The winner of the 2024 Mike Resnick Memorial Award for the best unpublished science fiction short story by a new author was announced at Dragon Con on September 1.
The award is sponsored by Galaxy’s Edge (published by Arc Manor) and Dragon Con. It was presented during the annual Dragon Awards ceremony.
The winner is:
“When I was Your Age” by Sam Brown
The first place winner gets a trophy, a cash award of $250 and has their story bought (at the magazine’s prevailing rate) by Galaxy’s Edge for publication in the magazine. The second place winner will be given a prize of $100 and the third place winner a prize of $50. The names of the runners up were not available as of this writing.
The members of the finalist judging panel were Lezli Robyn, Sheree Renée Thomas, Jody Lynn Nye, and William B. Fawcett.
Galaxy’s Edge editor Lezli Robyn announced today that after a decade of keeping a bi-monthly schedule as a magazine, by the end of 2023 the publication will become a bi-annual anthology book series.
Issue 60 came out in November, and there will be two more issues in the current format. The first volume of the anthology book series will appear at the end of 2023.
Editor Robyn’s press release adds these details:
…Not only will we continue to bring you the fiction our readers have grown to love so much, but this new format will make it easier to get into brick-and-mortar bookstores through a full-service distributor. It will also allow us to raise the rates we pay our authors as well as give us greater flexibility to buy more novelettes and novellas, which has been restricted by the current format.
We’ll have a submission system that will open twice a year for the anthologies, and stories currently in the magazine system will also be considered for future anthologies. I have made some rewrite requests and selected to buy numerous stories in the past few months, and I will be contacting authors by February 1st with information about which issue of the magazine or anthology their story will appear in and will follow up with the edits or contracts applicable. We appreciate a little grace period as we transition to the exciting new format!
(1) WHAT’S SPACE OPERA, DOC? Grant Wythoff tries to learn how authors are defining it: “What Is Space Opera in the 2020s?” at LA Review of Books.
In an afterword to Far from the Light of Heaven, [Tade] Thompson asks himself if he’s writing space opera — “a conversation my editor, my agent, my cat and I had many times” — and if so, what would the tropes of that subgenre bring to his work. As a practicing psychiatrist who somehow manages another full-time career as a novelist, Thompson has shared in interviews that he’s fascinated by “flawed people in interesting circumstances.” So, when he chooses space as the setting for this story, it seems to be a choice that grants his characters unique affects and experiences that wouldn’t be possible elsewhere: a backdrop, albeit an incredibly detailed and vivid one. But Thompson also acknowledges the problematic roots of spaceflight among Nazi scientists and military weapons programs: “We can’t erase the murderous origins just because we can see the first sunsets from Mars.” And so throughout the work, you can feel the characters engaging with the ethically compromised origins of the space sublime. Again, from the afterword: “I try to lean away from aliens being Other because that’s tied up with colonialist thinking. It’s one of the reasons I tried to avoid empires and massive space battles. I just have people who want to survive in the wider universe.”
Bitter Karella is a game designer, comic writer, video making and social media satirist with an insightful perspective on horror, science fiction and fantasy (but in particular horror). Her break out hit has been the satirical Twitter account The Midnight Society (aka Midnight Pals), which imagines some of the great names of horror (from Edgar Allen Poe to Dean Koontz) as teenage campers who tell horror stories around a campfire….
(3) FUNDRAISER. And Bitter Karella is raising money to attend the Worldcon: “Send BitterKarella to Chicon 8!!” at itch.io. You can buy individual books, or a whole bundle of 8 books for $44.
Bitter Karella needs has been nominated for a Hugo Award for best fan writer and she wants to go to Chicon 8 in September to accept (or possibly lose) his award in person! But it turns out that going to Chicon is, as we say here in the hellscape of nocal, hella expensive… so we’re raising money to cover trip expenses including con registration, plane fare, and lodgings! Just look at all this great merchandise you can get half off and know that you’re helping Bitter Karella get money!! Thanks for your consideration!
This includes the board for the Midnight Pals game, however, Karella wants you to know in advance, “This is a a joke and NOT an actual playable board game.” But it’s only a buck!
ILLUMINART – The Doctor Who Art of Andrew Skilleter, offered in two editions, will showcase the work from a career of over fifty years in the publishing industry, spanning work for a huge range of publishers and publications, including Target Books and Doctor Who Magazine.
This new collection is the first volume of a trilogy, that will cover not only most of the artist’s Doctor Who art, but many unpublished and unseen commissions, his “Hidden Dimensions”, together with some personally selected pieces from his extensive canon of work in other genres, such as Star Wars, Dan Dare, Gerry Anderson, BBC Video and Audio and much more.
Every picture tells a story and Andrew has quite a few to tell!
(5) CON COVID. Balticon yesterday reported they had a case of an attendee testing Covid-positive: “Covid Reports – Balticon 56”.
We wanted to let you know we’ve had one reported case.
Case A: – Received positive test results on Sunday 29 May 9:40 am
They are symptomatic
They are fully vaccinated and remained masked
They staffed the Discon Follow-Up Post-Con Fan Table
I’ve always had a weakness for stories that defy categorization, especially if they happen to include fantasy and romance. Sarah Gailey’s Magic for Liars is an excellent example; Tamsyn Muir’s captivating and beautifully strange Gideon the Ninth is another; Naomi Novik’s fabulous Scholomance series is a third. When I began writing Payback’s a Witch, I originally intended it to read as a more traditional rom-com, primarily a romance that just happened to revolve around two bisexual witches falling in love in a magical, Salem-inspired Halloweentown. The magic was initially intended to be a background element rather than a focal point of the plot. Something to add a little shimmer without detracting from the central romance.
The problem was, I’d forgotten that I was going to be the one doing the writing, and that I’m constitutionally incapable of stories that don’t feature Big Magic….
(7) WISCON 2023. Next year’s WisCon guests of honor. Thread starts here.
1992 – [By Cat Eldridge.] This is an appreciation of Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book which came out thirty years ago. This is nor a critical look at a novel, but a fan looking at a book. So grab a cup of your favorite beverage and we’ll get started.
As you know, Doomsday Book shared the Hugo at ConFranciso with Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep (Mike Glyer’s comments here about that shared Hugo would lead to Jo Walton writing An Informal History of the Hugos) and would also win a Nebula and a Locus Best SF Novel Award. It was nominated for a Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature and an Arthur C. Clarke Award as well. Quite an honor indeed.
It’s part of her excellent Time Travel series which all four parts would win the Hugo (including the novelette Fire Watch, and the diptych novels Blackout / All Clear) making her the first author to win Hugo awards for all works in a series. It was set fifty years in the future, a decent span of time but still one that feels conceivable.
And I’m always fascinated by any SFF narrative set at a University as it’s hard to make that setting feel proper. Willis does in my opinion as one who spent too much time as an undergrad and grad student at various universities a spot-on job of capturing the feel of University culture.
So why do I like this book? Because it handles time travel intelligently, something that is rare in SFF and the characters are all interesting. And I really love series, so I am very happy that it’s part of the Time Travel series.
Given it deals with two serious Pandemics, it probably not the best novel to read right now…
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born May 30, 1908 — Mel Blanc. Where to begin? Yes he delightfully voiced Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and a multitude of other characters from the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons. Blanc made his debut in 1940 “A Wild Hare”. Did you know that he created the voice and laugh of Woody Woodpecker but stopped doing it after the first three shorts as he was signed then to an exclusive Warner contract? His laughs did continue to get used however. Blanc, aware of his talents, fiercely protected the rights to his voice characterizations contractually and legally. (Died 1989.)
Born May 30, 1914 — Bruce Elliott. His fifteen stories in The Shadow magazine in the late Forties are generally held in low esteem by Shadow fans because of his handling of the character, best noted by the three stories in which the Shadow does not appear at all in his costumed identity. Oh the horror! He also wrote three genre novels — The Planet of Shame, Asylum Earth and, errr, The Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck. And he had stories in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction including “Wolves Don’t Cry” and “The Last Magician”. (Died 1973.)
Born May 30, 1922 — Hal Clement. Much to my surprise, his only Hugo was a Retro Hugo for a short story, “Uncommon Sense” which he got at L.A. Con III. He did get the First Fandom Award. My favorite novel by him is Mission of Gravity, and I’m also fond of The Best of Hal Clement which collects much of his wonderful short work. He’s reasonably well stocked at the usual suspects. (Died 2003.)
Born May 30, 1936 — Keir Dullea, 86. David Bowman in 2001: A Space Odyssey and its sequel, 2010: The Year We Make Contact. I know I saw 2001 several times and loved it but I’ll be damned if I can remember seeing 2010. He’s done a number of other genre films, Brave New World, Space Station 76, Valley of the Gods and Fahrenheit 451. And lest we forget he was Devon in “Cordwainer Bird’s” Starlost.
Born May 30, 1948 — Michael Piller. He was a writer and Executive Producer of The Next Generation, and co-creator of Deep Space Nine and Voyager. He’s likely best known for co-writing “The Best of Both Worlds” and the pilots of DS9 (“Emissary”) and Voyager (“Caretaker”). Post-Trek, he developed a series that last six seasons based off of Stephen King’s novel The Dead Zone, and he had a deal with WB for a series called Day One, a post-apocalyptic series based on the UK Last Train series. WB reneged on the contract. (Died 2005.)
Born May 30, 1952 — Mike W. Barr, 70. A writer of comic books, mystery novels, and science fiction novels. He written Trek fiction for the first series in either comic book form or other media. My favorite work by him is for DC, the Camelot 3000 series. He wrote one episode of Batman: The Animated Series, “Paging the Crime Doctor”.
Born May 30, 1953 — Colm Meaney, 69. Best known for playing Miles O’Brien in Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. Other genre roles include an unnamed Cop at Tess’s in Dick Tracy, Seamus Muldoon in The Magical Legend of the Leprechauns, a recurring role as Chief Cowen on Stargate Atlantis and Father Francis on Tolkien.
Born May 30, 1971 — Duncan Jones, 51. Director whose films include Moon (2009) which won a Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation-Long Form and a BAFTA Award for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer, and Source Code (2011) which was nominated for both a Hugo and a Ray Bradbury Award. He also directed Warcraft (2016), the highest grossing video game adoption of all time. He is totally not best known for being David Bowie’s son. (Alan Baumler)
(11) UPROAR. [Item by Hampus Eckerman.] There’s a scandal brewing in the comics community. Turns out the Toronto Comics Art Festival has invited Pink Cat as a guest.
Apart from Pink Cat being an NFT artist and disliked for that, it seems like she is also accused of stealing other peoples art, tracing the outlines and making it hers.
Seems the festival has observed this and will give a response.
Molly Odintz: As a followup, is the gothic a particularly potent place for feminist stories?
Sarai Walker: There are so many powerful stories by women that could be described as feminist gothic, including classics like Jane Eyre and “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and also Southern Gothic fiction about women from authors such as Carson McCullers and Toni Morrison. So I think writers today can build on that legacy. The gothic is a powerful form for exploring trauma and what has been repressed, so that makes it ideal for telling feminist stories. Using the gothic form to tell a political story is what excited me as I wrote The Cherry Robbers, even though the story is wrapped up in a pretty and spooky package, which might not seem overtly political to readers. It works in a stealthy way….
(13) JEOPARDY! Andrew Porter was tuned in to a wrong response on tonight’s episode of Jeopardy!
Category: The Animal in Its Logo
Answer: Paperback publisher Pocket Books
Wrong question: What is a penguin?
Right question: What is a kangaroo?
(14) RO, RO, RO YOUR BOT. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] As labor shortages continue in many industries, more managers seem to be turning to robots to keep the ship of commerce moving forward. Robot/automation orders are said to be up 21% for the year 2021 & 40% for the first quarter of 2022. “Robot Orders up 40% As Employers Seek Relief From Labor Shortage” reports Business Insider.
…”The robots are becoming easier to use,” Michael Cicco, chief executive officer of industrial robot provider Fanuc America, told the Wall Street Journal. “Companies used to think that automation was too hard or too expensive to implement.”
But as robot usage climbs, some have expressed concern about the machines displacing human workers as the labor crisis eventually eases….
(15) LOGAN’S WORLD CONTINUES. Kwelengsen Dawn: Book Two of the Logan’s World Series by David M. Kelly (Nemesis Press) will be released on June 7.
When you lose everything you love, the whole world becomes the enemy.
After his planet was invaded by ruthless Corporate forces, engineer Logan Twofeathers is trapped on Earth by the authorities, who are more afraid of starting a war than helping their people. He may be safe, but many others are still missing.
After his planet was invaded by ruthless Corporate forces, engineer Logan Twofeathers is trapped on Earth by the authorities, who are more afraid of starting a war than helping their people. He may be safe, but many others are still missing.
When security tries to arrest him on trumped-up charges, he must find his own way to return to Kwelengsen. His only option is to seek out someone from his past–a borderline psychotic, who might just be crazy enough to help.
Now, he must draw on all his strength and resilience as he undertakes a precarious and violent journey into the unknown, with enemies lurking in every shadow. The outlook is bleak, and all he has is his grit and sense of honor. Will that be enough?
The battle is over. But the war is about to begin.
(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] I watched this video from Wendover Productions about the Galaxy’s Edge section of Disney World, which has lots of good background on the battle between Disney and Universal. Disney nearly landed the Harry Potter rights in 2004 but balked at the cost and giving J.K. Rowling creative control. But Rowling’s views were the right ones because the Harry Potter section of Universal is immersive in a way that no ride at Disney was at the time. So they decided to outdo Harry Potter with Galaxy’s Edge. The goal is to attract Millennials who will post about thir experiences on social media, because a testimonial is more effective advertising than any ad. Also there’s no humor in Galaxy’s Edge because humor works only once and the goal is to have people keep coming back and spending $$$$$. “How to Design a Theme Park (To Take Tons of Your Money)”.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Kathy Sullivan, Hampus Eckerman, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jayn.]
The finalists for the inaugural Mike Resnick Memorial Award for the best unpublished science fiction short story by a new author have been announced.
The award is sponsored by Galaxy’s Edge (published by Arc Manor) and Dragon Con, and will be presented at Dragon Con during the annual Dragon Awards ceremony.
The finalists are:
Lucas Carroll-Garrett: Hive at the Dead Star
Shirley Song: Times, Needles, and Gravity
Z. T. Bright: The Measure of a Mother’s Love
Christopher Henckel: Echoes of Gelise
Torion Oey: Feel
The first place winner will get a trophy, a cash award of $250 and have their story bought (at the magazine’s prevailing rate) by Galaxy’s Edge for publication in the magazine. The second place winner will be given a prize of $100 and the third place winner a prize of $50.
The four runners-ups will have their stories displayed on the Galaxy’s Edge website for a period of two-months.
The shortlist will be judged by Nancy Kress, Sheree Renee Thomas, Jody Lynn Nye, Lois McMaster Bujold and William B. Fawcett.
Submissions for next year’s award are now being taken. The deadline to enter is April 15, 2022.
Laura Resnick announced on Facebook today that Shahid Mahmud, publisher of Galaxy’s Edge and Arc Manor Books, is launching the Mike Resnick Memorial Award for Short Fiction. “In keeping with Mike’s philosophy of helping new writers, the award will be for short works by new writers.”
The award for the best unpublished science fiction short story by a new author will be presented at Dragon Con during the annual Dragon Awards ceremony.
New Author (definition): An author who has not had any work (including short stories, novelettes, novellas and novels) published by any of the professional publishers listed by SFWA as an “eligible” publishing venue.
Eligibility: New science fiction short story by a new author. The story must not have previously been released to the public via any means, including online, digital, or paper publications, or privately through such avenues as newsletters, Patreon and the like. This award is exclusively for science fiction stories, not any other form of speculative genres (including fantasy and horror) and Arc Manor (the publisher of Galaxy’s Edge magazine) will be the final decider of this criteria in case of any disputes.
It will be a juried award. Stories may be submitted between January 1, 2021 and April 30, 2021. Full guidelines are on the award website here,
The first place winner will get a trophy, a cash award of $250 and have their story bought (at the magazine’s prevailing rate) by Galaxy’s Edge for publication in the magazine.
Four runners-ups will have their stories displayed on the Galaxy’s Edge website for a period of two-months.
The winners of the 62nd
GRAMMY Awards included two composers of interest to Filers:
60.
Best Score Soundtrack For Visual Media Award to Composer(s) for an original score created specifically for, or as a
companion to, a current legitimate motion picture, television show or series,
video games or other visual media.
CHERNOBYL Hildur Guðnadóttir, composer
62.
Best Instrumental Composition A Composer’s Award for an original composition (not an adaptation) first
released during the Eligibility Year. Singles or Tracks only.
STAR WARS: GALAXY’S EDGE SYMPHONIC SUITE John Williams, composer (John Williams)
The world still thought Coriolanus rich, but his only real currency was charm, which he spread liberally as he made his way through the crowd. Faces lit up as he gave friendly hellos to students and teachers alike, asking about family members, dropping compliments here and there. “Your lecture on district retaliation haunts me.” “Love the bangs!” “How did your mother’s back surgery go? Well, tell her she’s my hero.”
(2) HELP NAME THE ROVER. NASA’s Name the Rover contest—for their next Mars
rover—has published its list of nine finalists. Students around the
country sent in over 28,000 essays supporting their suggested names.
Now the public is invited to chime in — “You Can
Help Name the Mars 2020 Rover!” The polls are open for another five
days. Each finalist comes with a
link to the essay describing why the nominators think it should win.
(3) NEW EDITOR. Galaxy’s
Edge publisher, Shahid Mahmud, has
announced Lezli Robyn will take over as editor.
As many of you know, Mike Resnick passed away recently.
He pretty much single handedly created this magazine with the aim to give writers, particularly newer writers, a new venue for their stories. He was known in the industry as someone who loved helping younger aspiring authors and there is a large group of writers out there who proudly call themselves Mike’s Writer Children.
One of his writer children was Lezli Robyn, who also works for me as my assistant publisher. During the last year she also helped Mike with the magazine, particularly as his illness started taking a greater toll on his health.
Lezli is an award-winning writer in her own right and has also collaborated with Mike on a number of stories. She will now be taking over as editor of the magazine. I know Mike was very pleased with that decision…to have someone who was very close to him take over something he put so much of his heart into.
Since the two of them were working together on the magazine for the last few months, the transition should be smooth and we expect issue 43 to be available on time, on March 1, 2020.
(4) GALLERY OF HUGO ELIGIBLE ARTISTS. Rocket Stack Rank has
posted their annual gallery of pro artists who are
eligible for the Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist. “2020 Professional Artists”.
It has 300+ images from 100+ pro artists whose art was
used for short fiction, magazine covers, and novel covers.
However, there is this note –
Thumbnail images with a highlighted link are professional works done in 2019. Thumbnails without a highlighted link were done earlier (shown in last year’s list), later (show in next year’s list) or fan art (published in a semi-prozine) and included to give more examples of the artist’s style.
(5) STET, I REPEAT, STET. Ursula Vernon fights back against
the Copyedits of Doom. Thread starts here.
I just wrote "STET and shame on you" so that's where we're at now.
6) All this being said, Copyeditor Wot Thinks They’re A Co-Author is a known phenomenon. (I don’t think that’s what happened here, actually, but I’ve had that one too.) This must be crushed immediately and with prejudice lest, like the Joker, they escape and harm others.
7) Always remember, your editor bought the book because they liked what you wrote. If the copyeditor is rampaging through that rather than just sprinkling magic correction dust and catching little glitches, they are probably not doing what the editor wants.
It’s fine with me if the thriller pace slows down. I like your meditative stuff. so nice to have you doing real SF again! “Slash is electric once more.”
I love how Netherton is expecting to be in a superhero iron man peripheral, and then it’s squat and small, like part of an oil filled radiator. He’s a good anti hero, and you have fun tormenting him. He still works as a character being sober, still has the same outside attitude. When I had my character Sta-Hi be sober in Realware, some of my older fans were mad about it, grumbled that “Rucker has gone religious, he’s no fun anymore, etc.” But if they’d notice, Sta-Hi stays exactly as crazy as before, as does Netherton.
WG===
For me, what took over for Netherton in this book was his co-parenting! My first POV character with a baby to take care of! When I discovered how different that felt to write, I guess I decided to roll with it, getting some perverse satisfaction out of imagining poor fuckers who bought the book in an airport, just before jumping on an 8-hour flight, expecting to get the generic thriller hand-job, and bang, they’re parenting!
(7) VOTING AGAINST THE MUTANT REGISTRATION ACT. The National
Post’s “Rookies
of Parliament Hill” spotlights a new Canadian legislator with a link to
X-Men.
Lenore Zann, best known to the SFF community as the voice of Rogue in the classic X-Men cartoon series of the 1990s has a new role: as a legislator in the Canadian parliament. The 61-year-old actress was elected last autumn as part of the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau.
“X-Men is a deep show about deep themes that are universal. They’re almost like our Greek gods and goddesses — they’re like mythology for young people,” said Zann. “I sit on a plane watching what people are looking at on their TV screens in front of them. Most of them are watching stuff like that.”
Born in North Wales, Jones read English at Oxford University, where he met his long-term collaborator and friend, Michael Palin. The two would star together in the college’s comedy troupe The Oxford Revue, and after graduation, they appeared in the 1967 TV sketch comedy Twice a Fortnight.
Two years later, they created The Complete and Utter History of Britain, which featured comedy sketches from history as if TV had been around at the time. It was on the show Do Not Adjust Your Set where they would be introduced to fellow comic Eric Idle, who had starred alongside John Cleese and Graham Chapman in productions mounted by the Cambridge University theatrical club the Footlights.
The five — together with Terry Gilliam, whom Cleese had met in New York — would quickly pool their talents for a new show. Monty Python’s Flying Circus was born and ran on the BBC for four seasons between 1969 and 1974, with Jones driving much of the show’s early innovation.
Jones is a noted history buff who has written on Chaucer and hosted a number of documentaries, including one on the Crusades. He directed Life of Brian and Monty Python’s the Meaning of Life; apart from Monty Python he has directed the films Erik the Viking and The Wind in the Willows and written several children’s books. The son of a bank clerk, he was born in North Wales and attended Oxford University. He and his wife, a biochemist, live in London and have a son and a daughter. Jones regularly appeared nude (playing the organ) in the opening credits of the Monty Python television series; he also played the obscenely fat, vomit-spewing Mr. Creosote in The Meaning of Life.
36 years ago I met Terry Jones. I was meant to interview him. I asked for tea, so he opened a bottle of Chablis & got me drunk. He was funny, brilliant and honest. He was irrepressible and is seen here repressing the very young me. Rest in Peace, Terry. You were an inspiration. pic.twitter.com/fNBJZwOFcX
January 22, 2000 — Cleopatra 2525 first aired in syndication. It was created by R.J. Stewart and Robert G. Tapert. Many who aired it do so as part of the Back2Back Action Hour, along with Jack of All Trades. The primary cast of this SF with chicks not wearing much series was Gina Torres of later Firefly fame, Victoria Pratt and Jennifer Sky. (A sexist statement? We think you should take a look at the show.) it would last two seasons and twenty episodes, six episodes longer than Jack of All Trades. (Chicks rule?) it gets a 100% rating by its reviewers at a Rotten Tomatoes though the aggregate critics score is a much lower 40%.
January 22, 1984 — Airwolf would premiere on CBS where it would run for three seasons before ending its run on USA with a fourth season. Airwolf was created by Donald P. Bellisario who was also behind Quantum Leap and Tales of The Golden Monkey, two other SFF series. It starred Jan-Michael Vincent, Jean Bruce Scott. Ernest Borgnine, and Alex Cord. It airs sporadically in syndication and apparently has not developed enough of a following to get a Rotten Tomatoes rating.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born January 22, 1858 — Charles H. M. Kerr. He’s best remembered for illustrating the pulp novels of H. Rider Haggard. Some of his other genre-specific work includes the Andrew Lang-edited The True Story Book, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Wrong Box and Arthur Conan Doyle‘s “The Sign of the Four”. You can see the one of the H. Rider Haggard novels he did here. (Died 1907.)
Born January 22, 1906 — Robert E. Howard. He’s best remembered for his characters Conan the Barbarian and Solomon Kane, less so for Kull, and is widely regarded as the father of the sword and sorcery subgenre. His Cthulhu mythos stories are quite good. I believe all of these were published in Weird Tales. If you’re interested in reading him on your slate, you’re in luck as all the ebook publishers are deep stockers of him at very reasonable prices. (Died 1936.)
Born January 22, 1925 — Katherine MacLean. She received a Nebula Award for “The Missing Man” novella originally published in Analog, March of 1971. She was a Professional Guest of Honor at the first WisCon. Short fiction was her forte and her two collections, The Diploids and Other Flights of Fancy and The Trouble with You Earth People, are brilliant. I can’t speak to her three novels, all written in the Seventies and now out of print, as I’ve not read them. (Died 2019.)
Born January 22, 1940 — John Hurt. I rarely grieve over the death of one individual but his death really stung. I liked him. It’s rare that someone comes along like Hurt who is both talented and is genuinely good person that’s easy to like. If we count his role as Tom Rawlings in The Ghoul, Hurt had an almost fifty-year span in genre films and series. He next did voice work in Watership Down as General Woundwort and in The Lord of the Rings as the voice of Aragon before appearing as Kane, the first victim, in Alien. Though not genre, I must comment his role as Joseph Merrick in The Elephant Man — simply remarkable. He had the lead as Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four and had a cameo as that character in Spaceballs. He narrates Roger Corman’s Frankenstein Unbound and will later be one of two of the narrators of Jim Henson’s The Storyteller. That role is simply magnificent. Ok, I’m just at 1994. He’s about to be S.R. Hadden in Contact. Did you remember he played Garrick Ollivander In Harry Potter films? You certainly remember him as Trevor Bruttenholm in the Hellboy films, all four of them in total. He’s in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull as Dr. Harold Oxley, one of the few decent things about that film. Series wise, he’s been around. I’ve got him in Spectre, a Roddenberry occult detective pilot that I’ve not seen. On the Merlin live action series, he provides the voice of the Great Dragon. It’s an amazing role for him. And fitting that he’s a dragon, isn’t it? And of course he played The War Doctor. It, despite the brevity of the screen time, was a role that he seemed destined to play. Oh, for an entire series of stories about His Doctor! Big Finish, the audiobook company, had the singular honor of having him flesh out his character in a series of stories that he did with them just before his death. I’ve heard some, they’re quite remarkable. If I’ve missed anything about him that you feel I should’ve touched upon, do tell me. (Died 2017.)
Born January 22, 1959 — Tyrone Power Jr., 61. Yes, son of that actor. He is the fourth actor to bear the name Tyrone Power. If you remember him at all, it’s as Pillsbury, one of the aliens, in the Cocoon films. Other than Soulmates, a horrid sounding sort of personal zombie film, in which he had a role, that’s it for his SFF creds.
Born January 22, 1959 — Linda Blair, 61. Best known for her role as the possessed child, Regan, in The Exorcist. She reprised her role in Exorcist II: The Heretic. (I saw the first, I had no desire to see the second film.) Right after those films she started she started starring in a lot of the really bad horror films. Let’s see… Stranger in Our House, Hell Night (fraternity slasher film), Grotesque, Witchery, Dead Sleep and Scream to name a few of these films. She even starred in Repossessed, a comedy parody of The Exorcist.
Born January 22, 1969 — Olivia d’Abo, 51. She makes the Birthday Honors list for being Amanda Rogers, a female Q, in the “True Q” episode on Next Generation. Setting that gig aside, she’s got a long and extensive SFF series history. Conan the Destroyer, Beyond the Stars, Asterix Conquers America, Tarzan & Jane and Justice League Doom are some of her film work, while her series work includes Fantasy Island, Batman Beyond, Twilight Zone, Eureka and Star Wars: The Clone Wars.
Born January 22, 1996 — Blanca Blanco, 24. She’s here today because she’s on one of those Trek video fanfics that seem to have proliferated a few years back. This one had her planning on playing someone on Star Trek Equinox: The Night Of Time but the funding never materialized. I’m fascinated by this one as a certain actor was reprising his Gary Mitchell role here. If it was decided that an audio series would be made instead but I can’t find any sign of that being done either. Any of you spotted it?
(11) WHEN THE GALAXY IS OUT OF ORDER YOU CALL… Guardians of
the Galaxy!
Someone has to guard the galaxy – but who will accept the mission? And will they survive it? See who answers the call in the GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY #1 trailer featuring writer Al Ewing, Editor in Chief CB Cebulski, and Editor Darren Shan!
Cosmic peace is hanging by a thread as the major galactic empires bristle against each other. Amidst the chaos, the Gods of Olympus have returned — harbingers of a new age of war, reborn to burn their mark on the stars themselves! The legendary Star-Lord leads Rocket Raccoon, Nova, Marvel Boy, Phyla-Vell, and Moondragon on a mission to restore order to the stars!
“The galaxy is just one bad day away from complete and total collapse, and that day is here,” teases Shan.
“Guardians of the Galaxy is where the Marvel cosmic universe, as we know it, comes alive. Marvel space is about to come crashing into the Marvel Universe in a big way,” says Ewing.
… Take the recent Star Wars trilogy, whose entire existence is predicated on the revelation that Han, Leia and Luke all had a miserable old time of it after the events of Return of the Jedi. Before, any fan with R2-D2 on their jim-jams could envisage the three of them growing old together, with a grey-muzzled Chewbacca snoozing contentedly by a crackling hearth. The new films suddenly forced them to confront a new reality in which Han and Leia are estranged because their son became a mass-murderer, and a PTSD-ravaged Luke lives a life of solitude on a remote skerry somewhere uncannily reminiscent of Ireland. And what happens next? Oh, they all die. Miserably. Great. Thanks.
More than a century after the RMS Titanic sank to bottom of the sea — and nearly a quarter-century after its memory was dredged up for a Hollywood blockbuster — the U.S. and U.K. have implemented a formal agreement on how to safeguard and manage the ill-fated steamship’s remains.
British Maritime Minister Nusrat Ghani confirmed the news Tuesday during a visit to Belfast, Northern Ireland, where the ship was built before setting off from the English port city of Southampton in 1912.
…”This momentous agreement with the United States to preserve the wreck means it will be treated with the sensitivity and respect owed to the final resting place of more than 1,500 lives,” Ghani said in remarks released Tuesday by the Maritime Ministry.
Ghani’s comments cap a long and winding journey for the deal, which representatives from the U.K., the U.S., Canada and France officially agreed to as part of a 2003 treaty. The Agreement Concerning the Shipwrecked Vessel RMS Titanic sought to sort out and regulate public access, artifact conservation and salvage rights within 1 kilometer of the wreck site, situated hundreds of miles off the coast of Canada in the North Atlantic.
But since the countries negotiated the treaty, the document has largely languished. It requires the ratification of at least two of the four countries to enter into force, and while the U.K. quickly ratified the agreement, both Canada and France have yet to do so. The formal approval of the U.S. government looked long in doubt, as well.
It isn’t just languages that are endangered: dozens of alphabets around the world are at risk. And they could have even more to tell us.
On his first two days of school, in a village above the Bangladeshi port of Chittagong, Maung Nyeu was hit with a cane. This was not because he was naughty. It was simply that Nyeu could not understand what the teacher was saying, or what was written in his textbooks. Although 98% of Bangladeshis speak Bengali as a first language, Nyeu grew up with Marma, one of several minority tongues in the region. Written, it is all curls, like messy locks of hair.
Eventually Nyeu managed to escape this cycle of bewilderment and beatings. After learning Bengali at home, he returned to school and went to university. Now he is pursuing a doctorate at Harvard. Yet Nyeu never forgot his early schooldays. He spends much of his time in the hills where he grew up, where he founded Our Golden Hour – a nonprofit fighting to keep Marma and a flurry of other scripts alive.
There are between 6,000 to 7,000 languages in the world. Yet 96% are spoken by just 3% of the global population. And 85% are endangered, like Marma.
Along with the spoken words, something else is also at risk: each language’s individual script. When we talk about “endangered languages”, most of us think of the spoken versions first. But our alphabets can tell us huge amounts about the cultures they came from. Just as impressive is the length people will go to save their scripts – or invent whole new alphabets and spread them to the world.
The UK is going to lead a space mission to get an absolute measurement of the light reflected off Earth’s surface.
The information will be used to calibrate the observations of other satellites, allowing their data to be compared more easily.
Called Truths, the new spacecraft was approved for development by European Space Agency member states in November.
Proponents of the mission expect its data to help reduce the uncertainty in projections of future climate change.
Scientists and engineers met on Tuesday to begin planning the project. Industry representatives from Britain, Switzerland, Greece, the Czech Republic and Romania gathered at Esa’s technical centre in Harwell, Oxfordshire.
Last night, the National Weather Service called for lows in the 30s and 40s with a chance of falling iguanas. Apparently, the lizards can fall into a deeper slumber in the cold, and it is not uncommon for them to tumble from trees. The advice for you is watch your heads, and don’t bug the iguanas after they land. I mean, do you like being bothered when you’re just getting up?
Biologists say invasive green iguanas have been spreading in Florida, and they’re a major nuisance. The state encourages homeowners to kill iguanas on their property.
And for “historical context.” Bob & Ray “The
Komodo Dragon” (Live at Carnegie Hall, 1984)
[Thanks to Olav Rokne, JJ, Cliff Ramshaw, Martin Morse Wooster,
Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Chip Hitchcock, John King Tarpinian, and Andrew
Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing
editor of the day Rick Moen.]
(1) DREAMER’S BIOGRAPHY. “N.
K. Jemisin’s Dream Worlds” in The New Yorker is Raffi
Khatchadourian’s profile of the extraordinary author.
…In 2018, she released “How Long ’til Black Future Month?,” a collection of short stories. She also completed her next novel, “The City We Became,” the first installment of another trilogy, which is due out this March. Submitting the novel to her editor, a few hours before midnight on New Year’s Eve, she felt depleted; for more than a decade, she had been writing nearly a book a year. She resolved to take 2019 off, but she couldn’t stay idle. She sketched out the new trilogy’s second installment, while also navigating calls from Hollywood, speaking engagements, side gigs. Marvel Comics invited her to guest-write a series—an offer she declined, because she had already agreed with DC Comics to create a “Green Lantern” spinoff. As we sat in her office, the first issue of her comic was slated for release in a few weeks. “This is an unusual year for me,” she said. “Usually, I have only one thing to concentrate on.”
Above her desk she had hung family photos: glimpses of a truncated generational story. “Like most black Americans descended from slaves, it basically stops,” she told me. She once wrote about this loss—not merely the erasure of a backstory but also the absence of all that a person builds upon it; as she put it, the “strange emptiness to life without myths.” She had considered pursuing genealogy, “the search for the traces of myself in moldering old sale documents and scanned images on microfiche.” But ultimately she decided that she had no interest in what the records might say. “They’ll tell me where I came from, but not what I really want to know: where I’m going. To figure that out, I make shit up.”
As of today, 20th of January 2020, I am stepping down from being the fiction editor-in-chief and producer of StarShipSofa.
I delayed stepping down this as long as I could. For almost two years, in fact, but it’s come to this inevitable write-up.
…See, I was never an editor at heart. I am and always will be a writer. I spent years and years handling other people’s writing and enjoyed it immensely. But it wasn’t what I ultimately wanted to do. And being an editor, particularly for audio format, is hard. It’s time-consuming. It’s exhausting. It’s draining. Not going to run through the process and all its shenanigans. Take my word for it that it’s nothing less than a part time job. And I did it because I loved it.
…Meanwhile, Isabel Fall has maintained her justifiably low profile. Even during the height of the controversy, she issued statements through mediators — first “Pip,” then Neil Clarke — rather than take a public platform herself. It remains to be seen what paths her creative career will take after her needlessly hostile reception this month.
Another concern is the lasting effect that the controversy will have on trans authors as a whole. The affair of “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” makes plain a dilemma for contemporary transgender literature: fiction that is personal and boundary-pushing, that takes insults and abuse and turns them on the head to create something new, clearly runs the risk of being wildly misinterpreted and misrepresented. But the alternative — of creating only art that conforms to a narrow notion of “proper” transgender experience, that strives to avoid even the hypothetical possibility of causing offence or discomfort — is hardly appealing.
If transgender fiction is to soar, then it cannot afford for people like Isabel Fall to be bullied off the launchpad.
(4) OSHIRO RETURNS. Mark Oshiro recently announced plans to
resume work. Thread starts here.
Reviews start back up today, so let's begin with my journey through THE SCIENCE OF DISCWORLD IV. https://t.co/qnE1wVs5KU
— Mark Oshiro – Pre-Order JASMINE IS HAUNTED (@MarkDoesStuff) January 20, 2020
Mark Watches reviews are back today, too, and I jump back in to watching MONSTER. https://t.co/Rd6mHif82O
— Mark Oshiro – Pre-Order JASMINE IS HAUNTED (@MarkDoesStuff) January 20, 2020
(5) LET ROVER COME OVER. Future Engineers’ student
contest to Name the
Rover announced the semifinalists on January
13. There are over 150 – see them all in this gallery.
The finalists will be announced January 21, and the
winning name on February 18.
(6) TRAINS IN SPACE. Featured in the 2020 Lionel Train
Catalog are Star Trek trains. New: Tribble Transport Car;
Romulan Ale Tank Car; Capt. Kirk Boxcar; Capt. Picard Boxcar… (They also have
trains from other shows and movies – Thomas the Tank Engine, Toy Story, Frozen
II, and other Pixar productions, Scooby-Doo, and Harry Potter.
Batman looks pretty wild, too,
(7) MAYBE THERE’S A PONY UNDERNEATH. At Young
People Read Old SFF, James Davis Nicoll unleashes the panel on “The White Pony”
by Jane Rice.
Jane Rice is an author familiar to me solely though this story. Everyone gets to be one of the ten thousand sooner or later. She was a respected author of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. If this story is an example of her skill, I can see why her fans followed Rice. This meet-cute gone wrong is engaging enough for me to seek out more of Rice’s writing1. But what will my Young People think?
…As the transport’s doors open, actual humans playing First Order villains usher you out of the ship for you to be interrogated. They’re empowered to be a little strict with you — we witnessed one of them putting their evil fascist power to use in shushing someone who dared to speak during a speech they were giving to visitors.
“I know growing up, all I wanted to do was run around the corridors of a Star Destroyer — so hey, why not do it for real?” Imagineer John Larena said.
But as Imagineer Scott Trowbridge noted, “It turns out that it’s actually hard to make those experiences that we saw on the massive screen, to bring those to life with that sense of epic scale.” The ride was notably delayed from initial plans to open it alongside the rest of Galaxy’s Edge.
But looking around the ride, it feels like they actually did it. It may not feel quite as massive as some of the scenes from the Star Wars films, but there is a real sense of scale as you walk around what feel like movie sets….
(9) ASK THE FANTASY WRITERS. Be one of today’s lucky 10,000! View
this old episode of the BBC quiz show Only Connect featuring a team of
fantasy writers composed of Geoff Ryman, Paul Cornell, and Liz Williams. In the series, teams compete in a tournament of
finding connections between seemingly unrelated clues. The show ran from 2008
til 2014.
(10) TODAY IN HISTORY.
January 20, 1936 — Cosmic Voyage Is remembered as being one of the first films to depict spaceflight, including weightlessness in realistic terms. It was shot as a silent film and had only a short release window being banned by Soviet censors until the collapse of the USSR. And yes you, can indeed see it here.
January 20, 1972 — The first Star Trek convention took place in New York City from this day for two very full days. Memory Alpha notes that “Although the original estimate of attendees was only a few hundred, several thousand had turned up before the end of the convention, which featured a program of events of an art show, costume contest, a display provided by NASA and a dealers room.“ Gene Roddenberry, Majel Barrett, D.C. Fontana and Isaac Asimov were among the SFF community members who showed up.
(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born January 20, 1884 — A. Merritt. His first fantasy story was published in 1917, “Through the Dragon Glass” in the November 14 issue of All-Story Weekly. His SFF career would eventually consist of eight novels and fifteen (I think) short stories. I’m sure that I’ve read The Moon Pool, his novel, and much of that short fiction, but can’t recall the other novels as being read by me. In the digital release, Apple Books is clearly the better place to find his work as they’ve got everything he published whereas Kindle and Kobo are spotty. (Died 1943.)
Born January 20, 1934 — Tom Baker, 86. The Fourth Doctor of course and the longest serving one to date with a seven-year run. My favorite story of his? “The Talons of Weng Chiang”. He wrote an autobiography, Who on Earth Is Tom Baker?, and just did his first Doctor Who novel, Scratchman, co-written with James Goss.
Born January 20, 1958 — Kij Johnson, 62. Writer and associate director of The Center for the Study of Science Fiction the University of Kansas English Department which is I must say a cool genre thing to be doing indeed. If you not read her Japanese mythology based The Fox Woman, do so now as it’s superb. The sequel, Fudoki, is just as interesting. The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe is a novella taking a classic Lovecraftian tale and giving a nice twist. Finally, I’ll recommend her short story collection, At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories.
Born January 20, 1981 — Izabella Miko, 39. OK, she was in The Clash of Titans as Athens. Why Goddess tell would anyone remake such a perfect film? She also had a recurring role on the very short lived The Cape series as Raia, and she had a recurring role as Carrie on Deadwood.
Born January 20, 1983 — Svetlana Viktorovna Khodchenkova, 37. I think her only SFF role was in the most excellent Hugh Jackman led The Wolverine in which she had the dual role of Dr. Green who becomes The Viper. Marvels fans will recognise that this is a new version of the character. But most of her career involves Russian titled productions so I’m not sure…
(12) COMICS
SECTION.
Non Sequitur finds two guys who are unprepared for a UFO to land in their bar, but not for the reason you might expect.
(13) N3F SHORT
STORY CONTEST WINNERS. The winners of the National Fantasy Fan
Federation’s 2019 Short Story Contest were announced in TNFF.
First Prize: “As Day Follows Night” by Karen L. Kobylarz, a tale of heroic fantasy, highly embla-zoned with both heroism and fantasy, a “quest” story following a magic student on a harrowing journey into myth and sacrifice.
Second Prize: “The Safety of Thick Walls” by Gus-tavo Bondoni, a tale of the Roman Republic…with zombies!
Third Prize: “Where You G-O-H When You Die” by Adam R. Goss, following a fallen space hero in his astonishing afterlife, more fantastic than he could possibly have imagined.
Honorable Mention: “The Captain” by Michael Simon, a three-time loser is sentenced to serve as the captain of a spaceship: does the punishment really fit the crime?
(14) INSIDE DIVERSITY. Whether Tim Waggoner’s advice proves
valuable to the reader, it does surface a lot of good questions for writers to
think about: “Mix
it Up! Handling Diversity in Your Fiction”.
…I understand the basic idea of staying in your lane when it comes to diversity in fiction, and to a certain extent, I support it. I think writers shouldn’t try to tell a story meant to illuminate important aspects of another group’s experience. Only a person who was raised in and still is steeped in a culture/race/gender/etc. can ever know it well enough to write in-depth fiction exploring the issues that group faces. No amount of research can ever give you as authoritative an experience as someone who actually belongs a group other than your own, and you will never do as good a job as a writer from that group would at telling those stories. That said, I think if your story isn’t about the African-American experience or the gay experience, or the fill-in-the-blank experience, you can write from the point of view of a character unlike yourself if their racial/gender/cultural identity isn’t central to the story. Men in Black is a good example. Agents J and K could be people of any race, gender, or sexuality without having an appreciable impact on the film’s plot. (One does need to be older than the other, though.) Some character bits, such as J’s jokes which arise from his race would change, but the characters’ essential personalities and how they solve problems would remain the same. The story isn’t about J being black and K being white. It’s about the weird aspects of their job and saving the world. I’m perfectly comfortable writing from the point of view of someone with a different racial/ethnic/gender/sexual orientation background than myself in this circumstance. I focus on the character’s personality, and while their backgrounds will affect the expression of their character to a certain extent, I don’t attempt to delve very deep into their race, gender, sexuality, religion, etc. And if I do go a little deeper than usual, it’s because I have close relationships with people from those backgrounds, and I’m comfortable asking them if I misrepresented the group they belong to (or rather one of their groups, since we all belong to multiple ones).
Next month 21 films from the legendary Studio Ghibli are coming to Netflix.
It means new people will be introduced to “the ultimate escapism” of Studio Ghibli’s films – up until now they’ve only been available on DVD or illegally.
Some of its most famous films include the Oscar-winning Spirited Away, My Neighbour Totoro, and Howl’s Moving Castle.
“It will really give people the chance to enjoy a lot of classics that they may not know about but are famous in the anime world,” says Sarah Taylor, whose heart has “been with Ghibli” since she was 16 years old.
The weather forecasters have just given us an impressive display of their skill by predicting the scale of the current high pressure zone over the UK.
Overnight, Sunday into Monday, London’s Heathrow Airport recorded a barometric pressure of 1,049.6 millibars (mbar).
It’s very likely the highest pressure ever recorded in London, with records dating back to 1692.
But the UK Met Office and the European Centre for Medium Range Forecasts had seen it coming well ahead of time.
“Computerised forecast models run by the Met Office and the ECMWF predicted this development with near pinpoint precision, forecasting the eventual position and intensity of the high pressure area several days in advance, before it had even begun to form,” said Stephen Burt, a visiting fellow at Reading University’s department of meteorology.
…”The reason for the extremely high pressure can be traced back to the rapid development of an intense low-pressure area off the eastern seaboard of the United States a few days previously (this is the storm that dumped around 75cm of snow in Newfoundland),” he explained.
…With Sunday’s successful test, Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, said it is now “probable” that the first mission with astronauts on board could happen as early as the second quarter of 2020. He told reporters the test “went as well as one could possibly expect.”
Two men in New Zealand and Spain have created an “Earth sandwich” – by placing slices of bread on precise points, either side of the planet.
The man behind the sandwich, Etienne Naude from Auckland, told the BBC he wanted to make one for “years”, but had struggled to find someone in Spain, on the other side of the globe.
He finally found someone after posting on the online message board, Reddit.
The men used longitude and latitude to make sure they were precisely opposite.
That meant there was around 12,724km (7,917 miles) of Earth packed between the slices – and some 20,000km between the men, for those forced to travel the conventional route.
…Mr Naude only had to travel a few hundred metres to find a suitable public spot on his side of the world. His Spanish counterpart had to travel 11 km (6.8 miles).
“It’s quite tough to find a spot which isn’t water on the New Zealand end – and where public roads or paths intersect in both sides,” Mr Naude said.
As if he hadn’t gone to enough effort, Mr Naude – a computer science student at Auckland University – made specially-decorated white bread for the occasion.
(19) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Horror Musical Instrument — The Apprehension Engine”
on YouTube shows off a machine that comes up with the electronic scary
music used in horror movies.
[Thanks to N., Michael Toman, Chip Hitchcock, JJ, Martin Morse
Wooster, Danny Sichel, Giant Panda, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, John King
Tarpinian, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to
File 770 contributing editor of the day Ann Nimmhaus.]
(1) LEST MARKNESS FALL. Christine Feehan tweeted a justification of her application to trademark book series with the word “Dark” in the title. Penny Reid is one of many who still hopes someone will put a stop to the idea. [UPDATE: Feehan has removed the tweet to which Reid is responding. I have not located a screencap to replace it.]
Christine, If you do this, and if @romancewriters doesn't take action to stop you, we'll have to write a Dark Leopard Ghostwalker Carpathian anthology to raise money to stop you. Just FYI. -Cocky Collective
As Portland State University Indigenous Nations Studies professor Grace L. Dillon wrote in the introduction to 2012’s Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction, “It is almost commonplace to think that the Native Apocalypse, if contemplated seriously, has already taken place.” Indigenous authors are thus in a unique position to reclaim sci-fi narratives as a form of resistance against settler colonialism. Indigenous science fiction or speculative fiction—which Dillion encapsulates with the term “Indigenous futurisms,” inspired by the Afrofuturism movement—offers a space for Indigenous writers, filmmakers, and artists to explore possible futures. From cowboy films to government-assimilation policies, Native American communities and cultures are often portrayed as a “vanishing race” with no place in the present, let alone the future. Indigenous futurism is a contemplation of what our futures look like as Indigenous people, one that recognizes the significance and strength of Indigenous knowledge systems.
Such possible futures are prevalent themes in Cherie Dimaline’s 2017 novel The Marrow Thievesand Rebecca Roanhorse’s 2018 novel Trail of Lightning. Both books create new worlds that center and celebrate Indigenous people, knowledge, and land. “You don’t see a lot of Native Americans in science fiction and fantasy, and when you do they are usually not situated in a world that is specifically Native, like the Navajo reservation,” Roanhorse told Barnes & Noble in 2018. “I wanted to read a science fiction and fantasy story where Native characters held front and center, where the landscape was filled with the places and the people that I knew from living on the rez, where the gods and heroes were of North American Indigenous origin.”
…As each world is destroyed, a new one begins. The Diné believe that we are now in the fifth world, and in Trail of Lightning, Roanhorse creates the beginning of the sixth—one that takes shape in the aftermath of global destruction brought about by climate change and human hubris. In effect, Roanhorse is modernizing Diné stories and history without translating it for readers. She expects those who read her books to already know about these traditions and beliefs, making the Sixth World series uniquely accessible to Diné and other Native peoples in a way that other sci-fi and fantasy series are not.
(3) DEAD ASTRONAUTS MUSIC. [Item by Rob Thornton.] Jeff VanderMeer has posted “The Operatic, Post-Punk Sounds of Dead Astronauts”,
a selected list of 23 songs that were on the playlist that he listened to while
writing Dead Astronauts, his latest science fiction book for the Farrar,
Straus & Giroux imprint MCD Books. The playlist includes songs by Midnight
Oil, The Church, Spoon, Mercury Rev, Three Mile Pilot, Tropical Fuck Storm, and
the Chills:
The Dead Astronauts “mix tape” consists of 900 songs, played on shuffle unless I needed to summon a certain emotion for a particular scene. The 23 songs here are either favorites or representative of albums I love. But loving an album isn’t enough—I write very much by feel and music is essential to that. I have to be in the right headspace to stay within the style and voice of the novel. In the case of Dead Astronauts, there are ten sections and ten different perspectives and styles.
Yet pervading everything in Dead Astronauts is a dual sense of anger and defiance mixed acceptance and loss. These are big, almost operatic emotions that manifest in the novel in both bold, over-the-top ways and in a minor key, with intricate little eddies and shifts in perspective.
Leading up to its widely watched, less widely admired culmination in May, much was made of Thrones’ status as the last of its kind, a great unifier whose most fantastical flourish of all was reviving the monoculture for an hour at a time on Sunday nights. Nearly seven months later, those eulogies for Thrones still echo, though they take on a different tone when held up against the context of all this year’s other finales. In truth, television as communal mass consumption is a model that was de facto extinct long before Game of Thrones artificially expanded its lifespan, White Walker–style—and may in fact be better represented by The Big Bang Theory, another monster hit that wound down within days of its flashier peer. However warranted, the noise around Thrones may have obscured the passing of a different kind of cultural moment.
There’s so much else unusual about Los Espookys thatit’s easy to forget the novelty, and significance, of its being the first-ever Spanish-language series to air on HBO. Conceived of by SNL’s Fred Armisen and cowritten by Julio Torres and Ana Fabrega, all of whom serve in the ensemble cast, Los Espookys seems to set and defy its own rules at will. In this unnamed Latin American country, there’s ample demand for “horror groups” to stage elaborate, quasi-mystical pranks, some of them involving aliens. Also, valet parking is a high art; news anchors are beautiful, brainwashed abductees; and the U.S. ambassador is a live-action Barbie doll who gets trapped in an enchanted mirror. At once deadpan and fantastical, Los Espookys’flair for the dramatic resembles nothing else on television, except for Torres’s distinctive sketch work over in Studio 8H. The showachieves a similar effect, immersing the viewer in an alternate reality mercifully low on stakes and high on cursed amulets. Only when the spell is broken do you notice the quietly forceful statement of subtitling the English dialogue along with the Spanish.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAbaVE8BDxk
(5) FUTURE TENSE. This month’s entry in the Future Tense
Fiction series is “A Priest, a Rabbi, and a Robot Walk Into a Bar,” by Andrew Dana Hudson, a new short story that looks at how
artificial intelligence could support, and distort, faith.
(6) BABY YODA. Funko Pop’s The Child comes in two sizes, 10 and 3.75 inches. Speculation is that the former is intended to be life-sized. Available for pre-order now with delivery in Spring 2020, so don’t expect to see it in your Christmas stocking.
The Outspoken Author series is unique: it covers the gamut of genres, from hard SF to crime and literary fiction, and it collects the underappreciated and hard-to-find work of legendary figures in an accessible format. Not only is there fiction, the authors offer up essays, transcripts of talks and speeches, and ruminations about the writing life. Each volume concludes with an in-depth interview conducted by series editor Terry Bisson, and these go deep: you’ll learn about everything from revelations about drag personas to dissections of Trotskyism in the United Kingdom.
Never has a single StoryBundle offered work by so many of speculative literature’s most important figures: Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel R. Delany, Michael Moorcock, and many others. We’re offering twenty-three volumes in DRM-free digital formats that are yours to keep till freedom reigns over the world.
You decide what price you want to pay. For $5 (or more, if you’re feeling generous), you’ll get the basic bundle of six books in any ebook format—WORLDWIDE.
Thoreau’s Microscope by Michael Blumlein
A City Made of Words by Paul Park
The Beatrix Gates by Rachel Pollack
Totalitopia by John Crowley
Raising Hell by Norman Spinrad
Modem Times 2.0 by Michael Moorcock
If you pay at least the bonus price of just $15, you get all six of the regular books, plus SEVENTEEN more books!
The Atheist in the Attic by Samuel R. Delany
Fire. by Elizabeth Hand
Miracles Ain’t What They Used to
Be by Joe R.
Lansdale
Gypsy by Carter Scholz
My Life, My Body by Marge Piercy
Patty Hearst & The Twinkie
Murders by Paul
Krassner
The Science of Herself by Karen Joy Fowler
New Taboos by John Shirley
The Human Front by Ken Macleod
Report From Planet Midnight by Nalo Hopkinson
Surfing the Gnarl by Rudy Rucker
The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow by Cory Doctorow
The Wild Girls by Ursula K. Le Guin
Mammoths of the Great Plains by Eleanor Arnason
The Underbelly by Gary Phillips
The Lucky Strike by Kim Stanley Robinson
The Left Left Behind by Terry Bisson
(8) TODAY IN HISTORY.
December 4, 1970 — Latitude Zero premiered in New York City. It was directed by Ishir? Honda and scripted by Ted Sherdeman as based on his Latitude Zero radio show. The film stars both American and Japanese actors including Joseph Cotten, Cesar Romero, Akira Takarada, Masumi Okada, Richard Jaeckel and Patricia Medina. Critics found the plot weak but the special effects rather fun. It currently has a rating of 50% at Rotten Tomatoes among viewers.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born December 4, 1937 — David Bailie, 82. He played Dask in “The Robots of Death”, a Fourth Doctor story, and also appeared in Blake’s 7 as Chevner in the “Project Avalon” story. Also, he played the mute pirate Cotton in the Pirates of the Caribbean film franchise. Intriguingly he shows up in The Creeping Flesh which starredChristopher Lee and Peter Cushing.
Born December 4, 1939 — Jimmy Hunt, 80. He plays Dave MacLean in Invaders from Mars. Some three decades later, he’ll appear in the remake as the Police Chief. He’s an uncredited appearance early in his career in My Brother Talks to Horses which is definitely genre. And he’s in Close Encounters of the 4th Kind: Infestation from Mars though I know nothing of this film. Have any of you seen it?
Born December 4, 1945 — Karl Edward Wagner. As an editor, he created a three-volume set of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian fiction restored to its original form as it was originally written by Howard. He is quite likely best known for his invention of the character Kane, the Mystic Swordsman who I think is in as many as thirty works by Wagner. Anyone here read them? Rhetorical question I know. His Carcosa publishing company issued four volumes of stories by authors of the Golden Age pulp magazines. Anything I left off that folks should know about him? (Died 1994.)
Born December 4, 1949 — Jeff Bridges, 70. I’d say his best genre role was as Starman / Scott Hayden in the film of that name. Other genre work includes King Kong, the voice of Prince Lir in Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn, Jack Lucas in The Fisher King, Iron Monger in Iron Man and Kevin Flynn/CLU 2 in Tron: Legacy. He appeared also in a film called R.I.P.D. as Roycephus “Roy” Pulsipher which was either really bad or really, really bad.
Born December 4, 1954 — Sally Kobee, 65. Fan, Bookseller, filker. She has served on the committees for myriad conventions, and chaired both Ohio Valley Filk Fest 4 and OVFF 10, and WFC 2010 and 2016. She was honored as a Fellow of NESFA and as a Guest of Honor at Windycon XXVII. She and her now late husband purchased a bookstore in the 90s. She continues to the day to sell books at conventions.
Born December 4, 1954 — Tony Todd, 65. Let’s see… He was a memorable Kurn in Next Gen and Deep Space Nine, he plays Ben in Night of the Living Dead, he’s of course the lead character in the Candyman horror trilogy, William Bludworth in the Final Destination film franchise, Cecrops in Xena: Warrion Princess and Gladius on Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. Those are just selected highlights.
Born December 4, 1957 — Lucy Sussex, 62. Fan, reviewer, author, and editor. Born in New Zealand, resident in Australia… she’s been writing SFF ever since attending a Terry Carry led workshop. And she’s edited several anthologies such as She’s Fantastical, the first collection of Australian women’s speculative fiction. She’s won three Ditmar Awards, A. Bertram Chandler Award and an Aurealis Award to name some of her awards — impressive indeed! I’ve not heard of her before now, so I’ve not read her, so who has read her?
Born December 4, 1964 — Marisa Tomei, 55. May Parker in Marvel Cinematic Universe, but also to my delight has an uncredited role as a Health Club Girl in The Toxic Avenger. She also shows up as Mrs. O’Conner in the “Unwomen”, an episode of The Handmaid’s Tale.
Born December 4, 1989 — Nafessa Williams, 30. She had only two genre roles but with the first being the revival series of Twin Peaks where she was Jade. The other is what gets her Birthday Honors — She’s Anissa Pierce who is the superhero Thunder on the Black Lightning series. Superb series, great character!
In Shen Comix, one of the Old Ones is consulted about a typical teen problem.
(11) SCALZI’S DOPEST BREAD CONNECTION. John Scalzi tells
why he received a baked good by a very roundabout route: “The
Case of the Felonious Bread”.
…Seamus Blackley …sent me a loaf via Fed Ex this weekend, and yesterday I got a notice through email that the package had been delivered. I went down from my office to retrieve it —
— and it wasn’t there….
….Then I looked to see who it was who signed for my package:
“POLICE.”….
(12) WELL… Artist James Artimus Owens told his Facebook
readers about the time a therapist
gave him some unexpected advice – and it worked! But the story is funny,
too.
Now Disney is finally pulling the curtains off “Rise,” opening on Thursday at Walt Disney World and on January 17 at Disneyland. The stakes are high for this expensive gamble to succeed: Attendance at Disney’s domestic theme parks was down 3% in its latest quarter. The company also recently announced the departure of Catherine Powell, the president of Disney Parks who oversaw Anaheim and Orlando.
Disney is betting it can turn things around with the power of high-tech experiences. The attraction packs dozens of audio-animatronics — and a couple of giant AT-ATs — holograms, lasers, and the most complex ride system Disney’s Imagineers had ever designed: a trackless vehicle that moves laterally, vertically, and at all times unpredictably. At its annual shareholders meeting, Disney CEO Bob Iger called the ride “the most technologically advanced and immersive attraction that we have ever imagined.”
It’s written in a language called ZIL, which stands for Zork Implementation Language. The games have been rewritten for various platforms and have been circulating for years, but knowledge of the actual scripting language used to create the game was lost to the annals of history.
Recently a well-regarded essayist expressed dissatisfaction with the current state of the SF novel. He went so far as to confidently assert, “I stopped reading novels last year. I think you did too.” Sweeping assertions are often wrong. This one is definitely wrong, at least where I am concerned.
…What may have sparked his comment is burnout, of the form that might be called “reader’s block.” You want to read something, but can find nothing specific you want to read. I think most of us who read extensively have been there.
The best method I know of for mitigating reader’s block is to cast one’s net wider….
On Black Friday, as shoppers packed an outlet mall just up the road, Patrick Darby sat behind the counter at Novel Books, his charmingly cramped bookstore in suburban Maryland, narrating the last chapter of his business.
“I’ll be gone by next week if something doesn’t happen,” Darby said, his hands trembling.For Darby, 60, this bookstore tucked inside an old yellow house with a wraparound porch in Clarksburg was his opportunity to finally sell books the old-fashioned way. He had spent decades working for big chains, including Crown Books, once a staple of Washington.
“I’d been thinking about a store like this the whole time,” Darby said.
…The response from some fans online was highly reminiscent of the “Fat Thor” controversy after the release of Avengers: Endgame. Many were incredulous that Marvel appeared not to have learned anything from said controversy, including Twitter user @The_GothDaddy, who wrote, “The Black Widow trailer looks pretty good I’d like it more if Marvel learned their lesson with Thor and maybe considered leaving out yet… A n o t h e r… Dig at fat people.”
User @Artists_Ali agreed, writing, “So I watched the Black Widow trailer. Is Marvel just gonna do wall to wall fatphobic jokes in all their movies now or….? Yeah that’s gonna be a no from me.”
There were a wealth of similar tweets to be found in the trailer’s immediate wake, and while everybody is obviously entitled to their opinion, ours is that — as with the Endgame controversy — the approach to Harbour’s character is being wildly misinterpreted. User @MediocreJedi (great name) contributed another critical tweet that touched on our reasoning: “Imma watch the hell out of #BlackWidow,” they wrote, “but did Marvel learn ANYTHING from their Endgame Thor fat joke backlash? Most women I know find David Harbour hot. So, another fat joke? Signed, guy who can barely fit into his 21-year-old dress uniform but can still kick ass.”
(19) SHAKEN, NOT STIRRED. New trailer for the next James
Bond movie No Time To Die.
In No Time To Die, Bond has left active service and is enjoying a tranquil life in Jamaica. His peace is short-lived when his old friend Felix Leiter from the CIA turns up asking for help. The mission to rescue a kidnapped scientist turns out to be far more treacherous than expected, leading Bond onto the trail of a mysterious villain armed with dangerous new technology.
[Thanks to Michael J. Walsh, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King
Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, N., Jennifer Hawthorne, Darrah Chavey, Rob Thornton, Joey
Eschrich, Chip Hitchcock, StephenfromOttawa, Mike Kennedy, and Cat Eldridge for
some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing collaborative
editors of the day cmm and Jayn.]
(1) P STEW’S COWBOY CLASSICS. Where was I when this came out in 2016? Patrick Stewart did a fundraiser album of cowboy songs for International Rescue Committee (IRC). The album itself is sold out now, but they will still sell you a five-tune sampler at P Stew Sings.
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First, we have to take stock of what led us to this moment, including technology and gaming industries too willing to indulge the “passion” of their most ardent fans — even when that “passion” is nothing more than frothing rage and unchecked entitlement. We also have to reckon with why swatting is so potentially deadly: militarized American police forces trained to shoot first and ask questions later.
Just a few months ago, we witnessed another case of fandom gone horribly awry, which — in its own absurd way — prefigured the same entitlement and callousness on display in the instigators of the Wichita shooting. The incident is infamous now precisely for its penny-ante stupidity: fans of Rick and Mortyrunning wild at McDonald’s restaurants that ran out of szechuan sauce packets for a promotional tie-in with the show. Several McDonald’s employees were screamed at by fans who did not receive their sauce, and treated the people behind the counter as uniformed vending machines obligated to dispense the edible fandom kitsch they desired. “Some [fans] became physical,” reported Eater, and in one Los Angeles location, police were summoned to the scene.
The restaurant giant responded to the debacle by plucking a page from the PR handbook of the gaming industry, which routinely reacts to even the most vile attacks by rhapsodizing about the enthusiasm of their fans. Take Beamdog CEO Trent Oster, who responded to a furious transphobic backlashagainst Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear by saying: “The last few days have showed us how passionately many of our fans care for our games.” McDonald’s, similarly, issued one ingratiating tweet after another, calling the unruly Rick and Morty fans “the best fans in the multiverse,” and saying that the company was “humbled by the amazing curiosity, passion, and energy” of the enraged sauce-seekers.
The gaming industry routinely reacts to even the most vile attacks by rhapsodizing about the enthusiasm of their fans
There’s nothing quite so emblematic of commodified fan culture as corporate representatives euphemistically describing this sort of toxicity as “passion.” This C-suite impulse — to never draw a line in the sand and to let the ugliest and loudest voices dictate what fandom should look like — inevitably privileges the bottom line over the more vulnerable people who are harmed by the colliding forces of technology and toxic fandom.
The story about one of the greatest loves in Middle-earth sprang from the greatest love of Tolkien’s life. Ronald and Edith’s tombstone in Wolvercote Cemetery in Oxford bears the names of Beren and Lúthien right under their real names, revealing to those familiar with the legend that the love of Ronald and Edith was not an ordinary one. Just like the story of the mortal Man Beren and the Elven maiden Lúthien, the story of Edith and Ronald was full of sacrifice and difficulties, but was deeply rooted in great love and affection which they managed to carry throughout their whole lives.
We’re adding Jason McGregor and Charles Payseur to RSR’s Recommended By list and changing our criteria for “prolific reviewer” to make up for low coverage of Apex, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Strange Horizons magazines, as shown in red in the table below.
(5) GALAXY’S EDGE TO HAVE CHINESE OWNERSHIP. SF Site News reports “Galaxy’s Edge Sale”:
Publisher Shahid Mahmud announced in the Phoenix Pick January Newsletter that they will be offering Galaxy’s Edge for free on-line. The note stated that the expansion of free material was due to a cash infusion from various sources and also noted the “imminent sale” of the magazine to a Chinese publisher.
(6) CUMMINS OBIT. British actress Peggy Cummins (1925-2017) passed away December 29, 11 days after her 92nd birthday. Appeared in the 1953 comic fantasy Meet Mr. Lucifer, played the murdered professor’s daughter in the classic MR James adaptation Night of the Demon (1957, aka Curse of the Demon), and contributed to Speak of the Devil: The Making of Night of the Demon (2007). She’d recently made several public appearances and her films regularly feature on the UK cable channel Talking Pictures TV.
“Spotify brazenly disregards United States Copyright law and has committed willful, ongoing copyright infringement,” states the complaint. “Wixen notified Spotify that it had neither obtained a direct or compulsory mechanical license for the use of the Works. For these reasons and the foregoing, Wixen is entitled to the maximum statutory relief.”
The complaint (read here) suggests that as much as 21 percent of the 30 million songs on Spotify are unlicensed.
Spotify hasn’t responded to a request for comment. The company may continue to challenge Wixen’s authority or it could attempt the provocative argument that it has been putting forward in the Gaudio lawsuit — that “streaming” implicates neither reproduction nor distribution rights under copyright law.
All this occurs as lawmakers turn their attention to reforming music licensing.
In late December, Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.) and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) introduced the Music Modernization Act, which among other things, would end the “notice of intent” process that’s currently spelled out by Section 115. Instead, a database would publicly identify songs and potentially alleviate the way that digital services struggle to identify and locate co-authors of each of the tens of millions of copyrighted musical works. Under the proposal, digital services would fund a Mechanical Licensing Collective that would be granted blanket mechanical licenses. And rates would more closely hew to market value, with songwriters and publishers being granted audit rights.
I will work at paying attention to all the disparate groups that make up SFWA and serve their needs, particularly both our newer groups, like game writers and indie writers and groups that have in the past been underrepresented or underserved in/by the organization.
I will continue to piss off a few people with what they think is my irreverent or otherwise inappropriate sense of humor/outlook/set of principles.
And finally, as always, when I screw up, I’ll admit it and say what I’m doing in the future in order to do better.
(9) 451 REVIEW. Literary Hub, in “Savage and Shockingly Prophetic”, quotes what August Derleth said about Fahrenheit 451 in the Chicago Tribune, October 25, 1953.
Fahrenheit 451 was conceived out of Hitler’s burning of the books, and is all the more timely now because of the fortunately ill-fated American venture on a similar path….
(10) WORD FROM A TALKING CAT. Another author you won’t be seeing in San Jose.
Cattimothy House will be formally boycotting Worldcon this year because the last time I went to Worldcon it turns out it was actually the VET and I'd been TRICKED. I only just worked this out and I'm very cross with EVERYBODY concerned.
The foe to defeat the all-action space sequel in the year-end box office rankings was Emma Watson, with her hit Beauty and the Beast.
Beauty and the Beast earned £4.1m more than The Last Jedi in 2017.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Steve Green, JJ, Cat Eldridge, Cat Rambo, Andrew Porter, Chip Hitchcock, and David K.M. Klaus for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Hampus Eckerman.]
