Annie Bot by Sierra Greer is the winner of the 39th Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction book of the year. The selection was revealed today at an award ceremony held in London.
Sierra Greer receives a trophy in the form of a commemorative engraved bookend and prize money to the value of £2025.00; a tradition that sees the annual prize money rise incrementally by year from the year 2001 in memory of Sir Arthur C. Clarke.
Chair of Judges, Dr Andrew M. Butler, said:
I’m always impressed by the jury’s discussion and discernment in narrowing down our shortlist to a winner.
They picked Sierra Greer’s Annie Bot, a tightly-focused first person account of a robot designed to be the perfect companion who struggles to become free.
The Clarke Award winner was selected from a list of novels whose UK first edition was published in the previous calendar year by a judging panel composed of Dolly Garland and Gene Rowe for the British Science Fiction Association; Nic Clarke and John Coxon for the Science Fiction Foundation; and Glyn Morgan for the SCI-FI-LONDON film festival. Dr Andrew M. Butler represented the Arthur C. Clarke Award directors in a non-voting role as the Chair of the Judges.
The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden (Century, PRH)
The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands by Sarah Brooks (W&N, Orion)
The Book of Doors by Gareth Brown (Transworld, PRH)
The Silverblood Promise by James Logan (Arcadia, Quercus Books)
The award, judged by a team at Goldsboro Books in London, is called “the only prize that rewards storytelling in all genres – from romance, thrillers and ghost stories, to historical, speculative and literary fiction.” It is given annually to “a compelling novel with brilliant characterization and a distinct voice that is confidently written and assuredly realized”.
The complete longlist is at the link. The winner will receive £2,000 and a beautiful, handmade glass bell.
Named for Frank A. Munsey, publisher of the first pulp magazine, the award recognizes someone who has contributed to the betterment of the pulp community through disseminating knowledge, publishing, or other efforts to preserve and to foster interest pulp magazines.
The winner of the 2025 Munsey Award will be selected by a committee made up of all the living Lamont, Munsey, and Rusty Award recipients and announced on August 9 at PulpFest
The list of nominees and the citations that explain why they are up for this honor follows the jump.
Authors are reportedly being hit by negative reviews on the book review site Goodreads before proof copies are even circulated, with the review site allegedly failing to remove reviews.
Crime writer Jo Furniss was one of several authors to share her recent experience of the Amazon-owned review site with The Bookseller: “A lot of authors share the soul-destroying experience of seeing their books trashed before they are even available to genuine readers,” she said. “Worse, like me, they feel they are given no protection by one of the biggest platforms in the industry. What is Goodreads doing to protect authors from online abuse?”
In her comment piece for The Bookseller, Furniss wrote: “It is months until the publication of my next thriller, Guilt Trip (Bonnier Zaffre). The novel is not available anywhere yet. Not even advance review copies. So why does Guilt Trip already have a single two-star rating on Goodreads?
“That was my thought process when I skimmed over the title recently while on Goodreads doing pre-publication admin. I’m not a masochist, I don’t usually linger over bad reviews. But an impossible mystery intrigues me, so I clicked.”
After responding to the anonymous reviewer’s low rating, Furniss explained they then complained about the comment – which prompted an email from Goodreads explaining that it advises authors to “refrain from confronting users who give their books a low rating”. Her comment was then removed. She added: “That was on the 8th May. I followed up on my report of their behaviour and got a reply saying Goodreads will investigate. I followed up again and got no reply. I have heard nothing since [though the review has been removed after The Bookseller contacted Goodreads].”
She explained that she “doesn’t care about one petty review”, and said that: “It’s no more than a gnat bite on the thick skin you need for this business.” Furniss said that she cares more that she “doesn’t get the same protection as the troll”, adding: “Their actions are a form of online abuse. When Goodreads fails to respond to reports of harassment from members against authors, they let the abuse continue….
…In the online world of fanfiction writers, who pen stories inspired by their favorite movies, books, and games, and share them for free, there are unspoken codes of conduct. Among the most important: never charge money for your fanfic, and never steal other people’s work.
It makes sense then that fanfic writers were among the first creators to raise the alarm about their work being fed into learning language models powering generative AI without their knowledge or permission. But their efforts to stop the encroachment of AI into fan spaces is an uphill battle.
The latest salvo came in early April, when user nyuuzyou scraped 12.6 million fanfics from the online repository Archive of Our Own (AO3) and uploaded the dataset to Hugging Face, a company that hosts open-source AI models and software.
Nyuuzyou’s upload was quickly discovered by the Reddit community r/AO3, where hundreds of users posted furious reactions. A Tumblr account, ao3scrapesearch, built a search engine that allowed authors to search their usernames and see if their work had been scraped by Nyuuzyou….
…. In 2023 came Sudowrite’s Story Engine, powered in part by OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Nikki remembers watching a video about the new “writing assistant” AI software that allows users to enter details about characters and plot points and generate an entire novel. She was so appalled that it made her cry. Nikki, who works for a software company, had already seen her workplace shift toward integrating AI. But she hadn’t imagined her hobby would be impacted by it too.
“Trying to knock this stuff down, that’s probably the best thing that one can be doing now.”
Later that year, the prevalence of highly specific sexual terms related to the wolf-biology fanfiction trope of Omegaverse appeared in Sudowrite, revealing that ChatGPT had likely been trained on fanfic without the authors’ knowledge….
… But over the last few years, fanfic writers say there have been numerous examples of genAI entrepreneurs trying to cash in on their work — such as people like Cliff Weitzman, the CEO of text-to-voice app Speechify, who was found to have scraped thousands of fics from AO3 and uploaded them to WordStream, a website linked to his app, without the authors’ permission. (He swiftly removed that after fans pushed back on social media.) Then there was Lore.fm, a text-to-speech app from Wishroll Inc, which marketed itself on TikTok as “Audible for AO3.” The app was announced in May 2024 but was withdrawn later that month after fan pushback.
“It’s like a whack-a-mole thing. Every time you turn around, there’s, like, another grifter trying to steal your shit,” Nikki says.
It may seem odd to hear such a strong sentiment from a writer who, like most fanfic creators, uses copyrighted intellectual property as a “sandbox” to make up their own stories. But advocates for fanworks say they are “transformative,” meaning a “fanwork creator holds the rights to their own content, just the same as any professional author, artist, or other creator,” according to AO3….
Today I have an interview with Jaroslav Olša, Jr. about his brand-new book, Dreaming of Autonomous Vehicles: Miles (Miroslav) J. Breuer: Czech-American Writer and the Birth of Science Fiction (2025). In the book, he covers the life and career of Miles (Miroslav) J. Breuer (1889-1945), the first SF author to regularly write original stories for Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing…
Before we dive into the details of his fiction, what are two Breuer stories you recommend readers interested in the history of science fiction tackle?
Allow me to mention three stories, each for a different reason. The first one is “The Gostak and the Doshes” (1930) (in the March 1930 issue of Amazing Stories) (read online) definitely a tale that still has an important message today. It shows how fake news and media manipulation can change society—not for better but for worse, and that such fake news can even trigger war. This is probably the most mature of all Breuer’s stories. And one of only a few, which does not have either Czech or early English-language versions. It seems to me that this one was written originally for Amazing Stories.
The second story I would like to mention is “The Stone Cat” (1927) (read online). It is definitely not the most remarkable piece of Breuer’s writing, but it is an interesting example of how Breuer was writing and rewriting his short stories. Breuer was well aware that he had to adjust his stories to the audience that would read them—and “The Stone Cat” shows it the most of all his works as we have three different versions of it. It was the fifth short story Breuer ever published as early as 1909 when he was twenty years old. Seven years later he published it in Czech in a slightly revised version, which was localized for the Czech-American community. While these two editions were not known until recently, all historians know “The Stone Cat” was published—in a very different version—in 1927 Amazing Stories—it was Breuer’s second story published there. In all the versions we see his literary development…
(4) SCI-FI LONDON 48-HOUR CHALLENGE 2025 WINNERS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The Sci-fi London 48-hour challenge is open to all amateur film makers, who are told to include a prop and also given a line of dialogue to put in their film and then they go away and make a film in just two days. Some past winners have gone on to be film directors, including the 2008 winner Gareth Edwards who did Star Wars: Rogue One and The Creator, and whose next film is the next step in the Jurassic Park franchise.
This year the judges included author Adrian Tchaikovsky (who has a couple of books short-listed for this year’s Hugo).
A Russian missile and drone attack on Kyiv on June 17 destroyed a Ukrainian publishing house and damaged several other book-related businesses, the Ukrainian publishing industry news service Chytomo has reported. Ukrainian Priority Publishing was completely destroyed when Russian forces launched 175 drones, more than 14 cruise missiles, and at least two ballistic missiles at the Ukrainian capital and surrounding areas. The attack killed 28 people and damaged 27 sites across various districts.
“The Russian invaders targeted not only residential buildings and hospitals but finally struck a truly strategic site: our publishing house, Ukrainian Priority, was completely destroyed and burned to the ground,” Volodymyr Shovkoshytnyi, CEO of Ukrainian Priority Publishing, told Chytomo. “The office and warehouse are gone. Tens of thousands of books—over 130 titles—were turned to ash.”
Ukrainian Priority had previously lost an employee to the war when sales manager Valentyn Dobryi was killed at the front in November 2023 while serving as a volunteer with Ukrainian Armed Forces. After the June 17 attack, Shovkoshytnyi said he “sifted through the ashes of 14 years of my life,” but expressed determination to rebuild the company.
Їzhakultura Publishing’s office and storage space, located on the ground floor of a residential building, was also hit during the attacks. “The building sustained significant damage from the impact of fragments of a Russian cruise missile,” Artem Braichenko, cofounder of Їzhakultura Publishing, said. “The force of the explosion was so powerful that it caused structural deformation inside the building, including damage to the doors and walls of our office.”…
… The attacks came just a week after the 13th International Book Arsenal Festival was held in Kyiv for the third time since the war began. The country’s primary literary events attracted 30,000 attendees for some 200 events over three-and-a-half days, including 111 publishers and six bookstores….
(6) ON THE ROAD. Leigh Bardugo and John Picacio will be touring to celebrate their debut picture book release — The Invisible Parade.
Join us to talk art, storytelling, collaboration, and why we will always walk through those cemetery gates. You can bring books or art prints from home to get signed (limit 2 each for Leigh, and for me). You can ask us about old projects, new projects, adaptation, and everything in between. All events are ticketed. Limited seating. Get yours before they’re gone!
(7) HE’S HISTORY. Sahil Lavingia says the Codex writers community has banned him for reasons quoted in this post at X.com.
The group does not have a public-facing copy of its Code of Conduct on its website, but the Membership page does have this:
Codex is a privately run organization.
We reserve the right to decline an application or to close an account for any reason or no reason, especially in the case of grossly unprofessional or antagonistic behavior online or elsewhere. However, we’re glad to say this is hardly ever necessary.
Lavingia posted about his work in the journal “DOGE Days”. This is his May 25 entry.
I got the boot from DOGE.
I reached out to someone who wrote about Gumroad’s recent transition to open source. During the interview, which was then published in Fast Company, I was asked about my experience working at DOGE, which had been revealed publicly as part of a WIRED article.
Soon after publication, my access was revoked without warning.
The Short: I read The Cosmic Geoids: and One Other, a John Taine collection, 1949 Fantasy Publishing Company, Inc. The best thing about it are the Lou Goldstone illustrations and cover art. My overall average rating for the two novellas is 2.8/5, or “Poor”. Not recommended unless you are a huge fan of John Taine (Eric Temple Bell). Even then I have my doubts.
(9) CLUTE COLLECTION GIFTED TO TELLURIDE INSTITUTE. “Science-Fiction Library opens to public” reports Telluride News. Famed sff critic John Clute has transferred his over-13,000 volume collection to the Telluride Institute.
The habit of collecting books began early for John Clute, renowned author, literary critic and book collector. Inside a book he received for Christmas in 1948, he wrote, “John Clute Number 31.” He was eight years old at the time. Now, more than 13,703 distinct volumes from his private science fiction collection are on the shelves of the Clute Science Fiction Library at the Telluride Institute, where they will stay as a gift to the Telluride region.
Last week, Clute was in Telluride to assist while Henry Wessels, appraiser of antiquarian books, manuscripts and archives, went through the entire library to catalog and appraise the volumes. The appraisal was at the request of John and Pamela Lifton-Zoline, co-founders of Telluride Institute (TI). They accepted the collection from Clute in 2017.
“What’s really important here is the fact that Pam and John recently gifted the collection to the Telluride Institute,” said Dan Collins, president of TI board of trustees. “Before that, we didn’t have a legal kind of authority over the collection, but it was housed at the Institute and we understood that eventually, it would be given to the Institute, which it was in the last couple of months.”…
… Clute feels that Telluride is the perfect place to house the library. He has been collecting science fiction first editions and visiting Telluride since the 1970s.
“Telluride is an ideal cultural and physical place to have an accessible repository of knowledge,” he said. “This is a rural place, but also fundamentally urban in the best sense. A place like Telluride…is also romantic.”…
…Both Pam and her husband John also recommended the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Online. It’s Clute’s masterwork of collecting, an exhibit of science fiction story summaries and 35,000 scanned dust jackets from first editions in his libraries.
The dust jackets are critical pieces of the history carried by the genre.
“It’s an essential part of science fiction history, certainly in the 50s, 60s and 70s,” said Clute. “To understand the first appearance of many of these stories, which have become famous — or not — in the context of the time of their release. That moment, that significant moment in culture and in publishing history and the authors’ and the readers’ experience…What does it look like? and what are you being told? What did William Gibson’s ‘Neuromancer’ look like in 1984 when it came out?”
…Access to the library at 212 W. Colorado Ave. in Telluride is available by appointment for quiet reading, work, research and tours….
(10) HERE’S THE WINDUP AND THE WITCH. Charlie Jane Anders recommends “Eight Enchanting Novels About Witches” in the New York Times. (Link bypasses paywall.)
…I love reading about witches — and was eager to write about them in my new book, “Lessons in Magic and Disaster” — because it’s an identity that feels subversive and tied to a rebel glamour. Wizards attend fancy boarding schools: Witches gather furtively in the woods. Here are a few of my favorite, witchiest books….
Harkness, a real-life historian, writes engagingly about Diana Bishop, the scion of two powerful witch families who has turned her back on magic to pursue an academic career. While doing research at Oxford University, Diana uncovers a long-lost magical manuscript, which awakens her powers and attracts the attention of a charismatic vampire named Matthew Clairmont. Diana’s desire to hold onto academic respectability — even as a key primary source in her research turns out to be a secret magical book — feels utterly believable, and the confluence of magical politics, historical texture and romance provides an endless series of delights.
(11) MEMORY LANE.
[Item by Cat Eldridge.]
June 24, 1950 — Destination Moon on Dimension X
Seventy-five years ago on this date, the radio version of Robert Heinlein’s Destination Moon first aired on the Dimension X radio show.
It was episode twelve of the series.
Despite common belief that it based off the film version of Heinlein’s novel, it was not. It was instead based on Heinlein’s final draft of the film’s shooting script.
During the broadcast on June 24, 1950, the program was interrupted by a news bulletin announcing that North Korea had declared war on South Korea, marking the beginning of the Korean War.
A shortened version of this Destination Moon radio program was adapted by Charles Palmer and was released by Capitol Records for children.
(13) MARCHING TOWARDS AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #1000. Marvel Comics’ Amazing Spider-Man series hits issue #1000 next year. As part of the lead-up, artist Lee Bermejo will draw variant covers.
This September, Amazing Spider-Man #11, part of Joe Kelly, Pepe Larraz and John Romita Jr.’s hit current run, is the milestone 975th issue of Amazing Spider-Man, kicking off the countdown to the titles next monumental milestone—Amazing Spider-Man #1000! To help celebrate, superstar artist Lee Bermejo will draw a variant cover for each issue of Amazing Spider-Man starting with #11 and ending with next year’s 1000th issue, Amazing Spider-Man #36. The 25 Amazing Visions Variant Covers will depict key events in Spider-Man history, starting with his groundbreaking origin and first encounters with his most iconic supervillains!
(14) JEOPARDY! Andrew Porter was tuned in for tonight’s Jeopardy when this item came up.
Demet: Since Murderbot is genderless, were there any discussions about having a female actor? Or did you start just a male actor in mind?
Andrew: No, I think we were open to the best actor, the best opportunity, the best way to tell the story. It’s interesting because I’ve talked to, or I’ve read a lot and we’ve talked to a lot of different people, imagining who it could be in their own mind as readers, so there isn’t any one right way. What was important was to keep the character genderless in the show, referring to Murderbot as it, which when a male actor is playing, sometimes you run the risk… But it’s something that everyone took very seriously and was supportive of, and it was never a big deal. It was a matter of fact: this is who the character is.
The first new James Bond under the complete ownership of Amazon MGM Studios will make his debut in 2026, and he is young, brash, has a robust origin story and a mysterious scar on his right cheek … and is a playable character.
The future of the James Bond film franchise is still being written (Amy Pascal and David Heyman are hard at work on that), but the next chapter of James Bond the IP will begin next year, in what will be the first project to feature the iconic character since Amazon stunned the world by buying out control from Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson….
(17) NEW BOOKS FROM OUTER SPACE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.]In the current issue of the journal Science there were a number of fiction reviews of both SF and genre-adjacent fiction….
An astronaut hides her queer identity to protect her career. A museum researcher is detained while returning from international travel. A biologist grapples with extinction as war breaks out in Ukraine. A physicist confronts the off-Earth options for humanity. These themes, any of which might have been plucked from current headlines, are explored by the authors of this year’s summer reading selections—all of which are works of fiction. Some of the stories they tell employ dramatic satire and surreal scenarios to convey timely messages. (How better to discuss class inequality than through the murderous exploits of a mosquito-human hybrid?) Others—such as a tale of love that takes place during a catastrophic pandemic—feel closer to reality, even if the fictional virus wreaking havoc is more “undeadly” than deadly. Whether probing the lasting legacies of slavery and colonialism, interrogating humanity’s future with robots, or exposing the fallout of research misconduct, the books reviewed here entertain even as they offer thoughtful commentary on contemporary issues of interest to scientists and engineers….
(18) NEW AI HAS SCIENCE REASONING. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.]Current Artificial Intelligence (AI) can piece together disparate bits of knowledge from material on which it has been ‘trained’ which is all well and good. What it cannot do with any confidence is infer meaningful inferences about material on which it has not been trained. (Some AI have exhibited meaningful insights but only in a limited way.) A news item in this week’s Nature reports on a new AI, ether0.
Ether0 is an open source AI released 5th June 2025 from the FutureHouse, California, 2023 start-up company. It is trained on the laws of chemistry and can generate the formula of chemical compounds for possible pharmaceutical use. One of the innovations of this AI is that questions do not have to be in-putted by chemical formula but by spoken plain English. What is more it tracks its thoughts in English: AIs tend to be a ‘black box’ with their workings out hidden from questioners and operators. It works by merging the reasoning chains from a specialist AI, DeepSeek-R1 to generate seven models. Then each model was then tweaked with ‘enhancement’ (or ‘rewards’) for correct answers to a set of 500,000 chemistry questions. The resulting output model was the ether0 AI and it is more intuitive than other chemistry AIs to date. Some members of the FutureHouse predict that within two years most chemistry hypotheses put forward for science research may be generated by ether0 or future models like it.
I have always told folk that the machines are taking over but no-one ever listens…! The good news here is that of all the areas of science, chemistry has defined rules albeit complex ones including electron shell energies, chemical bond strength, atom movement within molecules and so forth. Other science is a little different. Biology tends to be a bit messy due to ill-defined, highly complex biological systems (try accurately modelling a tropical rain forest), and physics has gaping holes (such as whatever it is that merges quantum mechanics with special relativity). But this new chemistry AI could be a sort of analogous development akin to old computer programmes of the 1980s that could play chess compared to today’s sophisticated, 21st century, global climate models.
[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern. For those trying to decipher the title reference, Dern points to the lyrics of “One Meatball (and no spaghetti)” Also, remember our obscure tradition of referring to cats as Social Justice Credentials.]
Returning after a four-year hiatus, the award celebrates the best in Canadian fantastika published during the previous calendar year. Winners receive a medallion that incorporates the Sunburst logo. The winner receives a cash prize of $3,000.
Ghan, Ben Berman — The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits (Buckrider Books)
Hegele, Sydney — Bird Suit (Invisible Publishing)
Hopkinson, Nalo — Blackheart Man (Simon & Schuster)
Lubrin, Canisia — Code Noir (Alfred A. Knopf Canada)
Oliveira, Anthony — Dayspring (Strange Light)
O’Neill, Heather — The Capital of Dreams (HarperCollins)
Sawyer, Robert J. — The Downloaded (Shadowpaw Press)
Smith, Clayton B. — A Seal of Salvage (Breakwater Books)
The Sunburst official shortlist will be announced in July. Sunburst winners will be announced in the fall.
The jurors for the 2025 Award are authors Natalee Caple, Geoff Ryman, and Lorina Stephens. There were 78 books submitted to be considered for the 2025 Award.
The Sunburst Award takes its name from the debut novel of the late Phyllis Gotlieb, one of the first published authors of contemporary Canadian Speculative Fiction.
When Nicolas Vermont entered the greenhouse, he would make a gruesome discovery. It was the early 20th century in rural France, and Nicolas was visiting his uncle – a scientist and surgeon called Dr Frédéric Lerne – after 15 years apart. However, he had soon grown suspicious about his uncle’s odd behaviour, so for answers had decided to explore the grounds of his relative’s estate late at night.
Inside a greenhouse in the garden, Nicolas discovered that Dr Lerne had been conducting disturbing scientific experiments. At first, he saw plants grafted onto one another: a cactus growing a geranium flower, and an oak tree sprouting cherries and walnuts. His uneasy curiosity, though, soon turned to dread. ‘It was then that I touched the hairy plant. Having felt the two treated leaves, so like ears, I felt them warm and quivering,’ he recalled. Grafted onto the stem were the parts of an animal: the ears of a dead rabbit. ‘My hand, clenched with repugnance, shook off the memory of the contact as it would have shaken off some hideous spider.’ [Quotations from published English-language editions translated by Brian Stableford; the rest are the author’s own.]
Dr Lerne was in fact an impostor. His assistant Otto Klotz had stolen the true uncle’s body through a brain swap, and would not hesitate to punish Nicolas for his ill-placed curiosity… by transplanting his consciousness into the body of a bull.
Le docteur Lerne, sous-dieu (1908), or ‘Dr Lerne, Demi-God’, was a celebrated novel by Maurice Renard, hailed by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire as a ‘subdivine novel of metamorphoses’.Published in English as New Bodies for Old, it heralded the dawn of a new French literary genre – one that ventured boldly into the uncertain and the unknown. Renard called it ‘merveilleux-scientifique’ (‘scientific-marvellous’) and its ambition was to help the reader speculate on what could be, and on what exists beyond the reach of our senses, rather than what will be. In other words, allowing a better understanding of what Renard poetically called ‘the imminent threats of the possible’. As he wrote in 1914, the goal was to ‘patrol the margins of certainty, not to acquire knowledge of the future, but to gain a greater understanding of the present’.
Rejecting the ‘scientific adventure’ storytelling of the celebrated French sci-fi writer Jules Verne – who had died only three years before the publication of Le docteur Lerne, sous-dieu – the merveilleux-scientifique genre was grounded in plausibility and the scientific method. According to Renard, only one physical, chemical or biological law may be altered when telling a story. This strict discipline, he argued, is what lent the genre its power to sharpen the reader’s mind, by offering a wholly original kind of thought experiment….
(2) CYBILS HIATUS. The CYBILS (Children’s and Young Adults Book Lovers’ Literary) Awards have announced “We’re Taking a Break, Sort-of”. They’ll be doing something besides giving their customary set of annual awards.
…As the Board of a literary award aimed at celebrating children and young adult book lovers, we can’t see just continuing on with the award while books, reading, and learning is under attack. We refuse to simply pretend that everything is normal.
We believe that
Books are treasures to be discovered.
Books are explorations to be celebrated.
Books are gifts to be shared.
That’s why, in 2025 the usual nomination and award cycle of the CYBILS Award is going on hiatus in favor of sharing books that we love, that we’d like you to love.
We’ll be book-talking fiction and nonfiction, picture books, graphic novels, science fiction, fantasy, and mysteries. We’ll share books with diverse characters of varied genders, races, cultures, socioeconomic statuses, abilities, and orientations. We’ll talk about books that reflect our world, and we hope you’ll stick around on our social media platforms to celebrate these books with us.
After three conventions in four weekends, I finally catch my breath to celebrate several important personal comic book anniversaries, sort through Marie Severin’s classic covers, realize my discovery of horror comics was topsy-turvy, fail to answer a question about how to break into comics, remember Stan Lee’s fear of the word “horror,” appreciate the increased respect professional writing organizations are now paying comics, look back at the day Jim Shooter stopped sharing original art with writers, wrestle with the morality of my original art collection, and more.
In addition to the direct link, here’s a link to a dozen possible places to listen — https://pod.link/1775481331.
Scott Edelman and Joyce Carol Oates at StokerCon 2025.
(4) A HUNGRY FUTURE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Two papers in this week’s Nature do not bode well for a business-as-usual climate future. The first looks at drought, and the second at food supply.
With regard to the first we (those scientists who look at climate change) for decades, have had a very unscientific rule of thumb that wetter areas would become wetter and drier areas drier. The former because in a warmer world there is more ocean evaporation hence more rain, and the latter because in a warmer world dry becomes dryer. Of course, we all knew that this was a very rough rule of thumb as site-specific locality can knock this rule of thumb for six and other factors (such as seasonality – the nature of different seasons) are key.
Anyway, the first paper looks at how in a warmer world the air has the potential to hold more water vapour. The shortfall between atmospheric water content and the potential to hold water provides a metric called atmospheric evaporative demand (AED). The researchers looked at half-decade world data (2018-2022) and here areas of drought have expanded by 74% compared to the 1981-2017 average and over half of this, the research concludes, was due to increased AED. (By the way, if you are a Filer living in the USA then it is not good news for those in the inland south-western US… Northern US and Canada fare better.)
Of course, agricultural crops need water, and the second paper looks at what agricultural data from 12,658 regions will be impacted. These regions account for two-thirds of current global (calorific) agricultural output. Looking at six staple crops (maize, soybean, rice, wheat, cassava and sorghum) the researchers found that on average for every 1.0’C warming 120 kilocalories (kcal) per person per day from agriculture is lost. (For reference, on average a person needs around 2,000 kcal perday.) The real picture is more complicated as some of this loss can be offset by adaptation and some by expanding agriculture in areas likely to be more favourable to agriculture in a warmer world. There will be losers (mainly farmers in today’s breadbasket areas) and potential winners (areas likely to become more favourable to agriculture in a warmer world). Here farmers in northern Europe and Canada are likely to be among the winners.
Of course, politicians are free to deny that human-induced climate change is taking place if they think that will benefit their electoral chances and/or serve their constituents well. (There are some in most countries, naming no names.) However, nature takes no notice of political views. If any deny the science then they are welcome to try ignorance and see where that gets them.
End-of-century business-as-usual (no greenhouse emission reductions) maize yield projections. Dark red = -100%. Dark blue = +100%. Very light yellow/green close to zero percentage change.
(5) FOUNDATION SEASON 3. Apple TV+ has released a trailer for the third season of Foundation, based on Isaac Asimov’s stories. The 10-episode season will debut globally with one episode on July 11, followed by new episodes every Friday through September 12.
(6) LINDA EVANS (1958-2023). Baen author Linda Evans died June 13, 2023 at the age of 64. Her passing was just brought to my attention. Evans produced ten novels and four anthologies, as well as of several other novels co-authored with David Weber, John Ringo, and Robert Asprin.
She also worked for 28 years at the University of Florida as a writer, editor, webmaster and web graphic designer, photographer and print-document graphic designer, marketing and public relations specialist, event coordinator, and international-visitor tour organizer.
(7) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
June 23, 1976 — Logan’s Run
By Paul Weimer. My first encounter with Logan’s Run was not the movie, but the book. But it was a version of the book that prepped me for the movie. It was the early 1980s and I was dipping through my brother’s collection of SF paperbacks in my quest to read science fiction and fantasy and came across this slightly squashed copy of the book. Now, in those early days when Mammoths roamed the world, some books that had been turned into movies would have material tied to the movie. In this case, in the center of that old paperback, there were a few pages of still images from the movie.
So I sat down to read the book and was confused by the images. If you have read the book and seen the movie, you will know that the two part ways pretty definitively and drastically. So when the stills included stuff nowhere near the book, young me was pretty confused as to this, since I had still not seen the movie. The book made an impression, since three decades later, while in western South Dakota, I went to Crazy Horse, and was rather disappointed at how unimpressive it was compared to the completed version in the book. Logan’s Run was also the first SF book I read with a fair amount of sex in it (face it, Logan gets it on quite a bit).
It was years later that I saw the movie and finally it all came full circle. The movie is pure cheese in parts, and unintentionally funny, and less dark than the book (consider the character of Box, who is dangerous and funny in the movie, and dangerous and sadistic in the book). The movie also is unintentionally dark in that probably the population of the destroyed city is going to all starve and die, whereas Logan’s escape in the book is much more personal. I do like the visuals of the movie and in some ways those visuals have infected my reading of the book (which I re-read a couple of years ago).
1970’s science fiction, for better or worse, Logan’s Run is perhaps the definitive example in a way that Silent Running and its other kin can’t quite match.
It takes two to tango. Or at least to imitate a total solar eclipse from space.
Two spacecraft orbiting Earth have begun to mimic the phenomenon, with images from one of the duo’s successful early attempts unveiled on June 16. These artificial eclipses — produced when one satellite blocks the other’s view of the sun — will help researchers better understand the solar system’s star, specifically its outermost atmosphere: the corona.
“It was so incredible,” says solar physicist Andrei Zhukov of the Royal Observatory of Belgium in Brussels, who works on the mission. “We could see the corona without any special image processing. It was just visible there, like during a natural total solar eclipse.”…
Note, DDG-searching “science news artificial eclipse satellites” turns up several other interesting-looking hits, with (based on the summary link page) a bunch of good summary sentences. Here are a couple more:
ESA’s Proba-3 mission has achieved a spacefaring marvel: two satellites flying in perfect formation to mimic total solar eclipses on demand. Their first artificial eclipse delivered breathtaking images of the Sun’s outer atmosphere, offering scientists an unprecedented glimpse into the solar corona…
A pair of European satellites have created the first artificial solar eclipses by flying in precise and fancy formation, providing hours of on-demand totality for scientists.. The European Space Agency released the eclipse pictures at the Paris Air Show on Monday. Launched late last year, the orbiting duo have churned out simulated solar eclipses since March…
…The difference is that we can create our eclipse once every 19.6-hour orbit, while total solar eclipses only occur naturally around once, very rarely twice a year. On top of that, natural total eclipses only last a few minutes, while Proba-3 can hold its artificial eclipse for up to six hours….
Spectacular views of distant galaxies, giant dust clouds and hurtling asteroids have been revealed in the first images captured by a groundbreaking telescope that is embarking on a 10-year survey of the cosmos.
The stunning pictures from the $810m (£595m) Vera C Rubin observatory in Chile mark the start of what astronomers believe will be a gamechanging period of discovery as the telescope sets about compiling the best view yet of the universe in action.
In about 10 hours of observations, the observatory spotted 2,104 previously unspotted asteroids in our solar system, including seven near-Earth asteroids, which were said to pose no danger to the planet.
“I’m absolutely blown away. Just look, it’s teeming with gorgeous glittering galaxies!” said Prof Catherine Heymans, an astrophysicist at the University of Edinburgh and Scotland’s astronomer royal.
“I’m so delighted that they chose Virgo for the ‘first look’ as it celebrates a key moment in humanity’s dark matter story. It was 1930s observations of the Virgo and Coma clusters that prompted Fritz Zwicky to conclude there must be extra invisible dark matter out there.”
Built on Cerro Pachón, a mountain in the foothills of the Chilean Andes, the 18-storey observatory is equipped with the largest camera ever built. It will observe the entire southern sky every three to four days and then repeat the process, over and over, for a decade.
(12) HATE AT HOGWARTS? [Item by N.] In “You Can’t Separate Harry Potter from J.K. Rowling,” video essayist Princess Weekes argues that the art (and its franchise) can’t be separated from the artist when the artist profits off of it—and the artist uses said profit to fund anti-trans legislation.
(13) SOMEBODY’S SANDMAN. Meanwhile, Netflix seems to be depending on their viewers believing in the separability of Neil Gaiman from the series adapted from his work. “The Sandman: Season 2” releases in two parts next month, Volume 1 on July 3, followed by Volume 2 on July 24.
Animation World Network has completely bought in, going so far as to say, “The series is based on the beloved DC comic series by Neil Gaiman, Sam Keith, and Mike Dringenberg.” Beloved, no less.
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Daniel Dern, N., Nate Hoffelder, F. Brett Cox, Scott Edelman, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day John A Arkansawyer.]
The shortlists for the 2025 British Fantasy Awards have been released, along with the names of the jurors who will decide the winners.
The winners will be announced at an awards ceremony at World Fantasy Convention in Brighton, held from October 30 to November 2.
The nominees are…
BEST ANTHOLOGY
Nova Scotia 2, edited by Neil Williamson and Andrew J Wilson – Luna Press Publishing
I Want That Twink Obliterated!, edited by Trip Galey, C.L. McCartney, and Robert Berg – Bona Books
Fight Like A Girl 2, edited by Roz Clarke and Joanne Hall – Wizard’s Tower Press
Heartwood: A Mythago Wood Anthology, edited by Dan Coxon- PS Publishing
The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction (2023), edited by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki and Chinaza Eziaghighala – Caezik SF & Fantasy
Bury Your Gays – An Anthology of Tragic Queer Horror, edited Sofia Ajram – Ghoulish Books
Jurors: Kristen Platt, Steven French, Ariana Weldon, Stuart Conover, Jacqui Greaves
BEST ARTIST
Jenni Coutts
Kelly Chong
Greg Chapman
L N Bayen
Jurors: Sophie Jarrell, Donna Scott, Addison Smith, Ben Moxon, Kate Towner
BEST AUDIO
Podcastle
The Tiny Bookcase
Breaking the Glass Slipper
Pseudopod
Jurors: Elizabeth Elliott, Marc Bitterli, Jo Ross-Barrett, Edward Partridge, Graham Millichap
BEST COLLECTION
Dirt Upon My Skin – Steve Toase – Black Shuck Books
Limelight and Other Stories – Lyndsey Croal – Shortwave Publishing
Mood Swings – Dave Jeffery – Black Shuck Books
Preaching To The Perverted – James Bennett – Lethe Press
Elephants in Bloom – Cecile Cristofari – Newcon Press
Jurors: Rosemarie Cawkwell, Heather Valentine, Ed Fortune, Mark Findlater, Rick Danforth
BEST FANTASY NOVEL
The Green Man’s War – Juliet E. McKenna – Wizard’s Tower Press
Fathomfolk – Eliza Chan – Orbit
Long Live Evil – Sarah Rees Brennan – Orbit
A Shadow Over Haven – David Green – Eerie River Publishing
Masquerade – O.O. Sangoyomi – Forge Books
Jurors: Rhian Drinkwater, Jackson P. Brown, Suleman Kurd, Mira Manga, Sarah Gray
BEST HORROR NOVEL
Withered Hill – David Barnett – Canelo Horror
The Ravening – Daniel Church – Angry Robot
Among The Living – Tim Lebbon – Titan Books
Bury Your Gays – Chuck Tingle – Titan Books
My Darling Dreadful Thing – Johanna van Veen – Poisoned Pen Press
Feast While You Can – Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta – Grand Central Publishing
Jurors: Laura Langrish, Tam Moules, Arden Fitzroy, Erin Hardee, Corinne Pollard
BEST INDEPENDENT PRESS
Newcon Press
Black Shuck Books
Flame Tree Press
Luna Press Publishing
Swan River Press
Jurors: Andy Angel, Melanie Bell, Miguel R Peck, Alia McKellar, Bronte Rowan
BEST MAGAZINE / PERIODICAL
ParSec
Interzone
Phantasmagoria
Ginger Nuts of Horror
Jurors: Melissa Ren, Daniel S. Katz, Jonathan Laidlow, Anna Agaronyan, Hero Owen
BEST NEWCOMER
Eliza Chan – Fathomfolk – Orbit
Lyndsey Croal – Limelight and Other Stories – Shortwave Publishing
Frances White – Voyage of the Damned – Penguin Michael Joseph
L N Bayen – Wingspan of Treason – Bregma Publishing
J.L Odom – By Blood, By Salt – Azimuth
Adrian M Gibson – Mushroom Blues
Jurors: Lexie Way, Devindran Jeyathurai, Talia Nusbaum, Nicolas Gonzalez, Alasdair Stuart
BEST NON-FICTION
Spec Fic for Newbies Vol 2: A Beginner’s Guide to Writing More Subgenres of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror – Tiffani Angus and Val Nolan – Luna Press
Autism and Writing – David Green – BFS Blog
The Full Lid – Alasdair Stuart, edited by Marguerite Kenner
Queer as Folklore: The Hidden Queer History of Myths and Monsters – Sacha Coward – Unbound
Translating, Interpreting, and Decolonizing Chinese Fairy Tales: A Case Study and Ideological Approach (Studies in Folklore and Ethnology: Traditions, Practices, and Identities) – Juwen Zhang – Lexington Books
Comic-Con has announced that L.A. Strong Charity Comic, a fundraiser organized by Mad Cave Studios to aid those in the comics industry affected by the L.A. wildfires, is the recipient of the 2025 Bob Clampett Humanitarian Award.
Bob Clampett. Image by Milton Caniff.
“The comic book industry pulled together to support fellow creators who lost homes to the tragic 2025 Los Angeles fires with this benefit anthology special. Featuring contributions from Barbara Kesel, Brian Azzarello, Brian Michael Bendis, Christos Gage, Dan DiDio, Daniel Kibblesmith, Frank Tieri, Greg Pak, Jimmy Palmiotti, Jody Houser, Marv Wolfman, Paul Cornell, Rob DenBleyker, Sina Grace, Stephanie Phillips, Steve Orlando, Alex Cormack, Alison Sampson, Amanda Conner, Christian Ward, Geraldo Borges, Ian Churchill, Michael Avon Oeming, Nico Leon, Rian Gonzales, Salvador Larroca, Sami Kivelä, and many, many more. Together, as a community, we stood L.A. strong for one another.”
The launch event for the comic, held in March at the Revenge Of store, included a charity auction. Retailers including Cosmic Monkey Comics, East Side Mags, Skylight Books, Vroman’s Bookstore, Book Soup, Collector’s Paradise, and Golden Apple Comics generously donated original art, signed items, and collectibles to support the fundraiser.
The L.A. Strong charity comic has raised over $25,000 to date, with proceeds going directly to comic book creators who lost homes in the L.A. wildfires.
Comic-Con’s Humanitarian Award is presented in the name of famed animator Bob Clampett, who created the TV series Beany and Cecil, designed such popular characters as Porky Pig and Tweety Bird, and directed 84 classic Warner Bros. cartoons. Clampett was a regular guest at Comic-Con in the 1970s and early 1980s. After his death in 1984, the award was created to honor those people in comics and the popular arts who have worked to help others. The recipients are chosen by the Comic-Con Committee.
The award will be presented by Ruth Clampett (Bob’s daughter) during the Eisner Awards ceremony on Friday, July 25 at the Hilton Bayfront Hotel.
Alex Dueben: Before we get into your new book, I’m curious about where this series started. Was it the design of the world? Was it the characters?
Malka Older: There were two starting points. A long time ago, I had this sort of “what if” thought that is the beginning of a lot of fiction– and science fiction—which was, how would humans inhabit a gas giant planet? I had this idea of platforms that would be on a ring that was geosynchronous, so it would be revolving. At the same time, I had this idea that people would want to have some interaction with animals and so, there would be this zoo that existed there. That was a long time ago, and it didn’t go anywhere immediately….
…I’m going to list the novels in the order I plan to put them on the ballot. I will say that my first-place choice is fixed, and my last-place choice is fixed — but in all honesty the four novels in the middle could have gone in any order. I’ll also link to my reviews of the books — just click on the titles. At the end I’ll share my personal nomination ballot — which had only one book on it that made the final ballot. That said, the four books in the middle of my nomination list might possibly have vied for a couple of spots between them on my list of nominations….
(3) MATS STRANDBERG WILL MISS ARCHIPELACON.[Item by Nina Törnudd.] Unfortunately, Archipelacon 2 has had a Guest of Honour cancel his participation. A member of Mats Strandberg’s family is ill, and he is therefore unable to travel to Mariehamn.
Mats will be participating in two programme items remotely.
A teaser for a TV series based on his book Färjan (Blood Cruise) has been released this weekend by SVT, the Swedish national broadcasting company. The series will be out later this year, I suspect sometime around Halloween.
It’s almost 50 years since one of the strangest records ever made was launched – not into the pop charts but into the farthest reaches of outer space. Known as the Golden Record, this 12-inch, gold-plated copper disc was an album compiled by astronomer Carl Sagan featuring everything from classical music and spoken-word greetings to the sounds of nature and a blast of Chuck Berry’s Jonny B Goode. Humans could enjoy it, of course, but they weren’t the target audience. Rather, a copy was placed on Voyager 1 and 2, the two space probes launched in 1977, in the hope that they would one day be discovered and listened to by an alien life form.
The Golden Record came with various diagrammatic instructions on how to play it correctly. But as to what aliens might make of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto, the sounds of humpback whales and a greeting in the Chinese dialects Wu, we will never know. Both Voyager probes are still intact, currently hurtling through the Kuiper belt in interstellar space, but we are likely to lose contact with them in around a decade’s time. This means we will miss the Golden Record’s first realistic chance of being discovered – when it’s expected to pass within 1.6 light years of the star Gliese 445 in 40,000 years’ time.
And yet the record continues to inspire. It’s certainly the key influence behind Earth Rising: Messages from the Pale Blue Dot, the first in a series of three audio works by arts organisation Artangel that are being released on digital platforms in the run-up to the Golden Record’s 50th anniversary….
… The result is a collection of poems and experimental compositions that grapple with our present moment. Sebastián Riffo Valdebenito creates a track from the sounds of rock carving at the petroglyph site of Valle del Encanto in Coquimbo, Chile, while Michel Nieva contributes The Alien Mother, a short story set in a future where humanity has colonised Mars. Elsewhere, there are poems about US turmoil, ethereal songs created using just the human voice, and what is described as a “sonic invocation” that honours the calabash, a hard-shelled type of fruit used to make instruments. It’s almost as diverse and confounding as the Golden Record itself which, along with its various audio recordings, featured 115 images encoded in analogue form (a circle, a track athlete, etc) and a condensed recording of Sagan’s wife’s brainwaves, captured while she thought deeply about the Earth’s history and various human experiences such as falling in love (I’d like to see you work that one out, aliens!)….
(5) WILBUR SMITH WRITING PRIZE NEWS. The shortlist for the 2025 Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize was announced June 4. The six novels and their authors in the running for the £10,000 award.
Babylonia by Costanza Casati (Penguin Michael Joseph)
Water Moon by Samantha Sotto Yambao (Bantam, Transworld, Penguin Random House)
Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Orion Publishing Group)
Babylonia, Sycorax, and Water Moon are works of genre interest.
(6) LOCKED ROOMS LOCKED SLADEK OUT OF MYSTERY MARKET. [Item by Cora Buhlert.] Martin Edwards, who is a big deal in the UK crime and mystery scene (he is the president of the Detection Club, consultant to the British Library’s Crime Classics reprint series, and former Chair of the CWA) reviews one of John Sladek’s forays into the mystery genre and also explains why Sladek only wrote two mysteries – because the type of mysteries he preferred to write were unfashionable at the time and didn’t sell well: “Forgotten Book – Black Aura” at ‘Do You Write Under Your Own Name?’
Timing is everything in the world of writing, as so often it is in many walks of life. John Sladek’s misfortune was to demonstrate a mastery of the locked room mystery at a time when that delightful form of detective fiction was deeply unfashionable. He was primarily a science fiction writer, but he published two books of this type before giving up on mysteries.
As Sladek said in an interview with David Langford in 1982, ‘those two novels suffered mainly from being written about 50 years after the fashion for puzzles of detection. I enjoyed writing them, planning the absurd crimes and clues, but I found I was turning out a product the supermarket didn’t need any more – stove polish or yellow cakes of laundry soap. One could starve very quickly writing locked-room mysteries like those. SF has much more glamour and glitter attached to it, in these high-tech days.’ How lucky we fans of detective fiction are that the wheel has turned full circle, and locked room puzzles (genuine locked room puzzles, as well as the ‘closed circle’ mysteries that are similarly if erroneously badged) are all the rage….
“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose,” goes the famous Dr. Seuss refrain – and the late author’s universe of characters are steering directly towards YouTube.
Dr. Seuss Enterprises is today launching Seuss Circle Time, an eight-part YouTube summer takeover series that supports early learning through storytelling, singing, dancing and interactive play. This is part of a major investment into the company’s YouTube channel following a massive spike in viewership.
The show will be hosted by presenters Ziggy and Tizzie and Dr. Seuss’ characters, with each 30-minute episode featuring music, games and learning activities in imaginative settings such as the Circle Time House and Truffula Forest, before hour-long episodes begin in September….
…The series comes after the Dr. Seuss YouTube channel relaunched with new investment in July 2024, leading to subscriber growth of 1,084% and viewing up 993%, according to its own analysis….
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
June 22, 1947 — Octavia Butler. (Died 2006.)
By Paul Weimer: The first Octavia Butler story I encountered caused me not to read more of her work for over a decade afterwards.
The year was 1984. I was a young SF reader. Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine was one of the things I read as part of my SF education. June 1984 had a striking cover image for Octavia Butler’s story Bloodchild that drew my eye right away. I had to Know More!
But then I read the story itself. A hard-hitting Butler with an emphasis on biology, and the idea of human men becoming part of a life cycle of aliens’ breeding, I was, to say the least, a little traumatized at the idea of someone being a host for parasitic alien eggs! I got right away the parallels Butler was making and as a reader I was poleaxed.
I decided that Butler was Not for Me (or, Too Much For Me) and did not read her again for years.
Finally, I was persuaded to give Butler another go, and I picked up Wild Seed. This experience was completely and rather different. I was absolutely struck by the power and grace of her imagination, her consummate writing skill, and (yes) her ability to make me feel. I didn’t mind that I had started the series out of order, I was sucked in right away and was absorbed by the book, its pair of main characters, and the world Butler has made.
I then went on to other books in the Patterrnist sequence, the Parable novels, and in general, steadily consumed her oeuvre ever since. One of the best SF writers of all time? I don’t think that’s a stretch. Taken from us too soon? Absolutely yes, no question. (Recall that she won a MacArthur Award Genius grant, in addition to her SFF awards and nominations)
And yes, I have given Bloodchild another read…and yes, it STILL freaks me out. Some things never do change.
While I think her Parable books are the most timely books for today (and the ones I would push into the hands of interested readers), my favorite Octavia Butler piece might not be a novel at all, but rather the short story “Speech Sounds”. It focuses on her biological SF concerns, describing the aftermath of a plague which renders nearly everyone unable to speak. For those who still can talk…life is not precisely pleasant in the post-plague Los Angeles. But the bonds and the character development and worldbuilding packed into the short space of the story show just what Butler could do as a writer.
For those interested, I recount in even more detail my experience with Octavia Butler and her work in an essay in the anthology Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler, edited by Alexandra Pierce and Mimi Mondal (Twelfth Planet Press, 2017). One of the weirdest things I’ve ever had as a SFF person is someone wanting me to sign my essay in their copy of the book. I attribute that to the power Octavia Butler has, not mine own modest talents.
(10) 4E IN THIS MONTH’S MEGAZINE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] This month’s Judge Dredd Megazine (no. 481) is just out with much that is splundig from the Dredd-verse. Included in the mix is a story in the occasional series ‘Tales From The Black Museum’. These concern artefacts the Justice Department came across in their various investigations. Notable for SF fans in this month’s ‘Black Museum’ story is Forrest (4E) Ackerman being name-checked. Well, he was a notable collector and this month’s story is all about collectors fighting over an item. See below….
(11) FITTED FOR SPACE. [Item by Steven French.] Cori Winrock juxtaposes the lunar astronauts spacesuits with Emily Dickinson’s famous white dress in The Paris Review and recalls whose expertise was eventually called upon to stitch the former: “Dickinson’s Dresses on the Moon”.
How many worlds can a garment inhabit at one time? Let me reverse some of its stitches. In the city where I will be born an inventor will begin a humble company making latex bathing caps and swimwear. The company will grow larger, move cities, divide itself into different cells, some for the war effort and some for more commercial manufacturing. After the war, women from surrounding towns will be hired to work on the lines at a newly announced division, Playtex, stitching bras and diaper covers and latex-dipping “living” girdles. Twenty plus years into the future, it’s seamstresses at Playtex who are initially tapped to move over to the handcrafting of space suits for the NASA astronauts.
Every other company’s proposal for dressing and encasing the interstellar body in a military-engineered solution will fail. Their armor-like designs incapable of mimicking the human form or allowing a body to move with enough grace in low gravity. Hard-shell relics unsuited to carrying anyone to the moon. Playtex’s flexible rubber girdle and the bra’s nylon tricot was, is, and will be the secret to fitting women’s earthly bodies into the restrictive garments of Dior’s postwar New Look and the astronaut’s bodies into space suits. A garment that holds both a future and a past body in its fabric. An impossible, other-worldly, fantastical body achievable only through an adept understanding of how to alter the figure underneath the architectural lines of the clothing. In other words, through the illusion technology of undergarments.
Much of the language for the technical components and construction of the lunar space suits will be of the body: bladder, ribbed rings, webbing, joints. A language of intimacy and interiority. A language the seamstresses will already understand. Closer to earlier forms of embodiment in which we clothe a spirit with a body—a space suit: both an embodied body and an intervention of the body. The interior of the space suit touching the exterior of the body. The exterior touching endlessness. Each latex-dipped component a well-guarded technique to a fragile body dazzling us while bouncing through airlessness. Each of the space suit’s seventeen concentric sheets of mylar glued by the seamstresses, thinner than single-thread lace. A body kept safe in the vastness of space through couture handiwork—a reseau of women rendering the moon possible with precision stitching and cutting and gluing. An abundance of hours.’
For years, astronomers have been searching for a mysterious ninth planet lurking in the dark outer reaches of our solar system. Now, a team of researchers have taken a completely different approach to this cosmic detective story—instead of looking for reflected sunlight, they’re hunting for the planet’s own heat signature.
The story begins with a puzzle in the outer solar system. Scientists noticed that small icy bodies called Kuiper Belt Objects, which orbit far beyond Neptune, seem to be clustered together in unusual ways. Their orbits are aligned in patterns that shouldn’t exist by chance alone. The leading and most tantalizing explanation…. a massive, undiscovered planet (dubbed “Planet Nine”) is gravitationally shepherding these distant objects into their strange orbits.
If it exists, Planet Nine would be a true giant, roughly 5–10 times the mass of Earth, orbiting somewhere between 400–800 times farther from the sun than our planet does. At such an enormous distance, it would be incredibly faint and nearly impossible to spot with traditional telescope searches that rely on detecting reflected sunlight.
This is where the new research gets ingenious. Led by Amos Chen from the National Tsing Hua University, the team realized that searching for Planet Nine’s heat signature could be far more effective than looking for its reflected light. Here’s why: When you double the distance from the sun, reflected light becomes 16 times fainter (following what scientists call an inverse fourth-power relationship). But thermal radiation, the heat that all objects naturally emit, only becomes four times fainter when you double the distance….
Time, not space plus time, might be the single fundamental property in which all physical phenomena occur, according to a new theory by a University of Alaska Fairbanks scientist.
The theory also argues that time comes in three dimensions rather than just the single one we experience as continual forward progression. Space emerges as a secondary manifestation.
“These three time dimensions are the primary fabric of everything, like the canvas of a painting,” said associate research professor Gunther Kletetschka at the UAF Geophysical Institute. “Space still exists with its three dimensions, but it’s more like the paint on the canvas rather than the canvas itself.”
Those thoughts are a marked difference from generally accepted physics, which holds that a single dimension of time plus the three dimensions of space constitute reality. This is known as spacetime, the concept developed more than a century ago that views time and space as one entity.
Kletetschka’s mathematical formula of six total dimensions—of time and space combined—could bring scientists closer to finding the single unifying explanation of the universe.
(14) GAY ASTRONAUTS STILL STRUGGLE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.]There is a new documentary film out, SALLY directed by Cristina Costantini, which is a biography of NASA space shuttle astronaut Sally Ride. She started basic astronaut training in 1978. In 1981, she was the capsule communicator based at Houston Mission Control with second and third space shuttle flights. In 1982, she was selected to fly on the Challenger shuttle the next year. Reporters then asked Sally questions such as how she would manage to wear a bra in space, or whether she would cry under strain? Not surprisingly, she kept her sexuaІιty secret, even marrying fellow astronaut Steve Hawley 11 months before her first space flight.
Sally twice flew on Challenger but then in 1986 it exploded shortly after launch without her onboard but killing all seven onboard including four of her 1978 astronaut classmates. Aware that the shuttle programme would not restart, she retired from NASA in 1987 and around then divorced Steve. She then reconnected with her old friend (fellow teenage tennis compatriot), writer Tam O’Shaughnessy who became her partner for many years. It was only after Sally died that it was revealed, in an obituary of her, her relationship with O’Shaughnessy.
NASA’s other LGBTQAI+ astronauts have also remained closeted. One naval pilot, Wendy Lawrence, revealed the existence of her wife only years after she retired from NASA. Test pilot Anne McClain was unintentionally outed in 2019 during a messy divorce from her wife while Anne herself was on the International Space Station. No astronaut from European, Chinese, Soviet or Russian space programmes is known to be LGBTQAI+
After a 20th January 2025 executive order from US President Trump to purge government programmes from diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, NASA began telling employees not to display pride flags at work. It has also reportedly (I have not checked) its longstanding promise to send the first woman to the Moon.
Given that of the hundred-plus NASA astronauts to venture into space, only three, all women, have acknowledged LGBTQAI+ relationships, and none willingly while employed by the Agency, it would seem that LGBTQAI+ may really be the final frontier!
Raiders of the Lost Ark is an action-adventure game created for the Atari 2600 based on the film of the same name. The game was designed by Howard Scott Warshaw. The player controls Indiana Jones as he searches for the lost Ark of the Covenant. The game requires the player to use two different controllers: controller 2 moves Jones and its button uses an item; Controller 1 selects the item to use and its button drops the item.
The video game is set in the city of Cairo in 1936, represented by an entrance room and a marketplace. From the entrance room, the player can blast a hole in the wall with a grenade and enter the Temple of the Ancients. Two paths await inside the Temple, both of which contain various dangers, after which the player will, at last, find the treasure room. Gold and artifacts can be picked up in the treasure room which will help the player later in the game. The player must cross a mesa, on the other side of which lies the Map Room where the location of the Lost Ark is revealed. South of the Map Room is a Thieves’ Den and a Black Market. The Black Market contains various figures, such as two sheikhs, a Tsetse fly and a lunatic, and items needed to win the game (most notably a shovel).
After acquiring all the needed items from the various rooms, the player returns to the mesa and jumps off using a parachute. The player goes inside the mesa, via a small hole at the end of a branch, and digs up the Ark, after dodging more thieves.
[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Nina Törnudd, Cora Buhlert, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jon Meltzer.]
