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The Winners of the 2015 British Fantasy Awards

The Winners of the 2015 British Fantasy Awards

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Cuckoo Song Frances Hardinge-smallCherrio! The winners of the 2015 British Fantasy Awards have been announced by the British Fantasy Society.

The nominees in 13 categories were announced in July, and the complete list of winners follows. Congratulations to all the winners!

Best Fantasy Novel – The Robert Holdstock Award

Cuckoo Song, Frances Hardinge (Macmillan Children’s Books)

Best Horror Novel – The August Derleth Award)

No One Gets Out Alive, Adam Nevill (Macmillan)

Best Novella

“Newspaper Heart,” Stephen Volk (The Spectral Book of Horror Stories)

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Forbes on the Tragic Failure of Jem And The Holograms

Forbes on the Tragic Failure of Jem And The Holograms

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Jem And The Holograms-smallLast week Box Office Mojo reported that Guillermo del Toro’s gothic horror film Crimson Peak “crashed and burned into 2,984 theaters to the tune of an estimated $12.8 million.” So what did it make of Jem And The Holograms‘ historically bad take of one-tenth of that total this weekend, $1.3 million from 2,413 theaters? It calls it one of “the year’s biggest flops… the fourth worst opening for a film in more than 2,000 theaters.”

Jem And The Holograms was a much-loved 80s cartoon produced by Hasbro, Marvel, and Sunbow (the same team behind G.I. Joe and Transformers). Featuring the plucky Jerrica Benton, whose father left her virtually flawless hologram technology that allowed her to disguise herself as a beautiful pop singer, Jem was the brainchild of comics writer Christy Marx (Sisterhood of Steel, Conan, Red Sonja). Forbes writer Scott Mendelson sees the massive failure of the live-action version as a genuine tragedy.

The film took a source material that is over-the-top colorful and over-the-top exciting, filled with larger-than-life characters and musically-charged action sequences where Jem and her friends had to both be kick-ass rock stars and kick-ass crime fighters at the same time, and made a toned-down, muted, and overly patronizing “young girl gets in over her head due to fame and artistic success and forgets what matters” fable that basically penalized its young heroes for wanting and achieving success and power…

It was the kind of film that Josie and the Pussycats spoofed a decade ago, and basically operated as a dark-n-gritty origin story that spent the entire film building up to the possibility of maybe seeing a Jem movie that Jem fans wanted to see the first time out in a would-be sequel. Okay, so a cheap film that spit on the source material bombed, who cares right? Well, here’s the rub: The overriding message of Jem and the Holograms is that a girl-centric action cartoon from the 1980′s doesn’t deserve or justify even 5% of the resources given without a second thought to boy-centric properties cashing in on 80′s nostalgia.

Read the complete article here.

October 2015 Nightmare Special Issue: Queers Destroy Horror! Now on Sale

October 2015 Nightmare Special Issue: Queers Destroy Horror! Now on Sale

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Nightmare Magazine Queers Destroy Horror-smallThe October issue of online magazine Nightmare, issue 37, is now available.

This month is a massive special issue, Queers Destroy Horror!, containing far more content than regular issues, but the digital edition is still available for the same low price ($2.99). The issue was funded as a stretch goal of the incredibly successful Queers Destroy Science Fiction! Kickstarter campaign for Lightspeed magazine, which was released in June.

Nightmare 37 an all-horror extravaganza entirely written and edited by queer creators. Guest editor Wendy N. Wagner has assembled new horror from Chuck Palahniuk, Matthew Bright, Sunny Moraine, Alyssa Wong, and Lee Thomas, and reprints by Kelley Eskridge, Caitlin R. Kiernan, and Poppy Z. Brite. There’s also a generous assortment of nonfiction articles edited by Megan Arkenberg, and written by Lucy A. Snyder, Sigrid Ellis, Catherine Lundoff, Michael Matheson, Evan J. Peterson, and Cory Skerry, that take a hard look at queer achievements and challenges in the horror genre. Plus there’s a selection of queer poetry selected by Robyn A. Lupo, and an original cover by AJ Jones.

Like the supermassive Women Destroy Science Fiction! issue of Lightspeed,, the Queers Destroy Science Fiction! special issue of Nightmare is also available in print — as a 198-page trade paperback for $12.99.

Here’s the complete Table of Contents, including the free content on the website, as well as the exclusive paid content available online in the print and ebook editions.

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Canadian Inventor Creates the Goblin Glider

Canadian Inventor Creates the Goblin Glider

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This week Canadian inventor Catalin Alexandru Duru conducted the first successful test flight of a working hoverboard over a pond in Quebec.

Duru broke the world record for the longest hoverboard flight — more than 250 meters, five times the previous record — at Quebec’s Lake Ouareau in May of this year, but he’s been working on a “secret, next-generation version” of his device for the past five months. On Wednesday of this week, the 31-year-old Canadian inventor and his company, Omni Hoverboards, invited Reg Sherren of the CBC to witness the first test of the new prototype in Quebec. Watch the one-minute clip above for the results, and read all the details at the CBC website.

All I can say is: It’s about time, 21st Century. And now I know what I want for Christmas.

Amazon.com Files Suit Against 1,114 Review Sellers on Fiverr

Amazon.com Files Suit Against 1,114 Review Sellers on Fiverr

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Amazon HQ-smallYesterday Amazon.com filed suit against 1,114 individuals offering Review-For-Hire services through online marketplace Fiverr.

The suits follow a lengthy undercover sting operation in which Amazon purchased review-writing services from multiple sellers. Fivver is a popular online marketplace that lets sellers offer simple services, like video editing or photo conversion, typically for a flat fee of $5. Amazon claims it contacted Fiverr sellers who were advertising professional review-writing services for Amazon products.

Many sellers don’t even bother to write reviews, instructing buyers to write the reviews they want posted. In effect, they are selling the use of their online identities to post a review.

Amazon is not suing Fiverr, and in fact these services are effectively banned by Fiverr’s terms and conditions. But that obviously hasn’t prevented sellers from offering them.

See more details, and read the complete legal complaint, at Geekwire.

Stephenie Meyer Pens Gender-Swapped Version of Twilight

Stephenie Meyer Pens Gender-Swapped Version of Twilight

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Life and Death Twilight Reimagined-smallThe Twilight Tenth Anniversary edition was released today, ten years after the original novel went on sale, and buyers were very surprised to find that copies came packaged with an entirely new novel by Stephenie Meyer: Life and Death, a gender-flipped version of Twilight. As reported by Entertainment Weekly:

In honor of the 10th anniversary of her best-selling vampire romance, Twilight author Stephenie Meyer has written a 442-page reimagining of the novel that made her a publishing sensation. This time around, she’s switched the genders of her protagonists. Yes, it’s true. In the new tale titled Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined, Bella Swan is now a boy named Beau (short for Beaufort) and the brooding Edward Cullen is now Edythe…

Meyer explains in her foreword to the anniversary edition of the novel that she decided to go with the gender bending to underscore her position that Bella isn’t a “damsel in distress” as certain critics have charged. Rather, the author insists, the character is a “human in distress,” or as Meyer calls her, “a normal human being surrounded on all sides by people who are basically superheroes and supervillains.” Meyer also takes issue with the criticism that Bella was “too consumed with her love interest, as if that’s somehow just a girl thing.” The author mentions, too, that Beau is “more OCD” than Bella was and that he’s “totally missing the chip Bella carries around on her shoulder all the time.”

Meyer says writing the piece was “fun, but also really fast and easy.” According to the foreword, the rewrite allowed her to correct some errors that always bothered her and to re-edit the piece for grammar and word choice issues. She also altered some elements of the mythology for consistency.

The Twilight Tenth Anniversary/Life and Death Dual Edition was published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers on October 6, 2015. It is 752 pages, priced at $21.99 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital edition.

Lionsgate Wins Bidding War for Patrick Rothfuss’ Kingkiller Chronicle

Lionsgate Wins Bidding War for Patrick Rothfuss’ Kingkiller Chronicle

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Patrick Rothfuss-smallAs we reported in July, several major Hollywood studios — including Warner Bros., MGM and Lionsgate — were in a pitched bidding war for the rights to Patrick Rothfuss’ bestselling fantasy series The Kingkiller Chronicle. Now The Hollywood Reporter, and Rothufuss’ blog, are ‎reporting that Lionsgate‬ has won the rights to develop the series for film, TV, and video game platforms.

Lionsgate has closed a complex multi-platform rights deal picking up The Kingkiller Chronicle, the best-selling fantasy book series by Patrick Rothfuss. The deal sets up the simultaneous development of movies, television series and video games with the goal to adapt the many stories across the mediums at the same time.

It also caps off interest and dealmaking that has gone on since mid-July, when Rothfuss met with studios such as Warner Bros., MGM and Lionsgate, among others, at Comic-Con.

Robert Lawrence, whose credits include 1990s classic Clueless as well as the Mark Wahlberg vehicle Rock Star and the drama The Last Castle, will produce. Lawrence was an early chaser of the Kingkiller series and stayed on the series even when it was temporarily set up at Fox Television.

Terms were not disclosed. Read the report at The Hollywood Reporter here, and at Rothfuss’ blog here.

Weirdbook 31 Now on Sale

Weirdbook 31 Now on Sale

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Weirdbook 31-smallI am delighted to announce that Weirdbook 31, the latest issue of one of the greatest sword & sorcery and weird fantasy magazines in history, is now on sale.

New editor Doug Draa, the former online editor for Weird Tales, has done an tremendous job resurrecting Paul Ganley’s classic weird fantasy magazine, and dressing it up for the 21st Century. Weirdbook produced thirty annual issues between 1968 and 1997, publishing fiction by Stephen King, Joseph Payne Brennan, H. Warner Munn, Robert E. Howard, Tim Powers, Darrell Schweitzer, Delia Sherman, and countless others. The magazine was also renowned for its gorgeous interior artwork by Gene Day, Allen Koszowski, Stephen E. Fabian, and many others.

This is the first issue since 1997; its new publisher is Wildside Press, publisher of Adventure Tales, Wildside Pulp Classics, and Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine. The cover is by Dusan Kostic, and the back cover is a piece by the great Stephen E. Fabian, who did most of the covers for the original run.

The magazine is a large digest format on book paper, in the same format at Adventure Tales and Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine. It’s available directly from Wildside, from online distributors, and through Amazon.com.

The new issue includes brand new fiction and poetry from John R. Fultz, Adrian Cole, Paul Dale Anderson, Darrell Schweitzer, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Wade German, and many others. Here’s the complete table of contents.

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When Big Game Hunting was Glamorous: The Man-Eaters of Tsavo

When Big Game Hunting was Glamorous: The Man-Eaters of Tsavo

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1592281877The recent scandal over the killing of Cecil the Lion has once again brought big game hunting into the spotlight, with various websites outing rich hunters who go to Africa to blow away lions, giraffes, and other animals.

Here in Spain, we had an even bigger scandal back in 2012 when, at the height of this country’s financial crisis, King Juan Carlos went to Botswana and killed an elephant. He later apologized but this, plus rumors of extramarital affairs and numerous incidents of being apparently drunk in public, forced him to abdicate two years later.

There was a time when scandals like this would have never happened, when kings and commoners could empty their guns into beautiful animals free from the fear of criticism. Many wrote memoirs of going on safari, creating a genre that has all but died out today.

One of the classics of the genre is The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, by Lt. Col. J.H. Patterson and originally published in 1907. Patterson worked as the chief engineer building the Mombasa to Uganda railway in 1898. Managing a huge crew of Africans, Pathans, and Sikhs in adverse conditions to build a railroad through poorly mapped territory would have been hard enough, but soon lions started coming into the workmen’s camp at night and carrying off his workers.

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Foz Meadows Signs Two-Book Deal with Angry Robot

Foz Meadows Signs Two-Book Deal with Angry Robot

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Foz MeadowsBlack Gate blogger Foz Meadows has just signed a two-book deal with UK publisher Angry Robot, one of the most exciting and innovative genre publishers out there. Both books will be part of the same fantasy series. Here’s the release from Angry Robot:

An Accident of Stars, the first in the series, which is described by Foz as ‘a portal fantasy with the safeties off’, will be published in summer 2016, with a second novel to follow. You might know of Australian born, Aberdeen-based Foz through her Hugo-nominated blog, Shattersnipe, or from her many articles on The Huffington Post, Strange Horizons, Tor.com or the sadly now closed A Dribble of Ink. Foz has also written two previous books, Solace and Grief and The Key to Starveldt.

Foz Meadows: “After years of quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) obsessing over magic portals, feminism and adventuring ladies, I’m delighted to announce that Angry Robot has decided to enable me in these endeavours. An Accident of Stars is the book I desperately wanted to read, but couldn’t possibly have written, at sixteen – and, as you may have guessed, it features (among a great many other things) magic portals, feminism and adventuring ladies. I’m immensely excited to share it with you, and I look forward to collaborating in its production with our glorious Robot Overlords, who only asked in exchange a very small blood sacrifice and part ownership of my soul.”

Congratulations Foz!

You can read the complete release at the Angry Robot website, or check out Foz’s most recent blog post at Black Gate, “The Fascination of Dragons.”