Tag Archives: Batman

Pixel Scroll 7/22/23 A Scroll’s As Good As A File To A Blind Pixel

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(1) A GREEN THUMB – AND SO IS EVERYTHING ELSE. G. W. Thomas brings us clippings from “Plant Monsters of the 1950s” at Dark Worlds Quarterly.

If you missed the 1940s…

With the Plant Monsters of the 1950s we see the last of the Pulps and the transition to digest-sized SF. We also get the biggest plant monster hit since the days of H. G. Wells. John Wyndham, a Pulp writer, now rebranded a novelist, gave us The Day of the Triffids (1951). This book proved many things besides that Wyndham was fun to read. It proved that plant monsters could be a bestseller. It proved old SF ideas could be re-modeled for new purposes. And it proved that the 1950s was going to be an exciting time for plant stories.

The first example Thomas comes up with is —

“Flowering Evil” by Margaret St. Clair (Planet Stories, Summer 1950) is an unusual tale since Planet Stories’ policy was that their tales take place off planet. St. Clair’s story has a woman back on Earth who has a fantastic menagerie of plants from other planets. One in particular looks like a giant spider, ready to pounce. This is the Venusian Rambler that finally tries to devour Aunt Amy. She takes him out with a bar of soap!

(2) FROM BARBIE TO NARNIA? “Greta Gerwig Says She’s ‘Properly Scared’ To Tackle Netflix ‘Narnia’ Films, Addresses Prospect Of Directing A ‘Bond’ Pic” at Deadline.

…While there have been whispers about Gerwig tackling Narnia for some time, the reality of it solidified in a recent profile of Gerwig and Barbie toymaker Mattel in The New Yorker. News of a Narnia project from Netflix had been awaited for some time, given the streamer’s inking of a multi-year deal for rights to the books back in 2018. The fantasy books tell the story of siblings coming of age during WWII who escape via a wardrobe to a magical realm known as Narnia, where they play a key role in fending off the advances of evil, and were previously adapted into three films from Disney and Fox, which collectively grossed over $1.58B worldwide.

Gerwig’s highly buzzy summer feature Barbie has Margot Robbie playing the iconic doll, with Ryan Gosling as her partner Ken, watching as the pair face an existential crisis when they leave the utopian Barbie Land for the real world. The Warner Bros pic has scored the best preview box office of the year to date, as we told you first, at a total of $22.3M.

(3) VAL LEWTON APPRAISED. Bill Ryan reminds readers there was an artist at work in these little-regarded horror movies: “Death is Good: The Horror Films of Val Lewton” on the Roger Ebert website.

…I first heard about Lewton through Harlan Ellison’s Watching, a collection of the short story writer’s film criticism. In one essay, he describes at length the most suspenseful and beautifully constructed sequence in “The Leopard Man” (1943). Directed by Jacques Tourneur and adapted by Ardel Wray and Edward Dein from the novel Black Alibi by the great pulp writer Cornell Woolrich, the sequence in question features a young girl in a New Mexico town making her way home at night after running an errand for her mother to buy a bag of flour. On the way home, what appears to be a leopard begins stalking her. The scene culminates with a moment of such exquisitely composed horror that Ellison wrote that in The Big Hiring Hall in the Sky that Lewton would definitely be rewarded with a “happy eternity” in an “alabaster palace.”…

…Making horror films was not Lewton’s ambition, it was simply the assignment given to him by RKO Pictures. (He would parlay his success with the job into producing movies closer to his heart, like “Youth Runs Wild” and “Mademoiselle Fifi”). In fact, this bit of his career was loosely dramatized in Vincente Minelli’s “The Bad and the Beautiful,” when we see Kirk Douglas’ producer character Jonathan Shields struggling to make a quality picture out of the pulp horror title, “Doom of the Cat Men,” given to him by the studio. This also happened to Lewton, who was given titles—not actual scripts, mind you—like “Cat People” and told to make those titles into feature films. In “The Bad and the Beautiful” we see Shields and his director (Barry Sullivan) finding art in this cheap job they’d previously not cared about (it’s worth noting that, at least in my opinion, “Doom of the Cat Men” sounds like a much better film than any of the ones Shields is actually passionate about)…. 

(4) CRANK OUT THOSE WIDGETS. The New York Times explores “How TV Writing Became a Dead-End Job”.

For the six years he worked on “The Mentalist,” beginning in 2009, Jordan Harper’s job was far more than a writing gig. He and his colleagues in the writers’ room of the weekly CBS drama were heavily involved in production. They weighed in on costumes and props, lingered on the set, provided feedback to actors and directors. The job lasted most of a year.

But by 2018, when he worked on “Hightown,” a drama for Starz, the business of television writing had changed substantially. The writers spent about 20 weeks cranking out scripts, at which point most of their contracts ended, leaving many to scramble for additional work. The job of overseeing the filming and editing fell largely to the showrunner, the writer-producer in charge of a series.

“On a show like ‘The Mentalist,’ we’d all go to set,” Mr. Harper said. “Now the other writers are cut free. Only the showrunner and possibly one other writer are kept on board.”

The separation between writing and production, increasingly common in the streaming era, is one issue at the heart of the strike begun in May by roughly 11,500 Hollywood writers. They say the new approach requires more frequent job changes, making their work less steady, and has lowered writers’ earnings. Mr. Harper estimated that his income was less than half what it was seven years ago.

While their union, the Writers Guild of America, has sought guarantees that each show will employ a minimum number of writers through the production process, the major studios have said such proposals are “incompatible with the creative nature of our industry.” The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of Hollywood studios, declined to comment further….

(5) SDCC DAY ONE. SYFY Wire has a gallery of cosplay photos from San Diego Comic-Con in “SDCC 2023: Cosplay From Day 1”. Amazing stuff!

(6) SFF SMALL ARMS. ScreenRant admires “10 Hilariously Unconventional Sci-Fi Weapons (That Were Surprisingly Effective)”.

Science fiction media prides itself on its innovative ideas, and nowhere is this more evident than in the creative weapons many favorite characters wield. From the iconic lightsabers from Star Wars to Thor: Love and Thunder’s new and improved Mjölnir hammer, there have been no shortage of unusual armaments in sci-fi history….

For example:

POV Gun, Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy

The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy is absolutely full of outlandish and hilarious technology, like cows that cook themselves, or the ingeniously unique Point of View gun. Appearing only in the 2005 Hitchhiker’s Guide film instead of the books, the POV gun makes whoever is shot by it see things from the perspective of the wielder.

Hilariously, the gun was originally designed in the film to make men finally understand how their wives felt about things. Throughout the movie, the gun is used as a plot device to help the leads understand each other. However, at the end, it is comically weaponized by the famously nihilistic android Marvin to incapacitate a group of Vogons by making them see his worldview.

(7) MEMORY LANE.

1986 – [Written by Cat Eldridge from a choice by Mike Glyer.]

Bob Shaw is the writer of our Beginning this Scroll. Shaw was deep within our community to the extent that he won back to back Best Fan Writer Hugos at Seacon ‘79 and Noreascon Two. And as y’all know, he attended Worldcons as often as he could.

My favorite work by him is the Orbitsville trilogy set on a Dyson sphere. I like his short fiction but most critics think it pales in comparison to his novels but given that those critics aren’t generally authors, I’d say we can ignore their comments on this matter, don’t you think? Dark Night in Toyland was his last collection and it’s quite splendid indeed. So there.

We have as our Beginning, The Ragged Astronauts, the first novel of The Land and Overland trilogy. (And yes, it too is a splendid read.)  It was published by Gollancz thirty-seven years ago. The cover illustration is by Alan Brooks. 

It would garner a British Science Fiction Award and would be nominated for a Hugo at Conspiracy ’87 as well as an Arthur C. Clarke Award. 

Should you be interested in reading it, it is a Meredith Moment at the usual suspects right now as are the two other novels in the trilogy, all at three dollars. 

And here it is…

It had become obvious to Toller Maraquine and some others watching on the ground that the airship was heading into danger, but–incredibly–its captain appeared not to notice.

‘What does the fool think he’s doing?’ Toller said, speaking aloud although there was nobody within earshot. 

He shaded his eyes from the sun to harden his perception of what was happening. The background was a familiar one to anybody who lived in those longitudes of Land–flawless indigo sea, a sky of pale blue feathered with white, and the misty vastness of the sister world, Overland, hanging motionless near the zenith, its disk crossed again and again by swathes of cloud. In spite of the foreday glare a number of stars were visible, including the nine brightest which made up the constellation of the Tree.

Against that backdrop the airship was drifting in on a light sea breeze, the commander conserving power crystals. The vessel was heading directly towards the shore, its blue-and-grey envelope foreshortened to a circle, a tiny visual echo of Overland. It was making steady isprogress, but what its captain had apparently failed to appreciate was that the onshore breeze in which he was travelling was very shallow, with a depth of not more than three hundred feet. Above it and moving in the opposite direction was a westerly wind streaming down from the Haffanger Plateau. 

Toller could trace the flow and counter flow of air with precision because the columns of vapour from the pikon reduction pans along the shore were drifting inland only a short distance before rising and being wafted back out to sea. Among those man-made bands of mist were ribbons of cloud from the roof of the plateau–therein lay the danger to the airship

Toller took from his pocket the stubby telescope he had carried since childhood and used it to scan the cloud layers. As he had half expected, he was able within seconds to pick out several blurry specks of blue and magenta suspended in the matrix of white vapour. A casual observer might have failed to notice them at all, or have dismissed the vague motes as an optical effect, but Toller’s sense of alarm grew more intense. The fact that he had been able to spot some ptertha so quickly meant that the entire cloud must be heavily seeded with them, invisibly bearing hundreds of the creatures towards the airship.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born July 22, 1881 — Margery Williams. The Velveteen Rabbit (or How Toys Become Real) is the work that is by far her best-known work. Is it genre? Sure. And it has been adapted as video, audio and theatre myriad times. One audio version was narrated by Meryl Streep with music by George Winston. (Died 1944.)
  • Born July 22, 1932 — Tom Robbins, 91. Author of such novels as Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and Another Roadside Attraction. ISFDB lists everything he’s done as genre and who am I to argue with them on this occasion at least? Well I will. Now Jitterbug Perfume, that’s definitely genre! Cowgirls Get the Blues got made into a rather excellent film by Gus Van Sant and stars Uma Thurman, Lorraine Bracco, and Keanu Reeves. Interesting note: Still Life with Woodpecker made the long list at one point for the Prometheus Award for Best Libertarian SF Novel. 
  • Born July 22, 1941 — Vaughn Bodé. Winner of Best Fan Artist Hugo at St. Louiscon. (He was nominated for Best Professional Artist as well but that honor went to Jack Gaughan.) He has been credited as an influence on Bakshi’s Wizards and Lord of the Rings. Currently there at least three collections of his artwork, Deadbone Erotica, Cheech Wizard and Cheech Wizard‘s Book of Me in print. (Died 1975.)
  • Born July 22, 1941 — George Clinton, 82. Founder and leader of the bands Parliament and Funkadelic, who incorporated science-fictional themes in his music throughout his career, perhaps most notably with his 1975 hit album, Mothership Connection, which was a huge influence on Afrofuturism. (Xtifr)
  • Born July 22, 1961 — Rena Owen, 62. New Zealand native who appeared as Taun We in Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith as Nee Alavar. She also has minor roles in A.I. Artificial Intelligence, The Crow: Wicked Prayer, The Iron Man and The Last Witch Hunter. She had a lead role in Siren, a series about merfolk that lasted for three seasons and thirty-six episodes. Set in the state of Washington, it was, no surprise, filmed in British Columbia. 
  • Born July 22, 1964 — Bonnie Langford, 59. She was a computer programmer from the 20th century who was a Companion of the Sixth and Seventh Doctors. She also appeared in the thirtieth anniversary special Dimensions in Time. If you’re really generous in defining genre, she was in Wombling Free as Felicity Kim Frogmorton. Other than that, Who was all she did for our end of the universe. 
  • Born July 22, 1972 — Colin Ferguson, 51. Best known for being Sheriff Jack Carter on Eureka. I miss that series. Did it win any Hugos? He’s also been in Are You Afraid of the Dark, The Hunger, The X-Files, The Outer Limits, the Eureka “Hide and Seek” webisodes (anyone seen these?) and The Vampire Diaries. Oh and let’s not forget his Maytag commercials.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Tom Gauld is on the job.

(10) BAT-RARITIES. In “Holy Bat-Toys!”, Heritage Auctions previews offerings from The Ultimate Batman Collection Signature® Auction on August 4-5.

…And one of the modern centerpieces – Hot Toys’ one-of-a-kind 2016 1:6-scale Batcave diorama, with a Batmobile and four “strange costumes” lifted straight from the cover of Detective Comics No. 165 – replicates Adam West’s underground lair down to the Batcomputer, Anti-Crime Eye Checker and Batanalyst. And, of course, West’s Batman and Burt Ward’s Robin are standing alongside that sweet ride.

Holy prototype, indeed.

This diorama was first displayed at the Batman 100 Hot Toys exhibition in Tokyo in September 2016, coinciding with the release of the first Suicide Squad movie. Visitors to the show were overwhelmed, and with good reason: The diorama is 9 feet wide, 5 feet deep and 4 feet tall – room enough to display all the custom-made pieces, including the Batmobile that first roared into the San Diego Comic-Con four years earlier. Hot Toys planned to roll out the iconic vehicle soon thereafter, but this remains the only one….

(11) ALMOST LIKE NEON. “Saturn’s Rings Shine in Webb’s Observations of Ringed Planet” at NASA.gov.

…On June 25, 2023, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope turned to famed ringed world Saturn for its first near-infrared observations of the planet. The initial imagery from Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) is already fascinating researchers.

Saturn itself appears extremely dark at this infrared wavelength observed by the telescope, as methane gas absorbs almost all of the sunlight falling on the atmosphere. However, the icy rings stay relatively bright, leading to the unusual appearance of Saturn in the Webb image….

(12) GOING PROSPECTING. “NASA Prepares for Launch to Golden Asteroid Worth $10 Quintillion” at SYFY Wire. Reminds me a little of Poul Anderson’s economic premise for Satan’s World, though it was a very different celestial body.

… NASA’s Psyche spacecraft, named for the asteroid it intends to visit, has spent the last year at the Astrotech Space Operations facility near NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. There, folks from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) are working on final assembly and testing in advance of a planned October 5 launch. The spacecraft is headed for the asteroid 16 Psyche, roughly 279 kilometers (173 miles) across and orbiting inside the asteroid belt….

We’ve known that Psyche has existed for centuries, but only recently realized how valuable it might be, both in economic and scientific terms. Previous remote observations have suggested that Psyche might be the leftover core of a failed planet, from the construction phase of our solar system. Astronomers believe that because it appears to be comprised almost entirely of exposed metals like iron, nickel, and gold. If we could get our hands on such a massive piece of space, it would be worth more than the combined global economy, at an estimated $10 quintillion…. 

The spacecraft will be mounted to a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, which will push it to its destination in the asteroid belt. In addition to scoping out one of our system’s treasure hoards, the mission will also serve as a testbed for technologies which could be used for crewed missions in the future. The launch itself will be the first interplanetary mission for the Falcon Heavy, laying the groundwork for future Mars missions. It will also carry an optical deep space communications system, part of NASA’s ongoing work to build an updated space communications network.

After getting into low-Earth orbit, Psyche will blast off toward the asteroid belt using solar electric propulsion. Six years later it will rendezvous with Psyche and set up camp for a 26-month mission. But this is only a prospecting mission. Psyche is going to look, not to touch….

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. At Media Death Cult, Moid has been continuing his ‘on location’ videos this time with a little rambling about “The Multiverse” in the History of Science Fiction.

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

Toy Review: Batman Utility Belt

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Where does he get those wonderful toys! – The Joker, Batman

Review by Ian Delaney: Batman is famous for two possessions: the high-speed, highly armored Batmobile, and the utility belt. The utility belt holds all the tools the world’s greatest detective needs.

Now, NECA has released a replica utility belt based on the 1989 Tim Burton movie starring Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson. It comes with several gadgets seen in the movie, as well as devices you would expect Batman to carry.

The packaging is, as you expect, is all black with simple graphics and the gold and black ’Batman’ logo from the movie. The Batarang comes in a separate box with matching graphics. A black vacuformed tray holds the contents of each box.

The Batarang comes in a separate box because NECA previously made it and sold it as a single item. It is made of hard plastic and hinged in three places so that it collapses. Magnets embedded in the body hold it in the open or closed position until you change it. It’s easy to open the Batarang with a flick of the wrist after a little practice.

Inside the large box you’ll find a two-layer tray, with the grapnel gun on the top layer. The gun detail is movie-accurate from what I can see and has one moving part: a pistol grip that folds out and snaps into place. NECA has already created a grapnel gun with a spring-loaded launcher and battery-powered winch. NECA could have included their existing grapnel gun the same way they added the Batarang, but chose not to, perhaps to keep the cost down.

Removing the top tray reveals the belt itself and the smaller gadgets. The belt is a solid circle of hard plastic. The back of the belt expands with a hinged racket to change the size of the belt without affecting the appearance of the front. This lets the belt fit waists from 31.5 to 50 inches. The front buckle snaps together and is released by a center push button. Four vertical capsule pods surround the belt and break it into sections.

The rest of the tray contains the remaining gadgets for the belt. The “Torch”, “Taser”, “Scanner”, “Micro Camera”, “Rebreather”, and “Gas Pellets” all have matching yellow caps and will fit into the pods on the belt. The oddly shaped “Smoke Bombs” will not fit into the capsules or anywhere else on the belt. The last device is the communicator; mostly plain black rectangle with a painted grill and button.

The communicator has a magnet in it, as does the grapnel gun. This lets them stick to the front of the belt, which also has magnets in the front two sections. Getting the communicator, grapnel gun, and Batarang all attached and arranged on the belt at the same time is tricky, and one or more of them are likely to fall off as soon as you move. Since the Batarang comes with a display stand, it’s probably best to use these pieces as a static display rather than part of a costume.

The other major problem is that the gadgets don’t do anything other than look nice. The “Scanner” has a hinged piece, and a couple of sections of the belt pop off to reveal tiny gadgets fixed inside, but nothing does anything. Everything is a static prop, with almost no moving parts and no effects. As I mentioned before, the grapnel gun is static, the Batarang just folds up, and one device flips open. That’s it. I really wish something in the entire set used batteries, and something made a sound or lit up. At least a little flashlight or something.

To be fair, the utility belt is called a “prop replica” rather than a toy, so it’s best for static display or a reasonably screen accurate costume accessory as long as you know that you’ll be able to flip open a Batarang but not much more.

The Batman Utility Belt costs $135.00 US and is available from https://store.necaonline.com .

Iain Delaney was born in the UK but moved to Canada at an early age. The UK heritage explains his fascination with British TV SciFi, including Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, UFO, and, of course, Dr. Who. After fumbling through high school, he fumbled through university, emerging with a degree in physics. With no desire to pursue graduate studies he discovered that a bachelor’s degree had little to no job prospects, so he took up a career in computer programming. In his off time he reads, watches TV and movies, collects toys, and makes attempts at writing. To that end he has a small number of articles published in role-playing game magazines and won two honorable mentions in the Writers of the Future contest. He is working on an urban fantasy YA trilogy and entertains delusions of selling it to movies or TV.

Pixel Scroll 7/1/23 Yes, There Be Pixels And Where There Be Pixels There Be Birthdays

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(1) WILL FANS ENCOUNTER PICKET LINES AT LA CONVENTION? Anime Expo started today in LA under the cloud of a threatened strike by hotel workers. The union has not said when they will walk off the job: “Anime fans face hotel strike threat” in the Los Angeles Times. (An NBC Los Angeles post updated an hour ago does not show that the strike has begun.)

The largest U.S. hotel workers’ strike in recent memory and the largest anime convention in North America are both set to kick off this weekend in the same downtown Los Angeles spot — with all the attendant agitation playing out on social media.

More than 15,000 union workers are seeking higher pay and better benefits and working conditions at 62 hotels in Los Angeles and Orange counties.

They could walk off the job as early as Saturday after their contracts expire.

On Thursday, the largest hotel, the Westin Bonaventure Hotel & Suites, announced it had reached a tentative deal with the union representing its more than 600 employees.

The deal is the first among many that would be needed to avert the planned strike.

Meanwhile, thousands of fans of Japanese pop culture will gather Saturday for the start of Anime Expo, a four-day convocation of people interested in manga art, cosplay and video games with exhibitions and panels at the Los Angeles Convention Center and nearby hotels. Many have spent months hoarding vacation days and cash to trek to Southern California and commune with like-minded people.

The two passionate interest groups met up virtually in recent days, and the results weren’t pretty.

On Reddit, a union organizer with hotel workers’ Unite Here Local 11 kicked off the Ask-Me-Anything discussion by asking, “Did you know hotel workers at many of the properties you might be staying at for AX, such as the JW Marriott Downtown LA, Westin Bonaventure, Downtown Los Angeles Courtyard, Residence Inn Downtown LA, the Ritz Carlton and more, might be on strike?

“This could mean pickets, protests and other actions at hotels that could impact and potentially disrupt the Anime Expo,” wrote AnimeJustice11, the unnamed organizer.

“When workers go on strike, they stop work and walk off the job. If workers go on strike, there might not be anybody taking out the trash, cooking the food or cleaning the rooms. There also may be loud 24-hour picket lines right outside the property. How do you think this would affect the quality of the Anime Expo if you are attending / planning?”

AnimeJustice11 wrapped up with a plea: “I hope most/all of you will stand in solidarity with the potential striking workers and don’t cross picket lines!” The poster also asked those planning to attend Anime Expo to “contact the management and ask if they would negotiate a new contract that meets what workers are asking for.”

Unite Here Local 11 also has reached out to Anime Expo attendees, as well as other groups, with a targeted anime-style advertisement featuring a pink-haired worker carrying a sign reading: “Anime is cool! Disrespecting workers is not!”

Reddit users had many thoughts, including anger at the union for disrupting an expensive and cherished tradition, anger at hotel owners for not giving raises, and anger at one another for attacking the union organizer. Others debated what it meant to cross the picket line…

(2) LIKE SAND THROUGH THE HOURGLASS. Warner Bros. dropped a second Dune: Part Two Official Trailer.

The saga continues as award-winning filmmaker Denis Villeneuve embarks on “Dune: Part Two,” the next chapter of Frank Herbert’s celebrated novel Dune, with an expanded all-star international ensemble cast. The film, from Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures, is the highly anticipated follow-up to 2021’s six-time Academy Award-winning “Dune.”

(3) GRIST FOR THE RUMOR MILL. “Denis Villeneuve Wants To End His Dune Trilogy With A Dune Messiah Adaptation” according to GameSpot.

Fans got a hearty helping of Dune: Part Two yesterday with a wild new trailer, showing everything from Feyd (Austin Butler) in action, to Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet) delivering his iconic speech to the Freman. Even though there are only two parts to the Paul and House Atreides narrative, director Denis Villeneuve wants to fans to get a taste of the larger mythos at play with a third Dune film.

Deadline has reported that Villeneuve intends to cap off his Dune trilogy with a much deeper dive into Frank Herbert’s lore of the world of Dune with an adaptation of Dune Messiah. This film would be co-written by Villeneuve and screenwriter Jon Spaihts. Obviously, Warner Bros. Discovery has not yet officially announced active development for Part Three but should Part Two find success like its predecessor, a conclusion should be a no-brainer.

Dune Messiah was the second novel in the Dune Chronicles released in 1969. The book was adapted in the 2003 miniseries Children of Dune–the name of the actual third novel–which included parts of both “Messiah” and “Children.”…

(4) THE CIRCULAR FILE. Camestros Felapton fails to explain “Why did people read The Wheel of Time?” In that he probably has a lot of company.

… I’m happy to dunk on Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time books because I too read them, each and every one. I bought some of them as big chunky trade paperbacks as well *AND* I thought they were badly written at the time *AND* realised that the story was going nowhere somewhere around the middle. So really I could rephrase this question as “Why did I read the Wheel of Time?”…

(5) NOT THE SPITTING IMAGE.  [Item by Cora Buhlert.] Since I got some new figures, I also made a new Masters-of-the-Universe toy photo story called “Artistic License” to address the question of why Skeletor and his Evil Warriors created the least convincing He-Man doppelganger ever: “Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre: ‘Artistic License’”.

… As for why Faker looks the way he does, the real world reason is that some Mattel designer forty years ago thought a blue and orange He-Man looked cool. As for the in universe reason, well, here is one potential answer…

… “Behold my new robot doppelganger of He-Man, Lord Skeletor. Those accursed Masters of the Universe will never know what hit them, when we plant this Faker in their midst. And now arise, my Faker.”

“I Am He-Man.”

“Is he not glorious, Lord Skeletor? I daresay he is my best invention yet.”

“Why is he blue?”

“Excuse me, boss?”

“He-Man is not a Gar. So why is he blue?”…

(6) GENRE GENESIS. A paper by Helen de Cruz titled “Cosmic Horror and the Philosophical Origins of Science Fiction” is online at Cambridge Universe Press.

We now live in a universe composed of billions of galaxies. And, for the most part, we rarely give this any thought. We go about our lives as people have done in the past. Still, you might have reflected on the vastness of the universe: perhaps when you visited a planetarium, or watched a documentary, or even looked up at the (probably light-polluted) night sky and felt a dizziness, a vertigo. That experience is cosmic horror, a sense of the sublime that makes you feel both small and insignificant and a part of a huge, interconnected whole. Once we realize the universe is enormous, and that we’re but a tiny speck in that vast world, we need to recalibrate ourselves. We need to find meaning and significance in being the tiny speck we are. As I’ll argue here, science fiction helps us to come to terms with cosmic horror, as the history of philosophy shows. As a literary form, science fiction originated in philosophical speculation about the universe and our place within it….

(7) G.O.A.T. FANTASY MOVIES. You might not be surprised by what’s at the very top of TimeOut’s list of “The 50 best fantasy movies of all time”, but I, for one, was surprised to see what made number three:

3. Onward (2020)

A pair of grieving elf brothers turn to magic to reanimate, for 24 emotional hours, the dad they never really knew. But the spell is broken halfway through, leaving them with, well, half a dad. With only the legs operational and the missing top half flopping around under layers of clothes, the three bluff their way through a quest to find a magical gem and finish the job. Set in a fantastical land populated by evolved cyclops, fauns, mages and all manner of mythical fauna who have switched from magic to mod cons, ‘Onward’ is a cometh-of-age tale that makes playful capital from our habit of turning the past into touristy kitsch. 

Magic moment: When Ian listens to a tape of the dad he never knew and you wish you’d remember to bulk-buy tissues.

(8) RR DOES NOT STAND FOR RAILROAD. Dominic Noble is “Talking to George RR Martin About HIS Favorite Book”.

GRRM joins me for this very special episode of Reginald’s Book Club to talk about Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny, which is currently being adapted for TV by Robert Kirkman and Stephen Colbert. I was so nervous doing this I got the name of the book, the name of the author and the name of MY OWN PODCAST wrong, but George was so friendly and chill the whole time I think it came out pretty well.

(9) MEMORY LANE.

2022 – [Written by Cat Eldridge from a choice by Mike Glyer.]

Mike chose Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea, which came out last year as our Beginning this Scroll. It’s his only novel, published by MCD. 

He’s published considerably more short fiction, most of it in the past three years, though his first published sff story came out in 1996. And he’s written one wonderfully-titled essay, “Not Prediction, But Predication: The True Power of Science Fiction”, which ran in Asimov’s Science Fiction, the May-June 2023 issue.

Our choice was a finalist for the Nebula Award, the Locus Award, and for the LA Times Book Awards’ Ray Bradbury Award for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Speculative Fiction…

NIGHT. DISTRICT THREE of the Ho Chi Minh Autonomous Trade Zone. 

The plastic awning of the café streamed with rain. Under its shelter, wreathed in kitchen steam and human chatter, waiters wove between tables with steaming bowls of soup, glasses of iced coffee, and bottles of beer. 

Beyond the wall of rain, electric motorbikes swept past like luminescent fish. Better not to think of fish. 

Lawrence concentrated his attention instead on the woman across the table, wiping her chopsticks with a wedge of lime. The color-swarm of the abglanz identity shield masking her face shifted and wavered.

Like something underwater … 

Lawrence dug his nails into his palm. “I’m sorry—does that thing have another setting?” 

The woman made an adjustment. The abglanz settled to a bland construct of a female face. Lawrence could make out the faint outline of her real face, drifting below the surface. 

Drifting …

“I don’t usually use this setting.” The oscillations of the abglanz flattened the woman’s inflection. “The faces are uncanny. Most people prefer the blur.” 

She brought her chopsticks to her mouth. The noodles sank into the glitchy surface of the digital mask’s lips. Inside was the shadow of another set of lips and teeth.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born July 1, 1891 — Otis Adelbert Kline. Early pulp writer and literary agent whose great claim to fame was a possibly apocryphal feud with fellow author Edgar Rice Burroughs, in which he supposedly raised the latter’s anger by producing close imitations of Burroughs’s Mars novels. Wollheim and Moskowitz would believe in it, Lupoff did not. (Died 1946.)
  • Born July 1, 1934 — Jean Marsh, 89. She was married to Jon Pertwee but it was before either were involved in Dr. Who. She first appeared alongside The First Doctor in “The Crusade” as Lady Joanna, the sister of Richard I (The Lionheart). She returned later that year as companion Sara Kingdom in “The Daleks’ Master Plan”. And she’d return yet again during the time of the Seventh Doctor in “Battlefield” as Morgana Le Fay. She’s also in Unearthly Stranger Dark Places, Return to Oz, Willow as Queen Bavmorda and The Changeling. 
  • Born July 1, 1935 — David Prowse. The physical embodiment of Darth Vader in the original Star Wars trilogy. Ok, it’s been a very long time since I saw Casino Royale but what was Frankenstein’s Creation doing there, the character he played in his first ever role? That he played that role in The Horror of Frankenstein and Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell, Hammer Films a few later surprises me not. He shows up in Gilliam’s Jabberwocky according to IMDB as Red Herring and Black Knights (and no I’ve no idea what that means). Finally he’s the executioner in The People That Time Forgot, a film that’s very loosely based off of several Burroughs novels. (Died 2020.)
  • Born July 1, 1942 — Genevieve Bujold, 81. We would have had a rather different look on Voyager if things had played out as the producers wished, for Bujold was their first choice to play Janeway. She quit after a day and a half of shooting, with the public reason being she was unaccustomed to the hectic pace of television filming. What the real reason was we will never know.
  • Born July 1, 1955 — Robby the Robot, 68.Yes, this is this official birthday according to studio of the robot in Forbidden Planet which debuted a year later. He would later be seen is such films and series as The Invisible Boy,Invasion of the Neptune Men, The Twilight Zone, Lost In Space, The Addams Family, Wonder Woman and Gremlins.  He was also featured in a 2006 commercial for 2006 commercial for AT&T.
  • Born July 1, 1964 — Charles Coleman Finlay, 59. His first story, “Footnotes”, was published in 2001 in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction where many of his other stories were published, and which he edited for several years. The Traitor to the Crown series is his best-known work.
  • Born July 1, 1981 — Genevieve Valentine, 42. Author of the superb Persona novel and also she scripted a Catwoman series, working with artists Garry Brown and David Messina. Her first novel, Mechanique: A tale of the Circus Tresaulti, won the Crawford Award for a first fantasy novel. She scripted a run of Xena: Warrior Princess, and scripted Batman & Robin Eternal as well. 

(11) CAN YOU HEAR THE DRUMS FERNANDO? The Guardian’s Tim Dowling writes, “The board game is back out, and I’m losing again”.

…“We can have a takeaway for supper, but you’ll have to hang around.”

“In that case,” says the youngest, “shall we play this?” He is pointing to a box containing a complicated board game to do with medieval dynasties.

“Yeah, all right,” says the oldest.

“And Dad,” says the youngest, “you’re definitely playing.”

When this box was first opened a few weeks ago, I wrote about two fears: that it may be one of the last times I watched my grown sons sit down to play a board game in our house; and that I had accidentally raised three nerds.

At the time I did not realise the board game would become a Sunday fixture, and that I would be roped into playing against my will. I still don’t know which outcome is preferable.

“I’m new to this,” I say, sitting down. “So this is a practice round.”

“It’s easier if we just play,” says the middle one. “You’ll pick it up.”

I am supplied with a character, Fernando; some territory – the Iberian peninsula; and a number of plastic knights. I am then obliged to select an abiding trait at random.

“Chaste,” I say.

“Chaste is good,” says the middle one, “but it makes it hard to marry.”

He’s not kidding. By the start of the Second Era the middle one has launched a sustained attack on the Papal States – much to the consternation of the youngest one, who reigns there – but, critically, I have still not found a spouse….

(12) THE SMART SET. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] This item will be appearing in next season’s (September) SF² Concatenation news page’s science and SF interface section…

Smart clothing – that is, not ‘neat’ but, ‘clever’ clothing – is a minor SF trope.  In terms of SFnal clothing, space-suits are positively mundane, but the genre offers much more from the techno-suits of super-heroes to the stillsuits of Dune.  Now there is a new, electrically-controlled fabric that can vary its heat – infra-red – transmission that could be used to create clothing with abilities not too dissimilar to, say, those found in Iain Banks’ ‘Culture’.  US engineers and applied physicists have created this fabric they call Wearable Variable-Emittance (WeaVE).  To make the material flexible, the authors used kirigami principles, which entail cutting a 2D surface and then folding it into 3D patterns. The polymer can either emit heat or provide insulation depending on the voltage applied to it. Here, the voltage needed is really small, less than one volt, so no large batteries are required.  The material enables wearers to experience the same skin temperature at ambient temperatures from 17.1°C to 22.0°C: that’s almost a 5°C range. No doubt we will get even better smart fabrics in the future… A brief summary of this research appears in Nature and the primary research is Chen, T-H. et al (2023) A kirigami-enabled electrochromic wearable variable-emittance device for energy-efficient adaptive personal thermoregulation. PNAS Nexus, vol. 2, p1-10.

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. From a year ago, the opening scene of The Batman.

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Jennifer Hawthorne, N., Francis Hamit, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]

Batman 2022

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Review by Michaele Jordan: I don’t usually write about the big-name stuff. There’s always plenty of people out there discussing the blockbusters. You don’t need yet another opinion (even if it’s mine). But there’s been surprisingly little buzz about the 2022 version of The Batman, starring Robert Pattinson, for all that it did well in the official reviews and in the theatres (85/87 on Rotten Tomatoes). Even here on File 770 its only mention is that two of its actors were nominated for Saturn awards in 2022.

So let me tell you about it. Believe me, it’s a strange bird. (Well, a strange winged creature). First and foremost it’s Matt Reeves’ baby – his adopted baby. Originally it was intended to be a Ben Affleck film. Not only was Mr. Affleck going to star in the movie, he was going to direct it, write it—together with Peter Craig, and produce it—together with Dylan Clark. But in 2017, he stepped down from the writing and directing, although he assured us he would still star in the film. Mr. Reeves was hired to replace him in production. And then, in 2019 (fairly last minute by film production standards), Mr. Affleck also quit as star, to be replaced by Robert Pattinson.

It’s difficult to resist speculating on those two years in between. We are told that as soon as he started directing, Mr. Reeves started rewriting. That actually makes sense. The words are there to communicate the vision. Change the vision, and the words will have to follow.

But those rewrites were extensive. Did they perhaps represent a change of vision completely odds with Mr. Affleck’s vision? Nobody likes being rewritten.

Or not – I am probably reveling in my own overactive and drama-hungry imagination. Mr. Affleck has repeatedly stated that he resigned due to the stresses of the disintegration of his marriage to Jennifer Garner and the nightmarish production issues Justice League was suffering. He has never complained that this was not the film he would have made.

Entertaining as the gossip may be, none of that is actually relevant here. A review deals with the finished product, and its impact on the viewer, regardless of what issues may or may not have steered its creation. So let’s talk about the finished film. For me, the biggest problem was that it didn’t feel like a Batman movie.

As a legend grows, it absorbs a great deal of material that was not merely invisible, but genuinely absent from the original. This does not actually mean that the original has been forgotten, just that it has been sublimated. The Batman legend started with a comic book.

I’ve read something of Mr. Reeves’ intent. He felt it was important to explore the psychological trauma that underlies Batman’s existence. Having taken such a realistic approach to the character, he was committed to a realistic presentation of both the re-examined character, and the world that character lives in.

He’s not wrong. Every Batman fan has wondered about those issues and argued about them with their friends. Everything that Mr. Reeves has put on the screen makes sense to us, and echoes many of our own questions. But what the fans argue about is one thing and what they expect to see on the screen is another. I believe that, whatever the clever nuances, they still expect to see some reflection of the canon.

This movie starts – very cleverly, I thought – on a rainy Halloween night, with busy streets thronged with so many costumed revelers that Batman could walk right through them entirely unnoticed. When the costumed Batman confronts his first evil-doer, the guy says, “Who are you supposed to be?”

It’s funny. It’s also a warning of things to come. Batman’s costume is practically the only survival of the original cast, since so much of that cast was defined by the exotic imagery in which it was presented. It’s not that the original characters have been deleted, but they have been rendered so realistic that they are almost unrecognizable.

There is a slinky woman lurking and snooping around the edges of the underworld, but if you didn’t happen to remember the name Selina, you probably wouldn’t identify her as the Catwoman. (Kudos to Zoë Kravitz, for her sensitive presentation of a damaged soul.) Colin Farrell plays a fat and unscrupulous saloon owner named Oz. We accept him as exactly that – until we hear that he really hates it when people call him Penguin.

We don’t really get a chance to decide if we would have recognized Bruce Wayne, since we first see him when the Batman unmasks. So instead of being uncertain, I, for one, was disappointed. I was madly in love with Bruce Wayne as a child – he was rich and beautiful and heroic. But Robert Pattinson is not beautiful. He’s rich, but the money hasn’t made him whole. He’s sallow and sunken-cheeked. He looks like he got beaten up a lot as a kid. He looks like a loser. And, of course, he is. Because he’s never recovered from the crippling emotional damage caused by his father’s violent death. If he weren’t the Batman, he wouldn’t be anything at all.

The only character that retains any semblance of the original conception is the Riddler (played wonderfully by Paul Dano). He doesn’t wear an emerald green leotard, but he does decorate his handiwork with large, bloody question marks, and send the Batman cryptic clues, fully expecting them to be solved. In fact, he’s utterly delighted (laughs and laughs!) when one clue actually goes over the Batman’s head. And because he’s a realistic Riddler, he takes being a psychopathic killer seriously, and becomes so much more evil than any mere cartoon.

I can almost hear some of you muttering to yourselves, “So what’s wrong with that? He brings in a little realism? Treats our beloved characters seriously? Doesn’t sound so awful to me. And it isn’t awful. Just the opposite, The Batman is a fine film. The performances are superb and the plotting is precise – as it has to be, to navigate this convoluted tale of a troubled vigilante pursuing a serial killer through a stew of political corruption. If Mr. Reeves had simply changed all the names, and altered the protagonist’s costume, it might well have been hailed as a neo-noir classic.

It just doesn’t happen to feel like a Batman movie

Pixel Scroll 5/16/23 I Gave Them My Haploid Heart But They Wanted My Scroll

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(1) BRITISH FANTASY AWARDS TAKING NOMINATIONS. Voting for the British Fantasy Awards is open through May 31.

You can vote for the BFAs if you are any of the following:
– A member of the British Fantasy Society
– An attendee at FantasyCon 2022 (London Heathrow)
– A ticket-holder for FantasyCon 2023 (Birmingham)

In each category the four titles or names with the highest number of recommendations will make the shortlist of nominations.

The BFA also has put out a “Call for BFA jurors” – “ANYONE can apply to become a juror and we would actively encourage non-members to volunteer as jurors.”

(2) BRITISH BOOK AWARDS. R.F. Kuang’s novel has won again – this time a British Book Award. The complete list of winners is at the link.

Fiction, supported by Good Housekeeping

RF Kuang

Babel (HarperCollins / Harper Voyager)

(3) ABSCISSION. “New Leaf Literary & Media Faces Backlash After Dropping Authors” – Publishers Weekly monitored authors’ social media and is pursuing the story.

…The controversy unfolded shortly after New Leaf announced a series of changes to its staff structure. Hamessley has not returned requests for comment, and New Leaf emphasized that they cannot speak to any circumstances around her departure.

In an official statement on the matter, the Authors Guild expressed concern that Hamessley’s clients continue to be supported through the transition. “The Authors Guild strongly believes that every agent needs to have a succession plan for their authors in case of disabling ill health or death, and we instruct authors to inquire about such a contingency plan. We have seen far too many authors left in the lurch over the years.”

The statement continued: “New Leaf authors who were impacted by this sudden shakeup can reach out to us, though we can only represent Authors Guild members in legal matters. Authors who are members of the Authors Guild should send in their agency agreements to our legal staff so we can advise them on their rights.”

New Leaf told PW that it has been actively reaching out to Authors Guild representatives to clarify the situation.

In a statement to PW, author Stephanie Lucianovic said: “Undoubtedly, you’ll find out a lot about our reactions to these unceremoniously abrupt, late, Friday-night agency oustings on our socials, but our primary concern for the last 48+ hours has been about gathering our shocked and distraught agent-mate community and taking care of one another as best we can.”

(4) VALENTE Q&A. Catherynne M. Valente talks about Eurovision, Aliens and Mythpunk with Moid Moidelhoff at Media Death Cult.

(5) STARTING EARLIER. [Item by Dann.] What if… …the 1960s were the age of Marvel and DC movies?  This thread reimagines classic actors as classic heroes and villains. Thread starts here.

(6) TUNING UP. WhatsOnStage polled readers: “Top 100 musicals of all time revealed”. Six of the top 20 are sff. Believe it!

Audiences have been voting in their thousands across the month of April to find the top musicals of all time – and the results are now in!

We run down the top 20 below, with the subsequent 80 listed at the bottom. Where did your fave end up?

In terms of figures, leading the way with the highest number of musicals appearing is Stephen Sondheim on nine as composer and lyricist and a further two as lyricist. Andrew Lloyd Webber follows one behind on eight, including second place The Phantom of the Opera….

(7) TOR HIRE. Publishers Lunch reports Stephanie Stein has joined Tor Books as senior editor, acquiring adult science fiction and fantasy. She was previously at Harper Children’s.

(8) STAR WARS PROP GEMS. Paper City profiles the exhibition of a spectacular collection: “Star Wars Exhibit Wows With Galaxy Firsts at Valobra Master Jewelers — The Force Is Strong In Houston”.

In a climate-controlled garage, not so far away, sat one of the world’s most impressive Star Wars memorabilia collections, second only to that of the collection of George Lucas, the Jedi mind behind the science fiction franchise. That is until Franco Valobra, founder and CEO of Valobra Master Jewelers, decided to showcase the rare pieces for a limited engagement in his Houston store. 

Carrie Fisher’s (aka Princess Leia)  personally annotated script for The Empire Strikes Back, a fully functional R2D2 used for Star Wars promotions in the 1970s and a life-size original Darth Vader costume from the first Star Wars movie in 1977 are among the astonishing artifacts that were on display through Saturday, May 13.

Franco Valobra, a renowned luxury car collector, shares a “garage” with a close friend, storing his Ferraris and Maseratis alongside an array of astonishing memorabilia such as a model-size X-Wing Fighter and a Stormtrooper Blaster used in Star Wars: A New Hope. …

(9) MEMORY LANE.

2006 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Some of you I think are likely more familiar with Susanna Clarke by way of her two novels, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and Piranesi, than you are with her short stories.  It turns out that she is most excellent when it comes to this form.

She’s not written a lot of short stories but eight of these were collected in The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories, published seventeen years ago by Bloomsbury USA. The cover illustration (there’s no dust jacket) which I not surprisingly really love is by Charles Vess. 

All of them are set in the same alternative history as Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. 

Our Beginning is drawn from one of them, “The Ladies of Grace Adieu Above”. And now here it is for you to read…

The Ladies of Grace Adieu Above all remember this: that magic belongs as much to the heart as to the head and everything which is done, should be done from love or joy or righteous anger. 

And if we honour this principle we shall discover that our magic is much greater than all the sum of all the spells that were ever taught. Then magic is to us as flight is to the birds, because then our magic comes from the dark and dreaming heart, just as the flight of a bird comes from the heart. And we will feel the same joy in performing that magic that the bird feels as it casts itself into the void and we will know that magic is part of what a man is, just as flight is part of what a bird is.

This understanding is a gift to us from the Raven King, the dear king of all magicians, who stands between England and the Other Lands, between all wild creatures and the world of men. From The Book of the Lady Catherine of Winchester (1209-67), translated from the Latin by Jane Tobias (1775-1819) 

When Mrs Field died, her grieving widower looked around him and discovered that the world seemed quite as full of pretty, young women as it had been in his youth. It further occurred to him that he was just as rich as ever and that, though his home already contained one pretty, young woman (his niece and ward, Cassandra Parbringer), he did not believe that another would go amiss. He did not think that he was at all changed from what he had been and Cassandra was entirely of his opinion, for (she thought to herself) I am sure, sir, that you were every bit as tedious at twenty-one as you are at forty-nine. So Mr Field married again. The lady was pretty and clever and only a year older than Cassandra, but, in her defence, we may say that she had no money and must either marry Mr Field or go and be a teacher in a school. The second Mrs Field and Cassandra were very pleased with each other and soon became very fond of each other. Indeed the sad truth was that they were a great deal fonder of each other than either was of Mr Field. There was another lady who was their friend (her name was Miss Tobias) and the three were often seen walking together near the village where lived-Grace Adieu in Gloucestershire.

Cassandra Parbringer at twenty was considered an ideal of a certain type of beauty to which some gentlemen are particularly partial. A white skin was agreeably tinged with pink. Light blue eyes harmonized very prettily with silvery-gold curls and the whole was a picture in which womanliness and childishness were sweetly combined. Mr Field, a gentleman not remarkable for his powers of observation, confidently supposed her to have a character childishly naive and full of pleasant, feminine submission in keeping with her face.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born May 16, 1918 — Barry Atwater. Surak in “The Savage Curtain” episode where several reliable sources say he had serious trouble making Vulcan hand gesture. He did a lot of other genre work from Night Stalker where he played the vampire Janos Skorzeny to The Man From U.N.C.L.E., The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Night Gallery, The Wild Wild West and The Outer Limits. (Died 1978.)
  • Born May 16, 1937 — Yvonne Craig. Batgirl on Batman, and that green skinned Orion slave girl Marta in “Whom Gods Destroy”. She also appeared in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Wild Wild West, Voyage to The Bottom of the Sea, The Ghost & Mrs. Muir, Land of the Giants, Six Million Dollar Man and, err, Mars Needs Women. (Died 2015.)
  • Born May 16, 1950 — Bruce Coville, 73. He’s won three Golden Duck Awards for Excellence in Children’s Science Fiction. He won first for his My Teacher Glows in the Dark, the second for his I Was a 6th Grade Alien, and the third for producing an audio adaptation of Heinlein’s The Rolling Stones. And NESFA also presented him with the Edward E. Smith Memorial Award for Imaginative Fiction. He was twice nominated for the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature. 
  • Born May 16, 1953 — Pierce Brosnan, 70. Louis XIV in The Moon and the Sun adaptation of Vonda McIntyre’s novel, shot in 2014 then not released til 2022. James Bond in a remarkably undistinguished series of such films. Seriously, what do you remember about his Bond films? Dr. Lawrence Angelo in The Lawnmower Man, and he was lunch, errr, Professor Donald Kessler in Mars Attacks! and Mike Noonan in Bag of Bones.
  • Born May 16, 1955 — Debra Winger, 68. Not I grant you an extensive genre resume but interesting one nonetheless. Her first genre appearance is in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in uncredited turn as, and I kid you, a Halloween Zombie Nurse with a poodle. Really I’m not kidding. And she appeared in three episodes of the Seventies Wonder Woman as Drusilla / Wonder Girl. If you want to stretch it, she was Rebecca in The Red Tent film.
  • Born May 16, 1969 — David Boreanaz, 54. Am I the only one that thought Angel was for the most part a better series than Buffy? And the perfect episode was I think “Smile Time” when Angel gets turned into a puppet. It even spawned its own rather great toy line. He’s currently Master Chief Special Warfare Operator Jason Hayes on SEAL Team which has migrated to Paramount + which means that the adult language barrier has been shattered so it’s quite amusing to hear a very foul mouthed Boreanaz. 
  • Born May 16, 1977 — Lynn Collins, 46. She was an excellent Dejah Thoris in the much underrated John Carter. Her first genre role was Assistant D.A. Jessica Manning on the very short lived horror UPN drama Hauntings, and she showed up in True Blood as Dawn Green. She survived longer on The Walking Dead as Leah Shaw.  Back to films, she was in X-Men Origins: Wolverine and The Wolverine as Kayla Silverfox, Rim of The World as Major Collins and Blood Creek as Barb. 

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES. Space Cowboy Books presents the Simultaneous Times podcast Episode 63 with stories by Elad Haber and Brent A. Harris. Stories featured in this episode:

“They Promised Trees” by Elad Haber. Music by Fall Precauxions 

“The Story That Never Was” by Brent A. Harris. Music by Phog Masheeen

Theme music by Dain Luscombe

(13) THEY GOT ME. If you disdain clickbait then you won’t click on “Fun Facts About the 1960s ‘Batman’ Series You Probably Didn’t Know” at Sportzbonanza.

Alan Napier

Before getting to the audition for the show, Alan Napier had no clue who Batman was. He never heard of the character, and he didn’t take the casting that seriously. The truth is, when the producers offered him a part of Batman’s butler Alfred, Alan was a skeptic, and he even considered not accepting the part. The story and idea seemed funny and ridiculous to him.

Luckily, after Napier’s agent showed him the income that the role could get him, he immediately changed his mind and said yes.

(14) WOTF 39. Today is the official release of Writers of the Future Volume 39 book, ebook and audiobook.

(15) MORE WATER TRACES ON THE SURFACE OF MARS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] And they are in the low latitudes, away from the poles. In the Science Advances journal article “Modern water at low latitudes on Mars: Potential evidence from dune surfaces” Chinese researchers —

…report crusts, cracks, aggregates, and bright polygonal ridges on the surfaces of hydrated salt-rich dunes of southern Utopia Planitia (~25°N) from in situ exploration by the Zhurong rover. These surface features were inferred to form after 1.4 to 0.4 million years ago. Wind and CO2 frost processes can be ruled out as potential mechanisms. Instead, involvement of saline water from thawed frost/snow is the most likely cause. This discovery sheds light on more humid conditions of the modern Martian climate and provides critical clues to future exploration missions searching for signs of extant life, particularly at low latitudes with comparatively warmer, more amenable surface temperatures.

(16) WORSE THAN KUDZU. “Restart the Earth review – Chinese sci-fi is pacy plant-based apocalypse” says the Guardian.

No doubt to Alan Titchmarsh’s great relief, the horticultural arm of the post-apocalypse flick is finally entering the growth phase, with the likes of Annihilation, The Last of Us and now this lightweight effort from Chinese director Lin Zhenzhao. The hubris here is that mankind has overcompensated for the desertification of the planet with cutting-edge research to promote plant growth, accidentally creating a super-species of sentient flora that has choked the Earth, and whose roving vines hunt down people to snack on….

When a drug to replicate plant cells creates a sentient form of flower, the planet is over taken by flora and humankind is depleted. A Chinese task force, a widowed father and his young daughter fight to survive in a mission to inject an antidote to the core of the plants to reverse their growth.

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Mike Lynch Cartoons tells who’s who in this 1945 video “John Nesbitt’s Passing Parade: ‘People on Paper'”: H.H. Knerr (Katzenjammer Kids), Bud Fisher (Mutt and Jeff), Fred Lasswell (Barney Google and Snuffy Smith), Frank King (Gasoline Alley), Chester Gould (Dick Tracy), Dick Calkins (Buck Rogers in the 25th Century), Milton Caniff (Terry and the Pirates), Chic Young (Blondie), Raeburn Van Buren (Abbie an’ Slats), Ham Fisher (Joe Palooka), Hal Foster (Prince Valiant), Harold Gray (Little Orphan Annie), and Al Capp (Li’l Abner).

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

Pixel Scroll 4/19/23 Tick, Tock, Said The Pixel, Just Keep Scrolling

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(1) F&SF. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction’s May-June 2023 cover art is by Maurizio Manzieri.

(2) INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE. The International Booker Prize 2023 Shortlist of 6 works was released on April 18. The one longlisted item of genre interest has survived to make the shortlist, Cheon Myeong-Kwan’s Whale. The winner will be announced May 23. Publishing Perspectives breaks down the amount of the prize.

…The focus of this Booker is translation, and its £50,000 prize (US$60,734) is to be split into £25,000 (US$30,367) for the author and £25,000 for the translator—or divided equally between multiple translators. There also is a purse of £5,000 (US$6,072) for each of the shortlisted titles: £2,500 (US$3,036) for the author and £2,500 for the translator or, again, divided equally between multiple translators….

(3) DIGGING OUT FROM THE MUDSLIDE. Yesterday Larry Correia posted “A Letter To Epic Fantasy Readers: I Know Rothfuss And Martin Hurt You, But It’s Time To Get Over It And Move On” [Internet Archive], a cruel rant blaming a couple of well-known fantasy writers for allegedly crushing the nascent careers of other fantasy novelists by failing to finish their series and creating reader resistance to new writers’ series. (Then, finding he had mud left over, he deposited some on a third author who has an unfinished sf series.)

Today Mark Lawrence decided a few things needed to be said in response in a blog post, “Faith and blame”, which concludes:

…In short: 

i) Authors who delay a book in a series, be it for 10 years, or 50, or forever, are not lazy sacks of shit.

ii) The high profile authors who have delayed may be cited in some cases as a reason for readers not picking up a newly published book 1 — but I feel the reasons behind that reluctance are far deeper and considerably wider than two or three writers, however well known. Some portion of the reason (I do not say blame) may reside with them, but I think this would be happening even if book 3, 4, & 6 had turned up a year or two after their predecessors.

iii) It’s easy to give the reason for this problem a face – someone to call an apathetic sack of shit. It’s human nature to want a simple answer and a person to blame. But it’s more complicated than that.

Readers – have faith in your writers, that faith will be overwhelmingly rewarded. And when it’s not – the only thing that author has done is disappointed you, not tanked the entire publishing industry.

(4) DON’T LOOK FOR THIS BOOK ON THE RIVER. “Lydia Davis refuses to sell her next book on Amazon” – the author explains why to the Guardian.

Prize-winning author Lydia Davis’ new collection of short stories will not be sold on Amazon, with the author saying she does not “believe corporations should have as much control over our lives as they do”.

Our Strangers will be published by Canongate on 5 October, and is the seventh collection of fiction from Davis, who won the Man Booker international prize in 2013, when the award chose a winner based on a body of work, rather than a single book.

Due to be published just before Bookshop Day on 7 October, Our Strangers will only be sold in physical bookshops, Bookshop.org and selected online independent retailers.

Davis said: “We value small businesses, yet we give too much of our business to the large and the powerful – and often, increasingly, we have hardly any choice.

“I am all the more pleased, now, that Canongate, with its long history of independence and its high standards, will be publishing Our Strangers and doing so in a way that puts my book on the shelves of booksellers who are so much more likely to care about it.”…

(5) GROWING PROSPECT OF WRITERS STRIKE. Leaders of the Writers Guild of America secured a strong showing of support from members. “Writers strike looms after members vote to shut down film and TV production” reports CNN Business.

…The vote announced Monday afternoon showed 97.9% of participating union members voting to approve a potential strike.

If a strike happens, it would be the first in the industry since 2007, and it would bring production on many shows and films to a halt. The 2007 strike lasted 100 days.

The Writers Guild of America, the union that represents the writers, says it needs to make substantial changes to the way that writers are compensated because of the shift to streaming services from traditional films and cable and broadcast networks….

(6) AFRICANFUTURISM. Nnedi Okorafor did her own cover reveal yesterday. Preorder here.

(7) PICARD. NPR’s “Pop Culture Happy Hour” panelists respond as “’Picard’ boldly goes into the history books”. Beware spoilers.

[ERIC] DEGGANS: Well, you know, I wrote a review before the show debuted. I love, love, love this. And the reason I love this is because I’ve always felt that Paramount Plus’ new “Trek” series have erred by being so careful about trying to blaze their own path and tone down the references to past “Trek” stuff. And I understand that, especially with “Discovery,” the very first series to step out, they wanted to blaze a new trail. But there is a reason why this franchise has survived for nearly 60 years.

To have – especially “Star Trek: Picard,” in its first two seasons, really suffered from not being willing to look back and acknowledge the reason why people love Jean-Luc Picard in the first place. So it is just so great to see this series emerge as this love letter to not just “The Next Generation” but all those Trek series that kind of debuted in that 1990s, early 2000s era. So “The Next Generation,” “Deep Space Nine,” “Voyager” – there’s all kinds of Easter eggs and references that, if you don’t know the shows, you don’t need to worry about. But if you do know the shows, it is just so much fun and so much extra pleasure to watch this unfold.

(8) GET READY FOR “MRS. DAVIS”. “Mrs. Davis Co-Creator Tara Hernandez On Crafting Peacock’s Wild New Sci-Fi Series” at Slashfilm.

One might not imagine that one of the writers of “The Big Bang Theory” and “Young Sheldon” would be behind one of 2023’s most anticipated, high-concept sci-fi shows, but that’s exactly the situation we find ourselves in. Hailing from Tara Hernandez, “Mrs. Davis” debuts on Peacock later this month, with Damon Lindelof, of “Lost” and “The Leftovers” fame, serving as co-creator on the series alongside her….

I’ve not seen a ton of the show, admittedly, but this feels like the kind of thing where, especially because I know Damon got into some of this with “Lost” years ago where they just were chasing their tails, so how long would you ideally see this going? Is this a one season show? Is it a four season show? Do you have a rough idea of where you guys would like it to go?

Yeah, I think we really, and just my personal tastes, I really love a great season of television. I love a story that’s introduced. I love a nice conclusion on it. I think we had to know where we were ending up. We pitched the show, when we pitched it, it was very important to have the landing place.

That is nice to hear.

Yes. It has a landing place. We had to know what the North Star was, especially in a show that can feel like, “Is this going to go off the rails? Are they just going to be chasing their tails?” Just my personal preference about storytelling, whether that comes from really loving feature films or just loving a hero’s journey that’s a really closed-loop narrative, I think the world of “Mrs. Davis” is such that it has legs, but I think it is a great eight episodes. If that’s what it is, it’s just a really nice story. And people will be satisfied.

(9) GET YOUR RED HOT CAT BOOKS. Kristine Kathryn Rusch has curated The 2023 Cattitude Bundle for StoryBundle and it’s available for the next three weeks.

My cats have gotten out of control. During the lockdown, I promoted a series of projects using my co-workers as a hook. The only co-workers I had at the time were the the cats who boss me around: The Mighty Cheeps, and his buddy Gavin, a.k.a The Boys.

I’d post a picture of them on Facebook, write a funny or wry bit about their terrible office behavior, and end with a bit of promotion.

Little did I realize that the demand for the antics of the staff at Promotion Central would become the highlight of my Facebook page. I’ve learned if I don’t include a photo of the Boys, or our new(ish) third cat, Angel, no one reads the posts. Those cats are more popular than I am.

It shouldn’t surprise me. Cats and the internet go together like chocolate and peanut butter. You can live with either one, but once someone combined them, well, there’s no separating them. Ever.

Of course, we’re going to take advantage of that. Cats and the internet becomes cats in ebooks. Since cats in books have always gone hand in glove (have you ever met a bookstore dog?), it seems only natural to put cat books into a StoryBundle.

The best thing about cat books? It’s easy to find good ones because all of the best writers live with cats…. 

Here’s the deal:

For StoryBundle, you decide what price you want to pay. For $5 (or more, if you’re feeling generous), you’ll get the basic bundle of four books in .epub format—WORLDWIDE.

  • Too Big to Miss by Sue Ann Jaffarian
  • Familiarity – A Winston & Ruby Collection by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
  • A Cat of a Different Color by Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith
  • October Snow by Bonnie Elizabeth

If you pay at least the bonus price of just $20, you get all four of the regular books, plus six more books for a total of 10!

  • The Captain’s Cat by Stefon Mears (StoryBundle Exclusive)
  • Haunted Witch by T. Thorn Coyle
  • The Intergalactic Veterinarian of the Year! by Ron Collins & Jeff Collins (StoryBundle Exclusive)
  • Death by Polka by Robert Jeschonek
  • Single Witch’s Survival Guide by Mindy Klasky
  • Road of No Return by Annie Reed (StoryBundle Exclusive)

(10) NEVER GIVE UP, NEVER SURRENDER. “Oh please, no.  Just no. And you may quote me,” says Cat Eldridge. The Hollywood Reporter says “Galaxy Quest TV Series in the Works at Paramount+”. The article also chronicles several failed attempts to adapt it for TV in the previous decade.

Galaxy Quest is going from a fictional series to an actual TV series. 

Paramount+ is teaming with its studio counterpart, Paramount Television Studios, for a live-action adaptation of the 1999 cult favorite sci-fi spoof. Sources say the project is in the early development stages and a search is underway for a writer to pair with Mark Johnson, the Breaking Bad alum who exec produced the film and is returning for the scripted update. Johnson and his Gran Via Productions banner are the only execs currently attached to the project….

Ars Technica’s Jennifer Ouelette also has doubts that this is a good idea: “That Galaxy Quest TV series might finally be happening and we have mixed feelings”.

… Honestly, I have mixed feelings about a spinoff series from one of my all-time favorite movies. On the one hand, I love and cherish every character and every line of dialogue in Galaxy Quest. On the other, how do you improve on perfection? As Enrico Colantoni, who played Thermion leader Mathesar, told io9 in 2014, “To make something up, just because we love those characters, and turn it into a sequel—then it becomes the awful sequel.”…

(11) MEMORY LANE.

2015 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

I’m trying to remember what the first work of Holly Black’s that I read, so I went to ISFDB and researched her work. It appears it’s Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale which I read some twenty years ago. Fascinating novel. 

 Now, without doing the no-no of spoilers, The Darkest Part of The Forest is the work of a much more mature writer. Her grasp of what makes a character worth our time to be invested in is really improved a lot as has her ability to actually write an interesting story. 

The Darkest Part of The Forest was published by Little, Brown eight years ago. It was nominated for a Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature. 

The Darkest Part of The Forest is, I think, deliciously dark as you can see in The Beginning which you can read here. Beware apparently young boys with pointed ears in glass coffins… 

Down a path worn into the woods, past a stream and a hollowed-out log full of pill bugs and termites, was a glass coffin. It rested right on the ground, and in it slept a boy with horns on his head and ears as pointed as knives. 

As far as Hazel Evans knew, from what her parents said to her and from what their parents said to them, he’d always been there. And no matter what anyone did, he never, ever woke up. 

He didn’t wake up during the long summers, when Hazel and her brother, Ben, stretched out on the full length of the coffin, staring down through the crystalline panes, fogging them up with their breath, and scheming glorious schemes. He didn’t wake up when tourists came to gape or debunkers came to swear he wasn’t real. He didn’t wake up on autumn weekends, when girls danced right on top of him, gyrating to the tinny sounds coming from nearby iPod speakers, didn’t notice when Leonie Wallace lifted her beer high over her head, as if she were saluting the whole haunted forest. He didn’t so much as stir when Ben’s best friend, Jack Gordon, wrote IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, BREAK GLASS in Sharpie along one side—or when Lloyd Lindblad took a sledgehammer and actually tried. No matter how many parties had been held around the horned boy—generations of parties, so that the grass sparkled with decades of broken bottles in green and amber, so that the bushes shone with crushed aluminum cans in silver and gold and rust—and no matter what happened at those parties, nothing could wake the boy inside the glass coffin. 

When they were little, Ben and Hazel made him flower crowns and told him stories about how they would rescue him. Back then, they were going to save everyone who needed saving in Fairfold. Once Hazel got older, though, she mostly visited the coffin only at night, in crowds, but she still felt something tighten in her chest when she looked down at the boy’s strange and beautiful face.

She hadn’t saved him, and she hadn’t saved Fairfold, either. “Hey, Hazel,” Leonie called, dancing to one side to make room in case Hazel wanted to join her atop the horned boy’s casket. Doris Alvaro was already up there, still in her cheerleader outfit from the game their school lost earlier that night, shining chestnut ponytail whipping through the air. They both looked flushed with alcohol and good cheer.

(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born April 19, 1907 — Alan Wheatley. Best remembered for being the Sheriff of Nottingham in The Adventures of Robin Hood, with Richard Greene playing Robin Hood. In 1951, he had played Sherlock Holmes in the first TV series about him, but no recordings of it are known to exist. And he was in Two First Doctor stories as Temmosus, “The Escape” and “The Ambush” where he was the person killed on screen by Daleks. (Died 1991.)
  • Born April 19, 1925 — Hugh O’Brian. He was Harry Chamberlain in Rocketship X-M. (It was nominated in the 1951 Retro Hugo Awards given at The Millennium Philcon but lost out to Destination Moon.) He would later play Hugh Lockwood in Probe, not the Asimov Probe, the pilot for the sf TV series Search. His only other genre appearance I think was playing five different roles on Fantasy Island. Though I’m absolutely sure I’ll be corrected if I’m wrong (smile). (Died 2016.)
  • Born April 19, 1935 — Herman Zimmerman, 88. He was the art director and production designer who worked between 1987 and 2005 for the Trek franchise. Excepting Voyager, in that era he worked on all other live-action productions including the first season of Next Gen, the entire runs of Deep Space Nine and Enterprise, as well as six Trek films. As Memory Alpha notes, “Together with Rick Sternbach he designed the space station Deep Space 9, with John Eaves the USS Enterprise-B and the USS Enterprise-E. His most recognizable work though, have been his (co-)designs for nearly all of the standing sets, those of the bridge, Main Engineering (co-designed with Andrew Probert) and Ten Forward for the USS Enterprise-D in particular.” Not surprisingly, he co-wrote the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Technical Manual with Rick Sternbach and Doug Drexler. 
  • Born April 19, 1936 — Tom Purdom, 87. There’s very little on him on the web, so I’ll let Michael Swanwick speak for him in the introduction to his Lovers & Fighters, Starships & Dragons collection: “How highly do I regard Tom’s fiction?  So highly that I wrote the introduction to the collection — and I hate writing introductions.  They’re a lot of work.  But these stories deserve enormous praise, so I was glad to do it.”  He’s written five novels and has either one or two collections of his stories. He’s deeply stocked at the usual digital suspects. 
  • Born April 19, 1946 — Tim Curry, 77. Dr. Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, of course, but it’s not his first genre appearance. He’d appeared a year earlier at the Scottish Opera in A Midsummer Night’s Dream as Puck. And yes, I know that he appeared in the live show which was at the Chelsea Classic Cinema and other venues before the film was done. Other genre appearances include playing Darkness in Legend, an outstanding Cardinal Richelieu in The Three Musketeers, a most excellent genre film, Farley Claymore in The Shadow (great role), another superb performance playing Long John Silver in Muppet Treasure Island, in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead as The Player, Gomez Addams in Addams Family Reunion, and Trymon in TV’s Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Darkness. And others too numerous to list.
  • Born April 19, 1952 — Mark Rogers. He’s probably best known for writing and illustrating the Adventures of Samurai Cat series, a most excellent affair. His debut fantasy novel Zorachus was followed by The Nightmare of God sequel. His novella “The Runestone” was adapted as a film of the same name. And his art is collected in Nothing But a Smile: The Pinup Art of Mark Rogers and The Art of Fantasy. (Died 2014.)
  • Born April 19, 1967 — Steven H Silver, 56. Fan and publisher, author, and editor. He has been nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer twelve times and Best Fanzine seven times. In 1995 he founded the Sidewise Award for Alternate History and has served as a judge ever since. He has published the fanzine, Argentus, edited several issues of the Hugo-nominated Journey Planet. His debut novel After Hastings came out in 2020.
  • Born April 19, 1978 — K. Tempest Bradford, 45. She was a non-fiction and managing editor with Fantasy Magazine for several years, and has edited fiction for Fortean Bureau, Peridot Books and Sybil’s Garage. She’s written a lot of short fiction and her first YA novel, Ruby Finley vs. the Interstellar Invasion. She was a finalist for three Ignyte Awards, the Ember Award for unsung contributions to genre, and twice for the Community Award for Outstanding Efforts in Service of Inclusion and Equitable Practice in Genre. With Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward she shared a 2020 Locus Special Award to Writing the Other for Inclusivity and Representation Education.

(13) COMICS SECTION.

The future used to be better.

The future before.

The future now.

(14) BIG GREEN NUMBERS. Book Riot wants to discuss “The Bestselling Comics of All Time” – however, they don’t want the answer to be too easy.

But what is the bestselling comic of all time? Well, that depends on how you define comic.

Are we talking about single issues, or “floppies?” And if so, are we talking about the sales of one issue, or the series as a whole? Does that include collected editions and reprints? How do you account for changes in the retail market, from newsstands to specialty shops to digital, and the different reporting (or lack thereof) of each? How do you take into account the cultural changes since the ’40s, when over 90% of children read comics, compared to today’s globalized, media-saturated world? Should you account for the differences in population between America (331.9 million potential readers) versus Japan (125.7 million) versus, say, Finland (5.5 million)? Isn’t it apples and oranges to compare One Piece to X-Men to Peanuts, anyway?…

When it comes to the best selling single issue, the list begins at number five –

5. BATMAN: THE 10 CENT ADVENTURE BY GREG RUCKA AND RICK BURCHETT (MARCH 2002)

Most of the comics on this list are stunts of some sort, and selling a comic for literally just a dime in 2002 absolutely qualifies (most comics were $2.25 then). It’s actually a good story, kicking off the excellent Bruce Wayne: Murderer? plot line, but it was that nostalgic price point that sold 702,126 copies.

(15) BROWSING FOR DOLLARS. Untapped New York ranks the “10 Most Surprising Finds at the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair”. The treasures include Billie Holiday’s bar tab, and something a bit closer to being of genre interest —

9. A 17th-Century Celestial Atlas

Along with books, maps are a popular item to find at the antiquarian book fair. The book featured above is one of the most sought-after celestial atlases in existence. Produced by Dutch cartographer Andreas Cellarius in 1661, Harmonia Macrocosmica is priced at a whopping $395,000.

Considered Cellarius’s magnum opus, this map was made to illustrate competing theories of celestial mechanics, or how the solar system worked. The universe’s heavenly bodies are depicted in vibrant colors throughout 29 extremely detailed, hand-colored, double-page engraved plates in the book. The images take theories put forth by great thinkers and scientists like Ptolemy, Tycho Brahe, Nicolaus Copernicus, as well as lesser-known figures such as Aratus of Soli, and present them in an accessible way through images.

(16) BOOKSTORE SLEEPOVER. Zoos and museums have hosted them – now a downtown LA bookstore: “I spent the night at the Last Bookstore. Things got spooky” in the LA Times. The owner tried to make it a bit of a paranormal experience.

…Soon enough, Powell was recalling the spookiest things he’d seen in his years at the store. He described coworkers who’d heard or glimpsed figures moving around the corners, and instances where people watched books fly off shelves for seemingly no reason.

“That corner is where books fall off sometimes, in sci-fi, for some reason,” he said.

As we passed the portal, a hidden nook where my partner and I had signed up to sleep, we realized it was both secluded in the back corner of the store with books on U.S. history and located closest to the “haunted” shelves that books fall off of. We quickly decided we wouldn’t be sleeping there….

(17) THE MUSIC OF THE NIGHT. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Deep in a disused mind in Sardinia, scientists are assembling an experiment to find out just how much nothing weighs. Using an exquisitely sensitive balance beam and interferometric techniques cribbed from gravity wave detectors, they plan to switch on and off the Casimir effect using small temperature variations and measure the resulting change in the number of virtual particles that can exist between metal plates. If all goes well, they will have established a tight constraint on the energy of the vacuum. “How Much Does ‘Nothing’ Weigh?” at Scientific American.

It does something to you when you drive in here for the first time,” Enrico Calloni says as our car bumps down into the tunnel of a mine on the Italian island of Sardinia. After the intense heat aboveground, the contrast is stark. Within seconds, damp, cool air enters the car as it makes its way into the depths. “I hope you’re not claustrophobic.” This narrow tunnel, which leads us in almost complete darkness to a depth of 110 meters underground, isn’t for everyone. But it’s the ideal site for the project we are about to see—the Archimedes experiment, named after a phenomenon first described by the ancient Greek scientist, which aims to weigh “nothing.”…

…Geologically, Sardinia is one of the quietest places in Europe. The island, along with its neighbor Corsica, is located on a particularly secure block of Earth’s crust that is among the most stable areas of the Mediterranean, with very few earthquakes in its entire recorded history and only one (offshore) event that ever reached the relatively mild category of magnitude 5. Physicists chose this geologically uneventful place because the Archimedes experiment requires extreme isolation from the outside environment. It involves a high-precision experimental setup designed to investigate the worst theoretical prediction in the history of physics—the amount of energy in the empty space that fills the universe….

… Researchers can calculate the energy of the vacuum in two ways. From a cosmological perspective, they can use Albert Einstein’s equations of general relativity to calculate how much energy is needed to explain the fact that the universe is expanding at an accelerated rate. They can also work from the bottom up, using quantum field theory to predict the value based on the masses of all the “virtual particles” that can briefly arise and then disappear in “empty” space (more on this later). These two methods produce numbers that differ by more than 120 orders of magnitude (1 followed by 120 zeros). It’s an embarrassingly absurd discrepancy that has important implications for our understanding of the expansion of the universe—and even its ultimate fate. To figure out where the error lies, scientists are hauling a two-meter-tall cylindrical vacuum chamber and other equipment down into an old Sardinian mine where they will attempt to create their own vacuum and weigh the nothing inside….

(18) NOBODY SURVIVES THE FLAME TRENCH. [Item by Mike Kennedy.]On this past Monday’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Josh Groban talked about his visit to NASA, where, among other things, he received a tour of the “flame trench.”

Fellow space enthusiasts Stephen Colbert and Josh Groban geek out over the details of Groban’s trip to NASA’s Artemis mission launch pad. Check out Groban’s latest role as the lead in “Sweeney Todd,” playing now at Broadway’s Lunt-Fontanne Theatre.

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, JJ, Gordon Van Gelder, Rich Lynch, Lise Andreasen, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]

Pixel Scroll 4/5/23 The Words Of The Filer Are Written On The Pixel Scrolls

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(1) KGB. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Peng Shepherd and Paul Park on Wednesday, April 12 at 7:00 p.m. Eastern. Location: KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003 (Just off 2nd Ave, upstairs).

Peng Shepherd

Peng Shepherd is the nationally bestselling, award-winning author of The Book of M and The Cartographers. Her novels have been named Best Book of 2022 by The Washington Post, Amazon, Elle, and The Verge, Best Book of the Summer by the Today Show and NPR, and Pick of the Month by Good Morning America, as well as optioned for television. She was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, where she rode horses and trained in classical ballet, and has lived in Beijing, Kuala Lumpur, London, New York and Mexico City.

Paul Park

Paul Park is the author of three collections of short stories, most recently A City Made of Words from PM Press. His twelve novels include A Princess of Roumania, Celestis, and All Those Vanished Engines. His work has been nominated for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards, among many others.  He recently retired from teaching writing and literature at Williams College for many years, and is currently working on a series of screenplays for SunHaus Productions. He lives in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, with his wife, Deborah.

(2) HORROR POETS. At the Horror Writers Association blog “It’s National Poetry Month—How Incredibly Frightening!” Denise Dumars introduces the series:

Now that I’ve got your attention, April is National Poetry Month. Naming the month thusly implies that something of great value is being overlooked. Every poet in America knows what I’m talking about. Poetry has never had the huge following in the U.S. that it boasts in some other cultures; in fact, if you are an HWA member who lives in another country, I’d love to hear how poetry is viewed by the general public where you live. I know some countries where it is very much a part of the national conversation, and is not reserved for the so-called “ivory tower” or wherever people in the U.S. think it lives. (Folks, check the cemeteries, Goth clubs, museums, craft breweries, coffee houses, public libraries, and any place with a senior or student discount! I guarantee a poet will be hanging out in one of those locales or somewhere that has a Happy Hour or free WiFi.)

I write science fiction and fantasy poetry as well as horror poetry, and so I know the trouble poets in other genres face when trying to get genre fiction organizations to recognize it. That’s one of the reasons HWA is so special. Would you believe that horror poetry has been on the Bram Stoker Awards ballot for 23 years? I don’t think I realized it had been recognized by HWA for that long. It makes me very proud to be a member of HWA. But even within our ranks people often overlook poetry as a vitally important part of the genre, so here we are, people! Live poets! Two shows on Sunday!

Here are excerpts from the first four Q&A’s in the series.

What sparked your interest in horror poetry? Was there a particular event or work that inspired you to delve into the darker side of poetry?

I never really understood poetry. I struggled with it for years, both as a reader and as a writer, until I heard someone—I think it was Anselm Berrigan—describe it this way: Poetry is a machine you put people through. And then it just clicked. That was the moment where it fell into place for me, and unlike prose (with which my relationship has always been a slow, iterative kind of process), the transition from confused frustration to comfortable acceptance was immediate. That’s not to say that poetry is easy for me (is it for anyone?), but like realizing what a chisel is meant for, I could at least begin to work with this new tool in ways I couldn’t before.

How do you balance the need to be evocative and disturbing with the constraints of poetic structure and form? Are there any particular strategies you use to create tension and build suspense in your horror poems?

All of us are disturbed by different things, so my goal isn’t necessarily to disturb the reader. My first goal is clarity. Am I conveying what I want to convey? Whether that’s an image, or an emotion, or a concept, I need to make sure it gets across in words—and then I try to balance that communication with aesthetics.

Can you describe your creative process when writing horror poetry? Do you have any rituals or techniques that help you tap into your darkest fears and bring them to life on the page?

Do something related to what you want to be every day. I try to free-write something every day, even if it’s just a scrap or stub. Sometimes I will use a prompt, although most of them are pretty generic. Importantly, I try to read a couple of poems a day – either from a collection or from a site like the Poetry Foundation. I like the latter because I don’t know what to expect and get broad exposure. Poetry should be disruptive, and it’s easier to be surprised and outside your comfort zone when you don’t know what you’re getting into. The other thing is to try and go out into the world and experience things actively – try to really look at things and see them with fresh eyes. There’s a lot of juice in trying to describe something in a very specific way. I don’t know that I tap my darkest fears. I’m a reserved sort, clinical and academic by temperament and training. I tend to want to keep those things for myself. Poetry tends to work against that, which makes for an interesting struggle….

How do you balance the need to be evocative and disturbing with the constraints of poetic structure and form? Are there any particular strategies you use to create tension and build suspense in your horror poems? 

This is absolutely a balance that must be tended to with intention. I think stronger poets think this through and try out different iterations before finding what works. I’m still learning how to do this, so I enjoy reading the works of other poets and playing with imagery and form in my own work. I rely heavily upon the sounds of words to build tension and evoke emotions – alliteration, assonance, anaphora, cacophony – all the tricks!

(3) THE TEST. NPR reminds people “What is the Bechdel test? A shorthand for measuring representation in movies”. Named for the test’s creator, cartoonist Alison Bechdel.

…BECHDEL: As they talk, they’re trying to decide what movie to go see.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) I only go to the movie if it satisfies three basic requirements. One, it has to have at least two women in it…

(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) …Who, two…

BECHDEL: Who talk to each other.

(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) …About, three, something besides a man.

(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)

BECHDEL: And the punch line is…

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Last movie I was able to see was “Alien.” The two women in it talk to each other about the monster.

(SOUNDBITE OF SCREECH)

…(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

SAM JONES: The Bechdel Test.

JESSICA CHASTAIN: But then I looked at the test, and I thought, OK, it doesn’t seem too unreasonable. And then I looked at my films, and I realized not one of my films has passed that test….

(4) SADDLE UP! Space Cowboy Books is hosting an online reading and interview with Ai Jiang, author of Linghun, on Tuesday April 11t at 6:00 p.m. Pacific. Register for free here.

From acclaimed author Ai Jiang, follow Wenqi, Liam, and Mrs. to the mysterious town of HOME, a place where the dead live again as spirits, conjured by the grief-sick population that refuses to let go. This edition includes a foreword by Yi Izzy Yu, Translator of The Shadow Book of Ji Yun, the essay “A Ramble on Di Fu Ling & Death” by the author, and two bonus short stories from Jiang: “Yǒngshí” and “Teeter Totter.”

(5) THE MEMORY HOLE. So you bought that ebook before the revisions were made? The New York Times reminds Kindle readers, “It’s Their Content, You’re Just Licensing it”.

Amid recent debates over several publishers’ removal of potentially offensive material from the work of popular 20th-century authors — including Roald Dahl, R.L. Stine and Agatha Christie — is a less discussed but no less thorny question about the method of the revisions. For some e-book owners, the changes appeared as if made by a book thief in the night: quietly and with no clear evidence of a disturbance.

In Britain, Clarissa Aykroyd, a Kindle reader of Dahl’s “Matilda,” watched a reference to Joseph Conrad disappear. (U.S. editions of Dahl’s books were unaffected.) Owners of Stine’s “Goosebumps” books lost mentions of schoolgirls’ “crushes” on a headmaster and a description of an overweight character with “at least six chins.” Racial and ethnic slurs were snipped out of Christie’s mysteries.

In each case, e-books that had been published and sold in one form were retroactively (and irrevocably) altered, highlighting what consumer rights experts say is a convention of digital publishing that customers may never notice or realize they signed up for. Buying an e-book doesn’t necessarily mean it’s yours.

“Nobody reads the terms of service, but these companies reserve the right to go in there and change things around,” said Jason Schultz, the director of New York University’s Technology Law and Policy Clinic and a co-author of “The End of Ownership.”

“They make it feel similar to buying a physical book, but in reality it’s 180 degrees different,” he added….

(6) BOOK OR MOVIE: WHICH WAS BETTER? Inverse’s Ryan Britt claims “Logan’s Run Is a Sci-Fi Masterpiece Because it Rewrote the Book”. I’m not sure who thinks the movie is a masterpiece besides Britt, though – it finished behind No Award in the 1977 Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo vote.

…Although it was published in the same era as Frank Herbert’s Dune and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the novel isn’t spoken about in the same reverent tones relative to its movie adaptation. The number of people who have seen Logan’s Run may not be huge, but the number who still read the book must be minuscule. There are several ways to explain this, the most tempting of which would be to argue that the movie is simply better. But that’s not it.

Both the novel and the film float a similar dystopian premise about futuristic population control. There’s an age where people are required to die, those who try to skirt this rule are called “runners,” and they’re hunted by people called Sandmen. In the movie, the age of “renewal” is 30. In the novel, it’s just 21, a stark difference that makes the novel weirder and hard to buy. But the motivation was clear: the book represents a kind of twisted Lord of the Flies endgame. What if all the college kids protesting in the ‘60s really did run the world?

The novel is a bit more subtle than that, but this central premise is largely why it hasn’t aged well. Which is a shame because, unlike the movie, the world-building is expansive. In the film, Logan (Michael York), Jessica (Jenny Agutter), and all the other twenty-somethings live in domed cities, where the outside world is a distant memory. So when Logan and Jessica escape the domes, they’re out in the wilderness and we’re in Planet of the Apes territory, in which familiar buildings like the Capitol have been overrun by vines and cats.

These features make Logan’s Run the quintessential dystopia, more reminiscent of Brave New World than its own source material….

(7) MOBY KHAN. “Star Trek: Every Literary Reference In The Wrath Of Khan” — ScreenRant furnishes a “Cliff’s Notes” for the movie – not that you need it.

… Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan‘s references to Moby-Dick are anything but subtle, but the movie finds a way to perfectly utilize Herman Melville’s controversial narrative. Making his intentions clear throughout the story, Khan actually quotes the 1851 novel on several occasions and even uses his last dying breath to invoke one of its most moving passages. “From hell’s heart, I stab at thee,” is so much more than Khan showing off his well-read vocabulary, but instead succinctly encapsulates how he views Kirk and the situation he’s been living in for years on Ceti Alpha V. The parallels are on-the-nose, but powerful nonetheless….

(8) MEMORY LANE.

2006 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.] Patricia A. McKillip’s Solstice Wood

I assume that you’re familiar with the work of this author but it’s more likely that you’ve encountered her more fantastic works such as The Riddle-Master of Hed, The Cygnet series or The Forgotten Beasts of Eld.

Solstice Wood was published by Ace Books seventeen years ago as part of the Winter Rose duology with Winter Rose which was published a decade before this novel.

The cover on the left is the one from the Ace Books publication. Before this novel, Kunuko Y. Craft did all of the Ace covers for her books. This cover art is by Gary Blythe. 

It would win the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature.

I love this novel as what we have here is a quiet, gentler magic at work. I won’t say more about the novel as that would  involve, errrr, SPOILERS as you know. 

If you’re inclined, there’s a detailed review of Solstice Wood of course over at Green Man as we’re terribly fond of her fiction.  We also did a nice interview with her shortly before her death.

So without further commentary, here’s the Beginning…

Sylvia Gram called at five in the morning. She never remembered the time difference. I was already up, sitting at the table in my bathrobe, about to take my first sip of coffee. The phone rang; my hands jerked. Coffee shot into the air, rained down on my hair and the cat, who yowled indignantly and fled. I stared at the phone as it rang again, not wanting to pick up, not wanting to know whatever it was Gram wanted me to know.

At the second ring, I heard Madison stir on my couch-bed.

“Syl?”

“I’m not answering that.”

He unburied his face, squinted at me. “Why not? You having a clandestine affair?”

“It’s Gram.”

His head hit the pillow again on the third ring. “Is not,” he mumbled. “Tell him to leave a message and come back to bed.”

“I can’t,” I said firmly, though his naked body was exerting some serious magnetic pull. “I have to go to the store and unpack a dozen boxes of books.”

“Come back for five minutes. Please? She’ll leave a message.”

 “She won’t.” It rang again. “Only the weak-minded babble their business to inanimate objects.”

“Hah?”

 “She says.” 

It rang for the fifth time; I glowered at it, still not moving. I could have shown her any number of fairy tales in which important secrets imparted to a stone, to the moon, to a hole in the ground, had rescued the runaway princess, or the youngest brother, or the children lost in the wood. But Gram believed in fairies, not fairy tales, and in her world magic and machines were equally suspect.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born April 5, 1909 — Albert Broccoli. American film producer responsible for all the Bond films up to License to Kill, either by himself or in conjunction with others. He also was the producer of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and executive produced The Gamma People. (Died 1996.)
  • Born April 5, 1916 — Bernard Baily. A comics writer, editor and publisher. Best remembered as co-creator of The Spectre and Hourman. For DC Comics precursor National Comics, Baily co-created and drew the adventure feature “Tex Thomson” in Action Comics #1 (June 1938), the landmark comic book that introduced Superman. In 1943, he founded his own studio. Among the artists who started out in the industry there were Frank Frazetta, Carmine Infantino and Gil Kane. (Died 1996.)
  • Born April 5, 1917 — Robert Bloch. His Wiki page says he’s best known as the writer of Psycho, but I’ll guarantee that only film geeks and many of y’all know that. I know him best as the writer of the Trek “Wolf in the Fold” episode, one of three Trek episodes he did. His Night of the Ripper novel is highly recommended. And I know “That Hellbound Train” which won him first Hugo at Detention is the piece by him that I’ve read the most. He received a special committee award at L.A. Con II, where they were honored him for fifty years as SF professional. Impressive indeed. And yes, he’s a member of First Fandom as he should be. (Died 1994.)
  • Born April 5, 1926 — Roger Corman, 97. Ahhhh popcorn films! (See popcorn literature for what I mean.) Monster from the Ocean Floor in the early Fifties was his first such film and Sharktopus vs. Whalewolf on Syfy just a few years back was another such film. He’s a man who even produced such a film called, errr, Munchies. A Worldcon guest of honor in 1996.
  • Born April 5, 1950 — A.C. Crispin. She wrote several Trek and Star Wars novelizations and created her series called Starbridge which was heavily influenced by Trek. She also co-wrote several Witch World novels, Gryphon’s Eyrie and Songsmith, with Andre Norton. Crispin was also the co-founder of Writers Beware – the bane of literary fraudsters and scammers everywhere. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Price of Freedom was her last novel prior to her death from bladder cancer while in hospice care. (Died 2013.)
  • Born April 5, 1955 — Anthony Horowitz, 68. He wrote five episodes of Robin of Sherwood, and he was both creator and writer of Crime Traveller. He’s also written both Bond and Holmes novels. If you can find a copy, Richard Carpenter’s Robin of Sherwood: The Hooded Man is a very nice fleshing out of that series in literary form.
  • Born April 5, 1965 — Deborah Harkness, 58. She’s the author of the All Souls Trilogy, which consists of A Discovery of Witches and its sequels Shadow of Night and The Book of Life. I listened to the Jennifer Ikeda-narrated audiobooks which was an amazing experience. Highly recommended as Harkness tells a remarkable story here. I’m not even fond ’tall of vampires in any form and hers actually are both appealing and make sense.  

(10) EXODUS AND BACK AGAIN. Inverse remembers when the Matt Smith years began: “13 Years Ago, ‘Doctor Who’ Rebooted Itself Again — And Changed Sci-Fi Forever”

There’s a moment during David Tennant’s live announcement of his exit from Doctor Who, made via satellite video at Britain’s National Television Awards, when you can hear a woman scream “No!” over the sounds of shock and disbelief from the audience. That nameless woman unintentionally became the voice of countless fans devastated by the departure of the beloved actor, whose time on Doctor Who had turned him into a geek icon. But change is built into the DNA of Doctor Who, and it was inevitable that Tennant, like the nine actors before him, would leave the show. But at the risk of sounding dramatic, the stakes for this change were never higher….

(11) JEOPARDY! Andrew Porter watched a contestant on tonight’s Jeopardy! run afoul of an sf-themed item.

Category: Literary Bad Day for the Planet

Answer: Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Star” is a sun that went supernova, killing a planet, & is this celestial object from the New Testament.

Wrong question: What is the Star of David?

Right question: What is the Star of Bethlehem?

(12) SOUR NOTES. “Man who made £1.2m from fake vinyl records caught out by Clash fan” reports the Guardian. You can fool some of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time – especially ardent music fans.

A businessman who made more than £1m selling fake vinyl records was caught after a fan of punk band the Clash complained that the sound quality of an LP he had bought was not as sharp as it should have been.

Trading standards officers launched an investigation into Richard Hutter and found that he had been selling thousands of counterfeit records to rock and pop fans over a six-year period.

Hutter, 55, from Ringwood, Hampshire, was given a suspended jail sentence, ordered to do 250 hours unpaid work and told to wear a tag for three months.

He charged up to £35 for albums from bands ranging from the Beatles to Pink Floyd, Nirvana and Amy Winehouse.

He was found out when a Clash fan demanded his money back because of the poor sound quality on the record he had bought online.

When the refund was refused the customer complained to trading standards officers, who bought two sample records – Appetite for Destruction by Guns N’ Roses and Songs for the Deaf by Queens of the Stone Age – from Hutter’s online business and both turned out to be fakes.

Hutter’s home was searched and officers seized his phone and laptop, which led to them uncovering the scale of his operation. As well as selling through his website and a US site, he listed almost 1,200 LPS for sale on eBay in one year.

When questioned, Hutter denied knowing they were counterfeit records and said he had sourced them from Europe and sold them on. He pleaded guilty to 13 counts of selling counterfeit records and one count under the Proceeds of Crime Act (2002).

He was sentenced at Bournemouth crown court and was given a four-month prison sentence, suspended for 24 months. A £373,000 confiscation order was also made.

Martin Thursby, of Dorset Trading Standards, said: “Vinyl sales declined rapidly after CDs were introduced but the resurgence in vinyl started in around 2010.

“Demand is now so great that there are not enough vinyl pressing plants to meet demand. Hutter was aware of the increase in popularity and set up his business to take advantage of that.

“The LPs Hutter was selling were generally good copies that came to light because they were bought by avid fans of the music who could spot the small differences which showed the records were counterfeit.”…

(13) UNDER THE U235. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] A remote-operated underwater vehicle is being used to image the Fukushima nuclear reactors. A 5-minute portion of the first 39-hour video has been released. “New images from inside Fukushima reactor spark safety worry” at AP News. Watch the video at the link.

Images captured by a robotic probe inside one of the three melted reactors at Japan’s wrecked Fukushima nuclear power plant showed exposed steel bars in the main supporting structure and parts of its thick external concrete wall missing, triggering concerns about its earthquake resistance in case of another major disaster.

The plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, has been sending robotic probes inside the Unit 1 primary containment chamber since last year. The new findings released Tuesday were from the latest probe conducted at the end of March.

An underwater remotely operated vehicle named ROV-A2 was sent inside the Unit 1 pedestal, a supporting structure right under the core. It came back with images seen for the first time since an earthquake and tsunami crippled the plant 12 years ago. The area inside the pedestal is where traces of the melted fuel can most likely be found.

An approximately five-minute video — part of 39-hour-long images captured by the robot — showed that the 120-centimeter (3.9-foot) -thick concrete exterior of the pedestal was significantly damaged near its bottom, exposing the steel reinforcement inside.

TEPCO spokesperson Keisuke Matsuo told reporters Tuesday that the steel reinforcement is largely intact but the company plans to further analyze data and images over the next couple of months to find out if and how the reactor’s earthquake resistance can be improved….

(14) IN THE VILLAGE. EV Grieve shared “A new corner of the ‘Star Wars’ galaxy” – a photo of a new mural design going up in the East Village (NYC). See the image at the link.

EVG contributor Stacie Joy spotted local artist-illustrator Rich Miller starting on a new mural on the NE corner of Seventh Street and Avenue C. 

And a sneak preview of what’s to come… a work that includes Grogu, aka Baby Yoda…

(15) SISTERS IN CRIME BENEFIT AUCTION FOR INNOCENCE PROJECT. Vera Stanhope’s iconic hat and coat worn on the TV crime drama Vera will be centerpiece of a charity auction.

Sisters in Crime, an association of authors who specialize in writing stories about justice, are banding together to champion real-life justice. From May 18-21, 2023, the international writing group will host an online auction to support the Innocence Project, a non-profit that works to free the innocent, prevent wrongful convictions, and create fair, compassionate, and equitable systems of justice for everyone.

Sisters in Crime aims to raise $35,000 for the Innocence Project. Writers and agents have donated various items of interest to crime novel fans, including signed books, the chance to name a character in an upcoming book, consultations, and manuscript critiques. 

Fans can bid on the coat worn by Brenda Blethyn, who plays Vera Stanhope on TV in a role created by bestselling mystery author Ann Cleeves. They can also bid on a 50-page critique by Tracy Clark (Hide) or name a character in a future book by bestselling author Michael Connelly, author of the bestselling Harry Bosch series. Potential bidders can visit the site to see all the items and place a bid.  

The Innocence Project is well known for using DNA evidence to overturn wrongful convictions. Their policy work addresses each of the contributing factors to wrongful convictions: eyewitness misidentification, misapplication of forensic science, false confessions, unreliable jailhouse informant testimony, and inadequate defense.

Stephanie Gayle, the Immediate Past President of Sisters in Crime, created the auction as part of her legacy project for the organization. She was inspired by the work of Mystery Loves Democracy, a coalition of authors who raised funds for Fair Fight Action in 2022. 

(16) BAT SIGNAL. My boss and I used to have a running joke about turning on the “bat light” when she needed a quick answer. I could have sent her one of these for her office: “Metal Earth® Batman v Superman Bat-Signal 3D Metal Model Kit”.

Construct a 3D Metal model of the Bat-Signal used in the iconic movie Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice in 2016. High quality with a unique design and laser cut ready to assemble. No glue or solder needed.

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Mark Kressel, Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cliff.]

Pixel Scroll 3/25/23 Pixel Is That Which, When You Stop Scrolling It, Doesn’t Go Away— Pixel K. Dick

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(1) IA WILL CONTINUE LITIGATION. The Internet Archive announced they will appeal yesterday’s district court decision in favor of the publishers, ruling that IA cannot make and distribute entire digital copies of works still under copyright. “The Fight Continues” at Internet Archive Blogs.

Today’s lower court decision in Hachette v. Internet Archive is a blow to all libraries and the communities we serve. This decision impacts libraries across the US who rely on controlled digital lending to connect their patrons with books online. It hurts authors by saying that unfair licensing models are the only way their books can be read online. And it holds back access to information in the digital age, harming all readers, everywhere.

But it’s not over—we will keep fighting for the traditional right of libraries to own, lend, and preserve books. We will be appealing the judgment and encourage everyone to come together as a community to support libraries against this attack by corporate publishers…. 

Statement from Internet Archive founder, Brewster Kahle:
“Libraries are more than the customer service departments for corporate database products. For democracy to thrive at global scale, libraries must be able to sustain their historic role in society—owning, preserving, and lending books.

This ruling is a blow for libraries, readers, and authors and we plan to appeal it.”

(2) HEAD OF THE CLASS. John Garth shares research that will fascinate Tolkien fans: “Making an ass of yourself, with Geoffrey Bache Smith”.

…On the serious side, [Geoffrey Bache] Smith persuaded Tolkien to become a poet and was therefore truly instrumental in turning him into the author we know. Smith sent Tolkien a letter from deepest danger in the trenches of the Great War to declare himself a ‘wild and whole-hearted admirer’ of the first Middle-earth writings, and to urge him to publish them. One of the many ironies of that world war is that although Tolkien could find no publisher for his own poetry, he was able to edit Smith’s poems for publication (A Spring Harvest, 1918). You see, Smith had been killed on the Somme battlefield in 1916, and (as Dr Stuart Lee made clear in his conference paper) there was a demand for good poetry by dead soldiers….

(3) SFF IN THE UKRAINE. Borys Sydiuk shows there was a big turnout for a sff book event in Kyiv today:

Event marketing of the highest level. Max Kidruk, a rising star of Ukrainian Science Fiction, presents his book New Dark Ages: Colony in Kyiv on March 25, 2023.

(4) SUPPORT FOR OUSTING LUKYANENKO AS A CHENGDU GOH. On Facebook, David Gerrold encouraged readers to sign Polish fandom’s petition to remove Sergey Lukyanenko as a GoH of the Chengdu Worldcon: “Open letter to the Board of Worldcon 2023 / List otwarty do Organizatorów Worldconu 2023”. Gerrold’s appeal begins:

…I do not ordinarily share petitions of any kind, and I was reluctant to even share this one.

But, silence equals agreement, so I can’t be silent.

The petition asks the 2023 Worldcon Committee to withdraw their invitation to be a Guest of Honor at the convention to Russian author, Sergei Lukyanenko.

Now, ordinarily, I am against the withdrawal of any invitation. I am skeptical of any campaign anywhere to withdraw an honor, whether it is perceived as deserved or not. That is a situation where everybody looks bad, and I have expressed that thought several times in the past few years, even where I might have neither affection nor respect for the individual in the bullseye.

But there are circumstances where any kind of honor is so out of the question that voices must be raised.

Sergei Lukyanenko has made it clear that he endorses the war crimes that Russia has committed against Ukraine and is willing to endorse further war crimes.

That is so far beyond the normal range of fannish squabbles that I am horrified that the 2023 Worldcon committee has to even think twice on this….

(5) FAKE JOB OFFERS. At Writer Beware, Victoria Strauss issues a warning: “Alert: Scammers Impersonating Video Streaming Services With Fake Job Offers”.

About a year and a half ago, I wrote a post about a job offer scam in which fraudsters impersonated Acorn TV.

The scammers’ M.O.: they messaged writers on Twitter and Instagram, claiming to offer an opportunity to write stories for Acorn TV and earn an improbably large amount of money. If writers expressed interest (and why wouldn’t they), a two-part “texting interview” on Telegram followed, at the end of which the writer was offered a job agreement and description. Although I never heard from anyone who accepted, the presumed goal was to steal personal details, such as Social Security numbers and bank account information.

The same scammers are at it again. This time, they’re impersonating Minno, a Christian streaming service for kids….

(6) WHAT I SAY THREE TIMES IS TRUE. Karen Myers has advice about ways to help readers keep up with the story in “Failures of Memory” at Mad Genius Club.

…There’s no prize to be won by taxing the memory of your suffering readers — they won’t thank you for it. Make it easy on ’em, and you’ll have them in your hand for all the emotional and other effects you want to have, based on what you’ve told them.

Now, this takes some subtlety. The setting of the reminders has to feel natural rather than repetitive, worked casually into the general flow…

(7) FUTURE TENSE. Future Tense and Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination continue their series of short stories about how technology and science will change our lives: “The Preschool,” by Jonathan Parks-Ramage.

2042

Amanda sat at her desk, picking at the same $30 Little Gem salad she ordered daily, suffering a small burning sensation in her gut that was triggered either by acid reflux or the dying embers of her rapidly expiring conscience. Of course, it was standard procedure for her husband to demand that the security firm Dark Metal surveil potential new hires for any of his multibillion-dollar companies, but this was the first time Amanda had been involved in contracting the private intelligence agency herself. Seedlings is your venture, Reid had promised her, even though he’d named himself CEO. I want you to take the lead on this. Amanda was COO of Seedlings and reported to her husband, who dismissed Amanda’s concerns about the legal ramifications of their actions. Worrying about the law was something poor people did, Reid insisted. Besides, she’d never seen Reid do anything that nefarious with this type of information. He was a nice guy. Really….

Theo Zanto, a neuroscience researcher, follows with a response essay, “What can brain-computer interface technologies actually do?”

… Unlike time travel, cybernetics (which refers to the integration of our biology with machines) is one science fiction theme that is part of our experiential reality. We can already control machines with our thoughts—but only with simple commands, like those needed to move a wheelchair or play Pong. Cybernetic devices available today include (but are not limited to) pacemakers, cochlear implants, retinal prostheses, deep brain stimulators, and prosthetic limbs. Current brain-computer interface—or BCI—technologies have enabled us to use computers to decode information from our brains, such as what we have seen or heard, what we intend to say, and what we would like a prosthetic limb to do. With the continual integration of these technologies into our lives, 20th-century sci-fi writers would be surprised at how quickly humans are taking the evolutionary leap from primate to cyborg….

(8) PRETTY BATS ALL IN A ROW. The Guardian made me realize that somewhere not far from me is a movie history treasure house: “Batmobiles, Bugs Bunny and James Dean’s jeans: a day inside the Warner Bros top-secret archive”.

There is an actual Batcave in Los Angeles, where all the old Batmen live. I can’t tell you where: I signed an NDA. But in the most unlikely neighbourhood, in the most obscure location, lies a giant warehouse where Warner Bros keeps a century’s worth of treasures, including the best vehicles from its Batman films going back to 1989.

On a tour of this warehouse, which Warner Bros calls, with a slightly villainous air, the “Corporate Archive”, I saw nine Batmobiles, in a row, gleaming. Each one is a functioning vehicle with an engine, not just an elaborate prop. The most expensive cost close to $1m. It has wing-shaped treads on the tires, so it leaves little bats in its wake.

… Warner Bros, one of the original big five studios from Hollywood’s Golden Age, turns 100 on 4 April 2023, and as part of its centennial celebrations it’s letting reporters inside its secret treasure house. (You can search for the archive on Google: it’s not there.) Warner Bros has produced film or TV classics in every decade – from The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca and 42nd Street, to 2001: A Space Odyssey, to the Looney Tunes and Friends. The corporate archive is where its most infamous props, costumes and set pieces go to die – or rather, to achieve eternal life, watched over in chilled rooms by a team of dedicated archivists….

(9) MEMORY LANE.

2014 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Charles de Lint’s Seven Wild Sisters: A Modern Fairy Tale is part of his Appalachian stories. It was published by Little, Brown in 2014 as a sequel to The Cats of Tanglewood Forest with illustrations by Charles Vess.  It was later done in a limited diction by Subterranean Press with illustrations by again by Charles Vess, this time in black in white. Both are wonderful. 

The series started off in A Circle of Cats, a sparkling affair of a children’s book. Two of the characters in these books will show up in Medicine Road.

I’m writing this under a Vess signed limited edition print of fifty for the cover art for A Circle of Cats. 

Though Canadian, de Lint does a very nice job of capturing the feel of the Appalachian region. I know he’s a very good friend of Vess who lives in the Appalachian region, so I expect that at least part of his knowledge comes from him. 

I’ve read all of the works, no surprise as I love his fiction deeply. I think as books that they are more warm, more comfortable than anything else he’s done. And there’s nothing wrong with that sort of genre fiction once in a while, is there? 

And now our Beginning… 

There’s those that call it ginseng, but ’round here we just call it ’sang. Don’t know which is right. All I know for sure is that bees and ’sang don’t mix, leastways not in these hills.

Their rivalry’s got something to do with sweetness and light and wildflower pollen set against dark rooty things that live deep in the forest dirt. That’s why bee spirits’ll lead the ’sang poachers to those hidden ’sang beds. It’s an unkindness you’d expect more from the Mean Fairy—you know, the way he shows up at parties after the work’s all done.

‘Course there’s spirits in the hills. How could there not be? You think we’re alone in this world? We have us a very peopled woods, and I’ve seen all kinds in my time, big and small.

The Father of Cats haunts these hills. Most times he’s this big old panther, sleek and black, but the Kickaha say he can look like a handsome, black-haired man, the fancy takes him. I only ever saw him as a panther. Seeing yourself a panther is unusual enough, though I suppose it’s something anybody who spends enough time in these woods can eventually claim. But I heard him talk.

Don’t you smile. I don’t tell lies.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born March 25, 1916 — Jean Rogers. Rogers is best remembered for playing Dale Arden in the science fiction serials Flash Gordon and Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars, both released in the Thirties. Kage Baker would’ve have loved them as she was a great fan of such cinema and wrote a series of essays for Tor.com that turned into Ancient Rockets: Treasures and Trainwrecks of the Silent Screen. (Died 1991.)
  • Born March 25, 1920 — Patrick Troughton. The Second Doctor of who I’ll confess I’m not the most ardent fan of. The Fourth Doctor is my Doctor. Troughton had a long genre resume starting with Hamlet and Treasure Island early on before proceeding to such works as Scars of Dracula and Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell later on. Telly-wise, I see him on R.U.R. Radius playing a robot, on a Fifties Robin Hood show being that character, and on The Feathered Serpent. This is children’s series set in pre-Columbian Mexico and starring Patrick Troughton as the scheming High Priest Nasca. H’h. (Died 1987.)
  • Born March 25, 1939 — D. C. Fontana. Though best known for her work on the first Trek series, she was a story editor and associate producer on the animated series as well. During the 70s, she was staff for such series as Six Million Dollar Man, Logan’s Run and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. She later wrote for the fanfic Star Trek: New Voyages series. (Died 2019.)
  • Born March 25, 1942 — Jacqueline Lichtenberg, 81. She was nominated at the second DisCon for Best Fan Writer, the year Susan Wood won, and Neffy (National Fantasy Fan Federation Speculative Fiction Award) for Fan of the Year thirty-four years later. She’s written a number of Trek works and more fiction in the Sime/Gen ‘verse. If you’re so interested in the latter, she’s extremely well stocked at the usual suspects.
  • Born March 25, 1947 — Paul Levinson, 76. “The Copyright Case” novelette would garner him a much deserved Compuserve group HOMer Award. It was the first work in a series of novels and short stories featuring the fascinating NYPD forensic detective Dr. Phil D’Amato who first appeared in Levinson’s “The Chronology Protection Case” novelette. You can purchase it from the usual digital sources.
  • Born March 25, 1950 — Robert O’Reilly, 73. Best known I’d say for his appearance in the Trek franchise for a decade in his recurring role on Next Gen and DS9 as Chancellor Gowron, the leader of the Klingon Empire. He made one further appearance in the Trek verse as Kago-Darr in the Enterprise “Bounty” episode. Other genre series he appeared in include Fantasy Island, Knight Rider, Incredible Hulk, MacGyver, Max Headroom and the first version of The Flash. I’ll let y’all tell me what your favorite films with him are.
  • Born March 25, 1958 — Amy Pascal, 65. She gets Birthday honors for being responsible for bringing Hugo Award winning Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse to the screen. She also produced Spider-Man: Homecoming and Spider-Man: Far from Home. She is producing the forthcoming Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse sequel, Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse, and the Spider-Man: No Way Home as well.
  • Born March 25, 1964 — Kate DiCamillo, 59. She is just being one of six people to win two Newbery Medals, noting the wonderfulness of The Tale of Despereaux and Flora & Ulysses. The first I’ve encountered, the tale of a swords mouse in making, the latter I’ve not. Her Mercy Watson series is about the adventures of a fictional pig, illustrated by Chris Van Dusen.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • Pearls Before Swine reveals something that was powerful enough to kill one character’s romance.
  • Shoe shows a writer attempting what could be called a kind of reverse engineering.

(12) JEOPARDY! [Item by David Goldfarb.] The March 21 episode of Jeopardy! had a whole category in the Double Jeopardy round called “Books: The Future is Now”. The contestants took the category bottom-to-top, so that’s how I’ll give them to you.

$2000: He saw 2024 as a hellish wasteland in his 1969 short story, “A Boy & His Dog” 

Nobody was able to respond “Harlan Ellison”.

$1600: Later editions of this author’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” moved the story from 1992 to 2021

Returning champion Melissa Klapper correctly responded “Dick”.

$1200: In 2025, game shows are to the death in “The Running Man”, written by Stephen King under this pseudonym

This was another triple stumper: nobody knew “Richard Bachman”.

$800: This 1925 novel about a futuristic city in 2026 became an art deco sci-fi silent movie by Fritz Lang

Melissa knew “Metropolis”.

$400: In Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy about colonizing this planet, humans first visit there in 2020

Brandon Anderson (presumably no relation!) knew this one.

(13) STARFLEET RECRUITING OFFICE. How could anyone ever tire of this story? Don’t answer that question. “William Shatner Explains How He Landed ‘Star Trek’ Role as Captain Kirk”.

William Shatner recalled how he managed to land the role of Captain James T. Kirk on the original 1966 Star Trek series.

During the actor’s keynote interview at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, on Thursday, Alamo Drafthouse founder Tim League asked Shatner about how he got his career-changing gig.

“Talent,” Shatner initially deadpanned, to audience applause, but then he told the story.

As all Trek fans know, Jeffrey Hunter was cast in the NBC show’s first attempt at a Star Trek pilot, “The Cage,” as Captain Christopher Pike. “Jeffrey Hunter, good-looking guy, he was quite a name,” Shatner says. “They presented the pilot to NBC and then there’s that moment when the gods — and, in this case, NBC executives — decide to buy or not to buy. To buy, or not to buy, that is the question! They said, ‘No, we’re not going to buy it, because we don’t like it. But we like the idea. So rewrite, recast and we’ll give you the money to do it.’ I’ve never heard of that happening before or since.” (To be fair, it’s actually happened many times since.)

“So they went around looking for a new captain,” Shatner continued. “I was in New York doing some work. They called me and said, ‘Would you come and see the pilot?’ With the idea of me being the captain. And I watched the pilot [and thought], ‘Oh my God, that’s really good. Why didn’t they buy it?’ Yet [the actors] were a little ponderous. Like, [soberly] ‘Helmsman, turn to the Starboard.’ You’ve been out five years in the middle of space, wouldn’t you say, [casually] ‘Hey, George, turn left’? ‘There’s a meteor coming!’… ‘Well, get out of the way!’ So I added a little lightness. Then it sold. And that’s the answer.”…

(14) A CASE OF THE VAPORS. The Guardian reports “Aviation chiefs rejected measures to curb climate impact of jet vapours”.

Airlines and airports opposed measures to combat global warming caused by jet vapour trails that evidence suggests account for more than half of the aviation industry’s climate impact, new documents reveal.

The industry argued in government submissions that the science was not “robust” enough to justify reduction targets for these non-CO2 emissions. Scientists say the climate impact of vapour trails, or contrails, has been known for more than two decades, with one accusing the industry of a “typical climate denialist strategy”.

While carbon emissions from jet engines contribute to global heating, research suggests the contrails formed when water vapour and soot particles form into ice crystals have an even greater impact. These human-made clouds trap heat in the atmosphere that would otherwise escape into space.

… Milan Klöwer, a climate scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said airlines were adopting a “typical climate denialist strategy” by overstating the level of uncertainty about non-CO2 effects. He said: “Even in the best case, they roughly double the effect of CO2 emissions on the climate.”…

(15) LOOK OUT BELOW. Science reports a study showing “Earth at higher risk of big asteroid strike, satellite data suggest”.

Using a new catalog of high-resolution satellite imagery, James Garvin and his colleagues identified large rings around three impact craters and one probable one that are 1 million years old or younger. To Garvin, the rings imply the craters are tens of kilometers wider, and record far more violent events, than researchers had thought.

If Garvin is right—no sure bet—each impact resulted in an explosion some 10 times more violent than the largest nuclear bomb in history, enough to blow part of the planet’s atmosphere into space. Although not as destructive as the impact that killed off the dinosaurs, the strikes would have perturbed the global climate and caused local extinctions.

It’s an extraordinary claim, as Garvin himself admits. “We haven’t proven anything,” he says. Without fieldwork to back up the conclusions, impact researchers are wary of the circles Garvin and his colleagues have drawn on maps—especially because they defy other estimates of impact rates. “I’m skeptical,” says Bill Bottke, a planetary dynamicist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “I want to see a lot more before I believe it.”

Because water and wind quickly erase most impact craters on Earth, researchers estimate impact rates by tallying crater sizes and ages on the Moon. They also study the size of asteroids in orbit near Earth—potential future impactors. Based on those two methods, researchers estimate that an asteroid or comet 1 kilometer wide or larger hits the planet every 600,000 to 700,000 years.

The new study, however, suggests that in the past million years alone, four kilometer-size objects pummeled the continents—and, given that two-thirds of the planet is covered by water, that could mean up to a dozen struck Earth in total, Bottke says. Anna Łosiak, a crater researcher at the Polish Academy of Sciences, doubts the ringlike features identified by Garvin’s team are truly crater rims. If they somehow are, she says, “that would be very scary because it would mean we really don’t understand what’s going on at all—and that there are a lot of space rocks that may come and make a mess.”…

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Rich Horton, Steven French, David Goldfarb, 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 Randall M.]

Pixel Scroll 1/10/23 Scrolls Are Here, Scrolls Are Here, Life Is Pixels And Life Is Bheer

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(1) SPEAK MEMORY. The Guardian wonders, “Death of the narrator? Apple unveils suite of AI-voiced audiobooks”.

Apple has quietly launched a catalogue of books narrated by artificial intelligence in a move that may mark the beginning of the end for human narrators. The strategy marks an attempt to upend the lucrative and fast-growing audiobook market – but it also promises to intensify scrutiny over allegations of Apple’s anti-competitive behaviour.

The popularity of the audiobook market has exploded in recent years, with technology companies scrambling to gain a foothold. Sales last year jumped 25%, bringing in more than $1.5bn. Industry insiders believe the global market could be worth more than $35bn by 2030.

… Before the launch, one Canadian literary agent told the Guardian she did not see the value from both a literary or customer perspective.

“Companies see the audiobooks market and that there’s money to be made. They want to make content. But that’s all it is. It’s not what customers want to listen to. There’s so much value in the narration and the storytelling,” said Carly Watters….

(2) KELLY LINK Q&A. At Publishers Weekly: “Flights of Fancy: PW Talks with Kelly Link”.

… What can contemporary fiction inject into the fairy tale?

Maybe psychological depth. Fairy tales depend on what the reader brings to them. The difference between fairy tales and myth is that Disney hardened our idea of certain stories so that a particular version of them becomes so codified that it replaces other possibilities of how that story could exist. I don’t think it’s great to let those stories exist in one form. People are constantly retelling them, and I think you need the rigid, popular version everyone knows for the weirder versions to have any power….

(3) DEADLINE EXTENDED. L.A. County high school students now have until January 23, 2023 to submit their sff short stories to The Tomorrow Prize & The Green Feather Award.

The Omega Sci-Fi Awards invites Los Angeles County high school students to submit their short science fiction stories to The Tomorrow Prize. The Tomorrow Prize encourages young writers to use sci-fi to explore the diverse issues humanity wrestles with, spark creative solutions, and unite the worlds of art and science.

The Green Feather Award co-presented by the Nature Nexus Institute, highlights an environmentally focused sci-fi story. We are seeking stories that integrate creative solutions to the climate and biodiversity crises.

For more details please see submission guidelines.

Selected finalists will be chosen to have their stories read in their honor by celebrity guests during the May 2023 Culminating Event.

First, Second, and Third place Tomorrow Prize winners will receive $250, $150, and $100 USD cash prizes.

The First place Tomorrow Prize winner will be published in L.A. Parent Magazine.

The Green Feather Award is a special prize for an environmentally focused sci-fi story. The winner will receive $250 USD & online publication by the Nature Nexus Institute.

(4) IN THE BEGINNING? Whatever presents “The Big Idea: Nancy Kress” about the premise to Observer, the novel she’s co-written with Robert Lanza.

…On the one hand, could science support the idea that consciousness creates the universe?  On the other hand, wasn’t this just recycled philosophy 101 according to Irish philosopher George Berkeley, among others?…

(5) TRIVIAL TRIVIA. English-language prozine Interzone is being published in Poland by MYY Press.

(6) A GREEN MAN, BUT NOT A LITTLE ONE. MeTV remembers the time “Ted Cassidy helped Gene Roddenberry play a prank behind the scenes on Star Trek”. Here’s the first part of the story:

The first-season Star Trek episode “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” has a few memorable things that stand out. It gives us our second evil duplicate Kirk of the series, we get some backstory for Majel Barrett’s nurse Chapel… but arguably what sticks in the minds of fans the most is Ted Cassidy as ominous android Ruk.

At this time, Ted Cassidy was fresh off the ending of The Addams Family where he enjoyed a regular role as Lurch, the family butler. In his book Star Trek Memories, William Shatner talks about how Cassidy was cast as the seven-foot-tall, menacing android. Prior to filming, Star Trek‘s makeup artist, Freddie Phillips asked Cassidy to come in for a makeup test.

“Cassidy sat down in Phillips’ undersized makeup chair and allowed the artist to transform him from a smiling young actor to an evil, hulking monster,” Shatner writes. “First Freddie covered Ted’s head with a latex skinhead wig; then he applied a sort of greyish-green base coat over Cassidy’s entire face. Once all that was done, Phillips darkened the area around each of the actor’s eyes and employed a black grease pencil to sharpen the angles of Ted’s cheekbones, forehead and chin. The end result was quite frightening and really served to drain all the humanity from Cassidy’s face.”…

(7) BOOK KEEPING. “Floods, Fires and Humidity: How Climate Change Affects Book Preservation” in the New York Times.

…Both immediate and long-term strategies are needed to keep books secure in changing environments, experts say, but some threats are more insidious than wildfires or hurricanes.

Shifts in temperature and humidity from climate change can have large consequences. Archivists and conservators in Cincinnati, for example, are worried about big temperature swings in a single day. Humidity is on the rise in Southern California, where the climate is historically dry; most preservation systems in the area aren’t designed to manage precipitation.

“The higher the humidity, the higher the temperature, the quicker they will break down their organic materials,” said Holly Prochaska, the interim head of the Archives and Rare Books Library at the University of Cincinnati. “Leather will wet rot. Collagen fibers in vellum will tighten and shrink.”…

Institutions like U.C.L.A. are developing ways to combat humidity to work in tandem with their climate-controlled stacks and collections rooms. Now, because of climate change, Metzger thinks twice before loaning out materials, which can keep history and knowledge under lock and key.

“Books gain meaning by use — use is exhibit, use is research — and there’s a beauty in use,” Metzger said. “If we just isolate things and keep them in these little, perfectly controlled environments with guards around them, what is their meaning anymore?”

One solution is digitization — scanning pages and storing them online. The process is not only an answer to climate change; it also allows for documents to be easily accessible and shared, broadening a collection’s reach. Adding documents to a server or the cloud, though, presents its own set of obstacles, both practical and environmental.

(8) SYLVIA RUCKER (1943-2023). Sylvia Bogsch Rucker, Rudy Rucker’s wife, died January 6. He pays tribute to her in “Sylvia’s Life”.

…Her curiosity never ended, even in her final days she wanted to know the details of everyone’s lives. This special attention made everyone feel loved. Her loving, warm, beautiful spirit will be deeply missed by all….

(9) MEMORY LANE.

1926 — [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.] Pooh and food

We shall talk about Pooh and food. Well actually I believe that A.E. Milne only had one food that his round little bear found interesting to the point of obsession and that was honey. Honey, often spelled Hunny by Pooh, is as you know the ever so sweet food made by bees. 

It’s easily the most important food in the Winnie-the-Pooh works, being loved by pooh bears, heffalumps and woozles and also enjoyed by rabbits and piglets. 

Pooh even called it smackerel , which is to say a snack of a small amount of honey. Indeed In the very first chapter, Pooh tells us, “the only reason for making honey is so as I can eat it”.

And yes, actual bears do love honey. They’ll break open a tree to get at a wild hive inside a dead trunk eating the honey and bees alike. They particularly like the bee larvae. 

““When you wake up in the morning, Pooh” said piglet at last, “what’s the first thing you say to yourself?”

“What’s for breakfast?” said Pooh. “What do you say, Piglet?”

“I say, I wonder what’s going to happen exciting today?” said Piglet.

Pooh nodded thoughtfully.

“It’s the same thing,” he said.”

The illustration is from the 1926 first edition with the art by E.A. Shepherd.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born January 10, 1904 — Ray Bolger. The Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, the villainous Barnaby in Babes in Toyland, two appearances on Fantasy Island, andVector In “Greetings from Earth” on the Seventies version of Battlestar Galactica. He made a Dr. Pepper ad which you can see here. (Died 1987.)
  • Born January 10, 1937 — Elizabeth Anne Hull. She served as the President of the Science Fiction Research Association and editor of its newsletter. She was a member of the panel for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best SF novel since 1986. With her husband Frederik Pohl, Hull edited the Tales from the Planet Earth anthology. She was also the editor of the Gateways: Original New Stories Inspired by Frederik Pohl anthology. She has co-authored three short stories with him, “Author Plus”, “The Middle Kingdom” and “Second Best Friend”. (Died 2021.)
  • Born January 10, 1944 — William Sanderson, 79. I remember him best as J. F. Sebastian, the possibly insane genetic designer working for Tyrell in Blade Runner, but he’s had a career obviously after that film including appearing as Skeets in The Rocketeer, voicing Dr. Karl Rossum on Batman: The Animated Series, playing the character Deuce on Babylon 5 (a series I’ve watched through at least three times), E. B. Farnum on Deadwood (ok, it’s not genre, but it’s Will and Emma’s favorite show so let’s let it slide) and Sheriff Bud Dearborne on True Blood. 
  • Born January 10, 1944 — Jeffrey Catherine Jones. She was an artist providing more than a hundred and fifty covers for many different types of genre books through mid seventies including the Ace paperback editions of the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series including Swords Against Death. Among her work was also Flash Gordon for Charlton Comics in the Sixties and the Conan Saga for Marvel Comics in the late Eighties.  (Died 2011.)
  • Born January 10, 1947 — George Alec Effinger. I’ve read his Marîd Audran series at least twice as it’s an amazing series in both the characters and the setting. I never read the short stories set in this setting until Golden Gryphon Press sent me Budayeen Nights for Green Man to review.  I don’t think I’ve ever encountered any of his other works. (Died 2002.)
  • Born January 10, 1959 — Jeff Kaake, 64. He’s on the Birthday Honors list as he was Captain John Boon on the Space Rangers which lasted only six episodes. Damn. That was a fun show! He was also Thomas Cole on Viper which lasted four seasons. And he showed up in the Stormageddon film (which sounds like the name a Filer would give to a beloved  SJW Cred) as well. 
  • Born January 10, 1959 — Fran Walsh, 64. Partner of Peter Jackson, she has contributed to all of his films since the late Eighties when she started out as co-writer of Meet the Feebles, and as producer since The Fellowship of the Ring which won a Hugo. Need I note the next two films won Hugos as well? The Hobbit films did not win Hugos.  The first one was nominated at LoneStarCon 3 but lost out to The Avengers; the other two were not nominated.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) TOTOPOTUS. [Item by Ben Bird Person.] Miranda Parkin (@mparkinb) did this piece based on Season 2 of the HBO sci-fi comedy television series Avenue 5 (2020-):

(13) LOOK CLOSER. [Item by Jo Van.] Something tonight reminded me of the Deep Space Nine Documentary What We Left Behind, which I helped to crowd-fund back in 2017, and I was thinking, wait a minute, wasn’t there something about a posted acknowledgement of the contributors?

It took a foray into the Wayback Machine, but I found it… and there’s my name, down about where Sisko’s communicator would be.

(14) GAINING CREDENTIALS. Annalisa Barbieri tells the Guardian “What the love of cats taught me about myself”.

I never thought I’d kiss a cat. Or like them, or be in a room with them. Cats, to me, were evil and unpredictable. A classic projection, if ever I saw one, of fear manifesting as dislike. Intense fear. Intense dislike.

But then I became a mother and, as we all know, maternal love makes you do strange, selfless things occasionally. My children started asking for a cat. I said no, of course. My home was my safe place. No cats allowed. For some years they asked for a cat, on and off. Eventually, the “why we should get a cat” lists started getting toilet-roll long and I started thinking, maybe we can get a kitten. Kittens are cute. I started watching videos. Kittens were cute….

(15) BIG SIXTIES FINISH. Victoria Silverwolf wraps up a review of a famous anthology: “[January 10, 1968] Saving the Best For Last (Dangerous Visions, Part Three)” at Galactic Journey.

Welcome to the last of our three discussions about an anthology of original fantasy and science fiction that’s drawing a lot of attention. Love it or hate it, or maybe a little of both, it’s impossible to ignore….

(16) ALAS, POOR UNIVAC. Arturo Serrano brings us “Microreview [book]: Hamlet, Prince of Robots by M. Darusha Wehm” at Nerds of a Feather.

No longer the seat of Danish monarchy, Elsinore is now a corporation, a leading manufacturer of human-like robots. The murdered Hamlet senior was the Humanoid Artificial Mind (Learned Emotive Type), a model that represented a huge leap ahead in robotic innovation. Instead of a queen, Gertrude is a CEO, whose hopes for Elsinore’s bottom line now depend on the success of her latest creation, the Hamlet v.2. If the company doesn’t maintain dominance of the robot market, its (figurative) throne will be snatched by its main competitor, which is aggressively promoting a rival model, the Fortinbras. But one night, a portion of old code from Hamlet v.1 copies itself into the hard drive of Hamlet v.2, and a quest for revenge begins to take shape.

Everything’s better with robots, and a retelling of one of the biggest classics in the Western canon is a sure attention grabber….

(17) ON THE SHELF. Nerds of a Feather’s Paul Weimeralso asked the Hamlet author for recommendations in “Six Books with M. Darusha Wehm”.

1. What book are you currently reading?

I’ve had it on my shelf since it came out, but only just started The Book of Flora by Meg Elison. It’s the third and final book in the “Road to Nowhere” series, which starts with The Book of the Unnamed Midwife. The whole series is an incredible, post-apocalyptic saga of the struggles of communities in dark times. I’ve loved the two previous books in the series, but while the books offer stories of human resilience, they are also harrowing to read, so I’ve had to space them out in my reading time…. 

(18) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In case you missed the Sixties we offer “The Complete 14 Batman Window Cameos”.

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Jo Van, Daniel Dern, Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, JJ, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]

Pixel Scroll 12/29/22 What Are Pixels? Ask The Scrollman As He Knows

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(1) IS ENOUGH MONEY POURING IN? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] “Avatar: The Way Of Water passes $1bn at the global box office” the BBC reports. Arguably something the studio needed as Avatar: The Way of Water is apparently most expensive film made; Budget $350,000,000 (estimated). 

Remember, this is gross box office, director Cameron needs not just net box office but studio receipt, which means he needs US$2 billion to break even.

Avatar: The Way Of Water has made $1bn (£831m) at the global box office in just 14 days, becoming the fastest film to pass the milestone this year.

The long-delayed sequel has proved a hit with audiences despite wildly varying reviews.

It is one of only three films to surpass $1bn this year, after Top Gun: Maverick and Jurassic World Dominion….

Not seen it myself. Saw the first one. OK story with lots of meaningless but photogenic eye-candy. With a run time of over three hours, I’m not tempted, though I suspect this really needs to be seen on the big screen.

What do others think?

(2) CLARION WEST CALLING. The Clarion West Six-Week Summer Workshop is going virtual. Applications open January 4. 

Clarion West is returning to a fully virtual workshop in 2023. We will accept a class of 15 students to keep the workload and screen time manageable for all. Tuition is $3,200, and a scholarship section is included in our workshop application, which opens January 4.

The Workshop’s faculty members will be:

  • Week 1: Mary Anne Mohanraj & Benjamin Rosenbaum
  • Week 2: Cat Rambo
  • Week 3: Samit Basu
  • Week 4: Karen Lord
  • Weel 5: Arley Sorg
  • Week 6: N. K. Jemisin

Find full information in “Frequently Asked Questions about the Clarion West Summer Workshop”.

(3) CLAUSES, BUT NO SANTAS. David Steffen’s presentation “How to Read a Short Story Contract” is now available on Dream Foundry’s YouTube channel.

What is the purpose of short story contracts? What clauses do you want to see? What clauses do you want to avoid? What do you do if you see something in a contract that you don’t like?

(4) IT’S SHOW TIME. [Item by Soon Lee.] Adam Roberts does The Silmarillion to the tune of the Muppets Show theme, and others add verses. Thread starts here.

(5) CON OR BUST. Dream Foundry hit the target of raising $10,000 for Con or Bust before year end.

This year our fundraising efforts are focused on our Con or Bust program. If you are still unfamiliar, Con or Bust provides grants to fans and creators of colour who would otherwise be unable to attend industry events due to costs. Thanks to a very generous donation, we’ve met our goal of raising $10k before the end of the year, but we know we can do more! If we raise another $3,000 before the end of the year, that will ensure we can connect even more fans and creatives of color with community. Donate now to be a part of something truly special. If you’d like to learn more about Con or Bust, we have that information also here. 

(6) PLAY NICE. Let Jo Walton be your guide “In Search of Books in Which Nothing Bad Happens” at Tor.com. After a long search she eventually thinks of one. (This excerpt isn’t it – we wouldn’t want to steal the payoff.)

…Romance. Pretty much all genre romance is “everything is OK at the end” but bad things happen in the meantime. But some Georgette Heyer has plots that work because bad things seem about to happen and are averted—this is different from everything being all right in the end, the bad things never occur, they are no more than threats that pass over safely. Cotillion does this. Two people are separately rescued by the heroine from iffy situations that could potentially become terrible, but they don’t. I think this counts. (It’s funny too.) That makes me think of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey in which the worst thing that happens is somebody exaggerates and somebody else has to go home alone on a stagecoach…that’s really not very bad. Right up there with the bear who can’t go to sleep….

(7) DC FINALLY GETS SOME CREDIT. Drumroll, please! “The 2022 ComicBook.com Golden Issue Award for Best Comic Book Movie” goes to….

The Batman

Clocking in at nearly three hours with a pulse-pounding score, intense violence, and a plot inspired by some of DC’s best detective comics, The Batman is a true tour de force for the character. And while it includes echoes of the original Tim Burton franchise, takes influence from Christopher Nolan and Christian Bale’s trilogy, and even has a bit of the same flavor from Todd Philips’ Joker, The Batman stands out as a wholly unique cinematic entry featuring pop culture’s most unique crime fighter….

(7.5) BEAR REMEMBERED. The Guardian’s “Greg Bear obituary” appeared today and includes a long profile of his career. Plus a credited photo by Andrew Porter (an uncropped version of which appeared here).

The American science fiction writer Greg Bear, who has died aged 71 following heart surgery, was, as he put it “all over the map” as far as interests and subjects were concerned: genetics, starships, politics, artificial constructs and combat in space were among the themes explored in his 35 novels. The work he did to research them with thinkers and institutions made them remarkably prescient, not only scientifically – he is attributed with the first descriptions of nanotechnology – but also politically….

(8) MEMORY LANE.

2000 — [By Cat Eldridge.] Kermit the Frog Landmark Statue at Henson Studio

Kermit the Frog as Charlie Chaplin in his role as The Little Tramp? Why not?

Let’s start with beginning of the press release the Muppet Studio folk put as they call this they Kermit the Frog Landmark Statue Unveiled at Front Gates of Henson Studio: “In a touching homage to both Jim Henson and Charlie Chaplin, today, The Jim Henson Company unveiled a stately 12 foot tall statue of Kermit the Frog dressed as Charlie Chaplin’s The Little Tramp, which was permanently mounted on the tower of the studio’s front gates. All who enter or pass by will be reminded that the two visionaries contributions to mankind are celebrated on these grounds.”

This twelve-foot-high statue was unveiled on the roof of the main building in July of 2000.

The reason why Kermit is dressed like Chaplin is that this is the original location of Charlie Chaplin Studios. The studio was built in 1917 by silent and sound film star Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin sold the studio in 1957 to Kling Studios and they produced the old Superman television series with George Reeves. And then it was owned by Red Skelton, and CBS who filmed the Perry Mason series. In February 1969 it was designated a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument.

So did you know that in 2000, the Henson family sold the company to the German media company EM.TV & Merchandising AG, for a rather stunning six hundred and eighty million dollars which included the Sesame Street Workshop? I didn’t. 

Just three years after that German media company lost its behind on other concerns, the Henson family paid just over eighty million to get everything back. Nice, really nice.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born December 29, 1901 — William H. Ritt. US cartoonist and author, whose best known strip, Brick Bradford, was SF. Two of the early Thirties strips, Brick Bradford and the City Beneath the Sea and Brick Bradford with Brocco the Mountain Buccaneer, became Big Little books. In 1947, Brick Bradford, a 15-chapter serial film starring Kane Richmond, was produced by Columbia Pictures. (Died 1972.)
  • Born December 29, 1912 — Ward Hawkins.  Alternative universes! Lizard men as sidekicks! He wrote the Borg and Guss series (Red Flaming Burning, Sword of Fire, Blaze of Wrath and Torch of Fear) which as it features these I really would like to hear as audiobooks. Not that it’s likely as I see he’s not made it even to the usual suspects yet. (Died 1990.)
  • Born December 29, 1928 — Bernard Cribbins. He has the odd distinction of first showing up on Doctor Who in the non-canon Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. film (with Peter Cushing as The Doctor.) He would make it into canon when he appeared as Wilfred Mott in the Tenth Doctor story, “Voyage of the Damned”, and he‘s a Tenth Doctor companion himself in “The End of Time”, the two-part 2009–10 Christmas and New Year special. (Died 2022.)
  • Born December 29, 1963 — Dave McKean, 59. If you read nothing else involving him, do read the work done by him and Gaiman called The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr Punch: A Romance. Brilliant, violent, horrifying. Well, and Signal to Noise by them is worth chasing down as well. 
  • Born December 29, 1966 — Alexandra Kamp, 56. Did you know one of Sax Rohmer’s novels was made into a film? I didn’t. Well, she was the lead in Sax Rohmer’s Sumuru which Michael Shanks also shows up in. She’s also in 2001: A Space Travesty with Leslie Nielsen, and Dracula 3000 with Caspar van Dien. Quality films neither will be mistaken for, each warranting a fifteen percent rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes.
  • Born December 29, 1969 — Ingrid Torrance, 53. A very busy performer who’s had one- offs in Poltergeist: The Legacy, The Sentinel, Viper, First Wave, The Outer Limits, Seven Days, Smallville, Stargate: SG-1, The 4400, Blade: The Series, Fringe, The Tomorrow People, and Supernatural.
  • Born December 29, 1972 — Jude Law, 50. I think his first SF role was as Jerome Eugene Morrow in Gattaca followed by playing Gigolo Joe in A.I. with my fave role for him being the title role in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. He was Lemony Snicket in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, Tony in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Dr. John Watson in Sherlock Holmes and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Remy in Repo Men and he voiced Pitch Black in one of my favorite animated films, Rise of the Guardians.

(10) HELL RAISERS. It’s time to find out who Cora Buhlert has given “The 2022 Darth Vader Parenthood Award for Outstandingly Horrible Fictional Parents”. (Not to mention the “Retro Darth”!) There are so many possibilities…

It’s almost the end of the year, so it’s time to announce the winner of the coveted (not) 2022 Darth Vader Parenthood Award for Outstandingly Horrible Fictional Parents.

Let’s have a bit of background: I have been informally awarding the Darth Vader Parenthood Award since sometime in the 1980s with the earliest awards being retroactive. Over the years, the list of winners migrated from a handwritten page to various computer file formats, updated every year. Eventually, I decided to make the winners public on the Internet, because what’s an award without some publicity and a ceremony? The list of previous winners (in PDF format) up to 2017 may be found here, BTW, and the 2018 winner, the 2019 winner, the 2020 winner and the 2021 winner were announced right here on this blog.

Warning: Spoilers for several things behind the cut!

Before we get to the main event, let’s start with the 2022 Retro Darth Vader Parenthood Award for Outstandingly Horrible Fictional Parents. I originally created the Retro Darth Vader Parenthood Award as an anaologue to the Retro Hugos in 2020 to honour terrible parents who either did their villainous parenting before the award was a thing or who were overlooked in the past for unfathomable reasons….

(11) A CHRISTMAS CARACOLE. About that story John Scalzi promised if Locus hit its $75K fundraising target? Well, he wrote it: “A Holiday Gift For You: ‘End of the Year PR Missives From Scrooge & Marley’” at Whatever.

… DECEMBER 24 1843

SCROOGE & MARLEY DECRY THE USE OF COAL FOR HEATING, PLEDGE TO “GO GREEN” IN ‘44

When you think of “Ecologically Friendly Companies,” you might not immediately think of Scrooge & Marley (established 1803), but perhaps you should. Co-founder Ebenezer Scrooge has gone on record decrying the use of coal, a carbon-intensive “legacy fuel” for the purposes of heating office buildings in London and elsewhere in Great Britain. “It’s expensive and not what we need for the future of our company,” he proclaimed. 

Scrooge has encouraged employees to seek other options, including personal insulation units composed of natural, sustainable fibers….

(12) CENTENARY SALUTE. “Stan Lee Documentary Coming to Disney+ in 2023” reports Variety.

Marvel Entertainment tweeted a 25-second video on Wednesday confirming the 2023 release of a Disney+ documentary on Stan Lee. The announcement aligns with what would have been the 100th birthday of the late comic creator….

(13) FOR YOUR HOARD. The Royal Mint will be “Celebrating the Life and Work of JRR Tolkien” with the issue of a £2 coin in 2023. The King is on the front, Tolkien is commemorated on the back.

…Tolkien passed away in 1973 although, 50 years later, the father of modern fantasy fiction still has a palpable influence on the genre. His trademark monogram, encircled by a runic pattern skilfully created by the artist David Lawrence (pictured below), will forever grace this commemorative UK £2 coin. ‘NOT ALL THOSE WHO WANDER ARE LOST’, a quote from the poem ‘The Riddle of Strider’, which features in Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, serves as the coin’s edge inscription….

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Jennifer Hawthorne.] This library in Jamestown Township, Michigan, has been having serious trouble with politically-based attacks. (“Town votes to defund library after claims it was ‘grooming’ kids” — LGBTQ Nation.)

One of their librarians finally had enough. (“Angry librarian tells off conservative Christians protesting library in righteous speech” — LGBTQ Nation.)

Here’s a captioned video of her speech.

https://twitter.com/HeadlinerClip/status/1605960458741370881

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, PhilRM, Soon Lee, Jennifer Hawthorne, Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]