WWWednesday, September 14, 2016

This week’s word for Wednesday is the noun mizmaze; which can mean a state of confusion or a dazed state (“she was in a mizmaze”); it is also the name for a specific kind of turf labyrinth once common in Britain. There are only three mizmazes known to be left in existence.

It’s  a short column this week, but we have some fine artwork from the studio of an historic artist and illustrator.

Farewell to Eden (c) Jon Arfstrom

Awards:

The Aurora Awards, Canadian awards for excellence, were announced last week at When Worlds Collide.

A.M. Dellamonica won the Best English Novel award for Daughter of No Nation.

Leah Bobet won the Best YA English Novel award for An Inheritance of Ashes.

The French language awards, the Boreals, were announced in May, 2016.

The Harvey Awards were announced on September 4. These awards acknowledge outstanding contributions in comics. Several genre offerings got awards, and Image Comics’s long-running Saga did very well for itself.

Books and Writing:

The topic of omniscient point of view was getting quite a bit of play on Twitter last week, and Charlie Jane Anders went back to IO9 to discuss it.

Strange Horizons editor Niall Harrison discusses the Fireside Fiction report on the representation (or lack) of writers of color. They provide some graphs that show submissions/acceptances by gender; I guess to some extent they’re going by name or cover letter info, and this is what they have. Anyway, the graphs are interesting if not exactly on point. The action steps deeper into the article are interesting.

Say it ain’t so! Alan Moore has reported that he will no longer write comic books, choosing to focus instead on films and literary work. (Has he written a comic book recently?)

Mary Robinett Kowal has hidden an Easter Egg on her site, related to her latest novel, Ghost Talkers. To decipher it, you will need your copy of the book. It’s worth the effort!

An Encounter with Articulated Furniture (c) Jon Arfstrom 1987

Internet:

Happy birthday, Star Trek! Even the US Postal Service got into the act with a commemorative stamp.

File 770 posts an article on the evolution of AI and the Personal Assistant.

TV and Movies:

Amazon Studios is adapting Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things into a serial drama with Richard Madden, formerly Robb Stark of GOT, as the minister who travels to another star system to be a missionary Wow… this is daring indeed. The most interesting parts of this book were the interactions (human and exo-sapient), but the least interesting were Faber’s attempts to create an otherworldly landscape. I hope Amazon chooses the relationships as its focus.

Games:

Ars Technica shares BioWare’s tease of new characters and effects in Mass Effect: Andromeda.

Art:

Jon Arfstrom created imaginative and otherworldy cover art for Weird Tales, Mystic Magazine and Other Worlds Science Fiction Stories, and he was respected as a regional artist in his home state of Minnesota, doing portraits and landscapes. Arfstrom was at his heyday in the 1950s, but his work was rediscovered by the fan community in the 1970s. Jon Arfstrom passed away in 2015, but his daughter is working with a regional historical society to set up a museum and gallery. His work can be viewed online here. His beautiful prints are available for purchase (Kat bought one at WorldCon.) The site is currently under construction. I recommend visiting it and checking back in a week or two to see what’s been added.

I’m off to HawaiiCon! Have a good week, everyone.