In keeping with our space mission news this week, on this date in 1969, the Apollo 12 mission landed on the moon, making astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean the third and fourth humans to walk on the moon.

fantasy book reviews science fiction book reviews

UN Window “Peace” by Marc Chagall

Writing, Editing, and Publishing:

 A lot of fairy-tale news today: From SFSignal, Sarah Pinborough writes about what it’s like to rewrite fairy tales for grown-ups, anticipating her 2015 Snow White novel, Poison.

 The Guardian reviews Jack Zipes’ new translation of Grimm’s fairy tales, a translation that restores some of the initial horror and darkness to these stories before the Grimms made them a little more family-friendly.

And here, the Daily Geekette blog covers 5 female fairy tale authors you need to be reading.

Samuel Montgomery Blinn just won the Indie Arts Award; here, you can learn more about Blinn’s involvement in the SFF community in North Carolina and his literary journal Bull Spec. He sounds like a really neat guy; congrats, Samuel!

Eric Schwitzgebel, a philosophy professor at UC Riverside and an SFF fan, writes on his blog about two views of the relationship between science fiction and philosophy. He has a lot of thoughtful things to say, and the discussion continues in the comments. 

For all you NaNoWriMo-ers, if you’re proud of what you’ve written and you’re ready to look for a home for your novel, check out Ragnarok Publishing’s submission guidelines. They accept unagented manuscript submissions and queries, so it might be a good place to start if you’re a budding author.

fantasy book reviews science fiction book reviews

Bestiaire et Musique, by Marc Chagall

Movies and Television:

This is really cool. Lucasfilm is planning a new movie based in part on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This film appears to follow the fairy characters in the play as they try to understand why the love potion has gone awry, and it features some great voice talent. Can’t wait for this!

Internet Stuff:

There has been a lot of space news this week, the biggest stories of which revolve around the Rosetta mission which landed on a comet earlier this week. A lot of interesting stories came out of that, including some sounds similar to singing that the probe Philae picked up. Most exciting to me was the news that the probe detected organic molecules on the comet.

Also, astronomers detected some abnormally strong storms on Uranus this past week and are now working to theorize why these storms occurred, and why they’re sticking around.

Finally, these gorgeous cosplay pictures are worth a look; they blend superheroes and Star Wars characters with the costumes and posing of the Renaissance. The makeup is really remarkable; according to this article, no Photoshop was used to make Superman or Leia look like those characters—just real-life lighting and makeup skills.

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.