Pixel Scroll 2/21/24 Born Of Scroll And Pixel?

(1) NOT A NEW PHENOMENON. [Item by Anne Marble.] If the article quoted in Seanan McGuire’s thread is any indication, the people marketing “romantasy” seem to think they’re the first to publish fantasy novels for women. Or maybe they know better — but they don’t care because they’re trying to market romantasy/romantic fantasy.  Bluesky thread starts here.

(2) WELCOME TO DYSTOPIA. Like Abigail Nussbaum says in her headline: “The 2023 Hugo Awards: Somehow, It Got Worse” at Asking the Wrong Questions.

… I’m going to say this again, because it is so shocking that it seems to have taken a lot of people some time to grasp the enormity of it: hundreds, perhaps even thousands of valid, legal nominating ballots were dropped from the final nominating stats, apparently under the pretext of having represented a slate, even though slates are perfectly legal under the Hugo rules. This was done on the orders of the Hugo administrator, with apparently no outside input or discussion, and appears to have elicited so little response from the Hugo team that they are casually mentioning it as if it’s nothing. If these numbers are correct, it’s entirely possible that the whole Hugo ballot should have looked completely different, and that none of the eventual winners in the fiction categories should have even been nominated.

What this means is that the entire 2023 Hugo scandal is something completely different from what we’ve understood it as during the last month. Appalling as it is, the choice to screen English-language nominees for ideological compatibility may, in fact, be a sideshow to the real scandal, which is that hundreds of Chinese voters have been disenfranchised. And—barring even more revelations—this disenfranchisement cannot be blamed on PRC sensibilities and censorship. I truly doubt that it was in the interest of China, or the Chinese business interests who took over Worldcon, to remove Chinese-language nominees from last year’s Hugo ballot. This decision came from the American and Canadian staffers who made up the English-language Hugo team, many of them Worldcon volunteers of long standing.

In this context, it is infuriating to recall just how quickly the response to our original sense of what this scandal was turned to anti-democratic measures and calls to limit the power of rank-and-file Worldcon members. “Elections have consequences!” crowed the people who are still pissed they weren’t allowed to steal the site selection vote in 2021, while others called to limit site selection to those with “skin in the game”—read, those with the wherewithal to travel to US-based conventions. But as it turns out, the call was coming from inside the house. This was never a China problem. It’s an us problem. If the allegations that are now emerging claiming that McCarty has behaved this way in the past, and also harassed other Worldcon staffers, are to be believed (and there is certainly more than enough reason to believe them at this point), it’s a profound failure on the part of Worldcon and its membership to police toxic members, which has now blown up in all our faces….

(3) TCHAIKOVSKY’S STATEMENT ABOUT 2023 HUGO. His Children of Time was announced as winner of the 2023 Best Series Hugo, however, after all the revelations “Adrian Tchaikovsky Will No Longer Cite His 2023 Hugo”.

There are many reasonable points of view about how to deal with the awards. File 770’s goal is to support and respect the recipients’ decisions.

Another author, Samantha Mills, recently made a decision comparable to Tchaikovsky’s, in a blog post titled “’Rabbit Test’ unwins the Hugo”

(4) THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING. The Hugo Awards scandal has even made it into Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter – “Litteraturpris valde bort kinesiska författare”. The article is behind a paywall, though that’s honestly only a problem if you read Swedish.

(5) RAH VS. PKD. Giant Freakin Robot, in “The Sci-Fi Master Whose Work Has Been Ignored By Hollywood, And That Needs To Change”, feels Robert A. Heinlein deserves the kind of cinematic attention given to Philip K. Dick. (Survey says – *bzzzt*! “Wrong!”)

…Hollywood has had an ongoing love affair with the works of Phillip K. Dick for decades now. Sometimes it’s a healthy relationship, giving us masterworks such as Blade Runner. Sometimes it’s downright abusive when it produces flicks like Screamers or Paycheck. And sometimes it splits the difference and serves up enjoyable silliness such as Total Recall.

Still, as many times as the movies have returned to Dick’s catalog, you’d think he was the only SF writer out there. We all know better, of course, and pretty much any SF fan has their dream list of books they’d love to see brought to the silver screen.

If Hollywood really wants to freshen things up, they should take a closer look at the work of Robert A. Heinlein….

(6) BANNED FROM THE HIGHWAY. [Item by Dann.] Remember when non-genre magazines used to publish SFF stories?

Every automobile begins as the sparkle in someone’s eye. In 1981, Neil Peart and his Rush bandmates introduced the world to a Red Barchetta. Saved in an old white-haired uncle’s barn. A relic from before the Motor Law being chased down by gleaming alloy air cars before being saved by a one-lane bridge

But before that, it was an old MGB roadster. Rendered obsolete by wave after wave of modern automobile safety standards had made surviving car crashes not only likely but predictable. The drivers of the newly designed cars expected to walk away from accidents unscathed. As a result, drivers of these Modern Safety Vehicles began targeting older vehicles leaving them in mangled heaps. Those driving older cars were likely to be left in a similarly mangled condition. The price for driving a classic. And so the driver of the old MGB engages in a race for his life pursued by a pair of MSVs.

The story was “A Nice Morning Drive“. It was written by Richard S. Foster and first published in the November 1973 issue of Road & Track magazine. Neil Peart had encountered the story and was inspired to re-tell it in a more distant future where automobiles were banned. It appeared in 1981 on the quintessential RUSH album, Moving Pictures as the second track, “Red Barchetta“.

The band had tried to contact Richard, but R&T no longer had his current address. They did add a credit note referencing the original story in the liner notes.

It was many years later before a friend pointed out that Neil had been inspired by Richard’s story. And it was a few years after that when Richard began corresponding with Neil. The two eventually planned a motorcycle ride along the East Coast. It turns out that they both owned the same model motorcycle, the BMW R1200GS.

As a footnote, Moving Pictures came out in my junior year of high school when I took an advanced composition class. At some point, a red car entered into the zeitgeist of my classmates. The model would shift to suit the moods and tastes of various authors. Sometimes it was only glimpsed under a protective tarp. Other times it would it would fly along country roads kicking up a stream of fall leaves. Our automobile appreciations lasted about a month before our teacher put a firm but kindly end to our vehicular ruminations.

(7) BACK IN ACTION. Nancy Collins’ February 19 update to her GoFundMe backers is good news indeed: “Fundraiser by Nancy Collins : What Doesn’t Kill Me Leaves Me With Medical Bills”.

I want to take a moment to thank all of you once again for the great kindness and generosity you have shown me in the recent weeks and also update you on my current status and plans.

This coming weekend (February 23rd-25th) I will be a guest at Pensacon 2024 in Pensacola, FL. My doctor says I’m in good enough health to travel as long as I continue to pace myself and take my meds and supplements. And, to be blunt, I can’t afford to pass up what is likely my only comic con appearance for the foreseeable future. So if any of you who have donated are at the convention this coming weekend, please stop by so I can thank you in person. My good friend, Adam–who is the one who talked me into going to the ER instead of gutting it out another 24 hours–will be driving me there and back, as well as helping set-up and run my merchandise table for the weekend, so I have reliable support with me.

I have 3 more weeks, more or less, of blood thinners twice a day ahead of me before I get an idea of whether or not the blood clots were a one-off event or a symptom of something more serious. Until I know one way or another, I will be staying close to home. However, I still plan to be at the Outer Dark Writer’s Symposium in Atlanta next month, health permitting.

(8) LEE AND MILLER PHOTO. Following yesterday’s announcement of Steve Miller’s death, Andrew Porter sent File 770 his photo of the Steve and Sharon at Book Expo.

(9) MARK MERLINO DIES. Mark Merlino, one of the early founders of organized Anime and Furry fandoms in North America, died February 20 at age 71. He suffered a stroke in December, then was diagnosed with stage 4 liver cancer about two weeks ago. 

Merlino was known for organizing ConFurence, the very first furry convention, which laid the groundwork for the community’s expansion and visibility. His influential role was also recognized in the documentary feature The Fandom, showcasing his significant contributions.

Mark Merlino in 2006.

(10) RICHARD MATHEWS (1944-2024). Scholar Douglas Anderson pays tribute to a colleague in “R.I.P. Richard Mathews (1944-2024)” at Tolkien and Fantasy.

I just googled to see if my old friend Richard Mathews was still the Director of the University of Tampa Press, only to find out that he died last month.

I met him at the 1987 Mythcon in Milwaukee, where we both appeared on a panel on David Lindsay. We found we had many common interests. Richard had published, with Borgo Press, a short book on Tolkien, Lightning from a Clear Sky (1978), and other short books on William Morris and Brian Aldiss. His most notable work was the Twayne volume Fantasy: The Liberation of Imagination (1997; reissued in 2012), which was filled with insights despite the somewhat odd structure of the book (presumably imposed upon him as part of the series it was in). Richard also contributed introductions to some of the William Morris reprints for the Newcastle fantasy series in the 1970s…. 

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born February 21, 1946 Alan Rickman. (Died 2016.) The first time I saw Alan Rickman was in the decidedly not-genre role of German terrorist leader Hans Gruber in Die Hard, a film that’s still high on my list of great thriller films. Great role for him, too. It was amazingly his first film role.

He would won a BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for playing the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. I actually did see that film. No, I’ll never watch again. Simon R. Green’s publicist tells me he made a lot of money for writing the novelization. 

Rickman went on to play the wizard Severus Snape in the Harry Potter series. I can’t say I cared for the character but I don’t think we were supposed to. I never got beyond a hundred pages in the first novel before I gave up reading it, but loved the films. 

While in the film The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the GalaxyWarwick Davis played Marvin, the android who was clinically depressed and in the novels I thought a royal pain in the ass, it was Alan Rickman who actually voiced the character.

He also voiced Absolem, the Caterpillar in an odd version of Alice in Wonderland. Look it up. Trust me, it’s weird.

And yes, I saved the best first last for last which as you already know is his role in the Hugo Award winning Galaxy Quest which is by far his best genre role. Alexander Dane is a Shakesperean actor who resents his character  Dr. Lazarus, the ship’s science officer. His catch phrase? Oh, you know that by heart.

(12) COMICS SECTION.

  • Macanudo shows who really was entitled to say, “How wude!!”

(13) ALL IN THE FOUND FAMILY. [Item by Steven French.] How the story of the ‘Hopkinsville goblins’ led to ET, Gremlins and a bunch of other movies! “The Long, Surprising Legacy of the Hopkinsville Goblins” at Atlas Obscura.

…THE STORY COMES TO US from the local newspaper Kentucky New Era, which, on August 22, 1955, reported strange goings-on the previous night, eight miles north of Hopkinsville, Kentucky. At about 11:00 pm, two cars arrived at the local police station, blasting out of the night filled with at least five adults and several children, all of whom were highly agitated. “We need help,” they told the police. “We’ve been fighting them for nearly four hours.”

Once they’d calmed down enough to talk, they unfurled a strange story. One of the men, Billy Ray Taylor, had been visiting from Pennsylvania. At one point, he went outside to fetch water from the farm’s well. As he walked through the failing light, he saw a circular-shaped object hover through the air before coming to rest in a nearby gully…

… Concerned, Taylor retreated inside and returned with a shotgun to investigate. As he walked into the gloom, a strange, goblin-like thing with glowing eyes appeared and moved toward him. It had “huge eyes,” and hands out of proportion with its body, and looked to be wearing some kind of “metal plate.” Taylor retreated to the house yet again and grabbed a .22 caliber pistol, while Lucky Sutton grabbed a shotgun and joined him.

A creature—whether it was the same one, they didn’t know—appeared in the window, and Sutton unloaded his shotgun at it, blowing out the window screen. When they went outside to see if they’d hit anything, Taylor felt a “huge hand” reach down from the low roof above and grab his hair….

(14) CARVING OUT A PLACE IN SPACE. “Japan to launch world’s first wooden satellite to combat space pollution” – the Guardian has the story.

The LignoSat probe has been built of magnolia wood, which, in experiments carried out on the International Space Station (ISS), was found to be particularly stable and resistant to cracking. Now plans are being finalised for it to be launched on a US rocket this summer.

The timber satellite has been built by researchers at Kyoto University and the logging company Sumitomo Forestry in order to test the idea of using biodegradable materials such as wood to see if they can act as environmentally friendly alternatives to the metals from which all satellites are currently constructed.

“All the satellites which re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere burn and create tiny alumina particles, which will float in the upper atmosphere for many years,” Takao Doi, a Japanese astronaut and aerospace engineer with Kyoto University, warned recently. “Eventually, it will affect the environment of the Earth.”…

(15) IT’S SUN-GRY. The Guardian reports — “Astronomers discover universe’s brightest object – a quasar powered by a black hole that eats a sun a day”. (“Feed me!”)

The brightest known object in the universe, a quasar 500tn times brighter than our sun, was “hiding in plain sight”, researchers say.

Australian scientists spotted a quasar powered by the fastest growing black hole ever discovered. Its mass is about 17bn times that of our solar system’s sun, and it devours the equivalent of a sun a day.

The light from the celestial object travelled for more than 12bn years to reach Earth….

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Animation Magazine encourages readers: “Watch: Prime Video Sneak Peeks ‘The Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy’ in New Clip”. The series debuts February 23.

…In a new exclusive clip shared with Animation Magazine, we get an advance look at the premiere episode. The excerpt features Dr. Klak (Keke Palmer), Dr. Sleech (Stephanie Hsu), Dr. Vlam (Maya Rudolph) and Dr. Plowp (Kieran Culkin). In Season 1, doctors Sleech and Klak take on a highly dangerous and potentially groundbreaking case and, in doing so, put existence itself in jeopardy. (Although considering their dismal personal lives, oblivion might be an improvement.)…

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

Adrian Tchaikovsky Will No Longer Cite His 2023 Hugo

Adrian Tchaikovsky

Adrian Tchaikovsky has announced on his website that due to the revelation of major problems with 2023 Hugo administration he will no longer acknowledge the Best Series Hugo presented to Children of Time.


A Statement on the 2023 Hugo Awards

When the Children of Time books won the 2023 Hugo for best series I was overjoyed. The Hugos have been a major feature of the genre fiction landscape for decades. It should be a signal honour to be shortlisted for one, let alone to win.

Over the last month or so, a cascade of information has been released or uncovered demonstrating that those responsible for administering the award for the 2023 Worldcon (held at Chengdu, China) took a variety of actions that significantly distorted the result.

For details, I’ll direct you to Abigail Nussbaum’s writing here  which is up to date as at the time of this statement. However the TLDR is:

      1. Several works receiving large numbers of votes were ruled ineligible for unstated reasons, which from leaked emails appears to be the US-based administrators unilaterally deciding that they might cause political offence.
      2. A number of Chinese-language nominations appear to have been entirely disallowed.

The second, in what seems to be a mass disenfranchisement of Chinese voters, means that the composition of the shortlists, as they were presented to be voted on, was entirely unreliable, with an unknown number of Chinese nominees denied their chance at contending.

Based on this information, I cannot consider myself a Hugo winner and will not be citing the 2023 award result in my biographical details, or on this site.

The Hugo awards have the potential to be a respected pillar of the international fan community. I would be delighted to be considered, honestly and on my own merits, for such an award in the future. I look forward to systemic changes so that future awards can be administered with an eye to clarity, equity and accountability. 


[Thanks to JJ for the story.]

Cats Sleep on SFF: Shards of Earth

Michelle Morrell calls cats and books “Two of my favorite things!”


Loki is the tabby, our dim but sweet bruiser. He has tried to jump through a few too many closed windows in his life and it shows. He is part Maine Coon and weighs more than a bowling ball, which becomes obvious when he gets the zoomies and sounds like one rolling down the stairs at 2 a.m.


Pumpkin, aka Fuzzbutt, aka Miss Priss (RIP) was our calico queen, she ruled with an iron paw and was a stone cold killer, the scourge of the rodent world. 


Pips (short for Pipsqueak) is the tuxedo, the old man of the house. He’s 16 and can still beat out every other cat at speed when he hears that it’s food time. He has mad stealth skills and is relentless in pursuing his main passion … eating. 

Zero is the black cat, the baby of the family. She’s 100% attitude and lip, and will follow us around letting us know at full volume every injustice perpetrated by the other cats. She likes to hide in dark places and in piles of black clothing so she can scare the heck out of anyone tripping her proximity alarm. 


Photos of your felines (or whatever you’ve got!) resting on genre works are welcome. Send to mikeglyer (at) cs (dot) com

Michaele Jordan Reviews the 2023 Best Novella Hugo Finalists

By Michaele Jordan: Friends, as I’ve mentioned in previous years, I always read all the Hugo nominees. Usually I do this as soon as the nominees are announced. But this year, maybe because I was so focused on the Fan Writer Hugo (You rock, Chris!), I didn’t get to it in time. So I’m reading them now.

But I didn’t cheat. I pulled a list of the nominees in plain text, without the underlining that marked the winners. I’ve always read the candidates without knowing who would win. Why should this year be different?

I’ll start with the novellas, because they were mostly available in book form at the library, and since they’re short, I can finish them quickly. So here we go.


Even Though I Knew the End by C.L. Polk (Tordotcom)

This book presents itself as a detective story. But for me, the biggest mystery in this book was the mystery of what the title was supposed to mean. There is, I admit, a scene in which the protagonist, Helen, sits down on the sofa and watches an old movie, “even though,” she remarks, “I knew the end.”

The scene itself does not appear to be important, just there for mood or characterization. We don’t learn what the movie was, or whether Helen liked it or not. She appears to be just killing time. It’s never referred to again. In fact, less attention is paid to that movie than to the numerous cups of coffee she consumes. Helen is particular about coffee.

I believe Mx. Polk focused on that coffee specifically to establish Helen as a typical noir detective –  smart,  world-weary and unflappable. Helen just happens to be an auspex, or a magical detective. She receives a commission from a mysterious beautiful woman, and goes to work investigating a particularly horrific serial killer.

At the crime scene, Helen is confronted by a team of magical authorities. The  unflappable world-weary pose drops like a rock. She becomes a heart-broken woman, desperate to reconcile with one of the magic-cops, who hates her for some as-yet-unrevealed offense. (Mx. Polk does like to juggle tropes; their characters change like a cage full of chameleons.) What with the yearning looks, and the frigid resistance, we are led to suspect a tragic romance, torn apart by some misunderstanding which will eventually be resolved by a little honesty.

But no. That’s not it. Soon we will meet Edith, and Helen will turn into a deeply caring, romantic lover, who wants nothing in the world so much as to escape all this darkness, and run away with her true love, only. . .  she can’t. She has a dreadful secret.

She has only a few days to live. Now that, we probably didn’t see coming. It turns out that our warm-hearted, honorable, caring protagonist sold her soul to the devil ten years earlier, and her contract is nearly up. I admit that I would not normally expect someone with no soul to be warm-hearted, honorable and caring, but this is a different world.

Apparently here, your soul has nothing to do with your character – it’s just a thing. Sort of a ticket stub to get you into heaven (which is real, and so sublime that anybody brought back from there to life will hold a permanent grudge.) A world so different from ours that angels can be serial killers, and the most reliable, trustworthy character in the book is a demon. There is nothing in this ‘mystery’ that a reader can hope to solve, since no human rules apply, and all the clues are magical artifacts never heard of in our mundane reality. Just gotta hope you love the miasma.


Into the Riverlands by Nghi Vo (Tordotcom)

This story is strangely reminiscent of The Canterbury Tales. In the Chaucer, a large group of pilgrims are travelling together to the shrine of Thomas Becket (who got sainted for pissing off his drinking buddy (the king) when he turned into a Jesus freak). They pass the time with a storytelling contest. Into the Riverlands follows a good natured (gender-free) cleric named Chih who picks up some travelling companions on their way to Betony Dock, and they, too, tell each other stories along the way.

The resemblance ends there. The Riverside party is much smaller. And Chaucer didn’t include bandits or martial artists, as does Ms. Vo.

This book is the third in the Singing Hills cycle – all featuring Cleric Chih of the Singing Hills Abbey –  following The Empress of Salt and Fortune and When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain. The liner notes assure me that the books can be read independently, in no particular order. This is true. I skipped the liner notes, and never noticed that I had landed in a series.

Chih is a gentle, easygoing person.  They are a peacemaker, with no fighting skills. Their abbey is more concerned with the preservation of history than the observance of ritual, and Chih takes that calling very seriously, travelling extensively in search of more historical tales. They are assisted in their work by their companion, Almost Brilliant, who looks like a beautiful bird, except it talks, and is a brilliant scholar with total recall.   As you might guess, the book is a bit episodic, but not unpleasantly so. Just the opposite. It is charming, and I recommend it.


Mirror Mended by Alix E. Harrow (Tordotcom)

This book is a sequel to A Spindle Splintered by Alix E. Harrow, which took the best novella Hugo in 2022. I remarked then that it had a truly splendid, heartrending opening, but the very act of launching into the story resolved Sleeping Beauty’s initial peril, leaving the story with nowhere to go. The ending was ineffectual. Some magic gets thrown around, everybody’s problems are fixed, except for the protagonist, and she decides that maybe she’ll become a magical superhero rescuing timid princesses. I confess, I was extremely surprised that it took the Hugo.

But that was then. Over a year ago. Picking up A Mirror Mended, I again skipped the liner notes, and dove in. And it’s Sleeping Beauty again.  Already I’m rolling my eyes. Is this the new thing? Are we going to get story after story after story about Sleeping Beauty, until she’s as tired as vampires? Very slowly it dawns on me that this is a sequel.

NOT a good idea. Ms. Harrow had already run out of things to say about Sleeping Beauty half way through the first book. You remember (from two paragraphs back) that the protagonist had decided at the end to make a career of rescuing Sleeping Beauty? When A Mirror Mended opens she tells us that she’s done just that. And now she’s bored with it. Excellent! So am I.

So she jumps over to the Snow White story, and decides to rescue the Evil Queen instead, (largely, I suspect, because this particular Snow White is doing a very good job of taking care of herself.) There’s a little shell game with the identity of the Evil Queen, and surprise! one of the Snow Whites IS the Evil Queen.

You may have noticed that my tone has grown a bit snarky. I picked that up from the protagonist. I am sorry to report that I found this to be one of the most heavily padded books I’ve ever slogged through. Virtually nothing really happens, although there is a good deal of running around and being scared. So the author fills in with the protagonist’s voice. She’s very snarky. Except when she’s being sententious. I could go through this whole book, knocking out several whole paragraphs on every page, reducing it to a short story, and nothing of the actual content would be lost.

You are probably getting annoyed with me right now. A lot of people liked this book, or it wouldn’t have made it to the ballot.  But I promise I do not intend to insult them. I don’t really understand where they’re coming from but I fully acknowledge that I might well be missing something and I respect their right to their opinion. That said, I didn’t like this book, and wouldn’t have finished it if it hadn’t been a Hugo nominee.


Ogres by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Solaris)

I had a very difficult time getting into this book. Right off the bat, it’s second person, present tense. I am told that many writers feel that a second person narrative draws the reader into the story by making them feel that the author is addressing them personally. Doesn’t work for me, but maybe it does for most other people. I also don’t like present tense. Some writers think that makes the narrative more immediate. But in my experience, most people don’t talk in present tense. (Except maybe a cop calling in, “I am in the alley behind the suspect’s presumed location. Back-up requested.”)

A couple of pages further in, the narrator refers to Roben, the bandit in the woods (who sometimes wears a hood against the rain) and my shoulders hunch. Another Robin Hood mash-up? I haven’t had much luck with those.

But then, the narrator points out that a half-dozen or so half-starved outcasts living in the woods, no matter the weather, is a singularly unattractive life-style, and they’re not getting rich on the proceeds of banditry, either. At best, they earn the silence of the locals by sharing their meager take. I am charmed. Utterly and completely.

The story opens with a small, agricultural village preparing for a visit from their Landlord. The villagers are human. They are small and fragile, timid and poor. The Landlord – like all nobility – is an ogre. Large and cruel and rich off the labor of others.

This, we are assured, is the natural order of things. It’s preached in the churches. There’s even a  psalm about it, ” The Master in his castle, the poor man at the gate.”

Sir Peter stands maybe nine feet tall, and is correspondingly broad. Other than that, he looks like a human. He’s brought his son Gerald along, to learn the business of managing an estate. He is greeted – so very politely – by the Headman of the village, who has also brought along his son, Torquell.

Torquell is only six feet tall, but that’s big for a human. And although he’s good natured, he thinks pretty highly of himself. The kowtowing to ogres has always grated on his nerves. Gerald soon decides this uppity villager needs to be taught his place. The situation escalates drastically leaving Gerald dead and Torquell on the run.

He’s captured by a bounty hunter, but just when Sir Peter comes to claim him – rubbing his hands together as he plots a gruesome execution – the ogress Isadora appears on the scene. She is rich and important and very curious about this peculiar human. She buys Torquell right out from under Sir Peter. She also turns out to be an astonishingly lenient master. Torquell spends years in her household, being educated and studied.

All of the above is contained in the first seven chapters. It’s told with style and wit, and keeps you turning the pages as fast as you can consume them, even though it’s mostly set-up. But then . . . It’s as if Mr. Tchaikovsky unexpectedly found himself up against a deadline. I can’t help wondering if he had originally intended to make Torquell’s saga another series, but then changed his mind.

The remaining two chapters contain twice the action of the previous seven. They read like a summary of a history book. No more wit. No more personality. Just a list of events spinning by like machine gun fire, only slowing down as the ending – which you DON’T see coming – approaches.

I liked this book, but I didn’t love it. Not Mr. Tchaikovsky’s best work, but good enough for the beach or the airport.


What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher (Nightfire)

I happened to pick up this book on the same day I watched the last episode of the TV series The Fall of the House of Usher. So it gave me a chuckle to discover that this book was also drawn from the Edgar Allen Poe story The Fall of the House of Usher.

Mind you, the two are nothing alike. The TV series is a total remix. The twins Roderick and Madeleine Usher are not heirs to an ancient (but penniless) name, living in an historic ruin on a lakeshore in the middle of nowhere. They are self-made billionaires, and the cracks in their company’s foundation are moral, not literal. Even so, they are still living on shaky ground.

Neither are they childless (Roderick has six kids – all by different mothers) or solitary. They are celebrities, with their pictures on magazine covers and their names in newspaper headlines. This actually makes their story far more tragic than the original. They have so much more to lose. Their downfall is mythic.

What Moves the Dead is much closer to the original Poe.  It places the Usher twins back in their ancient family home – much of which is no longer habitable – located on the shore a lake so dank and murky, it must be called a tarn. The rest of the landscape is equally dismal. Clearly nobody would choose to live there – except  Madeleine Usher.

This is where the story veers from the original Poe. We know that Madeleine insists on continuing to live there. She has a viewpoint. She has a voice. Poe’s House of Usher was NOT a character driven piece. It’s entirely about the mood invoked by the setting, about the desolate and ruined house, and all it symbolized in the way of human futility. There are only two characters.

There’s the narrator. You should know that in the early 19th century, the anonymous third person narration was not much used in fiction. It was seen as being for primarily for use in factual content – journalism and educational text, materials where it was unimportant who was speaking. Fiction was written in first person, told by someone associated closely enough with the events to relate them. So Poe’s story had a narrator: Roderick Usher’s old friend, invited to come for a visit. He has no real voice, and certainly has no opinions. He’s just there to describe what happens, and that’s all he does.

The other character is Roderick Usher, who is described in detail. Sickly and solitary, neurotically high -strung, and subject to a number of nervous complaints. It’s a wonder he has even one friend he can invite to bring some cheer into the house. Or perhaps to bear witness. If he didn’t, who would tell the tale?

You will note that I did not include Madeleine as a character. She’s rarely mentioned, beyond Roderick mentioning she’s unwell. She has no lines. We see her pass by once in a corridor. And then Roderick says she had died, and the narrator helps lay her to rest in the family tomb.

But there are characters in What Moves the Dead. Madeleine and Roderick are a long way from normal, but they are real to us. Even the narrator has a voice. Alex Easton – who was invited by Madeleine, not Roderick – is, in fact, a very interesting character. They are Gallacian, and are extremely entertaining on the subject of their homeland. They’re genderless military personnel, (read the book if you want clarification of that ) and carry arms at all times. They worry about their bad tempered horse. They’re an active participant in the story. And from the moment they arrive at the house (which is still pretty horrible even if it’s no longer be the focus of the story,) they are worried sick about both their old friends. For more than one good reason.

And there IS a story in this version of the story. I won’t risk hinting about that story. It’s deliciously complex and unexpected, Yet affectionately faithful to Poe. I recommend this book to everyone.


Where the Drowned Girls Go by Seanan McGuire (Tordotcom)

This book started with a VERY interesting premise about schools for children touched by magic. Of course, we’ve all heard about magic schools.  But the schools in this book (there are two) are nothing like Hogwarts. In Hogwarts, the students are viewed as gifted, and are being trained to make the most of those gifts. They are acknowledged – and applauded – as special. None of them are less than happy to be there.

But in this book, the schools are reform schools for children who have strayed from reality. Each of these children was already unhappy before they were touched; each felt desperately out of place in their world. And each stumbled on a door, an impossible door, in a place where no door belonged. And because they were unhappy, and felt out of place, they opened that door.

In most books, that is where the story starts. This beginning is followed by a tale of magical adventure, in which wrongs are righted and lessons learned. At the end, some children return to their original homes, better equipped to face that reality. Or some children, who have no place to go back to, remain in the magical lands and build new lives.

But not this time. The children who stepped through the doors find many different magical lands: water worlds, fairy lands, candy lands. They had adventures. Maybe some children stayed on when their adventures were completed, but a lot of them – the ones this story is about – ended up stumbling through magic doors that led them back to that original home where they had already been unhappy and maladjusted. Their travels have NOT prepared them to deal with those old issues. Instead, these children are even further severed from their native reality.

It’s a fairly common occurrence in the world where this story occurs. Often enough that there are schools for these special children. There’s Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children, and there’s the Whitethorn Institute. And that’s where this story begins.

I confess, I did not find this book unflawed. Ms. McGuire has an extensive cast of characters, and since each has a different story, each occasionally takes the lead as the viewpoint character. There’s nothing wrong with that – the characters are all well drawn. But the shifting of viewpoint is irregular, even erratic. I frequently had to stop, and figure out who was talking now. It could have been better handled.

Also, I believe the ending was intended to be open-ended, to leave the characters in place for their new lives. But the set-up didn’t work for me. It seemed to me that the story just drifted vaguely away from its climax to a stop, like a car that’s run out of gas.

Please note: I am NOT saying that I didn’t like this book. As I said, the characters are good. The pictures of boarding school life are scary-accurate. The magic is wonderful – subtle yet pervasive, intriguing and original. I do recommend you read it. If I say it’s not quite perfect, I only mean that very few books are genuinely perfect. This one is definitely very good.

Pixel Scroll 7/9/23 Most Of Us Agree That Everyone Knows That Bacon Holds The Pixels Together

(1) HOW THE BESTSELLER LIST IS WON. Several authors responded to Sarah Pinborough’s question about whether certain kinds of sales affect the UK bestseller lists.

(2) THE FUTURE IS NOW. “’It’s not climate change, it’s everything change’: sci-fi authors take on the global crisis” in the Guardian.

… a new generation of writers now believes it is impossible to write “near future” sci-fi without putting the climate emergency at the forefront of their speculative fiction. For many, this is because they are living through the crisis and can imagine all too easily what may happen if real-life behaviour doesn’t change….

[EJ Swift says] “Climate breakdown is escalating so rapidly that events which 10 years ago might have seemed like the distant future are happening now. Everything is filtered through that lens – even when it’s not the main focus, climate anxiety is there in the periphery.”

Other recent books dealing with the devastation to the climate include Kate Sawyer’s The Stranding, which begins with the striking image of two strangers sheltering in the mouth of a dead, beached whale as a calamitous extinction event hits the world, Susannah Wise’s This Fragile Earth, in which the complete failure of all technology brings into focus our uneasy relationship with nature, and Sarah K Jackson’s Not Alone, about a mother and son surviving in the aftermath of a microplastics storm that has decimated the population.

The science fiction writer Adrian Tchaikovsky, known for his huge, widescreen space opera novels set in distant galaxies, is turning his attention to the climate crisis next year with a horror novella called Saturation Point….

(3) PARSING THE 2023 HUGO BALLOT. John Scalzi shares insights “about why the Hugos are the way they are these days: Why Tor seems to get a lot of nominations, for example, and why diverse groups are represented in the finalist list as they are, and whether the Hugo voters are an insular and monolith bloc” in “Hugo Neepery, Via Reddit” at Whatever.

… If you are wondering how marginalized groups have started to become widely represented in SF/F awards (as they are not just in the Hugos, but also the Nebulas, the Locus and the World Fantasy Awards) there are three factors I want you to consider. The first is the (relative) decline of the “Big Three” short fiction magazines in SF/F (Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF) and the commensurate rise of a series of online short fiction publishing venues like Uncanny, Clarkesworld and Strange Horizons (among others). The Big Three ran on Silent, Boomer and Elder GenX writers, and the market forces for the genre those writers came up in was heavily cis and white and male. The newer venues, by inclination and necessity, cultivated younger generations of writers from more diverse backgrounds. When the Big Three declined and the online magazines rose, their respective stables of authors more or less rose or declined with them, in terms of award consideration.

The second thing to consider is who is buying science fiction and fantasy, both in the magazine and in the publishing houses. Surprise! The editorial stratum of SF/F/H is not the straight, white and (predominately but not exclusively) male enclave it was before; the editorial bench of SF/F/H publishing (and publishing generally) is much more queer and of color than it has been in years past. They are interested in publishing more than just the “usual suspects” in SF/F/H as defined by previous decades and — this is important — the diverse SF/F/H they are acquiring is selling very well. This will naturally have an impact on what is considered at awards time.

The third thing to consider with respect to the Hugos specifically is that close to a decade ago a group of right-wing fans and writers, alarmed by what they saw as left-wing, SJW, politically-correct, etc work creeping into the awards, decided to try to run slates of work to counter that trend. This did not go well, in no small part because their tactics energized a very large group of fandom to counter their actions, including a significant number of more progressive Hugo voters. When the “takeover” of the Hugos failed, most of these right-wing folks flounced from the Hugo voting pool; some of the more progressive voters stayed and continue to vote today. This is reflected in what gets nominated and thus, what eventually becomes a finalist….

(4) CAN YOU BLAME HIS PARENTS? “Calvin and Hobbes’ Creator Already Answered Fans’ Darkest Question” claims MSN.com. The comic’s creator Bill Watterson gave an unexpectedly deep answer to an interviewer.

…WEST: The parents are really an interesting part of the strip. In a way they’re foils, but the thing that interests me is that it’s extremely rare for them to express any love for Calvin. Is that simply because it doesn’t have any comic potential, or is it something inherent in their characters?

WATTERSON: Again, I feel like I’m falling into the trap of psychoanalyzing the characters and I don’t want to say, “Well, this character acts this way,” because that’s confining. I think the way they relate to Calvin is more a reflection of my misanthropic tendencies than any literary concern.

Many strips have, you know, the funny character, the straight man, the foil — those characters are stereotypes and fairly flat. The role of these characters in the strip is entirely defined by their function as a member of a social group or age group, or whatever, and I’m trying to avoid that as much as I possibly can. I try to make each character, even the ones that aren’t that important, a unique personality that, over time, will develop. Some of the minor characters appear less often than Calvin and Hobbes, but, hopefully, over years, each one will become a unique personality that will be every bit as complex and interesting as Calvin and Hobbes.

In other words, I don’t want the parents to simply function as parents. I want them to be unique individuals as well. They are parents, of course, and, as sane people, they have to react to Calvin’s personality. What I try to do in writing any character is to put myself in his position, to the extent that I can, and I know that if I was Calvin’s dad or Calvin’s mom that I would not react to him with the gooey sentimentality that sometimes appears in other strips. Given Calvin’s usual behavior, I think his parents show admirable restraint in theirs….

(5) IT MIGHT HAPPEN. “Neil Gaiman Adapting Samuel R. Delany’s Nova as a Series” reports CBR.com.

…The report comes from a New Yorker profile on the 81-year-old Delany, which mentioned that Gaiman was adapting Nova for a Prime Video series. Gaiman was briefly interviewed for the article, and called Delany a profound influence whose work inspired him to attempt a similar sophisticated tone in his comics such as The Sandman. “I was used to very functional prose,” Gaiman said, calling the author by his nickname Chip. “Chip felt like I’d taken a step into poetry… There was no limit to how good you could be in your chosen area.” Prime Video has not yet confirmed a Nova series at this time….

(6) SUPERMAN. Animation World Network reports “‘My Adventures with Superman’ Episode 1 Now on YouTube”.  

Adult Swim has released the first full episode of My Adventures with Superman on YouTube – or you can watch it below. The series, which features Jack Quaid as Clark Kent, Alice Lee as Lois Lane, and Ishmel Sahid as Jimmy Olsen, is Warner Bros. Animation and DC’s newest animated series. The first two episodes are now streaming on Max. One new episode will debut every Thursday at midnight on Adult Swim and the next day on Max. It is unknown if future episodes will hit YouTube as well.

A serialized coming-of-age story, My Adventures with Superman follows 20-somethings Clark Kent, the bright and driven Lois Lane, and their best friend Jimmy Olsen as they begin to discover who they are and everything they can accomplish together as an investigative reporting team at the Daily Planet….

(7) MEMORY LANE.

2010 [Written by Cat Eldridge from a choice by Mike Glyer.]

South Africa is one of those countries just starting to get known for its genre fiction. Though it goes back a century in terms of a history of science fiction being created there, that fiction like the greater culture there has been irretrievably changed by Apartheid and the novel Mike has chosen this time is one of those works. 

Lauren Beukes is our author this time, she’s written six novels including the forthcoming Bridges, some of which are SF, some of which are mysteries. 

Great mysteries too though the cringe factor is really high in them. Blood and gore everywhere. Now the SF she has written is first rate — imaginative storytelling that is noticeably different has it is, well, rooted in South African history and culture. One most of us aren’t familiar with. 

Zoo City was published in trade paper thirteen years ago by Umuzi / Random House Struik. The cover art is by Joey Hi- Fi.  It would win both a Clarke Award and a Kitschie, and be nominated for a BSFA, Otherwise, and a World Fantasy Award.

And now for our Beginning…

In Zoo City, it’s impolite to ask. 

Morning light the sulfur color of the mine dumps seeps across Johannesburg’s skyline and sears through my window. My own personal bat signal. Or a reminder that I really need to get curtains. 

Shielding my eyes—morning has broken and there’s no picking up the pieces—I yank back the sheet and peel out of bed. Benoît doesn’t so much as stir, with only his calloused feet sticking out from under the duvet like knots of driftwood. Feet like that, they tell a story. They say he walked all the way from Kinshasa with his Mongoose strapped to his chest. 

The Mongoose in question is curled up like a furry comma on my laptop, the glow of the LED throbbing under his nose. Like he doesn’t know that my computer is out of bounds. Let’s just say I’m precious about my work. Let’s just say it’s not entirely legal.

I take hold of the laptop on either side and gently tilt it over the edge of my desk. At thirty degrees, the Mongoose starts sliding down the front of the laptop. He wakes with a start, tiki tavi claws scrabbling for purchase. As he starts to fall, he contorts in the air and manages to land feet first. Hunching his stripy shoulders, he hisses at me, teeth bared. I hiss back. The Mongoose realizes he has urgent flea bites to attend to. 

Leaving the Mongoose to scrolf at its flank, I duck under one of the loops of rope hanging from the ceiling, the closest I can get to providing authentic Amazon jungle vines, and pad over the rotten linoleum to the cupboard. Calling it a cupboard is a tad optimistic, like calling this dank room with its precariously canted floor and intermittent plumbing an apartment is optimistic. The cupboard is not much more than an open box with a piece of fabric pinned across it to keep the dust off my clothes—and Sloth, of course. As I pull back the gaudy sunflower print, Sloth blinks up at me sleepily from his roost, like a misshapen fur coat between the wire hangers. He’s not good at mornings.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born July 9, 1906 Walter Sande. He’s best remembered for being on Red Planet MarsThe War of the Worlds and Invaders from Mars, but he also showed up playing a heavy in such serials as The Green Hornet Strikes Again! and Sky Raiders, the latter being at least genre adjacent. He’s had a recurring role as Col. Crockett on The Wild Wild West, and one-offs on Voyage to the Bottom of The SeaThe Man from U.N.C.L.E.Lost in Space and Bewitched. (Died 1971.)
  • Born July 9, 1911 Mervyn Peake. Best remembered for the Gormenghast series which is quite delightfully weird. Most fans hold that there are but three novels in the series (Titus GroanGormenghast and Titus Alone) though there’s a novella, “Boy in Darkness”, that is a part of it. Peake planned a fourth book, Titus Awakes, but it was barely begun when he died. Maeve Gilmore, Peake’s widow, wrote the manuscript of a version titled Search Without End which remained unpublished until decades after her death. It incorporates a fragmentary text written by Peake. The Gormenghast series has been adapted for radio three times and television once, and it was announced in 2018 that Gaiman is writing the script for an adaptation. (Died 1968.)
  • Born July 9, 1944 Glen Cook, 79. Yes, I’ve read his entire excellent Black Company series. I’ve also mostly liked his far lighter Garrett P.I. series (though not the last novel for reasons I’ll not discuss here) which it seems unfortunately he’s abandoned. And I really should read the Instrumentalities of the Night as I’ve heard good things about it. I’m really, really surprised not only that he hasn’t won any awards, but how few he’s been nominated for.
  • Born July 9, 1945 Dean Koontz, 78. The genres of of mystery, horror, fantasy and science fiction are all home to him. Author of over a hundred novels, his first novel was SF — it being Star Quest (not in print) published as an Ace Double with Doom of the Green Planet by Emil Petaja. ISFDB claims over half of his output is genre, I’d say that a low estimate. 
  • Born July 9, 1954 Ellen Klages, 69. Her story “Basement Magic” won a Nebula Award for Best Novelette. I strongly recommend Portable Childhoods, a collection of her short fiction, published by Tachyon Publications, my favorite publisher of fantasy. They released another collection from her, Wicked Wonders, which is equally wonderful. Passing Strange, her novel set in 1940s San Francisco, which won a BSFA Award and a World Fantasy Award, is also really great. Ok, I really like her.
  • Born July 9, 1970 Ekaterina Sedia, 53. Her Heart of Iron novel which was nominated for a Sidewise Award for Alternate History is simply awesome. I’d also recommend The Secret History of Moscow and the recent The House of Discarded Dreams as well, the latter is a fantastic audio work which is narrated by Robin Miles. It’s worth noting that the usual suspects list several collections by her, Willful Impropriety: 13 Tales of Society, Scandal, and Romance and Wilfill Impropriety that ISFDB doesn’t list. They’re quite superb it turns out as is Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy for which she won a World Fantasy Award. She had a story out just last year, “Ghost Shop”, in Professor Charlatan Bardot’s Travel Anthology to the Most (Fictional) Haunted Buildings in the Weird, Wild World.  She’s amply stocked at the usual suspects. She’s also very deeply stocked at the audio suspects as well which sort of surprised and delighted me as I’ve added a number of her works to my To Be Listened to list, including The House of Discarded Dreams which sounds really fascinating in the manner of Gaiman’s Sandman.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • JumpStart involves some surprisingly early memories of Isaac Asimov.
  • Herman shows aliens getting their own first encounter.
  • Six Chix has a cool librarian joke.

(10) BEWARE THE BLINDING LIGHT. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] No, not the blinding light of atomic explosions in the Oppenheimer biopic, but the blinding light of full nudity, at least one sex scene, and an on-again-off-again love triangle. All involving Oppenheimer himself. 

One guesses this may be how the flick gained its R rating. Which doesn’t mean those things were inserted just for titillation, apparently they are true to his complicated story. “It Appears The R-Rated ‘Oppenheimer’ Will Be The Sauciest Movie The Decidedly Un-Saucy Christopher Nolan Has Ever Made” at Uproxx.

Christopher Nolan movies do love — sometimes. Memento and Inception feature dead wives who haunt their heroes. There’s a tragic love triangle in The Dark Knight and a tragic love quadrangle in The Prestige. That’s it! What he doesn’t do is sex and/or nudity. Oppenheimer, his forthcoming film about the “father of the atomic bomb,” is going to change that. If you thought the film’s R-rating — Nolan’s first since 2002’s Insomnia — was due to graphic A-bomb carnage…well, you may be right about that. But it’s also because there’s apparently a fair amount of kink….

(11) TAKE A WALK ON THE WILD SIDE. Tour the wild animal bridge inspired by the life of P-22, the fabled mountain lion of Griffith Park. NBC Los Angeles invites you to “Take a free tour of the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing”.

… This celebrated span, in short, will do an immeasurable amount of good for an incredible number of critters that both roam and home in the area.

That important education? It comes courtesy of the National Wildlife Federation’s #SaveLACougers campaign, which is shedding an informative light on the upcoming Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing via several docent-helmed tours at the Agoura Hills site.

The under-construction skyway, or “wildway” if you prefer, will allow animals to move safely above the 101 freeway, significantly (and safely) expanding their frontiers.

And while the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, which broke ground in the spring of 2022, still has a ways to go before the jubilant ribbon-cutting, supporters of urban wildlife can take a look at the progress now and find out more about the bridge’s development and progress….

(12) SHIFTING GEARS. This is a good time to revisit the question “What Is the Antikythera Mechanism, the World’s First Computer?” Smithsonian Magazine answers it in this 2015 article.

After 2,000 years under the sea, three flat, misshapen pieces of bronze at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens are all shades of green, from emerald to forest. From a distance, they look like rocks with patches of mold. Get closer, though, and the sight is stunning. Crammed inside, obscured by corrosion, are traces of technology that appear utterly modern: gears with neat triangular teeth (just like the inside of a clock) and a ring divided into degrees (like the protractor you used in school). Nothing else like this has ever been discovered from antiquity. Nothing as sophisticated, or even close, appears again for more than a thousand years.

For decades after divers retrieved these scraps from the Antikythera wreck from 1900 to 1901, scholars were unable to make sense of them. X-ray imaging in the 1970s and 1990s revealed that the device must have replicated the motions of the heavens. Holding it in your hands, you could track the paths of the Sun, Moon and planets with impressive accuracy. One investigator dubbed it “an ancient Greek computer.” But the X-ray images were difficult to interpret, so mainstream historians ignored the artifact even as it was championed by fringe writers such as Erich von Däniken, who claimed it came from an alien spaceship. It wasn’t until 2006 that the Antikythera mechanism captured broader attention. That year, Mike Edmunds of Cardiff University in Wales and his team published CT scans of the fragments, revealing more details of the inner workings, as well as hidden inscriptions—and triggering a burst of scholarly research…. 

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Smoking Causes Coughing” is French comedy with 50’s sf flair.

After a devastating battle against a diabolical turtle, a team of five avengers – known as the TOBACCO FORCE – is sent on a mandatory retreat to strengthen their decaying group cohesion. Their break goes wonderfully well until Lézardin, Emperor of Evil, decides to annihilate planet Earth… But will they repair their relationship in time for a final epic battle?

[Thanks to Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Ersatz Culture, Daniel Dern, 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 SocialInjusticeWorrier.]

BSFA Awards 2022

The British Science Fiction Association announced the winners of the 2022 BSFA Awards at Eastercon on April 9.

The awards are voted on by members of the British Science Fiction Association and by the members of the year’s Eastercon, the national science fiction convention, held since 1955.

The BSFA Awards have been presented annually since 1970. 

NOVEL 

  • City Of Last Chances by Adrian Tchaikovsky 

SHORT FICTION

  • Of Charms Ghosts and Grievances by Aliette de Bodard

ARTWORK

  • Cover of The Red Scholar’s Wake by Alyssa Winans

NON FICTION

  • Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes by Rob Wilkins

BEST BOOK FOR YOUNGER READERS

  • Unraveller by Francis Hardinge 

[Thanks to Dave Lally for the results.]

Pixel Scroll 3/21/23 Is This The Real File? Is This Just Fan Activity? Caught In A Pixel, No Escape From 770

(1) FUTURE SF’S ONLINE “ANTHOZINE”. UFO Publishing and Future Affairs Administration has launched a new project they term an “anthozine”.  

These stories will appear in The Digital Aesthete: Human Musings on the Intersection of Art and AI hybrid anthology/zine project. They will be published as a book on November 14, 2023, and gradually posted to the Future SF website over the course of the following months.

The antho’s preview story was posted today, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Silicon Hearts”.

“Next up is Johnny Zepter.” Steve called up the figures. At her own screen, Kate opened the spreadsheet and readied herself to make notes.

“This week, our good buddy Zee submitted four hundred and seventy-three stories to eight different outlets, of which four were accepted.” Steve nodded in appreciation. “Nice work Jay-Zee. That’s another forty quid in the kitty.”

“One percent takeup,” Kate noted. “We’re hitting the mark nicely there.”

“People’s tastes don’t change, right?” Steve said. Johnny Zepter wrote space adventure. He had a stable of half a dozen two-fisted, square-jawed action types who encountered alien planets or artifacts, defeated the locals with human ingenuity or just by punching them in what they had for faces, discovered something superficially revelatory and made a witty quip about it. Four hundred times this week alone….

Preorder the book via the links at the bottom of the story, or support them via Patreon.

(2) IN THE RUNNING. In the SFWA officer elections, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki is a write-in candidate for director-at-large he told Facebook readers today.

SFWA members have until April 11 to vote in the 2023 Officer Elections.

(3) SO WHAT HAPPENED? Very early Sunday morning during last weekend’s Furnal Equinox convention the committee sent this tweet:

And later that day this update was posted to the convention’s website which only added to the mystery: “March 19, 2023 – Early Morning Disturbance”.

Update:  What we know so far..

Early this morning there was an incident near the south tower elevators that created a disturbance which spread throughout the convention level at approximately 2 am.

The events occurred as follows:

• Attendees moved down the escalators away from the south tower

• They moved across the lobby and then back upstairs towards the sky bridge to the convention center 

• Hotel security called Toronto Police Services (TPS) immediately following the incident

• The Nightingales responded shortly after hearing the attendees

• Together with the Toronto Police Service, they secured the area

• They then performed a sweep of the area

• A lockdown was initiated, and the gaming lounge was evacuated

• An “all clear” was called within two hours after no immediate threats were located.

The investigation is still ongoing. At this time we do not have more details, but will provide updates as we investigate further. Please allow us to continue to gather information and avoid spreading rumours. 

We have been assured that the convention area is safe and Furnal Equinox attendees may enjoy the final day of the event as planned.  If you have any concerns now or in the future, please feel free to contact there Nightingales in person or via email at [email protected]. Your health and safety is our top priority.

We would also like to thank the Westin Hotel security team and Toronto Police Service for their quick response and assistance on this matter. And a thank you to all attendees for your cooperation and patience.

So what happened? “Sir Tillfred Laurier” knows, having had some too-personal experience with the offender. Twitter thread starts here.

Now have you figured out the answer? There’s video of Nakedman in action on Twitter here. Or there’s a version with “censored” blocks over the peccant parts, plus furry Odin Wolf’s commentary, here.

(4) INDUSTRY PRAISE. Publishing Perspectives reports the “British Book Awards: Trade and ‘Book of the Year’ Shortlists”. Fiction and children’s fiction are strong on genre nominations. The shortlists for those categories are shown below.

…British Book Awards—sometimes called the Nibbies, as the logo reminds us—are a brand of The Bookseller, the United Kingdom’s news medium of record for the publishing industry. There are 29 award categories. …

Fiction

  • Love Marriage by Monica Ali (Virago, Little, Brown)
  • Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes (Mantle, Pan Macmillan)
  • Fairy Tale by Stephen King (Hodder & Stoughton, Hachette)
  • Babel by R.F. Kuang (Harper Voyager, HarperCollins)
  • The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell (Tinder Press, Headline Publishing Group)
  • Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart (Picador, Pan Macmillan)

Children’s Fiction

  • Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Diper Överlöde by Jeff Kinney (Puffin, Penguin Random House Children’s)
  • Onyeka and the Academy of the Sun by Tọlá Okogwu (Simon & Schuster Children’s Books UK)
  • Tyger by SF Said, illustrated by Dave McKean (David Fickling Books)
  • The First to Die at the End by Adam Silvera (Simon & Schuster Children’s Books UK)
  • Skandar and the Unicorn Thief by A.F. Steadman (Simon & Schuster Children’s Books UK)
  • Loki: A Bad God’s Guide to Being Good by Louie Stowell (Walker Books)

(5) SWIPER, NO SWIPING.  Publishers Weekly reports that “At Hearing, Judge Appears Skeptical of Internet Archive’s Scanning and Lending Program”. He does sound dubious.

After nearly three years of legal wrangling, the Internet Archive’s scanning and lending program finally got its day in court on Monday, March 20. And if Judge John G. Koeltl’s questions are any indication, the Internet Archive is facing an uphill battle.

Over the course of a 90-minute hearing on the parties’ cross motions for summary judgment, Koeltl appeared skeptical that there was sufficient basis in law to support the Internet Archive’s scanning and lending of print library books under a legally untested protocol known as controlled digital lending, and unconvinced that the case is fundamentally about the future of library lending, as Internet Archive attorneys have argued.

“To say that this case is about the ability of a library to lend a book that it owns ignores whether the library has a right to copy wholesale the book,” Koeltl offered at one point during an extended exchange with IA attorney Joseph Gratz. “Does a library have the right to lend a book that it owns? Of course,” the judge conceded. But the question at the heart of this case, he added, is “whether a library has the right to make a digital copy of a book that it owns and then lend that digital copy, which it has made without a license and without permission” to patrons. “To formulate the issue in this case as simply ‘does the library have a right to lend a book that it owns’ belies the issue in the case,” Koeltl said….

… But Koeltl peppered [the Internet Archive’s attorney] Gratz with questions throughout the hearing, appearing deeply skeptical that the Internet Archive’s fair use case was properly supported by case law, and unconvinced that the publishers’ market for library e-books was not impacted by libraries choosing to scan print books under CDL protocols.

“A library whether they hold a physical copy or not, has the ability to license an e-book from a publisher. Rather than pay that licensing fee to the publisher some libraries choose to make their own copy and to lend that copy. Why isn’t it self-evident that that deprives the publisher of the fees that the publisher could otherwise obtain from licensing an e-book to that library?” Koeltl asked.

“It is because with respect to the copies at issue in the CDL situation the question is not between OverDrive and nothing. The question is between physically lending a book to a particular patron, for which no payment would be due to a publisher, or digitally lending that book to the patron,” Gratz replied, adding that to find harm “there would need to be a reason to think that the publishers were worse off than the situation in which in which the fair use did not occur at all.” In fact, library e-book lending has grown throughout the existence of the IA’s scanning program, and actually surged during the height of the pandemic….

(6) GOING PAPERLESS? This news item seems like a parallel issue: “Students speak out about one university’s plans to have a digital-only library” at NPR.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

What’s a library like without books? My kid’s school library removed most of the books, creating a space to use in other ways. And apparently, the university system in Vermont wanted this, too. They proposed taking library books off the shelves of at least three campus libraries and offering digital copies instead. That would save money, but…

ROSIE PHELAN: I was shocked. I was really taken aback when I heard that that was happening.

LEILA FADEL, HOST:

Rosie Phelan is an English major who works in the library at Castleton University. That’s one of three colleges merging to create a new Vermont State University.

PHELAN: You go to a college and you expect to have these resources, and the next thing you know, they’re just taken away.

INSKEEP: Phelan insists students still use physical books….

(7) JEOPARDY! Tonight’s episode of Jeopardy! devoted an entire category to science fiction books. Andrew Porter noted these two entries gave contestants problems.

Category: Books: The Future is Now

Answer: He saw 2024 as a Hellish wasteland in his 1969 short story “A Boy & His Dog”

No one could ask, “Who is Harlan Ellison?”

***

In 2025, game shows are to the death in “The Running Man”, written by Stephen King under this pseudonym

No one could ask, “Who is Richard Bachman?”

(8) TAX SEASON. Lincoln Michel encourages authors to “Write-Off What You Know” at Counter Craft.

Business Income Means Business Deductions

On the one hand, 1099 income seems like a raw deal. You don’t get taxes taken out for you like at a standard job, meaning you owe more at tax time. And you even pay higher taxes in the FICA category. (FICA taxes include Social Security and Medicare. These are paid 50% by your employer and 50% by you. But if you’re a self-employed business, then you pay both halves.)

OTOH, you can and should lower your freelance tax bill with business deductions. Just as a regular company takes deductions, you get to take them as a solo business. The money you can write off lowers the income that is taxed, thus lowering your tax bill….

And from there he goes into more tax return issues.

(9) MEMORY LANE.

1965[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is one of my favorite SF works. I knew it had won a well deserved Hugo at NyCon 3 but I hadn’t realized it was nominated the previous year at Tricon. Isn’t that a tad unusual?

It had been first published in If magazine in five parts starting in the December 1965 issue. It was then published in hardcover by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1966.  The Penguin Publishing Group has it for sale at the usual suspects as does what I suspect is one pirate publisher as it has no copyright information. 

Now I really think that everyone here has read this novel but keeping with our very firm policy of absolutely no spoilers, I won’t say anything beyond the fact that I think that this is one of his best novels and I’ve throughly enjoyed it each and every time I’ve experienced it. Characters, stetting and story — what’s not to really like here? 

So now to our most superb Beginning…

I SEE IN Lunaya Pravda that Luna City Council has passed on first reading a bill to examine, license, inspect—and tax—public food vendors operating inside municipal pressure. I see also is to be mass meeting tonight to organize “Sons of Revolution” talk-talk. 

My old man taught me two things: “Mind own business” and “Always cut cards.” Politics never tempted me. But on Monday 13 May 2075 I was in computer room of Lunar Authority Complex, visiting with computer boss Mike while other machines whispered among themselves. Mike was not official name; I had nicknamed him for Mycroft Holmes, in a story written by Dr. Watson before he founded IBM. This story character would just sit and think—and that’s what Mike did. Mike was a fair dinkum thinkum, sharpest computer you’ll ever meet. 

Not fastest. At Bell Labs, Buenos Aires, down Earthside, they’ve got a thinkum a tenth his size which can answer almost before you ask. But matters whether you get answer in microsecond rather than millisecond as long as correct? 

Not that Mike would necessarily give right answer; he wasn’t completely honest. 

When Mike was installed in Luna, he was pure thinkum, a flexible logic—“High-Optional, Logical, Multi-Evaluating Supervisor, Mark IV, Mod. L”—a HOLMES FOUR. He computed ballistics for pilotless freighters and controlled their catapult. This kept him busy less than one percent of time and Luna Authority never believed in idle hands. They kept hooking hardware into him—decision-action boxes to let him boss other computers, bank on bank of additional memories, more banks of associational neural nets, another tubful of twelve-digit random numbers, a greatly augmented temporary memory. Human brain has around ten-to-the-tenth neurons. By third year Mike had better than one and a half times that number of neuristors. 

And woke up.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born March 21, 1915 Ian Stuart Black. British screenplay writer best known for scripting two First Doctor stories, “The Savages” and “The War Machines” (with Kit Pedler and Pat Dunlop) and a Third Doctor story, “The Macra Terror”. He wrote thirteen episodes of The Invisible Man as well as episodes of One Step BeyondThe SaintStar Maidens and Danger Man. (Died 1997.)
  • Born March 21, 1931 Al Williamson. Cartoonist who was best known for his work for EC Comics in the ’50s, including titles like Weird Science and Weird Fantasy, and for his work on Flash Gordon in the Sixties. He won eight Harvey Awards, and an Eisner Hall of Fame Award. (Died 2010.)
  • Born March 21, 1936 Margaret Mahy. New Zealand author of over a hundred children’s and YA books, some with a strong supernatural bent. She won the Carnegie Medal twice for two of her fantasy novels, The Haunting and for The Changeover, something only seven authors have done in total. (Died 2012.)
  • Born March 21, 1947 Terry Dowling, 76. I was trying to remember exactly what it was by him that I read and it turned out to be Amberjack: Tales of Fear and Wonder, an offering from Subterranean Press a decade ago. Oh, it was tasty! If it’s at all representative of his other short stories, he’s a master at them. And I see he’s got just one novel, Clowns at Minnight which I’ve not read. He’s not at all deeply stocked at the usual digital suspects but Kindle has this plus several story collections. 
  • Born March 21, 1947 Don Markstein. He was the creator and sole maintainer of Don Markstein’s Toonpedia which is subtitled “A Vast Repository of Toonological Knowledge”. It is an encyclopedia of print cartoons, comic strips and animation started in 2001. He said, “The basic idea is to cover the entire spectrum of American cartoonery.” (Died 2012.)
  • Born March 21, 1956 Teresa Nielsen Hayden, 67. She is a consulting editor for Tor and is best known for Making Light, a blog she shares with her husband Patrick and which may yet resume activity. She is also one of the regular instructors for the Martha’s Vineyard writing workshop Viable Paradise.
  • Born March 21, 1970 Chris Chibnall, 53. A showrunner for Doctor Who and the head writer for the first two (and I think) best series of Torchwood. He first showed up in the Whoverse when he penned the Tenth Doctor story, “42”.  He also wrote several episodes of Life on Mars. He’s been nominated for a Hugo three times for work on Doctor Who, “Rosa” at Dublin 2019, “Resolution” CoNZealand and for “Fugitive of the Judoon” at DisCon III.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • Pickles has an unexpected Star Wars reference.

(12) EVANGELIZING FOR SUPERGIRL. [Item by Olav Rokne.] Some of the comic book nerds in the book club with me have all been quite impressed with Tom King’s latest work Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, which James Gunn has listed as the direct inspiration for the upcoming Supergirl movie. It’s eligible for the Hugo this year — and I think it’s something a lot of Worldcon folks would love. Smart, fun, serious, high adventure. “Kara Zor-El Unbound” at the Hugo Book Club Blog.

… These aren’t stories about saving the universe, defeating galactic tyrants, or challenges with world-shattering consequences. But the fact that the stakes are more personal shows what matters to Supergirl, and the human scale of the story makes it highly engaging.

On a technical level, this is a superhero comic book, but the writing takes much of its inspiration from heroic fantasy. This is a story about a sword-wielding hero and sidekick traveling across distant landscapes on a quest and getting pulled into side adventures. Given that it takes cues from the heroic fantasy work of Fritz Leiber, Woman of Tomorrow seems like something that would appeal to many Worldcon attendees….

(13) THEY’VE BEEN HAD. “These Painters Regret Their Dealings With Scam Artists” – and the New York Times introduces them to us.

… It seemed too good to be true — and it was.

What happened next followed a pattern seen in nearly a dozen attempts at defrauding artists of their paintings and money that were reviewed by The New York Times. In each case, young artists were offered an attractive price for artworks by “collectors” who sent them checks to cover the price of the work and the cost of shipping it. Each of them was then asked to forward the shipping fee by money order to a person who was arranging the delivery.

Ginsberg sent $2,060 to the aptly named Linda Shady, who was supposed to be a shipping agent based in Fond du Lac, Wis. That name turned out to be fictitious and the person apparently used fake identification to cash the money order before Ginsberg was told by his bank that the $6,210 check he had received — more than he asked for — had not cleared.

“That was when I realized it was fraud,” Ginsberg said.

Cybercrime experts said fake check scams were growing. Though it did not study art scams per se, a study published in February by the Federal Trade Commission’s Consumer Sentinel Network tallied more than $124 million in damages from more than 40,000 cases involving fraudulent foreign money offers or fake checks.

Most of the cases start with an email from a fictitious person, a subset of the surge in phishing that has greatly increased the vulnerability of communications online. A study by the tech security company SlashNext projected that there were more than 255 million phishing attacks in 2022 through email, mobile and other online channels. That was 61 percent higher than the rate of phishing attacks the company tallied a year before….

(14) BE THE MAN WHO BOUGHT THE MOON (NECKLACE). [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Christie’s is having an online-only auction (closing 28 March) of meteorites & meteorite-related objects. Several of the items have had their origin traced to the Moon, Mars, or a specific asteroid. “Deep Impact: Lunar, Martian, and Other Rare Meteorites”.

Perhaps the crown jewel (so to speak) of the auction is Lot #1—an 18 inch single-strand necklace, consisting of 48 8.25 mm beads derived from Lunar material. One particular asteroid, NWA 12691, has been sectioned for display and sale. Apparently some of the smaller bits from that were formed into these beads.

The estimated price for the necklace is $140,000-$200,000, though the top bid as I write this is a mere $10,000. There are a scant few items in the auction with a higher estimate, but none of those is likely to make as fine a red carpet display.

The catalog description notes:

Fastened with a white gold clasp and knotted when strung, each of these lunar beads are of the highest quality. As is the case with any other lunar feldspathic breccia, each bead is composed of fragments of olivine, pigeonite, augite, ilmenite and signature white anorthite — which is rare on Earth but common on the Moon. The different minerals and lithologies were naturally bound together by a melt of lunar regolith, the result of repeated impacts on the lunar surface prior to the collision responsible for launching NWA 12691 to Earth. 

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Honest Trailers does “Everything Everywhere All At Once”, delivering its on-brand snark:

…Stephanie Shu co-stars as their daughter Joy, a character whose complex journey takes her to the edge of madness and back, playing both a teenager struggling to connect with her mom and an omnipotent nihilist seeking to destroy the universe. So of course she lost the Oscar to Jamie Lee Curtis as a mean lady with a funny voice… Let’s just pretend this was a makeup for True Lies….

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Andrew Porter, Olav Rokne, Kathy Sullivan, Rich Lynch, Alex Shvartsman, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Tom Becker.]

Pixel Scroll 2/9/23 Fifty Ways To Scroll Your Pixels

(1) WEBSITE SECURITY. “Safety Dispatch: How to Secure Your Author Website” from the SFWA Safety Committee. Sections on choosing a hosting service, domain registration, and the like, are followed with some wisdom about choosing content.  

Carefully Choose What to Share

Your author bio doesn’t have to list family members, your hometown, or any other identity markers you aren’t comfortable sharing. You’re not obligated to mention your birthday, your employer, or your involvement with other organizations, through which somebody might find details about your identity and location that you don’t wish to share. Some authors are transparent about all of these things, and some aren’t. There isn’t a single right answer to sharing information about your life online. But if you think about the boundaries you would like to set in advance, you’ll find it easier to avoid posting information that you can’t take back.

Photographs can also be sources of more information than you intend. Pay attention to what’s in the background of any photos you post on your website or on social media, such as exterior shots of your home or distinctive landmarks through your windows. Turn off geolocation metadata when you take photos or make sure you know how to remove it before posting images online. 

(2) TRADPUB PAY HIKES. Two publishers recently raised their starting salaries, perhaps hoping to forestall the labor action current facing HarperCollins – Publishers Weekly reports “HBG Raises Starting Salaries to $47,500” and “Macmillan Raises Starting Salaries to $47,500”. It’s hard not to notice the figures are identical – collusion, anyone?

(3) SOONERCON. Oklahoma pop-culture event Soonercon announced a new graphic design and branding yesterday, along with a new mascot.

We are excited today to reveal an all new look and feel for Soonercon! We’ve been working closely these past few months with our Diamond Sponsor Robot House to rebrand Soonercon for the modern era. We started this journey with the Soonercon story and two words came forward: community and hope. Armed with that (and whole heck of a lot more words about our special convention), Robot House designed these new logos for us, a friendly and forward color scheme, and fonts to take us into the future.

Even more exciting, say hello to Ripley Raccoon, Soonercon’s new mascot! Ripley is curious, always learning, loves art and reading, and has a whole lot of hobbies – just like our members.

In the Soonercon Cosplay Facebook group the change received a mixed greeting. Some liked it. Some criticized it for resembling sites aimed at kids, others for lacking any sci-fi identity.

(4) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to collaborate over breakfast with Brian Keene and Mary SanGiovanni in Episode 191 of his Eating the Fantastic podcast.

Mary SanGiovanni and Brian Keene

Anyone who’s listened to more than a few episodes of Eating the Fantastic already knows — collaboration confuses me. Tell me two writers have managed to work together on the same project without blood on the floor and a lifelong feud and I’m baffled. So when I learned previous guests of the show Brian Keene and Mary SanGiovanni had collaborated on the short story collection Things Left Behind, released last year by Thunderstorm Books, I knew we’d have to chat about it.

We met for breakfast at Martinsburg, West Virginia’s Blue White Grill, which has been serving diner food since the ’50s.

Brian’s published more than 40 novels, including the best-selling The Rising, and he’s the winner of the 2014 World Horror Grand Master Award, while Mary is the author of The Hollower trilogy, the first volume of which was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award. There’s a whole lot more to know about each of them, as you’ll learn if you listen to those two earlier episodes.

We discussed how being intimidated by each other helps their collaborative process, their different tolerances for writing gore (and how that’s changed over time), the romantic reason (up until this episode known to only one of them) their collaborative short story collection came about, which of them once wrote 45,000 words in a day, how they came to agree on a joint dedication, who gives each story its final polish (and who get the final say on sending it to market), how Brian attempted to bleed all over Mary’s upcoming Alien novel, the way they approach their own deaths, their honeymoon book tour hitting every state but Alaska and Hawaii, their upcoming collaborative novel, and much more.

(5) MIDDLE-EARTH LEGO SET. “The 6,167-Piece Rivendell Is the One Lego Lord of the Rings Set to Rule Them All”Gizmodo takes readers on a tour. (See even more on the Lego website.)

…Although Lego’s Rivendell even includes the place where Aragon and Boromir first meet next to the shrine featuring the shards of Narsil, it appears as if the minifigure version of Boromir has yet to cut his finger on the still-sharp sword. But that’s nothing a red Sharpie can’t fix.

As peaceful as Rivendell appears, the elves are still well regarded for their weapons, and not only does this set come with a well-stocked armory, but also a glowing forge for creating Lhangs and other stabby tools for making short work of orcs and goblins.

There’s nothing worse than working your way through a textbook-sized Lego instruction manual only to come across a step that has to be repeated countless times that dramatically slows down your build progress. That is undoubtedly the case with the tiled roof atop Rivendell—each 1×1 Lego tile will have to be attached and aligned individually—but the results look like they’re definitely worth the effort.

Although Lego did release a mountain (of doom) of images of its new LOTR Rivendell set, there still appear to be lots of details not highlighted yet. So if you’re still on the fence over whether you want to make room to add this sizeable set to your collection, you can take a quick tour of its entire layout using this 360-degree animation….

(6) SOMETIMES THEY’RE RIGHT. [Item by David Goldfarb.] On last night’s episode of Jeopardy! in the Double Jeopardy round, “That’s Dedication”, $1200:

Douglas Adams dedicated this title guy’s “Holistic Detective Agency”,

“To my mother, who liked the bit about the horse”

Returning champion Matthew Marcus correctly responded, “Who is Dirk Gently?”


“Comedy Time”, $800:

1960s: General Buck Turgidson wants to explore the nuclear option

Dan Wohl responded, “What is Doctor Strangelove?”

(7) TCHAIKOVSKY Q&A. Moid Moidelhoff conducts “An Interview with Adrian Tchaikovsky – Children Of Memory and Beyond” at Media Death Cult.

(8) OMNIVOROUS READER. A New York Times interview: “Jojo Moyes’s Grandmother Knew a Bookworm When She Saw One”.

Do you distinguish between “commercial” and “literary” fiction? Where’s that line, for you?

Not in terms of my appetite for reading — I read everything from thrillers to literary fiction to comic books. And I’m enjoying the fact that the line appears to have become increasingly blurred between them. If someone I trust tells me something’s good, I’ll give it a go.

What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?

I was an only child and a voracious reader. My grandmother called me a bookworm, and it wasn’t a compliment, as my weekly visits to her were usually spent with my nose buried between the pages. The books that have stayed with me are “The Black Stallion,” by Walter Farley, and “The Secret Garden,” by Frances Hodgson Burnett, and, as a teenager, the books of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I was also a compulsive reader of horror — I could not read horror now if you paid me.

(9) LEE MODER OBITUARY. Comics artist Lee Moder died around January 15 says Deadline.

Comic book artist Lee Moder, who co-created the Courtney Whitmore version of Stargirl with Geoff Johns in 1999, has passed away, according to ComicBook.com and statements from his peers. The web site cited a family friend, who indicated that Moder died quietly at home sometime on or before January 15th. No cause of his death was given. Moder was 53.

(10) MEMORY LANE.

1982 — Paul Weimer offers us his thoughts on Robert Heinlein’s Friday

Heinlein’s Friday is, in my mind, unquestionably the strongest of the late Heinleins. It starts with a strong and indelible paragraph that introduces and defines the character. The world of the novel, a sequel to the story “Gulf” is also a refutation of that story’s thesis, and shows the evolved thinking Heinlein had about that earlier story’s assumptions. The balkanized America of the novel is a chaotic and interesting place, from its vividly imagined Democracy run amok California to the mighty and autocratic Chicago Imperium. 

Its ideas on corporations, artificial personhood, and more are thought provoking. Friday is far and away the most successful of the late Heinlein novels in what it tries to do, and remains the most readable by a large margin. 

And now the Beginning of that novel… 

As I left the Kenya Beanstalk capsule he was right on my heels. He followed me through the door leading to Customs, Health, and Immigration. As the door contracted behind him I killed him.

I have never liked riding the Beanstalk. My distaste was full-blown even before the disaster to the Quito Skyhook. A cable that goes up into the sky with nothing to hold it up smells too much of magic. But the only other way to reach Ell-Five takes too long and costs too much; my orders and expense account did not cover it.

So I had been edgy even before I left the shuttle from Ell-Five at Stationary Station to board the Beanstalk capsule…but, damn it, being edgy isn’t reason to kill a man. I had intended only to put him out for a few hours.

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born February 9, 1863 Anthony Hope. He is remembered predominantly for only two books: The Prisoner of Zenda and its sequel Rupert of Hentzau. Well so says online sources but I never heard of the latter novel. Any of you heard of it? The Prisoner of Zenda was filmed in 1936 with the legendary Ronald Coleman in the lead and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. as Rupert. (Died 1933.)
  • Born February 9, 1877 George Allan England. His short story, “The Thing from—’Outside’”, which had originally appeared in Gernsback’s Science and Invention, was reprinted in the first issue of the first SF magazine, Amazing Stories, in April 1926. Unfortunately, his later Darkness and Dawn trilogy is badly marred by overt racism as later critics note. (Died 1936.)
  • Born February 9, 1928 Frank Frazetta. Artist whose illustrations showed up damn near everywhere from LP covers to book covers and posters. Among the covers were Tarzan and the Lost EmpireConan the Adventurer (L. Sprague de Camp stories in that setting) and Tarzan at the Earth’s Core. He did over-muscled barbarians very well! In the early 1980s, Frazetta worked with Bakshi on the feature Fire and Ice. He provided the poster for it as he did for Mad Monster Party and The Fearless Vampire Killers, or Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck, two other genre films. He was inducted into both Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame and the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame. (Died 2010.)
  • Born February 9, 1935 R. L. Fanthorpe, 88. He was a pulp writer for UK publisher Badger Books during the 1950s and 1960s during which he wrote under some sixty pen names. I think he wrote several hundred genre novels during that time but no two sources agree on just how many he wrote. Interestingly nothing is available by him digitally currently though his hard copy offerings would fill a wing of a small rural library. He’d be perfect for the usual suspects I’d say.
  • Born February 9, 1946 Clive Walter Swift. His first genre appearance was as Snug in that version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1968). Several years thereafter he was Dr. Black in “A Warning to the Curious” (based on a ghost story by British writer M. R. James).Then he’s Ector, whoever that character is, in Excalibur. He shows up next in the Sixth Doctor story, “The Revelation of a The Daleks” as Professor Jobel. (Died 2019.)
  • Born February 9, 1951 Justin Gustainis, 72. Author of two series so far, one being the Occult Crimes Unit Investigations series which he’s written three superb novels in so far, and the other being the Quincey Morris Supernatural Investigations series which has seven novels and which I’ve not read yet. Who’s read the latter series? 
  • Born February 9, 1953 Ciaran Hinds, 70. I can’t picture him but he’s listed as being King Lot in Excalibur, that being his credited his genre role. He next shows up in Mary Reilly, a riff off the Hyde theme, as Sir Danvers Care. I’ve next got him in Jason and the Argonauts as King Aeson followed by being in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider – The Cradle of Life as Jonathan Reiss. (Yes I like those films.) before being replaced in the next film, he played Aberforth Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2. Two final roles worth noting. he played The Devil in Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance and Steppenwolf In Justice League.
  • Born February 9, 1956 Timothy Truman, 67. Writer and artist best known in my opinion for his work on Grimjack with John Ostrander, along with Scout, and the reinvention of Jonah Hex with Joe R. Lansdale. His work with Ostrander is simply stellar and is collected in Grimjack Omnibus, Volumes 1 and 2.  For the Hex work, I’d say get Jonah Hex: Shadows West which collects their work together. He did do a lot of other work and I’m sure you’ll point out what I’ve overlooked.

(12) COMICS SECTION.

  • Heart of the City is about a family’s plans to go to a con. 
  • Bizarro’s Star Wars-themed joke today proves again why this comic bears the name it has.  

(13) EKPEKI Q&A. The Horror Writers Association Blog continues their Black History Month theme with “Black Heritage in Horror: Interview with Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki”.

What was it about the horror genre that drew you to it?

It’s familiarity. The way that it approached all these very real issues we experienced and lived everyday in ways that were innocent and enticing enough to consume when we shied away from the stark reality of it.

Do you make a conscious effort to include African diaspora characters and themes in your writing and if so, what do you want to portray?

Yes. It’s a conscious, deliberate decolonization process for me. A reclamation of my identity and these pieces of myself, culture, identity that were eroded with slavery and colonialism….

(14) LET THE WOOKIEE WIN. “Chewbacca: Peter Mayhew’s Wife Slams Auction for Star Wars Sale” reports Variety. Things the Mayhews abandoned in an attic when they moved were scheduled to go under the hammer.

Angie Mayhew, the wife of the late “Star Wars” actor Peter Mayhew, is speaking out against an upcoming auction in which Peter’s “Star Wars” memorabilia will be sold. Ryedale Auctioneers is selling “Star Wars” scripts, call-sheets and more that were discovered in Peter Mayhew’s attic after his death. Peter starred as Chewbacca in George Lucas’ original “Star Wars” trilogy. Angie took to Twitter to say the auction “really breaks [her] heart.”

“When we moved out of this house, Peter’s movement challenges made it impossible for him to get into the attic to get the rest of these memories,” Angie wrote. “It really breaks my heart to see our belongings auctioned off like this by [auction house founder] Angus Ashworth and Ryedale Auctioneers.”

“It was one of Peter’s and my biggest regrets that we had to leave these items behind,” Angie added. “His knees and joints had gotten to be so painful that he was no longer able to go into the attic to get them.”

Several hours after posting, Angie updated fans using the Peter Mayhew Foundation account and said that she had a Zoom meeting with the auction house.

“I communicated our desire that Peter’s items be returned to the Mayhew family,” Angie wrote. “Will keep everyone posted as progress is made – thank you for the continued support!”…

(15) INFLATION RATE. Not that you ever doubted it: “Chinese Balloon Had Tools to Collect Communications Signals, U.S. Says” in the New York Times.

The Chinese spy balloon shot down by the U.S. military over the Atlantic Ocean was capable of collecting communications signals and was part of a fleet of surveillance balloons directed by the Chinese military that had flown over more than 40 countries across five continents, the State Department said Thursday.

The United States used high resolution imagery from U-2 flybys to determine the balloon’s capabilities, the department said in a written announcement, adding that the balloon’s equipment “was clearly for intelligence surveillance and inconsistent with the equipment onboard weather balloons.”

The agency said the balloon had multiple antennas in an array that was “likely capable of collecting and geo-locating communications.” Solar panels on the machine were large enough to produce power to operate “multiple active intelligence collection sensors,” the department said.

The agency also said the U.S. government was “confident” that the company that made the balloon had direct commercial ties with the People’s Liberation Army, the Chinese military, citing an official procurement portal for the army. The department did not name the company….

(16) SQUINTING IN SPACE. Nature reports the first space-based discovery of an exoplanet using microlensing. Primary research paper here.

K2-2016-BLG-0005Lb is the first bound micro-lensing exoplanet discovered from space-based data. 

The system lies at a distance of 5.2 ± 0.2 kpc (17,000 light years if my maths is right?) from Earth towards the Galactic bulge, more than twice the distance of the previous most distant planet found by Kepler. The sky-projected separation of the planet from its host is found to be 4.2 ± 0.3 au (1 au being the distance between the Earth and the Sun).

According to current planet formation models, this system is very close to the host mass threshold below which Jupiters are not expected to form…

(17) 00P$. “Google AI chatbot Bard sends shares plummeting after it gives wrong answer” reports the Guardian. “Chatbot Bard incorrectly said James Webb Space Telescope was first to take pictures of planet outside Earth’s solar system.”

Google’s response to ChatGPT has got off to an embarrassing start after its new artificial intelligence-powered chatbot gave a wrong answer in a promotional video, as investors wiped more than $100bn (£82bn) off the value of the search engine’s parent company, Alphabet.

The sell-off on Wednesday came amid investor fears that Microsoft, which is deploying an ChatGPT-powered version of its Bing search engine, will damage Google’s business. Alphabet stock slid by 9% during regular trading in the US but was flat after hours.

Experts pointed out that promotional material for Bard, Google’s competitor to Microsoft-backed ChatGPT, contained an error in the response by the chatbot to: “What new discoveries from the James Webb space telescope (JWST) can I tell my nine-year old about?”…

(18) APPARENT VIOLATION OF THE ROCHE LIMIT. Of course you know what that is. Errr…. “Astronomers Discover Unexpected Ring around Distant Dwarf Planet” at Sky & Telescope.

The distant dwarf planet 500000 Quaoar appears to have a ring that spans far beyond where it ought to be stable. “That is not where it was supposed to be,” says Bruno Morgado (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), lead author of a team of 59 astronomers who report the discovery in Nature

French astronomer Edouard Roche defined the concept of the Roche limit in 1848, calculating where a planet’s tidal forces would exceed the gravitational force holding a moon together. Inside that region, the stronger gravitational force of the planet overpowers the moon’s gravity and that tidal pull eventually tears the moon apart. Only outside that limit can small objects, dust, and debris coalesce under their own gravity to form a moon. With the ring’s discovery, the Roche limit may need a rethink….

How much trouble can they get into for violating the Roche Limit? John A Arkansawyer guesses, “They might get thrown out of the Astronomical Union?”

(19) DID THE EARTH MOVE FOR YOU? Matt O’Dowd of PBS Space Time displays multiple different ways of looking at the same question in “How Earth REALLY Moves Through the Galaxy”.

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cliff, David Goldfarb, Steven French, Scott Edelman, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, John A Arkansawyer, Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day by Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 12/8/22 By The Scrolling Of My Thumbs, Something Pixeled This Way Comes

(1) PETER WATTS Q&A. Media Death Cult’s Moid Moidelhoff hosts Peter Watts in “The Big Interview”.

Peter Watts is a Canadian marine biologist who also writes awesome science fiction stories. We talked for about three hours, we will do it again.

(2) KNOW YOUR COMICS. [Item by David Goldfarb.] The most recent LearnedLeague match day had a question that was at least SF-adjacent. 

The DC Comics superheroes Kid Flash, Robin, Aqualad, and Wonder Girl were the four original members of what superhero team, which has included countless other members over the years including (recently) Cyborg, Starfire, Raven, and Beast Boy?

The answer is “the Teen Titans”. Get rate was 50%, with the most common wrong answer (7% of answers) being “the Justice League”.

(3) OCTOTHORPE. The confession “I’m Not A Fan In The Way John Is” is the title of the Octothorpe podcast’s 72nd episode. But who’s confessing?

John Coxon isn’t gambling, Alison Scott isn’t reading, and Liz Batty doesn’t care. We discuss semiprozines quite a lot, mostly by accident (we might have to revisit that again sometime.) Oh, and we briefly touch on Andor, but we don’t say much.

(4) THE GAME’S AFOOT. ‘Sherlock Holmes in Oz’ and others’: The Sherlockian Writings of Ruth Berman, published by the Norwegian Explorers of Minnesota (December 2022, 110 pages) is available from the Norwegian Explorers, c/o Phil Bergen, 3829 179 Ave NW, Andover MN 55304-1820. $11.00, which includes postage.

The Norwegian Explorers of Minnesota is a “scion society of the Baker Street Irregulars of New York, dedicated to keeping green the memory of the Master, Sherlock Holmes, and honoring his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.”

Berman, an award-winning sff poet, was also a 1968 nominee for Best Fan Writer.

(5) MAJOR STATHOPOULOS PORTRAIT EXHIBIT. Blue Mountains Cultural Center in Australia has put up a webpage for its forthcoming exhibit “The Semblance of Things: portraits by Nick Stathopoulos”, running from February 4-April 2, 2023. It’s always exciting to see his achievements recognized, since along the way Nick’s work for sff publications has garnered 10 Ditmar Awards and a Hugo nomination.

The Semblance of Things is a comprehensive survey of Nick Stathopoulos’ portraits from the past 30 years documenting the evolution of his hyper-real style. The artist delves beneath the painted surface to reveal psychological insights into the subject, beyond the superficial likeness often expected of portraiture.  As well as the curated selection of portraits, the exhibition includes archival photographs, sketchbooks, and video clips. Subjects include celebrities Isla Fisher, David Stratton, Barry Crocker, Shaun Tan, Grahame Bond (Aunty Jack), Mr. Squiggle, and many more. This is the first time these portraits have been exhibited together, with works ranging in scale from the blockbuster Archibald finalists to more intimate and personal work.

(6) RALPH ROBERTS (1945-2021). [Item by Steven H Silver.] Ralph Roberts (b.1945) died on June 24, 2021. Roberts was the author of The Hundred-Acre Spaceship and from 1995-2012 ran Farthest Star Publishing (which mostly seems to have published works by Mike Resnick).

(7) MEMORY LANE.

1952 [By Cat Eldridge.] Robin Hood statue, Castle Place, Nottingham

Continuing our look at statues of fantasy characters, we now have the Robin Hood statue at Castle Place.

The statue was commissioned by local businessman, Philip E. F. Clay to provide a landmark that recognized Nottingham’s connection with the world-famous folk hero. Nottingham-born and resident Royal Academy sculptor James Woodford was chosen to design and cast the statue at a cost of a rather princely sum of five thousand pounds. 

Though it’s not visible to the eye, Robin Hood is actually in eight pieces as a single piece statue would have been way too exorbitant to cast. 

As I just noted, the figure was cast in eight pieces of half-inch thick bronze like the Rudyard Kipling statue we were talking about last Scroll,  and stands in a traditional archer’s pose on a two-and-half ton block of white Clipsham stone.

Extensive research was done by Woodford to understand what historians believed the stocky-built medieval foresters of the period would look like, but he made one change that upset a Hell of a lot of individuals. And still does seventy years later.

They expected Robin Hood to have the triangular pointed hat with a long feather which Errol Flynn had in his film role, so the statue’s authentic headgear of a woodsman’s leather skull cap did not go down well at all. 

They originally planned to place it in the roadway at the top of Castle Road but the realization dawned that that traffic and congestion would be a nightmare as everyone stopped to look at it. 

The statue was officially presented to the city to commemorate the visit of Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh on June 28, 1949, during Nottingham’s quincentenary celebrations. Keep in mind that actually it wasn’t actually completed and installed until three years later.

The statue was finally unveiled on July 24, 1952, by the Duchess of Portland on the specially-prepared lawn beneath the walls of Nottingham Castle. 

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born December 8, 1861 Georges Méliès. Director of A Trip To The Moon which I know was one of Kage Baker’s most-liked films. It surely must be one of the earliest genre films and also one of the most visually iconic with the rocket ship stuck in the face of the moon. He did some other genre shorts such as Baron Munchausen’s Dreamand The Legend of Rip Van Winkle. (Died 1938.)
  • Born December 8, 1894 E.C.Segar. Creator of Popeye who of course is genre. Who could not watch Altman’s film and not know that? Segar created the character who first appeared in 1929 in his comic strip Thimble Theatre. Fantagraphics has published a six-volume book set reprinting all Thimble Theatre daily and Sunday strips from 1928–38. (Died 1938.)
  • Born December 8, 1950 Rick Baker,72. Baker won the Academy Award for Best Makeup a record seven times from a record eleven nominations, beginning when he won the first award given for An American Werewolf in London. So what else is he known for? Oh, I’m not listing everything but his first was The Thing with Two Heads and I’ll single out The ExorcistStar WarsThe Howling which I love, Starman for the Starman transformation, Beast design on the Beauty and the Beast series and Hellboy. 
  • Born December 8, 1951 Brian Attebery, 71. If I was putting together a library of reference works right now, Attebery would be high on the list of authors at the center of my shopping list. I think The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature: From Irving to Le Guin is still essential reading and Parabolas of Science Fiction with Veronica Hollinger is very close to a Grand Unification Theory of the Genre. He won a World Fantasy Award for his editing of Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, and a Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Stories about Stories: Fantasy & the Remaking of Myth.
  • Born December 8, 1954 Rebecca Neason. She wrote a Next Generation novel, Guises of The Mind, plus several Highlander novels, and two fantasy novels; her widower says one novel went unpublished. She was a regular panelist at conventions in the Pacific Northwest. Jim Fiscus has a remembrance here. (Died 2010.)
  • Born December 8, 1957 Laura J. Mixon, 65. She won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer at Sasquan. She has written a number of excellent novels including Glass Houses and Up Against It which got an Otherwise nomination. She is married to SF writer Steven Gould, with whom she co-wrote the novel Greenwar.
  • Born December 8, 1965 David Harewood57. First genre appearance is the BBC adaptation of Philip Pullman’s The Ruby in the Smoke and The Shadow in the North (Billie Piper plays the lead). He played Tuck in the BBC’s Robin Hood series and showed up as Joshua Naismith in Doctor Who’s ‘The End of Time’ episode. He played two separate characters on Supergirl, J’onnJ’onzz/Martian Manhunter / Hank Henshaw and Cyborg Superman. 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • Least I Could Do suspects a skill you’re using right now will become extinct.
  • Bizarro has another example of fans getting ahead of creators.  
  • Candorville has a romantic “miss you more” exchange, couched in sff terms.

(10) THREE, NOT FIVE. Camestros Felapton shares his “Review: Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky”. Beware mild spoilers.

Tchaikovsky’s third book in the Children of Time series continues to build up the series about deep time and sapience with another tale of mysterious planets, lost colonies and nature of intelligence and identity.

As with the previous novels, the story is technically a stand-alone story but the depth of the background to the events sits within the previous two stories. Each novel adds to and expands the evolving space-faring culture around whom these stories take place….

(11) BLAST OFF! Dreams of Space takes us back to a Fifties magazine’s answer to “Will your child visit the Moon?” in Women’s Day -August (1953) Part 1”. The article is reproduced at the link.

Women’s Day magazine also got involved in the spaceflight fad in the early 1950s. This 1953 (August) issue had a number of space related articles including: Will Your Child Visit The Moon? The article makes the case to the mothers of America that travel into space and the Moon is possible. It lays out the current development of spaceflight and how it will evolve. Not a lot of illustrations for all this text but a most interesting article in an unlikely place….

(12) OR MAYBE ALIVE IN A DIFFERENT FORM. “Wonder Woman 3 Dead: Patty Jenkins Script Rejected” reports Cosmic Book News.

…The report comes from THR who reports how Wonder Woman 3 is not moving forward as the DC movies have hit a turning point.

Worth a mention is that just yesterday saw Gal Gadot tweet about playing Wonder Woman, which was liked on Twitter by the new co-head of the DCU, James Gunn.

“A few years ago it was announced that I was going to play Wonder Woman. I’ve been so grateful for the opportunity to play such an incredible, iconic character and more than anything I’m grateful for YOU. The fans. Can’t wait to share her next chapter with you,” tweeted Gadot.

It’s unknown if Gal Gadot knew about Wonder Woman 3 not moving forward prior to tweeting what she said, but it probably does seem likely that she knew about it as did James Gunn, so maybe Gadot is sticking around, as Gadot is rumored to appear in The Flash; however, more on that below….

(13) IN MEMORY YET GREENLAND. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] No, not an SF classic but this week’s Nature cover story.

The cover shows an artist’s impression of the rich ecosystem that existed in parts of northern Greenland some 2 million years ago. The ecosystem is reconstructed from ancient DNA in this week’s issue by Eske Willerslev and colleagues. Working at the Kap København Formation in Peary Land, the researchers gathered sediment samples rich in organic material from 5 different geological sites. By extracting and sequencing DNA from these samples, they were able to piece together a picture of the flora and fauna present around 2 million years ago. The team found evidence of open boreal forest mixed with Arctic species such as cedar, spruce and birch, as well as signs of animals including hares, mastodons, reindeer and geese. The evidence affirms that this part of Greenland, now a polar desert, was 11–17 °C warmer than it is today and suggests it was home to an ecosystem composition that no longer exists anywhere in the world.

 Research paper here. (Open access). 

(14) URGE TO MERGE. “Strange flashes linked to stars merging rather than dying” discussed in Nature.

Brief, intense flashes known as γ-ray bursts appear every day at random locations in the sky. These bursts are classified according to their duration. Short γ-ray bursts, lasting less than one second, are thought to derive from the merging of two neutron stars in a binary system, whereas long γ-ray bursts are active for a few seconds or more, and result from the collapse of a massive star. Four papers published in this issue of Nature by Troja et al.1Rastinejad et al.2Mei et al.3 and Yang et al.4 now challenge this long-standing paradigm, by providing evidence of a long γ-ray burst that seems to have been produced by the merger of a compact binary system.

One of the papers is open access here.

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Another sff short released this week by DUST, “Eureka!” starring Karen Gillan.

A lazy, uninspired woman is visited by an otherworldly being responsible for giving humanity all its great ideas.

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, Steven H Silver, John A Arkansawyer, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Xtifr.]

Pixel Scroll 11/12/22 I See A Pixel Pulling A Scroll Out Of A Magician’s Hat. Why Is The Rabbit Unhappy?

(1) DREAMSCRAPES. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] DeviantArt has launched a new AI-based text-to-art tool. The training set? Everything on DeviantArt. Of course, artists are allowed to opt out, but the default is opt in. More than a few artists are unhappy about that choice. “DeviantArt upsets artists with its new AI art generator, DreamUp” at Ars Technica.

On Friday, the online art community DeviantArt announced DreamUp, an AI-powered text-to-image generator service powered by Stable Diffusion. Simultaneously, DeviantArt launched an initiative that ostensibly lets artists opt out of AI image training but also made everyone’s art opt in by default, which angered many members.

DreamUp creates novel AI-generated art based on text prompts. Due to its Stable Diffusion roots, DreamUp learned how to generate images by analyzing hundreds of millions of images scraped off sites like DeviantArt and collected into LAION datasets without artists’ permission, a potential irony that some DeviantArt members find problematic….

(2) JUST A LITTLE RADIOACTIVE. In “Low-hostility reviews”, Camestros Felapton thinks out loud about a potential rubric for online reviews.

…Why not “no hostility”? Partly because then you can only review what was good and yes, sometimes you can write a good review of a story you like (I like this one I wrote) but typically it is a lot meaty to get into things you dislike. To stick with the dinosaur theme, I like this review I wrote of Think Like a Dinosaur by James Patrick Kelly. In both those cases, I know the authors have read those reviews because they gave me positive feedback about them. (Should authors read their reviews? That’s a silly question, they are going to regardless, but no, they should avoid disputing reviews or letting bad reviews get to them. Easier said than done though.) Also, some writers really are hypersensitive to criticism and may take offence at very innocuous discussions of their books. You can’t guarantee nobody will get upset with you.

In addition, superficially “no hostility” can simply be a disguise for patronisation or passive-aggressive writing. Effusive praise in a review that intentionally misses the point of the story is still hostile, as in intended to aggravate the author or fans….

(3) NOW A BIG Z-ERO. “Feds Seize One of the Largest Sites for Pirated Books and Articles, Z-Library” reports Vice.

Last week, one of the largest repositories of pirated books and articles available on the Internet went dark—seemingly for good. As first reported by Torrentfreak, a series of Z-Library domain names were seized by the FBI and the main pages now have the stamped seals of the Department of Justice to prove it. 

Z-Library was a shadow library project that offered file-sharing access to scholarly journal articles, academic texts, and trade books. The sites enabled access to otherwise paywalled content including more than 11 million books and over 80 million articles. 

The FBI’s New York press office declined to comment. However, the seizure comes shortly after authors and publishers began to call out TikTok for giving torrenters a platform to publicize their book piracy hacks. 

“The hashtag #zlibrary on popular social media platform TikTok has 19 million views, in reference to the countless videos posted by college and high school students and others across the world promoting it as the go-to place for free ebooks,” the Authors Guild wrote in a complaint to the Office of U.S. Trade Representative on October 7…. 

(4) BOB’S HIS UNCLE. Some heirlooms from Robert Bloch’s wife have made their way to another generation, items from separate golden ages of Hollywood and science fiction: “Manitoba man inherits trove of famous author Robert Bloch’s belongings”CBC News also has some pictures.

… But to Unik, Bloch was just his great-uncle Bob, who he remembers visiting in Los Angeles as a young boy. Bloch introduced Unik to celebrity friends like Barbara Eden, who starred in I Dream of Jeannie, and George Kennedy, from movies like Earthquake.

Unik said his mother, Myrna Unik, inherited the items from her Aunt Elly, who was born Eleanor Zelisko in Manitoba. She later became a model, moved to Los Angeles and married Bloch.

“That’s how I ended up … having a famous great uncle who’s a writer,” said Unik, who lives in the city of Selkirk, just north of Winnipeg.

The items Unik is still going through include two bookcases filled with autographed books and photographs of Bloch with actors including Boris Karloff, Joan Crawford, Christopher Lee and Buster Keaton — and even Hitchcock himself, he said.

Then there’s a Christmas poem to his great-aunt and uncle from the author Ray Bradbury, who wrote the novel Fahrenheit 451….

(5) ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY JOINS AMAZING STORIES SPECIAL ISSUE: SOL SYSTEM. Publisher Kermit Woodall says one of the goals for the “Amazing Stories Annual Special: SOL SYSTEM” Kickstarter has been a special chapbook to be first handed out to AmazingCon II attendees. Today he announced that the story which will be so published has been commissioned from award-winning British author Adrian Tchaikovsky.

(6) MEMORY LANE.

1995 [By Cat Eldridge.] Everything it seems get rebooted and so it was on this night twenty-seven years ago that The Invaders which ran twenty-eight years previously on ABC for two seasons saw itself rebooted.

James Parriot, who executive produced this series, went on to executive produce Dark Skies and Forever Knight. He previously did the same for Misfits of Science as well. Very impressive indeed.

Ray Thinnes was the lead in the original series which I admit I really loved, whereas Scott Bakula got the nod for the role here.  He was Nolan Wood, who discovers the alien conspiracy, and Roy Thinnes rather briefly appeared as David Vincent, now an old man handing the matter of dealing with the aliens over to Wood.

This is not, repeat not, a full blown series, but rather a two-part movie, though it’s promoted as a miniseries.

VERY BRIEF SPOILERS ARE HERE.

The story is remarkably similar to the original Invaders and no one should expect to be otherwise. 

Nolan Wood who is a former Air Force officer  Man inmate in prison for manslaughter charges, meets David Vincent while both are in prison. Vincent tells Nolan a fantastic story about the alien conspiracy to control the world. 

Shortly after that, Wood begins to have visions about aliens and UFOs. Are they real, or is he going crazy? 

Wood falls under the mental control of the aliens but eventually breaks free so he can save the President from certain death on a runaway train. 

OK, YOU CAN COME BACK.

It was supposed to be a pilot for a series but the ratings and internal politics at Fox made it not happen. Thinnes was supposed to have a larger role if it went to series however interestingly enough Bakula was supposed to be recast or in a much more limited role. 

In the FOX TV movie, the aliens were never shown even though digital footage of them existed. They do appear in the later airing on SYFY and on the DVD.

It is not streaming legally anywhere now.  That means you may not offer up links to the YouTube copies as they are pirated as it is still under copyright. 

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born November 12, 1917 Dahlov Ipcar. Though primarily an artist and you really should go visit her website, she wrote three amazing young adult novels between 1969 and 1978 which are The Warlock of Night, The Queen of Spells and A Dark Horn Blowing. She lived but thirty miles north of here and I was privileged to meet her a few times. Lovely lady! (Died 2017.)
  • Born November 12, 1922 Kim Hunter. She portrayed the chimpanzee scientist Zira in the Planet of the Apes films. Her first genre role was her debut as Mary Gibson in the early Forties film The Seventh Victim. She’s June in A Matter of Life and Death, and Amanda Hollins in The Kindred. She has one-offs on Project U.F.O.Night GalleryMission Impossible and even appeared on The Evil Touch, an Australian horror anthology series. (Died 2002.)
  • Born November 12, 1929 Michael Ende. German author best known for The Neverending Story which is far better than the film. Momo, or the strange story of the time-thieves is a charming if strange novel worth your time. The rest of his children’s literature has been translated from German into English mostly by small specialist presses down the years. Unlike The Neverending Story and Momo, which I’ve encountered, I’ve not read any of these. (Died 1995.)
  • Born November 12, 1943 Valerie Leon, 79. She appeared in two Bond films, Never Say Never Again and The Spy Who Loved Me. She was in the horror flick Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb as Margaret Fuchs / Queen Tera. She was also Tanya in Revenge of the Pink Panther, and had one-offs in The AvengersSpace:1999 and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased)
  • Born November 12, 1943 Wallace Shawn, 79. Probably best remembered as the ferengi Grand Nagus Zek on Deep Space Nine, a role he only played seven times. He was also Vizzini in the beloved Princess Bride, and he played Dr. Elliott Coleye in the My Favorite Martian film. He also was the voice of Rex in the Toy Story franchise. 
  • Born November 12, 1945 Michael Bishop, 77. David Pringle included his Who Made Stevie Crye? novel in Modern Fantasy: The 100 Best Novels, An English-Language Selection, 1946-1987, high praise indeed. Though slightly dated feeling now, I’m fond of his Urban Nucleus of Atlanta series. And Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas is simply amazing.
  • Born November 12, 1952 Max Grodenchik, 70. He’s best known for his role as Rom, a recurring character on Deep Space Nine. He has a long genre history with appearances in The RocketeerHere Come The MunstersRumpelstiltskinStar Trek: Insurrection (scenes as a Trill were deleted, alas), Tales from The CryptSlidersWienerlandThe Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Bruce Almighty.
  • Born November 12, 1982 Anne Hathaway, 40. She starred as Selina Kyle in The Dark Knight Rises, the final installment in The Dark Knight trilogy. More impressive she was The White Queen In Alice Through the Looking Glass, and she was Agent 99 in the remake of Get Smart! No, not as good as the original but fun nonetheless.

(8) GHIBLI AND GROGU. “Studio Ghibli’s Star Wars Short ‘Zen – Grogu and Dust Bunnies’ is Out” and FirstShowing.net gives a description of the short now available on Disney+.

…Zen – Grogu and Dust Bunnies is a hand drawn animated short by Studio Ghibli. The short film is written and directed by and animated by filmmaker Katsuya Kondo, who was worked as a key animator for Studio Ghibli on every single film ever since Castle in the Sky (in 1986) through The Wind Rises (2013) and When Marnie Was There (2014). Featuring digital ink & paint & camera & composite by Yoichi Senzui. Produced by Tomohiko Ishii. Including a zen circle by iconic Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki. With music by Ludwig Göransson…. 

(9) AIR SHOW TRAGEDY. “Texas: Vintage military aircraft collide mid-air at Dallas air show” and perhaps as many as half a dozen pilots and crew are dead, although specific details have yet to be released.

A Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress and a Bell P-63 Kingcobra collided and crashed at the Wings Over Dallas airshow around 1:20 p.m. on Saturday, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

Authorities responded to the incident at Dallas Executive Airport, Jason Evans with Dallas Fire-Rescue told CNN on Saturday.

The number of casualties in the crash was still not confirmed later on Saturday afternoon, according to Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson….

The B-17 was part of the collection of the Commemorative Air Force, nicknamed “Texas Raiders,” and had been hangered in Conroe, Texas near Houston. It was one of about 45 complete surviving examples of the model, only nine of which were airworthy.

The P-63 was even rarer. Some 14 examples are known to survive, four of which in the United States were airworthy, including one owned by the Commemorative Air Force.

More than 12,000 B-17s were produced by Boeing, Douglas Aircraft and Lockheed between 1936 and 1945, with nearly 5,000 lost during the war, and most of the rest scrapped by the early 1960s. About 3,300 P-63’s were produced by Bell Aircraft between 1943 and 1945, and were principally used by the Soviet Air Force in World War II….

(10) DID YOU MISS ME? “Unmanned, solar-powered US space plane back after 908 days” at MSN.com. I guess we’re not supposed to ask what it was doing. (Waiting for the results of the midterms before deciding to come back to the US?)

An unmanned U.S. military space plane landed early Saturday after spending a record 908 days in orbit for its sixth mission and conducting science experiments.

The solar-powered vehicle, which looks like a miniature space shuttle, landed at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Its previous mission lasted 780 days.

“Since the X-37B’s first launch in 2010, it has shattered records and provided our nation with an unrivaled capability to rapidly test and integrate new space technologies,” said Jim Chilton, a senior vice president for Boeing, its developer….

(11) STANISŁAW LEM IN SCIENCE PAPER. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Stanisław Lem’s Solaris has become a model for Gaian evolution.

The Earth’s biosphere consists of many sub-systems such as tropical rain forest biomes and peri-Arctic boreal land. These subsystems also undertake what is called ecosystem function such as the storage of carbon, management of water flow and so forth. Gaia theory has it that systems work together to provide stable states for the biosphere (such as creating greenhouse levels for either a glacial or interglacial planetary mode).  A paper, ’Gaia as Solaris: An Alternative Default Evolutionary Trajectory’, in the journal Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres has been published that suggests that ultimately all these sub-systems could become so closely integrated that they effectively become a super-organism. The researchers say: ‘The blueprint for a possible outcome of this scenario has been masterfully provided by the great Polish novelist Stanisław Lem in his 1961 novel Solaris. In fact, Solaris offers such a persuasive and powerful case for an “extremely strong” Gaia hypothesis that it is, arguably, high time to investigate it in a discursive astrobiological and philosophical context.

(12) HAVE I REACHED THE PARTY TO WHOM I AM SPEAKING? “Scientists Preparing for Alien Contact” says Futurism.

The University of St. Andrews in Scotland has announced the formation of a new research hub last week, bringing together the brightest minds to prepare humanity for the day we might make first contact with an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization.

The SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Post Detection-Hub is meant to be a meeting point for experts to devise a unified way to respond to aliens — in case they do get in touch with us, or vice versa.

… So far, the only commonly agreed upon rules have been set out by the SETI community, as laid out in the SETI Institute’s “Declaration of Principles Concerning the Conduct of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.”

But those rules are very vague. The SETI Post-Detection Hub is planning to overhaul and expand upon them significantly….

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, Michael J. Walsh, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Kermit Woodall, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Andrew Porter, and Michael Toman, for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]