fans of sf, fantasy, horror & whimsy
Short pieces: things to look out for
Dave Langford has been assembling ebooks from fannish writings, including TAFF trip reports, columns from Walt Willis and John Berry, back issues of Ansible and elsewhere.
All free, though a donation to the Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund (TAFF) is suggested.
These ebooks include some of the funniest pieces written in a long time. I particularly enjoyed the Walt Willis Fanorama columns from Nebula in the 50s.
ebooks at http://taff.org.uk/ebooks.php
The winners of the 2017 Locus Awards were announced at Locus Awards Weekend in Seattle on June 24.
Full list of all awards, winners and nominees, on the Locus Online site.
The Locus Awards are chosen by a survey of readers in an open online poll that runs from February 1 to April 15.
“It turns out the idea of living dead—depending how you define both “living” and “dead”—may not be as far-fetched as it might seem. Some science fiction writers have found inspiration—and trepidation—in real-life parasites. We talked to two of them, Mira Grant and M.R. Carey, about their newest books and the concept of scientific zombies.
…Carey searched for a pathogen that met his criteria for the cause of the hungry epidemic, and realized that Cordyceps fit perfectly. It was also a unique choice. “At the time nobody had ever used a fungus as the vector for a zombie plague,” he says, though the creators of a console game called The Last of Us came up with the same idea independently, around the same time.
… Besides reading, Grant also “spent a lot of time on the phone with the CDC, which was an incredible amount of fun.” Grant savored the information she gleaned that way, but her friends “had to make new rules about what I was allowed to discuss over food,” so they didn’t lose their appetites.”
— excerpts from Omnivorcious interview of “Mira Grant” and M.R. Carey in “The Scientific Case for Zombies”. thanks to File 770’s Pixel Scroll
A 4K restoration of the 1997 cult sci-fi epic will hit cinemas from June-September as part of the 20th anniversary celebration of Luc Besson’s masterpiece.
A 20th anniversary edition of The Fifth Element, featuring the 4K* restoration, is headed for select Australian cinemas! Don’t miss your chance to revisit Luc Besson’s cult classic on the big screen.
The Fifth Element has become a cult favorite over the past two decades. Starring Bruce Willis as military man-turned-cab driver Korben Dallas, who is by chance thrust into a world-saving, galaxy-spanning adventure after picking up Milla Jovovich’s Leeloo (above), the titular Fifth Element and humanity’s last hope.
In SA, screenings are on August 5th at Hoyts Tea Tree Plaza, Salisbury and Norwood.
More details, plus trailer at madman.
Roman will talk about these remarkable detectives, and the City of London which features as a character in the stories. 7pm at Kappys, 22 Compton St.
Arthur Bryant and John May are Golden Age Detectives in a modern world. They head the Peculiar Crimes Unit, London’s most venerable specialist police team, a division founded during the Second World War to investigate cases that could cause national scandal or public unrest. Originally based above a London tube station, the technophobic, irascible Bryant and smooth-talking modernist John May head a team of equally unusual misfits who are just as likely to commit crimes as solve them.
Christopher Fowler has chronicled their adventures since the war:
“…Hollywood frequently falls into the trap of making films which, while ostensibly about the lead woman, are actually all about the men in their lives, and thus deform the narrative arc of the film by not trusting a woman to carry its emotional weight.
Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman doesn’t do that. It does something entirely different, something I’ve never actually seen a big budget Hollywood film do before. It tells the story of a woman’s coming of age, both as an adult and a hero—mirroring the heroic coming-of-age stories we’ve seen for so many men, but with Diana of Themiscyra in the central role.”
— Liz Bourke, writing on tor.com about Wonder Woman
The general consensus on Wonder Woman at Continuum 13 was that it’s a hit. (Patty Jenkins will be able to name her price for directing the sequel, because they didn’t offer her the common bonus to be available to direct when she made the first movie.)
Psi powers — telepathy, telekinesis, precognition, and other parapsychological activity — was one of the founding tropes of science fiction, up there with rocket ships, time travel, and aliens. John W. Campbell coined the term “psionics” — from psi and electronics — and encouraged his stable of authors to write about it. And so they did.
But after reaching maximum saturation in the 1950s, psionics began disappearing from SF in the 70s, became uncommon by the 90s, and are a rarity today.
— Daryl Gregory, 5 Books About Psi Powers, tor.com
A new Australian sci-fi thriller shows what can be done on a limited budget. The film was shot in a variety of locations from Coober Pedy to Penrith in Sydney. So far, the only screening seems to have been on the Gold Coast, but we’re hoping it turns up in a local cinema soon. Written and directed by Shane Abbess. Stars Daniel MacPherson (Kane), Teagan Croft (Indi), and Kellan Lutz (Sy), also with Rachael Griffiths as a general, and Temuera Morrison as the prison governor. Our hero, Kane, is on a space station. There’s a prison riot on the Earth below, and he fears for the safety of his daughter, Indi. He teams up with Sy, an escaped prisoner, to try and rescue his daughter Indi.
The film looks fantastic. David Stratton (who doesn’t like SF) gave it 2.5 stars.
SF stories are often structured around the premise “If X is possible, then Y is required and Z may occur”. Our guest speaker for the June meeting would like to discuss this premise and how it applies in two anime: Stein’s Gate and Cowboy Bebop.
Steins;Gate takes place in the Akihabara district of Tokyo. On July 28, 2010, Rintarō Okabe and his friend Mayuri Shiina head towards the Radio Kaikan building for a conference, where Rintarō finds a girl named Kurisu Makise lying in a pool of blood.
When Rintarō sends a text message about the incident to his friend, Itaru “Daru” Hashida, he experiences a strange phenomenon and the people around him disappear, but no-one else notices anything had changed.
After later running into Kurisu — strangely alive and well — he discovers the message he sent to Itaru arrived a week before he sent it.
Rintarō deduces that the ‘Mobile Microwave’ he and his friends had been developing is, in fact, a time machine capable of sending text messages to the past…
Cowboy Bebop: In 2071, roughly fifty years after an accident with a hyperspace gateway made the Earth almost uninhabitable, humanity has colonized most of the rocky planets and moons of the Solar System.
Amid a rising crime rate, the Inter Solar System Police (ISSP) set up a legalized contract system, in which registered bounty hunters (also referred to as “Cowboys”) chase criminals and bring them in alive in return for a reward.[2] The series’ protagonists are bounty hunters working from the spaceship Bebop.
The original crew are Spike Spiegel, an exiled former hitman of the criminal Red Dragon Syndicate, and his partner Jet Black, a former ISSP officer. They are later joined by Faye Valentine, an amnesiac con artist; Edward Wong, an eccentric girl skilled in hacking; and Ein, a genetically-engineered Pembroke Welsh Corgi with human-like intelligence.
Don’t miss the June Critical Mass meeting! 7pm sharp at Kappy’s, 22 Compton St, Adelaide.
Juno — a spinning solar-powered spacecraft — launched on Aug. 5, 2011, from Cape Canaveral in Florida and entered Jupiter’s orbit in July 2016. The probe is scheduled to make 37 orbits over 20 months before the mission ends.
Jupiter has giant storms and cyclones.There are massive storms and cyclones located at Jupiter’s poles. The “Earth-sized cyclones” are “densely clustered and rubbing together,” with cyclones reaching up to 1400 km in diameter and 96 km tall — much larger than any cyclone found on Earth.
The JunoCam managed to capture images from the poles. The image of Jupiter’s south pole, taken from an altitude of 51,500 km shows cyclones as oval shapes. The image was created by combining photos from three separate orbits so that all areas could be portrayed in daylight.
“We’re puzzled as to how they could be formed, how stable the configuration is and why Jupiter’s north pole doesn’t look like the south pole,” Bolton said in a NASA statement. “We’re questioning whether this is a dynamic system, and are we seeing just one stage, and over the next year, we’re going to watch it disappear, or is this a stable configuration and these storms are circulating around one another?”
more details at mic.com:
https://mic.com/articles/178199/nasa-s-juno-mission-captured-new-images-of-jupiter-as-we-ve-never-seen-it-before
The Adelaide Fan Review 
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