Tag Archives: John Langan

Pixel Scroll 5/3/23 Don’t Ring That Pixel, It’ll Only Make The Scrolling Trickier

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(1) NEXT ON BABYLON 5. “The secret Babylon 5 project is… an animated movie”. The Verge does a roundup of what is known about the project based on J. Michael Straczynski’s tweets today, plus a little bit from his Patreon page. More details are coming next week, including a release date.

Meanwhile, the Babylon 5 reimagining live action show that’s been in development remains “on hold pending WGA issues” Straczynski said on Facebook last week.

(2) FAN WINS MINN STATE LITERARY AWARD. Congratulations to Minn-Stf member Karen E. Cooper on receiving the 2023 Emilie Buchwald Award for Minnesota Nonfiction, part of the Minnesota Book Awards. Cooper’s winning book is When Minnehaha Flowed with Whiskey: A Spirited History of the Falls.

From the 1880s until at least 1912, Minnehaha Falls was a scene of surprising mayhem. The waterfall was privately owned from the 1850s through 1889, and entrepreneurs made money from hotels and concessions. Even after the area became a city park, shady operators set up at its borders and corrupt police ran “security.” Drinking, carousing, sideshows, dances that attracted unescorted women, and general rowdiness reigned—to the dismay of the neighbors. By 1900, social reformers began to redeem Minnehaha Park. During the struggle for control, the self-indulgent goings-on there became more public and harder to ignore.

(3) LIKE SAND THROUGH THE HOURGLASS. The trailer for Dune: Part Two dropped today.

“Dune: Part Two” will explore the mythic journey of Paul Atreides as he unites with Chani and the Fremen while on a warpath of revenge against the conspirators who destroyed his family. Facing a choice between the love of his life and the fate of the known universe, he endeavors to prevent a terrible future only he can foresee.

(4) TONY AWARDS 2023. The 2023 Tony Award nominations are out. There are a few productions of genre interest like Into the Woods with cast members among the nominees, however the list is mostly not sff. The complete roster is at the link.

(5) KGB. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Paul Tremblay & John Langan on Wednesday, May 10, 2023, at 7:00 p.m. Eastern.

Paul Tremblay

Paul Tremblay has won the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, and Massachusetts Book awards and is the author of The Pallbearers Club, Growing Things, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, A Head Full of Ghosts, and the crime novels The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland. His novel The Cabin at the End of the World was adapted as the major motion picture Knock at the Cabin. His essays and short fiction have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and numerous year’s-best anthologies. He has a master’s degree in mathematics and lives outside Boston with his family.

John Langan

John Langan is the author of two novels and five collections of fiction. For his work, he has received the Bram Stoker and the This Is Horror awards. He is one of the founding members of the Shirley Jackson awards, and serves on its Board of Advisors. He lives in New York’s Mid-Hudson Valley with his family and worries about bears roaming the woods behind the house. His latest book is Corpsemouth and Other Autobiographies.

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

(6) THE SEX LIVES OF TRALFAMADORIANS. [Item by Steven French.] In an interesting and helpful article in Aeon, entitled “Sex Is Real” (but with the important sub-title: ‘Yes, there are just two biological sexes. No, this doesn’t mean every living thing is either one or the other’), philosopher of biology Paul Griffiths tackles the Tralfamadorians:

… imagine if there was a whole species … where three different kinds of gametes combined to make a new individual – a sperm, an egg and a third, mitochondrial gamete. This species would have three biological sexes. Something like this has actually been observed in slime moulds, an amoeba that can, but need not, get its mitochondria from a third ‘parent’. The novelist Kurt Vonnegut imagined an even more complex system in Slaughterhouse-Five (1969): ‘There were five sexes on Tralfamadore, each of them performing a step necessary in the creation of a new individual.’ But the first question a biologist would ask is: why haven’t these organisms been replaced by mutants that dispense with some of the sexes? Having even two sexes imposes many extra costs – the simplest is just finding a mate – and these costs increase as the number of sexes required for mating rises. Mutants with fewer sexes would leave more offspring and would rapidly replace the existing Tralfamadorians. Something like this likely explains why two-sex systems predominate on Earth….

(7) VECTOR NEEDS EDITORS. Jo Lindsay Walton and Polina Levontin will be standing down as editors of the British Science Fiction Association’s magazine Vector after one more issue (#298, late 2023), and the BSFA is inviting applications for new editors: “Vector: be part of a new editorial team!”

(8) MEMORY LANE.

2011 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Let’s talk about David Langford for a minute. Y’all know this wonderful individual already, so I need not go into depth on who he is, though I’d be very remiss not to mention that he has the most Hugo Awards in hand with twenty-nine so far. 

Many of those came about from his work as a fan journalist on his essential-reading Ansible newsletter which he has described as The SF Private Eye. The name Ansible you likely know is taken from Le Guin’s communication device.

That he borrowed the name from a fictional device is a fact that lends itself to the lead-in for the Beginning excerpted in this Scroll. It’s from Langford’s story in Fables from the Fountain, edited by Iain Whates, a collection which paid homage to Arthur C. Clarke’s Tales from The White Hart.

Fables from the Fountain centers on The Fountain, a traditional London pub situated in Holborn, sited just off Chancery Lane, where Michael, our landlord, serves only superb ales, ably assisted by barmaids Sally and Bogna.  It is a place where a group of friends – scientists, writers and, yes, genre fans — meet regularly on a Tuesday night to tell true stories, and some well, maybe not so true. 

Our story, “The Pocklington Poltergeist”, was published by NewCon Press as part of this collection twelve years ago. Dean Harkness did the cover art. 

They are, I must say, quite fun tales that keep nicely in the spirit of Clarke’s own. Available at the usual suspects, or in a more traditional paper edition.

And let’s us step into The Fountain for our Beginning…

A buzz of expectation could be felt in the back bar of the Fountain that Tuesday evening, and Michael the landlord hoped aloud that this didn’t mean funny business. No one needed to be told what he meant. The previous meeting had gone with a bang, not to mention a repeated flash, crackle and puff of purple vapour when anyone stepped in the wrong place. Whatever that noisy stuff was, it got on your shoes and followed you even into the sanctuary of the toilet.

“Nitrogen tri-iodide,” said Dalton reminiscently. “Contact explosive. A venerable student tradition. It’s amazing how each new year discovers the formula, as though it were a programmed instinct.”

“They read science fiction,” Ploom suggested. “Robert Heinlein gives a fairly detailed recipe in Farnham’s Freehold.”

“Not his best,” said Dalton. “And not the best procedure either. Solid iodine crystals are far, far more effective than the usual alcoholic solution. I speak purely theoretically, of course.”

At the bar, Professor Mackintosh made reassuring noises. “The only upheaval we’re expecting is a celebrity visitor, Michael. A demi-celebrity, at any rate. Have you heard of Dagon Smythe “the psychic investigator – a real-life Carnacki the Ghost-Finder? Colin Wilson wrote a whole book about him once.”

Next to the Professor, Dr Steve spluttered something into his beer. It could have been: “That charlatan.”

“Now, now,” murmured Mackintosh. “Guests are always received politely. We even managed to be civil to Uri Geller.”

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born May 3, 1896 — Dodie Smith. English children’s novelist and playwright, best remembered for The Hundred and One Dalmatians which of course became the animated film of the same name and thirty years later was remade by Disney as a live action film. (Saw the first a long time ago, never saw the latter.) Though The Starlight Barking, the sequel, was optioned, by Disney, neither sequel film (101 Dalmatians II: Patch’s London Adventure and 102 Dalmatians) is based on it. Elizabeth Hand in her review column in F&SF praised it as one of the very best fantasies (“… Dodie Smith’s sophisticated canine society in The Hundred and One Dalmatians and The Starlight Barking…”) she read. (Died 1990.)
  • Born May 3, 1928 — Jeanne Bal.  Ebony In Trek’s “The Man Trap” episode, she played Nancy Crater, a former lover of Leonard McCoy, who would be a victim of the lethal shape-shifting alien which craves salt. This was the series’ first-aired episode that replaced “The Cage” which the Network really didn’t like. She also had one-offs in Thriller and I-Spy. (Died 1996.)
  • Born May 3, 1939 — Dennis O’Neil. Writer and editor, mostly for Marvel Comics and DC Comics from the Sixties through the Nineties, and was the Group Editor for the Batman family of titles until his retirement which makes him there when Ed Brubaker’s amazing Gotham Central came out. He himself has written Wonder Woman and Green Arrow in both cases introducing some rather controversial storytelling ideas. He also did a rather brilliant DC Comics Shadow series with Michael Kaluta as the artist. (Died 2020.)
  • Born May 3, 1949 — Ron Canada, 74. He’s one of those actors who manages to show up across the Trek verse, in this case on episodes of Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager. He also showed up in the David Hasselhoff vanity project Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD as Gabe Jones, and had further one-offs on The X-Files, Star Gate SG-1, Elementary, Grimm and The Strain. He had a recurring role on the now canceled Orville series as Admiral Tucker.
  • Born May 3, 1958 — Bill Sienkiewicz, 65. Comic artist especially known for his work for Marvel Comics’ Elektra, Moon Knight and New Mutants. His work on the Elektra: Assassin! six-issue series which written by Frank Miller is stellar. Finally his work with Andy Helfer on The Shadow series is superb.
  • Born May 3, 1965 — Michael Marshall Smith, 58. His first published story, “The Man Who Drew Cats”, won the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Story. Not stopping there, His first novel, Only Forward, won the August Derleth Award for Best Novel and the Philip K. Dick Award. He has six British Fantasy Awards in total, very impressive indeed. 
  • Born May 3, 1969 — Daryl Mallett, 54. By now you know that I’ve a deep fascination with the nonfiction documentation of our community. This author has done a number of works doing just that including several I’d love to see including Reginald’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards: A Comprehensive Guide to the Awards and Their Winners written with Robert Reginald. He’s also written some short fiction including one story with Forrest J Ackerman that bears the charming title of “A Typical Terran’s Thought When Spoken to by an Alien from the Planet Quarn in Its Native Language“.  He’s even been an actor as well appearing in several Next Gen episodes (“Encounter at Farpoint” and “Hide and Q”) and The Undiscovered Country as well, all uncredited. He also appeared in Doctor Who and The Legends Of Time, a fan film which you can see here if you wish to.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

  • Frazz – is built around a culture wars malaprop. (Or at least a misunderstanding.)

(11) EXECUTIVE ACTION. “Jim Lee Re-Ups at DC, Promoted to President” – The Hollywood Reporter has the story.

Jim Lee, the superstar artist-turned-publisher of DC, has added the title president to his growing list of executive designations.

Lee, re-upping his deal with DC, has been promoted to president as well as publisher and CCO of the comic book company, which is part of Warner Bros. Discovery.

The executive will continue to report to Pam Lifford, president of global brands, franchises and experiences at Warner Bros. Discovery, who announced the promotion Wednesday.

Lee, per the company, will continue in his primary role as publisher at DC, where he leads the creative teams. He will also continue to lead the creative efforts to integrate DC’s publishing portfolio of characters and stories across all media, supporting the brands and studios of WBD…

(12) I’VE HEARD THIS TUNE BEFORE. [Item by Dan Bloch.] Did Spider Robinson nail it or what? (Cf. “Melancholy Elephants”) “The Ed Sheeran lawsuit is a threat to Western civilization. Really.” says Elizabeth Nelson in an opinion piece for the Washington Post.

Spider Robinson’s 1983 Hugo-winning short story “Melancholy Elephants” is about a woman fighting a bill in congress which would extend copyright into perpetuity, because it would ultimately stifle humanity’s artistic creativity.  (“Senator, if I try to hoard the fruits of my husband’s genius, I may cripple my race.”)

The Post article talks about musician Ed Sheeran currently being sued by a songwriter’s estate which claims that “a similar but not identical chord progression used by both songs as a principal motif” is copyrighted.  The author says the effects of the estate winning would be horrible: “If artists must pay a tax for employing the most common modes and tones of composition, the process of grinding popular music down to a consensus-driven pay window for tech entrepreneurs and corporate opportunists will have reached its apotheosis.”

The two are eerily similar.

(13) BIG GULP. The good part is you won’t be around by the time this happens to the earth: “Sun-like star swallowed entire planet, MIT and Harvard astronomers say” at CBS News.

For the first time, scientists have caught a star in the act of swallowing a planet – not just a nibble or bite, but one big gulp.

Astronomers on Wednesday reported their observations of what appeared to be a gas giant around the size of Jupiter or bigger being eaten by its star. The sun-like star had been puffing up with old age for eons and finally got so big that it engulfed the close-orbiting planet.

It’s a gloomy preview of what will happen to Earth when our sun morphs into a red giant and gobbles the four inner planets.

“If it’s any consolation, this will happen in about 5 billion years,” said co-author Morgan MacLeod of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics….

The source article is “An infrared transient from a star engulfing a planet” in Nature.

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Jeanne Gomoll and Scott Custis replaced their garage floor/slab with new concrete. But before that could happen, workers had to lift up the garage and move it out of the way. This timelapse video of their project is quite something.

[Thanks to Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, N., Steven French, Jo Lindsay Walton, Dan Bloch, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]

Pixel Scroll 12/27/21 The Force That Through The Green Pixel Drives The Scroll

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(1) NEW YEAR’S WHO. “Doctor Who’s special time loop trailer teases huge Dalek moment” – Digital Spy introduces the clip. BEWARE SPOILERS.

The New Year’s Day special ‘Eve of the Daleks’ will see Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor getting stuck in a time loop with Yasmin Khan (Mandip Gill), Dan Lewis (John Bishop) and a group of deadly Daleks.

The episode also features Aisling Bea and Adjani Salmon in the roles of Sarah and Nick as they get ready to celebrate the start of the new year….

(2) TRANSPORT OF DELIGHT. Julian Yap and Fran Wilde begin weekly publication of The Sunday Morning Transport in January, delivering speculative fiction using a newsletter platform. Subscribe for one free story a month, or become a paid subscriber and get a story every week.

Subscribing to Sunday Morning Transport means bringing a a new speculative short story connection to your inbox every week, fifty weeks a year.

Sunday Morning Transport readers are makers, thinkers, scientists, artists, authors, dreamers. With a single speculative short story each Sunday, we connect across space and time. We deliver, right to your inbox: a moment of whimsy; a deep dive into an unknown world; a single illuminating transformation; a vibrant community of readers and writers built around the best new speculative stories each week.

Free subscribers receive one story a month. Paid subscribers receive one story each week, fifty weeks a year.  For paid subscribers, there’s more: the opportunity to join in a conversation about story, to ask questions, and to help build a year’s worth of moments with authors including Max Gladstone, Karen Lord, Elwin Cotman, Kij Johnson, Kat Howard, Elsa Sjunnesson, Kathleen Jennings, Katherine Addison, Juan Martinez, E.C. Myers, Maureen McHugh, Tessa Gratton, Sarah Pinsker, Michael Swanwick, Brian Slattery, Malka Older, and many more. 

Subscribe now, and get ready for your Sunday Morning Transport starting in January 2022.

(3) BUILDING A HUGO CATEGORY. Ira Alexandre has launched a discussion on Twitter by asking: For purposes of a Game Hugo, what does it mean for a game to be “in the fields of science fiction, fantasy, or related subjects”? Thread starts here.

(4) A BAD WORD. Frell from Farscape is my favorite genre swear word, says Cat Eldridge. “Smeg and the art of sci-fi swearing” at Kerrang!

…For a long old time, the quickest way to get taken out of libraries or complained about by parents was to include swearing. This led sci-fi creators to come up with new alternatives to the usual suspects, both to evade censorship and emphasise the ‘otherness’ of the worlds in which their tales took place (if a movie was set 10,000 years in the future and started with someone calling someone else a shithead, that would just seem plain silly).

Bill The Galactic Hero by Harry Harrison is a terrific book, a laugh-out-loud funny anti-war satire with a hidden gut-punch of an ending. A bleakly hilarious look at the futility of war and the cruelty with which people can treat one another, it’s a book that should be read by as many people as possible – ideally when they are about 12. During the title character’s ascension through the ranks of the Space Troopers, there’s plenty of effing and jeffing, except Harry opts for his own coinage, ‘bowb’, instead of the curses we all know and love.

As with a lot of made-up swear words, ‘bowb’ is kind of all-purpose – the phrases “Don’t give me any of your bowb!”, “Get over here, you stupid bowb!” and “What is this, “Bowb Your Buddy Week?” suggest it can be substituted in easily enough for ‘shit’, ‘bastard’, ’asshole’ and ‘fuck’….

(5) IN TIMES TO COME NEXT WEEK. Nicholas Whyte tries the thought experiment of anticipating next year with the help of films and stories that treat 2022 as history: “2022 according to science fiction, in novels and films” at From the Heart of Europe. Some of these sources aren’t very helpful!

Time Runner (1993)

What’s it about? Mark Hamill, unsuccessfully attempting to fight off an alien invasion of Earth in 2022, somehow gets sent thirty years back in time to try and prevent it all from happening. He tangles with a corrupt politician who is destined to become the collaborationist president of the world, and ends up assisting at his own birth.

Is 2022 really going to be like that? Actually most of the film is set in 1992, apart from the very beginning and occasional flashforwards. As of now, we don’t (yet) have a President of Earth; as for the alien invasion, we will have to wait and see….

(6) FANZINES IN THE FAMILY TREE. Andrew Porter tells why the Gothamist report is sff-related: “Patti Smith Receives Key To New York City: ‘I Wish I Could Give NYC The Key To Me’”. It has to do with the photo accompanying the article.

In his last weeks as mayor, Bill de Blasio has been bestowing Keys to New York City to a number of figures, including legendary music producer Clive Davis (who helped stage the ultimately Mother Nature-interrupted “Homecoming” concert in Central Park), and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer for his indefatigable support for the city. On his last Monday in office, de Blasio honored one of his favorite artists, the “punk rock laureate,” Patti Smith….

Note Lenny Kaye in the photo behind her. Lenny was a teenage science fiction fan, active in science fiction fandom and publishing a fanzine, Here’s an article about his SF fanzine collection: “The Tattooed Dragon Meets The Wolfman: Lenny Kaye’s Science Fiction Fanzines”, a 2014 Thought Catalog post.

(7) TAKE BIXELSTRASSE TO I-95. Gwen C. Katz tweeted her interpretation of the history that shaped Worldcon’s administrative culture. Thread starts here.

(8) THE PRESTIGE. Catherine Lundoff followed-up the Katz thread with her thoughts about the Hugo Awards. Thread starts here. Lundoff evidently is focused on book-length work, since publishers of finalists like Uncanny, Clarkesworld, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, for example, aren’t operating with “deep pockets.”

https://twitter.com/clundoff/status/1474138626976010250

(9) END OF WATCH. At Vox: “NASA will let the ISS disintegrate into the atmosphere. Here’s why”. When hasn’t been specified, but “NASA has only technically certified the station’s hardware until 2028.”

The International Space Station brings together astronauts from around the world to collaborate on cutting-edge research, and some have called it humanity’s greatest achievement. But after two decades in orbit, the ISS will shut down, and a crop of several new space stations will take its place. While these new stations will make it easier for more humans to visit space, they’re also bound to create new political and economic tensions.

NASA is scaling back its presence in low-Earth orbit as the government focuses on sending humans back to the moon and, eventually, to Mars. As part of that transition, the space agency wants to rent out facilities for its astronauts on new space stations run by private companies. When these stations are ready, NASA will guide the ISS into the atmosphere, where it will burn up and disintegrate. At that point, anyone hoping to work in space will have to choose among several different outposts. That means countries won’t just be using these new stations to strengthen their own national space programs, but as lucrative business ventures, too….

(10) MEMORY LANE.

1893 — [Item by Cat Eldridge.] One hundred twenty-eight years ago, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes was first published by G. Newnes Ltd. sometime late in 1893 with an actual publication date listed as 1894. It was the second collection following The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and like the first it was illustrated by Sidney Paget. This hardcover edition has two hundred seventy-nine pages comprising twelve stories. The stories were previously published in the Strand Magazine. 

Doyle had determined that these would be the last Holmes stories, and intended to kill off the character in “The Final Problem”, but a decade later a new series, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, would begin in the aftermath of “The Final Problem”, in which it is revealed that Holmes actually survived. 

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born December 27, 1938 — Jean Hale. If you’ve watched Sixties genre television, you’ve likely seen her as she showed up on My Favorite Martian, In Like Flint (at least genre adjacent), Alfred Hitchcock Presents, My Brother the Angel, Wild, Wild West, Batman and Tarzan. (Died 2021.)
  • Born December 27, 1951 — Robbie Bourget, 70. She started out as an Ottawa-area fan, where she became involved in a local Who club and the OSFS before moving to LA and becoming deeply involved in LASFS. She’s been a key member of many a Worldcon and Who convention over the years. She was the co-DUFF winner with Marty Cantor for Aussiecon 2. She moved to London in the late Nineties.
  • Born December 27, 1960 — Maryam d’Abo, 61. She’s best known as Kara Milovy in The Living Daylights. Her first genre role was her screen debut in the very low-budget SF horror film Xtro, an Alien rip-off. She was Ta’Ra in Something Is Out There, a miniseries that was well received and but got piss poor ratings. Did you know there was a live Mowgli: The New Adventures of the Jungle Book series? I didn’t. She was Elaine Bendel, a recurring role, in it.
  • Born December 27, 1977 — Sinead Keenan, 44. She’s in the Eleventh Doctor story, “The End of Time” as Addams but her full face make-up guarantees that you won’t recognize her. If you want to see her, she’s a Who fan in The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot. Her final Who work is a Big Finish audio drama, Iterations of I, a Fifth Doctor story. And she played Nina Pickering, a werewolf, in Being Human for quite a long time.
  • Born December 27, 1987 — Lily Cole, 34. Been awhile since I found a Who performer and so let’s have another one now. She played The Siren in the Eleventh Doctor story, “The Curse of The Black Spot”. She’s also in some obscure film called Star Wars: The Last Jedi as a character named Lovey. And she shows up in the important role of Valentina in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. Not mention she’s in Snow White and The  Huntsman as Greta, a great film indeed.
  • Born December 27, 1995 — Timothée Chalamet, 26. First SF role was as the young Tom Cooper in the well received Interstellar. His only other genre role was Zac in One & Two before he played Paul Atreides in Director Denis Villeneuve’s Dune.

(12) COMICS SECTION.

  • The Far Side shows something by the side of the road – a little too big for a hubcap, I’m thinking.
  • The Argyle Sweater spots the moment an undercover operator’s cover is blown.

(13) IS SF ABOUT THE PRESENT OR FUTURE? Star Trek shouldn’t be gloomy insists Reason Magazine’s Eric Studer: “Even if Modern Star Trek Doesn’t Think So, the World Is Getting Better”.

For decades, various incarnations of Star Trek have offered mostly positive visions for the future of humanity—one in which we’ve set aside petty, earthbound squabbles in favor of boldly seeking out new worlds (and, of course, finding the occasional conflict). 

But the first three seasons of Star Trek: Discovery (Paramount+), the seventh television series in the long-running franchise, have too often seemed tied down by storylines that might have more in common with real-world politics of the 21st century rather than the unbridled optimism that was such an important part of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s original conception for the show. Discovery is highly serialized, more focused on a single calamity than a larger sense of exploration, and with far more internally focused characters who care more about their own interests than in a larger plan for society.

As a result, Star Trek now seeks to reinforce the trepidation and existential doubt that is a hallmark of our modern culture. Instead of showing the potential of what humanity can become, Discovery seems to reflect more on what the feelings of the human condition are today…

(14) INVADER FROM MARS. Space.com celebrates an anniversary: “On This Day in Space! Dec. 27, 1984: Famed Allan Hills Mars meteorite found in Antarctica”.

On Dec. 27, 1984, one of the most famous Mars meteorites was found in Antarctica. 

…Weighing in at just over 4 lbs., this space rock is considered to be one of the oldest Martian meteorites ever found on Earth. Scientists estimate that it crystallized from molten rock more than 4 billion years ago, when Mars still had liquid water on its surface. It also has been the source of controversy about the search for life on Mars that continues to this day.

(15) NOT JUST ANY KIND OF HORROR. The new episode of the Rite Gud podcast features an interview with John Langan on cosmic horror. And also about the horror of dealing with the publishing industry.

Bram Stoker Award-winning author John Langan joins us to talk about cosmic horror, his novel The Fisherman, upstate New York, how much money writers make (none), and how hard it is to get published when you’re a little too literary for the genre crowd but a little too genre for the literary crowd. Special appearance by Langan’s wiener dog/beagle.

(16) OPENING OUT OF TOWN. “Terry Gilliam’s Disputed Sondheim Show Finds a Home” – the New York Times knows its address.

For weeks, a question hung over London theater: What would happen to Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods”?

On Nov. 1, the Old Vic theater canceled a revival of the musical, co-directed by Terry Gilliam, after a dispute in which the renowned director was accused of endorsing transphobic views and playing down the MeToo movement. That left the production in limbo and London’s theater world wondering if anyone would dare to take it on.

Now, there is an answer. On Aug. 19, 2022, Gilliam’s “Into the Woods” will debut at the Theater Royal in Bath, 115 miles from London. The show will run through Sep. 10, 2022, the theater said in a statement….

(17) CRITICAL COMPONENT. DUST presents a short film about a young robot with a defective part, trying to find their way in the world.

(18) A BETTER PLAN. “Tesla agrees to stop letting drivers play video games in moving cars”  says the New York Times.

Tesla has agreed to modify software in its cars to prevent drivers and passengers from playing video games on the dashboard screens while vehicle are in motion, a federal safety regulator said on Thursday.

The agreement came a day after the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened a formal investigation of the game feature, which is known as Passenger Play. The investigation was announced after The New York Times reported this month on the potential safety risks the games posed….

(19) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Alasdair Beckett-King’s parodies are news to me but not to his quarter of a million YouTube subscribers. Here’s a sample.

As the first person ever to spoof Doctor Who, I decided not to bother doing an impression of 13 different actors, and just wore a jaunty hat instead.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, N., Bill, Raquel S. Benedict, Jeffrey Smith, Nicholas Whyte, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, and JJ for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Rob Thornton.]

Pixel Scroll 8/17/18 I Heard Him Say In A Voice So Gruff, I Wouldn’t Read You ‘Cause You’re So Tough

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Super short tonight!

(1) BETSY WOLLHEIM HONORED. Penguin Random House has announced that DAW Books Publisher Betsy Wollheim will be awarded the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award, for demonstrating outstanding service to the fantasy field.

(2) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman welcomes you to a fish and chips place with John Langan in episode 74 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

John Langan

John Langan wrote the poetic horror novel The Fisherman, which was probably my favorite book of 2016. And I obviously wasn’t the only one who felt that way, because it won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel the following year. His short fiction has been published in magazines such as Lightspeed and Fantasy & Science Fiction, anthologies such as Lovecraft’s Children and Poe, plus many other venues.

His debut short story collection, 2008’s Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters, went on to become a Stoker Award nominee. He and I may be the only two people in the history of the planet to write zombie stories inspired by Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town”—his 2008 story “How the Day Runs Down” and my 2001 story “Live People Don’t Understand” tackle that theme in very different ways. He’s a co-founder and on the Board of Directors of the Shirley Jackson Awards.

We discussed how reading Conan the Barbarian comic books as a kid made him hope he’d grow up to be a comic book artist, why his evolution as a writer owes as much to William Faulkner as it does to Peter Straub, what he learned about storytelling from watching James Bond with his father and Buffy the Vampire Slayer with his wife, the best way to deal with the problematic life and literature of H. P. Lovecraft, the reason his first story featured a battle between King Kong and Godzilla, his process for plotting out a shark story unlike all other shark stories, why a writer should never fear to be ridiculous, what a science experiment in chemistry class taught him about writing, his love affair with semicolons, that time Lucius Shepard taught him how to box, the reason the Shirley Jackson Awards were created, and much more.

(3) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

  • Born August 17, 1879 – Samuel Goldwyn. Producer, The Unexplained series pilot (1956) which was titled ‘The Merry-Go Round’ and which Bradbury reused in the Something Wicked This Way Comes film. Also The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and Hans Christian Andersen.
  • Born August 17, 1917 – Oliver Crawford. Screenwriter for episodes of Star Trek, The Wild, Wild West, Terry and The Pirates, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Outer Limits, I Spy, Land of the Giants, The Six Million Dollar Man, and The Bionic Woman.
  • Born August 17 – Robert DeNiro, 75. Ok, I’m surprised in that he has at least three genre roles, to wit Fearless Leader in The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle; also in Neil Gaiman’s Stardust in a role… well you decide, and in Brazil as well. Also in the forthcoming Joker film.
  • Born August 17 – Helen McCrory, 50. A lead in the Penny Dreadful series, also Dr. Who, the Harry Potter film franchise, a gender bending sf version of Frankenstein and Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles.
  • Born August 17 – Taissa Farmiga, 24. Lead role in American Horror Story, voice work in the animated Teen Titans: The Judas Contract and Justice League vs. Teen Titans.

(4) END RUN. James Davis Nicoll pleads, “When Will SF Learn to Love the Tachyon Rocket?” at Tor.com.

Readers of a certain age may remember the excitement stirred up when various physicists proposed to add a third category of matter to:

  • A. matter with zero rest mass (which always travels at the speed of light), and
  • B. matter with rest mass (which always travels slower than light).

Now there’s C: matter whose rest mass is imaginary. For these hypothetical particles—tachyons—the speed of light may be a speed minimum, not a speed limit.

Tachyons may offer a way around that pesky light-speed barrier, and SF authors quickly noticed the narrative possibilities. If one could somehow transform matter into tachyons, then faster-than-light travel might be possible.

(5) RETRO HUGO BASE. At the official Hugo site, a picture of the prototype awarded on Thursday.

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

Wonder and Horror at the KGB Bar With Langan and Kressel

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By Mark L. Blackman: On the evening of Wednesday, November 16, 2016, the Fantastic Fiction Readings Series hosted readings by authors John Langan and Matthew Kressel, both very familiar faces, at its longtime venue, the distinctively décored 2nd-floor Red Room of the KGB Bar in Manhattan’s East Village.

The Series is co-hosted by Kressel (for the past 8 years), however, as he was reading, David Mercurio Rivera ably filled in for him and welcomed the crowd. For over two decades, he noted, the Series, whose other co-host is Ellen Datlow, has presented readings (always free, and thank the Bar by buying drinks) both by luminaries and up-and-comers on the third Wednesday of the month. He announced that next month’s readers would be –

  • December 21 – Livia Llewellyn and Sarah Pinsker.
  • January 18, 2017 – Holly Black and Fran Wilde.
  • February 15 – Michael Cisco and Nicholas Kaufmann
  • March 15 – Nova Ren Suma and Kiini Ibura Salaam.

(Details are available at here.)  Concluding, he introduced the first reader.

Matthew Kressel

Matthew Kressel

Aside from co-hosting, Matthew Kressel is the author of the novels King of Shards and the forthcoming Queen of Static. His short fiction has twice been nominated for a Nebula Award.  Additionally, he published the World Fantasy Award-winning anthology Paper Cities, and, for his publishing work, received a World Fantasy Award nomination for Special Award Non-Professional.

At the mike, he expressed his humility at reading here, which is a very different experience from hosting. He did not recite Blade Runner in its entirety from memory, but instead read “In Memory of a Summer’s Day,” a story that will be appearing in an as-yet-entitled Alice in Wonderland-themed anthology edited by Datlow. Wonderland has here become a tourist destination and its celebrated locales attractions – the Mad Tea Party, the Croquet Ground (where hedgehogs scream), the Queen’s Court (there are no actual beheadings), etc., and eateries offer Beautiful Soup and Lobster Quadrille. (There are warnings about the Drink Me bottles, and the Caterpillar has an illegal trade in psychedelic mushrooms. Before going down the Rabbit Hole, visitors must sign a waiver. There is also, by the way, a Through the Looking Glass Tour.) Narrated by a veteran tour guide, whose British accent Kressel happily did not attempt, the humor had a strong element of inherent horror (think about it – Wonderland is far from a fun place), and ultimately the question surfaces …where is Alice?

John Langan. Photo by Mark Blackman.

John Langan. Photo by Mark Blackman.

After a break, Datlow introduced John Langan. He is the author of the novels The Fisherman and House of Windows, and the collections The Wide Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies and Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters., as well as the co-editor of Creatures:  Thirty Years of Monsters. A forthcoming third collection of his stories, Sefira and Other Betrayals, will be published by Hippocampus Press in February, and new stories will shortly appear in Children of Lovecraft, The Madness of Dr. Caligari, The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu, Swords v. Cthulhu, and Children of Gla’aki. This venue is one of the first places where he read, he said, and felt privileged to be back. The novella from whose beginning he read, “Hunger,” will be appearing in one of the Lovecraftian anthologies. The story, he revealed, is about two poets, though in the selection that he shared a boy and his father (who are into antique weaponry – they carry, respectively, a spear and a sword) confront an unearthly giant orange bear in their Upstate New York driveway who may be tied to a recent houseguest.

Copies of Langan’s and Kressel’s books were for sale at the back of the room by the Word Bookstores of Greenpoint, Brooklyn and Jersey City.

Datlow’s photos of the event may be seen at the Series’ website, http://www.kgbfantasticfiction.org/ .

Pixel Scroll 11/12/16 Like A Scroll On A Wire; Like A Pixel In A Midnight Choir

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(1) ROBOTIC PREDICTION OR CAMPAIGN PROMISE? “Meet Sofia, the Humanoid Robot That Looks, Thinks and Talks Like a Human”.

Right now, artificially intelligent robots are part of the workforce, from hotel butlers to factory workers. But this is just the beginning.

According to Ben Goertzel, AI researcher and entrepreneur who spoke at the Web Summit in Lisbon this week, intelligent robots in human-like forms will surpass human intelligence and help free the human race of work. They will also, he says, start fixing problems like hunger, poverty and even help humans beat death by curing us of all disease. Artificially intelligent robots will help usher in a new utopian era never before seen in the history of the human race, he claims.

“The human condition is deeply problematic,” says Goertzel. “But as super-human intelligent AIs become one billion-times smarter than humans, they will help us solve the world’s biggest problems. Resources will be plentiful for all humans, work will be unnecessary and we will be forced to accept a universal basic income. All the status hierarchies will disappear and humans will be free from work and be able move on up to a more meaningful existence.”

(2) FAN FICTION. In an article called Full-body reading” on the website Aeon (aeon.co), University of Toronto English lecturer Anna Wilson talks about how her dissertation on medieval mystic Margery Kempe inspired her to deepen her appreciation of fan fiction and make her a more committed lesbian.

Fanfiction makes its source texts richer for its loving readers. It amplifies allusions and hidden currents, pulls out notes of characterisation and subtleties of plot, and spends time with them. After reading fanfiction, I return to texts I love with a new eye – sometimes a more critical one. For example, I read hundreds of stories embroidering the relationship between the Harry Potter characters Remus Lupin and Sirius Black, which – fanfiction writers suggested – was the real reason Sirius’s family had thrown him out. Thanks to fanfiction, I was wondering ‘Where are all the gay people at Hogwarts?’ long before J K Rowling announced that Dumbledore was gay (but his first crush was an evil wizard, and he apparently never loved again – thanks, JK).

Fanfiction can fill gaps in the world of the story, or tease out elements forbidden or unspeakable in the original text and bring them to the surface. These might be erotic; Fifty Shades of Grey (2011) began life as a hugely popular erotic fanfiction of the Twilight series that reimagined its characters Bella and Edward in an office BDSM setting. E L James brought out an element of Twilight that many readers found appealing – the erotic power dynamics between Edward and Bella – and rewrote those dynamics for a commercial audience. Another example is slash fiction – fanfiction that imagines a gay romance into a straight narrative, like those Remus/Sirius stories I binged on (the name ‘slash’ comes from the /).

Slash is particularly powerful for me as a queer woman because it subverts some fundamental assumptions in media narratives about who is watching, and what they want. When I read slash, I feel recognised and loved as a reader in a way I almost never do when I watch TV. In fact, fanfiction gave me something I’d been craving; it was literature for me. Though I’ve always loved science fiction, I felt obscurely unwanted by books in which the female characters were unsatisfying and marginalised: women are barely imagined as part of the science fiction audience, let alone catered to. By the same token, romance novels (one of the few genres that almost exclusively caters to women) were overwhelmingly heterosexual, with male and female characters I found boring and unrelatable, moving through prescribed motions that always ended with marriage and babies. Reading romance novels felt like forcing myself into a too-tight corset: reading fanfiction was like taking a deep breath.

(3) INDIVIDUAL PROTESTS. Two comics creators will quit attending shows in states that voted for Trump reports Bleeding Cool — “George Perez To Fulfill Current Commitments, Then Stop Attending Shows In Trump States”

Yesterday, Humberto Ramos, the Mexican comic book creator, currently topping the charts with Champions #1 for Marvel declared that he had chosen not to attend comic book shows in the US, in states that had voted to elect President-Elect Trump.

He was, today, joined in that by American creator George Pérez, co-creator of the New Teen Titans, also joined that number.

(4) SEFTON OBIT CORRECTION. While other details in the November 10 Pixel Scroll about the late Amelia (Amy) Sefton were correct, I was mistaken in identifying her as working for Tor. That is a different Amy Sefton. Thanks to Andrew Porter for the correction.

(5) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • November 12, 1982 — Creepshow opens in theaters nationwide.

(6) NEXT AT KGB. The Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series will present John Langan and Matthew Kressel, on Wednesday, November 16, beginning at 7p.m. in New York’s KGB Bar (85 East 4th Street, just off 2nd Ave, upstairs.)

John Langan

John Langan is author of two novels, The Fisherman and House of Windows.  He’s also published two collections, The Wide Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies and Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters.  With Paul Tremblay, he co-edited Creatures:  Thirty Years of Monsters.  He is one of the founders of the Shirley Jackson Awards and he currently reviews horror and dark fantasy for Locus magazine.

New and forthcoming are stories in Children of Lovecraft, The Madness of Dr. Caligari, The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu, Swords v. Cthulhu, and Children of Gla’aki.  In February of 2017, his third collection of stories, Sefira and Other Betrayals, will be published by Hippocampus Press.

John Langan lives in New York’s Hudson Valley and teaches classes in creative writing and Gothic literature at SUNY New Paltz.  With his younger son, he’s studying for his black belt in Tang Soo Do.

Matthew Kressel

Matthew Kressel is the author of the novels King of Shards and the forthcoming Queen of Static. His short fiction has been twice nominated for a Nebula Award and has or will soon appear in such markets as Lightspeed, Nightmare, Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, io9.com, Apex Magazine, Interzone, and the anthologies Cyber World, After, Naked City, The People of the Book.

From 2003-2010 he published and edited Sybil’s Garage, an acclaimed SF magazine. He also published the World Fantasy Award-winning anthology Paper Cities and for his publishing work, received a World Fantasy Award nomination for Special Award Non-Professional. He co-hosts the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series alongside Ellen Datlow. When not writing fiction he codes software for companies large and small, studies Yiddish (Nu?), and recites Blade Runner in its entirety from memory.

(7) CROSSOVER SEASON. The CW has released a promo for upcoming DC crossover between Supergirl, The Flash, Arrow and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, a sequence of episodes that begins November 28.

During a press event earlier this week, executive producer Marc Guggenheim offered up a few details on the crossover, which will actually begin at the end of an episode of Supergirl as Kara is enlisted by Barry (Grant Gustin) and Cisco (Carlos Valdes) to help battle the threat of the extraterrestrial Dominators.

“Some people call it a four-way crossover because it involves four shows; my ulcer requires me to call it a three-part crossover,” states Guggenheim explains. “The story that’s being told has a beginning, middle, and end: a beginning in Flash, a middle in Arrow, and an end in Legends.

 

(8) BRING OUT YOUR UNDEAD. Fox has ordered a pilot for a drama series based on bestselling vampire novel The Passage.

Sink your teeth into this news, vampire fans: Fox is adapting the popular book trilogy The Passage into a drama series.

The network has ordered a pilot for a TV adaptation of Justin Cronin’s book series, per our sister site Deadline. Friday Night Lights writer Liz Heldens will pen the pilot, with Cloverfield‘s Matt Reeves attached to direct.

The 2010 novel The Passage, a New York Times bestseller, envisions a post-apocalyptic future where virus-infected vampires roam the earth, with human colonies banding together to survive. (That book was followed by 2012’s The Twelve and this year’s The City of Mirrors.) Fox bought the film rights to The Passage before it was even published, and a Twilight-like film series was planned for years, but now they’re opting to bring it to the small screen.

(9) MUSEUM GETS TAKEI COLLECTION. George Takei is giving 70 years of his belongings to a museum. The LA Times gives you a viewing.

The donation itself was announced in September.

Actor and activist George Takei is donating a trove of art and artifacts from his life and career to the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles.

The museum announced the gift Wednesday and said the collection will be featured in an exhibition next year. “New Frontiers: The Many Worlds of George Takei” is set to open March 12, 2017.

Takei’s collection includes photos, sculptures, scripts and other memorabilia from his “Star Trek” days, as well as his run for Los Angeles City Council in 1973 and the Olympic torch he carried ahead of the 1984 games in Los Angeles.

(10) MR. SCI-FI IS BACK. Sci-Fi Writer-Director-Producer Marc Zicree talks about politics in science fiction, as relates to Trump, alternate worlds with different Presidents, how science fiction reaches across all political beliefs, and more.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Xtifr.]

NYRSF Readings Series Post-Halloween Spookiness Featuring Authors John Langan and Nicholas Kaufmann

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John Langan at NYRSF Reading in November 2014. Photo by Mark Blackman.

John Langan at NYRSF Reading in November 2014. Photo by Mark Blackman.

By Mark L. Blackman: On the evening of Tuesday, November 4 (Election Day, which is far scarier than Halloween), the New York Review of Science Fiction Readings Series offered a double treat of spookiness and chills with horror authors John Langan and Nicholas Kaufmann. Held at the Series’ current venue, the low-ceilinged basement (variously the “downstairs cabaret”, the “dungeon” or the cellar, it was “a good venue for horror writers,” pronounced Langan) at the SoHo Gallery for Digital Art (aka Gallery La La) on Sullivan Street in Manhattan, the event was guest-hosted by former Series curator, book/audiobook reviewer Amy Goldschlager.

Unafraid, Jim Freund, the Series’ Executive Curator and the host of WBAI’s long-running Hour of the Wolf radio program on sf and fantasy (broadcast and streamed Wednesday nights/Thursday mornings from 1:30-3:00 AM), as well as host of the Hugo-winning Lightspeed Magazine Podcast, welcomed the audience and guests, and announced upcoming NYRSF readings. Tuesday, December 2 will be the Series’ annual Family Night, as traditional, featuring Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman, at the Commons Brooklyn, 388 Atlantic Ave., a manageable hike from the Barclays Center. The Series returns to the SGDA on Tuesday, January 6, 2015, presenting Sarah Pinsker and Daniel José Older. April’s readings have been dubbed “Sam-Enchanted Evening”, featuring Samuel R. Delany and Sam J. Miller. (Yes, Chip has in the past been called Sam and even Sammy.)

Taking the podium, Amy Goldschlager introduced the first reader of the night, Bram Stoker Award, Shirley Jackson Award- and Thriller Award-nominated author Nicholas Kaufmann, who read an excerpt from his new novel, Die and Stay Dead, a follow-up to Dying is My Business (St. Martin’s Press). Opposed by a small group seeking a perilous grimoire, necromancy intrudes on a fannish (or perhaps, in this context, mundane) event, a medieval festival in Lower Manhattan’s Battery Park (the Battery is really down) in the form of mind-controlled living dead called revenants. The situation is further complicated by the presence as well of a flash mob of fake zombie walkers, and, in the confusion, the protagonist is abducted by the necromancer’s real rotting corpses.

After the intermission and a raffle (the prizes were a signed copy of Kaufmann’s print-out of the piece just read and Langan‘s most recent collection of fiction, The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies, Hippocampus Press, 2013), Goldschlager delivered a fondly “passive-aggressive introduction” of the evening’s concluding reader. John Langan shared a selection from “Children of the Fang,” an original novella set to appear in Ellen Datlow’s upcoming anthology Lovecraft’s Monsters. In it, a pair of grown siblings revisit the eerie old house they were raised in and hear from their ancient grandfather tales of frightful doings, subterranean cities and homicidal hippies.

As traditional at NYRSF Readings, the Jenna Felice Freebie Table offered giveaway books, and refreshments (cider, cheese, crackers and Kit-Kat bars). At the front table, books by Langan and Kaufmann were for sale.

The audience of about 30 included Richard Bowes, David Cruces, Derrick Hussey, Kim Kindya, Gordon Linsner, James Ryan, Terence Taylor and Nick’s mom. After the chairs were origami’d, the readers and members of the audience adjourned to the SoHo Room, a nearby bar for dinner and drinks.

Langan, Kaufmann at NYRSF Readings 11/4

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Halloween stretches all the way til November 4 at the New York Review of Science Fiction Readings, when curator Amy Goldschlager will present two accomplished horror writers.

Nicholas Kaufmann, past nominee for the Bram Stoker Award, Shirley Jackson Award, and Thriller Award, is the author of General Slocum’s Gold, Chasing the Dragon, Hunt at World’s End, Still Life: Nine Stories, Dying is My Business, and Die and Stay Dead.

John Langan is the author of two collections, The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies (2013) and Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters (2008), and a novel, House of Windows (2009). His recent fiction has appeared in Ellen Datlow’s Fearful Symmetries (2014) and Ross Lockhart and Justin Steele’s Children of Old Leech (2014).

The NYRSF Readings take place at The SoHo Gallery for Digital Art / Gallery LaLa 138 Sullivan Street (between Houston & Prince St.) in New York. Doors open at 6:30 p.m., event begins at 7:00 p.m.

The full press release follows the jump.

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