World Fantasy ConventionSM 2021 will be held in Montreal, Canada from November 4–7 at the Hotel Montreal Bonaventure.
The information is on the World Fantasy Convention site.
So far as I can tell I haven’t reported it here before, although the awarding of the right to host the convention was apparently made some time ago – MONSFFA, the Montreal club, posted the news in May.
(1) DOZOIS REMEMBERED AT NYRSF. Via David Langford comes news that New York Review of Science Fiction #349, a Special Gardner Dozois Memorial Issue, is available as a free download.
Memories, anecdotes, appreciations, confessions, and clickbait, from:
Michael Bishop • F. Brett Cox • Jack Dann Samuel R. Delany • Andy Duncan Greg Frost • Eileen Gunn • Joe Haldeman John Kessel • Nancy Kress • George R.R. Martin • Mike Resnick Darrell Schweitzer • Nisi Shawl Allen M. Steele • Michael Swanwick Lynne M. & Michael Damian Thomas Gordon Van Gelder • Howard Waldrop Patty Wells • Henry Wessells Fran Wilde • Sheila Williams
Michael Swanwick’s contribution leads off the issue:
Daredevil: Gardner appeared as a character in a Daredevil comic book. I am not kidding you. It was a minor role. His friend George Alec Effinger, aka “Piglet,” played a larger part in the plot, much to Gardner’s pretended chagrin. “I don’t know why I couldn’t get to beat up crooks,” he would say. “Piglet did!”
Eccentrics: Susan Casper loved to relate how she had once overheard two writers bemoaning the fact that, with the deaths of some of the founding fathers of science fiction, there were no longer any great eccentrics in the genre. Those two writers were Gardner and Howard Waldrop.
(2) INVALUABLE MAPS. The Guardian has three excerpts from The Writer’s Map, An Atlas of Imaginary Lands, ed. Hew Lewis-Jones. In the excerpts, called “Wizards, Moomins and pirates: the magic and mystery of literary maps”, Frances Hardinge discusses the map she made of Tove Jansson’s Moominland, Miraphora Mina writes about the Marauder’s Map featured in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and Robert Macfarlane writes about his map of Treasure Island.
I remember poring over the Moominland map at the front of Tove Jansson’s Finn Family Moomintroll. The map is homely, crowded and jubilantly out of scale, yet also haunting. Like the books themselves, the map always touched me with a gentle and inexplicable sadness. I imagined the Lonely Mountains isolated by their own vastness and strangeness, their slow, cold hearts filled with a drear and incurable loneliness.
But even then I noticed that one feature of the little map was not accurate, except in the sense that a stopped clock is right twice a day. Near a bridge is drawn a small tent, and beside it sits a little figure in a tapering hat. This is clearly meant to show the campsite of the green-clad, harmonica-playing Snufkin. But Snufkin cannot be pinned to a location so easily. He is an inveterate nomad, vanishing from the Moominvalley for long months at a time, then returning without warning or explanation. He was probably packing up his tent before the ink on the map had dried.
(3) NARCOTIC POWERS. Lev Grossman also endorses the cartographic impulse at Literary Hub: “Lev Grossman: Why We’ve Always Needed Fantastic Maps”.
I mention this as one example of the strange narcotic power that maps have, especially fictional ones, even when they’re present only in trace quantities. Of course I also had the usual transports over maps of Middle-earth, and Narnia, and the archipelagos of Earthsea, and the Hundred Acre Wood, and The Lands Beyond, where The Phantom Tollbooth took place. But I could get a contact high just from the cartographical border of the Uncle Wiggily board game. All maps are fascinating, but there’s something extra-mesmerizing about maps of places that don’t exist. Maps are part of the apparatus of reality, and the navigation thereof. There’s a subversive, electric pleasure in seeing them miswired up to someplace fictional. In most cases, the closest you can get to actually visiting the land in a fictional map is by reading about it. But in my youth I got a little closer. I did this by playing Dungeons & Dragons.
(4) DEMOLITION AND SALVAGE. Aliette de Bodard has a guest post on Chuck Wendig’s blog about “Cannibalizing A Draft (Or: The Art Of Rewriting)”.
…I looked at my field of ashes draft and thought I might as well toss it in the bin: usually I manage to salvage scenes but this felt like no single scene was working properly.
I moped for a couple of weeks (a totally writer thing to do! Well, at least this writer!) And then I sat down, turned to a fresh page in my brainstorming notebook, and wrote, very deliberately, “list of current scenes in the draft”, and “list of scenes I would like in new draft” (ok, it might have been a teensy bit more cryptic since they were notes to myself). I also took another notebook and did pages of brain dumps that were essentially me talking to myself about what I needed to fix. Writing it down without judgement was actually super helpful to unlock the issues and possible fixes: since it was longhand and not on a computer, I didn’t feel like it was a final story or even graven in stone. It forced me to keep thinking, to keep track of what I was doing, but not in a way that paralyzed me….
(5) HE CONTROLS THE VERTICAL. While it’s cliché to ask an sf writer “Where do you get your ideas?”, Alastair Reynolds is happy to tell you where he got one of his — “Oh, Atlanta”.
I haven’t been back to Atlanta since 1992, but the hotel did have one lingering influence on my work which that article prompts me to mention. Those swooping interior elevators left a big mark on me, and when I came to write Revelation Space – which I started later that year – they became the model for the elevators in the Nostalgia for Infinity, especially the part where Ilia Volyova’s elevator plunges through the vast interior of the cache chamber. When, in Chapter Two, Ilia’s elevator announces its arrival at the “atrium” and “concierge” levels, that’s all down to the Marriot Marquis. I’d never been in an elevator that spoke before.
(6) TOUGH DAY FOR WOMBATS. My goodness!
Someday I will recover! pic.twitter.com/seUo1HYPY7
— Kingfisher & Wombat (@UrsulaV) October 23, 2018
(7) LOVECRAFT CONTINUES. Paul St.John Mackintosh considers the writers who are “Revising Lovecraft: The Mutant Mythos” in the LA Review of Books.
You can’t understand Lovecraft’s conflation of personal miscegenation and hereditary flaws with outside threats, social decay, and vast panoramas of evolution across Deep Time without first understanding the turn-of-the-century traditions within mainstream experimental literature and polemical pseudo-scientific writing that influenced him. Lovecraft may have been a bizarre, original outlier in the context of 1920s horror or science fiction, but he was completely comprehensible (and even representative) within these older and larger traditions. Many other far-right literary figures on both sides of World War I share much of Lovecraft’s grab-bag of Symbolist, Decadent, Spenglerian, and world-weary fin-de-siècle values and tropes. Period clichés of Yellow Book dandyism and racial doomsaying abound in this context. D’Annunzio, Hamsun, and Jean Lorrain would all have recognized a kindred spirit in Lovecraft, and period readers of Max Nordau’s Degeneration and sponsors of the Race Betterment Foundation would recognize familiar ideas, thinly recast, in Lovecraft’s oeuvre.
(8) RESISTANCE. Eneasz Brodski at Death Is Bad comes out “Against ‘Networking’”.
…So I hate it when people refer to going to these sorts of events as “networking.” I dislike the whole concept of networking. It makes people feel like tools. Networking implies business. It’s about profit and career. I never approach a friend with “Hey, you wanna network on Saturday?” I never ask a partner “Hey, I miss you, haven’t networked with you in a bit, got plans this weekend?” So why the hell am I “networking” at a convention about one of my passions in life?
I blame capitalism. Apparently one can’t even have fun without feeling guilty, unless it’s about advancing oneself in life. >:( I just like meeting people and talking and making acquaintances. I don’t expect anything from any of these evenings except a fun evening.…
(9) STILL GOLDEN. The Scientific American blog presents a profile of sff writer James Gunn, “Can Science Fiction Save the World?”
There was once a time when robots roamed the surface of Mercury, when a shape-shifting alien emerged from the ice of Antarctica, and when a galactic empire of 25 million planets spanned the Milky Way. It was called the “Golden Age” of science fiction, the period from the late 1930s to the late 1940s, when pioneering authors such as Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein wrote their first mind-bending stories. And though newer literary movements have mutated sci-fi’s DNA since then, the last surviving storyteller of the Golden Age—95-year-old James Gunn—is still writing.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and JJ.]
(11) COMICS SECTION.
(12) GRAHAM JOYCE. A 1998 interview with speculative fiction writer Graham Joyce, recipient of numerous awards, including the O. Henry Award and the World Fantasy Award, has just been uploaded — “Graham Joyce BBC Radio Leicester Interview 1998”.
(13) GOING CONCERN. This could be bad news — “Microplastics Are Turning Up Everywhere, Even In Human Excrement” – and it could be worse news if they aren’t leaving the body.
Microplastics have been found in human stool samples from countries in many parts of the world, according to a small pilot study being presented this week at the 26th annual United European Gastroenterology conference in Vienna.
The study, conducted by researchers from the Medical University of Vienna and the Environment Agency Austria, looked at stool samples from eight individuals in eight different countries: Finland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, the U.K. and Austria. Every stool sample tested positive for up to nine different plastic types, with an average of 20 particles of plastic per 10 grams of stool.
“Personally, I did not expect that each sample would … [test] … positive,” says lead researcher Dr. Philipp Schwabl of the Medical University of Vienna. He and his colleagues found that all eight stool samples contained polypropylene and polyethylene-terephthalate particles, which are major components of plastic bottle caps and plastic bottles. “Is it harmful to human health? That’s a very important question and we are planning further investigations.”
(14) CODE THREE. BBC says “Shipwreck found in Black Sea is ‘world’s oldest intact'”. It matches a portrayal of Odysseus and the Sirens.
A Greek merchant ship dating back more than 2,400 years has been found lying on its side off the Bulgarian coast.
The 23m (75ft) wreck, found in the Black Sea by an Anglo-Bulgarian team, is being hailed as officially the world’s oldest known intact shipwreck.
The researchers were stunned to find the merchant vessel closely resembled in design a ship that decorated ancient Greek wine vases.
The rudder, rowing benches and even the contents of its hold remain intact.
… The vessel is similar in style to that depicted by the so-called Siren Painter on the Siren Vase in the British Museum. Dating back to around 480 BC, the vase shows Odysseus strapped to the mast as his ship sails past three mythical sea nymphs whose tune was thought to drive sailors to their deaths.
(15) MORE BOMB THEORIES. Steven Zetichik in the Washington Post looks at the box-office failure of First Man (Peter Rabbit did better!) and says two reasons are that the film opened as a wide release, whereas director Damian Chazelle’s other two films, Whiplash and La La Land, opened in limited releases and built momentum. Also, the film didn’t do as well in space-friendly Houston and Los Angeles because Astros and Dodgers fans were too deeply involved in the playoffs to think about movies — “The Neil Armstrong movie appears to be flopping because of Marco Rubio. The truth is more complicated.”.
Some Hollywood pundits certainly thought so. In a post on the trade site Deadline, Michael Cieply asked, “What Do Words Cost? For ‘First Man,’ Perhaps, Quite A Lot,” and broke down the box-office underperformance by the word count in Gosling’s interview. Meanwhile, the Hollywood Reporter columnist Scott Feinberg advanced the theory even more directly.
“FIRST MAN got Swiftboated,” he posted on Twitter, referring to the politically motivated set of attacks during the 2004 presidential election about John Kerry’s Vietnam War record. “I genuinely believe its box-office performance was undercut by the BS about the planting of the American flag.”
He makes a potent case, given the decibel level of the controversy and the fact that “First Man” contains subject matter that might be expected to play strongly in red states.
But this political question, attention-grabbing as it is, ignores more nuts-and-bolts movie issues that were just as likely to have a significant impact, relating as much to how and when the film was released as to what a politician was tweeting about it.
(16) VINTAGE HOODIE. Don’t let the reception for First Man dissuade you from ordering the “3D Neil Armstrong space suite Tshirt – Zip Hoodie”!
(17) I THE JURY. Fantasy Literature’s Sandy Ferber finally has a chance to render a verdict: “From Hell It Came: Kimo therapy”.
Back in the 1960s, when I was just a young lad and when there were only three major television stations to contend with, The New York Times used to make pithy commentaries, in their TV section, regarding films that were to be aired that day. I have never forgotten the terse words that the paper issued for the 1957 cult item From Hell It Came. In one of the most succinct pans ever written, the editors simply wrote: “Back send it.” Well, I have waited years to find out if this hilarious put-down was justified or not, and now that I have finally succeeded in catching up with this one-of-a-kind cult item, have to say that I feel the Times people may have been a bit too harsh in their assessment….
(18) FILLED WITH PORPOISE. From SciFiNow we learn “Mary Poppins Returns first look video previews a new song”:
Mary Poppins Returns will be set in Depression-era London and follow now-grown up versions of Jane and Michael Banks, as well as Michael’s three children who are visited by Poppins following a personal loss….
(19) WHO DARES WINS. John Hertz, who once met Grace Slick, dares to conceive further attention to a parody (first offered in comments by Bonnie McDaniel) —
[Based on “White Rabbit”, G. Slick 1967]
When the pixels
From the day’s scroll
Get up and tell you where to go,
And you’ve just had some kind of comment
And your cursor’s moving, oh —
Go ask Glyer.
I think he’ll know.
When logic and proportion
Won’t even keep credentials fed,
And Camestros is hoaxing Hampus,
And Anna Nimmhaus’ titles are dead,
Remember
What the Filers said:
Get books read.
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, John A Arkansawyer, Chip Hitchcock, John King Tarpinian, JJ, Martin Morse Wooster, Cat Eldridge, John Hertz, Carl Slaughter, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew.]
World Fantasy Con 2019 will be held in LA at the Marriott Los Angeles Airport Hotel from October 31 – November 3.
The current membership rates are:
Attending Membership: $200.00
Supporting Membership: $50.00
The Attending Membership Rate will increase November 4 at 11:59 pm PST.
WFC 2019’s guests of honor are author Margo Lanagan, editor Beth Meacham, and artist Chris McGrath, with Robert Silverberg as Toastmaster.
Writer Guest of Honor
Tad Williams is a California-based fantasy superstar. His genre-creating (and genre-busting) books have sold tens of millions worldwide, in twenty-five languages. His considerable output of epic fantasy and science fiction book-series, stories of all kinds, urban fantasy novels, comics, scripts, etc., have strongly influenced a generation of writers.
Special Guest Author
Margo Lanagan, who lives in Sydney, Australia, has been publishing fiction for nearly thirty years.
Her second collection, Black Juice, containing the story “Singing My Sister Down”, attracted wide attention, winning a Victorian Premier’s Award, two Aurealis and two Ditmar awards, two World Fantasy Awards (for Best Short Story and Best Collection), was a Michael L Printz Honor Book and made the Tiptree honor list, and was shortlisted in two other premier’s awards, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Stoker, International Horror Guild and Seiun awards.
She published a novella about selkies, “Sea Hearts”, in Coeur de Lion’s X6 novellanthology in 2009, which won her a fourth World Fantasy Award. She later developed the story into the novel Sea Hearts, published as The Brides of Rollrock Island in the US and the UK.
From 2015 to 2018 she published, in collaboration with Scott Westerfeld and Deborah Biancotti, the New York Times-bestselling YA fantasy action adventure series Zeroes (Zeroes, Swarm, and Nexus).
Special Guest
Beth Meacham has been a science fiction and fantasy editor for more than 30 years. She has worked for Ace Books, Berkeley, and Tor, where she was editor in chief from 1985 through 1989. She now works as an Executive Editor for Tor, from her home in Arizona.
Toastmaster
Robert Silverberg has been a professional writer since 1955, widely known for his science fiction and fantasy stories. He is a many-time winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards, was named to the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 1999, and in 2004 was designated as a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America.
WFC 2019 is run by the Southern California Institute for Fan Interests, Inc., past sponsor of three Worldcons (1984, 1996 and 2006), the 1999 NASFiC, and several Westercons.
The WFC 2019 theme will be Fantasy Noir.
Fantasy Noir is a relatively new genre and has gained significant popularity in recent years. Sometimes described as “magical cities in decay,” noir’s combination of urban grime and sleazy glamour brings a realistic and deliciously nasty flavor to the fantasy genre. Fantasy Noir blends the setting, characters and plot structure of a Hardboiled Detective/Occult Detective mystery story with the more colorful elements of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Noir heroes are often extremely flawed or bad people or – on occasion – an honest cop or hero figure whose morality is distinctly at odds with the way the world works. Flawed protagonists are often motivated by greed, lust, anger, and revenge as much as higher motives. When they do something genuinely noble, it can be with great reluctance. A hero’s honesty and nobility often results in horrific personal consequences for himself and others.
Hotel reservations will open early 2019.
Party reservations will be taken in the Fall of 2018. Party Packets will be available at the 2018 World Fantasy Con in Baltimore.
(1) STFNAL MUSIC. Out of Mind, the new album by the band Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate, includes two songs inspired by Philip K. Dick and one by Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice. Here are the notes for “When I Was a Ship” —
This song was inspired by Ann Leckie‘s Ancillary series. The main character had once been a warship, whose artificial mind had been distributed within the ship, and also within many ancillaries – prisoners who have had their minds wiped. The ship itself and all of the other ancillaries was destroyed, leaving just one fragment of the mind left in one body.
And here’s a section of the lyrics —
That I was designed as a warrior slave
When I was an asset
I think I remember
The communal song
Of curious pleasure
The many mouths
The single phrase
Compounded eye
And reflected gaze
I am the last
I am my remains
All of my others
Dissolved in the flames
Leckie (who also likes their previous album When the Kill Code Fails) told readers of her blog where to find the new song –
You can hear “When I Was A Ship” on Spotify. You can also purchase it at Bandcamp,
Spotify requires registration.
(2) LEVAR BURTON READING SFF. The three most recent installments of LeVar Burton Reads: The Best Short Fiction, Handpicked by the World’s Greatest Storyteller feature —
(3) A KILLER COMPLAINS. Christian Gerhartsreiter, aka Clark Rockefeller, now serving time in San Quentin for the murder of LASFS member John Sohus, has written a complaint to the New York Review of Books about Walter Kirn’s book about him.
Please forgive the extreme delay of this letter in response to Nathaniel Rich’s review of Walter Kirn’s book about me [“A Killer Con Man on the Loose,” *NYR*, May 8, 2014]. To the whole business I can only say that I barely ever knew Mr. Kirn. … His reasons for wanting retroactively to insert himself so deeply into my life, calling himself a “close friend,” seem either purely commercially motivated or perhaps speak to a deeper pathology on which I do not have the expertise to comment.
(4) FUNDING FOR A PUNK ROCK FUTURE. Editor Steve Zisson and associated editors are in the final week of a Kickstarter appeal to fund publication of A Punk Rock Future, their anthology featuring sf/f/h stories mashing up genre fiction and punk rock music.
Why now for this anthology? A punk strain not only runs through music and art but right through the heart of SFFH (think cyberpunk, steampunk, solarpunk, silkpunk, hopepunk, ecopunk, or whatever punk).
…It is the forward-thinking science fiction and fantasy community that is propelling all things punk into the future.
Want a recent published example of the kind of story you’ll read in A Punk Rock Future? The Big So-So by Erica Satifka in Interzone. Or read Sarah Pinsker’s Nebula Award winner, Our Lady of the Open Road, published in Asimov’s. These influential stories were inspirations for this anthology.
The big news is that we will have stories from both writers in A Punk Rock Future!
The anthology will feature 25 stories by Erica Satifka, Sarah Pinsker, Spencer Ellsworth, Margaret Killjoy, Maria Haskins, Izzy Wasserstein, Stewart C Baker, Kurt Pankau, Marie Vibbert, Corey J. White, P.A. Cornell, Jennifer Lee Rossman, M. Lopes da Silva, R. K. Duncan, Zandra Renwick, Dawn Vogel, Matt Bechtel, Josh Rountree, Vaughan Stanger, Michel Harris Cohen, Anthony Eichenlaub, Steven Assarian and more to come.
The appeal has brought in $2,557, or 51 percent, of its $5,000 goal, with seven days to go.
(5) MUGGLES GOT TALENT. ULTRAGOTHA recommends this high school Harry Potter dance video posted by MuggleNet.com on Facebook.
(6) THE HOLE MAN. The Boring Company wants to give you a free ride. (No, not a Free Ride.) The Verge reports that “Elon Musk says the Boring Company’s first tunnel under LA will open December 10th.”
The rapid transit tunnel that Elon Musk’s Boring Company is digging beneath Los Angeles will open on December 10th, and free rides will be offered to the public the following night, Musk tweeted on Sunday evening.
The two-mile test tunnel underneath SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California, is a proof of concept for an underground public transportation system, which aims to transport passengers and vehicles beneath congested roadways on autonomously driven electric platforms called “skates.” The skates will theoretically transport eight to 16 passengers, or one passenger vehicle, along magnetic rails at speeds of up to 155 mph (250 km/h), Musk tweeted.
(7) PINOCCHIO ANTIFA? “Guillermo del Toro to direct new stop-motion Pinocchio for Netflix” – Entertainment Weekly has the story.
Fresh off his Best Picture and Best Director Oscar wins for The Shape of Water, Guillermo del Toro is ready for his next project — and it’s one he’s been working on for a long time. Netflix announced Monday that it’s teaming up with del Toro for a stop-motion musical version of Pinocchio that is the director’s “lifelong passion project.”
Although Disney famously created an animated version of Pinocchio in 1940 (widely regarded to be among the studio’s greatest artistic achievements), the fairy tale was first written by Italian author Carlo Collodi in 1883. Del Toro’s version in particular will draw heavily from illustrator Gris Grimly’s 2002 edition, but will still pay homage to the story’s Italian origins — this Pinocchio will be set in 1930s Italy, under the reign of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.
(8) RONNEBERG OBIT. Joachim Ronneberg has died at the age of 99 — “Joachim Ronneberg: Norwegian who thwarted Nazi nuclear plan dies”. Described as the most successful act of sabotage in WWII, he and his team destroyed the world’s only heavy-water plant.
In 1943, he led a top-secret raid on a heavily-guarded plant in Norway’s southern region of Telemark.
The operation was immortalised in the 1965 Hollywood film Heroes of Telemark, starring Kirk Douglas.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and JJ.]
(10) COMIC SECTION.
(11) TIMELAPSE SFF SCULPTURE. On YouTube, artist Steven Richter has posted time-lapse videos of his creation of a number of genre sculptures. These include:
And quite a few more.
(12) COLD CASE. BBC discusses “The bones that could shape Antarctica’s fate” — aka who was really there first? It could matter if the current protocols are allowed to expire in 2048.
In 1985, a unique skull was discovered lying on Yamana Beach at Cape Shirreff in Antarctica’s South Shetland Islands. It belonged to an indigenous woman from southern Chile in her early 20s, thought to have died between 1819 and 1825. It was the oldest known human remains ever found in Antarctica.
The location of the discovered skull was unexpected. It was found at a beach camp made by sealers in the early 19th Century near remnants of her femur bone, yet female sealers were unheard of at the time. There are no surviving documents explaining how or why a young woman came to be in Antarctica during this era. Now, at nearly 200 years old, the skull is thought to align with the beginning of the first known landings on Antarctica.
(13) AIRPORT ANXIETY. John Scalzi has a growing suspicion that all glory is fleeting —
WAIT
SOMEONE IS BEING UPGRADED TO FIRST CLASS
NOOOOOO TAKE ME INSTEAD
DON'T YOU KNOW WHO I AM
I AM A VERY IMPORTANT PHOTOGRAPHER OF CATS AND BURRITOS
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) October 22, 2018
(14) ROAD THROUGH TIME. BBC reports “A14 road workers find woolly mammoth bones” and woolly rhino bones. Did you know there was such a thing as a woolly rhino?
A spokesman they were “the latest in a series of fantastic finds” from the team working on the A14.
So far, they have also unearthed prehistoric henges, Iron Age settlements, Roman kilns, three Anglo-Saxon villages and a medieval hamlet.
(15) SABRINA. The entire first season– 10 episodes– of the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina become available to stream on Netflix this Friday.
(16) 1001 NIGHTS ART. NPR posts newly republished images by Danish illustrator Kay Nielsen — “Long-Lost Watercolors Of ‘1001 Nights’ Bring New Life To Age-Old Tales”. May be NSFW where you are.
To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Nielsen’s work, Taschen published all 21 of his original illustrations, reproduced directly from the never-before-seen original watercolors.
The extra-large coffee table book delivers an experience of its own — the prints are meticulously curated and presented in a blue velvet box, as if the book itself was a tale to unveil.
(17) WITCH WORLD REVIEWED. Galactic Journey’s Rosemary Benton reviews a prime Andre Norton novel, newly released in 1963 — “[October 22, 1963] A Whole New Fantasy (Andre Norton’s Witch World)”
When the subject of magic is approached in any of Norton’s writing there is never any easy solution lying right below the surface. Her flaire for piecing out information and not revealing more than what the characters themselves know keeps the reader on edge, as well as humble. This sense that there are always bigger forces at play, yet are never fully explained, teases the rational mind of the reader and allows for there to be doubt that anything “magical” can be easily quantified by rational, scientific method. It’s very disquieting when Norton’s established and venerated forces, like the witchcraft of the Women of Power and the Axe of Volt, are threatened by something indefinable that is even older and more powerful – travel across dimensions.
(18) QUICK SIPS. Charles Payseur finds a thread running through the stories in the October Clarkesworld — “Quick Sips – Clarkesworld #145”.
The October issue of Clarkesworld Magazine is all about survival. Or, I should say, about finding out what’s more important than survival. These stories take settings that are, well, grim. Where war and other disasters have created a situation where just holding onto life is difficult. Where for many it would seem obvious that it’s time to tighten one’s belt and get down to the serious business of surviving. And yet the stories show that surviving isn’t enough, especially if it means sacrificing people. That, without justice and hope beyond just making it to another day, surviving might not be worth it. But that, with an eye toward progress, and hope for something better (not just the prevention of something worse), people and peoples can begin to heal the damage that’s been caused and maybe reach a place where they can heal and find a better way to live. To the reviews!
(19) CODEWRITERS CODE. But for Jon Del Arroz’ wholehearted endorsement — “SQLite Created a Code Of Conduct And It’s AMAZING” [Internet Archive link] – it probably wouldn’t have come to my attention that SQLite, a library of public domain resources for a database engine, posted a Code of Conduct based on a chapter from The Rule of St, Benedict.
Having been encouraged by clients to adopt a written code of conduct, the SQLite developers elected to govern their interactions with each other, with their clients, and with the larger SQLite user community in accordance with the “instruments of good works” from chapter 4 of The Rule of St. Benedict. This code of conduct has proven its mettle in thousands of diverse communities for over 1,500 years, and has served as a baseline for many civil law codes since the time of Charlemagne.
This rule is strict, and none are able to comply perfectly. Grace is readily granted for minor transgressions. All are encouraged to follow this rule closely, as in so doing they may expect to live happier, healthier, and more productive lives. The entire rule is good and wholesome, and yet we make no enforcement of the more introspective aspects.
Slashdot’s coverage “SQLite Adopts ‘Monastic’ Code of Conduct” says the response has ranged from laughter to hostility, an example of the latter being —
https://twitter.com/joshbressers/status/1054365681150541825
On the other hand, Vox Day hopes it will be widely adopted [Internet Archive link].
(20) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “First Bloom” on Vimeo is a cartoon showing an Imperial Chinese love story, directed by Ting Ting Liu.
[Thanks to JJ, Martin Morse Wooster, Chip Hitchcock, Daniel Dern, John King Tarpinian, Mike Kennedy, Cat Eldridge, Carl Slaughter, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kip W – have we really not used that one before? It didn’t come up on my search.]
Two poetry collections, one memoir, one creative nonfiction book, and two novels will join the NEA Big Read, an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest. The NEA Big Read annually supports community reading programs across the country, each designed around a single book. Through the act of sharing a book together, participants have the opportunity to broaden their understanding of the world, their community, and themselves.
In total, 32 books will be available for nonprofit organizations to choose from in applying for a 2019-20 NEA Big Read grant. The six new additions are:
This timely collection explores the struggles and questions that can arise from an assigned gender identity that doesn’t feel right, described through the lens of, among other things, inanimate objects, talking animals, and 1980s pop culture.
In a ruined city overrun with hybrid creatures from a defunct biotech company, a woman nurtures a strange creature that grows into something she will both love and fear in this science fiction tale of love and hope and inevitable change.
Emblazoned with a tattoo on its cover, this collection examines the experiences of the poet’s Southeast San Diego youth—his activity in a gang, the complicated dynamics of his family life, and eventually his discovery of poetry, leading him to reflect on what it means to be a man.
This is the true story that inspired Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick about the crew of the 19th-century whaleship Essex that got rammed and shattered by one of the largest whales anyone had ever seen and the whalers’ subsequent, harrowing fight for survival on the open seas.
A young woman passionate about trees and plants and other aspects of the natural world finds friendship in odd places, battles bipolar disorder, perseveres through setbacks, and ultimately becomes a wife, a mom, and a respected scientist in this inspiring and engrossing memoir.
Set during World War II in the Australian bush and based on the true history of Italian POWs sent there to work the farms, this story is told from the perspective of a woman with albinism and a troubled past whose secrets and desires will upend her and her family’s isolated lives.
The NEA’s Big Read website has more information on the program, including book and author information, podcasts, videos, and community stories from past NEA Big Read grantees. In addition, the NEA will host a webinar on November 14, 2018 at 2 p.m. ET about these six new titles.
“We are always looking to expand the NEA Big Read library with a range of new genres, perspectives, and experiences,” said NEA Director of Literature Amy Stolls. “Communities can choose to explore, for example, the story behind Moby-Dick with In the Heart of the Sea, or get immersed in rural Australia and World War II history with The Paperbark Shoe, or dive into one of the books of poetry, a genre we know from NEA research is growing in popularity, particularly among younger readers. I look forward to seeing how communities embrace the new books and find ways to highlight and explore them together.”
Guidelines are now available for organizations applying for grants to support Big Read projects between September 2019 and June 2020. The application deadline is Thursday, January 24, 2019. Full details on eligibility, how to apply, and application advice are available on Arts Midwest’s website. Eligible applicants include organizations such as arts centers, arts councils, arts organizations, colleges and universities, community service organizations, environmental organizations, fairs and festivals, faith-based organizations, historical societies, housing authorities, humanities councils, libraries, literary centers, museums, school districts, theater companies, trade associations, and tribal governments.
To select new books for the NEA Big Read library, the NEA collected suggestions from a variety of sources, including the public, NEA Big Read grantees, and past NEA Big Read panelists. The National Endowment for the Arts narrowed the list of suggestions based on the following criteria: the capacity to incite lively and deep discussion; the capacity to expand the range of voices, stories, and genres currently represented in the NEA Big Read library; the capacity to interest lapsed and reluctant readers and/or to challenge avid readers and introduce them to new voices; and the capacity to inspire innovative programming for communities. A committee of outside readers and community organizers reviewed the books and made the final recommendations.
The full list of books available for 2019-2020 Big Read grants also includes works by Bradbury, Le Guin, Kelly Link, and Emily St. John Mandel —
[Thanks to Jeff VanderMeer for the story.]
Robert Kerr poses with the Ghostbusters car.
By John King Tarpinian: October 20 was the opening reception for the art exhibition of this match-up honoring the 200th anniversary of Frankenstein and the 150th anniversary of Little Women, two well-loved novels by two groundbreaking female authors.
The city of South Pasadena, CA had a lot going on this evening. They had an art-walk, with local artists hawking their wares. An Octoberfest, with an Oompa band, was happening. Their historic Rialto theater was doing a fundraiser screening of the original Ghostbusters. All of this within a few blocks of each other.
[Photos of more works on display follow the jump.]
“Franky Peruses A Classic” by Mike Bell
(1) CONGRATULATIONS MAYOR RODEN. World Fantasy Award winner Barbara Roden (1997, 2005) is the newly-elected mayor of Ashcroft, British Columbia – the first woman elected to the office. The population of Ashcroft is around 1,500.
(2) AWARD FOR SJW CREDENTIALS IN LITERATURE. The Stephen Memorial Book Award for books with distinctive cats is a literary award that will be of interest to many Filers.
The 2018 winner is a memoir:
The Three Kitties That Saved My Life by Michael Meyer
Cat: Sable, Coco and Pom Pom
Story: The Three Kitties that saved my life.A biography of troubles and the rescued cats (& Kitty) that pulled him through it. Touching, raw and heart-warming.
The three runners up are all SFF books and are listed here:
Cat: Dascha
Story: Familiar Trials by Taki Drake and T S PaulLearning to be a familiar is something Dascha was not expecting, but when she does begin, she shows bravery both in and out of the classroom, while learning what it means to be a familiar.
Awarded to Dascha, for bravery and determination in the face of dangerous trials. Stephen Memorial Award 2018
Cat: Purrcasso
Story: The Creatures of Chichester by Christopher JoyceThe cat from the art galley. Wrangling both teenagers and ghosts that came to the Sloe Festival in Chichester. Despite floods and fears, standing firm and proud as only a cat can.
Awarded to Purrcasso, for his assistance in the saving of several ghosts Stephen Memorial Award 2018
Cat: Sir Kipling
Story: Love, Lies, and Hocus Pocus: Cat Magic by Lydia SherrerA magical cat who can talk to his wizard. While she is away, he decides that he should, of course, be keeping an eye on anything magical. Of course, when someone evil does try something, Sir Kipling is on hand to ensure that such plans go awry.
Awarded to Sir Kipling, for showing that it takes a good feline to be in charge. Stephen Memorial Award 2018
The award also has a charitable component – this year they partnered with CatChat.org, the cat rehoming charity, and donated £1 for each book entered. Bookangel reports the award raised enough to rehome twenty cats.
(3) KGB READINGS. Ellen Datlow posted her photos from the October Fantastic Fiction at KGB readings where the guests were Tim Pratt and Lawrence M. Schoen.
Lawrence Schoen and Tim Pratt
(4) GAME OF THROWNS. Channel your inner orc at “LA’s premiere ax-throwing facility” — LA AX.
Axe Throwing is a unique and exciting activity that was brought into existence just over a decade ago in the backwoods of Ontario, Canada. Since then, it has exploded into a sport that is making waves on the international stage. Yes, you read that correctly, Axe Throwing is an international sport! How does one become a professional Axe Thrower? Well there are few ways to break into this sport! Whether you just want to be a casual thrower, a serious professional, or you have a group of friends looking for a fun night out; our LA AX coaches will give you the knowledge you need to become a professional in your own right!
(5) HONEST TRAILERS: SOLO. “The coolest new Star Wars character is… Never mind.” Got that right!
(6) IN THE VACUUM OF THEATER SPACE. According to Looper, First Man failed to gain an audience.
By all accounts, First Man is an excellent film, filled with great performances from stars like Ryan Gosling and Claire Foy. So why isn’t anyone going to see it? Here’s a look at why First Man has bombed at the box office so far…
(7) WHAT IF? The Hugo Award Book Club launches its review of Mary Robinett Kowal’s The Calculating Stars with this wee bit of snark —
In The Calculating Stars, @MaryRobinette offers an answer to one of alternate history’s most important questions: ‘What if Seveneves was fun to read?’ Blog post: https://t.co/e6HHU6DKd5 #sciencefiction #alternatehistory pic.twitter.com/ZcrJupY6Fq
— H Book Club blog (@Hugo_Book_Club) October 20, 2018
While we quite enjoyed Seveneves, many readers described it as a bit dry.
A comparison between the two books is apt. Seveneves and The Calculating Stars are books that explore many similar ideas, but they do so in very different ways that will appeal to different people.
(8) WTF? Umm….
In just a few weeks, Mr. Stubbs took to the prosthesis, integrating it into his movement https://t.co/fYnkMaDFZ5
— National Geographic (@NatGeo) October 20, 2018
(9) FORWARDING ADDRESS. James Davis Nicoll explores “(Semi-)Plausible Strategies for Moving a Whole Damn Planet” at Tor.com. It’s a lot easier if you have the help of supremely intelligent aliens.
Has this ever happened to you? You’re living on a perfectly good planet in orbit around a perfectly acceptable star—and then suddenly, the neighbourhood goes to crap and you have to move. For a lot of people, this means marching onto space arks.
Recapitulating Noah on a cosmic scale is such a pain, though. All that packing. All that choosing who to take and who to leave behind. And no matter how carefully you plan things, it always seems to come down to a race between launch day and doomsday.
Why not, therefore, just take the whole darned planet with you?
(10) BRADBURYIANA. On display at the Ray Bradbury Center in Indianapolis —
Many awards from #RayBradbury’s incredible career are preserved at the Center, including his Emmy, two of his Hugo Awards, his National Medal of Arts, several Ace Awards, and his Pulitzer. pic.twitter.com/wa1Kxwth7n
— Ray Bradbury Center (@BradburyCenter) October 20, 2018
(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and JJ.]
https://twitter.com/ursulaleguin/status/1054160750678327297
(12) REASON TO READ. The Chicago Tribune advises, “Worried about the international panel report on global warming? Go read Octavia Butler’s ‘Earthseed’ books”.
…“Parable of the Sower,” published in 1993 when it was still possible to heed its warning, tells the story of a world collapsed due to climate change, economic inequality and unchecked corporate power. Resources are scarce, and only gated communities are safe.
Set near what used to be Los Angeles, the novel focuses on teenager Lauren Oya Olamina, who has “hyperempathy,” both a gift and an affliction that allows her to feel the pain she witnesses others experiencing. Spurred by her worldview, Lauren develops a new belief system called “Earthseed,” which posits that humans’ time on Earth is a kind of childhood and that they will emerge as adults once they travel to other planets.
It is a story of two diasporas, first as Lauren and other refugees are forced out of Los Angeles, and then as they look toward finding an extraterrestrial home.
(13) LOOK ALIVE. Rolling Stone asks just how far AR startup Magic Leap has gotten toward crossing the Uncanny Valley (“Is This Creepy New AI Assistant Too Lifelike?”).
Some people already talk to Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa like she’s a real person, setting her up for jokes, and having conversations that go way beyond the basic commands like “Alexa, play ‘Hurt’ by Nine Inch Nails.” And that’s how people are treating a disembodied voice. But what if you could see her — and what if she looked disturbingly human?
Magic Leap, an augmented-reality startup, introduced the next evolution of the virtual assistant at their conference earlier this month. Mica performs many of the same functions as Alexa or Apple’s Siri, but when users wear Magic Leap’s augmented reality glasses, they can also see her incredibly life-like avatar. Mica smiles, makes eye contact and even yawns, making the interactions even more convincing. “Our focus was to see how far we could push systems to create digital human representations,” John Monos, Magic Leap’s vice president of human-centered AI, said at the conference. “Above all else, her facial movements are what connect you to her.”
(14) PAUL ALLEN AT THE BEGINNING AND THE END. In the Washington Post, Christian Davenport has an article about the Stratolaunch, a gigantic airplane funded by Paul Allen — “Paul Allen spent years building the world’s biggest airplane. He’ll never see it fly.”. This passage explains why Allen was one of us:
Allen grew up knowing all the names of the Mercury 7 astronauts as if they were his favorite baseball players, he wrote in his memoir, “Idea Man.” And like many kids of his generation, he grew up wanting to become an astronaut. But then in the sixth grade he couldn’t see the blackboard at school, he told me in his office, and he knew that meant “my dreams of being an astronaut were over.”
His father was the associate director of the University of Washington Library, a second home of sorts for Allen. “My Dad was just letting me loose in the stacks,” he recalled. “I loved it.”
He devoured not just science fiction, but books about Wernher von Braun, the German-born architect of NASA’s might Saturn V rocket, which sent men to the moon. Once, Allen tried to build a homemade rocket of his own using the arm of an aluminum chair packed with powdered zinc and sulfur and firing it from a coffee pot. It didn’t work.
(15) FOUND AGAIN. There were huge losses in the museum fire, but at least the oldest human fossil found in Latin America was mostly recovered — “Brazil museum fire: Prized ‘Luzia’ fossil skull recovered”.
Most of the skull from a prized 12,000-year-old fossil nicknamed Luzia has been recovered from the wreckage of a fire in Brazil’s National Museum.
The 200-year-old building in Rio de Janeiro burned down in September, destroying almost all of its artefacts.
But on Friday the museum’s director announced that 80% of Luzia’s skull fragments had been identified.
The human remains – the oldest ever found in Latin America – were viewed as the jewel of the museum’s collection.
The museum staff said they were confident they could recover the rest of Luzia’s skull and attempt reassembly.
(16) A CAUTIONARY TALE. With many overseas fans contemplating a trip to Dublin for the 2019 Worldcon, this report from Forbes (“How To Handle Getting Ripped Off On Auto Insurance When Traveling Overseas”) could be of interest. Such a situation can happen anywhere, but this particular situation—where a Hertz clerk insisted wrongly on bundling an overpriced insurance product as a condition of renting a car—happened to be in Dublin.
[Rick] Kahler: As soon as we got back to the U.S., I filed a dispute with my credit card company on both the initial $424 car rental cost and the $584 insurance charge. My grounds were that Hertz violated their contract, which only required me to accept full financial responsibility or to have verified that I had insurance that would cover a loss. They violated the contact by demanding that I prove having coverage in excess of the value of the car and by refusing to accept that proof when I produced it. I eventually got my money back after I complained. But that doesn’t make up for the time and stress they caused me.
(17) ANOTHER SWORD FINDER. Unlike the girl Saga, this one is fictional…. The Kid Who Would Be King is coming to theaters January 25, 2019.
Old school magic meets the modern world in the epic adventure THE KID WHO WOULD BE KING. Alex (Ashbourne Serkis) thinks he’s just another nobody, until he stumbles upon the mythical Sword in the Stone, Excalibur. Now, he must unite his friends and enemies into a band of knights and, together with the legendary wizard Merlin (Stewart), take on the wicked enchantress Morgana (Ferguson). With the future at stake, Alex must become the great leader he never dreamed he could be.
[Thanks to Carl Slaughter, Cora Buhlert, JJ, Cat Eldridge, ULTRAGOTHA, Chip Hitchcock, Steven H Silver, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, John King Tarpinian, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Steve Davidson.]
Elinor Busby. Photo by Earl Kemp, Corflu, Las Vegas, April 2008.
Elinor Busby made history as the first woman Hugo winner when Cry of the Nameless, which she co-edited, topped the Best Fanzine category in 1960.
I’ve corrected my obituary for Pat Lupoff to reflect that she was second, as co-editor of the Best Amateur Magazine winner in 1963. (The category title varied as the rules changed in the early years of the Hugo.)
Evidently this wasn’t the first time I’ve made this mistake either – see the note at the end of “Dark Carnival, a Science Fiction Landmark” from 2013.
Four women won fan Hugos – all in the Best Fanzine / Amateur Magazine category – before a woman won in any other category.
The third woman to win was Juanita Coulson, in 1965, co-editor of the fanzine Yandro.
The fourth woman was Felice Rolfe, in 1967, co-editor of the fanzine Niekas.
The first woman to win a Hugo in a fiction category was Anne McCaffrey, whose Weyr Search tied with Philip Jose Farmer’s Riders of the Purple Wage for Best Novella in 1968.
The 2018 British Fantasy Award winners have been announced:
Best Anthology
Best Artist
Best Audio
Best Collection
Best Comic / Graphic Novel
The Robert Holdstock Award for Best Fantasy Novel
Best Film / Television Production
The August Derleth Award for Best Horror Novel
Best Independent Press
Best Magazine / Periodical
Best Newcomer (the Sydney J Bounds Award)
Best Non-Fiction
Best Novella
Best Short Story
The Karl Edward Wagner Award for special services to the Fantasy genre and/or the British Fantasy Society
Next year’s British Fantasy Awards ceremony will be at Fantasy Con: Cities of Steel in Glasgow on October 20, 2019.
Delighted. The Karl Wagner award goes to @nkjemisin #britishfantasyawards this is an award for a lifetime contribution to the genre on many areas. Cited were her books, blogs, speeches
— Prof. Farah Mendlesohn (@effjayem) October 21, 2018
The BRILLIANT @sennydreadful wins Best Novel at the British Fantasy Awards with The Ninth Rain! pic.twitter.com/HULdAZzllt
— Nazia¹²? (@Gambit589) October 21, 2018
A huge congratulations to the brilliant @MarkMorris10 and all the New Fears contributors for today's British Fantasy Award win for Best Anthology – we're so proud of you all! pic.twitter.com/lK2SI7w1h4
— Titan Books (@TitanBooks) October 21, 2018
Congratulations to Joe Hill, who just won the British Fantasy Award for best collection:STRANGE WEATHER. That’s my boy, and I couldn’t be more proud or happy.
— Stephen King (@StephenKing) October 21, 2018
The winners of the 2018 Pegasus Awards for excellence in filking were announced at the Ohio Valley Filk Fest on October 20.
Best Filk Song
Best Classic Filk Song
Best Performer
(tie)
Best Writer/Composer
Best Roadtrip Song
(tie)
Best Song About Community
There are six Pegasus award categories, two of them different each year (in 2018, the last two shown here).
