2014 Bram Stoker Awards Final Ballot
The Horror Writers Association have announced the 2014 Bram Stoker Award final ballot. The noms for Superior Achievement in a Novel are:
- Suffer the Children, Craig DiLouie (Gallery)
- Jade Sky, Patrick Freivald (JournalStone)
- Beautiful You, Chuck Palahniuk (Jonathan Cape/Vintage)
- The Vines, Christopher Rice (47North)
- Blood Kin, Steve Rasnic Tem (Solaris)
You can see the complete list of noms in all categories in the official press release. The presentation of the Bram Stoker Award will occur during the World Horror Convention in Atlanta, Georgia on Saturday, May 9, 2015.
Congrats to all the nominees! Anything in this list piqued your interest? Any favorites?
A deleted scene from the Disney classic ‘Frozen’ as directed by John Carpenter
I saw this over on Topless Robot and there was no way I wasn’t going to share it here. Brilliant!
Horror Manga 101: The Ring
If you’re a horror fan, just the title alone should bring to mind the Verbinski film of 2002 or the original Japanese movie Ringu (Ring) from 1998. The original books by Koji Suzuki have circled the globe, capturing the attention of horror fans everywhere. And since this franchise came from Japan, a manga was almost unavoidable. I think the manga can stand alone, so it deserves our attention.
This is what Dark Horse has to say about Volume One:
Journalist Kazayuki Asakawa’s investigation into the sudden deaths of four teenagers leads to an isolated cabin containing a videotape warning of death in seven days unless certain, now missing, instructions are followed.
I’m not a horror movie person, but even I’d heard of the cursed videotape that causes death. Since that’s all I knew, I had no preconceived notions about the plot of the manga.
We start with gossip, rumor, people talking about a weird tape, that kills. This was the kind of rumor that seems to come from nowhere and is everywhere almost instantly. Watch the tape and you’ll die, in seven days. As a reporter, Asakawa, gets curious about this rumor since she knew a teen who died. A bit of digging and it turns out that four teens, all friends, all together seven days ago, all died on the same day, within minutes of each other.
2014 Nebula Award Nominees
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America have announced the nominees for the 2014 Nebula Awards. The nominees in the Novel category are:
- The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison (Tor)
- Trial by Fire, Charles E. Gannon (Baen)
- Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
- The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu (Tor)
- Coming Home, Jack McDevitt (Ace)
- Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer (FSG Originals; Fourth Estate; HarperCollins Canada)
See the official press release for the complete shortlist for all categories. The winners will be announced at the 50th Nebula Awards Weekend which will be held June 4th-7th, 2015, in Chicago, Illinois. Voting will open to SFWA Active members on March 1 and close on March 30.
Congratulations to all the nominees! So what do you think of this lineup? Any early favorites? This is the second award nom for Ancillary Sword. Can it possibly match the award haul of last year’s Nebula winner Ancillary Justice?
The Kitschies: 2014 Red Tentacle and Golden Tentacle Finalists
The finalists for the 2014 Kitschies Red Tentacle and Golden Tentacle awards have been announced and we have just added both awards to WWEnd!
The Kitschies reward the year’s most progressive, intelligent and entertaining works that contain elements of the speculative or fantastic published in the UK.
- Lagoon, by Nnedi Okorafor (Hodder & Stoughton)
- Grasshopper Jungle, by Andrew Smith (Egmont)
- The Peripheral, by William Gibson (Viking)
- The Way Inn, by Will Wiles (4th Estate)
- The Race, by Nina Allan (NewCon Press)
- Viper Wine, by Hermione Eyre (Jonathan Cape)
- The Girl in the Road, by Monica Byrne (Blackfriars)
- Memory of Water, by Emmi Itäranta (HarperCollins)
- The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, by Becky Chambers (Self-Published)
- The People in the Trees, by Hanya Yanagihara (Atlantic Books)
Our congrats to all the finalists! What do you think of this crop of books? Anything stand out to you? And what about the awards? Do you like these additions to WWEnd? Have you been following the Kitschies at all? Let us know in the comments.
2014 BSFA Award Shortlist
The shortlist for the 2014 BSFA Award has been announced. The noms in the Best Novel category are:
- The Race, Nina Allan (Newcon)
- Cuckoo Song, Frances Hardinge (Macmillan)
- Europe in Autumn, Dave Hutchinson (Solaris)
- Wolves, Simon Ings (Gollancz)
- Ancillary Sword, Anne Leckie (Orbit)
- The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, Claire North (Orbit)
- Lagoon, Nnedi Okorafor (Hodder)
- The Moon King, Neil Williamson (Newcon)
The extra nominees in the novel category are due to a fourth place tie. See the press release for the full list of categories and nominees. Winners will be announced in a ceremony taking place at Dysprosium the 66th Eastercon, taking place at the Park Inn, Heathrow from 3-6 April 2015.
Congrats to all the nominees! Anything strike your fancy in this list? Is Ancillary Sword going to pick up as many nods as Justice?
Openings: The Martian by Andy Weir
The Martian
by Andy Weir
Crown Publishers, 2014
Del Rey, 2014
LOG ENTRY: SOL 6
I’m pretty much fucked.
That’s my considered opinion.
Fucked.
Six days into what should be the greatest two months of my life, and it’s turned into a nightmare.
I don’t even know who’ll read this. I guess someone will find it eventually. Maybe a hundred years from now.
For the record… I didn’t die on Sol 6. Certainly the rest of the crew thought I did, and I can’t blame them. Maybe there’ll be a day of national mourning for me, and my Wikipedia page will say, “Mark Watney is the only human being to have died on Mars.”
And it’ll be right, probably. ‘Cause I’ll surely die here. Just not on Sol 6 when everyone thinks I did.
Let’s see… where do I begin?
The Ares Program. Mankind reaching out to Mars to send people to another planet for the very first time and expand the horizons of humanity blah, blah, blah. The Ares 1 crew did their thing and came back heroes. They got the parades and fame and love of the world.
Ares 2 did the same thing, in a different location on Mars. They got a firm handshake and a hot cup of coffee when they got home.
Ares 3. Well, that was my mission. Okay, not mine per se. Commander Lewis was in charge. I was just one of her crew. Actually, I was the very lowest ranked member of the crew. I would only be “in command” of the mission if I were the only remaining person.
What do you know? I’m in command.
A Water Planet in Our Solar System?
Okay, Ceres isn’t actually a planet, but a dwarf planet. Still, that’s nothing to sneeze at. Pluto is a dwarf planet, and we still know about it. So why did we not learn about Ceres? Oh, sure, you may argue that Pluto is 14 times more massive than Ceres (and you’d be right), but there is one reason to believe the solar system’s smallest dwarf planet might be the most exciting one:
It’s a water planet.
Last year, the Herschel Space Observatory announced that it had detected water vapor on Ceres. In case that isn’t impressive enough, I should add that it’s a whole LOT of water:
Scientists believe Ceres contains rock in its interior with a thick mantle of ice that, if melted, would amount to more fresh water than is present on all of Earth. The materials making up Ceres likely date from the first few million years of our solar system’s existence and accumulated before the planets formed.
More fresh water than is present on all of Earth? No wonder Ceres becomes the “Seat of the Empire” in Frank Herbert‘s Dune series. Take that, Arrakis.
Not only that, but geysers on Ceres appear to be erupting water into space, where the liquid sublimates into ice, possibly resulting in snow (which explains the white spots in the above image). Yes, that’s right, we may have our own mini-Hoth in the sol system. All we need now is to genetically engineer some tauntauns, and we’re ready for colonization.
Winners: Classical Traditions in Science Fiction
Sorry for posting this so late but it took some time to gather all our contestant’s names. We had 282 retweets and blog comments total! To pick our winners we assigned each contestant a number then used a random number generator to pick out 2 winners.
Our first place winner is:
Cathy S @SeeCat42
who will receive a hardcover copy of CTSF.
Our second place winner is:
Marie&Jason @WholesomelySpun
who will get a paperback copy.
Our Congrats to you both!
Many thanks to Brett M. Rogers and Benjamin Eldon Stevens and to their publisher Oxford University Press for making this contest possible. If you did not win, never fear – Classical Traditions in Science Fiction is available for purchase as an eBook right now and will be out in dead tree form on February 9th. If you appreciate this kind of scholarly work in genre fiction please show that appreciation by buying a copy for yourself. Let the publishers out there know that there is a desire for these kinds of works in our community.
Thank you to everyone who participated in our retweet contest! Until next time, read on.