By Dave Doering: While reviewing old fanzines of our early convention era, I note some curious parallels between the launch of the British “International Fantasy Award” (IFA) and the “Annual Science Fiction Achievement Award” [Hugo]. The big question is: “Who first came up with the idea?”
Origin Accounts
The IFA Origin: “The birth of the International Fantasy Award combusted spontaneously, as it were, during a conversation among four habituees [sic] of the London Circle at the White Horse Tavern one Thursday evening in April 1951.”
Dave Doering: With the event (titled Festivention) held on May 11-13th, and the statement that the awards were “conceived only two weeks prior to the convention”, this would likely have been Thursday, April 26, 1951.
“Highlight of this largest-ever British gathering was a surprise award promulgated by the London Circle for the Best fiction book and best technical book of 1950. The panel of critics chose George R. Stewart’s EARTH ABIDES (Random House) for fiction, and WIlly Ley & Chesley Bonestell’s CONQUEST OF SPACE (Viking Press) for the technical award. Forrest Ackerman accepted the two awards on behalf of his countrymen.”
The awards, conceived only two weeks prior to the convention, went on the drawing board immediately and a twelve-inch spaceship taken from the Bonestell design on the February 1951 GALAXY cover has been approved; it will be mounted on an oak base complete with ornate lighter.”
Dave Doering: This would have been a cigarette lighter, not a sailboat. Lighters were not uncommon add-ons in the 1950s awards. For example, here is one such trophy:
“Actual awards will be fashioned of heavy chrome for the fiction class, and bronze for the technical. Owing to the shortage of time, exact replicas were used in place of the models–not expected to be ready for some weeks. It is intended that these awards will be made annually, and planned to embrace other fields of science-fiction including the films.”
Dave Doering: Warp ahead from April 1951 to sometime in the summer of 1953:
The Hugo Origin: “The idea for the Awards was the brainchild of one of our club members, Hal Lynch. He came running over to my house one night, and said, “Hey, Bob, I’ve got a great idea! Why don’t we give awards for things like Best Novel and Best Magazine — sort of like the Oscars.”
And I said, “Gee, that’s great! We could call them the ‘Hugos’.”
Making the awards:
IFA: “For the event, it was only possible in the time available to have ready a facsimile of the actual Award trophies.”
Hugo: “Milt found out that the person who had originally been responsible for making the Awards had never even gotten started. So Jack stepped in and had to spend the entire convention in his machine shop.”
Appearance:
1953 Hugo Award1951 International Fantasy Award
Design Origin
Hugo: ” Milt Rothman suggested we use a rocket design based on a Chesley Bonestell cover for a Willy Ley book”
Dave Doering: Most likely the 1949 edition of The Conquest of Space by Willy Ley:
IFA: “The design was taken from the Bonestell cover on the March [sic] 1951 Galaxy” [Note that the cover is actually from the February 1951 Galaxy. Perhaps the writer is referring to the date when the issue appeared in Britain.]
Dave Doering: Wow, a remarkable coincidence! So, yes, the same Father of the Rocket was chosen on both sides of the Pond for a major award. Here’s another one: the 1951 Non-Fiction IFA went to that very book that inspired the IFA/Hugo design– The Conquest of Space.
The Question Remains…
Did the IFA spark the launch of the Hugo award?
There certainly may be a question, however small, about whether the British award made in 1951 would have been of notice two years later to Hal Lynch in Philly in 1953.
On the other hand, how much more likely is it that fen in 1951-53 would have discussed a significant award in their field? (Given too that there were two IFAs in 1951–Fiction and Non-Fiction Book.) If not the winners themselves, fen would certainly discuss what this new award would mean to fandom, wouldn’t they?
Point 1: The IFA history says: “Considerable publicity has been given the Awards on both sides of the Atlantic”
Dave Doering: [I looked for zines of that era that reflect this publicity. Just may need to dig deeper.]
Point 2: The IFA committee announced their judging panel for the 1952 awards which included:
“ANTHONY BOUCHER and J. FRANCIS McCOMAS (jointly), as editors of Magazine of Fantasy and Science-Fiction, both noted connoisseurs, critics and anthologists. EVERETT F. BLEILER – leading anthologist and bibliophile. GROFF CONKLIN – well-known anthologist and book reviewer. BASIL DAVENPORT – literary critic of the New York Times and Book-of- the-Month Club. AUGUST DERLETH – outstanding anthologist, author and book reviewer. JUDITH MERRIL – leading woman fantasy author and editor.”
F&SF/Anthony Boucher/August Derleth/Judith Merrill were all big deals in SF in 1951-52 and being on the IFA’s award panel would certainly have been newsworthy in that era.
Point 3: Forrest J Ackerman attended the Festivention in England and carried home an actual IFA to the US. Wouldn’t 4E have mentioned this award in a zine or two?
Point 4: Even if news didn’t travel far or fast in 1951, wouldn’t it seem likely that Philly fen (if anyone) would have heard/discussed this award? Given the seniority of Phil-fen in fandom rivaling that of New York?
Yes, these are compelling points to me on the spark for the Hugos. I think the conclusion has to be our British compatriots not only planted the seed of our country but also planted the seed of the fabled Hugo.
Notes for Future Worldcons
Here’s a couple of points mentioned about the IFA and the Hugo that are of interest for Worldcons even today:
Meeting the Financial Challenge
IFA: “it is to be hoped that sufficient financial support will be forthcoming to maintain the high standard already set, and to establish a sound foundation for the future.”
“A special Fantasy Fund Award [sic] has been opened whereby anyone may donate.”
Hugo: “But how were we going to do it? Money didn’t flow freely in those days. In the end we decided to make them ourselves.”
Dave Doering: Even with today’s membership numbers, the Hugo awards now cost ~$12,000 to produce, a tidy sum for the committee. Should we return to “make them ourselves”? Tougher now as we don’t have hood ornaments to reuse.
Another British Solution:
On how to fund the IFA: “The idea was, for our American friends, a dollar-a-throw competition which entailed listing in order of preference their own six choices, with prizes amounting to $25.00 offered to the three winners placing the books’ correct order of merit as revealed by the adjudicators’ final selection.”
Dave Doering: Hmmm… Budget-conscious Worldcon committees might consider this contest idea for funding. Seems more dependable than hoping for help in lean years from a fan revolt to generate a blossoming of memberships.
Selecting Winners
Here’s a final question posed for the IFA in 1951 that reads exactly as a current-day post on the Hugos:
“The main question that has been asked, and which is still the most important factor of all, is: who will be the judges of what are the best works of fiction and non-fiction of 1951 in the fantasy field? Who are the best-suited people to state categorically that a certain book was the best literary achievement in fantasy published last year, worthy of an Award that could conceivably influence the sales of that book, and certainly enhance the reputation of the author?”
Dave Doering: Dang! 74 years later and this question is still on the table–hotly debated online and infinitely at the WSFS Business Meeting.
(1) LOST BONESTELL LITHOGRAPHS COMING ONLINE FREE. You’ll soon be able to view thirty-two recently discovered industrial illustrations from Chesley Bonestell’s early career. Starting this Thursday, April 3, Michael Swanwick and Marianne Porter will be posting one new illustration every workday on Swanwick’s blog at Flogging Babel.
Most of these images have not been seen for over a century.
Chesley Bonestell was the most significant and influential astronomical illustrator of the 20th century. But before his rise to fame he worked as an architectural illustrator. In 1918, he was commissioned by the Army Corps of Engineers to document the construction of a wartime munitions plant and hydroelectric dam in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Bonestell created 32 large-scale lithographs, showing the construction of the plant, including meticulous records of both industrial interiors, the dam and railroad being built, and the surrounding countryside. They were all signed in the stone.
The munitions factory was never a particularly successful enterprise; it came on line only a few weeks before World War One ended. But the hydroelectric dam was the first in the Tennessee Valley Authority, the massive project that made possible the economic and industrial development of the American South.
The thirty-two lithographs were stored in the Packwood House Museum in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where only two were actually on display to the public. This set of prints are not numbered, and it is not clear if any other prints were made. The Museum was owned and operated by John Featherstone, and his wife, Edith Featherstone, an artist in her own right, and was intended to showcase her work, as well as central Pennsylvania arts and crafts. Eventually the museum was closed and its contents liquidated. The Bonestell lithographs seem to have been included in the collection because John Featherstone was the engineer in charge of the Muscle Shoals construction project.
The lithographs were purchased by Swanwick and Porter in an auction. When all of them have been posted online, a torrent will be created, making the complete collection available at full resolution.
Michael Swanwick is an award-winning science fiction and fantasy writer. His wife, Marianne Porter, is the editor and publisher of Dragonstairs Press. The first image to be posted is attached.
“I don’t know what they are, but I hope you get them.”
That’s what the lady at the auction house said when Marianne Porter told her that all Marianne wanted were the Chesley Bonestell lithographs. There were 32 of them in the lot, and it was clear nobody at Pook & Pook knew what they were….
…Is it common within the movie poster design industry to bid against other studios for projects?
Especially on really big films, there will be three to four different agencies. Just to give you an example, on Game of Thrones season two, there were like 11 agencies that worked on that. It’s super competitive. For independent films that don’t have that much money, they might only be able to hire one agency to work on it. But when you start getting into the Dunes of the world, then there are multiple agencies working on it. And they’re working on it until the end, by the way. You don’t even know if you’re gonna get the final post; it’s pretty wild….
…I also think successful movie posters can exist as standalone pieces in their own right, outside of their attachment to a movie. A graphic image or design that you might want on your wall or you find compelling simply because it looks good.
100%. The thing is, every filmmaker cares about their poster. There’s not one filmmaker that’s like, “Whatever…” Because it’s the face of the film. As great as trailers are, they’ll probably be forgotten. Nobody says, “I remember the trailer for Rosemary’s Baby or the trailer for Alien.” They’re like, “Oh, my God, the Alien poster!” …
…The other thing I’d like to say is that it never gets old. The other day, I went to see Captain America, and our poster was in the lobby. Seeing the stuff that I’ve worked on out in the world just never gets old. If it ever does, I think I’ll call it a day.
(3) CAN IT BE? “Trump Tariffs Hit Vox Day” says crusading journalist Camestros Felapton, who has found a way to leverage today’s headlines into a sff blog post. (By which I mean, dang, I wish I’d thought of it!)
…A country that surprised some in getting high tariffs was Switzerland at 31%. That’s higher than the UK (10%), EU (10%) and South Korea (25%). Sure would be a shame if some obnoxious hyper-nationalistic Trump support had invested a lot of money in printing and binding hardback books for Trump supporting fanboys in the US wouldn’t it?…
The Short: As discussed below, I believe The Other Worlds (aka The Other Worlds: 25 Modern Stories of Mystery and Imagination, 1942 editions), Phil Stong editor, 1941 Wilfred Funk, is the first speculative fiction anthology. I am glad I read it, but it’s a mixed bag and I would only recommend it to a big fan of horror, science fiction and fantasy from 1925 to 1940. It includes three essays by Stong in addition to 25 stories. My favorite story was the great “Alas, All Thinking!“, a novelette by Harry Bates (known best for “Farewell to the Master“, a novelette adapted for the movie “The Day The Earth Stood Still“), Astounding Stories, June 1935. I am not really a fan of horror, which influenced how I felt about The Other Worlds. My overall average rating is 3.45/5, or a rather anemic “Good”. It is in print, and available online…
(5) FUTURE TENSE. March 2025’s Future Tense Fiction story is “Coda,” by Arula Ratnakar—a story about computation, genetics, and cryptography.
The response essay, “Computing Consciousness”, is by computer scientist Christopher Moore, whose research actually inspired the story!
(6) TIME TO NOMINATE FOR THE CÓYOTL AWARDS. Members of the Furry Writers’ Guild are eligible to submit 2024 Cóyotl Awards nominations through April 5.
Nominations are open to all members of the Furry Writers’ Guild, though awards may be given to any work of anthropomorphic writing demonstrating excellence regardless of membership. Please see the award rules for what makes an eligible work. For a non-exhaustive list of what’s eligible, see the recommended reading list.
(7) DOUBLE-HEADER. In the first video below Erin Underwood interviews Martha Wells about her Murderbot series, with a couple of questions about the adaptation that is coming to Apple TV in May. The second video is a review of In The Lost Lands, which is an adaptation of GRRM’s short story.
Exclusive Interview with Martha Wells: Inside The Murderbot Diaries
Join me for this exclusive interview with Martha Wells, author of The Murderbot Diaries, as we explore one of science fiction’s most popular series — now being adapted into a new Apple TV series. What makes Murderbot so compelling, and how did Wells create such a nuanced, unforgettable character? Come watch on YouTube to find out!
In the Lost Lands, Movie Review – Worth the Watch?
Paul W.S. Anderson’s In the Lost Lands brings George R.R. Martin’s dark fantasy to life, but does its reliance on digital sets and AI-driven cinematography elevate or undermine the experience? With Milla Jovovich and Dave Bautista leading the charge, this film raises big questions about the future of sci-fi and fantasy filmmaking. Join me on YouTube where I break it down.
Criticisms that Doctor Who has become too “woke” prove the series is doing the right thing by being inclusive, its new star Varada Sethu has said.
Sethu plays the Doctor’s latest travelling companion, Belinda Chandra, in new episodes airing next month. With Ncuti Gatwa returning as the Doctor, the pairing marks the first time a Tardis team will comprise solely people of colour.
Speaking about the milestone, Sethu told the Radio Times: “Ncuti was like, ‘Look at us. We get to be in the Tardis. We’re going to piss off so many people.’…
When new Doctor Who companion Varada Sethu first told her family she wanted to be an actress, there wasn’t immediate support.
“They had difficulty coming to terms with it initially,” she tells BBC Asian Network News.
Varada, who will be playing Ncuti Gatwa’s sidekick, Belinda Chandra in the upcoming series, feels going into acting is “sadly still not encouraged in the South Asian community”.
“There’s an element of resistance we face,” the 32-year-old says.
But Varada wants to change all of that, and says inspiring young girls to follow their dreams is one of her big goals.
“I want to be the person that these girls can point out to and say: ‘She made it and she came from a community that looks like mine’.
“So I think I’ve gone about this with the energy of, I can’t fall flat on my face,” she says.
But the actress, who has had roles in Disney+ Star Wars series Andor, 2018 crime drama Hard Sun and Jurassic World Dominion, says change comes with challenges.
A report by the Creative Diversity Network found in 2022/23 the percentage of on-screen contributions by those who identify as South Asian or South Asian British was 4.9%.
That’s compared with the latest census data, analysed by the UK Government, that found around 8% of people from those backgrounds are in the working-age population.
“It’s a constant battle of failure isn’t an option,” says Varada.
“Because, you know, your uncle’s daughter who’s six, who might wanna go into acting when she’s a bit older, won’t be allowed to, if I become the cautionary tale.”…
The new trailer immediately goes meta, detailing at least more than a few adventures where Strange New Worlds will take the crew of the Enterprise beyond the typical spacebound adventures and into some very meta territory–from murder mystery holoprograms, to a kitschy spin on the original Trek‘s ’60s production aesthetics. And that’s even before you get to Carol Kane’s Commander Pelia hooking up the whole ship to old-timey analogue phones!…
(10) VAL KILMER (1959-2025). Actor Val Kilmer, whose iconic genre roles included Batman Forever and Real Genius, died April 1 at the age of 65. The Hollywood Reporter tribute notes he was most famous for playing Iceman in Top Gun and Doc Holliday in Tombstone. And it also recalled some of his other sff work —
…Marlon Brando’s insane assistant in John Frankenheimer’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996);
…He was married to British actress Joanne Whalley from 1988 until their divorce in 1996. They met while working together on Willow and wed months later.
…Kilmer starred as rockabilly teen idol Nick Rivers in the daffy spy spoof Top Secret! (1984) from Jim Abrahams and the Zucker brothers.
…Kilmer also provided the voice of K.I.T.T. in a new version of TV’s Knight Rider in 2008-09
(11) MEMORY LANE(S)
[First piece written by Paul Weimer. Second piece by Cat Eldridge.]
April 2, 1968 — 2001: A Space Odyssey
By Paul Weimer: Did the “Blue Danube Waltz” play through your head just now? Or perhaps “Also Sprach Zarathrustra”? Possibly both? Even though I am not a music guy, both of those music pieces come to mind when I think of 2001. The music is the first thing I think of when I think of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
You know the story. Monolith uplifts Ape with the power of ultraviolence. Humans find the Monolith on the Moon, a ship heads to Jupiter to investigate where the signal went. Hal goes mad and kills most of his crew. David Bowman has an apotheosis.
But 2001 is far more than the music and that plot. It’s visuals, really the first time I saw it, I felt that this could be what space would be like. Slow sedate visuals but one that felt accurate. (The jokes/conspiracy theories that the real moon landing was directed by Kubrick come from the visuals of 2001). Be it the apes scene, the casualness of the lounge in the space station, the investigation of the monolith, daily life on the Discovery, or the very very weird ending. I am still not quite sure I get it. But is it absolutely unforgettable? Yes.
And that’s the fun thing about the movie. It is slow, very slow. But it doesn’t drag. It’s sedately and sedate in places, and then violently and suddenly. The movie seems to just know when to interrupt the quiet stately pace with a sudden action or point of drama. In any event, the movie holds my attention throughout. Every time I’ve started watching it, I’ve kept it on. It is THE space movie for me.
And it became clear to me that when I saw Star Trek The Motion Picture, just how much they tried to borrow from 2001. Maybe too much, for their own good. They learned the need for stately pacing…but not so much when to break it up.
By Cat Eldridge: Fifty-six years ago, 2001: A Space Odyssey had its world premiere on this date at the Uptown Theater in Washington, D.C., it would be nearly a month and three weeks, the fifteenth of May to be precise, before the United Kingdom would see this film.
It was directed as you know by Stanley Kubrick from a screenplay by him and Arthur C. Clarke who wrote the novel.
It spawned a sequel about which the less said the better. (My opinion, the critics sort of like it. Huh.)
It would win a Hugo at St. Louiscon over what I will term an extraordinarily offbeat field of nominees that year — Yellow Submarine, Charly, Rosemary’s Baby and the penultimate episode of The Prisoner, “Fallout”.
It did amazingly well box office wise, returning one hundred fifty million against just ten million in production costs.
So, what did the critics think of it then? Some liked, some threw up their guts. Some thought that audience members that liked it were smoking something to keep themselves high. (That was in several reviews.) Ebert liked it a lot and said that it “succeeds magnificently on a cosmic scale.” Others were less kind with Pauline Kael who I admit is not one of my favorite critics saying that it was “a monumentally unimaginative movie.” Humph.
I was too young to see when I came out, but an arts cinema showed a few decades later which I saw it there, so I did see it on a reasonably large screen. It is extraordinarily amazing film. I don’t think the Suck Fairy would any problems with it even today
Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give it a most not unsurprising rating of ninety two percent.
(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
April 2, 1948 — Joan D. Vinge, 77.
By Paul Weimer: It is fitting that The Snow Queen has her birthday just as we are getting out of winter and into Spring, and the treacherous Winters of the planet Tiamat are reluctantly getting ready to hand over the control of the planet to the Summers for a time. The original Snow Queen novel and its sequels is where I began reading Vinge’s work. I picked it up for the same reason I picked up many books in the mid to late 90’s–it had been on an award ballot and I was filling in the gaps of my reading. (It won for Best Novel at the Hugos in 1981, and was a finalist for the Nebula the same year). I found the worldbuilding of the novel most satisfying, and the titular Snow Queen and her grand plot to try and control the planet for its entire cycle by means of her clone I found to be a crackerjack story.
Only after reading the story did I realize how much the story was influenced by both the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, and by Robert Graves (The White Goddess). A re-read when I decided to read the entire series showed me that as much as I thought it has been rich and interesting, on a re-read the book was *even better*. The Snow Queen is one of those novels that the more you know, the even cleverer and more intricately woven it appears to be.
My favorite of that entire series is the standalone Tangled Up in Blue, which is really a noir mystery novel that just so happens to take place on the mean streets of Carbuncle. It’s a genre mashup that works even better than I hoped, and it works really standalone, too. You don’t need to read The Snow Queen to dive into Tangled Up in Blue.
Besides the stories set on Tiamat, Vinge has written plenty of other stuff as well. Catspaw is a favorite of mine, although it is a case where I accidentally started with the second book in the series not even knowing there was a first book (Psion). Vinge feels, like Julian May, like one of the last SF authors to really use and deploy telepathy in a major mainstream SF novel straight up.
Finally, Vinge has also written a number of movie tie-in novelizations, including one (Cowboys and Aliens) that actually redeems that (IMO) very flawed movie.
In 1976, Jenette Kahn began one of the biggest roles in comic books – publisher of DC Comics, home to Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. She was only 28 and the first female boss.
(15) WRITING WHILE DISABLED. In the second audio episode of Writing While Disabledat Strange Horizons, hosts Kristy Anne Cox and Kate Johnston “welcome Farah Mendlesohn, acclaimed SFF scholar and conrunner, to talk all things hearing, dyslexia, and more ADHD adjustments, as well as what fandom could and should be doing better for accessibility at conventions, for both volunteers and attendees.”
There’s a transcript at the link, where you can also watch the full interview on video with close-caption subtitles.
April Fools’ Day is upon us, but this is no joke: Rick and Mortyseason eight hits Adult Swim May 25, with a first look to prove it. The news came as part of Adult Swim’s annual April 1 celebration, and also included a 22-minute special of favorite Rick and Morty moments re-interpreted in appropriately and unexpectedly freaky ways. Adult Swim described it as pulling from “absurd, live-action, theater-based genres,” and frankly you just need to watch it to believe it.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Paul Weimer, Erin Underwood, Michael Swanwick, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Mark Roth-Whitworth.]
In a spirited five-day celebration, held August 8–12 at the Scottish Events Campus in Glasgow, Scotland, crowds converged from all over the globe for the 82nd World Science Fiction Convention, known as Worldcon. Show organizers said that more than 8,000 membership badges were purchased in total, with over 7,200 issued at the venue and upwards of 600 in attendance online.
On the convention floor and across a wealth of a wealth of panels, book signings, and creative showcases, the mood was buoyant, with old hands and first-timers alike connecting in bars, at events, and simply in passing. And the organization’s promise to “[consider] access, inclusion, and diversity as integral to Glasgow 2024,” found the perfect venue in the Scottish city, which was welcoming, accessible, and spacious.
…From an industry perspective, there was a scarcity of American publishers at this year’s Worldcon. Still, everyone in attendance seemed more focused on celebrating the current boom in the genre around the world.
“There’s never been a more exciting time to be a SFF publisher,” said Bethan Morgan, editorial director of Gollancz. Eleanor Teasdale, publisher at Angry Robot Books and Datura Books, remarked, “It’s been a joyous festival of genre, with so many international attendees too.”
This excitement was shared by Amanda Rutter, commissioning editor at Solaris Books. “I haven’t been to [a Worldcon] that felt so productive and positive since before the pandemic,” she said, adding, “The Glasgow team made it the most inclusive convention I have been to by far, given their commitment to accessibility needs and striving to ensure that every single participant felt as though they were represented.”
“The con felt very well organized,” said George Sandison, managing editor at Titan Books. “Like all effective project management, it looked like it was very simple to do and probably required Herculean efforts by numerous highly competent people!” Francesca T. Barbini, founder of Luna Press Publishing, agreed, praising the organizers for “being lots of help when we arrived. Overall, it’s been an amazing experience.”
The main takeaway from the event seemed to be about the importance of in-person connection to both the publishing industry and the greater SFF community. Cath Trechman, editor at large at Titan Books, noted, “I can say I found this year’s Worldcon to be a great place to meet authors and agents and chat about the current trends and the idiosyncrasies of publishing, surrounded by an enthusiastic crowd of genre fans and book lovers.”…
(2) GLASGOW 2024 BUSINESS MEETING VIDEOS. At the link is the YouTube playlist for the 2024 WSFS Business Meeting videos recorded by Lisa Hayes. Kevin Standlee finally found a workaround to overcome the bandwidth problem at his Glasgow hotel.
(3) REVERSE PSYCHOLOGY. [Item by Olav Rokne.] Intended as a happy, silly coda to this year’s Hugo season, Amanda and I present “How to Lose a Hugo,” which after four go-arounds we’re starting to have some experience at. (Though we can think of some folks who have lost far more often than we have.) “How To Lose A Hugo” at the Hugo Book Club Blog.
… When it comes to the Hugo Awards, it’s worth remembering that they are a community award that masquerades as a literary institution. These awards are nominated and voted on by a self-selected group that loosely organizes itself around a series of conventions. That means that how well someone is known and how they are seen within the community will inevitably affect whether or not their work is recognized by the community.
Social media is awash with accounts run by authors who rarely post anything other than promotional content aimed at selling their own books. It’s also worth letting people know who you are, what books you enjoy, and what your general vibe is.
Engaging with the community isn’t just about telling people how good you think your book or art is, it’s about listening and talking about the things that are important to them. Talk about politics, talk about art, talk about architecture, talk about music, and be authentic….
(4) BRISBANE 2028 WORLDCON BID MAY CHANGE DATE. To July?
We are currently considering shifting the dates of our bid, to better align with the total solar eclipse that will be passing through Australia on July 22nd, 2028. We'll update you once we have made our decision.
— Australia 2028: Brisbane bid for Worldcon (@BrisbaneIn28) August 13, 2024
J.K. Rowling and Elon Musk have both been named in a criminal complaint filed to French authorities over alleged “acts of aggravated cyber harassment” against Algerian boxer and newly crowned Olympic champion Imane Khelif.
Nabil Boudi, the Paris-based attorney of Khelif, confirmed to Variety that both figures were mentioned in the body of the complaint, posted to the anti-online hatred center of the Paris public prosecutor’s office on Friday.
The lawsuit was filed against X, which under French law means that it was filed against unknown persons. That “ensure[s] that the ‘prosecution has all the latitude to be able to investigate against all people,” including those who may have written hateful messages under pseudonyms, said Boudi. The complaint nevertheless mentions famously controversial figures….
(6) TWO GREATS AGREE.
my theory about horror films (& fiction) is that the plot is just the clothesline upon which a succession of images is hung. you need to think that there is a (coherent) explanation for the nightmare but essentially, in life, there is not. endings of many novels, not just genre… https://t.co/tlr0bychnS
(7) DISCREET HORROR. [Item by Steven French.] Signs of the times: Nightmare on Elm Street gets downgraded from ‘18’ to ‘15’ while Paint Your Wagon is reclassified a ‘12’ from a PG for the ‘sex references’. “A Nightmare on Elm Street rating change defended by BBFC” reports the Guardian.
The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) has defended its decision to change the certificate of horror film A Nightmare on Elm Street from an 18 to a 15, saying that its audience research showed “strong support for older content to be reclassified in line with modern standards”.
The classic 1980s horror, featuring the malevolent, razor-gloved Freddy Krueger who stalks and murders teenagers in their dreams, was given an 18 certificate on its first UK release in 1985, a designation confirmed on a subsequent cinema release in 2013 and a series of home entertainment releases. However, after a new application from its studio Warner Bros, the certificate was changed to a 15 on 1 August, ahead of a home entertainment reissue in September….
…The spokesperson added: “In the case of A Nightmare on Elm Street, although the film features various bloody moments, it is relatively discreet in terms of gore and stronger injury detail. The kills often leave more to the imagination than visceral detail, and largely occur within a fantasy context. Compared to more recent precedents for violence and horror [classified] at 18 – such as Halloween, Thanksgiving, Imaculate or Saw X – the film is now containable at 15 and we reclassified it accordingly.”…
OMNI LOOP follows Zoya Lowe (Parker), a quantum physicist who finds herself in a time loop, with a black hole growing in her chest and only a week to live. But what the doctors and her family don’t know is that she has already lived this week before; so many times, in fact, that she doesn’t even know how long it’s been. Until one day Zoya meets a gifted student named Paula (Edebiri). Together they team up to save her life – and to unlock the mysteries of time travel.
(9) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born August 13, 1953 — The War of The Worlds film (1953)
It’s 1953, it’s New York City, it’s August, a hot summer night, a perfect evening for an alien invasion to begin, and so we have The War of The Worlds premiere there. Based off, of course the H.G. Wells novel of the same name, it was produced for the screen by George Pal.
The screenplay was written by Barré Lyndon. This is part of his legal name, Alfred Edgar Barre Lyndon, and it is obviously taken from the title character of Thackeray’s novel. This and Conquest of Space were his only SF screenplays.
It was directed by Brian Haskin, just one of many films where he teamed with George Pal, another one being Conquest of Space which our screenwriter here also was on.
It starred Gene Barry who six years later would be Bat Masterson, and Anne Richards, who would be in the Dragnet film that led to the series as Officer Grace Downey. (She does not reprise the character in the series.) Bless her, she’s still with us at age ninety-five. Barry passed on five years ago.
Paramount rather pointedly said there’d be a romantic subplot in which our scientist have a love interest, hence the casting of Richards here.
The story itself is moved to Southern California in to my surprise, it was set in, emphasis was, an actual real place. Linda Rose was formerly in San Diego County, but is now in Riverside County. It’s a ghost town as it was a failed development scheme from the 1880s, one of many from that time. Fascinating as Spock would say.
The special effects were, shall I say, inordinately expensive. Paramount budgeted two million and wouldn’t budge, not a dollar over that amount would be further given, so stock footage of World War Two battles had to do for the global Mars invasion. Even so the film just broke even — two million in production costs, two million in box office receipts in an era when studios generally own the cinemas.
What did critics think of it? The best summation I think come from Variety at the time: “War of the Worlds is a socko science-fiction feature, as fearsome as a film as was the Orson Welles 1938 radio interpretation of the H.G. Wells novel.” It was at the time, after all, only fourteen years since the latter broadcast.
Beetle Moses makes you glad(?) the chef’s work didn’t go to waste.
Bliss finds something that makes Hulk mad. What else is new?
Brewster Rockit questions whether these aliens are ready to invade.
(11) LATEST AND GREATEST. Lisa Tuttle, in “The best recent science fiction and fantasy – reviews roundup” for the Guardian, covers Extremophile by Ian Green; Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan; Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova; The Formidable Miss Cassidy by Meihan Boey; and Lake of Darkness by Adam Roberts.
Last spring, one of my favourite brand tie-ins of 2023 saw high-street cosmetics chain Lush team up with Nintendo to create a range of products based around Super Mario. It was a riot of brightly coloured shower gels and super-sweet fragrances, including a divine Princess Peach body spray that I’m still using because screw gender-based perfume norms.
Now, Lush has released a new video game range celebrating 15 years of Minecraft. There are 12 items in the collection, including easily the most literal bath bomb Lush has ever made – a TNT block – as well as Grass and Lava blocks, a Creeper head shower bomb and a Diamond Pickaxe bubble bar, which is genuinely quite hefty despite its diminutive size.
The collection is apparently the result of a year-long collaboration with the game’s developer Mojang, and it’s been a popular project for the company’s employees. Lush concepts creative director Melody Morton is a regular player – and she’s not the only one. “We have many Minecraft players within the business, so there was lots of reference and resource to pull on when it came to products, creative and messaging,” says Kalem Brinkworth, the creative lead on the Lush collaborations team….
Over the Horizon: Art of the Future from the Paul G. Allen Collection is devoted to how the future, especially interplanetary travel, was imagined by artists and other thinkers during the 20th century. These include Chesley Bonestell, Robert McCall, R.C. Swanson, George Gibbs, and Fred Freeman, among many others. The artworks in this auction, along with their publication in popular magazines, inspired a generation of explorers, scientists, and aerospace engineers.
Paul Allen was among the most significant collectors of works by Chesley Bonestell, widely acknowledged as the “father of space art.” Bonestell’s Saturn as Seen from Titan, first published in 1949, has been called by the Smithsonian “the painting that launched a thousand careers.” A version of that painting, circa 1952, is available in the sale, along with several works published as illustrations for the famous “Man Will Conquer Space Soon!” series of articles, published in Collier’s Magazine in the early 1950s.
(14) MET AT READERCON. The Nerd Count Podcast, hosted by Mercurio D. Rivera and Matthew Kressel, brings episode 4 “Live From Readercon”.
In our fourth episode, we come you you LIVE from Readercon, the “conference on imaginative literature,” held this past July in Quincy, Massachusetts. We had the pleasure of interviewing the following guests: Jeffrey Ford, A.T. Greenblatt, A.C. Wise, Scott H. Andrews, Mike Allen, A.T. Sayre, Julie C. Day, C.S.E. Cooney, William Alexander, John Wiswell, Rob Cameron, and Sophia Babai. We talk about Readercons past, what makes Readercon a truly special convention — particularly its welcoming and friendly vibe — and we talk with each guest about their recent and upcoming creative works. This was a blast to record, and we had so much fun talking to all these diverse and talented folks!
Scientists have discovered a reservoir of liquid water on Mars – deep in the rocky outer crust of the planet.
The findings come from a new analysis of data from Nasa’s Mars Insight Lander, which touched down on the planet back in 2018.
The lander carried a seismometer, which recorded four years’ of vibrations – Mars quakes – from deep inside the Red Planet.
Analysing those quakes – and exactly how the planet moves – revealed “seismic signals” of liquid water.
While there is water frozen at the Martian poles and evidence of vapour in the atmosphere, this is the first time liquid water has been found on the planet.
…Adrian Drake built the famous space station from the frame up using more than 75,000 pieces. It’s 6 feet tall and eight feet in diameter and is heavy enough that it needs some extra supports. The whole build took over two years.
It’s a truly impressive and gigantic build. Drake displayed it at Brickworld Chicago, where he gave a tour to Beyond the Brick. Check out how he built the LEGO Deep Space Nine and all of the cool details….
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Olav Rokne, N., Kevin Standlee, Anne Marble, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, and Teddy Harvia for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]
This episode’s guest is Carol Tilley, a professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois who teaches and writes about comics, libraries, reading, and censorship. We first met six years ago when she was in D.C. to deliver a presentation at the National Archives titled “Dear Sirs: I Believe You’re Wasting Your Time,” during which she shared what she learned about comics readers of the ‘50s while researching the records of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. In her role as a comics historian, she’s made numerous visits to D.C. over the years to research at the Library of Congress and National Archives for a biography of Fredric Wertham, whose attacks on sex and violence in comics, and particularly his infamous book Seduction the Innocent, helped bring about the Comics Code.
She was interested not just in the inner workings of Wertham — who comics fans, when I first entered fandom, considered a bigger villain than Doctor Octopus and Lex Luthor rolled into one — but also in the experiences of those who read, drew, and engaged with comics in the US during the ’30s-’50s. She came to Worldcon to share what’s she’s learned, and was also going to speak on a panel about the renewed attack on books and curriculum in schools across the U.S.
We discussed how we each first learned about the Comics Code, the mostly forgotten rich kid origins of Blondie‘s Dagwood Bumstead, the unsettling inconsistencies she discovered while going through 200 boxes of Fredric Wertham’s papers, what those documents reveal about how he came to believe what he came to believe, what it means to research with the brain of an historian, the proper pronunciations of Potrzebie and Mxyzptlk, her efforts to track down those who wrote letters to the Senate protesting comic book censorship during the ’50s (including one of the founders of the Firesign Theater), the enduring power of EC’s “Judgment Day,” why she believed comic book censorship would have occurred even without Wertham’s input, what she thinks he’d make of today’s comics, how Wertham felt about the way comic book fans felt about him, and much more.
… But no one had any inkling the company was in real trouble, or that Nichol was sick. With Nichol incommunicado, and many buy-ins and service purchases much older than PayPal’s 180-day claim window, how would authors get their money back? Who were Haney Hayes Promotions? What was this new publisher all about? Why hadn’t Nichol herself made any announcements? Why was Sosha Ann, whose name appeared alongside Nichol Smith’s on BBB’s contracts, and in multipleothercontexts to indicate that she was co-owner of the company, now claiming to be just a helpless employee who’d been in the dark about BBB’s problems and had no access to its finances? And if she was just an employee, what gave her the authority to transfer BBB’s anthology projects to a new publishing company?
Furious not just at the sudden transition and unanswered questions, but at the callous offloading of financial responsibility and the demand that they essentially pay twice for inclusion in the same anthologies, writers poured out their anger, confusion, and hurt on Facebook and in the new SIR Facebook group. Also unleashed: a flood of complaints and reports to me, which in addition to the problems mentioned above, exposed the extreme unprofessionalism of BBB’s operations….
(3) TWELVE TOUGH TRIVIA QUESTIONS. [Item by Brick Barrientos.] There is a Seanan McGuire quiz on the Learned League site. It was written by a couple of fans with the last name Dempsey. It seems pretty difficult, only for avid fans, but File 770 readers might be interested. “LL One-Day Special: Seanan McGuire”.
(4) SEE BONESTELL ART AGAIN. In the Washington Post, Michael E. Ruane discusses the renovation of the National Air and Space Museum which will display Chesley Bonestell’s 1957 painting “Lunar Landscape,” which has not been shown in public since 1970. Bonestell’s painting reflected the science of his time but research shows that micrometeorites have made the Moon more worn and less craggy than what Bonestell painted. “Smithsonian Air and Space Museum to reopen after renovations”.
… The Apollo 11 moon capsule sits at an angle in the eerie light of its display case, its heat shield still gouged from its 25,000 mph plunge through the atmosphere in 1969.
Nearby, the 1909 Wright brothers flier — the world’s first military airplane — still has oil stains on its fabric wings near the engine and the big bicycle chains that turned the propellers….
(5) WHITTAKER COMING TO DOCTOR WHO CON IN LA. Gallifrey One has confirmed Jodie Whittaker, who has played the most recent incarnation of the Doctor since 2017, as their headliner guest for Gallifrey One 33 1/3: Long Live the Revolution, taking place on February 17-19, 2023 at the Marriott Los Angeles Airport Hotel.
Ms. Whittaker, whose appearance is sponsored by Showmasters Events, will be joining us both Saturday & Sunday at the convention, for two interview panels, autographs & photo ops both days, and participating in our evening guest receptions. She joins previously confirmed guests Colin Baker, Janet Fielding, Sophie Aldred, Wendy Padbury, Frazer Hines, and a stellar lineup of guests including many still to be confirmed.
For more details about Ms. Whittaker’s appearance at her very first dedicated Doctor Who convention, or to purchase tickets to the event, visit our website at www.gallifreyone.com.
(6) JOHN WILLIAMS, JERRY GOLDSMITH & OTHERS. LA classical music radio station KUSC polled listeners about their favorite pieces of classical music. The station ran a blog post with part of the list – “Your 20 Favorite Movie Scores”. Over half are from genre films.
Music from the silver screen made quite a splash once again on this year’s Classical California Ultimate Playlist. Check out ths playlist of your favorite 20 favorite pieces from the movies, as voted by you for the 2022 Classical California Ultimate Playlist. Enjoy!
drive in movie theater sign with palm trees
(7) SPIDER-MAN LIBRARY CARD. Spider-Senses will be tingling across New York City as The New York Public Library (NYPL) and Marvel Entertainment join forces to release a special, limited-edition Spider-Man library card on October 11 to inspire new and existing patrons to explore a multitude of free books, resources, and programs at the Library, including Marvel graphic novels.
This dynamic collaboration—which debuts just in time for New York Comic Con—marks the 60th anniversary of Spider-Man’s first comic book appearance in Amazing Fantasy #15 and emphasizes the importance of reading, knowledge, and libraries to Peter Parker’s crime-fighting comic book adventures. Images of Spider-Man—alongside Miles Morales and Gwen Stacy, two other iconic web-slingers—will be featured on the card, as well as on upcoming banners outside the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building and the windows of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library (SNFL), exciting patrons of all ages to tap into the unique power of reading, comics, and libraries to discover their inner super hero. Details about the card and related activities are available online: nypl.org/beyondamazing
The Spider-Man card follows in the footsteps of previous library cards issued for the beloved children’s book The Snowy Day and the Library’s “Knowledge Is Power” card; aiming to help New Yorkers discover their full potential by tapping into the power of everything NYPL has to offer—millions of books to help readers scale new heights, a web of information via free computers and internet access, and a super-team of library staff—all available at your friendly neighborhood library.
The release of the Spider-Man card also marks the one-year anniversary of the Library’s decision to eliminate fines as a way to remove barriers to accessing the Library for all New Yorkers. This historic move was even a plot point in Marvel Comics’ Amazing Spider-Man #900, released on July 27. In a special story written by Daniel Kibblesmith, drawn by David Lopez, and colored by Nathan Fairbairn, Peter Parker returns a large stack of overdue books to the Library after learning of the elimination of late fines. Readers can check out Amazing Spider-Man #900 in a special bonus release on Marvel Unlimited, Marvel’s premier digital comics subscription service.
The launch of the special-edition card also marks the start of the Library’s Open House week, which begins October 11. The card will be available to new and current patrons free on a first-come, first-serve basis at all NYPL branches, located throughout the Bronx, Manhattan, and Staten Island. Libraries will be hosting a variety of programs and events throughout the week, as well as featuring book displays and reading recommendations from a special reading list curated by NYPL staff.
…Also, I realized that subconsciously I put a little bit of my Grandma Lafferty into a lot of my stories. They seem to frequently include a tough old woman I like to call a “murder granny.” (While tough, the murder granny may or may not be an actual murderer. Also, to my knowledge, my Grandma was not a murderer.) In this book, there’s a little bit of my maternal grandmother as well, who was not tough as nails, but screamed during televised golf for the rolling ball to do her bidding, and really liked radio contests…
(9) MEMORY LANE.
1993 – [By Cat Eldridge.] So what’s Sylvester Stallone’s perfect film? Without any doubt at all, that’d be Demolition Man which came out twenty-nine years this evening. (In my universe, all films came out in the evening.) It is a film that I saw first at the cinema on a proper full screen and I think have watched at least a half dozen times since.
It’s that ever so rare screenplay written by committee that I like, as it had three hands in the writing of it — Daniel Waters, Robert Reneau and Peter M. Lenkov. Waters had just written Batman Returns and had earlier received an Edgar for Heathers, Reneau had for genre just an episode of Tales from the Crypt, and Lenkov hadn’t done anything notable yet though much later he make his mark as a rebooter of, well everything — McGyver, Hawaii 5-0 and even Magnum PI got so done by him.
It was, weirdly, directed by Marco Brambilla, an Italian-born Canadian contemporary artist and film director, known for re-contextualizations of popular and found imagery. Huh?
Now for the film itself.
Stallone played a cop thawed out (shades of Niven) to capture an escaped criminal who originally had been frozen when he was. They both wind up in what is considered a utopia, the city of San Angeles. Like all utopian undertakings, it really isn’t.
I loved the absolute deadpan way Stallone deals with everything odd there from the lack of toilet paper to discovering sex has been replaced by virtual experiences. He would have made an absolute spot-on Dredd. (Oh, wait!)
Let’s not forget the other casting here. Wesley Snipes gives one of the best performances of his career as Simon Phoenix, and I completely adore Sandra Bullock as Lieutenant Lenina Huxley.
Her character was named after Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World, and Lenina Crowne, a character in the novel.
The studio refused to say how much it cost but estimates say somewhere between fifty and seventy-five million. It did exceedingly well at the box office making at least one hundred and seventy million.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born October 7, 1938 — Jane Gallion (Ellern). Writer, Poet, and Fan who was one of the members of the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society subgroup The Blackguards, which hosted many parties and tournaments. She edited the fanzines Karuna, and Topaze (etc.) and contributed to many other fanzines over the years. Wrote a great deal of erotica for Essex House, including the post-apocalyptic novels Biker and Going Down. (Died 2003.)
Born October 7, 1942 — Lee Gold, 80. She’s a member of LAFA, the Los Angeles organization for filkers, and a writer and editor in the role-playing game and filk music communities. She’s published Xenofilkia, a bi-monthly compilation of filk songs since 1988, four issues of the Filker Up anthology; and has published for forty-seven years, Alarums and Excursions, a monthly gaming zine, and edited many other fanzines. She is a member of the Filk Hall of Fame along with Barry Gold, her husband.
Born October 7, 1945 — Hal Colebatch. Lawyer, Journalist, Editor, and Writer from Australia who has written, singly or in collaboration, two novels and at least two dozen shorter pieces set in Larry Niven’s The Man-Kzin Wars series. However, his main body of work is non-genre, including six books of poetry, short stories, and radio dramas and adaptations. His non-fiction books include social commentary, biography and history, and he has published many hundreds of articles and reviews in various news and critical venues. (Died 2019.)
Born October 7, 1947 — John Brosnan. Australian writer who died way too young of acute pancreatitis. He used at least seven pseudonyms, and wrote scripts for a number of what I’ll generously call horror films including one I know that somehow I saw — Carnosaur. If you like your SF with a larger dose of pulp, his Sky Lords trilogy (The Sky Lords, The War of the Sky Lords and The Fall of the Sky Lords) is damn good. Airships, airships! (Died 2005.)
Born October 7, 1950 — Howard Chaykin, born 1950, 72. Comic book artist and writer. His first major work was for DC Comics drawing “The Price of Pain Ease” which was an adaptation of author Fritz Leiber’s characters Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser in Sword of Sorcery #1. He would illustrate damn near everything else from Batman and The Legion of Super-Heroes for DC to Hulk and Iron-Man for Marvel (to name but a few series) but I think his best genre work was his own American Flagg! series which I’ve enjoyed more than a few times. It’s available from the usual digital suspects.
Born October 7, 1958 — Rosalyn Landor, 64. She played Guinevere in Arthur the King, and Helen Stoner in “The Speckled Band” of Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes. She was the red-headed colleen Brenna Odell in the “Up the Long Ladder” episode of Next Generation.
Born October 7, 1977 — Meighan Desmond, 45. One of the beauties of the Xena-Hercules Universe is that they shared secondary characters betwixt them. So was the case with one played by Meighan Desmond — the Greek goddess Discord. She also showed up on the Young Hercules series as well. She stopped acting after these series and has done some, but not much, behind the scenes work since.
(11) COMICS SECTION.
Eek! shows an actor who only wants to do it if it’s artistic.
… Like the many Republicans who’ve rushed in to stick up for Walker in the wake of the abortion news, I don’t care if the former football star is an ancient, trans-dimensional, shape-shifting entity of pure evil that takes the form of a clown named Pennywise and terrorizes a small town in Maine. I want control of the Senate, and I’m sure Walker regrets any past desire to feed on humans….
… The big advantage Nona has over Gideon and Harrow is that Nona herself is just a lot more likeable. That’s a shallow criterion for judging a book but part of Muir’s writing genius with the Locked Tomb has been to pitch the style and structure of each volume to the titular character. Gideon was a brash, swashbuckling story with a protagonist who was fun to be with but who never really paid attention to the complex puzzle she was entangled with. Harrow was paranoid, secretive and actively leading the reader astray so as to hide their own vulnerability. Nona also doesn’t know what is going on but the central character is both innocent and curious and not afraid to ask questions….
(14) TUNE UP FOR HALLOWEEN. Not sure how the LA Opera got involved with Frankenstein, but they are! Tickets here.
The immortal horror classic is back onscreen with a live orchestra
This 1931 masterpiece of horror was originally released without a musical score, which inspired composer Michael Shapiro to fill in the void by creating an original new soundtrack. As the classic film plays on the big screen, he’ll conduct his gorgeous and atmospheric score, performed live by the LA Opera Orchestra, making this the ultimate audience experience for a truly iconic film.
Surround yourself with Old Hollywood glam at the beautifully-restored Theatre at Ace Hotel as the movie that made horror history returns to the big screen. Frankenstein with Live Orchestra is in town October 28 and 29 only, so click below to get your tickets before they’re gone!
(15) A TUMBLING TUMBLEWEED NO MORE. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] The pathfinding CAPSTONE mission had been in trouble for weeks with NASA unable to control the tumbling spacecraft. The trouble was finally located and the fix uploaded. This puts the mission back on track to try out the NRHO orbit planned for Gateway, the lunar space station portion of the Artemis program. “Engineers Regain Control of Moon-Bound Probe After a Frightening 4 Weeks” – Gizmodo has the story.
…The recovery team traced the problem to a partially opened valve on one of CAPSTONE’s eight thrusters, according to an Advanced Space press release. The requisite fix was transmitted to the spacecraft yesterday and executed this morning to positive results. The probe remains on track as it heads to its operational orbit around the Moon.
CAPSTONE, short for Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment, ran into difficulties following its third course correction maneuver on September 8. The 55-pound (25-kilogram) satellite lost full three-axis control and entered into a troubling tumble. A recovery team led by Advanced Space, which owns and operates CAPSTONE on behalf of NASA, scrambled to regain control of the $33 million cubesat.…
(16) ASTEROIDS IMPACTING EARTH. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] In this week’s Nature news of the asteroid re-direction test (previously covered by File 770) but also an editorial calling for NASA to do a complete survey of asteroids that are 140m across or more. NASA has already completed a survey of asteroids over 1km across likely to hit the Earth. These are of dinosaur global extinction level type asteroids. However, smaller asteroids over a few 100 meters across will cause regional devastation if they hit the Earth. The Near Earth Object (NEO) surveyor began its preparations in 2019 but has had its annual budget cut by over 75% from US$170 million. This will delay NEO’s launch from 2026 to after 2028.
…Heinz teamed up with “280 year-old vegetarian vampire, influencer and Tomato Blood activist” Toby, portrayed by viral TikTok star E.J. Marcus, on a “public-service-announcement film” to back the release of its Heinz Tomato Blood ketchup in its “spooky, Halloween-themed, limited-edition bottle.”…
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, Anne Marble, Brick Barrientos, Jeffrey Smith, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
(1) BEYOND “MY BAD”. In this video Cat Rambo offers pro tips about “How to Screw Up”. Which maybe you thought you already knew how to do, right? That’s probably true. Cat’s advice is really about what to do afterwards.
(3) WOMEN’S PRIZE. [Item by Cora Buhlert.] The shortlist for the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction, an important UK literary award, has been announced. Piranesi by Susannah Clarke is one of the finalists. Another finalist is at least borderline SF and yet another is a crime novel: “Women’s prize for fiction shortlist entirely first-time nominees” in the Guardian. The winner will be announced July 7, and receive £30,000.
(4) DOCTOR WHO BLOG TOUR. Titan Comics’ Doctor Who: Vol. 1: Alternating Current blog tour will be visiting File 770 on May 24 to share an art preview.
(5) NO STARTING GATE. In “The Art of Worldbuilding In Media Res” on CrimeReads, Nicole Kornher-Stace recommends novels by Lauren Beukes, Hannu Rajanemi, and Stephen Graham Jones for readers who want to start their novels with an action scene without a lot of backstory about how the world you are creating operates.
…Stephen Graham Jones’s The Only Good Indians starts practically in the middle of a parking-lot bar brawl, full of asides about events and characters that will make no sense to you until you get further in, but you’re being reeled into the story one sucker-punch of a sentence at a time. You don’t care that you don’t understand yet. You don’t need to. You’re immersed, and you realize distantly that you have no idea who or what is being referenced in some of these asides, but by that point you’re in it up to the eyeballs, and the only way out is through….
Following the deadly events at home, the Abbott family (Emily Blunt, Millicent Simmonds, Noah Jupe) must now face the terrors of the outside world as they continue their fight for survival in silence. Forced to venture into the unknown, they quickly realize that the creatures that hunt by sound are not the only threats that lurk beyond the sand path.
I don’t remember my dino chronology to know off-hand whether this is era-ologically inaccurate (were they all contemporaneous and in the Jurassic), but do we care?
I have several High Seas shirts already, they’re well made and worth the price.
I’d sent this to Robert J. Sawyer, since he’s a dinophile (or at least knowledgeable about ’em), for interest, along with my comment that I didn’t know enough to be sure whether the shirt was, chronologically, inaccurate/misleading. Here’s his reply, which he OK’d to use:
Robert J. Sawyer: “Very cool! They aren’t all contemporaneous, sadly. Triceratops (lower left) is the very end of the Cretaceous, for instance. But it’s a great-looking shirt!”
(8) NEW ATTITUDE. Here’s an art piece of Guilala, the kaiju in 1967’s The X From Outer Space — as a muppet. The artist is Melanie Scott/
Whatever’s happening underground at Hawkins, it definitely looks sinister… but then again, didn’t it always? Netflix is seemingly hinting that new evils are brewing for Stranger Things 4, and they’re unfolding mostly out of sight, inside the secret government lab that formerly served as Eleven’s supernaturally cold childhood home.
From his time drawing the iconic Milestone Media hero Static Shock while a junior at New York’s School of Visual Arts to his work on the genre-defining EarthX for Marvel in the late 1990s to his recent DC work with writer Kurt Busiek on Batman: Creature of the Night and the upcoming Batman/CatwomanSpecial, Leon brought his unmistakable take to everything that he touched.
DC executives and talent alike shared their thoughts across social media at the news of his passing. DC publisher and chief creative officer Jim Lee offered high praise for Leon, saying, “One of the greatest artists of our generation, he was also one of the nicest and most talented creators one could be lucky enough to have met.”…
(11) MEMORY LANE.
1971 –Fifty years ago, Mary Stewart won the first Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for The Crystal Cave. The other nominated works were The Marvellous Misadventures of Sebastian by Lloyd Alexander, Deryni Rising by Katherine Kurtz and Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny. She would later win another Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for The Hollow Hills novel. These would be her only genre awards.
(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
Born May 6, 1915 — Orson Welles. Certainly the broadcast of “The War of the Worlds” in 1938 was his pinnacle of genre success but he also did for the Federal Theatre Project the 1936 adaptation of Macbeth with an entirely African American cast. That was known as the Voodoo Macbeth which might give you an idea of what he did to it. He would later do a more straightforward film of Macbeth. And of course he made a most excellent radio Shadow as well! (Died 1985.) (CE)
Born May 6, 1923 – Gordon Davies. Ninety covers for us; some other work e.g. the Eagle Annual. Here is the Nov 52 Authentic. Here is Earthlight. Here is Space Cadet. Here is C. Brown ed., Alien Worlds. Here is M. Ashley ed., The History of the SF Magazine pt. 4. (Died 1994) [JH]
Born May 6, 1927 – Gerard Quinn. Fourscore covers, two hundred eighty interiors. Here is Gateway to Tomorrow. Here is Jack of Eagles. Here is a drawing that appears to have been auctioned at Loncon I the 15th Worldcon. Here is the Nov 61 New Worlds. Here is the Apr/May 82 Extro. Our Gracious Host’s appreciation here. (Died 2015) [JH]
Born May 6, 1946 — Nancy Kilpatrick, 75. Fangoria called her “Canada’s answer to Anne Rice”. I do recommend the anthology she edited Danse Macabre: Close Encounters with the Reaper as it’s a most excellent horror collection. She’s exceptionally well stocked at the usual suspects. (CE)
Born May 6, 1950 – Craig Strete, age 71. Six novels, threescore shorter stories for us; eight other novels. Did this cover for Red Planet Earth 2 while editor. First place in the 1984 Dramatists Guild – CBS New Plays Program. Sometimes uses the name Sovereign Falconer; he is Cherokee. [JH]
Born May 6, 1952 — Michael O’Hare. He was best known for playing Commander Jeffrey Sinclair on Babylon 5. Other genre appearances were limited — he played Fuller in the 1984 film C.H.U.D, was Jimmy in the “ Heretic” episode of Tales from the Darkside and appeared as a thug on the subway train in The Trial of the Incredible Hulk. And yes he’s one of many Babylon 5 actors who died well before they should’ve. (Died 2012.) (CE)
Born May 6, 1955 – Barbara McClintock, age 66. Half a dozen covers for us. Here is The Red-Eared Ghosts. Here is a Complete Tales of Uncle Remus (who, I respectfully suggest, deserves study, even with our modern reservations, however late we have been with them, in hand). Various books and prizes; five NY Times Best Books, two Time Best Books. Sets and costumes for the Minneapolis Children’s Theatre Twelve Dancing Princesses. Illustrated for Jim Henson’s Fraggle Rock. Website. [JH]
Born May 6, 1962 – Kamil Vojnar, age 59. Threescore covers. Here is Killing Time. Here is Flying in Place. Here is Others of My Kind. [JH]
Born May 6, 1969 — Annalee Newitz, 52. They are the winner of a Hugo Award for Best Fancast At Dublin 2019 for “Our Opinions Are Correct”. And their novel Autonomous was a finalist for the Nebula Award for Best Novel, John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Locus Award for Best First Novel while winning a Lambda Literary Award. They are also the winner of the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for best short science fiction, ”When Robot and Crow Saved East St. Louis”. (CE)
Born May 6, 1983 – Ingrid Jonach, age 38. One novel for us; three others. “Once you finally understand that the world is round, there is no way to make it flat again.” [JH]
While Dilbert has (theoretically) found a cure to racism.
Danish cartoonist Wulffmorgenthaler’sMay 3 has Sauron visiting a construction side. Translation to English: “Hm… Well, I know art deco is beautiful, but we were thinking more like gothic and black for my tower…” Lise Andreasen says, “I love the orc driving The Eye around.)”
(14) HERE’S LOKI AT YOU, KID. SYFY Wire covers an announcement by “Marvel Studios’ Loki”.
Channeling Loki himself, Disney+ decided to pivot without warning by moving the debut of the character’s Marvel Cinematic Universe TV show up two days to Wednesday, June 9. In fact, all episodes of Loki will now premiere on Wednesdays, instead of the usual Friday window that was reserved for WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Tom Hiddleston confirmed the news during a special video announcement that begins with an epic display of famous Marvel props: Iron Man’s helmet, Cap’s shield, and, of course, Thor’s hammer.
“Look, I’m sorry to interrupt,” Hiddleston says, abruptly cutting off the noble montage. “It’s just I’ve noticed that in these long superhero montages, Loki tends to get a bit left out, even though, arguably, he’s incredibly heroic himself [as well as] cunning and charming. I could go on, but maybe … why don’t I just prove it to you? Wednesdays are the new Fridays.”
Take a look at our ultimate trailer for Matt Reeves’ The Batman (2022), the trailer features footage from ‘The Batman Official Trailer’ as well as from previous Batman films and contains scenes that resonates with the actual plot for ‘The Batman’
(16) COMICS/GAME CROSSOVER. Here’s a clip promoting Batman’s entry into Fortnite.
Featured in the new Batman/Fortnite: Zero Point comics, Grab the Batman Zero Outfit in the Fortnite Shop now!
(17) A LONG TIME AGO IN A GALAXY NOT SO FAR AWAY. Mike Dunford, a lawyer who does law streams on Twitch called The Questionable Authority, did a lawstream about the time Star Wars tried to sue the original Battlestar Galactica series for copyright infringement. The discussion of the lawsuit itself is here if people are interested. The stfnal part starts 50 minutes in. He created a cool intro to his talk:
(18) SCREENLESS. [Item by David Doering.] The Engineering heroes at my alma mater, BYU, are developing incredible 3D simulations without monitors. Yes, free-floating 3D images of the Enterprise in combat with a Bird of Prey or a light saber battle. Wow. Has to be seen to be believed. “Using lasers to create the displays of science fiction, inspired by Star Wars and Star Trek”.
Inspired by the displays of science fiction like the holodeck from Star Trek and the Princess Leia projector from Star Wars, a BYU electrical and computer engineering team is working to develop screenless volumetric display technologies. Led by Dan Smalley, BYU professor of electical engineering, the team uses laser beams to trap and illuminate a particle and then to move the particle and draw an image in mid-air. “Like a 3D printer for light,” these displays appear as physical objects to the viewer and, unlike a screen-based image, can be seen from any angle. In this demonstration of the technology, the team shows how they’ve created tiny animations of battle explosions and other images created completely with laser light. Smalley also provides an update on new research that shows how to simulate virtual images in a volumetric display (research published in the April 6, 2021 issue of Scientific Reports).
(19) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Cat Rambo has lots of other good advice, in this video about “5 Tips for Story Submissions.”
I’ve talked before about sending out fantasy and science fiction story submissions. Here’s five tips (well, four and a half, really) about what to do once you’ve submitted a story.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Cora Buhlert, John Hertz, Dann, Mike Kennedy, JJ, Lise Andreasen, David Doering, Ben Bird Person, Cat Eldridge, Jennifer Hawthorne, Martin Morse Wooster, and Michael Toman for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Peer.]
(1) EVERYBODY COMPLAINS ABOUT THE WEATHER. And they complain even more if somebody does something about it. Sierra Garcia points to research about “How Early Sci-Fi Authors Imagined Climate Change” at JSTOR Daily.
More than a century before melting polar ice caps, geoengineering schemes, and soaring greenhouse gas emissions became the norm, humans causing climate change was the stuff of science fiction.
For a few decades in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, authors from across ideologies and genres published stories that today would be called “cli-fi,” or climate fiction. French author Jules Verne, best known for popular adventure stories like Around the World in 80 Days and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, penned a novel in 1889 called Sans Dessus Dessous about capitalists intentionally heating the Arctic to extract coal reserves. Mark Twain included a subplot of selling warm climates in his 1892 novel The American Claimant. Recently, literary scholar Steve Asselin reexamined these and dozens of other early cli-fi stories, finding several disquieting themes relevant to how we think about modern-day climate change.
…First the why: [Jude] Doyle says they left Substack because they were upset that Substack was publishing — and in some cases offering money upfront to — authors they say are “people who actively hate trans people and women, argue ceaselessly against our civil rights, and in many cases, have a public history of directly, viciously abusing trans people and/or cis women in their industry.”
Substack’s main business model is straightforward. It lets newsletter writers sell subscriptions to their work, and it takes 10 percent of any revenue the writers generate (writers also have to fork over another 3 percent to Stripe, the digital payments company).The money that Substack and its writers are generating — and how that money is split up and distributed — is of intense interest to media makers and observers
But in some cases, Substack has also shelled out one-off payments to help convince some writers to become Substack writers, and in some cases those deals are significant….
(3) CUT TO THE CHASE. In the Washington Post, David Betancourt interviews Zack Snyder and Deborah Snyder about the release of Zack Snyder’s Justice League, with Deborah Snyder saying “the fans got a huge corporation to listen to them and make this (Snyder cut) a reality,” but with Betanourt noting the release of the Snyder cut is also because HBO Max is hungry for superhero content to compete with Disney. “’Zack Snyder’s Justice League’ is what the director really wanted all along”.
… Knowing the Snyder Cut would be a streaming experience and not a theatrical one allowed it to grow. The film is four hours and two minutes, twice as long a the original. HBO Max’s hunger to have game-changing new superhero content to compete with Netflix and Disney Plus — not to mention a pandemic making everyone eager for more at-home offerings — created a golden opportunity for all involved.
“What the streaming services have done is allowed a lot more risks to be taken,” Deborah [Snyder] said. “There’s movies getting made — and [the Snyder Cut] is a perfect example — that wouldn’t be made if it wasn’t for the streamers. As a filmmaker and as a producer, that is exciting to me. I want to see the envelope being pushed and risks to be taken.”
(4) JOURNEY PLANET IS GETTING CRAFTY! They’re looking for a few good crafters… or any crafters really. Team Journey Planet (this time being James Bacon, Sara Felix, and Chris Garcia) is putting together a Crafting in the Time of COVID-19 theme issue that will explore the DIY methods that people tried to pass the time they would normally spend out in the world. They’re looking for stories of hobbies taken up or re-kindled, photos of crafts managed, art cars or campers created, art you might have created during lockdown, and much more.
Did you build a rudimentary lathe and start turning artisanal batbase bats? We wanna hear about it. Did you start painting alternate bookcovers for your favorite novels? We wanna see ’em? Take up bookbinding, or clockmaking, or knitting, crocheting or tiara-making? Share ’em with us.
China told local media not to broadcast next month’s Oscars ceremony in real time and to play down coverage of the awards, according to people familiar with the matter, after a documentary on the Hong Kong protests was nominated and amid concern over the political views of Best Director contender Chloe Zhao.
…“Do Not Split,” nominated for best short documentary, chronicles the anti-Beijing demonstrations that took hold in Hong Kong in mid-2019 and China’s growing power and influence in the former British territory.
…While initially lauded in the Chinese press for the success of her naturalistic film “Nomadland,” Zhao — who won the Golden Globe for Best Director last month — has since attracted criticism for a 2013 interview where she is said to have described China as “a place where there are lies everywhere.”…
(6) FRANK THORNE OBIT. Frank Thorne (1930-2021), artist of the Red Sonja comics of the 1970s has died. Heavy Metal pays tribute:
… Red Sonja, a character from the Conan-verse created by Robert E. Howard, made her Marvel Comics debut in Marvel Feature #1, penciled by Dick Giordano. Thorne took over as artist in the second issue, and remained Red Sonja’s artist through the title’s seventh and final issue, dated November 1976. Red Sonja got her own title beginning in January 1977, illustrated by Thorne (he did it all — pencils, inks, colors and lettering, and cover art) through issue 11.
Thorne clearly relished Red Sonja; his association with the title went beyond a job and became part of his identity. There was also a performative aspect — Thorne would show up at conventions dressed in a wizard costume, accompanied by a model or few (calling themselves “The Hyborean Players”) wearing the famous scale-mail bikini of Red Sonja. One of the Red Sonja models was Wendy Pini, who managed to make conventions and photo shoots when she wasn’t illustrating the series that would make her famous in the comics world: ElfQuest. Yup, that Wendy Pini….
(7) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.
March 19, 1999 — On this day in 1999, Farscape premiered on Syfy. The series was conceived by Rockne S. O’Bannon and produced by The Jim Henson Company and Hallmark Entertainment. The Jim Henson Company was responsible for the various alien make-up and prosthetics, and two regular characters, Rygel and Pilot were completely Creature Shop creations. Filmed in Australia by Network Nine, it would would last for four seasons ending in The Peacekeeper Wars which is considered the fifth season.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
Born March 19, 1821 — Sir Richard Francis Burton KCMG FRGS. He was a geographer, translator, writer, soldier, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, linguist, poet, fencer and diplomat. He worked on the translation of an unexpurgated version of One Thousand and One Nights. Also, Vikram and the Vampire or Tales of Hindu Devilry. Mind you, he was also the publisher of both Kama Sutra and The Perfume Garden. Philip Jose Farmer made him a primary character of the Riverworld series. (Died 1890.) (CE)
Born March 19, 1894 – Lilith Lorraine. Author of poetry and otherwise, editor, radio lecturer, under various names. Half a dozen short stories, a hundred poems. Founded Avalon poetry ass’n; The Avalonian carried Robert Silverberg’s first paid story. Time Grows Thin posthumous coll’n of poetry (so consider the title!) has an introduction by Steve Sneyd. (Died 1967) [JH]
Born March 19, 1926 — Joe L. Hensley. He was a First Fandom Dinosaur which is to say he was active in fandom prior to July 4, 1939 and he received the First Fandom Hall of Fame Award. He is also a published genre author with ”And Not Quite Human” in the September 1953 issue of Beyond Fantasy Fiction being his first published work, and The Black Roads being his only genre novel. It does not appear that his genre works are available in digital editions. (Died 2007.) (CE)
Born March 19, 1928 — Patrick McGoohan. Creator along with George Markstein of The Prisoner series with him playing the main role of Number Six. I’ve watched it at least several times down the years. It never gets any clearer but it’s always interesting and always weird. Other genre credits do not include Danger Man but do comprise a short list of The Phantom where he played The Phantom’s father, Treasure Planet where he voiced Billy Bones and Journey into Darkness where he was The Host. (Died 2009.) (CE)
Born March 19, 1936 — Ursula Andress, 85. I’m sure I’ve seen all of the original Bond films though I’ll be damned I remember where or when I saw them. Which is my way of leading up to saying that I don’t remember her in her roles as either as Honey Ryder in the very first Bond film, Dr. No, or as as Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale. Bond girls aren’t that memorable to me it seems. Hmmm… let’s see if she’s done any other genre work… well her first was The Tenth Victim based on Sheckley’s 1953 short story “Seventh Victim”. She also appeared in The Mountain of the Cannibal God, The Fifth Musketeer, Clash of the Titans where she played of course Aphrodite, on the Manimal series, The Love Boat series and the two Fantaghirò films. (CE)
Born March 19, 1946 – John Gribbin, Ph.D., age 75. Eight novels, a score of shorter stories; columnist, correspondent, reviewer for Analog, Omni, Vector; fourscore books of nonfiction e.g. Almost Everyone’s Guide to Science (with wife Mary Gribbin); Hyperspace, Our Final Frontier; biographies of Einstein, Feynman, Schrödinger. Lifetime Achievement Award from Ass’n of British Science Writers. [JH]
Born March 19, 1953 – Laurie Sutton, age 68. A dozen novels. Worked for the Comics Code Authority awhile; “I never considered my job to be one of censorship…. being a comic book fan.” Then comics for DC (including Adam Strange) and Marvel (including Star Trek); introduced Frank Miller to Japanese comics. Publishing Innovation Award. [JH]
Born March 19, 1955 — Bruce Willis, 66. So do any of the Die Hard franchise count as genre? Setting them aside, he has a very long genre list, to wit Death Becomes Her (bit of macabre fun), 12 Monkeys (weird shit), The Fifth Element (damn great), Armageddon (eight tentacles down), Looper (most excellent), The Sixth Sense (not at all bad), Sin City (typical Miller overkill) and Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (yet more Miller overkill). (CE)
Born March 19, 1960 – Karen Cooper, age 61. Chaired Ditto 12 (fanziners’ con; Ditto, a brand of spirit duplicator). Long-time member of Minn-Stf. Her Minicon 34 Restaurant Guide (with husband Bruce Schneier) was a Hugo finalist for Best Related Book (as the category then was, now “Best Related Work”). Fan Guest of Honor at WindyCon 40. [JH]
Born March 19, 1964 — Marjorie Monaghan, 57. JoJo on all six episodes of Space Rangers. My brain keeps insisting it lasted much, much longer. She also was on Babylon 5 as the Mars Resistance leader during the Earth Alliance Civil War, where she was known as Number One. She’s also appeared on Quantum Leap, in the cyberpunk Nemesis film, in The Warlord: Battle for the Galaxy film, on Andromeda series and on The Great War of Magellan film. (CE)
Born March 19, 1970 – Kimberly Sabatini, age 51. One novel so far. Alice Curtis Desmond Award. When her father died, she “discovered … she’s full of questions that need to be answered.” Has read Endurance (Scott Kelly), The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Hidden Figures, Frankenstein, Nothing Stopped Sophie (Sophie Germain), Seabiscuit, Gone With the Wind. [JH]
Born March 19, 1973 – Josh Rountree, age 48. One novel, twoscore shorter stories including “The Review Lester Bangs Would Have Written for the New Stones Album if He’d Lived Long Enough to Witness the Fall of Humanity and the Rise of the Other”. Seen in Andromeda Spaceways, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Daily SF, Electric Velocipede, Realms of Fantasy. [JH]
Of the seemingly thousands of Pop figures that Funko has made, it’s weird to think that the company has only released six from Star Trek: The Original Series, way back in 2013. Sure, it’s made characters from The Next Generation, the Star Trek Beyond movie, and even put the cast of The Big Bang Theory in Trek uniforms since then. But Funko will finally right this wrong later this year with eight new figures from TOS.
The original six Pop figures included Kirk, Spock, Scotty, a Klingon, an Andorian, and an Orion Slave Girl. It shouldn’t be surprising that after so long, as StarTrek.com reports, the new series also contains a Kirk and Spock, but now the former is sitting in his captain’s chair, while Spock is, uh… holding a cat…
Spock with Gary Seven’s familiar from “Assignment: Earth”
The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art has turned its Ray Harryhausen tribute into a “virtual experience” after spending years working on the exhibition with the legendary movie-maker’s family.
A £10 pass, which is available from today, will offer unlimited access to the online incarnation of the exhibition, which explores how Harryhausen inspired cinematic legends like Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Peter Jackson thanks to his groundbreaking work on Jason and the Argonauts, Clash of the Sitans, Earth vs the Flying Saucers and the Sinbad series.
They will be able to secure glimpses of rarely-seen models, drawings, sketches, photographs, posters and storyboards drawn from the archives of the Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation, which is run by the family of the Californian-born special effects legend and his wife, who both passed away in 2013.
(11) ZOOMING WITH THE BENFORDS. Fanac.org’s next FanHistory Zoom will be “The Benford Twins, Fandom and the Larger Universe” on March 27, 2021, 2 pm Eastern. To receive a Zoom link, please RSVP to fanac@fanac.org.
Jim and Greg Benford (founding editors of the legendary fanzine Void) became fans in the 1950s, and throughout a lifetime of science, professional writing, and extensive accomplishments, they have remained fans. In this Zoom session, they’ll talk about their introduction into fandom, their fandom over the years, and tell stories about the important and interesting people they’ve met. What influence has fandom had on them? Did relocation change their interactions with fandom? How have their professional lives influenced their fandom? Join us and find out (and expect a few surprises.)
The current schedule of future Fan History zoom sessions is available here.
NASA completed an engine test firing of its moon rocket Thursday, after the first attempt in January ended prematurely.
This time, the four main engines of the rocket’s core stage remained ignited for the full eight minutes. Applause broke out in the control room at Mississippi’s Stennis Space Flight Center once the engines shut down on the test stand.
NASA officials called it a major milestone in sending astronauts back to the moon, but declined to say when that might occur or even whether the first test flight without a crew would occur by year’s end as planned.
Our solar system’s first known interstellar visitor is neither a comet nor asteroid as first suspected and looks nothing like a cigar. A new study says the mystery object is likely a remnant of a Pluto-like world and shaped like a cookie.
Arizona State University astronomers reported this week that the strange 148-foot (45-meter) object that appears to be made of frozen nitrogen, just like the surface of Pluto and Neptune’s largest moon Triton.
The study’s authors, Alan Jackson and Steven Desch, think an impact knocked a chunk off an icy nitrogen-covered planet 500 million years ago and sent the piece tumbling out of its own star system, toward ours. The reddish remnant is believed to be a sliver of its original self, its outer layers evaporated by cosmic radiation and, more recently, the sun.
(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “MCI Commercial With Leonard Nimoy, TOS Cast, and Jonathan Frakes” on YouTube reveals that in 1993 the original Star Trek cast was eager to call 1-800-3BEAMUP to get 20 percent off the MCI Friends and Family Plan. But who invited Jonathan Frakes to the party?
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Cora Buhlert, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Cat Eldridge, John Hertz, and Michael Toman for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little.]
Eleven others who stayed at the Sheraton Atlanta have been diagnosed with Legionnaires’ disease, while another 61 probable cases have been identified, according to Nancy Nydam, director of communications at Georgia Department of Public Health.
“Probable cases” are people who have symptoms of the disease but have not yet had a laboratory test to confirm the disease — a serious form of noncontagious pneumonia.
“Based on epidemiological evidence we have an outbreak among people who stayed at the (Sheraton Atlanta) during the same time period,” said Nydam. Guests who complained of lung problems and were later diagnosed with Legionnaires’ had attended a convention at the Atlanta hotel in early July.
The Sheraton Atlanta Hotel has been closed
since early July while it is being tested to determine whether it is the
source of the outbreak. It is one of Dragon Con’s five main hotels, listed as
sold out on the con website. Dragon Con begins August 29.
Though the bacterium causing Legionnaires’ has not yet been confirmed at the hotel, Sheraton Atlanta voluntarily shuttered its doors and hired outside experts to conduct testing, Nydam said.
“Sheraton Atlanta remains closed until at least August 11,” Ken Peduzzi, the hotel’s general manager, said in a statement Tuesday. Public health officials and environmental experts are working with the hotel to determine if it is the source of the outbreak, he said.
About one in 10 people who get sick from Legionnaires’ disease will die, a recent government report found.
(2) AURORA AWARDS VOTING BEGINS. Canadian Science Fiction
and Fantasy Association announces to members that voting for the Aurora Awards is
now open, and will continue until September 14.
If you have not yet logged in, or you need to renew your membership, go to the member login page.
If you have not yet been a member of CSFFA, this year or in the past, you can go to the become a member page to join us. Membership costs $10 for the year and is renewed every year in January.
… Wheaton and his loan-out company Media Dynamics on Monday sued Legendary Geek & Sundry for breach of contract. The actor claims Legendary in 2015 hired him to create, write, executive produce and host a web series called Titansgrave: The Ashes of Valkana and he’d be paid $50,000 and 50 percent of the net profit from the series.
Legendary had the exclusive right to distribute and promote the web show, but it was supposed to “consult meaningfully” with Wheaton before doing so, according to the complaint. The actor says Legendary defied that provision and negotiated license agreements with Sinclair Broadcasting, Hulu and Pluto TV without informing him.
Wheaton expects Legendary has collected significant fees in connection with those deals, and therefore he’s due his share, but says the company won’t let him audit its books.
Wheaton is seeking at least $100,000 in damages and is asking the court to order that a full accounting be conducted.
(4) F&SF COVER.
Publisher Gordon Van Gelder has unveiled The Magazine of Fantasy &
Science Fiction’s Sep/Oct 2019 cover, with art by David A. Hardy.
Yesterday Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Joe Musgrove showed off his new glove for Players’ Weekend. And while it was a big hit and made me laugh, in hindsight it seems, I dunno . . . inevitable that someone would go with this model.
Really nice of Thanos to let @Pirates Pitcher Joe Musgrove use his glove today.
(6) MORE ON MACMILLAN LIBRARY EBOOK POLICY. In a CNN opinion
piece, Vermont librarian Jessamyn West comments on the
ongoing controversy regarding Macmillan’s library ebook purchase policy (first
tested by Tor Books): “Libraries are fighting to preserve your right to borrow
e-books”.
…Public libraries in the United States purchase a lot of e-books, and circulate e-books a lot. According to the Public Library Association, electronic material circulation in libraries has been expanding at a rate of 30% per year; and public libraries offered over 391 million e-books to their patrons in 2017. Those library users also buy books; over 60% of frequent library users have also bought a book written by an author they first discovered in a library, according to Pew. Libraries offer free display space for books in over 16,000 locations nationwide. Even Macmillan admits that “Library reads are currently 45% of our total digital book reads.” But instead of finding a way to work with libraries on an equitable win-win solution, Macmillan implemented a new and confusing model and blamed libraries for being successful at encouraging people to read their books.
Libraries don’t just pay full price for e-books — we pay more than full price. We don’t just buy one book — in most cases, we buy a lot of books, trying to keep hold lists down to reasonable numbers. We accept renewable purchasing agreements and limits on e-book lending, specifically because we understand that publishing is a business, and that there is value in authors and publishers getting paid for their work. At the same time, most of us are constrained by budgeting rules and high levels of reporting transparency about where your money goes. So, we want the terms to be fair, and we’d prefer a system that wasn’t convoluted….
Back-to-back non-US Worldcons has presented some unique challenges. One has been to arrange two tours back-to-back, but we have done it. With our Ireland tour about to begin, we are pleased to announce that we will be running a tour of both islands of New Zealand in connection with CoNZealand in 2020.
Born August 6, 1874 — Charles Fort. Writer and researcher who specialized in anomalous phenomena. The term fortean is sometimes used to characterize such phenomena. No, not genre as such, but certainly an influence on many a writer. The Dover publication, The Complete Books of Charles Fort, that collects together The Book of The Damned Lo!, Wild Talents and New Lands has a foreword by Damon Knight. L. Sprague de Camp reviewed it in Astounding Science-Fiction in the August 1941 issue when it was originally published as The Books of Charles Fort. (Died 1932.)
Born August 6, 1877 — John Ulrich Giesy. He was one of the early writers in the Sword and Planet genre, with his Jason Croft series He collaborated with Junius B. Smith on many of his stories though not these which others would call them scientific romances. He wrote a large number of stories featuring the occult detective Abdul Omar aka Semi-Dual and those were written with Smith. I see iBooks has at least all of the former and one of the latter available. Kindle just the latter. (Died 1947.)
Born August 6, 1926 — Janet Asimov. Author of some half dozen novels and a fair amount of short fiction on her own, mostly as J.O. Jeppson; co-author with Isaac of the Norby Chronicles. Her Notes for a Memoir: On Isaac Asimov, Life, and Writing, came out thirteen years ago. (Died 2019.)
Born August 6, 1934 — Piers Anthony, 85. Ok I’ll admit that I’m not at all familiar with him as comic fantasy isn’t my usual go-to reading. I know he’s popular so I’m going to ask y’all which of his novels would be a great introduction to him. Go ahead and tell which novels I should read.
Born August 6, 1956 — Ian R. MacLeod, 63. Another author I need to read more of. I’ve read the first two in what’s called the Aether Universe series, The Light Ages and The House of Storms, but there’s a number of novels I’m intrigued by including Song of Time and The Great Wheel. Anything else y’all would recommend I read?
Born August 6, 1962 — Michelle Yeoh, 57. Ok, I have to give her full name of Yang Berbahagia Tan Sri Dato’ Seri Michelle Yeoh Choo-Kheng. Wow. Her first meaningful genre roles was as Wai Lin in Tomorrow Never Dies and Yu Shu Lien in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I actually remember her as Zi Yuan in The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, the first film of a since-cancelled franchise. And then there’s her dual roles in the the Trek universe where she’s Captain Philippa Georgiou and Emperor Philippa Georgiou. The forthcoming Section 31 series will involve one of them but I’m not sure which one…
Born August 6, 1972 — Paolo Bacigalupi, 47. I remember the book group I was part of having a spirited debate over The Windup Girl over the believability of the central character. I think he did a better job with characters in his next novels, Ship Breaker and The Drowned Cities, but he’s really not about characters anyways.
…The “Ballistic Shield” recently unveiled by TuffyPacks, a Houston-based manufacturer of bulletproof backpacks, has a brightly colored picture of the Avengers charging headlong into view, with Captain America and his famous shield front and center.
Amid an epidemic of gun violence in America highlighted by recent mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, Dayton, Ohio, and Gilroy, Calif., the TuffyPacks shield is designed to keep children safe from handgun bullets.
TuffyPacks rolled out its latest models, which include a “Disney princess” theme featuring Jasmine from Aladdin, Cinderella, Belle from Beauty and the Beast and Rapunzel from Tangled, less than a month ago. In addition to Disney’s Avengers and Princesses, other themes include “Harry Potter,” “Major League Baseball” and “Camo.” They all retail for $129.
But the new bulletproof backpacks aren’t exactly endorsed by the Walt Disney Co. or Warner Bros.
“None of these products were authorized by Disney, and we are demanding that those behind this stop using our characters or our other intellectual property to promote sales of their merchandise,” a spokesperson for Disney says in a statement
A consortium of scientists hoping to build the world’s largest optical telescope on Hawaii’s tallest peak has applied to site it instead in the Canary Islands amid ongoing protests by native Hawaiians who oppose construction of the instrument on what they consider a sacred volcano.
For weeks, protesters have delayed the start of construction on the Big Island’s Mauna Kea volcano of the Thirty Meter Telescope, or TMT, which astronomers say will have a dozen times the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope.
In a written statement on Monday, TMT Executive Director Ed Stone said that obtaining a permit to build in Spain’s Canary Islands, off West Africa, was meant as a “‘Plan B’ site … should it not be possible to build in Hawaii.” However, he emphasized that Mauna Kea “remains the preferred site.”
Human bodies were never meant to exist in weightless conditions. All the fluid being pumped around your body right now needs gravity to get it to the right place. Think about hanging upside down from a jungle gym, the blood rushing to your head. How long do you think you could handle living like that? How many days in a row?
In microgravity, all of your internal organs climb up into your chest cavity, because the mass of the Earth isn’t holding them down anymore. This makes it a little hard to breathe. Farts collect inside your intestine until the pressure suddenly forces them out when you least want them to. Fluid builds up in places it shouldn’t, and there’s no good way to pump it back out of your tissues. The most dramatic—and obvious—way this effects you is that your face gets super puffy, distorting your features. And that’s when you learn just how much of living with other people is processing their facial expressions. Since everyone in space looks like they have the mumps, people start to get irritable. Innocent comments get misconstrued, and tempers flare. I spoke with one astronaut who joked that in the future one big career option is going to be “space lawyer”. Because of all the fistfights that are sure to break out during long missions to Mars. Of course, bouncing off other people all the time and getting in their way is inevitable given the close quarters. It might be better than the alternative, though…
An artificial “tongue” which can taste subtle differences between whiskies could help tackle the counterfeit alcohol trade, according to engineers.
They have built a tiny taster which exploits the properties of gold and aluminium to test differences between the spirits.
The technology can pick up on the subtler distinctions between the same whisky aged in different barrels.
It can tell the the difference between whiskies aged for 12, 15 and 18 years.
Engineers say the tongue “tasted” the differences with greater than 99% accuracy.
Alasdair Clark, of the University of Glasgow’s school of engineering, said: “We call this an artificial tongue because it acts similarly to a human tongue – like us, it can’t identify the individual chemicals which make coffee taste different to apple juice but it can easily tell the difference between these complex chemical mixtures.
(13) SKOAL! “Archaeologists find ‘Viking drinking hall’ during Orkney
dig”reports the BBC. Chip Hitchcock sends the link with a note – “The
Orkneys appear to have had many Earl/Jarl Sigurds; AFAICT, the one mentioned
here is not the one who died in 1014 fighting for an Irish crown, as Debra
Doyle filked in ‘Raven Banner’ back before she became known as a fiction
writer.”
Archaeologists have found what could be a Viking drinking hall during a dig in Orkney.
The site, at Skaill Farmstead in Westness, Rousay, is believed to date back to the 10th Century and may have been used by the chieftain Sigurd.
…Westness is mentioned in the Orkneyinga Saga – a historical narrative of the archipelago – as the home of Earl Sigurd, a powerful 12th Century chieftain.
The name Skaill, which is a Norse word for “hall”, suggests the site could have been used for drinking and was high-status.
A mercenary seeks a missing child, a dead man’s brain is reactivated, a woman travels to the Mayan underworld, a disease drives its victims mad with false memories. These are just a few of the plots that have captured readers’ attention in this year’s batch of science fiction and fantasy novels.
To identify the books resonating with readers, we looked at sci-fi and fantasy novels published so far this year in the U.S. Then we filtered that list by average rating (everything on this list has at least a 3.5-star rating), number of reader reviews, and additions to readers’ Want to Read shelves (which is how we measure buzz and anticipation).
A man who donated his mother’s body to what he thought was Alzheimer’s research learned later it was used to test explosives. So what does happen when your body is donated to medical science?
Last week new details of a lawsuit emerged against The Biological Resource Centre in Arizona following an FBI raid in 2014 in which gruesome remains of hundreds of discarded body parts were discovered.
The now closed centre is accused of illegally selling body parts against the donors wishes.
Newly unreleased court documents revealed that families of those whose bodies had been donated to the centre said they believed their relatives remains would be used for medical and scientific research.
Jim Stauffer is one of the multiple plaintiffs suing the centre. He told Phoenix station ABC 15 he believed his mother’s donated body would be used to study Alzheimer’s, a disease she had, but he later found out it was used by the military to examine the effects of explosives.
He says on the paperwork he was given by the centre he specifically ticked ‘no’ when asked if he consented to the body being used to test explosives.
So how does the body donation business operate in the US and what expectations do people have about these facilities?
A man who wrote music for The Simpsons for 27 years is suing its makers for allegedly firing him due to his age.
Composer Alf Clausen, 78, said he was sacked from the show in 2017.
In his claim, Clausen states he was informed that the show was “taking the music in a different direction”.
“This reason was pretextual and false,” the claim reads. “Instead, plaintiff’s unlawful termination was due to perceived disability and age.” The BBC has approached Fox for a comment.
At the time of Clausen’s departure, the show’s bosses stated they “tremendously value[d] Alf Clausen’s contributions” to the show.
According to trade paper Variety, Clausen was replaced by Bleeding Fingers Music, a music production company co-founded by Russell Emanuel, Hans Zimmer and Steve Kofsky.
Clausen’s suit says his replacement “was substantially younger in age, who was not only paid less, but was not disabled”.
(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Destination Moon 1950–On The Set With George Pal 1949” on YouTube is an hour-long show, first broadcast as an episode of City at Night on Los Angeles station KTLA in 1949, from the set of Destination Moon that includes rare interviews with Robert A. Heinlein and Chesley Bonestell.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOZyoJKltKI
[Thanks to Chip Hitchcock, Eric Franklin, Rich Lynch, Cat
Eldridge, JJ, Nina Shepardson, John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, Mike
Kennedy, Carl Slaughter, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title
credit goes to File 770 contributor of the day Acoustic Rob.]
(1) LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. Authors Charlie Jane Anders, Holly Black, Seanan McGuire, and John Scalzi, as well as many other writers outside of the genre, will be at the “2019 Library of Congress National Book Festival”. The Festival will be held in Washington, DC at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center on August 31. Check out the Festival blog.
(2) ON THE WAY TO THE MOON. The first two episodes of the new Washington Post podcast Moonrise focus heavily on John W. Campbell and Astounding Science Fiction, and it looks like there’s a lot more to come. Episodes can be downloaded from various distributors, or listened to through the Post’s website.
Want to uncover the real origin story behind the United States’ decision to go to the moon? In the 50 years since the moon landing, as presidential documents have been declassified and secret programs revealed, a wild story has begun to emerge. “Moonrise,” a new Washington Post audio miniseries hosted by Lillian Cunningham, digs into the nuclear arms race of the Cold War, the transformation of American society and politics ?— and even the birth of science fiction ?— to unearth what really drove us to the moon. Listen to the episodes as they’re released each week, and come along with us on a fascinating journey from Earth to the moon.
(3) WHAT IS “SENSE OF WONDER”? In
“First
Men and Original Sins” at Image, Adam
Roberts reviews the movie First Man, Catherine Newell’s Chesley
Bonestell biography Destined
for the Stars: Faith, Future, and America’s Final Frontier, and Kendrick Oliver’s To Touch the Face of God, in
order to discuss the sense of wonder many feel about space.
PROFANE IS AN INTERESTING WORD. Etymologically the word describes the ground outside—or, strictly, in front of (pro)—the temple (fanum). How do we understand the profanity, or otherwise, of space travel? Is earth the temple and outer space the outer (pro) fanum? Or could it be that the heavens are the temple, and it’s we who are stuck down here in a mundane, profane antechamber? Is the sense of wonder that attends space exploration fundamentally a religious impulse? Or is the achievement of Apollo a triumph of solidly non-spiritual science, engineering, technology, and materialism?
This matter is addressed by To Touch the Face of God, Kendrick Oliver’s absorbing social history of the space program. Oliver has sensible things to say about the limitations of simply mapping the religious convictions of NASA scientists and astronauts onto a project like Apollo, but nonetheless he assembles a convincing picture of just how interpenetrated the undertaking was by a kind of providentialist, Protestant ethos, exploring the pros and cons of considering spaceflight as a religious experience. He’s especially good on the way the program channeled national concerns about the separation of church and state, a debate that had been galvanized by the 1963 Supreme Court judgment ruling mandatory school prayer unconstitutional.
As Apollo 8 orbited the moon in December of 1968, astronaut Bill Anders informed “all the people back on earth” that “the crew of Apollo 8 has a message we would like to send you.” They then read the creation account of Genesis 1 aloud. The reading, Oliver shows, had an enormous impact. The Christian Century ran an editorial declaring themselves “struck dumb by this event,” and Apollo flight director Gene Kranz wept openly in the control room: “for those moments,” he later recalled, “I felt the presence of creation and the Creator.”
I was in HWA at the time of this immense battle and cultural shift. It works!
— Nick Buy My Book Mamatas ??????????????? (@NMamatas) July 30, 2019
(5) STUDENT JOURNALISTS LOOK INTO SCA. Paul Matisz was one
of the people interviewed by the student magazine The Tattler for its
article about “The Dark Side of Medieval Reenactment.” (The issue is here, and the article is on pages 17-19.) Matisz, who formerly
participated in the Society for Creative Anachronism as Fulk Beauxarmes, has
posted the full text of his responses on his blog “Interviewed
for an Article on the SCA”. He praised the thoroughness of their
reporting.
Here’s a clipping from the article:
(6) RINGS A BELL. While skimming Shelf Awareness, Andrew Porter spotted a notice for The Best of Manhunt edited by Jeff Vorzimmer (“… the crime-fiction magazine Manhunt (1952-1967)….editor Jeff Vorzimmer has pulled together 39 gripping and pitiless tales…”) That seemed an uncommon name and he wondered if this fellow was any relation to Fifties fan Peter Vorzimer (with one “m”, his fannish AKA spelling). Indeed, Jeff is his son, as confirmed by this blog post: “Death in Hollywood” (2017). I’ve heard of Peter myself – his name was still cropping up in anecdotes about the old days of LASFS when I joined in the Seventies. Most of this excerpt quotes a reminiscence written by Peter himself:
My father was in the last half of his senior year at Hollywood High and … he was inconvenienced by losing his driver’s license for a year.
“It was on the way to HAC one day, March 17th, 1954, that I got involved in an accident in which I killed an elderly pedestrian. Which, though she had made some negligent contribution, cost me my driver’s license for one year. It also took the wind out of my senior year of high school.
“My lack of wheels forced me to concentrate on my writing skills—particularly my editorship of an amateur science fiction magazine, Abstract, a fanzine, as they are called. This brought me closer to a group of similarly minded young men. Charley Wilgus was my closest friend, followed by Don Donnell, Jimmy Clemons and Burt Satz. Don was the most creative and, at 16, already a good writer; Burt, who was universally picked on by the rest, was the best read (Hemingway, Joyce, and a host of others). Clemons introduced me to the world of Science Fiction and the L. A. Science Fiction Society—whose meetings were attended by E. E. “Doc” Smith, Ray Bradbury, and the agent Forry Ackerman. Possibly because of its controversial—read argumentative—editorials, its excellent mimeographed and often salacious art, Abstract became quite popular in the world of science fiction fandom. The high point of my early career was my bus trip to San Francisco to meet various pen pals: Gilbert Minicucci, Terry Carr, Bob Stewart, and Pete Graham. It took something for my mother to permit her 15-year-old son to go up by bus to San Francisco from L.A. to attend a Sci Fi convention on his own for a week!”
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born July 30, 1911 — Reginald Bretnor. Author of many genre short stories involving Ferdinand Feghoot, a comical figure indeed. It looks like all of these are available in digital form on iBooks and Kindle. He was a consummate SJW. He translated Les Chats, the first known book about cats which was written by Augustin Paradis de Moncrif in 1727. He also wrote myriad articles about cats, was a companion to cats, and considered himself to have a psychic connection to cats. Of course, most of us do. (Died 1992.)
Born July 30, 1927 — Victor Wong. I’ll single him out here for his role as the Chinese sorcerer Egg Shen in John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China, a film I adore. He also appeared in Beauty and the Beast as Dr. Wong in the “China Moon” episode, and in Poltergeist: The Legacy as Lee Tzin-Soong in the “Fox Spirit” episode. (Died 2001.)
Born July 30, 1948 — Carel Struycken, 71. I remember him best as the gong ringing Mr. Homn on Next Gen, companion to Troi’s mother. He was also Lurch in The Addams Family, Addams Family Values and the Addams Family Reunion. He’s listed as being Fidel in The Witches of Eastwick but I’ll be damned if I remembered his role in that film. And he’s in Ewoks: The Battle for Endor which I’ve never seen…
Born July 30, 1961 — Laurence Fishburne, 58. Appeared in The Matrix films of which I watched at least two before deciding I could be reading something more interesting. His voice work as Thrax in Osmosis Jones on the other hand is outstanding as is his role as Bill Foster in Ant-Man.
Born July 30, 1966 — Jess Nevins, 53. Author of the superlative Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victorian and the equally great Heroes & Monsters: The Unofficial Companion to the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I didn’t know he was an author ‘til now but he has two genre novels, The Road to Prester John and The Datong Incident.
Born July 30, 1970 — Christopher Nolan, 49. Obviously the Batman films of which I think I’ve seen several (too noisy, too vivid). However The Prestige is magnificent as is Inception and Interstellar.
Born July 30, 1975 — Cherie Priest, 44. Her southern gothic Eden Moore series is quite good and Clockwork Universe series isa refreshing take on steampunk which has been turned into full cast audiobooks. I’ve not read Cheshire Red Reports novels so have no idea how they are.
Born July 30, 1984 — Gina Rodriguez, 35. Anya Thorensen in Annihilation based on Jeff VanderMeer’s novels which I’ve read though I’ve not seen the film. She was also Robin I the “Subway” episode of the Eleventh Hour series, and directed the “Witch Perfect” episode of the new Charmed series.
Here’s a pair of vintages that should be engaging to “Star Trek” fans.
The first two selections in a new Star Trek Wines series are available with one celebrating the United Federation of Planets, the other paying tribute to the “Star Trek: The Next Generation” character Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, played by Patrick Stewart.
The 2016 Chateau Picard Cru Bourgeois from Bordeaux, France, is timely as Stewart’s Picard returns next year in a new CBS All Access series, “Star Trek: Picard.” That wine can be purchased along with a numbered, limited edition of the United Federation of Planets Special Reserve for $120 (Only 1,701 packs will be sold. Star Trek fans will know 1701 as the starship Enterprise’s identification number.)
The wines, available at StarTrekWines.com, are being brought to market by Wines that Rock, which sells wines carrying the labels of rock bands such as The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Grateful Dead, and The Police and Woodstock. They will be poured at the Star Trek Las Vegas event, which runs Wednesday to Sunday.
(10) DO YOU HAVE WHAT IT TAKES? Who needs a Hugo Award when
you’ve got an SJW Credential?
I'm not up for a Hugo award, but I did win a Hurly. That's when you get to clean up cat puke while you're on the phone doing an interview. You're not a real writer until you can carry cat barf or dog shit to the trash while simultaneously discussing that third act twist.#ProTip
…This was the start of what Emett called his “machines.” He gained international fame for designing the contraptions featured in the 1968 film “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.” Soon, companies began hiring him to create fanciful machines to use in their marketing.
As for the sculptures at Air and Space, “The Exploratory Moon-Probe Lunacycle M.A.U.D.” was on loan and eventually went back to Britain. The museum commissioned “S.S. Pussiewillow II” — imagine a wispy dirigible — but removed it from display in 1990 after a motor caught fire, burning a “flying carpet” that was part of the work.
Despite that, “Emett’s machines are remarkably reliable,” said Tim Griffiths, founder of the Rowland Emett Society, a group of enthusiasts. “The motor that failed on the Pussiewillow wasn’t the original and was possibly installed because of the difference in voltages between the U.K. and U.S.”
Perspective | The National Air and Space Museum used to feature flying machines of the strangest sort, the product of the whimsical imagination of British artist Rowland Emett. https://t.co/7rhFmHzfvf
Chase Dekker believes the photo he took of a humpback whale “swallowing” a sea lion is the first time that happening has ever been caught on camera.
The 27-year-old wildlife photographer and marine biologist had taken a boat of whale watchers out on the water in Monterey Bay, California, on 22 July when the incident happened.
“It wasn’t a huge group, only three humpback whales and about two hundred sea lions,” Chase tells Radio 1 Newsbeat.
“We’ve seen it all the way up to 100 whales with 3,000 sea lions, so it can get really insane.”
The animals were feeding on a school of anchovies at the water’s surface when the whale ended up with something a little larger in its mouth than it probably expected.
Nintendo is replacing a voice actor in new game Fire Emblem: Three Houses after he admitted emotionally abusing ex-partners and friends.
The role-playing game was only released last week, but an update is already planned to remove Chris Niosi.
He posted an apology and explanation on Tumblr a few days before the game was released.
“I have horribly mistreated and abused friends, colleagues and even my significant others,” he wrote.
(14) EMERGENCY HOLOGRAPHIC CAMEO. At San Diego Comic-Con, it was revealed that Jeri Ryan will reprise her role as Seven of Nine (ST: Voyager) in the new CBS All Access show ST: Picard. Now she may have some company. Trekkie Girls is spreading the word:“Voyager’s Robert Picardo in talks to appear in Star Trek: Picard”.
It’s a cameo that makes perfect sense and at London Film and Comic Con last weekend, Robert Picardo (The EMH and Dr Zimmerman from Star Trek Voyager) confirmed that his agent was in talks with CBS to possibly return in Season 2 of Star Trek Picard.
“I am pleased that they (CBS) have expressed interest in me. They have reached out to my agent about next season. So I’m looking forward to seeing what it is. As you know I play two characters, primarily the Doctor but also Lewis Zimmerman.”
Robert Picardo – Sunday 28th July, LFCC.
A recording of the entire interview is here —
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, Chip Hitchcock, JJ, Alec Nevala-Lee, John
King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, Mike Kennedy, Rob Thornton, Carl
Slaughter, and Andrew Porter for some of thee stories. Title credit goes to
File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew.]
Cameron has made some truly great sci-fi movies (Avatar notwithstanding), and if anyone else were heading up a discussion of the genre, they’d undoubtedly devote a segment or several to the creator of the Terminator franchise. As he notes during a chat with Arnold Schwarzenegger, “Skynet” is synonymous with “robot revolution.” There’s no denying what Cameron’s contributed to the genre, and there’s a certain joy in seeing him geek out with Lucas, who had to be cajoled into participating, and Spielberg.
NASA’s next Mars mission will be the first Red Planet spacecraft to lift off from the West Coast. The InSight Mars lander is scheduled to launch on Saturday (May 5) at no earlier than 4:05 a.m. PDT (7:05 a.m. EDT/1105 GMT). Here’s how you can watch it in person, or online at Space.com or other locations.
InSight will provide an interior snapshot of Mars to learn more about how rocky planets are formed. A heat probe will dig under the surface to look at the temperature of the interior. A seismometer will measure marsquakes and meteorite hits. In addition, a radio science instrument will transmit InSight’s position to Earth as the planet wobbles in its orbit around the sun. The wobble provides information about the composition and size of the Martian core.
Behind every architect and builder is an artist who takes designs and ideas, morphing them into beautiful images for everyone to understand. Chesley Bonestell was this artist, yet very few know his name. He worked on the Golden Gate Bridge and the Chrysler Building, as a matte artist on famous movies like Citizen Kane, and his mesmerizing paintings of planets and star systems helped jumpstart America’s space program. His iconic “Saturn As Seen From Titan”, became known as “the painting that launched a thousand careers.” Discover the power of the forgotten man whose art inspired Americans to conquer “The Final Frontier”.
Watch the trailer – Ray Bradbury shows up at 2:08.
https://vimeo.com/176831599
(4) ONE IS THE ONLIEST NUMBER. Ars Technica’s Chris Lee says that in her new book, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder argues that the search for Beauty and Naturalness may be leading theoretical physics in a wrong direction. Well established physics whose math looks beautiful now were often regarded at ugly kludges when they were proposed: “Lost in Math: Beauty != truth”
…Hossenfelder is sounding that alarm by suggesting that perhaps theoretical physicists need to spend a little more time on introspection and examining some of their working assumptions. Theoretical physics has been starved of new data for more than an entire generation. How can a theoretician choose a good model in the absence of data? And how do you choose which experimental options to pursue based on competing theoretical models?
…In Lost in Math, Hossenfelder delves briefly into the history of particle physics in order to explain the success of the Standard Model of particles and forces. She touches on why we’ve not had any unexplainable data from experimental particle physics for the last 50 years. She then takes us on a tour of the data that make us think we should be looking for physics that is not explained by the Standard Model—dark matter, dark energy, and cosmic inflation.
…But what makes a “good” theory in the absence of data? You and I might think that this would be predictions for new data and, yes, that plays a role. But Hossenfelder takes us into a realm where theories are decades from being tested. Unfortunately, we need to evaluate their quality now so we can determine how much effort we put into preparing for those tests. What is the criteria for that?
The answer is… ugly. Theoreticians make the following sorts of arguments: the Standard Model is described by math that physicists find beautiful; therefore, we insist that new physics be described by mathematical beauty. That’s paired with another argument, termed naturalness. What is naturalness? It turns out that everything should be about equal to one. If a theory produces a very large number, that is OK, as long as it also produces another very large number so that the difference or ratio of the two is, you guessed it, roughly unity. One is the most natural and only acceptable answer. Any other answer is unnatural because it is unlikely to occur by chance.
(5) PAROLINI OBIT. Gianfranco Parolini (1930-2018): Italian director / screenwriter, often billed as “Frank Kramer”, reportedly died April 26 at the age of 88. Genre entries include The Fury of Hercules (1962), The Three Fantastic Supermen (1967), Giant of the 20th Century (1977). He also introduced one of the iconic spaghetti western anti-heroes in Sabata (1969).
Daniel Dern sent along his explication of today’s Sally Forth, because a lot of us will need one —
Hilary is their teen-age daughter. Here’s the speech being referenced:
The guy (Michael Keaton) driving Peter Parker (Spider-Man) and his date to the school dance isn’t just the date’s dad, he’s also the Big Bad for this movie (The Vulture). Peter didn’t know that until he showed up at their house, dad didn’t know Peter was S-M until this conversation.
“The brief: A few years ago, François Bachelart showed an Alien-themed game off to a publisher (Wonder Dice). It’s not uncommon for designers to create prototypes and the like for dream licenses – re-theming a game is often part of the development process. They negotiated with the designer for a while, but the two sides couldn’t come to an agreement.
“Wonder Dice recently announced that pre-orders are opening soon for a game called Nostromo, which bears striking similarities to the design that Bachelart showed them – only it doesn’t have his name on the product and the publisher is claiming it’s an in-house design. It looks like they actually managed to land a license to use Alien, too, which is impressive.”
Franklin adds: “Copyright on board games is … interesting. Because you can’t copyright game rules. Sorta. You can copyright specific expressions – that is, you can copyright specific wordings and the rules as a whole, but if someone else clones your game using different art and phrases their rules differently, it’s (oddly) completely legal. If you start to dig into this, it’s a real rabbit hole that will eat hours of your time.
“But that also means that game designers have no legal protections when something like this happens, and it needs to be fought out in the court of public opinion.”
(9) MYTHCON NEWS. The Mythcon 49 Progress Report is now available to read online or download and print. Our own Dr. Robin Anne Reid is a Guest of Honor. The con is in Atlanta, July 20-23. The theme is “On the Shoulders of Giants.”
My friend Antony Johnston doesn’t just write comics, novels, and graphic novels that get turned into “Atomic Blonde”. He also writes electronic music as Silencaeon. This week he released a new album. I got a preview a few months ago when he sent me a track called “Wintermute”, and I started laughing… because I realized that the entire album, titled Dead Channel, is an homage to one of my all-time favorite books, William Gibson’s “Neuromancer”, which begins with the line:
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
The album, which is great to have in the background while you’re focused on your computer screen, whether you’re writing, coding, or hacking into cyberspace while avoiding some nasty black-ice countermeasures, is officially “Music Inspired by William Gibson’s Neuromancer”, and even features an excerpt from the book at a key moment. The whole album, as well as the rest of Antony’s music stuff, is available at Bandcamp.
George Orwell escaped to a remote Scottish island to create his final masterpiece – the dystopian classic 1984.
Going into the Corryvreckan whirlpool is a heart-stopping experience even when conditions are relatively benign.
It hits quite suddenly as you are passing through the narrow stretch of sea between the islands of Jura and Scarba.
One side of the boat drops away and you find yourself sitting on the deck.
Then the other side goes and you are grabbing on to the guard rail to stop yourself sliding in the opposite direction.
It must have felt something like this when George Orwell found himself in the throws of the Corry on the way back from a picnic on the west side of Jura.
But for him, it was so much worse than being knocked about a bit.
The outboard motor was wrenched off and his young nephew, Henry, attempted to row them towards a rocky islet of Eilean Mor.
Chinese police have arrested 15 people suspected of creating cheat programs for the popular Player Unknown Battleground (PUBG) game.
The cheats helped people survive longer, aim more accurately and spot foes in the competitive shooting game.
The 15 suspects have also been fined about 30m yuan (£3.45m) for profiting from the cheats.
Chinese police are expected to make more arrests as they break up the gang that made and sold the programs.
…PUBG is hugely popular in China and almost half of its players live there.
(13) SPEAKEASY. Jason Fagone, in “The Quest To Save Stephen Hawking’s Voice” in the San Francisco Chronicle, discusses engineer Eric Dorsey’s efforts to preserve Stephen Hawking’s synthesized voice after in 2016 Hawking and his staff found that the CallText 5010 speech synthesizer which has served Hawking faithfully since 1986 was collapsing, and the company no longer existed and its source code might be permanently lost.
Wood explained something so improbable that Dorsey had trouble understanding at first: Hawking was still using the CallText 5010 speech synthesizer, a version last upgraded in 1986. In nearly 30 years, he had never switched to newer technology. Hawking liked the voice just the way it was, and had stubbornly refused other options. But now the hardware was showing wear and tear. If it failed entirely, his distinctive voice would be lost to the ages.
The solution, Wood believed, was to replicate the decaying hardware in new software, to somehow transplant a 30-year-old voice synthesizer into a modern laptop — without changing the sound of the voice. For years, he and several colleagues in Cambridge had been exploring different approaches. What did Dorsey think?
(14) CELEBRITY BUS. James Corden takes the Avengers: Infinity War cast on a tour of Los Angeles. It’s really entertaining.
(15) LATE TO THE PARTY. Marvel itself is asking, after Infinity War, “Where Were Ant-Man and the Wasp?”
[Thanks to Gregory Benford, Daniel Dern, John King Tarpinian, Steve Green, Cat Eldridge, JJ, Martin Morse Wooster, Chip Hitchcock, Mike Kennedy, Carl Slaughter, Lynn Maudlin, Gerry Williams, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Matt Y.]
(1) HEARTLESS. The day after the worst of recent mass-shootings in American history I don’t want to click on Nerds of a Feather and find “Non-review: Destiny 2 by Bungie (developer)”, a post that begins:
Nameless Midnight is my favorite weapon. It’s a scout rifle with explosive rounds and decreased recoil. It’s good in PVP, but it’s amazing in PVE. Every shot is a bloom of damage numbers. With sixteen rounds, I can empty a room with it. Dump a whole magazine into an elite enemy and I’ve probably killed it. Since it’s a scout rifle, it’s second only to a sniper for range too, so I don’t even have to be close. It’s not even an exotic weapon, so I can still carry my Hard Light as a backup. They’re an amazing pair.
I just despair for fandom.
(2) NEW WAVES. The Nobel Prize in Physics 2017 has been announced, given to those who contributed to the observation of gravitational waves. Half of the award goes to Rainer Weiss (LIGO/VIRGO Collaboration) and the other half jointly to Barry C. Barish (LIGO/VIRGO Collaboration) and Kip S. Thorne (LIGO/VIRGO Collaboration) “for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves”
Gravitational waves finally captured
On 14 September 2015, the universe’s gravitational waves were observed for the very first time. The waves, which were predicted by Albert Einstein a hundred years ago, came from a collision between two black holes. It took 1.3 billion years for the waves to arrive at the LIGO detector in the USA.
The signal was extremely weak when it reached Earth, but is already promising a revolution in astrophysics. Gravitational waves are an entirely new way of observing the most violent events in space and testing the limits of our knowledge.
LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, is a collaborative project with over one thousand researchers from more than twenty countries. Together, they have realised a vision that is almost fifty years old. The 2017 Nobel Laureates have, with their enthusiasm and determination, each been invaluable to the success of LIGO. Pioneers Rainer Weiss and Kip S. Thorne, together with Barry C. Barish, the scientist and leader who brought the project to completion, ensured that four decades of effort led to gravitational waves finally being observed.
(3) BONESTELL DOCUMENTARY. In production, Chesley Bonestell: A Brush With The Future is a feature-length documentary on the life, works, and influence of sff artist Chesley Bonestell (1888-1986). The website is filled with interesting resources.
Long before satellites would journey to planets and deep-space telescopes would photograph distant galaxies, there was an artist whose dazzling visions of planets and stars would capture the imagination of all who beheld them. Before that, he was an architect working on projects like the Chrysler Building and the Golden Gate Bridge. He would later become a matte painter in Hollywood working on films like “Citizen Kane” and “Destination Moon”. Who was this remarkable man? His name was Chesley Bonestell.
https://vimeo.com/176831599
(4) FREE PICKERSGILL. David Langford keeps rolling in high gear: “With Ansible out of the way for another month, I’ve been overhauling the TAFF free ebooks page.” Here’s a new addition, Can’t Get Off the Island by Greg Pickersgill.
A selection of living legend Greg Pickersgill’s fanwriting edited by Claire Brialey and Mark Plummer, published to mark Greg’s Fan Guest of Honour role at Interaction, the 2005 Glasgow Worldcon. Autobiography, reviews, convention reports, musings on fandom, controversy … with sources ranging from 1970s fanzines to 2005 posts on private email lists. First published 2005; reissued as an Ansible Editions ebook for the TAFF site in October 2017. 76,000 words.
Popular culture professor Garyn Roberts, who was received PulpFest’s Munsey Award in 2013, examines “100 Years With the Author of Psycho, Robert Bloch.”
Will Murray, pulp historian and author of the new adventures of Doc Savage, Pat Savage, and Tarzan, discusses “The Dangerous Dames of Maxwell Grant: Myra Reldon, Margo Lane, and Carrie Cashin.
David Saunders, pulp art historian and son of pulp artist Norman Saunders, talks with PulpFest 2017 Guest of Honor Gloria Stoll Karn about her career as a pulp artist.
California State University Sacramento professor Tom Krabacher and long-time pulp collector Walker Martin discuss “Hard-Boiled at 100: The Don Everhard Stories of Gordon Young.”
(6) DI FATE’S MAGICON SPEECH. Fanac.org has put on YouTube a video recording of 1992 Worldcon GoH Vincent Di Fate taking up the theme another artist addressed at the first Worldcon, “Science Fiction, Spirit of Youth” (46 minute video):
MagiCon, the 50th worldcon, was held in Orlando, Florida in 1992. As the 50th Worldcon, MagiCon recreated key parts of the first Worldcon program held in 1939. Guest of Honor Vincent Di Fate was asked to speak on the topic “Science Fiction, Spirit of Youth” as a nod to a talk of the same name by the first Worldcon Guest of Honor, Frank R. Paul. Here, Vincent Di Fate provides an engaging view of Frank R. Paul, and his impact on SF illustration. He also reflects on his own influences, on authors such as Robert Heinlein, and on some of the greats of early SF film. His love for science fiction is clear, and contagious.
(7) FANTASTIC FICTION AT KGB. Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel will present James Patrick Kelly and Jennifer Marie Brissett at the next gathering of Fantastic Fiction at KGB on October 18.
James Patrick Kelly
James Patrick Kelly has won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards. His most recent publications are the novel Mother Go, an audiobook original from Audible and the career retrospective Masters of Science Fiction: James Patrick Kelly from Centipede Press. Forthcoming in November are the premier of his stage play Grouped, at the Paragon Science Fiction Play Festival in Chicago and in February a new story collection from Prime, The Promise of Space. He writes a column on the internet for Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and is on the faculty of the Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine.
Jennifer Marie Brissett
Jennifer Marie Brissett is the author of Elysium. She has been shortlisted for the Locus Award, the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, the storySouth Million Writers Award, and has won the Philip K. Dick Special Citation. Her short stories can be found in Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Lightspeed, Uncanny, The Future Fire, APB: Artists against Police Brutality, and other publications. And once in her life, a long time ago and for three and a half years, she owned and operated a Brooklyn indie bookstore called Indigo Café & Books. She is currently on the faculty at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop where she teaches Science Fiction & Fantasy Writing.
The readings begin 7 p.m. on Wednesday, October 18, 7 p.m. at KGB Bar (85 East 4th Street (just off 2nd Ave, upstairs.) in New York.
Or is this Star Trek: Black Ops? The third episode is full of promise for what could be a really good series. Once again, the broad strokes and characters are good but the plot details still need attention.
It is six months after the events of the first two episodes. Michael Burnham is on a shuttle transport amid some kind of space storm on her way with other prisoners to some space mines etc. Viewer alert: engage disbelief suspension system. Beep, beep, beep. Space opera mode engaged: disbelief suspended.
It’s Star Trek, it wants more fake realism than other SF properties but this is still a rubber headed alien universe with tribbles and space monsters. I resolved to give it some more slack when the hull of the shuttle gets infected with electricity eating bugs.
(9) VEGGIES MR. RICO. In Squashalypse!”, BookViewCafe’s Deborah J. Ross finds a way to avert terrestrial takeover by an aggressive nonsentient species.
Okay, we’ve all heard the warnings. In summer squash season, do not leave the window of your parked car down or you will find a 20 lb zucchini on the passenger seat. And every year we (as do many others) suffer a memory lapse and plant — well, too many squash plants. (This applies only to summer squashes like zucchini, pattypan, and crookneck; winter squashes like butternut, buttercup, and acorn aren’t a problem because they can be stored and enjoyed over the course of months.) However, we have devised several strategies for dealing the the bounty that do not involve breaking and entering our neighbors’ vehicles.
(10) ATTENTION TO ORDERS. Hie thee to Camestros Felapton’s blog where you are instructed to laugh at “McEdifice Returns! Chapter n+1”!
It was week 4 of intensive training for the new recruits of the Intergalactic Space Army. Trainee unit Alpha 57 consisted of Dweeble, Mush, Henumhein, Chuckowitz, Mertlebay, Shumpwinder, Scoot, Pumpwhistle, Pendlebee, Zorb, Feratu, and McEdifice.
“I HAVE NEVER SEEN, a more mangy, misbegotten, NO GOOD, bunch of FLEA INFESTED, scum-bag eating EXCUSES for recruits in all MY DAYS at Bootcamp 67!” Drill Sergeant Ernie (Earnest to his friends of which he had none) was professionally loud, cantankerous and had master degrees in bullying, verbal abuse, and counterproductive unfairness.
McEdifice narrowed his eyes. Sure, he understood the basic principle of psychologically breaking the recruits down so as to rebuild their personalities as a hardened unit of warriors but McEdifice couldn’t ignore his instincts and his instincts told him that the camp had been infiltrated by SPACE VAMPIRES. He didn’t know who the infiltrator was but he knew that he didn’t like Drill Sergeant Ernie.
(11) FOR YOUR NYCC VIEWING PLEASURE. Marvel will be streaming programming from this weekend’s New York Comic Con.
Marvel Entertainment invites you to experience the best of New York Comic Con 2017 LIVE from the heart of Manhattan! Starting Thursday, October 5, tune in to Marvel Entertainment’s live stream coverage of NYCC, starting at 3:00 p.m. ET/12:00 p.m. PT and get ready to be a part of one of the biggest fan events of the year!
Hosted by TWHIP! The Big Marvel Show’s Ryan Penagos and Lorraine Cink, viewers will be able to watch booth events and panels from the Javits Center, play games with their favorite Marvel comic and television talent, and learn about all the fun surprises happening on the convention floor, from exclusive merchandise to special signings.
Trial and error abounds. “We’ve worked with 54 different species from 24 genera,” Bochman says, to find five yeasts capable of souring beers. Nevertheless, each new microbe — whether isolated from the microbiome of the Jamestown historical site, or some guy’s beard — expands sour beers’ flavor palette and allows craft brewers to work with entirely new compounds.
Note especially:
Bochman, for example, uses sour brewing as a “rubber bullet” to train students who’ll transfer their skills to isolating pathogens. “If they drop a sample on the floor, or ruin an experiment, it’s not $2,000 down the drain. You’re not screwing up some cancer cell line. You just spilled a beer.”
(14) UNCANNY DESTROY STRETCH GOAL FUNDS. Not only did the “Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction / Uncanny Magazine” Kickstarter fund Uncanny’s fourth year and the special SF issue, it also met the stretch goal for an additional Disabled People Destroy Fantasy Special Issue.
[Thanks to Dave Langford, Andrew Porter, Cat Eldridge, JJ, Chip Hitchcock, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Paul Weimer.]
