(1) CROWDFUNDING FOR UKRAINIAN ANTHOLOGY. A Kickstarter for Embroidered Worlds: Ukrainian Fantastic Fiction, edited by Valya Dudycz Lupescu, Olha Brylova, and Iryna Pasko, met its initial funding goal on the first day. This English language anthology (mainly translations) of Ukrainian SFF has several stretch goals that are very worthwhile, including a story from Elizabeth Bear. Neil Gaiman and John Scalzi have expressed support.
With our base funding of $5000, we will be able to produce and print the book, with, at a minimum, the stories funded by the grant, as well as translations into English for a story written in Ukrainian by Tatiana Adamenko and stories written in Hungarian by Károj D. Balla and Éva Berniczky.
At $7000 we can commit to adding a selection of diaspora stories including ones by R.B. Lemberg, Valya Dudycz Lupescu, and Natalka Roshak, and also pay all three editors for their work.
At $10,000 we will produce a completed collection, including stories by Elizabeth Bear, Anatoly Belilovsky, David Demchuk, Halyna Lipatova, Askold Melnyczuk, and Mikhailo Nazarenko, Stefan O. Rak, and A.D. Sui.
And there are stretch goals beyond that.
Embroidered Worlds presents a living snapshot of imaginative fiction in Ukrainian culture today, including stories that span and cross the speculative genres of science fiction, fantasy, horror, weird fiction, magic realism, and alternate history. The majority of stories included in the anthology will be from writers in Ukraine, and for most of them it will be the first time their work will be translated into English.
In a public status conference for the trial brought by bookstores and the AAP against Texas’s book ban law, Judge Alan Albright told lawyers for each party that he will be ruling for the plaintiffs and preventing any further action from the state. The judge said that he was not able to get a written order completed by the day the law was to take effect, Sept 1, and that it should be available in the next two weeks.
The order will grant a preliminary injunction to the statute in its entirety, and deny the state’s motion to dismiss the suit based on sovereign immunity. “Under my order, [the plaintiffs] have no obligation to comply with the state law,” he said.
A lawyer for the defense said that the state will appeal the decision and requested a stay of the injunction, which Judge Albright denied.
In a press release, representatives from Blue Willow Bookshop, Book People, AAP, ABA, the Authors Guild, and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund jointly stated, “We are grateful for the Court’s swift action in deciding to enjoin this law, in the process preserving the long-established rights of local communities to set their own standards; protecting the constitutionally protected speech of authors, booksellers, publishers and readers; preventing the state government from unlawfully compelling speech on the part of private citizens; and shielding Texas businesses from the imposition of impossibly onerous conditions. We look forward to reading the court’s full opinion once it is issued.”…
Over the past few weeks, Rachel Zegler has attracted aggressive backlash against her role as Disney’s live-action Snow White. The latest wave involves fake rumors that she was either fired from the movie, or Disney has canceled its release.
Initially spread by conservative culture war accounts, this backlash focuses on the idea that Zegler is disrespecting the 1937 animated Snow White. This stems from a handful of interviews where she mildly criticized dated elements of the film. In one, she jokingly refers to the prince as Snow White’s “stalker.” In another, she says the remake will de-emphasize Snow White’s love life.
As I’ve pointed out before, these comments appear to be part of Disney’s promo strategy, giving Snow White a modern rebrand. However, this was poorly received among conservative Disney fans, who labeled the remake “woke” and said Zegler seemed ungrateful. Others criticized her comments as “girlboss feminism” and “anti-romance.”…
The Society of Authors (SoA) has spoken out against publishers misrepresenting negative reviews on book covers and the UK publisher Bonnier Books is producing a “best practice” document for blurbs, after controversy over the use of reviews on the cover of the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson’s book Beyond Order.
On 15 August, prominent writers criticised the way their reviews had been quoted on the back cover of the paperback edition of Peterson’s book, published by Penguin Random House. The Times columnist James Marriott tweeted an image of the cover featuring a quote from his review that appears to endorse the work. In the now deleted tweet, he wrote: “Incredible work from Jordan Peterson’s publisher. My review of this mad book was probably the most negative thing I have ever written.”
The quote attributed to Marriott read: “A philosophy of the meaning of life … the most lucid and touching prose Peterson has ever written.” The actual phrase from Marriott’s review is: “one of the most sensitive and lucid passages of prose he has written”, a description specifically about one chapter in an otherwise almost entirely negative review.
In a similar vein, Johanna Thomas-Corr, literary editor of the Sunday Times, tweeted that her quote featured on the book (“Genuinely enlightening and often poignant … Here is a father figure who takes his audience seriously. And here is a grander narrative about truth, being, order and chaos that stretches back to the dawn of human consciousness”) was a “gross misrepresentation” of her review, calling for it to be removed. In a Sunday Times comment piece on 20 August, she wrote: “Beyond Order is an awful, mad book – you shouldn’t buy it.”
Nicola Solomon, chief executive of the SoA, said that “quoting lines out of context isn’t clever marketing”, calling the practice “morally questionable”. Readers and authors “deserve honest, fair marketing from publishers. We can’t get that by undermining and misrepresenting one writer to boost the sales of another. It puts off reviewers from reviewing and readers from buying,” she told the Bookseller.
A spokesperson for Bonnier said that the publishing house “will be putting together a best-practice document for blurbs to share across teams”….
… the woman who posed for the iconic artwork doesn’t want the public to come away with the wrong idea about sharks, those fearsome predators of the deep, whose attacks on humans are extremely rare.
“You should always be cautious when you’re in the water. If there’s some apex predator there, you have to be careful, but basically, they’re not there for you,” professional model turned devoted conservationist Allison Maher Stern explained on a recent episode of the WCS Wild Audio podcast. “They’re there for a seal or whatever their food source is.”
Her advice? “Don’t dress like a seal.”
How the famous Jaws poster was created
Stern also related the story of how she got the modeling gig for the Jaws artwork, which was initially commissioned for the paperback edition of Peter Benchley’s bestselling novel of the same name. The opportunity, she said, came to her “out of the blue” not long after she’d moved from Ohio to New York City in the summer of 1974 for a job with the Wilhelmina modeling agency.
“They requested me for some reason,” Stern remembered. “I already had it, I didn’t have to compete with anybody, so that was great. Since it was one of my first first jobs, [I said] ‘Yay, I’ll take that.’” The photo shoot took place at a studio on Fourth Avenue, where she was asked to lay “on a couple of stools” and pretend to swim. Artist Roger Kastel, who would be rendering the snapshots into the eventual cover art, provided directions like “‘Swim faster!” or “Look out, shark!’”…
(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born September 1, 1875 — Edgar Rice Burroughs. Bradbury declared him “the most influential writer in the entire history of the world.” He created Tarzan and John Carter of which there are far more novels for the former than the latter. He did the Pellucidar series which I think is one of the earliest hollow Earth series done. I’m tempted to say the first but I’m not sure, but the collective wisdom here will know I’m certain. (Died 1950.)
Born September 1, 1927 — Gene Colan. He co-created with Stan Lee the Falcon, the first African-American superhero in mainstream comics. He created Carol Danvers, who would become Ms. Marvel and Captain Marvel, and was featured in Captain Marvel. With Marv Wolfman, he created Blade. (Died 2011.)
Born September 1, 1942 — C. J. Cherryh, 81. SFWA Grandmaster. I certainly think the Hugo Award winning Downbelow Station at Chicon IVand Cyteen at Noreascon 3 are amazing works but I think my favorite works by her are the Merchanter novels such as Rimrunners. Defiance, the twenty-second book in the Foreigner series continuing the story of diplomat Bren Cameron, is out in October.
Born September 1, 1943 — Erwin Strauss, 80. A noted member of the MITSFS, and filk musician who born in Washington, D.C. He frequently is known by the nickname Filthy Pierre. He’s is the creator of the Voodoo message board system once used at cons such as Worldcon, WisCon and Arisia. He is the author of the monthly “SF Convention Calendar” in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and he’s the author of the MIT Science Fiction Society’s Index to the S-F Magazines, 1951–1965.
Born September 1, 1951 — Donald G. Keller, 72. He co-edited the oh so excellent The Horns of Elfland with Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman which I highly recommend. He is a contributor to The Encyclopedia of Fantasy and he was a member of the editorial board of the defunct Slayage, the online Encyclopedia of Buffy Studies.
Born September 1, 1964 — Martha Wells, 59. She’s has won a Nebula Award, a Locus Award, and two Hugo Awards. Impressive. And she was toastmaster of the World Fantasy Convention in 2017 where she delivered a speech called “Unbury the Future”. Need I note the Muderbot Dairies are amazing reading?
…“I’m probably the worst person to ask about this because if you ask me if Renoir should be allowed to touch up one of his pictures, I would say no. It’s done,” Anderson said.
“I don’t even want the artist to modify their work. I understand the motivation for it, but I’m in the school where when the piece of work is done we participate in it. We know it. So I think when it’s done, it’s done.”
Anderson added: “And certainly no one who is not an author should be modifying somebody’s book. He’s dead.”
In February, Publisher Puffin Books, an imprint of Penguin Books, announced that it had edited Roald Dahl’s books in an effort to reflect more inclusive language. Titles like James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory have been altered by modifying words that are now deemed offensive.
In a statement at the time, Puffin said the changes were made so that the books “can continue to be enjoyed by all today.”
(8) FRIGHTENING SFF FILMS. [Item by Steven French.] Collider says “Let’s not go back to these futures” in “10 Scariest Sci-Fi Movies of All Time, Ranked”. An interesting list with a provocative choice for number one.
9. ‘Signs’ (2002)
Even if it’s not quite one of 2002’s very best movies, Signs is still largely successful as a slow-burn combination of horror, mystery, and science-fiction. It’s one of M. Night Shyamalan’s strongest filmmaking efforts, and follows a family living on a farm, and the way they react to the news that alien invaders may be coming to Earth.
It’s more about the paranoia of such a visitation, and building up to it eventually happening, rather than being an action-packed alien invasion movie. Still, this is turned into one of the movie’s strengths, as between some goofy characters and exchanges of dialogue, there are some effectively creepy sequences, and a sense of grounded realism that makes this one of the more frightening alien-related sci-fi movies of the 21st century so far.
(9) TOP STREAMERS. JustWatch has sent along its rankings of the most-watched streaming films and television programs for August 2023.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum was a hit from the start. Published in 1900, the story of Dorothy and her friends the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, and Cowardly Lion captured the public’s imagination. It wasn’t long before there was merchandising, a Broadway musical, a silent film, and a whopping 13 sequels. Here‘s what you should know about the book….
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Dann, Steven French, Michael Burianyk, Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, and SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Thomas the Red.]
(1) WE’LL BE GONE FOR YEARS AND YEARS AND THEN. Cass Morris tells what it was like aboard Disney’s Halcyon Starcruiser in “Together As One”, first in a series of posts where she’ll capture full details of this Star Wars immersive experience. And joining her vicariously will be your best opportunity because the attraction will close at the end of September.
… And there was just… there was so much. Especially on Day 2. Noah and I spent four hours in Batuu, and almost all of that time was completing missions. We were running around all over the Outpost. And then once back on the Halcyon, we had a little breather (and much-needed time to clean up, considering the effect that Batuu’s balmy climate has) followed by lightsaber training, but from 3:30 onward? It was just go-go-go. Of the four major paths available, I ended up on three of them. (Or, at least, pieces of each — there are sort of sub-tracks to at least the Resistance path, with different characters and objectives). My schedule was bonkers. I think I had seven alarms set on the evening of Day 2 to make sure I moved when I needed to.
If you’re willing to go hard, it pays off. You absolutely cannot do everything — many things are mutually exclusive just due to scheduling. But you can do a lot if you’ve got the energy, the focus, the time management skill, and the willingness to dash up and down a few flights of stairs many times.
Anyone who was inclined to mock the price tag has no idea just how much goes into creating something like this — both creating it in the first place and then running it on a daily basis. I have some idea, but the work I do is on such a smaller scale, to say nothing of a smaller budget. But I know how many documents it takes to get the story set, to plan the props and scenic elements, to train the performers for something that’s really just a couple of hours of “on” time, without the complex branching trees the Starcruiser has. To do something for a 45-hour long experience, with so many variables… it would have to be utterly gargantuan….
(2) WHERE’D IT GO? For the record, David A. Riley has deleted from his blog the two posts discussing the sale of his novelette to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. News of the magazine’s decision not to publish it is at the link.
(3) ABOUT BRADBURY. Issue 7 of The New Ray Bradbury Review is out, the first completely online, open access issue. Editor Phil Nichols tells what readers can expect in times to come.
…As we enter this new phase of the The New Ray Bradbury Review, we hope to explore the four cornerstones of Bradbury’s life and work which have informed the Bradbury Center’s mission. The first of these, underpinning many of the articles in this current issue, is the advancement of literacy, a cause which seems ever more timely in 2023, where we see the states of Florida and Texas enacting policies which restrict readers’ access—and especially young learners’ access—to diverse voices. The Ray Bradbury Center’s home state of Indiana is regrettably heading along a similar path, while there is a glimmer of light in the darkness in Illinois, which has legislated to ban book bans. The other three cornerstones of Bradbury’s life and work will be explored in future issues of NRBR: freedom of imagination and First Amendment rights; advocacy for space exploration; and the preservation of libraries…
(4) WORKAROUNDS. Joe Yao of the Chengdu Worldcon committee responded to concerns from those having difficulty logging into the website to purchase memberships, or vote for the Hugos and 2025 Site Selection. This is a diagnosis of one individual’s problem, but includes much general information.
…The credential message was sent by Tencent Cloud, which I believe is one of the leading IT companies with the most advanced technologies in China. However, there are still some of the email systems recognize it as spam. I have checked the back-end records trying to figure out this issue, and here is some information I would like to share with you.
There are 1,084 requests for credential emails since we opened the Site Selection and the Hugo Packet, not all of them were logging in for the purpose of voting but for other membership purchases, including the Chinese members to buy admissions. And 1,057 of the requests arrived at the email addresses successfully, in other words, the receiving rate is about 97.5%. Most of the emails that failed to arrive were BLOCKED by the receivers, which we have no way to help from my side and I believe it happens not only to Chengdu Worldcon.
The way I can help is suggest you use gmail account if possible to login and if you are a voting member in DisCon 3 or you have already purchased any memberships of Chengdu with other emails but cannot login right now, I can re-upload your gmail information to the system from my side….
5. “The Shining. One of my favorite movie facts is from The Shining. In the book, the Torrance family drives a red Volkswagen Beetle; in the movie, they drive a yellow one. Later in the movie, as Halloran is driving in the snowstorm, he passes a car accident where a semitruck has crushed a red Beetle. This is thought of as director Stanley Kubrick knowing he totally changed the story and was actively snubbing it with this shot.”
…And indeed, Disney shot six episodes, with a cast that includes Jack Dylan Grazer, Lyon Daniels, Noah Cottrell, Joy Bryant, Mychala Lee, and Christian Slater as the shape-shifting ogre Mulgarath. But as it ends up…nah.
According to The A.V. Club, Disney has opted not to air the show on Disney+, even though it’s basically finished. This is a phenomenon we’re seeing more and more of lately. Remember the furor that resulted when Warner Bros. Discovery decided not to release the Batgirl movie after it had already finished shooting? How about when Disney spent over $100 million making a TV show based on the fantasy movie Willow only to remove it from Disney+ after a few months? Why are these studios spending all this money if they’re not going to let people watch what they bought?
A lot of it has to do with the economics of streaming. Will airing The Spiderwick Chronicles get more people to subscribe to Disney+? If not, it may be more cost-effective for Disney to dump it and write off the expenses on its taxes. It’s not like they can sell commercials during episodes, and they probably won’t sell a home video version, so there’s little way for the show to make money by itself. It’s a weird world we’re in now, and studios are trying to figure it out….
The completed six-episode series, which hails from Paramount Television Studios and 20th Television, is currently being shopped to other potential buyers.
…The Pratchett estate has likely been burned by its experience with The Watch, something which languished in adaptation limbo for a number of years after the rights were bought. While the Amazon adaptation of Good Omens has been received far better by fans, the star power and intoxicating chemistry of stars David Tennant and Michael Sheen help things along. It will also help that co-author and lifelong friend of Pratchett’s Neil Gaiman is credited as creating the show and serves as a hands-on showrunner as the series moves past the events of the novel. If anyone knows how to continue the Pratchett legacy, it’s him.
In response to a headline decrying Discworld as another huge franchise “going to waste”, the Pratchett estate posted a status to the social media platform formerly known as Twitter saying, “It’s not going to waste, it’s just very much wanting to do the right thing and definitely not do the wrong thing. Again.”
The account, run by Pratchett’s longtime assistant and business manager Rob Wilkins, followed up by saying, “Our nuclear weapon remains our ability to say no and you simply wouldn’t believe how often we still have to use it”, adding the hashtag #Narrativia, referencing Pratchett’s production company that owns the multimedia rights to all of the author’s work….
… Rhianna Pratchett responded too, saying that “we are more mindful than ever, than when we give the ‘yes’ it has to be right”. After the decidedly unPratchett adaptation of The Watch, she has every right to be cautious. While the books are timeless, and continuously prove that Pratchett was ahead of his time in more ways than you could ever imagine, a slew of poor quality adaptations could tarnish that legacy….
(8) ARLEEN SORKIN (1955-2023). Arleen Sorkin, known for voicing Harley Quinn in animated DC Universe productions, died August 26 at the age of 67.
…In 1992, Sorkin began voicing Harley Quinn in Batman: The Animated Series. She would reprise her role in other shows like Superman: The Animated Series, Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker, Gotham Girls, Justice League and Static Shock. Sorkin also lent her voice as Harley Quinn for DC video games like Batman: Arkham Asylum, DC Universe Online and DC Universe Online: The Last Laugh….
(9) CAREER INCLUDED HARRY POTTER FILM. Actress Matyelok Gibbs died August 14 at the age of 91.
…On film, she played Erik’s mum in Terry Jones’s Erik the Viking (1989) – Tim Robbins was Erik, discovering there might be more to life than raping and pillaging, with Mickey Rooney as Erik’s grandad – and Auntie Muriel Weasley in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2010), a gaudily attired, rude and gossipy great-great-aunt of the Weasley children resembling a bad-tempered flamingo….
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born August 28, 1915 — Tasha Tudor. American illustrator and writer of children’s books. Her most well-known book is Corgiville Fair, published in 1971, the first of a series to feature anthropomorphic corgis. (Died 2008.)
Born August 28, 1916 — Jack Vance. Where to start? The Dying Earth series? Or perhaps the Lyonesse trilogy? I think I’ll pick the Demon Princes series. Damn he was good. Hugos? Oh yes. Discon was his first for “The Dragon Masters” short story followed by winning one for “The Last Castle” novelette at NYCon 3. His autobiography, This is Me, Jack Vance! (Or, More Properly, This is “I”), Jack Vance, won at Aussiecon 4. Let’s not forget that he has a World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement as well. And a SFWA Grand Master Award, too. (Died 2013.)
Born August 28, 1917 — Jack Kirby. Responsible for a goodly part of modern comics from Captain America and the X-Men to Challengers of the Unknown and the New Gods. (Another DC film that got cancelled, damn it.) I had forgotten that he created the Black Panther. (Died 1994.)
Born August 28, 1925 — Arkady Natanovich Strugatsky.The Strugatsky brothers were well known Russian SF writers who were Guests of Honor at Conspiracy ’87, the Worldcon that was held in Brighton, England. Their best-known novel in the West, Piknik na obochine, has been translated into English as Roadside Picnic. It is available from the usual suspects with a foreword by Le Guin. (Died 1991.)
Born August 28, 1948 — Vonda McIntyre. I’ve read a number of her works including Dreamsnake and The Moon and the Sun which are all phenomenal. The latter was based on a short story of hers done as a faux encyclopedia article “The Natural History and Extinction of the People of the Sea”, that was illustrated by Le Guin. Neat. (Died 2019.)
Born August 28, 1951 — Barbara Hambly, 72. Author of myriad genre works including the James Asher, Vampire Novels, The Windrose Chronicles, and the Sun Wolf and Starhawk series. Some Trek work. Was married for some years to George Alec Effinger.
…A highlight of the auction is Green Arrow cover art by Matt Wagner from issues #1 – #12, estimated to bring in between $1500.00 and $3000.00 each. Additionally, the collection features one of Smith’s rarest gems, a page from Frank Miller’s Daredevil #161, penciled by Miller and inked by Klaus Janson, estimated to cost $20,000.00 to $40,000.00. Each lot in this historic auction will come with a Certificate of Authenticity (COA) from Bodnar’s and Smith’s autograph.
A percentage of the proceeds from the auction will be donated to a scholarship fund for the Joe Kubert School in Dover, New Jersey. Smith, in his characteristic manner, exclaimed, “My current reduction in home wall space is going to make some ardent comic collectors’ dreams come true!” He added, “This will be the sale of the century.”…
(13) PLANET STEWARDS. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has chosen eight books and a film for their Planet Stewards Book Club. Craig Russell’s climate-crisis novel, Fragment, was selected alongside the film Don’t Look Up and the work of many other excellent authors, including Pulitzer Prize winner, Annie Proulx. Dates and subjects of club sessions and video links are here.
…For his project Good Movies As Old Books , Matt Stevens combined two of his main interests: recreating his favourite films in the style of vintage paperbacks. The North Carolina -based designer and illustrator begins with iPad sketches before using Photoshop to create the effect of old paper and weathered cover textures. The first 100 designs were collected in a Kickstarter-funded art book, and a second one is in the works. “You have to be efficient with the visuals and really distil down the concept into something simple, while still making an impact,” he says. “I love the challenge of that.”…
Andrew Porter dropped the link with a note: “Stephens apparently has no idea that another James Gunn is an actual author of SF books… One of the cover designs looks suspiciously like it’s by Mike Hinge.”
(15) TIME CAPSULE. There are still 153 photos of fans and writers on Mike Resnick’s Facebook album, spanning the decades of his life in fandom. Moshe Feder pointed this out a few days ago.
(16) WHO DID YOU SAY YOU WERE? “TV Characters With Mystery Names” at TVLine. The genre examples are not the most interesting ones, but there are some.
…What follows is an extensive small-screen history consisting of the following:
Characters whose first, last or full names have never been revealed.
Characters whose names were kept secret for multiple seasons. (Angels, aliens and other inhuman entities were not included.)
Here’s one example:
AGENT 99, GET SMART
The name of Maxwell Smart’s partner-turned-wife was never disclosed. The show would later follow tradition when she gave birth to their twins — a boy and a girl — and never revealed the daughter’s name.
[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Naomi.]
…For now at least, you can still talk freely about being trans or queer on the Internet, without fear of overt censorship*. You might well face online harassment and violent threats, and you might even face real-world consequences if you get on the radar of the worst people. But the Internet does not suppress the trans and queer stories that are being violently removed from schools, libraries, and other public spaces in much of the country right now.
That’s about to change — unless we all take action.
A new bill called the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, is sailing towards passage in the Senate with bipartisan support. Among other things, this bill would give the attorney general of every state, including red states, the right to sue Internet platforms if they allow any content that is deemed harmful to minors. This clause is so vaguely defined that attorneys general can absolutely claim that queer content violates it — and they don’t even need to win these lawsuits in order to prevail. They might not even need to file a lawsuit, in fact. The mere threat of an expensive, grueling legal battle will be enough to make almost every Internet platform begin to scrub anything related to queer people.
The right wing Heritage Foundation has already stated publicly that the GOP will use this provision to remove any discussions of trans or queer lives from the Internet. They’re salivating over the prospect.
And yep, I did say this bill has bipartisan support. Many Democrats have already signed on as co-sponsors. And President Joe Biden has urged lawmakers to pass this bill in the strongest possible terms….
(2) WRITER’S NATIONAL FRONT CONNECTION RECALLED. David A. Riley announced to readers of his blog on June 19 that his 11,600-word sword and sorcery novelette “Ossani the Healer and the Beautiful Homunculus” “has been accepted for publication – and by one of the most prestigious markets I have ever appeared in.” On July 5 he revealed that the story “will be published sometime later this year in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.”
Today someone who noticed the F&SF sale news connected Riley with his history of having once been part of the UK’s National Front.
Christopher Rowe is referring to F&SF publisher Gordon Van Gelder and editor Sheree Renée Thomas.
David A. Riley’s history with the UK’s National Front became common knowledge in 2016 after Riley was included on HWA’s Bram Stoker Award Jury. The HWA appointment became news at a time when questions were already being asked of Riley due to his involvement in the relaunch of Weirdbook. Riley reportedly answered in a no-longer-available Facebook thread. The davidandrewrileyisafascist Tumblr hosts a screenshot of the comment, which says in part:
I think I need to put the record straight. Yes, I was in the National Front for ten year from 1973 to the middle of 1983. During that time I never regarded the party as fascist, though it did have minority elements within it that undoubtedly were. …I have never regarded myself as a fascist, and certainly not a nazi. The term ‘white supremacist’ is one I don’t recognise and certainly repudiate. If you saw me associating with my ethnically diverse neighbours in Bulgaria you would not level that at me then. I know this will not convince some people, and, quite honestly, I accept that….
The relationship between Riley’s past political views and organizing activity, and his current views, and whether he should be serving on an HWA awards jury, became subjects of intense discussion. Before long HWA President Lisa Morton said he was taken off the jury by mutual agreement.
Riley was interviewed by David Dubrow shortly after the 2016 kerfuffle (“Interview With David A Riley”.) Here is a quote:
Do you feel as though you have anything to apologize for in regard to your politics, past or present?
Who should I apologize to? To those who have been baying for my blood? Most of the people involved in this debate come from the States. Since I have never been involved in politics there I should certainly not have to apologise to them. Do I regret having spent those years that I did in the National Front? Yes. If I had my time over again I would not do it. But the early seventies were a different time….
Today s. j. bagley commented on Rowe’s report about Sheree Renée Thomas’ statement:
this is incredibly disappointing (and also, like, it's exceedingly unethical to promote white supremacists and, in fact, i'd say that's far more unethical than pulling a story.) https://t.co/Rjv7XTVot8
And Rowe expressed this concern to another author:
(3) AI TRAINING PUSHBACK. [Item by Bill.] Danish anti-piracy group Rights Alliance has taken down the prominent “Books3” dataset, that was used to train high-profile AI models including Meta’s. “Anti-Piracy Group Takes AI Training Dataset ‘Books3′ Offline” reports Gizmodo. Despite being removed from their original host site, the dataset is available elsewhere on the internet.
One of the most prominent pirated book repositories used for training AI, Books3, has been kicked out from the online nest it had been roosting in for nearly three years. Rights-holders have been at war with online pirates for decades, but artificial intelligence is like oil seeping into copyright law’s water. The two simply do not mix, and the fumes rising from the surface just need a spark to set the entire concept of intellectual property rights alight.
As first reported by TorrentFreak, the large pirate repository The Eye took down the Books3 dataset after the Danish anti-piracy group Rights Alliance sent the site a DMCA takedown. Now trying to access that dataset gives a 404 error. The Eye still hosts other training data for AI, but the portion allotted for books has vanished….
… More than 170,000 titles were fed into models run by companies including Meta and Bloomberg, according to an analysis of “Books3” – the dataset harnessed by the firms to build their AI tools.
Books3 was used to train Meta’s LLaMA, one of a number of large language models – the best-known of which is OpenAI’s ChatGPT – that can generate content based on patterns identified in sample texts. The dataset was also used to train Bloomberg’s BloombergGPT, EleutherAI’s GPT-J and it is “likely” it has been used in other AI models.
The titles contained in Books3 are roughly one-third fiction and two-thirds nonfiction, and the majority were published within the last two decades. Along with Smith, King, Cusk and Ferrante’s writing, copyrighted works in the dataset include 33 books by Margaret Atwood, at least nine by Haruki Murakami, nine by bell hooks, seven by Jonathan Franzen, five by Jennifer Egan and five by David Grann….
…After ruling the box office roost for four weekends, Barbie fell to second place as DC’s superhero pic Blue Beetle took the top spot. It opened to an estimated $25.4 in North America. …
(6) BRADBURY MEMORIES. On Ray Bradbury’s 103rd birthday, John King Tarpinian visited his gravesite, bringing a funny book, a cake, and a dinosaur. (John always takes the cake to the cemetery office for the staff to enjoy.)
(7) BACK IN THE DAY. In this episode of Day at Night taped on January 21, 1974, host James Day speaks with Ray Bradbury about his career, the importance of fantasizing, his aspirations as a young child, his dislike of college for a writer, his idea of thinking compared to really living, and his love of the library.
When I was a little kid, prior to the Civil War, I had an imagination as fertile and as wide as my large brown eyes, dreamily filled with awe and wonder. My dad brought home our first television set in 1950.
Here is an affectionate remembrance of the Saturday Matinee and 1950’s Philadelphia television when classic cliffhanger serials thrilled and excited “children of all ages”… when careening spaceships and thundering hooves echoed through the revered imaginations and hallowed corridors of time and memory…and when Buster Crabbe lovingly brought “Flash Gordon,” “Buck Rogers,” “Red Barry,” and “Captain Gallant Of The Foreign Legion” to life in darkened movie palaces, and on television screens, all over the world.
Return with us now to “those thrilling days of yesteryear” when Zorro, Buzz Corry of the “Space Patrol,” Ming, The Merciless, Hopalong Cassidy, The Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry in “The Phantom Empire,” and Larry “Buster” Crabbe lit the early days of television, and Saturday afternoon motion picture screens, with magical imagery, and unforgettable excitement. Just click on the blue link above to escape into the past, via the world of tomorrow.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born August 22, 1909 — Paul W. Fairman. His story “No Teeth for the Tiger” was published in the February 1950 issue of Amazing Stories. Two years later, he was the founding editor of If, but he edited only four issues. In 1955, he became the editor of Amazing Stories and Fantastic which he would hold for three years. There are several films, Target Earth and Invasion of the Saucer Men, based on his stories, plus some TV episodes as well. (Died 1977.)
Born August 22, 1919 — Douglas W F Mayer. A British fan who was editor for three issues of Amateur Science Stories published by the Science Fiction Association of Leeds, England. He was thereby the publisher of Arthur C. Clarke’s very first short story, “Travel by Wire”, which appeared in the second issue in December 1937. He would later edit the Tomorrow fanzine which would be nominated for the 1939 Best Fanzine Retro Hugo. (Died 1976.)
Born August 22, 1920 — Ray Bradbury. Seriously where do I start? He wrote some of the most wonderful stories that I’ve ever read, genre or not, many of which got turned into quite superb video tales on the Ray Bradbury Theater. As for novels, my absolute favorite will always be Something This Way Wicked Comes. (I’m ambivalent on the film version.) And yes I know it isn’t really a novel but The Illustrated Man I treat as such and I loved the film that came out of it with Rod Steiger in that role. Let’s not forget The Martian Chronicles. (Died 2012.)
Born August 22, 1945 — David Chase, 78. He’s here today mainly because he wrote nine episodes including the “Kolchak: Demon and the Mummy” telefilm of Kolchak: The Night Stalker. He also wrote the screenplay for The Grave of The Vampire, and one for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, “Enough Rope for Two”, which he also directed.
Born August 22, 1955 — Will Shetterly, 68. Of his novels, I recommend his two Borderland novels, Elsewhere and Nevernever, which were both nominees for the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature, and his sort of biographical Dogland. Married to Emma Bull whose Finder: A Novel of The Borderlands is always highly recommended, they did a trailer for her War for The Oaks novel which is worth seeing as you’ll spot Minnesota fans in it. And Emma as the Elf Queen is definitely something to behold. Will was planning to run for Governor of Minnesota so he had collected funds for that. That instead went instead to this film
Born August 22, 1948 — Susan Wood. She received three Hugo Awards for Best Fan Writer in 1974, 1977, and 1981, and a Best Fanzine Hugo as coeditor of Energumen in 1973. In 1976 she was instrumental in organizing the very first feminist panel at a con, at MidAmericon. The reaction to this helped lead to the founding of A Women’s APA and of WisCon. While teaching courses in SF at UBC, one of her students was William Gibson. “Fragments of a Hologram Rose” which is his first published story was written as an assignment in her SF class. (Died 1980.)
Born August 22, 1963 — Tori Amos, 60. One of Gaiman’s favorite musicians, so it’s appropriate that she penned two essays, the afterword to “Death” in Sandman: Book of Dreams) and the Introduction to “Death” in The High Cost of Living. Although created before they ever met, Delirium from The Sandman is based on her. Bookriot did a nice piece on their friendship.
We’ve all been there: You go to leave a review of an amazing book, only to see that someone has left it a dreaded 1-star review. And when you read it? Oof. Did the two of you even read the same book? Well, let’s put it to the test. Can you guess these fantasy books based only on their 1-star reviews?
I did not get this one. I should have – I read it! But then, I thought it was good. Maybe that threw me off.
…The information released by Disney today lists four initial series set to get the 4K Blu-ray and Blu-ray treatment: Loki Season One, WandaVision, The Mandalorian Season One, and The Mandalorian Season Two….
… What’s more, these TV series releases are going all-out to appeal to fans by sporting steelbook packaging for both their 4K and HD Blu-ray versions; gorgeous box art designs by artist Attila Szarka; as well as concept art cards and never-before-seen bonus features. And as perhaps the biggest surprise of all, Disney has confirmed that it will be pressing the 4K versions of these TV series releases on 100GB discs rather than the 66GB-capacity discs that it’s used for all of its previous 4K Blu-ray releases bar the two Avatar movies….
(12) WHERE’S MY JETPACK LYRICS? Here they are. Thank you, Peer, for these sympathetic words.
Jet pack crashes A new Scroll cries Its pixels falls to the floor Mike opens his eyes The confusion sets in Before the filer can even click the box
Jetpack crashes An old scroll dies Its pixel fall to the floor Mike closes his tabs The items that was in theirs Reposted now, by the baby down the hall Oh, now feel it being discussed again Like a rolling thunder reported on X Blogs pulling Items from the center of the scroll again I can tick box now
Jetpack crashes A new scroll is born.
(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon comes to Netflix starting December 22. The way Variety sees it, “…The trailer has just about every piece of sci-fi and fantasy imagery you can imagine: a princess prophesied to end a war, spaceships raining lasers down on a hapless village, talking robots, a spider creature, a badass wielding glowing red laser swords, a flying pegasus-like animal and lots of slow-mo….”
The YouTube blurb says:
From Zack Snyder, the filmmaker behind 300, Man of Steel, and Army of the Dead, comes REBEL MOON, an epic science-fantasy event decades in the making. When a peaceful colony on the edge of a galaxy finds itself threatened by the armies of a tyrannical ruling force, Kora (Sofia Boutella), a mysterious stranger living among the villagers, becomes their best hope for survival. Tasked with finding trained fighters who will unite with her in making an impossible stand against the Mother World, Kora assembles a small band of warriors — outsiders, insurgents, peasants and orphans of war from different worlds who share a common need for redemption and revenge. As the shadow of an entire Realm bears down on the unlikeliest of moons, a battle over the fate of a galaxy is waged, and in the process, a new army of heroes is formed.
[Thanks to Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Daniel Dern, Bill, Steven French, Dan Bloch, Steve Vertlieb, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]
(1) CHENGDU’S OFFER TO HUGO FINALISTS. Joe Yao, a WSFS Division department head for Chengdu, provides more information about the assistance being offered to 2023 Hugo finalists to attend the Worldcon:
As it is the first time a Worldcon held in China, along with the first time for the Hugo Awards presented in China, we really like to have more finalists coming in person, and they can also participate in program and other activities if they want. But as we all know, it is a long and expensive trip for most of the finalists and they might not afford such a trip by themselves, thus we tried our best to help them, even though we have limited budget as well.
Hope there will be more finalists coming in October.
It appears the offer of help is being offered to 2023 Hugo finalists generally (or to one representative of finalists involving teams of multiple editors/creators). A few more people who have confirmed to File 770 that they received the offer include Gideon Marcus, Alison Scott, and Olav Rokne and Amanda Wakaruk (the latter got theirs today; they didn’t have it yet when they responded yesterday.)
F&SF takes First North American Serial Rights and pays on acceptance (which in practice means on receipt of a contract). Acceptance emails indicate that writers will receive a contract and a check within two to four weeks. However, Writer Beware has recently received multiple reports from writers whose work has been officially accepted but, months later, are still waiting for contracts and checks.
…Writers also report a variety of other delays: waiting for notification of official acceptance well beyond the stated acquisition timeline of 6 weeks to 6 months; receiving copy edits and proofs for accepted stories without having received a contract or payment; receiving contract and payment only weeks before the publication date, after months of waiting; completing requested revisions and then hearing nothing more. Many of the writers who contacted me say that they’ve sent repeated emails asking about the delays, and haven’t received a response….
Writer Beware’s Victoria Strauss contacted F&SF publisher Gordon Van Gelder and heard what he is doing to resolve the issues. See his responses at the link.
(3) SDCC AMID THE STRIKES. Rob Kutner says the lack of big movie presentations had its advantages in “Comic-Con In the Time of Strikes” at Book and Film Globe.
…As I’ve written here, Comic-Con offers many uses for the working (on non-struck things) professional. I came this year in part to network for gigs, and in part to sign my new kids’ graphic novel at my publisher’s table. Neither of those directly tied to the big panel/preview scene, so for me it was mostly business as usual. Nor, at first glance, could I necessarily spot a difference, other than some occasionally empty patches in the crowds, which would normally be wall-to-wall nerd.
However, after two days, some patterns began to emerge, and friends and colleagues that I spoke to confirmed this. As Craig Miller, Lucasfilm’s Director of Fan Relations for the first two Star Wars movies, described it, the effect on strike-year Comic-Con was “both profound and minimal. Hall H, the big, 6,000-person room”—where they often announce the latest Marvel or Star War for the first time — “is empty. There are no lines of people waiting hours to get into that room. But they’re still here at the convention.”
As a result, Miller spent the Con at a table, selling his memoir Star Wars Memories, and sold every last copy. Granted, any SDCC might have brought him scads of customers who liked both Star Wars and books, but it’s also a highly competitive environment, with literally hundreds of vendors and publishers vying for those same dollars.
This time, however, the diversion of crowds, who might otherwise be in Lineworld, onto the main convention floor created a flood of foot traffic for vendors that lifted even the smallest boats. Rantz Hoseley, VP of Editorial for Z2 Comics, confirms, “sales and signings at our booth were the biggest we’ve had at any convention, with a number of deluxe editions selling out by Thursday evening [the first of Comic-Con’s four days].”…
…And now on Broadway: “Back to the Future: The Musical,” which opens Aug. 3 at the Winter Garden Theater, follows a story that will be familiar to fans of the film. Using a time machine devised by Doc Brown, Marty McFly travels to 1955, meets his parents Lorraine and George as teenagers and must help them fall in love after he disrupts the events that led to their romantic coupling.
On its yearslong path to Broadway, “Back to the Future” has faced some challenges that are common to musical adaptations and others unique to this property.
While the show’s creators sought actors to play the roles indelibly associated with the stars of the film and decided which of the movie’s famous scenes merited musical numbers, they were also trying to figure out how the stage could accommodate the fundamental elements of “Back to the Future” — like, say, a plutonium-powered sports car that can traverse the space-time continuum.
Now this “Back to the Future” arrives on Broadway with some steep expectations: After a tryout in Manchester, England, its production at the Adelphi Theater in London’s West End won the 2022 Olivier Award for best new musical. The show also carries a heavy price tag — it is being capitalized for $23.5 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Throughout its development process, the people behind it — including several veterans of the “Back to the Future” series — tried to remain true to the spirit of the films and keep intact a story that has held up for nearly 40 years.
Bob Gale, who wrote the original movie with Robert Zemeckis, said of the stage adaptation: “We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. We just want to make the wheel smooth.”
But, he added, “It cannot be a slavish adaptation of the movie. Because if that’s what people want to see, they should stay home and watch the movie. Let’s use the theater for what theater can do.”…
(5) LEARNEDLEAGUE. [Item by David Goldfarb.] LearnedLeague is currently in its “off-season” when it features player-created content, including 12-question specialized quizzes that last for one day. Monday there was one about the Stargate movie and TV franchise. As I write this it’s still live, but by the time tonight’s Pixel Scroll goes out, it will be graded and so available for the public to view. Here’s a link: Stargate 1DS
Time is nobody’s friend. Authors in particular can fall afoul of time—all it takes is a few years out of the limelight. Publishers will let their books fall out of print; readers will forget about them. Replace “years” with “decades” and authors can become very obscure indeed.
The Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award was founded in 2001 to draw attention to unjustly forgotten SF authors…. Since it’s been five years (and there have been four new recipients) since we last discussed the award in 2018, I’ve updated the discussion to include the newest honorees—including the most recent winner, announced this past weekend at Readercon.
I wish the award were more widely known, that it had, perhaps, its own anthology. If it did, it might look a bit like this. Who are the winners? Why should you care about them? I am so happy I pretended you asked….
(7) FANAC.ORG NEWS. The fanhistory website Fanac.orghas been adding scanned fanzines at an colossal rate. Among their accomplishments, they’ve finished scanning a run of Imagination, by LASFS members during the Fighting Forties…
We’ve added more than 1,000 publications since the last newsflash in March, and about 2,000 since the last full newsletter in December 2022. We’ve added some great zines by Arnie Katz, and many APAzines from Jeanne Gomoll. Here are some highlights.
We completed our run of LASFS’s first important fanzine, Imagination including the Rejected issue. Imagination is filled with contributions from notables in the field, fan and pro, among them Yerke and Bok, Kuttner and Bloch, Bradbury and Lowndes, Hornig and Wollheim, and of course 4sj….
(8) WILL WIKI MATE WITH CHATGPT? Jon Gartner calls it h “Wikipedia’s Moment of Truth”. “Can the online encyclopedia help teach A.I. chatbots to get their facts right — without destroying itself in the process?”
…In late June, I began to experiment with a plug-in the Wikimedia Foundation had built for ChatGPT. At the time, this software tool was being tested by several dozen Wikipedia editors and foundation staff members, but it became available in mid-July on the OpenAI website for subscribers who want augmented answers to their ChatGPT queries. The effect is similar to the “retrieval” process that Jesse Dodge surmises might be required to produce accurate answers. GPT-4’s knowledge base is currently limited to data it ingested by the end of its training period, in September 2021. A Wikipedia plug-in helps the bot access information about events up to the present day. At least in theory, the tool — lines of code that direct a search for Wikipedia articles that answer a chatbot query — gives users an improved, combinatory experience: the fluency and linguistic capabilities of an A.I. chatbot, merged with the factuality and currency of Wikipedia.
One afternoon, Chris Albon, who’s in charge of machine learning at the Wikimedia Foundation, took me through a quick training session. Albon asked ChatGPT about the Titan submersible, operated by the company OceanGate, whose whereabouts during an attempt to visit the Titanic’s wreckage were still unknown. “Normally you get some response that’s like, ‘My information cutoff is from 2021,’” Albon told me. But in this case ChatGPT, recognizing that it couldn’t answer Albon’s question — What happened with OceanGate’s submersible? — directed the plug-in to search Wikipedia (and only Wikipedia) for text relating to the question. After the plug-in found the relevant Wikipedia articles, it sent them to the bot, which in turn read and summarized them, then spit out its answer. As the responses came back, hindered by only a slight delay, it was clear that using the plug-in always forced ChatGPT to append a note, with links to Wikipedia entries, saying that its information was derived from Wikipedia, which was “made by volunteers.” And this: “As a large language model, I may not have summarized Wikipedia accurately.”
But the summary about the submersible struck me as readable, well supported and current — a big improvement from a ChatGPT response that either mangled the facts or lacked real-time access to the internet. Albon told me, “It’s a way for us to sort of experiment with the idea of ‘What does it look like for Wikipedia to exist outside of the realm of the website,’ so you could actually engage in Wikipedia without actually being on Wikipedia.com.” Going forward, he said, his sense was that the plug-in would continue to be available, as it is now, to users who want to activate it but that “eventually, there’s a certain set of plug-ins that are just always on.”…
(9) MITCH THORNHILL (IRA) OBITUARY. Mitch Thornhill (Ira) died July 25 after many months of serious medical problems. He lived in Mississippi. However, he first became known as a fan in the Seventies while living in New Orleans and Minneapolis. He sometimes went by the name Ira M. Thornhill.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born July 25, 1907 — Cyril Luckham. He played the White Guardian first in the Fourth Doctor story, “The Ribos Opperation”, part one, and then twice more in the two-part Fifth Doctor story, “Enlightenment”. He was also Dr. Moe in the Fifties pulp film Stranger from Venus, and also showed up in The Omega Factor, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) and Tales of The Unexpected. (Died 1989.)
Born July 25, 1910 — Kendell Foster Crossen. He was the creator and writer of the Green Lama stories about a Buddhist crime fighter whose powers were activated upon the recitation of the Tibetan chant om mani padme hum. He also wrote Manning Draco series, an intergalactic insurance investigator, four of which are can be found in Once Upon a Star: A Novel of the Future. Kindle has a really deep catalog of his genre work. (Died 1981.)
Born July 25, 1922 — Evelyn E. Smith. She has the delightful bio being of a writer of sf and mysteries, as well as a compiler of crossword puzzles. During the 1950s, she published both short stories and novelettes in Galaxy Science Fiction, Fantastic Universe and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Her SF novels include The Perfect Planet and The Copy Shop. A look at iBooks and Kindle shows a twelve story Wildside Press collection but none of her novels. (Died 2000.)
Born July 25, 1937 — Todd Armstrong. He’s best known for playing Jason in Jason and the Argonauts. A film of course made excellent by special effects from Ray Harryhausen. His only other genre appearance was on The Greatest American Hero as Ted McSherry In “A Chicken in Every Plot”. (Died 1992.)
Born July 25, 1948 — Brian Stableford, 75. I am reasonably sure that I’ve read and enjoyed all of the Hooded Swan series a long time ago which I see has been since been collected as Swan Songs: The Complete Hooded Swan Collection. And I’ve certainly read a fair amount of his short fiction down the years.
Born July 25, 1971 — Chloë Annett, 52. She played Holly Turner in the Crime Traveller series and Kristine Kochanski in the Red Dwarf series. She was in the “Klingons vs. Vulcans” episode of the Space Cadets, a sort of game show.
Born July 25, 1973 — Mur Lafferty, 50. Podcaster and writer. Co-editor of the Escape Pod podcast with Valerie Valdes. She is also the host and creator of the podcast I Should Be Writing which won a Parsec Award for Best Writing Podcast. She is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Escape Artists short fiction magazine Mothership Zeta. And then there’s the Ditch Diggers podcast she started with Matt Wallace which is supposed to show the brutal, honest side of writing. For that, it won the Hugo Award for Best Fancast at Worldcon 76, having been a finalist the year before. Fiction wise, I loved both The Shambling Guide to New York City and A Ghost Train to New Orleans with I think the second being a better novel. She has two nominations at Chicon 8, first for Best Semi Prozine as part of the Escape Pod team, second for Best Editor, Short Form with S.B. Divya.
WandaVision is the first Disney Plus series to have a physical release, but the upcoming steelbook doesn’t actually include any discs or a download code.
The steelbook set includes a case, full slip, folder, envelope, character cards, and stickers, but the lack of actual physical media may turn fans off.
The decision to release a steelbook without including the series itself seems odd and could be seen as a disappointment, especially considering Disney’s recent removal of other series from its streaming platform…
…Unlike other “comic-cons,” Pemmi-Con makes a point of bringing in scientists as well as science fiction content creators. Canadian paleontologist Phillip John Currie is speaking about Jurassic Park-inspired fiction and dinosaur art and will be participating on a panel about recent scientific discoveries.
Other guests include biologist and author Julie E. Czerneda, Captain Canuck comic creator George Freeman, and Indigenous author Waubgeshig Rice.
“One of the things we’re trying to do this year is…emphasize Indigenous contributions to Canadian science fiction and fantasy,” Smith said.
The convention takes a different name every year relating to its location. Pemmi-Con is an homage to pemmican, a popular Metis dish in Manitoba. Smith said NASFiC attracts a worldwide audience….
(14) TECHNOLOGY NEVER DIES. Especially when somebody is devoted to keeping it around like the people who host the Mimeograph Revival website.
Mimeograph Revival is dedicated to preserving the printing technologies of an earlier era – with a particular emphasis on the stencil duplicator, the hectograph, and (maybe, as this is still a work in progress) the spirit duplicator. These are the techniques, machines, and processes that have fallen by the wayside, been relegated to “obsolete” status, and nearly forgotten.
Once ubiquitous, these machines ushered in an era in which it became possible for individuals and organizations, including clubs, fraternal organizations, churches, and schools, to quickly, easily, and cheaply reproduce printed matter.
There’s not too much fannish content, however, the “Personal Narratives” section has a wonderful anecdote by Jeff Schalles.
Jeff Schalles, fanzine creator, printer, and founder of the facebook Mimeograph Users Group left the following story here at M. R. one day. A little historical documentation personal-narrative-style:
A while ago I was contacted by a researcher working for National Geographic Magazine. She was looking for material for an article on mimeo and ditto printing of the Greenwich Village Beat poets and writers scene and poetry chapbook creaters of the 1950’s.
I responded by suggesting she contact the late Lee Hoffman concerning the gatherings in her Greenwich Village apartment, where musicians like Dave Van Ronk and the poets, writers, musicians, and other local Beats, would jam all night. Lee had a reel-to-reel tape recorder and taped many of the parties.
Lee also had a mimeograph and produced Science Fiction fanzines, including the long-running “Science Fiction Five Yearly” published every five years until Lee died sometime in the early 21st Century. The print runs were short and there are few copies of SF Five Yearly around. Geri Sullivan and I edited and mimeo’d two of the later issues for Lee. Harlan Ellison had a long-running serial in every issue and never missed a deadline until Lee’s death finally ended the run of Science Fiction Five Yearly.
The Geographic researcher was only interested in “The Mimeograph Revolution” and its beginnings. Her response to my suggestion that she contact Lee, who was by then living in Florida, was that there was… absolutely, positively, no connection between the Beats and Science Fiction Fandom. She was very rude to me, and obviously had no interest and little knowledge of SF Fandom. I just sighed and stopped corresponding with her. I blame Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of National Geographic for hiring an idiot like her.
I’m of the opinion that SF fan mimeographers like Ted White, who had a small basement mimeograph print shop in the Village, had something to do with teaching the Beats how to use the technology. The Geographic researcher insisted that was impossible, and that SF Fandom was just a bunch of teenage amateurs amounting to nothing.
I’ve asked around to see if any of Lee’s party tapes survived, but no one ever got back to me, so I suspect they were tossed in a dumpster.
(15) NETFLIX PASSWORD CRACKDOWN: HOW HAS PERFORMANCE CHANGED? With the recent news about Netflix changes and its growth, JustWatch has put together a graphic about the global market shares of streaming services and how Netflix performed over the last 2 years.
In brief, global streaming giant Netflix found a way to restore its former glory after losing -3% market share in 2022. Launching a “Basic with Ads” brought back some interest, however the key move was introducing password sharing crackdown, as they gained nearly 6 million subscribers in the last three months.
(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ahsoka, a Star Wars Original series, begins streaming August 23 on Disney+.
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Joyce Scrivner, Moshe Feder, Rich Lynch, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Michael Toman for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
Half a million Duolingo users are currently learning High Valyrian. But how do you make a language out of nothing? The linguists behind top fantasy TV shows and films explain:
If a language offers clues to the culture of its speakers, then the experience of learning Game of Thrones’s High Valyrian on Duolingo conjures visions of a bustling historic civilisation in which owls stalk the skies, magic abounds, and the spectre of death forever haunts the imaginations of the living. You learn to say “The woman is sweating” before that most basic greeting, “Hello”. An incongruously cheerful cartoon asks you to translate “All men must die, goodbye.” And, of course: “Ñuhyz zaldrīzesse gevī issi.” (“My dragons are beautiful!”).
Described in George RR Martin’s books as the language of the dragon-taming rulers of a once-great empire, Old Valyria has been compared to the Roman Republic, and High Valyrian to classical Latin. The language only assumed full life when linguist David J Peterson took it on for season three of the television series in 2012. Working from the few High Valyrian phrases mentioned in the book – names, places, and the infamous strapline, “Valar Morghūlis” (“All men must die”) – Peterson created an entire language. The Duolingo course was launched in 2017….
(2) HUGO ANALYSIS. Cora Buhlert has posted “Some Thoughts on the 2023 Hugo Finalists”. Cora also says she is “Still trying to hunt down information on some of the Chinese finalists, but it’s difficult due to multiple spellings and multiple people with the same names. But I’ve made friends with the two Chinese fan writer finalists.”
Speaking about the Best Series category:
… Personally, I’m sad that Elric by Melniboné by Michael Moorcock did not make the ballot, because not only is it a seminal sword and sorcery series, it’s also the longest running series written by a single author ever, as far as I know. The first Elric story “The Dreaming City” appeared in 1961, The Citadel of Forgotten Myths in 2022, i.e. the series has been going for a whopping 61 years. Plus, Michael Moorcock has never won a Hugo due to the longstanding anti-fantasy bias of the Hugos and the undeserved dominance of John W. Campbell’s Analog in the 1960s, when he was editing New Worlds. That said, a new Elric story will appear later this year in New Edge Sword and Sorcery No. 1, so maybe we can rectify this oversight next year….
(3) SWORD SLINGER. Marion Deeds has a nice overview of the Jirel of Joiry stories by C.L. Moore in her latest “WWWednesday” column at Fantasy Literature.
Jirel of Joiry is arguably the first pulp-fiction sword-and-sorcery female protagonist. The creation of C.L. (Catherine Lucille) Moore, Jirel first appeared in Weird Tales in 1934. Did she pre-date Red Sonya? Well, yes and no. Also in 1934, Robert E. Howard (creator of Conan) wrote a historical fantasy “The Shadow of the Vulture” featuring a woman called Red Sonja of Rogatino, of Ukranian-Polish ancestry, who wielded pistols, not swords. In the 1960s, the chainmail-bikini- clad woman-warrior named Red Sonja emerged, but it’s hard to look at her and not see Moore’s tempestuous, red-tressed warrior—actually, probably staring in smirking disbelief at Sonja’s bikini….
(4) MAGIC KINGDOM. Former Disney Imagineer Jim Shull regularly tweets photos and history about the several international Disney theme parks he worked on. Here are some recent examples. (DCA = “Disney California Adventure”.)
In 20/20 the train near the entrance of DCA wasn't all that bad as it has been made out to be. There was an idea behind it, and it featured a real engine. There has been worst. #dca2023#Disneylandpic.twitter.com/EexT9jSSw3
One lesson learned while providing creative direction on global projects is that construction in different countries use different method to achieve the same objectives. In France a electric vault was made from pre cast concrete, where in China it was built brick by brick. pic.twitter.com/LDnKrYht26
Once the model for Toy Story Playland was complete, the question arose where the review for the model would occur? The image documents the scale of the model and so moving it would be no easy task. #ToyStory#Disneylandparispic.twitter.com/3BKFiyZtAI
The answer of how to move the Toy Story Playland model was to load it into this truck and drive the 6 1/2 hours up I 5 from Glendale to Emeryville. Harris Ranch was around the half way point and served a good lunch. #ToyStory#WDIpic.twitter.com/16pvt1fkGw
Our job complete and the model approved we drove back to Glendale picking up even more bugs on the 6 1/2 drive from Emeryville. The life of a Imagineer is filled with glamorous stories such as this one. #bugs#insects#WDW#Imagineerpic.twitter.com/6DfooTH74n
…Okay, time for the caveat. I’m not going to be participating in programming at Worldcon this year. (To be clear, I have not been invited to do so yet, not having an attending membership. And I have never attended before, though that hasn’t been by choice, simply logistics. Every year I say, “maybe next year I’ll be able to travel again… ah well.” So this isn’t as much of a sacrifice as I know it will be for others making similar decisions….
(6) NOW ON THE SHELVES. Lisa Tuttle’s “The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – reviews roundup” in the Guardian covers The Centre by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi; Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Törzs; Silent City by Sarah Davis-Goff; Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia; and Red Smoking Mirror by Nick Hunt.
It’s become tradition for my family to spend the Fourth of July watching a vaguely patriotic movie in which things are blown up in pursuit of a common good. Independence Day, both National Treasure movies, Team America: World Police … you get the idea. This year, we chose the Tim Burton film Mars Attacks!, in which an overstuffed cast must fend off an army of killer Martians. Released in late 1996, the film drew on the legacy of cheesy alien-invasion and disaster movies, and culminated in a couple of major musical reveals.
[This missive contains several Mars Attacks! spoilers. Stop reading now if you wish to remain in the dark about this 27-year-old film and the fate of its bloodthirsty villains.]
Given that parts of Mars Attacks! take place in Las Vegas, it wasn’t a huge surprise that Tom Jones, already an established presence in three decades of movies and TV, would pop up in several scenes — first performing “It’s Not Unusual” and later as part of a small band of heroes who make their escape from a city under siege. The bigger surprise was the identity of the musician whose voice, when blared through a loudspeaker, vibrated at a frequency that caused Martian heads to explode. His name was Slim Whitman, and he was one of the best-selling musicians of the 20th century. As we watched the film, we quickly realized that I was the only person in the room who’d heard of him….
(8) MEMORY LANE.
1996 – [Written by Cat Eldridge from a choice by Mike Glyer.]
One of the joys of doing these Beginnings as a collaboration with Mike is that I get to discover writers such as Gill Alderman.
She had a short genre career with just four novels, two in her Guna sequence – The Archivist: A Black Romance and The Land Beyond: A Fable, plus two others, Lilith’s Castle and The Memory Palace, plus two stories in a career that lasted about a decade starting in the Eighties.
And she’s done some screenplay writing including for HBO’s The Undoing mystery series. Outside of the genre, she has written are Gone Girl, Sharp Objects, Dark Places and the “The Grownup” novella.
The Memory Palace (Voyager, 1996) which is what Mike selected for our Beginning was nominated for British Science Fiction Award the year Kim Stanley Robinson’s Blue Mars won.
And now for this Beginning…
His hands ached badly, as they often did at the end of a long keyboard session. He flexed his fingers while he looked out, beyond the screen, into the twilit garden of the old rectory. It was a little cooler; he thought the rosebushes trembled slightly. There might be a breeze, one zephyr only: just a breath of air to end the stifling day. The lawns merged with churchyard and field and, in Humfrey’s Close, the Norman castle mound looked bigger than it was, worn down by nine hundred years of weather, rabbits and grazing sheep. A mile or so away, Karemarn’s dark slopes were beginning to merge with the night sky.
The sun had set. The only light in the room came from the screen of the computer before the window, a luminescent shield which occulted the world outside as effectively as the steep hill hid the rising moon. It was covered with words, the conclusion of his newest novel and–as necessary an adjunct to his storytelling as the hallowed and familiar phrase ‘Once upon a time’–with his authorial adieu to the reader, that essential phrase with which he always signed off at the finish of the task: ‘THE END’. Then, his last words, his hand upon the creation: ‘Guy Kester Parados, The Old Rectory, Maidford Halse, June 24th 1990’.
He stretched, reaching high, yawned wide. A grisaille light as glamorous as that cast by his mind-mirroring screen filled the garden and the small field beyond it. It was time to be gone. He clicked the mouse under his right hand and saw his work vanish into the machine. He would leave it now, to settle and sift out of his mind; when he returned after the break, he would come to it refreshed. Then, one or two readings, a little tweaking (especially of the unsatisfactory last chapter) and a punctuation check should suffice and he could be rid of it for ever, in the future seeing it only as an entity given public birth by others, separate from him, one more title on the shelf–He made a copy and, reaching up, hid the floppy disk in the customary place in the cracked mullion.
‘You may now switch off safely.’ He read the prompt and, reaching for the switch, said ‘I shall, I shall.’ It had been a long haul, this one, through the fifteenth. The landscape of the novels was so familiar that he no longer had to consciously invent it, only travel the road with his chosen company, as used to his fictional country of Malthassa as to the hedged and crop-marked fields of the rural Midlands outside his study window. It was an old picture, this place outside the house; he no longer needed to look at it to remember it, but only inwards, into his mind, where those more perilous places, the dangerous rocks, the wild steppes and untameable floods he had created called him persistently.
If I had gone in for the Church, he thought, would it have made me any happier? Would that honest life have felt more just, more true, than this of spinning the thread, weaving the cloth, cutting and stitching the garment of the storyteller? Would Helen have avoided me, or seen me as a greater challenge? I was a pushover for her after all, most eager to co-operate.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born July 8, 1914 — Hans Stefan Santesson. Trifecta of editor, writer, and reviewer. He edited Fantastic Universe from 1956 to 1960, and the US edition of the British New Worlds Science Fiction. In the Sixties, he edited a lot of anthologies including The Fantastic Universe Omnibus, The Mighty Barbarians: Great Sword and Sorcery Heroes and Crime Prevention in the 30th Century. As a writer, he had a handful of short fiction, none of which is available digitally. His reviews appear to be all in Fantastic Universe in the Fifties. (Died 1975.)
Born July 8, 1933 — Michael Barrier, 90. One of the few actors not a regular crew member on the original Trek who shows in multiple episodes under the same name. He was DeSalle in “The Squire of Gothos”, “This Side of Paradise” and “Catspaw”. While he has the same name each time, he does not have the same shipboard job as he serves as a navigator in the first episode, a biologist in “This Side of Paradise” and assistant chief engineer in “Catspaw”.
Born July 8, 1942 — Otto Penzler, 81. He’s proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City who edits anthologies. Oh does he edit them, over fifty that I know of, some of genre interest including The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories, Zombies! Zombies! Zombies! and The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories which an original Lester Dent story in it. Back in the Seventies, with Chris Steinbrunner, he co-wrote the Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection for which they won an Edgar Award.
Born July 8, 1944 — Jeffrey Tambor, 79. I first encountered him on Max Headroom as Murray, Edison’s editor. Later on, he’s Mayor Augustus Maywho in How The Grinch Stole Christmas. Finally I’ll note he was in both of the only true Hellboy films that there was playing Tom Manning, director of the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense.
Born July 8, 1951 — Anjelica Huston, 72. I’m going to single her out for her performance as The Grand High Witch of All The World, or Eva Ernst in The Witches, a most delicious film. She was also wonderful as Morticia Addams in both of the Addams Family films, and made an interesting Viviane, Lady of the Lake in The Mists of Avalon miniseries.
Born July 8, 1953 — Mark Blackman, 70. Mark has often written about the Fantastic Fiction at KGB and New York Review of Science Fiction readings series for File 770. He was a member of Lunarians and chaired Lunacon 38 in 1995. He was a member of the New York in 1989 Worldcon bid. (OGH)
Born July 8, 1955 — Susan Price, 68. English author of children’s and YA novels. She has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Prize for British children’s books. The Pagan Mars trilogy is her best known work, and The Sterkarm Handshake and its sequel A Sterkarm Kiss, will please Outlander fans.
Born July 8, 1988 — Shazad Latif, 35. If you watched Spooks, you’ll remember him as Tariq Masood. (Spooks did become genre.) He was Chief of Security Ash Tyler in Discovery,andDr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in Penny Dreadful. He voiced Kyla in The Dark Crystal: Voice of Resistance. And he was in the Black Mirror episode “The National Anthem” as Mehdi Raboud.
(11) OPPENHEIMER ACTOR. [Item by Steven French.] There’s some marginal genre interest here insofar as Cillian Murphy was the central character in the zombie apocalypse flick 28 Days Later but I was also struck by this comment regarding his role as Oppenheimer: “I had dinner with all these geniuses. I’ll never understand quantum mechanics, but I was interested in what science does to their perspective.” “Cillian Murphy on Oppenheimer, sex scenes and self-doubt: ‘I’m stubborn and lacking in confidence – a terrible combination’”: a profile in the Guardian.
…I raise method acting and Murphy tilts his head and frowns. “Method acting is a sort of … No,” he says, firm but with a half smile. Oppenheimer had many defining characteristics, not least walking on the balls of his feet and a vocal tic that sounded like nim-nim-nim, but Murphy didn’t want to do an impression. Nolan was obsessed with the Brillo-texture hair, so they spent “a long time working on hair”. And the voice. The real question for Murphy was what combination – ambition, madness, delusion, deep hatred of the Nazi regime? – allowed this theoretical physicist to agree to an experiment he knew could obliterate humankind. “He was dancing between the raindrops morally. He was complex, contradictory, polymathic; incredibly attractive intellectually and charismatic, but,” he decides, “ultimately unknowable.”…
(12) IT IS YOUR DESTINY. [Item by Dann.] Ryan George dropped a new Pitch Meeting for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Selling that concept had to be super easy! Barely an inconvenience!
(13) JEOPARDY! [Item by David Goldfarb.] The Thursday episode had three clues in the single Jeopardy round, and (at least arguably) the Final Jeopardy.
A TV Series, $200: Captains of the Enterprise: William Shatner; This man from 1987 to 1994; then Scott Bakula
Challenger Carol Oppenheim identified this as Patrick Stewart.
So I’m Reading This Book, $400: A novel, writing the clue for us: “The is a story of how a Baggins had an adventure”
Challenger Alex Gordon knew this one.
A TV Series: $1000: This big fella on “Game of Thrones”: Conan Stevens, Ian Whyte, Hafthor Julius Bjornsson
Returning champion Anji Nyquist responded: “Who is the Mountain?”
Ken Jennings said, “Gregor Clegane, well done.”
Final Jeopardy: Squashing the allegory theory, the daughters of the author of this novel say it’s “just a story about rabbits”
I watched Eurovision and this awesome Finnish dude with a bowl cut, a lime green bolero, and a name that’s a multi-level pun (Käärijä = wrapper) reminded me why I love performing and gave me some desperately needed inspiration with a song called “Cha Cha Cha.” If by some small chance, Käärijä himself hears this/sees the lyrics, I hope that he laughs and enjoys what we managed to accomplish. Despite how nerdy and funny the language is that I’m singing in, we always push for good musical arrangements. We had a fun day in the recording studio and I hope that fans of Käärijä, of which I am one, will catch the small details musically, in the translation effort, and in the accompanying lyric video. It’s my sincere hope that Käärijä fans who know nothing about Star Trek or Klingon enjoy this acoustic cover as much as my nerdy Trekkie fans.
[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, David Goldfarb, Cora Buhlert, Dann, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Xtifr.]
Fake reviews are ruining the web. But there’s some new hope to fight them.
The Federal Trade Commission on Friday proposed new rules to take aim at businesses that buy, sell and manipulate online reviews. If the rules are approved, they’ll carry a big stick: a fine of up to $50,000 for each fake review, for each time a consumer sees it.
That could add up fast.
It’s the biggest step to date by the federal government to deter the insidious market for buying and selling fake reviews, though the FTC’s rules don’t do as much to hold big review sites like Yelp, Google, Tripadvisor and Amazon directly accountable. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post. Interim chief executive Patty Stonesifer sits on Amazon’s board.)…
…In its notice of proposed rulemaking, the Commission cited examples of clearly deceptive practices involving consumer reviews and testimonials from its past cases, and noted the widespread emergence of generative AI, which is likely to make it easier for bad actors to write fake reviews.
The Commission is seeking comments on proposed measures that would fight these clearly deceptive practices. For example, the proposed rule would prohibit:
Selling or Obtaining Fake Consumer Reviews and Testimonials: The proposed rule would prohibit businesses from writing or selling consumer reviews or testimonials by someone who does not exist, who did not have experience with the product or service, or who misrepresented their experiences. It also would prohibit businesses from procuring such reviews or disseminating such testimonials if the businesses knew or should have known that they were fake or false.
Review Hijacking: Businesses would be prohibited from using or repurposing a consumer review written for one product so that it appears to have been written for a substantially different product. The FTC recently brought its first review hijacking enforcement action.
Buying Positive or Negative Reviews: Businesses would be prohibited from providing compensation or other incentives conditioned on the writing of consumer reviews expressing a particular sentiment, either positive or negative.
Insider Reviews and Consumer Testimonials: The proposed rule would prohibit a company’s officers and managers from writing reviews or testimonials of its products or services, without clearly disclosing their relationships. It also would prohibit businesses from disseminating testimonials by insiders without clear disclosures of their relationships, and it would prohibit certain solicitations by officers or managers of reviews from company employees or their relatives, depending on whether the businesses knew or should have known of these relationships.
Company Controlled Review Websites: Businesses would be prohibited from creating or controlling a website that claims to provide independent opinions about a category of products or services that includes its own products or services.
Illegal Review Suppression: Businesses would be prohibited from using unjustified legal threats, other intimidation, or false accusations to prevent or remove a negative consumer review. The proposed rule also would bar a business from misrepresenting that the reviews on its website represent all reviews submitted when negative reviews have been suppressed.
Selling Fake Social Media Indicators: Businesses would be prohibited from selling false indicators of social media influence, like fake followers or views. The proposed rule also would bar anyone from buying such indicators to misrepresent their importance for a commercial purpose.
(2) NICOLA GRIFFITH WINS FIRST ADCI LITERARY PRIZE. The inaugural ADCI (Authors with Disabilities and Chronic Illnesses) Literary Prize went to Nicola Griffith for Spear (Tordotcom Publishing), “a lyrical, queer reimagining of Arthurian legend, in which ‘those usually airbrushed from history take centre stage’” (Via Ansible.)
The prize, launched in 2022 to encourage greater positive representation of disability in literature, was announced alongside ten other prizes which make up the annual Society of Authors’ Awards. The SoA Awards is the UK’s biggest literary prize fund, worth over £100,000, this year shared between 30 writers, poets and illustrators.
The ADCI Literary Prize. Sponsored by Arts Council England, ALCS, the Drusilla Harvey Memorial Fund, and the Professional Writing Academy, the ADCI Literary Prize is awarded to a disabled or chronically ill writer, for an outstanding novel containing a disabled or chronically ill character or characters. Judged by Penny Batchelor, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, Nydia Hebden, Karl Knights, Julia Lund, Nii Ayikwei Parkes, Vikki Patis and Chloe Timms.
(3) CON OR BUST GRANT OPPORTUNITIES. Dream Foundry’s Con or Bust program for creators and fans of color makes direct cash grants to assist with travel, food, registration, and other expenses associated with attending industry events.
If you’re a person of color planning to go to a convention this year and need support, our Con or Bust program is here for you. Right now we have memberships to the following conventions for any Con or Bust qualifying application.
Readercon (July 13-16, 2023)
Pemmi-con, aka Nasfic (July 20-23, 2023)
Capricon (February 1-4, 2024)
If you want one of these memberships, or need other support from this program, you can apply on the Con or Bust page.
…That said, his desire for “Dial of Destiny” to succeed feels quite personal.
“I wanted to be ambitious, for those things we have not necessarily done in such measure,” he said. When asked what he means by “those things,” he explains in that instantly recognizable, back-straightening “take this seriously” tone. “I mean take a chance on telling the story of an older character, take a chance on introducing your character in present day in a totally anti-iconic way, reducing him to his underwear and a La-Z-Boy with a glass in his hand.
“That moment in film,” he says, relaxing into a laugh, “may be one of my favorite things I’ve ever done in a movie. That and grabbing a baseball bat and going out to the neighbors’.”
… Mostly, he said, he wanted to see Indy “inveigled into one last adventure. I wanted to see him at the nadir, where we could pick him up and kick him in the ass. I know what age is about. I wanted to bring that into the story. If I was going to be the actor playing this guy, I wanted the reality of my age.”
But first, in the film’s opening scene, he had to play a younger Indy, which made the contrast of past and present more striking. Ford’s face was de-aged through the miracle of artificial intelligence and Lucasfilm’s trove of images from the earlier films, but “the mouth is my mouth, the eyes are my eyes,” he said. “The voice is me talking in a higher register because age lowers the voice, and the body language I had to act. But he moves like I move and I remembered.”…
This episode’s guest is Jordan Kurella, who was a Nebula Award nominee this year in the category of Best Novella for I Never Liked You Anyway, which was also longlisted for the BSFA award. His stories have appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Apex, Mermaid Monthly, Glitter + Ashes, Strange Horizons, and many other magazines and anthologies. Some of these were gathered in his short story collection, When I Was Lost, published by Trepidatio in December. In his past lives, he was a photographer, radio DJ, and social worker, and he has also taught at Iowa State University and Rambo Academy.
We discussed which ice cream flavor he chose to celebrate his Nebula Award nomination, the way readers can tell which stories writers had the most fun writing, how all he needs to pants a story is the first line, what caused him to say “it’s not write what you know, it’s write what you’re embarrassed about,” why he doesn’t like to reread his own published work unless he has to, how to avoid getting stuck in rabbit holes of research, the ways writing a book can be like spending time with your best friends, his rule about story titles, why we’re both so attracted to writing love stories, how playing the violin in public prepared him for surviving rejection, why he published only a single piece of literary fiction before realizing the fantastic was where he belonged, and so much more.
Author Patrick Tomlinson and his wife, business owner Niki Robinson, have been “swatted” at their home in Milwaukee more than 40 times, often resulting in police pointing guns at their heads. Their tormentors have also called in false bomb threats to venues using their names in three states. Yet law enforcement hasn’t been able to stop the calls.
The couple’s terror comes as these incidents appear to be on the rise in the U.S., at least on college campuses. In less than a single week in April, universities including Clemson, Florida, Boston, Harvard, Cornell, Pittsburgh, Rutgers and Oklahoma, as well as Middlebury College, were targeted by swatters.
To combat the growing problem, the FBI has begun taking formal measures to get a comprehensive picture of the problem on a national level.
Chief Scott Schubert with the bureau’s Criminal Justice Information Services headquarters in Clarksburg, West Virginia, told NBC News that the agency formed a national online database in May to facilitate information sharing between hundreds of police departments and law enforcement agencies across the country pertaining to swatting incidents.
… Security expert Lauren R. Shapiro, who is an associate professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said: “Swatting involves people making fraudulent 911 calls reporting serious-level criminal threats or violent situations like bomb threats, hostages, killing, etc. to fool the police into raiding the house or business of somebody who is not actually committing a crime.”…
… Tomlinson’s troubles began after he posted a casual remark on Twitter in 2018 saying he’d never personally found the comedian Norm Macdonald very funny. As The Daily Beast reported, the tweet caught the attention of online trolls who soon began to harass, stalk, impersonate and defame Tomlinson and his wife, using a website of their own along with social media accounts on Reddit, Twitter and YouTube to target the couple and invite others to pile on.
Their harassers mostly converge on a website that’s cloned elsewhere so participants can migrate rapidly if their forum is ever banned by a service provider.
Since The Daily Beast report, the harassment escalated both online and offline.
The couple was mostly recently swatted at their home on Tuesday, bringing the total of swatting incidents to 43. Tomlinson’s parents, who are senior citizens, also suffered swatting at their home about 2 hours outside of Milwaukee this year…
Whether the FBI’s database will lead to any results is open to question based on past performance.
… At a federal level, Tomlinson filed a complaint with the Internet Crime Complaint Center in November 2020. He never saw a reply to that, so in early May 2022, he went to the Milwaukee branch of the FBI in person to file a new one.
An FBI special agent was assigned to evaluate his case. He says the agency already had a file on Tomlinson because of a false bomb threat that swatters had called into a hotel outside of Detroit in April 2022, a few weeks prior to a presentation he was scheduled to give. The presentation, part of PenguiCon, was titled,”Elon Musk is Full of S—.”
Since then, “There has been nearly zero communication by the FBI,” Tomlinson said.
One agent has requested more evidence from his family by email on rare occasions. But the agency has not brought him or his wife in for an interview, and have not arrested people who the couple identified as participants in their harassment and swatting…
“Rogers: The Musical” started as a joke in the Disney+ series “Hawkeye,” which presented a challenge for the Disneyland Resort’s live-entertainment team. How, in a 30-minute, heavily condensed Broadway-style show, do you bring a little heft to a production in which fans will be clamoring for cheese? Sure, there’s Captain America, Iron Man, Black Widow and the Hulk, among others, but these are superheroes who spend more time flexing jazz hands than muscle.
In the show opening today, directed by Disney’s Jordan Peterson with a book from Hunter Bell, known best for Broadway’s “[title of show],” the answer was simple: heartbreak.
The story of Steve Rogers’ transformation into Captain America is framed by longing — for better days, for acceptance and for love. It allows the production, which veers close to overt patriotism in its opening moments, to find a sense of personal grounding. When an actor playing a young Rogers is framed by an Uncle Sam military recruitment poster, he gets all wistful and rejected: “What’s a guy to do when ‘I want you’ doesn’t mean you?”
Don’t worry, the production doesn’t stay down for long. “Hawkeye” introduced fans to the over-the-top corniness of the song “Save the City,” a work written by Broadway vets Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, and it pops up multiple times, each one leaning into the showtune parody that it is. When it wants to, “Rogers: The Musical” embraces its silliness….
…The musical features five original songs, not counting the previously heard “Save the City” and “Star Spangled Man,” which dates to the film “Captain America: The First Avenger.” The new works are credited to composer Christopher Lennertz, with lyrics by Peterson, Lennertz and Alex Karukas. None quite reach the heights of “Save the City,” which went all out in its showtune glitz. “Rogers: The Musical” comes off as a series of puzzle pieces constructed around that signature number.
Lennertz, a composer with a lengthy résumé of film and television credits, including Marvel’s “Agent Carter,” plays it more low-key. The new works largely attempt to take “Rogers” out of parody mode, a decision that accounts for a series of tonal shifts and results in a theatrical mood that’s not quite serious yet not fully goofy.
(8) CSI SKILL TREE. The latest episode in the ASU Center for Science and Imagination’s Skill Tree series on video games, possible futures, and worldbuilding is out, featuring the award-winning science fiction roleplaying game Citizen Sleeper (2022). This episode’s guests are Gareth Damian Martin, the game’s developer, and Phoebe Wagner, a speculative fiction author, researcher, and editor of three solarpunk anthologies, including Sunvault. Here’s a link to the entire Skill Tree playlist, with 12 episodes so far.
(9) ALAN ARKIN (1934-2023). Four-time Oscar nominee Alan Arkin, who won Best Supporting Actor for Little Miss Sunshine (2007), died June 30 at the age of 89. He was perhaps best known for playing Yossarian in Catch-22 but his other three Oscar nominations honored his portrayals of deaf-mute Singer in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Russian Lt. Rozanov in one of my favorite movies, The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming, and the has-been producer Lester Siegel in the genre-adjacent Argo.
In Argo (2012), Arkin played the fictional producer of a fake sff movie that provided cover for a CIA operation to rescue Americans caught up in the Iranian Revolution of 1979. He acted in collaboration with a character based on real-life Planet of the Apes makeup man John Chambers, played by John Goodman.
Within the sff genre Arkin did a lot of voice work late in his career – including Dumbo (2019) and Minions: Rise of Gru (2022), but early on voiced Schmendrick in The Last Unicorn (1982).
He’s been in a Muppets movie, in The Monitors (1969), in the film adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night (1996), played Detective Hugo in Gattaca (1997), The Chief in the movie Get Smart (2008). He had parts in The Seven Percent Solution (Dr. Sigmund Freud — 1976) Edward Scissorhands (1990), and The Rocketeer (1991).
Arkin also won a Tony for his Broadway debut in 1963’s Enter Laughing.
(10) MEMORY LANE.
1989 – [Written by Cat Eldridge from a choice by Mike Glyer.]
This time Mike picked one of my favorite writers, Sheri S. Tepper. Her series have too many exemplary books to list them all and her standalone novels such as Singer from the Sea and The Companions are excellent as well.
She’s been nominated for a lot of Awards but garnered only two, one of which is the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement. Grass, the source of our Beginning this time, was published by the Doubleday Foundation in 1989 (one of their first books was Asimov’s Prelude to Foundation), and was a Hugo finalist at ConFiction.
And it has an absolutely stunning Beginning as you can read here…
Millions of square miles of it; numberless wind-whipped tsunamis of grass, a thousand sun-lulled caribbeans of grass, a hundred rippling oceans, every ripple a gleam of scarlet or amber, emerald or turquoise, multicolored as rainbows, the colors shivering over the prairies in stripes and blotches, the grasses—some high, some low, some feathered, some straight—making their own geography as they grow. There are grass hills where the great plumes tower in masses the height of ten tall men; grass valleys where the turf is like moss, soft under the feet, where maidens pillow their heads thinking of their lovers, where husbands lie down and think of their mistresses; grass groves where old men and women sit quiet at the end of the day, dreaming of things that might have been, perhaps once were. Commoners all, of course. No aristocrat would sit in the wild grass to dream. Aristocrats have gardens for that, if they dream at all.
Grass. Ruby ridges, blood-colored highlands, wine-shaded glades. Sapphire seas of grass with dark islands of grass bearing great plumy green trees which are grass again. Interminable meadows of silver hay where the great grazing beasts move in slanted lines like mowing machines, leaving the stubble behind them to spring up again in trackless wildernesses of rippling argent.
Orange highlands burning against the sunsets. Apricot ranges glowing in the dawns. Seed plumes sparkling like sequin stars. Blossom heads like the fragile lace old women take out of trunks to show their granddaughters.
(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born June 30, 1902 — Lovat Dickson. Australian-born publisher and author who wrote a biography of H G Wells, H G Wells: His Turbulent Life and Times. He was the first Canadian to have a major publishing role in Britain. (Died 1982.)
Born June 30, 1905 — Nestor Paiva. Sometimes it only takes one film or series for a performer to get a Birthday write-up from me. Paiva makes it for Lucas the boat captain in The Creature from the Black Lagoon and its oft-forgotten sequel Revenge of the Creature. Though that was hardly his only genre role as his first role was in the early Forties as an uncredited prison guard in Tarzan’s Desert Mystery and he’d be in many a genre film and series over the decades as Prof. Etienne Lafarge in The Mole People, as the saloon owner in (I kid you not!) Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter, Felicity’s Father in The Spirit Is Willing, Captain Grimby in “The Great Treasure Hunt” of The Adams Family and a Doorman in the “Our Man in Leotards” episode of Get Smart. (Died 1966.)
Born June 30, 1920 — Sam Moskowitz. SF writer, critic, and historian. Chair of the very first World Science Fiction Convention held in NYC in 1939. He barred several Futurians from the con because they threatened to disrupt it in which was later called the Great Exclusion Act. In the Fifties, He edited Science-Fiction Plus, a short-lived genre magazine owned by Hugo Gernsback, and would edit several dozen anthologies, and a few single-author collections, most published in the Sixties and early Seventies. His most enduring legacy was as a historian of the genre with such works as Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of “The Scientific Romance” in the Munsey Magazines, 1912–1920 and Hugo Gernsback: Father of Science Fiction. (Died 1997.)
Born June 30, 1959 — Vincent D’Onofrio, 64. His long running-role is Detective Goren on Law and Order: Criminal Intent which is in no way genre. He was Kingpin in Wilson Fisk / Kingpin in four television series of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Edgar the Bug in the only truly great Men in Black film to date and Vic Hoskins in Jurassic World. He also was Jason Whitney / Jerry Ashton in The Thirteenth Floor, loosely based upon Simulacron-3, a early Sixties novel by Daniel F. Galouye.
Born June 30, 1963 — Rupert S. Graves, 60. Here because he played Inspector G. Lestrade on thatSherlock series. He also appeared on Doctor Who as Riddell in the Eleventh Doctor story, “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship”. He had one-offs in The Nightmare Worlds of H. G. Wells: The Moth, Twelve Monkeys, Krypton and Return of the Saint.
Born June 30, 1966 — Peter Outerbridge, 57. Dr. David Sandström in what I think is the terribly underrated ReGenesis series as well as being Henrik “Hank” Johanssen in Orphan Black and a recurring role on Millennium as Special Agent Barry Baldwin. He’s currently in two series, The Umbrella Academy with a recurring role as The Conductor, and as Calix Niklosin in V-Wars, yet another Netflix SF series.
Born June 30, 1972 — Molly Parker, 51. Maureen Robinson on the Lost in Space series. One-offs in Nightmare Cafe, The Outer Limits, The Sentinel, Highlander: The Series, Poltergeist: The Legacy, Human Target and she appeared in The Wicker Man as Sister Rose / Sister Thorn. She also was Alma Garret on Deadwood. No, not genre but Emma and Will love the series.
(12) COMICS SECTION.
The Far Side shows a marriage that is no longer super…
Being a fan of Yelena Belova keeps getting better and better. The younger sister of Natasha Romanoff, Yelena is also a widow and is everything that a sassy younger sister could be. And now she’s getting her very own time in the spotlight with a new comic series! First appearing in 1998, Belova quickly became a popular character for fans of Nat but she gained a new level of fame when Florence Pugh took on the role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Getting her own comic storyline is just exciting evidence of how popular Yelena Belova has grown throughout the last twenty-five years. As someone who relates to Yelena Belova a lot (and she’s one of my all-time favorite Marvel characters), this comic makes me incredibly excited for the future of her character!
Called White Widow, the series is created by writer Sarah Gailey and they worked along side artist Alessandro Miracolo to bring her to life. David Marquez gave us a perfectly Yelena cover and the entire reveal is a dream come true for fans. Sometimes, you wait a long time to see a character you love get their time in the spotlight and that’s exactly what is happening with White Widow. She’s not the little sister in Nat’s shadow anymore with this series!
(14) AI IN CINEMA. [Item by Steven French.] The Guardian seems to be having a bit of a bout of listmania these days but this one contains some interesting recommendations: “The best films about AI – ranked!”
16. Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)
The first Avengers sequel isn’t particularly good, but at least it introduced cinema to the AI lifeform Ultron. Tasked with sparing the Avengers from having to suit up whenever a new baddie rolls into town, Ultron quickly realises that the greatest threat to world peace is humanity and – in time-honoured AI fashion – attempts to eradicate it himself. The moral of Age of Ultron is clear: trust AI less than the irresponsible billionaires who invented it.
(15) FUTURE TENSE. The June story in the Future Tense Fiction monthly series is “The Big Four v. ORWELL,” by Jeff Hewitt, about a copyright lawsuit against a prolific AI author.
… But what about ChatGPT-5, ChatGPT-15, or ChatGPT-55? Assuming this goes on, in classic science fiction fashion, the LLMs will surely continue to blur the lines between artificial and “real” authors. That blurriness is the setup for Jeff Hewitt’s “The Big Four v. ORWELL,” a courtroom drama in which a group of publishers sue ORWELL, an A.I. that has become a prolific author, for copyright infringement.
I have my doubts that the current approach to building LLMs, essentially an exercise in statistically predicting the most likely next “token” given a string of tokens, can lead to the holy grail of artificial general intelligence, an imagined state of crafted cognition capable of accomplishing any intellectual task a human can. (ORWELL definitely appears to be an AGI.) Symbol manipulation alone, without more, must plateau at some point short of “true” intelligence—or so I tell myself (using strings of symbols, of course, smug with irony). To be sure, there is reason to be humble here. Decades ago, when I was studying A.I. in college, the idea that anything resembling the current brute-force approach could construct a virtual entity that could tutor you on any subject you liked, compose college essays, and even answer personal ads would have seemed like handwavium sci-fi. And yet, here we are. So, maybe I’m wrong about the future this time too….
A restaurant in Douliu City, Yunlin County debuted its “Godzilla” ramen featuring crocodile meat as its main ingredient.
Nu Wu Mao Kuei (女巫貓葵) announced on Facebook the launch of its “Godzilla” ramen, which is prepared by steaming or braising the front leg of a crocodile. In a clip, a young female customer samples both flavors and describes the dish as surprisingly delicious.
She says the steamed version of the dish resembles chicken, while the braised meat has a taste similar to pork feet. The soup contains over 40 spices, and the owner reportedly learned how to make the spicy “witch soup” during a trip to Thailand, SETN reported
The crocodiles used for this dish are sourced from a farm in Taitung. The owner was inspired by the giant isopods ramen, which went viral at another restaurant.
(17) TYPECASTING. [Item by Tom Becker.] Womprat is a bold font, inspired by the classic “STAR WARS” text on the movie poster. But that is just the beginning. There are alternate character sets, ligatures, symbols, and special glyphs galore. It is clearly the work of obsessive font geeks who are also massive Star Wars fans. It is a delight just to browse the glyphs or the free desktop background at http://womprat.xyz
A brand new Good Omens Season 2 clip from the upcoming return of Amazon Studios’ fantasy comedy series has been released, featuring David Tennant as Crowley. The next installment will be available for streaming on July 28 on Prime Video.
The video confirms Crowley’s current status in Hell as persona non grata, as the fan-favorite demon continues to question the point of Heaven and Hell. It also features Miranda Richardson’s newest character, who has now assumed the role of Hell’s representative in London after previously playing the role of Madame Tracy in Season 1.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Steven French, Juli Marr, Tom Becker, Lise Andreasen, Joey Eschrich, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jayn.]
(1) BALTICON 57 COVID REPORT. The Balticon 57 committee has learned two attendees came down with Covid. They sent this report to their mailing list:
While we did our best to mitigate the risks, we did not come through unscathed. Yesterday we received a report of 2 COVID cases. Everyone is now home and recovering.
Cases A and B – Henderson Books named with permission:
– Started feeling bad Monday during breakdown – Tested positive after the close of the convention – They were the book vendors at the first booth to the right, just when you walked in the door
When to test:
CDC defines day of known or expected exposure as Day 0. An exposure is close or extended contact without respiratory protection with a person known or suspected of having covid. The earliest that one may show positive test results if they contract Covid is 48-72 hours after exposure; CDC recommends testing no earlier than day 5 (120 hours after exposure) or upon developing symptoms.
What to do if exposed:
If you are up to date on vaccinations, you do not need to isolate, but should wear a well-fitting mask around others for the next 10 days.
If you are not up to date, they recommend isolating for 5 days, and then wearing a mask around others for the following 5.
(2) BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS. Lisa Tuttle’s “The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – reviews roundup” in the Guardian covers: Perilous Times by Thomas D Lee; The Grief Nurse by Angie Spoto; Airside by Christopher Priest; Hokey Pokey by Kate Mascarenhas; and The Shadow Cabinet by Juno Dawson.
The writer Sathnam Sanghera has said he barely ever does public events in the UK because of a fear of being attacked amid a culture war-fuelled backlash over his views on Britain’s imperial past, saying he feared a Florida-style push towards the banning of books.
Sanghera, a journalist and author whose bestselling book Empireland assessed how the UK’s colonial territories still infect contemporary politics and discourse, said he had begun to dread holding book events here.
Speaking to the Intelligence Squared podcast, Sanghera, who also explored the legacy of empire in a Channel 4 series, said he had “more or less stopped doing events in Britain”.
He said: “Because actually, the trolling online is … I’m so used to it, it doesn’t really feel real. Although it does get to you when it’s relentless for days at a time when you get targeted.
“But it’s the way it translates into real life … It’s people coming to my events, and shouting at me. And you know, when that happens, it always makes for a good event in the sense that other people stand up for me – it feels like the whole event matters. I sell out my books.
“It’s good – I mean, it probably makes my publisher happy. But it comes at a personal cost to me. I realised I started dreading the moment. I was waiting to be attacked. And I just stopped doing those events. And I just did international ones.”…
… Born in Lawton, Oklahoma (I’ve also seen Anadarko, OK implied as a birthplace), [Russell] Bates was an enrolled member of the Kiowa tribe. After he finished high school, he entered the U.S. Air Force. While injured after an explosion at a missile assembly building, he was encouraged to take up a hobby. He began writing science fiction stories–including Star Trek fanfiction (discussed in more detail below) [4].
Interested in honing his craft, Bates attended the famous Clarion workshop in 1969, and his first story, “Legion” (1971), hit print two years later [4]. He published six science fiction short stories between 1971-1977. A seventh–“Search Cycle: Beginning and Ending 1. The Last Quest; 2. Fifth and Last Horseman”–was scheduled to appear in Harlan Ellison’s infamous Last Dangerous Visions, originally slated for 1973. It hasn’t been published elsewhere….
Get ready to be amazed by the legendary James Earl Jones, the voice behind some of the most iconic characters in cinematic history. His rich and velvety voice is the perfect fit for the commanding roles of Mufasa and Darth Vader. But it’s not all business for this Hollywood heavyweight. Despite the weight of his fame, Jones isn’t afraid to let loose and have some fun, even if it means using his powers for mischief. In fact, he once took to the airwaves on his CB radio as Darth Vader, much to the delight of his fans. Who knew this talented actor had such a great sense of humor?
… Fans’ love for these films transcends what could be seen as splitting hairs, getting bogged down in plot holes. Indeed, even the most lauded time travel sci-fi movies are guilty of breaking their own rules, yet the captivating stories and characters can eclipse any disobedience. However, though the very concept of time travel is implausible, some sci-fi films fare better than others at convincing their audience of their realism by avoiding flouting their rules, rendering them meaningless. These eight sci-fi movies have broken their own time travel rules, prioritizing their plot and impactful scenes over time travel mechanics and rule observation.
One of their offenders is Avengers: Endgame. Beware spoilers.
Time travel in Avengers: Endgame faces no risk of the Grandfather paradox because you can’t change the past since it has already happened. Nonetheless, the filmseems to establish this rule to preserve the events of previous movies but break it when it becomes inconvenient. The film’s time travel follows Novikov’s self-consistency principle which states that it is impossible to create time paradoxes; the time traveler can only do in the past what does not change history, elucidated in the film by Bruce Banner.
“If you travel back into your own past, that destination becomes your future, and your former present becomes the past, which can’t now be changed by your new future.”
Avengers: Endgame’s finale reveals that instead of Captain America promptly returning to the Sacred Timeline after replacing the infinity stones and Mjolnir to their respective timelines he stays in the past to grow old with Peggy Carter and shows up as an old man to pass on his shield. This breaks the film’s rules, changing history and the present, leaving the time loop open. By the film’s logic Steve Rogers has done the impossible and changed his future, something Avengers: Endgame doesn’t justify nor explain.
(7) MEMORY LANE.
2007 – [Written by Cat Eldridge from a choice by Mike Glyer.]
I was truly sad when Kathleen Ann Goonan passed on from bone cancer at the relatively young age of sixty-nine years as she was one of my favorite writers. Her first novel, Queen City Jazz, which was published twenty years ago was the first novel I read by her.
It was the beginning of the Nanotech Quartet which I enjoyed immensely.
I also enjoyed her WW II alternative history novel from which our Beginning comes, In War Times: An Alternate Universe Novel of a Different Present published by Tor sixteen years ago. It would win John W. Campbell Memorial Award.
And here’s that Beginning…
DR. ELIANI HADNTZ was only five foot three, though she had seemed taller in the classroom, and Sam had not suspected that her tightly pulled-back hair was a mass of wild black curls until the evening she sat on the edge of his narrow boardinghouse bed. A streetlamp threw a glow onto her pale breasts, she reached behind her head and yanked out the combs, made crooked by the intensity of their lovemaking.
Her loosened hair cascaded down her back and hid her face. She took a deep, shuddering breath, and sat with her elbows on her knees, staring out the window.
When Sam reached out and ran a finger up her spine, she flinched. He had no idea why she was here.
Sam Dance was an uncoordinated soldier. To someone less good-natured, his last name, chosen by an immigration officer on Ellis Island a few generations back, might have seemed like a cruel joke. Because of his poor eyesight, the Army had not accepted him when he first volunteered in 1940, even with almost three years of chemical engineering classes at the University of Dayton under his belt. But while working as an inspector at a Milan, Tennessee, ordnance polant, he heard of an outfit in Indiana recruiting at a used car dealership trying to reach an enlistment quota. He hastened to their office, and was finally allowed to join the Army and serve his country.
Sam stood out because of his height. His intelligence was less visible, but must have been noticed by someone in the Army. Plucked from daily twenty-mile marches through inclement weather in North Carolina, he was sent to D.C. for an intensive course on a potpourri of esoteric subjects. The class met in a hastily assembled temporary structure on the roof of a War Department building.
The subjects, up to now, had been curiously disparate. Codebreaking, mechanical engineering, advanced calculus, and now theoretical physics rushed past taught by an odd assortment of flamboyant Europeans with heavy accents and accompanied at the end of each week by a test.
Properly appreciative of the warmth into which he had been suddenly deposited, Sam was always in his seat each morning at seven A.M. when Dr. Hadntz opened the door, set her briefcase decisively on the bare metal desk at the front of the room, and draped her coat and scarf over the back of the desk chair. She always began her lecture immediately, chalking formulas on the board which he was sure represented some of the most rudimentary knowledge that she possessed. She was an exiled physicist from Budapest. The Army, of course, had not provided the students with an extensive background, but it was rumored that she had worked with Curie, Wigner, Teller, Fermi. Everyone who was anyone in theoretical physics.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born June 10, 1922 — Judy Garland. She is remembered for her portrayal of Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz, and her only genre role in her tragically short life. I will note that she was the first woman to win the Grammy Award for Album of the Year, which she won for her 1961 live recording titled Judy at Carnegie Hall. (Died 1969.)
Born June 10, 1937 — Luciana Paluzzi, 86. She’s best known for playing SPECTRE assassin Fiona Volpe in Thunderball. Genre wise, I see she was also in Journey to the Lost City (in the original German, Das indische Grabmal), Hercules, The Green Slime, 1001 Nights, Captain Nemo and the Underwater City and War Goddess.
Born June 10, 1950 — Ed Naha, 73. Among his many genre credits, he was Editor of both Starlog and Fangoria. An even more astonishing genre credit was that he produced Inside Star Trek in 1976 with Gene Roddenberry, William Shatner, DeForest Kelley and Mark Lenard talking about the series. Fiction wise, he wrote one series as D. B. Drumm, TheTraveller series and adapted a number of movies such as Robocop and Robocop 2 under his own name. Way back in the Seventies, he wrote Horrors: From Screen to Scream: An Encyclopedic Guide to the Greatest Horror and Fantasy Films of All Time which alas has not been updated. There are no digital books at iBooks or Kindles for him.
Born June 10, 1951 — Charles Vess, 72. If you ever need a crash course in learning about his art, go find a copy of Drawing Down the Moon: The Art of Charles Vess which lavishly covers his career up to a decade ago. I’ve got a personally signed copy here along with lots of his artwork. He’s had interesting career including the Spider-Man: Spirits of the Earth graphic novel that he wrote and illustrated. I strongly recommend the illustrated version of Stardust he did with Gaiman as it’s amazing.
Born June 10, 1952 — Kage Baker. I never met her but we had a decade long conversation via email and once in a while via phone. We were supposed to write a Company Concordance for Golden Gryphon but she got too ill for it to happen. And yes I loved all of The Company series. Harry the Space Raptor is now living with her sister Katheleen. (Died 2010.)
Born June 10, 1953 — Don Maitz, 70. Winner of the Hugo twice for Best Artist and ten Chesley Awards from the Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists. And a World Fantasy Award as well. Yes, I’m impressed. From Asimov to Wolfe, his artwork has adorned the covers of many genre authors. He’s married to Janny Wurtz and their excellent website can be found thisaway.
Born June 10, 1964 — Andrew M. Niccol, 59. Screenwriter / producer / director who wrote and produced one of my favorite genre films, The Truman Show. The film won him a Hugo at Aussiecon Three. He also involved in Gattaca, The Terminal, In Time, The Host, The Minutes short video and Anon.
(10) PURSUING TRIVIA. David Goldfarb reports Friday’s LearnedLeague questions included this:
A Wind in the Door (1973), A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978), and Many Waters (1986) continue the story first told by author Madeleine L’Engle in what 1962 novel?
With a 70% get rate, this was by far the easiest question on a tough day (the next easiest question had a 43% get rate).
Then on TV, Friday’s episode of Jeopardy! had quite a bit of SFF-related content. In the first round, the “Pets on Film” category had several:
$200: Miss Gulch takes away this Cairn Terrier early on in a classic film; the heroine calls her a “wicked old witch”
Returning champion Suresh Krishnan: “Who’s Toto?”
$400: Bong Joon-Ho’s 2017 film “Okja” is about a big one of these who has been genetically engineered by an evil corporation This was a triple stumper. Correct response: “What is a pig?”
$600: In the “DC League of Super-Pets” superego Krypto has an alias; punning on his master, he’s named this “Kent” Challenger Tim Hagood was right: “What’s ‘Bark’?”
Then in “Quick books”, $200: From 2006 it’s Cormac McCarthy’s title post-apocalyptic byway Challenger Vickie Cyr: “What’s The Road?”
$800: His “Midnight’s Children” is set in places like Kashmir and Delhi Suresh: “Who is Salman Rushdie?” (He might be thought to have had an advantage on that one.)
In the Double Jeopardy round:
“TV: Who Said It”, $2000: “We’ve had vicious kings & we’ve had idiot kings, but I don’t know if we’ve ever been cursed with a vicious idiot boy king” Tim evidently watched Game of Thrones and responded “Who is Tyrion Lannister?”
$1600: “Carl’s dead…Carl went out to help someone and he got bit” Tim: “Who’s Rick?” (This was Rick Grimes on The Walking Dead)
“Eponymous Science”, $1600: The Drake Equation, which estimates the number of advanced alien civilizations in our galaxy, was created as part of SETI, short for this Suresh: “What is search for extraterrestrial intelligence?”
“With This Ring”, $2000: Around 1850, Richard Wagner began writing a poem called “The Death of” this heroic character in the “Ring” cycle Vickie tried “Who is Wotan?” but this was wrong. Nobody else answered. Correct would have been, “Who is Siegfried?”
$1200: A poetic verse by this man mentions “Three rings for the elven-kings under the sky” You knew this had to be somewhere in “With This Ring”, right? Suresh got it.
And in Final Jeopardy: “British Novels”: Midway through this 1928 novel, the title character briefly takes “their” instead of his or her Vickie was correct with “What is Orlando?”. This Virginia Woolf novel about a sex-changing immortal surely counts as genre, for our purposes.
Neither of the other two were right. Tim tried “What is The Importance of Being Earnest?”, and Suresh’s response was “What is Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde?”.
(11) HECK YEAH! “An idea whose time had come a quarter of a century ago,” is what John A Arkansawyer calls The ACME Chocolate Registry.
This is the same idea as a wedding gift registry at a department store. You can register your preference in chocolate, and then your friends and relatives can look it up so they know what to get you.
The link comes from the ACME Laboratories website whose logo art is an anvil in outline.
The Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that the First Amendment did not protect a chew toy for dogs resembling a bottle of Jack Daniel’s from a lawsuit claiming trademark infringement.
The toy, the Bad Spaniels Silly Squeaker, has the shape and other distinctive features of a bottle of Jack Daniel’s but with, as an appeals court judge put it, “lighthearted, dog-related alterations.”
The words “Old No. 7 Brand Tennessee Sour Mash Whiskey” on the bottle are replaced on the toy by “the Old No. 2, on your Tennessee carpet.” Where Jack Daniel’s says its product is 40 percent alcohol by volume, Bad Spaniels’ is said to be “43 percent poo.”
A tag attached to the toy says it is “not affiliated with Jack Daniel Distillery.”
Justice Elena Kagan, writing for a unanimous court, seemed amused by the dispute. “This case is about dog toys and whiskey,” she wrote, “two items seldom appearing in the same sentence.”
She added that the characteristics of the whiskey bottle were familiar to almost everyone.
“A bottle of Jack Daniel’s — no, Jack Daniel’s Old No. 7 Tennessee Sour Mash Whiskey — boasts a fair number of trademarks,” she wrote. “Recall what the bottle looks like (or better yet, retrieve a bottle from wherever you keep liquor; it’s probably there).”
After reproducing a color photograph of the bottle, she continued: “‘Jack Daniel’s’ is a registered trademark, as is ‘Old No. 7.’ So too the arched Jack Daniel’s logo. And the stylized label with filigree (i.e., twirling white lines). Finally, what might be thought of as the platform for all those marks — the whiskey’s distinctive square bottle — is itself registered.”…
The First Amendment did not protect a chew toy for dogs resembling a bottle of Jack Daniel’s — the Bad Spaniels Silly Squeaker — from a lawsuit claiming trademark infringement, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday. https://t.co/tKfmxyFwEh
…The Cat From Outer Space has a pretty self-explanatory premise. What if there was a cat from outer space and it was part of a movie starring two of the cast members of M*A*S*H? The story is almost a moot point — the joy of The Cat From Outer Space is watching a cat who is always staring just off-camera at what is definitely some kind of chew toy or food. But there is indeed a story to The Cat From Outer Space. The movie follows Energy Research Laboratory scientist Frank Wilson (Ken Berry), who is studying a UFO taken into custody by U.S. officials. His unconventional theories get laughed at by his colleagues, but pique the interest of the UFO’s passenger, a cat-like alien named Zunar-J-5/9 Doric-4-7 that Frank decides to call Jake. Jake needs Frank’s help to return to his home planet, and the only thing that can help rebuild his ship is $120,000 worth of solid gold. So, of course, Frank sets about getting this gold by … gambling?
[Thanks to Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, John A Arkansawyer, David Goldfarb, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]
[When] the credits rolled, Cannes mustered a muted standing ovation for Indy’s latest adventure. Yes, the applause lasted for five minutes, but by Cannes standards, that’s more of a polite formality.
But regardless of how the crowd felt about the film, the biggest cheers of the night were reserved for Ford. The actor arrived on the carpet with wife Calista Flockhart, and an announcer introduced the duo as “Indiana Jones and Calista Flockhart.” Ford received a true movie’s star welcome, as thousands of fans screamed his name and the audience in the Palais jumped up to welcome him as he set foot inside the theater.
As the night began, Ford was summoned to the stage by Cannes festival director Thierry Frémaux to receive a surprise Palme d’Or after a reel of his greatest roles — from “Star Wars” to “The Fugitive” — played onscreen.
“I’m very moved by this,” Ford said. “They say when you’re about to die, you see your life flash before your eyes, and I just saw my life flash before my eyes. A great part of my life, but not all of my life. My life has been enabled by my lovely wife, who has supported my passion and my dreams, and I’m grateful.”…
(2) DON’T TOUCH THAT DIAL. And other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? “The ‘Indiana Jones 5’ Reviews Are In” and Dark Horizons has a roundup of critics reactions to Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
Here’s a sampling of reviews thus far:
“Exciting and excessive in equal measure, so over-the-top that an audience needs to throw up its collective hands and suspend disbelief… There are some beautifully affecting moments. If this is the final Indiana Jones movie, as it most likely will be, it’s nice to see that they stuck the landing. ” – Steve Pond, The Wrap
“However much action swirls on the surface of this kind of film, its foundations are built of reassuring nostalgia…[Mangold] is never anything but brisk… it moves along in the frame-by-comic book frame way that ‘Raiders’ did, but with more international destinations.” – Stephanie Bunbury, Deadline
“The final reel may take a serious flight of fantasy, but unlike those aliens in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, it somehow feels an apt journey for Indy. Perhaps the film could’ve been more daring – it feels fairly safe – but fans will leave cinemas feeling like their old hero had one final great outing in him” – James Mottram, Radio Times
“Nobody with a brain in their heads will compare Dial of Destiny favourably to the first three films. There is a sense throughout of a project struggling to stand beneath the weight of its history. But Mangold… knows how to keep his foot on the pedal… Think of it as one of those halfway decent David Bowie albums from the 1990s” – Donald Clarke, The Irish Times
(3) ROTHFUSS NOVELLA ANNOUNCED. Patrick Rothfuss returns to the universe he conjured in the Kingkiller Chronicle with The Narrow Road Between Desires, an expansion and reimagining of his story The Lightning Tree, illustrated by Nate Taylor. Announced by Rothfuss via Twitch and his blog, The Narrow Road Between Desires marks Rothfuss’s first new release since The Slow Regard of Silent Things in 2014.
A DAW press release says, “The Narrow Road Between Desires is Bast’s story, told over the course of a single day as the charming fae schemes and sneaks, and dances into trouble and back out again with uncanny grace.” It will be released in hardcover on November 14, 2023 from DAW Books and Gollancz, of the Orion Publishing Group.
Rothfuss discussed the news release at length on his blog: “New Novella – An announcement in Three Parts”.
Ever since book two was delayed more than a decade ago, I’ve promised y’all that when a new book is going to be coming out, you’ll hear the news from me first.
The reason for this is a little complicated. But it boils down to this:
When you create something people like, they want to know when you’re going to make a similar thing so they can enjoy that too. If they like it a *lot* then they *REALLY* want to know when you’re doing it again.
If the thing you create is say… a batch of cookies for your kids, this isn’t a problem. They want more cookies, so you can let them know the cookie release schedule. If they forget, you can remind them. If the schedule changes, you explain why.
Even if your kids want more cookies than you can produce, and they complain, or whine, or nag at you, the whole thing is still manageable. (Though as anyone who has dealt with kids can attest to, dealing with over-insistent kids can be rough.) But it works because the number of kids is (statistically speaking) only about 2-3. This makes clear and consistent communication possible. Since you’re all on the same page, everyone gets to anticipate cookies together.
All of this goes out the window if, say, instead of making cookies, you make a book. And instead of a 2-3 kids, you end up with several million readers.
When I was first published. I thought communicating with folks online would be easy. I post an update, everyone reads it. Easy peasy. Right?
It only took a couple years to realize it doesn’t work that way. I can spend 10 hours writing a blog about how my Dad’s in hospice, explaining how the whole thing’s upheaved my life, been hard on my boys, and utterly destroyed any semblance of normalcy in my world…. Then later that day still get half a dozen people pinging me on different platforms asking me why it’s been years since my last book was out.
I can post updates on my blog, on twitter, on facebook, on Twitch, but that doesn’t mean people will read them. What’s more, all it takes is a rumor on a reddit thread to spread bad information and make people think there’s a new book coming out. If amazon’s ordering system auto-fills a publication date for Doors of Stone, people think it’s real, then get pissed when no book comes out on that not-real timeline.
It’s something that I still don’t know how to come to grips with. And the only solution I do have is the promise I made years back: That when there *is* a publication date for DOS, or I put out a different book, you’ll hear about it directly from me first. And no matter where else I make the announcement. (Like today on Twitch, for example.) I’ll also post about it here on the blog.
It’s not a perfect solution, but this way, if people hear a rumor, they can at least come over here and check out whether or not it’s real.
When I first promised that, I thought it would be easy. But at this point, I think we all know that I can be terribly naive….
…When I told Betsy I wanted to be first to break news like this to y’all, she agreed. And since then both Betsy and the other lovely folks on the publishing team have gone along with it, despite the fact that it makes things harder for them.
They have to do extra work in order to keep things secret, and it ties their hands a little. Believe it or not, promoting and marketing a book is way harder when nobody knows a book is in the works. Despite all this, we’ve all been keeping news about the novella secret, and the lovely folks at DAW have done that extra work so that I can make the announcement here first.
There are some downsides, though. If I’m going to be the first to break the news, I have to do so fairly early in the publication process so that marketing and PR people can do important things like… talk to bookstores and see if any of them would be interested in, y’know, putting it on the shelves so people can buy it.
The bad news is that since this is early in the process, it means the book is still in development. I’m still tweaking the text…
Disney is permanently docking its Galactic Starcruiser hotel, it announced just 15 months after the massive project first opened.
“Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser is one of our most creative projects ever and has been praised by our guests and recognized for setting a new bar for innovation and immersive entertainment,” Disney said in a statement shared with PEOPLE. “This premium, boutique experience gave us the opportunity to try new things on a smaller scale of 100 rooms, and as we prepare for its final voyage, we will take what we’ve learned to create future experiences that can reach more of our guests and fans.”
Its final voyage will take place in September.
Disney will be contacting guests who previously booked a stay for after Sept. 30 to modify their reservations. New bookings are currently paused until May 26….
… Starcruiser is also unique in that it requires guests to participate in a full voyage, meaning they can’t hop into the parks at will (though there is an “excursion” to Batuu, aka Disney Studios’ Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge land) or choose their own dining options. And seeing as the Halcyon is hurtling through space, the property lacks a few other standard Disney resort offerings, like a pool or varied outdoor spaces to enjoy the Florida weather.
The experience does include some truly unique activities that should delight Star Wars aficionados and casual fans alike, like lightsaber training, a lesson in bridge operations — how to operate, shield (and yes, shoot from, when necessary) the impressive vessel — and two unique dining experiences where they can sample specialties like a blue iced Felucian shrimp cocktail and braised Bantha beef….
(6) GRAPHIC PROOF. Neil Clarke showed Facebook readers that Clarkesworld is still battling the flood of ChatGPT-written submissions.
Chart shows the number of bans issued since November, almost entirely courtesy of ChatGPT and other LLMs being used to write bad SF/F and submitted against our guidelines. (Not interested in having a debate about the merits of our policy. Our reasons have not changed and those issues have not been settled.) Anyhow, the dip in March/April was thanks to some mitigation efforts that were more successful than expected. (Some people are still bouncing off those walls.) New approach this month was much more targeted and brought us back to February levels. Some of the tools I’ve put in place are making it a bit easier, but volume can eventually break anything. Problem is clearly getting worse. The May numbers just passed February and in fewer days.
(7) MEMORY LANE.
2015 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Mike picked Paolo Bacigalupi for the Beginning and I picked The Water Knife as the work. Why that work? I’ll tell you in a moment.
But first some notes about Bacigalupi and this novel. He won a Hugo at Aussiecon 4 for The Windup Girl novel, and a World Fantasy Award for his Tangled Lands collection. I’m very fond of his Ship Breaker novel.
The Water Knife was published by Alfred A. Knopf eight years ago, and the cover illustration is by Oliver Munday. It’s based on The Tamarisk Hunter story he did which waspublished in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in their May 2007 issue.
So why this novel? Because I think it’s one of his most interesting near future stories with fascinating characters and a fully realized setting. Now that’s all I’ll say given our policy of avoiding spoilers at all costs.
So now let’s have his Beginning….
There were stories in sweat.
The sweat of a woman bent double in an onion field, working fourteen hours under the hot sun, was different from the sweat of a man as he approached a checkpoint in Mexico, praying to La Santa Muerte that the federales weren’t on the payroll of the enemies he was fleeing. The sweat of a ten-year-old boy staring into the barrel of a SIG Sauer was different from the sweat of a woman struggling across the desert and praying to the Virgin that a water cache was going to turn out to be exactly where her coyote’s map told her it would be.
Sweat was a body’s history, compressed into jewels, beaded on the brow, staining shirts with salt. It told you everything about how a person had ended up in the right place at the wrong time, and whether they would survive another day.
To Angel Velasquez, perched high above Cypress 1’ s central bore and watching Charles Braxton as he lumbered up the Cascade Trail, the sweat on a lawyer’s brow said that some people weren’t near as important as they liked to think.
Braxton might strut in his offices and scream at his secretaries. He might stalk courtrooms like an ax murderer hunting new victims. But no matter how much swagger the lawyer carried, at the end of the day Catherine Case owned his ass—and when Catherine Case told you to get something done quick, you didn’t just run, pendejo, you ran until your heart gave out and there wasn’t no running left.
Braxton ducked under ferns and stumbled past banyan climbing vines, following the slow rise of the trail as it wound around the cooling bore. He shoved through groups of tourists posing for selfies before the braided waterfalls and hanging gardens that spilled down the arcology’s levels. He kept on, flushed and dogged. Joggers zipped past him in shorts and tank tops, their ears flooded with music and the thud of their healthy hearts.
You could learn a lot from a man’s sweat. Braxton’s sweat meant he still had fear.
And to Angel, that meant he was still reliable.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born May 18, 1930 — Fred Saberhagen. I’m reasonably sure I’ve read the entirety of his Berserker series though not in the order they were intended to be read. Some are outstanding, some less so. I’d recommend Berserker Man, Shiva in Steel and the original Berserker collection. Of his Dracula sequence, the only one I think that I’ve read is The Holmes-Dracula File which is superb. And I know I’ve read most of the Swords tales as they came out in various magazines. His only Hugo nomination was at NYCon 3 for his “Mr. Jester” short story published in If, January 1966. (Died 2007.)
Born May 18, 1934 — Elizabeth Rogers. Trek geeking time. She had two roles in the series. She provided the uncredited voice for “The Companion” in the “Metamorphosis” episode. She also portrayed Lt. Palmer, a communications officer who took the place of Uhura, in “The Doomsday Machine”, “The Way to Eden”, and the very last episode of the series, “Turnabout Intruder”. She also had appearances on Time Tunnel, Land of The Giants, Bewitched, The Swarm and Something Evil. (Died 2004.)
Born May 18, 1946 — Andreas Katsulas. I knew him as Ambassador G’Kar on Babylon 5 but had forgotten he played played the Romulan Commander Tomalak on Star Trek: The Next Generation. His first genre role on television was playing Snout in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and he had a recurring role in Max Headroom as Mr. Bartlett. He also had appearances on Alien Nation, The Death of the Incredible Hulk, Millennium, Star Trek: Enterprise and The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest. (Died 2006.)
Born May 18, 1948 — R-Laurraine Tutihasi, 75. She’s a member of LASFS and the N3F. She publishes Feline Mewsings for FAPA. She won the N3F’s Kaymar Award in 2009. Not surprisingly, she’s had a number of SJW creds in her life and her website here gives a look at her beloved cats and a lot of information on her fanzines.
Born May 18, 1949 — Rick Wakeman, 74. Keyboardist and composer best known for his tenure with the pioneering space-rock band Yes. Wakeman has also released musical adaptations of the novels Journey to the Center of the Earth and 1984. The former album reached #1 in the UK and #3 in the US. He also wrote an album, Out There, dedicated to the memories of the astronauts who died in the Columbia disaster. (Xtifr)
Born May 18, 1950 — Mark Mothersbaugh, 73. Founder and main songwriter for the new wave band Devo, which regularly featured science-fictional themes in their music and stage shows. The band’s tongue-in-cheek conceit was that they had devolved from full humanity–hence the name. The title of their first album, Q. Are We Not Men? A. We Are Devo!, was a shout-out to The Island of Doctor Moreau. Mothersbaugh is also a prolific composer for films, tv, and games. His credits include the theme for the underrated SyFy show Eureka and much more. (Xtifr)
Born May 18, 1952 — Diane Duane, 71. She’s known for the Young Wizards YA series though I’d like to single her out for her lesser-known Feline Wizards series where SJW creds maintain the gates that wizards use for travel throughout the multiverse. A most wonderful thing for felines to do! Her Tale of the Five series was inducted into the Gaylactic Spectrum Award Hall of Fame in 2003. She also has won The Faust Award for Lifetime Achievement given by The International Association of Media Tie-In Writers.
Born May 18, 1958 — Jonathan Maberry, 65. The only thing I’ve read by him is a number of works in the Joe Ledger Series which has a high body count and an even higher improbability index. I see that he’s done scripts for Dark Horse, IDW and Marvel early on. And that he’s responsible for Captain America: Hail Hydra.
Born May 18, 1969 — Ty Franck, 54. Half of the writing team along with Daniel Abraham that’s James Corey, author of the Expanse series. I’ll admit that I’ve fallen behind by a volume or two as there’s just too many good series out there too keep up with all of them, damn it!
Chinese writer Tianrui Shuofu won the top award for his novel “Once Upon a Time in Nanjing” at the 14th Chinese Nebula Awards on Saturday in Guanghan, Sichuan province, demonstrating the rise of young talent in Chinese sci-fi.
Tianrui Shuofu, a 27-year-old online writer whose real name is He Jian, has created several popular sci-fi novels including “Die on Mars.” His latest work, “Once Upon a Time in Nanjing” (also known as “We Live in Nanjing”), was serialized on the literary site qidian.com in 2021. The story follows a high school senior in the city of Nanjing in 2019 who communicates via radio with a girl from 2040 who lives in the same city and learns about the apocalyptic future world. Together, they embark on a mission to save the Earth….
…Since the strike began, many recognizable faces have joined the picket lines. Many are writers, while others are actors and other entertainment industry professionals expressing solidarity with writers.
Earlier this week, a Tumblr user fuckyeahgoodomens spotted Gaiman at one picket site, holding a sign and wearing a striking red t-shirt….
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]
HITHER CAME CONAN is a compilation of two successful examinations of all of Robert E. Howard’s original Conan the Cimmerian stories (and one story fragment) with about 15 additional essays included. It is also the single most-inclusive repository of REH Conan story data to date. This alone makes this title invaluable; coupled with the almost 60 essays it makes this THE BOOK to shelve alongside your Wandering Star/DelRey Conan trilogy. The majority of essays (and opinions!) come from the Bob Byrne led ‘Hither Came Conan’ series hosted by Black Gate Magazine and the ‘Conan Re-Read’ of Bill Ward and Howard Andrew Jones in conversation on Howard’s blog. Data compiled for each story by Dierk Günther includes tidbits such as the probable age of both Conan and Howard, the location, the major characters, the word count, date and source of first publication, and the first recorded public reaction to be found. HITHER CAME CONAN is a wealth of all the information any reader of Conan could desire.
(2) JOHN MANSFIELD SERVICE ONLINE TOMORROW. Linda Ross-Mansfield has announced the Facebook link for the livestream of the funeral service for Pemmi-Con’s fan guest of honour, John Mansfield. Funeral begins May 12, 2:00 p.m. Central.
Murray Moore adds that at the convention there will be a special display and a memory book for fans who wish to share their memories with the family and others.
It’s hard to overstate the anticipation I had for Eastercon 1968. It was going to be the largest national convention ever, with over 200 fans expected! In the end I understand that something like 150 people turned up; still the largest British national convention yet….
… Pulling content off the service goes hand in hand with making less of it, or, as CEO Bob Iger put it on the call, “getting much more surgical about what we make.”
He said the company has spent a lot of time and money producing and marketing content that didn’t move the needle in terms of subscribers.
“When you make a lot of content, everything needs to be marketed. You’re spending a lot of money marketing things that are not going to have an impact on the bottom line, except negatively due to the marketing costs.”
Iger gave a shout-out to theatrical films, especially tentpoles, as great sub drivers. “But we were spreading our marketing costs so thin that we were not allocating enough money to even market them when they came onto the service. Coming up, Avatar, Little Mermaid, Guardians of the Galaxy, Elemental etc.. where we actualy believe we have an opportunity to lean into those more, put the right marketing dollars against it, allocate more basicaly away from programming that was not driving any subs at all.”
He called it “part of the maturation process as we grow into a business that we had never been in. We are learning a lot more about it. Specifically, we are learning a lot more about how our content behaves on the service and what customers want.”
“Forget your personal tragedy,” Ernest Hemingway exhorted his dear friend F. Scott Fitzgerald in a tough-love letter of advice. “Good writers always come back. Always.” It is an insight as true of writers as it is of all artists and of human beings in general, as true of personal tragedy as it is of collective tragedy — something Toni Morrison articulated in her mobilizing manifesto for the writer’s task in troubled times: “There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”
That is what Jorge Luis Borges (August 24, 1899–June 14, 1986) — born the same year as Hemingway, writing two decades before Morrison — conveys with uncommon splendor of sentiment in Twenty-Four Conversations with Borges: Including a Selection of Poems (public library) — the record of his dialogues with the Argentine journalist and poet Roberto Alifano, conducted in the final years of Borges’s life, by which point he had been blind for almost thirty years.
…Imagine losing your rudder out at sea and sending out a distress call. And then the largest ocean-going wooden sailing ship in the world comes to your rescue. Or in the words of the sailors on the sailing boat: “This moment was very strange, and we wondered if we were dreaming. Where were we? What time period was it?”
Paul Cornell’s “The Copenhagen Interpretation”was published first in Asimov’s in their July 2011 issue. It was nominated for the Best Novelette Hugo at Chicon 7, and also for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award.
You know that I don’t do spoilers, so I won’t do any for this extraordinary well-written story. Annoyingly, while doing research found a number of descriptions of “The Copenhagen Interpretation” that gave everything away. Idiots.
And for the Beginning…
The best time to see Kastellet is in the evening, when the ancient fortifications are alight with glow worms, a landmark for anyone gazing down on the city as they arrive by carriage. Here stands one of Copenhagen’s great parks, its defence complexes, including the home of the Forsvarets Efterretningstjeneste, and a single windmill, decorative rather than functional. The wind comes in hard over the Langeline, and after the sun goes down, the skeleton of the whale that’s been grown into the ground resonates in sympathy and gives out a howl that can be heard in Sweden.
Hamilton had arrived on the diplomatic carriage, without papers, and, as etiquette demanded, without weapons or folds, thoroughly out of uniform. He watched the carriage heave itself up into the darkening sky above the park, and bank off to the southwest, swaying in the wind, sliding up the fold it made under its running boards. He was certain every detail was being registered by the FLV. You don’t look into the diplomatic bag, but you damn well know where the bag goes. He left the park through the healed bronze gates and headed down a flight of steps towards the diplomatic quarter, thinking of nothing. He did that when there were urgent questions he couldn’t answer, rather than run them round and round in his head and let them wear away at him.
The streets of Copenhagen. Ladies and gentlemen stepping from carriages, the occasional tricolour of feathers on a hat or, worse, once, tartan over a shoulder. Hamilton found himself reacting, furious. But then he saw it was Campbell. The wearer, a youth in evening wear, was the sort of fool who heard an accent in a bar and took up anything apparently forbidden, in impotent protest against the world. And thus got fleeced by Scotsmen.
He was annoyed at his anger. He had failed to contain himself.
He walked past the façade of the British embassy, with the Hanoverian regiment on guard, turned a corner and waited in one of those convenient dark streets that form the second map of diplomatic quarters everywhere in the world. After a moment, a door with no external fittings swung open and someone ushered him inside and took his coat.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born May 11, 1920 — Denver Pyle. His first genre performance is in The Flying Saucer way back in 1950 where he was a character named Turner. Escape to Witch Mountain as Uncle Bené is his best known genre role. He’s also showed up on the Fifties Adventures of Superman, Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe, Men Into Space, Twilight Zone and his final role was apparently in How Bugs Bunny Won the West as the Narrator. (Died 1997.)
Born May 11, 1918 — Richard Feynman. Ok, not genre as such but certainly genre adjacent. I wholeheartedly recommend Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick for an entertaining look at his life. (Died 1988.)
Born May 11, 1935 — Doug McClure. He had the doubtful honor of appearing some of the worst Seventies SF films done (my opinion of course and you’re welcome to challenge that), to wit The Land That Time Forgot, The People That Time Forgot, Warlords of the Deep and even Humanoids From The Deep. Genre wise, he also appeared in one-offs in The Twilight Zone, Out of This World, AirWolf, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Fantasy Island and Manimal. Some of which were far better. (Died 1995.)
Born May 11, 1952 — Shohreh Aghdashloo, 71. Best known genre role is Chrisjen Avasarala on The Expanse series. (I’ve not seen it, but have listened to all of The Expanse series.) She also had a recurring role as Farah Madani on The Punisher. She was also in X-Men: The Last Stand as Dr. Kavita Rao, but her role as The Chairman in The Adjustment Bureau didn’t make it to the final version. She was Commodore Paris in Star Trek Beyond, and she had a recurring role as Nhadra Udaya in FlashForward.
Born May 11, 1952 — Frances Fisher, 71. Angie on Strange Luck and a recurring role as Eva Thorne on Eureka. Have I mentioned how I love the latter series? Well I do! She’s also shown up on Medium, X-Files, Outer Limits, Resurrection, The Expanse and has some role in the forthcoming Watchmen series.
Born May 11, 1976 — Alter S. Reiss, 47. He’s a scientific editor and field archaeologist. He lives in Jerusalem, he’s written two novels, Sunset Mantel and Recalled to Service. He’s also written an impressive amount of short fiction in the past ten years.
(10) BREAKING THINGS THAT WORK. Today, via a comment on Seanan McGuire’s discussion of Patreon (thread starts here), I learned about the Trust Thermocline. John Bull’s thread starts here.
I am astonished by companies whose logic on price hikes is, counter to everything we know about the psychology of pricing, "Well, they didn't all quit last time we did this, so they won't quit this time either."
One of the things I occasionally get paid to do by companies/execs is to tell them why everything seemed to SUDDENLY go wrong, and subs/readers dropped like a stone.
So, with everything going on at Twitter rn, time for a thread about the Trust Thermocline /1
(11) DO YOUR PULP HOMEWORK HERE. The Popular Culture Association’s Pulp Studies area now has a website with links and resources: “Pulp Studies”.
What is a “Pulp”?
Pulp magazines were a series of mostly English-language, predominantly American, magazines printed on rough pulp paper. They were often illustrated with highly stylized, full-page cover art and numerous line art illustrations of the fictional content. They were sold for modest sums, and were targeted at (sometimes specialized) readerships of popular literature, such as western and adventure, detective, fantastic (including the evolving genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror), romance and sports fiction. The first pulp Argosy, began life as the children’s magazine The Golden Argosy, dated Dec 2, 1882 and the last of the “original” pulps was Ranch Romances and Adventures, Nov 1971.
…On the surface, no play epitomizes this more than his first tragedy, the grisly Titus Andronicus. It is the Saw franchise of Elizabethan theatre, filled with as much shock and gore as Shakespeare could possibly have packed into a single play. As well as a full complement of stabbings, hangings, and beheadings, the audience is treated to Aaron being buried up to his neck until he starves to death, seeing Lavinia’s hands removed and tongue cut out, watching on as Alarbus’s arms and legs are cut off and he is thrown into a fire, and finally, Shakespeare delivers the coup-de-grace as Chiron and Demetrius are baked into a pie and then fed to their mother. Let it not be said that gore is a new thing in popular entertainment.
And yet, for all these horrors, this play never quite captures an audience (or a classroom) like some of his later, less graphic, tragedies. Why is that? Seen through the lens of a horror writer, Shakespeare’s progression as an artist is not just in his ability to play with structure, form, and character, but rather that he gains a deeper understanding of how to really scare people. As he grew as a writer, he learned there are better ways to emotionally wound an audience than the surface kills and thrills, and it’s this that ends up really defining him as a playwright….
J. G. Ballard’s modern fable High-Rise is almost fifty years old. In the past few decades, its potency has come closer to resembling prophecy, yet Ballard’s obsession with affluence and self-isolating communities isn’t limited to this novel alone. Novels like Super-Cannes, Concrete Island, and Cocaine Nights all invoke similar themes of alienation, isolation, and unrestrained affluence from the depths of his back catalogue, the rich coiling tightly around one another to block out the pressing realities of the wider, poorer world. Yet High-Rise remains a singular invocation, summoning a sturdy mental image with ease, a fraught zoo, a series of stacked cages, a social order imprinted on the quivering skyline in concrete—a book that has shaped its legacy at times with just a title and a stark image on the cover.
(15) FAILURE MODE. A Nature editorial says, “Space companies should not lose heart when things go wrong. The first Moon missions failed repeatedly — and provided lessons on how to achieve success in space and beyond.” “In space, failure is an option — often the only one”
“Failure is not an option,” NASA’s legendary flight-operations director Gene Kranz is said to have remarked, as seen in the 1995 film Apollo 13. Actor Ed Harris portrayed Kranz as he guided his team to save a spacecraft that had run into trouble on the way to the Moon. In the movie, as in real life, the three astronauts on the Apollo 13 mission pulled off a spectacular fix and returned safely to Earth.
Not all space ventures have such a tidy ending. A 2019 attempt by Israeli company SpaceIL to land on the Moon crashed. On 20 April this year, a spectacular intentional detonation ended the first major test flight of Starship, the world’s largest rocket, which SpaceX in Hawthorne, California, is building to carry humans back to the Moon and to Mars. The craft had spun out of control four minutes after lifting off its launch pad in Texas. Five days later, a robotic mission from the Japanese company ispace, based in Tokyo, tried and failed to land safely on the Moon…
“…The scientists and engineers involved should not be discouraged by these failures. Space is hard. This is a truism trotted out every time there’s an attempt to launch from this planet or land on another. But it is accurate. Those who wish to explore the cosmos should expect to fail — perhaps many times — before they can succeed.”
(16) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 83 of the Octothorpe podcast, John Coxon would like more drawers, Alison Scott uses the floor, and Liz Batty is okay with shelves. They also discuss fan funds briefly, and the 2023 Eastercon (Conversation) at some length. Listen here: “Efffffffff”.
Nintendo Switch gamers may be excited to see this promo bus for “The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom,” the highly anticipated sequel to 2017’s “Breath of the Wild” parked on First Avenue by 12th Street…
…This appears to confirm that we’ll get another full trailer for the trilogy of specials at some point during the Eurovision Song Contest, as had previously been rumoured….
— Bad Wolf Archives (@BadWolfArchives) May 9, 2023
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Lise Andreasen, Hampus Eckerman, Murray Moore, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]
By Steve Vertlieb: I was a lonely, introverted, deeply sensitive little boy with a fertile imagination as big and as vast as the sea. The 1950’s opened the door for me to a magical kingdom, overflowing with wonders that fed my appetite, enticing my yearning heart with the promise of worlds, oceans, and a dimensional universe of both dreams and promise. While my physical world was confined to emotional conflict, and the youthful constraints of intellectual subservience, a magical little box called television opened up limitless vistas of travel, exploration, and journeys to the stars. I could escape my fears, vulnerability, and self-doubts simply by turning that fertile “Dial of Destiny” on our new television set, inviting me to a gentle path along a beloved “Yellow Brick Road.” It was there, and only there, that I might, perhaps, find release from the bonds and fleeting ignorance of childhood, and fly away upon wings of fancy to “Never Never Land.”
As the newborn light within its circular dome flickered hesitantly to life, I found myself riding my valiant stallion across the Western plains alongside saddle pals like Hop-A-Long Cassidy, Roy Rogers, John Wayne, and Bob Steele. I galloped together with Zorro’s Fighting Legion, sat astride a camel’s humps with Buster Crabbe as Captain Gallant of the Foreign Legion, fought together with Gene Autry to escape The Phantom Empire, and the underground city of the future, “Murania.” I journeyed to a Forbidden Planet at my local neighborhood Benner Theater, on a Saturday matinee, savored exotic fruits upon the surface of Altair 4, and rocketed to the Planet Mongo every weekday afternoon, during my lunch break from school, with “Chuckwagon Pete”, and his identical twin brother, “Uncle Pete” (both played by beloved early Philadelphia children’s television host Pete Boyle, the real life father of Young Frankenstein, Peter Boyle), sharing the fabled exploits of Doctor Zharkov, Prince Barin, Dale Arden, Princess Aura, Ming the Merciless and, of course Larry “Buster” Crabbe as Flash Gordon.
Buzz Corry (Ed Kemmer) courageously commanded the star cruiser “Terra,” along with Cadet Happy and I … “Uncle Milty” (Milton Berle) owned Tuesday nights … Ed Sullivan was the Toast of the Town … and a gravel-throated cinematic magician known affectionately to “children of all ages” as “Uncle Walt” brought a magic kingdom to life for millions of adoring kids. He brought us Zorro every Thursday night on ABC TV, while sprinkling his special wand across generations over NBC Television with mythical stories and legends of Davy Crockett (starring Fess Parker), Zorro (played by swashbuckling Guy Williams … later to star in Lost in Space), The Nine Lives of Elfego Bacha (with Robert Loggia), The Swamp Fox (with Leslie Nielsen), Johnny Tremain (with Hal Stalmaster), Treasure Island (with Bobby Driscoll and Robert Newton), The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh (with the star of tv’s The Prisoner, Patrick McGoohan), The Hardy Boys, (with Tim Considine and Tommy Kirk), The Story of Robin Hood and His Merry Men (starring Richard Todd), The Adventures of Spin and Marty (with Tim Considine, David Stollery, Harry Carey Jr, and Annette Funicello), The Wonderful World of Disney, and the show that changed our youthful lives forever, The Mickey Mouse Club.
Walt Disney had been entertaining, and enchanting the children of the world since 1928 when he introduced “Steamboat Willie,” and a mouse named “Mickey” to motion picture screens. However, it wasn’t until 1954, with the premier of Walt Disney’s Disneyland, followed by The Mickey Mouse Club in 1955, and Walt Disney Presents in 1958 that this master showman made his everlasting mark on television. The memorable lyrics from Pinocchio” sung by Jiminy Cricket (Cliff Edwards), brings me to tears still, while Uncle Remus (James Baskett) singing “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” shall bring a smile of remembrance to my lips for as long there remains breath in my body. When I first visited my little brother and lifelong best friend, Erwin, in Los Angeles in 1974, I fulfilled a childhood dream by visiting the land of dreams … Disneyland. As we entered the park inside the Monorail, my eyes filled with tears, and I began to sob. I couldn’t understand why until I realized that the voice of that legendary little cricket was singing over the loudspeakers … “When You Wish Upon A Star … Makes No difference Who You Are … Anything Your Heart Desires Will Come To You. If Your Heart Is In Your Dream … No Request Is Too Extreme … When You Wish Upon A Star As Dreamers Do. Fate Is Kind … She Brings To Those Who Love … The Sweet Fulfillment of Their Secret Longing. Like A Bolt Out of the Blue … Fate Steps In and Sees You Through … When You Wish Upon A Star … Your Dreams Come True” (Leigh Harline and Ned Washington). I guess that’s when I lost it. I was six years old once more.
It was during the Christmas season to come that “Uncle Walt” told us of his newest feature film attraction, a cinematic re-telling of Jules Verne’s immortal fantasy classic novel, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. Directed by Richard Fleischer, with music by veteran Disney composer Paul Smith, and starring Kirk Douglas as Ned Land, James Mason as Captain Nemo, Peter Lorre as Conseil, and Paul Lukas as Professor Pierre Aronnax, this spectacular new film version was previewed on the weekly television Disney program with a special documentary about the making of the film. The highlight of the promotional film was a brief look at the giant squid luring the vessel to its ultimate destruction, both the interior and exterior of Captain’s Nemo’s fantastic submarine, the Nautilus, and Kirk Douglas performing his soon to be “hit” recording of “A Whale of A Tale.”
My eyes grew wide, and my little jaw dropped open as I encountered the Nautilus for the very first time. She was utterly magnificent. I’d never seen anything quite like her. I was utterly entranced by this vision of wonder. My expectations grew over the weeks to come, and it was during the week between Christmas and New Years Eve, 1954, that my mother took me downtown to, perhaps, the most majestic of old movie palaces in Philadelphia, “The Mastbaum Theater,” to see Walt Disney’s production of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea for the very first time. Located at 2001 Market Street in the very heart of the city, its vast lobby and auditorium were stunning beyond verbal description. As luck would have it, my mom deposited me at the theater a few moments late, and I can recall missing the opening credits of the movie. I was just nine years old when the movie opened, but I can still vividly remember walking slowly down the aisle in the already darkened theater, and seeing the Nautilus speeding toward its unwitting prey, a Victorian steamship, sailing blithely across the waves to its impending doom and destruction, as the Nautilus rammed into her bow, sinking the great vessel and her crew “Down to the Sea in Ships.” Consumed by the ravaging waters of the eternal sea, the nautical victim of Nemo’s vengeance sank to her inevitable doom.
Early in 2023, the city of Philadelphia became the joyous recipient of the Walt Disney Company’s “100th Birthday Celebration Exhibition,” the very first stop on a worldwide tour encompassing many of the studio’s most famous, fabulous, and most cherished artifacts and treasures. I purchased tickets to the show, being held at the famed Franklin Institute, along its fabled Parkway, for my girlfriend, Shelly, and I in late Spring. From the moment that we arrived at the exhibit, I happily shed the outer garments of maturity, and became an innocent once more. I had dwelt in ecstasy for countless hours within the land of enchantment. Few experiences in my own fragile seventy-seven years had ever come remotely close to the special feeling of bonding, and to returning “Home” that I felt upon entering this ‘Wonderful World of Disney,” this incomparable miniature “Disneyland” at my doorstep. It was as though I had traveled back to “Oz.”
The celebration of 100 years reached its zenith, however, when the sight that I’d dreamed of for nearly seventy years came at last in view. I’d seen a short television special on a local station in which the hosts took a brief tour of the exhibition, and so I knew that it was there … there within the confines of the museum in my own home town. I had met Kirk Douglas in 1974 on the set of the Gene London children’s tv program in 1974, twenty years after the film’s original release. I had even encountered the original “Robby, the Robot” full-sized prop from MGM’s 1956 science fiction classic, Forbidden Planet, at the home of William Malone, a well known film director. There was nothing, however, that could have prepared me for the sight of the actual model of the Nautilus, used in Walt Disney’s 1954 epic 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. I gasped audibly when she came into my view at last, and my eyes filled with tears of joy and remembrance. Here she was, actually before me, in all of her restored glory. It remains a moment … a memory that shall lovingly occupy both my memory and my heart for all the remaining years of my life …never to be erased or forgotten.
