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Swords and Spaceships

Swords and Spaceships May 10

It’s Friday, ye salty dogs and sugary cats! (Are sugary cats a thing? They should be a thing.) It’s Alex, here to bring you the news and whatever random thing squeezes out of my brain when I cruise through today in history.


This newsletter is sponsored by Stranger Things from Dark Horse Comics and Netflix.

Stranger Things coverSee The Other Side of the hit Netflix series Stranger Things in this original comic series, now collected in trade paperback! Find out what happens to young Will Byers after he is trapped in a dark dimension all alone… with a terrifying monster. Will must use his wits, courage, and heart to survive the monster and escape the Upside Down.


Awards Season Continues Apace

The Aurealis Awards have announced their 2018 winners! I recommend a browse through the shortlist to get your hands on some excellent Australian genre fiction.

The shortlist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award as been announced: Semiosis by Sue Burke, Revenant Gun by Yoon Ha Lee, Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi, The Electric State by Simon Stålenhag, Rosewater by Tade Thompson, and The Loosening Skin by Aliya Whiteley. Look, it’s an exciting list.

The Locus Awards Finalists have also been announced!

News and Views

Here’s a really cool post on Tor.com about Terry Pratchett and logic in the Discworld books. (Full confession: I took just enough logic in university to become utterly insufferable.)

In D&D news for the week, there’s a documentary coming up about the art of the game. You can see an exclusive clip at io9.

A look into an older piece of New Zealand fantasy kidlit that’s pretty bananas.

Bethesda might have plagiarized a D&D adventure in Elder Scrolls Elsewyr.

I admit this is only barely in the remit of the newsletter, but I live for genre and comics writer Genevieve Valentine’s red carpet rundowns, and the one she did for the Met Gala was something else.

Seanan McGuire talks about writing Middlegame.

There’s going to be a Nancy Drew series on the CW? I think my brain just cramped.

Book Riot contributor Alison Doherty on how teaching 6th grade made her love Twilight.

On the May 8 episode of the SFF Yeah! podcast, Sharifah and Liberty talk pirates!

You can now watch The Wandering Earth on Netflix; it’s based on Liu Cixin’s novella of the same name. And so far, it’s the third highest-grossing film of 2019.

Free Association Friday

Well, it’s actually John Scalzi’s birthday–happy birthday, Scalzi! My favorites of his lately have been Lock In and Head On. They’re fun detective stories and I wish to draw more attention to the fact that there are two versions of the audiobooks, one narrated by Wil Wheaton and one narrated by Amber Benson.

Don’t worry, I’m not free associating on Scalzi. It’s also worth noting that apparently on this day in 1962, Marvel published its first issue of The Incredible Hulk.

But instead, let’s talk about how in 28 BCE, Chinese astronomers observed a sunspot. It’s one of the earliest dated observations for China, but of course people have been observing sunspots for as long as there have been people who just really wanted to look at the Sun and figured out you could get away with it when there was fog or clouds or the Sun was at the horizon (NOTE: DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME. IT’S STILL BAD FOR YOUR EYES.) Sunspots are temporary cool (and therefore dark) areas on the surface of the Sun that result from magnetic field flux, which makes them a great way of tracking solar activity.

Rosarium publishing’s put together a two-volume collection of 100 short stories in fantasy, science fiction, and horror from around the world for its fifth anniversary. I mention this because they’re called Sunspot Jungle volume 1 and volume 2.

I also can’t help but think of Liu Cixin’s Three Body Problem, not because it’s about sunspots, but because part of the plot is about a world with three suns, viewed through a virtual reality game.

Sunspots are markers of solar activity, which over the last 1,150 years–until 1975, note–tracked pretty well to Earth’s climate so that more activity tended to match higher global temperatures. It does make sense in that more sunspots equals more activity equals a slightly brighter Sun. (But no, we can’t blame the current warming on solar activity no matter how much some people would like to. It’s all us.) And if we’re talking climate, I’ll just say I hope everyone’s read The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin and Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler. The last of those really freaked me out with its prescience on multiple axes.

See you, space pirates. You can find all of the books recommended in this newsletter on a handy Goodreads shelf. If you’d like to know more about my secret plans to dominate the seas and skies, you can catch me on the (Hugo-nominated!!!) Skiffy and Fanty Podcast or over at my personal site.