Awards:
The Arthur C. Clarke Awards, Campbell Awards and the Theodore Sturgeon Awards were announced at WorldCon in Kansas City, Mo.
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky won the Arthur C Clarke Award for best novel. Find the complete list here.
Radiomen by Eleanor Lerman took with John W Campbell award for best science fiction novel published in 2015, While Kelly Link’s short story “A Game of Smash and Recovery” won the Theodore Sturgeon Award for best short fiction. Find the complete list here.
San Jose, CA, beat out New Orleans, LA, to host the 2018 World Con.
San Juan, Puerto Rico will host the 2017 North America Science Fiction Convention. NASfic, as their website explains, is held any year in which WorldCon is held outside of North America.
The brand new Dragon Awards will be announced on Sunday, September 4.
Books and Writing:
On her blog, Mary Robinette Kowal shares a recording of Arthur Conan Doyle discussing both his creation of Sherlock Holmes, and his interest in spiritualism.
How different is the visual reading experience from the audiobook experience? This interesting article compares the two. Check out the links in the article; there’s some interesting stuff! (Thanks, Kat.)
IO9 shares some signs that you are stuck in a YA dystopia.
At SF Gateway, Robert Silverberg reviews some ancient books of magic. He finds them disappointingly, but humorously, unhelpful.
Zachary Quinto, of Heroes and the new Star Trek franchise fame, will narrate “The Dispatcher” by John Scalzi, exclusively for Audible Books.
Space:
Well, I was going to go to Iceland next year on vacation, but now I can see that Centauri Proxima B will definitely be the happening place. This planet orbits Centauri Proxima in the “Goldilocks Zone,” neither too hot nor too cold, and is about the size and weight of Earth. It seems like the perfect planet to start with if we are looking for interstellar life.
Movies and Television:
Kubo and the Two Strings, while getting rave reviews, is not doing as well at the box office as expected.
Could Gaiman’s “How to Talk to Girls at Parties” really be a 2017 movie? Well, this is from IMDB and it looks pretty real.
Variety announced that NBC is cancelling Grimm after next season. The show has always been fascinating and uneven, but Monroe, Rosalee and Officer Wu saved it for me, on more than one occasion.
Wild Cards might be coming to television soon. George RR Martin announced this on his LiveJournal site a few weeks ago. Here is the link. This looks exciting!
Internet:
Can there be a demonic prime number? I don’t know, but this palindromic one with ties to an “infernal” number has in interesting history.
Two writers for Bull Spec violated WorldCon’s anti-harrassment policy. It wasn’t the first time they had trouble at a con, and apparently the issue at WorldCon was with the same writer. The publisher of Bull Spec took action to suspend their column.
SFWA is now offering a New Release newsletter.
Mike Glyer, founder and author of the File 770 wewbsite, won two Hugos but was unable to travel to Kansas City to accept them because he has been ill. The site has mostly had Open Comment posts for the past week. Our thoughts and well-wishes are with Glyer, and we’re wishing him a speedy recovery.
This lovely piece of street art reminds us that we can all be heroes.
A Federal appeals court overturned the FCC’s attempt to increase competition for broadband services by blocking laws that prevented cities from offering broadband in direct competition with privately owned ISPs. The FCC will not appeal, but the municipalities themselves, which signed onto the suit, may choose to. Here is some background.
Vox.com offers a link to an interactive map of the worlds winds.
Games:
How about a game that appeals to two completely different types of players at the same time? Polygon discusses a gorgeous-looking game called Bound.
Earth:
We all know I like otters, so here’s nearly a minute of a baby otter chortling. It looks really, really cute, but those fangs…
Grimm has a really solid run, Monroe and Rosalee, I’d love them to be my next door neighbors.
Shoot, I’d just love to be able to go to Rosalee’s shop! They are supposed to be two fairy-tale monsters, and they are one of the strongest and most positive married couples on television. I guess that’s part of the point of the show.
I was so disappointed when I heard that Grimm was canceled, but I would rather they go out now rather than hold on too long. After last season’s finale I don’t see anyway in which they could reset the status quo, and I’m sure NBC didn’t like the idea of them going away from the procedural format they’ve had for the past five seasons.
I recently rewatched seasons 1-4 on Amazon, and can’t wait for season 5 to hit Prime.