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Cosmic Books

‘Star Trek: Lower Decks’ doubles up on Hugo Awards

Triptych featuring Timothee Chalamet in "Dune, Part Two," a Hugo Award trophy and characters from "Star Trek: Lower Decks"
"Dune: Part Two" (starring Timothee Chalamet, at left) and "Star Trek: Lower Decks" were among Hugo Award winners at Seattle Worldcon 2025. (Credits: Legendary Pictures / Warner Bros. for "Dune: Part Two"; Alan Boyle for Hugo Award photo; CBS Studios for "Star Trek: Lower Decks")

“Star Trek: Lower Decks,” the animated Trek spinoff that focuses on Starfleet’s lower ranks, scored a double win tonight when this year’s Hugo Awards were handed out at the world’s premier convention for science-fiction authors and fans.

One of the episodes of the Paramount+ streaming series, titled “The New Next Generation,” won the Hugo for best short-form dramatic presentation at Seattle Worldcon 2025. And a choose-your-adventure graphic novel — titled “Star Trek: Lower Decks – Warp Your Own Way” — took the prize for best graphic story or comic.

Series creator Mike McMahan accepted the award for the video episode in a video clip that was aired during the ceremony.

“I love being recognized by a community who have recommended so many good and weird books to me over the years,” he said. “I congratulate all the winners, but also all of those who support and work and represent, because it’s also in that direction that advancement and liberty and democracy will proceed.”

The writer for the graphic novel, Ryan North, thanked McMahan in turn for letting the team do a choose-your-adventure book. “Weird books are great,” North said. “That’s what I love about reading. The weirder the better.”

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Fiction Science Club

The search for alien civilizations gets a reality check

Zine Tseng at control console of radio telescope
Zine Tseng plays a Chinese radio astronomer in "3 Body Problem." (Credit: Ed Miller / Netflix © 2024)

Fortunately, the real-world search for signs of extraterrestrial civilizations doesn’t have to deal with an alien armada like the one that’s on its way to Earth in “3 Body Problem,” the Netflix streaming series based on Chinese sci-fi author Cixin Liu’s award-winning novels. But the trajectory of the search can have almost as many twists and turns as a curvature-drive trip from the fictional San-Ti star system.

Take the Breakthrough Initiatives, for example: Back in 2016, the effort’s billionaire founder, Yuri Milner, teamed up with physicist Stephen Hawking to announce a $100 million project to send a swarm of nanoprobes through the Alpha Centauri star system, powered by light sails. The concept, dubbed Breakthrough Starshot, was similar to the space-sail swarm envisioned in Liu’s books — but with the propulsion provided by powerful lasers rather than nuclear bombs.

Today, the Breakthrough Initiatives is focusing on projects closer to home. In addition to the millions of dollars it’s spending to support the search for radio or optical signals from distant planetary systems, it’s working with partners on a miniaturized space telescope to identify planets around Alpha Centauri, a radio telescope that could someday be built on the far side of the moon, and a low-cost mission to look for traces of life within the clouds of Venus.

Breakthrough Starshot, however, is on hold. “This looks to be quite feasible. However, it seems to be something that is still pretty, pretty expensive, and probably wouldn’t be feasible until later in the century,” says Pete Worden, executive director of the Breakthrough Initiatives. “So, we’ve put that on hold for a period of time to try to look at, are there near-term applications of this technology, which there may be.”

Worden provides a status report on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence — and sorts out science fact from science fiction — on the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast.

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Fiction Science Club

‘Men in Black’ saga turns into a cause for celebration

People walking by Maury Island UFO mural in Des Moines, Wash.
The 1947 Maury Island UFO incident is commemorated in a mural on display in Des Moines, Wash. (Explore Seattle Southside Photo)

Even the Men in Black need their day in the sun. And they’re getting it this week, in the place where those classic characters in UFO tales made their debut.

Roswell may be the nation’s best-known UFO capital — but you can make a good argument that the Seattle area served the true birthplace of the Men in Black and helped inspire shows including  “The X-Files,” “Project Blue Book” and yes, “Men in Black.”

Steve Edmiston — a lawyer, film writer and producer who’s one of the organizers of the Men in Black Birthday Bash — can make an especially good argument.

“It’s like almost the original X-File, if you think about it,” he says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast.

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Universe Today

Tech star supports a tribute to Star Trek’s Leonard Nimoy

An artist's conception shows the Leonard Nimoy Memorial at Boston's Museum of Science. (Image Courtesy of Museum of Science)

Efforts to create a memorial celebrating the legacy of Leonard Nimoy, the actor who played a pointy-eared alien named Spock on “Star Trek,” have shifted to warp speed nearly eight years after his death.

A six-figure contribution from Rich Miner, the co-founder of Android, is energizing the campaign to create an illuminated 20-foot-high sculpture depicting Spock’s famous “Live Long and Prosper” hand gesture. The sculpture would be placed at Boston’s Museum of Science, near the West End neighborhood where Nimoy grew up.

Nimoy’s daughter, Julie Nimoy, and her husband David Knight are working with the museum to hit a $500,000 fundraising goal for the project. Thanks to Miner’s contribution, Knight said that the stainless-steel monument, designed by artist Tom Stocker and sculptor David Phillips, could begin taking shape as early as this year.

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Universe Today

A bit of Star Trek’s Nichelle Nichols will fly to deep space

Nichelle Nichols at NASA Mission Control
Star Trek's Nichelle Nichols visited NASA in 1977 to support an astronaut recruitment campaign. (NASA Photo)

Nichelle Nichols, who blazed a trail for Black actors as Lieutenant Uhura on the original “Star Trek,” never got to go to space while she was alive — but her ashes and her DNA are due to reach the final frontier as early as this year.

The symbolic samples are scheduled to fly beyond the moon, along with the ashes of other dearly departed Star Trek pioneers such as James Doohan (“Scotty”); Majel Barrett Roddenberry (“Nurse Chapel”); the TV series’ creator, Gene Roddenberry; and visual-effects wizard Douglas Trumbull.

To top it all off, Nichols’ memorial journey will begin with the launch of a Vulcan rocket. “I’m sure she would have much preferred to go on the shuttle,” said her son, Kyle Johnson, “but this was a pretty close second.”

The “Enterprise” memorial mission is being organized by Houston-based Celestis, which has been making arrangements to fly its customers’ cremated remains for a quarter-century. A gram of Nichols’ ashes, plus DNA samples taken from her and from Johnson, will be among the secondary payloads for United Launch Alliance’s first Vulcan Centaur mission, set for no earlier than December.

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Fiction Science Club

Star Trek keeps up to date with science — and society

Spock and Captain Pike
Ethan Peck and Anson Mount as Spock and Captain Christopher Pike on "Strange New Worlds," (© 2022 CBS Studios Inc.)

Over the course of five decades, advances in space science and exploration have changed the Star Trek saga — but it’s obvious that the sci-fi TV show has changed the course of space exploration as well.

You need look no further than Amazon’s billionaire founder Jeff Bezos, who took inspiration from Star Trek to green-light talking computers and his very own Blue Origin space effort. The same goes for SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who’s mentioned in the same breath as the Wright Brothers in a “Star Trek: Discovery” episode.

“I can’t imagine a version of the world where Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos exist, for better or worse, however you feel about them, without Star Trek,” says Ryan Britt, the author of “Phasers on Stun,” a new book chronicling the history of the Star Trek sci-fi franchise.

“I’m not saying that those guys embody all of Star Trek’s ideals, because they may not,” Britt says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “But there is an audacity to space travel, whether it is from a government like NASA or another nation’s government that’s putting people in space, or if it’s from the private sector.”

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GeekWire

Comedian Pete Davidson gets his space trip confirmed

Blue Origin NS-20 crew
Comedian Pete Davidson will be among a crew of six for Blue Origin's May 23 suborbital space mission. (Photos via Blue Origin)

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has confirmed that “Saturday Night Live” comedian Pete Davidson will be going to space next week, less than a year after he portrayed a hapless Mars astronaut on NBC’s late-night sketch show.

Bezos won’t be accompanying Davidson, even though that was the impression given by some of last week’s gossip about the flight. Instead, five paying passengers will be riding alongside the 28-year-old actor, who co-wrote and starred in a semi-autobiographical movie titled “The King of Staten Island” in 2020.

The other five spacefliers listed in today’s announcement are:

  • Marty Allen, an angel investor and the former CEO of Party America and California Closet Company, among other ventures.
  • Marc Hagle, the president and CEO of Tricor International, a residential and commercial property development corporation.
  • Sharon Hagle, the founder of SpaceKids Global, a nonprofit organization focusing on STEAM+ education, with a special emphasis on empowering girls. SpaceKids participates in the Postcards to Space program led by the Club for the Future, Blue Origin’s educational foundation. Marc and Sharon Hagle are husband and wife.
  • Jim Kitchen, a teacher, entrepreneur and explorer who has served on the faculty of the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School since 2010.
  • George Nield, a former associate administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation who is now the president of Commercial Space Technologies.

Blue Origin said Davidson would be getting a free flight as the company’s guest. The company declined to say how much the other fliers would be paying for their trips.

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Fiction Science Club

Get a way-out reality check on dreams of leaving Earth

Multigenerational starship
An artist's conception shows a starship on a 5,000-year trip. (Jörgen Engdahl / Courtesy of Discovery+)

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos wants to have millions of people living and working in space — that’s why he founded his Blue Origin space venture more than two decades ago. But what if living in space turns out to be like holing up in an Amazon warehouse?

“The reality of going to another planet in our current environment, I think … the best analogy is an Amazon fulfillment center,” Taylor Genovese, an anthropologist at Arizona State University, says in “Last Exit: Space,” a new documentary about space settlement narrated by famed filmmaker Werner Herzog.

“You won’t be able to actually see where you are,” Genovese explains. “You’re going to be inside of a factory, and you’re not going to experience what you think you’re going to be experiencing — that is, the kind of awe of being on another planet and experiencing being off Earth. No, you’re going to be working inside of a cubicle.”

That’s a perspective you won’t often hear in the wave of space documentaries flowing through streaming-video outlets, including “Countdown” and “Return to Space” on Netflix, and “Secrets of the Universe” on Curiosity Stream.

But Rudolph Herzog — Werner’s son and the director of “Last Exit: Space,” now playing on Discovery+ — wasn’t that interested in doing a conventional documentary about the final frontier.

“I just like the edgy, quirky stories,” the younger Herzog, who’s built up his own portfolio of film projects, explains in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “I think everybody knows about Elon Musk, and everybody knows what Jeff Bezos is up to. … I just wanted to show the incredible lengths people will go to, to live this dream of going to space.”

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GeekWire

‘SNL’ comedian is reportedly up for a space ride

Pete Davidson on SNL
Pete Davidson portrays a slacker astronaut in a “Saturday Night Live” sketch. (NBC / SNL via YouTube)

Comedian Pete Davidson co-starred with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk last year in a “Saturday Night Live” sketch about a slacker astronaut named Chad, but it sounds as if Davidson could soon go into space for real — courtesy of Musk’s rival space billionaire, Jeff Bezos.

According to the New York Post’s Page Six gossip column, Davidson is close to signing up for a suborbital space trip on the New Shepard rocket ship built by Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture.

“Pete is excited,” according to an unnamed Page Six source said to be familiar with Davidson’s plans. “They haven’t signed a contract yet, but it looks like it’s going to happen. The details are being finalized.”

Blue Origin, which is based in Kent, Wash., launched three crewed suborbital space missions from its West Texas spaceport last year and is reportedly keen to pick up the pace this year. Page Six quoted its source as saying the timing for Davidson’s flight is still up in the air.

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GeekWire

‘Downfall’ recounts 737 MAX mess as a tech tragedy

Boeing 737 MAX rollout
Boeing workers and VIPs surround the first 737 MAX jet to roll out in Renton, Wash., in 2015. (Credit: Boeing)

The missteps traced in “Downfall: The Case Against Boeing” — Netflix’s new documentary about Boeing’s troubled 737 MAX jet — are the stuff of Greek tragedy.

Under the direction of filmmaker Rory Kennedy, the youngest child of Robert F. Kennedy, “Downfall” recounts how the aerospace giant cut corners in a race to compete against Airbus, and pressed mightily to minimize the known problems with a computerized flight control system that was capable of causing the 737 MAX to go into a fatal dive.

The result? Not just one, but two catastrophic crashes — first in Indonesia, in 2018, and only months later in Ethiopia. The combined death toll amounted to 346 people. The jets were grounded for nearly two years while Boeing worked on a fix to the control system.

When the Indonesian crash occurred, the root cause seemed to be shrouded in uncertainty. But subsequent investigations showed that Boeing knew the cause had to do with tweaks in an automated software routine known as the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS.

In the early stages of those investigations, I struggled to explain what MCAS was supposed to do (keep planes from stalling under extreme conditions) and what it ended up doing (forcing planes into a dive). “Downfall” uses graphics and re-enactments to show how MCAS and other points of failure on the 737 MAX figured in the tragedy.

The film also lays out evidence from emails and other documents showing that when the 737 MAX was undergoing certification for flight, Boeing was desperate to avoid providing pilots with extra training, at extra cost — so desperate that the company hid the MCAS software’s capabilities from pilots, airlines and regulators.

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