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Pixel Scroll 4/8/24 Everyone I Know Is A Hoopy Scroll, Who Know Where Their Pixel Is

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(1) ANGRY ROBOT BRINGS ON ECLIPSE OF STORYWISE. [Item by Anne Marble.] Angry Robot Books announced a one-week open submissions period that begins April 22, and several posts down in their thread they also said they would be using a submissions portal named Storywise to help them sort through their submissions. In their image, they explain a little more and point out that it’s not generative AI.

Angry Robot provided more information about Storywise here: “Storywise and Open Submissions FAQ’s “ [Internet Archive copy]. It included information on how authors can opt out of Storywise being used in their submission.

For obvious reasons, people are worried. People are pointing out that the Storywise platform can have biases. (And because it’s software, you can’t see those biases.) While it’s great that it’s not generative AI, does that mean writers can still trust it? For example, how do authors known what Storywise will do with their submissions? Others think its fine because it’s not generative AI — it’s just AI being used as a tool. Some have pointed out that slush readers are often unpaid, so that this is not taking away jobs. (But does that apply to slush readers working for book publishers?!)

Here is a quote-tweet by Vajra Chandrasekera with lots of information about Storywise. (Thread starts on X.com here.)

Angry Robot subsequently removed the posts to social media about their open submissions, and walked back the announcement with respect to Storywise, saying they will resume using their inbox system.

Editor’s note: Adrian Moher has a good roundup about the controversy at Astrolabe Digest: 040824. (Moher provided the link in his social media.)

(2) ON THE WAY TO THE CENTERLINE. Rich Lynch snapped this photo of the view from Interstate 87, in the middle of Adirondack Park while on his way to witness today’s eclipse. (Click for larger image to read sign).

No pictures of the event itself, though. “I don’t have any eclipse photos on my iPhone.” But Rich says, “It very much did exceed my expectations, even with the sun having to burn its way through a thin cloud layer.”

(3) STOKERCON 2024 ADDS GOH. Rob Savage was announced today as StokerCon 2024’s fifth Guest of Honor.

Rob Savage initially gained attention at the age of 19 when he wrote, directed, produced, and edited the low-budget romantic drama film Strings (2012), he later became more widely known for his work in horror films and has since co-written and directed lockdown horror hit Host (2020), co-written and directed Dashcam (2021), and directed Stephen King adaptation The Boogeyman (2023).

The con also signal-boosted HWA’s Librarian’s Day.

This year’s Librarian’s Day on Friday, May 31, 2024, once again offers fantastic programming featuring the conference’s guest authors on timely topics and more. Librarian’s Day ticket holders ($60) will have access to the Dealers Room and other areas of the full conference throughout the day.  

(4) DETROIT FURRY CON VICTIMIZED AGAIN. “Motor City Furry Con evacuated for second straight year” reports Audacy.

For a second straight year Motor City Furry Con attendees were forced to be evacuated from their hotel due to a threat.

The nature of the threat was not clear, but officials with the convention confirmed Sunday the Ann Arbor Marriott Ypsilanti at Eagle Crest in Ypsilanti was evacuated around 9 a.m.

The “all clear” was given around 12:30 p.m. and the final day of convention activities resumed.

Sunday’s evacuation comes a year after attendees were evacuated from the same hotel due to an emailed bomb threat. Ultimately, there were no injuries or any explosives found last March.

The Motor City Furry Con is a convention for people who “appreciate the anthropomorphic lifestyle,” according to a report from The Detroit Free Press.

The Detroit Free Press article also noted, “Event attendee Scoops took to social media to celebrate the second year of being an evacuee.”

(5) SLOWLY WE TURNED, STEP BY STEP. “Caeciliusinhorto” has written an impressive perspective piece synthesizing all the news items that comprise “The 2023 Hugo Awards fuckup” for Reddit’s r/HobbyDrama.

… After much discussion, the general consensus seemed to coalesce around a combination of two or three explanations: firstly, active censorship by the Hugo administrators, possibly due to pressure from the Chinese government (national or local); secondly, incompetence; and perhaps thirdly, weird nominator behaviour (possibly including organised voting blocs). For a while things stalled there: the data was obviously wrong, the most plausible explanation seemed to be some combination of cock-up and conspiracy, and there was no prospect of anyone finding out anything more.

And then we found out more….

(6) SURE. MAYBE. DUNNO. ABSOLUTELY NOT. Nautilus asked six sff writers “Does Science Fiction Shape the Future?”.

Behind most every tech billionaire is a sci-fi novel they read as a teenager. For Bill Gates it was Stranger in a Strange Land, the 1960s epic detailing the culture clashes that arise when a Martian visits Earth. Google’s Sergey Brin has said it was Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, the cyberpunk classic about hackers and computer viruses set in an Orwellian Los Angeles. Jeff Bezos cites Iain M. Banks’ Culture series, which unreel in an utopian society of humanoids and artificial intelligences, often orchestrated by “Minds,” a powerful AI. Elon Musk named three of SpaceX’s landing drones after starships from Banks’ books, a tribute to the role they played in turning his eyes to the stars.

Part of this makes sense. Science fiction widens the frontiers of our aspirations. It introduces us to new technologies that could shape the world, and new ideas and political systems that could organize it. It’s difficult to be an architect of the future without a pioneer’s vision of what that future might look like. For many, science fiction blasts that vision open.

Yet these tech titans seem to skip over the allegories at the heart of their favorite sci-fi books. Musk has tweeted, “If you must know, I am a utopian anarchist of the kind best described by Iain Banks.” Yet in Banks’ post-scarcity utopia, billionaires and their colossal influence are banished to the most backward corners of the galaxy.

Recently, I interviewed six of today’s foremost science-fiction authors. I asked them to weigh in on how much impact they think science fiction has had, or can have, on society and the future….

The interview subjects are N.K. Jemisin, Andy Weir, Lois McMaster Bujold, David Brin, Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross. Here’s a quote from Stross:

Charles Stross: Yes, the entire current AI bubble is exactly that. The whole idea of AI has been turned into the centerpiece of a secular apocalyptic religion in which we can create superhumanly intelligent slaves that will solve all our knottily human intellectual problems, then work out how to liberate our pure soul-stuff from these clumsy rotting meatbags and upload us into a virtual heaven. And right now, some of the biggest tech companies out there are run by zealots who believe this stuff, even though we have no clear understanding of the mechanisms underlying consciousness. It’s an unsupported mass of speculation, but it’s threatening to derail efforts to reduce our carbon footprint and mitigate the climate crisis by encouraging vast energy expenditure.

(7) MONSTER BOX OFFICE. Godzilla x Kong rang the registers loudly last weekend reports Variety.

“Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” dominated the domestic box office again, looming large over newcomers “Monkey Man” and “The First Omen.”

Warner Bros. and Legendary Entertainment’s monster tentpole added $31.7 million from 3,948 theaters in its second weekend of release. Ticket sales dropped a standard (for a tentpole of its size and scale) 60% from its mighty $80 million debut and stand at $132 million domestically and $361 million globally.

First-time director Dev Patel’s action thriller “Monkey Man” nabbed second place with $10.1 million from 3,029 venues, while Disney and 20th Century’s supernatural prequel “The First Omen” trailed at the No. 4 spot with a muted $8.4 million from 3,375 locations….

(8) PEAK TELEVISION. “Twin Peaks’ Agent Cooper: How TV’s strangest detective was born” – BBC went right to the source.

… Writer Mark Frost told the BBC’s Late Show that part of the inspiration behind the character was the show’s co-creator and director David Lynch. 

“I tried to base that character on David to some extent,” said Frost. “A lot of his quirkiness and attention to detail, which are things that David has in great abundance, sort of came to the surface with that character. I guess his interest in people’s obsessions, and characters who are obsessed with something, are pretty common with other things he’s done.” …

(9) SMALL BUSINESS. And what is David Lynch working on today? “David Lynch Still Wants To Make Animated Movie ‘Snootworld’: Interview” at Deadline. Netflix said no – maybe someone else will say yes.

…“I don’t know when I started thinking about Snoots but I’d do these drawings of Snoots and then a story started to emerge,” Lynch told us in a rare interview. “I got together with Caroline and we worked on a script. Just recently I thought someone might be interested in getting behind this so I presented it to Netflix in the last few months but they rejected it.”

Lynch was philosophical about the reasons for that decision: “Snootworld is kind of an old fashioned story and animation today is more about surface jokes. Old fashioned fairytales are considered groaners: apparently people don’t want to see them. It’s a different world now and it’s easier to say no than to say yes.”

Thompson described the storyline to us as “wackadoo”: “It takes my breath away how wacky it is. The Snoots are these tiny creatures who have a ritual transition at aged eight at which time they get tinier and they’re sent away for a year so they are protected. The world goes into chaos when the Snoot hero of the story disappears into the carpet and his family can’t find him and he enters a crazy, magnificent world”….

(10) WHO WAS THAT MASKED MAN? “Star Trek Discovery’s Doug Jones Reveals How He Said Goodbye to Saru (And It Involves Whitney Houston)” – Comicbook.com listens in.

Star Trek: Discovery‘s long-awaited fifth season finally debuted this week on Paramount+, and it marks the beginning of the end for the series. ComicBook.com recently had the chance to chat with some of the show’s cast, and they opened up about saying goodbye to their characters in the final season. Doug Jones (Saru) revealed how he said farewell to the character he began playing in 2017, and it involves an iconic song…

“Oh yeah,” Jones said when asked if he was able to keep any part of Saru after the show finished filming. “I wasn’t gonna let that go. Yeah. My final time taking Saru off, I did not cut him up and throw him across the room at all,” he added, referencing the famous story of René Auberjonois throwing his Odo mask at the showrunner at the end of Deep Space Nine. “I held him on my hand and we were playing a Whitney Houston song and I sang ‘I Will Always Love You’ to him and somebody was recording it. So I hope that’s out there somewhere.”…

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born April 8, 1974 — Nnedi Okorafor, 50. Tonight we have Nnedi Okorafor, a truly phenomenal writer. 

She’s Nigerian, and has coined two words to describe her literary focus, Africanfuturism, and Africanjujuism. The latter word identifies the Afrocentric subgenre of fantasy fiction that draws on African spiritualities and cosmologies. Cool. 

Let’s start with some of her work as comic book writer.  The LaGuardia series that she wrote for was published by Berger Books. The collection won a Graphic Story Hugo Award at ConZealand, and her Black Panther: Long Live the King was nominated at Dublin 2019. She did other work in the Panther universe as well — Shuri in which Black Panther is missing and she has to find him (great story), Wakanda Forever and Shuri: Wakanda Forever

I started there as I love her writing in this medium. Now let me pick my favorite novellas and novels by her. 

The Binti trilogy is an extraordinary feat of writing and my favorite reading experience by her. The “Binti” novella which leads it off won a Hugo at MidAmeriCon II. Then came the “Binti: Home” novella which was nominatedfor a Hugo at Worldcon 76 and the final “Binti: The Night Masquerade” novella to date which was nominatedfor a Hugo at Dublin 2019. 

Lagoon is a deep dive in Nigerian mythology including Legba in the forefront here, in what is a SF novel as aliens and humans come together to form a new postcapitalist Nigeria. Neat concept well executed, characters are fascinating and the story is done well. 

(12) COMICS SECTION.

(13) IT COULDN’T HURT. “Fallout Moves To California For Season 2 With Big Tax Credit Award” – Deadline pencils in the numbers.

Just days before its debut, Fallout looks to be assured a second season thanks to a $25 million tax credit from California.

Officially, Amazon has not said yet that the Prime Video series is coming back, but, with some hints from executive producers Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan recently, it is pretty clear the money is doing the talking here. Receiving one of the largest allocations ever from the program for a relocating series, the LA-set post-apocalyptic drama is among a dozen shows awarded $152 million in incentives.

Primetime prequel NCIS: Origins, the Noah Wyle starring The Pitt, plus the Ryan Murphy executive produced Dr. Odyssey starring Joshua Jackson, and Grotesquerie starring Emmy winner Niecy Nash also were awarded credits through the California Film Commission run $330 million annual program – as you can see below….

… Of course, being awarded the tax credits, even big bucks like what Fallout has reaped, is no guarantee a project will go forward. The allocations are conditional on certain timelines being met, and a number of films and shows, like Season 2 of Amazon’s spy saga Citadel, have dropped out of the program after getting a green light….

(14) FILM CENSORSHIP. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Though not SF in itself, this half-hour radio programme, Screenshot, will be of interest to anyone over here in Brit Cit who are fans of fantastic films.  It explains how Britain ranks its films for age suitability. Those in the rebel colonies are not ignored as there is a section comparing Britain’s system with that in the US. It seems we get a better deal over here. Meanwhile, along the way Kim Newman (co-master of ceremonies at the 2005 Hugo ceremony) gets a name check.

As the British Board of Film Classification publishes its new guidelines, Ellen E Jones and Mark Kermode delve into the long, chequered history of film censorship and classification in the UK.

Mark speaks to BBFC President (and original Strictly Come Dancing winner) Natasha Kaplinsky about her role, and about her reaction to the new guidelines. And he discusses the Board’s controversial history, and some of its most notorious decisions, with ex-BBFC Head of Compliance Craig Lapper.

Ellen talks to director Prano Bailey-Bond about her debut film Censor, which was inspired by the ‘video nasty’ moral panic of the 1980s. And pop culture critic Kayleigh Donaldson talks her through some of the differences between the BBFC and its US equivalent, the MPA Ratings Board.

Half hour prog here: BBC Radio 4 – Screenshot, “Censorship”.

(15) THE ELEPHANT NOT IN THE ROOM. “US company hoping to bring back the dodo and the mammoth – but here’s why it won’t be like Jurassic Park” explains Sky News.

… “We’ve got all the technology we need,” says Ben Lamm, chief executive of the firm, based in Dallas, Texas.

“It is just a focus of time and funding. But we are 100% confident [we can bring back] the Tasmanian tiger, the dodo, and the mammoth.”

The science behind the project is simple: Work out the genes that make an extinct animal what it is, and then replicate those genes using the DNA of a close existing relative….

… So after around 4,000 years of extinction, when could we see the return of the mighty mammoth – a creature that fell victim to human hunting and the changing conditions brought about by the end of the last Ice Age.

“We are well into the editing phase,” says Mr Lamm.

“We don’t have mammoths yet, but we still feel very good about 2028.”…

(16) STAND BY FOR MANIACAL LAUGHTER. “Animaniacs in Concert” will be presented at Pepperdine in Malibu on April 19. Buy tickets at the link. Learn more about the show itself at their website: “Animaniacs – IN CONCERT”.

Join the leading voice cast of Animaniacs—the iconic animated Warner Bros. series created and produced by Steven Spielberg—for a “zany, animany and totally insaney” evening as they perform the world-famous songs backed by projections from the beloved cartoon TV series. The live show celebrates the creative inspiration behind the songs with lots of audience interaction and never-before-told behind-the-scenes insider stories shared by the show’s original Emmy-Winning composer Randy Rogel and iconic voice actors like Rob Paulsen (Yakko) and Maurice LaMarche (The Brain) to some of the most unforgettable characters in the history of animation. Special guest Nancy Cartwright joins for this performance. Nancy, of course, is Bart Simpson, a lead character in a “globally known property,”  as well as Mindy in Animaniacs, from “Mindy and Buttons.”  

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Warp Zone’s video “If the Star Wars ‘Cantina Song’ Had Lyrics” was first posted six years ago – but it is news to me! (Maybe you, too?)

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

Pixel Scroll 3/30/24 What Do You Get When You Cross A Velociraptor With An Interociter

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(1) JMS’ OFFERINGS AT THE TEMPLE. “Harlan Ellison’s Last Words: Sci-Fi Writer Makes Posthumous Comeback” in Los Angeles Magazine.

The Lost Aztec Temple of Mars has stood atop the hills of Sherman Oaks for decades, with a façade lovingly fashioned like the ruins of an ancient alien civilization. Carved into its faded orange exterior is an imagined history of flying ships and extraterrestrials, of tangled tendrils and tentacles, of creatures serpentlike and humanoid. This was the home of author Harlan Ellison, a sanctuary he also called Ellison Wonderland, where he wrote his popular scripts and short stories and kept its rooms filled with a museum-grade collection of science fiction and pop culture.

The house is largely as he left it in 2018, when he died there at age 84. For much of his life, Ellison was a leading writer of science fiction (he preferred the less restrictive label “speculative fiction”), a close friend to colleagues including Isaac Asimov and Neil Gaiman, but also notorious among his many enemies and comrades in Hollywood and the once-insular science fiction world.

Upstairs at the house, where Ellison’s manual typewriters, tobacco pipes and a row of rocket-shaped Hugo Awards remain, it is familiar and sacred ground to his old friend, the writer and producer J. Michael Straczynski….

…For Straczynski, 69, Ellison was not just a friend but a father figure of lasting impact. His real father, he says, “was complete shit.” Another executor would have simply liquidated Ellison’s assets, donated them to a favorite charity and moved on. But Straczynski has taken on a bigger mission — to return Ellison’s name to prominence.

“I would not be where I am right now if not for Harlan,” explains Straczynski, who was a 12-year-old in Newark, New Jersey, when he discovered the writer, and sought out his books for years. As his own career evolved from journalism to writing for animated TV, then a latter-day version of The Twilight Zone, show-running Babylon 5 and writing screenplays for Clint Eastwood (2008’s Changeling) and others, Ellison’s feisty example remained central. “His words kept me going. He was the only writer that I came across who made the notion of courage essential to the writing process, and being willing to fight for it.”…

(2) WANDERING EARTH II HUGO PROMO IMAGE. [Item by Ersatz Culture.] The official Weibo account of The Wandering Earth posted an image to celebrate becoming a Hugo finalist.  This in turn was reposted by director Frant Gwo.  This acknowledgement might be a hopeful indicator of whether there might be some representation at Glasgow?

(3) MOVIE MAGIC. The Museum of Neon Art in Los Angeles is hosting “Larry Albright: A Great Magic Truth; March 29, 2024 through September 8, 2024”.

The Museum of Neon Art (MONA) is pleased to present Larry Albright: A Great Magic Truth, an exhibition celebrating the legacy of artist, inventor, and pop-culture force, Larry Albright. The exhibition contains plasma sculptures, consumer electronics, miniature neon set pieces, and film clips from Albright’s work in movies such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Wars, Star Trek, Blade Runner, The Goonies and more. Albright’s distinctive artistic style bridged the gap between the Light and Space Movement, assemblage, and pop culture in the 1970’s through 2000’s. A Great Magic Truth exemplifies the interconnectedness of art and science, and celebrates how humans can manipulate matter in a way that transcends time and space to create new realities. The exhibition will be on display March 29, 2024 through September 8, 2024.

(4) MONSTER RASSLIN. Matt Goldberg assures us “The World Is Big Enough for Two Godzillas” at Commentary Track.

…Last year’s Godzilla Minus One took the character back to his roots with a human-driven story with the monster standing in for trauma and pain. Far from a heroic savior, the Godzilla of Godzilla Minus One was a return for the horrifying entity that our heroes would risk everything to defeat. It’s a great movie, but that’s not all Godzilla can be. Even if you want to argue it’s an American/Japanese divide (as this Polygon article does, although I think it kind of breezes past large chunks of Godzilla’s history), the fact remains that Godzilla is not just one kind of character, and hasn’t been for some time. That’s why I have no problem riding with his heroic iteration in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.

If you’re familiar with the Showa Era Godzilla, you’ll see that’s where director Adam Wingard puts his allegiance—big, monster wrestling fights with lots of destruction and little concern towards plot details or character development. It’s been a strange journey for this “MonsterVerse” that Legendary (the series’ production company) put together where Gareth Edwards’ 2014 Godzilla feints at trying to the bridge the gap between a serious Godzilla and a monster-fighting Godzilla, but by the time you’ve reached this sequel, they’re fully in their monsters-rasslin’ mode. It’s nice to feature acclaimed actors like Rebecca Hall, Dan Stevens, and Oscar-nominee Brian Tyree Henry, but they’re simply here to class up the joint (and doing a solid job of it). The characters with the two clearest arcs are Kong and Jia (Kaylee Hottle), the deaf girl from Godzilla vs. Kong who can communicate with Kong via sign language. They’re both looking for a place to belong, and wouldn’t you know it, it’s even deeper in The Hollow Earth (Hollower Earth?)….

(5) SMILE, YOU’RE ON ROBOT CAMERA. Science reports on research where a “Robot face mirrors human expressions.”

Humanoid robots are capable of mimicking human expressions by perceiving human emotions and responding after the human has finished their expression. However, a delayed smile can feel artificial and disingenuous compared with a smile occur-ring simultaneously with that of a companion. Hu et al. trained an anthropomorphic facial robot named Emo to display an anticipatory expression to match its human companion. Emo is equipped with 26 motors and a flexible silicone skin to provide precise control over its facial expressions. The robot was trained with a video dataset of humans making expressions. By observing subtle changes in a human face, the robot could predict an approaching smile 839 milliseconds before the human smiled and adjust its face to smile simultaneously.

Primary research here: “Human-robot facial coexpression”.

(6) ALICE IN MOVIELAND. [Item by Daniel Dern.] “Alice through the projector lens” at Den of Geek. For serious Alice/Carroll video (movie, TV, etc) fans, this list (the article’s nearly 15 years old, but I’m seeing many I was unaware of and want to find, e.g. “A Song Of Alice,” along with some I might have seen but would cheerfully rewatch). And others I’m familiar with, happily.

There’s some well-known/fabulous actors among the casts, including WC Fields, Clark Gable, Ringo Starr, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Phyllis Diller, Jonathan Winters, and Gene Wilder. I’m curious to see Mr. T as the Jabberwock!

(Did Robin Williams ever do any Alice? Can somebody do one starring Kate McKinnon?)

This isn’t a complete list; e.g. it appears to omit the phenomenal 1988 (but not for young kids) Czech stop-motion animation (plus one live actor, playing Alice), Alice (Original title: Neco z Alenky).

(7) RING TOUR. Tech Wizards is selling a line of ten Lord of the Rings Posters done travel ad-style. Two examples below. (Click for larger images.)

Experience the beauty and adventure of Middle-earth through a beautifully illustrated scene that captures the essence of Tolkien’s legendary universe.

(8) CHANCE PERDOMO (1996-2024). Actor Chance Perdomo, the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and Gen V star, died following a motorcycle accident says The Hollywood Reporter obituary notice. Perdomo was relatively young, his career was just beginning to take off, and he had already done quite a bit of genre work.

Perdomo played Ambrose Spellman and appeared in all episodes of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018-2020) based on the Archie comics about Sabrina, the teenage witch.

Gen V (2023- ) is a spin-off of The Boys. He appeared in all 10 episodes of season 1. It has been renewed for a season 2, tentatively expected next calendar year. His character Andre Anderson was part of the cliffhanger at the end of S1, so his disappearance may take some explaining in S2, unless they recast the part.

Moominvalley (2019- ) is an English/Finnish production appearing originally on TV in the UK and Finland. Dubs for several other languages followed. It’s based on the Moomin series of books and comics. Perdomo‘s character Snork appeared in 4 episodes of the 3rd and currently final season. A 4th season is expected. 

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born March 29, 1930 — John Astin. Now let’s talk about one of my favorite performers, John Astin. I know him best as Gomez Addams in The Addams Family series which was on the air shorter than I thought, lasting just two seasons and a little over sixty episodes. He played him again in Halloween with the New Addams Family (which I’ve not seen) and voiced him thirty years later in The Addams Family, a two-season animated series. I’ll admit I’m not interested in animated series based off live series. Any live series.

John Astin and Carolyn Jones in The Addams Family (1964).

Oh did you know he was in West Side Story? He played Glad Hand, well-meaning but ineffective social worker. No, you won’t find him in the credits as he wasn’t credited then but retroactively he got credited for it which was good as he was a lead dancer. Brilliant film and I’ve no intention of watching the new version, ever.

(Yes I’ve long since abandoned the idea that these Birthdays are solely about genre.)

I’d talk about him being in Teen Wolf Too but let’s take the advice of Rotten Tomatoes reviewers and steer way clear of it. Like in a different universe. Same for the two Killer Tomatoes films. I see he’s in Gremlins 2: The New Batch as janitor but I can’t say I remember him.

So series work… I was going to list all of his work but there’s way too much to do that so I’ll be very selective. So he’s The Riddler in two episodes of Batman and a most excellent Riddler he was. 

But that was nothing when compared to his role on The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. as Prof. Albert Wickwire. He’s a charming, if somewhat absent minded inventor who assists Brisco with diving suits, motorcycles, and even grander creations such as rockets and airships. Dare I say that this was an element of steampunk in the series? It was a great role for him. 

Finally he has a recurring role as Mr. Radford (the real one) as opposed to Mr. Radford (the imposter) on Eerie, Indiana. A decidedly weird series that was cancelled before it completed.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

  • Candorville tries to find a bright side to look on.
  • Macanudo knows the benefits of reading.
  • Rhymes with Orange reveals an unexpected complication of raising a child.
  • War and Peas asks “You Dare Call That… Thing– HUMAN?!?” – and is mostly about xenosex.

(11) CAN’T TELL GOGGINS WITHOUT A SCORECARD. “’I was freaking out’: Walton Goggins on fear, The White Lotus and being a 200-year-old mutant in Fallout” in the Guardian.

…Goggins is almost unrecognisable as the Ghoul, in part due to the full-face prosthetic work that essentially turns him into a bright red, noseless skull. Which, as you may imagine, was not a lot of fun to wear.

“I didn’t know how I would hold up, to be quite honest with you,” he says. “The very first day we were working, it was 106F [41C]. And all of a sudden, the sweat started building up. I couldn’t stop it. Jonathan Nolan asked me: ‘Are you crying?’ I said: ‘No, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ And he touched my eye and water came pouring out of the piece, because there was a buildup of sweat inside. I’m not one to complain, but I sat down on a log and literally said to myself: ‘Man, you’re getting too old for this shit. I don’t know how I’m going to do nine months of this.’ I was freaking out.’…

(12) VERONICA CARLSON INTERVIEW. Steve Vertlieb invites you to look back at this 2013 YouTube video celebrating the life and career of beloved Hammer Films actress Veronica Carlson.

In an exclusive one-on-one sit-down recorded for the documentary, THE MAN WHO “SAVED” THE MOVIES, iconic Hammer Studios actress (and 60s era Mod “It Girl”) Veronica Carlson candidly discusses her days with Hammer, her near familial relationships with the legendary Peter Cushing & Christopher Lee, her close friendship with cinema journalist / archivist Steve Vertlieb, and what caused her to leave the film industry just as her star was rising.

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George takes us inside the “Divergent Pitch Meeting”.

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Ersatz Culture, Steve Vertlieb, Kathy Sullivan, Lise Andreasen, Daniel Dern, 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 Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 3/24/24 When Pixels Run in Titles, It’s A Very, Very, Scroll World

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(1) NORTHUMBERLAND HEATH SF HAD ITS MONTHLY MEET. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] No big deal in itself but the meet saw Nicki receive a copy of her father’s collected fan writings: A Vince Clarke Treasury. 

Vince, of course, being a long-standing BritCit fan from the days of Ken Bulmer, Tedd Tubb and — no relation – Arthur C. Clarke. Vince was GoH at the 1995 Glasgow Worldcon, Intersection. Here’s Vince’s conreport. (Click for larger image.)

Nicki is, roughly third from left next to husband in blue shirt.

(2) O CAPTAIN, MY CAPTAIN. “William Shatner: ‘Good science fiction is humanity, moved into a different milieu’” – so he tells a Guardian interviewer.

…In the case of his time on Star Trek, for instance, an inevitable subject of discussion with the former Captain Kirk: “It was three years of my life, you know?” It gladdens him to see how much joy the series has brought its many fans, but the richest rewards came in his introduction to science fiction, which activated and nurtured a lifelong curiosity about our species. He reminisces about meeting the great writers of the genre fondly yet frankly, honest enough to sort Ray Bradbury into “the category right below friend, I think”. He devoured their novels and developed a fascination with the principle of defamiliarization, that concepts taken for granted can be understood anew when viewed through the vantage of a stranger in a strange land. “Good science fiction is humanity, moved into a different milieu,” he says. “Great stories are great stories. You put human beings on a spaceship or a deserted planet, and we’ve got another way to see ourselves.”…

(3) KAIJU AROUND THE CLOCK. Collider tells where you can “Celebrate Godzilla’s 70th Birthday Party with a 24-Hour Franchise Marathon”.

…  the Music Box Theatre in Chicago is hosting a 24-hour Godzilla marathon in June as a part of an almost week-long event.

From June 7 to June 13, 2024, the Music Box Theatre has partnered with the Japanese Art Foundation to host a slew of events in honor of Godzilla’s historic reign. Opening night (June 7) will be a double feature of the last two Toho Godzilla films, Shin Godzilla and Godzilla Minus One. This is followed by a panel discussion entitled “Godzilla: The Atomic Age Anti-Hero” led by Saira Chambers of the Japanese Culture Center/Japanese Arts Foundation and Dr.Yuki Miyamoto of DePaul Humanities Center. June 8 is when the 24-hour Godzilla marathon will be taking place. This will feature 15 films from the character’s Showa-era. Then, June 9, a rare I.B. Technicolor 35mm print screening of the underrated Godzilla (1998) starring Matthew Broderick will be shown. Other screenings that will be shown throughout this monstrous event will include the original Godzilla from 1954, The Return of Godzilla, and Godzilla vs Biollante.

(4) 2024 WATERSTONES CHILDREN’S BOOK PRIZE. “Botanical fairytale set in Kew Gardens wins the Waterstones children’s book prize” reports The Guardian.

Kew Gardens features a hidden magical door in the winning book for this year’s £5,000 Waterstoneschildren’s book prize.

Greenwild: The World Behind the Door by Pari Thomson was voted the winner by Waterstones booksellers. The book “is a spellbinding triumph that will make children fall in love with the world they are reading about, and with reading itself,” said Bea Carvalho, head of books at Waterstones.

The book follows Daisy as she searches for her missing mother and discovers another world behind a hidden doorway in Kew Gardens. She soon learns that the new realm, filled with plants and magic, is under threat, and she bands together with a botanical expert, a boy who can talk to animals and a cat to save the green paradise.

Thomson lives near Kew Gardens – a place “full of sparkling glasshouses and carnivorous plants and lily pads big enough to take a nap on”, she said. “I have always felt that nature was a little bit magic – and Kew made me ask, what if it was true? What if the natural world all around us was brimming with magic? Greenwild is the answer to that question.”…

(5) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born March 24, 1930 – Steve McQueen. (Died 1980.) I know that Steve McQueen had but one SF role as Steve Andrews in The Blob. He received three thousand dollars in the late Fifties for that his first starring role, now thirty thousand if it was adjusted for inflation.

He had turned down a first offer for a  much smaller up-front fee in return for a ten percent share of profits, thinking the film would never make money, a reasonable assumption on his part. 

As later biographies noted, he needed this money immediately to pay for food and rent. However, this film ended up being a major hit, grossing four million at the box office after costing just one hundred and ten thousand to make, ten thousand under budget. 

I’ve seen it and he was quite excellent in it. Certainly I think he did better than the reviews of the time indicated such as the New York Times which said “the acting is pretty terrible” and or the Variety that proclaimed, “Neither the acting nor direction is particularly creditable.” Humph.

Steve McQueen in The Blob
McQueen in The Great Escape

So one genre film, right? Now let’s look at what else that I like that he was in.

Two years later, he’d be in The Magnificent Seven. Yes, it’s a remake of a Japanese film but it feels all American. And the cast, oh my — other performers included Yul Brynner, Charles Bronson, Robert Vaughn and James Coburn. It’s considered one of the greatest films of the Western genre and deservedly so. 

The Thomas Crown Affair, released a decade later, was a most extraordinary heist film that he headed with Faye Dunaway. The perfect crime takes place. And then again and possibly deadly consequences. Oh it’s wonderful. He’s definitely a much better performer here, not surprising really. 

Now let’s see… Anything else?  Yes, one last film worth, in my opinion to note.

He’s the lead in The Great Escape as Captain Virgil Hilts which tells the story of the escape by British prisoners of war from German POW camp Stalag Luft III. Well, a highly fictional version of course. 

(6) COMICS SECTION.

  • Candorville explains once again that sf jokes are hard.
  • Tom Gauld presents a double feature.

(7) GENTLEBEINGS, BE SEATED. At Sci-Fi World Museum in Santa Monica, CA, “The restored Star Trek Enterprise-D bridge goes on display in May” – Ars Technica has the story.

More than a decade has gone by since three Star Trek: The Next Generation fans first decided to restore the bridge from the Enterprise-D. Plans for the restored bridge morphed from opening it up to non-commercial uses like weddings or educational events into a fully fledged museum, and now that museum is almost ready to open. Backers of the project on Kickstarter have been notified that Sci-Fi World Museum will open to them in Santa Monica, California, on May 27, with general admission beginning in June.

It’s not actually the original set from TNG, as that was destroyed while filming Star Trek: Generations, when the saucer section crash-lands on Veridian III. But three replicas were made, overseen by Michael Okuda and Herman Zimmerman, the show’s set designers. Two of those welcomed Trekkies at Star Trek: The Experience, an attraction in Las Vegas until it closed in 2008.

The third spent time in Hollywood, then traveled to Europe and Asia for Star Trek: World Tour before it ended up languishing in a warehouse in Long Beach. It’s this third globe-trotting Enterprise-D bridge that—like the grit that gets an oyster to create a pearl—now finds a science-fiction museum accreted around it. Well, mostly—the chairs used by Riker, Troi, Data, and some other bits were salvaged from the Las Vegas exhibit….

(8) TWO THUMBS. Collider remembers “The Time Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel Stood Up For Star Wars”.

…[John] Simon’s opinion is highly unusual, as most critics who have reviewed the original Star Wars films are generally complimentary of the visual effects, which are often praised as being extremely convincing and for blending practical techniques with computer-generated work. For example, in his original review of Return of the Jedi for The Chicago Tribune, Siskel remarked that, “for the professional moviegoers, it is particularly enjoyable to watch every facet of filmmaking at its best.” In their response to Simon, Ebert disagreed with the idea of the prominence of the special effects being indicative of poor quality, saying, “I think all movies are special effects. Movies are not real. They are two-dimensional. It’s a dream. It’s an imagination,” alluding to the idea that since all films are brought to life with a combination of effects, what matters is whether said effects work in convincing ways and immerse viewers in a given story….

(9) BANG THE GAVEL SLOWLY. Then in the present, Judge John Hodgman has been called on to remedy a genre-related dispute: “My 60-Year-Old Brother has Never Seen ‘Star Wars.’ Help!” in the New York Times. Here’s the problem – see the answer at the link.

Erin writes: My brother Joel is 60, and I’m 52. But despite growing up in the ’70s, Joel never saw the original “Star Wars.” Now he refuses to, because “sci-fi is dumb.” Please order that he watch it with me on his next visit. I will even provide the gummies if needed!…

(10) BURRRP! [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Nature has a cover with a decidedly SFnal theme about stars that destroy worlds.  ‘Death Stars’ if you will….

The cover shows an artist’s impression of a planet being captured and ingested by one of the stars in co-moving pairs of stars. In this week’s issue, Fan Liu and colleagues present evidence suggesting about 1 in 12 stars might have ingested a planet. The chemical composition of a star can change when it engulfs a planet, so the researchers looked at binary star systems in which the two stars were born at the same time. By comparing the spectral signatures of the stellar twins, they were able to identify instances in which one of the stars had ingested a planet. They identified 91 pairs of close ‘co-natal’ stars and found evidence of planetary ingestion in about 8% of them.

(11) HORSES FOR COURSES? HANDICAPPING THE ECLIPSE. Atlas Obscura tells how “Eclipse Maps Entered a Golden Age Thanks to Edmond Halley”.

In 1715, Edmond Halley published a map predicting the time and path of a coming solar eclipse. Today the astronomer is most famous for understanding the behavior of the comet now named for him, but in his lifetime he was a hotshot academic, elected to the Royal Society at age 22 and appointed the second Astronomer Royal in 1720. He was fascinated with the movements of celestial bodies, and he wanted to show the public that the coming event was not a portent of doom, but a natural wonder….

… With each eclipse to pass over the British Isles, publishers became more savvy about promoting the event to the public. In 1737, mathematician and astronomer George Smith published a predictive eclipse map in The Gentleman’s Magazine, which is thought to be the first eclipse map published in a popular publication (as opposed to as a stand-alone broadside). By 1764, wrote historian Alice N. Walters in a 1999 paper published in History of Science, “so many eclipse maps were on the market—each with a different prediction—that one commentator likened the competition between them and their producers to an event quite familiar to the English public: a horse race.”…

(12) A DAYTIME VISIBLE NOVA. Another predictable but even rarer celestial event is coming up soon: “Stellar explosion: What to know about T Coronae Borealis nova” at Yahoo!

…It’s not exactly new but there will be an extra star in the sky that will be visible to the naked eye in the coming months in Northern California. T Coronae Borealis is a binary star system comprised of a cool red giant and a hot white dwarf star 3,000 light years away. The smaller white dwarf has been stealing matter from the red giant and appears to be getting ready to emit a burst of energy which will make it visible for at least a few days. It is known as a recurring nova where matter, mostly hydrogen, is collected by the white dwarf until enough mass is reached, creating a fusion reaction. That will then emits a burst of energy, which includes visible light. This process has been going on for a long time and occurs about every 80 years in this system….

(13) AS THE WORM TURNS. And one more reason to keep watching the skies – “Here’s how to see the upcoming worm moon lunar eclipse”

A glowing worm moon will light up the sky on Monday with a celestial performance in store for people venturing out in the early morning hours — a penumbral lunar eclipse.

March’s full moon, referred to as the worm moon by the Farmers’ Almanac due to its proximity to the spring equinox, will be at its fullest at 3 a.m. ET.

A few hours earlier, starting at 12:53 a.m. ET, according to EarthSky, the moon will be almost perfectly aligned with the sun and Earth, causing the outer edge of Earth’s shadow, known as the penumbra, to be cast onto the glowing orb.

The greatest eclipse will be at 3:12 a.m. ET, when the moon will appear to be slightly darker than usual, said Dr. Shannon Schmoll, director of the Abrams Planetarium at Michigan State University….

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, 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 Soon Lee.]

Pixel Scroll 3/12/24 I’m Just Fen

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(1) SPECIAL DINO DELIVERY. Royal Mail’s “The Age of the Dinosaurs” special issue features eight new stamps showing different prehistoric species and their habitats. The stamps are in collaboration with the Natural History Museum and also celebrate 19th-century paleontologist Mary Anning. (Click for larger images.)

(2) WICKED WORLD’S FAIR MELTDOWN. Stephen Beale, editor of The Steampunk Explorer, offers an “Inside Look: What Happened at Wicked World’s Fair?” The post first appeared on March 7 and has been updated half a dozen times with additional sources. Beale provided this synopsis of the post for File 770:

The event, Wicked World’s Fair, took place in February in Pennsylvania.

The organizer (Jeff Mach) is a highly controversial figure who previously ran the Steampunk World’s Fair, which was one of the largest steampunk events in the U.S. It collapsed in 2018 following misconduct allegations. The Daily Beast had a story about it.

The short version of this latest event is that he significantly overbooked vendor spots, so they ended up in spaces intended for panels and other non-vendor activities.

The sound crew for concert performances walked out due to non-payment.

There was a $35-per-head tea party, for which he sold 88 tickets, but due to overcrowding of vendors, there wasn’t enough capacity for all the ticketholders.

Requests for refunds via Eventbrite were declined. He’s blaming Eventbrite, but it appears that he just didn’t have the funds to cover his expenses.

My sources for the story include the former vendor coordinator and the former operations manager, both of whom worked as volunteers.

Some widely circulated videos show a confrontation between Mach and the vendors. One has 1.2 million views on Facebook. In some videos, one of his associates is seen standing in front of a vendor and reaching for a sword.

Since the event, vendors formed a private Facebook group called Disgruntled Wicked Vendors. It has around 100 members, though not all were actual vendors.

Following the SPWF collapse, many steampunk vendors, performers, etc. have vowed to avoid participating in Jeff Mach events. It appears that many vendors at WWF were not aware of this history. They’re trying to raise awareness of him so others are forewarned.

The vendor complaints were also covered by LehighValleyLive.com in “Bethlehem area steampunk convention ends contentiously. Vendors claim organizer running scam.”

(3) GODZILLA MINUS MORE THAN ONE COUNTRY. GeekTyrant says Japan is getting discs in May – no word when there will be a U.S. release. “Godzilla Minus One Blu-ray is Coming and Toho Shared a First Look”.

Godzilla Minus One had an incredibly strong box office run at the movie theaters and fans flocked to the cinemas to watch it. That theatrical run has ended and now Toho is teasing the upcoming Blu-ray and DVD release of the film.

The home video teased below will be made available for Japanese consumers, but I think it’s safe to say that the United States will get something very similar.

The movie will be released in both its color and Black and White versions. The home release of Godzilla Minus One is set to hit shelves in Japan on May 1st. There’s no word on when the movie will hit home video in the United States….

(4) FAREWELL, MY DARLING, NEVER. Philip Athans is determined to keep them alive! “Don’t Kill Your Darlings” at Fantasy Author’s Handbook.

There’s good writing advice, interesting writing advice, iffy writing advice, and then there’s terrible, awful, spirit- and creativity-destroying writing advice, and the worst example of the latter category is “Kill your darlings.” What makes this nonsense so bad is how often and irresponsibly it’s repeated.

Often attributed to Dylan Thomas, sometimes William Faulkner (who, if he followed this advice himself would have killed The Sound and the Fury in its entirety), and then repeated by other teachers and authors including Stephen King. In reality the concept seems to have first been belched forth by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in a series of Cambridge Lectures about 110 years ago. Never heard of him? Neither have I. Maybe that’s because of his darling-free writing.

Whoever started it, it goes something like this:

“If you find you’ve written something you just love, that makes you feel as though you were born to do this, that you’ve found the heart and soul of it, delete that immediately and without further consideration because if you love it that much it can only be self-indulgent crap that no one else but you will like.”

What a spectacular load of bullshit….

(5) PROPSTORE. Craig Miller told about his evening at the Propstore auction on Facebook.

Propstore is an auction house based in London with an office here in Los Angeles. Their specialty is, as their name suggests, props from movies and television. Though, of course, they go well beyond that. (They’re the main auction house I’ve used to sell some of my collectibles.)

Last night was a reception and preview for their current auction, held on the penthouse level of the Peterson Automotive Museum in the Miracle Mile section of Los Angeles. (The auction starts today and goes for a total of three days and around 1500 items.) Herewith a few photos.

I have just a couple items in this auction. Alas, none of the really high-ticket items. I think solely a couple of pre-production paintings from “Return to Oz”. They weren’t on display.

What was on display were items including a Stormtrooper helmet from “Return of the Jedi”, an iconic dress worn by Lucille Ball on “I Love Lucy”, the Ten Commandments tablets from Cecil B. DeMille’s epic of the same name, and so much more. You can see a bunch on the Propstore Facebook page or on their webpage, where the auction is carried live (with on-line bidding, of course).

Propstore does these previews once a year and I frequently run into friends at them. Last night was no exception. It was nice to chat and spend a little time with Melissa Kurtz, Shawn Crosby, Chris Bartlett, among several others.

Perhaps best of all, because it’s been so long since I’ve seen or spoken to them, also present were Howard Kazanjian, producer of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “Return of the Jedi”, and Anthony Daniels, known the world over for being the man inside C-3PO….

(6) AND IF YOU HAVE ANY MONEY LEFT OVER. Heritage Auctions’ “March 20 – 24 Treasures from Planet Hollywood” event is hawking stuff formerly on display at Planet Hollywood restaurants.

…Though Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Bruce Willis were the star investors best associated with the restaurant, Planet Hollywood was THE biggest star of them all. Millions would flock there to see items appearing on the silver screen, and sometimes even see one of Hollywood’s A-list coming to open the restaurant. Before emails and cell phones, before digital effects and Instagram, it was the closest we could get to being close to the movies we all know and love….

Here’s an iconic example of the wares: “Jurassic Park (Universal, 1993), Wayne Knight “Dennis Nedry” Hero”.

Designed to hold and preserve dinosaur embryos for 36 hours, the can is highly visible early in the film as Dennis Nedry (Wayne Knight) meets with his Biosyn contact, Lewis Dodgson (Cameron Thor), who gives him the can and explains its features while devising a plan to steal dinosaur DNA samples from John Hammond’s (Richard Attenborough) InGen. Later in the film, Nedry uses the can as he infiltrates the cold storage facility on Isla Nubar and secures the DNA samples. The can is ultimately lost as it falls from Nedry’s jeep, washed away in churning mud when the deceitful computer programmer meets his demise in the jaws of a Dilophosaurus. Chosen by Art Director John Bell, the Barbasol brand can was a perfect fit for its aesthetics and instant recognizability which would help it stick out in its scenes and draw the audiences’ eyes. Since the film’s 1993 release, Barbasol, and their can’s classic design, have become synonymous with the Jurassic Park franchise. Exhibits production and display wear with scuffing to the finish, oxidation across the metal components, color fading, and adhesive loosening to the vial’s labels. Vials contain remnants of the clear yellowish liquid used to fill them during production, with the “PR-2.012” vial missing its cap. Comes with a COA from Heritage Auctions.

Even more irresistible is this diminuitive costume: “Muppet Treasure Island (Buena Vista, 1996), Kermit the Frog”.

Muppet Treasure Island (Buena Vista, 1996), Kermit the Frog “Captain Abraham Smollett” Ensemble. Original (11) piece ensemble including (1) black frock-style coat with gold stitching, (1) ivory waistcoat with gold stitching, (1) pair of black breeches, and (1) long-sleeved ivory shirt with ruffled cuffs. The accessories included are: (1) black tricorn hat with gold stitching, (1) pair of ivory boots with button and buckle closures, (1) black cravat-style necktie, (1) black and red striped waist tie, (1) brown leather belt, (1) 19th century-style gray wig with ponytail and black bow, and (1) Kermit-sized sword with gold basket hilt that has some green coating from oxidation. This outfit is worn by Captain Abraham Smollett (Kermit) throughout the film as he captains the ship, “Hispaniola.” Ensemble displays some production wear. Obtained from Jim Henson Productions. Comes with a COA from Heritage Auctions.

(7) PANDAS AND SANDWORMS BECOME CASH COWS. Variety verified it by watching the ticket booth: “Box Office: Kung Fu Panda 4 Leads, Dune 2 Stays Strong”.

Universal and DreamWork’s animated adventure “Kung Fu Panda 4” topped the domestic box office, earning a solid $58.3 million from 4,035 theaters in its opening weekend.

It marks the biggest debut of the franchise since the original, 2008’s “Kung Fu Panda” ($60 million), overtaking the start of the two prior entries, 2016’s “Kung Fu Panda 3” ($41 million) and 2011’s “Kung Fu Panda 2” ($47.6 million), not adjusted for inflation….

…Although “Dune: Part Two” relinquished its box office crown to “Panda,” the sci-fi sequel had another strong outing with $46 million from 4,074 venues. It marks a 44% decline in ticket sales from its debut (an impressive hold for a blockbuster of this scale) and brings the film’s North American total to $157 million. Globally, the big-budget follow-up has generated $367.5 million.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born March 12, 1925 — Harry Harrison. (Died 2012.) So let’s talk about  Harry Harrison who I’d say is best known for his extraordinarily excellent Stainless Steel Rat series. James Bolivar diGriz, aka “Slippery Jim” and “The Stainless Steel Rat” is one of the most interesting characters I ever had the pleasure to read. 

The Stainless Steel Rat showed up, not surprisingly in a story called “The Stainless Steel Rat” sixty-seven years ago in Astounding in their August issue. 

Harry Harrison. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.

There are 12 works in the Stainless Steel Rat series, of which I’m absolutely certain that I’ve read and immensely enjoyed the first one, The Stainless Steel Rat, and after that is where it gets complicated. I’m looking now on the other iPad at the list of the novel titles and I can’t say that I remember any of them. I know that I’ve read at three or four of them, and liked reading them, but can’t tell you which, but I’m betting that they were the earlier ones. 

I do know that I read all of three of the Deathworld series with Jason dinAlt, a professional gambler, as the central character. They’re fun SF pulp, all three originally written as serials in the Sixties. A fourth, Return to Deathworld, for the Russian market was co-written with two Russian authors and hasn’t been translated into English.

His third series, Bill, the Galactic Hero, first appeared in the “Starsloggers” novella in sixty years ago in the December issue of Galaxy. Bill the character is among the silliest that I’ve ever read about. I’m really fond of truly silly SF, however, though I read the first one  I didn’t go beyond that.

Of course, worth noting is that Alex Cox directed an animated version of Bill, the Galactic Hero which was created with his students at the University of Colorado at Boulder, completed and released a decade ago. You can see it here.

Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! became Soylent Green with Charlton Heston. I’ll confess I’ve not read the novel, nor ever seen the film. I see the film was nominated first a Hugo at Discon II and won a Nebula for the film.

I’m only going to note two other Awards, one is Sidewise Award for Best Long Alternative History, the Hammer and the Cross trilogy, and a Grand Master Nebula. 

I’ll admit I’ve not read enough of his shorter works to form an informed opinion, so I’ll let y’all tell me about that aspect of his fiction.

(9) BRAND X? “’Calling them X-Men is so 1960s’: Chris Claremont weighs in on the X-Men name change debate (and his idea for a replacement)” at Popverse.

Should the X-Men change their name? Ove the past few years, there has been some discourse around the name of Marvel’s iconic mutant team. The name has been around since the team’s first appearance in X-Men #1 (1963), but the world has changed since the 60s. Why does the team have a male-centric name when some of their most iconic members are female?

Chris Claremont, a writer famous for his 16-year X-Men run, has some thoughts on the discussion. During a discussion at the Uncanny Experience event, Claremont mused about the topic. “Calling them X-Men is so 1960s,” Claremont said, after referring to the team as the X-Group.

Claremont circled back to the topic during a question-and-answer session later in the discussion. When he was asked about changing the name, the writer revealed that it had been on his mind for years. “I tried that,” Claremont said. “I spent about 10 years referring to them as the X. The X being the unknown. It was pointed out to me that X-Men is trademarked, which apparently is a whole different kettle of fish. You can’t argue with legal people. When I came to work for Marvel, it was one or two guys, Apparently the Mouse House has much more than that. There are some fights you can’t win.”…

(10) LAUGHS OF THE CENTURY. Charlie Jane Anders makes excitement contagious about “My Favorite Comedy Films of the 2020s (So Far)” at Happy Dancing. Here’s one of her picks.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)

This film finally made me a convert to the Chris Pine fan club. I know, I’m very late. Honestly, the whole cast is great, with Michelle Rodriguez getting better material than she usually gets and Justice Smith proving that he is an utterly brilliant actor. Not to mention Hugh Grant as a wonderfully oily villain. Like a lot of the other comedies on this list, Dungeons & Dragons manages to go way over the top while still having a lot of sympathy and respect for its characters, which is a tough balancing act. I appreciate any comedy whose characters seem to be genuinely trying to be better people, while screwing up over and over again. Also, the CGI monsters and other effects help tell the story instead of being a gaudy distraction!

(11) EMISSION POSSIBLE. [Item by Steven French.] Beautiful but deadly? No, not really! “The Collectors Who Hunt Down Radioactive Glassware” at Gastro Obscura.

IN JANUARY OF 2021, A New Jersey teenager brought a piece of an antique Fiestaware plate to a high-school science class. The student had received a Geiger counter, an instrument used to measure radiation, for Christmas, and wanted to do an experiment. When the plate registered as radioactive, someone at the school panicked and called in a hazmat team. The entire school was evacuated, and those in the nuclear science field were aghast….

…Prior to World War II, and well before its potential for energy or weaponry was recognized, uranium was commonly used as a coloring agent in everything from plates, glasses, and punch bowls to vases, candlesticks, and beads. Uranium glass mosaics existed as early as 79 AD.

Also known as canary or vaseline glass, uranium glass is typically yellow or green in color and glows bright green under a black light. Shades can range from a translucent canary yellow to an opaque milky white depending on how much uranium is added to the glass, from just a trace to upwards of 25 percent. Uranium was also used in the glaze of orange-red Fiestaware, also known as “radioactive red,” prior to 1944, and was once a common sight in American kitchens.

Although uranium glassware does register on a handheld Geiger counter, the radiation amounts are considered negligible and on par with radiation emitted from other everyday items such as smoke detectors and cell phones….

(12) FANCY A BEER? IT’LL KILL YOU. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Isaac Arthur departs from his usual Futurism for one of his “Sci-fi Sundays.”

This time it’s a shorter-than-usual edition at just 15 minutes because it is an impromptu one. This time the SFnal topic is of alien beer, specifically Alien Beer To Die For.

Now of course, I myself am unlikely to ever sample alien beer for the simple, factual reason that I live in Brit Cit, and have roots in Cal Hab and the Caledonian rad wastes, and am close to many of the best real ale hostelries in the spiral arm.

(Neat, huh? See some of you in Cal Hab this summer.)

A look at the possible effects of alien food, drink, and microbes on us or our ecosystem.

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Godzilla takes girl on date and it’s adorable” – here, let Dexerto spoil it all for you.

…The 138-second short starts with said girl losing her mind when Godzilla (or perhaps more accurately, someone in a Godzilla costume) shows up at her door. She hits the deck, starts hyperventilating, and becomes hysterical. Which isn’t traditionally how a great date starts. But then it all becomes rather lovely.

They go shopping. Then have a picnic in the park, before a trip to the beach where this decidedly odd couple wrestle on the sand. The date ends with them kissing each other as the sun sets (well, mainly her kissing Godzilla as the monster’s mouth can’t move)….

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

Pixel Scroll 3/11/24 Fast Pixels At Ridgemont Scroll

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(1) GLASGOW 2024 COMMUNITY FUND NEWS. The first deadline for Glasgow 2024 Community Fund applications is March 15. Details at the link.

In order to make Glasgow 2024 more affordable for those who need it most, we are running a community fund to help with the costs of attending. With the first deadline for applications coming up on the 15th of March, we encourage you to apply for funds if you need them in order to attend; or else to donate funds to help others attend, if you are able to do so. We are so grateful to all of you who have already done so!

(2) VILLAINOUS OSCAR PRESENTERS. Variety took notes on these Batman jokes at Oscars 2024.

Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito had a “Twins” reunion at the Oscars as they joined forces to present best visual effects to “Godzilla Minus One” and best film editing to “Oppenheimer.” But it was their jokes about Batman that stole the show and had the Oscars audience uproariously laughing.

“Arnold and I are presenting tonight together for a very obvious reason,” DeVito said.

“We’ve both tried to kill Batman!” Schwarzenegger revealed to applause….

…“Oh. He threw me out a window!” DeVito said about his Penguin death. “There he is. He’s right here. He’s right there. Look!”

The camera then cut to Micheal Keaton in the audience. Keaton was a presenter at the Oscars earlier in the night, taking the stage alongside his “Beetlejuice” co-star Catherine O’Hara.

“You have a lot of nerve to show your face around here,” Schwarzenegger quipped to Keaton.

DeVito then yelled: “We’ll see you after the Governor’s Ball, pal!”

(3) TRACKING THE ELUSIVE KAIJU. Variety analyzes “How ‘Godzilla Minus One’ Surprised With the VFX Oscar”.

…In late 2023, many still didn’t have the Kaiju movie, released by Japan’s Toho Studios, on their awards radar. But it was incredibly well received when it opened Dec. 1 in the United States, and in the weeks that followed, a VFX branch committee included the movie in the category shortlist.

Then came the Jan. 13 VFX category “bake off,” an event held at the Academy Museum during which the potential nominees representing the 10 shortlisted movies presented clips and spoke about their work before branch members entered their ballots for the final five. The “Godzilla Minus One” team made a charming  presentation, talking about their creative problem solving and challenges. The movie was made for under $15 million and the VFX were pulled off by a team of just 35 people.

The well-received presentation seemed to have secured the team a trip to the Dolby Theatre and when the nominations were officially announced on Jan. 23, a video of the thrilled team in Tokyo went viral. From there, they spoke at screenings and appeared at events including the nominees luncheon, building momentum along the way. In early February, as part of Variety’s Screening Series, the team also participated in a Q&A following a screening at Harmony Gold in Hollywood. The film played to a packed room, with guild members and Academy voters staying long after credits had rolled to meet the filmmakers….

(4) FEBRUARY THE FIRST IS TOO LATE. Peculiarly, if you want to see this Oscar-winner, you’re out of luck. “’Godzilla Minus One’ Isn’t Streaming or in Theaters: Here’s Why”. IndieWire knows the answer.

If you want to catch up with Oscar Visual Effects nominee “Godzilla Minus One” before the awards Sunday night, you’ve got exactly one option: Find an Academy member who will invite you to view it on the voters’ portal. For everyone else in the world, you’re out of luck.

Why? Although never confirmed by Toho, it relates to an apparent contractual agreement between Toho, the Japanese studio that created (and still owns rights to) “Godzilla,” and Legendary Entertainment, which licensed the monster character for a series of films released by Warner Bros. Legendary’s latest with Warners, “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire,” fifth in the MonsterVerse franchise, opens wide in the U.S./Canada March 29.

Toho retains the ability to make its own “Godzilla” movies, but with the reported limitation of not releasing them in the same year as a Legendary production. Under that arrangement, “Godzilla Minus One” opened in Japan last November, and then domestically (as well as multiple European countries) in December.

“Godzilla Minus One” turned out to be a sleeper success in the U.S, grossing $56 million stateside. That’s stunning for a subtitled film and even more so for one that was anticipated as pre-holiday filler. A black-and-white version was added in January.

However, Toho notified theaters that all dates for “Godzilla Minus One” had to end by February 1 — even though “Godzilla Minus One” still ranked #8 in the final weekend of its run, after January 26, with a $2.7 million gross. It’s highly unusual to force a film to leave theaters while it’s still making money, but that’s consistent with reports of limits imposed on its looming competition with “Godzilla x Kong.”…

(5) SHARON LEE UPDATE. In “And when the stars threw down their spears”, author Sharon Lee tells how she’s been keeping up with life since the loss of her husband and collaborator Steve Miller.

It’s a funny thing, how life goes on.  Until it doesn’t, of course, but we’re very good as a species about ignoring that.

So — life.  Much changed, but still moving, still demanding attention, response, thought, and action.

My short-term goal is to find all of Steve’s papers — which is not as easy as you might think — and get them into boxes to send to the archive at Northern Illinois University.  My brother-in-law and nephew are coming up from mid-Coast in a few days to help me, literally, with the heavy lifting, and a Dumpster has been engaged to receive such things as no longer have utility.

My longer-term goals are to finish the sequel to Ribbon Dance — the deadline having been moved from September to November — and start work on the book after that…

(6) KAPLAN ONLINE READING. Space Cowboys Books will host an “Online Reading and Interview with Carter Kaplan” on Tuesday, March 26 at 6:00 p.m. Pacific. Register for free tickets at the link.

Carter Kaplan is the author of The Invisible Tower Trilogy: Echoes, We Reign Secure, and The Sky-Shaped Sarcophagus. His first novel is Tally-Ho, Cornelius! Diogenes is an Aristophanic comedy. Editor of Emanations; IA edition of The Scarlet Letter with Afterword, “A” is for Antinomian: Theology and Politics in The Scarlet Letter; the anthology Fantasy Worlds. Co-translator and editor of Creation of the World by Torquato Tasso. Book on Wittgenstein and literary theory: Critical Synoptics. Articles on “Karel Čapek,” “Menippean Satire” and “Dystopian Literature” in The Encyclopedia of Literature and Politics. Articles on “Herman Melville” and “Michael Butterworth” in A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes (which has an article about him). A chapter on William Blake and Michael Moorcock appears in New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction. Teaching includes Literature, Philosophy, and post-graduate Medical Research Writing in universities ranging across Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York City, and Scotland.

(7) FANAC FAN HISTORY ZOOM.  This is the last FANAC Fan History Zoom for this season and it will stream on March 16. To attend, send a note to [email protected]

We have less than a week until the next FANAC Fan History Zoom program. We have some very knowledgeable fans on this program and it promises to be an enlightening subject in an often overlooked area of our field. Join us!

 Please get the word out to all your friends.

The Women Fen Don’t See

Claire Brialey, Kate Heffner, and Leah Zeldes Smith

Saturday, March 16, 2024

Time: 3PM EDT, 2PM CDT, Noon PDT, 7PM London (GMT), and Mar 17 at 6AM AEDT in Melbourne

(8) SECRET NO MORE. In “Move Over, Alan Turing; Meet the Teenage Girls Who Rocked Bletchley Park”, New York Times reviewer Sarah Lyall discusses THE ENIGMA GIRLS: How Ten Teenagers Broke Ciphers, Kept Secrets and Helped Win World War II, by Candace Fleming.

As war raged in Europe in 1941, Sarah Norton, the 18-year-old daughter of an English lord, received a letter in a plain brown envelope with no return address. “You are to report to Station X at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire in four days’ time,” said the letter, signed by a mysterious “Commander Travis.” “That is all you need to know.”

Little did Sarah realize she was being recruited for Britain’s top-secret wartime code-breaking operation. Arriving at Bletchley Park with a suitcase full of “what she considered the bare essentials — five daytime outfits, an evening gown with matching shoes, lipstick and, most importantly, her teddy bear” — she would work alongside hundreds of similar recruits to help intercept and decipher the Nazis’ secret communications.

“This is the story of a handful of young women — teenagers really — who left their childhoods behind and walked into the unknown,” Candace Fleming writes in “The Enigma Girls,” her beguiling new account of their contributions. “For most of their lives, they never breathed a word about their war experiences.”

We learn about 10 of these real-life conscripts. In addition to Sarah, there was Mavis Lever, also 18, who was assigned to work with Dilly Knox, a Greek scholar who had “spent years successfully deciphering ancient papyri fragments at the British Museum.” There was Patricia Owtram, another 18-year-old, whose job was to monitor radio frequencies for enemy communications while simultaneously converting the Morse code messages into plain text. And there was Diana Payne, just 17, who helped operate the massive “Bombe” machines, which sped up the process of breaking the enemy’s ever-shifting codes….

(9) LISA MORTON Q&A.  Alpha’s Court scored an interview with “Lisa Morton: Author, Editor, and Screenwriter”. Her new release, Placerita, comes out in June.

Q: Where do you draw inspiration from in your work?

A: Everywhere! One of my favorite places is my own backyard, which is both full of amazing plants and which draws all kinds of wildlife at night. As a horror writer, there’s certainly no shortage of fodder in the daily news and, of course, reading other writers’ work is always inspiring.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born March 11, 1952 — Douglas Adams. (Died 2001.) Was there ever a better work of epic humorous, and yes I deliberately used the British spelling there, SF  in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that Douglas Adams delightfully created? 

I first encountered it as the BBC television adaptation on public television in the Eighties. It was quite good. Really it was very, very silly. 

Douglas Adams in 2000.

I next listened to the most excellent radio series which originally broadcast in by BBC Radio 4, and then on the National Public Radio where I heard it. I think it one of the best full cast SF dramas I’ve heard and I’ve listened to it at least three or four times that I can remember. 

Now the books. Oh they’re most excellent as well. All five of them that he wrote before his very untimely death as there were more later, one of which I’ve read. The US edition of the fifth book was originally released with the note of “The fifth book in the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker’s Trilogy” on the cover. 

I’m trying to remember at what point the novels finally weren’t based on off the radio series but I know that it finally happened. 

I have not read Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency novels which were described by him as “a kind of ghost-horror-detective-time-travel-romantic-comedy-epic, mainly concerned with mud, music and quantum mechanics”. I did see some of the BBC series, oddly enough filmed in Vancouver, and it’s silly and fun.

Adams was the script editor for the seventeenth season of Doctor Who, and he wrote three scripts starring Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor — “The Pirate Planet” City of Death” and “Shada”. 

The latter was only partially filmed but never not televised due to industry disputes which even unclear to this day. It was later completed using animation for the unfinished scenes and broadcast as Doctor Who: The Lost Episode on BBC America seven years ago. 

The last thing I want you to mention is Last Chance to See, BBC radio documentary series and a book, written and presented by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine. Adams and Carwardine travel to various locations in the hope of encountering species on the brink of extinction. It’s quite extraordinary.

(11) WRITER BEWARE. Victoria Strauss gives Writer Beware readers a detailed rundown about “Author Complaints at City Owl Press”. This is just a taste.

…Several authors announced their split from COP on social media, without providing details as to why, causing questions and concerns from observers. This is also the point at which COP authors started contacting Writer Beware. Then, in late January, Erin Fulmer published her detailed series of blog posts about her departure from COP. Authors are often very, very reluctant to go public with publisher complaints, whether because they don’t want to single themselves out, fear retaliation and blowback from the publisher and/or fellow authors, or are simply too exhausted and demoralized–but a flood of other accounts followed Erin’s: Megan Van Dyke, SL Choi, Elisse Hay, Jen Karner, Lisa Edmonds, Lily Riley, and more have all chosen to speak out about their experiences.

This unusually public discussion has had an impact. On February 22, COP posted a public apology to authors and readers, with a pledge to implement “systematic and operational changes”. (This is the overshare mentioned in the first paragraph; it was later reformulated in response to criticism)….

(12) VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD. [Item by Steven French.] Early Antarctic explorers would while away the weeks of darkness by writing stories, some silly, some fantastical – the first book printed on the frozen continent included a science-fiction story (complete with drawings) about exploring an undiscovered tropical region of Antarctica: “Antarctica Publications Tried to Hide Danger in Fiction and Strange Stories” at Atlas Obscura.

…It imagines the Nimrod’s party making their way into the strange land of Bathybia, 22,000 feet below sea level. They used rafts made of giant, man-sized mushrooms to travel down rivers into a red jungle, encountering giant ticks, alcoholic algae, and huge carnivorous versions of microscopic Antarctic rotifers….

(13) IT’S NOT KANSAS CABERNET SAUVIGNON, TOTO. But drink enough and you will see flying monkeys. “The Wizard of Oz Tornado Etched Wine” from Mano’s Wine.

Embark on a mesmerizing journey with our Wizard of Oz wine bottles. Expertly deep-etched and lovingly hand-painted, these enchanting collectibles capture the essence of the beloved film. Sip from the elixir of nostalgia and let the magic unfold with every pour. Raise your glass to the Emerald City and indulge in a taste of cinematic splendor.

(14) WORM HYPE. [Item by Steven French.] Nature invites you to “Meet the real-life versions of Dune’s epic sandworms”. “‘Dune’s sandworms can grow to at least 450 metres long, about 15 times the size of the longest blue whale. How big do real-life worms get?”

…There are annelid worms that get up to several metres in length called eunicid worms, a type of bristle worm. They’re pretty gnarly — they have big jaws, they look a bit like Graboids from the 1990 film Tremors. Some of them are ambush predators. They eat octopuses, squid, vertebrates….

There are some earthworms that get really big, as well. Megascolides reaches up to 2 metres. The biggest ones are from Australia.

(Of course they are!)

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Dan Monroe wants to find out “Whatever Happened to LOGAN’S RUN?” (See, I didn’t know anything had happened to Logan’s Run!)

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

Pixel Scroll 2/18/24 Aren’t All Pixels Made Of Exotic Materials?

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(1) CANCELLING HERSELF. Samantha Mills mournfully headlined her latest blog post “’Rabbit Test’ unwins the Hugo”. After reading the Barkley/Sanford report and some others’ analysis of the voting reports, Mills says:

…Looking at the information we currently have, it’s hard for me to conclude anything other than: I shouldn’t have been on that ballot. On the one hand, it seems as though the final vote hasn’t been tampered with, and the voters engaged in good faith with the works they were told were the finalists, for which I still say thank you! But it’s really, really hard for me to see past the initial fact, which is that I shouldn’t have been on that ballot.

This entire experience has been very stressful and fraught. Initially I assumed I wasn’t going to be a finalist, because even though the story had taken off like mad in the U.S., the bulk of the membership was not going to be American. I assumed we would see a lot of Chinese nominees — which would have been cool! We’d get a slice of international scifi that I rarely ever see! And then I was really pleasantly surprised to be informed I was a finalist after all. When the full ballot was posted, I was also surprised at how few Chinese nominees were in the fiction categories. There were four in the short story category, though, so I thought it was legit, and that wow, John Wiswell and I somehow made the cutoff anyway, isn’t that amazing!

I accepted the nomination because, you know, it is supposed to be an honor. But then due to concerns about the Worldcon event itself, I elected not to participate in programming or accept a free trip to Chengdu. This was also fraught. I’ve never been to a Worldcon, and I’d never been nominated before. And as I said in my previous long-winded post on the subject, I have nothing against the fandoms at play. But I wasn’t comfortable being one of the faces of local PR under political circumstances that felt entirely above my pay grade, so I bowed out…

(2) HUGO DIAGNOSIS AND POSSIBLE CURE. Nerds of a Feather editorsThe G, Vance K, Arturo Serrano, Adri Joy, Chris Garcia, Paul Weimer, and Alex Wallace have each written part of “The Hugo Awards Crisis Deepens – Where We Stand and How to Save the Awards”.

The G’s segment concludes:

There are two sets of problems here: (a) the proximate issue of what was done in 2023 and (b) what this reveals or illuminates about the the cartel of self-proclaimed “SMOFs” (secret masters of fandom) who treat the Hugos – and Worldcon more broadly – as their birthright, playground and personal fiefdom. The Hugo Awards are supposed to be democratic in nature and process; the behavior of the self-proclaimed “SMOFs” is fundamentally anti-democratic – and this is by no means confined to Chengdu Worldcon.

Now here are my suggestions for how to rebuild trust in the Hugo Awards:

  1. No one involved in the administration of the 2023 Hugo Awards, or who assisted in the collection of political evidence, can ever be allowed to have any role in administering the awards ever again.
  2. Vote tabulation must be performed in a transparent manner using software that multiple people have access to for purposes of validation. 
  3. All tabulations must be independently audited for purposes of verification. 
  4. Individual Cons should no longer administer the Hugo Awards – this should be done by an independent, rotating committee.
  5. All decisions by said committee must be audited; all disqualified nominees must be notified and given time to appeal.

(3) STARSHIP FONZIE SCOOP. Eric Hildeman got ahead of the “Glasgow 2024 Passalong Funds Announcement” with the information he reported in Episode 36 of his “Starship Fonzie” podcast. He’s now also posted a transcript on his blog.

Here’s more information about Chengdu’s passalong offer of $40,000 to Glasgow:

“… My colleague, and I think it’s fair to say, con-running coach, Alexia Hebel, is not only the treasurer for Capricon, she was the treasurer for the Western component of the Worldcon in Chengdu. And as such, one of her duties was to administer the pass-along funds from Chengdu over to Glasgow. What are pass-along funds? Well, if there’s any money left over after running a Worldcon, they have the option and traditionally always do of passing that surplus along to the next Worldcon as a donation towards its effort. It’s a bit more complicated than that, but that’s the basic idea. While in between duties at Capricon and after speaking with Ben Yalow about it, she offered $40,000 in pass-along funds to the Glasgow Worldcon. And again, that’s de rigueur. You know, every Worldcon does this if they can. Glasgow turned the money down. They’re so anxious to avoid any associations with the Chengdu Worldcon that they’re unwilling to even touch the money, to the tune of 40 grand.

(4) SEEN AROUND FANDOM. These convention badge ribbons will be in great demand once somebody starts handing them out.

(5) DRAMA CRITIC. Lauren Oyler asks what effect Goodreads one-star reviews – or any other reviews – have in “’God forbid that a dog should die’: when Goodreads reviews go bad” at the Guardian.

Something dramatic happens on a social media platform every day. On Goodreads, the anachro­nistically designed website for logging, rating (out of five) and reviewing books, the dramas are more amusing, and they occasionally even draw attention from areas beyond the site’s supposedly book-loving users. The most recent featured Cait Corrain, the fantasy author who set up an elaborate network of fake accounts to post positive reviews of her own forthcoming book as well as negative reviews of authors she felt were her competitors. When citizen journalists uncovered her plot in December 2023, her book was cancelled, and she lost her agent and a future book deal.

A juicy, postmodern story of self-sabotage, or a sad one about the intersection of the internet and mental health. Regardless, its stakes are relatively low: publicly harassing one’s colleagues is a sackable offence anyway, and it’s hard to find someone who really cares about the vicissitudes of the young adult literature world who isn’t part of the subculture. I’m not; I’m a professional critic, and an author of a literary novel. I’m a snob. I care about my book, and the authors I feel are my competitors. And while Goodreads has been around since 2007, its significance to the broader literary world remains steadfastly confusing. Does it sell books? Does it make and break careers? The flashy, funny stories that have emerged about the site over the last several years have done exactly what its proprietors surely want: make it seem like Goodreads is important. But is it?…

(6) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES. Space Cowboy Books of Joshua Tree, CA presents episode 72 of the Simultaneous Times podcast with Eugen Bacon & Todd Sullivan. Stories featured in this episode:

  • “A Good Ball” by Eugen Bacon, with music by Fall Precauxions, read by Jean-Paul Garnier
  • “Shards of Glass” by Todd Sullivan, with music by Phog Masheeen, read by Jean-Paul Garnier

Theme music by Dain Luscombe

Available on all podcast players or at Podomatic.

(7) THE SOURCE: SARAH MAAS FANTASY. Ann Smoot points out “The Jewishness of Sarah Maas’ Fantasy World” at Hey Alma. Beware spoilers.

Whether you’ve been thinking about starting to read “A Court of Thorns and Roses,” or you’re a long-time fan of “Throne of Glass,” it’s likely that you’ve heard of Sarah J. Maas. The author is making headlines the world over thanks to her fantasy series. Whether you’re invested in them for the well-written smut or the beautiful way she weaves her stories, fans can’t put down her novels. But what some readers might not know about the rather private author is that she was raised by a Catholic mother and a Jewish father and attended Hebrew school in her youth. She went on to attend Hamilton College for religious studies and met her future husband at her college’s Hillel, where he served as president. Her connection to her Jewish faith isn’t just apparent when looking at her personal history, though. It just takes a keen eye and a flip through any of her series’ to recognize that she has woven her culture through every story….

… The way that Maas deftly and lovingly weaves her Jewish culture and faith into her writing opens up the world of our stories and tradition to a wider audience. Jewish faith hasn’t had a very loud voice in fantasy — but thanks to Maas, that might be about to change.

(8) ROLE MODEL. [Item by Danny Sichel.] “Peter Talks To a Spider”, a ten-page comic, by Donny Cates and Chip Zdarsky, published on Marvel’s official Threads account: “What happens when Spider-Man chats with an actual Spider”. Images at the link.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born February 18, 1919 — Jack Palance. (Died 2006.) Tonight I’ve come to talk of Jack Palance who was born of Ukrainian immigrant parents with name of Volodymyr Palahniuk. His last name was actually a derivative of his original name. While guesting on What’s My Line?, he noted that no one could pronounce his last name, and how it was suggested that he be called Palanski but instead that he decided just to use Palance instead. He didn’t say where his first name came from.

(OK nitpickers, I do not want to hear from you. Seriously, I don’t. His career makes a gaggle of overly catnapped kittens playing with skeins of yarn with lots of lanolin still on it look simple by comparison so I may or may not have knitted it properly here, so bear with my version of it.) 

Jack Palance in 1954.

Surprisingly it looks like that he got his start in our end of things in television performances and relatively late as they started in the Sixties with the first one being Jabberwock on a musical version of Alice Through the Looking Glass. I’m sure I want to see that as it had Jimmy Durante as Humpty Dumpty, and the Smothers Brothers as Tweedledee and Tweedledum. 

Next up was a Canadian production with him in the title role of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and that in turn saw him being the lead in Dracula, also known as Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Dan Curtis’ Dracula, the last when the ego of the Director got way, way too big. 

Jack Palance as Dracula (1973)

I’m going to digress here because it’s so fascinating. In 1963, The Greatest Show on Earth first aired. This Circus drama had Johnny Slate as the big boss who keeps the circus running as it moves from town to town. It was produced by Desilu, the production company founded by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Sr. It lasted but one season as it was up against shows by Jack Benny and Richard Boone. 

A bit of hard SF was next, Cyborg 2, released in other countries as Glass Shadow, creative but terribly uninformative, where he’s Mercy, an old renegade cyborg. 

Remember my Birthday recently on the wonderful Carol Serling? Well he was in The Twilight Zone: Rod Serling’s Lost Classics film that she made possible as Dr. Jeremy Wheaton in “Where the Dead Are”. 

If Treasure Island counts as genre and yes I do count it in my personal canon, then his role as Long John Silver is definitely canon. 

He got to play Ebenezer Scrooge in Ebenezer. Now the fun part is that it’s set in the Old West, where he is the most greedy, corrupt and mean-spirited crook in the old West obviously, he sees no value in “Holiday Humbug” by several reviewers. This film I went to look up on Rotten Tomatoes, but no rating there.

Not at all shockingly to me, he shows up on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. where he plays a character of Louis Strago in a two-parter “The Concrete Overcoat Affair” which got reedited as “The Spy in the Green Hat”. 

A bit of horror was next in Tales of the Haunted as Stokes in “Evil Stalks This House” was up late in career.

Finally for roles that I’m reasonably sure were of genre interest, he was on Buck Rogers in the 25th Century as Kaleel in the “Planet of the Slave Girls” episode.

One more gig for him related to genre or at least genre adjacent, though not as a performer, but as the host of Ripley’s Believe It or Not! for four years. He had three different co-hosts from season to season, including his daughter, Holly Palance, actress Catherine Shirriff, and finally singer Marie Osmond. 

I’ll take your leave now. 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) HEAVENLY OSCULATION. [Item by Steven French.] David Tennant answers Guardian readers’ questions about the length of his sideburns, what kind of cheese he would be and being a Doctor Who fan: “David Tennant: ‘Kissing Michael Sheen was fine. He’d brushed his teeth’”.

“Am I as geeky as the Doctor who fans? Yes. As a Doctor Who fan myself of old, I can very much can plug into that. I don’t think I ever got in trouble at school. That is one of those stories that’s ended up on Wikipedia. I wrote an essay on Doctor Who, which some unpleasant newspaper found and printed. But I didn’t get in trouble for it. I think I got quite a good mark for it.”

(12) LGBTQ VIDEO GAMERS. The New York Times article about a GLAAD study says “Report Says 17 Percent of Gamers Identify as L.G.B.T.Q.”  There were 1500 participants in the survey.

Less than 2 percent of console video games include L.G.B.T.Q. characters or story lines even though 17 percent of gamers are queer, according to GLAAD’s first survey on the industry.

The survey, whose results were released on Tuesday, said a majority of respondents had experienced some form of harassment when playing online. But it also found that many queer gamers saw virtual worlds as an escape in states where recent legislation has targeted L.G.B.T.Q. people. Seventy-five percent of queer respondents from those states said they could express themselves in games in a way they did not feel comfortable doing in reality.

“That is a statistic that should pull on everyone’s heartstrings,” said Blair Durkee, who led the advocacy group’s survey alongside partners from Nielsen, the data and marketing firm. “The statistic is driven largely by young gamers. Gaming is a lifeline for them.”

GLAAD has produced a similar breakdown of queer representation in television since 1996. Its latest report found that 10.6 percent of series regulars in prime-time scripted shows identified as L.G.B.T.Q., which researchers said helped put their video game study in perspective….

(13) CREATING VIDEO FROM TEXT. That’s the latest step forward in artificial intelligence says OpenAI in “Sora”.

We’re teaching AI to understand and simulate the physical world in motion, with the goal of training models that help people solve problems that require real-world interaction.

Introducing Sora, our text-to-video model. Sora can generate videos up to a minute long while maintaining visual quality and adherence to the user’s prompt.

Today, Sora is becoming available to red teamers to assess critical areas for harms or risks. We are also granting access to a number of visual artists, designers, and filmmakers to gain feedback on how to advance the model to be most helpful for creative professionals.

We’re sharing our research progress early to start working with and getting feedback from people outside of OpenAI and to give the public a sense of what AI capabilities are on the horizon….

… The current model has weaknesses. It may struggle with accurately simulating the physics of a complex scene, and may not understand specific instances of cause and effect. For example, a person might take a bite out of a cookie, but afterward, the cookie may not have a bite mark….

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. The second trailer for Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire has dropped. Only in theaters March 29.

The guardians of nature. The protectors of humanity. The rise of a new empire.

The epic battle continues! Legendary Pictures’ cinematic Monsterverse follows up the explosive showdown of “Godzilla vs. Kong” with an all-new adventure that pits the almighty Kong and the fearsome Godzilla against a colossal undiscovered threat hidden within our world, challenging their very existence—and our own. “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” delves further into the histories of these Titans and their origins, as well as the mysteries of Skull Island and beyond, while uncovering the mythic battle that helped forge these extraordinary beings and tied them to humankind forever.

[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Paul Weimer, Eric Hildeman, Joshua K., Cliff Ramshaw, Kathy Sullivan, Jean-Paul Garnier, Dan Bloch, Rich Lynch, Danny Sichel, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]

Pixel Scroll 12/4/23 Cool Carbonite Hand Luke 

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(1) POWELL ARRESTED. Longtime fan Rickland Powell was arrested December 1 in connection with “assaulting a female child who is known to him” according to the Middlesex (MA) District Attorney.  Their press release follows.

Powell is on the list of people who have been banned from Arisia. Prior to that he worked on Arisia over the past couple of decades in positions ranging from Division Head to logistics and art show help.

(2) UNCATCHABLE. Gideon Lewis-Kraus’ “Maybe We Already Have Runaway Machines”, a discussion of David Runciman’s The Handover: How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States, and AIs,  is a rather Strossian article in The New Yorker.

…Yet we citizens of modern states have always labored under the shadow of a partly mitigated alignment problem—a “mismatch between the drives of these artificial persons and the needs of the planet,” as Runciman describes it—that provides a frame, a vocabulary, and a sense of foreboding as we seek to process the automation on the horizon. The concern about unaligned machines is that even if we can program, so to speak, their ultimate ends, we can’t necessarily anticipate the instrumental subgoals they might pursue as an intermediate measure. If you instruct a machine to complete a task, the likeliest instrumental subgoal is to “gain control.” If the danger of the alignment problem seems indistinct or preposterous, Runciman suggests, you haven’t been paying attention….

“… States and corporations reflect two different sides of our contemporary fear of machines that have escaped human control. One is that we will build machines that we don’t know how to switch off, either because we have become too dependent on them or because we can’t find the off switch. That’s states. The other is that we build machines that self-replicate in ways that we can no longer regulate. They start spewing our versions of themselves to the point where we are swamped by them. That’s corporations….”

(3) FOLLOW-UP ON ALASKAN MUDSLIDE. Max Florschutz wrote in November that his mother survived the mudslide in his hometown of Wrangell, Alaska but at that time he did not know the fate of his father. Unfortunately, his father passed on. He has an update in “Emergency News and Classic Being a Better Writer: Horizontal and Vertical Storytelling” at Unusual Things.

(4) BEST XX. Esquire’s list of “The 20 Best Books of 2023” is topped by a genre work.

…Our selections range from debut works by emerging voices to new outings for canonical writers. They delve into everything from prisons to shipwrecks, ghost stories to extraterrestrials, American dreaming to American failures. Whether you’re into novels, short stories, memoirs, or nonfiction, we’ve covered the whole waterfront here with a bumper crop of incredible books. They’re all worth their weight in gold (believe us, we know exactly how much they weigh).

Below, here are Esquire’s 20 best books of the year…

Ranked number one:

Chain-Gang All-Stars, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Ever since his breakout debut, Friday Black, we’ve been eagerly awaiting Adjei-Brenyah’s sophomore outing. Nearly five years later, it arrived this past spring, and it surpassed all expectations. In a dystopian United States, the prison-industrial complex has gone private, leaving incarcerated people with no choice but to compete for their freedom in the Criminal Action Penal Entertainment system. Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker have traveled together for years as Links in the same Chain-Gang, but as Thurwar nears her freedom, she contemplates how to bring dignity to her multi-racial and multi-gendered coalition of fellow gladiators. Reading Chain-Gang All-Stars in a nation addicted to violent sports that brutalize athletes of color, Adjei-Brenyah’s acerbic vision lands like a lightning bolt of truth.

Read an exclusive excerpt here at Esquire.

(5) WILKINS GOFUNDME. Cory Doctorow signal boosted an appeal to help Pacific Northwest bookseller Duane Wilkins.

Nearly every sf writer who’s ever toured the west coast knows Duane – he’s the encyclopedically knowledgeable sf buyer for the U Washington Bookseller, who has organized some of the best sf signings in Seattle history. He’s a force of nature.

He’s also broke. A two-week hospital stay left him drowning in medical debt – despite being insured! – and now he’s being threatened by a collection agency.

Now, Duane is forced into participating in one of the most barbaric of contemporary American rituals, fundraising to cover his medical debt. He’s raised $6k of the $10k he needs (I just pitched in $100).

If you can afford to help out someone who’s done so much for our community, please kick Duane whatever you can spare.

Shawn Speakman, who set up the GoFundMe (“Please Help Duane Wilkins Pay His Medical Debt”) says there are reward for certain levels of donation. (Also note – as of this writing the appeal has brought in $15,567).

I told him that I’d help him relieve that debt and raise some extra funds for any future situation that might require aid.

That’s where you come in.

If you donate $10 or more, Grim Oak Press will email you free ebooks of our amazing anthologies Unfettered, Unfettered II, Unfettered III, Unbound, and Unbound II. These are filled with amazing SF&F short stories. Google them to view their incredible author line-ups.

And if you donate more than $20 to Duane’s GoFund Me, several of these writers are willing to give free ebooks of some of their novels. Starting with me and my newly-edited edition of The Dark Thorn.

I hope you will consider donating to Duane’s GoFundMe and help spread word about it. Together, we can help one of our best SF&F booksellers….

(6) MONSTER MASH. They’re at it again: Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire Official Trailer is coming to theaters April 12, 2024.

(7) FAITHFUL EEYORE. John Boston reviews the latest (in 1968) issue of Amazing at Galactic Journey. “[December 4, 1968] Sign Me Up (January 1969 Amazing)”.

In this January’s Amazing, on page 138, there is an editorial—A Word from the Editor, it says, bylined Barry N. Malzberg—which suggests a different direction (or maybe I should just say “a direction”) for this magazine.  First is some news.  There will be no letter column; Malzberg would rather use the space for a story.  Second, “the reprint policy of these magazines will continue for the foreseeable future,” per the publisher, but “A large and increasing percentage of space however will be used for new stories.”

Pointedly, the editor adds, “it is my contention that the majority of modern magazine science-fiction is ill-written, ill-characterized, ill-conceived and so excruciatingly dull as to make me question the ability of the writers to stay awake during its composition, much less the readers during its absorption.  Tied to an older tradition and nailed down stylistically to the worst hack cliches of three decades past, science-fiction has only within the past five or six years begun to emerge from its category trap only because certain intelligent and dedicated people have had the courage to wreck it so that it could crawl free. . . .  I propose that within its editorial limits and budget, Amazing and Fantastic will do what they can to assist this rebirth—one would rather call it transmutation—of the category and we will try to be hospitable to a kind of story which is still having difficulty finding publication in this country.”

As far as I know fifty years later Malzberg is still disappointed in science fiction. G.W. Thomas took inventory of some of his past predictions for the genre in “The Fate of Science Fiction According to Barry N. Malzberg” at Dark Worlds Quarterly.

(8) MEDICAL UPDATE. Erwin “Filthy Pierre” Strauss, who fell down some stairs at Smofcon thie weekend, suffered a broken wrist and was taken to New England Hospital, wrote Kevin Standlee yesterday. “They expect to keep him at least one more night. Sufford and Tony Lewis will retrieve him from the hospital when he is released.”

(9) TIM DORSEY (1961-2023). Crime novelist Tim Dorsey, who wrote about the eccentricities of Floridians long before Florida Man became a meme, died November 26. The New York Times obituary is here: “Tim Dorsey, Who Turned Florida’s Quirks Into Comic Gold, Dies at 62”.

…Mr. Dorsey gave his books comic titles that reflected the blend of Jimmy Buffett and Raymond Chandler that filled their interiors.

“The Maltese Iguana,” published this year, was Mr. Dorsey’s most recent book.via HarperCollins

He reveled in the diversity of Florida — the dog tracks and swamps around Miami, the Redneck Riviera along the Panhandle, the morass of state politics in Tallahassee, the nostalgic weirdness of the Keys.

His novel “Atomic Lobster” (2008), Mr. Dorsey said in an interview with Powell’s Books, was “the dissection of a Florida neighborhood populated almost entirely by degenerates, con men, the terminally dysfunctional, golf freaks, trophy wives, and prescription-abusing retirees in Buicks tying up traffic. In other words, a documentary.”

Some people considered Serge to be Mr. Dorsey’s alter ego, but he corrected them. Serge was, he said, his ego, living the kind of life and doing the sorts of things he would love to do if not constrained by conscience and the law….

(10) TODAY’S WISDOM.

From Wole Talabi:

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • The Flying McCoys wondered how to get hold of Batman if the Batlight went out.
  • Tom Gauld decodes some highly technical terminology so the layperson can understand it.

(12) LEGACY. Bobby Derie looks at an example of the Japanese Cthulhu Mythos in “The Cthulhu Helix (2023) by Umehara Katsufumi (梅原克文)” at Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein.

… Which is why The Cthulhu Helix works as a Lovecraftian novel. The characters are all conscious of Lovecraft’s legacy, but for them it’s all shorthand and metaphor, a way to frame and discuss these complex ideas and relationships without getting bogged down in Elder Signs and other minutiae. The particular approach Umehara took is fairly Derlethian, but that’s not surprising considering when and where it was published….

(13) SEEKING SUBSCRIBERS. Sunday Morning Transport’s free-to-read story for December is “Deconstruction in the Form of a Cat God” by LaShawn Wanak.

LaShawn Wanak opens with talking cats; then the tale only grows more wondrous — and we can think of nothing better

(14) CASTING CALL. Slashfilm tells readers “How David Tennant Ended Up Playing Huyang In Star Wars”.

… It’s brilliant casting, if I may gush for a moment. I love him in both franchises. I think part of the appeal is that David Tennant’s voice is pretty recognizable; “Doctor Who” fans have a built-in feeling that this is a wise person who has centuries of universal knowledge behind whatever he’s saying. I suppose you could say the same thing for fans of “Good Omens” (where he plays a fallen angel who has been around for all of time) who only discovered Tennant’s Huyang in “Ahsoka.” Of course, his performances are great across the board, but there is something to be said for many audience members having immediate feelings about him from his past work…. 

(15) IT’S GOOD FOR YOU. “Neuroscience Says 1 Rather Brainless Activity Can Lower Your Stress and Make You More Productive” says Inc.com. And we’re all into brainless activities, right?

…The activities included coloring in a mandala, doodling within or around a circle marked on a paper, and having a free-drawing session, each for three minutes, with rest periods in between. During all three activities, there was an increase in blood flow in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, which forms a part of the wiring for our brain’s reward circuit. 

“This shows that there might be inherent pleasure in doing art activities independent of the end results,” said the study’s lead author.

The advantages of creating art go beyond just the pleasure of the activity itself. According to surveys before and after the art-making activities, participants who engaged in art-making felt more creative and were better able to solve problems….

(16) AI CON GAME. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] BBC Radio 4’s documentary programme File on Four has taken a fascinating look at how artificial intelligence (A.I.) is being used by criminals to con victims. A crime that, if written as a story a decade ago, would be decidedly SFnal.  A.I.-generated deep fakes are no longer restricted to images but also to voices and even video.  In the programme, the presenter gets a researcher to train an A.I. to simulate the presenter’s voice and then gets the A. I. to phone his mother: someone who arguably best knows what his voice sounds like. His mother is completely taken in by the A.I. voice.

The programme reveals that the banks, which have been using voice identification as an added security measure, are in an arms race with criminals. One A.I. researcher has even refused to let his bank use voice identification on his account!

Artificial intelligence, or AI, makes it possible for machines to learn – and in the future it will perform many tasks now done by humans. But are criminals and bad actors ahead of the curve? AI is already being used to commit fraud and other crimes by generating fake videos and audio; fast emerging threats that form just part of a potential new crime wave. File on 4 investigates.

You can listen to the half-hour programme here: “File on 4, Artificial Intelligence: The Criminal Threat”.

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. How It Should Have Ended, strangely enough, has an opinion about how Transformers: Rise of the Beasts should have ended.

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Ersatz Culture, Steven French, Andrew (not Werdna), Kathy Sullivan, Kevin Standlee, Cat Eldridge, 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 Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 9/11/23 Pixels Are A Scroll’s Best Friend

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(1) USE THESE EMAILS FOR SUBMISSIONS TO WSFS BUSINESS MEETING. Donald Eastlake III, Presiding Officer of the 2023 WSFS Business Meeting, announced that if anyone is having trouble sending email to businessmeeting (at) chengduworldcon.com, there is an alternative email address available for the submission of new business: ChengduNewBusiness (at) pobox.com.

The general deadline for new business is September 19, Chengdu time.

(2) GET IA TO TAKE DOWN YOUR BOOKS. From the Authors Guild: “Update: How to Tell Internet Archive to Remove Your Books”. “The court’s decision in the Open Library lawsuit made it clear that making full-text copyrighted books available for free without permission is copyright infringement. Here’s how any author can demand the Internet Archive take down any titles that are still on its website.”

In March, four major publishers scored a resounding victory in their copyright lawsuit against Internet Archive and its so-called Open Library program. The court decisively ruled that Internet Archive’s practice of scanning books and making them freely available on its website is copyright infringement and does not constitute fair use. While the Authors Guild was not a party to the lawsuit, we supported the publishers throughout the litigation and welcomed the court’s clear rejection of Internet Archive’s “Controlled Digital Lending” theory.

Following the decision, the court directed the parties to propose specific steps that Internet Archive must take to remedy its infringement. The parties agreed, in a proposed consent judgment, that Internet Archive should be subject to a permanent court-ordered injunction barring it from making the publishers’ books available online. We have heard from some authors who are concerned that the injunction is limited to books in which the four publisher plaintiffs hold copyrights and does not cover books whose copyrights are owned by the author or a smaller publisher. Unfortunately, this case was not a class action, and therefore only the actual parties in the case can be bound by the court’s order. We were surprised and disappointed, however, that the court adopted Internet Archive’s proposal to limit the injunction to books that the publishers have made available in electronic form. As we explained, limiting the injunction in this way fails to recognize that the author has the right to decide in what formats they wish to make their books available, and that the market for a print book can be harmed by an unauthorized electronic edition as easily as the market for an ebook can.

But regardless of the scope of the injunction, the court’s decision on the main legal issue remains in place: Making full-text copyrighted books available for free on the open internet without permission is copyright infringement. That is just as true for books owned by self-published authors and micro publishers as it is for the books owned by the publishers in this case.

We therefore expect Internet Archive to comply with demands by authors who hold copyrights in their books (e.g., self-published authors and where rights are reverted) to take down any titles that are still on its website….

A model takedown letter and full directions are at the link.

(3) IT MEANS MORE THAN SIMPLY NAMING A CRATER. BBC Radio 4 program “Seek the Light, Out of the Shadows” is available online for the next few weeks.

Singer, story teller and seven-times Radio 2 Folk Awards winner, Karine Polwart brings together her love of science, history and the natural world.

Karine looks up into the dark for a story of discovery, diversity and the righting of a historical wrong.

When young geologist turned planetary scientist Annie Lennox surveyed the night sky of her Aberdeenshire home, little did she realise that one day she’d be giving names to landmarks on our closest neighbours in the solar system. In 2021, while studying for her PhD, Annie discovered an enormous 50km wide crater near Mercury’s southern pole. An area that had never been seen in sunlight until until the Messenger mission of 2015.

The crater’s distinctive spectral colour and shape caught her eye. As the first person to see it, Annie has the honour of naming it. An accomplished singer and harpist, Annie named it ‘Nairne’ after the 17th-century Scottish poet and songwriter Lady Carolina Nairne.

All the craters of Mercury are named after famous artists, Burns and Pushkin are there along with Bach and Boccaccio. And it was this dominance of white men that Annie wanted to challenge. The International Atstonomical Union’s naming conventions around new discoveries have proven themselves inherently sexist and exclusionary and Annie felt compelled to do waht she could to rebalance it. In her lifetime, Lady Carolina Nairne was responsible for such staples of Scottish folk singing as ‘Charlie is my darlin’ and ‘Caller Herrin’, yet she’s largely unknown, publishing much of her work anonymously or under pseudonyms. Now there is a corner of the universe that will forever be a testament to her talents.

(4) MAXIMUM PEEVATION. James Davis Nicoll actually got paid to tell Tor.com readers about his “Five Readerly Pet Peeves (That Have Nothing To Do With Storytelling)”

…A bugaboo I discovered when I began collecting the books published by the otherwise exemplary Haikasoru imprint has to do with the orientation of the book’s title on the spine of the book with respect to the text inside the book. In short, if the title on the spine is right way up, I expect the words on the page to be right way up when I open the book. Opening the text to discover I am holding it upside down kicks me out of the reading experience. Haikasoru eventually stopped orienting their titles in an idiosyncratic way, yay…but until then it was a distraction.

Don’t let that stop you from running out and buying every book in the Haikasoru line. The works themselves earned their places on my shelves….

(5) PUBLISHER FUNDRAISING AUCTION. “Award-Winning Indie Publisher Hosts Auction To Stay Open Amid Book Bans Targeting Poc, LGBTQ+ Youth Lit” at The Mary Sue.

Award-winning indie publisher Levine Querido is hosting an auction to stay open as book banning takes a toll on publishers. Unfortunately, Levine Querido is exactly the type of publisher most likely to be badly impacted by the rise of book banning across the United States. This isn’t only because it’s an independent publisher with less support and resources than major publishers like HarperCollins or Penguin Random House. It also has to do with the kinds of books LQ specializes in, which feature marginalized writers and artists….

The full list of auction items is here.

(6) PROPOSED LAW ABOUT CLOTHING IN CHINA. The New York Times reports “China May Ban Clothes That Hurt People’s Feelings. People Are Outraged.” Andrew Porter wonders how such a law would affect cosplay.

…Now the government is proposing amendments to a law that could result in detention and fines for “wearing clothing or bearing symbols in public that are detrimental to the spirit of the Chinese people and hurt the feelings of Chinese people.” What could be construed as an offense wasn’t specified.

The plan has been widely criticized, with Chinese legal scholars, journalists and businesspeople voicing their concerns over the past week. If it goes into effect, they argue, it could give the authorities the power to police anything they dislike. It would also be a big step backward in the public’s relationship with the government.

Under the rule of China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, the government has been fixated on control — how people think, what they say online and now, what they wear.

In July, an older man on a bus berated a young woman, on her way to a cosplay exposition — where people dress up as a characters from movies, books, TV shows and video games — for wearing a costume that could be considered Japanese style. A security guard at a shopping mall last month turned away a man who was dressed like a samurai. Last year, the police in the eastern city of Suzhou temporarily detained a woman for wearing a kimono.

These episodes were related to anti-Japanese sentiment instigated by the Chinese government. But the confrontations go beyond that.

Last month in Beijing, security guards cracking down on expressions of gay pride stopped people dressed in rainbow-themed clothes from entering a concert featuring the Taiwanese singer Zhang Huimei, better known as A-Mei. Also in August, people filed complaints about a concert by the Taiwanese singer Jolin Tsai because her fans displayed rainbow lights and some of the male fans dressed in what was described as “flamboyant” female clothing. Just last week the police in Shenzhen scolded a man who was livestreaming in a miniskirt. “A man wearing a skirt in public, do you think you’re positive energy?!” the police yelled at the man.

If the proposed amendments, which are open to public comment until Sept. 30, are approved by the national legislature, such incidents could result in fines of up to $680 and up to 15 days in police custody.

“The morality police is on the verge of coming out,” a lawyer named Guo Hui wrote on Weibo. “Do you think you can still make fun of Iran and Afghanistan?” People posted photos last week of Iranian and Afghan women wearing miniskirts and other Western-style clothes in the 1970s, before their countries were taken over by autocratic religious rulers.

Many people are concerned that the proposal doesn’t specify what would constitute an offense. The language it uses — clothing or symbols that are “detrimental to the spirit of the Chinese nation and hurt the feelings of the Chinese people” — tracks expressions the foreign ministry and official media use to voice their displeasure at Western countries and people. No one knows exactly what they mean.

Without a clear definition, enforcement of the law would be subject to the interpretation of individual officers….

(7) LOSCON 49 SPECIAL GUEST. Loscon 49 welcomes Robert J Sawyer as a Special Guest. The convention will be held at the LAX Marriott from November 24-26.

Rob is one of only eight writers in history — and the only Canadian — to win all three of the world’s top Science Fiction awards for best novel of the year: the Hugo, the Nebula, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. A prolific author, his most recent release is The Oppenheimer Alternative.

(8) DISNEY’S LATEST WAY TO EMPTY YOUR WALLET (OR MAYBE YOUR BANK ACCOUNT). [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Disney has announced they are releasing a Blu-ray + digital box set of 100 films. What’s the price, you ask? Well, if you ask, maybe you can’t afford it. Pre-orders start at Walmart.com later this month at a cool $1,500. “Disney will release a 100-film Blu-ray collection that includes Pixar movies” at The Verge.

Disney is releasing a 100-film Blu-ray collection on November 14th called the Disney Legacy Animated Film Collection (via The Wrap). Preorders will start on September 18th at Walmart.com, and we regret to inform you it will cost $1,500, according to The Wrap.

The collection includes movies from both Disney and Pixar, all crammed into three volumes of discs that span Disney’s entire feature film history from 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves to this year’s Elemental.

What’s really impressive is how little filler this package seems to have. Scrolling through the list that The Wrap published, it has every single movie I’d have wanted to see, like all of the Toy Story movies, both of The Incredibles, The Black Cauldron, Frankenweenie, and Robin Hood, but very few of the mediocre direct-to-video snoozers the company produced so many of over the years…

The Wrap’s coverage includes the complete list of films.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born September 11, 1856 — Richard Ganthony. Playwright of A Message from Mars: A Story Founded on the Popular Play by Richard Ganthony which is a genre version of Dicken’s A Christmas Carol. Really, it is. Published in 1912, it was filmed twice, both times as A Message from Mars (1913 and 1921) and I’m assuming as silent movies given their dates. It would be novelized by Lester Lurgan. (Died 1924.)
  • Born September 11, 1929 — Björn Nyberg. A Swedish writer known largely for his Conan stories which given that he wrote just one non-Conan story makes sense. His first book in the series was The Return of Conan which was revised for publication by L. Sprague de Camp. Likewise, they later did Conan the Avenger, Conan the Victorious, Conan the Swordsman and Sagas of Conan. The latter two are available at the usual suspects. (Died 2009.)
  • Born September 11, 1930 — Jean-Claude Forest. He became famous when he created Barbarella, which was originally published in France in V Magazine in 1962.  In 1967 it was adapted by Terry Southern and Roger Vadim and made into 1968 film of that name featuring Jane Fonda, with him acting as design consultant.  It was considered an adult comic by the standards of the time. (Died 1998.)
  • Born September 11, 1941 — Kirby McCauley. Literary agent and editor, who as the former who represented authors such as Stephen King, George R.R. Martin and Roger Zelazny. And McCauley chaired the first World Fantasy Convention, an event he conceived with T. E. D. Klein and several others. As Editor, his works include Night Chills: Stories of Suspense, Frights, Frights 2, and Night Chills. (Died 2014.)
  • Born September 11, 1951 — Michael Goodwin, 72. Ahhh — Alan Dean Foster’s Commonwealth series. I know that I’ve read at least a half dozen of the novels there and really enjoyed them, so it doesn’t surprise that someone wrote a guide to it which is how we have Goodwin’s (with Robert Teague) A Guide to the Commonwealth: The Official Guide to Alan Dean Foster’s Humanx Commonwealth Universe. Unfortunately, like so many of these guides, it was done once and never updated.
  • Born September 11, 1952 — Sharon Lee, 71. She is the co-author with Steve Miller of the Liaden universe novels and stories which are quite excellent reading with the latest being Neogenesis. The authors have won Edward E. Smith Memorial Award for lifetime contributions to science fiction, and The Golden Duck (the Hal Clement Young Adult Award) for their Balance of Trade novel.  They are deeply stocked at the usual digital suspects.
  • Born September 11, 1965 — Catriona (Cat) Sparks, 58. She’s manager and editor of Agog! Press with her partner, Australian horror writer Rob Hood. Winner of an astounding sixteen Ditmar Awards for writing, editing and artwork, her most recent in 2021 for Best Collected Work for Dark Harvest. She also collected one for The 21st Century Catastrophe: Hyper-capitalism and Severe Climate Change in Science Fiction. She has just one novel to date, Lotus Blue, but has an amazing amount of short stories which are quite stellar. Lotus Blue and The Bride Price are both available at the usual suspects. 
  • Born September 11, 1970 — Colson Whitehead, 53. Winner of the Arthur Clarke C. Award for The Underground Railroad. Genre wise, he’s not a prolific writer, he’s written but two other such works, The Intuitionists and Zone One. He’s written but one piece of short genre fiction, “The Wooden Mallet”. However he’s written seven other works including John Henry Days which is a really interesting look at that legend, mostly set at a contemporary festival. 

(10) IT PAYS TO PAY ATTENTION. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Even when it’s not something plot-essential, a lot can go by if you aren’t listening carefully (and know the territory).

Here’s an addition to the two callouts I caught in the final two episodes of The Flash (see Item 10 in the June 17, 2023 scroll)…

In the trailer for Gen V, the upcoming spinoff of The Boys, as potential supers (in a looks-like-Professor X’s School for Mutants) suggest power-related names, one student suggests “Coagula”. Which is the cape-name (or whatever we call these) of one of the late Rachel Pollack’s characters for her run on DC’s The Doom Patrol comics (after Grant Morrison’s run). (Here’s Coagula’s Wikipedia entry.)

(11) LOOK FOR IT ON STAR TREK DAY. “Paramount Teams with Kid Cudi on ‘Star Trek: Boldly Be’ Campaign” — Animation World Network has the story.

In celebration of “Star Trek Day,” Scott Mescudi, AKA Kid Cudi, is joining forces with Star Trek in a one-of-a-kind collaboration reflecting the “optimistic and inclusive spirit of adventure, discovery, imagination, and most importantly, hope, at the heart of the cultural phenomenon.” The collaboration will launch Star Trek’s new “Boldly Be” campaign.

Mescudi lends his lens to music with an original song inspired by Star Trek, an interactive gaming component, and a bold fashion collaboration that will launch in October. More details will be announced later….

(12) THERE’S PLENTY GOOD MONEY TO BE MADE SUPPLYING THE TOOLS OF THE TRADE. [Item by Steven French.] A company previously known for making chips for games is now making billions from AI: “How savvy trillion-dollar chipmaker Nvidia is powering the AI goldrush” in the Guardian.

It’s not often that the jaws of Wall Street analysts drop to the floor but late last month it happened: Nvidia, a company that makes computer chips, issued sales figures that blew the street’s collective mind. It had pulled in $13.5bn in revenue in the last quarter, which was at least $2bn more than the aforementioned financial geniuses had predicted. Suddenly, the surge in the company’s share price in May that had turned it into a trillion-dollar company made sense.

Well, up to a point, anyway. But how had a company that since 1998 – when it released the revolutionary Riva TNT video and graphics accelerator chip – had been the lodestone of gamers become worth a trillion dollars, almost overnight? The answer, oddly enough, can be found in the folk wisdom that emerged in the California gold rush of the mid-19th century, when it became clear that while few prospectors made fortunes panning for gold, the suppliers who sold them picks and shovels prospered nicely.

We’re now in another gold rush – this time centred on artificial intelligence (AI) – and Nvidia’s A100 and H100 graphical processing units (GPUs) are the picks and shovels. Immediately, everyone wants them – not just tech companies but also petro states such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Thus demand wildly exceeds supply. And just to make the squeeze really exquisite, Nvidia had astutely prebooked scarce (4-nanometre) production capacity at the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the only chip-fabrication outfit in the world that can make them, when demand was slack during the Covid-19 pandemic. So, for the time being at least, if you want to get into the AI business, you need Nvidia GPUs….

(13) TIM BURTON ON AI. “Tim Burton on Seeing His Animation Style Imitated by AI: ‘It’s Like a Robot Taking Your Humanity’” at Yahoo!

…“They had AI do my versions of Disney characters!” he exclaimed in response. “I can’t describe the feeling it gives you. It reminded me of when other cultures say, ‘Don’t take my picture because it is taking away your soul.’”

Some of the AI-generated examples included Elsa from Frozen with a pale white face and wearing a black dress while standing in what appeared to be a haunted forest, as well as Aurora from Sleeping Beauty with a similar colored face but with stitches across her cheeks and lying in a long, dark dress.

While Burton acknowledged that some of the creations were “very good,” it didn’t take away from the less-than-enjoyable feeling he got from seeing his creative style imitated.

“What it does is it sucks something from you,” he explained. “It takes something from your soul or psyche; that is very disturbing, especially if it has to do with you. It’s like a robot taking your humanity, your soul.”…

(14) THE FLIP SIDE. Guillermo del Toro is positively glib by comparison. “Guillermo del Toro Talks Artificial Intelligence: ‘I’m Worried About Natural Stupidity’” at Yahoo!

Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro isn’t much worried about artificial intelligence and its impact on making entertainment content.

It’s people that keep him up at night, evidently. “People ask if I’m worried about artificial intelligence, I say I’m worried about natural stupidity. It’s just a tool, right?” the Pinocchio and Shape of Water director said during a keynote address at the Toronto Film Festival on Friday.

“If anyone wants movies made by AI, let them get it immediately. I don’t care about people who want to be fulfilled and get something shitty, quickly,” he said, arguing that AI would succeed or die based on what people did with it creatively to bring a personal vision to a screen.

“Otherwise, why not buy a printer, print the Mona Lisa and say you made it,” del Toro said during his appearance in Toronto, which was part of the TIFF Visionaries program sponsored by The Hollywood Reporter….

(15) A GIF TO HUMANITY. Here’s a Godzilla teaser. You can watch the complete commercial on Facebook.

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. J. Michael Straczynski pointed Facebook followers to this is a dramatization of the Amazing Spider-man #36 that is about the terrorist attacks in New York on 9/11/2001: The Black Issue 9/11.

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

Pixel Scroll 8/19/23 Where Have All The Flowers Gorn

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(1) WHAT’S IN THE HUGO VOTER PACKET? Ersatz Culture has assembled an infographic listing the existing 2023 Hugo Award Voter Packet Contents, with plans to update it as more content becomes available. Here’s an example, the Best Novel category.

(2) HOW TO ACCESS THE HUGO VOTER PACKET. Jed Hartman has basic guidance as well as a Chrome-specific workaround in “How to download this year’s Hugo Packet” at Loren Ipsum. From the introduction:

Disclaimer: I’m not involved with this year’s Hugo Awards or Packet, and I don’t know anything about what’s going on behind the scenes; I’m just a Worldcon member who wants to read the works in the Packet.

Part of the Hugo Packet is now available, for members of this year’s Worldcon. (If you’re not a member, you need to buy a membership before you can download the Packet. Details about how to buy a membership are beyond the scope of this guide.)

  1. Unfortunately, there are three issues that may make it difficult for some people to download and read the ebooks in the Packet:
  2. The site is currently set up in such a way that you may see a security warning when you visit it.
  3. It’s not obvious how to find the ebooks on the site, and clicking the download links doesn’t work.

The Packet doesn’t include Kindle files as such….

(3) WHICH SFF MAGAZINE IS TOPS? Eric Schwitzgebel does his annual update ranking the “Top Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazines 2023” at The Splintered Mind. [Via Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki.] Tor.com is number one.

… (2.) I gave each magazine one point for each story nominated for a Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, or World Fantasy Award in the past ten years; one point for each story appearance in any of the Dozois, Horton, Strahan, Clarke, Adams, or Tidhar “year’s best” anthologies; and half a point for each story appearing in the short story or novelette category of the annual Locus Recommended list….

(4) FILLER UP. The Guardian’s Tim Dowling tells how he convinced his family (well, part of it) that “I am talking to the coffee machine. And yes, it’s listening”.

I have never attempted this trick in front of anyone – until now. It is the greatest day of my life…

(5) NO SURPRISE HERE. “Intelligence Agencies Warn Foreign Spies Are Targeting U.S. Space Companies” – the New York Times has the story.

Chinese and Russian intelligence agencies are targeting American private space companies, attempting to steal critical technologies and preparing cyberattacks aimed at degrading U.S. satellite capabilities during a conflict or emergency, according to a new warning by American intelligence agencies.

The National Counterintelligence and Security Center, the F.B.I. and the Air Force issued a new advisory to American companies Friday morning. The broad warning to industry said that foreign intelligence services could be targeting space firms, their employees and the contractors that serve those companies.

Space companies’ data and intellectual property could be at risk from attempts to break into computer networks, moles placed inside companies and foreign infiltration of the supply chain, officials said.

“Foreign intelligence entities recognize the importance of the commercial space industry to the U.S. economy and national security, including the growing dependence of critical infrastructure on space-based assets,” the Counterintelligence Center warning said. “They see U.S. space-related innovation and assets as potential threats as well as valuable opportunities to acquire vital technologies and expertise.”

While the United States still builds and launches multimillion dollar reconnaissance and communications satellite, much of American innovation in space is being done by commercial companies, including those that conduct launches and others that build and field satellites.

Intelligence agencies are increasingly dependent on the private-sector space industry, and U.S. officials are worried about the interest Chinese and Russian spy services have shown in those companies, based on recent F.B.I. investigations and intelligence collection on foreign intelligence plans. American officials believe innovations by SpaceX, Blue Origin and other private companies have given the United States a huge advantage in space, one that is envied by foreign adversaries….

(6) TUTTLE’S PICKS. Lisa Tuttle delivers “The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – reviews roundup” in the Guardian. Selections this time are Bridge by Lauren Beukes; The Kindness by John Ajvide Lindqvist; Mister Magic by Kiersten White; Pink Slime by Fernanda Trías; The Finery by Rachel Grosvenor

Bridge by Lauren Beukes (Michael Joseph, £18.99)
“Reality is not real,” Bridge’s mother, Jo, used to tell her. Was that a delusion caused by the brain tumour that killed her? But after Jo’s death, Bridge finds evidence that her mother had discovered a way to access other realities, close to our own, and she becomes obsessed with finding one in which Jo is still alive. The latest from the author of The Shining Girls is an addictive page-turner that draws on not only theoretical quantum physics, but research into neuroscience, altered states and parasitology for a fascinating, compelling story and an original take on the many worlds theory.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born August 19, 1921 — Gene Roddenberry. Oh, you know who he is. But did you know he wrote a lot of scripts for Have Gun – Will Travel? Indeed his script for the show, “Helen of Abajinian” would win the Writer’s Guild of America award for Best Teleplay in 1958. And yes, he would share a Hugo for Star Trek’s “The City on the Edge of Forever” episode which was awarded at Baycon. (Died 1991.)
  • Born August 19, 1928 — Richard N. Farmer. Author of Islandia Revisited: A Sequel By Other Hands which he claims to be a sequel to Austin Tappan Wright’s Islandia. No, it wasn’t at all authorized. There are authorized sequels to Islandia, three of them, all written by Mark Saxton, the man who edited the original Islandia manuscript. They are, in this order, The Islar, Islandia Today – A Narrative of Lang III, The Two Kingdoms and Havoc in Islandia. Sylvia Wright, Wright’s daughter and the executrix of the estate, died shortly before the third Saxton book was completed. Mark Saxton himself died in 1988, so it’s not really likely that we will see any additional Islandia novels. (Died 1987.)
  • Born August 19, 1930 — D.G. Compton, 93. SWFA Author Emeritus whose The Steel Crocodile was nominated for the Nebula Award. The Unsleeping Eye, The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe in the U.K., was filmed as Death Watch which the Audience Reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes actually like giving it a 60% rating. His two Alec Jordan near-future police stories are superb. Nearly everything he wrote of a genre nature is available from the usual digital suspects save Hot Wireless Sets, Aspirin Tablets, the Sandpaper Sides of Used Matchboxes, and Something That Might Have Been Castor Oil.
  • Born August 19, 1938 — Diana Muldaur, 85. She appeared in the original series in two episodes, first in “Return to Tomorrow” as Dr. Ann Mulhall / Thalassa and then in “Is There in Truth No Beauty?”  as Dr. Miranda Jones. She, of course, is up again in Next Gen as Dr. Katherine Pulaski.  She voiced Dr. Leslie Thompkins in that animated Batman series as well. 
  • Born August 19, 1940 — Jill St. John, 83. She’s best remembered as Tiffany Case, the Bond girl in Diamonds Are Forever. She was the first American to play a Bond girl. She shows in The Batman in “Smack in the Middle” and “Hi Diddle Riddle” as Molly. And she played Jennifer Holmes in the 1960 film version of The Lost World. Even more fascinatingly she’s one of the uncredited dancers on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In! 
  • Born August 19, 1950 — Mary Doria Russell, 73. The Sparrow series, The Sparrow and its sequel Children of God, are awesome. The Sparrow won BSFA, Clarke, and Otherwise Awards, and it was the reason she won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. 
  • Born August 19, 1952 — Jonathan Frakes, 71. Best known for his portrayal of Commander William T. Riker in Next Gen and I’m fond of his voicing David Xanatos on the Gargoyles series which had at least five Trek actors doing voice work. Interesting bit of trivia: For a time in the Seventies, he worked for Marvel Comics at Cons as Captain America. He has directed more than seventy television episodes, including episodes of myriad Trek series, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Leverage, The Librarians and The Orville.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) FLASH ARRIVES ON THE SMALL SCREEN. “‘The Flash’ Movie Gets Streaming Premiere Date On Max” reports Deadline.

Warner Bros. Pictures and DC’s The Flash, which hit theaters in June, now has a date for its streaming debut on Max: the superhero pic starring Ezra Miller will bow Friday, August 25.

The film, in which Miller reprised his role as Barry Allen in the superhero’s first stand-alone pic, was highly touted by incoming DC bosses James Gunn and Peter Safran, but it saw a sluggish bow in theaters. It opened to $55.1 million over its first three days domestically, and $64M over the Juneteenth holiday frame. Along with a similarly tepid performance overseas, all those numbers were below expectations for a DC tentpole with a budget of $200M….

…The plot of Christina Hodson’s script: Worlds collide when Barry uses his superpowers to travel back in time in order to change the events of the past. But when his attempt to save his family inadvertently alters the future, he becomes trapped in a reality in which General Zod has returned, threatening annihilation, and there are no superheroes to turn to. That is, unless Barry can coax a very different Batman out of retirement and rescue an imprisoned Kryptonian… albeit not the one he’s looking for….

(10) IN A HOLE IN THE GROUND THERE LIVED A…? The Case of Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose featuring the voice of Neil Gaiman comes to George R.R. Martin’s Jean Cocteau Cinema in September. Swing by if you’re in Santa Fe.

In 1935, Hungarian-American para-psychologist Nandor Fodor began his investigation of a strange occurrence on the Isle of Man. An average British family, the Irvings, claimed to have been contacted by a mysterious entity at their farm. A talking mongoose. Named Gef (Pronounced “Jeff”.)

(11) THE FAMILY BUSINESS: MONSTERS. “Godzilla Returns in Apple TV+’s ‘Monarch: Legacy of Monsters’ First Look” at Animation World Network.

…In the series, following the thunderous battle between Godzilla and the Titans that leveled San Francisco and the shocking revelation that monsters are real, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters tracks two siblings who follow in their father’s footsteps to uncover their family’s connection to the secretive organization known as Monarch. Clues lead them into the world of monsters and ultimately down the rabbit hole to Army officer Lee Shaw (played by Kurt Russell and Wyatt Russell), taking place in the 1950s and half a century later, where Monarch is threatened by what Shaw knows. The dramatic saga — spanning three generations — reveals buried secrets and the ways that epic, earth-shattering events can reverberate through our lives….

(12) MILLIONS OF ‘EM MISTER RICO! Vulture grades these as being “The 12 Best Bug Movies”. Guess which movie isn’t on the list? (But you’re not surprised, right?)

…Be terrorized by a giant Japanese moth! Fight back against a race of intelligent ants! Travel across the sea in a giant stone fruit! Turn on your porch lights, open your door, and welcome them inside. They’ll get in anyway….

(13) SIX LEGS GOOD? The Vulture article had to come first because Scientific American’s answer to the question “Do Insects Feel Joy and Pain?” would be too hard an act to follow.

…Researchers have since shown that bees and some other insects are capable of intelligent behavior that no one thought possible when I was a student. Bees, for example, can count, grasp concepts of sameness and difference, learn complex tasks by observing others, and know their own individual body dimensions, a capacity associated with consciousness in humans. They also appear to experience both pleasure and pain. In other words, it now looks like at least some species of insects—and maybe all of them—are sentient.

These discoveries raise fascinating questions about the origins of complex cognition. They also have far-reaching ethical implications for how we should treat insects in the laboratory and in the wild.

… The conventional wisdom about insects has been that they are automatons—unthinking, unfeeling creatures whose behavior is entirely hardwired. But in the 1990s researchers began making startling discoveries about insect minds. It’s not just the bees. Some species of wasps recognize their nest mates’ faces and acquire impressive social skills. For example, they can infer the fighting strengths of other wasps relative to their own just by watching other wasps fight among themselves. Ants rescue nest mates buried under rubble, digging away only over trapped (and thus invisible) body parts, inferring the body dimension from those parts that are visible above the surface. Flies immersed in virtual reality display attention and awareness of the passing of time….

(14) AN EVERGREEN. OR MAYBE EVERPURPLE.  I couldn’t resist quoting this one. Neither could Alan.

https://twitter.com/AlanBaxter/status/1692105265125228684

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Lise Andreasen, Michael Toman, 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 Andrew (not Werdna).]

Pixel Scroll 7/21/23 Pixel 9 From Outer Scroll

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(1) STACKING THE DECK ON GOOGLE. Kelly Jensen does a thorough analysis of “How To Own A News Cycle: Book Censorship News” in a Substack article. A very interesting read. It begins:

One of the checks I make in doing the weekly censorship news research is ensuring that the news comes from a reliable source. This is out of accuracy, of course, as much as it is also about media literacy. As it stands, right-wing “activists” are doing a bang up job of creating a fake controversy, pushing it through the media, keeping their names in the mouths of those outlets, then reaping (fake) benefits from the outrage cycle. Case in point: a news story that popped up earlier this month about the National Education Association and the books they were recommending their teacher members to read over the summer….

(2) COMPANIONS AGAIN. “Doctor Who classic companions Tegan & Nyssa reunite in emotional clip” – Radio Times sets the frame.

After making her return to Doctor Who in last year’s special The Power of the Doctor, Tegan is back once again in a new clip, and while last time she was seen palling around with Ace, this time there’s another companion reunion on the cards….

… It’s Nyssa! The pair embrace and Nyssa reveals that she was looking for Tegan, having “hitched a ride” in the TARDIS from Terminus, where the pair last saw one another….

In the clip, as the pair get reacquainted, Nyssa tells Tegan the Doctor wants to see her, to which she asks: “Which one? Scarf or celery, or woman?”

The duo reminisce about the past, with Nyssa saying she’s missed their interactions and Tegan saying she wishes she’d realised how lucky she was.

(3) HER MILEAGE VARIED. Because NASFiC isn’t in the USA, Cheryl Morgan can attend it. That didn’t mean it was easy to get there – her travel saga from the UK to Winnipeg was by way of Switzerland. As she says in “Pemmi-Con – Day 1”, “I am in Canada, by the skin of my teeth. I am getting too old for travel nightmares….”

(4) FULL COURT PRESS ENDS. It’s been four years since Ryan Kopf made news here, time enough for his litigation against Nerd & Tie blogger Trae Dorn to reach its conclusion – a judge granting Dorn’s motion to dismiss for “failure to prosecute” due to Kopf’s inactivity. A roundup of the legal saga is now a podcast: “Ryan Kopf v. Nerd & Tie – The Full Story”.

Ryan Kopf has been suing Nerd & Tie owner Trae Dorn in one form or another for over seven years. With the conclusion of the Illinois suit against Trae Dorn and former Nerd & Tie contributor Pher Sturz earlier this month, we thought we should sit down and talk about what’s happened over those years. We discuss the full timeline of events, what Trae was actually accused of saying, and how things affected us.

(5) KAIJU, KONG, AND COMPANY. “DC’s Justice League Is Crossing Over With The MonsterVerse’s Godzilla And Kong In A Cool Way” – Yahoo! has a preview.

A seven-issue comic book series called Justice League vs. Godzilla vs. Kong was announced at San Diego Comic-Con, with DC and Legendary producing it in partnership with Toho Entertainment. Writer Brian Buccellato is teaming with artists Christian Duce and Luis Guerrero for the project, and Drew Johnson, Jim Lee and Scott Williams, Rafael Albuquerque, Francesco Mattina and Dan Mora and Alan Quah are all tackling cover art. Take a look at the first piece of officially-released Justice League vs. Godzilla vs. Kong artwork below.

(6) A DOCTOR IN WAITING. [Item by Steven French.] Mark Gatiss always gives great interview! He tells the Guardian “‘I’d be the first naturist Doctor. That would scare away the Daleks’”.

…HG Wells invented great swathes of science fiction: the time machine, alien invasion. Nigel Kneale, my other great hero, had a similarly prophetic vision, peeking around corners at what might happen. It’s speculative fiction but the broad strokes are staggeringly accurate. It’s interesting to look back at old sci-fi and fantastic fiction to see if what they were wrestling with remains relevant. The possibilities of technology throw up an awful lot of new terrors that are exciting to play with, because you look at the dark underside. Like the internet, information has never been more accessible, but people have never been more stupid. That’s the title of my autobiography!…

(7) BILL LAUBENHEIMER DIES. Bay Area fan Bill Laubenheimer died July 19 while attending the Winnipeg NASFiC. Kevin Standlee, who saw him at the con on Wednesday, reports “Apparently, he fell ill (I don’t know why) and was taken to hospital, where he died later that evening.”

The International Costumers Guild had an immediate report.

We are saddened to report that Bill Laubenheimer, the husband of Carole Parker passed away last night while attending Pemmicon, the Nasfic being held this weekend in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Bill was an experienced software architect and expert in software patents. In fandom Bill was known for their love of filking, writing songs focused on programming. Bill was the LepreCon 32 Music GoH.

Carole is still at Pemmicon and is bravely fulfilling her convention obligations while also grieving and going through the necessary bureaucracy to send Bill home.

The Pemmi-Con newzine, Mooseletter-1, also mourned his passing:

Bill Laubenheimer We are deeply saddened to hear that Bill Laubenheimer passed away suddenly, in Winnipeg for Pemmi-Con. Bill had a brilliant creative mind, and a gentle and cheerful soul. He will be much missed. Condolences to Carole Parker and their many friends.

(8) MEMORY LANE.

2019 – [Written by Cat Eldridge from a choice by Mike Glyer.]

So let’s talk about Kameron Hurley who’s the writer of our Beginning this Scroll. 

For eight years, she wrote a column for Locus about the craft and business of fiction writing, a cool thing indeed. And speaking of non-fiction, her The Geek Feminist Revolution essay collection was nominated for a Hugo for Best Related Work; it includes “We Have Always Fought” which won a Hugo Award for Best Related Work. 

As much as her two trilogies are impressive, and make no mistake as they are that, it is her two one-off novels that are truly fantastic — The Stars Are Legion and The Light Brigade are of the some of the best military fiction that has ever been done. 

So our Beginning is from the latter which was published by Saga Press four years ago with the cover illustration by Eve Ventrue. 

And here is the Beginning for The Light Brigade.

They said the war would turn us into light. 

I wanted to be counted among the heroes who gave us this better world. That’s what I told the recruiter. That’s what I told my first squad leader. It’s what I told every CO, and there were . . . a couple. And that’s what I’d tell myself, when I was alone in the dark, cut off from my platoon, the sky full of blistering red fire, too hot to send an evac unit, and a new kid was squealing and dying on the field. 

But it’s not true. 

I signed up because of what they did to São Paulo. I signed up because of the Blink. All my heroes stayed on the path of light, no matter how dark it got. Even bleeding-heart socialist drones who play paladin can take an oath of vengeance to justify violence. I did.

The enemy had eaten my family and the life I once knew; a past I now remember in jerky stutter-stops, like an old satellite image interrupted by a hurricane. I wanted to be the light: the savior, the hero, sure. But more than that, I wanted the enemy obliterated. 

How many other corporate soldiers signed up for money, or voting rights, or to clear a debt, or to afford good housing, or to qualify for a job in one of the big towers? 

I believed my reasons were nobler. 

When I signed up after São Paulo, me and my friends were shocked that the recruiting center wasn’t packed. Where were all the patriots? Didn’t they know what the aliens had done? I thought all those people who didn’t sign up were cowards. While you were all upgrading your immersives and masturbating to some new game, we were fighting the real threat. We were the good guys. 

You were cowardly little shits.

The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley
The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born July 21, 1911 — Marshall McLuhan. He coined the expressions the medium is the message and global village, and predicted the World Wide Web almost thirty years before it was invented. I read The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects a long time ago. Somehow it seemed terribly quaint. (Died 1980.)
  • Born July 21, 1921 — James Cooke Brown. He’s the creator of Loglan. Oh, and he did write SF. The Troika Incident written in 1970 features a global data net. That, and two short pieces of fiction, are the sum total of his of genre writings. The Troika Incident is available from Kindle but not from iBooks. (Died 2000.)
  • Born July 21, 1929 — John Woodvine, 94. First role in our realm is as Macbeth at Mermaid Theatre back in the early Sixties. Shortly thereafter, he’s Badger in Toad of Toad Hall at the Comedy Theatre before being The Marshal in the Fourth Doctor story, “The Armageddon Factor”.  He’s in An American Werewolf in London as Dr. J. S. Hirsch, and he had a recurring role in The Tripods as Master West. He did show up on The Avengers several times, each time as a different character, and he was Singri Rhamin for the episodes of Danger Man. 
  • Born July 21, 1933 — John Gardner. Novelist, critic, teacher, medievalist, among other things. His student Jeffrey Ford described Gardner’s knowledge of literature as ‘encyclopedic,’ with no regard whatever for genre boundaries. He considered Stanislaw Lem the greatest living writer, disliked Tolkien’s poetry (an assessment I agree with) but thought The Lord of the Rings ‘one of the truly great works of the human spirit’. Most of his best works are fantasy: most famously Grendel, but also Freddy’s Book, Mickelson’s Ghosts, the short story collection The King’s Indian, and his posthumously-published short story, “Julius Caesar and the Werewolf”. His book The Art of Fiction is well worth reading for anyone interested in fiction, as a writer or a reader. (Died 1982.) (PhilRM)
  • Born July 21, 1948 — G. B. Trudeau, 75. Ok we decided when I first put this Birthday up that there’s enough content including not quite human characters to be genre, but he did an amazing series on the Apple Newton when it came out. A Doonesbury Retrospective series is up to six volumes and is available from the usual suspects at very reasonable prices. 
  • Born July 21, 1951 — Robin Williams. Suicides depress me. I remember a bootleg tape of a performance of him and George Carlin in their cocaine fueled days. No, not even genre adjacent but damn brilliant. Such manic energy. Genre wise, he was brilliant in most everything he did, be it Mork & Mindy, Hook which I adore, The Fisher King, Bicentennial Man or Jumanji. (Died 2014.)
  • Born July 21, 1976 — Jaime Murray, 47. If you watch genre television, you’ve most likely seen her as she’s been Helena G. Wells in the Warehouse 13, Stahma Tarr in Defiance, Fiona/the Black Fairy In Once Upon a Time, Antoinette in The Originals, and Nyssa al Ghul in Gotham. Film wise, she was Livinia in The Devil’s Playground and Gerri Dandridge in Fright Night 2: New Blood.

(10) IN COMICS TO COME. Marvel Comics teased two super secret Rob Liefeld projects at San Diego Comic-Con. Besides the titles in the lower left corners, the file of the first piece of art is named “Major X” and the second is “Cable”.

(11) SFF-THEMED PROSTETHICS. [Item by Bruce D. Arthurs.] Came across a mention of The Alternative Limb Project, which makes prosthetic limbs that are also works of art. Some really lovely (and often fantastic/science-fictional) examples in their gallery here.

The one that might be of most interest to F770’s audience is the “Gadget Arm”, described thusly: “With a nod to the Swiss Army Knife we created a vintage styled arm stiched in leather with various gadgets including: secret compartment, torch, laser, matches, telescopic magnet, watch, compass and knives.” 

There’s also a clear plastic limb that reminds me of “Demon With A Glass Hand”.

(12) THE BOOKS MADE FROM THE EPISODES. We don’t know the plots yet, of course, however, Radio Times says “Doctor Who 60th anniversary special novelisations confirmed”.

Three new Doctor Who books are on their way and they’re pretty important ones – it’s been confirmed that the the trio of 60th anniversary specials will be turned into novelisations.

(13) THE EARLY RETURNS. “’Horrifying!’: Movie critic reacts to AI-generated films” in a BBC News video.

Filmmakers are using AI to generate short films and adverts. But are they any good?

Movie critic Rhianna Dhillon and BBC technology correspondent Marc Cieslak watch and react to four examples.

(14) WARPSPEED WATCHES. The “5 best futuristic, spaceship-inspired watches of tomorrow: from Kickstarter-funded Argon SpaceOne and MB&F’s HM8 Mark 2 to Urwerk’s UR-112, a brand loved by Michael Jordan and Robert Downey Jr” at South China Morning Post.

1. Argon SpaceOne

…This would easily have been the most affordable spaceship-inspired watch “manufactured on Earth” on this list – in mid-May, prices sat at €1,500 for the stainless steel version and €1,900 for blue titanium. But punters may have to wait as the Argon SpaceOne page on Kickstarter is currently down and unavailable, allegedly due to an intellectual property dispute….

3. Urwerk UR-112 Aggregat Back to Black

In the world of avant garde watch design, Urwerk is one of the great names. Since its inception in 1997, not a single one of the brand’s releases tell time in the traditional two- or three-handed way. Heavily leaning into exposed mechanics and sci-fi design language, Urwerk boasts Michael Jordan and Robert Downey Jr. (he was Iron Man after all) among its dedicated owner base.

(15) POIROT IN VENICE. Nerdtropolis introduces us to “A Haunting In Venice”, the next Hercule Poirot adaptation featuring Kenneth Branagh.

A new trailer for “A Haunting in Venice” by 20th Century Studios is here. This upcoming supernatural thriller, directed by Oscar winner Kenneth Branagh, is based on Agatha Christie’s novel “Hallowe’en Party.” Branagh also stars as the famous detective Hercule Poirot…

Set in eerie, post-World War II Venice on All Hallows’ Eve, and is a terrifying mystery featuring the return of the celebrated sleuth, Hercule Poirot. Now retired and living in self-imposed exile in the world’s most glamorous city, Poirot reluctantly attends a séance at a decaying, haunted palazzo. When one of the guests is murdered, the detective is thrust into a sinister world of shadows and secrets.

(16) IF IT’S GOOD, IT’S A MARVEL. The trailer for Marvel Studios’ The Marvels.

Carol Danvers aka Captain Marvel has reclaimed her identity from the tyrannical Kree and taken revenge on the Supreme Intelligence. But unintended consequences see Carol shouldering the burden of a destabilized universe. When her duties send her to an anomalous wormhole linked to a Kree revolutionary, her powers become entangled with that of Jersey City super-fan, Kamala Khan aka Ms. Marvel, and Carol’s estranged niece, now S.A.B.E.R. astronaut Captain Monica Rambeau. Together, this unlikely trio must team-up and learn to work in concert to save the universe as “The Marvels.”

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Steve French, Bruce D. Arthurs, Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, 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 Tom Becker.]