Tag Archives: Naomi Alderman

Pixel Scroll 4/1/23 Shhh. Be Vewy Quiet, I’m A Pixel and I’m Hunting Filers

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(1) VOTING OPENS IN SFWA ELECTION AND REFERENDUMS. Full SFWA members have until April 11 to vote in this year’s SFWA Board of Directors election and respond to two referendums on whether English-language translations and speculative poetry should be allowed to count toward SFWA membership eligibility.

BOARD ELECTION

Candidates for President: Jeffe Kennedy*

Candidates for Secretary: Jasmine Gower*

Candidates for Director-At-Large (three [3] positions open): Phoebe Barton, Chelsea Mueller, Anthony Eichenlaub, Christine Taylor-Butler*

Oghenechovwe Ekpeki is also running for SFWA Director-at-Large, as a write-in.

* = currently serving on the Board

REFERENDUMS. Genre writers of poetry and translators of fiction cannot currently use those portions of their paid work as part of their catalog when applying to join SFWA or to upgrade their membership classification. Two resolutions dealing with those qualifications are up for a vote:

(I) Paid SFF and related genre poetry sales shall be considered for the purposes of determining eligibility for membership in SFWA.

(II) Payment for SFF and related genre translation work shall be considered for the purposes of determining eligibility for membership in SFWA by the translator.

(2) WELL, I’M BACK. The Chengdu Worldcon’s English language website is operational again after being down for several days. Naturally it never occurred to the committee to announce the outage before it began, or explain it while it was happening. They told Facebook readers today:

Our official website of 2023 Chengdu Worldcon has come back after upgrades. Please visit the previous address to checkyour membership status, purchase new memberships and to participate in the 2023 Hugo Awards nomination. For any inquiry, please contact us at：

[email protected]

en.chengduworldcon.com

Thanks for your patience and have a good weekend ahead!

(3) HOUR OF POWER. Well, maybe forty-two minutes anyway. BBC Radio 4 Front Row on Thursday included coverage of the Naomi Alderman novel The Power – a topical item as it has just been made into a TV series. “Front Row, Ria Zmitrowicz on The Power, The ENO’s The Dead City and God’s Creatures reviewed”.

The trailer for The Power is online.

The Power, is an emotionally-driven global thriller, based on Naomi Alderman’s international award-winning novel. The world of The Power is our world, but for one twist of nature. Suddenly, and without warning, teenage girls develop the power to electrocute people at will. The Power follows a cast of remarkable characters from London to Seattle, Nigeria to Eastern Europe, as the Power evolves from a tingle in teenagers’ collarbones to a complete reversal of the power balance of the world.

(4) WRONG ENOUGH TO WIN. [Item by ErsatzCulture.] The April 1 edition of the BBC quiz show Pointless Celebrities (which should be available online to UK iPlayer users here) opened with a question asking the contestants to complete the names of a set of science fiction novels.

For anyone unfamiliar with Pointless, it’s roughly an inverted Family Fortunes/Feud, where surveys have been done of 100 members of the public, but here contestants have to pick the least popular answers. If a completely incorrect answer is put forward, that’s scored as 100 points. The eight contestants are split into four teams of two, and in the opening round, one member of each team has to choose one of 7 questions to answer, and then the other members of each team have to choose from a second set of 7 questions. The aim is to come out of that round with the lowest total score, with the team having the highest score being eliminated.

All but one contestant went for a correct answer – the offender being Children of Dune.  Whilst it’s not surprising to me that the Vonnegut and Cixin Liu novels aren’t well-known to the general public, I was surprised to see how low the James, Haig and St. John Mandel works scored.

There is a series of screencaps from this part of the game in Ersatz Culture’s post at Mastodon, “An episode of Pointless Celebr…”

(5) FLAME ON! Carriesthewind’s Tumblr is the source of the rant “The IA’s ‘Open Library’ is Not a Library,…” quoted by Seanan McGuire at Seanan’s Tumblr.

…Yesterday’s district court ruling DID NOT CHANGE ANY SUBSTANTIVE COPYRIGHT LAW IN THE U.S. I cannot emphasize that enough. Regardless of whatever you think of the ruling, it was applying already existing law to the facts.

This is because the Internet Archive’s “Open Library” absolutely violates existing copyright law. It just does! They broke the law, they had plenty of notice they were breaking the law and harming authors (more on that below) and just think the law shouldn’t apply because they don’t like it.

The Internet Archive’s “Open Library” is not a library….

But what really got Carriesthewind steamed was a line in IA’s statement about the decision “The Fight Continues” which says — “It hurts authors by saying that unfair licensing models are the only way their books can be read online.” That provoked this response:

…How DARE you cloak your theft in the real struggles authors face with unfair licensing models. How DARE you pretend you are on the side of authors when you are stealing their works, and they have made it quite clear that they would like you to stop, please. And how DARE you frame it in this “for exposure” bullcrap that ignores the real struggles that authors have to eat, to get healthcare, to get any sort of fair pay and wages for their work, and instead pretend that all authors should care about is whether or not their books can be read online….

(6) COURT REJECTS A BOOK BAN. [Item by Jennifer Hawthorne.] CNN is reporting: “Judge orders books removed from Texas public libraries due to LGBTQ and racial content must be replaced within 24 hours”. Although no SFF titles are specifically mentioned in the article as having been targeted for the bans, there is a statement that the library cut off access to thousands of digital titles because they weren’t able to restrict access to two of the books they wanted to ban unless they banned access to the ALL the digital titles — so that’s what they did (!@#@!)  and I’m sure that impacted access to a lot of SFF digital titles. Also I figure that the Filers are interested in book banning/unbanning just as a general topic.

A federal judge in Texas ruled that at least 12 books removed from public libraries by Llano County officials, many because of their LGBTQ and racial content, must be placed back onto shelves within 24 hours, according to an order filed Thursday.

Seven residents sued county officials in April 2022, claiming their First and 14th Amendment rights were violated when books deemed inappropriate by some people in the community and Republican lawmakers were removed from public libraries or access was restricted.

The lawsuit filed in the US District Court for the Western District of Texas in San Antonio claimed county officials removed books from the shelves of the three-branch public library system “because they disagree with the ideas within them” and terminated access to thousands of digital books because they could not ban two specific titles….

(7) STEAMY IN SEATTLE. Clarion West is promoting “Steamy in Seattle, a Paranormal Romance Tea Party”, an in-person event also being streamed online. Takes place May 5 from 3:00-4:30 p.m. Pacific. Buy admission for the in-person experience at the link above, or register for the free online version.

Meet authors Gail Carriger and Piper J. Drake as they discuss the paranormal romance genre and their own work in steampunk, shapeshifter romance, and romantic thrillers! Grab a steaming cup of tea and some delicious treats prepared by the Seattle Central College culinary students, or tune in via livestream.

Location: One World Restaurant on Seattle Central College campus (Capitol Hill neighborhood) and streaming worldwide!

(8) MEMORY LANE.

1958 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

The Muppet Show used to have a segment called “Pigs in Space.” Well this Social Justice Credential counterpart called “Cats in Space”, with a dollop of ever so cute kittens added in, appeared long before Heinlein’s Pixel came into being. 

Our Beginning this Scroll is of Ruthven Todd’s Space Cat and the Kittens. It was published sixty-five years ago by Scribner’s. It’s the fourth, and last, of a children’s books series involving Flyball, a cat who, yes, lives in space. 

The preceding books which, like this one are illustrated by Paul Galdone, are Space Cat, Space Cat Visits Venus and Space Cat Meets Mars. Without giving anything away, let me just say that there will be a lot of cats, not a few kittens and a considerable comical situations as the series goes on. 

They are available in both hardcover and from the usual suspects.

Yes there are spoilers here, so go away if you don’t want to read them as this Beginning tells us about how these cats… Oh that would be giving something away, wouldn’t it? 

And here it is…

They were in and out of everything. When you thought you had cornered one of the red and gray bundles flashing among the crates in the storeroom, you would suddenly become aware that you had been attacked from behind by another. With its sharp claws unsheathed it was scrambling up your back. 

Still, everyone on the Moon not only put up with them but liked them. This was only right, for their parents were the most famous cats in the whole of space. Flyball, their father, had not only been the first cat to leave Earth for the Moon, but he had also been the first cat on Venus and on Mars. 

On Mars he had found his wife. Moofa was the last of the Martian fishing cats. Red as any firetruck, with darker stripes that ran from her head to her tail, she had lived on the fish that she caught in the Martian canals.

Now Moofa and Flyball had these two kittens—Marty and Tailspin. Marty was the older brother by a few minutes and was as proud of it as if he had arranged it himself. 

At first glance the kittens, showing both their father’s gray and their mother’s red, looked exactly alike. Then a second look showed that Tailspin had a pure gray tip to his tail while Marty’s tail was red all the way. 

The kittens had been born on the Moon and both Moofa and Flyball agreed that it was an ideal place for kittens, even though there were neither mice nor birds for them to chase. 

On the Moon they were almost as light as feathers and could jump the most tremendous distances. Still, they found, it was just as hard to catch one’s tail on the Moon as it was on Earth. They knew about Earth, for they had visited it on the shuttle-rockets which went back and forth all the time. 

The Earth, the kittens thought, was rather a dull place. A jump that on the Moon would carry them across a room, on Earth was only an ordinary little pounce.

So please name other SF where cats are characters in the story.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born April 1, 1875 — Edgar Wallace. Creator of King Kong, he also wrote SF including Planetoid 127, one of the first parallel Earth stories, and The Green Rust, a bioterrorism novel which was made into a silent film called The Green Terror. Critics as diverse as Orwell, Sayers and Penzler have expressed their rather vehement distaste for him.  Kindle has an impressive number of works available. (Died 1932.)
  • Born April 1, 1883 — Lon Chaney. Actor, director, makeup artist and screenwriter. Best remembered I’d say for the Twenties silent horror films The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera in which he did his own makeup. He developed pneumonia in late 1929 and he was diagnosed with bronchial lung cancer which he died from. (Died 1930.)
  • Born April 1, 1926 — Anne McCaffrey. I read both the original trilogy and what’s called the Harper Hall trilogy oh so many years ago when dragons were something I was intensely interested in. I enjoyed them immensely but haven’t revisited them so I don’t know what the Suck Fairy would make of them. I confess that I had no idea she’d written so much other genre fiction! And I recounted her Hugo awards history in the March 7 Pixel Scroll (item #9). (Died 2011.)
  • Born April 1, 1930 — Grace Lee Whitney. Yeoman Janice Rand on Star Trek. She would reach the rank of Lt. Commander in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Folks, I just noticed that IMDB says she was only on eight episodes of Trek, all in the first fifteen that aired. It seemed like a lot more at the time. She also appeared in in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. By the last film, she was promoted to being a Lt. Commander in rank. Her last appearance was in Star Trek: Voyager’s “Flashback” along with Hikaru Sulu. Oh, and she was in two video fanfics, Star Trek: New Voyages and Star Trek: Of Gods and Men. (Died 2015.)
  • Born April 1, 1942 — Samuel R. Delany, 81. There’s no short list of recommended works for him as everything he’s done is brilliant. That said I think I’d start off suggesting a reading first of Babel- 17 and Dhalgren followed by the Return to Nevèrÿon series. His two Hugo wins were at Heicon ’70 for the short story “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones” as published in New Worlds, December 1968, and at Noreascon 3 (1989) in the Best Non-Fiction Work category for The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village, 1957-1965.  I will do a full look at his awards and all of his Hugo nominations in an essay shortly. 
  • Born April 1, 1960 — Michael Praed, 63. Robin of Loxley on Robin of Sherwood which no doubt is one of the finest genre series ever done of a fantasy nature. He also played Phileas Fogg on The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne, an amazing series that never got released on DVD. It has spawned a lively fanfic following since it was cancelled with names such as Spicy Airship Stories which I admit I’m going to go read.
  • Born April 1, 1963 — James Robinson, 60. Writer, both comics and film. Some of his best known comics are the series centered on the Justice Society of America, in particular the Starman character he co-created with Tony Harris. His Starman series is without doubt some of the finest work ever done in the comics field. His screenwriting is a mixed bag. Remember The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen? Well, that’s him. He’s much, much better on the animated Son of Batman film. And I’ll admit that James Robinson’s Complete WildC.A.T.s is a sort of guilty pleasure.
  • Born April 1, 1970 — Brad Meltzer, 53. I’m singling him for his work as a writer at DC including the still controversial Identity Crisis miniseries and his superb story in the Green Arrow series from issues 16 to 21 starting in 2002.  He and artist Gene Ha received an Eisner Award for Best Single Issue (or One-Shot) for their work on issue #11 of Justice League of America series. 

(10) KELLY LINK INTERVIEW. Electric Literature declares, “Kelly Link Makes Fairy Tales Even Weirder Than You Remember”.

Chelsea Davis: Rules—often arbitrary, always ominous—shape many fairy tales, and most of the stories in White Cat. Don’t let anyone enter the front door; don’t visit your lover unless it’s snowing; and (my favorite) don’t hunker down for the night in a home that doesn’t have a corpse inside. How do explicit rules activate or shape a story?

Kelly Link: I love thinking about rules! I’m deeply interested in the relationship that we have with them as members of a family, or a social group, or a culture. They mark out the territory in which we (or our characters) live our lives. When thinking about imaginary people, a useful approach is to consider what rules they live by, which rules they break, and the consequences or freedoms that occur as a result.

When I was a kid, I was fascinated and horrified by all sorts of rules: Don’t wear white after Labor Day! Wear pantyhose with skirts. Never wear navy and black together. Don’t take candy from a stranger. 

I was a preacher’s kid, and aside from all the familiar stuff about virginity, and not taking the Lord’s name in vain, there were weirder, more interesting rules about not eating shellfish, or wearing certain fibers together, or not suffering a witch to live. (Though the two rules about loving your neighbor as yourself, and doing unto others as you would have them do unto you still seem like good practice.)…

(11) EKPEKI GOFUNDME CONTINUES. Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki’s GoFundMe fundraiser for visa processing & legal fees has reached 20 percent of its $17,500 goal.

Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki recently experienced visa complications that left him unable to attend the NAACP Image award ceremony, where he was a nominee for his work co-editing the anthology Africa Risen. These visa issues will also prevent him from attending the 44th Afrofuturism-themed International Conference For The Fantastic In the Arts as a guest of honour or be a visiting fellow at Arizona State University.

Because of these issues, Ekpeki is crowdfunding for a new visa that allows him the range of activities his burgeoning literary career demands.

Specifically, this crowdfunding is for a new visa and the associated legal and application fees. Ekpeki has already connected with a lawyer experienced in this legal area who will assist with the application.

(12) JEOPARDY! David Goldfarb notes that Thursday’s Jeopardy! episode had a category in the Double Jeopardy round called “Quoth the Title”. It hit one SFF trilogy in the middle, at the $1200 level:

Philip Pullman quoted Milton, “Unless the almighty Maker them ordain” these “to create more worlds”.

Returning champion Lisa Srikan tried, “What are men?” Jacob Lang was perhaps influenced by this to respond, “What are children of men?”. Sharon Stone (not that one) declined to guess. This isn’t quite at the level where I would just assume that every Filer would know it: the clue was looking for “His Dark Materials”.

Goldfarb also tuned into Friday’s Jeopardy! episode and enjoyed several more SFF-related clues. 

In the first Jeopardy round, 

“Hey, Big Spender” for $200:

If you’ve really got all that dough, why don’t you buy Action Comics #1 from 1938, which saw the debut of this otherworldly hero

Jen Petro-Roy responded correctly.

In the Double Jeopardy round,
“Oh, the Literary Places You Don’t Want to Go!”: $1200: 

The Sprawl is a rough city with an artificial gray sky in “Mona Lisa Overdrive”, a novel from this cyberpunk master

Jen knew William Gibson.

“Literary Places”: $2000: 

The idyllic school Hailsham harbors grotesque deeds in “Never Let Me Go” from this Japanese-born author

Jen messed up the name Kazuo Ishiguro: “Kashiguro” was not accepted. The other two didn’t answer.

“Last Lines of Movies”: $800: 

“Oh, no. It wasn’t the airplanes. It was Beauty killed the Beast.”

Jen knew it.

“Literary Places”, $400: 

Isla Nublar off Costa Rica sets the scene of this 1990 Michael Crichton novel that bioengineers some terror

Brittany Shaw knew this one.

(13) APRIL FOOL’S DAY. The Unofficial Hugo Book Club blog tried its best to keep the holiday alive.

(14) FURTHER APRIL FOOLISHNESS. James Davis Nicoll reviews an essential volume of the science fiction canon in “By Klono’s Silk Unmentionables!”

Time erodes all, including our collective memory. Even what is preserved in print can be subject to caprice; once well-known works can be forgotten. Take, for example, that classic space opera: Thorne Smith’s Lensmen….

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Meanwhile, this trailer for Trolls Band Together is not an April Fool – but maybe it ought to be!

After two films of true friendship and relentless flirting, Poppy (Anna Kendrick) and Branch (Justin Timberlake) are now officially, finally, a couple (#broppy)! As they grow closer, Poppy discovers that Branch has a secret past. He was once part of her favorite boyband phenomenon, BroZone, with his four brothers: Floyd (Golden Globe nominated electropop sensation Troye Sivan), John Dory (Eric André; Sing 2), Spruce (Grammy winner Daveed Diggs; Hamilton) and Clay (Grammy winner Kid Cudi; Don’t Look Up). BroZone disbanded when Branch was still a baby, as did the family, and Branch hasn’t seen his brothers since. But when Branch’s bro Floyd is kidnapped for his musical talents by a pair of nefarious pop-star villains—Velvet (Emmy winner Amy Schumer; Trainwreck) and Veneer (Grammy winner and Tony nominee Andrew Rannells; The Book of Mormon)—Branch and Poppy embark on a harrowing and emotional journey to reunite the other brothers and rescue Floyd from a fate even worse than pop-culture obscurity.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, David Goldfarb, Jennifer Hawthorne, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Danny Sichel, ErsatzCulture, Cat Eldridge, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]

Cats Sleep on SFF: The Power

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Ken Richards shares a last visit with his cat on File 770:

I bring you my cranky old Birman Ruskin, to whom we bid farewell today. He is resting in ‘The Power’ indeed, having given up on Lovecraft. Here he is also, taking in one last bit of sunshine in the courtyard.

Photos of your felines (or whatever you’ve got!) resting on genre works are welcome. Send to mikeglyer (at) cs (dot) com

Pixel Scroll 6/8/17 The Pixel Who Circumnavigated Filerland In A Scroll Of Her Own Making

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(1) BUM OF THE MONTH CLUB. The time is ripe for “The Official Pornokitsch Taxonomy of Villains”.

So we’ve been at this Villain of the Month thing for a while now — since August 2016, to be precise — and by this point we’ve accumulated an interesting roster of villains….

First up, we have the True Believer (the Operative, Dolores Umbridge). True Believers have a cause to which they are faithfully devoted. That’s not to say they lack other ambitions — wealth, for example, or glory — but those take a back seat to one all-important ideological goal. For the Operative, that goal is creating “a world without sin”. For Umbridge, it’s a fascist regime ruled by the Ministry of Magic. Villains who obsequiously serve a Dark Lord (e.g. Bellatrix Lestrange) or fight to preserve the existing order (e.g. Agent Smith) would also fall into this category. For me, the most interesting True Believers are those fighting for a cause the audience could nominally get behind (e.g. the aforementioned world without sin), but whose methods are beyond the pale….

(2) MISSING THE APOCALYPSE. “Yeah, why DON’T authors deal with climate change??? <rolleyes>,” wrote JJ after seeing Tobias Buckell, Daniel Abraham and some other sff authors on Twitter get a little peeved because Publishers Weekly touted an article by Siddhartha Deb in The Baffler that said only nonfiction writers seemed to be dealing with it.

Such are the absurdities of the fossil-fuel lifestyle we are locked into globally, folly piling upon folly, the latest among them the decision by the United States to pull out of a Paris Climate Agreement that itself is like a band-aid applied to an earthquake. (Its target is to limit the global rise in temperature to between 1.5 and 2 degrees centigrade but, since it comes into effect only in 2020, it is seen by many critics as putting such a target beyond reach.) Yet in spite of all the evidence of the destruction visited upon the world by our resource-heavy appetites, accompanied by a gnawing recognition that something is fundamentally wrong in our relationship with the Earth and in the way we live, and all the cumulative knowledge about climate change and the irreplicable characteristics of an era that some have named the Anthropocene, the end result is still a kind of imaginative fatigue.

This makes itself evident in the paucity of fiction devoted to the carbon economy, something the Brooklyn-based Indian writer Amitav Ghosh addresses in his marvelous recent book, The Great Derangement, writing, “When the subject of climate change occurs . . . it is almost always in relation to nonfiction; novels and short stories are very rarely to be glimpsed within this horizon.”

(3) FAUX POP CULTURE. The Book Smugglers reminds all that Yoon Ha Lee’s Raven Stratagem comes out next week with this guest post from the author, “You Were Watching What on TV, Cheris?”

One of the most entertaining things I’ve gotten to do in the background worldbuilding for the hexarchate is its popular culture. For example, in Ninefox Gambit, my heroine Cheris spends her free time watching crackalicious TV shows (“dramas”). In Raven Stratagem, one of the Kel recalls a classmate who used to read trashy adventures involving “dungeon-crawling” in the bowels of the campus. And it also reveals that Jedao’s mom used to like reading equally trashy sci-fi novels involving survivalists and tentacled monsters from outer space. Just because she’s a science fantasy character doesn’t mean she can’t like sci-fi, right?

(4) INDIGENOUS VOICES. Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Robin Parker have succeeded in creating the Emerging Indigenous Voices Awards, which is now hosted by the Indigenous Literary Studies Association. And the ILSA has announced the award judges. (No excerpt, because the news item is one big image file — not text!) ILSA has set a funding target of $150,000 to”make the award sustainable for many years to come.” As of this writing, the Indiegogo appeal has raised $109,298 (Canadian). [H/T to Earl Grey Editing.]

(5) TIPTREE FELLOWSHIP REPORTS. The two 2016 Tiptree Fellowship winners have reported on how their work has been facilitated by the fellowships. [H/T to Earl Grey Editing.]

First on Porpentine Charity Heartscape’s list:

Here’s what I’ve been up to since I got the Tiptree fellowship. I made Miniskirt World Network: Business Slut Online, a video/music hypertext about a femme vaporwave world where fashion is a basic computer peripheral. I wanted to evoke the contradictory tensions of feminine-coded clothing and the weird emotional textures that come with it.

Mia Sereno (Likhain) explains:

I cannot separate my being Filipino, of the Philippines, from my being a woman; they are inextricably intertwined. Thanks to the Tiptree Fellowship I was able to examine this intertwining more closely through my art. Life has not been easy this past year and between trying to keep my household afloat and taking care of my own health, I’ve had less time than I would have liked to work on my art series built around the concept of Filipinas as monsters, monstrosity reclaimed and embraced. Still, I’d like to share with you some work-in-progress pencils and concept sketches featuring both high fantasy settings and the supernatural as the second skin of our everyday.

(6) THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND. The Wombat Conservancy, Winery, and Writer’s Retreat — a hilarious conversation on Twitter.

To reach the beginning, JJ advises, “You have to keep scrolling up until you get to the top (land for sale listings).”

(7) RARE POWER. ScreenRant tells you what they think is the “Wonder Woman Movie’s Most Important Scene”. But I will excerpt a less spoilery part of the article.

By now most superhero fans with an eye for gender representation will have noticed a discrepancy between males and females with superpowers in comic movies, fantasy, science fiction, etc., etc.. Where the men either immediately or eventually see their superpowers as a gift, and the testing and mastery of the powers as a thrilling ‘coming of age’ story (or montage), women face a different road ahead. Often, the surfacing of a latent or new superpower is treated as an illness: something to hide, remove, control, or at the very least suspect as a problem to be solved (no matter how cool those superpowers may be). For every ‘Professor X’ there is a Jean Grey, for every Flash there is a Killer Frost, for every super-fast Quicksilver, there is a mentally-traumatized Scarlet ‘Witch.’

It’s a gender difference that means men will typically exert power by hitting things, while women are given powers rendering them unpredictable, mentally unstable, or simply tied to forces from an ‘unknown, mystical, potentially harmful’ source. But with Wonder Woman, Diana’s discovery of her ability to punch straight through stone is treated as the world-altering, empowering, and thrilling gift the viewers would take it to be. After smashing her hand through the stone in a frantic fall, Diana deduces that she is stronger than any Amazon before her

(8) NEBULA SHOWCASE. Don’t forget the Nebula Awards Showcase 2017 edited by Julie Czerneda.

The Nebula Awards Showcase volumes have been published annually since 1966, reprinting the winning and nominated stories of the Nebula Awards, voted on by the members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). This year’s editor, selected by SFWA’s anthology Committee (chaired by Mike Resnick), is Canadian science fiction and fantasy writer and editor Julie Czerneda. This year’s Nebula Award winners are Naomi Novik, Nnedi Okorafor, Sarah Pinsker, and Alyssa Wong, with Fran Wilde winning the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy Book. Also included in this volume are works by N. K. Jemisin and Ann Leckie.

(9) ON THE ROAD. I laughed.

(10) TODAY IN HISTORY REDUX

  • June 8, 1949 — George Orwell published his most significant book, 1984. (You may be pardoned for thinking there’s an echo around here.)
  • June 8, 1984 — Ghostbusters is released in theaters across the United States.

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY

  • June 8, 1910 — John W. Campbell, Jr

(12) BRYANT MEMORIAL. George R.R. Martin tells about attending the memorial service for Ed Bryant in “Saying Farewell”.

Ed was a talented writer and a great workshopper, who mentored and encouraged many writers younger than himself and helped them on their way. He was one of my Wild Cards authors, creator of Sewer Jack and Wyungare. But most of all he was a sweet, kind man, with a warm smile and a gentle wit. Science fiction and fantasy will be poorer without him. Memorials like this are not for the deceased so much as they are for those left behind, I believe. It was good to get together with so many others who cared about Ed, and to share our memories of him, with laughter and love.

(13) TURNABOUT. Queen Idia’s Africa: Ten Short Stories by Cordelia Salter was released May 11.

Africa is rich and the West is poor. That’s the setting for Queen Idia’s Africa: Ten Short Stories by Cordelia Salter with a foreword by Zeinab Badawi.

This is a world where slavery and colonialism never happened and Africa is the rich global superpower.

The West is mired in poverty, politically unstable and relies on aid from Africa. Zeinab Badawi, Chair of the Royal African Society, points out in the foreword that the stories make us think what things could have been like if the boot had been on the other foot.

What would Africa do about swarms of illegal European migrants trying to get to Africa in search of a better life? How would Africa respond to droughts, famines and rebel warfare in North America? Could there have been apartheid the other way round?

(14) SHE, THE JURY. Naomi Alderman, whose sf novel The Power just won the Baileys Prize for Women’s Fiction, has been added to the jury for the The Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize.

Alderman will be one of five judges, chaired by award-winning writer and television presenter, palaeontologist and Royal Society Fellow, Richard Fortey. They are joined by: writer and presenter of BBC Radio 4’s All in the Mind, Claudia Hammond, Channel 4’s Topical Specialist Factual Commissioner, Shaminder Nahal and former Royal Society University Research Fellow, Sam Gilbert.

The Prize has worked with many eminent judges over its illustrious 30-year history, among them Ian McEwan, Sarah Waters, Terry Pratchett, David Attenborough, Tracy Chevalier and Michael Frayn.

The Prize celebrates outstanding popular science books from around the world and is open to authors of science books written for a non-specialist audience. Over the decades, it has championed writers such as Stephen Hawking, Jared Diamond, Stephen Jay Gould and Bill Bryson.

Naomi Alderman commented: “It’s a terrible shame that arts and sciences are so often seen as mutually opposed, and that there’s so little understanding of what makes great work in ‘the other’ culture. So many of the most urgent problems that face us today can only be solved by thinking in an interdisciplinary way. That’s why I’m particularly thrilled to be a judge of this Prize, where we’ll be looking both for great science and excellent writing and storytelling. There’s no reason that a science book can’t be a bloody good read, and I can’t wait to get stuck in, and to discuss the best new science writing with the other judges.”

(15) ILLEGAL ESPIONAGE. In Section 31: Control, frequent Star Trek novelist David Mack takes on Starfleet’s secretive, rogue agency. Dr. Bashir, as he was in Deep Space Nine episodes involving Section 31, is the chief protagonist.

No law…no conscience…no mercy. Amoral, shrouded in secrecy, and answering to no one, Section 31 is the mysterious covert operations division of Starfleet, a rogue shadow group pledged to defend the Federation at any cost.

The discovery of a two-hundred-year-old secret gives Doctor Julian Bashir his best chance yet to expose and destroy the illegal spy organization. But his foes won’t go down without a fight, and his mission to protect the Federation he loves just end up triggering its destruction.

Only one thing is for certain: this time, the price of victory will be paid with Bashir’s dearest blood.

(16) TOASTY. A “heat battery” in use in real world: “From hand-warmer to house-warmer for tech firm”.

It took a creative leap to take the idea further: could you scale up the phase change process so a hand-warmer became a house-warmer?

Several big corporations – over several decades – tried to make it happen but each time the research petered out.

Now an East Lothian company with fewer than 30 employees has succeeded.

The equipment Sunamp have developed at their base in Macmerry has already been installed in 650 Scottish homes, providing heat and hot water for about half the cost of gas.

(17) HAWKING MEDAL. Space.com reports “Neil deGrasse Tyson Becomes 1st American to Receive Stephen Hawking Medal”.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson received the Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication Tuesday (June 6), becoming the first American scientist to earn the prestigious award.

Tyson, who refers to himself as “your personal astrophysicist,” is most known for his television series “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey” and podcast-turned-television-series “StarTalk.” He is the director for the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History here in New York City, where Tuesday’s announcement was made.

The Stephen Hawking Medal is an annual award created in association with the Starmus Festival, an international gathering celebrating science and art that will take place in Trondheim, Norway, on June 18-23 this year. Medals are given to science communicators in three categories: writers, musicians and artists, and people in the film and entertainment industry. Hawking, a famous theoretical physicist and author of several best-selling books about the universe, handpicks the recipients himself. [The Most Famous Astronomers of All Time]

(18) WHEN MEN WERE MEN AND DINOS WERE FROGS. Looking for a Father’s Day present? How about this “ORIGINAL JURASSIC PARK Screenplay SPECIAL Copy”, asking price (reduced 30%!) now $2,450 on eBay.

[JURASSIC PARK – THE FILM]. CRICHTON, MICHAEL, DAVID KOEPP. Original Limited and Numbered Confidential Shooting Script for the Film ‘Jurassic Park’ by David Koep. Based on the Novel by Michael Crichton and on Adaptations by Michael Crichton and Malia Scotch Marmo. Los Angeles: Amblin Entertainment, 1992. Original limited and numbered copy of a 126 page shooting script with color rewrite pages for the film ‘Jurassic Park’ by David Koep, based on the novel by Michael Crichton and on adaptations by Michael Crichton and Malia Scotch Marmo. A special printed page at the beginning reads: “HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL – You are a part of a very limited distribution. This numbered copy of JURASSIC PARK has been assigned to you and is for your eyes only.” next to which “JP” and “64” are stamped in red and throughout the script. This copy belonged to the film’s safety coordinator

(19) MARKET OVERVIEW. David Steffen’s “SFWA Market Report for June” at the SFWA Blog includes these opening markets.

OPENING MARKETS

(20) NOT THAT ANYONE WOULD REMEMBER. Chris Chan continues his Orwellian remaking of recent fanhistory in “‘No Award’: The Hugo Awards, Sad Puppies, and Sci-Fi/Fantasy Literature — Part Two: A Short History of the Sad Puppies at the Hugos” at Nerd HQ.

The results of the 2015 experiment were dramatic and explosive. The recommendations of the Sad Puppies (and also those put forward by the Rabid Puppies) dominated the 2015 Hugo Nominations. John C. Wright received five nominations in three categories (he initially was awarded a sixth slot, but one was revoked on a technicality). The Hugo nominee list changed over the coming weeks. Aside from the aforementioned instance, some nominees chose to decline their nomination (Hugo nominees have this option and can decline for any reason they like — some original nominees did not approve of the Sad or Rabid Puppies and did not wish to have any connection with them, and others objected that they believed that the voting process was being corrupted), and the slots were then filled by the runners-up. Incidentally, Correia’s Monster Hunter Nemesis received enough votes to qualify for a Best Novel nomination, but he turned down the nod to make the point that Sad Puppies was not being organized in order to receive honors for himself.

And yet that’s exactly why Correia started down this road — see the first post in 2013, “How to get Correia nominated for a Hugo. :)”, and the follow-up post that initiated the Sad Puppies theme, “How to get Correia nominated for a Hugo PART 2: A VERY SPECIAL MESSAGE”. There was really nothing noble about it, in the beginning or later.

(21) THERE ARE TWO KINDS OF PEOPLE. Jon Del Arroz, after studying the wildlife in its native habitat, offers his “Behavioral Observations In Science Fiction”.

There’s two groups, the old guard burnout mentality, and the new indie pulp revolution. There’s a bit of a line up along political lines, but not as much as you’d expect, and in fact, that’s used as an excuse a lot of the time to poo poo the new. This is the state of science fiction today. I’ve talked about it briefly before, but here’s a broader look at the experiences I’ve had after engaging with both.

Old Guard

You walk into social media, or a group, or a convention of what I called the “old guard”, they’e hesitant. They’re the type to complain that they’re introverts, having to recharge after social interactions (which is fine to be, but knowing that — why complain so often?). A new person is immediately greeted with a stand-offish attitude, like they have to vet you to make sure you’re “really one of them” or that you have to pay your dues to prove yourself somehow. They’re hyper-political. If you look at their social media posts, 70-90% of them are endless shrieking about politics they don’t like. They keep talking about how they’re too busy for anyone or anything — including the next generation of fans and writers. And this is all before they know that you’re on the “wrongthink” side of politics.

(22) WE INTERRUPT THIS PROGRAM. The Coode Street Podcast will take a couple of breaks this year. The announcement provoked this hilarious exchange.

(23) ALTERNATE REALITY HUMOR. It might be too late for this to be funny — Loki Runs For President, a video from last November. (Was it funny then? It’s basically somebody talking a mile a minute over scans of a comic book.)

(24) APE CLIP. Two minutes of War for the Planet of the Apes about “Meeting Nova.”

She is the future. Meet Nova in the first clip from #WarForThePlanet and be the first to #WitnessTheEnd on Monday, June 19

 

[Thanks to JJ, Chip Hitchcock, John King Tarpinian, Earl Grey Editing, and Carl Slaughter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor the day Oneiros.]

2017 Baileys Prize Goes to SF Book

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Naomi Alderman’s The Power is the first science fiction novel to win the Baileys Prize for Women’s Fiction reports The Guardian.

The thriller, set in a dystopian future where women and girls can kill men with a single touch, was the favourite on a shortlist that included former winner Linda Grant and Man Booker-shortlisted Madeleine Thien.

The chair of judges, film and TV producer Tessa Ross, said that the book was a clear winner of the £30,000 prize, despite at times passionate debate among the judges. “This prize celebrates great writing and great ideas and The Power had that, but it also had urgency and resonance,” she said. The judges, she added, had been impressed by Alderman’s handling of the big issues that affect all humanity, from greed to power, and predicted the novel would be “a classic of the future.”

The novel has been described as feminist science fiction, and asks the question what is power: who has it, how do you get it, and what does it do when you have it? And, when you have power, how long before power corrupts you? It follows four main characters: Roxy, the daughter of a London crime lord; Tunde, a journalism student in Lagos; Allie, from the southern states of the US and Margo, a low-level politician. They all feature in a combination of page-turning thriller and thought experiment that attacks some of the biggest issues of our times, including religion, gender politics and censorship.

 

Naomi Alderman in 2010.

This is Naomi Alderman’s second time winning the women’s prize for fiction, then called the Orange award when she won it in 2006 with her debut novel, Disobedience.

The inspiration for the Baileys Prize was the Booker Prize of 1991, when none of the six shortlisted books was by a woman, despite some 60% of novels published that year being by female authors.

The winner of the prize receives £30,000, along with a bronze sculpture called the Bessie created by artist Grizel Niven, the sister of actor and writer David Niven.

[Thanks to Mark-kitteh and Sean R. Kirk  for the story.]