My favorite stories from January all wrestled with tough ethical questions [“A Saint Between the Teeth” by Sloane Leong, “Nothing of Value” by Aimee Ogden, and “A Cure for Solastalgia” by E.M. Linden].
It touches on big issues, features biological speculation that is near and dear to me, but it does all this without skimping on character-driven aspects and precise language that evokes empathy and reflection.
Award-winning podcaster and author Emma Newman has teamed up with the London-based Friends of the Earth grassroots environmental campaigning community to produce a new podcast series entitled Imagining Tomorrow.
Ch-ch-changes. Turn and face the strange! That’s right. The brand new season of The Skiffy and Fanty Show is coming your way, and it’s going to be different. The biggest and most important change: We’re turning into a live show this year. Barring scheduling or tech problems, we’ll be live every Friday at 6:30 PM Central for the foreseeable future. Where? On Twitch at AlphabetStreams. If you’d like to see the show as it’s made, then join us every Friday at 6:30 PM Central! Our first show of the season will be on Feb. 9th (Looking Back, Moving Forward). Does this mean we’ll stop releasing podcasts? Nope. All of our live shows will be produced as podcasts, too. They’ll also end up on our YouTube channel. These changes will come to our Patreon page, too. We’ll also begin experimenting with a live version of the Speculative Dispatch on on our Discord. These will occur on Mondays at 6:30 PM Central, with the first of these expected on Feb. 12th. Our Torture Cinema livewatch events will also move to the Monday before Torture Cinema (the last Friday of every month)(first one: Feb. 19th for the livewatch; Feb. 23rd for Torture Cinema on Twitch). We’re trying to keep things as simple as we can. Fridays for live shows. Mondays for Patreon stuff. Boom! We hope to see everyone in the live show chats. If you can’t make these shows, that’s OK! You can keep listening through your regular podcast feed (iTunes, Castbox, Goodpods, Podchaser, etc.). Don’t forget to review the show, too! Thanks for sticking with us through the years. We hope this year will be an exciting one. It will be for us because it’s so new! Onward ho!!!
It’s a cerebral space opera set on a large scale with multiple protagonists and antagonists vying for control. Sometimes, the lines between protagonist and antagonist can become blurred, as can the nature of their moralities.
I want to come to recent events in another way. All of this reminds me of a story that I want do a deep dive on: “The World Science Fiction Convention of 2080” by Ian Watson (published in 1980). This is a short, very inside baseball story of Worldcon, Worldcon fandom and science fiction, and it is quite revealing.