2022 Queen’s New Year Honours List

The people of genre interest on the 2022 Queen’s New Year Honours list include actors, filmmakers, authors, and a gaming industry executive.

KNIGHT BACHELOR

Boorman’s films include ZardozExorcist II: The Heretic, and Excalibur.

Livingstone co-authored the Fighting Fantasy series of books. He contributed to the Tomb Raider project Tomb Raider: Anniversary. And he has become an executive in the online gaming industry.

COMPANION OF THE ORDER OF ST MICHAEL AND ST GEORGE (CMG)

Daniel Craig, says the BBC, “who bowed out as James Bond with this year’s movie No Time to Die, has been made a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George. It is the same honour that the fictional spy himself received, and which author Ian Fleming wrote in the 1957 novel From Russia With Love, was usually given ‘on retirement from the Secret Service’.”

KNIGHT / DAME COMMANDER OF THE ORDER OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE (KBE / DBE)

  • Joanna Lumley, OBE. For services to Drama, to Entertainment and to Charitable Causes.

While Lumley is most famous for her work in Absolutely Fabulous, fans remember her for the TV shows The New Avengers and Sapphire & Steel. She also played The Doctor in The Curse of Fatal Death.

Redgrave is one of the most highly-regarded actresses ever, and her extensive resume includes a scattering of small genre roles.

COMMANDER OF THE ORDER OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE (CBE)

  • Barbara Dana Broccoli, OBE, Film Producer. For services to Film, to Drama, to Philanthropy and to Skills.

Broccoli is best known for her work on the James Bond film series.

His works for young adult readers include The Diamond Brothers series, the Alex Rider series, and The Power of Five series (known in the U.S. as The Gatekeepers). His work for adults includes two Sherlock Holmes novels, three Bond novels based on unpublished material by Ian Fleming, plus several detective novels with his own characters. He has also written for television.

Half-brother of Barbara Broccoli, Wilson is a screenwriter and film producer, best known for his association with the James Bond film series.

OFFICER OF THE ORDER OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE (OBE)

  • Ann Cleeves, Author. For services to Reading and Libraries.   

Cleeves is an author of mysteries.

Pixel Scroll 10/19/21 He Learned Almost Too Late That Man Is A Scrolling Pixel

(1) TOR.COM DEFCON DOWNGRADED. Reddit has updated yesterday’s warning that Tor.com was hacked and spreading malware to say the site is now “safe-ish” to use.

It appears that Tor.com has taken action and cleaned up the file mentioned in this post, meaning the information below is now outdated and Tor.com should currently be safe-ish to use.

Safe-ish, as the vulnerability that allowed the hack to happen may still exist, along with any possible backdoors the hackers left behind. So until Tor.com confirms that the problem is completely resolved, it is possible that malware might re-appear on the site.

(2) IT’S CROSSOVER SEASON. [Item by Daniel Dern.] This season/year’s Flash/Arroverse crossover will span five episodes across several shows, starting with The Flash, on November 16. Gizmodo has the story: “The Flash: Armageddon First Trailer for New Crossover Event”.

Despero first appeared in  Justice League of America #1 (October 1960) (via Despero – I knew he was initially a JLA villain and was early Silver Age, since I’m pretty sure I remember buying (or borrowing) and reading it when it came out, for a dime… and the TV preview/trailer’s brief chess images around the 15-second mark are, I’m sure, an homage to JLA #1’s cover.) Despy has returned many times over the decades; in more recent manifestations, all muscle-bulked out. I also realized that I was briefly conflating him, JLA-comic-villain-appearance-wise, with Kanjar Ro, my bad. Based on the trailer, in this cross-over, he’ll look like a human being, no head-fin, etc.

Here’s File 770’s roundup of two past crossovers.

2019:

2017: The musical one

And here’s CBR’s summary of the Arrowverse cross-overs: “Every Arrowverse Crossover, Ranked”.

(3) HARROW & VALENTE ONLINE. The Glasgow in 2024 Worldcon bid invites you to joing them for “Tor-rific tales: Alix Harrow and Catherynne M. Valente in conversation with Anna Milon” on Thursday, November 11 at 7:00 p.m. British Summer Time. Free. Register here.

Offering fresh, feminist perspectives and chilling, creepy visions in their reimaginings of beloved stories, the authors will discuss craft, favourite tales, and of course, their latest novellas. So grab a hot drink and a copy of A Spindle Shattered by Alix E. Harrow and Comfort Me With Apples by Catherynne M. Valente.

(4) RAUM AT THE TOP. The next two articles in Cora Buhlert’s episode-by-episode review of the West German science fiction show Space Patrol Orion are live at Galactic Journey.

Here’s episode 2, “Planet Off Course”: “[October 18, 1966] Moral Dilemmas and Earth in Peril: Space Patrol Orion Episode 2: ‘Planet Off Course’”.

… So far, science fiction had had no presence on West German TV, so professional TV critics were mostly baffled, to put it politely. The Berlin tabloid B.Z. called Orion “pseudoscientific nonsense” set in a “brainless utopia”. The magazine Kirche und Fernsehen (Church and Television) lamented that the dialogues were too complicated for the viewers to understand, at least viewers not used to science fiction and gadget speak….

And here’s episode 3, “Guardians of the Law”: “[October 19, 1966] Routine Missions and Asimovian Robots: Space Patrol Orion Episode 3: ‘Guardians of the Law’”

After pulling out all the stops in episode 2, what would Raumpatrouille Orion do for an encore? Well, instead of threatening the entire solar system this time around, writer Rolf Honold and W.G. Larsen have opted for a more low-key adventure for the Orion 8 and her brave crew.

And so episode 3 “Hüter des Gesetzes” (Guardians of the Law) opens with that most routine of situations, namely a robotics training course for Space Fleet personnel, including the Orion crew. The Orion crew seems bored, but my interest perked up once robotics specialist Rott (Alfons Höckmann) mentioned the Three Laws of Robotics. Yes, Isaac Asimov’s famous Three Laws of Robotics exist in the Space Patrol Orion universe….

(5) FIRST CONTACT. [Item by Olav Rokne.] Great little twitter thread from Farscape star Claudia Black about her encounter with a young James McAvoy. Bit of a long read (best to see the quote about her in the linked article first, to give context), but it’s just heartwarming. (“James McAvoy, Son Of Dune, Has Advice For His Father, Dune Star Timothée Chalamet” at Slashfilm.) Twitter thread starts here.

(6) HEROIC NEW ENCYCLOPEDIA. [Item by Andrew Porter.] After over a year’s worth of work, Jess Nevins completed the expansion and conversion of his Encyclopedia of Print Heroes (2017) to an online edition. Table of Contents here. Introduction here:

The Encyclopedia of Pulp Heroes is intended to be a kind of sequel to my Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana: an attempt at providing a panoptical view of the characters of genre culture from across media and around the world, spanning the years from 1902 to 1945. But as was the case with Fantastic Victoriana the title of Encyclopedia of Pulp Heroes is likely to be misleading, and some explanation of what the book is and what it is not is necessary. 

Pulp Heroes is an encyclopedia. However, any book with the word “encyclopedia” in the title is at least implicitly laying claim to both authority and exhaustiveness. I’ve made a reasonable attempt at the former, but the latter was beyond my capabilities, and perhaps beyond anyone’s. As I documented in my Pulp Magazine Holdings Directory, time has been cruel to the American pulps. 38% of all American pulps no longer exist (at least in libraries), and 14% of all American pulps survive in only scattered (less than five total) copies. It’s theoretically possible that pulp collectors own large numbers of these missing pulps, but collectors are hard to locate and many are uncooperative when it comes to letting outsiders view their collections (or even to sharing information). [1] Only a handful of academic libraries have more than one or two issues of the longer-lasting and better-known pulps, and more obscure pulps, like Spicy Screen StoriesThrilling Mysteries, and Zeppelin Stories, are completely unavailable. And the rarest pulps of all, Spicy Gorilla StoriesHobo Romance, and Two-Fisted Quaker Mysteries, are not mentioned in even the most in-depth reference works.…

(7) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.

1954 – Sixty-eight years on this date, Ballantine Books first published Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. It would be awarded a Retro Hugo at Noreascon 4.  It would also be voted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award. Though most reception at the time of publication was extremely favorable with the Galaxy reviewer Groff Conklin saying the novel was “among the great works of the imagination written in English in the last decade or more”, some were not at all pleased with the P. Schuyler Miller review for Astounding saying that it was “one of Bradbury’s bitter, almost hysterical diatribes”. It would later be made into a well-received François Truffaut film which has a strong rating of seventy-two percent among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes. A remake which was made three years ago fares much worse garnering a rating of just thirty- three percent. 

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born October 19, 1934 Peter Weston. He made innumerable contributions  in fan writing and editing, conrunning, and in local clubs. He was nominated for a number of Hugo awards but never won, including a nomination for his autobiography Stars in My Eyes: My Adventures in British Fandom. Since 1984, those awards have been cast by the car-parts factory which Weston owned and managed until he retired. (Died 2017.)
  • Born October 19, 1940 Michael Gambon, 81. Actor of Stage and Screen from Ireland who is best known to genre fans as Professor Albus Dumbledore from the Hugo-nominated Harry Potter films (a role he picked up after the passing of Richard Harris, who played the character in the first two films). He also had roles in Toys (for which he received a Saturn nomination), Mary ReillySleepy Hollow, and the Hugo finalist Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. He has had guest roles in episodes of The Jim Henson HourDoctor Who, and Tales of the Unexpected, and played an acerbic storyteller and possibly tomb robber in Jim Henson’s The Storyteller. He has also done voice roles in animated features including Fantastic Mr. FoxPaddington, and The Wind in the Willows, in which he voiced very nicely The Badger. 
  • Born October 19, 1945 John Lithgow, 76. He enters SF fame as Dr. Emilio Lizardo / Lord John Whorfin in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. He’ll later be in Santa Claus: The MovieHarry and the HendersonsShrekRise of the Planet of the ApesInterstellar and the remake of Pet Sematary. Oh, and he voiced The White Rabbit on the Once Upon a Time in Wonderland series! He of course is Dick Solomon in 3rd Rock from the Sun.  And for true genre creds, he voiced the character of Yoda in the  NPR adaptations of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.
  • Born October 19, 1943 L.E. Modesitt, Jr., 78. Writer of more than 70 novels and 10 different series, the best known of which is his fantasy series The Saga of Recluce. He has been Guest of Honor at numerous conventions, including a World Fantasy Convention. He won a Neffy for his Endgames novel, and a Utah Speculative Fiction Award for his Archform: Beauty novel. 
  • Born October 19, 1946 Philip Pullman, 75. I’ll confess that I like his Sally Lockhart mysteries, both the original versions and the Billy Piper-led series, far more than I enjoy the Dark Materials series as there’s a freshness and imagination at work there I don’t see in the latter. Oh, some of the latter is quite good — I quite enjoyed Lyra’s Oxford and Once Upon a Time in The North as the shortness of them works in their favor.
  • Born October 19, 1955 Jon Favreau, 66. I can’t possibly list everything he’s done so I’ll just singly my favorite things he’s done or will do. He’s the creator of The Mandalorian, and he’s serving as a director and executive producer for its spin-off series, The Book of Boba Fett. He was executive producer of The Avengers and the first and only great Iron Man film where he made his appearance as Happy Hogan, a role he’s reprised several times. 
  • Born October 19, 1990 Ciana Renee, 31. Her most known genre role is as Kendra Saunders / Hawkgirl  on Legends of Tomorrow and related Arrowverse series. She also showed up on The Big Bang Theory as Sunny Morrow in “The Conjugal Configuration”, and she played The Witch in the theaterical production of Daniel Wallace’s Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions.  She was also Elsa in the theaterical production of Frozen.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) THE PRICE FOR CHALLENGING SCIENCE CLAIMS. [Item by Brown Robin.] Is there (scientific) method to this madness? “Bik And Raoult Hydroxychloroquine Feud Exposes Tensions” at Buzzfeed.

Days after a mysterious new illness was declared a pandemic in March of last year, a prominent scientist in France announced that he had already found a cure.

Based on a small clinical trial, microbiologist Didier Raoult claimed that hydroxychloroquine, a decades-old antimalarial drug, was part of a 100% effective treatment against COVID-19. Then–US president Donald Trump promptly proclaimed that the finding could be “one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine.”

But the study seemed off to Elisabeth Bik, a scientist turned science detective living in Silicon Valley. Bik has a sharp eye for spotting errors buried in arcane scientific papers, particularly when it comes to duplicated images. And much about Raoult’s paper looked fishy, as she later noted on her blog. Unfavorable data was left out, and the trial’s timeline was mathematically impossible. “Something does not seem quite right,” she wrote.

Before long, Bik would learn the price of raising such concerns. Raoult and a coauthor went on to call her a “witch hunter,” a “mercenary,” and a “crazy woman” on Twitter and in the press. Then, in April 2021, Raoult’s collaborator announced that they had filed a criminal complaint against Bik and a spokesperson for PubPeer, a website where she and others post scientific criticism, accusing them of blackmail, extortion, and harassment. He tweeted out a screenshot of the complaint, revealing her home address to the world….

(11) TOURING IMAGINARY WORLDS. [Item by David K.M. Klaus.] Rick Steves is / was my / Nila’s favorite travel writer and PBS travel program TV host, and we wished we could have gone on one of his marvelous European tours. I never saw anything specific until this very article, but he always set off my fannish radar. “Rick Steves Casually Reviews Dangerous Fantasy Locations” by Kurt Zemaitaitis at McSweeney’s.

… The Shire used to be the best-kept secret of Middle Earth, but tourists have been flocking there lately because of their famous “second breakfasts.”…

(12) AMBIVALENT OPTION. Kotaku says “Classic Doom Is Now Playable Via A New Twitter Account”. Yeah, I don’t know – I’m still traumatized from playing it on the network in the Loscon game room years ago and being repeated killed by the same teenager before I’m 30 seconds into the game…

Are you bored, sitting in some waiting room? Maybe, instead of just doing nothing you want to play some Doom? Well you could download the fantastic mobile ports of Doom or play it on Switch. Or, why not play Doom using Twitter via short commands and videos?…

(13) CONFLATION. Yeah, I can sort of see how this might cross someone’s mind. This Dune meme is a callback to the poster for the 2000 stoner comedy Dude, Where’s My Car?

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In “Honest Trailers: Every Sean Connery Bond” on YouTube, the Screen Junkies take on the six Sean Connery Bond movies (Never Say Never Again doesn’t count).  They note that Connery is “England’s best Scottish spy” and Connery fights “like a drunk stepdad.”  But he’s up against SPECTRE, whose limited range of evil plans results from all the henchmen who keep getting killed off.  Also, for “peak evil performance” you need “the physique of an egg.”

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Eric Franklin, David K.M. Klaus, Brown Robin, Ben Bird Person, Cora Buhlert, Olav Rokne, Daniel Dern, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, and Michael Toman for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day m.c. simon milligan.]

Pixel Scroll 10/11/21 The Pixel Went Down To Georgia, He Was Looking For A Scroll To Steal, He Was Way Behind, He Was Fifth

(1) INDIGENOUS HERITAGE IN HORROR. The Horror Writers Association blog features Owl Goingback, a three-time Bram Stoker Award Winner, receiving the award for Lifetime Achievement, Novel, and First Novel. “Interview with Owl Goingback”.

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

Yes. I’ve used indigenous characters in most of my books and stories, because I wanted to share a culture rich in history, folklore, and ceremony, and often very misunderstood. I also wanted to show that native people of this country have a different way of looking at things than people whose ancestors came from other parts of the world. Like the traditional oral storytellers of my people, I wanted to create stories that were enjoyable while weaving a bit of teaching into the narrative. That way I’m educating in addition to entertaining.

I guess I’ve done a good job of weaving teaching elements into my stories, because my books are being used in an eight-week educational program for youthful offenders at the Orange County Corrections Facility in Orlando, Florida. The young inmates get to read a novel featuring monsters and mayhem, and scenes of bloody carnage, while subconsciously being reminded to listen to their elders and respect Mother Earth.

(2) BECKY CHAMBERS Q&A. Vox’s Emily VanDerWerff hears from “Becky Chambers on why the best aliens are just a little bit human”.

You’re really good at designing non-human species. They’re just recognizable enough for us to be like, “Oh, I understand the emotions and the intellect going on here,” but also just alien enough for us to be like, “That’s really different.”

One of my favorite things to do on any project is invent aliens. I always start with the caveat of: We have to have a point of entry. We have to be able to relate to them on some human level. Do the aliens in Wayfarers resemble anything like what I think actual extraterrestrial life is like? No, of course not. But you have to be able to emotionally connect with them. And I don’t know that we could [immediately do that] with other species out there in the universe that exists.But from there, we’re gonna get weird. I start with biology first. I look at the physicality. I look at how they are different from us. I always start with a particular trait. For example, the Aeluons, one of the big alien species in Wayfarers, communicate through the chromatophore patches on their cheeks. That starts with a real-world inspiration — squid and octopus.

I take that and blow it up to a civilization level. If color is your primary mode of communication, how does that affect your art? How does that affect your architecture, the way you dress, the sorts of technology you have? And how do you relate to other species, especially if they have different ideas about what color means or just use it as a decoration? There’s a million questions you can ask with just that one element. Everything else comes from there….

(3) F&SF COVER. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction’s Nov/Dec 2021 cover art by Maurizio Manzieri illustrates “Broad Dutty Water” by Nalo Hopkinson. Publisher Gordon Van Gelder says, “The issue has just been printed and will be distributed soon.”

(4) ORDER IN THE COURT. Every so often someone sends me a link to a stfnal t-shirt, and if I like it well enough I run it in the Scroll. Which is always promptly greeted by fan-lawyering comments to the effect “I hope they have the rights to that art” or “I looked that up and its copyright hasn’t expired OMG!” Well, there’s no stopping that, however, after yesterday’s response to Out of Print’s Foundation unisex book t-shirt I contacted the company to inquire if they had the rights. Here’s their reply:

Thank you for your interest in Out of Print. We work with the Estate of Isaac Asimov (Asimov Holding LLC) and the Estate of both respective artists for each book cover. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any other questions. 

So please step it back down to Defcon 770.

(5) T-PARTY. Boskone 59 will be returning to an in-person convention with a hybrid option. The Boston con will run from February 18-20, 2022. This weekend they announced their current Covid-related attendance requirements.

The following policies were just approved at today’s Boskone and NESFA meetings:

  1. [Boskone] Attendees must be vaccinated and show proof of vaccination or have tested negative with a PCR test taken February 15, 12:01 am or later and before the convention. There are no exceptions.
  2. All humans 2 years old or older [attending Boskone] must wear a mask in convention spaces (including open parties) at all times, except when eating or drinking in designated food and drink spaces. There are no exceptions.

(6) MORRISON Q&A. At Altered Instinct, Stephen Hunt invites fans to “Meet Diane Morrison, author of A Few Good Elves”.

Without spoilers, what was one of your favourite moments of the story to write? What was it that made you enjoy that section so much? 

The Aces High obstacle course, hands-down, was the most fun in this book! The protagonist must successfully navigate an obstacle course in an asteroid field like a slalom race to qualify for entry into an advanced Star-Pilot’s school. It’s full of raw action, but unlike many action scenes in the story, there’s no violence involved. It’s a chance for the reader to see starfaring through a Pilot’s eyes, with excitement and joy. Describing the different challenges, and how Shaundar deals with them, not only let me really buckle down into how the universe works, but it let me show you a lot of important things about Shaundar as a character. It was a glorious moment.

(7) BRIANNA WU ENGAGED IN DEVELOPING TV SERIES. Deadline reports, “Fictional Gamergate Series In The Works From Mind Riot Entertainment & Video Games Developer Brianna Wu”.

Mind Riot Entertainment will work with journalist, game developer and computer programmer Brianna Wu for Gamergate, a series about her experience as a critic and target of the notorious 2014 online harassment campaign, for which the studio has optioned life rights.

The 2014 Gamergate online campaign ignited a firestorm for its targeting of women in the gaming industry which laid the foundation for current issues of disinformation and hate. Before QAnon, Covid-19 conspiracists and the January 6th insurrection, there was Gamergate. Wu was among the targeted women, which also included Zoë Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian.

… The series will explore the origins of the widespread intimidation campaign from the perspective of multiple, fictional people in the game industry – from executives to journalists and indie developers.

Gamergate is co-created and co-written by Wu and J. Brad Wilke (Camel Spiders), and will be produced by Mind Riot Entertainment’s Jonathan Keasey (Parallel) and Jeremy J. Dodd (One Nation Under Earl).

… [Wu said:] “We’re not going to retread the same story told in thousands of news stories from outlets such as the New York Times and Washington Post, plus multiple documentaries like GTFO. Our series will focus on new, fictional people within the industry reacting to a horrific situation. By explaining how they were unable to stop the video game industry from being hijacked by the lunatic fringe – we can show how the tactics of Gamergate were the same ones that led to tragedies like Christchurch and January 6th”…

Keasey added: “Working with Brianna is a huge score for us. Based in Seattle, one of the country’s meccas for gaming, we’ve been wanting to shed light on this subject matter for a while and are honored that Brianna will be co-writing the series alongside Brad.”

(8) 007 PLUS 007 EQUALS THREE HOURS. Leonard Maltin finds that in Daniel Craig’s last outing as 007, there’s “Plenty Of Time To Die: The New James Bond Movie”.

The caretakers of the Intellectual Property known as James Bond, knowing that their newest effort would be the last one to star Daniel Craig, decided to spare no expense—or footage—to make this an “epic” entry in the long-running series. The result is a lavish piece of entertainment that ought to please any 007 fan. My only complaint is that there’s just too much of it. Any film that asks its audience to sit still and pay attention for nearly 3 hours had better have a damn good reason. This one doesn’t….

(9) NO PLACE LIKE HOME. Discovery’s lead actress gets profiled by her home state news site: “Alabama’s Sonequa Martin-Green rules Season 4 trailer for ‘Star Trek: Discovery’” at AL.com.

…In the trailer for Season 4, Martin-Green’s character and her crew are faced with a mysterious and deadly space anomaly.

“Today, we seek to understand a threat like none our galaxy has faced before,” Martin-Green says in the trailer. “With so much at stake, countless lives, futures … Once we enter the anomaly, we are going where no one has gone before.”

That’s a direct pull, of course, from the voice-over introduction to the original “Star Trek” series, an iconic TV program that first aired in the 1960s and spawned an entire universe of sci-fi content. As Burnham, Martin-Green is the first Black woman to have the lead role in a “Star Trek” series….

(10) MEMORY LANE.

  • 1999 – Twenty-two years this Autumn, the Baen Free Library, which was founded by writer Eric Flint and Baen Books publisher Jim Baen. opened for business. (Accounts differ on the actual date. And really it doesn’t matter that much, does it?) Jim Baen considered it an experiment in the field of intellectual property and copyright whereby the giving away of free books would increase the sale of other books sold by that publisher. Currently Baen Ebooks, as it’s now called, sells individual e-books, a subscription-based e-book program and access to galleys of forthcoming publications. 

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born October 11, 1940 Caroline John. Liz Shaw, companion to the Third Doctor. Shaw was a brilliant scientist, unusual for a companion. She returned for The Five Doctors. And she would reprise her character in the Big Finish audio works. Later she played the role of Laura Lyons in the BBC adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles, opposite Tom Baker as Holmes. (Died 2012.)
  • Born October 11, 1944 Patrick Parrinder, 77. I’ve a soft spot for academics who plow our fields. This one settled upon H. G. Wells starting with H. G. Wells and H. G. Wells: The Critical Heritage nearly forty years ago all the way to H. G. Wells’s Perennial Time Machine that he recently wrote with Danièle Chatelain and George E. Slusser. 
  • Born October 11, 1960 Nicola Bryant, 61. Well known for her role as Perpugilliam “Peri” Brown, a companion to both the Fifth and Sixth Doctors. She also worked in “The Two Doctors” story so she appeared with the Second Doctor as well. Of course she’s done Big Finish Doctor Who audio dramas. Like so many, many genre performers, she shows up in the video Trek fan fiction playing Lana in Star Trek Continues.
  • Born October 11, 1964 Michael J. Nelson, 57. Best known for his work on Mystery Science Theater. He was the head writer of the series for most of the show’s original eleven-year run, and spent half of that time as the on-air host. Bad genre films were a favorite target of his and his companions. 
  • Born October 11, 1965 Sean Patrick Flanery, 56. I really do think that his best work was on The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and the films that followed. It certainly wasn’t as Bobby Dagen in Saw: The Final Chapter, a film best forgotten. (It gets a forty-one percent rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes, much better than I expected.) He appeared as Jake Greyman in Demon Hunter, another low budget horror film, and as John in The Evil Within. I see a pattern…
  • Born October 11, 1972 Claudia Black, 49. Best remembered for being Aeryn Sun in Farscape, Vala Mal Doran in Stargate SG-1 and Sharon “Shazza” Montgomery in Pitch Black. She also had a recurring role as Dahlia in The Originals and starred as Dr. Sabine Lommers in the Containment series. 
  • Born October 11, 1972 Nir Yaniv, 49. Author, editor, musician, and filmmaker.  He founded a webzine for the Israeli Society for Science Fiction & Fantasy.  Currently, he’s the chief editor of Chalomot Be’aspamia, Israel’s only professionally printed genre magazine. His short fiction has appeared in Weird TalesApex Magazine and The Best of World SF. He co-wrote The Tel Aviv Dossier with Lavie Tidhar. 
  • Born October 11, 1976 Emily Deschanel, 45. Temperance “Bones” Brennan in Bones which crossed over with Sleepy Hollow twice (she visited the latter once) and she had a bit part on Spider-Man 2. More notably she was Pam Asbury in Stephen King’s Rose Red series. Actually the forensic science on Bones is genre, isn’t it? 

(12) COMICS SECTION.

  • Close to Home shows why astronauts should have been alerted by the fiddle playing cat.
  • Dork Tower, in “Foundation’s Edgy,” is skeptical that fans really want to watch an absolutely faithful adaptation of Asimov’s trilogy. (“I do not agree with the views expressed in this comic,” says Lise Andreasen.)

(13) PHOTOS FROM NY COMIC CON. Gizmodo has a slide show of the “Best Cosplay NYCC 2021”. Daniel Dern says his favorite is “Bicycleb Loki Variant”.

(14) AUTOGRAPHED FANZINE RARITY. Bidding ends October 14 on The Gary Munson Collection of Horror and Fantasy Rare Books Auction at Heritage Auctions. One fascinating item is Ray Palmer’s personal, bound copy of Cosmos – The Serial Novel, produced in the early Thirties with seventeen chapters by seventeen different authors. Installments ran in the fanzine Science Fiction Digest between July, 1933 and January, 1935. It was a round-robin novel with each chapter by a different author (one a Palmer pseudonym). Palmer got sixteen “Masters of Science Fiction” to write successive chapters of the story, “using each other’s unique characters, worlds, and conflicts to build an adventure that spans galaxies.” Each author has autographed a page in the volume.

  • Chapter 1 – Faster Than Light by Ralph Milne Farley – July, 1933
  • Chapter 2 – The Emigrants by David H. Keller, M.D. – August, 1933
  • Chapter 3 – Callisto’s Children by Arthur J. Burks – September, 1933
  • Chapter 4 – The Murderer From Mars by Bob Olsen – September, 1933
  • Chapter 5 – Tyrants of Saturn by Francis Flagg – October, 1933
  • Chapter 6 – Interference on Luna by John W. Campbell – November, 1933
  • Chapter 7 – Son of the Trident by Rae Winters [Pseudonym of Raymond A. Palmer] – December, 1933
  • Chapter 8 – Volunteers From Venus by Otis Adelbert Kline and E. Hoffman Price – January, 1934
  • Chapter 9 – Menace of the Automaton by Abner J. Gelula – February, 1934
  • Chapter 10 – Conference at Copernicus by Raymond A. Palmer – March, 1934
  • Chapter 11 – The Last Poet and the Robots by A. Merritt – April, 1934
  • Chapter 12 – At the Crater’s Core by J. Harvey Haggard – May-June 1934
  • Chapter 13 – What a Course! by Edward E. Smith, Ph.D. – July, 1934
  • Chapter 14 – The Fate of the Neptunians by P. Schuyler Miller – August, 1934
  • Chapter 15 – The Horde of Elo Hava by L. A. Eshbach – September, 1934
  • Chapter 16 – Lost in Alien Dimensions by Eando Binder – October-November, 1934
  • Chapter 17 – Armageddon in Space by Edmond Hamilton – December, 1934-January, 1935

(15) ASK THE PANEL. QI is a BBC comedy panel show with Sandi Toksvig and Alan Davies, where panelists get points for being interesting. Here’s a recently posted excerpt from a show a couple years old, BUT, there’s an equation! “When Is The Best Time For Interstellar Travel?”

(16) SWORN-IN. Paul Weimer discusses his latest read: “Microreview: When the Goddess Wakes by Howard Andrew Jones” at Nerds of a Feather.

Howard Andrew Jones Ring-Sworn Trilogy has been a recent highlight and hallmark of positivist heroic epic fantasy. In strong contrast to grimdark, morally grey epic fantasy that has long been a dominant note, the Ring-Sworn Trilogy has opted for the path of less ambiguous protagonists and antagonists, and highlighting and emphasizing the importance, and effectiveness of positive action and standing up for one’s beliefs, family, and country.  All of this takes place in a richly created multiverse….

(17) VICIOUS CYCLE. [Item by Ben Bird Person.] Artist Martha Womersley did this piece based on a vinyl toy for the 1963 movie Matango or Attack of the Mushroom People

(18) ALLEY OOPS. Once again I came across an ad for the Wizard AlleyWorld Bookshelf Insert Box, which I think is a clever little thing (although the ad’s choice to put it on a shelf full of thriller novels seems tone-deaf.)

(19) AMBITIOUS HALLOWEEN DECORATIONS. Laughing Squid draws our attention to this “Halloween Light Show Featuring the Final Scene of ‘The Matrix’ and Rage Against the Machine’s ‘Wake Up’” in Tracy, CA that runs a couple hours a night during October. The schedule is available on Facebook. Or if that’s too far to drive, here’s a video of the display:

VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] The Death and Return of Superman/Long Live Superman on YouTube is a 2019 documentary, written by Scott McCulloch and directed by Alexander Gray, which is connected with the publication of the thousandth issue of Action Comics.  As DC publisher Dan DiDio notes, if “Batman comes into a bar, everyone wants to run and hide.  If Superman comes into a bar, you want to buy him a drink.”

This documentary is worth seeing if you want to see great comics creators such as Denny O’Neil, Neal Adams, and Louise Simonson talk about what Superman means to them.  This works for me, but it might not work for you.  The existence of Zack Snyder’s evil Superman is thankfully ignored.

Best bit of trivia: superheroes in 1940 were known as “long johns characters.”

[Thanks to Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Ben Bird Person, Gordon Van Gelder, Daniel Dern, Lise Andreasen, Brown Robin, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter  for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Miles Carter.]

Pixel Scroll 10/7/21 Snappy Scroll Wraps For Stupid Pixels

Already a full day writing the Lou Antonelli obituary and the Luis Rondon murder conviction, so we’ll have to take it easy on the Scroll as we continue catching up with everything Filers have been sending.

(1) LET’S NOT BE PREMATURE. “Jodie Whittaker isn’t ready to let go of Doctor Who quite yet”, as she tells Radio Times.

Speaking to Shaun Keaveny for The Line-Up podcast, Whittaker said she hadn’t had time to process leaving Doctor Who yet since filming was still underway.

“Well, it’s strange because, like, announcing you’re the Doctor, it always happens at a very strange time. So you announce that you’re going to play the Doctor and it happens before, essentially, you’ve stepped foot on set.

“So that’s one big announcement and the very emotionally, kind of contradicting thing is you announce you’re leaving, but you haven’t left.

“So I am still knee deep in shooting. So to me this hasn’t finished,” she added. “You’re just in it, but I can be in it. So the good thing now is being announced that these are my last episodes that I’m shooting doesn’t mean I have to let go yet.”

(2) ESSENCE OF WONDER. “Mermaids Monthly and the Panther Anti-Racist Union on Why Representation Matters!” will be the topic of the next Essence of Wonder with Gadi Evron.

We will be speaking with the kids who organized the protests against the Racist and homophobic book ban that was just overturned in Pennsylvania, and with the incoming publishing team for Mermaids Monthly (Cental York School District).

This Saturday, October 9t at 3:00 p.m. US Eastern Time. Streaming on YouTube, Facebook Live, and Twitch.

(3) MARVELOUS CUISINE. [Item by Daniel Dern.] “What Do Marvel Characters Eat? Pop-Culture Cookbooks Have Answers, and Rapt Audiences.” The article begins:

Chelsea Monroe-Cassel is currently developing a recipe for a dish whose traditional version she’ll never be able to taste, and whose place of origin she’ll never be able to visit: Plomeek soup, a staple on the fictional planet Vulcan. In writing “The Star Trek Cookbook,” out next March, she has spent hours watching old episodes and movies from her home in West Windsor, Vt., trying to deduce what might be in the reddish soup.

“We know shockingly little about Vulcan cuisine, given how much of a fan favorite Spock is,” she said. Some people believe that Vulcans are vegetarian, as their strong morals and fear of their own capacity for violence would mean they avoid food that requires slaughtering. But do those arguments hold up, she wondered, in a universe where meat can be replicated with machines?

The result: “A cold gazpacho with tomato and strawberry and a little bit of balsamic.”…

DPD notes: While this article does passingly note that books like this have been happening for a few decades, it talks about one current author, Chelsea Monroe-Cassel, working on The Star Trek Cookbook without acknowledging, say, Star Trek Cookbook by Ethan Phillips and William J. Birnes from 1999 (info which took me all of 0.73 mintues to web-suss out).

Tsk.

(4) NEW DELANY FELLOWSHIP. CatStone Books is taking applications for its inaugural Samuel R. Delany Fellowship through October 31. It will be awarded “to one author from a community that has traditionally been marginalized in speculative fiction. This can include authors of color, LGBT+ authors, female authors, authors with disabilities, and authors living an immigrant experience.”

The fellowship will award the selected author with:

  • a $10,000 stipend
  • mentorship from a member of the Advisory Board
  • additional resources as requested

in order to help the recipient set aside time to work on and complete a speculative fiction project. 

Applications for the Samuel R. Delany Fellowship begin annually May 1 and must be submitted by October 31. The recipient of the fellowship will be announced on December 15. The application process is outlined in the application packet, which can be downloaded below.

To apply, please visit catstonebooks.moksha.io and select the Delany Fellowship option.

(5) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.

1998 – Twenty-three years ago this evening on The WB, Charmed first aired. Created by Constance M. Burge, who had no genre background at all having been responsible for Ally McBeal, it first starred the trio of Shannen Doherty, Holly Marie Combs and Alyssa Milano. (Rose McGowan joined in season four.)  The pilot episode, “Something Wicca This Way Comes” played rather nicely off the title of the Bradbury novel. The early seasons of Charmed got generally excellent reviews but the latter seasons are considered a mixed bag among both critics and viewers alike. The overall rating at Rotten Tomatoes currently is a stellar ninety-five percent. I was surprised that it didn’t get any Hugo nominations. And yes, I immensely enjoyed most of it.  

No, I’ve not see the recent reboot which at least one of the original cast has been very, very unhappy about. Any Filers care to comment upon it? 

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born October 7, 1926 Ken Krueger. Krueger co-founded and organized the first San Diego Comic-Con International convention in 1970, originally called “San Diego’s Golden State Comic-Con”. He attended the first Worldcon in 1939. I’ll leave it up to y’all to discuss his activities as a fan and as a pro as they won’t fit here! (Died 2009.)
  • Born October 7, 1938 Jane Gallion (Ellern), 83. Writer, Poet, and Fan who was one of the members of the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society subgroup The Blackguards, which hosted many parties and tournaments. She edited the fanzines Karuna, and Topaze (etc.), contributed to many other fanzines over the years, and was known for her three post-apocalyptic novels which were very early examples of feminist works involving explicit sex.
  • Born October 7, 1942 Lee Gold, 79. She’s a member of LAFA, the Los Angeles organization for filkers, and a writer and editor in the role-playing game and filk music communities. She’s published Xenofilkia, a bi-monthly compilation of filk songs since 1988, four issues of the Filker Up anthology; and has published for forty-four years, Alarums and Excursions, a monthly gaming zine. She’s edited more fanzines than I care to list here, and is a member of the Filk Hall of Fame along with Barry Gold, her husband. 
  • Born October 7, 1945 Hal Colebatch. Lawyer, Journalist, Editor, and Writer from Australia who has written, singly or in collaboration, two novels and at least two dozen shorter pieces set in Larry Niven’s The Man-Kzin Wars series. However, his main body of work is non-genre, including six books of poetry, short stories, and radio dramas and adaptations. His non-fiction books include social commentary, biography and history, and he has published many hundreds of articles and reviews in various news and critical venues. (Died 2019.)
  • Born October 7, 1950 Howard Chaykin, 71. Comic book artist and writer. His first major work was for DC Comics drawing “The Price of Pain Ease” which was an adaptation of author Fritz Leiber’s characters Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser in Sword of Sorcery #1. He would illustrate damn near everything else from Batman and The Legion of Super-Heroes for DC to Hulk and Iron-Man for Marvel (to name but a few series) but I think his best genre work was his own American Flagg! series which I’ve enjoyed more than a times. It’s available from the usual digital suspects.
  • Born October 7, 1958 Rosalyn Landor, 63. She played Guinevere in Arthur the King, and Helen Stoner in “The Speckled Band” of Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes. She was the red headed colleen Brenna Odell in the “Up the Long Ladder” episode of Next Generation which has this choice dialogue with Riker:

Will, is something wrong?

What do you mean?
Do you not like girls?
Of course I do. Oh, is there a certain technique to this foot washing?
You generally start at the top and work your way down.
I think I could get used to that.

  • Born October 7, 1959 Steven Erikson, 62. He’s definitely  most known for his Malazan Book of the Fallen series, which began with the publication of Gardens of the Moon and was completed with the publication of The Crippled God, ten novels later. Though I’ve not read it, and didn’t know it existed until now, he’s written the Willful Child trilogy, a spoof on Star Trek and other tropes common in the genre. 
  • Born October 7, 1962 Rick Foss, 59. Historian, Writer, Food Connoisseur, Conrunner, and Fan who has had around a dozen short fiction works published, mostly in Analog, some of which are in his Probability Zero universe. He is also a food writer, maintains a blog of interesting and little-known stories about food and cooking, has published the book Food in the Air and Space: The Surprising History of Food and Drink in the Skies about the history of airline food, and has had occasional food-related contributions on File 770. He is a member of LASFS and SCIFI, has worked many Loscons and other conventions, and chaired Loscon Sixteen in 1990. Along with his twin brother Wolf Foss, he was Fan Guest of Honor and Toastmaster at Windycon 19 in 1992.

(7) COMICS SECTION.

  • Curtis tells what you should read now that it’s October.

(8) JEOPARDY! Andrew Porter witnessed a couple of Jeopardy! contestants strike out in a surprising way on tonight’s episode.

Category: character development

Answer: He tinkers with history at the Ministry of Truth, gets a girlfriend & has a very bad year.

Wrong questions: Who is Snape? and Who is Harry Potter?

Right question: Who is Winston Smith in 1984?

(9) PUNCH, BROTHERS, PUNCH WITH CARE. James Davis Nicoll tells Tor.com readers to have their tickets out: “All Aboard! Five SFF Stories About Trains and Railways”. The second stop on this trip is —

Inverted World by Christopher Priest (1974)

The City of Earth creeps across a surrealistic landscape under a distorted sun at a snail’s pace: one mile in ten days. Forever pursuing the enigmatic optimum, the City’s population is organized around the task of keeping the City moving. Track creates the rails on which the City moves, Traction propels the City, the Militia guards the City from the barbarians around it, and surveyors like Helward Mann scout the path Earth will follow.

It’s a difficult existence. Work is burdensome and constant. The women of the City bear few children; the City must draft barbarian women to bear children. Nevertheless, Helward and people like him do their bit to keep their home crawling westward. Now, however, the journey may be at its end. Ahead of the City is an ocean, vast and unbridgeable…

(10) VIDEO OF THE DAY.  The people who did “Libertarian Game of Thrones” have now come out with “LIbertarian James Bond!” — “A spy with a license to stop requiring licenses.”

[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Cat Eldridge, Michael J. Walsh, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Michael Toman, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jack Lint.]

Pixel Scroll 9/2/21 Who Knows Where The Springers’ Space-Time Goes

(1) FUTURE-CON ONLINE, FREE. Starting tomorrow, Future-Con runs from September 3-5 online, free. On Discord and YouTube with speakers from many parts of the world such as Aliette de Bodard, Cristina Jurado, Francesco Verso, Fábio Fernandes, Rachel Cordasco, Emily Jin etc. (Language of communication: English)  Among the highlights, the first panel will focus on African SFF.

UNITED FUTURES OF AFRICA: A Whole Continent Rising to the Global Conversation. Themes and elements of contemporary Science Fiction from African countries. Panelists: Cheryl S. Ntumy (Ghana/ Botswana); Dilman Dila (Uganda); Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki (Nigeria); Mame Bougouma Diene (US/Senegal/France); Tlotlo Tsamaase (Botswana); Fábio Fernandes (Brazil, host).

Latin American SFF, Arab SFF will be on special panels. Chinese SFF will be discussed in the 1st panel on Sunday (On Friday, Xia Jia will also be on board the second panel about languages; Saturday, Chen Qiufan will be in the 2nd panel and Gu Shi in the 3rd one. Recommended reading: A Summer beyond your reach Xia Jia anthology and Vector, spring 2021 magazine of BSFA about Chinese SF in addition to everything that was published since the 1989 anthology by Dingbo Wu and P.D. Murphy). 

More general themes such as translations, posthumanism, architecture, will also be discussed. Check the full program here

(2) OUT FOR A SPIN. The Wheel Of Time – Official Teaser Trailer dropped today. The show arrives on Prime Video November 19, 2021.

(3) RESISTANCE IS FUTILE, RECURRING IS LUCRATIVE. We’ll see the Borg Queen in the next season of Picard. “‘Star Trek: Picard’: Annie Wersching To Recur As Borg Queen For Season 2 Of Paramount+ Series”Deadline has the story.

Star Trek: Picard Season 2 follows its titular character (Stewart) into the next chapter of his life. Season 2 also touts the return of John de Lancie’s Q.

Wersching will recur as the Borg Queen. Alice Krige played the Borg Queen in Star Trek: First Contact and VOY: Endgame. Susanna Thompson also took on the character in Star Trek: Voyager.

(4) EMERGENCY HOLOGRAPHIC SWEDES. “ABBA Announce First Album in 40 Years, Share New Songs: Listen”Pitchfork offers a preview.

Swedish pop icons ABBA have shared two new songs, the previously teased “I Still Have Faith in You” and “Don’t Shut Me Down.” The tracks will be included on Voyage, the band’s first new album since 1981. The record is out November 5…. 

Since at least 2016, ABBA have been teasing a digitally-aided return. And, finally, on May 27, 2022, the quartet will perform the ABBA Voyage concert with a 10-piece band at London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. The original members—Benny Anderson, Anni-Frid Lyngstad, Agnetha Fältskog, and Björn Kristian Ulvaeus—will be performing as digital versions of themselves, which are previewed in the “I Still Have Faith in You” visual. It took “weeks and months of motion-capture and performance techniques” to create the hologram artists, according to a press release.

YouTube has “I Still Have Faith In You” and a lyrics video of “Don’t Shut Me Down”.

(5) FIRST SIGHT OF STATEN ISLAND. The New York Times’ Alexis Soloski asks: “Does Harvey Guillén, of ‘What We Do in the Shadows,’ Look Familiar?”

“I’m not waiting for people’s permission to be comfortable in my body, in my queerness, in my brownness,” said Harvey Guillén, who was discouraged from acting early on….

On a blistering August afternoon, the actor Harvey Guillén bounced onto the grounds of Staten Island’s Snug Harbor.

For the past three years, Guillén has inhabited a fictional Staten Island as a star of “What We Do in the Shadows,” FX’s wackadoo vampire comedy. But “Shadows” shoots in Toronto. And Guillén had never before visited the actual New York borough, which he reached via ferry. (A movie musical devotee, he sneaked in a quick tribute to Barbra Streisand in “Funny Girl” on the way.) Snug Harbor, a former home for retired sailors and reputedly one of Staten Island’s most haunted places, seemed like a good place to start.

“It’s actually very pretty,” he said.

A local pointed out a nearby building where a grisly murder had purportedly taken place. “What kind of a murder?” Guillén asked, inflection rising like a party balloon.

An actor of effortless sweetness, he has infused shows like “Shadows,” “The Magicians” and “Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist” with kindness and deep humanity. (In many episodes of “Shadows,” he plays the only human.) What is he like offscreen? Let’s just say I had never met a man who seemed so immediately deserving of a lollipop…

(6) CAROLYN SHOEMAKER (1929-2021). If you remember comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, she’s one of the reasons for its name: “Carolyn Shoemaker, Hunter of Comets and Asteroids, Dies at 92”. The New York Times profiled the late skywatcher.  

Carolyn Shoemaker, who for more than a decade managed a telescopic camera with her husband from a high-altitude observatory in California and became widely regarded, without academic training, as the world’s foremost detector of comets and asteroids, died on Aug. 13 at a hospital in Flagstaff, Ariz. She was 92.

Her health had deteriorated after a fall a week earlier, her daughter Linda Salazar said.

Ms. Shoemaker’s career as a professional stargazer began when she was around 50, after Ms. Salazar, her youngest child, left for college. 

… One comet, known as Shoemaker-Levy 9 (named in part for their associate David Levy), had stood out from the rest. Rather than making a lonely journey through the cosmic vacuum, Shoemaker-Levy 9 was on a collision course with Jupiter. By detecting the comet shortly before impact, Ms. Shoemaker gave scientists an opportunity to examine whether or not comets slamming into planets represented major astronomical events — and to test the hypotheses of her husband’s work.

The result had all the drama the Shoemakers might have imagined: whirling fire balls, a plume of hot gas as tall as 360 Mount Everests and a series of huge wounds that appeared in Jupiter’s atmosphere. Amateur astronomers could witness much of it with store-bought telescopes….

(7) SAUNDERS REMEMBERED. A memorial was held for Charles R. Saunders on August 28. A replay of the livestream is available here. Cora Buhlert sent the link with a note, “Considering how vastly underrated Saunders was in life, I’m glad that he at least gets some recognition in death.” Charles Saunders (1946-2020), author of Imaro and Dossouye and creator of Sword and Soul, died in May 2020.

(8) MEMORY LANE.

  • 1955 – Sixty-six years ago at Clevention the Hugo Awards become a permanent part of the Worldcon. The first Hugo Awards had been held two years previously at the 11th Worldcon but the next Worldcon, SFCon, didn’t award them. The Toastmaster that year was Anthony Boucher with the Guests of Honor of being Isaac Asimov (Pro) and Sam Moskowitz (Special Mystery Guest). The identity of the latter was not revealed (even to the honoree) until the first night of the convention.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born September 2, 1899 — Martin Miller. He played Kublai Khan in the completed but erased by the BBC First Doctor story, “Marco Polo.” He’s in the first Pink Panther film as Pierre Luigi, a photographer, and has roles in Danger ManDepartment SThe Avengers and The Prisoner. In the latter, he was number fifty-four in “It’s Your Funeral.” The Gamma People in which he played Lochner is I think his only true genre film though I’m obviously open to being told I’m wrong. (Died 1969.)
  • Born September 2, 1909 — David Stern III. Creator of the Francis the Talking Mule character who became the star of seven popular Universal-International film comedies. Stern adapted his own script for the first entry, simply titled Francis. Talking mules are genre, aren’t they? (Died 2003.)
  • Born September 2, 1911 — Eileen Way. She shows up on Doctor Who twice, first as Old Mother in the First Doctor story,  “The Forest of Fear” and later in a major role as Karela in the Fourth Doctor story, “The Creature from the Pit”. She’d also shows up on the non-canon Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. as simply Old Woman at the age of fifty five. Other genre appearances I think are limited to an appearance on Alcoa Presents: One Step Beyond. Well unless you count The Saint which is at best genre adjacent. (Died 1994.)
  • Born September 2, 1915 — Meinhardt Raabe. He was the last surviving Oz cast member with any dialogue in the film. He portrayed the coroner who certified the death of the Wicked Witch of the East. This film was his entire acting career. (Died 2010.)
  • Born September 2, 1936 — Gwyn Thomas. Welsh poet and academic who translated Tales from the Mabinogion with Kevin Crossley-Holland. “Chwedl Taliesin”, “The Tale of Taliesin”, was a short story by them as well. By the way my SJW credit is named Taliesin. And he tells a lot of tales.  (Died 2016.)
  • Born September 2, 1966 — Salma Hayek, 55. Her performance as Santanico Pandemoniumin From Dusk till Dawn is quite excellent. I can’t say the same for her performance as Rita Escobar in Wild Wild Wild West which got her nominated for a Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Supporting Actress. (The film currently has a twenty-eight percent rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes.)  I really like her as Francesca Giggles in Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over. She’s Ajak in the forthcoming Eternals film based on the Jack Kirby comics.
  • Born September 2, 1968 — Kristen Cloke, 53. Captain Shane Vansen in the unfortunately short-loved Space: Above and Beyond, a damn fine series. She has one-offs in Quantum LeapThe X-FilesMillennium and The  Others. She co-wrote with Shannon Hamblin an episode of The X-Files, “Rm9sbG93ZXJz” which is base64 code for “Followers”. 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

  • Bizarro show somebody who should have paid more attention to his mother.

(11) CAT SCRATCH FEVER. This Kentucky high school has a ban on hats and Budweiser shirts, but furry garb meets the dress code? “Teen Furries Reportedly Taking Over Kentucky High School” reports Jezebel.

It’s back-to-school time all across the country, and in Kentucky, one district has an unexpected challenge in one of its high schools. WLKY-TV reported that high school students in the Meade County school district are attending school dressed as and acting like … cats.

One grandmother is upset. “Apparently, from what I understand, they’re called ‘furries,'” she said. “They identify with animals. These people will hiss at you or scratch at you if they don’t like something you’re doing. The students are told they can’t wear hats or Budweiser shirts in school, but they can wear cat ears, cat tails, masks, leashes. It doesn’t make sense.”

…Last week, someone identifying themselves only as an “MCHS student” started [a] Change.org petition that has so far garnered almost 1,000 signatures, calling out Meade County School District for hypocrisy…

Here’s the text of the petition: “Allow Hat Or Remove Animal Behavior/Clothing”.

Meade County School District decided to 100% ban hats and headwear. But it had come to the attention of many that furries/People who wish to be animals can still wear these animals ears, tail, and in a lot of cases even have each other on leashes. And this supports their behavior of these “furries” taking the actions of growling, hissing, or even scratching and biting at other people yet staff members seem to think it is okay. Yet when someone of non-authorities tells them to not do that that said person gets in trouble for nothing when this “furry” was making animal noises and actions towards them.

(12) WITH SHARP, POINTY TEETH. “’God of Death’ Whale Was Scourge of Land and Sea 43 Million Years Ago” says Smithsonian Magazine. Would you expect to find whale bones in the Egyptian desert? Apparently you should.

A 43-million-year-old fossil of prehistoric whale with four legs and very sharp teeth has been found in the Egyptian desert. Named after Anubis the god of death, this previously unknown amphibious species was about ten feet long with an impressive jaw that indicates a raptor-like feeding style, according to a new study published in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

“We discovered how fierce and deadly its powerful jaws are capable of tearing a wide range of prey … this whale was a god of death to most of the animals that lived in its area,” lead author Abdullah Gohar, a Cetacean paleobiologist at Mansoura University in Egypt, tells Matthew Low of Insider

(13) WHAT THE EARLY BIRD GETS. An article in Astronomy & Astrophysics tells why gassy planets are bigger around more-massive stars: “Why do more massive stars host larger planets?”

Planets that form around more-massive stars can efficiently wrap themselves in a blanket of gas — making them larger than planets around less-massive stars.

More than 4,400 planets are confirmed to exist outside the Solar System. Among parent stars that have a mass lower than that of the Sun, comparably more-massive stars tend to host larger planets than do lower-mass stars. Astronomers have puzzled over why this might be.

Michael Lozovsky at the University of Zurich in Switzerland and his colleagues analyzed data from NASA’s database of exoplanets, and modeled what planets of different sizes and masses might be made of.

The authors’ calculations suggest that planets around relatively massive stars are more efficient at accreting hydrogen and helium gas from the swirling disks of gas and dust from which they form. These planets grow more quickly and so grow larger before the disk runs out of material and dissipates.

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In “James Bond: Quantum of Solace”  on Screen Rant, Ryan George says Bond is battling Quantum, which is “a completely different organization with the exact same concept” as Spectre because they haven’t been able to resolve the rights issue over “Spectre.”  Also the villain is “a short little guy from France” and the producer notes that “James Bond fighting a tiny Frenchman” isn’t the big fight scene fans have come to expect.

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Liley Flor, David Doering, Jeffrey Smith, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Michael Toman, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Remembering Sean Connery

By Steve Vertlieb: Sean Connery, the iconic actor and super star whose irresistible presence on the motion screen happily dominated our lives for nearly sixty years died today at age ninety.  Few actors of his or any other generation possessed the wit, charisma, and staggering masculinity that this remarkably gifted actor brought to the screen.  With the probable exception of Cary Grant, with whom Connery shared male dominance and magnetism, no other actor before or since has attracted both men and women with his nearly startling sexuality.

Born August 25, 1930, Connery achieved international recognition with his smoldering portrayal of Ian Fleming’s James Bond in Dr. No in 1962.  Although he’d appeared in relatively minor parts in a variety of television and movie roles, it was his remarkable major screen debut as James Bond in 1962 that instantaneously, and deservedly, elevated him to super star status.

Connery followed his singular appearance as “Bond … James Bond” in Dr. No with six additional star turns as the invincible secret agent in From Russia With Love (1963), Goldfinger (the definitive Bond thriller in 1964), Thunderball (1965), You Only Live Twice (1967), Diamonds Are Forever (1971) and, finally, in Never Say Never Again, (1983) whose clever title noted the irony of his having said repeatedly that he’d never play the part again.  Having played Bond in seven motion pictures, Connery established himself as the definitive characterization of Fleming’s deadly British agent.

After this last performance as the impeccably tailored spy, Connery defied critics who’d complained about his being a single dimensional actor, by joyously emerging as one of the finest character actors of our time.  Prior to being cast as Bond, In such films as Darby O’Gill and The Little People for Disney (1959), and after in Marnie for Alfred Hitchcock (1964), The Hill” (1965), The Anderson Tapes (1971), and Zardoz (1974), Connery proved to his critics that he was, indeed, a gifted, dangerously provocative performer.

Five of his most joyous, exquisitely layered, multi textured performances, followed in the years that lay before him.  As the irascible, inherently  masculine “Raisuli” in the enormously entertaining John Milius film The Wind And The Lion, Connery’s striking individuality quite literally lit the screen with his colorful interpretation as the leader of a noble Berber tribe, timed imaginatively by Jerry Goldsmith’s electrifying musical score.

As the sadly proud, yet vulnerable Robin Hood in Robin And Marian (1976), Connery  showed rare sensitivity and elegance as the aging warrior whose difficulty transitioning from young rebel to graceful elder champion wove poetic lyricism to the legend of Robin, accompanied by composer John Barry’s wistfully romantic themes.

In The Untouchables (1987) for director Brian De Palma, Sean Connery’s Oscar winning performance as “Malone,” the simple cop on the beat whose street intelligence and long tenured wisdom helped Eliot Ness bring down Capone, would at long last silence the critics who had cynically predicted his rapid departure and absence from the screen after leaving the lucrative “Bond” franchise.

For Steven Spielberg, Connery would deliver his most wonderful portrayal, perhaps, as the colorful, cantankerous Professor Henry Jones as Harrison Ford’s father in Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade (1987), elevating another beloved franchise to sublime levels of joyous delight and perfection.  Connery’s comedic gifts and unexpected pathos turned this third entry of the iconic film series into it’s most beloved chapter.

For First Knight (1995), a highly romanticized screen version of the Arthurian legend, Connery was at his most regal in his performance as literature’s legendary King Arthur.  Bringing both nobility and grace to a classic role that only he, in suave maturity, could deliver, Connery once again brought quiet dignity and eloquence to the image of expiring royalty in the face of danger and finality.

Sean Connery has left us, but his indelible face and distinctive voice shall remain forever burned into the haunting imagery of the motion picture screen.   We came alive in the sweet mirror of your artistry. Rest Well, Sir Sean.  May angels sing you to your rest.

Pixel Scroll 10/8/20 It’s Time For The Retro-Dragon Awards

(1) CATS MEOW, LIZARDS THUNDER, BOOK HAPPENS. Filers Charon Dunn and Sally Smith collaborated on a book that’s newly released! What’s it about? Rhonda Wray’s “favorite boy band is trapped on a dinosaur planet and it’s up to Rhonda to save them!” Let’s eavesdrop on what their cats think about it: “Rhonda Wray: Raptor Wrangler by Charon Dunn and Sally Smith (according to their cats)”.

Charon Dunn (above) and Sally Smith (below)

…T.B. Kahuna: I helped write the Sonny Knight trilogy. She didn’t really give me any credit. She did give me some of the cake with the book cover decoration, and it had whipped cream frosting. 

Naomi: Pardon me, I didn’t mean to talk while you were interrupting. And yes, that was very good frosting. “Charon wanted to write about a girl adventurer going from zero to hero. And about dinosaurs, and boy bands, two things that have fascinated her for at least half a century. Sally wanted to make sure the science was tight and that the hero was truly heroic. They both undertook some serious #dinosaur research and many of their surprising findings are incorporated into the book.

For instance, raptors had feathers. There’s a little controversy over whether tyrannosaurids did, but raptors are basically birds with fangs, and they probably acted a lot more like crows or parrots than a pack of wolves. Which means they could probably communicate.” …

(2) NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE. The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2020 is awarded to the American poet Louise Glück “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”.

(3) MINTY FRESH. [Item by Dann.] Minty of Minty Comedic Arts dropped a “10 things” video about Dune recently.  He actually had quite a few things that I hadn’t heard before.  The behind-the-scenes ties to other genre properties were really interesting.

  • 10 Things You Didn’t Know About DUNE

As a result, I also saw this one from August.

  • 10 Things You Didn’t Know About The Matrix

(4) HI TECH, HIGH FEAR. “Thoroughly Modern Hauntings: How Ghost Stories Keep Finding New Ways To Scare Us”: Frazer Lee explains at CrimeReads.

…Modern ghost stories, rather than being exposed as bunkum by technology, have instead utilised that technology to create new sources of terror. Our baby monitors, camera phones, and laptop webcams have of course given us a window on a secure and happy world. But they have also provided the ghosts with a way in. Just in the same way that Shirley Jackson’s paranormal investigators found themselves possessed by the evil in Hill House, our need to connect with each other is now providing fertile ground for the ghosts to emerge. Poltergeist’s entry point for evil was the TV set in the corner of every living room, swiftly followed by Stephen Volk’s Ghostwatch (1992), which made us afraid to watch live TV broadcasts ever again…. 

(5) A TREK FOR NICKELODEON. Ars Technica excites Trek fans with news of “Kate Mulgrew returning as Capt. Janeway in Star Trek: Prodigy.

…Mulgrew popped in to make made the surprise announcement during the end of a Star Trek panel at this year’s all-virtual New York Comic Con. “I have invested every scintilla of my being in Captain Janeway, and I can’t wait to endow her with nuance that I never did before,” Mulgrew said. “How thrilling to be able to introduce to these young minds an idea that has elevated the world for decades. To be at the helm again is going to be deeply gratifying in a new way for me.”

…Prodigy, the first modern* Star Trek series to be explicitly targeted to a young audience, will be coming to Nickelodeon at some point in 2021. According to ViacomCBS, the show “follows a group of lawless teens who discover a derelict Starfleet ship and use it to search for adventure, meaning, and salvation.”

(6) ROCKET STACK RANK. Eric Wong forwarded the link to Rocket Stack Rank’s annual Outstanding SF/F Horror of 2019 with 28 stories that were that were finalists for major SF/F awards, included in “year’s best” SF/F anthologies, or recommended by prolific reviewers in short fiction.

Included are some observations obtained by changing the Highlight from Free Online to Podcasts, changing the table View by Publication and Author, and Filtering the table by awards, year’s best anthologies, and reviewers.

(7) WHO HOLIDAY SPECIAL. There’s going to be a Doctor Who holiday special – but exactly which holiday, they haven’t said. “NYCC 2020: The Gang Has To Fight A Dalek While The Doctor’s Stuck In Space Prison In Holiday Special”.

A lthough the cast of Doctor Who couldn’t reveal much about the upcoming holiday special Revolution of the Daleks, they were able to give fans a taste of what to expect during the virtual Doctor Who Spotlight New York Comic Con panel.

During the panel, series stars Jodie Whittaker, Mandip Gill, and Bradley Walsh explained that Revolution picks up where the Season 12 finale left off, with The Doctor stuck in a maximum security space prison, while her friends were back on Earth, completely unaware of the Time Lord’s incarceration.

(8) MEDIA ANNIVERSARY.

  • Fifty years ago, the British SF Association Award went to John Brunner‘s The Jagged Orbit, and it followed his BSFA Award win in the previous year for Stand on Zanzibar which also won a Hugo at St. Louiscon. It would also be nominated for a Nebula but did not win. It was first published by Doubleday the previous year, but it hasn’t been printed in almost twenty years, though Open Road Integrated Media has it as an ebook available from the usual digital suspects. 

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born October 8, 1916 – George Turner.  Eight novels, a dozen shorter stories; anthology The View from the Edge; memoir In the Heart or in the Head; essays, letters, reviews, in AlgolAmazingAstoundingAustralian SF News, Australian SF ReviewFoundationMetaphysical RevNY Rev SFSF CommentaryVector; Chandler, Clarke Awards; nine Ditmars (three for fiction, six for criticism); more work outside our field.  Named Guest of Honor for Aussiecon Three the 57th Worldcon but died before it was held.  Stern, perhaps waspish, distinguished.  (Died 1997) [JH]
  • Born October 8, 1920 Frank Herbert. I’ll confess that I enjoyed Dune and Dune Messiah that’s as far as I got in the series. The BBC full cast audio version of Dune is quite amazing. The other Herbert novel I really liked was Under Pressure. Yes, I’ve read much more by him but all that I remember vividly. (Died 1986.) (CE) 
  • Born October 8, 1924 – Suzanne Martel.  Quatre Montréalais en l’an 3000 (tr. as The City Under Ground; rev. as Surréal 3000 and The City Undergound) seems to have been the first SF novel in Quebec (or Québec).  Two dozen novels in and out of our field.  Three ACELF Prizes (Association canadienne d’éducation de langue française), Metcalf Award (for body of work; Canadian Authors’ Ass’n), Canada Council Children’s Literature Award (for Nos Amis robots tr. Robot Alert), Governor General’s Literary Award.  (Died 2012) [JH]
  • Born October 8, 1928 John Bennett. A very long involvement in genre fiction starting with The Curse of the Werewolf in the early Sixties and ending forty years later with a role on the Minority Report series. Being a Brit, naturally he appeared on Doctor Who in the prime role of Li H’sen Chang as part of a Fourth Doctor story, “The Talons of Weng-Chiang”. He had roles in Blake’s 7, Watership DownTales of The UnexpectedThe Plague DogsDark MythSherlock Holmes and the Leading Lady (as Dr. Sigmund Freud!), Merlin of The Crystal Cave and The Infinite Worlds of H.G. Wells. (Died 2005.) (CE)
  • Born October 8, 1941 – Penny Frierson, 79.  Chaired DeepSouthCon 15, co-chaired ConFederation the 44th Worldcon.  Guest of Honor at Coastcon 1978 with husband Meade; fanzines with him e.g. Friersign Theater PresentsScarfing Humble Pie; play (with MF) Shattered Like a Clockwork Orange.  Rebel Award.  [JH]
  • Born October 8, 1946 – Andrew Stephenson, 74.  Two novels, five shorter stories; a dozen covers, five dozen interiors.  Here is Vector 69.  Here is the Aug 75 Galaxy.  Here is an interior for Inferno in its magazine serialization.  [JH]
  • Born October 8, 1949 – Richard Hescox, 71.  A hundred fifty covers, fifty interiors; more outside our field.  Artbooks The Fantasy Art of RHThe Deceiving Eye.  Gaughan Award.  Cover designer for DAW Books 1987-1994.  Here is Walkers on the Sky.  Here is Once on a Time.  Here is Dancer of the Sixth.  Here is The Sailor on the Seas of Fate.  Website here.  [JH]
  • Born October 8, 1949 Sigourney Weaver, 71. I’m picking her greatest genre role as being the dual roles of Gwen DeMarco and Lieutenant Tawny Madison in Galaxy Quest. Chicon 2000 did give the film Best Dramatic Presentation Award after all and it is a loving homage to all that is good in the genre. And yes, I know Conspiracy ‘87 gave Aliens a Best Dramatic Presentation Award as well but I’m really not a fan of that franchise. (CE)
  • Born October 8, 1951 Terry Hayes, 69. Screenwriter of Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior which he co-wrote with George Miller & Brian Hannant, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome with Miller, and From Hell (from the Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell novel) which he co-wrote with Rafael Yglesias. He’s also the writer of an unused screenplay, Return of the Apes. (CE)
  • Born October 8, 1954 Stephen Furst. Stephen is dead, damn it all. The saddest part of doing these birthdays is discovering how many folks have died that I reasonably expected were still living. Babylon 5 has had far too many deaths among its cast. He died of complications from diabetes at a far too young age. You know him most likely as Centauri diplomatic attaché Vir Cotto on Babylon 5, a decent being way over his head in a job he was ill-prepared for. He also directed three low-budget movies for the Sci Fi Channel: Dragon StormPath of Destruction, and Basilisk: The Serpent King; he additionally co-starred in the last two films. And he produced Atomic Shark which aired during Sharknado Week on Syfy. (Died 2017.) (CE) 
  • Born October 8, 1983 Molly C. Quinn, 37. Fey / Intern Molly / Melony on the Welcome to Night Night podcast and Pemily Stallwark on the sort of related Thrilling Adventure Hour podcast. She’s Jenny in the Authurian Avalon High series, and showed up in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 as Howard’s date. (CE)
  • Born October 8, 1988 – Charlotte McConaghy, 32.  Author, screenwriter.  Eight novels.  Interested in nature and fierce women.  Migrations just released.  [JH]

(10) COMICS SECTION.

  • Off The Mark gives a genre example of a “senior moment.”

(11) BEA MOVIE. Leonard and Jessie Maltin’s latest podcast is “Howard Ashman Documentary” which is a double-length episode centering around Don Hahn’s documentary Howard:  The Howard Ashman Story, currently streaming on Disney+. Director Hahn, who the Maltins had interviewed before, is interviewed along with Ashman’s life partner, Bill Lauch; his sister, Sarah Gillespie;, composer Alan Menken; and Little Mermaid writer/director John Musker.

Fun fact:  the producers of The Little Mermaid modeled villain Ursula after Bea Arthur but Arthur never read for the part because her agent refused to send her the script because he didn’t want her playing a witch.

(12) GEORGE CARLIN. Matthew Berry’s ESPN fantasy football column begins with a reminiscence about his first boss, George Carlin, which some of you who don’t hang around sports sites might like to read just the same.

…To be specific, I was the stage PA (production assistant) for “The George Carlin Show,” a 1994 sitcom that ran on Fox, so technically I was the assistant to George and the rest of the cast. But George was the star and, you know, his name was in the title, so it was made clear to me by my bosses that my primary and even my secondary duty was taking care of George and anything he needed, any time he needed it.

I answered the stage phone for him (George didn’t have a cellphone back then). I got meals for him. I would drive scripts to his house, and then I would drive George’s handwritten notes on scripts (George preferred to write things out longhand, and if he used email back then I never saw it) and bring them back to the writers room, among many other various tasks, all of them with the sole purpose of making George’s life easier.

I absolutely loved working for him.

As kind and gentle a guy as you’d ever want to meet, someone if you didn’t know who he was you’d never guess was a living legend. The exact opposite of his on-stage persona, he was always positive, not angry. Soft-spoken and unassuming, he was the first guy on the set every morning and the last guy to leave….

(13) JEOPARDY! Rich Lynch says tonight’s Jeopardy! has a whole category on science fiction novels.

Andrew Porter found contestants had trouble with this item —

Category: The World is Not Enough

Answer: In a Larry Niven novel, a motley crew of explorers travel to this ribbon-like “world” that encircles a star.

Wrong question: What is Discworld?

(14) PEGG’S PARANORMAL PROJECT. SYFY Wire eavesdrops on the New York Comic Con program: “Truth Seekers: Nick Frost And His Co-Stars Share Their Own Ghost Stories At Nycc 2020”.

When the Ghostbusters are busy and can’t catch a last-minute flight to England, who ya gonna call? Truth Seekers! Before the new paranormal comedy series hits Amazon later this month, Nick Frost and most of the core cast stopped by New York Comic Con to discuss the project, which Frost co-created with Simon Pegg, James Serafinowicz, and Nat Saunders. The panel kicked off with the actors recounting some of their personal experiences with the otherworldly.

After breaking up with a former girlfriend years ago, Frost came home to find all of his possessions (save for a single mattress) had been taken by his ex. With her gone, strange things started to happen.

“Me and Simon Pegg ended up sleeping on this single mattress and just watching The X-Files on this weird, TV-video player combo,” said the Shaun of the Dead actor, who plays Gus, a paranormal investigator posing as an internet technician. “But we’d hear the door banging all the time and this bell would ring. And then one day I was laying there, watching TV, and I felt a woman kiss my forehead. As I span ’round, thinking it was Simon mucking about, I was just there in the house on my own.”

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Daniel Craig was on Jimmy Fallon’s show on Monday and said that he had never had a martini until he was chosen as James Bond, so the first thing he did was to go to Whole Foods, get a bottle of vermouth and a bottle of vodka and learned how to make one.

[Thanks to JJ, Cat Eldridge, Eric Wong, Martin Morse Wooster, Michael Toman, Mike Kennedy, John King Tarpinan, John Hertz, Rich Lynch, Dann, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 10/6/20 Don’t Clickety, Don’t Call Me, Let Me Sit For A While, I’m Reading All The Books In My Tsundoku Pile

(1) POWERFUL CANON. Amy Tenebrink shares the impact that stories by a leading sff author had on her: “Personal Canons: Nnedi Okorafor”.

…Onyesonwu is one of those angry, defiant, adventurous heroines of my heart. But Who Fears Death isn’t just a story of a warrior girl; it’s the story of all warrior girls. Who Fears Death is, itself, angry, defiant, and adventurous. It rips apart the fabric of our quotidian world and shows us, more clearly for all its speculation, what is wrong with us but what could be right with us. This is speculative fiction at its best: incisive, unflinching, uncompromising. Untethered from what’s “real” in a way that can show us what is, in fact, actually real—and what could be real if only we reached for the stars.

In Who Fears Death, Nnedi put a heroine of my heart into a book of my heart. Who Fears Death showed me, in a moment, what speculative literature can be: not just a series of quest-wanderings, of dragon-slayings, of evil mage-vanquishings, but an inspirational, aspirational blueprint for me and my place in the world. Who Fears Death is itself a sword, a magic wand, a spell that can change everything.

(2) ALPHA OF THE OMEGA. The award administrators — Sci-Fest L.A. and Light Bringer Project — have announced that the Tomorrow Prize and The Roswell Award will now reside under an umbrella competition name, the Omega Sci-Fi Awards. Here’s the new logo.

(3) MEMBERS OF THE JURY. James Davis Nicoll introduces the Young People Read Old SFF panel to “The Pleiades” by Otis Kidwell Burger.

The Pleiades is impressive enough readers would no doubt run out to acquire her other works. Unfortunately, Rediscovery’s biographical entry on her reveals that her SF career was quite short1. At least, I assume younger readers would react as positively as I did. How did my Young People actually feel?

(4) QUESTIONS ABOUT THE POLICY. [Item by Cora Buhlert.] Non-binary writer Akwaeke Emezi, whose works are at least borderline SFF, has declared that they will no longer submit their novels to Women’s Prize for Fiction (where they were a finalist last year), after being asked to provide proof of their legal gender: “Akwaeke Emezi shuns Women’s prize over request for details of sex as defined ‘by law'” in The Guardian.

Emezi said that when Faber got in touch with the Women’s prize about submitting The Death of Vivek Oji, they were informed: “The information we would require from you regards Akwaeke Emezi’s sex as defined by law.”

“Forget about me – I don’t want this prize – but anyone who uses this kind of language does not fuck with trans women either, so when they say it’s for women, they mean cis women,” wrote Emezi. “And yes, this does mean that them longlisting [Freshwater] was transphobic. It’s fine for me not to be eligible because I’m not a woman! But you not about to be out here on some ‘sex as defined by law’ like that’s not a weapon used against trans women.”

The Women’s prize was established in response to the Booker failing to shortlist a single female writer in 1991. Following Emezi’s nomination in 2019, the organisers of the £30,000 award said it was working on a policy “around gender fluid, transgender and transgender non-binary writers”.

Responding to Emezi’s comments, the prize organisers said that their terms and conditions for entry equated the word “woman” with “a cis woman, a transgender woman or anyone who is legally defined as a woman or of the female sex”.

(5) O’DELL KICKSTARTER. [Item by Cora Buhlert.] Here is a Kickstarter of interest: Claire O’Dell is looking for funding to republish her River of Souls trilogy, which came out in 2010 from Tor, when she was still writing as Beth Bernobich: “The River of Souls Trilogy, Second Edition” With 26 days left, $566 of the $2,500 goal has been raised.

I’m Claire O’Dell, author of the Lammy Award-winning Janet Watson Chronicles, the River of Souls trilogy, and the Mage and Empire books.

Back in 2007, writing as Beth Bernobich, I landed my very first book deal—a three-book contract with Tor Books for my novel Passion Play and two sequels, aka, the River of Souls trilogy.  Passion Play came out in October 2010, and to my absolute delight it won the RT Reviewers’ Choice Award for Best Epic Fantasy. Queen’s Hunt and Allegiance followed in 2012 and 2013, with great reviews, and a prequel novel, A Jewel Bright Sea, appeared last year from Kensington Books.

Now that I have the rights back to the trilogy, I’d like to re-release them with new covers that better match the story and the characters. (Not to mention fixing a few continuity errors that crept in along the way.) Pledges from this campaign will pay for custom cover art and rewards.

(6) FOUNDATION. At WIRED, “The Geeks Guide to the Galaxy” interviews several creators to support the claim that “‘Foundation’ Has One of the Best Sci-Fi Concepts Ever”.

John Kessel on psychohistory:

“I studied physics as an undergrad, and basically what [Asimov] is doing is taking classical thermodynamics and applying it to human behavior. In thermodynamics, you can’t predict what one atom is going to do, but if you have several billion atoms in a contained box, you can predict—very precisely—if you raise the temperature, exactly what the effect on pressure is going to be, things like that. He’s basically saying if you have enough human beings—you have 100 million worlds, all inhabited by human beings—that psychohistory can predict the mass behavior of human beings, without being able to predict any individual human being’s behavior. That’s a cool idea.”

(7) WHITE SCREEN OF DEATH? [Item by Cora Buhlert.] The Guardian has run several articles and opinion pieces about how the postponement of Dune and that James Bond movie will affect British cinemas — and may kill them off altogether. A lot of anger, which is partly understandable, because movie theatres are open again at reduced capacity in the UK and much of the rest of Europe, but have nothing to show, because all of the big Hollywood movies are being held back. Here are four views of the situation.

He’s best known for sweeping in at the last minute to save the day – but James Bond’s latest act could be the death knell for many British cinemas.

The announcement that the release of No Time to Die, the 25th film featuring the secret agent, would be delayed again has left cinemas facing financial obliteration because of the absence of other forthcoming blockbuster films.

Our movie industry was just about keeping its morale steady. It was enforcing perfectly workable rules on sanitising and physical distancing and not subject to those closures taking theatre and live entertainment to the cliff edge. The pilot light of big-screen cinema culture was flickering. But it was still alight.

But this is a serious blow. If it is really true that Cineworld will close 128 cinemas, putting 5,500 jobs at risk (and it is not simply a scare-story negotiating ploy leaked to the press alongside the company’s official letter to the culture secretary Oliver Dowden demanding action) then this is potentially devastating. 

…For an understanding of how we got here, look at the fates of two films that did get released during the pandemic. Following a tense summer in which Christopher Nolan’s Tenet and Disney’s live-action Mulan remake competed against the coronavirus in a game of grandmother’s footsteps, both films were finally released using opposing strategies.

“Warner Bros did a brave thing bringing out Tenet [in cinemas] at that very fraught time,” says Naman Ramachandran, international correspondent at Variety magazine. “It sent a positive message to the exhibition sector as a whole.” Disney, on the other hand, launched Mulan on its streaming service Disney+, where it came with a premium price tag (£19.99/$29.99) in addition to subscription fees. Cinemas screened it only in territories where Disney+ is not available. “My opinion is that Disney should’ve released Mulan in cinemas also,” says Ramachandran. “There was a demand for it and it would’ve kept the theatrical chains happy.” As it stands, no one is: not the exhibitors who lost out on an event movie, nor Disney, who won’t be thrilled if the mediocre streaming audience estimates are correct.

Mulan’s defection and Tenet’s under-performance in the US (it still hasn’t opened in the lucrative New York and Los Angeles markets, where cinemas remain closed) have had a devastating effect on other big releases.

…After six weeks of global release, Tenet has grossed more than £235m worldwide – a number that means different things to different analysts. For a latter-day Nolan film, it’s borderline disastrous: far short of the £405m grossed by his last film, Dunkirk, which itself was a modest performer compared to the £830m racked up by The Dark Knight Rises. With a production budget around £154m, it’s fair to say these are not the receipts of Nolan’s or Warner Bros executives’ dreams. Others would argue that they’re not half bad for a film released in the midst of a global pandemic in which the filmgoing public has been actively discouraged from communal indoor activity – a metric for which there is no precedent to set the bar. Globally, it’s the third-highest grosser of the year, behind Chinese epic The Eight Hundred and January’s Bad Boys for Life, which already feels like a relic from another era.

All in all, things could be worse for Tenet – except for the fact that, by just about anyone’s yardstick, things haven’t been nearly good enough….

(8) MEDIA ANNIVERSARY.

  • Twenty five years ago this year at Intersection, the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form went to Star Trek: The Next Generation’s two-part series finale, “All Good Things…“.  (It beat out The MaskInterview with the VampireStargate and Star Trek: Generations.) It was directed by Winrich Kolbe from a script written by Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga. The title is derived from the expression “All good things must come to an end”, a phrase used by Q during the story itself. It generally considered one of the series’ best episodes with the card scene singled out as one of the series’s best. 

(9) TODAY’S DAY.

10/6 Mad Hatter Day. The original picture of the Mad Hatter by John Tenniel in Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll depicts him wearing a hat, bearing the note “In This Style 10/6”. Although we know this is really an order from the time the picture was drawn to mean a hat in that style cost 10 shillings and sixpence, we take this as inspiration to act in the style of the Mad Hatter on 10/6 (In the UK this would point to the tenth of June, but as the day was founded in America it is the 6th of October).

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born October 6, 1895 – Caroline Gordon.  Guggenheim Fellowship.  O. Henry Award.  Honorary D.Litt. degrees from Bethany College (West Virginia), St. Mary’s College (Indiana).  The Glory of Hera for us, her last novel; ten others; short-story collections; non-fiction.  (Died 1981) [JH]
  • Born October 6, 1928 – Frank Dietz.  Co-founder of the Lunarians; chaired the first 15 Lunacons; Fan Guest of Honor at Lunacon 50.  Fanzine Luna (and Luna’).  Recorded many SF cons on wire and tape, unfortunately most now seems lost.  File 770 appreciation by Andrew Porter here.  (Died 2013) [JH]
  • Born October 6, 1942 – Arthur Hlavaty, 78.  A dozen times Best Fanwriter Hugo finalist.  No doubt inspired by the C.M. Kornbluth story “MS. Found in a Chinese Fortune Cookie” – maybe the only circumstance in which no doubt could be applied to him – he called a fanzine The Diagonal Relationship, later The Dillinger Relic, then Derogatory Reference; not seen since 2002, but in Fanzineland that’s neither complete nor conclusive: No. 33 of his Nice Distinctions just appeared after three years.  Fan Guest of Honor at Empricon 3, MidSouthCon 2, Westercon 42, Minicon 37; Detcon the 11th NASFiC (North America SF Con, since 1975 held when the Worldcon is overseas).  If Sarcasm is in anger, satire is with love, he is as so often with him both.  [JH]
  • Born October 6, 1942 Britt Ekland, 78. She starred in The Wicker Man* as Willow MacGregor, and appeared as a Bond girl, Goodnight in The Man with the Golden Gun. She was also Queen Nyleptha in King Solomon’s Treasure based off the H. Rider Haggard novels. *There is only one Wicker Man film as far as I’m concerned. (CE)
  • Born October 6, 1946 John C. Tibbetts, 74. Film critic, historian, author. He’s written such articles as “The Illustrating Man: The Screenplays of Ray Bradbury” and “Time on His Hands: The Fantasy Fiction of Jack Finney”. One of his two books is The Gothic Imagination: Conversations on Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction in the Media, the other being The Gothic Worlds of Peter Straub. (CE) 
  • Born October 6, 1950 David Brin, 70. Author of several series including Existence (which I do not recognize), the Postman novel and the Uplift series of which The Uplift War won the Best Novel Hugo at Nolacon II and is most excellent. I’ll admit that the book he could-wrote with Leah Wilson, King Kong Is Back! An Unauthorized Look at One Humongous Ape, tickles me for its title. So who’s read his newest novel, The Ancient Ones? (CE)
  • Born October 6, 1953 – Roseanne Hawke, Ph.D., 67.  Wolfchild, 11th Century story set in the lost land of Lyonesse (RD was awarded Bard of Cornwall in 2006).  Daughter of Nomads, Mughal empire.  Chandani and the Ghost of the Forest, Himalayan mountains.  Memoir, Riding the Wind.  “I started a romantic novel when I was 17 but I burnt it….  working for ten years in the Middle East and Pakistan … I started writing seriously.”  Website here.  [JH]
  • Born October 6, 1955 Donna White, 65. Academic who has written several works worth your knowing about — Dancing with Dragons: Ursula K. LeGuin and the Critics and Diana Wynne Jones: An Exciting and Exacting Wisdom. She’s also the author of the dense but worth reading A Century of Welsh Myth in Children’s Literature. (CE) 
  • Born October 6, 1955 Ellen Kushner, 65. If you’ve not read it, do so now as her sprawling Riverside seriesis amazing. I’m reasonably sure that I’ve read all of it. And during the the High Holy Days, do be sure to read The Golden Dreydl as it’s quite wonderful. As it’s Autumn and this being when I read it, I’d be remiss not to recommend her Thomas the Rhymer novel which won both the World Fantasy Award and the Mythopoeic Award. (CE) 
  • Born October 6, 1962 – John Knoll, 58.  Chief Creative Officer at Industrial Light & Magic.  Creating the Worlds of “Star Wars”; covers for The Art of “Star Trek” (with M. Uesugi), Inside “Star Trek”.  Scientific & Engineering Award given him and his brother Thomas for creating Adobe Photoshop.  Cameo appearance as a pilot in The Phantom Menace.  More in his Wikipedia entry.  [JH]
  • Born October 6, 1978 – Anna Elliott, 42.  Three Tristan & Isolde books; four about Jane Austen characters, two about Sherlock Holmes, a few more.  Among her favorites by other authors, Life With Father, Wodehouse’s books about Bertie Wooster, Sayers’ books about Lord Peter Wimsey.  “What do you like to do when you’re not writing?”  “Mostly think about writing.”  [JH]
  • Born October 6, 1986 Olivia Jo Thirlby, 34. She is best known for her roles as Natalie in Russian SF film The Darkest Hour and as Judge Cassandra Anderson in the excellent Dredd. And she was Holly in the supernatural thriller Above the Shadows. (CE)  

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) HEAVY GOING. Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson finds it easy to curb his enthusiasm: The Haunting of Bly Manor Is an Erratic, Melodramatic Follow-Up”.

A great actor whose name I am not supposed to mention here narrates much of the new Netflix series The Haunting of Bly Manor (out October 9). In 2007, her character tells a wedding party a chilling, sad story of 1987 (and years previous) England, when a spooky estate’s resident ghosts tangled fitfully with living people, all caught in the grip of personal loss. This American actor tries her noble best to maneuver a Northern English accent, though it gets a bit wobbly as her narration scrapes the ceiling of profundity but never quite breaks through. 

The voiceover, with its heavy writing and uneven if committed delivery, is pretty neatly representative of the whole of Bly Manor, which aims for something scary and sweeping but is too often hampered by messy adornment. Bly Manor is the second series in the Haunting franchise that began with 2018’s Hill House, an adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s novel led by horror auteur Mike Flanagan.

(13) SCRUBTOBER IS OVER. “After series of scrubs, SpaceX launches Starlink mission from Kennedy Space Center” reports Florida Today.

After more than a month of scrubs and delays, SpaceX broke the Space Coast’s launch drought early Tuesday when a Falcon 9 rocket boosted 60 Starlink internet satellites from Kennedy Space Center.

The 7:29 a.m. liftoff from pad 39A signaled the end of what was commonly referred to as “Scrubtober,” a long series of mission delays that actually began in September due to hardware issues and inclement weather. Tuesday’s Starlink mission, for example, had been scrubbed four times…

(14) FINDING THE GEMS. The Virtual Memories Show devotes Episode 399 to editor “Sheila Williams”.

With her new fantastic short story anthology, Entanglements: Tomorrow’s Lovers, Families, and Friends (MIT Press), editor Sheila Williams brings together a panoply of voices to explore how technology and scientific advances have on the deepest human relationships. We talk about Sheila’s nearly 40 years editing science fiction stories at Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, how she manages to balance new and diverse voices with a foundation of SF’s history, how she copes with receiving ~800 stories a month (while only being able to buy 5-6), and technology’s greater role in day-to-day life and what that means for writers’ and readers’ imagination and expectations. We also get into her author freakouts (like going blank when she met Samuel R. Delany many years ago), how her philosophy background helps her as an editor, missing cons and festivals, the challenge of editing an author in translation (in this case Xia Jia), and more. Give it a listen! And go read Entanglements!

[Thanks to Cora Buhlert, JJ, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, John Hertz, James Davis Nicoll, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Bill.]

Pixel Scroll 9/3/20 This Is Not The Pixel Scroll You Are Looking For

(1) POWERFUL RECOMMENDATION. Innocent Chizaram Ilo writes a guest feature for Sarah Gailey’s series: “Personal Canons: Lesley Nneka Arimah”. “They are the winner of the 2020 Commonwealth Short Story Prize (African Region). …They live in Lagos but dream of vast lives in unimaginable places.”

The Kirkus Review, while reviewing Lesley’s brilliant collection of short stories, described it as one that heralds a new voice with certain staying power. This staying power is something that has continued to resonate within me anytime I read Lesley Nneka Arimah. That she decided to give her characters names like Nneoma, Ogechi, Mama Said, Ogechi, Chidinma, seemingly ordinary names belonging to ordinary people, and fling them into bold and daring futures or reimaginations opened up a world of possibilities for me that speculative fiction can be other things not just…white.

Everything and anything is possible and impossible in the whimsical worlds Lesley Nneka Arimah builds with fiction. This distinctive feature of her work keeps the reader on edge, even while reading her realistic stories, because we are always expecting the weird and wonderful. Lesley Nneka Arimah’s stories are also unapologetically political, from her allusions to Biafra in What It Means When A Man Falls From the Sky and War Stories, to reimagining a world where women decide when they want to have children in Who Will Greet You At Home, to interrogating the pressure Igbo tradition places on women to get married in Skinned (which won the 2019 Caine AKO Prize for African Writing).

(2) WHEN DINOSAURS ROAMED THE TOWN. “A new interactive map lets you track where your city or town was located on Earth 750 million years ago”Business Insider has the story. The map is here. You can pick various points in history to compare. For example, 400 million years ago during the Devonian Period my town was underwater and my neighbors included Plesiosaurus and Fresnosaurus.

…Have you ever wondered what the area around your hometown was like during the Cretaceous period, when the Tyrannosaurus rex roamed? How about before then, when Earth had just one supercontinent?

Now you can find out.

An interactive map developed by software engineer Ian Webster lets users track the locations of modern-day landmarks back hundreds of millions of years.

If you type in the name of your hometown or current city, the map can pinpoint its location on the planet in a given era, going back 750 million years (that’s about 150 million years before multicellular life emerged).

New York City, for example, formed part of the Rodinia supercontinent 750 million years ago.

Webster’s map relies on the work of geologist and paleogeographer Christopher Scotese, who created his own chronological map in 1998 that charts how tectonic plates shifted throughout Earth’s history.

(3) LONCON 3 REVISITED. Given that Britain is now bidding for the 2024 Worldcon, SF2 Concatenation’s Mark Bilsborough looks back at the last UK-venued Worldcon in “The 2014 SF Worldcon”.

Glasgow is bidding to host Worldcon in 2024, which would be a welcome British return for the science fiction and fantasy sprawling roadtrip that in recent years has taken in HelsinkiMelbourne and Dublin, as well as Glasgow itself in 2005 and London in 2014.  This year it was meant to be in New Zealand, in Wellington, a great venue for SF folk, but global events kyboshed that one (though it did go ‘virtual’. The world’s first truly ‘world’ con?).  Mostly other years since its inception have been North American affairs (as was last and will be next year’s, and 2022), so a 2024 return to UK shores is most welcome….

(4) ‘TIS THE SEASON FOR CONNIE WILLIS. The November/December Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine will publish a new holiday novella by Connie Willis. The release date for the issue is October 20, 2020. There will also be a signed and limited hardcover edition published by Subterranean Press in November (preorder here.)

About the Book:

Ori’s holidays are an endless series of elaborately awful meals cooked by her one-time stepfather Dave’s latest bride. Attended by a loose assemblage of family, Ori particularly dreads Grandma Elving—grandmother of Dave’s fourth wife—and her rhapsodizing about the Christmas she worked at Woolworth’s in the 1950s. And, of course, she hates being condescended to by beautiful, popular Sloane and her latest handsome pre-med or pre-law boyfriend.

But this Christmas is different. Sloane’s latest catch Lassiter is extremely interested in Grandma Elving’s boringly detailed memories of that seasonal job, seeing in them the hallmarks of a TFBM, or traumatic flashbulb memory. With Ori’s assistance, he begins to use the older woman in an experiment—one she eagerly agrees to. As Ori and Lassiter spend more time together, Ori’s feelings for him grow alongside the elusive mystery of Grandma’s past.

(5) APPRAISING BEOWULF. Filer StephenfromOttawa recommends Ruth Franklin’s “A ‘Beowulf’ for Our Moment in The New Yorker as a long, generally positive discussion of the Headley Beowulf translation.

I’m out of free articles at that site, but you might not be!

(6) THE DOCTOR DOESN’T MAKE HOUSE CALLS, BUT DALEKS DO. Simon Stephenson, author of Set My Heart To Five, tells Whatever readers where he got his Big Idea.

A few years ago, I spent a night in a chain hotel after a long series of international flights.  I arrived after midnight, took a shower and an Ambien, and then discovered that I had forgotten my toothpaste. I called down to reception and ten minutes later, the doorbell on my room rang. I threw on my robe, grabbed a few dollars for a tip, and opened the door to reveal the creature that had perma-stalked my childhood nightmares: a Dalek.

For a moment, my Dalek and I stood in silent contemplation of each other. I had outrun them for decades but now Davros’ mechanical foot soldiers had caught me: alone, tired, drugged, be-robed and with no real weapons to defend myself except a Gideon bible and that thing they leave in hotel rooms that has something to do with shoes….

(7) JAMES BOND. A new trailer for No Time To Die dropped today.

(8) SAUNDERS OBIT. Charles Saunders (1946-2020), author of Imaro and Dossouye and creator of Sword and Soul, died in May of natural causes reported Milton Davis on Facebook. An African-American author and journalist who lived in Canada. Called a pioneer of Black Speculative Fiction, Saunders’ first sff story was published in 1974.

(9) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.

September 3, 1996  — Burning Zone premiered on UPN. A series where the cast explored the worst kinds of epidemiological outbreaks. Yeah not the best viewing perhaps currently. It ran just one season of nineteen episodes With elements of the supernatural and super science as well. Initially, it was focused on virologist Edward Marcase as played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Dr. Kimberly Shiroma as played by Tamlyn Tomita.  Due to the series’ epic low ratings at that point, they were removed in the middle of the season with Dr. Daniel Cassian as played by Michael Harris became the lead character.  (It didn’t help.) Critical response to the series was overwhelmingly negative with it being compared quite unfavourably to The X-Files. To date, it has not been released to any of the streaming sites. 

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born September 3, 1930 – Cherry Wilder.  New Zealander living two decades in Australia, two in Germany, then home.  Ten novels, forty shorter stories; some short stories, poetry, under another name outside our field.  Reviews in Foundation (F 54 a special Wilder issue), InterzoneVector.  Collection, Dealers in Light and Darkness.  One Ditmar.  (Died 2002) [JH]
  • Born September 3, 1934 Les Martin, 86. One of those media tie-in writers that I find fascinating. He’s written the vast majority of the X-Files Young Readers series, plus a trio of novels in the X-Files Young Adult series. He’s also written two Indiana Jones YA novels, and novelizations of Blade Runner and The Shadow. (CE) 
  • Born September 3, 1937 – Paul R. Alexander, 83.  A hundred fifty covers, thirty interiors; three novels (with Laurie Bridges).  Here is the 25th Anniversary Best from F&SF.  Here is The Worlds of Frank Herbert.  Here is The Witches of Karres.  Here is The Best of “Trek” 10.  Here is Crown of Empire.  [JH]
  • Born September 3, 1940 Pauline Collins, 80. She played Queen Victoria in the Tenth Doctor story, “Tooth and Claw”, a most excellent tale, but she first showed up on Who over thirty years earlier as Samantha Briggs in “The Faceless Ones”, a Second Doctor story. She’s appears in Tales of the UnexpectedThe Three Musketeers, Julian Fellowes’ From Time to Time film and the Merlin series.(CE)
  • Born September 3, 1943 Mick Farren. Punk musician who was the singer with the proto-punk band the Deviants. He also wrote Hawkwind lyrics.  His most well-known genre work was the The Renquist Quartet about an immortal vampire. His late Eighties novel The Armageddon Crazy was set in a post-Millennium States dominated by fundamentalists who toss the Constitution away.  (CE) 
  • Born September 3, 1943 Valerie Perrine, 77. She has an uncredited role as Shady Tree’s sidekick in Diamonds Are Forever, her first film appearance. Her first credited film role is as Montana Wildhack in Sluaughterhouse-Five. She’s Eve Teschmacher in Superman and Superman II. She showed up as Tins in “The Three Little Pigs” episode of Faerie Tale Theatre, and was April Flowers in “ Who’s Who: Part 3” of Ghostwriters. (CE)
  • Born September 3, 1950 – Faren Miller, Ph.D., 70.  Her book notes in Locus 1981-2018 earn her this place.  A novel too, The Illusionists.  [JH]
  • Born September 3, 1956 – Fred Gambino, 64.  Three hundred seventy covers, thirty interiors.  Here is Ship of Shadows.  Here is The Man in the High Castle.  Here is N-Space.  Here is Foundation.  Here is the Dec 96 Analog and here is the May 18.  Artbooks Ground ZeroDark Shepherd.  [JH]
  • Born September 3, 1959 Merritt Butrick. He played Kirk’s son, David, in The Wrath of Khan and again in The Search for Spock. Note the very young death. He died of AIDS. Well he died of toxoplasmosis, complicated by AIDS to be precise. (Died 1989.) (CE) 
  • Born September 3, 1969 – John Picacio, 51.  A hundred seventy covers, fifty interiors.  Here is Dante’s Equation.  Here is Her Smoke Rose Up Forever.  Here is Mission of Gravity.  Here is the Dec 10 Asimov’s.  Here is When the Devil Drives.  Artbook Cover Story.  Interviewed in ClarkesworldLocusShimmer.  Graphic Artist Guest of Honor at Minicon 41, Boskone 47, Balticon 50, Westercon 68; roused support for bringing fifty folk to the 76th Worldcon (where he was a Guest of Honor) in his Mexicanx Initiative (i.e. including Mexicana, Mexicano).  Three Hugos, seven Chesleys; World Fantasy Award; Solstice.  Has been doing cards for his version of Lotería, e.g. herehere.  [JH]
  • Born September 3, 1974 Clare Kramer, 46. She had the recurring role of Glory, a god from a hell dimension that was the main antagonist of the fifth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She’s been a lot of horror films including The Skulls IIIThe GravedancersThe ThirstRoad to HellRoad to Hell, Big Ass Spider! and Tales of Halloween. (CE)
  • Born September 3, 1980 – Jenny Han, 40.  M.F.A. from the New School.  Three novels for us; eight others, three being NY Times Best Sellers and a fourth winning the Young Adult 2015-2016 Asian / Pacific American Award for Literature.  A short story too is ours, “Polaris Is Where You’ll Find Me”.  Website here. [JH]

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • Does anyone remember this Trek episode? The Far Side.
  • Garfield observes a competition.
  • Off the Mark shows what happens when everybody talks and nobody listens if he conversation includes R2-D2.

(12) BOOK THOUGHTS. At Nerds of a Feather, Paul Weimer groks “6 Books with Dan Moren”

5. What’s one book, which you read as a child or a young adult, that has had a lasting influence on your writing?

Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising is one of my all time favorites. I can still remember the boxset that my aunt gave me—for years I was terrified of the cover image, with the Rider on the rearing horse outside of Will Stanton’s house. But once I finally got up the courage to start reading, I was transported into this amazingly atmospheric world, scenes and characters of which stick with me to this day. It’s just this master class in telling a young adult fantasy story that, like the best of them, has these dark and sinister elements. It’s one of the few books that I’d love to do a screenplay adaptation of (as long as we can all agree that the execrable 2007 movie never happened).

(13) PROPRIETY OF SELLING POINTS. Adri Joy questions what’s up with the marketing of a forthcoming 2021 book: “Tor.com Publishing, First Become Ashes, and the pretty pastel packaging of abuse” at Nerds of a Feather.

CW: Discussions of rape, rape apologism, abuse, slavery, racism, explicit BDSM. Spoilers for Docile by K.M. Szpara.

…The thing is, though, the desire to celebrate the transgressive blending of rape and happy endings (pleasure and pain!) plays out rather differently in an unmonetized fandom space than it does when backed up by a significant portion of a Big 5 Publishing imprint’s marketing budget and social media reach. The use of tags in fanfiction can be playful, but they are ultimately there to inform readers of the exact content of a piece of media (however imperfectly), and let them make their own choices. When turned into a marketing tool, the incentives for “tagging” completely change to become about what will sell, and that completely changes what is appropriate and what is trustworthy. Likewise, the choice to pair your dark stories with an unexpected pastel aesthetic is one thing when you’re choosing a Tumblr theme or commissioning an artist to draw your fic, but it has an entirely different weight behind it when you’re printing 75,000 hardbacks to go out to major stores and sit on the shelf alongside all the other pastel aesthetic SFF books which are almost entirely not about rape and BDSM. Once you’ve started writing about the traumatic, abusive cock cages in your book in cutesy handwriting font, it’s possible you’ve lost the plot entirely… but even if there is an audience that would be good for, it’s certainly not all 25,000 Twitter followers of Tor.com Publishing! These are not responsible choices; they deliberately obfuscate and misrepresent the book, and in doing so prevent potential readers – particularly those who aren’t clued in on the past pattern via Twitter – from making fully informed choices about their reading. For other books, that might be annoying, especially at hardback price point; for one with this combination of sensitive topics, it’s frankly dangerous….

(14) RADIO ACTIVITY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] BBC Radio 4 yesterday broadcast Science Stories which this week concerned possible alien life in meteorites. A notion that goes back over 100 years.  Apparently, Pasteur had an interest and around that time there was a hoax perpetrated (it is thought to discredit those arguing against Pasteur). Filers can listen to it here: “The meteorite and the hidden hoax”

Also yesterday, BBC Radio 4 broadcast Thinking Allowed which this week included mass surveillance.  While this does sort of relate to an SFnal trope, of particular interest is that the exploration of present-day mass surveillance is through the prism of Orwell’s 1984. Filers can listen to it here: “Surveillance”.

(15) CREDENTIALS AHOY. Atlas Obscura invites you aboard “De Poezenboot (The Cat Boat)”.

De Poezenboot is an animal sanctuary floating on a canal in Amsterdam. It was founded by Henriette van Weelde in 1966 as a home for stray, sick, and abandoned felines, and has since grown into an official charity.

The house boat accommodates up to 50 cats at once, 14 of which are permanent residents. Human visitors are welcome on the vessel as well. Many come to choose a cat for adoption, but tourists are also welcome to drop in and scratch a kitty behind the ears. 

(16) NEW ARRANGEMENT. In “Ghostbusters Theme: Medieval Bardcore Version” on YouTube, L’Orchestra Cinematique has a version of the Ghostbusters theme you can play at a SCA banquet.

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “Honest Trailers: The Boys” on YouTube, the Screen Junkies take on the Amazon Prime series where “Superman is a stone-cold psychopath, Wonder Woman is a jaded alcoholic, The Flash is a jaded junkie who’s lost his edge, and Batman is pretty much the same.”  Also featured:  laser babies!

[Thanks to John Hertz, Daniel Dern, Michael Toman, Lise Andreasen, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, StephenfromOttawa, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Cat Eldridge, James Davis Nicoll, Catherine Lundoff, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]

Pixel Scroll 8/31/20 Inspired By Cordwainer Smith And Seeing
A Sign Backwards

(1) THE BROTHERS STRUGATSKY. “Striving to become: how a former officer changed Russian science fiction” at Pledge Times.

,,,,But it was Arkady Strugatsky who was the first to understand that if they really want to “break out, break through, ah,” then the last thing they need to do for this is to become normal good science fiction writers.

He formulates the credo of the Strugatsky writers back in 1959: “Our works should be entertaining, not only and not so much in their idea – even if the idea has been sucked by fools ten times before – but in a) the breadth and ease of presentation of scientific material; “Down with Zhulvernovshchina”, we must look for very precise, short, clever formulations designed for a developed student of the tenth grade; b) according to the good language of the author and the diverse language of the heroes; c) by the reasonable courage of introducing into the narrative the assumptions “on the verge of the possible” in the field of nature and technology and by the strictest realism in the actions and behavior of the heroes; d) by a bold, bold and once again bold appeal to any genres that seem acceptable in the course of the story for a better depiction of a particular situation. Not to be afraid of light sentimentality in one place, rude adventurism in another, a little philosophizing in the third, amorous shamelessness in the fourth, etc. Such a mixture of genres should give things an even greater flavor of the extraordinary. Isn’t the extraordinary our main theme? “

(2) MAGICAL POWERS. James Davis Nicoll asks the Young People Read Old SFF panel what they think about “The Putnam Tradition” by Sonya Hess Dorman.

Sonya Hess Dorman’s science fiction career lasted about a generation and produced enough short pieces to fill a collection, as a well as a fix-up. I first encountered Dorman via her ?“When I Was Miss Dow”, reprinted in Pamela Sargent’s ground-breaking Women of Wonder (as well as many other anthologies). ?“When I Was Miss Dow” was considered for a Nebula, although it didn’t make the finalist list, and it won a retrospective Tiptree. Odds on the favourite for inclusion in Rediscovery. That is not the call Journey Press made. Journey Press eschews the easy choices.

One wonders, therefore, what my Young People will make of the Dorman Journey did select.

(3) STAND AND DELIVERY DATE. ScreenRant looks for clues to the forthcoming series: “The Stand Trailer Teases the Aftermath of the Modern-Day Plague”. The limited weekly show will debut on CBS All-Access on December 17, 2020. ScreenRant adds:

King has reportedly written a new ending for The Stand, which isn’t surprising considering he has released multiple versions of the novel since its initial release in 1978.

(4) SFF EXHIBIT ARCHIVED ONLINE. “A Conversation larger than the Universe: science fiction and the literature of the fantastic” is a website that provides an illustrated record of the books and other materials displayed at the Grolier Club in New York City from January to March 2018. 

It suggests, among other things, a history of science fiction from its Gothic roots to the present. Items are arranged here chronologically and the labels are keyed to numbers in the exhibition checklist included in A Conversation larger than the Universe. Readings in Science Fiction and the Fantastic 1762-2017, published by the Grolier Club (and available here). 

In the original exhibition, the entries were grouped in four broad periods: from 1762 to 1912 (nos. 1-14); the interwar years (nos. 15-27); the late 1940s through 1980 (nos. 28-49); and from 1981 to the present (nos. 50-70); there are seven chronological headings here, and three additional headings offer new ways of making connections between the works. A very few items displayed at the Grolier Club are not reproduced on this website.

(5) IF YOU EVER ASKED, “WHERE IS MY FLYING CAR?” CNN reports “Japanese company successfully tests a manned flying car for the first time”.

A Japanese company has announced the successful test drive of a flying car.

Sky Drive Inc. conducted the public demonstration on August 25, the company said in a news release, at the Toyota Test Field, one of the largest in Japan and home to the car company’s development base. It was the first public demonstration for a flying car in Japanese history.

The car, named SD-03, manned with a pilot, took off and circled the field for about four minutes.

“We are extremely excited to have achieved Japan’s first-ever manned flight of a flying car in the two years since we founded SkyDrive… with the goal of commercializing such aircraft,” CEO Tomohiro Fukuzawa said in a statement.

(6) IN THE TRASH. Alan Stewart’s report of site selection voting in CoNZealand Progess Report #4, released today,prompted a critical response from Cade. Thread starts here.

(7) SOMETHING NEW. As Variety notes, it may not be big as Hollywood measures things, it’s just the biggest thing going: “Box Office: ‘New Mutants’ Lands $7 Million Debut”

Superhero thriller “The New Mutants,” one of the first major movies to open since coronavirus forced theaters to close in March, launched to $7 million over the weekend. Though ticket sales were on the lower end of expectations, the Disney and 20th Century Studios title marks the biggest debut yet for a new release during the pandemic.

Around 60-70% of theaters have reopened across the U.S. and Canada, according to Disney. However, some of the biggest moviegoing markets, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington DC, New Jersey and New York, still remain closed. In parts of the country where theaters have resumed business, venues are capping capacity and keeping space between seats to comply with social distancing measures. “The New Mutants” played in 2,412 theaters, making it the widest release in months.

(8) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.

  • August 31, 1979 Time After Time premiered. (It would lose out to Alien for Best Dramatic Presentation at Noreascon Two.)  It was directed by Nicholas Meyer who wrote the screenplay from a story by Karl Alexander and Steve Hayes, and produced by Herb Jaffe. The primary cast was Malcolm McDowell, David Warner and Mary Steenburgen. Reception by critics was unambiguously positive, the box office was good and the audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give it a 72% rating. 

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born August 31, 1908 – William Saroyan.  This remarkable Armenian American gave us a short novel Tracy’s Tiger and a handful of short stories.  One was in Unknown Worlds!  Outside our field his play The Time of Your Life won a Pulitzer Prize, which he refused, saying commerce should not judge the arts; his screenplay for The Human Comedy, rejected as too long, he made into a novel and won an Academy Award for Best Story.  In 1991 the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. jointly issued postage stamps honoring him.  (Died 1981) [JH]
  • Born August 31, 1914 Richard Basehart. He’s best remembered as Admiral Harriman Nelson in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. He also portrayed Wilton Knight in the later Knight Rider series. And he appeared in “Probe 7, Over and Out”, an episode of The Twilight Zone. (Died 1984.) (CE) 
  • Born August 31, 1927 – Ted Coconis, 93.  Illustrates children’s books e.g. Newbery Award winner The Summer of the Swans.  For us, here is Camber of Culdi.  Here is Labyrinth.  Here is A Matter of Time.  Here is Dorian Gray.  Here is Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 14.  [JH]
  • Born August 31, 1941 – Larry Schwinger, 79.  Six dozen covers, a handful of interiors.  Here is The Owl Service.  Here is Star Rangers.  Here is On Basilisk Station.  Here is the Jul 95 Burroughs Bulletin.  Here is Kindred.  [JH]
  • Born August 31, 1942 – Alan J. Lewis, 78.  Member of the leading apas of his day, FAPAOMPASAPS, he famously in the mid-1960s organized the Fanzine Foundation which shipped a ton of fanzines – really; more than 2,800 pounds – to Bruce Pelz, where they became part of his elephantine collection; this at BP’s death went to Univ. California at Riverside.  [JH]
  • Born August 31, 1949 Richard Gere, 71. He was Lancelot in First Knight starring Sean Connery as King Arthur, and  he was Joe Klein in The Mothman Prophecies. That’s it for genre video work. First Knight for me is more than enough to get Birthday Honors, but he also was in live performances of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in the Sixties. (CE) 
  • Born August 31, 1968 – Néné Thomas, 52.  As it happens she was Graphic Artist Guest of Honor at InCon the year I was Fan Guest of Honor; since then, Loscon 29, Windycon 37, MidSouthCon 29, ConQuesT 46.  Artbooks Parting the VeilThe Unwinding Path.  Here is Aveliad: the Forest done as a 1,000-piece puzzle.  Also she makes cross-stitch charts and decorative resin butterflies.  [JH]
  • Born August 31, 1969 Jonathan LaPaglia, 51. The lead in Seven Days which I’ve noted before is one of my favorite SF series. Other than playing Prince Seth of Delphi in a really bad film called Gryphon which aired on the Sci-fi channel, that’s his entire genre history as far as I can tell unless you count the Bones series as SF in which he’s in “The Skull in the Sculpture” episode as Anton Deluca. (CE)
  • Born August 31, 1974 Marc Webb, 46. Director of The Amazing Spider-Man and The Amazing Spider-Man 2, as well as the forthcoming Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. He’s also directed over ninety music videos over the past several decades with the first being Blues Traveler’s “Canadian Rose”.  (CE) 
  • Born August 31, 1982 G. Willow Wilson, 38. A true genius. There’s her amazing work on the Hugo Award winning Ms. Marvel series starring Kamala Khan which I recommend strongly, and that’s not to say that her superb Air series shouldn’t be on your reading list as well. Oh, and the Cairo graphic novel with its duplicitous djinn is quite the read. The only thing I’ve by her that I’ve not quite liked is her World Fantasy Award winning Alif the Unseen novel.  I’ve not yet read her Wonder Women story: should I? (CE)
  • Born August 31, 1984 – Cassandra Khaw, 36.  Her work is horrible – I mean, on purpose.  Or we could call it horrific.  She knows and includes Southeast Asian images.  Hammers on Bone is one of four Re-imagining Lovecraft novellas.  Fifty short stories, half a dozen poems, in ApexDaily SFGamutThe Magazine of Fantasy & Science FictionUncanny; interviewed in LightspeedMithila ReviewNightmare.  Ranks Oor Wombat’s Castle Hangnail above Lukyankenko’s Night Watch and Pratchett’s too.  [JH]
  • Born August 31, 1992 Holly Earl, 28. English actress who was Kela in Beowulf: Return to the Shieldlands, and Agnes in Humans. She also played the young Kristine Kochanski in Red Dwarf in the “Pete, Part One” as well as Lily Arwell in the most excellent Eleventh Doctor story, “The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe.“ She was Céline in the “Musketeers Don’t Die Easily” episode of Musketeers, and played Hermia in the ‘18 A Midsummer Night’s Dream film. (CE) 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) DC IGNORES COMICS SHOPS. Cliff Biggers, owner of Dr. No’s Comics in Marietta, GA told Facebook followers today:

DC’s latest slap in the face to comic shops: in all their promotional information about Batman Day, they don’t mention anything about comic shops or what they intend to do for our market (probably because, as in years past, they don’t intend to do ANYTHING for our market). Short of beating us up and stealing our lunch money, there isn’t much more that DC can do to show their contempt for comic shops that would surprise me any more.

(12) BATMAN NEWS. This is from U.S. News: “Batman Prowls Streets of Santiago Delivering Food to Homeless”

There is a masked crusader on the streets of Santiago, Chile this summer.  But rather than fighting criminals, Solidarity Batman delivers hot meals.  Months of lockdown have caused hardship in Chile, where unemployment has reached a record 12 percent.  Recently, an unidentified man has been donning a full Batman suit, plus a surgical mask for coronavirus protection, and travelling through the capital city sharing sympathy and plates of food.  Almost anybody can be like him, the everyday superhero says.  ‘Look around you, see if you can dedicate a little time, a little food, a little shelter, a word sometimes of encouragement to those who need it.

(13) NUMBER FIVE, NUMBER FIVE. James Davis Nicoll counts up ”Five SFF Stories Featuring Truly Terrible Parents”.

Parents! Pesky narrative roadblocks when writing books centred on young people. Common, garden-variety parents want to make sure their offspring are healthy and happy, which is a problem for writers who want to send young protagonists off into danger. Authors can, of course, dispatch parents to a location too distant for them to interfere or simply kill them off—both very popular choices—but there is another alternative: Simply have the parents themselves (or their equivalent) be part of the problem….

(14) STRANGE AUCTION ITEM: Heritage Auctions is taking bids on a fragment salvaged from the Hindenburg wreckage. Current bid is $5,000.

Graf Zeppelin Hindenburg: Large Section of Aluminum Framework. 28″ long section of the strut or framework used to construct the famous dirigible Hindenburg, destroyed in a catastrophic & dramatic explosion on May 6, 1937, while attempting to dock at the Naval Air Station in Lakehurst, New Jersey. The scene was captured on film and broadcast live via radio. The reason for the explosion remains elusive and controversial, even to this day. It is thought that a spark of static electricity might have ignited the flammable outer skin. Various relics from the event come on the market from time to time, but none are as sought-after as sections of the strut work. This example is covered in deep emerald and black carbon deposits. It is accompanied by a July 14, 2020 Letter of Provenance that indicates a workman in the clean-up crew, Harry Manyc, was permitted to take home a large section of the “ribbing” as a souvenir, from which pieces, like this, were parceled out over the years.

(15) WHERE HE GOT HIS LICENSE. At BBC Sounds, a 9-minute “Witness History” segment: “Inventing James Bond”.

The author Ian Fleming created the fictional super-spy, James Bond, in the 1950s. Fleming, a former journalist and stockbroker, had served in British naval intelligence during the Second World War. Using interviews with Fleming and his friends from the BBC archive, Alex Last explores how elements of James Bond were drawn from Ian Fleming’s own adventurous life.

(16) BE THE ENTRÉE. We ran an item before about what visitors can eat here – now read about something there that’s ready to swallow them: “Godzilla Museum Allows You to Zipline Into the Kaiju’s Mouth”.

The Godzilla Museum located in Japan is now open. The Attraction features tons of Godzilla memorabilia, interactive sections and a themed menu. Most notably, the upcoming giant true-to-size statue that allows you to zipline into Godzilla’s mouth to perform a mission.

(17) UPSTAIRS, DOWNSTAIRS. In these homes, it’s not the staff you’ll find below stairs: “Truly, madly, deeply: meet the people turning their basements into secret fantasy worlds” in The Guardian.

…Shron needed the perfect basement because, for nearly 30 years, he had dreamed of building a life-size replica of a 1970s Canadian VIA Rail railway carriage inside his house, the exact train that took him from Toronto to Montreal to visit his grandmother when he was a little boy.

Step inside Shron’s basement today and you will be greeted by a 200lb blue-and-yellow train door. As you pass through it, an MP3 player will hiss the sounds of air circulation accompanied by the squeaking of gangway connections. Inside the carriage there are rows of vintage reclinable red-and-orange-striped seats, luggage racks, a real VIA garbage can removed from a scrapped train and a metal sign instructing passengers that smoking is indeed permitted. What Shron couldn’t find on the scrap heap, he made. He printed out orange litter bags, custom-printed napkins and engraved wine glasses.

“The great thing was it ended up looking exactly as I’d envisioned it,” the 45-year-old says of his basement train, which took him four-and-a-half years to build and cost $10,000 (the scrapped carriage alone cost $5,000). “I fell in love with VIA trains from the age of two – I became madly obsessed, it’s all I would talk about, all I wanted.” Shron recreated the train that he took to visit family to tap into “that very warm, comfortable, positive energy” he felt as a child. “I get a little bit of that every time I go down to the train.”

Shron’s basement is an unusual thing, but it is perhaps a little more common than you’d expect. A number of people have created their own “worlds” underneath their homes. In late May, the listing for a Maryland mansion went viral after a Twitter user discovered a fake town inside the basement. The basement features cobbled streets, 15 shopfronts, fake flowers and real vintage cars. But even this isn’t unusual. More than a decade ago, a YouTube video documented the basement of John Scapes, an Illinois man who had built an 1890s street under his home.

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John Hertz, Cat Eldridge, Michael Toman, James Davis Nicoll, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day James Moar.]