Here are 13 developments of interest to fans.

(1) “Steampunk weapons useless against fists” reads the Daily Mash headline:

Bravado and goggles are a dangerous combination

While attending the Whitby Goth Weekend, steampunk lifestyle person Julian Cook received a beating in a pub despite being armed with a laser blunderbuss and a Gatling-gun duelling pistol.

This is a joke, no matter how much people might like it to be true…

(2) Admirers of manual typewriters and the writers who used them are in for a treat. The Typewriter Movie gallery contains photos of the machines used by Hemingway, Updike, George Bernard Shaw and Jack London. Better yet, the movie, largely funded through Kickstarter, is now in release and got a positive review in the LA Times:

Such prize-winning authors as Robert Caro and David McCullough, various collectors, journalists (including former L.A. Times reporter Alex Pham) and “typosphere” bloggers, plus an eclectic array of active typewriter repairmen all warmly celebrate their predilection for their vintage Royals, Underwoods and Smith-Coronas. Several “poets on demand,” a few teen enthusiasts and even a musician who uses the 19th-century invention as a percussion instrument also weigh in.

Although the movie is mostly dominated by these talking heads, and punctuated by only bits of archival clips and other fleeting visuals, [director] Lockett keeps things moving quickly and enjoyably.

(3) With the aid of a Saskatchewan synchrotron a Canadian paleontologist hopes to learn the color of a hadrosaur’s hide. (Can you say that three times fast? I knew you could.)

Hadrosaurs are duck-billed dinosaurs that lived 100 million to 65 million years ago.

If the search works, this would be the first time anyone has found color in dinosaur skin, Philip Currie, a University of Alberta paleontologist who is working on the project, tellsPopular Science. During the last few years, paleontologists have found melanosomes, the organelles in living cells that are responsible for certain colors, in dinosaur feather fossils. But colors haven’t been found in skin fossils.

“It’s not that these older specimens don’t have melanosomes,” Currie says. “Nobody’s really looked for them.”

(4) You’ll find an excerpt from Steven Paul Leiva’s collection of Bradbury essays at Neworld Review.

Leiva writes in “Ray Bradbury: Masterheart of Mars” –

The mission of Curiosity to Mars, and all the other past Mars missions, might very well not have happened without Ray Bradbury. It would probably be difficult to find a space scientist, especially one concentrating on Mars, who was not inspired by Ray’s The Martian Chronicles, despite the fact that the novel contains not one concrete factual detail on the difficulties of getting to, landing, and living on Mars.

Count me among Ray Bradbury’s ardent admirers, yet I find Leiva’s suggestion that the current exploration of Mars literally owes its existence to Bradbury’s stories a bit overblown. Visionaries like Burroughs, Wells and Welles had already done enough to rouse curiosity about the Red Planet – were, in fact, responsible for Bradbury’s own interest in the setting.

(5) But if they’re really sending haikus to Mars make sure there’s an entry written by Bradbury.

Galactic poet?
Here’s how to become famous.
Send your work to Mars!

NASA is raising awareness for its upcoming launch of the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution spacecraft with its Going to Mars project. The MAVEN spacecraft is scheduled for launch this November, to study the Red Planet’s upper atmosphere; the craft will examine why Mars lost its atmosphere, and how that catastrophe affected the history of water there.

But to liven things up, the mission managers have invited the public to submit literary messages that could be tucked into a DVD that will go with the craft. Three lucky poets will get the chance to include their haiku, specifically written for the occasion — and everybody who submits something will have their name included on the DVD.

(6)The Week has distilled all the Star Wars movie rumors into one article, and confirms that John Williams is aboard:

5. John Williams will probably be writing the score
It’s hard for many fans to imagine a Star Wars film without John Williams’ bombastic score — particularly the immortal title theme, which helped the first Star Wars film pop off the screen from the moment it began. Fortunately, fans probably won’t have to imagine a Williams-less Star Wars; at an April 29 promotional appearance for Star Trek Into Darkness in Berlin, J.J. Abrams revealed that Williams is likely to return. “For Star Wars, it’s very early days — but I believe that, going forward, John Williams will be doing that film, because he was there long before I was,” said Abrams.

(7) Famous Monsters of Filmland promises there are “five never before seen photos from the set of Return of the Jedi”. After 30 years I’m unlikely to remember if I’ve seen them before, however, Craig Miller checks in here every so often and I know he’ll set us straight if this is a bogus claim.

(8) And my third of three Star Wars items…

The largest Native American tribe in the U.S . plans to dub Star Wars in Navajo as means of preserving its traditional language.

Fluent Navajo speakers have been invited for a casting call in Window Rock in northern Arizona on Friday and Saturday to dub the roles of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Princess Leia and others, tribal officials said.

Manuelito Wheeler, the director of the Navajo Nation Museum, said he first came up with the idea 13 years ago as a way to preserve the consonant-rich Navajo language, believed to be spoken by about 170,000 people, according to government figures.

(9) Researchers believe they have identified some words that are 15,000 years old. Read the Washington Post article to see how they did it.

A team of researchers has come up with a list of two dozen “ultraconserved words” that have survived 150 centuries. It includes some predictable entries: “mother,” “not,” “what,” “to hear” and “man.” It also contains surprises: “to flow,” “ashes” and “worm.”

The existence of the long-lived words suggests there was a “proto-Eurasiatic” language that was the common ancestor to about 700 contemporary languages that are the native tongues of more than half the world’s people.

This reminds me of one of Owen Barfield’s ideas about the original language in Poetic Diction.

(10) Sue Lange at Book View Cafe pointed to Strange Horizons’ statistical profile of literary coverage by gender for 2012 which concluded:

As in previous years, in the majority of the SF review venues surveyed, disproportionately few books by women were reviewed, and disproportionately few reviews by women were published

Lange’s own comment is:

Perhaps the larger question and the one the Strange Horizons post seemed to be asking is why aren’t the women being reviewed? Which actually translates to: why isn’t women’s writing being taken seriously? I’ll let the academics, the people that study science fiction, answer that. They’re the ones falling down on the job.

(11) London’s Fantasy Centre Bookstore closed in 2009. Rob Hansen’s reminiscences are here and Andrew Porter’s photos of the store, taken in 2001, are here.

(12) Elinor Busby won the 2013 Lifetime Achievement Award, presented to her at Corflu XXX in Portland.

(13) James H. Burns wonders if the Philip K. Dick stamp will have any (ahem) special properties:

Once it’s finally released:
If one goes beyond its self-stick transluscency:
For those who dare to lick the inverse:
Will it be coated with a hallucinogenic?

Surely it ought to be the dopest stamp in history!

[Thanks go out to James Hay, Gerry Williams, John King Tarpinian, Janice Gelb and David Klaus for these links.]

Here are 11 developments of interest to fans:

(1) “Career Arc: Harrison Ford” by Alex Pappademas (at Grantland) is a fun read –

Should we start with carpentry? The fact that Harrison Ford spent some years working as a carpenter is one of the cornerstones — one of the load-bearing struts, you might say — of his mythos. He may still be the most famous ex-carpenter since Jesus.

***

“There’s nothing good about being famous,” Ford told an interviewer a few years ago. “It was unanticipated and I’ve never enjoyed it. You can get the table you want in a restaurant. It gets you doctor’s appointments. But what’s that worth? Nothing.”

Question: Can you imagine a less-appealing description of the upside of being a public figure than “It gets you doctor’s appointments”? No wonder Ford looks so glum all the time; he’s been in the game for 50 years and all it represents to him is the express lane to a colonoscopy.

(2) Another unhappy Star Wars vet is the maestro himself. Do you think the residents of Marin County are sorry they made George Lucas mad?

After George Lucas abandoned plans to build a movie studio along a woodsy road in Marin County, he complained about the permitting process in a place so environmentally friendly that hybrid-car ownership is four times the state average.

His next move, some here say, was payback for what Lucas described in a written statement as the “bitterness and anger” expressed by his neighbors.

The creator of “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” is working with a local foundation that hopes to build hundreds of units of affordable housing on a former dairy farm called Grady Ranch, where his studio would have risen.

Now MarinCounty is squirming at that prospect — and it is not a pretty sight.

(3) For 75 years, writers have injected Superman into American politics, from World War II to Vietnam, from race relations to the war on terrorism.

Remember Superman #168 in 1963 where President Kennedy agreed to put on a Clark Kent mask to protect Superman’s identity? A 1970 story called “I Am Curious (Black),” where “Lois steps into a handy Kryptonian Plastimold outfitted with Transformaflux technology that transforms her into a righteous African American woman who goes undercover to expose racial prejudice”? All this and more in the Washington Post op-ed by Glen Weldon, author of Superman: The Unauthorized Biography. 

(4) James Bacon applauds the slate of nominees in the Best Graphic Story Hugo category in a post at Forbidden Planet.

(5) Nolan Bushnell is not a very self-effacing guy, but the creator of Pong and co-founder of Atari is willing to pretend to be one if it will sell copies of his book Finding the Next Steve Jobs: How to Find, Hire, Keep and Nurture Creative Talent.

Pong offered a new kind of entertainment with with its black and white graphics and dials to control the on-screen action.

But Bushnell admits they did not even intend to make it.

“It was meant as a training project for one of my engineers,” he remembered.

“And we kept fiddling with it and doing slight improvements.

“One of the improvements all of a sudden made the game completely fun.”

At the time, Atari had been contracted by Bally Technologies – a company now based in Las Vegas and specialising in casino gaming – to create a driving game.

Excited by his new game, Bushnell offered Pong instead.

“We thought [Pong] is so fun, maybe they’ll take this and it will fulfill our contract.

“They said ‘no, we want the driving game’.”

(6) Did it take this long for somebody to finally read the entire 500-page transcript of conversations among the Apollo 10 astronauts? Because it was just last week a New York paper reported about the poop problem in the space capsule. The dialog between Stafford, Young and Cernan makes it sound like one of those Turkish galleys in a Patrick O’Brien novel (“turds everywhere”).

(7) Scott Turow’s New York Times op-ed “The Slow Death of the American Author” complains that emerging digital book technology is being treated as another excuse for publishers to scalp writers –

Take e-books. They are much less expensive for publishers to produce: there are no printing, warehousing or transportation costs, and unlike physical books, there is no risk that the retailer will return the book for full credit.

But instead of using the savings to be more generous to authors, the six major publishing houses — five of which were sued last year by the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division for fixing e-book prices — all rigidly insist on clauses limiting e-book royalties to 25 percent of net receipts. That is roughly half of a traditional hardcover royalty.

(8) Writers have been scuffling since, oh, forever, as Gardner Dozois told the Philadelphia Weekly.

You collaborate with George R.R. Martin in editing themed short-story anthologies. What’s it been like watching Martin’s already-strong genre popularity explode through the American mass culture since Game of Thrones hit HBO?
It’s been amazing watching George’s success. We started out as broke young writers together. I remember, back in the mid-’70s, going to a Nebula Award banquet in New York City with George and trying to find an editor who was willing to buy us dinner, because neither of us had any money; the best we could do was an editor who took us out in front of the hotel and bought us each a hot dog from a hot dog cart. Now he’s perhaps the best-known and most successful writer in the genre, even personally satirized in cartoons and on Saturday Night Live. It’s astounding—but he’s worked very, very hard for his success, and deserves every bit of it.

(9) Vanity Fair contributor Mark Seal’s follow-up comment about the Christian Gerhartsreiter guilty verdict includes the length of the potential jail sentence:

One juror told the media that he would suggest a lighter sentence if the defendant would lead authorities to Linda Sohus, which seems unlikely; among other things, it would mean that the imposter would have to break his silence and come clean. In the meantime, Gerhartsreiter will serve 27 years to life in federal prison, after his sentencing is handed down on June 26. And until then, he’ll receive what he always loved most: attention — though not, to his chagrin, as a Rockefeller.

(10) Guy Gavriel Kay is inspired by history:

Tell us about River of Stars for the reader who’s not familiar with your work.

River of Stars is inspired by history: the remarkable Northern Song dynasty of China (around 1100 A.D.). It moves from the tensions of a dangerous court to scenes involving the most ordinary people in villages so small they aren’t even on the map. One mother does the bravest thing in the book, perhaps, to try to save her beloved, very sick daughter… and all she does is walk, alone, to the neighbouring market town. These small moments in people’s lives are central to how I write.

The two main characters are a man and a woman who are each, in their own way, fighting what their time and world “allow” people to be. The role of women in this very “formal” society is a major theme. The book is pitched on a very large scale–war, peace, politics, intrigue–but I am always as interested in the inner lives and relationships of my characters. That means romantic love, parent-child dynamics, and even two brothers who are among my favorite figures in the novel. I want readers to care about these people and what happens to them.

(11) If you’re having a good day, listening to John Astin read “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe will take care of that…

 [Thanks for these links goes out to John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, Andrew Porter  and John King Tarpinian. (Hey, dude deserves double mention!)]

Here are 12 developments of interest to fans.

(1) Priceline’s next round of commercials features Big Bang Theory’s Kaley Cuoco  playing William Shatner’s daughter. The link takes you to a “behind-the-scenes” video with a funny reference to the TV series.

(2) But Captain Kirk isn’t merely a historic reference, he’s still fighting aliens –

Shatner got into it with his old adversary again to promote Star Trek: The Video Game, which pits Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock against a new and radically redesigned race of Gorns (meaning, they can actually open and close their mouths). So it was the ideal occasion to re-create one of the most memorable moments from the original “Star Trek.”

With a stuntman in a replica Gorn costume — most of the original was destroyed, and the head sold at auction for $27,500 in 2006 — Shatner once again throws down some of Kirk’s signature moves: double fists to the back, judo chop to the neck, and the paralyzing ear clap. Though this time the octogenarian doesn’t do Kirk’s iconic flying drop kick.

(3) Amazon’s Jeff Bezos decided to spend some of his zillions locating and retrieving the Saturn rocket engines used to launch the Apollo moon mission — the first stage that fell into the ocean.

The Bezos expedition returned enough major components to rebuild two Saturn V F-1 engines — out of the 65 that were launched between 1967 and 1973 — for display. Despite claims last year that the engines were specifically from Apollo 11, Bezos now says the history of the engine parts he recovered may not be known.

Inspecting the raised pieces, Bezos reported that many of the parts’ original serial numbers are missing or partially missing, which may make mission identification difficult.

“We might see more during restoration,” Bezos wrote.

(4) The Literature Map is a fun toy, displaying around the writer you enter a compass of other writers’ names based on various shared traits. John King Tarpinian has preloaded Ray Bradbury for this demo (who else?) — http://www.literature-map.com/ray+bradbury.html

(5) The Supreme Court recently handed down a decision against the entertainment industry, ruling in favor of Supap Kirtsaeng, an immigrant from Thailand who challenged the $600,000 he was ordered to pay for willfully infringing a textbook publisher’s copyrights when he sold books first purchased overseas in the U.S. through eBay.

The important ruling deals with the first-sale doctrine under U.S. copyright law, which allows for the reselling of acquired copyrighted works without the authority of the original copyright owner. Advocates for Kirtsaeng argued that limiting the first-sale doctrine would cause manufacturing to fly overseas and imperil the reselling of many goods including films and music.

(6) The FBI’s Hottel Memo containing second-hand reports of UFO sightings in New Mexico around 1950 is the most popular file in its reading room. The agency never found it as interesting as the true believers:

The FBI denied that the memo constituted evidence for the existence of extraterrestrial spacecraft — and said Hottel’s report was never taken all that seriously. Instead, it was considered “an unconfirmed report that the FBI never even followed up on.”

Yes, the truth is out there. And it is: The FBI didn’t think this was any big deal.

(7) Stephen and Tabitha King  have offered to foot one-third of the $9M cost of renovating the Bangor, Maine library if the city can find people to pay the other $6 million.

(8) The spirit of Mystery Science Theater 3000 lives on.

Few can riff as well — or as lucratively — as the alumni of “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” the 1990s cult TV show about a human and his robot buddies skewering B-movies while stuck in space.

And former host Michael J. Nelson, aka Mike Nelson, should be applauded for taking clever commentary to a place where it had never successfully gone before: crowd-funding site Kickstarter. A campaign seeking financial help from strangers ended Wednesday, raising nearly $264,860, about five times its goal.

But it may be Nelson’s move to give power to the people that really encouraged riffing to thrive. Nelson moved to San Diego and created RiffTrax in 2006 as an outlet to offer fans his quirky commentary on movies. A few years later, he opened the system to anyone, with iRiffs, which enables people to create and sell their own movie commentaries.

The piece includes 7 tips on making your own Riff, not the least of which is, “Don’t talk over the dialogue.”

(9) Lots of amusing Star Wars bits at Wired.

(10) Uh,Scope Bacon Mouthwash? I assume Scalzi already knows all about this.

(11) You’d think Captain Cook was paid by the island, otherwise it’s hard to fathom why he mapped Sandy Island — an island that isn’t there. And it’s not the only one.

The question is, How many more phantom islands are sitting on maps, waiting to be Un-Discovered? Right now, all over the world, mapmakers are removing Sandy Island from their maps. It’s no longer on Google. It will not appear in the next National Geographic map.

Frank Jacobs has written about Bermeja, a Mexican island that has been on maps of the Yucatan since the 16th century. It’s disappeared. (Did it sink?) There’s New Moore Island, off India in the Bay of Bengal. It rose out of the water in 1970; By 2010, it was covered again. Sannikov Land, in the arctic sea off Siberia, first sighted by an explorer in 1811, then “seen” again in 1886 and 1893, was finally visited by the Soviet ice-breaker Sadko. They found…nothing.

Some of these islands were once actually there, some not. We may be at the dawn of a new cartographical era, where mapmakers rush about un-discovering what we once discovered.

 (12) On the theory that if it hasn’t happened on the internet it hasn’t happened yet,The Atlantic has revived speculation that Paul Linebager (“Cordwainer Smith”) was Kirk Allen, the patient in “The Jet-Propelled Couch,” a case study from Dr. Robert Lidner’s bookThe Fifty Minute Hour. The book was published in 1955, Brian Aldiss suggested the connection in 1973. Both Alan Elms and Lee Weinstein(New York Review of Science Fiction, April 2001) have searched for a definitive answer.

[Thanks for the links goes out to John King Tarpinian, Gary Farber, Taral, David Klaus, Michael Walsh and Stu Hellinger.]

Here are 6 developments of interest to fans.

(1) Upside Down, judging by Peter Sobczynski’s review, does little more than inspire puns about a “willing suspension” of disbelief:

By all rational standards, “Upside Down” is one of the dumbest movies that you will see in your entire life. Right from the start, it takes its first giant misstep with a prologue that is meant to simultaneously set up the story and explain the physics of the twin world gimmick in ways that will more or less satisfy the average moviegoer or at the very least keep them from asking pesky questions about the apparent lack of orbits or how the twinned worlds can have sunrises, sunsets and the like.

(2) Everybody knows a digital text doesn’t cost as much to produce as a physical book, consequently people don’t want to pay for an ebook what what they’d pay for the print edition.

Forbes analyzed customer resistance to higher ebook prices and found people will even compare a used paperback version sold by a third party to the ebook when making a decision to purchase. (I certainly do!)

The magazine also learned consumers hate paying more than $9.99 for an ebook.

(3) Amazon.com, which knows a lot more than Forbes about getting people to pay for books but tells a lot less, came under fire for applying to be assigned high profile internet domain names like .book and .app. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will be handing them out and asked thousands of companies, individuals and agencies for input. The Daily Mail reports authors groups fear the outcome if Amazon receives control:

Scott Turow, president of the US-based Authors Guild, wrote in a letter to ICANN: ‘Placing such generic domains in private hands is plainly anticompetitive. ‘The potential for abuse seems limitless.’

He added that if Amazon gets what it wants then it would ‘move a few inches closer to a monopoly in the book business’ and give it an ‘enormous competitive advantage’.

(3) Robert J. Sawyer’s hardboiled detective novel Red Planet Blues arrives in hardcover on March 26 from Penguin in Canada and Ace in the US. It’s the twenty-second novel of his career. Read the opening chapters here. Listen to Sawyer being interviewed about the novel by SETI Institute astronomer Seth Shostak here [MP3 audio, 8 minutes].

Sawyer’s tour to promote the novel brings him to Los Angeles on April 16. Catch him at Mysterious Galaxy (2810 Artesia Blvd., Redondo Beach) starting at 7:30 p.m.

(4) The Wall Street Journal’s article about “useless machines”  that only exist to turn themselves off credits Marvin Minsky for inventing them. Arthur C. Clarke said they were “sinister.” Famous Monsters had a version with a creepy hand emerging from the box to turn the machine off.

The brains behind the original machine is Marvin Minsky, a professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Back in 1952 as a graduate student, he spent a summer at Bell Labs, the intellectual hive known for cranking out Nobel laureates.

Mr. Minsky’s job there was nebulous, he says today. “I got there and a manager said, ‘Don’t work on anything that will take less than 30 years—we like to take a long view.’ ”

On a lark, Mr. Minsky spent some time “inventing useless things,” he says, such as a “gravity machine,” a device that would ring a bell if the force of gravity changed. The bell never rang. The force of gravity is a “basic physical constant,” Mr. Minsky, 85, explains.

(5) Here’s a funny line from a report about the Big Bang Theory cast’s appearance at PaleyFest –

Parsons may play a genius, but he’s having a tough time getting his head around the show’s current success.

“There’s something impossible to fathom about viewers and numbers and things like that,” Parsons explained. “I can barely picture 20 people in one room. If you want to say 17 or 18 million, well you’ve lost me.”

(6) When people have a lot of time on their hands they can put together things like the Periodic Table of Comic Books that identifies references to the elements in comics and shows the pages where they were made. Hafnium, anybody?

[Thanks for these links goes out to John Mansfield, Martin Morse Wooster and John King Tarpinian.]

Here are 7 developments of interest to fans.

(1) Say, if two rats can mind meld, why not a Jedi?

The brains of two rats on different continents have been made to act in tandem. When the first, in Brazil, uses its whiskers to choose between two stimuli, an implant records its brain activity and signals to a similar device in the brain of a rat in the United States. The US rat then usually makes the same choice on the same task.

What do copycats think of copyrats?

(2) Dover Publications obviously heard you can make money with steampunk. The website is offering Steampunk Paper Dolls, a Steampunk Designs Coloring Book and Steampunk Stained Glass Coloring Book,Steampunk Tattoos, Steampunk Postcards, the Steampunk Sourcebook image collection and even the Steampunk Notebook, 64 blank pages with a thematic cover.

Sam Long explains that Dover does all kinds of topical stuff: “There are also Speakeasy paper dolls, Victorian fashion paper dolls, Lucky Cat (Japanese maneki neko) paper dolls, and many others. They’re up-to-date too: William and Kate Cambridge paper dolls. And down-to-date: Henry VIII and his six wives paper dolls.”

Does the last set come with detachable heads?

(3) William F. Nolan’s latest book, Nolan on Bradbury, is a collection of 20 articles he’s written about Ray’s work:

William F. Nolan knew the late great Ray Bradbury for more than sixty years, and during that entire span he has written perspicaciously about his mentor and friend, beginning with The Ray Bradbury Review (1952) and continuing to the present day. This volume, published on the occasion of Nolan’s 85th birthday, is a celebration of his lifelong devotion to the master of fantasy and science fiction.

I met Bill Nolan for the first time in 1969 when he talked to a group of librarians about Logan’s Run. He’s always been a source of wisdom about the history of the sf field.

(4) Women writers were a rarity in the Golden Age of science fiction. One of the most highly-esteemed was C. L. Moore, subject of Andrew Liptak’s column for Kirkus Reviews.

Moore’s first professional sale in 1933 made the biggest splash: Farnsworth Wright, editor for Weird Tales magazine received her story, Shambleau, and immediately knew that he had something fantastic. Reportedly, Wright closed Weird Tale’s offices for the day in celebration upon reading the story, which appeared in the magazine’s November issue, under the name C.L. Moore. While other women writing in the science fiction field at the time masked their names to compete in a male-dominated field, Moore claimed that the abbreviation of her name was more to protect her identity from her employer.

Moore continued the adventures of the story’s central character, Northwest Smith, with Black Thirst, published in Weird Tales’ April 1934 issue and with Scarlet Dream in May and Dust of Gods in August. The Black God’s Kiss, appearing in the October 1934 issue of Weird Tales, featured a new character, Jirel of Joiry, a notable female protagonist in a sword and sorcery story.

Weird Tales readers praised Moore’s characters, prose and storylines, including fellow author H.P. Lovecraft. Others in the industry took notice, including F. Orlin Tremaine, the editor of Astounding Science Fiction, bringing Moore into the science fiction fold with her story The Bright Illusion in the October 1934 issue. She would continue to publish in the magazine market throughout the rest of the 1930s as C.L. Moore.

(5) Many of you were fond of Animaniacs cartoons when they aired 20 years ago. Tell me if this article lives up to the promise in its title – Way More Than You Ever Wanted To Know About Animaniacs:

In episode #65, “The Warners 65th Anniversary Special,” we learn that the Warners were created in 1929 to be the sidekicks for Buddy, a real character from the early days of Warner Bros. Animation. Their only role in the Buddy cartoons was to pop out of unexpected places and use giant mallets to make a pancake out of the star. The Warners were soon given their own series of cartoons, but the resulting shorts were considered too incomprehensible for public consumption. The films were locked away in the Warner Bros. vault, and the Warner Brothers were locked inside the water tower at the Warner Bros. studio. Until the present day, when the Warners escaped.

(6) Known as the Statler-Hilton when it hosted the Worldcon in 1967, the Hotel Pennsylvania has eluded the wrecking ball once more thanks to the bad economy –

Plans to knock down the 1919 hotel, where Glenn Miller broadcast in the 1940s, and replace it with a 67-story office tower, are “on the shelf,” said Vornado Realty Trust, which has owned the building since 1998.

Although NYC City Council approval of zoning changes for a tower to replace the 1,700-room hotel remains valid, the weak economy led Vornado to switch gears; [they are] close to finding a partner and principal developer to help restore some of the hotel’s former grandeur. Though the lobby retains traces of its origins and it still has the “PEnnsylvania 6-5000″ phone number made famous by Miller’s orchestra, the Hotel Pennsylvania is now a budget-priced destination with a less-than-luxurious reputation.

The hotel was designed by famous architects McKim, Mead & White, but the author says that what remains of their stately interior was covered by alterations done in the 1980s.

Also the site of LunaCons, Star Trek and Comics conventions over the decades, the hotel was sold in the early 1980s and renamed The New York Statler. After it was bought by Penta they called it the New York Penta. When Penta went out of business in 1992, the hotel reverted to its original name, the Hotel Pennsylvania.

(7) There’s a comprehensive report about “How Disney Bought Lucasfilm – and Its Plans for ‘Star Wars’” in Bloomberg Businessweek. Here’s an anecdote I hadn’t read before:

Iger accelerated that process by making acquisitions. The first was the $7.4 billion purchase of Pixar Animation Studios in 2006. Iger personally negotiated the deal with Steve Jobs, who was then Pixar’s CEO. As part of the deal, Iger kept the creative team, led by John Lasseter, in place and allowed them to continue to operate with a minimum of interference in their headquarters near San Francisco. “Steve and I spent more time negotiating the social issues than we did the economic issues,” Iger says. “He thought maintaining the culture of Pixar was a major ingredient of their creative success. He was right.”

The transaction gave Disney a new source of hit movies. Jobs also became a Disney board member and its largest shareholder. Periodically he would call Iger to say, “Hey, Bob, I saw the movie you just released last night, and it sucked,” Iger recalls.

[Thanks for these links go out to John King Tarpinian, Sam Long, Gary Farber, Stu Hellinger and Andrew Porter.]

Here are 12 developments of interest to fans.

(1) The Lava Lamp is 50 years old. Smithsonian Magazine has all the strange details. John King Tarpinian was surprised: “Who knew this was invented by an English nudist accountant?”  If you bet this was the invention of an engineer who kept his pants on — you lost!

I really wanted a Lava Lamp when I was in the sixth grade. Don’t seem as interested now. So if youth is wasted on the young, are paychecks are wasted on the old…?

(2) Asimov’s “Bicentennial Man” won a Hugo in 1977 and was made into a movie. In spite of those recommendations it took a recent article to convince me the story has literary depth.

“Asimov’s Embarrassing Robot: A Futurist Fable” by Irving H. Buchen in The Futurist (scroll down a ways and you’ll find it) sees it as a gateway to understanding the “the technological Singularity and of the projected symbiotic human relationships with machines has been hailed rightly as an evolutionary crossover…”

It is curious that Asimov, in a sense, used his own craft as a model for Andrew’s development. The capacity to create or respond to art has fascinated science-fictionists. To prove that the aesthetic response is not acquired but innate in man, Mary Shelley, in Frankenstein, has the creature stop in his tracks one moonlit night on the moors and almost swoon with delight at the beauty of the sky. Kurt Vonnegut’s favorite form of survival is the artful dodger. And all of Arthur C. Clarke’s computer beings are adept at design. Thus, art functions, as it always has for humans, as the ultimate test of creativity and independence of thought and imagination—except, of course, Andrew is an android. Nevertheless, art also serves as the threshold for Andrew’s next stage of development: freedom.

(3) Stanley Kubrick worried about making IBM upset after they’d been so helpful with the production of 2001. Letters of Note says Kubrick asked a studio executive “Does I.B.M. know that one of the main themes of the story is a psychotic computer?” The answer, reports Slate was “so long as the company’s name was ‘not associated with the equipment failure,’ they had no problem with the movie.” That was a broadminded attitude for a big corporation to take in the Sixties. Nothing like, say, the builders of the S.S. Minnow for Gilligan’s Island — try finding their name in the credits.

(4) James Bacon in “Cosplay and Comics at Arisia” told Forbidden Planet readers there was a “superb convention” in Boston last month with a fine masquerade –

Let no one be deluded, these fans know their comics. The winners of the Novice category in the Masquerade, Antonia Pugliese and Raven Stern, were as excited about Gail Simone commenting on social media about their costumes, as any comic book blogger would be if they managed to get a comment from their favourite writer. Along with Julia Pugliese, their entry, The Birds of Prey, not only looked stunning, but their dance routine had the crowds cheering.

(5) DC Comics’ “New 52” celebrated love in a Valentine’s Day Special. A review by the prolific James Bacon.

(6) Andrew Liptak introduces a new generation to John W. Campbell in an article for Kirkus Reviews:

John W. Campbell Jr. was born in 1910, and had become a notable science fiction author in his own right throughout the pulp era. His first story, “When the Atoms Failed,” was published in the January 1930 issue of Amazing magazine and was followed by a number of other stories in a similar vein before shifting to a new, less campy style in 1934 under a pseudonym, Don A. Stuart. Along the way, he attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and Duke University in North Carolina, eventually earning a degree in physics in 1932. With few positions for physicists available, he continued to write, eventually producing some well-known stories, such as “Who Goes There?,” which would eventually be filmed three times as The Thing from Another World and The Thing (in 1982 and 2010).

And he takes the story through Campbell’s rise to the editorship of Astounding. Campbell literally put the “science fiction” in Astounding – the words weren’t originally part of the magazine’s title.

(7) Leslie Klinger is suing the Conan Doyle estate, hoping to end its practice of charging writers to use the Sherlock Holmes character in new stories.

On Valentine’s Day 2013, I made a big commitment: I filed an action in federal court in the Northern District of Illinois against the Arthur Conan Doyle Estate. The Estate has for some time been insisting that creators who want to use the characters of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson in their new creation pay the Estate not insubstantial amounts for “permission” to do so. I believe that this violates U.S. copyright laws. Although 10 of the Sherlock Holmes stories written by Conan Doyle remain protected by copyright for 95 years after publication date, the last expiring in 2022, 50 of the stories are in the public domain. Because the essential characteristics of Holmes and Watson are set forth in detail in those public domain stories, I believe that anyone can freely use the characters as they see fit. In particular, the Estate is trying to stop publication of a new anthology created by Laurie R. King and me, tentatively called “In the Company of Sherlock Holmes,” a second collection of stories inspired by the Sherlock Holmes Canon by an amazing group of writers.

Copies of the filing and exhibits are available at Free Sherlock.

Nate Hoffelder analyzes the case at The Digital Reader:

The Conan Dolye’s justification for their legal shakedown is at best questionable and is based on a not-entirely settled point of copyright law. Allow me to explain.

As you probably know, the vast majority of the Holmes stories are old enough that they are no longer in copyright in the US. (The author died in 1930, so his entire body work is public domain everywhere but the US.) In the US you can legally download nearly any of the Holmes stories from sites like Project Gutenberg. If you wanted to, you could then format the stories as ebooks or bind them into a paper book and sell the stories. This is completely legal.

But according to the Conan Doyle estate, one thing you cannot do is write a new story that features Sherlock Holmes. There is exactly one remaining Conan Doyle book,The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, that still contains copyrighted Sherlock Holmes stories – 10 stories, in fact. Because some of the original stories are still in copyright in the US, the estate believes that they can control who writes new stories. They are using that control to collect fees from publishers, studios, and anyone with deep pockets.

(8) Joy V. Smith’s first novel, Detour Trail, will be released February 25; it’s a western and will be available from Melange Books, the publisher, and online. She’s interviewed about Westerns generally and Detour Trail in particular at The Western Online.

Joy hopes her SF novels make it to the starting gate soon…

(9) John Williams wants to score Star Wars VII. Greg Brian says – give him a chance!

That isn’t easy for an established composer who’s already over 80 years old. So goes the same issue other legendary film composers endured when reaching their career sunsets. Movie composing legends such as Bernard Herrmann, John Barry, and Henry Mancini were sometimes unfairly overlooked for new, higher profile features once they were deemed composers from an older, classic era….

Let’s also not underestimate Williams possibly using new musical ideas to update his sound. He already knocked over his traditionalist streak when he used a new fingerboard instrument called a Continuum in 2008 for “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.” It proved his astuteness to newer sounds and how it can keep him relevant in film scoring for at least another decade.

(10) Here are two videos about the home office of the future. I’d say Walter Cronkite’s 1967 prediction of what a home office would look like in 2001 [YouTube] came much closer to hitting the target than AT&T’s image of the future from a 1993 TV ad.

In 2001 people needed different hardware for all these purposes, as shown – something that has changed since then. AT&T missed the target by assuming people with all this technology would use it to watch pages turning in a physical copy of a book. That prediction was already obsolete in 1993!

Not that we should be ungrateful for the other cheap thrills AT&T gave us along the road to the future. John King Tarpinian vividly remembers “going to the County Fair as a wee lad and the ATT Pavilion had a dial phone next to a touch tone phone. The test was to see if you could dial you home phone number faster than you could dial an unknown number on the touch tone phone.”

(11) Fred Lerner’s donation to Columbia University is a continuing source of wonder to the librarians working with it, as are the memories it evokes about the Columbia University SF club of his day –

The magazines that Green is now processing were donated in July by Fred Lerner ’66CC, ’81LS — a collection of two thousand or so copies of such titles as the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Astounding Science Fiction,and, of course, Amazing Stories. Lerner, as an undergraduate, had founded the Columbia University Science Fantasy Society (CUSFS), which in the 1970s morphed into today’s Columbia University Science Fiction Society, with an identical acronym affectionately pronounced “cuss-fuss.”

Since its inception, CUSFS has hosted mini-conventions; produced a newsletter of reviews, essays, and fiction called CUSFuSsing (with that peculiar capitalization); screened movies like Metropolis and Blade Runner; held birthday parties for hobbit extraordinaire Bilbo Baggins; and conducted virgin sacrifices to Cthulhu, a creation of H. P. Lovecraft (“It typically involved wrestling in a pool filled with fake blood,” recalls former CUSFS president Eugene Myers ’00CC).

(12) The sources of Orwell’s political vision are concisely traced in 1984: George Orwell’s Road to Dystopia, a BBC News article by David Aaronovitch:

Orwell’s opposition to totalitarianism, of left and right alike, was toughened up by his association with the novelist Arthur Koestler, a communist who had been imprisoned under threat of execution by the fascists in Spain.

Koestler later escaped to England where he published his novel, Darkness at Noon, in 1940.

This bleak story of an old Bolshevik who confesses to crimes he has not committed and is shot by the Soviet authorities, was to have a profound influence on Orwell.

His many book reviews also reveal much about his political influences, but one name, James Burnham, stands out.

An ex-communist, Burnham’s 1941 book, The Managerial Revolution, filled Orwell with both horror and fascination.

In the book, he found two of the crucial elements of his novel: a world ruled by three super-states, and the idea that the overlords of the future would not be demagogues or democrats, but managers and bureaucrats.

[Thanks for these links goes out to Dan Goodman, David Klaus, James Bacon, Andrew Porter and John King Tarpinian.]

Here are 8 developments of interest to fans.

(1) William Shatner calls J. J. Abrams a “pig” for directing movies in both the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises. Then he asks for a job. What could be more Hollywood?

“I think of him as a buddy of mine. I’ve taken him out for sushi. I think it’s time for J.J. and I to have another sushi and let me put him straight about two of the largest franchises and not employing me in either one of them is just foolhardy,”  

(2) And what could be more Florida – if your impression of Florida comes from Serge A. Storms novels – than somebody named Johnnie Blade getting busted for swinging a bat’leth around in public?

The man was “wildly swinging” the four-foot long sword and “proudly displaying” it to passing motorists.

“This sword…is known to loyal Star Trek fans as traditional Klingon ‘Bat’leth’ or ‘Sword of Honor,’ said the Broward Sheriff’s Office report on the matter.

Blade was charged with improper exhibition of a dangerous weapon, disorderly intoxication in a public place that caused a disturbance, resisting an officer without violence and drug possession.

(3) A U.S. District Court judge has ruled “it’s clear that the Batmobile is a copyrighted character”, granting Warner Brothers summary judgment in its lawsuit against Mark Towle, a California resident who operates Gotham Garage, a specialist in customizing replicas of automobiles featured in various films and TV shows. The Hollywood Reporter quotes the judge –

“Thus, the Batmobile’s usefulness is a construct…. Additionally, Defendant’s argument that Batman is merely a car wholly fails to capture the creativity and fantastical elements that stand apart from the fact that the Batmobile also happens to look like a car.”

The judge also went into the particulars of the Batmobile to single out what’s conceptually separable such as the “Batmobile’s entire frame, consisting of the rear exaggerated, sculpted bat-fin and the mandibular front,” which he says “can stand on its own without the underlying vehicle.”

(4) Fans knew from the beginning Fredric Wertham’s anti-comics views in Seduction of the Innocent (1954) were nonsense. Now Carol Tilley has shown what a cheat his scholarship really was:

Wertham’s personal archives…show that the doctor revised children’s ages, distorted their quotes, omitted other causal factors and in general “played fast and loose with the data he gathered on comics,” according to an article by Carol Tilley, published in a recent issue of Information and Culture: A Journal of History.

“Lots of people have suspected for years that Wertham fudged his so-called clinical evidence in arguing against comics, but there’s been no proof,” Tilley said. “My research is the first definitive indication that he misrepresented and altered children’s own words about comics.”

Scholars didn’t have an opportunity to study the original data until Wertham’s archives at the Library of Congress were made widely available to researchers in 2010.

(4) Ray Bradbury Square is an official Google Map site. But there seems to be a difference of opinion between the submitter and the site editor over whether Bradbury Square is of Historic Interest or just a name for an intersection. Puh-leeze!

(5) Can’t tell your Elves without a scorecard? Another graphic from the LoTR blog makes the connections between different groups of Elves in Tolkien’s works a little easier to understand.

(6) James Bacon has done a great job reporting the “Heroes & Villains: The Comic Book Art of Alex Ross” exhibition at the Norman Rockwell Museum for Forbidden Planet. Lots of cool images posted, too.

Ross created an illustration of Norman Rockwell, a superhero of a different sort. Instead of a cape, he holds the American flag over his shoulder, otherwise looking very normal, but the viewer knows that Rockwell was indeed a hero amongst illustrators. Ross also illustrated an image of Andy Warhol flying into the sky amongst swans, again showing an artistic colleague in a different light.

The exhibition in Stockbridge, MA is open through February 24.

Alex Ross, “Norman Rockwell”, 2012, courtesy of the artist, ©Alex
Ross. Used with permission.

(7) A girl blasted her Hello Kitty doll into space for a school science project. “Now if we could just send the rest of them there,” quips James Hay.

(8) Amazon is entertaining the idea of using an Amazon currency in its store. Presently, Amazon Coins work in the Amazon app store. According to TechCrunch:

In their press release announcing Amazon Coins, the company makes it clear that they are going to give away (not sell) tens of millions of dollars worth of Amazon Coins in the coming quarters. The only rational reason to give away tens of millions of dollars of virtual currency that has real-world value is to juice the market and get people who have Kindles spending more money on apps and in-app purchases. It will be great for developers who have apps live in the store and for consumers looking to get more free stuff.

TechCrunch speculates that the goal is to drive more customers to Amazon who can only use the money there. On the other hand, Amazon’s implacable foe the Canadian Booksellers Association says it may be the first sign that Amazon is becoming a full-blown nation state…

[Thanks for these links goes out to David Klaus, Martin Morse Wooster, John King Tarpinian, James Bacon and John Mansfield.]

Here are 9 developments of interest to fans.

(1) The advocates for Baltimore’s Poe House did not waste the opportunity presented by the local team’s presence in the Super Bowl to blame the Ravens football franchise for not picking up part of the tab to preserve the famed writer’s house. Y’know, just like the Chicago Bears subsidize the architectural masterworks of Frank Lloyd Wright, the San Francisco 49ers pay for painting the Golden Gate bridge, and the New York Giants played host to Jimmy Hoffa’s gravesite under the old Meadowlands stadium. (Well, they may have actually done that last one, just nobody’s certain.)

(2) I first encountered the idea of solar sails in the story “Sunjammer” by Arthur C. Clarke in a 1963 issue of Boys Life. Almost at the same slow rate of acceleration provided by the sails themselves, this technological idea is gaining acceptance. NASA reports there will soon be an outer space demonstration:

The concept of a huge, ultra-thin sail unfurling in space, using the pressure of sunlight to provide propellant-free transport, hovering and exploration capabilities, may seem like the stuff of science fiction, but a NASA research team developing the Technology Demonstration Mission known as “In-Space Demonstration of a Mission-Capable Solar Sail” intend to prove the viability and value of the technology just a few short years from now.

The project is called Sunjammer in honor of the story. Or perhaps that should be stories, plural, for a few months after Clarke’s tale appeared, Poul Anderson’s unrelated adventure about the same technology, likewise titled “Sunjammer,” ran as an Analog cover story (under his pseudonym, Winston P. Sanders).

(3) Before They Were Giants, edited by James L. Sutter, reprints the first published stories of 15 major sf/fantasy authors, together with brand-new retrospective critiques and interviews discussing the stories’ histories and what they know now about writing that they wish they’d known then. The authors are: Ben Bova, Charles Stross, China Mieville, Cory Doctorow, David Brin, Greg Bear, Joe Haldeman, Kim Stanley Robinson, Larry Niven, Michael Swanwick, Nicola Griffith, Piers Anthony, R. A. Salvatore, Spider Robinson, and William Gibson.

(4) The word on the street is – don’t quit your day job even if you do sell your first genre novel. Galley Cat has the disillusioning figures –

Horror novelist Brian Keene gave a speech at Towson University’s Borderlands Boot Camp recently, laying out some frank statistics for aspiring genre novelists. Here is an excerpt:

The average advance these days, for a genre fiction novel, ranges between $2,500 and $10,000. That’s right. The novel you spent a year working on only earns you between $2,500 to $10,000 at first. When the book is published a year later, that advance will have long been spent. And you probably won’t see a royalty check until another year AFTER your book has been published (provided enough copies have sold to earn out your advance). So it will actually be two years from that advance check before you get paid again.

What’s really pathetic is that these numbers don’t seem to be any different than I heard writers throwing around 25 years ago. The low end of the range may have gotten worse, as far as that goes.

(5) People who live around Edgbaston in Birmingham know perfectly well where Tolkien got his inspiration for the towers that dominate Middle-Earth’s landscape:

The building is spectacular but perilous. It sways slightly in strong wind and its seven rooms – one on each storey – are the size of a hearth rug. But, said Bradley: “As it turned out, my CEO is a Tolkien fanatic, and so the deal was done.”

…The eyeball-shaped windows at the top of Perrott’s Folly look down in one direction on where JRR Tolkien lived as a child, and in the opposite direction on the Oratory, where he went to school. It also gives a spectacular view of the other tower he passed twice a day, the gothic ornamented chimney of the Edgbaston waterworks, which in the writer’s day would have belched smoke from the steam engines. To Tolkien true believers, there is no point looking further for the origins of the two sinister towers that loom over the world of his Lord of the Rings.

(6) A pity Ed Green wasn’t cast in this 30-second Powerball ad – he’d have done a great job with the lead character, and enjoyed the heck out of the commercial’s wild, science-fictional premise.

(7) Dale L. Skran Jr. evaluated predictions Gregory Benford made for a “Writers of the Future” time capsule in 1987, now posted on the web. Here’s one example, with the sf author’s follow-up comment as the last line:

Benford next throws out a snide little line about how “Most Americans are barely literate … just like today.” Although this statement is clearly intended to be witty, it turns out to be true. There seems little doubt that the increasing usage of computers and the playing of video games has decreased the general level of literacy, but, as Benford reminds us, it was never that high anyway!

Sad to be somewhat right on this one.

(8) There’s a lot of fun to behad generating faux pulp magazine covers with the Pulp-o-Mizer at Thrilling Wonder. I’ve seen a lot of amusing examples so far. My favorite is David Gerrold’s, posted on his Facebook page, which may well be a truth said in jest:

(9) Count me among the many who are outraged to read that author M. C. Hogarth is being persecuted by Games Workshop for using the term “space marine,” which it claims as a trademark despite the term having been a staple of sf stories decades beforeWarhammer 40K came along:

In mid-December, Games Workshop told Amazon that I’d infringed on the trademark they’ve claimed for the term “space marine” by titling my original fiction novel Spots the Space Marine. In response, Amazon blocked the e-book from sale [original post and update]. Since then, I’ve been in discussion with Games Workshop, and following their responses, with several lawyers.

To engage a lawyer to defend me from this spurious claim would cost more money than I have, certainly more than the book has ever earned me. Rather than earning money for my family, I’d be taking money from them, when previously my writing income paid for my daughter’s schooling. And I’d have to use the little time I have to write novels to fight a protracted legal battle instead.

Adam Whitehead has posted a helpful (and long) list of examples of prior use at The Wertzone (– quite a good blog, let me say too.)

[Thanks for these links goes out to John King Tarpinian, David Klaus, James Hay, Martin Morse Wooster and Andrew Porter.]

Here are 10 developments of interest to fans.

(1) Is it steampunk? Restoration Hardware now features (expensive!) furniture that looks like it was made from old steamer trunks.

(2) The work is deadly but never dull. A doctor has made a career of researching human diseases by dissecting mummies:

As a pathologist, Michael Zimmerman was familiar with dead bodies, but when he was asked to autopsy a mummy for the first time, he wasn’t sure what to expect. There were a dozen layers of wrapping, which he peeled off one at a time, “like Chinese boxes,” he said. When he finished, he found the body was dark brown and hard. “It smelled like old books.”

And Ray Bradbury would have been pleased to learn Dr. Zimmerman is a believer in the Nefertiti-Tut railway myth –

It’s not hard to find mummies, he said. When modern Egyptians built railroads, so many mummies turned up during the digging that workers burned them for warmth.

– despite Mark Twain casting doubt on the story after he repeated it inThe Innocents Abroad.

(3) Who had the One Ring when? This infographic from the LotrProject Blog tracks all the ringbearers. And answers a tricky question as a bonus.

(4) I hit the replay button again and again! Nic Farey’s “Werewolves of Fandom” –

You hear him howling about your colophon
Or that your page count is too thin
He could spindle, fold or mutilate you anytime
Werewolves of Fandom again

Ah-ooooo, Werewolves of Fandom….

Starring your favorite Vegas werewolves.

(5) This may be news to U.S. readers. Next week the Canadian penny starts its long march to extinction:

On February 4, the Canadian Mint will stop circulating pennies to financial institutions and will also be encouraging them to send back any pennies that they have on hand.

The decision to phase out the penny was due to its excessive and rising cost of production relative to face value, the increased accumulation of pennies by Canadians in their households, environmental considerations, and the significant handling costs the penny imposes on retailers, financial institutions and the economy in general.

The estimated savings for taxpayers from phasing out the penny is $11 million a year.

…It is important to note that the issue of rounding will only apply to cash transactions (not debit or credit) and that there is no legal requirement to round, as the penny is still legal tender.

(6) At AbeBooks, Richard Davies offers a list of the 50 essential science fiction books.

Here are the criteria I used. One book per author, so that was hard on the big three of science fiction – Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, who each have multiple classic titles to their name. Attempt to show as many subgenres of science fiction and plot themes as possible. Include early stories that influenced the genre as a whole and launched popular themes, even if those books appear a bit dated today.

He skips alternate reality novels as not having much science in them. That’s fine, his list after all. But it’s much harder to explain how someone who’s focusing on hard and soft science stories fails to include anything by Poul Anderson. The comments section is overrun with similar complaints. I assume this bothers Davies not at all because while we’re at the AbeBooks site throwing our brickbats he’s showcasing their merchandise.

(7) Once upon a time Ray Bradbury and Gene Roddenberry did a talk at the 1968 World Science Fiction Convention.

(8) Hobnob with your fellow convention runners at Con Com 20, slated for the Seattle area on June 7-9. The event is run the Seattle WesterCon Organizing Committee (SWOC). Its program will be posted in the spring.

(9) SDSU alumnus Edward Marsh, who lives in Escondido and made his fortune in real estate, has donated a collection of science fiction books, letters and manuscripts valued at $2 million to the university. According to KPBS, “He got into science fiction working for the Church of Scientology, whose founder, L. Ron Hubbard, wrote pulp fiction in the 1930s and 1940s. SDSU hopes, one day, to become custodian of Marsh’s entire book collection, valued at over $10 million.”

(10) A movie is being made about the genesis of the Doctor Who tv series. Entertainment Weekly reports:

Hogwarts will meet Who in the forthcoming TV movie An Adventure in Space and Time, which details the creation of the 50-year-old British science-fiction show Doctor Who. It has been announced that Harry Potter actor David Bradley, who played Hogwarts caretaker Argus Filch in the beloved film series, will portray “First Doctor” William Hartnell in the TV movie.

Meanwhile, Brian Cox (The Bourne Identity) is set to portray BBC Head of Drama Sydney Newman and Jessica Raine has been cast as Doctor Who producer Verity Lambert. BBC America — which is co-producing the film with BBC Cymru Wales — will premiere the movie in the U.S. later this year.

[Thanks for these links goes out to John Mansfield, James Hay, Isaac Alexander, David Klaus, Nancy Hay, Andrew Porter, Michael J. Walsh and John King Tarpinian.]

Here are 9 developments of interest to fans:

(1) The original Batmobile sold for $4.6 million over the weekend, quashing all doubters:

Others pointed out, though, that many imitation Batmobiles had been built over the years, a good number of them virtually indistinguishable from the original. That raised the question of whether collectors would be willing to pay a huge sum for this Batmobile simply because it was the first.

Rick Champagne, who owns a logistics company in Tempe, Ariz., was very willing. He identified himself as the buyer in an interview with Speed TV immediately after the sale, and his name was confirmed by a representative for Barrett-Jackson.

He told Speed that the car would go in his living room.

(2) Libraries remain important for a variety of reasons according to “Library Services in the Digital Age,” a report by the Pew ResearchCenter’s Internet & American Life Project:

Based on “a survey of 2,252 Americans ages 16 and above” conducted between October 15 and November 10 of last year, the Pew report assures us that, even in the digital age, libraries continue to serve a variety of functions, with nearly 60% of respondents having had some kind of interaction with a library in the last 12 months, and 91% saying that “public libraries are important to their communities.”

As for the way these numbers break down, the vast majority of patrons (73%) still visit libraries to browse the shelves and borrow print books. In contrast, only 26% use library computers or WiFi connections to go online.

That’s not to say that digital services are insignificant; 77% of those surveyed by Pew said it was “very important” for libraries to provide free access to computers and the Internet, numbers that go up considerably in black (92%) and Latino (86%) communities.

(3) Here’s a nostalgic collection of photos of Robert Bloch at Wisconsin in History.

(4) A Kickstarter fundraiser is collecting donations to restore Paramount’s duplicate Enterprise D bridge and “make it a Fully Interactive, Simulator available for Display, Parties, Movie Showings, Fundraising, Charities like HABITAT FOR HUMANITY and MAKE A WISH, Fan Films, as well as newly created interactive education ‘Missions’ so entire classrooms of students can steer the Enterprise to other planets, galaxies and more!”

(5) Some people have a gift. David Levine stars in a 15-minute YouTube video of his story "Letter to the Editor"

He’s Dr. Talon, Evil Genius and implacable foe of Ultimate Man (“who is, by the way, an illegal immigrant!”). The story is part of John Joseph Adams’s forthcoming anthology The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination due out on February 19, and available for pre-order in hardcover, trade paperback, ebook, and audio formats.

And don’t forget to visit David’s new website.

(6) If there are a few issues of Omni you never got around to reading, like maybe all of them, note that the entire run of the magazine is posted at the Internet Archive. (Via Giant Freakin Robot.)

(7) We demand the spotlight and also the power to remain invisible. Alexandra Petri in the Washington Post comments on this human paradox:

There is a difference between privacy and obscurity. No one wants obscurity. This is why we complain to Wikipedia about their unfair treatment of us. “But there’s no article on you at all,” Wikipedia says. “Precisely!” we bellow. Obscurity is easy enough to cultivate. People do not care to see pictures of us or our trip to Guam, no matter how vigorously we share them. We are not seen, even when we want to be. They stay off our lawn because of their total and wondrous indifference to our lives. But we want both: we want people to know who we are and care about us and the wonderful things we do and exciting contributions we make to charities, but not trample through our lawns and ruin our parties. That is what we mean by privacy: the ability to be seen only when we want to be seen, at the angles that flatter. That is why privacy is much rarer than obscurity.

(8) Ed Green is not the star of this video project.

[YouTube]

But he’s in there. Don’t blink.

(9) John Scalzi apparently has no plans to start writing in 19th-century Russian or starve in a garret just to please critics of his literary prowess:

Occasionally I’ve had people gripe that my books are explicitly commercial, which they don’t like, and that’s fine. But I’ve also had people gripe that I’m a sell out because of that aspect of the books. Those people I look at like they’ve turned into a farting fungus. Dudes: I intentionally write approachable books designed to sell in large numbers, constructed to make that goal as easy to achieve as possible. That’s not selling out, that’s the actual plan.

[Thanks for these links goes out to David Klaus, Andrew Porter and John King Tarpinian.]