(1) IGNYTE AWARDS. Congratulations to the winners of the 2024 Ignyte Awards, which were announced today.
The Awards “seek to celebrate the vibrancy and diversity of the current and future landscape of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror by recognizing incredible feats in storytelling and outstanding efforts towards inclusivity within the genre.”
(2) AUGUST CLARKE Q&A. At Shelf Awareness, “Reading with… August Clarke”.
…On your nightstand now:
The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera and Loteby Shola von Reinhold, both fabulously gorgeous, knock-the-wind-out-of-you type books. I’m savoring them. Compound Fracture by Andrew Joseph White is next up.
Favorite book when you were a child:
The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle for transgender reasons or The Queen of Attoliaby Megan Whalen Turner for mischief reasons. Huge influences on the way I think about fantasy writing; I would recommend reading them aloud….
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny or Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, both of which I entered expecting quick fun pulp and leaving fully awed and unbelievably moved and excited to talk about genre….
(3) SF 101. Hear from Phil Nichols and Colin Kuskie in episode 48 of the Science Fiction 101 podcast holding forth about the concept of the book: “Uniquely Portable Magic”.
It occurred to us that although we have discussed many specific books on the show, we’ve never devoted an episode to the idea of the book – those papery, texty things that Stephen King has described as “uniquely portable magic”.
So in this episode, we address the various ways in which books can be enjoyed and consumed, and discuss ten (or eleven) questions on the subject of books.
We also have a book-adjacent quiz, and our usual round up of recommendations of past, present and future SF.
(4) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to “Feast on fish and chips with Paul Cornell” in Episode 240 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.
This third episode I brought back features Paul Cornell, with whom I’ve been trying to break bread ever since the 2019 Dublin Worldcon. Paul started out writing Doctor Who fan fiction, which led to him writing canonical Doctor Who novels (where he created the companion Bernice Summerfield), audio plays, and comics. Plus he recently won the Terrance Dicks Award for lifetime achievement in Doctor Who writing from the Doctor Who Appreciation Society.
But aside from his achievements in the Doctor Who universe, he’s created so many other awesome experiences for us. He’s written episodes of Elementary, Primeval, Robin Hood, and many other TV series, including his own children’s show, Wavelength. He’s worked for every major comics company, including his creator-owned series I Walk With Monsters for The Vault, The Modern Frankenstein for Magma, Saucer Country for Vertigo, and This Damned Band for Dark Horse, plus runs on Young Avengers and Wolverine for Marvel, and Batman and Robin for DC,
He’s the writer of the Lychford rural fantasy novellas from Tor.com Publishing. His short fiction has been published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Interzone, The Daily Telegraph, The Times, and at Tor.com, plus he also written for George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards short story anthologies. He’s won the BSFA Award for his short fiction, an Eagle Award for his comics, a Hugo Award for his SF Squeecast podcast, and shares in a Writer’s Guild Award for his Doctor Who work. He’s the co-host of Hammer House of Podcast.
We discussed where he stands on the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby debate, how his UK mind was blown the first time he saw a U.S. issue of The Avengers, why fannish history fascinates him, the reason he went the self-funding route for Who Killed Nessie (and what that did to his blood pressure), how some of his Doctor Who fan fiction eventually became canon, the reason he’s suspicious of nostalgia, how he knows when ideas pop into his head which of his many projects they’re right for, the legacy comics characters he’d love to write more of, what he learned from the great Terrance Dicks, how he manages to collaborate while remaining friends with his co-creators, his fascination with Charles Fort, why he announced there’d be no more Doctor Who in his future, and much more.
(5) ERIN UNDERWOOD PRESENTS. Erin Underwood’s two latest reviews on YouTube focus on Star Wars,
- Music by John Williams, Review – Why is his music so iconic?
The biography that you didn’t know you needed is here, but is it what you wanted? John Williams’ career is immense and impressive, and this new documentary gets into who he is and his impact upon the music, film, and television industries. Featured guests also include Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Ron Howard, JJ Abrams, Kathleen Kennedy, and more. Check out my new review.
- Star Wars 1977, Movie Review – Does the OG Stand Up or Fail Today?
Nearly 50 years after it was released, does the original Star Wars film still hold up today? The film has been digitally remaster, but is that enough to push it across the line? Check out my new review.
(6) A GOLDEN (BOOK) AGE. “Chris Ware on Richard Scarry and the Art of children’s literature” in The Yale Review.
…In my grandparents’ second-floor guest room, formerly my mother’s childhood room, one bookcase had a row of children’s books slumped to the side, offering a chronological core sample of my grandmother’s attempts to busy not only her own kids, but all the grandkids who’d stayed there before me. There were the original Oz books, a copy of Ferdinand the Bull, Monro Leaf’s inexplicably compelling yet mildly fascistic Manners Can Be Fun, some 1950s and 1960s Little Golden Books purchased at the Hinky Dinky supermarket down the street, and, among many others I’ve now long forgotten, the big blue, green, and red shiny square of Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever. The largish (even just plain large if you were smallish when holding it) book offered a visual index of the everyday puzzle pieces of life in humble, colored-in line drawings. Each page was a fresh, funny composition of some new angle on the world, making the book a sort of quotidian picture-map containing everything imaginable and unimaginable a kid might be curious about: where and how people lived, slept, ate, played, and worked.
The thing is, “people” weren’t anywhere to be seen in Best Word Book Ever. Instead, the whole world was populated by animals: rabbits, bears, pigs, cats, foxes, dogs, raccoons, lions, mice, and more. Somehow, though, that made the book’s view of life feel more real and more welcoming. A dollhouse-like cutaway view of a rabbit family in their house getting ready for their day didn’t seem to just picture the things themselves—they were the things themselves, exuding a grounded warmth that said, “Yes, everywhere we live in houses and cook together and get dressed, just like you.”…
…Golden Books employed displaced if not just plain refugee artists from Europe like Feodor Rojankovsky, Tibor Gergely, and Gustaf Tenggren. Working in a careful, deliberate, and illuminatory style, they carefully limned every hair of every dog—think The Poky Little Puppy—and set every page aglow with a strangely dark, yet warm light. On the page, their paintings were frequently vignetted in darkness, almost as if the artists still felt shadowed by the lingering specter of war. These books, dismissively looked down upon by librarians, were nonetheless immediately, snot-flyingly popular, with orders mounting into the millions of copies. Such publishing numbers were astonishing then (and are even more astonishing now, when 15,000 is considered a gee-whiz success)….
(7) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Appreciation: Elizabeth Bear’s Sub-Inspector Ferron Series
Sometimes it’s the offbeat stories that I really like from authors, the short works that aren’t expanded into full length stories. Such is the case with Elizabeth Bear’s Sub-Inspector Ferron series. Of course, everything she writes is a delight to read which is why I’m looking forward to the third White Space novel, The Folded Sky, out next year.
Bear’s Sub-Inspector Ferron series at the present consists alas of but two novellas, “In the House of Aryaman, a Lonely Signal Burns” and “A Blessing of Unicorns”. Will there be more? Oh, I hope so.
TASTY, SPICY ASIAN SPOILERS FOLLOW. THEY REALLY DO!
“In the House of Aryaman, a Lonely Signal Burns” is set a half a century from now. In the city of Bangalore, a scientist working on cutting-edge biotechnology has been discovered inside his own locked flat, his body converted into a neat block of organic material.
It’s up to Police Sub-Inspector Ferron to figure out the victim’s past and solve the crime, outwitting the best efforts of whoever is behind the death, her overbearing mother, and the complexities of dealing with the only witness – an ever so cute parrot-cat Chairman Miaow. (The latter, she says are, as I guessed, a cat with parrot colors and “a parrot-like level of intelligence and ability to mimic speech”. That cat will later be adopted by her. She already has a fox.
I’ll note that the stories aren’t freestanding, so the novella, “A Blessing of Unicorns” builds off the first novella, therefore must be experienced after the first is read or listened to.
Together they make up a fascinating look at the life and work of Ferron as a Police Sub-Inspector in a balkanised world where there are no national or regional police forces. No, it’s not some small libertarian wet dream here, but a real world with actual consequences to everything that happens.
WE HAVE CONSUMED THOSE TASTY MORSELS, SO YOU CAN COME BACK.
There is certainly more than enough story here for her to someday write a novel set in the universe. And I look forward to it.
When I asked her if there would be a novel in the series, she replied “there might be a novel someday but I really need to visit Bangalore myself to write that! I’ve been relying on friends who hail from there, or who have family there and have visited extensively, but it’s not the same as boots in the dirt experience!”
Fantastic stories told well by a master storyteller, what more do you want?
The Audible narrations are done most excellently by narrated Zehra Jane Naqvi. She’s an Australian expatriate in the United Kingdom of Anglo-Indian descent. She very much handles the Indian accents quite wonderfully here. She started her voice acting career in Big Finish Productions’ Doctor Who audio dramas with Sylvester McCoy and Peter Davison reprising the Seventh and Fifth Doctors.
The first one is available at the usual suspects, but the second remains at this time an Audible exclusive several years later. I just got a note from Elizabeth Bear that said that there will not be a print edition, she says, “Not unless something unforeseen happens”.
(8) COMICS SECTION.
- Bliss may have found the Dark Side.
- Breaking Cat News reports on the aftermath.
- Eek! has a malfunction.
- Andy Capp will not win at trivia tonight.
- Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comments on the usual interpretation.
(9) GOOD GRIEF. Somebody warn Jiminy Cricket! “Pinocchio Slasher Casts Robert Englund and Richard Brake, First Look“ in Variety.
Freddy Krueger has joined the cast of the next IP-smashing slasher from the makers of microbudget hit “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey.”
Well, almost. Robert Englund, who famously played the murderous horror icon across the “Nightmare on Elm Street” films, will star in “Pinocchio: Unstrung,” the latest standalone feature to join the so-called low-budget Twisted Childhood Universe. Richard Brake, a regular collaborator with Rob Zombie and whose horror credits also include the likes of “Barbarian” and “Mandy,” has also joined the film in the key role of Geppetto….
(10) READY FOR YOU. Francis Hamit’s novel Starmen is now available worldwide through Ingram Spark. The direct purchase link is here: STARMEN: A Novel by Francis Hamit.
(11) A COMPUTER IS BORN. BBC Sounds hosts Witness History’s episode “The invention of the ‘Baby’ computer”.
In June 1948, the ‘Baby’ was invented.
It was the first stored-program computer, meaning it was the first machine to work like the ones we have today. It was developed in England at the University of Manchester.
The computer was huge, it filled a room that was nearly six metres square. The team who made it are now recognised as the pioneers of modern computing.
Gill Kearsley has been looking through the archives to find out more about the ‘Baby’.
(12) GOING UP. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The rise in global mean sea level – is one of the most unambiguous indicators of climate change. It also is something of a minor trope in SF: cf. Stephen Baxter’s ”Flood” (2008).
In the real world, over the past three decades, satellites have provided continuous, accurate measurements of sea level on near-global scales. Research has now shown that since satellites began observing sea surface heights in 1993 until the end of 2023, global mean sea level has risen by 111 mm. In addition, the rate of global mean sea level rise over those three decades has increased from ~2.1mm/year in 1993 to ~4.5mm/year in 2023.
To put this in perspective, this is what the UN’s Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change projects in its mid-level scenario in its 2021 Assessment Report.
In short, we are moving into the future science predicts… Hopefully not the one some SF presents.
The research is Hamlington, B. D., et al (2024) “The rate of global sea level rise doubled during the past three decades”..Communications Earth & Environment, vol. 5, 601.
(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Giant Freakin Robot says “Return Of The Jedi Almost Made Mon Calamari A Punchline”.
…For fans of this last Original Trilogy entry, there is always something new to discover, especially if you go to YouTube (the next best thing to the Jedi Archives) and look up the film’s deleted scenes. Case in point: the deleted footage has many lines from a Mon Calamari pilot (Ika Sulko) that would have made their entire species a joke, including uttering “fried Calamari tonight” as a battle cry.
What’s fascinating about these Return of the Jedi deleted scenes is that they are hilariously rough…more equivalent to behind-the-scenes footage than something you could just pop back into the movie via a fan edit. For example, in the clips, you can actually hear director Richard Marquand feeding silly lines to Tim Rose, who is both the voice and puppeteer of this Mon Calamari pilot. While “fried Calamari tonight” is definitely the silliest of the lines, there are others that threaten to turn these aliens into a punchline.
For example, another line you can hear in this deleted Return of the Jedi footage is “all this technology and no men’s room.” While we can only guess the motivation behind this silly line, it is likely a joking reference to fans always wondering where the bathroom is in their favorite sci-fi shows…
[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]
