(1) CHENGDU WORLDCON UPDATE. [Item by Ersatz Culture.]
What is the Tianwen Program/Award?
Right now, this is a bit of an enigma. I stumbled across a link to this Chinese-language news article at the bottom of the article covered in the next item. Here are some extracts via Google Translate (my emphases, I haven’t attempted to correct likely mistranslations):
Under the premise of the vigorous development of Chinese science fiction, in order to discover science fiction talents, support science fiction works, and promote the integrated development of the science fiction industry, the “Tianwen Project” jointly launched by the Chinese Writers Association and the World Science Fiction Conference Organizing Committee was officially “debuted” at the summit .
The plan includes a science fiction award “Tianwen Award” and N actions to promote the integrated development of China and even the global science fiction industry. The “Tianwen Award” is oriented to encourage emerging and young writers and has permanently settled in Chengdu. It has become a useful supplement to the “Hugo Award” of the World Science Fiction Conference. While awarding the award, it also holds various activities such as IP roadshows, theme exhibitions, and salon promotions. . At the same time, it will be displayed on the platform of the World Science Fiction Conference and hold exchange activities to promote the in-depth integration of Chinese science fiction into world science fiction.
“We very much appreciate Chengdu’s plan to establish the ‘Tianwen Prize’. It is not only for China, but also for the world.” In the view of Dave McCarty, a member of the Hugo Award selection committee, the “Tianwen Prize” will become China’s An important channel for science fiction to integrate into world science fiction, it has become a platform to promote in-depth exchanges between Chinese fantasy fans and world fantasy fans.
Given the highlighted bits, and with quotes from the current Hugo Administrator, and on a stage with “WSFS” at the bottom, it was hard to shake the impression that this award/project is in some way WSFS affiliated? On re-reading, I suspect that’s actually a red herring, likely caused by a reporter not fully understanding all the different entities and relationships and/or machine mistranslation. I presume “World Science Fiction Conference Organizing Committee” is a reference to the fact that three (I think) of the eight people on the stage for this announcement are on the Chengdu 2023 concom; four if you count Cixin Liu who was listed as part of the original bid team.
I tried searching on a few Chinese sites for 天问计划 (Tianwen Program) and 天问奖 (Tianwen Award), but found only one relevant result, a Weibo post. The text appears to be much the same as the above linked article, but it does have a short, slightly strange, clip from the announcement.
My guess is that this is actually a domestic Chinese award, possibly with some extra stuff to help promote the finalists or winners internationally, perhaps similar to the Galaxy Awards 1 anthology that came out last year.
Media coverage of the “First Industry Development Promotion Conference”
Red Star News has an article on one of the handful of programme items deemed worthy of streaming to virtual attendees. The following extract via Google Translate (no manual cleanup edits):
Judging from the investment amount, the “Chinese Story·Science Fiction Situation Drama Incubation Base Project” with an investment amount of 2 billion will use the “program + park + base + academy” model to aggregate high-quality resources from the science fiction industry chain to create a first-class domestic science fiction sitcom Incubation platform.
From the perspective of project level, the Trisolaran Universe Global Headquarters project with a total investment of 1 billion yuan is committed to building a top Chinese science fiction brand with international influence. It will focus on developing Three-Body games, film and television drama content products, brand derivatives and other businesses, presenting A more three-dimensional three-body world.
(Note: 1 billion yuan is approximately 137 million USD.)
Huawei sponsoring the “Science Fiction vs Science Fact” panel?
Although they aren’t one of the previously announced corporate partners of the con, judging by this tweet it would appear that Huawei are sponsoring the “Science Fiction vs Science Fact” panel/event on Saturday. This is another item that is being streamed. Nnedi Okorafor is listed as one of the speakers.
Galaxy Award winners announced
These were announced on Thursday evening; winners include Hugo Short Story finalist “On the Razor’s Edge” by Jiang Bo. The “Ghost of Tsushima” art book that was in the leaked list of Hugo finalists was also a winner in the Related Work category. Weibo links: (1), (2), (3), (4)
Links to official (?) photo galleries
Earlier today, Adaoli/SF Light Year messaged me this photo of QR codes for what I presume are official photo galleries. I think the first one has been previously linked in a Facebook post from the official con account, but I’d not seen any other mention of them online.
As yet, I’ve not been able to get my phone to recognize the QR codes for the 21st and 22nd; if anyone else can extract the links, please post in the comments. I’ll try to get a better photo of that poster tomorrow, in the hope that I can get a readable image. The links for the first three days are:
The galleries are arranged by the room the photos were taken in. As far as I can tell, the UI and room names are only in Chinese, but the translation functionality built into Chrome does a decent enough job.
Photo galleries posted by publishers, writers and fans to Weibo
Eight Light Minutes Culture had several Weibo post showing some of the panels (1), (2), (3), (4) as did Future Affairs Administration. The latter also posted a gallery of an area documenting Worldcon history.
Translator Tian Tian posted photos of her meeting people and being on panels. (As an aside, I notice from her CSFDB page that she co-wrote an essay which Google Translate renders as “The 2019 Hugo Awards are here. Will the United States continue to use science fiction to resist reality?”, which I am now dying to read.)
There were quite a lot of user comments on this post about James Bryant making his way alone to his 15th Worldcon at the age of 81.
Xie Yunning has written for SF World magazine, and also has a few gallery posts on his Weibo page.
Wandering Earth team video
I’m not sure exactly what the team behind the Wandering Earth film (including director and star) are doing here, but they seemed to enjoy themselves doing it.
Queue for Cixin Liu signing
Short video on Weibo; Twitter video; Weibo photo gallery posted by Adaoli/SF Light Year.
English language videos from China Daily
China Daily posted a minute-long video to Twitter, with a couple of English native-speaker presenters, one of whom was the interviewer in the Chris M. Barkley video featured in yesterday’s Scroll. As a guide to the quality of journalism on display, the presenter refers to the con venue as “the Space Museum”, although whoever did the Chinese subtitles evidently knows what it’s really called. Still, it could have been worse.
Those presenters also appeared in a short comedic (?) video, and briefly in another China Daily video posted a couple of days ago. Dave McCarty and Liza Groen-Trombi can be seen in the latter video at 0:25 chatting at what I assume is the Locus table.
(2) UGANDA BID TABLE. Micheal Kabunga, Kampcon 2028 bid chair/coordinator, sent this photo of the Kampcon booth at the Chengdu Worldcon — booth B40.
(3) MEDICAL UPDATE. Tony C. Smith of Starship Sofa told subscribers today that his surgeon has declared him cancer free.
That is a great feeling.
If folks don’t know… I had bladder cancer, only picked up by the fact I was going to the toilet more often through the night. Huge thanks to my wife Melanie for pushing me to go get it checked out. So, I’m minus a bladder, prostrate and glands and now have a bag attached to my side for the rest of my life but it’s a small price to pay.
This means SSS is rebooting her engines on Tuesday 24th November. Hope you can join me, as we travel into deep space looking for amazing SF stories.
(4) GOING VIRAL. Editors Brian Keene and Christopher Golden have announced The End Of The World As We Know It: Tales Of Stephen King’s The Stand — an original short story anthology based on the highly influential and seminal work of apocalyptic fiction and good versus evil; featuring an introduction from Stephen King himself and new fiction from a world ravaged by the virus “Captain Trips” and the minds of Josh Malerman, Paul Tremblay, Richard Chizmar, S. A. Cosby, Tananarive Due, Alma Katsu, Caroline Kepnes, Michael Koryta, Scott Ian, Joe R. Lansdale, Maurice Broaddus and Wayne Brady, Bryan Smith, Somer Canon, Hailey Piper, Jonathan Janz and many others. Thanks to Stephen King for entrusting these two constant readers with this task.
Brian Keene added this update on Facebook:
F.A.Q for THE STAND Anthology:
1. Yes, this is 100% authorized by the Big Man himself.
2. No, we are not open to submissions. Anything sent will be deleted unread.
3. No, we don’t have an official release date yet, nor info on various editions.
4. No, we can’t release the final full line-up yet.
5. Yes, *that* Wayne Brady with Maurice Broaddus.
(5) IT’S A TRAP! Sarah Rees Brennan has discovered something about NaNoWriMo.
(6) TODAY’S DAY
October 20, 1955 — J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Return of the King, the final volume of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, was published sixty eight years ago today by Allen & Unwin with Tolkien’s artwork on the cover.
In The Letters Of J.R. R. Tolkien as edited by Humphrey Carpenter, he says he felt the chosen title revealed too much of the story, and that he would have instead preferred The War of the Ring as the title for the volume.
The entire series was nominated for a Hugo at Tricorn in Cleveland, though the Foundation series would be the winner that year.
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
- Born October 20, 1905 — Frederic Dannay. One half with Manfred Bennington Lee of the writing team who created Ellery Queen. ISFDB lists two Ellery Queen novels as being genre, And on the Eight Day and The Scrolls of Lysis, plus a single short story, “A Study in Terror”. The Roman Hat Mystery, the first Ellery Queen mystery is free to all Audible members. Yes, I’m going to listen to it next. (Died 1982.)
- Born October 20, 1916 — Anton Diffring. A long career with many genre roles which I’ll note but a few of here. He was Fabian in Fahrenheit 451, Graf Udo Von Felseck of Purbridge Manor in The Masks of Deaths (a rather well-crafted Holmes film) and he played De Flores, a neo-Nazi in “Silver Nemesis”, a most excellent Seventh Doctor story. (Died 1989.)
- Born October 20, 1913 — Barney Phillips. Though he’s best remembered as Sgt. Ed Jacobs on the Dragnet series and yes, I remember him well from it, he did do some genre work of which his most notable being was one on The Twilight Zone, in which he played a Venusian hiding out on Earth as Haley, the short-order cook in “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?” episode. Remember you can see it on Paramount+. I just did and he’s amazing. I’m not forgetting his other three appearances there, the first being in “The Purple Testament” as Captain E. L. Gunther, next in “A Thing about Machines” as television repairman which is also a brilliant role for him, followed by the Venusian role, and in “Miniature” as Diemel. Quite a feat that many appearances! He also appeared on The Invaders, Shazzan, Three Musketeers where he was voice of Porthos for all 18 episodes of the animated series, Get Smart! And The Funky Phantom, the latter being a clone of Scooby-Doo! that was set in the American Revolution. Really, I’m not kidding. (Died 1982.)
- Born October 20, 1934 — Michael Dunn. He’s best remembered for his recurring role on the Wild Wild West as Dr. Miguelito Loveless attempting to defeat our heroes over and over, but he has had other appearances in genre television. He would be Alexander, a court jester, in the Trek “Plato’s Stepchildren” episode and a killer clown in the Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea’s “The Wax Men” episode. He was even in the Get Smart! pilot as Mr. Big. (Died 1973.)
- Born October 20, 1937 — Emma Tennant. To the manor born and a lifelong supporter of Labour, ISFDB lists nine of her novels as being as SFF. As the Literary Encyclopedia says “Her work is feminist, magical and wicked, and uses the fantastic and the Gothic to interpret and explore everyday women’s roles.” I’ve not read her, so do tell me about her please if you’ve read her! (Died 2017.)
- Born October 20, 1946 — Thomas Wylde, 77. He’s here because he’s got two stories in the Alien Speedway franchise, Roger Zelazny’s Alien Speedway #2: Pitfall and Roger Zelazny’s Alien Speedway #3: The Web. I’ve never heard of these. Anyone read them? He’s also got two stories in L. Sprague de Camp’s Doctor Bones series as well.
- Born October 20, 1955 — Magdalena Tulli, 68. Polish writer of many, many novels, a few of which are fantastic tales. Some were translated into English and are available from the usual suspects. The one work by her that I wish to single out is Tryby, published in translation as Moving Parts, as it is a metafiction in which the novel in question takes over from its author.
- Born October 20, 1966 — Diana Rowland, 57. New Orleans writer with a fascinating job history that includes cop, a crime scene investigator, and a morgue assistant. She’s best known for her Kara Gillian series and White Trash Zombie series. Her only award is a Phoenix Award, a lifetime achievement award for a science fiction professional who has done a great deal for Southern Fandom, given by DeepSouthCon.
(8) COMICS SECTION.
- The Far Side depicts a luggage mixup of the future.
(9) EARTHLY CHILD BLOCKS UNEARTHLY CHILD. “First Doctor Who Story Excluded from BBC iPlayer in Legal Dispute” – Gizmodo has the story.
Nearly 60 years to the day that Doctor Who began airing, next month, the BBC will launch an unprecedented collection of over 800 episodes from the show’s distant and not-so-distant past on its streaming platform, iPlayer—the first of its kind from the corporation. But it turns out that the very first story that kicked all those adventures off in the first place won’t be a part of it.
Known by the title of its first episode, “An Unearthly Child,” the four-part serial was written by Anthony Coburn, at the time a staff writer for the BBC, who would go on to write three more stories for Doctor Who that never made it to air….
Decades later, Coburn’s son, Stef Coburn, has repeatedly pushed back against the BBC over what he perceives as a mistreatment of his father—especially over the conceptual ideas behind, and eventual name of, the Doctor’s time-travel machine, the TARDIS. Coburn first attempted to legally challenge the BBC’s ownership of the TARDIS in 2013, timed to the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who—alleging that the corporation lost the rights to use ideas leveraged in Coburn’s script for “An Unearthly Child” when he died in 1977, despite the corporation having held various copyrights and trademarks on the ship and its police box design for decades prior.
Now, a decade later, Coburn has taken to social media to confirm that he has rejected attempts by the BBC to license “An Unearthly Child” for streaming on its platforms, claiming that the corporation refused a proposed deal to license the story….
(10) THE MAYOR’S ON THE LINE. “Eric Adams Uses A.I. to Robocall New Yorkers in Languages He Doesn’t Speak” reports the New York Times.
The calls to New Yorkers have a familiar ring to them. They all sound like Mayor Eric Adams — only in Spanish. Or Yiddish. Or Mandarin.
Has the mayor been taking language lessons?
The answer is no, and the truth is slightly more expensive and, in the eyes of privacy experts, far more worrisome.
The mayor is using artificial intelligence to reach New Yorkers through robocalls in a number of languages. The calls encourage people to apply for jobs in city government or to attend community events like concerts.
Privacy advocates still criticized the robocalls, arguing that it was “deeply Orwellian” to try to trick New Yorkers into thinking that Mr. Adams speaks languages that he does not. The group has previously criticized the mayor’s embrace of facial recognition technology and his dispatch of a police robot to patrol the Times Square subway station.
“Yes, we need announcements in all of New Yorkers’ native languages, but the deep fakes are just a creepy vanity project,” said Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project….
(11) TO HELL AND BACK. 100 Places to See After You Die: A Travel Guide to the Afterlife by Jeopardy! host and champion Ken Jennings is a thing.
Ever wonder which circles of Dante’s Inferno have the nicest accommodations? Where’s the best place to grab a bite to eat in the ancient Egyptian underworld? How does one dress like a local in the heavenly palace of Hinduism’s Lord Vishnu, or avoid the flesh-eating river serpents in the Klingon afterlife? What hidden treasures can be found off the beaten path in Hades, Valhalla, or TV’s The Good Place? Find answers to all those questions and more about the world(s) to come in this eternally entertaining book from Ken Jennings.
Written in the style of iconic bestselling travel guides, Jennings wryly outlines journeys through the afterlife, as dreamed up over 5,000 years of human history by our greatest prophets, poets, mystics, artists, and TV showrunners. This comprehensive index of 100 different afterlife destinations was meticulously researched from sources ranging from the Epic of Gilgamesh to modern-day pop songs, video games, and Simpsons episodes. Get ready for whatever post-mortal destiny awaits you, whether it’s an astral plane, a Hieronymus Bosch hellscape, or the baseball diamond from Field of Dreams.
Fascinating, funny, and irreverent, this “gung-ho travel guide to Heaven, Hell, and beyond” (The New Yorker) will help you create your very own bucket list—for after you’ve kicked the bucket.
(12) WAS IT JUSTIFIED? JustWatch’s Owen Harris asks, “Are you as astonished by the Netflix price increase as I am?”
We all just got to know the news about the subscription price change. What we don’t know, however, is how their catalog justified such an increase.
That’s why I thought you might want to see our data, which will show you the top 5 streaming services by catalog size over time and quality. It shows that Netflix’s price rise is not justified.
[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Lise Andreasen, Daniel Dern, Nickpheas, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Ersatz Culture, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Bill.]
