The Aurora Awards, presented by the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association, recognize the best work done by Canadians in the previous year. The winners of the 2023 awards were announced last weekend in an online ceremony, and you can see the full list of nominees and winners below.
Congratulations to all the winners!
Author Ned Beauman has won the 37th Arthur C. Clarke Award for his excellently named novel Venomous Lumpsucker, which The Guardian called “a jaunty, cerebral eco-thriller.”
This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the film being covered here wouldn’t exist.
Shai-Hulud, Kraven the Hunter, and the Ghostbusters are an odd group to have something in common, but they do: All three are the stars of movies that have been moved to 2024. Warner Bros. has moved their big dusty sequel from this fall to March 15, 2024. Does Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) need to worry about the Ides of March?
Sure, the approach of fall means cozy sweaters and seasonal beverages, but it means something more important, too: The return of Our Flag Means Death. David Jenkins’ perfect pirate comedy returns for its hotly anticipated second season sometime in October—no date has been announced, but what we do know is that it’ll return with more pirates, more ships, more locations, and more queer romance.
Star Trek debuted on September 8, 1966, and now that date is Star Trek Day, a day of festive celebrations online and off. Strange New Worlds on CBS! Lower Decks screenings! And more!
As far as premises for space exploration go, the one in Foe seems to have some flaws. Pick a guy who’s never even been on an airplane and send him to space—leaving a robot version of him in his place? This is not a space program; this is a demented psychological experiment.
At least, I hope it is, or the rest of the people in space are in trouble.
Last week, there was a heat wave in Portland. I won’t tell you the numbers, because everyone has their own idea of “absurdly hot,” and their own threshold for what is a bearable temperature in which to leave the house. Suffice it to say that it was too hot. It was the kind of hot that you can feel even when you’re in a blissfully air-conditioned home. It presses down, it muddles, it limits. I couldn’t figure out why I was so irritable about it—irrationally irritated—until I realized something so basic that I felt foolish for not having grasped it before.
If it’s that hot, I can’t walk. If I can’t walk, I get fussy and can’t focus on reading. And if I’m not reading, I’m not writing.
This is a long way of saying that there was no new column last week because it was too hot, but also of getting at the way these things—moving, and sitting, and thinking; walking, and reading, and writing—are inextricably linked.
This post was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the series being covered here wouldn’t exist.
The second season of The Wheel of Time is virtually upon us, but Prime Video is still rolling out sneak peeks—and the latest is a clip from a scene involving a very uptight Rand al’Thor (Josha Stradowski) and a very soup-savoring Logain Ablar (Álvaro Morte).
SFWA, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, announced a welcome change this week: Poetry and translated fiction are now accepted as qualifying works for membership.
“Fetter isn’t even the only feral child of a messiah in his social network.” This is not the first sentence of The Saint of Bright Doors, but it effectively sets the scene—at least for a while. Vajra Chandrasekera’s immersive debut passes through coming-of-age territory and reshapes itself into stranger terrain: a mystifying prison landscape, a place of prophets who can rewrite the truth of the world, a city of mysteries only somewhat solved.
Fetter was once a child raised for his mother’s crusade, a weapon shaped by her anger. As a young man living in a city that changes at the whims of the rich and powerful, he knows a lot of unchosen ones; he met them at a support group. But only he is the son of the Perfect and Kind, the messiah whose divided religion is at once all-powerful and the kind of thing that needs a crowdfunding campaign.
Also, he doesn’t have a shadow.
Since Super Mario 64, Charles Martinet has been the voice of Mario in countless Nintendo games—and the voice of Luigi, and Wario, and more characters inside the Mushroom Kingdom. Now, he’s hanging up his plumber’s cap, so to speak: The 67-year-old voice actor is “moving into the brand-new role of Mario Ambassador.”
Here’s something you don’t expect on a random Friday in the doldrums of August: a charming, perfect, too-short teaser for a new series you’ll have to wait four months to watch. Entire generations of kids have now grown up on Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson books, which got two, er, not terribly well-loved movie adaptations over a decade ago.
Now, Disney+ is giving the books the series treatment, and the first few glimpses we get of Percy (Walker Scobell), Annabeth (Leah Sava Jeffries), and Grover (Aryan Simhadri) are a delight.
Premiere dates and times across a world full of time zones were already confusing enough, but now they’re even more so. In June, we finally (finally) got a premiere date for Star Wars: Ahsoka. But despite countless trailers and TV spots and tweets and posts that said August 23rd, Disney+ has made a last minute change: Ahsoka will now appear for your viewing pleasure on August 22nd.
In the last months of 2022, I had, for various reasons, occasions to move a lot of my books around. I could get into the whys and the wherefores, the reasons and the inciting incidents, but the important thing is this: I highly recommend this process.
Put your hands on your books. All of them. Are you sure you know what’s in there?
It started with a mystifying, blacked-out tweet—but within an hour, Apple TV had shared the secret. The upcoming Godzilla series from Chris Black (Severance) and Matt Fraction (Hawkeye) is called Monarch: Legacy of Monsters.
