Chernobyl (****, 2019, 200 minutes) with Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgård, Paul Ritter, Jessie Buckley, Adam Nagaitis, Con O’Neill, Adrian Rawlins,Sam Troughton, Robert Emms,Emily Watson, David Dencik, Mark Lewis Jones, Alan Williams, Alex Ferns, Ralph Ineson, Barry Keoghan, Fares Fares and Michael McElhatton. Written by Craig Mazin, Directed by Johan Renck.
Bechdel Test: Passes (In Spades)
Yeah
I can’t believe the news today Oh, I can’t close my eyes And make it go away How long? How long must we sing this song? How long, how long? ‘Cause tonight, we can be as one Tonight
Broken bottles under children’s feet Bodies strewn across the dead end street But I won’t heed the battle call It puts my back up Puts my back up against the wall
Sunday, Bloody Sunday…
The opening lyrics of U2’s political horror anthem “Sunday Bloody
Sunday,” released in March 1983, three years and one month before the Chernobyl
disaster…
In Episode Four of HBO’s historical drama series Chernobyl,
entitled “The Happiness of All Mankind,” a Soviet soldier encounters an old
woman milking a cow in a barn. This soldier is strict under orders to evacuate
every civilian from an ever-widening exclusion zone around the city of Pripyat,
the site of the shattered and dangerously radioactive Chernobyl nuclear reactor
plant.
As the old woman milks the cow, she calmly maintains that she has
seen waves of young men with guns, bolsheviks, revolutionaries, thieves and
Germans alike, family and friends murdered or disappeared and she has stayed
here on her family farm. And she has no intention of leaving now. Nervous and
agitated, the soldier snatches the half-filled container of milk from beneath
the cow and unceremoniously dumps it outside. Returning, he finds the old woman
has resumed her milking with a different bucket. Angry, he draws his service
pistol from his holster, cocks it and forcefully says, “It’s time to leave!”
The old woman ignores him.
What happens next shocked me to my core and is one of the most
brilliantly disturbing moments in this moving, caustic and infuriating
docudrama, and in my opinion, one of the best dramas ever made for television.
Nothing can prepare you for some of the shocking images Chernobyl
serves up:
The meeting of the city’s party bosses, who
decide to conceal the truth from the citizens and cut off communications from
the outside world to contain the bad news.
The face of a plant engineer, who is ordered,
under the threat of force, to go to the roof the shattered reactor building to
report on the state of the exploded core, knowing all too well that he will
have days to live after peering over the edge into the inferno.
A fireman, unknowingly picking up a piece of
graphite from the core of the reactor, is on the ground minutes later, holding
up a blistered and bloody hand.
The irradiated bodies of barely alive first
responders, whose flesh is literally melting off of their bodies.
In the middle of watching Chernobyl, I wrote the following post on
my Facebook wall:
After seeing three of Chernobyl’s five episodes, I have no doubt WHATSOEVER that it is one of the most excruciating, shocking, sorrowful dramas in the history of television. It is brilliantly acted through an astonishing ensemble and I have yet to detect a false note in its script or direction.
People, I’ve seen a TON of television in my life and I say this from the heart, you may never see a finer drama in your lifetime than HBO’s Chernobyl. SEE IT!
Over the past few weeks, I have also seen a lot of negative reviews in print and online, maligning Chernobyl as being sensationalistic, overwrought, scientifically and historically inaccurate and generally slanders the former Soviet Union, the people who lived in the city of Pripyat and those who heroically dealt with the crisis.
This, of course, is all bullshit.
Chernobyl’s writer, Craig Mazin and director Johan Renck were very
upfront in stating that this production was not a documentary but a
fictionalized version of events. In other words, Chernobyl is about as
accurate as other historical dramas such as the film adaptations of The
Right Stuff, All the President’s Men, Hidden Figures, Chariots of Fire, Selma
and Moneyball. These works don’t tell the LITERAL truth of their stories
but the ESSENTIAL truth of what happened. In an interview with Forbes Magazine,
Mazin
said that “The lesson of Chernobyl isn’t that modernnuclear power is dangerous. The lesson is that
lying, arrogance, and suppression of criticism are dangerous”.
And while no docudrama or historical fiction is
above criticism or reproach because there have been plenty of ham-fisted and
wrongheaded productions that have been produced over the decades. But I get a
little annoyed when a remarkable work such as Chernobyl is treated as
though it must live up to an impossible standard, when in fact it has made no
pretense about being a dramatization, an amalgamation of the true facts mixed
with drama. And while drama,
mythmaking and truth may not be the same thing but their paths lead in the same
direction with a common destination: Illumination.
I would be remiss if I did not mention that the
mini-series’ emotional heart is anchored by a trio of brilliant, powerhouse
performances; veteran character actor Jared Harris portrays Valery Legasov, one
of the real scientists who was recruited to help manage the crisis, Stellan
Skarsgård as his boss, Boris Shcherbina, a Council of Ministers’
deputy chairman who quickly finds out that all of the political power he wields
is no match for the forces of nature he has been commanded by the State to stop;
and Emily Watson as Ulana Khomyuk, a composite character created to stand in
for the scores of scientists who persistently defied the Soviet
bureaucracy in order to learn exactly what went wrong with the reactor design
and how the accident happened.
I offer a vivid validation in this review I
found on the public comments page of Chernobyl’s IMDB entry, from an actual
eyewitness::
They got it right
24 May 2019 | by curiosityonmars
“I was born in Pripyat. I was four years old when the accident happened. Watching it is more horrifying than living through it. We didn’t know what we were dealing with. It’s not like a hurricane or an earthquake that takes you by surprise and causes massive destruction. Here everything looked normal, that day was just like any other day and yet you were told to abandon everything and just leave. The immediate casualties of the accident were not huge, but it had an enormous impact on lives of hundreds of thousands of people. I often think what my life would be like if this didn’t happen.
This mini series is a masterpiece, perfect in every way. Some people are complaining here that the actors don’t speak Russian. I’m a native speaker of Russian and Ukrainian, I don’t want the actors to speak Russian. You get so consumed by this show you stop noticing what language they speak.
It’s not a documentary, so not each and every detail is accurate, yet I would still call it authentic. The creators got the important stuff right… Both of my parents worked at Chernobyl plant, I grew up hearing stories and versions of what happened. I think this show is the best depiction of the Chernobyl disaster and the stories of its victims. This show is to remind all of us of the cost of lies.”
In the weeks that have passed since I saw Chernobyl,
I have been thinking about next year’s Hugo Awards ballot and what I might be
nominating in the Best Dramatic Presentation-Long Form category. And, as much
as I loved Captain Marvel and Avengers: Endgame, Star Trek Discovery,
Black Mirror, The Umbrella Academy and probably the upcoming season of Stranger
Things, I cannot bring myself to nominate any of them next year. What U2
sang about the terrorism, riots, bloody countermeasures and lies told in
Northern Ireland in the 1970’s, easily applies to the leaders and policies of
Soviet Union in the 1980’s and, more significantly, today’s brutally toxic
political landscape.
I think that Chernobyl will cast a long shadow
for the next generation of visual artists, as the high bar for what can be
dramatized and how it should be done. In my opinion, efforts like this should
not be ignored nor go unrewarded by the fannish community.
Chernobyl will be the lone entry on my ballot in the BDP-Long Form category next year.
And it’s true we are immune When fact is fiction and TV reality And today the millions cry We eat and drink while tomorrow they die
the real battle just begun (Sunday, Bloody Sunday) to claim the victory Jesus won
On Sunday Bloody Sunday, yeah Sunday Bloody Sunday
(1) STRIVING FOR BALANCE. Mystery writer Laura Lippman has an op-ed in the Washington Post
about how her next novel, Lady in the Lake, will be narrated by an
African American ghost and whether it is all right for a white woman to write
about black characters: “Is
it ok for a white author to write black characters? I’m trying.” She notes that none of the 20 characters in
her novel resemble her, and “In creating this wide-ranging cast, I took a lesson
from one of my heroes, Donald Westlake, who once said, ‘I became a novelist so
I could make things up.’ So I did that–but I also asked that my novel be
assigned to a sensitivity reader.”
…When I teach creative writing, I tell my students that the biggest mistake they can make is to try to write around problems, hoping no one else will see them. I advocate running right at the problem, making it the story. I have never shied away from writing characters of color, but that choice is clearly different and more fraught now, even in the 14 months since my last novel appeared. So with my most recent book, to be published next month, I took my own advice, inventing a middle-aged white woman who tries to give her life meaning and purpose by investigating the death of a young black woman. It was a particularly meta choice. This is what I do, after all. I write about death, and the stories are often inspired by real-life crimes, which is another kind of appropriation….
Shannon Wheeler, Eisner Award-winning New Yorker cartoonist (Too Much Coffee Man, Sh*t My President Says, God is Disappointed in You), and veteran journalist Steve Duin (The Oregonian, Comics: Between the Panels, Oil and Water) turn their critical eye on the Mueller Report – a comprehensive, understandable, and readable graphic novel version of the book every patriot needs.
Fight the spin spewing forth from both parties and political pulpits and check out this graphic novel that brings a 400-page legal document down to size. Wheeler and Duin, in graphic form, bring to life scenes detailed in the report: from the infamous Trump Tower Meeting of 2016 to Trump exclaiming “I’m f*cked” upon finding out he was the subject of investigation. It’s in the report and it’s in the graphic novel!
The Mueller Report: Graphic Novel borrows style from classic private detective yarns, complete with a villain’s rogues’ gallery, nail-biting cliffhangers, and a lone lawman standing proud against the wave of crime.
…To go to an academic conference, let alone earn an advanced degree in history, literature, or art history, requires an enormous amount of money and free time. To participate in the SCA requires… an interest in the Middle Ages and a reasonable attempt at pre-17th century clothing, which can be made with $12 of material from Jo-Ann’s Fabric and half an hour at a sewing machine. (I should know; that was me in college.) Who, then, are the privileged ones? If anything, the SCA game threatens to destabilize systematic racism by replacing real-world hierarchies of race and class with its own imaginary social structure.
The SCA is diverse in other ways, as well: While academic historians focus narrowly on, say, women’s faith in the 14th century or the role of the Capetian dynasty in building the French state, the SCA is interested in everything that happened under the premodern sun from the death of Elizabeth I back to… the birth of Hammurabi, apparently. These include sword-fighting, cooking, visual arts, fabric arts, dancing, equestrian arts, and the list goes on. As my friend Mike Cramer points out, it’s like a state fair of medieval stuff.
(5) HOLLAND OBIT. [Item by Rob Hansen.] News of someone who was a LASFS club mascot as a child in the 1940s, namely Francis T. Laney’s daughter. She was named in Harry Warner Jr’s All Our Yesterdays (Advent, 1969):
To this second wife, Jackie, the two Laney Children were born. They were Sandra Rae, born Aptil 8th, 1940, and Sonya Lynn, born November 11th, 1942, mentioned in a thousand fanzine pages as Sandy and Quiggy.
Rob Hansen says, “Out of curiosity I did a web search and discovered this obit for Sandy originally published by Oregon Live from which I discover her sister still goes by Quig, and that Jackie’s actual name was Alberta, something I hadn’t known.”
Sandra Rae Laney Holland April 8, 1940 – Sept. 11, 2018 Sandra Rae Laney Holland, 78, of Vancouver, passed away Sept. 11, 2018, in Vancouver. Sandi was born in Lewiston, Idaho to Francis and Alberta Laney, April 8, 1940….
Found among Washington Irving’s papers are fragments of what might have been notes for a memoir, scribbled down in spare moments during either 1843 or 1845 (the date is hard to decipher), when he was the American minister to Spain under President John Tyler. In one entry he describes the genesis of his most famous story:
When I first wrote the Legend of Rip van Winkle my thought had been for some time turned towards giving a colour of romance and tradition to interesting points of our national scenery which is so deficient generally in our country. My friends endeavored to dissuade me from it and I half doubted my own foresight when it was first published from the account of the small demand made for that number, but subsequent letters brought news of its success and of the lucky hit I had made. The idea was taken from an old tradition I picked up among the Harz Mountains.*
June 23, 1976 — The George Clayton Johnson/William F. Nolan-scripted movie based on their book, Logan’s Run, premiered.
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born June 23, 1945 — Eileen Gunn, 74. Her story “Coming to Terms” based on her friendship with Avram Davidson won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story. Her stories are in Stable Strategies and Others, Steampunk Quartet and Questionable Practices. With L. Timmel Duchamp, she penned The WisCon Chronicles, Vol. 2: Provocative Essays on Feminism, Race, Revolution, and the Future.
Born June 23, 1947 — Mark Olson, 72. One could reasonably call him an Uberfan. And among his many accomplishments is that he oversees Fancyclopedia 3 which I constantly use. If you don’t know him, I’m going to send you to his Fancyclopedia 3 bio which is far too long to quote here. It’s just a little boastful as it should be.
Born June 23, 1957 — Frances McDormand, 62. She’s God. Well at least The Voice of God in Good Omens. Which is on Amazon y’all. Her first genre role was in the “Need to Know” episode of Twilight Zone followed shortly thereafter by being Julie Hastings in Sam Raimi’s excellent Dark Man. She’s The Handler in Æon Flux and that’s pretty much everything worth noting.
Born June 23, 1963 — Liu Cixin, 56. He’s a winner of a Hugo Award for The Three-Body Problem and a Locus Award for Death’s End. Anyone got a clue what’s going on with the alleged Amazon production of The Three-Body Problem as a film?
Born June 23, 1964 — Joss Whedon, 55. I think I first encounter him with the Buffy tv series. And I’ll hold that I think Angel was better told. Firefly was an interesting mess. And don’t get me started on the Avengers: Age of Ultron…
Born June 23, 1972 — Selma Blair, 47. Liz Sherman in Hellboy and Hellboy II: The Golden Army. She also voiced the character in the animated Hellboy: Sword of Storms and Hellboy: Blood and Iron. She’s Stevie Wayne in The Fog, a slasher film a few years later and was Cyane on the “Lifeblood” episode of Xena: Warrior Princess. Later on, she’d be Jessica Harris in the “Infestation” episode of Lost in Space.
Born June 23, 1980 — Melissa Rauch, 39. Bernadette Rostenkowski-Wolowitz on The Big Bang Theory which is at least genre adjacent if not genre. She gets to be really genre in voicing Harley Quinn in Batman and Harley Quinn which Bruce Timm considers “a spiritual successor to Batman: The Animated Series”. H’h.
Born June 23, 2000 — Caitlin Blackwood, 19. She was the young Amelia Pond in these Doctor Who episodes; “The Eleventh Hour”, “The Big Bang”, “Let’s Kill Hitler”, and “The God Complex”, and had a cameo in “The Angels Take Manhattan”. She’s the cousin of Karen Gillan who plays the adult Pond. No idea how she was cast in the role.
…There had been some worry inside NASA about whether, from Earth, they would be able to pinpoint the lunar module’s landing location. The Moon was mapped, but not in anything like fine, up-close detail; there were no constellations of tracking satellites around the Moon in 1969. “With a wry smile, (Armstrong) radioed Houston, ‘The guys who said we wouldn’t know where we were are the winners today.’ ”
It’s an interesting selection of these that 1943 brings us. First off, there are three instances of a peculiar little subgenre, the afterlife story – people who are newly dead or on the verge of death, who are given a last chance to face up to the realities of heaven and hell, and try to make the right choice….
Three films with the same underlying idea, but the treatment of it is very different.
2. BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk’s Inception (Infocom 1988)
Way back in the pivotal year of 1984, Chicago-based FASA developed a mecha combat game using designs from Japanese sources without permission. Coming at the perfect time, FASA had a true hit on their hands, and the BattleTech empire was founded. While originally, BattleTech was a tabletop wargame, today, BattleTech is also a successful series of video games that all started in 1988. Infocom, that gave us Zork!. The first BattleTech game, The Crescent Hawk’s Inception, was released for a variety of PC machines like the Commodore 64 and the ATARI ST. Featuring an amazing cover, it was sadly not as dynamic as the cover art would lead you to believe. This turn-based RPG game looks more like The Legend of Zelda than MechWarrior, and had you play as a Mechwarrior cadet named Jason Youngblood in the service of the Lyran Commonwealth during the 31st century. During the game, Jason will be thrust into a war, finding LosTech, and the fate of this lost father. From videos and articles, the game is complex and lengthy, that proved successful enough to warrant a sequel in 1990 called BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk’s Revenge. The reason for these early BattleTech games becoming LosTech was that the kinetic nature of mech combat was not expressed in the gameplay like later titles, and the fact they were released back in 1988 media.
It’s midnight in Sommaroy, but the sun is still shining on this Norwegian island. The clock strikes 12, but the island’s residents are playing, working, fishing and socializing. Nighttime commands sleep, but Sommaroy doesn’t want to listen.
If the 350 residents of Sommaroy get their way, the clocks will stop ticking and the alarms will cease their noise. A campaign to do away with timekeeping on the island has gained momentum as Norway’s parliament considers the island’s petition.
“Why do we need time and clocks when there is no night?” reads the campaign’s Facebook page. During a 70-day period leading up to and following the summer solstice, from May 18 to July 26, darkness never falls across the sky.
“There’s always less wind at night here, perfect to paint the garage. Fishermen are out half the night, after all. If we get tired, we’re fit to go after a nap on the sofa. Why don’t we just sign out of time, throw away all the clocks and forget about them? Life would be so much easier,” the Facebook post continues.
(12) FEARFULLY MADE. Publishers Weekly’s Brian
Evenson calls these “The
10 Scariest Novels”. First on the list —
1. Dawn by Octavia E. Butler
This 1987 science fiction novel concerns a woman named Lilith who wakes up with no idea where she is or how she got there. As she begins to figure things out, she comes to understand that she’s been taken by the Oankali, aliens who want to blend with humanity as a way of diversifying their species and allowing the remnant of humanity to continue in a less violent (and less human) fashion. What makes this book so effective is you are never sure to what degree Lilith should be considered a collaborator with the enemy. Even Lilith isn’t sure. The moral implications of the novel are immense, and Butler shifts the tension every time you (or Lilith) begin to become comfortable. It builds slowly but inexorably, leaving readers in ethical ambiguity until the end, trapped in the dilemma of not knowing what to think. It’s one of the most unsettling books I’ve ever read, partly because of how benign and reasonable the aliens seem as they gently manipulate Lilith.
(13) SO MUCH SPACE, SO LITTLE TIME. Or so it might seem.
The size and age of the universe seem to not agree with one another. Astronomers have determined that the universe is nearly 14 billion years old and yet its diameter is 92 billion light years across. How can both of those numbers possibly be true? In this video, Fermilab’s Dr. Don Lincoln tells you how.
(14) HOT PITCH. ScreenRant encourages everyone to step inside the pitch meeting that led to 2005’s Fantastic
Four.
[Thanks to Rob Hansen, JJ, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Chip
Hitchcock, Martin Morse Wooster, John King Tarpinian, Mike Kennedy, Carl
Slaughter, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to
File 770 contributing editor of the day Ingvar.]
Irish Scientist-Astronaut Candidate Dr. Norah Patten will be a Special Guest at Dublin 2019 – An Irish Worldcon.
Born in Co. Mayo, and now based in Dublin, Dr. Patten became fascinated by space and space travel after a visit to a NASA facility at age 11. She earned a Ph.D. in aeronautical engineering at the University of Limerick in 2011 following internships at Boeing and Bell Labs. She has participated in several citizen science campaigns with Project PoSSUM including microgravity research flights, spacesuit testing and evaluation, hypoxia training and spacecraft egress. Project PoSSUM prepares their candidates to perform research on commercial space missions.
Dr. Patten’s interest in space and education led her to organize the first Irish student experiment sent to the International Space Station in 2014. The experiment was designed by four teenagers from St Nessan’s Community College in Limerick, investigating the effects of microgravity on reinforced concrete. She currently works as a programme manager at the Irish Composites Centre.
Dr Patten has been a lecturer and project manager at the University of Limerick and has served on the faculty of the International Space University since 2012. In 2017 she founded Planet Zebunar, a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) education company focused on space stories. Her children’s book Shooting for the Stars is forthcoming from O’Brien Press in September. She won the 2018 PoSSUM Science Educator award. Dr. Patten will be Dublin 2019’s first Special Guest and will attend the convention on Saturday and Monday.
“Worldcon is about keeping in touch with the factual as well as the fictional aspects of science,” Dublin 2019 chair James Bacon said. “It’s wonderful that we are going to hear about cutting-edge developments in space research from a scientist of Norah’s caliber.”
Dr. Patten can be found at SpaceNorah on Facebook and Twitter.
Panels, talks and presentations with scientists and engineers form a major programme track in a distinguished tradition at Worldcons. Dublin 2019 will be the 77th annual World Science Fiction Convention, the first to be held in Ireland and the eleventh in Europe.
Dublin 2019 – An Irish Worldcon will take place in the Convention Centre Dublin from August 15 to August 19. More than 6600 people have already signed up as members, including more than 5200 attending members. More than 830 people will be attending Worldcon for the first time.
Other activities at the Dublin Worldcon will include the 2019 Hugo Awards, the world’s leading awards for excellence in science fiction and fantasy, as well as the spectacular Masquerade costume display. There are typically 650 to 800 separate programme items, including author readings and autograph sessions, films and videos, academic presentations, and panel discussions on speculative literature and other media, many involving fans and audience.
Guests of Honour for Dublin 2019 include YA author Diane Duane, and screenwriter and Hugo winner Ian McDonald, as well as game designer Steve Jackson (Melee, Chaos Machine, Munchkin) and editor Ginjer Buchanan. Science Guest of Honour will be Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who discovered radio pulsars in 1967 as a postgraduate student and in 2018 was awarded the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. Bill and Mary Burns will be fan Guests of Honour.
More information and membership registration for Dublin 2019 are available at https://dublin2019.com. Follow them on Twitter at @dublin2019.
(1) MÜNCHHAUSEN DEBATE. Some regard Retro-Hugo nominee Münchhausen to be the best thing on the ballot, while others are considering refusing to rank it at all because the movie was made in Germany during the Third Reich. Cora Buhlert and Evelyn C. Leeper are two fans who are on opposite sides of the argument.
… This post grew out of a comment on Steve J. Wright’s blog (whose Hugo and Retro Hugo reviews you should really read), where Steve expressed that he was unsure whether he should vote for Münchhausen due to its provenance. His is not the only comment along those lines I have seen, so here is a post explaining why you should not dismiss Münchhausen out of hand.
… However, quite a few Hugo voters have issues with Münchhausen, because it was made in Germany during the Third Reich and they don’t want to vote for “a Nazi film”. This is wrong, because – unlike some of the pretty crass propaganda stuff found elsewhere on the Retro Hugo ballot, particularly in the dramatic presentation and graphic story categories – Münchhausen is not a propaganda film, merely a film that happened to be made during the Third Reich. For while the Nazi propaganda movies are infamous – even though hardly anybody has seen them, because they still cannot be publicly displayed in Germany except for educational purposes* – these propaganda movies (about forty) only make up a small percentage of the total film output of the Nazi era. In fact, it’s a lot more likely to find propaganda in a random Hollywood movie made during WWII than in a random German movie. For the vast majority of the German movies made during the Third Reich were apolitical entertainment: musicals, melodramas, comedies, romances and the like.
…It’s also notable that most of the Münchhausen cast and crew, including director Josef von Baky, had careers that continued unimpeded in postwar Germany. And considering that both the Allies and the postwar West and East German authorities came down harder on artists who were involved with questionable movies than on Nazi doctors, judges, civil servants, military officers, etc… who were actually responsible for the deaths of many people (cause the latter were deemed important for building up the postwar state, while the former were not), this means that most of the people involved with Münchhausen were not Nazis….
MUNCHHAUSEN was an attempt to provide the German audience with the lush Technicolor films they were not getting from Hollywood in 1943. And the film is beautiful, with some scenes reminiscent of Brueghel paintings, and the scenes on the moon quite fantastical. As a Hugo finalist, though, it has two flaws. One is that long stretches are fairly boring–I just don’t find Munchhausen’s intrigues with Catherine the Great very interesting. The second is that if people balk at giving an award to a film directed by someone accused of sexual misconduct and possible rape, what should one think of awarding a Hugo to a film made by the Nazis as a propaganda film (of the “Volksfilm” style)? It’s a fine line, I agree, but while I think the film worth watching (it’s available free on YouTube, and if you get it on DVD, whoever is getting the royalties, it’s not the Nazi party), I cannot vote to give it a Hugo.
(2) SCALING MT. TSUNDOKU. [Item by
rcade.] Wajahat Ali, a New York Times opinion writer
and CNN contributor, asked for advice on Twitter about meeting his goal of
reading 3 books a month:
I had a goal of reading 3 books a month this year. Not gonna happen. For those able to do it, what are your tips please?
…“Toy Story 4” is directed by Josh Cooley, and it must be said that, for a while, the tale doesn’t seem like the freshest that Pixar has ever told. Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks, as ever), Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), and their bunch of pals are forced to adjust when young Bonnie (Madeleine McGraw), in whose bedroom they reside, departs for orientation day at kindergarten and returns with a toy—or a thingamajig—that she has made. His name is Forky (Tony Hale), he was put together from cutlery, pipe cleaners, and goggly eyes, and he clings to a fervent belief that he is trash. Time and again, despite not having read Dostoyevsky, he has to be stopped from throwing himself away. Parents with children of Bonnie’s age may find these scenes difficult to explain….
One world is not enough (probably). There are space operas that center on one world—novels such as Dune or The Snow Queen come to mind—but their plots require interactions between that planet and the rest of the narrative universe. The story may take place on one world, but this world is only one of many.
Space travel is a therefore a necessary feature of space opera. Travel can delightfully complicate the plot: trade, migration, proselytization, and the chance that the local equivalent of the Yekhe Khagan might pop by with ten thousand of his closest friends to discuss taxation and governance.
(5) PREFERRED SFF. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] Tyler Cowen interviewed Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian, in his podcast “Conversations With Tyler.” (“Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business”). In minute 38 of the interview, Varian recommended some sf. He liked Frederik Pohl’s “The Midas Plague” in which robots produce so much stuff that the rich live lives of bucolic simplicity while the poor have to consume until they keel over. Varian also liked L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall, and said that if he could live at any time in history, it would be in the Rome of the fifth century described in de Camp’s classic novel.
Read free sample chapters from the most exciting new voices in science fiction and fantasy today, including C. S. E. Cooney, Katharine Duckett, Jennifer Giesbrecht, Kerstin Hall, Vylar Kaftan, Scotto Moore, Tamsyn Muir, Lina Rather, Priya Sharma, and Emily Tes.
Data from self-published authors has shown a much greater variability.
If you want to help out (note your name and your book name will not be used) then message me the following information for each fantasy book you want to tell me about. It will become a point on a graph. I will not share your figures with anyone (except as an anonymous point on a graph). Note – please only submit info for books with more than 200 Goodreads ratings:
Year the book was published
number of Goodreads ratings for the book
number of copies sold via Kindle Unlimited
number of copies sold in all other formats
estimate the % of all non KU sales (i.e number listed in 4) that were free / £0.00
(8) FIELDS OBIT. Star
Trek writer Peter Alan Fields died June 19. StarTrek.com paid tribute:
For Trek, Fields wrote or co-wrote a total of 13 episodes, most notably the TNG hours “Half a Life,” “Cost of Living” and “The Inner Light,” as well as the DS9 installments, “Dax,” “Duet,” “Blood Oath,” “In the Pale Moonlight” and “The Dogs of War,” among others. In short, he had a hand in several of both shows’ finest moments. He also served DS9 as a co-producer and later producer from 1993 to 1994, spanning seasons one and two.
(9) TODAY IN HISTORY.
June 22, 1925 — The Lost World enjoyed its original theatrical premiere. The feature starred Wallace Beery and Bessie Love. And yes, Arthur Conan Doyle was said to have approved of this version. Indeed in 1922, Conan Doyle showed O’Brien’s test reel to a meeting of the Society of American Magicians, which included Harry Houdini. He refused to say if it was actual footage or not.
June 22, 1979 – Alien debuted.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born June 22, 1856 — H. Rider Haggard. Writer of pulp fiction, often in the the Lost World subgenre. King Solomon’s Mines was the first of his novels with Allan Quatermain as the lead and it, like its sequels, was successful. These novels are in print to this day. Haggard by the way decided to take ten percent royalties instead of a flat fee for writing, a wise choice indeed. And let’s not forget his other success, She: A History of Adventure, which has never print out of print either. (Died 1925.)
Born June 22, 1936 — Kris Kristofferson, 83. He first shows up in a genre film, The Last Horror Film, as himself. As an actor, his first role is as Bill Smith in Millennium which is followed by Gabriel in Knights, a sequel to Cyborg. (A lack of name creativity there.) Now comes his role as Abraham Whistlerin Blade and Blade II, a meaty undertaking indeed! Lastly, he voiced Karubi in Planet of the Apes.
Born June 22, 1947 — Octavia E. Butler. As you know, I do research before I decide who gets a Birthday write-up. I kept running across her detractors who grumbled that she was one of those dread SJWs. Well let’s note that she’s a multiple recipient of both the Hugo and Nebula awards, and she became in 1995 the first genre writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. As regards her fiction, I’d suggest the Xenogenesis series shows her at her very best but anything by her is both good and challenging. I’m pleased to note that iBooks and Kindle have everything of hers available. (Died 2006.)
Born June 22, 1949 — Meryl Streep, 70. She’d make the Birthday list just for being Madeline Ashton in Death Becomes Her and her epic battle there with Goldie Hawn. She’s the voice of Blue Ameche in A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and a very real Aunt Josephine in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. She’s the voice of Felicity Fox in Fantastic Mr. Fox, based off the on Dahl’s 1970 children’s novel. She voices Jennie in a short that bring Maurice Sendak’s dog to life, Higglety Pigglety Pop! or There Must Be More to Life. She’s The Witch in Into The Woods. I think that it.
Born June 22, 1953 — Cyndi Lauper, 66. Ok I’m officially old as I’m thinking of her as always young. Genre-wise, she played a psychic, Avalon Harmonia, on the Bones series. She also has one-offs in series as diverse as The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!, Shelley Duvall’s Mother Goose Rock ‘n’ Rhyme and Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales for Every Child. Oddly enough she has one serious acting credit, Jenny (Ginny Jenny/Low-Dive Jenny) in Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera.
Born June 22, 1958 — Bruce Campbell, 61. Where to start? Well let’s note that Kage loved him so I’ve linked to her review of Jack of All Trades. I personally like just as much The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. and think it’s well worth checking out. I think his work as Ash Williams in the Evil Dead franchise can be both brilliant and godawful, often in the same film. The series spawned off of it is rather good. Oh and for popcorn reading, check out IfChins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor, his autobiography.
Born June 22, 1971 — Laila Rouass, 48. She was Sarah Page, an Egyptologist on Primeval, a series I highly recommend if you’ve not seen it. She played Colonel Tia Karim, a traitorous UNIT officer in the two part “Death of The Doctor” on The Sarah Jane Adventures. This story was the last to feature Sarah Jane Smith and the Doctor, The Eleventh here, together onscreen. Jo Grant would also show up.
Born June 22, 1973 — Ian Tregillis, 46. He is the author of the Milkweed Triptych trilogy which is frelling brilliant. He’s contributed three stories to Max Gladstone’s The Witch Who Came in From the Cold, a rather good serial fiction anthology (if that’s the proper term) and he’s got another series, The Alchemy Wars, I need to check out.
There’s no real news on the cancer front. If all goes well, Amy will get the next dose of chemo on Monday and Tuesday. But we have to wait a bit longer to see if and how well this is working. We’re also waiting on insurance approval for the CAR T-cell procedure she needs. In the meantime, she’s still pretty weak, but her pain is better managed, which helps a lot.
This last round – discovering the masses in her abdomen after six months of chemo and treatment – flipped a switch in my brain. Before, I’d been struggling to make time to write, squeezing in anywhere from 200-500 words a few times a week. But with this setback, I just stopped.
I’m not quitting forever. Terminal Peace is still under contract, and I’ve got an idea for a contemporary fantasy I want to do next. But…priorities, you know? I need to spend time with my wife. I need to be there for the kids. And I need to stop pushing myself to do ALL THE THINGS, and to stop beating myself up for not being able to do everything.
My editor has been incredibly understanding. So much love for Sheila and DAW! The longer gap between books two and three of this trilogy is going to suck, but c’est la vie. I just can’t worry about that right this minute….
(12) TROTTING
THE GLOBE. Rich Lynch has posted the 22nd issue of his zine My
Back Pages online at eFanzines.com.
Because of the temporal nearness of the upcoming Irish Worldcon, Issue #22 has a travel-oriented theme and has essays involving Native American culture and Indian food, tall mountains and ocean vistas, ancient computers and modern cell phones, completed walks and works-in-progress, rental cars and water buses, famous writers and somewhat obscure composers, small spittoons and large ash heaps, opened time capsules and preserved brains, strange stories and familiar melodies, glass artifacts and wooden bells, sunny afternoons and inky-dark skies, colorful theories and black & white comics, intense business meetings and serene beach life, fine cheese and a traffic jam, labyrinthine passageways and an expansive convention center, old friends and “old school”…and 15 minutes of media fame – in Estonia!
(13) LOOKING TO REDECORATE? Popular Mechanics displays
the latest fashions from Star Wars.
To paraphrase Obi-Wan Kenobi: These are the chairs you’re looking for. https://t.co/Wuo1KHwyqq
(14) BITE YOUR TONGUE. The Warp Zone’s sketch shows
scenes from Steve Rogers’ domestic life with Peggy Carter in “Captain America’s Life After Endgame.”
If you had a spare $25,000 lying around, what would you spend it on? Believe it or not, a total of three people have already spent that amount of money on a very specific purchase at Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, the latest Disneyland attraction that immerses fans in the galaxy far, far away. According to The OCR, the park is selling a “$25,000 life-size custom astromech unit” which is sold at Driod Depot and “looks just like the 3-and-half-foot-tall R2-D2.”
(17) LOCKED
AND LIDDED. Alasdair Stuart says, “This week’s The Full Lid takes
us from the mutable dimensions of grief and horror to how much fun dying slowly
in orbit can be.”
In the first instance, I take a look at Starfish, AT White’s fiercely inventive and intensely personal exploration of grief and inter-dimensional invasion. It’s a great, determined and uniquely voiced movie and one you should definitely seek out.
Elsewhere, Matt Miner’s eco-noir direct action specialists return and get WAY more than they bargained for in Lab Raider issue 1. I’ve enjoyed the way Matt’s explored this world through the two previous standalone mini-series, Liberator and Critical Hit and this new series looks to be just as good.
Finally, I take a look at Adr1ft, the under-rated EVA/Survival game released a couple of years ago. It has interesting things to say about the pressures of modern spaceflight, looks absolutely beautiful and is frequently terrifying. An overlooked gem, albeit one leaving a trail of empty oxygen cylinders in its wake.
Adr1ft
I’ve spent a good chunk of this week slowly dying in space. it’s been fun! Adr1ft, by Three One Zero and published by 505 Games is a pared down, minimalist game that demands attention and cheerily punishes you for not giving it. I found a lot to enjoy in there, not the least of which is the killer opening. You wake up in a damaged space suit, in a decaying orbit, surrounded by the shattered remains of a vast space station that has very recently exploded. Player and character enter the game in identicla states of confusion and the plot unfolds at the same pace you follow the debris trail around the shattered station. You are Commander Alex Oshima, head of the HAN-IV project. You are the lone survivor of a catastrophic accident. The accident was your fault.
Now what?
The game perfectly embodies the brutal math of orbital survival without ever getting over-excited about how unforgiving it is….
The efficiency of junction-based solar cells has almost reached its theoretical limit, and it is therefore imperative to explore methods for converting sunlight into electricity that do not require semiconductor junctions. Writing in Nature, Zhang et al. report a key advance in this direction. They demonstrate a junction-free solar cell that is produced by curling an atom-thick semiconductor layer into a nanoscale tube.
It’s easy to get jaded about potential signs of life on Mars, but a recent discovery might raise eyebrows. The New York Times has learned that NASA’s Curiosity rover has detected “startlingly high” levels of methane — the gas typically produced by life as we know it. The quantities are still tiny at 21 parts per billion, but that’s three times the amount Curiosity spotted during a surge in 2013. The rover’s operators were reportedly surprised enough to pause regularly scheduled studies to obtain follow-up data, with the additional findings slated to arrive on June 24th.
For the fifth consecutive year, the student robotics team from The University of Alabama won NASA’s grand prize in its Robotics Mining Competition.
[…] Made up of 60 students, primarily from UA’s College of Engineering, Alabama Astrobotics won the Joe Kosmo Award for Excellence, the grand prize, in NASA’s 2019 robotic mining competition, NASA announced. UA’s teams previously placed first in 2012 and from 2015-2018.
[…] In a separate event hosted at The University of Alabama, UA’s team bested 27 other robotics teams from across the nation to win first in mining, first in the Caterpillar Autonomy Awards and the SSERVI Regolith Mechanics Award.
In the Robotic Mining Challenge held at UA, teams demonstrated how a robot they built over the past year could autonomously navigate and excavate simulated lunar and Martian soil, known as regolith.
[Thanks to Chip Hitchcock, Martin Morse Wooster, John King
Tarpinian, Dann, Carl Slaughter, JJ, Cat Eldridge, Andrew Porter, SF
Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, rcade, Daniel Dern, and Mike Kennedy for some
of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Rob
Thornton.]
By John Hertz: Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Game is one of the finest s-f novels, indeed one of the finest novels. I rejoice to find it on the Retro-Hugo ballot.
Its architecture, characterization, and what we’ve called world-building, are masterly. In these I include timing, and imagination and handling of its s-f element.
It raises to a peak Sturgeon’s great pun “Science fiction is knowledge fiction” (the Latin root of “science” means knowledge). It deserves fullest attention.
It was one of the S-F Classics we discussed at the 69th World Science Fiction Convention.
Here’s a story from my Westercon LV report, a few years earlier, in File 770 142 [PDF].
Before the con when Glyer [who was head of Programming] put me on The Glass Bead Game I thought to help find panelists. Against “The Popularity of Alternative History” and “The Bar’s My Destination” there were conflicts. Greg Benford, who I hoped might’ve read it in German, was distracted with other affairs. Ellison? Len Wein encouraged me.
I phoned. “Don’t even start with me,” Ellison said. “I’ve been asked to do every kind of panel, and I’ve done every kind of panel, and I don’t want to do any more just now.” What about The Glass Bead Game, I asked. He stopped. “You’re right,” he said. “No one has ever asked me to sit on a panel about The Glass Bead Game.” Until the end of the century it was the only Nobel Prize s-f novel, and it might be Hesse’s greatest.
Alas, Ellison still couldn’t do it. I phoned Wein to report. “You know,” I said, “I got the distinct notion he felt he wasn’t worthy.” Ulrika O’Brien and I had to do without him. Art Widner and Geri Howard came by.
E.B. Frohvet thinks Game isn’t s-f, but although I was half joking when I said the book Lord of the Rings was, treating manufacture of a device and its consequences, about Game I mean it. Poetic even in translation, superb at character study, it handles what-if wonderfully in its future world, and for lagniappe brings a fine unreliable narrator and hints hard questions.
From the audience: is there such a thing as decadent art? I said, maybe but watch out for that narrator.
For an 800-word note by me, go to the sidebar, below “meta”.
Finalists have been announced for two of the awards that will be
presented at Utopiales, the International Science Fiction Festival
of Nantes.
The Prix Utopiales recognizes a novel, or a collection, published in French during the eligibility period by a European author. The prize has a cash value of 3000 euros. This year, five books are in competition:
La trilogie Trademark – T.1 Bonheur TM by Jean Baret (Le Bélial)
Colonies by Laurent Genefort (Le Bélial)
Dans la toile du temps by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Denoël)
Helstrid by Christian Léourier (Le Béllial)
Les derniers jours du Nouveau-Paris by China Miéville (Au diable vauvert)
The Prix Utopiales
Jeunesse 2019 (Utopiales Youth Award) recognizes a novel or a
collection of short stories by a European author, published or translated into
French during the eligibility period. The winner is chosen by a jury of readers
aged 13-16. The prize has a value of 2000 euros. These five books have are the
finalists:
In real life – T.1 Déconnexion by Maiwenn Alix (Milan)
La Voie Verne by Jacques Martel (Mnémos)
Le Cirque interdit by Célia Flaux (Scrineo)
Marqués by Alice Broadway (Pocket Jeunesse)
Rêves scientifiques, 8 nouvelles de science-fiction by J.-N. Blanc, J. Benameur, P. Favaro, Gudule, J. Héliot, C. Thiebert (Thierry Magnier)
The Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop begins June 23. The intensive six-week summer program at UC San Diego focuses on fundamentals particular to the writing of science fiction and fantasy short stories.
Clarion
Faculty Reading Series: While
the workshop itself is behind closed doors, the Clarion Faculty Reading Series
hosted by San Diego’s Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore, is open to the
public.
Click
on the above for more information about each of the faculty via the Mysterious
Galaxy event pages.
Clarion
Write-a-Thon: Every
year, the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop holds a
six-week Write-a-thon to coincide with the workshop. Like
a walk-a-thon, participants write to raise money for scholarships to support
future students.
This year, the Write-a-thon
will begin June 23, the same day that the workshop begins. Participants commit
to achieving their writing goals for the summer, whether that’s a daily word
count, number of chapters, stories or submissions, or just butt-in-chair
writing time.
You can either sign up to do the Write-a-thon yourself, donate to individual participants, or just make a
general donation to the workshop. Everything helps achieve Clarion’s goal of
$15,000 to support the workshop and future students. The majority of the Thon
funds goes to scholarships for incoming students. Check it out and sign-up
or back a writer today!
Congratulations to our Class of 2019! A warm welcome to Clarion – we can’t wait to see you in San Diego this summer.
We’d also like to thank all of our applicants for their interest and patience. It was a very competitive class, and we hope to welcome you in the future! pic.twitter.com/vTuLXqvXyZ
(1) BE THE FIRST ON THE MOON. Apollo 11 in Real Time is a
very impressive site that collates all kinds of archival mission material to
simulate a real-time journey through the first landing on the Moon. You can
watch the launch, you can follow what I’ll describe as a media reenactment of
the entire mission.
Included real-time elements:
All mission control film footage
All TV transmissions and onboard film footage
2,000 photographs
11,000 hours of Mission Control audio
240 hours of space-to-ground audio
All onboard recorder audio
15,000 searchable utterances
Post-mission commentary
Astromaterials sample data
(2) TOP ART. Mark Lawrence has started a page for the 2019
Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off cover contest – only three covers as of today, more to be added when the
participating blogs make their picks.
Each year I run a cover contest for the SPFBO entrants. Each blog choses its 3 favourite covers from their pool of 30 entrants. The 30 favourites collected from the 10 blogs are then voted on in separate ballots by the bloggers and by the public.
The public vote is of course a bit of fun and subject to all the issues of brigading and cheating that online polls often are – though our anti-cheat software is more effective than the raw poll results might lead you to believe.
(3) CHASTE CHUCK. Here’s a position you won’t find in the Kama
Sutra:
please enjoy new paperback NOT POUNDED BY ANYTHING: SIX PLATONIC TALES OF NON-SEXUAL ENCOUNTERS. perfect for the trots of asexual buds or buds who just dont feel like it right now or any other non-sexual way ORDER NOW https://t.co/teVyXgmn6Zpic.twitter.com/ut50uwLSz5
(4) IT COULD HAPPEN. Also, there’s reason to believe that
Chuck will be at CONvergence 2019 in Minneapolis over July 4th
weekend.
schedules have been post for @CONvergenceCon 2019 (this timeline) as buckaroos MAKE SURE TO PLAN YOUR TRIP and get to chuck panels early this is sure to be big time sell out event all around this will help show you were to be so you have a seat pic.twitter.com/nvHFEw9aWJ
(5) AVOID CALENDRICAL HERESEY. Steve Davidson proclaims, “Well, we FINALLY did it, and by ‘we’, I mean Kermit
Woodall, Amazing Stories’ Art Director and Electronic Media Maestro and
by ‘it’ I mean Amazing Stories Events Calendar!”
It’s gorgeous.
It’s clean.
It’s easy to navigate.
It has well over 500 events listed (and more regularly added).
It covers events World Wide.
It covers events from Bronycons to Middle Eastern Gaming Cons and, if there were such things as cons located off the Earth, we’d have them in there too!
You can export it to other calendar programs.
You can display it on your screens in a variety of different ways.
You can search it by date and by keyword, including type of event, name of event, location of event.
You can not only read about an event on our website, but you can click through to the event’s website right from the calendar.
There’s pop-outs and roll-overs and clicking for more info!
AND – you can add your own events.
In short, we’re now providing fans with an indispensible tool for planning their cons, one with comprehensive information and an easy to use interface.
No longer will you have to say “These aren’t the events I was looking for.”
Mini-editorial: We’ve been working towards this pretty much from the launch of the website. We’ve long believed that a comprehensive, one-stop-shopping events calendar is a must for the Fan community. Many more conventions than most realize are held every month, most of them small, intimate affairs with little to no marketing or advertising outside of a very small local footprint.
Yes, there are a few websites out there, and Erwin ‘Filthy Pierre’ Straus continues to do yeoman’s work for a couple of the print magazines (and continues to put his events rack out at conventions), but these efforts are limited in scope for a variety of legitimate reasons.
We wanted to go beyond that and we think that we’ve succeeded.
***
Want your convention to be seen by over 45,000 convention-going fans? Go click that button that says “Submit Your Event”, right there on the events calendar. There’s an easy to use interface that will let you add an image, set your dates and locations, contact information, website, select multiple ‘types’ of con (there’s 23 different categories and we’ll add more as needed!); you can add your own description of the event, enter costs, venue and more.
Check out the sample page below or visit The Events Calendar here – here.
And if you visit those pages and come away saying “But my event isn’t in there” – ADD IT!
(6) WHERE THE BODIES ARE BURIED. Andrew Liptak told readers
of The Verge that although the movie adaptation has never been released,
there may
be a Three-Body Problem TV series in the works:
China’s biggest science fiction novel, The Three-Body Problem, is being developed for a potential television series, according to CX Live. If it happens, it’ll come after the massive success of another big sci-fi adaptation from the country, The Wandering Earth.
Chinese entertainment company YooZoo Entertainment holds the rights to the series, and it’s apparently working on an adaptation of the book. CX Live discovered a publicity form submitted to the Chinese government that lists the production details of the proposed series, which will apparently run for 24 episodes and could begin shooting this September.
Day of the Tentacle wasn’t the only splendid adventure game which LucasArts released in 1993. Some five months after that classic, just in time for Christmas, they unveiled Sam & Max Hit the Road.
At first glance, the two games may seem disarmingly, even dismayingly similar; Sam and Max is yet another cartoon comedy in an oeuvre fairly bursting with the things. Look a little harder, though, and some pronounced differences in the two games’ personalities quickly start to emerge. Day of the Tentacle is clever and funny in a mildly subversive but family-friendly way, very much of a piece with the old Warner Bros. cartoons its aesthetic presentation so consciously emulates. Sam & Max, however, is something else entirely, more in tune with an early 1990s wave of boundary-pushing prime-time cartoons for an older audience — think The Simpsons and Beavis & Butt-Head — than the Saturday morning reels of yore. Certainly there are no life lessons to be derived herein; steeped in postmodern cynicism, this game has a moral foundation that is, as its principal creator once put, “built on quicksand.” Yet it has a saving grace: it’s really, really funny. If anything, it’s even funnier than Day of the Tentacle, which is quite a high bar to clear. This is a game with some real bite to it — and I’m not just talking about the prominent incisors on Max, the violently unhinged rabbit who so often steals the show.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born June 21, 1938 — Ron Ely, 81. Doc Savage in Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze, a film I saw a long time ago and remember little about. He was also, fittingly enough, Tarzan in that NBC late Sixties series. Somewhere Philip Jose Farmer is linking the two characters… other notable genre roles included being a retired Superman from an alternate reality in a two-part episode “The Road to Hell” of the Superboy series, and playing five different characters on the original Fantasy Island which may or may not be a record.
Born June 21, 1932 — Lalo Schifrin, 87. Argentina-American pianist and composer of the music for the original Mission: Impossible series along with The Four Musketeers (1974 version), The Amityville Horror, The Mask of Sheba, The Hellstrom Chronicle, THX 1138, The Cat from Outer Space and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. to select some of his work.
Born June 21, 1947 — Michael Gross, 72. Ok, I’ll admit that I’ve a fondness for the Tremors franchise in which he plays the extremely well-armed graboid hunter Burt Gummer. Other than the Tremors franchise, he hasn’t done a lot of genre work as I see just an episode of The Outer Limits where he was Professor Stan Hurst in “Inconstant Moon” (wasn’t that a Niven story?) and voicing a few Batman Beyond and Batman: The Animated Series characters.
Born June 21, 1952 — David J. Skal, 67. Vampires! He’s an academic expert on them and horror in general, so he’s got a number of with his first being Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen. He followed that up with a more general work, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror. And then he produced The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror which links horror films to what is going on in culture at that time, ie AIDS. His latest book was a biography of Bram Stoker, Something in the Blood.
Born June 21, 1957 — Berkeley Breathed, 62. ISFDB on the basis of a chapbook called Mars Needs Moms is willing to include him as genre but I’d argue that Bloom County which includes a talking penguin is genre as they are fantastic creatures.
Born June 21, 1964 — David Morrissey, 55. His most well-known role is playing The Governor on The Walking Dead (which is a series that I’ve not seen and have no interest in seeing) but I saw his brilliant performance as Jackson Lake, the man who who believed he was The Doctor in “The Next Doctor”, a Tenth Doctor adventure which was an amazing story. He was also Theseus in The Storyteller: Greek Myths, and played Tyador Borlú in the BBC adaption of China Mieville’s The City & The City. I’ll admit that I’m very ambivalent about seeing it as I’ve heard the novel at least a half dozen times and have my own mental image of what it should be. He has also shows up in Good Omens as Captain Vincent.
Born June 21, 1965 — Steve Niles, 54. Writer best- known for works such as 30 Days of Night, Criminal Macabre, Simon Dark and Batman: Gotham County Line. I’ve read his Criminal Macabre: The Complete Cal McDonald Stories and the the graphic novel — great bit of horror! Sam Raimi adapted 30 Days of Night into a film.
Born June 21, 1969 — Christa Faust, 50. It does not appear that she’s written any original fiction save one nove with Poppy Z. Brite called Triads but she’s certainly had a lot of media tie-in work including novels set in the Final Destination, Friday the Thirteenth, Fringe, Gabriel Hunt, Nightmare on Elm Street, Supernatural and Twilight Zone universes. Did you know there’s an entire ecology of novels, fan fiction, a game, comics, even an encyclopedia guide, September’s Notebook — The Bishop Paradox made around Fringe? I hadn’t until I was researching her. One of the perks of doing this.
Born June 21, 1979 — Chris Pratt, 40. Starlord in the MCU film franchise. His first genre role was voicing Jake in the “Attack of the Terrible Trio” episode of The Batman series. After that, he’s largely confined himself to the MCU with the exception of being Owen Grady in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.
And Bizarro shows that if it’s not easy being green, consider the alternatives.
(10) GUNN BEARING. Dark Matter Zine has posted another
Ian Gunn illo: Hollywood
Cliché No. 15. See it there!
Last week we began a series of movie cliche illustrations by Ian Gunn. This week we look at villains’ habits of climbing to the highest room in the tallest tower — then falling off. And here are some of New York’s finest, puffing and panting their way in pursuit of said villain… who is climbing to the highest room in the tallest tower.
(12) ON THE MENU. Scott
Edelman urges listeners to hash
it out with Kathe Koja in Episode 98 of his Eating the Fantastic podcast.
Kathe’s debut novel The Cipher, for which she won a Bram Stoker Award, had a tremendous impact on the horror field — as much of an impact on horror, in fact, as William Gibson’s first novel Neuromancer did on science fiction — a tremendously rare thing for a debut. She’s also written historical fiction, such as her Under the Poppy trilogy, as well as a number of young adult novels, starting with Straydog in 2002, and most recently Headlong. Her short stories have been published in Asimov’s, Weird Tales, Realms of Fantasy, F&SF, and many other magazines, plus anthologies such as Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells and Redshift: Extreme Visions of Speculative Fiction. She is the founder of nerve, a Detroit-based immersive theatre company.
We snuck away during StokerCon to San Chez Bistro. Not only is this tapas restaurant well-reviewed and highly rated, but they’re also amazingly sensitive to the needs of their guests, so much so they have multiple full specialized menus — not just a Vegan menu, but ones for soy allergies, tree nut allergies, citrus allergies, shellfish allergies and more. It’s one of the most accommodating restaurants I’ve ever visited when it comes to food preferences. My one regret from my trip to Grand Rapids is that time didn’t permit me to experience the full dinner menu.
We discussed her love of immersive theater (and dissected her previous night’s performance at StokerCon), why her groundbreaking debut novel The Cipher will always be The Funhole in her heart, what caused her to move into the YA world after her dark adult novels and why it’s harder to write for a younger audience, how she accidentally wrote her Under the Poppy trilogy, the allure of writing historical novels, how being in the presence of Kate Wilhelm at Clarion changed her life, what she got out of her many collaborations with Barry Malzberg and others, plus much, much more.
I did have a couple of stylistic issues with the novel. The primary one is that some of the dialogue doesn’t feel realistic. Elmore Leonard once said, “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it,” and some of the dialogue here definitely sounds like writing.
Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Ruin continues the Children of Time universe in a mostly standalone braid of stories of terraforming, Uplift and first contact.
…The novel follows two strands in the web of plot. In the “past” timeline, a human exploration ship before their fall into a dark age (and subsequent revival) has come into a likely solar system looking for a planet to terraform. What they find are two candidate planets, a marginal glaciated one, Damascus, that might be melted into terraformability, and a second inner one, Nod, that, much to their disappointment is already full of indigenous life. That strange alien life is worth study, but it means the planet is not really suited for future colonization. But within that life on Nod is a surprise. On Damascus, in the meantime, a crew member’s idea to use octpodes to help in the colonization will have unexpected consequences.
In the present day, a Human/Portiids (Spider) exploration ship with a clone of the AI from Children of Time, has arrived in that same solar system thousands of years later, to find, to their shock and surprise, what has happened in the interim to the two planets. The humans are gone, but on both planets, their legacy and inheritors are most definitely in evidence, and much more than the explorers anticipated…
(15) THE REASONS. Ian Sales tells
what he thought about “The Hugos
2019, novellas” and why at It Doesn’t Have To Be Right. This is
an excerpt from his take on Binti: the Night Masquerade.
…I’m no fan of exposition, and I disagree entirely with Kim Stanley Robinson’s statement “it’s just another form of narrative”, and “streamlining exposition into the narrative” is another piece of writing advice that gets my back up… Which is not to say there’s zero info-dumping in Binti: the Night Masquerade. There’s plenty. But it’s all about Binti and her culture, or that of her male companion. The rest of the world is so sketchy it might as well have been made-up on the spot by Binti herself. I really do not rate these novellas, and I’m mystified by the love shown to them.
(16) CANCEL CULTURE. Remember that petition signed by 20,000 calling on Netflix to cancel Good Omens? Well, they did. And Amazon Prime returned the favor.
(17) BY THE YARD. The New York Times points to
another Amazon Prime offering, reruns of a Fifties show with Boris Karloff.
‘Colonel March of Scotland Yard’ When to watch: Now, on Amazon.
This is more specimen than gem, but there aren’t that many shows from the 1950s available to stream — and this one, starring Boris Karloff in an eye patch, has a fun spookiness. Karloff plays Colonel March, who works in the “department of queer complaints,” and thus solves mysteries of all sorts. How can he do it all? one character marvels. “Because I’m a student of the major obsessions of our time: food, finance, fashion and frenzied love,” he replies. Sounds fun.
(18) TALES OF SUPER SCIENCE. You can thank a black rocket scientist from Alabama for both the
Super Soaker and the Nerf Blaster. Assuming, of course, that you weren’t
traumatized as a child by being blasted by either one of those at an
embarrassing time (or place). Smithsonian Magazine: “The Accidental
Invention of the Super Soaker”. Tagline: “A leak in a heat pump gave rocket scientist
Lonnie Johnson the idea for his powerful squirt gun”
You might think it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to invent a squirt gun like the Super Soaker. But Lonnie Johnson, the inventor who devised this hugely popular toy that can drench half the neighborhood with a single pull of the trigger, actually worked on the Galileo and Cassini satellite programs and at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he helped develop the B2 stealth bomber.
Johnson is a prodigious creator, holding more than 120 patents on a variety of products and processes, including designs for film lithium batteries, electrochemical conversion systems, heat pumps, therminonic generators and various items to enhance battery production, including a thin-film ceramic proton-conducting electrolyte. In addition to serious-science inventions, Johnson has also patented such versatile and amusing concepts as a hair drying curler apparatus, wet diaper detector, toy rocket launcher and Nerf Blasters. Yes, that rapid-fire system with foam darts that tempts the child in all of us to mount ambushes on unsuspecting relatives and pets.
“I’m a tinkerer,” Johnson says. “I love playing around with ideas and turning them into something useful or fun.”
In the 1820s, Augustin Fresnel invented a new kind of lens and installed it in France’s Cordouan lighthouse. Suddenly, one lamp could light the way for sailors many miles out to sea.
Since antiquity, lighted beacons have guided ships to port. The earliest lighthouses were controlled fires on hilltops that warned vessels that they were approaching land. Over time, these signals were powered by burning coal or oil lamps backed by mirrors, which could reach navigators further out to sea. But lamp power was no match for a dark and stormy night; over centuries, broken hulls and wind-whipped sails ran aground as ships’ captains and crew perished within, unable to spot the coastline before it was too late.
All that changed in the early 1820s, when a French physicist invented a new kind of lens: a ring of crystalline prisms arranged in a faceted dome that could reflect refracted light. Augustin Fresnel installed his creation in the Phare de Cordouan, a towering lighthouse situated in France’s Gironde estuary, about 100km north of Bordeaux. Suddenly, one lamp could illuminate the way for sailors many nautical miles out to sea.
Anyway. Time for me to don my World’s Worst Film Critic hat and look at the films this year. They’re all good, you see. They get shown on a screen that’s bigger than my bedroom! Nobody would do that if the films weren’t any good, right?
(22) PLAN F***. Rachel Bloom featured in a video that
illustrated the host’s topical comments on state abortion laws on Jimmy
Kimmel Live!
[Thanks to JJ, John King Tarpinian, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse
Wooster, ULTRAGOTHA, Chip Hitchcock, Cat Eldridge, Carl Slaughter, Andrew
Liptak, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to
File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
The Manning Award is
presented to a comics artist who, early in his or her career, shows a superior
knowledge and ability in the art of creating comics. It is named for Russ
Manning, the artist best known for his work on the Tarzan and Star
Wars newspaper strips and the Magnus, Robot Fighter
comic book. Russ was a popular guest at the San Diego convention in the 1970s.
The 2019 nominees are:
Lorena
Alvarez, writer/artist
of Hicotea and Nightlights (Nobrow)
Ellen T.
Crenshaw, artist of Kiss
Number 8 (First Second)
M. J. Kim, artist of Faith: Dreamside
(Valiant)
Sumit Kumar, artist of These Savage Shores
(Vault Comics) and Ruin of Thieves (Action Lab)
Kieran
McKeown, artist of Halo:
Lone Wolf (Dark Horse)
The nominees were
chosen by a panel consisting of board and committee members of Comic-Con
International and a San Diego comics retailer. The winner will be chosen by
past Manning award winners and Russ Manning assistants. The recipient will be
announced during the Eisner Awards ceremony on July 19.
…Irene joined Tor Books twenty-six years ago and quickly rose to head the Art Department. She has won the World Fantasy Award, the Richard Gangel Award for Art Direction from the Society of Illustrators, thirteen Chesley Awards, and numerous gold and silver medals from Spectrum and the Society of Illustrators.
Irene was also one of the founding members of the Tor.com website. In its first decade Tor.com has become a must-read site for science fiction and fantasy fans, and one of the most frequented publishing websites. Tor.com has won numerous awards for its original fiction, nonfiction, and art, including the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Locus Awards….
(2) GOVERNING SPACE. Future Tense, a
partnership ofSlate, New
America, and Arizona
State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and
society, is
going to be holding a symposium on July 10 addressing the question “How
Will We Govern Ourselves in Space?” They’re planning to livestream the
event. The complete schedule is here.
(3) MARVEL SALE. Through 6/23
11 PM EDT,Marvel Digital Comics Shop is holding a storewide Buy One Get One Free Sale.
With the purchase of a comic or collection, you’ll get another digital title — for FREE! Use code MARVEL2019 at checkout for this unbeatable offer! [See site for details.]
Looking for prelude reading to Marvel Studios’ Spider-Man: Far From Home? Try the classic collection SPIDER-MAN VS. MYSTERIO, and read a curated handful of the Wall-Crawler’s best battles against the Master of Illusion! Or, try best-selling horror mag IMMORTAL HULK! Seeking a high stakes blockbuster? Try the ongoing event WAR OF THE REALMS today, and see Avengers, X-Men, street-level heroes and more, unite against Malekith’s global siege of Midgard! And it’s by MIGHTY THOR maestros Jason Aaron, Russell Dauterman and Matt Wilson!
Our Buy One Get One Free Sale is a perfect opportunity to discover a new series that piques your interest! Explore top-sellers from our STAR WARS lineup, or pick up the ongoing alt-universe X-Men arc AGE OF X-MAN! Or, check out the return of Cimmerian barbarian CONAN in his current series! New to comics and looking for a place to dive in? Visit the Digital Comics Shop’s READING LIST Section, and explore themed lists based off your favorite characters, creators, events and more! Get inspired by our favorite Spider-Man starter stories here!
More than 20,000 Christians have signed a petition calling for the cancellation of Good Omens, the television series adapted from Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s 1990 fantasy novel – unfortunately addressing their petition to Netflix when the series is made by Amazon Prime.
… they say that Good Omens is “another step to make satanism appear normal, light and acceptable”, and “mocks God’s wisdom”.
I was dubious about the first sequel to Pixar’s wonderful Toy Story, which turned out to be terrific. But a fourth go-round for Woody, Buzz and company? I harbored doubts but I should have had more faith in the Pixar team. This is a highly enjoyable film with laugh-out-loud gags, ingenious plotting, and endearing new characters. By the closing scene I found myself marveling at how my emotions were stirred by these innately inanimate objects.
Seven years on, queer characters are found in every corner of the expanding audio drama world. So this list of recommendations is by no means exhaustive; it is simply one starting point based on the SFF series I’ve laughed, gasped, and teared up at. From radio-show hosts caught up in romantic fanfic tropes to stories that aren’t about ships but just about being a queer person in the world, these eight fiction podcasts are something to be proud of.
Kenyon had her blood, hair, and nails tested for 21 different heavy metals. The results, which she shared with me, appeared to show elevated levels of chromium, beryllium, manganese, nickel, cadmium, antimony, platinum, mercury, lithium, selenium, tin, barium, thorium, and arsenic. These tests are the basis of her claim that she was poisoned. But when I spoke with Dr. Ernest Lykissa, the lead scientist of the lab that performed the tests, he said the concentrations of heavy metals in her system weren’t high enough to support her theory. “In this case,” he said, “the only thing I see is environmental exposure.” He thought she’d probably absorbed the metals from her surroundings — from the paint in her home, for example, or the exhaust from her car.
Kenyon never had any direct contact with Lykissa. To get tested, she stopped into Any Lab Test Now, a strip-mall operation that promises to have patients “in and out in 15 minutes.” It collected the samples of her blood, hair, and nails and forwarded them to Lykissa’s company, ExperTox, which then produced a list of the toxins found in the samples and their concentrations. In order to have those results interpreted by a scientist at ExperTox, Kenyon would have had to pay extra — a step she didn’t take, according to Lykissa. When I mentioned this to Bruce Goldberger, the president of the American Board of Forensic Toxicology and the director of forensic medicine at the University of Florida, he found it troubling. At my request, Goldberger had reviewed Kenyon’s test results and had come to the same conclusion as Lykissa — that she hadn’t been poisoned. But he felt that Lykissa’s company had failed her. “She’s convinced herself that her illness is associated with poisoning,” he said; by giving her results without any analysis, he continued, ExperTox allowed that belief to endure.
(8) HEINLEIN NOVEL MAKES SLOW PROGRESS. Arc Manor / Phoenix Pick admitted to folks on their mailing list that they are “having some issues with the title of the new Heinlein novel, Six-Six-Six” – one being that it won’t be published with that title.
All parties have now agreed on the final title for the book and we want our readers to be the first ones to know.
The new Heinlein novel is going to be titled:
The Pursuit of the Pankera
With a sub-title that will go on both The Pursuit of the Pankera as well as the republished edition of The Number of the Beast.
Subtitle: A Parallel Novel about Parallel Universes.
The Pankeran reference is directly from the book.
We will be announcing the release date soon. As for the status of the book; Pat LoBrutto has completed his overall editorial review of the book and it is about to go to a copy-editor.
The publisher says they’re going to attempt to defray some of their costs through a Kickstarter campaign.
The really cool part about this is that the Kickstarter will offer a presale of the book at less than the launch price of the book, which we figure is a win-win for all. Fans get to purchase the book at a lower price, and we can get some funds to help us pay for our production costs moving forward.
They haven’t set a release date yet.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born June 20, 1897 — Donald Keyhoe. Early pulp writer whose works included the entire contents of all three published issues of the Dr. Yen Sin zine. The novels were The Mystery of the Dragon’s Shadow, The Mystery of the Golden Skull and The Mystery of the Singing Mummies. He would create two pulp characters, one with ESP who was a daredevil pilot and one who was blind that could see none-the-less in the dark. He’s best remembered today for being one of the early believers in UFOs and being very active in that community. (Died 1988.)
Born June 20, 1913 — Lilian Jackson Braun. Author of The Cat Who… series which really may or may not be genre. The two cats in it are delightful and one, Koko, certainly has a sixth sense, but the author never suggests this is psychic. Good popcorn reading. (Died 2011.)
Born June 20, 1928 — Martin Landau. I’ve got his first genre role as being on The Twilight Zone as Dan Hotaling in “Mr. Denton on Doomsday” episode. Of course, his longest running genre role was as Rollin Hand on Mission Impossible though he had a good run also on Space: 1999 as Commander John Koenig. His last role was in Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie voicing Mr. Rzykruski. (Died 2017.)
Born June 20, 1951 — Tress MacNeille, 68. Voice artist extraordinaire. Favorite roles? Dot Warner on The Animaniacs, herself as the angry anchorwoman in Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, Babs Bunny on Tiny Toons and Hello Nurse on Pinky and The Brain.
Born June 20, 1952 — John Goodman, 67. Some may know him as the TV husband of a certain obnoxious comedienne but I’ve never watched that show. So I picture him as Fred Flintstone in The Flintstones, a role perfect for him. Mind you he’s had a lot of genre roles: voicing James P. “Sulley” Sullivan in the Monsters franchise, a cop in the diner in C.H.U.D., and he’ll even be the voice of Spike in the Tom and Jerry due out two years hence.
Born June 20, 1957 — Candy Clark, 71. Mary Lou in The Man Who Fell to Earth which of course featured Bowie. She also was in Amityville 3-D, Stephen King’s Cat’s Eye and The Blob the role of Francine Hewitt. That’s the remake obviously, not the original. Oh, and she’s Buffy’s mom in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Wiki being Wiki lists that as non-canon.
Born June 20, 1967 — Nicole Kidman, 52. Batman Forever was her first foray into the genre but she has done a number of genre films down the years: Practical Magic, The Stepford Wives, Bewitched (I liked it), The Invasion (never heard of it), The Golden Compass (not nearly as good as the novel was), Paddington (anyone see this?) and her latest was as Queen Atlanna in the rather good Aquaman.
Born June 20, 1968 — Robert Rodriguez, 51. I’ll single out the vastly different Sin City and Spy Kids franchises as his best work, though the From Dusk till Dawn has considerable charms as well. ISFDB notes that he’s written two novels with Chris Roberson riffing off his The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D film, The Day Dreamer and Return to Planet Droll.
(10) THE INSIDE STORY. Technology
writer and programmer Paul Ford has posted a SF story idea inspired by the
tireless forces of heroic keyboard warriors on the front lines of Twitfacegram:
A sci-fi story where the main character is an utterly committed activist who spends all their time online arguing their beliefs and then comes to realize they're a bot.
In the first study, researchers led by Eske Willerslev, a geneticist at the University of Copenhagen, sequenced the whole genomes of 34 individuals who lived in Siberia, the land bridge Beringia, and Alaska from 600 to nearly 32,000 years ago. The oldest individuals in the sample—two men who lived in far northern Siberia—represent the earliest known humans from that part of the world. There are no direct genetic traces of these men in any of the other groups the team surveyed, suggesting their culture likely died out about 23,000 years ago when the region became too cold to be inhabitable.
Elsewhere on the Eurasian continent, however, a group arose that would eventually move into Siberia, splinter, and cross Beringia into North America, the DNA analysis reveals. A woman known as Kolyma1, who lived in northeastern Siberia about 10,000 years ago, shares about two-thirds of her genome with living Native Americans. “It’s the closest we have ever gotten to a Native American ancestor outside the Americas,” Willerslev says. Still, notes Ben Potter, an archaeologist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks who was not involved with the work, the relation is nevertheless distant.
Additional DNA evidence suggests a third wave of migrants, the Neo-Siberians, moved into northeastern Siberia from the south sometime after 10,000 years ago. These migrants mixed with the ancient Siberians, planting the genetic roots of many of the area’s present-day populations.
(12) BDP. Bonnie
McDaniel has posted her assessment
of the Dramatic Presentation Short Form Hugo Finalists. The list begins with an
item that ranks behind No Award on her ballot –
7) The Good Place, “Jeremy Bearimy”
I simply cannot comprehend many Hugo nominators’ and voters’ continued affection for this mess. This show grates on me like coarse sandpaper. In the interest of fairness, even though I hated the two episodes that were nominated last year, I tried to watch this and had to turn it off fifteen minutes in. The only good thing about this episode was the title, which provides a fairly witty, rhyming new name for “looping time-travel shenanigans.”
(13) WORTH A
THOUSAND WORDS. Steve J.
Wright has completed his Hugo Graphic Story Finalist reviews:
This week I will cover the Retro Hugo Best Novelette category. (It may be a mistake to start with the longest items first; as the works grow shorter they start seeming–and being–less complex and thought-provoking.)
“Citadel of Lost Ships” by Leigh Brackett is one of those stories that was based on the planetary knowledge of the time, particularly of Venus, but now is woefully outdated. However, that aspect of it is not the main story, merely the background for the characters, so it doesn’t intrude enough to cause problems. What is more problematic is the lack of subtlety in its essentially libertarian message dressed up in science fiction trappings.
(15) ON TONIGHT’S JEOPARDY! Andrew Porter monitored the game
—
Category: “Books of Mystery”
Answer: “This detective featured in 4 novels & 56 short stories was killed of in 1893, but that didn’t stop him for long.”
NASA revealed Monday that it needs an additional $1.6 billion in funding for fiscal year 2020 to stay on track for a human return to the Moon by 2024. The space agency’s budget amendment comes in addition to the $21 billion the Trump administration asked Congress for in March.
In a teleconference with reporters on Monday evening, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said the budget amendment was a “down payment” on what will be needed in future years to fund the program. “In the coming years, we will need additional funds,” he said. “This is a good amount that gets us out of the gate.” He and the other NASA officials on the call would not say how much that would be.
Two people familiar with NASA’s internal deliberations say the agency has estimated that it needs as much as $6 billion to $8 billion a year for a lunar return by 2024.
[…] Bridenstine noted that, 50 years ago, the human program to land on the Moon was named after Apollo, the son of Zeus and Leto. Because the return to the Moon will include women, Bridenstine said the new program would be named Artemis, after Apollo’s twin sister.
“Our goal here is to build a program that gets us to the Moon as soon as possible that all of America can be proud of,” he said. […]
When the next car-sized rover lands on Mars in 2020, the ultimate head of this extraterrestrial endeavor will be physicist Lori Glaze. She’s leads NASA’s Planetary Science Division.
And she’s not alone. For the first time in history, three of NASA’s four science divisions are now run by women, a milestone announced by NASA on Friday.
“I am proud to say that for the 1st time in #NASA’s history, women are in charge of 3 out of 4 #NASAScience divisions. They are inspiring the next generation of women to become leaders in space exploration as we move forward to put the 1st woman on the Moon,” NASA’s associate administrator Thomas Zurbuchen tweeted Friday.
June’s Uncanny Magazine brings a bit of heartbreak, a bit of horror, but also a bit of romance. At least, two of the stories feature some rich romantic themes, and develop characters reaching out in compassion even as the world around them seems to descend into some very dark waters. The works explore worlds dominated in many ways by cruelty, and seek to find compassion and empathy, sometimes rather forcibly. Throw in a pair of poems taking on some different meta-fictional lenses, and it’s an issue that will make you think even as it entertains. So let’s get to the reviews!
Americans are less interested in NASA sending humans to the moon or Mars than they are in the U.S. space agency focusing on potential asteroid impacts and using robots for space exploration. That’s according to a poll by The Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research released Thursday, one month before the 50th anniversary of the first walk on the moon.
Two-thirds of respondents said monitoring asteroids, comets and “other events in space that could impact Earth” was “very or extremely important.” According to NASA, which watches for objects falling from space, about once a year an “automobile-sized [a]steroid hits Earth’s atmosphere,” but it usually burns up before it hits the surface. And the instances of larger objects actually making it past Earth’s atmosphere and causing any damage happen thousands of years apart, NASA says.
The world’s glaciers are melting faster than before, but it still takes decades to see changes that are happening at a glacial pace.
To look back in time, researchers are turning to a once-secret source: spy satellite imagery from the 1970s and 1980s, now declassified. “The actual imagery is freely available for download on the USGS website, and people can use it,” says Josh Maurer, a doctoral student at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
Maurer is the lead author of a study using satellite imagery to show that in the past 20 years, Himalayan glaciers melted twice as fast as they did in the 1980s and ’90s. The work was published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.
The spy satellite images come from KH-9 Hexagon military satellites, launched during the Cold War to help the U.S. peer over the Iron Curtain, says Summer Rupper, a co-author of the study. Each satellite was about the size of a school bus and carried miles of film. Packaged in buckets equipped with parachutes, the film was later ejected into the upper atmosphere and plucked out of the air over the Pacific Ocean by Air Force pilots. Most Hexagon images were declassified in 2011 as a continuation of a 1995 executive order by President Bill Clinton to release spy satellite footage that was “scientifically or environmentally useful.”
On last Sunday afternoon, New Plymouth resident, Michael Atkinson, was driving up Devon St when he spotted four knights in armour sword fighting in the middle of the street.
He pulled over and filmed the tournament on his mobile.
In the video, Atkinson can be heard laughing in the background, repeatedly saying the whole thing was “random as” while the knights ran into the middle of the intersection and fought each other.
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, JJ, Chip Hitchcock, Nina, Mike Kennedy, Michael
Toman, Paul Weimer, Harold Osler, Martin Morse Wooster, John King Tarpinian,
rcade, Carl Slaughter, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title
credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day C.A. Collins.]
