Among the 2,600 stories that series editor John Joseph Adams screened for Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015, he chose 80 as notable — see the list, now posted on the series’ website.
Editor Joe Hill selected 20 for publication (ten science fiction, ten fantasy). Those picks are designated on the table in green.
100 Year Starship has announced the finalists in the inaugural Canopus Award for Excellence in Interstellar Writing.
The Canopus Award is an annual writing prize that recognizes “the finest fiction and non-fiction works that contribute to the excitement, knowledge, and understanding of interstellar space exploration and travel.”
The winners will be revealed on October 30, during the 100 Year Starship 2015 Public Symposium in Santa Clara, California.
Previously Published Long-Form Fiction (40,000 words or more):
Previously Published Short-Form Fiction (between 1,000 and 40,000 words):
In the category of “Original Fiction” (1,000-5,000 words):
Original Non-Fiction (1,000-5,000 words):
Canopus Award Judges: Writer and 100YSS Creative and Editorial director Jason Batt; author and former Wall Street Journal reporter August Cole; Founder of International Speechwriting Associates Kathleen Colgan, Ph.D.; teacher at the University of Edinburgh in the School of Education and Leadership, Janet DeVigne; editor Jaym Gates, 100YSS Principal and former astronaut Mae Jemison, M.D., Chapman University creative writing student Alec Medén; Rutgers University Professor Ronke Olabisi. Ph.D.; faculty and advisor to the Singularity University David Orban, Georgia high school freshman Bailey Stanley, writer and anthropologist Juliette Wade, Ph.D.; Aeronautical and Astronautical engineer Paul Webber; journalist Sofia Webber; astrobiologist and creator of Yuri’s Night Loretta Whitesides; and Major General Ken Wisian.
By JJ: We’ve spent a lot of time over the last several months reading and discussing the Hugo Best Novella finalists. This thread has been created to give us the opportunity to discuss the rest of the entries on the longlist.
Please employ your best judgment, and use rot13 to encrypt anything especially spoilery, in consideration of those who may not have gotten to read all of the entries yet.
To make a JavaScript bookmarklet for your browser that handles rot13 – so that all you have to do is highlight some text and click the bookmark to encrypt/decrypt it — go here, click on the “file suppressed” message, copy the one line of code to your clipboard, and save it as the target/URL of a Bookmark/Favorite. (Thanks to Rev. Bob for the neat trick.)
[Second in a series. See also — Hugo Best Novel Longlist Discussion Thread and Hugo Best Novelette Longlist Discussion Thread.]
(1) Sasquan GoH and ISS astronaut Kjell Lindgren knows what day it is —
Happy #HobbitDay! To celebrate, I'm having second breakfast! pic.twitter.com/pwW70KYt16
— Kjell Lindgren (@astro_kjell) September 22, 2015
It’s Bilbo’s and Frodo’s birthday!
(2) But that’s not today’s only important birthday. Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer announced the arrival of their “humble bundle” —
He was born at 8:37 in the morning on September the 16th, which is, I am told, the commonest birthday in the US. It was a long but rewarding labour. The name on his birth registration is Anthony, but mostly I call him Squeaker. He makes the best noises in the world, mostly squeaks and peeps and snuffles.
Amanda is an amazing mother. I am changing nappies (or diapers, if you are not English) and enjoying it much too much. This is wonderful.
(3) George R.R. Martin has something of his own to celebrate — “A New Record”:
For now, let it suffice to say that the Emmy looks very good in my TV room, and while it IS an honor just to be nominated (as I have been, six times before), it’s even cooler to win.
(4) Today in History:
1986 – The TV show “ALF” debuted on NBC.
2004 – The pilot episode of “Lost” aired.
(5) Run away! Run away! “Burger King’s Halloween Whopper will be its first intentionally frightening burger”:
We’ve seen a lot of scary fast food over the years but now Burger King is reportedly coming out with a new Whopper that’s intentionally frightening. Fast food blog Burger Lad seems to have obtained some leaked pictures of a special Halloween Whopper that will feature pitch-black buns. As you can see in the photo above, this does not look like an appetizing burger — it rather looks as though Burger King has slapped a slab of beef and some vegetables in between two large pieces of charcoal.
(6) I don’t like that grub, but I do like this garb!
"900 years of time and space and I've never met anyone who wasn't important." @slcomiccon @SevenTimesSix Booth #1002 pic.twitter.com/h3CDeREk5S
— Seven Times Six (@SevenTimesSix) September 22, 2015
(7) I’ve been waiting for this – Steve Davidson’s latest look at “The 1941 Retro Hugo Awards (Part 5 — Dramatic Presentation Short Form)”.
So far as radio plays go, there’s plenty to listen to, though again, many of the originals are simply not archived anywhere accessible. Superman is an obvious choice; an episode or two from Lux Radio or Mercury Theater may whet your appetite. Don’t forget to check out the Blue Beetle too, as well as taking the opportunity to compare the Green Hornet’s radio appearances against the serial show.
(8) The “’Star Trek’ virtual tour will recreate every deck of the Enterprise” comes with a nice 12-minute animation.
You’ve probably seen a few attempts at recreating worlds in game engines, but never at this level of detail. Artist Jason B is working on the Enterprise-D Construction Project, an Unreal Engine-based virtual tour that aims to reproduce all 42 decks in the Enterprise from Star Trek: The Next Generation. While it’s not quite photorealistic, the attention to detail in this digital starship is already uncanny — the bridge, shuttle bay and other areas feel like lived-in spaces, just waiting for the crew to return. Jason is drawing on as much official material as he can to get things pixel-perfect, and he’s only taking creative liberties in those areas where there’s no canonical content.
(9) Mothership Zeta officially launches in October, but Editor Mur Lafferty, Fiction Editor Sunil Patel, Non-fiction Editor Karen Bovenmyer have posted sample Issue 0 at the website. The magazine will be a quarterly, “crammed with the best, most fun speculative fiction.” Read Issue 0 now, containing work from:
(Note: “Jackalope Wives” by Ursula Vernon originally ran in Apex Magazine in 2014.)
(10) The Star of the Guardians Indiegogo Campaign has raised over $20,000. Thanks to our contributors,we can now fund the conceptual artwork and the illustrated storyboard book. We can also ensure that all of our amazing perks will be delivered to all of our contributors.
The goal of the campaign is to raise $55,000.
(11) Joe Haldeman is interviewed by Brian Merchant in “The Author of Our Best SF Military Novel Explains the Future of War”.
Now, it’s becoming closer to reality—3D printers may soon allow anyone with the right hardware to manufacture deadly weaponry at home. Obscene weapons are increasingly obscenely easy to find. “Once we have that access to abundant materials, and anyone can print out a hydrogen bomb, we’re about an hour away from total destruction,” he says. “We are just a hair’s thread away from a large disaster.” The future of war is distributed, in other words. But we are just as ill-equipped to deal with our violent impulses now as we were four decades ago, Haldeman says.
“I don’t think we’ve learned any fundamental thing about solving the problem. We’ve learned more about why people do seek violent solutions,” he says. “That doesn’t mean we have the social mechanism to address it.” His words resonate, depressingly, when you consider that the US now averages one mass shooting per day, and that the trend is only accelerating upwards.
“We have people who just go down to the K-mart and just buy ammunition, and they could kill a few dozen people before we can do anything,” he says. “[M]ore brute force is available to individuals, with no obvious improvement in the individual’s ability to responsibly apply that force. Or decide not to use it.” War, it seems, has been distributed.
Hence the forever warring, in smaller theaters.
(12) “Hear Radio Dramas of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy & 7 Classic Asimov Stories” at Open Culture.
If you’re thinking that the epic scale of Asimov’s sprawling trilogy—one he explicitly modeled after Edward Gibbon’s multi-volume History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire—will prove impossible to realize on the screen, you may be right. On the other hand, Asimov’s prose has lent itself particularly well to an older dramatic medium: the radio play. As we noted in an earlier post on a popular 1973 BBC adaptation of the trilogy, Ender’s Game author Orson Scott Card once described the books as “all talk, no action.” This may sound like a disparagement, except, Card went on to say, “Asimov’s talk is action.”
(13) The supermoon lunar eclipse happens this weekend:
The supermoon lunar eclipse of 2015 will occur Sunday, Sept. 27, and is a confluence of three events: a full moon; a lunar eclipse, in which the Earth blocks the sun’s light from hitting the moon; and lunar perigee, when the moon is in the closest part of its orbit to Earth. The last time such a confluence happened was in 1982; there were just five instances of it in the 20th century. This time around, viewers looking from the Americas, Europe, Africa, western Asia and the eastern Pacific Ocean will have a chance to see the show.
(14) A new Mars exploration tool — “’Mars Trek’ Is Google Earth for the Red Planet” on Motherboard.
If you are one of the thousands of people who would like to start a new life on Mars, you might want to get an early start on scouting out some premium real estate options. Fortunately, NASA has created a new Google-Earth-style web app for the red planet, providing the Mars-eyed among us with a way to virtually explore their fantasy destinations in stunning detail.
“Working with our expert development team at [the Jet Propulsion Laboratory], we have just released our latest product, Mars Trek,” said NASA project manager Brian Day in a video about Mars Trek released today. According to Day, this “web-based portal allows mission planners, scientists, and the general public to explore the surface of Mars in great detail as seen through the eyes of a variety of instruments on a number of spacecraft.”
… Beyond these experiments, you can also calculate the trip time between two points on Mars, explore the adopted homes of NASA rovers and landers, and, if you are feeling really ambitious, 3D-print full sections of the online map. Day and his team also plan to add more features soon, including speculations about landing sites for future projects like the Mars 2020 rover.
[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Will R., and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day GSLamb.]
Salt Lake Comic Con opens September 24. Held for the first time in 2013, the rapidly growing event drew 120,000 in 2014 and this year will fill the entire Salt Palace Convention Center in Salt Lake City.
Salt Lake Comic Con is not only distinguished by its explosive success. Among all the Comic Cons in America, the event run by Dan Farr Productions is the only one being sued by the San Diego Comic Con (SDCC) for trademark infringement.
SDCC alleges that the name of Salt Lake City’s event is too similar. In court papers filed in August 2014, SDCC claimed that SLCC had piggybacked on its “creativity, ingenuity, and hard work,” and by using the Comic Con name “intended to suggest, mislead and confuse consumers into believing that the Salt Lake Comic Con convention is associated with, authorized by, endorsed by or sponsored by SDCC.”
Comic-Con International, the organizers of San Diego Comic-Con and WonderCon, own the trademarks on San Diego Comic-Con, Anaheim Comic-Con, San Francisco Comic-Con and Los Angeles Comic-Con.
Although the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) registered the Salt Lake Comic Con trademark in July, the ultimate fate of the trademark depends on a settlement of the suit or a court decision.
In August, U.S. Magistrate Judge Jan Alder gave both conventions until August 18, 2016 to settle, and set a timeline for discovery and other actions that could lead to a trial in late 2016 or early 2017.
One head-scratching oddity about the suit is that SDCC did not originate the “comic con” nomenclature. It was first used by the New York ComiCon in 1965.
Andrew Porter recalls, “In 1965, I ran off the program for a New York ComiCon — note abbreviation, not what’s used now — on my spirit duplicator, all 125 copies. And I worked on several ComiCons, including one with Ted White, John Benson, Mike McInerney and others, in the mid-1960s. And now someone wants to [trademark] the name?”
Salt Lake Comic Con management is well aware of the history, and displays online a huge array of documents supporting their position. They emphasize that more than 90 other events have been called “Comic Cons.” Several are megacons. Denver’s drew a reported 101,500 attendees in May. A Seattle convention had 80,000 in March. The New York Comic Con says it attracted 151,000 last year.
And it actually was not until 2007 that the nonprofit behind SDCC trademarked the Comic-Con name which it has been using since 1970.
Peter Hahn, a lawyer who represents the nonprofit on trademark issues, pointed out that registration is not required to protect a mark. Mr. Hahn said the nonprofit’s tools in dealing with more than a dozen conventions that have used some form of the Comic-Con name have included warning letters and licensing arrangements. Litigation has been used for “the most egregious” cases, he said.
Last August, the San Diego group filed an infringement suit against the operators of Salt Lake Comic Con, who, according to the complaint, had gone so far as to wrap an Audi with advertisements for their convention and drive it around San Diego. The Salt Lake operators countersued, asking the United States District Court for the Southern District of California to declare the San Diego nonprofit’s trademark claims invalid.
Encouraged by the USPTO’s initial decision granting registration to the Salt Lake group, a large number of other local comic cons have now launched trademark bids .
The NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Solar System Ambassadors Program (SSA) is inviting applicants to become an ambassador to the public for calendar year 2016.
The Solar System Ambassadors Program is a public engagement effort accomplished by space enthusiast volunteers across the nation who communicate NASA’s exciting discoveries and plans for future exploration of the solar system and beyond to general public audiences. Ambassadors become an extended part of each mission’s team and an important interface between the NASA community and the populace at large.
Applications will be accepted through September 30. Selections will be announced in early December, with successful candidates beginning their year of service after completing Orientation and Ethics training.
Solar System Ambassadors are asked to arrange, conduct and report at least four (4) community-based events per year.
Is this for you?
The Ideal Ambassador Candidate —
NASA has ambassadors in every state and territory, and several dedicated to specialties. Interested parties from the following areas are especially encouraged to apply: Alaska, Delaware, Iowa, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia, Wyoming, District of Columbia and US territories.
They hope to add at least 100 new volunteers to the program in 2016.
[Thanks to James H. Burns for the story.]
Once Larry Smith got home from the hospital after totalling his van on the way back from Dragon Con, he and Sally Kobee took stock of what they’d need to get their convention bookselling business going again.
Marcia Kelly Illingworth set up a GoFundMe with an initial target of $10,000. But with the encouragement of fans who wanted to help Larry and Sally get a new van that goal was increased to $20,000.
Now the sf community has contributed $19,646 to the fund — while many donors are anonymous, there are also some pretty well-known names on the list.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter for the story.]
The Museum of Science Fiction of Washington, DC has called for submissions to its new triannual Journal of Science Fiction. The first issue will appear in January 2016.
The Journal “will serve as a forum for scientists and academics from around the world to discuss science fiction, including recent trends in the genre, its influence on the modern world, and its prognostications of the future.”
Monica Louzon, managing editor of the Journal, commented —
We want readers everywhere to consider the science fiction genre they love from new angles. We want them to ask questions and to have fun doing so... We’re encouraging anyone who considers themselves a science fiction scholar to send us their original articles, essays or book reviews for our first issue.
The Journal of Science Fiction will be published online three times a year. No subscription or submission fees will be required. A typical issue will feature between eight and twelve peer-reviewed academic articles and several book reviews and essays.
For further information, see the Author Guidelines.
What is the Museum of Science Fiction? http://t.co/oxsZgl0VfU #MOSF pic.twitter.com/XZYYfiVD3E
— Museum of Science Fiction (@Museum_SciFi) September 16, 2015
[Thanks to Michael J. Walsh for the story.]
Bill Nye the Science Guy, CEO of The Planetary Society, invites people to mark the Society’s 35th anniversary on October 24.
The “More to Explore: A Space Celebration with Bill Nye” event at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium will run 7:30-9:00 p.m. Ticket prices range from $27 to $97.
Before the event there will be a pre-show VIP dinner from 5:00-7:00 p.m. with Planetary Society dignitaries including Bill Nye, Nichelle Nichols (Star Trek’s Lt. Uhura), Andy Weir (author of The Martian), and others. Tickets to the dinner are $200 per person.
The Planetary Society hopes to raise $100,000 to fund its Archive with these anniversary events and related donations.
(1) Today’s birthday boys:
Born 1866: H.G. Wells
H. G. Wells in 1943.
Born 1912: Chuck Jones
Chuck Jones
Born 1947: Stephen King
Born 1950: Bill Murray
Bill Murray
And as a bonus, also on This Day in History:
1937: J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit published
(2) Grotesque parody news story of the day: “Game of Thrones Cast Murdered Following Emmy Victory”.
FANS of popular HBO fantasy series Game Of Thrones were this morning trying to get over last night’s shocking post-Emmy massacre, where virtually the entire cast and creative team were brutally murdered in cold blood.
… “One minute Peter Dinklage was standing with his Emmy and a big smile on his face, the next minute his head went sailing through the air,” said one eyewitness to what is now being referred to as the ‘Red Emmys’.
“Maisie Williams and Sophie Turner were stabbed through the heart, and the big lad who plays Sam got it in the neck. Even by Game of Thrones standards, it was fairly over the top”.
With so many members of the cast and crew slaughtered, fans are now fearing that next year’s season will focus mainly on Bran Stark as there’s basically nobody left at this stage.
(3) Constructed languages are the topic of a forthcoming documentary, Conlanging: The Art of Crafting Tongues .
Featuring an overview of the history of constructed languages up to and through the amazing creations and initiatives of those who actively invent new tongues today, this film tells the rich story that has expanded far beyond Tolkien’s “secret vice.” It’s being made by the people who know the craft intimately for language lovers and a general audience alike.
https://player.vimeo.com/video/130812323?color=faa302&byline=0&portrait=0
And All Things Linguistic has an interview with the creators of the documentary in the Conlangery #112 podcast.
(4) Add this to the list of “Han Solo in Carbonite” products — a huge vinyl sticker for your door.
(5) This year Gen Con featured another official beer, Drink Up and Prosper, from Sun King Brewing. According to the Indianapolis Star, not only was the brew available at the con, but it was put in cans and sold in stores.
This will be the fourth year the brewery has partnered with the world’s largest gaming convention, and the fourth beer brewed specifically for the event….
Previous beers included Froth of Khan (2014), Flagon Slayer (2013) and Ale of Destiny (2012).
(6) The Pittsburgh Pirates major league baseball team recently dressed up as superheroes “in the greatest baseball-themed comic book crossover of all-time.”
After the Pirates defeated the Dodgers, 4-3, the team dressed up as superheroes before boarding their flight to Colorado — like, for example, Superman with an expert hair curl hanging out with Bane that came complete with appropriate Zack Snyder lighting.
A squadron of Marvel’s cinematic heroes hung out with either a Na’vi or a really off-brand Nightcrawler: …
Costume selfie! (Via @El_Coffee on IG) pic.twitter.com/06VfkxqmZ1
— Pittsburgh Pirates (@Pirates) September 21, 2015
(7) The Tor boycott continues to fade to invisibility as a news story. Here’s what I found searching Twitter for “Tor boycott” today.
PLEASE BOYCOTT THE #BBC TONIGHT. THEY WILL BE SHOWING A PROGRAMME AT 7.40PM (BST) GLORIFYING TERRORISM. THE DOC-TOR MUST BE EXTERMINATED!
— Ginger Dalek (@Ginger_Dalek) September 19, 2015
It was the hyphenated “Doc-Tor” that triggered the result.
(8) And by strange coincidence, Adam-Troy Castro has written some good advice in his new blog post, “Writers: The Long-Term Benefits of Not Being An Ass”.
For the vast majority of artists, being an asshole to the people who give you money is not a good career move. You are not indispensable unless you’re an eminence of such towering fame that they are willing to bend heaven and Earth to keep you. And sometimes not even then. Fame is fleeting.
So one guy I’m thinking of, who has come out and described himself as one of the greatest writers of his generation, who says that his work is reeking with literary virtues that any number of others would give their left tits to be even shelved next to, who has been abusing his publisher in public and attacking his editors as people and in general making himself a horse pill – I think he’s in for a surprise, sooner or later, probably sooner. Writers who can sell the number of copies he sells, or more, are not exactly thin on the ground, and the vast majority of them will not be rallying their readers to send hate mail.
But this is not about him. This is about you, the struggling artist. And to you I have some strong advice.
Be a sweetheart.
Be the kind of artist who, when dropping by the publishing house, brings cookies. Or if not cookies, then at least a warm smile and a gracious manner.
(9) The Clarion Foundation has received a $100,000 donation from a benefactor who wishes to remain anonymous. Clarion will use the donation to launch an endowment fund in support of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, held annually at UC San Diego.
Karen Joy Fowler, president of the Clarion Foundation, expressed profound appreciation for this generous gift. “This is tremendously important to all of us who have worked with, for, and on behalf of Clarion over the years. For us, the workshop is a labor of love. Having these funds in hand allows us to plan for the future in a way we’ve never been able to before. This gift provides a solid foundation on which we can build.”
“Our global civilization is now embarked on an unconstrained experiment in long-term sustainability, which we have to get right for the sake of the generations to come,” says Clarion Foundation Vice President Kim Stanley Robinson. “Science fiction stories, ranging from utopian to dystopian, are what we do now to imagine outcomes that help us evaluate our present practices. The Clarion workshop nurtures and trains writers to change the ways we think about the future, and it helps to connect the sciences and the arts at UC San Diego and around the world. We’re thrilled with this gift, which enables us to continue that crucial work.”
The Clarion Foundation partners with UCSD in the delivery of the workshop, with the foundation managing faculty selection and the admissions process and UCSD managing the six-week summer workshop. The foundation has annually conducted fundraising campaigns that allow it to provide about $12,000 in scholarships each year and to cover expenses.
(10) Aaron French compares horror traditions in “Past and Future: Esoteric and Exoteric Philosophy in Weird Fiction” on Nameless Digest.
As with everything else, the philosophy behind dark, weird, and horrific fiction has evolved over time. This philosophical evolution of horror fiction arguably began in earnest with Edgar Allan Poe – though Poe also nurtured a sense of romantic love, which conquers, as well as defeats, his harshest poetry, e.g. “Alone.” Bleaker still, and more callous in disregard of the human race, is H. P. Lovecraft, grandfather of the grim, who described his philosophical position as the following: “…by nature a skeptic and analyst… [I] settled early into my present general attitude of cynical materialism.”
….But if we turn our attention to the postmodern, a new speciation occurs in the writings of Thomas Ligotti, representing a philosophy so hopeless, malicious, and unorthodox that it gives readers pause, unintentionally flipping mental levers and bringing about unwelcome psychological changes.
(11) Here’s somebody else who has definitely flipped his mental levers — “Man angers neighbors by shining ‘alien’ fighting spotlights”:
Neighbors in the Virginia Road area of Hermitage said Arthur Brown, 78, shines the spotlights outside his foil-wrapped house at all hours of the day and night because he is afraid of extra-terrestrial attacks.
(12) From June of 1992, a YouTube clip from Arsenio Hall with guests William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, who are too funny. Shatner enters using a walker and a nurse pushes Nimoy in a wheelchair.
James H. Burns further comments:
Shatner and Nimoy even pitch their convention appearances at the Creation cons of my old pals, Gary Bermand and Adam Malin–
And most amazingly, Shatner talks about his hopes for Star Trek Seven, which he later helped turn into a pretty good Trek novel!
[Thanks to James H. Burns, Will R., Martin Morse Wooster, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Rose Embolism.]