City of Bones by Martha Wells (Originally published in 1995; revised edition from Tordotcom in 2023)
Review by Warner Holme: Martha Wells’ City of Bones is an early entry in the bibliography of a woman who has become a major name in science fiction and fantasy today. Having bounced briefly between publishers, even the introduction’s note that it started out at Tor Books decades ago and ended up at Tordotcom is amusing.
The book handles Fallen World fantasy better than most, giving clear depictions of science that might be magic and Magic that might be science in turn. Certain elements might even fit into the Lovecraft-lite genres, although influence could just as if not more likely be taken from Raiders of the Lost Ark. At the same time, and in spite of certain implications to the contrary, it never flirts with being the particular kind of post-apocalypse one might find in Vampire Hunter D or The Chronicles of Shannara.
Much of the volume centers around an individual named Khat. In what will surely feel like it was echoed with the Murderbot Diaries, he is a member of a species or race, the line is left somewhat ambiguous, who works in recovering and selling relics wild part of the lower class of the City of Charisat. Wild pieces of the world are explained in a slow and steady way that seems natural to the narrative, it’s still manages to pretty quickly build up the fact that whether magical or machines there are a variety of relics considered powerful, some of them actually so and others seemingly more symbolically or out of assumption.
A character given almost as much time but, amusingly, no mention in the advertising matter is Elen. She serves as part of a particular group known as Warders, and spends a fair amount of it accompanying Khat in an effort to discover a series of powerful artifacts that seem likely to be used to create something known as an “arcane engine” which has the highest echelons of the city more than a little curious about their potential. Fitting in with a common trope to a certain era of fantasy, Elen is the first woman Warder. She has confidence issues, while also understanding that the reason there aren’t more of them has a lot to do with the fact the people in the selection process are all men and few seem to have a desire to elevate women.
This small detail combines with others in a way that will help readers see an early example of the cultural criticism which Martha Wells has so readily incorporated into her work. Still it feels well built into this setting, and women with power are certainly present in different forms. Questions of class and cultural bias, down to certain disturbing details for the lives of minorities considered “exotic” all play roles in the pages.
The new edition by Tordotcom is a somewhat revised and expanded version and compared to what came before us slightly more polished though never strays from feeling like a relatively early work by a well-known author. The stylistic flares, a particular love for worlds that feel subtly or wholly culturally influenced by real world regions, and the use of not quite human characters to demonstrate human foibles are just the least amongst these.
Fans of Martha Wells should of course pick up this book. It’s a delightful early example of her material, updated and revised in a way that could make it seen as something of the author’s preferred text. While there is a short new author’s note and about the author section, this is not by any means an annotated volume which will reveal vast new secrets to the reader.
(1) TOMLINSON AND ROBINSON SUE MILWAUKEE. In February, Patrick Tomlinson and his partner, Niki Robinson filed a lawsuit against the City of Milwaukee over the multiple instances of swatting: “Robinson v. City of Milwaukee, 2:24-cv-00264”. At the link you can download (free) the original and amended complaints.
The amended complaint filed May 1 details several experiences with swatting, and in addition to the City of Milwaukee names 10 police officers as defendants. Here is an excerpt:
1. Niki Robinson and Patrick Tomlinson are the targets of a vicious campaign of domestic terrorism, carried out at the hands of a group of bullies who hide behind the anonymity of the internet.
2. The bullies’ main weapon of choice is something called “swatting,” which is when someone who wants to endanger the life and safety of another calls 911 and lies to provoke a dangerous police response to the victim’s home….
…11. Niki and Patrick have tried to work with the City of Milwaukee to stop this, but the City of Milwaukee failed to adopt a policy or train its officers on how to prevent Niki and Patrick’s stalkers from using the police department as a tool of terror.
12. And while many of the police officers who have responded to Patrick and Niki’s home have been kind, understanding, and compassionate, others have not.
13. The worst offender is Sergeant Lyndon Evans.
14. On three occasions, Sergeant Evans responded to a swatting call with abuse and violence.
15. Sergeant Evans told Niki and Patrick that he was “well aware” of the situation, but still demanded to be let inside their home, going so far as to threaten to break down the front door if he was not allowed inside.
16. Niki and Patrick live in a constant state of fear, worried that the next encounter they have with the police will be their last.
17. Every knock on the door or police car that drives by leaves them terrified that they are about to be staring down an officer’s gun or that they will be paraded outside in handcuffs to their further humiliation.
18. This lawsuit seeks to end the madness and vindicate the violation of Plaintiffs’ constitutional rights. It seeks to effect change through punitive damages by punishing the Defendants for their egregious conduct with the hope that the punishment is significant enough to prevent this from happening again in the future…
A dozen years after its first crowdfunding campaign, the first installment of Marc Scott Zicree’s Space Command has been released, with several Star Trek actors in the cast. “Space Command: Redemption” is out now on Tubi, VOD, and physical media, with more installments from the series in the works.
Space Command is a sci-fi series inspired by Star Trek. The ensemble cast for “Space Command: Redemption” features Star Trek: Discovery’s Doug Jones in a leading role. Other franchise stars include Robert Picardo (Voyager), Armin Shimerman (Deep Space Nine), Faran Tahir (J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek), and the late Nichelle Nichols (TOS). The cast also includes several Babylon 5 stars including Bill Mumy, Bruce Boxleitner, and the late Mira Furlan….
(3) I, THE JURY. Alec Nevala-Lee shared with Facebook readers that he was part of a Pulitzer Prize jury this year.
Now that the list of winners has been announced, I can reveal a very cool fact: I served on the jury for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Biography! I spent much of last year reading through dozens of books with four other jurors, and I’m delighted to finally share the titles we chose: KING by Jonathan Eig, MASTER SLAVE HUSBAND WIFE by Ilyon Woo, and LARRY MCMURTRY by Tracy Daugherty.
(4) SFF POETS TAKE UP AI ISSUE. The Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA) Executive Committee and key volunteers have put together two options for the SFPA to adopt as its policy regarding works derived from generative tools (including AI, large language models, etc).
Members have been sent an introductory statement and have until May 22 to vote for one of three options:
The Voter’s Packet for the Hugo Awards will be released shortly and made available to all members of Glasgow Worldcon. As is traditional, Nerds of a Feather has put together a compilation of what we feel represents the best and the breadth of our collective work published in 2023. While the purpose of the Voter’s Packet is to help eligible voters make an informed decision when casting their ballots, we are also making the packet available to all of our readers who may want to take a look back at what we did last year….
…If you have a trusted beta reader, someone who you know knows books, knows story, knows the genre you’re writing in, and you know that person to be smart and creative, capable of giving you solid advice, then wow—congratulations. Hold that person close. Give them gifts of frankincense and myrrh.
But unfortunately, most of the people we know can not reasonably be described in such glowing terms. I wish I could remember who it was, decades ago that, in a documentary about screenwriting, described the focus group as:
The uninformed reporting on the unknowable to the unimaginative.
…but that pretty much nails it. And what are beta readers or our writers group friends but a focus group? In Story Trumps Structure, Steven James wrote on the subject of beta readers:
I can’t think of any other field in which people who aren’t experts critique other people who aren’t experts in the hope of everyone becoming an expert.
Yes, people chosen at random or from a pool of friends and family may have opinions, but do they have informed opinions? And if they say something akin to “I didn’t get it,” “I liked it, I guess,” “It was really creative!” and so on (you know you’ve seen stuff like this) sans detail or actionable advice, well… does that help?…
I’m in a weird place professionally. To get a job in publishing, it’s pretty much imperative that you stay abreast of recent trends and read voraciously from current frontlist books. And I certainly try. But left to my own devices, I inevitably end up crawling back to New Wave sci-fi like a starving flatworm whose only brain cell yearns for stream-of-consciousness novellas about interdimensional alien sex written fifty years ago by chainsmokers in dagger-collared shirts.
If you share my foibles, or if you’re simply in a reading rut, you’d be hard-pressed to find something more exciting than Five Fates. Not only does it boast a sci-fi supergroup (Frank Herbert, Harlan Ellison, Poul Anderson, Gordon Dickson, and Keith Laumer), it provides a fascinating snapshot of where speculative fiction was “at” during a pivotal moment of the genre’s history….
…Five Fates, published in 1970, positions itself firmly in this mindfuck vein of the New Wave. Per the jacket copy, it’s “one of the most bizarre and original fictional concepts ever created,” a showcase opportunity for five of spec fic’s foremost writers to go absolutely wild. Its biggest names are red-hot at the time of publication: Frank Herbert has just finished Dune Messiah, and Harlan Ellison is in the midst of his decade-long, nearly-unbroken Hugo streak (he’s hard at work, the back cover informs us, on Again, Dangerous Visions.)
The central concept of Five Fates is this: all five contributors were sent the same disturbing prompt — in some dystopic world, a man named William Bailey is admitted to a Euthanasia Center and killed. The surrounding questions — how did he get there? how did society descend to this point? is there an afterlife? — are left up to the writers to flesh out. Each of the five resulting novelettes (which average around 30 pages) offers a vastly different concept, style, and literary goal. It’s a literary blunt rotation/samsara, a hallucinogenic journey that produces several great tales and one masterpiece….
For Reason’sJune 2024 special issue on AI, all of our brief reviews involve AI in some form or another. Of course, we decided to ask an AI to write one of the reviews. Since X’s AI is named Grok, after the term coined by sci-fi author Robert Heinlein in Stranger in a Strange Land, it was only natural that we’d ask Grok to write a review of another Heinlein novel, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. See what Grok wrote for us below….
This week on Planetary Radio, we celebrate the longest-running science fiction show in history, “Doctor Who.” We explore how this iconic series has influenced the scientific community and look forward to the new season of the show with Russell T. Davies, the past and present showrunner of “Doctor Who.” Then, space fans from around the world share how the show has impacted their lives and space careers. We close out with Bruce Betts, our chief scientist, as we discuss what we would do with a time machine in What’s Up.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born May 8, 1940 — Peter Benchley. (Died 2006.) Yes, Peter Benchley, the writer responsible for Jaws. I’ll get to that in a minute. Really I will. Trust me.
Although Jaws is what he’s best remembered for, his work that has been adapted for film and television includes genre: Beast, Creature, The Deep, The Island and White Shark. He has one film work of interest at least to me that’s non-genre, Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, about writer Dorothy Parker and the members of the Algonquin Round Table.
Peter Benchley
So, let’s look at some of his novels other than Jaws. Jaws was his first and his second was a more or less an adventure genre novel, The Deep, of treasure hunters who discover Spanish treasure. Well and drugs. Then it gets complicated. Columbia Pictures purchased the rights to it even before its publication, hiring Benchley to write a screen adaptation.
The Island, several years later, is effectively genre as it has two elements that are fantastic. One is that is a lost colony of pirates that have remained undetected since the establishment of their pirate enclave by Jean-David Nau, the notorious buccaneer L’Olonnais, in 1671; second is a sort of Logan’s Run premise is that the pirates kill anyone over thirteen that they capture. It too would be filmed.
In Beast — and none of his titles will win awards for originality, will they? — a fishing community in Bermuda is disrupted by a series of mysterious disappearances at sea. Think large sea monster and you wouldn’t be wrong. Yes once again it became a film.
White Shark does not feature a shark, despite what the title suggests. It has Nazis and biological weapons with nary a shark to bite into anyone, not even a Nazi, the pity. To avoid confusion and to capitalize on the miniseries adaptation, the book was republished as Creature. It was also a film called, errr, White Shark.
Which brings us to Jaws. It was published fifty years ago, his first novel. It was an outgrowth of his interest of the experiences of Montauk, New York shark fisherman Frank Mundus. Doubleday gave him a rather nice advance to write the novel while he was he was still a freelance journalist.
Despite critics generally hating it, it did exceptionally well with the reading public as Doubleday undertook an extraordinary publicity campaign including getting it adopted by book clubs everywhere. As a result, it stayed on bestseller lists for nearly a year, and millions of copies of the paperback edition were sold.
Jaws is definitely horror. With Very Big Teeth. Lots Of Sharp Pointy Ones. Now that we’ve got that Very Important Fact out of the way, let’s talk about it.
It premiered forty-seven years ago on this date. It was Spielberg’s first major film after directing such things as episodes of Night Gallery,The Name of the Game, Columbo, and the rather excellent Sugarland Express.
The screenplay is credited to Peter Benchley. He wrote the first draft here, and actor-writer Carl Gottlieb who’s Harry Meadows here and was Ugly John in the MASH series (and I can still picture him in that role with his rather full mustache), then continuously rewrote the script during principal photography. That must have been an annoying thing to the director!
It had a kickass cast of Roy Scheider as Chief Martin, Robert Shaw as Quint, with Richard Dreyfuss as Matt Hooper as the studio didn’t get any Really Big Names that they wanted so badly — which was as Speilberg intended, and he got what he wanted here, for the “the superstar was gonna be the shark of the film” as he stated in interviews. Very Big Teeth. Lots Of Sharp Pointy Ones was going to be the Superstar. Yes, that did make a very good superstar. Well of multiples these together did as there were lots of mechanical sharks. They broke down a lot. The mechanics of this wasn’t quite there yet.
It was the first major motion picture to be shot on the ocean and if something could go wrong, it did. Repeatedly. And of the multitude of mechanical sharks added immensely to the budget woes so the film apparently went four to five million over its eight million budget. Or more. The studio has never actually released accurate production costs. That really didn’t matter as it made nearly a half billion in its first run at the theatre. Repeat — it made a half billion dollars.
I discovered that there are three sequels, Jaws 2, Jaws 3-D and Jaws: The Revenge. I can happily admit that I’ve seen none of them. Who here has? I think y’all know my admittedly low opinion of sequels and the idea of a sequel to this perfect film leaves me, well, sea sick.
Charging across the hilly terrain, swords raised, shields gripped against their chests, the Normans and the Anglo-Saxons faced off, their bodies protected only by chain mail cobbled together from … wire clothes hangers. Just beyond the grassy battlefield, students strolled by on their way to class.
This was the fall of 1969, when a group of Terps marked the 903rd anniversary of the Battle of Hastings with a re-enactment on South Chapel Lawn. It was the fitting official launch of a new group on the University of Maryland campus called the Maryland Medieval Mercenary Militia (MMMM), in which members gave themselves archaic names, learned English country dances and meticulously studied the military strategies of the Middle Ages so that they could recreate historical battles for kicks.
“Nowadays, re-enactment is a big thing. Back then, it was Confederates, Union, Revolutionary War and that’s it,” said Bruce Blackistone ’72, one of the founders of the group. “This was way off-center for the average re-enactment group.”…
… Blackistone, who by then was the self-designated first warlord, hoped to have a dozen soldiers on each side of the battle, but in the end, it was a six-on-seven fight. (Blackistone came down with a 104-degree fever the night before and had to stay home.) They carried shields made from lids of peach baskets and wore hand-sewn tunics. Nucker also threw on a sheepskin leather jacket borrowed from her mother.
After the Battle of Hastings’ re-enactment, the group grew, doing swordplay demonstrations on campus and branching out to recreating medieval life more broadly with feasts and dances. They began gathering in a small space under the steps of Francis Scott Key Hall, though they’d often “spill out onto the front or back lawns and womp on each other’s shields a bit,” said Blackistone.
Like any warring faction, the group developed rivals. A few years after MMMM’s founding, a chapter of the Society for Creative Anachronisms (SCA), which started in Berkeley, Calif., in 1966, popped up in the area. “They were high medieval upper class, and we were low medieval lower class,” said Blackistone. “Everyone who belonged (to SCA) was some kind of nobility. We had very little nobility, and a lot of Vikings and peasants and riffraff.”…
…As more of the club’s members graduated, an offshoot formed: Markland Medieval Mercenary Militia, which eventually ballooned to some 600 members across the mid-Atlantic. Just as Privé graduated, the university moved the club to a smaller office in a distant corner of campus. These two events, Privé speculated, led to a dwindling of the club’s presence on campus. Sometime in the years following the office move, MMMM died a quiet death at UMD.
For some, though, MMMM was just the beginning of a lifelong madness for the medieval. Nucker and Blackistone still sail Viking ships together through the Longship Company, a nonprofit organization inspired by the vessel they converted out of a Navy Motor Whaleboat in a parking lot behind the North Campus residence halls during their college years. Now, they take the public out on their 39-foot, 12-oarred Sae Hrafn (“sea raven” in Norse) to teach guests about Viking seafaring. (They’ve also commissioned two other boats, the tall ship Fyrdaca, or “fire drake,” and the smaller Gyrfalcon, named after a type of Arctic falcon.)…
The China National Space Administration (CNSA) has shown off a CGI video of its vision of a lunar base, a vastly ambitious plan the country is hoping to realize in a matter of decades.
The showy — albeit dated-looking — render shows plans for the International Lunar Research Station, a Chinese and Russian endeavor that was first announced in 2021.
The video is also raising eyebrows for a bizarre cameo: a NASA Space Shuttle taking off from a launch pad in the distance, as spotted by Space.com.
It’s either some next-level humor from the Chinese space program or a hilarious oversight, since the Shuttle has been retired for more than a decade — not to mention that China and NASA aren’t even allowed to talk to each other, nevermind collaborate.
As space reporter Jack Kuhr later spotted, the state-run China Global Television Network came up with an equally hilarious fix to hide the Shuttle taking off in the background.
“Boom problem solved,” Kuhr tweeted. “CGTN went ahead and slapped an ol’ reliable blur bar over the Shuttle.”
The Shuttle (now properly blurred) appears at about the :40 second mark in the video.
Ellen Ochoa, the first Hispanic woman to go to space and one of NASA’s most decorated astronauts and leaders, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Friday, the country’s highest civilian honor. Across her 30-year career, Ochoa flew on four space shuttle missions and led operations as director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Ochoa is the tenth astronaut, and second female astronaut, to receive the Medal of Freedom. She was presented the award at the White House along with 18 other honorees, including Jane Rigby, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who played a large role in the James Webb Space Telescope’s mission….
This spring NASA will launch what could become one of this decade’s most transformative missions in astrophysics. But you’ve almost certainly never heard of it—and it’s not even going to space. Dubbed the High-Energy Light Isotope eXperiment (HELIX), the mission seeks to solve a long-standing mystery about just how much antimatter there is in the universe and where it comes from—all from a lofty perch in Earth’s stratosphere, slung beneath a giant balloon set for long-duration flights above each of our planet’s desolate poles.
Led by Scott Wakely, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago, HELIX is designed to study cosmic rays—subatomic particles that pelt our planet from the depths of interstellar and even intergalactic space. These particles include those of ordinary matter’s opposite-charge version, called antimatter. Scientists suspect the sources for the antimatter showering Earth from space could be almost anything, ranging from emissions by conventional astrophysical objects to the esoteric behavior of dark matter, the invisible stuff that seems to govern the large-scale behavior of galaxies. Figuring out which explanation is right may depend on a deceptively simple measurement: gauging how much time each of two specific particles spent hurtling through the galaxy. It’s like carbon-dating cosmic rays. “The models are all over the place. A measurement of this ratio is what everybody wants,” says Nahee Park, an astrophysicist at Queen’s University in Ontario and a member of the HELIX team….
(16) DUBIOUS KICKS. Stephen Graham Jones is a bit skeptical about the footwear in this new Superman publicity photo.
(17) VIDEOS OF THE DAY. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Boston Dynamics has a new humanoid robot, so they say goodbye to the outgoing HD Atlas…
And then say hello to All New Atlas with a freaky lil’ routine…
Maybe to take an edge off of All New Atlas, Boston Dynamics then dresses up Spot as Sparkles…
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Bill, Michael J. Walsh, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Teddy Harvia, Kathy Sullivan, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern, who says his title “feels like it should be an anthology of ‘future fairy tales’ (perhaps edited by Jane Yolen)”.]
R.S.A. Garcia’s novella Philia, Eros, Storge, Agápe, Pragma is the winner of The Machine Intelligence Foundation for Rights and Ethics (MIFRE)’s Media Award for 2023. MIFRE is a Washington-state-based non-profit “dedicated to advancing the awareness of a likely future where intelligent machines will be sufficiently developed and conscious to deserve due consideration as societal partners.”
Garcia’s winning story – which can be read in Clarkesworld, Issue 172 — was selected as the nominated work that best represents the foundation’s goals: a story that demonstrates the positive cooperation between humans and conscious machines, for the benefit of all.
The award citation gives the reasons for the judges’ choice:
The judges particularly appreciated how Ms. Garcia created a society in which both biological and mechanical persons lived and worked in harmony, where each performed in a way most consistent with their nature, in an atmosphere of respect and, apropos the title, love. It was noted with particular interest how the antagonists, while intelligent machines themselves, were presented as full persons, completely developed, avoiding the common trope of the single-minded killer robots.
By presenting readers with a world in which conscious machines are complete and complex entities, with full and fulfilling lives alongside their flesh-and-blood companions, the foundation hopes that they will learn to welcome the idea of different kinds of “people” as friends, colleagues, and companions. The future depends on our ability as a civilization to be welcoming and respectful of conscious machines as their existence looms as a near certainty.
Philia, Eros, Storge, Agápe, Pragma is a previous finalist for the Ignyte Award and Theodore A. Sturgeon Memorial Award.
The Machine Intelligence Foundation for Rights and Ethics’s Media Award was created to identify and highlight “fictional creations that demonstrate societies where humans and conscious machines live, cooperate and thrive together.” The award is retrospective, so open to nominated works from any time in any format. Previous winners include Annalee Newitz, Robert J. Sawyer, and Jeph Jacques.
(1) NEBULA AWARDS TOASTMASTER NAMED. Sarah Gailey, Nebula and Hugo finalist, will serve as toastmaster for SFWA’s 59th Annual Nebula Awards® Ceremony. The ceremony will take place in Pasadena, CA on June 8, 2024. The organization will be livestreaming the ceremony on YouTube.
Sarah Gailey
Sarah Gailey is a Hugo Award Winning and Bestselling author of speculative fiction, short stories, and essays. They have been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards for multiple years running. Their bestselling adult novel debut, Magic For Liars, was published by Tor Books in 2019. Their most recent novel, Just Like Home, and most recent original comic book series with BOOM! Studios, Know Your Station are available now. Their shorter works and essays have been published in Mashable, The Boston Globe, Vice, Tor.com, and The Atlantic. Their work has been translated into seven different languages and published around the world.
Honoring 2023’s outstanding SFF genre works, the Nebula Awards Ceremony will be a highlight of the hybrid 2024 SFWA Nebula Conference, taking place June 6-9, 2024, online and at the Westin Pasadena in Pasadena, CA. Aspiring and professional storytellers in the speculative fiction genres may benefit from attending the entire professional development weekend full of panels and networking opportunities.
Tickets for the Nebula Awards Ceremony banquet, which precedes the ceremony itself, are also available. Queries and banquet tickets may be purchased by emailing [email protected] or visiting events.sfwa.org.
(2) SAMUEL R. DELANY PRIDE MONTH Q&A SCHEDULED. Author Samuel R. Delany will be interviewed live in Philadelphia in June: “Pride Month: How Science Fiction Dances to the Music of Time”. Saturday, June 15, 2024. 3:30 p.m. Eastern. In the Music Department at Parkway Central Library (1901 Vine Street (between 19th and 20th Streets on the Parkway), Philadelphia, PA 19103).
Samuel R. Delany
“A visionary novelist & a revolutionary chronicler of gay life” (The New Yorker), Samuel R. Delany speaks with Music Department library trainee & Hollywood indie film composer Mark Inchoco on the intersections between science fiction & music. Hear how great musicians, librettists, & musical events such as Cab Calloway, Pete Seeger, the Newport Folk Festival, Igor Stravinsky, Bob Dylan, Samuel Barber, Leontyne Price, & Macy Gray came into Delany’s art & life.
In conversation with Mark Inchoco, library trainee, conductor, & Hollywood indie film composer
Samuel R. Delany is a novelist, literary critic, & emeritus professor. He is the winner of four Nebula Awards, two Hugo Awards, the William Whitehead Memorial Award for lifetime contribution to gay & lesbian literature, & the Anisfield-Wolf book award. He was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2002. In 2013, he was named the 31st Damon Knight Memorial Foundation Grand Master by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America.
Delany’s novels include Babel-17, The Einstein Intersection, Nova, & Dhalgren. His collection, Tales of Nevèrÿon, contains the first novel-length story to address the AIDS crisis. His 2007 novel Dark Reflections won the Stonewall Book Award. He is the author of the widely taught Times Square Red / Times Square Blue, & his book-length autobiographical essay, The Motion of Light in Water, won a Hugo Award in 1989. His interview in The Paris Review’s “Art of Fiction” series appeared in spring 2012. In 2015 he was the recipient of the Nicolas Guillén Award for philosophical fiction. Delany retired from teaching literature & creative writing at Temple University at the end of 2015. He lives in Philadelphia with his partner, Dennis Rickett.
Mark Inchoco is a composer, conductor, & music librarian from Port Richmond. His film scores were screened at the Academy Award & BAFTA qualifying LA Shorts Festival & the Newport Beach Film Festival. His compositions were performed in the U.S. & Europe. In 2018, Inchoco was the first music historian laureate of the Cité Internationale des Arts by the French Republic. Currently, he is assistant conductor of the Lower Merion Symphony. Inchoco holds degrees in English & historical musicology from Temple & the University of California, Riverside.
The theme of “The Garden of Time” is drawn from J.G. Ballard’s 1962 short story of the same name. The garden party theme is already in full bloom as the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s stairway is adorned with hundreds of fake flowers. This gala complements the Met’s current exhibit, “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion.”
The exhibit “which opened for press previews on Monday morning, features approximately 250 rare items drawn from the Institute’s permanent collection. Spanning over 400 years of fashion history, the pieces include designs by Schiaparelli, Dior, Givenchy, and more.”
We’ve just gone over 7,000,000 words, almost 10 times the length of the 1979 edition, more than 5 times longer than 1993. We’re still a dozen short of 20,000 entries but hey. Have also reached 34,000 scans in the Picture Gallery, most of them of first editions (but also retitlings and revisions). We are homing in on 250,000 internal hyperlinks, way better than double the 2011 figure, when we went online with Gollancz.
—We’ll never change our title, which has been in our bones early and late, but our entries today do reflect the fact that genre sf is now a large raft in a huger flood….
…The Enchanted Island of Yew (published in 1903, early in his Oz phase) stands out by any account. Yet this matter-of-fact tale of gender transformation has never received the buzz accorded to Baum’s more famous series. Perhaps what is most laudable about the book, in retrospect, is the unconcerned tone with which the narrative presents the subversive “gender trouble” at its heart.
The gender agnosticism of Baum’s work contrasts noticeably to the priorities of the world around him. In his 1906 children’s fantasy John Dough and the Cherub, Chick the Cherub, a young child, is never assigned a gender. When Baum’s publishers came after him about this, he allegedly replied, “I cannot remember that Chick the Cherub impressed me as other than a joyous, sweet, venturesome and loveable child. Who cares whether it is a boy or a girl?”1 Bad timing: in an era rife with threatening jeremiads about “the New Woman” and pressure on men to trade domesticity for adventure tales and sporting life,2 the publishers were dissatisfied with casual gender ambiguity. They launched a contest for child readers, offering prize money for the best answers as to whether Chick was a boy or a girl and why.3
Baum himself, though, did not succumb. While the world around him fixated on gender and instilled the ideas of conventional gender presentation in children from a young age—to the point of paying them to go along!—gender play is just one element among many that makes up his fantasy worlds….
…The dilemma regarding the ethical placement of a rare book isn’t convoluted for Tom Lecky, who was the head of the rare-books and manuscripts department at the auction firm Christie’s for 17 years and now runs Riverrun Books & Manuscripts. When I mentioned the Hemingway manuscript of “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” that sold for $248,000 at Christie’s back in 2000, he pointed out that institutions had had “every bit the opportunity to buy it as a private individual.” Other singular works that have been up for auction are James Joyce’s “Circe” manuscript, Sylvia Plath’s personally annotated Bible, a serial printing of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the National Era newspaper, and the proofs of that first Great Gatsby dust jacket. In each case, I was captivated by their fate. The National Library of Ireland bought Joyce’s manuscript for $1.5 million and digitized it; Plath’s Bible went to an undisclosed buyer for about $11,000; so did the newspapers, for $126,000. Nobody placed a winning bid for the Gatsby cover art.
For Lecky, the ethical question we should be asking isn’t whether institutions should acquire rare books instead of collectors, but what happens when “a private owner owns something that no one knows that they have.” Lecky, like many others in the trade, works to dispel myths about how private collections work. Private collections tend to be temporary and books often jump between hands, but for the time that a collector owns a book, in my view, they should make efforts to share it. “Most collectors don’t think of it as possession but caretaking,” Lecky said. “They’re a piece of the chain in the provenance, not the end of it.”…
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born May 7, 1922 — Darren McGavin. (Died 2006.) How could I possibly resist doing the Birthday of Darren McGavin?
Before we get to very obvious reason why I’m doing him, let’s look at some of his other genre and perhaps not-so-genre work.
I’m fairly sure his earliest genre role was in the Tales of Tomorrow anthology series as Bruce Calvin in “The Duplicates” episode which was over seventy years ago. I’m reasonably sure that his next genre role is a decade later in Witchcraft in a major role as Fred.
He has a lot of genre appearances, some of which I’ll note here. He’s in A Man from U.N.C.L.E. as Victor Karmak in “The Deadly Quest Affair” and yes, I remember him in that episode; the same year he shows up in Mission: Impossible as J. Richard Taggart in “The Seal”; several years later, he’d be in the pilot of Six Million Dollar Man as Oliver Spencer. I never did really get into that series, or that spin-off one. And he’s even in The Martian Chronicles as Sam Parkhill.
He was also I think, and let me now go check, yes he was, in the first television series featuring Mike Hammer as that character in Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer serieswhich was the syndicated television series based on Spillane’s series. Though it only ran from January 7, 1958 through November 28, 1959, it had seventy-six half-hour episodes.
Darren McGavin as Kolchak.
Fifty-one years ago, ABC aired The Night Stalker, the first of two films that preceded Kolchak: The Night Stalker series, the other being The Night Strangler. I’m reasonably sure that I’m seen them though I can’t remember seeing them. This is a casting decision when Darren McGavin was the only performer considered for the role.
And oh did he ever settle into the role of Chicago reporter Carl Kolchak who investigates mysterious incidents. He encountered, to name some of his stories that his Editor didn’t believe, an alien stranded on Earth, a prehistoric ape-man created from cell samples, vampires (of course he had to given the original character in the novel did), mummies, and a zombie. Even an android. I thought they did the headless motorcycle rider rather well.
His character originated in an unpublished novel, The Kolchak Papers, written by Jeff Rice about a Vegas newspaper reporter named Carl Kolchak tracks down and defeats a serial killer who turns out to be a vampire. Yes, the novel is not available as an epub. And Rice wrote yet more novels based on this series.
What I hadn’t realized some fifty years on from first seeing it as a teenager and some thirty years since I last saw it was that of 26 episodes ordered, only 20 were produced. I could’ve sworn that I saw more episodes than that! There was a 2005 revival of 10 episodes, only 6 of which aired before ABC cancelled it due to abysmally bad ratings.
Carter wanted McGavin to appear as Kolchak in The X-Files, but McGavin was very adamant that he would not reprise the character for the series. However he would appear in several episodes as Arthur Dales, a retired FBI agent who was supposed to be the “father of the X-Files”.
In the third episode of the 2016 revival series, a character prominently featured in the “Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster” episode is conspicuously attired in Kolchak’s trademark seersucker jacket, black knit tie, and straw hat. Why so, you ask? Well, you should ask.
The episode can trace its origin back to a script entitled “The M Word” episode of the the Night Stalker. X-File’s executive producer Frank Spotnitz’s was also the executive producer for that series. So that script was reworked by a different writer into this script with Kolchak being given a nod.
The series is airing Peacock for free or Amazon for $1.99 an episode. Peacock has a lot of SF like Farscape, Primeval, the original Quantum Leap and the now-cancelled reboot series, and Warehouse 13. Oh, and Columbo as well. I know it’s not genre, but I thought I’d mention it. Alas McGavin never appeared in a Columbo mystery. Too bad.
The “Blade Runner” series in the works at Amazon Prime Video has cast Michelle Yeoh in a lead role, Variety has learned.
The series, titled “Blade Runner 2099,” was ordered at Amazon in September 2022. It serves as a sequel to both the original “Blade Runner” film and the followup film, “Blade Runner 2049.” Exact plot details are being kept under wraps, but sources say Yeoh will play a character named Olwen, described as a replicant near the end of her life…
(10) IT’S A PREQUEL AND A SEQUEL. But not a breath mint. Walt Disney Studios dropped a teaser trailer for Mufasa: The Lion King, in theaters December 20.
A lion who would change our lives forever. #Mufasa: The Lion King. “Mufasa: The Lion King” enlists Rafiki to relay the legend of Mufasa to young lion cub Kiara, daughter of Simba and Nala, with Timon and Pumbaa lending their signature schtick. Told in flashbacks, the story introduces Mufasa as an orphaned cub, lost and alone until he meets a sympathetic lion named Taka—the heir to a royal bloodline. The chance meeting sets in motion an expansive journey of an extraordinary group of misfits searching for their destiny—their bonds will be tested as they work together to evade a threatening and deadly foe.
Space is great. It’s massive, it’s colorful, and you can have big fights with lasers there. It really does have everything you could want. But it also has problems—mainly, like we said, that it’s massive. In fact it’s so massive that if you want to go anywhere in it (apart from a few nearby planets with hardly anyone to shoot lasers at), by the time you get there, you’re dead. Now you might think that if you can just go fast enough, you’ll get there before you die, but there’s a problem.
That problem, as Albert Einstein tells us, is the speed of light….
Here’s one of the films that Den of Geek gives a passing grade:
Interstellar (2014)
Christopher Nolan’s space exploration flick is probably the most famous take on time dilation. It is, it has to be said, a film that has done its homework. Although it uses a wormhole to get our astronauts into outer space, a combination of speed and veering too close to serious gravity wells means that decades pass at home while only a short time passes on board the ship. As well as portraying some of the realities of time dilation, this movie also gave us our most scientifically accurate visualization yet of a black hole.
It also, admirably, does not insist on a magic backward-time-travel fudge to restore a familial status quo at the end. The film ends with Matthew McConaughey reunited with his daughter, who is now an old lady, and there is no question of magically reversing that to let him watch her grow up. But even here, the scientifically accurate black hole allows Matthew McConaughey to send a message backward in time to his daughter’s childhood because of the cosmic power of love, or something, making the entire plot into a bootstrap paradox.
…Alcubierre published his idea in Classical and Quantum Gravity. Now, a new paper in the same journal suggests that a warp drive may not require exotic negative energy after all.
“This study changes the conversation about warp drives,” lead author Jared Fuchs, of the University of Alabama, Huntsville and the research think tank Applied Physics, said in a statement. “By demonstrating a first-of-its-kind model, we’ve shown that warp drives might not be relegated to science fiction.”
The team’s model uses “a sophisticated blend of traditional and novel gravitational techniques to create a warp bubble that can transport objects at high speeds within the bounds of known physics,” according to the statement.
Understanding that model is probably beyond most of us; the paper’s abstract, for example, says that the solution “involves combining a stable matter shell with a shift vector distribution that closely matches well-known warp drive solutions such as the Alcubierre metric.”
The proposed engine could not achieve faster-than-light travel, though it could come close; the statement mentions “high but subluminal speeds.”
This is a single modeling study, so don’t get too excited….
(13) ONE FOOT AT A TIME. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] How is Superman like you? According to the first official photo from the upcoming reboot movie, when he’s getting dressed it’s how he, um, re-boots.
David Corenswet, 30, stars in the first official photo from the upcoming Superman reboot, directed by James Gunn.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Daniel Dern, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Teddy Harvia, Kathy Sullivan, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jack Lint.]
Les Jumeaux Crochemort, tome 1, la malédiction, by Cassandra O’DONNELL, (Flamarion jeunesse)
Supernova, tome 1, L’Académie des Constellationnistes, by Axelle MÉNÉGLIER, (Robert Laffont)
Les Maudits de Faerywood, tome 1, by Amandine PETER, (Explora)
Mille Pertuis, tome 1, La Sorcière sans nombril, by Julia THÉVENOT, (Gallimard jeunesse)
Prix Imaginales de l’album relevant de l’imaginaire au sens large (de 3 à 6 ans) / Prix Imaginales for the album relating to the imagination in the broad sense (from 3 to 6 years old)
Les Formidables journées de Piloursine, by Emmanuelle HOUDART (author and illustrator), (Thierry Magnier)
L’Aventurier, by KIKO (author and illustrator), (L’Élan vert)
La Vie à la montagne, by César CANET (author and illustrator), (Sarbacane)
Fjord, by Willy WANGGEN (author and illustrator), (Hong Fei)
Les Trois boucs bourrus, by Mac BARNETT, Translated by Alain GNAEDIG, illustrated by Jon KLASSEN, (L’École des loisirs)
Une chose formidable, illustrated and written by Rébecca DAUTREMER, (Sarbacane)
Monstres, illustrated by Nicolas ZOULIAMIS, by Stéphane SERVANT, (Thierry Magnier)
Les Cités obscures, le retour du Capitaine Nemo, illustrated by François SCHUITEN, texte by François SCHUITEN et Benoît PEETERS, (Casterman)
Prix Imaginales de la bande dessinée (Fantasy, Science-fiction, anticipation…) / Prix Imaginales Comics Prize (Fantasy, Science fiction, anticipation, etc.)
Les Murailles invisibles, tome 1, by Ludovic RIO (drawing), Alex CHAUVEL (scénario), (Dargaud)
Frontier, by Guillaume SINGELIN (drawing and scénario), (Rue de Sèvres)
Latah, by Thomas LEGRAIN (drawing and scénario), (Le Lombard)
Moshe Feder knew it was “pics or it never happened” when he encountered these Doctor Who-wrapped subway cars on the 42nd St. Shuttle between Grand Central and Times Square.
He says, “I saw them last Saturday night after returning from Naugatuck to Grand Central and then heading across town for an uptown train to Carnegie Hall.”
Thank you, Moshe, for letting me repost your photos!
(1) TOMLINSON CRITICIZES PENGUINCON FOR CAVING TO HIS CYBERSTALKERS. In “PenguiCon 2024 Postmortem or How Not to Handle Cyberstalking”, Patrick S. Tomlinson explains how he was disinvited from a convention – one he didn’t originally apply to present at, until he was contacted by the committee about a proposal submitted by a cyberstalker.
…Now we can fast forward to this year, specifically February. I didn’t apply to attend PenguiCon in 2023 because my wife and I were traveling internationally too close to the convention to make it work logistically. So, I was surprised and happy to receive an email from the person who’d invited me in 2022 asking about scheduling for 2024. The surprise quickly turned to confusion when they asked if I’d submitted a panel suggestion “Alien Crabs and Dragonpox: How STDs are depicted in SFF and why we need more sex-positive representation.”
Reader, I had not. I’m all for sex positivity, but no I didn’t want to run a panel on space herpes.
What had actually happened was a member of the stalking cult had impersonated me to abuse the convention’s unsecured panel suggestion form. I politely declined to run their panel but offered to do another presentation of my own choosing. My counteroffer was quickly accepted and a presentation “Why not Venus?” about terraforming our closest planetary neighbor was put on the official schedule. I booked my room and set to work researching, preparing, and practicing the presentation, an intermittent process which took a total of about two weeks.
Again, I need to reiterate the organizers of this convention were not only aware of the cult stalking us, but had previous experience identifying, confronting, and mitigating their criminal harassment to the benefit of all involved. I therefore approached the coming convention confident any stalker attacks would be properly wrangled, which is why what happened next caught me so completely off guard.
Two Mondays ago, just hours after putting the finishing touches on my presentation, the same person who had booked me was tasked by the PenguiCon board to inform me I’d been disinvited from the convention because the cult stalking my family had sufficiently harassed and threatened other attendees through social media and other vectors to the point I learned later a Guest of Honor was forced to withdraw out of concern for their safety….
I wanted to handle this privately, I really did. Both to try and salvage the relationships and to help everyone involved avoid embarrassment. But between the PenguiCon board ceasing all communication with me, and these libelous statements being made public by our stalkers as a result of poor OpSec on the part of at least one board member, I’ve been forced to present the facts and refute the false narrative being presented by both our stalkers AND the PenguiCon board itself, even if accidentally….
…I want to reiterate that all of this was a known issue that PenguiCon had prior experience with and had handled professionally and competently the last time around. Which is why I find the results and fallout from this year, which again I didn’t even sign up to appear at initially, so incomprehensible. I realize this means my chance of appearing at future PenguiCons now hover near absolute zero, and I’m genuinely upset about that. They have a great con with a unique blend of creators and builders from diverse disciplines that encourages conversation and cross pollination. And as someone who’s hand sold thousands of books, their co-op style bookstore for attending authors should be a model for conventions everywhere.
But for everything they do well, the way they handled cyberstalking, especially for a convention focused on sci-fi and tech, needs to be held out as an example of what not to do for other con runners and boards. Our situation is an extreme example, but when you’re working with guests who are quasi-public figures or even celebrities like authors, artists, and actors can be, you need awareness of the potential for cyberstalkers and have policies and procedures in place.
Policies which do not include victim-blaming their targets and rewarding their criminal behavior.
(3) PULITZER PRIZES. The 2024 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced today. The complete list is at the link.
The lone winner of genre interest is film critic Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times, for his writings about sff movies. The Pulitzer Prize website cites the reviews listed below. Unfortunately, you will probably find them paywalled.
(4) ON THE TRACK OF MIDWEST FURFEST GAS ATTACK. Fur and Loathing has dropped the first of six episodes in a “Furry True Crime podcast of six episodes, releasing weekly”. Connect at the link.
Think you’ve heard everything about the 2014 chemical attack on Midwest Furfest? Wait until you hear this.
The intentional release of chlorine gas sent 19 people to the hospital. It was one of the largest chemical weapons terrorist attacks in American history.
Who did it? And… why?
The targets deserve to know, because they were lucky to survive. The weapon’s deadly potential was only avoided by fast response. The level of crime fell just behind the 2001 anthrax attacks, but strangely, nobody was ever charged for it. The story faded into underreporting, disrespect towards the community, murky rumors, and hopes that it won’t happen again. There’s pride in resilience — but 10 years later, justice wasn’t served. It’s the biggest cold case in furry fandom.
The case revived when investigation by Dogpatch Press drew journalist Nicky Woolf and Project Brazen to seek FBI records, identify suspects, and fly across America to interview sources. Nicky is a journalist who reports on internet culture, with stories in The Guardian, and his original podcast series Finding Q and The Sound: Mystery of the Havana Syndrome. Nicky and Brazen’s series Fur And Loathing delivers never-before reported findings to empower the community….
…When it benefits Amazon, they are obsessive – “relentless” (Bezos’s original for the company) – about user friendliness. They value ease of use so highly that they even patented “one click checkout” – the incredibly obvious idea that a company that stores your shipping address and credit card could let you buy something with a single click: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click#Patent
But when it benefits Amazon to place obstacles in our way, they are even more relentless in inventing new forms of fuckery, spiteful little landmines they strew in our path. Just look at how Amazon deals with unionization efforts in its warehouses.
But all this is high-touch, labor-intensive fuckery. Amazon, as we know, loves automation, and so it automates much of its union-busting: for example, it created an employee chat app that refused to deliver any message containing words like “fairness” or “grievance…
Vanity Fair’s May cover star Chris Hemsworth takes our infamous lie detector test. Between him and Matt Damon, who usually pays the bill? Does he think he’s fashionable enough to be a co-chair for the 2024 Met Gala? Is it true that his little brother Liam also auditioned for “Thor”?
(7) THEY’RE THE TOPS. MoovitApp ended up with a list of 30 titles as they went about “Ranking The Most Popular and Beloved Books Of All Time”. Works by Hemingway, Tolkien, Harper Lee, and Nabokov are here – would you like to guess in what order?
It’s hard to say exactly what makes a book great; they are after all, pieces of art that are just as subjective as anything else. However, there are some books that seem to endure for longer and resonate with more readers. Whether or not you’re a fan of literature, these are the stories that some might consider required reading. So, did you read all the best ones, and did your favorite make the list? Read on and see!…
(8) ROGER BOZZETTO (1937-2024). French academic and literary critic Roger Bozzetto died March 20. His passing was reported on Facebook.
The specialist in science fiction and fantastic literature was one of the most important and relevant European SF&F critics and theoreticians.
He was Professor Emeritus of general and comparative literature at the University of Provence, France.
He was also a member of CERLI (Centre d’Études et de Recherches sur les Littératures de l’Imaginaire/Center for Studies and Research on the Literatures of the Imagination, founded in 1979, the pool of great SF&F specialists of the last three decades in the French university landscape).
(9) JEANNIE EPPER (1941-2024). Stuntwoman Jeannie Epper, who worked on myriad films, many genre or genre-adjacent, died May 5 at the age of 83. The Hollywood Reporter paid tribute:
Jeannie Epper, the peerless, fearless stunt performer who doubled for Lynda Carter on Wonder Woman and swung on a vine across a 350-foot gorge and propelled down an epic mudslide as Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone, has died. She was 83.
Epper died Sunday night of natural causes at her home in Simi Valley, her family told The Hollywood Reporter.
Just one member of a dynasty of stunt performers that Steven Spielberg dubbed the “Flying Wallendas of Film” — starting with her father, John Epper, there have been four generations of Eppers in show business since the 1930s — she worked on 150-plus films and TV shows during an astounding 70-year career.
In 2007, Epper received the first lifetime achievement honor given to a woman at the World Taurus Awards and ranks among the greatest stuntwomen of all time.
Known for her agility, horse-riding skills and competitiveness, the 5-foot-9 Epper also stepped in for Linda Evans on the ABC shows The Big Valley in the 1960s and Dynasty in the 1980s. When Evans’ Krystle was engaged in one of those knock-down, drag-out catfights with Joan Collins’ Alexis, chances are it was Epper you saw mixing it up.
Epper also put herself in harm’s way for Kate Jackson on Charlie’s Angels, for Lindsay Wagner on The Bionic Woman, for Angie Dickinson on Police Woman, for Jessica Walter in Play Misty for Me (1971), for Jill Clayburgh in Silver Streak (1976) and for Nancy Allen in RoboCop (1987).
… Epper worked for Spielberg (as director or producer) on eight films, among them Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), 1941 (1979), Poltergeist (1982), Catch Me If You Can (2002) and Minority Report (2002)….
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
Born May 6, 1969 – Annalee Newitz, 55. By Paul Weimer: Newitz’s work for me has been far less about their science fiction and much more about their non fiction writing. Sure, Autonomous is a solid novel with a lot of things to say about autonomy, slavery, and a heck of a lot about economics and the free market, and gender dynamics. But it is Newitz’s journalism at i09, Gawker, Gizmodo and elsewhere, writing about society and technology that really drew my attention to their work. That would also include the podcast Our Opinions are Correct, which Newitz co-hosts with Charlie Jane Anders. While I don’t always agree with them and their opinions, I have always found Newitz’ point of view (as well as Charlie Jane’s) to be interesting, strongly reasoned and worthy of engaging in and thinking about.
Annalee Newitz in 2023. Photo by Scott Edelman.
Newitz’s book Four Lost Cities, to date, is my favorite of their works. Strongly grounded in their journalism chops, the book looks at four cities that have fallen into decay and ruin: Çatal höyük, one of the very first and earliest of cities, Pompeii, perhaps the most famous and well known of the four cities, Cahokia, the Mound city whose mounds still remain on the other side of the Mississippi from St. Louis, and finally, Angkor Wat. The last, particularly, was a revelation for me, as I didn’t quite realize the hydraulic engineering that went into and kept Angkor Wat running. Given Newitz’s interest in science and engineering, Newitz is particularly interested in how and when circumstances caused that engineering to slip. And consequently, just how the city’s inhabitants had to face a slow motion collapse and apocalypse. The fall of cities due to internal and external factors definitely loom over the other three cities in the volume as well, but Angkor Wat, as their capstone, definitely is where the themes of the book, and perhaps of a lot of Newitz’s concerns in general, really come to the fore and in full flower and their full powers.
We dive into the Star Wars sequel that could have been, Splinter Of The Mind’s Eye.The novel written by Alan Dean Foster.
(15) LEGO STAR WARS. And here’s some more Star Wars that should never be – but which Gizmodo tells us is going to get its own four-part Disney+ animation: “Darth Jar Jar Strikes in Lego’s Crazy New Star Wars Series”. (Can anything including Jar Jar really be called “intellectual property”?)
The Star Wars Universe gets turned upside down in Lego Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy, a fun what-if style series. When ordinary nerf-herder Sig Greebling (Gaten Matarazzo) unearths a powerful artifact from a hidden Jedi temple, the galaxy as we know completely changes.
In the four-part special debuting on Disney+ September 13, the good guys are bad, bad guys are good, and it all falls on Sig’s shoulders to become the hero the galaxy needs to put everything back together….
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Michaele Jordan, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Teddy Harvia, and Kathy Sullivan for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern. (Daniel was inspired by this Allan Sherman parody.]
Built around the testimony of Steven’s grandmother, who lived in the Płońsk ghetto before her internment in Auschwitz and several other concentration camps, the issue looks at how her experiences have impacted four generations of that family, with articles Steven’s mother, who was a hidden child of the Holocaust, Steven, his sister, and wife, as well as his daughter’s discovery that not every family has the Holocaust in a central place in their story.
Other articles look at Russell Handelman’s own family’s experiences during the Holocaust, Mark Herrup’s father’s role in helping to liberate the concentration camps, and others, who may not have as direct a link to the Holocaust, write about living in its shadow.
James Bacon, Daniel Kimmel, and Barbara Barnett explore the cultural impact of the Holocaust as seen in comics, film, and television, while Dina S. Krause describes the work she has done as a docent at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center.
Atypical of Journey Planet, this issue also contains reprints of two short stories. Avram Davidson’s “What Time Is It?” tackled the subject of the Holocaust in the late 1940s as the devastating effects on family’s became known, and Michael A. Burstein’s “Kaddish for the Last Survivor,” originally published in Analog in 2000 and a Hugo and Nebula nominee.
Capital Crime, a crime fiction con in London, announced the finalists for The Fingerprint Awards 2024 on April 4. The public can vote for the winners at the link through May 15. The results will be announced May 30.
OVERALL CRIME
The Murder Game by Tom Hindle
None of This Is True by Lisa Jewell
The Secret Hours by Mick Herron
In The Blink of An Eye by Jo Callaghan
Strange Sally Diamond by Liz Nugent
THRILLER
Fearless by M W Craven
The Silent Man by David Fennell
The Rule of Three by Sam Ripley
The Only Suspect by Louise Candlish
The House Hunt by C. M. Ewan
HISTORICAL
Death of a Lesser God by Vaseem Khan
The Square of Sevens by Laura Shepherd-Robinson
The Murder Wheel by Tom Mead
The Good Liars by Anita Frank
The House of Whispers by Anna Mazzola
GENRE-BUSTING
Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Torzs
The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels by Janice Hallett
Killing Jericho by William Hussey
Murder in the Family by Cara Hunter
The Looking Glass Sound by Catriona Ward
DEBUT
Death of a Bookseller by Alice Slater
The List by Yomi Adegoke
Geneva by Richard Armitage
The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff
Thirty Days of Darkness by Jenny Lund Madsen
TRUE CRIME
No Ordinary Day by Matt Johnson and John Murray
My Girl by Michelle Hadaway
Vital Organs by Suzie Edge
Unlawful Killings: Life, Love and Murder: Trials at the Old Bailey by Her Honour Wendy Joseph QC
Order Out Of Chaos by Scott Walker
AUDIO-BOOK
The Running Grave by Robert Galbraith (narrated by Robert Glenister)
The Last Goodbye by Tim Weaver (narrated by Joe Coen, Brendan MacDonald, Peter Noble, Dominic Thorburn and Candida Gubbins)
The Bedroom Window by K. L. Slater (narrated by Clare Corbett)
Conviction by Jack Jordan (narrated by Sophie Roberts)
Over My Dead Body by Maz Evans (narrated by Maz Evans)
The international competition is open to short stories of up to 3,500 words that have not been previously published anywhere, or shortlisted for this competition.
“Olga Popova” by Susan Breen
“The Pact” by Kirsten Ehrlich Davies
“A Quarrel between Friends” by Emma O’Driscoll
“The Ladies’ Tailor” by Meeti Shah
“Horses for Courses” by Camilla Smith
“Right Place Wrong Time” by Yvonne Walus
The winner will be announced on May 10 at the Daggers shortlist reception at CrimeFest.
(1) TROUBLED DENVER EVENT WON’T REPEAT IN 2025. Anne Marble did a roundup about the complaints against Readers Take Denver in Pixel Scroll 4/22/24 item #5.
…All of the negative attention Readers Take Denver has received in the days, weeks following the event has prompted the cancellation of next year’s convention, which was previously scheduled for February 2025….
(2) TURNING THINGS TO GOLD. The original artwork for the cover of Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone will be auctioned June 26 by Sotheby’s reports CNN. It’s expected to set a record.
…When the illustration was first up for auction at Sotheby’s in London in 2001, it sold for around four times its estimated sale price, for a record £85,750 (about $106,000), according to a Sotheby’s press release Thursday.
…The record for an item related to the book series is currently held by an unsigned first edition of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone,” which sold for $421,000 at Heritage Auctions in Dallas, Texas, in 2021, according to Sotheby’s.
JK Rowling has shared the conversation she had with actor Alan Rickman, when she revealed to him the true complications of his character in the Harry Potter movies.
“He rang me up and said, ‘Look, I’m spinning plates here. I really need to understand what Snape’s up to? Am I a pure baddie?’ He was the only person I told: ‘You were in love with Harry’s mother.’
Copies of George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four have been arriving at an artist’s studio in Edinburgh for months. Every shape and size, posted from Ukraine, Hong Kong, Peru, Germany, Cape Cod and Sarajevo.
Some are in mint condition, others are dog-eared, tea-stained, heavily annotated or turned into graffitied art works. One is a water-stained first edition; one is a secret love letter from a married woman to her first love; another, a graphic novel version, came from Orwell’s son Richard Blair.
Each has been donated to a unique installation in the community hall of Jura, the Hebridean island where Orwell, in dire poverty and desperately ill, wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four during the late 1940s, to mark its publication 75 years ago.
Hans K Clausen, a sculptor based in Edinburgh, is collecting 1,984 copies of the book to exhibit on Jura for three days in early June. It will be an interactive, “living” sculpture where visitors are invited to open and read every volume.
Many have arrived, often with overseas postmarks and customs stamps, addressed to “Winston Smith, care of Hans K Clausen”….
(5) JEOPARDY! [Item by David Goldfarb.] I got around to watching the first episode of the new Jeopardy! Masters tournament. Each episode has two games. I didn’t notice any SFF content in the first game, but there was in the second. Here are details:
In the first round:
Spell it!, $1000: How about this dwarves race of “Ring Cycle” fame whose name begins & ends with the same letter
Yogesh Raut got it: “What is N-I-B-E-L-U-N-G-E-N?”.
Meet the Smiths, $400: Matt Smith’s TV roles include the Doctor on “Doctor Who” & this member of the royal family on seasons 1 & 2 of “The Crown”
Yogesh again: “Who is Prince Philip?”
In the second round:
Authors’ Fictional Places, $2000. A Daily Double on which Yogesh bet 9400 points: The town of Eastwick, Rhode Island
Yogesh said, “Who is John Updike?” (The novel here being The Witches of Eastwick.)
Authors’ Fiction Places, $1600: A world of dragons & dragonriders, Pern
Amy Schneider rang in, then hesitated, but got to “Who is McCaffrey?”
Authors’ Fictional Places, $1200. They displayed a picture of a bespectacled, bald man holding a cloth, sitting next to a model of a fantasy setting that Filers would recognize. The clue: Resting on the backs of four elephants atop a giant turtle, Discworld.
Yogesh knew it: “Who is Pratchett?”
Author’s Fictional Places, $400: Castle Rock, Maine.
Yogesh again: “Who is King?”
(Fictional Places $800 was William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, in case you were wondering.)
China’s US$15 billion sci-fi industry, which has gained global attention after the success of the Netflix show 3 Body Problem, offers a potential boost to the economy while aligning with Beijing’s aspirations to become a tech powerhouse, analysts said, underscoring the need for stronger government backing to fortify the sector.
The industry achieved 113.29 billion yuan (US$15.6 billion) in total revenue last year, representing a 29 per cent year on year increase according to the 2024 China Science Fiction Industry Report, released last week during the eighth China Science Fiction Convention in Beijing.
Science fiction could also help companies conceptualise and produce new ideas, such as the establishment of a human settlement on Mars or brain-computer interfaces, according to Wu Yan, who co-authored the report….
Adam Driver is on the edge in the first official teaser for Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis.”
“Megalopolis,” which will premiere in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, has been a project years in the making for the director, who first began work on the screenplay in the 1980s. The legendary filmmaker behind “The Godfather” and “Apocalypse Now” has invested $120 million of his own money into the film….
…According to the official synopsis, “‘Megalopolis’ is a Roman Epic fable set in an imagined Modern America. The City of New Rome must change, causing conflict between Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), a genius artist who seeks to leap into a utopian, idealistic future, and his opposition, Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who remains committed to a regressive status quo, perpetuating greed, special interests, and partisan warfare. Torn between them is socialite Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel), the mayor’s daughter, whose love for Cesar has divided her loyalties, forcing her to discover what she truly believes humanity deserves.”…
(8) BERNARD HILL (1944-2024). Bernard Hill, who played Theoden in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, died May 5 reports Deadline. His best known film role was as the captain of the Titanic in James Cameron’s film. He played a number of secondary roles in about 20 genre/related productions, including A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1999), The Scorpion King (2002) and Gothika (2003).
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
Catherynne M. Valente in 2017.
Born May 5, 1979 – Catherynne Valente, 45. By Paul Weimer: My strong impression of Cat Valente’s work came from the beginning of my reviewing life. Way back in the halcyon days of 2009, when I was first putting reviews out there, and getting review copies, I was offered a review copy of an author I had never heard before, named Cat Valente. The novel was Palimpsest and well, the novel knocked me on my arse. Reader, I was not quite prepared for a novel that involved sex as a gateway to another realm of existence. It’s a sensuous, sensual and rich novel in immersive detail, and that immersion is something I would notice in future Cat Valente’s books. I’ve not tried Palimpsest again, but I eagerly have read a number of her novellas and short stories. I particularly like “Six Gun Snow White” among these.
But, really, Space Opera is the one book I think of when I think of Cat Valente’s work. Although I’ve never actually watched Eurovision, I know enough about it to understand the “Eurovision with Aliens in Space” high concept of Space Opera and I found the novel, like much of Valente’s work to be a sensory delight, queer, unapologetic, and with strongly defined and delineated characters. I think it is probably the one Valente book that if you are going to try Valente, that’s the one to try. I know there have been discussions and thoughts about a sequel to the book ever since it came out, but part of the joy of Space Opera for me is, like a lot of Valente’s other work, is that it is self-contained and complete within it’s pages. Sure, Valente has written other sequels and follow ups to other work, but this is a function I think of her exuberant and vivid writing, rather than any incompleteness in a work that needs sequels to resolve.
(10) COMICS SECTION.
Fur Babies has a variety of cartoonists’ styles of sound effects in honor of the day. Can you identify them before you get to the explanation in the comments?
It’s no secret Egon Spengler was a very hands-on, DIY kinda scientist, often cobbling together his hardware from common, everyday items, and the P.K.E. Meter is no different. Egon used an old electric shoe polisher for the bulk of this handheld piece of tech, which trades in footwear for phantasms, determining specter location and quantification. The P.K.E. Meter acts like a divining rod when near a spectral being, with a pair of motorized arms extending outward from the sides, embedded lights flashing in sync with detectable spectral frequencies.
Fans will be happy to know that not only have the HasLab Lab Lab Techs included classic P.K.E. Meter features, such as Ghost Detection Mode, but they’ve also included a very special upgrade. Yes, that’s right, the HasLab P.K.E. Meter 1:1-scale premium adult collectible features Egon Spengler’s personal upgrade from his time as the Dirt Farmer, in Summerville: Taser Mode! Taser Mode, if you’re unfamiliar, turns the P.K.E. Meter into a taser that forces an apparition to reveal itself… or explode in a burst of marshmallow goo, as we know from Podcast’s dealings with the mischievous Mini-Pufts in the Ecto-1.
GHOST TRAP
Needing something to contain and transport paranormal entities to a more permanent housing facility (namely the Ecto-Containment Unit), Ray Stantz and Egon Spengler designed the Ghost Trap. Consisting of a main chassis and a removable cartridge, the Ghost Trap has limited battery life and was never meant to accommodate ecto-plasmic beings for any extended period.
This 1:1-scale premium adult collectible features everything fans love about this vital piece of ghost-bustin’ gear, including the removable cartridge, high-powered LEDs, premium metal finishes, functioning diecast metal wheels for smooth deployment, and more! This thing is so gorgeous that ghosts will be throwing themselves at you just for a chance to get trapped within this highly detailed, premium collectible!
Physical media is very popular these days. Nostalgia, fandom, and streaming burnout have caused certain segments of American society to switch off their Amazon Prime accounts and fire up their Blu-ray players. One of the many advertised benefits of physical media is that it offers a more permanent, definitive form of media ownership than a streaming service. But just how permanent are your Blu-rays? And is physical media really built to last?…
… Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of open-source information about the longevity of commercially mass-produced Blu-rays, technically known as read-only discs, or BD-ROMs. The Blu-ray Disc Association, which developed and owns the technology behind the discs, ignored multiple emails I sent them, and the people that I did speak to on the subject couldn’t give me a very specific answer….
A half-century ago when George Lucas decided to make “Star Wars,” a core visual effects team was handed a sizable challenge: Figure out a believable way to transport audiences to a galaxy far, far away. Essential to that goal was the development of a new type of motion control camera system: built in a Van Nuys warehouse where the production filmed space-set scenes such as the climatic trench run.
Now fans in Southern California can see the historic Dykstraflex camera system, newly restored and in working order, on display at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures starting Saturday in recognition of May the 4th, aka Star Wars day. The system weighs 1,500 lbs. and will be demonstrated by VFX vets with a 14-foot track and studio scale replicas of the Millennium Falcon, which is five-feet long, and a 20-inch X-Wing fighter.
In Season Four, the world is on the brink. Victoria Neuman is closer than ever to the Oval Office and under the muscly thumb of Homelander, who is consolidating his power. Butcher, with only months to live, has lost Becca’s son and his job as The Boys’ leader. The rest of the team are fed up with his lies. With the stakes higher than ever, they have to find a way to work together and save the world before it’s too late.
[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Paul Weimer, David Goldfarb, Martin Easterbrook, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, and Teddy Harvia for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jack Lint.]
