He also edited a zine I’ve not heard of, Venture Science Fiction Magazine, for two years 1969 – 1970). And, of course, he’s edited myriad anthologies that were assembled from F&SF
Born March 6, 1942 — Dorothy Hoobler, 78. Author with her husband, Thomas Hoobler, of the Samurai Detective series which is at least genre adjacent. More interestingly, they wrote a biography of Mary Shelley and her family called The Monsters: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Frankenstein which sounds absolutely fascinating. Note to ISFDB: no, it’s not a novel. Kindle has everything by them, alas Apple Books has only the biography.
Born March 6, 1957 — Ann VanderMeer, 63. Publisher and editor, and the second female editor of Weird Tales. As Fiction Editor of Weird Tales, she won a Hugo Award. In 2009 Weird Tales, edited by her and Stephen H. Segal, won a Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine. She is also the founder of The Silver Web magazine, a periodical devoted to experimental and avant-garde fantasy literature.
Born March 6, 1972 — K. J. Bishop, 48. Her first book, The Etched City, was nominated for a World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. It won the Ditmar Award. She is a recipient of the Aurealis Award for best collection, That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote. Both works are available from the usual digital sources.
Born March 6, 1979 — Rufus Hound, 41, Ok, I’ll admit it was his name that got him here. He also on the good fortune to appear as Sam Swift in “The Woman Who Lived”, easily one of the best Twelfth Doctor stories. He’s also played Toad in the world premiere of the musical, The Wind In The Willows in Plymouth, Salford and Southampton, as written by Julian Fellowes.
(11) BIERYOGA. [Item by Mike Kennedy.]
If Worldcon, SMOFcon, etc. are looking for
a new way to encourage fans to exercise at the con… well, it seems like a good
fit for much of fandom. That said, notice the source of the article. — Funny
or Die claims “‘Beer Yoga’ Is A Real Thing That Exists, Namaste”.
Although it’s impossible to predict exactly what the future holds, there are a couple things that are pretty much guaranteed to happen with each new year. First, we’re all going to make resolutions. Second, we’re all going to abandon those resolutions.
One of the most common goals we make for ourselves when January rolls around is hitting the gym more often, and that’s also one of the toughest things to stick with for more than a few months. Life gets in the way, gyms are far or expensive, and let’s be honest — working out sucks. Yeah, yeah, you get a rush of endorphins and you feel good afterward, but actually dragging your butt there and the entire process of exercising leave much to be desired. However, this year might be the year things change.
If you’re like everyone else on earth and struggle to hold fast to your New-Year-New-Me resolutions, look no further than Bieryoga….
As we hurtle closer to a time when little kids will look up from their tablets to inquire, “What was a book, Mommy?” much as they now ask, “What’s a record player?,” it may cheer you to learn, from a charming new documentary about bookselling, that while the middle-aged tend to play on Kindles these days, millennials are to be seen in droves reading print books on the New York subway. They’re probably also the ones ordering “vintage” turntables, and they may be driving the encouraging current renaissance of independent bookstores serving cappuccino on the side, to lure us back from Amazon.
The books being bought, sold and read there, though, are unlikely to be the kind found at the New York Book Fair in a gorgeous old building on the city’s Upper East Side: ancient tomes, some with curled and peeling pages, others gorgeously illuminated. The handlers of those books are the subject of D.W. Young’s beguiling film, The Booksellers, about the world of New York antiquarian book dealers. They’re a vanishing breed who, with some exceptions, regard their work more as consuming passion than as career.
Momentum is building among planetary scientists to send a major mission to Uranus or Neptune — the most distant and least explored planets in the Solar System. Huge gaps remain in scientists’ knowledge of the blueish planets, known as the ice giants, which have been visited only once by a space probe. But the pressure is on to organize a mission in the next decade, because scientists want to take advantage of an approaching planetary alignment that would cut travel time.
Sending a mission to moons of Mars has been on the wish list for mission planners and space enthusiasts for quite some time. For the past few years, however, a team of Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) engineers and scientists have been working on putting such a mission together.
Now, JAXA announced this week that the Martian Moon eXploration (MMX) mission has been greenlighted to move forward, with the goal of launching an orbiter, lander — and possibly a rover — with sample return capability in 2024.
For the past three years, MMX has been in what JAXA calls a Pre-Project phase, which focuses on research and analysis for potential missions, such as simulating landings to improve spacecraft design. Now that the mission has been moved to the development phase, the focus will be on moving ahead with the development of mission hardware and software.
(16) TRAILER TIME. Dreamworks Animation dropped a
trailer for Trolls World Tour. In theaters April 2020.
Anna Kendrick and Justin Timberlake return in an all-star sequel to DreamWorks Animation’s 2016 musical hit: Trolls World Tour. In an adventure that will take them well beyond what they’ve known before, Poppy (Kendrick) and Branch (Timberlake) discover that they are but one of six different Troll tribes scattered over six different lands and devoted to six different kinds of music: Funk, Country, Techno, Classical, Pop and Rock. Their world is about to get a lot bigger and a whole lot louder.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse
Wooster, Chip Hitchcock, Cat Eldridge, Michael Tolan, JJ, and Andrew Porter for
some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the
day Jeff Jones.]
The International Association of Media Tie-In Writers
has named Grandmaster Nancy Holder the winner of its 2019
Faust Award.
Not many women get to play in over ten different universes, let alone create several of their own. Yet that is exactly what Nancy Holder makes look so very—and deceptively—easy to her myriad and devoted fans.
Every year, the International Association of Media Tie-In
writers selects a grandmaster of tie-in writing to receive the Faust, IAMTW’s
lifetime achievement award.
Holder’s tie-in work runs the gamut
from Firefly to Saving Grace. She’s written Angel
in the Buffyverse, and Zorro in the
seventeenth century. She novelized the Wonder
Woman, Crimson Peak, and Ghostbusters
movies, and wrote about a Feline Felon, and a pup in Wishbone. Above and beyond her media work, she’s co-created the YA
series Wicked and Crusade.
Of the Bram Stoker award-winning and NYT bestselling author,
IAMTW president Jonathan Maberry says, “Nancy is not only a superb writer and a
smart businesswoman, but also a kind and compassionate member of the writing
community.”
(1) MCINTYRE. Followers
of CaringBridge learned
today that Vonda N. McIntyre has finished work on her book. Jane Hawkins announced:
Vonda has finished Curve of the World! Be ready for a great read in a while! (No clue about publication date or anything like that.)
(2) PEAK OF THEIR CAREERS. Congratulations to Jason Heller (interviewed about his shortlisted book by File 770 in February), Alex Acks, and others whose work of genre interest made the finals of the 2019 Colorado Book Awards. Winners will be announced May 18. (Via Locus Online.)
Science Fiction/Fantasy
Murder on the Titania and Other Steam-Powered Adventures, Alex Acks (Queen of Swords)
While Gods Sleep, L.D. Colter (Tam Lin)
Denver Moon: The Minds of Mars, Warren Hammond & Joshua Viola (Hex)
General Nonfiction
Strange Stars: David Bowie, Pop Music, and the Decade Sci-Fi Exploded, Jason Heller (Melville House)
Juvenile Literature
The Lighthouse Between the Worlds, Melanie Crowder (Atheneum BFYR)
Del Toro Moon, Darby Karchut (Owl Hollow)
Nadya Skylung and the Cloudship Rescue, Jeff Seymour (Putnam)
(3) MARGINALIZED VOICES IN
YA. Neither the headline on Katy Waldman’s New Yorker article, “In
Y.A., Where Is the Line Between Criticism and Cancel Culture?”, nor
the subhead, “When it comes to young-adult novels, what, precisely, is the
difference between the marketplace of ideas and a Twitter mob?”, genuinely
reflects her approach to the topic she discusses, however, they’re enough to
help you decide whether you’d like to dive into the information she’s
assembled.
…[A] disparaging Goodreads review, which took issue with Jackson’s treatment of the war and his portrayal of Muslims, had a snowball effect, particularly on Twitter. Eventually, Jackson tweeted a letter of apology to “the Book Community,” stating, “I failed to fully understand the people and the conflict that I set around my characters. I have done a disservice to the history and to the people who suffered.”
The Jackson fracas came just weeks after another début Y.A. author, Amélie Wen Zhao, pulled her novel before it was published, also due to excoriating criticisms of it on Twitter and Goodreads….
(5) TWO RUSCH BOOKS IN NEW BUNDLE. “The 2019 Truly Epic Fantasy Bundle”, curated by Kevin J. Anderson, is available for a short time from StoryBundle.
Epic Fantasy is a genre that stretches the boundaries of the quest. Whether a triumph of good vs. evil, or a search for meaning or truth, these stories take readers to a new place.
For StoryBundle, you decide what price you want to pay. For $5 (or more, if you’re feeling generous), you’ll get the basic bundle of five books in any ebook format—WORLDWIDE.
Thought Gazer by Raymond Bolton
MythWorld by James A. Owen
Rider’s Revenge Trilogy Book 1: Rider’s Revenge by Alessandra Clarke
The Fey Book 1: The Sacrifice by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Set in Stone by Frank Morin
If you pay at least the bonus price of just $15, you get all five of the regular books, plus TEN more!
Shadow Blade by Chris Barili
The Taste of Different Dimensions by Alan Dean Foster
The Whisper Prince Book 1: Fairmist by Todd Fahnestock
The Fey Book 2: The Changeling by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
The First DragonRider by Kevin McLaughlin
Accidental Thief by C.J. Davis and Jamie Davis
Viridian Gate Online: Side Quests by James A. Hunter, D.J. Bodden, N.H. Paxton & More
Half-Bloods Rising by J.T. Williams
Nova Dragon – Book One of the Goblin Star by Gama Ray Martinez
The Dragon’s Call Book 1: Dragon Sword by Angelique Anderson and Craig A. Price, Jr.
X-ray observations of the Galactic Centre have uncovered chimney-like structures filled with hot plasma. The discovery might reveal how energy is transported from this central region to far-off locations….
The centre of our Galaxy hosts a supermassive black hole that currently emits electromagnetic radiation extremely weakly, but could have been much more active in the past. Observations of ?-rays have revealed two huge structures known as Fermi bubbles located above and below the Galactic plane1 . These bubbles are filled with highly energetic particles moving at close to the speed of light, which were released from the Galactic Centre a few million years ago.
Actually, my latest tie-in gig came right through IAMTW! Thanks, guys! One of our members is not only a tie-in writer himself, but is an editor for Mongoose Publishing, a British game publisher. They’re doing a reboot of the great old SF RPG, Traveller, and the editor, Matthew Sprange, asked the group for anyone familiar with the game who was interested in writing a short story tie-in. I played Traveller a lot back in my college days, and jumped at the chance. I’ve since written four stories for Mongoose and I’m delighted with the experience!
What’s your fan experience been like?
Mixed, but primarily positive. We all get those one-star reviews, right? A few stand out, however, and they are curiously all of the same theme: men who don’t like romance in their fiction. Mostly, I just eye-roll these and let them go. You don’t like romantic elements in your fiction, don’t read mine, but don’t tell me I’m doing it wrong. For the most part, the fan response has been great, and the feedback from my publishers has been wonderful. You know you’re doing your job right when people come up to you at conventions begging for your next novel, and publishers actually solicit you for work without prompting. That, above all else, speaks for itself.
(8) HANRAHAN OBIT. The
International Costumers Guild reports
Jamie Hanrahan died March 20. He was an early member of S.T.A.R. San Diego,
and his other fanac included a term as co-editor of PyroTechnics, “The Now and Then Newsletter of General Technics.”
His son Chuck wrote, “There was
some kind of cardiac event and despite all heroic attempts, they were unable to
restore a cardiac rhythm.”
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled
by Cat Eldridge.]
Born March 21, 1902 — Gustav Fröhlich. Not widely known before landing the role of Freder Fredersen in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Though my German be rusty, I see no indication that anything else he did was genre in nature. (Died 1987.)
Born March 21, 1936 — Margaret Mahy. New Zealand author of over a hundred children’s and YA books, some with a strong supernatural bent. She won the Carnegie Medal twice for two of her fantasy novels, The Haunting and for The Changeover, something only seven authors have done in total. (Died 2012,)
Born March 21, 1946 — Timothy Dalton, 73. He is best known for portraying James Bond in The Living Daylights and License to Kill but is currently in The Doom Patrol as Niles Caulder, The Chief. As I’ve said before, go watch it now! He also was Damian Drake in Looney Tunes: Back in Action, Sir Malcolm on the Penny Dreadful series and Lord President of the Time Lords (Rassilon) during the Time of Tenth and Eleventh Doctors. He went to theatre to play Lord Asriel in the stage version of His Dark Materials.
Born March 21, 1956 – Teresa Nielsen Hayden, 63. She is a consulting editor for Tor and is best known for Making Light, ablog she shares with her husband Patrick. You can blame them for the Puppy target John Scalzi. And she is also one of the regular instructors for the writing workshop Viable Paradise.
Born March 21, 1958 — Gary Oldman, 61. First genre film role was as Rosencrantz in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. Next up is the lead role in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. And, of course, he was Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg In Fifth Element followed by being Lost in Space‘s Dr. Zachary Smith which in turn led to Harry Potter’s Sirius Black and that begat James Gordon in the Batman films. Although some reviewers give him accolades for us as role as Dr. Dennett Norton in the insipid Robocop remake, I will not. Having not seen Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, I can’t say how he is as Dreyfus in it.
Born March 21, 1962 — Matthew Broderick, 57. Very long, so let’s get started… He started off in WarGames but appeared over the years in Ladyhawke, Project X, The Lion King franchise (surely talking lions are genre, aren’t they?), Infinity (anything about Richard Feynman is genre), Godzilla, Inspector Gadget, the remake of The Stepford Wives, The Tale of Despereaux and Adventure Time.
Born March 21, 1966 — Michael Carroll, 53. He also writes Judge Dreddfor 2000 AD and the Judge Dredd Megazine. He has other genre work such as the New Heroes series (known in the States as the Quantum Prophecy series) and the Pelicos Trilogy which is part noir mystery and part end of all things human as well.
Born March 21, 1985 — Sonequa Martin-Green, 34. She currently plays Michael Burnham on Discovery. She had a brief recurring role as Tamara in Once Upon a Time and a much longer recurring role on The Walking Dead as Sasha Williams but I’ve never seen her there as zombies hold no interest to me. Well Solomon Grundy does… and she was in the Shockwave, Darkside film.
Born March 21, 1986 — Scott Eastwood, 33. Deputy Carl Hartman in Texas Chainsaw 3D (truly horrid idea that) Lieutenant GQ Edwards in Suicide Squad and Nathan Lambert in Pacific Rim: Uprising.
(10) NAME THAT MOON. Gently
thieved from John Scalzi’s Twitter feed (like so many good things are), Phil
Plait’s tweet leads us to his post on SYFY
Wire“Contest:
Pick names for Jupiter’s new moons!”
We already have wonderful names for some of Jupiter’s moons, like Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto (the four Galilean moons), Amalthea, Metis, Adrastea, Themisto, Carpo (also the little-known sixth Marx brother), Himalia, Leda… well, you get the picture. There are dozens more.
Now that these newly discovered moons have been confirmed it’s time to name them. In general, the discoverer can suggest names to the International Astronomical Union (or IAU), the keeper of rules and lists of names. They’ll mull things over and decide if the names are up to snuff.
Faced with this, Sheppard and his team have decided to do something fun: Hold a contest where you, Earthling, can suggest names for these tiny worlds*!
All you have to do is submit your suggestions to the team by simply tweeting them to the handle @JupiterLunacy (ha!) on Twitter, either as a text tweet or as a short video, and adding the hashtag #NameJupitersMoons. Cool!
(11) GIVING WRITER’S BLOCK A NEW MEANING. Also tweeted by Scalzi — he’s discovered a use for the toxic waste social media miscreants aim at GRRM:
(12) YMMV. David
Doering has a point: “Saw the
announcement of a Funko Stan Lee doll on Amazon to be released in April. What
made me curious is the delivery options: I do not think the word ‘Expedited’
means what you think it does…”
(15) TOUGH NEIGHBORHOODS. At
Crimereads, Adam Abramowitz discusses
how gentrification threatens crime and noir fiction set in big cities, because
the dodgy neighborhoods where those stories are set are rapidly vanishing: “Noir in the Era of Gentrification”.
On the New York end, the bus route would take us through the Bronx, the borough announcing itself unfailingly with the calling card of a vehicle sitting squarely on its rims, hard by the side of the highway, engulfed in flames—welcome to the Bronx! Similarly, the arrival at the Port Authority Bus Terminal at 41st Street and 8th Avenue brought its own thrills. After all, it was a place described in a 1970 New York Times where “two types of people could be found inside, some are waiting for buses. Others are waiting for death.” Though they left out the pimps waiting for those starry-eyed ingénues from Middle America, those corn-fed easy marks, sad scripts in waiting.
…One of my favourite new buildings in my hometown Bremen is the Stadthalle, a multi-purpose arena for exhibitions, sports events and concerts. Designed by Roland Rainer and completed only this year, the Stadthalle is notable by the six concrete struts which jut out of the front of the building and hold both the stands as well as the roof in a design reminiscent of tents and sailing ships.
For the Kongresshalle conference centre in Berlin, built for the Interbau exhibition of 1957, American architect Hugh Stubbins designed a spectacular hyperbolic paraboloid saddle roof, inspired by the Dorton Arena in Raleigh, North Carolina. The people of Berlin quickly nicknamed the organic structure the “pregnant oyster”.
(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “How to
Write Descriptively” on YouTube, Nalo Hopkinson, in a TedEd talk from
2015, uses the work of Kelly Link, Cornelia Funke, and Tobias Buckell to
provide samples of how to write imaginatively.
[Thanks to
Cora Buhlert, JJ, Frank Catalano, John King Tarpinian, Chip Hitchcock, Cat
Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse
Wooster, Carl Slaughter, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title
credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Rob Thornton.]
The IAMTW’s Scribe Awards honor licensed works that tie in with other media such as television, movies, gaming, or comic books.
The Scribe Award winners will be revealed at ComicCon San Diego in July, where they also will present Greg Cox with their equivalent of a grandmaster award, the Faust Award.
Short Story
“Banana Republic” by Jonathan Maberry
“Ganbatte” by Keith DeCandido
“Murderers´ Row” by John Jackson Miller
“Pacing Place” by Bob Mayer
“Rear Guard” by Sarah Stegall
“Storm Blood” by Peter Wacks and David Boop
Adapted Speculative and General
Doctor Who: The Pirate Planet by James Goss
Resident Evil: The Final Chapter by Tim Waggoner
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets by Christie Golden
Kong Skull Island by Tim Lebbon
Original Speculative
The Librarians and the Mother Goose Chase by Greg Cox
Solar Singularity by Peter J. Wacks, Guy Anthony Demarco, and Josh Voight
Halo: Legacy of Onyx by Matt Forbeck
Star Wars Battlefront II: Inferno Squad by Christie Golden
Star Trek Discovery: Desperate Hours by David Mack
Supernatural: The Usual Sacrifices by Yvonne Navarro
Original General
Don Pendleton´s The Executioner Fatal Prescription by Michael A. Black
The Will to Kill by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins
Robert B. Parker´s The Hangman´s Sonnet A Jesse Stone Novel by Reed Farrel Coleman
YA Original
Star Wars Adventures in Wild Space – The Cold by Cavan Scott
Warriors Three: Godhood´s End by Keith R. A. DeCandido
X-Files Origins: Devil´s Advocate by Jonathan Maberry
Audio
Doctor Who: Across the Darkened City by David Bartlett
Doctor Who: Cold Vengeance by Matt Fitton
Warhammer 40,000: Agent of the Throne, Blood and Lies by John French
Torchwood: Cascade by Scott Handcock
Torchwood: The Dying Room by Lizzie Hopley
International Association of Media Tie-In Writers 2017 Faust Award
Tannhäuser: Rising Sun, Falling Shadows, Robert T. Jeschonek (Fantasy Flight Games)
Adapted Novel
Clockwork Angels, Kevin J. Anderson (ECW)
Audio
Dark Shadows: The Eternal Actress, Nev Fountain (Big Finish)
A. C. Crispin received the IAMTW’s Grandmaster Award and wrote in her acceptance remarks —
When I heard the name of the IAMTW’s Grandmaster Award, it struck me as ironic that it’s officially the “Faust Award.” I know this title refers to Frederick Faust, who wrote as Max Brand, but to those of us who work in media universes, it sometimes comes down to making a deal with the devil, doesn’t it? Some members of the writing profession look down on those who take on media tie-in projects as having sold out, or assume they’re lazy and can’t do the work to create “real” fiction. Those of us here all know, of course, that nothing could be further from the truth. It is every bit as challenging to write a good tie-in story as it is a good original novel. When you throw in tight deadlines, unreasonable and clueless studio minions, and the rules of story canon, it can be even more difficult than writing an original book.
But a good story is a good story, no matter what universe it is written in.
My dear friend Andre Norton once listened to me complaining about how tie-in writers aren’t respected the way they should be, and remarked, “Being a storyteller is one of the oldest and most valued professions. Without stories to lift us out of life’s problems and doldrums, where would we be? Be proud of what you do.”
Andre was a very wise lady, and her words stuck with me over the years.
Crispin’s full acceptance speech appears on her blog.