The National Space Society will honor sff author Joe Haldeman with the inaugural Arthur C. Clarke Memorial Award at its 43rd annual International Space Development Conference® (ISDC®) in June. The award is given for inspiring and educating the public about humanity’s journey to space.
(Note, this new award is a different honor than the literary Arthur C. Clarke Award, or those presented by the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation.)
(1) 2025 HUGO FINALIST ANNOUNCEMENT SUNDAY. The finalists for the 2025 Hugo Awards, Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book, and Astounding Award for Best New Writer will be revealed by the Seattle Worldcon committee through social media and their website at Noon Pacific on Sunday, April 6.
(2) HOW CHINA TARIFF AFFECTS BOARDGAME MAKERS. Steve Jackson Games’ Daily Illuminator says “Tariffs Are Driving Up Game Prices Now”.
On April 5th, a 54% tariff goes into effect on a wide range of goods imported from China. For those of us who create boardgames, this is not just a policy change. It’s a seismic shift.
At Steve Jackson Games, we are actively assessing what this means for our products, our pricing, and our future plans. We do know that we can’t absorb this kind of cost increase without raising prices. We’ve done our best over the past few years to shield players and retailers from the full brunt of rising freight costs and other increases, but this new tax changes the equation entirely.
Here are the numbers: A product we might have manufactured in China for $3.00 last year could now cost $4.62 before we even ship it across the ocean. Add freight, warehousing, fulfillment, and distribution margins, and that once-$25 game quickly becomes a $40 product. That’s not a luxury upcharge; it’s survival math.
Some people ask, “Why not manufacture in the U.S.?” I wish we could. But the infrastructure to support full-scale boardgame production – specialty dice making, die-cutting, custom plastic and wood components – doesn’t meaningfully exist here yet. I’ve gotten quotes. I’ve talked to factories. Even when the willingness is there, the equipment, labor, and timelines simply aren’t.
We aren’t the only company facing this challenge. The entire board game industry is having very difficult conversations right now. For some, this might mean simplifying products or delaying launches. For others, it might mean walking away from titles that are no longer economically viable. And, for what I fear will be too many, it means closing down entirely.
Tariffs, when part of a long-term strategy to bolster domestic manufacturing, can be an effective tool. But that only works when there’s a plan to build up the industries needed to take over production. There is no national plan in place to support manufacturing for the types of products we make. This isn’t about steel and semiconductors. This is about paper goods, chipboard, wood tokens, plastic trays, and color-matched ink. These new tariffs are imposing huge costs without providing alternatives, and it’s going to cost American consumers more at every level of the supply chain.
We want to be transparent with our community. This is real: Prices are going up. We’re still determining how much and where.
If you’re frustrated, you’re not alone. We are too. And if you want to help, write to your elected officials. Ask them how these new policies help American creators and small businesses. Because right now, it feels like they don’t.
We’ll keep making games. But we’ll be honest when the road gets harder, because we know you care about where your games come from – and about the people who make them.
— Meredith Placko
(3) MAD PARODIES ANTHOLOGY. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Fantagraphics is bringing out “The Sincerest Form of Parody: The Best 1950s Mad Inspired Satirical Comics” on April 29, 2025.
I have fond memories of reading (and enjoying) Mad’s musicals parodies, I can still visualize the mournful face of a short guy singing (within his speech balloon) “The ghoul that I marry…” for example. Ditto panels from their East Side Story. Here’s an example.
Killzoneblog, with more extensive details and lyric excerpts: “Mad Magazine, RIP” from 2019.
…My big brother bought Mad religiously, and thus I got the issues second hand. I learned about politics from Mad. I knew who Castro and Khrushchev were only because of the cartoon renditions within its pages.
In those years they had literate, educated satirists who were able to skewer sacred cows with a precise wit that appealed to adults, too. And the artists! Here I must call out two of my favorites—Mort Drucker, master caricaturist; and Don Martin, whose mind-bending cartoons blew right past the safe and predictable into uncharted realms of hilarity….
… Of all the talent, though, my absolute favorite was the poet laureate of Mad, Frank Jacobs, who, at age 90, is still among us. Jacobs did the libretti for many of the Mad satires of famous movie musicals. I also have a first edition of his legendary collection, Mad For Better or Verse. The amazing thing about Jacobs is that his satirical songs always scanned perfectly along with the originals. He never hit a bad note.
Here’s an example. One of the first political pieces I remember from Mad is East Side Story, a send-up, of course, of the Leonard Bernstein-Stephen Sondheim musical. It was Jacobs at his best, along with the fantastic caricatures of Drucker…
That also links to a collection for Frank Jacobs’ many MAD parody lyrics along art by Paul Coker Jr. (I’m seeing bunches of used copies of this in the highly-affordable range, in case you’re tempted — Mad for Better of Verse by Jacobs at AbeBooks.)
(4) HE WON’T CROSS THE BORDER. When the Niagara Falls Comic Con happens on the Canadian side of the falls at the end of May, American comics creator Larry Hama won’t be there. An invited guest, he’s concerned he might have trouble getting back into the U.S. afterwards. Hama’s career includes stints as a writer and editor for Marvel Comics, where he wrote the licensed comic book series G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero. He has also written for the series Wolverine, Nth Man: The Ultimate Ninja, and Elektra.
(5) HUMAN AUTHORSHIP REQUIRED FOR COPYRIGHT. “U.S. Copyright Office issues highly anticipated report on copyrightability of AI-generated works” — Reuters has the link.
…The United States Copyright Office (Office) has released Part 2 of its Report on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence which addresses the copyrightability of AI-generated works (here, opens new tab). It maintains that human authorship and creativity remain essential in the quest to obtain copyright protection for works involving materials created by artificial intelligence.
While Part 1 discusses the legal and policy issues related to artificial intelligence (AI) and digital replicas (here, opens new tab), the recently released “Part 2: Copyrightability” analyzes the type and degree of human contributions required to bring AI generated works within the scope of copyright protection in the United States, as well as the international landscape of how other countries are approaching questions of copyrightability in the AI space and the policy implications of providing additional legal protection to AI-generated material….
… In “Part 2: Copyrightability,” the Office affirms that copyright protection in the United States requires human authorship. The Office points to the foundational principles found in the Copyright Clause in the Constitution and the language of the Copyright Act as interpreted by U.S. courts which grants Congress the authority to “secur[e] for limited times to authors … the exclusive right to their … writings.” U.S. Const. art. I, § 8, cl. 8….
(6) GOOD GRIEF. We tend not to link to the Daily Mail here. In case you’ve forgotten why, consider this piece based on the TV documentary Wonderland: Science Fiction in the Atomic Age which Ersatz Culture previewed in yesterday’s Scroll — “CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews Science Fiction In The Atomic Age on Sky Arts: The sci-fi ‘psychic’ who predicts everyone will be gay in 100 years”. Here are screencapped excerpts.
(7) ROBERT MCGINNIS (1926-2025). Renowned magazine/paperback artist Robert McGinnis died March 10. He was a member of the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame.
McGinnis is known for his illustrations of more than 1,200 paperback book covers, and over 40 movie posters, including Breakfast at Tiffany’s (his first film poster assignment), Barbarella, and several James Bond and Matt Helm films.
Starting in 2016, McGinnis painted a number of retro-style covers for reissues of books by Neil Gaiman.
(8) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
April 4, 1914 — Edgar Rice Burroughs’ At the Earth’s Core novel
On this day, one hundred and eleven years ago, the first part of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ At the Earth’s Core novel appeared in All-Star Weekly. This magazine started life as The All-Story Magazine before becoming The All-Story and All-Star Weekly. Burroughs’ serial would run from April 4 to April 25, 1914. It would be first published in book form in hardcover by A. C. McClurg in July, 1922.
It is of course freely available at the usual suspects.
Pellucidar, a hollow Earth story, is very influential with writers using the setting later on, not the least of which is the author who has Tarzan appearing there. Lin Carter’s “Zanthodon” series, beginning with his novel Journey to the Underground World, is considered a homage to this work.
And the Skartaris setting used by Mike Grell in The Warlord series is another homage to Pellucidar in the graphic medium. Justice League Unlimited’s “Chaos at the Earth’s Core” episode would show the hollow Earth in an animated medium. It’s quite wonderful even if, like the Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World series, it has very, very little to do with the source material. That animated series is streaming on Max.
Wiki claims that Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness was largely influenced by this work. Huh? Please someone explain.
The novel has been filmed once as At the Earth’s Core in 1976 as directed by Kevin Connor and starring Doug McClure as David Innes and Peter Cushing as Abner Perry.
It fared badly among critics and audience reviewers alike at Rotten Tomatoes, garnering just thirty-three and thirty-four percent respectively. My favorite critic comment? This one by Stephen Randall of the Los Angeles Free Press: “It’s the type of movie you can send your kids to, but only if you don’t much like them.” Ouch. Really ouch.
If you really must, and have nothing else at all else to watch, it is streaming on Prime. Yes, I did watch it with the Suck Fairy. Neither of us was at all happy we did. Ellen Kushner’s hot chocolate was needed.
(9) COMICS SECTION.
(10) RINGO AWARDS TAKING NOMINATIONS. Public nominations for the Mike Wieringo Comic Book Industry Awards – the Ringo Awards – opened today and will through June 19.
The Mike Wieringo Comic Book Industry Awards is an annual celebration of the creativity, skill, and fun of comics. The awards return for their ninth year on Saturday, October 18, 2025 as part of the fan- and pro-favorite convention, the Baltimore Comic-Con.
Unlike other professional industry awards, the Ringo Awards include fan participation in the nomination process along with an esteemed jury of comics professionals.
More than 20 categories will be celebrated with top honors being given at the awards ceremony in October.
Fan and pro-jury voting are tallied independently, and the combined nomination ballot is compiled by the Ringo Awards Committee. The top two fan choices become nominees, and the jury’s selections fill the remaining three slots for five total nominees per category. Ties may result in more than five nominees in a single category.
(11) WEIRD FANTASY BEGINS. “75 Years Ago, One of the Most Iconic Sci-Fi Comic Series Made Its Debut” – the anniversary is celebrated by CBR.com.
Who inspired the launch of Weird Fantasy?
As noted, Gaines was a very open-minded guy, and so Harry Harrison, who was working in an art partnership with Wallace Wood (Harrison would pencil the comics, and Wood would ink them, although sometimes the lines blurred between who was penciling and who was inking. The two had first met while both were studying with artist Burne Hogarth, but they didn’t start working together until Wood had already started working at EC on his own), approached Gaines about EC doing science fiction comics. He gave Gaines some science fiction books to read, and Gaines was quickly hooked, and so he approved the new series.
The series was edited by Al Feldstein, though, who was becoming Gaines’ top editor/creative partner at the company. Harrison had no control over the idea he inspired, so he and Wood would actually split up their partnership by the end of 1950, and Harrison would go off to become a popular science fiction author….
(12) ARTEMIS II PATCH ART. “NASA’s Artemis II astronauts reveal moon mission patch to honor ‘AII’” at CollectSPACE.
The next astronauts to fly to the moon now have a mission patch to represent their history-making journey.
NASA on Thursday (April 3) debuted the official Artemis II insignia, its first emblem for a moon-bound crew in more than 50 years. Astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen will wear the patch when they launch on the Artemis II mission, currently targeted for no later than April 2026.
“This patch designates the mission as ‘AII,’ signifying not only the second major flight of the Artemis campaign, but also an endeavor of discovery that seeks to explore for all and by all,” wrote the crew in their description of the mission patch.
The emblem includes design elements that symbolize the past, present and future of human space exploration.
Borrowing the same outline as NASA’s Artemis program patch (as well as the shape of the “A” in “AII” and the red trajectory line forming the crossbar of the “A” and the path between Earth and the moon), the border frames an artistic depiction of “Earthrise.” The now-iconic image of our home planet hovering above the lunar horizon was captured by the Apollo 8 crew, the first humans to fly to the moon.
The Artemis II crew will not enter lunar orbit like Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders did in December 1968, but will share in seeing some of the same sights as they did while flying beyond the moon and then looping back to return to Earth….
(13) LOCH NESS CANDID CAMERA. “Scientists Recover Underwater Camera Designed to Snap Photos of Loch Ness Monster” reports Futurism.
In 1970, a cryptid-obsessed biologist placed several cameras inside plastic trap boxes and sent them down to the depths of Scotland’s Loch Ness in hopes of finally capturing compelling evidence of its storied monster — and now, it appears that one of those cameras has been recovered by sheer accident.
As USA Today and other outlets report, one of the cameras deployed by University of Chicago biologist Roy Mackal some 55 years ago was discovered during a test dive of an unmanned research submersible in the famed lake in the Scottish Highlands.
Specifically, the camera trap’s mooring system appeared to have gotten tangled up in the propellers for the submersible, which was named, much to the chagrin of the British government, “Boaty McBoatface” by the public in a viral poll in 2016…
… When researchers developed the Instamatic’s film, they unfortunately didn’t find any photos of Nessie, though they did recover some beautiful, eerie photos of the deep, dark lake…
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Daniel Dern, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel “Music Man” Dern.]
THE 2024 HUGO AWARDS CEREMONY IN GLASGOW SCOTLAND, A PHOTO ESSAY
By Chris M. Barkley:
(1-3) Lining Up for the Hugo Awards Ceremony outside of the Armadillo, 7:00 pm local time.
(4) Artist Maurizo Manzieri (right) and Silvio Sosio (left), publisher and editor of the magazine Robot and the online magazine Fantascienza.com, outside of the Armadillo, 7:00 pm.
(5) Hugo Ceremony Auditorium Stage.
(6) Hugo Awards Ceremony poster.
(7) Gay and Joe Haldeman.
Forty-two more photos follow the jump!
Continue readingBy Richard Man: One of the pleasant surprises with Nebula 2024 was that Dr. Gregory Benford was there. Dr. Benford suffered a stroke in December 2022, but he appears to be recovering well and quite sharp.
Gay Haldeman, Naomi Fisher, Joe Haldeman, and Gregory Benford (seated)
Richard Man, Gay Haldeman, Naomi Fisher, Joe Haldeman, John Hertz, and Gregory Benford (seated)
Photos by and © Richard Man.
Journey Planet 76 – The American War in Vietnam
7th December 2023. Ho Chi Minh City.
On December 7, 1968 PFC Joe W. Haldeman wrote “Notes from the Jolly Green Jungle” about his experiences in Vietnam, which first appeared in the fanzine ODD #20.
55 years later this, plus his “Tales from the Jolly Green Jungle,” which appeared in ODD #19, are reprinted in the new issue of Journey Planet which looks at the American War in Vietnam.
Journey Planet co-editor James Bacon writes from the War Remembrance Museum in Ho Chi Minh City:
“It is important to pay respects to those who suffered so much, and so I am here in the War Remnants Museum, where so much time and effort is spent educating and sharing the horror of the American War in Vietnam. Whole sections are dedicated to war crimes and the effects of the use of Agent Orange by the U.S. These consequences are shown through exhibits and through paintings by children. It is a hard and challenging series of documentations. There is a requiem and photo exhibition for journalists and soldiers alike; there is acknowledgment of those who fought. As much as there is about Lt Calley’s role in the Mỹ Lai massacre, and Senator Bob Kerrey, who was a Navy SEAL and part of the atrocities at Thanh Phong Village, the museum also notes the Veterans Against the War, soldiers who marched for peace, and those like Lawerence Manley Colburn and Hugh Clowers Thompson Jr. who fought in their own way to stop atrocities by comrades.”
“This issue of Journey Planet looks at the American War in Vietnam and its connections to fans and professionals as we consider the impact of the War. As I sit here among the artifacts of war, and contemplate it, remembering it, aware of the unbelievable losses, the sadness, the horror and the injuries and death, I am grateful to the fans who have allowed us to share their stories and memories of the War. These are personal and important stories. It is right that we confront and consider our history, and it is right that we confront and consider the experiences of the Vietnamese–those who lived through the War and those who left and those who extensively wrote about it. We started this issue five years ago, and now, at 104 pages, with dozens of people helping bring it together, we hope that you find the issue of interest.
“We look thoughtfully at Vietnamese voices, and how they shared their experience through writing and film. We discuss the works of novelists Doan Phuong Nguyen, Aliette de Boddard, Lê Minh Khuê, Dương Thu Hương, and Hoa Pham; filmmaker Eirene Tran Donohue; graphic novel writer/artists GB Tran, Clement Baloup, Marcellino Truong, Thi Bui, and Minh Lê as we carefully consider how the War is portrayed and shared.”
Along with these Vietnamese voices, they share the writings and art of Joe Haldeman and David Thayer from their time of service in Vietnam, along with excerpts of Dick Eney’s fanzine, “Curse you Red Baron!” which he published from Saigon while he was stationed there for over five years. Bacon says, “We are honored to share first-hand accounts of these vivid experiences with readers.”
Fans have taken the time to share very personal matters, writing about their family members, some of whom were lost in the War, as they contemplate carefully the personal impacts. Sara Felix, Errick Nunally, Guy Lillian, III, and co-editor Christopher J. Garcia have shared articles about their family members.
The impact of the War on comics is considered as they look at works by Vietnamese comic book creators Nguyễn Thành Phong, Khánh Dương, Huu Do Chi, Nguyễn Khánh Dương, Can Tiểu Hy, and Võ Hùng Kiệt (ViVi). They reprint State Representative Julian Bond’s anti-war comic, Vietnam, which was first published in 1967, look at Snoopy and Charles Shultz during the time of the War, chat to comic writer Garth Ennis, write about Joe Kubert’s connection to Vietnam, and look at how DC Comics and Marvel reacted through their publications to the War at the time, while also making recommendations.
This issue contains a wide selection of art by Keith Burns, Sara Felix, Nguyễn Thanh Phong, Khánh Dương, Guillermo Ortego, Teddy Harvia, Joe Haldeman, Col Art, Arnie Fenner, Juan Gimenez, Võ Hùng Kiệt, TG Lewis, Huy Oánh, Marcia Rosler, Bill Rotsler, and Rick Swan.
With extensive articles by Brenda Noiseux among many contributors, this issue saw Allison Hartman Adams join Christopher J. Garcia and James Bacon as co-editor in this broad look at the American War in Vietnam.
Download the issue here: Journey Planet issue 76.
Table of Contents
(1) END OF AN ERA. Kristine Kathryn Rusch signed off her influential weekly business blog on November 22. “Business Musings: All Good Things”.
…I wasn’t that desparate in 2009 and I’m certainly not that desperate now. As I noted in some recent blogs, my books are all in print. The books of my traditional friends? Not in print at all. Or if they are in print, my friends aren’t making a dime off of them.
It’s discouraging, but as I’ve seen over the past few years, people have dug in. It doesn’t matter that traditional writers now have to get a “real” job to make a living. Or that the changes in indie have made it possible for those of us who understand business to make a good living while writing what we love.
We’ve changed.
The world has changed.
And honestly, I’m not that interested in writing about the publishing industry weekly. There is no publishing industry anymore. There are different aspects of book publishing, all of which fascinate me, and none of which make me want to pontificate for a few thousand words every single week.
Then there’s my writing itself. In the spring, I made a list of the books clamoring to get out of my brain. The series that need finishing right now, the standalones I’ve been dying to write, the books I’ve intended to write since the turn of the century if not longer, as well as the short stories that rise to the top of my to-do list because I read an inspiring article or saw an amazing play.
I will have time to write all of that if I double down on my fiction writing. Or triple down. When I write fiction, I write a minimum of 1,000 new words per hour. The blog takes a minimum of 10 hours per week from idea to page, including the audio (which is maybe 20 minutes of that 10 hours). I love the audio. It’s fun.
The blog, not so much.
In fact it had become such a drag that I put it off until the last minute, and then have to give up even more fiction writing time to get it down.
And while the blog makes me more money per month than someone would earn making minimum wage (not counting all the nonfiction books I get out of it or the other perks), I could make more money if I write three novellas a year, whether I sell them to traditional markets or not.
The blog is self-sustaining financially, but it’s actively costing me money. My earnings as a fiction writer have gone up dramatically in the past fourteen years….
… Thirty dollars per hour writing a blog post that has little resale value or $1000 per hour writing stories that can sell for decades. It’s really a no brainer….
… Except…I do like noting things about the publishing industry, from time to time. Some things catch my attention and I want to discuss them. I will do that on my Patreon page, which I am not shutting down.
I’ll be doing mostly short posts pointing out an article that writers might want to pay attention to, or commenting on some major change. I’m not going to do a long essay, unless I feel inspired….
(2) BUMPER CROP. Slashfilm reveals “Syfy Spent Thousands On Leonard Nimoy And William Shatner Star Trek Ads You Probably Missed”.
…Barry Schulman had been with the Sci-Fi Channel since its start, and he remembers the glory days in detail. He was interviewed for the indispensable book “The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years: From The Next Generation to J. J. Abrams,” edited by Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross, and he remembered the production of what was to be one of the more ambitious advertising tie-ins the network could have possibly received. It seems that the Sci-Fi Channel wrote and paid for a series of extended “Star Trek”-inspired interview-style infomercials to be hosted by Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner — Spock and Kirk themselves! — to run after individual episodes.
Sadly, due to poor ratings, the ads were only sparsely seen….
Of course, programming “Star Trek” presented a technical problem. In the late 1960s, when the hour-long “Star Trek” originally aired on NBC, the broadcast ad breaks only totaled about 10 minutes, leaving 50 minutes of show. By the early 1990s, ad time had grown to 16 minutes, leaving only 44 minutes of show. That would mean any new broadcast of “Star Trek” would, by advertisers’ decree, need to be shaved down by six minutes.
Shulman’s solution was to expand the “Star Trek” time slot from a 60-minute span to a 90-minute span, including all 50 minutes of “Trek” as well as whole ad breaks. He’d then pad out the remainder of the 90-minute slot with Shatner/Nimoy intro/outro segments. Brilliant….
… The good news is that you can actually watch all of these bumpers with Shatner and Nimoy on YouTube.
Here’s the video for the original Star Trek pilot, “The Cage”.
(3) FANAC.ORG ZOOM. The next Fan History Zoom session is scheduled for Saturday, December 9 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern. If you would like to join, drop a note to fanac@fanac.org.
APAS EVERYWHERE – Fred Lerner, Christina Lake, Amy Thomson and Tom Whitmore.
Since the first FAPA mailing in 1937, APAs have been a part of fannish life. There are topic specific apas, local apas, general interest apas, convention committee apas, letter substitutes and doubtless many more. Our panelists, all long time APA members, talk about their experiences with APA life: Why did you join the APA(s)? Did you APA live up to your expectations and why? Tell us about the APAs you’ve been part of, and tell us what makes them unique. (You can tell us about APAs you weren’t part of too!) Talk about the way the members of the APA related to each other, and the nature of that community. Compare the experience of an online community like LiveJournal or Facebook with your APA experience. The Cult was called the “13 Nastiest Bastards in Fandom”. Was it? What feels different about womens’ APAs? Are APAs now obsolete? Would you join a new APA today?
Future Zoom History sessions:
(4) THE DOG IN THE NIGHT. “Arthur Conan Doyle secretly resented his Sherlock Holmes creation, says historian” reports the Guardian.
Arthur Conan Doyle secretly hated his creation Sherlock Holmes and blamed the cerebral detective character for denying him recognition as the author of highbrow historical fiction, according to the historian Lucy Worsley.
Doyle was catapulted from “obscurity to worldwide fame” after his crime stories began appearing in a magazine in 1891, Worsley writes in the Radio Times. Eleven years later he was awarded a knighthood.
Yet “beneath the surface he was a discontented man”, according to Worsley….
(5) MAJOR SFF EVENTS IN EUROPE IN 2024. [Item by Dave Lally.] The year 2024 has a number of major SF+F events, in Europe, approaching (and all dates given herein are inclusive). And this info is primarily for those from outside the area (and I trust this data is of help).
Here is major SF+F event No 1 (and in the English Midlands of the UK):
EASTERCON 2024 — Fri 29 March – Mon 1 April we have, in the UK, Eastercon / “Levitation” (the UK’s annual National SF Con: Telford, just north of Birmingham).
[And NOTA BENE, post Eastercon on Thu 4 April, there is the very long standing “One Tun” Central London SF fen meeting (Asimov came in 1974). Upstairs (private) bar 1800-> closing. THE BISHOPS FINGER (pub), London EC1A 9JR (for internet maps). Real craft ale/hot food. Order both on Ground floor. Food delivered later up to you. Nearest Tube: Barbican. Nearest Rail : Farringdon. Nearest Elizabeth Line (esp from Heathrow) : Farringdon ( /// Barbican exit!!/// ). All welcome: whether local-to-London or non locals just passing thru!! ]
Nearest UK Rail Station to 2024 Eastercon : Telford {UK Rail Station code: TFC}. There are Express InterCity trains from London Euston (if first visiting there, pre-Eastercon) but one should then change trains at Birmingham International { Station code: BHI } NOT Birmingham New St (and see below why, esp re TfW trains).
Nearest Airport : Birmingham UK [ IATA code : BHX ], then take the free air-rail shuttle from that Airport, to the local, next door train Station : Birmingham International (as above). There, catch a north-bound train to Telford.
[If esp travelling from the States, it might be useful to fly to Shannon or to Dublin and then transfer onto a more local flight to BHX. Why? Cos on the return journey from either of those 2 Irish airports (and thanks to JFK +60 years ago), one pre-clears US formalities at those departure locations (the only two so far in Europe, which have them) and then one leaves one’s US airport as a standard, domestic passenger!]
Especially useful, re UK train travel from { BHI } above, is the long-distance train (run by Transport for Wales: TfW) which always starts from that Rail Station (usual final destination: ABERYSTWYTH, in mid-Wales). So seats to Telford are usually plentily available thereon, at that Station. Other northbound trains from { BHI } may only go to nearby Birmingham New St (in that City’s central area) or onto Wolverhampton, where one may otherwise then have to change trains anyway. And those other trains may get heavily used by Birmingham commuters, who may block seats for longer-journey-travelling passengers.
And UK rail data (times, fares etc) are available on: nationalrail(dot)co(dot)uk. The “green” way to travel..!!
[By the way, that TfW train eventually goes, on splitting much further up the line, past Portmeirion (!), tho that famous SF (Prisoner) site is much, much further away in North West Wales (oh and see LocationCon data I will provide later, re the proposed visit –on Tue 6 August– to that venue, pre- and on the way to, Glasgow Worldcon 2024).]
Eastercon 2024’s website : Levitation 2024 — The 2024 British National Science Fiction Convention.
( And, as always, non-UK fen are very welcome indeed at all SF+F events in Europe, incl the UK’s annual NatSFCon- Eastercon..)
(6) LIKE SAND THROUGH AN HOURGLASS. Inverse is warming up the audience for the release of the next Dune movie on March 1, 2024. “’Dune 2’s First 10 Minutes Restores a Classic Scene From The Book — With a Twist”. Spoilers at the link.
When Dune: Part One hit in 2021, fans immediately noticed one change from both the original 1965 novel and the 1984 feature film. Instead of an opening narration from Princess Irulan, Dune: Part One began with a voiceover from Chani (Zendaya). This inversion smartly centered the story of Dune: Part One from the perspective of the Fremen, at least partially. And now, with Dune: Part Two hitting in 2024, the opening of the film will honor the opening of the original book. But this time, the content of the narration will be decidedly different.
Minor spoilers ahead for the first 10 minutes of Dune: Part Two.
At CCXP 2023 in São Paulo, Brazil, on December 3, 2023, during a Dune: Part Two panel, audiences were treated to several preview scenes, including the first 10 minutes of the movie. Back in 2021, the first 10 minutes of Part One were also teased in special screenings, so this kind of preview seems to now be a tradition ahead of the launch of a new Dune movie.
(7) MISSING A NUMBER. Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw was there: “The Moonwalkers: A Journey With Tom Hanks review – a gobsmackingly huge space spectacle”.
Tom Hanks is the narrator and co-writer of this colossal and immersive multimedia family entertainment event or next-level school trip, about Nasa’s historic Apollo moon landings and the planned new Artemis missions. It’s taking place at Lightroom, the innovative new digital art performance venue at London’s Kings Cross – recently the site of Bigger And Closer, an immersive show about David Hockney.
With the audience gathered in the darkened arena-type area, seated on little upholstered double-stools dotted about, Tom Hanks’s likably folksy and nerdily enthusiastic voiceover booms out telling us that this floor space is the size of Mission Control, Houston. Soon, gobsmackingly huge photo images of the moon’s surface and our own planet Earth are flashed up around the walls, also great film footage of the astronauts bouncing and floating, and all with the cathedral vastness and crystal clarity that they have probably always deserved but never before got from TV screens or even movie screens….… But the strangest omission is the lack of any mention of Apollo 13, the near-disaster rescued with magnificent ingenuity and resourcefulness by the astronauts and ground crews, which Tom Hanks himself almost single-handedly turned into a key moment of American history with his performance as astronaut Jim Lovell in Ron Howard’s film.
Apollo 13 is, after all, why Tom Hanks is narrating this….
(8) NORMAN LEAR (1922-2023). The resume of TV’s Norman Lear even included a few items of genre interest. “Norman Lear, Whose Comedies Changed the Face of TV, Is Dead at 101” in the New York Times.
Norman Lear, the television writer and producer who introduced political and social commentary into situation comedy with “All in the Family” and other shows, proving that it was possible to be topical as well as funny while attracting millions of viewers, died on Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 101.
In 2003, he helped write a few episodes of “South Park,” the taboo-breaking animated series that was the “All in the Family” of its day. (The show’s creators, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, have said that their bile-spewing character Eric Cartman is partly based on Archie Bunker.)
Mr. Lear turned his attention back to movies in 1982, when he, Mr. Yorkin and Jerry Perenchio bought Avco Embassy Pictures. The newly renamed Embassy Communications released films, including … the acclaimed mock documentary “This Is Spinal Tap” (1984), directed by the “All in the Family” alumnus Rob Reiner.
In 1985… Mr. Lear founded Act III Communications, named to signify the third act of his life. Act III’s most notable productions were two other Rob Reiner films, “Stand by Me” (1986) and “The Princess Bride” (1987)….
(9) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
1975 –Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War. Anyone here who has not read Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War should now leave. Really should as I’m going to discuss it.
It was published by St. Martin’s Press forty-eight years ago with the cover illustration not being credited by ISFFB.
It would win a Hugo at MidAmeriCon, plus a Nebula and a Ditmar, and be nominated for a Prometheus Award.
Haldeman said in a Guardian review of 2011 that “It’s about Vietnam, because that was the war the author was in”.
It was sixteen years after Starship Troopers came out and I thought that Haldeman said it was written as a reaction to that novel but the Guardian quote contradicts that. The reviewer there thinks that much of the look and feel of the book comes from Heinlein’s novel but I didn’t feel that was true. Do you?
According to the Authors note to my epub Open Road edition of 2008, “This is the definitive edition of The Forever War.” It looks like a novella titled “You can never go back again” that Bova wouldn’t publish at Analog because he thought it was “too downbeat” and therefore wasn’t in the first edition is now included in the middle section of the novel.
Now for its excellent Beginning…
‘Tonight we’re going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.’ The guy who said that was a sergeant who didn’t look five years older than me. So if he’d ever killed a man in combat, silently or otherwise, he’d done it as an infant.
I already knew eighty ways to kill people, but most of them were pretty noisy. I sat up straight in my chair and assumed a look of polite attention and fell asleep with my eyes open. So did most everybody else. We’d learned that they never scheduled anything important for these after-chop classes.
The projector woke me up and I sat through a short tape showing the ‘eight silent ways.’ Some of the actors must have been brainwipes, since they were actually killed. After the tape a girl in the front row raised her hand. The sergeant nodded at her and she rose to parade rest. Not bad looking, but kind of chunky about the neck and shoulders. Everybody gets that way after carrying a heavy pack around for a couple of months.
‘Sir’—we had to call sergeants ‘sir’ until graduation—‘most of those methods, really, they looked … kind of silly.’
‘For instance?’ ‘Like killing a man with a blow to the kidneys, from an entrenching tool. I mean, when would you actually have only an entrenching tool, and no gun or knife? And why not just bash him over the head with it?’
‘He might have a helmet on,’ he said reasonably.
‘Besides, Taurans probably don’t even have kidneys!’
He shrugged. ‘Probably they don’t.’ This was 1997, and nobody had ever seen a Tauran; hadn’t even found any pieces of Taurans bigger than a scorched chromosome. ‘But their body chemistry is similar to ours, and we have to assume they’re similarly complex creatures. They must have weaknesses, vulnerable spots. You have to find out where they are.
‘That’s the important thing.’ He stabbed a finger at the screen. ‘Those eight convicts got caulked for your benefit because you’ve got to find out how to kill Taurans, and be able to do it whether you have a megawatt laser or an emery board.” She sat back down, not looking too convinced.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born December 6, 1911 — Ejler Jakobsson. (Died 1984.) His first publications, edited with his wife, were The Octopus and The Scorpion in 1939 which were definitely of a pulpish nature.
He has responsibility for Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories briefly before they shut down production due to paper shortages. When Super Science Stories was revived in 1949, Jakobsson was named editor until the magazine again (and finally) ceased publication in 1951. I’ve never read that magazine. Who here has?
He was an editor for Graphic Books in the 1950s. Jakobsson returned to editing in 1969, when he took over Galaxy and If, succeeding Frederik Pohl. He worked to make the magazines more up to date according to SFE with the help of Judy-Lynn del Rey and Lester del Rey. He left the magazines in 1974 and was succeeded by Jim Baen.
SFE says that “During Jakobsson’s editorship the following anthologies were published (his name did not appear on their title pages): The Best from Galaxy Vol I (anth 1972) edited by The Editors of Galaxy Magazine; The Best from If (anth 1973) edited anonymously; The Best from Galaxy Vol II (anth 1974) edited by The Editors of Galaxy Magazine; and The Best from If Vol II (anth 1974) edited by The Editors of If Magazine.” None of these are currently in-print.
He also wrote a handful of short fiction according to ISFDB, all with Edith Jakobsson. The titles, such as “Corpses on Parades”, “Coming of The Unborn Things” and “Satan’s Toy Monsters”, suggest they were horror writers. These were never gathered into a collection.
(11) COMICS SECTION.
(12) FAN MAIL FOR FLASH GORDON. “1980’s FLASH GORDON: Movie of the (Wonderfully) Impossible!” at 13th Dimension.
…It’s a famous story by now—one of the great What If?s in all of pop culture—that in the early 1970s, George Lucas tried to buy the rights to Flash Gordon. His failure to do so led (indirectly) to the creation of Star Wars, and popular entertainment would never be the same. De Laurentiis had first wanted Federico Fellini(!) to direct, then moved onto Nicolas Roeg(!!), finally settling on journeyman director Mike Hodges and screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr. (who, besides helping develop the Batman TV series, wrote the 1976 King Kong remake for De Laurentiis). With a budget of $27 million (around $100 million today), De Laurentiis was, as usual, going big.
He’s a miracle!
After a magnificently exciting opening credits scene (scored to Queens’ iconic, propulsive theme music, and peppered with art from the comic strip), we jump right to the action—by the 20-minute mark we’re already on Mongo.
Every sci-fi/fantasy film post-Star Wars bears its influence, visually and tonally. But De Laurentiis’ personality was still so big and forceful that Flash Gordon hits a sweet spot between what a big budget, modern sci-fi movie was supposed to feel like in 1980, and the more idiosyncratic, phantasmagorical, Pop Art feel of the 1960s. Almost everything in Flash Gordon is a practical effect—the retro-futuristic spaceships and weaponry, the Art Deco sets, and the costumes that look mighty uncomfortable for the actors to wear….
(13) SUBMISSION WINDOW. Chris Barkley wanted to make sure I didn’t miss “The Magazine of Horror” by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, published in 2020 by Apex Magazine. I’m glad he sent the link.
… PS: as an aside, I was wondering and didn’t want to add something so silly to the main body of my cover letter. It’s silly really. The worries of a newbie writer. I heard that your magazine is the greatest horror magazine and will only publish the greatest horror story at a time, and in the lifetime of the published writer, will publish no other story, until the accepted writer expires. Also, that should a story be accepted, the current story is deleted and the displaced writer dies. What is worse, I heard that all those rejected by your magazine also die. This is of course all just silly rumours. I notice that your magazine only has one story on it, despite its ridiculously high pay rate of a hundred thousand dollars per story…
(14) DAY AND NIGHT, YOU ARE THE ONE. “Chronobiologist and Nobel Laureate in Medicine Michael Rosbash: ‘Lack of sunlight during the day is worse than electric lighting at night’” in El País USA Edition.
… Q. One of the things that flies and privileged people have in common is napping and sleeping at night. What is the biological purpose of sleep and of these intermediate pauses during the day?
A. We do not know. Memories are consolidated during sleep and neuronal morphology is modified during sleep. All that happens, but I do not think that is the major purpose of sleep. We do not know what fly and human sleep, for example, have in common. My guess is that it is related to metabolism, such as recharging ATP [adenosine triphosphate, a key energy molecule in cells]. The brain is the largest consumer of ATP; perhaps there is a metabolic need for recharging….
(15) ALL GLORY IS FLEETING. The New York Times tells how “George Santos Uses Cameo Videos to Make, of All Things, an Honest Buck”. (You can view his Cameo videos here: George Santos.) (Though it’s possible Bowen Yang is an even better Santos, as proven by his imitation in Saturday Night Live’s “George Santos Expelled Cold Open” last weekend.)
…Three days after George Santos was expelled from the House of Representatives, he sat in front of a camera to address the American people.
Well, a few American people. The ones willing to pay Mr. Santos — the former congressman who stands accused on federal fraud charges of stealing money from campaign donors for personal expenses — hundreds of dollars a pop on the video app Cameo.
“Hey, Sarah,” Mr. Santos said in one video. “Sometimes work sucks. I mean, let’s talk about bad days, huh? Last Friday wasn’t so great for me, either.”
It was a rare moment of truth for Mr. Santos, who lied to voters and his colleagues about where he went to high school, going to college, being a volleyball star, working on Wall Street, having Jewish ancestry and family ties to the Holocaust and the Sept. 11 attacks, among other things.
There was a time when Mr. Santos expressed regret for some of those falsehoods. His videos on Cameo suggest that time has passed.
“Hey, Harper! I love that you are such a dedicated student at N.Y.U.,” Mr. Santos says in one, before pausing, smirking and chuckling. “You know,” he adds, cocking his eyebrows: “My … not-so-real M.B.A.”
(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. I don’t think dogs are rules lawyers by nature the way Ryan George makes them out to be in “When Dogs See A Christmas Tree”, but that’s where the humor comes from in this video. Tell the internet to go fetch it for you.
[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Steven French, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Peer.]
Something not quite right in the San Diego Comic-Con International souvenir book caught Scott Edelman’s eye: “In the midst of getting verklempt reading the In Memoriam section, I spotted a major error on the page honoring the late Ron Goulart — they’ve mistakenly used a photo of the very much living Joe Haldeman.”
Goulart, of course, actually looked like this:
Edelman understands these things can happen. Because it’s happened to him.
“My photo appeared on Robert Reed’s Wikipedia page for awhile, after I accepted his Hugo award in Yokohama.”
When Scott wrote about the Goulart mistake on Facebook, people chimed in with other examples they’d seen.
Mine was remembering that Torcon 2 used the wrong photo for fan guest of honor Bill Rotsler in the 1973 Worldcon program book. At the time someone said it was really a picture of Philip K Dick. Since I didn’t yet know what PKD looked like I always assumed that was the identity. And therefore, the following year when PKD no-showed for his guest of honor stint at the 1974 Westercon, I thought it was an especially funny inside joke that they brought on Bill Rotsler to give the guest of honor speech instead.
The post I planned to write was going to end there. I knew I could find that old 1973 program book on Fanac.org and copy the photo to run with it. Which I have. There is just one problem. I know what Philip K. Dick looks like now, and that photo doesn’t look like PKD to me. I have never seen a photo of PKD with a long scraggly beard. So who is it really?
I asked Andrew Porter, who turned to others in the Fictionmags discussion group for help. Not only did they come up with the name, they found a copy of the original photo online. It’s artist John Schoenherr. The photo was taken by Jay Kay Klein at the 1971 Worldcon.
Porter sent a copy of the photo to John’s son Ian Schoenherr who confirmed the identity. He also commented, “Still have that corduroy safari jacket somewhere – and the ceramic tiki bowl.”
(1) WHOSE SECRETS ARE THESE ANYWAY? That’s one of the questions sf writer Alma Katsu answers while explaining why her historical horror novel The Fervor has an Asian protagonist. “Alma Katsu: Why I Finally Decided to Write a Main Character Who Shares My Ethnicity” at CrimeReads.
…When I started work, I didn’t think it was a big deal. Meiko was just another character and it was my job to slip into her head, as I do with all the POV characters.
Only it wasn’t that simple. The ghosts of my past kept dropping in, insisting on being heard.
My mother was Japanese. She married my father, who was white, when they met after the war. My mom was a product of her time and culture, demure and quiet, but she was also shaped by her experiences after the war. Complete strangers would come up to her in public and say hateful things (much like the anonymous assailants who attack Chinese grandmothers on the streets today). Until she died at 91, she hid in her room every December 7th, Pearl Harbor Day.
It was more than the influence of WWII. Being an Asian woman means navigating stereotypes and others’ assumptions….
(2) BUTLER AS OPERA. We’ve talked about the opera version of Parable Of The Sower. This article has a link to a trailer: “Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower Created by Toshi Reagon & Bernice Johnson Reagon”.
Parable of the Sower is a triumphant, mesmerizing work of rare power and beauty that illuminates deep insights on gender, race, and the future of human civilization.
This fully-staged opera brings together over 30 original anthems drawn from 200 years of black music to recreate Butler’s sci-fi, Afrofuturist masterpiece live on stage.
(3) SHEER LUNACY. CBC News says “Crimes on the moon could soon be added to Canada’s Criminal Code”. But it may take awhile for the cops to arrive.
…The proposed amendment to the code that would include crimes committed on the moon can be found deep inside the 443-page Budget Implementation Act that was tabled Tuesday in the House of Commons.
The Criminal Code already accounts for astronauts who may commit crimes during space flight to the International Space Station. Any such crime committed there is considered to have been committed in Canada.
But with Canada part of the Lunar Gateway project, which also includes a planned trip to the moon, the federal government has decided to amend the Criminal Code to incorporate those new space destinations.
In the Budget Implementation Act, under the subhead Lunar Gateway — Canadian crew members, the amendment reads:
“A Canadian crew member who, during a space flight, commits an act or omission outside Canada that if committed in Canada would constitute an indictable offence is deemed to have committed that act or omission in Canada.”…
(4) SIGNATURE WEBSITE LAUNCHED. GideonMarcus.com is now live, publicizing his many sff activities.
Founder of Journey Press, an independent publisher focused on unusual and diverse speculative fiction, four-time Hugo Finalist Gideon Marcus also runs the time machine project, Galactic Journey. He is a professional space historian, member of the American Astronautical Society’s history committee, and a much sought after public speaker.
Galactic Journey, frequently covered here, is a remarkable project:
Gideon Marcus and his team live in 1967, regularly commuting 55 years into the future to write about then-contemporary science fiction and fantasy, particularly fiction found in magazines. But that’s not all there is to life 55 years ago! So expect to read about the movies, the space shots, the politics, the music, and much more!
Galactic Journey has been a smash hit, garnering the Serling Award and four Hugo Nominations. So come jump through the portal and see a world you may but dimly remember, or which you may never have seen before, but without which your time could never have been…
(5) CROWDED TARDIS. “Is Doctor Who’s regeneration Centenary special too overstuffed?” asks Radio Times. This might be a rare occasion when being “bigger on the inside” won’t be enough.
In the thrilling trailer for the Doctor Who Centenary special, we discovered a whole host of exciting characters will be joining Jodie Whittaker for her final outing as the Doctor. Chief among those returning? ‘80s companions Tegan Jovanka (Janet Fielding) and Ace (Sophie Aldred), whose shock comeback has thrilled Doctor Who fans old and new.
But that’s not all – some of the Doctor’s more recent allies including Vinder (Jacob Anderson) and UNIT leader Kate Stewart (Jemma Redgrave) were also revealed to be joining the Thirteenth Doctor and her companions Yaz (Mandip Gill) and Dan (John Bishop) once again. And that’s not all – the Daleks, the Cybermen and Sacha Dhawan’s brilliant incarnation of the Master were also shown to be returning. Clearly, this will be a jam-packed finale episode for Whittaker.
But herein lies a potential issue. While all of these character returns are thrilling for fans, in an episode which should be Whittaker’s final time to shine as the Doctor, it’s possible to get the feeling that Doctor Who’s Centenary special is at risk of being overstuffed.
(6) DINO MITE. This trailer for Jurassic World Dominion dropped today.
This summer, experience the epic conclusion to the Jurassic era as two generations unite for the first time. Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard are joined by Oscar®-winner Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum and Sam Neill in Jurassic World Dominion, a bold, timely and breathtaking new adventure that spans the globe. From Jurassic World architect and director Colin Trevorrow, Dominion takes place four years after Isla Nublar has been destroyed. Dinosaurs now live—and hunt—alongside humans all over the world. This fragile balance will reshape the future and determine, once and for all, whether human beings are to remain the apex predators on a planet they now share with history’s most fearsome creatures.
(7) GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN. GateWorld remembers “Why (Almost) Every Stargate SG-1 Cast Member Was Written Out”.
Whether they’re moving on to new opportunities, ready to retire from show business, or are driven away by conflict on the set, there are moments in the life of a hit show where the actor leaves … but the show must go on.
And so the characters we’ve come to know and love set out for greener pastures. Or they’re recast with another actor. Or, worst case scenario, they get killed off.
Stargate SG-1 was no exception. Running for 10 years across both Showtime and the SCI FI Channel in the United States, the series saw its fair share of cast changes over the years. In each case the writers had to think creatively to write the character out of the show – and in a few cases to bring them back again later.
In fact, every single member of the show’s original cast ended up written out at one time or another … everyone, that is, except for one. Let’s round up when and why the writers wrote out each member of the original cast, as well as a couple of honorable mentions along the way.
(8) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.
1978 — [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.] Ahhh, Space Force. Do you remember it? Well forty-four years ago on this evening, the pilot for it aired on NBC with the primary cast being William Phipps as Commander Irving Hinkley, Fred Willard as Captain Thomas Woods, and Larry Block as Private Arnold Fleck. It also had a very large ensemble cast.
Now I say pilot but the series was never picked up, so that was it. Some parties claimed the cancellation was a result of the network earlier canning Quark which had lasted but eight episodes. This series was modeled upon the Phil Silvers series and perhaps someone at the networks thought better of a SF series based on that premise.
Fred Willard reprised his role from the pilot in a comedy sketch for Jimmy Kimmel Live! in 2018.
Willard portrayed an unrelated character for the 2020 Netflix series Space Force, which began airing two weeks after his death.
Not a single review I read about the 1978 series had a less-than-completely-harsh word for it. Now I have not seen it, so I do want to know what those who have seen it think of it, please.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
(10) COMICS SECTION.
(11) LEVAR BURTON HONORED. “LeVar Burton will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award” at the inaugural Children’s Emmys in December.
LeVar Burton, the beloved former Reading Rainbow host, will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award at the inaugural Children’s and Family Emmys in December, the Television Academy announced this week.
Burton took on executive producer and hosting duties for the PBS kids’ program in 1983. On the show, Burton read books, conducted interviews and explained current events to children. The show aired for 23 years, and has won 12 Daytime Emmys and a Peabody Award….
(12) WOMEN OF MARVEL. “Marvel Entertainment’s Original Podcast Series ‘Women of Marvel’ is Now Back for the Spring Season” – the first episode of the new season went live today: Peggy Carter: “Made to be Captain America.”
…In each episode, the hosts talk to the early and modern-day creators who helped bring to life some of Marvel’s most iconic women super heroes and learn how these beloved characters have evolved over time. This season features an impressive lineup of guests including comic writers Trina Robbins, Rainbow Rowell, Elsa Sjunneson; editors Alanna Smith, Lauren Amaro, Renee Witterstaetter; colorist Jordie Bellaire; actors Milana Vayntrub, Ashlie Atkinson; historians Jacque Nodell, Beth Pollard; games designer Paige Pettoruto; playwright Karen Zacarias; directors Giovanna Sardelli, Jenny Turner-Hall, and more!
Episode 1 is titled Peggy Carter: “Made to be Captain America.” Meet the beloved Peggy Carter and in particular, a fan-favorite version of her – the Super-Soldier serum-enhanced Captain Carter. Captain Carter didn’t begin in the comics pages or on-screen. Rather, she was born on the smaller screens of the MARVEL Puzzle Quest game – but she didn’t stop there! This week’s guests include Paige Pettoruto and Elsa Sjunneson!…
(13) OCTOTHORPE. The Octothorpe staff, John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty are live from @reclamation2022, the 2022 Eastercon! “Sorry, Am I Supposed to Be Recording This”.
We discuss Eastercon a lot and we’re very excited, plus there are audience heckles and questions.
(14) ZOOMING WITH THE HALDEMANS. Courtesy of Fanac.org, you can now see the two-part video of “Joe and Gay Haldeman – Fandom From Both Sides,” a Fan History zoom with Joe Siclari
Esteemed icons in the field, Joe and Gay Haldeman have been involved with science fiction fandom since discovering it in the early 1960s. With long, successful careers, they have a view on science fiction from both the fan and the professional side. Joe Haldeman’s highly regarded writing career has included 5 Hugo awards, 5 Nebulas, 3 Rhysling Awards, and many other honors; Big Heart award winner Gay Haldeman has managed the business as well as been a literary agent. But in this delightful zoom interview, the focus is primarily on fandom. Interviewer Joe Siclari knows just what to ask, having been friends with the Haldemans for decades.
PART 1. Joe and Gay describe how they first found fandom, their experiences at their first convention (Discon I, 1963), and how (and why) they became fans. They tell anecdotes of fans and professionals, their connections with non-US fandom, and the surprising identity of Joe’s Italian editor. Joe tells the story of how he single-handedly (if unintentionally) started I-Con in 1975, his work on convention program (some of it while serving in Viet Nam), his contributions to fanzines and more. There’s serious discussion about the reaction of fandom to him as a returning vet, along with Gay’s fannish activities while Joe was overseas. You’ll also hear much more, including the relationship between book advances and house mortgages, and the ultimate story of how far a science fiction novel can go. Highly recommended.
PART 2. The conversation continues with discussion and personal anecdotes about well-known authors and Big Name Fans. Rusty Hevelin was a particularly good friend, and Joe and Gay tell how they met him, and some impressive travel stories (especially the bicycle ones!). They offer stories and insights on Keith Laumer, Gordon Dickson, Robert Heinlein, Harlan Ellison, and others outside the field as well. This part of the zoom has audience Q&A, ranging from a literary question about the role of women in the Forever War to favorite means of writing (which leads to samples of Joe’s artwork). Many of the questions begin with “I first met you in xxxx”, and the tone of the session is that of close friends, sharing a cherished time together. As one of the attendees says, “You are some of the best people I know”.
(15) DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER. A data disk you don’t want to lose…or need to back up too quickly! Gizmodo is wowed that this “Quantum Computing Diamond Disc Could Store A Billion Blu-Rays”.
Don’t toss your hard drives, SSDs, and RAIDs just yet, but a company with an expertise in making precision jewel-based industrial tools has partnered with researchers from Japan’s Saga University to create a diamond wafer that’s both pure enough and large enough to be used in quantum computing applications, including memory with a mind-blowing storage capacity….
(16) JULES VERNE PREDICTED THIS. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] Companies blast satellites into orbit with a huge gas cannon. “Hypersonic space cannon promises 10 minutes from ground to orbit” at New Atlas.
…Green Launch COO and Chief Science officer Dr. John W. Hunter directed the Super High Altitude Research Project (SHARP) program at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory some 30 years ago, and in the process led the development of the world’s largest and most powerful “hydrogen impulse launcher.”
This is effectively a long tube, filled with hydrogen, with helium and oxygen mixed in, and a projectile in front of it. When this gas cannon is fired, the gases expand extremely rapidly, and the projectile gets an enormous kick in the backside. The SHARP program built and tested a 400-foot (122-m) impulse launcher in 1992, breaking all railgun-style electric launcher records for energy and velocity, and launching payloads (including hypersonic scramjet test engines) with muzzle velocities up to Mach 9….
(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] (Spoiler warning?) In “Moonfall Pitch Meeting,” Ryan George begins with the writer saying, “You know the moon? It’s going to fall!” “Are you putting spoilers in the title?” says the producer. After the pitch, the producer asks why it’s a happy ending. “Didn’t billions of people die?” “Yeah, but none of the people we care about,” says the writer.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Daniel Dern, Olav Rokne, John A Arkansawyer, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian,and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Niall McAuley.]
(1) HOTROOTING. Eddie Kim tells why he looks forward to the production, and shares a Redwall-inspired recipe: “’Redwall’ Netflix TV Series: The Best Food Porn Ever Written” at Mel Magazine. (“GRRM wept,” says N., who sent the link.)
The world of Brian Jacques’ Redwall is rife with every manner of woodland creature, depicting the lives of mice, moles, squirrels, badgers and beyond in mythic detail. As a young boy, I fell in love with everything about the series — the intricately illustrated covers, the sweeping tales of battle and camaraderie and the idiosyncrasies of each animal community. Over the course of 23 (!!) thick novels, Jacques weaves a tapestry of narratives, builds a unique lifestyle, dialect and even diet around various tribes and timelines.
I, being a Korean kid in Hawaii who loved the water, imagined myself as one of the river otters. They played hard, fought hard and adored the spicy flavor of hotroot in their foods. Just like me, I thought as I read another Redwall novel at the dinner table, eating spoonfuls of kimchi stew.
It wasn’t just the otters’ favorite shrimp ‘n’ hotroot soup that I craved; I’m fairly certain the Redwall books radicalized me at a young age into a type-A obsessive about delicious food. No matter whether I was reading Eulalia! or Martin the Warrior, I knew the book would feature page after page of lusty food prose, especially if it was a celebratory feast held in Redwall Abbey or another enclave. The words are straight out of a Chez Panisse menu: “Tender freshwater shrimp garnished with cream and rose leaves, devilled barley pearls in acorn puree, apple and carrot chews, marinated cabbage stalks steeped in creamed white turnip with nutmeg … crusty country pasties, and these were being served with melted yellow cheese and rough hazelnut bread.”…
(2) THE FELAPTON CUT. Camestros Felpaton has seen the elephant: “I watched Zak Snyder’s Justice League cut (slowly and pieces)”. (Don’t ask me where the “c” in Zack went.)
…This is very much a Zak Snyder film and contains all his intentional problems. It is pretentious, has lots of slow-mo, odd music-video like sequences, many people starring off into the distance to express their inner feelings and, of course, a colour palette that’s best described as “metallic”. The dialogue is grim. The characterisation is angst. It’s a clever but disaffected teenage kid’s idea that goofy comic books are essays on Nietzsche….
(3) POWER OF FIVE. This link waited patiently to be rediscovered in a cache of unopened February emails: James Davis Nicoll’s “Five SF Works That Explore the Mysteries of Alpha Centauri” at Tor.com.
… Not only is Alpha Centauri the nearest system to ours, two of its three stars are at least somewhat sunlike. Unsurprisingly, science fiction long ago saw the narrative potential offered by Alpha Centauri. Consider these five examples.
He begins with —
Alpha Centauri or Die! by Leigh Brackett (1963)
The Solar System is firmly under the thumb of an authoritarian government determined to bring peace with a stomping boot. While every reasonable need is filled, daily life is regimented and the space lanes are plied solely by robot ships. Not everyone is happy with this arrangement. The malcontents include among them men like Kirby—men with the skills to crew a one-way flight to Alpha Centauri and its known habitable world.
There are, of course, one or two catches. The State forbids such flights. The same robot ships that travel between the solar planets could follow the refugees to Alpha Centauri. Most importantly, there is a reason the Solar System’s authoritarian have never tried to annex Alpha Centauri. Alpha Centauri’s world may not be home to someone but it is definitely home to something. How it will react to invaders remains to be seen….
(4) GAMING HORROR IS HARD. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In the February 10 Financial Times, gaming columnist Tom Faber looks at the recent release of The Medium (set in “an abandoned Soviet resort”) to discuss whether video games can be as scary as horror movies.
I started out with the venerable Resident Evil series, which since 1996 has oscillated between survival-horror and action-oriented adventures, also spawning a surprisingly robust film franchise starring Milla Jovovich. 2017’s Resident Evil 7: biohazard, due a sequel this May, seemed promisingly spooky at first. I arrived at an abandoned house in the Louisiana bayou and felt genuinely unsettled by the ominous creaking noises of the house, the squalid family kitchen and the sculpture out front, a cross between Alexander Calder and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Yes as soon as a monster emerged and I had to start waving an axe around, I mentally flipped into monster-fighting game mode and all the tension abruptly vanished.
Horror needs to be paced slowly to allow tension time to build, to hide its monsters in the shadows, but this is a hard proposition for games, a medium defined by interactivity and action. A new breed of narrative horror games prioritises atmosphere over combat, including Soma and Amnesia by Swedish team Frictional Games, an eerie demo for a cancelled Silent Hill sequel called P.T., and Taiwanese game Devotion, a disturbing tale which was removed from online stores due to a controversial reference to Chinese premier Xi Jinping.
(5) THOSE MONEY QUOTES. Most of the story is behind a Wall Street Journal paywall, however, the introduction is entertaining: “Is It Time to Kill the Book Blurb?”
Pulitzer-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen would have preferred that his forthcoming book, The Committed, have no praise-laden blurbs at all, he says. “Kill it. Bury it. Dance on its grave. They create so much work, emotional labor and guilt, whether one is writing one or one is asking for one.”
Often fawning and sometimes composed after only a casual skim of the book, pre-publication endorsements have been an entrenched part of the publishing industry since Ralph Waldo Emerson mailed a little-known Walt Whitman a note about his first poetry collection, Leaves of Grass, in 1855. Sensing an opportunity, Whitman’s publisher emblazoned a standout line from Emerson’s letter on the second edition of the book’s spine in gold letters: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career. RW Emerson.”
As blurbs multiplied, however, the public’s distaste for them also grew. In 1936, George Orwell claimed that “the disgusting tripe that is written by the blurb-reviewers” was causing the public to turn away from novels altogether. “Novels are being shot at you at the rate of fifteen a day,” he wrote in an essay, “and every one of them an unforgettable masterpiece which you imperil your soul by missing.”…
(6) NOT COMING TO A TELEVISION NEAR YOU. That Hashtag Show believes “Star Wars Detours Leaked Episode Gives Us A New Hope for Disney+ Release”. Your lack of faith is disturbing.
Anyone ever heard of Star Wars Detours? No? It’s no surprise, since no one has aired it since its production. Ever since Disney bought up Lucasfilm, they’ve locked up this Star Wars animated parody series in their vaults and never looked back. With the leak of a single episode though, there may be a new hope that Star Wars Detours may come to Disney+.
A few days ago on November 29, 2020; someone leaked a single episode of the never-aired Star Wars Detours series onto Reddit. The episode featured the bounty hunters Zuckuss and 4-LOM attempting to rob Dex’s Diner, with decidedly mixed results. An all-star cast of Lando Calrissian, Boba Fett, Jabba the Hutt, and more contributed to the situation with utmost hilarity.
No one know who leaked this episode or why. All we know is that as soon as the leak occurred, Disney was just as quick to take it down with a copyright strike. By then though, it might as well have been closing the barn door after the horse already got out. Even Disney can’t make us unsee what we’ve already saw. Yet.
(7) A TITANIC MISSION. How far will it have to sink? “Seven Hundred Leagues Beneath Titan’s Methane Seas”. (Likely behind a New York Times paywall.)
What could be more exciting than flying a helicopter over the deserts of Mars? How about playing Captain Nemo on Saturn’s large, foggy moon Titan — plumbing the depths of a methane ocean, dodging hydrocarbon icebergs and exploring an ancient, frigid shoreline of organic goo a billion miles from the sun?
Those are the visions that danced through my head recently. The eyes of humanity are on Mars these days. A convoy of robots, after a half-year in space, has been dropping, one after another, into orbit or straight to the ground on the Red Planet, like incoming jets at J.F.K. Among the cargo is a helicopter that armchair astronauts look forward to flying over the Martian sands.
But my own attention was diverted to the farther reaches of the solar system by the news that Kraken Mare, an ocean of methane on Titan, had recently been gauged for depth and probably went at least 1,000 feet down. That as deep as nuclear submarines will admit to going. The news rekindled my dreams of what I think would be the most romantic of space missions: a voyage on, and ultimately even under, the oceans of Titan…
(8) TALE END. SYFY Wire broadcasts a promise: “DuckTales creators say series finale is going to have a lot of pay offs”.
…[The] series finale is aiming to go bigger and grander, as it sees Clan McDuck face off against their most devious foes yet: a secret evil organisation called the Fiendish Organisation for World Larceny, otherwise known as F.O.W.L. Led by Bradford Buzzard, F.O.W.L. is not only the biggest and most widespread threat the family has ever gone up against during all this time adventuring, but its also one whose roots began quite close to
the Money Binhome, with Bradford having served as the chairman of Scrooge’s company, with a seat on its board of directors at one point….
(9) HOW HE WANTED TO BE REMEMBERED. Only he would have said it in more flattering terms: “’Self-satisfied pork butcher’: Shakespeare grave effigy believed to be definitive likeness” reports The Guardian. An image is included at the article.
…The painted effigy is a half-height depiction of Shakespeare holding a quill, with a sheet of paper on a cushion in front of him. In the 17th century, a Jacobean sculptor called Gerard Johnson was identified as the artist behind it. Orlin believes that the limestone monument was in fact created by Nicholas Johnson, a tomb-maker, rather than his brother Gerard, a garden decorator….
(10) MEMORY LANE.
1976 — Forty five years ago, Joe Haldeman wins a Hugo for The Forever War at MidAmeriCon which was held in Kansas City. It had been published by St. Martin’s Press the previous year. The novel would also win a Nebula Award, a Locus Award for Best Novel and the Australian Ditmar Award. It has never been out of print and has a sequel, Forever Peace.
(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
(12) NEVER GET AN ARTIST MAD AT YOU. They might do the monster mash – to you!Mental Floss unveils twelve “Secrets of Comic Book Artists”.
…Telling a sequential story across panels and pages is the purview of the comics artist, who must be accomplished in everything from the human anatomy to perspective to lighting. Whether they’re working with a writer or generating their own material, comic book artists must be versatile.
…To get more insight into how these fantasy illustrators operate, Mental Floss spoke to Coller and others. Here’s what they had to say about deadlines, owning their work, and getting penciled-in revenge….
8. COMIC ARTISTS CAN GET REVENGE IN THEIR ART.
It’s not uncommon for artists to use real people as models for their fictional characters—typically background or supporting figures. “You spend so many hours alone with a page that you get bored sometimes,” Jones says. “So you’ll draw your editors in the background.” Other times, it might be someone they’re annoyed with who meets an untimely end. “Maybe someone who has frustrated you becomes a bystander getting crushed.”
(13) DEAL OF THE DAY. Hey, I can’t afford it, but I’ve never seen an author make this offer before.
(15) LONG-DISTANCE MARRIAGE. [Item by David Doering.] I could have written this as an SF short story in the 70s. My home county, Utah County, will perform civil marriages via the Internet (as a Covid protection). However, it soon got noised about not just nationally, but internationally. Now couples in Israel who did not qualify to wed there could be officially married by a Utah administrator. As this article states, Israel will recognize marriages conducted by other countries, however — “Utah finds itself at the center of a new legal battle over Israel marriage rights” — at KSL.
Two Utah rabbis joined an administrative petition this week filed against the Israeli Interior Minister and the country’s population authority in an effort to lift an order that does not recognize civil marriages for Israeli couples completed through a Utah online system.
… Israel carries strict religious rules regarding marriage but recognizes legal marriages done by other states.
…However, once Interior Minister Rabbi Aryeh Deri learned of the practice, he ordered the population authority to stop registering the couples and counting their marriage as legitimate. The petition was filed in an effort to reverse the ban and take it all the way to the country’s Supreme Court….
(15) ON THE REVERSE. In “The Trouble with Charlotte Perkins Gilman” at The Paris Review, Halle Butler says admirers of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist sf and horror also have to take into account that Gilman was a supporter of nativism and eugenics.
…Herland, Gilman’s sci-fi novel about a land free of men, is an example of this. The inhabitants of Herland have no crime, no hunger, no conflict (also, notably, no sex, no art). They exist together in dreamlike harmony. Held one way, Herland is a gentle, maternal paradise, and the novel itself is a plea for allowing these feminine qualities to take part in the societal structure. Held another, we see how firmly their equality is based in their homogeneity. The novel’s twist is that the inhabitants of Herland are considering whether or not it would benefit them to reintroduce male qualities into their society, by way of sexual reproduction. Herland is a tale of the fully realized potential of eugenics, and for Gilman, it’s a utopia.
All of this is especially troubling when you consider that Gilman was a staunch and self-described nativist, rather than a self-described feminist, as the texts surrounding her rediscovery imply. Nativists believed in protecting the interests of native-born (or “established”) inhabitants above the interests of immigrants, and that mental capacities are innate, rather than teachable. Put bluntly, she was a Victorian white nationalist. When Gilman is described as a social reformer and activist, part of this was advocating for compulsory, militaristic labor camps for Black Americans (“A Suggestion on the Negro Problem,” 1908). Part of this is pleading for racial purity and stricter border policies, as in the sequel to Herland, or for sterilization and even death for the genetically inferior, as in her other serialized Forerunner novel, Moving the Mountain.
These ideas of Gilman’s are hard to reconcile with our current conception of her as a brave advocate against systems of oppression—a political hero with a few, forgivable flaws….
(16) HEATED EXCHANGE. Literary Hub recalls a sophisticated analysis offered to disprove the then-new theory of evolution: “Charles Darwin’s Great Uncertainty: Decoding the Age of Our Planet”.
…[William] Thomson was a man of faith but he had no truck with biblical literalists who believed the earth to be 6,000 years old. His position was that a slowly changing ancient earth stood in direct contradiction with the scientific principles that he had worked so hard to establish—that energy cannot be created or destroyed and that heat tends to dissipate. Using these laws, argued Thomson, it would be possible to estimate the age of the earth and investigate whether it was old enough for evolution to take place.
In April of 1862, he brought out a paper claiming that a thermodynamic analysis of the flow of heat in the earth showed directly that it must be younger than uniformitarians, and by extension Darwin, believed. It starts, “Essential principles of thermodynamics have been overlooked by geologists.” Dissipation was the key to Thomson’s argument. Observations from mine shafts and tunnels showed that the earth’s temperature increases with depth below the surface. Thomson’s friend the Scottish physicist J.D. Forbes, by taking measurements in and around Edinburgh, estimated that the earth’s temperature rose by one degree Fahrenheit for every 50 feet of descent. This persuaded Thomson that the earth was cooling, losing heat to the atmosphere.
Using elegant mathematics, Thomson combined Forbes’s measurements with others relating to the thermal conductivity and the melting point of rock. Even acknowledging uncertainties in the data, he concluded the earth’s age was somewhere between 20 million and 400 million years. This was far too short a time for evolution. Even if the older estimate was true, Thomson argued the earth would have been considerably hotter than it is now for most of its existence. Before around 20 million years ago, the temperature of the entire earth would have been so high that the whole globe was molten rock. Evolution’s requirement that the earth was much as it is now for eons defied thermodynamic sense.
Darwin was shaken. “Thomson’s views on the recent age of the world have been for some time one of my sorest troubles.” “I am greatly troubled at the short duration of the world according to Sir W Thomson.” “Then comes Sir W Thomson like an odious spectre”—these are lines from Darwin’s letters to friends. In turn, his allies felt unqualified to attack the physicist’s arguments and suggested that perhaps evolution worked faster than previously believed, a solution that didn’t satisfy Darwin….
(17) MARTIAN MINERAL WATER. “Mars’ Missing Water Might Be Hiding in Its Minerals” – Smithsonian Magazine has the story.
The Martian landscape is an arid expanse of craters and sandstorms, but scientists have spotted several signs that at one point in its life, the Red Planet was awash with blue waters. Scientists have theorized that much of the planet’s water was lost to outer space as the atmosphere dissipated.
But the planet’s vast oceans couldn’t have been lost to space fast enough to account for other milestones in Mars’ existence. The water must have gone somewhere else. A new study presents a solution: the water became incorporated into the chemical makeup of the ground itself. The research uses new computer models and found that if Mars once had a global ocean between 328 and 4,900 feet deep, then a significant amount of that water might now be stored in the planet’s crust.
The study, published on March 16 in the journal Science and presented at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, incorporated data collected from Martian meteorites and by NASA’s Curiosity rover….
(18) RADIO ACTIVITY. Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait says a new search tool finds “No alien signals found from 31 nearby Sun-like stars” at SYFY Wire.
The results? They detected 26,631,913 candidate signals. Yes, 26 million. Their new algorithm (which I’ll get to in a sec) screened out 26,588,893 of them (99.84%) as anthropogenic — that is, coming from humans. Radio transmissions, satellites, radar, and all sorts of human tech can emit radio waves, and they were able to find those pretty well and eliminate them.
Of those left, 90% or so were close enough to known radio frequency interference that they could be weeded out as well.
That left 4,539 candidate signals. They checked all those by hand, amazingly enough, and found…
… they too were all from radio interference. So, out of 26 million sources, not a single one was from aliens. Bummer*.
[Thanks to N., Michael Toman, Jennifer Hawthorne, Cat Eldridge, JJ, John Hertz, David Doering, John King Tarpinian, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Rob Thornton.]
(1) MAKE IT SO AGAIN. Although showrunner Michael Chabon is moving on, Picard is not a one-and-done series judging by this item of state tax news. (However, CBS declined comment). “‘Star Trek: Picard’ Renewed For Season 2 Ahead Of Series Debut On CBS All Access Next Month” at Deadline.
… Like the first season that will premiere on CBS All Access on January 23, Season 2 of the Patrick Stewart-led Picard looks to be a 10-episode order for the streamer. As a part of that second season, the latest venture in the Alex Kurtzman marshaled Trekverse has been allocated over $20.4 million in California tax incentives….
Certainly, the huge reaction that Picard received when the resurrection of the philosopher-captain was first announced in Las Vegas last year and the tax credits made public today were a cold hard cash indication that the CBS Television Studios, Secret Hideout and Roddenberry Entertainment produced series was going to engage further, to paraphrase Jean-Luc himself.
(2) WELL-INFORMED. Joe Haldeman explained to his Facebook readers why he signed a petition to ban assault weapons – and how he became familiar with them.
We got this interesting petition, which Gay asked me to sign, from an outfit called Ban Assault Weapons Now.
I did sign it, but not reflexively. I do know assault weapons.
Unlike most people — unlike almost every American — I have been shot, both as a soldier and as a civilian. But I did carry a gun for most of a year “in country,” in Vietnam, sometimes two guns, and was conventionally glad to be armed.
Because of odd timing, I was never issued an M-16. They were not ubiquitous in Vietnam in 1968. I carried — and preferred, most of the time — the M-14 automatic rifle. We also had a Colt .45 automatic, sealed in a plastic bag, and traded around a Chinese AK-47, which my squad carried on convoy….
(3) ENJOYING THE WRONG FUTURE. In another article that takes off from Gary K. Wolfe’s Sixties sff novel collection for Library of America, Scott Bradfield holds forth on “Science Fiction’s Wonderful Mistakes” in The New Republic. Tagline: “The great novels of the 1960s remain enjoyable because they got everything wrong.”
…The science fiction novels of the 1960s—as this two-volume collection of eight very different sci-fi novels testifies—remain enjoyable because they got everything wrong. They didn’t accurately predict the future of space travel, or what a postnuclear landscape would look like, or how to end intergalactic fascism. They didn’t warn us against the roads we shouldn’t travel, since they probably suspected we were going to take those roads anyway. And they definitely didn’t teach us what a neutrino is. But what ’60s science fiction did do was establish one of the wildest, widest, most stylistically and conceptually various commercial spaces for writing (and reading) fiction in the history of fictional genres. Each book is unpredictable in so many ways as to almost constitute its own genre.
Take, for example, Samuel R. Delany’s influential space opera, Nova (presented here in a newly corrected, author-approved text), which takes the concept of the “cybernetic” fusion of human and machine and runs with it. Nova envisions a universe boiling over with star-hopping spaceships, spine-socketed crew members, weirdly mutated sexual and familial relationships, synesthetic video-art instruments, and at least one character raised on another planet who speaks in a verb-delaying syntax several years before Yoda was a gleam in George Lucas’s eye. (“Not too good going to be is. Out of practice am.”) Delany’s prose was stylistically bright, fizzing with ambitious energy (he began publishing novels in his late teens and won several major awards early) and relentlessly inventive, with flashy new visions of the future in one paragraph after another….
(4) WILL YOU BE MY NEIGHBOR? Alastair Reynolds tells how he admired Niven’s “Tales of Known Space” and that despite recent discoveries a writer can still do wildly creative worldbuilding. Then the question is – how do your space-faring characters navigate your stellar neighborhood?
…In some instances, our observations have begun to put limits on the numbers and properties of planets around familiar, SF-friendly stars such as Epsilon Eridani. It may well turn out that what was perfectly reasonable speculation thirty years ago is now ruled out by current data.
Still, let’s assume for now that our real stars and imagined planets remain viable locations, and we wish to use them in new stories. That’s where an additional wrinkle comes in: it’s very easy to look up how far away these stars are, and on that basis, work out (depending on the mechanics of your imagined space technology) how long it would take to get there from Earth. But sooner or later your story may depend on getting from star A to star B, without stopping off at Earth en-route. How do we work out how far these stars are from each other?
All the information we need is present: for any given star, all we need are its coordinates in the night sky, and a figure for its distance….
(5) KEYS TO THEIR PERSONALITIES. In the Washington Post, Frank Lehman, a music professor at Tufts University, analyzes John Williams’s scores to the Star Wars films and argues the music Williams composed for evil characters such as Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vader gives many clues to how we view these characters: “How John Williams’s Star Wars score pulls us to the dark side”.
…It’s said that the Devil gets the best tunes, but Williams has long proved that that maxim applies to Sith lords, too. Within Star Wars’ ever-expanding library of leitmotifs — recurring, malleable musical symbols — much of the most insinuating material belongs to the villains, from Darth Maul to Jabba the Hutt to Supreme Leader Snoke. Listening to these nefarious themes with the ear of a music scholar offers a lesson in the real power of the dark side, showing us how music can repel, deceive and, with the right compositional tricks, even charm.
(6) A DIFFERENT KIND OF COPIER. Daniel Dern’s GrabCAD article unexpectedly predicts “3D Printers Could Be Coming to a Library Near You”.
Public libraries have always been the place where you can go to borrow books, CDs, DVDs, and magazines. And in recent years, it’s now where you can go for 3D printing services.
“Libraries represent the public on-ramp to the world of 3D printing and design,” said Dan Lee, chair of the Advisory Committee for the American Library Association’s (ALA) Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP).
According to a report from ALA, there are over 428 public library branches in the United States that offer 3D printers to the public….… Using 3D printers requires education. The Medway library, for example, offers weekly walk-in 3D printer certification sessions.
How libraries charge for use of their 3D printers varies. Some charge per hour of printing time (probably around a dollar), while others will charge based on the amount of printing materials that will be required — typically nickel to a quarter per gram of filament.
(7) KERFUFFLE IS COMING. According to Vanity Fair, “David Benioff and D.B. Weiss’s Lovecraft Movie Has a Massive Problem: H.P. Lovecraft”. Laura Bradley’s question is: “The renowned horror writer was also a known racist and anti-Semite. Are the Game of Thrones creators the right people to handle that history?”
… What is known, however, is that Lovecraft, for all his pop-culture influence, was also terribly racist. His letters and literary work overflow with these sentiments, and in some cases it’s not even subtext. In 1912 he penned a poem titled “On the Creation of N—–s,” in which, as Lithub explained in its thorough exploration of Lovecraft’s white supremacy, Gods create black people as a semi-human species somewhere between man and beasts.
Benioff and Weiss, no strangers to online controversy, are seeing some of the same pushback that happened when they first announced the now-defunct series Confederate for HBO: namely, why this story, and why them?
(8) LEFT BRAINED ALIENS. NPR invites us to “‘Imagine Pleasant Nonsense’ With ‘Strange Planet’ Creator Nathan Pyle”.
Nathan Pyle fills the pages of his new book Strange Planet with big eyed, bright blue aliens from a planet that shares a lot in common with Earth. These aliens sunbathe, sneeze and even wish each other sweet dreams like us, but they describe these practices with deadpan technical terminology like “sun damage” and “face fluid explosions.” The lifegiver aliens even implore their offspring to “imagine pleasant nonsense” as they tuck them in for the night.
“One of the points of Strange Planet is that this is all (gestures in every direction) delightfully odd. It’s wonderful how much complexity we [humans] have created,” Pyle tells me in an email conversation — and yes, those parentheticals are his.
Pyle was inspired to create the series one day as he and his wife were preparing to have guests over — and they began hiding their possessions to make their small New York City apartment appear as clean as possible. “I realized this would make an excellent comic. I drew this one based on the experience, and the series was born,” he says. He began posting the comics on social media in February, and in less than a year, the series has amassed over 4.7 million followers on Instagram.
(9) KARINA OBIT. Actress Anna Karina died December 15 at the age of 79. Her work has been saluted by many culture blogs, including Lawyers, Guns and Money. Alphaville is the only SF she did, “a science-fiction tale set in a loveless dystopian future…”
(10) TODAY IN HISTORY.
(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
(12) COMICS SECTION.
(13) SOUND AND THE FURY. ScienceFiction.com is excited because “Your Alexa Device Can Now Curse You Out With The Samuel L. Jackson Voice Package!”.
To get started, just say, “Alexa, introduce me to Samuel L. Jackson.” Then, choose whether you’d like Sam to use explicit language or not. If you change your mind later, simply go to the settings menu of the Alexa app to toggle between clean and explicit content.
The Bloomberg video is a bit calmer: “Amazon Alexa Now Lets You Make Samuel L. Jackson’s Your Personal Assistant.”
Amazon company kicked off its celebrity voice program for Alexa, giving customers the option to hear some familiar voices—and it’s starting with Samuel L. Jackson. Users can pay $0.99 and have Jackson respond to your Alexa requests for music, the weather forecast, and more. You can also ask questions that are specific to Jackson, including queries about his career, specific roles, or his interests outside Hollywood.
(14) STEPHENSON BOOK TO SMALL SCREEN. The A.V. Club reports that “HBO is taking a crack at adapting Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash for TV”.
Hollywood’s ongoing efforts to adapt every single book that some guy spent way too much time and energy recommending at you at a party in college continues apace today, with Deadline reporting that HBO has put a TV version of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash into development. The series comes courtesy of The Kid Who Would Be King and Attack The Block director Joe Cornish, with 21 Jump Street’s Michael Bacall set to write the script…[Snow Crash] is satirical, fast-paced, and with one of the most kinetic opening sequences ever committed to print, it’s also one of Stephenson’s most readily accessible books. (Which is to say, he keeps the parables about computer programming, cryptography, and 17th century economics to a minimum.)
(15) FREE DOWNLOAD. Free anthology of Tor.com fiction from 3rd quarter — “Download the Fall 2019 Tor.com Short Fiction Newsletter”.
(16) TAKEN TO THEIR LEADER. Lou Antonelli has posted the latest free story at his Sirius Science Fiction site: “’Trump Asks a Feminist Extraterrestrial Leader for a Favor’ by Marleen S. Barr”.
It’s satirical. Whether it’s satirical enough for you remains the question.
(17) RAMBO UNLIMITED. And to complete our free fiction trifecta, Cat Rambo has released a bunch of titles on KU: “Free Fiction: Stories Newly Enrolled in Kindle Unlimited”. Here are a few of them —
Tabat stories include:
(18) PLUS ONE. ComicBook.com reports “Guardians of the Galaxy Star Karen Gillan Has Completed Her Role on Marvel’s What If…?”
Marvel’s What If…? may be one of the most anticipated offerings coming to Disney+. The animated series, based on the comics of the same name, will explore many significant moments from the Marvel Cinematic Universe but from the angle of what would have happened had just one thing gone a little differently. It’s a premise that is set to offer Peggy Carter as Captain Carter instead of Steve Rogers as Captain America among other interesting twists, but while it’s an exciting premise it’s one that fans have to wait for as the series isn’t set to debut until summer 2021. But while we don’t yet have a release date, fans can at least take some comfort in knowing that work is underway and that when it comes to Guardians of the Galaxy star Karen Gillan, she’s already completed her voice work on the series….
(19) THE FUTURE OF A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWAY. Los Angeles Times: “After ‘Rise of Skywalker’ and Baby Yoda, Kathleen Kennedy’s plan for ‘Star Wars’ and beyond”.
[Rob Bredow [(head of Lucasfilm’s visual effects division Industrial Light & Magic), speaking of Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy:]
“She said, ‘There have been a few times in my career where there have been these kinds of moments. Go for it,’” Bredow recalled in the cafeteria of Lucasfilm’s San Francisco headquarters. “She, and we, are looking for those opportunities to break new ground.”
By all accounts, the gamble on “The Mandalorian” has paid off for Lucasfilm since it debuted to an enthusiastic response on streaming service Disney+ in November. Viewers have obsessed online about the show’s introduction of so-called Baby Yoda, an infant from the same species as the green Jedi master…
Kennedy said she plans to make key decisions about the direction of the franchise in the coming weeks. But some things she already knows. While the “Skywalker” saga is ending, the company won’t abandon the characters created in the most recent trilogy. Additionally, she said, the plan is to move beyond trilogies, which can be restricting.
“I think it gives us a more open-ended view of storytelling and doesn’t lock us into this three-act structure,” she said. “We’re not going to have some finite number and fit it into a box. We’re really going to let the story dictate that.” […]
(20) WORKS FOR HER. NPR interviews somebody who had success with the idea — “Researchers Explore A Drug-Free Idea To Relieve Chronic Pain: Green Light”.
Ann Jones tried everything short of surgery for her chronic migraines, which have plagued her since she was a child.
“They’ve actually gotten worse in my old age,” says Jones, who is 70 years old and lives in Tucson, Ariz.
Jones would have as many as two dozen migraines a month.
Over the years, some treatments might work initially, but the effects would prove temporary. Other medications had such severe side effects she couldn’t stay on them.
“It was pretty life-changing and debilitating,” Jones says. “I could either plow through them and sometimes I simply couldn’t.”
In 2018, her doctor mentioned a study that was taking place nearby at the University of Arizona: Researchers were testing if daily exposure to green light could relieve migraines and other kinds of chronic pain.
Jones was skeptical.
“This is going to be one more thing that doesn’t work,” she thought to herself.
But she brushed aside the hesitation and enrolled in the study anyway.
It began with her spending two hours each day in a dark room with only a white light, which served as the control. In the second half of the study, she swapped out the conventional light for a string of green LED lights.
For more than a month, Jones didn’t notice any change in her symptoms. But close to the six-week mark, there was a big shift.
She began going days in a row without migraines. Even when the headaches did come, they weren’t as intense as they had been before the green light therapy.
(21) NOT DARWIN. But a sign of the times: “Driver ‘blows up’ car with ‘excessive’ use of air freshener”. Doesn’t smell so good anymore. (Includes a picture of the destruction.)
A driver caused an explosion in his car when he lit a cigarette after spraying air freshener.
He used “excessive” amounts of the aerosol scent before sparking up, according to firefighters.
Gas from the spray ignited, blew out the windscreen and windows and buckled the doors but the man escaped with only minor injuries.
Police said the incident in Halifax on Saturday “could’ve been worse” and warned people to follow safety advice.
The motorist was in stationary traffic in Fountain Street in the town at about 15:00 GMT on Saturday when the explosion happened.
It was so powerful it caused damage to windows at nearby businesses.
(22) YULE TRADITION. Marcus Errico, in the Yahoo! Entertainment story “The Joker’s still getting away… How ‘Jingle Bells, Batman Smells’ became the ultimate holiday spoof”, looks into the origins of “Jingle Bells, Batman Smells” and traces its origins to the Batman TV series of the 1960s.
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Rob Thornton, Cat Eldridge, Chip Hitchcock, Alan Baumler, Darrah Chavey, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]