Pixel Scroll 4/9/22 Pixelscrollia As The Key Insight

(1) NEVER MIND. Roseanne Roseannadanna asks, “What’s all this I hear about Paramount walking back Spock’s canonical first name?” That’s what Collider says in an update to their post “Spock’s Full Name Revealed on Star Trek Strange New Worlds Poster”.

Update: We’ve been contacted by CBS Studios, and they’ve sent us a statement about our story:

“At Star Trek: Mission Chicago, we inadvertently displayed posters with Spock and M’Benga’s names that were incorrect. Sometimes when you work at warp speed, mistakes are made. While Spock and M’Benga do indeed have first names, they have yet to be revealed.”

Barbara Hambly, whose novel is the source of what was announced as Spock’s complete name, responded on Facebook:

Well, fooey. My 15 minutes of fame seems to have lasted about 18 hours. Evidently – so Randy Carter informs me on a comment to my post – Paramount has now walked back on that announcement and said that the poster was in error and they haven’t yet revealed Mr. Spock’s real name.

So it all remains to be seen. But it did make me smile.

But for one brief and shining moment, it was Camelot.

Meanwhile, discussion of Spock’s real name continues unabated in social media and has prompted several funny replies, like these two.

(2) ERUPTION IN BOOK BANNING. Publishers Weekly has details from the research: “PEN America Report Documents Massive Spike in Book Bans”.

Free speech defender PEN America this week released a new report that seeks to put numbers to the current wave of book banning across the nation. The report titled Banned in the USA: Rising School Book Bans Threaten Free Expression and Students’ First Amendment Rights includes an Index of School Book Bans, a spreadsheet that documents “the alarming spike in censorship of books in school districts across the country over the past nine months” with 1,586 book bans and restrictions in 86 school districts across 26 states, targeting some 1,145 unique book titles.

In its report, PEN also found that the vast majority of book bans, some 98%, did not adhere to established guidelines and best practices in place for challenging materials is school and on library shelves….

(3) PERFORMANCE ART. PW reported that a Congressional hearing on the same subject delivered a mixed bag: “Congress Investigates Book Banning in School”.

The U.S. House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties marked National Library Week this week by holding a three-hour hearing April 7 to discuss the recent spike in book bans in school classrooms and libraries across the country.

While the speakers were sincere in relating their personal experiences with book banning and its impact upon them as students, teachers, librarians, parents, the proceedings at times veered into political theater, with subcommittee members springboarding from book bans to Hunter Biden’s laptop, the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and subcommittee member Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio)’s complaint that conservatives are victims of “cancel culture.”

After calling the meeting to order an hour late, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) provided a short history of court cases in the U.S. that addressed relevant First Amendment issues.

(4) LUCKY 13. “Mystery Science Theater 3000: Season 13 Exclusive Trailer and Release Date Announcement” at IGN.

Thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaignMystery Science Theater 3000 is returning for Season 13, and this time the MST3K crew are self-distributing new episodes via their own platform dubbed the Gizmoplex. New episodes premiere May 6-8, 2022.

… Returning for the next season are the Mads – Kinga Forrester (Felicia Day), loyal henchman Max (Patton Oswalt), and grandmother Pearl Forrester (Mary Jo Pehl) – as well as a few other familiar faces.

(5) JUDITH CHAPMAN (1948-2022). LASFSian Judith Chapman died April 4 reports the Orange County English Country Dance Facebook group. She is survived by her husband John.

(6) MEMORY LANE.

1955 [Item by Cat Eldridge.] Again tonight, I’m reaching back into early days of the genre in broadcast terms by talking about the television premiere of Science Fiction Theatre which sixty-seven years ago started off in syndication. It would end rather quickly two years later on the sixth of April with a total of seventy-eight episodes over the course of just two seasons. The first season was in color but to save money the second was not. 

It was the product of Hungarian born Iván Tors who had earlier done the Office of Scientific Investigation trilogy of SF films (The Magnetic Monster which recycled footage from a German horror film, Riders to the Storm and Gog which average twenty percent among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes). He’s also responsible for Flipper and Flipper’s New Adventure which surely are genre adjacent, aren’t they?

Hosted by Truman Bradley, a radio and television announcer and a Forties film actor, its schtick, snd I use that Yiddish word in its fullest sense, was that they were doing a quasi-documentary series that what Ifs of modern science. Now mind they were to a great extent re-using the stories that had been earlier on Dimension X, so they were recycling existing stories. Or so say several sources.

The program never aired over a network. All seventy-eight twenty-six minute episodes were syndicated across the country in package deals of thirty nine episodes each with Bradley doing custom commercials for each market. If you watched it later on PBS, you got the entire episode, but when the Sci-fi channel broadcast them they were cut by five minutes to cram in more blipverts, errr, I mean advertisements.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born April 9, 1913 George F. Lowther. He was writer, producer, director in the earliest days of radio and television. He wrote scripts for both Captain Video and His Video Rangers and Tom Corbett, Space Cadet.  You can see “The Birth of The Galaxy” which he scripted for the first show here as it is in the public domain. (Died 1975.)
  • Born April 9, 1921 Frankie Thomas. He was best remembered  for his starring role in Tom Corbett, Space Cadet which ran from 1950 to 1955. He had been slated as a special guest of L.A.con IV (2006) but died before the convention. Though definitely not genre or genre adjacent, he was in the Nancy Drew film franchise that ran in the late Thirties. (Died 2006.)
  • Born April 9, 1935 Avery Schreiber. He’s had a long history with genre fiction starting with Get Smart! and going from there to include More Wild Wild West!Fantasy IslandFaerie Tale Theatre: PinocchioShadow ChasersCavemanGalaxinaDracula: Dead and Loving ItAnimainiacs in which he voiced Beanie the Brain-Dead Bisonand, of course, The Muppet Show. (Died 2002.)
  • Born April 9, 1937 Marty Krofft, 85. Along with Sid, his brother, are a Canadian sibling team of television creators and puppeteers. Through Sid & Marty Krofft Pictures, they have made numerous series including the superb H.R. Pufnstuf which I still remember fondly all these years later not to forget Sigmund and the Sea MonstersLand of the Lost and Electra Woman and Dyna Girl.
  • Born April 9, 1949 Stephen Hickman. Illustrator who did done over three hundred and fifty genre covers such as Manly Wade Wellman’s John the Balladeer and Nancy Springer’s Rowan Hood, Outlaw Girl of Sherwood Forest. His most widely known effort was his space fantasy postage stamps done for the U.S. Postal Service which won a Hugo for Best Original Art Work at ConAndian in 1994. (Died 2021.)
  • Born April 9, 1954 Dennis Quaid, 68. I’m reasonably sure that his first genre role (but as always I stand by to be cheerfully corrected if I’m wrong) was in Dreamscape as Alex Gardner followed immediately by the superb role of Willis Davidge in Enemy Mine followed by completing a trifecta with Innerspace and the character of Lt. Tuck Pendleton. And then there’s the sweet film of Dragonheart and him as Bowen. Anyone hear of The Day After Tomorrow in which he was Jack Hall? I hadn’t a clue about it.
  • Born April 9, 1955 Earl Terry Kemp. Author of The Anthem Series: A Guide to the Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror and Weird Specialty Publishers of the Golden Age and The Anthem Series Companion: A Companion to The Guide to the Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror and Weird Specialty Publishers of the Golden Age. He did publish several databases devoted to the same including The Golden Age of Pulps: SF Magazine Database: Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror (1890-2009). No idea what happened to those after his passing. (Died 2020.)
  • Born April 9, 1972 Neve McIntosh, 50. During time of the Eleventh Doctor, She plays Alaya and Restac, two Silurian reptilian sisters who have been disturbed under the earth, one captured by humans and the other demanding vengeance. Her second appearance on Doctor Who is Madame Vastra in “A Good Man Goes to War”. Also a Silurian, she’s a Victorian crime fighter.  She’s back in the 2012 Christmas special, and in the episodes “The Crimson Horror” and “The Name of the Doctor”. She’s Madame Vastra, who along with her wife, Jenny Flint, and Strax, a former Sontaran warrior, who together form an private investigator team. Big Finish gave them their own line of audio adventures which I really should listen to soon. 

(8) COMICS SECTION.

  • xkcd turns this “Frankenstein Captcha” into a Gotcha.

(9) MAJOR LEAGUES. MLB.com noticed a fashion trend among pro ballplayers on opening day: “Xander Bogaerts wore Wolverine-inspired X-Men cleats” – see photos of the various comics and movie-inspired footwear at the link.

Xander Bogaerts, the Red Sox’s longest tenured player, has a pretty simple nickname: X-Man. When your first name starts with an X and you have enough talent to be considered a superhero, it just makes sense. So, for Opening Day against the Yankees on Friday, Bogaerts put on the most fitting cleats possible, even giving himself Wolverine-style claws.

…Bogaerts isn’t the only Red Sox player with some flashy feet, though. Christian Vazquez joined in with a pair of Toy Story cleats. He’s got one shoe for Woody and another for Buzz Lightyear. Sadly, Rex has been overlooked again.

(10) SHOW BIZ. Long before Virginia Gerstenfeld married Robert Heinlein, before she ever joined the Navy, she was part of a local Brooklyn drama troupe. If you’re curious, view this clipping from the Brooklyn Eagle’s 1939 profile of the Tophatters (located by Bill).

(11) JEOPARDY! On last night’s episode of Jeopardy!, reports Andrew Porter, a contestant may have confused Clark Kent with Philip José Farmer.

Category: What kind of place is this?

Answer: Smaller than it sounds, this Illinois place was designated “Home of Superman” in 1972

Wrong question: What is Peoria?

Right question: What is Metropolis?

(12) STINKERS. BuzzFeed lists “21 Laughably Bad Sci-Fi Films” – but you probably don’t need their help to come up with that many.

… I’ve assembled 21 of these out-of-this-world sci-fi duds with the “can’t look away” quality saved for the most laughably half-witted of the genre….

18. Solarbabies

This over-the-top post-apocalyptic film feels like a second-rate Mad Max with a group of rollerblading orphans, but has achieved newfound popularity as a long-lost “so-bad-it’s-good” gem.

(13) EATS, SHOOTS, AND LEAVES. The New York Times has a surprising example of new uses for warehouse space: “Vertical Farms Expand as Demand for Year-Round Produce Grows”.

The term vertical farm was popularized by Dickson Despommier, a professor emeritus of environmental health sciences at Columbia University. Vertical farming is expected to grow to $9.7 billion worldwide by 2026, from $3.1 billion in 2021, according to ResearchAndMarkets.com, a data analysis firm. Pitchbook, a financial data and software company in Seattle, tracked 33 deals worth nearly $960 million in 2021, up from $865 billion the year before and $484 million in 2019.

AppHarvest, a greenhouse grower, recently went public via a merger with Novus Capital. And in August, BrightFarms, another greenhouse operator, was acquired by Cox Enterprises in Atlanta.

Scientists caution that technology has limitations, with LED lights, sensors and operating systems adding to utility costs. “They don’t want to be warehouses, they want to be food production facilities,” Professor Giacomelli said. “And food production facilities have never had this kind of money.”

The money is creating demand for warehouse space. Kalera, a vertical farm company based in Orlando, Fla., harvests greens and culinary herbs there and in Houston and Atlanta. Farms in Denver, Seattle, Honolulu and St. Paul are opening later this year, and one in Columbus, Ohio, is planned for 2023. Farms are also open in Munich and Kuwait.

Details are hard to come by because the farms closely guard their intellectual property, growing system designs, material and structures….

(14) NOW ARRIVING AT THE I$$. In the Washington Post, Christian Davenport launched the first crew of private citizens towards the International Space Station, including three entrepreneurs who paid $55 million to secure their slots and Axiom Space vice-president Manuel Lopez-Alegria, a former NASA astronaut, as pilot. “SpaceX launches first all-private mission to International Space Station”.

… A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 11:17 a.m., carrying three wealthy entrepreneurs, each of whom paid $55 million for the mission, and a former NASA astronaut, who is serving as their guide. While private citizens have for years flown to the space station on Russian rockets, the mission — which was commissioned by Axiom Space, a Houston-based company — is the first all-private mission to the station. It also is the first time private citizens have flown to the station from American soil.

The international crew is composed of Larry Connor, the managing partner of an Ohio real estate group; Mark Pathy, the chief executive of a Canadian investment firm; Eytan Stibbe, a businessman and former Israeli Air Force Fighter pilot; and Michael Lopez-Alegria, a former NASA astronaut who serves as an Axiom vice president. They are expected to reach the station Saturday at approximately 7:45 a.m. Eastern. They will spend eight days on the station before coming home in SpaceX’s autonomous Dragon spacecraft….

(15) HERE’S THE WAY THEY DO IT IN CHICAGO. Gizmodo tells us “Star Trek: Lower Decks’ First Season 3 Trailer Teases a Chaotic Kidnapping”.

… Revealed at this weekend’s Star Trek Mission Chicago, the first trailer for the new season shows our quartet of screw ups get ready to hijack their ship, which is noticeably missing its outer plating now that it’s been grounded….

(16) HOT ON THE TRAILER. Marcel The Shell With Shoes On comes to theaters on June 24.

[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Lise Andreasen, Bill, John Hertz, Larry Hansen, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Danny Sichel.]

Pixel Scroll 4/8/22 No One But A Blockhead Ever Scrolled Except For Pixels

(1) CANON SALUTE. “Spock Gets New Canon Full Name In Star Trek Strange New Worlds” reports Gizmodo. And that name is S’Chn T’Gai Spock.

…[This] is not an unfamiliar name to fans of classic Star Trek novels. Barbara Hambly’s Pocket Book novel Ishmael, first released in 1985, gave S’Chn T’Gai as Spock’s name. It was established that, in a similar manner to how the Bajorans naming conventions work—where, for example, Deep Space Nine’s Major Kira Nerys’ given name is Nerys, not Kira—Vulcan names are inverted, and S’Chn T’Gai is actually Spock’s family name. Spock had previously alluded to having a first name in the Star Trek season 1 episode “This Side of Paradise,” where he described it as “unpronounceable.” Not any more, apparently!…

A watermarked version of the forthcoming poster with Spock’s full name can be seen here at TrekCore.com.

Naturally, Barbara Hambly is ecstatic. As she told Facebook followers: “Now, classic Star Trek fiction is having its legacy live on in TV once more with the canonization of S’Chn T’Gai. And that makes me Mr. Spock’s godmother! This delights me as much as winning a Hugo or a Nebula. Maybe more.”

(2) A CRUEL CAREER. “’Unlivable and Untenable.’ Molly McGhee on the Punishing Life of Junior Publishing Employees” – a Literary Hub podcast.

Fiction writer and former Tor assistant editor Molly McGhee joins co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to discuss details of her recent resignation from a position she’d fought for in the industry she loves. She also talks about what’s behind #PublishingBurnout for junior employees and what that means for the future of publishing.

Molly McGhee: I had a lot of people reach out privately to me, and publicly, and express that this is something they felt as well, but that they were really nervous to burn any bridges. The thing about publishing is that no matter how high you are, especially if you’re in editorial, you had to start from the bottom. And so you have been experiencing this struggle for years and years, and then find yourself in a position of frustration where you cannot alleviate that struggle for other people below you….

(3) THE FOOD OF AFROFUTURISM. Eat the Culture presented an array of recipes in their “2022 Black History Month Virtual Potluck”.

We collaborated with more than 30 Black recipe developers as we celebrate Black History Month 2022. This Virtual Potluck explores Black food through the lens of Afrofuturism. Our collaboration of recipes explores the intersection of the Black diaspora via culture, future, geopolitics, imagination, liberation, culture, and technology…

What is Afrofuturism?

“Afrofuturism evaluates the past and future to create better conditions for the present generation of Black people through the use of technology, often presented through art, music, and literature.”

Taylor Crumpton, “Afrofuturism Has Always Looked Forward,” Architectural Digest, August 24, 2020

We tasked participants with developing recipes that honor the culinary ingenuity of our past and stretch towards an innovative culinary future.  We sought out to take familiar cultural foods and reimagine them with the ingredients we use, flavors we develop, textures we mold, and visually the way we present….

(4) CAN’T GET IT FIXED. Chad Orzel tells about a writer’s heartbreak from “The Persistence of Errata” at Counting Atoms.

… [The] problem of errors creeping in and somehow making it past the seemingly endless rounds of editing is a pretty universal one. I’ve had a few over the years, and in fact just this week got another email pointing one out. The biggest of the errors that I’ve been alerted to are:

— I’m shocked to realize that this was ten years ago, now, but all the way back in How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog, we ended up with a typo in Maxwell’s equations (on page 34 of the paperback)— there’s an incorrect sign in the Ampere-Maxwell law. In my defense, in the first round of proofs, basically every symbol in there had been replaced by some random dingbat because of a font issue, so it took quite a bit of effort to even get them close. I think the Kindle edition was still rendering a lot of them as empty boxes a few months after publication. I’ve gotten a bunch of emails about this one over the years, starting with one from Bill Phillips….

(5) NO VISIBLE MEANS OF SUPPORT. And here’s another little mistake that made it past quality control: “’The Northman’ Subway Posters Trolled For Excluding Title” at Comic Sands.

If you’ve been anywhere near the internet or TV lately, you’ve likely heard about the new film The Northman as commercials have hit the airwaves and the film’s star-studded cast have begun walking red carpets at various glitzy premieres.

The sweeping Viking epic from director Robert Eggers star-studded cast includes Alexander Skarsgård and Nicole Kidman, making the film pretty hard to miss as its opening weekend approaches.

But if you get most of your advertising from the New York city subway? …[The] film’s marketing team seems to have forgotten to put the film’s title on its poster….

Twitter is helpfully filling in the blank. This might be the best of them:

(6) EAVESDROPPING. In case you haven’t listened to BBC Radio 4’s encounter between the Archbishop and Stephen King, linked here last month, there is now a webpage with the highlights: “Ten things we learned when the Archbishop of Canterbury met author Stephen King”.

1. King’s versatility surprises people

The Archbishop confesses that he didn’t know that King wrote The Green Mile and Shawshank Redemption. He’s not alone.

“The thing that I remember best about those books,” says King “is being in the supermarket one day and going up an aisle where this woman was looking at me, and she said, ‘I know who you are. You write all those scary stories. And that’s all right. For some people, that’s fine. I don’t read those scary stories. I like uplifting things like that Shawshank Redemption.’ And I said, ‘I wrote that,’ and she said, ‘No, you didn’t.’ So that was it. That was our whole conversation!”

(7) SCRIBNER OBIT. Australian fan Edwin A. “Ted” Scribner who edited the web version of the Australian SF Bullsheet (second series) has died. The editor of the email/print version Edwina Harvey announced the news today. He and Harvey were nominated six times for the Ditmar Award for their work on the newzine, winning in 2004, 2005, and 2006. Scribner also was a member of the Sydney Futurians.

Edwina Harvey’s personal tribute to her co-editor and friend is here on Facebook.

(8) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.

1950 [Item by Cat Eldridge.] I’m reaching way back into the history of the genre this time as the Dimension X radio show premiered seventy-two years ago this evening on the NBC radio network. It was preceded by Mutual’s 2000 Plus which as the name suggests was another SF series with episodes like “Men from Mars”. That series lasted two years.

The Dimension X radio show was, according to all the articles I read, not the first SF radio series but it benefited from the deep stock of writers involved and I’m going to list all of them here: Isaac Asimov, Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, Fredric Brown, Robert A. Heinlein, Murray Leinster, H. Beam Piper, Frank M. Robinson, Clifford D. Simak, William Tenn, Jack Vance, Kurt Vonnegut, Jack Williamson and Donald A. Wollheim. Holy frell! 

If I may single out an episode, I will by noting June 10, 1950’s “The Green Hills of Earth“, based upon the Heinlein story of the same name, relates the life of “Noisy” Rhysling whose story y’all know. It’s wonderful to hear it told. 

The stories of course had already been published, be it in Astounding Science Fiction or the Saturday Evening Post. It was really the Golden Age of Science Fiction for these authors as they’d get paid for these stories again when they were used on the X Minus One series that followed not long after. Remember Heinlein’s adage about filing the serial numbers off. 

With a five-month hiatus from January to June of 1951, the series spanned seventeen months. Quite remarkably all fifty episodes of the series have survived and can be heard today. I’ve profiled at least six episodes of this series on File 770. Do a search here if you want to listen to one of them.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born April 8, 1942 Douglas Trumbull. Let’s call him a genius and leave it at that. He contributed to, or was fully responsible for, the special photographic effects of Close Encounters of the Third Kind2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Blade Runner, and directed the movies Silent Running and Brainstorm. And Trumbull was executive producer for Starlost which we will forgive him for. (Died 2022.)
  • Born April 8, 1943 James Herbert. Writer whose work erased the boundaries between horror and sf and the supernatural in a manner that made for mighty fine popcorn reading. None of his work from his first two books, The Rats and The Fog, to his latter work such as Nobody True would be considered Hugo worthy in my opinion (you may of course disagree) but he’s always entertaining. I will note that in 2010 Herbert was greatly honored by receiving the World Horror Convention Grand Master Award which was presented to him by Stephen King. (Died 2013.)
  • Born April 8, 1967 Cecilia Tan, 55. Editor, writer and founder of Circlet Press, which she says is the first press devoted to erotic genre fiction. It has published well over a hundred digital book to date with such titles as Telepaths Don’t Need Safewords and Other Stories from the Erotic Edge of SF/Fantasy (Wouldn’t Bester be surprised to learn that. I digress), Sex in the System: Stories of Erotic Futures, Technological Stimulation, and the Sensual Life of Machines and Genderflex: Sexy Stories on the Edge and In-Between. She has two series, Magic University and The Prince’s Boy
  • Born April 8, 1974 Nnedi Okorafor, 48. Who Fears Death won a World Fantasy Award for Best Novel.  Lagoon which is an Africanfuturism or Africanjujuism novel (her terms) was followed by her amazing Binti trilogy. Binti, which led off that trilogy, won both the Nebula and Hugo Awards. Binti: The Night Masquerade was a Hugo finalist at Dublin 2019. She was also a 2019 Hugo finalist for her work on the most excellent Black Panther: Long Live the King. Several of her works have been adapted for video, both in Africa and in North America. She wrote LaGuardia, winner of the Best Graphic Story Hugo at CoNZealand, and won a Nommo Award for writing Shuri, another graphic novel.  
  • Born April 8, 1977 Sarah Pinsker, 45. A nine-time finalist for the Nebula Award, her first novel A Song for a New Day won the Nebula for Best Novel while her story Our Lady of the Open Road won the award for Best Novelette. Her short story, “In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind”, won a Sturgeon Award, and “Two Truths and a Lie” won Best Novelette at DisCon III. Another novelette, “The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye” was nominated at ConNZealand, and a novella, “And Then There Were (N-One)”, was nominated at Worldcon 76. Very impressive indeed.
  • Born April 8, 1980 Katee Sackhoff, 42. Being noted here  for playing Lieutenant Kara “Starbuck” Thrace on the rebooted Battlestar Galactica though I must confess I’ve only seen in her excellent role as Deputy Sheriff Victoria “Vic” Moretti on Longmire which is now streaming on Peacock. She also played Amunet Black, a recurring character who showed up on the fourth season of The Flash. To my pleasant surprise, I see her on Star Wars: The Clone Wars in a recurring role of voicing Bo-Katan Kryze.
  • Born April 8, 1981 Taylor Kitsch, 41. You’ll possibly remember him  as the lead in John Carter which I swear was originally titled John Carter of Mars. He also played Gambit in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and was Lieutenant Commander Alex Hopper in Battleship which was based off the board game.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) BUCHA AND BOYCOTT. [Item by James Bacon.] The Will team continue to inform fans of what they are seeing and doing, as they are faced with daily news that is upsetting and horrifying. 

The massacre in Bucha has stunned many, and artist Igor Kurilin created a piece of art,

And there is one raising awareness of Russian supporters in our midst. 

Art by Igor Kurilin & TheWillProduction

(12) ALL ABIRD! “Whoopi Goldberg joins Anansi Boys TV series as Bird Woman” reports Entertainment Weekly.

… Goldberg has boarded the cast of Anansi Boysthe TV series adaptation of Gaiman’s acclaimed 2005 book at Amazon. And she’s playing a key antagonistic role that Gaiman himself promises is “going to be scary.”

Amazon revealed the actors who will portray the pantheon of deities on the show, including Goldberg’s Bird Woman, a.k.a. the God of Birds. She is the embodiment of birds, and not just the more beautiful, stately avian animals, but the dangerous ones, as well. Long ago, Anansi, the African trickster God of Stories did her dirty, and now she might finally have her chance to turn the tables….

(13) SPLICING GENRE GENES. James David Nicoll introduces Tor.com readers to “5 Captivating SFF Mystery Novels”.

I’ve noticed that many of my friends who read SFF also read mysteries. Not only that—authors who publish in SFF sometimes publish mysteries as well (which are often more profitable). Indeed, some authors even write SFF mysteries. Here are five recent SFF mysteries I liked.

One of his picks is A Study in Honor by Claire O’Dell (2018).

(14) POSSIBLE NEW FORCE IN PHYSICS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Back in the day, at our occasional dinners, the bioscientists on the SF2 Concatenation team would always rib our physicist, Graham Connor (who was prone to saying that physics was the> key science), by asking him had physicists found anti-gravity yet? Or, broken the speed of light? etc.  Well, now it just may be the BBC News reports that a new force in physics may have been discovered…

The new research from Fermi Lab has been published in the journal Science and it may upset the standard model of physics.

(15) SF CINEMA SFX. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Another chance to hear Unreal: The VFX Revolution.

This is a three-part BBC Radio 4 documentary, first broadcast last year, that largely focuses on SF film special effects. It is now being repeated on BBC Radio 4 but you can access all three episodes on BBC Sounds.

Yesterday’s Part 2 episode was particularly interesting.

Oscar winner Paul Franklin explores how film entered the digital realm.

The 1970s saw the very first onscreen digital effects in films like Westworld. Those first pioneers of CGI already spoke of digital humans, indeed of entire films being made within the computer, but Hollywood was unconvinced. By 1979, some of those visionaries like Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith, later founders of Pixar, were working for filmmaker George Lucas, who primarily wanted new digital tools for editing and compositing and to explore computer graphics. Their first all-digital sequence created life-from lifelessness with the Genesis effect for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Meanwhile Disney itself was creating TRON, a spectacular mix of state-of-the art animation and pioneering digital effects that took audiences into cyberspace for the first time. In their different ways these two films were the true harbingers of the digital revolution that would bring profound change to moviemaking within little more than a decade. And then came Terminator 2’s chrome shape shifter-the T1000. The revolution was underway.

(16) FROM LOTR TO UFO. Mashable declares “Stephen Colbert’s latest ‘Lord of the Rings’ rant is beautiful to witness”.

Stephen Colbert has nerded out over Lord of the Rings many times before on The Late Show, and frankly it’ll never get old.

The latest glorious example came on Thursday during a segment on space news, when the discovery of a new star name Earendel prompted Colbert to launch into a truly impressive rundown of the name’s importance in Tolkien’s world….

“Space News: Hubble Finds A New Star, Bret Baier Warns Of Alien Pregnancies” on YouTube.

Outer space enthusiast Stephen Colbert shares updates from beyond our world, including news about a newly-discovered star with a name borrowed from “The Lord of the Rings,” and an explosive report on unexplained alien phenomena from our buddy Bret Baier at Fox News.

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Rob Thornton, Chris Barkley, James Bacon, Lise Andrerasen, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jim Janney.]

Pixel Scroll 9/20/21 Something Is Pixelling But You Don’t Know What It Is, Do You, Mr. Scroll?

(1) SOMTOW’S FILM WINS AWARD. This past weekend Somtow Sucharitkul and an orchestra flew in to do a concert at the Oldenburg International Film Festival — the biggest indie fest in Europe, “Sundance of Europe.” The music selected for the occasion, he says, “included all sorts of great music appropriate to our field including the 1922 score from Nosferatu and the ‘classic’ overture to Piranha II.”

The festival audience also witnessed the premiere of The Maestro, a film made with director Paul Spurrier, with Somtow’s score and onscreen performance.  (See File 770’s post about the making of The Maestro.)

In the video below you can watch the entire concert of film music at the Oldenburg Festival — followed by Somtow’s surprise at receiving the Spirit of Cinema Award 2021 for The Maestro.

Oldenburg Festival founder and director Torsten Neumann (left) Somtow Sucharitkul (right)

(2) NO EMMYS FOR SFF SHOWS. The Primetime Emmy Awards aired last night but I don’t have a post up about them because “Sci-fi and fantasy shows completely shut out of Primetime Emmys”, as explained at Winter Is Coming.

… And while series like WandaVision and The Mandalorian cleaned up at the Creative Arts Emmys, which awards more technical categories like production design and costuming, they came up empty at the Primetime Emmys, which rightly or wrongly are considered to be more prestigious….

(3) NEW LEM TRANSLATION. Stanislaw Lem’s 1964 story, published in English for the first time, tells the tale of a scientist in an insane asylum theorizing that the sun is alive. “The Truth, by Stanislaw Lem”, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, is part of a new collection and a free read at The MIT Press Reader.

Here I sit writing in a locked room, where the door has no handle and the windows can’t be opened. They’re made of unbreakable glass. I tried. Not out of a wish to escape or out of rabid fury, I just wanted to be sure. I’m writing at a walnut table. I have plenty of paper. I’m allowed to write. Except no one will ever read it. But I’m writing anyway. I don’t want to be alone, and I can’t read. Everything they give me to read is a lie, the letters start to jump before my eyes and I lose patience. None of what’s in them has been of the least concern to me ever since I realized how things really are….

(4) MARCIA LUCAS’ OPINION ABOUT SW SEQUELS. From Marcia Lucas’ foreword in a new biography about Howard Kazanjian.

IGN continues, in “Marcia Lucas Was ‘Furious’ Over Star Wars Sequel Trilogy: ‘They Don’t Get It’”.

…And perhaps to set the record straight, Lucas also directs her wrath at her ex-husband’s prequel trilogy, revealing her disappointment in Episode I literally brought her to tears in 1999.

“I remember going out to the parking lot, sitting in my car and crying,” Lucas writes. “I cried. I cried because I didn’t think it was very good. And I thought [George] had such a rich vein to mine, a rich palette to tell stories with… There were things I didn’t like about the casting, and things I didn’t like about the story, and things I didn’t like — it was a lot of eye candy. CG.”…

(5) DUNE, ON THE BIG AND BIGGER SCREEN. “’Dune’ Earns $36.8M in Overseas Debut”The Hollywood Reporter has a breakdown.

The highly anticipated Legendary/Warner Bros. movie opened overseas to $36.8 million across 24 markets and 7,819 screens. Russia led international tickets sales with $7.6 million, followed by France ($7.5 million), Germany ($4.9 million) and Italy ($2.6 million).

Dune‘s giant-format ticket sales were a particular stand-out, with the movie earning $3.6 million in Imax ticket sales from 142 screens, making its per-screen Imax average an astounding $25,000. The Imax ticket sales made up 10 percent of the movie’s total international take. The movie was shot for large-format viewing, with the Imax version featuring an exclusive expanded aspect ratio….

(6) IN CASE YOU WANT TO KNOW. Deadline has a vast calendar of when shows will begin airing: “Fall TV Premiere Dates 2021: New and Returning Series”.

Deadline’s comprehensive annual list of fall premiere dates for new series and new seasons of returning series. It covers more than 450 broadcast, cable and streaming shows bowing from September 1 through December 31

(7) SOUNDS OF SILENCE. I’m gradually working my way through SF Signal’s blogroll. It was compiled years ago and many of the authors have in the interim changed to another platform or dropped blogging for other alternatives. Justine Larbalastier explains why she moved on from Twitter in “Why I Left Twitter, or, the Last Day of 2019”, and left  blogging in “The Importance of Masks”, posted in July 2020.

…I haven’t been blogging because I missed the community that used to be here. When this was a regular blog there was a wonderful conversation in response to almost every post. I’m finding blogging here to silence soul sucking.

I miss the community of the old days but I accept those days are gone. The conversations now unfold on social media.

I have found an engaged community on Instagram ready and willing to discuss the intersections of fashion and politics during this pandemic and there are no trolls. I’m loving it. So I post my mini essays there. I will continue to post longer essays here and will soon be updating this site with my fashion research.

I don’t foresee returning to Twitter anytime soon. It was too depressing. I miss those of you I no longer interact with, but my mental health is so much better since I left. So . . .

(8) RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT IN 1840. Barbara Hambly, who is still at it, recently migrated her blogging activity to Barbarahambly.blogspot.com as she notes in “Experimental Post #2”.

And here we are, at my new blog. The website is yet to come, and for the first couple of weeks I’ll be buried in a deadline: Benjamin January # 19, Death and Hard Cider, which takes place against the background of the 1840 Presidential election. I thought about calling it, “Tippecanoe and Murder, Too,” but realized that a lot of people won’t understand the reference to the campaign of William Henry Harrison. That was the first “modern” style Presidential campaign, with songs, rallies, women’s auxiliary organizations (even though women couldn’t vote – the guys found them convenient for providing refreshments at the rallies, and Harrison’s opponents railed against those hussies for handing out leaflets and reading newspapers and having opinions about the politics of their betters)….

(9) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.

  • 1979 – Forty-two years ago on this evening, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century first aired on NBC. It was developed by Glen Larson who created Battlestar Galactica and Leslie Stevens who created Outer Limits. It is of course based on characters created by Philip Francis Nowlan. The only cast that counts was Gil Gerard as Captain William “Buck” Rogers and Erin Gray as Colonel Wilma Deering. Oh, and Mel Blanc in the first season voicing Twiki. It lasted but two seasons of thirty-seven episodes. Buster Crabbe who played Buck Rogers in the original thirties Buck Rogers film serial would play Brigadier Gordon in an episode here. It’s worth noting that the series re-used most of the props, star fighters, stages, some of the effects film and even costumes from Battlestar Galactica. 

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born September 20, 1935 — Keith Roberts. Author of Pavane, an amazing novel.  I’ve also read his collection of ghost stories, Winterwood and Other Hauntings, with an introduction by Robert Holdstock. Interestingly he has four BSFA Awards including ones for the artwork for the cover of his own first edition of Kaeti & Company. (Died 2000.)
  • Born September 20, 1940 — Jonathan Hardy. He was the voice of Dominar Rygel XVI, called simply Rygel, once the royal ruler of the Hynerian Empire, on Farscape.  He was also Police Commissioner Labatouche in Mad Max, and he had a one-off in the Mission: Impossible series that was produced in his native Australia in the “Submarine” episode as Etienne Reynard. (Died 2012.)
  • Born September 20, 1950 — James Blaylock, 71. One of my favorite writers. I’d recommend the Ghosts trilogy, the Christian trilogy and The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives whichcollects all of the Langdon St. Ives adventures together as his best writing, but anything by him is worth reading. I see the usual suspects don’t have much by him but they do have two Langdon St. Ives tales, Homunclus and Beneath London.
  • Born September 20, 1951 — JoAnna Cameron, 70. I’ve previously mentioned in passing Shazam!, a Seventies children’s series done by Filmation. Well she was the lead on Isis, another Filmation children’s series done at the same time. Her only genre appearance was a brief one in the Amazing Spider-Man series. Anyone here seen it? I don’t remember seeing it. 
  • Born September 20, 1955 — David Haig, 66. He played Pangol in “The Leisure Hive” a Fourth Doctor story. He also showed up on Blake’s 7 in “Rumours of Death” as Forres, and was Colonel Bonnet inThe Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Tales of Innocence. He’s also General Vandenberg in the film remake of A for Andromeda. Finally I should I should he’s The Player in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead done at The Old Vic a few years back.
  • Born September 20, 1974 — Owen Sheers, 47. His first novel, Resistance, tells the story of the inhabitants of a valley near Abergavenny in Wales in  the Forties shortly after the failure of Operation Overlord and a successful German takeover of Britain. It’s been made into a film.  He also wrote the “White Ravens”, a contemporary take off the myth of Branwen Daughter of Llyr, found in the New Stories from the Mabinogion series.
  • Born September 20, 1986 — Aldis Hodge, 35. He played Alec Hardison on the Leverage series which just got a reboot. Ok, I know it’s not precisely genre but if there’s a spiritual descendant of Mission: Impossible, this series is it. Both the cast and their use of technology in that series are keeping with the MI spirit. He’s also had one-offs on CharmedBuffy the Vampire SlayerSupernaturalThe Walking DeadStar Trek: Discovery’s Short Takes and Bones (which given that it crossed over with Sleepy Hollow…)

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) FROM THE NEIGHBORHOOD. “Whistle, Gotham City’s latest superhero, is Jewish. It’s a full-circle moment for the comics industry” reports the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

It turns out that Batman’s hometown of Gotham City has a historically Jewish neighborhood, complete with a synagogue. And for this year’s High Holidays, at least one masked superhero will be worshipping there. 

Her name is Whistle, a.k.a. Willow Zimmerman, and she’s a Jewish superhero — DC Comics’ first to be explicitly created as Jewish in 44 years. She’s an activist-turned-masked-crusader who draws inspiration from Jewish teachings; she develops the ability to talk to dogs; and she’s making her debut this month in “Whistle: A New Gotham City Superhero,” a graphic novel geared to young adults.

“There’s a long and fascinating history of Jewish creators in comics,” the book’s author and character creator, E. Lockhart, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Superman, Batman and Spider-Man were all invented by Jewish men, and scholars have interpreted them through a variety of lenses that take that into account. But while there have certainly been Jewish superheroes before, Whistle is the first Jewish hero to originate as Jewish from DC Comics since 1977.”

Lockhart was referring to Seraph, a superhero from Israel who helped Superman in “Super Friends #7? before immediately falling out of the public eye. 

(13) TWENTY ACROSS. Catherynne M. Valente celebrated on Facebook her appearance as a clue in a Washington Post crossword puzzle.

(14) NEIGHBORHOOD READY TO BEAM UP. Janice L. Newman tells Galactic Journey readers about their new (in 1966) television-watching tradition: “[September 20, 1966] In the hands of an adolescent (Star Trek’s ‘Charlie X’)”.

….It’s official, we now have a “Star Trek” night at our house each week, when we gather our friends and watch the latest episode. Though we’ve only watched two episodes so far, the show is off to an interesting start! This week we saw “Charlie X”, which had thematic similarities to both of the pilots we saw at Tricon….

(Tricon was “this year’s” Worldcon in Cleveland.)

(15) LIKE THE TUNGUSKA EVENT? It’s a theory. “A giant space rock demolished an ancient Middle Eastern city and everyone in it – possibly inspiring the Biblical story of Sodom” reports Yahoo!

…Experiments with laboratory furnaces showed that the bubbled pottery and mudbricks at Tall el-Hammam liquefied at temperatures above 2,700 F (1,500 C). That’s hot enough to melt an automobile within minutes.

The destruction layer also contains tiny balls of melted material smaller than airborne dust particles. Called spherules, they are made of vaporized iron and sand that melted at about 2,900 F (1,590 C).

In addition, the surfaces of the pottery and meltglass are speckled with tiny melted metallic grains, including iridium with a melting point of 4,435 F (2,466 C), platinum that melts at 3,215 F (1,768 C) and zirconium silicate at 2,800 F (1,540 C).

Together, all this evidence shows that temperatures in the city rose higher than those of volcanoes, warfare and normal city fires. The only natural process left is a cosmic impact….

(16) JEOPARDY! Andrew Porter was tuned in to tonight’s episode of Jeopardy! where contestants had trouble connecting this chemistry lesson with a famous film.

Final Jeopardy: 1980s Movies

Answer: The dip used to kill characters in this 1988 film consisted of Acetone, Benzene & Turpentine, ingredients in paint thinner.

Wrong questions: What is “Dune?” and “What is Raiders of the Lost Ark?”

Right question: What is, “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”

(17) MOVIE HISTORY UP FOR BIDDING. Heritage Auction’s “Monsters & Friends: Featuring The Kevin Burns Collection” event November 5-7 will include many prime items, including these two:

First, Producer Stanley Bergerman’s Personal Copy of the Universal Pictures Script for Frankenstein (1931). A vintage studio bound and bradded, 99-page screenplay for the Classic Horror movie, Frankenstein. Stanley Bergerman was Universal Studios head, Carl Laemmle’s, son-in-law and a Producer. The oversized script is filled with the content that became one of the greatest monster movies of all time. Second, The Wizard of Oz Metro Goldwyn Mayer Clapperboard (1938). A large vintage wooden clapperboard with metal-hinged clapstick, hand lettered in white on the black painted front face, “Metro Goldwyn Mayer, Wizard Of Oz, Director – Victor Fleming, Camera – Harold Rosson,” and dated, at the bottom of the board, “11-6-1938.” 

[Thanks to JJ, Michael Toman, John King Tarpinian, Lise Andreasen, Will R., Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to contributing editor of the day Randall M.]

Pixel Scroll 7/13/21 They Scrolled In Through The ‘Fresher Portal

(1) BETTER: LATE OR NEVER? Barbara Hambly talks about “One of the problems I’ve had in writing historicals” at her LiveJournal.

One of the problems I’ve had in writing historicals – particularly earlier on, when I was researching from libraries rather than the Internet – is when after the book came out (usually about a year after), a book that would have been REALLY REALLY USEFUL for my research on a particular topic will appear, and cause me to say, Grrr, dammit… In one case the discrepancy was great enough that I phoned the editor and asked that a couple of paragraphs be changed in the next printing… I don’t know if they ever did that or not…. 

(2) THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ZEROS. How can I not link to something with this title? “Is This The End of Our Hero, Coke Zero, Part III: The Final Zeronation” – by John Scalzi at Whatever. The subject turns out to be less mysterious than one might expect.

…As with last time the formula was tweaked, people are wondering what I, who basically lives on Coke Zero (not because I have fragile masculinity I SWEAR but because I prefer the taste to Diet Coke), thinks of the plan to fiddle with the taste profile. My response is basically the same as last time: If it ends up tasting more like regular Coke, great, because that’s what I want; if it goes horribly wrong and I hate it, well, then, it’s a very fine time for me to give up my cola addiction, which as a 52-year-old man is probably doing neither my pancreas or my kidneys any favors. That said, the last time Coke tweaked the Zero formula, I was perfectly fine with it; it was only subtly different….

(3) LIBERTYCON WILL HOST DEEPSOUTHCON 61. Newly-elected Southern Fandom Confederation President Randy Boyd Cleary announced that next year’s DeepSouthCon will be hosted as part of LibertyCon in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 2023. [After the Scroll was posted, Cleary has issued a correction that 2023 is the year DSC and LibertyCon will be jointly held.]

LibertyCon has a membership ceiling – recently raised from 750 to 1000 paid attendees – and the available memberships for the 2022 convention go on sale July 23 at Noon Eastern time.

(4) TEEN LIFE IS UNBEARABLE. Disney and Pixar’s Turning Red releases March 11, 2022.

Growing up is a beast. …Mei Lee [is] a 13-year-old who suddenly “poofs” into a giant red panda when she gets too excited (which is practically ALWAYS). Sandra Oh voices Mei Lee’s protective, if not slightly overbearing mother, Ming, who is never far from her daughter—an unfortunate reality for the teenager….

(5) HEAD’S UP. [Item by Meredith.] YouTube’s making a change to their rules which will render a lot of linked videos inaccessible, but people can opt out if they know about it.

(6) A LITTLE DIP. Shat showed up on Shark Week! Let Yahoo! tell you about it: “90-year-old William Shatner conquers his fear of sharks by swimming with them”.

As Discovery’s Shark Week swims on, Monday’s special called Expedition Unknown: Shark Trek, featured Captain Kirk himself, William Shatner, trying to conquer his fear of sharks by boldly going and jumping into the water with them.

“I am deathly afraid of sharks,” Shatner told the show’s host, Josh Gates. “I really am.”

So to ease the Star Trek actor into things, Gates started by taking Shatner through a couple of relatively safe visits with hammerhead and reef sharks, neither of which are known to eat or attack humans. But those were just the appetizer courses, the main course was swimming with potentially deadly tiger sharks, and hoping not to become the main course….

(7) QUIZ TIME. Heroes & Icons challenges viewers: “How well do you remember the colors of ‘Star Trek’?” I only scored 4 out of 8 and was derisively told “You’ve either never seen Star Trek, or you’re color blind.” Surely you can do better!

(8) SCANNERS LIVE. Stuff reports New Zealand’s “National Library signs ‘historic’ agreement to donate 600,000 books to online archive” Cat Eldridge, who sent the link, wonders how that’s supposed to work because, “Errr, they don’t own the copyright to those books.”

The National Library will donate 600,000 books that it was planning to cull from its overseas collection to a United States-based internet archive that will make digital copies of the works freely available online.

National Librarian Rachel Esson announced the “historic” agreement on Monday, saying books left at the end of the library’s review process would be donated to the Internet Archive, a digital library with the self-stated mission of universal access to all knowledge.

“This is a great outcome for us,” Esson said…

(9) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.

July 13, 1984 – Thirty-seven years ago, The Last Starfighter premiered. It was produced by Gary Adelson and directed by Nick Castle and Edward O. Denault. It was written by Jonathan R. Betuel who would later write and direct Theodore Rex. It starred Lance Guest, Dan O’Herlihy, Robert Preston and Catherine Mary Stewart. It was nominated for a Hugo at Aussiecon Two which was the year 2010: Odyssey Two won. Reception among critics was remarkably middlin’ for it with even Ebert neither really liking or not liking it. The Box Office likewise was just OK with it breaking even. The audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give it a excellent rating of seventy percent. 

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born July 13, 1904 — Norvell W. Page. Chief writer of The Spider pulp series as Grant Stockbridge. He started out by writing a backup story in the first issue of The Spider pulp: “Murder Undercover” and by the third issue was writing the main Spider stories which he did for some seventy stories. He also wrote The Black Bat and The Phantom Detective pulps. (Died 1961.)
  • Born July 13, 1926 — Robert H. Justman. Producer and director who worked on many a genre series including Adventures of SupermanThe Outer LimitsStar TrekMission: ImpossibleMan from Atlantis and Star Trek: The Next Generation.  He was the assistant director for the first two Star Trek episodes: “The Cage” and “Where No Man Has Gone Before”. (Died 2008.)
  • Born July 13, 1937 — Jack Purvis. He appeared in three of director Terry Gilliam’s early fantasy films, with roles in Time BanditsThe Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Brazil. He’s in three of the Star Wars films, the only actor who claims to have played three different roles, and he’s also in Wombling Free (based on The Womblies, a UK Children’s series), The Dark Crystal and Willow. (Died 1997.)
  • Born July 13, 1940 — Sir Patrick Stewart OBE, 81. Jean-Luc Picard starting with being Captain of the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-D) on Star Trek: The Next Generation up through the current Star Trek: Picard. (They’re filming two seasons of Picard back to back.) Also had some minor role in the MCU as Professor Charles Xavier, and played Leodegrance in Excalibur. Though only slightly genre adjacent, I’m fond of his role as King Henry II in the second version of The Lion in Winter
  • Born July 13, 1942 — Harrison Ford, 79. Three  great roles of course, the first being Dr. Henry Walton “Indiana” Jones, Jr. in the Indiana Jones franchise which is four films deep with a fifth on the way. The second of course being Han Solo in the Star Wars franchise, a role he’s done four times plus a brief cameo in The Rise of Skywalker. And the third being Rick Deckard in Blade Runner, a role he reprised for Blade Runner 2049. Oh, and he played the older Indy at age fifty in the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles in the “Young Indiana Jones and the Mystery of the Blues” episode. 
  • Born July 13, 1955 — David J. Schow, 66. Writer of splatterpunk horror novels, short stories, and screenplays. (He’s oft times credited with coining the splatterpunk term.) His screenplays include The Crow and Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III. He’s also done scripts for Masters of HorrorPerversions of Science and The Outer Limits. As an editor, he did the very impressive three-volume collection of Robert Bloch fiction, The Lost Bloch.
  • Born July 13, 1981 — Monica Byrne, 40. Her debut novel The Girl in the Road which is stellar won the Otherwise Award and was nominated for the Locus and Kitschies awards. The Actual Novel, her next novel, is due out in September. She’s written a generous handful of short fiction which you can find some of at her excellent website.
  • Born July 13, 1985 — Holly Lyn Walrath, 36. I don’t acknowledge SFF genre poetry nearly enough here, so let’s do it now. Her Glimmerglass Girl collection won the Elgin Award given by the Science Fiction Poetry Association. She’s also been a four-time finalist for the Rhysling Award which is given by the same group for the best genre poem of the year. Now who’s calling to tell me who these Awards are named after?

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • Speed Bump shows a traffic encounter with some clever wordplay.

(12) KRAFTWERK. The Takeout’s reviewers actually loved it — “Taste Test: Kraft Macaroni & Cheese Ice Cream (yes, it’s real)”.

Look, you’re about to read a lot about bright orange, macaroni-and-cheese-flavored ice cream. If that’s objectionable to you, we completely understand. It wasn’t something we expected to find information about in our own inboxes, either. But find it we did, and according to a press release, Kraft Macaroni & Cheese Ice Cream is, in fact, an intentional product and not some horrible mistake….

The reviewers trade comments in realtime –

MS: It’s kind of… noodly. I’m getting the starchy noodle flavor as much as the cheese.

LS: It actually tastes startlingly like Kraft mac and cheese. [laughing]

MS: Have you ever had goat cheese ice cream? It tasted a lot like that on the front end. I wonder if I would have tasted “mac and cheese” if it wasn’t orange, and if it didn’t say Kraft right on it….

(13) FEELING BETTER. There’s a saying about the permanence of LASFS membership, “Death will not release you. Even if you die!” It came to mind when I saw the trailer for Risen.

Disaster unfolds when a meteor strikes a small town, turning the environment uninhabitable and killing everything in the surrounding area. Exobiologist Lauren Stone is called to find answers to the unearthly event. As she begins to uncover the truth, imminent danger awakens and it becomes a race against time to save mankind.

(14) SEVENTIES TV. CrimeReads shows that in the early 1970s TV movies often focused on sf, fantasy, and horror. “In 1970s America, Bizarre TV Movie Thrillers Were All the Rage”. Although I mainly remember reading the TV listings for these and thinking, “There’s something I won’t have to watch.”

The series of movies was promoted as “an original motion picture produced especially for the Movie of the Week.” The use of the phrase “motion picture” seemed to imply class, of course.

The anthology film series began on September 23, 1969 with the airing of “Seven in Darkness,” about a plane crash whose seven survivors are all blind and must make their way out of the wilderness together. It starred old-school comedian Milton Berle, so perhaps there were bugs to be worked out of the prestige made-for-TV movie machine.

The first year’s worth of TV movies were dominated by thrillers starring the likes of Christopher George in the pilot for “The Immortal,” a TV series that I previously wrote about for CrimeReads, as well as films starring Eva Gabor, Sammy Davis Jr., Larry Hagman and Karen Valentine as the new Gidget. That movie, “Gidget Grows Up,” was a pilot for a TV series, a practice to be repeated many times during the 1970s TV-movie era.

The second season of the ABC movie anthology gave viewers more dynamic thrillers, though. “How Awful about Allan” starred Anthony Perkins. James Franciscus of “Longstreet” and Leslie Nielsen starred in “Night Slaves.” “The House That Would Not Die” featured Barbara Stanwyck….

(15) SUPER MARIO GOES FOR SUPER PRICE. “’Super Mario’ cartridge sold for video game record $1.5 million” reports Yahoo! Presumably the buyer isn’t going to take it out of the package.

A cartridge of Nintendo’s classic video game “Super Mario 64” set a world record Sunday, selling at auction for $1.56 million.

The sale, the first ever of a game cartridge to surpass $1 million, came just two days after a sealed copy of “The Legend of Zelda” — made for the old Nintendo NES console — sold for a then-record of $870,000.

Dallas-based Heritage Auctions, which handled both sales, has not identified the buyers. Before Friday, the record for a video game auction was the sale in April of a 1986 “Super Mario Bros.” cartridge: it went for $660,000….

(16) FOLLOW THE BOUNCING APPLE. Daniel Dern has decided, “Rather than wait until late Sept (when Foundation starts) — we’re turning in for… Schmigadoon!” “Apple’s musical comedy series ‘Schmigadoon!’ breaks into song with new trailer”.

… Apple TV+ today released the trailer for its new musical comedy series “Schmigadoon!,” executive produced by Lorne Michaels and starring Emmy Award nominee Cecily Strong and Emmy Award winner Keegan-Michael Key. The first two episodes will premiere globally on Friday, July 16, 2021 exclusively on Apple TV+, followed by one new episode weekly every Friday.

A parody of iconic Golden Age musicals, “Schmigadoon!” stars Strong and Key as a couple on a backpacking trip designed to reinvigorate their relationship who discover a magical town living in a 1940s musical. They then learn that they can’t leave until they find “true love.” The six-episode season also stars Alan Cumming, Kristin Chenoweth, Aaron Tveit, Dove Cameron, Ariana DeBose, Fred Armisen, Jaime Camil, Jane Krakowski and Ann Harada. Martin Short guest stars….

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In the Honest Game Trailers “World of Warcraft:  the Burning Crusade Classic,” Fandom Games says in this reissue of a 2008 expansion.”Everyone playing it is at least 30, so you can discuss your burgeoning health problems!”

[Thanks to Michael Toman, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, Meredith, Lise Andreasen, Daniel Dern, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Martin Morse Wooster, and JJ for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Hambly Wins 2019 Forry Award

By John Hertz:  The Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society on October 3 voted its annual Forry Award to Barbara Hambly, author of science fiction & fantasy and indeed a graphic artist of no small ability.

Her first published book was Time of the Dark (1982); forty more. Those Who Hunt the Night (1989) won a Locus Award.  She’s written originally for Star TrekStar WarsBeauty & the Beast, the DC Comics Metaverse.  She’s been translated into Dutch, French, German, Italian, and Russian.  She was President of SFWA (Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America) 1994-1996. 

Writing outside our field she’s done – among others – a dozen and a half historical-fiction novels about Benjamin January, starting with Free Man of Color (1997), i.e. him; Lady of Perdition is expected in February 2020.

She’s been a teacher, model, waitress, technical editor, all-night liquor-store clerk, and Shotokan karate instructor (she has a Black Belt).

When someone asked me about her fantasy writing, I said “If she sends a man of today into Swordland, and he has to pick up a sabre and use it, he’ll have been athletic enough already to defend himself, but afterward he’ll realize his hand is blistered.”

The Forrest J Ackerman or Forry Award has been given by the LASFS each year since 1966 for lifetime achievement in the SF field.  It is decided by a vote of members at a club meeting, usually in the fall, and currently presented at Loscon, the SF convention hosted annually by the LASFS since 1977.  The eponym of the award – you were waiting for me to use that word, weren’t you – was a pioneer of SF, fandom, and the LASFS in particular.

This year’s nominations and voting were conducted by Program Chief Charles Lee Jackson II, assisted by Christian McGuire.  The names of all previous winners were posted.  They can be seen listed by year here and alphabetically here (LASFS Website).

Each attending member was allowed three nominations; this resulted in twenty nominees.  In the first round of voting, members were allowed three votes; eliminating the lowest gave a list of ten; a second round, with members allowed two votes, gave a list of five; a third round, with one vote, gave a list of two; a fourth round gave the winner.

Most winners have been pro SF authors, illustrators, editors; some have been fans.  Some people are both.  A Forry Award anthology was published in 2016; see here; the LASFS motto De profundis ad astra (Latin; “From the depths to the stars”) is reflected in the title.

The LASFS is the oldest SF club in the world – founded 1934.  This was its 4,286th meeting.

LASFS President Marty Cantor announced he would present the Forry Award at Loscon.  This year’s Loscon will be Loscon XLVI, held 29 November – 1 December (United States Thanksgiving weekend) at the L.A. International Airport (LAX) Marriott Hotel; see here.  

That’s my SF club.  How’s yours?  Anything to report?

Harlan Ellison Tribute Roundup

Acclaimed speculative fiction writer Harlan Ellison died today at the age of 84. Here is a selection of tributes and reactions posted in social media immediately following the announcement.

Stephen King

Samuel Delany on Facebook

Here’s the guy who started the notable part of my career. At the Tricon, he ran up to me and demand a story: I wrote it at the upcoming Milford–Aye and Gomorrah, which won the following year’s Nebula Award.

Patton Oswalt

Arthur Cover on Facebook

As most of the planet knows, Harlan Ellison passed away in his sleep last night. I am seriously bummed. Little did I know when I bought the first volume of the paperback edition on Dangerous Visions when I was a sophomore at Tech did those two words would have such a profound impact on my life. Harlan was responsible for my first sale, to the mythical Last Dangerous Visions, at a Clarion Workshop.

He became a big brother figure to me, and I stayed at Ellison Wonderland on and off during the many times when I was *ahem* between places in LA. I knew his dog Abu, who used to sneak out of the house to get some Hungarian Goulash from a couple down the street. I knew his maid Yosondua, a wonderful person. And I missed meeting his mother by a couple of weeks. There’s so much to remember about him that I can barely stand it.

I met a whole bunch of interesting people thanks to him. Forget the famous ones like Erica Jong; thanks to him, I met Pam Zoline, author of “The Heat Death of the Universe.” We saw Borges together. Thanks to him, I discovered Mahler and Bruckner. I turned him on to Kalinnikov. We both read comics and he liked to impersonate the Hulk with the voice of Ronald Coleman. (Try it.) He tried to set me up with young women; usually I ignored them, thus driving him stinking bonkers. And that was just the 70s.

Then there’s that Dangerous Visions thing – a whole bunch of autograph parties just for starters. (And let’s not forget the time he streaked A Change of Hobbit.) He was immensely supportive throughout the entire frustrating, rewarding enterprise. True, he had his faults; usually I ignored them too. But the exception of my family and friends from Tazewell, I wouldn’t know any of you today were it not for his generosity and friendship. He was a helluva guy, and I have been proud to be his friend forever.

Barbara Hambly on Facebook

Just got word that my friend Harlan Ellison passed away last night. An amazing man to know. I knew he was very ill – he’d never really recovered from a stroke a couple of years ago. So I feel no surprise. Just very, very sad.

Michael Cassutt on Facebook

A talented writer for sure, a self-made writer for absolutely sure…. I so remember “Repent, Harlequin” and “On the Downhill Side” and THE CITY ON THE EDGE OF FOREVER… and his columns that became THE GLASS TEAT, which sent me here to LA…. and more, the friendship that developed in the past decade or so, where I would pop up to Ellison Wonderland and have coffee with HE in his kitchen…. telling tales of George O. Smith and who else. I am actually bawling right now…..Harlan was my big brother and while his passing now, given his stroke three years back, is not a surprise…. it’ s still a shock.

Jaym Gates on Facebook

Harlan Ellison has died. My sympathies to those who will miss him. His voice was powerful, sometimes for good.

As a woman, I am not sad that there will be one less person who thinks it is funny to grope a woman on stage, and who was often used as a smoke screen for bad behavior by creative men.

Wil Wheaton on Twitter

Rest in Peace, Harlan. You always treated me like I was a person whose voice mattered, and I will cherish that memory for the rest of my life.

David Gerrold on Facebook

Harlan didn’t drink. I rarely drink.

Today I will drink.

Today I will toast a man who was a role model, a mentor, a critic, a friend — and ultimately my big brother.

He knew how much I loved him. I told him more than once.

The one thing he said about me that I cherish the most was shortly after I adopted Sean. He said, introducing me to someone else, “David Gerrold is the most courageous man I know.” Actually, it was Sean who needed the courage, but I understood what he was saying. He was acknowledging that I had finally grown up.

Harlan had a great public persona — but it was the private soul I loved the most. And goddammit, I’m going to miss that man.

Charles de Lint on Facebook

I’m very sad to have to write this but Harlan Ellison has passed away. He was a voice of reason, if somewhat contrary, and one of the best short story writers this field, or really any field, has known. He wore his “angry young man” persona lost after he was a young man but behind that bluster was a kind and generous man who would do anything for a friend. He will be greatly missed.

Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing

Ellison’s voice was infectious and has a tendency to creep into his fans’ writing. When I was 19, I attended a writing workshop at a local convention taught by Ann Crispin, who told me that I would be pretty good writer once I stopped trying to write like Harlan Ellison (I went on to sell that very Ellisonian story to Pulphouse).

Harlan was one of my Clarion instructors in 1992. He taught us remotely, by speakerphone, from his hospital bed in LA where he was recovering from angioplasty. I had attended that year because I couldn’t miss the opportunity to learn from Harlan Ellison, whom I held in highest regard (“hero worship” is not too strong a phrase to use here).

Ellison was not a good teacher (that year, at least). In fact, I think it’s safe to say that his instructional methods, which involved a combination of performative bullying and favorite-playing, were viewed as a disaster by all of my classmates, at least in hindsight.

Confronting the very real foibles of the object of my hero-worship was the beginning of a very important, long-running lesson whose curriculum I’m still working through: the ability to separate artists from art and the ability to understand the sins of people who’ve done wonderful things.

John Scalzi in the Los Angeles Times

…My second Harlan Ellison story was from 2011, the last time he was a finalist for the Nebula Award, given out by SFWA. Traditionally, SFWA contacts the Nebula finalists by phone to see if they’ll accept being on the ballot, and knowing of Harlan’s sometimes irascible phone manners, I was the one to call.

Harlan was not irascible. He wept into the phone. He had been ill, he said, and he wondered if what he was writing now still resonated and still mattered to people. To have his professional peers nominate him for one of the field’s most significant awards, he said, meant everything to him.

In that moment he wasn’t a giant of the field, a figure equally loved and loathed, a man about whom everyone had a story, or an opinion, about. He was simply a writer, happy to be in the company of, and remembered by, other writers.

Jeff VanderMeer on Facebook

He was a monumental personality who was influential in his day and to some extent today. He dove into the style and issues of his times with vigor, which sometimes makes his work feel dated but also resulted in classics that feel timeless. As an anthologist, he pushed boundaries in ways that, like his fiction, risked looking silly or actively terrible to modern audiences, but because of that also published a ton of innovative material and furthered the careers of writers who were quite experimental.

In erratic and sporadic fashion Ellison tended to be immensely helpful to some beginning writers and actively not helpful to others for no particular reason. Sometimes, I think, because he was too caught up in his mythology. Sometimes because he had a chip on his shoulder and was mercurial. I have mixed feelings about him for that reason, not to mention others, but there’s no denying he was a protean creative talent. I did learn to take risks in my writing from him, while also learning who I did not want to be as a teacher.

Richard Pini on Facebook

There are no words. He used them all anyway, and far better than most.

Robert Crais on Facebook

We lost Harlan Ellison today. The dedication to THE FIRST RULE reads as follows: “For my friend, Harlan Ellison, whose work, more than any other, brought me to this place.”. He cannot be replaced. He was a giant. He mattered.

David Brin on Facebook

Harlan was wickedly witty, profanely-provocative, yet generous to a fault. His penchant for skewering all authority would have got him strangled in any other human civilization, yet in this one he lived – honored – to 84… decades longer than he swore he would, much to our benefit with startling, rambunctious stories that will echo for ages.

John Hertz

I can’t remember who first remarked that “H.E.” stood equally for Harlan Ellison and High Explosive.

It also stands for His Excellency. Our H.E. being a whole-souled egalitarian would never have stood for that. But if one can break from the bonds of aristocratic associations – which in principle he was always for – it’s true.

I’m glad, not I hope without humility, that what pushed down the Montaigne piece was your notice of Brother Ellison’s death. Although Montaigne and the nature of zeal were two topics I never discussed with him, he might – and he did this sometimes – have approved.

David Doering

I feel a strong sense of loss with his passing. While he and I shared few opinions in common, I always appreciated his ability to stir up discussion.

To be clear, I did not have much personal interaction with Harlan over the years. The first tho was at a Worldcon in the 80s when he asked a large audience who had read a particular book he appreciated. Turned out that only he and I had done so. We chatted for a minute sharing comments, and, as a first encounter, I found him pleasant despite his reputation.

The other time was when Ray Bradbury suggested I call “his friend Harlan” about serving as a guest to LTUE. I can just imagine what must have gone through Harlan’s mind when he got a call from Utah, and from very Mormon BYU at that, asking about being a guest. (Had it happened, it would certainly have stirred things up here!) He was polite, straightforward, and nothing like his public “persona”. I came away appreciating him much more.

The last time was at a LASFS meeting at the old “Hooverville” building. He looked tired, but came to be with fen and seemed to have a good time. I’ll keep that image in my mind as I remember him.

Deadline.com“Harlan Ellison Dead: Legendary ‘Star Trek’, ‘A Boy And His Dog’ Sci-Fi Writer was 84”

Along with the Star Trek episode, Ellison’s 1964 Outer Limits installment “Demon with a Glass Hand” is widely considered among the best of its series. The bizarre, uncanny episode starred Robert Culp as a man who wakes with no memory but an apparently all-knowing glass hand. For years, rumors persisted that “Demon” inspired Terminator, though Ellison was quoted to have said, “Terminator was not stolen from ‘Demon with a Glass Hand,’ it was a ripoff of my OTHER Outer Limits script, ‘Soldier.’” According to a 1991 Los Angeles Times article, Ellison once again sued and settled.

ComicBook.comSci-Fi Writer Harlan Ellison Dies At 84

…Ellison also crafted a script for the Batman ’66 television series that would’ve introduced Two-Face into the show’s canon, but it was never shot. The story recently was turned into a comic titled Batman ’66: The Lost Episode, which officially brings the character into the series.

Variety Harlan Ellison Dead: Sci-Fi Writer Was 84

…When he dealt with Hollywood, he fearlessly said exactly what he thought again and again — often causing fallout as a result. In the wake of the 1977 release of “Star Wars,” a Warner Bros. executive asked Ellison to adapt Isaac Asimov’s short story collection “I, Robot” for the bigscreen.

Ellison penned a script and met with studio chief Robert Shapiro to discuss it; when the author concluded that the executive was commenting on his work without having read it, Ellison claimed to have said to Shapiro that he had “the intellectual capacity of an artichoke.” Needless to say, Ellison was dropped from the project. Ellison’s work was ultimately published with permission of the studio, but the 2004 Will Smith film “I, Robot” was not based on the material Ellison wrote.

Perhaps Ellison’s most famous story not adapted for the screen was 1965’s “Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman,” which celebrates civil disobedience against a repressive establishment. “Repent” is one of the most reprinted stories ever.

Shawn Crosby

[Editor’s note: The evil done to Harlan Ellison’s television scripts by cigar-chomping producers has long been part of his legend. In some of the worst cases he refused to have his name appear in the credits, and they aired with his pseudonym Cordwainer Bird shouldering the blame.]

Harlan’s death is accompanied by the passing of Cordwainer Bird, his writing partner of many years, described as “a short, choleric, self-possessed writer of mystery stories and science-fiction for television”, who “has no compunction about punching directors and producers two foot taller than himself right in the mouth.” Bird’s parents were Jason Bird and Rhonda Rassendyll, and he is nephew to The Shadow and a descendent of Leopold Bloom. As a member of the Wold Newton Family himself, Bird’s illustrious heritage has made him something of a fighter for justice in his own right.

Godspeed, gentlemen…

Mark Barsotti

A great voice silenced.

Until you pick up one of his books…

 

2016 LA Vintage Paperback Show

2016 Vintage Paperback Show, panoramic view. Photo by John King Tarpinian.

2016 Vintage Paperback Show, panoramic view. Photo by John King Tarpinian.

The 37th Los Angeles Vintage Paperback Show took place April 3 at the Glendale Civic Auditorium.

I finally made it!

It’s a great event. I really enjoyed it. Book dealers fill the exhibit hall, and at a row of tables next to the stage waves of writers and artists autograph their works for fans, free, throughout the day. Some of the people signing when I first arrived were Karen Anderson, Barbara Hambly, and Tim Kirk. Joe Lansdale and his daughter, Kasey, were at one of the dealers tables.

Kasey Lansdale and her father Joe Lansdale.

Kasey Lansdale and her father Joe Lansdale.

On the way in I met Tim and Serena Powers. Tim said he looks in on the File 770 blog, which was nice to hear. I had a long conversation with Marc Schirmeister, who I last saw at Sasquan.

I met artist Tony Gleeson for the first time – an artist often mentioned here in news stories — and he in turn introduced me to author Odie Hawkins.

Quite a few LASFS members were present — Matthew Tepper, Michelle Pincus, Karl Lembke – in addition to the member/authors who were signing. I hear Robert J. Sawyer visited the Loscon table later, after I had gone.

Robert J. Sawyer. Photo by Michelle Pincus.

Robert J. Sawyer. Photo by Michelle Pincus.

While touring the dealer tables I saw lots of classic old stuff — but got a giggle out of seeing a copy of Zotz! Among the precious wares in a glass case. That’s the book which became a (negative) legend and running joke in the LASFS Xmas Gift Exchange — even though it’s a hardcover, you couldn’t get credit for contributing ZOTZ! as a gift unless you included with it something else that was worth the minimum. One year I unwrapped a copy which came with a $5 bill…

The event staff were doing a really good job — seemed to have an eye open for everything, and treated people very nicely.

I can’t end without mentioning the Civic Auditorium’s rather odd parking structure. The property is built into a hillside. You enter the structure on the bottom level, as you would expect, however, to exit you have to drive all the way up to the roof — which puts you on a level with another driveway to the street.

Pixel Scroll 11/2 Unstable Molecules: For Starship Captains Who Shift Shape, And Get Overly Personal With Hedgehogs and Fondue Pots

(1) Jon Zeigler has posted his “100 Year Starship Symposium 2015” report at Sharrukin’s Palace.

Executive summary: I was quite impressed by the whole endeavor. It’s a fairly small technical conference, but it’s attracting serious academics and scientists, and it has a distinctive focus on cultural and social issues as well as science and technology. I can recommend it for science fiction writers, especially those of us who are interested in doing work in the “hard” end of the field.

As with all technical conferences, I found myself wanting to be in several places at once. There are always more technical tracks going on that any one person can possibly take in.

A set of three one-hour “classes” was held first thing on Friday morning. I sat in on a presentation by Bobby Farlice-Rubio, from the Fairfield Museum and Planetarium in Connecticut. The title was Neighborhood Watch: An Advanced Look at our Space Neighborhood, and it served as a summary of recent discoveries in planetary science. I follow interplanetary exploration closely, so I didn’t hear much that was completely new, but there were a few details I hadn’t heard before.

One item in particular stuck with me. Apparently the New Horizons spacecraft that just made a flyby of Pluto contained a small canister of human remains – a pinch of the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh, the man who discovered Pluto in 1930. That makes Mr. Tombaugh the one human being thus far whose remains are destined for interstellar space. Don’t know if there’s a whole story in that, but it’s a very evocative image.

(2) Although he hasn’t gotten as close to Pluto as Clyde Tombaugh, the Guardian proclaims David A. Hardy “The space artist who saw Pluto before Nasa”.

In 1950, a 14-year-old boy found an astronomy book at his local library. As he pored over it, a light bulb lit up over his head. “It inspired me, really, to do it myself,” says that boy, David A Hardy, 65 years on. Not to become an astronaut, but to draw outer space with incredible military accuracy. Today, he is the world’s oldest living space artist. He’s 79 and he lives in the suburbs of Birmingham, churning out visions of the universe while his wife makes him cups of tea.

Chances are, if you’ve read books by Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke, the covers were painted by Hardy. He worked with Sir Patrick Moore for over half a century. He has created spaceships descending upon Big Ben for Doctor Who and the Daleks. His art has been the backdrop for Pink Floyd gigs, and he counts the Rolling Stones and Queen among his collectors.

Hardy’s work is part of a new exhibition called Visions of Space at the Wells & Mendip Museum, Somerset, from November 7-21. David A Hardy speaks on November 6 at 7:30pm.

(3) A website now documents the “Aliens, Androids & Unicorns” exhibition at the University of Otago (New Zealand) held March to May 2015, that highlighted sf&f collection of the late Harold Terrence Salive (1939-2012). The exhibition contained (amongst others) his almost complete run of Astounding Stories, numerous works by Van Vogt, Delany, C.J Cherryh, Jack L. Chalker, Poul Anderson, and Piers Anthony. Salive’s Collection was donated to Special Collections in March 2013 by his wife Rachel.

(4) To avoid spoilers, the release of the Star Wars: The Force Awaken tie-in novel has been delayed.

Walt Disney Co. is so determined to maintain the secrecy surrounding its hotly anticipated “Star Wars” movie that it asked its publishing partner to delay the release of a hardcover book tied to the film and forgo a potential holiday sales bonanza.

“Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” the franchise’s first new installment in a decade, will hit theaters Dec. 17. But the print edition of the novel, which will be published by Penguin Random House’sDel Rey imprint, won’t be released until Jan. 5, after the lucrative holiday gift-giving season has ended.

The unusual delay reflects Disney’s fears that printed copies of the book, which would have to start rolling off presses long before they hit store shelves, could be purloined by people who want to spill plot details online. The e- book will be released Dec. 18, since it is easier to control digital files before they go on sale.

(5) “Amazon opens its first real bookstore – at U-Village” in Seattle.

Bookstore owners often think of Amazon.com as the enemy.

Now it’s becoming one of them.

At 9:30 Tuesday morning, the online retail giant will open its first-ever brick-and-mortar retail store in its 20-year life, in University Village.

The store, called Amazon Books, looks a lot like bookstores that populate malls across the country. Its wood shelves are stocked with 5,000 to 6,000 titles, best-sellers as well as Amazon.com customer favorites.

(6) “Holy Crap, They Are Officially Making a New Star Trek TV Series” reports io9.

Multiple outlets are reporting that Alex Kurtzman, co-writer of 2009’s Star Trek and its sequel Star Trek Into Darkness, will executive produce a new Star Trek show through CBS Television Studios.

The show will premiere in January 2017 with a preview episode on CBS and then, in the U.S., move exclusively to the CBS video on-demand and streaming service, CBS All Access. It’ll be the first developed specifically for the CBS streaming service.

Quoting the CBS press release —

The brand-new “Star Trek” will introduce new characters seeking imaginative new worlds and new civilizations, while exploring the dramatic contemporary themes that have been a signature of the franchise since its inception in 1966.

(7) Far more surprising – incredible, really — is Fox’s decision to reboot Greatest American Hero. Deadline reports —

In a preemptive buy, Fox has given a pilot production commitment to Greatest American Hero, a single-camera comedy inspired by Steven J. Cannell’s 1981 cult classic. It hails from Dope writer-director Rick Famuyiwa, Phil Lord & Chris Miller–  the directing duo behind the successful feature franchise based on another ’80s TV series by Cannell, 21 Jump Street — and Cannell’s daughter, television director Tawnia McKiernan. 20th Century Fox TV, where Lord and Miller are under an overall deal, is the studio.

Written and to be directed by Famuyiwa, Greatest American Hero is the story of what happens when great power is not met with great responsibility. An ordinary man, completely content with being average, wakes up with a superpower suit he never asked for and has to deal with the complications it brings his life.

Via SF Site News.

(8) Today’s Birthday Manned Space Mission

  • November 2, 2000 — The first crew docked at the International Space Station. Commander William Shepherd and Flight Engineers Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gidzenko spent 141 days in space. Since Expedition 1, there has been a continuous human presence aboard the space station for 5,478 days and counting.

(9) Nate Hoffhelder responds to John Scalzi’s post about kids not reading the classics in “Culture and Relatability Are Why people Don’t Read Classic SF, Not Age” at The Digital Reader.

While all the points he made are correct, I don’t think he gets at the root cause of the shift in reading tastes.

I have trouble accepting the point that commercial availability driving demand because when I was growing up (in the 1990s) I frequented used book stores just to get those older books. I also combed through the library stacks for those three-, four-, and five-decade-old books because I liked the authors and wanted to read them. (In fact, there were a few early Heinleins that I didn’t find for the first time until the early aughts, and I still read them when I found them.)

Instead, I have to agree with the several commenters who argue that culture in the older books and the relatability of the characters have a greater impact.

(10) Harper Voyager’s open call for submissions runs November 2-6.

In this time of flux and accelerated evolution in the field of genre publishing, the editorial leaders of Harper Voyager Books are delighted to announce an exciting venture that will offer talented aspiring writers the chance to join the same science fiction and fantasy imprint that publishes such visionary authors as Richard Kadrey, Chuck Wendig, Raymond E. Feist, and many, many more.

For the first time since 2012, Harper Voyager is offering writers the chance to submit full, un-agented manuscripts for a limited five-day period. The publisher is seeking new authors with fresh voices, strong storytelling abilities, original ideas and compelling storylines. In this Open Call, Harper Voyager will be seeking out novels written in the Urban Fantasy and Military Sci-Fi genres. Submission guidelines and key information can be found at www.harpervoyagersubmissions.com.

The submission portal, www.harpervoyagersubmissions.com, will be open from noon ET on the 2nd to noon ET of the 6th of November 2015. The manuscripts will then be read, and all submissions will receive a letter notifying them of whether or not their submission is being offered publication on the Voyager list. As with every Harper Voyager project, the author will be paired with an editor, publicist, and marketing team in order to develop the manuscript and promotional efforts before and during publication.

The submissions and digital publications are spearheaded by Executive Editor David Pomerico.  He notes that: “The last time we had an open call, we had over 4,500 submissions, and were able to add 10 new voices to our growing list. We know, though, that writers are always eager to connect with editors here, and we’re excited to offer them an opportunity to do exactly that. These are two sub-genres we are finding a lot of readers for—especially in the digital space—and I’m looking forward to finding some great new projects.”

(11) Thomas Rossiter declares that “My Hugo Must Be Acknowledged” at Pelican Magazine, though it never is made evident why the headline refers to “my Hugo.”

This controversy led to the largest number of votes ever received by the awards committee (just over five thousand). Not one of the Puppies’ nominees received an award. Many of the categories were resolved with “No Award” where there was no alternative to a Puppy-approved candidate.

The Puppies have on numerous occasions stated that their goal is to make the Hugos as democratic as possible, so their anger now that their nominees have lost seems hypocritical to say the least.

(12) A review in the October Audiofile praises the audiobook edition of Francis Hamit’s novel The Queen of Washington.

Narrator Melanie Mason finds a wonderful Southern accent for Rose Greenhow that adds a great deal to the atmosphere of this novel. David Wilson Brown uses a variety of tones and accents–Southern and Northern, as well as French and Spanish–for the various male characters. Together, the two narrators provide tension and a theatrical atmosphere to the story. Rose, a rich nineteenth-century player in Washington, D.C., society is a spy, first for the Confederacy and later for British and French intelligence in the 1850s and ’60s. The many plot twists of this historical novel make for an engaging performance by two smooth narrators.

Says Hamit: “I could not be more pleased for my narration team, who worked very hard on this and are the real stars. I do call this ‘alternative history’ so it fits (barely) within the genre.”

(13) A Princess of the Chameln by Cherry Wilder ($5.99, ISBN 978-1-5040-2697-0) is going to be published as an e-book for the first time, on November 17, by Mashup Press, distributed by Open Road Integrated Media on all major retailers’ web sites. It will be available as a print on demand trade paperback a month later. The sequels Yorath the Wolf and The Summer’s King, which together with A Princess of the Chameln comprise the Rulers of Hylor trilogy, will be published at three month intervals.

It has been a while since this book has been available—two decades, in fact, since the Baen Books paperback edition, which reprinted the original hardcover edition ofA Princess of the Chameln.

Princess of the Chameln cover final COMP

A Princess . . . is the story of Aidris, the heir to the double-throne of Hylor. When her crown is usurped by pretenders and she must flee for her life, she must fend for herself, exiled in a world of enemies, forced to fight to survive as she seeks allies friendly to her cause. In the richly developed fantasy world of Hylor and the realms within it that vie for ascendance, Cherry Wilder deftly balances politics and warfare with the subtly nuanced, memorable characters whose lives play out in this uniquely powerful novel.

Jim Frenkel of Mashup Press predicts, “If you are familiar with A Princess of the Chameln or the trilogy—you already know that they are Cherry Wilder’s great epic high-fantasy adventure. If you don’t know these books, I think you’ll have a great surprise in store. Cherry Wilder died in 2003, but her great works live on, and we’re all thrilled to be able to bring these books to a new generation of fantasy readers.”

Stack of Old Books

(14) Free Special Speaker Event presented by the Greater Los Angeles Writers Society on Saturday November 21, 2:30 p.m. at the Palms-Rancho Park Library in Los Angeles, CA.

Spec fic then and now

(15) Steven Moffat told Variety to expect Doctor Who to be around for years to come:

You are credited with taking “Doctor Who” to a new level. What do you think allowed this format to be rebooted so brilliantly?

“Doctor Who” is the all-time perfectly evolved television show. It’s a television predator designed to survive any environment because you can replace absolutely everybody. Most shows you can’t do that with. For example, once Benedict Cumberbatch gives up “Sherlock,” what are we going to do? We are going to stop, that’s what we are going to do. Most shows have a built-in mortality. But here is a show that sheds us all like scales; a show that can make you feel everything except indispensable. It will carry on forever, because you can replace every part of it…

In terms of longevity of the show, I think you’ve said it could go five more years?

It is definitely going to last five more years, I’ve seen the business plan. It’s not going anywhere. And I think we can go past that. It’s television’s own legend. It will just keep going.

(16) Last Friday, Chuck Yeager stopped by the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum to say hello to his Bell X-1, the airplane in which he broke the sound barrier 68 years ago on October 14, 1947.

ChuckYeager COMP

[Thanks to Wendy Gale, Roger Tener’s Chronicles of the Dawn Patrol, Gregory Benford, Will R., Michael J. Walsh, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]