The International Association of Media Tie-in Writers president Jonathan Maberry today announced the nominees for the Scribe Awards for superior works published in 2022.
The IAMTW’s Scribe Awards honor licensed works that tie in with other media such as television, movies, gaming, or comic books.
The winners will be announced at San Diego Comic-Con on July 21.
SPECULATIVE
League of Legends Ruination by Anthony Reynolds
Marvel Crisis Protocol Shadow Avengers by Carrie Harris
Star Trek Original Series Harm’s Way by David Mack
Star Trek Strange New Worlds High Country by John Jackson Miller
World of Warcraft Sylvanas by Christie Golden
GENERAL/ADAPTED NOVEL
Black Cat: Discord by Cath Lauria
Doctor Who: The Fires of Pompeii by James Moran
Murder She Wrote: Death on the Emerald Isle by Terrie Moran
The Legend of the Five Rings: The Flower Path by Josh Reynolds
Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Firewall by James Swallow
GRAPHIC NOVEL
Drawing of Cards by Paul Cornell
Kolchak the Night Stalker by David Avallone, Rodney Barnes, Jonathan Maberry, Gabriel Hardman, Peter David, James Aquilone, R. C. Matheson, Nancy A. Collins, Kim Newman, James Chambers, Tim Waggoner, & Steve Niles
Spectrum, the Worlds of Gerry Anderson by Steve Tanner
The Mighty Nein Origins–Yasha Nydoorin by Cecil Castellucci
YA/MG
Squirrel Girl Universe by Tristan Palmgren
Star Trek Prodigy: A Dangerous Trade by Cassandra Rose Clarke
Star Wars: The High Republic – Quest for the Hidden City by George Mann
The Mystery of Lucy Wilson: Memories of the Future by George Ivanoff
Tower of Nerek by David Guymer
AUDIO
Doctor Who – Peake Season by Lizbeth Myles
Previously Next Time Parts 1 and 2 by James Moran
Doctor Who – The War Doctor Begins – He Who Fights Monsters by R. Valentine
Doctor Who Albie’s Angels by Roy Gill
Tom Clancy’s Firewall by Paul Cornell and Sebastian Baczkiewic
Call Me Joe (The Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson) NESFA Press, 2009
Review by Warner Holme: Call Me Joe by Poul Anderson strongly starts off a NESFA Press series of volumes covering the work of one of the key 20th century writers of Science Fiction, Poul Anderson.
In the introduction, the editor, Rick Katze, states “This is the first in a multi-volume collection of Poul Anderson stories. The stories are not in any discernible pattern…” The pieces of fiction are an eclectic mix of early works in his oeuvre, mixed with poetry and verse that range across his entire career.
The contents include: Call Me Joe, Prayer in War, Tomorrow’s Children, Kinnison’s Band, The Helping Hand, Wildcat, Clausius’ Chaos, Journey’s End, Heinlein’s Stories, Logic, Time Patrol, The First Love, The Double-Dyed Villains, To a Tavern Wench, The Immortal Game, Upon the Occasion of Being Asked to Argue That Love and Marriage are Incompatible, Backwardness, Haiku, Genius, There Will Be Other Times, The Live Coward, Ballade of an Artificial Satellite, Time Lag, The Man Who Came Early, Autumn, Turning Point, Honesty, The Alien Enemy, Eventide, Enough Rope, The Sharing of Flesh, Barbarous Allen, Welcome,Flight to Forever, Sea Burial, Barnacle Bull, To Jack Williamson, Time Heals, MacCannon, The Martian Crown Jewels, Then Death Will Come, Prophecy, Einstein’s Distress, Kings Who Die, Ochlan and Starfog.
The introduction is not quite correct, in that the reader can find resonances between stories, sometimes in stories back to back. There are plenty of threads, and a fan of Anderson and his Nordic viewpoint might call it a skein, a tangled skein of fictional ideas, themes, ideas and characters. The same introduction notes that a lot of the furniture of science fiction can be found in early forms here, as Anderson being one of those authors who have made them what they were for successive writers. In many cases, then, it is not the freshness of the ideas that one reads these stories for, but the deep writing, themes, characters and language that put Anderson in a class of his own.
The titular story, for example, Call Me Joe, leads off the volume. It is a story of virtual reality in one of its earliest forms, about Man trying to reach and be part of a world he cannot otherwise interact with. Watchers of the movie Avatar will be immediately struck by the story and how much that movie relies on this story’s core assumptions and ideas. But the story is much more than the ideas. It’s about the poetry of Anderson’s writing. His main character, Anglesey, is physically challenged (sound familiar). But as a pseudoJovian, he doesn’t have to be and he can experience a world unlike any on Earth:
Anglesey’s tone grew remote, as if he spoke to himself. “Imagine walking under a glowing violet sky, where great flashing clouds sweep the earth with shadow and rain strides beneath them. Imagine walking on the slopes of a mountain like polished metal, with a clean red flame exploding above you and thunder laughing in the ground. Imagine a cool wild stream, and low trees with dark coppery flowers, and a waterfall—methanefall, whatever you like—leaping off a cliff, and the strong live wind shakes its mane full of rainbows! Imagine a whole forest, dark and breathing, and here and there you glimpse a pale-red wavering will-o’-the-wisp, which is the life radiation of some fleet, shy animal, and…and…”
Anglesey croaked into silence. He stared down at his clenched fists then he closed his eyes tight and tears ran out between the lids, “Imagine being strong!”
Reader, I was moved.
That’s only part of the genius of Anderson’s work shown here. Anderson has many strings in his harp and this volume plays many of those chords.
There is the strong, dark tragedy of “The Man who Came Early” which is in genre conversation with L Sprague De Camp’s “Lest Darkness Fall” and shows an American soldier, circa 1943, thrown back to 11th century Iceland and, pace Martin Padway, doing rather badly in the Dark Ages. Poul Anderson is much better well known for his future history that runs from the Polesotechnic League on through the Galactic Empire of Dominic Flandry, but this volume has three stories of his other future galactic civilization, where Wing Alak manages a much looser and less restrictive galactic polity, dealing with bellicose problems by rather clever and indirect means.
And then there is his time travel tales. Time Patrol introduces us to the entire Time Patrol cycle and Manse Everard’s first mission. I’ve read plenty of his stories over the years, but this first outing had escaped me, so it was a real delight to see “where it all began”. A wildcat has oil drillers in the Cretaceous and a slowly unfolding mystery leads to a sting in the tail about the fragility of their society. And then there is one of my favorite Poul Anderson stories, period, the poetic and tragic and moving “Flight to Forever”, with a one way trip to the future, with highs, lows, tragedies, loss and a sweeping look at man’s future. It still moves me.
And space. Of course we go to space. From the relativistic invasion of “Time-Lag” to the far future of “Starfog” and “The Sharing of Flesh”, Anderson was laying down his ideas on space opera and space adventure here in these early stories that still hold up today. “Time-Lag’s” slow burn of a captive who works to save her planet through cycles of invasion and attack, through the ultimate tragedy of “Starfog” as lost explorers from a far flung colony seek their home, to the “Sharing of Flesh”, which makes a strong point about assumptions in local cultures, and provides an anthropological mystery in the bargain. “Kings Who Die” is an interesting bit of cat and mouse with a lot of double dealing espionage with a prisoner aboard a spacecraft.
Finally, I had known that Anderson was strongly into verse and poetry for years, but really had never encountered it in situ. This volume corrects that gap in my reading, with a variety of verse that is at turns, moving, poetic, and sometimes extremely funny. The placing of these bits of verse between the prose stories makes for excellent palette cleansers to not only show the range of Anderson’s work, but also clear the decks for the next story.
The last thing I should make clear for readers who might be wondering if this volume truly is for them to is to go back to the beginning of this piece. This volume, and its subsequent volumes, are not a single or even multivolume “best of Poul Anderson”. This is a book, first in a series, that is meant to be a comprehensive collection of Poul Anderson. This is not the book or even a series to pick up if you just want the best of the best of a seminal writer of 20th century science fiction. This volume (and I strongly suspect the subsequent ones) is the volume you want if you want to start a deep dive into his works in all their myriad and many forms. There is a fair amount from the end of the Pulp Era here, and for me it was not all of the same quality. I think all of the stories are worthy but some show they are early in his career, and his craft does and will improve from this point. While for me stories like the titular Call Me Joe, “Flight to Forever”, “The Man Who Came Early”, and the devastating “Prophecy” are among my favorite Poul Anderson stories, the very best of Poul Anderson is yet to come.
(NESFA, 2009)
Often shy and retiring Warner Holme has worn many hats over the years. He has worked in fields ranging from the medical to advertising, but always finds himself most at home among stories and words. He can usually be found in the mid-south, caring for some person or animal, and is almost never more than a meter away from a few books.
(1) 2023 WORLDCON CRITICIZED. C. L. Polk, author of a 2023 Hugo finalist, told newsletter readers they want the Hugos taken away from the Worldcon.
…I rebuke Chengdu Worldcon for inviting Sergey Lukianenko, a choice that is so terrible I can’t even make a bitter derisive joke about it. That’s a fucking horrifying choice from all angles and this person should not be honored in this way. And I shouldn’t have to be horrified by even one GOH who supports fucking genocide, but actually there’s two, since Liu Cixin is also invited.
The treatment of Uighyr Muslims in China is an atrocity and I hate it. The attempt to invade Ukraine and re-colonize it with unspeakable violence is an atrocity and I hate that too. I don’t have any clever words for this. it’s fucking evil and gross and thinking about it makes me feel fury. There was no way I would attend or participate, and being on the ballot for the Hugo awards doesn’t change my mind.
Again, I don’t really feel like anyone is surprised that I object to Chengdu worldcon’s guests and I have nothing to say to any of them.
But I wish that the Hugo Award would/could separate itself from Worldcon.
I have had this opinion for ages. yes, the Hugo Award is not Worldcon; it is only presented there, but that’s a distinction that doesn’t register for a lot of people who believe or assume that they are the same thing. They’re not…but.
The Hugo award is like the Aurora Award here in Canada. It has its own organization, just like the Aurora Award here in Canada. But the Aurora Award ceremony in Canada is hosted by different Canadian conventions each year. In 2019, I went to Ottawa for a lovely award ceremony as part of Can Con (please attend this convention; it’s a good one.) The Aurora Award ceremony has been held in Calgary several times. It floats from place to place, year to year, and in that wandering, asserts that it belongs only to itself.
Perhaps the Hugo Award should do that too, to reinforce that it’s not Worldcon – it’s simply that a worldcon bid, by tradition, includes the hosting of the Hugo awards and so they are associated in this way….
…I wish that I could just spend my time celebrating. But there’s more we need to discuss. I’ve wrestled with this for some time.
The ceremony for the Hugo Awards traditionally takes place at each year’s Worldcon. I support Worldcon touring the world; it should not always be in the U.S., especially not as the U.S. becomes increasingly dangerous for visitors and marginalized people.
I am a descendant of many Slavs. One of my first introductions to fantastical literature was my grandmother telling me fairy tales from her ancestors. My great grandfather helped assemble one of the largest collections of Slavic literature in the English-speaking world. He gave the collection to Texas A&M University in the hopes of further spreading knowledge of Slavic culture.
It shouldn’t take that level of connection to be disturbed here. It is repulsive that anyone would platform and celebrate Lukyanenko while he gloats about war crimes. It is the same repulsion I feel when reading reports of the genocide against the Uyghurs, and that I feel when so-called Guests of Honor vocally support that genocide.
So, as a Hugo finalist, I will not be participating in this year’s Worldcon. I will not travel to Chengdu in person. I will not do any virtual programming remotely, either.
The Worldcon community should know how these decisions have hurt us, and that this is how a Hugo finalist feels. I’m grateful that my work is meaningful to you. I hope the community can do better. It deserves better….
(3) PAY THE WRITER. [Item by Anne Marble.] Yilin Wang learned the British Museum was using their translations of poems by Qiu Jin (“China’s Joan of Arc”) — without credit, permission, or payment – and tweeted about it on June 18. Wang translated works that were in the public domain, and the copyright on the translation is owned by Wang.
The translator, Yilin Wang (she/they), has been published in Clarkesworld, Fantasy Magazine, and others. (Wang has been covered in several File 770 posts.) Wang was a finalist for the Aurora Award and attended Clarion West Writers Workshop 2020/2021.
On July 10 an organization called the International Intellectual Property Law Association put up a very misinformed article about the topic that could have been considered defamatory because it said the translator was the copyright infringer. It has since been superseded by the version “British Museum Drops Writer’s Chinese Poetry Translations Over Copyright Claims” which ends with an apology by IIPLA for its “wrong interpretation”.
The British Museum has issued an apology following the unauthorized use of translations by writer and translator Yilin Wang in their exhibition titled “China’s Hidden Century.” Wang expressed disappointment on Twitter, stating that their translations of Chinese feminist poet Qiu Jin’s work were included without their consent.
The museum released a press statement acknowledging the incident as an “unintentional human error.” They privately corresponded with Wang and offered compensation for using the translations. Consequently, both Wang’s translations and the Chinese poems they translated were removed from the exhibition. However, the museum’s actions have faced criticism, sparking a broader conversation about the role of translators.
The British Museum, which previously stated it would not remove “controversial objects” from the display, faced criticism from Wang, who described the response as “erasure.” This raises concerns about the museum’s engagement with its curation and power dynamics with non-white contributors. The museum issued a statement acknowledging Wang’s request, removing the translations from the exhibition, and offering financial compensation. However, Wang disputes the sufficiency of the museum’s response….
Vancouver-based writer, translator and poet Yilin Wang has raised enough money to initiate a legal claim against the British Museum, as she continues to accuse the institution of copyright infringement after the museum removed poetry translations from a major exhibition on nineteenth century China.
As of July 10, Wang has raised £17,380 ($22,400) on crowd-funding platform CrowdJustice to work with lawyers in the UK to file a claim against the British Museum in the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court (IPEC), a specialist court that is part of the Business and Property Courts of the High Court of Justice in London. Wang has also retained the services of Jon Sharples, a solicitor specializing in intellectual property and art, from the British firm Howard Kennedy LLP.
,,, Wang told ARTnews Monday she decided to raise money to pursue legal action after exchanging several emails with the British Museum about full reinstatement of Qiu Jin’s poetry with credit for her translations; “reasonable payments” for the use of her work in several different formats; as well as an apology explaining what happened and how the museum would avoid it in the future. Wang said the British Museum initially offered a payment of £150 ($194) for the catalogue. That amount was raised to £600 ($775) after Wang asked for a list of all the places the poetry translations had appeared, but the museum also said it would not reinstate Qiu Jin’s poetry and Wang would not be credited because the work would not be in the exhibit.
“They refused twice,” Wang said. “And that was why I started the fundraiser, because it was just not going anywhere at that point.”…
(4) IN THE FIRST PERSON. The SFWA Blog has more testimony in “The LGBTQ+ Speculative Experience: Part 2”, curated by Elle Ire. Ire is joined by Scott Coatsworth, Nicola Griffith, Jose Pablo Iriarte, and Virginia Black. “Kind of like the Star Trek Experience—lots of diversity that some accept, some fight, and others never see.”
Our exploration of the experiences of various members within the LGBTQ+ spec fic community continues in this blog post. Please see Part 1 for an introduction to the series, disclaimers, and why I began this quest. In Part 2, we’ll look at the publishing choices my interviewees made once they were bitten by the writing bug and examine whether there was a connection between their initial exposure to spec fic and the publishing paths they took….
(5) NEW TRANSLATION PRIZE. The Cercador Prize is a new bookseller-led prize for literature in translation. A wide range of prose works will be eligible.
A new and auspicious distinction, the Cercador Prize for Literature in Translation will be awarded annually by a committee of five independent booksellers. During the initial prize cycle, each committee member will be responsible for nominating two full-length translations published in the U.S. between January 1, 2023 and December 31, 2023. The Cercador committee’s primary focus will be translated prose works including but not limited to fiction, nonfiction, memoir, and hybrid texts. As nominations are culled from the organic discovery, discussions, and recommendations of the committee, there is no formal submissions process for this prize.
The ten finalists for the Cercador Prize will be announced no later than October 15, 2023 with one winner, chosen by whatever method the committee deems appropriate, to follow. The winning translation will be announced no later than November 15, 2023. A prize amount of $1,000 will be attached and conferred entirely to the winning translator(s). Translators based anywhere in the world are eligible for the Cercador Prize.
The inaugural prize’s five committee members include:
Thu Doan of East Bay Booksellers in Oakland, Calif.
Gary Lovely of Prologue Bookshop in Columbus, Ohio
Javier Ramirez of Exile in Bookville in Chicago, Ill.
Riley Rennhack of Deep Vellum Books in Dallas, Tex.
Spencer Ruchti of Third Place Books in Seattle, Wash. (chair)
(6) HOLLYWOOD BOWL. Steve Vertlieb was in the audience to hear this concert over the weekend. Great poster!
(7) MEMORY LANE.
1971 – [Written by Cat Eldridge from a choice by Mike Glyer.]
Philip Jose Farmer’s the writer who Mike choose this time. Now I know that y’all are very familiar with him, so I don’t feel that I need to go into any depth on him.
I will say that I love the first two novels of the Riverworld saga, plus Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life.
So the Beginning for this Scroll is To Your Scattered Bodies Go, the beginning of the Riverworld saga, which won a Hugo at the first L.A. Con. It was also nominated for a Ditmar.
It was published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons fifty-two years ago. It was originally serialized as two separate novellas: “The Day of the Great Shout” which was printed in the January 1965 issue of Worlds of Tomorrow, and “The Suicide Express” that was in the March 1966 issue of Worlds of Tomorrow. The cover illustration is by Ira Cohen.
And now let’s see how the Riverworld novelstarted off..
His wife had held him in her arms as if she could keep death away from him.
He had cried out, “My God, I am a dead man!”
The door to the room had opened, and he had seen a giant, black, one-humped camel outside and had heard the tinkle of the bells on its harness as the hot desert wind touched them. Then a huge black face topped by a great black turban had appeared in the doorway. The black eunuch had come in through the door, moving like a cloud, with a gigantic scimitar in his hand. Death, the Destroyer of Delights and the Sunderer of Society, had arrived at last.
Blackness. Nothingness. He did not even know that his heart had given out forever. Nothingness.
Then his eyes opened. His heart was beating strongly. He was strong, very strong! All the pain of the gout in his feet, the agony in his liver, the torture in his heart, all were gone.
It was so quiet he could hear the blood moving in his head. He was alone in a world of soundlessness.
A bright light of equal intensity was everywhere. He could see, yet he did not understand what he was seeing. What were these things above, beside, below him? Where was he?
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born July 11, 1899 — E. B. White. Author of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, both of which are surely genre. Along with William Strunk Jr. he’s the co-author of The Elements of Style English language style guide. In a survey of School Library Journal readers, Charlotte’s Web came in first in their poll of the top one hundred children’s novels. I know I saw the Stuart Little film. It was, errr, cute. (Died 1985.)
Born July 11, 1913 — Cordwainer Smith. Pen name of Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger. Most of his fiction was set in The Instrumentality of Mankind series which I know I’ve read once upon a time at in fragments. Both iBooks and Kindle are well stocked with his novels and short stories including Scanners Live in Vain, a most excellent novella. (Died 1966.)
Born July 11, 1950 — Bruce McGill, 73. His first role was as Director Eugene Matuzak in Time Cop. He later has got one-offs in Quantum Leap (twice), Babylon 5, Voyager and Tales from the Crypt. He’s in the first television remake of The Man Who Fell to Earth as Vernon Gage. If MacGyver counts as genre and I for one think that it should, he had the recurring role of Jack Dalton there.
Born July 11, 1956 — Amitav Ghosh, 67. Author of the absolutely brilliant The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium and Discovery. Really go read it and then we’ll discuss it over a cup of chai masala.
Born July 11, 1958 — Alan Gutierrez, 65. An artist and illustrator, specializing in SF and fantasy cover art. His first professional sale was to Rigel Science Fiction, #3 Winter 1982 . He then began producing work for Baen Books, Tor Books, Pequod Press and other publishers. He has also painted covers for Analog magazine, Aboriginal Science Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and other SF magazines.
Born July 11, 1976 — T.L. Morganfield, 47. She is as she says “An Aztec geek; whether it’s history or mythology, I devour it all. It’s a love affair that began in college and has taken over my fiction writing life.” And that’s why I’m recommending her Bone Flower trilogy which is at genre adjacent if not genre. Her Aztec West series bring the Aztec gods into the Old West and is quite entertaining in a weird sort of manner.
(9) JUDGE DREDD. [Item by Olav Rokne.] This was an emotionally challenging book to read. Often damning and enraging. But brilliantly written, and insightful. Michael Molcher’s I Am The Law deserves consideration for Best Related Work next year. “Judge, Jury, Executioner … and Prophet” at the Hugo Book Club Blog.
…The book depicts the creation of Judge Dredd as a response to the rising reactionary moral panics that engulfed British media in the late 1970s. Molcher seems to argue that comics provided a fertile ground outside of the “establishment” media for Judge Dredd writers like John Wagner and Alan Grant. It provided a platform from which they could offer pointed critiques that were later seen as prescient.
“Things that happen in [Judge Dredd] echo, copy, or pressage things that happened in real life maybe a week or two either side. These are comics that were written months before,” Molcher says. “It’s almost Cassandra-like.”
By understanding Judge Dredd, Molcher argues, we can understand the multifaceted political crisis we are facing today. Thus, it might also be considered an important work of social science fiction. Throughout the book, history, sociology, and cultural studies are woven together.
“When you look at the book Policing The Crisis by Stuart Hall — it’s about the moral panic around the mugging crisis of the 1970s — you can’t help but realize that Hall and [Judge Dredd writers] John Wagner and Alan Grant are talking about the same things,” Molcher says….
Philadelphia has some of the strangest museums in the country. There is a Dental Museum with buckets of teeth, a museum dedicated to insects, and Pizza Brain, featuring…pizza. But the strangest collection must be the Mütter Museum.
Part of the College of Physicians, the museum houses a vast store of medical oddities dating back to the 1850s. Although not large, the two-story institution houses hundreds of specimens and maintains a 19th century feel. Visitors can see part of Albert Einstein’s brain, tumors removed from American presidents, and the death cast of the “Siamese twins” Chang and Eng Bunker, who died in 1874. The collection of skulls and diseased body parts defies description. One of my favorite exhibits is a large set of drawers filled with bizarre objects that people have swallowed (including, as I recall, a cast metal toy ship).
As much as I loved the Mütter, I have been careful to bring only visitors I thought would enjoy it. Some people prefer to keep their distance from a display of a 9-foot human colon….
(11) SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED. Speaking of gizzards, here’s what Archie McPhee has been up to.
These are some adorable organs! From kidneys to livers, this pack of internal organs is a perfect pick-me-up for a minuscule mortician. While it includes a few unpopular organs, you’ll also get the most popular organ of all time, the heart! (Brain is a close second. Also included.)
Want to make it look like a gnome died in your potted plant? These Itty Bitty Bones are like a tiny archaeological dig in your azaleas. Or, pose them in front of your cat and take a picture! What has little Fluffy been up to?
(12) SLEEPOVER IN A MISSILE SILO. Alta will host a Zoom interview with missile silo owner and enthusiast Gary Baker tomorrow, July 12, at 12:30 p.m. Pacific. Register here.
Would you spend the night in a decommissioned missile silo in Roswell, New Mexico? If your answer is an enthusiastic yes, you’ll want to meet Gary Baker: silo enthusiast and owner of Site 4, one of Airbnb’s most curious rental offerings. Profiled in Mark Wallace’s Alta Journal article “Sleeping in the Barrel of a Gun,” Baker joins Alta Live to detail his passion for missile silos, tell us about “preppers”—people who prepare for the end of the world—and reveal what it’s like to sleep in an underground bunker that was built to withstand a war. This will be a fun one—join us!
(13) THE VIBES. [Item by Steven French.] It turns out that the shape of your brain may be more important than previously thought (presumably by folk with particularly shaped brains …!) “MRI study challenges our knowledge of how the human brain works” at Physics World.
We have long thought that specific thoughts or sensations elicit activity in specific parts of the brain, but this study reveals that structured patterns of activity are excited across nearly the entire brain, just like the way in which a musical note arises from vibrations occurring along the entire length of a violin string, and not just an isolated segment…
This is a preview of the digital audiobook of How to Resist Amazon and Why by Danny Caine (Audiobook Excerpt from Chap. 2: An open letter to Jeff Bezos from a small bookstore), available on Libro.fm
[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Bill, Anne Marble, Olav Rokne, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
The Ursula K. Le Guin Trust today announced the shortlist for the 2023 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction. The prize honors a book-length work of imaginative fiction with $25,000. The nine shortlisted books will be considered by a panel of five jurors— William Alexander, Alexander Chee, Karen Joy Fowler, Tochi Onyebuchi, and Shruti Swamy. The winner will be announced on October 21, Ursula K. Le Guin’s birthday.
Here is the Shortlist for the 2023 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction.
Wolfish by Christiane M. Andrews
Arboreality by Rebecca Campbell
Spear by Nicola Griffith
Ten Planets by Yuri Herrera, translated by Lisa Dillman
The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez
Brother Alive by Zain Khalid
Meet Us by the Roaring Sea by Akil Kumarasamy
Geometries of Belonging by R.B. Lemberg
Drinking from Graveyard Wells by Yvette Lisa Ndlovu
The Prize is given to a writer whose book reflects the concepts and ideas that are central to Ursula’s own work, which include (but are not limited to): hope, equity, and freedom; non-violence and alternatives to conflict; and a holistic view of humanity’s place in the natural world. Read more about the prize and eligibility requirements here.
[Introduction: Gary Westfahl has authored, edited, or co-edited over thirty books about science fiction and fantasy, including the Hugo Award-nominated Science Fiction Quotations (2005) and the two-volume Science Fiction Literature through History: An Encyclopedia (2021). In 2003 he won the Science Fiction Research Association’s Pilgrim Award for his lifetime contributions to science fiction and fantasy scholarship.]
By Gary Westfahl: I am announcing a new science fiction award, the Westfahl Award. Unlike other awards, given to science fiction authors and works, this award will be given to other science fiction awards. Specifically, it will “honor” the most dubious and superfluous awards in this field.
Given the extreme proliferation of such awards, there will be no shortage of credible nominees.
The award’s other special feature is that, unlike other science fiction awards, it is not designed to encourage people to continue the fine work they have been doing; rather, in the tradition of Hollywood’s Razzie Awards, the hope is that the stigma of such an award might encourage some recipients to stop what they have doing – giving out questionable awards – and significantly reduce the number of such awards, to everyone’s benefit.
*****
In a sense, all these awards are superfluous, since authors effectively receive awards all the time, as a natural consequence of their careers. This is especially true of science fiction writers, since the strong community that grew up with the genre supports several mechanisms to honor the field’s popular writers. To list some of these natural awards: writers read letters in magazines and receive personal letters from fans praising their work; their stories are chosen to be republished in anthologies; they attend science fiction conventions to be greeted as honored guests and are asked to sign copies of their books; they are interviewed by major publications interested in their works; they are consulted by journalists seeking quotable comments on contemporary phenomena related to science fiction; their texts are analyzed by science fiction commentators and scholars; and publishers request that they provide blurbs praising other authors’ works, testifying to their own prominence as names readers will recognize and respect. Most significantly, they regularly receive checks for published stories and royalties from their books, and I would argue that these represent the most tangible and meaningful of all awards. In all these ways, then, authors are regularly informed that their writings are meritorious and appreciated, and they don’t need small statues or fancy certificates to confirm that is the case.
The question then becomes: if they aren’t really necessary, why are there so many awards, and why have these awards become so numerous that it now seems File 770 is announcing some new award every day? The answer is not that authors and their works require recognition, since as noted that is already occurring. In a few cases, such as the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the Endeavor Award, awards do provide funds that contribute to the authors’ income, so one can defend them as charities to support worthwhile writers; but almost all of the other awards for science fiction writers offer nothing more than some objects to place on their mantles or certificates to hang on their walls.
The real purpose of these awards, in virtually all cases, is nothing more than self-aggrandizement, an effort by organizations to draw more attention to themselves. Consider this situation: you have a science fiction society dedicated to a particular region, or particular subgenre; you publish fanzines, you stage annual conventions, you sponsor other activities, but you are distressed to realize that you are being entirely ignored by the larger science fiction community. So you have a brilliant idea: we’ll establish and give out annual awards! Some distinguished authors might show up to accept them at our conventions, increasing our attendance, and we can send announcements of our awards to science fiction websites, publicizing ourselves as well as our recently invented awards. And every time one organization implements this policy, it can inspire other organizations to do the same, each coming up with some category of science fiction to honor that is not precisely covered by all the other awards.
Whenever people read an announcement about yet another science fiction award, then, they must bear in mind one simple fact: the award is not primarily designed to honor the identified author or work; it is primarily designed to honor the organization bestowing the award. And this motivation constitutes one reason to dislike these awards – that they are disingenuous, emerging from motivations that have nothing to do with any genuine desire to honor meritorious authors and works.
A second reason to dislike these awards is the manner in which they are decided upon. Certain awards, prominently including the Hugo Awards and Nebula Awards, are determined by the votes of large numbers of presumably qualified readers, and therefore have some credibility; however, most awards I know of are decided upon by small committees that may or may not be making objective judgments about such matters. While I would prefer to not provide details, I was briefly involved in deciding upon the Eaton Awards and Milford Awards, announced at the annual J. Lloyd Eaton Conferences on Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, once held at the University of California, Riverside. These respectively recognized the year’s outstanding critical work on science fiction and lifetime achievement in science fiction editing. (Later, the Eaton Awards honored lifetime achievements in writing science fiction, undoubtedly because the person then in heading the collection imagined that she could attract more publicity by honoring authors instead of scholars.) Clearly, then-conference coordinator George Slusser inaugurated these awards to draw attention to the Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature that he oversaw and associated conferences, and they have been duly recognized in compilations of science fiction awards.
However, the way that these awards were determined was never specified – and thus properly suspect. For the record, the Eaton Awards and Milford Awards were basically decided upon by Slusser himself, with some input from a few other colleagues. And his decisions were sometimes based on questionable considerations, and were subject to pressure by people with a personal interest in their outcome, raising the issue of why anyone should consider them significant. Now, I have no inside information on the processes that result in all the other awards now being received by science fiction texts and authors, but I would guess they are often the result of equally questionable negotiations among the few committee members who make the key decisions, and hence that the results are not necessarily based purely on merit.
As a third reason to be critical of certain awards, many are based on the premise that there exists a particular form of science fiction that requires special recognition, which usually is not the case. Consider the Philip K. Dick Award, established to honor each year’s best science fiction novel originally published as a paperback. Now, back in the 1950s, when Dick first began publishing, one could justify such an award, since the policy then was that major authors first published works as hardbacks, while minor authors first published works as paperbacks; thus, one could argue that the poor authors relegated to the paperback-first marketplace might be overlooked and thus demand a special award to honor their outstanding works. The problem is that there is absolutely no evidence in later decades that science fiction novels originally published as paperbacks have been ignored by other awards; indeed, three of the field’s most enduring classics – Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Larry Niven’s Ringworld (1970), and William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) – were all first published as paperbacks, yet this proved no barrier to their winning both the Hugo Award and Nebula Award. In addition, the rigid rules governing first publications are no longer enforced, as many major authors are happy to have their novels first appear as paperbacks, and further muddying the waters is that some publishers now publish books simultaneously as hardbacks – for libraries – and paperbacks – for the general public – not to mention the issues raised by print-on-demand books and ebooks which may first manifest themselves as physical objects as either hardbacks or paperbacks. In sum, there is no need for a special award for original paperback novels – yet the Philip K. Dick Award is destined to endure, as one device to draw attention to its sponsor, the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society.
Also open to criticism are the awards designed for writers who live in particular regions – such as the Endeavor Award, for writers in the Pacific Northwest, and the Manly Wade Wellman Award, for writers in North Carolina. Long ago, people tended to spend their entire lives in the places where they were born, and enjoyed only limited contact with other areas of the country; thus, there emerged in America, as recognized by scholars, distinctive regional literatures. But things are different today: thanks to modern media such as films, television, and the internet, everyone in America today effectively grows up in the milieu of a national culture, if not an international culture, and it is commonplace for people to move to different regions several times during their lifetime, further diminishing the influence of their surroundings at any particular time. It would be impossible, then, to argue that there exists some singular form of “North Carolina Science Fiction” that demands a special award; all one can say in defense of the Manly Wade Wellman Award is that it is a purely parochial gesture to celebrate writers who happen to live close to the organization that gives out the award and to celebrate the organization that awards it. But why should writers living in North Carolina be especially privileged to have an award just for them? What about the writers in the other forty-nine states? Doesn’t Paul Di Filippo deserve to be eligible for an award for writers currently living in Rhode Island?
As it happens, I recently received personal evidence undermining any defense of the Endeavour Award as a way to especially recognize the unique qualities of authors who inhabit the Pacific Northwest. For my Science Fiction Literature Through History: An Encyclopedia (2021), I interviewed among other writers Ted Chiang, resident of a Seattle suburb, and one of my original questions was, “Along with other noteworthy authors, including the late Ursula K. Le Guin and William Gibson, you have long lived in the Pacific Northwest region. In what ways has that environment influenced your writing?” Chiang advised me to substitute another question, since the only way he could respond to that question was “none that I’m aware of.” So much for the argument that living in the Pacific Northwest constitutes any meaningful influence on the science fiction of its authors.
I am also suspicious of all awards to works of science fiction that focus on particular issues, such as the Prometheus Award, annually given by the Libertarian Futurist Society to novels that especially promote libertarian ideals. The problem with such awards is simple: as anyone learns in literature classes, the very definition of superior novels is that they are characteristically devoted to multiple issues, in contrast to short stories that are typically centered on one particular issue. Thus, a novel that is so conspicuously focused on the topic of criticizing oppressive governments, to the exclusion of all other matters, as to attract the attention of judges determining awards is arguably not a successful novel, and hence not truly worthy of an award. In the case of the Prometheus Award, some widely praised novels have won the award, yet a number of other winners, which I will tactfully not name, have to put it mildly failed to receive widespread recognition as contemporary classics of science fiction.
For the record, I am not automatically opposed to all science fiction awards dedicated to particular categories of science fiction. I think the Scribe Awards – given to outstanding novels based on media franchises – perform a valuable service, since all such novels are invariably and automatically excluded from consideration for all other awards; and while I have no fondness for such works, I am sure that some works in the field are excellent, and others are not, and there should exist some way to recognize the best writers who specialize in this form of science fiction. It is, however, harder to argue that there exists any need to especially recognize works that first appear as paperbacks, or writers who happen to live in North Carolina.
Yet the final problem with all these awards is a principle that is unfortunately not understood by contemporary elementary school teachers – namely, that if you give everyone an award, it is equivalent to giving no one an award. Today there are, quite simply, too many awards being given out to science fiction authors and works, and each one unjustifiably but significantly diminishes the importance of such awards. A reader becomes numb while reading about all of them, so that they virtually have no impact at all. I mean, to mention one recent award, no one could possibly care less that Stephen Graham Jones’s The Only Good Indians (2020) won the Los Angeles Times’s Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Speculative Literature. All these spurious awards only diminish the significance of the few awards that actually mean anything, and they clutter websites with breaking news stories that in no way actually reflect the opinions of the larger science fiction community or the individuals who will ultimately determine whether certain works of science fiction attract a larger and more enduring audience.
That, I suppose, represents the ultimate argument against attaching any value to awards given to authors: they have, in the long run, absolutely no effect on the opinions of future generations, which is really important. During his career, Booth Tarkington distinguished himself as one of America’s most respected authors, twice winning the Pulitzer Prize along with other honors; today, virtually nobody reads his works. At the same time, people would have laughed at the notion of giving any awards to Edgar Rice Burroughs, a little-esteemed writer for pulp magazines, yet many of his novels remain in print today and he is the center of a vigorous community of enthusiasts.
Awards simply don’t matter; later generations make their own decisions about which authors to ignore and which authors to read, and they don’t attach any importance to the opinions of contemporaries and the awards they bestow. Who today has bothered to read Mark Clifton and Frank Riley’s They’d Rather Be Right (1956), a terrible novel that happened to win a Hugo Award? And so what if the Science Fiction Writers of America stupidly ignored two of the field’s acknowledged classics published in 1968, John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, to give that year’s Nebula Award to a now-forgotten mediocre pastiche of a Heinlein juvenile, Alexei Panshin’s Rite of Passage? History has made its judgment, and that organization’s judgment has been resoundingly confirmed as incorrect. From one perspective, then, one should calmly accept announcements of awards based on questionable premises or given to questionable works, knowing these will ultimately have absolutely no impact on how these texts are embraced or rejected by later readers.
However, even recognizing that these awards have little lasting effect, one can still be irritated by their existence, and the attention being given to them. Along with criticisms of this kind, there is one way to reduce their frequency, and that is simply to ignore them. Thus, when someone receives a press release that someone’s novel has won this year’s Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Speculative Literature, the recipient should stop and think: have I ever heard of this award? Is anyone other than the author’s family members and friends going to care about this award? Is it necessary to mention this award in our magazine and website? If the people giving out these superfluous awards notice that nobody is responding to their portentous announcements, perhaps they might reconsider whether they should bother to hand them out.
Science fiction authors could also play a role by routinely declining to show up to accept awards of dubious merit. No organization is crass enough to announce that an award is contingent upon the recipient personally accepting it, but it is often clearly their hope that the award will inspire an author to come to their event and provide them with a celebrity guest. For authors, non-attendance would be a win-win decision: they could if interested add a questionable award to lists of their accomplishments, but they would not be validating the award by attending a ceremony. And if organizations realize that recognized authors are displaying little interest in their awards, this could become another reason they might dispense with them.
*****
So, let us consider all the awards specifically criticized above as the first preliminary nominees for the Westfahl Award: the Philip K. Dick Award, the Endeavor Award, the Manly Wade Wellman Award, the Prometheus Award, and the Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Speculative Literature. That list surely excludes many other undistinguished candidates, but I am disinclined to engage in any extensive process of compiling and evaluating all of the routinely announced awards, since I prefer to limit my research efforts to subjects of genuine significance, and these awards simply don’t qualify. However, I invite additional nominees by comments on this website or sent to my email address, Gwwestfahl@yahoo.com . (Hey, if this commentary attracts any interest, I may actually announce a winner.) Passionate defenses of their work by the creators of these and similar awards can also be offered, since the question of what does and does not constitute a truly meaningful award should properly invite an extended debate that cannot be resolved by a single commentator, whose opinions about certain awards might be questioned. Yet the problem of too many science fiction awards remains something that should be provoking such a debate, and perhaps inspire some reforms.
Happy Fourth of July! A dog who is mostly indifferent to fireworks helps make it so.
Review by Cider: Lis got me this packet of Lamb Tripe Treats from our friend Paula, who does important stuff for the Greater Derry Humane Society. I could tell right away it smelled really good, but despite my best efforts I couldn’t get it open myself. Lis did it easily; I think she cheated this time. This kind is called “green tripe,” but I don’t know what other kinds there are.
So then she let me sniff one of the tripe thingies.
As I had suspected, it smelled really yummy! Lis says it’s made from a lamb’s stomach lining, and lots of humans don’t like it, but most dogs do. Cats, too. All I can say is, if you humans don’t like it, more for us hardworking service animals, mousers, credentials, and household companions.
Turns out they also break easily into smaller pieces, so “it will spoil your supper” will never be a valid excuse for not letting me have some!
With any luck, Lis won’t get much better at breaking them up. What are my chances, do you think?
I decided to go for the smaller piece first,
but I kept a close eye on the packet and the bigger piece, and got the bigger piece, too.
Fortunately, it turns out Lis wasn’t kidding about not liking it herself, and I got to finish off the whole stick!
It’s good to know that this is a healthy, chewy treat for both dogs and cats, who are I think the two most popular credentials and household companions here. I honestly don’t know if it’s good for birds. I suppose it might depend on what kind of bird.
(2) AFRICAN/BLACK HUGO FINALISTS. Writing Africa’s post “Hugo Awards 2023 finalists announced” names seven writers of African descent (African or Black) in the running for the awards. List at the link.
(3) HELP IS ON THE WAY. Twitter’s API changes (including price hikes) radically affected certain kinds of services. Shaun Duke tells about how he replaced a resource he used in “When You Lose Your Social Media Manager (Or, Notes on SMMSs to Drown Your Tears In)”. Duke screened over 100 services and has shared his scouting report on 11 finalists. (For him, whether they link to Mastodon is an important consideration.)
…Like a lot of folks, I don’t really have the time to sit on social media apps posting. And like a lot of folks, I have things to “sell,” which means I don’t have much choice but to be on social media apps. In this case, I mostly “sell” a podcast, and in the corporate environment of podcasting, you can’t exist without a social media presence. And one person really can’t manage that much social media without a little help. For me, that help comes in the form of a social media manager.
As such, when my existing management tools either went belly up or fell apart due to Muskian shenanigans, I knew I needed to find something else that would help me manage my personal feeds AND the feeds for The Skiffy and Fanty Show without me needing to be constantly app-bound. To do that effectively, that “something else” needed to be more or less similar to SmarterQueue in terms of price and function….
The original post only featured SocialChamp, Buffer, SocialBu, Sociomonials, and Vista Social.
New entries include the following: SocialBee, Publr, SocialOomph, Zoho Social, Missinglettr and dlvr.it…
In the battle of the bomb vs. the bombshell… why not both?
Plenty of moviegoers are making the decision to watch Christopher Nolan’s atomic drama “Oppenheimer” and Greta Gerwig’s colorful romp “Barbie” on the same day when the two tentpoles hit theaters on July 21….
(5) ON THE RADIO. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Lots on the B Beeb Ceeb Radio 4.
Open access, so no need even for a BBC Sounds account.
Tales of a bipedal ape-like creature persist in the myth and legend of the Himalayas. But does the yeti really exist? Two enthusiasts are determined to find out.
Andrew Benfield and Richard Horsey begin their search in the north-east Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh.
Speaking to villagers and yak herders, they hear multiple accounts of yeti sightings. Will they find the evidence they need to prove the creature is real?
Love the end of the world. One of the best SF tropes going.
This is a sort of drama documentary following the last man alive but also explores the quiet Earth trope in SF.
In the near future, Paul Farley finds that he is the last person on the planet – everyone else has disappeared without any explanation.
At first bewildered, in order to mark time and help him keep his wits sharp, he sets about creating an audio journal, centred on an exploration of the various novels, poems and films that feature a last man (and it is almost always a man) character.
These stem back to the Romantics, and include Byron’s poem Darkness and Mary Shelley’s overlooked gem The Last Man, which raises some of the key questions that arise not just in later narratives but also in Paul’s own experience – what happens to time when you’re the last person standing, should you live in the town or the countryside, is it possible to really be happy or simply enjoy a view, a meal or a song when there’s nobody left to enjoy them with?
After a traumatic car crash, Mary joins a clinical drug trial that promises a cure for PTSD. The medication triggers intense flashbacks of the accident that left her fiancée comatose. But is Mary simply remembering the event, or reliving it? And if she is actually returning to the past, does that mean she can change her future?
(5) AI JIANG EVENT. Space Cowboy Books of Joshua Tree, CA (which incidentally just retired its Simultaneous Times newsletter) will host an Online Reading & Interview with Ai Jiang on Tuesday July 18 at 6:00 p.m. Pacific.
If you have the opportunity to give up humanity for efficiency, mechanical invincibility, and to surpass human limitations. . . would you? Ai is a cyborg, under the guise of an AI writing program, who struggles to keep up with the never-blinking city of Emit as it threatens to leave all those like her behind.
Get your copy of I Am AIhere. Register for the reading free here.
(6) CELEBRITY BRUSH. Steve Vertlieb is visiting LA. Last night he and his brother Erwin met Paul Williams at The Catalina Jazz Club. Paul was there to support his friend, Jimmy Webb.
Erwin Vertlieb, Paul Williams, and Steve Vertlieb.Steve Vertlieb, Jimmy Webb, and Erwin Vertlieb.
(7) MEMORY LANE.
2004 – [Written by Cat Eldridge from a choice by Mike Glyer.]
So Mike picked a work by Geoff Ryman, a writer that I like a lot. I think one of his best works is the revisionist fantasy of The Wizard of Oz, Was…, and 253, or Tube Theatre which a Philip K. Dick Award is stellar work. The Child Garden which I honestly can’t decide if I like or loathe won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award
He’s written a fair amount of short fiction, half of which is collected is Paradise Tales, and some of his novellas are in Unconquered Countries: Four Novellas.
So what was that work? It was Air (or, Have Not Have) which was published nineteen years ago by St. Martin’s Griffin. It won an Arthur C. Clarke Award, a British Science Fiction Award, an Otherwise Award and the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic.
And now for our Beginning…
MAE LIVED IN THE LAST VILLAGE IN THE WORLD TO GO ONLINE. After that, everyone else went on Air.
Mae was the village’s fashion expert. She advised on makeup, sold cosmetics, and provided good dresses. Every farmer’s wife needed at least one good dress.
Mae would sketch what was being worn in the capital. She would always add a special touch: a lime-green scarf with sequins; or a lacy ruffle with colorful embroidery. A good dress was for display. “We are a happier people and we can wear these gay colors,” Mae would advise. “Yes, that is true,” her customer might reply, entranced that fashion expressed their happy culture. “In the photographs, the Japanese women all look so solemn.”
“So full of themselves,” said Mae, and lowered her head and scowled, and she and her customer would laugh, feeling as sophisticated as anyone in the world.
Mae got her ideas as well as her mascara and lipsticks from her trips to the town. It was a long way and she needed to be driven. When Sunni Haseem offered to drive her down in exchange for a fashion expedition, Mae had to agree. Apart from anything else, Mae had a wedding dress to collect.
Sunni herself was from an old village family, but her husband was a beefy brute from farther down the hill. He puffed on cigarettes and his tanned fingers were as thick and weathered as the necks of turtles. In the backseat with Mae, Sunni giggled and prodded and gleamed with the thought of visiting town with her friend and confidante who was going to unleash her beauty secrets.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born July 10, 1903 — John Wyndham. His best-known works include The Day of the Triffids and The Midwich Cuckoos, both written in the Fifties. The latter novel was filmed twice as Village of the Damned. The usual suspects have an impressive selection of his novels though little of his short fiction is available alas. (Died 1969.)
Born July 10, 1914 — Joe Shuster. Comic book artist best remembered for co-creating Superman with Jerry Siegel. It happened in Action Comics #1 which was cover-dated June 1938. Need I mention the long fight with DC over crediting them as the creators and paying them? I think not. He was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame and the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame. (Died 1992.)
Born July 10, 1923 — Earl Hamner Jr. Though much better known for writing and producing The Waltons, he wrote eight scripts for the Twilight Zone including “Black Leather Jackets” in which an alien falls in love with a human girl and “The Hunt” where raccoon hunters enter the Twilight Zone. He also wrote the script of the Hanna-Barbera production of Charlotte’s Web. (Died 2016.)
Born July 10, 1931 — Julian May. She‘s best known for her Saga of Pliocene Exile (known as the Saga of the Exiles in the UK) and Galactic Milieu series: Jack the Bodiless, Diamond Mask and Magnificat. At age 21 she chaired TASFiC, the 1952 Worldcon in Chicago. She was inducted into the First Fandom Hall of Fame at the Sasquan Worldcon. (Died 2017.)
Born July 10, 1941 — Susan Seddon Boulet. Another one who died way, way too young after a long struggle with cancer. If you’ve read the American edition of Terri Windling’s The Wood Wife (which won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature Award), you’ve seen her amazing work. Or perhaps you’ve got a copy of Pomegranate‘s edition of Ursula Le Guin’s Buffalo Gals Won’t You Come Out Tonight which also features her art. If you’re keen on knowing more about this amazing artist, see the Green Man review of Susan Seddon Boulet: A Retrospective. (Died 1997.)
Born July 10, 1941 — David Hartwell. Encyclopedia of Science Fiction describes him as “perhaps the single most influential book editor of the past forty years in the American science fiction publishing world”. I certainly fondly remember the The Space Opera Renaissance he co-edited with Kathryn Cramer. Not to mention that his Year’s Best Fantasy andYear’s Best SF anthologies are still quite excellent reading, and they’re available at the usual suspects for a very reasonable price. (Died 2016.)
Born July 10, 1945 — Ron Glass. Probably best-known genre wise as Shepherd Book in the Firefly series and its sequel Serenity. His first genre role was as Jerry Merris in Deep Space, a SF horror film and he’d later show up voicing Philo D. Grenman in Strange Frame: Love & Sax (“slated as the world’s first animated lesbian-themed sci-fi film”; look it up as it as an impressive voice cast) and he showed up twice as J. Streiten, MD in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Oh and he was on Voyager playing a character named Loken in the “Nightingale” episode. (Died 2016.)
I was born in July. I remember telling the physician who attended my birth that I was going to be a male model and therefore needed to be sure that my belly button was a neat innie and not an outie. The doctor obliged, but as it turned out I didn’t have the right stuff to be a model. I was four weeks old, making the rounds of agents, getting one polite rejection after another, when I finally encountered a man who understood that what I needed to hear was not insincere encouragement but the blunt truth. “Kid,” he said, though I was still a mere infant, “take a long look in a mirror. A moldering turnip has a better chance of being a model than you do.”
Oh, I recall vividly the emotional turmoil that overcame me when he issued that judgment. He spoke the truth, but there was no need to phrase it so cruelly. I wanted to give him a thrashing he would never forget, but he was six feet four, and I was only twenty-six inches tall with inadequately developed musculature. I told him I’d be back to settle the score in twenty years, and I left his office red-faced with anger and shame…
(10) OVER THERE. [Item by Michael Toman.] Bibliophile Filers might be interested in browsing this list to see who (and what!) “made the cut” of 1,322 titles before June, 1947. “List of Armed Services Editions” in the Wikipedia. Have to wonder just how valuable titles like the Lovecraft and Stoker are now?
Armed Services Editions (ASEs) were small paperback books of fiction and nonfiction that were distributed in the American military during World War II. From 1943 to 1947, some 122 million copies of more than 1,300 ASE titles were published and printed by the Council on Books in Wartime (CBW) and distributed to service members, with whom they were enormously popular.
Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light & Magic, which won Oscars for the visual effects in Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones films Raiders of the Lost Ark and Temple of Doom, returned to use every trick in the book on the whopping 2,350 VFX shots in the fifth installment of the franchise.
In the opening action sequence of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, a young Harrison Ford appears in a 1944-set flashback highlighted by an action scene atop of moving train. Then we meet the elder Indy in 1969 for his next adventure, which includes a tuk-tuk chase in Morocco and — using the titular dial to time travel — a climax set during the epic siege of Syracuse….
It goes without saying, a lot of attention has been placed on the young Harrison Ford, who appears during the movie’s opening scene. How’d you do it?
ANDREW WHITEHURST It’s called ILM Face Swap; it’s using an enormous number of techniques.
ROBERT WEAVER Face swap essentially is replacing the face with another face, whether it’s a younger version or somebody entirely different. In this case, it was the younger version. And as Andrew was saying, we utilized every trick in the book as far as what it would take to get each individual shot to the level that it needed to be. It employed using machine learning; it employed building a full CG asset to highly critical detail. This work doesn’t lend itself well to having a very consistent recipe; it’s completely dynamic to the individual shot. So there were times that we were leaning more on the CG asset, and there were times that we would be getting a bit more out of the machine learning passes.
WHITEHURST The one continuous element throughout all of this is having really great artists with really great eyes making those choices with Robert and me. And we had an enormous amount of reference material from earlier Indy films, which we got scanned, and we could use that and we could frame through that and understand what exactly the likeness was that we were trying to hit. And it’s building it up. We would initially do a low-resolution pass that we could give to the edit. So they were always cutting with an age-appropriate Indiana Jones, even if it was not a final quality, so that they could judge the performance in the cut and understand how that was working. And that meant we then got better notes back….
…Unknown: Killer Robots walks us through various inventions (including those headless robot dog-alikes you see far too much on social media), scenarios and ramifications with admirable surefootedness. You sense that its heart lies with the cool guys making all the cool stuff. And it is hard not to be mesmerised by the extraordinary stuff in the offing. To see MIT’s latest dog quickly navigate new surfaces via the infinite raw power of machine learning, or a flight lieutenant with 20 years of combat under his immaculately polished belt be outclassed in a dogfight by a new piece of tech that has been filled with 30 years of experience in 10 months, is to watch a terrible beauty being born. But whenever the film slips into full cheerleading (and jingoistic) mode, it recalls itself and us to duty and turns to showcasing the less telegenic side of things.
By which I mean stories like Sean Ekins’ and Fabio Urbina’s. They “just flipped a 0 to a 1” in their work finding treatments and cures via AI molecules and modelling for underresearched diseases, “pushed go” and returned to their desks later to find their six-year-old Apple Mac had created 40,000 new molecules that would be absolutely lethal to humanity. Only if a bad actor got hold of them, but … anyway, Ekins has barely slept since. “We were totally naive … Anyone could do what we did. How do we control this technology before it is used to do something totally destructive?”…
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Michael Toman for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day SocialInjusticeWorrier.]
The Eugie Award “honors stories that are irreplaceable, that inspire, enlighten, and entertain.”
We will be looking for stories that are beautiful, thoughtful, and passionate, and change us and the field. The recipient is a story that is unique and will become essential to speculative fiction readers.
This is a juried award, that begins with a longlist of nominations coming from publishers and editors, supplemented by choices of select readers. A selection committee of spec fiction fans picks the finalists. The winner is chosen by a panel of judges, and receives a plaque and a $1000 prize. All finalists receive a pin. The award is presented at Dragon Con.
Individuals must have a WSFS membership to be eligible to vote (in addition to any other type of available membership).
Eligible members log into the 2023 Hugo Awards page on the official website. Click “Vote” to enter the Qualification Check. After verification, you can access the voting page.
All online ballots must be received by October 1, 2023, 17:59 pm China Standard Time (CST, UTC +8)/September 30, 2023,23:59 pm Hawaiian Time. For the paper ballots, the valid date shall be subject to the postmark and the ballots shall be mailed before October 1, 2023 China Standard Time (CST, UTC +8). If you have any questions about the final ballot, please contact the Hugo Awards Subcommittee of the 2023 Chengdu Worldcon by sending emails to hugoteam@chengduworldcon.com.
The winners will be announced at the Hugo Award ceremony on October 21, 2023.
For the website also has an instructional graphic.
[Introduction: Melanie Stormm continues her humorous series of posts about the misdirected emails she’s been getting. Stormm is a multiracial writer who writes fiction, poetry, and audio theatre. Her novella, Last Poet of Wyrld’s End is available through Candlemark & Gleam. She is currently the editor at the SPECk, a monthly publication on speculative poetry by the SFPA. Find her in her virtual home at coldwildeyes.com. Wipe your feet before entering.]
THE TROUBLE WITH BAERS
Hello All, Melanie here!
In recent weeks, Writer X has solved the dilemma on How to Become Famous Instantly When You Are A New/Early Career SFF Writer. The answer is simple: write something that no one else has written.
Now, I hear some of you saying that this is what all writers have to do if they don’t want to spend valuable money and years of their lives being sued for plagiarism. Plagiarism is complicated, as we learned last week when X formed a Not For Profit organization dedicated to fighting Pre-Stolen ideas. You don’t have to plagiarize to accuse someone else of nicking your idea.
In previous iterations of this goal, Writer X created a “new genre.” In this current iteration, she’s mashing up two different genre conventions to prove to the world that she truly is the “next big, epic fantasy writer of all time.”
Unfortunately for X, there’s a new TV show called Plight of Stars with a premise very like the idea that X is certain will help her Make It Big. But X has a plan: hire a Juju practitioner to wipe the existence of the show out of the consciousness of everyone who’s ever seen it—or even worked on it. Simple enough stuff.
Meanwhile, in Cradensburg, a mysterious carnival has come to town but no one’s been able to attend thanks to all the rains they’ve been experiencing. This also means that Tryxy the demon hasn’t met up with his angel friend at all as everyone knows angels are allergic to rain.
Perhaps X would do better if she moved on to a new idea—say, sitting down and actually doing some writing. But that doesn’t seem to have occurred to her yet.
Without further ado…
Subject: MARCHING AN ARMY IN THE RAIN
Dear Gladys,
As I wait for my new juju practitioner to return my email, there’s something else I’d need to talk to you about.
I’m writing to request provisions for my army. The rains have been long and plentiful, and my soldiers are up to their knees in the significant overflow. Just yesterday I took my army on a rucksack march down to the corner store and back and at least two of my soldiers were swept away and nearly sucked into a drainage tunnel. I had to drive all the way to Walmart to get a pool noodle to retrieve them!!!!
The news is grim, Galdsy. We are not going to make the long march to our local IRS office without better provisions than what we have.
Please send all your pool noodles right away!!!! My latest fantasy saga is on the line!!!!
xox,
Generally X
P.S. Originally, I was calling myself General X, but my boyfriend, award nominated fantasy writer Tod Boadkins, says that it might be disrespected to real, actual generals and so I told him that I was just generally a general and we both agreed that it probably would be fine for people to just call me Generally X. After all, I am me at least 90% of the time!!!!
Subject: THE FUTURE IS WITHIN REACH
Dear Gladys,
So far, I’ve heard nothing from my new juju practitioner. I called her office and her sister Linda told me she’s on vacation at a llama farming retreat in Oshkosh, Wisconsin through Thursday. Until then, I am forced to stay on my current path!!
My troops have had a tough couple of days with their morale. First, they were disheartened when the shipment of pool noodles I had said were on the way never arrived. I told them not to worry, have a heart, Gladys ALWAYS DELIVERS!!!!
Then, the popcorn contribution we requested from Mr. Morgans also never came and we were forced to commence with our Regimental Movie Night making do with a can of ginger beer I found in the back of my pantry and some of the Cool Ranch Doritos Tryxy keeps in his secret stash. But don’t worry, I will replace them before he misses them!!!
Anyhoo, I’m sure you’re DYING to know how my writing is going. Unfortunately, I am in the middle of a war, Gladys. As you know, I created a nonprofit organization just last week to address the problems Plight of Stars has created for me and SO MANY other writers. I submitted all of the necessary paperwork and waited for them to give me my 501c3 number and you know what they said???? THEY SAID IT TAKES 6 to 9 MONTHS!!!!
I said, “That’s ridiculous. I took the time to fill in all those questions and you mean to tell me that you’re just going to put my papers on the shelf and not look at them for 6 to 9 months???”
And the person on the helpline said, “First of all, we don’t accept applications filled out in pink crayon. Secondly, is this like your first time interacting with the IRS. Ever???”
That kind of calloused dismissal of pink crayon grinds my gears, Gladys!!!! Now I have to fill it out all over again and in the stifling, repressive colors of blue or black!!!!
At first, I wasn’t going to build an army and march on them. But then I really didn’t have anything else to do and it turns out that there were a bunch of unemployed gnomes and libertarians from Brokenheap, NH that really like the idea of marching down to the IRS and weren’t really doing anything else either.
When I explained to them the awful trouble Plight of Stars has made for my writing career, one of them suggested that we all watch the show together so that we could get good and mad. ‘Cause if there’s one thing that can keep you excited about your decision to join the army, it’s getting good and mad!!!!
So that’s how Regimental Movie Night started. But really it’s more like Regimental Movie Hour. On Monday alone, we binge watched the entire first season of Plight of Stars TWICE.
After our rucksack march to the corner store to get more snacks went afoul, we decided to google fan theories about what caused the Blight and whether everyone agrees that the strange thing that happens to Elfthera when her eyes go black is caused by exposure to the blight and that caused a good deal of infighting.
By the fourth binge-watching, we had all switched our computer wall papers and phone lock screens to the image of Elfthera with the black Blight eyes. Then, I decided we had to do some real army activities so we marched on down to the town green and practiced bivouacking there.
There’s one thing that has become painfully clear: THIS SHOW IS AMAZING!!!!!! It’s the best thing I’ve ever watched and that tells me more than ever that my epic fantasy saga is going to be SOOOOO GOOOOOD so long as Linda isn’t leading me down the garden path regarding my juju person being back on Thursday.
By the way, Gladys, can you pop by the town green with your airhorns??? We were unexpectedly set upon by baers and had to retreat to the trees and now the baers have made a real mess of our tents and are sleeping down there and going to town on Tryxy’s Cool Ranch Doritos.
Also: bring more Cool Ranch Doritos. Once you clear the baers we’re planning a Plight of Stars Sing Along and Cosplay Sewing Session.
xox,
Generally X
sent from my iPhone in a tree
Subject: Further complications with the baers
Dear Gladys,
So I called my new juju practitioner’s sister Linda to ask her if my juju practitioner was back yet and she said, “I told you. She’s not due back until Thursday.”
And I said, “I was just checking in case she came home early.”
And she said, “People don’t come home from retreats early.”
So I said, “They do if they discover too late that someone has infiltrated the catering and replaced all of the food with rotten eggs.”
And she said, “HOW DO YOU KNOW ABOUT THAT?”
And I said, “I DON’T KNOW. IT WAS HYPOTHETICAL AND I’M CLAIRVOYANT.”
That’s when her phone became mysteriously disconnected. Must be all the rain!!!!!
Unforunately, the baers have drastically reduced my army’s numbers. Five or six of the gnomes said that they were only in this for the cool ranch doritos and now that we’ve resorted to eating pine cones, their intestines are responding adversely to all the fiber. Three of the libertarians are threatening to leave on the principle that they don’t like conforming to anything for too long and they already have day jobs working for the government.
But the biggest problem is the Plight of Stars withdrawal. We’ve been forced to comfort ourselves with reenacting our favorite scenes from the safety of the tree tops. It really is a wonderful show. This is the best idea I’ve ever had and I can’t wait to start writing it as soon as I obliterate the show from the memory of the World with the use of juju magic.
We also have Trivia Time where we ask each other pop questions like “what was the actress who played Elfthera’s first TV role?” (ANSWER: it was a pampers commercial.)
Sometimes we run out of things to talk about with Plight of Stars so I’ve taken to teaching my troops this thing I like to call Wild Crafting. It’s when we create pictures and sculptures of our favorite POS character using nothing but pine needles, pinecones, and sap. I made a picture of Elfthera. One of the gnomes actually created an entire model of the Starship Blightrunner and one of the libertarians made a cute little sign that read, “Taxation is Theft.”
Yes, it didn’t conform to the rules, but UNLIKE THE IRS, I ACCEPT CREATIVITY, GALSDY!!!!!
This is further complicated with the fact that the baers have started to bully my soldiers from below. The baers don’t like our trivia or sing alongs or scene recreation and have started growling at us and rearing back and head-butting the trees until we’re forced to let go of our arts and crafts and hang on for dear life!!!!!
Then, they ate all our pinecones!!!
None of this would have happened if it weren’t for Plight of Stars!!!!!
As soon as I get out of this tree I’m going to march right on down to my juju practitioner’s house and obliterate this show from the face of the planet!!!!!
xox,
Generally X
sent from my iPhone up a tree with a baer at the foot of it
Subject: ALLS WELL THAT ENDS WELL
Dear Gladys,
Well, my visit to my juju practitioner was an overwhelming success. As I predicted, the rotten eggs had her return home from her retreat a day early to find an entire battle-scarred gnome and liberatarian army resting from our toils among her llamas.
At first she looked very confused by our presence and then her sister Linda came out and whispered something about, “this is the lady I told you about” and then the juju practitioner got right to business. I told her I wanted “something something” COMPLETELY AND TOTALLY wiped from everyone’s minds. I even wrote it down in pink crayon. She got to work, right away!!!!
As far as I can tell, things have returned to working order and I can get back to writing that epic fantasy saga I was telling you about just as soon as you write back to me and remind me what it was supposed to be about.
Also, have you seen my pool noodle, tent, and pink crayons? They appear to be missing.
