Haeems Wins Terran Prize

June 17, 2020 at 9:07 am

When astronauts look down on Earth from orbit, they don’t see borders, national boundaries, or linguistic groups; they see one world, a gorgeous blue globe spinning in space, streaked with clouds. I don’t know if humanity will ever reach the stars (though I hope we will), but if we do, it won’t be Americans who get there. It won’t be the Chinese or the Russians or the British or the French or the Brazilians or the Kiwis or the South Africans or Indians or the folk of any other nation either. It will be humanity; in the language of the SF of my youth, it will be Terrans or Earthlings or Earthmen. The future belongs to all the peoples of the world.

With that in mind, back in 2018 I established THE TERRAN PRIZE, to bring an aspiring SF writer from abroad to the Taos Toolbox, the graduate level writing workshop that Walter Jon Williams runs every summer in the mountains of northern New Mexico. The Prize is given annually and covers all tuition and fees to the Toolbox (but not travel).

Here’s the official announcement of this year’s winner:

The Terran Prize for 2020, consisting of a scholarship for the Taos Toolbox writing workshop, has been won by Maurice Haeems of Mumbai, India.

Taos Toolbox was forced by the Covid pandemic to move from its original June dates to September 6-19, in Angel Fire, New Mexico. The workshop will be taught by Nancy Kress and Walter Jon Williams, along with special lecturers George R.R. Martin and E.M. Tippetts.

Maurice was born in Mumbai and has a bachelor’s degree in Engineering from the University of Mumbai and an MBA in Finance from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Over the last 30 years, he has lived in Mumbai, London, Hong Kong, Taipei, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Dubai while pursuing professional careers in mechanical engineering, investment banking, and software entrepreneurship.

Recently, Maurice turned to his fourth career and first love – Writing, Storytelling, and Filmmaking. His first project, the multi-award-winning sci-fi feature film Chimera, which Maurice wrote and directed, was released in April 2019 and is now available on VOD and DVD. Maurice is delighted and honored to be a part of the 2020 class of the Taos Toolbox.

Maurice says, “My goal in reading and writing speculative fiction is simply to explore the hypothetical though, as a bonus, I am often rewarded with an improved comprehension of my reality. It is a privilege, as a writer, to gaze into crystal balls and magical devices, to contemplate their revelations, and to translate the resulting visions into words.”

Current Mood: creative

Tags: awards, writing

Beastly Books Reopens

June 10, 2020 at 8:34 am

New Mexico has begun to reopen — cautiously, step by step — from its lockdown, and that includes at least one of my own enterprises.

Beastly Books, my bookshop on Montezuma Street, opened its doors again on June 2, for coffee, hot chocolate, and — of course — signed books. We are not doing any author events at present, except the virtual kind, and we are taking every precaution, with masks, sanitizers, limits on the numbers of people allowed in the shop at one time, and so forth. We shall see how it goes. All of us hope the worst is over.

Of course, our mail order department remains open as well, as it has throughout the pandemic. Check out our offerings at https://jeancocteaucinema.com/beastlybooks/ ALL our books are autographed, and we have some great titles on offer.

The Jean Cocteau Cinema, next door to Beastly Books, remains closed for the moment, but is showing new films every week via streaming video. You can sign up for that via the JCC newsletter. I am not sure when the theatre will reopen. That depends in large part of the progress of the fight against coronavirus… but we are also looking at doing some major renovations to the old gal, down the line.

Current Mood: hopeful hopeful

Tags: Beastly Books, jean cocteau cinema, jean cocteau cinema bookstore, life and death, signed books

Words For Our Times

June 9, 2020 at 11:35 am

Current Mood: angry angry

Tags: life and death, politics

Bloggity Bloggity

May 25, 2020 at 8:00 am

History buffs, baseball fans, and Wild Carders alike will enjoy the newest post on the Wild Cards blog, John Jos. Miller’s “Annotated Long Night at the Palmer House,” touching on all the references, hidden and fictional, in his acclaimed LOW CHICAGO interstitial.

The Annotated “A Long Night At The Palmer House”

When he is not writing Wild Cards stories or watching the New York Mets, John is a huge fan of… ah… strange cinema. Of late he has been doing some fun blog posts for our friends over at BLACK GATE, talking about some of his odder favorites. Check it out at:

https://www.blackgate.com/2020/05/12/son-of-19-movies-the-good-the-bad-and-the-weird-edition/#more-427597

Current Mood: amused amused

Tags: films, movies, wild cards

All Aboard for Lamy

May 19, 2020 at 2:36 pm

We lived in an apartment when I was a kid, in the federal housing projects on First Street in Bayonne, New Jersey. We did not have much money, and we did not have much room. One Christmas, I decided I wanted a set of Lionel electric trains. Santa brought them to me, good guy that he was. It was years later that I learned that they were hand-me-down trains that had originally belonged to my cousin Richie. He was a few years older than me, and had outgrown toys. By then he was more interested in girls. His train set was pretty basic, to tell the truth. A circle of track, a transformer, a locomotive, a couple of cars, and a caboose. None of the really cool cars that Lionel was making in the 50s. I had friends who lived in houses whose train sets occupied their entire basements, with a whole town, a mountain, tunnels, bridges, all kinds of cool cars that did stuff. My train went in a circle around the Christmas tree, and when the tree came down, it was time to put away the train set for another year. Eventually my trains vanished unaccountably, and I later learned they had been handed down again, to another cousin, one who was a few years younger than me.

Perhaps these experiences during my formative childhood years gave me a deep-buried case of Train Lust.

Or maybe it was my middle initials. I remember when I first started going to SF cons, there were a lot of guys named George around. George Zebrowski was “George,” Gardner Dozois informed me. George Alec Effinger was “Piglet.” So I would have to be “Railroad.” Jack Dann still calls me that, half a century later.

Whatever the reason, yeah, it’s true. I bought a new train set. Well, me and a couple of friends and partners, Bill Banowsky of Violet Crown Cinema, and Catherine Oppenheimer of the New Mexico School for the Arts. All three of us are involved in Santa Fe’s resurgent Railyard neighborhood, at the heart of which is the old, defunct Santa Fe Southern Railroad, which hasn’t run regularly for years. The SFSR only ran eighteen miles, from just behind my theatre the Jean Cocteau down to the old historic depot in Lamy, New Mexico. But it was a great fun ride once upon a time, and Bill and Catherine and I think it could be a great fun ride again.

The JOURNAL NORTH has all the details, here:

https://www.abqjournal.com/1456291/working-on-the-railroad-ex-trio-plans-to-revive-train-service-between-santa-fe-and-lamy.html

It is going to take a lot of work, more than a few bucks, and a fair amount of time to get the railroad running again. There are tracks and trestles to inspect and repair, old historic coaches to restore to their former splendor, a dead locomotive to bring back to life. And the coronavirus has slowed the process way down. But sooner or later, we do hope to have the old Lamy Line chuffing and puffing once again, and we have all sorts of fun ideas for the future, live music and murder mysteries and train robberies and escape rooms and… well, we shall see.

And best of all, we won’t need to pull up the tracks when Christmas is over.