(1) 2025 DRAGON AWARDS. The 2025 Dragon Awards winners were announced today at Dragon Con.

(2) 2025 EUGIE AWARD. The 2025 Eugie Award winner is “Marginalia” by Mary Robinette Kowal (Uncanny Magazine).

(3) 2025 MIKE RESNICK AWARD. The 2025 Mike Resnick Memorial Award winner is “Elsewhere” by Anaïs Godard.

(4) A LITERAL SPACE OPERA. [Item by Jan Vaněk jr.] Cyril Simsa digs out a remarkable manuscript: “’The Utmost Sail’ by Karel Janovický: A Neglected Czech SF Opera” at Vector.

My late father, the Czech composer and broadcaster, Karel Janovický – born Bohuš František Šimsa in Pilsen in 1930, but better known under the pseudonym he adopted in the 1950s to protect his parents, whom he had left behind in Communist Czechoslovakia, when he skipped the border during the Cold War – died in January 2024. He left behind a four-storey Victorian terrace in North London, crammed with music, books, and papers, including 250 or so classical compositions and a not inconsiderable personal archive. 

It was in his papers that I found a booklet with the libretto of his one-act opera, The Utmost Sail, which he wrote in 1958 to an English-language text by another Czech émigré, Karel Brušák (1913-2004). The booklet is mimeographed, fanzine-style, so it is not a professional publication; but to anyone familiar with the history of fanzines or sf fandom, the format will be immediately recognisable, and I assume this is something that he or Brušák must have had printed for the benefit of future producers and performers at around the same time they were finishing the work itself.

I had been long aware that my father had written an opera, and back in my teenage years, when I was at the height of my initial involvement with science fiction, he had even told me it was set on a spaceship. However, in the way children have of ignoring their parents, I had never actually seen a copy or read the text. And while I have still not seen a performance, the libretto can stand on its own as an interesting example of mid-20th Century European sf theatre. 

(5) DEL TORO’S FRANKENSTEIN. Variety reports “Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi Shed Tears as Guillermo del Toro’s ‘Frankenstein’ Brings Venice to Life With Monstrous 13-Minute Ovation”.

Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein” injected some life into Venice on Saturday night, earning a rapturous 13-minute standing ovation, the longest of the festival so far. Oscar Isaac, who plays the titular mad scientist, and Jacob Elordi, who embodies his monstrous creation, couldn’t hold back their tears as the crowd continued to applaud.

During the lengthy ovation, del Toro waved to the crowd and shared multiple hugs with Elordi and Isaac. A visibly emotional Elordi also got a kiss on the cheek from Isaac as the two embraced, with Elordi resting his chin on Isaac’s head.

The gothic sci-fi film — which is competing for the prestigious Golden Lion at the festival — is a retelling of Mary Shelley’s 1818 classic horror novel following a brilliant scientist who brings a monstrous creature to life, ultimately resulting in both of their undoings. The 149-minute, $120 million epic could become a major awards contender for Netflix….

(6) BANDWITH OF THE IMAGINATION. Does sff now require the same, or less?The Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog shares “Hot Take: The Abstraction of Science Fiction”.

…Photorealistic special effects in live action film transformed speculative fiction by visually realizing imaginative worlds once limited to prose. In the 1980s, if you wanted to experience a story about small, hairy-footed country folk befriending talking trees and fighting dragons the primary way to do so was to read a book and imagine much of the associated world-building.

If you’re looking for a cinematic turning point, you could name Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs in 1993 or the seamless use of digital compositing in 1997’s Titanic. But Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings should be seen as the watershed moment; the moment at which filmic reality became virtually indistinguishable from documentary footage for the viewer. Film and television are the primary access points for viewing and engaging with The Lord Of The Rings. Although approximately 40 million copies of the first volume of the trilogy have been sold across the globe with a readership of likely triple that number, somewhat in excess of 200 million documented viewers have seen Peter Jackson’s movie. The work has been flattened out in its filmic form, the poetry stripped from the page, and Tom Bombadil relegated to a footnote. While this might offend militaristic bibliophiles, there’s no question that the story found a wider audience through film.

It has often been observed that speculative fiction won the culture war, becoming the ascendant genre and providing most of the popular culture touchpoints in current society, but what’s left unsaid is that it is filmic speculative fiction and fantasy that was the victor, not works of prose. Speculative fiction film and television are the lingua franca of North American culture in the new millennium, but speculative fiction literature is not. As movies took over spectacle and futuristic imagery, written speculative fiction — which is still a relatively niche pursuit — was freed from the need to describe elaborate visuals.

Much of the heft of worldbuilding was suddenly provided to the consumer, in a more passive visual format. We would posit that this shift provided authors with the freedom to delve deeper into complex ideas, philosophical questions, and experimental narratives. Rather than focusing on detailed scene-setting, prose speculative fiction seems now to focus more on literary styling, metaphor, and ambiguity, perhaps redefining itself in response to cinema’s dominance over visual storytelling. It is also possible that there are writers who would have turned to prose in the past, who are now writing for the screen because the medium is in demand, supports the stories they want to tell, and arguably provides more reliable remuneration.

We wonder if speculative fiction authors have had to become more poetic to compete with the hard-edged realism of screen special effects and more demanding readers. The classic work There Will Come Soft Rains — praised in its day for Bradbury’s elegiac style — seems hard-nosed and unambiguous when compared to John Chu’s Hugo-winning magical realist fable The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere.

It should not be lost on anyone that there is an ongoing backlash against abstract (and dare we say more literary) work. Those who preferred the prose style that Heinlein and Asimov had popularized have taken aim at a style of writing that is more metaphorical….

(7) ADDRESSEES KNOWN AND UNKNOWN. David Langford reports that authors with Science Fiction Encyclopedia entries are the would-be targets of a recent wave of “AI Spam”.

 AI-generated spam sent via the SF Encyclopedia feedback form, addressed not to the editors but to authors who have SFE entries. For example, Guy N Smith (“Hi Smith”) is praised for the superb cover of one of his least-known books, before an attempt to sell him promotional videos crammed with “scroll-stopping, emotion-grabbing, goosebump-giving moments”….

(8) IMPACT OF TARIFFS. “Anime vendors, fans feel pressure from U.S. tariffs on Japan imports” reports Japan Today.

Some American vendors and fans of Japanese anime content are feeling the pinch from price increases on memorabilia after recent U.S. tariff policy changes and fresh levies imposed on imports from Japan.

President Donald Trump’s administration has suspended a tariff exemption for low-cost goods worldwide that was seen as a loophole hurting U.S. manufacturers, while its country-specific tariffs include a 15 percent rate for imports from Japan.

At a recent anime convention in New York City where over 540 vendors gathered to sell collectibles related to Asian cartoons, many attendees expressed dissatisfaction with the new policies, with some fearing a double-digit percentage hike on the prices of merchandise.

Max Suwaki, co-owner of the Texas-based online store G.M. Anime, who sold figurines from “Demon Slayer” and other popular Japanese manga titles at the Anime NYC convention, said prices for his customers have increased by around 10 percent.

Under the de minimis rule, low-value shipments worth $800 or less were exempt from import duties. But under a July 30 executive order, starting Friday, they are subject to a levy corresponding to the country-specific tariff rate or a duty of at least $80 per item, a change many predict will hit small-business owners and e-commerce retailers with increased costs.

Suwaki noted that his business in recent months saw costs rise as much as 40 percent in one extreme case, saying, “That definitely impacts negatively how we can operate.”

Since the administration announced sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs on April 2, targeting dozens of countries with which the United States runs trade deficits, the tariff rates for some countries have been modified.

(9) FILLING IN THE BLANK VERSE. Harvard Magazine knows you want to read all about “Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival”. Because that’s how you swing!

HE WAS A RADICAL, the inventor of blank verse, a master of internal monologue, and a victim of murder. This was the English playwright Christopher Marlowe, a contemporary and rival of William Shakespeare—and perhaps the Bard’s key creative influence….

… By the time Marlowe died in 1593, at just 29 years old, England was in the midst of a cultural and intellectual flourishing. Greenblatt credits Marlowe with sparking this transformation. In a new book, Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Christopher Marlowe, Greenblatt—one of the world’s foremost Shakespeare scholars—argues that Marlowe didn’t merely precede Shakespeare, he made Shakespeare’s career possible.

“It was Marlowe who cracked something open,” Greenblatt says, “and enabled Shakespeare to walk through—how should we say?—over his dead body.”

Marlowe’s story, Greenblatt adds, is also relevant to many of academia’s current preoccupations. He was a “first-gen” student who glimpsed radical possibilities in the supposedly conservative texts of “great books courses.” He faced a “vocational crisis” familiar to many humanities students today—and pursued his passion despite the risk.

That career began with Marlowe’s debut play, Tamburlaine the Great, written in 1587 or 1588. “Virtually everything in the Elizabethan theater,” Greenblatt writes, “is pre- and post-Tamburlaine.”

Part of the play’s shock value lay in its plot. Loosely based on the rise of the fourteenth century Central Asian conqueror Timur (also known as Tamerlane), Tamburlaine the Great tells the story of a Scythian shepherd who ascends from obscurity to become a dominating tyrant. The violence is unrelenting, and the ambition unchecked: Tamburlaine faces no moral comeuppance for his pride. This rags-to-riches arc may have mirrored Marlowe’s own desires, Greenblatt writes—and defined many of the other outsider characters Marlowe would go on to write.

But the play’s most revolutionary element was formal: the use of “this hallucinatory blank verse, which Marlowe basically invented,” Greenblatt says….

(10) A FOUNDATION OF IRISH FANDOM. Nicholas Whyte introduces us to “Hugh Carswell: Belfast’s first science fiction fan” at From the Heart of Europe.

I’m browsing Then, Rob Hansen’s comprehensive analysis of the early history of UK science fiction, and came across the interesting fact that in 1935, one Hugh C. Carswell was appointed as Director of the Belfast chapter of the Science Fiction League, created by Hugo Gernsback for readers of his magazine Wonder Stories. Hansen then reports that this chapter ‘collapsed’ in around May 1937, when Hugh Carswell joined the RAF. Quite possibly there were no other actual members. In any case, Hugh Carswell is the first identifiable participant in science fiction fandom from Northern Ireland (I originally thought he might be the first from the whole of Ireland, but Fitz-Gerald P. Grattan (1913-1993) was writing to Astounding in 1931) and in the UK, the Belfast chapter of the SFL was preceded only by Leeds.

I wondered what else might be traceable about Carswell….

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Lis Carey.]

August 31, 1982 — G. Willow Wilson, 43.

By Lis Carey: G(wendolyn) Willow Wilson is an American fiction writer, comics writer, and essayist, who headed up the relaunch of the Ms. Marvel title for Marvel Comics with its 16-year-old Muslim superhero, Kamala Khan. Let me just admit right here that I love it.

Wilson was born in New Jersey, to ex-Protestant atheist parents, and so not raised in a religious household. While attending Boston University, she began reading about a variety of religions, and ultimately converted to Islam. Not long after graduation, she began teaching English in Cairo, where she met her husband, Omar.

Her prose fiction includes Alif the Unseen, set in an unnamed Middle Eastern city undergoing a political crisis enlivened by jinn, magicians, and highly talented hackers on both the government side and the happily “neutral” independent side. Alif is a very good hacker, expert at shielding his clients from their governments and rivals. He might be a bit sunnily optimistic for the environment he’s living and working in. It’s delightfully convoluted and interesting.

Air is a graphic novel series about an acrophobic flight attendant named Blythe, working for fictional Clearfleet Airlines, who is approached by the “Etesian Front,” which claims to be an antiterrorism organization. She and a man named Zayn wind up on a plane which is being hijacked, and they eventually found it wise to jump out of it—and very strange things start to happen. Including meeting Amelia Earhart and Quetzalcoatl, and visiting Narimar, a country that disappeared in the redrawing of borders in the partition of India. The Etesian Front discovers (along with Blythe, who is even more surprised than they are) that Blythe is a hyperpract, able to travel into alternate dimensions.

There’s so much here that’s exciting, interesting, and lots of fun. Go read her stuff.

(12) COMICS SECTION.

• Frazz says libraries are the real thing. 
• Loose Parts has bagged its limit. 
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal  used science to figure out who to blame.
• xkcd points out that normal is odd. 
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has fun with punctuation.
• Tom Gauld ponders who writers should want to represent them.

(13) JO-BURG’S BIG CON. “Comic-Con Africa draws thousands of fans and cosplayers to Johannesburg” reports NBC News.

Tens of thousands of South African comic book fans and cosplayers flocked to Johannesburg on Saturday to celebrate the sixth edition of Comic-Con Africa, the continent’s biggest celebration of pop culture and gaming.

The four-day festival, which began Thursday, celebrated anime, gaming, comics and cosplay with a variety of entertainment, including vintage arcade games, esports and costume competitions.

Fans dressed up as their favorite comic book heroes and villains, snapping selfies in replicas of famous local sets and donning original character outfits inspired by their own imagination.

“This year’s Comic-Con has been bigger and bolder than ever before,” said Comic-Con Africa Show Director Carla Massmann, adding they anticipate a total of 70,000 fans having walked through the gate by Sunday….

(14) EASTER EGG ALERT. [Item by Daniel Dern.] As a friend thankfully let me know, there’s an amusing extended Easter Egg after the credits on the (newest so far) episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, “Four And A Half Vulcans”.

(15) IN THE SPHERE. “Interview: Backstreet Boys at the Sphere Sci-Fi Themes” – at Gizmodo in an article that traces the inspirations behind the Backstreet Boys’ popular new residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas, Nevada.

…This past July, one of the biggest boy bands of all time celebrated 20 years of their iconic album, Millennium, at the technologically advanced venue, with two months of sold-out shows that generated a ton of buzz and interest. As a result, two more months of shows were recently added, and io9 spoke to Baz Halpin, CEO and founder of Silent House, about it. Silent House was one of several companies crucial to the creation of the show, and Halpin explained how a love of science fiction was instrumental in creating what some, like director Joseph Kahn, have called the “best concert I’ve ever seen.”

“It. Is. Mind-blowing,” Kahn, who directed two of the group’s most iconic videos—the monster-filled “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” and sci-fi heavy “Larger Than Life”—said on X. “You think I’m joking. I’m not. Perfect blend of their performance, creativity, charisma, and visuals. Think of the way people felt about the opening of Star Wars in ’77 turned into a concert. You have to see it to believe it.” Well, we have seen it and he’s right. Even if you don’t like the timeless pop music of the Backstreet Boys, the show takes you on an epic journey through the galaxy, filled with some intentional and some unintentional winks to iconic sci-fi movies of the past and present….

… “Get Another Boyfriend,” for example, the show’s eighth song, sees the Boys in a very neo-noir setting with floating transports above, towering buildings in the mist, and small vehicles driving on neon lights. It looks very much like Blade Runner or Akira, with a hint of Tron, all of which were part of the conception, to a point. “So the Tron reference was actually something that we’re trying to get away from,” Halpin said. “Initially, they were actually bikes with wheels. And I said, ‘I don’t want that. If anything, they should be more like speeder bikes.’ So I went on this whole concept art dive on different types of speeder bikes. And I didn’t want any trail. I didn’t want any lightcycle trail or anything like that. But, you know, in this world, they’re gonna have a neon outline. They’re gonna have a sort of light-up thing. It’s hard because Tron… was so aesthetically singular, it’s hard to have an LED outline on anything, and someone not say, ‘It’s Tron.’”…

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Kathy Sullivan.] I was in the audience at Worldcon while they were recording this: “Martha Wells Reflects on ‘Murderbot’ S:01” at Creative Conversations.

Author Martha Wells joins LIVE at Seattle Worldcon 2025 to discuss “Murderbot” season 1, adapted by Paul and Chris Weitz for Apple TV+. In episode 356, Luke Elliott & James Bailey host their first live-recording in front of a packed room of Martha Wells fans, adding to their “Creative Conversations” series. They kick things off with a special video message from the show’s cast for Martha Wells: Noma Dumezweni, Sabrina Wu, Akshay Khanna, Tamara Podemski, Tattiawna Jones, David Dastmalchian, and Alexander Skarsgård! Topics include: the original idea that led to Murderbot’s creation, surprise insights into herself after reader reactions, her input and thoughts on the casting of the series’ biggest role, her visit to the set (and what she got to take home), and why she pushes back at fans surprised by the show’s more comedic tone.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Jan Vaněk jr., Daniel Dern, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Lis Carey and Cat Eldridge.]