The Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA) membership has voted a complete ban against using AI-produced work in their publications, and will treat such work as ineligible for its awards.
The organization will not accept or publish poetry, art, or other works created using a generative tool, either wholly or in part, and that published works created using a generative tool will not be eligible for SFPA awards, including the Rhysling, Elgin, and SFPA Poetry Awards.
Earlier this month the SFPA Executive Committee presented members two options for the SFPA to adopt as its policy regarding works derived from generative tools (including AI, large language models, etc). With 168 members voting, the outcome was as follows:
The SFPA recognizes and supports the creative talent of human beings. While the organization encourages creative exploration of new tools, we can not support the use of tools built on the exploitation of other people’s creative work without their consent or compensation.
While the terms “AI,” “LLM,” and “generative media” (which we will call “generative tools” for this statement) are being used for many applications, these technologies are part of a rapidly changing environment and no two are designed the same way. There have been cases of proven and alleged copyright infringement with many such tools, however, as well as arguments that they exploit creative work.
The allegations of copyright infringement in generative tools typically rests on the fact that these tools are “trained” on datasets made of other artists’ and authors’ work without their consent[2]. These training materials are how generative tools create “new” works, which may or may not resemble the original creator’s work. However, not all generative tools are necessarily exploitative or plagiaristic, with some companies looking to create ethical alternatives trained on datasets that are made up solely of creator-submitted and compensated materials.
As an organization that supports creators, the SFPA will not accept or publish poetry, art, or other works created using a generative tool, either wholly or in part.
Published works created using a generative tool will not be eligible for SFPA awards.
The SFPA will also not use generative works in any of its official publications, including Star*Line, Eye to the Telescope, the SpecPo Blog, and the SFPA website.
[1] Generative AI can be thought of as a machine-learning model that is trained to create new data, rather than making a prediction about a specific dataset. A generative AI system is one that learns to generate more objects that look like the data it was trained on.” (Zewe, 2023)
[2] “In a case filed in late 2022, Andersen v. Stability AI et al., three artists formed a class to sue multiple generative AI platforms on the basis of the AI using their original works without license to train their AI in their styles, allowing users to generate works that … would be unauthorized derivative works.” (Appel, Neelbauer, and Schweidel, 2023)
The Crime Writers of Canada have announced the 2024 winners of their annual Awards of Excellence.
THE PETER ROBINSON AWARD FOR BEST CRIME NOVEL
sponsored by Rakuten Kobo, with a $1000 prize
Loreth Anne White, The Maid’s Diary, Montlake
BEST CRIME FIRST NOVEL
sponsored by Melodie Campbell, with a $1000 prize
Amanda Peters, The Berry Pickers, Harper Perennial
THE HOWARD ENGEL AWARD FOR BEST CRIME NOVEL SET IN CANADA
sponsored by Charlotte Engel and Crime Writers of Canada, with a $500 prize
Joan Thomas, Wild Hope, Harper Perennial/HarperCollins
THE WHODUNIT AWARD FOR BEST TRADITIONAL MYSTERY
sponsored by Jane Doe, with a $500 prize
Nita Prose, The Mystery Guest, Viking
BEST CRIME SHORT STORY
Marcelle Dubé, Reversion, Mystery Magazine
THE BEST FRENCH LANGUAGE CRIME BOOK (FICTION AND NONFICTION)
André Marois, La sainte paix, Héliotrope
BEST JUVENILE/YA CRIME BOOK
sponsored by Shaftesbury Films with a $500 prize (Fiction and Nonfiction)
Cherie Dimaline, Funeral Songs for Dying Girls, Tundra Books
THE BRASS KNUCKLES AWARD FOR BEST NONFICTION CRIME BOOK
sponsored by David Reid Simpson Law Firm (Hamilton), with a $300 prize
Michael Lista, The Human Scale, Véhicule Press
BEST UNPUBLISHED CRIME NOVEL MANUSCRIPT WRITTEN BY AN UNPUBLISHED AUTHOR
Craig H. Bowlsby, Requiem for a Lotus
2024 GRAND MASTER AWARD
Maureen Jennings
Established in 2014, the Grand Master (GM) Award recognizes a Canadian crime writer with a substantial body of work that has garnered national and international recognition.
Maureen Jennings, a long-time Crime Writers of Canada member, is a prolific author of non-fiction, short stories and book series featuring Christine Morris, Detective Murdoch, and D.I. Tom Tyler. The Detective William Murdoch television series, set in Victorian era Toronto, was optioned in 2003 by Shaftesbury Films. Murdoch Mysteries are shown in over 120 countries and feature innovative crime-solving techniques, social justice subplots and surprise guest appearances.
(1) RARE APPLAUSE. George R.R. Martin says he found an exception to the rule in “The Adaptation Tango” at Not A Blog.
…Everywhere you look, there are more screenwriters and producers eager to take great stories and “make them their own.” It does not seem to matter whether the source material was written by Stan Lee, Charles Dickens, Ian Fleming, Roald Dahl, Ursula K. Le Guin, J.R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, Raymond Chandler, Jane Austen, or… well, anyone. No matter how major a writer it is, no matter how great the book, there always seems to be someone on hand who thinks he can do better, eager to take the story and “improve” on it. “The book is the book, the film is the film,” they will tell you, as if they were saying something profound. Then they make the story their own.
They never make it better, though. Nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand, they make it worse.
Once in a while, though, we do get a really good adaptation of a really good book, and when that happens, it deserves applause.
I came across one of those instances recently, when I binged the new FX version of SHOGUN.
…The new SHOGUN is superb. Better than Chamberlain’s version, you ask? Hmmm, I don’t know. I have not watched the 1980 miniseries since, well, 1980. That one was great too.…
Tobias Carroll is the author of the novels Ex-Members, Reel, and In the Sight, the short story collection Transitory, and the nonfiction book Political Sign. …He writes a column on notable books in translation for Words Without Borders. Plus he has a podcast of his own — Framed & Bound, in which bookish people discuss movies set in the literary world.
We discussed which punk rock music made him a fan, why his heart belongs to novella-length works rather than massive epics, the artistic motivation for sometimes not giving readers what they’ve been taught to expect, the reason Ann Nocenti’s run on Daredevil was meaningful to him (and why he believes it aged so well), his fascination with deteriorating physical media, why Edward Hopper’s classic painting Nighthawks would have made the perfect cover art for one of his books, how you know when you’ve stuck the landing with a short story, and much more.
(3) SETTING THE STANDARD. C. E. Murphy did a lot of writing during a “Milford writing retreat” and makes that fact into an interesting story of its own.
I was afforded the unexpected opportunity to go on a writing retreat in mid-May. It was a great success, but I have to start by telling you about the first time I went on this retreat, in 2019, which MIGHT have been the first year this retreat was held.
That week, I wrote 41,000 words. Which is a lot. In fact, it’s enough that they said “we’re now going to use ‘murphy’ as our unit of measurement for this retreat forever,” which I thought they were joking about, except it turns out they’re not. :laughs: So, yeah. Wordcounts at this retreat are measured in “murphys,” although it turns out that they thought I’d written 33k that week so a “murphy,” technically speaking, is 33k. 🙂
That, however, was evidently not the legendary bit.
The legendary bit is that, because I was driving in with a friend and her van broke down, and we had to wait for the AA(A)* guy, I said, “Well, we might as well get some writing done” and made her take out her laptop and got my laptop out and we got some writing done.
I THOUGHT THIS WAS A PERFECTLY NORMAL REASONABLE THING TO DO! I now understand, at least intellectually, that…it was not. 🙂
Anyway, so that’s kind of the level of expectation I had/have for myself, going into a retreat. Nothing less than ‘legendary.’
Well, mes amis, I did not achive legendary.
Which is to say, I ONLY accomplished a Full Murphy by Retreat Standards: ie, I did about 32,000 words, which is Close Enough, sez I. I ONLY finished one novella and did 80% of another. (Well, 90%. I finished that one yesterday.) And also I edited a friend’s book, which probably should give me some kind of writing credit but is too hard to figure out in terms of wordcount….
Pixar was hit with layoffs on [May 21] as approximately 175 employees, or 14% of its workforce, were let go….
…Pixar employees have been bracing for layoffs since January, but cuts were smaller than the speculated 20% reduction that was reported at the time.Once considered the gold standard of family films, Pixar has been struggling since the pandemic when its corporate overlords at Disney used the pedigree of the animation brand to prop up its new streaming service. During that period, new offerings “Soul,” “Luca” and “Turning Red” were sent directly to Disney+ and family audiences became accustomed to expect those movies at home. When it reverted to prioritizing theatrical releases, moviegoers rejected the $200 million-budgeted “Toy Story” spinoff “Lightyear,” which marked Pixar’s second consecutive misfire after 2020’s “Onward” (which was released just before theaters shut down due to COVID). Although “Elemental” finished with $495 million globally, much stronger than its disappointing opening weekend would have suggested, it’s far less than past Pixar movies have earned.
Tom Bombadil has finally been invited on one of the long and winding road trips through Middle-earth. The mystical character is one of the more offbeat figures in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings saga, a woodland-dwelling man with an ethereal presence and a penchant for nonsense songs and brightly colored clothes, who helps rescue the hobbits from peril early in the first book, The Fellowship of the Ring. As much as he stands apart, his name would likely draw a blank from anyone who hasn’t read the novels since the two primary film retellings—Ralph Bakshi’s animated 1978 opus and Peter Jackson’s Oscar-winning live-action trilogy—both cut the him from the narrative completely. Now Old Tom, as the books refer to him, is finally getting his moment in the sun.
The Rings of Power, the Amazon Prime Video series based on Tolkien’s ancient history of his fantasy realm, will break that tradition of exclusion and finally feature Tom Bombadil—along with his jolly songs and his flamboyant wardrobe—when its second season begins August 29. Bombadil was described in Tolkien’s books as “older than the old,” a benevolent entity who began life around the time all life began, so his existence in this earlier era, thousands of years before the events of The Lord of the Rings, fits within the canon established by the author. In a 1937 letter to his publisher, mulling a possible sequel to The Hobbit, Tolkien described Bombadil as “the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside.” The author bristled at the notion that he wrote in allegory, but it’s clear he saw Bombadil as nature personified—right up to the character’s ambivalence about interfering in the larger world around him. That left showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay to figure out exactly how he might turn up in their show—and why.
(7) WHERE THEY’RE WATCHING BRIDGERTON. JustWatch covers one of the most anticipated releases of 2024, Bridgerton season three. Netflix has seen great success with Bridgerton, and as the newest season has just dropped they wanted to see how its release stacks up against the first two. (Click for larger image.)
Key Insights:
Season 2 had the most successful launch, ranking 1st in 93 countries
Season 3 has the highest rating out of all three Bridgerton seasons
Season 1 is the least successful out of all three seasons, with the lowest IMDb rating and the lowest global popularity
JustWatch created this report by pulling data from the week following the release of Bridgerton, and compared it to the previous two seasons. JustWatch Streaming Charts are calculated by user activity, including: clicking on a streaming offer, adding a title to a watchlist, and marking a title as ‘seen’. This data is collected from >40 million movie & TV show fans per month. It is updated daily for 140 countries and 4,500 streaming services.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
May 28, 1906 – T. H. White. (Died 1964.)
By Paul Weimer.
Sure, the only thing I have read of him is the four volumes of the Once and Future King, and I particularly remember best the original, The Sword in the Stone. Yes, I read the book because I saw the animated Disney version on WPIX. So when I turned to the book itself, and found just how different it was, it was an early lesson for me in the perils of adaptations. This was a good lesson to learn, that adaptations could be extremely different than the original source text. When I saw the animated Hobbit, Lord of the Rings and Return of the King, I was prepared for the books to be very different, thanks to the Sword in the Stone and White’s book.
T. H. White
But White’s book was also a lesson in something else. The Sword in the Stone was arguably the first time I came across a book which “extended” a myth I already knew. I knew who King Arthur and the Round Table were from a book of mythology I read when I was young. But it was White’s book that showed me that you could extend a story backwards in time, that you could go “beyond the myth and legend” and invent new stories for a character. And I will bet that most people who aren’t scholars, take the events in the Sword in the Stone as fully amalgamated parts of the Arthur story. Consider: This is where the idea that Merlin either is living backwards (something Piers Anthony would later borrow for his Incarnations books), or that he is quite aware or is preparing for our modern day (c.f. Zelazny’s The Last Defender of Camelot). Other adaptations of the Arthurian myths from Lawhead to Attanasio to Barron have had to have at least a passing familiarity with White’s ur-Arthur story, even if they take it in very different directions.
Sure, it’s an anachronism stew, and it left me for years wondering why other books didn’t have Robin Hood and Camelot in the same time period, but the sheer audacity of mixing and remixing history and myth and telling a new story of young Arthur is, and was, audacious and I admire it still for that audacity.
Or, in other words, The Sword in the Stone is the prequel that defies the curse of prequels and in fact fully canonizes the prequel. And the rest of the series feels as fully canonical as Malory, and perhaps even more so. Not a bad legacy, in my book.
The largest and most complete Stegosaurus fossil ever found is expected to fetch up to $6m (£4.7m) when it is sold as the star lot in Sotheby’s “geek week” auction this summer.
At 11ft (3.4 metres) tall and more than 20ft long the “virtually complete” fossil, which has been nicknamed “Apex”, is more than 30% larger than “Sophie”, the previously most intact stegosaurus specimen which was on display in London’s Natural History Museum….
…With an auction estimate of $4m-$6m it may become one of the most valuable dinosaur fossils ever sold at auction. The record is held by Stan, a T rex skeleton auctioned off by Christie’s for $31.8m in 2020….
… Apex was discovered by the commercial palaeontologist Jason Cooper in the Morrison Formation, in Moffat County, Colorado, near the town of Dinosaur, in May 2022.
As our world becomes increasingly reliant on computerized data storage, it becomes clearer and clearer that the wars of tomorrow will be fought using leaks, hacks, and online attacks. A widespread hack of police data in India was recently conducted, releasing facial images, fingerprints, and other personal data about Indian police, and those seeking to apply for police jobs. The leaked info has also been compiled into zip files and offered for sale to criminals over the encrypted messaging app Telegram, clearly for nefarious purposes.
This hack of police data is a sign of more cyber crimes of this kind to come, as criminals continue to become better equipped with online hacking skills with each passing day. Security researcher Jeremiah Fowler explained that he’s already uncovered numerous web servers with hundreds of gigabytes of stolen data, targeting victims from multiple countries all over the Earth. This data ranges from basic information such as birthdays, purchase history, and education certificates, to more personal documentation such as birth certificates, bank info, and social security cards….
For four years now, orcas have been ramming and sinking luxury yachts in European waters, and scientists have struggled to work out just why these smart, social animals had learnt this destructive new trick. But it’s not due to some anticapitalist ‘eat the rich’ agenda, nor is it to do with territory and aggression. The truth is, well, it’s child’s play.
Following years of research, a team of biologists, government officials and marine industry representatives have released their findings on just why one particular Orcinus orca group has developed this destructive streak. And it turns out, orcas – especially the kids and teens – just want to have fun. The report reveals that a combination of free time, curiosity and natural playfulness has led to young orcas adopting this ‘trend’ of boat-bumping, which is not at all surprising for a species that has been known to adopt odd, isolated behaviors from time to time.
In recent years, a dramatic recovery in the population of bluefin tuna in the region has been a win for a group of about 40 critically endangered Iberian killer whales that feed exclusively on the large fish. This has meant they’ve cut down their time spent foraging, leaving space for other ‘hobbies.’…
The first vaccine designed for insects may make honeybees healthier overall.
Honeybee hives vaccinated against a bacterial disease had much lower levels of an unrelated viral disease than did unvaccinated hives, veterinarian Nigel Swift of Dalan Animal Health reported April 3 at the World Vaccine Congress.
Researchers at Dalan, based in Athens, Ga., designed the bee vaccine to protect against American foulbrood — a fatal disease caused by a spore-forming bacterium called Paenibacillus larvae. Adult bees don’t get sick but can spread spores in the hive, where the disease infects and kills larvae. Spores can remain viable for more than 50 years, so beekeepers with infected colonies must destroy hives by irradiating or burning them to keep the disease in check. A vaccine may save bee lives and beekeepers’ livelihoods….
… Dalan’s vaccine against foulbrood disease doesn’t rely on tiny syringes. Instead, bees are inoculated through a sugar paste that researchers spike with heat-killed P. larvae. Worker bees eat the candy and incorporate it into their royal jelly, which they feed to the queen. Inside the queen’s gut, bits of the bacteria attach to a protein, which in turn transports the vaccine fragments to the ovaries where they can be deposited in eggs. Larvae that hatch from the eggs should be protected from the disease…
… Yet the researchers found a surprising result: Vaccinated hives were protected from a viral disease spread by varroa mites (SN: 3/7/16). Both vaccinated and unvaccinated hives started the study with the same number of mites and a baseline level of virus, as measured by a PCR test. Virus levels continued to rise in the unvaccinated hives but declined in the vaccinated ones. At the end of the study, vaccinated hives had accumulated 83 percent less virus than unvaccinated hives did, Swift said. The number of mites per hive remained the same….
[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Teddy Harvia, Cliff, Kathy Sullivan, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kip W.]
Romance Writers of America Inc. filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Wednesday saying it has lost thousands of members in recent years and can’t pay hotel penalties it owes or expects to owe after failing to fill the contracted number of rooms at its keynote conferences.
…Before 2019, RWA had 10,000 members, but membership has dropped to about 2,000. The organization’s declining membership meant that its long-term conference commitments were “threatening RWA’s ability to continue to operate,” according to its court filings.
The organization estimated that it owes roughly $3 million to the hotels that host its annual writers’ conference and about $74,500 in cash to other creditors. It plans to use its bankruptcy to eliminate the debt to the hotels, and instead institute a three-year payment plan that directs all of the organization’s disposable income to the hotels and other creditors…
Bloomberg Law reports:
The hotel that hosted RWA’s most recent conference has sought more than $700,000 from RWA because it sold fewer rooms than RWA had reserved, and the group expects to lose money on its upcoming 2024 conference in Austin, Texas, as well. RWA also faces a $1 million contract termination demand from the Philadelphia Marriott that is slated to host RWA’s 2025 conference….
…RWA’s lawyer, Carollynn H.G. Callari, said the organization doesn’t expect bankruptcy to impact its day-to-day operations. The Chapter 11 filing is necessary to restructure the group’s legacy obligations, including its conference contracts.
Five years ago, Romance Writers of America suffered a backlash of mass resignations of officers and loss of members following the board’s attempt to censure Courtney Milan. A new board hoped to signal their changing vision for the problem-ridden organization by remaking RWA’s annual awards and naming them after founder Vivian Stephens, an African-American woman (“The Vivian”). However, in their very first year (2020) a controversy led RWA to rescind one of the inaugural awards, given to a western romance whose male protagonist takes part in the Wounded Knee massacre and then is redeemed by religion and the love of a good woman. At the time Kymberlyn Reed tweeted: “A ‘romance’ in which the ‘hero’ commits genocide against Native Americans is honored with an award named after the pioneering Black woman founder of RWA is why the organization continues to bleed membership.”
I don’t agree with the framing of the headline – I left it intact here in quotes because…it’s a choice that speaks volumes. If you lose 70% of your membership to protect the values of the 30% that stays…leadership obviously isn’t representing the interests of the majority.
The case is Romance Writers of America Inc., case number 24-32447, in the US Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of Texas.
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association will posthumously present the 2024 Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award to Jennell Jaquays (1956-2024) at the 59th Annual SFWA Nebula Awards® ceremony on June 8. Her wife, Rebecca Heineman, will accept the award on her behalf.
The Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award is given by SFWA for significant contributions to the science fiction, fantasy, and related genres community. The award was created in 2008, with Wilhelm named as one of the three original recipients, and was renamed in her honor in 2016. Ms. Jaquays joins the ranks of the latest Solstice Award winners, including Cerece Rennie Murphy, Greg Bear, Petra Mayer, Arley Sorg, Troy L. Wiggins, Ben Bova, and Rachel Caine.
Kate Wilhelm’s Solstice Award (2008).
A multi-award winning and honored artist, game designer, editor, and activist, Jennell Jaquays left an indelible mark on the gaming industry and SFF community for nearly fifty years. Ms. Jaquays’ career began in college, when she and her friends created The Dungeoneer, one of the first licensed Dungeons and Dragons fanzines.
Now, from magazines to books, Ms. Jaquays’ art can be seen on multiple covers and throughout the pages of the many different forms and iterations of Dungeons and Dragons’ media. Having designed two modules of her own, “Dark Tower” and “The Caverns of Thracia,” her writing was celebrated by players for eschewing traditional and linear game mechanics and are not only playable today–but continue to inspire game designers and GMs.
Also known for her game industry work at companies such as Coleco, TSR, and id Software, Ms. Jaquays designed and contributed to multiple projects such as Coleco Vision, certain levels on the Quake II and III video games, arcade conversions of Pac-Man and Donkey-Kong, Halo Wars, and created an expansion pack in Age of Empires III.
Ms. Jaquays was nominated for multiple H.G. Wells Awards for her work and creation of the “Dark Tower” D&D module and for her design and illustrations on“Griffin Mountain.” Her work with Coleco’s WarGames won her the 1984 Summer C.E.S. original software award. Additionally, Castle Greyhawk won an Origins Gamer’s Choice Award for Best Role-Playing Adventure, and in 2017, the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts & Design inducted Ms. Jaquays into their Hall of Fame.
Inspired by her own journey, Ms. Jaquays also became a recognized transgender activist, spending time working as the creative director of the Transgender Human Rights Institute.
“A beacon of hope and inspiration, Jennell Jaquays worked tirelessly in the spirit of community while gifting us with her art, her games, and her stories for almost fifty years,” said SFWA Director-at-Large, Monica Valentinelli. “The Board is honored to commemorate Jennell Jaquays and her indelible legacy as an artist, writer, and game designer in the video game and tabletop roleplaying industries.”
All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron Books)
Happiness Falls by Angie Kim (Hogarth)
Murder Book by Thomas Perry (Mysterious)
Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead (Penguin Random House – Doubleday)
BEST FIRST MYSTERY
The Peacock and the Sparrow by I.S. Berry (Atria)
The Golden Gate by Amy Chua (Macmillan Publishing – Minotaur)
Scorched Grace by Margot Douaihy (Zando/Gillian Flynn Books)
Murder by Degrees by Ritu Mukerji (Simon & Schuster)
Dutch Threat by Josh Pachter (Genius Book Publishing)
Mother-Daughter Murder Night by Nina Simon (William Morrow)
BEST MYSTERY SHORT STORY
“Real Courage” by Barb Goffman (Black Cat Mystery Magazine #14, Oct. 2023)
“Green and California Bound” by Curtis Ippolito (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Sept/Oct 2023)
“Ticket to Ride” by Dru Ann Love and Kristopher Zgorski, (Happiness is a Warm Gun: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of The Beatles, ed. Josh Pachter, Down & Out Books)
“Pigeon Tony’s Last Stand” by Lisa Scottoline (Amazon Original Stories)
“One Night in 1965” by Stacy Woodson (More Groovy Gumshoes: Private Eyes in the Psychedelic Sixties, ed. Michael Bracken, Down & Out Books)
SUE FEDER MEMORIAL AWARD FOR BEST HISTORICAL MYSTERY
Time’s Undoing by Cheryl Head (Dutton)
Evergreen by Naomi Hirahara (Soho Crime)
The River We Remember by William Kent Krueger (Simon & Schuster-Atria Books)
Our Lying Kin by Claudia Hagadus Long (Kasva Press)
The Mistress of Bhatia House by Sujata Massey (Soho Crime)
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride (Riverhead Books)
BEST MYSTERY-RELATED NONFICTION/CRITICAL
Finders: Justice, Faith, and Identity in Irish Crime Fiction by Anjili Babbar (Syracuse University Press)
Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction by Max Allan Collins & James L. Traylor (Mysterious Press/Penzler Publishers)
A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe by Mark Dawidziak (St. Martin’s Press)
Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall by Zeke Faux (Crown Currency)
Fallen Angel: The Life of Edgar Allan Poe, by Robert Morgan (LSU Press)
[ANDERS] So one really startling thing in your book is how much of psychological warfare comes out of real science, but kind of twisted sideways. Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays was an innovator of propaganda. Science fiction author Paul Linebarger, aka Cordwainer Smith, wrote a classic book about psychological war. How much of the roots of psyops come from pseudoscience?
[NEWITZ] One way that a psyop can be really effective is if it is crafted to give it the air of authority that comes from science. And of course, psychological warfare grows out of the field of psychology — it’s literally written on the tin. And a lot of these early psychological campaigns that you see in World War I and World War II really are pop psychology — they’re intended to play on people’s fears and neuroses, or their sexual anxities. Like one of the really popular psyops in World War II was telling the U.S. soldiers that bad guys were back home, stealing their women [while they were fighting overseas]. Very simplistic stuff. But remember, this is at the same time that advertising is also using these same techniques and saying, “Sex sells.”
But the other thing that is going on, is that a number of science fiction writers are contributing to propaganda efforts during both World War I and World War II, and up into the present. And what they bring to this project is an interest in how you create a story that’s really immersive and makes your audience feel like it’s real. Science fiction is really good at this because, like pop psychology, it often uses the language of science to bolster realism. Writers will describe faster-than-light ships in great detail, or depict an alien civilization in such concrete ways that you feel like an anthopologist standing there, looking at this alien world.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is off to a disappointing start at the US box office, bringing in $32m (£25m) over the long Memorial Day weekend.
Its takings make it the lowest box office figures for the holiday weekend since Casper debuted to $22.5m (£17.6m) in 1995.
Furiosa only narrowly beat its closest competitor, The Garfield Movie, which made $31.1m (£24.3m).
The figures for the 2024 weekend were significantly down from 2023, when Disney’s The Little Mermaid brought in $118m (£92.4m)….
(3) HISTORY OF SF IN 20 MINUTES. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Moid Moidelhoff over at Media Death Cult takes the brave step of recounting the key moments in the history of SF in a tad over 20 minutes. Some of this is shot on location at the Jodrell Bank radio telescope…(Don’t try this at home….) “The ‘Complete’ History Of Science Fiction”.
Much like the definition of Science Fiction I believe it will forever be impossible to pinpoint exactly when the genre was born it’s an art form that spontaneously emerged from ancient human history the tales of Gilgamesh the epics of Homer and the musings of Aristophanes consider the concept of immortality and the idea of traveling to other Realms and meeting other life forms as far back as the second millennium BC…
The first in a new series, the Captive’s War trilogy, Corey’s The Mercy of Gods tells the story of an alien invasion, the enslavement of a human population, and a scientist’s assistant, Dafyd Alkhor, who stumbles into a deeper mystery. During a recent virtual event, Franck cheekily described the book as “the disappointing love child of Frank Herbert and Ursula Le Guin,” while Abraham said it was a total departure from the types of stories they were able to tell in the Expanse series. “It’s the story of living as a slave in a totalitarian regime,” he said via email. “How you stay true to — and even discover — yourself, how you compromise, how you serve the regime and how you can undermine it.”…
(5) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
May 28, 1984 – Max Gladstone, 40.
By Paul Weimer. My greatest regret in reading Max Gladstone is that I didn’t start reading him sooner.
Max Gladstone in 2022. Photo by Scott Edelman.
When Three Parts Dead, the first in his Craft Sequence novels came out, I was reading other things and left the book alone. I also got some wrong idea about what the book was about and so while Gladstone’s reputation started to grow from that one book, I had not picked up his work at the time.
About a year-and-a-half later, when it was clear there were going to be more Craft books and that a number of people I trust considered him talented, I decided to pick it up. I was immediately struck by the strength of the prose, the complexity of the characters, and the logical and clever way Gladstone went about his worldbuilding. Even more than Tara Abernathy, the protagonist of the book, the other characters of the book, especially Elayne Kevarian, jumped off of the page at me. I began to read and acquire the rest of the Craft Sequence novels as they came out. His willingness to jump in time, focus on various events and characters speaks and sings to my worldbuilding heart, bringing a strong vision of what his world looks like from a variety of diverse perspectives, locales and characters.
The book of his that sings to me the most, however, is none of the Craft Sequence novels, and not the audacious Empress of Forever, but, rather, Last Exit. Readers of this space are well aware of my love of Amber and all things multiversal, long before the multiverse became a thing. Last Exit tells the story of a group of people who, when younger, discovered they could travel alternate worlds. Now, ten years after their last disastrous trip, they have to get the band back together. It is a book that like Amber, or like Zelazny’s Roadmarks, is an ultimate road trip book across realities and worlds. It’s a book with enormous heart, something that is very much at the bottom of Gladstone’s work.
Happy Birthday Max.
(6) COMICS SECTION.
Non Sequitur suggests an addition to book signings that nobody wants.
Based on Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s novel All You Need is Kill, Edge of Tomorrow follows Major William Cage (Tom Cruise), who finds himself drafted into humanity’s ongoing war against a seemingly unstoppable race of hostile aliens called Mimics. Cage is killed in combat, but wakes in a time loop, reliving the same battle day after day. Gradually, he realizes that if he teams up with the decorated war hero Sergeant Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt), he can exploit the time loop to defeat the Mimic army and save the human race.
Edge of Tomorrow was a fantastic Tom Cruise sci-fi movie that blended intense military action with the repeating time-loop narrative structure of Groundhog Day and featured one of the most compelling movie monster species in the Mimics. These were an extraterrestrial species that came to Earth and waged war against humanity and, in Edge of Tomorrow, Cruise’s character of Major William Cage was tasked with facing them time and time again. As an alien race that operated with a hive mind, Mimics were able to rewind time when they were killed and create temporal loops.
Science fiction movies have had countless monsters that have enthralled and terrified filmgoers for generations. While many of the most famous sci-fi monsters, like the Xenomorph or Predator, have continued to appear in sequels and ongoing franchises, other terrifying creatures left their mark in standalone movies. The one-and-done nature of these creatures made them all the more horrifying as the impact of their initial reveal was never lessened by subsequent appearances in later films….
As incredibly large brooding creatures that were hugely agile and possessed numerous tentacles, Mimics would often camaflouge themselves only to emerge and take out their unsuspecting prey. With three connected castes known as Drones, Alpghas, and Omegas, the Mimic species was truly a force to be reckoned with. While plans for an Edge of Tomorrow sequel have been festering for the past 10 years, for now, Mimics stand as one of the best monsters from standalone sci-fi movies.
A trailer has been released for Jon M. Chu’s two-part film adaptation of the Tony award-winning Broadway musical Wicked, which was based on Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. Ariana Grande “is returning to her child-star roots” to play Glinda the Good Witch, with Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba (later known as the Wicked Witch of the West), Jonathan Bailey as Prince Fiyero, and Jeff Goldblum as the Wizard, IndieWire reported.
The cast also includes Michelle Yeoh, Bowen Yang, Peter Dinklage, Adam James, Keala Settle, Bronwyn James, Ethan Slater, and Colin Michael Carmichael. Wicked: Part One premieres November 27 in theaters, with a 2025 holiday season release anticipated for part two.
Chu (In the Heights, Crazy Rich Asians) directs the project, written by Tony nominee Winnie Holzman. “We decided to give ourselves a bigger canvas and make not just one Wicked movie but two!” Chu noted. “With more space, we can tell the story of Wicked as it was meant to be told while bringing even more depth and surprise to the journeys for these beloved characters.”
…The Wizard is uncredited until the final chapter, since part of the “cliffhanger” aspect to this story is the Dynamic Duo trying to figure out who he really is. The initial suspect seems to be the uber-crotchety Professor Hammil (William Fawcett), who has invented a device that allows the user to remote control any vehicle in Gotham City. Not too long after confronting Hammil for the first time, the wheelchair-bound inventor calls our heroes “A pack of careless idiots.” See? Crotchety!
The Wizard steals the device, and starts using it in ever-larger doses to show Batman and the GCPD that he means business. The machine runs on diamonds, so that means he has to steal a lot of them to keep it running. He spends a lot — a lot — of time in his secret cave base flipping switches and turning dials, while letting his fedora-d henchmen do the heavy lifting.
As you can see from the first chapter, where poor Bats has to tilt his head up so he can see through the eye-slits of his dime-store cowl, Batman and Robin is a cheap, cheap affair. Brought to you by the same team that would work on Atom Man vs. Superman, director Spencer Bennet and producer Sam “Eh, Good Enough” Katzman, this 15-chapter adventure has our heroes fighting almost exclusively during the day, which does Batman no favors. Most of the time, he and Robin just look completely ridiculous as they stand around regular citizens, and everyone pretends this is a totally normal set of affairs….
It looks like something out of the dystopian show “Black Mirror,” but it’s just the latest adaptation of robotics for the modern battlefield.
During recent military drills with Cambodia, China’s military showed off a robot dog with an automatic rifle mounted on its back, essentially turning man’s best (electronic) friend into a killing machine.
“It can serve as a new member in our urban combat operations, replacing our (human) members to conduct reconnaissance and identify (the) enemy and strike the target,” a soldier identified as Chen Wei says in a video from state broadcaster CCTV.
The two-minute video made during the China-Cambodia “Golden Dragon 2024” exercise also shows the robot dog walking, hopping, lying down and moving backwards under the control of a remote operator….
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, Rob Jackson, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Teddy Harvia, Kathy Sullivan, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]
[Introduction: Melanie Stormm continues her humorous series of posts about the misdirected emails she’s been getting. Stormm is a multiracial writer who writes fiction, poetry, and audio theatre. Her novella, Last Poet of Wyrld’s End is available through Candlemark & Gleam. She is currently the editor at the SPECk, a monthly publication on speculative poetry by the SFPA.]
ADHD IS EATING THE FUTURE
Hello, All! Melanie here.
When last we left our heroes, they were stranded at a Time Lounge in the future, waiting for a mechanic to repair the time machine that Writer X and Tryxy assembled from parts they had purchased on the internet. X’s boyfriend and fantasy writer, Tod Boadkins, has been writing on X’s behalf since she fell off the clock tower and broke both her wrists in a time travel accident.
X and Tryxy have taken to time traveling again as a means of reversing X’s wrist injuries and also to cheat. Tryxy has had a big show coming up for his band DemonKitty but still hasn’t written any additional material so that they can fill an hour-long set. Rather than buckle down and write music, Tryxy has decided to jump ahead into the future when DemonKitty is on a world tour and get a glimpse of what songs he should be writing.
Unfortunately, writing doesn’t work like this. Not even in the future.
Last week, we learned that Tod believes that Tryxy has ADHD and that he’s worried that Tryxy is jumping through time not because he’s trying to cheat but because the demon is grappling with ADHD overwhelm and paralysis.
Tod’s desperately trying to get Tryxy help, but he needs X’s support to convince Tryxy of this, too.
Without further ado…
Subject: Tod Boadkins is sending you a message courtesy of Time Lounge™
Hi Gladys,
Well, the good news is that I’ve managed to convince X that Tryxy needs help and may have ADHD, but the bad news is much more plentiful. We’re currently in the year 2029, and with world financial markets running so hot, I almost couldn’t afford the fifteen minutes of wifi at the local Time Lounge so that I could send you this message.
Where to begin? After the time mechanic repaired X and Tryxy’s Ghost Time Machine last week, we went jumping year by year through summers looking for a DemonKitty world tour by perusing the top 100 streaming songs looking for “Ninevah Burns In My Soul,” “Meow,” or “Meow Meow.” Basically, all the songs Tryxy has written for DemonKitty so far.
We couldn’t find them, which was disheartening for Tryxy. He’s proud of those songs, and it’s hard for any artist to know that their best work still won’t change things for them.
Meanwhile, we could only average one time jump a day, which meant we spent the better part of the week in the future while DemonKitty’s first festival show got closer and closer in the past—well, in the present: your present; our past.
I was terrified that DemonKitty would No-Show because Tryxy had spent two weeks jumping through time so that he could learn what songs he would write in the future rather than writing them in the present. I shouldn’t have been worried because, when X asked me to check her email the other day, I learned that the festival promoter had gotten fed up with DemonKitty’s lack of communication and dropped them from the festival performer line-up.
This was crushing, but it came at the same time as our landing in 2029 and X discovering this.
When Tryxy saw this, he became convinced that canceling his festival gig would be unimportant. This is a bad idea for any young person to get in their head. X was excited for Tryxy, too, and had come down on his side of things; instead of having a sit down with Tryxy about getting some help in 2024, she spent all yesterday in 2029 looking for tickets to the tour’s opening night in Berlin.
I already mentioned the financial markets; we had to refinance her home to afford the tickets. I asked X if we should be doing this, and her response was, “We’re not refinancing until 2029, so we have until then to change our minds!!!!”
That’s when I cornered her about Tryxy not writing any songs, and she gave me the same logic: “They’re on a world tour in the future, so obviously everything works out.”
And that’s when we found this:
I think Tryxy bombing out his gig in 2024 due to (possible) ADHD is changing the future as I type.
X still wasn’t convinced that not getting your art made could cancel your future as an artist. And I knew that there was no way Tryxy would get help if X didn’t also agree that he needed it, so I had to push on X.
And there goes the second wave of bad news.
The conversation went like this:
X: “Tryxy is just an artistic artist. Artistic artists don’t ‘show up’ and ‘write on demand.'”
Me: “X, I’m an artist. I write. The only way my writing gets done is by me writing.”
X: “You’re an artist, yes, but not an artistic artist like me and Tryxy.”
Me: “What does that even mean?!”
X: “If you were an artistic artist, you’d know.”
Me: “Okay, so what about the fact that we’ve been jumping around space and time for the last two weeks, and Tryxy hasn’t done any homework or checked into any of his college classes? Is that because he’s an artistic student? Will Miskatonic University accept that he’s an ‘artistic’ student who doesn’t get any homework done?”
X lost it. It’s complicated, but I’ll cut to the chase. Some people believe in Santa Claus. Like, they really believe. X believes that all the writing she hasn’t been doing in the last two years will magically get done at some point in the future, and I had to break it to her that if a writer doesn’t write, their writing doesn’t get done.
She wasn’t prepared for this.
“You mean I won’t wake up tomorrow and be famous as the world’s next big epic fantasy writer of all time because I didn’t write anything for the last two years????”
She spent the last six hours completely unconsolable, sobbing into a pillow and singing “Rudolph the Rednose Reindeer” as a funeral dirge.
But I’ve gotten through to her that Tryxy might not be doing his homework or writing music because he needs help.
Sometimes, it’s hard for a writer to know if they’re not writing because they aren’t showing up for themselves or because they need help.
I wish we had figured this out a week ago. Tomorrow morning, we’ll take the last of the home equity loan, take Tryxy to breakfast, and talk about his future.
The Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers is pleased to announce the second annual Wayward Wormhole, this time in New Mexico. Join us for the short story workshop to study with Arley Sorg and Minister Faust, or the novel workshop with Donald Maass, C.C. Finlay, and Cat Rambo.
Both intensive workshops will be hosted at the Painted Pony ranch in Rodeo, New Mexico. The short story workshop runs November 4-12, 2024, and the novel workshop runs November 15 through 24, 2024.
(2) EARLY ENTRY ON THE 2024 BUSINESS MEETING AGENDA. Linda Deneroff, Alexia Hebel, Kevin Standlee, and Kevin Black have submitted to the Glasgow 2024 Business Meeting an amendment to the WSFS Constitution to restore “supporting” and “attending” to replace “WSFS Membership” and “Attending Supplement”.
Short Title: The Way We Were
Moved, to amend the WSFS Constitution by striking out and inserting the following:
Moved: To replace WSFS Membership with Supporting Membership wherever it appears in the Constitution, and to replace Attending Supplement with Attending Membership, including all similar variations of the words (e.g., WSFS Memberships, WSFS members, attending supplement) to their grammatically correct replacements.
Proposed by: Linda Deneroff, Alexia Hebel, Kevin Standlee, and Kevin Black
Commentary: Since both terms involved the word “Membership” there has been a lot of confusion among people purchasing memberships who do not understand why they have to purchase a “second” membership, or why they have to buy a “WSFS membership” in the first place. Under the original terminology, the price of an attending membership was inclusive of the support price.
Any reimbursement restrictions could still remain in place, with the price of the supporting portion of the attending membership deducted from any refund.
(3) IF IT’S NOT MADE IN MIDDLE-EARTH, IT’S CRAP! “Why Do Dwarves Sound Scottish and Elves Sound Like Royalty?” While Atlas Obscura tries to say Tolkien had a lot to do with it, their evidence shows it’s not his books but the filmmakers who adapted them that are the greatest influence.
…Of course the original readers couldn’t hear what Tolkien’s creatures sounded like, but the intense focus he placed on developing their languages gave people a pretty good idea. “Tolkien was a philologist,” says Olsen.“This is what he did. He studied language and the history of language and the changing of language over time.”
Tolkien would create languages first, then write cultures and histories to speak them, often taking inspiration from the sound of an existing language. In the case of the ever-present Elvish languages in his works, Tolkien took inspiration from Finnish and Welsh. As the race of men and hobbits got their language from the elves in Tolkien’s universe, their language was portrayed as similarly Euro-centric in flavor.
For the dwarves, who were meant to have evolved from an entirely separate lineage, he took inspiration from Semitic languages for their speech, resulting in dwarven place names like Khazad-dûm and Moria….
… However, the dwarves of the Lord of the Rings movies don’t speak with an Israeli accent, and the elves of Warcraft don’t have a Finnish inflection. This comes down to the differences between how Tolkien portrayed his fantasy races and how he imagined they should talk, and the readers’ interpretation….
There are a lot of movie series that made it through four or five entries as an unusual rotating showcase for different directors before giving in to the temptation to re-hire past successes. I still love the Alien and Mission: Impossible movies dearly, but they’ve also made me extra-grateful for the rare franchise that has managed to never repeat a director or major (human) cast member. I’m talking – for now – about the Predator movies, the B-movie little siblings to the classier, weirder, more thought-provoking A-list Alien. Only one is bad – the second Alien vs Predator match-up, nonsensically subtitled Requiem. All of the rest, where various badass aliens hunt various opponents (including Arnold Schwarzeneggar, Danny Glover, Olivia Munn, the xenomorph and Adrien Brody, among others) for sport, filter their premise through a different vision of monster-movie splendor. On one level, you always know what you’ll get: clicky noises, gory deaths, those triangle laser-sight things. Yet the specifics have plenty of wiggle room: should they be scary, funny or nasty? Action, horror or sci-fi? It’s a throwback to when movie franchises knew their place as fun programmers, rather than tentpole sagas. Alas, Dan Trachtenberg is about to become the first Predator director to return to the series. He did a great job with the entertaining Prey; it’s just a shame for the series to lose its constant one-and-done churn. For now, I’ll continue to savor those no-nonsense weirdos with the ugly mandibles and over-elaborate armor, and their accidental compatibility with B-movie auteurism. Jesse Hassenger
(5) THAT 70’S ART. This link assembles many examples of “Space Bar” themed examples of “70s Sci-Fi Art”. (And from later, too).
(6) JOHNNY WACTOR (1986-2024). Best known for his work in daytime TV, Johnny Wactor was reportedly killed by thieves on May 25. The New York Times’ summary shows he also had roles in several genre series.
Johnny Wactor, an actor best known for his role in “General Hospital,” was shot and killed on Saturday, reports said, amid what his family described as an attempted theft of a catalytic converter in Los Angeles.
Ms. Wactor said her son thought his car was being towed at first, and when he approached the person to ask, the person “looked up, he was wearing a mask, and opened fire.”
Mr. Wactor … also appeared in episodes of “Westworld,” “The OA” and “Station 19.”
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
May 27, 1934 – Harlan Ellison. (Died 2018.)
By Paul Weimer. Or, even though he has passed away, he still might sue me from beyond the grave, so Harlan Ellison® .
My reading of Harlan Ellison® was benefited to me thanks to my older brother, whom I have mentioned earlier in this space was mainly responsible for me to get into science fiction and fantasy, and his bookshelf were my early steps into the genre. As it so happened, he had a fair number of the extant Harlan Ellison® short story collections. So very early on in my SFF reading, I did come across “I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream” “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes” and other SFF stories of his. At that early age, I found few SFF short story writers that could match him.
Harlan Ellison at the ABA convention; Larry and Marilyn Niven behind him: Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.
And I learned, thanks to the collections my brother had, that Harlan Ellison® wrote far more than SFF short stories. I’m not even talking about his movie or television scripts. Ellison is the first SFF author who I read non-SFF work by. I read The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat. I read and reread his criticism of television and cinema and began to understand the wide range of his talent. When I discovered he wrote mimetic short stories, and horror short stories as well, there was a point that I wondered what Ellison didn’t excel at as a writer in the short form.
My favorite Harlan Ellison® is not “Mouth” because I think that is just too easy an answer. I have a fondness for the sadness of “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes” and the tragic fate of the protagonist. “Jeffty is Five” breaks my heart every time I read it. “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” moved me, even though I was too young to know it was a take on the Kitty Genovese murder.
I will reach more deeply and go with “Paladin”, which I saw first as the Twilight Zone episode “Paladin of the Lost Hour” and then later read the Hugo winning novelette. It’s a poignant story, with some of the sadness and gray veil that you find in some of Ellison’s work. It’s as if Harlan Ellison® is grabbing me by the collar and shouting. “Feel something, you coward. Feel something!”. The anger of raging against the dying of the light and being angry when people shoulder-shrug, give up, and shuffle along? I may not have ever met Harlan Jay Ellison®, but I think Paladin helps you feel just how powerful, angry, and potent a writer he was. Love him or hate him, his work could not and would not be ignored.
I think there are definite periods and waves of Harlan Ellison® ‘s work. And like another sui generis artist, David Bowie, you probably will find a wave or period of Harlan Ellison® that you will like best. Not all of his oeuvre worked for me, there is a definite band I like, and a narrower (but not narrow) band that I really like. This may be the consequence of his extensive oeuvre and constant ability to change and try and write new things, or rewrite old things in a new way. Restless, Angry, Raging. Potent.
I loved his cameo on Babylon 5 which he served as a creative consultant and wrote an episode “A View from The Gallery”. (Which may mean that we have Harlan Ellison® to thank for Lower Decks, which is to Star Trek that this episode is to the rest of Babylon 5.)
That, my friends, is the work of Harlan Ellison®
Harlan Ellison in 2014 at Creation event in Las Vegas.
(9) ANOTHER HARLAN TRIBUTE. Janis Ian marked Harlan Ellison’s 90th with this tribute on Facebook.
In my life, there have been very few colleagues who viscerally understand having been an “enfant terrible”. Even fewer that lived up to their promise. And even fewer who continued to be brave, and bold, fearlessly speaking out despite the consequences.
Today is the birthday of my late friend Harlan Ellison. A writer who completely understood what it was like for me at the age of 15, when “Society’s Child” became a hit. Unable to connect with most of my peers because of the experiences I was having, unable to much time with those I could connect with, who were always 5 to 10 years older and usually on the road.
Harlan understood better than most that Fame hadn’t changed me, it had changed the people around me. And he understood the impossibility of living up to the expectations placed on me because of my innate talent and ability.
He could be an unbelievable pain in the rear. He could be absolutely impossible. He could be rude and obnoxious and he did not suffer fools. God help you if you annoyed him. But to me, he was unfailingly courteous, generous, kind, and giving. I miss him more than I can say, and I regret the years I did not know him.
Marie Brennan has been publishing short SF and Fantasy (mostly Fantasy, I think) for a couple of decades, after winning the Asimov’s Undergraduate Award back in 2003. (That’s an award which spurred some excellent careers over time — writers like Rich Larson, Marissa Lingen, Eric Choi, and Seth Dickinson are also among the past winners.)…
…The two books [Cold-Forged Flame, and Lightning in the Blood] concern Ree, whom we meet “coming into existence” as Cold-Forged Flame opens. She has no idea of her name, only a dim sense of her abilities (she is a warrior, for one thing) and of her character (suspicious, prickly) — but also aware that she is bound to do what the nine people who have summoned her ask. After some debate, she learns what these people want: she must go and bring back a vial of blood from the cauldron of the Lhian. And, in exchange, they offer her her freedom — and, but only after the fact, what knowledge they have of her … history. To tell too much in advance would harm her, they suggest….
…In Appendix C of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien explained the in-universe origin of the surname Gamgee. It came from the family’s ancestral village of Gamwich, which meant “game village” in the language of the hobbits. Over time, the name Gamwich evolved into Gamidge and later to Gamgee. This was one of many examples of the great amount of thought and effort that went into even the tiniest worldbuilding details of The Lord of the Rings. However, this backstory was a retroactive explanation that Tolkien came up with long after settling on the name Sam Gamgee for his story’s deuteragonist. The real-world basis for Sam’s surname was more unusual, and its origins predated Tolkien’s conception of Middle-earth.
Gamgee is a real — albeit uncommon — surname. In fact, in 1956, a man named Sam Gamgee wrote a letter to Tolkien after learning that a character in The Lord of the Rings shared his name. Tolkien was surprised and delighted by this coincidence. Since the real Sam had not read the novel for himself, Tolkien assured him that the fictional Sam was “a most heroic character, now widely beloved by many readers” and offered to send him a copy of the book. In Tolkien’s response, he also explained the reason that he chose to use the name. It was a long story that began with a famous surgeon: Dr. Joseph Sampson Gamgee.
Born in 1828, Joseph Gamgee made major strides in the field of aseptic surgery, the practice of ensuring that a doctor’s hands and tools remain sanitary during medical procedures….
(12) WOLFE PACK ON LOCATION. Black Gate has Bob Byrne’s newest installment of “Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone”: “Welcome to Kanawha Spa – The Wolfe Pack 2024 Greenbrier Weekend”. He joined the Wolfe Pack for a descent on the West Virginia resort featured in Too Many Cooks.
…Trish [Parker] is the resident Greenbrier historian. She is also a Wolfe fan! She gave a really cool presentation that talked about the Greenbrier, the logistics of of other locations (Barry Tolman was NOT going to make that court session he was pressing to be at), and other related information.
I loved it! It was really neat. Especially as she knew the story. I really enjoyed it. She took a couple questions and got a healthy round of applause.
Intelligence Guided by Experience – A question I heard more than once over the weekend was, “Did Rex Stout stay here before he wrote the book?” While the thought seemed to be, ‘Probably, as he knew the place pretty well.’ it’s unknown. The records from that early have been lost over the years. No proof he had been to the Greenbrier….
[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Rob Jackson, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Teddy Harvia, Kathy Sullivan, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]
Susan and Harlan Ellison in 2014. Photo by Steve Barber.
What Harlan Ellison (STILL) Means To Me
By Chris M. Barkley
“The only thing worth writing about is people. People. Human beings. Men and women whose individuality must be created, line by line, insight by insight. If you do not do it, the story is a failure. […] There is no nobler chore in the universe than holding up the mirror of reality and turning it slightly, so we have a new and different perception of the commonplace, the everyday, the ‘normal’, the obvious. People are reflected in the glass. The fantasy situation into which you thrust them is the mirror itself. And what we are shown should illuminate and alter our perception of the world around us. Failing that, you have failed totally.”
― Harlan Ellison
And what exactly is the art of writing? Because people have been freaking out over the process for many millennia.
Including myself.
Until I had a near-death experience at the age of forty in October of 1996, I hadn’t really given the matter much thought. But surviving that event, the cataclysmic, coma induced diabetic, bitch slap my body gave me for abusing it so terribly for decades, was enough to give me pause about who I was and what I wanted to do with whatever time I had left on this mortal coil.
Writing, which until that point in my life had been an interesting little sidebar I dabbled in, became an integral and driving force since then.
The late William H. Gass (1924-2017), who is still regarded in many circles as one of the most highly regarded literary writers who ever lived, compared the process of writing to alchemy, saying, “The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.”
Which brings us to the late Harlan Ellison, whose 90th birthday we celebrate today. He had an entirely different take on the matter:
“Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you – as if you haven’t been told a million times already – that writing is harder. Lonelier. And nobler and more enriching.”
–– Harlan Ellison
With all due respect to Mr. Gass, I’m siding with Mr. Ellison on this point.
Harlan Ellison. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.
To say that Harlan Jay Ellison was, no, wait, still is, a huge influence in my life would be a huge understatement. In going through my archives of my memories of him, I came across this, one of my favorite anecdotes about him, that directly affected me, can be found in my 2019 Windycon Fan Guest of Honor Speech, which is linked here.
I first met Harlan in 1978 at Kubla Khan 5 in Nashville, Tennessee. Like countless other people, I found him to be a brilliant writer of fiction and essays, a dynamic personality and above nearly all of his other talents, an amazing and brilliant raconteur.
One story he shared with the audience at that convention was burned into my synapses forever, an incident he had experienced at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. Harlan had just finished doing his “business” in a washroom when he noticed out of the corner of his eye that a middle-aged patron was leaving without washing his hands.
Now THIS greatly offended Harlan since, if anything, he was a real stickler for health and cleanliness.
“Hey! You”, he said in his loud, nasally, faux-Brooklyn accent. “You forgot to wash your hands!”
The man in question turned and said something incredibly rude about Harlan’s parentage and proceeded to walk out into the terminal.
Enraged at this person’s intransigence, Harlan burst out of the restroom and trailed behind the man screaming at the top of his lungs, “UNCLEAN, UNCLEAN! DON’T TOUCH HIM! HE DIDN’T WASH HIS HANDS!”
And he did this. All the way to this person’s departure gate.
Now, I told you that story to tell you this one: For Chicon 2000, I was promoted from my regular duties in the Worldcon Press Office to serve on Chairman Tom Veal’s staff AND as the Fairmont Hotel liaison. It was a very important position, which I shared with my ex-wife, in that both the Masquerade and the Hugo Award Ceremony were being held there.
One afternoon, I was finishing my “business” in the restroom, when I noticed out of the corner of my eye, a middle-aged fan was leaving without washing his hands.
My mind immediately flashed back to Harlan’s story. My first thought was, I am NOT Harlan Ellison. And then my second thought was, “What would Harlan do?”
So, within a few seconds, I screwed up my moral courage and, in my even tempered, faux-midwestern black accent, I spoke up and said, “Excuse me, but you forgot to wash your hands.”
The fan whirled around and shouted, “YOU’RE NOT MY DAD!”
Needless to say, I was taken aback. But fortunately, my skills as a radio talk show host and a standup comedian kicked into high gear:
“You see this?” I pointed to the bright blue COMMITTEE ribbon hanging on my convention badge and stated with absolute authority:
“While you’re here at this convention, this ribbon says I AM YOUR DAD!!”
The fan sighed, turned and washed his hands.
“You must never be afraid to go there.”
― Harlan Ellison
Harlan Ellison. Photo by Jill Bauman.
I have recounted here before that the very first story of his I read was in the summer of 1972 (courtesy of my good friend and fellow File 770 columnist Michaele Jordan), was one his most infamous stories, the 1969 novella “A Boy and His Dog”. It featured in her paperback copy of the 1970 edition of World’s Best Science Fiction edited by Donald Wollheim and Terry Carr. Needless to say, my fifteen-year-old mind was blown wide open.
(I tend to think she gave me this particular story to read ON PURPOSE, like a good friend should. Thanks Again, Michaele…)
Harlan Ellison immediately became, and in many ways still is, my favorite writer. And it was a great time to discover his works; Again, Dangerous Visions and Alone Against Tomorrow (1972), Approaching Oblivion (1974), Deathbird Stories and No Door, No Windows (1975), The Illustrated Harlan Ellison and Strange Wine (1978) and that’s only the fiction published during that period.
After devouring those books, I went back and discovered earlier collections; Ellison Wonderland, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream and The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World amaze me to this day.
And who am I to argue that “‘Repent, Harlequin!’, Said the Ticktockman” is NOT one of the greatest short stories ever written?
Harlan’s non-fiction works, such as his fascinating books of essays on television, The Glass Teat (1970) and The Other Glass Teat (1975), gave me some very up close and personal observations of the television industry and the media manipulations of that era that still serve me well to this day.
“The trick is not becoming a writer. The trick is staying a writer.”
— Harlan Ellison, Strange Wine
Of course, I, like many people before me, tried to imitate his style. And, like those countless other writers, found that this was an incredibly foolish endeavor. Because there was, is, only one Harlan Ellison. You can write as sharply, angry and curmudgeonly as you like but there is no way anyone, myself included, can duplicate Harlan’s life, education, perceptions and experiences into words.
The lesson that I learned was that I needed to write what I feel, what I have experienced, what I have felt and what I know to be true.
And the hard truth was that for decades, I was afraid to express myself, in my writing or in real life. But, as I grew older, I eventually realized that Harlan also was right in another regard; embracing and wrestling with one’s fears and overcoming them not only led me to be a better writer, but to being a better person as well.
In the numerous times I saw Harlan Ellison in person, either on university tours or at conventions, he frequently claimed, over and over again, that he NEVER wrote ‘science fiction”, per se. Some people, lesser literary minds one might say, just perceived and labeled his fiction that way, much to his frustration:
“What I write is hyperactive magic realism. I take the received world and I reflect it back through the lens of fantasy, turned slightly so you get a different portrait.”
— Harlan Ellison
And Harlan hated, hated, HATED the artificial neologism “sci-fi” and constantly being called a “sci-fi writer” (even up to and, unfortunately, after his death) was one of the worst insults he had to endure. In my earliest encounters with him, he passed along this intense dislike directly to me. To this day, I’d rather eat a raw onion and gummy worm sandwich than have that (alleged) word pass my lips.
Six years ago, a commenter named Joe Adams wrote one of the most succinct and elegant answer as to why Harlan felt that way that I have ever read, excerpted here from Quora:
“Harlan objected to the term because it restricted writers in flexibility and in payscale. Sci-Fi was the cheap spaceships, rayguns, and aliens cranked out for pulps and comic books. It was low-paying and serious authors, like himself or Philip K. Dick, were the Rodney Dangerfields of writing – “No Respect.” And tiny paychecks…I can’t say he single handedly changed the face of 21st Century fiction, but he is closer to that claim than anyone else I can think of. He shepherded new talent, chided the old, and cranked out his own hundred-plus title bibliography at the same time…He brought a simple concept to the Science Fiction/Speculative Fiction arena – be a Mensch. Stand up for what you believe, show up for what you believe, put your money where your mouth is, complete what you start, and take as good as you give.
Society at large is welcome to use it on a regular basis but, like Harlan, I remain steadfast in my utter revulsion of it.
“Like a wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we were, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment.”
― Harlan Ellison
Harlan Ellison in 1981. Photo by Marsha Traeger for the LA Times.
Here’s something weird; in examining my life, I have found some strange and opposing parallels in my life and Harlan’s:
Harlan was white and Jewish, I am black and raised catholic.
Harlan was born in Painesville, Ohio (near Cleveland) and I was born almost directly southwest from him in the other corner of Ohio, in Cincinnati.
In his youth, Harlan could recite, from memory, the starting lineup of the 1948 World Champion Cleveland Indians of the American League (now, thankfully, the Guardians). I can still name the Great Eight lineup of the 1975-1976 double World Champion Cincinnati Reds (AKA, the Big Red Machine).
Harlan was well known as a double threat, writing fiction and non-fiction in great quantities. I am only known for my smaller amount of social activism in fandom and these columns.
Harlan earned an enormous amount of money (by my standards) during his lifetime. I have never accepted a dime for anything I’ve written (so far).
Harlan has won a ton of awards and accolades, I have (allegedly) won only one Hugo Award.
Harlan relished performing for the public and being in the spotlight and the center of attention. And while I have given speeches and have spoken on both radio and television, I prefer observing than being observed.
Harlan ADORED his Olympia typewriters and the way it felt when he was writing. I, on the other hand, am happy and grateful to be using word processors, tablets and laptops.
Harlan often wrote in the nude. I, fortunately, never developed this habit.
Harlan never had any children. I have a daughter (Hi, Laura!) and have been graced with four grandchildren; Lilly, Atlas, Navia and Bowie.
Harlan (and his lovely partner in life, Susan) have left the building. And I remain, mourning their absence.
“The passion for revenge should never blind you to the pragmatics of the situation. There are some people who are so blighted by their past, so warped by experience and the pull of that silken cord, that they never free themselves of the shadows that live in the time machine…
And if there is a kind thought due them, it may be found contained in the words of the late Gerald Kersh, who wrote:”… there are men whom one hates until a certain moment when one sees, through a chink in their armour, the writhing of something nailed down and in torment.”
― Harlan Ellison, from The Essential Ellison: A 50 Year Retrospective
Susan and Harlan Ellison. Photo by Annie Fishbein.
Harlan Ellison was not a perfect person. I have witnessed and read about his public mistakes and social faux pas. We know now, after the fact, that he suffered from a myriad of various illnesses and maladies. It does not excuse some of his behavior and we don’t need to recount them here. I tend to think he would loathe being called a role model for anyone or any cause.
I, too, have made mistakes in my life. I often cringe at the thought of them when I dredge them up out of my memory banks.
But here’s the thing; in the wake of those actions, for good or for ill, he strived to move forward. In the end, it was his will to do that, no matter what the odds, to do better and be better. And I have as well.
That’s a lesson that’s worth remembering.
“To say more is to say less.”
― Harlan Ellison
I do not consider myself to be a follower, disciple or an acolyte of Harlan Ellison. I am a reader and a writer.
To me, Harlan’s greatest legacy is as a teacher; to write clear and understandable prose, to stand up for what you believe, to give no quarter or comfort to those who would oppress another person’s rights and to rally against censorship, lies and disinformation at every opportunity.
How should we honor the memory of Harlan Ellison?
By remembering.
By remembering his countless acts of kindness towards his fans and colleagues.
By remembering his works and keeping them in print for others to discover.
By remembering that while you are alive, each day brings an opportunity to be better AND do better, for yourself, the people in your life and even for random people who need your help, today and every day that follows.
Remember Harlan Ellison’s epitaph, the very last words that he wanted to be known by:
“For a brief time I was here, and for a brief time, I mattered.”
