This week would have been Kurt Vonnegut’s 93rd birthday, and there’s a new animation of a talk he gave at NYU in 1970:

The winners of this year’s World Fantasy Awards were announced this week.

Which brings us to, probably, the biggest genre news of the week, which is the decision to replace the current World Fantasy Award statuette–a stylized bust of influential horror author and notoriously vile racist H.P. Lovecraft–with something less upsetting and more in line with what the awards actually represent.

• File 770 has a good rundown of the situation.
• Alexandra Erin (quite reasonably) points out that H.P. Lovecraft was always a terrible choice for the award.
• Small Beer Press reminds us that it was never the H.P. Lovecraft award.
• Apparently Lovecraft biographer S.T. Joshi is having a giant pissbaby fit about it.
• And Damien Walter has the best suggestion I’ve seen so far on what the new award should be.

In other news, Starbucks has already fired the first shots in this year’s War on Christmas, and national treasure Chuck Tingle has written porn about it.

Geek Feminism looks at why new musical Hamilton is so popular with geek feminists.

Atlas Obscura goes on a quest to find the fairytale capital of the world.

At the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi and Fantasy blog, a look at why there’s never been a better time to be a sci-fi and fantasy reader.

The Oatmeal made a comic about Gene Roddenberry, and now I’ve got something in my eye.

Tamora Pierce did a Reddit AMA.

Fantasy Literature interviewed Ann Leckie.

SyFy posted this video about their process of adapting The Expanse:

Tor.com has a big list of upcoming sci-fi and fantasy adaptation projects. It’s sadly about 90% adaptations of work by and about men, but I have some suggestions that would shift that balance a little.

The Atlantic looks at why there are so many Catholics in science fiction.

New Republic examines the work of the group of  writers they call The New Utopians.

HuffPo examines the trend towards optimism in science fiction.