WWWednesday: August 5, 2020

Awards:

Arkady Martine took the Hugo for best novel with A Memory Called Empire; Amar El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone won best novella with This is How You Lose the Time War; N.K. Jemisin took the award for best novelette with “Emergency Skin;” the best short story was awarded to S.L. Huang for “As the Last I May Know.” See all the winners.

File 770 printed a correction for the Baen Fantasy Adventure Award winners.

A Kerfuffle Because of Course:

The first online WorldCon ever could not go off without problems. Were they technical? They were not. Finalists and the audience were indignant at the poor job George R.R. Martin did of MCing, including systematically mispronouncing the names of some finalists. I picked this post describing the event because this blogger also extolled the winners. Then there was the John W. Campbell thing… The Con Committee issued an apology. Martin issued a statement here.

Books and Writing:

Ann Leckie writes about why she withdrew The Raven Tower from consideration for the Hugo Award.

Do these five stories make you yearn for a sequel? Interesting compilation.

“No longer should white people be allowed the comfort of this racial invisibility; they should have to see themselves as raced.” Should “white,” when used as a description of race, be capitalized? I’m still thinking about this article. This article has a link to the statement from the National Association of Black Journalists.

Print sales jumped in July.

Nerds of a Feather shares an interview with Hugo-winning writer R.F. Kuang, author of The Burning God.

Film, Streaming and TV:

Ars Technica reviews the new film biography of Marie Curie.

San Diego Comic-Con took place online, but as always, it shared lots of upcoming trailers and teasers. Ars Technica put together a round-up.

Tech and History:

The Smithsonian looks back to 2019 and the first drone delivery in the USA.

When you have to please too many people at once, you can end up pleasing no one. Microsoft’s offer to buy the US arm of the video app Tik Tok may go that way.

Real Estate:

The “most haunted mansion in Ireland” is for sale for the low, low price of $2.87 million.