On this day in 1945, the United States successfully detonated a plutonium based test weapon in New Mexico as part of the Manhattan Project, bringing in the Atomic Age.

The Atomic Age

The Atomic Age

Writing, Editing, and Publishing:

The World Fantasy Awards announced the 2014 list of nominees last week, as well as the two winners of the Lifetime Achievement Award, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and my girl Ellen Datlow.

Tor interviews Tiphanie Yanique, whose first novel, Land of Love and Drowning, has just been released. She is planning someday to write a retelling of the fairytale, “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” which has long been one of my favorites.

A fan writes about China Mieville’s work, specifically “The Crawl,” a short story in the form of a screenplay for a film trailer about zombies! This piece is fun, and can be read here, on Mieville’s personal website.

Far Fetched Fables provides this free podcast of Janny Wurts’ short story, “Blood, Oak, Iron,” which originally appeared in Flight: Extreme Visions of Fantasy, edited by Al Sarrantonio.

This essay by Fred D. White (Terry’s husband!) on the value of physical books is really thoughtful and smart. Plus, it gives us an insider’s look at Terry and Fred’s enviable personal library.

John Farrell wrote this Forbes article about booksellers focusing on sci-fi classics at ReaderCon, which provides neat synopses of a lot of out-of-print books.

Marvel is bringing us a lady Thor!

Movies and Television: 

Syfy has greenlit the pilot for a series based on Lev Grossman’s MAGICIANS series. Now casting: Shia LeBeouf as Quentin, obviously; Kristen Stewart as Alice; and Krysten Ritter as Janet (. . . actually, Ritter might be pretty good in that role . . . ).

You can watch a YouTube video of a sci-fi movie starring Bill Murray, called Nothing Lasts Forever by Tom Schiller. The movie was made, but not released, in 1984; it was uploaded to YouTube in 2011, and just recently has been making the Internet rounds.

Internet Stuff:

A medieval manuscript shows Merlin building Stonehenge! Housed in the British Library, this manuscript is an illuminated copy of Wace’s Arthurian romance, Roman de Brut, which does feature a section describing Merlin’s engineering feat.

This girl mummified her Barbie. What?!? I did a lot of crazy things with my Barbies when I was young, including building them a house from a cardboard box, complete with hand-colored wallpaper and “hardwood floors” that I made out of paint and layers of glue, but nothing as cool as this.

And R2D2 dances to Michael Jackson. ‘Nuff said.

lolz_by_sorah42-d33k0u6Artist Feature:

I’m under the gun on some projects so we don’t have an artist feature this week. Sorry! I give you permission to image search for as many fluffy kittens as you wish.

Author

  • Kate Lechler

    KATE LECHLER, on our staff from May 2014 to January 2017, resides in Oxford, MS, where she divides her time between teaching early British literature at the University of Mississippi, writing fiction, and throwing the tennis ball for her insatiable terrier, Sam. She loves speculative fiction because of what it tells us about our past, present, and future. She particularly enjoys re-imagined fairy tales and myths, fabulism, magical realism, urban fantasy, and the New Weird. Just as in real life, she has no time for melodramatic protagonists with no sense of humor. The movie she quotes most often is Jurassic Park, and the TV show she obsessively re-watches (much to the chagrin of her husband) is Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

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