Giveaways: This is an announcement. The “Notify Me of Follow Up Comments” button began causing some problem on the site. At this time it is disabled. I generally announce Giveaway winners on Sundays, so please check back each Sunday to see if you’ve won.
Because I categorized this as a Giveaway, one commenter will get a hardcover Copy of Tripping Arcadia by Kit Mayquist.
UPDATE: It seems the feature has been reactivated. If you use it, I recommend checking back on Sundays anyway, at least for a week or two.
Catherine Lucille Moore, often using the pseudonym C.L. Moore, published science fiction since the 1930s. Much but not all of her work was a collaboration with her husband Henry Kuttner. She also wrote for television in the early 1960s.
File770 has a very long article on suggested nomination for the Drama: Long Form category of the Hugos.
File 770 also shares the Critics’ Choice Awards.
Some people have commented on Disney’s Turning Red that they don’t believe a 13 year old would write/draw fanfiction. I don’t know what planet these people grew up on, but the Mary Sue sets them straight in this honest and endearing essay.
SFWA has officially changed its name to “Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association.”
David Steinberger, former CEO of Comixology, is moving to Amazon to start an online comic initiative there.
This announcement was made a couple of weeks ago. Fireside Fiction is closing. The site was a good source for fiction and worked hard to improve equity in the speculative fiction field through the stories they selected and some non-fiction work. While they had a bad stumble early last year, it’s clear that overwork and economics are the main reasons they are closing.
Tuesday, March 14, was Pi Day. In its honor, Atlas Obscura offers up several heirloom pie recipes. (My mom made the Ritz cracker mock apple pie for us once.)
The stone used to carve the 30,000 year old figure called the Willendorf Venus has been identified as coming from Northern Italy, which answers one long-standing question and raises others about migration and trade.
We don’t talk about Pluto. (About 3:41 long.)
Two pieces of news from the intertubes this week that I found, respectively, discouraging and exciting.
First, George R. R. Martin says he is “still working on” The Winds of Winter, the next and allegedly penultimate volume in his A Song of Ice and Fire series. But he’s still working on that as one of many other hot projects involving TV shows and books. Because it’s been eleven years since the previous volume in the series got published, I am feeling like it’s still possible that this next volume will be published in my lifetime, but probably very unlikely that the final volume, A Dream of Spring, gets published while I’m still around to read it (if it gets published at all, at least with Martin as the principal author).
Second, in much more encouraging news, Walter Jon Williams says he is working on a third book in the excellent series he started long ago with Metropolitan (1995) and its sequel City on Fire (1997), books which have the feel of science fiction while being totally fantasy under the hood.
No news, unfortunately, on whether Rosemary Kirstein is making any progress on the next two books in her excellent Steerswoman series, which is pretty much the opposite of the Williams series in terms of feel versus what’s going on under the hood. Still holding out hope for this one though.
Thanks for these updates, Paul!
I’m hopeful for the Kirstein books because of where she left us hanging! The good news seems to be that, per her blog at least, her health is improving.
Thanks for the updates.
I’m still patiently waiting for The Winds of Winter. I don’t even want to be hopeful for A Dream of Spring. At this stage anything is possible, but to me, it seems more likely that someone else would finish the work in a decade or so.
I clicked on the link to the obscure, forgotten heirloom pies, and that was really interesting! I want to try most or all of them–although I want to avoid sugar. Maybe some baker offers one or more of them at some online shop! (I’ll check on that.)
That’s the age range I was when I started reading and writing fanfiction, if not sooner. Are these people confused?
Thank you for the giveaway opportunity!
Oh my! Esquire has now come out with a “50 greatest fantasy works of all time” list which repeats many of the same biases toward very recent novels as in the disgraceful Time “100 greatest” list. They did at least sneak Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell onto this list, which was one of the worst oversights on the Time list, but otherwise this shows the same ridiculous overestimation of novels from the last dozen years and apparent ignorance of all but a few books published before, say, 1990.
So no Watership Down, no The Once and Future King, no Mythago Wood or Lavondyss, no The Dragon Waiting, no Little, Big. But we do get Myst: The Book of Atrus…which I did read enthusiastically as a Myst fanatic back in the day, but, come on, one of the 50 greatest?!
Rather than consider the whole Lord of the Rings as a unitary work, as it was intended to be, they single out only The Fellowship of the Ring and ignore the other two books. And from that unfinished series which spawned a TV show, they picked A Game of Thrones, although I think most people would say A Storm of Swords was the best volume published so far. Just to remind you this is a naked marketing ploy, they have links to buy the books at Amazon next to each entry on the list. Sigh.
Honestly, these lists!
Sorry to hear about Fireside Fiction.
None of Your Business, if you live in the USA, you win a copy of TRIPPING ARCADIA!
Please contact me (Marion) with your US address and I’ll have the book sent right away. Happy reading!