An extraordinary performance of the main theme from Wonder Woman!

“I just didn’t know what to do with my stuff until I stumbled into science fiction and fantasy,” Le Guin says. “And then, of course, they knew what to do with it.” “They” were the editors, fans, and fellow-authors who gave her an audience for her work. If science fiction was down-market, it was at least a market. More than that, genre supplied a ready-made set of tools, including spaceships, planets, and aliens, plus a realm—the future—that set no limits on the imagination. She found that science fiction suited what she called, in a letter to her mother, her “peculiar” talent, and she felt a lightheartedness in her writing that had to do with letting go of ambitions and constraints. In the fall of 1966, when she was thirty-seven, Le Guin began “A Wizard of Earthsea.” In the next few years—which also saw her march against the Vietnam War and dance in a conga line with Allen Ginsberg, when he came to Portland to read Vedas for peace—she produced her great early work, including, in quick succession, “The Left Hand of Darkness,” “The Lathe of Heaven,” “The Farthest Shore,” and “The Dispossessed,” her ambitious novel of anarchist utopia.
—  The Fantastic Ursula K leGuin, Julie Philips, New Yorker Oct 17, 2016

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.

• SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL: Death’s End, Cixin Liu (Tor; Head of Zeus)
• FANTASY NOVEL: All the Birds in the Sky, Charlie Jane Anders (Tor; Titan)
• HORROR NOVEL: The Fireman, Joe Hill (Morrow)
• YOUNG ADULT BOOK: Revenger, Alastair Reynolds (Gollancz; Orbit US ’17)
• FIRST NOVEL: Ninefox Gambit, Yoon Ha Lee (Solaris US; Solaris UK)
• NOVELLA: Every Heart a Doorway, Seanan McGuire (Tor.com Publishing)
• NOVELETTE: “You’ll Surely Drown Here If You Stay”, Alyssa Wong (Uncanny 5-6/16)
• SHORT STORY: “Seasons of Glass and Iron“, Amal el-Mohtar (The Starlit Wood)
• ANTHOLOGY: The Big Book of Science Fiction, Ann & Jeff VanderMeer, eds. (Vintage)
• COLLECTION: The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, Ken Liu (Saga; Head of Zeus)
• EDITOR: Ellen Datlow
• ARTIST: Julie Dillon
• NON-FICTION: The Geek Feminist Revolution, Kameron Hurley (Tor)
• ART BOOK: Charles Vess, Walking Through the Landscape of Faerie (Faerie Magazine)

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

Read the full article on tor.com to find out why the titles above are considered important.