Barry Longyear has died

Barry Longyear (Creative Commons photo, source). 

Science fiction writer Barry Longyear has died. He was 82.

Longyear was best known for his 1979 novella "Enemy Mine," which won both the Hugo and Nebula awards and which was made into a movie. He won the Prometheus Award in 2021 for The War Whisperer Book Five: The Hook. 

The main idea behind The Hook is that a libertarian society can protect itself through targeted assassination rather than full scale war, an idea possible inspired by Hassan-i-Sabbah and the Assassins in Illuminatus! It's not clear whether Longyear got the idea from there or from another source, see this post. 

Grant McPhee news update

1. My last post about Pool of Life, the upcoming Liverpool documentary by the Scottish filmmaker Grant McPhee covering the Ken Campbell area, the wave of bands after the Beatles, etc., ended on a bit of a down note, as I quoted the guy writing for the Liverpool Post, ""Sadly, if you want to see Pool of Life, you may have to wait." 

But I contacted Mr. McPhee, and he gave me a more upbeat report: "No news at the moment but there may be something more positive in the near future. Thanks for all your support with it, much appreciated. [Pool of Life]  needs a sound mix and colour grade. The other two films in the trilogy are nearly finished, and there's going to be an accompanying oral-history book to go into some of the topics in far greater detail." (Note that the project has now grown into a trilogy, as the article referenced in the previous post explains). 

2. I am late in noting this, but the British Film Institute published a list of 35 great British horror movies, and Grant's Far from the Apple Tree made the list.