Monthly Archives: December 2011

Chicon 7 Still Looking For Hugo Base Design

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Chicon 7 has extended its deadline to enter the 2012 Hugo base design competition until January 15, 2012.

The iconic Hugo rocket, always the dominant feature of the annual award, is set on a unique base commissioned by the current year’s committee. Extending a recent trend, Chicon 7 has invited artists and designers from around the world to create a base with a theme appropriate to Chicago and the Midwest.

The winning designer will get to introduce the base design at the Hugo Awards Ceremony, and in addition, will receive a full five-day attending membership to Chicon 7.

Entrants are asked to submit initial drawings, sketches, and/or a fabricated sample of their proposed designs by January 15, 2012. Entrants also need to arrange for the full set of up to 30 bases to be manufactured if their design is successful, with a target price of no more than $150 per individual base. Bases must be delivered by no later than June 30, 2012.

Full terms and conditions for the competition can be found on the Chicon website Chicon 7 web site.

The full press release follows the jump.

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Gaiman on “Wait, Wait” TV Special

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Neil Gaiman will be a guest on the television debut of Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!. Its “2011 Year in Review” special airs December 23 at 8 p.m. on BBC America.  

Show mainstays, host Peter Sagal, official judge and scorekeeper Carl Kasell, and frequent panelists Paula Poundstone and Alonzo Bodden all join the fun, says The Hollywood Reporter.

NPR’s Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! reaches 3.2 million listeners weekly, who will get to hear “2011 Year in Review” on NPR stations December 24 and 25.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian for the story.]

NYRSF Readings 1/3

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Kay T. Holt, Barbara Krasnoff and Daniel José Older, writers from the new anthology Subversion: Science Fiction & Fantasy tales of challenging the norm, will read from their works at the January 3 NYRSF Readings. They’ll be hosted by the book’s editor, Bart R. Leib.

Kay T. Holt is co-founder and editor of Crossed Genres Publications and runs the Science in My Fiction blog. Her fiction has been published in M-Brane SF, and the anthologies Rigor Amortis (Edge, 2010), Beauty Has Her Way (Dark Quest, 2011) and Space Tramps (Flying Pen, 2011).

Barbara Krasnoff’s short fiction has appeared in such publications as Sybil’s Garage, Weird Tales, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Crossed Genres, Space & Time Magazine, Electric Velocipede, Apex Magazine, Amazing Stories, and Clockwork Phoenix 2. Most recently, she’s had stories in Broken Time Blues from Absolute XPres and Fat Girl in a Strange Land, also from Crossed Genres, which will be out February 17, 2012.

Daniel José Older is a writer, composer and paramedic living in Brooklyn, New York. His short stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Flash Fiction, Crossed Genres, and The Innsmouth Free Press, among others. Follow his true ambulance adventures at http://www.raval911.blogspot.com and his music at http://ghoststar.net/  

Bart R. Leib is co-publisher of Crossed Genres Publications. He edited the anthology Subversion: Science Fiction & Fantasy tales of challenging the norm, and co-edited Fat Girl in a Strange Land (Release: 2/17/12). Bart’s fiction has been published in M-Brane SF Magazine and the anthology Beauty Has Her Way (Dark Quest, 2011). His nonfiction has been published by Fantasy Magazine and Science in My Fiction.

The full press release follows the jump.

 [Thanks to Jim Freund for the story.]

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The End Is Near

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The Mayan calendar runs out in 2012. That may be nothing more than the stonecutters’ equivalent of the Y2K Crisis. However, audiences have found in it a fresh reason for paying attention to science fictional scenarios of world-ending doom.  

The trend has led Andrew Fitzgerald to ask: If the world is ending, how will we find out? (Assuming this takes more than a couple of minutes, of course.) Now Fitzgerald is enjoying a mini-career as a commentator on apocalyptic journalism, recently guesting on NPR’s On the Media.

Worth reading is his blog post “Reporting the End of the World”, summarizing a discussion among journalists at the recent Newsfoo conference. What if aliens attack, as in Independence Day? How will journalists get information and distribute stories when broadcast technologies are shut down? These and similar practical concerns make for a very interesting thought experiment.

How are you going to post to your Alien Attack Liveblog and Alien Species Topic Page when there is no internet?? Other telecommunications? Thinking about 9-11 in particular, we realized that even if the aliens waited to zap our mobile networks, humans themselves would render them ineffective in a flurry of phone calls to Mother.

[Via James Hay.]

Now, a Word To Our Sponsors

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Taral Wayne posted about the unwonted notoriety he’s gained thanks to the internet scavengers at Betascript. Since then he’s corresponded with them:

In response to my email they claim they have used no copyrighted art of mine in the publication.  I can’t tell if this is true or not… I can only say one online service described it as “b/w, 68 pages, illustrations.”  But it might have been generic stuff, similar to the “cover.”  In any case, the only way I could find out is spend $45 to buy the book.

Taral wondered how this outfit gets away with cluttering up booksellers’ databases:

Who’s going to buy a book about me, the guy who invented the pretzel, or the second monkey on the right in a Planet of the Apes sequel? Makes it harder for customers to find what they’re really looking for.  I’m expecting the dealers will eventually refuse to list crap by outfits like Betascript.

Robert Lichtman hopes to accelerate that outcome with KTF reviews of Betascript’s Taral book on Amazon Canada, UK and Germany, plus Blackwells, Alibris and the DEA Store (Italy):

Don’t buy this book. Betascript Publishing is a pirate organization, and stole writing and artwork *copyrighted* by Taral Wayne for their sleazy little overpriced efforts. Yes, per the production description he is a well-known and honored artist, but please don’t support his hard work being ripped off by this disreputable publish-on-demand gang of thieves! Thank you.

Lange Novel Makes Kirkus Year-End List

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Sue Lange’s novel Tritcheon Hash has been named to the Kirkus Best Indie of 2011 list.

Tritcheon Hash was first published in paper in 2003 by Metropolis Ink. It was released as an ebook by Book View Café in November.

“Against a vivid sci-fi backdrop, Lange brings a light touch to heavy material, with a fast-paced, funny story to boot,” says the Kirkus Indie review.

Tritcheon Hash is available in the Kindle store or at the Book View Cafe website.

The City of Smofly Love

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Smofcon 30 will be held next year in Philadelphia, November 30-December 2, 2012. (Although no longer breaking news, I wanted to get it on record here for future reference.)

Smofcon 30’s theme will be “Building a Winning Team: The Right Player for the Right Position.” They’ll explore how to create and keep an organizing committee for every size convention and associated tasks such as:

  • defining the skill sets needed for a particular job
  • identifying a person’s skill sets (people, data management, logistics & planning, money handling, marketing and publications, computer and internet, theatrical, etc)
  • matching people to jobs to get the most enthusiasm and effort
  • keeping a geographically diverse committee together
  • evaluating yourself – figuring out which convention job(s) you’re best for

The 2012 Smofcon committee is: Joni Brill Dashoff, Laurie Mann, Ben Yalow, Todd Dashoff and Jim Mann.

Memberships cost $50 until February 29; $60 (3/1-9/30); $75 (10/1 and at door).

Smofcon 30 information is also available via Facebook and Twitter.

Don Sharp (1922-2011)

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Don Sharp, Tasmanian-born film director, best known for his genre work at the Hammer studio, died December 18, aged 89. His films included The Kiss of the Vampire (1963), Witchcraft (1964), Curse of the Fly (1965), Rasputin, the Mad Monk and The Face of Fu Manchu (both 1966), Jules Verne’s Rocket to the Moon (1967) and Psychomania (1973). Before stepping behind the camera, Sharp had been an actor, playing ‘Mitch’ Mitchell in the 1953 BBC radio serial Journey Into Space.

[Thanks to Steve Green for the story.]

Pointing the Way, But to Where?

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Do not miss Charles Platt’s review of The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick in the New York Times. Platt tells how he heard some of these exegetical ideas from Dick in person back in 1979, while the rest of his mini-essay is rich with other intriguing insights.

 The following quotes are selected merely to give a sense what is being reviewed.

The trouble is, any revelatory messages are embedded in more than 900 pages of impulsive theorizing, much of which is self-referential. Dick typically floats a concept, criticizes it 10 pages later, criticizes the critique, then rejects the whole thing as a totally different notion enters his head.

We receive no help from the editors in mapping this tangle. As Richard Doyle, a professor of English and information sciences and technology at Penn State, writes in his afterword, “When you begin reading the ‘Exegesis,’ you undertake a quest with no shortcuts or cheat codes.” Thus we’re on our own when we ponder sentences like “This ­forces me to reconsider the ‘discarding and annexing’ process by the brain in favor of a proliferation theory,” or “So irreality and perturbation are the two perplexities which confront us,” or “I dreamed: I am the fish whose flesh is eaten, and because I am fat, it is good. (Bob Silverberg ate me.)”

[Thanks to Andrew Porter for the story.]