Hobbit

Here's the official shortlist:

Ravenheart Award
For best fantasy book cover

Olof Erla Einarsdottir for Power & Majesty (HarperCollins Australia)
Victoria Frank for Tymon’s Flight (HarperCollins Australia)
Todd Lockwood for The Ragged Man (Pyr)
Cliff Nielson for The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (Orbit)
Jon Sullivan for Shadow King (The Black Library)


Morningstar Award
For best debut novel
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Think this is brilliant!

Jethro Tull meets astronaut to celebrate Yuri Gagarin's first flight.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeC4nqBB5BM

Sadly reminds me of the Jean Michel Jarre / Ron McNair event that never happened.

But I do like this.

Mark

that Yuri Gagarin went into space.

Hard to think how little we've progressed since then, but a remarkable achievement.

And hearing some of the details about the flight, it is amazing (and extremely brave!) that it happened in the first place.

Great play on Radio 4 today, called Titanium about Gagarin through the eyes of Titov. Good stuff!

Found out this morning that Nicholas Courtney, the Brigadier in the original Doctor Who series, died yesterday.



Was an icon of Hobbit's youth. Met him and Tom Baker at a signing a few years ago. Both were lovely.

Don't think I can say it any better than Tom Baker himself: http://www.tom-baker.co.uk/pages/con...asp?PageID=159
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Don't know why, but this cover of The New Yorker (not my usual reading material!) caught my eye this week.



Not sure why, really, though its style reminds me very much of the Golden Age magazines of the 1950's.


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Imagine the situation...

A student working away at a dissertation, alone in a student house. He's spent most of the day crunching numbers and researching obscure details for a 15000 word whopper.

To keep him company, the TV's on but with the sound down way low. Music would distract, but the television's background murmur is a pleasingly comforting sound, used mainly to cover up the sound from outside the room.

He looks up just in time to see the screen ...

One more piece of news, good I think, from Entertainment News, via Locus Magazine:

17 minutes of never before scenes that didn't make the final cut of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey have turned up, in of all places, an underground salt mine vault in Kansas. Warner Brothers' discovery of the old 17 minutes of a science fiction classic was revealed by Douglas Trumbull and David Larson while the two were publicly discussing their canceled documentary 2001: Beyond the Infinite:

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Belated Christmas greetings to one and all.

I hope you all got what you wanted/deserved (not always the same thing!)

Today has been one of those days in-between Xmas and the New Year, but the date has been jiggling itself around in my head as 'a date of importance' all day.

It was as I was tidying up the SFFWorld SF Review of the Year for 2010 that I suddenly twigged.

Today (or rather tonight!) is the 70th 'anniversary' of the heaviest ...

Astronomy pictures always give me that sense of being shown how small I am in the scale of things, and the latest pic from NASA is one of my favourites.

And to think that this is just one....

The detail on this image is brilliant, too.

Hope you're as impressed as I am!

Mark

These days I find myself going to the cinema less and less. The main reason (apart from cost!) is not the number of films I want to see but having paid my money the number of irritating things around me that spoil it.

Seems I'm not alone. Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode (national UK radio DJ and film critic accordingly) have created a list of annoyances and turned them into a Code of Conduct:

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If I wanted to sum up my love of SF, or even Space, then this picture might just help:



How cool is that? And perhaps more worrying is that these sense-of-wonder-things are happening every day without being pointed out to the masses.

From: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap101115.html
Mark

I can get away with this one as it is just after midnight here in the UK.

I love Halloween, though I realise it is more of an American thing. Makes me feel all Bradbury, and I drag out The October Country and Something Wicked This Way Comes again...

It's a bit like ghost stories between now and Christmas, which again I love (Good 'ol M.R. James!).

I'm not a believer, but like a good chill now and then.

This year for me it's lots of the old stuff ...

Tor.com (and Jo Walton) has started a look at the Hugo Award winners, from 1953 onwards, comparing the Winner (in this case Bester's The Demolished Man) to what else was around.



Think this is great: have been meaning to do the same myself for years. Once upon a time, the strapline 'Hugo Award Winner' meant that I would pick that book up on my limited budget (or ...

There are certain book covers that generate a response from a reader: those which remind you of books that you read a long time ago.

For me, there's Chesley Bonestell and Chris Foss, both of which I've mentioned before.

There's also Peter Elson, for whom I've just found this great website. Peter, like Chris, adorned the cover of some of my favourite SF books in the 1970's and 80's.

Sadly, Peter died in 1998, his last cover being for Kim Stanley Robinson's ...

Recently I have been reading lots of 1950's and 60's stuff, where the fear of Atomic Armageddon was all too real.

These photos LINK help illustrate the reality. (Try the audio link too.)

What a fearsome and yet opportunistic time it must have been!