Talking With Michael Moorcock About His Music: Part 1

Michael Moorcock

By RL Thornton: When fans talk about Damon Knight Grand Master Michael Moorcock, they are usually talking about his extensive bibliography, the literary innovations that he encouraged as editor of the legendary ‘60s SF magazine New Worlds, and the tremendous influence that his Eternal Champion series has had on fantasy and science fiction. However, you may not know that Moorcock has been always pursuing a parallel career in music.

Moorcock has been performing and playing from his youth onward to recent years, where he has been collaborating with psychedelic rock collective Spirits Burning on a series of albums based on his Dancers at the End of Time trilogy. In this two-part interview, Michael Moorcock talks about his adventures with Hawkwind, his band the Deep Fix, and others.

NOTE: For those not familiar with the people or bands that he mentions, you can click on the link to see their Wikipedia entry (or other webpage if necessary).

Part 1:

Q: How did you first get involved with music? Did it start in 1955 with “your cousin’s Gretsch” guitar like you said in the fictionalized autobiography from The Whispering Swarm?

Michael Moorcock: I was into skiffle from about 1955, First stringed instrument was a six-string banjo, second was a Spanish guitar. I had friends with Gretches but my first electric was actually a Sears, which came with an amp in the carrying case. Then a Gibson and then a Rickenbacker 12.

Q: So how long did you play with skiffle bands?

Michael Moorcock: About two years. First I was with The Greenhorns, then the Travellers and I occasionally played with the Vipers. Also played individual blues in small clubs in England, Sweden, Germany and France.

Q. You were in the ‘60s UK music scene, which may have been one of the most exciting music scenes ever. What were some of your most memorable moments from that time?

Michael Moorcock: Many equally memorable times. Maybe the scratch band at Portobello Green with Paul Kossoff, Arthur Brown, Jon Trux [UK journalist], where we variously fell asleep, were chased home by girlfriends, failed to light Arthur’s hat [part of Brown’s act for his single “Fire”], and ultimately fell through the stage, was one. French fans thought it was the coolest gig they’d ever seen. Nik Turner‘s ‘frog in flight’ at Harlow was also pretty memorable!

Q: What was a Portobello Green gig like? Was it an open stage at the market?

Michael Moorcock: The stage was a small stage with bench seating, but was open on the north side facing the Green.

Q: Could you supply more info about Nik Turner’s “frog in flight” gig in Harlow? 

Michael Moorcock: Fairly famous. It was an open stage and raining slightly. We were late for the gig. He rushed into his [frog] costume and I rushed out to take my regular position. A few moments later, I saw this giant frog with a sax round its neck fly at full length past me and into the audience. The stage was slippery and Nik’s momentum took him to full flight.

Q: From what I have read, your future adventures with Hawkwind may have started when Robert Calvert started writing for New Worlds. How did you actually first meet?

Michael Moorcock: Nope. Jon Trux brought Calvert to see me around the time Hawkwind were starting but before Bob joined. Later Dave Brock asked me to perform my own material (inc Sonic Attack) at a Portobello Green gig. Trux and I had helped Bob into the Priory before he did damage to himself and Bob was worried I’d take his place so I promised him I’d fill in for him only when he was incapacitated but I’d step back as soon as he was ready to perform again.

Q: Beg pardon, but what is the Priory?

Michael Moorcock: Posh loony bin.  Several of my friends wound up there. They also treated alcoholism and serious conditions like Parkinsonism. Still do. Mervyn Peake, Martin Stone and Marianne Faithful were all in, as well as drunks. 

Q: From what I can tell, you first foray into recording was with Hawkwind on “Space Ritual.” What was that like?

Michael Moorcock: It wasn’t. I did a demo for HMV – terrible — no result. We did a comedy record Suddenly It’s The Bellyflops in 1964/5. As for the pieces I did on Hawkwind’s Warrior On The Edge Of Time, I recorded them on my way to see a movie, all one take in about an hour. I was supposed to get a fee, but never did (nor wanted it). I had no trouble. All went ok.

Q: Your next foray into music was with your band the Deep Fix on “New Worlds Fair.” How did the recording process go? The violin seems particularly prominent on the album.

Michael Moorcock: Cello from Pete Pavli. Maybe Simon House [of the Third Ear Band] did some fiddle. We did it the usual way, laying down music tracks first then doing voices, then maybe adding a little more to fill out.

Q: Looking back, how successful was New Worlds Fair?

Michael Moorcock: Pretty successful but it didn’t chart significantly mainly because UA had expected it to sound like Hawkwind and of course it didn’t. Before I did that we did a demo for a single which UA didn’t go ahead with but was released by Flicknife a few years later around 1981. Most of this was people asking me to do a record. I had no particular ambition to do records until Pete Pavli and I began to work together in the 70s and 80s — those demo and rehearsal tapes were released by Don Falcone some years ago.

Pixel Scroll 3/18/24 We Cannot Do With More Than 16, To Give A Tentacle To Each

(1) HOLLY BLACK Q&A. “Holly Black interview: The Cruel Prince author on the boom in faerie fantasy novels, BookTok, and sex scenes” at Slate.

What does it feel like now to be surrounded by all these other faerie fantasy books and, consequently, readers who potentially read only fantasy, who are not coming into the genre for the first time?

[Black] As a person who writes and reads a lot of fantasy, it’s been extremely gratifying to see fantasy move into a mainstream place. There are a lot of people who’ve grown up watching Lord of the Rings at a young enough age that it’s become part of their vocabulary of how the fantasy world works. Game of Thrones too. I think, for a lot of people, that barrier to entry is much lower than it was when there wasn’t so much exposure to fantasy.

I think the rise of romantasy is certainly in part because people do have the vocabulary of fantasy. Romance is one of the biggest genres in the world, so of course people want to see, or are able to read, fantasy romances in a way that might not have been true before. Romantasy is really two different genres kind of mushed together, probably in the same way that urban fantasy was. You have two streams: the romance-forward fantasy, where it’s really a romance novel with fantasy, and then you have fantasy that has romance. They’re paced really differently, and they have different focuses, but they live in the same genre. Then you had urban fantasy that came out of fantasy, and often those were the faerie books; for a long time urban fantasy was faerie, in the late ’80s.

(2) NEW WORLDS TURNING 60. Richard Glynn Jones told the New Worlds Facebook group on March 13 that an anniversary issue is in the works:

Michael Moorcock and some associates are preparing a new issue of New Worlds to commemorate the 60th anniversary of his becoming its editor. This will be in magazine format as before (A4, saddle-stitched) for publication in mid-summer. The contents are pretty much finalised, so please don’t send any unsolicited material: it’s by invitation only. A second book-format New Worlds is due from PS Publishing later in the year. More info soon.

(3) SOMETHING IS ROTTING IN HOLLYWOOD BITS. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Digital is forever. Except when it isn’t. The movie industry has a data migration problem. From The Hollywood Reporter: “’It’s a Silent Fire’: Decaying Digital Movie and TV Show Files Are a Hollywood Crisis”.

Industry pros sweat the possibility that many digital files will eventually become unusable — an archival tragedy reminiscent of the celluloid era.

While David Zaslav and Bob Iger’s tax-optimization strategy of deleting films and TV shows from their streamers has triggered plenty of agita among creators, the custodians of Hollywood’s digital era have an even greater fear: wholesale decay of feature and episodic files. Behind closed doors and NDAs, the fragility of archives is a perpetual Topic A, with pros sweating the possibility that contemporary pop culture’s master files might be true goners, destined to the same fate as so many vanished silent movies, among them Alfred Hitchcock’s second feature, The Mountain Eagle, and Ernst Lubitsch’s Oscar-winning The Patriot.

It’s underscored by initiatives such as Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation. “The preservation of every art form is fundamental,” the industry icon says on a video on the organization’s web site. For the business, these are valuable studio assets — to use one example, the MGM Library (roughly 4,000 film titles including the James Bond franchise and 17,000 series episodes) is worth an estimated $3.4 billion to Amazon — but there’s a misconception that digital files are safe forever. In fact, files end up corrupted, data is improperly transferred, hard drives fail, formats change, work simply vanishes. “It’s a silent fire,” says Linda Tadic, CEO of Digital Bedrock, an archiving servicer that works with studios and indie producers. “We find issues with every single show or film that we try to preserve.” So, what exactly has gone missing? “I could tell you stories — but I can’t, because of confidentiality.”

(4) FADING SCHOLARSHIP. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The same fear holds true for scholarly publications. Nature this week has rung an alarm bell.  SF fans should note: this is another reason why fandom’s move away from paper publications is to be deplored. Digital is simply not for evermore. We need plurality and a diversity of solutions…. “Millions of research papers at risk of disappearing from the Internet” at Nature.

An analysis of DOIs suggests that digital preservation is not keeping up with burgeoning scholarly knowledge.

DOIs for the uninitiated are Digital Object Identifiers: every academic publication should have one so that if a publisher’s website changes and there is a new web-page address (URL) the DOI remains the same and links through. [Jonathan adds, “Fans need not worry about this (the only one they should remember is https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139087735…” Guess whose book that link goes to…]

More than one-quarter of scholarly articles are not being properly archived and preserved, a study of more than seven million digital publications suggests. The findings, published in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication on 24 January1, indicate that systems to preserve papers online have failed to keep pace with the growth of research output.

“Our entire epistemology of science and research relies on the chain of footnotes,” explains author Martin Eve, a researcher in literature, technology and publishing at Birkbeck, University of London. “If you can’t verify what someone else has said at some other point, you’re just trusting to blind faith for artefacts that you can no longer read yourself.”

Primary research is here.

(5) LEGACY WORRIES. Brian Keene muses about the disturbingly short half-life of author name recognition in “Letters From the Labyrinth 372”.

…On Tuesday of this past week, I took a rare day off and drove up to Asbury Park, New Jersey to visit my pal F. Paul Wilson. It occurs to me that I will need to explain to some of my younger readers just who Paul is, and therein lies the meat of this missive. Paul was one of the first horror novelists I read. (As I’ve written in OTHER WORDS, my evolutionary chain as a kid was comic books and Hardy Boys, then Stephen King and F. Paul Wilson). First thing I read by him was The Keep — a seminal, classic horror novel which, sadly, most of you under the age of forty have probably never read. The Keep was the third “grown up book” I ever read (right after King’s Night Shift and Salem’s Lot), and it is an essential part of my writer DNA.

Paul went on to become a giant in the fields of not just horror, but science-fiction, fantasy, thrillers, and other genres, as well. He was a stalwart, perennial New York Times bestseller, and his best-known IP — Repairman Jack — will carry on long after he’s gone. I guarantee you that right now, many of you who did not recognize the name F. Paul Wilson are now nodding and saying, “Oh, yeah, I’ve heard of Repairman Jack.”

It feels absurd to have to explain all of this to you. How could anyone not know this? But then, I think about this past Thursday in the store, when I overheard a mother explaining to her daughter who Brian Keene was, and that he owned the store they were currently shopping in, and that she (the mother) had started reading him in high school. The girl, high school age herself, was holding a book by Wile E. Young that she’d pulled off the shelf. Wile E. Young, was reading me in high school and my books are an essential part of his writer DNA the way Paul’s are a part of mine….

(6) FEAR THE LEFTOVERS. “Godzilla Minus One Director Releases New Kaiju Short, ‘Foodlosslla’” – here is Comicbook.com’s introduction.

…Godzilla Minus One director Takashi Yamazaki teamed up with Ajinomoto (a line of cooking products in Japan) on a special new promo that takes the Kaiju director’s expertise and brings it to life in a new way. Highlighting the amount of food waste in Japan (2.44 million tons according to the advertisement), it results in the creation of “Foodlosslla” a kaiju made out of all the wasted food that doesn’t get eaten or cooked. But with the director’s eye, it’s a great looking monster for the promo. Check it out in action below…

(7) STILL PLENTY OF GOOD EATING ON THIS ONE. Don’t ask what internet rabbit hole this 2014 recipe came from: “Edible Art: Spice Stuffed Squash Sandworms” at Kitchen Overlord. (Click for larger image.)

(8) THOMAS STAFFFORD (1930-2024). [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Gemini 6. Gemini 9. Apollo 10. Apollo 10 Lunar Module. Apollo-Soyuz. Air Force Lt General. A long and busy life. RIP. “Astronaut Thomas Stafford, commander of Apollo 10, has died at age 93”. He died March 18. PBS News Hour pays tribute.

…Stafford, a retired Air Force three-star general, took part in four space missions. Before Apollo 10, he flew on two Gemini flights, including the first rendezvous of two U.S. capsules in orbit. He died in a hospital near his Space Coast Florida home, said Max Ary, director of the Stafford Air & Space Museum in Weatherford, Oklahoma.

Stafford was one of 24 people who flew to the moon, but he did not land on it. Only seven of them are still alive….

…After he put away his flight suit, Stafford was the go-to guy for NASA when it sought independent advice on everything from human Mars missions to safety issues to returning to flight after the 2003 space shuttle Columbia accident. He chaired an oversight group that looked into how to fix the then-flawed Hubble Space Telescope, earning a NASA public service award.

“Tom was involved in so many things that most people were not aware of, such as being known as the ‘Father of Stealth’,” Ary said in an email. Stafford was in charge of the famous “Area 51” desert base that was the site of many UFO theories, but the home of testing of Air Force stealth technologies….

… After the moon landings ended, NASA and the Soviet Union decided on a joint docking mission and Stafford, a one-star general at the time, was chosen to command the American side. It meant intensive language training, being followed by the KGB while in the Soviet Union, and lifelong friendships with cosmonauts. The two teams of space travelers even went to Disney World and rode Space Mountain together before going into orbit and joining ships.

“We have capture,” Stafford radioed in Russian as the Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft hooked up. His Russian counterpart, Alexei Leonov, responded in English: “Well done, Tom, it was a good show. I vote for you.”

The 1975 mission included two days during which the five men worked together on experiments….

(9) BELATED BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born March 17, 1948 William Gibson, 76. Not at all surprisingly, the first series that I read by William Gibson was the one that started off with his first novel, Neuromancer, published forty years ago, which is called the Sprawl trilogy. I still love the now anachronistic wording of the opening, “THE SKY ABOVE the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

I don’t know at all how many times that I’ve read that trilogy but the last time I did read it, about a decade, it was still impressively excellent. 

William Gibson

Neuromancer would get a much deserved Hugo at Aussiecon Two as well as a Ditmar, Nebula and a Philip K. Dick; and Mono Lisa Overdrive won an Aurora. The novels had too many nominations to list here.

Yes, I’m looking forward to the Apple financed Neuromancer series. If anyone can financially afford to do it right, it’s them. And they have a strict hands-off policy of not interfering with the actual production team. 

Going back in time I must talk about “Johnny Mnemonic” which was not his first story, which was “Hinterlands“ which I’ve never of until now. “Johnny Mnemonic” I think is one of the finest SF short story written.  The same holds true for “The Gernsback Continuum” which was published in the same year, forty-two years ago.  I’ll toss in “New Rose Hotel” which showed up a few years later.

Please let’s not talk about the Johnny Mnemonic film. Really don’t mention it. I get queasy thinking about how they butchered that stellar story. And I’ve seen some pretty awful scripts but few that matched this, plus the casting of him. Why oh why? 

His second series, the Bridge trilogy, which is Virtual LightIdoru and All Tomorrow’s Parties came out some thirty years ago. No, I’ve not read it nearly as many times as I’ve read the Sprawl ones but I did find rather excellent. The near future setting is more grounded and a more fascinating read for that. 

Ok, I’ll admit that I do not at all know what to make of Pattern RecognitionSpook Country and Zero History. They are well written like everything he does, and the characters are fascinating, but something these works is just not quite right for me. It comes off cold, distanced and just not interesting as what else he’s done.

On the other catspaw, the Jackpot trilogy, or possibly longer series, which so far consisted of The Peripheral that has contain time travel (of sorts, maybe) and Agency, and a third, Jackpot, which I don’t think has a release date, is fascinating in the first two novels. Strange, disjointed but fascinating. 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) JUNE 4. ScreenRant says The Acolyte release date has been confirmed by Lucasfilm: “We Finally Know When The Next Star Wars TV Show Comes Out”.

… With a summer 2024 Disney+ drop having long been rumored, Lucasfilm has officially confirmed The Acolyte‘s release date as June 4, 2024, via Star Wars‘ official Twitter/X account. As it turns out, the release dates that have been reported for The Acolyte were accurate. This means Star Wars fans will not have to wait long to sink their teeth into the High Republic era, as Lucasfilm takes a big step into a new facet of a galaxy far, far away….

… The books of the High Republic are set centuries before Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. Upon The Acolyte‘s announcement, it was confirmed that the Disney+ show would detail the waning days of the High Republic era. This places the show about 100 years before The Phantom Menace in the Star Wars timeline, promising a new, exciting look at an entirely new era of the franchise….

(12) DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF LOOKING UP AT GIANT ELECTRIC SHEEP? YES THEY CAN! [Item by Daniel Dern.] “Montana Man Pleads Guilty to Federal Wildlife Trafficking Charges as Part of Yearslong Effort to Create Giant Hybrid Sheep for Captive Hunting” at the US Department of Justice.

Defendant Worked to Traffic Marco Polo Sheep Parts from Kyrgyzstan, Clone Sheep, Illegally Inseminate Ewes to Create Hybrids and Traffic Rocky Mountain Bighorn Sheep Parts

A Montana man pleaded guilty today to two felony wildlife crimes – a conspiracy to violate the Lacey Act and substantively violating the Lacey Act – as part of an almost decade-long effort to create giant sheep hybrids in the United States with an aim to sell the species to captive hunting facilities.

Arthur “Jack” Schubarth, 80, of Vaughn, Montana, is the owner and operator of Sun River Enterprises LLC – also known as Schubarth Ranch – which is a 215-acre alternative livestock ranch in Vaughn. The Schubarth Ranch is engaged in the purchase, sale and breeding of “alternative livestock” such as mountain sheep, mountain goats and various ungulates. The primary market for Schubarth’s livestock is captive hunting operations, also known as shooting preserves or game ranches.

According to court documents, Schubarth conspired with at least five other individuals between 2013 and 2021 to create a larger hybrid species of sheep that would garner higher prices from shooting preserves. Schubarth brought parts of the largest sheep in the world, Marco Polo argali sheep (Ovis ammon polii), from Kyrgyzstan into the United States without declaring the importation. Average males can weigh more than 300 pounds with horns that span more than five feet. Marco Polo argali are native to the high elevations of the Pamir region of Central Asia. They are protected internationally by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, domestically by the U.S. Endangered Species Act and are prohibited in the State of Montana to protect native sheep from disease and hybridization.

Schubarth sent genetic material from the argali parts to a lab to create cloned embryos. Schubarth then implanted the embryos in ewes on his ranch, resulting in a single, pure genetic male Marco Polo argali that he named “Montana Mountain King” or MMK….

(13) TINY MESSAGES. Like the “golden record” sent with two 1977 Voyager probes,“NASA’s Europa Clipper mission will carry a poem and millions of names to ocean moon” reports CNN.

When NASA’s Europa Clipper aims to launch on its highly anticipated mission to an icy moon in October, the spacecraft will carry a unique design etched with names, poetry and artwork symbolizing humanity.

The US space agency has a long history of sending names and meaningful designs aloft aboard missions, including the Voyager probes, the Perseverance rover and Parker Solar Probe. Now, it’s Europa Clipper’s turn to carry on the tradition of ferrying a design that illustrates why humans are driven to explore the cosmos….

… Decorated on both sides and made of the rare metal tantalum, the triangular plate will seal the spacecraft’s sensitive electronics inside a vault to protect them from Jupiter’s harsh radiation.

On the inside of the vault is a silicon microchip stenciled with more than 2.6 million names submitted by the public. The microchip is at the center of a design that shows a bottle floating within the orbit of Jupiter and its moons to symbolize that it serves as a cosmic message in a bottle.

Technicians at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, used electron beams to stencil the names at a size smaller than one-thousandth the width of a human hair.

Below the bottle, the design features the original poem “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa” by US Poet Laureate Ada Limón, etched in her handwriting, as well as a portrait of the late planetary sciences pioneer Ron Greeley, an Arizona State University professor who played a crucial role in laying the foundation for the development of a mission to Europa.

The side of the plate facing the inside of the vault also includes an etching of the Drake Equation, developed by the late astronomer Frank Drake of the University of California Santa Cruz in 1961 to estimate the possibility of finding advanced life beyond Earth. The equation remains an important part of astrobiological research as scientists search for evidence of life beyond our planet.

The external side of the plate carries waveforms, or visual representations of sound waves, that depict the word “water” in 103 languages from around the world. At the heart of the spiral is a symbol that means “water” in American Sign Language. The audio of the spoken languages collected by linguists for NASA is available on its website….

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Mother’s Basement looks back on “How Akira Toriyama Changed The World”.

Akira Toriyama didn’t just change manga and anime forever, he changed the entire world. Here’s how.

Geoff Thew creates videos analyzing the storytelling techniques of anime and video games. He has been named the number one Worst YouTube Anime Reviewer by The Top Tens.

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

Emails From Lake Woe-Is-Me — Fit the Hundred & Eighth

A dark forest sits beneath a starry sky. Creepy black goo drips over the scene. Whimsical white letters read: “Fit the Hundred & Sixth: The Thing About Bus Stops.”

[Introduction: Melanie Stormm continues her humorous series of posts about the misdirected emails she’s been getting. Stormm is a multiracial writer who writes fiction, poetry, and audio theatre. Her novella, Last Poet of Wyrld’s End is available through Candlemark & Gleam. She is currently the editor at the SPECk, a monthly publication on speculative poetry by the SFPA.]

THE THING ABOUT BUS STOPS

Hello, All! Melanie here.

If you haven’t been following along recently, Tryxy the demon’s band DemonKitty had a gig at the bus stop this week! Yes, you read that right: bus stop. We all have to start somewhere. Probably even at the beginning!

Last week, Tryxy was worried that he didn’t have enough original songs to fill the hour long set he was contracted to pay. Alas and alack, this is the common plight of the rookie rock n’ roller. You’ve got talent, you’ve got ambition, but you’ve got no songs!

…This is also the common plight of the rookie writer; talent, ambition, a magic system, but no pages. Funny how those pages don’t magically write themselves.

Without further ado…


Subject: Walpiskiddy Springs!!!!!!!

Dear Gladys,

Once upon a time, I took a bus in Boston. Like everything else in Boston, it was the strangest thing!!! First of all, there were multiple buses, each going to different parts of the city with multiple stops between. And they ran on Time instead of Whim!!!! Some people have no imagination. Regular transportation that takes you to where you want to go????? It fill me with a cold and desperate shudder!!! Who would want that????

Fortunately, bus stops in New Hampshire are much better and better still in Cradensburg. First of all, you don’t have to worry about something as restricting as a regular bus schedule with pick ups every fifteen minutes to half hour!!!!! I know that people THINK they want to get from Farm Hill down to Mr. Morgan’s for groceries and not spend all day waiting for a bus that may never come, but think about all the GRIT they’re missing out on gladys!!!!!

Writers need grit. We are gritty gritty people. We grit our gritty teeth down to smooth mounds and grit our way through a short story that we know may never see the light of day, even if we ARE the next big epic fantasy writer of all time. And for some stupid reason, when we write it, it has to actually be GOOD, even if we KNOW it will never see the light of day!!!!!!

Then we send our story off to an editor to be fed to spam wolves for nineteen months, and when the spam wolves are done tearing the encryptions to shreds, the editor sends a form rejection by email that STILL MANAGES TO BE COVERED IN COFFEE STAINS AND KETCHUP!!!!!

HOW DO YOU EMAIL KETCHUP, GLAYDS??????

Anyhoo, what was I saying??? Oh yeah, you need grit if you’re going to sit down and write ANOTHER SHORT STORY that may or may not see the light of day. Sheer grit. And you’ll need grit to eat the congealed ketchup off your emails because it’s just disgusting.

No really, what was I saying??? I thought I was talking about something else when I started this email. Let’s see, we’ve covered ketchup…grit… OH RIGHT THE BUSES!!!!!

Come to think of it, Cradensburg bus routes have a lot in common with being a writer, too. When you go to Boston, you get on THIS number bus at one particular time to get to THAT particular location by another particular time. BUT THAT DOESN’T PREPARE YOU FOR YOUR WRITING CAREER, DOES IT GLADYS?????

Here in Cradensburg, our bus stops emerge out of thin air. They tap you on your shoulder and then clothesline you when you turn around. They moon you when you’re minding your own business. They may wipe boogers on your shirt, Galdsy, but they’re the only thing around. That means that when they appear like a shimmering oasis on the horizon, you break a sweat running for it!!!!!!

Sometimes, a bus stop appears—and there’s even a bus!!!! And you get on it!!!!! And four days later you realize that it’s never going to stop going circles around that new statue they put up of the Mayor and his husband discovering pulled pork sandwiches for the first time this summer at the town barbecue.

And sometimes, you end up on a bus that says it’s taking you to Walpiskiddy Springs and the bus driver is an angry Djinn, but that’s not really why I’m writing you. Well, it is, but there are other things, too!!!

It all began last week when I discovered churros. Now, I know that you think you’ve eaten churros, Gladys, but you haven’t eaten churros until you’ve eaten parking lot churros sold by a tiny old lady with a one-eyed dog and a cooler full of hot heaven!!!!!! One bite of those churros and you will have churro brain!!! And if you don’t have churro brain after one bite, YOU HAVEN’T EATEN CHURROS. And if you don’t know what churro brain is. YOU HAVEN’T EATEN CHURROS!!!!!

As you know, Tryxy has been very anxious about his gig at the bus stop. After the fiasco playing all DemonKitty’s songs just 19 minutes at the tractor haul show, Tryxy was really worried that he and #bestkitten wouldn’t be able to write enough new music before the big bus stop show to fill the HOUR he’d been booked for. The anxiety was killing him!!

(Between you and me, I caught him with a voodoo doll of himself, sticking himself in the thigh so that he would get a charley horse and wouldn’t have to play drums and could back out of the gig. But don’t tell him I told you!!!!!)

Then, when my boyfriend, award nominated fantasy writer Tod Boadkins, dropped us off at the spot that LOOKED like a bus stop but turned out to be an atm machine, Tryxy was giddy at the thought that there wasn’t a bus stop after all, and hence he wouldn’t have to play his 19 minutes of music.

But it was not to be!!! I realized that I had mistaken a tall skinny man flipping me the bird for the bus stop!!!! We gathered up the drums and #bestkitten’s cat carrier and microphone and marched across the street to the ACTUAL bus stop that was wearing fishnets and showing a little leg.

No sooner had Tryxy and #bestkitten started playing their show, a flaming #666 bus came to a screeching halt in front of them and—you’ll never believe this Galdsy—but off the bus fell a singed and bewildered A & R rep who had been riding circles around the statue of our mayor. He’d been trapped in a bus full of tipsy fire dancers for three weeks straight!!!!

He was so overcome with joy at his escape, he invited DemonKitty to come down and play for him in Boston next week!!!!!!

GLADYS!!!! It’s Tryxy and #bestkitten’s first big break!!!!!!

We needed to celebrate right away AND impress the A & R rep, so I told Tryxy and Arnold Rolfson (that’s what A & R stands for) to talk amongst themselves and of course I went looking for the churro lady in the parking lot but there was a line!!!! Wouldn’t you know, no sooner had I gotten to the churro lady, a bus pulled up and I thought I saw Tryxy, #bestkitten, and Arnold Rolfson get on the bus!!! SO I Threw a hundred dollars at the churro lady and stole her cooler and broke for it.

She immediately tackled me and her one-eyed dog bit my shoe off my foot.

Sure enough, the bus was pulling away!!!

I threw another fifty dollars at the old lady and she and One-Eyed Rover laid off me. I started running after the bus, dragging the cooler behind me, but my speed was hampered since I was running with one shoe!!! Fortunately for me, ANOTHER bus pulled up beside me. I looked at it long enough to see that it was heading for Walpiskiddy Springs.

“AFter that bus!!” I yelled to the Djinn bus driver and threw a handful of churros at him (I had given the churro lady all my money.)

It’s now been three days. I finally picked all the churros out of my ears thanks to Mr. Temper Temper (that’s the bus driver) and I’m all out of food.

Here’s what I need you to do Gladys. Get in your car and follow the churro crumb trail out of town. I’ll need a ride home from Walpiskiddy Springs!!!!!

And then we can throw a party for Tryxy and #bestkitten!!!!

Pages next week!!!

xox,

X

THIS IS

INCREDIBLE.

SO LUCKY.

STILL HAVE

ONE

PROBLEM.

WE ONLY

HAVE

FIVE

SONGS.

HOW ARE

WE

SUPPOSED

TO IMPRESS

ARNOLD

ROLFSON

WITH

JUST

FIVE

SONGS?

HWAs Sixth Annual Summer Scares Reading List

The Horror Writers Association (HWA), in partnership with United for Libraries, Book Riot, Booklist, and NoveList®, a division of EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO), has announced the sixth annual Summer Scares Reading List, with titles selected by a panel of authors and librarians and designed to promote horror as a great reading option for all ages, during any time of the year. 

This year, Summer Scares welcomes author Clay McLeod Chapman as the 2024 spokesperson. “Our bookshelves are getting haunted this summer!” exclaims Chapman. “Every last one of the books selected for this year’s Summer Scares is a beautiful little nightmare just waiting for the right reader to come along and crack it open. The outright honor of amassing this awesome roster of authors cannot be overstated. I love each and every last one of these books and I can’t wait to shout about how terrifying they are all summer long.”

Every year, three titles are selected in each of three categories: Adult, Young Adult, and Middle Grade. For 2024 the selected titles are:

ADULT SELECTIONS:

  • Jackal by Erin E. Adams (Bantam, 2022)
  • Such Sharp Teeth by Rachel Harrison (Berkley, 2022)
  • This Thing Between Us by Gus Moreno (MCD x FSG Originals, 2021)

YOUNG ADULT SELECTIONS:

  • All These Bodies by Kendare Blake (Quill Tree Books, 2021)
  • Dead Flip by Sara Farizan (Algonquin Young Readers, 2022)
  • #MurderTrending by Gretchen McNeil (Freeform, 2018)

MIDDLE GRADE SELECTIONS:

  • Ophie’s Ghosts by Justina Ireland (Balzer + Bray, 2021)
  • The Nest by Kenneth Oppel (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2015)
  • My Aunt Is A Monster by Reimena Yee (Random House Graphic, 2022)

The goal of Summer Scares is to introduce Horror titles to school and public library workers in order to help them start conversations with readers that will extend beyond the books from each list and promote reading for years to come. In addition to the annual list of recommended titles, the Summer Scares Programming Guide, created each year by the Springfield-Greene County (MO) Library–and free for libraries anywhere to access, is back with the tools libraries need to connect with their patrons. 

“The 2024 guide is packed with ideas that library workers can use to engage their communities with these great titles, whether they’re putting up book displays, hosting author events, or planning an entire Summer Scares program series,” states Konrad Stump, co-creator of the programming guide. The guide will be available beginning March 1, 2024 on the Summer Scares Resource page.

Along with the guide, the Summer Scares committee will work with both the recommended list authors and Horror authors from all over the country to provide free programming to libraries. Any library looking to host horror-themed events anytime of year is encouraged to email [email protected] to get started.

Once again, Summer Scares will be included as part of iRead, a summer reading program that is used by libraries in the United States and across the globe by the Department of Defense for libraries on military bases. “While there is nothing scary about Summer Reading, there is no better time than summer to scare up some great books. iREAD is thrilled (and chilled!) to partner once again with Summer Scares to introduce Horror titles to school and public library workers in order to help them start conversations with readers that perfectly align with our mission to bridge the summer gap while inspiring literacy and life-long learning,” shares iREAD Content and Development Manager Becca Boland. 

Booklist is helping to kick off Summer Scares 2024 in March with a series of three free webinars with this year’s featured authors in conversation with the committee members: 

  • Monday, March 11, 2024, at 4pm Eastern, featuring our Middle Grade authors and moderated by Sarah Hunter (register here)
  • Thursday, March 21, 2024, at 2pm Eastern, featuring our Young Adult authors and moderated by Yaika Sabat (register here)
  • Monday March 25, 2024, at 2pm Eastern, featuring our Adult authors and moderated by Clay McLeod Chapman (register here)

Each webinar lasts one hour. Anyone may register to participate for free at https://www.booklistonline.com/webinars. Recordings will be available for on-demand viewing after the live events at https://www.booklistonline.com/webinars-archive.

All are welcome to join the Summer Scares committee and featured authors at the HWA’s Librarians’ Day, taking place in person on May 31, 2024, in San Diego as part of StokerConⓇ. Details at: https://www.stokercon2024.com

The HWA is a non-profit organization of writers and publishing professionals and the oldest organization dedicated to the Horror/Dark Fiction genre. One of the HWA’s missions is to foster an appreciation of reading through extensive programming and partnerships with libraries, schools, and literacy-based organizations.

The 2024 Summer Scares program committee consists of author Clay McLeod Chapman, HWA Library Committee Co-Chairs Becky Spratford and Konrad Stump, as well as Academic Librarian Carolyn Ciesla, Book Riot Editor and YA specialist Kelly Jensen, Booklist Editor and Middle Grade specialist Julia Smith, and Manager of Reader Services at NoveList Yaika Sabat. 

For more information about the Summer Scares reading program, including committee member bios and how to obtain promotional materials and schedule events with the authors/committee members, please visit the Summer Scares Resource page or email HWA Library Committee Co-Chairs Becky Spratford and Konrad Stump at [email protected].

[Based on a press release.]

Pixel Scroll 3/17/24 Raindrops Keep Scrollin’ On My Thread

(1) THE SOUND OF IRISH MUSIC. C.J. Cherryh put her readers in a holiday mood at Facebook. Read the full post there.

It’s an important holiday for me not because of the mythical snakes, but because of the pipers, and the fact I so love traditional Gaelic music and dancing….

… My ancestry’s a mess of people who spent a lot of time fighting each other—England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, up one side and down. But I don’t celebrate the old wars. I celebrate that we survived all of it, and can remember the songs and the dancing.

(2) THE FLIP SIDE. [Item by James Bacon.] The Irish entry into the Eurovision by Bambie Thug, “Doomsday Blue” is utterly brilliant. 

Here is Bambie Thug talking about themselves before being on The Late Late Show.

Spotify song link and Eurovision video link also.

(3) KELLY LINK Q&A. We learn how “Kelly Link Is Committed to the Fantastic” in an interview with The New Yorker. “The MacArthur-winning author on the worthwhile frivolity of the fantasy genre, how magic is and is not like a credit card, and why she hates to write but does it anyway.”

Is there a connection between your religious upbringing and the fantasy you write now?

What religion and fantasy have in common is that the reader knows, going in, that they’ll be asked to imagine that the world might be different from the way it is now. They’ll be asked to imagine the possibility of a world that is radically transformed. I salute and love the fact that fantasy is, in some ways, a frivolous genre. You read a genre book not necessarily because you feel you’re going to learn something. Sometimes it’s because the structure of a particular genre produces patterns that are pleasurable to engage with.

I didn’t expect you to say that the fantasy genre was frivolous!

It’s a story I have to tell myself when I’m working. That I am engaged in a practice which, on some level, is frivolous. I am imagining changes to the world that produce a kind of delight, not necessarily trying to describe the world in the way that it is.

It’s not that the fantastic can’t be used as a tool to do serious and pointed work. Plenty of genre writers do exactly that. But I am committed to the idea that there is something, aside from utility, in the excess and play of imagination that fantasy allows as a genre. I couldn’t write if I felt that I had something which needed to be said…

(4) FANTASY WHACKS SF AT THE BOX OFFICE! Oh, the embarrassment. (Er, I mean, “Oh, how great!” for you fantasy fans.) “Box Office: ‘Kung Fu Panda 4’ & ‘Dune: Part Two’ Fight For No. 1”. Deadline is keeping score.

SUNDAY AM UPDATE: The whole marketplace is coming in lighter than expected at $89M, which is -3% off from the same frame a year ago when Shazam Fury of the Gods did $30M. That’s exactly what the second weekend is for Kung Fu Panda 4 which is a great hold at -48%, rising to $107.7M stateside running total. Legendary/Warner Bros’ Dune Part Two isn’t far behind with $29.1M, -37%, for a running total of $205.3M. The domestic endgame on the sequel is expected to be around $275M….

(5) GAME MAKERS FACING HARASSMENT. WIRED covers the attempt to run back an ugly piece of the culture wars in “The Small Company at the Center of ‘Gamergate 2.0’”.

The accusations began around the release of Spider-Man 2 last October. More came when Alan Wake II hit a week later. They were all over the replies to the social media accounts of Sweet Baby Inc.: hateful comments, many of which hinged on the idea that the Montreal-based narrative development and consulting company was responsible for the “wokeification” of video games, recalls Kim Belair, the company’s CEO.

In the months following, the noise only increased. “You made this character Black, or you added these gay characters, or you ruined the story,” Belair says of the comments, the tone of which, she adds, never changed. Neither have the demands of the people behind them. “It’s usually, ‘leave the industry,’” Belair says, or admit there’s truth to wild conspiracy theories about being involved with investment company BlackRock. (Sweet Baby is not.) Or, more succinctly: “Die.”

Online, those clamoring for Sweet Baby’s demise are calling it Gamergate 2.0, invoking the online harassment campaign that erupted into a culture war a decade ago. Gamergate formalized the playbook for online harassment used by hate groups and the far right; it inspired figures who would later tap into that outrage and rise all the way to positions of power, such as chief strategist in the White House. The two movements do share a handful of similarities: harassment campaigns flooded with falsehoods and accusations bordering on conspiracy; attacks aimed primarily at women and people of color; the idea that video game culture for cis white men is being stolen from them.

“People want to believe that our work is surgically removing the things that they would have liked. ‘Change this line, make this line less racist,’” she says. “That’s just not the reality of it.”…

(6) MAKE YOUR MOVE WITH THE RED KNIGHT. You still have two days to bid on “Vlad the Impaler’s Red Armor” from the movie Dracula (1992) in the “Treasures from Planet Hollywood” event at Heritage Auctions.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Columbia, 1992), Gary Oldman “Vlad the Impaler” Red Armor Display Figure. Original reproduction armor made from molded fiberglass components covering a ribbed, cotton body suit with separate arm extensions. Armor includes full head helmet and corresponding plate guards. Display figure features a foam body with wire armature mounted on a wooden support platform for easy display. It measures approx. 71″ x 28″ x 11″ (wood base to mask horns). The figure is dressed in the iconic red armor that Vlad/Dracula (Gary Oldman) wore at the beginning of the Francis Ford Coppola film. Exhibits display wear, chipping in fiberglass pieces, detached components, cracking, discoloration and general age. Special shipping arrangements will apply. Obtained from technical advisor Christopher Gilman. Comes with a COA from Heritage Auctions.

(7) TIKTOK IS FOCUS OF PROPOSED LAW. A Pew Research Center daily newsletter reports:

The House of Representatives passed a bill March 13 with bipartisan support that would require TikTok’s China-based parent company to either sell the app or risk a ban in the United States. The legislation now heads to the Senate, where its fate is unclear. [The full story is behind a New York Times paywall.]

While a majority of Americans said in May 2023 that TikTok is at least a minor threat to U.S. national security, support for a TikTok ban fell over the course of the year, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. In fall 2023, 38% of U.S. adults said they would support the U.S. government banning TikTok, down from 50% who said the same in March 2023.

Overall, a third of U.S. adults (33%) say they use the video-based platform, and the share who say they regularly get news from TikTok has risen sharply in recent years, from 3% in 2020 to 14% in 2023.

(8) SCENES FROM THE AUTHOR’S EXPERIENCE. Cora Buhlert’s compelling photo narrative about the WWII destruction of Dresden follows Gideon Marcus’ (unenthusiastic) review of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five – newly released this month (which at Galactic Journey is March 1969, 55 years ago): “[March 14, 1969 ] (March 1969 Galactoscope)”.

…. I have never seen Dresden before 1945, though my grandmother who grew up in the area told me it was a beautiful city and how much she missed attending performances at the striking Semper opera house, which was largely destroyed by the bombings and is in the process of being rebuilt (The proposed completion date is 1985). However, I have visited the modern Dresden with its constant construction activity and incongruous mix of burned out ruins, historical buildings in various stages of reconstruction and newly constructed modernist office and apartment blocks and could keenly feel what was lost….

(9) PHOTOS OF THE STOPA FAMILY. With an assist from Andrew Porter, I rounded up a few more photos of Jon and Joni Stopa, and their daughter Debbie. All now passed away. [Click for larger images.]

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born March 17, 1926 Peter Graves. (Died 2010.) Now Peter Graves is truly interesting. Paramount + has the Mission: Impossible series, so I watched all of it from beginning to end even before Peter Graves was James “Jim” Phelps of the Impossible Missions Force (IMF) for seasons two to seven. He was superb in the role which, like the series, held up very well when I rewatched it.

He would reprise this character during the writers’ strike. Now the producers couldn’t hire new writers obviously, so they literally went into the vaults for previously written material. Yes, they used scripts that were rejected the first time. Was the new Mission Impossible any good? I think so. 

Peter Graves in 1967.

They did new characters even though the idiots at Paramount wanted them the original characters recast, and some of original characters showed up here. (The strike ended while they were still filming so they have fresh scripts.) 

He refused to reprise this role (which would be played by Jon Voight) in the first film of the Mission: Impossible film franchise, after reading the script and discovering the character would be revealed to be a traitor and the primary villain of the film.

He did do a lot of genre films — Red Planet Mars which appears to a rather decent piece of early Fifties SF, Killers from Space (also known as The Man Who Saved the Earth) with Big Eyed Monsters and aliens, It Conquered the World with a Venusian alien, The Eye Creatures (alternatively shown as Attack of the Eye Creatures with, oh guess), Scream of the Wolf, oh look no aliens, Where Have All the People Gone? in which you can guess what happens, Addams Family Values which he narrates, he appears as himself in House on Haunted Hill which he dies in, MIB II as well, and finally he’s in a film (uncredited) that I wish I hadn’t seen, Looney Tunes: Back in Action.

 Now let’s see what other genre TV he did other than Mission: Impossible. There’s two one-offs, The Invaders and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.

(11) FIRE CLAIMS ACTOR’S LA MANSION. “Cara Delevingne’s Los Angeles home destroyed in fire”AP News has the story. Delevingne has a deep genre resume, including roles in American Horror Story, Futurama, Carnival Row, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, Suicide Squad, and Pan.

The Los Angeles home of model and actor Cara Delevingne was destroyed in a fire Friday [March 15].

One firefighter was taken to a hospital in fair condition with unspecified injuries, and one unidentified person from the house suffered minor smoke inhalation, Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman Nicholas Prange said….

…The cause was under investigation.

The 31-year-old London-born Delevingne became widely known as a fashion model in the early 2010s and later began acting, appearing in the 2016 DC Comics film “Suicide Squad” and director Luc Besson’s 2017 “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.”

(12) SHOW ME THE MONEY. At Deadline, “Billy Dee Williams Says “Pay Me A Lot Of Money” To Return To ‘Star Wars’ As Lando & Shares Thoughts On Donald Glover Taking On Character”.

…Williams said he has met Glover and shared the advice he gave the actor about taking on the role.

“I had a nice little lunch with him. He’s a delightful young man. Extremely talented. But I don’t see him… I mean, when it comes to Lando Calrissian there’s only one Lando Calrissian. I created that character,” he said. “I told him to be charming – two words! That’s all I needed to tell him. That’s all I could think of.”

Last year, Glover shared details of his encounter with Williams recalling that he gave him the “secret” on how to play Lando by telling him to “just be charming.”

“He’s right, Lando is charm incarnate,” Glover said in an interview with GQ. “He’s kind of a maverick, which I don’t think there’s a lot of anymore. It’s hard to be a smooth talker nowadays ’cause, where’s the line? But I think that’s also where the danger is. It’s like, how close can you get without tripping over it?”…

(13) UP ON THE ROOFTOP. The Guardian has a little different take on vacuum and space: “Cosmic cleaners: the scientists scouring English cathedral roofs for space dust”.

On the roof of Canterbury Cathedral, two planetary scientists are searching for cosmic dust. While the red brick parapet hides the streets, buildings and trees far below, only wispy clouds block the deep blue sky that extends into outer space.

The roaring of a vacuum cleaner breaks the silence and researcher Dr Penny Wozniakiewicz, dressed in hazmat suit with a bulky vacuum backpack, carefully traces a gutter with the tube of the suction machine.

“We’re looking for tiny microscopic spheres,” explains her colleague, Dr Matthias van Ginneken from the University of Kent, also clad in protective gear. “Right now, we are collecting thousands and thousands of dust particles, and we hope there will be a minuscule number that came from space.”’

(14) HOW FIT IS OUR GALAXY? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] In this week’s Science journal asks, “How massive is the Milky Way?”

It looks like our galaxy is a tad slimmer than thought???

The total mass of an isolated galaxy can be determined from its rotation curve, a plot of orbital velocity against distance from the galaxy’s center. Determining the rotation curve is difficult for the Milky Way because we are located inside of it. Ou et al. used a machine learning method to improve distance determinations for stars on the red giant branch, then used the stars’ velocities to extend the Milky Way’s rotation curve to 30 kiloparsecs from the Galactic Center. By fitting a mass model to the rotation curve, the authors found a lower mass for the Milky Way than was found in previous studies because of differences in the inferred distribution of dark matter.

Science journal coverage here — scroll down a little

Primary research here.

(15) SEND EELS TO OTHER WORLDS. In this week’s Science we have a brief report of a new robot designed to explore gas giant moons that may have a sub-surface ocean harboring life… “Snaking around extreme icy worlds”.

There is growing interest in the exploration of icy moons such as Enceladus because of the potential for these worlds to have liquid water that could support Earth-like life. However, obtaining samples is challenging because of environmental extremities on the surface or within ice vents. Vaquero et al. developed a snake-like robot named Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor (EELS) that was capable of autonomously navigating on icy surfaces. EELS has a perception head that contains a series of sensors and cameras to observe its environment, and its body has articulated segments for shape changing and a screw-like outer surface to enable motility. EELS shows potential for risk-aware autonomous exploration of complex icy terrains.

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Cat Eldridge.] View the unsold 1959 pilot for a Nero Wolfe series with Kurt Kasznar as Nero Wolfe and William Shatner as Archie Goodwin. The theme was composed by Alex North. This 26-minute pilot is in the public domain.

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

So Glad You (Didn’t) Ask #84: A Column of Unsolicited Opinions

Chris M. Barkley

Unburdening Myself of Unfinished Business

By Chris M. Barkley: 

ITEM ONE: As we emerge from the cold and cloudless days of January and February, you would think that the prospect of sunny days, baseball, international football (soccer), the open swimming pools and children playing outside would bring some joy to my soul.

Every year for the past forty years or so, the coming of the so-called “Daylight Savings Time” fills me with sadness, anxiety, moodiness and lastly, anger. (Yes, I only appear to be a mild-mannered reporter for a daily metropolitan daily sf news zine.)

Because myself and most of my fellow North Americans have lost an hour’s sleep. And why?

Because the farmers, blah, blah, blah. And the kids getting on the bus in the dark, blah, blah. And commerce and businesses flourish, blah, blah, blah… 

When I was a young lad in the mid-1960’s, the prospect of time travel (in this fashion) was novel and exciting. Forward into the future and then returning back into the past a few months later was a perfectly appealing idea to my young mind.

But, as I got older, my priorities and attitude towards DST gradually changed. Just the thought of the approaching date brought on bouts of gnawing and persisting dread. Changing the clocks forth and back became (and still are) a hassle. And the loss of an hour’s sleep every spring is just plain wrong.

 I’m not going to bore everyone with its history, musings, opinions or statistics about whether we should choose to sat in “standard” or “daylight” time or why the DST should be hunted down with pitchforks and torches, staked through the heart and left burning in the noonday sun. 

Instead, I will leave you with a well known Native American aphorism:

“Only a white man would have you believe you could cut a foot off the top of the blanket, sew it onto the bottom of the blanket, and you’d be left with a longer blanket.”

Contact your congressional representative and Senators; they are the only ones who can kill this stupid and unhealthy abomination once and for all.

Enough. Said. 

ITEM TWO: On the morning of February 5, 2024, my audio interview with Dave McCarty was published here on File770.com.

As many of you may know, I distribute the daily “Pixel Scroll” and other standalone news items on eight sff Facebook groups and on the Bluesky app. (I have mostly avoided posting on X/Twitter since September 2023.) If there is something more important or pressing at hand, like an exclusive interview with Dave McCarty for example, I post a File 770 link to a more widespread group of forty groups…well, actually, thirty-nine as of today. Let me explain…

That particular morning, I started posting the interview to my usual group but when I came up to the Washington Science Fiction Association, I had to pause because I was served with a notice that stated that my posting privileges had been suspended:

“Your profile been (sic) suspended in this group. The admin has temporarily turned off your ability to post, comment and earn contribution points in the group until February 23, 2024, 10:19 AM.”

I was flabbergasted for several reasons, the first of which was that I had not received any notice of the suspension from any of the administrators, there was no previous indication of any trouble before that day. 

Since I was locked out of the page, there was no way to send a message to an admin, so I decided to shout out on my own page:

To the Washington Science Fiction Association Facebook Page:

While posting my latest File 770 column this morning, I found out that the admins of the Washington Science Fiction Association suspended my posting privileges on their page for three weeks. Apparently they found my most recent dispersing news on a regular basis either offensive and/or disturbing.

I have done my best to pass along vital and accurate information there for some time and I am HIGHLY upset that I was suspended without notification or an adequate explanation. Do I need to point out the parallels to what happened recently regarding the Chengdu Long List nominees?

As a journalist, I resent being effectively censored in this fashion; sf fans have every right to be informed, whether the news is for good or for ill, especially during these tumultuous times in sf fandom.

While I recognize that they have every right to run their page as they see fit, I find this action egregious, unnecessary and a disservice to the other members of the group. As a result of these actions I will be leaving the group later today.

Chris B.

During the course of that day, several friends offered advice and support, which, for the most part, I appreciated. Several suggested I reach out to the administrators to find out what the problem was. I wasn’t very receptive to doing that because I was very upset and the aggrieved party; so why would I do that? 

Two friends intervened on my behalf and made inquiries on my behalf. One reported in a direct message:   

Sent your message to the three admins. I’m guessing what set this off was the piece with the McCarty interview.”

I did not hear back from anyone else about this that day. And so, at a little after 10pm, the Washington Science Fiction Association page had one less member. 

My other friend sent me the following message in the early morning hours of the next day:

“Chris, you were paused by the moderator because they were traveling and could not monitor posts.

I sent back the following message:

Well, that’s a troubling explanation. Was this applied to everyone? Or just me? Because without a notification to me or on the page, it felt like I was being targeted.

Also  the period of time described in the suspension notice wasn’t for a period of days but weeks. 

So yeah, I’m having a hard time believing this.”

As of today, I have not been contacted by any of the admins involved nor have I been given an adequate explanation for their actions or offered an apology.

My reason for airing my grievance here and now is two-fold; this incident has been simmering with me for over five weeks and I felt the need to let loose before I lose my sanity, self esteem or both. Secondly, this is not my first rodeo with unresponsive page admins and frankly I’m becoming more and more disenchanted with social media and Facebook in particular.

And at its best, Facebook is a wonderful tool to keep in touch with friends and share ideas and opinions. But I am beginning to realize that for me, the pervasive and oftentimes intrusive effects of social media may outweigh its benefits. 

Lately, I have been contemplating leaving Facebook for good. Incidents like this just nudge me a little further towards doing that.

ITEM THREE: And then there was the matter of D.G. Valdron’s essay on Medium.com.

On February 18, Mr. Valdron, who describes himself on the website as a “Canadian Speculative Fiction and Pop Culture writer”, published an article that was ominously titled “Moral Compromise and the Lesson of the Hugos”.

Mr. Valdron, in an imperious and somewhat solemn tone, vaguely (and, mind you, without attribution) outlined the problems regarding the Chengdu Worldcon:

In 2023, the World Science Fiction Convention was held in Chengdu, China.

This was a little bit controversial, given the Chinese government’s genocidal actions regarding Ughyers and Tibetans, their authoritarian police state shtick, etc. But everyone went along with it. Why rock the boat?

The problem came with the Hugo Awards.

Now, the thing with the Hugos, is that everyone submits nominations, the Hugo Awards Committee vets the nominations, and a final list gets put out for the fans and convention members to vote on by secret ballot. Now, that’s how I understand it. I might have gotten some detail wrong, but I believe that’s the gist. It doesn’t matter.

Here’s what matters:

The Hugos were corrupted. The Hugo Awards Committee turns out to have been screening out the works of American, English and Chinese creators, on behalf of the Chinese government. Basically, anyone whose novel or background was critical of the Chinese government, or even politically sensitive, like mentioning Tibet, was dropped from the list.

But you know what strikes me?

It’s how trivial this is.

Forgive me, I’m sure it’s important to the people involved. Careers and friendships ended, a community rocked.

But let’s get a grip. Most people in North America have never even heard of the Hugos. Most people in North America are not science fiction writers, or readers. Hell, most people in North America are not readers.

The Hugos aren’t the Nobels, or the Pulitzers. In the larger scheme, they’re a minor award, restricted to a literary/social subculture which might result in a few extra sales and an ego boost.

No one’s life was at risk. No one’s freedom was imperiled. No huge sums of money, no public safety.

This was a small trivial thing.

In my cynical side, I suspect that most times, people would make the wrong moral choice, but hopefully, in the face of more pressure, or intimidation or incentive than this. Maybe I just want people to suffer more.

Anyway, we’ve been down this path before you and I. Sorry to belabour it. How we treat each other is a hobby horse of mine. I’ve had my tests, and I’ll have more. I’ve dealt with them.

What about you?

I’m SO GLAD you asked, sir.

Now, to be fair, Mr. Valdron is entitled to his opinion. And granted, what happened with the Chengdu Worldcon and the 2023 Hugo Awards is definitely not as important as the ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip, the current battle between democracy and fascism in the United States or our ever increasing concerns over climate change and various environmental crises all over the world.

What really ticked me off about D.G. Valdron’s article is his rather cavalier attitude towards what happened, the Hugo Awards and general air of disapproval of the fandom that supports it.  

Fantasy, science fiction and horror is, despite the bleating of insufferable academics and mainstream literary critics, a vital part of the tree of literature, and whose roots run a millenium or two deep.

Modern sff literature (and fandom) started over a hundred years ago when teenagers in the US and United Kingdom began to correspond, meet, talk and write about their mutual fascination. 

And out of those meetings came conventions, cosplay, and generations of aspiring publishers, writers, editors, artists, game creators, filmmakers, and commentators, like myself.

I have had the privilege of growing up in a period of this history to witness sff grow from being considered a freakish sideshow to becoming a dominant force in world culture.

And the Hugo Awards, for better or worse, have provided all of us with an invaluable anecdotal, year by year snapshot of what people thought about fantastic literature and the visual arts. Readers, writers, editors, artists and publishers look to it as a bellwether of the field’s vitality. 

So, no this is NOT “a small trivial thing,” Mr. Waldron.

And I find it very disappointing to see a member of our own community like yourself thinking so little of the situation as to look down your nose at the sff fandom and its history under the pretense of high handed criticism.

There is a term for this Mr. Waldron. 

It is called “bad form”.

ITEM FOUR: Having a little notoriety in your life can be fun. I have been a fan guest of honor at three conventions (Windycon in 2019, Astronomicon in 2021 and Confusion in 2023), a panelist art auctioneer at local, regional conventions and at Worldcons. I’ve been nominated for a Hugo Award twice (and may have even won one).

But speaking personally, I don’t go out of my way to seek it out. I know myself well enough to know that if my ego were well fed on a regular basis it would be to the detriment of myself and my family and friends.

So, as you can well imagine my quandary as the Chengdu Worldcon story grew exponentially, my name (as well as my co-author, Jason Sanford) popped in all sorts of media outlets like the Guardian (UK), NBC News, the Associated Press and the New York Times among others.

I was even interviewed by Andrew Linbong for National Public Radio, which, as a listener of fifty-plus years, was the thrill of a lifetime as far as I’m concerned.

But, there’s a downside as well. While I and Jason received universal praise for our reporting, we were also reminded that there are a lot of cranks out there who were more than willing to let the air out of tires, so to speak.

There were several that stood out; sff author Larry Correia was irked because of Jason and I had previously reported on and commented negatively against his involvements in the Sad/Angry/Rabid Puppy wars a decade ago. Frankly, having someone like Correia upset with me is a badge of honor as far as I’m concerned. (See my post on Bluesky.)

My partner Juli alerted me that some wag on Reddit had heard my interview with Dave McCarty and had come to the startling conclusion that I was actually in cahoots with him to cover up his complicity in the scandal. To which I replied that he had obviously seen far too many episodes of The Traitors reality competition show to be reasoned with. 

I was very heartened when I read that both Samantha Mills (author of the acclaimed short story “Rabbit Test”) and Adrian Tchaikovsky (who wrote The Children of Time series) had both decided not to acknowledge their Hugo Awards in the wake of the Chengdu scandal. 

Adversely, I received a bit of backlash from some people once I let it be known that I was going to keep my Hugo Award more as a keepsake and family heirloom than a personal achievement. 

I might have felt the same way as Ms. Mills and Mr. Tchaikovsky if I was sitting at home watching the Hugo Awards Ceremony at home and found out later that my presence on the ballot was dubious at best and that many Chinese writers and fans were most likely disenfranchised from the process.    

But, I went to China, had the time of my life, made the speech of my life and felt a close affinity for this award I thought I had rightly won. If anything, I wanted to be reminded of the trip, the people I met and befriended and the devastating revelations that followed.

Well, for a very vocal fringe minority of people, keeping this Hugo Award was tantamount to rooting for Lex Luthor, killing baby seals, helping the Houston Astros win the 2017 World Series or actually being a communist.

I laughed off nearly all of this outrage as either sour grapes, jealousy, pettiness or “virtue signaling”. In the course of all of this sturm and drang, I posted the following on Bluesky:

This generated a (unnecessarily snarky) response from @afab boyfriend:

It’s responses like these, that seemingly come out of the social ether that occasionally bother me, referring back to my general unease about social media. I don’t know this person and they CLEARLY don’t know me and yet it seems my comment struck a nerve that needed a pointed response. And I get it; I admit that in the past, I too, have sought out people I don’t know to comment on how reprehensible I thought their opinions or positions were, but tried to do so from a reasonable point of view and not to make it personal enough to hurt someone’s feelings.

THIS comment was meant to be both condemning AND personal. 

But, I decided to take the high road:

I followed that up with:

Case Closed, @afab boyfriend.

ITEM FIVE: Last week, this happened:

My response was:

Two things happened after I posted this; two days later, on Sunday March 10th, I fumbled my understanding of GMT time and Eastern Daylight Time (DAMN YOU AGAIN, DST) and as a result, both Juli and I logged onto the Glasgow Worldcon site three hours too late to nominate anything for this year’s Hugo Awards for the first time in more than a decade.

Even more ironically, I began to hear from friends and acquaintances who openly stated that despite my recusal of future nominations in my speech at the Chengdu Hugo Award Ceremony and my public statement on March 8th, people were still nominating me in the Best Fan Writer category.

Their reasons ranged from they viewed my “win” in Chengdu as invalid and they wanted me to have another chance or that my works from 2023 were quite worthy of consideration.

I have to admit that the idea of being nominated again in light of what happened last year excites me, but the other side of that coin brings feelings of despair. 

Do I actually deserve another nomination? Would I be depriving someone else of a nomination? And, what if I get that email in the next week or so; am I allowed to change my mind? 

My partner Juli says that she will abide by and support any decision I make, which is one of the many reasons why I love her so much.. The few friends I have asked about this dilemma all said I should take the nomination.

Right now, I have no idea what I should do.

Watch this space, readers…

Deutscher Krimipreis 2023

The winners of the Deutscher Krimipreis 2023 have been announced. (Translations by Cora Buhlert.) 

NATIONAL

[Original German language crime fiction]

1st Place: Wie Sterben geht (How Dying Works) by Andreas Pflüger, Publisher: Suhrkamp

Winter 1983. At Glienicke Bridge in Berlin, everything is ready for the most spectacular agent exchange in history. KGB officer Rem Kukura – codename Pilgrim – is supposed to be exchanged against the son of  politbureau member. Caught up in the middle: Nina Winter, the only person who can identify Kukura. However, on the bridge Nina is plunged into an inferno, as her and Rem’s fate becomes a question of war and peace between the two superpowers.

2nd Place: Antoniusfeuer (St. Anthony’s Fire) by Monika Geier, Publisher: Ariadne/Argument

Detective inspector Bettina Boll is used to annoyances, but the latest order by her department leaves a bitter aftertaste. A death in juvenile detention has to be investigated, officials fear a scandal and Bettina is supposed to take the heat off her new boss and interfere with a colleague’s investigation. Moreover, the case turns out to be extremely bizarre. Are there really Catholic village activists who exorcise demons? And what does the famous Isenheim altar with its many colourful monsters and demons have to do with the case?

3rd Place: Die Guten und die Toten (The Good and the Dead) by Kim Koplin, Publisher: Suhrkamp

Saad and his little daughter Leila live off the grid in Berlin. Saad earns his living as a watchman in a parking garage in the Charlottenburg neighbourhood, working the nightshift for good reason. Parked in this garage is the luxury limousine of state secretary Brasch who is involved in nasty business deals with arms dealer Müller and shady Saudis. When Brasch causes an accident, while drunk and high on cocaine, and a body is discovered in the trunk of his car – much to Brasch’s surprise – the young female detective inspector Nihal Khigarian takes the case.

INTERNATIONAL

[Crime fiction translated into German]

1st Place: Fünf Winter (Five Decembers) by James Kestrel, translated by Stefan Lux, Publisher: Suhrkamp [Winner of the 2022 Edgar Award for Best Novel]

December 1941. America teeters on the brink of war, and in Honolulu, Hawaii, police detective Joe McGrady is assigned to investigate a homicide that will change his life forever. Because the trail of murder he uncovers will lead him across the Pacific, far from home and the woman he loves; and though the U.S. doesn’t know it yet, a Japanese fleet is already steaming toward Pearl Harbor.

This extraordinary novel is so much more than just a gripping crime story—it’s a story of survival against all odds, of love and loss and the human cost of war. Spanning the entirety of World War II, Five Decembers is a beautiful, masterful, powerful novel that will live in your memory forever.

2nd Place: Aus der Balance (The Turnout) by Megan Abbott, translated by Karen Gerwig and Angelika Müller, Publisher: Pulp Master

With their long necks and matching buns and pink tights, Dara and Marie Durant have been dancers since they can remember. Growing up, they were homeschooled and trained by their glamorous mother, founder of the Durant School of Dance. After their parents’ death in a tragic accident nearly a dozen years ago, the sisters began running the school together, along with Charlie, Dara’s husband and once their mother’s prized student.

Marie, warm and soft, teaches the younger students; Dara, with her precision, trains the older ones; and Charlie, sidelined from dancing after years of injuries, rules over the back office. Circling around one another, the three have perfected a dance, six days a week, that keeps the studio thriving. But when a suspicious accident occurs, just at the onset of the school’s annual performance of The Nutcracker—a season of competition, anxiety, and exhilaration—an interloper arrives and threatens the sisters’ delicate balance.

Taut and unnerving, The Turnout is Megan Abbott at the height of her game. With uncanny insight and hypnotic writing, it is a sharp and strange dissection of family ties and sexuality, femininity and power, and a tale that is both alarming and irresistible.

3rd Place: Sekunden der Gnade (Small Mercies) by Dennis Lehane, translated by Malte Krutzsch, Publisher: Diogenes

In the summer of 1974 a heatwave blankets Boston and Mary Pat Fennessy is trying to stay one step ahead of the bill collectors. Mary Pat has lived her entire life in the housing projects of “Southie,” the Irish American enclave that stubbornly adheres to old tradition and stands proudly apart.

One night Mary Pat’s teenage daughter Jules stays out late and doesn’t come home. That same evening, a young Black man is found dead, struck by a subway train under mysterious circumstances.

The two events seem unconnected. But Mary Pat, propelled by a desperate search for her missing daughter, begins turning over stones best left untouched—asking questions that bother Marty Butler, chieftain of the Irish mob, and the men who work for him, men who don’t take kindly to any threat to their business.

Set against the hot, tumultuous months when the city’s desegregation of its public schools exploded in violence, Small Mercies is a superb thriller, a brutal depiction of criminality and power, and an unflinching portrait of the dark heart of American racism. It is a mesmerizing and wrenching work that only Dennis Lehane could write.

Hans Christian Andersen Awards 2024 Shortlist

The International Board on Books for Young People has announced the 2024 Hans Christian Andersen Award shortlist.

The Hans Christian Andersen Award is the highest international distinction given to authors and illustrators of children’s books. Given every other year by IBBY, the Hans Christian Andersen Awards recognize lifelong achievement and are given to an author and an illustrator whose complete works have made an important, lasting contribution to children’s literature.

AUTHORS

  • Marina Colasanti from Brazil
  • Heinz Janisch from Austria
  • Lee Geum-yi from the Republic of Korea
  • Bart Moeyaert from Belgium
  • Timo Parvela from Finland
  • Edward van de Vendel from the Netherlands

ILLUSTRATORS

Cai Gao from China
Iwona Chmielewska from Poland
Nelson Cruz from Brazil
Elena Odriozola from Spain
Sydney Smith from Canada
Paloma Valdivia from Chile

The award is presented in alternate years by the International Board on Books for Young People to “a living author and illustrator whose complete works have made a lasting contribution to children’s literature.”

Jury President Liz Page leads the 10-member jury which included Evelyn Arizpe (Mexico/UK), Brenda Dales (USA), Sabine Fuchs (Austria), Diana Laura Kovach (Argentina), Shereeh Kreidieh (Lebanon), Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer (Germany), Jaana Pesonen (Finland), Tan Fengxia (China), Pavle Učakar (Slovenia) and Morgane Vasta (France).  IBBY Executive Director Carolina Ballester is an ex officio Jury member. 

The criteria used to assess the nominations included the aesthetic and literary quality as well as the freshness and innovation of the body of work; the ability to see the child’s point of view and to stretch their curiosity; and the continuing relevance of their works to children and young people. There were 59 candidates from 33 countries on the longlist.

The two winners will be announced at the IBBY Press Conference on Monday, April 8 at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair. The medals and diplomas will be presented to the winners during the 39th IBBY Congress in Trieste, Italy being held August 30-September 1, 2024.

Pixel Scroll 3/16/24 And The Riverbank Scrolls Of The Pixels Of March

(1) SEE SAMATAR’S EPIC LECTURE. Sofia Samatar will deliver the 2024 Richard W. Gunn Memorial Lecture on Monday, March 18, at 4:00 p.m Central. The lecture is virtual and you can register here. She will be speaking on the relationship between epic poetry and fantasy:

What is the relationship between ancient epic poetry and the contemporary genre known as epic fantasy? This talk offers five answers to that question, from the perspective of a speculative fiction writer. Sofia Samatar is the author of six books, including the memoir The White Mosque, a PEN/Jean Stein Award finalist. Her works range from the award-winning epic fantasy A Stranger in Olondria to Tone, a collaborative study of literary tone with Kate Zambreno.

(2) THE FIRST GREEN HILLS. Bobby Derie filled in a previously unsuspected gaping hole in my knowledge of sff history with “Quest for the Green Hills of Earth (1995) by Ned Brooks” at Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein. Originally I was just checking to see if he was talking about the Ned Brooks I knew – he was. Then – bang! – I discovered that C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner are at the root of a famous verse tradition.

…Who wrote this bit [in “Quest of the Starstone”]? Moore was the poet of the pair, but Kuttner was no slouch, and the title itself is a callback to two previous tales. In “Shambleau” Moore wrote: “[…] he hummed The Green Hills of Earth to himself in a surprisingly good baritone”; and in “The Cold Gray God” (1935):

“No one sang Starless Night any more, and it was the Earth-born Rose Robertson’s voice which rang through the solar system in lilting praise of The Green Hills of Earth.”

That could be the kind of detail that a good pasticheur like Kuttner would pick up and expand upon. Yet it wouldn’t be surprising if they both had a hand in the final version of this scene….

…However, Sam Moskowitz claims:

“When Robert Heinlein read the story, he never forgot the phrase which became the title of one of his most famous short stories and of a collection, The Green Hills of Earth.”Sam Moskowitz, Seekers of Tomorrow (1967), 312

“The Green Hills of Earth” ran in The Saturday Evening Post for 8 Feb 1947, and provided the title for Heinlein’s 1951 collection of science fiction. Heinlein did not reiterate Moore & Kuttner’s verses, but came up with his own—and attributed it to an author, the blind poet Rhysling….

Ned Brooks later produced a chapbook based on these works:

…This is where Quest of the Green Hills of Earth (1995) comes in. Edited by Ned Brooks and illustrated by Alan Hunter, this is the kind of standalone chapbook that is a hallmark of science fiction and fantasy fandom. It reprints “Quest of the Starstone” in its entirety, Heinlein’s verses from “The Green Hills of Earth,” and three fan-made versions—one by Chuck Rein, George Heap, “and other fans of the 1960s”; one by Don Markstein (“late 60s”), and one by Steve Sneyd (Oct 1992)….

(3) SPIRITED GIVING 2024. Spirited Giving, a horror-themed fundraiser serving as the official kickoff to StokerCon 2024, takes place May 29, 2024 beginning at 3:00 p.m. in the San Diego Central Library. Full details at the link.  

It’s a night of author readings, live performances, meet and greets, and book signings, all while raising funds for the San Diego Library Foundation, particularly the Books Unbanned Initiative.

The event will feature readings from: Clay McLeod Chapman, Jamie Flanagan, Ai Jiang, Vincent V. Cava, Danger Slater, and Bridget D. Brave. And a special one-hour live performance by YouTube Horror Narrator Mr. Creepypasta.

To attend the event, get Spirited Giving Tickets at Eventbrite.

(4) IF NOT NEWS TO YOU, IT WILL BE NEWS TO SOMEONE. At Literary Hub Debbie Berne makes her case — “Not Just Covers, But Every Page: Why Writers Should Talk About Book Design Early On”.

… Interior design is both micro and macro. It involves technical prowess and creativity. There is line-by-line typesetting and there is translation of vibe.

Take, for instance, chapter openers. Most books are divided into chapters and an author has decided if they each have chapter titles or just numbers, or both, or neither, or additional info like a subtitle or time stamp or narrator name or geographic locator or setting-up-an-idea pull quote.

The designer, then, must figure out how to make those pieces of text—many or few—look nice and clear on the page and put forward an aesthetic, bringing visual voice to the writing voice. Which font? How big? How bold? Italic? Centered or no? In a single line, neatly stacked, cascading? Each decision is literal and expressive….

(5) HOW MUCH WAS C-3PO’S HEAD WORTH? Read the answer reported in Friday’s Birmingham (UK) Mail.

(6) SPRINGTIME FOR WONKA. Everyone is going to make money off this disaster except the people who perpetrated it. (Would you have it any other way?) “Viral Willy Wonka Glasgow event to be turned into musical” at BBC.

A new musical satire based on a Glasgow Willy Wonka experience that went viral is in the works.

The show’s lead producer, Richard Kraft, has assembled a team of writers and producers for the project titled Willy Fest: A Musical Parody.

The event in February gained notoriety after angry families, who paid up to £35 to attend, demanded their money back.

Kraft says he hopes people watching the show “won’t be left in tears.”

The creative team working on the musical includes Emmy-nominated actor and comedian Riki Lindhome who tweeted, “I’m so excited,” along with screenshots of an article.

Others attached to the project include Broadway songwriters Alan Zachary and Michael Weiner.

Kraft is known for producing and directing a Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory concert at the famed Hollywood Bowl.

He told the BBC it was his idea to turn the Glasgow event into a musical and that the writing team was “assembled in less time than it takes for someone to sing the first verse of ‘Oompa Loompa Doompa-Dee-Do’.”

He hopes to launch the musical later this year….

…Asked why the Glasgow event might be ripe for the musical theatre treatment, Kraft said: “It is about desperate dreamers who actually have fragments of a great idea, just executed beyond their budget and abilities.”

He said he loved shows “about big-hearted flim-flam artists in musicals like The Music Man, The Greatest Showman, and The Producers. At the core they are romantics who get in over their heads.”…

(7) THREE-BODY, BUT NOT JUST ONE PROBLEM. “’3 Body Problem:’ How Netflix’s new sci-fi saga employs the legendary Wow! signal”Space.com is sure you’ll want to know.

The Wow! signal is one of the great astronomy puzzles of the past 50 years, but it’s not so mysterious in the sci-fi universe of “3 Body Problem.”

Netflix’s new eight-episode alien invasion saga “3 Body Problem” uses the famous SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) signal as a prominent plot device in its wild centuries-spanning narrative.

The Wow! signal was an intense narrowband radio signal detected on the night of Aug. 15, 1977 by Ohio State University’s Big Ear Radio Observatory and the North American Astrophysical Observatory (NAAPO) during a standard SETI search. No personnel were on duty at the time, yet the strong 72-second-long signal was recorded by a computer printer….

Beware spoiler:

… “3 Body Problem,” which drops on March 21, puts its own spin on the signal. In the series, Wow! is a real message from intelligent aliens beyond Earth. A Chinese astrophysicist responds to the translated signal by inviting the aliens to visit Earth — to humanity’s detriment, as we later learn….

(8) SIGNING TIME. John King Tarpinian has the Glendale Civic Auditorium all prepared to welcome tomorrow’s influx of dealers to the 2024 LA Vintage Paperback Collectors Show & Sale.

(9) JON STOPA (1935-2024). Longtime Chicagoland fan Jon Stopa died March 4 at the age of 88. See the family obituary in the Kenosha News at the link. (The family obituary spells his first name “John”. In the sff field he was known as “Jon” except for the few instances when he used “John” in the credits for his book cover art for Advent:Publishers).

Jon Stopa

Fancyclopedia 3’s article about Jon records that he made his first sf short story sale to Astounding at age 22, “The First Inch” published in 1957, followed by two more appearances in Campbell’s magazine in 1958. Jon’s fourth and last fiction credit was in 1973 with “Kiddy-Lib” in Eros in Orbit.

He co-founded Advent:Publishers in 1955 with Earl Kemp, Robert Briney, Sidney Coleman, James O’Meara, George Price, and Ed Wood. The company produced nonfiction books about the sf field, the first of which was Damon Knight’s essay collection In Search of Wonder (1956).

A Jon Stopa-designed Advent book cover.

Stopa met Joni Cornell at the 1960 Worldcon (Pittcon). They married in 1962 and lived at Wilmot Mountain, Stopa’s family ski resort in Wilmot, WI, where they began hosting Wilcon, a three-day long invitation-only relaxacon.

Jon appears as a bartender in the video Faans (1983) (around the 18:50 mark) in a scene shot at the lodge at Wilmot Mountain.

Throughout the 1960s, the Stopas entered and won many convention masquerades. In the early 1970s, the couple helped found the conrunning group ISFiC.

The Stopas were Fan GoHs at Chicon V, the 1991 Worldcon.

Jon’s survivors include his grandson, Keanen (Kim) Burns; sister, Diane Reese; great-granddaughter, Kinsley Burns; and nieces: Tiffany and Amanda Stopa. Along with his parents and wife; John was preceded in death by his daughter, Deb Burns; and brothers: Walter Jr. and Conrad (Karen) Stopa.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born March 16, 1920 Leo McKern. (Died 2002.) Pop culture is wonderful, isn’t it? And Leo McKern was definitely part of it. 

The Prisoner where he was Number Two in three of the seventeen episodes is definitely his best remembered SF role. He played that role more than any of the other seventeen credited actors. That is if you consider The Prisoner to even be SF and not merely a spy series gone very weird. Just tossing that idea out here.

Leo McKern as Number Two in The Prisoner.

Next up is The Adventures of Robin Hood where he was Sir Roger DeLisle, usurper of the Locksley manor and lands, and Herbert of Doncaster, a corrupt moneylender. It was an early Fifties series and his of earliest acting roles. 

Sliding on later in his career is one of my favorite roles by him, Horace Rumpole, a London barrister on Rumpole of the Bailey. He was a great  character to watch, the cases were interesting and the supporting cast was well thought out.

Slipping on over to his radio work, he was the voice of Captain Haddock in the 1992 and 1993 BBC Radio Hergé’s The Adventures of Tintin.

He was “Mac” MacGill in X the Unknown, a Fifties horror SF film from Hanmer Productions; and he’s got a lead role as Bill McGuire in The Day the Earth Caught Fire, an end of the world Sixties film.

The final role I want to mention is in The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother where he gets to be Professor Moriarty. I’m almost certain that I’ve seen it. 

(11) COMICS SECTION.

And we’re overdue to catch up with Tom Gauld!

(12) STAND AND DELIVER. [Item by Steven French.] Sally Wainwright is a national treasure over here in the U.K. so her writing a new fantasy show set in the 18th century (featuring Louisa Harland formerly of Derry Girls as a gender fluid highwaywoman with superpowers!) is a Big Deal: “’I never dreamed I’d get this role!’: Derry Girl Louisa Harland on Sally Wainwright’s thrilling new heroine” in the Guardian.

When Louisa Harland was cast as the lead in the new Sally Wainwright drama, Renegade Nell, the director told her: “Nell needs to be one of those characters, even when she’s on the screen so much, you still want the audience to miss her when she’s not.” It’s quite an ask: Nell is a massive Doctor Who of a role, swashbuckling, always with a new accent or cool pyrotechnics or punch in the face, and Harland fills the screen every second she’s on it. Somehow, though, you do miss her when she isn’t. Meeting the 31-year-old in central London, I can see exactly why she was chosen for Nell, even though almost the first thing she says is “I never in my wildest dreams thought I would get this role. My parents still think it is so random.”

Renegade Nell is a rebel and a chancer, an 18th-century tomboy in a constant life-or-death scenario of some other bugger’s making. The year is 1705, and she’s just lost her husband in a battle that has left her both widowed and superhuman, but only sometimes. The show has a lush period feel and is a closely observed love affair with the British countryside (Harland describes the incredibly precise location scouts combing through forests searching for trees that would have been mature by 1705), but it is powered by mischief – fight scenes, disguises, magic monsters and highway robbery after highway robbery….

(13) JAPANIMATION’S SUICIDE SQUAD. Animation Magazine introduces Warner Bros. Japan LLC’s updated trailer featuring the anime-styled anti-heroes of Suicide Squad ISEKAI.

Synopsis:  In the crime-ridden Gotham city, Amanda Waller, the head of A.R.G.U.S., has assembled a group of notorious criminals for a mission: Harley Quinn, Deadshot, Peacemaker, Clayface and King Shark. These DC Super-Villains are sent into an otherworldly realm that’s connected to this world through a gate. It’s a world of swords and magic where orcs rampage and dragons rule the skies — an “ISEKAI!”

Harley and others go on a rampage after arriving in ISEKAI but are captured by the Kingdom’s soldiers and sent to prison. They only have 72 hours before the bomb on their neck explodes.

The deadline is fast approaching. After negotiations with Queen Aldora, the condition for liberation was the conquest of the hostile Imperial army. They have no choice but to throw themselves head-first into the front line of battle.

They run; they die. They lose; they die. With their lives on the line, can Harley Quinn and The Suicide Squad survive in ISEKAI? Brace yourselves for the pulse-pounding saga of the elite task force known as the “Suicide Squad” as they embark on a jaw-dropping adventure! Let the party begin!

(14) THE HOBBIT DIET EXPLAINED SCIENTIFICALLY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Filers may have noted “(10) NO MICHELIN STARS FOR MORDOR.  CBR.com chronicles ‘Every Meal Hobbits Eat In Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings’” in “Pixel Would Like A Word With Engineering”. It strikes me that there is a very logical, biological reason for Hobbits requiring more meals than us, larger, humans!

It centres on the fact that scale is size specific: a cube does not have the same spatial properties at any scale – its surface area to volume ration is scale specific. For example, to depart slightly from a simple cube, a single cube might have a volume of one unit and a surface area of six square units: a cube has six sides. However, a cube of volume of two cubic unites only has a surface area of ten square units. (You can easily create a volume of two cubic units by joining two one-cubic-volume cubes together and in the process cover two, one cubic square sides leaving just ten cubic squares as the surface area.)

What this all means is that smaller creatures have proportionally more surface area from which to lose heat.

Hobbits are smaller than humans and so must lose more heat assuming they have the same blood temperature. Proportionally losing more heat means that they must consume proportionally more food, hence require more meals.

Jus’ sayin’.

Second breakfast anyone?

(15) POOR LITTLE MERCURY! Space.com says “Mercury slammed by gargantuan eruption from the sun’s hidden far side, possibly triggering ‘X-ray auroras’”.

A gigantic, fiery eruption around 40 times wider than Earth recently exploded from the sun’s hidden far side. The eruption hurled a massive cloud of plasma into space that later smashed into Mercury, scouring the planet’s rocky surface and potentially triggering “X-ray auroras” on the unprotected world.

The eruption was likely triggered by a powerful solar flare, which occurred around 7 p.m. ET on March 9, Spaceweather.com reported. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) spotted a large, partially obscured plasma filament exploding outward from behind the sun’s northeast limb. Based on the amount of visible plasma, the eruption likely spanned around 310,000 miles (500,000 kilometers) across.

SDO data showed that the explosion, which likely left behind a massive “canyon of fire” on the sun’s surface, also released a large coronal mass ejection (CME) — a fast-moving cloud of magnetized plasma and radiation — that collided with Mercury on March 10.

Mercury is often blasted with CMEs due to its proximity to our home star. The small planet has no atmosphere left as a result of this bombardment and is fully exposed to the full force of these solar storms. …

(16) HOT TIMES CLOSER TO HOME. “The Staggering Ecological Impacts of Computation and the Cloud” at The MIT Press Reader. “Anthropologist Steven Gonzalez Monserrate draws on five years of research and ethnographic fieldwork in server farms to illustrate some of the diverse environmental impacts of data storage.” (A full version of this article, as well as a bibliography, can be accessed here.)

…The molecular frictions of digital industry, as this example shows, proliferate as unruly heat. The flotsam and jetsam of our digital queries and transactions, the flurry of electrons flitting about, warm the medium of air. Heat is the waste product of computation, and if left unchecked, it becomes a foil to the workings of digital civilization. Heat must therefore be relentlessly abated to keep the engine of the digital thrumming in a constant state, 24 hours a day, every day.

To quell this thermodynamic threat, data centers overwhelmingly rely on air conditioning, a mechanical process that refrigerates the gaseous medium of air, so that it can displace or lift perilous heat away from computers. Today, power-hungry computer room air conditioners (CRACs) or computer room air handlers (CRAHs) are staples of even the most advanced data centers. In North America, most data centers draw power from “dirty” electricity grids, especially in Virginia’s “data center alley,” the site of 70 percent of the world’s internet traffic in 2019. To cool, the Cloud burns carbon, what Jeffrey Moro calls an “elemental irony.” In most data centers today, cooling accounts for greater than 40 percent of electricity usage….

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Physicist Matt O’Dowd at PBS Space Time this week takes a dive into a decidedly SFnal trope, that of the possible need to hide humanity from aliens as they themselves may be doing so?

Dark Forest: Should We NOT Contact Aliens?

In 1974 we sent the Arecibo radio message towards Messier 13, a globular cluster near the edge of the Milky Way, made up of a few hundred thousand stars. The message was mostly symbolic; we weren’t really expecting a reply. Yet surely other civilisations out there are doing the same thing. So, why haven’t we heard anything? What if the silence from the stars is a hint that we shouldn’t be so outgoing? What if aliens are deliberately keeping quiet for fear that they might be destroyed?

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