Happy Friday, me hearties! I’m the new captain of this marauding ship-masquerading-as-a-humble-newsletter, the Dread Pirate Alex. If you frequent the main Book Riot site much, you may remember me for my obsession with local beer and my (admittedly at times overly-long) looks at book world controversies. I also write steampunk about rail pirates under my own name, and science fiction about space witch biker mercenaries under the pen name Alex Wells.
Ready for some pillaging and general skullduggery? Er, I mean… let me check my notes… news! And books!
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News and Views
The 2018 Shirley Jackson Award nominees have been announced, and it’s a heck of a good list.
Goodbye, Peter Mayhew. He will be missed as the Wookie of our hearts and, more importantly, an all-around nice human being.
An interview with Samuel R. Delany over at io9. (What’s your favorite of Delany’s books, though? Mine’s Dhalgren.)
How did I not know before now that there’s going to be a YA novel about Marvel’s Loki by Mackenzi Lee and it’s apparently going to be super queer? Prepare to smash the pre-order button.
You can get the Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set for a cool $8-ish right now.
Sarah Gailey’s Upright Women Wanted has a cover and it’s pretty cool looking. (Fully disclosure: Sarah and I have the same agent.)
SYFY Wire has a list of 11 sci-fi and fantasy romances.
Captain America clips edited to Old Town Road. Or how about the women of Marvel to Wicked Ones. Or maybe a Twitter thread of Brie Larson as each of the Sailor Senshi. You’re welcome.
Once again we have to have the same old talk about Mary Sues because a lady character was good at something. (This time it was Arya in Game of Thrones)
If you, like me, love profanity, then you need to read this list of all the best profanity from Black Leopard, Red Wolf.
The other dynamic duo, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, will be adapting Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London for TV.
Spoiler warning for Avengers: Endgame, but if you’ve watched the movie, I really want you to go read this piece on Tor.com about Thor in that film.
Spoiler warning for this week’s Game of Thrones episode, but the Angry Staff Officer wrote a tactical analysis of the Battle of Winterfell at Wired. I am a bad nerd who doesn’t even go here and I still found it fascinating.
Throwback Thursday
Or not quite… that’s just easier to say than “free association combining books and some weird thing that happened on this day in history.”
Long before the internet as we know it could have ever been imagined, there was ARPANET; ARPA stood for the (US) Advanced Research Projects Agency. ARPANET was first conceptualized in 1967, then came to life in 1969 when four university computers were interconnected. More computers were added to the network so (mostly) scientists could share resources and information more easily.
On May 3, 1978, a marketing executive from the company Digital Equipment Corporation (doesn’t that sound like something from a comic book already?) sent unsolicited commercial email to every US west coast address on ARPANET. And thus, the spam email was born. Curse you, unnamed marketing executive!
Another bulk email that wasn’t quite spam went out on ARPANET the next year, asking a bunch of recipients who their favorite science fiction writers were. In those fledgling pre-internet days, no one screamed in horror at the thought of replying to all. Those emails eventually morphed into a sort of proto-forum, and the ARPANET users started seeing the social possibilities of this kind of network, particularly when it came to talking about nerdy stuff. Read the full story over at Slate.
And the rest, as they say, is history. Society restructured the internet, and now the internet is in the process of restructuring society–in both good and really scary ways. Which leads me to Malka Older’s Hugo-nominated Centenal Cycle, which explores how powerful information and the networked exchange thereof is. Start with Infomocracy.
Or, for true throwback goodness, you can currently get The Pride of Chanur by Science Fiction Writers of America Grandmaster C.J. Cherryh for $2.99 on Kindle.
See you, space pirates. You can find all of the books recommended in this newsletter on a handy Goodreads shelf. If you’d like to know more about my secret plans to dominate the seas and skies, you can catch me on the (Hugo-nominated!!!) Skiffy and Fanty Podcast or over at my personal site.