(1) WORLD FANTASY AWARDS BALLOT UPDATE. Awards administrator Peter Dennis Pautz today announced that The Essential Patricia McKillip , which had been nominated in the Collection category,has been removed from the ballot. No reason was given. The vacant slot on the ballot has not been backfilled.

(2) LESS THAN 24 HOURS LEFT TO VOTE FOR HUGO AWARDS. LAcon V Hugo Awards Administrator Tammy Coxen reminds people that Hugo Award nominations will close TOMORROW, Saturday, August 8, 2026, at Noon Pacific Time/ 3:00 pm Eastern Time/ 7:00 pm GMT. Access to the Hugo Voter Packet will be removed at that time.

(3) HEAR FROM NEW WINNIPEG SFF BOOKSTORE OWNER. The Winnipeg Free Press interviewed Didi Chanoch about their new sff bookstore: “Out of this world”.

A new chapter has begun in Winnipeg’s literary landscape with the opening of science fiction and fantasy bookstore Other Places Books….

…The bookstore is the brainchild of Didi Chanoch, who moved to Winnipeg from Israel in 2025 after the Canadian federal government began offering work permits to those in Israel and Palestine looking to leave the area due to the conflict….

…Prior to opening Other Places, the 54-year-old Chanoch, whose pronouns are they/them, worked in translation and purchasing of science fiction books in Israel, and has long been active in the online sci-fi community. So it didn’t take long to land on the idea of opening a niche bookstore — particularly once they looked at the landscape of booksellers in the city….

…Chanoch has found the city’s independent bookstores to be supportive on the path to opening Other Places — especially the fellow genre bookstores.

“Raven’s End invited me to their book club so I could tell their customers about my store. They have a fantasy book club, so that’s a perfect marriage — and they’re also a pretty queer bookstore,” says Chanoch.

The intersection of queer writers and readers with sci-fi and fantasy is a natural one, Chanoch reckons.

“A lot of people really identify strongly with the genres, for obvious reasons — they have always explored identity in ways that either are directly about queerness or could easily be interpreted as such and can be absorbed by a reader as that. I was able to pretty much a fill a bookstore with books that are in some way queer.”

As an example, Chanoch mentions Arkady Martine’s Teixcalaan duology — both books from the series, A Desolation Called Peace and A Memory Called Empire, won Hugo Awards, the sci-fi and fantasy world’s top prize.

“These are queer science fiction books written by a lesbian author married to another lesbian author whose books we also carry,” Chanoch says. “These books both won the best novel prize at the Hugo Awards. If you look at the list of Hugo finalists for best novel in the past decade, you’ll see a huge number of queer authors and queer books.”….

(4) HWA MEMBER NEWSLETTER EDITOR RESIGNS. Andrew Robinson has told the Horror Writers Association Facebook group that he is “stepping down as volunteer compiler of the HWA member news and stepping back from the organization because I showed poor judgment and I am concerned that staying on in this role would just do more damage.” Here is an excerpt from his much longer statement:

…I want to apologize to each of you for the inclusion of the In the Trenches op-ed in the recent newsletter, and I take full and sole responsibility for the decision. The HWA has a strict AI policy in place, and the op-ed doesn’t reflect that so it should not have been included, even just for the sake of discussion. I also want to apologize to the leadership of the HWA who trusted me with this position when I volunteered to revive the newsletter after it had been gone for so many months.

My goal has been to add new content like the Indie Bookstore spotlight, the HWA Publication Spotlight, and special features and resources designed to inform and assist our members, and this month, I worked against that by not taking more time to consider all of the content. These efforts also mean that the newsletter has become quite a big one, and, likely, unmanageable for me as one person with my own full-time job and responsibilities.

I have always seen In the Trenches as a space where the trustees share their own thoughts and opinions on writing. As I rushed to get this issue out, I didn’t use enough critical thinking or follow my usual process of having some other members proofread the content and give feedback, which in this case would have been invaluable.

Sephera sent in her piece, and told me she had written an op-ed on how quickly people get attacked/’cancelled’ over some discussions, especially related to AI use. As her friend, and knowing she was a board member, I did not push back. I know now that I should have.

My own position on AI is that it has no place in the creative arts….

(5) BOSTON COSPLAYERS VISIT HOSPITAL REHAB PATIENTS. [Item by Daniel Dern.]  “Superheroes visit young patients at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital” in the Boston Globe.

Is that a bird? Is that a plane?

No … it’s a group of superheroes from the Marvel and DC universes visiting pediatric patients at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital.

Cosplayers dressed as Batman, Spider-Man, Captain Marvel, Supergirl, and Thor stopped by the hospital Thursday afternoon to tell jokes, sing jingles, and wrap plastic capes around the children’s backs.

In a room with long windows overlooking the water, the superheroes and the children added jewels to paper masks. A girl in pink shoes and a pink cape giggled as Supergirl helped her decorate a pink mask.

“We’ve got the silliest goose,” Supergirl said, sliding the mask over the girl’s face as they finished.

“We’re going to take on a bad guy,” Batman said, approaching.

“Get away!” the girl said, swinging her walking stick toward him. “Wham!”

The cosplayers were participating in Fan Expo Boston, a festival scheduled for this weekend that connects hundreds of thousands of comic, sci-fi, horror, anime, and gaming fans.

“Pretty much all the kids know the superheroes, love the superheroes,” said Leah Terrill, 34, a child life specialist at the hospital. “[The reaction], I think, sometimes, is shock. They’re like, ‘How are you here?’ I had one kid ask, ‘They’re really superheroes?’”

Matches Malone, who was dressed as Batman for the event, said that for him, the kids always come first.

“It’s always about the kids. If they really believe that you’re the character that you’re portraying, you can get them to believe in themselves and be the hero that they want to be,” said Malone, 57, a retired military personnel from Dorchester who now works in security….

Dern says: It’s not clear from the text “Matches Malone, who was dressed as Batman for the event” whether that’s actually (but unlikely-y) the cosplayer’s real name — or the reporter is not aware that “Matches” Malone was initially a small-time Gotham City criminal, and then a name/personna used at times by Batman when the Bat wanted/needed to be somewhere/someone other than his Bat-self or as Bruce Wayne.

See Matches Malone for more than enough info; see “After 53 Years, DC Kills Off the Bat-Family’s Most Underrated Hero” at ScreenRant for even more than enough info including info from DC’s current “Absolute” universe/line (similarish to what Marvel’s Ultimate line began as, way back when (today, don’t ask 🙂 or ask Tom Galloway.

(6) TAROT HISTORY EXHIBIT. [Item by Andrew Porter.] Gorgeous artwork! “Tarot Was a Courtly Card Game. How Did It Become a Tool for Divination?” Link bypasses the New York Times paywall.

Around 1442, the Duke of Milan gave his daughter a deluxe set of handcrafted playing cards for the courtly game of tarot.

The cards, featuring meticulously illustrated figures like Death, the Chariot and the Emperor on gold- and silver-leaf backgrounds, were created by a renowned Renaissance workshop. They cost about 1,500 ducats, 10 times the annual salary of an average courtier.

Before its use in spiritual divination, tarot was a card game played by Italian nobility — mostly women — and each card was a hand-held work of art.

The Morgan Library & Museum in New York is presenting surviving cards from that tradition in “Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions.”

The show explores the 600-year evolution of tarot from a game to an occult practice and popular entertainment, from those early gilded exemplars through decks made by artists including Salvador Dalí, Leonora Carrington and the contemporary British painter Chris Ofili….

… In their original form, tarot cards were used for a game played a bit like bridge, O’Driscoll said, but the concept of the game was partly inspired by Petrarch’s “Triumphs,” a 14th-century allegorical poem that set out moral hierarchies.

“Chastity defeats Love, Death defeats Chastity, Fame defeats Death, Time defeats Fame,” he explained. “The last one is Eternity, which defeats them all.” Along with teaching morality, “it was a game of the intellect,” he said. The word “trump,” which was used in the game, he noted, comes from the Italian word “trionfi,” or “triumph.”…

… In 18th-century France, a few occultists fabricated an origin story for the cards, linking their symbols to Egyptian hieroglyphics, because they were both considered to be mystical and indecipherable image-based languages.

Although the story was invented out of whole cloth, this shift altered the course of tarot’s history, giving it its persistent esoteric aura.

The set that popularized tarot cards for divination in the English-speaking world was the Rider-Waite-Smith set, created in 1909 by the artist Pamela Colman Smith, under the direction of Arthur Waite. Waite, a poet and scholarly mystic, wrote an accompanying guidebook, “The Key to the Tarot.”…

Waite was a leading figure in the Modernist occult movement known as the Golden Dawn, whose adherents included the poet William Butler Yeats and Bram Stoker, the author of “Dracula.” The key thinker behind the tarot occultist movement was Aleister Crowley, the English magician and author, who made his own deck, the Thoth Tarot.

(7) ROBERT REED Q&A. Asimov’s latest “From Earth to the Stars” feature is a “Q&A with Robert Reed”.

AE: What is your history with Asimov’s? 
RR: Now and again, my work has been published in your magazine. Someone’s keeping a running tally. Not me. But last I heard, nobody was close to my title total.

AE: What is your process?
RR: I start each project with a clear idea of where I’m going. And when my characters tell me that I’m wrong, I listen to them. Oliana, for example. She delivered a nice surprise in the end.

AE: What inspired you to start writing? 
RR: It was the 1970s, and I was a child who thought writing would bring easy money….

(8) UPDATING THE THREE LAWS. [Item by John A Arkansawyer.] A Guardian op-ed writer says, “One of science fiction’s greatest writers warned us about AI. Could his ideas help us avoid a dystopian future?” This seems like wishful thinking to me:

…What might a modern day equivalent of Asimov’s laws of robotics look like to avoid a dystopian future? Here, guided by Asimov’s three law of robotics, I propose a possible formulation of Three Laws of AI: 1) An AI must not directly or indirectly harm or deceive a human being, nor act in a way that supports an unlawful or unethical activity; 2) An AI must obey the lawful and ethical orders given to it by a human being except where such orders would conflict with the first law; 3) An AI may operate autonomously as long as its autonomous operations do not conflict with the first or second law….

 I’d like to be wrong

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

August 7, 1933 — Jerry Pournelle.  (Died 2017.)

By Paul Weimer: Jerry Pournelle was the first author I wrote a fan letter to. True story.  I am, if you have met me, shy and introverted as all get out. (No, really, stop laughing. I am).  Anyway, back in the 80’s I got hooked on Pournelle. I’d read The Mote in God’s Eye, and a few of his standalone novels and stories. But it was the There Will Be War anthology series (this was before Theodore Beale and Castalia House got their paws on it) that really ramped up my interest. I think I’ve mentioned the series before, connecting me to a number of authors and author worlds in the process of reading straight up military fiction, pure grade A stuff. Those versions of the anthologies back then really were a premiere set of stories.

So, one day, I got it into my head to write a fan letter to Pournelle to thank him for editing the anthologies.  I didn’t get a response back from him, but I did get one from editor John F. Carr, who thanked me for my letter, and suggested I might like the War World series next. (Those are the military stories set in the Mote universe on the planet of Haven).  I didn’t quite like that series, being almost too focused on one planet, albeit in different times and locations, but I appreciated the letter back.

As time has gone on, my opinions of Pournelle’s work, unfortunately, have soured. I think it was finally The Burning City that did it for me, since the novel was very thinly disguised polemic against the government and the city of Los Angeles in particular. I knew that Pournelle was conservative, ultra conservative and as shocking as, say, the use of poison war gas in Todos Santos was, I finally had decided I had enough of Pournelle and stopped reading anything new by him.  

I do think however, that a little dated as it is now, the original The Mote in God’s Eye, which he co-wrote with Niven, is his best work, and the work that possibly has stood up the best. Oh, I was thinking of his Janissaries work not long ago when I was reading the latest from Stirling, but it is the space opera of Mote that has stood the test of time the best. And it’s explicitly Monarchy in Space, so the politics are going to skew that way, anyway. And the Moties are an interesting species, with interesting character throughout.

I kind of wish I could get a hold of the original There Will Be War volumes, without the taint of Castalia House. Alas.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

• Dog Eat Doug describes a predicament with a reference.
• Off the Mark puts Snoopy to the test.
• Yaffle is daunted.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal creates the paracosm.
• xkcd has a new game.

(11) WHAT THEY KNOW THAT AIN’T SO. John McWhorter eviscerates “Three Myths People Love to Believe About English” in the New York Times. Link bypasses the NYT paywall.

Three things that people often mention to me, as a linguist, leave me wondering whether to just nod politely or disappoint them with the truth. In this space, I feel that I should deal only with the truth, so if I may, prepare for some fun-fact disappointment! Here are those things people share with me with bright eyes.

Here’s the first —

English has a long list of fancy names for groups of animals. Not just the boring old herd of cows, flock of birds and gaggle of geese. There is also a murder of crows, a flamboyance of flamingos, a tower of giraffes, a charm of goldfinches, a conspiracy of lemurs, an ostentation of peacocks, a dazzle of zebras and so on.

These collective words always seemed a little suspicious. Almost none of them are actually used. When is the last time you heard someone talking about a smack of jellyfish?

In fact, many of these words were made up. The collective fun was kicked off back in 1486 by a prioress, Juliana Berners, in an arch tome cataloging the activities of a gentleman, “The Book of Saint Albans.” In the list of animal collectives, Berners was clearly having a little fun, as in coming up with group names for humans like a “blast of hunters” and a “melody of harpers.” There were new editions of the book into the 17th century. The ones about flamboyant flamingos and ostentatious peacocks are of later vintage than the original book.

These words are certainly fun, but ultimately most of them are less words than jokes. Comprehensive dictionaries list neither a peacock-related definition of “ostentation” nor one of “bloat” referring to hippopotamuses. These words are a part of the English language in much the same way that I possess an Estonian translation of the book “Ragtime” and an ocarina, neither of which I ever touch, though I am vaguely pleased that they are around….

(12) DINO DOCUMENTARY. Animation World Network tells “How Milk VFX Built the Lost Worlds and Creatures of ‘Surviving Earth’”.

Combining natural history documentary with visual effects to recreate the deep past has become a genre of its own. Walking with Dinosaurs pushed the boundaries back in 1999 and received a serious technological upgrade in 2025, and Prehistoric Planet, Life on Our Planet, Planet Dinosaur and Earth have all contributed since.

The latest is Surviving Earth, which premiered on NBC on June 11 and is now streaming on Peacock. Tim Haines, the producer behind Walking with Dinosaurs, created the eight-part miniseries for Loud Minds and Universal Television Alternative Studio, with Josh Goodman narrating and a score by Nitin Sawhney. It tracks life through six mass extinction events, from the early seafloor to the first caveman. Haines partnered with Milk VFX, Lola Post, FIN VFX and Floating Rock to bring to life the massive environmental extinction and rebirth events that have reshaped the planet, with Milk delivering roughly 1,000 visual effects shots across the eight episodes.

“Surviving Earth is not just about dinosaurs,” notes He Sun, Visual Effects Supervisor, Milk VFX. “It’s a lot more variety than that. It features six extinction events and goes from the early seafloor and all the way to the first caveman. There are a total of 73 types of creatures and 55 variations on top of that, including insects, mammals, reptiles, marine life and dinosaurs.”

The production adopted a more naturalistic approach to creature behavior. “This is a lot more locked-off cameras and studying the creatures rather than directing; that was quite important,” remarks Joe Tarrant, Animation Supervisor, Milk VFX. “There’s a narrative structure to the story, but as animators, what you’re trying to do is to catch things in their most natural way in their most natural environments. Whereas in Jurassic Park it’s got to burst through that wall and the cameras are dynamic. Surviving Earth is not like that at all.”…

…Damage such as wounds had to be tracked for continuity. “It’s clear in the Ischigualastia episode,” remarks Sun. “The juvenile got hurt and had a scar on the forehead, and that was kept all the way even when he became an adult. There is definitely a continuity of things that we constantly had to make sure it was flowing between the sequences, such as not using the wrong variant in the wrong shot.”…

(13) ‘IS THIS CALL NECESSARY?’. “Man makes 1,700-mile round journey to save rare phone box on Scottish island” – BBC tells why. (Subscription required by readers outside the UK.)

A man has travelled from Cornwall to the Isle of Lewis to make 52 calls from a rural telephone box in order to keep it in service.

William Arnold, who works as an artist and photographer, took the 1700-mile (2,735km) round trip to visit the rare phone box in Einacleit as part of a project to preserve phone lines in rural communities.

Ofcom guidelines state a minimum of 52 calls have to be made from a phone box each year in order for it to remain operational.

“The project is slightly ridiculous and comedic,” said William. “But there is also a serious point about how we communicate with each other and how these phone boxes are often vital rural lifelines.”

The 43-year-old has been working to save phone boxes since 2022.

“It all started on the Isle of Lewis when I was working on a photographic project and I wanted to call my partner who was staying back at the house to say I was going to be back late,” he said. “My mobile phone battery was nearly dead and I came across this pristine looking phone box that had the old yellow British Telecom branding from the 1980s. There was a phone in there and I was really excited because I hadn’t used a phone box for years. But when I picked up the receiver, the line was dead and I was so disappointed.”…

(14) DALEKS ENDORSE COUNT BINFACE. [Item by Jim Janney.] The Clacton by-election just keeps getting sillier. “Vote Dalek – 2026 Clacton By-election”.

[Thanks to Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Paul Weimer, Daniel Dern, Jim Janney, John A Arkansawyer, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Chris Barkley, Mark Roth-Whitworth, and Kathy Sullivan for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]