……But the Third Stage Guild navigator is not an alien. That’s a human who has been mutated by longterm exposure to the Spice. Outside of extraterrestrial animal life, there are precisely zero space aliens inDune. Arguably, this fact is part of what makes Dune so successful. Common science fiction ideas don’t really drive the story of Dune, mostly because alien life is totally left out of the equation. Here’s how that works, and why Dune’s world-building is super-reliant on a lack of aliens.
(2) FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION. [Item by Dann.] Grimdark Magazine’sissue #24 dropped a few days ago. There were a couple of non-fiction pieces that might be of interest.
FICTION
A Slow Kill by Peter Orullian
Berzerker by Matthew X. Gomez
How Not to Invade a Country by Anna Stephens
The Hunt by Matthew Ward
NON-FICTION
An Interview with Richard K. Morgan by Beth Tabler
Review: Persephone Station by Stina Leicht
Robert E. Howard: Godfather of Grimdark? by Matthew John
The ‘TNG’ Uniforms Nearly Caused Permanent Damage To The Cast
To an observer, spandex may seem like the world’s easiest garment to wear. Super stretchy, light, and form-fitting, it looks like it should be comfortable. But looks can be deceiving, according to designer Robert Blackman:
Jumbo, or Super Spandex, whatever you want to call that heavier weight stretch, will stretch from side to side or top to bottom, depending on how you cut the garment. So the costume would dig into the actors’ shoulders, wearing them 12 or 15 hours a day.
Blackman explained that pressure from the spandex led to back problems among the cast. Patrick Stewart, who starred as Captain Jean-Luc Picard, was told by his chiropractor that he should sue Paramount for the “lasting damage done to [his] spine.”
Born October 4, 1904 – Earl Binder. First half of Eando Binder (second being E’s brother Otto 1911-1974), credited author of a dozen novels, twoscore shorter stories. Pioneering stories of robot Adam Link. Collection Anton York, Immortal about protagonist attaining immortality and then what? E quit about 1940; O developed a solo career. (Died 1966) [JH]
Born October 4, 1908 – Al Ashley. During the 1940s, among the top two dozen active fans. Fanzines En Garde, Nova, sometimes with wife Abby Lu. The Ashleys made their house in Battle Creek, Michigan, a co-operative dwelling for fellow fans; those were the days of Van Vogt’s Slan and the self-depreciative joke “Fans are slans” (as in “Wassamatta you, you think fans are –?”), so the house was the Slan Shack. Later, lived in Los Angeles. I assume Al has gone to After-Fandom, but I have not learned when he left. [JH]
Born October 4, 1917 – Donn Brazier. Charter member of N3F (Nat’l Fantasy Fan Fed’n). Army Air Corps during World War II, mustered out as a Major, his remains buried in Jefferson Barracks Nat’l Cemetery. Leading fanzine Title; later Farrago. Guest of Honor at AutoClave 1, first SF con devoted to fanzinery (1976). Early adopter of photocopy. See two appreciations of him in File 770 142 pp. 12-13 (PDF). (Died 2002) [JH]
Born October 4, 1923 — Charlton Heston. Without doubt, best remembered for playing astronaut George Taylor in the Planet of the Apes. He retuned to the role in Beneath the Planet of the Apes. He’s also Neville in The Omega Man based off of I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. By the way, he once at the LA Music Center played Sherlock Holmes in The Crucifer of Blood, opposite Richard Johnson as Dr. Watson. His IMDB credits show him as being on SeaQuest DSV in the “Abalon” episode. ((Died 2008.) CE)
Born October 4, 1928 — Alvin Toffler. Author of Future Shock and a number of other works that almost no one will recall now. John Brunner named a most excellent novel, The Shockwave Rider, after the premise of Future Shock. (Died 2016.) (CE)
Born October 4, 1946 — Susan Sarandon, 74. She makes the Birthday list just for being Janet Weiss in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but she’s also been in Enchanted as Queen Narissa, The Witches of Eastwick as Jane Spofford, The Lovely Bones as Grandma Lynn and The Hunger as Sarah Roberts. An impressive genre list indeed! (CE)
Born October 4, 1946 – Val Ontell, 74. Chaired Lunacon 29 & 32, Conjecture 2010, World Fantasy Con 2011. Fan Guest of Honor (with husband Ron Ontell) at Lunacon 45, Westercon 70. The Ontells have conducted fannish travel expeditions on the occasion of Worldcons: Britain (1987), Scotland & Ireland (1995, 2005), Melbourne (1999, 2010), Yokohama (2007), London (2014), Helsinki (2017), Dublin (2019); see their Website. [JH]
Born October 4, 1975 — Saladin Ahmed, 45. His Black Bolt series, with Christian Ward as the artist, won an Eisner Award for Best New Series and the graphic novel collection, Black Bolt, Volume 1: Hard Time, was a finalist at Worldcon 76 for Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story. His first novel, Throne of the Crescent Moon, won a Locus Award for Best First novel. (CE)
Born October 4, 1979 — Caitriona Balfe, 41. She is best remembered for her lead role as Claire Fraser on Outlander. Her first genre role was as Elizabeth Lamb in Super 8, and she has two other genre credits, one voicing Tavra in The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, and the other playing Breena Sheehan in the H+: The Digital Series in which the singularity has come and gone. (CE)
Born October 4, 1984 – Sara Bickley, 36. Poetry, some ours, in Red Sky (anthology); Best of Every Day Poets, Haiku Journal, Punchnel’s, The Same, Three Line Poetry, Trinacria. Poetry editor of The Germ awhile. Short stories in Cover of Darkness, Drabblecast B-Sides, Not One of Us, Tales of the Talisman. [JH]
Born October 4, 1988 — Melissa Benoist, 32. Kara Danvers / Supergirl In the Arrowverse. It was recently announced that the Supergirl series is ending with the next season. She also voiced Overgirl in the animated Freedom Fighters: The Ray series. (CE)
Born October 4, 1990 – Carlyn Worthy, 30. Photographer, cook, author, Afrofuturist. One story for us I’ve found published so far; and see this interview. Other work, see this article about her University’s centennial. [JH]
This podcast is now in its third season, but it just doesn’t get the credit it deserves. The series is curated by writer Tonia Ransom, who intended Nightlight to highlight Black authors telling Black stories, and in doing so the show is releasing some of the very best horror stories out there. Some tales veer into romance, some into sci-fi, and some are more standard horror fare, but each story is haunting and unforgettable. Genre faves like reluctant werewolves and murderous mermaids embrace tropes while turning them on their head to give us something new. Each episode runs about half an hour, making it a great lunchtime listen.
(7) HARRYHAUSEN 100. Coming soon at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art: “Ray Harryhausen | Titan of Cinema” – October 24, 2020-September 5, 2021. Highlights include the Medusa model from Clash of the Titans.
Film special effects superstar Ray Harryhausen elevated stop motion animation to an art. His innovative and inspiring films, from the 1950s onwards, changed the face of modern movie making forever. For the first time, highlights chosen from the whole of Ray’s collection will be showcased, which will be the largest and widest-ranging exhibition of his work ever seen, with newly restored and previously unseen material from his incredible archive.
Ray Harryhausen’s work included the films Jason and the Argonauts, the Sinbad films of the 1950s and 1970s, One Million Years B.C. and Mighty Joe Young, and a wider portfolio including children’s fairy tales and commercials. He also inspired a generation of filmmakers such as Peter Jackson, Aardman Animation, Tim Burton, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg, and his influence on blockbuster cinema can be felt to this day.
(8) EAU THAT MAN! Is this product’s message: Who doesn’t want to smell like Captain Kirk? “Star Trek Tiberius Cologne”.
[Thanks to John Hertz, Cat Eldridge, JJ, Michael Toman, John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, Mike Kennedy, Jeffrey Smith, Dann. and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day OGH, who cannot guarantee it hasn’t been used before.]
(1) COLUMBUS NASFIC OPENING CEREMONIES. [Item by David Doering.] Watching the Opening Ceremonies of the Columbus NASFiC, I noted the number of apologies for lack of the in-person meetings.
However, I also think we should celebrate that we are LIVING an SF novel. If we had written this 20 years ago, it would have been SF–real-time linkups with AV from around the globe!! Is that KEWL or what??
We did NOT have to cancel. We still have a great slate of programming. AND we still can get together to honor Mike Resnick.
I should add that we also don’t have worry about scaring each other with pathogens if we were in person. Thus potentially setting off a “War of the Worlds” scenario with all of us “aliens” descending on a single city only to be doomed by GERMS.
(2) ROGUE NASFIC. Chris Garcia is the virtual Columbus NASFiC’s Editor Guest of Honor. The con newsletter made everyone aware he’s also got some real-life concerns right now:
Please share your positive thoughts, hopes, prayers – as appropriate – and spare a moment of contemplation for Christopher J. Garcia (GOH), his wonderful family Vanessa, John Paul and Ben, as they await news of their home, and neighbourhood, evacuated as they are from Boulder Creek in the Santa Cruz County CZU August Lightning Complex Fire. Certainly, we all wish them well. (submitted by James Bacon)
In better Chris Garcia news, check out his Rogue NASFiC YouTube channel of extra programming. As Chris explained on Facebook:
This is what happens when I’m given the power of Guest of Honor without oversight!
This YouTube Channel has some great videos of interviews and more! I’ll be adding as the Weekend (and beyond!) goes on!
Coming soon will be our Podcast channel!
I wanna thank the entire team of the NASFiC for letting me have a little fun!!!
Here’s one example:
(3) NINA ALLAN FIRES A CANON. [Item by PhilRM.] Here’s another very interesting piece by Nina Allan, discussing, among other things**, the notion of an SFF canon: “Weird Wednesdays #11: the question of lineage”. There’s a well-known quote by Borges, from his essay on Kafka: “The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.” Nina’s take (which I completely agree with) is that every writer creates their own canon; I’d extend this to say that every reader creates their own canon also.
**Her piece also convinced me that I really need to read William Golding’s The Inheritors and The Spire, which sound like fascinating books.
…I have explored and will continue to explore some of the ‘canonical’ works from science fiction’s so-called Golden Age – not because I feel I should but because I am interested. I enjoy thinking about these things, I enjoy writing criticism, and I happen to believe that the more widely you read around a subject, the more fiercely you can argue your corner, the more enjoyment you can derive. And having said that, I saw an interesting comment somewhere at some point during the post-Hugo furore with words to the effect that it is actually the middle generation of science fiction writers – Le Guin, Butler, Russ, Delany, Disch, Haldeman, Pohl – who are the true pioneers of the American tradition, who not only wrote better then but speak better now to the generation of writers currently winning Hugos. That definitely rings true for me, though it might not for you. But that’s the beauty of such contentions: they are there to be discussed.
In celebration of Bradbury, the AWM will also air in August on its newly launched podcast four conversations with contemporary science fiction and fantasy writers. Each weekly episode of the podcast features one of the AWM’s past live programs and covers a range of topics including process, writing influences, and the life of a writer. J. Michael Straczynski, author of Becoming Superman headlines the August 10 episode. On the August 17 episode, Annalee Newitz, author of The Future of Another Timeline, is joined by journalist Dan Sinker. Hugo-Award winner John Scalzi, author of The Consuming Fire, is featured on the August 24 episode. Isabel Ibanez, author of Woven in Moonlight, closes out the month on the August 31 episode.
If there is one lesson to be learned from Hamilton’s Broadway success, it’s that a surprising diverse number of themes can be successfully turned into musicals. After all, who would have believed Ontario’s steel town—just a second—I have just been informed that the musical Hamilton is not in fact about Hamilton, Ontario, but rather about a significant figure in the American Revolution. I see.
Nevertheless, my point stands: almost everything can be turned into a musical, given sufficient talent. Even science fiction epics. Which brings me to the exciting topic of What Science Fiction Works I Would Like to See as Musicals.
Ray Harryhausen original sculpture, #10 in the limited edition of 12 created in the early 1990s, and then cast in 2010, the last work of fine art by the cinematic trailblazer before his passing. Entitled ”Giving Life to Fantasy”, this self-portrait sculpture depicts Harryhausen as he wanted to be remembered, filming the animated creatures of his imagination: the Cyclops and Dragon in their climactic battle in ”The 7th Voyage of Sinbad”. Other personal touches in this detailed sculpture include Harryhausen’s Giant Octopus from ”It Came from Beneath the Sea” in a box on the floor (along with his inspiration, the gorilla from ”King Kong”), and his Brontosaurus from ”The Animal World” on the side table. Signed and numbered by Harryhausen on the corner of the table, ”Ray Harryhausen 10/12”. Sculpture stands on a green marble and wooden base, with entire presentation measuring 19” x 11.5” x approximately 11” tall, and weighing nearly 50 lbs. Some light patina to bronze, overall near fine condition.
(7) HUNGER GAMES IN EVERYDAY LIFE. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster, Designated Reader, Financial Times.] This is the lede of an article by John Reed in the August 20 Financial Times about protests against the Thai government.
“It is a morning ritual at every Thai school, steeped in tradition and nationalist decorum: children stand still and sing the national anthem as the kingdom’s blue, white, and red flag is raised.
But this week, amid a growing ‘Free People’ youth protest movement, children across Thailand raised their hands during the ceremony to make the protesters’ trademark, defiant three-fingered salute.
The gesture originated in The Hunger Games, the dystopian young adult franchise of books and films, but has been adopted as an emblem of a movement that has spread from university campuses to secondary schools…
…”it has become a peacefully powerful symbol of anti-authoritarianism,’ said Viengrat Nethipo, assistant professor of political science at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University. ‘Recently it’s been described among youth as symbolic of the French Revolution’s values of liberty, equality, and fraternity, so it’s easily adopted as a symbol.'”
(8) STATUE READY FOR PRIME TIME. [Item by rcade.] Medusa, a 2008 statue by the Argentine-Italian sculptor Luciano Garbati, is getting a seven-foot tall bronze version in New York City across from the New York Criminal Courthouse where Harvey Weinstein was put on trial. NSFW image in a tweet here.
Garbati’s statue is a response to Benvenuto Cellini’s famous Perseus with the Head of Medusa statue and the idea that Medusa is the villain of the story.
The original Greek myth of Medusa offers plenty to be angry about. The monstrous being with snakes for hair starts out as a human woman, who Poseidon rapes in Athena’s temple. The goddess then punishes Medusa by turning her into a Gorgon and exiling her. Perseus is later sent on an errand to bring Medusa’s head to King Polydectes. Equipped with a mirrored shield, winged sandals, and a special sack for her head, Perseus creeps up on Medusa while she lies sleeping, cuts off her head, and then uses it as a weapon for turning enemies into stone.”
Garbati says, “The representations of Perseus, he’s always showing the fact that he won, showing the head…if you look at my Medusa…she is determined, she had to do what she did because she was defending herself. It’s quite a tragic moment.”
…With Steven Universe and She-Ra both having ended this year, PAPER invited showrunners Rebecca Sugar and Noelle Stevenson to sit down with one another and reflect on the legacies of their respective series, getting their start in comics, the state of representation in the animated field and where things go from here.
PAPER: Since you’re both wrapping up your respective series’, looking back at what each of you have accomplished, in those series what are you proud of, what do you wish you could have improved on or pushed further?
Rebecca Sugar: Okay, well looking back on everything, I’m really proud of what we were able to do with the characters of Garnet and Ruby and Sapphire. It really goes all the way back to the time I spent on Adventure Time and when I got a chance to do some of the earlier episodes with Marceline and Bubblegum. This was 2010 so Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was still a national policy. It would be half a decade before same-sex marriage was legal in The United States and I wanted to do something with the characters of Marceline and Bubblegum but figure out how to get it on TV. The strategy at the time that I pitched was that because they’re both centuries-old, millenniums-old, had a relationship sometime in the past and they’re unpacking that in a way that would be apparent. That was the only way to be able to do something with these characters and their relationship on screen.
As I was entering my show, I really wanted to find a way to be able to show characters actively in a relationship happening in real-time. We strategized the concept of fusion to be able to explore relationships and include queer relationships. Central to that, one of the things we were excited about was to have the character of Garnet have a ton of screen time and be a main character. There were a lot of things I wanted to explore with an active relationship to parallel my own relationship. I was inventing these characters with my co-executive producer Ian Jones-Quartey, who is also my partner. We wanted to explore an active, queer relationship that would parallel a lot of our experiences with bigotry as an interracial couple.
(10) N.K. [Item by rcade.] While discussing a project called Women’s Prize for Fiction Reclaim Her Name that asked to publish one of her stories for free, then asked to publish one of her novels for free, Nora Jemisin explains how she came to write novels under the initials N.K. Thread starts here.
“(And for those wondering, I’ve said this in multiple interviews, but I did it bc at the time I was an academic starting to publish papers, and thought the initials would separate my fiction writing from my academic writing. [Yeah, this was before natural language processing.])”
Read the whole thread for how she handles a question about what the K stands for.
(11) MEDIA ANNIVERSARY.
August 1998 — Blade premiered. With Wesley Snipes as Blade, this film, the first of a trilogy, was directed by Stephen Norrington and written by David S. Goyer as based on the Marvel character developed by writer Marv Wolfman and penciller Gene Colan. It was produced by Snipes along with Peter Frankfurt and Robert Engelman. Stephen Dorff, Kris Kristofferson, N’Bushe Wright and Donal Logue were the other principal cast. Marvel, along with Amen Ra Films and Imaginary Forces, were the producing film companies. It was generally well-received by critics though several thought it was way too violent. Box office-wise, it did fantastic but Marvel earned just a flat fee of $25,000. Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently only give it a 55% rating.
(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
Born August 21, 1872 — Aubrey Beardsley. Best remembered for his often highly erotic art, ISFDB lists him as having a genre novel, The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser, which bears one of the longest subtitles I’ve encountered (“The story of Venus and Tannhäuser in which is set forth an exact account of the manner of State held by Madam Venus, Goddess and Meretrix under the famous Hörselberg, and containing the Adventures of Tannhäuser in that Place, his Repentance, his Journeying to Rome, and Return to the Loving Mountain”). He has two genre novellas as well, “Catullus: Carmen Cl.“ and “ Under the Hill”. And yes, he was just twenty-five when he died of tuberculosis. (Died 1898.) (CE)
Born August 21, 1888 — Miriam Allen deFord. Although it is said that she started writing SF when Boucher became editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, she only published five of her eighteen late Forties through Fifties works there. One published there, “Mary Celestial“, was written with Boucher. And one, “A Death in the Family”, was adapted in Night Gallery‘s second season. Best remembered as a mystery writer. I see no indication that she’s in print in any manner these days for her SF (but three of her mysteries are available from the usual suspects) though she had two SF collections, Elsewhere, Elsewhen, Elsehow and Xenogenesis. (Died 1975.) (CE)
Born August 21, 1911 – Anthony Boucher. Co-founded The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction with Francis McComas, co-edited with him 1949-1954, alone through ’58; two Hugos for Best Professional Magazine. Eight Best of F&SF anthologies 1952-1959 (’52-’54 with FM). A Treasury of SF ’59, one of our best. Six dozen short stories. Translated into Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Russian. Opera lover. First translator of Borges into English, hello Evelyn Leeper. Also detective fiction (a star there too), radio drama, poker. (Died 1968) [JH]
Born August 21, 1927 – Arthur Thomson. Fanartist. Thirty covers, a hundred forty interiors. Signature often read as “ATom”, some insist it’s just “Atom”. Resident illustrator of Hyphen. Back covers for Nebula. Here is the Nov 64 Riverside Quarterly. Here is Banana Wings 49 (repr. from An ATom Sketchbook). TAFF (Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund) delegate, published ATom Abroad. Official Artist of Boskone 15. Two Novas. Rotsler Award. (Died 1990) [JH]
Born August 21, 1943 – Ron Walotsky. A hundred eighty covers, fifty interiors. Gallery in Locus 500. Interview in SF Chronicle 214. Magic: the Gathering cards. Ancient Warriors of Lost Civilizations series based on horseshoe-crab shells found near his Florida home. Here is the May 67 F&SF. Here is Lord of Light. Here is Earth Ship and Star Song. Here is The Shores Beneath. Here is Houston, Houston, Do You Read? (Souls cover bound with it is by Dieter Rottermund.) Here is the Nov 97 Analog. Here is Jimi Hendrix. Artbook, Inner Visions. (Died 2002) [JH]
Born August 21, 1943 — Lucius Shepard. Damn, I didn’t know he’d passed on. Life During Wartime which won him the Astounding Award for a Best New Writer is one seriously weird novel. And his World Fantasy Award winning The Jaguar Hunter is freaking amazing as are all his short collections. I don’t remember reading “ Barnacle Bill the Spacer” which won a Best Novella Hugo at ConFrancisco. (Died 2014.) (CE)
Born August 21, 1956 — Kim Cattrall, 64. Gracie Law in John Carpenter’s amazing Big Trouble in Little China. She also played Justine de Winter in The Return of the Musketeers, Paige Katz in Wild Palms, Lieutenant Valeris in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country and Linday Isley in Good v. Evil. Series wise, she was one offs in Tales of the Gold Monkey, Logan’s Run, The Incredible Hulk and The Outer Limits. (CE);
Born August 21, 1957 – John Howe, 63. A hundred sixty covers, two hundred fifty interiors. The Maps of Middle-Earth, There and Back Again with Brian Sibley; A Middle-Earth Traveler. Here is Rip van Winkle. Here is The Lord of the Rings (presumably not meaning to imply Gandalf is he, aiee). Here is The Once and Future King. Here is Fool’s Errand. Here is Créatures. Artbooks Myth & Magic, Sur les terres de Tolkien, John Howe Fantasy Art Workshop, Forging Dragons, Lost Worlds, Coloring Dragons. Website here. [JH]
Born August 21, 1965 – Darynda Jones, 55. Sixteen novels, three shorter stories. Summa cum laude from U. New Mexico. Sign-language interpreter. RITA Award. Admits to almost finishing a post-Apocalypse story while in a corner booth at a Tastee Freez, kindly has never shown the manuscript. Lives in New Mexico with husband and two sons the Mighty Mighty Jones Boys. Third Grave Dead Ahead a NY Times Best Seller. [JH]
Born August 21, 1968 — Carrie-Anne Moss, 52. I first saw her as Tara McDonald in the Dark Justice series. Not genre, just her first video I think. Due later played Monica Howard in the “Feeding the Beast” episode of Forever Knight as her first genre role. Oddly enough her next role was as Liz Teel in the Canadian series called Matrix which has nothing to do with the Matrix film franchise where she’s Trinity. Her latest genre role was playing Jeryn Hogarth in the now defunct Netflix based Marvel Universe. (CE)
Born August 21, 1972 – Socorro Vegas, 48. Premio Nacional de Poesía y Cuento «Benemérito de América», Premio Nacional de Novela Ópera Prima «Carlos Fuentes» (Mexico). Five book-length works (Todos las islas is short stories). We may claim “The Giant in the Moon”, see it in English here. Other translations in Compressed, Concho River Review, The Listening Eye, Literal, The Modern Review. [JH]
Born August 21, 1975 — Alicia Witt, 45. Her first role was at age eight as Alia Atreides in David Lynch’s Dune. Next, genre wise at least, voices Caitlin Fairchild In the animated Gen¹³ film. She has series one-offs in Twilight Zone, Person of Interest, Elementary, Walking Dead, Supernatural and The Librarians. She showed up in an episode of the original Twin Peaks and reprised that role nearly thirty years later in Twin Peaks: A Limited Event Series. (CE)
(13) DC FANDOME. In addition to everything else happening this busy weekend is the DC Fandome. It’s free and signing up is easy — here. The 24-hour event starts at 10 a.m. Pacific.
(14) GRATITUDES. In “i am grateful”, Wil Wheaton admits it’s hard for him to fall asleep because when he’s trying, that’s when anxiety works on him most aggressively. He shares a practice that has made it easier.
…But I started doing something that’s been incredibly helpful, and I thought I’d share it.
Every night as I’m getting ready for bed, I focus on a list of things for which I am grateful. I call it “doing my gratitudes”. I just start somewhere, like “I am grateful that I am going to sleep in a warm, safe bed. I am grateful that I get to share this bed with Anne. I am grateful I have enough food.” Stuff like that. I remind myself that there is so much that is good in my life, and by thinking about those things, recognizing those things, and making space to feel grateful for them, I do not give my anxiety an opportunity to grab hold of anything and go to work on me.
… Those bright lights are so important right now, whether they are stadium lights turning night into day, or pinpricks that barely allow candlelight through black velvet. Spending time in gratitude makes it easier for me to find the light, and remember that it is there, even when I can’t see it.
Did the iconic theme song for The X-Files need fan-written lyrics? If it got the cast of the sci-fi series to reunite for a musical Zoom call, then, perhaps — like the massive government archives secreting away the supernatural — it’s worth it for the greater good.
…Now how many government secrets are hidden in this song? The new lyrics — courtesy of contest winners Jennifer Large and Rebecca MacDonald — give composer Mark Snow’s classic eerie theme a twist, especially when sung by a wide-ranging collection of cast members and crew.
…Explanations abound for the game’s sudden explosion in popularity, but I have noticed a particularly common camaraderie among fellow writers. What is it about this game, with so many other open-concept games already in existence, that draws writers to it with such gusto? The timing of release and the sweetness of the game in such dark times are no doubt factors, but I believe it goes deeper than that, down to the very core of our creative hearts.
…From that moment on, I unconsciously spun the narrative of my experience. From the clothes I wore to where I placed the coin-operated tourist binoculars I’d shot out of a balloon with a slingshot, I was crafting a story within this story-less game. This is the garden where I breed pink roses. Here is my carnival for when I need a bit of a thrill, outfitted with a popcorn machine and a teacup ride. There is the playground and community pool where I’ll meet my friends on the weekend, lined with color-coded tables for playing chess. Every piece of wallpaper, every color, every pair of jelly sandals I place on my chibi feet are dishing out tone and theme and mood.
And then there are the villagers. They are a delight to witness as they flit about the island, munching on popsicles, singing, or sprinting Naruto-style on the beach. I’ve dedicated far too many hours to crafting and designing spaces on my island that my residents might enjoy, despite many of the items being stationary and non-interactive. My imagination does all the work the game does not.
Alexander Muscat tweets, “In Microsoft Flight Simulator a bizarrely eldritch, impossibly narrow skyscraper pierces the skies of Melbourne’s North like a suburban Australian version of Half-Life 2’s Citadel, and I am -all for it-.”
In Microsoft Flight Simulator a bizarrely eldritch, impossibly narrow skyscraper pierces the skies of Melbourne's North like a suburban Australian version of Half-Life 2's Citadel, and I am -all for it- pic.twitter.com/6AH4xgIAWg
— Alexander Muscat linktr.ee/alexandermuscat (@alexandermuscat) August 19, 2020
In Japan, if you want to disappear from your life, you can just pick up the phone and a ‘night moving company’ will turn you into one of the country’s ‘johatsu,’ or literally ‘evaporated people.’ You can cease to exist. Meet the people who choose to disappear and the people who are left behind.
After a cliff collapsed in Grand Canyon National Park, a boulder with fossilized tracks was revealed, park officials said in a Thursday news release. The fossil footprints are about 313 million years old, according to researchers.
“These are by far the oldest vertebrate tracks in Grand Canyon, which is known for its abundant fossil tracks” Stephen Rowland, a paleontologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said in the news release. “More significantly, they are among the oldest tracks on Earth of shelled-egg-laying animals, such as reptiles, and the earliest evidence of vertebrate animals walking in sand dunes.”
Pumpkin spice came early this year — too early, according to majorities of consumers.
Dunkin’ Donuts’ pumpkin-flavored coffee and other fall treats returned to the menu earlier than ever this year, the company said, arriving at participating locations Wednesday. Starbucks Corp. has yet to confirm the return date for its much-loved pumpkin spice latte, but one location reportedly said the product would launch on Aug. 28.
While some social media users are eager for the early return of fall products — a silver lining in an otherwise difficult year — new polling from Morning Consult shows that many consumers would prefer to see products promoted closer to the seasons or holidays with which they’re associated….
(21) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Metal Monsterette is a fun family film made in 1957 with kids and cousins by Ed Emshwiller. His daughter Eve is the heroine and daughter Susan is the mad scientist Dr. Majenius.
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, John King Tarpinian, John Hertz, Michael Toman, JJ, rcade, Martin Morse Wooster, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kip W.]
(1) NEW BOB SHAW EBOOK. Rob Jackson and David Langford’s new Ansible Press edition The Full Glass Bushel by Bob Shaw is now available as a free download in multiple formats at the Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund website (where they hope you’ll make a little donation to the fund if you please.) The official release date is June 30 but Langford gave File 770 permission to jump the gun.
Bob Shaw’s column “The Glass Bushel” in the legendary fanzine Hyphen has never until now been collected in full. Thirteen of these columns – selected by Bob himself – were brought together as the printed booklet The Best of the Bushel (1979) edited by Rob Jackson, introduced by Walt Willis and illustrated by Jim Barker – who has recreated his cover illustration for this ebook. A different though partly overlapping selection of fourteen columns appeared as 14 Bob the Bushel (1995) edited by Bruce Pelz.
The Full Glass Bushel includes the entire text of The Best of the Bushel and adds the remaining seventeen “Bushel” instalments from Hyphen, plus six non-Bushel pieces that Bob Shaw also published in Hyphen and two further columns from Science Fiction Review, where “The Glass Bushel” was briefly revived in 1984. All in all, it’s a huge feast of wit, wisdom and autobiography by one of our greatest fanwriters.
This collection complements The Serious Scientific Talks, issued as a TAFF ebook in November 2019. A third and even larger ebook of Bob Shaw’s other fanzine writings is in preparation, tentatively titled Slow Pint Glass.
…New cover art and layout by Jim Barker, plus selected interior art by Jim from The Best of the Bushel. Edited by Rob Jackson (who has contributed a new introduction) and David Langford. 81,000 words.
Langford adds, “The page mentions a third Bob Shaw ebook still under construction, which currently contains nearly 80 articles — more than 120,000 words.”
(2) SLF SEEKS JURORS. The Speculative Literature Foundation is looking for people to read applications for their grants. More information on Facebook. There’s a $25 honorarium for serving.
The Speculative Literature Foundation needs jurors to read applications for the Diverse Writers and Diverse Worlds Grants, and the AC Bose Grant for South Asian Speculative Literature. Ideally, we’re looking for people who are well read in science fiction, fantasy and horror, but we’d also like a mix of readers, writers, librarians, teachers, editors, etc. who are capable of judging literary quality in a work. Please note: we’d love to have South Asian and South Asian diaspora jurors for the AC Bose Grant, but it’s not a requirement.
Jurors will probably read 25-50 applications, which includes a writing sample of no more than 5,000 words. Jurors will have about six weeks to read applications, select finalists, and choose a winner or winners for the grants, as can be seen in more detail below… If interested, please send a brief note to Malon Edwards at [email protected] with the subject line: JUROR. Please include the grant you wish to be a juror for and a paragraph about what your qualifying background is to serve as a juror: for example, your interest in / connection to the field. (i.e., “I’m an ardent reader!” or “I’ve been writing SF/F for seven years…”). Please feel free to ask any questions you may have as well.
‘Afterland,’ by Lauren Beukes (Mulholland, July 28)
After the “Manfall” pandemic wipes out most of the men on the planet, Cole disguises her son — one of the last males on Earth — as a girl and tries to get him to safety before the government can snatch him. Their cross-country journey is treacherous, as they evade not only the Department of Men but also Cole’s sister, Billie, who is determined to separate mother and son. Beukes’s imagined world — complete with bootleg sperm and faux baby bumps — is a thrilling setting for an examination of maternal love.
Full list is probably paywalled. No other real genre cites, but #2 is Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek’s memoir, and deep in the list is a discussion of popular superstitions like the “devil” of the New Jersey Barrens.
(4) FROM VALLEY FORGE TO THE WINTER SOLDIER. Daniel D’Addario, in “Anthony Mackie and Daveed Diggs on Black Lives Matter, Marvel, and Hamilton” on Variety, has Mackie and Diggs interview each other, including promotion of Diggs’s role in Hamilton and Mackie’s in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. “Anthony Mackie and Daveed Diggs on Black Lives Matter, Marvel and ‘Hamilton’”
Daveed Diggs: Congratulations on jumping into “Altered Carbon.” Are you a sci-fi head? Because I am, and you do an awful lot of sci-fi stuff.
Anthony Mackie: I’m not a big sci-fi person. I grew up on “Star Wars,” but I never got into anything futuristic. When I was in high school, there was this movie called “Starship Troopers.”
Diggs: Familiar.
Mackie: In New Orleans we had huge cockroaches. “Starship Troopers” freaked me out. I can’t do it, man. My imagination is too vivid. But “Altered Carbon” was great. If you look at the “Avengers” movies, I’ve never been the lead, or had to do that much action. It became a painstaking weekly hustle to finish that show.
(5) AS YOU WISH. “Watch the Celebrity-Filled Fan-Film Version of The Princess Bride”. Tagline: “A-list actors worked secretly in quarantine to create a rough-hewn, homemade version of the classic film and raise $1 million for charity. Vanity Fair has the exclusive look at three clips from the series, which will start showing this Monday on Quibi.”
… Jeffrey Katzenberg loved the concept and was moved by the charitable effort, so Quibi made a $1 million donation to World Central Kitchen, which equates to approximately 100,000 meals, in order to distribute the handmade project.
The creators hope the footage can also provide some laughter to viewers in a time of hardship. Their scrappy version of The Princess Bride leans into its continuity lapses, utilizes absurd household props and back-of-the-closet costumes, and deploys multiple castings of the same roles to show that in a true fantasy, anyone can play anything.
Before we go any further, just watch some. It’ll be easier to explain after that.
That’s Josh Gad playing the little boy with a cold who is reluctantly told the swashbuckling story by his grandfather. If you’re wondering what the director of the original movie, Rob Reiner, thinks of this riff on his work—that’s him playing the grandfather in this sequence.
[Film Historian Bruce] Crawford: When they made the first Jurassic Park (1993), originally the full-body shots of the dinosaurs were to be realized through a form of stop-motion animation called go-motion, to be done by Phil Tippett. And even though they ended up using CGI instead, Tippett stayed on as one of the lead technicians, and many people on the crew, including Dennis Murren at Industrial Light & Magic — not to mention director Steven Spielberg — are huge admirers of Ray’s. Many of them cite movies like One Million Years B.C. (1966) and The Valley of Gwangi (1969) as the most inspirational dinosaur films ever made. That shows in the film. For example, the scene where the T. rex attacks the Gallimimus was modeled specifically after a key moment in The Valley of Gwangi.
Also, remember when the T. rex eats the lawyer? Well, the lawyer survived in the book. But in the movie, the T. rex bites him from the head down and lifts him up in his mouth — very much like that scene in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), where the Rhedosaurus is rampaging around the city and snatches up a police officer. It’s one of the most iconic scenes in monster movie history, and Ray recognized that moment in Jurassic Park as an homage to his work. He was really touched by that.
(7) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.
June 29, 1979 — Moonraker premiered. It was directed by Lewis Gilbert, and produced by Albert R. Broccoli. Screenplay was by Christopher Wood off the Moonraker novel by Ian Fleming. It was the fourth Bond film to star Roger Moore. Supporting cast was Lois Chiles, Michael Lonsdale, Richard Kiel and Corinne Cléry. Broccoli had originally intended to make For Your Eyes Only, but chose Moonraker because of the popularity of Star Wars. Some critics really liked it, some really hated it. (Connery thought it was crap.) Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes give it a mediocre 43% rating. (CE)
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
Born June 29, 1900 – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Author, aviator, illustrator, journalist. His novella The Little Prince (1943) won the Retrospective Hugo and has been translated into 300 languages. He was a viscount, a pioneer of international postal flight, a pilot in and out of war with 13,000 flying hours; his complicated heroic life and his works outside SF are worth study, as is LP which may be even more than it seems. Prix Femina; Prix des Ambassadeurs; Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française; inscribed in the Panthéon, Paris; Officer of the Legion of Honor; Croix de Guerre with Palm; U.S. Nat’l Book Award. (Died 1944, maybe) [JH]
Born June 29, 1919 —Slim Pickens. Surely you remember his memorable scene as Major T. J. “King” Kong in Dr. Strangelove? I certainly do. And. of course, he shows up in Blazing Saddles as Taggart. He’s the uncredited voice of B.O.B in The Black Hole and he’s Sam Newfield in The Howling. He’s got some series genre work including several appearances on Alfred Hitchcock Presents, plus work on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Night Gallery. (Died 1983.) (CE)
Born June 29, 1935 – Richard Harter, F.N. In his words, “a collector who prizes his mint copy of Dick and Jane meet Robby Robot, a club fan who is … also a diamond fan and a spade fan, a fanzine fan whose multitudinous publications, if not always award winning, certainly ought to be, and a convention fan noted for attending conventions that no one else attended.” Fellow of NESFA (New England SF Ass’n; a service honor); six entries in the history section of the NESFA Website. Proposed the NESFA Hymnal. Upon retirement, moved back to South Dakota, from which he remained active. Always a Marine. (Died 2012) [JH]
Born June 29, 1940 – Joe Sanders, 80. Reviewer for Algol, Delap’s, Fantasy Review, Int’l Ass’n for Fantasy in the Arts Newsletter, Locus, NY Review of SF, SF Book Review, SF Chronicle, SF Commentary, Starling, Starship. Wrote Roger Zelazny, a Primary & Secondary Bibliography (1980: who’ll do a 2nd ed’n?); E.E. “Doc” Smith; Science Fiction Fandom; The “Sandman” Papers; The Heritage of Heinlein (with T. Clareson). Clareson Award after C died. Professor emeritus, Lakeland Community College, Ohio. [JH]
Born June 29, 1950 – Michael Whelan, 70. Seven artbooks, from Wonderworks (edited by Kelly & Polly Freas) through Beyond Science Fiction with this exhibit. Fifteen Hugos. Fourteen Chesleys, recently for “In a World of Her Own”, which was made the Beyond cover. Spectrum Award; SF Hall of Fame; 370 book and magazine covers, plus interiors. Many times Guest of Honor including 56th and 65th Worldcons. Among the very best. [JH]
Born June 29, 1956 – David Mattingly, 64. Hundreds of book and magazine covers for us, two thousand in all, plus interiors; Chesley for the Amazing Sep 91 cover; two Magazine & Bookseller Best Cover of the Year awards. Here is the Aug 81 Asimov’s. Here is A Rising Thunder. Guest of Honor at Boskone 25, Con*Stellation XX (some use Roman numerals, some don’t), Lunacon 49, Bubonicon 36 & 38, Canvention 38, Loscon 42. [JH]
Born June 29, 1957 – Fred Duarte, Jr. Chaired Fandom Ass’n of Central Texas; member of NESFA. Chaired ArmadilloCon 9-10, 14, 17, Fan Guest of Honor at ArmadilloCon 33. Co-chaired Westercon 49. Chaired World Fantasy Con in 2000, 2006. Chaired Smofcon 13. Copperhead Award. OGH’s appreciation is here. (Died 2015) [JH]
(9) JUST NEEDS SOME BIPLANES PILOTED BY MICE. Mlex asks, “Does this count as genre? I was thinking: King-Kong-esque.”
Astronomers say big cool patches on a “supergiant” star close to Earth were behind its surprise dimming last year.
Red giant stars like Betelgeuse frequently undergo changes in brightness, but the drop to 40% of its normal value between October 2019 and April 2020 surprised astronomers.
Researchers now say this was caused by gigantic cool areas similar to the sunspots seen on our own parent star.
There had been speculation that Betelgeuse was about to go supernova.
But the star instead began to recover and by May 2020 it was back at its original brightness.
Betelgeuse, which is about 500 light-years from Earth, is reaching the end of its life. But it’s not known precisely when it will explode; it could take as long as hundreds of thousands of years or even a million years.
When the giant star does run out of fuel, however, it will first collapse and then rebound in a spectacular explosion. There is no risk to Earth, but Betelgeuse will brighten enormously for a few weeks or months.
(11) ROWLING REITERATES. Incredibly, J.K. Rowling was back for another round on Twitter this weekend. Thread starts here:
Today I discovered that I was accused of hate by shadow environment minister Lloyd Russell-Moyle in the pages of @tribunemagazine. He claimed I was ‘using’ my experiences of sexual assault and domestic violence to ‘discriminate’ against trans people. 1/9
Andrea Dworkin wrote: ‘Men often react to women’s words—speaking and writing—as if they were acts of violence; sometimes men react to women’s words with violence.’ It isn't hateful for women speak about their own experiences, nor do they deserve shaming for doing so. 8/9
(12) PUPPY ACTS OUT. P. Alexander, publisher of Cirsova, a 2017 Hugo nominee courtesy of the Rabid Puppies slate, today proclaimed “SFWA is a Terrorist Organization” [Internet Archive copy] due to its statement in support of Black Lives Matter.
…And it is for this reason that Cirsova Publishing has officially adopted the policy of recognizing the SFWA as a terrorist organization.
We strongly recommend any authors with good conscience leave this malign organization.
We strongly recommend any authors considering membership to avoid it.
While we will not make it a policy to ask, Cirsova Publishing will no longer consider submissions from new authors with SFWA credentials in the bio materials that they send us until the organization takes a real stand against racism and disavows and ceases supporting domestic terrorist groups.
…The cape appeared in 1978’s Superman: The Movie, 1980’s Superman II, and possibly 1983’s Superman III. According to Julien’s Auctions, the trademark red cape was used to film Reeve while he was mounted on a wire harness, for both blue screen and front projection work, to make it appear as though he was flying. Slits in the fabric accommodated the wires. There are also pockets at the bottom of the cape so rods could be inserted to make it seem as though it were flapping in the air.
(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “The Last Airbender Pitch Meeting” on YouTube, Ryan George explains why boiling down hours of anime into a 90-minute movie doesn’t work.
[Thanks to John Hertz, JJ, Chip Hitchcock, Cat Eldridge, Michael Toman, Martin Morse Wooster, Andrew Porter, Mike Kennedy, Mlex, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title cedit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Anna Nimmhaus.]
Steve Vertlieb and Ray Harryhausen at Temple University in 1981 during the national “Clash Of The Titans” tour
By Steve Vertlieb: Ray Harryhausen remains one of the most revered figures in fantasy/sci-fi motion picture history. Born June 29, 1920, Ray was not only a childhood hero, but became a dear and cherished friend of nearly fifty years duration. Today fans will commemorate his genius, as well as the joyous centennial of his birth with numerous remembrances, events, and exhibitions in celebration of his 100th birthday throughout the wondrous months ahead.
His work in films inspired and influenced generations of film makers, and garnered him a special Academy Award, presented by Tom Hanks, for a lifetime of cinematic achievement. Steven Spielberg joyously proclaimed that his own inspiration for directing Jurassic Park was the pioneering special effects work of Harryhausen.
Published shortly after his death on May 7, 2013, here is a celebration and loving remembrance of the life and work of cinematic master, and special effects genius, Ray Harryhausen. It is also the tender story of a very special man, as well as an often remarkable personal friendship. I love you, Ray. You filled my dreams, my life, and my world with your wondrous creatures.
In remembrance of this wonderful soul, here is my affectionate tribute to my friend of nearly fifty years, and boyhood hero of interminable recollection and duration…the incomparable stop-motion genius, and Oscar-honored special effects pioneer, Ray Harryhausen.
Journey with me now to a “Land Beyond Beyond” where dreams were born, cyclopean creatures thundered across a primeval landscape, mythological dragons roared in awe struck wonder, and magical stallions ascended above the clouds…Once Upon A Time. “From the Land Beyond Beyond: An Intimate Personal Remembrance of Ray Harryhausen” at The Thunderchild.
(1) IN VINO VERITAS. How’s your Finnish? Tähtivaeltajablogi has put up a post about the translation of Bradbury’s Dandleion Wine, “Kirjat – Ray Bradbury: Voikukkaviiniä”. The beautiful cover speaks for itself!
(2) LASFL DAZE. “Ray Bradbury’s Clubhouse” chronicles Ray’s earliest contact with fandom at First Fandom Experience.
…In Surround Yourself With Your Loves and Live Forever, edited by John L. Coker III, Bradbury’s friend Ray Harryhausen later recalled:
“In the mid-1930s when I was still in high school, Forry told me about the little brown room in Clifton’s Cafeteria, where the Los Angeles chapter of the Science Fiction League would meet every Thursday. Robert Heinlein used to come around, and a guy named Ray Bradbury. We were a group who liked the unusual.
“Ray would arrive wearing roller skates. After selling newspapers on the street corner he would skate to the meetings because he had no money. He used to go meet the stars at the Hollywood Theater where they did weekly radio broadcasts.”
(3) RAY & RAY. Eyes on Cinema presents an undated video of these two friends and creators in dialog: “The importance of curiosity with Ray Bradbury and Ray Harryhausen.”
(4) CALLING. This is from an interview with Tobias S. Buckell in the June Locus. Buckell grew up biracial in the Caribbean Islands.
“Ray Bradbury has a story in The Martian Chronicles about a couple with a kid that dies. The Martians can adopt whatever form people around them want, so one of them goes to their parents and looks just like the kid. Their son is back from the dead, and they don’t care why–they fold him into their routine. He starts disappearing a lot, so they follow him, and realize he’s also being a lot kid for another family along the way. The two families call him back and forth like a dog until he just rips apart and dies. I read that in high school in the US Virgin Islands and broke into tears. That story literalizes a metaphor about the question you asked earlier, about being pulled to one side or the other. That story is not about being biracial–but for me it was.”
(5) DESPARACION DE LOS LIBROS. Ray Bradbury was interviewed by Cristina Mucci on the Argentine TV show Los siete locos in 1997. The program is “dedicated to the dissemination of books and culture.” Bradbury’s answers were broadcast with Spanish subtitles. Early on, he was asked about Fahrenheit 451.
(6) A VISIT ON CABLE TV. The Planetary Society has posted this 1982 interview with Bradbury on their YouTube channel.
Mat Kaplan crossed paths with author, poet, and visionary Ray Bradbury many times across three decades. UK Planetary Radio fan and Bradbury expert Dr. Philip Nichols recently revealed that he had a VHS copy of Mat’s first interview with Ray, conducted in 1982. The author of The Martian Chronicles was a frequent visitor to Long Beach, California where Mat managed a cable television channel. Here’s that interview.
…In the world of pandemia in 2020, Bradbury’s stories resonate with a different irony. For those who can afford the technology, screen life has become more critical than ever, critical to education, business, government, and ministry. It has become a way of connecting, a method of community. It keeps us close, yet as Bradbury thought, isolated from our neighbors and family. But that’s the nature of the current virus, a destroyer of community. Bradbury did not predict a plague-inspired isolation, at least not this type of plague.
Instead I think he saw technology as the plague that isolates, a relentless social force. He would ask us, “What are we dependent on? What can we not live without?” As if Bradbury was thinking aloud, he offers several “solutions.” We could destroy technology, especially if we realize it controls us too much. In “The Murderer” (1953) Albert Brock is arrested for shooting a television set, murdering a telephone, a wall radio, a wrist radio, intercom system, and other things. Brock is happily committed to an institution for six months in a quiet cell. This is the stance of a rebel, not a conformist….
Experience the transformative power of creative writing through the life and works of famed fantasy writer, Ray Bradbury. As the author of Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury remains one of the 20th century’s most visionary and celebrated writers. This course explores practical creative writing strategies through a deep dive into the “dark fantasy” of Ray Bradbury.
(9) APOLLO 11 NIGHT. Ray Bradbury is interviewed on the night of the first moon landing by Mike Wallace. From Comic-con 2009, Ray’s own DVD. Part 1 of 2
Ray Bradbury Moon Landing Interview part 2
Marc Scott Zicree (“Mr. Sci-Fi”) tells where he was when the Moon landing happened. And he also relates Ray Bradbury’s anecdote about why he skipped out on David Frost’s show that night to find someone who would interview him about this great event.
(10) WICKED GOOD. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In the Washington Post, Angela Haupt asked 13 novelists “which books they like best when they need to get away.” Pierce Brown recommended Something Wicked This Way Comes. Diana Gabaldon is the only sf or fantasy novelist whose name I recognize (I don’t know current YA novelists) and she recommended Shogun. “Salman Rushdie, Diana Gabaldon and other authors reflect on the books they find most transporting”.
(11) NO THANKS. It’s a 1980 rejection letter from Ray Bradbury to Stan Lee. Makes you wonder what Stan submitted to Ray…
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, and Martin Morse Wooster, for these stories.]
(1) THE TOP OF THE WORLD. Rachel S. Cordasco is dedicating June to “Nordic SF in Translation” on her SF in Translation site and on FB and Twitter: “SFT From The Nordic Countries” . She’s looking for on-topic contributions, too.
Speculative fiction in English translation from the Nordic countries has been available as far back as the turn of the twentieth century. Since the beginning of the twenty-first, though, we’ve gotten a lot more, especially horror from Sweden and fantasy from Finland.
During the month of June, I’ll be spotlighting this little-known (in the Anglosphere) but important and often brilliant speculative fiction. Several stories listed here are available for free online.
Elizabeth Knox has been named a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature in the Queen’s Birthday honours list announced today. We note that she describes her books as “literary non-realism”, but if you read them you will recognise science fiction and fantasy when you see it.
Taika Waititi picked up an ONZM in the same awards for services to film. He has been involved in many projects which fit in our genre description, although we note that the Stuff article about the awards fails to mention his role in the creation of what we here at SFFANZ news think is the best of them – Wellington Paranormal.
Stuff fills in Knox’s bibliography:
…The first book in the series, Dreamhunter, won the 2006 Esther Glen Award and the 2007 ALA Best Books for Young Adults award, was shortlisted for the 2006 Montana New Zealand Book Awards, and awarded a ‘White Raven’ by the International Youth Library in 2006.
Her most recent book, published in 2019, The Absolute Book, won the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement.
(3) FELLOWSHIP REUNITED. Josh Gad has posted “One Zoom to Rule Them All | Reunited Apart LORD OF THE RINGS Edition.”
It’s the Return of the KINGS – Josh gathers the Fellowship and then some, to go on a very important mission…. quest…. thing.
FEATURING: Sean Astin, Elijah Wood, Dominic Monaghan, Billy Boyd, Orlando Bloom, Ian McKellan, and many more!
(4) CHECKING IN. CoNZealand Fan Guest of Honour Rose Mitchell stays in touch —
(5) SOUTH GATE IN ’58. Fanac.org is adding folders of photos scanned from the collection of Elinor Busby, including today’s packet from the 1958 Worldcon. (Which, incidentally, was held at the Hotel Alexandria, whose marquee was in a helicopter view I saw of Friday night’s protests in downtown LA.)
Thanks to the scanning of Linda Deneroff, we’re putting up photos from Elinor Busby’s collection. Today, we’ve added the first 16 and these are from the 1958 Solacon, and parties thereafter. Find them at http://fanac.org/Fan_Photo_Album/b03-p00.html . There are more to come. Thanks to Linda for scanning and to Elinor for providing the photos. It’s a real treat to see these.
… The text includes long lists of suicidal chess players, war criminals and notable Latvian celebrities, from Mikhail Baryshnikov to Mark Rothko. There are also accounts of victims of the Nazis, from Ban’s uncle’s young love, a violinist, to Joseph Roth’s mentally ill wife, fatally institutionalised in the euthanasia clinic Schloss Hartheim, “the only killing centre in the second world war from which not a single person emerged alive”.
…These issues are as relevant now as they were years ago, if not more so (see, for instance, the ChiZine scandal, where authors accepted all kinds of abuse, including questionable contract language, because of the publisher’s then-stellar reputation). I hear all the time from writers who’ve been offered seriously problematic contracts and are using various rationalizations to convince themselves (sometimes at the publisher’s urging) that bad language or bad terms are not actually so bad, or are unlikely ever to apply.
Here are my suggestions for changing these damaging ways of thinking.
Don’t assume that every single word of your contract won’t apply to you at some point. You may think “Oh, that will never happen” (for instance, the publisher’s right to refuse to publish your manuscript if it thinks that changes in the market may reduce your sales, or its right to terminate the contract if it believes you’ve violated a non-disparagement clause). Or the publisher may tell you “We never actually do that” (for instance, edit at will without consulting you, or impose a termination fee). But if your contract says it can happen, it may well happen…and if it does happen, can you live with it? That’s the question you need to ask yourself when evaluating a contract….
…Muren’s role also expanded with Empire, as he took point on directing the fleet of miniatures that play a major part of the film’s iconic opening set-piece on the ice planet, Hoth. With the advent of digital technology still many years away, Muren and his team brought the Rebel’s herd of tauntauns and the Empire’s squad of AT-AT walkers to life by hand. And through it all, he followed the example established by Harryhausen.
Even as scores of bookstores came and (mostly) went along the West Side of Manhattan in recent decades, Steve Hann endured.
He could be found through the dead of winter and the muggy heat of summer selling secondhand books on a sidewalk near Columbia University.
He drew a following from Columbia and NASA’s nearby Goddard Institute for Space Studies, with his fold-up tables proffering a well-curated array of mysteries, classics, art books and — his specialty — science fiction.
Mr. Hann began selling books and CDs in stores in the Morningside Heights section of Manhattan starting at least in the early 1980s, before settling into his longtime spot on Broadway between 112th and 113th Streets.
To generations of Columbia students, he was part of the streetscape, as much a sidewalk fixture as the parking meter he leaned upon while almost invariably immersed in a sci-fi paperback.
But even when his head was in a galaxy far away, his tennis shoes were planted on New York streets, where life, he would remark, could often be stranger than anything dreamed up by Ray Bradbury or Isaac Asimov….
(10) TRIVIAL TRIVIA.
The name of the soft serve ice cream cart on the space force military base is named Meal Armstrong
(11) TODAY IN HISTORY.
May 31, 1990 — Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall premiered. It starred Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rachel Ticotin, Sharon Stone, Ronny Cox, and Michael Ironside. It’s rather loosely based on Philip K. Dick‘s “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” story. Ronald Shusett, Dan O’Bannon and Gary Goldman Wrote the screenplay. It finished second at Chicon V for Best Dramatic Presentation to Edward Scissorhands. Most critics liked it well-enough though a number of feminist critics thought it excessively violent towards women. It currently holds a 78% rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes.
(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
Born May 31, 1893 – Elizabeth Coatsworth. Newbery Medal for The Cat Who Went to Heaven (1930). Four “incredible tales” for adults; four books of poetry; ninety in all; memoir Personal Geography. (Died 1986) [JH]
Born May 31, 1895 — George R. Stewart. His 1949 novel Earth Abides won the first International Fantasy Award in 1951. That was a British award and the first one was given at Festivention. Other genre works would include Man, An Autobiography and Storm which is at least genre adjacent. (Died 1980.) (CE)
Born May 31, 1910 – Aubrey MacDermott. Possibly the first fan. He always said he was. Unfortunately, the supporting evidence is thin. He may well have founded the Eastbay Club in the San Francisco Bay area around 1928. Anyway, he was Fan Guest of Honor at Westercon XXXX (Oakland, 1987). Here is his Origin Story as of 1990. (Died 1996) [JH]
Born May 31, 1921 – Arthur Sellings. Six novels, fifty shorter stories, in Fantastic, Galaxy, Imagination, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Nebula, New Worlds, New Writing, Worlds of Tomorrow; translated into Dutch, French, German, Italian, Russian. Born in Kent, died in Sussex. Antiquarian, book & art dealer. (Died 1968) [JH]
Born May 31, 1930 — Gary Brandner. Best remembered for his werewolf trilogy, The Howling of which the first was very loosely made into a film. He wrote the script for Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf. The fourth film of the Howling series, Howling IV: The Original Nightmare, is actually almost an accurate adaptation of the first novel. He wrote a lot of other horror and penned the novelisation of Cat People. (Died 2013.) (CE)
Born May 31, 1942 – Brian Burley. Active fan in Ohio and New York. In 1966, co-founder of Marcon. In 1979 he was in FISTFA (Fannish Insurgent Scientifictional Ass’n); here he is (with S.H. Craig and Pat O’Neill) on “Fandom in New York” for the Lunacon XXII Program Book. Co-founded (with John Boardman and Fred Lerner) the Beaker People Libation Front, which Fancyclopedia III mildly calls “not entirely serious”; see here. (Died 2006) [JH]
Born May 31, 1950 — Gregory Harrison,70. I’m always surprised to discover a series didn’t last as long as I thought It had. He was Logan 5 in Logan’s Run which only lasted fourteen episodes. He was also in Dark Skies, twenty episodes before cancellation, as the voice of Old John Loengard, and had one-offs in Dead Man’s Gun (cursed object), Touched by an Angel, Outer Limits and Miracles. (CE)
Born May 31, 1961 — Lea Thompson, 59. She’s obviously best-known for her role as Lorraine Baines in the Back to the Future trilogy though I remember her first as Beverly Switzler in Howard the Duck as I saw Back to the Future after I saw Howard the Duck. Not sure why that was. Her first genre role was actually as Kelly Ann Bukowski in Jaws 3-D, a film I most decidedly did not see. If you accept the Scorpion series as genre, she’s got a recurring role as Veronica Dineen on it. (CE)
Born May 31, 1968 — John Connolly, 52. An Irish writer who is best known for his series of novels starring private detective Charlie Parker. According to ISFDB, these novels are well within the genre as some of the assigned tags are “zombies”, “alien invasion”, “supernatural thriller” and “dark fantasy”. So who has read these? (CE)
Born May 31, 1977 – Cat Hellisen. Fantasy for adults and children; free-lance editing; also archery, aikidô, figure skating. Here is a digital-art sketch of a chaffinch; here in ink are some vines and chrysalides. First novel, When the Sea is Rising Red; four more; a dozen and a half shorter stories. “The Worme Bridge” won the Short Story Day Africa award. More recently in Fife she likes the forests and the fields and the Forth. [JH]
Born May 31, 1979 — Sophia McDougall, 41. She has a very well-crafted alternative history series, the Romanitas series, in which Rome didn’t fall and rules the world today. She has two SF novel — Mars Evacuees is sort of YA alien invasion novel; Space Hostages reminds of a Heinlein YA novel. (CE)
Born May 31, 1995 – Jeremy Szal. Two dozen short stories electronically and on paper, e.g. at Tor.comand in Nature. Fiction editor at StarShipSofa 2014-2020 (Episodes 360-600). First novel Stormblood scheduled for release in early June. See his review of Predestination at Strange Horizons here. [JH]
(13) COMICS SECTION.
Candorville revises a nursery rhyme for greater astrophysical accuracy.
(14) GUESS WHO? Scott Edelman invites Filers who haven’t already seen this in his Twitter and Facebook feeds to identify the swordsman:
Who among you will be the first to identify a certain costumed attendee of SouthwesternCon '66 from this photo which ran in the Winter 1967 issue of Star-Studded Comics? pic.twitter.com/nKJn5VlmrI
…I experienced Tochi Onyebuchi’s RIOT BABY(Tor.com, 176 pp., $19.99) as one tightly held breath. Moving from South Central Los Angeles to Harlem to Rikers Island to a speculative near-future in short bursts of fierce feeling, “Riot Baby,” Onyebuchi’s first novel for adults, is as much the story of Ella and her brother, Kevin, as it is the story of black pain in America, of the extent and lineage of police brutality, racism and injustice in this country, written in prose as searing and precise as hot diamonds.
Ella has a “Thing,” a power that manifests variably as telepathy, precognition, telekinesis, but isn’t ever described in those terms; she experiences it as overwhelming grief and anger, as explosion and aftermath, and struggles with controlling and deploying it over the course of the book. Kevin, born in 1992 during the Los Angeles riots, grows up in Harlem in the shadow of Ella’s furious, repressed power — but when Ella vanishes after watching reports of the murder of Sean Bell on television, she takes her limited protection of him with her. Kevin’s adolescence consists of being harassed by the police and consistently steered away from education and prospects, before getting arrested on an attempted armed robbery charge and imprisoned on Rikers….
…. For great love, as the Nobel-winning Polish poet Wis?awa Szymborska observed in her splendid meditation on its mystery, is “never justified” but is rather “like the little tree that springs up in some inexplicable fashion on the side of a cliff: where are its roots, what does it feed on, what miracle produces those green leaves?”
That improbable and inexplicable miracle is what Edward Gorey (February 22, 1925–April 15, 2000) celebrates with his signature faux-terse tenderness and soulful oddness in the vintage gem The Osbick Bird (public library).
This week in The Full Lid, Streets of Rage 4 teaches me how to crystallize my love for a good action scene. Louie Stowell’s wonderful The Dragon in the Library is a big-hearted and witty MG fantasy that has a lot for parents too while Doctor Who audio specialists Big Finish head into new SFnal territory with The Human Frontier. We’ve also got a look at some of the best indie tabletop RPGs on the market and a massive Signal Boost section, including several Hugo finalists and their voter packet material. If you’re a finalist and you have your material hosted online already, please get in touch and I’d be happy to link to that too.
The Full Lid is published every Friday at 5pm BST. You can sign up, and find an archive of the last six months of issues, here.
(18) HELLO, MR. CHIPS. It might not be the cuisine I expect to read about at Food and Wine, but news is where you find it — “Necco Wafers Are Officially Back”.
…Back in 2018, Necco—one of America’s oldest candy companies—went out of business, leaving a number of well-known but polarizing products in limbo, including Sweethearts Conversation Hearts, Clark Bars, Mary Janes, and the eponymous Necco Wafers. Nearly all of these brands have been snapped up by someone. For instance, Sweethearts are a Valentine’s Day classic, so Ohio’s Spangler Candy Company has been pushing to get them back into production. The Clark Bar has its roots in Pittsburgh, so Pennsylvania’s Boyer Candy Company decided to bring the bar home. Heck, even Mary Jane—those peanut butter chews that made it easy to decide which houses to T.P. on Halloween—found a new producer, according to CandyIndustry.com.
But what about Necco Wafers? The flavored discs are historically significant, first produced over 150 years ago in 1847, but they are also often unfavorably compared to chalk. Plus, with Necco unable to keep the lights on, was the writing on the wall for the company’s signature wafers?
Imagining your place in the universe can make you feel pretty small and insignificant, and in the midst of a global pandemic? Well, even more so.
“I think this moment that we are living through reminds us how fragile our species is, living on this small rock in the vastness of the cosmos,” says astrophysicist Ray Jayawardhana. But he doesn’t think that the universe should necessarily make you feel alone. It’s inspiring, he says, to remember the “intimate and enduring connections that we have with the rest of the cosmos.”
Jayawardhana, a professor at Cornell University, has written a bedtime story called Child of the Universe which helps parents talk with their children about some of those connections.
“The universe conspired to make you …” a dad tells his daughter as they look up at a full moon. “The iron in your blood, the calcium in your bones, are made up of stars that lived long ago.”
Jayawardhana drew from memories of looking up at the night sky with his father, when he was a child growing up in Sri Lanka. “I remember being awed by constellations of twinkling stars and bright planets like Venus and Jupiter in particular” Jayawardhana says. “One night, my father told me that people had been to the moon. I was just amazed. Suddenly, that bright light up above became a place that one could visit. At that moment, my sense of what’s possible expanded dramatically.”
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, John King Tarpinian, Chip Hitchcock, Martin Morse Wooster, Mike Kennedy, JJ, Lise Andreasen, John Hertz, Scott Edelman, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew.]
(1) ITALCON: FATE UNKNOWN. The winners of Italy’s Premio Italia are known – what’s unknown Is when they can be revealed. There were 438 voters, compared to last year, when 500 was reached.
The award ceremony was due to take place at Italcon in San Marino on 13 June. The health situation naturally makes it implausible that Italcon could actually take place on that date. At the moment, a date of convenience is indicated on the website of the Prize, September 1st (for technical reasons, a date must necessarily be indicated); however, decisions on the progress of Italcon are awaited. Decisions that evidently depend only in part on the organization of Italcon, but primarily on the decisions of the government of San Marino and on the progress of the epidemic. Probably no decision will be made before September.
(2) SOUL SURVIVOR. Filmmaker Fabrice Mathieu has released another ingenious fantasy short film, Memorium.
After the death, what happens? Where do we go? “Memorium” invites you to a journey of a man into the afterlife.
Inspired from the world created by the french artist Marc Giai-Miniet.
…One of the weirder things always danced around on Star Trek is how its myriad bridge crews, despite being from the 23rd and 24th centuries, are fascinated with a popular culture that is not their own, but more reflective of our own recent past as peoples of the 20th and 21st century. Sisko loves baseball, a sport that, hilariously, apparently just stops being played professionally in 2042 according to Deep Space Nine. Picard loves the pulpy noir fiction of Dixon Hill, an original character for Trek but specifically rooted in the detective fiction boom of the 1940s. Janeway, when she’s not palling around with Leonardo DaVinci, is writing 19th-century Irish village self-insert fic or participating in a dull as hell Austen-esque choose your own adventure type stories.
Former Big Talk Productions duo Edgar Wright and Nira Park have teamed up with writer-director Joe Cornish and producer Rachael Prior to launch a London and Los Angeles-based film and TV outfit called Complete Fiction.
The company’s debut development slate includes three new series for Netflix. Cornish is directing Lockwood & Co, a supernatural detective series based on Jonathan Stroud’s novel series of the same name, while the company has also optioned Tade Thompson’s literary sci-fi horror trilogy The Murders Of Molly Southbourne and S.A. Chakraborty’s historical fantasy series inspired by Islamic folklore The City Of Brass (The Daevabad Trilogy).
Complete Fiction is presently in post on Wright’s Last Night In Soho, produced with Working Title Films for Focus Features and Film4, as well as Wright’s untitled feature documentary about the band Sparks which it produced with MRC.
….“We wanted to just do something as wild as we could imagine,” Kindt said. “Getting David to do the art really just made it a slam dunk proposition, because he can just draw absolutely anything. He’s the Catalonian Moebius. And he’s going to hate that I said that, but he’s got a visual intelligence and creativity that really only shows up once every generation or so. He’s it. It’s not just design and art for art’s sake, because he’s a writer too. Everything has meaning. Every color and costume and gadget. It all feeds into the story. So I think David was truly one of our greatest inspirations for this book.”
…In the process of becoming the first museum to host the exhibit, which was created by Bruce Rosenbaum and is part of Imagine Exhibitions’ traveling exhibits, the Museum of Idaho tackled one of the dilemmas of steampunk: how to make the unfamiliar concept accessible to general audiences. Months before the exhibit opened in May 2018, the Museum of Idaho displayed steampunk statues, advertised on billboards, and created events in tandem with the exhibit, such as a steampunk street party and a steampunk ball. They started with steampunk’s dynamic visual presentation and then lured the general public into asking what it was they were looking at.
(7) PITCH MEETING. Jessica Camerato, in “Doolittle Finds Balance, Focus In Love of Books” on MLB.com, notes that Washington Nationals closer Sean Doolittle isn’t just an avid cosplayer, but reads quite a lot. His signed first edition of Octavia Butler’s Parable Of The Sower is on his top shelf right next to a baseball signed by Nationals players after his 2019 World Series win. Doolittle is also a fan of Juliette Wade. In January, the American Booksellers Association named him the Indie Bookstore Day Ambassador because Doolittle patronizes independent bookstores whenever he’s on the road.
“I will totally judge a book by its cover,” Doolittle said. “If I think it looks cool, I’ll buy it. I have one waiting for me at home that I bought just because the cover was so sick. It was a fantasy book — it’s called ‘Mazes of Power’ by Juliette Wade. It came out right before Spring Training.”
(8) NONVERBAL MEMORY. James P. Blaylock’s 2019 piece “My Life in Books: A Meditation on the Writer’s Library” for Poets & Writers sounds like my original plan – to own and keep the books I read, and if I needed to refresh my memory, the volume would be on my shelves.
…Not long ago I was reading a collection of essays by Hilaire Belloc titled One Thing and Another, and, as is sometimes the case when I read other people’s essays, I got the idea of writing this one. The “idea,” such as it was, had nothing to do with the subject matter of any of the forty essays contained in Belloc’s book; what struck me was that the pages smelled as if they had been soaked in gasoline. I remembered abruptly that it had smelled that way when I’d bought it, and although it has sat on the shelf in my study for twenty years, waiting to be read, the odor hasn’t diminished. It could be fatal to light a match anywhere near it.
This olfactory discovery sent me off in a nostalgic search for my copy of Philip K. Dick’s Dr. Bloodmoney, which Phil gave to me in 1975….
…Upon graduating, I knew that I was moving to LA one-way without much money or even a job lined up. It was like that back then. You packed up your car and hit the road. You had to have blind faith. You chased after your dream. You lived on ramen. You had a roommate. You got paid $500 bucks a week. You ran errands and answered phones and started at the bottom. My first job was at Michael Bay’s new company Platinum Dunes. The first film we made was a remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. We were the first to do the remake thing. Everyone thought we were crazy. My parents wondered if my tuition money had gone to waste.
The film was a hit, earning over $80 million at the domestic box office. Within a year of moving West, I landed my dream job working for the executive producer of The Lord of the Rings. Did I mention that I’m a giant nerd? I’d read Tolkien’s classics cover to cover numerous times. A run of book-to-film properties followed on our slate, including The Golden Compass, Love in the Time of Cholera, and Inkheart. Working in Hollywood was a dream come true, albeit a complicated one with its share of workplace toxicity (which has now become quite public).
Despite loving my job, I had an itch that started to grow stronger. It needed scratching. After working on so many wonderful authors’ books and helping bring their worlds to life on the big screen, I found myself wanting to write my own big sci-fi trilogy….
…Though she’s perhaps best known for her proximation to her husband, Annie Glenn was an American hero in her own right, veteran reporter Bob Greene wrote in a 2012 CNN Opinion piece.
“Glenn has had a hero of his own,” Green wrote, “Someone who he has seen display endless courage of a different kind: Annie Glenn.”
And she was at the center of this legendary moment in The Right Stuff.
As John’s prowess as a pilot culminated in his historic orbital flight on Feb. 20, 1962, the spotlight shone ever more intensely on the Glenn family, which by then included a son, David, and a daughter, Lyn. After becoming the first American to orbit the Earth, John and his wife were cheered in a ticker-tape parade in New York City. Celebrity pursued them relentlessly and each brush with the media and famous people painfully revealed Annie’s stuttering.
With reporters in tow after the flight, then-Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was intent on visiting the Glenns at their home in Arlington, Virginia, but John angered Johnson by refusing to receive him, proffering the excuse that Annie was in bed with a migraine to spare her from the attention. Even so, the Glenns became good friends with Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird.
(11) TODAY IN HISTORY.
May 19, 1956 — Science Fiction Theatre’s “The Flicker” first aired. Each episode was supposedly based on scientific fact though the host weaseled his way out of that in his narration. This story has a sociology graduate student committing murder after watching a badly flickering movie. Subliminal images I presume. It starred Victor Jory, Michael Fox and Judith Ames. You can watch it here.
(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
Born May 19, 1901 – George Pendray. Early rocketeer; co-founded the American Interplanetary Society (its successor Am. Inst. Aeronautics & Astronautics gives the Pendray Award); invented the time capsule, for the 1939 World’s Fair; coined the word “laundromat”; helped establish Guggenheim Jet Propulsion Center at Cal. Tech., Guggenheim Labs at Princeton U., U.S. Nat’l Aeronautics & Space Adm’n. Wrote SF as science editor of Literary Digest, e.g. “A Rescue from Jupiter”. Co-edited The Papers of Robert H. Goddard. (Died 1987) [JH]
Born May 19, 1920 – Walter Popp. Prolific pulp illustrator for e.g. Amazing, Fantastic, Startling, Thrilling; see here. Also Gothic-romance fantasy, see here, some becoming limited-edition prints for fine-art galleries, see here. Outside our field, true-crime and men’s-adventure magazines, paperbacks including Popular Library; toy and sporting-goods manufacturers; greeting cards. (Died 2002) [JH]
Born May 19, 1921 – Pauline Clarke. Children’s fantasy The Twelve and the Genii won the Carnegie Medal and the DeutscherJugendliteraturpreis. The Pekinese Princess has talking animals and trees. Thirty novels for various readers; Warscape, for adults, “lurches into the future”, says a remarkable 4,300-word Wikipedia entry. (Died 2013) [JH]
Born May 19, 1937 — Pat Roach. He was cast in the first three Indy Jones films as a decided Bad Person though he never had a name. His first genre appearance was in A Clockwork Orange as a Milkbar bouncer. His first name role was Hephaestus in Clash of Titans. He was of an unusually stocky nature, so he got cast as a Man Ape in Conan the Destroyer, and as Bretagne the Barbarian in Red Sonja. And, of course, he had such a role as Zulcki in Kull the Desttoyer. Oh, and he played an very large and mostly naked Executioner in the George MacDonald Fraser scripted The Return of The Musketeers. (Died 2004.) (CE)
Born May 19, 1944 — Peter Mayhew. Chewbacca from the beginning to The Force Awakens before his retirement from the role. The same year he first did Chewy, he had an uncredited role as the Minotaur in Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger. He also shows in the Dark Towers series as The Tall Knight. (Died 2019.) (CE)
Born May 19, 1946 — Andre the Giant. Fezzik in The Princess Bride, one of my all-time favorite films. Also, an uncredited role as Dagoth In Conan the Destroyer. He’s actually did a number of genre roles such as The Greatest American Hero with his American acting debut playing a Bigfoot in a two-part episode aired in 1976 on The Six Million Dollar Man titled “The Secret of Bigfoot”. (Died 1993) (CE)
Born May 19, 1946 – Ken Kelly. 240 covers; interiors; The Art of Ken Kelly, Ken Kelly Fantasy Art Trading Cards (2 sets), Escape (collection); album covers for KISS, Manowar, Ace Frehley. See here (Amazing), here (The Stars My Destination), here (The Lincoln Hunters), here (Ace Frehley). [JH]
Born May 19, 1948 – Paul Williams. Created Crawdaddy! Literary executor of Philip K. Dick, co-founder of PKD Society, biography of PKD Only Apparently Real; worked with David Hartwell on Age of Wonders – also The Int’l Bill of Human Rights; edited vols. 1-12, Complete Works of Theodore Sturgeon; also The 20th Century’s Greatest Hits (including Winnie-the-Pooh; The Little Prince; God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater), four on Bob Dylan, twenty more. (Died 2013) [JH]
Born May 19, 1948 — Grace Jones, 72. First genre appearance was as Stryx in Rumstryx, an Italian TV series. Her next was Zulu in Conan the Destroyer followed by being May Day in A View to Kill and Katrina in Vamp. She was Masako Yokohama in Cyber Bandits which also starred Adam Ant. Her last several genre role to date was Christoph/Christine in Wolf Girl, and Death aka The Devil in Gutterdammerung, a film that also featured Henry Rollins, Slash and Iggy Pop! (CE)
Born May 19, 1955 – Elise Primavera. Author and illustrator of children’s books, some fantasy: The Secret Order of the Gumm Street Girls, Fred & Anthony Meet the Heinie Goblins from the Black Lagoon (as Esile Arevamirp), Marigold Star. Here’s a book cover. [JH]
Born May 19, 1966 — Jodi Picoult, 54. Her Wonder Women work is exemplary (collected in Wonder Women, Volume 3 and Wonder Woman: Love and Murder). She also has a most excellent two-volume YA series called the Between the Lines Universe which she wrote with Samantha van Leer. ISFDB lists her Second Glance novel as genre but I’d say it’s genre adjacent at best. (CE)
Born May 19, 1996 — Sarah Grey, 24. Before DC Universe cast the present Stargirl in Brec Bassinger for that series, Legends of Tomorrow cast their Stargirl as this actress for a run of three episodes. The episodes (“Out of Time”, “Justice Society of America” and “Camelot 3000”) are superb. I’ve not seen her as Alyssa Drake in The Order but I’ve heard Good Things about that series. (CE)
(13) COMICS SECTION.
Bizarro jokes about a bed that shares a name with a law.
(14) MOVING PICTURES. Not Pulp Covers hosts four GIFs made from clip of The Best from 20,000 Fathoms. They really pop out of the page, despite being black-and-white. The film’s stop-motion animation special effects are by Ray Harryhausen. Its screenplay is based on Ray Bradbury’s short story The Fog Horn, specifically the scene where a lighthouse is destroyed by the title character. (I’m not going to put a sample here because people tell me GIFs in the Scroll drive them crazy.)
(15) THAT’S PUTTING IT MILDLY. In John Scalzi’s post “A Reminder, Re: Famous People I Know” he reasonably says he’d rather keep his friends. (So he won’t be starting a news blog.)
So, it turns out I know, and am friends (or at least I have been friendly) with, people who are notable or famous to some degree or another. Yes, I am as amazed about that as anyone else. Sometimes, those notable/famous people:
* Are disliked by a large group of people, for whatever reason(s);
* Have a life event, often not a happy one, that gains attention in the public sphere;
* Will have a public conflict with some other person who is also generally notable;
* Says or does something that causes the Internet to fall on their head;
* Some combination of two or more of the above;
* Otherwise attracts attention to themselves in some manner or another that elicits general comment.
What better time to zip into a happily unfamiliar realm? The DIY History project at the University of Iowa Library, which invites people to help transcribe digitized objects from the library’s special collections and other holdings, could use your help with its massive trove of science-fiction zines. Some date back to the 1930s; all were collected by the late James L. “Rusty” Hevelin. More than 10,780 pages of the Hevelin Fanzines collection have been transcribed so far, but there are still around 500 left to go. If you need a mental break from this planet and its familiar troubles, pop into this project and spend a little time somewhere else.
(17) CELEBRITY BURIAL. Atlas Obscura also introduces readers to “Nicolas Cage’s Pyramid Tomb” in a New Orleans cemetery. (He won’t be in residence for some time to come, though.)
…The empty grave is a stark, nine-foot-tall stone pyramid that stands in obvious contrast to the blockier, above-ground burial sites that have been crumbling away in the cemetery for over two centuries. There is no name on the pyramid yet, but it is emblazoned with the Latin maxim, “Omnia Ab Uno,” which translates to “Everything From One.”
The actor himself has chosen to remain silent about his reasoning for the flamboyant tomb. Some speculate it’s an homage to the “National Treasure” movie franchise, though given that many cemeteries host pyramid grave markers, it may have simply been a stylistic choice.
(18) THE VISIBLE BOOSTER. Popular Mechanics sets the frame for a video showing “Here’s What the Guts of Four Famous Rockets Look Like During Launch”. You see side-by-side the Saturn V, Space Shuttle, Falcon Heavy and the Space Launch System (SLS) rockets launching from Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39.
A new video reveals what the launches of four famous spacecraft would look like if the rockets were transparent. Seeing how the sausage is made, so to speak, is mesmerizing.
Youtuber Hazegrayart posted the video, which also includes audio from the four launches, to YouTube earlier this week. Hazegrayart has a number of other animated videos on their page. (This 52-year time lapse of Launch Complex 39 at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida from the artist’s page is super cool, too.)
[Thanks to Ita, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Chip Hitchcock, JJ, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, Michael Toman, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jayn.]
Earlier this year, I had just finished with the “Snowfall” writers’ room for the season when I took a similar job on a different show at a different network. I’d been in the new room for a few weeks when I got the call from Human Resources. A pleasant-sounding young man said, “Mr. Mosley, it has been reported that you used the N-word in the writers’ room.”
I replied, “I am the N-word in the writers’ room.”
He said, very nicely, that I could not use that word except in a script. I could write it but I could not say it. Me. A man whose people in America have been, among other things, slandered by many words. But I could no longer use that particular word to describe the environs of my experience.
…I do not believe that it should be the object of our political culture to silence those things said that make some people uncomfortable. Of course I’m not talking about verbal attacks or harassment. But if I have an opinion, a history, a word that explains better than anything how I feel, then I also have the right to express that feeling or that word without the threat of losing my job. And furthermore, I do not believe that it is the province of H.R. to make the decision to keep my accusers’ identities secret. If I’ve said or done something bad enough to cause people to fear me, they should call the police.
My answer to H.R. was to resign and move on. I was in a writers’ room trying to be creative while at the same time being surveilled by unknown critics who would snitch on me to a disembodied voice over the phone. My every word would be scrutinized. Sooner or later I’d be fired or worse — silenced….
The Hollywood Reporter solicited CBS’ take on Mosley’s
departure –
CBS TV Studios responded to Mosley’s op-ed on Friday in a statement provided to The Hollywood Reporter: “We have the greatest admiration for Mr. Mosley’s writing talents and were excited to have him join Star Trek: Discovery. While we cannot comment on the specifics of confidential employee matters, we are committed to supporting a workplace where employees feel free to express concerns and where they feel comfortable performing their best work. We wish Mr. Mosley much continued success.”
India’s space program will bounce back strong from the apparent failure of Friday’s (Sept. 6) lunar landing attempt, Prime Minister Narendra Modi stressed.
The nation’s Chandrayaan-2 moon orbiter dropped a lander called Vikram toward the lunar surface Friday afternoon. Everything went well for a while, but mission controllers lost contact with Vikram when the craft was just 1.3 miles (2.1 kilometers) above the gray dirt.
As of this writing, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) had still not officially declared Vikram lost; the latest ISRO update stated that descent data are still being analyzed. But Modi’s comments strongly suggest that Vikram and Pragyan, the rover that was supposed to deploy from the lander, are dead.
…Indeed, India plans to develop a Chandrayaan-3 moon mission in the coming years, and the nation also intends to put humans on the lunar surface at some point. ISRO is working to send a second orbiter to Mars in the mid-2020s as well. (The nation’s first Red Planet probe, Mangalyaan, has been studying Mars from orbit since September 2014.)
And there’s still the other half of Chandrayaan-2 to consider. The mission’s orbiter, which arrived at the moon last month, is scheduled to operate for at least a year. The spacecraft is using eight science instruments to study the moon in a variety of ways — creating detailed maps of the lunar surface, for example, and gauging the presence and abundance of water ice, especially in the south polar region.
…Atwood says it just seemed like the time for a sequel. “People had been asking me to write a sequel for a long time, and I always said no, because I thought they meant the continuation of the story of Offred which I couldn’t do,” she says. “But then I thought, what if somebody else were telling the story? And what if it were 15 or 16 years later? And it was also time, because for a while we thought we were moving away from The Handmaid’s Tale. And then we turned around and started going back toward it, ominously close in many parts of the world. And I felt it was possibly time to revisit the question of, how do regimes like Gilead end? Because we know from The Handmaid’s Tale that it did end.”
A year after their viral Harry Potter dance routine, the students of Arizona’s Walden Grove high school are at it again with some incredible Avengers-themed homecoming choreography. The talented PAC dance team put their own twist on Marvel’s Cinematic Universe and brought the beloved superheroes back to life — with some badass moves.
…In 2016, a bust of HP Lovecraft was removed as the trophy for the World Fantasy Award, but the change had caused so much debate that a new trophy — a twisted tree girdling a full moon — wasn’t released till the next year. Last year, after the death of Harlan Ellison, obituaries from grieving fans were mixed with accounts of his serial sexual harassments, including of women author peers. Two months later, NK Jemisin made history by winning her third consecutive Hugo Award for the best novel. Veteran author Robert Silverberg denounced her acceptance speech as “graceless and vulgar” for having passionately spoken against the obstacles faced by black women writers in SFF, again to the thundering applause of the auditorium in San Jose, which I was present to witness. Jemisin’s speech was in more than one way a precursor to Ng’s.
The change in our genre is a reflection of the change that’s happening in the world. As a genre, SFF is fairly new — barely a century old — and, while science fiction in particular (less so fantasy and horror) has always worn a progressive veneer, the stories of progress have always belonged to a small, privileged group of people. But SFF is also a hugely popular and consumer-facing genre, which means trends are driven by those who consume the stories. Changes in SFF are a direct result of the changing reader and buyer demographic, which no longer simply constitutes white men in the West….
(6) YOU’RE GETTING COLDER. “Was Walt
Disney Frozen?”Snopes says nope. Is there nothing left for us
to believe in?
Half a century onwards, the rumor that Walt Disney’s body was put in cryonic storage remains one of the most enduring legends about the entertainment giant.
(7) LYNLEY OBIT. Actress Carol Lynley died September 3 of a heart attack reports the New York Times.
She was 77. Her genre appearances included The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Night
Gallery, and Tales of the Unexpected, She was in the feature films Beware!
The Blob and Future Cop, and the TV movies that gave rise to series Kolchak:
The Night Stalker and Fantasy Island.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born September 7, 1795 — John William Polidori. His most remembered work was “The Vampyre”, the first published modern vampire story published in 1819. Although originally and erroneously accredited to Lord Byron, both Byron and Polidori affirmed that the story is his. Because of this work, he is credited by several as the creator of the vampire genre of fantasy fiction. (Died 1821.)
Born September 7, 1937 — John Phillip Law. He’s probably best remembered as the blind angel Pygar in the cult film Barbarella which featured Jane Fonda in that bikini. He shows up in Tarzan, the Ape Man as Harry Holt, and he’s in a South African SF film, Space Mutiny, as Flight Commander Elijah Kalgan, that’s set on a generation ship. Look actual SF! (Died 2008.)
Born September 7, 1955 — Mira Furlan, 64. She’s best known for her role as the Minbari Ambassador Delenn on entire run of Babylon 5, and also as Danielle Rousseau on Lost, a series I did not watch. She’s reunited with Bill Mumy and Bruce Boxleitner at least briefly in Marc Zicree’s Space Command.
Born September 7, 1960 — Christopher Villiers, 59. He was Professor Moorhouse in “Mummy on the Orient Express”, a Twelfth Doctor story. It’s one of the better tales of the very uneven Calpadi run. He’s also Sir Kay in First Knight and is an unnamed officer in From Time to Time which based on Lucy M. Boston’s The Chimneys of Green Knowe.
Born September 7, 1966 — Toby Jones, 53. He appeared in “Amy’s Choice”, an Eleventh Doctor story, as the Dream Lord. In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, he voiced Dobby the house elf. And in
Finding Neverland, Mr. Smee, Captain Hook’s bo’sun. Guess what work that film was based on. Finally I’ll note that he was — using motion capture — Aristides Silk in The Adventures of Tintin.
Born September 7, 1973 — Alex Kurtzman, 46. Ok, a number of sites claim he destroyed Trek. Why the hatred for him? Mind you I’m more interested that he and Roberto Orci created the superb Fringe series, and that alone redeems them for me.
Born September 7, 1974 — Noah Huntley, 45. He has appeared in films such as 28 Days Later, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (excellent film), Snow White and the Huntsman (great film), Event Horizon (surely you’ve something else to do) and Dracula Untold (woo, not so great). He’s Gawain in The Mists of Avalon series and shows up as Donovan Osborn in the CW series Pandora which, I’m not kidding, got a Rotten Tomatoes zero percent approval rating. Ouch.
Born September 7, 1993 — Taylor Gray, 26. He’s best known for voicing Ezra Bridger on the animated Star Wars Rebels which I highly recommend if you’re into Star Wars at all as it’s most excellent. He also played Friz Freleng in Walt Before Mickey.
State District Judge John Chupp dismissed a number of the claims by Mignogna’s attorney and promised to rule on the remainder in the next 30 days.
…Friday was a significant milestone in a civil lawsuit brought by local anime voice actor Vic Mignogna against two of his Dallas-area colleagues, the fiance of one of the women, and a company that cut ties with him. Mignogna says their statements about his inappropriate behavior with women amount to an unfair campaign to destroy his career. His accusers say his lawsuit is aimed at silencing them.
After three hours of arguments between a tightly scripted defense team and Mignogna’s astonishingly unorganized — and at times ill-prepared and illogical — attorney, Chupp dismissed a number of the claims and promised to rule on the remainder in the next 30 days.
…January’s record-breaking opening of Broly also set off another round of accusations and stories on social media about the 56-year-old actor’s long-rumored inappropriate behavior with women — which allegedly has included aggressive kisses, hugs and unwanted sexual advances.
Online, thousands of anime fans rushed to pick a side in the warfare hashtagged #kickvic and #IStandWithVic. Mignogna repeatedly, and sometimes in great detail, denied all the allegations.
Amid the outcry, Flower Mound-based Funimation Productions, which dubs and distributes anime shows, including much of the Dragon Ball franchise, announced in February that it had severed ties with Mignogna after an internal investigation.
Mignogna’s lawsuit, filed April 18, alleged defamation, tortious interference, conspiracy and other charges against Funimation, voice actors Jamie Marchi and Monica Rial, and Rial’s fiance, Ron Toye. The lawsuit painted the company and three individuals as a band of conspirators leading the charge to reduce Mignogna to ruins.
Friday the 141st District Court’s gallery was packed with interested parties, and many of them were there to support Rial and Marchi. But Mignogna was nowhere to be found. Perhaps that was for the best, given the often befuddled oral arguments of his Tyler-based attorney, Ty Beard….
And the many worldwide Mignogna fans who have contributed to the massive GoFundMe for his legal fees, a war chest which now stands at more than $242,000, might well have wanted their money back if they had been in the courtroom today.
…At the end of the proceedings — which went an hour longer than the court had allocated — Chupp dismissed all claims against Marchi, all except defamation against Funimation and all except defamation and conspiracy against Rial and Toye.
Those outstanding claims are weighty ones — Funimation, Rial and Toye are still on a sharp hook. I suspect Chupp needed to give more consideration and study to each before making his ruling. Or maybe the amateurish performance of the plaintiff’s legal team had just worn on his last nerve to the point that the extremely patient judge needed a break.
All good things come to an end. Including TV shows. (Except maybe The Simpsons.) But for fans of USA Network’s critically-acclaimed hacker drama Mr. Robot, at least they’ll have a beer to toast when the series premieres its fourth and final season on October 6.
In an official collaboration, USA Network has enlisted New York’s Coney Island Brewery to produce fsociety IPA — a hazy IPA inspired by Mr. Robot. Though the connection between television show and branded beer can often feel tenuous, working with the Coney Island-based brand is actually an inspired choice since the beachy New York City neighborhood serves as a significant setting in the show.
Something is happening in the place where our revolution began.
Japanese scientists have identified a new species of dinosaur from a nearly complete skeleton that was the largest ever discovered in the country, measuring eight metres (26 feet) long.
After analysing hundreds of bones dating back 72 million years, the team led by Hokkaido University concluded the skeleton once belonged to a new species of hadrosaurid dinosaur, a herbivorous beast that roamed the Earth in the late Cretaceous period.
A partial tail was first found in northern Japan in 2013 and later excavations revealed the entire skeleton.
The team named the dinosaur “Kamuysaurus japonicus,” which means “Japanese dragon god,” according to a statement issued by the university.
(12) ANOTHER CON REPORT. Emily Stein in CrimeReads offers “An Ode To Podcasts: Dispatches From Podcon 2019” as a report from a podcasting convention in Seattle that
won’t be held again because of financial trouble.
…Earlier this year, I traveled to Seattle to attend PodCon, an annual conference celebrating all things podcasts. While many kinds of podcasts were represented, PodCon has always had a special fondness for audio dramas, or fiction podcasts, and the fervent fandom they inspire. (Have I stayed up until midnight to hear the mind-blowing 50th episode of The Bright Sessions the second it dropped? Maybe! Did I co-create a Facebook group for listeners of I Am In Eskew to trade their nerdy fan theories? Who’s to say? Might I have joined a Discord server just to talk about Debbie’s mysterious notebook in King Falls AM? Yes, I might have. I did.)…
Four months after PodCon 2 came to a close, conference co-founder Hank Green announced that PodCon would not be returning. A variety of financial and logistical challenges had converged to make the event unsustainable, though Green expressed optimism that another conference might develop solutions to the issues they’d found insurmountable. As beloved as many podcasts are, in many ways, the medium is still finding its footing in today’s entertainment landscape. For every My Favorite Murder or Reply All, there’s a multitude of indie podcasts fighting for a wider audience, even as some bask in the glow of a small but fiercely loyal following—a coven of people who’ve found the same secret, whose days all light up when a new episode hits their feed.
…For the past six months, as part of the exhibition As If: Alternative Histories from Then to Now at The Drawing Center, a small art museum in New York City, I have explored illustration, novels, and posters as well as fanzine materials from as far back as the 1940s. Zines were hard for fans to get their hands on, as they were printed and collated in school clubs or at the dining room table, sometimes mailed out to subscribers and contributors one by one. And yet, these publications formed the backbone of what would become modern fan culture, not just a reflection of media but a reimagining of reality.
The cost of a mimeograph machine may have been high, but the cost of not talking to each other was higher — even in some of the most dire moments of the 20th century. The oldest zine included in As If is also the longest running fanzine to remain in distribution in Britain throughout the course of the second World War: Futurian War Digest, or FIDO, which printed from October 1940 until March 1945.
FIDO reviewed science fiction works and reflected on the fragile state of the fan community in the United Kingdom during wartime. The first issue of the zine, which was published and distributed less than a month after the start of the London bombing raids known as The Blitz, made a point of announcing the conscription of fan William F. Temple and the death on active duty of sci-fi enthusiast Edward Wade. These sombre announcements ran alongside musings about John Carter of Mars.
In a time of great uncertainty, publisher J. Michael Rosenblum said in the pages of FIDO that his self-avowed goal was to “a) to give news of and to fandom, b) to keep burning those bright mental constellations possessed by all fans.” The publication was created just as much to be an archive and time capsule as a source of entertainment, news, and distraction. By publishing the fanzine, Rosenblum recorded the history of a subculture of science fiction enthusiasts, and helped to keep a community that was being actively ripped apart together.
… The physical evidence of this transatlantic fan solidarity can be seen in the unusual shape and size of Futurian War Digest Vol. 1 #9, which was printed on four packages of paper donated by U.S. fan Forrest J. Ackerman. Ackerman, who became a pioneer in his own right, helped fund publications and initiatives similar to FIDO in the United States, contributing to Le Zombie fanzine. Le Zombie, which began production in December 1938, likewise included a “War Department” section which organized to provide fanzines to American fans who had enlisted, in order to help them maintain some level of connection and normalcy under the pressures of war.
The first of two podcasts exploring Ray Harryhausen’s unmade films, this episode features interviews with contributors to upcoming Titan Books publication, ‘Harryhausen: The Lost Movies’. The book examines Harryhausen’s unrealised films, including unused ideas, projects he turned down and scenes that ended up on the cutting room floor. This book includes never-been-seen-before artwork, sketches, photos and test footage from the Harryhausen Foundation archives.
(15) FAMILIAR FACE. Hayley Atwood will be in the next Mission:
Impossible film. More details in The
Hollywood Reporter.
https://www.instagram.com/p/B2Fl_JOA_bZ/
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, BravoLimaPoppa,
Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, JJ, Martin Morse Wooster, and Chip Hitchcock for
some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the
day Jon Meltzer.]
(1) CHECK YOURSELF. Cat Rambo’s social media advice.
Thread starts here.
Want to know how you come off online? Go back and look at the last few dozen of your posts on FB, Twitter, or wherever. Is the predominant tone angry, scolding, mocking, or otherwise shout-y? That would be the impression you're making.
(2) HUGO MIA. Foz Meadows’ 2019 Best Fan Writer Hugo has suffered a misadventure in delivery.
USPS tried to deliver what I suspect was my Hugo Award today, but didn’t twig that the doorbell was broken and left without knocking. The little note they left behind says the parcel had “visible damage/empty,” which is very reassuring. ????
Hey @USPS I arranged for a parcel redelivery today and my USPS driver doesn’t have it. I tried calling the office on the redelivery form multiple times but there was no answer.
I’m feeling pretty sure that @USPS has either lost my Hugo Award or broken it so badly they won’t cop to having the package. I’ve organised redelivery twice and it hasn’t come either time; none of the postmen know anything about it. ????
(3) KEEPING HUGO. Amazing Stories’ Steve
Davidson, in “On
Renaming Awards”, tries to preempt an anticipated effort to take Hugo
Gernsback’s name off of the Worldcon’s award.
…And now the other side of that coin is revealed. Prior to and immediately following the Best New Writer award name change, some have suggested that the Hugo Award name be changed as well. After all, Hugo Gernsback, for whom the Science Fiction Achievement Awards were renamed, had bad paying practices; there are historical complaints from H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. P. Lovecraft, Jack Williamson and Donald Wollheim to name those who are known.
He took on airs and presented himself as sophisticated and superior and it may even be that he used his low word rates to help maintain a lavish lifestyle.
On the other hand, he didn’t reject female authors out of hand (encouraged them in editorials, actually). He himself was Jewish, so it is unlikely that antisemitic thoughts were expressed and as for people of color, though I’ve no evidence, circumstantial evidence suggests that he would have encouraged them as well as he consistently operated in a manner that was designed to grow and spread interest in the genre. If he had recognized that there was a new market to exploit, he’d have jumped right in. His motivation was to grow awareness and acceptance of the genre. How he felt about other social issues remains largely a mystery (but given that he also published Sexology, a magazine devoted to human sexuality in a manner that was extremely provocative and progressive in its time, suggests that the man was more progressive leaning than not).
(4) SHARING AND PRESERVING
WORLDCON. Claire Rousseau retweeted a call to stream,
record, and caption all of Worldcon and considered how to marshal the resources
necessary to do it. Thread
starts here.
It's also crucial to ask & acquire the panelists AND the audience members' consent to being recorded. If we truly want to record EVERY ITEM and not burden the volunteers even more, we'd best make it a condition to agree to when signing up to be a panelist. (5)
The alt-right has taken root in fandom. Like any parasitic plant, once it takes hold, it attempts to strangle the life out of everything around it, drain them of energy until they perish. There are factions on the internet—be they GamerGate, the Sad/Rabid Puppies, ComicsGate, #IStandWithVic/Weeb Wars—who wish to fight a culture war against what they see as a liberal agenda to dominate media.
There are a multitude of individuals who have spoken against these alt-right groups.
And these individuals have been targeted in ways that put their personal safety in jeopardy.
In writing this article, I reached out to several individuals I knew had personally been targeted. In doing so, I talked to online media critic Kaylyn Saucedo (more famously, MarzGurl), artist Tim Doyle, comic writer Kwanza Osajyefo, and cosplayer/comic writer Renfamous about their experiences with online harassment. What they told me needs to be heard.
Trigger warning: The following article contains detailed accounts of sexism, homophobia, transphobia, threats of violence and sexual assault, racism, and a lot of harassment. Screenshots of harassment will be provided to supplement the information provided.
(6) SEE YOU AT THE FAIR. The
poster for the Brooklyn
Antiquarian Book Fair is pretty interesting. The event happens September
7-8, 2019.
The late Ray Harryhausen is the man most synonymous with stop-motion animation and for good reason. Harryhausen’s contributions to films like It Came from Beneath the Sea, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, Jason and the Argonauts, and Clash of the Titans immortalized him as a legend, his work paid tribute to by everyone from Chuck Russell in Nightmare on Elm Street: Dream Warriors to Sam Raimi in Army of Darkness. Next year, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art pays tribute to the stop-motion master with Ray Harryhausen: Titan of Cinema.
Reported by Creative Boom, it’ll be “the largest and widest-ranging exhibition of Harryhausen’s work ever seen,” including materials both previously unseen and newly restored.
(8) TRIVIAL TRIVIA.
August 28, 1991 — First e-mail sent from space. Using a Mac Portable aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis, the first e-mail from space is sent to Earth. Two astronauts on the spacecraft, James Adamson and Shannon Lucid, wrote, “Hello Earth! Greetings from the STS-43 Crew. This is the first AppleLink from space. Having a GREAT time, wish you were here,…send cryo and RCS! Hasta la vista, baby,…we’ll be back!” The message was transmitted to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born August 28, 1749 — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. I once saw a production of his Faust in the Seattle Cathedral some decades back where Faust came up the central aisle standing regally on a cart in his blood red robes dragged along slowly by four actors dressed as demons. Very fascinating. (Died 1832.)
Born August 28, 1833 — Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1st Baronet. English artist and designer associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Although the ISFDB says his artwork graces a mere dozen or so covers of genre books, I’m willing to bet that it’s a lot more than that. The 1996 Signet UK of Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow’s Black Thorn, White Rose anthology uses his artwork, as does the 1990 Random House publication of A.S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance. (Died 1898.)
Born August 28, 1873 — Sheridan Le Fanu. One of the most well-known Irish ghost story writers of the Victorian Era. M. R. James said that he was “absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories”. Three of his best-known works are “Carmilla”, “The House by the Churchyard” and “Uncle Silas”. If you’re interested in sampling his fiction, iBooks has a lot of his ghost stories for free. (Died 1914.)
Born August 28, 1896 — Morris Ankrum. Numerous appearances in the Fifties as he appeared in Rocketship X-M as Dr. Ralph Fleming, as a Martian leader in Flight to Mars, in Red Planet Mars playing the United States Secretary of Defense, in Invaders From Mars playing a United States Army general, and as yet another Army general in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. (Died 1964.)
Born August 28, 1916 — Jack Vance. I think I prefer his Dying Earth works more than anything else he did, though the Lyonesse Trilogy is damn fine too. And did you know he wrote three mystery novels as Ellery Queen? Well he did. And his autobiography, This Is Me, Jack Vance!, won the Hugo Award, Best Related Book. (Died 2013.)
Born August 28, 1917 — Jack Kirby. Responsible for a goodly part of modern comics from Captain America and the X-Men to Challengers of the Unknown and the New Gods. I’m very much looking forward to the New Gods film being worked on now. (Died 1994.)
Born August 28, 1925 — Arkady Natanovich Strugatsky. The Strugatsky brothers were well known Russian SF writers who were Guests of Honour at Conspiracy ’87, the Worldcon that was held in Brighton, England. Their best-known novel in the West, Piknik na obochine, has been translated into English as Roadside Picnic. It is available in digital form with a foreword by Le Guin. (Died 1991.)
Born August 28, 1948 — Vonda McIntyre. I’ve read a number of her works including Dreamsnake and The Moon and the Sun which are all phenomenal. The latter was based on a short story of hers done as a faux encyclopaedia article “The Natural History and Extinction of the People of the Sea”, that was illustrated by Le Guin. Neat. (Died 2019.)
Born August 28, 1965 — Amanda Tapping, 54. She’s best known for portraying Samantha Carter on Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis. She also starred as Helen Magnus on Sanctuary which I never managed to see. Anyone see it? She was in The Void which also starred Adrian Paul and Malcolm McDowell.
(11) KIDNEY DONOR SOUGHT. Longtime Phoenix fan Shane Shellenbarger is on dialysis and
needs a kidney transplant. His wife has set up some webpages to help spread the
word and widen the search for a donor. Filer Bruce Arthurs adds, “Shane’s a
good guy and could use a break.” Learn more about Shane
at the Kidney
for Shane website.
Shane needs a kidney! He has been on dialysis and on the recipient list for over 650 days. The average length on the list is 2 to 5 years, usually waiting for an unfortunate tragedy leading to a cadaver organ. Many of his friends as well as his wife have tried to donate, but have not qualified for one reason or another. So, we need to spread the request far and wide!
It’s that time again: Millions of folks are heading back to school, carrying with them varying degrees of excitement and dread. A new school year is filled with unknowns, which can sure be anxiety-inducing, so it’s no surprise that when movies feature characters hitting the books, it might stir up some old feelings of dread for audiences.
In this week’s Debate Club, we celebrate cinema’s most memorable schools and academies. (It killed us, but we decided not to include the boot camp in Starship Troopers since it’s technically not a school.) All five of our picks are way more exciting than your boring old trig class.
(13) CALL FOR JUDGES. Red rover, red rover, send a name for Mars 2020 right over!
NASA is recruiting help from students nationwide to find a name for its next
Mars rover mission. Starting Tuesday, K-12 students in U.S. public, private and
home schools can enter Future Engineers’ “Name the Rover Challenge”
to pick a name for a Mars Rover to be launched next year. One grand prize winner will name
the rover and be invited to see the spacecraft launch in July 2020 from Cape
Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
NASA is seeking volunteers to help judge the thousands of contest entries anticipated to pour in from around the country. U.S. residents over 18 years old who are interested in offering approximately five hours of their time to review submissions should register to be a judge at: https://www.futureengineers.org/registration/judge/nametherover
Here’s the writeup for participating students:
K-12 Students
If you are a K-12 student in the United States, your challenge is to name NASA’s next Mars rover. Submit your rover name and a short essay (maximum 150 words) to explain the reasons for your selected name. Be sure to review the RULES for all challenge details and entry requirements, including the privacy requirement of NO PERSONAL NAMES in your submission so that your entry may be posted in the public gallery. The Mars 2020 rover will seek signs of past microbial life, collect surface samples as the first leg of a potential Mars Sample Return campaign, and test technologies to produce oxygen from the Martian atmosphere to prepare for future human missions. More background information about the Mars 2020 mission is provided in the education resources section below.
(14) AVOIDING THE LAST RESORT. James Davis Nicoll,
in “SFF
Works in Which Violence Is Not the Solution” at Tor Books, takes
delight in beginning his list with a work that plays against type – the Niven/Pournelle
novel Mote in God’s Eye.
Indeed, the violent solution is so expected that readers can be surprised by a plot that avoids it… Consider the venerable The Mote in God’s Eye. (So old that we don’t need to avoid spoilers, right?)
Now when we turn to the effect of cat ownership we find that it has virtually zero predictive value when it comes to national voting trends. For those states where the percentage of cat ownership is highest, the average election results were 52.5% in favor of the Republican candidate over the 4 elections tabulated. This clearly does not represent a meaningful bias in voting behavior. When we look at those states where the percentage of cat ownership is lowest we get a similar indication that there is no predictive value of feline ownership, with an average of 60% voting Democratic. Neither of these results is different enough from the expected chance effect of 50% to be statistically significant.
Say the word “exosuit” and superheroes come to mind — somebody like Tony Stark from Marvel Comics, whose fancy suit enables him to become Iron Man.
But scientists at Harvard University have been developing an actual exosuit — a wearable machine that they say can improve a mere mortal’s strength and stamina. This new prototype is novel because it improves a wearer’s performance while walking and running — just one example of progress in what’s become a surging field.
This suit looks kind of like bike shorts, with some wires and small machines around the waist and cables down the legs. When it’s turned on, a person expends less energy while moving.
Avengers: Endgame has become the UK’s fastest-selling digital download film of all time.
The Marvel movie debuted at the top of the official film chart on Wednesday with the highest-ever opening week of digital download sales.
In July, the finale of the super-hero film series became the highest-grossing film of all time at the box-office.
Now it’s racked up 335,400 downloads in its first week – smashing the previous record held by Bohemian Rhapsody.
The Queen biopic entered the history books in February with 265,000 downloads in its first week.
Endgame’s prequel Avengers: Infinity War is the third fastest-selling download, having claimed almost 253,000 downloads in its first seven days.
In this week’s film chart, fellow Avenger Captain Marvel also sits in sixth place
(20) INSTANT MASTERPIECE. Camestros Felapton in comments:
Picture a clause in a strange constitution With fantasy prizes for make-believe guys Some one amends it The motion goes slowly A clause about mustard in pies [dum, dum, dum, dum] Throwing mustard pies at Worldcon Throwing mustard pies at Worldcon Throwing mustard pies at Worldcon Ahhhhhh, ahhhhhhhhh
[Thanks to Steve Davidson, Mike Kennedy, Cat Eldridge,
Chip Hitchcock, John King Tarpinian, JJ, Hampus Eckerman, ULTRAGOTHA, Mike
Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, mirotherion, and Andrew Porter for some of these
stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Avilyn.]
(1) MILES TO GO. In “Lessons learned: writing really long fiction”
on his blog, Charles Stross
discusses his Merchant Princes and Laundry Files series and gives advice to
authors planning multi-book series.
The first thing to understand is the scale of the task. Each of these projects, the Laundry Files and the Merchant Princes, represents a sunk cost of many years of full time labour. At my rate of production (roughly 1.5 novels per year, long term, where a novel is on the order of 100-120,000 words) either of them would be a 7 year slog, even if I worked at them full time to the exclusion of all other work. So we’re talking a PhD level of project scale here, or larger.
In reality, I didn’t work at either series full-time. They only account for two thirds of my novel-length fiction output: in the case of both series, I’ve gone multiple years at a time without touching them. Burnout is a very real thing in most creative industries, and if you work for a duration of years to decades on a single project you will experience periods of deep existential nausea and dread at the mere thought of even looking at the thing you just spent the last five years of your life on. It will pass, eventually, but in the meantime? Try not to put all your eggs in the one ultra-maxi-giant sized basket.
(2) CLICK WITHOUT THINKING.
James Davis Nicoll gives us three reasons to click through to Tor.com —
There are in every field creators whose output has been lamentably small, people from whom one wishes more material had emerged. This is as true for science fiction and fantasy as any other field. Here are five authors on my “more, please” list.
…At other times, as with the following books, one has a nearly subconscious sense that somehow these works share something…without quite being able to articulate what that something is.
Who knows? If careless time travellers had stepped on different animals 541 million years ago, the Earth’s surface might be dominated by…larger but still squishy things, rather than our marvellous selves….
(3) 2020 VISION. The
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern Two) will host the “Ray
Harryhausen | 100 years” exhibit from May 23-October 25, 2020
Special effects superstar Ray Harryhausen elevated stop motion animation to an art during the 1950s to 1980s. For the first time, Ray’s collection will be showcased in its entirety, and, as such, this will be the largest and widest-ranging exhibition of his work ever seen, with newly restored and previously unseen material from his incredible archive.
Ray Harryhausen’s work included the films Jason and the Argonauts, the Sinbad films of the 50s and 70s, One Million Years B.C and Mighty Joe Young, and a wider portfolio including children’s fairy tales and commercials. He also inspired a generation of film-makers such as Peter Jackson, Aardman Animation, Tim Burton, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg, and his influence on blockbuster cinema can be felt to this day.
This exhibition is in collaboration with the Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation to celebrate what would have been his 100th birthday year. As part of a series of events and initiatives under the banner #Harryhausen100, this exhibition will be accompanied by screenings, workshops and more, bringing his creations to life once more and celebrating the legacy of a filmmaker who changed the face of modern cinema.
(4) HARRYHAUSEN TRIBUTE YOU
CAN OWN TODAY. Steve Vertlieb says: “Scary Monsters Magazine presents Monster
Memories, issue No. 27,
is an all Ray Harryhausen issue, and features my affectionate tribute to Ray,
and to our half century of friendship. This wonderful one-of-a-kind magazine is
available, and on newsstands now. Get yours while copies last. You won’t want
to miss this very special collector’s edition honoring the beloved special
effects pioneer.”
(5) SHUT UP AND TAKE MY
MONEY. This Kickstarter has funded and attained a whole series of stretch
goals, but how can we resist?
(6) CRISIS MANAGEMENT. Start
planning for your next social media disaster now! (Wait, that didn’t come out
quite right.) Here’s Janet Falk’s article about “Advising
a Client on Crisis Communications” [PDF file].
(7) A MODEST PROPOSAL.
Hugo Awards nominations close soon.
Locus is Hugo Award eligible in "Related Work". (World Fantasy: Special Award; other stuff – editor, cover art, and so on…!)
Whatever/whomever you enjoy in art/literature, support them in the ways that you can. – Ahttps://t.co/nLhxqPyJ9y
Kind of interesting how this logic works. There’s a Hugo category for Semiprozines and Fanzines, but by design, no category for prozines (which Locus is) — it was superseded by the creation of the Best Editor (now Best Editor, Short Form) category. The rules say anything eligible in another Hugo category may not be nominated for Best Related Work, however, an editor and a magazine are by no means the same thing, and in the absence of a prozine category the rules don’t seem to prevent this result. Yet we’ve gone all these years without the Best Related category being captured by Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF, etc. Someone needs to be reminded how this is supposed to work.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled
by Cat Eldridge.]
Born March 12, 1925 — Harry Harrison. Best known first I’d say for his Stainless Steel Rat and Bill, the Galactic Hero series which were just plain fun, plus his novel Make Room! Make Room! Which was the genesis of Soylent Green. (Died 2012.)
Born March 12, 1933 — Barbara Feldon, 86. [86, you say?] Agent 99 on the Get Smart series. Other genre credits include The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and reprising her character on the short-lived follow-up to this series. She didn’t have that much of an acting career.
Born March 12, 1952 — Julius Carry. His one truly great genre role was as the bounty hunter Lord Bowler in The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. oh but what oh role it it was! Over the course of the series, he was the perfect companion and foil to Bruce Campbell’s Brisco County, Jr. character. (Died 2008.)
(11) FILERS ON THE RONDO BALLOT. I was honored when it was pointed out to me that File 770 is up for the Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Award in the Best Website category. There are lots of true horror-oriented sites that deserve the award more, but news of that genre is part of the mix here. It’s a very nice compliment.
Don Glut’s film Tales of Frankenstein is a nominee in the Best Independent Film category. It’s an anthology-style film, inspired by the old Hammer Horror films from the 1950s. Ed Green has a part in the final chapter. It’s also the last film Len Wein acted in and is dedicated to his memory. Len Wein created Wolverine, as well as several of the “New” X-Men, and had a cameo in X-Men: Days of Future Past. In this trailer, Len appears around the :45 mark, and Ed very briefly as the priest on the right at 1:33.
And nominated for Best Article is Steve Vertlieb’s “Dracula in the
Seventies: Prints of Darkness,” a restored version of an original article on
the Christopher Lee vampire cycle.
(12) UP ABOVE THE WORLD SO
HIGH. During the Cold War while the U.S. Air Force was inspiring Dr. Strangelove, the Royal Air Force was
discovering the hazards of “Exploding
Chocolate Teacakes”.
When Tony Cunnane joined the Royal Air Force in 1953, chocolate teacakes were “all the rage.” Employees aboard strategic nuclear strike aircrafts requested the snack be added to their in-flight ration boxes. But this wasn’t just a sugary jolt to fuel their Cold War training. Chocolate-coated marshmallow teacakes had become, as Cunnane described it, “the subject of some rather unscientific in-flight experiments.”
Shortly after the foil-wrapped treats appeared in RAF ration packs, pilots began to notice that as altitude increased, the teacakes expanded….
On Friday the Crew Dragon capsule will detach from the International Space Station (ISS) 400km above Earth and begin a fiery journey back through the atmosphere, ending in a splashdown 450km off the coast of Florida.
If all goes according to plan, it will wrap up the first complete test mission of the Crew Dragon spacecraft, which is expected to carry its first astronauts into orbit by the middle of this year.
They’ve played 300 shows around the world – and most of their instruments don’t make it through the set.
It’s three hours before showtime and members of an orchestra are seated onstage in the garden of a 1,000-year-old Benedictine monastery outside Cologne, Germany. On cue, the neatly coiffed, black-clad musicians slowly raise their instruments, purse their lips and begin playing the opening passage of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Just then, a sound technician abruptly cuts them off. The carrot flutes were too strong and he couldn’t hear the leek violin.
“One more time,” he says. “Starting with the cucumber.”
Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot has become embroiled in a row with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the status of the country’s Arab minority.
“Love your neighbour as yourself,” the Israeli actress said, amid wrangling over the role of Israeli Arab parties in upcoming polls.
Mr Netanyahu caused a stir when he said Israel “was not a state of all its citizens”, referring to Arabs who make up 20% of its population.
…Another man with a variant of that name became the center of an online controversy involving Charlotte’s popular and long-running science fiction convention ConCarolinas last year. This was the conservative military science fiction and political action thriller writer John Ringo, whose announcement as Guest of Honor caused some other scheduled guests to boycott the convention.
Kurtz was one of those who announced she would not attend the 2018 convention, despite being previously announced as a guest. I asked her if she planned to attend this year’s ConCarolinas, which will be held May 31 through June 2 at the Hilton Charlotte University Place Motel.
“There is an entirely new board and new convention committee this year,” she wrote back, “so I am going to go and see if they’ve done anything differently. I know firsthand from speaking with board members and programming directors they are very interested in increasing diversity and fostering an open, collaborative, and safe environment. I am going to see the changes put in action. The board has stated they wanted to show fans that what was shown last year wasn’t who they are as a convention.”
John Ringo’s publisher is Baen Books, the science fiction and fantasy imprint founded in 1983 by conservative editor Jim Baen. Headquartered in Wake Forest and distributed by Simon and Shuster, Baen Books is also the publisher of several writers associated with the anti-diversity “Sad Puppies” movement formed as a reaction to what its members claim is the negative influence of “social justice warriors” on their genres. Although the Sad Puppies have repeatedly proclaimed their manifesto of restoring what they call the classic virtues of old-fashioned action-adventure storytelling to science fiction and fantasy, few of them write nearly as well as the best of the 1930s and ‘40s pulp authors they claim to admire.
Last July, Baen Books published the Weird Western anthology Straight Out of Tombstone, edited by David Boop. It included Kurtz’s story “The Wicked Wild.” I asked her how it felt appearing in a book from the same publisher as John Ringo.
Kurtz replied that she and the book’s editor David Boop had been friends for decades. “I trusted him with my story, and with the material.” She also said that Straight out of Tombstone wasn’t a typical Baen publication. “I think they were surprised by the success of it. Baen is associated with the Sad Puppies, but I am not sure they want to just be known as the publisher of Sad Puppies authors. They have diverse titles in their catalog, so I didn’t worry about it too much, because I trusted my editor.”
Why does she write horror?
…But, she explained, for a kid growing up in public housing projects, nothing on the page was as frightening as the real world, where she saw people die from violence or drugs, and in which the Atlanta child murders dominated the T.V. news cycle. Horror was an escape from that.
Scientists have found evidence of a huge blast of radiation from the Sun that hit Earth more than 2,000 years ago.
The result has important implications for the present, because solar storms can disrupt modern technology.
The team found evidence in Greenland ice cores that the Earth was bombarded with solar proton particles in 660BC.
The event was about 10 times more powerful than any since modern instrumental records began.
The Sun periodically releases huge blasts of charged particles and other radiation that can travel towards Earth.
The particular kind of solar emission recorded in the Greenland ice is known as a solar proton event (SPE). In the modern era, when these high-energy particles collide with Earth, they can knock out electronics in satellites we rely on for communications and services such as GPS.
…Modern instrumental monitoring data extends back about 60 years. So finding an event in 660BC that’s an order of magnitude greater than anything seen in modern times suggests we haven’t appreciated how powerful such events can be.
Hal Blaine, one of the most prolific and influential drummers of his generation, has died at the age of 90.
Over the course of his career, he played on countless hits by Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, the Beach Boys and John Lennon, amongst others.
But his most recognisable riff was the “boom-ba-boom-crack” bar that opened The Ronnettes’ Be My Baby.
…According to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which inducted him in 2000, Blaine “certainly played on more hit records than any drummer in the rock era, including 40 number one singles and 150 that made the [US] top 10.”
Among those songs were Elvis Presley’s Return to Sender, The Byrds’ Mr Tambourine Man, the Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations, Simon & Garfunkel’s Mrs Robinson, The Mamas and the Papas’ California Dreamin’ and the theme song to Batman.
Blaine also played on eight songs that won a Grammy for record of the year, including Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water, 5th Dimension’s Aquarius/Let The Sunshine and Frank Sinatra’s Strangers In the Night.
Prof Stephen Hawking has been honoured on a new 50p coin inspired by his pioneering work on black holes.
The physicist died last year at the age of 76, having become one of the most renowned leaders in his field.
He joins an elite group of scientists to have appeared on coins, including Sir Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin.
Designer Edwina Ellis said: “I wanted to fit a big black hole on the tiny coin and wish he was still here chortling at the thought.”
(20) UNHAPPY ENDING. Anastasia
Hunter told Facebook readers this
video was taken at San Diego Comic Fest this past weekend and the speaker will
not be invited back.
[Thanks to
John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Carl Slaughter, Cat Eldridge, JJ, Mike
Kennedy, John A Arkansawyer, Martin Morse Wooster, and Chip Hitchcock for some
of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jack
Lint.]
