From the large number of stories that series editor John Joseph Adams screened for this year’s collection, he picked the 80 best pieces to submit to editor Diana Gabaldon for a blind reading, so that the prestige of the venues or author bylines were not a factor. (The ones Adams designated as notable are shown in a table at the link). Gabaldon then selected 20 for publication (ten science fiction, ten fantasy, (highlighted in green on the table.)
The book will be published on November 3.
Here is the Table of Contents with the 20 stories they thought the best.
FANTASY
Thirty-Three Wicked Daughtersby Kelly Barnhill from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
Erase, Erase, Eraseby Elizabeth Bear from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
Canst Thou Draw Out the Leviathanby Christopher Caldwell from Uncanny Magazine
The Freedom of the Shifting Seaby Jaymee Goh from New Suns
The Eight People Who Murdered Me (Excerpt from Lucy Westenra’s Diary)by Gwendolyn Kiste from Nightmare Magazine
Up from Slaveryby Victor LaValle from Weird Tales
Shape-ups at Delilah’sby Rion Amilcar Scott from The New Yorker
Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Islandby Nibedita Sen from Nightmare Magazine
Another Avatarby S.P. Somtow from Amazing Stories
The Time Invariance of Snowby E. Lily Yu from Tor.com
SCIENCE FICTION
The Bookstore at the End of Americaby Charlie Jane Anders from A People’s Future of the United States
Life Sentenceby Matthew Baker from Lightspeed Magazine
Bullet Pointby Elizabeth Bear from Wastelands: The New Apocalypse
The Galactic Tourist Industrial Complexby Tobias S. Buckell from New Suns
Sacrid’s Podby Adam-Troy Castro from Lightspeed Magazine
Thoughts and Prayersby Ken Liu from Future Tense Fiction
The Robots of Edenby Anil Menon from New Suns
Between the Dark and the Darkby Deji Bryce Olukotun from Lightspeed Magazine
A Brief Lesson in Native American Astronomy by Rebecca Roanhorse from The Mythic Dream
The Archronology of Love by Caroline M. Yoachim from Lightspeed Magazine
Guest editor Diana Gabaldon is the author of the bestselling Outlander novels—Outlander, Dragonfly in Amber, Voyager, Drums of Autumn, The Fiery Cross, and A Breath of Snow and Ashes (for which she won a Quill Award and the Corine International Book Prize)—and one work of nonfiction, The Outlandish Companion, and another series featuring Lord John Grey, a character she introduced in Voyager.
John Joseph Adams is bringing back Fantasy Magazine. The first new issue of Fantasy will publish in November 2020 and will join sister-magazines Lightspeed and Nightmare under the same publishing umbrella. Henceforth the publishing company that publishes all three magazines will be known as Adamant Press.
Adams has named Arley Sorg and Christie Yant as co-editors-in-chief and will continue in his role as publisher. Yant will also serve as co-publisher of Fantasy—and of the other two magazines.
Arley Sorg is an associate editor at Locus Magazine, where he’s been on staff since 2014. He joined the Lightspeed family in 2014 to work on the Queers Destroy Science Fiction! special issue, starting as a slush reader. He eventually worked his way up to associate editor at both Lightspeed and Nightmare. He also reviews books for Locus, Lightspeed, and Cascadia Subduction Zone and is an interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine.
Christie Yant worked as an assistant editor for Lightspeed Magazine from its launch in 2010 through 2015, and, in 2014 she edited the Women Destroy Science Fiction! special issue of Lightspeed, which won the British Fantasy Award for Best Anthology. In 2019 she co-edited (with Hugh Howey and Gary Whitta) Resist: Tales From a Future Worth Fighting Against, an anthology benefiting the ACLU, and co-edited The Dystopia Triptych series of anthologies (with Hugh Howey and John Joseph Adams). She is also a consulting editor for Tor.com’s line of novellas, and her own fiction has appeared in best of the year anthologies.
Yant and Sorg’s creative vision includes being “a welcoming market eager to find new voices.” They will be open to submissions July 1-7 and, going forward, will be open the first week of every month (1st – 7th). Visit fantasy-magazine.com/guidelines for more information.
Fantasy Magazine’s format will differ slightly from its sister-magazines with its inclusion of flash fiction and poetry. Like Nightmare and Lightspeed, Fantasy will be publishing each issue in ebook format (and offering subscription options) as well as making the contents of the magazine online for free. The forthcoming issue with Yant and Sorg as co-editors will be the first new Fantasy issue in four years.
(1) THE CITY WITH TWO NAMES TWICE. N. K. Jemisin will join W. Kamau Bell, host of CNN series United Shades of America (and her cousin) on June 16 for a discussion of sci-fi, Afrofuturism, and her most recent novel The City We Became. The event is hosted by the New York Public Library. Hyperallergic has the story: “A POC-Centered Vision of NYC From NK Jemisin, Celebrated Sci-Fi Author”.
…Next Tuesday (June 16), Jemisin will join comedian W. Kamau Bell for a discussion of sci-fi, Afrofuturism, and her most recent novel, The City We Became, presented by the New York Public Library. The novel, which brings her unique brand of speculative fiction a little closer to earth, is set in a version of New York City where the future is threatened by an ancient evil that seeks to divide and destroy its community by capitalizing on its differences (sound familiar?). The City We Became imagines cities as living, sentient organisms that take shape as individual human avatars. New York and its five boroughs are embodied as mainly Black and brown folks (Staten Island and the nefarious Enemy that threatens the city are not insignificantly imagined as white women).
At a moment when New York City is slowly beginning to reopen amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, while simultaneously considering numerous pieces of legislation that could combat pervasive police brutality against Black people, Jemisin’s POC-centered speculations about the future of this city feel especially timely.
Also, I've made the price free on Kobo and have been trying to get Amazon to price-match but thus far they haven't. I've made the POD print editions priced so that they're the lowest possible (i.e., sold at cost).
— John Joseph Adams (Bluesky: @johnjosephadams.com) (@JohnJosephAdams) June 11, 2020
(3) THE HEART OF YOUR WEEKEND. Essence of Wonder with Gadi Evron will host several of the “Hugo Finalists for Best Novella and Best Novelette 2020” on its June 13 program, including Seanan McGuire, Sarah Gailey, Sarah Pinsker, Siobhan Carroll, and Amal El-Mohtar. Facilitating the discussions will be Vincent Docherty and Karen Castelletti.
The episode will also feature a Sara Felix Tiara Giveaway and “Tammy Coxen’s Mixology Show Corner.”
(4) STOKERCON UK: STRIKE TWO. StokerCon UK has postponed again, having decided its new August dates are no longer tenable. New dates forthcoming.
As per previous communications, like all of you we have been closely monitoring the NHS and UK Government guidelines as they have evolved over the past weeks and months, and the situation with regard to COVID-19 is still extremely changeable.
We have done everything we can to try to continue with StokerCon UK in August but, unfortunately, this is still a fast-changing situation and, with the worldwide situation and the current government guidelines as they stand now, we are left with no choice but to postpone the convention once again as we feel it would be irresponsible to push ahead and put anyone’s health at risk, apart from the obvious issues with social distancing, travel etc. Safety has to be the paramount concern for all involved.
We will advise new dates in the next week, as we’re currently finalising details of this with the hotels and will advise plans moving forward for everyone who has already signed-up to attend. We understand how disappointing this will be to many of you, and share that disappointment, but we want to make sure our members are safe, and postponing will be the best way to try and achieve that.
(5) THE SUN GIVES ABUSER PAGE ONE. Right after J.K. Rowling published an essay defending her views on gender and sex, in which she revealed she is the survivor of domestic abuse in her first marriage, UK tabloid The Sun tracked down her former husband for a front-page interview. The Guardian covered the response: “JK Rowling: UK domestic abuse adviser writes to Sun editor”.
The government’s lead adviser on domestic abuse has written to the editor of the Sun to condemn the newspaper’s decision to publish a front page interview with JK Rowling’s first husband, under the headline: “I slapped JK and I’m not sorry.”
In the letter seen by the Guardian, Nicole Jacobs, the independent domestic abuse commissioner, said it was “unacceptable that the Sun has chosen to repeat and magnify the voice of someone who openly admits to violence against a partner”.
Jacobs joined a chorus of voices speaking out against the newspaper, which described the remarks by Rowling’s ex as a “sick taunt” against the Harry Potter creator.
“The media can play a vital role in shining a light on this issue and bringing it out of the shadows, but articles such as this one instead feed the shame that so many survivors will feel every day, minimising their experiences and allowing perpetrators to continue to abuse without fear of consequence,” Jacobs wrote to Victoria Newton, who was appointed the Sun’s editor in February.
(6) WRITERS OFFERED INSURANCE PROGRAM. The Book Industry Health Insurance Partnership, a coalition of 10 organizations that includes SFWA, has partnered with Lighthouse Insurance Group Solutions to “provide its members with a choice of health insurance options, including ACA-compliant major medical, Medicare/supplements, short-term policies, vision, dental, critical care, supplemental coverage, as well as small group/Health Reimbursement Arrangements.”
The Authors Guild noted in a recent press release that the coalition also includes the American Booksellers Association, American Society for Indexing, Book Industry Study Group, Graphic Artists Guild, Independent Book Publishers Association, Novelists Inc., and Western Writers of America.
No, I hear you: Now doesn’t seem the ideal moment to Netflix-and-chill with an animated series about the last vestiges of humanity struggling to survive.
I mean, imagine the pitch meeting:
“The future.
“Cities lie in ruin.
“The surface of the earth is overgrown with plant life — and with overgrown animals: mutated beasts, 300 feet tall, that stomp across the land hunting for prey.
“Which is to say: for humans, who, now firmly at the bottom of the food chain, have retreated to vast underground burrows to protect themselves.”
It all sounds … pretty bleak, I get that. Depressing, even. Like if you mashed up The Walking Dead with the popular anime series Attack on Titan, in which gruesome giants gobble up humanity’s last survivors like so many chocolate-covered cherries.
And I haven’t even mentioned the violent gangs of mutant, human-sized animals who’ve staked out their own territories, making the Earth’s surface a deadly place for the few humans who still live there.
And yet?
Netflix’s Kipo and the Age of the Wonderbeasts, which returns for a second season Friday, June 12, manages to be anything but bleak and depressing. It’s bright and sunny, colorful and funny, and … then, there are those tunes.
(8) O’NEIL OBIT. Comic book writer Denny O’Neil died June 11 at the age of 81. Games Radar’s tribute is here.
…O’Neil was best known for his work on Batman, which included writing Batman, Detective Comics, and Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight, as well as editing DC’s Batman titles from 1986 to 2000. He, editor Julius Schwartz, and artist Neal Adams are credited for guiding the Dark Knight back to his darker roots after a period of campiness brought on by the success of the 1960s Batman TV series….
(9) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.
June 12, 1956 — X Minus One’s “If You Was A Moklin” was aired for the first time. Written by Murray Leinster (published in Galaxy, September 1951) who would win a number of Hugos in his career (L.A. Con III awarded him a Retro Hugo Novelette for “First Contact”, published in Astounding May 1945; NY Con II would give him Best Novelette for “Exploration Team”, published in Astounding March 1956; and he’s up this year for a Retro Hugo Novella for “Trog”, published in Astounding Science Fiction, June 1944.) This story is about a planet that has a strange imitative trait it shows in producing its offspring. Or so it seems. Adapted as usual by Ernest Kinoy. The cast was Joe Julian, Patricia Weil, Karl Weber and Ralph Camargo. You can listen to hear it here.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
Born June 12, 1856 – Georges Le Faure. Among a dozen popular swashbuckling novels, War Under Water against Germany; The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist (with Henry de Graffigny, 4 vols.; tr. in 2 vols. 2009) with an explosive that could destroy the world, a Space-ship faster than light, visits to other planets, aliens. Verne was first but not alone. (Died 1953) [JH]
Born June 12, 1914 – Frank Kelly. Two novels, half a dozen shorter stories, from this pioneer. “Light Bender” was in the June 1931 Wonder Stories – he was 15! Later a speechwriter for Harry Truman; vice-president, Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. “My Interplanetary Teens” in the June 1947 Atlantic. Fiction outside our field in The New Yorker and Esquire. First Fandom Hall of Fame. (Died 2010) [JH]
Born June 12, 1914 — William Lundigan. Col. Edward McCauley in the Fifties serial Men into Space which lasted for thirty-eight episodes. He really didn’t do any other SF acting other than showIng up once on Science Fiction Theater. (Died 1975.) (CE)
Born June 12, 1927 — Henry Slesar. He had but one genre novel,Twenty Million Miles to Earth, but starting in the Fifties and for nearly a half century, he would write one hundred sixty short stories of a genre nature, with his first short story, “The Brat” being published in Imaginative Tales in September 1955. He also wrote scripts for television — CBS Radio Mystery Theater (which, yes, did SF), Tales Of The Unexpected, the revival version of the Twilight Zone, Batman, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and genre adjacent, lots of scripts for Alfred Hitchcock Presents. (Died 2002.) (CE)
Born June 12, 1940 — Mary A. Turzillo, 80. She won the Nebula Award for Best Novelette for her “Mars is No Place for Children” story, published in Science Fiction Age. Her first novel, An Old Fashioned Martian Girl was serialized in Analog, and a revised version, Mars Girls was released. Her first collection to polish her SWJ creds is named Your cat & other space aliens. Mars Girls which I highly recommend is available from the usual digital suspects. (CE)
Born June 12, 1945 — James Stevens-Arce, 75. Encyclopedia of Science Fiction says that “James Stevens-Arce, is perhaps the first Puerto Rican to publish sf, and the most prolific.“ He has but one novel, Soulsaver which won thePremio UPC de Ciencia Ficción, and a double handful of short stories which do appear to have made to the digital realm.(CE)
Born June 12, 1946 – Sue Anderson. Fannish musicals with Mark Keller, performed at 1970s Boskones: Rivets, Rivets Redux, Mik Ado about Nothing (note Gilbert & Sullivan allusion), The Decomposers. George Flynn, Anne McCaffrey, Elliot Shorter are gone, but Chip Hitchcock was in some or all and I’m counting on him to explain what really happened. Three short stories (one posthumously in Dark Horizons 50), and this cover with Stevan Arnold for Vertex. (Died 2004) [JH]
Born June 12, 1948 – Etienne Sándorfi. Hungarian hyperrealist painter. It was said that he painted like an assassin; also that, working at night, he went to bed each day later than the day before, puzzling his daughters. Ten interiors for Omni. The Wayback Machine has this interview; see some of his paintings here (Madeleine), here (nature morte organes). (Died 2007) [JH]
Born June 12, 1948 — Len Wein. Writer and editor best known for co-creating (with Bernie Wrightson) Swamp Thing and co-creating Wolverine (with Roy Thomas and John Romita Sr.) and for helping revive the the X-Men. He edited Watchmen which must have been interesting. He’s a member of the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame. (Died 2017.) (CE)
Born June 12, 1955 — Stephen Pagel, 65. Editor with Nicola Griffith of the genre anthologies, Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction, Bending the Landscape: Fantasy, and Bending the Landscape: Horror. (CE)
Born June 12, 1963 – Franz Miklis. Austrian artist active for decades in fanart (see here and here) and otherwise (see here and here). His Website is here. [JH]
Born June 12, 1970 – Claudia Gray. A score of novels, some in the Star Wars universe; a few shorter stories; translated into Dutch, French, German, Portuguese. Her Website is here (“Bianca, Tess, Nadia, Skye, Marguerite, and Noemi aren’t that much like me. For example, they all have better hair”; also “Read as much as you can…. Read the stuff you love. Read the stuff you never thought you’d love”). [JH]
The Mouse Factory“The Mystery of Mickey’s Ears Revealed” Illustration by Ward Kimball Original Art (Walt Disney, c. 1970s). Walt Disney like to say, “I only hope that we don’t lose sight of one thing – that it was all started by a mouse.” Mickey’s trademark ears have been a source of conversation since the famous mouse was born in 1928. Created by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks, Mickey is characterized as a cheerful and mischievous “little guy” with ears that move strangely. In the early 1970s, Disney Legend Inductee and one of “Walt’s Nine Old Men”, Ward Kimball (1914 – 2002) attempted to clear up the matter and explain the mystery of Mickey’s ears on the television show, The Mouse Factory. In this lot is a rare illustration by Kimball showing Mickey in front and side views with an explanation on how his ears move independently as he moves his head.
(12) BE SEATED. In “Episode 29: Omphalistic Hugosity” of Two Chairs Talking (no relation to Arthur “Two Sheds” Jackson), former Aussiecon chairs David Grigg and Perry Middlemiss talk about the shorter fiction nominees for the 2020 Hugo Awards, and then take the Hugo Time Machine back to 1962, when Stranger in a Strange Land won Best Novel.
Loma Homes translated the magic of “Harry Potter” into an epic new rental just 30 minutes away from The Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Orlando.
The Wizard’s Way villa has eight themed bedrooms with 10 beds, five bathrooms, and dozens of book and movie Easter eggs that fans of the franchise will love.
(14) AVATAR. [Item by Cliff.] This video demonstrates a digital avatar created by the company founded by an ex-colleague of mine.
This demo showcases a cutting edge end-to-end virtual assistant prototy[e developed by Pinscreen. The entire Avatar runs on the cloud and is streamed directly onto a web browser. This demo highlights a real-time facial AI-synthesis technology based on paGAN II, cutting edge NLP, voice recognition, and speech synthesis. None of the conversation is scripted.
(15) MURDER(BOT) SHE WROTE. Camestros Felapton has many kind (but non-spoilery) words to say about Martha Wells’ new novel: “Murderbot: Network Effect”.
I sort of gave up reviewing Murderbot a few novellas ago. There is a sense that actually the plot really doesn’t matter and the simplest explanation of an instalment is that its a Murderbot story and the reader either knows the formula or doesn’t and if they don’t then see earlier reviews. However, that belies how much I enjoy each and every one of Martha Wells’s brilliant episodes of Murderbot’s continuing adventures.
The essence of the formula is the juxtaposition of this incredibly vulnerable highly competent killing machine. Murderbot has been shot and blasted and zapped but the struggles with their own sense of self and connections with other people pulls you in….
On board the International Space Station since May 2018 is a mini-fridge-size facility called the Cold Atom Lab (CAL), capable of chilling atoms in a vacuum down to temperatures one ten billionth of a degree above absolute zero. It is, for all intents and purposes, one of the coldest spots in the known universe. And according to a new study published in Nature, scientists have just used it to create a rare state of matter for the first time ever in space. From a report:
Bose-Einstein condensates, sometimes called the fifth state of matter, are gaseous clouds of atoms that stop behaving like individual atoms and start to behave like a collective. BECs, as they’re often called, were first predicted by Albert Einstein and Satyendra Nath Bose over 95 years ago, but they were first observed in the lab by scientists just 25 years ago. The general idea when making a BEC is to inject atoms (in the case of CAL, rubidium and potassium) into an ultra-cold chamber to slow them down. A magnetic trap is then created in the chamber with an electrified coil, which is used along with lasers and other tools to move the atoms into a dense cloud. At this point the atoms “kind of blur into one another,” says David Aveline, a physicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the lead author of the new study.
(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Creative Writing Advice From Neil Gaiman” on YouTube is a 2015 compiilation by Nicola Monaghan of excerpts from speeches Gaiman has given on writing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPN7vDu9Rsk
[Thanks to Cliff, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, JJ, Chip Hitchcock, John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, John Hertz, Cat Eldridge, Daniel Dern, and Michael Toman for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Bill.]
From the large number of stories that series editor John Joseph
Adams screened for this year’s collection, he picked the 80 best pieces to
submit to editor Carmen Maria Machado for a blind reading, so that the prestige
of the venues or bylines were not a factor. (The ones Adams designated as notable are shown in a table at the
link). Machado then selected 20 for publication (ten science fiction, ten
fantasy, highlighted in green on the table.)
The book will be published on October 1, with a cover by Galen Dara.
Here is the Table of Contents with the 20 stories they thought the best.
2019 Table of Contents
FANTASY
Variations on a Theme from
Turandotby Ada
Hoffmann
from Strange Horizons
What Gentle Women Dareby Kelly Robson
from Uncanny Magazine
The Storyteller’s Replacementby N.K. Jemisin
from How Long ’til Black Future Month?
Dead Airby Nino Cipri
from Nightmare Magazine
Pitcher Plantby Adam-Troy Castro
from Nightmare Magazine
Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Memphis
Minnie Sing the Stumps Down Goodby LaShawn M. Wanak
from FIYAH
Godmeatby Martin Cahill
from Lightspeed Magazine
The Secret Lives of the Nine
Negro Teeth of George Washingtonby P. Djèlí Clark from Fireside Magazine
Six Hangings in the Land of
Unkillable Womenby
Theodore McCombs
from Nightmare Magazine
Dead Lovers on Each Blade, Hungby Usman Malik
from Nightmare Magazine
SCIENCE FICTION
The Kite Makerby Brenda Peynado
from Tor.com
What Everyone Knowsby Seanan McGuire
from Kaiju Rising II
Poor Unfortunate Foolsby Silvia Park
from The Margins (Transpacific Literary Project)
Hard Maryby Sofia Samatar
from Lightspeed Magazine
On the Day You Spend Forever with
Your Dogby Adam
Shannon
from Apex Magazine
Nine Last Days on Planet Earthby Daryl Gregory
from Tor.com
STETby Sarah Gailey
from Fireside Magazine
When Robot and Crow Saved East
St. Louisby
Annalee Newitz
from Future Tense Fiction
Skinnedby Lesley Nneka Arimah
from McSweeney’s
Through the Flash by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenhyah
from Friday Black
(1) AO3’S HUGO PACKET
ENTRY. Archive of Our Own has publicly released its Hugo Voter Packet Submission.
The two-page writeup is here
[PDF file]. The following intro comes from Firenze
to Therum:
Here’s some information about AO3, including its origins, some key features, and the team that makes it all possible. You can also check out the shiny PDF we submitted for the 2019 Hugo packet!
(2) AVENGING ECONOMIST.
Behind the Financial Times paywall, economics
columnist Tim Harford offers his thoughts on Avengers: Endgame.
Thanos fascinates me not only because he’s the best bad guy since Darth Vader–but because the muscular utilitarian is an economist on steroids.
Thanos’s claim to the economists’ hall of fame lies in his interest in scarce resources, his faith in the power of logical analysis, and a strong commitment to policy action–specifically, to eliminate half of all life in the universe, chosen at random…
…Thanos has convinced himself that he’s seen something nobody else can quite understand. The truth is that he sorely needs peer review. Like many powerful people, he regards himself as above his critics, not to mention every sapient being in the universe. He views humans less as free-willed spirits capable of solving their own problems, and more like overbreeding rabbits, needing a cull for their own good.
Going into Avengers: Endgame, one would be well-advised to manage both one’s expectations, and — given its three-hour-plus, intermissionless runtime — one’s fluid intake.
…The Russos’ decision to stick close to the experiences of the remaining Avengers proves a rewarding one, as they’ve expressly constructed the film as an extended victory lap for the Marvel Cinematic Universe writ large. Got a favorite character from any Marvel movie over the past decade, no matter how obscure? Prepare to get serviced, fan. Because the film’s third and final hour contains extended references to every single Marvel film that has led up to this one – yes! even Thor: The Dark World! I’m as surprised as you are! – and part of the delight Endgame provides to the patient audience member is gauging the size of the cheer that greets the entrance of any given hero, locale or – in at least once instance – item of super-hardware.
Make no mistake: There will be cheers. And boos. And gasps. The final, climactic battle (come on, you knew there’d be one) is legitimately thrilling, because every one of its manifold delights is fueled by (a cynic would say coasting on) the warm familiarity that spending a decade with these characters has engendered….
…Many authors and industry spokespeople have talked more eloquently about the need to address this disparity in publishing than I will ever be able to. But I also suspect more than a few publishers will quietly check their new submissions piles or log into BookScan after reading this, and suggest that in order to affect any real change they need to submit more books by writers of colour.
They may argue, of course, that there needs to be more evidence of sales potential first to get those books past gatekeepers in marketing, finance and other departments. They might (just) have a short-term point, but to me this sounds more like using data to justify a current position – and I think it also misses the bigger publishing opportunity.
Here are four cultural tipping point trends that show what I mean.
From the ‘respectable’ bookshelves: Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad wins the Pulitzer, the National Book Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction literature.
From the Box Office: The Marvel Universe film Black Panther makes over a billion dollars at the box office in record time and gets nominated for seven Oscars including Best Picture (it doesn’t win that one though, of course).
From an adjacent cultural sector: The Musée d’Orsay in Paris opens their major exhibition Black Models: From Gericault to Matisse, challenging our historic perceptions of French masterpieces by reframing and renaming them to foreground attention on their black subjects, gaining both critical acclaim and a big upswing in first time visits from new audiences (new readers to you and me) along the way.
…In 2018, almost every category of the Hugos were won by women, including N.K. Jemisin, who became the first person ever to win the Hugo for Best Novel three years in a row. Before Jemisin, no Black person of either gender had ever won the top award.
Then came this year’s historic collection of nominees, which are notable not just for the elevation of a more diverse field of storytellers, but for the specific type of story that many of them represent.
Rowland coined the term “hopepunk” on a whim in a 2017 Tumblr post, having no idea that it would catch on so strongly within the community. She defined it initially as “the opposite of grimdark,” referring to a popular dystopian subgenre characterized by nihilism, amorality, and a negative view of human nature. Hopepunk, in contrast, is optimistic about humanity and sees kindness as “an act of rebellion” against a power structure that benefits from people giving up on compassion.
In an essay for the Winter 2019 issue of The Stellar Beacon zine, Rowland expanded on hopepunk, emphasizing the resistance element. Unlike another subgenre dubbed “noblebright”—characterized by the belief that righteous heroes can and will prevail over wicked villains—hopepunk does not deny the inherent injustices of the real world. However, it also recognizes the potential for justice within humanity. Compassion and empathy are weapons in the eternal fight between good and evil within the human heart. Hopepunk acknowledges that that fight will never be won, but insists on fighting anyway, because, as Rowland wrote, “the fight itself is the point.”
Dann listened to the podcast and sent along these
notes —
During the interview, Burk categorically denied having anything to do with abusive/predatory behavior that had been an issue at past cons. He was incensed at the post-con attempts to tie abusive behavior with himself or Morrison. Burk suggested that the tone/perspective of comments that he received at the con were decidedly different from what was seen on the Internet in the days that followed. The people complaining most loudly online had appeared to have substantially different perspectives while at the con. He also denied that Morrison ever exposed himself during his performance. A prosthetic/prop was used during the performance.
Burk acknowledged that he had made the mistake of thinking that BizarroCon was an appropriate venue for Morrison’s performance. Similar (and perhaps more gross) performances have been a long tradition at KillerCon.
Brian Keene indicated that he had acted as a consultant/mediator after the BizarroCon performance, but he had no direct input on Deadite Press’ decision to fire Burk.
Burk indicated that he disagreed with the decision by Eraserhead Press’ decision to terminate him. But he also said that he is still on good terms with the executives in charge and has a positive opinion of them.
He also discussed his new imprint “Section 31 Productions”. Star Trek fans will recognize the homage in the company’s name.
In theSeason 8 premiere, Winterfell leather goth Sansa Stark questions her brother Jon Snow’s decision to bring his pushy new girlfriend (and aunt!) Daenerys and her two dragons to the north, wondering out loud what precisely the dragons are going to eat. The Mother of Dragons smugly replies, “Whatever they want.” (Which, judging from past episodes, includes a lot of animal herds and the occasional shepherd boy.)
Later in the episode, two of Dany’s Dothraki footmen inform her that her dragons only ate only “18 goats and 11 sheep” for lunch, a sign that they are losing their appetite as a result of the move up north. Considering that Game of Thrones scribes D.B. Weiss and David Benioff love foreshadowing, we couldn’t help but wonder if the dragon’s dietary needs will play some key role in the upcoming Battle of Winterfell. To better understand the dragon hunger situation and how it could impact the impending war with the Night King, Eater got in touch with a bona fide expert on large reptiles and flying animals, and asked her a few questions about how these aerial beasts might act during the epic battle ahead.
(9) CONNOR TRIBUTE. Graham
Connor (1957-2018) co-founded SF² Concatenation at the 1987 Eastercon and remained one of its
co-editors until his death in December 2018. Jonathan Cowie and other friends have
assembled an illustrated profile of his life in SF and space communications in “A
life in SF and space”, an advance post ahead of SF²
Concatenation’s
summer edition.
Graham was born in the Cumbrian, coastal town of Workington, in the shadow of Windscale (now Sellafield). 1957 was the year of the Windscale nuclear disaster. And so the scene was set for Graham to potentially have been bitten by a radioactive spider and become a superhero. But, alas, that did not happen….
He did make it to several Worldcons — Brighton (1979), Brighton (1987), The Hague (1990) – he
subsequently worked a couple of years for ESA nearby, and Glasgow (1995).
Sadly, chronic illness prevented further attendance beyond the mid-2000s.
One of the co-designers of a machine later recognised as the world’s oldest working digital computer has died.
Richard “Dick” Barnes helped to create the Harwell Dekatron, which was first put to use in 1951 by Britain’s fledgling nuclear research establishment.
He was also involved in the 2.5-tonne machine’s restoration, which saw it switched back on in 2012.
…He and two colleagues, Ted Cooke-Yarborough and Gurney Thomas, began their work on the Harwell Dekatron in 1949.
It was initially used by the Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Oxfordshire, where its tasks involved solving equations used to design the structure supporting the world’s first commercial nuclear reactor at Calder Hall.
…In November 2012 the machine was successfully switched back on after a three-year restoration project.
The revived machine functioned as planned, which is to say, very slowly.
It could take up to 10 seconds to multiply two numbers – but Mr Barnes and his co-designers had wanted a machine that could run continuously, not necessarily quickly, in order to be useful.
Indeed, it was known to calculate continuously for periods of up to 80 hours.
(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled
by Cat Eldridge.]
Born April 24, 1930 — Richard Donner, 89. Oh, now he’s credited in directing Superman as making the modern superhero film. H’h. Well I’m going to celebrate him instead for Scrooged, The Goonies (really not genre but fun) and Ladyhawke. Not to mention the horror he did — Tales from the Crypt presents Demon Knight and Bordello of Blood. Oh and the first X-Men film which was superb.
Born April 24, 1936 — Jill Ireland. For her short life, she was in an amazing number of genre shows. She was on Star Trek romancing Spock as Leila Kalomi In “This Side of Paradise”. She had five appearances on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. as well as being on Night Gallery, My Favorite Martian, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Voodoo Factor and the SF film The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything based on the 1962 novel of the same name by John D. MacDonald. (Died 1990.)
Born April 24, 1946 — Donald D’Ammassa, 73. Considered to be one of the best and fairest long-form reviewers ever. His Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2005) covers some five hundred writers and as can two newer volumes, Encyclopedia of Fantasy and Horror Fiction (2006) and Encyclopedia of Adventure Fiction (2009) are equally exhaustive. I can’t comment on his fiction as I’ve only ever encountered as a reviewer.
Born April 24, 1947 — Michael Butterworth, 72. Author with Michael Moorcock of, naturally, two Time of the Hawklords novels, Time of the Hawklords and Queens of Deliria. He also wrote a number of Space 1999 Year 2 novels, too numerous to list here. He also edited Corridor magazine from 1971 to 1974. He also wrote a number of short fiction pieces including one whose title amuses me for reasons I’m not sure, “Circularisation of Condensed Conventional Straight-Line Word-Image Structures“.
Born April 24, 1953 — Gregory Luce, 66. Editor and publisher of both the Science Fiction Gems and the Horror Gems anthology series, plus such other anthologies as Citadel of the Star Lords / Voyage to Eternity and Old Spacemen Never Die! / Return to Earth. For a delightful look at him and these works, go here. Warning: cute canine involved!
(12) WILSON FUNDRAISING
UPDATE. The “Help
Gahan Wilson find his way”GoFundMe
is now up to 1300 contributors and just over
$60,000 raised. Gahan Wilson is suffering from severe dementia, and the
goal is to pay for his memory care.
Gahan and my mother had been residing in an assisted living facility in Arizona. With my mother’s passing, he must move to a memory care unit.
…Gahan will be in our care at the casita, and we will also find him a memory care unit in Santa Fe since he also needs daily medical care.
Memory care is wildly expensive. More so than assisted living. If we could cover the cost ourselves, we would. We can’t, and Gahan and my mother did not save for anything like this. We are asking his fans to help us, help Gahan.
That’s what this is all about. Making the rest of Gahan’s days as wonderful as they can be.
…Any author or editor attempting to claim the mantle of [Howard] Zinn’s work has an unenviable task ahead of them. But when SF luminaries John Joseph Adams and Victor LaValle — both of whom have produced top-quality works — announced a short story collection whose title is an homage to Zinn, we were very excited.
Given the provocative and timely premise of A People’s Future Of The United States, we approached the collection of stories with enthusiasm. Unfortunately, the collection as a whole failed to live up to the grand ideas described by the editors.
…Questions of race, class and gender are important to explore and have all-too-often been ignored in science fiction.
We would argue that because science fiction is an inherently political genre, it is of paramount importance to create inclusive futures we can believe in. Some of the stories in this volume do indeed ably tackle topics of race, class and gender. But the topic of labour is almost entirely neglected.
It is disappointing that an anthology that so explicitly aims to address cultural blindspots has reproduced one itself.
In comparison, the index to Zinn’s classic history book includes a full page of references to organized labour movements. At a rough estimate, 30 per cent of the book deals with the struggles of traditional union movement organizing, and workers rights are integral to much of the rest of the text….
(14) ROBOTS
LIKE ME. James Wallace Harris reviews Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me in “Why
Should Robots Look Like Us?” at Auxiliary
Memory.
McEwan’s story often digresses into infodumps and intellectual musings which are common pitfalls of writing science fiction. And the trouble is he goes over the same well-worn territory. The theme of androids is often used to explore: What does it mean to be human? McEwan uses his literary skills to go into psychological details that most science fiction writers don’t, but the results are the same.
I’ve been reading these stories for decades, and they’ve been explored in the movies and television for many years too, from Blade Runner to Ex Machina. Why can’t we go deeper into the theme? Partly I think it’s because we assume AI robots will look identical to us. That’s just nuts. Are we so egocentric that we can’t imagine our replacements looking different? Are we so vain as a species as to believe we’re the ideal form in nature?
…Instead of writing stories about our problems of dealing with facsimiles of ourselves, we should be thinking about a world where glittery metallic creatures build a civilization on top of ours, and we’re the chimpanzees of their world.
Scientists have developed a brain implant that can read people’s minds and turn their thoughts to speech.
The team at the University of California, San Francisco says the technology is “exhilarating”.
They add that their findings, published in the journal Nature, could help people when disease robs them of their ability to talk.
Experts said the findings were compelling and offered hope of restoring speech.
The mind-reading technology works in two stages.
First an electrode is implanted in the brain to pick up the electrical signals that manoeuvre the lips, tongue, voice box and jaw.
Then powerful computing is used to simulate how the movements in the mouth and throat would form different sounds.
(16) KRUGMAN’S
WORLDCON TALK. At Anticipation, the 2009 Worldcon in Montreal, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman spoke and then took questions.
Scott Edelman has posted an audio recording on YouTube.
(17) PROP MAKER. Kenneth Spivey is “The Swordsmith to the Stars”. Great Big Story has a video (just over 3
minutes) about this artist and prop maker who is “working on
Hollywood films like the ones he’s always loved—and likely inspiring the
next generation.” Chevy trucks are featured prominently since they are the
corporate sponsor.
(18) GEMINI MAN. The Hollywood Reporter
asks “Can ‘Gemini Man’ Revive the Golden Age of ’90s Sci-Fi?” That is, can it be “an event unto itself?” Will
Smith stars opposite a CGI-ed 23-year-old version of himself in Ang Lee’s Gemini
Man—a property with a long history of previous stars being attached. The
movie opens October 11.
This morning Paramount had us seeing double with the first trailer for the Ang Lee-directed sci-fi/action film Gemini Man, starring not one, but two Will Smiths. The long-gestating film, which began development as a Tony Scott feature in 1997, centers on assassin on the verge of retirement Henry Brogen (Smith), who is forced to combat a younger clone of himself (Smith) in the not-too-distant future. Since the film’s inception in the late ’90s, a number of big names have been attached to star, including Harrison Ford, Nicolas Cage, Clint Eastwood and Sean Connery. When Ang Lee took over the project in 2017, he cast Smith in the lead role, giving the actor the unique opportunity to play both his current 50-year-old self and his 23-year-old self, who, thanks to the film’s revolutionary technology, looks like he just stepped right off the set of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. If the trailer for the film, which also stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Clive Owen and Benedict Wong, is any indication, Gemini Man may be just what the science fiction genre needs.
[…] Big-budget original science fiction needs a win, and hopefully Gemini Man can recapture the spirit of the ’90s where a big-name director, producer and actor were an event unto themselves, regardless of preexisting material. Gemini Man looks appealing not simply because of its concept and slick action sequences, but because it looks to simultaneously tap into our nostalgia with a sunglasses-wearing Smith, and also our desire for an original, high-concept property that doesn’t require any prior knowledge. It’s a double threat.
[Thanks to
John King Tarpinian, JJ, Cat Eldridge, Chip Hitchcock, Mike Kennedy, Martin
Morse Wooster, Dann, Carl Slaughter, StephenfromOttawa, Jonathan Cowie, Scott
Edelman, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File
770 contributing editor of the day Jack Lint.]
(1) NAME THAT ROCK. In the Washington Post, Sarah Kaplan profiles the “byzantine and marvelously
nerdy naming guidelines” of the International Astronomical Union (“The
bizarre and brilliant rules for naming new stuff in space”). Among them: the mountains and
plains of Titan have to be named according to references in Dune or Lord of the Rings, Names for asteroids have relatively few rules,
but one of them is not to name an asteroid after your cat, as James Gibson
found out when he named an asteroid after his cat, Mr. Spock, and was told that
while his asteroid remains “2309 Mr. Spock,” he really shouldn’t do
it twice.
[Names for the moons of Jupter] must come from a character in Greek or Roman mythology who was either a descendant or lover of the god known as Zeus (in Greek) or Jupiter (Latin). It must be 16 characters or fewer, preferably one word. It can’t be offensive, too commercial, or closely tied to any political, military or religious activities of the past 100 years. It can’t belong to a living person and can’t be too similar to the name of any existing moons or asteroids. If the moon in question is prograde (it circles in the same direction as its planet rotates) the name must end in an “a.” If it is retrograde (circling in the opposite direction), the name must end in an “e.”
Most people don’t kill time by finding the most distant object ever discovered in the solar system, but most people aren’t Scott Sheppard.
Last week, the Carnegie Institution for Science astronomer announced he had just discovered an object that sits about 140 astronomical units away. One AU equals the 93 million miles between Earth and the sun, so that means this object is 140 times the distance of Earth from the sun, or 3.5 times farther away than Pluto.
This is just a mere couple months after he and his team discovered 2018 VG18, nicknamed “Farout,” which sits 120 AU away, and for a brief moment was the farthest known object in the solar system. Sheppard and his team have already given a pretty apt tongue-in-cheek nickname to the usurper: “FarFarOut.”
Realistic worldbuilding requires that we get out of the dystopia/utopia binary and imagine futures that are a diverse mix of worlds. To imagine a plausible future world, we need to look critically at our own history, where progress is uneven and resistance is not futile. Annalee Newitz, journalist, co-founder of the website io9, and author of the acclaimed science fiction novel Autonomous joins us to share her insights into worldbuilding as part of the San Diego 2049 series of programs.
(4) SALAM AWARD JUDGES. The 2019 jury for the Salam Award will be Jeffrey Ford, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Maha Khan Phillips, John Joseph Adams, and Saba Sulaiman. The award promotes imaginative fiction in Pakistan. (Via Locus Online.)
Last year’s winner was Akbar Shahzad for his story Influence
From what I’ve seen–and the effects of the last decade in the genre short fiction scene have been to render it even more diffuse than it already was, so I really can’t say that I’ve had a comprehensive view–2018 was a strong year for SF short fiction, with venues including Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and Uncanny delivering strong slates of stories. I was interested to observe how easy it is to discern an editorial voice, and a preoccupation with certain topics, when reading through a magazine’s yearly output. Uncanny, for example, had a strong focus on disabled protagonists in 2018, with stories that often turn on their struggles to achieve necessary accommodation, with which they can participate and contribute to society.
One topic that I expected to see a great deal more of in my reading was climate change. Only a few of the pieces I’ve highlighted here turn on this increasingly important topic, and very few stories I read dealt with it even obliquely. Given how much climate change has been in the public conversation recently (and not a moment too soon) it’s possible that next year’s award nominees will deal with it more strongly, but I was a bit disappointed not to see SF writers and editors placing an emphasis on it already.
The Necronomicon is undoubtedly the most emblematic book in the mythology of H.P. Lovecraft. In this game you will assume the role of Abdul Alhazred with the aim of completing all sections of the aberrant book. It is a game for 2 to 4 players with game modes for 20 or 60 minutes.
(7) PLAYING IN THE FIELDS OF D.C. John Kelly in the Washington Post went on the press tour for Tom Clancy’s The Division 2, a Ubisoft
video game in which Washington, wiped out by a pandemic, has turned the
National Air and Space Museum into an armory and the Lincoln Memorial into a
graffiti-covered headquarters for paramilitary groups. (“A
new video game invites players to wallow in a dystopian Washington”.) But Ubisoft couldn’t use the World
War II Memorial for copyright reasons and decided not to have shooters blast
away at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial because “the gamemakers
thought it would be disrespectful to have players shooting at each other around
the statue of the famous pacifist.”
The game is set in the months after a deadly pandemic has swept the country and transformed the area around the Tidal Basin into a flooded wasteland, the National Air and Space Museum into a heavily guarded armory and the Lincoln Memorial into the smoke-blackened, kudzu-shrouded headquarters of a paramilitary group.
On the plus side, rush hour traffic is pretty light.
The challenge facing anyone designing a video game set in an actual place is making it realistic. The purpose of this junket — events were spread over two days, with a shuttle bus squiring the group from site to site — was to explain that process.
Four years ago, Stephanie Lauren looked into a painting and had an epiphany… “I could do this.”
No, she wasn’t imagining herself as a painter. She already was one, and the painting she was looking at was hers – a colorful portrait of a cute, furry kitty cat.
Rather, she started to imagine herself as one of her works come to life – a character, an expression of childhood and innocence. A new reality, purely of her own making.
Stitch by stitch, using cloth and Ethylene-vinyl acetate foam and beads, a cosplay character was born….
(9) WYNDHAM MEMORIAL. Triffid
Alley is a website intended to become a
memorial to the author John Wyndham, author of Day of the Triffids, who died in 1969.
It takes its name from Triffid Alley in Hampstead, London, which is the only known existing memorial to John Wyndham in the United Kingdom.
It will consist of a talk by David Ketterer and Ken Smith on Wyndham and the Penn Club where he lived from 1924 to 1943 and from 1946 to 1963 followed by drinks and food at a pub on the nearby Store Street, a street which figures on page 98 of the Penguin edition of The Day of the Triffids.
David Ketterer has more or less completed a full scale critical biography entitled TROUBLE WITH TRIFFIDS: THE LIFE AND FICTION OF JOHN WYNDHAM…
Anyone who is interested is invited to gather outside the Penn Club at 21-23 Bedford Place, London W.C.1 (near the British Museum) at 6.00 pm on Monday, 11 March 2019. We shall move to seating in the Penn Club lounge around 6.15 pm for the talk and questions. Around 7.00 pm we shall walk to The College Arms at 18 Store Street (near Senate House).
(10) HUGH LAMB OBIT. British anthologist
Hugh Lamb, editor of many paperback collections of vintage horror, died March 2.
His son, Richard, tells more in a “Tribute to My Father”.
On the night of 2nd March 2019, Hugh Lamb passed away. He died peacefully, in his sleep, after a long illness that had left him frail and weak. At the end he chose to move on, rather than suffer long months of treatment with no guarantees. We, his family, chose to honour his wishes and were with him at the end.
Hugh Lamb was, to many, one of the country’s foremost authorities on Victorian supernatural literature and a respected anthologist of those stories. To me, however, he was just dad. Certainly, I inherited a great love of ghost stories, as well as the cinema of the macabre, from my father. We would recommend movies to each other and enjoy critiquing them. As a child I used to thrill at tales of the supernatural, both real and fictional, all because of my father’s influence. When I wrote a series of screenplays, two of which were optioned by producers, they were all either ghost stories or stories with a supernatural flavour. And when one of my screenplays won the 2008 Rocliffe/BAFTA New Writers award, it was my father who positively glowed with pride. The screenplay was a father and son story, and he recognised himself in the pages with a mischievous delight.
(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled
by Cat Eldridge.]
Born March 3, 1863 — Arthur Machen. His novella “The Great God Pan” published in 1890 has garnered a reputation as a classic of horror, with Stephen King describing it as “Maybe the best horror story in the English language.” His The Three Impostors; or, The Transmutations 1895 novel is considered a precursor to Lovecraft and was reprinted in paperback by Ballantine Books in the Seventies. (Died 1947.)
Born March 3, 1920 — James Doohan. Montgomery “Scotty” Scott on Trek of course. His first genre appearance was in Outer Limits as Police Lt. Branch followed by being a SDI Agent at Gas Station in The Satan Bug film before getting the Trek gig. He filmed a Man from U.N.C.L.E.film, One of Our Spies Is Missing, in which in played Phillip Bainbridge, during 5he first season of Trek. Doohan did nothing of genre nature post-Trek. (Died 2005.)
Born March 3, 1945 — George Miller, 74. Best known for his Mad Max franchise, The Road Warrior, Mad Max 2, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome andFury Road. He also directed TheNightmare at 20,000 Feet segment of the Twilight Zone film, The Witches of Eastwick, Babe and 40,000 Years of Dreaming.
Born March 3, 1948 — Max Collins, 71. Best known for writing the Dick Tracy comic strip from 1977 to 1993 giving The it a SF flavor. He also did a lot of writing in various media series such as Dark Angel, The Mummy, Waterworld, The War of The Worlds and Batman.
Born March 3, 1955 — Gregory Feeley, 64. Reviewer and essayist who Clute says of that “Sometimes adversarial, unfailingly intelligent, they represent a cold-eyed view of a genre he loves by a critic immersed in its material.” Writer of two SF novels, The Oxygen Barons and Arabian Wine, plus the Kentauros essay and novella.
Born March 3, 1970 — John Carter Cash, 49. He is the only child of Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash. To date, he’s written two fantasies, Lupus Rex which oddly enough despite the title concerns a murder of crows selecting their new leader, and a children’s book, The Cat in the Rhinestone Suit, which I think Seuss would be grin at.
Born March 3, 1982 — Jessica Biel, 37. A number of interesting genre films including The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Blade: Trinity, Stealth, The Illusionist, the remake of Total Recall which I confess I’ve not seen, and the animated Spark: A Space Tail.
(12) COMICS SECTION.
Rich Horton, quite rightly, calls this a “very Eganesque” Dilbert.
(13) VARIANT COVERS. Brian
Hibbs in his Tilting at Windmills column
for Comics Beat“Heroes
in (Sales) Crisis” says variant covers are helping to break the
market:
Again, the new Marvel catalog leads with a mini-series called “War of the Realms” that has seventeen different covers attached to it. For one single issue worth of release. Even if you try to “ignore variants” they take up catalog and “eye” space, they increase the amount of time it takes to order (let alone find) the comics you want to stock; they also consume distributor resources, ultimately increasing overages, shortages and damages, hurting everyone as a result.
The January 2019 order form features 1106 solicited periodical comic books. Of those, only 454 of those SKUs are new items – the other 652 are variant covers. That means a staggering fifty-ninepercent of all solicited comics are actually variants. That’s completely and entirely absurd! It is deluded, it is dangerous, and it actively works against the best interests of the market.
Last Man on Earth star Will Forte voicing Shaggy, Jane the Virgin star Gina Rodriguez [Velma], Tracy Morgan [Captain Caveman] and Frank Welker [Scooby-Doo] are going for a ride in the Mystery Machine.
The actors have closed deals to voice star in the untitled Scooby-Doo animated movie being made by Warner Bros. and its Warner Animation Group division.
Tony Cervone is directing the feature, which counts Chris Columbus, Charles Roven and Allison Abbate [as] producers.
[…] The story sees the Mystery Inc. gang join forces with other heroes of the Hanna-Barbera universe to save the world from Dick Dastardly and his evil plans…and this time, we are told, the threat is real. The movie is slated for a May 2020 release.
(15) WHERE NO WOMAN HAS
GONE BEFORE. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Sure, some Star Trek projects—going back to Next
Gen—have been directed by a woman; but none have taken the helm for the
first episode in a series. And certainly no woman of color has been the leadoff
batter. Until now. Deadline has the story—”‘Star Trek’: Hanelle Culpepper Will
Direct Picard Pilot, First Woman To Launch Starfleet Series“.
Star Trek is boldly going on a new mission where only men have gone before. Hanelle Culpepper will direct the first two episodes of the upcoming untitled Star Trek Jean-Luc Picard series, making her the first woman to direct a pilot or debut episode of a Starfleet series in the franchise’s 53-year history. All 13 feature films in the Trek universe have also been directed by men.
Culpepper has directed two episodes of Star Trek Discovery on CBS All-Access. She helmed the episode titled Vaulting Ambition in Season One as well as an upcoming episode in Season Two, now underway on the subscription streaming site.
…Try as they will to style themselves international, the Inner and Outer Party members of American literary SF/F are hopelessly provincial, sharing a painful overlap in ideology, as well as a kind of homogeneous, mushy globalist-liberal outlook. Which, being “woke”, puts a premium on demographics over individualism. Fetishizing ethnicities and sexualities. While remaining borderline-militant about a single-track monorchrome political platform.
So, certain Inner and Outer Party folks proceeded to step all over their own unmentionables in an effort to “call out” the “slate” of the indie Proles from the dirty ghettos of indie publishing. And now the Inner and Outer Parties are in damage control mode (yet again!) trying to re-write events, submerge evidence, gaslight the actual victims of the literary pogrom, blame all evils on Emmanuel Goldstein (cough, Sad Puppies, cough) and crown themselves the Good People once more. Who would never, of course, do anything pernicious, because how could they? They are Good! They tell themselves they are Good all the time! They go out of their way to virtue-signal this Goodness on social media! It cannot be possible that they have done anything wrong!
Rabid Puppies packmaster Vox Day not only reprinted Torgersen’s post at Vox Popoli (“Puppies redux: Nebula edition” [Internet Archive link]), he appropriated to himself others’ credit for indie authors being in SFWA:
It was funny to read this in my inbox, as it was the first time I’ve had any reason to give a thought to SFWA in a long, long time. Possibly the most amusing thing about this latest SFWA kerfluffle is that it is a direct consequence of SFWA adopting my original campaign proposal to admit independent authors to the membership. Sad Puppy leader Brad Torgersen observes, with no little irony, the 2019 version of Sad Puppies…
(17) DIAL 451. The New Indian Express’ Gautam Chintamani uses a famous Bradbury novel as
the starting point to comment on news coverage of the recent Pakistan-India incident
in “White
Noise”.
Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 as a commentary on how mass media reduces interest in reading literature but considering the times we live in, it is doing more than that. Following the February 14 Jaish-e-Mohammed fidayeen attack on a CRPF convoy in Pulwama that left 44 Indian soldiers dead, most television news channels bayed for blood. There is no denying that the national emotions were running high and it was only natural for citizens of a nation that have been at the receiving end of a proxy war conducted by a neighbour that as a national policy believes in causing loss of life in India to ask for a befitting reply. Yet the fashion in which many news anchors assumed the mantle of judge, jury, and executioner was nothing less than appalling. The constant white noise emanating from most news debates, where everyone was urged to shout louder than the next person, offers a greater emotional bounty to the one who would teach Pakistan a lesson and this showed a committed effort from media to not allow the average citizen a moment to think.
(18) GAHAN WILSON FUNDRAISER. A GoFundMe to “Help Gahan Wilson find his way” wants to raise $100,000 for the artist’s care. Neil Gaiman gave $1,000. Other donors include artist Charles Vess, editor Ellen Dtalow, and Andrew Porter.
Gahan Wilson is suffering from Dementia
Gahan is suffering from severe dementia. We have helped him through the stages of the disease and he is currently not doing very well.
His wife, Nancy Winters, just passed away
My mother, and his wife of fifty three years, Nancy Winters, passed away on March 2, 2019. She was his rock. His guide through the world. While we all helped with his care, it was my mother who grounded him. He is currently distraught and out of sorts with the world.
Memory care is needed immediately
Gahan and my mother had been residing in an assisted living facility in Arizona. With my mother’s passing, the facility is about to discharge him. We must find him a memory care facility immediately.
… Memory care is wildly expensive. More so than assisted living. If we could cover the cost ourselves, we would. We can’t, and Gahan and my mother did not save for anything like this. We are asking his fans to help us, help Gahan.
Canada will contribute US$1.4bn to a proposed Nasa space station that will orbit the Moon and act as a base to land astronauts on its surface.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the step would “push the boundaries of innovation”.
The space station, called Gateway, is a key element in Nasa’s plan to return to the Moon with humans in the 2020s.
As part of the 24-year commitment, Canada will build a next-generation robotic arm for the new lunar outpost.
“Canada is going to the Moon,” Mr Trudeau told a news conference at Canadian Space Agency’s headquarters near Montreal, according to AFP.
Nasa plans to build the small space station in lunar orbit by 2026. Astronauts will journey back and forth between Gateway and the lunar surface. It will also act as a habitat for conducting science experiments.
[…] At one point in the trailer, all of the film’s mutants (save for Jean) are being transported by armed officers on what appears to be an armored tank. Wired UK writer Matt Kamen spotted three very familiar letters on their uniforms. If you look closely they read “MCU” which, as Kamen pointed out, could stand for “mutant containment unit.” But it could also be a clever nod to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Disney’s recent acquisition of 20th Century Fox and the cinematic rights to the X-Men.
(22) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “Motion Makes a Masochist” on
Vimeo, Dev warns that if you want to be a motion designer for movies, you
should be prepared to suffer a lot for your art.
[Thanks to
John King Tarpinian, Rich Horton, Mike Kennedy, Frank Olynyk, Chip Hitchcock, Carl Slaughter, JJ, Martin
Morse Wooster, Brian Z., Andrew Porter, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories.
Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day John Winkelman.]
(1) SUPERHEROES BY ACCIDENT.
The DC Universe streaming service debuts Doom Patrol on February 15.
Just like us. Only totally different. #DCUDoomPatrol series premiere on February 15, only on #DCUNIVERSE. DOOM PATROL reimagines one of DC’s most beloved groups of Super Heroes: Robotman aka Cliff Steele (BRENDAN FRASER), Negative Man aka Larry Trainor (MATT BOMER), Elasti-Woman aka Rita Farr (APRIL BOWLBY) and Crazy Jane (DIANE GUERRERO), led by modern-day mad scientist Niles Caulder aka The Chief (TIMOTHY DALTON). Each member of the Doom Patrol suffered a horrible accident that gave them superhuman abilities, but also left them scarred and disfigured. Traumatized and downtrodden, the team found their purpose through The Chief, coming together to investigate the weirdest phenomena in existence. Following the mysterious disappearance of The Chief these reluctant heroes will find themselves in a place they never expected to be, called to action by none other than Cyborg (JOIVAN WADE), who comes to them with a mission hard to refuse. Part support group, part Super Hero team, the Doom Patrol is a band of superpowered freaks who fight for a world that wants nothing to do with them.
(2) READ EMSHWILLER. The
Library of America’s “Story of the Week” is “Pelt” by Carol
Emshwiller, who died February 2.
One of the best-known of the 150-plus stories Emshwiller published between 1954 and 2016, is the often-anthologized “Pelt,” which was most recently reprinted in the Library of America collection, The Future Is Female! Describing the trek of a trophy hunter accompanied by his dog on a distant planet; the story is told from the dog’s point of view—one of Emshwiller’s numerous tales that explore the interactions of predators and prey or that adopt a non-human perspective. “I took several classes in prey animal psychology, which actually were classes on the psychology of everything,” she explained in her Contemporary Authors essay. “About how we, being predators and having predators such as cats and dogs around us all the time, understand predators, but know very little about prey animals.”
Our payment system is back online for all those who have been patiently waiting to book their memberships to this year’s Convention. If you’re ready to buy your membership please click through the link below where you’ll find the button to our Grenadine site for credit or debit card payments using Stripe.
Our Membership Rates are currently the same as they were prior to taking the sales page down to change payment systems, so those who have been trying to book have not lost out at all. These rates are:
EK: We are going to do something today that I’m incredibly excited about, because I have never done it before. We’re going to build a world. What is world building, in the science fiction/fantasy sense, because it seems to have a specific meaning that those who aren’t familiar with it may just not know. NKJ: It does. It’s one of the things that makes SFF unique among literary forms, just because you’re not doing a story in the first world, which is what we call our world/this world. We’re often using secondary worlds, i.e. worlds that aren’t earth. Could be another planet, another reality, could be another universe! It’s somewhere where the laws of physics don’t work the same way. there may be magic, there might be creatures or beings that don’t exist in our world. Could be strange environmental circumstances, but who knows. It’s a staple of science fiction and fantasy writing.
This collection of 25 stories from speculative fiction’s sharpest voices presents visions of future Americas that are born, bloody and aching, from the peril and difficulty of this present moment.
In his introduction, editor Victor LaValle writes about how this book derives from the project of its namesake, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States — the story of this place, as told by its people, all of its people. Indigenous and immigrant, female and queer and poor, rural and urban; a history spoken by the voiceless. This collection is full of futures which belong to the same people Zinn centered.
They are, in majority, not comfortable or easy futures — nor would one expect them to be, derived as they are from the second year of the Trump presidency and its pervasive damage to the marginalized of the United States. Several of these stories are brutal in their plausible despair — but all of them are rich with an undercurrent of, if not resistance, then the profound resilience of human beings, particularly those who have too often been denied rights and voices. As a whole, the collection challenges the ideas of who the people of the future United States might be — and therefore also challenges assumptions about who the people of the United States are now.
(7) SFRA. The Science
Fiction Research Association’s Support
a New Scholar Award has been won by Beata
Gubacsi. This excellence-based grant is helps fund one graduate student of
outstanding promise by covering SFRA membership costs for two years.
Beata Gubacsi is a PhD candidate at the University of Liverpool. Her research interests are genre, trauma, climate and animal studies, technology in medicine and health care with a focus on gaming and mental health. While working on her thesis, “Literature of Monstrosity: Posthumanism and the New Weird”, she has also been involved in Bluecoat Liverpool’s science fiction projects as part of her LiNK placement, and co-hosting and facilitating workshops at the Being Human Festival, Tate Exchange, and Nottingham New Art Exchange. She is author of the column, “Medical Humanities 2.0”, for The Polyphony, the blog of the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University while also running the Current Research in Speculative Fiction Conference. Most recently, she has joined the team of the Fantastika Journal as assistant reviews editor.
(8) IMPROVING THE CLASSICS. Hayati Evren’s art is news to me!
The renowned French cartoonist, author and illustrator Tomi Ungerer, a lifelong activist who protested against racial segregation, the Vietnam war and the election of US President Donald Trump, has died at the age of 87 in Ireland, his former adviser told AFP on Saturday.
…He was obsessed with books from an early age.
“For me, if there was a heaven it would be a library,” he told AFP in a 2016 interview, adding that he was “brought up on reading”.
Ungerer’s oeuvre ranged from globally celebrated children’s books like The Three Robbers and The Moon Man to erotic drawings as well as satirical paintings and political posters. He wrote in three languages: English, French and German.
He published over 140 books which have been translated into 30 languages.
(10) TODAY IN HISTORY
February 10, 1957 –Roger Corman’s Not Of This Earth premiered in theatres.
February 10, 1957 — Attack Of The Crab Monsters debuted.
(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled
by Cat Eldridge.]
Born February 10, 1904 — Lurton Blassingame. Literary agent for Heinlein. No, usually I don’t do such creatures here but he makes the birthday list because Grumbles from the Grave has more letters to Blassingame than to any other correspondent. And even some of Blassingames’s letters to Heinlein are included. (Died 1988)
Born February 10, 1906 — Lon Chaney Jr. I certainly best remember him as playing Larry Talbot in The Wolf Man but he has a lot of other roles as well: The Ghost of Frankenstein as The Monster (hey, correct billing!), The Mummy’s Tomb as The Mummy Kharis or Son of Dracula as Count Dracula, he played all the great monsters, often multiple times. (Died 1973.)
Born February 10, 1920 — Robert Park Mills. He was the managing editor of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine beginning in 1948 and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction the following year. He also edited Venture Science Fiction for several years. Under him, F&SF won an impressive three Hugo Awards for best magazine in 1959, 1960 and 1963. (Died 1986.)
Born February 10, 1929 — Jerry Goldsmith. Composer whose music grace many a genre undertaking including, and this is nona completing listing, Alien, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Poltergeist, Planet of the Apes, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. series, Star Trek: Voyager, The Mummy, The Twilight Zone (need I say the original series?) and he even did the music for Damnation Alley! (Died 2004.)
Born February 10, 1953 — John Shirley, 66. I not going to even attempt a complete précis of his career. I read and much enjoyed his first novel City Come A-Walkin and oddly enough his Grimm: The Icy Touch is damn good too in way many of those sharecropped novels aren’t. I see that to my surprise he wrote a episode of Deep Space Nine, “Visionary” and also wrote three episodes of the ‘12 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Born February 10, 1967 — Laura Dern, 52. Ok I’m going to note she’s in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet as Sandy Williams which is not genre but which is one fucking weird film. Jurassic Park where she is Dr. Ellie Sattler is her first SF film followed by Jurassic Park III and a name change to Dr. Ellie Degler. Such are the things movie trivia is made of. Star Wars: The Last Jedi has her showing as Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo. I think her first genre appearance was on Shelley Duvall’s Nightmare Classics series as Rebecca in “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” episode.
Born February 10, 1992 — Karen Fukuhara, 27. She is known for her role of Katana in Suicide Squad, as well as voicing Glimmer in the She-Ra and the Princesses of Power series. She plays Female in The Boys, the forthcoming web series based on The Boys by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson.
(12) COMICS SECTION.
Frazz knows that gravity sucks; maybe just enough suckage.
Well, I guess technically he wasn’t using his hands… In the Bleachers
(13) LOVE WILL BE PROVED.
Chuck Tingle today announced he’ll be a guest at CONvergence
in Minneapolis over the July 4-7 weekend.
In 2016 Tingle was nominated for a Hugo Award for his short story, Space Raptor Butt Invasion. As a response to an alt-right fan group conspiring to politicize his works, Tingle announced video game designer and anti-harassment activist Zoë Quinn would accept the award on his behalf if he won. His story did not win and Tingle subsequently published Pounded in the Butt by My Hugo Award Loss, which went viral on social media.
Billings newspaper The New York Times says, “By creating an online community in which his particular outlook—what he calls his ‘unique way’—is not just accepted but celebrated, Mr. Tingle has delivered a strong rebuke to the intolerant forces that used him as a prop in attacking diverse voices in the sci-fi world.”
(14) MISSY SERIES. Big Finish has released Missy, Series
1, audio adventures with Doctor Who’s rival, voiced by Michelle Gomez.
Missy… alone, unleashed and unfettered. What does she get up to when the Doctor isn’t around? Well, Missy has a plan. And to carry it out, she’s going to have to break some rules. And people. And planets. Look out universe, Missy is on a mission. And nobody is going to stop her…
“Get to the choppa!” is about to take on a whole new meaning. Silver Screen Bottling Company and Fox Studios have joined forces to release Dutch Bourbon Whiskey, a tie-in brand paying tribute to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character, Maj. Alan “Dutch” Schaefer, in John McTiernan’s 1987 sci-fi action classic Predator.
According to the bottler, the spirit’s logo is emblazoned with, yes, a chopper set against the targeting crosshairs made famous by the alien hunter with Ah-nuld’s now iconic line “Get to the chopper.”
(18) DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF
ELECTRIC CATS? [Item by Mike
Kennedy.]Cat Trigger Warning: Fast
Company wants you to know, “This AI dreams about cats–and they’ll
haunt your nightmares.” They look at some work Nvidia has done with their
AI StyleGAN—beyond generating human faces that don’t actually exist (for which
they grabbed tons of headlines). It turns out that they’re also into SJW
Credential (AI Weirdness: “Letting neural networks be weird • GANCats”). Some
of the generated cate are… just… a… bit… bizarre…
A few months ago, Nvidia’s AI photo generation technology went viral. The media marveled at the uncanny technological power of the company’s engine, called StyleGAN, which generates photos of people that don’t actually exist.
But while people were busy gawking at how real these machine-generated people looked, they missed the other important part of Nvidia’s experiment: Computer-generated cats.
(19) TANGLED UP IN BLUE.
Walt Disney Studios released a new trailer for its live-action Aladdin. I’m not worried whether Will Smith
can fill Robin Williams’ slippers – because I know nobody can! The movie comes
to theaters May 24.
[Thanks to
Cora Buhlert, Andrew Porter, Mike Kennedy, Michael Toman, Carl Slaughter. Chip
Hitchcock, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Michael J. Walsh, Bonnie McDaniel, Cat
Eldridge, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. Title credit goes
to File 770 contributing editor of the day Steve Davidson.]
(1) MARVEL AT 80. The
company will be celebrating all year —
Eighty years ago, the Marvel Universe roared into existence with the publication of the now-historic MARVEL COMICS #1. Over the years, the company expanded mightily under the guidance of legends Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and countless other industry titans. Today, Marvel is one of the most exciting and recognizable brands shaping pop culture, modern mythology and entertainment around the world – and this year, you can join millions of fans in celebrating MARVEL’S 80TH ANNIVERSARY!
For all of 2019, Marvel will be honoring its iconic characters and stories across every decade of the company’s rich history – from the early years as Timely Comics, to the latest adventures in the Marvel Universe fans know today. Whether you have been following Marvel since the beginning or you’ve just discovered The House of Ideas, you won’t want to miss this year-long celebration across publishing, animation, new media, collectibles, games, and more!
Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley notes that many of the stories, such as Samuel R. Delany’s “The Hermit of Houston,” have a clear political message.
“In his author’s note Delany says this is his attempt to write a post-Trump science fiction story,” Kirtley says. “And there were at least two other authors—E. Lily Yu and Charlie Jane Anders—who explicitly say in their author’s notes that their stories were somehow a response to Trump being president.”
Charles Payseur, whose story “Rivers Run Free” leads off the book, agrees that the Yu and Anders’ stories will make readers think hard about current political realities. The Yu story, in which humanity declines to aid extraterrestrial refugees, and the Anders story, in which a trans woman’s consciousness is forcibly transferred into a male cadaver, both grapple with the issue of morally-compromised bystanders.
“I think that both of them do an excellent job of challenging the perspective of not taking action, or being complicit with evil,” Payseur says.
Listen to the complete interview with John Joseph Adams, Caroline M. Yoachim, and Charles Payseur in Episode 342 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above)….
What’s being passed around among authors in the last few days:The latest Authors Guild survey, which shows that the median income for all authors (from their books) is $6,080, while the median income for full-time authors is $20,300. That $6k median figure is down significantly from previous years. So if you made more than $6k from book earnings last year, congratulations, you made more than half of your authorial compatriots.
Before everyone panics about the declines too much, please note: “The Authors Guild’s prior surveys were focused on Authors Guild members. For our 2018 survey, we greatly expanded the number of published authors we surveyed to provide a much larger, highly diverse pool and wider perspective,” i.e., the comparing the results this year to previous years isn’t apples to oranges, but might be comparing a Honeycrisp to a Red Delicious….
I’m back home for the first time in a while, and I’ve been given permission to talk more about what’s going on. Last month, my wife Amy was diagnosed with cancer — an aggressive form of lymphoma, to be specific.
Aggressive, but treatable. We’ve done the first round of chemo, and the last scans showed some tumor shrinkage, which is a good sign.
(5) LIPTAK’S NEWSLETTER. Andrew
Liptak, whose contributions to The Verge are
often linked here, launched his own newsletter last year, and just published
the 6th installment. Liptak says —
The goal is to talk about SF/F, storytelling, as well as reading and writing. I’m hoping to grow it a bit, and to use it as a platform to talk about stuff that isn’t necessarily newsworthy — a bit more commentary driven about the content of SF, but also to chat a bit about the general broader SF/F community at some point.
You can find it here: here. 5 of the 6 issues are archived: a 6th is subscriber-locked, which I’ll be using to publish short stories.
…A while ago on Twitter, I asked for suggestions for standalone SF novels — nominally for this list — but also because I was generally interested in finding something different to pick up. One story that came up a lot was Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time. Orbit recently released the book in the US for the first time — it originally came out in the UK in 2015 and won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. I picked up both the book and the audiobook, which we listened to on the drive down to PA and back between Christmas and New Year’s Eve.
It’s a fantastic novel, and I can see where all the praise is coming from I’ll write up a proper review of it at some point in the coming week, but something stood out for me that’s notable: Tchaikovsky’s use of suspended animation for his characters to play out a story that stretches thousands of years.
He’s not the first to do this by a long shot, but the use here reminded me of Cixin Liu’s The Dark Forest, and Peter Watts’ Freeze-Frame Revolution, in which several characters drop in and out of suspension, again, over decades and hundreds of years. Both stories use the technology not just as a convenient tool for the characters, but it’s also a neat literary instrument that allows both Cixin and Tchaikovsky to frame their story from one, unwavering perspective….
… According to Frederik Pohl, after years of lobbying and proposals a major studio bit and decided it was going to produce a series of big-budgeted Lensman films. Deals were made, contracts were written, millions of dollars were going to be invested – and the Smith family stood to profit greatly from the entire endeavor.
Then, a video tape showed up on the Smith family doorstep.
Back up. Up until the 1980s, Japan (and much of Asia) worked on a different system of copyright and licensing rights than the Western world; if a Japanese publisher bought the publishing rights to something, under Japanese law they bought the rights to EVERYTHING – including the rights to exploit that property in movies, tv, comics, or whatever. This is one of the reasons why you ended up with things like Batman manga, two different adaptations of Captain Future, etc. Western publishers knew this but worked with it anyway, reasoning that even if someplace like Japan made a TV or movie adaptation of a property it was highly unlikely that copies of it would make their way back to the west, and even if they did, who would want to watch them anyway? (Remember, this was all before the advent of the VCR, and the subsequent tape trading/collecting culture of SF/F media fandom). So when Japanese publisher Kodansha bought the rights to publish E.E. Doc Smith in Japanese in the 1960s, they considered themselves the owners of all the Japanese rights to Smith’s oeuvre. Meaning, they could make TV series or movies of any of it if they chose to, so long as it stayed in Japan….
(7) KGB.Fantastic Fiction at KGB
reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Victor LaValle and
Julie C. Day on Wednesday, January 16, 2019, 7pm at the KGB Bar in New York.
Victor LaValle
Victor LaValle is the author of seven works of fiction and one graphic novel. His most recent novel, The Changeling won the World Fantasy Award and the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel and the Dragon Award for Best Horror Novel. His novella, The Ballad of Black Tom, won the Shirley Jackson Award, the British Fantasy Award, the This is Horror Award for Novella of the Year, and was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, World Fantasy, and Bram Stoker Awards.
He lives in New York City with his family, and teaches writing at Columbia University.
Julie C. Day
Julie C. Day has published over thirty stories in venues such as Black Static, Podcastle, and the Cincinnati Review. Her genre-bending debut collection, Uncommon Miracles, was released by PS Publishing in October 2018. Julie lives in a small New England town with her family and various pets. You can also find her on twitter at @thisjulieday or on her blog stillwingingit.com
Wednesday, January 16th, 2019, 7 p.m. at KGB Bar,85 East 4th Street (just off 2nd Ave, upstairs.) New York, NY.
He is best-known for his work on Star Trek across the years, playing the Rura Penth commandant in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, the chief Vulcan Science Council minister in 2009’s Star Trek, Data’s “grandfather” Ira Graves in The Next Generation episode “The Schizoid Man,” and as Quatai in the Star Trek: Voyager episode “Bliss.”
He appeared in the opening episode of series six of Doctor Who, in an episode titled “The Impossible Astronaut”. In it, he played the older version of the character Canton Everett Delaware III, while his son, Mark Sheppard, played the younger version.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled
by Cat Eldridge.]
Born January 7, 1899 – F. Orlin Tremaine. He was the Editor of Astounding Science Fiction and Fact from 1933 to 1937. It said that he bought Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness without actually reading it. Later as Editor at Bartholomew House, he brought out the first paperback editions of Lovecraft’s The Weird Shadow Over Innsmouth and The Dunwich Horror. He wrote a dozen or so short stories that were published in the pulps between 1926 and 1949. (Died 1956.)
Born January 7, 1912 – Charles Addams. Illustrator best known for the Addams Family which he first drew in 1932 and kept drawing until his death. Needless to say there has been a number of films using these characters of which The Addams Family is my favorite. (Died 1988.)
Born January 7, 1913 – Julian S. Krupa. Pulp cover and interior illustrator from 1939 to 1971 who graced Amazing Stories and Fantastic.(Died 1989.)
Born January 7, 1928 – William Peter Blatty. Novelist and screenwriter best known for The Exorcist though he was also the same for Exorcist III. The former is by no means the only genre work that he would write as his literary career would go on for forty years after this novel and would include Demons Five, Exorcists Nothing: A Fable which he renamed Demons Five, Exorcists Nothing: A Hollywood Christmas Carol and The Exorcist for the 21st Century, his final work. (Died 2017.)
Born January 7, 1955 – Karen Haber, 64. Wife of Robert Silverberg. Author Of the Fire In Winter series (first co-written with Robert) and the War Minstrels series as well. With Robert, she edited three of the exemplary Universe anthologies that Terry Carr had created. Her Meditations on Middle Earth, her essay collection on J.R.R. Tolkien is quite superb. And of course her prequel Thieves’ Carnival to Leigh Brackett’s The Jewel of Bas is stunning.
Born January 7, 1961 – Mark Alan Shepherd, 48. The bar patron Morn in Deep Space Nine. His character appeared once in Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager.
Born January 7, 1982 – Lauren Cohen, 37. Best known as Maggie Rhee on The Walking Dead. She is also known as Bela Talbot on Supernatural, Rose on The Vampire Diaries, and Vivian McArthur Volkoff on Chuck. And she was in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice as Martha Wayne.
Born January 7, 1983 – Ruth Negga, 36. She was Raina in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. but she left that show as she got a leading role Tulip O’Hare in Preacher. She was also Nikki in Misfits, Queen Taria In Warcraft and a WHO Doctor In World War Z
Born January 7, 1988 — Haley Bennett, 31. First role was Molly Hartley in The Haunting of Molly Hartley. She was also Julie Campbell in The Hole, Stella in Kaboom andJustine Wills In Kristy.
(10) COMICS SECTION.
Brewster Rockit illustrates a little laundry problem aboard the Death Star.
(11) PROHIBITION. Camestros Felapton saw Wikileaks had issued a general prohibition to the media against saying certain things about their leading light and decided to share his own list of “40 Other Things You Shouldn’t Say About Julian Assange”.
As a major news organisation Felapton Towers has a confidential memo listing 40 other things we are not to say about Julian Assange which at great risk to myself I am leaking to the public.
At the top of his list is —
It is false and defamatory to say that Julian Assange is or ever has been a member of Slytherin House or ever shouted “I’ll get you Potter!” across the Hogwarts dining hall.
…I’m really glad to be writing more again. I mean, for one thing I’m writing at least twelve pieces of poetry and/or flash fiction a year, because of Patreon. (Obligatory plug: You can get one new piece of my work each month for $1!) Some of my work has been noveling, and some isn’t out yet, so it’s not all visible in this list– but I am really happy to enjoy prose again….
More than 100 years ago acoustic mirrors along the coast of England were used to detect the sound of approaching German zeppelins.
The concave concrete structures were designed to pick up sound waves from enemy aircraft, making it possible to predict their flight trajectory, giving enough time for ground forces to be alerted to defend the towns and cities of Britain.
Invented by Maj William Sansome Tucker and known as sound mirrors, their development continued until the mid-1930s, when radar made them obsolete.
Joe Pettet-Smith set out to photograph all the remaining structures following a conversation with his father, who told him about these large concrete structures dotted along the coastline between Brighton and Dover.
Some 200 million years ago in what is now Warwickshire, a dolphin-like reptile died and sank to the bottom of the sea.
The creature’s burial preserved its skull in stunning detail – enabling scientists to digitally reconstruct it.
The fossil, unveiled in the journal PeerJ, gives a unique insight into the life of an ichthyosaur.
The ferocious creature would have fed upon fish, squid and likely others of its kind.
Its bones were found in a farmer’s field more than 60 years ago, but their significance has only just come to light.
Remarkably, the skull is three-dimensionally preserved and contains bones that are rarely exposed.
(15) DEEP UNCOVERED.
Undersea mining was once a mere cover story for Howard Hughes’ Glomar Explorer
(intended to retrieve a Soviet submarine) – now it’s a real thing: “Japan’s grand plans to mine deep-sea vents”.
Off the coast of Okinawa, a slim stretch of land among Japan’s southern Ryuku islands, thousands of metres below the surface, there are the remains of extinct hydrothermal vent systems scattered about the ocean floor.
The minerals at these long-dead former vent sites are now gaining attention due to increasing international interest in deep-sea mining. Just one of these deposits is thought to contain enough zinc to supply Japan’s demand for a year. For a country that imports the vast majority of its mineral resources, seafloor sulphide deposits are seen as a tantalising potential domestic alternative. But there is a high price: disrupting these sites through mining could put unique and fragile ecosystems at risk.
(16) AMERICAN GODS RETURNS.
Here’s a sneak peek.
Mr. World (Crispin Glover) and Technical Boy (Bruce Langley) deal with the ramifications of the Season 1 finale in this exclusive clip from Season 2.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoDLnTO_dYY
[Thanks to JJ, John King Tarpinian, Rachel Swirsky, Chip Hitchcock, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, Carl Slaughter, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Matthew Johnson.]
Congratulations to Lightspeed and publisher/editor John Joseph Adams on reaching the century mark and celebrating with a super-sized 100th issue containing ten original stories–more than twice the amount of original fiction than usual–plus ten reprints and some special nonfiction.
Lightspeed launched in 2010 and soon became one of the field’s most acclaimed magazines, winning the Best Semiprozine Hugo in 2014 and 2015 before reclassifying as a prozine in 2016.
Issue 100’s cover art is by Hugo award-winning artist — and fifty-three-time Lightspeed illustrator — Galen Dara.
The issue’s new science fiction comes from Vylar Kaftan: “Her Monster, Whom She Loved.” We also have new SF from Carrie Vaughn (“Harry and Marlowe and the Secret of Ahomana”), Adam-Troy Castro (“The Last to Matter”), Ken Liu (“The Explainer”), and Sofia Samatar (“Hard Mary”), plus reprints from A. Merc Rustad (“How to Become a Robot in 12 Easy Steps”), Charles Yu (“NPC”), Caroline M. Yoachim (“Stone Wall Truth”), An Owomoyela (“Travelling Into Nothing”), Seanan McGuire (“Frontier ABCs: The Life and Times of Charity Smith, Schoolteacher”), and David Barr Kirtley (“They Go Bump”).
And there’s new fantasy from Maria Dahvana Headley (“You Pretend Like You Never Met Me, and I’ll Pretend Like I Never Met You”), Cadwell Turnbull (“Jump”), Genevieve Valentine (“Abandonware”), Sam J. Miller (“Conspicuous Plumage”), and Kat Howard (“A Brief Guide to the Seeking of Ghosts”), plus reprints from Yoon Ha Lee (“The Coin of Heart’s Desire”), Theodora Goss (“Elena’s Egg”), Charlie Jane Anders (“The Super Ultra Duchess of Fedora Forest”), and Jeremiah Tolbert (“The Girl with Sun in Her Head”).
There’s also a novel excerpt from Gene Doucette’s The Spaceship Next Door.
John Joseph Adams
The nonfiction entries are “A Few of Our Favorite Things” by Wendy N. Wagner; “Book Reviews: September 2018” by Arley Sorg; “Media Reviews: September 2018” by Jenn Reese; and “Interview: John Joseph Adams” by Christian A. Coleman.
Lightspeed 100’s online edition includes the usual amount of fiction published — 8 stories — but the rest of the special issue bonus content is exclusive to the ebook and trade paperback editions. These can be acquired from the usual vendors or Direct from Lightspeed (epub, mobi, pdf), Amazon (Kindle), Kobo (epub), Barnes & Noble (Nook), and Weightless Books (epub, mobi, pdf). A trade paperback edition is also forthcoming from Amazon.com.
From the large number of stories that series editor John Joseph Adams screened for this year’s collection, he picked the 80 best pieces to submit to editor N.K. Jemisin for a blind reading, so that the prestige of the venues or bylines were not a factor. (The ones Adams designated as notable are shown in a table at the link). Jemisin then selected 20 for publication (ten science fiction, ten fantasy, highlighted in green on the table.)
Here is the Table of Contents — including the 20 stories they thought the best:
2018 Table of Contents
FANTASY
Loneliness is in Your Bloodby Cadwell Turnbull from Nightmare Magazine
The Resident by Carmen Maria Machado from Her Body and Other Parties
Carnival Nineby Caroline M. Yoachim from Beneath Ceaseless Skies
Rivers Run Freeby Charles Payseur from Beneath Ceaseless Skies
Tasting Notes on the Varietals of the Southern Coastby Gwendolyn Clare from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
The Last Cheng Beng Giftby Jaymee Goh from Lightspeed Magazine
You Will Always Have Family: A Triptychby Kathleen Kayembe from Nightmare Magazine
Black Powderby Maria Dahvana Headley from The Djinn Falls in Love (ed. Mahvesh Murad and Jared Shurin)
The Orange Tree by Maria Dahvana Headley from The Weight of Words (ed. Dave McKean and William Schafer)
Church of Birdsby Micah Dean Hicks from Kenyon Review
SCIENCE FICTION
Brightened Star, Ascending Dawnby A. Merc Rustad from Humans Wanted (ed. Vivian Caethe)
Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sueby Charlie Jane Anders from Boston Review: Global Dystopias
The Wretched and the Beautifulby E. Lily Yu from Terraform
Destroy the City with Me Tonightby Kate Alice Marshall from Behind the Mask (ed. Tricia Reeks and Kyle Richardson)
Justice Systems in Quantum Parallel Probabilitiesby Lettie Prell from Clarkesworld Magazine
Cannibal Actsby Maureen F. McHugh from Boston Review: Global Dystopias
ZeroSby Peter Watts from Infinity Wars (ed. Jonathan Strahan)
The Greatest One-Star Restaurant in the Whole Quadrantby Rachael K. Jones from Lightspeed Magazine
The Hermit of Houstonby Samuel R. Delany from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenanceby Tobias S. Buckell from Cosmic Powers (ed. John Joseph Adams)
