My Nominees for the Hugo Awards

For a description of the annual Hugo Awards, look at their official site. My nominees for certain categories are as follows:

Best Novel: Virtues of War by Bennett R. Coles.

I reviewed Virtues of War at this previous post.

Best Novella: “The Coward’s Option” by Adam-Troy Castro in Analog magazine.

I usually don’t review shorter works, but I did here.

Best Short Story: “The Narrative of More” by Tom Greene and “The Museum of Modern Warfare” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

I thought the best short story I read last year was “The Narrative of More.” It is the fascinating account of what seems to be an anthropologist studying a degenerate human colony on a planet. They live by foraging and cannot build a civilization, not because they lack intelligence, but because they are all habitual thieves and liars.

Since the Hugo Awards allow us more than one nominee in a category, I also included “The Museum of Modern Warfare,” where a veteran has to encounter old memories.

Best Professional Artist: Julie Dillon.

  

As I indicated in a previous post, Julie Dillon did a slideshow of her work at Norwescon.  

Norwescon 2016 Part II

So now here are some more pictures from Norwescon, that big science fiction convention in Seattle I attended. Here’s the Dalek that Torrey Stenmark saved me from.

That plant is in the background; it’s not a headdress. That’s also a lesson for writing: do not let the background overwhelm what you’re trying to get across in a scene.

One of the sessions was on how Roman legions fought. As you can see, it was hands-on with authentic shields.

The fellow on the left was the instructor—very knowledgeable. Below is the pagan army.

They’re pretty much just there to get slaughtered.

Here are some Medieval villagers.

NPC means non-player character. In other words, a character in a game that is not controlled by a player—a character that is controlled by a computer or employees of the game company. So they are drolly suggesting that this is a video game, and the woman on the right is not an avatar of a real person.

Medieval themes were very common.

The armor was not normally made of metal, but some of the weapons were.

Here are Perseus and Medusa. These costumes were fantastic.

They were asked to do a fighting pose, though we know they were allies. And if you’re really boned up on your mythology, you’ll know whose head is on Athena’s shield.

Superheroes were popular.

The less traditional comic book figures can have guns.

And here are Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn.

And who is the little figure that Poison Ivy is holding? 

[Permission granted to use any photo on this post, so long as it is labeled “Photo by Mark Murata”]

Norwescon 2016 Part I

I went to Norweson again this year. It’s the biggest science fiction/fantasy convention in the Northwest with a large emphasis on writing. I saw a couple of familiar faces. The artist Julie Dillon was there.

She showed us slides of her fantasy art. I nominated her for best artist in the upcoming Hugo Awards.

I was getting ready to take a picture of a Dalek when Torrey Stenmark walked by.

This reinforced my previous theory that if you stay in one place long enough, the whole world passes by. She reprised her floor costume of Ms. Marvel from last year.

A new face was Adam Rakunas. He is the author of Windswept, a nominee for the Philip K. Dick Award.

Although his paperback novel didn’t win, I rather enjoyed his live reading of an excerpt. I thought I detected an element of Max Headroom in his style, and when I asked him about it afterwards, he said that might have been swirling around in part of his brain. 

[Permission granted to use any photo on this post, so long as it is labeled “Photo by Mark Murata”]

Sniper and Swordsman Join Virtual Forces

Sword Art Online 5 & 6: Phantom Bullet pose a conundrum: Someone is using his avatar to kill other players online. But that’s impossible. If your avatar gets shot, why would you die in the real world?

Kirito, a young man with a mysterious past, is recruited to enter the game and find out what’s happening. He possesses incredible sword skills, to the point that he can use a photon sword to slice bullets headed his way. He encounters a sinister figure who was part of a group he battled in his past—a group that succeeded in killing people in real life. But the old virtual reality headsets have been replaced with new ones that cannot accidentally/on purpose electrocute players. So can this sinister figure really be killing people again?

Sword Art Online 5 

Sinon wields a sniper gun with great skill and confidence. She has the build of an ordinary girl, but she uses most of her points for strength and agility, so she can carry around the immense gun as if it weighed no more than a backpack. If she can just win the Bullet of Bullets championship, she may attain the confidence she needs to overcome a real-life trauma.

She encounters Kirito, whom she mistakes for a girl, since he got stuck in a delicate avatar with long hair. After a rather bitter confrontation over that, she decides to join forces with him, even though she is putting her life on the line. Can they stop the sinister figure before he kills again?

 Sword Art Online 6

Sword Art Online 5 & 6: Phantom Bullet are light novels, which means they are mostly text with a few illustrations. They are written with a future virtual reality so realistic, the writing does not get bogged down with technical details. The players walk, talk, run, and fight with no extraneous explanation of how the tech works.

I mainly read these two works to get familiar with how virtual reality is written nowadays. But I found these light novels to be interesting and satisfying. Towards the end things were a little repetitive, but don’t stop reading—there’s a good twist.

For those of you familiar with Sword Art Online, this occurs after the Aincrad story, but it’s not the Progressive series. (Are we clear?) And now the manga version is coming out in America, which naturally would be more than two volumes. And I first became interested through the anime, but I will not even begin to explain the numbering system for those. 

Of course it’s not Skynet

DeepMind. Perhaps the most powerful gaming artificial intelligence in the world. It is designed to learn organically, like a living creature. DeepMind just beat Lee Sedol, the world champion of Go—the board game that uses black and white stones.

The operators of DeepMind assure us that it is only used for games—for the moment—so it is harmless. Well, that’s comforting, and . . . hey, didn’t they ever see WarGames?

It was kind of funny to watch that and see nuclear missiles being targeted at Seattle.

DeepMind is part of Google. Their motto is “Don’t be evil.” And if you believe that, then you won’t fear that this worldwide network will ever become Skynet.

Music to give you chills

Ever hear music on the radio that gave you chills, so that you had to go out and buy the CD? That happened recently as I listened to a classical FM station. It wasn’t anything by Bach or Brahms. It was music from the movie GalaxyQuest.

I’m serious. Anyone who has seen the movie will associate comedy with the main theme, as Captain Nesmith (Tim Allen) and his alien sidekick (Alan Rickman), the engineer, the navigator, and the woman who did nothing but repeat the computer went off and . . . I’m not sure what they were trying to do. But behind, beneath, and above all that was the music.

The composer, David Newman, used to play violin for the background music for the old Star Trek, so you know he understands this sort of thing. He said in an interview on The Score (more on that show in a moment), that he did not set out to compose humorous music. He set out to write music for a great space adventure movie.

He succeeded. Beyond the main theme, the music he composed was remarkably complex. The piece that gave me chills was when they went in a shuttle down to the planet, then made their way to the mine. Yes, the actors were doing silly things, especially Tony Shalhoub looking weird, and Tim Allen diving around for no reason, but ignore all that. The music is brilliant.

I heard it on The Score, which plays on many classical stations. The host plays symphonic movie music, so it’s partway between classical and popular. He often has interviews with the composers, so it’s worth your time to see if it plays in your area. 

Best Zombie Jane Austen Movie Ever

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is what it sounds like, and more. About the first fifteen minutes consists of slapping together scenes of zombies with Pride and Prejudice. Then the movie becomes much more serious, integrating those two disparate elements together into a satisfying storyline.

If you like the video above, you’ll like the movie, if you don’t like it, don’t see the movie. Surprisingly, it pretty much follows the story of Lizzy and Mr. Darcy, but with zombies integrated. For instance, Jane takes sick on her way to Mr. Bingley’s not just because of a rainstorm, but because she is too shocked to defend herself from a zombie mother and baby, saying, “This cannot be.” And there is a deeply moving scene as Lizzy reads a letter from Darcy, and she has to reconsider who is truly guilty of pride and prejudice.

Standout scenes include Lizzy leading her sisters in a wedge attack against zombies at a dance, Darcy beating back zombies from the great wall around London, Matt Smith (a former Doctor Who) as the delightfully dimwitted Parson Collins, and a rather surprising Lady Catherine de Burgh.

If you like alternate versions of Pride and Prejudice, there is the best science fiction Jane Austen movie, the 2008 Lost in Austen.

Or there is the fundamentally wacky web series, the Lizzie Bennett Diaries.

Short Takes on Short Stories

I don’t normally review short stories, but the current issue of Analog (March 2016) features the excellent “The Coward’s Option” by Adam-Troy Castro. This is an Andrea Cort story, but it works well for a reader who hasn’t read the previous stories. Cort is a total misanthrope, and her Diplomatic Corps finds her cynical, unrelenting pursuit of justice useful in her job as a prosecutor.

Cort cares nothing about the perpetrator in this case, who obviously deserves death for his murder of an indigenous person on this alien planet. What intrigues her is these aliens have a “coward’s option” as an alternative to the death penalty. Since this society despises cowards, she wonders if this alternative is worse than death. If you read this issue of Analog, you’ll find out.

I’m also making my way through Worst Contact, edited by Hank Davis. Obviously a riff on “first contact,” these short stories tell of first contacts between humans and extraterrestrials that go bad for the humans, the extraterrestrials, or both. My favorite is an old one, “Puppet Show” by Fredric Brown, written in 1962. If you ignore some of the dated details, it’s quite hilarious.

Also worthy of mention is “The Flat-Eyed Monster” by William Tenn, written in 1955, which is almost as funny. It concerns a professor who is transported to a planet of aliens with bulbous eyes at the ends of their multiple tentacles, who finds out they can be as boastful and egotistical as humans. There’s also “Early Model” by Robert Sheckley, written in 1956, about an astronaut whose personal force field keeps snapping on automatically when aliens try to approach and make friendly contact with him.

Despite the above, not all the stories are old, and not all of them are funny (but the older ones tend to be so). So Worst Contact contains a generous amount of older stories, mixed with some newer ones.

The short story among those I’ve read recently that I recommend the most highly is the original version of Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card. (It’s not in Worst Contact or the Analog issue I mentioned above. It appeared in the 1977 issue of Analog, and it’s up to you to find it online.)

For those of you who have read the novel or seen the movie (which I reviewed here), the original novella is notably different. Don’t worry, it’s the same plot. But the original starts with Ender already a hardened commander, and he meets his subordinate Bean, who is quite cocky. Also, Maezr Rackham’s first encounter with Ender is quite violent.

The twist ending is still there, but it is different. You’ll have to read it to find out why Ender is so inconsolable. If you do, you may get the same reaction I did when I told a couple of people who read the novel. They disagreed with me, one of them strenuously, about how the original ended.

Idiot Hits Empire State Building with Drone

Someone hit the Empire State Building with a drone. Let’s all agree it was an accident. But then the guy went to security there to get his drone back. He was arrested.

photo by S J Pinkney 

If you hit something like the Empire State Building, don’t be stupid enough to go up to the security guards and ask for it.

A more skillful drone operator buzzed the Space Needle without hitting it (still not legal), as I recounted in this previous post.