Pixel Scroll 1/18/20 The Previous Title Appears to Be Accurate

(1) THE FOREVER FRANCHISE. Dave Itzkoff wonders “Can ‘Star Trek’ Chart a Way Forward?” in New York Times Magazine.

Michael Chabon’s job used to consist of writing novels, earning literary acclaim and receiving the occasional prestigious award. But this past June he was racing around the soundstages here at “Star Trek: Picard,” where he was working as an executive producer.

Chabon, a 56-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner, strode through hallways decorated with timelines that chronicled the fictional histories of alien empires and stepped onto the set of a futuristic spacecraft. He giggled to himself as he toyed with some of the fake technology, occasionally exclaiming “Engage!,” and flashed a thumbs-up across the room to the “Picard” star Patrick Stewart as he rehearsed a scene.

These were all welcome perks in Chabon’s new line of work. But what drew him to “Star Trek” as a fan in his teens and kept him invested as a producer, he said, was an underlying message about humanity that was hopeful within reason.

“It’s not saying human beings are basically wonderful and if we just learn to agree, all our problems will go away,” he explained. “It takes work. It takes effort.”

…“If you feel that each piece is handcrafted with care, then I think people really appreciate it,” said Alex Kurtzman, an executive producer of the many new “Star Trek” series. “If you feel like a universe is being shoved down your throat for speed and dollars, there’s no faster way to lose an audience.”

(2) OPENING THE DOOR TO BOOK BANNING. PEN America protests that “Proposed Book Banning Bill in Missouri Could Imprison Librarians”.

 … The bill — the Parental Oversight of Public Libraries Act or House Bill 2044 — aims to add several provisions to the state’s funding law for public libraries. These new provisions establish “parental library review boards” that would evaluate whether any library materials constitute “age-inappropriate sexual material.” Members of these five-member boards, who would be elected at a town meeting by a simple majority of voters, are empowered to determine whether material is appropriate, including by evaluating its literary merit. Public librarians are explicitly barred by the statute from serving on such review boards, even if they are from the community.

“This is a shockingly transparent attempt to legalize book banning in the state of Missouri,” said James Tager, deputy director of Free Expression Research and Policy at PEN America. “This act is clearly aimed at empowering small groups of parents to appoint themselves as censors over their state’s public libraries. Books wrestling with sexual themes, books uplifting LGBTQIA+ characters, books addressing issues such as sexual assault—all of these books are potentially on the chopping block if this bill is passed.”

Under the act, the boards would hold public hearings to receive suggestions as to possible inappropriate books, and would have the authority to order the library to remove any such material from access by minors. Any public library who allows minors access to such “age-inappropriate materials” would have their funding stripped, and librarians who refuse to comply with the act can be fined and imprisoned for up to one year.

(3) KGB. Ellen Datlow posted her photos from the January 15 KGB readings where Richard Kadrey read from his new novel The Grand Dark and Cassandra Khaw read from her forthcoming novella Nothing But Blackened Teeth.

Cassandra Khaw and Richard Kadrey 1
Cassandra Khaw and Richard Kadrey

(4) PANTSER. At Whatever, “The Big Idea: Simon Jimenez” begins with a confession:

I wrote no encyclopedia and I drew no map before I began writing The Vanished Birds. I laid the track as the train chugged forward and hoped I wouldn’t be outpaced and run over. Of course I was. I wince now as I think back on all the soft resets and double-backs and total rethinks and rewrites I had to do. I’d blame this all on the fact that it was my first book and I didn’t know what I was doing, but that wouldn’t be the truth. This is how I tend to go about all things. Without a plan and screaming in freefall.

(5) WITCHER APPECIATION SOCIETY. On YouTube, Paste’s Allison Keene and Josh Jackson celebrate the new fantasy series from Netflix.

(6) COP ON THE CORNER. “Nine years later, Detroit’s RoboCop statue is finally ready for installation”Curbed Detroit has the story.

It started with a successful Kickstarter campaign. A mere nine years later, the RoboCop statue is nearly done.

The campaign, launched by the community arts nonprofit Imagination Station in March 2011, received $67,436 in donations.

In an update from December 31, 2019, the team showcased photos to scores of eager backers of the enormous, bronze, nearly finished statue. “Here are a last few teaser pics of Robo in the positioning and welding process before his final form is unveiled later this winter, with installation details to follow,” wrote Brandon Walley of the Imagination Station.

The last touches include installing its head and adding a gray patina, now only visible on a breastplate. Once finished around March, the recreation of the original Peter Weller costume will stand 11 feet tall.

(7) RETRO RESEARCH. Cora Buhlert has posted two more reviews of 1945 Retro Hugo eligible works, namely “The Big and the Little” a.k.a. “The Merchant Princes” by Isaac Asimov, which is the second Foundation story of 1944, and “Guard in the Dark”, a horror story by Allison V. Harding.

She’s also posted a roundup of links to other reviews of eligible 1944 works, including several reviews by Steve J. Wright:  “Retro Review Links for January 15, 2020”.

(8) TODAY IN HISTORY.

  • January 18, 1952 Tales of Tomorrow’s Frankenstein first aired on ABC. It would be the sixteenth episode of the first season of the series. It was directed by Don Medford. The episode starred Lon Chaney, Jr. in the role of Frankenstein’s monster and John Newland in the role of Victor Frankenstein. Lon Chaney, Jr. Is credited here as Lon Chaney as he was in all his later work. He’s no stranger to playing the Monster as he played the role of the monster in the Universal Pictures Ghost of Frankenstein a decade earlier. You can watch it here.
  • January 18, 1959 Cage of Doom premiered in the United Kingdom. (It would be called Terror from the Year 5000 in the States.) it’s credits were long, so have patience when we say that it was by produced by Robert J. Gurney Jr., Samuel Z. Arkoff, James H. Nicholson, and Gene Searchinger. It was directed by Robert J. Gurney Jr., and starred Ward Costello, Joyce Holden, John Stratton, Salome Jens, and Fred Herrick. The story was actually based on an actually SFF story that ran in in the April 1957 issue of Fantastic, Henry Slesar’s “Bottle Baby”. It is not credited as such however. It’s not a great film and hence it got featured in the eighth season of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes are sure it’s not good giving it a Zero percent approval rating though we caution only a little over a hundred cared enough to express a view. You can watch it here.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born January 18, 1882 A.A. Milne. Talking fat bears obsessed with honey. Bouncing tigers, err, tiggers. Morose, well, what is he? It’s certainly genre. And though it isn’t remotely genre, I wholeheartedly recommend Milne’s The Red House Mystery, a Country House Mystery that’s most excellent! (Died 1956.)
  • Born January 18, 1920 Constance Moore. She gets Birthday Honors for being in the 1939 movie serial Buck Rogers in which she was Wilma Deering, the only female character in the serial.  Were there ever other female main cast characters in Buck Rogers?(Died 2005.)
  • Born January 18, 1932 Robert Anton Wilson. Conspiracy nut or SF writer? Or both. I think I first encountered him in something Geis wrote about him in SFR in the Eighties. Schrödinger’s Cat Trilogy is just weird and might or might not be a sequel to The Illuminatus! Trilogy. But the absolutely weirdest thing he did I think is an interview titled Robert Anton Wilson On Finnegans Wake and Joseph Campbell. Yes, he frothed at the mouth on Campbell and Joyce! (Died 2007.)
  • Born January 18, 1933 John Boorman, 87. Director who’s responsible for one of the best SFF films ever done, Excalibur with Sean Connery, and one of the worst with that also starred Sean Connery, Zardoz. He also directed the rather nifty The Emerald Forest which Holdstock did a far better than merely good job of novelising.
  • Born January 18, 1937 Dick Durock. He was best known for playing Swamp Thing in Swamp Thing and The Return of Swamp Thing and the following television series which ran for three seasons. His only other genre appearances were in The Nude Bomb (also known as The Return of Maxwell Smart) and “The First” of The Incredible Hulk. He shows up in Die Hard with a Vengeance in a subway scene. No, it’s not genre, I just like that film. (Died 2009.)
  • Born January 18, 1943 Paul Freeman, 77. Best remembered I’d say for being the evil René Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Ark. He also played Professor Moriarty in Without a Clue which had Michael Caine as Holmes and Kingsley as Watson.
  • Born January 18, 1953 Pamela Dean Dyer-Bennett, 67. Her best novel is I think Tam Lin though one could make an argument for Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary which Windling claims is her favorite fantasy novel. Her Secret Country trilogy is also a great deal of fun to read. Much of her short stories are set in the Liavek shared universe created by Emma Bull and Will Shetterly. Alll of the Liavek anthologies are now available on all major digital platforms. According to the files sitting in my Dropbox folder, there’s eight volumes to the series. They’re wonderful reading. End of plug. 
  • Born January 18, 1964 Jane Horrocks, 56. Her first SFF video role was Pattern in The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, scripted off the Joan Aiken novel. A year later, she showed up in The Witches, scripted off the Roald Dahl novel playing Miss Susan Irvine. She voices Black Widow / Mrs. Plum in Tim Burton’s The Corpse Bride, and voiced Hannah in the late Ninties Watership Down.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) JUGGLING THE BOOKS. “Majipoor – Les Objets Volants” took inspiration from a Robert Silverberg novel to create this stage act.

Majipoor is a fantastic journey through juggling and object manipulation, an exploration of objects and bodies, individuals and community.

The show is freely inspired from Robert Silverberg’s 1980 novel «Lord Valentine’s Castle». This is the story of an identity winning back, a route surrounded by exotic landscapes on giant planet Majipoor, along with a juggling company of intelligent four-handed being called Skandars.

(12) WATER LOSS ON MARS GREATER THAN THOUGHT. Science reports that water is easily transported high into the atmosphere during storms and lost. This takes place even during the dusty season. “Stormy water on Mars: The distribution and saturation of atmospheric water during the dusty season”.

Mars once hosted abundant water on its surface but subsequently lost most of it to space. Small amounts of water vapor are still present in the atmosphere, which can escape if they reach sufficiently high altitudes. Fedorova et al. used data from the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter spacecraft to determine the distribution of water in Mars’ atmosphere and investigate how it varies over seasons. Water vapor is sometimes heavily saturated, and its distribution is affected by the planet’s large dust storms. Water can efficiently reach the upper atmosphere when Mars is in the warmest part of its orbit, and this behavior may have controlled the overall rate at which Mars lost its water.

(13) VERY OLD BIRDS OF A FEATHER. SYFY Wire also reports on the distant past: “This new dinosaur just called it: even feathered dinos were nothing like birds”.

Some dinosaurs looked like birds. Some prehistoric birds looked like dinosaurs, and some birds that are still around echo dinosaurs. That doesn’t mean feathers and wings always make a bird—or a dinosaur.

Wulong bohaiensis was a small feathered therapod that lived 120 million years ago in what is now China, going twice as far back as T. rex. The dinosaur species this creature is most closely related to is (another star of Jurassic Park) the Velociraptor. “Wulong” translates to “dancing dragon,” and the fantastic specimen, which is preserved so well that even some of its feathers are frozen in time, is not only dragon-like, but also birdlike. The thing is that the bones and feathers revealed this newly unearthed dino to be a juvenile who went through different growing pains than birds….

(14) TIS MANY A SLIP. Popsugar thinks “Disney’s New Space Mountain Mug Is Light Years Ahead of Everything Else in My Kitchen Cabinet”.

Official blog Oh My Disney recently announced the upcoming arrival of Space Mountain mugs at both Disneyland and Walt Disney World in honor of the high-speed roller coaster’s 45th anniversary.

(15) RELATIVELY WRONG. This week Andrew Porter saw another wrong question on Jeopardy! Can you believe it?

Final Jeopardy: Children’s Literature

Answer: Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and Max Planck’s Quantum Theory inspired this book that won a 1963 Newberry Medal.

Wrong question: “What is ‘The Fault in Our Stars’?”

Correct question: “What is ‘A Wrinkle in Time’?”

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Terry Pratchett: Back in Black” on Vimeo is a 2018 documentary about Sir Terry’s life from BBC Scotland. (Vimeo setting requires it be watched at their site.)

[Thanks to JJ, Chip Hitchcock, Cat Eldridge, Contrarius, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, John King Tarpinian, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, N., Cora Buhlert, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Steve Davidson.]

18 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 1/18/20 The Previous Title Appears to Be Accurate

  1. @2: words fail.

    @9 (Milne): I recall original illos in which the morose Eeyore is clearly a donkey.

    @9 (Boorman): Connery was not in Excalibur; he did play an older Arthur in the not-very-good First Knight, which didn’t involve Boorman.

    @11: we can dream of it touring the US….

    @Andrew: very good!

  2. @Chip
    “Eeyore” is close to a phonetic English spelling of “hee-haw”. (I’ve never seen any of the Disneyfied Pooh. I grew up with the Shepard illos.)

  3. Yes, Eeyore’s a donkey. (Are donkey rides a thing in the USA? I think a lot of UK kidlets will have been on the back of one at some point, and would be quite familiar with them. Plus, donkey sanctuaries are lowkey popular.)

    @Andrew

    Not all those who File are Fifth, surely 🙂

  4. The BBC documentary about Sir Terry Pratchett includes lengthy footage from the 2016 Discworld convention and what I am told are scenes of his signing at the 2005 Worldcon in Glasgow. Neil Gaiman, who did the first interview with Pratchett for a 1985 issue of SPACE VOYAGER, talks at length about his friend and says in his opinion the best Discworld novel is NIGHT WATCH.

  5. @9: if I had to describe Schrödinger’s Cat in relation to Illuminatus!, it might be by calling it a collection of sidequels. There are characters from the prior work who appear, but none of them seem aware of the events of the previous work (and the Joe Malik of The Universe Next Door certainly is not), with the exception of one who knows he’s in a novel and may be physically traveling between stories.

    @9bis: Zardoz is that special kind of bad movie that you can watch and get a feeling for the good movie it could have been, if the cast and crew had been equal to the task. As it is, it’s a bad movie that I enjoy more than a few good movies I’ve seen.

    Saw Makoto Shinkai’s new film Weathering With You tonight, and it is a good good movie, like everything else he’s done to date. My screening was followed by a brief ‘interview’ with Shinkai (quotes because there was no interviewer role; it was edited together from con appearances and some in-studio talking head work) that I found interesting – especially where he addresses the dissenting audience reactions he expects to the denouement of Weathering.

  6. (1) The comment from Kurtzman is either extremely cynical or drenched in self-delusion. I know which I favour.

  7. (2) More context from Snopes, and yes, it gets worse:

    The controversy over the proposed measures arose in part from the background and stated intentions of its sponsor. In a Jan. 13 Facebook post, Baker said the bill was designed to target “events like ‘Drag Queen Story Hours’” and “agenda driven literary content designed to encourage excessive interest in sexual matters.”

  8. “For tuppence more, up scrolls the pixel!”

    (Combining two of today’s elements: donkeys and Pratchett.)

  9. I knew Robert Anton Wilson very well. Let’s say that he reserved judgement about some of the stuff he wrote about. Not counting the parts he made up out of whole-cloth. (And, I’m proud to say, at least one crazy theory I invented made it into one of his books. Though I’d have to go re-read them to remember which book and which theory at this late date.)

    He had two main tricks he used. First, when he found existing conspiracy theories which contradicted each other, he would try to find ways to justify claiming they were both true. Which lead to some truly outrageous and entertaining speculation. And second, he would invent a series of increasingly implausible things leading up to something truly implausible, but true, so that if someone were to check, they’d most likely check the most implausible (but true) one, and not bother checking the ones he made up. 🙂

    I think my favorite of his is probably Masks of the Illuminati, which pits James Joyce and Albert Einstein against Aleister Crowley. It’s less outrageous and more focused than his other books, which makes it quite compelling and more believable. And scarier.

  10. @Meredith: I’ve never seen a ride-the-donkey-up-the-hill in the US that I saw on Rhodes — but I’ve seen only a fraction of the US. (That fraction may be more than many Filers as my family drove around the country one summer during my teen years, but it’s still way under half.) I do remember seeing a corral of mules at the top of the Grand Canyon recently, but those were for serious trips (most of mile of vertical, taking a day each way). There used to be an … entertainment … involving playing softball on donkeyback, but I haven’t heard of it in a long time; I suspect the SPCA got involved.

    wrt Milne: I got to see some of the originals (drawings and at least one of the stuffed animals, IIRC) at an exhibit at the MFA recently. Interesting, but the biggest jolt was the marked stair halfway down a mockup staircase. (“The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil” was the first Jefferson Airplane I heard; I still think it’s one of the all-time great 60’s rock songs.)

  11. Donkey basketball is still around as a fund raising event. You can find various websites who provide the donkeys and equipment. Obviously some people have pointed out that it’s not good for the donkeys being pushed and pulled around by people who have no experience handling them.

  12. I think pony rides are more common in the US, though that may just be because there used to be one in the regional park near my home town.

    As for “Eeyore” sounding like a donkey–that’s really only true in the debased (i.e. non-rhotic) version of English spoken in much of England these days. :p

  13. @Chip: Thanks

    @Meredith: Good point!

    Speaking of swords: https://www.ign.com/articles/the-sword-in-the-stone-pulled-out-by-guest-at-disneyland

    One Disneyland visitor reportedly succeeded in pulling King Arthur’s sword from the stone, effectively breaking the famous Fantasyland prop.

    After initial reports that claimed the sword’s sudden removal was a part of King Arthur Carousel’s upcoming refurbishment, WDW News Today reports (via Cinemablend) that it was actually a determined park visitor that yanked the hilt right out of place.

    Two separate witnesses both told WDWNT about the event, with one person saying, “My friend Sam broke it last week on the 8th when we went to Disneyland. He literally ripped it out. The staff said that it was really old and that’s why he was able to do so.”

  14. @Xtifr:

    As for “Eeyore” sounding like a donkey–that’s really only true in the debased (i.e. non-rhotic) version of English spoken in much of England these days. :p

    Or in Boston and environs. True story: a long-ago bridge partner, a native of the Boston area, met my then girlfriend, who was working with students on theater issues; she told him the first thing she’d do was fix his r’s, and he said with no hesitation that he didn’t see what was wrong with his aaahz. It’s nice when actors pick up their cues…

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