The Poppy War By R.F. Kuang 19.10 Study and pass a test to enter an academy to be trained as a member of the military or become the unwilling wife of a man twice her age all to benefit the Aunt and Uncle who adopted her –Fang Runin doesn’t really have much of a choice. Not only does she pass, but she soon becomes one of the highest-ranking students of Sinegard attracting the notice of the secretive and unstable Lore Master. Will he take her on as an apprentice? Can she survive the attentions of the Phoenix, the fractious god of fire who has taken an interest in her? Finally, can Rin survive the next Poppy War which is suddenly breaking out all around her and threatening all of Nikan?
-November’s meeting is on the 20th at the Simpson Library in Mechanicsburg and the book of the month is Kill the Farm Boy by Delilah S. Dawson and Kevin Hearne. -Cover art by Tithi Luadthong, modified by Jeff Young -Dear Crabby shines some light into the black hole that is Fortnite
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NEW RELEASES November 2019 BEN AARONOVITCH - False Value DAVID MOODY - Chokehold PIERS ANTHONY- Fire Sail ERIN MORGENSTERN - The Starless Sea HOLLY BLACK - The Queen of Nothing CLAIRE NORTH - The Pursuit of William Abbey RICHARD CHIZMAR - Gwendy’s Magic Feather DANIEL JOSÉ OLDER - The Book of Lost Saints GENEVIEVE COGMAN- The Secret Chapter SUSAN PALWICK - All Worlds Are Real EOIN COLFER - The Fowl Twins K.J. PARKER - My Beautiful Life GLEN COOK - Best of Glen Cook JERRY POURNELLE - The Best of Jerry Pournelle PAUL CORNELL - The Lights Go Out in Lychford TIM PRATT - Miracles & Marvels: Stories JOHN CROWLEY - And Go Like This HANNU RAJANIEMI & JACOB WEISMAN, JOHN CROWLEY - Reading Backwards EDS. - The New Voices of Science Fiction TERRY DOWLING - The Complete JENNIFER ROBERSON - Life and Limb Rynosseros BRANDON SANDERSON - Starsight JOHN FLESKES, ED. - Spectrum 26: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art BRYAN THOMAS SCHMIDT, ED. - Infinite Stars: Dark Frontiers TERRY GOODKIND - The Wasteland NEAL SHUSTERMAN - The Toll PAULA GURAN, ED. - The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2019 Edition ANGELA SLATTER - The Heart Is a Mirror for Sinners and Other Stories ROBERT IRWIN - My Life Is Like a Fairy Tale RIVERS SOLOMON - The Deep ALLAN KASTER, ED. - The Year’s Top KAARON WARREN - Into Bones Like Oil Hard Science Fiction Stories 3 PETER WATTS - Peter Watts Is an Angry GARRY KILWORTH - Elemental Tales Sentient Tumor NAOMI KRITZER - Catfishing on CatNet MANLY WADE WELLMAN - The Complete John the Balladeer MERCEDES LACKEY, ED. - Seasons WALTER JON WILLIAMS - Quillifer the ALISON LITTLEWOOD - Mistletoe Knight JAMES LOVEGROVE - Age of Legends DANIEL H. WILSON - The Andromeda JONATHAN MABERRY - Rage Evolution IAN MCDONALD - The Menace from Farside
FINAL ISSUE AVAILABLE AT PHILCON DEAR CRABBY
Dear Crabby, OH MY GOD! THE END! What do I do now? Fortnite blew everything up and there's only a black hole! What do I do? Anon
Dear Chicken Little, The end of the Fortnite season 10 or even the whole Fortnite world is not the end of the actual world itself. Breathe. How much of a noob are you that you don't realize that a) that's what this game does...it does big weird wacky stuff and b) nobody is going to kill the golden goose. Sources have approximated that 250 million people play this game worldwide...250 million! Nobody is just going to say goodbye to the revenue that brings in, buddy. Now what I think is amazingly sad is that we can't get 250 million people on board with anything as important as...oh, say ending world hunger, preventing the destruction of the planet we actually live on or even to get that amount of voter turnout for elections in the US. We came in at just over that amount of the population being of age to vote in 2016 and got less than an estimated 56% turnout. However, it's obvious to me now that if we held voting in cyberspace allowing people to pick costumes, an alias, and earn coins towards cool gadgets by doing crazy things like learning about current events, topics of interest, the candidates, the platform they run on, and maybe their political history and who buys them...I mean...supports them with donations...well, then I'm sure we could get a record turn out! I'm sure we could even get lots of volunteers from other countries to help run the election behind the scenes. Probably even ones with lots of experience in doing so already. Take your head out of your...device and get a real life. You're part of the problem. Crabby https://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2019/10/fortnite-black-hole-everything-you-need-to- know/fortnite-black-hole-event
-It isn’t always the face at the forefront that you remember. Robert Forster is someone you’ve seen before, but it may take you a moment to remember. Maybe it was Dan Holland, the captain in the movie The Black Hole. Perhaps as Arthur Petrelli in Heroes or Sheriff Truman in Twin Peaks: The Return. You might even know him as Ed, a vacuum cleaner salesman from Breaking Bad. Sadly, Robert passed away on October 11th from brain cancer, but his legacy lives on in his films and TV performances. -Dario Argento, famous for his unique Italian horror films, such as Suspiria plans to direct a TV show called Longinus. The show is to be set in the French Alps and the Siena of Palio. The title would seem to refer to the Roman Soldier from the crucifixion of Christ. Very little is known except rumors that it will include ancient mysteries and unexplained murders. -Terminator : Dark Fate has several things going for it that could make it a box office smash. The film falls directly after T2 in the franchise timeline. If you haven’t already seen the promo pics, it’s no surprise that Linda Hamilton is once again looking bad ass. Add on the fact the James Cameron is producing, Tim Miller (Deadpool) will be directing and Arnold Schwarnenegger and Edward Furlong are both returning to reprise their roles, it certainly gives one hope that things will be explosively cool. Dark Fate drops on November 1st. -December 1st marks the return of The Expanse for season four, this time on Amazon. Trailers do a good job of revealing the crews landing on Ilus and capturing the moment when Naomi first steps onto a world, which is a foreign thing to a Belter. Once again it looks like the series plans to follow closely to the books and Abbadon’s Gate is a nicely contained piece that will make for a solid season. -Lana Wachowski has chosen Yahya Abdul-Mateen II for an unrevealed pivotal role in the latest installment of the Matrix franchise. One of Yahya’s most recent roles was The Black Manta in DC’s movie, Aquaman. Since then, he’s also starred in Us and is part of HBO’s Watchmen series. The new Matrix film will include returning stars Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Ann Moss reprising their roles as Neo and Trinity. There is also some more interesting Matrix news surfacing. Writer Zak Penn has also been working on another Matrix project. Little is known about it, but while Lana’s is a sequel, Zak’s is believed to be a prequel. As more news came out about the Wachowski project, Zak jumped on Twitter to let folks know that these are two separate entities. He stressed that neither project is a reboot of the original. Zak is known for his writing work on X-Men, Avengers and the TV show Alphas. -The Orville cast had fun at the New York Comicon riffing on an idea where others have gone before—a musical episode. Popularized by the Buffy the Vampire Slayer Episode “Once More with Feeling”, the singing episode concept has also been embraced by The Flash, Fringe, Legends of Tomorrow (who did an entire Bollywood number) and The Magicians (whose piece of choice was Les Miserables). Since the show creator, Seth McFarlane, wasn’t with them, the cast played around with the concept in their conversation after a fan asked about a musical episode. Scott Grimes apparently tried to run with an idea that Penny Johnson Jerald had suggested on set about visiting a world where the inhabitants emote through song. Towards the end of things, Grimes decided to sing Air Supply’s “Goodbye” to Mark Jackson. -As a promotional gag, Starman and the Tesla in space are pretty hard to top. However, by now pundits believe that the roadster is no longer roadworthy. Sure, there’s no oxidizing going on, but there still are plenty of micrometeorites that have been peppering the car and its passenger in it 470 million mile journey. With regards to the paint job, cosmic rays and other radiation have certainly taken their toll. It’s not going to be shiny red any longer. A chemist commented that organic items like the leather seats wouldn’t even last a year. Not fear though, there’s only a 6% chance of it crashing on Earth.
The Bodhana Group is a nonprofit organization that advocates the use of tabletop gaming as a directed therapeutic and clinical practice that can benefit personal growth as well as enhance social and educational services to individuals and families. Over the weekend of October 11 through 13th they also ran their annual convention “Save Against Fear”. IF you're in the Central Pennsylvania area and enjoy playing games, I would highly recommend putting this event on your calendar. This year was the ninth year for the event and the third time I had attended. I was not alone. The con this year brought in about 450 people from all across the area and nearby states. The convention took over a large space in a local mall and used it all. There were literally dozens of games running at any given time all weekend long. Role playing games, computer simulation games, board games, card games – even beta test games. There were at least six game design groups set up and showing off their latest creations. Massive miniatures displays and games took up the rear section of the game floor covering everything from the Civil War to Star Wars. The miniatures on display were painted in myriad colors and stood out against all sorts of terrain. Some folks took the opportunity to learn how to paint the minis and add spectacular bases to them. In short, if you like to game this was the place to be. Registration was right up front. It was fast, clearly marked and a breeze to get through. In fact, all the aspects of the convention were super smooth. There was a bake sale if you needed a snack. Vendors took over a section of the floor and brought a wide variety of items in for sale, from art to books to the next set of dice that you clearly need. The game designers had a lot of interesting things to play test and just have plain fun with. The single biggest part of the con was the game library. It's massive. It was overwhelming. When I say those thing, it feels a bit like hyperbole, but there were hundreds of games to choose from. The games were all laid out along a huge set of tables and roughly divided into sections based on how long it would take to play the game. If you can name the game, I'd wager it was there. I know there are some skeptics out there but when I saw Gnip Gnop, Payday, and Canasta next to the Mork and Mindy board game I began to have trouble choosing what to play. If there's any criticism of the con it would be that. The game selection was too much if you were even a tiny bit unsure what to play. The best part would be the fine folks working all the tables. All the people working were gamers and fans of the work they do. They were happy to come up with a recommendation based on what you were thinking and even an explanation of how to play if somebody in your crowd didn't know how to play. By Eric V. Hardenbrook
COME TO THE BOOK LAUNCH AT PHILCON Tillyer’s News of the High Frontier October 2019
-While the landing aspect of the Chandrayaan-2 mission was not a success, the orbiter is already sending back information of import. However, it ‘s not quite as expected. Chandrayaan-2 has two instruments, the Large Area Soft X-ray Spectrometer (CLASS) and the Solar X-Ray Monitor, which are used in conjunction to observe the interaction between X-rays and the lunar surface. These interactions can then be view spectroscopically to determine the composition of areas of the moon’s surface. Since technology tends to improve over time, the Solar X-Ray Monitor is actually better at detection than some of the instruments currently in space designed to monitor X-rays from the sun. Because of this, it caught flares coming off the Sun between the last day of September and the first of October that other probes like the GOES-15 weather satellite only registered as tiny variations. Scientists are interested in these flares because the Sun is currently in a quieter phase of the Solar Cycle and flares are more unusual. The only downside to this is that the instruments of Chandrayaan-2 are not pointed in quite the right direction to discover the effects of the X-rays from the flares. Hopefully, we’ll be luckier in the future.
-We have quite a few satellites and probes in orbit – how are we going to keep them there and keep them functioning? Nothrop Grummand built the Mission Extension Vehicle-1, MEV- 1, a satellite servicing craft. MEV-1 was recently launched into orbit from Baikonur Cosmodrome via a Proton rocket along with the Eutelsat 5 West B, a communications satellite. The mission is to have the robotic repair craft find the Intelsat 901 and refuel it. Intelsat has been in orbit since 2001. Refueling would increase Intelsat 901’s life by five years. Astronauts on Shuttle missions were dispatched to occasionally do similar work, but this would be the first instance of an unmanned craft accomplishing the task. While it maybe the first to do this, the idea isn’t new, and others are pursuing it. NASA has its own mission, Restore-L set up to refuel a government satellite. Made in Space, based in California, has their own design for a repair craft called Archinaut (previously mentioned in WTS), which can not only be used for maintenance but also for construction. DARPA has worked on this since 2007 in a project called Orbital Express and their latest effort is something known by the less than surprising moniker, Robotic Servicing or Geosynchronous Satellites.
-Virgin Orbit, a division of Richard Branson’s Virgin Group is working to put satellites into orbit. But what really is interesting is how they plan to do it. Virgin Orbit is using a rocket (LauncherOne) dropped from a 747(Cosmic Girl). They began tests in July and hope to be able to eventually provide 24 hour turn around time upon mission requests. LauncherOne when dropped at an altitude of 35k feet will turn on its booster and lift into orbit. The rocket is designed to carry loads up to 1,100 pounds. The plane to orbit strategy is also what Virgin uses to loft SpaceShipTwo. This Spring Virgin began the process of moving its development and testing to Spaceport America in New Mexico. The Space Ship Company, which is responsible for the manufacturing end of the business, will remain in Mojave, California.
COMING IN NOVEMBER