Book Cover of Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno Garcia. Against a red background, in a strip of gray, frightened eyes stare out.The 2023 Locus Awards were announced on Sunday. Congratulations to John Scalzi for Best SF Novel (The Kaiju Preservation Society); R.F. Kuang for Best Fantasy Novel (Babel); T. Kingfisher for Best Horror Novel (What Moves the Dead); Charlie Jane Anders for Best YA Novel (Dreams Bigger than Heartbreak)—and congratulations to all the other winners.

NASA stepped in to halt lithium mining on a tabletop flat in Nevada, joining forces with indigenous tribal people and environmentalists. NASA uses the flat, untouched land as a calibration site for it satellite. Space carried the day on this one.

Tor.com provides an excerpt from Meriam Metoui’s YA horror mystery, A Guide to the Dark.

Also at Tor.com, a review of T.J. Klune’s latest, In the Lives of Puppets.

I can safely say I had never thought about the black hole at the center of our galaxy until I found this Ars Technica article.

On “The Big Idea” Robin C.M. Duncan postulates that scientific accuracy (or even, to some extent, plausibility) is less important to a good SF story than, well, the story. Do you agree? I think they make some interesting points.

This article has nothing to do with anything I discuss in this column. Well, except for alcohol. Iron Horse Winery and Vineyard is close to where I live, and my husband helped build it, so here, without further ado, is a cute article about how it because the “official sparkling wine of diplomacy” in the USA.

A world created by a single mother to entertain her two daughters on a remote Wyoming homestead in the 1920s has become a tradition honoring imagination, family and magic.

Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia is not mentioned in the column, but PBS Newshour listed it as a recommended summer read, so I thought it could be our lead image.

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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