The 2019 Writers and Illustrators of the Future Contest Award Event was held April 5 in Los Angeles.
2019 Writers of the Future Golden Pen Award was won by Andrew Dykstal for his story “Thanatos Drive.”
The Illustrators of the Future Golden Brush Award went to Aliya Chen for her illustration of Elise Stephens’ story “Untrained Luck.”
Each winner received a trophy and a $5,000 check.
Also, the L. Ron Hubbard Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to artist Bob Eggleton.
Artist Bob Eggleton asked to have his statement posted:
I’m taking a major step back from SF fandom. I’ll still do covers for my favorite people, here and there and will be around, just have to step back from some of the unkind aspects and pithy fights fandom has developed into recently to focus on my landscape, seascape and spacescape work and my Fine Art direction. People take themselves waaay too seriously in regards to awards like the Hugo and so forth. I got a bunch when it was fun and before Social Media and “campaigning.” Now I see too much backbiting and a tendency to forget the past honors going back to the Hugo’s beginning.
Events like SPACE FEST, Windy City Pulp Con, and G FEST(Godzilla Con) I will still attend as I will Boskone (local) and some of the “Monster Convention” shows. Some of the cattiness and political backbiting and disrespect in the core of “SF fandom” has been very tiring. I have been declining AGoH invites politely anyway, I wish them well but it’s not my “tribe” as it were.
“All Best Wishes, Stay Positive.”
Marianne Plumridge and Bob Eggleton in 2008.
The New York Science Fiction Society – the Lunarians (2), Inc. – has announced Bob Eggleton will be Artist Guest of Honor and Marianne Plumridge will be Special Guest Artist at Lunacon 2017. They join others already on the marquee, Ben Bova as Writer Guest of Honor, Roberta Rogow as Fan Guest of Honor, and the Boogie Knights as Musical Guests.
Bob Eggleton is a multiple Hugo, Chesley and Locus Award-winning artist who first came to prominence for his awe-inspiring spacescapes. (Asteroid 13562 was named Bobeggleton in his honor.)
Over the years, Bob has done art for comics, collectible card games, and book covers for many well-known authors, as well producing as his own illustrated books and art books. “Publishers love artists that slam out the work and sell their books,” he says. Appropriately, his work will be featured on the cover for the upcoming novel by our Writer Guest of Honor, Ben Bova. The Lunacon 2017 Art Show will be exhibiting his work throughout the Convention weekend.
Marianne Plumridge, Special Guest Artist, and Bob’s wife, works mainly in the fields of fantasy and adventure, with occasional forays into science fiction. “When I embarked on a creative career,” she relates, “I started out as a writer. When I found that I could tell the story in paint, the writing sort of fell by the wayside.” Her art history started in her native Australia, where she honed her black and white illustration skills for fan magazines, and earned her the Australian Science Fiction Media (ASFMA) Award for Best Australian Media Fanartist.
Lunacon 2017 will be held on the weekend of April 7 – 9, 2017 at the Westchester Marriott Hotel, 670 White Plains Road, Tarrytown, NY 10591-5104.
Money, money, money – we cover the spectrum from scarcity to infinite wealth in today’s Scroll.
(1) David Pascoe (“Trekking With The Green-Eyed Monster” on According To Hoyt) knows something that nobody else knows. ‘Cause he made it up:
It occurs, what with the Hugo voting just finished, and the results to be announced in a couple of week, that most of the Puppy Kickers are suffering from an excess of envy. I mean, think about it: the prospect of Jim Butcher (or Kevin Anderson, etc.) receiving a shiny, rocket-shaped object is so painful to them that they’re willing to ruin the award’s (remaining shreds of) credibility to prevent it. It’s accepted wisdom at this point that a move to limit voting to attending memberships will be advanced at the WSFS business meeting at Sasquan. While there’s a good deal of speculation over whether such a motion will even get approved (what then, would supporting members get for their hard earned filthy lucre? How could WorldCon possibly garner any kind of diverse, international support by shutting out anybody who can’t afford to fly across an ocean to come to the majority of conventions?), that it’s not reduced to backroom rumor mills is a sign of how strong the desire is to keep out the undesirable types.
Use this link to keep track of new business actually submitted to Sasquan.
(2) Bob Eggleton has some more anecdotes and critiques about Worldcon art shows, and in the last paragraph alludes to professional shows that are competing effectively for artists’ attention, which may be the most important influence on the fate of the Worldcon art show.
Illuxcon had risen in 2008 and, it started being for many pro artists the model for such a quality artshow. Security, professional hangings, a sense of overall quality to the show and one where artists, art fans and art collectors could come and be treated all well. No politics or stupidity or getting caught in some “fan” feud or political battle. Everyone gets on. Everyone does fairly well. Spectrum Live also fills a similar need. So maybe there is hope, but it requires a new and consistent sustainable model for such shows.
(3) Ahrvid Engholm’s post about Girl With The Dragon Tattoo author Stieg Larsson at Europa SF reminds readers about Larsson’s beginnings as a fanzine fan, and draws attention to a successor’s work on a new Millennium series novel that is coming out late this month.
An avid science fiction reader from an early age, he became active in Swedish science fiction fandom around 1971; co-edited, together with Rune Forsgren his first fanzine, Sfären, in 1972; and attended his first science fiction convention, SF•72, in Stockholm. Through the 1970s, Larsson published around 30 additional fanzine issues; after his move to Stockholm in 1977, he became active in the Scandinavian SF Society where he was a board member in 1978 and 1979, and chairman in 1980. In his first fanzines, 1972–74, he published a handful of early short stories, while submitting others to other semi-professional or amateur magazines. He was co-editor or editor of several science fiction fanzines, including Sfären and FIJAGH!; in 1978–79, he was president of the largest Swedish science-fiction fan club, Skandinavisk Förening för Science Fiction (SFSF).
The Swedish morning paper Dagens Nyheter August the 2nd published an “exclusive diary” by David Lagercrantz, covering his work with writing the new Millennium novel.
(4) Responding to a report that “Most of the [Hugo] votes were cast in the final week before the deadline, over 3,000,” Vox Day suggests —
Something to consider: on July 24th, I posted my complete Hugo recommendations. I am NOT saying those are all Puppy votes, only that there may be a connection.
(5) J. A. Micheline explains “Why I’m Boycotting Marvel Comics” at Comics Alliance.
First, came your quiet decision to hand the new Blade book over to two white creators. To be clear, I have no reason to think either creator will do a bad job on this book, but I was disappointed that one of Marvel’s most prominent black heroes would be handed to white people yet again.
I feel like I have to say this five or six times. Whenever this comes up, I get a tsunami of white people wondering what my problem is and suggesting I’m racist for saying white people can’t write about people of color. It’s not that white people can’t; it’s not even that they shouldn’t (except in some circumstances that I have written about almost ad nauseam recently) — it’s that white people are the ones who, historically and systemically, are consistently offered the opportunity. And in 2015, perhaps the right thing to do is to let people of color have a turn.
But that wasn’t the dealbreaker for Micheline, it was the string of gaffes that followed, beginning with —
The moment you and I really started having a problem, Marvel, was when your editor-in-chief all but laughed off the numerous critiques of the variants. Axel Alonso’s interview with CBR was unspeakably condescending and horrendously dismissive. From using scare quotes to frame the discussion to referring, to outcry from David Brothers and other readers/critics as a “small but very loud contingent,” to — and this is the part that I pretty much can’t forgive — indicating that we had suddenly learned the phrase ‘cultural appropriation’ and were eager to use it in an essay.
(6) Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam will appear at Live Talks Los Angeles on October 19, 2015 at the Alex Theatre. It’s the launch event for Gilliam’s memoir.
In Gilliamesque, his “pre-posthumous memoir,” he offers an intimate glimpse into his world in this fascinating book illustrated with hand-drawn sketches, notes, and memorabilia from his personal archive.
From his no-frills childhood in the icy wastes of Minnesota, to some of the hottest water Hollywood had to offer, via the cutting edge of 1960s and ’70s counter-culture in New York, L.A. and London, Terry Gilliam’s life has been as vivid, entertaining and unorthodox as one of his films.
(7) Larry Correia is selling a second series of challenge coins. Jack Wylder gives the details at the link.
2) Instead we’re doing it through the MHI Swag page: https://mhiswag.myshopify.com/ Important: Do NOT order yet! Wait until all 12 designs are finalized and up there so you only have to order once. Even if you’re planning on buying a complete set, hold off- we have a few other items we’ll be introducing along the way that might interest you. In fact, I’m not even going to put them on the site until all has been revealed…
This is the first of the series —
(8) At Bloomberg, Noah Smith writes about “Star Trek Economics: Life After the Dismal Science”.
I grew up watching “Star Trek: The Next Generation” (easily the best of the Star Trek shows). There’s one big, obvious thing missing from the future society depicted in the program. No one is doing business. There is almost no one buying and selling, except for a few species for whom commerce is a form of traditional religion. Food and luxuries are free, provided by “replicators” — machines capable of creating essentially anything from pure energy. Recreation, provided by virtual reality, is infinite in scope. Scarcity — the central defining concept of economics — seems to have been eliminated.
Is this really the future? Is it possible? Is it something we want?
Wait ‘til Smith discovers the Culture novels of Iain M. Banks…
[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kurt Busiek.]
A Hollywood bomb that made money, a cable hit with a future, and the perpetual love feast that is the Worldcon, all in today’s Scroll.
(1) James Earl Jones played B-52 bombardier Lt. Lothar Zogg in Dr. Strangelove.
It was his seventh professional credit. In five of his first 10 roles he was cast as a doctor. That early typecasting wasn’t enough to get him the part of Dr. Strangelove himself, though… Jones first appears in this YouTube clip at :40.
James Earl Jones would establish his greatness as an actor a few years afterwards on Broadway, earning a Tony as the lead in The Great White Hope, and an Academy Award nomination in the film version of the play. Because of his prominence in mainstream entertainment, gigs like voicing Darth Vader or Mufasa in The Lion King seem like sidelines, however, Jones has often worked in genre, fantasy and offbeat productions.
He played alien abductee Barney Hill in a 1975 TV movie, Thulsa Doom in Conan the Barbarian, the warrior Umslopogaas in Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold (1986), reclusive author Terence Mann in Field of Dreams (1989), and also has been in many obscure genre and animated productions.
(2) J. Michael Straczynski, interviewed by Comic Book Resources, is cautiously optimistic about a second season of Sense8.
While the streaming service hasn’t officially given the green light to second season, a promising gesture occurred when Netflix hosted a “Sense8″ panel during the Television Critics Association summer press tour with cast and creators in attendance, including Straczynski who updated the status of a possible renewal. “We’re still awaiting word,” he said on stage. “We’re in the process. We’re waiting for a final determination. We’re cautiously optimistic, but ultimately it’s Netflix’s call.”
If the call does come, Straczynski said he and the Wachowskis have already given plenty of thought to the next phase of the “Sense8” universe. “We’re looking at expanding that as far as logic goes,” he said. “What’s kind of fun about the characters is that what they’re sharing are not necessarily [powered] – like, in other concepts, which might be superpowers, flight. They have ordinary abilities, and we’re trying to say that there is value and merit and power in [that] – whether you’re an actor or you are a martial arts person or a bus driver, you have something to contribute.”
(3) You have til tomorrow to bid on a copy of the American first edition of Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea. Currently up to $2,400.
(4) “7 Science Fiction Publishers that Pay $750+ for Short Stories” seems to have valid info (I checked the Analog entry and it is good) even if the page itself is an ad for writing jobs.
(5) Today’s birthday boy – Clifford D. Simak, three-time Hugo winner, for “The Big Front Yard” (1959), “Grotto of the Dancing Deer” (1981), and one of my very favorite sf novels, Way Station (1964). He was named a SFWA Grand Master, received a Bram Stoker Award for Life Achievement, and won the First Fandom Hall of Fame Award.
After the original Dean of Science Fiction, Murray Leinster, passed away, Isaac Asimov considered only two writers had earned the right to succeed to the unofficial title, saying in The Hugo Winners: 1980-1982 (1986) “the only writer who can possibly compete with [Clifford D. Simak] as ‘dean of science fiction’ is Jack Williamson, who is four years younger than Cliff but has been publishing three years longer.”
Clifford Simak
(6) Artist Bob Eggleton predicts the demise of the Worldcon art show in “We LOVE Worldcon….but here’s what happened…”
Back in the 1980s, it was commonplace for us Pro Artists to schlep or ship our work to the convention. The 80s was a great time, SF looked good, major authors were doing major works, the covers were the best they’d ever been. Costs were low. Even in the 90s it was still viable. I can remember in 1996 shipping 3 large boxes of artwork to the LACon of that year in Anaheim. It was a lot of fun, I won a Hugo in fact. The boxes cost me something like $300.00 each way for a total of $600 and change. I made something like $4500 in the show, so including everything, I still made money.
….It’s the shipping costs that it all comes down to vs the return in sales that are not always congruent. So while people ask “What happened to all the name artists?”….it’s simply cost that we can’t do this anymore. My personal view is also that, Worldcon has changed and few people are interested in the physical art like they used to be, with all the interest in digital media. And it has become a lot of work to prepare for these events. My memories are long and I will always remember the good times, but, they’ve passed. I see a future of an artshow-less Worldcon, due to insurance costs and lack of manpower and, as digital art becomes the mainstay, a lack of physical art.
(7) Dave Freer’s “Show me” at Mad Genius Club is a one-man roundup post.
In this case I’m talking about all those folk who have been telling us ‘we’re doing it wrong’. You know precisely the sort of individuals I’m talking about. They’ll tell me I’m an evil cruel man for killing a chicken or a wallaby… but they have never done it. They’ve never been faced with a choice of that, or no food (let alone meat). They buy a product in the supermarket… which magically makes it appear in the freezer. They’ll tell you that you did your book all wrong and that it is terrible and full of typos… but they haven’t written one. Or if they have, they didn’t have to survive the mill of the slush-pile as I did (or self-pub), but thanks to their ‘disadvantages’ and connections had a publisher pay an editor to help, and proof reader to clear some of those typos. They’ll tell you that the puppies efforts are dragging sf back in time (yes, JUST in time), yet they’ve done nothing to alter the catastrophic plunge of sf/fantasy sales from traditional publishers. If you force them to confront the figures showing they’ve been part of excluding anyone to the right of Lenin from traditional publishing and the various awards (which, it seems extremely likely, downgraded the sale-value of those awards, and the popularity of the genre… they’ll tell you there might be a problem (but of course nothing like as bad as you make it out to be) and we, the puppies just did it wrong.
(8) But never let it be said the Puppies haven’t left their noseprint on the field. Dave Hicks’s cover art for Novacon 45’s progress reports is themed for GoH Stan Nicholls’s Orcs fantasies. Here’s the topical #2.
Art by Dave Hicks.
[Thanks to David Langford and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Snowcrash.]
All five nominees for the 2010 Best Professional Artist Hugo are strutting their stuff at Tor.com this week. Art Director Irene Gallo has lined up screensavers from Shaun Tan, Dan Dos Santos, Stephan Martiniere, John Picacio, and Bob Eggleton. She’s posting one each day.
Gallo led off with Shaun Tan on Monday:
To celebrate AussieCon’s (home of this year’s Hugo ceremony) artist Guest of Honor, Shaun Tan, we decided to kick-off the week with this lovely “Eric” drawing from one of my favorite stories in Shaun’s short story picture-book collection, Tales from Outer Suburbia.
This example makes it easy to understand why the sig line reads: “Irene Gallo is in love with every piece of paper Shaun Tan touches.”
She followed with Dan Dos Santos’ contribution on Tuesday, an incredible portrait of an elf painted during the 2009 Illustration Master Class.
I’m looking forward to seeing more breathtaking art at Tor.com as the week progresses.