Awards:

The Arthur C. Clarke Awards, Campbell Awards and the Theodore Sturgeon Awards were announced at WorldCon in Kansas City, Mo.

science fiction and fantasy book reviewsChildren 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.

science fiction and fantasy book reviewsCould 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…

Author

  • Marion Deeds

    Marion Deeds, with us since March, 2011, is the author of the fantasy novella ALUMINUM LEAVES. Her short fiction has appeared in the anthologies BEYOND THE STARS, THE WAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE, STRANGE CALIFORNIA, and in Podcastle, The Noyo River Review, Daily Science Fiction and Flash Fiction Online. She’s retired from 35 years in county government, and spends some of her free time volunteering at a second-hand bookstore in her home town.

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