Tag Archives: Fantastic Fiction at KGB

Pixel Scroll 3/11/23 Please Send In Two Hypercube Tops As Proof Of Ob, To Receive Your Free Pixel Scroll Title

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(1) SPARKS FROM A GOOD CONDUCTOR. Somtow Sucharitkul proudly announces, “I ranted in my Facebook page and the Hollywood Reporter picked it up as an Op-Ed!” Beware spoilers. “Tár Ending is Not Cate Blanchett’s Character’s Downfall: Consultant” in The Hollywood Reporter.

The closing shot of Todd Field’s Oscar-nominated drama has been taken to represent the final fall from grace of the film’s eponymous heroine. But maybe we’ve got the whole thing backwards, writes Thai conductor Somtow Sucharitkul….

Well before Todd Field’s Tár opened in Thailand, I got my first review of the film from my friend, director Paul Spurrier. Paul had seen the film while in Los Angeles for the American Film Market.

“So we have here a mad genius conductor, who is kicked out of a major European orchestra after an act of violence, has rather ambiguous dealings with some young prodigies, ends up in Southeast Asia conducting a youth orchestra in a tawdry venue …,” he began.

“Oh!” I said, “You went to a screening of our film?” Because Paul was giving me the exact plot of our own film, The Maestro: A Symphony of Terror, a horror fantasy we made two years ago, which I wrote and starred in as the aforementioned “mad genius” conductor.

“Actually, no,” he said. “I just saw Tár.”

Since, I too have seen Tár and, as it turns out, Paul wasn’t wrong. Field’s movie does have a similar plot to The Maestro. Alas, I am a poor substitute for the incomparable Cate Blanchett, and our film is wholly different in substance anyway, being a modest little tribute to the horror films of the 1980s. In any case, the fall of the mighty, from Prometheus to the present, has always been the very essence of what we mean by the word tragedy….

(2) GUNN CENTER BOOK CLUB. Everyone is invited to the Gunn Center for the Study of SF’s (CSSF) monthly virtual book club happening on Friday, March 31, 2023, at noon (Central Time). Register here. 

For the month of March, the Center has chosen Donna Barbra Higuera’s The Last Cuentista. A comet has hit Earth and now Petra Peña’s world is collapsing. Petra, her family and hundreds of others venture to another planet to continue the human race. Petra awakes on a new planet 100 years in the future, and she is the only one who remembers the history of her people. Winner of the Newberry Medal and the Pura Belpré Award in 2022, Higuera infuses Mexican folklore with interplanetary elements to highlight the importance of preserving the history and culture through storytelling.  All ages are welcome to join.

(3) KGB PHOTOS. Ellen Datlow shared her snapshots from the March 8 Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series with Scott Lynch and Elizabeth Bear: KGB March 8, 2023 at Flickr.

(4) I’LL BE STABBED! “Using ChatGPT to Rewrite ‘Game of Thrones’? OpenAI Co-Founder Says ‘That Is What Entertainment Will Look Like’” – The Hollywood Reporter has the story.

… “That is what entertainment will look like,” Brockman said at a Friday panel at SXSW. “Maybe people are still upset about the last season of Game of Thrones. Imagine if you could ask your A.I. to make a new ending that goes a different way and maybe even put yourself in there as a main character or something.”

Hollywood creatives have already begun considering the potential impact — both good and bad — that ChatGPT could have on the TV and filmmaking process. As The Hollywood Reporter examined in January, organizations like the Writers Guild of America West have said they are “monitoring the development of ChatGPT and similar technologies in the event they require additional protections for writers,” though screenwriters interviewed by THR said they could see ChatGPT as a tool to aid the writing process, rather than replacing the work of writers….

(5) MOVIE REVIEW. The Hollywood Reporter’s James Hibberd says “SXSW: ‘Mrs. Davis’ Is a Perfectly Timed Warning About A.I. Madness”.

What if ChatGPT, but too much? Too popular, too omniscient, and far too nefarious than today’s cutting-edge chatbots?

That’s the premise of Mrs. Davis, an ultra-ambitious series from Big Bang Theory veteran Tara Hernandez and Watchmen creator Damon Lindelof. Mrs. Davis, premiering at SXSW before its April 20 streaming debut on Peacock, tells the story of a heroic, street-savvy nun (three-time GLOW Emmy nominee Betty Gilpin) battling an omnipresent AI and its legion of obsessed fans who will do anything to please their tech deity (called Mrs. Davis), which is supposedly striving to make the world a better place. Oh, and there’s also a quest for the Holy Grail, possible Nazis with butterfly nets, nefarious magicians and a teary make-out session with Jesus — and that’s just in the first two episodes. As Gilpin’s character, Simone, says at one point: “It’s a lot.”…

(6) OFFICIAL FILTERS CHALLENGED. George Packer argues “The Moral Case Against Equity Language” in The Atlantic.

The Sierra Club’s Equity Language Guide discourages using the words stand, Americans, blind, and crazy. The first two fail at inclusion, because not everyone can stand and not everyone living in this country is a citizen. The third and fourth, even as figures of speech (“Legislators are blind to climate change”), are insulting to the disabled. The guide also rejects the disabled in favor of people living with disabilities, for the same reason that enslaved person has generally replaced slave : to affirm, by the tenets of what’s called “people-first language,” that “everyone is first and foremost a person, not their disability or other identity.”

The guide’s purpose is not just to make sure that the Sierra Club avoids obviously derogatory terms, such as welfare queen. It seeks to cleanse language of any trace of privilege, hierarchy, bias, or exclusion. In its zeal, the Sierra Club has clear-cut a whole national park of words. Urban, vibrant, hardworking, and brown bag all crash to earth for subtle racism. Y’all supplants the patriarchal you guys, and elevate voices replaces empower, which used to be uplifting but is now condescending. The poor is classist; battle and minefield disrespect veterans; depressing appropriates a disability; migrant—no explanation, it just has to go.

Equity-language guides are proliferating among some of the country’s leading institutions, particularly nonprofits. The American Cancer Society has one. So do the American Heart Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association, the National Recreation and Park Association, the Columbia University School of Professional Studies, and the University of Washington. The words these guides recommend or reject are sometimes exactly the same, justified in nearly identical language. This is because most of the guides draw on the same sources from activist organizations: A Progressive’s Style Guide, the Racial Equity Tools glossary, and a couple of others. The guides also cite one another. The total number of people behind this project of linguistic purification is relatively small, but their power is potentially immense. The new language might not stick in broad swaths of American society, but it already influences highly educated precincts, spreading from the authorities that establish it and the organizations that adopt it to mainstream publications, such as this one.

Although the guides refer to language “evolving,” these changes are a revolution from above. They haven’t emerged organically from the shifting linguistic habits of large numbers of people. They are handed down in communiqués written by obscure “experts” who purport to speak for vaguely defined “communities,” remaining unanswerable to a public that’s being morally coerced. A new term wins an argument without having to debate. When the San Francisco Board of Supervisors replaces felon with justice-involved person, it is making an ideological claim—that there is something illegitimate about laws, courts, and prisons. If you accept the change—as, in certain contexts, you’ll surely feel you must—then you also acquiesce in the argument….

(7) ANOTHER IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS COME. Ever notice how often two movies with the same general idea reach theaters in the same year? Now ask how it comes to pass than two movies based on the same book might do so. Gizmodo looks ahead to when “Cixin Liu’s Novel Supernova Era Will Explode Into Theaters”.

…For those who want to see Liu’s work on the big screen, good news—his 2003 novel Supernova Era is coming to theaters.

In fact, two Supernova Era movies are technically on the way, and possibly a TV series as well. Conquerer Entertainment, which has the adaptation rights to the novel, has announced a Chinese-language version of the movie, which will be simultaneously produced with an English-language version. If you don’t know the book (which Tor Books released in English in 2019), it’s got a (somewhat literally) killer premise. Here’s the official synopsis:

Eight light years away, a star has died, creating a supernova event that showers Earth in deadly levels of radiation. Within a year, everyone over the age of thirteen will die.

And so the countdown begins. Parents apprentice their children and try to pass on the knowledge needed to keep the world running.

But when the world is theirs, the last generation may not want to continue the legacy left to them. And in shaping the future however they want, will the children usher in an era of bright beginnings or final mistakes?

“The book has captured my interest due to Liu’s imaginative world-building and thought-provoking themes such as the fragility of civilization, the importance of leadership, and the role of technology in shaping society,” Conquerer co-founder Vasco Xu told Deadline. “It also raises questions about the nature of power, the relationship between science and morality, and the implications of different forms of administrations. Due to its futuristic setting and the presence of a significant global event at its core, the book has the potential to be adapted into two enthralling productions that would appeal to both the domestic Chinese audience and the global market.”

Assuming both movies get made, it’ll be very interesting to see how they compare and contrast. But we likely won’t get a chance to do so until 2026 at the earliest.

(8) RED DWARF NEWS. Radio Times reports ”Red Dwarf’s future confirmed after legal dispute resolved”.

…The future of Red Dwarf has finally been confirmed after a legal dispute between its creators, Rob Grant and Doug Naylor.

It’s no secret that the writers, who co-created the comedy series, haven’t always seen eye to eye, dissolving their partnership in the 1990s.

Naylor continued to write the Red Dwarf TV series but, in 2021, launched a High Court action against Grant over the rights to the show.

The dispute has now been resolved and it’s been confirmed that both of the writers will continue separately working on Red Dwarf in different media.

A statement reads: “Rob Grant and Doug Naylor are delighted to announce that the ongoing dispute over the Red Dwarf rights has been resolved.

“Moving onwards and upwards, Rob and Doug hope to launch separate iterations of Red Dwarf across various media, working again with the cast and other valued partners, and wish each other the very best.

“Smoke a kipper, Red Dwarf will be back for breakfast!!”…

(9) MEMORY LANE.

1970 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

This is something rather different for a Beginning.Jefferson Starship’s Blows Against the Empire would be nominated for a Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo fifty-two years ago at the first Noreascon. It wouldn’t win and it’s the only album nominated until the Splendor & Misery recording by Clipping was nominated at Worldcon 75 for a Hugo in the Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form category. That didn’t win either. 

It is the first album to use Starship instead of Airplane, this under Kantner alone who produced the album, a name which Kantner and Slick would use for the Jefferson Starship that emerged after Jack Casady and Jorma Kaukonen left Jefferson Airplane. 

Kantner claimed that the inspiration for the album was the work of Heinlein, particularly Methuselah’s Children where a group of people hijack a starship. Kantner even quotes the novel in the opening song, “Mau Mau (Amerikon)”: “Push the button, pull the switch, cut the beam, make it march”. 

After listening to the album, I’ll be frelled if I can see how it relates to Methuselah’s Children at all. And I’d love to hear why it was nominated for a Hugo. Was it the Heinlein connection?

1974’s Dragon Fly was I think a much better SF album with “Hyperdrive” alone being one of the best SF songs done. 

So I’ll pick the Beginning stanza of “The Baby Tree”

There’s an island way out in the sea
Where the babies they all grow on trees
And its jolly good fun To swing in the sun
But you gotta watch out if you sneeze-sneeze
You gotta watch out if you sneeze

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born March 11, 1921 — F. M. Busby. Together with his wife and others he published Cry of the Nameless which won the Hugo award in 1960. Heinlein was a great fan of him and his wife — The Cat Who Walks Through Walls in part dedicated to Busby and Friday in part to his wife Elinor. He was a very busy writer from the early Seventies to the late Nineties writing some nineteen published novels and myriad short stories before he blamed the Thor Power Tools decision for forcing his retirement. (Died 2005.)
  • Born March 11, 1925 — Christopher Anvil. Pen name of Harry Christopher Crosby, a Campbellian writer through and through. He was a staple of Astounding starting in 1956. The Colonization Series that he wrote there would run to some thirty stories. Short stories were certainly his favored length as he only wrote two novels, The Day the Machines Stopped and The Steel, the Mist, and the Blazing Sun. He’s readily available at the usual digital sources. (Died 2009.)
  • Born March 11, 1935 — Nancy Kovack, 88. She appeared as Nona in Trek’s “A Private Little War”. She also showed up in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Invaders, as Medea in Jason and the Argonauts, Batman (twice as Queenie), Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, I Dream of Jeannie, Tarzan and the Valley of Gold,  Marooned, Get Smart! and The Invisible Man. 
  • Born March 11, 1952 — Douglas Adams. Another one who died way too young. I’ve read and listened to the full cast production the BBC did of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy but have absolutely no desire to see the film. Wait, wasn’t there a TV series as well? Yes, there was. There’s also the Dirk Gently series which is, errr, odd and its charms escape my understanding. He and Mark Carwardine also wrote the most excellent Last Chance to See, their travels to various locations in the hope of encountering species on the brink of extinction. It’s more upbeat than it sounds. (Died 2001.)
  • Born March 11, 1961 — Elias Koteas, 62. Genre appearances include the very first (and I think best of the many that came out) as the sports-crazed vigilante Casey Jones in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III (I did warn you, didn’t I?), Cyborg 2 (just don’t, really don’t), Gattaca, Skinwalkers, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and The Haunting in Connecticut.
  • Born March 11, 1963 — Alex Kingston, 60. River Song in Doctor Who. She’s in a number of different stories with a number of different Doctors.  I don’t see a lot of other genre work from her but she was in Ghost Phone: Phone Calls from the Dead, as Sheila and she was Lady Macbeth in the National Theatre Live of Macbeth. Now the latter I would have really to seen!  Oh, and she’s in the Arrowverse as Dinah Lance, in FlashForward as Fiona Banks and recently shows up as Sara Bishop on A Discovery of Witches, a series based off the stellar Deborah Harkness All Souls Trilogy series of the same name.
  • Born March 11, 1989 — Anton Yelchin. Yes another way too early death. Best known for playing Pavel Chekov in Star Trek, Star Trek Into Darkness, and Star Trek Beyond. He also was in Terminator Salvation as Kyle Reese, in the Zombie comedy Burying the Ex as Max and voiced Clumsy Smurf in a series of Smurf films. Really he did. (Died 2016.)

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • Arlo and Janis work a genre reference into a strip about tonight’s change to daylight savings time.

(12) YOU’VE GOT MAIL. Not sff, but the New York Times tells about a fascinating project that’s started to sift the centuries-old impounded mail taken to from prize ships during England’s colonial wars: “Long-Lost Letters Bring Word, at Last”. At the article are quotes from these old letters.

… None of those lines ever reached their intended recipients. British warships instead snatched those letters, and scores more, from aboard merchant ships during wars from the 1650s to the early 19th century.

 While the ships’ cargoes — sugar from the Caribbean, tobacco from Virginia, ivory from Guinea, enslaved people bound for the Americas — became war plunder, the papers were bundled off to so called “prize courts” in London as potential legal proof that the seizures were legitimate spoils of war….

…For centuries since, the bulging boxes of those undelivered letters, seized from around 35,000 ships, sat neglected in British government storage, a kind of half-forgotten dead letter office for intercepted mail.

Poorly sorted and only vaguely cataloged, the Prize Papers, as they became known, have now begun revealing lost treasures. Archivists at Britain’s National Archives and a research team at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg in Germany are working on a joint project to sort, catalog and digitize the collection, which gives a nuanced portrait of private lives, international commerce and state power in an age of rising empires.

The project, expected to last two decades, aims to make the collection of more than 160,000 letters and hundreds of thousands of other documents, written in at least 19 languages, freely available and easily searchable online.

Many of the papers haven’t been read in centuries, and many letters remain sealed and unopened….

(13) THAT’S WHO. At Galactic Journey, Jessica Holmes provides commentary on the very latest (in 1968) Doctor Who story arc. “[March 10, 1968] The Best Laid Plans (Doctor Who: The Web Of Fear [Part 2])”.

The latest serial of Doctor Who tempers the base-under-siege formula with an infusion of ‘whodunnit’, but is this a fresh take on the format or are the mystery elements just a red herring? Let’s take a look at the latter half of The Web Of Fear….

(14) BREAK IT TO HIM GENTLY. “What $27.2 billion buys NASA — and more space stories you may have missed this week” at Yahoo!

Tom Cruise, if you’re reading this, you may want to sit down

Back in October, the head of Universal Pictures made waves by hinting that an upcoming film led by none other than Tom Cruise could literally be heading to outer space. Now, at the time, it seemed a little outlandish, but given Cruise’s career of going to increasingly extreme lengths to pull off elaborate stunts, going to space didn’t seem like too much of a giant leap.

But, unfortunately, it appears someone already beat him to it. On Wednesday, a trailer for “The Challenge,” which was produced by Channel 1 Russia in partnership with Roscosmos and partially filmed aboard the International Space Station, was released. The story is said to follow a surgeon who’s taken aboard the ISS to perform an emergency procedure on an injured cosmonaut. No word on if “The Challenge” will see an official release in the United States, although Tom Cruise likely still hopes to one-up that production by becoming the first civilian to do a spacewalk outside the ISS. And you know what? I think there’s a pretty good chance he’ll actually try to do it….

(15) PUT ON YOUR THINKING CAPS. “To Save Physics, Experts Suggest We Need to Assume The Future Can Affect The Past” contends a writer for Science Alert.

…The quantum threat to locality (that distant objects need a physical mediator to interact) stems from an argument by the Northern Ireland physicist John Bell in the 1960s.

Bell considered experiments in which two hypothetical physicists, Alice and Bob, each receive particles from a common source. Each chooses one of several measurement settings, and then records a measurement outcome. Repeated many times, the experiment generates a list of results.

Bell realized that quantum mechanics predicts that there will be strange correlations (now confirmed) in this data. They seemed to imply that Alice’s choice of setting has a subtle “nonlocal” influence on Bob’s outcome, and vice versa – even though Alice and Bob might be light years apart.

Bell’s argument is said to pose a threat to Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity, which is an essential part of modern physics.

But that’s because Bell assumed that quantum particles don’t know what measurements they are going to encounter in the future. Retrocausal models propose that Alice’s and Bob’s measurement choices affect the particles back at the source. This can explain the strange correlations, without breaking special relativity.

In recent work, we’ve proposed a simple mechanism for the strange correlation – it involves a familiar statistical phenomenon called Berkson’s bias (see our popular summary here).

There’s now a thriving group of scholars who work on quantum retrocausality. But it’s still invisible to some experts in the wider field. It gets confused for a different view called “superdeterminism”….

(16) READY FOR MY CLOSE UP. “NASA spacecraft beams back tantalizing images of volcanic world Io” at MSN.com.

… Io is tortured because it’s stuck in a relentless “tug-of-war” between the massive Jupiter and two of Jupiter’s other big moons, Ganymede and Europa — a world that might harbor a sizable ocean. This powerful push and pull creates profound heat inside a world that’s a little larger than our moon. All this heat seeks to reach the surface, resulting in molten lava and extreme volcanism. It’s extremely unlikely a world swimming in lava could host conditions for even the hardiest of life to evolve. But other moons in our solar system could potentially contain suitable conditions for life to evolve in their subsurface, like the Saturnian moons Enceladus and Mimas (and, of course, Europa).

Scientists like [mission director Scott] Bolton use these images to, among other things, identify new volcanoes. The darker spots are often places where eruptions have occurred, and other recent NASA imagery shows that this volcanism is incessant. A looming question is whether a global magma ocean oozes inside Io, or if there are just giant pockets of molten rock.

When the Juno spacecraft gets nearer to Io, it’s not directly approaching the moon, but veering by the moon’s orbit, as shown in the graphic below. During each orbit, Juno will snap pictures at the closest approach before it once again whips around the gas giant Jupiter. By the end of December 2023, Juno’s orbit (PJ 58) will bring it within some 930 miles of Io. It’s a much-anticipated event.

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Stephen Colbert interviews Steven Spielberg about a now-ironic complaint about Spielberg’s Night Gallery episode. “Spielberg’s ‘Appalling, Irresponsible’ Contribution to the Horror Anthology, ‘Night Gallery’”.

[Thanks to Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Kathy Sullivan, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]

Pixel Scroll 3/1/23 A Fifth! Dinner In Memison

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(1) WISCON 2024 HIATUS. There will be a WisCon in May 2023, but the signs point to there not being one next year: “WisCon on break in 2024 – A chance to recover and plan” at the WisCon Blog.

The Board of WisCon’s parent non-profit, SF3, and the WisCon ConCom have come to a consensus that we won’t be planning to run a WisCon as usual in 2024: our leadership bench is very thin, and with the ongoing pandemic and challenging political situation in the US, folks are getting worn out. We need some time to rest and figure out how we can continue WisCon in a sustainable way.  If you want to be involved paving a path to the next WisCon, join us for a planning session this Memorial Day Weekend and make sure you’re subscribed to our newsletter, where we’ll be posting updates.

We’re still absolutely putting on a con this May, and we’re going to do our very best given the people and resources we have available! We know this is scary and a big change, but we believe it gives WisCon the best chance to continue in the long run. Huge thanks to everyone who has volunteered their time and donated funds to enable us to host WisCon both last year and this year!

If you haven’t registered for WisCon yet, now is a great time! Both of our amazing Guests of Honor, Martha Wells (she/her) and Rivers Solomon (fae/faer), are planning to attend in person, and so far we’ve sold about 200 in-person memberships out of our 600 person cap on in-person attendance. Register to attend WisCon online or in person and complete our Panel Interest Survey by 3/10 to tell us what kind of programming you want to attend at WisCon.

(2) KGB. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Scott Lynch and Elizabeth Bear on March 8 at the KGB Bar.

Scott Lynch

Scott Lynch’s debut novel The Lies of Locke Lamora was nominated for a World Fantasy Award and is now in its 36th US printing, sixteen years later. His shorter work has appeared in multiple anthologies, and he recently provided an introduction for the Tor Books reissue of John M. Ford’s The Dragon Waiting. His next works in the Gentleman Bastard milieu will be More Than Fools Fill Graves (novella) and The Thorn of Emberlain (novel). Scott lives in Massachusetts with his wife, SF/F legend Elizabeth Bear, plus four cats and a horse.

Elizabeth Bear

Elizabeth Bear is the Hugo, Sturgeon, Astounding, and Locus Award-winning author of more novels, articles, and short fiction than she likes to think about. Her most recent books are Machine and The Origin of Storms. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband, SF/F legend Scott Lynch, plus four cats and a very small horse.

  • Where: KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003 (Just off 2nd Ave, upstairs)
  • When: March 8, 2023, 7:00 p.m. Eastern.

(3) SHORT FICTION SPECIALTY. The Speculative Literature Foundation is taking registrations for “Writing the SFF Novelette” with instructor Alec Nevala-Lee, a Zoom class being held March 25 from 10:00 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Central. Max 30 students. Cost $60.  

The novelette (between 7,500 and 17,500 words long) can be a challenging but rewarding form for SFF writers. As a novel in miniature, it requires authors to think about narrative structure in ways that differ from the specific requirements of the short story, with a more complex plot that frequently falls into distinct acts. Because a novelette can be written in a shorter timeframe than a full novel, it allows writers to develop and refine skills that will be useful for longer projects, while also providing a form that is deeply rewarding in itself. This workshop will focus on idea generation, structure, and editing with an emphasis on the novelette, as well as elements of craft that can be applied to fiction of any length.

(4) DOTSON READING. Space Cowboy Books hosts an online reading and interview with J. Dianne Dotson author of The Shadow Galaxy on Tuesday March 21 at 6:00 p.m. Pacific. Get your copy here. Register for the reading free here.

A mesmerizing first collection, THE SHADOW GALAXY features short stories and poetry spanning magical realism, science fiction, fantasy, horror, and Appalachian tales. With stories and poetry spanning three decades of work, the author taps into journeys both fantastical and deeply personal. Categories include Shadow Shores: Tales from the Sea; Other Futures: Tales of the Galaxy and a Place Called Earth; Into the Darkest Hollow: Tales of Horror; Love and Other Moments: Traces of the Heart; Far Appalachia: Tales from the Ancient Mountains; and Resonant Thoughts: Some Poetry.

(5) OLIVIER AWARDS. Genre leads the field this year: “‘My Neighbour Totoro’ Dominates Olivier Award Nominations” reports the New York Times.

A stage adaptation of “My Neighbour Totoro,” an animated Japanese children’s movie filled with fantastical creatures, emerged on Tuesday as the front-runner for this year’s Olivier Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys.

The show, which ran at the Barbican Theater in London and included numerous giant puppets, secured nine nominations for the awards — more than any other play. Those included nods for best comedy, best director for Phelim McDermott and best actress for Mei Mac as a girl who discovers a magical world near her home….

(6) COMING ATTRACTIONS. Mrs. Davis is a Peacock original that will begin streaming April 20.

“Mrs. Davis” is the world’s most powerful Artificial Intelligence. Simone is the nun devoted to destroying Her. Who ya got?

(7) CONTROVERSY OVER ATTEMPTED REVIEW OF HOGWARTS LEGACY. [Item by Dann.] Girlfriend Reviews is a YouTube channel that provides reviews based on the perspective of a girlfriend watching her boyfriend playing various games.  Shelby and Matt received a free evaluation copy of Hogwarts Legacy which they used.  When they attempted to review the game on their Twitch channel, activists brigaded the comments section.  Additionally, they were reported to various platforms for promoting “hate”.  In their video below, they state that they lost their Reddit group/subReddit.  It looks as if that access has been restored since then.

The Girlfriend Reviews review of Hogwarts Legacy is really more about their experience with activists swarming their media streams with insults and false claims to get their accounts closed by the social media hosts.  Shelby states that she has other concerns about Hogwarts Legacy related to anti-Semitism and that she should be free to interrogate those concerns without running afoul of other activists with other concerns.

A quote from the video:

…Nobody wants to be labeled pro-child labor for tweeting from their iPhone any more than they want to be labeled transphobic for downloading Hogwarts Legacy, especially if how they vote on Election Day says something different than how they vote on the PlayStation store. And then there’s me and Matt, two video game critics who received a review copy of Hogwarts Legacy for free. It is our job to appraise video games while providing commentary on any controversies surrounding them and if you’ve ever watched our show you should know that we don’t hold any punches when it comes to calling out injustice. This channel has always been committed to creating a safer space for women in The Gaming Community…

(8) MEMORY LANE.

1935 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man is a locked room mystery narrated by his investigator Gideon Fell.  First published in 1935 by Hamish Hamilton in the U.K., it has the much reprinted locked room lecture in which Fell addresses the reader. He sets out the various ways in which murder can be committed in what appears to be a locked room or otherwise seemingly impossible situation.

Fell was the protagonist of twenty-three rather good novels. Carr was said to have modeled him upon G. K. Chesterton who wrote the Father Brown stories as his physical appearance and personality were similar to those of Doctor Fell.

All of the Fell mysteries are intensely descriptive of Thirties London with sharply drawn characters and fascinating stories. They were considered cozy crimes novels, a description I’m not quite sure I agree with.

Highly recommended.

Among our usual suspects, Kindle and Kobo have it, but not Apple Books. Seven have been made into audiobooks but alas not The Hollow Man.

And now the rather startling Beginning to The Hollow Man…

THE THREAT 

To the murder of Professor Grimaud, and later the equally incredible crime in Cagliostro Street, many fantastic terms could be applied-with reason. Those of Dr Fell’s friends who like impossible situations will not find in his case-book any puzzle more baffling or more terrifying. Thus: two murders were committed, in such fashion that the murderer must have been not only invisible, but lighter than air. According to the evidence, this person killed his first victim and literally disappeared. Again according to the evidence, he killed his second victim in the middle of an empty street, with watchers at either end; yet not a soul saw him, and no footprint appeared in the snow. 

Naturally, Superintendent Hadley never for a moment believed in goblins or wizardry. And he was quite right – unless you believe in a magic that will be explained naturally in this narrative at the proper time. But several people began to wonder whether the figure which stalked through the case might not be a hollow shell. They began to wonder whether, if you took away the cap and the black coat and the child’s false-face, you might not reveal nothing inside, like the man in a certain famous romance by Mr H. G. Wells. The figure was grisly enough anyhow. 

The words ‘according to the evidence’ have been used. We must be very careful about the evidence when it is not given at first hand. And in this case the reader must be told at the outset, to avoid useless confusion, on whose evidence he can absolutely rely. That is to say, it must be assumed that somebody is telling the truth-else, there is no legitimate mystery and, in fact, no story at all. 

Therefore it must be stated that Mr Stuart Mills at Professor Grimaud’s house was not lying, was not omitting or adding anything, but telling the whole business exactly as he saw it in every case. Also it must be stated that the three independent witnesses of Cagliostro Street (Messrs Short and Blackwin, and Police-constable Withers) were telling the exact truth. 

Under these circumstances, one of the events which led up to the crime must be outlined more fully than is possible in retrospect. It was the key-note, the whip-lash, the challenge. And it is retold-from Dr Fell’s notes, in essential details exactly as Stuart Mills later told it to Dr Fell and Superintendent Hadley. It occurred on the night of Wednesday, February 6th, three days before the murder, in the back parlour of the Warwick Tavern in Museum Street.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born March 1, 1915 — Wyman Guin. Ok, occasionally doing these Birthdays results in me being puzzled and this is one of those times. In 2013, he was named as recipient for the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award at ReaderCon 24. When I look him up, I find that he wrote a single novel and seven stories according to the folks at ISFDB. I’ve not read him. So, was he that good? Should I seek out his novel, The Standing Joy, and add it to my reading list? His short stories are available at the usual digital publishers, but the novel still isn’t. (Died 1989.)
  • Born March 1, 1923 — Andrew Faulds. He’s best remembered as Phalerus in Jason and the Argonauts in which he was in the skeleton fight scene that featured model work by Ray Harryhausen. He appeared in a number of other genre films including The Trollenberg Terror, The Flesh and the Fiends and Blood of the Vampire. He had one-offs on Danger Man and One Step Beyond. Oh, and his first acting gig was as Lysander in A Midsummer’s Night Dream. (Died 2000.)
  • Born March 1, 1930 — Eddie Hice. One of the original Red Shirts on Star Trek. He appeared in two episodes, first as a Red Shirt in “The Day of The Dove” and then having the same role in “Wink of an Eye”. I don’t recall either episode well enough to remember his fate in those stories. He had an extensive genre history showing in Batman twice, including once playing The Riddler, he was in Get Smart nine times, six as an actor and three as stunt double (his career as a stunt double was much longer and extensive than his acting career), The Beastmaster and voice work on the animated Lord of The Rings. (Died 2015.)
  • Born March 1, 1938 — Michael Kurland, 85. His The Unicorn Girl was the middle volume of the Greenwich Village trilogy by three different authors, the other two being Chester Anderson and T.A. Waters. (And yes, they’re available from the usual suspects.) Kurland has also written genre novels including Ten Little Wizards and A Study in Sorcery, set in the world of Garrett’s Lord Darcy. His other genre novels are Ten Years to Doomsday (written with Chester Anderson), Tomorrow Knight, Pluribus and Perchance.
  • Born March 1, 1946 — Lana Wood, 77. She’s best remembered as Plenty O’Toole in Diamonds Are Forever. She was in The Wild Wild West as Vixen O’Shaughnessy in “The Night of the Firebrand” and Averi Trent in “The Night of the Plague” episodes. She was in both up the CBS televised Captain America films playing Yolanda, and she was still active in the genre as little three years ago playing a character named Implicit in Subconscious Reality.
  • Born March 1, 1950 — David Pringle, 73. Pringle served as the editor of Foundation during the Eighties and helped found Interzone durning that time. The Glasgow Worldcon committee gave Pringle a Special Award for his work on Interzone.  With Malcolm Edwards and Ian Watson, he also edited Foundation: The Review of Science Fiction from the late Seventies through the mid Eighties. Besides his various guides to the genre such as The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Fantasy, I see early on that he did a lot of work on J.G. Ballard such as Earth Is the Alien Planet: J. G. Ballard’s Four-Dimensional Nightmare  and J. G. Ballard: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography. I also note that he’s not published anything listed on ISFDB in the field of late. Any idea why?  
  • Born March 1, 1952 — Steven Barnes, 71. Co-writer with Niven of the Dream Park series. I read the first two when they came over forty years ago, not bad at all. Their Heorot series is quite good too. I’ve not read him on his own so cannot say how he is as a solo writer. For TV, he’s done work for The Outer Limits, Andromeda and Stargate SG-1. His “A Stitch In Time” episode of The Outer Limits won an Emmy Award.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

  • The most recent xkcd  mentions fandom and fan service…just not in the traditional manner.

(11) THERE ARE THUNDERCATS IN OUR FUTURE. [Item by Dann.] A trailer has dropped for the Thundercats movie that is supposed to be released in 2023.  Henry Cavill is one of those actors that I could watch warm soup on a stove and be entertained.  The trailer doesn’t reveal much about the plot of the movie but the graphics are good.

(12) IS THERE ENOUGH SCIENCE IN THE UNIVERSE TO MAKE THIS HAPPEN? “Back to the father: the scientist who lost his dad – and resolved to travel to 1955 to save him” – a science article in the Guardian.

Prof Ronald Mallett thinks he has cracked time travel. The secret, he says, is in twisting the fabric of space-time with a ring of rotating lasers to make a loop of time that would allow you to travel backwards. It will take a lot more explaining and experiments, but after a half century of work, the 77-year-old astrophysicist has got that down pat.

His claim is not as ridiculous as it might seem. Entire academic departments, such as the Centre for Time at the University of Sydney, are dedicated to studying the possibility of time travel. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is working on a “time-reversal machine” to detect dark matter. Of course there are still lots of physicists who believe time travel, or at least travelling to the past, is impossible, but it is not quite the sci-fi pipe dream it once was.

However, the story of how Mallett, now emeritus professor at the University of Connecticut, reached this point could have been lifted straight from a comic book. A year after losing his father, Boyd, at the age of 10, Mallett picked up a copy of HG Wells’s The Time Machine and had an epiphany: he was going to build his own time machine, travel back to 1955 and save his father’s life.

Mallett still idolises his dad, and thinks about him every day. He had been exceptionally close to Boyd, whom he describes as a handsome, erudite and funny “renaissance man” who would try to inspire curiosity in Mallett and his two brothers and sister. “When he passed away, it was like this light went out. I was in shock,” Mallett says down the line from his study in Connecticut….

(13) INSPIRATION POINTS. Will Higginbotham takes New York Times readers on a tour of “Where the Lion and the Witch Met the Hobbit” – Oxford.

…Is this where Lewis found inspiration for Narnia? “No one knows for sure, but the timeline makes sense,” Mr. Walters said. In the early 1940s, Lewis was a lay theologian, and he occasionally gave sermons in St. Mary’s, just a few feet away. “Perhaps he left one evening through the side door and walked straight out onto this,” Mr. Walters said, gesturing to what’s become known as the Narnia Door….

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Peter Pan & Wendy trailer.

“Peter Pan & Wendy,” a live-action reimagining of the J.M. Barrie novel and the 1953 animated classic, will begin streaming April 28, 2023, exclusively on Disney+. Check out the teaser trailer and key art for the original movie directed by David Lowery (“The Green Knight,” “Pete’s Dragon”), and get ready to experience the timeless adventure featuring the beloved characters like never before. “Peter Pan & Wendy” introduces Wendy Darling, a young girl afraid to leave her childhood home behind, who meets Peter Pan, a boy who refuses to grow up. Alongside her brothers and a tiny fairy, Tinker Bell, she travels with Peter to the magical world of Neverland. There, she encounters an evil pirate captain, Captain Hook, and embarks on a thrilling and dangerous adventure that will change her life forever.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Dann, Rich Lynch, Steven French, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 2/10/23 Jetpack Failing, Must Attempt To Pixel To A Safe Scrolling

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(1) VINTAGE OR VINEGAR? At Young People Read Old SFF, James Davis Nicoll tasked the panel to read Melancholy Elephants by Spider Robinson. Click through to hear what they thought about it.

Young People Read Old Hugo Finalists focuses on Spider Robinson’s 1982 Hugo-winning ​“Melancholy Elephants”. Readers of my vintage might remember Robinson as the author of the once-popular Callahan’s stories (to which series ​“Melancholy Elephants” does not belong) as well as a prolific reviewer whose pieces appeared in Galaxy, Analog, and Destinies Magazine and no doubt elsewhere. ​“Melancholy Elephants” is a stand-alone focusing on the issue of perpetual copyright. It’s a subject still relevant today. I am curious what the Young People make of Robinson’s story….

(2) IT’S A RISKY BUSINESS. And at Tor.com, James Davis Nicoll picks out “Five SF Stories About Space Scouts and Cosmic Exploration”.

Of all the career paths offered to player characters in the venerable tabletop roleplaying game Traveller, few were as memorable as that of the scout. Stalwart explorers of empire’s hinterlands, scouts could expect a charmingly informal command structure, a good chance of a loaner starship on retirement, and, oh yes, the life expectancy of a newborn puppy in a crocodile-filled swamp. Classic Traveller was notorious for its character generation system: player characters could and often did expire during the process. Few careers offered the harrowing mortality rate of the scout class.

Traveller author Marc Miller drew inspiration from classic science fiction, whose authors delighted in dropping explorers into situations for which the explorers soon discovered they were insufficiently prepared. Here are five tales of the sort  that inspired Traveller….

(3) UNION AND HARPERCOLLINS ANNOUNCE AGREEMENT. Vox’s overview “What the hard-won HarperCollins union contract means for the future of books” actually does little to answer its own question. But it does supply this snapshot of how the strike ended.

…On January 26, HarperCollins management agreed to enter federal mediation with the union. Five days later, it announced that it would be laying off 5 percent of its workforce. A HarperCollins spokesperson attributed the layoffs to supply chain pressures and declining revenue, saying, “The timing had nothing to do with mediation.”

Because HarperCollins is the only union shop among the Big Five, the stakes here are high. It is pushed by necessity to set the labor standards for the rest of the industry: when it raises its wages, Penguin Random House raises its wages too. The hope among supporters both in and out of the union was that the new agreement would spark similar structural changes at the other Big Five houses, and maybe even inspire other houses to unionize.

Finally, at 8 pm on February 9, the union and HarperCollins together announced they had reached a tentative agreement. “The tentative agreement includes increases to minimum salaries across levels throughout the term of the agreement, as well as a one-time $1,500 lump sum bonus to be paid to bargaining unit employees following ratification,” said HarperCollins in a statement. Currently, there’s no word on whether the union also succeeded in bringing in new diversity initiatives or in getting a union security clause. The contract doesn’t become official until it’s ratified….

Publishers Weekly’s coverage put the agreement in perspective with HarperCollins’ recent business reverses: “Deal Reached in HarperCollins Strike as Publisher Has Another Bad Quarter”.

…News of the tentative agreement came shortly after HC parent company News Corp. released financial results for the quarter ended December 31, 2022. The company reported that earnings tumbled 52% at HC, falling to $51 million, from $107 million in the comparable quarter a year ago. Sales dropped 14%, to $531 million.

News Corp. attributed the revenue decline to slowing consumer demand for books, difficult comparisons to a strong frontlist performance a year ago, and “some logistical constraints at Amazon.” In the first quarter of the 2023 fiscal year, HC attributed the decline in sales and earnings largely to a steep drop in orders from Amazon, and in a conference call, News Corp. executives said the negative impact of Amazon on second quarter sales was less than in the first quarter. Sales were down in both print and digital formats.

In addition to lower sales, News attributed the plunge in profits primarily to “ongoing supply chain, inventory, and inflationary pressures on manufacturing, freight, and distribution costs.” A change in the product mix also depressed earnings, with the share of e-book sales falling in the second quarter as that of the the less-profitable print books rose.

With financial results also down in the first quarter, in the first six months of fiscal 2023, profits declined 53%, to $90 million, and sales fell 12%, to $1.02 billion.

Last month, HC began implementing a program to cut its North American workforce by 5% by the end of the fiscal year ending June 30. In a conference call announcing results, News Corp. CEO Robert Thomson said News is making a 5% workforce cut in all its businesses, which will result in the elimination of about 1,250 positions….

(4) KGB. Ellen Datlow shared her photos from the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series event on February 8 at Flickr. Jeff Ford and Marie Vibbert were the evening’s readers.

(5) SKY HIGH DINING. The Torrance (CA) Public Library hosts a Zoom presentation by Richard Foss, “Food in Space in Science Fiction and Reality”, on February 15 at 6:30 p.m. Pacific. Email [email protected] for the invitation link.

Early science fiction stories about space travel ignored the most basic need of any pioneer – what did they eat, and how? The science fiction authors did get around to addressing this question, their solutions were sometimes novel but impractical.

How do their fantasies match up with reality, and are authors getting it right now? Join Richard Foss, author, culinary expert and lecturer as we explore this fascinating subject.

Please email [email protected] for the invitation link to join this discussion on Zoom.

(6) START YOUR OWN INKLINGS. “Writers Need Writers: In the Footsteps of the Inklings” at Inspire Christian Writers.

… Writing is a solitary pursuit. Only the writer understands the intent. Hunched alone over our notepads and computers, we snaggle our words and graft them onto the page, prayerfully hopeful they will touch hearts. But we can’t know the true strength of our writing unless we are willing to share those words with another who will render kind and honest feedback. Our mothers don’t count. Neither does a stranger. One lacks honesty, the other an understanding of the writer’s heart.

Twelve members of the Inklings steadfastly met for almost twenty years. Weathering war and broken friendships, they left us with poetry, Christian essays, and stories that delight and instruct to this day. That’s what I want. I want their journey. How? Here’s some gleanings from Bandersnatch.

[Dr. Diana] Glyer believes it’s possible to have what the Inklings had. Start small but keep at it, she says. The Inklings began with just two, Tolkien and Lewis….

(7) MANTELL OBITUARY. The New York Times marks the passing of the co-creator of a spoken word record business: “Marianne Mantell, Who Helped Pave the Way for Audiobooks, Dies at 93”.

Marianne Mantell, who in her early 20s helped start the audiobook revolution by co-founding a record company [Caedmon] that turned recordings of countless literary giants, including Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce and Dylan Thomas, into mass-market entertainment, died on Jan. 22 at her home in Princeton, N.J. She was 93….

… In an era when American business was dominated by Fortune 500 companies, it was rare enough for two recent college graduates to create what was in essence a tech start-up aimed at disrupting two industries, book publishing and the record business. And in an era when those corporate giants were run largely by men in Brooks Brothers suits, it was even more unusual for two women to do so.

“Caedmon was the era’s only female-owned record company, and its remarkable success stood out in a male-dominated record industry,” Mr. Rubery said. “At the time, only around 5 percent of record industry employees were women, and those women were almost all in marketing and retail roles. The rise to the top by two female entrepreneurs represented a remarkable exception.”

As Ms. Mantell wrote in a 2004 remembrance for AudioFile magazine, “Although poets had been recorded before as vanity efforts, it was Barbara and I who realized that there was an audience of literate people and made a business out of it.”

… The labels had no interest, so Ms. Mantell and Ms. Holdridge scratched together $1,800 to start a label of their own, which they christened Caedmon after the seventh-century cowherd considered the first recognized English poet. The company’s slogan: “A third dimension for the printed page.”

…“We were not just out to preserve celebrity voices (to the extent that a poet is a celebrity),” she wrote. “Our purpose was literary: to capture on tape as nearly as possible what the poet heard in his head as he wrote.”

(8) MEMORY LANE.

1974 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

I think I read Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed in University when a classmate recommended it. I had a keen interest in politics, particularly those on the Left, so the politics of the novel interested me. 

I think it works much better for its politics than it does for the strength of the character therein. The politics and the set-up of two planets was fascinating though I admit that it’s not a novel by her I’ve re-read, unlike her exemplary Earthsea series. 

It won both a Hugo and a Nebula, and deserved them. 

And with that, here’s the Beginning…

THERE was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall. 

Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on. 

Looked at from one side, the wall enclosed a barren sixty-acre field called the Port of Anarres. On the field there were a couple of large gantry cranes, a rocket pad, three warehouses, a truck garage, and a dormitory. The dormitory looked durable, grimy, and mournful; it had no gardens, no children; plainly nobody lived there or was even meant to stay there long. It was in fact a quarantine. The wall shut in not only the landing field but also the ships that came down out of space, and the men that came on the ships, and the worlds they came from, and the rest of the universe. It enclosed the universe, leaving Anarres outside, free. 

Looked at from the other side, the wall enclosed Anarres: the whole planet was inside it, a great prison camp, cut off from other worlds and other men, in quarantine.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born February 10, 1904 — Lurton Blassingame. Literary agent for Heinlein. He makes the birthday list because Grumbles from the Grave has more letters to Blassingame than to any other correspondent. And even some of Blassingames’s letters to Heinlein are included. (Died 1988.)
  • Born February 10, 1906 — Lon Chaney Jr., 1906 – 1973. I certainly best remember him as  playing Larry Talbot in The Wolf Man but he has a lot of other roles as well: The Ghost of Frankenstein as The Monster (hey, correct billing!), The Mummy’s Tomb as The Mummy Kharis or Son of Dracula as Count Dracula, he played all the great monsters, often multiple times. (Died 1973.)
  • Born February 10, 1920 — Robert Park Mills. He was the managing editor of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine beginning in 1948 and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction the following year. He also edited Venture Science Fiction for several years. Under him, F&SF won an impressive three Hugo Awards for best magazine in 1959, 1960 and 1963. (Died 1986.)
  • Born February 10, 1929 — Jerry Goldsmith. Composer whose music graces many a genre undertaking including, and this is not complete listing, Alien, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Poltergeist, Planet of the Apes, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. series, Star Trek: Voyager, The Mummy, The Twilight Zone (need I say the original series?) and he even did the music for Damnation Alley! (Died 2004.)
  • Born February 10, 1953 — John Shirley, 70. I not going to even attempt a complete précis of his career. I read and much enjoyed his first novel City Come A-Walkin and oddly enough his Grimm: The Icy Touch is damn good too in way many of those sharecropped novels aren’t. I see that to my surprise he wrote a episode of Deep Space Nine, “Visionary” and also wrote three episodes of the ‘12 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. His latest novel which I’ve not read so do tell me about it is A Sorcerer of Atlantis.
  • Born February 10, 1967 — Laura Dern, 56. I’m going to note she’s in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet as Sandy Williams which is not genre but which is one weird film. Jurassic Park where she is Dr. Ellie Sattler is her first SF film followed by Jurassic Park III and a name change to Dr. Ellie Degler.  Such are the things movie trivia is made of. Star Wars: The Last Jedi has her showing as Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo.  I think her first genre appearance was on Shelley Duvall’s Nightmare Classic.
  • Born February 10, 1970 — Robert Shearman, 53. He wrote the episode of Who called “Dalek” which was nominated for the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form at L.A. Con IV. (There were three Who entries that year and “The Empty Child”/”The Doctor Dances” won.) His first book, a collection of short stories called Tiny Deaths was a World Fantasy Award winner. He’s written a lot of short fiction since then, collected helpfully into two collections, Remember Why You Fear Me: The Best Dark Fiction of Robert Shearman and They Do the Same Things Different There: The Best Weird Fantasy of Robert Shearman. Some, but by no means all, of his works are up at the usual suspects.
  • Born February 10, 1976 — Keeley Hawes, 47. Ms Delphox/Madame Karabraxos in my favorite Twelfth Doctor story “Time Heist”.  She also played Zoe Reynolds in MI5 which is at least genre adjacent given where the story went. She has also provided the voice of Lara Croft in a series of Tomb Raider video games. 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

  • The Far Side is present at the Creation.
  • Edge City tries to figure out what all the remotes are for.
  • Sheldon predicts who will be AI art’s mortal enemy.
  • Sheldon also illustrates the limits of dog science.

(11) SHORT REVIEWS. Lisa Tuttle supplies “The best recent science fiction and fantasy – reviews roundup” for the Guardian. The four titles covered this time are Hopeland by Ian McDonald; Ten Planets by Yuri Herrera; Observer by Robert Lanza and Nancy Kress; and Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett.

(12) PLAYING GAMES. Them is reporting that “Hogwarts Legacy Features the Harry Potter Franchise’s First Trans Character”.

Now that the review embargo for Hogwarts Legacy is up, more details about the forthcoming Harry Potter role-playing game, set to release on Friday, are surfacing. One particularly noteworthy new fact? The inclusion of a transgender non-playable character (or NPC) named Sirona Ryan, whom players can find at the Three Broomsticks pub.

The news came courtesy of a gameplay clip shared by YouTuber Doctor Gramma, in which Sirona serves a pair of characters Butterbeer and remarks upon a recent, unspecified attack on Hogwarts. Although Sirona was not confirmed as trans in the clip itself, Entertainment Weekly and other outlets have since reported on in-game dialogue referencing her transition. Speaking about her former classmates, the barkeep reportedly says,  “Took them a second to realize I was actually a witch, not a wizard.”

Given Potter author J.K. Rowling’s well-documented transphobia, Sirona’s presence is unexpected, to say the least. Some in the video game world are even claiming the character was included in hopes of quelling a boycott from gamers who have chosen not to play the game based on Rowling’s dangerous anti-trans platform.

“An old acquaintance did some work on that Hogwarts game,” YouTuber Stephanie Sterling tweeted early Monday morning. “I’m told they added a token trans NPC to pivot the conversation away from JKR. They’re barely in it.”

“Did You Know Gaming” contributor and video game historian Liam Robertson backed up Sterling’s account, writing, “I was also told this. There was apparently some trans representation added after some of the initial controversy. I don’t know how it appears in the final product but one of the sources I talked to described it as ‘performative bullshit.’”…

(13) YOU’RE FIRED. While Elon Musk was making news for firing a Twitter engineer, his SpaceX was getting attention for test-firing an engine: “SpaceX Test Fires 31 Engines on the Most Powerful Rocket Ever” in the New York Times.

SpaceX moved one step closer to its future on Thursday with a successful ground test of the engines of the most powerful rocket ever built.

The company, founded by the entrepreneur Elon Musk, conducted what is known as a static fire of Super Heavy, a massive rocket booster. Super Heavy was made to send SpaceX’s next-generation Starship vehicle toward orbit before returning to Earth.

More than 110,000 people watched a livestream broadcast by NASASpaceFlight.com, an independent space media company that has cameras monitoring the Starship test site in Boca Chica, Texas. The video feed showed clouds of vapor enveloping the launch stand when propellants started flowing into the rocket, and rings of frost forming around the rocket as the tanks filled with ultracold propellants.

Then the clouds mostly vanished when the fueling was complete — for the brief test, the tanks were not filled to the brim.

At 4:14 p.m. Eastern time, on a video feed provided by SpaceX, the engines roared to life for a few seconds and shut down, kicking up that rose clouds above the rocket and prompting masses of birds to flee the area. An update on Twitter from SpaceX indicated the test was a success, lasting as long as intended. The booster and launch stand appeared to be in good shape afterward.

(14) APOLOGIES. JUPITER-SIZED ERROR. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] I have to correct a stupid error I made in yesterday’s piece about one of the most distant exo-planet detected and first space-based detection of an exo-planet using gravitational lensing. It was not the close to smallest theoretical-sized Jupiter — close to the host mass threshold below which Jupiters are not expected to form.  Instead, it was somewhat surprising to find a Jupiter-sized exoplanet around such a small star (a little over half the mass of the Sun).  It is thought that the planetary mass around small stars is smaller than the planetary mass around larger stars. So to have a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting such a small star is a little unusual and close to the theoretical limit.

The error came about because I only quickly scan/read the abstracts of papers of interest at a cybercafé and then blat an e-mail off to Mike, and I only subsequently read papers in detail when I get home.  Also, since we (SF2 Concatenation) lost our much missed physics and space science editor, I have taken over that coverage in addition to that of the bio- and geosciences about which I am more sure-footed.

See Specht, D. et al, (2023) “Kepler K2 Campaign 9: II. First space-based discovery of an exoplanet using microlensing”. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, stad212.

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Honest Game Trailers gives its brutally frank opinion of “Fire Emblem Engage”.

…Discover yet another fantasy Kingdom on the brink of inevitable War as you take control of a protagonist so anime that they are actually a dragon, an amnesiac, and also a God who looks like a deviantART character where you took two cheesy anime protagonists and smashed them together in a hydraulic press…

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Andrew Porter, Ellen Datlow, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Dann, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, and Mike Kennedy  for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day by Andrew (not Werdna).]

Pixel Scroll 1/31/23 A Subway Named Moebius, Larryus, And Curlyus

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(1) KINDRED CANCELED. Can the news get any worse? The Hollywood Reporter tells us “’Kindred’ Canceled at FX”. The drama was based on Octavia E. Butler’s 1979 novel about a young Black woman who is pulled back and forth in time.

Sources tell The Hollywood Reporter that the Disney-backed basic-cable network has canceled the drama based on Octavia E. Butler’s 1979 novel about a young Black woman who is pulled back and forth in time. Showrunner Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Watchmen) is expected to shop the drama from FX Productions as he envisioned a multiple-season run for the series.

Reps for FX declined to comment.

Kindred debuted Dec. 13, launching all eight episodes of the drama that starred Mallori Johnson as an L.A. woman who is pulled back in time to the 19th century South.

…The drama, which streamed exclusively on Hulu, currently has a 70 percent score among critics on Rotten Tomatoes and a 51 percent rating among viewers. In his review, THR chief TV critic Daniel Fienberg said Kindred was “often effective, but key choices aren’t clicking.” (Hulu does not release traditional viewership data.)…

(2) FUTURE TENSE. The January 2023 entry in the Future Tense Fiction series, “Bigfeet” by Torie Bosch, is a story on “de-extincting a creature that (probably) never existed” —  about a rogue effort to genetically engineer Bigfoot.

It was published along with a response essay, “De-extinction and conservation: When introducing a new species goes wrong” by conservation researcher Challie Facemire.

… This fictional scenario has many real-world counterparts: In the 1920s, sport hunters released a dozen mountain goats on the Olympic Peninsula in western Washington state—the same region where some of the story’s Bigfeet are set loose. Like the Bigfeet, the mountain goat population grew out of control quickly. The goats have caused problems since, from eating sparse alpine plants to trying to lick salt off hikers’ clothes and gear—salt deposits don’t occur naturally in the peninsula, but the goats need it in their diet. As a result, federal and state land managers were forced to carefully devise a multiyear plan to relocate or extirpate the goats (including lifting some by helicopter to more suitable habitats)….

(3) KGB. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Jeffrey Ford and Marie Vibbert in person at the KGB Bar on Feburary 8, beginning at 7:00 Eastern.

Jeffrey Ford

Jeffrey Ford is a New York Times Notable author for his novel The Physiognomy. In addition, his eleven novels and eight collections of stories have garnered multiple genre awards. His short stories have appeared in a myriad of venues within the SFF/H genres and beyond, He has new stories coming out this year from Tor.com, Asimov’s, and a couple of anthologies. He is recently retired from 40 plus years teaching literature and writing. He lives somewhere out in Ohio in a hundred-and twenty-year-old farmhouse with his wife and seven cats, four dogs, and a turtle.

Marie Vibbert

Marie Vibbert is the Hugo-longlisted author of over 80 short stories, translated into four languages, as well as three novels, some poems, comics, and video games. Her first novel, Galactic Hellcats, was longlisted for the BSFA in 2021. Her latest novel is The Gods Awoke.

Where: KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003 (Just off 2nd Ave, upstairs). When: February 8th, 2023, 7:00 p.m. Eastern.

(4) MONTELEONE INTERVIEW RESURFACES. Hatchet Mouth Episode 158 “Facebook has AIDS w/ Tom Monteleone” seems to have reappeared if you haven’t heard enough toxicity yet today. It includes the insulting anecdotes referenced in yesterday’s Scroll.

(5) HARPERCOLLINS STRIKE. Literary Hub shares “Why I’m Still on Strike: Portraits from the HarperCollins Picket Line”.

…As the only union in the Big 5, we are in the unique position to push the needle forward for all publishing, not just HarperCollins—a weight and opportunity that isn’t lost on any of us. You can feel it in our picket line chants, in our weekly membership meetings, in our Slack conversations. It’s palpable—the outcome of this strike will determine if hundreds of brilliant workers will leave publishing forever, or if people will finally be able to see a future for themselves in an industry desperately in need of change.

We’re on Day 58 of the strike, with no idea of how much longer this will stretch on. I admit it: I’m terrified and exhausted. I also have never believed in our mission more….

(6) HAUNTED HOUSES IN SPACE. [Item by Ben Bird Person.] YouTuber Romancing the Gothic posted this video exploring “Haunted Houses in Space” through the films Solaris, Alien, and Event Horizon.

(7) JEOPARDY! Andrew Porter was pleased to see tonight’s episode of Jeopardy! had an entire category, “Sci-Fi and Fantasy”. Some of the entries were too tough for the contestants.

Answer: This Joe Haldeman classic tells of William Mandella, who fights the interstellar Taurans for a really long time.

No one could ask, “What is ‘The Forever War’?”

Answer: A “Star Trek” homage, this colorful John Scalzi title refers to clothing soon-to-die crew members wear.

Wrong question: “What is a red shirt?”

Right question: “What are the red shirts?”

Rich Lynch, who also was watching, adds that “One of the clues was a head shot of GRRM.”

(8) MEMORY LANE.

1948 — [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

In tonight’s Scroll, we debut a new essay series which is First Paragraphs. To start this off, we have the beginning of the Lensmen series by E.E. “ Doc” Smith which was chosen by Mike Glyer who says, “First paragraphs — it’s actually the first line  of E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith’s Triplanetary: A Tale of Cosmic Adventure that I love the most. It really sets the tone for what he turned into a six-book saga.” 

The magazine version of Triplanetary appeared in 1934 and only later was turned into a fix-up novel, a prequel that begins the series. Four of the Lensmen series as this would known as would be nominated for Retro Hugos though this was not one of them. 

The entire series is available for free from the usual suspects. And, I kid you not at all, there are eleven different audio recordings of Triplanetary. 

Two thousand million or so years ago two galaxies were colliding; or, rather, were passing through each other. A couple of hundreds of millions of years either way do not matter, since at least that much time was required for the inter-passage. At about that same time—within the same plus-or-minus ten percent margin of error, it is believed—practically all of the suns of both those galaxies became possessed of planets.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born January 31, 1923 — Norman Mailer. I never knew he wrote in the genre but he did. Ancient Evenings certainly has the elements of fantasy and The Castle in the Forest is interesting retelling of Adolf Hitler and his last days. (Died 2007.)
  • Born January 31, 1937 — Philip Glass, 86. 1000 Airplanes on the Roof: A Science Fiction Music-Drama, Einstein on the Beach, The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (with a libretto by Doris Lessing based on her novel of the same name), The marriages between zones three, four, and five (1997, libretto by Doris Lessing, after her second novel from Canopus in Argos), The Witches of Venice and The Juniper Tree would be a fragmentary listing of his works that have a genre bias. 
  • Born January 31, 1947 — Jonathan Banks, 76. First genre role was as Deputy Brent in Gremlins, a film I adore. In the same year, he’s a Lizardo Hospital Guard in another film I adore, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. Ahhh, a good year indeed. Next I see him playing Michelette in Freejack, another better than merely good sf film. The last thing I see him doing film wise is voicing Rick Dicker in the fairly recent Incredibles 2.  Series wise and these are just my highlights, I’ve got him on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as Shel-la in the “Battle Lines” episode, in Highlander: The Series as Mako in the “Under Colour of Authority” episode and as Kommander Nuveen Kroll in short lived Otherworld series. In SeaQuest 2032 also had for two episodes as Maximillian Scully. 
  • Born January 31, 1960 — Grant Morrison, 63. If you can find it, their early stuff on such U.K. publishers as Galaxy Media and Harrier Comics is worth searching out. Not your hero in tights materials at all. For their work in that venue, I’d recommend his run on The Resurrection of Ra’s al Ghul, all of his Doom Patrol work (and the HBO series is based on their work and is quite spectacular), Seven Soldiers and The Multiversity which is spectacularly weird.
  • Born January 31, 1962 — Will McIntosh, 61. Best known for the dozens of short stories he’s written that have been published in magazines including Asimov’s, Interzone, Lightspeed and Strange Horizons. He won a Hugo for his short story “Bridesicle“ at Aussiecon 4.
  • Born January 31, 1973 — Portia de Rossi, 50. She first shows up as Giddy in Sirens which would I’d stretching things to even include as genre adjacent but which is definitely worth watching. For SFF roles, she was in Catholic Church tinged horror film Stigmata, musical Zombie comedy Dead & Breakfast and werewolf horror Cursed. She was Lily Munster in the delightfully weird Mockingbird Lane pilot that never went to series. 
  • Born January 31, 1977 — Kerry Washington, 46. Alicia Masters in Fantastic Four and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. Also played Medical Officer Marissa Brau in 30,000 Leagues Under the Sea. She voices Natalie Certain in Care 3. She also voices Princess Shuri in a short run Black Panther series. 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

  • Non Sequitur applies logic to the idea of colonizing Mars.

(11) WORD POWER. The Hugo Book Club Blog reviews R. F. Kuang’s Babel in “All Words In All Languages Are Metaphors”.

…This is a novel that uses the form of Regency-era historical fantasy to tackle themes of social justice that are at the forefront of today’s cultural vanguard in science fiction and fantasy. In short, it uses the cultural precepts of England at the peak of its colonial power to disclose and critique the social impacts of those systems.

It’s worth noting that although many American authors have attempted to mimic the style of period British prose, the vast majority have failed, often sounding affected, or pompous, or leaden. But instead of clumsy pastiche, Babel feels like a fantasy that William Makepeace Thackeray might have written. Kuang evokes era-appropriate ambiance and regionally-believable prose and dialogue so skillfully that we double-checked to see if she was born and raised in Hertfordshire or Dorset. (We strongly encourage everyone to read the “Author’s Note on Her Representations of Historical England, and of the University of Oxford in Particular,” which precedes the text of the novel.) It is especially gratifying that a book that is deeply concerned with language as a concept uses it so skillfully….

(12) MARVEL’S THIRD ANNUAL X-MEN ELECTION STARTS TODAY. Make your mutant voice heard! For the third consecutive year, Marvel is putting the fate of the X-Men in the hands of fans The 2023 X-Men election will run from Tuesday, January 31 until Friday, February 3. Participants can vote now at marvel.com/xmenvote. The results, along with the full new X-Men team, will be unveiled during the Hellfire Gala in Marvel comics this July.

For three years, the X-Men election has given True Believers everywhere the opportunity to determine the newest protector of Krakoa. In 2021, Polaris won the first-ever election and was featured in Gerry Duggan and Pepe Larraz’s X-MEN. And in 2022, fan-favorite Firestar was chosen to become the newest member of the X-Men, where she then took on a starring role in Duggan’s second year of X-MEN, with artists C.F. Villa and Joshua Cassara.

Once again, several nominations have been accepted to determine the final member of the new X-team. Only one vote is allowed per person, so read about the nominees below and choose wisely!

2023 X-Men Ballot Nominations:

CANNONBALL: One of the original “New Mutants,” the second class of students in the Xavier School, Sam Guthrie has come a long way. His ability to transform into a human cannonball, propelling himself with great force at high speeds while making himself “nigh invulnerable” has taken him from an awkward lanky teen to a married father who is both a former X-Man and Avenger! Why not rocket him to the front lines again?

DAZZLER: Dazzler first made it to the scene as a pop star, using her secret mutant power to transform sound into light as part of her stage show. Becoming a hero and joining the X-Men never dimmed her star-power, even as she learned to use her ability to dazzle as an offensive weapon. Since then, she’s been a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, a freedom fighter, mother to a time paradox, and a vampire hunter. Isn’t it time for Alison Blaire to reclaim center stage?

FRENZY: Superhuman strength, speed, stamina, agility, reflexes and durability have made Joanna Cargill a formidable opponent to any who crosses her. From her early days opposed to the X-Men as a member of Apocalypse’s Alliance of Evil, her time as one of Magneto’s Acolytes, and Mister Sinister’s Marauders, to her time on the side of good with the Jean Grey School, and eventually as an intergalactic ambassador with S.W.O.R.D., Frenzy has what it takes to tackle anything!

JUBILEE: Having joined the X-Men as a teenaged runaway, Jubilation Lee had been shooting explosive fireworks out of her hands into the face of evil for many years when she lost her powers in M-Day. Even so, that didn’t stop her from fighting for what’s right—first as a New Warrior using a power suit, and later as a vampire, going against every monstrous urge that came with that transformation. Cured of that curse and with her mutant powers returned, Jubilee deserves to reclaim her spot on the X-team!

JUGGERNAUT: The non-mutant stepbrother of Professor X, Cain Marko long ago claimed the gem of the ancient “god” Cyttorak, transforming him into the unstoppable brute known as Juggernaut. For many years he was a thorn in the X-Men’s side, frequently rampaging through their lives leaving wreckage behind. More recently, however, Cain has shaken off the evil influence of his dark master, claiming the power of Juggernaut under his own terms and making amends for his past deeds.

PRODIGY: Prodigy possesses the power of psychomimetry—a form of telepathy that grants him the skills and knowledge of those in his proximity. This allows him equal mastery of any skill—mental or physical—as those around him. His ability to retain knowledge from those sources makes him an even more formidable mutant – one who is brilliant at biology, computers, martial arts, and strategic planning. David Alleyne may borrow from others, but he is one of a kind.

(13) PLEISTOCENE PARK. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] A Dallas-based company believes it’s well on its way to resurrecting the woolly mammoth. They’ve targeting 2027 to re-introduce this “cold-resistant elephant“ in Siberia. Or, well, maybe somewhere else given the current political situation. “Woolly Mammoth Coming Back to Life by 2027: De-Extinction Details”.

…The woolly mammoth’s DNA is a 99.6 percent match of the Asian elephant, which leads Colossal to believe it’s well on its way toward achieving its goal. “In the minds of many, this creature is gone forever,” the company says. “But not in the minds of our scientists, nor the labs of our company. We’re already in the process of the de-extinction of the Woolly Mammoth. Our teams have collected viable DNA samples and are editing the genes that will allow this wonderful megafauna to once again thunder through the Arctic.”

Through gene editing, Colossal scientists will eventually create an embryo of a woolly mammoth. They will place the embryo in an African elephant to take advantage of its size and allow it to give birth to the new woolly mammoth. The eventual goal is to then repopulate parts of the Arctic with the new woolly mammoth and strengthen local plant life with the migration patterns and dietary habits of the beast….

(14) STEAM THEME. “New Universal Citywalk LA Restaurant Goes Full Steampunk Willy Wonka” reports Eater – LA.

Fresh off the buzz from the Super Mario Brothers-themed Toadstool Cafe, Universal CityWalk opens a new and immersive dining restaurant called Toothsome Chocolate Emporium & Savory Feast Kitchen on Friday, January 27. This new spot took over the former Hard Rock Cafe and feels very much like a merger of steampunk industrialism cobbled together with the Cheesecake Factory — and sprinkled with plenty of Willy Wonka vibes to boot.

This isn’t a new concept for Toothsome Chocolate Emporium, since there are locations in both Orlando and Beijing, but it is new for Los Angeles. The entire full-service space, complete with a bar area and multi-level dining room, runs with its bigger-than-life theme to extremes and even offers an extensive backstory involving two live dolled-up characters named Penelope and Jacques that’ll rove throughout the eatery to interact with the guests….

(15) ON THE WAY FROM DC. In this video James Gunn shares his vision for the future of the DC Universe and the upcoming slate from DC Studios. “Chapter 1 – Gods and Monsters”.

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, N., Rich Lynch, Olav Rokne, Ben Bird Person, Mike Kennedy, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 1/4/23 Give It To Me Pixelled, Doctor, I Can Scroll It!

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(1) EARLY 2023 AWARDS WARNING. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The SF2 Concatenation has just tweeted its annual, internal poll as to the Best Science Fiction Books and Films of the Year.  This is just a bit of informal fun and most certainly not to be taken too seriously. Having said that, previous years have seen a few works go on to win awards (scroll down the previous link).

(2) DEMOCRACY AT WORK. Meanwhile, the Critters Writers Workshop Readers Poll is taking votes from the public through January 14. Categories added this year: Magical Realism, Positive Future Fiction (novel & short story).

The award is unique for posting a running tally of the leaders in every category while voting is carried on.

I can say that I have actually heard of one of the top ten leaders in the Science Fiction & Fantasy category. (Reflecting on this process, I have to wonder why the Dragon Awards shortlists aren’t filled with the same kinds of indie books.)

(3) KGB. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Christopher M. Cevasco and A. T. Greenblatt on Wednesday, January 11.

Christopher M. Cevasco

Christopher M. Cevasco’s debut novel Beheld: Godiva’s Story (Lethe) was released in April 2022. His stories have appeared in such venues as Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Black Static, and Shades of Blue and Gray: Ghosts of the Civil War (Prime). After ten years in Brooklyn, Chris and his wife moved to Myrtle Beach, SC, where they live with their two children.

A. T. Greenblatt

A. T. Greenblatt is a Nebula award winning short story writer. Her stories and essays have appeared in Slate, Tor.com, Uncanny, and many other places. She has been a finalist for the Hugo, Locus, Sturgeon, and WSFS awards. By day, she is a systems engineer and lives in Brooklyn.

At the KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003 (Just off 2nd Ave, upstairs) on January 11. Begins at 7:00 p.m. Eastern.

(4) PERPETUALLY PEEVED. C. T. May is “mad at Harlan Ellison” for reasons explained in “A Good Story, a Great Story, and the Guy Who Couldn’t Tell Them Apart” at Splice Today.

Harlan Ellison was a very loud man. Even when he made a passing, matter-of-fact observation, it would be noisily matter-of-fact. For instance, “the two men wrote almost identical stories,” he once asserted. The two men, a pair of innocent authors, had done no such thing. But Ellison said otherwise to readers of Again, Dangerous Visions, the long-ago s.f. anthology that he compiled. I’m mad because a dead science fiction author didn’t understand a couple of stories.

Lord Dunsany wrote “Two Bottles of Relish,” and John Collier wrote “The Touch of Nutmeg Makes It.” A condiment and a spice, that’s a parallel. Further, each story involves murder and builds to a wicked one-line payoff, and the goal of each payoff is to chill the blood and flatter reader sophistication by laying before us a bitter, even grotesque secret regarding human nature and what people are capable of. The two stories are even told in a similar way: a character narrates what he saw other men say and do.

Those are some striking points of resemblance. I’d say the task of an intelligent person is to recognize that they’re just a list. Add these things up and you don’t get the same story twice….

Ellison opined on the two stories in his introduction to “Getting Along” by James Blish…

(5) DOINK DOINK. A case of New York publishing law and order is reaching its conclusion: “The End of a Book World Mystery: A Suspect in Manuscript Thefts to Plead Guilty” reports the New York Times.

The mystery captivated the book world: For years, someone impersonated authors and agents, editors and publishers, trying to steal unpublished book manuscripts from high profile authors like Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan and Ethan Hawke, but also from debut novelists and writers of more obscure works.

Now, a resolution to the yearslong scheme is near. On Friday, Filippo Bernardini is expected to plead guilty to wire fraud in front of a magistrate court judge in Manhattan, according to an email from the office of the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York that was sent to victims on Tuesday.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Bernardini early last year, saying he had “impersonated, defrauded, and attempted to defraud, hundreds of individuals” over five or more years, gaining access to hundreds of unpublished manuscripts in the process….

(6) LOOK FOR THE UNION LABEL. “Video game workers form Microsoft’s first US labor union” – the Associated Press has details.

A group of video game testers is forming Microsoft’s first labor union in the U.S., which will also be the largest in the video game industry.

The Communications Workers of America said Tuesday that a majority of about 300 quality-assurance workers at Microsoft video game subsidiary ZeniMax Studios has voted to join the union.

Microsoft already told the CWA it would accept the formation of the union at its Maryland video game subsidiary, fulfilling a promise it made to try to build public support for its $68.7-billion acquisition of another big game company, Activision Blizzard….

… The unionization campaign accelerated thanks to Microsoft’s ongoing bid to buy Santa Monica game giant Activision Blizzard. Microsoft, which is based in Redmond, Wash., made a June pact with the CWA union to stay neutral if Activision Blizzard workers sought to form a union….

(7) LET’S YOU AND HIM FIGHT. [Item by Michael Kennedy.] Is it punching down or punching up if Wolverine attacks Deadpool?

Actor Ryan Reynolds has been receiving Oscar attention for his song “Good Afternoon” in the Christmas flick Spirited. Hugh Jackman, who will be playing Wolverine opposite Reynolds‘ Deadpool in the upcoming Deadpool sequel, has thoughts. His video tweet jokes, “Ryan Reynolds getting a nomination in the best song category would make the next year of my life insufferable. I have to spend a year with him shooting Wolverine and Deadpool. Trust me, it would be impossible. It would be a problem.”

Variety analyzes Jackman’s tweet here: “Hugh Jackman Roasts Ryan Reynolds: Don’t Give ‘Spirited’ an Oscar Nom”.

Ryan Reynolds has earned himself a spot on the Oscar shortlist for best song for “Good Afternoon,” from his Christmas movie “Spirited” with Will Ferrell. But Hugh Jackman, who is preparing to star alongside Reynolds in the upcoming “Deadpool” sequel, hopes the Academy refrains from further boosting Reynolds’ ego with a nomination….

Or you can just watch it yourself.

(8) SUZY MCKEE CHARNAS (1939-2023). Author Suzy McKee Charnas died January 4. The author of many groundbreaking books (to quote Catherine Lundoff), her first published book, Walk to the End of the World, appeared in 1974 and later won a retrospective Otherwise Award. Her novella “Unicorn Tapestry” won a 1981 Nebula. Her short story “Boobs” won the Hugo Award in 1990.

Charnas’ story “Beauty and the Opéra or The Phantom Beast”  was shortlisted for the 1997 Hugo, World Fantasy, and Theodore Sturgeon awards.

She was a three-time winner of the Otherwise Award for Motherlines (1996; retrospective), Walk to the End of the World (1996, retrospective), and The Conqueror’s Child (2000).

Her series The Holdfast Chronicles was named to the Gaylactic Spectrum Hall of Fame in 2003.

The Kingdom of Kevin Malone won the Mythopoeic Award for Children’s Fantasy (1994).

Read more about her writing in John Clute’s SFE entry: Charnas, Suzy McKee. Her own website is: Suzy McKee Charnas science fiction.

Michael Swanwick also shared a significant memory in “Suzy McKee Charnas Meets Her Ideal Reader”.

…I met Ms. Charnas only once, back in the eighties, and I doubt I made much of an impression on her. But it’s worth recounting because that was the time she first met Judith Moffett.

Judy Moffett began as a serious poet (I greatly admire her collection Whinny Moor Crossing, the title poem in particular), fell into science fiction almost by accident, and quickly became an intensely admired novelist and short fiction writer. She was and is one of those tough-minded, tolerate-no-nonsense, totally admirable women who find in genre a place where they can think and do exactly as they like. And she admired the hell out of Suzy McKee Charnas. Most particularly, as with me, for The Vampire Tapestry.

Judy’s day job was as an academic at the University of  Pennsylvania, where she taught, among other things, a science fiction class. As part of which, that year, the class did a reading of a script–I think written by Judy, but it’s been a long time–of one of the component stories of the Tapestry. The protagonist was female but the student reading her lines was male.

Judy wrote to Suzy McKee Charnas telling her about the project and inviting her to come and witness an encore performance. An invitation which was readily accepted….

Suzy McKee Charnas accepting a Nebula Award in 1981. Photos by and (c) Andrew Porter.

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Waffles, or rather food in Emma Bull’s Finder: A Novel of the Borderlands

We sat at the round table that was just the right size for two; I don’t know if the Ticker ever has dinner parties. If she does, she can probably find another table. This one was made of some highly-polished golden wood in high Art Nouveau style. Heaven only knows how these things come into Bordertown, or, once they have, why they should land on Tick-Tick’s doorstep instead of in some parlor on Dragonstooth Hill.

The alcohol was gone from the liqueur, the strawberries were warmed and softened, and some of the sugars had caramelized. The waffles were crisp all around the edges and soft in the middle. And the Ticker had stopped me just in time on the whipped cream. There was hot tea to wash it down with, which tasted something like Darjeeling and something like not. It was related to last night’s shower: It was a meal to make me grovellingly happy to be alive.

— Orient in Emma Bull’s Finder: a Novel of The Borderlands

I have written this novel up here as one of my favorite novels but I’ve don’t think I mentioned in that review that food plays a role in it. Another scene takes place in the Hard Luck Cafe. 

Here’s the best quote from the part of that novel: 

It was warm inside in spite of the fans, and busy, and noisy, and remarkably like a combination of farmhouse kitchen, private club, and arts salon. Anyone who makes trouble at the Hard Luck Cafe is considered an incurable misfit, even within the loose social contract of Bordertown, and is not welcome anywhere, to anything. Consequently, the Hard Luck’s habituTs include humans, elves, and halfies, people from Dragontown and shimmers from up on the Tooth, painters and gang leaders. It’s such a desirable place to simply be that it’s almost too much to hope that the food is good. The food is good.

I peered at the back wall and the blackboard that serves as menu. The Hard Luck is a cooperative, and the people working the kitchen cook whatever they feel like that day. Certain things are almost always availableùburgers for the philistines, for instance—but if the staff decides they want to do Chinese that day, that’s what’s for dinner. If you don’t like it, that’s—all together now — Your Hard Luck. That day it looked like mixed down-home: fish chowder, lentil and spinach casserole, stuffed peppers, Brunswick stew.

Finally I need to mention the strawberries:

I sliced strawberries with all my attention. They were particularly fine ones, large and white clear through without a hint of pink. (Wild Borderland strawberries are one of the Border’s little jokes. They form bright red, and fade as they ripen. No strawberry has ever been so sweet.)

The novel is so richly, not just with these note, but everything that it brings the unnamed city, its inhabitants and the surrounding area to a quite vivid reality.  As I said in my post on the novel, I highly recommend Finder. But then I send Will and Emma dark chocolate which tells you how much I like them, so why wouldn’t I? 

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born January 4, 1785 — Jacob Grimm. Here solely for two reasons, the first being that he and his brother were the first to systematically collect folktales from the peasantry and write them down. Second is that the number of genre novels and short stories that used the Grimms’ Fairy Tales as their source for ideas is, well, if not infinite certainly a really high number. I’d wager that taking just those stories in any of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror would get quite a number based on these tales. (Died 1863.)
  • Born January 4, 1927 — Barbara Rush, 96. She won a Golden Globe Award as the most promising female newcomer for being Ellen Fields in It Came From Outer Space. She portrayed Nora Clavicle in Batman, and was found in other genre programs such as the revival version of Outer Limits, Night Gallery, The Bionic Woman and The Twilight Zone.
  • Born January 4, 1946 — Ramsey Campbell, 77. My favorite novel by him is without doubt The Darkest Part of the Woods which has a quietly building horror to it. I know he’s better-known for his sprawling (pun full intended) Cthulhu mythology writings but I never got into those preferring his other novels such as his Solomon Kane movie novelization which is quite superb.
  • Born January 4, 1958 — Matt Frewer, 65. His greatest role has to be as Max Headroom on the short-lived series of the same name. Amazingly I think it still stands thirty-five years later as SF well-crafted. Just a taste of his later series SF appearances include playing Jim Taggart, scientist  and dog catcher on Eureka, Pestilence in Supernatural, Dr. Kirschner in 12 Monkeys and Carnage in Altered Carbon. His film genre appearance list is just as impressive but I’ll single out Supergirl, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, The Stand, Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (oh do guess where he is in it) and lastly Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb, a series of films that I really like.
  • Born January 4, 1960 — Michael Stipe, 63. Lead singer of R.E.M. which has done a few songs that I could say are genre adjacent. But no, I’ve got him here for being involved in a delightful project called Stay Awake: Various Interpretations of Music from Vintage Disney Films. Lots of great songs given interesting new recordings. His contribution was “Little April Shower” from Bambi which he covered along with Natalie Merchant, Michael Stipe, Mark Bingham and The Roches. Fun stuff indeed! 
  • Born January 4, 2000 — Addy Miller, 23. She is on the Birthday List for being Sarah in Plan 9. Really? They remade that movie? Why? And yes, she played A Walker in that other show. My fav role by her is because of the title, it was a short called Ghost Trek: Goomba Body Snatchers Mortuary Lockdown, in which she was Scary Carrie Carmichael. And yes, you can watch it here.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • Speed Bump turns a miraculous moment into a mundane complaint. (And yet it’s not about social media…)

(12) BRACE YOURSELVES. Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki will be part of HWA New York’s  “Galactic Terrors” online reading series on January 12, along with Meghan Arcuri and Nathan Carson, with co-hosts Carol Gyzander and James Chambers. The writers will read their stories live and take questions.

(13) CONTINUED NEXT ROCK. Atlas Obscura has pictures of a “Hidden J.R.R. Tolkien Quote – Natural Bridge, Virginia”.

VIRGINIA’S NATURAL BRIDGE IS a wonder in and of itself. It’s no surprise that North America’s largest natural land bridge has been drawing people to it for centuries. But those who visit Natural Bridge State Park just to see the enormous stone structure miss risking one of its hidden gems.

Head to Cedar Creek, and you’ll find a literary surprise. There, etched into the side of a large rock, is a J.R.R. Tolkien quote….

(14) HISTORIC SOUND RECORDINGS PRESERVED. “Wax Cylinders Hold Audio From a Century Ago. The Library Is Listening.” And the New York Times eavesdrops.

 The first recording, swathed in sheets of distortion, was nonetheless recognizable as a child’s voice — small, nervous, encouraged by his father — wishing a very Merry Christmas to whoever was listening.

The second recording, though still noisy, adequately captured the finale of the second act of “Aida,” performed by the German singer Johanna Gadski at the Metropolitan Opera House in the spring of 1903.

And the third recording was the clearest yet: the waltz from “Romeo and Juliet,” also from the Met, sung by the Australian soprano Nellie Melba.

Accessed by laptop in a conference room at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the recordings had been excavated and digitized from a much older source: wax cylinders, an audio format popularized in the late 19th century as the first commercial means of recording sound. These particular documentations originated with Lionel Mapleson, an English-born librarian for the Metropolitan Opera, who made hundreds of wax cylinder recordings, capturing both the turn-of-the-century opera performances he saw as part of his job and the minutiae of family life….

…These particular cylinders were previously available to the library in the 1980s, when they were transferred to magnetic tape and released as part of a six-volume LP set compiling the Mapleson recordings. After that, they were returned to the Mapleson family, while the greater collection stayed with the library. But, Wood said, “there’s people all over the world that are convinced that a new transfer of those cylinders would reveal more audio details than the previous ones.”

Wax cylinders were traditionally played on a phonograph, where, similar to a modern record player, a stylus followed grooves in the wax and translated the information into sound. The Endpoint machine uses a laser that places less stress on the cylinders, allowing it to take a detailed imprint without sacrificing physical integrity, and to adjust for how some cylinders have warped over time. The machine can retrieve information from broken cylinder shards that are incapable of being traditionally played, which can then be digitally reconstituted into a complete recording.

Within the next few years, the library hopes to digitize both the cylinders and the diaries, and make them available to the public. The non-Mapleson cylinders in the library’s collection are also eligible to be digitized, though Wood said that process will be determined based on requests for certain cylinders. The library’s engineers are shared across departments, and with a backlog of thousands, she said, “We have to wait our turn.”…

(15) TAILS OF CLI-FI. The Scientist Magazine says “Animals Are Shape-Shifting in Response to a Warming World”.

At the South African nature preserve where Miya Warrington and colleagues study Cape ground squirrels (Xerus inauris), the maximum daily temperature has increased by about 2.5 °C in just 18 years. The animals have evolved a quiver of tactics to tolerate the region’s sweltering heat, says Warrington, a conservation ecologist at the University of Manitoba. Sprawling flat on the ground in a pose called splooting, for example, helps the animals shed heat from their less furry undersides. The squirrels also take shady respites under their bushy tails, which they curl above their heads like tiny parasols. When it’s really hot, the fossorial mammals retreat to their burrows to cool off. But Warrington warns that, even with all these options for keeping cool, “still they could be at the limits of their tolerance” due to such a rapid climactic shift.

That intense pressure could be why their bodies have begun to change shape, Warrington says. She found that, over the course of just under two decades, the squirrels’ already incredibly large hind feet, which may help dissipate heat, have grown relative to their body sizes by about 11 percent. Meanwhile, their spine lengths have become about 6 percent shorter….

(16) THE NEXT CRISIS. “’Foundation’ Season 2 Release Date on Apple TV Plus, Trailer” discussed at TV Line.

Apple TV+ has unveiled a sneak peek at the upcoming season, which you can check out above, featuring Gaal making her way home and Brother Day bracing for a potential war. New episodes will arrive this summer, the streamer has announced.

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Brown Robin.]

Pixel Scroll 12/2/22 Pixel Plus X

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(1) STOCKHOLM BIDS FOR 2023 SMOFCON. A group is bidding Stockholm, Sweden at the site of the 2023 Smofcon. Their proposed dates are December 1-3, 2023, and the venue would be a culture center called Dieselverkstaden in Sickla. In Dieselverkstaden there are conference rooms, a public library, a room for indoor climbing, a restaurant and a café. The group has organized several Swecons in the same place.

The convention venue is a culture center called Dieselverkstaden in Sickla, where there are conference rooms, a public library, a room for indoor climbing, a restaurant and a café. Sickla is a suburb of Stockholm.

The bid committee members are Carolina Gómez Lagerlöf (chair) Tomas Cronholm, Britt-Louise Viklund, Marika Lövström, Nina Grensjö, Ann Olsson Rousset, and Shana Worthen.

(2) FREE EDITING PANEL. The Omega Sci-Fi Awards invite anyone, including those writing a story for The Roswell Award or the New Suns Climate Fiction Award, to get ready to edit with the pros.

Free registration here for this one-hour panel on Thursday, December 8 at 12pm PST to hear advice on sharpening short science fiction stories. Featuring: Tamara Krinsky, Howard V. Hendrix, Gwen E. Kirby, and Gary Phillips.

(3) KGB. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Richard Kadrey and Cassandra Khaw on Wednesday, December 14, 2022 at 7:00 p.m. Eastern.

RICHARD KADREY

Richard Kadrey is the New York Times bestselling author of the Sandman Slim supernatural noir series. Sandman Slim was included in Amazon’s “100 Science Fiction & Fantasy Books to Read in a Lifetime.” Some of Kadrey’s other books include King Bullet, The Grand Dark, and Butcher Bird. He’s also written screenplays and for comics such as Heavy Metal, Lucifer, and Hellblazer.

CASSANDRA KHAW

Cassandra Khaw is an award-winning game writer, and a Bram Stoker, World Fantasy, Ignyte, British Fantasy, Shirley Jackson, and Locus Award finalist. They have written for video games like Sunless Skies, Gotham Knights, Wasteland 3, and Rainbow 6: Siege. Khaw lives in New York, and spends a lot of time lifting large weights before putting them down.

At the KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003. (Just off 2nd Ave, upstairs)

(4) WHAT MADE THE POHL HOLE? On August 22 the IAU approved naming a crater on Mars after Frederik Pohl. Which is why his name appears on maps in news articles today bearing headlines like “Giant Asteroid Unleashed a Devastating Martian Megatsunami, Evidence Suggests”.

Multiple lines of evidence suggest that Mars wasn’t always the desiccated dustbowl it is today.

In fact, the red planet was once so wet and sloshy that a megatsunami was unleashed, crashing across the landscape like watery doom. What caused this devastation? According to new research, a giant asteroid impact, comparable to Earth’s Chicxulub impact 66 million years ago – the one that killed the dinosaurs.

Researchers led by planetary scientist Alexis Rodriguez of the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona have located an enormous impact crater that, they say, is the most likely origin yet of the mystery wave.

They named it Pohl and located it within an area scoured with catastrophic flood erosion, which was first identified in the 1970s, on what could be the edge of an ancient ocean.

When NASA’s Viking 1 probe landed on Mars in 1976, near a large flood channel system called Maja Valles, it found something strange: not the features expected of a landscape transformed by a megaflood, but a boulder-strewn plain.

A team of scientists led by Rodriguez determined in a 2016 paper that this was the result of tsunami waves, extensively resurfacing the shoreline of an ancient Martian ocean….

(5) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to bite into blood sausage with Tim Waggoner in episode 186 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

Tim Waggoner is a writer of dark fantasy and horror whose first short story was published in 1992 and first novel came out in 2001. Since then he’s published more than 50 novels and seven collections of short stories. He’s written tie-in fiction based on Supernatural, Grimm, The X-Files, Alien, Doctor Who, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Transformers, and other franchises, and he’s written novelizations for films such as Halloween Kills, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter and Kingsman: The Golden Circle. His most recent original novel, We Will Rise, was published earlier this year.

He’s the author of the acclaimed horror-writing guide Writing in the Dark, which won the Bram Stoker Award in 2021. He won another Bram Stoker Award in 2021 in the category of short nonfiction for his article “Speaking of Horror,” and in 2017 he received the Bram Stoker Award in Long Fiction for his novella The Winter Box. In addition, he’s been a multiple finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and the Scribe Award, and a one-time finalist for the Splatterpunk Award. In addition to writing, he’s also a full-time tenured professor who teaches creative writing and composition at Sinclair College in Dayton, Ohio.

We discussed whether being a horror writer gives him any special insights into the pandemic, the true meaning of his latest novel’s very specific dedication, the patience the writing life requires, what his agent doesn’t want him to let his editors know, the reason ghost stories have never struck him as scary, how to write about people unlike yourself and get it right, the unusual way he decided which characters would live and which would die, why Psycho was one of the best movie experiences he ever had, the most difficult thing a writing teacher can teach, and much more.

(6) FANCAST ILLUMINATED. Cora Buhlert has posted another Fancast Spotlight for the “Fiction Fans Podcast”.

What format do you use for your podcast or channel and why did you choose this format?

We decided to do audio-only because it’s lower-key. Video editing is a lot more effort and also would require that we look at least semi-presentable when recording.

In terms of episode format, we always spend some time chatting about a good thing that’s happened recently and what we’re currently reading (not podcast-related) at the beginning of the episode, before we actually start discussing the book of the week. We like to have an initial section where we talk about non-spoiler themes or character motivations, before we dive in to a meatier full-on spoiler discussion of the book. We figured that if we were listening to a podcast about a book we hadn’t read, we would want a chance to stop listening before any major plot twists were spoiled for us. Be the podcast you want to listen to, right?

(7)  WHAT SHOULD WIN THE REH NEXT YEAR? The 2023 Robert E. Howard Awards are open for nominations.

We are pleased to announce the opening of nominations for the 2023 Robert E. Howard Awards starting on November 30, 2022. The Robert E. Howard Foundation has revised the rules and categories for the awards, so please read over the information below. Some categories have changed, and there is a new category for works of fiction. We have also brought back the Black River Award. Under the new rules, nominations are due in to the Awards committee by January 15, 2023, with the Awards committee selecting the top nominees in each category for the final ballot by January 31, 2023. The Final ballot will be uploaded on a website with its address sent out to all current Robert E. Howard Foundation members for voting on the winners on February 15, 2023.

You do not have to currently be a member of the Robert E. Howard Foundation to send in nominees…

(8) DRAWING A CROWD. I hadn’t noticed how this local event is blowing up: “LA Comic Con Expects 140,000 Fans This Weekend — And Plans To Keep Growing” reports LAist.

L.A. Comic Con had a rocky start. In its early years, issues ranged from a lineup without star talent to fire marshals shutting the doors and not letting more people inside.

Cut to this year, when one of its major guests is actor Simu Liu, best known for playing Marvel superhero Shang-Chi. Organizers also managed to bring in Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in recent years. Convention CEO Chris DeMoulin notes that getting a current Marvel star is still unusual for L.A. Comic Con — the local convention that’s still not at the same level in the convention world as marquee events like San Diego’s Comic-Con International or New York Comic Con.

Still, what started as a rickety alternative has quickly grown, now featuring a who’s who of guests from the wider universe of pop culture…

(9) MEMORY LANE.

1912 — [By Cat Eldridge.] Peter Pan in Kensington Garden

It of course is a statue of the character in Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, the 1904 novel by Barrie which actually started life two distinct works by Barrie, The Little White Bird, 1902, with chapters 13–18 published in Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, 1906, and the West End stage play “Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up”, 1904.

It was commissioned and paid for by Barrie and sculpted  by Sir George Frampton, a Scottish sculptor best remembered as for having been commissioned by the Royal Family  during the Diamond Jubilee to sculpt a statute of Queen Victoria.

Now let’s talk about this statue which is located in London in Kensington Garden. If you should visit, you can find it to the west of the Long Water, in the same spot as Peter lands his bird-nest boat in “The Little White Bird” story.  This is close to Barrie’s former home on Bayswater Road. 

Barrie hired workers to put the statue in Kensington Gardens without permission from the City of London or the Borough of Kensington.

He published a notice in The Times of London newspaper the following day, May 1, 1912: “There is a surprise in store for the children who go to Kensington Gardens to feed the ducks in the Serpentine this morning. Down by the little bay on the south-western side of the tail of the Serpentine they will find a May-day gift by Mr J.M. Barrie, a figure of Peter Pan blowing his pipe on the stump of a tree, with fairies and mice and squirrels all around. It is the work of Sir George Frampton, and the bronze figure of the boy who would never grow up is delightfully conceived.”

It stands about fourteen feet and is shaped a tree stump, topped by a young boy, about life size for an eight-year-old, blowing a musical instrument, maybe a usually thought to be pan pipes. 

The sides of the stump are decorated with mice, rabbits, squirrels and fairies. 

Barrie had intended the boy to be based on a photograph of Michael Llewelyn Davies wearing a Peter Pan costume, but Frampton instead, not at all pleased with him as Peter Pan, chose another model, perhaps George Goss or William A. Harwood, though no one is really certain. Barrie was quite disappointed by the results, claiming the statue “didn’t show the Devil in Peter”. 

In 1928, vandals tarred and feather sculpture. The bronze surface was exceedingly difficult to clean.

Royal Parks replaced the plinth, the base below the animals and faeries, in 2019, which caused great controversy. It had deteriorated badly due to exposure to weather and salt.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born December 2, 1937 — Brian Lumley, 85. Writer of Horror who came to distinction in the 1970s, both with his writing in the Cthulhu Mythos and by creating his own character Titus Crow. In the 1980s, he created the Necroscope series, which first centered on speaker-to-the-dead Harry Keogh. His short story “Necros” was adapted into an episode of the horror anthology series The Hunger. His works have received World Fantasy, British Fantasy, and Stoker Award nominations; the short story “Fruiting Bodies” won a British Fantasy Award. Both the Horror Writers Association – for which he was a past president – and the World Fantasy Convention have honored him with their Lifetime Achievement Awards.
  • Born December 2, 1946 — David Macaulay, 76. British-born American illustrator and writer who is genre adjacent I’d say. Creator of such cool works as Cathedral, The New Way Things Work which has he updated for the computer technology age, and I really like one of latest works, Crossing on Time: Steam Engines, Fast Ships, and a Journey to the New World. 
  • Born December 2, 1946 — Josepha Sherman. Writer and folklorist who was a Compton Crook Award winner for The Shining Falcon which was based on the Russian fairy tale “The Feather of Finist the Falcon”. She was a prolific writer both on her own and with other writer such as Mecedes Lackey with whom she wrote A Cast of Corbies and two Buffyverse novels with Laura Anne Gilman. I knew her personally as a folklorist first and that is she was without peer writing such works as Rachel the Clever: And Other Jewish Folktales and  Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts: The Subversive Folklore of Childhood that she wrote with T K F Weisskopf.  Neat lady who died far too soon. Let me leave you with an essay she wrote on Winter for Green Man twenty five years ago: “Josepha Sherman’s Winter Queen Speech” . (Died 2012.)
  • Born December 2, 1952 — O. R. Melling  70. Writer from Ireland. For novels by her that I’d recommend, the Chronicles of Faerie series, consisting of The Hunter’s Moon, The Summer King, The Light-Bearer’s Daughter, and The Book of Dreams are quite excellent; the first won a Schwartz Award for Best YA-Middle Grade Book. For more adult fare, her People of the Great Journey: Would You Go if You Were Called? – featuring a fantasy writer who is invited to take part in a week-long retreat on a magical, remote Scottish island – I’d highly recommend.
  • Born December 2, 1968 — Lucy Liu, 54. She was Joan Watson on Elementary in its impressive seven-year run. Her other genre role, and it’s been long running, has been voicing Silvermist in the Disney Fairies animated franchise. I kid you not. She’s had a few genre one-offs on The X-Files, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and the Rise: Blood Hunter film, but not much overall haughty she did show up in Luke Cage.
  • Born December 2, 1971 — Frank Cho, 51. Artist and Illustrator from South Korea who is best known as creator of the ever so stellar Liberty Meadows series, as well as work on Hulk, Mighty Avengers, and Shanna the She-Devil for Marvel Comics, and Jungle Girl for Dynamite Entertainment. His works have received Ignatz, Haxtur, Charles M. Schulz , and National Cartoonists Society’s Awards, as well as Eisner, Harvey, and Chesley Award nominations, and his documentary Creating Frank Cho’s World won an Emmy Award.

(11) ANTI-ANTICIPATION. [Item by Cora Buhlert.] Comic writer and artist Tim Seeley posted this rather sad Tweet about the effect the rise of toxic fandom has on creators: 

It’s not certain which comic he is referring to. Several people assume that he was referring to the upcoming Masters of the Universe comics, since that normally friendly fandom has attracted a bunch of toxic jerks of late, but the new Masters of the Universe comics won’t be out until February 2023. Personally, I suspect it’s Hexware, which is debuting next week.

(12) SPOILER, MAYBE? “Disney Robbed Us of Maarva’s Choice Words for the Empire in the ‘Star Wars: Andor’ Finale” says The Mary Sue.

…In an interview with Empire Magazine, star Denise Gough talked about her first day on set and let us all know the truth about Maarva Andor’s speech at her own funeral. She really did say “Fuck the empire” in it. “My first day was Ferrix,” she said. “I was given my two Death Troopers – one of whom had to be trained to run like a Death Trooper and not like a musical theatre star – and I couldn’t help myself, I just started doing the [hums the Imperial March]. Then, everyone started doing it.”…

(13) GOSH. The Atlantic’s Marina Koren assures everyone “’2001: A Space Odyssey’ Is the Most Overhyped Space Movie”. (Behind a paywall.)

As the outer-space correspondent at The Atlantic, I spend a lot of time looking beyond Earth’s atmosphere. I’ve watched footage of a helicopter flying on Mars. I’ve watched a livestream of NASA smashing a spacecraft into an asteroid on purpose. I’ve seen people blast off on rockets with my own eyes. But I have never seen 2001: A Space Odyssey.

This is an enormous oversight, apparently. The 1968 film is considered one of the greatest in history and its director, Stanley Kubrick, a cinematic genius. And, obviously, it’s about space. Surely a space reporter should see it—and surely a reporter should take notes.

What follows is my real-time reaction to watching 2001 on a recent evening, edited for length and clarity. Even though the movie has been out for 54 years, I feel a duty to warn you that there are major spoilers ahead. (If you’re suddenly compelled to watch 2001 first, you can rent it for $3.99 on YouTube.)…

(14) STREAMING LEADERS. JustWatch says this is what people were watching in November.

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Andrew Porter, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Cora Buhlert, James Bacon, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, JJ, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 11/7/22 Make Me A Poster From An Old Pixel Scroll

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(1) SFPA ELECTS NEW PRESIDENT. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association has voted Colleen Anderson to be their next SFPA President. Anderson previously served SFPA as Vice-President.

The vote breakdown by percentages was:

Colleen Anderson – 38%
Christina Sng – 31%
Brian U. Garrison – 31%

Outgoing SFPA President Bryan Thao Worra, who held the office for six years, said:

I thank all of our members who took the time to vote this year, and I thank all of the candidates who ran for President. I welcome Colleen with joy and the confidence of having worked closely with her as the Vice-President of SFPA that she is at once familiar with our traditions and key elements of our organization, its bylaws, and our opportunities and challenges. I have no doubt that she will bring her talent and vision to making this an effective and dynamic organization that is inclusive and empowering, expanding the passion for speculative verse around the globe in all of its many forms. To all of the members of SFPA, past and present, please accept my gratitude for all that you have done in service to speculative poetry and the association. The last 6 years have been some of the most important and inspiring years of my life, and I enjoyed seeing how vibrant science fiction, fantasy, and horror poetry has continued to grow. I hope you all will continue to reach out to one another and the very best within us as writers and kindred spirits.

(2) DIAGRAM PRIZE SHORTLIST. “Oddest Book Title of the Year shortlist announced for The Diagram Prize 2022” reports The Bookseller.

A six-book shortlist has been released for the Bookseller Diagram Prize for the Oddest Book Title of the Year. The winning title will be chosen by members of the public via an online vote, and a winner announced December 2.

The shortlisted titles are:

  • Frankenstein Was a Vegetarian: Essays on Food Choice, Identity and Symbolismby Michael Owen Jones
  • The Many Lives of Scary Clowns: Essays on Pennywise, Twisty, the Joker, Krusty and More by Ron Riekki
  • Jane Austen and the Buddha: Teachers of Enlightenment by Kathryn Duncan
  • RuPedagogies of Realness: Essays on Teaching and Learning With RuPaul’s Drag Race by Lindsay Bryde & Tommy Mayberry
  • Smuggling Jesus Back into the Church by Andrew Fellows
  • What Nudism Exposes: An Unconventional History of Postwar Canada by Mary-Ann Shantz

The award was conceived in 1978 by Trevor Bounford and Bruce Robertson, co-founders of publishing solutions firm the Diagram Group, as a way to avoid boredom at the Frankfurt Book Fair. There is no prize for the winning author or publisher, but traditionally a “passable bottle of claret” is given to the nominator of the winning entry. 

(3) TWITTER DEFECTIONS. How many are leaving? In an unpdate, John Scalzi says his Twitter following now has dropped by 3,000 since Musk took over.

(4) KGB. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Eileen Gunn and Stephanie Feldman at the KBG Bar on Wednesday, November9, 2022 at 7:00 p.m. Eastern.

EILEEN GUNN

Eileen Gunn writes short stories. Her fiction has received the Nebula Award in the US and the Sense of Gender Award in Japan, and has been nominated for the Hugo, Philip K. Dick, World Fantasy and James Tiptree, Jr. awards. She will be reading from new work.

STEPHANIE FELDMAN

Stephanie Feldman is the author of the novels Saturnalia and the award-winning debut The Angel of Losses. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Catapult Magazine, Electric Literature, Flash Fiction Online, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and The Rumpus.

Location: The KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003. (Just off 2nd Ave, upstairs)

(5) AMAZING KICKSTARTER. New Amazing Stories, LLC publisher Kermit Woodall announced the “Amazing Stories Annual Special: SOL SYSTEM by Steve Davidson — Kickstarter” today.

The Amazing Stories Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign begins.  And once again, Amazing Stories hopes to harness the energy of the science fiction community to raise the funds to release a special issue featuring some of the biggest names in SF today speculating about the future of mankind in our solar system!

Stretch goals will be used to increase author and artist pay and to fund Amazing’s second ONLINE science fiction convention — AmazingCon II. There are also numerous contributor rewards, including copies of the special issue, some of our books and anthologies, AmazingCon convention tickets, and other exciting bonuses!

(6) BEEN THERE! Artist Kieran Wright tells Print Magazine how he fabricates small models of iconic LA buildings as a hobby. “Kieran Wright’s Miniature Models of LA Buildings Reflect His Big Love for the City”. I live only a couple of miles from one of his subjects, the Aztec Hotel. My barber shop is in the building. John and Bjo Trimble were volunteers involved in its restoration a couple of decades ago.

(7) SFF BIBLIOGRAPHY. Kenneth R. Johnson has produced another SF bibliography, “Futuristic Romances”. It’s been posted by Phil Stephenson-Payne on the Homeville website.  It documents a little-known series of Science Fiction paperbacks. 

(8) JOANNA RUSS FICTION. The Library of America’s “Story of the Week” is Joanna Russ’s “When It Changed” (1972), originally published in Again, Dangerous Visions.

…“There are plenty of images of women in science fiction. There are hardly any women.”

So concludes Joanna Russ’s often-reprinted essay, “The Image of Women in Science Fiction,” which first appeared in 1970 in the seventh and last issue of Red Clay Reader, a relatively obscure literary annual. Three years earlier, Russ had published her debut book, the sword-and-sorcery space adventure Picnic on Paradise, which was a finalist for the Nebula Award and a notable break from the conventions and stereotypes common in science fiction and fantasy during the previous decades. “Long before I became a feminist in any explicit way,” Russ told an interviewer in 1975, “I had turned from writing love stories about women in which women were the losers, and adventure stories about men in which men were winners, to writing adventure stories about a woman in which the woman won.”…

(9) MEMORY LANE.

1992 — [By Cat Eldridge.] Next Generation’s “A Fistful of Datas” 

Spot meows and jumps onto Data’s console.
“Spot, you are disrupting my ability to work.”
After Data moves her to the floor, Spot meows and jumps back up.
“Vamoose, you little varmint!” in a Texan accent. 
— Next Generation’s “A Fistful of Datas” 

Oh let’s get silly. I mean really, really silly. Now understand before writing this essay on the Next Generation’s “A Fistful of Datas”  which aired thirty years ago on this date according to MemoryAlpha, that I rewatched it on Paramount + earlier today. 

MASSIVE HOLODECK SIZED SPOILERS FOLLOW. REALLY I MEAN IT. 

Patrick Stewart directed this silly affair.  The story by Robert Hewitt Wolfe with the actual  script by Robert Hewitt Wolfe and Brannon Braga. Now that we’ve got those details out of the way, let’s get to the story.  

We get such deliciously comical things as Data in drag, really we do. How we came to this is Worf reluctantly joins his son Alexander in a holodeck story in Deadwood along with Deanna Troi. 

Now that wouldn’t be a problem but Data proposes that they use his psitronic brain as a backup to the ship’s computer in case something goes. ( Huh? WTF?) While interfacing the two, an energy surge happens. (Love those surges — haven’t they ever heard of buffers?) 

Now it gets weird. Data suddenly, and really for no reason, is a pastiche of the Old West. A bit of this, a bit of that, a dollop of something else. 

Both the hologram town of Deadwood and all of the performers here in their Western garb are oh so perfect. 

Unfortunately for the Enterprise crew, the interactive characters physically resemble and have the same enhanced abilities as Data. Really Bad Idea.

WE ARE OFF THE HOLODECK NOW.

“A Fistful of Datas” is taken from Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars, the Clint Eastwood film, the very first Spaghetti Western. The first title pitched was “The Good, the Bad and the Klingon”. Really it was. 

Brent Spiner in Captains’ Logs: The Unauthorized Complete Trek Voyages said that “I had the chance to play five or six characters in a show and Patrick directed, which made it additionally fun. It’s certainly the most fun episode I’ve had to do and I would have liked to have done a show called ‘For a Few Datas More.’”

It has been rated one of the best Next Generation episodes with some comparing it to “Shore Leave”. It won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Sound Mixing for a Drama Series.

It of course is available for viewing on Paramount +.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born November 7, 1910 — Pearl Argyle. Catherine CabalI in the 1936 Things to Come as written by H.G. Wells based off his “The Shape of Things to Come” story. Being a dancer, she also appeared in 1926 The Fairy Queen opera by Henry Purcell, with dances by Marie Rambert and Frederick Ashton. Her roles were Dance of the Followers of Night, an attendant on Summer, and Chaconne. At age thirty-six, she died of a sudden massive cerebral hemorrhage while visiting her husband in New York. (Died 1947.)
  • Born November 7, 1914 — R. A. Lafferty. Writer known for somewhat eccentric usage of language.  His first novel Past Master would set a lifelong pattern of seeing his works nominated for Hugo and Nebula Awards as novels but generally not winning either though he won a Best Short Story Hugo for “Eurema’s Dam” at Torcon II. He received a World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award, and has been honored with the Cordwainer Smith Foundation’s Rediscovery award. (Died 2002.)
  • Born November 7, 1950 — Lindsay Duncan, 72. Adelaide Brooke in the Tenth Doctor‘s “The Waters of Mars” story and the recurring role Lady Smallwood  on Sherlock in “His Last Vow”, “The Six Thatchers” and “The Lying Detective”. She’s also been in Black Mirror, A Discovery of Witches, Frankenstein, The Storyteller: Greek Myths, Mission: 2110 and one of my favorite series, The New Avengers. Oh and she voiced the android TC-14 in The Phantom Menace.
  • Born November 7, 1954 — Guy Gavriel Kay, 68. So the story goes that when Christopher Tolkien needed an assistant to edit his father J. R. R. Tolkien’s unpublished work, he chose Kay who was then a student of philosophy at the University of Manitoba. And Kay moved to Oxford in 1974 to assist Tolkien in editing The Silmarillion. Cool, eh? Kay’s own Finovar trilogy is the retelling of the legends of King Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere which is why much of his fiction is considered historical fantasy. Tigana likewise somewhat resembles Renaissance Italy . My favorite work by him is Ysabel which strangely enough is called an urban fantasy when it isn’t. It won a World Fantasy Award. 
  • Born November 7, 1960 — Linda Nagata, 62. Her novella “Goddesses” was the first online publication to win the Nebula Award. She writes largely in the Nanopunk genre which is not be confused with the Biopunk genre. To date, she has three series out, to wit The Nanotech Succession, Stories of the Puzzle Lands (as Trey Shiels) and The Red. She has won a Locus Award for Best First Novel for The Bohr Maker which the first novel in The Nanotech Succession. Her 2013 story “Nahiku West” was runner-up for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and The Red: First Light was nominated for both the Nebula Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Her site is here.
  • Born November 7, 1974 — Carl Steven. He appeared in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock as a young Spock, thereby becoming the first actor other than Leonard Nimoy to play the role in a live action setting. Genre one-offs included Weird Science, Teen Wolf and Superman.  He provided the voice of a young Fred Jones for four seasons worth of A Pup Named Scooby-Doo which can be construed as genre. Let’s just say his life didn’t end well and leave it at that. (Died 2011.)

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • Dinosaur Comics has all kinds of writerly advice about worldbuilding.

(12) TRANSPARENT LAYERS. Netflix dropped a trailer for Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, which begins streaming on December 23.

(13) A DIFFERENT HUGO. [Item by Olav Rokne.] I’ve not been able to track down a copy, but I figure that any adaptation of a Heinlein story is of interest. “Life –Line”.

Based on the 1939 short story by Robert Heinlein, Life-Line tells the story of an eccentric professor named Dr. Hugo Pinero, who sets in motion a future history with his invention that can accurately predict how long a person has to live.

(14) FORTIFIED FOOD. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] Scientists at Kellogg’s determined that massive amounts of orangium and electricity have turned beloved characters Snap, Crackle, and Pop into one-eyed mutants!  Fortunately this shocking experiment proved abortive and the cereal was banished to the half-price aisle. “Kellogg’s Launches New Rice Krispies Shocking Orange Colored Cereal For The 2022 Halloween Season” at Chew Boom.

(15) WATCHING: THE TOP 10. JustWatch Top 10’s for October just became available after some glitches. These are the viewing rankings for the U.S.

Rank*MoviesTV shows
1Everything Everywhere All at OnceThe Peripheral
2The ThingDoctor Who
3Halloween III: Season of the WitchQuantum Leap
4Jurassic World DominionAvenue 5
5VesperThe Handmaid’s Tale
6Crimes of the FutureLa Brea
7Significant OtherThe X-Files
8AlienSeverance
9InterstellarOrphan Black
10Event HorizonResident Alien

*Based on JustWatch popularity score. Genre data is sourced from themoviedb.org

(16) ZOOTOPIA GETS SERIES. Disney Plus dropped this trailer for the sequel to Zootopia today: Zootopia+

“Zootopia+” heads back to the fast-paced mammal metropolis of Zootopia in a short-form series that dives deeper into the lives of some of the Oscar®-winning feature film’s most intriguing residents, including Fru Fru, the fashion-forward arctic shrew; ZPD dispatcher Clawhauser, the sweet-toothed cheetah; and Flash, the smiling sloth who’s full of surprises.

(17) ACROSS TIME. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Media Death Cult cracks the covers of these “MUST READ Wibbly Wobbly Timey Wimey Books”.

…My personal recommendations for time travel time, Loop, Multiverse, hop in inter-dimensional pop-in stories. I’ve tried to keep the focus of the video on books where the wobbly elements are the essence of the story rather than something like Revelation Space or the later Ender’s Game books where obviously time dilation plays a big part of those stories but I don’t consider them first and foremost time travel books.

(18) VIDEO OF THE DAY. The How It Should Have Ended gang takes on Jurassic World Dominion. 

[Thanks to JJ, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Andrew Porter, Olav Rokne, Lise Andreasen, Jeffrey Smith, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Randall M.]

Pixel Scroll 10/19/22 The Music Slan

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Illo by Teddy Harvia

(1) UNCLE HUGO’S NEWS. Don Blyly’s latest email says a sign for Uncle Hugo’s has finally been installed on the west side of the building. He hopes the new awnings will be installed on the front of the building within the next few weeks, replacing the ones with the old tenant’s name.

Blyly also pointed out that a couple of the local TV stations have done reports on the Uncles re-opening. “You can see the new building, Ecko acting as store dog, and me explaining things to the camera.”

Minneapolis TV station KARE 11 has the text on its website, and the video on YouTube: “The Uncles are back: After burning to the ground, beloved Minneapolis bookstores find new home”.

“I had more and more people who were saying, ‘Please, please reopen. We can’t find anything like what you were offering,'” Blyly said.

Blyly originally opened Uncle Hugo’s Science Fiction Bookstore in 1974. While attending law school and reading constitutional law in the library, Blyly decided he needed something fun to do as a pastime. He had about $1,500 in student loan money left and decided to use it to open a bookstore.

After opening Uncle Hugo’s, customers came to him requesting the same type of concept but for mysteries. When Blyly couldn’t find anyone interested in doing it, he opened Uncle Edgar’s Mystery Bookstore at a separate location in 1980.

Eventually, both bookstores were housed in the same building off of Chicago Avenue. That remained the Uncles’ home until the building burned down in the early morning hours of May 30, 2020.

Here’s the report aired by Minneapolis CBS affiliate WCCO: “Beloved sci-fi bookstore, in business since the ’70s, reopens”.

(2) FANTASTIC FICTION AT KGB FUNDRAISER. Matt Kressel says the “Fantastic Fiction reading series at the KGB Bar” Gofundme needs a push to get over the finish line.

Thank you to all those who’ve donated so far! We’re more than two-thirds of the way to our goal of funding the series for three more years! We have just under $2,000 left to go. Can you help us reach our goal this week?

(3) SEAT OF FAME. Richard Wilhelm offers Facebook readers the opportunity to claim a piece of history.

Is anyone interested in owning a piece (actually, three pieces) of Science Fiction history? We have a couch and two matching chairs to give away to someone. They are a set from the 30s; overstuffed with mohair upholstery and carved wood arms. They were owned by my folks, authors Kate Wilhelm and Damon Knight, since the 1960s, and just about every author you’ve heard of from the realm of Science/Speculative Fiction mid-century forward, has sat in these at one time or another. Yes, there’s a caveat… They all need TLC to bring them back to excellent condition. Plus, you’d need to pick them up in North Portland.

(4) DISNEY V. FRANCE. The Guardian explains why Disney is resisting France’s protective regulations. “Disney threatens to bypass French cinemas unless release rules are relaxed”.

Disney is to release Black Panther: Wakanda Forever in French cinemas next month but has warned that future blockbusters may go straight to its streaming service, Disney+, unless France relaxes film distribution rules….

…Earlier this year, Disney took a stance against the French “windowing” system, which is designed to protect its industry and national TV industries, sending the animated action adventure Strange World straight to Disney+.

Films that are not released in French cinemas are not subject to the restrictive windowing regulations. In January, French film authorities shortened the window between film release and availability on subscription streaming services to 15 months but Disney was not a signatory of the new deal.

Disney said it had decided to push ahead with the cinema release of the Black Panther sequel because the French authorities have acknowledged that the windowing system “needs to be modernised”….

(5) EMIGRATING TO MARS. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] This is from an interview with Elon Musk by Financial Times editor Roula Khalaf, behind a paywall in the October 8 Financial Times.  X is Elon Musk’s son.

Musk’s biggest worry is the preservation of life beyond Earth.  His solution is to populate Mars. ‘Something will happen to Earth eventually, it’s just a question of time.  Eventually the sun will expand and destroy all life on Earth, so we do need to move at some point, or at least be a multi-planet species,’ he says.  ‘You have to ask the question:  do we want to be a space-flying civilisation and a multi-planet species or not?’  I’m not sure what i think but Musk is emphatic.  ‘It’s a question of what percentage of resources we should devote to such an endeavour?  I think if you say 1 per cent of resources, that’s probably a reasonable amount.

Would Musk himself join the pioneering colony on Mars? ‘Especially if I’m growing old, I’ll do it.  Why not?’ he says.  But how useful would he be to Mars if he’s too old?  ‘I think there’s some non-trivial chance of dying, so I’d prefer to take that change hen I’m a bit older, and saw my kids grow up.  Rather than right now, when little X is only two-and-a-half.  I think he’d miss me.’

(6) HANDMADE BY MARTIANS. Meanwhile, the Guardian observes artists who are exploring what life might be like if a human colony was established on Mars. “An other-worldly art project: the artists furnishing a Martian house”.

There is a “Martian guitar” manufactured out of recycled pieces of wood and metal with an amp fashioned from a coffee pot. A surprisingly comfortable chair, plus rug and curtains, have been created out of the sort of parachute material a Mars landing craft may have used.

The bedding in the sleeping pods has been decorated with dyes from plants, while a “mist shower” has been made using bits of hose and garden irrigation sprays.

Over the last 10 weeks, the people of Bristol have been taking part in an other-worldly art project – to furnish a “Martian house” that materialised, golden and gleaming, on the harbour-side in Bristol during the summer only using recycled and repurposed objects….

(7) THE PLANET WITH PUMPKINS. The previous two items perhaps set the mood for us to link to Library of America’s “Story of the Week”, Ray Bradbury’s “The Emissary”. It’s a Halloween tale, not a Mars story, so the segue isn’t completely smooooth.  Here’s an excerpt from the introduction.  

“Halloweens I have always considered wilder and richer and more important than even Christmas morn,” Ray Bradbury wrote in an article for the October 1975 issue of Reader’s Digest. “1928 was one of the prime Halloween years. Everything that was grandest came to a special climax that autumn.”

Ray Bradbury was eight years old that year, and his beloved Aunt Neva, 19 years old and recently graduated from high school, owned a Model-A Ford. Sometime around October 20, he recalls in his essay, she said to Ray, “It’s coming fast. Let’s make plans.” She drove him and his brother, Skip, around the countryside to collect pumpkins, corn sheaves, and other decorations to embellish their grandparents’ house for the upcoming festivities. “Then, everything set and placed and ready, you run out late from house to house to make certain-sure that each boy-ghost remembers, that each girl-become-witch will be there.” The big night arrived . . . and then it was over.

“365 darn days until Halloween again. What if I die, waiting?” Ray complained.

“Why, then,” Skip responded, “you’ll be Halloween. Dead people are Halloween.”

(8) STAND BY FOR SCIENCE FICTION IN REAL LIFE. “Next pandemic may come from melting glaciers, new data shows” – the Guardian has the story.

The next pandemic may come not from bats or birds but from matter in melting ice, according to new data.

Genetic analysis of soil and lake sediments from Lake Hazen, the largest high Arctic freshwater lake in the world, suggests the risk of viral spillover – where a virus infects a new host for the first time – may be higher close to melting glaciers.

The findings imply that as global temperatures rise owing to climate change, it becomes more likely that viruses and bacteria locked up in glaciers and permafrost could reawaken and infect local wildlife, particularly as their range also shifts closer to the poles.

For instance, in 2016 an outbreak of anthrax in northern Siberia that killed a child and infected at least seven other people was attributed to a heatwave that melted permafrost and exposed an infected reindeer carcass. Before this, the last outbreak in the region had been in 1941.

To better understand the risk posed by frozen viruses, Dr Stéphane Aris-Brosou and his colleagues at the University of Ottawa in Canada collected soil and sediment samples from Lake Hazen, close to where small, medium and large amounts of meltwater from local glaciers flowed in….

(9) EDGAR ALLAN POE NEWS. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] This is a group that is trying to create a national theater for Poe’s works and is having a performance as a fundraiser in Baltimore. They have a trailer! “Poe’s Blood, Sweat & Fears”.

(10) MEMORY LANE.

1990 — [By Cat Eldridge.] Ray Bradbury Theater’s “And the Moon Be Still as Bright” (1990)

It was so cold when they first came from the rocket into the night that Spender began to gather the dry Martian wood and build a small fire. He didn’t say anything about a celebration; he merely gathered the wood, set fire to it, and watched it burn.  — opening words of “And the Moon Be Still as Bright”

Ahhhh Bradbury. So have I mentioned that I’m madly in love with the fiction that he wrote? Well I am. Damn great stuff it is. And he himself was a wonderful individual as well.

So this Scroll we’re looking at the Ray Bradbury Theater’s production of “And the Moon Be Still as Bright” thirty-two years ago. It was first published in Thrilling Wonder Stories in the June 1948 issue where it would’ve cost you twenty cents, and three dollars today adjusted for inflation, still a bargain I’d say. It would become part of The Martian Chronicles when that was first published by Doubleday two years later. It was the lead story there. 

OK SPOILERS LIKE AUTUMN LEAVES ABOUND NOW. 

This is the third of the Mars expeditions and they find nothing but leaves. Leaves that are actually the ashes of the Martins all killed by a human disease. One member of the expedition is so outraged by this as he thinks that he can foresee how humanity and its culture will supplant all which remains of Mars.

He being an archaeologist vows to become a Martian himself so he goes off to a nearby town to study what he thinks is Martian culture and wage a one-man war against humanity. Of course the only humans are his fellow crew whose defilement of Mars he hates. He kills several when he returns to them. 

Studying the other is a long passion in archaeology and anthropology as Le Guin as noted more than once. It’s interesting to Bradbury use it here in telling a story. And yes it often ends this badly.

END OF SPOILERS. JOIN ME BY THE FIRE FOR SOME MULLED CIDER. 

David Carridine as Spender is absolutely perfect here though the rest of the cast are really little than barely sketched out. The production values are ok but it really didn’t convince me that they were anywhere but on a backlot in California. But then Star Trek with a much higher budget didn’t either. 

Look I think Bradbury is one of the great writers and be forewarned that this is one of his more brutal undertakings from start to finish. It’s not one of his comfortable stories at all. 

Want to watch it? You’re spoiled for streaming choices as it is on Amazon, Freevee, Peacock, Pluto and Vudu which might well be a record. 

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born October 19, 1921 — George Nader. In 1953, he was Roy, the leading man in Robot Monster (a.k.a. Monster from Mars and Monsters from the Moon) acknowledged by him and others to be the one of the worst SF films ever made. He showed up in some decidedly low budget other SF films such as The Human Duplicators, Beyond Atlantis and The Great Space Adventure. Note: contrary to popular belief, Robot Monster is not in the public domain. This movie is under active copyright held by Wade Williams Distribution. (Died 2002.)
  • Born October 19, 1940 — Michael Gambon, 82. Actor of Stage and Screen from Ireland who is best known to genre fans as Professor Albus Dumbledore from the Hugo-nominated Harry Potter films (a role he picked up after the passing of Richard Harris, who played the character in the first two films). He also had roles in Toys (for which he received a Saturn nomination), Mary Reilly, Sleepy Hollow, and the Hugo finalist Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. He has had guest roles in episodes of The Jim Henson Hour, Doctor Who, and Tales of the Unexpected, and played an acerbic storyteller and possibly tomb robber in Jim Henson’s The Storyteller. He has also done voice roles in animated features including Fantastic Mr. Fox, Paddington, and The Wind in the Willows, in which he voiced very nicely The Badger. 
  • Born October 19, 1943 — L.E. Modesitt, Jr., 79. Writer of more than 70 novels and 10 different series, the best known of which is his fantasy series The Saga of Recluce. He has been Guest of Honor at numerous conventions, including a World Fantasy Convention. He won a Neffy for his Endgames novel, and a Utah Speculative Fiction Award for his Archform: Beauty novel. 
  • Born October 19, 1943 — Peter Weston. Writer, Editor, Conrunner, and Fan from England who founded the Birmingham Science Fiction Group (the longest-lived fan group in the U.K.), and chaired several conventions, including the 1979 Worldcon. His fanzines Zenith and Speculation received 8 Hugo nominations, and his memoir With Stars in My Eyes: My Adventures in British Fandom was a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Related Book. He was the TAFF delegate in 1974, was Guest of Honor at several conventions, was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the long-running fanzine convention Corflu, and received the Doc Weir Award (the UK Natcon’s Life Achievement Award). (Died 2017.) (JJ)
  • Born October 19, 1945 — John Lithgow, 77. He enters SF fame as Dr. Emilio Lizardo / Lord John Whorfin in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. He’ll later be in Santa Claus: The Movie, Harry and the Hendersons, Shrek, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Interstellar and the remake of Pet Sematary. Oh, and he voiced The White Rabbit on the Once Upon a Time in Wonderland series! He of course is Dick Solomon in 3rd Rock from the Sun.  And for true genre creds, he voiced the character of Yoda in the NPR adaptations of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.
  • Born October 19, 1946 — Philip Pullman, 76. I’ll confess that I like his Sally Lockhart mysteries, both the original versions and the Billy Piper-led series, far more than I enjoy the Dark Materials series as there’s a freshness and imagination at work there I don’t see in the latter. Oh, some of the latter is quite good — I quite enjoyed Lyra’s Oxford and Once Upon a Time in The North as the shortness of them works in their favor.
  • Born October 19, 1948 — Jerry Kaufman, 74. Writer, Editor, Conrunner, and Fan who, while in Australia as the DUFF delegate, created a Seattle bid for the Australian Natcon which actually won the bid (temporarily, for a year, before it was overturned and officially awarded to Adelaide). He was editor of, and contributor to, numerous apazines and fanzines, two of which received Hugo nominations. With Donald Keller, he founded and ran Serconia Press, which published criticism and memoirs of the SF field. He served on the Board of Directors of the Clarion West Writers Workshop and served as Jurist for the James Tiptree, Jr., Memorial Award. He has been Fan Guest of Honor at several conventions, including a Westercon. (JJ) 
  • Born October 19, 1990 — Ciana Renee, 32. Her most known genre role is as Kendra Saunders / Hawkgirl on Legends of Tomorrow and related Arrowverse series. She also showed up on The Big Bang Theory as Sunny Morrow in “The Conjugal Configuration”, and she played The Witch in the theatrical production of Daniel Wallace’s Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions.  She was also Elsa in the theatrical production of Frozen.

(12) THE QUEER ANTICAPITALIST AFROFUTURIST HIP HOP MUSICAL EXTRAVAGANZA YOU’VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR. [Item by Olav Rokne.] Look, I’ll admit it, I’m full-on campaigning to see Neptune Frost get shortlisted for a Hugo Award. It’s a supremely complex, layered, and challenging piece of cinema. It tackles a wide variety of social justice issues that need to be addressed within fandom (human rights, exploitation, the marginalization of the Global South). And it is the product of creative voices who have all-too-often been silenced in fandom and in broader discourse. 

Put bluntly, this isn’t the feel-good Hollywood corporate refined product that often ends up on awards ballots. This is a raw anarchic kaleidoscope of narrative art that takes work to understand and appreciate. I’ve seen it three times, and keep finding new layers to appreciate. Like, I’m still mentally chewing on the line “To imagine hell is a privilege.”

Honestly, it’s kind of great.

The four of us from my blogging group who watched it all argued about the content for most of a year before being able to craft a review: “A Unanimous Gold Mine Of Subtext” at the Hugo Book Club Blog.

If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like if Sun Ra and Samuel R. Delany had tried to make The Matrix, the answer is something like Neptune Frost….

(13) NIGHTMARE AT 351,000 FEET. This excerpt from Shat’s memoir discusses his trip into space aboard Blue Origin. “William Shatner: My Trip to Space Filled Me With Sadness” in Variety.

So, I went to space.

Our group, consisting of me, tech mogul Glen de Vries, Blue Origin Vice President and former NASA International Space Station flight controller Audrey Powers, and former NASA engineer Dr. Chris Boshuizen, had done various simulations and training courses to prepare, but you can only prepare so much for a trip out of Earth’s atmosphere! As if sensing that feeling in our group, the ground crew kept reassuring us along the way. “Everything’s going to be fine. Don’t worry about anything. It’s all okay.” Sure, easy for them to say, I thought. They get to stay here on the ground.During our preparation, we had gone up eleven flights of the gantry to see what it would be like when the rocket was there. We were then escorted to a thick cement room with oxygen tanks. “What’s this room for?” I asked casually.

“Oh, you guys will rush in here if the rocket explodes,” a Blue Origin fellow responded just as casually.

Uh-huh. A safe room. Eleven stories up. In case the rocket explodes.

Well, at least they’ve thought of it….

(14) IMMERSIVE MIYAZAKI. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In the Washington Post, three reporters led by Michelle Ye Hee Lee visit the Studio Ghibli theme park which has just opened. “We visited Studio Ghibli’s long-awaited theme park. It’s a sensory delight.”

… Don’t expect rides or human-sized characters posing for photos. The vision for the 494-acre park is unique to the vision of Hayao Miyazaki, the studio’s 81-year-old co-founder, and is an homage to his legacy as a groundbreaking animator and creator. (The idea came about in 2017 after Miyazaki made what seemed to be his final retirement announcement, though he is now working again.)

The result is believed to be Japan’s first “hybrid park,” built around an existing public space to minimize harm to the environment. Mindful of sustainability, its creators sourced as many materials as possible locally. The main attraction — Ghibli’s Grand Warehouse — is converted from an indoor pool attached to an indoor skating rink.

As with Ghibli films, you cannot help but appreciate the nature surrounding you. It’s designed so that you feel like you are living in an actual Ghibli world, rather than visiting a fantasy. The result: a sensory overload that is peaceful at the same time….

(15) NAME THAT DECADE. I was looking at a fanzine recently added to the archives at Fanac.org. Can you guess the decade when this evergreen argument was uttered?

Why do you consider that those readers of science fiction who might vote if they didn’t have to join the Worldcon to do so would add so much to the validity of the voting? Like most award contests (though not all of them) the HUGO election is a popularity contest, and all sorts of factors come into play to influence the voters — including when he gets around to voting, what his friends are touting, and even what particular temperament he is in that morning — rather than merely the literary merit of the book under discussion. So the addition of one more pack of popularity selectors is not going to raise the quality very much. Might as well give the con members the voting privilege so they’ll help the con in its early money-raising stages.

It comes from Bruce Pelz’ Rache 6 published in March 1962.

(16) ON THE TUBE IN BRITAIN. Some all-time classics included here.“From the Triffids to Blake’s 7 and Ghostwatch: the BBC’s greatest cult classics”. The Guardian makes its picks.

The Beeb has seemingly spent a century trying to scar the nation. Here are its most influential – and most terrifying – cult hits so far.

R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) (1927 on radio, 1938 on TV)

Sadly nothing survives of either production beyond the listings in the Radio Times, but in February 1938 an excerpt of Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) was broadcast on the BBC’s fledgling television service. The play gave the English language the word “robot” and is widely credited as the first ever piece of television science-fiction. The BBC made a radio version in 1927, and would remake the play several times over the years in both mediums, including in 2022.

(17) LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN. Netflix dropped a vignette in which Wednesday stars Jenna Ortega, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and showrunners Alfred Gough and Miles Millar discuss the creative genius that Tim Burton brings to the series.

(18) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In “Honest Trailers: She-Hulk, Attorney-At Law,” the Screen Junkies say that She-Hulk “fights the half of humanity Thanos forgot to worry about — men,” including “dating-App dinguses” who think “How much do you dead lift?” is a good line for picking up She-Hulk. The show “isn’t as bad as the Twitter-bashers made it out to be, but isn’t good enough to defend.” But after that statement, Epic Voice Guy faces his greatest foe — the YouTube algorithm!

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Olav Rokne, Jeffrey Smith, Steven French, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Chris Barkley, and Michael Toman for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 10/3/22 My Positronic Brain It Teems With Endless Subroutines

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(1) FANTASTIC FICTION AT KGB FUNDRAISER. Fantastic Fiction at KGB is a monthly speculative-fiction reading series held on the second Wednesday of every month at the KGB Bar in Manhattan, hosted by Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel. Admission is always free. To cover the next round of guest expenses, they have launched their first fundraiser in three years, with a $6,000 goal: “Fantastic Fiction reading series at the KGB Bar Gofundme”.

The monthly series, which has been running since the late 1990s , serves as a salon, where writers, editors, agents, and fans of science fiction, fantasy, and horror can co-mingle in a shared event space. The series also served a vital social function during multiple Covid lockdown periods, when we featured authors from all over the globe on our live YouTube channel, and people who were isolated due to the lockdown could keep in contact with the writing community. We also release a free podcast, where we post audio recordings of the monthly readings.

Running the series costs us money. We pay a stipend to our guests, we pay for their drinks at the bar, and we also take them out to dinner after the readings. At present, the series costs about $2,000 per year to run. Unfortunately, we are almost out of money from our last fundraiser three years ago. We hope to raise at least $6,000, which will fund the series for three more years. It would be great if we could raise more.

(2) BLACK PANTHER. “Show them who we are.” A new trailer for Marvel Studios’ Black Panther: Wakanda Forever dropped today. See it only in theaters beginning November 11.

(3) CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS — JOURNEY PLANET: ANTHROPOCENE RUMINATIONS. [Item by Olav Rokne and Amanda Wakaruk.] When Chris Garcia and James Bacon approached us to guest edit an edition of their Hugo-winning fanzine Journey Planet, they asked us “what subject would you most like to tackle?”

The answer was easy: climate fiction.

Climate change is the defining crisis of our age. Given that the causes of climate change are rooted in technological transformations celebrated by the past century of science fiction, enthusiasts like us have some responsibility to grapple with what it means.

The upcoming “Anthropocene Ruminations” will contain some of the various ways in which SFF fans are grappling with a rapidly heating and chaotic planet: through fiction, through art, through poetry, and through critical discourse. 

We’re hoping to have reviews of books depicting climate change, discussions of historical trends, and examinations of aspects of climate change that may have been neglected by genre fiction. 

We’d love to hear article and art pitches from across the fandom community (that means all y’all). Send us your ideas before October 15 (email BOTH of us at amanda.wakaruk at gmail dot com and olavrokne at gmail dot com). We’re aiming to have the finished works submitted by November 15. 

Will “Anthropocene Ruminations” singlehandedly solve climate change? It’s too early to say for certain. What it’s not too early to say is that it will contain some pieces by Hugo-finalist and Hugo-winning fanwriters.

Drop us a line. Amanda & Olav. Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog co-editors

(4) KEEPING UP WITH CORA BUHLERT. The alumni newsletter of Bremen University, Kurzmeldungen, listed Cora Buhlert’s Hugo win.

Issue Zero of New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine published Cora’s article about C.L. Moore and Jirel of Joiry, as well as fiction and non-fiction by Howard Andrew Jones, Brian Murphy, Milton J. Davis, Nicole Emmelhainz, David C. Smith, Dariel R.A. Quiogue, Remco van Strane and Angeline B. Adams, Bryn Hammond, J.M. Clarke, T.K. Rex, Robin Marx and editor Oliver Brackebury. The digital edition is free, the print editions are fairly cheap.

And Cora has an essay about anime in West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s in Rising Sun Reruns: Memories of Japanese TV Shows from Today’s Grown-Up Kids.

In these pages you will find glowing memories of flights of fancy such as Ultraman, Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot, Astro Boy, Battle of the Planets, Space Giants, Speed Racer, Robotech, and many, many more—including a few you may never even heard of!

(5) NOBEL PRIZE FOR PHYSIOLOGY OR MEDICINE. “Svante Pääbo Wins Nobel Prize for Unraveling the Mysteries of Neanderthal DNA” – Smithsonian Magazine has the story.

The Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine awarded the field’s top prize on Monday to Svante Pääbo, a Swedish geneticist who determined how to extract and analyze DNA from 40,000-year-old Neanderthal bones. Pääbo’s decades of research have made it possible for scientists to begin probing differences between today’s modern humans and their ancient ancestors.

Pääbo, who is 67, has spent decades pioneering and perfecting new methods of extracting Neanderthal DNA, an extremely complex and challenging process. Over time, very old DNA degrades and can become polluted with the DNA of bacteria, and modern scientists can also easily contaminate it with their own genetic material.

But time and again, Pääbo found ways around these and other issues. In 2010, after years of painstaking work, Pääbo and his team published the sequenced Neanderthal genome, a feat that at one time was considered impossible, reports the New York Times’ Benjamin Mueller. As Elizabeth Kolbert wrote in her book The Sixth Extinction, the process was like trying to reconstruct a “Manhattan telephone book from pages that have been put through a shredder, mixed with yesterday’s trash, and left to rot in a landfill.”

…On Monday morning, Pääbo was just finishing a cup of tea when he got a call from Sweden. He assumed the call was bad news about his family’s summer home in Sweden and was instead surprised to learn he’d won the Nobel Prize. When asked whether he ever envisioned winning science’s most prestigious prize, Pääbo humbly replied that he “somehow did not think that this really would… qualify for a Nobel Prize,” per an interview posted on the Nobel Prize website….

Here’s a further excerpt from the Nobel’s “Svante Pääbo – Interview”.

…AS: Your work is of course on the sequencing of these early hominins. What does our knowledge, your knowledge of the genetic makeup of those species tell us about our relationship with them.

SP: Well, it does tell us that we are very closely related, first of all, and we’re actually so closely related that they have contributed quite directly, 50, 60 thousand years ago, DNA to the ancestors of most people today, those who have their roots outside Africa. And that variation that, sort of, those variants do have an influence, and influence many things in our physiology today.

AS: Do you think that changes our view of ourselves, knowing that?

SP: In some sense, I do think it does so, the sort of realisation that until quite recently, maybe 14 hundred generations or so ago there were other forms of humans around and they mixed with our ancestors and have contributed to us today. The fact that the last 40 thousand years is quite unique in human history, in that we are the only form of humans around. Until that time, there were almost always other types of humans that existed.

(6) A MOMENT IN SFF HISTORY. “Science Fiction In Communist Bloc Changed Forever 40 Years Ago” writes Jaroslav Olsa Jr., the Consul General of the Czech Consulate in Los Angeles.

In October 1982, the first issue of FANTASTYKA, Polish science fiction monthly reached its first readers. This was the first real science fiction magazine in the former Soviet bloc! And it had an enormous impact on science fiction in other neighbouring countries as the situation in Eastern Europe was significantly different than in Western Europe as all publishing business in Soviet bloc was under strict control of each state and its leading (often Communist) party. The publishing houses were operated and owned predominantely by state ministries or its subsidiaries, controlled more or less visibly by various types of censorship bodies and though in some Soviet bloc countries in different times publishing was allowed greater freedom (e. g. Yugoslavia, Hungary and/or 1980s Poland), there was never allowed a free press.

And thus even publishing SF fanzines was a sort of risky adventure…

Thank you late Adam Hollanek, late Maciej Parowski, late Andrzej Krzepkowski, Jacek Rodek, Andrzej Wójcik and many many others, who gave us Fantastyka, and who helped us to open the window to science fiction in the West and internationalize science fiction – something then a real novelty….

(7) MICKEY MOUSE CAPITALISM. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In the Financial Times behind a paywall, Elaine Moore discusses how Disney CEO Bob Chapek is concerned that people who show up at a Disney park every week are crowding out the occasional visitor who will spend a lot of money on stuff.

The problem is that super fans don’t spend as much per visit as occasional park visitors.  There are only so many Minnie Mouse headbands a person can wear.  For some, the annual pass that allows buyers to visit Disney parks throughout the year is extremely good value too.  A one day trip to Disney World in Florida is $109.  The annual Incredi Pass is $1,299 plus tax. Visit once a month and you break even.  Go every week and you’d save over $4,000.  The mismatch has shades of the MoviePass debacle, in which subscribers paid less than $10 per month for multiple cinema trips.  MoviePass guessed they might visit once or twice a month.  But their willingness to go day after day left the company bankrupt…

…At the recent D23 Expo there were complaints that passes were still suspended.  Unluckily for them, Chapek used to run the parks division.  He knows that demand is far higher than supply and is sufficiently unsentimental to take advantage.  Prices would double and visitors would pay them.  Disney fans may moan but they will still keep coming back.”

(8) ANTI-MUSLIM SENTIMENTS. The culture war is engulfing Bollywood reports the Guardian: “Bollywood under siege as rightwing social media boycotts start to bite”.

…For decades, India’s Hindi film industry, known as Bollywood, has been one of the country’s most popular products, for Indians themselves and the world at large. But the consolidation of Hindu nationalism under the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has marked a cultural shift.

Laal Singh Chaddha stars, and is produced by, Aamir Khan, one of Hindi cinema’s trio of superstar Khans (Shahrukh and Salman are the other two, all unrelated). On its release, social-media platforms witnessed a tidal wave of targeted attacks calling for a boycott of the movie. The resurfacing of remarks made by Khan on the rise of “intolerance” in India in 2015, as well as clips from his 2014 film PK (which criticised blind-faith belief) were coupled with targeted tweets. Laal Singh Chaddha has fared poorly at the box office, but the calls for a boycott have not stopped. Other movies, such as Vikram Vedha, Dobaara, Shamshera and Brahmastra, are also in the line of fire, the last two owing to the recirculation of 11-year-old remarks by the lead actor, Ranbir Kapoor, on eating beef….

(9) SALES FIGURES. In the Washington Post, David Betancourt looks at the process that Hasbro uses to make 32-inch action figures that cost $399,99.  (The latest, Galactus, will be “a towering 32-inch monstrosity of plastic articulation.”)  Betancourt says Hasbro uses a crowdfunding method of deciding which giant action figures to make; they greenlit the huge Galactus last summer after 14,000 people agreed to buy it.) “Would you buy a $400 Marvel action figure? Thousands of people can’t wait.”

In comic books,Galactus is known as the devourer of worlds. When it comes to action figures, Galactus is now the destroyer of wallets.

Hasbro decided that its newest figure depicting the giant planet eater from Marvel’s Fantastic Four wouldn’t be the typical six-inch toy that retails inthe $20 to $30 range and decorates work desks and bookshelves. This Galactus,with a design based on the art of famed Marvel writer-artist John Byrne, would be a towering 32-inch-tall monstrosity of plastic articulation. The figure, scheduled for release some timethis fall, is the biggest toy Hasbro has ever built for its Marvel line, which is fitting, given Galactus’s gigantic stature….

(10) A FREE-TO-READ STORY. Sunday Morning Transport presents “A Hole in the Light” by Annalee Newitz, “an astounding new world wrapped around a stellar story of grief and growth.”

Arch had never been to a ritual of dissolution for someone who mattered.

Of course, there were distant kin who had died. But when they dissolved, it felt like they had moved to the next village: poignant, but not a disaster. The artificiality of the ritual made her more uncomfortable than their loss. Well, perhaps that wasn’t quite true. She had genuinely suffered when her physics teacher had died, and she could no longer ask questions about what lay beyond the village of Slope-Toward-Sea, on the planet Skiff, wrapped in the mottled glow of the eroding firmament. Even when her teacher dissolved, though, the ritual had seemed absurd….

(11) MEMORY LANE.  

2016 – [By Cat Eldridge.] Six years ago on NBC the Timeless series debuted. (Yes, I do delve into the recent past on occasion). It would last but two seasons. (Yes, two seasons. Read below for why it was only two seasons, really.)

Not terribly original in concept, it involved a group that attempts to stop a mysterious organization from changing the course of history through time travel. 

It was created by Eric Kripke who of Supernatural series fame along with the later The Boys, and Shawn Ryan who’s done nothing else they genre wise but has created S.W.A.T. that I love and Lie to Me, a rather odd crime drama series I also like a lot. Yes, I have odd tastes.

Project Lifeboat, among its members, had a history professor, a Delta forces soldier, a computer programmer and a creator of the Lifeboat time machines. Ok I did say it wasn’t a terribly original concept, didn’t I so guess what? NBC got sued by the Spanish series El ministerio del tiempo (The Ministry of Time), which follows the adventures of a three-person team made up of two men and a woman who travel to the past with a view to preserving past events.  

It went to court but eventually “their attorneys of record hereby stipulate that the entire civil action may be and hereby is dismissed with prejudice, with each party bearing that party’s fees and costs of suit.” One assumes that large sums of money were involved. Isn’t there always money involved when such things need to be settled?

Getting back to the series, it was cancelled after the second season but a massive, and I do mean massive, fan campaign sort of saved it, so it got a special two-part finale. It originally didn’t make the cut for the next fall season but when they started getting a pushback from fans, NBC responded saying “And then we woke up the next morning, heard the outcry (from fans). We went back to the drawing board, with our partners at Sony, and we found a way to bring it back. It’s extraordinarily well produced and deserved to come back.”

Unlike many similar series, it was allowed a proper wrap-up. Fandango noted, “A fitting farewell, Timeless wraps with a fun, festive finale that ties up loose ends and provides enough fan service to satisfy.”

It carries a most excellent seventy-seven percent rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes. It does not appear to be streaming for free anywhere. 

(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born October 3, 1933 — Norman Adams. The SF Encyclopedia says genre wise that “Adams may be best known for his cover for the first edition of Larry’s Niven’s World of Ptavvs” on Ballantine Books in 1966.  I must say having looked at his ISFDB listings that their assessment is absolutely right. (Died 2014.)
  • Born October 3, 1927 — Don Bensen. Best-known for his novel And Having Writ… which is not in print in form digitally or in hard copy — damn it. Indeed, nothing by him is. Huh. (Died 1997.)
  • Born October 3, 1931 — Ray Nelson, 91. SF writer best known for his short story “Eight O’Clock in the Morning” which was the basis of John Carpenter’s They Live.  He later collaborated with Philip K. Dick on The Ganymede Takeover. In the 1940s Nelson appropriated the propeller beanie as a symbol of science fiction fandom. His fannish cartoons were recognized with the Rotsler Award in 2003. He was inducted to the First Fandom Hall of Fame in 2019.
  • Born October 3, 1935 — Madlyn Rhue. She on Trek’s “Space Seed” as Lt. Marla McGivers, Khan Noonien Singh’s (Ricardo Montalbán) love interest. Other genre appearances included being on the original Fantasy Island as Lillie Langtry in “Legends,” and Maria in the “Firefall” episode of Kolchak: The Night. (Died 2003.)
  • Born October 3, 1944 – Katharine Kerr, 78. Ok I’m going to confess that I’ve not read her Deverry series so please tell me how they are. Usually I do read such Celtic tinged series so I don’t know how I missed them.
  • Born October 3, 1964 — Clive Owen, 58. First role I saw him in was the title role of Stephen Crane in the Chancer series. Not genre, but fascinating none the less. He’s been King Arthur in film of the same name where Keira Knightley was Guinevere. He’s also was in Sin City as Dwight McCarthy, and in The Pink Panther (though weirdly uncredited) as Nigel Boswell/Agent 006. I’ll also single him out for being Commander Arun Filitt in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.
  • Born October 3, 1973 — Lena Headey, 49. Many of you will know her as Cersei Lannister on Game of Thrones, but I liked her sociopathic Madeline “Ma-Ma” Madrigal on Dredd better.  She was also Angelika in The Brothers Grimm, a film I’m sure I’ve seen but remember nothing about. 

(13) COMICS SECTION.

(14) SURPRISE BEGINNING. John Grayshaw of the Middletown PA Public Library arranged for questions about Murray Leinster to be answered for his Online Science Fiction Book Club by Steven H Silver and the author’s daughter, Billee Stallings. See the Q&A here: “Interview about Murray Leinster”. Note: Murray Leinster was the pen name of Will Jenkins, but I never knew til now that H.L. Mencken was behind his decision to use one.

Damo Mac Choiligh: A trivial question perhaps, but where did he get the pseudonym ‘Leinster’? The word is the English version of the name of a region of Ireland, well known to any Rugby fans.

Billee: When Will was published in Smart Set magazine in his teens, H. L. Mencken put down the other magazines he was selling to and said he should use a pen name and save his own for the “good stuff” (ie; Smart Set). Dad selected Murray from his mother’s maiden name (Murry. Wyndham Martyn, an English writer for the magazine, suggested Leinster. Martyn (known for the Anthony Trent novels) told him the Fitzgeralds (Dad’s middle name) were descended from the Dukes of Leinster.

(15) A DIFFERENT KIND OF TIMELESS NEWS. In 2020, Alex Ross crafted over 30 extraordinary depictions of Marvel’s most beloved super heroes in a beautiful art piece known as Timeless. This iconic imagery was used to produce a best-selling variant cover program and now… it’s the villains turn.

The legendary artist’s newest art piece deviously unites 37 of Marvel’s classic villains! Capturing the menace, danger, and allure of characters like Green Goblin, Doctor Doom, and Thanos, this stunning group shot represents the definitive takes on Marvel’s deadliest foes straight from one the industry’s most revered talents! Look for this beautifully painted artwork to be used for a new series of variant covers starting in March 2023.

“The passion I held for illustrating many of Marvel’s heroes in a timeless representation was easily matched by the passion I felt for illustrating the villains,” Ross said. “Marvel clearly has some of the greatest concepts in the realm of supervillains as well as heroes.”

Find more information about Alex Ross’ new piece including which titles it’ll grace the covers of at Marvel.com.

(16) HERE THEY COME AGAIN. “’The Rings of Power’ Season 2 Has Started Filming” in the UK says The Hollywood Reporter.

The news follows the first official Nielsen ratings being released Thursday for the Prime Video series, showing The Rings of Power topped the streaming charts for its debut week with 1.3 billion minutes viewed (likely an Amazon series record given that only two hours were released).

The first season of the show was filmed in New Zealand over an epic stretch of 18 months during the pandemic. For season two, which will consist of eight episodes, Amazon switched the show’s production to the U.K., which is considered more economical and is also where the company is establishing a multishow hub….

(17) SCREEN TIME. Here are JustWatch’s September’s Sci-Fi Top 10 lists:

Rank*MoviesTV shows
1NopeQuantum Leap
2Everything Everywhere All at OnceThe Handmaid’s Tale
3Jurassic World DominionSeverance
4MoonfallWar of the Worlds
5AvatarThe Twilight Zone
6PreyOrphan Black
7Jurassic World: Fallen KingdomDoctor Who
8The ThingLa Brea
9Jurassic WorldThe X-Files
10Crimes of the FutureMoonhaven

*Based on JustWatch popularity score. Genre data is sourced from themoviedb.org

(18) MORE HOLLYWOOD BUZZ. The teaser trailer for the new Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania movie dropped Friday.

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Olav Rokne, Kate Yeazel, Kathy Sullivan, Andrew Porter, Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 10/2/22 Call Me Ishpixel

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(1) KGB. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Meg Elison and Clay McLeod Chapman on Wednesday, October 12, 7:00 p.m. Eastern.

Meg Elison

Meg Elison is a Philip K. Dick and Locus award winning author, as well as a Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, and Otherwise finalist. A prolific short story writer and essayist, Elison has been published in Slate, McSweeney’s, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Fangoria, Uncanny, Lightspeed, Nightmare, and many other places. Elison is a high school dropout and a graduate of UC Berkeley.

Clay McLeod Chapman

Clay McLeod Chapman writes books, comic books, children’s books, and for film and television. His upcoming novel Ghost Eaters hit shelves on September 20th, from Quirk Books. He lives in Brooklyn.

Masks welcome at the KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003. (Just off 2nd Ave, upstairs).

(2) THE U.S. AND THE HOLOCAUST. [Item by Steve Vertlieb.] This somber new three part documentary by film maker Ken Burns is among the most sobering, heartbreaking, and horrifying indictments of humanity that I have ever encountered. It was extremely difficult to watch but, as an American Jew, mere hours away from the start of Yom Kippur, I remain struck by the similarities between the rise in Fascism in the early nineteen thirties, leading to the beginnings of Nazism in Germany, and the attempted decimation of the Jewish people in Europe and throughout the world, with the repellant echoes of both racial and religious intolerance, and the mounting hatred and suspicion of the Jewish communities and population residing presently in my own country of birth, these United States.

I am reminded of the disturbing adage that “those who forget the lessons (and atrocities against mankind) of the past are condemned to repeat them. While I have struggled these many years to keep my observations and postings limited to appreciations of films, music, and the arts, I can no longer, in clean conscience, remain silent as the clear signs of domestic and international Fascism are once again on the rise.

Perhaps these concerns have no place in this setting and personalized forum, but I can no longer keep silent as the horrific remnants of Nazism and racial genocide reach out their despicable tentacles from the graves of millions once more, threatening to consume both America and our planet in the decimation of freedom by the frightened zealots of bigotry, stupidity, and arrogance.

The warning signs are unmistakable as fear and hatred threaten enlightenment, while intolerance escalates alarmingly among those broadcasting their supposed patriotism as an end to democracy in what was once proclaimed as “The Land of the Free, and The Home of the Brave.” Intolerance must not be permitted to cloak itself yet again in the guise of patriotism to the detriment of free thought and speech.

We alone are responsible for the course and degree of our own success or failure. No other people or group can truly symbolize or camouflage our personal dissatisfactions. To hide our grievances and individual frailty beneath the cloak of blame is not only dishonest, but cowardly. For America to thrive and endure, freedom of expression, as well as the embrace and cultivation of our differences, is essential if we are, indeed, to survive the smoldering, unforgiving passage of time.

Never Again …

(3) NEW WSJ SF CRITIC. Liz Braswell has begun her reign as the Wall Street Journal’s science fiction and fantasy columnist. The WSJ is paywalled, however, here is the beginning of her current piece, “Science Fiction & Fantasy: Global Myths, Brave New Worlds”.

As a lifelong reader of all things folklorish and fantastical, like many of my American contemporaries, I grew up on a diet of European tales and legends—a satisfying but ultimately limited fare. These days readers have an enormous range of stories to delight them as contemporary fantasy engages with an ever-widening pool of cultural sources that encompass the world’s collective mythologies. This season publishers have presented readers with a veritable feast for the imaginative mind….

(4) HE DRAWS THEM IN. “Illustrator Joseph Namara Hollis Wins Klaus Flugge Prize” reports Publishing Perspectives. “When a parent walks the aisles of a bookstore, it’s not a book’s story that grabs them. It may not even be the title. It’s the artwork.”

Illustrator Joseph Namara Hollis has won the 2022 Klaus Flugge Prize for Pierre’s New Hair, illustrator Joseph Namara Hollis, editor Emilia Will, designer Jade Wheaton (Tate Museum).

The book is described as being “about a bear obsessed with looking good but also desperate to show the world his roller-skating flair.”

In accepting the award—which is personally funded by Klaus Flugge rather than by the Andersen Press that Flugge founded—Hollis is quoted, saying, “Winning  the Klaus Flugge Prize is invigorating.

… Hollis wins the program’s purse of £5,000 (US$5,555) and helps bring needed attention to the work of illustrators—like translators, far too often overlooked for their critical importance to publishing. …

(5) MIGHTY STEEDS. File 770’s coverage of the National Toy Hall of Fame and the comments from Breyer horse fan Cat Rambo and Masters of the Universe fan Cora Buhlert caught the eye of the Breyer History Diva: “Test Color Bears and Other Dreams”.

…A discussion about Breyer on a Science-Fiction Fandom news web site!?! If some of the names are not familiar to you, Cat Rambo was President of the SFWA from 2015-2019, and Cora Buhlert just won a Hugo for Best Fan Writer….

(6) MEMORY LANE.  

1972 – [By Cat Eldridge.] Ngaio Marsh’s Tied Up in Tinsel (1972)

If you’ve been paying attention, you know that I am very fond of British Country  House mysteries, be the written form such as Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot’s Christmas (which yes I know has became several excellent filmed versions including one with the beloved David Suchet) or filmed works such as Robert Altman’s rather good Gosford Park.  

Fifty years ago this year, Ngaio Marsh’s Tied in Tinsel was published by the Collins Crime Club. It was the twenty-seventh novel to feature Inspector Roderick Alleyn.  It was late in the series, so there would only be five more as she’d live but a decade more. 

(Lovely title, eh? Guaranteed to catch the eye of the shopper in a bookstore nigh unto Christmastime when they’re desperately shopping for that mystery lover they’re buying for as you can see from the image below with its excellent design on the Collins Crime Club edition. Very Christmasy I’d say.)

In a brief recapping that really has no spoilers to speak of, his wife Troy Alleyn is at Hilary Bill-Tasman’s manor for Christmas time to paint a portrait of her husband and, while she’s there take part in the Christmas festivities that includes a Pageant along with the other guests who being in a Marsh novel are, to put it mildly, rather eccentric. Troy is enjoying these festivities until one of the Pageant’s players wanders off into the bitterly cold, snowy night. So her husband, Sir Roderick Alleyn is called upon to figure out what happened.

I liked it. It is a light affair I grant you, but it is a perfectly done Christmas Manor House mystery that any fan of Golden Age mysteries will no doubt enjoy very much. 

For reasons I’ve never figured out, she is considered a second rate mystery author when compared to Agatha Christie when I think is very, very unfair. (Reviews of her writings are often exceedingly harsh.) She’s just as good a writer as Christie was. I wonder if a large part of that bias was based in her not being properly British as she from New Zealand originally. British readers and critics can be harshly xenophobic.

The Blackstone edition audio version as narrated by Wanda McCaddon is available to Audible members for free. Need I say that’ll I will be listening to it? It’ll be interesting to see how it comes across as an audio drama. 

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born October 2, 1911 — Jack Finney. Author of many novels but only a limited number of them genre, to wit The Body Snatchers, Time and Again and From Time to Time. He would publish About Time, a short story collection which has the time stories, “The Third Level” and “I Love Galesburg in the Springtime”. The film version of The Body Snatchers was nominated for a Hugo at Seacon ‘79. He has a World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement. (Died 1995.)
  • Born October 2, 1919 — Edward Wellen. Mostly remembered for the most excellent mysteries he wrote in great number that showed up in the Alfred Hitchcock Magazine and other outlets. He’s here because he wrote an ongoing column in Galaxy called Spoofs with first one in July entitled “Origins of Galactic Slang”. It was followed by similar Galactic Origins well call them for lack of a better term spoofs over the following decade. He wrote a fair amount of short fiction, all if it quite good, most, if not all, is collected in two digital Golden Age Metapacks. (Died 2011.)
  • Born October 2, 1932 — Edmund Crispin. He’s well remembered and definitely still read for his most excellent Gervase Fen mystery series. It turns out that he was the editor of the Best SF anthology series that ran off and on between 1955 and 1972. Writers such as Kuttner, Moore, Blish, Bradbury and Von Vogt had stories there. These anthologies alas to my knowledge are not available digitally or in hard copy.  (Died 1978.)
  • Born October 2, 1944 — Vernor Vinge, 78. Winner of five Hugo Awards, though what I consider his best series, the Realtime/Bobble series, was not one of them. And he won the Robert Heinlein Award in 2020. I’m also very fond of his short fiction, much of which is collected in The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge. 
  • Born October 2, 1948 — Avery Brooks, 74. Obviously he’s got his Birthday write-up for being Benjamin Sisko on Deep Space Nine, but I’m going to note his superb work also as Hawk on Spenser: For Hire and its spinoff A Man Called Hawk which are aren’t even tangentially genre adjacent. He retired from acting after DS9 but is an active tenured theater professor at Rutgers. 
  • Born October 2, 1950 — Ian McNeice, 72. Prime Minister Churchill / Emperor Winston Churchill on Doctor Who in “The Beast Below,” “Victory of the Daleks,”  “The Pandorica Opens,” and “The Wedding of River Song,” all Eleventh Doctor stories. He was an absolutely perfect Baron Vladimir Harkonnen in Frank Herbert’s Dune and Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune series. And he voiced Kwaltz in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. 
  • Born October 2, 1953 – Walter Jon Williams, 69. The last thing I read by him was his most excellent Dagmar Shaw series which I highly recommend. I also like his Metropolitan novels, be that SF or fantasy, as well as his Hardwired series. I’m surprised how few Awards that he’s won, just three with two Nebulas, both for shorter works, “Daddy’s World” and “The Green Leopard Plaque”, plus a Sidewise Award for “Foreign Devils”.
  • Born October 2, 1954 — Diane Carey, 68. A major contributor to the Trek multiverse of novel. I mean really, really major contributor. I learned there are lines of Trek novels that I never knew existed. She uses three pen names (Lydia Gregory, Diane Carey, and D. L. Carey) which helps when you’re pumping out a lot of product. She has novels in the Original Series, Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Enterprise. So nothing surprising there you say. Then under Diane Carey, she has the New Earth series and there’s at three other series which extrapolate off the existing series. She also did a novel about Kirk as a cadet at Starfleet Academy. 

(8) WESTERCON ARCHIVES. [Item by Kevin Standlee.] The minutes of the 2022 Westercon Business Meeting, the current Westercon Bylaws as of the end of Westercon 74, and links to the video recordings of the Westercon 74 Business Meeting and the Committee of the Whole on 2024 Westercon Site Selection are now posted on the updated Westercon Business page at http://www.westercon.org/organization/business/

(9) LET THE DICE FLY. A profile of the makers of Rubikon in Variety: “Inspired by ‘Star Trek,’ ‘Rubikon’ Grapples With Questions of Morality”.

In Leni Lauritsch’s gritty sci-fi thriller “Rubikon,” the final frontier could well be humankind’s last refuge.

The film, which stars Julia Franz Richter, Georg Blagden (“Versailles”) and Mark Ivanir, screens in the Zurich Film Festival’s Focus Competition.

Set in a dark future in which a polluted and barely sustainable Earth is plagued by corporate armies battling for depleting resources as the wealthy live in air domes that protect them from the contaminated atmosphere, the story centers on three astronauts aboard the space station Rubikon, where scientists have developed a possible means of survival, a sustainable algae project to provide oxygen and food….

(10) WAIT A MINUTEMEN. “Hold fire: Re-enactors fear being targeted by NY gun law” – the Brooklyn Eagle has the story.

Some historical battle re-enactors in New York are holding their musket fire because of worries over the state’s new gun rules — an unplanned side effect of a law designed to protect the public’s safety.

The law that went into effect this month declares parks, government property and a long list of other “sensitive” places off limits to guns. The rules were geared more for semiautomatic pistols than flintlock weapons, but re-enactors who fear being arrested if they publicly re-stage battles from the colonial era to the Civil War are staying off the field.

Gov. Kathy Hochul’s administration insists that historical battle re-enactments are still OK, and some have still taken place this month. But persistent skepticism among event organizers and participants has resulted in some cancellations, like an 18th century encampment and battle re-enactment planned for last weekend north of Saratoga Springs.

“We’ve been getting reports from units that were supposed to attend that they don’t feel comfortable transporting muskets or bringing muskets to the site,” said Harold Nicholson, a re-enactor involved in the event at Rogers Island. “And so at that point, we decided that it was probably best not to (go ahead).”

The consternation stems from a law quickly approved after the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated New York’s requirement that people must demonstrate an unusual threat to their safety to qualify for a license to carry a handgun outside their homes.

Hochul and her fellow Democrats in control of the state Legislature responded with a law that set strict new licensing criteria and limited where handguns, shotguns and rifles can be carried. Some re-enactors looking at the letter of the law have concluded the old-style weapons they use could place them in the crosshairs of the new rules….

(11) WOULD YOU BUY IT FOR A QUARTER? Coinweek tells us that a “New Coin From CIT Features Cthulhu and H.P. Lovecraft”. It’s issued by Palau.

One side depicts the tentacled head of Cthulhu above the sea. Its tentacles are wrapped around a sailing ship, which is tiny in comparison; in the field incuse 2022.

The other side features numerous tangled tentacles, and between them the silhouette-like portrait of H.P. Lovecraft. Legend H. P. LOVECRAFT / 1890 / 1937. Above, the coat of arms of Palau with the circumscription REPUBLIC OF PALAU 20 $.

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Kevin Standlee, Steve Vertlieb, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Chris Barkley, and Michael Toman for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Bill.]