The winners of this year's Locus Award for science fiction and fantasy

Locus Magazine has announced the winners of this year's Locus Award:

* Science Fiction Novel: Blackout/All Clear, Connie Willis (Spectra)
* Fantasy Novel: Kraken, China Miéville (Macmillan UK; Del Rey)
* First Novel: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit UK; Orbit US)
* Young Adult Book: Ship Breaker, Paolo Bacigalupi (Little, Brown)
* Novella: The Lifecycle of Software Objects, Ted Chiang (Subterranean)
* Novelette: "The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains", Neil Gaiman
* Short Story: "The Thing About Cassandra", Neil Gaiman (Songs of Love and Death)
* Magazine: Asimov's
* Publisher: Tor
* Anthology: Warriors, George R.R. Martin & Gardner Dozois, eds. (Tor)
* Collection: Fritz Leiber: Selected Stories, Fritz Leiber (Night Shade)
* Editor: Ellen Datlow
* Artist: Shaun Tan
* Non-fiction: Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century: Volume 1: 1907-1948: Learning Curve, William H. Patterson, Jr., (Tor)
* Art Book: Spectrum 17, Cathy & Arnie Fenner, eds. (Underwood)

Picasso's amazing "Light Grafitti"

These are fascinating historic images by LIFE photographer Gjon Mili of Pablo Picasso drawing with a flashlight, captured with a long exposure. Amazingly, his mind could "see" and guide his actions thought he couldn’t visually see what he was doing until the entire set was done and exposures developed. Amazing stuff and more here.

What have we become: sculpture from old books.

Artist Nicholas Galanin has created a wonderful collection of sculptures made from books, featuring reliefs of faces and traditional Tlingit forms. The Flickr stream for the collection entitled "What Have We Become" is here. In the artist's statement he discloses that he uses old ethnographic texts about the Tlingit written by non-native ethnographers/anthropologists, etc.

Nameless Letter

NamelessleTTer is a collaborative art project where people from all horizons leave personalized bookmarks in books with the goal of seeing other readers discover them. The most interesting and original bookmarks will be posted on the website and you can instantly share them on several social networking sites. It is also geolinked to Google Maps pin-pointing where new bookmarks have been left. Very cool idea!

Example: Left in "The Pink Floyd Encyclopedia"......