The BBC
Audio Drama Awards 2020 saluted only one genre entry, with Mary Ward-Lowery winning Best
Director for her work on Talk to Me: HP Lovecraft, BBC Bristol, BBC
Radio 4.
The
awards were presented at ceremony in the Radio Theatre of BBC Broadcasting
House, London, on February 2.
The
BBC Audio Drama Awards – presented by the BBC together with the Society of
Authors and the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain – celebrate the range,
originality and cut-through quality of audio drama on air and online and give
recognition to the creativity of actors, writers, producers, sound designers
and others who work in this genre.
The finalists
for the BBC Audio Drama Awards 2020 have been revealed.
In contrast with last year, few programs of genre interest have made the list. In the Best Director category, Mary Ward-Lowery is a contender for Talk to Me: HP Lovecraft. Body Tourists by Jane Rogers is a finalist for Best Adaptation. And so is Orlando by Virginia Woolf – which ought to count as genre by today’s reckoning, being about an immortal changing gender.
(1) FANTASY LIST. ReedsyDiscovery offers its list of “The 100 Best Fantasy Series Ever”. It’s in alphabetical order by title – I was briefly worried, because if somebody wanted to put A Song of Ice and Fire in first place for some reason that could make sense, but it took me a moment to understand why Lord of the Rings was down around number 60.
I’ve read a dozen of these – you’re bound to do better!
The other day, Victor LaValle, a Queens-born author who employs the form of the fairy tale as a barbed hook to lure readers into serious treatments of race, parenting, and the internet, ordered dim sum with Marlon James, a Jamaican author of sweeping social epics that delight in challenging all the conventions of narrative. Both have book projects out this week. Black Leopard, Red Wolfis James’s highly anticipated follow-up to the Man Booker Prize–winning A Brief History of Seven Killings. LaValle has co-edited a new speculative anthology, A People’s Future of the United States, prompting 25 of today’s biggest SFF writers to contemplate the future — and dark present — of the country….
MJ: I gotta say, that’s maybe the first time anybody’s ever mentioned that I write about sex. I actually kinda screamed.
VL: Did you feel all right with me talking about that aspect of it?
MJ: Absolutely! I don’t mind people writing about the violence, but it tends to be all they write about.
VL: For a black writer writing about gangsters, violence is almost the go-to. But sex is absolutely a part of your work in such a big and vital way, as another form of — not just violence but as communion, communication. I was talking about this with my wife, and she pointed out that none of the reviews of your last book mentioned sex at all. So as I was reading this one, I was like, It’s here, too. I just need to say, people should talk about sex.
MJ: Literary realism has this sort of indie-film attitude toward sex. Violence is violent, but sex isn’t sexy. It’s compulsive; nobody’s happy; they enjoy the cigarette way more than the sex. Sometimes I read these novels, none of which I’ll name, and I go, It’s not that hard to enjoy sex, people.
(3) KLAGES INTERVIEW. Juliette
Wade and her team take another Dive Into
Worldbuilding with “Ellen
Klages and Passing Strange”. See the interview in video (below) or
read the synopsis at the link.
I asked Ellen what had been the initial seed of this novella. As it turns out, the novella has a very long history! Ellen told us that she started writing a novel or a short story or something in 1977 when she was 22 or 23, and had just moved to San Francisco, and just figured out that she was queer. She ended up wandering around a lot, learning about Mona’s and many of the other locations that appear in the novella. She did a lot of research and did what she described as cosplaying Haskel and Netterfield with her love of the time. She told us she thought it would be a novel. She had four scenes typed, and would read the scenes every few years and say to herself, “Damn, I should do something with that.”
Then, years later, Jonathan Strand asked her for a novella for Tor.com. By that point, Ellen says, she had four or five folders full of notes and photographs put together from all her years of research. At that point she did 3 1/2 more months of research before writing. She read about a dozen books on Chinatown. She said she started there because it was “the thing I knew I had to get right.” She filled eighty pages with notes, most of which didn’t get used. One page, which she showed us on video, was filled with Haskel’s signature. She explored the gay and lesbian historical archives about Mona’s.
Three of the characters in the story, Babs, Polly, and Franny, have appeared in other works of Ellen’s fiction. In “Out of Left Field,” Babs and Franny appear as relatives of the main characters. Polly appears in “Hey, Presto!” and Franny in “Caligo Lane.”
A chance discovery, hidden away in a series of 16th-century books deep in the archive of Bristol Central Library, has revealed original manuscript fragments from the Middle Ages which tell part of the story of Merlin the magician, one of the most famous characters from Arthurian legend.
Academics from the Universities of Bristol and Durham are now analysing the seven parchment fragments which are thought to come from the Old French sequence of texts known as the Vulgate Cycle or Lancelot-Grail Cycle, dating back to the 13th century.
Parts of the Vulgate Cycle were probably used by Sir Thomas Malory (1415-1471) as a source for his Le Morte D’Arthur (published in 1485 by William Caxton) which is itself the main source text for many modern retellings of the Arthurian legend in English, but no one version known so far has proven to be exactly alike with what he appears to have used.
(5) ONE FOR THE FILES. Colette
H. Fozard, Co-Chair
of the DC in 2021 Worldcon bid, writes:
I wanted to let you know that we made our bid filing with Dublin 2019 Site Selection and it has been accepted as complete by the Site Selection Administrator.
(6) ANNIE BELLET 10 YEARS IN SFF.
Celebratory thread starts here.
(7) EMSHWILLER OBIT. Author
Carol Emshwiller (1921-2019), winner of World
Fantasy Con’s Lifetime Achievement Award (2005) has died. The SFWA Blog has an
obituary:
Author Carol Emshwiller (b.Carol Fries, April 12, 1921) died on February 2nd, 2019. Ms. Emshwiller began publishing science fiction in 1954, with the story “Built for Pleasure.” Emshwiller built a reputation as a short fiction author and Ursula Le Guin said that she had “one of the strongest, most complex, most consistently feminist voices in fiction.”
…SFWA President Cat Rambo remembers,
Carol Emshwiller was one of the greats of short story writing, right up there with Grace Paley, James Tiptree Jr., Ursula K. Le Guin, and R.A. Lafferty, and she pushed its edges in order to do amazing, delightful, and illuminating things–just as she did with her longer work. As a short story lover, I am gutted by this loss to the writing community and plan to spend part of today re-reading Report to the Men’s Club and Other Stories, with its beautifully incisive and unflinching stories.
This photo
from Melissa C. Beckman shows the author in front of a portrait of her painted
by her late husband Ed Emshwiller.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled
by Cat Eldridge.]
Born February 5, 1904 – William S. Burroughs. I’m going to confess that I’ve read nothing by him so everything I know about I’ve absorbed by reading about him and seeing his fiction turned into films. So though ISFDB lists a number of his works as SF, I’ve not a clue what they’re like. So educate me please. (Died 1997.)
Born February 5, 1922 – Peter Leslie. Writer in a number of media franchises including The Avengers, The New Avengers (and yes they are different franchises), The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. and The Invaders. ISFDB also lists has writing in the Father Hayes series but I don’t recognize that series. (Died 2007.)
Born February 5, 1934 – Malcolm Willits, 95. Author of The Wonderful Edison Time Machine: A Celebration of Life and Shakespeare’s Cat: A Play in Three Acts which he filmed as Shakespeare’s Cat. He also co-edited Destiny, an early Fifties fanzine with Jim Bradley.
Born February 5, 1940 – H.R. Giger. Conceptual designer in whole or part for Aliens, Alien³, Species and Alien: Resurrection to name a few films he’s been involved in. Did you know there are two Giger Bars designed by him, both in Switzerland? And yes they’re really weird. (Died 2014.)
Born February 5, 1964 – Laura Linney, 55. She first shows up in our corner of the Universe as Meryl Burbank/Hannah Gill on The Truman Show before playing Officer Connie Mills in The Mothman Prophecies (BARF!) and then Erin Bruner in The Exorcism of Emily Rose. She plays Mrs. Munro In Mr. Holmes, a film best described as stink, stank and stunk when it comes to all things Holmesian. Her last SF was as Rebecca Vincent in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows.
(9) LEAPING V. LOOKING BEFORE.
Jason Heller tells other dreamers not to wait. His thread starts here.
My dream is that @jason_m_heller pays all my bills while I post silly rants on the interwebs. As soon as I receive my first check, I'll be ready to start.
That's $4000.00 for the first month, Jason. I take PayPal too.
(10) ON THE RADIO. Genre
was shut out at the BBC
Audio Drama Awards 2019 but there’s the link in case you want to see
the results. However, the winner in the Best Actress category is known to fans
from her work on Torchwood.
BEST ACTRESS
WINNER: Eve Myles, 19 Weeks, director Helen Perry, BBC Cymru Wales, BBC Radio 4
(11) KLINGON CUTLERY. Police in Northwest England raided the home of a teenager
and seized a cache of weapons including one that was … more esoteric. The BBC
reports “A replica of a weapon wielded by a race of alien warriors in the
sci-fi TV show Star Trek has been seized by police from a 17-year-old boy’s
bedroom.” They did not, however find a ChonnaQ or D’k
tahg. “Star Trek Klingon blade seized from Widnes teen’s
bedroom”
Nina : This is what happens when you remove Kahless from schools and everything else! Thoughts and prayers.
Michael Z. Williamson: Remember when young British males were REQUIRED to have a longbow? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
(12) OH, THE HUMANITIES. “Ursula
K. Le Guin Was a Creator of Worlds” by Julie Philips is the cover
story on the new issue of Humanities, published
by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
When she found her way into science fiction and fantasy, those genres turned out to be well suited to her imagination, her curiosity, and her subversive suspicion that man was not the measure of all things. From the very beginning, in interviews and essays, Le Guin championed science fiction’s literary value. She did it most memorably in a 2014 speech when she accepted the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (or what writer China Miéville in the documentary calls “the welcome-to-the-canon award”). In that speech, she described herself and her colleagues as “realists of a larger reality.”
STX Entertainment has unveiled the second trailer for its animated UglyDolls movie via The Ellen Show, and the message of what looks to be a Trolls redo is actually very resonant for us all: Don’t shy away from what makes you different; embrace it.
The new trailer also explains where the singing UglyDolls come from — they’re factory rejects compared to the “normal” dolls of our world, and are left discarded in a town all their own. They’re all pretty much happy until a renegade by the name of Moxy (voiced by Kelly Clarkson) wants to explore the wider world and find the kid who will love her. Along with her friends, Moxy will travel to the Institute of Perfection, which pairs dolls with humans.
[Thanks to
JJ, Chip Hitchcock, Juliette Wade, Cat Eldridge, Olav Rokne, John King
Tarpinian, Alan Baumler, rcade, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, Carl
Slaughter, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to
File 770 contributing editor of the day microtherion.]
Up for Best Actor are Derek Jacobi for The War Master 1.1 Beneath the Viscoid, a Doctor Who story from Big Finish Productions, and David Tennant in Wild Honey, a play by Chekov. Two contenders for Best Actress, nominated for non-sff roles, also have past connections to Doctor Who, Eve Myles and Mandeep Dhillon. Lastly, a production of Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys is a nominee for Best Use of Sound.
The winners will be revealed at a ceremony in the Radio Theatre at BBC
Broadcasting House London on the evening of Sunday, February 3.
Dangerous Visions: Culture by Al Smith, producer Sally Avens, BBC Radio Drama London
The Music Lesson by Hannah Silva, producer Melanie Harris, Sparklab Productions
The Red by Marcus Brigstocke, producer Caroline Raphael, Pier Productions
Best Audio Drama (Series or Serial)
Black Eyed Girls by Katie Hims, producer Sasha Yevtushenko, BBC Radio Drama London
Dangerous Visions: Resistance by Val McDermid, producer Sue Roberts, BBC Radio Drama North
Home Front by Katie Hims and Sarah Daniels, producer Jessica Dromgoole, BBC Radio Drama Birmingham
Best Adaptation
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, producer Gary Brown, BBC Radio Drama North
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, adapted by Ayeesha Menon, producers Tracey Neale and Emma Harding, BBC Radio Drama London
Terrible Beauty by Gerald Doyle, adapted and produced by Bernard Clarke, RTE Lyric FM
Best Actor
Paapa Essiedu, Wide Open Spaces
John Hurt, The Invisible Man Chapter 1
Nikesh Patel, Midnight’s Children
Best Debut Performance
Andrew Leung, Prime Cut
Kate Phillips, Gudrun’s Saga
Sabrina Sandhu, Black Eyed Girls
Best Use of Sound
Dangerous Visions: Kafka’s Metamorphosis, sound by Nigel Lewis, producer James Robinson, BBC Cymru Wales
Midnight’s Children, sound by Peter Ringrose, Anne Bunting, Jenni Burnett, producers Tracey Neale and Emma Harding, BBC Radio Drama London
War of the Worlds, sound by Cal Knightley, Mike Etherden, Alison Craig, producer Marc Beeby, BBC Radio Drama London
The winners will be announced at a ceremony in the Radio Theatre at BBC Broadcasting House, London, on January 28. Each category is judged by a team of industry experts including actors Ruth Jones and Paterson Joseph, Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis, and writer David Eldridge.
(1) GET IN ON THE ART. Many museums are offering free downloadable coloring books this week, February 6-10, as part of the #Color Our Collections event. There is quite a lot of fantastic imagery of interest to fans — indeed, one item literally is fan art.
Orycon. (October 30, 1981 – November 1, 1981). A review of Orycon ’80 – Document 1, Page 1 Fritz LeiberScience Fiction & Fantasy Convention Flyers & Programs. Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries,
From February 6-10, 2017, libraries, archives, and other cultural institutions around the world are sharing free coloring sheets and books based on materials in their collections. Users are invited to download and print the coloring sheets and share their filled-in images, using the hashtag #ColorOurCollections.
All content is sourced from the collections of participating institutions. With participants from around the globe, this campaign offers an opportunity to explore the vast and varied offerings of the library world, without geographical constraints. Last year’s campaign included over 210 institutions and featured coloring sheets based on children’s classics, natural histories, botanicals, anatomical atlases, university yearbooks, patents, and more.
Glyer’s detective work is not only intriguing; it is also often insightful. Her readers will gain useful perspectives on two things: many of the Inklings’ works that they already love, and the writing process itself, especially the role of collaboration and encouragement in it. Judged by their longevity and their output, the Inklings were surely the most successful writers’ group ever assembled. There are reasons why. Each chapter of Bandersnatch ends with a sidebar entitled “Doing What They Did.” People interested in starting their own writers’ groups, or those already involved in one who want to make it work better, will find a gold mine of practical wisdom there.
— Nicholas Briggs Loves His Cat (@BriggsNicholas) January 30, 2017
(4) CLARKE CONVERSATION. The first in a series of interviews exploring themes of science fiction and STEM, sponsored by the Arthur C. Clarke Award, is online at Medium, a conversation between Anne Charnock and Ada Lovelace Day founder Suw Charman-Anderson.
[Charman-Anderson] …The first of my cherished books was Stranded at Staffna by Helen Solomon. Mrs Solomon was my English teacher and when I was nine she gave me a signed copy of her book:
I hope you enjoy reading this story about Morag MacDonald, Susan, and that you agree with me?—?that she was a real heroine. With love, Helen Solomon. December 1980.
Mrs Solomon was right?—?I did enjoy it and I did agree with her that Morag was amazing. It’s the first book I remember crying at the end of, not least because it’s based on the true story of Mary MacNiven, who rescued a horse from a shipwreck in 1940.
I was already an enthusiastic reader, but Mrs Solomon was the person who helped me understand that books didn’t just appear out of nowhere, that someone sat down and wrote them. It was around this time, I think, that I wrote my first complete story, about a girl who lost her sight when she was hit on the head, and who entered into a parallel world when she slept. It was a complete rip-off of Marianne Dreams by Catherine Storr, of course, but I structured it properly and even had character development! It was then that I started to think that I would become a writer when I grew up.
(5) AUTHORITY DIES, Professor Irwin Corey, the comedian, died February 6 at the age of 102.
It’s impossible to provide a short explanation of Corey’s surreal brand of comedy, which was most potent when delivered in his seemingly nonsensical stream of non sequiturs. But the breadth of his career hints at his creative genius: Who else could have appeared in the 1976 film Car Wash, two years after accepting a National Book Award on behalf of the reclusive Thomas Pynchon?
Billed as “the World’s Foremost Authority,” Corey’s guise as an absent-minded professor offered a way to poke fun at multisyllabic jargon and those who use it. When political or scientific authorities seemed to annex a chunk of language, there was Corey to claw it back — a very human antidote to our complicated modern times.
(6) TODAY IN HISTORY
February 7, 1940 — Walt Disney’s movie Pinocchio debuted
(7) FAN WRITER, FANZINE, EDITOR: Rich Horton posted the final installment of his recommendations, — “Hugo Nomination Thoughts — Other Categories” — which included some very kind comments about Filers, such as the fan writing of Camestros Felapton and Greg Hullender’s Rocket Stack Rank.
But of course there are many wonderful fan writers out there. For years I have been nominating Abigail Nussbaum, especially for her blog Asking the Wrong Questions (http://wrongquestions.blogspot.com/), and I see no reason not to do so again this year. I will note in particular her review of Arrival, which captured beautifully the ways in which the movie falls short of the original story, but still acknowledges the movie’s strengths.
Another fan writer who has attracted my notice with some interesting posts is Camestros Felapton (https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/). Some of the most interesting work there regarded (alas) the Puppy Kerfuffles, and I was quite amused by this Map of the Puppy Kerfuffle: https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/the-puppy-kerfuffle-map/. But the blog is much more than Puppy commentary – indeed, it’s much more than SF commentary. In the more traditional fanwriting area, I can point to the most recent entry (as I write), a well-done review of Greg Egan’s Diaspora.
Christopher Robin Milne, the son of Winnie the Pooh creator A.A. Milne, grew up in this quaint brick manse in the English countryside. Christopher Robin inspired the young boy of the same name in Milne’s iconic children’s stories and, so too did the bucolic setting of the family home serve as the backdrop. Known as Cotchford Farm, and on the market for the first time in more than 40 years, the Grade II listed estate spans 9.5 acres of lawns, forest, and streams. The six-bedroom main house, the quintessential English country house if there ever was one, is listed for $3.22M. There’s more to the Milne house than just Pooh, as it was also later owned by Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, who reportedly died on the property.
The best part of the news item might be that the author’s name is “Rob Bear.”
The eight-page story will debut this March in the Suicide Squad/Banana Splits Annual #1, before turning into a regular DC series this fall. “I envision him like a tragic Tennessee Williams figure,” writer Marc Russell told HiLoBrow.com. “Huckleberry Hound is sort of a William Faulkner guy, they’re in New York in the 1950s, Marlon Brando shows up, Dorothy Parker, these socialites of New York from that era come and go.”
The sexual orientation was never affirmed in the Hanna-Barbera cartoons, but Russell, who has also done an updated take on The Flintstones for DC Comics, is making Snagglepuss’ sexuality a key part of the story, in which the pink mountain lion is dragged before the Communist-hunting House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). He’s accused of being a pinko, get it?
This is the first I’ve heard that Snagglepuss was pink. I watched those cartoons when I was really young — the station they were on was still broadcasting in black-and-white.
“What Happened at Blessing Creek” (Intergalactic Medicine Show)
“Cleanout” (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction)
“Artifice” (Analog Science Fiction and Fact)
“Perfection” (not previously published)
“The Good Son” (Jim Baen’s Universe)
“Scrap Dragon” (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction)
“Comrade Grandmother” (Strange Horizons)
“Isabella’s Garden” (Realms of Fantasy)
“Bits” (Clarkesworld)
“Honest Man” (Realms of Fantasy)
“The Wall” (Asimov’s Science Fiction)
“So Much Cooking” (Clarkesworld)
(10) BACK TO WORK. The Hugo Nominees 2018 Wikia site has gone live. Not to early to list the 2017 works you love that might deserve an award next year.
TV maker Vizio has agreed to pay out $2.2m in order to settle allegations it unlawfully collected viewing data on its customers.
The US Federal Trade Commission said the company’s smart TV technology had captured data on what was being viewed on screen and transmitted it to the firm’s servers.
The data was sold to third parties, the FTC said.
Vizio has said the data sent could not be matched up to individuals.
It wrote: ” [The firm] never paired viewing data with personally identifiable information such as name or contact information, and the Commission did not allege or contend otherwise.
“Instead, as the complaint notes, the practices challenged by the government related only to the use of viewing data in the ‘aggregate’ to create summary reports measuring viewing audiences or behaviours.”
(12) HOLY PUNCHOUT. Netflix is bringing Marvel’s Iron Fist to television in 2017.
[Thanks to John Lorentz, Bruce D. Arthurs, Chip Hitchcock, Mark-kitteh, Gregory N. Hullender, John King Tarpinian, and Carl Slaughter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Lee.]
The 2016 BBC Audio Drama Award winners included the Best Adaptation award for Mikhail Bulgakov’s fantasy/satire The Master and Margarita, adapted by Lucy Catherine. (Visit Master and Margarita website to learn about the novel and other adaptations.)
According to the show’s BBC page, it’s unfortunately not available for playback at this time. (Also, the BBC iPlayer requires listeners to be UK residents.)
Other winners of genre interest:
Best Actor: Alfred Molina in A View from the Bridge; Jarvis and Ayres Productions for Radio 3.
Molina is also known to fans for Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Spider-Man (2004).
Outstanding Contribution: John Hurt
His career includes Alien, and Doctor Who (he’ll be at next weekend’s Gallifrey One convention in LA.)
