Category: Critical Mass

The Continuum Foundation (ConFound) has announced this year’s finalists for the 2018 Aurealis Awards. Two books from Tor.com Publishing, Corey J. White’s Static Ruin and Kirstyn McDermott’s Triquetra, have been nominated, as well as Sam Hawke’s City of Lies, which was published by Tor Books in the U.S., and Penguin Random House in Australia. The winners of the 2018 Aurealis Awards, Sara Douglass Book Series Award, and the Convenors’ Award for Excellence will be announced at the Aurealis Awards ceremony, which will be held in Melbourne on Saturday May 4, 2019.

BEST FANTASY NOVEL

• Devouring Dark, Alan Baxter (Grey Matter Press)
• Lady Helen and the Dark Days Deceit, Alison Goodman (HarperCollins Publishers)
• City of Lies, Sam Hawke (Penguin Random House)
• Lightning Tracks, Alethea Kinsela (Plainspeak Publishing)
• The Witch Who Courted Death, Maria Lewis (Hachette Australia)
• We Ride the Storm, Devin Madson (self-published)

BEST SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL

• Scales of Empire, Kylie Chan (HarperCollins Publishers)
• Obsidio, Amie Kaufman & Jay Kristoff (Allen & Unwin)
• Lifel1k3, Jay Kristoff (Allen & Unwin)
• Dyschronia, Jennifer Mills (Picador Australia)
• A Superior Spectre, Angela Meyer (Ventura Press)
• The Second Cure, Margaret Morgan (Penguin Random House)

Head over to The Aurealis Awards site for more information and details of the other categories!

Andrew leads off our discussion of last year’s winner of the Hugo for best Novella, All Systems Red, by Martha Wells. 

I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels on the company satellites. It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don’t know, a little under 35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.

— opening paragraph of chapter one of All Systems Red by Martha Wells

Please read the novella, and come along ready to contribute to our discussion of the work. As usual, 6:45 for a 7pm start at Kappys, 22 Compton St, Adelaide.

Did you know that the BBC shares a lot of their teleplays online? Including a lot featuring our favourite Doctor.

I didn’t until today (thanks for the information, Bleeding Cool), but it turns out the BBC Writer’s Room website features an extensive backlog of screenplays for BBC shows. Their latest post is the first episode of this past season of Doctor Who, featuring the debut of Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor.

There are a lot of goodies here, actually, from some older Doctor Who’s to Sherlock to Luther. For fans of the BBC’s approach to genre television, this is a goldmine. And for students of screenwriting, resources like this are always an incredible find.

So, pull up a chair, settle in, and spend the evening reading some screenplays. It’ll be relaxing.

— Julie Muncy, gizmodo.com.au

File770 reports

CBS All Access has officially tapped Yeoh to captain a Star Trek series of her own: a black ops-themed spinoff of Discovery in which the actress will reprise her role and explore the next chapter in the life of Capt. Philippa Georgiou. The untitled drama will further explore Starfleet’s Section 31 division, a shadow organization within the Federation featured on Star Trek: Discovery.

2019 Philip K. Dick Award Nominees Announced — January 12, 2019

The judges of the 2018 Philip K. Dick Award and the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society, along with the Philip K. Dick Trust, are pleased to announce the six nominated works that comprise the final ballot for the award:

• TIME WAS by Ian McDonald (Tor.com)
• THE BODY LIBRARY by Jeff Noon (Angry Robot)
• 84K by Claire North (Orbit)
• ALIEN VIRUS LOVE DISASTER: STORIES by Abbey Mei Otis (Small Beer Press)
• THEORY OF BASTARDS by Audrey Schulman (Europa Editions)
• AMBIGUITY MACHINES AND OTHER STORIES by Vandana Singh (Small Beer Press)

First prize and any special citations will be announced on Friday, April 19, 2019 at Norwescon 42 at the DoubleTree by Hilton Seattle Airport, SeaTac, Washington.

The Philip K. Dick Award is presented annually with the support of the Philip K. Dick Trust for distinguished science fiction published in paperback original form in the United States during the previous calendar year.
The award is sponsored by the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society and the Philip K. Dick Trust and the award ceremony is sponsored by the Northwest Science Fiction Society.

The 2018 judges are Madeline Ashby, Brian Attebery, Christopher Brown, Rosemary Edghill, and Jason Hough (chair).

One of the bedrocks of the sf magazines was the short story. At the february meeting (7pm Wed feb 6th, at Kappys, 22 Compton St, Adelaide) we’re going to discuss some recent short stories published by tor.com on their website.

We invite you to read (at least) two of the following, and come prepared to talk about them.

These include stories by Australian authors, new authors and old favourites:

• 11874 words  Triquetra, by Kirstyn Mcdermott
• 11972 words Nine last days on Planet earth, by Daryl Gregory
• 6644 words AI and the trolley problem, by Pat Cadigan
• 13824 words Fitting In, by Max Gladstone
• 6201 words Bread and Milk and salt, by Sarah Dailey
• 9453 words The Word of Flesh and Soul, by Ruthanna Emrys
• 5744 words  The Last voyage of Skidbladnir, by Karin Tidbeck

Tor regularly publishes short fiction on their tor.com website.
Here are some recent entries of interest…

• The Last Voyage of Skidbladnir / Karin Tidbeck
  Life on the transdimensional ship Skidbladnir is a strange one. The new janitor, Saga, finds herself in the company of an officious steward-bird, a surly and mysterious engineer, and the shadowy Captain.
• The Word of Flesh and Soul / Ruthanna Emrys
  Fantasy || The language of the originators defines reality, every word warping the world to fit its meaning…
• Bread and Milk and Salt / Sarah Gailey
  Not all things are built to obey… Reprinting Sarah Gailey’s “Bread and Milk and Salt,” originally published in Robots Vs. Fairies (Saga Press, 2018).
• Fitting In /  Max Gladstone
   A Wild Cards story. A failed contestant of the superhero reality TV show, American Hero, Robin Ruttiger now works as a high school guidance counselor to reluctant students. Things change, however,…
• AI and the Trolley Problem / Pat Cadigan
  Science Fiction || A provocative story about the relationship between the humans on a British airbase and the AI security system that guards that base.
• Nine Last Days on Planet Earth / Daryl Gregory
  Science Fiction ||  When the seeds rained down from deep space, it may have been the first stage of an alien invasion—or something else entirely.
• Triquetra / Kirstyn McDermott
  Dark Fantasy, Fairy Tales and Folklore || After marrying the prince and having her own child, Snow White visits her stepmother—promising to kill her in ever more horrible ways, at the same time attempting to stay away from the mirror that started it all.

How stable would a World State be, in practice? Sure, one could argue (and people have) that without external enemies there’s no particular reason for a world-spanning government to fall apart. That was the argument in A World Out of Time: the state controlled all the apparatus necessary to sustain Earth’s vast population, making rebellion suicidal.

The problem is that one can point to historic polities that managed to dissolve into independent regions without much help from the outside. Gran Columbia lasted twelve years. The West Indies Federation lasted about four years. The United Arab Republic lasted three. All that’s needed is for the divisions driving people apart to be slightly greater than the ones binding them together.

Indeed, peace might exacerbate internal divisions, since there is no common enemy against which to unite. Canada might have escaped the West Indies Federation’s fate only because of the perception that a moment’s inattention would allow our hegemonic neighbour to invade (again), burn our cities (again), commit affronts against our Catholic population (again ) and leave the letter “u” out of some words for some reason (still).

— from “World States and Mega Empires in SF” by James Davis Nicoll
at Tor.com See the full article for examples of large empires on Eaeth and how long they survived…