Archive
Starburst Magazine Issue 490!
It’s another Star Wars issue, and Starburst’s long relationship with the Galaxy Far Far Away continues. The Revenge of The Sith 20th Anniversary issue let us have council of contributors, include Abigail Thorn and Force Majeure‘s very own Adam. Everything from toys to burlesque. There’s also a smashing feature on The Murderbot Diaries and so much more. It’s a great issue. (I always say that.)
My main thing for the print magazine is books and games, so it was a delight to get to talk to the Mantic Games team about Halo Flashpoint, and I love the pun title of the piece ‘ Say Halo To My Little Friends ‘. (So much so that I couldn’t help but show it off to the Mantic Team when I visited them at UKGE. ) My Brave New Words column was a pick of cool new books, include Ben Aaronovitch’s latest, Stone and Sky . Emily Tesh’s The Incandescent, Aliya Whiteley’s Three Eight One and I couldn’t resist taking a look at Critical Role spin off book, Tusk Love. There’s more, you should read the whole column.
Roll for Damage covered the UK’s amazing miniatures scene. Obviously we talked a bit about Games Workshop, but shout outs also included Bad Squiddo, Warp Miniatures, Crooked Dice, Loke Battlemats and so much more.
As always, you can buy the latest issue here.
Starburst Magazine Issue 489!
It’s that time again, and issue 489 of Starburst Magazine puts it’s heart on it’s sleeve by having a memorial cover for David Lynch. Suffice to say that Lynch had a massive influence on movies, and the Starburst crew takes the passing of this titan of cinema very seriously.
It’s a great issue, of course. In addition to a comprehensive and quality feature on David Lynch and his works, we also get a 70th Anniversary special on the Muppets. It’s really good.
My bits include a smashing interview with Bionic Man, V and Alien Nation TV Series creator Kenneth Johnson. I interviewed Kenneth on the eve of the US election, so it was a very interesting (and slightly tense) chat. A lot of the best stuff made it into the issue. Fascinating chap.
We also have tenth anniversary look at Critical Role. This is peppered with comments from the likes of Ginny Di, Liv Kennedy, Jasper Cartwright and Professor MacCallum-Stewart. I hoped to talk to some LA based folk for the piece, but I picked the wrong time to arrange that. It worked out well though.
Brave New Words was mostly about source material style books; movie books etc, and Roll For Damage was filled with some of the most exciting indie games, plus a little bit of commercial stuff like D&D and Games Workshop.
Starburst Magazine Issue 488!
It’s always nice when I get to write about fantasy movies, and issue 488 has a full top 50 feature. The way we do these things that the team pick a handful of favourites and write about them. I got to write about The Seven Voyages of Sinbad and Dungeons and Dragons Honour Among Thieves as well as a few others.
We also have a really solid feature about Kieron Moore’s movie, Secrets of a Wallaby Boy, written by Kris. It’s a fun piece on a fun and bawdy indie movie. (The Guardian didn’t understand it, which is high praise indeed.)
This issue’s Brave New Words column talks about the fun I had Glasgow Worldcon 2024 and a whole host of science fiction and fantasy books. Roll For Damage lets me talk about the Aliens boardgame, space dwarves and a host of fun party games for your christmas present list.
Starburst Magazine Issue 486!
I’m a sucker for the Alien franchise. (Fun fact, the Alien on the cover isn’t the one from Romulus. The issue came out round about when Romulus came out, but this is from an earlier movie. Because the rights were easier to get. Tricks of the trade and all that.) In addition to a brilliant feature on all things Xenomorph, there’s plenty of coverage of the criminally under-rated Star Wars: The Acolyte. It was fun to work on this issue.
My Roll For Damage column talks about the excellent Star Trek skirmish game, Star Trek Away Missions from Gale Force Nine. I also get to talk about Free League’s Alien RPG. (Sometimes, the column matches the cover. Sometimes.) Brave New Words is about cook books. Seriously, I have so many genre focused cook books, so I have to write about The Game of Scones, Flavours of the Multiverse and of course, Wookie Cookies.
Starburst Magazine Issue 485!
485 is out! And can be found in all good bookshops. It’s a horror focused cover, and I wrote some bits for the main feature about horror themed games, including Blood on the Clocktower.
I also got to write a piece called Taking It To The Next Stage, which mostly talks about the stage version of My Neighbour Totoro, as well as stuff such as 2018’s production of Astro Boy Pluto and the My Hero Academia musicals.
Brave New Words focuses on luxury editions of popular books, so I get to fill the page with photos of lovely Folio Society, Black Library and The Broken Binding books. Roll For Damage focuses on TTRPG books that help Dungeon Master’s run a game, from Sly Flourish’s series to Matt Colville‘s advice.
Starburst Magazine Issue 484!
This issue celebrates the 40th anniversary of the Toxic Avenger. (If you don’t know who that is, or what Troma is, blimey you’re in for a very specific treat.) I met Lloyd Kaufman a whole bunch of years ago, fascinating chap. The magazine has covered all things Troma in the past, but it’s nice to revisit themes.
This issue’s Roll For Damage Column is all about Play By Mail, and yes, that includes IT’S A CRIME, a game that was heavily marketed to geeks in the 80s. It was a blast researching this; I recall playing En Garde! as a student and having more fun writing the letters and the like than actually playing the game.
Brave New Words looks at women in horror, Sci-Fi and fantasy, so I get to talk about Jen Williams, Silvia Moreno Garcia, Cassandra Khaw, Kiersten White and whole bunch of other exciting authors.
Features wise, there’s a lovely tribute to works of Terry Pratchett written by myself, specifically his non-fiction and non-Discworld fiction. A lot of this about reprints of his earlier work, many of which are fascinating in terms of seeing how his work evolved.
Finally we have a piece called What They Did In Shadows, which talks about the Stranger Things stage play, First Shadow. It’s an amazing show (go see it while you can), It was an interesting set of interviews to do, and as always I asked some standard ‘silly’ questions that didn’t go into the feature but let me gauge tone and clarity (as well as establishing rapport, to be all mechanical about it.) One of those was ‘Webber or Sondheim’, which one of my standard ‘stagey’ questions, but it did get quite a response from one of the actors, who was surprised I’d compare the two.
Worst Hugo Award Ceremony – Ever
If you were a British teenager back in the 1980s, there’s a fair chance that you’ll remember the 1989 Brit Awards. Presented by Mick Fleetwood and Sam Fox, it’s gone down in award ceremony history as how not to do the thing. Plagued by technical difficulties, presenters who had no empathy with the audience and a general lack of scripting and planning, I was pretty sure it was the worst awards presentation I’d ever see.
The 1989 Brit Awards are still painful to watch
All that changed when I made the mistake of tuning in to watch the 2020 Hugo Award ceremony, presented by George RR Martin. The Hugo Award ceremony is never the most slickly produced thing. And this year, the convention organisers 1 had to do the whole thing via the internet.
And just before we get into it: The speeches were amazing. The technical achievement was incredible. The team did very well on short notice (Worldcons take years to plan) and the things the winners said were important and deserving of respect. A super-cut, shorter version of the ceremony, can be found here:
You’ll note it’s shorter than the full ceremony. That’s because they cut out all the bits from Toastmaster, George RR Martin. The edited version is two hours shorter.
That’s right; the full ceremony was three and a half hours long. Two hours of this was George RR Martin reminiscing on his youth, whilst throwing shade at the new generation of Hugo Nominees and fans. Now had George been a gracious host, that might have been charming. But instead it was an old fan using his platform to lecture and bore his community, whilst disapproving of the community he claims to love.
For example, the award for new voices in sci-fi fandom got changed last year from being called ‘The John W Campbell Award’ to ‘The Astounding Award’. This is mostly because Jeanette Ng pointed out that John W Campbell was a “fucking fascist” and a racist, during her acceptance speech last year for that award.
As Ng acknowledged later; the fans have been trying to get the award changed for years, it’s just that Ng took a stand, risked her career and made the point at a critical time. It prompted the name change.
Martin used his platform to not only mock the way the award had been changed, but to repeatedly talk about Campbell, the noted fascist and racist. Martin would go on to mis-pronounce names (despite given clear guidance to the contrary.) It was a 210 minute dis-fest, punctuated by actually relevant members of the community popping on to accept their awards and say important things about the state of the world.
Worse, Martin changed the narrative of the ceremony. Most of the speeches mentioned the state of the world right now, which is correct for a science fiction awards ceremony. Winners talked about the harassment and bigotry they had to cope with from within the publishing world. They talked about the state of Hong Kong and Hungary. They made impassioned speeches that acknowledged the poor state of our planet right now. It was strong stuff. It was stuff that should be said.
And yet, here we are complaining about Martin and his attempt to sweep that all under the table and talk about himself.
This is not the first time George has been rude to those nominated for a Hugo Award. Back before the days of inside toilets and wifi, Martin invented a thing called the Loser’s Party; a silly name for the Hugo Awards Ceremony after-party. Over the years it’s become a bit of a legend, with talented types from the world of SciFi and Fantasy having fun. It’s become more than what it once was, much like the SciFi community itself.
Last year, at Dublin 2019– An Irish Worldcon, it was held at the spacious Guinness Storehouse. Martin later admitted that he had under-estimated the number of guests attending and it’s clear that certain cliques got in over others. You would assume that a Hugo Losers party would prioritise those nominated for a Hugo Award but didn’t win. Instead, the venue hit capacity and a number of the ‘losers’ couldn’t get in. They were left, outside in the rain. For hours. Waiting to get in to their own party
Just let that sink in; the Hugo Losers party didn’t prioritise the Hugo Losers on the guest list. Though of course George and friends did get in. That generated quite a bit of bad blood, as you can imagine.
The seemingly deliberate disrespect Martin gave to Hugo Nominees last night puts that incident in a fresh light: Martin does not care about the younger, more diverse people who now get nominated for a Hugo award. He can’t be bothered to get their names right and to him, the past is more important than the future. This is unsustainable for an organisation that is all about speculating on what tomorrow brings.
Worldcon and The Hugo Awards need to change. Future Worldcons will not only need to be accessible to those who can only access things online, or who choose not to attend a particular location, but it also needs to acknowledge that this is a world that no longer trusts its elders. Condescending and elite events like the ‘Loser’s Party’ need to go, replaced with something that respects the hard work of those involved with the awards.
The Brit Awards are a slick, well presented show these days. The Hugos need to learn this lesson – the conventions that host it need to spend the money, hire professional hosts and produce something worthy of those the world science fiction community wants to give its highest praise to. That means spending some actual money on the ceremony.
This should have been a celebration of New Zealand’s unique contribution to world of Science Fiction and Fantasy. This should have been a rallying call and an inspiration to the world. Instead it was an ageing white American millionaire rambling on endlessly about the last century, alienating his peers and throwing us back into the past.
Let’s do better in future.
1: Worldcons are volunteer ran. It’s not a monolithic organisation – those in charge change from convention to convention. It’s a feature, not a bug. It’s incredibly hard work and all of the volunteers and technical teams involved have done an amazing job under difficult circumstances.
Brave New Words Award 2020
Back in March, STARBURST Magazine announced it’s finalists for the Brave New Words Award. They are:
Evan Winter – Rage of Dragons (Orbit Books)
Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar – This is How You Lose the Time War (Jo Fletcher Books)
Tyler Hayes – The Imaginary Corpse (Angry Robot)
Sady Doyle – Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers (MHP Books)
Nisi Shawl – New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color (Rebellion)
Tamsyn Muir – Gideon the Ninth (Tor)
This year’s Brave New Words list is very exciting
In case you don’t know the award, it’s pretty simple. It’s an award for words that are Brave and New. It covers a lot of space, can go to editors, writers, bloggers and the like. It’s always exciting to managed.
I walked away from this year’s Starburst International Film Festival in March after vigorous chat with the team, which is the final bit of the of the shortlist process. We announced the finalists via the main website and in print. The plan was to then get the judges to judge the books, and announce the winner at Edge Lit. (We’d selected judges in January.)
Covid-19 had other ideas, and Edge Lit got cancelled. So we are taking our time with it all, and the results are likely to turn up an online convention in October/November 2020. Goodness knows how we are getting the award to people, that’s a job for a future Ed.
We are also planning to a new award, the Starburst Hero Award for Literary excellence. It does what it says on the tin, the designs are very exciting.
The panel of judges for the Brave New Words Award includes genre critics and media professionals. The panel includes Urban Fantasy author Russell Smith media expert Rebecca Derrick, book podcaster Jane Hanmer and book blogger Matt Cavanagh Finally, we welcome narrative expert Professor Esther MacCallum-Stewartto the team. They are excellent people and I’m looking forward to announcing who the winner is.
(Thanks to the magic of editing old blogs, you can find out who won here. )
Brave New Words Award 2019 / Edge Lit
Well that’s another Brave New Words Award done and dusted. The winner is Tasha Suri. The judges felt that her book, Empire of Sand, was just the sort of thing the award is far. It’s brave, it’s new and the words are absolutely lovely.
The award itself is on it’s way to Tasha. Expect to find the award’s journey appear on the Brave New Words Instagram sometime soon.
The actual statue is called ‘The Roboto’ and it modelled on the original Starburst Fantasy Award from the 70s. It’s the same model that get’s given away during the Starburst Film Festival, but with a slightly different base.
The judging process was fun. This time round we had more time go through the short list. Last year we had to work with a March deadline, as the award ceremony was a the Starburst International Film Festival. 2019’s award ceremony happened at Edge Lit in Derby, so we had ages to read all the books.
It was still an extremely tough list choice though. The final judging process was fun though. A long chat with lovely, intelligent well read people where we beat out what we liked about each work. As the chief judge I get to say ‘why’ a lot to the jurors, which was both fun and frustrating.
The short list was: Aliya Whiteley – The Loosening Skin , Tasha Suri – Empire of Sand, Rachel Armstrong – Origamy, Claire North – 84K, Micah Yongo- Lost Gods and Tade Thompson – Rosewater.
Genre fans might notice that some of these nominations have appeared elsewhere in other award lists; The Brave’s mission statement tends to have some cross-over with The Clarke and The Kitschies after all. I think the nominations nail the very strong state of genre thus far, and the winner is totally spot on.
The final announcement happened at Edge Lit and was on just before the legendary raffle. Thanks massively to Del who came up with some genius slides and I think I wasn’t too boring. The audience seemed amused at my terrible puns, I think. I did leave the Roboto on the podium and had to rescue it just before the infamous drunken raffle occured and now it’s on it’s amazing voyage.
Starburst Editorial have given the okay to do this again next year, and Edge Lit is going to be a two-day affair next year. And yes, the podcast is coming back. It’s been a busy year.
Oh, and Edge Lit itself was awesome. I got to hang out with some of my favourite people, attend a couple of useful workshops and here some of the best writers in the industry talk about their work. Looking forward to next year.
Lies Sleeping – Ben Aaronovitch
If you are into both detective fiction and supernatural adventure stories, then we’d be surprised if you haven’t at least heard of the Peter Grant novels. The long running novel series has recently spawned its own comic book spin-offs, novellas and a TV show is still in development. Lies Sleeping is the seventh novel is the series proper, and we are happy to report that it’s still as fresh as ever.
Typically Peter Grant novels start with some sort of incident that can only be handled by Falcon; The Metropolitan Police’s own specialist supernatural crime division can handle. This time round though, we are pretty much dipped straight into the over-arching plot from the previous books. The mysterious Faceless Man, the villain from the last six books or so, is the focus of a major sting operation. This means changes for the team. It’s nice to see how things have developed.
Merchandise.
In the first book of the series, Peter Grant was a humble Police Constable, still wet around the ears. By book seven he’s made it to Detective and regularly taking swims in rivers. His magical abilities are accomplished and reliable. His mentor, DCI Nightingale also feels much more powerful in both confidence and magical might. Even their cosy little base of operations, The Folly, has become a full-on operational centre, with everyday crime fighting professionals rubbing shoulders with the casual creepiness that lies in The Folly. This makes for solid development of the series; after all the characters must progress at some point and it’s been a joy so far to watch them strive through every little set-back.
Aaronovitch melds the magical and mundane extremely well. There’s a good mix of ‘London practicality’ and ‘unimaginable terror’ here; this isn’t a world where everyone can take the idea that magic is a real thing in their stride. Fear of the unknown keeps things in the margins, which provides a back-drop for the main characters struggles. Practical policing versus existential horror, to put in another way.
Lies Sleeping doesn’t try to catch up new readers, which is quite right. (Though if this sounds like your thing, do go and read Rivers of London first.). The plot dives straight into strands from the previous serious, tying up plot threads going all the way back to book one, whilst fraying new threads to keep the intrigue going. The pace is solid and steady, the action is as thrilling as ever and the whole thing ticks along like an old yet exciting friend. It would be unfair to call this more of the same, as the story delivers many answers. And at the same time, asks plenty of questions.
A must for fans of the series so far, and as always, we can’t wait to read the next one.
Ed Fortune 