(1) ABCD16 AWARDS. Ben Summers’ cover design for Lavie Tidhar’s novel A Man Lies Dreaming has won an Academy of British Cover Design Award in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy category.
The complete shortlist with images of all the covers is at ABCD16 Shortlist and Winners. There are more sf/fantasy books among the finalists in other marketing categories.
(2) MAC II LEADERSHIP REORGANIZES. The 2016 Worldcon decided its communications will be better with a single voice at the top and replaced its three-co-chair structure (“Team LOL”) with a single chairperson, Ruth Lichtwardt.
Diane Lacey, another of the co-chairs, will become a Vice-Chair, and the third, Jeff Orth, is said to be deciding among several options for continuing his work on the con. The decision was shared with the division heads at a meeting last weekend.
(3) AMAZING CELE. Mike Ashley chronicles the reign of Amazing editor Cele Goldsmith in “The AMAZING Story: The Sixties – The Goose-Flesh Factor”. Pulpfest is serializing Ashley’s history of the magazine, first published in its pages in 1992.
[Cele] Goldsmith chose all the material, edited everything, selected the title and blurb typefaces and dummied the monthly magazines by herself. [Norman] Lobsenz, who arrived for an editorial conference usually once a week, penned the editorials, read her choices, and wrote the blurbs for the stories. They did cover blurbs together, and Goldsmith assigned both interior and cover art.
Goldsmith had no scientific background but had a sound judgment of story content and development, and this was the key to her success. She accepted stories on their value as fiction rather than as science fiction. “When I read something I didn’t understand, but intuitively knew was good,” she said, “I’d get ‘goose flesh’ and never doubt we had a winner.” That “goose flesh” was transmitted to the readers. I know when I encountered the Goldsmith AMAZING and FANTASTIC in the early 1960s, I got goose flesh because of the power and originality of their content. As I look now at the 150 or more total issues of those two magazines that Cele Goldsmith edited, that thrill is still there.
Other installments already online are:
- “The AMAZING Story: The Twenties — By Radio to the Stars”
- “The AMAZING Story: The Thirties — Escape from Oblivion”
- “The AMAZING Story: The Forties — ‘Gimme Bang-Bang’”
- “The AMAZING Story: The Fifties — Dream Worlds”
(4) JAR JAR JERSEYS. The Altoona Curve minor league baseball team will host another Star Wars night – if the team isn’t too embarrassed to take the field….
Last year, the team wore these beautiful Jabba the Hutt jerseys. For our Star Wars Night, we’re following that up with a jersey featuring another controversial Star Wars character, Jar Jar Binks. Like last season, we will have appearances by the Garrison Cardida of the 501st Legion.
To follow up last year's gorgeous Jabba the Hutt jerseys, here are the jerseys for #StarWars Night 2016. #JarJar pic.twitter.com/jMbUKX3K3m
— Altoona Curve (@AltoonaCurve) February 23, 2016
Meanwhile, the Birmingham Barons have enlisted fans to pick the Star Wars-themed jersey their players will wear during a game this season.
Join the @BhamBarons on Facebook to help them choose this season's Star Wars Night jersey! pic.twitter.com/Ai4a7phWEE
— Minor League Promos (@MiLBPromos) January 13, 2016
(5) GREAT POWERS. An interview with Tim Powers conducted by Nick Givers has been posted at PS Publishing.
NICK GEVERS: In your new novel, Medusa’s Web, you set out a very interesting and mesmerizingly complex metaphysical scheme, of spider images that draw human minds up and down the corridors of time. What first suggested this scenario to you?
TIM POWERS: I thought it would be fun to play around with two-dimensional adversaries after reading Cordwainer Smith’s short story, “The Game of Rat and Dragon.” I decided that since such creatures would be dimensionally handicapped by definition, why not have them be fourth-dimensionally handicapped too? I.e. they don’t perceive time, and therefore every encounter these creatures have with humans is, from the creature’s point of view, the same event. So by riding along on the point of view of one of them, you can briefly inhabit whatever other encounters it’s had with humans, regardless of when those encounters happened or will happen.
This seemed like an opportunity for lots of dramatic developments, and even one very intriguing paradox for our protagonist to blunder through.
(6) A MOVIE RECOMMENDATION. Zootopia is getting a lot of buzz, and Max Florschutz agrees it’s a winner in a review at Unusual Things.
First, a quick summary for those of you who just want the yay or nay: Zootopia is an excellent, wonderful film with a lot of heart, a lot of adventure, and a wonderful moral at its core that wraps up everything in a fantastic way. Put it on your list.
Now, the longer explanation….
(7) TIM BURTON PROJECT. Entertainment Weekly has a report on “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (film)”, due in theaters September 30.
In Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, the latest fantasy from director Tim Burton, Asa Butterfield plays Jake, a 16-year-old plagued by nightmares following a family tragedy.
On the advice of his therapist, the teen embarks on an overseas journey to find the abandoned orphanage where his late grandfather claims to have once lived. Not only does the place turn out to be real, it also serves as the gateway to an alternate realm where children with strange powers are looked after by a magical guardian (Penny Dreadful star Eva Green) and time moves of its own accord.
(8) POLITICAL SCIENCE FICTION. At the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog, Andrew Liptak names “6 Political SF Novels as Bingeable as House of Cards”. One of them is –
Jennifer Government, by Max Barry
Max Barry’s second novel is a fantastic satire of globalized trade and the deregulation of industry. In this alternate future, the United States has taken over much of north and south America, with government and its services privatized. Citizens take on the names of their employers, and the titular Jennifer Government is an agent tasked with tracking down the perpetrators of a series of murders . The crime turns out to be an attempt by Nike to drum up notoriety for a new line of shoes, but the plot quickly escalated beyond what anyone planned. It’s a ridiculous, often funny book that shows off a very different, but scarily plausible, hyper-commercial world.
(9) ONCE MORE INTO THE SPEECH. MD Jackson touts favorite examples of “The Rousing Speech” at Amazing Stories.
There’s always a rousing speech.
When the odds are against you, when the forces of darkness, or the alien invaders, or the giant lizards have gathered and your pitifully small band of heroes stand against them, the single vanguard against annihilation, what does your leader do?
Well, if he’s any kind of leader he starts talking.
Motivational speeches keep your team together and focused. Rousing speeches keep your smallish army from losing soldiers due to desertion rather than the upcoming decimation. And it’s got to be a doozy of a speech in order to make otherwise sensible men and women stand with you against almost certain death….
One of my favorite rousing speeches comes from an episode of Star Trek. In Return to Tomorrow, a second season episode from 1968, William Shatner throws all the weight of his dramatic acting into a rousing speech: The infamous “Risk is our business…” speech. It doesn’t come before a battle, but before three of the crew, including Kirk, decide to have ancient powerful aliens take over their bodies. Despite the context and the odd placement of the speech which doesn’t really further the plot, the speech has become iconic for its application to the entire Star Trek universe through all the series and movies. It kind of sums up what Star Trek is all about.
Risk. Risk is our business. That’s what this starship is all about. That’s why we’re aboard her.
And with Shatner`s just-shy-of-bombast delivery, the speech is kind of powerful.
(10) TONY DYSON OBIT. The builder of the original R2-D2, Tony Dyson, died March 4 reports the BBC.
The 68-year-old Briton was found by police after a neighbour called them, concerned his door was open.
He is thought to have died of natural causes. A post-mortem is being carried out to determine cause of death.
Dyson was commissioned to make eight R2-D2 robots for the film series. He said working on it was “one of the most exciting periods of my life”.
The look of R2-D2 was created by the conceptual designer Ralph McQuarrie who also created Darth Vader, Chewbacca and C-3PO.
Prof Dyson, who owned The White Horse Toy Company, was commissioned to make eight models plus the master moulds and an additional head.
He made four remote control units – two units for the actor Kenny Baker to sit in with a seat fitted inside and two throw away units to be used in a bog scene in Empire Strikes Back where a monster spits out the droid onto dry land, from the middle of the swamp.
(11) TODAY IN HISTORY
- March 4, 1967 — Neal Hefti won a Grammy for our favorite song, the “Batman Theme.”
(12) YO, GROOT! According to the Daily News, Sylvester Stallone has joined the cast of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
Who might Stallone be playing? Perhaps, Peter Quill’s (Pratt) father. We know that coveted role will appear in the sequel. However, most people assume Kurt Russell already snagged that part and a source for the Daily News says Stallone’s role is just a cameo.
(13) KRYPTON ENNOBLED. As Yahoo! News tells the story, “Polish chemists tried to make kryptonite and failed, but then made a huge discovery”.
Avert your eyes, Superman, because according to news out of Poland this morning, a team of chemists just got awfully close to actually creating the fictional substance of kryptonite. Don’t sweat too much though, Clark — the scientists were only able to bond the element of krypton with oxygen (as opposed to nitrogen) which wound up creating krypton monoxide. Inability to create real kryptonite notwithstanding, the fact the chemists successfully bonded krypton with anything is a revelatory achievement for an element previously known to be entirely unreactive. In light of the success, krypton (which is a noble gas like helium and neon) is no longer considered inert.
Conducted at the Polish Academy of Sciences, a team of chemists ran krypton through a series of various tests to build off a previous study positing that the chemical may react with hydrogen or carbon under extreme conditions. What they discovered — and subsequently published in Scientific Reports — was that krypton, while under severe pressure, also has the ability to form krypton oxides after bonding with oxygen. Thing is, the chemists didn’t actually see the reaction happen, but rather, used genetic algorithms to theorize its likelihood.
(14) GUESS WHY ZINES ARE COMING BACK? News from Australia — “Sticky Institute: Internet trolls sparks resurgence of zines ahead of Festival of the Photocopier”.
Photocopied zines are making a comeback, with some young self-publishers keen to escape the attention of online trolls.
While the internet has democratised publishing, allowing anyone to potentially reach a global audience with the click of a button, vitriolic internet comments are pushing some writers back to a medium last popular in the 1990s.
Zines, or fanzines, are self-published, handmade magazines usually produced in short runs on photocopiers or home printers.
Thomas Blatchford volunteers at Melbourne zine store Sticky Institute, which is preparing for its annual Festival of the Photocopier later this month….
While unsure of the exact reason for the resurgence of zines, Mr Blatchford said it was more than just a “weird nostalgia thing”.
He said some zine-makers had been scared away from online publishing because of unkind comments from people on the internet.
“There’s some horrible people on there,” he said.
(15) BATTLE OF THE BURRITO. John Scalzi is engaged in a culinary duel with Wil Wheaton.
Some of you may be aware of the existential battle that Wil Wheaton and I are currently engaged in, involving burritos. I am of the opinion that anything you place into a tortilla, if it is then folded into a burrito shape, is a burrito of some description; Wil, on the other hand, maintains that if it is not a “traditional” burrito, with ingredients prepared as they were in the burrito’s ancestral home of Mexico, is merely a “wrap.”
Expect someone to write a post soon complaining that Scalzi is doing to Mexican food what he did to sf, by which I mean someone longing for the days when you could tell what you were buying by looking at the tortilla cover…
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Brian Z., Martin Morse Wooster, Andrew Porter, and Chip Hitchcock for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]
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OT:
Remember the “Meh” comment Lois Tilton made here on File 770 in response to the Nebula nominees?
Someone was amused by that enough to use it for calligraphy for Letter of the Month. I was not so lucky to receive one, but Fran Wilde (among others did)
https://twitter.com/fran_wilde/status/706179649827684352/photo/1
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
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eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeinhaleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
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@James Davis Nicoll
Heh. [snort] Obviously that made your week.
@Stoic Cynic
I remember seeing an episode of The Dawning Zone about that, where these Kondaks find a book called “To Serve Man,” and make all kinds of assumptions based on that, and at the end, they are shocked to realize it’s a tennis manual.
RETRO SPOILER WARN… oh, damn, not again
Umph.
Kip W. once again adds to the reasons I want to read here. Mike Glyer is and remains the main reason, but many of the commenters are wonderful.
@Paul Weimar
I suspect that “meh” meme may have started here-ish .
@mark. Yeah, looks like. And then it went from there to calligraphic glory
Seconding Kip W.’s recommendation for old time radio plays. The dramas hold up better but I still have a soft spot for Jack Benny.
Might I also suggest some nonfiction podcasts? I never miss Science Friday. Each 2 hour episode begins with a recap of this week’s science news, and contains longer segments with long interviews with actual scientists. I also love On the Media, which covers how media cover the news and Planet Money, explaining economic concepts to those of us with only normal intelligence. A recent highlight was their episode discussing presidential candidates’ economic plans with a panel of economists. For lighter fare, Filmweek reviews all the movies coming out each weekend.
People who love words should seek out Says You. http://www.saysyou.net
This is my absolute favorite. I was heartbroken when my local public radio station stopped broadcasting it.
For news junkies like me, I also recommend Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me.
So for long car trips, I download the latest episodes of these shows, some radio dramas and three audio books. One of the books will be from Mount TBR, one will be of a favorite novel (Lord of Light and Curse of Chalion were recent choices) and the final one will be something light and easy to follow. Currently, I’ve been listening to audio editions of my dad’s favorite author, Louis L’Amour. I also recommend kid’s books for this, like the Oz series or anything by Bruce Coville.
(1) ABCD16 AWARDS.
That’s some mighty fine design and typography there.
Mark – Actually not. It has an antecedent that I’m quite sure I can’t locate.
Although I note that “meh” has been a common response to the ballot, only not so succinctly phrased.
Klaatu burrito nikto
@Lois Tilton
Quite possibly then, I just remembered seeing that retweeted and was able to re-find it.
My opinion was higher than “meh”, but as I’m not a nebula voter that’s neither here nor there.
I follow the advice of Polonius – “Neither a nominator nor a voter be.”
@Lois Tilton
“For review oft loses both itself and friend”?
World Weary, not all radio comedy was awful, but a distressing amount of it turned out to be on closer examination. Fred Allen, I still think holds up, and Benny. Vic and Sade were transcendent, and I still enjoy the cornball ethnic humor of Lum ‘n’ Abner. I’m sure there are others. Much of the comedy on Lux holds up, for instance (and the half-hour ARSENIC AND OLD LACE from Screen Guild, with Eddie Albert as Mortimer, playing against Boris Karloff as Jonathan, was a howl). STURGEON!!
My favorite radio comedy might be the Albert Brooks Show of August 4, 1943, which sparkles with pep from the theme song (“Hey, Whattaya do when it’s Wednesday? / Have you got any place to go? / If not, may we invite you / To the Albert Brooks Show!”) to the closing credits (“Albert Brooks is brought to you by the United States Treasury, which reminds you that Series E War Bonds are winning the war, so buy more!”). Clocking in at 10:45, it hits just about every mark of classic radio comedy, from the stock characters (“Hellooo, Al-bert!”) to mild ethnic humor (“How many times do I have to tell you? You’re not an American, Sam! Until this war’s over, you’ve got to wake me gently!“) to name stars (Sheldon Leonard, Pat Carroll…) and the musical number. It’s a perfect pastiche that never breaks the fourth wall or winks at the listener. Even the canned laughter is just right. It can be found on his “A Star is Bought” album, which is darn hard to find, and nobody ever seems to put it on YouTube.
Since I can’t link that, I’ll sub with the ventriloquist bit (this is from Flip Wilson, but the first time I saw this it was Albert on Ed Sullivan, when nobody knew him from Adam): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J43bcbIzfI
(Lowell, thanks! I’m beaming, here.)
@Asimov
Asimov On Chemistry and other titles are available on ABE.com
If you are going the used book route and want to support indie bookstores, its a good site. I’ve rarely NOT found OOP stuff on there.
“Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar,” especially with Bob Bailey in the lead, is my addiction.
The first time I heard of wraps was in the mid-90s, when a place called World Wraps opened up in San Francisco, selling burrito-like objects with non-Mexican ingredients. The Thai-inspired chicken, satay sauce, cucumbers and jasmine rice in a spinach tortilla was very popular and soon everyone was serving some version. There was fierce debate over this in San Francisco, where we take our burritos very seriously. It’s nice to see the fire still burning, over a decade later.
[Flashforward: 2089 – The Burrito Wars have decimated humanity. Calientebots prowl the street, ready to fire lethally hot streams of habanero sauce at any encroaching Wraptors. Maria, the last human possessing the secret of the hand-patted tortilla, peered around the corner before lobbing an avocado-sized grenade. When it landed with a ripe thump, she realized she had actually thrown the avocado, and the grenade was still tucked in her pocket. She swore.]
I knew the bride when she used to pixel scroll . . .
@ Mark-Kitteh (re the Expanse):
CQB wasn’t even a question for me. With Person of Interest’s If-Then-Else, I was amused that my first two lock-in votes for Best Dramatic Short occurred respectively in the very first and very last weeks of 2015.
(By contrast, I seem to have different favourite Doctor Who this year than everyone else…)
@Nigel:
Some peoples’ minds went to the Prisoner. Mine went straight to this:
Six
@John M. Cowan:
Don’t mind me. I’ll be over here kicking myself for not thinking of that first.
@Soon Lee: Very nice Pixel Scroll title; I still own that album!
(1) ABCD16 AWARDS. Wow, a lot of those covers are dull, tedious, and/or unoriginal, including, sadly, the cover for Tidhar’s book. There are some interesting, inventive ones, but not as many as I’d hope for an award like this.
The Nopi cover is more impressive in person (we own it); the photo doesn’t do it justice. It’s got a slight metallic sheen and the book looks quite elegant. The cover color is washed out in that photo. Some things just don’t come across in a photo, so – in fairness! – maybe some of the ones that look boring to me are better in person.
(14) GUESS WHY ZINES ARE COMING BACK? You can avoid trolls by (a) moderating, or (b) protecting your content online (require registration, moderate initial comments, boot trolls, etc.). Just because it’s online doesn’t mean it has to be open to all, or that you have to allow trolls to stomp all over everything. It’s sad that people don’t get that, and just let trolls run rampant – or let the trolls drive them away. Still, I guess it’s kinda cool (despite the sad reasons) that there’s a resurgence in zines.
@Fugue: I usually use audiobooks as a way to re-read; if there’re books you love and the samples sound good, get those. This has the benefit of not requiring 100% of your attention (as a new book would), so you can pay more attention to the road.
On the other paw, a friend at work recommends The First Fifteen Lives of Henry August and And Again (his first-reads seem to be in audiobook these days). If you haven’t read Planetfall by Emma Newman, I highly recommend it; Newman reads the audiobook, and I picked up the book based on hearing her read the first chapter or two. (I read the print book and bought the audiobook, but haven’t listened to the full audiobook yet.)
Currently reading Seveneves. I will report more fully when I have finished, but there were two points I wanted to mention.
a. I seem to be afflicted with coincidences when reading Stephenson. I was reading Quicksilver, which is partly set in Grantham, on a train, and the train unexpectedly stopped in Grantham. A few weeks later I was again on a train, reading The Confusion, which is about gold from the Solomon Islands, and there were some children in my carriage who, according to their t-shirts, were from the Solomon Islands. This year, I read the bit about people singing Cwm Rhondda nf gurl ragrerq gur zvar on St David’s Day. (By the way, Cwm Rhondda isn’t the name of the hymn in the original Welsh; it’s the name of the tune, quite a different thing. Why do people always get church things wrong?)
b. Did people notice the passage where a not very likeable character is described as having a sad-puppy look on her face? Could this be why Mr Day doesn’t like it?
Ah, from The Way The Wrap Stood Filled.
@Charon D. LOL
Sixel Scroll!
There ya go!
Camestros: “The Way the Wrap Stood Filled.”
I see you are a fellow member of the club.
As previously discussed, Bay City Scrollers We Love You! / Scrollers Show
ETA: And while I’m here, Billy Joel’s It’s Still Pixel Scroll to Me.
I have to disagree with Kendall, many of the covers are gorgeous and enticing. Well done, all the designers. Interesting (unfortunately) that they have a category for “women’s fiction”, that is to say marketing designed to appeal specifically to women, half of which designs use pink or hearts.
You mean Cadbury’s got even worse ever since Mondelez took them over? Considering how bad it was in the 1990s, I find that hard to believe.
On the other hand, this is Mondelez, end result of the many international mergers and take-overs that destroyed Milka, my favourite chocolate brand in my teens.
@Vasha: You can’t get much pinker than The Time of the Clockmaker, though. 😉
I want to pixel, but the internet scrolled me.
Recs and pups and pixel scrolls
Stoic Cynic on March 5, 2016 at 9:42 am said:
The Donner Public Library has a copy of that.
Re Asimov on chemistry: The article about modeling how krypton could be combined with oxygen reminded me of “Death in the Laboratory”. He begins,
And goes on to talk about how difficult and hair-raisingly dangerous working with fluorine has historically been.
Sometimes, I agree, scientific advances are talked about only in terms of ideas and not enough credit is given to difficult technological feats. Just come up with an idea and you’re there. Failing to discuss what actually goes into the details of scientific work can make it seem like slow progress is a matter of lack of imagination in those cases where a lack of technology is a problem.
A slightly different version of this came up in the discussion of LIGO. A lot of journalists were like, “Einstein’s theory confirmed!” I.e. Einstein was a genius, this is just confirmation. But an article in the New Yorker took a more interesting tack and described how the fantastically delicate instrument was created, making it understandable why it took over three decades of refinement before LIGO could begin observing and finding out interesting things about distant parts of the universe. And a century since Einstein.
Radio comedy that still holds up well: The Goon Show!
Good for in-flight reading over the Andes
As I recall, the section on desserts made with lady fingers is worth a look.
ABCD16 Awards. Is that a competition over who can make worse covers than Baen?
@Ultragotha
The Donner Public Library has a copy of that.
I’ll pass.
@Petrea Mitchell
Radio comedy that still holds up well: The Goon Show!
Oh, yes! I’ve got some of that on the iPod as well. Also Bob & Ray. So far, I’m only up to about 1950 on them, and they haven’t truly become Bob & Ray yet, but it’s only a matter of time now, if Uncle Fletcher doesn’t interfere.
I really wanted to like Harry Morgan, but so far, he’s sort of scattershot. And I know Stan Freberg hit the heights, but listening to the whole shows they’re in doesn’t always serve the great parts as well as it might. Of course I’m a Spike Jones fan, but more of the recordings than of his live appearances (fantastically tight ensemble playing, however). Homer & Jethro, similarly. I was pleased to see them live in concert about 1969, and they were hot as pistols—fantastic string players, too.
The humor element of the Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street seems to hold up pretty well, at least for me. The straight-faced pretend sophistication worked better for them than the burlesque version Jones usually reached for, and their music melts me right down. (Their Basin Street Blues turns me into happy protoplasm. Each instrument takes a chorus and bows out, and the last twelve bars are the string bass, quietly playing alone.)
Ice cream is ice cream. If you add vanilla to it, it’s vanilla ice cream. Add chocolate, it’s chocolate ice cream. Add pureed strawberry, it’s strawberry ice cream.
But vanilla is a flavor, not a default.
Ain’t no party like a Donner Party cause a Donner Party don’t respect taboos.
Heh. Remember Stephen King’s funny/gross story, “Survivor Type”?
The final line:
Lady fingers they taste just like lady fingers
Hint: The surgeon stranded on a rocky island wasn’t referring to lady fingers at all.
Also: For animal pixel titles, Scrollie Wants a Cracker
#7 — The title of the new Tim Burton movie sounds rather like Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, a highly original cartoon show from a few years ago — made by the same people who made Samurai Jack, Powerful Girls and, recently, the new My Little Pony. I’m not sure the plot description reassures me that it isn’t somewhat like Foster’s Home, also.
Vanilla *ought to* be a flavor. The cheap “vanilla” ice cream lots of us had as kids had no detectable flavor at all.
Scrollelujah, scrollelujah…
Ned Flanders used to serve Rod & Todd unflavored ice cream.
Scroll over, Beethoven.
15) I was under the impression that a burrito was not an authentic tacqueria menu item, that it was invented in America, so can hardly be authentic however it’s made. If I were to take a side on whether a tortilla stuffed with fried chickpeas, shredded greens and a spicy sauce was a burrito or not, I think I’d say not. Around here we call those Shawarma or Donar. So if one wrap is a Shawarma, it seems to make sense for all different wraps to have their own name, and a burrito is a burrito only with typical Mexican ingredients. Mind you, that can include hot sausage, pork and other meat stuffing, not necessarily ground beef. The best burritos I ever had were in Chicago, in a little dump on a corner that served a dozen different kinds, each the size of a small football.
World Weary: Just finished A Thousand Nights by E.K Johnston. I really enjoyed this book. Her first book appears to have been published in 2014 so I am adding her to my Campbell longlist. No short stories appeared when I googled her.
The Internet Speculative Fiction Database is not infallible (sometimes entries from the last year or two take a while to get entered), but it’s a pretty good source for this kind of information.
Podcast and audiobook recommendations: I’ve been making my way through the History of English podcast and am enjoying it and learning a lot. It’s currently up to episode 75, so there’s lots to listen to.
How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer is very interesting. And if you like it, there’s also the almost 50-hour Complete Essays of Montaigne.
Oh, and speaking as a Californian: that is not a burrito. I’ve been accused of committing abominations against the pizza gods, I’ve done at least blasphemy against the burrito gods, but even I recognize that that is not a burrito.
I’m kind of curious to hear people’s beefs with the covers in the ABCD16 Awards.
I found them interesting and graphic in their approach.