(1) DUBLIN 2019 MASQUERADE. The convention tweeted photos of the winners:
Other entries:
(2) DUBLIN 2019 ATTENDANCE. At the end of Thursday, Dublin 2019’s daily newzine reported the “total warm bodies registered” at 4,700.
(3) 2019 HUGO LIVESTREAM. Here’s where you find the 2019 Hugo Awards Ceremony on Vimeo tomorrow.
The premiere event of the Worldcon will take place on Sunday evening, as we celebrate the best science fiction and fantasy of 2018. Hosted by Afua Richardson and Michael Scott, we invite you to join us in congratulating this year’s finalists and winners of the prestigious Hugo Awards.
(4) DUBLIN 2019 ART SHOW AWARDS. The daily newzine posted the results:
- Best Jewellery Collection: Angela Jones-Parker
- Best Collection Of Work: Maja Winnacka
- Best Traditional Original: Johnman (John Green) for We Are All Majestic
- Best Artwork: Jim Burns for Jane Delawney Had Her Dreams
- Best Digital Art: Fred Gambino for 2nd Gen
- Spirit Of Dublin: Paul Sheridan for An Unexpected Pub Crawl
- Best 3D: Didier Cottier for Le Grand Chambellan
- Best Textile Art: Sarah Haddock aka Cryptozoo
With thanks to the judging panel, Alice Lawson, Colin Harris, Jo Playford and Serena Culfeather, who had a hard task.
(5) RETRO HUGO VOTING STATISTICS. Hugo Administrator Nicholas White has published the Retro-Hugo results for this year. He also tweeted an analysis of how differently this year’s Retro Hugos would have been reported if the “Notability Still Matters” amendment had been in force for this year’s awards. The thread starts here.
(6) T WRECKS. Camestros Felapton revisits Rachel Swirsky’s Nebula-winning story: “Hugosauriad 4.4: If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love by Rachel Swirsky”.
But there is something (intentionally) not quite right from the start. A T-Rex? The tyrannosaur has been stomping through dinosaur stories throughout this project and in almost every instance they have been symbols of sudden violence and an agent of vengeance and punishment of the wicked or cowardly. Symbolically in dinosaur stories the T-rex has been a kind of saurian Fury punishing the cowardly or those who in hubris forgot to show the proper respect to time-travel or dinosaurs.
Yet, in the very next sentence Swirsky flips this around, emphasising the vulnerability and muted scale of this fantasy T-Rex. The tyrant lizard is more of a benevolent and humane despot with fragile bones like a bird and a gentle gaze. The contrast is severe and adds to the sense that there is something going on here other than a fanciful musing.
(7) TOLKIEN’S ART. James Trilling considers “One Man’s Modernism: J. R. R. Tolkien” at the Yale Review. Robin Reid sent the link with a note, “I bristled a bit at the opening section about the ‘academic and critical community’ (seemed way oversimplistic) but was intrigued by the shift to focus on his visual art and provide some commentary.” The article focuses on Tolkien’s artwork, and the catalog of the recent Bodleian exhibit Tolkien: Maker of Middle-Earth, edited by Catherine McIlwaine.
…Only in one respect does the new catalogue suggest a new approach [from the Bodleian’s previous exhibit]: the greater attention paid to Tolkien’s achievements as a visual artist. His visual world was complex and unresolved. He made, for example, naturalistic, largely academic early drawings in pen and ink, depicting buildings and landscape features. One of the best, from 1912, is reproduced in the catalogue. It is recognized that Tolkien’s most important drawing teacher was his mother. Even her handwriting shimmers with energy and elegance (see, e.g., cat. 17), and it is tempting to see in it the basis of her son’s medievalizing fantasies. Unfortunately we are deprived–like Tolkien himself–of the chance to investigate her influence in detail. After her tragically early death in 1904, her sister-in-law burned her papers: not from fear of any scandal, but because she simply could not imagine anybody wanting them.
(8) WILLIAMS OBIT. Animator Richard Williams, famed for his work on Who Framed Roger Rabbit, died August 16 at the age of 86. The NBC News profile begins:
The Oscar-winning artist died from cancer at his home in Bristol, England, on Friday, his daughter Natasha Sutton Williams said Saturday.
Williams’ career straddled the “Golden Age of Animation,” which petered out between the 1950s and 1960s, and the rise of computer-assisted animation in the 1990s and beyond.
His best-known work may be as director of animation for “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” a 1988 film that married live action cinema and cartoons from all eras, a process involved the laborious insertion of animated characters into each individual frame and complex lighting effects. The result — a madcap and slightly dark comedy where “toons” and humans interact seamlessly against a live action film noir background — was commercial and critical hit and helped revitalize Disney’s flagging animation department.
He won Oscars for Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and A Christmas Carol.
(9) TODAY IN HISTORY.
- August 17, 1939 — The Man They Could Not Hang debuted in theatres.
- August 17, 1960 — The Time Machine premiered in theaters, later losing the Hugo to a TV show called The Twilight Zone.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
- Born August 17, 1917 — Oliver Crawford. Screenwriter who overcame the Hollywood blacklist during the McCarthy Era of the 1950s. He wrote three scripts for Trek, “The Cloud Minders”, “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” and “The Galileo Seven”. He also wrote for The Outer Limits (“The Special One”), Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (“The Lost Bomb”) and The Wild Wild West (“The Night of the Cossacks” and “The Night of Sudden Death”). No, that’s not everything hescripted. (Died 2008.)
- Born August 17, 1930 — Harve Bennett. The individual who gave us Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Really he did. He would then serve as produced on the next three Trek films, The Search for Spock, The Voyage Home and The Final Frontier. His only on scene appearance is in the latter as Starfleet Chief of Staff. (Died 2015.)
- Born August 17, 1945 — Rachel Pollack, 74. She’s best known is well known for her run of issues 64–87 (mid-Nineties) on DC’s Doom Patrol which took it up to its cancellation. She also had a run on the New Gods, the Jack Kirby created mythos. Two of her novels won major awards. Unquenchable Fire won the Arthur C. Clarke Award; Godmother Night won the World Fantasy Award.
- Born August 17, 1956 — John Romita Jr., 63. If you’ve read Spider-Man since the Sixties, it’s very likely that you’ve seen his artwork as he had six stints on it between 1980 and 2009. He find a number of other titles on Marvel and DC including Superman, Ghost Rider, Hulk, All-Star Batman, Eternals, Captain America and Daredevil to name but a few of the titles he illustrated. He also worked with Mark Miller at Image Comics on Kick-Ass, and did the one shot Punisher/Batman: Deadly Knights.
- Born August 17, 1960 — Chris Baker, 59. He’s the cover artist for British and German versions of the Redwall books, as well as a storyboard and conceptual artist having worked with Steven Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick and Tim Burton. Among his films are Big Fish, Skyfall, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, A.I. Artificial Intelligence and Corpse Bride.
- Born August 17, 1962 — Laura Resnick, 57. Daughter of Mike Resnick. She is a winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in Science Fiction for “No Room for the Unicorn”. I’ve not read her Manhattan Magic series so I’m interested to know what y’all think of it. She’s readily available ion iBooks and Kindle.
- Born August 17, 1966 — Neil Clarke, 53. Editor in Chief of Clarkesworld Magazine which has won an impressive three Best Semiprozine Hugos. SFWA also gave him a Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award. He edits The Best Science Fiction of the Year series for Night Shade Books.
(11) THE SHEEP SHOW UP. A reliable source says an anonymous package was waiting for RedWombat at her panel this afternoon…
(12) THE BIRDS. “The New ‘DuckTales’ Is ‘Game of Thrones’ for Kids” according to Fatherly’s Andy Kryza:
The new Disney DuckTales reboot has taken on a mythology all its own, one far more complicated than the show we might remember from the nineties. The theme song threatens “racecars, lasers, aeroplanes,” but those things seem tame compared to what the ducks are facing now: Duels on erupting volcanoes, shadow creatures, sorceresses, gladiators, sky pirates, undersea realms, cursed talismans, and full-blown demigods. That’s more than a duck-blur. This is some Game of Thrones action, only with less murder, more jokes and a lack of crushing disappointment from the conclusion. At least for now.
Sound silly? Well, the new version of Ducktales; which started in 2017 and recently ended its stellar second season on — of course — a cliffhanger, has more in common with the world of Westeros than the Disney-verse of old. And not just because its characters are perpetually pantsless….
(13) TRUE LOVE. The News arm of The Beeb brings us an in depth article (Why I ‘married’ an anime character) about a young man who fell in love with Miku, an anime character.
There is a word in Japanese for people who are obsessed with video games and anime – otaku. An increasing number of otaku now say they have fallen in love with anime characters and given up on the idea of real-world romance, reports the BBC’s Stephanie Hegarty.
Akihiko Kondo wakes up every day to the sound of his wife’s voice. She calls him from across the room in her high-pitched, girlish, sing-song voice. She dances and swirls around, urging him to get out of bed.
At the same time, he’s holding her in his arms on the bottom tier of their metal-framed bunk bed – and if he was more awake he could be watching an illustrated cartoon of her singing on YouTube.
This is because Akihiko’s “wife” is an idea – an anime character called Miku.
She’s the hologram that lives in a glass capsule on a shelf in the corner of the room, and the cuddly toy with its big soft head and small body that he holds close at night. But she can take innumerable other forms.
(14) BY A WHISKER. I’d Watch That shows how the upcoming CATS musical is even scarier when it comes from the mind of Stephen King!
(15) ONE SMALL STEP. BBC reports “Nasa picks headquarters for Moon lander”.
A Nasa facility in Alabama that developed the giant rocket for the Apollo programme in the 1960s will play a key role in sending astronauts down to the Moon’s surface in 2024.
The Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville will lead the development of a vehicle that will land astronauts on the body for the first time since 1972.
The decision was announced by Nasa’s administrator Jim Bridenstine.
But it’s a disappointment for Texas, which was in the running.
The White House wants to send a man and a woman to the South Pole of the Moon in five years, under a programme called Artemis.
(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “New Civilization VI Theme *EPIC CHOIR* Performance” on YouTube is the Oregon State University choir singing the theme music to the video game Civilization VI.
[Thanks to JJ, Cat Eldridge, Chip Hitchcock, Michael Toman, Robin Reid, John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Patrick Morris Miller.]