Monthly Archives: February 2010

Ray Bradbury Award Nominees

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 SFWA announced the six nominees for the Ray Bradbury Award today, given for best motion picture in the science fiction field. The winner will be announced in May during the Nebula Awards:

The Ray Bradbury Award for
Outstanding Dramatic Presentation

Star Trek, J.J. Abrams (Paramount)
District 9, Neill Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell (Tri-Star)
Avatar, James Cameron (Fox)
Moon, Duncan Jones and Nathan Parker (Sony)
Up, Bob Peterson and Pete Docter (Disney/Pixar)
Coraline, Henry Selick (Laika/Focus)

(The link works for the rest of the Nebula nominees, too, if you insist…)

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian for the story.]

Elliott Shorter Update

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Master El at Black Rose Ball

It’s been almost a year since my last story on Elliot Shorter. Through Facebook I’ve learned he has been getting around more and been feeling better. Master El looked particularly elegant in his Society for Creative Anachronism attire at the Black Rose Ball on February 6.

During the fall he attended the Bridge Birthday Party in Hope Valley, Rhode Island and even took charge of one side in a board game played with living pieces:

Later in the evening, El climbed the long, steep stairs to the second floor — with the help of the “brute squad” — to take part in the traditional bout of live alquerques (an ancestor of checkers and chess, and one of the oldest known board games). El took one side of the tabletop board, and Josef the other, while a host of local lords and ladies took to the carefully marked-up floor to play out their moves, stylishly sweeping the opposing pieces off the board. Three games were played … and the final score was a tie, with one win for El, one for his opponent, and one draw.

Bark is Worse than the Byte

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Puppy Tweets

Now available from Amazon is Puppy Tweets, a technology that will send a tweet to a dog’s Twitter account whenever the animal barks. As the LA Times explains:

A round of woofing could lead to a tweet of “I bark because I miss you. There, I said it. Now hurry home.” A frenzied run through the backyard might garner “I finally caught that tail I’ve been chasing, and . . . OOUUUCHH!”

Puppy Tweets consists of a collar tag with integrated motion and sound sensors that’s linked to a home computer via Wi-Fi. A USB receiver is included. There are 500 canned tweets, all in English, which gives Puppy Tweets a leg up (pardon the expression) on Bowlingual Voice, a device that translates barks into Japanese, which I don’t understand any better.

I’m reminded of the recruiting sergeant in Starship Troopers who tells Johnny Rico, “I don’t think we can risk assigning a boy to K-9 who didn’t outwit his mother to have his dog sleep with him,” because if Heinlein was writing his novel today he might have to use a different line, like “How can we trust a Caleb to a boy who never let his dog tweet?”

[Thanks to Diana Glyer for the story.]

Splashman

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Reading about Yves Rossy’s unsuccessful attempt to use his jetpack to fly from Morocco to Spain last November brought to mind the voice of the Wizard of Oz, who was asking Rossy: “What do you have that Icarus didn’t have? I’ll tell you, my friend: a ridiculously large support staff.”

When “Jetman” jumped from a plane 6,500 feet above Tangier in Morocco for a flight expected to take a quarter of an hour, the turbulence and clouds drove him low enough that he let go the wing and parachuted into the sea. He was rescued uninjured by the Spanish Coast Guard, who also recovered the wing (which had its own parachute and float.) (The BBC video report is here.)

Didn’t Childhood’s End develop a human society so advanced that it became a popular pastime to rescue adventurers who stranded themselves in life-threatening predicaments?

[Thanks to David Klaus for the story.]

BookViewCafe Contest at SF Signal

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SFSignal.com is giving away two copies of the e-book, The Shadow Conspiracy, a steampunk anthology from Book View Press edited by Phyllis Irene Radford and Laura Anne Gilman.

The Shadow Conspiracy is a collection of stories set on alternative earth. The press release says this earth is “a place powered by steam and magic.” Wasn’t Bruce Jay Friedman the last writer to work with this concept? But seriously, folks…

This world takes off from a gathering of four poets on the shores of Lake Geneva in 1816, and provides a setting for stories by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, Sarah Zettel, Steven Harper, Pati Nagle, Jennifer Stevenson,  Nancy Jane Moore, Brenda Clough, Judith Tarr, and Irene Radford.

Available Formats include PDF, EPUB, Mobi, .prc, .lrf, and .lit.

For a chance to win a free copy, visit the SFSignal contest page. The contest ends Wednesday, February 24, 11 p.m. US Central Time.

Jim Harmon Dies

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Well-known fan Jim Harmon died February 16. I had the good luck to meet him for the first time at last year’s Loscon. Unfortunately, on the last day of the con he suffered a mild heart attack and was briefly hospitalized and now, less than three months later, he has passed away.

Harmon was one of the many fans who also enjoyed professional success in sf, writing more than 50 stories for the prozines. Later he gained a strong following in another fandom, among the followers of “old time radio.” His friend Martin Grams recalls:

In 1967, he published The Great Radio Heroes which to this day, is considered a milestone for reference books about old-time radio. Prior to that book, there was nothing really published that truly documented old-time radio through interviews and newspaper articles. Not only was he the first to do any sort of real research, but his smooth prose offered his generation a chance to revisit feelings of nostalgia.

In the mid-Seventies Harmon was West Coast editor of Monsters of the Movies, Marvel’s version of Famous Monsters of Filmland. In 1977 he was presented the Inkpot Award by the San Diego Comic-Con.

For better or worse, Harmon’s early fannish fame revolved around the “Midwestcon Door Incident.” As Harry Warner wrote in A Wealth of Fable:

Around 8 p.m. on May 27, 1954, Harlan Ellison was engaging in the ancient fannish pastime of tossing water encased in paper bags from a window when Jim Harmon happened by the impact point of one missle on the sidewalk. Several fans went immediately to the room where Ellison locked himself. Informed that Harlan was not receiving visitors, Harmon “hit the door about four times with my fist and it splintered and fell down,” as Jim remembered the event later. Ellison, undiscouraged, simply locked himself in another room with an intact door until police arrived.

Later, so Buck Coulson told Mimosa readers:

The police left and that evening Harlan came around to various room parties, apologizing for the affair and taking up a collection to pay for the broken door. A bit later, Harmon came around, ‘disguised’ in Lynn Hickman’s coat (which was about half the size he usually wore), apologizing for the incident… and taking up a collection to pay for the broken door. Our group tossed quarters to each one.

It’s a funny part of fanhistory, but Harmon outgrew it years ago. We can count on Harmon’s memory remaining alive in several different fandoms for years to come.

[Thanks to Lee Gold and Andrew Porter for the story.]

Mike Returns to the Time Tunnel

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SF Signal has posted a new “Mind Meld.” I was lucky enough to be invited to answer a question that’s right up my alley:

Q: Which off-the-air science fiction television show deserves a remake? What changes would you make to update it?

My plan to redo Time Tunnel gives the Mind Meld a climactic ending. (Though it may only be that mine was the last piece to come in before the deadline…)

Bradbury Coming to Egyptian Theater

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Ray Bradbury will speak before a showing of the Charles Beaumont documentary at the Egyptian Theater on Saturday, March 27 (the theater’s March calendar has yet to be posted online, so no direct link.) 

The new Beaumont documentary features a long interview with Harlan Ellison, as well as Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, S.T. Joshi, John Shirley, the late Forry Ackerman, George Clayton Johnson, Bill Nolan and Marc Scott Zicree.

Johnson, Nolan and Zicree will answer questions after the March 27 screening.

That same weekend the Egyptian will show Logan’s Run (March 26). The novel’s author’s Bill Nolan and George Clayton Johnson will be there, and they will be back for the showing of The Intruder on March 28.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian for the story.]

X Marks the Spot

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Hubble image of...what, exactly?

Hubble image of...what, exactly?

When the Hubble Telescope took follow-up photographs of an object detected by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research sky survey, it captured images of the remarkable X-pattern near the nucleus of the object and trailing streamers of dust. Astronomers speculate this is the product of a head-on collision by two asteroids.

One fan demurs. Bjo Trimble e-mailed friends, “Don’t they see this is an alien spaceship? For pitysake! Every Sci-fi reader/watcher would recognize it!”