(1) SPSFC 4. The Self-Published Science Fiction Competition begins accepting book entries tomorrow, September 2. This will be the fourth iteration of the contest. Here are the key dates:
- New book applications (Sept. 2, 2024 to Sept. 29, 2024)
- Resubmissions (Sept. 17, 2024 to Sept. 29, 2024)
- Judge teams finalized (October 2024)
- Filter/confirm submissions (October 2024)
- Team allocations and reading starts (October 2024)
- Round One (October 2024 to March 2025)
- Semifinals (March 2025 to May 2025)
- Finals (May 2025 to July 2025)
- Winner announced (July 2025)
(2) DRAGON CON AWARDS CEREMONY. Many awards were given at today’s Dragon Con ceremony.
So were the following two traditional Dragon Con recognitions:
(3) HANK REINHARDT FANDOM AWARD. The recipient of the Hank Reinhardt Fandom Award, formerly the Georgia Fandom Award, is Clyde Gilbert.
(4) JULIE AWARD. And John Cleese popped up unexpectedly at the ceremony to be presented with Dragon Con’s “Julie Award”
In 1998, Dragon Con established the Julie Award presented annually in tribute to the legendary Julie Schwartz. The Julie Award is bestowed for universal achievement spanning multiple genres, selected each year by our esteemed panel of industry professionals. The first recipient in 1998 was science fiction and fantasy Grandmaster Ray Bradbury.
(5) FREE DELANY ZOOM LECTURE. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago invites everyone to join them on September 10 for a live virtual lecture by writer Samuel R. Delany followed by an audience Q&A. Click HERE to join via Zoom at 6:00 p.m. Central. Free and open to the public. Registration is not required.
In 2016, Samuel R. Delany was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. A filmmaker, novelist, and critic, he is the author of the award-winning books Babel-17 and Dark Reflections, as well as Nova, Dhalgren, and the Return to Nevèrÿon series. He has won Nebula Awards from the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association and two Hugo Awards from the World Science Fiction Convention. In 2013, he was made a Grand Master of Science Fiction. His works are available through his website at samueldelany.com. Presented on the occasion of the exhibition In Your Face: Barbara DeGenevieve, Artist and Educator on view at the SAIC Galleries August 28–December 7. A related symposium will take place on September 14.
This event will be live captioned by Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) services.
(6) GRABBY ALIENS AND THE FERMI PARADOX. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Over a year ago there was much discussion about a 2021 paper that some scientists nicknamed the ‘Grabby Aliens’ paper. (If I have done right by Mike I’ll have clocked him in on this but we did cover it over at SF² Concatenation.) The original paper’s lead author was an economist from George Mason University in the US and the other authors were maths (or maths adjacent) academics from the US and UK.
Its basic contention was that either we are alone in the Galaxy or that we should very soon see long arcs in the sky from alien civilisations and that the aliens would arrive (possibly in a wave front travelling at over half the speed of light) and likely take us over, at least culturally/technologically, and so curb our own expansion to control a sphere of stars for ourselves.
There was much debate, but if you don’t want to take a deep dive into the rather dry paper then a year ago physicist Matt O’Dowd over at PBS Space Time did a neat 20-minute video (now over 2 million views) explaining it all.
This brings us to the present and Brit astrophysicist David Kipping of Columbia University, New York, and host of Cool Worlds has jumped onto the debate. “Do ‘Grabby Aliens’ Solve The Fermi Paradox?”
“There are many possible solutions to the Fermi Paradox but a few have risen to particular prominence – including the “Grabby Aliens” hypothesis. Today, we’ll explore what this solution proposes, what it assumes, and ultimately three reasons why I personally don’t think it’s right.”
Those of you that know me, will not be surprised that I have my own views which I hinted at at the end of the SF² Concatenation coverage. However, it is important you make up your own mind.
(7) POLISH LEGENDS. lance oszko says the Balticon 59 Short Film Festival was seeking Legendy Polskie, a highly rated series of short videos.
Due to a Corporate Decision, the Multiverse Series “Legendy Polskie” is not available to Festivals.
A continuing theme is smart Polish People outwitting Evil. Meanwhile still on YouTube with Subtitles.
A series of 27 Legendy Polskie videos (including a teaser and other odds and ends) is available on YouTube; playlist at the link.
(8) SAFETY LAST. GamesRadar+ gleefully reports “Star Wars Outlaws stormtroopers don’t have seatbelts, and that means players are already turning their speeders into death traps”. (Video on Reddit here: “My Favorite Thing to Do”.)
…It might only technically be out today, but Star Wars Outlaws early access means that players who bought into special editions have had their hands on the game for a few days already. And one of those has been playing around with the open worlds available on Star Wars Outlaws’ planets, utilizing the physics systems to really upset some unfortunate troopers.In a Reddit post, one player points out that you can shoot out the front of an incoming speeder, causing a dramatic drop in speed that sends the trooper riding the vehicle to be thrown, ragdoll-like, through the air. There are two clips in the video, including one where the unfortunate Empire grunt clatters at high speed into a small building, ping-ponging off it in a particularly slapstick moment….
(9) USE THE SWITCH, LUKE. The Verge tells “How Star Wars walked away from the world’s first self-retracting lightsaber toy”.
The Star Wars toymaker spent two years secretly working on a kids lightsaber that can automatically extend and retract its blade — the very first of its kind. Hasbro acquired all rights to the idea from a previously unknown Israeli inventor and patented it around the world.
But instead of finishing the product, Hasbro walked away without explanation. It let the inventor claw back the rights. Today, with the help of a different manufacturer, you can finally buy it at Amazon, Walmart, and Target— as the Goliath Power Saber.
The $60 toy doesn’t have official Star Wars sounds or authentic Jedi or Sith hilts. The blade isn’t as long as the movie sabers, and it doesn’t have the build quality or sophistication of pricier props.
But a simple yet ingenious mechanism means we finally have a lightsaber toy that can actually retract its own blade. Slide the golden switch, and a noisy motor sends each of its glowing blade segments smoothly in and out of the handle. Poke someone with the saber, and its blade will safely collapse without damage. You can even safely point it at your own face — see that in my video below.
Three years after Disney jazzed the world with a self-retracting lightsaber prop that you’ll never get to touch, one that was exclusively used by a paid actor in its shuttered $6,000-per-stay Star Wars hotel, you can now buy a toy that captures some of the same magic….
(10) DEBORAH CLAYPOOL. Southern fan Deborah Claypool passed away on August 30 after an extended illness her brother Tom reported on Facebook. She was the Vice-Chair of the Memphis State University SF Association when it was founded in 1980. We were both active in the apa Myriad around that time. Curt Phillips notes she also founded FOLD, an apa devoted to the art of origami. A memorial is planned for a later date.
(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
September 1, 1942 — C J Cherryh, 82.
By Paul Weimer:
The most amusing thing I can start off with my discussion of Cherryh is the fact that for the first few decades of my life, I thought her last name was pronounced Chair-uh, not Cherry like the fruit.
My love of her work began, given my age, predictably, with Morgaine. I actually encountered Morgaine, before the actual books, in Dragon Magazine, the official magazine of Dungeons and Dragons. In the early issues of Dragon Magazine, there was a column called “Giants in the Earth”. Issue 57 featured writeups and stats for Morgaine and her companion Vanye. Those writeups explained not only the stats but gave background to the characters and what they were all about:
“Morgaine is from a universe where an early civilization discovered or invented the ability to teleport via gates. These gates are controlled by a mechanical contrivance housed in a large cubical building. The lesser gates on a planet can transfer someone through space and/or time between each other. The master gate of a planet is physically located near the control center and has the additional capability to teleport to gates on other planets.”
Given my love of portal fantasies, teleportation and the like, this first paragraph was catnip. I had to read the Morgaine books. And I was delighted that the novels were every inch the column promised, and much more. Cherryh was a hell of a writer, and I was hooked. I went from Morgaine to the Faded Sun novels, to Cyteen, and on and on.
Cherryh’s facility with hard science fiction, with clever fantasy, and mixing the two in things like Morgaine just show her facility as a writer. I know the latter part of her career has seemingly been an endless series of Foreigner novels (and rightly so, the novels are a fascinating study of human-alien cultures) but her oeuvre is so wide and diverse, that I would almost recommend people start with something OTHER than Foreigner and its seemingly limitless series. Try the Pride of Chanur, with its fascinating aliens and a space station that certainly inspired Babylon 5. Or Fortress in the Eye of Time, and see the power of deep time and an old conflict and a wizard’s older ambition. Or the fantastic Downbelow Station, a slow burn novel in the Alliance-Union Wars that, when it goes off, it hits like a brick, and shows the power of the author’s work.
(12) COMICS SECTION.
- Bob the Angry Flower presents the “Alphabetical Bot Parade!”
- Frank and Ernest notices someone planning a trip.
- Thatababy knows copy/paste shortcuts
- Bizarro lights up Gotham City’s backup plan.
(13) SAIL ON! Space.com applauds as “NASA’s solar sail successfully spreads its wings in space”.
…NASA’s Advanced Composite Solar Sail System (ACS3) caught a ride to space on April 24 on Rocket Lab’s Electron vehicle and, at the end of August, NASA shared in a release that its mission operators verified the technology reached full deployment in space. On Thursday, Aug. 29 at 1:33 p.m. EDT (5:33 UTC), the team obtained data indicating the test of the sail-hoisting boom system was a success. Just like the wind guides a sailboat on the water, it only takes a slight amount of sunlight to guide solar sails through space. Though photons don’t have mass, they can force momentum when they hit an object — that’s what a solar sail takes advantage of. Thankfully for us, the spacecraft that deployed the sail contains four cameras that can capture a panoramic view of both the reflective sail and the accompanying composite booms. The first of the high-resolution imagery is expected to be accessible on Wednesday, Sept. 4….
(14) EVERY DOG HAS ITS DAY. And that day may have started four thousand years ago. “The Discovery of a Bronze Age Game Board in Azerbaijan Challenges the Origin of One of the World’s Oldest Games” reports Arkeonews.
A new archaeological study revealed that an ancient board of a game, known as “Hounds and Jackals” or the “Game of 58 Holes”, found in 2018 on the Absheron peninsula in present-day Azerbaijan, is the oldest known.
For a long time, most have believed that the oldest board games originated in ancient Egypt. That presumption has been contested by a recent study, though. Analyzing board games found on Azerbaijan’s Absheron Peninsula indicates that they might have originated in Asia rather than Egypt.
The study is published in the European Journal of Archaeology. Traditional interpretations hold that the board game originated in ancient Egypt in the second millennium BCE, but evidence from recent excavations suggests that the game was also played in the South Caucasus during this time, casting doubt on this theory.
(15) CAN STARLINER GET BACK TO EARTH ON AUTOPILOT? We’ll soon know. “Boeing will try to fly its troubled Starliner capsule back to Earth next week” at Ars Technica.
…Flying on autopilot, the Starliner spacecraft is scheduled to depart the station at approximately 6:04 pm EDT (22:04 UTC) on September 6. The capsule will fire its engines to drop out of orbit and target a parachute-assisted landing in New Mexico at 12:03 am EDT (04:03 UTC) on September 7, NASA said in a statement Thursday.
NASA officials completed the second part of a two-day Flight Readiness Review on Thursday to clear the Starliner spacecraft for undocking and landing. However, there are strict weather rules for landing a Starliner spacecraft, so NASA and Boeing managers will decide next week whether to proceed with the return next Friday night or wait for better conditions at the White Sands landing zone.
Over the last few days, flight controllers updated parameters in Starliner’s software to handle a fully autonomous return to Earth without inputs from astronauts flying in the cockpit, NASA said. Boeing has flown two unpiloted Starliner test flights using the same type of autonomous reentry and landing operations. This mission, called the Crew Flight Test (CFT), was the first time astronauts launched into orbit inside a Starliner spacecraft, and was expected to pave the way for future operational missions to rotate four-person crews to and from the space station….
(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. From 2015, Saturday Night Lives’ “Hobbit Office” sketch.
After saving Middle-earth, Bilbo (Martin Freeman), Gandalf (Bobby Moynihan), Gollum (Taran Killam), Legolas (Kyle Mooney) and Tauriel (Kate McKinnon) take up office jobs.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Rich Lynch, Cath Jackel, Sean CW Korsgaard, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
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(0) A file, of course.
(6) What do you expect from economists? Ignoring the “what if they don’t like rocky, water and oxygen covered planets?”, and never mind “why in the galaxy would I care about those primitives?”
(11) Caroline (CJ) is a lovely person – I first met her when running the con suite at Philcon, back in the eighties, when the theme of the con was, of course, a Cherryh jubilee… And her aliens – she walks right on the line between having real aliens and having aliens so alien the reader doesn’t understand them.
(11) “Cuckoo’s Egg” and “40,000 in Gehenna” come time mind, for aliens.
11) My path to Cherryh (which I still tend to pronounce “SHARE-eh” unless I stop and think about it) was similar to Paul’s in that it started with that same issue of Dragon Magazine, although the first novels of hers I read were Downbelow Station (still my favorite SF novel, bar none, to this day) and Pride of Chanur. Now I’ve read almost everything of hers except the Foreigner books (someday, someday) and am very eagerly awaiting the next Alliance/Union novel sometime in the next few months.
@P J Evans — I love 40,000 in Gehenna, although I admit it’s one that took me a few reads before I actually grokked it back in high school.
Cherryh is easily in my top five favorite SF writers, and Cyteen is one of my favorite novels, so it will probably seem surprising when I say that I didn’t really care for Downbelow Station. The world-building and plot were fine, but for me, it just falls into Eight Deadly Words territory. If I hadn’t tried (and loved) Merchanter’s Luck shortly after bouncing off of DS, it might have been many years before I discovered how much I like Cherryh!
I did eventually finish DS, and, in fact, I have re-read it a couple of times, since it is one of the most popular novels by one of my favorite writers. Seemed like it was worth giving it another chance. Or two. But it’s still failed to win me over.
I say this not to criticize those who do like it, but because there may be others out there who tried it and didn’t care for it and who gave up on Cherryh as a result. I’d like to encourage those folks to try some of her other works! 🙂
@Mike: Sorry to tell you the subscribe-to-this-post tickbox is missing again.
Nice to join so many other Cherryh fans! I still remember finding the first Morgaine novel in the college bookstore. Much as I enjoy the big series, I also love smaller standalones, such as Cuckoo’s Egg, Rimrunners and Paladin. Oddly enough, I just finished rereading Chanur’s Legacy. Still amazed and delighted to find so much comedy amid the serious themes.
11) Cherryh is by far my favorite author. I started with Gate of Ivrel, a Whelan cover with a blurb and introduction by Andre Norton. How could I resist? I read and liked her stuff as it was published but she became my favorite when I read Merchanter’s Luck.
@Xtifr, same with me, Downbelow Station was much better after reading Merchanter’s Luck.
@Joe H, I read an eARC of Alliance Unbound (twice) it was worth the wait. Getting back to Alliance space was like going home. It will be on my Hugo ballot in Novel and Series.
11) Another big Cherryh fan here, though there are certainly books of hers I’ve bounced off, and Downbelow Station was one of them. Perhaps I should give it another try.
The first book of hers I read was Fires of Azeroth, bought at random when I was a teenager because the cover(*) caught my eye. Not having read the first two books in the series made it a little confusing but I enjoyed it anyway.
Seconding all the recommendations already made, especially 40,000 in Gehenna and Cookoo’s Egg. And Serpent’s Reach is a favourite of mine, though not everyone likes it. Good aliens, a historian’s sense of the ways history is both contingent and inevitable, and I love the intensity of the second half.
16) Very funny!
(11) Cherryh was GoH at my first Worldcon (Buconneer) and gave a terrific speech.
It was when a con invited David Cherry to be artist guest and CJ Cherryh for author guest that I learned the two are siblings. CJ added the h at the end of her last name to be taken more seriously.
(6) has the advantage of not being falsifiable.
Periodic reminder/complaint that there’s a whole lot of C.J. Cherryh’s work (mostly from the 90s when she branched out from DAW) that’s currently unavailable in eBook form including, inexplicably, Cyteen, and I’d like someone to address that Right Now, Please.
And yeah, while Downbelow Station is my favorite, it’s not the one I’d recommend as a starting point — I’d probably lean towards Gate of Ivrel, Merchanter’s Luck or Pride of Chanur, depending. And @BGrandath I’m very happy to hear that about Alliance Unbound.
Thank you for sharing the news that SPSFC 4 has begun taking entries. I’m returning as a team lead and we’re looking for more volunteers to serve as judges.
Details on the rules to enter the contest are here:
https://spsfc.space/2024/09/01/how-to-enter-spsfc/
@Joe H
I think that’s because she didn’t have an electronic version, or it was lost in a crash.
(6) @mark: It is the “dismal science”, after all.
Applying mathematics to a ridiculous set of assumptions doesn’t make the conclusions any less ridiculous.
Oh, and I know we’re only doing one birthday per day now, but I have to point out that September 1st hosts and embarrassment of birthday riches, including Martha Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Harold Lamb.
Joe H, I scanned and digitized my copy of Cyteen for my own personal use back when it came out. If C.J. Cherryh or her publishers would like the file, I’d be happy to send it to them. (I have never and would never pirate, sell, or distribute works. This was simply changing the media for personal use.)