MonSFFA Website

NEXT CLUB MEETING: THIS SATURDAY, MAY 10!

MonSFFA’s next meeting is scheduled to take place this Saturday, May 10, from 1:00PM to 5:00PM!

We will gather at our usual downtown meeting locale, Le Nouvel Hotel, 1740 René-Lévesque Ouest (corner St-Mathieu).

Out-of-towners, as always, may join our ZOOM-chat and take part in the meeting from the comfort of home!

On the Agenda:

The Cartoons of Tom Gauld: SF, Fantasy, Literature, and Commentary. And Books!

We examine the art and humour of prolific cartoonist Tom Gauld, whose work covers a wide range: science, science fiction, fantasy, role-playing games, classic literature, politics, and more. Gauld happily combines different genres in a single cartoon. Vampire tropes… and modern politics; classic literature…and science fiction; fantasy…and the reality of television. Not only does Gauld love books, he also loves booklovers, and publishes in major newspapers and magazines, including The Guardian, The New Scientist, The New York Times, and The New Yorker.

Section 31 (Game)

How well do you know your sci-fi spaceships, aircraft, and vehicles? As a Section 31 agent, you will be required to covertly gather information on various of these as potential targets, and this afternoon, we will test your ability to correctly identify a few!

and more…

Meeting Theme: We will be discussing, during the course of this meeting, our annual club field trip, upcoming in June! We’ll welcome your suggestions as to which museum, exhibition, or interesting locale to visit this year.

We’re looking forward to seeing as many of you as possible at our downtown meeting hall for this May 2025 meeting! Bring a friend! See you all there this Saturday, May 10, 1:00PM-5:00PM!

Please Note: While we strive to keep on schedule, we do, sometimes, fall behind a little, or find ourselves having to reshuffle the order of items on the agenda for one reason or another, or reschedule planned presentations/discussions. Therefore, please understand that all programming is subject to change!

MonSFFA Website

NEXT CLUB MEETING COMING SOON, ON SATURDAY, MAY 10!

MonSFFA’s next meeting is scheduled to take place this Saturday, May 10, from 1:00PM to 5:00PM!

We will gather at our downtown meeting locale, Le Nouvel Hotel, 1740 René-Lévesque Ouest (corner St-Mathieu).

Out-of-towners, as always, may join our ZOOM-chat and take part in the meeting from the comfort of home!

On the Agenda:

The Cartoons of Tom Gauld: SF, Fantasy, Literature, and Commentary. And Books!

We examine the art and humour of prolific cartoonist Tom Gauld, whose work covers a wide range: science, science fiction, fantasy, role-playing games, classic literature, politics, and more. Gauld happily combines different genres in a single cartoon. Vampire tropes… and modern politics; classic literature…and science fiction; fantasy…and the reality of television. Not only does Gauld love books, he also loves booklovers, and publishes in major newspapers and magazines, including The Guardian, The New Scientist, The New York Times, and The New Yorker.

Section 31 (Game)

How well do you know your sci-fi spaceships, aircraft, and vehicles? As a Section 31 agent, you will be required to covertly gather information on various of these as potential targets, and this afternoon, we will test your ability to correctly identify a few!

and more…

Meeting Theme: We will be discussing, during the course of this meeting, our annual club field trip, upcoming in June! We’ll welcome your suggestions as to which museum, exhibition, or interesting locale to visit this year.

We’re looking forward to seeing as many of you as possible at our downtown meeting hall for this May 2025 meeting! Bring a friend! See you all there on Saturday, May 10, 1:00PM-5:00PM!

Please Note: While we strive to keep on schedule, we do, sometimes, fall behind a little, or find ourselves having to reshuffle the order of items on the agenda for one reason or another, or reschedule planned presentations/discussions. Therefore, please understand that all programming is subject to change!

Books

Locus List of Forthcoming Books

MAY 2025

  • JOE ABERCROMBIE • The Devils • Orion UK/Gollancz, May 2025 (hc, eb)
  • JOE ABERCROMBIE • The Devils • Tor, May 2025 (hc, eb)
  • GENEVIEVE COGMAN • Damned • Macmillan/Tor UK, May 2025 (hc, eb)
  • CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN • The Night Birds • St. Martin’s, May 2025 (1st UK, h, pb, eb)
  • MIRA GRANT • Overgrowth • Tor/Nightfire, May 2025 (h, hc, eb)
  • GUY GAVRIEL KAY • Written on the Dark • Penguin Random House/Berkley, May 2025 (hc, eb)
  • DEAN KOONTZ • Going Home in the Dark • Ama­zon/Thomas & Mercer, May 2025 (h, hc, eb)
  • PAT MURPHY • The Adventures of Mary Dar­ling • Tachyon Publications, May 2025 (tp, eb)
  • EMMA NEWMAN • The Vengeance • Rebellion/Solaris UK, May 2025 (tp, eb)
  • JODY LYNN NYE, ED. • L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume 41 • Galaxy, May 2025 (oa, tp, eb)
  • TOCHI ONYEBUCHI • Harmattan Season • Tor, May 2025 (hc, eb)
  • ADAM OYEBANJI • Esperance • Quercus UK/Arcadia, May 2025 (tp, eb)
  • ADAM OYEBANJI • Esperance • Astra House/DAW, May 2025 (hc, eb)
  • ALASTAIR REYNOLDS • The Revelation Space Collection • Volume 1, Orion UK/Gollancz, May 2025 (c, hc, eb)
  • ALASTAIR REYNOLDS • The Revelation Space Collection • Volume 2, Orion UK/Gollancz, May 2025 (c, hc, eb)
  • VIVIAN SHAW • Strange New World • Orbit UK, May 2025 (tp, eb)
  • VIVIAN SHAW • Strange New World • Orbit US, May 2025 (tp, eb)
  • CAITLIN STARLING • The Starving Saints • Harper Voy­ager US, May 2025 (hc, eb)
  • NEON YANG • Brighter than Scale • Swifter than Flame, Tordotcom, May 2025 (tp)
Upcoming meeting

Meeting of May 10:  The Cartoons of Tom Gauld

Looking forward to our May 10th meeting!

 The Cartoons of Tom Gauld: SF, fantasy, literature, and commentary. And books.  

Tom Gauld (born 1976) is an astonishingly prolific Scottish cartoonist. His cartoons cover a wide range: science, science fiction, fantasy, role playing games, classic literature, politics, and more. Gauld happily combines different genres in a single cartoon. Vampire tropes – and modern politics. Classic literature – and science fiction. Fantasy – and the reality of television. Not only does Gauld love books – he also loves booklovers.

He publishes in major newspapers and magazines including The New Scientist, The Guardian, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and more. His work has been collected in more than 20 books.

One of Gauld’s best-known cartoons, showing the eternal struggle between science and science fiction.
Astronomy News, Science and technology

THE STARLINK INCIDENT IS NOT WHAT WE THOUGHT

THE STARLINK INCIDENT IS NOT WHAT WE THOUGHT: It never made sense. On Feb. 3rd, 2022, SpaceX launched a batch of 49 Starlinks to low-Earth orbit–something they had done many times before. This time was different, though. Almost immediately, dozens of the new satellites began to fall out of the sky.

Above: A Starlink satellite falls from the sky over Puerto Rico on Feb. 7, 2022. [video]
At the time, SpaceX offered this explanation: “Unfortunately, the satellites deployed on Thursday (Feb. 3rd) were significantly impacted by a geomagnetic storm on Friday, (Feb. 4th).”

A more accurate statement might have read “…impacted by a very minor geomagnetic storm.” The satellites flew into a storm that barely registered on NOAA scales: It was a G1, the weakest possible, unlikely to cause a mass decay of satellites. Something about “The Starlink Incident” was not adding up.

Space scientists Scott McIntosh and Robert Leamon of Lynker Space, Inc., have a new and different idea: “The Terminator did it,” says McIntosh.

Not to be confused with the killer robot, McIntosh’s Terminator is an event on the sun that helps explain the mysterious progression of solar cycles. Four centuries after Galileo discovered sunspots, researchers still cannot accurately predict the timing and strength of the sun’s 11-year solar cycle. Even “11 years” isn’t real; observed cycles vary from less than 9 years to more than 14 years long.


Above: Oppositely charged bands of magnetism march toward the sun’s equator where they “terminate” one another, kickstarting the next solar cycle. [more]

McIntosh and Leamon realized that forecasters had been overlooking something. There is a moment that happens every 11 years or so when opposing magnetic fields from the sun’s previous and upcoming solar cycles collide. They called this moment, which signals the death of the old cycle, “The Termination Event.”

After a Termination Event, the sun roars to life–”like a hot stove where someone suddenly turns the burner on,” McIntosh likes to say. Solar ultraviolet radiation abruptly jumps to a higher level, heating the upper atmosphere and dramatically increasing aerodynamic drag on satellites.

This plot supports what McIntosh and Leamon are saying:

The histogram shows the number of objects falling out of Earth orbit each year since 1975. Vertical dashed lines mark Termination Events. There’s an uptick in satellite decay around the time of every Terminator, none bigger than 2022.

As SpaceX was assembling the doomed Starlinks of Group 4-7 in early 2022, they had no idea that the Terminator Event had, in fact, just happened. Unwittingly, they launched the satellites into a radically altered near-space environment. “Some of our satellite partners said it was just pea soup up there,” says Leamon.

SpaceX wasn’t the only company hit hard. Capella Space also struggled in 2022 to keep its constellation of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites in orbit.

“The atmospheric density in low Earth orbit was 2 to 3 times more than expected,” wrote Capella Space’s Scott Shambaugh in a paper entitled Doing Battle With the Sun. “This increase in drag threatened to prematurely de-orbit some of our spacecraft.” Indeed, many did deorbit earlier than their 3-year design lifetimes.

The Terminator did it? It makes more sense than a tiny storm.

Dinosaurs and Company

Ankylosaur footprints from Canada are first of their kind in the world

Three-toed prints from B.C., Alberta fill gap in fossil record

Emily Chung · CBC News ·
Woman with fossil footprints in a rock
Victoria Arbour, curator at the Royal B.C. Museum, with Ruopodosaurus prints (far left for the foot and middle for the hand) in the field at Wolverine River near Tumbler Ridge, B.C., in August 2023. (Royal B.C. Museum)

The new species, which has been named Ruopodosaurus clava, would have been an armoured dinosaur about five to six metres long, reports a new study published this week in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Victoria Arbour, curator of paleontology at the Royal B.C. Museum and lead author of the new study, said Ruopodosaurus would have lumbered through the coastal redwood forests between the Rocky Mountains and an inland sea that covered Saskatchewan and Alberta during the Middle Cretaceous, about 100 million to 94 million years ago. Previously identified footprints suggest the other creatures it lived alongside: giant crocodiles, duck-billed dinosaurs and bird-like dinosaurs — and a related group of four-toed ankylosaurs.

But no bones of three-toed, club-tailed ankylosaurs have ever been found in North America from the Middle Cretaceous, which, until now, suggested they may have gone extinct during this time, before reappearing about 84 million years ago, perhaps by the migration of populations from Asia. The tracks from this new species suggest otherwise.

This species, Arbour said, is “new for North America. It’s new for the world…. And it really helps us fill in this gap in the fossil record.”

Royal B.C. Museum fossil preparator Calla Scott and former University of Victoria MSc student Teague Dickson apply a glue to a slab containing the fossil ankylosaur footprints to prepare it for making a silicone mould of the tracks in August 2024. (Royal B.C. Museum)

More to read: https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/ankylosaurid-footprints-1.7511766

Astronomy News

Scientists find ‘strongest evidence yet’ of life on distant planet

Scientists find ‘strongest evidence yet’ of life on distant planet

Pallab Ghosh, Science Correspondent BBC

Cambridge University The bottom half of the frame shows a large blue planet with a shimmering atmosphere. Above it is space with a small red star above the planet
Cambridge University: Artwork of K2-18b, a faraway world that may be home to life

Scientists have found new but tentative evidence that a faraway world orbiting another star may be home to life.

A Cambridge team studying the atmosphere of a planet called K2-18b has detected signs of molecules which on Earth are only produced by simple organisms.

This is the second, and more promising, time chemicals associated with life have been detected in the planet’s atmosphere by Nasa’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

But the team and independent astronomers stress that more data is needed to confirm these results.

The lead researcher, Prof Nikku Madhusudhan, told me at his lab at Cambridge University’s Institute of Astronomy that he hopes to obtain the clinching evidence soon.

“This is the strongest evidence yet there is possibly life out there. I can realistically say that we can confirm this signal within one to two years.”

For more, click the link: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c39jj9vkr34o
Awards

2025 Hugo Award Finalists

To view the full list of nominees, go directly to https://seattlein2025.org/wsfs/hugo-awards/2025-hugo-award-finalists/

2025 Hugo Award Finalists

Seattle Worldcon 2025, the 83rd World Science Fiction Convention, is delighted to announce the finalists for the 2025 Hugo Awards, Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book, and Astounding Award for Best New Writer.

1,338* valid electronic nominating ballots were received by the deadline of March 14 at 11:59 p.m. PDT and counted from the members of the 2024 and 2025 World Science Fiction Conventions for the 2025 Hugo Awards. ​​Unfortunately, two mailed ballots were received 2.5 weeks later on April 3 after the deadline of receipt. Voting on the final ballot will open during April 2025.

Only Seattle Worldcon 2025 WSFS members will be able to vote on the final ballot and choose the winners for the 2025 Awards. The 2025 Hugo Awards, the Lodestar Award, and the Astounding Award will be presented on Saturday evening, August 16, 2025, at a formal ceremony at Seattle Worldcon 2025.

Questions about the Hugo Awards process may be directed to hugo-help@seattlein2025.org.

* Initial publication had an error of 1,738 ballots instead of the correct number of 1,338.

Seattle Worldcon 2025 Hugo Award Finalists

Best Novel

  • Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Orbit US, Tor UK)
  • The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (Avid Reader Press, Sceptre)
  • Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tordotcom)
  • Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell (DAW)
  • A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher (Tor)
  • The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett (Del Rey, Hodderscape UK)

1078 ballots cast for 554 nominees, finalists range 90 to 157

Best Novella

  • The Brides of High Hill by Nghi Vo (Tordotcom)
  • The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed (Tordotcom)
  • Navigational Entanglements by Aliette de Bodard (Tordotcom)
  • The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar (Tordotcom)
  • The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler (Tordotcom)
  • What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher (Nightfire)

739 ballots cast for 209 nominees, finalists range 75 to 135

Best Novelette

  • “The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video” by Thomas Ha (Clarkesworld, May 2024)
  • “By Salt, By Sea, By Light of Stars” by Premee Mohamed (Strange Horizons, Fund Drive 2024)
  • “The Four Sisters Overlooking the Sea” by Naomi Kritzer (Asimov’s, September/October 2024)
  • “Lake of Souls” by Ann Leckie in Lake of Souls (Orbit)
  • “Loneliness Universe” by Eugenia Triantafyllou (Uncanny Magazine, Issue 58)
  • “Signs of Life” by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny Magazine, Issue 59)

394 ballots cast for 188 nominees, finalists range 36 to 58

Best Short Story

  • “Five Views of the Planet Tartarus” by Rachael K. Jones (Lightspeed Magazine, Jan 2024 (Issue 164))
  • “Marginalia” by Mary Robinette Kowal (Uncanny Magazine, Issue 56)
  • “Stitched to Skin Like Family Is” by Nghi Vo (Uncanny Magazine, Issue 57)
  • “Three Faces of a Beheading” by Arkady Martine (Uncanny Magazine, Issue 58)
  • “We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read” by Caroline M. Yoachim (Lightspeed Magazine, May 2024 (Issue 168))
  • “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole” by Isabel J. Kim (Clarkesworld, February 2024)

610 ballots cast for 673 nominees, finalists range 32 to 110

Best Series

  • Between Earth and Sky by Rebecca Roanhorse (Saga Press)
  • The Burning Kingdoms by Tasha Suri (Orbit)
  • InCryptid by Seanan McGuire (DAW)
  • Southern Reach by Jeff VanderMeer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
  • The Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson (Tor Books)
  • The Tyrant Philosophers by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Ad Astra)

621 ballots cast for 201 nominees, finalists range 57 to 90

Best Graphic Story or Comic

  • The Deep Dark by Molly Knox Ostertag (Graphix)
  • The Hunger and the Dusk: Vol. 1 written by G. Willow Wilson, art by Chris Wildgoose (IDW Publishing)
  • Monstress, Vol. 9: The Possessed written by Marjorie Liu, art by Sana Takeda (Image)
  • My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Book 2 by Emil Ferris (Fantagraphics)
  • Star Trek: Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way written by Ryan North, art by Chris Fenoglio (IDW Publishing)
  • We Called Them Giants written by Kieron Gillen, art by Stephanie Hans, lettering by Clayton Cowles (Image)

265 ballots cast for 259 nominees, finalists range 13 to 37

Astronomy News

A STRONG GEOMAGNETIC STORM IS UNDERWAY

https://spaceweather.com/

A STRONG GEOMAGNETIC STORM IS UNDERWAY: A G3-class (Strong) geomagnetic storm is underway on April 16th, with a slight chance of intensifying to category G4 (Severe). This is happening because a CME hit Earth’s magnetic field on April 15th. It may have been a Cannibal CME–a pile-up of two closely-spaced CMEs, in which one overtook the other. Cannibal CMEs contain shock waves and enhanced magnetic fields that do a good job sparking auroras.

“The CME delivered!” reports Sebastian Sainio from Finland. “It sparked a great, although not so long-lasting show on the night between the 15th and 16th of April.”

“The scenic landscape on the island of Raippaluoto in western Finland gave extra vibe to the photos,” he says. “The water was also exceptionally calm that night.”

If today’s storm persists at current levels (a big IF), auroras would appear across Canada and some northern-tier US states during the night of April 16-17. Aurora alerts: SMS Text

more images: from Gregory Ash of Ely, Minnesota; from Kristian Eli Eli Zachariasen of the Faroe Islands; from Thierry Garcia of Fishburn, Durham, England; from Jeff Dykstra of Búðardalur, Iceland

Montreal Science Fiction and Fantasy Association