The house John Adams was born in. Photo by Marion Deeds
Awards:
Rosewater by Tade Thompson won the 2019 Arthur C. Clarke award.
The 2019 Prism Awards, for excellence in LGTBQ+ Comics, were announced at San Diego ComicCon. For short form, see me by e Jackson won. SuperButch won for excellence in a webcomic.
The Inkpot Awards were announced at ComiCon.
The 2019 British Fantasy Awards shortlist was announced, including Robert Jackson Bennett, Tomi Aayemi and Paul Tremblay among others.
Cons:
Locus has a report on The Outer Dark Symposium on the Greater Weird.
Thomas Crane Public Library, Children’s Section
Books and Writing:
From Skye, here’s a Goodreads link to Erin Morgenstern’s commentary on The Night Circus.
A New York Times opinion piece credits science fiction with helping us reach the moon.
The Los Angeles Review of Books takes a look at the importance of Chinese SF works in translation. Ken Liu is justifiable lauded in this article.
Strange Horizons and Uncanny Magazine are both in the middle of crowd-sourcing campaigns, and both are doing well. It’s not too late to pledge to either one or both of these fine homes of short fiction.
Over at Black Girl Nerds, this list of five speculative fiction books by black writers that you’ll want to read came out in February, but it has great books on it so I’m including it.
Cory Doctorow has an unpleasant but thought-provoking about the purpose “fake news” serves in society. He gets style points for using “ideomotor” in a sentence.
Compelling Science Fiction is switching to a subscription model and no longer providing free content.
Crime Reads puts up some great opening paragraphs, courtesy of Raymond Chandler. They aren’t genre, but they’re good.
Spinning wheel in the winter kitchen of the Adams House.
TV and Movies:
Syfy has some video of the cast of The Expanse talking about their upcoming season on Amazon Prime Video, from San Diego ComiCon.
Also from SDCC, Entertainment Weekly has lots of photos.
Season Three of Westworld will have some big changes.
Internet:
The suspect in the Kyoto Animation (KyoAni) Studio arson says the studio plagiarized his work. The fire killed 33 people, and four more are in critical condition. The studio was well-known for hiring women animators and most of the fatalities were women.
Atlas Obscura has a charming article in the category of People Who Staple Bread to Trees in Britain.
Earth:
Icelanders lamenting the loss of traditional culture in their country can go to New Iceland in Canada. No, really.
Art:
These some photos from my Massachusetts visit for ReaderCon.
Ive never heard of Black Girl Nerds but now its bookmarked.
I really like their site. A couple of their members hosted some interviews and one on ones at a convention I went to a few years back.