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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 487!
Scary clown on the cover means that this issue all about Terrifier. It’s really not my sort of thing, so unsurprisingly I didn’t help with the cover story. (I love a good horror movie, but the Terrifier moves just aren’t fun or interesting to me. As big a fan as I am of all things genre, even I have limits.
My feature in this issue is called Beyond The Dream Park and talks about all the interactive theater you can find in the UK right. It focuses especially on Lemon Difficult’s Key of Dreams, which is more my speed for horror; I like the mix of the mundane, the mystic and the cosmic. Also, Beyond Dream Park was also the name of one of the first convention panels I ever moderated.
Brave New Words focuses on women writing modern science fiction, from speculative climate fiction to shooty bang explosions in space. Roll for Damage gives Wizkids some love, talks about the end of Fantasy Flight’s X-Wing game and cover’s Gale Force Nine’s Alien’s game, Another Glorious Day in the Corps. We also look at the Darrington Press edition of For The Queen and Bright Eye Game’s storytelling game, The Plot Thickens.
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.
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.
On awards and clever titles
So this Monday1 Starburst, that magazine I write for, announced the nominees for the Brave New Words Award, which can be found here.
It’s a bit exciting. It’s also a bit different, in terms of its aims. It’s not a simple best2 book award. For a start, it’s not for a work. It’s for an individual, based on their work3. It’s also based around the name; Brave, New and Words.
Before I break that down though, let me explain how the award came about:
Back in 2016, Starburst had a film festival. It was rather special. Like many of the adventures that magazine has taken me on, it wasn’t the smoothest of affairs. However, it was also pretty amazing. People came from all over the world to show quirky and different genre movies. Stuff that was new and interesting. I met a whole load of actors, directors, FX types and of course script writers. It was a ‘2am in the morning, talking nonsense with interesting strangers’ sort of affair.
And amidst the more mainstream panels and movie showings, were some brilliantly curated gems. Features like Blood of Tribades, a valiantly silly homage to 70’s Italian horror movies. Or Good Tidings, a flick about a rampage of killer Santas. The latter won ‘Best Feature’ at the festival’s award ceremony.
But what really caught my eye was the Independents Day4 Award, given to Christian Nicolson for This Giant Papier Mache Boulder is Actually Really Heavy. Nicolson’s movie is a gem. It’s from New Zealand and it’s a different sort of low budget sci-fi comedy. It does things that mainstream movies would never dare try and it’s clearly cobbled together with love and grit. Of course it won.
Papier Mache Boulder has done quite well at festivals
I walked away from the festival reminded that since it’s rebirth in Manchester, Starburst’s mission has been about encouraging and highlighting new talent. After all, it’s first ever issue was founded on an indie movie, and it’s been promoting brave and clever stuff ever since. I knew then that we needed an award for people who wrote rather than people who acted or directed. Naming the award after the magazine’s book column, Brave New Words5, seemed obvious, and that helped define what the award would be about.
The ‘Words’ bit is obvious. We wanted written works. To widen it out though, the idea was to make it cross-discipline. We got a good variety of entries this year, which is encouraging as the award is in its first year and ‘what it’s for’ isn’t really set in people’s minds as yet.
‘New’ was easy as well; works from the previous year 6. But also new as in different, new as in fresh. New as in eye-catching. New of course, doesn’t automatically mean debut. We have some quite illustrious types on our shortlist, because they’re all doing stuff that’s fresh and exciting with their writing.
‘Brave’ is perhaps the most nebulous. In a way, we mean striking. Different. Clever. Something that stretches the scope of the genre. Boundary pushing. Or simply something that needed writing that no one else seems to have written.
I think this award will fit in well with its fellow Starburst awards. This year’s Starburst Festival should be fun.
In the meantime, I have six works to critically analyse, and an amazing panel of judges to debate with. See some of you at Starburst’s Media City Festival, for the results of the inaugural winner.
The shortlist for the Brave New Words Award, courtesy of the BNW Instagram.
1: As I write this. Chances are you’re reading this in the future. Always check the dates. This applies as much to blog posts as it does to bacon.
2: There’s nothing wrong with ‘best’, of course. Except simply saying ‘best’ tends to obscure criteria. Besides, the name of the award rather tells you what it’s for.
3: Simply put, making the prize about the writer not the work makes it harder for the prize to become predictable over the years.
4: Independents Day is the name of a regular feature in the magazine.
5: Brave New Words is also the name of a podcast. Which is eligible for the Best Fancast, if you’re the sort of person who nominates Hugos. Just saying.
6: The Sudden Appearance of Hope got in thanks to the paperback version coming out in 2017. We’ll probably tighten that next year.
Bonus Note: By the way, if want more cool book related pictures, check out the Instagram feed for the Brave New Words podcast.
Ed Fortune 