In Ascension by Martin MacInnes is the winner of the 38th Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction book of the year. The selection was revealed today at an award ceremony held in London.
The annual Arthur C. Clarke Award is presented for the best science fiction novel of the year, and selected from a list of novels whose UK first edition was published in the previous calendar year.
Chair of the Judges, Dr Andrew M. Butler said:
As always, the judging session was filled with emotion and intelligence and it took a while for Martin MacInnes’s In Ascension to emerge as the front runner. It shows us, in the words of one judge, “vistas between the cellular and the cosmic.” It’s an intense trip and for once it’s a winner that is in the tradition of Clarke’s own novels.
Martin MacInnes receives a trophy in the form of a commemorative engraved bookend and prize money to the value of £2024.00; a tradition that sees the annual prize money rise incrementally by year from the year 2001 in memory of Sir Arthur C. Clarke.
The winner of the 2023 Dashiell Hammett Award for Literary Excellence in Crime Writing was named by the International Association of Crime Writers (North American Branch) on June 17. The award is given to a book, originally published in the English language in the United States or Canada, “that best represents the conception of literary excellence in crime writing.”
Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday)
Other Nominees
The Almost Widow by Gail Anderson-Dargatz (Harper Avenue)
Night Letter by Sterling Watson (Akashic)
The Quiet Tenant by Clémence Michallon (Alfred A. Knopf)
Stealing by Margaret Verble (Mariner)
NGAIO MARSH AWARDS
The organizers of New Zealand’s annual Ngaio Marsh Awards have released their longlist of 12 nominees for the 2024 Best Novel prize:
Dice, by Claire Baylis (Allen & Unwin)
The Caretaker, by Gabriel Bergmoser (HarperCollins)
Ritual of Fire, by D.V. Bishop (Macmillan)
Birnam Wood, by Eleanor Catton (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
Pet, by Catherine Chidgey (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
El Flamingo, by Nick Davies (YBK)
Double Jeopardy, by Stef Harris (Quentin Wilson)
The Quarry, by Kim Hunt (Spiral Collectives)
Devil’s Breath, by Jill Johnson (Black & White/Bonnier)
Going Zero, by Anthony Mccarten (Macmillan)
Home Before Night, by J.P. Pomare (Hachette)
Expectant, by Vanda Symon (Orenda)
The longlist is currently being considered by an international panel of crime and thriller writing experts from the USA, United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand. Finalists for Best Novel, Best First Novel, and Best Kids/YA will be announced in early August, with the finalists celebrated and winners announced as part of a special event held in association with WORD Christchurch in late August.
KILLER NASHVILLE SILVER FALCHION
Finalists have been announced for the 2024 Silver Falchion award given by the Killer Nashville Writers Conference in Franklin, Tennessee. The Silver Falchion award categories cover the spectrum of popular literature.
In writer Geoffrey Landis’s short story “Cloudskimmer,” a pair of astronauts in the near future gaze down at planet Venus from their idling spacecraft. Hired by some unnamed government backer, the two, Zara and Sanjay, begin a loose debate after one decides to—for the sake of better research!—travel to Venus’s surface himself. Why? Zara asks.
“Same reason Mallory climbed Everest,” Sanjay says. “Because I can.”
“What are we going to tell our backers?” she tells Sanjay later in the story. “They’re paying us for science, not for stunts.”
Sanjay makes the trip personal. “Humans see different things than drones do,” he says.
The vision and risk in Landis’s science fiction, like in that 2022 short story, are barely contained to the realm of make believe. Landis, besides being an award-winning novelist and fiction writer, is an aerospace engineer at NASA Glenn, which has gifted the now 69-year-old a reciprocal gift in by-day and by-night lives: interplanetary research that feeds into his writing; writing that foreshadows his research….
A ceramic skull, grinning at visitors from a side table in the entry hall, offers a clue to the identity of the former owner of this grand home perched above the banks of the River Dart in Devon.
You don’t need Hercule Poirot’s little grey cells or the observational skills of Jane Marple to solve this mystery. Who else but the Queen of Crime would display such a macabre ornament?
Welcome to Greenway, the country retreat of Agatha Christie. This compact Georgian mansion, faced in white stucco that gleams in England’s rare bursts of spring sunshine, was her refuge from the demands of being the world’s most famous and beloved crime writer. It’s secluded – accessible only by boat or via a long, narrow driveway – and set on more than thirty acres of gardens and woodland. Her dream home, she called it, “the loveliest place in the world.”
Each year thousands of Christie fans make the pilgrimage to Greenway, which opened to the public fifteen years ago….
…Staff members circulate through the house, answering questions and offering insights and anecdotes. The doll a bored-looking, four-year-old Christie clutches in a portrait housed in the morning room? Her name is Rosie and, 130 years later, she’s propped up in a nearby chair. Ask about the cuneiform tablet embedded in an outside wall – Mallowan brought it back from Iraq in the 1930s – and a staff member hands over a printout explaining it dates from 600 BCE and is a plea to the Assyrian god Nabu. The black gown with gold trim hanging in a bedroom closet? Christie wore it to the 1952 premiere of The Mousetrap, her record-setting play that has been performed in London’s West End more than 29,000 times and is still going strong…
(4) DAVID BRIN ON FIRST CONTACT. The Science in Fiction podcast hosted David Brin after they talked to Avi Loeb. So “first contact scenarios, Fermi Paradoxf and plausible types of alien probes in the Solar System all came up.” “David Brin on First Contact in ‘Existence’” at Spotify.
Marty and Holly speak with David Brin, science fiction icon, scientist, futurist and civilizational optimist. We discuss his particular view of first contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, as portrayed in his 2012 novel ‘Existence’, along with his predictions about how artificial intelligence and virtual reality will change our world in the near future. We discuss the UFO phenomenon (a sophisticated form of cat lasers for us to chase) and the unspeakably rude behaviour of these hypothetical silvery teaser punks. David speaks directly to the artificial intelligences and possibly alien intelligences who may be inveigled in our internet. We talk about Cixin Liu’s ‘The Three Body Problem’ (there is no three body problem), the likely prevalence of life in the universe (90% of star systems), the Fermi Paradox, SETI, METI, and various forms that first contact with alien civilizations may take, among them Von Neumann machines and artificial alien intelligences stored in ‘envoy eggs’ orbiting our planet for millions of years. David tells us how to make the most powerful telescope in the universe, by turning the Kuiper Belt into a solar system sized lens. Finally, he implores us to fight back against the ingrate habit of cynicism and pessimism rotting our global civilization today, and declares “I’m proud as hell and nothing can stop us! … Be citizens of wonder, help save a good civilization.”
(5) RARE CODEX. The Folio Society’s illustrated edition of A Canticle for Leibowitz can be yours for $600.
Explore a world of feudal futurism in the beloved classic A Canticle for Leibowitz, a post-nuclear masterwork featuring 12 full-page pieces of original artwork by premier fantasy artist Elliot Lang. Folio presents Walter M. Miller Jr’s Hugo-award winning novel as never before seen. This vital chapter in the canon of 20th century science fiction takes place in a scorched earth in which an order of monks is dedicated to recovering the remnants of scientific knowledge lost to nuclear war. Evocative, complex and gently funny, A Canticle for Leibowitz most recently provided direct inspiration for the Fallout games and TV show, and has been one of Folio’s most consistently requested titles. Having recommended the book himself, Pulitzer Prize-winning literary essayist Michael Dirda provides an illuminating introduction, while Elliot Lang’s brilliant designs and illustrations create a truly immersive reading experience. Along with medieval-style historiated chapter initials, scrollworked part-titles, ingenious endpaper design, an illustrated cover and slipcase, Lang also contributes an exclusive afterword that tells the uncanny story of his own personal connection to this timeless work of spiritual wonder and post-apocalyptic terror.
(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
July 23, 1947 – Gardner Dozois. (Died 2018).
By Paul Weimer: I mentioned Dozois recently in my birthday appreciation of James E Gunn. And like Gunn, Dozois has both fictional and non-fictional elements to his oeuvre, but for Dozois that balance is even more on the nonfictional side.
Gardner Dozois
But the piece of Dozois fiction I want to mention before his editorial work is near and dear to me — his “Counterfactual”. It is an alternate history story of the metafictional kind, as someone who is in an alternate history (where the Civil War went very differently) and is trying to write a story about a world where the South lost, and not hitting the mark of our own world, but coming up with a complete and different variant. Since I had read The Man In the High Castle by the time I came across “Counterfactual”, I saw immediately what Dozois was doing, and was delighted he was going for that approach, too.
But really, Dozois as an anthologist is really what his bread and butter is. The Year’s Best SF collections were bread and butter to me, and once I got into Hugo nominations and voting regularly, they served as a guidepost as to help inform my choices. Those volumes not only had a great set of stories every year, but the gigantic editorial/field review essay Dozois provided gave a perspective as to what he thought the field was doing, where it had been and where it was going. I didn’t always agree with his assertions and ideas (once I had enough feet under me to do so) but I found his arguments and perspective fascinating. And that essay always included a whole additional set of recommendations of stories (and novels!) that he could not anthologize in that volume. I could set up a good half year’s reading just from one of those Year’s Best volumes and working my way through his recommendations.
Aside from the Year’s Best, I always found a new original or reprint anthology of Dozois’ to command my attention, and my wallet. And the sheer variety of the subgenres and topics he anthologized showed his Renaissance Man-like knowledge of the field. From The Good Old Stuff, to One Million AD, to The Book of Swords, Dozois provided endless reading of short fiction carefully curated and collected for particular tastes. One of my favorite of this was among his last. Ever since I read A Princess of Mars, Mars in its dying civilization mode has always fascinated me as a setting. So his collection Old Mars, with many stories in that vein, was a particular favorite. And with a kickass set of authors including Michael Moorcock, Ian McDonald and Melinda Snodgrass, the reputation of Dozois meant that when he cast for an anthology of new stories, authors jumped at the chance.
While there are plenty of year’s best and other anthologies since, no one, IMHO, has quite shown the power and magic of a collector of stories, be it reprints or original fiction, quite like Gardner Dozois did.
It wouldn’t be San Diego Comic-Con without a little drama, some big questions, and a lot of hype. Just 24 hours before this year’s show floor opens at the San Diego Convention Center, it appears that the con will deliver all that and more—including some terrific programming set to begin on Thursday and Friday’s Eisner Awards ceremony. And with downtown San Diego abuzz with comics fever, some companies are ramping up their presence at the show while others are leaving the playing field.
Star Trek: Prodigy gave Wesley Crusher the story he’s deserved for decades while also providing Wil Wheaton with the experience of watching his voiceover performance, one that made us both emotional talking about it. I think it’s a given at this point that fans would love to see more of him, potentially via his own upcoming Trek spinoff, but is that a realistic hope hold onto? Wil Wheaton had some thoughts.
As the host of The Ready Room (available to stream with a Paramount+ subscription) and someone who is around the Star Trek fandom and its creatives quite a bit, Wil Wheaton has a definite read on the franchise. If anyone would know rumblings about what is and isn’t possible, it’s probably him. So I decided to get his thoughts on the probability of a Wesley Crusher spinoff happening down the road, noting that Star Trek rarely produces projects centered around non-Starfleet characters (Prodigy being the first). When I asked whether a spinoff was a realistic hope or just a pipe dream, he told me:
“Well, if there’s one thing that we have learned through like 60 years of Star Trek, It’s that anything is possible. Like no one’s ever really gone. Things are constantly in flux, and when you have a character who can manipulate spacetime and thought to kind of do anything and go anywhere, sure, you could put him any place. As an audience member, as a fan of the characters and Prodigy, and as a fan of the actors who play them, I would love to see more. I am fascinated by stories in the Star Trek universe that do not take place inside of Starfleet. I’ve always been fascinated by that. I’ve always wanted to know what it is like. What is this universe that Starfleet is kind of like looking after? What goes on on these planets before and after the Federation shows up?”…
NASA is celebrating the 25th anniversary of its Chandra X-ray Observatory launch by sharing never-before-seen photos of the largest known spiral galaxy in the universe.
The Chandra X-ray observatory was launched on July 23, 1999. Since then, it has scoured the universe to look for X-ray emissions from exploded stars, clusters of galaxies and more, according to NASA. The observatory returns data to the Chandra X-ray Center at Harvard University’s Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.
Since its launch, the observatory has captured images of the aftermath of exploded stars, photographed the supermassive black hole that exists at the center of the Milky Way, and helped scientists learn more about dark matter, dark energy and black holes….
… The observatory captured thousands of images of the spiral galaxy, known as NGC 6872, since its launch. The galaxy, located in the Peacock constellation of the universe, is over 522,000 light-years across, or more than five times the size of the Milky Way, according to NASA…
Of all the potential super-Earths—terrestrial exoplanets more massive than Earth—out there, an exoplanet orbiting a star only 40 light-years away from us in the constellation Cetus might be the most similar to have been found so far.
Exoplanet LHS 1140 b was assumed to be a mini-Neptune when it was first discovered by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope toward the end of 2023. After analyzing data from those observations, a team of researchers, led by astronomer Charles Cadieux, of Université de Montréal, suggest that LHS 1140 b is more likely to be a super-Earth.\
If this planet is an alternate version of our own, its relative proximity to its cool red dwarf star means it would most likely be a gargantuan snowball or a mostly frozen body with a substellar (region closest to its star) ocean that makes it look like a cosmic eyeball. It is now thought to be the exoplanet with the best chance for liquid water on its surface, and so might even be habitable.
Cadieux and his team say they have found “tantalizing evidence for a [nitrogen]-dominated atmosphere on a habitable zone super-Earth” in a study recently published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters….
(12) JOKER TRAILER. When you’re smiling, the whole world smiles with you. Joker: Folie À Deux in theaters and IMAX, October 4.
…The next in the line-up is Italian-language Citadel: Diana, which will tell a completely fresh story when it arrives on 10 October, and will have little overlap with the main series, other than the fact that it’ll involve the mysterious Citadel agency.
Diana herself is played by Matilda De Angelis, who’s been making quite a name for herself in Italian productions, and looks suitably big-budget and high-concept, fusing the same sci-fi aesthetic as the first season of Citadel did….
[Thanks to Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Paul Weimer, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, and SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]
Finalists have been announced for the 2024 Silver Falchion award given by the Killer Nashville Writers Conference in Franklin, Tennessee. The Silver Falchion award categories cover the spectrum of popular literature.
The conference takes place August 22-25. The awards dinner is on August 23.
Here are the finalists in Silver Falchion categories that include works of genre interest.
BEST SCI-FI / FANTASY
The Pilgrim – Part I by A. Keith Carreiro
The Confession of Hemingway Jones by Kathleen Hannon
Interface: Book One: Connection by R.K. Hillhouse
The Zone: A Cyberpunk Thriller by Stu Jones
Do You Believe in Magic? by Jim Melvin
Darwin’s Dilemma by Don Stuart
BEST JUVENILE / Y.A.
Where Echoes Die by Courtney Gould
The Sasquatch of Hawthorne Elementary by K.B. Jackson
Loscon: the home away from home, where every being knows your name, like Callahan’s Place or the Draco Tavern. Spider Robinson has unfortunately had to cancel his appearance at Loscon 50.
Larry Niven
In his stead, Larry Niven has accepted the invitation to be Writer Guest of Honor for Loscon 50. Niven is an American science fiction writer whose extensive writing, beginning with a 1964 story, “The Coldest Place,” has won every major award in the genre. His work has inspired countless readers with a love of science, space and yet-to-be invented technologies that have transformed worlds in and out of fiction.
His most recent work is a short story with Steven Barnes, “Sacred Cow” published in Analog Science Fiction & Fact, November/December 2022.
During his career, Larry Niven has gifted the space and satellite industry with visions that inspire a never-ending reach for the impossible. As he states in one of Niven’s Laws, “There is only one universal message in science fiction: there exist minds that think as well as you do – but differently.” For more information about Larry Niven, visit larryniven.net.
Other guests include singer songwriter Kathy Mar, illustrator and costumer Dr. Laura Brodian Freas Beraha, fan guests Genny Dazzo and Craig Miller.
Loscon hosts a cosplay costume contest, writers and science panels, ice cream social, Regency dance, film screenings, music, art show and maker space during our three day weekend event.
Loscon 50: Nov 29- Dec 1, 2024 Los Angeles area’s longest running Science Fiction Fan Convention. Hilton Los Angeles Airport Hotel 5711 W Century Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90045.
For updates, follow Loscon on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and search for #Loscon.
Presented by The Chinese Science Fiction Database (CSFDB), Xanadu (https://xanadu.csfdb.cn/) is an innovative platform that aims to bring Chinese speculative works to a global audience.
CSFDB contains entries for over 50,000 works, and it is unrealistic to write synopsis for all of them, let alone ones in English. Xanadu, however, aims to make a difference by providing English synopses of a selection of works, with contact information for copyright/agency parties. Currently, the platform showcases works selected in the CSFDB Annual Recommendation List from the past two years.
The platform also features works that have already been translated into other languages with direct links for reading, purchasing, and reviewing, making it a convenient resource for interested readers worldwide. This feature allows Chinese speculative fiction to reach a broader audience and promotes cross-cultural exchange.
The challenges of translating Chinese works into other languages are numerous, including difficulty in finding copyright information, incomplete work information, etc. Xanadu aims to overcome these challenges by developing an integrated information platform that fosters collaboration and connections among various stakeholders.
Another goal of the platform is to dispel misconceptions about Chinese science fiction and provide a space for Chinese works to gain recognition and appreciation from a global audience. With only 1.4% of Chinese fictions translated into English, there is a significant need to showcase more works to the global market.
Future features, such as translator announcements, may be added after a trial period, and the CSFDB welcomes suggestions from all parties.
Kathryn Gossow received the Award for her many contributions to the field of fairy tales in Australia, particularly in building and nurturing the community of fairytalers.
She was a key part of the group that created the only collection of contemporary Australian fairy tales, South of the Sun Australian Fairy Tale Anthology, a project of many years, defining just what a fairy tale is, ensuring a respectful relationship with the writers and illustrators, and organizing events to promote the book and get it out into the community.
She was one of the key people in organizing the Flesh or Fossil AFTS conference in Brisbane in 2022 – the most highly attended conference so far.
Kathryn liaised between the Brisbane Fairy Tale Ring and GOMA when they created the unique Fairy Tale exhibition 2023-2024, to create opportunities for our Storytellers to participate and communicate about fairy tales with the general public, and to sell the South of the Sun Australian Fairy Tale Anthology beside other fairy tale classics.
Perhaps most importantly, she has been the leader and nourisher of the Brisbane Fairy Tale Ring for many years, providing stability and support for their enduring community.
(1) HAS DARK REGIONS PRESS REACHED THE END? Dark Regions Press is a small press founded by Joe Morey in 1985, specializing in horror and dark fiction. His son, Chris, is the current owner.
… With them also taking on the Dark Renaissance books when that venture folded, Dark Regions Press ended up as home to a lot of my material – more than fifteen books in total, and I was always happy to see it there, given the tremendous production values that the company put into their products, particularly the hardcovers…
So, from a purely selfish viewpoint, I’ve been mostly happy there.
But over the years there have been many rumblings of discontent, from both authors and customers, and it’s been getting increasingly hard for me to ignore them. I’ve pulled some of my work for them in recent years, and just last month was asking them to release rights back to me on some others… maybe my spidey-senses were tingling just enough to try to tell me something.
And now there’s the current shitshow.
The website is down, the company is up for sale (although my books are still being sold on the online sites), and Chris Morey, the owner, is incommunicado. I’ve seen reports of customers being over $1000 in the hole on preorders, and of people waiting for many years for books that now look like they’ll never arrive. I can’t begin to imagine how much money is owed, given the number of people I see complaining over the past few days. It’s turned into one of the all time great small press publishing clusterfucks.
Right now I’m trying to get in contact with them to find out exactly what’s going on, but I think this is the end of the line for me there whatever happens to them now.
Brian Keene remembers reporting issues with that publisher before:
During The Horror Show with Brian Keene’s final year, we factually detailed what an absolute tire fire Dark Regions Press was. As usual, many people yelled at us. Dave always took it personally when folks did that. You’re welcome to come to Vortex and apologize to his ashes.
It has come to our attention that Dark Regions Press has gone dark and their site has come down with no word to customers. We are aware that DRP owes a lot of books to a lot of customers. While Weird House is a separate entity from Dark Regions, many of you know that Chris at DRP is Joe’s son and that Joe used to own Dark Regions over a decade ago. As such, we feel compelled to make a statement and share what we know.
Some of you may be aware that Joe at Weird House was helping Dark Regions to fulfill some of the books they were behind on, including Transmissions from Punktown and Wolf Hunt 3. Weird House lent some of its resources to Chris to finish these books and fulfill orders. Small press is a tough business however, and we could only afford to help out so much. We had hoped that with the aid we lent to Chris and DRP the company could recover and make good on their commitments to customers. Unfortunately, Dark Regions seems to have needed more help than Weird House could afford to give.
As for what is happening with DRP, we honestly don’t know at the moment. We at Weird House were unaware of Dark Regions taking down their site. We only became aware of this when it was brought to our attention by a reader. Chris at DRP didn’t inform Joe or anyone else at Weird House of his intention to take down the site. At this point, we still don’t know the status of the company.
We wish that there was more we could do, but the truth is, Joe left Dark Regions many years ago. While we sympathize with those impacted by the actions of DRP, Chris and Dark Regions are responsible for their unfulfilled orders. We simply can’t afford to pay for the failings of another business because of a shared last name.
We will continue to share any information as it comes to us. Feel free to reach out to us via email or facebook messenger if you have any questions or concerns.
Book trilogies often suffer from second-book syndrome, with the middle installment feeling like a slow and unnecessary bridge between the opening and conclusion — though there are a few lucky trilogies where the second book is the best. Trilogies tend to struggle when it comes to balancing their stories, and when this happens, the middle typically suffers. This is why so many book trilogies peak with the first installment, though some manage to make a comeback during the finale, even after a lackluster second novel.
Then there are the rare trilogies that successfully navigate their second books, using them to raise the stakes and move the story forward ahead of the final chapter. In some cases, the middle novel is even the best of the series, as endings don’t always stick the landing….
At the top of their list:
1. The Farseer Trilogy By Robin Hobb (1995-1997)
Second Book: Royal Assassin
Robin Hobb’s Farseer Trilogy is considered a fantasy classic, and while all three books deserve their reputations, Royal Assassin stands out as the best. The Farseer Trilogy tells the tale of Fitz, and it continues well beyond this series. But this trilogy sets the stage for the rest of the Elderlings books, and it does a compelling job of it. Assassin’s Apprentice is a great start, but the later books surpass it. Again, the first book in any trilogy bears the burden of introducing characters and world-building elements that make it slower and more difficult to get into.
(3) BE ON THE LOOKOUT. Crypt Keeper taken from The Mystic Museum this weekend in Burbank, CA.
Walking through the doors of this boutique video game festival, you are immediately greeted by a bullet hell shoot-em-up with a painterly twist. In ZOE Begone!, you dodge and unleash attacks at blistering speed before the game erupts into a euphoric shower of pointillist colour, dazzling the eyes and punishing the thumbs. Next to it sits Left Upon Read; at first glance, a dark-fantasy Quake clone, but one that gives you the bizarre task of checking text messages on a smartphone as you slice your way through a dungeon. These are subversive games, taking well-worn design tropes and breaking them in witty, playful ways.
Rule-breaking is a major theme of Glasgow independent game festival, the latest iteration of an event previously known as Southside games festival. It took place last weekend at Civic House, nestled in the shadow of the M8, the concrete eyesore that carves through Glasgow and connects the city with the wider central belt. On display are more eccentric and smaller-budget games than those you see on shelves, all made by developers who either live within Glasgow or a short train ride away….
The Big Bang Theory wasn’t just a ratings juggernaut—it was a casting magnet for big names. But even the biggest magnets have their limits, as the show discovered with a few near misses that would have sent fan theories into overdrive….
…Forget the whispers of Harrison Ford as Professor Proton or Sandra Bullock as a mystery love interest. Big Bang almost landed a true legend: Ringo Starr (Richard Starkey). In an interview with TV Line, creator Chuck Lorre revealed his dream casting for the absentee Howard Wolowitz Sr.—Howard’s mysterious father….
(6) DEBORAH P KOLODJI (1959-2024). The Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association today announced the passing of its former president, Deborah P Kolodji, on July 21.
Deborah P. Kolodji
She was an integral part to the growth and continuance of the speculative poetry community and the SFPA. A lifelong champion and educator of short form poetry, Debbie was well-respected through many writing communities. Her influence, talent and passion will be missed. She was the creator of the Dwarf Stars Award, and we believe she remains a giant in the cosmos.
She was the inaugural recipient of SFPA President’s Lifetime Service Award in 2023. The citation told about her many career highlights:
[She was] the moderator of the Southern California Haiku Study Group, the California Regional Coordinator for the Haiku Society of America, and a member of the board of directors for Haiku North America. She has given hundreds of haiku workshops over the past 15 years and recorded two Poetry Pea videos, one on “Exaggerated Perspective” in haiku (which referenced scifaiku) and one on speculative haiku.
She has long been an advocate for speculative haiku and scifaiku, writing several articles for mainstream haiku journals, including one in Terry Ann Carter’s book, Lighting the Global Lantern: A Teacher’s Guide to Writing Haiku and Related Literary Forms. She presented a talk on scifaiku at the 2007 Haiku North America in Ottawa as well as being on a haiku panel at the 2007 WorldCon in Montreal. She has given several scifaiku workshops at ConDor as well as participating in a scifaiku slam in San Diego.
The Dwarf Stars Award came out of Kolodji’s advocacy for short form poetry, and she edited several volumes of the Dwarf Stars anthology, including the first one. As SFPA president, she created Eye to the Telescope with Samantha Henderson, and co-edited the first issue. The Vice President position was added to the SFPA board under her administration, and the SFPA also held its first poetry contests.
A native Californian, she has a degree in mathematics from the University of Southern California. With over 1,000 published haiku to her name, her first full-length book of haiku and senryu, highway of sleeping towns, from Shabda Press, was awarded a Touchstone Distinguished Book Award from The Haiku Foundation. Her e-chapbook tug of a black hole won 2nd Place in the Elgin Awards from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association. Her new book, Distance, was co-authored with Mariko Kitakubo of Tokyo. This book was written in a collaborative form called “Tan-ku,” a conversation in tanka and haiku, where the tanka were written by Mariko and the haiku by Deborah….
(7) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
1974 – A Midsummer’s Tempest by Poul Anderson.
By Paul Weimer: Shakespeare, no surprise, is extremely popular and common to reference, allude and outright steal from by science fiction and fantasy authors. And why not? The Bard’s work is immortal, after all, and while most of his work is not genre as we understand it, plenty of it touches upon or outright waltzes into fantasy. But what if everything that Shakespeare wrote was true, especially the fantastic bits. What if Shakespeare’s work were history, not fantasy and quasi-history? Faeries, wizards, ghosts and more were all established facts in the world?
That’s the conceit of Poul Anderson’s A Midsummer’s Tempest, fifty years old this year.
The setting is the early 17th century in this alternate world, and we are in the midst of the English Civil War. The Roundheads and the Cavaliers are in deadly contention. Charles the First is on the edge of defeat. Prince Rupert, in our timeline, is one of the most interesting characters of the period with a varied career ranging from Cavalry officer to colonial governor, and cousin to several English Monarchs. In this world and timeline, in the course of the book, he teams up with the ward of his captor (love, true love, friends) and together they go through a whirlwind set of plots involving Titania and Oberon, the books of Prospero, and a lot more in their efforts to try and preserve Charles I as king of England. Chases, escapes, magic, romance and much more.
And if you like cinematic universes and multiverses, this novel is also for you. This novel features The Old Phoenix, an inn that connects to multiple worlds in Anderson’s verse, and Rupert meets characters from other Anderson universes in the process. A decade before Heinlein tried it in Number of the Beast, the appearance of the Old Phoenix in A Midsummer’s Tempest helps knit together a lot of the fantastic verses and worlds of Anderson’s worlds.
Oh, and did I mention the characters speak in blank verse, and sometimes outright poetry, in the bargain, with plenty of allusions to a slew of Shakespeare’s plays in the bargain?
This is one of the lighter, funnier and confectionary of Anderson’s oeuvre. Some of his work can be fraught with doom, dark destiny and a vision of fighting against fate bravely but in vain. A Midsummer’s Tempest is the exception that proves the rule. The protagonists win, true love prevails, and the book ends in a proper marriage, Shakespeare style.
About the only other novel that even tries to come close to Anderson’s approach here is John M Ford’s The Dragon Waiting, which is pretty good company for A Midsummer’s Tempest to share.
(8) COMICS SECTION.
The Flying McCoys witness a communications breakthrough. Or is it breakdown.
The Far Side – “I have always wanted to pull over and read one of these tickets,” says John King Tarpinian.
(9) SCIENCE FICTION HOMEWORLDS ONE-DAY SPECIAL ON LEARNEDLEAGUE. [Item by David Goldfarb.] An SFF-related One-Day Special quiz appeared on LearnedLeague over the past weekend: Science Fiction Homeworlds. I got 8/12, which was good for 95th percentile since some of the ones I knew were relatively obscure to the LL community. (I didn’t do better because it branched out into media and video game franchises that I haven’t followed.)
Ryan Reynolds recently spoke to The New York Times ahead of the release of “Deadpool and Wolverine” and remembered the humble beginnings of his R-rated superhero franchise. The actor said the first “Deadpool” movie finally got off the ground at 20th Century Fox after he’d already spent a decade trying to get it made. Reynolds even paid out of pocket for his screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick to be on set because the scrappier production was not that of a normal comic book tentpole.
“No part of me was thinking when ‘Deadpool’ was finally greenlit that this would be a success,” Reynolds said. “I even let go of getting paid to do the movie just to put it back on the screen: They wouldn’t allow my co-writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick on set, so I took the little salary I had left and paid them to be on set with me so we could form a de facto writers room.”…
[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, David Goldfarb, Anne Marble, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Paul Weimer.]
Seattle Worldcon 2025 today announced Brandon O’Brien as their Poet Laureate.
Poet laureate is a new special guest category for our convention. Appointment of a poet laureate will elevate our proceedings and help us spotlight and emphasize the craft and literary tradition of speculative poetry at this Worldcon. If you aren’t already familiar with Brandon and his work, prepare to be thrilled!
Brandon O’Brien is a writer, performance poet, teaching artist, and tabletop game designer from Trinidad and Tobago. His poetry has been published in Uncanny Magazine, Fireside Magazine, Strange Horizons, and New Worlds, Old Ways: Speculative Tales from the Caribbean, among others. He is the former poetry editor of FIYAH. His work has been shortlisted for the 2014 and 2015 Small Axe Literary Competitions and the 2020 Ignyte Award for best in speculative poetry. His debut poetry collection Can You Sign My Tentacle? won the 2022 Elgin Award and is available from Interstellar Flight Press.
The Glasgow 2024 Worldcon announced today they have detected at least 377 fraudulent votes for the Hugo Awards, most meant to benefit a particular unnamed finalist, and have disqualified those votes. As a result, the beneficiary of those votes now will not win in their category.
The Glasgow 2024 Hugo Awards Statement is published below, followed by a video commentary by Nicholas Whyte, WSFS Division head and Hugo Administrator.
In the course of tallying the votes on the final ballot for the 2024 Hugo Awards, the Glasgow 2024 Hugo Administration team detected some unusual data.
Paragraph 6.2 of the WSFS Constitution states that “In all matters arising under this Constitution, only natural persons may introduce business, nominate, or vote, except as specifically provided otherwise in this Constitution. No person may cast more than one vote on any issue or more than one ballot in any election.”
A large number of votes in 2024 were cast by accounts which fail to meet the criteria of being “natural persons”, with obvious fake names and/or other disqualifying characteristics. These included, for instance, a run of voters whose second names were identical except that the first letter was changed, in alphabetical order; and a run of voters whose names were translations of consecutive numbers.
Many of these votes favoured one finalist in particular, who we will call Finalist A. This pattern of data is startlingly and obviously different from the votes for any other finalist in 2024, and indeed for any finalist in any of the previous years where any member of the current Hugo Subcommittee has been involved with administering the Hugo final ballot.
In addition to patterns observable in the data, we received a confidential report that at least one person had sponsored the purchase of WSFS memberships by large numbers of individuals, who were refunded the cost of membership after confirming that they had voted as the sponsor wished.
On the basis of the above evidence, we have concluded that at least 377 votes have been cast fraudulently, of a total of 3,813 final ballot votes that we received. We have therefore disqualified those 377 votes from the final vote tally. This decision is not one made lightly, but we are duty bound as the Hugo Administrators to protect the Hugo Awards and to act against fraud.
We have no evidence that Finalist A was at all aware of the fraudulent votes being cast for them, let alone in any way responsible for the operation. We are therefore not identifying them. Finalist A has not been disqualified from the 2024 Hugo Awards. However, they do not win in their category, once the invalid votes have been disallowed.
No other votes have been disallowed. The only votes disallowed are those which we have positively identified as not cast by natural persons.
We recognise that after the Hugo voting in 2023, many in the community will, understandably, have questions about this. Unfortunately, our ability to answer is very limited, due to our responsibility to maintain the confidentiality of the ballot and data protection regulations. There are proposals to institute a system of independent audit for Hugo votes. But at present such a system does not exist, therefore the raw 2024 voting data cannot and will not be shared outside the Glasgow 2024 Hugo team.
However, the full voting results, nominating statistics, and voting statistics will be published immediately after the Hugo Awards ceremony on August 11th, 2024 as previously agreed in our transparency statement. Those will not include the 377 votes which have been disallowed but will include the other 3,436 votes.
We believe that it is important for transparency that we inform you now about what has happened. We want to reassure 2024 Hugo voters that the ballots cast were counted fairly. Most of all, we want to assure the winners of this year’s Hugos that they have won fair and square, without any arbitrary or unexplained exclusion of votes or nominees and without any possibility that their award had been gained through fraudulent means.
