Martha Wells's Blog, page 55

Painting

For people interested in home improvement stuff, here's the before and after pictures of the painting I did this weekend: https://twitter.com/marthawells1/status/1097174389886455808

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BSFA Awards

One piece of good news:

The Murderbot Diaries: Exit Strategy is up for a British Science Fiction Association Award for short fiction!


Congrats to all the other nominees!

https://bsfa.co.uk/awards-shortlist/



Best Novel

Dave Hutchinson – Europe at Dawn (Solaris)

Yoon Ha Lee – Revenant Gun (Solaris)

Emma Newman – Before Mars (Ace Books)

Gareth L Powell – Embers of War (Titan Books)

Tade Thompson – Rosewater (Orbit)



Best Shorter Fiction

Nina Allan – The Gift of Angels: an Introduction (Clarkesworld)

Malcolm Devlin – The Purpose of the Dodo is to be Extinct (Interzone #275)

Hal Duncan – The Land of Somewhere Safe (NewCon Press)

Ian McDonald – Time Was (Tor.com)

Martha Wells – Exit Strategy (Tor.com)

Liz Williams – Phosphorus (NewCon Press)

Marian Womack – Kingfisher (Lost Objects, Luna Press)



Best Non-Fiction

Nina Allan – Time Pieces column 2018 articles (Interzone)

Ruth EJ Booth – Noise and Sparks column 2018 articles (Shoreline of Infinity)

Liz Bourke – Sleeps With Monsters column 2018 articles (Tor.com)

Aliette de Bodard – On motherhood and erasure: people-shaped holes, hollow characters and the illusion of impossible adventures (Intellectus Speculativus blog)

Adam Roberts – Publishing the Science Fiction Canon: The Case of Scientific Romance (Cambridge University Press)



Best Artwork

Ben Baldwin – wraparound cover for ‘Strange Tales’ slipcase set (NewCon Press)

Joey Hi-Fi – cover for ‘Paris Adrift’ by EJ Swift (Solaris)

Sarah Anne Langton – cover for ‘Unholy Land’ by Lavie Tidhar (Tachyon Publications)

Sing Yun Lee and Morris Wild – artwork for ‘Sublime Cognition’ conference (London Science Fiction Research Community)

Likhain – In the Vanishers’ Palace: Dragon I and II (Inprnt)

Bede Rogerson – cover for ‘Concrete Faery’ by Elizabeth Priest (Luna Press)

Del Samatar – artwork for ‘Monster Portraits’ by Sofia and Del Samatar (Rose Metal Press)

Charlotte Stroomer – cover for ‘Rosewater’ by Tade Thompson (Orbit)

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Painting

So yesterday I had a doctor's appointment and then spent the rest of the day painting our guestroom. It had been a soft yellow for quite a few years, and that was okay, but the walls had been really scraped up and it was just looking really bad. It's a very bright room so I tried something different and painted it a fairly dark blue. It took me from about 11:30 or so to 4:00, but it looks really good, even without the furniture and everything in place. I have a ton of touch-up to do and I need to re-paint the white trim, but I should be able to get that done this weekend.

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Minor Update

I was a bit sick and very low energy over the weekend, so now I'm behind on everything. I did get most of my tax receipts sorted out and added up, so it's almost ready to go. (And I really need to start keeping everything in a spreadsheet as the year goes along and not relying on doing it all at once.) And I'm getting ready to paint our guestroom.

I've seen the cover for the new re-release of The Cloud Roads in mass market paperback. That will be out in November. It's the same art, but a slightly different design.

The Murderbot novel is going along, slowly but surely (:knock on wood:) and I think I have a very good chance of finishing by the deadline in May. :knock on wood again: It's been slow going and I don't see it speeding up anytime soon, but at least it's going.

These are the events I'll be at this year (so far):

May 10-12, 2019 Comicpalooza in Houston, Texas.

August 15-19, 2019.WorldCon Dublin in Dublin, Ireland.

October 4-5, 2019. Brown County Library ComicCon at Central Library in Green Bay, WI.

October 18-20, 2019. I'll be a guest of honor at Capclave in Rockville, MD.

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New Book Thursday - Short Fiction Edition

(If you've been following my book rec and new book listing posts for a while, you may have noticed this already, but while most book lists emphasize books by popular straight white men, this one emphasizes everybody else. I include books by straight white men, but in about the same percentage that other book lists include everybody else. I also try to highlight books that are less well known.)

(I only link to one retail outlet in the book's listing, but most books are available at multiple outlets, like Kobo, iBooks, international Amazons, Barnes & Noble, etc. The short stories are usually on free online magazines.)



* Non-fiction: The POC Guide to Writing Dialect in Fiction by Kai Ashante Wilson


* Short story: His Footsteps Through Darkness and Light by Mimi Mondal


* Short story: The Glass Galago by A.M. Dellamonica


* Short story: The Bottom Garden by Jessica Reisman


* Short story: Monsters Come Howling in their Season by Cadwell Turnbull


* Short story: St. Juju by Rivers Solomon


* Short story: Circus Girl, the Hunter, and Mirror Boy by JY Yang


* Short story: You Can Make a Dinosaur but You Can't Help Me by K.M. Szpara


* Short story: The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington by Phenderson Djèlí Clark

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Archives Visit

Yesterday a friend came up to visit and I got us a tour of the SF/F collection at Cushing Memorial Library and Archives. We saw so much stuff, I should have taken notes, but let's see:

* A proto-SF book from I think 1640? called the "Lunar World" where the author described what he thought a spaceship trip to the Moon would look like.

* Andre Norton's portrait and her SFWA Grandmaster award.

* The boxes for my collection of letters and manuscripts, plus a bunch of our friends' collections, plus cool people's boxes like Samuel Delany's and George R.R. Martin's.

* The boxes for the media fanzine collection and the fan vid collection dvds.

* And because the rare book collection is right there, we saw a real Sumerian cuneiform tablet and got to hold it.

* We got to see (and smell) a book with 400 year old smoke trapped in its pages.

* A 1500s occult book that has an inscription to Beelzebub written in blood.

* A Coptic scroll.

* Papyrus fragments

I posted a few pictures on Twitter https://twitter.com/marthawells1/status/1090740382483337216

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NPR Review

The Murderbot Diaries: All Systems Red got reviewed on the NPR site:

https://www.npr.org/2019/01/27/688354123/sulky-cynical-murderbot-is-one-of-sci-fis-most-human-characters

It's the wonder of the character — that something so alien can be so human. That everyone who has ever had to hide in a crowded room, avert their eyes from power, cocoon themselves in media for comfort or lie to survive can relate. It's powerful to see that on the page. It's moving to ride around in the head of something that is so strong and so vulnerable, so murder-y and so frightened, all at the same time.

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Cushing Memorial Library and Archives

This is a lot more extensive than the last time I looked at it, so I thought you guys would be interested. Here's a link to the Sandy Hereld Memorial Digitized Fanzine Collection: http://oaktrust.library.tamu.edu/handle/1969.1/149935

It's part of the SF/F Special Collection at Cushing Memorial Library and Archives at Texas A&M University. http://cushing.library.tamu.edu/collecting/scifi.html part of a group of special collections: http://cushing.library.tamu.edu/collecting/index.html

There's also the SF/F Research database: https://sffrd.library.tamu.edu/site/

World Imagined: The Maps of Imaginary Places exhibit (my Books of the Raksura map was in this one) The catalog in PDF is here http://oaktrust.library.tamu.edu/handle/1969.1/160507 and a full tour here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TkCoYZc4oc&feature=youtu.be

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Movies and TV

We watched First Man last night because we love space movies, and it was not good. If Neil Armstrong had been forced to go to the Moon because NASA was holding his wife and children at gun point, some of the directorial choices might have made sense. I think the actual idea and story was good, and it showed things some of the other space movies (like Apollo 13) didn't. (Like the protests against the cost (in money and lives) of the space program and a couple of quick shots of black engineers working the launches.)

But the editing and the cinematography stepped on the actors' performances in what I thought was an unprecedented way. It felt like it was deliberately obscuring them when they tried to show anything other than stoic angst, to the point where it was like the sound dropped when anyone said anything funny, or they switched to a long shot whenever anybody had an expression. It's like, why did you put in bits with people making jokes and enjoying themselves if you're going to make it nearly impossible for us to see and hear them during those parts? When they land on the moon, Aldrin and Armstrong look at each other and you can't see most of their expressions because of reflections off the helmet glass. And why do you hire Ryan Gosling if you don't let us see the full range of his performance? Or even like part of the range of his performance? I felt like I was trying to look at him through binoculars. And it made it really hard to keep track of who the other actors were playing.

Neil Armstrong was a taciturn guy who had some tragedy in his life, but there's plenty of video of him talking and laughing with friends and co-workers, and he was an actual badass, and we didn't see much of that at all. (My two favorite scenes: when Armstrong is having his interview to join the astronaut program, and other candidates are sniffing at him for being a civilian, and it's obvious his giant cast iron balls will hardly fit through the door. And later, when Buzz Aldrin is being a butt and the other astronauts are getting upset, and Aldrin says, "I'm just saying what you're all thinking." Armstrong looks at him for a beat, smiling slightly behind sunglasses, and says something like, "Maybe you should stop." And everybody shuts up. And even that scene was edited in a way that it minimized the impact.)

Other things:

1) not nearly enough talking between the ships and mission control
2) NO LIGHTS in the capsules, HARDLY ANY INSTRUMENT LIGHTS. It made the powerless capsule in Apollo 13 look like the bridge of the JJ Abrams' Enterprise.
3) Very bad at communicating what was going on during the space scenes. Apollo 13 and Hidden Figures were very good at explaining complex technical ideas without slowing the story down and First Man absolutely was not.

Basically I thought it was essentially well-written but so badly filmed and edited it was like watching an unrestored 1920s era film where I was just trying to guess at what was going on. And because of it, it'll be years before we get a good film about this period.

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Pressure

I think The Good Place is the only thing keeping me sane this week.

(The 3rd season finale is tonight.)

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