Worldcon is nine days out. LAcon V, the 84th World Science Fiction Convention, descends on the Anaheim Convention Center August 27-31, 2026, and the Hugo Awards ceremony hits the stage on Sunday the 30th. The Doctor has opinions about who should win. The Doctor also has opinions about Anaheim in August (hot, crowded, smells faintly of churro and sunscreen), but he goes where the speculative fiction goes.

Quick civic service announcement: Hugo voting closed August 8th, so if you didn’t vote, congratulations, you forfeited your right to complain about the results. The category slate this year includes the second-ever Best Poem award (yes, poetry, keep your monocle in), and finalists in Best Novel include Robert Jackson Bennett’s A Drop of Corruption and Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author, among others. The field is legitimately strong. Whether the ceremony will be equally strong is, as always, a separate question entirely.

If you’re going, find me in the vendor hall. I’ll be the one judging your costume. High-5 to everyone who shows up in something with gears on it. lacon.org for the full schedule, membership info, and streaming details for the ceremony if you’re experiencing Anaheim from a safe distance.

Impressive…  Take a handful of fat capacitors (probably 500uF to 800uF each) and hook them up to an electromagnetic coil; make a stylish weapon.  Now, the typical muzzle velocity of a handgun is about 1200km/h, whereas this gun only fires at 110km/h; so it won’t kill you, but it’ll hurt like Hell.  By the way, real rail guns supposedly fire aluminum projectiles at relativistic speeds (near the speed of light), which is why you only see them in science fiction.

Daniel Eindhoven is talented designer who created this  cool  coil  gun. It took around 40 hours to finish this outstanding job. It weights 5 Kg and, capable of delivering over 18J kinetic energy, and speeds up to 110km/h . This  weird coil gun has  laser pointer for easy aiming and it costs around 100 Euros. It needs 8 seconds to fire a projectile if is connected to  power source or 90 seconds with batteries. It is really impressive, I’m not a gun lover but this one is really made with creativity. You may also would like to check this Swiss mini gun, the smallest gun in the world.

From thecontaminated.com

H.G. – You’re about to have your ass handed to you…

It’s an R-rated, retro-history, [1914 steampunk epic], fourteen years after the first failed Martian invasion. Mankind has rebuilt her cities and [the military is] adapting a lot of the abandoned Martian technology… Think of “Band of Brothers” meets “Star Wars”… It will be cool, steam-powered battle tripods, doomed Cossack cavalry charges, Victorian deco, steampunk Manhattan, 1,500-foot-long armored battle zeppelins, Teddy Roosevelt, souped up tri-planes, blood on steaming metal, sex in the cockpit. The usual… It will have a budget of around $3 million, and be produced by Tripod Entertainment… and is being co-produced by Kevin Eastman (owner of Heavy Metal).

I really hope they get this one right.  The 1st Heavy Metal was cool, but old.  The 2nd was more modernized, but did little to hold my interest.  However THIS should be a big win; I just don’t see how it ties into the other two – maybe there’s a hottie in there somewhere with a steamwork sword…  Check it out: “War of the Worlds: Goliath”