Pixel Scroll 3/1/18 I Fell Into A Pixeled Link Of Fire

(1) MANAGEMENT CHANGES AT TOR. Today Tor.com announced “Fritz Foy Named President and Publisher of Tor and Forge Books”.

Tom Doherty, who will become Chairman, wrote:

Fritz Foy, Senior Vice President of Strategic Technology at Macmillan and Publisher of Tor.com, will join Tom Doherty Associates as President and Publisher, with all the Tom Doherty Associates publishing units reporting to him.

Fritz has had an impressive career in publishing, first at Simon & Schuster, and for the last 21 years at Macmillan. He has had roles in sales, marketing, operations, technology, workflow, production, and analytics. He brings with him a passion for books and publishing. For the last decade he has been actively engaged with me at Tor Books.

Fritz will be reporting to me as I move into the role of Chairman and as he begins to lead Tom Doherty Associates into the future.

Fritz Foy announced additional promotions and changes, including:

Effective immediately, Devi Pillai, previously Associate Publisher, is now Vice President and Publisher of Tor Books, reporting to me. In her year and a half with Tor, Devi has brought a true sense of author and editor care to the organization, while also building efficiency through the adoption of publishing-industry best practices. She is uniquely qualified to help lead Tor into the future.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Associate Publisher, is now also Vice President and Editor-in-Chief of Tor Books, reporting to me. Patrick’s 29 years at Tor, coupled with his encyclopedic knowledge of the industry and his award-winning editing skills, make him perfect for this key role that will help us to continue to grow the business.

Kathleen Doherty, Publisher of Tor Teen/Starscape, has been promoted to Vice President. Kathleen has been instrumental in the establishment of our young adult and teen publishing programs, and has been responsible for our success across educational markets.

While continuing in her role as Creative Director of Tom Doherty Associates, Irene Gallo will take on the additional responsibility of Publisher of Tor.com. I’ve been working with Irene for over a decade on online community building, and more recently on launching the novella imprint, and I prize her innovative spirit.

[H/t Locus Online.]

(2) READERCON AND THE AGE DISCRIMINATION CHARGE. Kathryn Cramer listed her takeaways from social media response to her request that the Readercon Board investigate age discrimination against writers told they will not be invited to be on program this year.

First of all, the Readercon board not only did not answer the questions I asked but never acknowledged receipt of that email. The conclusions I draw from that are that they feel the questions I asked in my letter should not have been asked and that I am not entitled to an answer. This may in part be because I framed my quantitative questions with a suggested remedy involving the firing of the program chair. So maybe my framing got their back up. But since I am not the only one who has expressed concerns about age discrimination, I think the main problem is that they don’t want to talk about it. This, in itself, is not all that surprising.

Here is what does surprise me. After several days of relatively unpleasant conversation of the topic, I also arrive at the following conclusions…

5) There are worthwhile values such as increasing diversity and showcasing new talent that are sometimes in conflict with non-discrimination, and these are some of the values that are cited by people who think age discrimination should not be seen as a problem.

6) Inexperienced convention-runners have fewer strategies for resolving the conflicts between these conflicting values and some seem uninterested in learning them.

7) Because of the lack of consensus against retaliation, engaging with and further exploration of this problem should be done by writers collectively rather than individually. SFWA, of which I am not a member, is the obvious organization to draft best practices guidelines on how conventions might achieve diversity goals and liven up their programs without engaging in one or more kinds of discrimination. Another possible organization that might be a venue for such best practices guidelines would be the Worldcon Runners Guide Editorial Committee, which is tasked with curating information about con-running best practices. I have no involvement with that either.

8) Given the overlap between con-running and the small press, publishing, reviewing, etc. all of the above-listed issues may occur in those areas as well.

When I engaged with the question of whether there had been age discrimination, I made two basic assumptions: that we all agree that age discrimination as such is a bad thing, and secondly that we all agree that it is something that it is OK to ask questions about. Since both of those assumptions appear to be wrong, I exit the conversation, leaving the matter to others with more organization and institutional umph behind them. Good luck.

(3) SFWA SPACE OPERA PANEL. The SFWA YouTube channel did an episode on space opera featuring Ann Leckie, Bonnie Milani, Khaalidah Muhammed-Ali, Chandra
Trulove Fry, and Diane Morrison:

(4) MAKING A STINK STINKIER. Io9 is tracking the daily changes in Terry
Goodkind’s justification for disliking Bastien Lecouffe Deharme’s cover on his new book: “FantasyWriter Terry Goodkind Now Claims He Hated His Book Cover Because It’s ‘Sexist’”:

Earlier this week, Goodkind wrote a post on Facebook calling Shroud of Eternity “a great book with a very bad cover. Laughably bad,” inviting readers to share their thoughts in a poll. He later apologized to cover artist Bastien Lecouffe Deharme in a follow-up post, though Deharme said he was never contacted by Goodkind personally nor does he plan on working with the author again. Now, after posting a video of his dog licking the book cover, Goodkind has added a new layer to his previous criticism. The author told io9 he and his agent had objected to the cover upon release because the protagonist’s portrayal was too sexist and didn’t match the character in-book.

…I followed up with Deharme, who said this was the first time he’d heard any claims of sexism regarding the book cover, from Goodkind or anyone else. On the contrary, he said Tor Books specifically asked him to avoid typical sexist fantasy tropes when designing the cover. After reading the part of the book sent to him by the art director, as well as the character description provided, Deharme said he chose to focus on Nicci’s strength. He gave her practical armor and didn’t put the focus on the traditionally exploited parts of the female body.

(5) PLAYING WITH A MISSION. Filers attending Emerald City ComicCon this weekend can support a good cause by playing games with awesome authors: “Worldbuilders Party: Emerald City Comic Convention”. Cat Rambo will be one of them.

Where: Washington State Convention Center, Room 3AB
When: Friday, March 2nd, 7 – 11 p.m.
Tickets and Infohttps://worldbuildersparty.com/

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to play tabletop games with some of the folks who create the books, podcasts, games, and other geeky stuff you love? Wonder no more! Join Worldbuilders, Pat Rothfuss and friends for an evening of games, food, drinks, and mingling with some awesome authors, game designers, and creators. Sign up to play games with the celeb of your choosing in a relaxed environment, and participate in the silent auction and raffle for a chance to win some cool geeky prizes.

This is a charity event and all proceeds will go towards Worldbuilders.

(6) THE GREENING OF A WRITER. Cat Rambo has become a contributor to Green Man Review. Her first review is of “Tim Cooper’s The Reader: War For The Oaks.

The Reader: War For The Oaks is a hardbound book presenting a photography project by Tim Cooper.  It’s a slim little 8.5?x 11? volume, clocking in at 96 pages. The pleasant interior design presents the photos nicely, along with some pretty arboreal details. The cover, whose design is unobjectionable but unremarkable, features a photo that lets the reader know exactly what the book is about: photos of people reading War For the Oaks in various Minneapolis locations.

She follows with: “Recent Reading: Cat Valente Launches in a New Direction”.

It is difficult to describe how Catherynne M. Valente’s new book Space Opera (Saga Press, available April 3, 2018, 292 pages) manages to be so wonderfully resonant of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy yet so insistently, inimitably her own. And yet, that’s the challenge.

Valente’s skill manifests in a book that bounces right along, full of glorious, funny, wonderful, sparkly explosions of humor and wit that still, just as Adams always did, manages to say Insightful and Interesting Things about Human Nature. And it’s funny. Did I mention that this is a funny book? It’s the story of failing rock singer Decibel Jones and his dysfunctional band, the Absolute Zeroes, who have been chosen to represent their world in an interstellar challenge that determines whether or not the Earth will be destroyed.

(7) A NEW SCREEN. Another first for Cat Rambo – she made her Twitch TV debut in February.

(8) ALT-RIGHT COMICS. At Medium, Jason Yungbluth takes aim at Theodore Beale’s recent attempt to create an alt-right brand of comic books: “The Menace of Doc Vox!” The article dates to last October, but hasn’t been mentioned in the Scroll before. The article explores the business model that Beale is using, all designed to monetize controversy.

Can Teddy make a profit off of this effort? Sure, but not much. There is obviously a fascist ecosystem out there capable of bringing a project like this to life, but it is very niche. The thrill of pissing in liberals’ Cheerios (which, as Markku put it to me, was this project’s first, last and only goal) won’t make ugly, politically driven comic books any less boring….

What, then, will Teddy get out of all the time he will ultimately have to pour into this low-reward venture? An excuse to troll the Eisner awards? The thrill of ruining the costume contest at Comic-Con?

(9) TODAY’S THING TO WORRY ABOUT. Never mind global warming or the imminent extinction of honeybees – Camestros Felapton has discovered s fresh crisis: “Felapton Towers Scoop – How Numbers are Disappearing”.

Look, there’s just some breaking stories that you can only read here thanks to the deep investigative journalism that my crack team of journalists do. In this case – plugging two digit numbers into Google n-gram.

I don’t know what I expected the graph to look like but apparently peak numbers-in-books was sometime in the late 1980s after which the bubble burst plunging books into a deepening two-digit-numbers-as-words recession.

Are digits really disappearing? Maybe they have migrated to television? Sesame Street seems to use plenty of them.

(10) JUST WHAT IS IT? Cora Buhlert is catching up with The Orville — “The Other Star Trek Show: Some Thoughts on The Orville”.

For starters, The Orville is not a Star Trek parody in the vein of Bully Herbig’s Traumschiff Surprise skits, Pigs in Space or even Galaxy Quest. And The Orville is indeed very different from Seth MacFarlane’s comedy work (which is a good thing, as far as I’m concerned, considering how dreadful my previous experience with Seth MacFarlane and his work was), though it does resort to typical US sitcom humor on occasion. Now some of the jokes – mostly those arising out of science fiction and Star Trek clichés, e.g. the jokes about the “anti-banana ray”, drinks on the bridge and cannabis from the replicator, Ed accidentally walking through the Blob like crewmember, the tentacled underwater creature which turns out to be a botanist or the bit with the Krill commander standing off center on the viewscreen (come on, it is weird that people always stand exactly in the middle of the viewscreen in SF films and TV shows, to the point that I even included a “Sorry, could you please adjust your screen” line in Graveyard Shift) – work. They work precisely because these jokes arise naturally out of the science fiction setting.

In the interests of good taste, please, no one tell Seth MacFarlane the German word for space travel is “raumfahrt.”

(11) MORE MEXICANX PICKS. The next group of Mexicanx Initiative recipients of Worldcon 76 memberships has been announced by John Picacio.

(12) WALKING THE PATTERN. Michael Michel talks about “Forming Practice from Passion” at the SFWA Blog.

Success is not a thing given, nor a thing taken or forced. It is something practiced. The pathways we travel most often are the ones with the deepest grooves. Ever heard the term, “Get in the groove?” It holds more truth and functionality than folk might realize. Success depends on the proverbial grooves we create–practices forming pathways.

Here’s a quick and easy process to get in the Write Groove:

  1. Orient: Despite my B.S., how would I love to show up to my writing, right here and now?
  2. Engage: Am I willing to show up to it in the way I’d love?
  • If yes, continue to step three…
  • If no, see step one again…
  1. Practice: Show this by completing a small, clear action step.
  2. Celebrate: You’ve practiced successful writing. Savor the truth, then repeat at later date.

(13) A DISNEY WINTER IS COMING. Peter Marks has written in the Washington Post about the development of the Broadway version of Frozen, which has ten new songs, a new ending, and has been in development for seventeen months:

Disney likes to hire directors who don’t just reorchestrate, but also can cogitate freshly about what on the surface might merely seem easily digested fairy tales rendered immaculately on celluloid. This has not always translated into success on Broadway: Think of opera director Francesca Zambello’s overproduced “The Little Mermaid” or design auteur Bob Crowley’s turgid “Tarzan.” When it does work, though, as in Julie Taymor’s visually ravishing “The Lion King,” the enchanting results fulfill the artistic mission the company has striven to uphold as it continues the tradition of big-time transferences from screen to stage it commenced with “Beauty and the Beast” in 1994.

For Grandage, the challenge has not only been to accept the magnitude of expectation fans of the movie would bring into the theater — “You realized you were taking on something that has seeped so deeply into the consciousness of people globally” — but also to bring to the fore an emotionality better suited to characters in three dimensions.

“It’s a show that’s very much about a family in trauma,” says Kristen Anderson-Lopez, who with her husband, Robert Lopez, wrote the score for the film and added more than a dozen other songs for the Broadway version, which of course retains the Oscar-winning “Let It Go.” That was sung on screen by Idina Menzel as the tormented Elsa, the young queen cursed with an ice-making power that bedevils her subjects and sends her into self-imposed exile.

(14) TWO MUSIC LOVERS. Steve Vertlieb invites you to watch a video of “a delightful conversation with composer and music preservationist Roger Hall in my living room, talking candidly about the cultural significance and artistic importance of Music For The Movies … our interaction with composers Elmer Bernstein, Lee Holdridge and Mark McKenzie … as well as the oldest, most successfully enduring website devoted entirely to the study and presentation of original motion picture music, Film Music Review.”

[Thanks to Mark Hepworth, JJ, Cat Eldridge, Cat Rambo, Carl Slaughter, Cora Buhlert, Olav Rokne, Martin Morse Wooster, John King Tarpinian, Chip Hitchcock, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Rambo.]

Pixel Scroll 2/24/18 I Am Just A Pixel, Though My Story’s Seldom Scrolled

(1) HIGH CONCEPT. This quartet of movie posters for Solo features Han Solo, Qi’ra, Lando, and Chewie.

(2) WAIT A MINUTE. Mark Hamill is going to get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. You mean he didn’t already have one? And this guy did? —

Trump was awarded a Walk of Fame star in 2007 for his role in reality series “The Apprentice.”

The official ceremony for Hamill’s star will take place on Mar. 8, according to Variety magazine. “Star Wars” creator George Lucas and Hamill’s costar, Harrison Ford, will assist in hosting the event.

(3) WORLDCON 76 PROGRESS REPORT 2. Available to read here [PDF file].

(4) MEXICANX INITIATIVE HITS 50. Worldcon 76 guest of honor John Picacio and supporters have reached a milestone:

WE DID IT. Thanks to my Mexicanx Initiative teammates, we have now reached our goal of 50(!!!) Sponsored Attending Memberships to Worldcon 76 in San Jose for deserving Mexicanx pros and fans. I had envisioned doing this since last August, but it was exactly one month ago that I was able to announce this endeavor. My good friend John Scalzi immediately joined in, and together with some amazing friends, here we are — ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED. My friends at ALAMO pushed us over the top with the final seven memberships! This was truly a team effort and you’re looking at everyone responsible for this win: John Scalzi Mary Robinette Kowal Chris Rose Fast Forward: Contemporary Science Fiction Ctein John O’Halloran Elizabeth McCarty Chris Brown Kate Elliott Kat Angeli Rina Elson Weisman Randall Shepherd Richard Flores IV Amazing Stories Worldcon 76 in San Jose Joanna Volpe, Ty Franck, Mur Lafferty, Christine O’ Halloran, BWAWA, and of course, Canadiense Anónima. Muchas gracias, all!

Picacio reveals there will be a follow-on fundraiser:

For those still wanting to contribute — ping me. I’ll share more on this tomorrow, but I’ve been building a secondary fund called ‘The Mexicanx Initiative Assistance Fund’, to assist with travel and food needs for Mexicanx facing an expensive journey to Worldcon 76 in San Jose. I’ve done this quietly, but it’s been building and it’s a complementary, but very separate fund from what we’ve achieved above. And yes, Worldcon’s treasury handles all the money. I never touch it. I just go get it.

(5) PROFESSIONAL DISCOURTESIES. John Picacio came back online later to chastize Terry Goodkind for belittling the artist of one of Goodkind’s book covers.

Heads up to everyone in the publishing industry: Authors, please take note, especially those new to the sf/f field — Pictured here is some of the most unprofessional behavior you will ever witness. This is a writer publicly throwing his cover artist under the bus, while embarrassing his publisher and their art director. This is the behavior of a child throwing a tantrum. It’s pathetic and it’s bush league. Never make the same mistake this guy just did. EVER. To Bastien Lecouffe-Deharme: Hold your head high. We’ve got your back.

And on Twitter they do have his back — lots of supportive tweets like these —

(6) NONFICTION FICTION. In “Why Adding Monsters and Fairies to a Memoir Can Make It Even More Real”, Matthew Cheney, Carmen Maria Machado, Rosalind Palermo Stevenson, and Sofia Samatar discuss the speculative memoir.

Sofia Samatar: Since I am starting this adventure, let me tell you why I chose to bring this particular group together. Carmen has written some of my favorite short stories, and one time when we were sharing a hotel room at a conference, I told her I’d been thinking about the intersection of memoir and speculative fiction, and she said she was actually working on a speculative memoir at the moment. Matt’s a fiction writer, too, and I invited him because, also at a conference, at some reception in a dark room, we were standing around with our paper plates, and he told me he was writing a dissertation on the blurry space between fiction and nonfiction, looking at Virginia Woolf and J.M. Coetzee and Samuel R. Delany. Rosalind is a brilliant writer, whose story “Insect Dreams” I have read many times. Her work plays with history and the fantastic, and recently she told me her new book is about the idea of the female Adam, and described it as a “hybrid” and a “faux autobiography.”

I started thinking about the idea of “speculative memoir” because I was a fantasy and science fiction writer whose work was becoming more and more autobiographical. Of course, all writing draws from experience, but there’s a particularly weird energy to writing memoir, in a deliberate way, in a fantastic or uncanny mode. It seems to announce a certain relationship to memory, and to experience. I wonder if each of you could start by talking a bit about this in relation to your own work. What do you find compelling about the concept of speculative memoir?

(7) REALLY EVERYTHING. Jeb Kinnison’s after action report about Life, The Universe & Everything 2018 covers some dimensions not heard about in the earlier File 770 account.

The LibertyCon contingent was well-represented, with local writers Larry Correia and Brad Torgersen, and Sarah Hoyt in from Colorado. Baen did its roadshow and the infamous Lawdog attended. While I met Larry briefly at LibertyCon two years back, I saw a lot more of him and his charming wife Bridget this time. We had listened to the audiobook of “Tom Stranger, Interdimensional Insurance Agent” (written by Larry, read by Adam Baldwin) on the drive up. As Larry’s media empire has grown and the movie options for some of his worlds are pending, it’s kind of a thrill that he now knows who I am and lets me hug him (his excuse being his arm was injured and couldn’t take too many handshakes.)

(8) NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED. Allegedly. “PETA Hands Out Awards to ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Jumanji’ for Being Animal-Friendly”.

From Star Wars: The Last Jedi to Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals on Thursday revealed the Hollywood actors and movies it recognizes for animal-friendly achievements this year with its first-ever Oscats Awards.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi nabbed the prizes for best live-action movie and best original screenplay for positive storylines, like Finn and Rose liberating fathiers used for racing and Chewbacca choosing not to eat a porg.

Wait a minute, in the movie I saw, Chewie already killed and cooked one of the damn things! How does PETA square giving an award after that?

(9) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • February 24, 1886Thomas Edison married Mina Miller. He wooed the 19-year-old woman via Morse code. Who says online dating is new?

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

  • Born February 24, 1786 — Wilhelm Karl Grimm, the younger of the two Brothers Grimm, is born in Hanau, Germany.
  • Born February 24, 1945Barry Bostwick (The Rocky Horror Picture Show)
  • Born February 24, 1947Edward James Olmos (Battlestar Galactica, Blade Runner 2049)
  • Born February 24, 1961Kasi Lemmons (Candyman, Vampire’s Kiss)
  • Born February 24, 1966Billy Zane (The Phantom, Back to the Future II)
  • Born February 24, 1970Ungela Brockman (Starship Troopers, Mystery Men)

(11) RELENTLESS. Kameron Hurley isn’t willing to coast: “From Good to Great: Starting With ‘Why'”.

It’s easy to stay motivated when you’re crushing yourself against a system. I loved being a young, scrappy writer in my 20’s, speaking truth to “the establishment,” and coming up through the slings and arrows of SFF publishing to claim my space within it. But what happens when you become the establishment? Do you just head off to do the movie deals, to expand your work to a new audience? Do you spend your time mentoring new writers? Do you just blurb a lot of books?

Accepting that I was an established author has been a hard road, for me. There are young people coming into SFF now who don’t know of an SFF without me in it. I’ve been publishing novels for seven years, which feels like a blink compared to my hard road to get here, but plenty of readers have come of age during those seven years, and for some that’s half or a third or a quarter of their lives. I know I have a long way to go, still. A huge career ahead. But I need to find my passion again for why I’m doing this. I have to find the why, or the road just stops here.

And, you know, I realize this sounds like, “Wah, wah, I got everything I wanted!” but I’ve seen how many people get stuck at “good” on the way to great. And I don’t want to just be good. I want to be great. To get to great requires continuous learning, interrogation of what you want, and leveling up again and again. So while I may not have all the steps mapped out to get me to “great” yet… at least that seems to be the place I want to reach. I don’t want to stop at good. I’ve gotten to good.

(12) HI-TECH INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY POSSE. Fast Company profiles copyright violation search services in “Here Come The Copyright Bots For Hire, With Lawyers In Tow”.

“I climbed up 900 stairs on an island to take a photo of the whole island, and it was used on the cover of a local magazine out there,” she says.

[Photographer Christy] Turner might not have known about the photo theft if not for a pair of services called Copypants and Pixsy, which use algorithms to scour the internet for copies of photographers’ work and help them enforce their rights. They send stern letters to suspected infringers, demanding that their clients be compensated or that licensing fees be paid; in some cases, law firms that work with the companies will even initiate a lawsuit on their behalf. In Turner’s case, justice came in the form of $500 in damages.

(13) SIDE BY SIDE. Cat Eldridge says, “One of the firm memes of sf is that new technologies always replace existing technologies. Reality is far messier than that meme which is why shows like Firefly makes sense.” Fast Company contends “The CD Business Isn’t Dying—It’s Just Evolving”.

…“We felt like the culture dictated that people were going to buy vinyl, not CDs,” says Kevin Farzad, Sure Sure’s drummer and percussionist. “And we were kind of surprised that more CDs sold than not.”

The band could be forgiven for assuming CDs wouldn’t sell. From their peak of $13.2 billion in 2000, U.S. CD revenues have slid to just $1.2 billion in 2016, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. And as listeners flock to streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music, the CD’s decline isn’t slowing down. Earlier this month, Billboard reported that Best Buy will stop selling CDs in stores this summer, and that Target only wants to pay distributors for the CDs it actually sells. Some observers saw the news as a death blow to a fading format.

Yet it’s hard to reconcile that gloomy outlook with what’s happening in the indie music world, where the CD is still thriving. Earlier this week, the online music store Bandcamp reported 18% year-over-year growth in CD sales for 2017, up from 14% growth in 2016. (Bandcamp declined to comment for this story.)

(14) JOBS APPLICATION. History on the block: “Steve Jobs’s 1973 job application going on sale” and is expected to fetch $50K.

It is not known what the application was for, nor whether Jobs was successful.

He wrote his name as “Steven jobs” and his address as “reed college”, the school he attended briefly in Portland, Oregon before dropping out.

On the form, Jobs responded “yes” to having a driving licence but when asked if he had access to a car he wrote “possible, but not probable”.

Next to “Phone” the creator of the iPhone wrote “none”.

(15) PROXY CANCERS. In-vitro repro of specific tumors lets oncologists test drug efficacy without testing patients: “‘Mini-tumours’ created to battle cancer”.

Scientists have been able to predict how cancer patients will respond to therapy by growing miniature versions of their tumours in the laboratory.

They say the groundbreaking work could lead to “smarter, kinder and more effective treatments”.

The study, in the journal Science, was 100% accurate at telling which drugs would fail and this could spare patients from unnecessary side-effects.

Mini-tumours could also be a powerful way of testing new drugs.

(16) BEST HORROR. The cover for Ellen Datlow’s The Best Horror of the Year, Volume Ten, has been revealed:

(17) MEDIA TIE-IN. In the Washington Post, DeNeen L. Brown interviews Jesse Holland, who wrote the Black Panther novelization while spending a semester as the distinguished visiting professor of the ethics of journalism at the University of Arkansas: “He loved ‘Black Panther’ comics as a kid. Then Marvel asked him to write a novel for the movie.”

Holland, who teaches nonfiction writing at Goucher College outside Baltimore, had already written four books, including “The Invisibles: The Untold Story of African American Slaves in the White House,” when Marvel approached him.

They’d seen his companion novel for another blockbuster movie: “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” He’d written about Finn, a former First Order stormtrooper.

After “Finn’s Story” was published in 2016, an editor at Marvel called Holland. “She says, ‘We have this character, the Black Panther,’?” Holland recalled. “There’s never been a novel about the Black Panther.”

Marvel wanted to recount the origin of the Black Panther in novel form, update the story and introduce the superhero to new readers.

“Most of the world didn’t know the character until last year,” Holland said. “If you want a succinct origin story to tell you who he is, my novel is a good place to start. You’ll see a lot of characters in the movie in the novel. We are drawing from the same wellspring.”

(18) WAKANDA WEAR. Yahoo! Entertainment’s Gwynne Watkins, in “Behind ‘Black Panther’: The hidden meanings of those stunning Wakanda costumes”, looks at the costume designers for Black Panther and what statements they were trying to make in describing a country that had never been conquered by colonial powers.

Yahoo Entertainment: The concept of Wakanda as an African nation that was never colonized by the Dutch or British is so powerful. How did that inform your design choices?
Ruth Carter: 
I discovered so many things about Africa that I didn’t know — like, the cloth that we normally see in many African-inspired things, the wax cloth, was brought in from the Dutch. There are influences of the British; when you see a Nigerian wedding, you’ll see a Nigerian traditional drape and a guy with a top hat on. [laughs] So you have to dig deeper and go to the indigenous tribes of Africa. You’re not a real historian, you’re just kind of the temporary historian for the picture, so you’re looking at beadwork and you’re looking at carvings and you’re looking at masks. And you’re being inspired by patterns. There are a couple of patterns that I saw repeated throughout the continent: one is like a checkerboard, another one is a triangle.

And I looked at books on African ceremonies, since ceremonies reminded me of precolonization. So for example, the Dogon tribe were the first astronomers. They do a ceremony once a year where they adorn themselves in these brilliant raffia skirts and wood-carving masks that shoot up to the stars — they’re really tall. And they do these moves that sweep the earth….

(19) NOW BOARDING. Flying to Wakanda? Your connecting flight is ready in Atlanta.

Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport is getting into the Marvel movie spirit by jokingly offering flights to Wakanda — the fictional country from Black Panther.

The airport tweeted out a digitally altered image of gate T3 showing its destination as Wakanda, the kingdom ruled by King T’Challa, aka the Black Panther, in the eponymous super hero film.

 

[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Cat Eldridge, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Chip Hitchcock, and Carl Slaughter for some of these stories, Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Peer.]