Martha Wells wins best novel prize in 2021 Hugo Awards

Showing all posts about science fiction

Martha Wells wins best novel prize in 2021 Hugo Awards

22 December 2021

Network Effect, by American speculative fiction author Martha Wells, won the best novel in the Hugo Awards for 2021. Established in 1953, the Hugos celebrate the best science fiction and fantasy written works – across a number of categories – of the past twelve months.

RELATED CONTENT

Martha Wells, novels, science fiction

Can turning to the light side of the force change the world?

13 November 2021

Can the light side of the force (à la the Star Wars universe) change the world? Washington D.C. based American author Stephen Kent, writer of How the Force Can Fix the World, believes some of the core principles of the Star Wars stories – hope, humility, and balance among them – can be of help to humanity in times of uncertainty.

We’re living in a time of unprecedented and rapid change. An age of chaos. Democracies are in decline worldwide. Dictators are ascendant. Civic organizations are crumbling. People feel lonelier and more rudderless than in any other time in recent history. We’ve tried to slow down, and in some cases we, like Anakin, have tried stop the change, but failed at every turn. The fears that come with living in an age of disruption have produced public anger, and that anger has swelled movements of hate.

And for those who are strong with the force, American journalist and editor Meg Dowell recently interviewed Kent about the book and its concepts, on the Followers of the Force Podcast.

RELATED CONTENT

books, science fiction

Laura Jean McKay wins the 2021 Arthur C Clarke award

1 October 2021

New Zealand based Australian author Laura Jean McKay has been named the winner of the 2021 Arthur C Clarke award for science fiction writing, with her 2020 novel The Animals in That Country. Very much a novel for our times.

Wuher: A Star Wars Story, and other films you may not live to see

18 November 2015

If a single movie, Rogue One, a Star Wars “spin off” story, slated for release in late 2016, can be spawned by way of a few words taken from the opening crawl of A New Hope, then imagine what else seen in the six films released to date, has the potential to inspire? A point that’s not lost on current series producers, the Walt Disney Company:

And if the people at the Walt Disney Company, which bought Lucasfilm for $4 billion in 2012, have anything to say about it, the past four decades of Star Wars were merely prologue. They are making more. A lot more. The company intends to put out a new Star Wars movie every year for as long as people will buy tickets. Let me put it another way: If everything works out for Disney, and if you are (like me) old enough to have been conscious for the first Star Wars film, you will probably not live to see the last one. It’s the forever franchise.

I think Wuher, the gruff bartender in the canteen at Mos Eisley, is worthy of a film. In fact, I’m of the opinion that the significance of his role in the saga has been greatly understated so far. Read his profile. I think you’ll agree there’s far more to him than meets the eye.

Originally published Wednesday 18 November 2015.

Back to the future, I met my parents before they met each other

29 October 2010

Twenty-five years on and people are still asking questions about 1985’s Back To The Future. One that consistently crops up regards the apparent inability of George and Lorraine, Marty McFly’s parents, to remember him, and the part he had in bringing them together, many years earlier.

And to a degree the question makes sense. It would certainly be easy to forget a person you knew only briefly — like for a week — from thirty years earlier. But surely you’d remember anyone who played a big, and very active, part in bringing you together with your future spouse.

The conundrum is this: you tend to remember the people who brought you together in life. You’d certainly remember the person who played Johnny B Goode in such dramatic fashion at the Enchantment Under The Sea dance. And, given that Lorraine had such a crush on Marty in 1955, she’s unlikely to have forgotten him altogether.

What can change over time though are individual perceptions and memories of a person. While I doubt George and Lorraine had forgotten Marty (aka Calvin Klein) all together, they would have forgotten exactly what he looked like after a while. Twenty to thirty years is a long time to remember something like that, more so when you don’t have a photo either.

Even so though, who in their right mind is going think their child, born years after the event, could possibly have had anything to do with their meeting? Can we get back now to simply enjoying repeat screenings of this classic, without the excess analysis?

Originally published Friday 29 October 2010, with subsequent revisions, updates to lapsed URLs, etc.

We made it back to the future, but in a parallel universe

9 July 2010

If you’re a dyed-in-the-wool Back to the Future fan I hope you weren’t taken in by the claim that last Monday, 5 July, was “Future Day”. That being the day Marty McFly and Doc Brown arrived in the future when they travelled forward in time during 1989’s Back to the Future Part II.

The arrival of the time travellers from 1985 last Monday may not have been all bad though, had it have happened. In the twenty-five years since the release of Back to the Future, and only five years out from 2015 — the setting for much of Back to the Future Part II — we still have ground to make up in terms of matching some of the advances in technology seen in the movie trilogy.

So far we’re still lagging in the development of:

Flying cars (actually they exist, but are far from in everyday use)
Hoverboards
Time travel

We have however made advances in other areas, with the advent of:

The World Wide Web
Smart phones
High Definition TV (if that’s much of innovation really, considering we’ve had low-def TVs for years)

There’s still another five years to go though, perhaps by then we’ll at least have hoverboards that are able to match what we can do with skateboards today.

Originally published Friday 9 July 2010, with subsequent revisions, updates to lapsed URLs, etc.

You can travel no further back in time than 1955

18 August 2009

The Time Traveler’s Wife is the latest in a long line of time travel themed movies, and according to physicist Dave Goldberg, makes for a more realistic representation of time travel than most of the (fiction) served to date.

But this is interesting, time travel is (theoretically) only possible to points in time where a time machine already exists, according to Goldberg.

In other words, for Marty McFly to travel from 1985 to back to 1955, as he did in Back to the Future, a DeLorean like time machine would already need to have been in existence in 1955…

According to Einstein’s picture of the universe, space and time are curved and very closely related to each other. This means that traveling through time would be much like traveling through a tunnel in space — in which case you’d need both an entrance and an exit. As a time traveler, you can’t visit an era unless there’s already a time machine when you get there — an off-ramp. This helps explain why we’re not visited by time-traveling tourists from our own future. Futuristic humans don’t drop in for dinner because we haven’t yet invented time travel.

Of course the concept of time travel — in the form of the Flux Capacitor — did exist in 1955, it simply hadn’t taken physical form… does that count?

Originally published Tuesday 18 August 2009, with subsequent revisions, updates to lapsed URLs, etc.

Tastemakers to get a bite of Star Trek at Sydney Opera House

26 March 2009

The Sydney Opera House will host the world premiere of the new Star Trek movie, on Tuesday 7 April 2009, before an audience of 1600 tastemakers (Internet Archive link):

Director JJ Abrams’ new Star Trek movie will have its world premiere at the Sydney Opera House next month, presented by Aussie star Eric Bana. Abrams, Bana and co-stars Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto and Karl Urban will present the blockbuster to 1,600 tastemakers in art, design, entertainment, fashion, media and politics on April 7. It is only the third time a film has debuted at the Sydney Opera House, and the first time a premiere has been held in the concert hall.

I wonder what it takes to become a Star Trek tastemaker then?

Originally published Thursday 26 March 2009, with subsequent revisions, updates to lapsed URLs, etc.

Arthur C Clarke’s Newspad RSS news aggregator

30 May 2008

Author and futurist Arthur C Clarke is credited with predicting the emergence of a number of technologies, including a tablet-like device called a “Newspad”, which could serve the latest news stories from electronic versions of newspapers.

So far more has been said about comparing the Newspad to PDAs or Tablet PCs, but the Newpad also worked in a very similar way to today’s news aggregators, or RSS feed readers.

In the novelised version of 2001: A Space Odyssey, (chapter title “Moon Shuttle”, pg 66-67) Dr Heywood Floyd, chairman of the US National Council of Astronautics, spends time reading on his Newspad, while traveling to the Moon.

Floyd sometimes wondered if the Newspad, and the fantastic technology behind it, was the last word in man’s quest for perfect communications. Here he was, far out in space, speeding away from Earth at thousands of miles an hour, yet in a few milliseconds he could see the headlines of any newspaper he pleased. (That very word “newspaper,” of course, was an anachronistic hangover into the age of electronics.) The text was updated automatically on every hour; even if one read only the English versions, one could spend an entire lifetime doing nothing but absorbing the ever-changing flow of information from the news satellites.

Not only did Arthur C. Clarke predict PDAs and Tablet PCs, he also foresaw the emergence of news aggregators, and RSS technology.

Originally published Friday 30 May 2008.

Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, speak at 2001: A Space Odyssey screening, Sydney, Australia

1 October 2006

Anyone who has even once watched 2001: A Space Odyssey, could be forgiven for thinking the two lead actors, Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood, who portray astronauts Dave Bowman and Frank Poole respectively, mightn’t exactly be the life of the party, were they ever to meet them.

After all, nary a snigger, let alone the merest of smiles, is ever forth coming during their ill-fated deep-space voyage towards Jupiter. Aside from the BBC 12 interview that is, but such theatrics are referred to as spin in today’s post-2001 world.

Were you however to meet Dullea and Lockwood in person, you’d be forgiven for believing they were part of a comedy act. A latter day version of Laurel and Hardy, god help us, piloting humanity one-way through the final frontier. “It’s full of Aussies,” quipped Lockwood, to much amusement, as the actors walked on to the stage at the Orpheum theatre, in the Sydney suburb of Cremorne.

The actors were speaking at a special 2001 event held on the evening of Wednesday 27 September, 2006. The event also included a screening of the seventy millimetre version of the movie. “A very good print, actually,” Dullea told us.

And he was right, not only was the film visually stunning (as always), but the soundtrack really hit the audience in the face also. Never before has the Moon monolith’s electronic scream seemed so shrill, so high pitched, so prolonged.

The pair spoke with Australian film critic David Stratton, and for the most part talked candidly about almost, well everything. The conversation was laced with anecdotes about working with director Stanley Kubrick, and the movie itself.

There were plenty of asides, including discussion on the “science of acting”, with Lockwood insisting improvisation is not an acting method per se. Lockwood also told stories about meetings with people such as Orson Wells, John Lennon, and Neil Armstrong, over the years.

There was little doubt that the pair’s participation in 2001 was a highlight of both their acting careers. And how couldn’t taking part in the greatest movie of all time, not be? Greatest movie of all time?

Lockwood related once meeting someone — possibly not a fan of the film — who told him 2001 was ranked as the thirty-fourth greatest movie ever. “Oh yeah?” Lockwood had retorted, “well, name the thirty-three movies that come before 2001 then.”

If that’s not the greatest comeback of all time, what is?

Originally published Sunday 1 October 2006.

« older posts

newer posts »