Category: Snippets

2020 Hugo Award Finalists

Best Novel

• The City in the Middle of the Night, by Charlie Jane Anders (Tor; Titan)
• Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir (Tor.com Publishing)
• The Light Brigade, by Kameron Hurley (Saga; Angry Robot UK)
• A Memory Called Empire, by Arkady Martine (Tor; Tor UK)
• Middlegame, by Seanan McGuire (Tor.com Publishing)
• The Ten Thousand Doors of January, by Alix E. Harrow (Redhook; Orbit UK)

Best Novella

• “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom”, by Ted Chiang (Exhalation (Borzoi/Alfred A. Knopf; Picador)
• The Deep, by Rivers Solomon, with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson & Jonathan Snipes (Saga Press/Gallery)
• The Haunting of Tram Car 015, by P. Djèlí Clark (Tor.com Publishing)
• In an Absent Dream, by Seanan McGuire (Tor.com Publishing)
• This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone (Saga Press; Jo Fletcher Books)
• To Be Taught, If Fortunate, by Becky Chambers (Harper Voyager; Hodder & Stoughton)

— full list of all categories at tor.com

Our guest speaker for the May meeting is Melbourne Fantasy and Science Fiction writer Jane Routley. Her 7th book, Shadow in the Empire of Light, is due out in epub this August.  She has published 6 books, 5 as herself and one as Rebecca Locksley, and won two Aurealis Awards for Best Fantasy Novel for her novels Fire Angels and Aramaya.  Her short stories have been widely anthologized and read on the ABC.

Jane was a judge for the recent Australian Role Playing Industry Awards. She has had a variety of careers, including fruit picker and occult librarian and she lived in Germany and Denmark for a decade. Now she works on the railways in Melbourne and is a keen climate activist.

The meeting will be held by zoom, at 7pm May 6th, Adelaide time. In the first half, Jane will talk about her work and answer questions. At 7:40 we will have a short (10 min) tea-break, reconvening at 7:50pm for a discussion of what’s new and interesting in SF & F.

Join Crit Mass Zoom Meeting, 7pm May 6th:
https://us04web.zoom.us/j/78026195446?pwd=SmQraE1jbXJxaitxMXhuOHpIN08zQT09

Meeting ID: 780 2619 5446
Password: 7fXx7M

Join Zoom Meeting, Critical Mass, Adelaide, part 2, May 6th, 7:50 PM Adelaide
https://us04web.zoom.us/j/76738664461?pwd=Tk83eGh3SFJIMTdjazVyL0QyMlJwdz09

Meeting ID: 767 3866 4461
Password: 7fXx7M

[Note that we are also holding a second meeting, on May 20th, to discuss novellae, and chat in general]

For obvious reasons, Critical Mass will conduct the next few meetings online, via Zoom (which can be used on desktop, laptop or smart phone).

Our special guest for the April 1st Meeting is Karen J Carlisle, local author of The Adventures of Viola Stewart, The Aunt Enid Mysteries and The Department of Curiosities series. Hopefully, she’ll treat us with details of her latest work.

The meeting will start at 7pm (Adelaide time, 30 mins later in Melbourne ), run for 40 mins, then take a 10-minute tea/coffee/G&T break and re-convene at 7:50 (Adelaide time) for the final half hour.

To join the meeting, you will need to provide the following information to zoom*:
Join Zoom Meeting at 7pm:
https://us04web.zoom.us/j/242593495
Meeting ID: 242 593 495

Join meeting at 7:50pm:
https://us04web.zoom.us/j/130077258
Meeting ID: 130 077 258

Please note the different meeting ID for part 2 of the meeting

*If you need some guidance in using zoom, here’s a useful video on joining meetings:
https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201362193-Joining-a-Meeting 

An unexpected message from The Doctor, well worth a listen…

One the most emotional world premieres at the upcoming 2020 Berlin International Film Festival is bound to be “Last and First Men,” the directorial feature debut of the late Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson.[…]

Jóhannsson’s only directorial feature, “Last and First Men” is an adaptation of his touring multimedia project of the same name. The movie — shot on 16mm black-and-white film with “Victoria” and “Rams” cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen — played in concert halls, accompanied by Jóhannsson’s score with a live orchestra. The feature film playing at Berlin includes the composer’s original score and narration from Tilda Swinton….

— from Mike Glyer’s file770.com

This month, Roman looks at the novels in the best-selling russian series by Sergei Lukyanenko. What started as a trilogy is now a hexology, but he’s just looking a the setup in the first two novels: Night Watch and Day Watch. Some of you might recall the movies based on the novels…

It’s 6:45 Wed 4th March for a 7pm start at kappy’s tea & coffee merchants,
22 Compton St,Adelaide.
Come along and tell us about your favourite stand-alone fantasy story!

City of Bones by Martha Wells

Martha Wells has recently entered the spotlight with her delightful, award-winning science fiction novella All Systems Red, but she’s also got a fabulous backlist. City of Bones wars with Death of the Necromancer for my favorite Martha Wells novel, but City of Bones undoubtedly wins the place of “Best Standalone by Martha Wells.”

— Sarah Waites, in her list of 10 standalone Fantasy Novels on Tor.com

Jules Verne was a ridiculously prolific author, publishing more than 90 novels, short stories, non-fiction books, essays, and plays over his 50-odd year career. His magnum opus was the Voyages Extraordinaires, a series of 54(!) novels that sought “to outline all the geographical, geological, physical, and astronomical knowledge amassed by modern science and to recount, in an entertaining and picturesque format…the history of the universe.”

[…]

From Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Alphonse de Neuville and Édouard Riou)

But it wasn’t just Verne’s inventive prose that captivated 19th century audiences. The Voyages Extraordinaires also included plenty of lavish illustrations, most in black-and-white, depicting each protagonist’s globetrotting adventures.

Thanks to the work of the late Verne scholar Dr. Zvi Har’El, you can peruse all of the original illustrations online.

— more details at Tor.com