If there are two words that can describe this year’s nominees for Best Short Story, it would be “triumphant” and “bleak”. Every one of them features someone overcoming a trial, whether it’s living life on their own terms, or making the hard decision to sacrifice their life for others. These are all lyrical and fierce,
The Hugo Award finalists for 2020 have been announced! The convention (July 29 – August 2) will be online only, for obvious reasons. So there’s less than three months before the award ceremony, and between this year and the retro 1945 awards there are 186 separate finalists and I’ve read…two of the novellas, and a
You can listen to this episode on our Binary System Podcast channel at Anchor.fm! Things are progressing quickly in the five-part story about the missing Delta Flight 18713 and the escaped inmates of the Night Vale asylum. The Desert Otherworld is coming into play, and there’s a good chance that a mad pilot who can
Why don’t you swallow broken glass. Late at night in the Hotel Caiette, someone writes a vicious and weirdly specific message on the lobby’s glass wall. The strangest part of the whole incident is that it happens so late at night that hardly anyone sees it. The grafitti disturbs the night manager, upsets an insomniac
Time to Social Distance the heck out of this epidemic and watch a movie together while still staying in three different states: North Carolina, Florida, and California. First up for the Tri-State Watch Party (is that our name? IT IS NOW.), Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark! The Netflix Watch Party app ended up
More comfort reading time! This week I’m only going back to 2012 (or forward to the 2400’s) with John Scalzi’s Redshirts. (Courtesy of a free ebook from Tor Books this month. Thanks guys!) It’s Ensign Andrew Dahl’s first posting, and as luck would have it a position just opened on the Intrepid, flagship of the
So, anyone up for some comfort reading? BECAUSE I SURE AM. This week we’re going all the way back to 1991, and a book I’ve been meaning to read for a while now: Ray Aldridge’s first novel, The Pharaoh Contract, book 1 of The Emancipator series. It follows reluctant enforcer Ruiz Aw, who’s been sent
You can listen to this episode on our Binary System Podcast channel at Anchor.fm! It’s the Welcome to Night Vale episode that Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor described as “maybe the most upsetting thing we’ve ever written.” Listen in as we recap a one-person show featuring unearthly roommates, really cruel pranks, and something called “the
It took five years for us to get a sequel to Natasha Pulley’s The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, but it was worth it. This book was everything I wanted out of a return to the British translator with synesthesia, and the eccentric Japanese watchmaker who can remember the future. The plot of Book 1 was