(1) DAYTON LITERARY PEACE PRIZE. Paul Lynch’s book Prophet Song, set in a near future Ireland, is the 2024 Fiction Winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Lynch’s novel also received the Booker in 2023.

(2) THE BOOKSHELF IS THEIR COSTAR. Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin have launched a weekly newsletter called Shelfies, in which they get people to talk about their favorite bookshelf, and their connection with the books on it. Shurin declares, “It is unashamedly us snooping at people’s shelves.”

Take a unique peek each week into one of our contributors’ weird and wonderful bookshelves! We love books – and we’re the sort of people who love checking out other people’s collections! With Shelfies, we’ve asked a wide range of readers, authors and collectors from all walks of life to share not just their shelves with us – but the books that changed them.

From novelists to video game designers, scientists and film makers, and from London to Singapore, Ghana, Australia and New York and all points in between, Shelfies is a unique dose of book love directly into your inbox – sharing our love of books, with you.

(3) AMAZON EDITORS PICKS OF THE YEAR. Today Amazon posted: “Announcing the Best Books of 2024, as chosen by the Amazon Editors”. These two novels of genre interest are listed:

• The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo
• The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

(4) SFPA OFFICER ELECTION RESULTS. Starting January 1, 2025, Diane Severson Mori will be Vice President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association.

(5) ONCE MORE INTO THE AIRLOCK, DEAR FRIENDS. On the Seattle Worldcon 2025 blog, Cora Buhlert pays tribute to a Poul Anderson novel that was a Hugo finalist in 1961, the last time the Worldcon was in the city. “Fantastic Fiction: Knights versus Aliens: The High Crusade by Poul Anderson”.

Science fiction often begins with a question of “what if”? And in 1960, Poul Anderson asked just such a question: What if aliens attempting to invade the Earth encountered a troop of medieval knights? And what if the knights won the ensuing struggle? This is the premise of The High Crusade, one of the most offbeat and entertaining science fiction novels of the early 1960s….

(6) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES. Space Cowboys Books of Joshua Tree, CA has produced the eightieth episode of their Simultaneous Times podcast with stories by Elena Sichrovsky and Colin Alexander.

From the pages of Radon Journal.

Stories featured in this episode:

“Tonight We’re Wearing Waste Bags” by Elena Sichrovsky; Music by Patrick Urn; Read by Jenna Hanchey

“Dreamer, Passenger, Partner by Colin Alexander; Music by Phog Masheeen; Read by Jean-Paul L. Garnier

Theme music by Dain Luscombe

(7) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Anniversary: The Running Man (1987)

By Paul Weimer: Possibly the best of the Schwarzenegger SF movies of the late 1980’s. Yes, better than The Terminator, better than Predator, possibly on a par with Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The Running Man remains a biting satire of fascism, authoritarianism, consumerism, game shows, and a whole lot more. 

The authoritarian hellhole that the United States, using violent game shows as an opiate to the masses is really on point, decades later, rather more plausible than ever. Some of the best (and by best, I mean scary) are some of the commercials and interstitial bits in between the actual Running Man show. The show where a man climbs a rope, trying to grab dollars with a vicious pack of dogs underneath him…or the neo-Puritanism revealed when an announcer shockingly reveals Amber may have had several lovers in a year.

Arnold strides through this film and carries it on his charisma, as a package deal with Richard Dawson, who plays Damon Killan as an evil version of his Family Feud persona. They have the best rapport and the movie sings when they finally meet each other. (I was surprised on a rewatch how long the movie actually takes to put the two of them in the same room as each other). I also think the movie hits the right level of action, adventure, social commentary, and humor. 

And then there are the betting pool scenes. Long before betting truly has taken over sports, and a lot of other things, the betting on the TV show seemed to me at the time to be “over the top” (who would bet on a game show)?  Naive me didn’t believe it…but in the years since, it makes absolute and corrosive sense that the general public would in fact bid on the game show and the deaths on the show. I mean, if The Running Man was made today, Draftkings would be advertising on The Running Man.

Sadly, given recent events…I think it might be too naive in thinking that the ending, where the crimes of the state being revealed lead to revolution and change, can actually be realistic in this day and age. But I can dream, right?

(8) COMICS SECTION.

• Eek! Introduces a new were.
• Reality Check has a better escape plan.
• Zack Hill plans a villain.

(9) MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE. Cora Buhlert celebrated the recent holiday with “Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre Halloween Special: ‘The Tomb of Sibor’”.

…“Remember, girls, we are looking for the Lost Tomb of Sibor. Scorpia, since your people hail from the Crimson Waste, you have knowledge of this wasteland that the Horde lacks…”

“Yes, but…”

“So I get why you need Scorpia. But why am I here, Shadow Weaver?”

“Because you are Force Captain, Catra. And because Scorpia didn’t want to go without you.”

“I’ll get you for this, Scorpia.”

“So lead the way, Scorpia. You do know where the tomb is, don’t you?”

“Yes, but… I don’t think this is a good idea, Shadow Weaver. The Tomb of Sidor is an accursed place. My people shun it and never go there.”

“Silly barbaric superstition. The Tomb of Sidor contains something of great value to the Horde and I mean to retrieve it for Lord Hordak. And now go, Scorpia. Take us to the Tomb.”

“Yes, but it’s your funeral.”

“Is that a promise?”

“Hush, Catra, she’ll hear you.”…

(10) WET WORK. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] It may be that there are sub-surface mini-seas on some of the moons of Uranus!

The Voyager 2 flyby of Uranus in 1986 revealed an unusually off-centred planetary magnetic field. Nine US and one Brit researchers have now re-examined the Voyager Solar wind data set. It reveals that Uranus was hit by a Solar windstorm at the time of the craft’s encounter with the planet. This Solar windstorm offset the planet’s magnetic field.

Similar observations in the Saturn system reveal that when its moons with sub-ice surface water orbit outside of the protection of Saturn’s magnetic field, probes cannot detect water-group ions; this is because they have been swept away by the Solar wind. The researchers therefore hypothesise that the absence of water-group ions when Voyager 2 passed by might not be due to an absence of moons sub-surface water but due to the Solar windstorm that was raging at the time that swept those ions away.  It could be that some of Uranus’ moons do have sub-surface water. They hypothesise that Uranus’s two outer moons, Titania and Oberon, are more likely candidates for harbouring liquid water oceans.

The primary research paper is Jasinski, J. M. et al. (2024) “The anomalous state of Uranus’s magnetosphere during the Voyager 2 flyby”. Nature Astronomy, Pre-print.

(11) MOOR OR LESS. “Utility in Britain Offers Free Electricity to Grow Clean Energy” – a New York Times article. Link bypasses the paywall.

Were Heathcliff to roam the blustery moors around Wuthering Heights today, he might be interrupted by a ping on his cellphone saying something like this: The wind is raging, so power is cheap. It’s a good time to plug in the car.

OK. So the 18th-century literary occupants of these windswept hills received no such pings.

But Martin and Laura Bradley do. They live in Halifax, an old mill town below the wuthering, or windy, heights of West Yorkshire. And when a squall kicks up, producing a surplus of electricity from wind turbines on the moor, their phones light up with a notification, like one that informed them of a 50 percent discount one Saturday in October….

…Octopus Energy, the country’s biggest electricity supplier, runs nine wind turbines on those hills. When it’s gusty, and power is abundant, it offers discounts. The Bradleys say they save upward of 400 pounds ($517) a year. Octopus says it not only attracts customers but also persuades communities that they benefit from new energy infrastructure.

“We’ve got these famously bleak, windy hills,” said Greg Jackson, the company’s chief executive. “We wanted to demonstrate to people that wind electricity is cheaper, but only when you use it when it’s windy.”…

(12) THE DEATHS FROM TROPICAL STORMS AND HURRICANES IN THE USA HAVE BEEN GREATLY UNDERESTIMATED. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] In climate-change science fiction, people die in major climate events: cf. the film The Day After Tomorrow or the climate fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson.

In the real world, people die all the time and this enables demographers to calculate the number of expected deaths. Usually only a score or more deaths are associated with US tropical storms.  These are due to obvious things like drownings or being hit by wind-blown debris.

Two US demographers have now looked the number of excess deaths (those above the expected death rate) between 1930 and 2015. They have found that there are an average of 7,000 – 11,000 excess deaths in the months following a tropical storm or hurricane. These deaths are mainly from infants (less than 1 year of age), people 1 – 44 years of age, and the black population. (Presumably the elderly were safe in a refuge while young adults were protecting property and so in harm’s way? But the very elderly also took a big hit.) The researchers did not look at the death certificates of all (around 100,000) those excess deaths over this eight-and-a-half decade period and so do not know exactly what it was they died of. This, they say, needs to be the subject of future research.

The primary academic paper is Young, R. & Hsiang, S. (2024) “Mortality caused by tropical cyclones in the United States” Nature, vol. 635, p121-128.

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Disney Debuts ‘The Boy & The Octopus’, Taika Waititi’s Holiday Tale Starring a CG Cephalopod” – Animation Magazine introduces the four-minute short.

A Disney Holiday Short: The Boy & The Octopus follows the journey of a child who discovers a curious octopus has attached to his head during a seaside vacation. After returning home, the boy forms a true friendship with the octopus by introducing his new companion to his life on land — harnessing the power of the Force with his Jedi lightsaber, playing with his Buzz Lightyear action figure, and imagining Santa Claus’ route around the world with the map on his wall — before taking the lovable octopus out into the world to experience the joy of the holidays, hidden under his Mickey Mouse beanie….

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cora Buhlert, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Thomas the Red.]