Tag Archives: copyright

Pixel Scroll 1/26/24 La Scroll È Mobile

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(1) SATURN AWARDS NEWS. Keanu Reeves will be the inaugural recipient of the Lance Reddick Legacy Award when the 51st Saturn Awards take place on February 4. reports Variety.

The Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films has announced that Keanu Reeves will receive the inaugural Lance Reddick Legacy Award at the 51st Saturn Awards. The entire show will be dedicated to the memory of the late Reddick, who died at the age of 60 in March 2023.

Reeves, who was friends with Reddick, starred alongside him in the “John Wick” action-thriller franchise. Reddick appeared in all four movies as Charon, the concierge at the Continental hotel, where his character interfaced with Reeves’ titular hitman.

Academy president Robert Holguin and Saturn producers Bradley and Kevin Marcus released a statement on Reeves’ forthcoming honor: “This award symbolizes and celebrates not only a performer’s talent, but their character; someone who’s a true goodwill ambassador in the industry. From science fiction (‘The Matrix Trilogy’), fantasy (‘Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure’/’Constantine’) and horror (Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Dracula’/’The Devil’sAdvocate’), Keanu has done it all — not to mention ‘Speed’ and ‘Point Break.’”…

(2) SNUBBED? [Item by Dann.] The Hollywood Reporter has a story about the backlash to the backlash that protested the lack of Oscar nominations for Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie.  Media outlets from the New York Times to Slate offered rebuttals suggesting that it’s OK for a successful property to not win every award. “The ‘Barbie’ Oscar Snubs Backlash-Backlash: ‘Everyone Lost Their Minds’”.

The penultimate paragraph includes a quote from a genre fan-favorite:

And finally there was The View‘s Whoopi Goldberg, proclaiming, “[Saying somebody was snubbed] assumes someone else shouldn’t be in there. There are no snubs. That’s what you have to keep in mind: Not everybody gets a prize, and it is subjective. Movies are subjective. The movies you love may not be loved by the people who are voting.”

(3) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to “Munch MVP sandwiches with MVPs Gary K. Wolfe and Jonathan Strahan” in Episode 217 of his Eating the Fantastic podcast.

Gary K. Wolfe and Jonathan Strahan

Gary K. Wolfe is a science fiction critic, editor, and biographer who’s had a monthly review column in Locus since December 1991. He was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Related Work in 2006 for the book Soundings: Reviews 1992–1996, and again in 2011, for the book Bearings: Reviews 1997–2001. Over the years, he’s won the Eaton Award from the Eaton Conference on Science Fiction, the Pilgrim Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Science Fiction Research Association, the Distinguished Scholarship Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, and the British Science Fiction Association Award for nonfiction for the previously mentioned Soundings: Reviews 1992–1996. He’s also (among many other things) edited two wonderful volumes for the Library of America — American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels 1953-1956 and American Science Fiction: Five Classic Novels 1956-1958.

Jonathan Strahan is a nineteen-time Hugo Award nominated editor and publisher of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. He’s won the Aurealis Award, the William Atheling Jr Award for Criticism and Review, the Australian National Science Fiction Convention’s “Ditmar Award”, and the Peter McNamara Achievement Award. As a freelance editor, he’s edited or co-edited more than sixty original and reprint anthologies and seventeen single-author story collections and has been a consulting editor for Tordotcom Publishing and Tor.com since 2014, where he’s acquired and edited two novels, 36 novellas, and a selection of short fiction. Strahan won the World Fantasy Award (Special – Professional) in 2010 for his work as an editor, and his anthologies have won the Locus Award for Best Anthology four times (2008, 2010, 2013, 2021) and the Aurealis Award seven times. He has been Reviews Editor at Locus since 2002.

As the reason I’m with both of them is — together, they’ve been cohosts of The Coode Street Podcast since May 2010, which had 640 episodes live the last time I looked, and has been nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Fancast ten times, winning once.

We discussed why The Coode Street Podcast is “the Cheers of podcasts,” the foolish statement made during their first episode which meant there had to be more, the identity of the guest who was most resistant to appearing on their show, the reason the podcast made Paul Cornell want to run, the different interviewing techniques necessary when having conversations with the voluble vs. the reticent, the white whales whom they could never snare, how to make sure we’re speaking to more than just our own generations, their advice for anyone who wants to launch a podcast, the way to avoid getting canned responses out of guests, how their conversational methods have changed over 13 years, whether critiquing books or rejecting stories has ever affected relationships with a guest, and much more.

(4) PRESSURE FOR REGULATION. “The Sleepy Copyright Office in the Middle of a High-Stakes Clash Over A.I.” – the New York Times has the story.

For decades, the Copyright Office has been a small and sleepy office within the Library of Congress. Each year, the agency’s 450 employees register roughly half a million copyrights, the ownership rights for creative works, based on a two-centuries-old law.

In recent months, however, the office has suddenly found itself in the spotlight. Lobbyists for Microsoft, Google, and the music and news industries have asked to meet with Shira Perlmutter, the register of copyrights, and her staff. Thousands of artists, musicians and tech executives have written to the agency, and hundreds have asked to speak at listening sessions hosted by the office.

The attention stems from a first-of-its-kind review of copyright law that the Copyright Office is conducting in the age of artificial intelligence. The technology — which feeds off creative content — has upended traditional norms around copyright, which gives owners of books, movies and music the exclusive ability to distribute and copy their works.

The agency plans to put out three reports this year revealing its position on copyright law in relation to A.I. The reports are set to be hugely consequential, weighing heavily in courts as well as with lawmakers and regulators.

“We are now finding ourselves the subject of a lot of attention from the broader general public, so it is a very exciting and challenging time,” Ms. Perlmutter said.

The Copyright Office’s review has thrust it into the middle of a high-stakes clash between the tech and media industries over the value of intellectual property to train new A.I. models that are likely to ingest copyrighted books, news articles, songs, art and essays to generate writing or images. Since the 1790s, copyright law has protected works so an author or artist “may reap the fruits of his or her intellectual creativity,” the Copyright Office declares on its website.

That law is now a topic of hot debate. Authors, artists, media companies and others say the A.I. models are infringing on their copyrights. Tech companies say that they aren’t replicating the materials and that they consume data that is publicly available on the internet, practices that are fair use and within the bounds of the law. The fight has led to lawsuits, including one by The New York Times against the ChatGPT creator OpenAI and Microsoft. And copyright owners are pushing for officials to rein in the tech companies….

(5) RADIO SILENCE. Looking for comments from Kevin Standlee? We’re told he’s probably seeing the questions, but he’s been told he mustn’t say anything, so don’t be offended about getting no response to the Standlee Signal.

(6) ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL. “Pharrell Williams: Lego Animated Biopic Coming From Focus Features” at Variety.

The musician and superproducer announced that he is teaming with The Lego Group, director Morgan Neville and Focus Features to create “Piece by Piece,” an animated film about his life using the famous toy blocks.

Per the press release, “Uninterested in making a traditional film about his life, Pharrell set out to tell his story in a way that would set audience’s imaginations free. Developed from his singular vision, ‘Piece by Piece’ defies genres and expectations to transport audiences into a Lego world where anything is possible.”…

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born January 26, 1979 — Yoon Ha Lee, 44. A truly stellar writer.

His first work for us was “The Hundredth Question” story published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in the February 1999 issue. May I note that magazine has published some of the finest short fiction I’ve ever had the pleasure to read?

After “The Hundredth Question”, I count just over a hundred short stories and intriguingly nearly thirty pieces of poetry which is a fair amount of genre work I’d say.

Yoon Ha Lee

Quite interesting is that the stories have several series running there — one that runs off with “The Cat Who Forgot to Fly” and runs five stories (I went to read these); then there’s series of stories about dragons, librarians, mermaids, phoenixes and queens. 

So let’s talk about his novels. His Machineries of Empire space opera novels, well space opera is a gross understatement to it mildly, consisting of Ninefox Gambit, Raven Stratagem and Revenant Gun are splendid works indeed. As a follower of Asian folklore, the fact that these nicely use Korean folklore is a bonus. 

Ninefox Gambit was nominated for a Hugo at Worldcon 75, Raven Stratagem at Worldcon 76 and Revenant Gun at Dublin 2019. None alas won a Hugo.

He likes fox spirits, he really does. (As do I.) So The Thousand World series is a space opera, and yes time that is an accurate term, about thirteen-year-old Min, who comes from a long line of fox spirits. Oh there’s dragons and tigers, oh my here as well. 

I’ve not read his latest novel, Phoenix Extravagant, but magic fueled weaponized armored giants sounds potentially interesting. 

Remember all of those short stories? Well they have been collected,  well I thought most of them had in The Candlevine Gardener and Other Stories but it turned out that those are flash fiction, all sixty five of them as I just discovered, though available are free from his website here.

I just read “The Cat Who Forgot to Fly”. It read like a classic folklore story from well before the 1800s — charming, magical and everyone is fine at the end. All two pages. 

The longer stories can be found in Conservation of Shadows, The Fox’s Tower and Other Tales and Hexarchate Stories.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) SOMETHING ELSE YOU CAN’T SAY. [Item by Cat Eldridge.] Can we please stop calling it AI? They’re not actually artificial intelligences, they’re collections of algorithms doing routines based off them. None could pass a Turing test. “George Carlin’s Estate Sues Creators Of AI Version Of Comedy Icon” at Deadline.

Over 50 years ago, the late and great George Carlin listed off the seven words you couldn’t say on television. Based on a lawsuit from the iconic comedian’s estate filed in federal court in California today, at least two of those words may apply to the creators of an AI generated special that uses Carlin’s style and voice to a 2024 effect.

AKA: “a bastardization of Carlin’s real work,”  the copyright infringement complaint says.

“Defendants’ AI-generated “George Carlin Special” is not a creative work,” it goes on to exclaim. “It is a piece of computer-generated click-bait which detracts from the value of Carlin’s comedic works and harms his reputation.”… 

(10) THE END. Another one from Sam Sykes that tickled me.

(11) VIDEO OF A YEAR AGO. [Item by Danny Sichel.] German band Electric Callboy just (for values of ‘just’ that include ‘over a year ago’) released a very genre-intense video for their song ‘Spaceman’.

Warning: Electric Callboy’s style is a mix of bouncy energetic rave pop and thrashing deathcore growls. They are an extremely non-serious band.

(12) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “The Wicked Witch on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (1975)”.

David Newell (Mr. McFeely) recollects Margaret Hamilton’s visit to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood filmed at WQED in Pittsburgh. In the episode on scary images, Fred Rogers meets the actress who played the Wicked Witch of the West in 1938 movie “The Wizard of Oz”.

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Daniel Dern, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Dann, Danny Sichel, Kathy Sullivan, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day OGH.]

Pixel Scroll 1/6/24 10 Pixels To Scroll, Number 9 Will SHOCK You

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(1) 2024 IS LAST YEAR KRESS AND WILLIAMS RUNNING TAOS TOOLBOX. Taos Toolbox, a two-week master class in writing science fiction and fantasy helmed by authors Nancy Kress and Walter Jon Williams, is open for submissions.

And as part of the announcement Williams told Facebook readers, “This will be the last year that Nancy and I will be doing this. Taos Toolbox may continue under new management (it’s under discussion), but Nancy and I won’t be running things.”

This year’s Taos Toolobox workshop will take place June 2-15, 2024, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Special Guest for 2024 is the creator of The Expanse, James S.A. Corey, in reality the writing team of Daniel Abraham and Ty Frank…

Special lecturers this year include Jeffe Kennedy, who currently holds the office of President of the Science Fiction Writers of America. She’s been widely published and has special expertise in indiepub, and owns her own press.

The second special lecturer is Diana Rowland, who at various times been an Air Force pilot, a Las Vegas card dealer, a detective for a sheriff’s office in Louisiana, and a morgue assistant, occupations that contributed to writing her Demon and White Trash Zombie series.

(2) MISSING ROYALTIES. Authors are the hidden victims of the cyber-attack on the British Library, which has prevented them receiving an annual rights payment. The Guardian explains: “Richard Osman among authors missing royalties amid ongoing cyber-attack on British Library”.

…In February 2023, those authors would have been paid thousands of pounds each from Public Lending Right (PLR) payments – money earned by writers, illustrators and translators each time a book is borrowed. But not this year.

Ongoing fallout from a massive cyber-attack means that PLR payments will not be paid as expected while the British Library, which manages the service, fights to restore its crippled systems.

Every time an author’s book is borrowed from a library, they get about 13p, capped at £6,600 a year. To authors like Osman and JK Rowling, whose first Harry Potter book was also on last year’s top read list, this might be a drop in the ocean, but for many authors whose books are library favourites it is a different matter….

The British Library was hit by a cyber-attack at the end of October. At the time, its chief executive, Sir Roly Keating, said that access to even basic communication tools such as email was initially lost. “We took immediate action to isolate and protect our network but significant damage was already done.

“Having breached our systems, the attackers had destroyed their route of entry and much else besides, encrypting or deleting parts of our IT estate.”…

(3) STEVE VERTLIEB MEDICAL UPDATE. File 770 contributor Steve Vertlieb was briefly hospitalized after suffering a mini-stroke on January 4. He told Facebook friends:

Well, there’s good news and bad news early in the new year. The bad news is, that while at needed physical therapy for my balance on Thursday afternoon, I began babbling unintelligibly. I knew what I wanted to say to my trainers but, when it physically left my lips, it became distorted beyond recognition, rather like mumbling incoherently in my sleep.

They called an ambulance and rushed me to nearby Nazareth Hospital where I spent the next twenty-four hours.

I continued complaining, while in the ambulance, that I simply wanted to go home but they drove me, instead, to the Emergency Room.

I began recovering once we reached the waiting hospital. However, to be on the safe side, they kept me overnight in a hospital room. I knew that I must have been returning to “normal,” however, when I began cracking jokes.

It appears that I must have suffered a “T.I.A,” or what’s called a “mini-stroke.” However, following that isolated assault on my sensory nerves, the seemingly isolated attack that apparently came out of nowhere somehow abated and I’ve recovered.

I had a single previous occurrence some eighteen months earlier on what was to have been my last night in Los Angeles. It’s frightening. I can tell you that. The wiring in your brain goes … you should excuse the expression … “haywire.”

I asked the doctors what I can do to keep this from happening again. They said “You’re doing it. You’re taking all the right medications. Just keep an eye out for trouble signs in future.”

What’s the good news, you may well ask?????????? Well, the simple answer is that I’m Home once more!!!!!!!!!! Unlike the esteemed Mr. Bond, I’m “shaken, yet stirred.” “Toto, We’re home …. We’re Home.”

(4) SFWA’S COPYRIGHT OFFICE RESPONSE. Following up SFWA’s October 30th comments to the Copyright Office, they had the opportunity to respond to some of the many other comments received. With over 9,000 responses, SFWA “focused on specific aspects of the conversation around fair use that we felt were not given due attention, as well as to raise concerns that are unique to our community.” Their 10-page response document can be downloaded from Regulations.gov at the link.

One topic SFWA discussed is the scraping of content that is offered free to readers by online sff magazines.

…SFWA acknowledges the problem of generative AI scraping pirated material published as copy-protected ebooks by professional publishers, but SFWA additionally has the unique position of representing many authors who have fought to make their work available for free for human readers. Over the last twenty years, many science fiction and fantasy authors of short fiction have embraced the open Internet, believing that it is good for society and for a flourishing culture that art be available to their fellow human beings regardless of ability to pay. That availability is not without cost; it is quite difficult to bring an online magazine to market, and being freely available has never meant abandoning the moral and legal rights of the authors, nor the obligation to enter into legal contracts to compensate authors for their work and spell out how it may and may not be used. But on balance, many writers and fans believe that freely sharing stories is a good thing that enriches us all.

The current content-scraping regime preys on that good-faith sharing of art as a connection between human minds and the hard work of building a common culture. The decision to publish creative work online to read and share for free is not guaranteed; it is a trade-off of many factors including piracy, audience, and the simple (albeit elusive) ability to make a living. In too many comments to enumerate here, individual authors have made clear that they regard the use of their work for training AI to be another important factor in that mix, and the ultimate effect on the short fiction marketplace and its role in our culture is far from certain. Bluntly, many authors do not want their work taken for this purpose, and that cannot be ignored.

“If my work is just going to get stolen, and if some company’s shareholders are going to get the benefit of my labor and skill without compensating me, I see no reason to continue sharing my work with the public — and a lot of other artists will make the same choice.” (N. K. Jemisin, COLC-2023-0006- 0521)

The developers of AI systems seem to believe that a green light to use scraped copyrighted work will result in a clear field for them to continue freeloading forever; we fear rather that it will result in large swathes of artistic work removed from the commons, locked behind paywalls and passwords to the detriment of all….

(5) AURORA AWARDS. [Item by Danny Sichel.] The Eligibility Lists for this year’s Aurora Awards are open. If you’re aware of any genre work produced by Canadians, submit it. (CSFFA membership required — $10 – to make an addition to the lists.)

(6) WESTERCON 2025 UP FOR ADOPTION. Kevin Standlee announced a “Committee Formed to Select Site of 2025 Westercon” at Westercon.org.

Because no bid filed to host Westercon 77, selection of the site of the 2025 Westercon devolved upon the 2023 Westercon Business Meeting held at Westercon 75 (in conjunction with Loscon 49) in Los Angeles on November 25, 2023. The Westercon 75 Business Meeting voted to award Westercon 77 to a “Caretaker Committee” consisting of Westercon 74 Chair Kevin Standlee and Vice Chair Lisa Hayes with the understanding that they would attempt to select a site and committee to run Westercon 77 and transfer the convention to that committee.

Any site in North America west of 104° west longitude or in Hawaii is eligible to host Westercon 75. There are no other restrictions other than the bid has to be for dates in calendar year 2025. All other restrictions in the Westercon Bylaws are suspended, per section 3.16 of the Westercon Bylaws.

To submit a bid to the 2025 Caretaker Committee to host Westercon 77, contact Kevin Standlee at [email protected], or send a paper application to Lisa Hayes at PO Box 242, Fernley NV 89408. Include information about the proposed site, the proposed dates, and the proposed operating committee. The Caretaker Committee asks that groups interested in hosting Westercon 77 contact them by the end of February 2024.

Should the Caretaker Committee be unable to make a determination for a site for Westercon 77 by Westercon 76 in Salt Lake City (July 4-7, 2024), and assuming that no bid files to host Westercon 77, the Caretaker Committee will ask the Business Meeting of Westercon 76 for additional guidance on how to handle Westercon Site Selection.

(7) MOVING FORWARD – AT OLD MAN SPEED. Tor.com notified those not reading Bluesky that “Netflix’s Adaptation of John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War Is Still In The Works”.

We first found out that Netflix optioned the rights to John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War over six years ago, back in December 2017. It’s not uncommon for things to get optioned but never get made (Old Man’s War, in fact, had been previously optioned by Paramount and Syfy without making it to the production stage), but it sounds like the Netflix movie adaptation is still moving forward.

Scalzi gave an update on the project over on Bluesky yesterday, where he said that work on it is “slowly but surely moving along.”…

(8) COPPOLA’S NEXT APOCALYPSE. Another long-awaited sff project finished filming last year and should actually get released sometime: “Francis Ford Coppola Says ‘Megalopolis’ Is Coming Soon” at Collider.

Francis Ford Coppola is renowned as the mastermind behind some of the greatest pieces of cinema in history but as all legends do, he refuses to rest on his laurels and he’s preparing to release his first film in over a decade with his self-funded star-studded sci-fi drama, Megalopolis. The film has been mired by a number of setbacks, but filming wrapped on the project back in March. And now, we won’t have much longer to wait for it to arrive, as Coppola revealed on the latest episode of The Accutron Show.

The film has an eye-watering array of talent attached, including Adam Driver, Forest Whitaker, Nathalie Emmanuel, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Chloe Fineman, Kathryn Hunter, Dustin Hoffman, DB Sweeney, Talia Shire, Jason Schwartzman, Bailey Ives, Grace Vanderwaal, James Remar, and Giancarlo Esposito.

All that’s known so far about the film so far is that it has a futuristic setting and that it will revolve around the idea of humanity attempting to build some sort of utopian society in the wake of a natural disaster. Other than that, it’s anybody’s guess, and Coppola isn’t up for explaining more quite yet.

(9) WAS THIS THE BEST SF OF 2023? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Every January the SF2 Concatenation have an informal survey as to the best SF novels and films of the previous year. It is strictly informal and a bit of fun, enabling team members see what more than one of the others rate. The years have shown that this informal survey has form in that invariably some of the chosen works go on to be short-listed, and sometimes even win, major SF awards later in the year. SF² Concatenation have just advance-posted their selection for 2023 as part of the “Best Science Fiction of the Year Possibly?” post. Scroll down to see how previous years’ choices fared…

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born January 6, 1905 — Eric Frank Russell. (Died 1978.) So let’s talk about the British writer Eric Frank Russell. His first published piece of fiction was in the first issue of Tales of Wonder called “The Prr-r-eet” (1937). (Please don’t tell me it was about cats.) He also had a letter of comment in Astounding Stories that year. He wrote a lot of such comments down the years. 

Eric Frank Russell

Just two years later, his first novel, Sinister Barrier, would be published as the cover story as the first issue of Unknown. His second novel, Dreadful Sanctuary, would be serialized in Astounding, Unknown’s sister periodical, in 1948.

At Clevention, “Allamagoosa” would win a Short Story Hugo.  The Great Explosion novel garnered  a Prometheus Hall of Fame Award.

Now let’s note some reworkings he did as I like them a lot. Men, Martians and Machines published in 1955 is four related novellas of space adventures at their very best. 

The 1956 Three to Conquer, nominated for a Hugo at NY Con II is a reworking of the earlier Call Him Dead magazine serial that deals with an alien telepath and very well at that. Finally Next of Kin, also known as The Space Willies, shows him being comic, something he does oh so well. It was a novella-length work in Astounding first.

And then there’s the Design for Great-Day novel which was written by Alan Dean Foster. It’s an expansion by him based off a 1953 short story of the same name by Russell. I’m pretty familiar with Foster has done but this isn’t ringing even the faintest of bells. Who’s read it? 

He wrote an extraordinary amount of short stories, around seventy by my guess. 

(My head trauma means numbers and I have at best a tenuous relationship. I once counted the turkeys left over after we distributed them at a food pantry I staffed pre-knee injury. Three times I counted. I got, if I remember correctly now, twelve, fifteen and eighteen birds. I had someone else do it.)

Short Stories Collection is the only one available at the usual suspects. He’s an author who needs a definitive short story collection done for him. 

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • Free Range shows there are always lines.
  • Edith Pritchett’s cartoon for the Guardian recalls how “I climbed the tube station steps and entered another dimension.” Steven French adds, “Of marginal genre interest but having walked up those steps, this made me laugh!”

(12) PIONEERING WOMAN COMICS ARTIST RETIRES. BoingBoing pays tribute as “Aquaman, Metamorpho, and Brenda Starr cartoonist Ramona Fradon retires”.

Famed cartoonist Ramona Fradon is retiring at the age of 97, according to a January 3 announcement from her comic art dealer Catskill Comics….

An extremely long run, indeed. Her comic book career started in 1950, and her career highlights include a 1959 revamp and long run on Aquaman, the co-creation of DC’s offbeat superhero Metamorpho with writer Bob Haney in 1965, a run on Super Friends in the 1970s, and the comic strip Brenda Starr, Reporter from 1980-1995.

She also was a pioneer, as one of the only women working in comics during the first decades of her career.

Cartoonist and curator of the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco Andrew Farago wrote on BlueSky, “Ramona Fradon retires today at the age of 97, just a little shy of Al Jaffee’s retirement age of 99. Not sure if that means that cartooning keeps you young or if it just means that cartooning keeps you broke, but what a body of work she’s produced over the past eight decades!”…

(13) WHAT THEY WILL READ IN 2024. “’I want some light in my life’: eight writers make their new year reading resolutions “ – the Guardian’s collection of quotes includes a declaration from Sheena Patel.

‘I’m turning to sci-fi and dystopia’
Sheena Patel

I have a fascination with sci-fi that is purely theoretical. I often think about reading it but never make any attempt to go near such books because I am afraid of the imagination I will find there. Perhaps I haven’t felt I can really access the genre because sci-fi feels like what Black and Brown people can go through on a daily basis. We’re still in an age of empire, even though we are distracted from this knowledge.

I do love sci-fi films though. I had a true epiphany when I saw Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin at the cinema. It was so strange, the alien mixed with the mundane, documentary spliced with fantastical set pieces. Next year I think I will read the Michel Faber book from which the movie was adapted.

In 2024 I also want to tackle Frank Herbert’s Dune books. Earlier this year, I watched the film on my laptop maybe 50 times. At first, I hated it, but then I totally fell in love with it – the visual representation of different worlds opened my mind. Throat singing and nomadic desert tribes could be used as a mood board for the future, but this is already happening now in communities that are regarded as “primitive”. It is the future because it is eternal – such a beautiful thought.

We are fed so much dystopia that reading it in fiction feels hard – but, as the world burns, maybe it is a good idea to hear from artists about where we might be heading. So the other three titles I will try are classics: Octavia E Butler’s Kindred, Stanisław Lem’s Solaris and The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin. The present feels so bleak, and our vision of the future so foreshortened, it almost seems like tempting fate – but, without science fiction, how can we dream?

I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel is published in paperback by Granta

(14) HOOFING IT TO MOUNT DOOM. They say “One does not simply walk into Mordor,” but apparently they exaggerated. The Conqueror Virtual Challenges is a thematic program to encourage you to exercise by walking, running, and biking, with solo variations costing from $49.95 to bundles costing $299.95 and up. This link takes you to All 8 LOTR Conqueror Virtual Challenges.

Follow Frodo and Aragorn on an epic journey across Middle-earth with the ULTIMATE THE LORD OF THE RINGS Virtual Challenge Series.

Walk, run or cycle all the way from The Shire to Mount Doom in an epic adventure with one goal – destroying the One Ring. Complete this unforgettable saga by following Aragorn into battle and restoring peace to Middle-earth.

(15) CITY OF HEROES. “11 years after this cult classic superhero MMO was shut down, the original publisher has given its blessing to the community’s custom servers” reports GamesRadar+.

Despite the shutdown of the beloved superhero MMO City of Heroes over a decade ago, fans have been keeping it alive for years with a variety of custom server efforts. Now, one of those projects has just gotten the blessing of the game’s original publisher and license holder, NCSoft.

City of Heroes: Homecoming made the surprising announcement earlier today that “Homecoming has been granted a license to operate a City of Heroes server and further develop the game – subject to conditions and limitations under the contract.” The Homecoming project will remain free and donation-funded, and while there are a few changes to how the project is being managed, it doesn’t look like players will see any meaningful differences in the game itself.

“NCSoft has always had (and will continue to have) the right to demand that Homecoming shuts down,” as the announcement notes. “This agreement provides a framework under which Homecoming can operate the game in a way that complies with NCSoft’s wishes in hopes of minimizing the chances of that happening. We’ve had a really positive and productive relationship with NCSoft for over four years now, so we do not anticipate there being any issues.”…

…The question mark that currently weighs over the license for Homecoming is what this means for other custom server projects, like City of Heroes Rebirth. Today’s announcement notes that “other servers are out of scope” for this license, and the devs say that “our hope is that our license will help us consolidate our userbase with City of Heroes fans from other servers.” There’s already a bit of fear in the community that other private servers might start to disappear following this news, but only time will tell what will happen on that front….

(16) RECORDS BROKEN. Gizmodo tells why “Doctor Who’s New Streaming Home Has Been a Huge Success” – that is, for viewers who can accesss the BBC platform.

To celebrate Doctor Who’s 60th anniversary last year, the BBC made a huge, unprecedented move: for the first time, almost the entirety of Doctor Who, from episodes from 1963 all the way up to the then-airing anniversary specials, would be made available to stream in the UK in one place, on the BBC’s own streaming platform iPlayer. And it turns out doing so has helped the BBC break streaming records over the festive period.

The corporation has announced that Doctor Who—and most specifically Doctor Who episodes from 2005 onwards—were streamed 10.01 million times over the week between Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve, helping the platform break a previous record for streamed content for the week between January 2 and January 8, 2023, with 177 million programs being streamed in total….

It’s hard to say just how that success has panned out internationally, however. The BBC’s new deal with Disney to stream Doctor Who on Disney+ everywhere but the UK and Ireland only covers new episodes from the 60th anniversary onwards—other contemporary and classic Doctor Who access is spread out on various platforms elsewhere, such as Britbox for classic Doctor Who and Max for post-2005 Doctor Who.

(17) MY BLUE HEAVEN(S). [Item by Mike Kennedy.] So you know how astronomers are always using false color images to show this detail or that detail or what something would look like if it was only in the visible spectrum or some such? well, those can leave lasting misimpression.

New images showing color-corrected true-color likenesses of Uranus and Neptune show the latter ice giant—rather than being a dark blue—is only slightly darker than the former.  “True blue: Neptune only slightly deeper colour than Uranus, say Oxford scientists” in the Guardian.

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kevin Standlee, Kathy Sullivan, Danny Sichel, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley  for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Thomas the Red.]

Pixel Scroll 12/28/23 Pixel’s Just Another Word For Nothing Left To Scroll

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(1) LET LOOSE THE LAWYERS. The New York Times would like to be the first to tell you: “The Times Sues OpenAI and Microsoft Over A.I. Use of Copyrighted Work”.

The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement on Wednesday, opening a new front in the increasingly intense legal battle over the unauthorized use of published work to train artificial intelligence technologies.

The Times is the first major American media organization to sue the companies, the creators of ChatGPT and other popular A.I. platforms, over copyright issues associated with its written works. The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, contends that millions of articles published by The Times were used to train automated chatbots that now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information.

The suit does not include an exact monetary demand. But it says the defendants should be held responsible for “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages” related to the “unlawful copying and use of The Times’s uniquely valuable works.” It also calls for the companies to destroy any chatbot models and training data that use copyrighted material from The Times….

(2) I FOUGHT THE LAW AND THE LAW WON. Meanwhile, the Guardian ponders the corporate trauma Disney will (or won’t) suffer as the “Copyright for original Mickey Mouse persona to run out 1 January 2024”.

…The loss of exclusive rights to the historically important first draft of a character who went on to capture the hearts of millions worldwide will cut deep, as proven by the decades of legal maneuvers the company made to try to preserve them.

The episode is also reflective of the turbulent waters in which Disney currently finds itself, including a bruising culture war fight with Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, over LGBTQ+ rights, and strong financial headwinds from its loss-making streaming service Disney+, as well as a worrying series of movie flops.

“I always say any of us going past 100 years will usually have issues, but this whole original Mickey Mouse thing is something to think about as we look at Disney going into its second century with a good deal of troubles,” said Robert Thompson, a trustee professor of television, radio and film, and founding director of the Bleier center for television and popular culture at Syracuse University.

“Disney has a lot of things to worry about right now, and the expiration of Steamboat Willie’s Mickey Mouse probably shouldn’t be on the top of their list. The original Mickey isn’t the one we all think of and have on our T-shirts or pillowcases up in the attic someplace.

“Yet, symbolically of course, copyright is important to Disney and it has been very careful about their copyrights to the extent that laws have changed to protect them. This is the only place I know that some obscure high school in the middle of nowhere can put on The Lion King and the Disney copyright people show up.”…

(3) CREATING GAME CHARACTERS AS TRANS OUTLET. “Video Games Let Them Choose a Role. Their Transgender Identities Flourished.” The New York Times says, “Transgender people have turned to games, some with robust character creators, as places where they can safely express themselves.”

Nearly a decade before Anna Anthropy came out as a transgender woman, she was wearing a dress in the world of Animal Crossing on the Nintendo GameCube, leaving virtual bread crumbs for her family about information she was not prepared to share as a teenager.

“We were all playing in the same town, and I had chosen a female character,” said Anthropy, 40, now a professor of game design at DePaul University, in Chicago. “It wasn’t something we talked about, but it was my way of seeing a version of my family where I was the right gender.”

More than a dozen transgender and nonbinary people said in interviews that video games were one of the safest spaces to explore their queer identities, given the array of tools to modify a character’s appearance and a virtual world that readily accepts those changes.

Character creation tools in role-playing games like Starfield and Baldur’s Gate 3 are making fewer gendered assumptions than in the past, giving players more freedom to select pronouns, shape their bodies and select a vocal range. Those new options are leading some players to spend hours creating their virtual avatars….

(4) THE KING TOPS THE DOCTOR? UNBEEVABLE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] When it comes to Christmas, if Nineteenth Century Britain gave us the Christmas Card then arguably the Twentieth Century gave us the tradition of watching TV at Christmas (as well as throughout much of the rest of the year). So, of 68 million in the United Kingdom, what were the Brits watching this Christmas day?

Well, according to B. A. R. B., (Broadcasters Audience Research Board) the UK broadcasting ratings bureau, the most watched programme over the 2023 Christmas was the King’s Speech. This is an annual address from the Monarch and this year it was King Charles III’s second such address. Some 7.5 million tuned in live (not counting catch-up viewers). The King was broadcast on both BBC1 (the UK’s principal state sponsored terrestrial channel) and simultaneously with ITV 1 (Independent Television) Britain’s leading commercial terrestrial channel.

Second was BBC1’s Strictly Come Dancing, a dancing competition, which garnered a little over 5 million viewers.

Third, was a programme that was broadcast immediately after Strictly on BBC1, so no need to get up from the sofa as the turkey with all the trimmings digested. It was Doctor Who and Ncuti Gatwa’s first solo outing as the new Doctor. Some 4.75 million tuned in to see him tackle the Goblin King. (Again, this figure does not include catch-up viewers.)

Of course Doctor Who was also broadcast in other countries including N. America’s Mega-Cities, so the global viewing figure would be much higher.

(5) THE APPAREL OF AFROFUTURISM. Visit the “Ruth E. Carter: Afrofuturism in Costume Design” exhibit at The Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit anytime through March 31.

This new exhibition features over 60 of the Two-Time Academy Award winning costumer designer’s original designs from iconic films such as Black Panther, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Malcolm X, Do The Right Thing, and more.

(6) MAN OF STEEL, FEET OF CLAY. [Item by Olav Rokne.] Polygon makes some good points about the phenomenon of “superhero fatigue,” which they argue has more to do with ill-considered studio decisions than with the core idea of superpowered guys in capes having adventures on screen. “People aren’t tired of superheroes, they’re tired of bad superhero movies”.

Companies considered the simple existence of an extended universe and the affection for recognizable characters as a core selling point, when it is, and should always be, the sauce and not the meat.

(7) FIFTEENTH DOCTOR, FOURTEENTH SERIES. “Doctor Who Series 14 Trailer Confirms a Returning RTD Character and Release Date Window “ at Den of Geek.

The Fifteenth Doctor era of Doctor Who is well underway with Ncuti Gatwa‘s first full episode helming the TARDIS. This year’s Christmas Special, “The Church on Ruby Road,” saw the Doctor not only face off with mischievous Goblins with a taste for baby scones (that is, scones made out of babies) but also meet his new companion, Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson), who brings plenty of her own mysteries to the show. Who are her birth parents, what does her neighbor Mrs. Flood have to do with the upcoming season’s overarching plot, and what’s going on with the Hooded Woman who dropped her off at the church 24 years ago?

All questions we’ll have to wait to have answered in series 14, which is officially being marketed as Doctor Who season 1, marking the start of a new production era for the show, with returning showrunner Russell T Davies back at the helm. Fortunately, we won’t have to wait too long for season 1/series 14 to hit our screens. The very first trailer for the Fifteenth Doctor’s debut series confirms that the show will return in May 2024 with eight new episodes. Give the short trailer a watch below…

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born December 28, 1932 — Nichelle Nichols. (Died 2022.) So let’s us honor Nichelle Nichols on her Birthday. I’ll get her SF work eventually but she’s got a fascinating story long before that. She started off as a dancer and a singer in the bands of Duke Ellington and Lionel Hampton, very impressive indeed. This photo is her as a singer with Duke Ellington.

In 1959, she appeared as the principal dancer in Carmen Jones and performed in a New York production of Porgy and Bess. 

Did I mention Hugh Hefner briefly employed her to sing at his Chicago club? Well he did. No idea if she also danced there. 

Now we come to the Sixties. 

It said that she came to attention of Roddenberry when she was cast as Norma Bartlett in the “To Set It Right Episode” of his The Lieutenant military series. 

(The series was thick of actors who would later appear on Trek. The lead here, second lieutenant William Tiberius Rice, played by Gary Lockwood, who will appear in “Where No Man Has Gone Before”. Majel Barrett, Leonard Nimoy, and Walter Koenig also appeared as guest stars, along with Ricardo Montalbán and Paul Comi, of the “Balance of Terror” episode.)

She did an interesting bit of genre work appearing in the Tarzan’s Deadly Silence is a 1970 adventure film composed of an edited two-parter of Ron Ely’s Tarzan series released as a feature. The actual original air dates were October 28, 1966 and November 4, 1966. She played Ruana. I was even able to find a high-resolution image of her on location on Hawaii. 

Now Star Trek. What a wonderful character Lieutenant Nyota Uhura was! And yes, I realize that she wasn’t called by that full name until William Rotsler created the name it for Star Trek II Biographies, his 1982 licensed tie-in book. 

There’s little I could say here about her Trek years that haven’t been said before.  She had one of the best roles on the series bar none and the writers wrote her wonderfully.  The films give her an ever more active role and I applaud the writers for doing this..

The films give her a more active role and I applaud the writers for doing this. 

She did appear possibly in several fan video fictions, the first being Star Trek: Of Gods and Men in which she was Captain, and a narrator role in Star Trek First Frontier (but not onscreen). Here she is as captain in Star Trek: Of Gods and Men, and yes, that is Walter Koenig as well. 

But you want to see her given a more expanded role as a character in the real Trek universe, that’s after the original series was long off the air. It comes into play in the matter of a hidden Star Trek: Picard season two Easter egg which reveals that she has become a starship captain after The Undiscovered Country.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • Peanuts from March 1, 1955 is the first day of 4 Martian jokes. (March 3 is my favorite.)
  • Pickles asks a sci-fi question.

(10) OLIVE & POPEYE. [Item by Daniel Dern.] ComicsKingdom takes you “Inside the Kingdom with Olive & Popeye: A Heartfelt Chat with the Creators of the New Comic Sensation”

Olive & Popeye are back with a new twice-weekly webcomic here at Comics Kingdom, where fans are family. The strip stars two of the most iconic and classic characters that have been around for nearly 100 years, with a rich history in comics.

Olive and Popeye, published twice weekly, is done alternately by webcomic creator Randy Milholland and comic writer and artist Emi Burdge (following Shadia Amin’s departure).

The new weekly comic was originally penned by Shadia Amin (Aggretsuko, Spider-Ham) and Randy Milholland (Popeye, Something Positive) and centers on both beloved pop-culture characters and their individual adventures, including Olive’s yoga classes, or Popeye’s messy family dynamic, which usually leads to brawls.

Comics Kingdom offers a 7-day free trial period — or (as of December 27, 2023, “four months free.” (To all Comics Kingdom’s strips etc., not just O & P.)

Or, if your library offers Hoopla access, Hoopla includes a Comics Kingdom Binge Pass (good for seven days).

(11) DRESSED FOR BATTLE SUCCESS. [Item by Steven French.] From Prince Caspian to Assassin’s Creed: on the use of brigandines in fantasy. “Brigandines” at The Secret Library, the Leeds Libraries Heritage Blog. There is a photo gallery at the link.

… A brigandine is a form of armour that became popular in Europe in the 15th century.  Constructed of overlapping plates that were riveted to fabric, it offered more flexible protection than plate armour, and could be produced at a lower cost….

(12) WEARING PROTECTION. Incidentally, here’s a whole article (from 2017) about “The armor sets of ‘Game of Thrones,’ ranked”, which are many and varied, at CNET.

Ranking the armor sets on “Game of Thrones”? Not exactly a walk in the water gardens of Dorne. But we gave it a shot anyway. Here are 21 different armor styles, ranked from worst to best.

Starting with No. 21: The Sons of the Harpy get points for being dramatic but their attire is going to do little to shield from them injuries on any actual battlefield…. 

(13) GONE IN A SPLASH. “Historic SpaceX Falcon 9 booster topples over and is lost at sea” reports Spaceflight Now. Without knowing what they expected, nineteen successful missions sounds like impressive longevity to me.

A piece of America’s space history is now on the ocean’s floor. During its return voyage to Port Canaveral in Central Florida, a SpaceX Falcon 9 first stage booster toppled over and broke in half.

This particular booster, tail number B1058, was coming back from its record-breaking 19th mission when it had its fatal fall. The rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Dec. 23 carrying 23 Starlink satellites. The booster made a successful landing eight and a half minutes after launch on the drone ship ‘Just Read the Instructions’ which was stationed east of the Bahamas. SpaceX said in a statement on social media that it succumbed to “high winds and waves.”…

… The company stated that “Newer Falcon boosters have upgraded landing legs with the capability to self-level and mitigate this type of issue.

In a separate post, Kiko Deontchev, the Vice President of Launch for SpaceX, elaborated by added that while they “mostly outfitted” the rest of the operational Falcon booster fleet, B1058 was left as it was, “given its age.” The rocket “met its fate when it hit intense wind and waves resulting in failure of a partially secured [octo-grabber] less than 100 miles from home.”…

(14) CYBORG? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] A hybrid bio-computer – combining laboratory-grown human brain tissue with conventional electronic circuits – has been built… and it has learned speech recognition.

Artificial Intelligence, cyborgs, replicants, positronic brains, are all allied SF tropes. Meanwhile, in real life we have in the past built computers part of whose electronic circuitry is based upon neural network structures and we have had computer-to-brain interfaces. This new development is different: it is an artificial intelligence computer made out of both electronic and purely biological components.

The biological component is a brain organoid. An organoid is a clump of cells created by stem cells next to brain cells. The stem cells grow and multiply taking on the properties of the neighbouring cells and turning into brain cells that are in effect similar to brain tissue. (This is different to growing a brain from an embryo.) A high-density multi-electrode array connects the electronic part of the bio-computer with the brain cell organoid. The researchers have only begun to explore the possibilities of this new technology, which they call ‘Brainoware’, but already they have trained it to recognise and distinguish speech from different speakers as well as solve non-linear equations.

(See the primary research Cai, H. et al (2023) Brain organoid reservoir computing for artificial intelligence. Nature Electronics, vol. 6, p1,032–1,039 and the review piece Tozer, L. (2023) ‘Biocomputer’ combines brain tissue with silicon hardware. Nature, vol. 624, p481.)

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Olav Rokne, Kathy Sullivan, Lise Andreasen, Daniel Dern, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]

Pixel Scroll 11/13/23 Yesterday, Upon A Scroll, I Met A Pixel Who Wasn’t There

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(1) MAYBE “COYOTE” ISN’T DEAD YET. “I’m feeling better!”Deadline reports “Coyote vs. Acme: Warner Bros Showing Pic to Amazon, Apple For Acquisition”.

Screenings are being set up this week for streamers Amazon Prime Video, Apple and Netflix to check out and potentially acquire Warner Bros‘ axed Looney Tunes movie Coyote vs. Acme after the studio’s phone ran off the hook the entire weekend from angry filmmakers and talent reps over their third feature film kill after Batgirl and Scoob Holiday Haunt!

The more egregious Hollywood sin with Coyote vs. Acme is that it’s a finished film was intended for a theatrical release, while the other two movies were still in the works.

Of those kicking the tires, even though no deals have been drafted, I hear Amazon is a leading contender given the fact that Courtenay Valenti, the Head of Film, Streaming and Theatrical for Amazon Studios and MGM, was a big champion and linchpin for the movie while she was President of Production and Development at Warner Bros. All of this boils down to Head of Amazon Studios Jen Salke’s signoff, I understand. During the pandemic, Prime Video acquired Sony’s family titles Hotel Transylvania 4 and Cinderella, among other movies. Amazon has been known to take finished films off the table for $100M and turn them into events for Prime Video….

(2) SFPA OFFICER ELECTION RESULTS. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association has tallied the votes and announced that starting January 1, 2024, John Philip Johnson will be SFPA Secretary and Jordan Hirsch will be SFPA Treasurer.

(3) ULTRAMAN ARRIVING IN 2024. “The First Ultraman: Rising Trailer Looks Incredible” says Yahoo!

Ultraman is one of Japan’s biggest superheroes – both figuratively and literally – but outside of Japan the hero’s popularity hasn’t quite hit fever pitch. Netflix’s newest film could change all that, if the first trailer for Ultraman: Rising is anything to go by, as it looks absolutely incredible.

Netflix released the first trailer for the CG animated film Ultraman: Rising last night, as part of its annual Geeked Week celebrations. The trailer shows off a rebooted Ultraman, a gigantic super-powered hero that’s the powered-up form of baseball superstar Ken Sato.

As the story goes, Ken comes back to Japan to take up his duties as the biggest superhero on the planet, promptly defeating a large, dragon-like kaiju. In the trailer, he retrieves a mysterious orb from the monster, only to discover it’s an egg — and it hatches into the child of his greatest foe…

(4) LEARNEDLEAGUE CALENDAR. [Item by David Goldfarb.] Here are LearnedLeague One-Day Special quizzes scheduled for 2024, that relate to SF and fantasy. Some are specifically SFF-related, some are genre-adjacent. I’ll list both.

SFF-related:

  • Spaceballs: The One-Day Special!  Jan 9
  • The Sandman  Jan 10
  • The X-Men   May 8
  • Folk Horror Films  May 13
  • Science Fiction Homeworlds  Jul 20
  • Mars in Popular Culture  Jul 23
  • Studio Ghibli  Jul 23
  • Faerie Tale Theatre  Aug 6
  • Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere  Aug 7
  • Murderbot for Everyone  Aug 21
  • Elemental Masters (probably? Mercedes Lackey has a series with that title, but it could be about something else with a similar name)  Oct 7
  • The Silmarillion   Oct 10 (we’ve had 3 quizzes already about The Lord of the Rings, so now we move on to The Silmarillion)
  • Godzilla  Oct 14
  • Just Audio Horror Pairings  Oct 16
  • Jurassic Park  Oct 17
  • Just Images Portals  Oct 28
  • Romance Novels 3: Super Friendly Monsters  Oct 31
  • Science of Science Fiction 2  Nov 4
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation  Nov 7

Genre-Adjacent:

  • Polyamory  Jan 12
  • Video Game Weaponry  Jan 22
  • Homestuck  Feb 7
  • Year of the Dragon (possibly? not 100% clear what this one is about)  Feb 8
  • Secret Identities  Mar 25
  • DuckTales  Apr 9
  • Nanotechnology  Apr 10
  • Chemicals I Won’t Work With  Apr 13
  • Asteroids  Apr 15
  • Horror Hosts  Apr 15
  • Fictional Religions  May 15 (not clear how this will differ from Fictional Theology)
  • Science Theater  Jul 15
  • Tintin Comics  Jul 18
  • Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall Trilogy  Oct 10
  • Mercury 7 Astronauts  Nov 7

I’m particularly looking forward to Cosmere, Homeworlds, Murderbot, and Science of SF. (I was part of a 10-way tie for champion of the first “Science of Science Fiction” quiz.)

(5) WHO MAY GIVE YOUNG VIEWERS THE CREEPS? “Doctor Who showrunner Russell T Davies issues warning to parents ahead of anniversary specials” and The Independent boosts the signal.

Doctor Who’s returning showrunner Russell T Davies has issued a warning to parents about “dark” and “violent” content in the show’s forthcoming episodes.

… Of the three episodes, series opener The Star Beast, which airs on 25 November and centres on a furry creature called a Meep (voiced by Miriam Margolyes), is the most child-friendly, Davies explained.

“It is like a great big Pixar family film, like a bank holiday film – all the family watching, lots of laughs, a funny monster,” he said.

However, the following two episodes will not be appropriate for children, Davies warned. “The second one, Wild Blue Yonder, is darker. Not scary – it’s genuinely weird,” he said.

“We do very scary stuff. Some stuff is quite violent. It’s not for children, it’s about children.”…

(6) LOKI SEASON 2 BOX SCORE. Deadline has the viewership numbers: “’Loki’ Season 2 Finale Pulls In 11.2M Views, +3% From Opener”.

Marvel Studios’ season 2 finale of Loki went out with a blast attracting 11.2M global views over three-days, which is +3% from the season 2 first episode 3-day draw of 10.9M.

Loki‘s season 2 kickoff was the second most-watched season premiere this year on Disney+, behind March’s season 3 premiere of The Mandalorian.

The finale of the Marvel Studios series—which concluded last Thursday—was only behind the season three finale of The Mandalorian, which wrapped up its season in April….

(7) OUROBOROS Q&A. “Ke Huy Quan Discusses Loki Season 2 Finale & His Marvel Entry” at Deadline. Beware spoilers.

DEADLINE: It’s so great to get to talk with you about Loki. You haven’t really been able to talk about your role, due to the actors strike. What have you been waiting to say?

KE HUY QUAN: When I decided to become an actor again, [being part of the MCU] was at the top of my wishlist…They all welcomed me with wide open arms, and I was so happy. I was patiently waiting for the show to come out so we can go and celebrate it and tell the fans. Then, of course, the strike happened. I just want to tell everybody how proud of the show I am. How happy I am with it. And working with Tom Hiddleston, Owen Wilson, the entire Loki family has just been incredible. We made this last year in London. I was there for four months, my wife and I were there. It was one of the best four months of my life. I’ve done a few shows before, and this was the first time where I didn’t want it to end. I was so happy. In fact, I’ll tell you this. We were scheduled for reshoots this February, and I was waiting. My wife and I were looking forward to spending more time in London and with our Loki family. And all of a sudden we were told, ‘Oh, we don’t need any reshoots. It’s all good.’ I was kind of disappointed. I was actually disappointed that we didn’t get to go back because of how much fun we had… So we made history. We make history two times. One is the first series of Marvel getting a second season and the second is the first time a Marvel show didn’t have any reshoots. I’m so proud of that….

(8) MICHAEL BISHOP (1945-2023). Beloved sff author Michael Bishop died November 13, the day following his 78th birthday, after a prolonged stay in hospice care. His daughter made the announcement on Facebook.

…It is with great sadness (and yet relief for my dad) that I post with the news that Daddy breathed his last breath early this morning with my mom by his side. He is at peace and free from pain AND we miss him terribly already….

He made such an immediate and strong impression on the field that he was presented DeepSouthCon’s Phoenix Award for lifetime achievement in 1977, less than a decade after his first work was published.

By the time his career was over, Bishop was a 17-time Nebula finalist, winning Best Novelette for “The Quickening” in 1982 and Best novel for No Enemy But Time in 1983. He was also a 9-time Hugo finalist, though never won.

His versatility was proven by the other awards he received. His short story “The Pile” won a 2009 Shirley Jackson Award. His novel Unicorn Mountain won the Mythopoeic Award for Best Fantasy in 1989. His poem “For the Lady of a Physicist” won a 1979 Rhysling Award. He was also a four-time Locus Award winner.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born November 13, 1850 — Robert Louis Stevenson. Author of Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and the New Arabian Nights collection of short stories.  Internet Movie Database gives over three hundred productions that have been based off of his works. What are your favorite ones? And I’m not even going to get into the deeps of genre fiction based off just the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll as I know Theodora Goss was making use of that story in one of her series and Simon R. Green had Hydes in his Nightside series. Not to mention Bugs Bunny… (Died 1894.)
  • Born November 13, 1887 — A. R. Tilburne. Pulp artist who by 1938 was selling cover illustrations to Short Stories and Weird Tales such as the November 1938 issue of the latter, and in the 1940s he also drew many interior story illustrations for Weird Tales. In 1947 he painted the cover for H. P. Lovecraft’s The Lurking Fear, published by Avon paperback books. (Died 1965.)
  • Born November 13, 1888 — Philip Francis Nowlan. He’s best known as the creator of Buck Rogers. While working in Philadelphia, he created and wrote the Buck Rogers comic strip, illustrated by Dick Calkins. Philip Nowlan working for the syndicate John F. Dille Company, later known as the National Newspaper Service syndicate, was contracted to adapt the story into a comic strip. The Buck Rogers strip made its first newspaper appearance on January 7, 1929, but the first appearance of “Anthony Rogers” was actually in Amazing Stories in August of 1928 in the “Armageddon—2419 A. D.” Story there with cover illustration by Frank R. Paul. (Died 1940.)
  • Born November 13, 1945 — Pierre Pelot, 78. A French writer who wrote fourteen science fiction novels and seven horror novels including space operas. Only But What If Butterflies Cheat? (its English translation title) is available in English so far. It’s part of the might exist The Child Who Walked on the Sky / But What If Butterflies Cheat? omnibus as I failed to find it anywhere including Amazon and any of the places that resell books online. He was nominated for a dozen Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire Awards winning two. 
  • Born November 13, 1955 — Brenda Clough, 68. She was nominated for a Hugo at ConJosé for her “May Be Some Time” novella. I’m very fond of her fantasy Averidan series. Though very much not genre, I recommend her A Most Dangerous Woman, a sequel to The Woman in White by Wilkie Collin. It’s a serial on Realm which you can find at the usual suspects. 
  • Born November 13, 1957 — Stephen Baxter, 66. Ok I’m going to confess that the only thing I’ve read that he’s written is the Long Earth series with Terry Pratchett.  I’ve only read the first three but they are quite great SF!  Ok I really, really need your help to figure out what else of his that I should consider reading.  To say he’s been a prolific writer is somewhat of an understatement and he’s gotten a bonnie bunch of awards as well though no Hugos.  It’s worth noting that Baxter’s story “Last Contact” was nominated for a Hugo for best short story at Denvention 3 as were The Time Ships as L.A. Con III, “Moon Six” novellette at BucConeer, “On the Orion Line” novellette  and “The Gravity Mine” short story at the Millennium Philcon, and finally “The Ghost Pit” short story at ConJosé.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

  • Speed Bump checks the shelves of an interesting library.
  • Thatababy has a strange way of getting rid of autumn leaves.
  • Wallace the Brave gives a teacher a novel excuse.
  • Tom Gauld made a design with you in mind.

(11) HORRENDOUS PROBLEMS IN IRON FLAME PRINT BOOKS. Publishers Lunch learned that “Entangled Is Working On A Solution to ‘Iron Flame’ Misprints”.

Entangled Publishing said in a statement that it’s working to correct misprints in the new Rebecca Yarros novel Iron Flame that published on November 7. Entangled reportedly indicated the book sold more than half a million copies on its release day, and some of the copies had irregularities including damaged pages, missing pages, upside down pages, and more, which readers catalogued on TikTok.

In a statement to Variety, the company acknowledged that the misprints “have caused disappointment among those who eagerly awaited this release.” They write, “In keeping with our values of quality and responsibility, we are committed to making this right. We are actively working with our distribution partner to create a solution for those who wish to exchange their copy but are unable to do so at their original retailer. Our printing company is also working to produce the additional copies needed to facilitate this process. Entangled Publishing appreciates the patience and support of our readers as we work to swiftly resolve this issue. More details will be available on our social media platforms in the coming weeks.”

(12) AI COPYRIGHT LAWSUIT NEWS. Publishers Weekly reports“Judge Will Toss Part of Authors’ AI Copyright Lawsuit”.

At a hearing last week, a federal judge said that he will dismiss part of the lawsuit filed by a group of authors including comedian Sarah Silverman that claims Meta’s Llama AI application infringes their copyrights.

According to Reuters, judge Vince Chhabria said the authors’ allegations that text generated by Llama infringes their copyrights simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. “When I make a query of Llama, I’m not asking for a copy of Sarah Silverman’s book—I’m not even asking for an excerpt,” Chhabria observed, noting that, under the authors’ theory, a side-by-side comparison of text generated by the AI application and Silverman’s book would have to show they are similar.

However, the judge said he will not dismiss the case with prejudice, meaning the authors will be allowed to amend and refile their claims. Furthermore, a core claim of the suit—that Meta’s use of unauthorized copies to train its AI model is infringing—remains.

The judge’s decision was not unexpected. As PW reported in July, multiple lawyers said that the authors’ copyright claims face long odds in court.

The proposed class action suit before Chhabria was filed on July 7 by the Joseph Saveri Law Firm on behalf of authors Christopher Golden, Richard Kadrey, and comedian Sarah Silverman, just days after the Saveri firm filed a similar suit on behalf of authors against Open AI, with authors Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad as named plaintiffs (though Awad has since withdrawn). A third group of authors represented by another firm (with authors including Michael Chabon, David Henry Hwang, Matthew Klam, Rachel Louise Snyder, and Ayelet Waldman among others) filed a lawsuit in August….

(13) TOY-BASED MOVIE GETTING ANOTHER CHANCE. “‘Masters of the Universe’ Movie Eyes New Home at Amazon” reports Variety.

In “Masters of the Universe,” He-Man’s nemesis is the evil wizard Skeletor. In Hollywood, his greatest threat has been a list of studio partners that have sidelined him from the big screen for nearly two decades. 

The blond barbarian, based on a popular set of Mattel toys, may finally win the day. Amazon MGM Studios is in serious talks to mount a live-action “Masters of the Universe” movie from Adam and Aaron Nee, the writing and directing team behind “The Lost City,” according to multiple insiders. Conversations are taking place with Amazon after Netflix dropped a planned version of the Nee brothers film in July….

(14) TERMINATOR BEGINS AGAIN. Yahoo! says“Terminator is back with a new anime series coming to Netflix”.

Netflix is giving the Terminator franchise the anime treatment in a new series that’s set to hit the streaming platform “soon.” The company dropped the first teaser for Terminator: The Anime Series this weekend during its Geeked Week event. Details so far are scant, but we do know it’ll be produced by Production IG, the Japanese animation studio behind the original Ghost in the Shell movie and spinoff TV series.

Terminator: The Anime Series will take us back to August 1997, when the Skynet AI becomes self-aware and turns against humans. While there is no information on the cast just yet, Variety reports the series will feature entirely new characters….

(15) THESE GHOSTS ARE ON THE CASE. Variety is there when “’Dead Boy Detectives’ Netflix Series Drops First Trailer”.

The “Dead Boy Detectives” series is officially set to air on Netflix after originally being set up at Max.

The show, based on characters created for DC by Neil Gaiman and Matt Wagner, was originally ordered to series at Max back in April 2022. However, it was reported earlier this year that it would be moving to Netflix due to the fact it did not fit the new direction for Max-DC content being spearheaded by James Gunn and Peter Safran.

The official description for the eight-episode series states, “Do you have a pesky ghost haunting you? Has a demon stolen your core memories? You may want to ring the Dead Boy Detectives. Meet Edwin Payne (George Rexstrew) and Charles Rowland (Jayden Revri), ‘the brains’ and ‘the brawn’ behind the Dead Boy Detectives agency. Teenagers born decades apart who find each other only in death, Edwin and Charles are best friends and ghosts… who solve mysteries….

(16) MOON UNIT. “Rebel Moon Trailer: Part One A Child of Fire Kicks Off Zack Snyder Epic” – Variety provides the introduction.

Netflix has debuted an explosive new trailer for Zack Snyder‘s “Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire,” set for a limited one-week theatrical release on Dec. 15 and a wide streaming release on Netflix on Dec. 22.

Snyder’s epic space adventure film stars Sofia Boutella, Ed Skrein, Cleopatra Coleman and Cary Elwes. The story centers on a young woman living on the outskirts of a galaxy who must find a group of warriors to save the galaxy from an invasion from a tyrant. Snyder revealed to Total Film that “Rebel Moon” takes place in the same universe as another Netflix film of his, “Army of the Dead,” though one is set in outer space and the other in apocalyptic Las Vegas….

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

Pixel Scroll 9/8/23 Pixel? I Don’t Need A Pixel, My File Is On The Bandstand, My Scroll Is On The Floor

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(1) ATTACKING THE KILLER TOMATOES. “The most overrated metric in movies is erratic, reductive, and easily hacked,” says Vulture, nevertheless, “Rotten Tomatoes Still Has Hollywood in Its Grip”.

…“The studios didn’t invent Rotten Tomatoes, and most of them don’t like it,” says the filmmaker Paul Schrader. “But the system is broken. Audiences are dumber. Normal people don’t go through reviews like they used to. Rotten Tomatoes is something the studios can game. So they do.”

In a recent interview, Quentin Tarantino, whose next film is reportedly called The Movie Critic, admitted that he no longer reads critics’ work. “Today, I don’t know anyone,” he said (in a translation of his remarks, first published in French). “I’m told, ‘Manohla Dargis, she’s excellent.’ But when I ask what are the three movies she loved and the three she hated in the last few years, no one can answer me. Because they don’t care!”

This is probably because Rotten Tomatoes — with help from Yelp, Goodreads, and countless other review aggregators — has desensitized us to the opinions of individual critics. Once upon a time, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert turned the no-budget documentary Hoop Dreams into a phenomenon using only their thumbs. But critical power like that has been replaced by the collective voice of the masses. A third of U.S. adults say they check Rotten Tomatoes before going to the multiplex, and while movie ads used to tout the blurbage of Jeffrey Lyons and Peter Travers, now they’re more likely to boast that a film has been “Certified Fresh.”…

(2) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to munch on a monstrous fish sandwich with Michael Bailey in Episode 206 of his Eating the Fantastic podcast.

Michael Bailey

This might be my most horrific conversation yet! Not merely because of my guest — but because certain scenes from Night of the Living Dead were shot in the basement of our chosen venue, The Original Oyster House!

Michael Bailey is an award-winning writer and editor, having been nominated for a Bram Stoker Award nine times, winning once for the anthology The Library of the Dead, and a four-time Shirley Jackson Award nominee. His novels include Palindrome Hannah (2005) and Phoenix Rose (2009). His short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies, including Birthing Monsters: Frankenstein’s Cabinet of Curiosities and Cruelties, Lost Highways: Dark Fictions from the Road, Canopic Jars: Tales of Mummies and Mummification, and most recently Hybrid: Misfits, Monsters and Other Phenomena.

Many of these stories have been gathered in the collections Scales and Petals (2010), Inkblots and Blood Spots (2014), Oversight (2018), and The Impossible Weight of Life (2020). He’s the owner of the small press Written Backwards, which has published many excellent anthologies, and I’m not calling them excellent simply because my own short stories have appeared in many of them. He’s currently the screenwriter for the documentary series Madness and Writers: The Untold Truth. Maybe?, which all of us in the horror community are looking forward to seeing.

We discussed his Stoker Award-nominated poetry collaboration with Marge Simon (and how they managed not to kill each other during the writing of it), how he knows when a poem is a poem and not a short story, what reading other anthologies taught him that made his own anthologies better, the economics of small press publishing, how to lose awards gracefully, the way getting an early story torn apart by Douglas E. Winter at Borderlands Boot Camp gave him the boost he needed, why his novel Psychotropic Dragon took 16 years to transform from an idea into a book, how one of the joys of writing is never knowing the end until you get there, his new obsession of making chocolate from fruit to bar, our shared love of revising continually, and so much more.

(3) SAAVIK JUSTICE WARRIOR. Charlie Jane Anders is back with “7 Hot Takes About Star Trek” at Happy Dancing. I second this motion:

4. We need a Saavik TV show or movie.

I understand why Jean-Luc Picard became the first Star Trek character to headline a TV series — because after all, Patrick Stewart is a beloved figure, even to extremely casual Trek fans. But when I think about Star Trek characters who both need and deserve to be explored further in long-form storytelling, my mind goes to Saavik. Even in a film as overstuffed with goodness as Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan, Saavik stands out as one of the most interesting characters: an ambitious young Vulcan who looks up to Spock while also striving to embody the Starfleet values that Kirk often overlooks (because they come in the form of regulations.) Later, there are hints that she’s half-Romulan. The treatment of Saavik after Wrath of Khan is one of the worst travesties in Star Trek history: first, she helps the rejuvenated but rapidly-aging Spock through a slew of pon-farrs, then she’s tossed aside. Saavik is basically transformed into one of many plot devices in a clunky movie that only exists to bring Leonard Nimoy back to the franchise he’d been so eager to escape. Saavik was supposed to return in Star Trek VI as a traitor to the Federation, but she was replaced by Valeris. I have so many questions about this character: Does she have Spock’s baby? Why didn’t she go with Kirk and the others in Star Trek IV? How does she approach her return to the Federation after everything she went through? Justice for Saavik!

(4) DRAWN THAT WAY. BBC Culture analyzes “The legacy of Star Trek: The Animated Series, 50 years on”.

On a remote planet, the Guardian of Forever sits, a passageway through time to other realities, locations, dimensions. All of a sudden, Captain Kirk comes through the portal, with Spock close behind him, fresh from an adventure observing the beginnings of the Orion civilisation. There’s just one problem: Dr Bones McCoy has no idea who Spock is – and neither does anyone else on the starship USS Enterprise.  

This scene, from an episode called Yesteryear, doesn’t feature in any of the five core Star Trek series. The Original Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise are modern classics that contain unending nostalgia for fans, but there’s another early Star Trek show that many people overlook – Star Trek: The Animated Series. It ran for just 20 episodes. Its status, and specifically whether it’s considered part of the “canon”, is uncertain. But it has an important legacy, bringing animation in as a key part of the franchise as well as keeping Star Trek in people’s minds during an in-between era, much like the one we’re entering now….

(5) BAD REVIEWS. Mark Roth-Whitworth’s “Bad reviews, good and bad” is about what make a bad review poorly written — it’s not about the review, it’s about style and form.

…I’ve always heard that any publicity is good publicity, but that’s not always the case… and not all bad reviews are equal….

…A legitimate bad review follows the kind of review that most are, dealing with things like writing, worldbuilding, etc. The bad review I looked at violated two basic rules…

(6) DEEP DIVE ON AI AND COPYRIGHT. “Potential Supreme Court clash looms over copyright issues in generative AI training data” at VentureBeat.

… The question is: How did we get here? How did the trillions of data points at the core of generative AI become a toxin of sorts that, depending on your point of view and the decision of the highest judicial authority, could potentially hobble an industry destined for incredible innovation, or poison the well of human creativity and consent?…

… But whether AI researchers creating and using datasets for model training thought about it or not, there is no doubt that the data underpinning generative AI — which can arguably be described as its secret sauce — includes vast amounts of copyrighted material, from books and Reddit posts to YouTube videos, newspaper articles and photos. However, copyright critics and some legal experts insist this falls under what is known in legal parlance as “fair use” of the data — that is, U.S. copyright law “permits limited use of copyrighted material without having to first acquire permission from the copyright holder.”… 

… However, the concept of “fair use” is based on a four-factor test — four measures that judges consider when evaluating whether a work is “transformative” or simply a copy: the purpose and character of the work, the nature of the work, the amount taken from the original work, and the effect of the new work on a potential market. That fourth factor is the key to how generative AI really differs, say experts, because it aims to assess whether the use of the copyrighted material has the potential to negatively impact the commercial value of the original work or impede opportunities for the copyright holder to exploit their work in the market — which is exactly what artists, authors, journalists and other creative professionals claim. 

“The Handmaid’s Tale” author Margaret Atwood, who discovered that 33 of her books were part of the Books3 dataset, explained this concern bluntly in a recent Atlantic essay: 

“Once fully trained, the bot may be given a command—’Write a Margaret Atwood novel’—and the thing will glurp forth 50,000 words, like soft ice cream spiraling out of its dispenser, that will be indistinguishable from something I might grind out. (But minus the typos.) I myself can then be dispensed with—murdered by my replica, as it were—because, to quote a vulgar saying of my youth, who needs the cow when the milk’s free?”…

(7) MISSION IMPERTURBABLE. Here are links to four more installments of Cass Morris’ diary from her adventures on Disney’s Star Wars-themed Starship Halcyon.

…Noah and I started at Weapons, which was simple but very satisfying: I was aiming, Noah was firing. I really can’t overstate how cool it is to play the game on that enormous viewport. It’s very easy to forget you’re not actually in space, firing lasers. From there we moved to Shields (I think; I may have steps 2 and 3 backwards in my brain), which is essentially playing Pong, but it’s also so satisfying. We both liked this station best — which apparently is an unusual choice? But we were very good at it. (This would be important later). Loaders was a bit like weapons, with one of us moving and the other grabbing cargo out of space. Then Systems was the hardest by far — but I think my second-favorite station. The display tosses up a sequence of positions that the console’s various dials, buttons, and toggles need to be in, and you have to match it as fast as possible to keep the ship in good repair. That station was manic. There are so many buttons. It was genuinely hard to keep track of them! But hard in a fun way….

Followed by —

(8) EXERTING A SPELL. The one book that makes the £50,000 Wolfson Prize Shortlist worth noting here is Portable Magic A History of Books and their Readers.

Portable Magic unfurls an exciting and iconoclastic new story of the book in human hands, exploring when, why and how it acquired its particular hold over us. Gathering together a millennium’s worth of pivotal encounters with volumes big and small, Smith reveals that, as much as their contents, it is books’ physical form – their ‘bookhood’ – that lends them their distinctive and sometimes dangerous magic. From the Diamond Sutra to Jilly Cooper’s Riders, to a book made of wrapped slices of cheese, this composite artisanal object has, for centuries, embodied and extended relationships between readers, nations, ideologies and cultures, in significant and unpredictable ways.

Exploring the unexpected and unseen consequences of our love affair with books, Portable Magic hails the rise of the mass-market paperback, and dismantles the myth that print began with Gutenberg; it reveals how our reading habits have been shaped by American soldiers, and proposes new definitions of a ‘classic’-and even of the book itself. Ultimately, it illuminates the ways in which our relationship with the written word is more reciprocal – and more turbulent – than we tend to imagine.

(9) BROOKLYN SCIFI FILM FESTIVAL. The 135 short and feature length films selected for screening at this year’s Brooklyn SciFi Film Festival are listed at the link above. The festival runs October 9 through the 15, and fans from around the world are welcome to join this one-of-a-kind event as all films will be made available online for streaming and rating through Brooklyn SciFi’s Netflix style festival platform. 

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born September 8, 1925 — Peter Sellers. Chief Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther films which are genre. Of course, he had the tour de force acting experience of being Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, President Merkin Muffley and Dr. Strangelove in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. He also took multiple roles (even the Queen) in The Mouse That Roared. Amusingly he was involved many folk tale productions in various mediums (film, radio, stage) including Cinderella, Tom Thumb, Mother Goose and Jack and The Beanstalk. (Died 1980.)
  • Born September 8, 1937 — Archie Goodwin. Comics writer and editor with a very long career. He was the writer and editor of the horror Creepy and Eerie anthologies, the first writer on the Iron Man series, wrote comic book adaptations for Marvel of the two Star Wars sequels and edited the Star Wars line for them. For DC, he edited Starman which Robinson said he was inspiration for. (Died 1998.)
  • Born September 8, 1945 — Willard Huyck, 78. He’s got a long relationship with Lucas, first writing American Graffiti and being the script doctor on Star Wars before writing Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom before being the writer and director on Howard the Duck which, yes, is a Lucasfilm. It’s the lowest rated on Rotten Tomatos Lucasfilm production ever at 15% followed by Radioland Murders, the last script he’d write for Lucasfilm.  
  • Born September 8, 1952 — Linda D. Addison, 71. First Black winner of the Stoker Award which she has won five times which is rather amazing. Equally amazing, the first two awards were for her poetry collections Consumed, Reduced to Beautiful Grey Ashes and Being Full of Light, Insubstantial. Indeed all five of her Awards were to be for poetry collections. She also is the author of the story “Shadow Dreams”, published in the Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda anthology.
  • Born September 8, 1954 — Mark Lindsay Chapman, 69. Sorry DCU but the best Swamp Thing series was done nearly thirty years ago and starred the late Dick Durock as Swamp Thing and this actor as his chief antagonist, Dr. Anton Arcane. Short on CGI, but the scripts were brilliant. Chapman has also shown up in Poltergeist: The Legacy, The New Adventures of Superman, The Langoliers and Max Headroom to name a few of his genre appearances.
  • Born September 8, 1965 — Matt Ruff, 58. I think that his Sewer, Gas & Electric: The Public Works Trilogy is his best work to date though I do like Fool on The Hill a lot. Any others of his I should think about reading? And of course there is the adaptation of Lovecraft Country which I’ve not seen as I don’t have HBO. He won an Otherwise Award for Set This House in Order: A Romance of Souls, and an Endeavour Award for The Lovecraft Country.
  • Born September 8, 1975 — C. Robert Cargill, 48. He, along with Scott Derrickson and Jon Spaihts, worked on the script for Doctor Strange. More intriguingly they’re writing the script for The Outer Limits, a movie based on the television show. The film if ever happens, produced by MGM, will be adapted from just the “Demon with a Glass Hand” episode begging the question of what they’re writing for a script given that Ellison did write the Writers Guild of America Awards Outstanding Script for a Television Anthology script. 

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • The Flying McCoys shows the doctor is surprised by results of Dracula’s medical test.

(12) THREE PINTS OF PLOT IN A TEN GALLON HAT. The Guardian’s Stuart Heritage is not an Ahsoka fan: “Oh dear, George Lucas! Why the Star Wars universe is going from bad to worse”.

It must be very complicated being George Lucas. On the one hand, you get to wake up inside a vast Scrooge McDuck money vault every morning. On the other, you have to live with the absolute mess Disney has made of your life’s work. To be George Lucas must be to know that you are indirectly responsible for allowing something as soggy and aimless as Ahsoka to seep into the world.

Ahsoka has now reached its halfway point, with four of its eight episodes aired, and it’s fair to say that literally nothing has happened. We know what’s going to happen, because the characters won’t stop talking about it – they’re going to meet a new baddie who has been banished to a different galaxy and represents an enormous existential threat – but the show is plodding towards it so glacially that it feels as if we may never actually get there. It’s almost (almost!) as if Star Wars realises it has spread itself too thin and is doling out plot one measly quarter-portion at a time….

(13) FILL UP THE THIRD. Simultaneous Times Vol.3, a science fiction anthology, is now available from Space Cowboy Books. Edited by Jean-Paul L. Garnier, with cover art by Austin Hart (Critters Award Winner).

Sixteen wonderous stories of science fiction by authors from all over the world! From alien invasions to sentient plants to intergalactic travelers, this book has it all. Featuring stories from the 2023 Laureate Award winning, and two-time Hugo Award longlisted podcast Simultaneous Times, as well as stories appearing for the first time, this collection spans multiple generations of award-winning science fiction authors and covers a wide variety of SF styles and themes.

Stories by: Jonathan Nevair (Indie Ink Award Finalist); F. J. Bergmann (Writers of the Future Winner); Brent A. Harris (Sidewise Finalist); Gideon Marcus (Hugo Finalist); A. C. Wise (Sunburst Winner); Tara Campbell (Robert Gover Story Prize Winner); David Brin (Hugo Winner); Robin Rose Graves (Laureate Award Finalist); Renan Bernardo (Argos & Utopia Award Finalist); Christopher Ruocchio (Manly Wade Wellman Winner); Toshiya Kamei; Todd Sullivan; Susan Rukeyser; Ai Jiang (Nebula Finalist); Cora Buhlert (Hugo Winner); Michael Butterworth (Laureate Award Winner).

(14) THE TWO-EDGED SWORD OF TRUTH. Talya Zax introduces readers to “The Woman Who Reimagined the Dystopian Novel” in The New Yorker.

…The world of the Swedish writer Karin Boye’s little-known 1940 novel, “Kallocain,” is a close cousin to those depicted in “We” and “Brave New World.” Like Zamyatin’s and Huxley’s dystopias, Boye’s underground World State is a centralized authoritarian society whose inhabitants’ lives are tightly controlled. And, as in these earlier novels, Boye’s closed state is destabilized by the experience of awe. That wonder, however, is sparked by a contact not with the unpredictable and ungovernable external world but with the equally unpredictable and ungovernable reality of human experience—and, specifically, female experience. The women characters in many classic twentieth-century dystopias tend to be flat, mere foils to male protagonists. But in “Kallocain” it is the inner lives of women that come to illustrate both the state’s power over its citizens and their own power to resist….

… Dystopias weaponize what they fear. The World State of “Kallocain” fears truth, and therefore weaponizes truth. It fears familial bonds, so it weaponizes them, too. In her description of that process, Boye articulates a deceptively simple idea: when the state creates a weapon that requires human coöperation, it opens the door to that weapon being used against it….

(15) NOT JUST MOURNING COLORS. “To dye for: why Victorian Britain was more colourful than we think” explains the Guardian.

…A decade earlier, the flamboyant purple dresses made fashionable by the style leader Empress Eugénie of France were the preserve of the fabulously wealthy. Yet in just a few years, colours once made with expensive vegetable dyes were being industrially produced cheaply, thanks to an accidental discovery by an 18-year-old chemistry student William Henry Perkin. While attempting to synthesise quinine from aniline, a derivative of coal tar, Perkin realised the intense purples this colourless chemical produced could be used as a dye. He quickly established a factory for his new “mauveine”, as he called this early synthetic dye and chemists across Europe soon followed suit, expanding the synthetic colour palette. “The modern world of ubiquitous colour begins at this point,” says Winterbottom. “London’s streets and train stations are covered in brightly printed posters. People wear brightly coloured clothes. Everything from books to postage stamps becomes colourful.”

This rainbow transformation affected the entire social spectrum, from a working class who were now able to afford bright colours to members of the social elite rethinking their wardrobes. “Women asserted a more emboldened identity through colour,” says Winterbottom. In addition to loud dresses, ankles sporting coloured and striped stockings could be flashed thanks to newly swinging steel-hooped crinoline petticoats, which replaced the layers of fabric that previously helped to fill out skirts….

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Francis Hamit, Jeff Smith, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jeff Smith.]

Pixel Scroll 8/30/23 And The Pixels That Mother Gives You Don’t Do Anything At All

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(1) COURT DECISION CURBS A LONGTIME COPYRIGHT REQUIREMENT. [Item by Anne Marble.] In 2018, print-on-demand publisher Valancourt Books sued the U.S. Copyright Office because of the “mandatory deposit” requirement — which required the publisher to send U.S. Copyright Office copies of about 240 of the books they publish. They didn’t have the books on hand and would have had to spend several thousand dollars to produce them. Valancourt faced the possibility of as much as $100,000 in fines.

The legal issues were analyzed by the plaintiff’s law firm Institute for Justice in a 2021 article “Unique Richmond Publisher Will Appeal After D.C. Judge Insists It Must Give the Government Free Copies of Its Books”.

Valancourt is a unique publisher run by James and his husband Ryan Cagle. James is a former lawyer who found his life’s calling reviving and popularizing rare, neglected and out-of-print fiction, including 18th century Gothic novels, Victorian horror novels, forgotten literary fiction and works by early LGBT authors. Founded in 2005, Valancourt has published more than 300 books, all of which they have permission to reprint, winning praise from literature professors and the press alike.

The U.S. Copyright Office is demanding copies of hundreds of books published by Valancourt. If Valancourt doesn’t send the books, they could be subject to fines of $250 per book (plus the retail price of the books), along with additional fines of $2,500 for “willful” failure to deposit the books. But there’s a problem: Valancourt doesn’t have the books. They are a print-on-demand publisher, and giving the federal government free books would damage their business.

An earlier Forbes article (“Why Is The Federal Government Threatening An Indie Book Publisher With $100,000 In Fines?” (2018) also explained:

…[M]andatory deposit was originally required if an owner wanted their works protected by copyright. That requirement was upheld as constitutional by the Supreme Court—in 1834….

Valancourt lost at the District Court level but won at the U.S. Appeals Court level (read the decision here). Reuters covered the victory: “US appeals court curbs Copyright Office’s mandatory deposit policy”. The Copyright Office says they are reviewing the decision.

(2) BIG GREEN NUMBERS. The Hollywood Reporter passes this on with a grain of salt: “’Ahsoka’ Series Premiere Gets Big Ratings, Disney+ Says”.

Disney+ is breaking with its usual practice to share some (strong) viewing numbers for the premiere of its latest Star Wars series, Ahsoka.

According to the streamer, the first episode of the series, starring Rosario Dawson as the titular Jedi, has racked up 14 million views worldwide in the five days after its Aug. 23 debut. Disney+ is using the same methodology for counting a “view” that Netflix has employed for the past couple of months — dividing the total viewing time by the run time for a given title.

In Ahsoka’s case, 14 million views of the 56-minute premiere episode would equate to 784 million minutes of viewing worldwide. “Views” doesn’t necessarily equal “viewers,” however, as the total viewing time doesn’t necessarily account for multiple people watching the show together or a single person watching the episode several times. Disney+ also didn’t release any figures for episode two of Ahsoka, which also premiered Aug. 23.

(3) PRATCHETT PROJECT EVENT. “Terry Pratchett at the Unseen University”, featuring a series of short presentations from researchers of various disciplines, is an in-person and virtual event happening September 22. Tickets available at the link.

The Pratchett Project in Trinity College Dublin is an interdisciplinary platform for research into the life and works of Terry Pratchett. It builds on the comprehensive collection of Pratchett’s works and their translations into forty languages, held in the Trinity College Library, as well as Pratchett’s personal connection with the College, borne out of the adjunct professorship he held from 2010. A further part of this endeavour is driven by Pratchett’s own life story and inclinations. In 2007, Pratchett publicly announced that he had a rare form of young-onset Alzheimer’s disease, called posterior cortical atrophy. He subsequently became a passionate campaigner who was determined to reduce the stigma of dementia. A docudrama on BBC followed the literary career and charitable work of the beloved author.

So, research into brain health is an important part of the Pratchett Project in Trinity College. We are currently developing this strand of the project to find new ways in which the implications of breakthroughs in research can be “translated” for members of the public. We aim to bring people together from various backgrounds and fields to make new connections, to promote public understanding and awareness, to change perceptions and inspire people to support brain awareness campaigns and get involved.

This Culture Night, we will be joined by a wide range of speakers, each discussing their research, which is in some way connected to the life and/or work of Terry Pratchett.

THIS EVENT CAN BE ATTENDED BOTH ONLINE AND IN PERSON.

IT WILL ALSO BE RECORDED AND UPLOADED TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL

(4) AVOID TOO MUCH INFORMATION. Sarah A. Hoyt speaks with the voice of experience in “Starting Your Novel and Need to Know” at Mad Genius Club.

…Anyway, one thing that is becoming painfully obvious as I read people’s beginnings of novels, is that most of you have no idea how much information and world building to put in the beginning of your book.

This is not strange or unusual. I not only went through years of having this issue, but I also revert to this issue whenever I have not written for a long while.

When I fail I have two modes: either I write completely incomprehensible stuff or I write an opening that reads like you’re in a classroom and I’m expecting you to take notes.

But there is a way to handle it. I only figured it with Darkship Thieves, and only after breaking it pretty badly with an extra fifty pages in the beginning.

Anyway, so, what do you need to tell the reader: no more and no less than the reader needs to know.….

(5) GENRE WORK UP FOR KIRKUS PRIZE. The Kirkus Prize announced finalists across three categories, with winners to be named on October 11. The Fiction category shortlist includes White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link and Shaun Tan. Literary Hub explains how the award works.

The Kirkus Prize is one of the richest annual literary awards in the world with the prizes totaling $150,000. Writers become eligible by receiving a rare, starred review from Kirkus Reviews; this year’s 18 finalists were chosen from 608 young readers’ literature titles, 435 fiction titles, and 435 nonfiction titles….

(6) HUANG Q&A. “Reading with… S.L. Huang” at Shelf Awareness.

On your nightstand now: 

I don’t actually have a nightstand, but next to my bed or currently on my phone are:

The Search for E.T. Bell: Also Known as John Taine by Constance Reid. It’s the biography of mathematician Eric Temple Bell, who wrote Radium Age science fiction under the pen name John Taine, and it is WILD, because this man?? completely made up??? his entire life??? I read it because I’m writing an intro to a rerelease of his fiction, but his life is fascinating. I love reading about mathematicians!

Lost Ark Dreaming, a novella by Suyi Davies Okungbowa, which I was lucky enough to be sent an advance copy of. I haven’t started this one yet, but I’m looking forward to it!

Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, which is Wole Talabi’s debut novel–another advanced copy I’m super excited to start reading! I’ve really enjoyed Wole’s short fiction.

And finally, I’m also currently part of a book club reading this podcast version of Romance of the Three Kingdoms: 3kingdomspodcast.com . We’ve been at it a year, and we’re about a third of the way through! It’s a very, very long book.

(7) THE ART OF ZARDOZ. The Hugo Book Club Blog improved on a meme about good art vs. bad art that has been getting a lot of attention. Their table is effing brilliant. Or zeeing brilliant. You decide.

(8) WITH EXTRA ADDED BRAIN. At Galactic Journey, Victoria Silverworlf explains a fact of TV life in 1968: “[August 30, 1968] TV or Not TV, That is The Question (They Saved Hitler’s Brain and Mars Needs Women)”.

Not all movies show up in theaters. Movies made for television began a few years ago, at least here in the USA, with a thriller called See How They Run. There have been quite a few since then.

A similar phenomenon is the fact that theatrical movies are frequently altered for television. Of course, films are often cut for broadcast, either to reduce the running time or to remove material deemed inappropriate for the tender sensibilities of American viewers.

But did you know that new footage is sometimes added to movies before they show up on TV? That’s because they’re too short to fill up the time slot allotted to them.

An example is Roger Corman’s cheap little monster movie The Wasp Woman. In theaters, it ran just over an hour. On television, new scenes increased the length by about ten minutes.

Wasting time in front of the TV screen recently, I came across such an elongated theatrical film, as well as one made for television only. Let’s take a look at both.

They Saved Hitler’s Brain

This thing began life in 1963 under the a much less laughable title….

(9) MEMORY LANE

1991 – [Written by Cat Eldridge from a choice by Mike Glyer.]

To my thinking, there are two great fictional uses of the Babbage Machine that Charles Babbage designed but never built. Oh, and the first complete Babbage Engine was constructed in London in 2002, one hundred and fifty three years after it was designed. So what are those novels?

One is S.M Stirling’s The Peshawar Lancers in which the British Empire decamps to India after meteor strikes usher in a new ice age. That novel and his Sky People novels, particularly In the Courts of the Crimson Kings, are my favorite works by him.

Then there’s the one our Beginning comes from which is William Gibson & Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine, their name for The Babbage Machine. It was published by Gollancz thirty-three years ago with cover art by Ian Miller.

It was nominated for a number of Awards but didn’t win any. The nominations were a BSFA, a John W. Campbell Memorial Award, a Nebula and a Prix Aurora.

It is at the usual suspects as a Meredith Moment. 

And now, as I don’t want to give a single message generated by The Difference Engine, is our Beginning…

THE ANGEL OF GOLIAD

Composite image, optically encoded by escort-craft of the trans-Channel airship Lord Brunel: aerial view of suburban Cherbourg, October 14, 1905.

A villa, a garden, a balcony.

Erase the balcony’s wrought-iron curves, exposing a bath-chair and its occupant. Reflected sunset glints from the nickel-plate of the chair’s wheel-spokes.

The occupant, owner of the villa, rests her arthritic hands upon fabric woven by a Jacquard loom.

These hands consist of tendons, tissue, jointed bone. Through quiet processes of time and information, threads within the human cells have woven themselves into a woman.

Her name is Sybil Gerard.

Below her, in a neglected formal garden, leafless vines lace wooden trellises on whitewashed, flaking walls. From the open windows of her sickroom, a warm draft stirs the loose white hair at her neck, bringing scents of coal-smoke, jasmine, opium.

Her attention is fixed upon the sky, upon a silhouette of vast and irresistible grace—metal, in her lifetime, having taught itself to fly. In advance of that magnificence, tiny unmanned aeroplanes dip and skirl against the red horizon.

Like starlings, Sybil thinks.

The airship’s lights, square golden windows, hint at human warmth. “Effortlessly, with the incomparable grace of organic function, she imagines a distant music there, the music of London: the passengers promenade, they drink, they flirt, perhaps they dance.

Thoughts come unbidden, the mind weaving its perspectives, assembling meaning from emotion and memory.

She recalls her life in London. Recalls herself, so long ago, making her way along the Strand, pressing past the crush at Temple Bar. Pressing on, the city of Memory winding itself about her—till, by the walls on Newgate, the shadow of her father’s hanging falls …

And Memory turns, deflected swift as light, down another byway—one where it is always evening….

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born August 30, 1797 — Mary Shelley. Author of Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818), her first novel. Another of Shelley’s novels, The Last Man (1826), concerns Europe in the late 21st century, ravaged by a mysterious pandemic illness that rapidly sweeps across the entire globe, ultimately resulting in the near-extinction of humanity. Scholars call it one of the first pieces of dystopian fiction published. (OGH) (Died 1851.)
  • Born August 30, 1942 — Judith Moffett, 81. Editor and academic. She won the first Theodore Sturgeon Award with her story “Surviving” and the fame gained for her Pennterra novel helped her win John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer at Nolacon II. Asimov wrote an introduction for the book and published it under his Isaac Asimov Presents series.  Her Holy Ground series of The Ragged World: A Novel of the Hefn on Earth, Time, Like an Ever-Rolling Stream: A Sequel to the Ragged World and The Bird Shaman are her other genre novels. The Bear’s Babys And Other Stories collects her genre short stories. All of her works are surprisingly available at the usual digital suspects.
  • Born August 30, 1943 — Robert Crumb, 80. He’s here because ISFDB lists him as the illustrator of The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick which is likely they say an interview that Dick did with Gregg Rickman and published in Rickman’s The Last Testament. They’re also listing the cover art for Edward Abby’s The Monkey Wrench Gang which I think is genre.
  • Born August 30, 1955 — Jeannette Holloman. She was one of the founding members of the Greater Columbia Costumers Guild and she was a participant at masquerades at Worldcon, CostumeCon, and other conventions. Her costumes were featured in The Costume Makers Art and Thread magazine. She’s here in the gold outfit that she designed and made at Costume-Con 9 which was held February 15-18, 1991 at The Columbia Inn in Columbia, Maryland. (Died 2019.)
  • Born August 30, 1955 — Mark Kelly, born 1955, aged sixty eight years. He maintains the indispensable Science Fiction Awards Database (SFADB), which we consult almost daily. He wrote reviews for Locus in the Nineties, then founded the Locus Online website in 1997 and ran it single-handedly for 20 years, along the way winning the Best Website Hugo (2002). More recently he’s devised a way to use his awards data to rank the all-time “Top SF/F/H Short Stories” and “Top SF/F/H Novelettes”. Kelly’s explanation of how the numbers are crunched is here. (OGH)
  • Born August 30, 1965 — Laeta Kalogridis, 58. She was an executive producer of the short-lived not so great Birds of Prey series and she co-wrote the screenplays for Terminator Genisys and Alita: Battle Angel. She recently was the creator and executive producer of Altered Carbon. She also has a screenwriting credit for Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, a film the fanboys hate but which I really like. 
  • Born August 30, 1972 — Cameron Diaz, 51. She first shows as Tina Carlyle in The Mask, an amazing film. She voices Princess Fiona in the Shrek franchise. While dating Tom Cruise, she’s cast as an uncredited bus passenger in Minority Report.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • Brewster Rockit has an inside comics joke, and it’s a hoot.
  • Tom Gauld, meanwhile, has an inside physics joke.

(12) A BIG FAN, EVENTUALLY. Peter Stone shows the evolution of one comics artist’s respect for another: “Mapping Out NEAL ADAMS’ Enduring Respect and Admiration for JACK KIRBY” at 13th Dimension, Comics, Creators, Culture.

Like many of us, Neal was not a big fan of Jack Kirby’s art when he was younger. In fact, Neal thought very little about Kirby’s art. IN FACT, Neal kind of hated it…

The transformation of Adams’ opinion began here:

…[Challengers of the Unknown]  Issue #4! Chapter 4, “The Mechanical Judge”! The splash page was exactly what Neal was looking for. It had changed the way Neal viewed Jack Kirby when he was just getting into comics. Jack was writing and pencilling these stories and this was Neal’s Dream. His theory was always that artists should be writing their stories. They understood storytelling better than writers, according to Neal. A writer was there to add dialogue and that was “the icing on the cake.” But, in this case, it was the splash page image that blew his mind.

It was all about perspective. Kirby had drawn a futuristic, sci-fi building where the reader can see the bottom, middle and top clearly. The middle of the building is the focus and closest to the reader. However the top of the building AND the bottom of the building curve away and get smaller. Neal would always say it’s wrong but absolutely fascinating. Neal once drew a couple other examples of what Kirby was doing with perspective. The first is a boat with three men in it where the front of the boat comes to a point and the back end of the boat does the same. The widest spot is the middle section. Neal viewed it very much like a cinematic technique; a fish-eye lens that adds drama to the image….

…When Neal was 27 in the late ’60s, he started to realize how unique Kirby was. Fantastic Four was obviously a heightened version of the Challengers. Then, the Hulk, the Avengers, the (almost throwaway) X-Men, Ant-Man, Thor, Black Panther, a revised Captain America and so many others. Neal drew Deadman, Green Lantern/Green Arrow, Batman, Avengers, the X-Men and so much more while Jack Kirby was changing the comic universe. Neal saw that every page of a Jack Kirby comic had a boldly new idea that someone else could explore and turn into a regular series….

(13) THANKED AND EXCUSED. The actress that Carrie Fisher beat out for her Star Wars role — Terri Nunn — still went on to fame: “’Star Wars’ Princess Leia Runner-Up Wound Up Becoming A Famous Musician” at Slashfilm.

…Lucas said, “Your runner-up? She became a rockstar.” That runner-up was Terri Nunn, the lead singer of the band Berlin, who brought us songs like “Take My Breath Away” and “Metro.” In fact, Nunn’s audition with Harrison Ford is out there (via WishItWas1984) on YouTube. Nunn brought a softness to the part that is very different than Fisher’s interpretation. Frankly, I’m in awe of both of them for making what, at the time, was space gibberish sound compelling.

Nunn spoke about the audition in a 2022 interview with Rave It Up. She said, “I’m sitting there with Harrison Ford, and we’re reading these lines, and I had no idea what the hell is an R2-D2. I don’t know what that is. But I was trying to make it happen.” Nunn would go on to act in projects like “T.J. Hooker,” “Lou Grant,” and “Vega$,” but Fisher just nailed that audition….

(14) HOOCH YOU CAN FIND IN THE DARK. If It’s Hip It’s Here introduces oenophiles to “The latest in global design and creativity”.

The 19 Crimes x Universal Monsters Glow-In-The-Dark Wine Bottles are a must have for lovers of old classic monster movies and Halloween. The wine brand 19 Crimes has launched 2 new wines; a Frankenstein Cabernet Sauvignon and a Dracula Red Blend, both with illustrated labels that illuminate when the lights are out.

… The Frankenstein Cabernet, vintage 2021, is firm and full with a rich mouth feel. Aromatics of dark berries, violets and vanilla….

… The Dracula Red Blend, vintage 2021, is rich and round with a soft fruity finish. Sweet aromatics with notes of chocolate….

The place to buy them is at the 19 Crimes website.

(15) CYBERATTACKS ON TELESCOPES. “Hackers shut down 2 of the world’s most advanced telescopes” at Space.com.

Some of the world’s leading astronomical observatories have reported cyberattacks that have resulted in temporary shutdowns.

The National Science Foundation’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory, or NOIRLab, reported that a cybersecurity incident that occurred on Aug. 1 has prompted the lab to temporarily halt operations at its Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii and Gemini South Telescope in Chile. Other, smaller telescopes on Cerro Tololo in Chile were also affected. 

… “We plan to provide the community with more information when we are able to, in alignment with our commitment to transparency as well as our dedication to the security of our infrastructure,” the update added. 

The cyberattacks on NOIRLab’s facilities occurred just days before the United States National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC) issued a bulletin advising American space companies and research organizations about the threat of cyberattacks and espionage. …

(16) WHAT HAS IT GOT ON ITS SPROCKETSES? “Chandrayaan-3: What has India’s Moon rover Pragyaan been up to since landing?” BBC News overviews the rover’s first week of activity.

…Over the past few days, the rover has been hard at work.

On Tuesday evening, Isro said that a laser detector onboard had made “the first-ever in-situ – in the original space – measurements on the elemental composition of the surface near the south pole” and found a host of chemicals, including sulphur and oxygen, on lunar soil.

The instrument “unambiguously confirms” the presence of sulphur, it said, adding that preliminary analysis also “unveiled the presence of aluminium, calcium, iron, chromium, titanium, manganese, silicon and oxygen”.

“A thorough investigation regarding the presence of hydrogen is underway,” it added….

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George’s “Game of Thrones Season 8 Pitch Meeting – Revisited!” is something you may have seen before. There’s some new content at the very end, and his explanation of how he decided which viewer questions to answer is worth skipping ahead to.

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

Implications of the Thaler vs Perlmutter Decision. Can You Use Artificial Intelligence in Your Writing?

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[Introduction: Francis Hamit, currently running a Kickstarter appeal for Starmen: A Novel, wrote this article as one of the Updates. He’s given File 770 permission to reprint it.]

By Francis Hamit: Not even God can get a Copyright. That’s one of the takeaways from Thaler vs. Perlmutter.  Thaler wanted to register an image generated by a computer program he devised.  Perlmutter, who runs the Copyright Office at the Library of Congress, said no.  Only works made by humans can get copyright protection.  Your pet monkey pounding away on a computer keyboard might produce something brilliant that everyone wants to buy but you won’t be able to protect it from infringement.   Likewise anything from a celestial being also falls into the Public Domain. Only work that is the result of human creativity can be protected.

Francis Hamit

Copyright is a global law through various treaties so registration here protects your work in most but not all markets. It lasts a very long time and is about the money and controlling who gets to publish, display, distribute and  adapt original work.

ChatGPT may seem like a brilliant innovation to some but all it really is is a very sophisticated computer program with a huge database.  Even then it has to be trained by humans before it gets those amazing results.  The “ghost in the machine” is us.  (Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.)

To be a real writer you have to be real.  You have to do your own work.  Artificial Intelligence is just that; artificial.   And it shows in recent AI submissions submitted by quick buck artists to magazines in the science fiction field.  There were so many that they closed down the submissions window.   Easily detected and easily dismissed but still a drag on the process because they had to be dealt with.  

I recommend that everyone register their copyrights.  Forget about that mail it to yourself nonsense.  Go online and pay the fees but understand that all you are protecting is the expression, the arrangement of the words, not the idea behnd the words. And all you have is the right to sue some person you think has infringed your work in a Federal District Court.  

I’ve done this and don’t recommend it unless there is life-changing money at stake.  You have to prove the case and the Federal Courts hate copyright cases with a passion. Why? There is the Law, which is simple.  Black Letter as they say.  And then there are the Facts and those are incredibly complicated.

Most cases settle before they get to trial.  Mine did but it took four years and thousands of dollars and thousands of hours before I got paid.  How much I’m not allowed to say.  The Judgment is Sealed.

The Thaler vs.  Perlmutter decision sets a precedent.  Any taint of A.I. in your text can void your copyright registration.  But the judge left open the use of A.I. as a tool similar to a spellchecker as long as that original spark of creativity is preserved.  If you use A.I. to transform your short story into a screenplay is that simply a derivative work?  Will the original copyright registration stretch to cover it? Ask yourself this:  Which is easier? Learning how to write that screenplay yourself or defending your A.I. generated version in Federal Court? 

Pixel Scroll 8/20/23 But Can He Put A Brick To Sleep Through Hypnosis?

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(1) MAINE PAPER INTERVIEWS LIADEN CREATORS. “Waterville authors’ marriage has stood the test of time – and deadlines”, in the Portland, ME Press-Herald.

In the days when they were trying to build their careers as science fiction writers, Sharon Lee and Steve Miller had multiple jobs to pay the bills, and a shared typewriter.

Lee remembers going off to work at the paper mill in Skowhegan during the day and leaving whatever she had written in the typewriter for Miller, so he could pick up where she left off when he came home from his overnight shift at a Cumberland Farms.

“We just left the paper in the typewriter for whoever was home to work on the book,” said Lee, 70. “We had a deadline to meet, it was a necessity.”

Some 35 years later, Lee and Miller still write science fiction novels together, but with the luxury of time and space. Both write full-time and each have their own writing office, at opposite ends of their ranch house in Waterville. Nowadays, they sometimes leave finished pages on the dining room table for the other to read over. They’ve collaborated on some 100 stories and books over the years, including 25 novels in the popular Liaden Universe series.

The most recent book in the series, “Salvage Right,” went on sale in July and debuted at No. 2 on book publishing industry data provider BookScan’s science fiction list. It was published by Baen Books and distributed by Simon & Schuster. Their first book came out in 1988, the year they moved to Maine from Baltimore. The couple has been married since 1980.

“They are two very intelligent, creative people playing off each other, and there’s a huge element of trust in the way they work. You can’t tell which ones Sharon took the lead on or which ones Steve did,” said Toni Weisskopf, the publisher at Baen Books. “There have been some husband-and-wife collaborations in science fiction, but for a couple to work together this long and for their marriage to remain successful is probably unique.”…

(2) CHENGDU WORLDCON TAKING APPLICATIONS FOR FAN TABLES. The Chengdu Worldcon (October 18-22) is now accepting requests from those who want to run Fan Tables. The deadline to apply is August 31 at 5:00 p.m. (Beijing Time). Detailed information is in the 2023 Chengdu Worldcon Exhibition Brochure. The contact email is [email protected].

…As one of the most important parts of a Worldcon, the exhibition is an excellent platform for global fannish groups to experience science fiction culture from various community and communicate and exchange science fiction ideas and perspectives. This year, we have set up an area of over 5,000 sqm exhibition space which composed with industries and fannish groups related to science fiction genre. You can find exhibitors featuring the content of science fiction lifestyle, arts, films, publishing, games, popular science and culture and tourism along with Fan Table, Dealer’s Room and the Future Worldcons. Now we are pleased to announce the open of application for the exhibition, however, due to the limited space and table, we have to approve the application in a manner of first come first get.

(3) ALL BRADBURY, ALL THE TIME. The Library of America interviewed Jonathan Eller, editor of  The Illustrated Man, The October Country, Other Stories, which gathers two of Ray Bradbury’s celebrated collections and twenty-seven other stories. Eller is the author of the definitive, three-volume Ray Bradbury biography (Becoming Ray Bradbury, Ray Bradbury Unbound, Bradbury Beyond Apollo) and the general editor of the Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury and The New Bradbury Review. “Jonathan R. Eller on Ray Bradbury’s journey from the pulps to the slicks”.

Jonathan R. Eller: Throughout World War II, Ray Bradbury published in the genre pulps by way of his first New York agent, Julius Schwartz. His success with off-trail stories in the pages of Weird Tales came first, as he slowly developed a style to match his tales of strange children and eccentric supernatural creatures that bore little resemblance to the conventional vampires, ghosts, and werewolves usually featured in the supernatural pulps.

By 1945 he had found another reading audience through the crime fiction pulps, again creating unconventional characters who blurred the boundaries between rational, neurotic, and psychotic behavior. All along he had also been publishing in the science fiction magazines with limited success, hampered to some degree by an anxiety of influence and the virtual lack of any background in the sciences or technologies that stimulated many other writers in the field.

Nevertheless, Bradbury was already developing his own distinctive, metaphor-rich style, and genre mentors such as Leigh Brackett, Edmond Hamilton, and Henry Kuttner helped him discover his true strengths as a writer. Bradbury always believed that his subconscious was the key to original ideas, and by the mid-1940s he realized, on some level, that his strengths were not in imagining the experiences of others, but in telling stories that came from the emotional responses to life found in the mind of a child, and the mind of the adult that the child would become. These subjects he knew well….

(4) I’VE HEARD THAT SONG BEFORE. “Rod Serling Committed Plagiarism In The Twilight Zone – By Accident” – Slashfilm explains what they mean by that.

The pilot episode for Rod Serling’s seminal sci-fi TV series “The Twilight Zone” was called “Where Is Everybody?,” and it aired on October 2, 1959. It was directed by Robert Stevens and, like most episodes of “The Twilight Zone,” was written by Serling himself…

Bradbury was unambiguous when addressing Serling’s “inspiration.” He explained:

“The first program of ‘The Twilight Zone’ is based on a story from ‘The Martian Chronicles.’ He invited me to a screening with my friend Bill Nolan and the other boys in the gang, you know, and when we came out we all looked at each other and said, ‘God, that looks a little bit like a story from “The Martian Chronicles.”‘ I didn’t say anything because I was embarrassed. And a month or so later, Rod called me on the phone and said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I said, ‘Tell you what?’ He said, ‘Well, my pilot script is based partially on a story of yours from “The Martian Chronicles?”‘”

It seemed that Serling didn’t know that Ray Bradbury had beaten him to a “lone soul wanders a human-free landscape” story by about nine years. Serling then told Bradbury that it took his wife, Carol, to point out the similarities to him. Luckily, she happened to be readying Bradbury’s book at the time. The author recalled:

“[Serling] said ‘I was in bed reading with my wife and Carol turned over, she was reading “The Martian Chronicles” and she said, “Rod, read this, it’s like your pilot.”‘ And he said, ‘My God, I realized that inadvertently I’d stolen part of your idea.'”

Luckily, Serling wanted to do the honorable thing, and give credit where credit was due; it seems that Rod didn’t want to rip off any ideas or claim credit for himself. He offered to pay Bradbury to appropriate amount to purchase the rights to his story. Bradbury refused, saying that the acknowledgment was enough, offering him vindication….

(5) SCOREBOARD, BABY! “Another judge agrees: AI-Created art isn’t copyrightable” reports Mashable.

…There has been a debate raging over whether or not work created by generative artificial intelligence can be copyrighted. Some judges have ruled no, of course not, that would be absurd; others have argued the opposite. On Friday, the computers took another L.

A federal judge ruled to uphold a finding from the U.S. Copyright Office that states that pieces of art that are created by AI are not protected by copyright law. As the Hollywood Reporter found, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell, who delivered the ruling, said copyright law hasn’t ever protected “works generated by new forms of technology operating absent any guiding human hand.”

Stephen Thaler, the chief executive of the neural network firm Imagination Engines, has been leading the charge in hopes of copywriting AI works, according to the Hollywood Reporter. In his lawsuit, he argued that AI should be acknowledged “as an author where it otherwise meets authorship criteria” and that works generated completely and solely by artificial intelligence should be protected by copyright law.

“In the absence of any human involvement in the creation of the work, the clear and straightforward answer is the one given by the Register: No,” Howell wrote, adding that copyright law “protects only works of human creation.”…

(6) GRABBING WITH BOTH ROBOTIC HANDS. [Item by Bill.] Meanwhile, Google wants Australian copyright (and presumably other countries as well) to explicitly allow AI/LLM systems to scrape copyrighted material as “fair use”. “Google Wants AI Scraping to Be ‘Fair Use.’ Will Courts Agree?” at Tom’s Hardware.

What do you think would happen if I tried this? I stroll into a bank and see a wad of cash within arm’s reach behind an unoccupied teller window. I grab the dough and start walking out the door with it when a police officer, very rudely, stops me. “I’m entitled to take this money,” I say. “Because nobody at the bank told me not to.”

If you think my defense is implausible, then you don’t work for Google. This week, the search giant said that it wants to change copyright laws so that it can grab any content it wants from the Internet, use it as training data for its AI products, and argue “fair use” if anyone objects to the plagiarism stew Google’s cooking up. Google’s figleaf to copyright holders: they’ll find a way to let you opt-out.

In a recent statement to the Australian government, which is considering new AI laws, Google wrote that it wants “copyright systems that enable appropriate and fair use of copyrighted content to enable the training of AI models in Australia on a broad and diverse range of data while supporting workable opt-outs for entities that prefer their data not to be trained in using AI systems.”…

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born August 20, 1883 — Austin Tappan Wright. Did you know that Islandia wasn’t published when he was alive? His widow edited his fifteen hundred page manuscript for publication, and following her own death in 1937 their daughter Sylvia further edited and cut the text; the resulting novel, shorn of Wright’s appendices, was published in 1942, along with a pamphlet by Basil Davenport, An introduction to Islandia; its history, customs, laws, language, and geography, based on the original supplementary material. (Died 1931.)
  • Born August 20, 1890 — Howard P. Lovecraft. Virtually unknown during his lifetime, he was published only in pulp magazines before he died in poverty. He’s regarded now as one of our most important authors of horror and weird fiction. He is not the originator of the term Cthulhu mythos, that honor goes to August Derleth. (Died 1937.)
  • Born August 20, 1932 — Anthony Ainley. He was the fourth actor to play the role of the Master, and the first actor to portray the Master as a recurring role since the death of Roger Delgado in 1973. He appeared in eleven stories with the Fourth through Seventh Doctors.  It is noted that he enjoyed the role so much that sources note he even stayed in character when not portraying The Master by using both the voice and laugh in social situations. (Died 2004.)
  • Born August 20, 1943 — Sylvester McCoy, 80. The Seventh Doctor (my second favorite of the classic Who Doctors after Baker) and the last canon Doctor until the modern era of the official BBC Doctors when they revised canon. He also played Radagast in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit films, he’s The Old Man of Hoy in Sense8 and he voices Aezethril the Wizard in the “Endgame” episode of Thunderbirds Are Go. 
  • Born August 20, 1951 — Greg Bear. Blood Music which won both a Nebula and a Hugo for Best Novelette is an amazing read. I’m also very fond of the Songs of Earth and Power duology, The Infinity Concerto and The Serpent Mage, and found his Queen of Angels a fascinating mystery. (Died 2022.)
  • Born August 20, 1961 — Greg Egan, 62. Australian writer who exists though he does his damnedest to avoid a digital footprint. His excellent Permutation City won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award  and “Oceanic” garnered a Best Novella Hugo at Ausiecon Three. I assume he wasn’t there given his stance against attending Worldcons?
  • Born August 20, 1962 — Sophie Aldred, 61. She’s Ace, the Seventh Doctor’s Companion. (By the way Doctor Who Magazine: Costume Design: Dressing the Doctor from William Hartnell to Jodie Whittaker is a brilliant read and has a nice look at her costuming.) She’s reprised the role in the Big Finish audio adventures, and she’s recently written Doctor Who: At Childhood’s End where Ace meets the Thirteenth Doctor. 

(8) COMICS SECTION.

  • Shoe shows an alternative “next generation” idea.
  • Tom Gauld finds a case of scholarly overkill.

(9) RUSSIAN MOON LANDER FAILS. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Well, it looks like the anomaly in Luna 25’s orbit was of the “we attempted a negative altitude maneuver” type.  “Luna-25 crashes into moon after orbit maneuver” at Space.com.

Russia’s Luna-25 mission ended in failure after crashing into the moon, space agency Roscosmos has announced.

A statement posted to the agency’s Telegram social media channel early Aug. 20 confirmed that an anomaly during an Aug. 19 maneuver to lower Luna-25’s orbit resulted in the spacecraft impacting the lunar surface.

The spacecraft was scheduled to attempt a soft lunar landing Aug. 21, near Boguslawsky crater, located approximately 70 degrees south latitude in the vicinity of the south polar region of the moon.

Roscosmos announced Aug. 19 that at 7:10 a.m. Eastern that day Luna-25 was instructed to fire its engines to send the spacecraft into a “pre-landing” orbit around the moon. The planned maneuver was anomalous, however. 

“An emergency situation occurred on board the automatic station, which did not allow the maneuver to be performed with the specified parameters,” according to a translation of the Roscosmos statement. 

The agency clarified Sunday that contact was lost with the spacecraft around 7:57 a.m. Eastern. Measures taken Aug. 19 and 20 to reestablish contact with Luna-25 were not successful, according to the Aug. 20 statement.

A preliminary analysis revealed that a deviation of the actual parameters of the impulse from those calculated resulted in the spacecraft colliding with the lunar surface, according to a machine translation of the statement….

(10) ICONIC ARCHITECTURE NO MORE. The Guardian listens to the “Outcry over loss of features on Bangkok’s landmark ‘robot building’”.

A Bangkok landmark known as the “robot building” has been stripped of its identity, heritage campaigners have said, as they called for the city’s distinctive architecture to preserved.

The building – in the form of a giant robot made up of stacks of cubes and inspired by the architect watching his son play with a toy – has loomed over one of Bangkok’s busiest commercial districts for decades. Its design included oversized bolts and antenna, and windows shaped like cartoonish eyes.

The building’s owner, the Thai arm of the Singaporean multinational United Overseas Bank (UOB), is renovating the structure, however, and its distinctive features have been altered or removed.

The building, which is mentioned in many guides of the city, was completed in 1986 and was previously the headquarters of Bank of Asia. The architect, Dr Sumet Jumsai na Ayudhya, who sought to reflect the computerisation of banking, wanted to create a building that was futuristic….

(11) WWII FLIGHT PHOTOS. The Guardian reports that the Historic England website has made available for the first time large numbers of photos indexed under “Baseball and Bombers: USAAF Reconnaissance Photography During the Second World War”.

The United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) reconnaissance aircraft flew hundreds of sorties over England during the Second World War. The Historic England Archive holds a USAAF collection of over 20,000 photographs that records airfields, military bases, towns, and countryside in England between 1943 and 1944.

… The photographs also show incidental details, including Second World War anti-invasion defences. Traces of earlier times can also be seen, from prehistoric archaeological features to the remains of First World War camps. Others record busy townscapes or the relative tranquillity of the natural landscape and cloud formations….

(12) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George convinces himself to make a sequel in “Meg 2: The Trench Pitch Meeting”.

Jason Statham fighting giant prehistoric sharks. That’s maybe the easiest pitch that’s ever been made, and first Meg movie made over half a billion dollars thanks to that awesome sounding premise. And when something makes half a billion dollars, you can bet we’re going to see some more of it. Meg 2: The Trench definitely raises some questions. Like why is this shark movie mostly about humans running around doing sketchy stuff? How did Jason Statham free dive at 25,000 feet? Wait, these movies are based on books? Where did that Kraken come from and why isn’t anyone talking about it? To answer all these questions, check out the pitch meeting that led to Meg 2: The Trench!

[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 Jim Janney.]

Pixel Scroll 8/8/2023 I Have Eaten The Notifications For The Scrolls You Posted

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(1) PROSECRAFT NUKED FROM SPACE. A site called Prosecraft stirred tremendous controversy yesterday once authors realized thousands of their books were used by the site without their permission. Also, people believe their texts are being used to train AI.

Benji Smith’s initial attempt to skate around the controversy was to tell writers he would remove their book if they emailed him a link.

Smith took the site down today and left a sort of apology in its place, but they still have the texts — and the software. “Taking Down Prosecraft.io” on The Shaxpir Blog.

…Today the community of authors has spoken out, and I’m listening. I care about you, and I hear your objections.

Your feelings are legitimate, and I hope you’ll accept my sincerest apologies. I care about stories. I care about publishing. I care about authors. I never meant to hurt anyone. I only hoped to make something that would be fun and useful and beautiful, for people like me out there struggling to tell their own stories.

For what it’s worth, the prosecraft website has never generated any income. The Shaxpir desktop app is a labor of love, and during most of its lifetime, I’ve worked other jobs to pay the bills while trying to get the company off the ground and solve the technical challenges of scaling a startup with limited resources. We’ve never taken any VC money, and the whole company is a two-person operation just working our hardest to serve our small community of authors….

Lincoln Michel said the effort to decry a profit motive is deceptive.

Gizmodo’s report “Fiction Analytics Site Prosecraft Shut Down After Backlash” includes an extensive roundup of yesterday’s social media comments about the site.

Prosecraft.io, a site that used novels to help power a data-driven project to display word count, passive voice, and other much more subjective, writing-style markers such as vividness, shut down today after authors protested the project. Prosecraft used the full text of over 25,000 books—which is entirely copyrighted material—in order to develop a library of data. Authors, once they caught wind of what was happening, immediately hated this….

Ellen Datlow’s response to today’s shutdown was:

Susan Bridges pointed out why this is still dodgy:

And what’s more, Ursula Vernon found Prosecraft itself not very useful, as she illustrated in a long thread that starts here.

(2) ZOOM. Writers also discovered a much more important tool – Zoom – is grabbing their intellectual property with both robotic arms in its updated TOS.

Alex Ivanovs’ analysis at Stackdiary finds “Zoom’s Updated Terms of Service Permit Training AI on User Content Without Opt-Out”.

…What raises alarm is the explicit mention of the company’s right to use this data for machine learning and artificial intelligence, including training and tuning of algorithms and models. This effectively allows Zoom to train its AI on customer content without providing an opt-out option, a decision that is likely to spark significant debate about user privacy and consent.

Additionally, under section 10.4 of the updated terms, Zoom has secured a “perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license” to redistribute, publish, access, use, store, transmit, review, disclose, preserve, extract, modify, reproduce, share, use, display, copy, distribute, translate, transcribe, create derivative works, and process Customer Content….

Under Section 10 of the new Zoom TOS:

“10.4 Customer License Grant. You agree to grant and hereby grant Zoom a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license and all other rights required or necessary to redistribute, publish, import, access, use, store, transmit, review, disclose, preserve, extract, modify, reproduce, share, use, display, copy, distribute, translate, transcribe, create derivative works, and process Customer Content and to perform all acts with respect to the Customer Content: (i) as may be necessary for Zoom to provide the Services to you, including to support the Services; (ii) for the purpose of product and service development, marketing, analytics, quality assurance, machine learning, artificial intelligence, training, testing, improvement of the Services, Software, or Zoom’s other products, services, and software, or any combination thereof; and (iii) for any other purpose relating to any use or other act permitted in accordance with Section 10.3. If you have any Proprietary Rights in or to Service Generated Data or Aggregated Anonymous Data, you hereby grant Zoom a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license and all other rights required or necessary to enable Zoom to exercise its rights pertaining to Service Generated Data and Aggregated Anonymous Data, as the case may be, in accordance with this Agreement.”

Eddie Louise, like many professionals, is out of there.

Michael Damian Thomas concluded:

(3) LET’S MAKE A DEAL. Simon & Shuster has been sold to private equity firm KKR for $1.62 billion reports Publishers Weekly.

In a move that some in the industry will welcome as putting at least a temporary stop to industry consolidation, the private investment firm KKR has reached an agreement with Paramount Global to acquire Simon & Schuster for $1.62 billion in an all cash transaction.

Though below the $2.175 billion that Penguin Random House had previously agreed to pay for the country’s third largest trade publisher, $1.62 billion is a healthy price since most trade publishers sell for not much better than 1.5 times sales, and S&S’s 2022 revenue was $1.18 billion….

… Overall, Bakish said the $1.62 billion sale price plus the $200 million termination fee paid by Penguin Random House after last year’s deal was blocked by regulators, plus the cash flow gained from strong sales from S&S over the last year, means the company will “realize approximately $2.2 billion of gross proceeds” from the S&S sale….

NPR’s story reminds readers:

…Last year, the Department of Justice blocked Penguin Random House from acquiring Simon & Schuster for $2.2 billion.

“The proposed merger would have reduced competition, decreased author compensation, diminished the breadth, depth, and diversity of our stories and ideas, and ultimately impoverished our democracy,” Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division said in a statement at the time….

(4) MEET THE HANTU. BookBrunch titles its interview with Zen Cho without good reason “No tongue sandwiches in these adventure stories”. Don’t let that keep you from enjoying her comments about writing the stories now collected in Spirits Abroad.

…But it felt important to me to write about a mundanity reflecting my day-to-day life, featuring people who looked and spoke like my friends and family. 

The stories that resulted were about Asian girls and women navigating multiple worlds, challenging and being challenged by the strange beings they found there – whether those were white people, or magical creatures. The characters are witches, shapeshifters, vampires and hantu – a Malay term for a diverse and terrifying group of local spirits. 

They encounter lovesick dragons, argue with their bossy undead grandmas, and battle fairy armies. They eat sambal (a pungent condiment characteristic of Malaysian and Indonesian cuisine, made from a mixture of chillies and shrimp paste) and curry chicken bread. They address each other using Hokkien kinship terms and speak a variety of languages, not least Malaysian English – what we call ‘Manglish’, a creolised form of English that borrows grammar and vocabulary from Malay, Chinese dialects and Indian languages.

I called the collection of these stories Spirits Abroad. Despite its flights of whimsy, it’s a book rooted in my reality, in a way none of the books I read growing up were. It features magic and the supernatural, but it’s also about characters who are far away from home and trying to figure out who they are in the new places where they find themselves. It’s the book I wish I could have given my younger self….

(5) HOPE FOR EARLY DOCTOR WHO COMPLETISTS. A better explanation of an item here the other day: “Doctor Who: Head of TV Archive Gives Promising Update on Missing Episodes” at CBR.com.

…However, Perry has given Doctor Who fans a peculiar update on the issue. RadioTimes reported that the CEO of Kaleidoscope assured audiences that the lost episodes are “very likely” to be recovered somewhere along the line. At the moment, 97 episodes (out of 253), all from the show’s first six years, are still missing, meaning that quite a few stories featuring the First Doctor and the Second Doctor and their companions are either partially or completely lost.

Perry claimed that he and his team were aware of the location of the missing episodes, yet they had no means of getting their hands on them due to lacking the owners’ permission. “We know where there is missing Doctor Who out there but the owners won’t return it at the moment,” he explained.

…. The recovery work for Doctor Who‘s missing episodes has been going on for years. In fact, all of the Third Doctor’s adventures — as well as six complete serials and quite a few episodes from the lost stories with the First and the Second Doctors — have been tracked down since the 1970s. Most recently, for instance, four episodes of Troughton’s Season 5 Serial 5, called “The Web of Fear,” were miraculously found in Nigeria back in 2013…

(6) GLASGOW 2024 TO OPEN ONE YEAR FROM TODAY. [From a press release.] The 82nd World Science Fiction Convention will open its doors to the public exactly one year from today. Glasgow 2024, a Worldcon for Our Futures will host over 5,000 fans of science fiction books, films, TV shows, games and other media and is expected to inject over £5m into the local economy. The one year milestone was marked by a live-streamed announcement from convention chair Esther MacCallum-Stewart.

This is the third time that Worldcon has been held in Glasgow, following successful conventions in 1995 and 2005, and in a notable coincidence Glasgow 2024 will open 19 years to the day after the gavel was brought down on the 2005 event. Next year’s celebration of science fiction is already proving very popular with SF fans and professionals around the world, with over 3,000 members from 30 countries registered to date.

Glasgow 2024 will be held at the Scottish Events Campus (SEC), widely recognised as a leading international convention and events venue. The SEC has been significantly upgraded since 2005, with additional conference spaces and a greatly expanded range of on-site hotels. The Glasgow 2024 team has had fantastic support from Glasgow Life throughout the bidding process and in preparing for the convention.

Glasgow 2024’s Guests of Honour include writers, editors, artists and fans – Chris Baker (Fangorn), Claire Brialey and Mark Plummer, Ken MacLeod, Nnedi Okorafor, and Terri Windling. These Guests will be joined by a range of Special Guests, professionals and fans from across the field and the world, with over 600 hours of programming and over 500 speakers planned for the five days of the convention.

Worldcon is, however, not just an extraordinarily engaging and diverse conference, but a celebration of all aspects of the SF genre, and the team will be making regular announcements over the coming months as plans are finalised.  This will start this week with a look at the major events, ranging from the traditional Hugo Award Ceremony and costume Masquerade to an orchestral concert, the world premiere of an original opera, theatrical performances, dances, and live action video games. Subsequent announcements will cover Special Guests, spectacular themed exhibits, a substantial Art Show and Dealers’ Room, and arrangements for virtual participation and attendance for those who cannot come to Glasgow in person.

Glasgow 2024 Chair, Esther MacCallum-Stewart said, “I’m hugely proud of the whole team for the dedication and hard work that have brought us to this point, and excited to start sharing our plans with both members and the wider community.  It’s a rare privilege to host the Worldcon and we are committed to our vision of being imaginative, caring and inclusive.”

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born August 8, 1920 — Jack Speer. He is without doubt one of the founders of fandom, and perhaps the first true fan historian, having written Up to Now: A History of Science Fiction Fandom covering up to 1939 as well as the first Fancyclopedia in 1944. Filking and costume parties are also widely credited to him as well.  Mike has a proper remembrance here. (Died 2008.)
  • Born August 8, 1930 — Terry Nation. Best known as scriptwriter for Doctor Who and creator of the Daleks. He later created Blake’s 7. He would also write scripts for Department S, The Avengers, The Champions and MacGyver. He both Davros and the Daleks on Who. He died from emphysema in Los Angeles aged 66, as he working with actor Paul Darrow who played Kerr Avon on Blake’s 7 in an attempt to revive that series. (Died 1997.)
  • Born August 8, 1935 — Donald P. Bellisario, 88. Genre shows include Tales of the Gold Monkey, Airwolf and of course that truly amazing show Quantum Leap. OK, is Tales of the Gold Monkey genre? Well if not SF or fantasy, it’s certainly pulp in the best sense of that term. 
  • Born August 8, 1937 — Dustin Hoffman, 86. Ahhh Captian Hook, the man who got figuratively swallowed by the vast crocodile in Hook. Yeah I like that film a lot. But then I like the novel very much, too. By no means his only genre appearance as he was Mumbles, Caprice’s fast-talking henchman in Dick Tracy (a film I actually find rather odd), Mr. Edward Magorium in Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium and the voice of Master Shifu in Kung Fu Panda.
  • Born August 8, 1950 — John D. Berry, 73. Editor of myriad fanzines, notable as one featured a column in the Eighties written by his longtime friend, William Gibson. “The Clubhouse” which he wrote from July 1969 to September 1972 for Amazing Stories reviewed fanzines. His last published piece was “Susan Wood: About and By”, an appreciation of the late author. Partner of Eileen Gunn.
  • Born August 8, 1961 — Timothy P. Szczesuil, 62. Boston-based con-running fan who chaired Boskone 33 and Boskone 53. He’s also edited or co-edited several books for NESFA, Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys with Gardner Dozois and His Share of Glory: The Complete Short Science Fiction of C. M. Kornbluth. 
  • Born August 8, 1974 — Dominic Harman, 49. Wandering through the Birthday sources, I found this UK illustrator active for some twenty years. He’s won three BSFA Awards, two for Interzone covers and one for the cover for 2011 Solaris edition of Ian Whates’ The Noise Revealed. My favorite cover by him? Naomi Novik’s His Majesty’s Dragon cover, the 2006 Del Rey / Ballantine edition, is an outstanding look at his work.
  • Born August 8, 1993 — Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs, 30. She’s a Kahnawake Mohawk. Why I mention that will be apparent in a moment. Her most recent role was recurring one as Sam Black Crow on now-cancelled American Gods but she has a very long genre history starting with being Monique on the Stephen King’s Dead Zone series. From there, she was Claudia Auditore in Assassin’s Creed: Lineage, a series of three short films based on the Assassin’s Creed II video game before showing up as Ali’s in Rhymes for Young Ghouls which is notable for its handling of First Nations issues. She’s Daisy in Another WolfCop (oh guess which monster), an unnamed bar waitress in Being Human, Nourhan in Exploding Sun and Sam in the The Walking Dead: Michonne video game. Her latest genre role is Blood Quantum about a zombie uprising on a First Nations homeland.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) FIGHTING COPYRIGHT ABUSE. Fifteen-time Hugo winning artist Michael Whelan tweeted about a new battle to stop a site that computer-generates art in imitation of his style. Thread starts here.

(10) YOUR NAME HERE – EH, NO THANKS! Meanwhile, author Jane Friedman spent yesterday battling with book sites over junk books they are attributing to her name: “I Would Rather See My Books Get Pirated Than This (Or: Why Goodreads and Amazon Are Becoming Dumpster Fires)”

There’s not much that makes me angry these days about writing and publishing. I’ve seen it all. I know what to expect from Amazon and Goodreads. Meaning: I don’t expect much, and I assume I will be continually disappointed. Nor do I have the power to change how they operate. My energy-saving strategy: move on and focus on what you can control.

That’s going to become much harder to do if Amazon and Goodreads don’t start defending against the absolute garbage now being spread across their sites.

I know my work gets pirated and frankly I don’t care. (I’m not saying other authors shouldn’t care, but that’s not a battle worth my time today.)

But here’s what does rankle me: garbage books getting uploaded to Amazon where my name is credited as the author. (Here’s but one example.) Whoever’s doing this is obviously preying on writers who trust my name and think I’ve actually written these books. I have not. Most likely they’ve been generated by AI.

It might be possible to ignore this nonsense on some level since these books aren’t receiving customer reviews (so far), and mostly they sink to the bottom of search results (although not always). At the very least, if you look at my author profile on Amazon, these junk books don’t appear. A reader who applies some critical thinking might think twice before accepting these books as mine.

Still, it’s not great. And it falls on me, the author—the one with a reputation at stake—to get these misleading books removed from Amazon. I’m not even sure it’s possible. I don’t own the copyright to these junk books. I don’t exactly “own” my name either—lots of other people who are also legit authors share my name, after all. So on what grounds can I successfully demand this stop, at least in Amazon’s eyes? I’m not sure.

To add insult to injury, these sham books are getting added to my official Goodreads profile. A reasonable person might think I control what books are shown on my Goodreads profile, or that I approve them, or at the very least I could have them easily removed. Not so.

If you need to have your Goodreads profile corrected—as far as the books credited to you—you have to reach out to volunteer “librarians” on Goodreads, which requires joining a group, then posting in a comment thread that you want illegitimate books removed from your profile….

Update (afternoon of Aug. 7): Hours after this post was published, my official Goodreads profile was cleaned of the offending titles. I did file a report with Amazon, complaining that these books were using my name and reputation without my consent. Amazon’s response: “Please provide us with any trademark registration numbers that relate to your claim.” When I replied that I did not have a trademark for my name, they closed the case and said the books would not be removed from sale.

Update (morning of Aug. 8): The fraudulent titles appear to be entirely removed from Amazon and Goodreads alike. I’m sure that’s in no small part due to my visibility and reputation in the writing and publishing community. What will authors with smaller profiles do when this happens to them? If you ever find yourself in a similar situation, I’d start by reaching out to an advocacy organization like The Authors Guild (I’m a member).

(11) UNION GROWTH. “Marvel VFX artists take first step toward unionisation amid Hollywood strikes” notes the Guardian.

Visual effects artists working for Marvel have taken the first step towards unionisation in a notoriously poorly represented area of the film industry. According to a statement from the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) a group of on-set VFX artists employed by the studio have filed a petition with the US’s National Labor Relations Board.

Hailing the move as “a major shift in an industry that has largely remained non-union since VFX was pioneered during production of the first Star Wars films in the 1970s”, the IATSE said a supermajority of Marvel’s 50-plus VFX crew had signed authorisation cards indicating they wished to be represented by the union, which already represents around 168,000 technicians and craftspeople in live theatre, film and TV and associated areas in the US and Canada….

(12) PITTSBURGH DOES SPACE. [Item by Daniel Dern.] “One small step for man, one giant leap for Pittsburgh” says Route Fifty.

Think of the space industry in the U.S., and places like Houston, Cape Canaveral, Florida, or Huntsville, Alabama, likely spring to mind. But how about Pittsburgh?

No? Well, a collection of state and local officials and business leaders from the Keystone State are looking to change that.

…The Keystone Space Collaborative, a regional organization that works to promote space industry businesses and talent in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, announced in June that it would form a space and innovation district in Pittsburgh….

And yet they mention neither James Blish’s Cities In Flight tetrology (Pittsburgh, like many other cities, spindizzies through space) nor Wen Spencer’s (highly entertaining) Elfhome series (Pittsburgh gets dimension-swapped to a magic/elf/etc world).

(13) A FACE IN AN ANCIENT CROWD. Live Science offers readers the opportunity to “See stunning likeness of Zlatý kůň, the oldest modern human to be genetically sequenced”.

In 1950, archaeologists discovered a severed skull buried deep inside a cave system in Czechia (the Czech Republic). Because the skull was split in half, researchers concluded that the skeletal remains were of two separate individuals. However, through genome sequencing done decades later, scientists concluded that the skull actually belonged to a single person: a woman who lived 45,000 years ago.

Researchers named her the Zlatý kůň woman, or “golden horse” in Czech, in a nod to a hill above the cave system. Further analysis of her DNA revealed that her genome carried roughly 3% Neanderthal ancestry, that she was part of a population of early modern humans who likely mated with Neanderthals and that her genome was the oldest modern human genome ever to be sequenced.

Although much has been learned about the woman’s genetics, little is known about what she may have looked like. But now, a new online paper published July 18 offers new insight into her possible appearance in the form of a facial approximation….

(14) THE SUSPENSE IS NOT KILLING ME. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The record for suspended animation has been smashed by a worm revived after some 46,000 years! Suspended animation is a common trope in science fiction that is usually applied to astronauts in SF stories so that they can travel interstellar distances. However in reality finding organisms that can do this over potentially geological timescales has been elusive.

Now, past work has shown that bacterial spores can survive tens of millions of years, but bacteria are very simple life forms being single celled prokaryotes. What would be really neat would be something multi-cellular surviving very many years. Well, we have managed to revive 30,000 year old fruit tissue that had been frozen in permafrost from which whole plants were grown.  But what we really want to see is a multicellular animal survive thousands of years in suspended animation or, to be technical, cryptobiosis. Here too there has been some success with the resurrection of a rotifer from 24,000 year old permafrost. But rotifers are still simple animals that do not even have a through-gut and only have two, not three, layers of cells.

The latest development also involves reviving from suspended animation a species that had been buried in permafrost. Here, the species involved was a nematode worm, and a new species at that which the researchers call Panagrolaimus kolymaensis. (Panagrolaimus species have been known before, but P. kolymaensis is new.)

The dormant P. kolymaensis was found in permafrost near a riverbank at a depth of 40 metres and some 11 metres above the river level, the river being the Kolyma River, a few miles from Cherskyn north-eastern Siberia, Russia.

The worms were actually found in the remains of what was once a burrow of Arctic gophers (Citellus). The burrow also contained other organic material which the researchers used to radiocarbon date the burrow. They found it to be 44,315 years old (give or take nearly half a century of experimental error). The previous record for reviving a nematode worm in the wild was after about 25 years of being frozen in Antarctic moss. The record in the lab was 39 years of a dried worm in a herbarium. So this 46,000 year old discovery smashes both those records!

The researchers did some further work that suggests that the mechanisms Panagrolaimus kolymaensis uses to survive suspended animation are similar to that by another nematode worm, Caenorhabditis elegans. C. elegans is a workhorse species for biologists working with nematodes. (It has even been used to elucidate why we mammals get the cannabis munchies.)

This work is also remarkable in another way. During Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, this research was conducted by Russians together with western Europeans from Germany, Britain, Switzerland and Ireland. Two Russians and a German conceived the work. (See Shatilovich, A. et al (2023) A novel nematode species from the Siberian permafrost shares adaptive mechanisms for cryptobiotic survival with C. elegans dauer larva. PLOS Genetics, vol. 19 (7), e1010798.)

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

Pixel Scroll 6/24/23 My Pixel Threw Out All My Old Scrolls And All That’s Left Is This Godstalk

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(1) TROLLING FOR DOLLARS. Victoria Strauss advises how to handle a certain kind of litigation threat in “When the Copyright Trolls Came for Me” at Writer Beware.

If you’re a writer who’s serious about a career, you probably have some form of online presence: a website, a blog, an Instagram account. You may make use of images and/or videos created by others–to add visual interest to your blog posts or newsletters, decorate your website, and/or engage your readers and followers. For example, the header image at the top of this post.

If you use images online, you need to be aware of copyright trolls….

The full article is at Writer Unboxed: “When The Copyright Trolls Came for Me”. And part of the advice is to actually have rights to the images you used online.

The Importance of Protecting Yourself

The resources I consulted in my research for this post agree that copyright trolling is on the rise—and as my experience shows, you don’t have to infringe to be a target. In that environment, it makes sense to do what you can to defend yourself.

What does that include?

  1. First and most obvious, if you use images, make sure you have the proper licenses and/or permissions, or that the images are free to download under a Creative Commons license, such as photos from sites like Pixabay and Unsplash (though do read the license terms: there may be restrictions on use, such as a requirement for attribution—and yes, trolls come after people for messing that up too). Giving credit to the image creator and/or linking back to the source is polite, but it won’t protect you from copyright claims….

(2) NEW BLOCH TRIBUTE. The Robert Bloch Official Website launched just one week ago, and today Jim Nemeth announced a major update: the Stories page is greatly expanded, providing the most comprehensive list of Bloch’s published stories to date.

 (3) A REAL HE-MAN. Cora Buhlert shows off two Masters of the Universe figures.

(4) TINGLE BOOK AD. “Chuck To The Future” is an appeal to preorder Chuck Tingle’s Camp Damascus.

“No, no buckaroo, the Hugo Awards are fine. We’ve gotta help Chuck Tingle!”

(5) TINGLE BOOK TOUR. And Chuck Tingle has been dropping announcements about book tour appearances with colleagues – you’ll be able to tell them apart, he’ll be the one with a bag over his head.

With Nicola Griffith in Seattle.

With Catriona Ward in Minneapolis.

With N.K. Jemisin in New York.

(6) REGRETS, I’VE HAD A FEW. “Our Way” is a parody of the Frank Sinatra hit “My Way” about the DC Extended Universe.

The Flash marks the end of the DCEU run as we’ve known it. Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman sing goodbye to the DCEU and reminisce on the good, the bad, and the weird that the DC Comics movie universe entailed

(7) MEMORY LANE.

2015 – [Written by Cat Eldridge from a choice by Mike Glyer.]

Becky Chambers as you all well know is the author of the Hugo Award-winning Wayfarers series which is where our Beginning comes from this Scroll, as Mike choose wisely in selecting The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, the first novel in that series. It is one of my favorite novels, period.  

The novel itself surprisingly didn’t garner any Awards though it was nominated for an  Arthur C. Clarke Award, a British Fantasy Award for Best Newcomer, a Grand prix de l’Imaginaire and a Kitschie for Best Debut Novel. No Hugo nomination though. 

And now for a rather superb Beginning…

As she woke up in the pod, she remembered three things. First, she was traveling through open space. Second, she was about to start a new job, one she could not screw up. Third, she had bribed a government official into giving her a new identity file. None of this information was new, but it wasn’t pleasant to wake up to. 

She wasn’t supposed to be awake yet, not for another day at least, but that was what you got for booking cheap transport. Cheap transport meant a cheap pod flying on cheap fuel, and cheap drugs to knock you out. She had flickered into consciousness several times since launch—surfacing in confusion, falling back just as she’d gotten a grasp on things. The pod was dark, and there were no navigational screens. There was no way to tell how much time had passed between each waking, or how far she’d traveled, or if she’d even been traveling at all. The thought made her anxious, and sick.

Her vision cleared enough for her to focus on the window. The shutters were down, blocking out any possible light sources. She knew there were none. She was out in the open now. No bustling planets, no travel lanes, no sparkling orbiters. Just emptiness, horrible emptiness, filled with nothing but herself and the occasional rock. 

The engine whined as it prepared for another sublayer jump. The drugs reached out, tugging her down into uneasy sleep. As she faded, she thought again of the job, the lies, the smug look on the official’s face as she’d poured credits into his account. She wondered if it had been enough. It had to be. It had to. She’d paid too much already for mistakes she’d had no part in.

Her eyes closed. The drugs took her. The pod, presumably, continued on.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born June 24, 1947 — Peter Weller, 76. Yes, it’s his Birthday today. Robocop obviously with my favorite scene being him pulling out and smashing Cain’s brain, but let’s see what else he’s done. Well, there’s The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, a film I adore. And then there’s Leviathan which you I’m guessing a lot of you never heard of. Is Naked Lunch genre? Well Screamers based on Philip K. Dick’s short story “Second Variety” certainly is. Even if the reviews sucked.  And Star Trek Into Darkness certainly qualifies. Hey, he showed up in Star Trek: Enterprise! 
  • Born June 24, 1950 — Mercedes Lackey, 73. There’s a line on the Wiki page that says she writes nearly six books a year. Impressive. She’s certainly got a lot of really good series out there including the vast number that are set in the Valdemar universe. I like her Bedlam’s Bard series better. She wrote the first few in this series with Ellen Gunn and the latter in the series with Rosemary Edgehill. The SERRAted Edge series, Elves with race cars, is kinda fun too. Larry Dixon, her husband, and Mark Shepherd were co-writers of these. 
  • Born June 24, 1950 — Nancy Allen, 73. Officer Anne Lewis in the Robocop franchise. (I like all three films.) her first genre role was not in Carrie as Chris Hargensen, but in a best forgotten a film year earlier (Forced Entry) as a unnamed hitchhiker. She shows up in fan favorite The Philadelphia Experiment as Allison Hayes and I see her in Poltergeist III as Patricia Wilson-Gardner (seriously — a third film in this franchise?). She’s in the direct to video Children of the Corn 666: Isaac’s Return as Rachel Colby. (Oh that sounds awful.) And she was in an Outer Limits episode, “Valerie 23”, as Rachel Rose. 
  • Born June 24, 1961 — Iain Glen, 62. Scots actor who played as Ser Jorah Mormont in Game of Thrones, he’s also  well known for his roles as Dr. Alexander Isaacs/Tyrant in the Resident Evil franchise; and he played the role of Father Octavian, leader of a sect of clerics who were on a mission against the Weeping Angels in “The Time of Angels” and “Flesh and Stone”, both Eleventh Doctor stories.
  • Born June 24, 1982 — Lotte Verbeek, 41. You most likely know her as Ana Jarvis, the wife of Edwin Jarvis, who befriends Carter on Agent Carter. She got interesting genre history including Geillis Duncan on the Outlander series, Helena in The Last Witch Hunter, Aisha in the dystopian political thriller Division 19 film and a deliberately undefined role in the cross-world Counterpart series. 
  • Born June 24, 1988 — Kasey Lansdale, 35. Daughter of Joe Lansdale. Publicist at Tachyon Books and a really nice person. Really she is. And yes, she’s one of us having written The Cases of Dana Roberts series, and edited two anthologies, Fresh Blood & Old Bones and Impossible Monsters. In her father’s Hap and Leonard collection Of Mice and Minestrone, she has “Good Eats: The Recipes of Hap and Leonard”. 
  • Born June 24, 1994 — Nicole Muñoz, 29. You’ll perhaps best remember her for role as Christie Tarr (née McCawley) in the Defiance series. Her first role was playing a Little Girl in Fantastic Four. Likewise she was A Kid with Braces in The Last Mimzy, and yes, Another Girl, in Hardwired. The latter was written by Michael Hurst, and has apparently nothing to with the Walter Jon Williams novel of the same name.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Yo_runner reveals the superpower of reading.

(10) NO ONE WILL WANT TO LEAVE. Architectural Digest takes readers to “The 9 Most Beautiful Bookstores in the World”. One is in Chengdu, China.

Dujiangyan Zhongshuge Bookstore (Chengdu, China)

When Dujiangyan Zhongshuge Bookstore opened in 2020, it was hard to escape news coverage of the surreal masterpiece. The company is known for its maximalist bookstores, and this location—with its tower book spirals and sculptural shelves—was no exception. In her book, Stamp recommends a visit to a similarly extravagent sister store, the Taizhou City branch.

(11) CHANNELING THE FUTURE. MeTV analyzes “Five predictions from ‘TV of Tomorrow’ that came true, and five that didn’t”.

3. Interior Design

While maybe not to the extent in this exaggerated cartoon, many rooms today are constructed with special attention given to the furniture’s placement in relation to the TV. While most of us aren’t installing a bathtub in the living room, televisions are nonetheless often the anchor, or focal point, in a room’s design. 

(12) PRIME DIRECTIVE. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] You’ve probably heard that Amazon Prime Day is coming on July 11-12th. A few Prime Day sale prices are reserved as “invitation only“. (You can request, but are not guaranteed, an invitation.)

This year, a trio of those deals have genre connections — stands for the 4th & 5th generation Echo Dot styled as Darth Vader, a Storm Trooper, or the Mandalorian. They’ll be 25% off the usual price. Check them out here.

(13) THE DINOS MAY BE DEAD BUT THEIR BONES STILL MOVE. Science News investigates “How ‘parachute science’ in paleontology plays out in 3 countries”.

In the Cretaceous Period, roughly 100 million years ago, the dinosaur Ubirajara jubatus probably turned heads with its feathers, shoulder rods and flashy displays. In 2020, the petite theropod made headlines as the first feathered dinosaur discovered in the Southern Hemisphere (SN: 12/14/20).

Today, the dinosaur is notorious for different reasons: Shortly after the news of its discovery, its backstory quickly drew some red flags.

The fossil had been unearthed in Brazil’s Araripe Basin, yet no Brazilian researchers were involved in its study. The researchers initially said they found the fossil in a Brazilian museum and brought it to a German museum in 1995 for further study, yet that museum later revealed it bought the fossil in 2009 from a private company. That company imported the fossil to Germany in 2006, yet it’s not clear if that import was legal.

U. jubatus isn’t unique in this sense. A supposed four-legged, 120-million-year-old snake (Tetrapodophis amplectus), for example, also made an unsanctioned trip from Brazil to Germany (SN: 7/23/15). And then there’s a roughly 90-million-year-old shark (Aquilolamna milarcae) from Mexico with a fantastic wingspan, which may have been purchased by a private collector through a legal loophole  (SN: 3/18/21).

These and many other cases of fossil fishiness are part of a long trend of what some call “parachute science” (or in this case “parachute paleontology”) and “scientific colonialism.”

These umbrella terms describe practices where scientists from high-income countries travel to middle- and low-income countries to study or collect fossils and fail to collaborate with or involve local experts. Or they skirt local laws around fossil collection and export. Sometimes the fossils are removed from their home countries under dubious or outright illegal circumstances. In other cases, the scientists purchase fossils from dealers, smugglers or private collectors in their own countries. The trend is linked to the legacy of colonialism, as many of the lower-income countries also happen to be former European colonies, while the higher-income ones are former colonizers….

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “We Don’t Talk About Pluto” is a parody of “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” from Disney’s Encanto. Written in tribute to the Pluto formerly known as “planet”.

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