Although she was scribbling changes to her acceptance speech up to shortly before the ceremony, when she was named winner of the World Fantasy Award for Novel Sofia Samatar didn’t refer to her notes and could only approximate what she said when it came time to blog about it.

She knows what people are interested in, of course. What was it like to be a writer of color and be given an award in the image of H.P. Lovecraft, whose correspondence is riddled with racist statements,after a season when many have called for the design to be changed?

2. The Elephant in the Room I think I used those words. I think I said “I can’t sit down without addressing the elephant in the room, which is the controversy surrounding the image that represents this award.” I said it was awkward to accept the award as a writer of color. (See this post by Nnedi Okorafor, the 2011 winner, if you are confused about why.) I also thanked the board for taking the issue seriously, because at the beginning of the ceremony, Gordon van Gelder stood up and made an announcement to that effect: “The board is taking the issue very seriously, but there is no decision yet.” I just wanted them to know that here I was in a terribly awkward position, unable to be 100% thrilled, as I should be, by winning this award, and that many other people would feel the same, and so they were right to think about changing it.

After the con Samatar shared her explicit views about the issue:

a) Nobody’s post about winning an award should turn into a post about controversy! Everyone should be able to announce their awards with unadulterated joy! And unless the statue is changed, there will be a lot more posts like this. Can we not?

b) I don’t think the statue should be an image of any person.

c) I am not telling anybody not to read Lovecraft. I teach Lovecraft! I actually insist that people read him and write about him! For grades! This is not about reading an author but about using that person’s image to represent an international award honoring the work of the imagination.

d) I discovered, with a horror I’m sure Lovecraft would share, that we look a lot alike.

WFA Novel winner Sofia Samatar.

[Thanks to Michael J. Walsh for the link.]

We’re almost halfway through NaNoWritMo — National Novel Writing Month — a November tradition where aspiring authors challenge themselves to produce a complete novel in one month. For many, this will be their first novel.

Science fiction and fantasy authors James Morrow, Patricia C. Wrede, Ian R. MacLeod, Paul Di Filippo, and Simon R. Green share the fun, challenging, and sometimes frustrating experience of writing their first novels in this video from Open Road Media.

“I just looked at the piece of scrap paper I had in front of me,” author Ian R. MacLeod says of the epiphany he had while at work for the civil service, “and I thought, ‘Well, let’s have a go at doing something more interesting that this.’” Take heart, says Simon R. Green – for him it took “fifteen years to be an overnight success.”

[Thanks to Paul Di Filippo for the link.]

Brother Guy J. Consolmagno

Brother Guy Consolmagno, an astronomer at the Vatican Observatory, will give an acceptance speech for the Carl Sagan Medal at Sasquan, the 2015 Worldcon. The award is given annually by the American Astronomical Society.

Brother Guy, an active fan and a member of the MIT Science Fiction Society, will give this speech at 8:00 p.m. on Thursday evening of the convention.

Brother Guy will also be interviewing Guest of Honor Leslie Turek, also a MITSFS member, later in the convention.

The full press release follows the jump.

Continue reading →

By Andrew Porter: Leigh Chapman, 75, 1960s actress-turned-screenwriter, died November 4 at her West Hollywood home, after an 8-month battle with cancer. Chapman was familiar to TV viewers as Sarah, Napoleon Solo’s efficient secretary in several 1965 episodes of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. But she found her calling as a scriptwriter … in TV with My Favorite Martian. She penned six scripts for The Wild Wild West, one of which earned Agnes Moorehead her only acting Emmy.

There is no army so powerful as an idea whose time has come, and apparently the idea of making H.P. Lovecraft the protagonist of his own comic is that idea. A week ago, while I was writing about the late Larry Latham’s Lovecraft Is Missing, the creators of Lovecraft: The Blasphemously Large First Issue were already reaching their initial Kickstarter funding goal.

Writer Craig Engler, inker Daniel Govar, colorist Mat Lopes and cover artist Lewis LaRosa are going to publish a 48-page limited edition comic that recasts H.P. Lovecraft as “a modern-day, kick-ass action hero & alchemist.”

Lovecraft is a dirty, gritty story about magick, monsters and the occult. It takes place in a modern-day world where H.P. Lovecraft the writer never existed but where all the horrors he wrote about are real. In this story, the man named Lovecraft is the world’s foremost magician and alchemist who maintains a secret library of forbidden knowledge which includes books like the Necronomicon.

Lovecraft is a classic Byronic antihero: “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” He functions as the semi-reluctant guardian of mankind, one of the few who can traffic with occult forces without becoming (totally) corrupted by them. In his world, magicians are a secret culture within the culture who vie for power and knowledge, leading to feuds and wars that can unleash unspeakable terrors. When they do, Lovecraft is the guy who cleans things up.

Supporters found this idea so appealing they pledged 130% of the target amount in the first 36 hours. Now Engler and company have added a list of stretch goals, enhancements that will be added to the issue as money allows. The fund drive lasts until November 25.

Engler’s Lovecraft has a supporting cast that includes the resurrected John Dee, two of Aleister Crowley’s great-grandchildren, and Nyarlathotep the Crawling Chaos — who sows disorder and confusion wherever it goes but is neither good or evil, and is as likely to seemingly help these characters as harm them.

At World Fantasy Con this past weekend Howard Tayler lent a hand to assure someone got the medical attention they needed.

I was engaged in a late-night conversation in the lobby bar when one of the bikers with whom we shared the hotel approached our group.

“You guys, man… you guys gotta take better care of your own.”

“I’m sorry, what’s wrong?” I was puzzled. He seemed frustrated and worried.

“One of your girls, she’s sick drunk outside. She needs her friends to care of her.”

Tayler checked on the person, found she was slumped over and couldn’t be wakened, then went and alerted the hotel staff who promptly sent security to take care of the situation. An even worse ending was avoided.

As Tayler says, “All I did was take ownership of the problem for just long enough to hand it off to the folks who knew how to solve it,” but he calls on anyone who encounters such a situation to do the same in his blog post  “They Know What To Do But You Have To Tell Them”. (“They” meaning hotel security.)

Incidentally, the bikers sharing the hotel with World Fantasy Con were part of the Rolling Thunder Run, which keeps alive the memory of service members left behind after the Vietnam War and “strives to affect national policy in a way that will assist POW/MIA’s.” WFC co-chair Michael J. Walsh says “WFC and Rolling Thunder got along quite well.”

Fred Patten and furry fandom got a mention in the November issue of Flaunt, a high-end glossy fashion magazine that sells for $15.95 a copy.

Blogger “Patch O’Furr” at Dogpatch Press paged through their special Nine Lives issue that profiles cats and the Haute Monde, including furless sphinx cats and trendy Cat Cafés around the world, to find –

…Amidst all the cats, mentions in tiny type on page 81 of Mary E. Lowd as a furry fiction writer specializing in “cats in space”; “furry fandom founder” Fred Patten about what furry fandom is really like – Anthrocon, and furry conventions and other meetings around the world like Zillercon, an annual winter furry skiing event at a lodge in the Austrian or Swiss Alps (Patten says that most furry fans prefer to identify with feral animals, but they have cats as pets); and a profile of Dennis Avner (“Stalking Cat”), who had himself transformed surgically into a big cat (tiger).

Apparently the coverage passed muster with Patch, who has a long memory for any slighting description of furry fandom by mainstream media and demonstrates it by reciting half a dozen examples, like the one from Vanity Fair that reported furry cons are about “fans in fursuits having nonstop sex together.”

Just a suggestion, but people who want their corner of fandom treated with more respect don’t help themselves by giving a signal boost to ancient material. The whiff of resentment encourages the idea there’s some reason not to ignore the report.

Charles Addams painting done in 1946.

Items that went unsold during the first Ray Bradbury Estate Auction are being auctioned again by the Nate D. Sanders firm, some with significantly reduced minimum bids.

For example, they’ll accept a starting bid of $22,500 for the Charles Addams painting that featured in publicity for the first auction in September, when it had a minimum price of $32,500.

The new auction ends November 20 at 5:00 p.m. PST.

Image by EosFoxx

By Fred Patten: There are less than two months left to recommend titles for the Anthropomorphic Literature and Arts Association’s 2014 Recommended Anthropomorphics List. See the Ursa Major Awards website for the current 2014 Recommended List. The next update will be on November 30. If you have read, seen, or played anything furry-fantasy related that you liked, that was first published or released during 2014, and it is not already on the Recommended List, please recommend it yourself before the end of the year.

Nominations for the 2014 Ursa Major Awards will open on January 15, 2015 (the first day of Further Confusion 2015), and will remain open until February 28, 2015. Fans often use the previous year’s Recommended Anthropomorphics List as a guide to what is worth nominating. If there is anything that you consider worth recommending, don’t wait for someone else to recommend it. Speak up!

Carol Ann Susi, the voice of Howard Wolowitz’ mother on The Big Bang Theory, died November 11 of cancer. She was 62.

Susi grew up in Brooklyn and moved to Los Angeles in the 1970s. Her first role on TV was as Kolchak’s secretary, Monique Marmelstein, on ABC’s The Night Stalker.