Category: Critical Mass

The Witch Who Came in from the Cold takes place in Prague, between January 18 and March 2 in the year 1970. Prague (now the capital of the Czech Republic) is in 1970 the capital of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, a nation within the ambit of Soviet Russia’s sphere of influence. The city’s dark and wintry atmosphere, as well as its age and character, are deftly evoked within the pages of the serial. So is its sense as contested territory, a field for not-quite-open war – and this same sense is evoked within the lives of each of the characters. Prague in 1970 is a place where CIA agents and KGB officers may frequent the same cafes and the same diplomatic soirées, while attempting to recruit their various local pawns.

Alongside the CIA and the KGB – and among them – are agents of two warring magical factions, the Ice and the Flame. The Ice and the Flame are vying for control of elemental Hosts – according to members of the Ice, the Flame want them in order to destroy the world.

— from Liz Bourke’s  review of  The Witch Who Came in from the Cold, Locus

Once Upon a Time In Hollywood, a.k.a. “the 9th film from Quentin Tarantino,” made quite the splash upon release when it hit theaters this past summer. It had all of Tarantino’s signature trademarks — a couple of cranky male leads, excessive violence, and a rockin’ retro soundtrack. And it’s left QT fans salivating for whatever his 10th (and possibly final?) movie will be. Rumors abound that it could in fact be a Star Trek film. Leading many fans to ponder just what the heck a “Pulp Fiction-esque Star Trek” movie would even look like.

Well, one fan has combined the well known Quentin Tarantino sensibilities and aesthetics with some old school Star Trek footage, and the result is “Once Upon a Time in Star Trek.”

— from “Fan Video Imagines Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in STAR TREK”, nerdist.com

Maria Popova of Brain Pickings contemplates “Ursula K. Le Guin’s Playful and Profound Letter-Poem to Children About the Power of Books and Why We Read”.

…Most dragons don’t know how to read. They hiss and fume and guard their hoard. A tasty knight is what they need
For dinner (they spit out the sword),
Then go to sleep on heaps of treasure. They’ve no use for the written word….

— Thanks to Mike Glyer for pointing this out in File770

This month, we’re looking at Neil Gaiman’s novel, American Gods, and the associated comics and TV series.

Join Kate as she leads off the discussion at 7pm November 6th at Kappys.

As usual, 6:45 for a 7pm start at Kappys, 22 Compton St, Adelaide.

Your story “STET” is a Hugo Award finalist, and has an unusual structure (and great emotional power). Tell us about it, and how you came to write it.

“STET” is a story that explores human priorities, AI, responsive algorithms, and the trolley problem. It’s structured as a paragraph from a textbook about autonomous vehicles, with footnotes. The reader then gets to see the conversation that occurs between the author and the editor, revealing the author’s personal connection to the subject matter. I decided to write this story after a conversation with someone who couldn’t believe that an author of genre fiction could possibly have an interest in or understanding of literary fiction. That person’s vehement skepticism drove me to write a piece in the mode of one of my favorite stories, which is told through the footnotes on a paragraph from a textbook. I wanted to explore themes of human accountability for failures of machine morality, and discussing that within a single layer of story seemed impossible, so this format suited the concept perfectly. The story is also an examination of how people, women in particular, are expected to suppress emotions like grief for the sake of professional objectivity — which is itself already myth. On one level, this is a story about grief; on another level, it’s about a woman refusing to have her grief silenced.

— from an interview with Sarah Gailey in Locus, Sept 2019

TransAtlantic Fan Fund Free Ebooks

These are just some of the 45 titles currently available at the TAFF site. They are collections of fannish writing, copied and converted to epubs for the modern fan.
Some are there for historical interest, some trip reports and some are collections of fine writing which deserve (re-)discovery. All are free to download, though we strongly recommend that a donation is made to the TAFF fan fund coffers.

I heartily recommend the two Terry Carr Fandom Harvest collections, one of which is a reprint, the other a new collection, each full of his entertaining writing.

Through the Looking Glass To See What is Reflected in the Magic Mirror: a guided tour to speculative non-fiction

Speculation is a natural part of the human imagination. Science fiction thrives on it. But it is found across the sciences, philosophy, the social sciences, and other intellectual disciplines including the popular imagination. Some of these places will be visited. Certain locations will be avoided: the pseudosciences and other forms of pseudodoxy. This talk will look at the curious and quaint relationships between science-fiction and speculative nonfiction, and certainly not the literary conceits of the kind found at https://www.speculativenonfiction.org/
Apologies for the title. It’s a twisty metaphor for our proposed trip into the conceptual realm.

Children of Ruin follows Adrian Tchaikovsky’s extraordinary Children of Time, winner of the Arthur C. Clarke award. It is set in the same universe, with a new cast of characters and a thrilling new narrative.

It has been waiting through the ages.
Now it’s time . . .

Thousands of years ago, Earth’s terraforming program took to the stars. On the world they called Nod, scientists discovered alien life – but it was their mission to overwrite it with the memory of Earth. Then humanity’s great empire fell, and the program’s decisions were lost to time.

Aeons later, humanity and its new spider allies detected fragmentary radio signals between the stars. They dispatched an exploration vessel, hoping to find cousins from old Earth.

But those ancient terraformers woke something on Nod better left undisturbed.

And it’s been waiting for them.