The winner of the 2017 Sunburst Award for Adult Fiction is Spells of Blood and Kin by Claire Humphrey (Thomas Dunne Books).
The Sunburst Jury commented:
In her debut novel, Claire Humphrey shows us a world of magic existing in the shadow of Queen Street bars and down side streets lined with old houses in Toronto. When Lissa Nevsky’s grandmother dies, she inherits the old world magical practices and an old obligation that comes trailing a dark history of violence and bitterness. In cool, elegant prose, Humphrey’s novel gives us a fresh take on magic, exploring the gifts it can bestow and the price it exacts. Humphrey’s use of a real, contemporary Canadian setting and her refusal to allow her characters any easy victories set this novel apart from a field of strong competitors.
Claire Humphrey is a national buyer for Indigo Books. Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Apex, Crossed Genres, Fantasy Magazine, and Podcastle. Her short story “Bleaker Collegiate Presents an All-Female Production of Waiting for Godot” appeared in the Lambda Award-nominated collection Beyond Binary, and her short story “The Witch of Tarup” was published in the critically acclaimed anthology Long Hidden.
Sophie Quire and the Last Storyguard (volume two in the Peter Nimble series by Jonathan Auxier) is a surprisingly complex take on age-old themes. Intrepid heroes, vivid villains, and an array of fantasy characters interact in a plot that places the importance of storytelling at its heart. It’s a metafictional adventure about the power (and limits) of story that, despite its invocation of well-worn tropes and its echoes of classics of children’s fantasy, still manages to be both surprising and gripping (and very funny) in its long, intricately-plotted narrative. It celebrates pure storytelling pleasure and refreshingly avoids any didactic moralizing.
Jonathan Auxier is a Canadian-American writer of young adult literature. His debut novel Peter Nimble and his Fantastic Eyes was an ABA New Voices pick and a BookPage Magazine Best Book of 2011. His novel The Night Gardener won the TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award and the Canadian Library Association Book of the Year for Children Award, and was shortlisted for the Sunburst Award and the Governor General’s Award.
In an ingenious twist on the “found manuscript” trope, the narrative develops through pictorial vignettes inscribed on whalebone, baleen, and a rib of mysterious origin, minutely described as if for a museum catalogue or forensic report. Wise’s story is eerie, subtle, and highly visual, with pleasurably chilling overtones of Lovecraft’s Innsmouth abominations. Although individual characterization is virtually eliminated by the unique form and the distanced, objective narrative, it still succeeds in frightening and engaging the reader.
A.C. Wise was born and raised in Montreal, and currently lives in the Philadelphia area. Her work has appeared in publications such as Clarkesworld, Tor.com, Shimmer, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2017, among other places, and has been a finalist for the Lambda and the Sunburst Awards. Her collections The Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron Saves the World Again and The Kissing Booth Girl and Other Stories are both published by Lethe Press.
Sunburst medallion.
Winners of the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic receive a medallion that incorporates the Sunburst logo. Winners of both the Adult and Young Adult Sunburst Award also receive a cash prize of $1,000, while winners of the Short Story Sunburst Award receive a cash prize of $500.
The Sunburst Award takes its name from the debut novel of the late Phyllis Gotlieb, one of the first published authors of contemporary Canadian speculative fiction.
SUNBURST JURORS. The 2017 Sunburst Award jury was comprised of Nancy Baker, Michel Basilières, Rebecca Bradley, Dominick Grace, and Sean Moreland.
Jurors for the 2018 novel awards will be Megan Crewe, Kate Heartfield, Dominik Parisien, Halli Villegas, and Heather Wood. Jurors for the 2018 short story awards will be Candas Jane Dorsey, Alexandra Renwick, and Emily Pohl-Weary.
The juried awards are presented to the best Canadian speculative fiction novel, book-length collection, or short story published any time during the previous calendar year. Sunburst Award winners will be announced in Fall 2017.
Sunburst Award winners receive a cash prize of $1,000 for the Adult and Young Adult categories, and $500 for the short story category, as well as a medallion which incorporates the Sunburst logo.
The jurors for the 2017 award are Nancy Baker, Michel Basilières, Rebecca Bradley, Dominick Grace, and Sean Moreland.
ADULT SHORTLIST
Spells of Blood and Kin by Claire Humphrey (Thomas Dunn Books)
The Witches of New York by Ami McKay (Knopf Canada)
Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel (Del Ray)
Necessity by Jo Walton (Tor Books)
Last Year by Robert Charles Wilson (Tor Books)
YOUNG ADULT SHORTLIST
Sophie Quire and the Last Storyguard by Jonathan Auxier (Puffin Canada)
Worlds of Ink and Shadow by Lena Coakley (HarperCollins)
The Inn Between by Marina Cohen (Roaring Brook Press)
Julia Vanishes by Catherine Egan (Doubleday Canada)
The Skids by Ian Donald Keeling (ChiTeen)
SHORT STORY SHORTLIST
K.T. Bryski, “La Corriveau” [Strange Horizons, October 2016]
James Alan Gardner, “The Dog and the Sleepwalker” [Strangers Among Us, Laksa Media Groups Inc.]
Helen Marshall, “Caro in Carno” [The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu, Constable-Robinson UK & Running Press US]
The Sunburst Award official shortlist come out in late June. Sunburst Award winners will be announced in Fall 2017.
The jurors for the 2017 award are Nancy Baker, Michel Basilières, Rebecca Bradley, Dominick Grace, and Sean Moreland.
The Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic is an annual award celebrating the best in Canadian fantastika published during the previous calendar year. Winners receive a medallion that incorporates the Sunburst logo. Winners of both the Adult and Young Adult Sunburst Award also receive a cash prize of $1,000, while winners of the Short Story Sunburst Award receive a cash prize of $500.
The Sunburst Award takes its name from the debut novel of the late Phyllis Gotlieb, one of the first published authors of contemporary Canadian speculative fiction.
(1) COZY HORROR? In the November 12 Financial Times, columnist Nilanjana Roy explains why she likes “Black Mirror” — “’Black Mirror’ and ghost stories of a digital dystopia”. (* Article is behind a paywall, but you can get to it by Googling the name of the columnist.)
Black Mirror starts by riffing on the modern fear of living in a digital, immersive world. It’s ironic that fans will watch episodes where a young boy is surveilled through his webcam by unrevealed stalkers, with inevitable grim results, then take to their smartphones or Twitter to declare that they want to get away from their phones and get offline.
But, huddled in a razai quilt with the air purifier on full blast, with a cup of ginger tea by my side, I realize I don’t watch Black Mirror to have my worst fears confirmed. I watch it to be reassured.”
(2) THE FANNISH INQUISITION. Smofcon 34 has asked existing and prospective Worldcon and NASFiC bidders to complete a questionnaire – some responses are already available online.
(3) THE BOUNDARIES OF EMPATHY. Ann Leckie says there was really nothing special about Nazis — “On Monsters”.
Here’s the thing–the Nazis? Those concentration camp guards, the people who dug and filled in mass graves, led prisoners to gas chambers, all of that? They were not inhuman monsters. They were human beings, and they weren’t most of them that different from anyone you might meet on your morning walk, or in the grocery store.
I know it’s really super uncomfortable to look around you and realize that–that your neighbors, or even you, yourself, might, given circumstances, commit such atrocities. Your mind flinches from it, you don’t want to even think about it. It can’t be. You know that you’re a good person! Your neighbors and co-workers are so nice and polite and decent. You can’t even imagine it, so there must have been something special, something particularly different about the people who enthusiastically embraced Hitler.
I’m here to tell you there wasn’t.
(4) QUESTIONING AND COMMON GROUND. Cat Rambo inserts a page from Maslow in her response to recent events, and shares her plan for moving forward: “Nattering Social Justice Cook: Stay the Course”
One of the phenomena that led to the weirdness of the recent election is the use of binary thought, a basic Us vs. Them that does not allow for the fact that human beings are significantly more complicated than a single yes/no statement. I see it being embraced even more strongly now – by both the Left and the Right.
The world is more complicated than that. To fall into that trap is to let yourself be controlled by whoever wields the media around you the most effectively. You must think, you must question. You must figure out where your common ground is and how to use it. This is not the time to be silent. This is a time when how you live and act and speak is more important than it ever has been.
So. Here’s what I’m doing.
I’m listening to the voices that haven’t been listened to and amplifying their message wherever I can. Recommending a wide and interesting range of works for the SFWA Recommended Reading List. Reading across the board and making sure I look for new, interesting, diverse stuff – and then spreading the word of it. I’m nominating and voting for awards and taking the time to leave reviews when I can.
As a teacher, the most important thing I can do is try to show my students how an artist lives and works. Why it’s important to confront and acknowledge one’s own flaws so you understand them in others. How to be a good human, one that is responsible, ethical, open to the world. Feminism is more important now than ever, and being one publicly in a way that redeems the bizarre media stereotypes that have been imposed upon it is crucial to generations to come.
Whitson became the first female commander of the International Space Station in 2007, and at 3:20 EST today, she’ll ride a Soyuz rocket alongside cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy and ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet, to take her place as commander of Expedition 51 on the International Space Station. She’s also set to become the oldest woman in space, at 56 years of age.
In a CBS News interview from 2008, following an extremely hard reentry of Expedition 16, Whitson—today holding the title of NASA’s most experienced female astronaut, with nearly 377 days logged in space and six space walks totaling 39 hours 46 minutes—said of her many records that “no one should be counting,” but until we’re beyond the point of having to count, she’s happy to be a role model. “It seems odd to me to think of myself that way, but I hope that I can inspire someone to do something they maybe didn’t think they could.”
(6) SPOOLING OUT. The inaugural Rewind Con, a new celebrity convention held this month in Chicago, probably took a bath according to a Nerd & Tie report, “Rewind Con Was Apparently a Total Mess”.
We’ve been following this con behind the scenes for quite some time, mostly because they rescheduled the even from September to November earlier this year. The schedule change was due to a switch in venues, and originally they put out a statement which directly stated that it was because the convention had grown too much — although they would later take that back and put out a slightly more vague one blaming “multiple factors with the original venue.”
…We don’t have exact figures, but people present have estimated numbers anywhere between one and three thousand attendees. And while any of those would be a respectable number for a first year convention, when you consider Rewind Con had between fifty and sixty guests (most of whom likely asked for pretty sizable guarantees) this event must have been a massive financial disaster. The only way the organizers could have paid those guarantees is if the money came directly out of owner Jaymie Lashaway’s pocket.
We’ve also seen reports of people who paid for the $300 VIP Passes not receiving what was promised, tons of reports of staff mismanagement, issues with paid photo ops, and a complete inability to put on a good show.
(7) MIND MELD. Shana DuBois populated the latest Mind Meld with the editors and authors of the recently released anthology The Starlit Wood from Saga Press.They were asked “to chat about fairy tales and their influence on modern-day storytelling.” The participants are Navah Wolfe, Dominik Parisien, Margo Lanagan, Kat Howard, Stephen Graham Jones, Aliette de Bodard, Charlie Jane Anders, Jeffrey Ford, Theodora Goss, and Daryl Gregory.
(8) FULL FATHOM FIVE-SEVEN-FIVE. With two five-syllable verses, the traditional haiku is arguably a poetic form tailor-made for Filers. Therefore I want you all to know Fantasy Literature has kicked off its “Third Annual Speculative Fiction Haiku Contest”. Leave entries in the comments. The rules don’t state a deadline for entering.
This is incredible. This is quite amazing because who you’re honoring tonight is not only myself but the ghost of a lot of your favorite writers. And I wouldn’t be here except that they spoke to me in the library. The library’s been the center of my life. I never made it to college. I started going to the library when I graduated from high school. I went to the library every day for three or four days a week for 10 years and I graduated from the library when I was 28.
(10) UNDER THE HAMMER. Heritage Auctions published the top bids from its recently-completed Space Exploration Auction #6167.
We are proud to announce that, as of this writing, total sales are $744,923 with a 98% sell-through rate both by lot and value. Of 729 total bidders, 226 were successful in winning 515 lots. It’s interesting to note that 296 of these 515 lots were won by bidders on Heritage Live! If you’re not using this amazing online bidding platform, you should definitely check it out. Eight lots vied for the honor of top price realized:
Lot 50102 Apollo 13 Flown and Crew-Signed Checklist $42,500
Lot 50145 Skylab: Rare NASA Contractor’s Model, 1/48 Scale $42,500
Lot 50038 Alan Bean Original 1984 Painting “Test Drive” $42,500
Lot 50064 Apollo 11 Flown Quarantine Cover $40,000
Lot 50037 Alan Bean Original 2005 Painting “Our World At My Fingertips” $38,750
Lot 50119 Apollo 14 LM Flown and Surface Carried Tool $37,500
Lot 50132 Apollo 17 Flown Robbins Medal, Serial Number 62 $37,500
Lot 50065 Apollo 11 Flown Robbins Medal, Serial Number 64 $35,000
(11) SUNBURST SEEKS SHORTS. The Sunburst Awards, recognizing “Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic,” is looking for submissions to be considered in its short story award category. Short stories published in magazines, anthologies or collections, or online all qualify.
Canadian authors: It’s free to submit, and your publishers may not have already done so.
Publishers: If you have submitted a collection for the novel length award already, please send us a note to [email protected] to let us know which of the stories included qualify (see below) for the short story award. You may submit stories which qualify from magazines or anthologies you have published as well. To submit these, please upload the individual story files from the link on our website.
The Sunburst Awards will consider short fiction (up to 7,500 words.) for the short story award. Submissions are made electronically using a submission system for short form works and must be in either Word document or pdf format only. You will be asked to provide details of where the work was originally published along with the date and story length. All works must have been previously published in 2016. *See additional criteria on our website.
*Please include only one story per upload file.
*Do not submit a complete magazine or anthology.
*Non paying markets qualify.
*Short stories have only one year of eligibility.
*There is no administrative fee for short form submissions.
*Deadline for submissions is Midnight Eastern Standard Time on January 31, 2017.
The moody male lead is widespread throughout all genres, but it can be difficult to see why anybody would want to spend time with him. He’s brooding, exceedingly individualistic, melancholic, and disposed to hanging around outdoors during thunderstorms for no good reason beyond cultivating his mystique. Furthermore, despite possessing attributes such as introspection, sophistication in some form, and intelligence, he is also typically rather unpleasant.
So what’s underpinning his enduring presence and appeal in fiction?
(13) A WRETCHED HIVE OF SCUM AND VILLANY…AND LOVE. Turns out Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford weren’t the only ones getting busy on the set of Star Wars. Stephen Colbert had a Star Wars affair, too
[Thanks to JJ, John King Tarpinian, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Chip Hitchcock.]
Peter Wendt, “Get the Message” (in Second Contacts[Bundoran Press])
Sunburst medallion.
The 2016 Sunburst Award jury was comprised of Timothy Anderson, Sylvia Bérard, Virginia O’Dine, Dale Sproule, and Myna Wallin.
Jurors for the 2017 award will be Nancy Baker, Michel Basilières, Rebecca Bradley, Dominick Grace, and Sean Moreland.
Winners of the Adult and Young Adult Award receive a cash prize of $1,000. Winners of the Short Story Award receive a cash prize of $500.00. All winners also receive a Sunburst Medallion.
The Sunburst is named after the first novel by Phyllis Gotlieb, among the first published authors of contemporary Canadian science fiction.
Sunburst Award winners receive a cash prize of $1,000 for the Adult and Young Adult categories, and $500 for the short story category, as well as a medallion which incorporates the Sunburst logo.
Jurors for the 2016 award are Timothy Anderson, Sylvie Bérard, Virginia O’Dine, Dale Sproule, and Myna Wallin.
Sunburst Award winners will be announced on September 14th.
The Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic celebrates the best in Canadian fantastic literature published during the previous calendar year.
The winners receive a cash prize of $1,000 as well as a medallion which incorporates the Sunburst logo.
ADULT FICTION
Andre Alexis, Fifteen Dogs [Coach House Books]
Samuel Archibald, Arvida [Biblioasis]
Margaret Atwood, The Heart Goes Last [McClelland & Stewart]
Andrew Battershill, Pillow [Coach House Books]
Rebecca Bradley, Cadon, Hunter [self-published]
Matt Cahill, The Society of Experience [Wolsak & Wynn]
Jill Ciment, Act of God [Pantheon]
Alain Farah, Ravenscrag [House of Anansi Press] (Translated by Lazer Laderhendler)
Katherine Fawcett, The Little Washer of Sorrows [Thistledown Press]
Gemma Files, Experimental Film [Chizine Publications]
Alexandra Grigorescu, Cauchemar [ECW Press]
Lisa L. Hannett, Lament for the Afterlife [Chizine Publications]
D. J. McIntosh, The Angel of Eden [Penguin Canada]
Jamie McLachlan, Mind of the Phoenix [Penner Publishing]
Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Signal to Noise [Solaris]
Heather O’Neill, Daydreams of Angels [HarperCollins Canada]
Andrew Pyper, The Damned [Simon & Schuster]
Simone St. James, The Other Side of Midnight [New American Library]
Carsten Stroud, The Reckoning [Penguin Random House]
Robert Charles Wilson, The Affinities [Tor]
A.C. Wise, The Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron Saves the World Again [Lethe Press]
YOUNG ADULT FICTION
Leah Bobet, An Inheritance of Ashes [Scholastic Canada]
David Carroll, Sight Unseen [Scholastic Canada]
Jason Chabot, Above [HarperTrophy]
Charis Cotter, The Swallow: A Ghost Story [Tundra Books]
Mikaela Everett, The Unquiet [HarperCollins Canada]
Dominik Parisien, “Goodbye is a Mouthful of Water” [Playground of Lost Toys, Exile Editions]
Dominik Parisien, “Spider Moves the World” [Lackington’s Magazine, Issue 6]
Kelly Robson, “Two-Year Man” [Asimov’s Science Fiction, August 2015]
Holly Schofield, “Two Steps Forward” [Scarecrow, World Weaver Press]
Peter Wendt, “Get the Message” [Second Contacts, Bundoran Press]
The Sunburst Award official shortlist will be announced on July 5. Sunburst Award winners will be announced on September 14.
The jurors for the 2016 award are Timothy Anderson, Sylvie Bérard, Virginia O’Dine, Dale Sproule, and Myna Wallin.
The Sunburst Award takes its name from the debut novel of the late Phyllis Gotlieb, one of the first published authors of contemporary Canadian speculative fiction.
The universe may have existed forever, according to a new model that applies quantum correction terms to complement Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The model may also account for dark matter and dark energy, resolving multiple problems at once.
The widely accepted age of the universe, as estimated by general relativity, is 13.8 billion years. In the beginning, everything in existence is thought to have occupied a single infinitely dense point, or singularity. Only after this point began to expand in a “Big Bang” did the universe officially begin.
… I have several writer friends who are what I would call Tinkerers. They write via a method of creating something, then they continue to tinker it into perfection. It’s amazing to watch, and as a result they often have skills for rewriting that are hard to match.
Some, like me, are more Serial Iterators. They do better writing something new, incorporating the lessons of a previous work. They depend on a lifetime of practice and learning. They lean more toward abandoning a project that hasn’t worked to move on….
When I wrote 150 short stories at the start of my career, I abandoned over 100 of them to the trunk. I did this by knowing I was interested in iteration and not interested in trying to rescue them. I had an intuitive sense of how long it would take for me in hours, manpower, to try and rescue a story, versus how many it would take to make a new one. That came with practice, trusted readers opinions being compared to my own impressions of the writing, and editorial feedback. But I am very aware of the fact that I’m not a Tinkerer.
(3) CONNIE AT SASQUAN. She makes everything sound like a good time no matter what. Her nightmare of a hotel was an especially good source of anecdotes — “Connie Willis Sasquan (WorldCon 2015) Report”.
But instead of being taken to rescue on the Carpathia–or even the Hyatt–we were transported to a true shipwreck of a hotel.
It was brand-new and ultramodern, but upon closer examination, it was like those strange nightmare hotels in a “we’re already dead but don’t know it yet” movie. The blinds couldn’t be worked manually, and we couldn’t find any controls. There was no bathtub. The shower closely resembled the one in a high-school locker room, and there was no door between it and the toilet. (I am not making this up.) The clock had no controls for setting an alarm–a call to the front desk revealed that was intentional: “We prefer our clients to call us and request a wake-up call”–and when you turned the room lights off, the bright blue glow from the clock face enveloped the room in Cherenkhov radiation, and there was no way to unplug it. We tried putting a towel and then a pillow over it and ended up having to turn it face-down.
That wasn’t all. If you sat on the edge of the bed or lay too close to the edge, you slid off onto the floor, a phenomenon we got to test later on when we began giving tours of our room to disbelieving friends. “Don’t sit on the end of the bed,” we told them. “You’ll slide off,” and then watched them as they did.
… This one year they had these great Hugos, with sort of a modernist sculpture look, a big angled ring of Saturn thing with the rocket ship sticking up through it and marbles representing planets, and brass nuts and bolts and stuff.
They looked great, but they weren’t glued together very well, and by the time Samuel R. Delaney got off the stage, his Hugo was in both hands and his pockets and on the floor, and mine had lost several pieces altogether.
“Did you lose your marbles?” I whispered to Gardner backstage.
“No,” Gardner whispered back in that voice of his that can be heard in the back row, “My balls didn’t fall off, but my toilet seat broke!”
(5) TAFF. Sasquan has donated $2,000 to the Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund.
(6) LUNACON. Lunacon’s Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign has ended, 58 people contributed a total of $6,127. The funds will be put to good use to make Lunacon 2016 a success.
(7) BEYOND NaNo. Amanda S. Green, in “NaNo is over. What now?” at Mad Genius Club, helps writers who missed the target deal with their results, and shows how her own experiences have taught her to adjust.
That collective sigh of relief and groan of frustration you heard yesterday came from the hoards of authors who met — or didn’t — their NaNoWriMo goals. Now they are looking at those 50,000 words and wondering what to do with them. Should they put them aside for a bit and then come back to see if they are anywhere close to a book or if they more resemble a cabbage. Others are wondering why they couldn’t meet the deadline and wondering how they can ever be an author if they can’t successfully complete NaNo. Then there are those who know they finished their 50,000 words, that they have a book (of sorts) as a result but aren’t sure it is worth the work they will have to put in to bring it to publishable standards.
All of those reactions — and more — are why I don’t particularly like NaNo. I’ve done it. I’ve failed more often than I’ve successfully concluded it….
I’ll admit, as I already have, that I usually don’t meet my NaNo goals. That’s because I know I can do 50k in a month and don’t adjust the word count. That is when Real Life tends to kick me in the teeth. Whether it is illness, either of me or a family member, or death or something around the house deciding to go MIA, something always seems to happen. It did this year. The difference was that I still managed to not only meet my 50k goal but I exceeded it.
Much Slower Than Light, from Who’s that Coeur? Press is currently in its 7th edition (2014) and is probably quite different than the 2008 6th edition (I don’t have a copy from which to compare); there are 6 poems, as far as I can tell, which have been added since then and the 6th edition apparently had poems dating back to 1984. This is a retrospective collection; representing the best Carolyn Clink has offered us from 1996 through 2014 and is likely to morph again in a few years when Clink has more wonderful poems to call her best. There is an astonishing variety in form and subject and genre. There are only 22 poems in all, but all of them are gems.
Now that 2015 is almost over as far as the Hugos go, we decided to look over all the stories that we or anyone else recommended and see which qualified as hard SF. In particular, we wanted to investigate the following claims:
I write fantastical, action-adventure. Thrillers, which are sometimes magic realist, and which sometimes borrow from Indian mythology. Oh! And my young heroes are often of Indian origin. So yeah! My brand of YA is not easily classifiable. Imagine my relief when I found I had a home in speculative YA. There are less rules here, so I don’t worry so much about breaking them.
So, then, I wanted to understand what YA speculative fiction really meant in today’s world.
Rysa Walker, author of the Chronos Files YA series told me, “Anything that couldn’t happen in real life is speculative fiction.”
Speculative fiction is, as I found, an umbrella term for fantasy, science fiction, horror, magic realism; everything that falls under “that which can’t really happen or hasn’t happened yet.”
I admit it. I’m a natural risk taker, though I’ve never been tempted by heli-skiing, free climbing or any other extreme sport. I’m talking about a different kind of risk taking. I’m a stay-at-home writer who taps away in a cosy lair, inventing daredevil strategies for writing projects. My new novel, Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind, is a case in point.
Readers of my first novel, A Calculated Life, were probably expecting me to stay comfortably within the category of science fiction for my second novel. Science fiction offers a huge canvas, one that’s proven irresistible to many mainstream writers. But for my latest novel, Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind, I wanted to crash through the centuries. The story spans over 600 years—from the Renaissance to the twenty-second century. It’s an equal mix of speculative, contemporary, and historical fiction.
The Sunburst Awards, an annual celebration of excellence in Canadian fantastic literature, announces that its 2016 call for submissions is now open.
The Sunburst Awards Society, launched in 2000, annually brings together a varying panel of distinguished jurors to select the best full length work of literature of the fantastic written by a Canadian in both Adult and Young Adult categories. 2016 is also the inaugural year for our short fiction award, for the best short fiction written by a Canadian.
Interested publishers and authors are asked to submit entries as early as possible, to provide this year’s jurors sufficient time to read each work. The cut-off date for submissions is January 31, 2016; books and stories received after that date will not be considered.
Third Place Story: “Animalizing,” by Marisela Navarro
Honorable Mentions:
The judges would like to acknowledge “The Lion and the Beauty Queen” by Brenda Peynado and “Linnet’s Gifts” by Zoe Gilbert as the fourth and fifth place stories.
The three winners will be published on their website, and receive $2000, $200, and $100 respectively.
(15) LE GUIN POETRY READINGS. Ursula K. Le Guin will be reading from Late in the Day: Poems 20-10-2014 in Portland, OR at Another Read Through Books on December 17, Powell’s City of Books on January 13, and Broadway Books on February 24.
As Le Guin herself states, “science explicates, poetry implicates.” Accordingly, this immersive, tender collection implicates us (in the best sense) in a subjectivity of everyday objects and occurrences. Deceptively simple in form, the poems stand as an invitation both to dive deep and to step outside of ourselves and our common narratives. As readers, we emerge refreshed, having peered underneath cultural constructs toward the necessarily mystical and elemental, no matter how late in the day.
These poems of the last five years are bookended with two short essays, “Deep in Admiration” and “Form, Free Verse, Free Form: Some Thoughts.”
1) I am never going to be on a panel about diversity, feminism, or privilege, ever again. Not because these panels shouldn’t be held or because I don’t like being on them or because they aren’t useful. But because they reveal so much injustice that I come away seething and upset.
1A) I know that I am a beneficiary of privilege. I pass for straight white male. And to the extent that I am not paying attention to it, I am part of the problem.
1B) This is why, for my own sake, I have boiled it down to, “I do not have the right to be arrogant or judgmental. I do not have the right to be disrespectful of anyone. I must treat everyone with courtesy and respect.” Sometimes it’s easy — sometimes it takes a deliberate and conscious effort. (I have become very much aware when my judgments kick in — yes, it’s clever for me to say, “I’m allergic to stupidity, I break out in sarcasm.” But it’s also disrespectful. I know it. I’m working on it.)
(17) CANTINA COLLABORATION. Did you know J.J. Abrams wrote the Star Wars: The Force Awakens Cantina Band Music with Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda? Abrams told the story on last night’s Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.
There are also two other clips on the NBC site, “J.J. Abrams broke his back trying to rescue Harrison Ford,” and “J.J. Abrams was afraid to direct Star Wars.”
I myself will not be purchasing, reading, and therefore not voting for anything published by Tor
[VD] Who said anything about purchasing or reading? Never limit your tactical options.
His answer reminded me of the bestseller Steal This Book. Although in that case, it was the author, Abbie Hoffman, who gave his own book that title.
(19) VOX LOGO NEXT? In a different post, Vox added a stinger in his congratulations to a commenter who bragged about being the point of contact for the outfit that does Larry Correia’s logo-etched gun parts.
I’m actually his point of contact at JP, so I’m feeling proud of myself today.
[VD] Good on you. Now tell them that the Supreme Dark Lord wants HIS custom weaponry and it will outsell that of the International Lord of Hate any day.
And it should look far more evil and scary than that.
(21) LUCAS EXPLAINS. In a long interview at the Washington Post, George Lucas offers his latest explanation why he re-edited Star War to make Greedo shoot first.
He also went back to some scenes that had always bothered him, particularly in the 1977 film: When Han Solo (Harrison Ford) is threatened by Greedo, a bounty hunter working for the sluglike gangster Jabba the Hutt, Han reaches for his blaster and shoots Greedo by surprise underneath a cantina table.
In the new version, it is Greedo who shoots first, by a split second. Deeply offended fans saw it as sacrilege; Lucas will probably go to his grave defending it. When Han shot first, he says, it ran counter to “Star Wars’ ” principles.
“Han Solo was going to marry Leia, and you look back and say, ‘Should he be a cold-blooded killer?’ ” Lucas asks. “Because I was thinking mythologically — should he be a cowboy, should he be John Wayne? And I said, ‘Yeah, he should be John Wayne.’ And when you’re John Wayne, you don’t shoot people [first] — you let them have the first shot. It’s a mythological reality that we hope our society pays attention to.”
An obvious point, but it needs to be stated clearly: Star Wars fans don’t own the Star Wars movies. We just like them. If they get changed and we don’t like them anymore, that’s perfectly cool, because we don’t have to like them anymore. That’s the deal. All sorts of creative works come in multiple editions, director’s cuts, abridged versions, expanded versions. Lucas appears to be far more into this tinkering than other filmmakers, but he’s hardly unique. Take Blade Runner: …
(22) DUELING SPACESHIPS. Millennium Falcon or Starship Enterprise? There is no question as to which space vehicle Neil deGrasse Tyson would choose.
[Thanks to Gregory N. Hullender, Martin Morse Wooster, Andrew Porter, Brian Z., and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Josh Jasper.]
The Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic celebrates the best in Canadian fantastic literature published during the previous calendar year.
Adult Category
The Troop by Nick Cutter
The Back of the Turtle by Thomas King
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
My Real Children by Jo Walton
Will Starling by Ian Weir
Young Adult Category
The Night Gardener by Jonathan Auxier
Tin Star by Cecil Castellucci
A Breath of Frost by Alyxandra Harvey
Sophie, In Shadow by Eileen Kernaghan
The Door in the Mountain by Caitlin Sweet
The winners will be announced in the fall.
Sunburst Award winners receive a cash prize of $1,000 as well as a medallion which incorporates the Sunburst logo.
The jurors for the 2015 award are S.M. Beiko, Gerard Collins, Paula Johanson, Corey Redekop and Sherryl Vint.
