By Daniel Dern: Boskone 56, held
Friday, February 15 through Sunday, February 17, 2019 at Boston’s Westin
Waterfront Hotel, was a fun con — good guests, fun interesting sessions, good
readings… and good (for Boston winter) weather — bearably cold, and no snow
or rain coming down or on the streets or walkways.
(Some of
us still have memories of 2015’s Boskone when the MBTA (locally aka “the
T”) pre-emptively announced, mid-Saturday, that due to the impending
blizzard, they were
shutting down the T starting 7PM Saturday, through Sunday.)
GoH’s for
Boskone 56 were:
Guest of Honor: Elizabeth Hand
Special Guest: Christopher Golden
Official Artist: Jim Burns
Young Adult Fiction Guest: Cindy Pon
Hal Clement Science Speaker: Vandana Singh
(Burns,
unfortunately, was unable to make it, due to a last-minute emergency; however,
his art was still on display.)
Burns art, from Boskone 56 main web page
Boskone
always gets a good bunch of writers, artists, editors and other sf pros. This
year’s 150+ program
participants included (drawing mostly on people I know/names I
recognize) Ellen Asher, James Cambias, John Chu, Brenda W. Clough, John Clute, Br. Guy
Consolmagno, C. S. E. Cooney, Bruce Coville, Vincent Docherty, Sarah Beth
Durst, Kate Elliot, Greer Gillman, KJ Kabza,
James Patrick Kelly, Justin Key, Dan Kimmel, Mur Lafferty, Patrick &
Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Errick Nunnally,
Suzanne Palmer, Julia Rios, Erin Roberts, Michael Swanwick, Catherynne M. Valente, Jane Yolen, and
Brianna Wu.
(Side
note: I just came back from the library with the 2018 “Year’s Best Science
Fiction and Fantasy” edited by Rich Horton – and there’s a good handful of authors
whose names might not have recognized a week ago, but, thanks to Boskone, I
recognize many more names and know I saw several panelize/read.)
Headcount
of as 11AM Sunday, according to the con’s Helmuth newsletter, came in at 1,382
total members, 1,061 “warm body count,” and 270
“at-the-door” registrations — pretty consistent with the past few
years’ numbers.
There was,
as always, no shortage of things to do.
Program
items spanned classic through current sf/fantasy people, titles and
topics, from the serious through silly, plus a range of media-oriented
discussions including comics, Star Wars, and Star Trek, along with a number of
sessions aimed at new authors and artists. Plus readings, kaffeeklatsches, and
a room for movies/anime and other videos, also filking, board-gaming, the Art
Show, the Dealers Room, noshing in the Con Suite area (which was, sadly, due to
new hotel regulations, limited only to individual-portion-packaged,
no-refrigeration-needed snacks’n’such). And a few evening parties, plus NESFA’s
Saturday evening chocoholics-delight schmorgasbord.
And the
non-program items like “meet new people, schmooze with friends” and
“be a volunteer.”
Boskone’s
Friday afternoon sessions were free — a nice way to help let potential
first-timers get a sense of the con (particularly, I suspect, for people who
have never attended a con). (ReaderCon has been doing this, too, for the past
several years, with its Thursday evening programming.) Free-to-public panel
topics included “The new Dr. Who,” gaming tournament
demos/rules/Q&A, “Welcome to Boskone,” “Laundering Your
Fairy Tales,” along with media/TV-themed sessions, and useful panels for
new writers.
The art
show had good stuff to look at (I’ve used up my quota of wall space, so I’m
just looking, these days), although it seemed slightly smaller than last year.
The
Dealers Room was mostly booksellers, including publishers and groups like Broad
Universe, along with a handful of single-author tables. (My bookshelf space is,
like my wall space, mostly full, although I did buy a few books… plus
snarfing up about a foot of read-and-pass-on magazines and books from the Free
Books table.)
Still,
between books and magazines, I had no trouble spending thirty or forty bucks on
additions to my Mount To-Be-Read (referring, of course, to that pile of books,
often near the bed). Of course, by the end of the con, I had a vision of
foothills forming around my Mount TBR of yet more books and authors to pursue,
hopefully as library borrows.
(The late
Morris Keesan once remarked (possibly at one of the monthly RISFA-North sf fan
gatherings), when somebody mentioned to him their stack of TBR’s, he responded,
more or less, “Stack? I’ve got a bookshelf.”)
Everyone I
chatted with was having fun — schmoozing with friends, going to sessions,
getting autographs, more schmoozing, etc.
Me, I had
fun.
One of the things I did this year was go to
more readings, including well-known’s like Jane Yolen, John Chu, Fran Wilder
and Bruce Coville, as well as some newer and lesser-known authors and groups of
authors. All were good, and helped add to my “authors and books to look
for” list.
Also, kaffeeklatsches, in particular, Jane
Yolen and (her son) Adam Stemple), and Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Teresa
Nielsen Hayden. (I still wish Boskone could find a less noisy space for the
‘klatches rather than the public area in between the Art Show and the “Con
Suite” space.)
I got a Press ribbon, to point at as I was
taking pictures.
I wasn’t originally on the program (not a
complaint, I’ve had my “turn at bat” at Boskone plenty of times, in
main and DragonsLair programming), but while I was buying my membership, I
inquired at Program Ops, and was given an empty-as-of-then slot in the Readings
track. (I had come prepared with a handful of my short-short stories.)
Equally nice, when I went to see if there were
any open slots for the Flash Fiction Slam competition — with points deducted
if you run over three minutes — I discovered I was already signed up! So I
read my newest shortie, “Vampire, T.Rex Bite Robot, Chomp! Gnash!
Ouch!”
One of my
favorite Boskone Program Items is Mark & Priscilla Olson’s “Trivia For
Chocolate” contest — SF trivia, of course, from way back when through
current stuff, where speed matters as much as correctness, with the
green-rectangle chocolate Thin Mints used as point counters totaled up at the
end (emptied wrappers don’t count).
This year,
I tied with Bob Devney for 4th place, with 23 points. Karen von Haam thirded
with 30 points, Kimball Rudeen came in second with 35, and Rich Horton ate all
our lunches with 60 points.
A quick
browse through past Helmuths
(“Helmith”?) confirms my sense that Devney and I often place in the
top five, e.g.:
Boskone 55: Bob Devney 52, Daniel Dern 44, Tim
Liebe 27. Peter Turi 23.
Boskone 54: Kim Rudeen 65, Tom Galloway 45,
Jordin Kare 45, Bob Devney 32, Daniel Dern 29.
(Boskone 53: I wasn’t there.)
Boskone 52: Kimball Rudeen 51, Karen Von Hamm
44, Bob Devney 16, Naomi Hinchen 15, Daniel Dern 12.
Boskone 50: Bob Devney 54, Athena Martin 30,
Zev Sero & Peter Trei: 16
Boskone 49: Jordin Kare 69, Bob Devney 48,
Christopher Davis 40, Daniel Dern 35, Team of Burton, Klein-Burton, Wall &
Moore 30.
(1) GRRM BOUND FOR BELFAST. TitanCon
EuroCon 2019 has announced their first Guest of Honour, George R. R. Martin.
Science fiction, fantasy and horror writer George R.R. Martin began his SFF career in comics, writing letters to the Stan Lee-written Fantastic Four and Avengers in the mid-1960s, and published his first novel in 1977. A multiple winner of the Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy Awards, Martin was already critically acclaimed for his novels Fevre Dream, Dying of the Light and Tuf Voyaging, and his work on the Wild Cards superhero anthology series, when released his game-changing fantasy novel A Game of Thrones in 1996….
George was instrumental in TitanCon’s creation, as you can read about in our TitanCon History page, and appeared at our first pre-con Moot. So it is only fitting that he returns to Belfast to see our take on EuroCon!
TitanCon has
announced two other participants as well —
We are also proud to present our, for the first time ever, Toastmutant!
Pat Cadigan and Peadar Ó Guilín have agreed to achieve some sort of symbiosis and appear as our Toastmutant – as if there was ever any doubt that we wanted, nay needed, them both? We hope it wont be too messy! We know they are going to be wonderful hosts, and Pat will turn the party out, whilst minding Peadar and helping him curb his cannibalistic tendencies.
Brett and Sandra are at Boskone 56 right now. Our entire stock of books was mistakenly put out on the freebie table.
If you grabbed a book from or see someone with a CZP, CHITEEN, or CHIGRAPHIC book, please tell them to return them to us at our dealer’s table, location A5. Or you can just come and pay for it! We are reasonably priced!
We are quite overcome. Thank you to all the fans, readers and everyone at Boskone 56… A bunch of our missing books (that were mistakenly put out on the freebie table) were returned! We have recovered almost a full third. So our dealer’s table no longer looks so sparse. Come by and see our wares!
MOTION PICTURE – ANIMATED Isle of Dogs Original Dialogue Mixer: Darrin Moore Re-recording Mixer: Christopher Scarabosio Re-recording Mixer: Wayne Lemmer Scoring Mixer: Xavier Forcioli Scoring Mixer: Simon Rhodes Foley Mixer: Peter Persaud, CAS
…Nowhere is it written, though voters sometimes act as if it is, that the Oscars are an elitist award for which mass-appeal movies need not apply. In a sane world, intelligently satisfying an enormous audience should be one of the things the Oscars are all about.
The key word there is “intelligently,” and if you’ve watched more than your share of superhero movies, you know that quality is often in short supply in a genre dominated by business-as-usual boilerplate.
Coogler (who cowrote with Joe Robert Cole) ensured that “Black Panther” would be an exception, in part by retaining his core creative team of collaborators, including composer Ludwig Goransson and production designer Hannah Beachler (both Oscar-nominated) as well as editor Michael P. Shawver and cinematographer Rachel Morrison.
Adding costume designer Ruth E. Carter (also nominated, for the third time in a distinguished career) was icing on the cake….
(5) COMPETING
MARVELS. Adam Lance Garcia, in “The
Twisted Story of How We Wound Up With Two Captain Marvel Movies (And Why One is
Named SHAZAM!)” on Yahoo! Entertainment, discusses the backstory of how C.C. Beck and
Bill Parker created Captain Marvel for Fawcett Comics in 1940, how National
Comics sued Fawcett claiming that Captain Marvel was a copy of Superman, how
Fawcett killed Captain Marvel as a result of the lawsuit, and how Marvel
resurrected the name for a different character in the late 1960s, forcing DC to
rename the character Shazam! when they revived it in 1972.
First we need to rewind to 1938, when Superman created the superhero genre overnight, and comic book publishers, eager to get into the burgeoning superhero market, began creating countless flash-in-the-pan heroes in an attempt to recapture the magic of Superman.
Heroes such as Major Victory, Stardust the Super Wizard and Air-Male and Stampy — yes, these are all real — would only last a few issues before being tossed into the dustbin of comics history.
But in 1939, writer Bill Parker and artist C.C. Beck created a hero that, for a time, would become the most popular superhero in the world.
His name? Captain Marvel….
(6) TRAILER SPOOF. Not only does this Captain have a split personality, she can’t remember one of them…
In this animated parody of the Captain Marvel movie trailer, the titular Capitano gets her mission to eliminate Skrulls confused with her personal hatred of senior citizens, Talos reveals what a true megastar he is and Nick Fury refuses to throw the first cat-punch. Let’s war party!
…Cons can sometimes be frustrating (your milage will vary from con to con), but I’ve been finding these sorts of events excellent for networking within the SF/F field, but not so much for getting anything productive out of them when it comes to the panels and programming. My standing advice for authors — if you’re looking for inspiration / advice / information that will be useful to you as a writer — is to hit up industry conventions and conferences instead. My trip to the West Point Modern War Institute’s conference last fall generated more useful ideas and talking points than I’ve gotten at places like Boskone or ReaderCon. I did get one solid idea for a story out of one panel, and I’m going to try and write that up this week…
(8) EXTENDED DOOM. Here’s
a long-version trailer for DC’s Doom
Patrol, which DCUniverse began airing on February 15.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled
by Cat Eldridge.]
Born February 17, 1912 — Andre Norton. She penned well over a dozen series, but her major series was Witch World which began rather appropriately with Witch World in 1963. The first six novels in that series were Ace Books paperback originals published in the Sixties. (Died 2005.)
Born February 17, 1930 — Ruth Rendell. whose full name of Ruth Barbara Rendell, Baroness Rendell of Babergh, CBE (née Grasemann) is quite wonderful. I know her only as an English author of very superb thrillers and somewhat disturbing murder mysteries but ISFDB lists her as doing horror as well to my surprise in the form as three novels, to wit The Killing Doll, The Tree of Hands and The Bridesmaid, plus a not inconsiderable amount of short fiction that is fantasy no doubt. She was also the editor of A Warning to the Curious: The Ghost Stories of M.R. James. (Died 2015.)
Born February 17, 1939 — Kathy Keeton. Founder and publisher of Omni. It was founded by her and her partner and future husband Bob Guccione, the publisher of Penthouse. It would publish a number of stories that have become genre classics, such as Card’s “Unaccompanied Sonata”, Gibson’s “Burning Chrome” “and “Johnny Mnemonic” and George R. R. Martin’s “Sandkings” to name a few of the stories that appeared there. (Died 1997.)
Born February 17, 1947 — Bruce Gillespie, 72. He’s one of the major Australian SF fans and is best known for his long-running fanzine SF Commentary. Over the years, he’s published The Metaphysical Review, Steam Engine Time and is currently putting out Treasure. He was fan guest of honour at Aussiecon 3, the 57th Worldcon held in Melbourne in 1999.
Born February 17, 1954 — Don Coscarelli, 65. A film director, producer, and screenwriter best known for horror films. His credits include the Phantasm series, The Beastmaster, and Bubba Ho-Tep, the latter based a novella by Joe R. Lansdale whom I’ve met and who is a really nice person.
Born February 17 1974, — Jerry O’Connell, 45. Quinn Mallory on Sliders, a series whose behind the broadcast politics is too tangled to detail here. His first SF role was on Mission to Mars as Phil Ohlmyer with the SF dark comedy Space Space Station 76 with him as Steve being his next role. He’s done a lot of of DCU voice work, Captain Marvel in Superman/Shazam!: The Return of Black Adam, Clark Kent / Superman in Justice League vs. Teen Titans and Justice League: Throne of Atlantis, Justice League Dark, The Death of Superman and Reign of the Supermen where he also plays Cyborg Superman. The latter film is kickass excellent.
Born February 17, 1979 – Dominic Purcell, 40. Best known as Mick Rory / Heat Wave in The Flash and Legends of Tomorrow, as well as Dracula from Blade: Trinity. He was lead as Tim Manfrey in Primeval where I’m assuming the giant croc ate him. Was that a spoiler? Oh well. Blood Creek, previously known as Creek and Town Creek — marketing woes? — has him as Victor Alan Marshall mixing with the occult and Nazis. Lastly I’ve got him on Beastmaster as Kelb in a recurring role.
(10) I’M SORRY, I’LL READ
THAT AGAIN. “Maine
farm’s bid to save ‘Game of Thrones’ goats imperiled by crackdown on
semen” was a headline in the Bangor Daily News this week. The story involves efforts to sustain an
endangered breed of goats. One of them was eaten by a dragon on Game of Thrones, but that was a CGI
dragon and not really why they’re endangered….
Much of the semen comes from goats in Johanna Thorvaldsdottir’s flock on her farm, Haafell, in Borgarnes, Iceland. Thorvaldsdottir owns the world’s largest flock of Icelandic goats, with 208 in total. Her goats were the lucky flock featured in the 2014 “Game of Thrones” episode.
Today, we bring Gaiman fans even more glad tidings: “Snow, Glass, Apples”, Gaiman’s chilling retelling of the Snow White fairy tale, will join Dark Horse’s growing stable of Gaiman adaptations courtesy of The Sandman contributor Colleen Doran, who previously adapted and illustrated Gaiman’s Troll Bridge.
In typically topsy-turvy Gaiman fashion, Snow, Glass, Apples portrays a not-so-evil queen desperately trying to stop her wicked step-daughter’s “happily” ever after that was never supposed to be. Stopping ever after, however, is no small task…
(12) PLUS CA CHANGE. Despite tons of changes going on, Forbes contributor
Mark Hughes thinks the DC Extended Universe is going great (“Why The Future Of DCEU Movies Looks
Brighter Than Ever”). The article is long enough to strain the attention
span of even those who haven’t been Twitterized, but maintains an almost
uniformly positive view throughout. Some of the additions and changes below to
the DC movie universe are recent and some date back a few months, but the stuff
addressed in Hughes’ article includes:
An Aquaman spinoff, The Trench, has been announced
The Aquaman sequel has signed a screenwriter
Wonder Woman 1984 was delayed from the original mooted date, leaving only Shazam! and Joker on the 2019 slate for the DCEU
The Flash is still in preproduction with no start date announced
James Gunn—after being booted from working on the Marvel Cinematic Universe—has been hired in the DCEU
The next Suicide Squad movie will be a “soft reboot” rather than a sequel and will drop Harley Quinn
There seems to be no future for the Jared Leto version of Joker (from Suicide Squad) so don’t expect Leto to share the screen with Margot Robbie (at least in the DCEU)
Superman probably will not take to the screen for the next few years; a Supergirl movie is up next in that corner of the DCEU—circa 2021
After losing one writer-director-actor (Ben Affleck), The Batman movie has a writer-director (Matt Reeves) on board, but the script is still being polished
Rumors are ongoing about New Gods and Green Lantern Corps projects, but nothing is firm on either (especially the latter)
Tons of other potential projects are mentioned, but they’re even more speculative
(13) MUSIC OF THE SPHERES. [Item by Mike Kennedy.]NPR: “Ph.D. Student Breaks Down Electron Physics Into A
Swinging Musical” (The title is slightly misleading in that it’s about
formation of Cooper pairs, superconductivity, and even delves a little into
quantum computing).
It took [PhD candidate] Senarath Yapa six weeks to choreograph and write the songs for “Superconductivity: The Musical!” — a three-act swing dance depicting the social lives of electrons. The video is based on his master’s thesis, which he completed while pursuing his degree at the University of Victoria in Canada.
[…] “Superconductivity relies on lone electrons pairing up when cooled below a certain temperature,” Senarath Yapa toldScience. “Once I began to think of electrons as unsociable people who suddenly become joyful once paired up, imagining them as dancers was a no-brainer!”
(14) BOOK FUNNIES. This kind of listicle can be tedious; or it can illuminate
basic truths. Well, OK, not basic, but a lot of truths (“21 A+ Jokes About Books That Will
Make You Snort-Laugh”). Many in Buzzfeed’s
collection of tweets about books relate to genre works; many others are simply
relatable.
The middle initials "R.R.", a ranked list: 1. J.R.R. Tolkien 2. George R.R. Martin 3. The Children R.R. Future
An occultation of Sirius (by an asteroid named Jürgenstock) will be observable in parts of South America, Central America, and the Caribbean Monday 18 February and some astronomers are asking for your help. (Note the this projected path of the occultation is a major shift from that reported at the time the ScienceAlert article was written. That earlier prediction crossed a large swath of North America.)
Full instructions for how to help can be found in a
post in this post by Bill Merline and David Dunham.
The spaceship is designed to be refueled in low-Earth orbit in order to propel 100 passengers and more than 100 tons of cargo at a time to Mars.
But the success or failure of the launch system – and by extension Musk’s plan to back up the human race – may boil down to the viability of two major and recent design changes, which Musk has described as “radical” and “delightfully counterintuitive.”
One change involves building the spaceship from stainless-steel alloysinstead of carbon-fibre composites.
But the most surprising shift, according to aerospace-industry experts, is the way Starship will try to keep itself from burning up in the atmospheres of Mars and Earth.
Instead of relying on of thousands of heavy ceramic tiles to shield Starship from heat, as NASA did with its space shuttle, Musk says the spaceship will “bleed” rocket fuel through tiny pores to cool itself down.
In theory, putting liquid between Starship’s steel skin and the scorching-hot plasma generated while it plows through atmospheric gases would prevent the ship’s destruction
(17) HELP ME OBI-WAN
SHOE-NOBI. Time to upgrade your kicks? Maybe this
is what you’re looking for (DorkSideOfTheForce:
“Inkkas Star Wars New Rebel Footwear
Collection is now available”). They’re available in a wide range of unisex
sizes, but apparently not in various widths. Most styles are slip ons, but
there are also lace ups including some high tops.
These are the shoes you are looking for. The Inkkas new Star Wars Rebel Collection has arrived with characters such as Princess Leia, R2-D2, and Chewbacca.
Available for both men and women the new Star Wars Rebel Collection by Inkkas is here! Take your pick from boots, to high tops, and slip-on shoes representing both the Rebellion and The Empire….
Who run the world? Girls. Who run the universe? Also, girls. Obviously. The Future is FEMALE, y’all, and these tough and brilliant characters are all the reminder that we need to stand up and fight for what matters.
*bleep bloop bleep bloop* We couldn’t have said it better ourselves, R2-D2! That heroic droid always knows exactly what to say. In case you need some translation help: this shoe features a clean and striking representation of one of our favorite characters on a sleek, slim slip on shoe.
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Sophie Jones, Andrew Porter, Martin Morse Wooster, Carl Slaughter, John King Tarpinian, JJ Chip Hitchcock, Mlex, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Peer.]
Nicolas Delort is an award-winning illustrator currently living in the grey suburbs of Paris. Gathering inspiration in the daily and mundane as well as books and any kind of narrative medium, Nicolas endeavors to tell stories, big and small, by working on strong, evocative and intricate black and white compositions. His work has received the Gold Medal from The Society of Illustrators, and has been recognized by American Illustration, 3×3, Juxtapoz, Supersonic Electronic and This Is Colossal. Some of his clients include Blizzard Entertainment, Games Workshop/The Black Library, Quirk Books, Tor.com and Solaris Books.
The Gaughan Award honors
the memory of Jack Gaughan, a long-time friend of fandom and one of the finest
SF artists of the 20th century. Because Jack felt it was important to encourage
and recognize new blood in the field, The New England Science Fiction Association,
Inc., presents the Gaughan Award annually to an emerging artist (an artist who
has become a professional within the past five years) chosen by a panel of
judges. The judges for this year’s award were Stephen
Hickman, Marianne Plumridge, and Patrick Wilshire.
By James Bacon. I’m a bit rough around the edges. Coffee is trying to sharpen my state of mind and indeed it tastes good but I’m tired, that good tired where I cannot stop, the convention tired where you want to keep going, I’ve no headache or hangover but the body knows it’s been a punishing time, it’s been so much fun. A bit more sleep, that’s it. No. Wait. Not that much!
I’ve had a mighty time. I am farewelled in the lobby and I leap into the taxi with the delicacy of a well used wet bath towel hitting the bathroom floor. I get to O’Hare and am working on this piece as I go. It’s been great fun.
What is fun though? Why am I asking that question, how long before this piece goes a bit gonzo?
Fun is so subjective.
I’m not sure if the debate about what makes a con fun would match the passion that I saw demonstrated during the Last Jedi panel where it was clear that some wanted to debate really hard whether Rey, growing up on the streets, would have more or less skills than a whiney farm boy or whether the film was good or not and whether it’s now ruined the next instalment. There was earnestness there, an energy that manifested in thoughtful challenging opinions, held strongly and by people well able to put their argument forward clearly with fine examples. Did I ruin the fun by finding the intransigence of some entrenched views wonderful, pulling myself from the mired muddy débâcle to observe the melee, noting that watching on as opinions are sharpened and objections raised the blood obviously flowing more strongly as people care about the concepts and interpretations that they have taken from a film animate them into a position where it’s clear how there is no changing this viewpoint, and I’m not arguing, rather watching on impressed that a film can create such discussion and loving it. It was a fabulous panel, and Timothy Zahn was very good on it.
I saw people enjoying themselves, could mean anything.
I have to elucidate a little more coherently. Why did it feel good. It’s true I’m welcome here but from the reg desk through to the way people are applauded for their first Capricon, I hope they feel welcomed, but it sure looks like it.
Rey’s staff
By Friday over 1,000 people were members, every child that walked into kids programme to make Rey’s staff was greeted warmly even when they were drifting between ambivalence, shy driven distaste, but all came along onward and all got the crafting going and soon the dejected few were finding that a multi coloured staff of their own design with their favourite colours was really desirable. All are then shouting CAP-RI-CON with a room full of kids where it’s all very organised but only a heart beat from chaos, and a good time while taking a five foot foam and pipe staff home was not all that bad. ‘Who doesn’t know Rey, any one need to be patronised about how awesome she is?’ I ask. They are smart and brutally honest, patient but happy to voice and act on immediate feelings and if you aren’t doing a good job, they will let you know. Fannish feedback that is not so much sharp, incisive and cutting here, but a brutal hack and slash instantaneous style that means one implores ‘no blasters no blasters’ and dive behind the table for cover.
My flight has gone astray. A bit. My plans today are changing shape. An hour for the dealers room to see the awesome Art Exhibit at Boskone, is now going to be lost. Indeed as I write this I’ve no idea if I’ll make the Craig Miller GOH item that has excited me so much. I was sure I’d miss it, then when the schedule came out it worked perfectly and now it’s in the air. Literally. I may turn up late. Sneaking in down the back and pretending I was there all the time could be a plan but it’s imbued with a rake of potential pitfalls, creaky doors, noises clumsiness, worse the entrance of shame with an annoyed welcome from the top, it’s all a bit exciting.
Damnit can this fecking plane not belt down the runway any faster. Maybe if I play some Ramstein it will quicken the pace. Faster. Come on. It’s not working. I flick the fingers over the glass and choose ‘Into the trap’ by John Williams, oh yeah, this is more like it, I’m pushed back into the seat, and soon we rotate, and hit some awesome turbulence just as I hear and imagine the falcon swooping through the fleet, the orchestra rising in tempo and quickening like my heart as we rise and jet skyward towards Boston.
Last night at Capricon; ‘Are you British?’ washes past me, was that a question, was it humour, was it rhetorical, can I spell rhetorical, I’m unsure, but the question fails to even raise a pithy, abusive and sarcastic ‘bloody septic’, and as I see there’s a response required I smile calmly, ‘no Irish’ which oddly leaves everyone else more worried than anything, is my smile menacing, I try to smile more, it doesn’t help, is it now a bit demented looking, it’s easy to go astray with accents, and smiles, and aren’t we all fans, but this is awkward and doesn’t my Train Driving Licence have the Union Flag on it,’ I’m an immigrant living in London.’ I helpfully say. Did that help? I dunno. Everyone’s friendly, fall back to a trope or as I heard it described this weekend, a story device that frequently works well. ‘Where’s the beer?’ I smile as I ask, everyone smiles and points
Who’d nationalise individuals, isn’t that dreadful, aren’t we are all fans in this happy borderless bliss. British Fan Dermot Dobson careens around the corridor corner and I greet him, he is exceptionally well-known in these north westwards Chicago parts, and he is soon brandishing his new Irish ID at me, we embrace long and warmly and cheer and whoop and he smiles and gesticulates and I, in an instantaneous semi-official self-appointed capacity welcome him to his newly found fannish family and he describes the joy of his receiving his new passport and I’m pleased like he’s joined Dublin 2019 but a version that is infinite. Irish fan Dermot Dobson. Many are envious. I ponder if we can import all the fans and make them Irish and whether Octocon chair Janet O’Sullivan would string me up, strike me down or send me some extra membership forms.
Also, proof that even our Chair helps out at these tables. Here is James with our table wrangler Pam at #capricon yesterday! pic.twitter.com/yE6g60AIGK
There’s a Star Wars vibe at Capricon but it’s not overpowering. Sarah Wilkinson and Timothy Zahn are show stealers, both are so erudite and enthusiastic but also love the world they have a place in and it shows. I meet four Princess Leia’s, although I admit I wish there was a Jyn here, there’s a couple of Sith and a few Jedi, I’d like more rebels really. I cosplay up myself, doing a personal interpretation of The Bombshells Batgirl in a Baseball uniform but adjusting it as you do and switching up to Batwoman. I meet Michigan fans in Star Wars cosplay, and an excellent local family, with superhero and star wars cosplay on.
Princess Leia
There’s a solid programme at Capricon and it creates that conflict of annoyance that there is too many good things to go to. There’s over 200 programme items and that doesn’t include screenings, games and all the parties. Items of interest vary from discussing Mary Shelly at 200 to the diversity backlash. I consider listing my top 10 programme items, but rather, I shall cover my favourites in more detail later. It has been a great programme.
I’ve missed a cracking party at Boskone. Erin Underwood arranged a Dublin 2019 late night meet up. I’m envious although at the same time I’m dancing at a party, my feet flying across the floor like a rhino on ice. I am not the only one dancing, and across in Boston, I hear reports that Geri Sullivan is leading the dance there. Erin reports that great chat is happening as fans sit around and are joined by Dublin GOH Ginjer Buchanan and the dancing is fun and there are lots of green lights. Meanwhile, the Dublin 2019 team in Dublin may be sleeping after an excellent day at Leprecon. I get sent a lovely set of photos, one in Scrabble’s letters, really makes me smile.
Message from Leprecon
Back at Capricon, Tammy has set up a ‘Pop-Up’ cocktail spread at Lance’s party, and Deanna is doling out fabulous ciders. Cows are having a fun session, and I cannot believe that Dr Zhivago nails it. (Fannish Family Feud) Barfleet are here in strength with two party suites, providing a disco, Friday was awesome 90’s music, now there is a great mix, decent rock and well-known anthems. They really know how to party. The Barfleet team show everyone a great time, and indeed very warm welcome. The UBS Abandon, the Chicago Chapter of Barfleet is celebrating its tenth anniversary, and they really throw one hell of a party, while it is lovely how they recognise their volunteers so well, and indeed, recognise fan achievment. I am impressed.
Ten Years
The plane, which has formed my writing desk, is descending. ETA is 12.50 it’s early. John Williams has worked, the Cap-bosk run in six parcecs! It’s 12.20. OK, so we did it in less time, and the distance is 4.694e-11 in parsecs, but don’t ruin the flow of a good story with hard science.
We land. We taxi…Why has the plane stopped? This is not good. This is not a jetty this is somewhere in Logan but not where I need to be. That’s it. Move to the jet bridge. Unload you feckers. Luggage. I have all the luggage, it’s 1240 now. Jackie Kamlot is waiting, the car is not revving, but soon it is. Crikey we are going.
12.48 I can see the Westin on the horizon, the car skews around and we gain traction. Engine still running as I get out. 12.54 I am walking into the Westin, badge on, say hello to the Dublin fan table team, and beg grace to go see an item, and then walk into the Harbour III room just as Craig finishes ensuring the presentation is set up right. Craig starts. Made it. Done it.
The USC School of Cinematic Arts has partnered with 20th Century Fox Film to host an exclusive exhibit and retrospective celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Planet of the Apes franchise titled 50 Years of Planet of the Apes.
A vast collection of props, costumes, photos, posters and artwork from across all iterations of the longstanding franchise will be on display in the Hugh Hefner Exhibition Hall at USC this spring. The exhibit will be available to visit as a work-in-progress from January 26th – February 8th and all final displays will be open from February 9th through May 13th, 2018. A series of panels and screenings will complement the exhibit, including all feature films from the Planet of the Apes universe.
The exhibit is in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of the 1968 release of the first Planet of the Apes film, the original installment of the still expanding franchise that now includes four sequels, a TV series, an animated series, comic books, merchandise, and 20th Century Fox Film’s highly successful prequel film series Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and War for the Planet of the Apes.
There is a schedule of associated film screenings at the link.
What’s more, it landed the two flanking boosters in perfect synchronized formation. But the fate of the core booster was unclear; now it appears that the center booster, which was supposed to land on a drone ship, was lost.
Elon Musk said on a conference call with reporters that the launch “seems to have gone as well as one could have hoped with the exception of center core. The center core obviously didn’t land on the drone ship” and he said that “we’re looking at the issue.” Musk says that the core ran out of propellant, which kept the core from being able to slow down as much as it needed for landing. Because of that, the core apparently hit the water at 300MPH, and it was about 100 meters from the ship. “It was enough to take out two thrusters and shower the deck with shrapnel,” Musk said. That should be worth seeing on video: “We have the video,” Musk confirmed, “it sounds like some pretty fun footage… if the cameras didn’t get blown up as well.”
(5) SFWA AUCTION. Steven H Silver tells about a SFWA fundraiser:
Did you miss our charity auctions in December? Good news! SFWA will be auctioning off five new items every month on Ebay. Available items in February include an autographed uncorrected proof copy of Fevre Dream by George RR Martin, uncorrected proof 13th Annual Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (signed by Ellen Datlow), and a rare signed copy of This Island Earth by Raymond F. Jones.
The bidding began on February 5th and will run through February 12: Ebay.com/usr/sfwa65
All auction proceeds will be earmarked for the SFWA Givers Fund which is used to disperse grants to deserving applicants, along with bolstering the existing Emergency Medical (EMF) and Legal Funds.
For more information about our funds and what they support, please visit sfwa.org/donate. If you have items you would like to donate for future SFWA Charity Auction fundraisers, please contact Steven H Silver at [email protected] for more information.
(6) BOSKONE PROGRAM. Look forward to the panels and participants discussing “Black Science Fiction at Boskone”, February 16-18 in Boston.
This year Boskone features a program with a strong selection of panels and discussions dedicated to black science fiction authors, publishers, and fans. Our program includes everything from black publishers and Afrofuturism to works by authors such as Octavia Butler, science panels that include the future of medicine, writing discussions that tackle young adult fiction, and much, much more!
Here’s a quick list of some of our program items with an emphasis on black science fiction and the authors who will be joining us from across the country. For the full set of program items, view the Boskone 55 program….
(7) VOLCANO IN TOWSON. Scott Edelman’s Eating the Fantastic podcast visits with Norman Prentiss to sample the volcano shrimp at a Chinese restaurant in Towson, MD.
And who is this episode’s guest? Why, it’s Norman Prentiss, who won the 2010 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Long Fiction for Invisible Fences, and the 2009 Stoker for Superior Achievement in Short Fiction for “In the Porches of My Ears.” His powerful, personal fiction has been reprinted in both Best Horror of the Year and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, and his poetry has appeared in Writer Online, Southern Poetry Review, and A Sea of Alone: Poems for Alfred Hitchcock.
Norman Prentiss
We discussed the day he wowed the other kids on his school playground by reading them Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the movies a Catholic Church newsletter’s warnings made him want to see even more, the supernatural superhero comic that led to a lawsuit against Harlan Ellison, the upside and (surprising) downside of having won a $35,000 college writing prize, how the freebies he got at a Horrorfind convention goosed him to start writing fiction again, why he wrote the last part of his novel Odd Adventures with Your Other Father first, how he’s been able to collaborate with other authors without killing them, what can be taught about writing and what can only be learned, why he ended up writing horror instead of science fiction, and much, much more.
Last year, I collated and linked to the webzine stories picked by Clarke, Dozois, Horton, and Strahan for their annuals. This year, I’ve collated all the selections. (I’ve also noted whether I’ve read them and, if so, whether they got an honorable mention, a recommendation, or were recommendations which made my Web’s Best Science Fiction or Web’s Best Fantasy.)
… When a follow-up attack of reremice occur, the fairies must question what they are fighting for and what makes a race worthwhile. While Frankos could have told the story with tremendous amounts of gravitas, the venue for its publication was looking for more lighthearted fare and she managed to deliver, sprinkling her tale with wonderful puns….
Over the past decade Marvel has brought us 18 films, starting with Iron Man in 2008 and including Thor, The Avengers and Captain America.
The class photo of 76 actors appeared on Twitter on Thursday.
It includes major players in the films like Robert Downey Jr, Vin Diesel, Scarlett Johansson and Letitia Wright.
The picture was shortly followed by a behind the scenes video.
It begins with Thor’s Chris Hemsworth saying: “It was sort of like being at the Academy Awards or something, every person had been in one or all of my favourite films.”
Marvel Studios kicks off its yearlong 10th anniversary celebration with a behind the scenes look at the class photo featuring 79 actors and filmmakers from across the Marvel Cinematic Universe. pic.twitter.com/YyYTxMnUrc
Yes, I knew about Forry Ackerman twenty years ago.
I was part of the committee that gave him the Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award. I need you to know that I was outvoted. We were giving two awards that year and the Ackerman partisans were given what they wanted in order for those who were against the citation to be given what they wanted. Even so, the hell that went on behind the scenes was intense and lasted for months after the official announcement was made. But yes, one of the things that came up during the hellish brouhaha that followed was that he had, quote, “a house full of child pornography.”
The months of invective that went on, back and forth, behind the scenes, amounted to the worst period of my writing career….
“The underwater forest is like the Garden of Eden underwater,” says Christine DeLong, a paleo-climatologist at Louisiana State University. She says tests date the forest to be between 50,000 and 70,000 years old.
“It’s a huge deal,” DeLong says. “Because here we have this like perfectly preserved time capsule of an ice age forest.”
Flares can occur on their own, or be accompanied by powerful eruptions of plasma (charged gas) from the Sun.
If charged particles from these eruptions reach Earth, they can create havoc with infrastructure, such as satellite systems and power grids.
Now, researchers in France say the interaction of distinct magnetic structures controls these outbursts from our star.
Generally speaking, solar eruptions are caused by a sudden, violent rearrangement of the Sun’s magnetic field.
At a deeper level, the process is controlled by two types of structures that form in the magnetic field of the Sun: ropes and cages.
The rope is confined within the magnetic cage. If the cage is strong, it can contain the rope’s contortions, but when the cage is weak, an eruption can take place.
They had tried flashing signs, neon signs and staggered signs.
But when lorry drivers continued to keep on driving their over-sized trucks though low tunnels, Australian authorities took the extreme measure of warning drivers with water signs.
Drivers are greeted with a curtain of water falling from the entrance of tunnels with a huge ‘stop’ sign projected on to them….
Laservision said that the Sydney Harbour Tunnel has experienced more than 10,000 incidents of vehicles hitting the structure since it opened.
The damage caused by too large vehicles crashing into the overhead of the tunnel affected up to 12,000 motorists at peak time, the company said.
One might assume that any animal with two forward-facing eyes would automatically have stereopsis, but that’s not true. It’s a sophisticated skill that requires a lot of processing power and a complex network of neurons—one that not every animal can afford to build. Indeed, after stereopsis was first confirmed in humans in 1838, it took 132 years for scientists to show that other species had the same ability. Macaque monkeys were the first confirmed member of the stereopsis club, but they were soon joined by cats, horses, sheep, owls, falcons, toads—and praying mantises. In the 1980s, Samuel Rossel placed prisms in front of these insects to show that they do triangulate the images from both eyes to catch their prey.
When Jenny Read, from Newcastle University, first read about this, she was amazed. How could an insect pull off such a complicated trick with a brain that contains just 1 million neurons? (For comparison, our brains have 100,000 times that number.) To find out, she and Nityananda set up their mantis 3-D cinemas….
They presented the insects with screens full of black and white dots, with a slightly different pattern projected to each eye. Against these backgrounds, a small circle of dots—a target—would slowly spiral inward from the outside. “It’s meant to be like a little beetle moving against a background,” says Read.
By tweaking the dots, the team could change how far away this target would appear to the watching mantises. And they found that the insects would start to attack the target when it seemed to get within striking distance. Clearly, the insects have stereopsis.
But their stereopsis is not our stereopsis. We use brightness as a cue to align and compare the images that are perceived by our two eyes. Scientists can confirm this by presenting one eye with an image that’s a negative of the other—that has black dots where the other has white ones, and vice versa. “For us, that’s incredibly disruptive. We really can’t match up the images anymore, so our stereopsis falls apart,” says Read. “But the mantises are completely unfazed.” Brightness clearly doesn’t matter to them.
Demand for body parts from America — torsos, knees and heads — is high in countries where religious traditions or laws prohibit the dissection of the dead. Unlike many developed nations, the United States largely does not regulate the sale of donated body parts, allowing entrepreneurs such as MedCure to expand exports rapidly during the last decade.
No other nation has an industry that can provide as convenient and reliable a supply of body parts.
(Larry Niven once said he preferred Alexei Panshin’s “thumbrunners,” but having been beaten to the term, he’d come up with his alternative, “organleggers.”)
How fast do you think you’re traveling when you’re in the rockets on Space Mountain?
Think of the speed of a car on the freeway. Is Space Mountain faster than that? Slower? Is it 100 miles per hour, like Bill Watkins has heard people telling each other?
Watkins contemplated the speed question for years in the early- to mid-1970s. He built his first Space Mountain at Walt Disney World in Florida. But it was bigger – a 300-ft. circle on two tracks. When the Disneyland Space Mountain opened in 1977, Watkins had completed what he always saw as a giant math problem.
Space Mountain is a gravity coaster. Unlike the Matterhorn, which relies on thrusters to help move its vehicles forward, Space Mountain simply starts up and goes down. Technically, it’s 75 seconds of free fall.
At its maximum speed (which can vary slightly depending on the combined weight of the riders) the car you’re riding in Space Mountain is traveling about 40 feet per second.
That’s 27.27 miles per hour.
That seems really slow.
But Watkins somehow made it just right. More than 250 million people have ridden Space Mountain since it opened. And while it’s unclear if it’s the best – Disneyland’s public relations department would only say that Space Mountain is, according to guests, “a top 10 attraction” – how many are better?
It is certainly arguable that Bill Watkins created the most popular roller coaster of all time.
“I seldom meet anyone who hasn’t ridden it,” he said.
To help people make nominations for the 2018 Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist, we have set up a “lightbox” system to let fans quickly flip through the works of over 113 artists listed below and to set aside the ones they particularly liked.
Greg Hullender says —
This is aimed at helping people pick artists to nominate, based on covers for magazines and for books containing original novels or anthologies. We don’t have pictures for reprints.
Where possible, we have links to the artists’ portfolios, so readers can get a broader idea of any particular artist’s work. To simplify that a bit, for eligible artists who had just a few works published in 2017 we’ve padded their list of pictures with their art from earlier years. (They’re marked by date for the benefit of those who only want to see works published in 2017.)
(22) ROBOTECH RETURNS. Titan Comics will publish a new graphic novel based on the classic Robotech saga.
A mysterious ship crashes on a remote island… 10 years later, the ship’s ‘Robotechnology’ has helped humanity advance its own tech. But danger looms from the skies and an epic adventure is set to begin…
The world-famous, fan-favorite animated epic returns to comics with a classic transforming-jetfighters-versus-giant-aliens adventure! Written by Brian Wood (Star Wars, Briggs Land, X-Men), with art from Marco Turini (Assassin’s Creed) and colorist Marco Lesko! Return to the fan-favorite Macross Saga that began the classic Robotech franchise, as hotshot Veritech pilot Roy Fokker and skilled rookie Rick Hunter are pulled into an intergalactic war when the Earth is invaded by the insidious Zentraedi! Whether you’ve seen the classic cartoon to the point you can quote every episode, or whether you’ve never experienced Robotech before, this graphic novel collection is for you!
[Thanks to JJ, Martin Morse Wooster, Cat Eldridge, John King Tarpinian, Scott Edelman, Mike Kennedy, Chip Hitchcock, Cath, Andrew Porter, Will R., David K.M. Klaus, and Carl Slaughter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day evilrooster.]
Crumbs may seem harmless here on Earth, but they can be a hazard in microgravity — they could get in an astronaut’s eye, or get inhaled, causing someone to choke. Crumbs could even float into an electrical panel, burn up or cause a fire.
That’s part of the reason why it was a very big deal in 1965 when John Young pulled a corned beef sandwich out of his pocket as he was orbiting the earth with Gus Grissom.
“Where did that come from?” Grissom asked Young.
“I brought it with me,” Young said.
Young took a bite and then microgravity took over, spreading bread crumbs throughout the spacecraft.
Today, instead of bread, astronauts usually eat tortillas: They don’t crumble in the same way and they’re easy to hold with one hand as the astronaut floats about.
But for many Germans, tortillas just don’t cut it. So when a man named Sebastian Marcu heard that German Astronaut Alexander Gerst is returning to the International Space Station in 2018, that got him thinking: “Shouldn’t we do something to enable him to have fresh bread in space?”
The module is called BEAM, the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, and it has been attached to the International Space Station since April last year.
Expandable modules allow NASA to pack a large volume into a smaller space for launch. They’re not made of metal, but instead use tough materials like the Kevlar found in bulletproof vests.
The station crew used air pressure to unfold and expand the BEAM, but it’s wrong to think about BEAM as expanding like a balloon that could go “pop” if something punctured it.
NASA’s Jason Crusan says there is a better analogy: “It’s much like the tire of your car.”
Chip Hitchcock calls it, “Another example of science bypassing SF — it looks like we may never have the space-based construction workers featured by writers from Heinlein to Steele.”
Researchers living near the active Hawaiian volcano Mauna Loa are six months into an eight-month mission which simulates what it’s like to live on Mars. We asked how “living on Mars” – in close quarters – has been so far.
(4) OPEN FOR SUBMISSIONS. Fantastic Trains: An anthology of Phantasmagorical Engines and Rail Riders is taking submissions until Midnight September 30, 2017.
Edited by Jerome Stueart and Neil Enock, the anthology focuses on speculative fiction stories of trains—fantasy, steampunk, science fiction, horror, slipstream, urban fantasy, apocalyptic, set in any time, any place—and will be released by EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing in the spring of 2018.
Stories must be previously unpublished, in English, between 1,000-5,000 words.
Authors are invited to structurally play with some ‘locomotifs’ that will add interesting connections to these disparate and individual stories.
Dick Van Dyke has apologised for the “most atrocious cockney accent in the history of cinema” more than half a century after his role in the 1964 Disney classic Mary Poppins.
The US actor played chimney-sweep Bert in the film, and has been the subject of much teasing from fans about his famously off-radar accent.
Van Dyke, 91, was chosen this week by Bafta to receive the Britannia award for excellence in television. Speaking afterwards, he said: “I appreciate this opportunity to apologise to the members of Bafta for inflicting on them the most atrocious cockney accent in the history of cinema.”
… Van Dyke recently announced that he would be doing “a little song and dance number” in the Mary Poppins sequel. He will play the part of Mr Dawes Jr, chairman of Fidelity Fiduciary bank, alongside Emily Blunt as the nanny extraordinaire in Mary Poppins Returns.
Van Dyke rose to prominence in films including Bye Bye Birdie, Mary Poppins and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, as well as his 60s TV sitcom The Dick Van Dyke Show. His wide-spanning career has earned him five Emmys, a Tony, a Grammy, the SAG lifetime achievement award and induction into the Television Hall of Fame.
But he has previously spoken about his turn as Bert, saying he would never be allowed to forget it. “People in the UK love to rib me about my accent, I will never live it down,” he said. “They ask what part of England I was meant to be from and I say it was a little shire in the north where most of the people were from Ohio.”
A biopic based on the coming-of-age of writer J.R.R. Tolkien is to be made by the same Hollywood studio as the recent War for the Planet of the Apes. It could also be Finnish director Dome Karukoski’s international debut.
(9) TED TALK. Howard Hendrix passed along the link to the TED talk he presented in April at UC Riverside, “since it’s sfnal, concerns Phil Dick (among other matters), and was presented by a science fiction wirter (me).” It was just posted by TED last week. “Saving Private Mind: Madness, Privacy, Consciousness | Howard Hendrix”
Society is not a prerequisite for the existence of privacy. Privacy is a prerequisite for the existence of society. Howard Hendrix’s TEDxUCR talk explores the philosophical, legal, neurological and evolutionary contexts for understanding the relationship between privacy and individual human consciousness — particularly through the lens of “madness” in the lives and works of science fiction writer Philip K. Dick and Hendrix’s younger brother, Vincent John “Jay” Hendrix.
(10) THEY HAVE A WORD FOR IT. John Hawthorne helped create a resource on the topic of “amazing words that don’t exist in English.”
I recently reached out to over 150 language learning websites and facilities and asked them to give me some of their opinions on what are the most interesting foreign words that are not found in English. I took all my research and gave it to my colleague Adrian who made a list of 35 of the best words.
You can read all the takeaways from their research right here. These are three examples:
Antier/Anteayer (Spanish)
Can we all agree that saying, “The day before yesterday,” is a complete waste of words? So many words for such a simple concept. Those who speak Spanish have a much simpler version: “Antier”.
When did you last talk to your mom? Antier.
Desvelado (Spanish)
Insomnia. The tossing. The turning. The inability to fall asleep. That feeling of being sleep deprived is called “desvelado” in Spanish. It’s that feeling of exhaustion that comes after a terrible night’s sleep.
You need five cups of coffee. Why? Because desvelado.
Tuerto (Spanish)
What do you call a man with one eye who isn’t also a pirate? Tuerto. It seems like this word would have rather limited usage unless you work in a BB gun factory or something.
But you do have to admit, have a single word to describe someone with one eye is pretty fantastic.
(11) EARL GREY LISTENS. Elizabeth Fitzgerald, in “My Current Podcast Playlist”, provides an excellent survey of more than 15 sff, gaming and writing podcasts.
Not Now, I’m Reading: A new podcast just started by Chelsea of the Reading Outlaw and Kay Taylor Rae which focuses on reviewing genre books and media. As a keen reader of romance, I appreciate that their focus is a little wider than just SFF and the way they’re unapologetic about their passions.
Overinvested: Gavia Baker-Whitelaw and Morgan Leigh Davies review movies, TV shows and comics. Most are genre, though not all. These ladies are savvy critics who really know their stuff and are also not afraid to love material they know is rubbish.
The Skiffy and Fanty Show: This Hugo-nominated podcast is headed up by Shaun Duke and Jen Zink with a large cast of co-hosts. They do multiple segments of varying kinds, including signal boosts, interviews and Torture Cinema (wherein a panel reviews a movie deemed to be awful by pop culture).
(12) SWARMING SHARKES. Are these the final transmission of the Shadow Clarke Jury? The Clarke Award winner, Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad, was announced today.
Awards, it seems to me, work in unusual ways in the science fiction community. They link to an existing community of fans, writers and publishers that has its own particular shape and weight. Fandom is changing. Having spent much of the twentieth century on the edges of literary culture, what was once marginal is now thoroughly mainstream. The success of major titles such as Harry Potter, Game of Thrones and The Hunger Games, promoted by cinematic adaptations, has broadened the pool of readers—but simultaneously brought pressures of its own, the pressure to sell and sell big, to build blockbuster brands.
Awards fit awkwardly into this changing space. Are they primarily markers of prestige? Are they handed out by fan communities to honor the successes of their own? Do they chart new trends? Whereas winning the Man Booker Prize can have huge ramifications for an author’s career—and their sales—this isn’t really the case for science fiction awards. Many writers and editors will tell you that even the Hugos in most cases don’t result in a substantial change in sales numbers. One case, oddly enough, where it did was Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem which won the 2015 award for best novel, a year that was mired down by the Sad Puppies/Rabid Puppies slate-creation. In fact, it may well have been the high volume of conversation in online circles surrounding those Hugo awards that inadvertently contributed to the sales boost. Certainly, journalists could sense a story and so the firestorm may well have provoked media attention that simply wouldn’t either ways have focused on the Hugos.
And if awards themselves occupy an ill-defined space then the relationship between awards and criticism is even murkier. Sometimes critics participate in the process of choosing award winners but just as frequently that role falls to the fans themselves, through various membership and voting systems. Fans of a genre that has always had a popular element—almost by definition—and has for much of its existence been barred from prestige culture may well have a justified suspicion of criticism. And yet just as science fiction is going mainstream, it is also entering areas where it was previously barred: there are several degrees that include science fiction literature within the UK and the field itself has developed through prizes like the Clarke Awards and through institutions like the British Science Fiction Association.
As regards the Sharke winner, the race was between Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, Lavie Tidhar’s Central Station, and Martin MacInnes’s Infinite Ground. But whilst Infinite Ground enjoyed passionate support from two or three jurors in particular, and Central Station ran a close second for pretty much the entire jury, in the end it was The Underground Railroad that came through as the clear winner. ‘The Whitehead is a phenomenal book,’ Vajra said, summing up our discussions. ‘In my reading, the very core of science fiction is not novelty, but freedom: that is, emancipation. By this measure The Underground Railroad is as core as core science fiction can possibly be, and the extent to which this is contested is an indictment of the state of discourse in science fiction itself. I would like to see it win all the awards and be firmly planted in this soil so that a better science fiction could grow from here. It’s not Whitehead that needs it so much as the rest of us.’
What they predicted would win —
We all felt that whilst Ninefox Gambit is very much a traditional space opera, it also presents some interesting variations on that tried-and-tested formula by being more ambitious in terms of its concept, more inventive in its use of language, more diverse in relation to its character demographic. For all these reasons – together with the fact that we all, to varying degrees, found things in this novel to admire – we came eventually to the conclusion that Ninefox Gambit would be the title inside that envelope:
(13) THE BOOKER. The 2017 Man Book Prize longlist was announced yesterday. Mark-kitteh says, “I see several books of genre interest in the Booker. Underground Railroad, 4 3 2 1, and Exit West. (There may be more, I’m not familiar with them all).” You can add Lincoln in the Bardo, for sure.
Title Author (nationality) (imprint)
4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster (US) (Faber & Faber)
Days Without End by Sebastian Barry (Ireland) (Faber & Faber)
History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund (US) (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid (Pakistan-UK) (Hamish Hamilton)
Solar Bones by Mike McCormack (Ireland) (Canongate)
Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor (UK) (4th Estate)
Elmet by Fiona Mozley (UK) (JM Originals)
The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy (India) (Hamish Hamilton)
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (US) (Bloomsbury)
Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie (UK-Pakistan) (Bloomsbury)
Autumn by Ali Smith (UK) (Hamish Hamilton)
Swing Time by Zadie Smith (UK) (Hamish Hamilton)
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (US) (Fleet)
(14) TOOTHSOME. Once the Sharkes wrap up, people will have to depend on Syfy for their finnish entertainment: Sharknado 5: Global Swarming.
With much of America lying in ruins, the rest of the world braces for a global sharknado, Fin and his family must travel around the world to stop them.
(15) STARSHIP PRANKS. Fox showed this version of their trailer for The Orville at Comic-Con.
THE ORVILLE is a one-hour science fiction series set 400 years in the future that follows the adventures of the U.S.S. Orville, a mid-level exploratory vessel. Its crew, both human and alien, faces the wonders and dangers of outer space, while also dealing with the familiar, often humorous problems of regular people in a workplace…even though some of those people are from other planets, and the workplace is a faster-than-light spaceship. In the 25th century, Earth is part of the Planetary Union, a far-reaching, advanced and mostly peaceful civilization with a fleet of 3,000 ships.
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, Hampus Eckerman, Mark-kitteh, John King Tarpinian, Paul Weimer, Martin Morse Wooster, and Michael J. Walsh for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (Hopefully I’ve used this only once…).]
Kirbi Fagan was presented with The Jack Gaughan Award for Best Emerging Artistduring the NESFA Awards ceremony at Boskone on February 19.
The Gaughan Award “honors the memory of Jack Gaughan, a long-time friend of fandom and one of the finest SF artists of the 20th century.” The winner is selected by a three-person jury appointed by the President of the New England Science Fiction Association (NESFA).
The award is given annually by vote of the Regular members of the New England Science Fiction Association to a person, who “has contributed significantly to science fiction, both through work in the field and by exemplifying the personal qualities which made the late ‘Doc’ Smith well-loved by those who knew him.”
Jo Walton has published thirteen novels, three poetry collections and an essay collection. She won the John W. Campbell Award in 2002, the World Fantasy Award for Tooth and Claw in 2004, the Hugo and Nebula awards for Among Others in 2012, the Tiptree Award for My Real Children and the Locus Non Fiction award for What Makes This Book So Great in 2014. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal. She reads a lot, enjoys travel, talking about books, and eating great food. She plans to live to be ninety-nine and write a book every year.
Much like ‘jumping the shark’ from ‘Happy Days’, the Indiana Jones movie series has a similar phrase to encompass the moment it all went a little bit too far.
And it’s ‘nuked the fridge’.
Many ardent fans of Harrison Ford’s swashbuckling archeologist very much drew the line at the moment in ‘Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’ where Indy jumps into a conveniently situated fridge to protect himself from a nuclear blast.
Walking away unscathed, it did seem a trifle unfeasible….
Vanessa Hudgens is on a roll after starring in FOX’s smash hit version of ‘Grease Live!’ She’s just landed the lead role in NBC’s upcoming DC Comics-inspired sitcom ‘Powerless’. Hudgens will play Emily Locke, an insurance claims adjuster, working for “the worst insurance company in the DC Universe” which covers victims caught in the crossfire of super hero/villain battles. This workplace comedy has been compared to ‘The Office’ but set within the DC Universe.
[Camestros] Noted. So what book do you have today?
[Timothy] Well, today I have with me Honor at Stake by Declan Finn. A tale of love and vampires in modern New York.
[Camestros] And why this book in particular?
[Timothy] Well I was reading twitter and there was this tweet with a graph that showed it was really doing well in the Sad Puppy 4 lists.
[Camestros] The graph from my blog?
[Timothy] Your blog? I don’t think so, this was some sort of SadPuppy4 twitter account.
[Camestros] They tweeted my graph. Do you not even read this blog?
[Timothy] Good grief, no. I mean your very name offends me.…
[Camestros] So the sexy love interest vampire – she is conflicted about this? A bit of a Romeo & Vamp-Juliet thing going on?
[Timothy] No, no. She is a good vampire and a good Catholic girl. She goes to mass and everything.
[Camestros] So crucifix don’t work on vampires then?
[Timothy] No, you see the book has this all worked out. Vampires can be good or bad and the more good you are the nicer you look and the less things like holy water and sunlight affect you. The more bad you are the more hideous you become and the more holy water hurts,
[Camestros] OK so the bad vampires are like regular vampires.
[Timothy] Yup – a bit like the ones in Buffy.
[Camestros] Let me guess – the author explains this by comparing them to the vampires in Buffy?
[Timothy] Exactly! Quality writing – explains things up front so you know what is going on.
(4) MEMORIAL CUISINE. Frequent File 770 contributor James H. Burns has found yet another way to time travel… See “Recipe For the Dead” at Brooklyn Discovery.
Perhaps this is unusual. I have no way of knowing. But when I’m missing a loved one who has passed, or wishing to commemorate someone who is no longer with us… Sometimes, I’ll cook a meal that they loved. Not that I necessarily ever cooked for the departed. But sharing a repast that they favored, having those aromas in the air as the food is cooking, seems a very real way of honoring a memory.
(5) OSHIRO STORY FOLLOWUP. Here are some items of interest related to the Mark Oshiro story.
3) I am and remain a big fan of Ms. Rosen. I’ve only read one of her novels, but I fell in love with her personality from the two times I’ve been to ConQuesT. She is lively, articulate on her strong opinions, and she is a strong woman. No, I do not always agree with her. In fact, I often greatly disagree with her and her methods of dealing with situations. It in no way changes my respect for her. She doesn’t need me to agree with her for her to be comfortable in her skin. We can disagree, and it in no way takes away from her person. That’s the biggest reason I like the woman. So, in my opinion, she can pull her pants down whenever she wants. Her white legged exposure at ConQuesT 45 was in no way indecent, and no one was assaulted by anything more than her wit, charm, and strong opinions. And honestly, if that’s not what you’re looking for, then you probably shouldn’t go to a convention filled with writers. If the writers at a convention are going to be overtly nice and congenial, I’m not going to pay a hefty entry fee to go listen to their polite little opinions. I go to conventions because of the lively discussion of various opinions from very opinionate writers. If I leave feeling strongly about something, even if that feeling is offense, then in my opinion, the panelists have done their jobs and done them well.
4) I was not present at ConQuesT 46 and cannot speak to the events that happened there.
If I am a guest at a convention you are attending, or simply a fellow attendee, and you feel that you have been harassed, intimidated, or that your boundaries have been trampled or ignored, please feel free to ask me for support, help, intervention, or just an escort to a safer area or backup on the way to talk to convention or hotel security.
If you do not feel that you can stick up for yourself, I will help. I will be a buffer or a bulwark if necessary or requested.
Just walk up to me and ask for Leverage, and I promise that I will take you seriously and I’ll try to make things better.
Final thoughts? There were lots of smiles walking out the door on Sunday. The David Hartwell memorial was touching, much-needed and well-handled. From what I was able to see, everything went very smoothly (except for perhaps a few hiccups with pre-registration that I understand are already being addressed).
Slocombe shot 80 films, from classic Ealing comedies such as The Lavender Hill Mob and Kind Hearts and Coronets, to three Indiana Jones adventures.
In 1939 he filmed some of the earliest fighting of World War Two in Poland.
Indiana Jones director Steven Spielberg said Slocombe – who won Baftas for the Great Gatsby, The Servant, and Julia – “loved the action of filmmaking”.
(9) NOW YOU KNOW. Some believe Carrie Fisher revealed the working title of Star Wars: Episode VIII when she tweeted this photo of her dog. It’s on the sweatshirt back of the director’s chair.
February 22, 1957 — When Scott Carey begins to shrink because of exposure to a combination of radiation and insecticide, medical science is powerless to help him in The Incredible Shrinking Man, seen for the first time on this day in 1957. Did you know: special effects technicians were able to create giant drops of water by filling up condoms and dropping them.
(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY GIRLS
Born February 22, 1968 – Jeri Ryan
Born February 22, 1975 – Drew Barrymore
(12) CORREIA ISN’T LEAVING TWITTER. Well, what else do you say when somebody announces “I’ll leave the account open to post blog links back to here and book ads, but other than that I’m not going to use it for any sort of conversation,” as Larry Correia did on Monster Hunter Nation today?
Recently they created a Trust and Safety Council, to protect people from being triggered with hurtful dissenting ideas. Of course the council is made up of people like Anita Sarkesian, so you know how it is going to swing.
They’ve been unverifying conservatives, and outright banning conservative journalists. Then there were rumors of “shadow banning” where people would post, but their followers wouldn’t see it in their timelines. So it’s like you’re talking to a room that you think has 9,000 people in it, but when the lights come on you’ve been wasting time talking to an empty room.
For the record, I don’t know if that’s what happened to me or not. Some of my posts have just disappeared from my timeline entirely. Other tweets seem to show up for some followers, but not others, and it wasn’t just replies. Beats me. Either something weird was going on and I’ve violated the unwritten rules of the Ministry of Public Truth, or their technical interface is just getting worse (never attribute to malice what could just be stupidity). Either way it is enough of a pain that it was getting to be not worth the hassle.
Then today they disappeared all of my friend Adam Baldwin’s tweets. Ironically, his only visible post (out of 8,000) was a link to an article about how Twitter is banning conservatives. That was the last straw.
….Baldwin, who has nearly a quarter of a million followers, deleted his entire Twitter history Monday morning, leaving only one tweet asking for the CEO of Twitter to be fired and the abolishment of the platforms new Trust and Safety Council….
“This group-think, Orwellian, so-called Safety Council is really killing the wild west of ideas that Twitter was,” Baldwin laments:
“That’s what made Twitter fun. You could run across all sorts of differing viewpoints. That is what free speech is all about. As long as you’re not threatening people with violence, have at it.”
Baldwin cites the banning of prominent conservative tweeter Robert Stacy McCain as a major reason for leaving …
Twitter is a private company, of course, and if it wants to outlaw strong language, it can. In fact, it’s well within its rights to have one set of rules for Robert Stacy McCain, and another set of rules for everyone else. It’s allowed to ban McCain for no reason other than its bosses don’t like him. If Twitter wants to take a side in the online culture war, it can. It can confiscate Milo Yiannopoulos’s blue checkmark. This is not about the First Amendment.
But if that’s what Twitter is doing, it’s certainly not being honest about it—and its many, many customers who value the ethos of free speech would certainly object. In constructing its Trust and Safety Council, the social media platform explicitly claimed it was trying to strike a balance between allowing free speech and prohibiting harassment and abuse. But its selections for this committee were entirely one-sided—there’s not a single uncompromising anti-censorship figure or group on the list. It looks like Twitter gave control of its harassment policy to a bunch of ideologues, and now their enemies are being excluded from the platform.
(15) BRIANNA WU DEFENDS TWITTER. Brianna Wu commented on Facebook about Correia’s Twitter statement. (File 770 received permission to quote from it; the post is set to be visible to “friends” only.)
He and other conservative figures like Adam Baldwin are claiming that Twitter is breaking down on “free speech” and capitulating to the “SJWs,” which I guess means people like me. I have spent much of the last year asking Twitter and other tech companies to improve their harassment policies. There is one problem with Mr. Correria’s claim.
There is no evidence whatsoever for it.
None, zilch, zero. It’s a fantasy. A similar lie is going around that Twitter has put Anita Sarkeesian in charge of their Trust and Safety council, which is similarly baseless. I’ve spoken with a lot of tech companies in the last year and I have never heard anyone propose shadowbanning.
The only “proof” that Twitter is shadowbanning people comes from a disreputable conservative blog, that is so disreputable it cannot even be used as sourcing on Wikipedia. That blog used anonymous sourcing, and was written by someone with a personal axe to grind against Twitter.
The truth is, companies like Twitter are finally enforcing their own TOS if you threaten someone, dox someone, or set up an account specifically created to harass someone. That has led to some people being banned, and some accounts that perpetually break Twitter harassment rules to become deverified.
The backlash against Twitter is by people that prefer these system to remain as they are – a place where the women in your life will get rape threats, where anyone can have their private information posted, and where swarms of vicious mobs are destroying people’s reputation with slander.
The last I checked, almost 100 people have spread Mr. Correria’s baseless claim – and even more with Adam Baldwin. This is an important thing to fact check, and I hope you’ll share this to set the record straight.
…And yet I witness so many “activists” who claim to care about those at the bottom of society ignoring the realities of oppression, as if being offended by a person’s speech or worldview is equal to prison time or living on the streets. They talk about listening, being humble, questioning one’s preconceived notions about other people and hearing their lived experiences…and yet ignore the lived experiences of those who don’t speak or think properly in the view of university-educated social justice warriors, regardless of how much worse off they really are. That is not to say that we should accept bigotry in any form?—?far from it. But I would go as far as saying that the politically correct mafia on the left perpetuates a form of bigotry on its own because it alienates and “otherizes” those who do not share their ways of thinking and speaking about the world.
I’m tired of the cliques, the hierarchies, the policing of others, and the power imbalances that exist between people who claim to be friends and comrades. I am exhausted and saddened by the fact that any type of disagreement or difference of opinion in an activist circle will lead to a fight, which sometimes includes abandonment of certain people, deeming them “unsafe” as well as public shaming and slander.
I couldn’t give a toss how I ‘come over’ to File 770 and its occupants, (there is no point in trying to please a miniscule market at the expense of my existing readers) but it’s a useful jumping off point:…
Is Freer simply unable to generate his own column ideas? He proves his indifference by spending most of today’s 2,500-word post teeing off about half-a-dozen imagined slights he thinks self-published writers suffered here.
When you declare a political preference (especially at either end of the spectrum) you’re immediately plumbed into an extensive support network. It’s rather like a church. Complete strangers will shout “Amen, brother!”.
Yes, you may well alienate half the political spectrum but you’ll still have half left, and half of ‘everything’ looks pretty attractive when all you’ve got is all of nothing.
Plus, the business of blogging becomes easy. You don’t have to think up something new and original to write, you can just turn the handle on the outrage machine and content drops onto the page.
“SJWs ate my baby!”
“This group of two is insufficiently diverse, you BIGOT.”
If you don’t ‘get’ either of those headlines from opposing political extremes then I’m rather jealous of you.
Anyway, the fact is that joining a side in the culture war can seem like a no-brainer to an aspiring author who needs backup. I’m entirely sure that the motivations for many authors taking to political blogging are 100% genuine, born of deep convictions. I’m also sure that many jump on board, dial up their mild convictions to 11 and enjoy the ride, blog-traffic, retweets, prime spots on the ‘right on’ genre sites of their particular affiliation, oh my.
It’s a step I’ve never been able to take. I do have moderately strong political convictions, but they’re moderate ones, and moderation doesn’t sell, doesn’t generate traffic, doesn’t get retweeted.
Ten classic episodes of The Twilight Zone will be broadcast in the UK for the first time—but, much like the show’s trademark, there’s a twist. The episodes will be reinvented as radio plays taken from Rod Serling’s original TV scripts, thanks to BBC Radio 4 Extra.
According to the Independent, veteran actor Stacy Keach will step in to perform the late Serling’s iconic monologues; other cast members throughout the series will include Jane Seymour, Jim Caviezel, Michael York, Malcolm McDowell, and Don Johnson. Producer Carl Amari has owned the rights since 2002, which he obtained in part by promising to do the episodes justice in terms of production values and casting.
It’s not unusual for the cast and crew to open up text books, work on papers and discuss theoretical physics in their downtime. It provides an opportunity to network too, with students acting beside people who work in the fields they’re studying, Wong said.
“To be able to stand on stage with all of these people and sing about ‘Star Trek’ that’s just crazy,” he said.
“Boldly Go!” started out with the cast meeting on weekends, before amping up to twice a week and nearly every day in the past month.
Marie Blatnik, who studies experimental nuclear physics and plays a fierce Klingon named Maltof, described the scheduling as hectic. She originally auditioned — in half a Starfleet uniform — for a different role, but the brothers recast a male Klingon when they saw her energy.
“It kind of feels like a cult where they lure you in with ‘it’s only 15 bucks’ then jump to ‘I want your life savings,” Blatnik joked about the time invested in the show.
(21) YOUR GAME OF THRONES NEIGHBORS. Seth Meyers has had two Late Show skits where Game of Thrones characters are featured in everyday situations:
Melisandre at the Meyers’ baby shower:
Jon Snow at a dinner party:
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, Frank Wu, Rob Thornton, and JJ for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Anna Nimmhaus (you know who you are!).]
(1) CROTCHETY GOES TO TOWN. Amazing Stories’ Steve Davidson gets his Boskone report off to a fast start with a post about Day 1.
I’m at Boskone this weekend, hanging out with the fans, loquaciously displaying my intimate knowledge of arcana on several panels and availing myself of various perks offered by this long-running (53rd year) convention that was launched as a bid for the 1967 Worldcon.
It’s operated by the New England Science Fiction Association (NESFA), one of the longest running fan clubs in the country.
One of the things NESFA does is clear out their library and make the clearances available on a freebie table. Last year, someone snagged a bunch of large-size Analogs out from under my reaching hand (‘sigh’). This year I was one of the first ‘gleaners’ to hit the table and was rewarded with:
several D series Ace Doubles; a good-sized stack of early Locus fanzines; same for File 770; a handful of Groff Conklin paperback anthologies (filling in a couple of gaps. The paperbacks are shortened versions of the hardback anthologies Conklin produced over the years.); a couple of Lee & Miller hardbacks; a NESFA anthology of Lester Del Rey shorts (edited by our own Steven H. Silver); the remaining issues of Galileo magazine that I didn’t have (complete run now!). (Galileo was a “semi-prozine” from back in the late 70s); a few issues of Infinity digest magazine, and a smattering of this and that interesting looking items.
I’m thinking a loquacious displayer would be a great subject for an Audobon drawing.
(2) HARTWELL REMEMBERED. Boskone ran a David Hartwell memorial panel.
While in San Francisco for a panel on artificial consciousness, I had an opportunity to stop by the headquarters of the Electronic Frontier Foundation — dedicated to preserving your freedom online and off. As part of their 25th year anniversary celebration, EFF released Pwning Tomorrow, an anthology of science fiction stories by Bruce Sterling, Ramaz Naam, Charlie Jane Anders, Cory Doctorow, David Brin, Lauren Beukes, and others. You can download it for a donation to this worthy organization.
(5) TODAY IN HISTORY
February 20, 1962 — A camera onboard the “Friendship 7” Mercury spacecraft photographs astronaut John H. Glenn Jr. during the Mercury-Atlas 6 space flight.
Star Trek: The Ultimate Voyage brings five decades of Star Trek to concert halls for the first time in this galaxy or any other.
This lavish production includes an impressive live symphony orchestra and international solo instruments. People of all ages and backgrounds will experience the franchise’s groundbreaking and wildly popular musical achievements while the most iconic Star Trek film and TV footage is simultaneously beamed in high definition to a 40-foot wide screen.
The concert will feature some of the greatest music written for the franchise including music from Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Star Trek: Insurrection, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, Starfleet Academy and much more. This never-before-seen concert event is perfect for music lovers, filmgoers, science-fiction fans and anyone looking for an exciting and unique concert experience.
(8) PERCEPTIONS ABOUT DISABILITY. At The Bias, Annalee Flower Horne covers a lot of ground in “The Geeks Guide To Disability”.
I want the science fiction community to be inclusive and accessible to disabled people. I want our conventions and corners of the internet to be places where disabled people are treated with dignity and respect. I’m hoping that if I walk through some of the more common misconceptions, I can move the needle a little–or at least save myself some time in the future, because I’ll be able to give people a link instead of explaining all this again.
What is Disability?
This may seem like starting from first principles, but a lot of the misconceptions I’ve encountered within the science fiction community have been rooted in a poorly thought-out model of what the term ‘disability’ means….
(10) LONG FORM EDITOR. George R.R. Martin, in “What They Edited, The Third”, posts an impressive resume from Joe Monti of Saga Press, the new science fiction imprint of Simon & Schuster/ Pocket Books.
(11) PRIVATE LABEL. From the Worldcon in the city where everything’s up to date….
(13) AND SPEAKING OF EATING. Scott Edelman says a second episode of his podcast Eating the Fantastic has gone live, with guest Bud Sparhawk.
Bud Sparhawk
I chatted with Bud—a three-time Nebula finalist and Analog magazine regular—about how Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions anthology inspired him to become a writer, what it was like to write for three different Analog editors over four decades, the plotters vs. pantsers debate, and more.
Edelman ends, “If all goes well, Episode 3 will feature writer, editor, and Rosarium Publishing owner Bill Campbell.”
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Rose Embolism, and Gerry Williams for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]
