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2018 John W. Campbell Award Winner
The winner of the John W. Campbell Award for 2018 was presented during the Campbell Conference held June 22-24, 2018 at the University of Kansas Student Union in Lawrence KS.
WINNER:
- The Genius Plague by David Walton (Pyr)
FINALISTS:
- The Rift by Nina Allan (Titan)
- Tropic of Kansas by Christopher Brown (HarperCollins)
- Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich (Harper)
- The Stars Are Legion by Kameron Hurley (Saga)
- The Moon and the Other by John Kessel (Saga)
- The Stargazer’s Embassy by Eleanor Lerman (Mayapple)
- Austral by Paul McAuley (Gollancz)
- Autonomous by Annalee Newitz (Tor)
- After the Flare by Deji Bryce Olukotun (Unnamed)
- New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit)
- The People’s Police by Norman Spinrad (Tor)
- Borne by Jeff VanderMeer (MCD)
Our congrats to David Walton and all the finalists. What do you think of this result?
2018 Locus Awards Winners
The Locus Science Fiction Foundation has announced the winners for the 2018 Locus Awards on Saturday during the Locus Awards Weekend in Seattle, WA. The winners are:
- WINNER: The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi (Tor US; Tor UK)
- Persepolis Rising by James S.A. Corey (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
- Walkaway by Cory Doctorow (Tor; Head of Zeus)
- The Stars Are Legion by Kameron Hurley (Saga; Angry Robot UK)
- Provenance by Ann Leckie (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
- Raven Stratagem by Yoon Ha Lee (Solaris US; Solaris UK)
- Luna: Wolf Moon by Ian McDonald (Tor; Gollancz)
- Seven Surrenders by Ada Palmer (Tor; Head of Zeus)
- New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
- Borne by Jeff VanderMeer (MCD; HarperCollins Canada; Fourth Estate)
- WINNER: The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
- The Stone in the Skull by Elizabeth Bear (Tor)
- City of Miracles by Robert Jackson Bennett (Broadway; Jo Fletcher)
- Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr by John Crowley (Saga)
- The House of Binding Thorns by Aliette de Bodard (Ace; Gollancz)
- The Ruin of Angels by Max Gladstone (Tor.com Publishing)
- Spoonbenders by Daryl Gregory (Knopf; riverrun)
- Jade City by Fonda Lee (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
- The Delirium Brief by Charles Stross (Tor.com Publishing; Orbit UK)
- Horizon by Fran Wilde (Tor)
- WINNER: The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter by Theodora Goss (Saga)
- The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden (Del Rey)
- The City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty (Harper Voyager US)
- Amberlough by Lara Elena Donnelly (Tor)
- Winter Tide by Ruthanna Emrys (Tor.com Publishing)
- The Art of Starving by Sam J. Miller (HarperTeen)
- Autonomous by Annalee Newitz (Tor; Orbit UK 2018)
- Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (Random House; Bloomsbury)
- An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon (Akashic)
- Amatka by Karin Tidbeck (Vintage)
- WINNER: Akata Warrior by Nnedi Okorafor (Viking)
- Tool of War by Paolo Bacigalupi (Little, Brown)
- In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan (Big Mouth House)
- The Dragon with a Chocolate Heart by Stephanie Burgis (Bloomsbury; Bloomsbury USA)
- Chalk by Paul Cornell (Tor.com Publishing)
- Buried Heart by Kate Elliott (Little, Brown)
- A Skinful of Shadows by Frances Hardinge (Macmillan; Amulet)
- Frogkisser! by Garth Nix (Scholastic; Allen & Unwin; Piccadilly)
- Shadowhouse Fall by Daniel José Older (Levine)
- The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman (Knopf; Fickling UK)
For the complete list of winners in all categories check out the official press release from Locus. Our congratulations to all the winners and nominees!
What do you think of these picks? Did your favorites win?
2018 Aurora Awards Finalists
The 2018 Aurora Awards finalists have been announced, celebrating the “best works and activities done by Canadians in 2017.” The nominees in the Best Novel category are:
- The Rebel by Gerald Brandt (DAW)
- To Guard Against the Dark by Julie E. Czerneda (DAW)
- All Those Explosions Were Someone Else’s Fault by James Alan Gardner (Tor)
- Recipearium by Costi Gurgu (White Cat)
- Jade City by Fonda Lee (Orbit)
- Light of a Distant Sun by Brent Nichols (Bundoran)
Locus has the list of finalists in all categories.
Our congrats to all the nominees. What do you think of this list? Anything there look good to you?
First Man – Official Trailer (HD)
Holy crap this looks awesome! I hope it’s as good as Apollo 13.
2018 John W. Campbell Memorial Award Finalists
The finalists for the 2018 John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best science-fiction novel have been announced by the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction. The awards will be presented on June 22-24, 2018, as part of the Campbell Conference held annually at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.
The finalists are:
- The Rift by Nina Allan (Titan)
- Tropic of Kansas by Christopher Brown (HarperCollins)
- Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich (Harper)
- The Stars Are Legion by Kameron Hurley (Saga)
- The Moon and the Other by John Kessel (Saga)
- The Stargazer’s Embassy by Eleanor Lerman (Mayapple)
- Austral by Paul McAuley (Gollancz)
- Autonomous by Annalee Newitz (Tor)
- After the Flare by Deji Bryce Olukotun (Unnamed)
- New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit)
- The People’s Police by Norman Spinrad (Tor)
- Borne by Jeff VanderMeer (MCD)
- The Genius Plague by David Walton (Pyr)
Reading the Pulps 11: Where to Find Them
Few people still read the pulps. There are collectors, like those who gather at PulpFest, that buy, collect, and read the actual magazines from the past. But they are not many anymore. Pulps were printed on cheap paper that wasn’t acid-free, so decades later they’re doing a slow burn into oblivion. Generally, their pages are brown, brittle, and have a distinctive smell. Many of them have become too fragile to read, with pages so dry that fragments snap off.
There is little reason for the average reader to read an original pulp magazine because most of their best stories have been long reprinted in books, audiobooks, and ebooks. Many bookworms don’t even know they’ve been reading pulp fiction their entire life. But if you love a particular genre, and want to explore its roots, I highly recommend reading digital copies of the original pulps. The illustrations, editorials, letters to the editor, non-fiction columns, and ads all take you back to another time. Just look at how space suits were imagined in this 1940 illustration from the June issue of Astonishing Stories.
There are many places on the web to find copies of pulps to read. For example, the issue of Astounding Stories that contained the illustration above can be found at the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive is a non-profit library that preserves popular culture digitized for the web. The Internet Archive is also known for its WayBackMachine that archives old websites.
For each issue of a pulp magazine the Internet Archive preserves, it provides a variety of reading formats, including Kindle, ePub, PDF, full-text, Abbyy OCR, and the one I prefer, CBR reader (RAR/CBR/CBZ files). These are single file collections of images that can be viewed with a comic book reader (CBR) program. The advantage of CBR is each page is a high-resolution image.
The Pulp Magazine Archive at the Internet Archive also allows visitors to read the pulps on screen with a web viewer. This is great for casual reading. But if you want to sit in your easy chair and use your iPad to travel back to the first half of the 20th century, then downloading a preferred file-type is better. I just save an issue to Dropbox and open it with Chunky, my iOS CBR reader.
I don’t regularly read pulp magazines. I mainly read specific old issues for research about the history of science fiction. I doubt the Internet Archive will become a major source of free reading. Pulps are fun to sample like finding an old 1938 issue of Life Magazine at a flea market and taking it home for an afternoon of contemplating the past.
There are many places on the web to learn about pulp magazine history. Just search Google for “Pulp Magazines.” Most fans of these old magazines are bookworms in their last third of life who remember what they loved to read from their first third. I expect as they die off, interest in pulps will fade, and these old scanned issues will only be of interest to scholars.
If you would like to buy pulp magazines to see what they were physically like, I suggest using eBay and searching for bargain lots. Individual issues of can run into money because of specific collector value, whereas some sellers will bunch together several odd issues and sell them at a bargain. However, what you really want is one with a beautiful cover in top condition. Some people even frame these as decorative art objects.
