The British Science Fiction Association today announced the winners of the BSFA Awards for work published in 2024 in a ceremony at Eastercon, Reconnect, in Belfast.
SHORT FICTION
‘Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole’ by Isabel J. Kim (Clarkesworld)
SHORTER FICTION (NOVELETTE AND NOVELLA EQUIVALENT)
Saturation Point by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Solaris)
NOVEL
Three Eight One by Aliya Whiteley (Rebellion Publishing)
FICTION FOR YOUNGER READERS
Doctor Who: Caged by Una McCormack (Penguin)
COLLECTIONS
Punks4Palestine: An Anthology of Hopeful SciFi for an Uncertain Future ed Jasen Bacon (Hyphen Press)
AUDIO
The Personal Touch by Rick Danforth (Manawaker Studio’s Flash Fiction Podcast)
ART
Cover – Nova Scotia Vol 2 by Jenni Coutts (Luna Press Publishing)
SHORT NON-FICTION
‘Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art’ by Ted Chiang (New Yorker, August 31 2024)
LONG NON-FICTION
Track Changes by Abigail Nussbaum (Briardene Books)
BEST TRANSLATED SHORT WORK (Juried Award)*
‘Bone by Bone’ by Mónika Rusval, translated from Hungarian by Vivien Urban (Samovar)
*Our Jurors for this award are Cristina Jurado, Rachel Cordasco and Nadya Mercik.
The BSFA Awards have been presented annually since 1970. They are voted on by members of the British Science Fiction Association and members of the year’s Eastercon, the national science fiction convention, held since 1955.
Who were the first Black horror writers in a country that made enslaved Africans’ everyday life horrific? How did stories develop and what were their themes?
I wanted to write this because of my own curiosity. I didn’t know where this was going to lead me but the more I dug the more I found. The yellow brick road of discovery took me away from the land of published authors to places unexpected….
… Storytelling is the cornerstone of many cultures. For African and African-American communities it’s a way of communicating history, passing on lessons, and entertaining. Most of this storytelling was done in oral folktales by those surviving the nightmare of slave ships and a ‘New World’ that forbids their traditional practice.
The folk tales from Africa were modified to be acceptable in a country where anything that sounded aggressive or like strength from slaves could result in torture or death. The first recorded Black folktales I found were from the late nineteenth century. There are a number of stories with animals where one plays the part of the trickster, but I was looking for monsters, demons, etc.
“Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-tales from the Gulf States”, Black folklore collected by Zora Neale Hurston in the late 1920s documented almost 500 folktales from 122 Black workers, farmers, and artisans by traveling to places like Alabama, Florida, and New Orleans. Besides themes of religion, family, and other social concepts I also found two sections named: “Devil Tales” and “Witch and Hant Tales” (Hant means “haunt” or “ghost”)….
We report on the BSFA’s policy on reviewing, with a comment from BSFA Chair, Allen Stroud. Then, we tell you all what John’s doing for Reconnect (the 2025 Eastercon), discuss Iridescence (a bid for the 2026 Eastercon), talk BSFA Awards (presented at Eastercon) and Liz reads a book (which you could read at Eastercon).
In the podcast one of the Octothorpe crew says they’d been hearing “probably gossip” to the effect that the BSFA have been rejecting incoming reviews —
…so we were alerted last week to a blog comment from a reviewer who reviews for the BSFA Reviews, Steven French, and they say “ all the reviews I wrote for BSFA Reviews, the reviews journal of the British Science Fiction Association, have been discarded by the new editor because the BSFA is going for charitable status and so reviews of books that the reviewer is not happy with or did not understand (?) are not acceptable” which is interesting because I think we’d heard the same rumors from a couple of other sources that the new incoming bsfa reviews editor was not publishing reviews that were a bit negative or possibly a book they didn’t understand and was trying to go for a much more positive tone….
They reached out to BSFA chair Allen Stroud who told them —
This is a simple misunderstanding on the part of the Reviews Editor in relation to BSFA oversight of its publications.
Editorial policy of BSFA publications is usually determined by the editors.
There is no connection between BSFA Review Editorial policy and the BSFA’s transition to being a charity. This transition has not been confirmed and will need to be confirmed (or rejected) as a motion at the forthcoming EGM on February 23rd.
The BSFA’s constitution is to promote science fiction and science fiction criticism. There is no priority to favour either over the other.
We will be working with the reviews editor in order to produce a clearer set of guidelines.
(3) SCL AWARDS. The Wild Robot won Outstanding Original Score for a Studio Film at the Society of Composers and Lyricists Award presentation on February 12. Here are the other “SCL Awards 2025 Winners” of genre interest.
OUTSTANDING ORIGINAL SCORE FOR A STUDIO FILM Kris Bowers, The Wild Robot (DreamWorks Animation)
OUTSTANDING ORIGINAL SCORE FOR INTERACTIVE MEDIA Winifred Phillips, Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (Digital Eclipse)
DAVID RAKSIN AWARD FOR EMERGING TALENT Andrea Datzman, Inside Out 2 (Disney/Pixar Animation Studios)
…Special honorees tonight were composer Harry Gregson-Williams and legendary director Ridley Scott, who shared the 2025 Spirit of Collaboration Award, having made seven films together. Five-time Emmy winner Jeff Beal received the Jury Award for his score for the 1920 silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which he premiered and was performed live-to-picture at Carnegie Hall in June….
…I got a call from a journalist from the NDR asking if I wanted to participate in a TV interview about the topic of their latest survey – “Were the covid measures too strict and do we need some kind of political post-mortem?” I considered for a moment – it is a sensitive topic, after all, and there’s a chance of pissing off people – and then said yes….
Some of Cora’s Masters of the Universe figures got on TV, too.
…In the end, the TV team decided that they preferred the dining room/hall and asked me to set up the laptop. The camera operator also asked if we could put some of my Masters of the Universe figures onto the dining table.
I said, “Of course. There actually were some figures on the table until yesterday, but I moved them away. Do you want any specific figures or should I just pick something?”
“Could we have these ladies?” the camera operator asked and pointed at three different Teela figures.
So I took the three Teelas and when they turned out to have problems keeping their footing on my quilted tablerunner, I also grabbed Battle Cat to hold them upright.
“Could we also have the King?” the camera operator asked, so I grabbed King Randor and positioned him opposite the three Teelas….
(5) A THURB BLURB. BGrandrath says, “I know a running gag when I see one. I thought this would fit the theme, and remember: you started it.” And he sent along an item title that mashes up two of the Scroll’s recent story lines. Here are more clues to the reference for those of you playing along at home. [Click for larger images.]
Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin opens with one of the best first sentences I’ve ever read: “Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.” Though the novel isn’t structured as a conventional mystery, there’s mystery inherent in that first sentence, and it only grows as the reader learns more about the narrator, Iris Chase, her sister Laura, and Alex Thomas, the man they both love. The novel spans genres, decades, and galaxies, weaving together elements that a lesser writer would never think to put together….
Ashley Winstead explains why the book is enthralling.
… One time the writer Deborah Eisenberg came to talk to us, and she was talking about braided narrative structure, where disparate parts of the story come together in a way you can’t predict. In The Blind Assassin, you’ll have one chapter with newspaper articles from the 1930’s, and in the next a story of two people having an affair, and in the next the science fiction story that one of them is writing, and in the next Iris as an old woman in her eighties reflecting on her life. Atwood puts all these pieces together and allows the reader to make the connections and associations between them. I just fell in love with that form of writing, and I thought of The Blind Assassin as the ultimate version of that kind of narrative.…
(7) BONUS BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
February 12, 1929 — Donald Kingsbury, 96.
By Paul Weimer. The first ever winner of the Compton Crook Award Donald Kingsbury has sat in a position of appreciating and boosting science fiction for decades. The inaugural Compton Crook Award-winning book was Courtship Rite, which I read back in the 80’s and was my first introduction to his work. It’s a throw-into-the-deep-end space colony novel that impressed for me just how much Kingsbury likes to play the harsh main beats of science fiction. It’s not a 101 Science Fiction work, since the protocols of the book mean that you really want to feel and known the ebb and flow of how science fiction novels work before ever tackling it.
Donald Kingsbury
There has been a long promised but never materialized sequel that has been in the works for decades. I’d read it…but I’d want to re-read the original first if it was released but…hold that thought for a moment.
Psychohistorical Crisis, however, is his most audacious and outstanding work. It started off as a novella (Historical Crisis) in the collection Far Futures, which I happened to recently re-read in an audio edition. Psychohistorical Crisis is a full-on expansion of that novella. The best way I can describe it, however cheekily, is that it is a full-on fanfic novel of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, set sometime after the Galactic Empire has risen again. The numbers that make it not an Asimov novel and instead set in a different ‘verse are rubbed off very gently. There is nothing in the novel that contradicts or contraindicates that it is in Asimov’s ‘verse. Even the names of the characters in the novel (e.g. Eron Osa) sound Asimovian. If you ever wondered what a Second Empire Asimov story could look like, Psychohistorical Crisis has got you covered. Like Courtship Rite, it dumps you in the deep end but the swim is so worth it.
But there is one complaint I have. I’ve recommended two wonderful novels of his, and I am sure that readers in this space might want to try his work, if they haven’t. But…his work is resolutely out of print. No ebook editions. Only that audio book of Far Futures with his novella. Getting a hold of his work requires work to get used editions. And that is a damn shame. I can’t even remember if I have my copy of Psychohistorical Crisis.
But again, not a 101 SF writer, maybe a 301 writer for when you want something uncompromising and dunked into the deep end. That’s Kingsbury’s work to me.
Back in 2013, having bought the series from Eidos, Square Enix released a reboot of the hit 1990s action game Tomb Raider starring a significantly less objectified Lara Croft. I loved that game, despite a quasi-assault scene near the beginning that I would later come to view as a bit icky, and I wasn’t the only one – it was extremely well received, selling 3.4m copies in its first month alone. Then Square Enix came out and called it a disappointment.
Sales did not meet the publisher’s expectations, apparently, which raises the question: what were the expectations? Was it supposed to sell 5m in one month? If a book sells 10,000 copies in a week it’s considered a bestseller. Even at the height of its popularity in the 90s, no Tomb Raider game ever sold more than a few million. Square Enix’s expectations were clearly unrealistic. It wouldn’t be the last time; in a 2016 interview with Hajime Tabata, Final Fantasy XV’s director, he told me that game needed to sell 10m to succeed.
Last week in an earnings call, EA’s executives had to explain a shortfall in profits. It was driven mostly by EA FC, the ubiquitous football series whose revenue was down on the previous year, but CEO Andrew Wilson also singled out the long-awaited RPG Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which came out last October. “Dragon Age had a high-quality launch and was well reviewed by critics and those who played. However, it did not resonate with a broad enough audience in this highly competitive market,” he said.
Dragon Age has “reached 1.5 million players” in the months since launch, which presumably includes people paying via subscription services as well as direct sales. If 3.4m was a disappointment for Square Enix in 2013, you can only imagine that 1.5m was a disaster for EA in 2024, when games cost multiples more to make….
“You’re sitting at Jack Nicholson’s table,” my server, dressed in a sharp red jacket, told me on a recent visit to legendary Los Angeles restaurant The Musso & Frank Grill in Hollywood. According to the server, Nicholson favored the curved round booth at the back of the restaurant’s main dining room for its proximity to the back exit, making it easy to duck in and out unnoticed….
…“Last year, 145,000 customers came through the restaurant,” fourth-generation owner and Musso & Frank Chief Financial Officer Mark Echeverria tells SFGATE. “We have 210 seats, so if you drill down, that’s 460 customers a day, or over two full turns of the restaurant every night we’re open for dinner.”
That means that, all these years later, diners are still sliding into those wide red leather booths, sidling up to the bustling grill (the restaurant’s centerpiece) and grabbing ice-cold martinis at the back mahogany bar….
…In the 1930s, Carissimi and Mosso opened the exclusive Back Room, which became a favorite for celebrities and literary luminaries of the day. Orson Welles reportedly wrote “Citizen Kane” at a booth; John Steinbeck, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner and Fitzgerald were some of the many other famous writers who considered the Back Room a second home….
…As sunlight hits the ocean’s surface it scatters, gets absorbed, or reflected back into space. As a result, the waters of the world get pretty dark pretty fast, and scientists often separate the seas into distinct layers based on how much light they receive.
At the ocean surface you’ll find the sunlight (euphotic) zone, where light is strong enough for photosynthesis. This layer extends to about 200 meters deep, where you’ll find the beginning of the twilight (dysphotic) zone. Here, sunlight decreases rapidly with depth. There’s not enough light for photosynthesis, but there is enough for some critters to live and see by.
The ocean’s twilight zone extends to a depth of 1,000 meters before transitioning to the aphotic zone which is itself broken into three layers. You’ll first encounter the midnight (bathypelagic) zone from 1,000 to 4,000 meters, the abyss (abyssopelagic) zone from 4,000 to 6,000 meters, and the hadal (hadopelagic) zone at 6,000+ meters…
(12) ZAPPED BY THE UNIVERSE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] This week’s Nature cover story is “Cosmic Catcher”.
The cover shows a light sensor from the Kilometre Cube Neutrino Telescope (KM3NeT) at sunset above the Mediterranean Sea. This is one of thousands of sensors that are currently being assembled into enormous 3D grids in the abysses off the coast of Sicily in Italy and Provence in France. KM3NeT detects high-energy neutrinos, elementary particles that can be created by powerful events in the Universe. The neutrinos are spotted as a faint flash of light generated when the products of a neutrino interaction with water molecules pass through these detectors. In this week’s issue, the KM3NeT team presents the observation of the highest-energy cosmic neutrino ever detected. The telescope in Sicily caught a signal from a muon that had an energy of around 120 petaelectronvolts, which is most likely to have come from a neutrino of around 220 petaelectronvolts. The highest energy neutrino detected before this was 30 times less energetic. The exceptionally high energy, together with the almost horizontal direction of travel, implies that the neutrino is extraterrestrial. Its probable origin is beyond the Milky Way.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, BGrandrath, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]
The British Science Fiction Association has released the longlists of nominees for the BSFA Awards for work published in 2024.
The awards are voted on by members of the British Science Fiction Association and by the members of the year’s Eastercon, Reconnect, which will be held in Belfast, Northern Ireland from April 18-21, where the winners will be announced.
(1) LUKYANENKO NOT AT WORLDCON. There’s no sign of the Chengdu Worldcon’s Russian GoH Sergey Lukyanenko in social media coverage of the con. And the latest posts to his blog on his official website (devoted to anti-Israel remarks, and a report that his wife rescued a migrating woodcock in the backyard) suggest he’s at home. Although he made two other professional visits to the Far East earlier in 2023 he hasn’t mentioned Chengdu on his blog this year.
(2) 2023 HUGO BASE. This year’s Hugo base was debuted at the Chengdu Worldcon Opening Ceremonies by Hugo Administrator Dave McCarty. Here’s a screencap from the video. There are much better closeup photos of the base at his Facebook page.
(3) CHENGDU WORLDCON SOUVENIR BOOK. The “Member Guidebook” Member Guidebook for 2023 Chengdu World Science Fiction Convention has been released. It’s a publicly available download here (PDF).
The member guidebook for the 2023 Chengdu World Science Fiction Convention is available online. The guidebook consists of the welcome message from the co-chairs, an introduction to the main venue, notes for participants, an introduction to theme activities, a brief introduction of Chengdu, and an appendix.
(4) UYGHURS REMEMBERED. Andrew Gillsmith moderated a pre-Worldcon panel for the “World Uyghur Congress” which can be viewed on X.
(5) CHENGDU WORLDCON ROUNDUP. [Item by Ersatz Culture.]
Unofficial (?) Bilibili video of the opening ceremony
This seems to have been ripped from the stream, as it has a jump near the start where the video froze for me and others and audio glitches later on. It is mostly in Chinese.
I don’t think that opening ceremony video is complete; there was a section at the end where a bunch of the VIPs came up on stage to declare the con open. Most of that is in this 2-minute video, but it also has bits chopped out for some reason.
Donald Eastlake, Kevin Standlee, Chris M. Barkley and Nicholas Whyte are amongst several Western fandom figures pictured in this Xiaohongshu photo gallery.
Kevin Standlee and Don Eastlake III. Chris BarkleyNicholas Whyte
Longer fannish reports on Weibo
(Note: in the last couple of weeks or so, Weibo has added a “Translate content” link to posts, similar to what you get for foreign language tweets on Twitter. However, for long-form posts like these, it tends to time out, so you might instead want to use any translation tools built into browsers such as Chrome to read the following links.)
For those not keen on the more commercial or “mainstream” stuff in some of the prior links, Best Fan Writer and Fanzine finalist RiverFlow has a long Weibo post going over his activities today, which included meeting various fans and pros, and being on a panel about university SF societies.
From left to right: Hua Wen, Wei Ran, Bei Yu, RiverFlow (Best Fan Writer and Best Fanzine finalist), Tian Tian, San Ma, Dan Fan.(left) Best Fan Writer finalist Arthur Liu; (middle, in blue polo shirt) Ling Shizhen, who worked on the Best Fanzine finalist, Zero Gravity SF
SF Light Year aka Adaoli, who has commented here on File 770, has also posted some long reports on Weibo, such as this one.
English language promo video from Chengdu Museum
This 6-minute English language video is for the most part covers things that are more likely to appeal to general tourists, but is framed within a time-travel story featuring the Kormo mascot, and ends with the SF museum.
Xiaohongshu videos and photo galleries
As is to be expected with the con now underway, there are loads of these out there, and there’s a lot of repetition of material. These are a fairly arbitrary selection of the ones that showed up in search results:
Various panels, with a nice text summary of the poster’s impressions if you push it through browser translation tools
(6) LE GUIN VIDEOS. Available for viewing on Literary Hub, The Journey That Matters is a series of six short videos from Arwen Curry, the director and producer of Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, a Hugo Award-nominated 2018 feature documentary about the iconic author. Here are the fifth and sixth installments.
In the fifth of the series, Theo Downes-Le Guin introduces “Where I Write,” an intimate peek into Ursula’s study and her writing process.
…Recently I viewed an online video titled “I Tried Ursula K. Le Guin’s Writing Schedule,” one of many such links. The production was snappy and well-intentioned, but the writer-presenter lost me when she described preparation of a “fancy breakfast.” The fried egg, tomato, and rocket sandwich bore no resemblance to mornings in my childhood home. Note to content creators: if you geek out on someone’s routine, do your research. Ursula wrote an entire essay about how to properly soft-boil an egg. That’s what she ate for breakfast. Not fancy.
In the final installment of the series, Julie Phillips reflects on “He’s My First Reader,” in which Ursula and her husband, Charles, discuss how their division of household labor helped Ursula thrive.
…When Ursula Kroeber met and fell in love with Charles Le Guin, their meeting, on a ship bound for France, seemed to her almost magically improbable. “Obviously this sort of thing doesn’t happen,” she wrote him six weeks after they met. “I mean, conceivably you might exist, but you would never sit at Table 30 at 2nd sitting for dinner in tourist class on the Queen Mary on Sept 23rd 1953; I ask you, now would you?”
Charles felt the same, though he didn’t recognize true love quite as quickly as she. “I thought she was awfully snooty and shy the first meals; and she thought that I was British and very reserved. But after those first misapprehensions were displaced, we have scarcely been apart at all the last month,” he wrote his parents. “How do I tell you all this without it seeming silly or impossible? It is neither—not impossible because it has happened; not silly because it is too deep and too wonderful. Ursula and I are going to be married.”…
Lately I feel like everyone is talking about masculinity and what it means to be a good dude. The other day, I was on a panel at the Pride on the Page book festival with Jacob Tobia (Sissy) who was saying that we’ve spent decades expanding gender roles for women in mainstream society — women won the right to wear pants in the workplace (for now) — but meanwhile, most men remain trapped, unable to express healthy emotions or process all of their trauma.
As someone who was so successful at being a man that I actually graduated, I want to help!
So it’s a really good thing that science fiction and fantasy offer us so many excellent examples of guys who are secure in their masculinity and ready to do the right thing, even when it’s tough….
Take for example —
11) Henry Deacon (Eureka)
In a “town full of geniuses,” Henry Deacon might just be the smartest of them all — but when this underrated show begins, he’s working as a mechanic because he has ethical objections to the work that Global Dynamics is doing. Henry isn’t just the guy who steps in and fixes things when all the out-of-control science goes off the rails, he’s also the town’s moral center. (And eventually, he becomes its mayor.) Emmy-winning actor Joe Morton, who plays Henry, also plays a resourceful, kind alien refugee in the movie The Brother From Another Planet.
(8) LARA PARKER (1938-2023). Actress Lara Parker, age 28 when she was cast as Dark Shadows’ beautiful and evil witch Angelique Bouchard Collins, died October 12. She was 84. The Deadline tribute also mentions her writing career:
…In her later years, Parker turned to writing and teaching — her novels include Angelique’s Descent (1998), The Salem Branch (2006), Wolf Moon Rising (2013) and Heiress of Collinwood (2016). The books proved popular among Dark Shadows‘ still-devoted, conventions-attending fan base, as well as devotees of romance and horror genre novels.
(9) MEMORY LANE.
1992 — [Written by Cat Eldridge from a suggestion by Mike Glyer.]
So let’s talk about Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book which is where our Beginning is from this Scroll.
It’s a novel in her series about Oxford time-traveling historians, which consists of Fire Watch, Doomsday Book, To Say Nothing of the Dog, or How We Found the Bishop’s Bird Stump and Blackout/All Clear.
It was published thirty-one years ago by Bantam Spectra with the cover art being by Tim Jacobus.
The series has an extraordinary history when it comes to awards. Fire Watch started off with a Best Novelette Hugo at ConStellation, along with winning a Nebula and being nominated for Balrog. Next up was a BSFA nomination for this novel followed by a Hugo win (a tie with with Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep) at ConFrancisco and a Nebula as well as picking up Clarke and Mythopoeic nominations.
To Say Nothing of the Dog, or How We Found the Bishop’s Bird Stump at Last won a Hugo at Aussiecon Three and also picked a Nebula nomination too.
Blackout/All Clear got a Hugo at Renovation and Nebula, plus a Campbell Memorial nomination.
So now that we’ve got those out of the way, let’s turned to the Beginning….
Mr. Dunworthy opened the door to the laboratory and his spectacles promptly steamed up.
“Am I too late?” he said, yanking them off and squinting at Mary.
“Shut the door,” she said. “I can’t hear you over the sound of those ghastly carols.”
Dunworthy closed the door, but it didn’t completely shut out the sound of “O Come, All Ye Faithful” wafting in from the quad. “Am I too late?” he said again.
Mary shook her head. “All you’ve missed is Gilchrist’s speech.” She leaned back in her chair to let Dunworthy squeeze past her into the narrow observation area. She had taken off her coat and wool hat and set them on the only other chair, along with a large shopping bag full of parcels. Her gray hair was in disarray, as if she had tried to fluff it up after taking her hat off. “A very long speech about Mediaeval’s maiden voyage in time,” she said, “and the college of Brasenose taking its rightful place as the jewel in history’s crown. Is it still raining?”
“Yes,” he said, wiping his spectacles on his muffler. He hooked the wire rims over his ears and went up to the thin-glass partition to look at the net. In the center of the laboratory was a smashed-up wagon surrounded by overturned trunks and wooden boxes. Above them hung the protective shields of the net, draped like a gauzy parachute.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born October 18, 1917 — Reynold Brown. Artist responsible for many SF film posters. His first poster was Creature from the Black Lagoon with other notable ones being Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, I Was a Teenage Werewolf and Mothra vs. Godzilla. (Died 1991.)
Born October 18, 1925 — Walter Harris. He wrote a New Avengers novel, To Catch a Rat, and novelized Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Werewolf of London. ISFDB lists four more genre novels by him, The Mistress of Downing Street, The Day I Died, The Fifth Horseman and Salvia. (Died 2019.)
Born October 18, 1944 — Katherine Kurtz, 78. Known for the Deryni series which started with Deryni Rising in 1970, and the most recent, The King’s Deryni, the final volume of The Childe Morgan Trilogy, was published several years back. As medieval historical fantasy goes, they’re damn great.
Born October 18, 1951 — Jeff Schalles, 72. Minnesota area fan who’s making the Birthday Honors because he was the camera man for Cats Laughing’s A Long Time Gone: Reunion at Minicon 50concert DVD. Cats Laughing is a band deep in genre as you can read in the Green Man review here.
Born October 18, 1964 — Charles Stross, 59. I’ve read a lot of him down the years with I think his best being the rejiggered Merchant Princes series especially the recent Empire Games and Dark State novels. Other favored works include the early Laundry Files novels and both of the Halting State novels though the second makes me cringe.
Born October 18, 1965– Kristen Britain, 58. She is writing the Green Rider series of which Green Rider was nominated for the Crawford Award and Blackveil was nominated for the David Gemmell Legend Award. It’s now a dozen novels deep.
(11) COMICS SECTION.
The Far Side — This is mainly about Mrs. Frankenstein’s monster?
(12) THAT POPEYE FILM. Daniel Dern (as a longtime fan of the movie) encourages Filers to watch “Popeye – It’s Not THAT Bad – The Insane True Story Behind the Movie”. Interesting enough. One notable item early in: the initial leads casting offer went to Dustin Hoffman (for Popeye) and Gilda Radner (for Olive Oil).
The final selections were Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall, both delightfully great… but I would still love to have seen Radner’s take on Ms. Oil, particularly playing opposite Robin Williams.
(13) DOWNLOAD VECTOR’S “CHINESE SF” ISSUE. The British Science Fiction Association opens issues of Vector to the public after about two years. The 2021 issue on Chinese SF is now available to download here.
‘ Vector 293 is a collaboration with guest editors Yen Ooi and Regina Kanyu Wang. Yen Ooi introduces the issue as well as many of its recurring concepts, such as techno-orientalism. Regina Kanyu Wang takes us through the history of women writing SF in China. Artist and curator Angela Chan interviews Beatrice Glow about her work with colonial histories and the ability of science fiction to ‘tell truthful histories and envision just futures together’ through art. The conversation about history, futures, science fiction and art continues in Dan Byrne-Smith’s interview with Gordon Cheung. Chinese SF scholars Mia Chen Ma, Frederike Schneider-Vielsäcker and Mengtian Sun offer glimpses of their recent and ongoing research. Authors Maggie Shen King (An Excess Male) and Chen Qiufan (Waste Tide) interview each other about their recent novels. Feng Zhang introduces us to the SF fandom in China, while Regina Kanuy Wang brings us up to speed with accelerating Chinese SF industry. Dev Agarwal questions the maturity of the Chinese SF blockbuster as can be judged from Shanghai Fortress and The Wandering Earth (both available on Netflix). Virginia L. Conn explores Sinofuturism, while Emily Xueni Jin delves into the implications of translating a growing body of SF work from Chinese into English. We learn about the global perspectives on Chinese SF from an illustrious panel assembled at WorldCon 2019, and about transnational speculative folklore of the Uyghur people from Sandra Unerman. Niall Harrison completes the issue with an illuminating survey of Chinese short SF in the 21st Century.’
(15) TRAILER PARK. Beacon 23 – a series coming on MGM+. The series, based on a book by Hugh Howey, is set to premiere its first two episodes on MGM+ on Sunday, November 12 at 9:00 p.m. EST/PST.
Aster (Lena Headey) and Halan (Stephan James) are drawn to Beacon 23 and face an onslaught of threats. When an object called The Artifact appears, they begin to unravel its mysteries, and develop a deep bond just in time to face a deadly AI.
The recent “ring of fire” solar eclipse looked stunning across portions of North and South America and we now have a new view of the stellar event. The Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite created the image of the eclipse on Saturday October 14, depicting the mostly blue Earth against the darkness of space, with one large patch of the planet in the shadow of the moon.
Launched in 2015, DSCOVR is a joint NASA, NOAA, and U.S. Air Force satellite. It offers a unique perspective since it is close to 1 million miles away from Earth and sits in a gravitationally stable point between the Earth and the sun called Lagrange Point 1. DSCOVR’s primary job is to monitor the solar wind in an effort to improve space weather forecasts.
A special device aboard the satellite called the Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) imager took this view of the eclipse from space. According to NASA, the sensor gives scientists frequent views of the Earth. The moon’s shadow, or umbra, is falling across the southeastern coast of Texas, near Corpus Christi….
[Thanks to Ersatz Culture, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Lise Andreasen, Daniel Dern, Steven French, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter, for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Peer.]
(1) NEXT ON BABYLON 5. “The secret Babylon 5 project is… an animated movie”. The Verge does a roundup of what is known about the project based on J. Michael Straczynski’s tweets today, plus a little bit from his Patreon page. More details are coming next week, including a release date.
BABYLON 5 ANIMATED MOVIE coming from Warner Bros. Animation & WB Home Entertainment! Classic B5: raucous, heartfelt, nonstop, a ton of fun through time and space & a love letter to the fans. Movie title, release date and other details coming one week from today. #B5AnimatedMoviepic.twitter.com/5ylImI65mm
— J. Michael Straczynski (@straczynski) May 3, 2023
I'm ridiculously excited about the #B5AnimatedMovie because it feels the most B5-ish of anything we've done since the original show. Warners was terrific in giving me the freedom to write the story I wanted, and the animation is phenomenal. It's fun, deep, emotional, classic B5.
— J. Michael Straczynski (@straczynski) May 3, 2023
Meanwhile, the Babylon 5 reimagining live action show that’s been in development remains “on hold pending WGA issues” Straczynski said on Facebook last week.
(2) FAN WINS MINN STATE LITERARY AWARD. Congratulations to Minn-Stf member Karen E. Cooper on receiving the 2023 Emilie Buchwald Award for Minnesota Nonfiction, part of the Minnesota Book Awards. Cooper’s winning book is When Minnehaha Flowed with Whiskey: A Spirited History of the Falls.
From the 1880s until at least 1912, Minnehaha Falls was a scene of surprising mayhem. The waterfall was privately owned from the 1850s through 1889, and entrepreneurs made money from hotels and concessions. Even after the area became a city park, shady operators set up at its borders and corrupt police ran “security.” Drinking, carousing, sideshows, dances that attracted unescorted women, and general rowdiness reigned—to the dismay of the neighbors. By 1900, social reformers began to redeem Minnehaha Park. During the struggle for control, the self-indulgent goings-on there became more public and harder to ignore.
(3) LIKE SAND THROUGH THE HOURGLASS. The trailer for Dune: Part Two dropped today.
“Dune: Part Two” will explore the mythic journey of Paul Atreides as he unites with Chani and the Fremen while on a warpath of revenge against the conspirators who destroyed his family. Facing a choice between the love of his life and the fate of the known universe, he endeavors to prevent a terrible future only he can foresee.
(4) TONY AWARDS 2023. The 2023 Tony Award nominations are out. There are a few productions of genre interest like Into the Woods with cast members among the nominees, however the list is mostly not sff. The complete roster is at the link.
(5) KGB. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Paul Tremblay & John Langan on Wednesday, May 10, 2023, at 7:00 p.m. Eastern.
Paul Tremblay
Paul Tremblay has won the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, and Massachusetts Book awards and is the author of The Pallbearers Club, Growing Things, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, A Head Full of Ghosts, and the crime novels The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland. His novel The Cabin at the End of the World was adapted as the major motion picture Knock at the Cabin. His essays and short fiction have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and numerous year’s-best anthologies. He has a master’s degree in mathematics and lives outside Boston with his family.
John Langan
John Langan is the author of two novels and five collections of fiction. For his work, he has received the Bram Stoker and the This Is Horror awards. He is one of the founding members of the Shirley Jackson awards, and serves on its Board of Advisors. He lives in New York’s Mid-Hudson Valley with his family and worries about bears roaming the woods behind the house. His latest book is Corpsemouth and Other Autobiographies.
Where: KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003 (Just off 2nd Ave, upstairs).
(6) THE SEX LIVES OF TRALFAMADORIANS. [Item by Steven French.] In an interesting and helpful article in Aeon, entitled “Sex Is Real” (but with the important sub-title: ‘Yes, there are just two biological sexes. No, this doesn’t mean every living thing is either one or the other’), philosopher of biology Paul Griffiths tackles the Tralfamadorians:
… imagine if there was a whole species … where three different kinds of gametes combined to make a new individual – a sperm, an egg and a third, mitochondrial gamete. This species would have three biological sexes. Something like this has actually been observed in slime moulds, an amoeba that can, but need not, get its mitochondria from a third ‘parent’. The novelist Kurt Vonnegut imagined an even more complex system in Slaughterhouse-Five (1969): ‘There were five sexes on Tralfamadore, each of them performing a step necessary in the creation of a new individual.’ But the first question a biologist would ask is: why haven’t these organisms been replaced by mutants that dispense with some of the sexes? Having even two sexes imposes many extra costs – the simplest is just finding a mate – and these costs increase as the number of sexes required for mating rises. Mutants with fewer sexes would leave more offspring and would rapidly replace the existing Tralfamadorians. Something like this likely explains why two-sex systems predominate on Earth….
(7) VECTOR NEEDS EDITORS. Jo Lindsay Walton and Polina Levontin will be standing down as editors of the British Science Fiction Association’s magazine Vector after one more issue (#298, late 2023), and the BSFA is inviting applications for new editors: “Vector: be part of a new editorial team!”
(8) MEMORY LANE.
2011 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Let’s talk about David Langford for a minute. Y’all know this wonderful individual already, so I need not go into depth on who he is, though I’d be very remiss not to mention that he has the most Hugo Awards in hand with twenty-nine so far.
Many of those came about from his work as a fan journalist on his essential-reading Ansible newsletter which he has described as The SF Private Eye. The name Ansible you likely know is taken from Le Guin’s communication device.
That he borrowed the name from a fictional device is a fact that lends itself to the lead-in for the Beginning excerpted in this Scroll. It’s from Langford’s story in Fables from the Fountain, edited by Iain Whates, a collection which paid homage to Arthur C. Clarke’s Tales from The White Hart.
Fables from the Fountain centers on The Fountain, a traditional London pub situated in Holborn, sited just off Chancery Lane, where Michael, our landlord, serves only superb ales, ably assisted by barmaids Sally and Bogna. It is a place where a group of friends – scientists, writers and, yes, genre fans — meet regularly on a Tuesday night to tell true stories, and some well, maybe not so true.
Our story, “The Pocklington Poltergeist”, was published by NewCon Press as part of this collection twelve years ago. Dean Harkness did the cover art.
They are, I must say, quite fun tales that keep nicely in the spirit of Clarke’s own. Available at the usual suspects, or in a more traditional paper edition.
And let’s us step into The Fountain for our Beginning…
A buzz of expectation could be felt in the back bar of the Fountain that Tuesday evening, and Michael the landlord hoped aloud that this didn’t mean funny business. No one needed to be told what he meant. The previous meeting had gone with a bang, not to mention a repeated flash, crackle and puff of purple vapour when anyone stepped in the wrong place. Whatever that noisy stuff was, it got on your shoes and followed you even into the sanctuary of the toilet.
“Nitrogen tri-iodide,” said Dalton reminiscently. “Contact explosive. A venerable student tradition. It’s amazing how each new year discovers the formula, as though it were a programmed instinct.”
“They read science fiction,” Ploom suggested. “Robert Heinlein gives a fairly detailed recipe in Farnham’s Freehold.”
“Not his best,” said Dalton. “And not the best procedure either. Solid iodine crystals are far, far more effective than the usual alcoholic solution. I speak purely theoretically, of course.”
At the bar, Professor Mackintosh made reassuring noises. “The only upheaval we’re expecting is a celebrity visitor, Michael. A demi-celebrity, at any rate. Have you heard of Dagon Smythe “the psychic investigator – a real-life Carnacki the Ghost-Finder? Colin Wilson wrote a whole book about him once.”
Next to the Professor, Dr Steve spluttered something into his beer. It could have been: “That charlatan.”
“Now, now,” murmured Mackintosh. “Guests are always received politely. We even managed to be civil to Uri Geller.”
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born May 3, 1896 — Dodie Smith. English children’s novelist and playwright, best remembered for The Hundred and One Dalmatians which of course became the animated film of the same name and thirty years later was remade by Disney as a live action film. (Saw the first a long time ago, never saw the latter.) Though The Starlight Barking, the sequel, was optioned, by Disney, neither sequel film (101 Dalmatians II: Patch’s London Adventure and 102 Dalmatians) is based on it. Elizabeth Hand in her review column in F&SF praised it as one of the very best fantasies (“… Dodie Smith’s sophisticated canine society in The Hundred and One Dalmatians and The Starlight Barking…”) she read. (Died 1990.)
Born May 3, 1928 — Jeanne Bal. Ebony In Trek’s “The Man Trap” episode, she played Nancy Crater, a former lover of Leonard McCoy, who would be a victim of the lethal shape-shifting alien which craves salt. This was the series’ first-aired episode that replaced “The Cage” which the Network really didn’t like. She also had one-offs in Thriller and I-Spy. (Died 1996.)
Born May 3, 1939 — Dennis O’Neil. Writer and editor, mostly for Marvel Comics and DC Comics from the Sixties through the Nineties, and was the Group Editor for the Batman family of titles until his retirement which makes him there when Ed Brubaker’s amazing Gotham Central came out. He himself has written Wonder Woman and Green Arrow in both cases introducing some rather controversial storytelling ideas. He also did a rather brilliant DC Comics Shadow series with Michael Kaluta as the artist. (Died 2020.)
Born May 3, 1949 — Ron Canada, 74. He’s one of those actors who manages to show up across the Trek verse, in this case on episodes of Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager. He also showed up in the David Hasselhoff vanity project Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD as Gabe Jones, and had further one-offs on The X-Files, Star Gate SG-1, Elementary, Grimm and The Strain. He had a recurring role on the now canceled Orville series as Admiral Tucker.
Born May 3, 1958 — Bill Sienkiewicz, 65. Comic artist especially known for his work for Marvel Comics’ Elektra, Moon Knight and New Mutants. His work on the Elektra: Assassin! six-issue series which written by Frank Miller is stellar. Finally his work with Andy Helfer on The Shadow series is superb.
Born May 3, 1965 — Michael Marshall Smith, 58. His first published story, “The Man Who Drew Cats”, won the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Story. Not stopping there, His first novel, Only Forward, won the August Derleth Award for Best Novel and the Philip K. Dick Award. He has six British Fantasy Awards in total, very impressive indeed.
Born May 3, 1969 — Daryl Mallett, 54. By now you know that I’ve a deep fascination with the nonfiction documentation of our community. This author has done a number of works doing just that including several I’d love to see including Reginald’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards: A Comprehensive Guide to the Awards and Their Winners written with Robert Reginald. He’s also written some short fiction including one story with Forrest J Ackerman that bears the charming title of “A Typical Terran’s Thought When Spoken to by an Alien from the Planet Quarn in Its Native Language“. He’s even been an actor as well appearing in several Next Gen episodes (“Encounter at Farpoint” and “Hide and Q”) and The Undiscovered Country as well, all uncredited. He also appeared in Doctor Who and The Legends Of Time, a fan film which you can see here if you wish to.
(10) COMICS SECTION.
Frazz – is built around a culture wars malaprop. (Or at least a misunderstanding.)
Jim Lee, the superstar artist-turned-publisher of DC, has added the title president to his growing list of executive designations.
Lee, re-upping his deal with DC, has been promoted to president as well as publisher and CCO of the comic book company, which is part of Warner Bros. Discovery.
The executive will continue to report to Pam Lifford, president of global brands, franchises and experiences at Warner Bros. Discovery, who announced the promotion Wednesday.
Lee, per the company, will continue in his primary role as publisher at DC, where he leads the creative teams. He will also continue to lead the creative efforts to integrate DC’s publishing portfolio of characters and stories across all media, supporting the brands and studios of WBD…
Spider Robinson’s 1983 Hugo-winning short story “Melancholy Elephants” is about a woman fighting a bill in congress which would extend copyright into perpetuity, because it would ultimately stifle humanity’s artistic creativity. (“Senator, if I try to hoard the fruits of my husband’s genius, I may cripple my race.”)
The Post article talks about musician Ed Sheeran currently being sued by a songwriter’s estate which claims that “a similar but not identical chord progression used by both songs as a principal motif” is copyrighted. The author says the effects of the estate winning would be horrible: “If artists must pay a tax for employing the most common modes and tones of composition, the process of grinding popular music down to a consensus-driven pay window for tech entrepreneurs and corporate opportunists will have reached its apotheosis.”
For the first time, scientists have caught a star in the act of swallowing a planet – not just a nibble or bite, but one big gulp.
Astronomers on Wednesday reported their observations of what appeared to be a gas giant around the size of Jupiter or bigger being eaten by its star. The sun-like star had been puffing up with old age for eons and finally got so big that it engulfed the close-orbiting planet.
It’s a gloomy preview of what will happen to Earth when our sun morphs into a red giant and gobbles the four inner planets.
“If it’s any consolation, this will happen in about 5 billion years,” said co-author Morgan MacLeod of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics….
(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Jeanne Gomoll and Scott Custis replaced their garage floor/slab with new concrete. But before that could happen, workers had to lift up the garage and move it out of the way. This timelapse video of their project is quite something.
[Thanks to Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, N., Steven French, Jo Lindsay Walton, Dan Bloch, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]
The British Science Fiction Association today announced the shortlist of nominees for the BSFA Awards, for work published in 2022. The BSFA Awards have been presented annually since 1970. The awards are voted on by members of the British Science Fiction Association and by the members of the year’s Eastercon, the national science fiction convention, held since 1955.
The winners will be announced at the Eastercon convention, “Conversation” held at the Birmingham NEC Hilton from April 7-10.
Voting by members of the BSFA will open later in March.
Finalists for the British Science Fiction Association Awards for publications in 2022.
Best Artwork
Alyssa Winans, Cover of The Red Scholar’s Wake by Aliette de Bodard, Gollancz
Manzi Jackson, Cover of Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction, Macmillan
Chris Baker, Cover of Shoreline of Infinity 32, Shoreline of Infinity
Vincent Sammy, Cover of Parsec 4, PS Publishing
Miguel Co, Cover of Song of the Mango and Other New Myths, Ateneo De Manila UP
Jay Johnstone, Cover of The Way the Light Bends, Luna Press Publishing
The British Science Fiction Association has released the longlists of nominees for the BSFA Awards for work published in 2022.
The awards are voted on by members of the British Science Fiction Association and by the members of the year’s Eastercon, the national science fiction convention. The 2023 Eastercon, Conversation, will be held in Birmingham from April 7–10, where the winners will be announced.
Influential sff critic and reviewer Maureen Kincaid Speller died September 18 of cancer. She was the Senior Reviews Editor at Strange Horizons, and Editorial Consultant for Foundation: the International Review of Science Fiction.
Active in fandom since about 1980, she wrote over the course of time as Maureen Porter, Maureen Speller, and Maureen Kincaid Speller; she was the partner of Paul Kincaid from 1986 until her death (they married in 1993).
A leader in the British Science Fiction Association, she edited its publication Matrix in the late Eighties, served as Magazine Reviews editor of Vector in the Nineties, and wrote innumerable reviews and essays for each of them. The organization mourns her loss, saying “Her diligence, wisdom and vision were instrumental in the BSFA’s continuance for several years.”
She also edited the first issue of The Gate, a quarterly science fiction semiprozine which lasted three issues (1989-1990).
Cover the The Gate #1Photo cover of Geri Sullivan’s Idea #12 showing the Minnesota State Fair expedition.
Speller was a four-time Hugo nominee, once for Best Fan Writer (1999) and three for her work on Strange Horizons (2016, 2019, 2021). She won a 1998 Nova Award, given for achievement in British fanzines, as Best Fan Writer.
In addition to the BSFA publications she worked on, Speller created her own fanzines, including Snufkin’s Bum, and Steam Engine Time co-edited with Paul Kincaid and Bruce Gillespie.
Elected the 1998 Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund delegate, she traveled to Bucconeer, the 1998 Worldcon in Baltimore, and fannish centers including Madison, Seattle, Minneapolis, and Portland. Geri Sullivan reminded friends today that Speller was “the TAFF delegate for whom TAFF-on-a-stick (a fannish outing to the Minnesota State Fair) was first invented.”
She often served as an awards judge – four years for the Arthur C. Clarke Award (1989, 1990, 1993, 1994); the Otherwise Award (2004); and the Rotsler Award (2004-2006). She also contributed reviews to the Clarke Award “Shadow” Juries of 2017 and 2018.
A great deal can be learned about the nuances of sff criticism by reading her work, partly because it was so insightful, and partly because she expressed her thoughts so clearly and concisely. One memorable example is “You’re Never Alone with a Critic – Shadowing the Clarke Award, 2018”, which says in part —
…Here’s the thing – a critic’s job is not to provide plot synopses, nor is it to tell you whether or not you’ll like a novel. It is definitely not a critic’s job to act as an unpaid publicity agent. A critic’s job is to look at the fiction itself, and to have a view about it. Critics write about all sorts of things. They think about where a text sits in relation to other works of sf, they explore themes, tease out aesthetic similarities and differences; they consider what a novel says about the world at large, and, yes, they make judgement based on their experience as informed readers….
…It took me close to 20 years to build up my reputation there as a person who did her best to make sure everyone had representation, that willful ignorance would be avoided, to be someone who was safe for anyone to speak to, to offer info, links, and some perspective that may help them as well as learn how I can improv myself, and now it is gone here with no proof and no way to defend myself. All I got was the decision of the board still stands and I still don’t have an idea of what exactly I was supposed to have said. They told me they didn’t have the recordings in the room where ever panel was recorded so unless someone is lying about the recording, I’ll never get the chance to defend myself. Unless of course, the recording is found at the last moment but to me that sounds like looking for proof of guilt than proof of evidence of innocence.
One of the last things I told them and still remains true, was that closest feeling I could aquait with being walked out of that room like that was a time when I was a teen working at a summer camp when some woman claimed that I had stolen her wallet. I was marched out of the room like the cops knew I was guilty, the accusing eyes and twisted lips, only to be let back in a few moments later with the woman happily calling out that she just misplaced her wallet and just found it in her purse and everything was all good and okay now, right? The cops kind of shrugged at me and said okay and that was it but I went into the bathroom and threw up my lunch. This was the closest I had ever come to feeling like that and I never want to feel like that again. I know would feel it again if I walked into another Balticon event….
Taos Toolbox is not going to be in Taos this year. The two-week intensive science-fiction writing workshop that Walter Jon Williams and I teach is usually held at the ski resort of Angel Fire, near Taos, New Mexico. However, the Calf Canyon/Hermit’s Peak wildfire is less than a dozen miles from Angel Fire and not yet close to being contained. Since it’s not good to incinerate workshop attendees, the workshop has moved to a hotel in Albuquerque….
Walter Jon Williams, the event’s founder, filled in the details on Facebook.
So quite a number of plans have gang agley in the last days, so I’ve been putting out fires— nearly literal fires.
Taos Toolbox, the master class for writers of science fiction and fantasy, starts this weekend, and has been held at the Angel Fire resort for the last decade or more. It’s a deluxe place in a beautiful mountain setting, and unless there’s a mountain bike rally or something, it’s not too crowded or noisy and we can concentrate on our work.
Except this year we have the Hermit’s Peak Fire, the largest wildfire in New Mexico history, over 300,000 acres and currently only 60% contained. It’s ten miles from Angel Fire, and when it gets a wind behind it, a fire can race along at 5 miles per day. Angel Fire has been at the “prepare to evacuate” stage for weeks now.
I mean, the pandemic wasn’t enough?
Now the fire is 60% contained, and the odds are Angel Fire would have been fine, but I couldn’t guarantee that. I couldn’t absolutely promise that Hermit’s Peak wouldn’t blaze up again, or that we wouldn’t have to evacuate 20 people to lodging unknown. So I moved the workshop to the Sonesta ES suite hotel in Albuquerque, which is quite luxe, offers free breakfast, and has a fine view of the semi trucks running past on the freeway….
(3) ROYALTY IN GENRE. The British Science Fiction Association anticipated Jubilee Weekend by launching this discussion topic:
It’s the run-up to Jubilee Weekend and I think it’s time for a potentially knotty question…
During the Star Wars Celebration panel “Fandom Through the Generations”, Dan Madsen – the founder of the Star Wars Celebration conventions and Star Wars Insider – called me “The Godfather of Star Wars Fandom”.
That actually felt a little weird. I suppose not entirely inaccurate. Part of my job was to take Star Wars to Fandom and to keep Lucasfilm of the mind that fans are important. But I’d never thought of it that way….
The post also contains a photo of the plaque and trophy Craig received this weekend when he was made an Honorary Member of the 501st Legion.
(5) SHOULD IT BE A PERMANENT HUGO? Trevor Quachri expands on a DisCon III panel discussion about the proposed Best Video Game Hugo in “The Play’s the Thing”, his editorial in the May/June Analog.
…So it seems straightforward: games, particularly of a “science fiction, fantasy, or related subject” bent (per the award description) deserve a permanent spot on the ballot, right?
Well, let’s hit the pause button for a moment.
Everyone on that games panel quickly stumbled over the same basic question: Given all of that background, what’s the primary criterion for judging the “best” game in a given year? And what makes the Hugo for Best Video Game different from any of the other already-existing game awards given out by fans, professional game designers, and the like? Is it a “writing in games” award? The Hugos may be primarily literary, but well-written games may not actually be the best games, taken on their own merits. (Chess, for example, isn’t a lesser game because the pieces don’t each have an elaborate backstory.)
And how do you explain what makes a good game to folks unfamiliar with them? Games are built from readily-understandable art to one degree or another—the graphics are art; the music is art; voice acting is acting, which is art; and yes, the stories in games are art—but the thing that makes games unique—the game part—isn’t so easily grasped….
Cora Buhlert is a prolific indie author, champion of independent publishing, blogger, pulp historian as well as a teacher and translator. Based in Germany, her sci-fi writing and reviews are primarily in English but she is also a tireless ambassador for science fiction from beyond the insular English speaking perspective on the genre.
When Did the History of Published African SFF Begin?
Tricky. And there is probably no right answer since publishing from early colonial Africa was problematic and it depends on what you define as SFF. I’ve arbitrarily limited my scope to works published between 1921 and 2021, even though I don’t have any entries from 1921. Why 100 years? To quote Geoff Ryman: Because it’s easy to remember. And the first entry in the database is Cameroonian Jean-Louis Njemba Medou’s Nnanga Kon, a novel published in 1932 in Bulu. I suppose that’s as good a point as any to start. However, that’s only one way to look at things. Another is to observe the rapid increase in published works that begins in 2011, peaks in 2016, and has somewhat stabilized since (although this could simply reflect my inability to keep up with documenting new works).
(8) COVID TRACKING. Balticon 56’s “Covid Reports” page lists five attendees who report they have tested positive.
This page will continue to be updated as COVID-19 positive tests are reported after the con. If you attended Balticon in person and have a positive test result before June 15th, please email covid@balticon.org.
…Last weekend was a benefit auction for the Ad Astra Center, held at ConQuest, the KC SF convention, this was fantastic fun: we had a great team of six people, and ended up with more than 300 auction items, and made (we think) close to $3000, which is pretty extraordinary, considering this was a small con this year. (I also was on panels with Fonda Lee, Katherine Forrister, and other cool people.) Chris McKitterick and I had a chance to talk about what Ad Astra is looking forward to doing, and I am ever more excited by what’s going to be possible….
(10) SHALLOW ROOTS. Abigail Nussbaum says there’s a reason for the sense of sameness in the series’ second season in “Love, Death, Robots, but no Women” at Lawyers, Guns & Money.
…There have been thirty-five Love, Death + Robots episodes. Something like thirty of them are based on a previously-published short stories. Only one of those stories is by a woman. (Also, only one of those stories—not the same one—is by a person of color.) And frankly, that’s not only reprehensible in its own right, but it tells in the final product. There’s a certain laddishness to the stories the show chooses to tell, a disinterest in the inner life of anyone but manly, taciturn men. Bug hunt stories abound, and despite the show identifying itself as science fiction, there is no shortage of episodes that are just plain horror, whose appeal seems primarily to be watching a lot of people get torn to bits cinematically (“The Secret War” in season 1; “The Tall Grass”, season 2; “Bad Traveling”, season 3). Though some episodes have female protagonists, there are also a lot of stories where women exist to be ogled (“The Witness”, season 1) or fucked (“Beyond the Aquilla Rift”, season 1; “Snow in the Desert”, season 2).
I watched the recently-released third season over the last couple of evenings and was not impressed….
Folks, I am somewhat flabbergasted to report that the fourth season of Stranger Things – a show that I would previously have described as “derivative fun, if you don’t think about it too hard” – is not only its best, but genuinely good TV. There are some caveats to this claim – the last two episodes haven’t been released yet, and the protracted episode runtimes (ranging from 63 to 98 minutes) are impossible to justify – though for the most part the show wears them pretty lightly. But even so, this sort of thing just doesn’t happen….
(12) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.
1984 – [By Cat Eldridge.] I still remember The Dune Encyclopedia fondly as it is an amazing creation. Published by Berkley thirty-eight years ago, it was written by Willis E. McNelly and forty-two other individuals not as a work of non-fiction but rather as an in-universe work. Everything in it was something that was supposed to actually be true. It was edited by Hadi Benotto, an archaeologist you’ll find in God Emperor of Dune and Heretics of Dune.
It was authorized by Herbert, who considered it canon, and went into detail such things as character biographies, looks at the worlds in that universe, a look at the spice melange, how such things as the stillsuits and the heighliners of the Spacing Guild function.
Herbert wrote the foreword to The Dune Encyclopedia and said: “Here is a rich background (and foreground) for the Dune Chronicles, including scholarly bypaths and amusing sidelights. Some of the contributions are sure to arouse controversy, based as they are on questionable sources … I must confess that I found it fascinating to re-enter here some of the sources on which the Chronicles are built. As the first ‘Dune fan’, I give this encyclopedia my delighted approval, although I hold my own counsel on some of the issues still to be explored as the Chronicles unfold.”
Brian Herbert later, being the, well, I can’t use the word I want to use, declared everything here non-canon. That allowed him to write anything he wanted to in the novels he and Kevin J. Anderson have putting out by the armload. He even said his father never intended it to be canon.
If you’d like to purchase a copy today, it’ll cost you dearly, particularly in hardcover. A good copy is now running around two hundred and fifty dollars.
(13) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born June 1, 1926 — Andy Griffith. His most notable SFF genre credit is as Harry Broderick on the late Seventies Salvage I which lasted for two short seasons. Actually that was it, other than a one-off on The Bionic Woman. It’s streaming for free on Crackle whatever the Frelling that is. (Died 2012.)
Born June 1, 1928 — Janet Grahame Johnstone, and Anne Grahame Johnstone. British twin sisters who were children’s book illustrators best remembered for their prolific artwork and for illustrating Dodie Smith’s The Hundred and One Dalmatians. They were always more popular with the public than they were with the critics who consider them twee. (Janet died 1979. Anne died 1988.)
Born June 1, 1940 — René Auberjonois. Odo on DS9. He’s shown up on a number of genre productions including Wonder Woman, The Outer Limits, Night Gallery, The Bionic Woman, Batman Forever, King Kong, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Enterprise, Stargate SG-1 and Warehouse 13. He’s lent both his voice and likeness to gaming productions in recent years, and has done voice work for the animated Green Lantern and Justice League series. He directed eight episodes of DS9. And he wrote a lot of novels, none of which I’ve read. Has anyone here read any of them? (Died 2019.)
Born June 1, 1947 — Jonathan Pryce, 75. I remember him best as the unnamed bureaucrat in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. He’s had a long career in genre works including Brazil, Something Wicked This Way Comes as Mr. Dark himself, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End as Governor Weatherby Swann, The Brothers Grimm, in the G.I. Joe films as the U.S. President and most recently in The Man Who Killed Don Quixote as Don Quixote.
Born June 1, 1948 — Powers Boothe. Though not genre, he played saloon owner Cy Tolliver on the Deadwood series, and “Curly Bill” Brocius in Tombstone, one of my favorite films. Now genre wise, he’s in the animated Superman: Brainiac Attacks voicing Lex Luthor, The Avengers as Gideon Malick, Gorilla Grodd and Red Tornado in Justice League and Justice League Unlimited and a recurring role as Gideon Malick in the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. series. (Died 2017.)
Born June 1, 1954 — Michael P. Kube-McDowell, 68. A filker which gets major points in my book. And yes, I’m stalling while I try to remember what of his I’ve read. I’m reasonably sure I’ve read both of his Isaac Asimov’s Robot City novels, and now I can recall reading Alternities as well. God, it’s been at least twenty years since I read him which I thought odd, but then I noticed at ISFDB that he hasn’t published a novel in that long.
Born June 1, 1966 — David Dean Oberhelman. Another one who died far too young. Mike has an appreciation of him here. The Intersection of Fantasy and Native America: From H.P. Lovecraft to Leslie Marmon Silko which he co-wrote with Amy H. Sturgis was published by The Mythopoeic Press. ISFDB lists just one genre essay by him, “From Iberian to Ibran and Catholic to Quintarian”, printed in Lois McMaster Bujold: Essays on a Modern Master of Science Fiction and Fantasy. (Died 2018.)
Born June 1, 1996 — Tom Holland, 26. He’s known for playing Spider-Man in five films: Captain America: Civil War, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Avengers: Infinity War,Avengers: Endgame, and the recently out Spider-Man: Far From Home.
In February of this year, Amazon finally completed its consumption of the once independent app for downloading comics, Comixology. Amazon had acquired the app way back in 2013, and apart from removing the ability to buy comics directly from the app, it left it untouched for nearly a decade. But this year, Amazon changed things — incorporating Comixology’s digital marketplace directly into the Kindle ecosystem and totally redesigning the Comixology app. It has taken two distinct mediums — digital comics and digital books — and smashed them together into an unholy blob of content that is worse in every single way. Apparently, if you let one company acquire a near-monopoly in the digital books and comics spaces, it will do terrible things that make the experience worse….
…The new Comixology app is largely just… annoying. That’s the best word for it. Everything you need is still there, but the design isn’t really intuitive, and it can make a large collection of comics (I’ve been using Comixology since 2011) difficult to navigate. It feels sort of like when you go to the grocery store after they move aisles around. Everything is still there, but the change feels so dramatic after years of the familiar.
But where my local Food Bazaar will helpfully label the aisles, Comixology has not. There are no clear labels for useful built-in tools like its “Guided View,” which is designed to fluidly move you from panel to panel with a swipe instead of having each page take up the whole display. The Guided View is still there, but the clear explanation of what it is or how to use it is gone. You access it by double-tapping — which I only know because I was trying to access the menu to leave the book.
(15) CONFRONTING THE BLANK PAGE. Neil Clarke wrestles with the question of what he should be doing in his monthly Clarkesworld editorial: “Managing This Expectation”. He posits several ideas – here are two of them.
…Or perhaps, I’m filing a report of “criminal” acts? Earlier this week I was the victim of an ageist attack suggesting that I was “too old to be editing one of the leading science fiction magazines” and I should “get out of the way” so someone younger can do it. I’m only fifty-five, not the oldest editor I know, and not about to give up the magazine I started over one person’s disrespectful opinion on the matter. Their punishment is measured by the amount of time I continue to edit Clarkesworld.
Could be that it’s like being a referee, outlining how we’d like to see the game played? It’s perfectly fair to criticize or celebrate the finalists or winners of any award. Science fiction is a broad field with a variety of styles that might not appeal to everyone and the awards will reflect some of that. It’s only natural to be thrilled or disappointed when your favorite player wins, loses, or is benched. That said, we want a fair fight here. There should be no punching below the belt–criticizing or campaigning against based on anything other than the work they’ve done….
(16) FANTASY ART ON EXHIBIT. [Item by Bill.] The Hunter Museum of Art in Chattanooga, TN is holding this exhibition through September 5: “Enchanted: A History of Fantasy Illustration”.
For hundreds of years, artists have been inspired by the imaginative potential of fantasy. Unlike science fiction, which is based on fact, fantasy presents an impossible reality—a universe where dragons breathe fire, angels battle demons, and magicians weave spells. Enchanted offers a thoughtful appraisal of how artists from the early 20th century to the present have brought to life myths, fairy tales, and modern epics like Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones. Featuring nearly 100 artworks, the exhibition explores Greek myths, Arthurian Legends, fairy tales, and modern superheroes.
The Hunter’s description of the event isn’t much, and a better one can be found here at the Norman Rockwell Museum, which organized the event.
If you can’t make it to Chattanooga, the exhibition is also travelling to Flint, MI and will be on display at the Flint Institute of Arts from September 24, 2022 – January 8, 2023.
…On the internet, Vox Day summarizes the alt-right – to which he avoids being directly attached – as the defense of “the existence of the white man and the future of white children”. The blogger also confesses a certain admiration for Adolf Hitler. “National Socialism is not only human logic, it is also much more logical and true than communism, feminism or secular Zionism,” the Minnesota-born American writes on his blog. …
Here it is! My analysis of the metaphors hidden in Everything Everywhere At at Once. Did you know why Michelle Yeoh put a googly eye on herself? Let’s find out!
(20) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In “Honest Game Trailers: Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodhunt,” Fandom Games says while earlier installments of this franchise “turned a bunch of nerds into enerds wearing eye shadow,” this installment is “the latest in the ‘kill people in a rapidly shrinking circle genre.” The narrator thinks the game is boring and says, “call me when Bloodhunt has Ariana Grande and industrial dancing!”
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Bill, N., John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Andrew Porter, and Michael Toman for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Maytree.]
The British Science Fiction Association today announced the winners of the 2021 BSFA Awards.
The awards are voted on by members of the British Science Fiction Association and by the members of the year’s Eastercon, the national science fiction convention, held since 1955.
The BSFA Awards have been presented annually since 1970. This year marks the launch of a new category, the Best Book for Younger Readers.
