2012 BSFA Awards Winners

Best Novel: The Islanders by Christopher Priest (Gollancz)

Best Short Fiction: "The Copenhagen Interpretation" by Paul Cornell (Asimov’s, July)

Best Non-Fiction: The SF Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition ed. John Clute, Peter Nicholls, David Langford and Graham Sleight (Gollancz website)

Best Art: Cover of Ian Whates’s The Noise Revealed by Dominic Harman (Solaris)

That said

This will get more attention than the award winners, I'm guessing.

Something that puzzles me

The Rt. 1 Stanley Park bus generally never packed except on Sunday afternoon (the 4:15 and the 5:15) when it is always packed. OK, fewer runs on a Sunday but the increase in density does not seem proportional to the drop in frequency of buses.

Actually, a second thing puzzles me: why is the Stanley Park run in particular the number one? Both the 8 and the 7 see far more use.

An unexpected phrase discovered in Clark Ashton Smith's "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis"

the glacial tundras of the nightward hemisphere of Venus.

This story was first published in May 1932. Now, there was good reason to think Venus' day was much longer than Earth's and "tide-locked" certainly falls within the allowed range, but aside from Smith and Weinbaum I cannot think of another who had Venus as a tide-locked world. Even Venuses with much longer days than Earth do not come to mind, at least for stories predating the New Solar System.

I see no joy in this animal's future

I got chewed out by an angry bird for standing too close to its nest.

There's an overhead bridge from Market Square across Frederick St. to the old City Hall. There's a small gap in the steel cover. The bird used that to construct a well protected nest. The problem is the gap is pretty much directly above the bus stop, the bus stop that serves the 1, a couple of 8s, the 15, the 23, and I think a few others; a lot of people congregate there.

APOD

is awesome
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Dear British SF

What went wrong? You used to be cool.

What so-called international cooperation cost us

As pointed out in email:

The year is 2065. Nearly two-thirds of Earth's ozone is gone -- not just over the poles, but everywhere. The infamous ozone hole over Antarctica, first discovered in the 1980s, is a year-round fixture, with a twin over the North Pole. The ultraviolet (UV) radiation falling on mid-latitude cities like Washington, D.C., is strong enough to cause sunburn in just five minutes. DNA-mutating UV radiation is up 650 percent, with likely harmful effects on plants, animals and human skin cancer rates.

Question

Should I apply for this?

It tolls for Thee

I just realized that two years from now most frosh will have been born after TSR, Inc. collapsed into financial insolvency.

A Coronation Street poll

[Poll #1832564]

Inspired by this ad, specifically the crack about Americans getting to hear words pronounced correctly, which given the range of accents in the UK is pretty rich unless he only counts Received Pronunciation as correct, in which case, good job at unifying Britain by getting everyone not in a specific subset pissed off at that subset but what about all those shows not recorded in Received Pronunciation? Does BBC America just not import those or what?

A Coronation Street poll

[Poll #1832564]

Inspired by this ad, specifically the crack about Americans getting to hear words pronounced correctly, which given the range of accents in the UK is pretty rich unless he only counts Received Pronunciation as correct, in which case, good job at unifying Britain by getting everyone not in a specific subset pissed off at that subset but what about all those shows not recorded in Received Pronunciation? Does BBC America just not import those or what?

I snorted derisively at Wallander

Not the blubbing copper himself but the moment in the extras where they were talking about the fire-storm of violence that is consuming Sweden, which in this specific region has led to about a half a dozen murders since the turn of the century. Murder is bad but the set up made me expect a number somewhat higher than six or seven.

Wallander seems to exist in an atypically homicidal zone: the number of deaths in any episode account for a significant percentage of Sweden's homicides (Sweden had about 230 homicides in 2009). In fact, in one of the BBC movies he's not just the investigator but personally plays a crucial role in provoking seven murders.

Swedish murder rates have increased somewhat since the 1950s (violent crime has doubled but I am not sure of the exact figure for homicide), but look at it a global or historical context: