AMAZING NEWS: 10-25-20

SPECIAL NOTE:  As of today – October 25th – there are 9 days until Election Day.  Most, if not all states that allow early voting are now doing so.  Mail in voting is active.  If you have not voted – do so.  And remember, Vote Like Your Life Depends Upon It.  Because it DOES.

Congratulations to Amanda Makepeace for her Chesley Award for Best Paperback Cover.  Amanda’s artwork has appeared in several issues of Amazing Stories

In a post robotic world, writers may be happy with chump change

Carl Sagan’s letter to Chuck Berry

Involuntary probings do not transmit Covid.  Now all the aliens have to work on is the consent thing.

Susan Wood critiques Marvel comics for sexism

NASA’s Osiris-Rex “Touched and Goed”:  asteroid sample capture a success.  Video coverage as well

Creative Pan Handling

ISS Mission Ends with capsule landing

RIP James “Amazing” Randi

Cover Art by Alan White:  A Comment on Fanzines

RIP Richard A. Lupoff.  Here’s a quote:

“I discovered a subculture of people who valued the intellectual over the physical, ideas over objects, imagination over conformity, cooperation over competition.”

Starship Troopers demoted

They’re creepy and they’re kooky, Mysterious and spooky, They’re altogether ooky, The Addams Family.
Their daughter is a feature, of a sequel that may reach ya, Tim Burton will direct her,  The Addams Family.

The Universe may be conscious

Rebecca Roanhorse – praised and criticized

HOW TO SUPPORT INDIE BOOKSTORES and THE STRAND IS STRUGGLING

Is a Moon Base Safe for Humans?

NEWS FROM ELSEWHERE (stuff through the transom)

Treat Yourself This Halloween

An Unconventional Mr. Peadlebody

Sale price $1.99

on Amazon

Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Apple


00:0000:58

A dysfunctional vampire family is ensnared in a murder mystery.

Campy, fun, for some reason the writing and characterization remind me of The Confederacy of the Dunces…This is a fun, imaginative book. It’s well written and well told. ” – review from Ingram Spark

The World in 2050 and Beyond
with Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal
November 10, 2020
12:00–1:00pm, PST
Webinar; Register Here
Through a series of interwoven programs, we are creating New Profiles of the Future—inspired by Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s seminal book Profiles of the Future—to bring together the world’s leading thinkers (science fiction writers, cultural scholars, scientists, and more), young visionaries, and the public to produce a well-researched, complex, and empowering set of speculations about the next hundred years that can serve as a roadmap for today’s generation to use to navigate the relentless change of contemporary life.
We are honored to have Lord Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and founder of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, join us virtual to deliver a talk entitled “The World in 2050 and Beyond.”
A discussion with Erik Viirre, Director of the Clarke Center, and a Q&A will follow.
Lord Martin Rees is the Astronomer Royal. He founded the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk with Huw Price and Jaan Tallinn. He is a Fellow of Trinity College and Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge. He was formerly the Master of Trinity College and President of the Royal Society. He has extensive experience engaging with both policymakers and the public to better prepare for our long term challenges. He is the author of a number of popular books, including Just Six Numbers and the existential risk-focused Our Final Century? He has written over 500 peer reviewed papers and eight books in total. His most recent book is On the Future: Prospects for Humanity.
___
“Prophecy may be a lost art, but I can think of no better way to envision what lies ahead than this book―a multidimensional meditation by one of our most distinguished and wise scientific minds on where we are headed and what we can do to right the ship of our civilization. In a time when it is hard to find a dream of the future that is not dystopian, Martin Rees sees and writes with rigor, clarity, and hope.”―Ann Druyan, writer, producer, and director of Cosmos
“On the Future is a very important book that should be widely read and acted upon. Martin Rees combines his deep scientific insights and compassion for humanity’s welfare to address, in clear and elegant prose, the major issues facing human civilization today, some of which are not now commonly considered. Whether or not you agree with all the points he makes, you must take them very seriously indeed.”―Roger Penrose, author of Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe
“On the Future, by a leading senior scientist and written in a charming and crystalline style, provides the kind of wisdom humanity most needs to make our way on through the twenty-first century.”―Edward O. Wilson, professor emeritus, Harvard University
ABOUT NEW PROFILES OF THE FUTURE
In the original Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible, Arthur C. Clarke presented a grounded but optimistic series of speculations on where technology and culture were taking the human species. It was a roadmap for countless scholars, innovators, and scientists over the last half-century. Many of its predictions hold up remarkably well. Take a look at the chart from the back of the original edition:
Along with the World-Making Visionaries series, we organized the Extended Pause, a public collaborative act of cultural imagination during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as last summer’s SDFutures youth workshops.
These projects will result in a new podcast series, documentary film, and publication—inspired by Clarke’s vision but updated for our times.
For more information, please contact us at info@imagination.ucsd.edu.
Other News and Events:
UC Speculative Futures Collective presents:
Transnational Equivalences & Inequalities
Virtual Symposium Hosted by UC Irvine
The UC Speculative Futures Collective is proud to present the fall virtual symposium “Transnational Equivalences and Inequalities,” hosted by UC Irvine and Professor Christopher Fan.
A recent meme featuring the South Korean director Bong Joon-ho quotes him as saying, “We all live in the same country now: that of capitalism.” This symposium will take stock of this view from multiple lines of approach. How is the future produced through the reproduction, categorization, and mobility of bodies? How has the speculative mode been affected by the deterioration of the postwar rules-based international order, financial crisis, environmental disaster, and pandemics?
The next session is:
Fri, Oct 16, 1-3PM PST
Panel 2: “Borders”
“Unsettling Border Imperialism: Speculative Geographies of Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rainforest and Malka Older’s Centenal Cycles”
Heejoo Park (UC Riverside)
“Technologies of Displacement: Cinema, Military, and Refugee Labor”
Quyên Nguyen-Le (UC Irvine)
“Redefining Pasifika Settlements in the Climate Crisis”
Gregory Loui (UC San Diego)
“Angel Island, Immigration, and Anti-Militarism”
Qianru Li (UC Irvine)
For more information, please visit specfutures.org.
And if you missed the first session, “Carceral Bodies,” please enjoy the recording of the discussion below:
"Carceral Bodies" - Transnational Equivalences and Inequalites, Panel 1 - October 6, 2020
Speculative Writing, Art, and World-Making in the Wake of Octavia E. Butler as Feminist Theory
If you, like so many of us, have been meditating on the writings of Octavia E. Butler these past few months, be sure to read the new journal article by Shelley Streeby (Professor of Ethnic Studies and Literature at UC San Diego and Faculty Director, Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop) on “Speculative Writing, Art, and World-Making in the Wake of Octavia E. Butler as Feminist Theory,” published in Feminist Studies.
The article explores Butler’s archive and the question “What is the ‘speculative’ and why is it important in thinking about Butler’s intersectional feminist legacies,” as well as the work of contemporary writers and thinkers like adrienne marie brown, Ayana Jamieson, Moya Bailey, Sami Schalk, Aimee Bahng, and Walidah Imarisha, who have creating new real and virtual communities through Butler’s inspiration.
Measuring Computational Creativity
A Workshop for ISEA 2020
Sunday, October 18
15:00pm – 19:00pm (Montreal Time, GMT-4, EST)
For those of you interested in computational creativity and machine imagination (and what they may reveal about the functioning of our own human imagination), you won’t want to miss this upcoming workshop at the International Symposium on Electronic Art 2020, co-organized by our own Robert Twomey:
“How do we make a creative machine? This workshop follows a series of studies conducted in the classroom setting at CMU and UC San Diego. For ISEA, participants will collectively find a definition of creativity specific to machines, addressing follow up questions: Can we computationally model ambiguity? Would a novelty search result in valuable discoveries? Where is the threshold between randomness and creativity? How do we evaluate the creativity of an algorithm? To answer these questions, participants develop sets of criteria to assess their own and peer groups’ creative AI and ML projects. Although such a human-centered method is subjective, we anticipate discovering ways to describe and interpret dimensions of algorithmic creativity. This half-day workshop engages a broader arts and machine learning community to collaboratively define these quantitative criteria, in a first attempt to collectively establish evaluation metrics for the area of creative AI.
ISEA 2020 is a virtual event and this workshop will be conducted online. Our invited speakers will provide prerecorded video talks and participate in live panel discussions.”
Speakers include:
Image above created by Eunsu Kang.
For more information, please visit https://mcreativeai.github.io/.
Into the Impossible
Nobel Prize Week!
Did you lose a Nobel Prize this year? Join the club!
But fear not: last week we featured new interviews with two Nobel Prize winners and two losers, Monday through Thursday!
  • Duncan Haldane (winner in 2016)
  • Carl R. Hagan, co-creator of the ‘Higgs Boson’, loser of the 2013 Nobel Prize…
  • Carl Wieman (winner in 2001)
  • Brian Keating in a special interview with Luis Razo
Listen via Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts, or enjoy the video versions below. And as always, we appreciate your reviews and shares!
Duncan Haldane: Winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics: Strange & Delicious Topological Matter!
Carl Hagen: Spontaneous Symmetries, the Higgs Mechanism and the Nobel Prize
Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman: science pedagogy; debunking Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour rule.
The Faith of a Physicist: A conversation with Luis Razo Bravo
We are grateful to all of our supporters, including:

 

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Arc Manor/Phoenix Pick

Welcome to this very late newsletter (nearly three weeks late). We had some issues that needed to be resolved and I kept delaying this. I had thought to even skip October, and just go to November, but you know what, we need as much reading material as we can in these unusual times…so here goes.

First, just in time for the holiday season we  have a very, very special gift you can give to someone who loves science fiction (or yourself!). A leather-bound, limited, numbered edition of the Pursuit of the Pankera, This edition is limited to 400 copies only, and given that it is (in all probability) the last novel ever to be published by the Dean of science fiction, it is indeed special.

You get to choose your number (from those available at the time).

Unlike many other offers of collectables we are offering a full refund on the of this book.


We are also offering a 40% discount on both the ebook and the trade paperback for And the Last Trump Shall Sound.

“Three alarming, eclectic novellas imagine a ravaged America left behind by the totalitarian reign of Donald Trump in this chilling anthology, which picks up after Trump’s death in 2024 during ‘the second great COVID outbreak’ “—Publishers Weekly


Our free ebook of the month is Kevin J. Anderson and Steven Savile’s Tau Ceti. This book won the Lifeboat to the Stars award when originally published.

The Beacon has spent generations reaching a home away from home, finally reaching a planet they can finally settle in and start a new life.

​However, as the years passed, technology has been radicalized travel, re-writing space travel.

Faster-than-light ships are a fact of life, and the far flung systems and planets are now common place.

And a ruthless dictator who wants to lay claim to the new planet already tamed and ready for expansion. Can Captain Jorie Taylor stave off almost certain disaster and save their dream?

Additional books by Larry Niven and Robert Silverberg are also available at part of a bundle.

Happy reading.

Thank You and have a Good Evening,

Shahid

 

ReAnimus Press News

JUST RELEASED! HURRAH!

THE WITCHING HOUR by James Gunn

…and lots more…

Book cover for The Witching Hour

 

THE WITCHING HOUR by James Gunn

The Witching Hour

    • ReAnimus Press store:

www.ReAnimus.com/1650

    • Amazon:

www.Amazon.com/dp/B08L5JLW7L/?tag=reanimus-20

    • Also available in paperback

 

Another just in time for Halloween!

“WE SUMMON THEE, PRINCE, RULER OF DARKNESS, LORD OF EVIL: YOUR WORSHIPERS SUMMON THEE TO RECEIVE OUR SACRIFICE…” SFWA Grandmaster James Gunn applies the principles of science and science fiction to the realm of the unholy with the Witching Hour, three novelettes of satanic scenery and devilish deceit.

Not every witch intended to be one; there’s more going on with beer than you might imagine; and there’s devilish doings at the magicians conference.

Mischief abounds. Demons, death and disbelief will haunt you at every corner. Macabre rituals of darkness will creep up your spine until your fragile mind tingles with fear.

 

 

And lots more…

See the list of our newest books here. Lots of stuff you’ll love!

 

New in Sci-Fi and Fantasy

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

V.E. Schwab

A Life No One Will Remember. A Story You Will Never Forget.

In the vein of The Time Traveler’s Wife and Life After LifeThe Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is New York Times bestselling author V. E. Schwab’s genre-defying tour de force.

“For someone damned to be forgettable, Addie LaRue is a most delightfully unforgettable character, and her story is the most joyous evocation of unlikely immortality.”—Neil Gaiman

?  Read an excerpt

GET YOUR COPY TODAY!

 

N. K. Jemisin is a MacArthur Fellow!

N. K. Jemisin is part of this year’s class of MacArthur Fellows! The MacArthur Foundation’s Fellowship Program awards unrestricted fellowships to talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction. Learn more and watch N. K. Jemisin herself talk about her work.

New from Witcher author Andrzej Sapkowski

This month, get ready to meet Reinmar of Bielawa, a beloved new hero on an epic journey in THE TOWER OF FOOLS by the bestselling author of The Witcher series.

The first book of the Hussite Trilogy is packed with all the narrative twists, political intrigue, and morally gray characters that Witcher fans have come to know and love from Andrzej Sapkowski’s writing. To learn more, head on over to The Gamer for their review and pre-order a copy today.

THE TOWER OF FOOLS releases on October 27th in print, e-book, and audio formats—read by Witcher narrator Peter Kenny!

Choose your next read based on
your favorite trope!

From ‘Found Family’ to ‘The Chosen One,’ we’ve put these lists together to help match you with an SFF book based on your favorite trope! Read here.

#OrbitLIVE events

Don’t miss our October Witch Extravaganza event on Tuesday October 27th with witchy authors Alix E. Harrow (THE ONCE AND FUTURE WITCHES), Constance Sayers (A WITCH IN TIME), and Louisa Morgan (THE AGE OF WITCHES). Register here.

We also had great virtual live events this past month, including Kim Stanley Robinson, author of THE MINISTRY FOR THE FUTURE, and Michael E. Mann, climate scientist and author of Dire Predictionsdiscussing climate changeMelissa Caruso, author of THE OBSIDIAN TOWER, and Katy Rose Pool, author of There Will Come a Darknessdiscussing all things fantasy; and a virtual cover launch for FOR THE WOLF by Hannah Whitten, where Hannah Whitten and Orbit Associate Editor Angeline Rodriguez discuss the new fantasy novel coming out in June 2021 and answer audience questions.

If you missed any of these, you can watch all of the replays here. Be sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook where we’ll be announcing new events as they are organized.

Don’t miss this month’s giveaways!

To celebrate the spooky season, we’re giving away three witchy books on our Instagram: A WITCH IN TIME by Constance Sayers, THE ONCE AND FUTURE WITCHES by Alix E. Harrow, and THE AGE OF WITCHES by Louisa Morgan!

Follow the directions in our post to enter for a chance to win this magical bundle.

(US only; giveaway ends 10/25/20 11:59pm EDT)

Witchy Reads Sweepstakes! Enter for your chance to win one of seven magical books including THE ONCE AND FUTURE WITCHES by Alix E. Harrow and more from our fellow Hachette imprints!

Click here to enter.

No purchase necessary. 50 U.S./DC, 18+. Ends 10/31/20 at 11:59pm ET. Official Rules apply: https://bit.ly/3cQw58I

Keep up to date with the latest Orbit news and giveaways. Follow us on social media!

Facebook Orbit Books US
Twitter Orbit Books
Instagram Orbit Books
YouTube Orbit Books
Orbit Books

We have no fewer than seven gorgeous new covers we’re excited to share with you!

From one of the most exciting new storytellers in epic fantasy, SON OF THE STORM, the first book in the Nameless Republic trilogy is a sweeping tale of violent conquest and forbidden magic set in a world inspired by the pre-colonial empires of West Africa.

Learn more and read an excerpt.

The first daughter is for the Throne.
The second daughter is for the Wolf.For fans of Uprooted and The Bear and the Nightingale comes a dark, sweeping debut fantasy novel about a young woman who must be sacrificed to the legendary Wolf of the Wood to save her kingdom. But not all legends are true, and the Wolf isn’t the only danger lurking in the Wilderwood.Learn more about FOR THE WOLF by Hannah Whitten, coming June 2021.
Enjoy history as you’ve never seen it before! A RADICAL ACT OF FREE MAGIC is the ambitious sequel to H. G. Parry’s A DECLARATION OF THE RIGHTS OF MAGICIANS, which Publishers Weekly gave a starred review and called a “poetic tale of justice, liberation, and dark magic.”

While you wait in anticipation for its July 2021 release, feast your eyes on the brilliant cover! Learn more.

Looking for an immersive fairytale-inspired novel to sweep you off of your feet? Rena Rossner, author of THE SISTERS OF THE WINTER WOOD, returns with a dazzling new book full of magic, history, and Jewish folklore: THE LIGHT OF THE MIDNIGHT STARS, on sale April 2021.

Learn more and read an excerpt.

Your favorite monster-hunter is back and better than ever. Devin Eveson is the Soulkeeper, honor-bound to protect humanity from monsters once thought to be only legend. Devin’s saga began with  SOULKEEPER and its sequel RAVENCALLER, and now finds its explosive conclusion in VOIDBREAKER. In a world overrun by monsters, Devin will have to face his most dangerous enemy yet—his own sister. Their battle is front and center in VOIDBREAKER’S brilliant cover. Learn more.
Teagan Frost is back. And this time, the sh*t is going to hit the fan.

Teagan Frost might be getting better at moving sh*t with her mind – but her job working as a telekinetic government operative only ever seems to get harder. That’s not even talking about her car-crash of a love life…

EYE OF THE SH*T STORM, the latest installment in Jackson Ford’s Frost Files series, releases in April 2021. Learn more.

Discover your next magical read! Willa Reece’s lush debut novel, WILDWOOD WHISPERS, is a beautifully-crafted tale of hope after traumatic loss, folk magic, and the strong, and often healing, bonds between women. Landing at your nearest bookstore in August 2021!

Learn more.

Prepare your TBRs: books on sale in November

 

 

Please take a moment to support Amazing Stories with a one-time or recurring donation via Patreon. We rely on donations to keep the site going, and we need your financial support to continue quality coverage of the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres as well as supply free stories weekly for your reading pleasure. https://www.patreon.com/amazingstoriesmag

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