The Orwell Prize shortlists were announced May 25. Four prizes are awarded each year for writing and reporting that meets the spirit of George Orwell’s own ambition “to make political writing into an art” — for Political Fiction, Political Writing, Journalism, and one for “Exposing Britain’s Social Evils”.
All four shortlists are at the link. One of the Political Fiction finalists is of genre interest:
Orbital by Samantha Harvey. The marketing copy says this is:
A slender novel of epic power, Orbital deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men traveling through space. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts—from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan—have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below. We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief communications with family, their photos and talismans; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet. Their experiences of sixteen sunrises and sunsets and the bright, blinking constellations of the galaxy are at once breathtakingly awesome and surprisingly intimate.
Another of the Political Fiction finalists, James, is notable for telling Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s perspective.
The magisterial craft of James lies in its combination of biting humour and a page-turning plot, with ruminations on sovereignty and Voltaire along the way. Everett stays close, if not true, to the dangerous journeys of Huckleberry Finn, and draws on titans of post-Reconstruction African American writing to bring Jim to the foreground of the story. As we keep pace with our charismatic narrator, Twain’s tale of friendship on the run is converted into a larger history of collective freedom won through close encounters with the great American outdoors and its jealous, violent gatekeepers.
…What started in 1992 as an experiment in bringing horror to tweenage bookworms has become a cross-media phenomenon that includes TV shows, movies, comic books and video games. And if Stine had had his way three decades ago, the serieswould have ended before it even began.
“I didn’t want to do Goosebumps,” he reveals now, crediting his wife — author and editor Jane Waldhorn — with pushing him to confront the one thing he actually was afraid of: writing for a younger audience. “She kept after me, saying, ‘No one’s ever done a horror series for 7- to 12-year-olds. We have to try it!’ I said, ‘All right, we’ll try two or three of them.'”…
I’m continuing my Non-Fiction Spotlight project, where I interview the authors/editors of SFF-related non-fiction books that come out in 2022 and are eligible for the 2023 Hugo Awards. For more about the Non-Fiction Spotlight project, go here. To check out the spotlights I already posted, go here.
Why should SFF fans in general and Hugo voters in particular read this book?
McCARTY: I have some great interviews with some great science fiction and fantasy writers such as Alan Dean Foster, Harry Turtledove, Terry Brooks and Charles de Lint and Connie Willis. Plus, a slew of horror and dark fantasy writers and filmmakers as well.
The book is bursting at the seams with great interviews. You’ll walk away knowing more about the interviewees but also about the horror and science fiction publishing and film industry the art and craft of writing books and doing movies.
I hope the reader comes away more knowledgeable and inspired and will write a terrific work after they finish the book. No thanks needed.
(3) ORWELL PRIZES. The Orwell Foundation announced the Orwell Prizes 2022 on July 14.
The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2022: Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (Faber).
The Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2022: My Fourth Time, We Drowned by Sally Hayden (Harper Collins)
The Orwell Prize for Journalism 2022: George Monbiot (The Guardian)
The Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils 2022: The Cost of Covid – Burnley Crisis by Ed Thomas (BBC News)
A Special Prize was awarded to David Collins and Hannah Al-Othman (The Sunday Times) for The Murder of Agnes Wanjiru. All winners receive £3000 and took part in the Awards Ceremony at Conway Hall on Thursday 14th July 2022. Jean Seaton, the Director of The Orwell Foundation, said of the Book Prizes:
Both Sally Hayden and Claire Keegan have, in very different ways, written gripping stories about things that should alarm us: there are awful truths right at the heart of our societies and systems. However, in their wit, elegance and compassion, these powerful winning books also help us think about the choices we make, and how to make the future better. Orwell would be proud.
(4) FREE READ. The Sunday Morning Transport is doing four free stories in July. The second, Ian Tregillis’ “The Owl and the Reptiloid”, examines a vision of first contact and what comes after.
Edy is boarding the 147 at Foster, running late to a soul-rotting customer-service gig just off Michigan Avenue, when the Secret Masters grace Chicago with a Black Triangle of its very own. But at the historic moment, she’s earning a little sigh of disdain from the bus driver, thanks to some amateur-hour fumbling of her Ventra card….
After decades of declining union membership, organized labor may be on the verge of a resurgence in the U.S. Employees seeking better working conditions and higher pay have recently organized unions at Starbucks, Amazon, Apple and elsewhere. Applications for union elections this year are on pace to approach their highest level in a decade. I asked Noam Scheiber, who covers workers and labor issues for The Times, what’s behind the latest flurry of union activity.
Ian: You recently profiled Jaz Brisack, a Rhodes scholar and barista who helped organize a union at a Starbucks in Buffalo that was the first at a company-owned store in decades. Why did she want to work there?
Noam: Jaz comes out of a tradition. We saw it during the Depression; people with radical politics taking jobs with the explicit intention of organizing workers. The term for this is “salting,” like the seasoning. The practice has had some limited success in recent decades, but we’re seeing a broader revival of it, and Jaz is part of that. Several salts got jobs at Amazon and helped organize a facility on Staten Island. Academics like Barry Eidlin and Mie Inouye have written extensively about this.
(6) PODCAST PEOPLE. Simultaneous Times is a monthly science fiction podcast produced by Space Cowboy Books in Joshua Tree, CA. Episode 53 presents stories by Geoff Habiger and Jonathan Nevair read by Jean-Paul Garnier.
Stories featured in this episode:
“Kreuzungmeister” by Geoff Habiger.
“That New Spaceship Smell” by Jonathan Nevair.
(7) HARRYHAUSEN’S LEGACY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In this video, the Royal Ocean Film Society looks at how Ray Harryhausen, “one of Hollywood’s most beloved craftsmen,” combined live action and stop motion animation. He notes that the methods Harryhausen used were actually quite complicated, and just as Harryhausen built on the work of Willis O’Brien, so do today’s animators at ILM and WETA Digital use Harryhausen’s techniques as a basis for their own work.
(8) LAST SURVIVING MEMBER’S BOTTLE. John L. Coker III told First Fandom members in the latest Scientifiction that he had acknowledged Robert A. Madle as the sole surviving member of First Fandom and dispatched to him the bottle of Beam’s set aside for the winner of a tontine established over 60 years ago.
I sent him the last man’s bottle, inscribed thusly: “This bottle is reserved for science-fiction fandom’s Living Legend Robert A. (Bob) Madle, who in 1958 suggested the idea of forming an organization called First Fandom, a fun-loving group of science-fiction fans of the Golden Era. Founders of First Fandom included C. L. (Doc) Barrett, Don Ford, Lou Tabakow, Ben Keifer and Lynn Hickman. The first person to join the group other than the founders was Robert Bloch. First Fandom would give recognition awards to the great authors of the past, publish a magazine and keep the history of science fiction in front of today’s fans. It would be a “last man’s club” with the final member “knocking off a privately held fifth of liquor.”
(10) HARRY ALM OBIT. Long-time Louisiana fan Harry Alm, husband of Marilyn and mainstay of their region’s fandom (not least filking), died this morning. Marilyn announced the news on Facebook.
(11) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.
1982 – [By Cat Eldridge.] Forty years ago on a summer July evening, Elliott Gould and Mimi Kuzyk starred in this most excellent half hour episode broadcast on HBO of The Ray Bradbury Theater called “The Happiness Machine”.
It is based off the short story that may have first been published in the Saturday Evening Post or the Dandelion Wine novel that was also published that month.
SPOILER ALERT (AS IF YOU NEEDED ONE)
After having upon a summer morning what he thinks is the perfect happiness in watching bees buzzing, birds chirping and children playing and so on the husband builds a happiness machine for his family so that they can experience the joy he feels, but the machine’s effect is not what he expects.
It gives the user a perfect experience of whatever they want which leads to deep depression upon coming back to their usual life. Now given this a Bradbury story, you already know that will be an upbeat ending. After he destroys the Happiness Machine, his wife points out that reality (bees buzzing, birds soaring and chirping with children playing), and of course his home and family are the actual Happiness Machine.
END OF THE SPOILERS (AS IF YOU NEEDED TO BE TOLD)
I like Bradbury, his stories always just interesting enough to worth reading or watching. I thought HBO do a rather great job with the Ray Bradbury Theater.
It’s streaming presently on HBO Max. As always please don’t link to copies on YouTube as they are pirated. We’ll just need to remove your post.
(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born July 17, 1889 — Erle Stanley Gardner. Though best remembered for the Perry Mason detective stories, he did write a handful of SF stories, all of which are collected in The Human Zero: The Science Fiction Stories of Erle Stanley Gardner. It is not available from the usual digital suspects but Amazon has copies of the original hardcover edition at reasonable prices. (Died 1970.)
Born July 17, 1952 — David Hasselhoff, 70. Genre roles in the Knight Rider franchise, Nick Fury: Agent of Shield film, as the title characters in — and I’m not kidding — Jekyll & Hyde: The Musical, and in Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2.
Born July 17, 1954 — J. Michael Straczynski, 68. Best known rather obviously for creating and writing most of Babylon 5 and its all too short-lived sequel Crusade. He’s also responsible as well for the Jeremiah and Sense8 series. On the comics sides, he’s written The Amazing Spider-Man, Thor and Fantastic Four. Over at DC, he did the Superman: Earth One trilogy of graphic novels, and has also written Superman, Wonder Woman, and Before Watchmen titles.
Born July 17, 1965 — Alex Winter, 57. Bill in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and its sequels Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey and Bill & Ted Face the Music. And though I didn’t realize it, he was Marko in The Lost Boys. He directed two Ben 10 films, Ben 10: Race Against Time and Ben 10: Alien Swarm. He also directed Quantum is Calling, a short film that has cast members Keanu Reeves, Simon Pegg, John Cho, and Paul Rudd.
Born July 17, 1967 — Kelly Robson, 55. She finally has a collection out, nearly five hundred pages of fiction, Alias Space and Other Stories. It’s available at the usual suspects for four dollars and ninety-nine cents. Bliss! It contains “A Human Stain” for which she won a Nebula, and two Aurora winners, “Waters of Versailles” and “Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach”.
Born July 17, 1976 — Brian K. Vaughan, 46. Wow. Author of Ex Machina, the stellar Pride of Baghdad, Runaways, the Hugo winning at LoneStarCon 3 Saga (which has won a BFA and a Dragon), Y: The Last Man which briefly was a series, and one of his latest undertakings, Paper Girls, which is wonderful. You could spend an entire summer just reading those series. In his spare time, he was a writer, story editor and producer of Lost during seasons three through five, and he was the showrunner and executive producer of the Under the Dome series.
Born July 17, 1992 — Billie Lourd, 30. Lourd is the only child of actress Carrie Fisher. She appeared as Lieutenant Connix in the Star Wars sequel trilogy. She also has been a regular cast member on American Horror Story for five seasons.
(13) COMICS SECTION.
Candorvillethinks we should not be assuming this widely believed astronomical fact is true.
(14) FERDINAND’S OFFSRING.[Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In the Washington Post, the weekly humor competition, conducted by Pat Myers, is about feghoots. And boy, are the winners groaners!
Here are some of the entries that stumped me. YMMV, as they say; the puns might jump right out at you. If so, or if you just want to guess, leave a comment right here at the bottom of the column, rather than in the usual forum of the Style Invitational Devotees group on Facebook. I’m reprinting the entries as they came in, with no editing except to fix spelling, typos, etc. I didn’t check at all who wrote them, though if their authors want to reveal themselves in the comments thread, fine with me!
…The individual placed several different orders, amounting to $35,000 worth of medical and engineering textbooks, each costing between $100 and $200. Then, in late May, staff received a notification from the store’s merchant service provider, flagging a credit card the person used as fraudulent.
The bookstore co-owners went through the individual’s purchases — all of which were shipped to the same address outside Michigan — and quickly realized that the person had placed every past order using a stolen credit card, as well.
“That’s when we started to consider closing,” said Cooper, 28.
They contacted to law enforcement, their insurance provider and different banks, hoping for a reprieve from the serious financial toll they knew the scam would take on their small company. The cost, they were told, would probably fall entirely on them — which would put them out of business.
… “We realized we needed to ask for help,” Erin Pineda said.
The store co-owners started a GoFundMe campaign, and within 10 days, they surpassed their goal of $35,000. They were stunned by the generosity.
“We’re just blown away by how the community responded and lifted us up in a really difficult situation,” Erin Pineda said. “It was incredible.”…
(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] An old man struggles to keep his house from collapsing and deal with aging in this 2017 animated film directed by Wong Jin Yao.
[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Cora Buhlert, “Orange Mike” Lowrey, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Bill.]
(1) YOUNG PEOPLE READ OLD SFF. The panel is getting younger. “This week actual high schooler (for about two more months) Raya joins the crew, says James Davis Nicoll. “Like most of the others, she’s familiar with recent genre but not the older material.”
1978’s Hugo Nominee “A View From a Height” first appeared in the June 1978 issue of Analog. It was selected for Terry Carr’s The Best Science Fiction of the Year, #8, Gardner Dozois’ Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year: Eighth Annual Collection, Pamela Sargent’s Women of Wonder, the Classic Years: Science Fiction by Women from the 1940s to the 1970s, as well as other collections and anthologies. The theme of irreversible life decisions cast into doubt by new revelations seemed to me one that would have aged well. Let’s see if I was right.
It starts with teenage girls. At 14 or 15, the age when in our present world girls are waking to an awareness of their own sexuality tangled up in all the ways society will seek to stifle or exploit it, Alderman has them come alive to the thrill of pure power: the ability to hurt or even kill by releasing electrical jolts from their fingertips. “Something’s happening. The blood is pounding in her ears. A prickling feeling is spreading along her back, over her shoulders, along her collarbone. It’s saying: you can do it. It’s saying: you’re strong.”
The shortlist will be announced on May 15, and the winner on June 8.
(3) MAKING MUSIC. Sammy Cahn (“Come Fly With Me,” “Three Coins in the Fountain”) used to tell people he got his inspiration when the check arrived. Disney songwriter Alan Menken says he needs a little more.
“Where does it start and where does it end, and what’s the title and what song might it remind us of? …” Menken asks. “A million questions and only then will I sit and … start to play the piano.”
Menken’s musical chops were developed off-Broadway. He and lyricist Howard Ashman’s success with the 1982 comedy rock horror musical Little Shop of Horrors got Hollywood’s attention.
But when he first started working at Disney animation, he had some reservations. “I can’t tell you how many people said to me: Ugh, man, take a powder. Nobody takes animated musicals seriously,” he recalls.
Menken and Ashman’s first musical film — The Little Mermaid animation in 1989 — was a life saver for Disney. It lifted the studio out of a slump, and led to more big hits.
The new film, Get Out, defies easy classification. Though it has funny moments, it’s primarily a horror film, with racial anxiety at its center. Writer-director Jordan Peele tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross that he thinks of Get Out as a “social thriller.”
The movie tells the story of a young black man named Chris whose white girlfriend, Rose, takes him to meet her parents for the first time — without first telling them he’s black. Rose’s parents go out of their way to show Chris how open minded they are, but there’s something suspicious in the liberal facade they present. The film takes several twists and turns (which we won’t spoil here) as Chris figures out what is going on.
Peele wanted the audience, regardless of race, to see the subtle racism through Chris’ eyes. “It was very important to me to just get the entire audience in touch in some way with the fears inherent [in] being black in this country,” Peele says. “Part of being black in this country, and I presume being any minority, is constantly being told that … we’re seeing racism where there just isn’t racism.”
The new movie Life, which opens March 24, is about astronauts who discover an alien life form and live to regret it. You could say exactly the same thing about Alien: Covenant, which was originally scheduled to open the following Friday — until someone realized that was a recipe for box-office disaster. Alien: Covenant will now open in early May, and that close call, crazy as it is, isn’t uncommon in Hollywood.
Rival studios often stare each other down, refusing to blink, in showdowns that didn’t need to happen. In 1998, Earth-snuffing asteroids were blown up in the nick of time by nuclear warheads not once, but twice: with much electronic beeping and enormous special effects in Armageddon, and slightly higher beeping and enormous special effects in Deep Impact. That same year, animated insects skittered onto movie screens in both Antz and A Bug’s Life — and all of that just one year after dueling lava flows erupted in Dante’s Peak and Volcano.
Do you really think Democrats need to take pages from the Trump playbook? I would say we need to speak with our hearts more. The typical Democratic way of talking about, say, wealth inequality is to bring out Robert Reich, who will give a cute academic presentation. But at the core, wealth inequality is about people’s dreams for their families and their children. It’s friends my age who are dying to have a child and don’t know if they can afford to do that. The Democratic Party tends to have this hypereducated ruling-class mentality, and we need to realize that’s not making us connect with a lot of voters.
Considering the internet culture leading up to the election, some have said 2016 was a banner year for internet trolls. Do you think that’s accurate? Absolutely. I’ve rarely talked about Obama’s share of the blame for the rise of the alt-right and Gamergate. I had two separate calls with the White House, and they were telling me they had some ideas they were putting together to address Gamergate without needing to go through Congress, and nothing came of it. And what happened is a lot of people learned that there are no consequences to harassing women. If I play Grand Theft Auto and I decide to blow up a police helicopter, there are going to be consequences to that; eventually I’m going to go to jail and maybe pay 100 virtual dollars. We don’t even have that…..
In the aftermath of Gamergate, you said that you and the other women who were harassed “did everything right, and the system failed us.” Now you’re saying you want to be a part of that system. Do you think you can make changes inside of it? To me, the only way to get further gains on these issues is for more women to be represented in Congress. I don’t even care if it was a higher percentage of Republican women: I genuinely believe that if that number were closer to 50-50, we wouldn’t have ludicrous policies like the Hyde Amendment going through and devastating women’s access to reproductive health care. I want women out there to look at how incredibly unqualified Trump is and then ask themselves: “What on earth is holding you back? Do you think you don’t measure up with Donald Trump in the White House?”
Truth be told, when I wrote Dmitry, I didn’t know he was gay until I got to the scene in ANGLES OF ATTACK where Dmitry and young master Andrew have a drink together and show each other pictures of their main squeezes, as soldiers do when they have downtime and some alcohol in front of them. I’m not the kind of writer who claims that my characters have their own will—they do what I tell them to, goddammit, because I’m the master of their universe—but that was a moment where a character revealed a little detail that I hadn’t intentionally sketched out, but that felt natural and proper. Dmitry pulled out the picture of his spouse, and my brain just went, “He has a husband. Huh, Of course he does.”
So no, I don’t sit down with a character creation sheet and a checklist for Maximum Diversity(tm) and threw in a gay character to advance an agenda, score Social Justice Warrior brownie points, or engage in virtue-signaling. Dmitry is gay because he is, and with all the crap these soldiers have to deal with in their alien-besieged dystopia, I found it appropriate that at the very least, showing someone else a picture of your same-sex spouse is not worthy of special commentary above and beyond “Nice picture” in that version of the future.
(8) CHOOSING THE POWER. Abigail Nussbaum shares the Best Novel and Campbell Award categories on her Hugo nominating ballot. The first of her four novel picks is –
The Power by Naomi Alderman (review) – As I’ve said, this feels more like a Clarke award book than a Hugo award one, but nevertheless Alderman’s chilling, Handmaid’s Tale-esque story about a world in which women suddenly develop the ability to shoot bolts of electricity from their bodies, upending the world’s balance of violent potential, is one of the most interesting and thought-provoking works of science fiction I’ve read in some time. What’s most interesting about The Power is that while it is undeniably a book about gender and the role that violence plays in maintaining gender roles, that’s not its main interest. What Alderman is doing with her premise is using it to discuss the role that violence and the use of force play in organizing our society, even when we pretend to be beyond them. That feels like a vital issue at this point in time.
(9) SIR POT. Mashable reports that Sir Patrick Stewart has announced that he has used medical marijuana for several years to help with his arthritis. Stewart made this announcement to support an Oxford University proposal calling for more research into marijuana’s medical benefits. The piece is called “Patrick Stewart reveals that he uses medical marijuana every day”.
But Stewart isn’t rolling up a joint or hitting the bong, he says he typically uses sprays, ointments and edibles.
“I purchased an ointment, spray and edibles. The ointment, while providing some relief from the discomfort, was too greasy to use during daytime and so I only use it at night.”
Patrick went on to describe how he uses his medicine, later adding that he can now make a fist with his hand, which was impossible for him to do before using cannabis.
As the Captain might say, “Make it grow!”
(10) NEW PIXAR MOVIE. Coco, a Disney-Pixar movie, opens in US theatres in 3D on November 22.
(11) EYE-SEARING. Starz new American Gods trailer is violent and gory. Beware!
[Thanks to Chip Hitchcock, Martin Morse Wooster, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories.Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day StephenfromOttawa.]
