Pixel Scroll 6/8/19 The Moon is A Harsh Marstress

(1) CURRENT FUTURES. Mary Beth Griggs tells fans where they can “Dive into a new sci-fi anthology set in the world’s oceans” at The Verge.

Genetic editing, holograms, and underwater cities each make appearances in the 18 stories and 18 accompanying illustrations. The stories were edited by sci-fi author Ann VanderMeer, and come from authors all over the world. One author, Lauren Beukes, even wrote her story, “Her Seal Skin Coat” while in Antarctica.

…The 18 writers — all women — were prompted to imagine a future in which the innovations of today have had a positive impact, and have altered humanity’s relationship with the ocean.

The stories are available to read free here — Current Futures: A Sci-Fi Ocean Anthology.

The original stories were authored by Elizabeth Bear, Lauren Beukes, Catherynne Valente, Brenda Peynado, Karen Lord, Gu Shi, Marie Lu, Nalo Hopkinson, Sheila Finch, Mohale Mashigo, Gwyneth Jones, Kameron Hurley, Madeline Ashby, Deborah Biancotti, Brenda Cooper, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Malka Older, and Vandana Singh.

The original artwork is by Tracy J. Lee, Nancy Liang, Cornelia Li, Robin Eisenberg, Jing Jing Tsong, Carolina Rodriguez Fuenmayor, Andreea Dobrin, Ayelet Raziel, Chiara Zarmati, Daria Kirpach, Rosanna Tasker, Alyssa Winans, Christina Dill, Kaela Graham, Priscilla Kim, Jazmen Richardson, Kristen Zirngibl, and Michela Buttignol.

(2) COMICS COLLECTION PRESERVED. The University of South Carolina has acquired one of the largest collections of its kind: “The Gary Lee Watson Comics Collection includes 143,000 unique comics, 20,000 magazines, 15,000 paperbacks and 5,000 pulp publications and other items.” “Blockbuster comics collection comes to UofSC”

It took two trips to Ohio to pick up the collection — with two 26-foot-long moving trucks. Weighing in at about 36,000 pounds, the collection represents all comics genres and publishers and gives the university community access to a significant percentage of all comics ever published.

The collection also represents all eras of American comics production, including the Platinum Age (1897-1938), when comic books often consisted of compilations of newspaper comic strips, Golden Age (1938-1950), during which superheroes like Superman were born, Silver Age (1956-1970), Bronze Age (1970-1985) and Modern Age (1985 to present).

A comics collection may seem out of sync for the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, which is best known for its Audubon prints, medieval manuscripts and Scottish literature, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Pat Conroy collections. “This is a new direction for us,” says Sudduth, “but this is precisely what special collections are really all about.”

The Library Journal also covered the story: “University of South Carolina Receives a Gift of Over 180,000 Comics”.

While all your favorite superheroes, Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Hulk, etc., are to be found, there are also some early characters such as Mutt and Jeff from the beginning of the twentieth century. Those were the days when comics were actually comical. Undoubtedly, there are many as yet unidentified titles hidden away in all of those boxes.

An estimated value has been placed on the collection of $2.5 million.

(3) ROMERO ARCHIVES. And a different genre collection has landed at the University of Pittsburgh – Library Journal has the story: “University of Pittsburgh Acquires Romero Collection, To Found Horror Studies Center”.

University archives can be a resting place for papers and special collections—or they can reanimate them so that they may live on. The University of Pittsburgh’s (Pitt) University Library System (ULS) has acquired the archives of pioneering horror filmmaker George A. Romero (1940–2017), including correspondence, scripts, footage, promotional material, and props from his legendary films. These include Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, both shot near Pittsburgh. The new archive will form the foundation for a future horror studies center, building on collections already housed in ULS archives and special collections and funded in part by the George A. Romero Foundation.

Pittsburgh is an appropriate home for the George A. Romero Collection, to be housed in Pitt’s Hillman Library; Romero graduated from Carnegie Mellon University (then the Carnegie Institute of Technology) in 1960 and stayed in the area shooting commercials and short films, including a segment for Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. The film that launched his career, the 1968 horror movie Night of the Living Dead, was shot outside Pittsburgh, and his second zombie film, Dawn of the Dead (1978), takes place in a shopping mall in nearby Monroeville. As the films’ popularity grew, Pittsburgh became known as the “Zombie Capital of the World.” Local events celebrating Romano include annual “zombie walks,” where fans dress up as the undead and stagger through the mall and Evans City Cemetery.

(4) WTF MOMENTS. WhatCulture invites you to count down Avengers: Endgame – 40 WTF Moments. Number 40 is Hawkeye asking for mayo on his hot dog. (I suspect some of you may wind up asking WTF about these choices.)

(5) TODAY IN HISTORY.

  • June 8, 1949 — George Orwell’s 1984 was first printed, in London. (Read James Bacon’s related post here.)

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born June 8, 1910 John W. Campbell Jr. As you well know, he was editor of Astounding Science Fiction (later to be called Analog Science Fiction and Fact) from late 1937 until his death and was part of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. A not terribly prolific writer, his novella Who Goes There? was adapted as The Thing from Another World, The Thing and yes once again The Thing. (Died 1971.)
  • Born June 8, 1928 Kate Wilhelm. Author of the Hugo Award–winning Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang. She also won a Hugo Award for Best Related Book and a Locus Award for Best Nonfiction for Storyteller: Writing Lessons and More from 27 Years of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. SFWA renamed their Solstice Award the Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award. She established the Clarion Workshop with her husband Damon Knight and writer Robin Scott Wilson. (Died 2018.)
  • Born June 8, 1943 Colin Baker, 76. The Sixth Doctor. Ok let’s admit that Doctors are a matter of personal taste. So don’t be offended when I say he is my least favorite Doctor. Neither his character nor costuming was to my liking. That he came between Tom Baker and Sylvester McCoy who I both really like definitely doesn’t help. If you like him as a Doctor, good for you. 
  • Born June 8, 1946 Elizabeth A. Lynn, 73. She is well known for being one of the first genre writers to introduce gay and lesbian characters as part of her stories. So in honor of her, the widely known A Different Light chain of LGBT bookstores  took its name from her novel of that name. Her best known work is The Chronicles of Tornor series. 
  • Born June 8, 1947 Sara Paretsky, 72. Best best known for her private detective novels focused on V.I. Warshawski, she has one genre novel in Ghost Country. It, too, involves V.I. Warshawski and may or may not involve things of supernatural nature.
  • Born June 8, 1973 Lexa Doig, 46. Cowgirl the hacker on TekWar,  Andromeda Ascendant/Rommie on Andromeda and  Sonya Valentine on Continuum. Also Dale Arden in the animated Flash Gordon series. One-offs in Earth: Final Conflict, The 4400Stargate SG-1, Eureka, V, Smallville, Supernatural and Primeval: New World

(7) COMICS SECTION.

  • Bizarro cracks a pretty good Aladdin joke.

(8) DRAGONS FOR HIRE. I have it on good authority from io9 that “The Game of Thrones Series Finale Would Have Been Very Different if an AI Had Been in Charge”. College Humor turned the output into this video:

(9) WORDS TO LIVE BY.

(10) WISDOM PASSED ON. Elsewhere at the Australian National Convention, people were equipped with what they needed to survive:

(11) SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVILS. Not exactly SJWCs…. “Tasmanian Devils filmed in Australia playing in the snow”.

Snow may have caused travel issues in Australia, but these Tasmanian Devils still had fun.

The endangered marsupials live at a special breeding facility in the country’s southeast.

(12) MOMBOT. I Am Mother started airing on Netflix on June 7.

A sci-fi thriller about a teenage girl (Clara Rugaard), who is the first of a new generation of humans to be raised by Mother (Rose Byrne), a robot designed to repopulate the earth after the extinction of humankind. But the pair’s unique relationship is threatened when an injured stranger (Hilary Swank) arrives with news that calls into question everything Daughter has been told about the outside world and her Mother’s intentions.

(13) CAT BACKWARDS. Space.com inquires: “Can Physicists Really Save Schrödinger’s Cat?”

…In physics, Schrödinger’s cat is a thought experiment in which a cat is trapped in a box with a particle that has a 50-50 chance of decaying. If the particle decays, the cat dies; otherwise, the cat lives. Until you open the box, however, you have no idea what happened to the cat, so he exists in a superposition of both dead-and-alive states, just as electrons and other subatomic particles simultaneously exist in multiple states (such as multiple energy levels) until they’re observed. When a particle is observed and randomly chooses to occupy just one energy level, it’s called a quantum jump. Physicists originally thought that quantum jumps were instantaneous and discrete: Poof! And suddenly, the particle is in one state or another.

But in the 1990s, more physicists began to suspect that the particles follow a linear path as they take their jump, before entering their final state. At that time, physicists didn’t have the technology to observe those trajectories, said Todd Brun, a physicist at the University of Southern California, who was not involved in the research. That’s where Devoret and his co-authors come in.

The Yale physicists shone a bright light at an atom and observed how the light scattered as the quantum jump occurred. They found that the quantum jumps were continuous rather than discrete, and that jumps to different discrete energy levels held to specific “flight” paths.

Once the physicists knew the specific state the atom approached, they were then able to reverse that flight, by applying a force in just the right direction with just the right strength, said lead author and Yale University physicist Zlatko Minev. Correctly identifying the type of jump was crucial to successfully reversing the flight, he added. “It’s very precarious,” Minev told Live Science….

(14) THE ROOK. STARZ premieres The Rook on June 30.

The first step toward Myfanwy’s future is uncovering her past. Starring Emma Greenwell, Olivia Munn, Jon Fletcher, and Adrian Lester.

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

15 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 6/8/19 The Moon is A Harsh Marstress

  1. Thanks for the title credit!

    (6) I read Campbell’s Arcot, Morey and Wade space operas as a teen (and didn’t get to Doc Smith until later) so Campbell’s work sits in the place in my mind where a lot of other fans seem to keep Smith.

  2. (14) I rarely am a fan of urban fantasy, but received an ARC of The Rook some years ago at American Library Association annual, and quite thoroughly enjoyed it. Enough to pick up the sequel. Definitely plan to check out that show.

  3. 6) While I am not familiar with most of Kate Wilhelm’s bibliography, I love her 1983 SF novel Welcome, Chaos, a near-future work that quietly, carefully knocks your socks off.

  4. 14) I am not a big reader of UF either, but interesting…

    5) This is the fourth comment, but as 1984 teaches us, 2+2 can equal 5 if Big Brother says so, so this is really the 5th comment. Aristotle!

  5. I was invited onto the set of Dr Who when Colin Baker was the Doctor. It was the most interesting and simultaneously boring thing I’d witnessed. I do remember the director, trying to figure out how many cameras he had (one was locked down on a special effect) and re-allocating shots, rounding on a camera operator writing notes on the script and saying “Pen! Never use a pen when I direct, always use a pencil!”

    Anyway, happy birthday Colin Baker.

  6. Are we allowed to add birthdays to the list? Don’t answer that. I’m doing it:

    Suzanne Tompkins, aka Suzle: June 8, 1948. Co-founder of the Western Pennsylvania SF Association; co-chair with Ginjer Buchanan of the first PghLange (Pittsburgh regional convention of the late 1960s and 1970s); co-editor of Granfalloon, with Linda Bushyager for its first six or seven issues; co-editor, with Jerry Kaufman, of three fanzines: The Spanish Inquisition, Mainstream, and Littlebrook (Span Inq and Mainstream were both Hugo nominees); 2005 TAFF Delegate to Interaction, a Glasgow Worldcon; co-chair of fifth Corflu fanzine convention, with Jerry Kaufman; hotel liaison for many small Seattle area cons; Facilities honcho (but not Department Head) for several Worldcons; and, oh yes, married to Jerry Kaufman. (Are you surprised by that?)

    I’ve left out one or two things.

  7. Jerry Kaufman asks Are we allowed to add birthdays to the list? Don’t answer that. I’m doing it:

    Yes, or to quote Molly in Joyce’s Ulysses:

    I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish Wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

  8. Ah, PhgLange! We honeymooned at the 1970 PhgLange and got to hear Toastmaster Silverberg say of the GoH, “So we won’t have Harlan Ellison to kick around any more?” (IIRC, Harlan had announced he was leaving SF.)

  9. Russell Letson: Hey, I got to hear Harlan Ellison leave SF in his 1975 NASFiC speech, too — good times!

  10. @Rob Thornton: I’ve read quite a bit of Wilhelm, including several of her mundane mysteries (Barbara Holloway, Charlie&Constance). She always had particular skill at showing how ordinary-seeming people could produce — not the sort of raving-mucker-lunacy that shows up in too many US headlines and makes people say “But they were such a quiet person!” but the sort of thing that makes the world worse, just by stepping into grayer and grayer areas.

  11. Russell Letson: I had no idea you were at that PghLange and am surprised we didn’t meet there. If we did, I’m surprised I’ve forgotten.

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