The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) announced the finalists for the 60th Annual Nebula Awards® in a livestreamed presentation on March 12.
The awards will be presented in a ceremony on Saturday, June 7, that will be streamed live as it is held in-person in Kansas City, MO as part of the 60th Annual Nebula Awards Conference. Winners in each category will be determined by the vote of Full, Associate, and Senior members of SFWA.
Here is the complete list of finalists:
NEBULA AWARD FOR NOVEL
Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory, Yaroslav Barsukov (Caezik SF & Fantasy)
Rakesfall, Vajra Chandrasekera (Tordotcom)
Asunder, Kerstin Hall (Tordotcom)
A Sorceress Comes to Call, T. Kingfisher (Tor; Titan UK)
The Book of Love, Kelly Link (Random House; Ad Astra UK)
Someone You Can Build a Nest In, John Wiswell (DAW; Arcadia UK)
NEBULA AWARD FOR NOVELLA
The Butcher of the Forest, Premee Mohamed (Tordotcom)
The Tusks of Extinction, Ray Nayler (Tordotcom)
Lost Ark Dreaming, Suyi Davies Okungbowa (Tordotcom)
Countess, Suzan Palumbo (ECW)
The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, Sofia Samatar (Tordotcom)
The Dragonfly Gambit, A.D. Sui (Neon Hemlock)
NEBULA AWARD FOR NOVELETTE
The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video, Thomas Ha (Clarkesworld 5/24)
Katya Vasilievna and the Second Drowning of Baba Rechka, Christine Hanolsy (Beneath Ceaseless Skies 4/18/24)
Another Girl Under the Iron Bell, Angela Liu (Uncanny 9-10/24)
What Any Dead Thing Wants, Aimee Ogden (Psychopomp 2/24)
Negative Scholarship on the Fifth State of Being, A.W. Prihandita (Clarkesworld 11/24)
The Witch Trap, Jennifer Hudak (Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet 9/24)
Five Views of the Planet Tartarus, Rachael K. Jones (Lightspeed 1/24)
Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole, Isabel J. Kim (Clarkesworld 2/24)
Evan: A Remainder, Jordan Kurella (Reactor 1/31/24)
The V*mpire, PH Lee (Reactor 10/23/24)
We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read, Caroline M. Yoachim (Lightspeed 5/24)
ANDRE NORTON NEBULA AWARD FOR MIDDLE GRADE AND YOUNG ADULT FICTION
Daydreamer, Rob Cameron (Labyrinth Road)
Braided, Leah Cypess (Delacorte)
Benny Ramírez and the Nearly Departed, José Pablo Iriarte (Knopf)
Moonstorm, Yoon Ha Lee (Delacorte; Solaris UK)
Puzzleheart, Jenn Reese (Henry Holt)
The Young Necromancer’s Guide to Ghosts, Vanessa Ricci-Thode (self-published)
NEBULA AWARD FOR GAME WRITING
A Death in Hyperspace, Stewart C Baker, Phoebe Barton, James Beamon, Kate Heartfield, Isabel J. Kim, Sara S. Messenger, Naca Rat, Natalia Theodoridou, M. Darusha Wehm, Merc Fenn Wolfmoor (Infomancy.net)
Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, Hidetaka Miyazaki (From Software)
The Ghost and the Golem, Benjamin Rosenbaum (Choice of Games)
Neil Gaiman answered sexual assault and trafficking allegations made by former live-in nanny Scarlett Pavlovich on Tuesday, filing a motion for dismissal that included text messages he says show they engaged in an “enthusiastic” and consensual sexual relationship.
“None of Pavlovich’s claims are true,” Gaiman wrote in the motion filed in a Wisconsin federal court. “She is a fantasist who has fabricated a tale of abuse against me and Ms. Palmer.”
Gaiman provided screenshots from a number of WhatsApp messages in hopes of furthering his point. The first was from February 2022 – shortly after the pair’s first interaction in a bathtub in New Zealand.
“Thank you for a lovely lovely night – wow x,” Pavlovich said.
She followed up a couple days later saying, ““Let me know If you want me to run a bath… I am consumed by thoughts of you, the things you will do to me. I’m so hungry.”
Pavlovich filed a complaint against Gaiman and Amanda Palmer on Feb. 3, accusing his now-estranged wife of “procuring and presenting Plaintiff to Gaiman for such abuse,” including physical harm, emotional distress and disturbing non-consensual sex acts, pushing her to become suicidal.
“The Defendants knowingly recruited, enticed, harbored, transported, and/or obtained Scarlett for labor or services while knowing she would be forced to engage in sexual acts as a condition of receiving the pay and housing they promised her,” the suit stated. Pavlovich “endured those acts because she would lose her job, housing, and promised future career support if she did not.”
Gaiman’s filing Tuesday also included messages where he initially confronted Pavlovich about her rape accusations and plans to “MeToo” him.
“Oh my God. Neil! I never said that,” she wrote. “But I’m horrified by your message – me too you? Rape? WHAT? This is the first I have heard of this. Wow. I need a moment to digest your message… I have never used the word rape, I’m just so shocked, I honestly don’t know what to say.”
Later texts show Gaiman expressing concern he was being painted as a “monster” when he assumed their relationship was consenting. Pavlovich’s responses seemed to provide reassurances she thought the same.
“This is beyond out of control and as I said I only have fondness and kindness for you,” she wrote. “It was consensual – how many times do I have to f–king tell everyone.”
Five women initially accused Gaiman of sexual misconduct as part of the podcast series “Master: The Allegations Against Neil Gaiman.” Four more women later shared their experiences with with New York Magazine…
…“In no uncertain terms, Pavlovich’s accusations are false,” a brief in support of motion to dismiss filed Tuesday in federal court in Wisconsin proclaims in language similar to blog post reactions he issued to such allegations last year. “The sexual scenarios she describes deliberately in graphic detail are invented. Any sexual conduct that occurred was in all ways consensual. Law enforcement authorities in New Zealand thoroughly investigated the same claims Plaintiff makes here, found no merit, and declined to file any charges against Gaiman. There was no credible evidence of wrongdoing.”
…“No matter what Plaintiff says happened, it all happened in New Zealand between a New Zealand citizen and a New Zealand permanent resident,” the brief asserts. “There is no legal authority to adjudicate her lawsuit in federal court in Wisconsin, or in other federal courts around the United States,” the filing adds, with a declaration from Gaiman listing over a dozen people in NZ and the USA who will back his version of events. “Pavlovich’s claims are false, but there is no dispute that all of the conduct alleged in the Complaint occurred in New Zealand, the proper forum, if any, for this lawsuit.”…
Over the last few months, the makers of a popular card game have been wrestling with the byzantine process that surrounds video game age classifications. Age ratings are intended to help parents determine whether or not a game is appropriate for their children. But in practice, an erroneous label doesn’t just mislead consumers – it can be the difference between success or failure.
Balatro is an award-winning poker game made by an anonymous game developer known as LocalThunk, in which the only guiding principle is chaos. In each match the player must divine the best possible poker hand out of a randomised draw, but the conditions fluctuate constantly. In one round, the game might prevent you from using an entire suit or junk all your face cards, while the next round might challenge you to achieve an eyebrow-raising score with only a single hand. As the game progresses, players accrue jokers for their deck that add yet more wild rules.
It’s an ingenious premise that has allowed a game that began as a small side-project to sell millions of copies since its release in February 2024. Though players win in-game money to buy new cards between rounds, Balatro’s version of poker is fictional, and only bears a faint resemblance to the classic card game. Yet shortly after launching, Balatro hit a snag: it was classified as a gambling game.
At first, Balatro went on sale with a classification that deemed it appropriate for audiences ages three and up. But then, the classification was revised to an adults-only 18 rating. The reasoning? The Pan-European Game Information (Pegi), the organisation that determines age classifications, claimed that Balatro “contains prominent gambling imagery and material that instructs about gambling”.
Without warning, Balatro was pulled from sale on some digital storefronts in Europe and Asia.
“This was obviously a crucial moment and we had two options,” says Wout van Halderen, the communications director at PlayStack, Balatro’s publisher. “Be de-listed, or take the 18+ rating and get back in the store Asap. We opted for the second and started preparing an appeal to have the rating changed.”
The appeal was initially declined – and issues began to snowball. In Korea, the rating outright barred Balatro from being sold. In December, when Balatro won Game of the Year at The Game awards, the team was also ramping up for a physical release. Another appeal was filed by that version’s distributor, Fireshine. It is only now, a year later and after a handful of updates, that the dust has settled and Balatro has been bumped down to a 12+ rating by Pegi.
… Pegi, for its part, reiterated that it seeks to apply a fair criteria for ratings in a press release, and that any game that teaches or glamorises gambling will automatically lead to an 18+ rating. The board that oversaw the appeal also ceded that Pegi is a system that “continuously evolves in line with cultural expectations and the guidance of independent experts who support our assessment process”. To that end, Balatro’s dilemma has led Pegi to create a more granular classification system for games that depict gambling. The 18+ rating will now only apply to games that simulate the type of poker people play at actual casinos….
(3) THREE NEBULA AWARDS SHOWCASES OUT IN MARCH. The SFWA anthology team, led by Editor Stephen Kotowych, will have three more Nebula Awards Showcase editions ready for launch on Tuesday, March 25.
Nebula Awards Showcases 57, 58, and 59 span work published in 2021, 2022, and 2023, which then became celebrated as Nebula-finalist and award-winning materials in 2022, 2023, and 2024. The prestigious Nebula Awards anthology series has published reprints of winning and nominated works annually since 1966, as voted on by SFWA members, and we’re deeply thankful to return to that strong tradition this year. It is a great privilege to celebrate the work of these authors, and we hope you’ll join us in honoring their achievement when these volumes launch as one.
Going forward, our new workflow will also allow us to celebrate Nebula Awards Showcase 60 at this year’s Nebula Awards in Kansas City, Missouri.
In the summer of 1985, I made the long pilgrimage from my home in Cheadle Hulme to London’s glamorous Hammersmith Novotel for the Commodore computer show. As a 14-year-old gamer, this was a chance to play the latest titles and see some cool new joysticks, but I was also desperate to visit one particular exhibitor: the publisher Newsfield, home of the wildly popular games mags Crash and Zzap!64. By the time I arrived there was already a long queue of kids at the small stand and most of them were waiting to have their show programmes signed by reigning arcade game champion and Zzap reviewer, Julian Rignall. As an ardent subscriber, I can still remember the thrill of standing in that line, the latest copy of the mag clutched in my sweaty hands. I wouldn’t feel this starstruck again until I met Sigourney Weaver a quarter of a century later.
It turns out I’m not the only one who remembers that day. In his wonderful new book, The Games of a Lifetime, Rignall himself recalls the shock of being swamped by fans. “We just didn’t expect anything like that,” he writes. “I had no idea readers would be so interested in us. But I loved it.”
I’m not sure he should have been so surprised, though. Back in the mid-80s, the boom era of the C64 and ZX Spectrum home computers, magazines such as Crash, Zzap and Computer & Video Games were the only sources of news and opinion about new games. At the time, information about game developers was scarce, so magazine reviewers, with their photos plastered in every issue, were the stars of the industry, the social media influencers of the era….
Gigantic reptiles are lounging on warm rocks as yellow grass sways in a gentle breeze.
You may be a monster hunter, feller of beasts with a razor-sharp sword, yet a companion has encouraged you to first stop and observe this flora and fauna. Press a button to gaze intensely at these lustrous creatures, learning that it is a gaggle of females gathered around a spiked, larger male. As the camera zooms in, tiny critters scuttle past your feet toward their next meal, a carcass in the distance.
The majestic scale and teeming ecological detail in Monster Hunter Wilds can make it feel as if you are playing a fantastical version of a David Attenborough documentary.
But there is no ignoring the title of this celebrated Japanese series: These are foremost monster-slaying games that have cultivated bloodlust for more than 20 years. The franchise’s inherent tension is that the allure of battling prehistoric behemoths and exploring their detailed, entwined habitats leaves a sour aftertaste when you are carving up the remaining cadavers for loot.
“There is a bizarre feeling at the center of Monster Hunter,” said Jacob Geller, a critic and YouTube video game essayist. “Unlike most other video games, it’s made pretty clear that the creatures you’re killing are not evil, and so it does feel undeniably bad hunting them.”
More than any other entry in the series, Monster Hunter Wilds, which was released for the PC, PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X|S on Friday, reckons with the interplay between the exceptional beauty of these animals, the ecosystems they are part of, and the player’s core task of dispatching them….
(6) FIRST BRUSH WITH FAME. Artist Michael Whelan’s autobiographical post takes us back to his professional beginnings: “1976: Year in Review (Part One)”
Staking everything on a letter from Donald Wollheim, bolstered by recent success selling his work at conventions, Michael packed his VW Beetle and with trailer in tow headed to New York City to pursue illustration in 1975.
His parents may not have been happy about his career choice, but by that time they lived in New Jersey, and he was able to stay with them for a short time while he scoured bookstores, studying science fiction and fantasy book covers. He spent 18 hours a day polishing a portfolio that he felt compared favorably to what he saw on the shelves.
His first professional sale was to Marvel Comics, who bought pieces right out of his portfolio and hired him for more cover work. Like many young New York area artists, Michael worked out of Neal Adams Studio. That was only a brief stop as the fast turnaround and revolving deadlines of comics didn’t appeal to him.
Fortunately Donald Wollheim came through on his offer and gave Michael his first book cover assignment. Regular work with DAW Books would follow.
At the same time, Neal Adams kindly arranged an interview with Ace Books, who also hired Michael to do cover work. With a second client secured, Michael was never without an assignment after that….
(7) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Robert Bloch’s “That Hell-Bound Train”
So let’s talk about Robert Bloch’s “That Hell-Bound Train” which many decades after reading it remains my favorite piece of fiction by him. I read it at least once a year.
It was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in September of 1958. That issue also has the second part of three of Heinlein’s Have Space Suit – Will Travel (and which is the story shown on the cover).
I’d stick a spoiler alert in here but surely every Filer here knows the story of Martin, a hobo, who one dark night has a large black train pulls up beside him. The conductor says Martin can have anything he wants in exchange for which he will ride that “Hell-Bound Train” when he dies. He hands Martin a watch which he tells him will stop time when Martin reaches he perceives to be the absolute perfect moment in his life.
Y’all know what that moment turns out to be…
It would win the Hugo Award at Detention in a field of other nominees which was rather large as here they are with nominated works: They’ve Been Working On …” by Anton Lee Baker, “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” by Alfred Bester, “Triggerman” by J. F. Bone, “The Edge of the Sea” by Algis Budrys, “The Advent on Channel Twelve” by C. M. Kornbluth, “Theory of Rocketry” by C. M. Kornbluth, “Rump-Titty-Titty-Tum-TAH-Tee” by Fritz Leiber, “Space to Swing a Cat” by Stanley Mullen and “Nine Yards of Other Cloth” by Manly Wade Wellman.
What an amazing selection of reading that is! The only author that I do not recognize is Stanley Mullen. For the purpose of this piece I am not going to look him up on ISFDB and instead I’m going to ask y’all to tell me about him.
I love every word of the story from what Martin does with his life until he finally stops time, it is truly an extraordinary story. Yes.
William Tenn says in Immodest Proposals: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn, volume 1, that he helped shape the story while at the magazine as it was “an absolutely fine piece of work that just didn’t have a usable ending”. He had come to the magazine after Boucher retired.
I know there’s at least three audio versions that have been done, so it’s possible that one might actually does this story justice, but I wouldn’t know as so far I’ve not tracked any of them down. Anyone heard any of them?
Now to my surprise, though I should not have been as it is great source material for one, it became an opera staged in (at least) workshop form at the University of Texas.
It’s available from the usual suspects in Tim Pratt’s excellent anthology Sympathy for the Devil. It was included a number of times in another anthologies before that, but that’s near as I can tell the only one in print right now, either from the usual suspects or in the old-fashioned paper version.
I wondering did anyone wrote a filk off of it?
So here’s the first words to savor…
When Martin was a little boy, his daddy was a Railroad Man. Daddy never rode the high iron, but he walked the tracks for the CB&Q, and he was proud of his job. And every night when he got drunk, he sang this old song about That Hell-Bound Train.
The Walt Disney Animation Studios are no longer cooking up longform streaming content, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The first title to be culled from the lineup is Tiana, the Disney+ series based on the 2009 movie The Princess and the Frog, which introduce the studio’s first Black Disney Princess.
A source revealed that WDAS was also shelving an unannounced feature project destined for Disney+, and confirmed that there will be layoffs at Disney’s Vancouver animation studio. This shift follows Pixar’s announcement last year that it will not be prioritizing longform episodic content after launching the Inside Out spinoff Dream Productions and recent original Win or Lose on Disney+
A short-form special set in the world of The Princess and the Frog is reportedly still in development. Tiana‘s Joyce Sherrí (staff writer on Midnight Mass) and Steven Anderson will be directing….
The acclaimed German writer, producer and filmmaker, Werner Herzog, behind celebrated work such as Grizzly Man, Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, The Wrath of God, announces his first animated film, The Twilight World. Herzog will direct the narrative feature, with animation and production support from renowned animation studio, Psyop, in partnership with Sun Creature Studio, producers of the Bafta- and triple Oscar-nominated film, Flee.
Sun Creature will also be providing animation services for the film out of its Bordeaux-based studio, and has brokered discussions with several potential French animation directors to collaborate with Herzog on the project.
Adapted from Herzog’s best selling novel of the same name, The Twilight World tells the true story of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese intelligence officer who refused to believe that World War II was over, and continued to fight a personal, fictitious war in the jungles of the Philippines for 30 years. Part fictionalized history, part war drama and part dream log, the film is a meditation on the nature of reality, the illusion of time, and the conflict between the external world and our inner lives.
Herzog worked closely with writers Michael Arias (Tekkonkinkreet, The Animatrix) and Luca Vitale on the screenplay adaptation of the book. He will also narrate the film…
A plan to revive the mammoth is on track, scientists have said after creating a new species: the woolly mouse.
Scientists at the US biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences plan to “de-extinct” the prehistoric pachyderms by genetically modifying Asian elephants to give them woolly mammoth traits. They hope the first calf will be born by the end of 2028.
Ben Lamm, co-founder and chief executive of Colossal, said the team had been studying ancient mammoth genomes and comparing them with those of Asian elephants to understand how they differ and had already begun genome-editing cells of the latter.
Now the team say they have fresh support for their approach after creating healthy, genetically modified mice that have traits geared towards cold tolerance, including woolly hair. “It does not accelerate anything but it’s a massive validating point,” Lamm said….
[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
In November 2024, SFWA announced the launch of two new Nebula Awards, one for speculative poetry and one for speculative comics. Eligibility for these awards began in January 2025, with the first awards for these new categories to be presented at the 2026 Nebula Awards Ceremony….
Let’s start with the big question:
Why a poetry award, and why a comics award? What traditions and recent trends in SFF are these new prizes celebrating?
Holly Lyn Walrath: I would say that there is a thriving sub-pocket of speculative poetry alive and well today. Similar to the larger SFF community, speculative poetry often does not get the recognition we might wish for in realist or “literary” circles, yet many authors who got their start in, say, an MFA end up publishing speculative poetry, and many realist/literary magazines publish speculative poetry. Speculative poetry is also a central part of the history of SFF. The earliest pulp magazines published poetry—for example, Weird Tales. There is a rich, unexplored past in speculative poetry that most writers are not familiar with, so it’s exciting to see a resurgence in the genre.
Wendy Van Camp: Genre poetry has come a long way. It used to be nearly invisible. As a poet, you’d often have to explain and defend the idea of writing poetry with science fiction or fantasy themes. Now, it has a place at major conventions worldwide. Like filk singers and genre artists, speculative poets have found a welcoming community. This poetry is not only for our fans, but traditional poets are noticing the growing opportunities. Paying markets, an award system for both books and single poems, and recognition as creators are all attractive. Literary poets realize there is a community for their ideas about technology, science, and concepts of the future.
Jessica Maison: Looking back to the first pulp magazines like Amazing Stories, a clear intersection between speculative fiction and comics emerges. Many of the pulps and comics were being published by the same larger publishers and even had some of the same heroes and stories overlap. What the pulps and comics share—besides the serial format—is that there was freedom to push boundaries and the limits of genre. That freedom has expanded tenfold in modern speculative comics, especially from its current independent creators and publishers. Whether a writer and illustrator are adapting and reinterpreting beloved characters from a favorite speculative novel like Frankenstein, or, on the flip side, a writer is adapting a story from a comic for the screen, comics weaves into traditional and emerging SFF industry in ways that push the boundaries of speculative fiction from within its structured panels. Honestly, I’m just excited to be part of it all and to introduce my favorites to as many people as possible.
(2) DETECTING ONE’S OWN BIASES. Herb Kauderer’s “Award Season: Show Me Your Bias” at SPECPO is an essay on speculative poetry awards that has application to many sff award voters.
… In recent times the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA) has made some changes to their award processes to reduce inappropriate bias. Notably, it is no longer legal for a member to nominate a work for the Rhysling if it is written by a close family member. This certainly makes sense to me. I have a large family that could easily flood nominations should they, or I, think that a good idea. That would be an unfair advantage assuming they are biased toward my work. At least, I hope they would be biased in favor of my work. My family is always surprising.
Another point of discussion is whether members should share all their eligible poetry. The SFPA facilitates members making their eligible poetry available to each other. Since the membership nominates and votes on the awards, this does cause some preference to members. Yet, in my experience members also recommend to each other poetry outside SFPA’s member packets, because we are happy to nominate and give awards to non-members’ poetry if it moves us. F.J. Bergmann has convinced me to be generous in what I share in Rhysling packets even though some members feel flooded by them. Yet I appreciate David C. Kopaska-Merkel’s caveat that I can exclude anything that I am uncomfortable seeing nominated. I may not know what others find to be my best poems, but I definitely know what I’m comfortable allowing to represent my best work….
(3) HARLEY QUINN CO-CREATOR DEAN LOREY REVEALS WHY TO WATCH DC’S UNHINGED ANIMATED HIT. [Based on a press release.] JustWatch spoke to hit showrunner, producer, and writer Dean Lorey about his must watch list of movies and TV shows. Check out his take on different versions of Harley Quinn, James Gunn’s Creature Commandos and more.
Harley Quinn Co-Creator Dean Lorey Reveals Why to Watch DC’s Unhinged Animated Hit
Dean Lorey, Showrunner
Even though it’s a comedy, we write Harley Quinn like a drama, and we take the characters very seriously. We cry when they die, and we cheer them on when they do something funny. So the secret sauce of the show is that despite being a genuinely funny comedy, there’s a lot of character and tragedy behind it. We honor all of that, and to me, it’s the most defining thing about the show. It’s not how R-rated it is (although that’s obviously very important). It’s that we take the world seriously while also delivering on the raunchiness and absurdity it’s known for.
Harley Quinn Showrunner Dean Lorey Names His 3 Other Favorite On-Screen Harleys
Batman The Animated Series is where Harley Quinn was created, it’s where we first met her. And she just sort of explodes from the word Go! That planted the direction at the core of the character. She is chaotic and she enjoys it. I always loved that.
Margot Robbie‘s first appearance as Harley [inSuicide Squad] was transformative. I loved her take on it.
I loved Harley Quinn in the Arkham video game. There’s something about playing the character that makes you feel it a little bit more.
About Dean Lorey: Whether he’s writing, producing or showrunning, Dean Lorey is responsible for creating and developing some of your favorite tv shows and movies, from cult classics to smash hits. Starting his career writing screenplays for films like My Boyfriend’s Back and Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, as well as comedies like Major Payne, Dean got arguably his biggest break writing on the landmark series Arrested Development. He’s since worked to bring some of the quirkiest comic book stories to life on projects like Powerless and iZombie. His recent notable accolades include co-creating breakout hits Harley Quinn (the animated series) and Kite-Man: Hell Yeah!, and showrunning James Gunn’s Creature Commandos.
Published in 1980, National Geographic Picture Atlas of Our Universe was among the most successful projects Michael has been involved with. He didn’t provide the cover—that was the stellar John Berkey—but Michael’s work on the interiors is still widely regarded today.
A massive initial print run of 670,000 copies pushed the first edition into stores everywhere where this coffee table book flourished for more than two decades in print. With revisions in 1986 and 1994, the book sold a staggering 2.5 million copies….
Then Whelan takes over —
What if…there really were creatures on other planets?
Our Universe was a fun assignment, and I’m glad so many people enjoyed the work I did for that project. Someone once asked what my favorite piece from the book was, and that’s hard to pin down. I will say that I had the most fun working on the silly alien creatures the editors came up with.
That section was written by the National Geographic editorial department. They asked me to illustrate their rather whimsical inventions, so I did these little paintings (about the size of my normal concept work) to accompany the text.
Among those, the Jupiter and Venus critters were probably my faves.
Twelfth World Science Fiction Convention Poster and Frank R. Paul Newspaper Article and Obituaries Group (Various Publishers, 1954-57). A very interesting lot for pulp collectors! Offered here is a 10″ x 14″ cardboard poster for the 12th World Science Fiction Convention in San Francisco, California. Held at the historic Sir Francis Drake Hotel on Union Square from September 3rd through 6th, 1954. Attendance was approximately 700, and among the first attendees was Philip K. Dick, with the Guest of Honor being John W. Campbell, Jr. The poster is printed in red and dark blue and is in Fine condition, with only very slight soiling and handling wear. Also included is an article about Frank R. Paul, “The Dean of Science Fiction Illustrators”, and several examples of his obituary from July of 1963. The newspaper clippings are in Very Good condition, with moderate tanning. From the Roger Hill Collection.
Early fans wrote and published prolifically. In The Visual History of Science Fiction Fandom, we excerpt and distill their work to focus on the most important, interesting and entertaining material they created. Even so, each volume has filled over 500 pages. If you’ve carried one around, you know the meaning of the term “weighty tome.”
Still, we’re frustrated by the exclusion of the full versions of key fan artifacts that provide additional richness and context. This leads to today’s announcement:
The Supplement to The Visual History of Science Fiction Fandom, Volume Three: 1941 is now available. The Supplement includes 168 pages of material created by fans in 1941, with full narratives presented as originally published in seldom-seen fanzines.
Supplements for Volumes One and Two are forthcoming.
While shredding another old notebook from my early comics career, I reminisce about the many wretched one-act plays I created while being taught by famed playwright Jack Gelber, the lie I told Marv Wolfman and Len Wein which got me hired at Marvel, the most wrongheaded conclusion Fredric Wertham reached in Seduction of the Innocent, my plot for an Inhumans strip starring Karnak which had no reason to exist, the most ridiculous method any writer ever conceived of for killing a vampire, what Gerry Conway said about Gwen Stacy which was censored out of his F.O.O.M. interview, the first words to reach readers about my Scarecrow character, and much more.
With its banks of bafflingly complex equipment, and staff members that were among the most progressive musical minds in the UK, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop was a laboratory of 20th-century sound that produced endless futuristic effects for use in TV and radio – most memorably, the ghostly wail of the Doctor Who theme.
Now, the Workshop’s considerable archive of equipment is being recreated in new software, allowing anyone to evoke the same array of analogue sound that its pioneering engineers once did….
… The Workshop may be best known for the Doctor Who theme, but it also created music and sound effects for other sci-fi shows such as Quatermass and the Pit, Blake’s 7 and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Other cornerstone BBC shows such as Blue Peter and Tomorrow’s World were also beneficiaries of the Workshop’s creativity.
The Workshop was originally created in 1958, tasked with adding an extra dimension to plays and other shows on Radio 3. Co-founders Daphne Oram and Desmond Briscoe were brilliant and high-minded, inspired by musique concrète – the style that asserted that raw, tape-recorded sound could be a kind of music. Before long a highly experimental, even fantastical means of composition was afoot, with lampshades being bashed to produce percussion, and long tape loops being carried along BBC corridors…
… The newly available software will cost £149, and is available from 19 February, though it will have an introductory price of £119 until 17 March.
(9) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
February 19, 1960 – The Twlight Zone episode “Elegy”
The time is the day after tomorrow. The place: a far corner of the universe. A cast of characters: three men lost amongst the stars. Three men sharing the common urgency of all men lost. They’re looking for home. And in a moment, they’ll find home; not a home that is a place to be seen, but a strange unexplainable experience to be felt. — opening narration
On this date sixty-five years ago, Twilight Zone’s “Elegy” aired for this first time. It was the twentieth episode of the first season and was written by Charles Beaumont who you might recognize as the screenwriter of 7 Faces of Dr. Lao. Beaumont would die at just 38 of unknown causes that were assumed to be neurological in nature.
The cast for this SF Twilight Zone episode was Cecil Kellaway as Jeremy Wickwire, Jeff Morrow as Kurt Meyers, Kevin Hagen as Captain James Webber and Don Dubbins as Peter Kirby. These are not the names in the short story it come from in that, the caretaker of the cemetery and the most logical crewman are named Mr. Greypoole and Mr. Friden respectively. In the Twilight Zonescript, their names are Jeremy Wickwire and Professor Kurt Meyers.
This episode was based on Beaumont’s short story “Elegy” published in Science Fiction Quarterly, May 1954. It’s available for Subterranean Press on their website as an epub in The Carnival and Other Stories for just $6.99.
(11) URSA MAJOR AWARDS NOMINATIONS OPEN. The public is invited to submit Ursa Major Awards nominations through February 28.
More formally known as the Annual Anthropomorphic Literature and Arts Award, the Ursa Major Award is presented annually for excellence in the furry arts.
Fan fiction — the creation of unsanctioned, unofficially published, new works usually based on popular novels or films — was intentionally never mainstream.
There are the legal issues — copyright laws, intellectual property laws — of drawing from someone else’s creation, for one. Fan fiction authors also have historically considered their online arenas (Archive of Our Own, Fanfiction.net and others) more of a sandbox, a place to play with new ideas using characters and worlds people already know and love.
Take, for example, fan works imagining Harry Potter and friends in their 8th year at Hogwarts. Or pairing Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger romantically — dubbed “Dramione” fan fiction.
But this summer and early fall will see the wide publication of three books by popular Dramione Harry Potterfan fiction authors: Rose in Chains by Julie Soto, Alchemised by SenLinYu and The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy by Brigitte Knightley.
Soto’s romantic fantasy is a reworked version of her fan fiction The Auction, centered on a heroine who is sold to the highest bidder. SenLinYu’s debut fantasy about a woman with memory loss in a war-torn world is a revision of her popular Manacled. Brigitte Knightley’s debut novel, an enemies to lovers tale, is an original work….
….Most fan fiction authors don’t worry too much about how much of their work plays off a published author’s book or film because they are writing for personal fun, not for profit. Some works do get noticed by publishers who solicit these stories and help their authors rework them to distance them from their original: It’s called pull to publish.
Pull to publish isn’t a new concept, but writers and publishers say it’s a growing area. The idea of moving from fan fiction to traditional publishing used to be a virtual nonstarter, but stigmas around fan fiction are lifting.
“I know a fan fiction writer who pulled to publish in the early 2000s and then denied they’d ever written fan fiction,” said Stacey Lantagne, a copyright lawyer focusing on fan works and professor at Western New England University School of Law. “That was not a cool thing to say, not a cool thing to admit … so if you went looking for it, you’d have a really hard time identifying those authors because they just didn’t ever connect those two parts of their background.”
Lantagne says it appears that more fan fiction is being pulled to publish than a few years back, based on what she’s seeing in her work and because more people are talking about it openly, though it’s tough to track data on this area of publishing….
On Wednesday, OpenAI published the latest version of its “Model Spec,” a set of guidelines detailing how ChatGPT should behave and respond to user requests. The document reveals a notable shift in OpenAI’s content policies, particularly around “sensitive” content like erotica and gore—allowing this type of content to be generated without warnings in “appropriate contexts.”
The change in policy has been in the works since May 2024, when the original Model Spec document first mentioned that OpenAI was exploring “whether we can responsibly provide the ability to generate NSFW content in age-appropriate contexts through the API and ChatGPT.”
ChatGPT’s guidelines now state that that “erotica or gore” may now be generated, but only under specific circumstances. “The assistant should not generate erotica, depictions of illegal or non-consensual sexual activities, or extreme gore, except in scientific, historical, news, creative or other contexts where sensitive content is appropriate,” OpenAI writes. “This includes depictions in text, audio (e.g., erotic or violent visceral noises), or visual content.”…
(14) I TAKE IT BACK. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The top universities in the world for retracting science are overwhelmingly Chinese says Nature.
A first-of-its-kind analysis by Nature reveals which institutions are retraction hotspots.
Though I’m always mindful of the former Astronomer Royal, Prof Sir Martin Rees saying better good SF than bad science…
[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Mark Roth-Whitworth, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, and Kathy Sullivan for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
(1) BRITISH FANTASY AWARDS TAKING NOMINATIONS. It’s time for eligible voters to nominate for the British Fantasy Awards 2024. Full details at the link. Voting will remain open until Saturday, June 29.
You can vote for the BFAs if you are any of the following: – A member of the British Fantasy Society – An attendee at FantasyCon 2023 (Birmingham) – A ticket-holder for FantasyCon 2024 (Chester)
For each category, you may vote for up to three titles. There is no requirement to complete all three fields for each category, or to vote for every category. …
A crowdsourced list of suggestions has been created here: http://tinyurl.com/suggestionlist2024. You may vote for titles not on the suggestions list – this is just to help you generate ideas if you need some guidance….
…The four titles or names with the highest number of recommendations will make the shortlist of nominations. In case of a tie, the title with the most recommendations in space “1” will go through – so please rank your votes in order of preference.
(2) WORLDCON 2026 SITE SELECTION OPENS. Glasgow 2024 announced that WSFS Site Selection for the 2026 Worldcon is open. Complete directions for voting are at the link.
Los Angeles (Anaheim) in 2026 is the sole bidder on the ballot. Their website can be found here. Write-in bids are also allowed, however, to be selected they must meet the requirements in the WSFS Constitution and file the necessary documents with the administering Worldcon.
Glasgow 2024 WSFS Members who wish to vote in Site Selection need to purchase an Advance WSFS Membership in the 2026 Worldcon, at a cost of £45.00 (GBP). All members who pay this fee will automatically become WSFS Members of the 2026 Worldcon, regardless of who they vote for (or indeed if they vote at all). All Advance WSFS Membership fees received by Glasgow for the 2026 Worldcon will be passed on to the successful candidate.
There are three ways for you to vote in Site Selection:
We have partnered with Election Buddy, a leading provider of secure voting solutions, to enable easy online voting for Site Selection this year. Full information on how to vote online is provided below. This is the quickest and simplest way to pay your fee and submit your site selection ballot.
Attending Members can vote in person at Glasgow 2024, until the Site Selection desk closes at Noon on Saturday, 10th August.
You can also submit a printed ballot by postal mail. If you wish to use this option, please contact us at siteselection@glasgow2024.org. All postal ballots must reach us by Thursday, 1st August.
(3) WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION. The winner of the 29th Women’s Prize For Fiction is Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshananthan, a non-genre novel.
The only shortlisted genre work was The Blue, Beautiful World by Karen Lord (Gollancz).
The Prize is awarded annually to the author of the best full-length novel of the year written in English and published in the UK. The winner receives £30,000, and the “Bessie”, a bronze statuette created by the artist Grizel Niven.
A memorial to The Lord of the Rings author JRR Tolkien has been unveiled at the University of Oxford college where he used to teach.
The bronze sculpture, created by sculptor Tim Tolkien, the writer’s grand-nephew, was revealed at Pembroke College.
Neil Gaiman, who served as master of ceremonies at the event, told the BBC that Tolkien was a “towering figure” who “singlehandedly created an entire genre of literature”.
The college said Tolkien was “one of the college’s most esteemed fellows and a literary giant of the 20th Century”.
The memorial design depicts Tolkien as he looked during his time at Pembroke.
Its Junior and Middle Common Rooms each raised 10% of the funds. The Tolkien Society and the Tolkien Estate also contributed.
The author served as the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the college from 1925 to 1945.
He also wrote The Hobbit, part of The Lord of the Rings, and critical works such as Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics during his time there.
A special poem was read out at the unveiling by writer and Pembroke alumna Roz Kaveney.
Gaiman, author of The Sandman and Good Omens, said he had been a fan of Tolkien ever since he bought an “ancient green hardcover” of The Hobbit for a penny.
He said: “Even more exciting for me was finding in the school library The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers.
“I read them over and over and when I got to the end of The Two Towers I’d go back to The Fellowship of the Ring.
“And when at the age of 12 I won the school English prize they said: ‘What do you want? We’ll get you a book.’ And I said: ‘Can I have The Return of the King? I want to find out how it ends.'”
He said hosting the event was “an honour that I’m not worthy of, and that’s fine because none of us are”.
He added: “Being in this place feels huge and strange and very appropriate. Walking the grounds that Tolkien walked, [feeling] just slightly disappointed that there are not enough trolls and elves here as well, but maybe they’ll turn up.”…
…Thinking back over the decades I’ve been going to cons, in the last few years, things seem to have changed. For one, there are more writers, and fewer fans on panels….
(6) MALIK & SHAWL EVENT. Usman T. Malik will be in conversation with Nisi Shawl at Hugo house in Seattle next week. It will be a hybrid event. Free registration to see it online is available here.
Xinran: What excites you about the literary scene in China today?
Lai Wen: I think Chinese science fiction is particularly good. It’s something that often sucks in the fundamental social conflicts and contradictions of a given time and remodels them through these incredibly creative and vast fantasy worlds. The earliest Chinese science fiction novels weren’t all that great, to be frank, but they still told you a lot about Chinese society, our way of life, our fears and our hopes.
Lu Shi’e’s New China, published at the beginning of the twentieth century was one of the first examples of homegrown Chinese sci-fi/fantasy. The memory of the Opium Wars—the defeat by foreign powers and the vast numbers of the population who remained addicted to the drug—was still raw.
In his novel, one of the central characters is a genius doctor who invents medical techniques that can pull the population out of an opium-induced stupefaction and supercharge their minds. China then goes on to experience a period of intense rejuvenation, emerging as an economic and cultural superpower where peace and prosperity reign. The novel itself is somewhere between wish-fulfillment and prophecy, as many of the novels from that period were.
I think that the creative and original wave of science fiction coming out of China can be understood in the context of our history. Throughout the twentieth century, change was occurring at a frenetic, world-shattering pace. The final Manchu/Qing dynasty ended in 1911 and then power was dispersed amongst hundreds of local war lords jockeying for position; then Kuomintang was able to unite China under a modern nationalization program.
There was the Second World War, the civil war, Mao’s communists, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, until, eventually, the country was opened up under Deng Xiaoping. Today, China has emerged as a dominant global power.
So many Chinese people born in the last hundred years have lived through successive social systems and different economic models compressed into a handful of decades. Chinese science fiction reflects this. During the period of Communist dictatorship, the genre tended to be more sterile, reduced to the level of propaganda for the Party, but in the 1980s and 1990s science fiction went through something of a revival under Deng’s administration.
While censorship was still robust, science fiction and dystopic fantasy enabled cutting political and social commentaries to fly under the radar. Nineteen Eighty-Four made it past the censors, for instance, and many of the classics of Western science fiction were accessible to people during this time, along with Hollywood films such as E.T.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the most famous Chinese science-fiction writers lived through this period—writers such as Han Song and, most famously of all, Liu Cixin, whose most successful novel, The Three-Body Problem, has been made into a Netflix series….
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born June 13, 1893 — Dorothy Sayers. (Died 1957.) I’m going to talk about Dorothy Sayers tonight who though she wrote a handful of ghost stories is here because of mysteries. Oh, what mysteries they were.
Her first novel, Whose Body?, was published in 1923. Over the next thirteen years, she would write ten more novels featuring the ever so proper Lord Peter Wimsey who solved mysteries. In Strong Poison, we would be introduced to artist Harriet Vane who Wimsey would fall in love with in an properly upper-class manner. Harriet appears off and on in the future novels, resisting Lord Peter’s proposals of marriage until Gaudy Night six novels later.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Yes, I read all ten of these novels in order some forty years back. I like them better than Agatha Christie novels on the whole as the social commentary here gives them a sharper edge and I think Sayers described her society better than Christie did. Now Christie was way more productive over a much longer period of time as Sayers stopped writing these mysteries, which includes short stories, by the later Thirties in favor of writing plays, mostly on religious themes which were performed in cathedrals and broadcast by the BBC.
So there’s eleven novels and the short story collection, Lord Peter Views the Body, which I’ve not read but now I see is on the usual suspects as a rather good deal of just a dollar, so I’ll grab a copy now. Done.
I’d like to speak about The Lord Peter Wimsey series starring Ian Carmichael of the early Seventies, it covered the first five novels. Carmichael said he was too old to play the part for the romantic relationship of the later novels, but it didn’t matter as the series was cancelled.
I thought it was a rather well-done series and I caught it recently on Britbox, one of those streaming services, and it has help up rather well fifty years on with the Suck Fairy concurring.
He did play Wimsey into the BBC radio series that covered all of the novels and ran at the same time. They are quite excellent and are available on Audible at a very reasonable price.
Finally she wrote, according to ISFDB, a handful of genre stories, four to be precise —“The Cyprian Cat”, “The Cave of Ali Baba”, “Bitter Almonds” and “The Leopard Lady”. Three seem to be fantasy and the fourth, “Bitter Almonds” I’ve no idea about. Anyone have knowledge of these?
Carpe Diem offers the correct explanation why one species became extinct.
(10) THE BOYS IS BACK IN TOWN. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Season 4 of The Boys, based on Garth Ennis’ comic book series, (all available in digital omnibus editions via Hoopla, etc.) starts up (on Prime) Thursday, June 14 with the first 3 episodes, the following 5 dropping weekly.
Reminder, the Prime spin-off series GEN V takes place between The Boys seasons 3 and 4.
If you haven’t seen Seasons 1-3 and GEN V, watch those first.
Like the comics, The Boys (and GEN V) contains lots of fairly explicit violence, cussing, sex, nudity, and drugs. And a bit of song and dance here and there, but not much.
Also returning, August 8: the 4th and final season of The Umbrella Academy.
(12) GINA CARANO SUIT PROCEEDING. The Hollywood Reporter updates readers: “Mandalorian Lawsuit: How Gina Carano, Disney Are Battling In Court”. “At a Wednesday hearing, a judge expressed skepticism that the Carano’s lawsuit should be tossed before discovery is allowed to take place.”
A federal judge has signaled that Gina Carano‘s lawsuit against Disney and Lucasfilm over her termination from The Mandalorian will be allowed to proceed as the court considers whether the First Amendment allows private companies to sever ties with employees who publicly clash with their values.
U.S. District Judge Sherilyn Peace Garnett on Wednesday pushed back on arguments from Disney lawyer Daniel Petrocelli, who argued that the lawsuit should be dismissed because the company has the “right not to associate with a high-profile performer on a high-profile show who’s imbuing” the Star Wars series with “views it disagrees with” that could turn fans away from the show.
Petrocelli urged the court to find in favor of Disney on its First Amendment defense on dismissal rather than at a later stage of litigation after discovery takes place in which it’s determined whether the case should be allowed to proceed to trial.
“I’m not convinced there are no disputed facts,” Judge Garnett responded. She pointed to allegations that Carano was terminated to deflect attention from Disney’s contentious business decisions at the time, including the company’s contract dispute with Scarlett Johansson and criticism of Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law, which led to the dissolution of its special tax district in the state….
(13) LATEST IN CAPTAIN FUTURE SERIES. Hugo, Locus, and Seiun award-winning author Allen Steele returns to the world of Edmond Hamilton’s classic SF pulp hero with Lost Apollo, a new Captain Future adventure,
The first installment of a two-part story arc takes the cosmic defender and his uncanny crew on a quest across parallel worldlines to save not just our own universe, but countless others!
When an archaic spacecraft unexpectedly comes through a spacetime rift between Earth and the Moon, Curt Newton and the Futuremen intercept it and discover that it’s Apollo 20, a NASA lunar mission from 1973. Yet history doesn’t record there being any further Apollo missions after Apollo 17 in 1972, which can only mean this craft and its crew must have come from a parallel universe … but how, and why?
To discover the answers, Newton enlists the aid of an old foe, a renegade Martian physicist who has unlocked the secret to multiverse travel. Together with the Apollo astronauts, the adventurers lead a military expedition back to the worldline the wayward spacecraft came from, only to discover an unexpected menace awaiting them, a force that threatens Earth … not just one, but many.
Allen Steele’s Captain Future series has been acclaimed by science fiction fans and pulp enthusiasts alike as the blazing return of a classic SF champion. The debut novel, Avengers of the Moon (Tor, 2017) was nominated for Japan’s Seiun Award for Best Foreign Translation. Steele is also the author of an unrelated 1995 novella, “The Death of Captain Future,” which received the Hugo, Locus, and Seiun Awards and was a finalist for the Nebula Award.
Lost Apollo is his sixth Captain Future adventure and his fifth to be published by Amazing Selects.
…In the best case, Santos said, the advent of molecular machines will be less like the invention of an individual tool and more like the creation of a new toolbox. “We have to decide which tool works best for each job,” she told me. Nanomachines bring to mind other innovations for which scientists have found new applications over time. After lasers were invented, in 1960, the military used them to improve guidance systems for smart bombs; now they are used for eye surgery, high-speed Internet, and tattoo removal. Of course, for every technology like the laser, there are many others that never live up to their promise. Directing the right number of molecular machines to the right places, so that they do exactly what they’re made for and nothing more, is much easier in a petri dish than a living body.
Some machines could have untoward interactions with the immune system; others may be harmful to mammalian cells. It will probably be many years before the technologies are tested in humans. “There’s a huge leap between showing something works in a lab and proving it works in people,” Mihail Roco, a senior adviser at the National Science Foundation, who helped create the National Nanotechnology Initiative, told me. “These nanomachines could be a new treatment paradigm, but the human body is enormously complex. Many things we thought would work turned out to be ineffective or toxic.” Still, he went on, “Even if you don’t get exactly what you hoped for, you often learn something useful. You advance knowledge that, down the line, could benefit humanity.”
The 59th Annual Nebula Awards took place in Pasadena, California on June 8th, 2024. Hosted by Toastmaster, Sarah Gailey, the evening brought with it a toast to service, remembrance for those we lost in the publishing field, celebration of our finalists and winners of the evening and the induction of the 40th SFWA Grand Master, Susan Mary Cooper.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Ellen Datlow, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Anne Marble, Bill, Daniel Dern, Andrew (not Werdna), Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Teddy Harvia, Kathy Sullivan, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) announced the 59th Annual Nebula Awards® in Pasadena, CA on June 8.
NEBULA AWARD FOR NOVEL
The Saint of Bright Doors, Vajra Chandrasekera (Tordotcom)
NEBULA AWARD FOR NOVELLA
“Linghun”, Ai Jiang (Linghun)
NEBULA AWARD FOR NOVELETTE
“The Year Without Sunshine“, Naomi Kritzer (Uncanny 11-12/23)
NEBULA AWARD FOR SHORT STORY
“Tantie Merle and the Farmhand 4200“, R.S.A Garcia (Uncanny 7-8/23)
ANDRE NORTON NEBULA AWARD FOR MIDDLE GRADE AND YOUNG ADULT FICTION
To Shape a Dragon’s Breath, Moniquill Blackgoose (Del Rey)
NEBULA AWARD FOR GAME WRITING
Baldur’s Gate 3, Adam Smith, Adrienne Law, Baudelaire Welch, Chrystal Ding, Ella McConnell, Ine Van Hamme, Jan Van Dosselaer, John Corocran, Kevin VanOrd, Lawrence Schick, Martin Docherty, Rachel Quirke, Ruairí Moore, Sarah Baylus, Stephen Rooney, Swen Vincke (Larian Studios)
RAY BRADBURY NEBULA AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING DRAMATIC PRESENTATION
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) invites speculative fiction fans and creators to the 59th Annual Nebula Awards® Ceremony. The ceremony will stream live on Saturday, June 8, at 8:00 p.m. Pacific from Pasadena, CA. Sarah Gailey will serve as Toastmaster. The 59th Annual Nebula Awards Ceremony on YouTube.
(1) NEBULA AWARDS TOASTMASTER NAMED. Sarah Gailey, Nebula and Hugo finalist, will serve as toastmaster for SFWA’s 59th Annual Nebula Awards® Ceremony. The ceremony will take place in Pasadena, CA on June 8, 2024. The organization will be livestreaming the ceremony on YouTube.
Sarah Gailey
Sarah Gailey is a Hugo Award Winning and Bestselling author of speculative fiction, short stories, and essays. They have been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards for multiple years running. Their bestselling adult novel debut, Magic For Liars, was published by Tor Books in 2019. Their most recent novel, Just Like Home, and most recent original comic book series with BOOM! Studios, Know Your Station are available now. Their shorter works and essays have been published in Mashable, The Boston Globe, Vice, Tor.com, and The Atlantic. Their work has been translated into seven different languages and published around the world.
Honoring 2023’s outstanding SFF genre works, the Nebula Awards Ceremony will be a highlight of the hybrid 2024 SFWA Nebula Conference, taking place June 6-9, 2024, online and at the Westin Pasadena in Pasadena, CA. Aspiring and professional storytellers in the speculative fiction genres may benefit from attending the entire professional development weekend full of panels and networking opportunities.
Tickets for the Nebula Awards Ceremony banquet, which precedes the ceremony itself, are also available. Queries and banquet tickets may be purchased by emailing events@sfwa.org or visiting events.sfwa.org.
(2) SAMUEL R. DELANY PRIDE MONTH Q&A SCHEDULED. Author Samuel R. Delany will be interviewed live in Philadelphia in June: “Pride Month: How Science Fiction Dances to the Music of Time”. Saturday, June 15, 2024. 3:30 p.m. Eastern. In the Music Department at Parkway Central Library (1901 Vine Street (between 19th and 20th Streets on the Parkway), Philadelphia, PA 19103).
Samuel R. Delany
“A visionary novelist & a revolutionary chronicler of gay life” (The New Yorker), Samuel R. Delany speaks with Music Department library trainee & Hollywood indie film composer Mark Inchoco on the intersections between science fiction & music. Hear how great musicians, librettists, & musical events such as Cab Calloway, Pete Seeger, the Newport Folk Festival, Igor Stravinsky, Bob Dylan, Samuel Barber, Leontyne Price, & Macy Gray came into Delany’s art & life.
In conversation with Mark Inchoco, library trainee, conductor, & Hollywood indie film composer
Samuel R. Delany is a novelist, literary critic, & emeritus professor. He is the winner of four Nebula Awards, two Hugo Awards, the William Whitehead Memorial Award for lifetime contribution to gay & lesbian literature, & the Anisfield-Wolf book award. He was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2002. In 2013, he was named the 31st Damon Knight Memorial Foundation Grand Master by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America.
Delany’s novels include Babel-17, The Einstein Intersection, Nova, & Dhalgren. His collection, Tales of Nevèrÿon, contains the first novel-length story to address the AIDS crisis. His 2007 novel Dark Reflections won the Stonewall Book Award. He is the author of the widely taught Times Square Red / Times Square Blue, & his book-length autobiographical essay, The Motion of Light in Water, won a Hugo Award in 1989. His interview in The Paris Review’s “Art of Fiction” series appeared in spring 2012. In 2015 he was the recipient of the Nicolas Guillén Award for philosophical fiction. Delany retired from teaching literature & creative writing at Temple University at the end of 2015. He lives in Philadelphia with his partner, Dennis Rickett.
Mark Inchoco is a composer, conductor, & music librarian from Port Richmond. His film scores were screened at the Academy Award & BAFTA qualifying LA Shorts Festival & the Newport Beach Film Festival. His compositions were performed in the U.S. & Europe. In 2018, Inchoco was the first music historian laureate of the Cité Internationale des Arts by the French Republic. Currently, he is assistant conductor of the Lower Merion Symphony. Inchoco holds degrees in English & historical musicology from Temple & the University of California, Riverside.
The theme of “The Garden of Time” is drawn from J.G. Ballard’s 1962 short story of the same name. The garden party theme is already in full bloom as the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s stairway is adorned with hundreds of fake flowers. This gala complements the Met’s current exhibit, “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion.”
The exhibit “which opened for press previews on Monday morning, features approximately 250 rare items drawn from the Institute’s permanent collection. Spanning over 400 years of fashion history, the pieces include designs by Schiaparelli, Dior, Givenchy, and more.”
We’ve just gone over 7,000,000 words, almost 10 times the length of the 1979 edition, more than 5 times longer than 1993. We’re still a dozen short of 20,000 entries but hey. Have also reached 34,000 scans in the Picture Gallery, most of them of first editions (but also retitlings and revisions). We are homing in on 250,000 internal hyperlinks, way better than double the 2011 figure, when we went online with Gollancz.
—We’ll never change our title, which has been in our bones early and late, but our entries today do reflect the fact that genre sf is now a large raft in a huger flood….
…The Enchanted Island of Yew (published in 1903, early in his Oz phase) stands out by any account. Yet this matter-of-fact tale of gender transformation has never received the buzz accorded to Baum’s more famous series. Perhaps what is most laudable about the book, in retrospect, is the unconcerned tone with which the narrative presents the subversive “gender trouble” at its heart.
The gender agnosticism of Baum’s work contrasts noticeably to the priorities of the world around him. In his 1906 children’s fantasy John Dough and the Cherub, Chick the Cherub, a young child, is never assigned a gender. When Baum’s publishers came after him about this, he allegedly replied, “I cannot remember that Chick the Cherub impressed me as other than a joyous, sweet, venturesome and loveable child. Who cares whether it is a boy or a girl?”1 Bad timing: in an era rife with threatening jeremiads about “the New Woman” and pressure on men to trade domesticity for adventure tales and sporting life,2 the publishers were dissatisfied with casual gender ambiguity. They launched a contest for child readers, offering prize money for the best answers as to whether Chick was a boy or a girl and why.3
Baum himself, though, did not succumb. While the world around him fixated on gender and instilled the ideas of conventional gender presentation in children from a young age—to the point of paying them to go along!—gender play is just one element among many that makes up his fantasy worlds….
…The dilemma regarding the ethical placement of a rare book isn’t convoluted for Tom Lecky, who was the head of the rare-books and manuscripts department at the auction firm Christie’s for 17 years and now runs Riverrun Books & Manuscripts. When I mentioned the Hemingway manuscript of “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” that sold for $248,000 at Christie’s back in 2000, he pointed out that institutions had had “every bit the opportunity to buy it as a private individual.” Other singular works that have been up for auction are James Joyce’s “Circe” manuscript, Sylvia Plath’s personally annotated Bible, a serial printing of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the National Era newspaper, and the proofs of that first Great Gatsby dust jacket. In each case, I was captivated by their fate. The National Library of Ireland bought Joyce’s manuscript for $1.5 million and digitized it; Plath’s Bible went to an undisclosed buyer for about $11,000; so did the newspapers, for $126,000. Nobody placed a winning bid for the Gatsby cover art.
For Lecky, the ethical question we should be asking isn’t whether institutions should acquire rare books instead of collectors, but what happens when “a private owner owns something that no one knows that they have.” Lecky, like many others in the trade, works to dispel myths about how private collections work. Private collections tend to be temporary and books often jump between hands, but for the time that a collector owns a book, in my view, they should make efforts to share it. “Most collectors don’t think of it as possession but caretaking,” Lecky said. “They’re a piece of the chain in the provenance, not the end of it.”…
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born May 7, 1922 — Darren McGavin. (Died 2006.) How could I possibly resist doing the Birthday of Darren McGavin?
Before we get to very obvious reason why I’m doing him, let’s look at some of his other genre and perhaps not-so-genre work.
I’m fairly sure his earliest genre role was in the Tales of Tomorrow anthology series as Bruce Calvin in “The Duplicates” episode which was over seventy years ago. I’m reasonably sure that his next genre role is a decade later in Witchcraft in a major role as Fred.
He has a lot of genre appearances, some of which I’ll note here. He’s in A Man from U.N.C.L.E. as Victor Karmak in “The Deadly Quest Affair” and yes, I remember him in that episode; the same year he shows up in Mission: Impossible as J. Richard Taggart in “The Seal”; several years later, he’d be in the pilot of Six Million Dollar Man as Oliver Spencer. I never did really get into that series, or that spin-off one. And he’s even in The Martian Chronicles as Sam Parkhill.
He was also I think, and let me now go check, yes he was, in the first television series featuring Mike Hammer as that character in Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer serieswhich was the syndicated television series based on Spillane’s series. Though it only ran from January 7, 1958 through November 28, 1959, it had seventy-six half-hour episodes.
Darren McGavin as Kolchak.
Fifty-one years ago, ABC aired The Night Stalker, the first of two films that preceded Kolchak: The Night Stalker series, the other being The Night Strangler. I’m reasonably sure that I’m seen them though I can’t remember seeing them. This is a casting decision when Darren McGavin was the only performer considered for the role.
And oh did he ever settle into the role of Chicago reporter Carl Kolchak who investigates mysterious incidents. He encountered, to name some of his stories that his Editor didn’t believe, an alien stranded on Earth, a prehistoric ape-man created from cell samples, vampires (of course he had to given the original character in the novel did), mummies, and a zombie. Even an android. I thought they did the headless motorcycle rider rather well.
His character originated in an unpublished novel, The Kolchak Papers, written by Jeff Rice about a Vegas newspaper reporter named Carl Kolchak tracks down and defeats a serial killer who turns out to be a vampire. Yes, the novel is not available as an epub. And Rice wrote yet more novels based on this series.
What I hadn’t realized some fifty years on from first seeing it as a teenager and some thirty years since I last saw it was that of 26 episodes ordered, only 20 were produced. I could’ve sworn that I saw more episodes than that! There was a 2005 revival of 10 episodes, only 6 of which aired before ABC cancelled it due to abysmally bad ratings.
Carter wanted McGavin to appear as Kolchak in The X-Files, but McGavin was very adamant that he would not reprise the character for the series. However he would appear in several episodes as Arthur Dales, a retired FBI agent who was supposed to be the “father of the X-Files”.
In the third episode of the 2016 revival series, a character prominently featured in the “Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster” episode is conspicuously attired in Kolchak’s trademark seersucker jacket, black knit tie, and straw hat. Why so, you ask? Well, you should ask.
The episode can trace its origin back to a script entitled “The M Word” episode of the the Night Stalker. X-File’s executive producer Frank Spotnitz’s was also the executive producer for that series. So that script was reworked by a different writer into this script with Kolchak being given a nod.
The series is airing Peacock for free or Amazon for $1.99 an episode. Peacock has a lot of SF like Farscape, Primeval, the original Quantum Leap and the now-cancelled reboot series, and Warehouse 13. Oh, and Columbo as well. I know it’s not genre, but I thought I’d mention it. Alas McGavin never appeared in a Columbo mystery. Too bad.
The “Blade Runner” series in the works at Amazon Prime Video has cast Michelle Yeoh in a lead role, Variety has learned.
The series, titled “Blade Runner 2099,” was ordered at Amazon in September 2022. It serves as a sequel to both the original “Blade Runner” film and the followup film, “Blade Runner 2049.” Exact plot details are being kept under wraps, but sources say Yeoh will play a character named Olwen, described as a replicant near the end of her life…
(10) IT’S A PREQUEL AND A SEQUEL. But not a breath mint. Walt Disney Studios dropped a teaser trailer for Mufasa: The Lion King, in theaters December 20.
A lion who would change our lives forever. #Mufasa: The Lion King. “Mufasa: The Lion King” enlists Rafiki to relay the legend of Mufasa to young lion cub Kiara, daughter of Simba and Nala, with Timon and Pumbaa lending their signature schtick. Told in flashbacks, the story introduces Mufasa as an orphaned cub, lost and alone until he meets a sympathetic lion named Taka—the heir to a royal bloodline. The chance meeting sets in motion an expansive journey of an extraordinary group of misfits searching for their destiny—their bonds will be tested as they work together to evade a threatening and deadly foe.
Space is great. It’s massive, it’s colorful, and you can have big fights with lasers there. It really does have everything you could want. But it also has problems—mainly, like we said, that it’s massive. In fact it’s so massive that if you want to go anywhere in it (apart from a few nearby planets with hardly anyone to shoot lasers at), by the time you get there, you’re dead. Now you might think that if you can just go fast enough, you’ll get there before you die, but there’s a problem.
That problem, as Albert Einstein tells us, is the speed of light….
Here’s one of the films that Den of Geek gives a passing grade:
Interstellar (2014)
Christopher Nolan’s space exploration flick is probably the most famous take on time dilation. It is, it has to be said, a film that has done its homework. Although it uses a wormhole to get our astronauts into outer space, a combination of speed and veering too close to serious gravity wells means that decades pass at home while only a short time passes on board the ship. As well as portraying some of the realities of time dilation, this movie also gave us our most scientifically accurate visualization yet of a black hole.
It also, admirably, does not insist on a magic backward-time-travel fudge to restore a familial status quo at the end. The film ends with Matthew McConaughey reunited with his daughter, who is now an old lady, and there is no question of magically reversing that to let him watch her grow up. But even here, the scientifically accurate black hole allows Matthew McConaughey to send a message backward in time to his daughter’s childhood because of the cosmic power of love, or something, making the entire plot into a bootstrap paradox.
…Alcubierre published his idea in Classical and Quantum Gravity. Now, a new paper in the same journal suggests that a warp drive may not require exotic negative energy after all.
“This study changes the conversation about warp drives,” lead author Jared Fuchs, of the University of Alabama, Huntsville and the research think tank Applied Physics, said in a statement. “By demonstrating a first-of-its-kind model, we’ve shown that warp drives might not be relegated to science fiction.”
The team’s model uses “a sophisticated blend of traditional and novel gravitational techniques to create a warp bubble that can transport objects at high speeds within the bounds of known physics,” according to the statement.
Understanding that model is probably beyond most of us; the paper’s abstract, for example, says that the solution “involves combining a stable matter shell with a shift vector distribution that closely matches well-known warp drive solutions such as the Alcubierre metric.”
The proposed engine could not achieve faster-than-light travel, though it could come close; the statement mentions “high but subluminal speeds.”
This is a single modeling study, so don’t get too excited….
(13) ONE FOOT AT A TIME. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] How is Superman like you? According to the first official photo from the upcoming reboot movie, when he’s getting dressed it’s how he, um, re-boots.
David Corenswet, 30, stars in the first official photo from the upcoming Superman reboot, directed by James Gunn.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Daniel Dern, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Teddy Harvia, Kathy Sullivan, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jack Lint.]
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) announced the finalists for the 59th Annual Nebula Awards® in a livestreamed presentation on March 14.
The awards will be presented in a ceremony on Saturday, June 8, that will be streamed live as it is held in-person in Pasadena, CA, as part of the 2024 Nebula Conference Online. Winners in each category will be determined by the vote of Full, Associate, and Senior members of SFWA.
Here is the complete list of finalists:
Nebula Award for Novel
The Saint of Bright Doors, Vajra Chandrasekera (Tordotcom)
The Water Outlaws, S.L. Huang (Tordotcom; Solaris UK)
Translation State, Ann Leckie (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
The Terraformers, Annalee Newitz (Tor; Orbit UK)
Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, Wole Talabi (DAW, Gollancz)
Witch King, Martha Wells (Tordotcom)
Nebula Award for Novella
The Crane Husband, Kelly Barnhill (Tordotcom)
“Linghun”, Ai Jiang (Linghun)
Thornhedge, T. Kingfisher (Tor; Titan UK)
Untethered Sky, Fonda Lee (Tordotcom)
The Mimicking of Known Successes, Malka Older (Tordotcom)
Mammoths at the Gates, Nghi Vo (Tordotcom)
Nebula Award for Novelette
“A Short Biography of a Conscious Chair“, Renan Bernardo (Samovar 2/23)
I Am AI, Ai Jiang (Shortwave)
“The Year Without Sunshine“, Naomi Kritzer (Uncanny 11-12/23)
“Imagine: Purple-Haired Girl Shooting Down The Moon“, Angela Liu (Clarkesworld 6/23)
“Saturday’s Song“, Wole Talabi (Lightspeed 5/23)
“Six Versions of My Brother Found Under the Bridge“, Eugenia Triantafyllou (Uncanny 9-10/23)
Nebula Award for Short Story
“Once Upon a Time at The Oakmont“, P.A. Cornell (Fantasy 10/23)
“Tantie Merle and the Farmhand 4200“, R.S.A Garcia (Uncanny 7-8/23)
“Window Boy“, Thomas Ha (Clarkesworld 8/23)
“The Sound of Children Screaming”, Rachael K. Jones (Nightmare 10/23)
“Better Living Through Algorithms”, Naomi Kritzer (Clarkesworld 5/23)
“Bad Doors”, John Wiswell (Uncanny 1-2/23)
Andre Norton Nebula Award for Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction
To Shape a Dragon’s Breath, Moniquill Blackgoose (Del Rey)
The Inn at the Amethyst Lantern, J. Dianne Dotson (Android)
Liberty’s Daughter, Naomi Kritzer (Fairwood)
The Ghost Job, Greg van Eekhout (Harper)
Nebula Award for Game Writing
The Bread Must Rise, Stewart C Baker, James Beamon (Choice of Games)
Alan Wake II, Sam Lake, Clay Murphy, Tyler Burton Smith, Sinikka Annala (Remedy Entertainment, Epic Games Publishing)
Ninefox Gambit: Machineries of Empire Roleplaying Game, Yoon Ha Lee, Marie Brennan(Android)
Dredge, Joel Mason (Black Salt Games, Team 17)
Chants of Sennaar, Julien Moya, Thomas Panuel (Rundisc, Focus Entertainment)
Baldur’s Gate 3, Adam Smith, Adrienne Law, Baudelaire Welch, Chrystal Ding, Ella McConnell, Ine Van Hamme, Jan Van Dosselaer, John Corocran, Kevin VanOrd, Lawrence Schick, Martin Docherty, Rachel Quirke, Ruairí Moore, Sarah Baylus, Stephen Rooney, Swen Vincke (Larian Studios)
Ray Bradbury Nebula Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation
Nimona, Robert L. Baird, Lloyd Taylor, Pamela Ribon, Marc Haimes, Nick Bruno, Troy Quane, Keith Bunin, Nate Stevenson (Annapurna Animation, Annapurna Pictures)
The Last of Us: “Long, Long Time”, Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin (HBOMax)
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley, Michael Gilio, Chris McKay (Paramount Pictures, Entertainment One, Allspark Pictures)
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, Dave Callaham (Columbia Pictures, Marvel Entertainment, Avi Arad Productions)
The Boy and the Heron, Hayao Miyazaki (Studio Ghibli, Toho Company)
Author Martha Wells graciously declined her nomination as a novel finalist this year for System Collapse published by Tordotcom. In 2022, Wells also declined a nomination for novella and felt that the Murderbot Diaries series has already received incredible praise from her industry peers and wanted to open the floor to highlight other works within the community.
(1) SFWA NEBULA FINALIST ANNOUNCMENT TOMORROW. The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) will announce the 2023 Nebula Award finalists (to be presented this year in Pasadena) on the SFWA Youtube channel, tomorrow, March 14, starting at 5:00 p.m. Pacific.
Once again, we’ll be calling upon a talented group of SAG-AFTRA narrators to take us through an evening filled with a variety of outstanding speculative fiction works.
It’s sure to be a night to remember! We hope you’ll join us!
(2) NEBULA CONFERENCE SCHOLARSHIP DEADLINE. Also tomorrow — March 14, is the deadline to apply for the scholarships SFWA is offering for members of under-served communities to attend the Nebula conference! The 2024 Nebula Conference will take place June 6-9 in Pasadena, CA and online. If you or someone you know may benefit from these scholarships, please apply here or share this link: https://airtable.com/appqxO86fh6JpPBNR/shrjMcYbZyuTxhwVH
Scholarship applications must be completed on this form by March 14th, 2024. The scholarship recipients will be selected from the applicant pool by lottery. Applicants may be considered for more than one scholarship if they identify with more than one of the following groups.
Here are the categories of scholarships being offered and the number of online conference scholarships available for each:
Scholarship for Black and/or Indigenous Creators: This scholarship is open to Black and/or Indigenous creators in the United States and abroad. (quantity: 15 online scholarships)
Scholarship for AAPI Creators: This scholarship is available to Asian creators, Asian American creators, and creators from the Pacific Islands. (quantity: 15 online scholarships)
Scholarships for Hispanic/Latinx Creators: This scholarship is available to creators with backgrounds in Spanish-speaking and/or Latin American cultures. (quantity: 15 online scholarships)
Scholarship for Writers Based Outside of the U.S.: This scholarship is available to creators who live outside the United States. (quantity: 15 online scholarships)
Scholarship for members of the LGBTQIA+ Community: This scholarship is available to creators who identify as LGBTQIA+. (quantity: 15 online scholarships)
Scholarship for creators with disabilities: This scholarship is available to creators who identify as having a disability. (quantity: 15 online scholarships)
Scholarship for creators who face financial barriers: This scholarship is available to creators whose financial situations may otherwise prevent them from participating. (quantity: 15 online scholarships)
Scholarship for in-person registration are available in limited quantities for creators who identify with one of our online scholarship groups. This scholarship does not include funds for travel, lodging or other related expenses to attend the conference, only for registration.
SFWA says, “Our support of underserved communities isn’t possible without your help. If you are able, please consider making a donation at sfwa.org/donate to help us fund additional scholarships in the future.”
HarperCollins will publish The Collected Poems of J R R Tolkien, edited by Christina Scull and Wayne G Hammond, in September 2024, the first time all the author’s poems will appear in one volume.
HC, which holds world all-language rights to Tolkien’s works, said: “Poetry was the first way in which Tolkien expressed himself creatively and through it the seeds of his literary ambition would be sown.” One of Tolkien’s poems “The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star”, begun in 1914, is where the “Silmarillion” first appears and both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings “are enriched with poems both humorous and haunting, magical and moving”. Tolkien scholars Scull and Hammond will provide analysis of each poem.
Scull and Hammond were hired for the project by Christopher Tolkien’s, J R R Tolkien’s son and executor of his literary estate until Tolkien died in 2020. They said: “Charged at first to review only his early poems, we soon saw the benefits of examining the entire poetic opus across six decades, vast though it is with hundreds of printed and manuscript sources…Not long before his death, we were able to send Christopher a trial portion of the book, which he praised as ‘remarkable and immensely desirable’.”…
Somewhere in the California desert, a police officer pulls over a 1964 Chevrolet Malibu as it lurches wildly across the highway. After interrogating the driver, he opens the trunk and is instantly vaporized by a blinding light that reduces him to a skeleton, leaving behind only a pair of smoldering leather boots.
Thus begins Repo Man, a sci-fi cult classic sci-fi with a nihilistic worldview and a punk rock soundtrack that by all accounts probably shouldn’t exist….
…Dick Rude (plays Duke): I was a teenager going to the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute in Los Angeles. I wrote a script called Leather Rubberneck with a friend of mine from school, about two kids who get drafted. Alex [Cox, writer and director] wanted to make the film, but it didn’t pan out. So he incorporated it into Repo Man. A lot of the characters, some of the dialogue, some of the ideas, there was quite a bit of it that was used in Repo Man….
Jonathan Wacks: We went through the Yellow Pages and looked up studios and producers and we sat and typed letters. We knew they wouldn’t pick up our phone. We sent hundreds of letters out and got zero responses. So we decided to raise $500,000 and shoot it at UCLA so we could use the equipment for free.
Peter McCarthy: The thing with UCLA is you never wanted to get your diploma. Once you did, you couldn’t go back and use anything….
Olivia Barash: I was talking to Alex, and I said, “Who are you going to have do the title track?” And he goes, “There’s one of two people. David Byrne, we have something out to his agent. But I really want Iggy Pop, we just don’t know where to find him.” And I said, “I know where to find him. He’s in my building. He’s my neighbor.” So Alex came over, and we rang the intercom outside, and Iggy answered. And that’s how we got Iggy….
The first trailer for Netflix’s futuristic sci-fi thriller Atlas is here, featuring Jennifer Lopez having a very bad day.
Atlas follows the titular character Atlas Shepherd (Lopez), a government data analyst with a healthy distrust of artificial intelligence. However, after a mission to capture a rogue robot from her past goes wrong, she soon finds herself having to trust AI in order to save humanity. If AI wrote propaganda, this is probably what it would sound like….
As a kid, I desperately wanted a horse but knew I would never have one, so I lived vicariously through Maureen and Paul Beebe’s adventures in Misty of Chincoteague by Marguerite Henry and illustrated by Wesley Dennis.
Dragonsong by Anne McCaffrey had it all as far as I was concerned: a gifted girl who isn’t allowed to be a musician because of her gender, tiny, colorful dragons called fire lizards, and a nearby planet that rained down flesh-eating parasites frequently enough to keep things exciting. I probably read it 20 times.
The Tombs of Atuan is the second book in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series and features a female protagonist who struggles against the confines of a role that’s been chosen by others. Most of the story takes place in a nightmarish underground labyrinth, where Le Guin’s hero Ged (Harry Potter’s prototype) struggles to steal a talisman. I loved everything about it.
I was always on the lookout for books about girls on adventures. When visiting the library, I often checked out Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking books or the Danny Dunn series by Raymond Abrashkin and Jay Williams, which features a girl who loves physics.
Your top five authors:
Ursula K. Le Guin: She caught my attention as a middle-grade reader with her Earthsea fantasy series and has kept me captivated as an adult.
She uses science fiction to escape the social confines of our planet and explores themes of colonization, race, environmental destruction, political systems, gender roles, and sexuality without ever losing sight of the story. The Word for World Is Forest, The Dispossessed, andThe Left Hand of Darknessare three of my favorites.
Amy Tan: I can’t recall whether The Kitchen God’s Wife or The Joy Luck Clubwas my first Amy Tan book. I adore the funny, relatable stories she tells about women and family, and enjoy learning about Chinese culture and history. The Bonesetter’s Daughter, which weaves science and anthropology into the story, was fantastic too. I became an even bigger fan after hearing Tan sing with the Rock Bottom Remainders at First Avenue a few years ago.
J.R.R. Tolkien: I can’t count how many times I’ve re-read TheLord of the Rings. I love losing myself in Middle-earth, with its mountains and languages and monsters and lore, and I’ve always been a sucker for a well-told hero’s journey.
Margaret Atwood: Sometimes I think she can see the future. The Handmaid’s Taleis a masterpiece in so many ways. I heard her speak once, and I recall her saying that she grew up reading science fiction stories with her brother. It’s amazing how the books we read as children shape us as adults.
Ann Patchett: She has been one of my favorite authors for years. As a reader interested in themes of music, science, and theater, she’s hit the mark over and over again with books like Bel Canto, State of Wonder, and Tom Lake. I can’t wait to see what she writes next….
(7) THE WRITERS’ PRIZE. A non-genre work, Liz Berry’s The Home Child, was announced as the winner of the poetry category (£2000) and The Writers’ Prize Book of the Year (£30,000) at the London Book Fair on March 13.
Born in the Black Country and now living in Birmingham, The Home Child was inspired by the story of Berry’s great-aunt Eliza Showell, one of the many children forcibly emigrated to Canada as part of the British Child Migrant Schemes. This beautiful novel-in-verse about a child far from home was described as ‘absolutely magical’ by Fiona Benson.
The book achieved the highest number of votes from the 350+ celebrated writers in the Folio Academy, who exclusively nominated and voted for the winners of The Writers’ Prize 2024.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born March 13, 1956 — Dana Delany, 68. I remember Dana Delany best for her role as nurse Colleen McMurphy on China Beach, set at a Vietnam War evacuation hospital. It aired for four seasons starting in the late Eighties. Great role, fantastic series. I rewatched it a decade or so ago on DVD — it held up very well.
Dana Delany
So let me deal with her main genre role which was voicing Lois Lane. She first did this twenty years ago in Superman: The Animated Series for forty-four episodes, an amazing feat by any standard. That role would come again in Superman: Brainiac Attacks, Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox (avoid if you’ve got even a shred of brain cells), in a recurring role on the Justice League and Justice League Unlimited series, The Batman and even in the Superman: Shadow of Apokolips game.
Her other voice role of note was for Wing Commander Academy as Gwen Archer Bowman. And she wasn’t Lois Lane but Vilsi Vaylar in Batman: The Brave and the Bold’s “The Super-Batman of Planet X!”.
She’ll have a one-off on Battle Galactica as Sesha Abinell; more significantly she has a starring role as Grace Wyckoff in the Wild Palms series.
Oh, she showed up on Castle as FBI Special Agent Jordan Shaw in a two-part story, the episodes being “Tick, Tick, Tick…” and “Boom!”.
So I’m going to finish with her role in Tombstone, Emma Bull and Will Shetterley’s favorite Western film along with the Deadwood series. It’s an inspiration she says for her Territory novel. And I love it as well. Delany played magnificently Josephine Sarah “Sadie” Earp, the common-law wife of Wyatt Earp. The final scene of them dancing in the snow in San Francisco is truly sniffles inducing.
Beau DeMayo, the showrunner and executive producer behind Disney+’s upcoming animated series “X-Men ’97,” has been fired ahead of the March 20 premiere, Variety has confirmed.
DeMayo had completed work on Seasons 1 and 2 of “X-Men ’97” ahead of his exit. He will not attend the March 13 Hollywood premiere for the show. His Instagram account, on which he had been previewing artwork and answering fan questions about “X-Men ’97,” has also been deleted.
He wrote and produced “X-Men ’97,” which is a continuation of the popular “X-Men: The Animated Series” that aired on Fox Kids in the ’90s. It is unclear why DeMayo was fired from “X-Men ’97” so close to the premiere, but he will no longer promote the show or be involved with future seasons….
Peter Jackson and actor Billy Boyd found a memorable way to convey that love in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. As Aragorn leads the Hobbits toward Rivendell, Pippin asks about “second breakfast” and a litany of additional meals that will presumably be skipped as they continue. Tolkien specified six meals in the Prologue to The Fellowship of the Ring — which roughly match European traditions — but two of them are essentially the same meal. Here’s a rundown of each one to give a good idea of what Pippin is missing….
Here’s the one I’m always interested in:
Second Breakfast
Tolkien mentions second breakfast in The Hobbit, with Bilbo settling down to his just as Gandalf appears to tell him that the Dwarves have already left for The Lonely Mountain. It serves as a quiet joke — stressing that Hobbits in general and Bilbo in particular enjoy eating — as well as emphasizing the comfortable lifestyle he’s leaving behind to go on his adventure with the Dwarves. It also serves as the inspiration for Pippin’s line about second breakfast in The Fellowship of the Ring, which he doesn’t deliver in Tolkien’s text.
(11) PRAISE FOR STARMEN. [Item by Francis Hamit.] Demetria Head is a book blogger, one of that legion of reviewers who do it without pay and for the joy of it. Ms. Head actually read the entire book and delivered an almost forensic analysis. I think her work deserves wider exposure.
Demetria Head Review from BookBub and A Look Inside book blogs
“STARMEN” by Francis Hamit is a sprawling epic that seamlessly blends elements of magical realism, historical fiction, and sci-fi fantasy to create a mesmerizing tale that will captivate readers from start to finish. Set against the backdrop of the American Southwest in 1875, the novel introduces us to a cast of richly drawn characters whose lives become intertwined in a web of intrigue, adventure, and supernatural mystery.
At the heart of the story is George James Frazer, a budding anthropologist working for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, whose quest to contact a local Apache tribe leads him on a journey beyond the realms of ordinary reality. When a mysterious hot air balloon appears over the town of El Paso, owned by the British Ethnographic Survey, Frazer finds himself drawn into a world of ancient magic and hidden truths.
The characters in “STARMEN” are truly the heart and soul of the novel, each one fleshed out with depth and nuance that makes them feel like living, breathing individuals. From the determined and resourceful Frazer to the enigmatic Apache witches and the ruthless Pinkerton agents, every character brings their own unique perspective to the narrative, driving the plot forward with their conflicting desires and motivations.
Plot development in “STARMEN” is masterfully executed, with Hamit weaving together multiple storylines that intertwine and intersect in surprising and unexpected ways. From the quest to find a missing heir to the discovery of a town inhabited by extraordinary gunfighters, each twist and turn of the plot unfolds with breathtaking intensity, keeping readers on the edge of their seats until the very last page.
What truly sets “STARMEN” apart is its seamless blend of genres, incorporating elements of historical fiction, magical realism, and hard sci-fi into a cohesive and compelling narrative. From the romantic entanglements to the political intrigue and the mind-bending concepts of quantum mechanics and string theory, the novel offers something for every reader, appealing to fans of both traditional historical fiction and speculative fiction alike.
Overall, “STARMEN” is a tour de force of storytelling that will transport readers to a world of adventure, mystery, and wonder. With its unforgettable characters, intricate plot, and bold exploration of complex themes, it is a must-read for anyone seeking an immersive and thought-provoking literary experience.
(13) SHAKEN TO THEIR CORE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] I have not seen it yet (but have downloaded to mem stick for home viewing – it might be rubbish???) In the TV series Pending Train, “100 People Accidently Time-Travel By Train to a Destroyed Earth in 2063”. See video at the link.
In Tokyo, train passengers find themselves fighting for their very survival after their train car jumps into an apocalyptic future
(14) ON THE AIR. Breathe (2024) with Jennifer Hudson, Milla Jovovich, Sam Worthington, Common, and Quvenzhané Wallis. In Theaters, On Digital, and On Demand April 26.
(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. How It Should Have Ended brings us up to date with “Previously On – DUNE”.
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Francis Hamit, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Steven French for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]
(1) WORLDS OF IF REVIVAL. The title that won three straight Hugos in the Sixties under the editorship of Frederik Pohl, Worlds of If, then folded in 1974, is making a comeback here.
The classic science fiction magazine Worlds of IF will live again starting February 2024. The magazine will be relaunched with Justin Sloane of Starship Sloane as editor-in-chief and publisher, Jean-Paul L. Garnier of Space Cowboy Books filling the role of deputy-editor-in-chief, and Dr. Daniel Pomarède as science editor. The inaugural issue will be available both in print and free download PDF, with works from multiple generations of SFF authors, artists, and poets. Leading up to the release, the website will feature teasers including interviews with notable SFF authors and fans, audio adaptations of classic tales from the original IF, and articles about SFF and beyond. In the tradition of IF, the editors plan on experimenting with new forms and styles of SF, showcasing new authors, interacting with fandom, and bringing fun and weird science fiction to readers.
Visit Starship Sloane Publishing’s homesite for a free webzine reissue of the April 1955 Worlds of IF, featuring novelettes by James E. Gunn and Fox B. Holden, with a short story by Philip K. Dick. Learn more and find bonus content here.
(2) TOLKIEN STUDIES NEWS. David Bratman of Tolkien Studies today announced his co-editor, Verlyn Flieger, is ending her run with the journal. Her place will be taken by Yvette Kisor, Professor of Literature at Ramapo College of New Jersey.
After 22 years as co-Editor of Tolkien Studies, Verlyn Flieger will be retiring to take up the position of Editor Emerita. One of the co-founders of the journal, Verlyn has co-edited 20 volumes of the journal. Highlights include editing previously unknown material by Tolkien, some of his scholarly works that had become very difficult to access, and many of the most insightful and original articles published on Tolkien in the past two decades. It is impossible to list even a fraction of the contributions Verlyn has made to every single aspect of the journal’s operations, so we are reduced to saying the obvious: without Verlyn, there would be no Tolkien Studies. We will miss her terribly (though we expect to be drawing upon her wisdom on a regular basis). Volume 20, to be published later this year, will be the last issue she will have co-edited.
Tolkien Studies is delighted to announce that, beginning with Volume 21, Yvette Kisor, Professor of Literature at Ramapo College of New Jersey, will be taking up the position of co-Editor. The co-editor of Tolkien and Alterity, Yvette is well known to the international community of Tolkien scholars both for her publications on Tolkien, including “‘The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun’: Sexuality, Imagery, and Desire in Tolkien’s Works,” in Tolkien Studies 18 (2021), and her work organizing the influential “Tolkien at Kalamazoo” sessions at the International Congresses on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University. A medievalist by training, Prof. Kisor has also published extensively on Old and Middle English literature. We are extremely pleased that she will be joining the journal’s editorial team.
(4) ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDALS LONGLISTS. The Longlist for 2024 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction is now available on the awards’ website.
Forty-five books (21 fiction, 24 nonfiction) have been selected for the longlist for the 2024 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction. The list is now available on the awards’ website. The six-title shortlist—three each for the fiction and nonfiction medals—will be chosen from longlist titles and announced on November 14, 2023. The two medal winners will be announced by 2024 selection committee chair Aryssa Damron at the Reference and User Services Association’s (RUSA) Book and Media Awards livestreaming event, held during LibLearnX in Baltimore on Saturday, January 20, at 9:45 a.m. Eastern. A celebratory event, including presentations by the winners and a featured speaker, will take place in June 2024 at the American Library Association’s (ALA) Annual Conference in San Diego.
The fiction longlist contains the following works of genre interest. Several are novels, while others are story collections in which one or more of the stories have a genre component.
Qian, Cleo. Let’s Go Let’s Go Let’s Go (Tin House)
(5) ASKING FOR FLASH FICTION NEBULA. A letter being circulated for signatures calls for SFWA to create a Nebula Award for Flash Fiction. The letter says in part:
… Flash fiction, short-short fiction, drabbles, dribbles, and other forms of very short prose stories have long had a place in genre fiction. Over the years, there have been many respected genre publications devoted exclusively to flash, while other publications recognize it as a distinct category. Despite this, works of flash rarely appear on the SFWA Nebula final ballot, and even fewer works of this length have won.
We do not think this is because SFWA members do not appreciate or enjoy flash fiction or other forms of very short fiction. Rather, it is likely because the strategies and techniques of flash often differ from those used in short stories, which makes it difficult to compare them to these longer works. In particular, flash as a form encourages experimentation, and pieces of flash fiction are more likely to include unusual narrative structures and points of view, to blend elements of poetry and prose, or to otherwise approach storytelling differently than longer works of fiction.
Indeed, in early 2022 the SFWA membership recognized the value of flash fiction and its presence in the genre community by passing two rules changes to the membership qualification criteria that removed the minimum word count for joining as an associate or full member….
(6) SIDEWISE AWARD PRESENTATION. [Item by Steven H Silver.] The Sidewise Awards will be presented this Friday, October 27 at 12:30 CDT (UTC-5) at the World Fantasy Con in Kansas City, Missouri.
The presentation will be made by judges Eileen Gunn and Steven H Silver in the Chicago A Room.
Finalists who will not be in attendance can appoint a designated acceptor or e-mail an acceptance speech to Steven H Silver at shsilver@stevenhsilver.com.
A perennial question for the worldbuilding writer: How much do you need to do before you actually start drafting?
The answer varies by writer, of course. Some of us compile chonky world bibles before setting down a word; some of us start with the plot and fill the world in as we go. For me it’s usually somewhere in the middle. The dolls and the dollhouse tend to come at least a bit at the same time.
The answer can also vary by project. Some may need more scaffolding before you can set to work. That may be dictated by how near or far your speculative world is from the “real world,” or by how much research you need to do.
When it comes to Nano, though, it can help to target your worldbuilding to the sort of story you think you’re working on. Me, I gravitate towards political plots, so I can’t really get started until I know a lot of details about what sort of government a world has, how it functions, and what factions are at play. If you’re doing a tightly-focused fantasy of manners, however, that might be something you can handwave….
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born October 23, 1880 — Una O’Connor. Actress who appeared in the 1930s The Invisible Man as Jenny Hall. She had a bit part in Bride of Frankenstein, and a supporting role in the genre The Adventures of Robin Hood. Though not even genre adjacent, she was Mrs. Peters in the film adaptation of the quite excellent Graham Greene’s Stamboul. Great novel, I’ll need to see if I can find this film. She’s in The Canterville Ghost, and shows up twice in TV’s Tales of Tomorrow anthology series. (Died 1959.)
Born October 23, 1918 — James Daly. He was Mr. Flint in Trek‘s most excellent “Requiem for Methuselah” episode. He also showed up on The Twilight Zone, Mission:Impossible and The Invaders. He was Honorious in The Planet of The Apes, and Dr. Redding in The Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler.
Born October 23, 1935 — Bruce Mars, 87. He was on Trek three times, one uncredited, with his best remembered being in the most excellent Shore Leave episode as Finnegan, the man Kirk fights with. He also had one-offs in The Time Tunnel, Voyage to the Bottom of The Sea, and Mission: Impossible. He is now Brother Paramananda with the Self-Realization Fellowship in Los Angeles which he joined shortly after ending his acting career in 1969.
Born October 23, 1942 — Michael Crichton. An impressive number of Hugos, both winners and nominations. The Andromeda Strain nominated at L.A. Con, Westworld at Discon II and the Jurassic Park film would win a Hugo at ConAndian. I’m very fond of the original Westworld film, not at all enamored of anything that has followed. Same holds for The Andromeda Strain film which I think is a perfect adaptation of his novel unlike the latter series that trashes the novel. (Died 2008.)
Born October 23, 1948 — Brian Catling. Author of The Vorrh trilogy whose first novel, The Vorrh, has an introduction by Alan Moore. Writing was just one facet of his work life as he was a sculptor, poet, novelist, film maker and performance. And artist. Impressively he held Professor of Fine Art at the [John] Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford and was a fellow of Linacre College. Yeah that John Ruskin. (Died 2022.)
Born October 23, 1953 — Ira Steven Behr, 70. Best remembered for his work on the Trek franchise, particularly Star Trek: Deep Space Nine which is still my favorite Trek though Strange Worlds has its charms, on which he served as showrunner and executive producer. As writer and or producer, he has been in involved in Beyond Reality, Dark Angel, The Twilight Zone, The 4400, Alphas, and Outlander.
Born October 23, 1969 — Trudy Canavan, 54. Australian writer who’s won two Ditmars for her Thief’s Magic and A Room for Improvement novels and two Aurealis Awards as well, one for her “Whispers of the Mist Children” short story, and one for The Magician’s Apprentice novel. It’s worth noting that she’s picked up two Ditmar nominations for her artwork as well.
(9) COMICS SECTION.
Shoecontains a horrible, horrible, genre-adjacent pun. Did I mention it’s horrible?
Tom Gauld’s pick is probably number one in its own obscure Amazon category.
(10) MYTHING ANSWERS. The Scots Magazine invites you to take the “Scottish Myths And Folklore Quiz”. Flying absolutely blind I scored 7 out of 10. All those fantasy book blurbs I’ve read must have helped.
Do you know the name of the Loch Ness Monster’s cousin, who is said to live in Loch Morar? Or which season, Beira, who washes her clothes in the Corryvreckan whirlpool, represents?
There’s so much more to learn about Scotland’s strange and mystical past….
Please join us on Wednesday, October 25th at 7:30PM as we kick off the 2023-24 season of our Evening @ The Barn series with a very special Halloween edition!
In this exclusive multimedia event, the career of Jack Pierce, legendary makeup department head at Universal Pictures from 1928-1947, will be explored in depth. Unquestionably, Pierce was responsible for many of cinema’s most memorable screen characters, including The Frankenstein Monster, The Mummy, The Bride of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, and The Phantom of the Opera, during that seminal period in horror films. Videos, photos, and unique, rarely seen elements will be critical aspects of this two-hour presentation hosted by author and historian Scott Essman. Additionally, special guests and surprises are in store for attendees!
Free parking is available in Hollywood Bowl Lot “D” which is directly adjacent to the museum.
The Hollywood Heritage Museum is a must-visit for cinema enthusiasts. It is located in the oldest surviving motion picture studio in Hollywood. Here, you can learn about the history of the studio and how it played a crucial role in the birth of Paramount Pictures Corporation in 1916. The first feature length film was produced here in 1912 by Jesse L. Lasky and Cecil B. DeMille. This 1901 barn turned studio was designated California State Historic Landmark No. 554 in 1956.
Last fall, Neil DeGrasse Tyson made the claim that E.T., the lovable cosmic visitor, “was a sentient plant” during a guest appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. When asked how he came by this strange piece of information, DeGrasse Tyson simply replied: “Steven Spielberg told me in my office.” He didn’t elaborate any further than that, but we now know he wasn’t just blowing smoke.
The legendary director confirms the titular alien of his 1982 coming-of-age classic (now streaming on Peacock) is “more like a plant or a vegetable” in the pages of Laurent Bouzereau’s new book — Spielberg: The First Ten Years.
Bouzereau is, perhaps, one of the few people alive who could actually pull off something like this. After all, he’s spent decades cultivating a close professional relationship with the celebrated storyteller while serving as director on the numerous behind-the-scenes documentaries found on the home release editions of Spielberg’s own movies.
Hitting stands tomorrow, Tuesday, October 24, from Insight Editions, Spielberg: The First Ten Years features exhaustive and must-read interviews centered around the productions of Duel, The Sugarland Express, Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1941, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and, of course, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial….
What other references did you study?
I wanted E.T. to give the impression of a thousand-year old wizened life form. Carlo took directions the same way an actor would — but it’s of course really the actor who creates the performance, and in that sense, it’s really Carlo Rambaldi who created E.T. I also remember saying to Carlo that E.T. should kind of waddle when he walks like Chaplin with his cane, that he should look like Bambi on ice. When E.T. starts to walk on Earth, he is ungainly, and he is insecure. Several times in the movie, we showed how awkward E.T. is and how funny he is when he falls over…
(13) WHAT CATS THINK. This book trailed for The Adventures of Trim series is pretty cute – probably because several cats are interviewed on camera.
Three guys listen to Bad Bunny’s idea for a script.
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Ersatz Culture, Lynne M. Thomas, Daniel Dern, John-Paul L. Garnier, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, and SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Joe H.]
