Tag Archives: John Steinbeck

Pixel Scroll 11/2/21 Escape From the Other Pixel Scroll (A Sequel)

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(1) ANTITRUST ACTION. “Justice Department sues to stop Penguin Random House’s purchase of Simon & Schuster” reports CNN.

The Justice Department is suing to block Penguin Random House’s proposed acquisition of Simon & Schuster, arguing that the combination of the two book business giants “would likely harm competition in the publishing industry.”

Tuesday’s complaint in United States District Court is one of the first major antitrust actions by the Biden administration.

The publishers said they are prepared to defend the deal in court, calling it “a pro-consumer, pro-author, and pro-book seller transaction.”

Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster are two members of the “Big Five,” the industry’s term for the five biggest publishers in the United States.

In a court filing on Tuesday, DOJ lawyers said the companies should not be allowed to combine because it “would give Penguin Random House outsized influence over who and what is published, and how much authors are paid for their work.”

The New York Times has a bit more about the government’s legal arguments: “Justice Dept. Sues Penguin Random House Over Simon & Schuster Deal”.

In a publishing landscape dominated by a handful of mega corporations, Penguin Random House towers over the others. It operates more than 300 imprints worldwide and has 15,000 new releases a year, far more than the other four major U.S. publishers. With its $2.2 billion proposed acquisition of Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House stood to become substantially larger.

The deal was challenged amid a shifting atmosphere in Washington toward consolidation, where there has been increased scrutiny on competition and the power wielded by big companies like Amazon and Facebook. The move provides a window into how the Biden administration will handle these concerns going forward.

Rather than concerns solely over harm to consumers, the Department of Justice said the acquisition could be detrimental to producers — in this case, authors — in what is called a monopsony, as opposed to a monopoly. The Biden administration filed its case against Penguin Random House in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia on Tuesday.

A combined statement issued by Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster contends:

“DOJ’s lawsuit is wrong on the facts, the law, and public policy,” Daniel Petrocelli, Vice Chair of O’Melveny & Meyers and PRH’s lead trial attorney, said. “Importantly, DOJ has not found, nor does it allege, that the combination will reduce competition in the sale of books. The publishing industry is strong and vibrant and has seen strong growth at all levels. We are confident that the robust and competitive landscape that exists will ensure a decision that the acquisition will promote, not harm, competition.”

PRH and S&S’ attorneys make additional arguments in the linked statement.

(2) CLIMATE FUTURES. The “Crafting Climate Futures: From Story to Policy” webinar on Monday, November 8 is cohosted by ASU’s Imagination and Climate Futures Initiative and the Olaf Stapledon Centre for Speculative Futures at the University of Liverpool. It features three of ASU’s Climate Imagination Fellows—Xia Jia, Hannah Ongowue, and Vandana Singh—along with Kim Stanley Robinson, and the moderator is Adeline Johns-Putra, a professor of literature at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University and author of the book Climate Change and the Contemporary Novel. Begins 5:30 a.m. Pacific.

The UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow presents an opportunity for decisive global action amidst escalating climate chaos. Now, more than ever, we need narratives of positive climate futures alongside coordinated interventions in order to ameliorate the crisis. Join the University of Liverpool’s Olaf Stapledon Centre for Speculative Futures and the Climate Imagination Fellows at Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination for a session dedicated to exploring the stories that might catalyze new understandings and connect narrative interventions to transformations in policy, governance, and culture.

(3) FOR YOUR REFERENCE. Susan Guthmann Henry saw yesterday’s Scroll item about the Texas legislator who has put together a list of 850 books and is demanding that schools in the state tell him if they have these books in their libraries and how much they have spent on them, and the discussion in comments about the seeming random order of the list. “It occurred to me that there might be a way to make the 16 page Matt Krause list ‘easier’ to look through. So, I downloaded it, converted it to a spreadsheet, and made two lists, one that is alphabetical by title and one that is alphabetical by author.” Many thanks! Here are the Excel spreadsheets:

krausebooklist–alpha by authorDownload
krausebooklist–alpha by titleDownload

(4) AS TIME GOES BY. Cora Buhlert discusses the Jirel of Joiry stories by C.L. Moore on the Appendix N Book Club podcast: “C.L. Moore’s ‘Jirel of Joiry’ with special guest Cora Buhlert”.

Cora Buhlert joins us to discuss C.L. Moore’s “Jirel of Joiry”, used book store finds, kisses as stand-ins for sex, the appropriateness of using genre to explore our fear of sexual violence, cozy stories, writers being inspired by their peers, comparing and contrasting Conan and Jirel as characters, employing undead suckers, the influence of comics on the early pulps, her work with Henry Kuttner, fictitious France, C.L. Moore’s reemerging popularity, and much more!

(5) COLD-HEARTED ORB. Jess Nevins reviews John Steinbeck’s lost werewolf murder mystery Murder at the Full Moon: “Nine-10ths of a Triumph: On John Steinbeck’s ‘Murder at Full Moon’” at LA Review of Books.

… At first glance, Murder at Full Moon seems to consist primarily of the clichéd routines and tropes of detective fiction circa 1930: the whodunnit structure; the eccentric but all-knowing detective; the hapless sidekick; the events that abide by “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories” laid out by S. S. Van Dine in 1928 and by the “Ten Commandments” for mystery stories conceived of by Ronald Knox in 1929; the gathering of the characters at the end to watch the detective reveal and apprehend the murderer; and so on. A superficial reading of Murder at Full Moon could indeed lead one to claim that it is “a shameless commercial satire of pulp-detective novels” or “a cynical attempt at a standard commercial mystery-thriller.” But what Steinbeck clearly attempted to do, and mostly succeeded at doing, was tell a mystery story about mysteries as they were written in 1930, and to challenge his fellow mystery authors to write more ambitious material in a more intelligent way — to step up their game….

(6) UNDER CONSTRUCTION. Cora Buhlert’s newest Fancast Spotlight interview features Hugo finalist Worldbuilding for Masochists from Marshall Ryan Maresca, Cass Morris and Rowenna Miller:  “Fancast Spotlight: Worldbuilding for Masochists”.

Tell us about your podcast or channel.

Tide charts — a stack of books on constellation mythology — an elaborately sketched map — a bulletin board covered in illustrations of obsolete technology — research on textiles, naming conventions, architecture and a dozen ways to cook lentils — what could it all mean? 

It means worldbuilding. Big worldbuilding. Elaborate worldbuilding. Obsessive worldbuilding. Dare we say… masochistic worldbuilding?…

(7) LAWRENCE PERSON ON HOWARD WALDROP’S YEAR. Howard Waldrop related the details of his very tough medical year to an audience at Armadillocon, and Lawrence Person has signal-boosted what he said.

These topics were covered at his interview at Armadillocon in October 2021, and as they’re now public knowledge, here is the concise summary of Howard Waldrop’s trials and tribulations from late 2020 through 2021:

  1. He had to deal with an infestation of bedbugs in his apartment.
  2. He was involved in a minor car wreck in a driving rainstorm that totaled his car (but inflicted no serious injury).
  3. Had to deal with the legal fallout from that (since cleared up).
  4. Suffered a series of minor falls.
  5. Found out he had kidney stones that were too large to pass.
  6. Had his kidney stones zapped with lasers via a tube up his urethra (a very science fictional future, but not the one he was hoping for). As a result of which…
  7. “I pissed blood and gravel for a week.”
  8. His power went out for several days as part of the Texas ice storm (second coldest recorded temperature in Austin history).
  9. Suffered a major fall that broke his shoulder ball and socket, and left him unable to reach his cell phone to call for help.
  10. Spent a day crawling around on the floor of his apartment.
  11. Ended up barfing on himself just before Brad Denton and Martha Grenon came to his apartment to check on him.
  12. Went to the hospital, by which time he was already suffering from diabetic ketoacidosis.
  13. Got his bone set and his blood sugar stabilized.
  14. He spent weeks recovering at two different recovery centers.
  15. By which time he was suffering gastrointestinal distress, which was traced to a perforated colon.
  16. Which required the removal of several feet of lower intestine and installing a colostomy bag.
  17. “They’ve removed my ass. I have no ass.”
  18. Moved into an assisted living facility, where he’s recovered nicely. “The food is really good.”

This summary is quite condensed but chronologically accurate and Howard-approved. And I’ve actually spared you a few bodily function details. 

Howard’s close circle of caregivers has been keeping a lid on all this until Howard was recovered enough to reveal it to the public at large.

On the bright side, he lost enough weight that he’s no longer diabetic, and several of his short stories have been optioned for film, including “Heirs of the Perisphere,” “Night of the Cooters” and “The Ugly Chickens,” all in various states of production. And won the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement. 

(8) SOMEWHERE IN OUR LITERARY FAMILY TREE. You might need Mental Floss after reading this sentence repeatedly: “’A Dark and Stormy Night’: The History of Literature’s Worst Sentence”. But can it be true that Edward Bulwer-Lytton inspired a forerunner of sf fandom?

…If you want to start a novel, your options for an opening line are just this side of infinite. But if you want to start a novel badly, any cartoon beagle can tell you that there’s only one choice: “It was a dark and stormy night.”

The phrase has become so ingrained in our literary culture that we rarely give much thought to its origin—and when he put pen to paper, it’s likely that author and politician Edward Bulwer-Lytton had no idea just how infamous his dark and stormy night would become. Bulwer-Lytton was once as widely read as his friend Charles Dickens, but today he’s remembered almost exclusively for one bad sentence. It’s an ironic legacy for a prolific author who influenced some of the most popular novels in English literature, helped invent sci-fi fandom, laid the groundwork for modern crime fiction, and accidentally sparked a movement for an important social reform.

…Bulwer-Lytton’s 1862 novel A Strange Story is thought to have influenced Dracula, and his 1871 science fiction novel The Coming Race inspired the world’s first sci-fi convention (and gave rise to an exceptionally bizarre Nazi conspiracy theory)….

(9) MEMORY LANE.

2001 – Twenty years ago, Monsters, Inc. was released by Pixar. It was directed by Pete Docter in his directorial debut, and executive produced by John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton. The screenplay by Andrew Stanton and Daniel Gerson from a story by Pete Docter, Jill Culton, Jeff Pidgeon and Ralph Eggleston. An amazing voice cast consisted of John Goodman, Billy Crystal, Steve Buscemi, James Coburn, Mary Gibbs and Jennifer Tilly. 

It generated a lawsuit by a poet who said it was based on her “There’s a Boy in My Closet” poem but the Judge refused to issued an injunction stopping the film from opening and eventually said her suit had absolutely no merit. Another suit claimed the lead characters of Mike and Sulley were based on his art. That suit was settled out of Court and the details of the settlement were sealed. 

Critics all loved the film with the Salon critic saying it was “agreeable and often funny, and adults who take their kids to see it might be surprised to find themselves having a pretty good time.”  Box office wise, it made nearly six hundred million on a budget of under three hundred million, not counting streaming revenue and DVD sales. Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give it a monstrous ninety percent rating. 

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born November 2, 1913 — Burt Lancaster. Certainly being Dr. Paul Moreau on The Island of Doctor Moreau was his most genre-ish role but I like him as General James Mattoon Scott in Seven Days in May. And of course, he’s really great as Moonlight Graham in Field of Dreams. (Died 1994.)
  • Born November 2, 1924 — Michi Kobi. She was Dr. Hideko Murata in Twelve to the Moon, half of a double feature with either Battle in Outer Space or 13 Ghosts. Unless you consider her doing voices on Courage the Cowardly Dog, an early Oughts animated series, to be genre, this is her only SF work. (Died 2016.)
  • Born November 2, 1927 — Steve Ditko. Illustrator who began his career working in the studio of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby during which he began his long association with Charlton Comics and which led to his creating the Captain Atom character. Did I mention DC absorbed that company as it did so many others? Now he’s best known as the artist and co-creator, with Stan Lee, of Spider-Man and Doctor Strange. For Charlton and also DC itself: a complete redesign of Blue Beetle, and creating or co-creating The Question, The Creeper, Shade the Changing Man, and Hawk and Dove. He been inducted into the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame and into the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame. (Died 2018.)
  • Born November 2, 1941 — Ed Gorman. He’d be here if only for writing the script for the  Batman: I, Werewolf series in which Batman meets a werewolf. Very cool. More straight SFF is his Star Precinct trilogy with Kevin Randle which is quite excellent, and I’m fond of his short fiction which fortunately is showing up in digital form at the usual suspects. (Died 2016.)
  • Born November 2, 1942 — Carol Resnick, 79. Wife of that Resnick who credited her according to several sources with being a co-writer on many of his novels. He also credited her as being a co-author on two movie scripts that they’ve sold, based on his novels Santiago and The Widowmaker. And she’s responsible for the costumes that she and Mike wore in five Worldcon masquerades in the Seventies, winning many awards.
  • Born November 2, 1942 — Stefanie Powers, 79. April Dancer, the lead in The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. which lasted just one season. (I just downloaded the pilot to watch as I’ve never seen the series.) Did you know Ian Fleming contributed concepts to this series and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. as well?  She would play Shalon in the crossover that started on The Six-Million Man and concluded on The Six-Million Woman called “The Return of Bigfoot”. 
  • Born November 2, 1949 — Lois McMaster Bujold, 72. First let’s note she’s won the Hugo Award for best novel four times, matching Robert A. Heinlein’s record, not counting his Retro Hugo. Quite impressive that. Bujold’s works largely comprises three separate book series: the Vorkosigan Saga, the Chalion series, and the Sharing Knife series. She joined the Central Ohio Science Fiction Society, and co-published with Lillian Stewart Carl StarDate, a Trek fanzine in which a story of hers appeared under the byline Lois McMaster. 
  • Born November 2, 1980 — Brittany Ishibashi, 41. Ishibashi played Karai in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, the sequel to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. She’s currently portrays Tina Minoru on Runaways, streaming on Hulu. And she was Maggie Zeddmore in the Ghostfacers webseries. 

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • Take me to your leader is a cliché, so Garfield starts the conversation in another way.

(12) THE UNMITIGATED EIGHTIES. Ed Brubaker talks to Alex Segura of CrimeReads about his new graphic novel, Destroy All Monsters. “Ed Brubaker on 1980s Los Angeles, Private Eye Fiction, and the Changing Face of Graphic Novels”.

…But Reckless is not a nostalgia tour, or an attempt to recapture the magic of previous private detectives or locales. The series motif and past setting allowed Brubaker and Phillips to tell stories set in another time that still reflected a lot of what was going on now.

“I wanted to write about the past from today’s point of view, to show how we got from there to here, how much the decisions of the past made this place, like the ripple effects of corruption and politics through time,” Brubaker said. “This is why the newest book DESTROY ALL MONSTERS has at the heart of it, the fallout of the construction of the 105, and the corridors of vacant houses that stood for something like 12 or 15 years during the court battle over that freeway, and which became a major source of crime and devastation in South LA, predating the crack epidemic, even.”

(13) TAKING THE CARS. Gothamist shows us “The Best Halloween 2021 Costumes On The NYC Subway”. At West 4th Street station, end-point for the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade… 96 photos in the gallery!

After things were understandably subdued last year due to the pandemic, Halloween celebrations were back across the city over the weekend. New Yorkers of all ages tend to take this holiday quite seriously, and after a year of mostly avoiding human contact, everyone seemed more excited than ever to show off their brilliant, clever and often weird costumes while traversing our mass transit system.

Indefatigable photographer Sai Mokhtari, who first started this Subway Halloween project nine years ago (it has become our favorite annual tradition since), went out between 5 p.m. and 10 p.m. on Sunday to capture all the hottest Halloween looks… in transit. Overall, Mokhtari said, “the subways were more crowded than last year but definitely a far cry from pre-pandemic days (I’d say maybe half as many people overall).”

(14) TIS THE SEASON. Delish held its breath til Halloween was past, and now has gone into full Christmas merchandising mode. To begin with: “Le Creuset Has New ‘Harry Potter’ Kitchen Items”. A $300 Dutch oven is one of them.

Le Creuset is best known for their beloved dutch ovens and baking accessories. This line has a little bit of everything and will be available exclusively on Le Creuset’s website and through Williams-Sonoma. Every piece features a subtle nod to the Harry Potter series, like a blue dutch oven with a golden snitch knob, a red dutch oven with an embossment of Harry’s glasses and a lightening bolt knob, and even a tea kettle with 9 3/4 on the handle as a shoutout to the Hogwarts express.

(15) MOVING PICTURES. Bradbury scholar Phil Nichols is giving an online talk about “Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man at Seventy” on November 16 at 7:00 p.m. UK time as part of the University of Wolverhampton’s Artsfest Online, Free registration here.

Ray Bradbury’s book The Illustrated Man – a short story collection very loosely woven together with a fantastical framing narrative – is now seventy years old, and yet it remains a greatly influential work. Dealing with ideas around virtual reality, civil rights, the end of the world, and body art, it has managed to sustain a resonance through to the twenty-first century, despite its 1950s trappings. Individual stories from the collection have been adapted for film, television, radio and stage on multiple occasions, confirming Bradbury’s position as one of the most significant writers of science fiction even as the author tried to escape from the “ghetto” of genre fiction.

In this illustrated talk, Dr Phil Nichols will show how Bradbury’s short-story collection both defines and confines the author.

(16) JEOPARDY! Andrew Porter watched three of last night’s Jeopardy! contestants unable to come up with this one:

Category: Fantastical Creatures

Answer: George Langelaan wrote the Playboy short story that inspired this film in which Seth Brundle transforms.

No one could ask, “What is The Fly?”

(17) WHO WATCHED WHAT LAST MONTH. JustWatch compiled this list of the Top 10 Sci-FI Movies and TV Shows in the US in October:

Rank*MoviesTV shows
1DuneFoundation
2Free GuyCowboy Bebop
3VenomLa Brea
4GhostbustersRick and Morty
5TitaneDoctor Who
6The ThingBattlestar Galactica
7Halloween III: Season of the WitchY: The Last Man
8Black WidowThe Twilight Zone
9A Quiet Place Part IIAmerican Horror Story
10The Rocky Horror Picture ShowInvasion

*Based on JustWatch popularity score. Genre data is sourced from themoviedb.org

(18) NO IDLE PAWS HERE. [Item by JJ.] OMG, it’s a subreddit for working credentials – “Purposeful Pusses” at Reddit. Check out the video with Harpo, who works for serious book lovers.

(19) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In “Honest Trailers: Marvel’s What If…?” the Screen Junkies say this is based on a Marvel series that included “What if Iron Man Fought King Arthur?” and “What if Wolverine Was A Vampire?”  (These are actual comics.)  They say that all the characters sound like AIs barfing out Chandler Bing dialogue. You can also take in Chadwick Boseman’s last performance as the Black Panther.

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Joey Eschrich, Jumana Aumir, Cora Buhlert, Lise Andreasen, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, and Michael Toman for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Steve Davidson.]

Pixel Scroll 5/27/21 We Sell Mobius Scrolls, In Klein Bottles

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(1) SUPPORT THE OTHERWISE AWARD. The Otherwise Award benefit auction will be online Saturday night May 29 at 7:00 p.m. Central, as part of WisCon’s online festivities: “The Otherwise Auction? In MY Visioning WisCon?” The fun for everyone will include a custom crossword puzzle with Otherwise-related clues. Register here to join them May 29 & 30 at Visioning WisCon.

The Otherwise Auction supports the Otherwise Award, and it’s always a good time — famed Otherwise auctioneer Sumana Harihareswara will be reprising her role. As Otherwise Award Motherboard member Pat Murphy says:

“Last year, Sumana’s online auction was amazing, compelling, and impossible to describe. I’m a science fiction writer; I should be able to describe just about anything. But somehow Sumana managed to auction off things that didn’t actually exist but were (despite that) real. It was one of those “you had to be there” events — even though none of us were actually there.

“This year Sumana promises that there will actually be some physical things that people can buy and possess — along with a custom crossword puzzle with Otherwise-related clues. Just a few tangible objects and a lot of intangible fun — which seems appropriate as we slowly ease back into the physical world.”

Unlike last year, we’ll be using actual money for this auction. (If you have no idea what we’re talking about, ignore this whole paragraph! You never saw us, we were never here.)

The auction will start at 7pm Central on Saturday night (5/29), and will end when Sumana says it’s over. We’re really excited to have a chance to support the Otherwise Award, even without an in-person convention this year, and to have fun doing it!

(2) FROM SOAP TO SPACE. Rich Horton calls back to his 2014 anthology by that name in “Space Opera: Then and Now” at Strange at Ecbatan.

The term space opera was coined by the late great writer/fan Wilson (Bob) Tucker in 1941, and at first was strictly pejorative. Tucker used the term, analogous to radio soap operas, for “hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn, spaceship yarn[s].” The term remained largely pejorative until at least the 1970s. Even so, much work that would now be called space opera was written and widely admired in that period . . . most obviously, perhaps, the work of writers like Edmond Hamilton and, of course, E. E. “Doc” Smith. To be sure, even as people admired Hamilton and Smith, they tended to do so with a bit of disparagement: these were perhaps fun, but they weren’t “serious.” They were classic examples of guilty pleasures. That said, stories by the likes of Poul Anderson, James Schmitz, James Blish, Jack Vance, and Cordwainer Smith, among others, also fit the parameters of space opera and yet received wide praise.

It may have been Brian Aldiss who began the rehabilitation of the term with a series of anthologies in the mid 1970s: Space Opera (1974), Space Odysseys (1974), and Galactic Empires (two volumes, 1976). Aldiss, whose literary credentials were beyond reproach, celebrated pure quill space opera as “the good old stuff,” even resurrecting all but forgotten stories like Alfred Coppel’s “The Rebel of Valkyr,” complete with barbarians transporting horses in spaceship holds.

(3) IZUMI SUZUKI. Lex Berman interviews Daniel Joseph about Terminal Boredom, the first anthology of Izumi Suzuki’s science fiction to appear in English for the Diamond Bay Radio podcast.

The author, Izumi Suzuki, who committed suicide in 1986, wrote science fiction to project her own experience of the drug-fueled Japanese counter-culture into fantastic realms and situations. 

Is it nihilism? Is it true love? Is it an altered consciousness critique of the mundane world? Yeah.

“‘How long are you planning on staying on this planet?’ asks CHAIR after about half an hour has passed. ‘I want to stay here forever.’ ‘Everyone says that, dear. But you can’t, can you? You have to live your life. You have to cook, clean, look after the kids when they’re sick. You have to go out to work.’ ‘Why do I have to keep on living that life?’ ‘Well, I’m not sure why.’ Her voice strikes a gentler chord, all of a sudden. And I repeat that phrase in my head. ‘I’m not sure why.’ I fluff my pillow, turn off the lights, and chant a spell. Sleep, sleep. Make the world disappear…”

(4) NEW FANTASY TRILOGY. “Q & A with Victoria Aveyard” at Publishers Weekly.

Victoria Aveyard’s dystopian fantasy debut, Red Queen, launched a hit series and landed on bestseller lists in its first week of publication. Aveyard is hoping for a repeat performance with Realm Breaker, a YA high fantasy that marks the start of a trilogy….

Was it challenging to incorporate adult perspectives into a YA story?

The key is—and I think this is the hallmark of the YA genre—that all of your characters are figuring out who they are. While that is usually something that happens when you’re a young adult, that isn’t always the case. You have adults who discover who they are much later in life—in the case of some of these characters, hundreds and hundreds of years in. They are, compared to some people, kind of young adults themselves. So that was a fun dichotomy to play with—that trope of the all-knowing immortal who’s actually kind of a dummy when it comes to the real world…

(5) CONDUITS OF POWER. “Octavia Butler’s ‘Kindred’ and ‘Fledgling,’ Reviewed: She Wanted to Write a ‘Yes’ Book” explains The New Republic’s Stephanie Burt.

…“I began writing about power,” Butler once said, “because I had so little.” Hannah Arendt’s distinction between power and violence—the first a tacit cooperation or compact, the second mere force—makes no sense in the world of Kindred, nor in most of Butler’s worlds: Consent, political, legal, or sexual, is at best contingent and suspect, at worst nonsensical. We did not, could not, consent to our own existence beforehand: We are born into the country that we get—for 330 million of us, the United States—not a country we chose in advance. It is a country founded on anti-Blackness, on white supremacy, on what that very un-American thinker Michel Foucault called biopower, the use of knowledge and law and information not to create free or equal individuals but as a channel for force….

(6) DOES IT BITE? WE’LL NEVER KNOW. Here’s the New York Times’ take on Steinbeck’s unpublished werewolf book: “Yes, Steinbeck Wrote a Werewolf Novel. Don’t Expect to Read It.”

…“I was expecting a fragmented, bizarre, incomplete work,” Professor Jones said.

Instead he found a coherent, completed 233-page manuscript. “It’s a potboiler, but it’s also the caldron of central themes we see throughout Steinbeck’s later work,” he said. For this reason, he believes it’s worth sharing with the public.

His campaign prompted a firm email statement from Steinbeck’s agents this week.

“Steinbeck wrote ‘Murder at Full Moon’ under a pseudonym, and once he became an established author, he did not choose to seek publication of this work,” a representative of the New York-based agency, McIntosh & Otis, wrote. “There are several other works written by Steinbeck that have been posthumously published, with his directions and the careful consideration of the Estate. As longtime agents for Steinbeck and the Estate, we do not exploit works that the author did not wish to be published.”

The pseudonym Steinbeck chose was Peter Pym. Professor Jones said the use of the name did not mean Steinbeck had not wanted the book to see the light of day. The author did not get rid of the manuscript, something he had done with other unpublished works, the professor noted.

“He didn’t destroy ‘Murder at Full Moon,’” he said.

Steinbeck wrote the story in nine days, according to William Souder, who wrote the biography “Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck.”

The writer was 28 in 1930, living in a cottage in Pacific Grove, near Monterey, Calif., hoping for his big break. The year before, he had published his first book, “Cup of Gold,” a swashbuckling pirate adventure set in the Caribbean in the 1600s. Though it received better than expected reviews, it was already out of print, Mr. Souder said.

Steinbeck had written more serious books but had not had any luck selling them. He told a friend that all he needed was another 10 or so rejections to become convinced that he should give up on writing….

(7) HARDWARE INVENTORY. Book Riot’s Jenn Northington has compiled “A Guide To The Fantasy And Science Fiction Awards Scene”.

… These have been organized by date first awarded, from most recent on, since many of these prizes have been around for decades and I wanted to show some love to the new folks on the scene. 

Before we dive in, may I also present: Jenn’s Theory Of Why To Care About Awards. Let’s start with a given: all awards, no matter their voting system, are inherently subjective and biased. Whether it’s decided by a public popularity contest, a committee, or a single judge, literary merit is in the eye of the beholder. A book that has won science fiction or fantasy awards isn’t guaranteed to be great (for you) and a book that hasn’t won an award isn’t guaranteed to be a dud (for you). To quote S.R. Ranganathan: “Every book its reader.” So why should we care?…

By the time Northington finishes all the caveats, you may be talked out of reading the list.

(8) MEDIA ANNIVERSARY.

  • May 27, 1996 — On this date in 1996, Doctor Who premiered on BBC. The film involving the Eighth Doctor played by Paul McGann that is. Short of The War Doctor as portrayed by John Hurt, he would have the briefest tenure of any Doctor from a video representation viewpoint having just the film and a short video later on. (He has done some seventy Big Finish audio stories to date.) The film was directed by Geoffrey Sax off the screenplay by Matthew Jacobs. The remaining cast of importance was Daphne Ashbrook as the Companion to the Doctor, Dr. Grace Holloway, and Eric Roberts as The Master. Critics, American and British alike, were decidedly mixed on their reactions, and the audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes are equally divided and give it exactly a fifty percent rating.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born May 27, 1894 — Dashiell Hammett. He’s widely regarded as one of the finest mystery writers of all time, but ISFDB says that he was also the editor of three genre anthologies, Creeps by Night: Chills and Thrills, The Red Brain and Other Creepy Thrillers and Breakdown and Other Thrillers with writers such as Frank Bellnap Long and H.P. Lovecraft, it certainly looks that way. ISFDB also says one Continental Op story, “The Farewell Murder,” is at genre adj. (Died 1962.) (CE)
  • Born May 27, 1911 — Vincent  Price. Ok, what’s popping into my head is him on The Muppets in “The House of Horrors“ sketch they did in which he and Kermit sport impressive fangs which you can see here. If I had to single out his best work, it’d be in such films as House on Haunted Hill, House of Usher and The Pit and the Pendulum. Yes, I know the latter two are Roger Corman productions.  He also did a lot of series work including being Egghead on Batman, appearing in the Fifties Science Fiction Theater, having a recurring role as Jason Winters on the Time Express and so forth. (Died 1993.) (CE) 
  • Born May 27, 1918 — Robert C. Stanley. He was one of the most two prolific paperback book cover artists used by the Dell Publishing Company for whom he worked from 1950 to 1959. Among the covers he did was Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan and the Lost Empire, Anthony Boucher’s Rocket to the Morgue and Olaf Stapledon’s Odd John. (Died 1996.) (CE)
  • Born May 27, 1922 — Christopher  Lee. He first became famous for his role as Count Dracula in a series of Hammer Horror films.  His other film roles include The Creature in The Curse of Frankenstein, Sherlock Holmes in Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace, Kharis the Mummy in The Mummy, Francisco Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun, Lord Summerisle In The Wicker Man, Saruman in The Lord of the Rings films and The Hobbit film trilogy, and Count Dooku in the second and third films of the Star Wars prequel trilogy. Now interestingly enough, ISFDB lists him as being the co-editor in the Seventies with Michael Parry with a number of horror anthologies such as Christopher Lee’s ‘X’ Certificate No. 1, From the Archives of Evil and The Great Villains. (Died 2015.) (CE)
  • Born May 27, 1900 – Rudolph Belarski.  Virtuoso at air-combat magazine covers; five dozen covers for us; interiors too.  Here is one from 1955.  Here is a 2018 reprint.  (Died 1983) [JH]
  • Born May 27, 1915 – Herman Wouk.  (Pronounced “woke”.)  Gag man for Fred Allen; Pulitzer Prize; four honorary doctorates.  Besides The “Caine” Mutiny, his masterpiece Marjorie Morningstar, The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, he wrote the fine SF novel A Hole in Texas.  (Died 2019) [JH]
  • Born May 27, 1929 – Burnett Toskey, age 91.  Among the Nameless Ones of Seattle.  Edited several Cry of the Nameless issues.  Made Official Editor of SAPS (Spectator Amateur Press Society) in 1968; moved to Los Angeles; OE off and on since.  [JH]
  • Born May 27, 1930 – John Barth, age 91.  Fellow of Am. Acad. Arts & Sciences.  Lannan Award for lifetime achievement.  National Book Award.  The Floating Opera is only strange (it won the Roozi Rozegari at Teheran for best translated novel, also strange); The Sot-Weed Factor could perhaps be called historical fiction; by Giles Goat-Boy he was doing SF.  Heinlein compared Stranger in a Strange Land to it.  In The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor a man jumps overboard from a reconstructed Arab ship and finds himself in the world of Sindbad.  Nor was that all.  [JH]
  • Born May 27, 1934 — Harlan Ellison. He was a SFWA Grandmaster, member of the SF Hall of Fame, and winner of eight other life achievement awards. His short story “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” is the second-highest ranked of the 102 Top SF/F/H Short Stories listed at Science Fiction Awards Database. Ellison wrote the most famous episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, “The City on the Edge of Forever” (setting aside the backstory about Roddenberry and others who had a hand in the broadcast version). His Dangerous Visions and Again Dangerous Visions anthologies were milestones, while Last Dangerous Visions was a millstone around his neck because it never appeared. Further harming his reputation, he groped Connie Willis during the 2006 Hugos. He won 8 Hugos, 4 Nebulas, 2 World Fantasy Awards, 6 Bram Stoker Awards and 18 Locus Awards. But there were lighter moments, like this 30-second clip of Harlan as himself conversing with “H.P. Hatecraft” in the Scooby-Doo episode “Shrieking Madness.” (Died 2018.) (OGH)
  • Born May 27, 1940 – Jackie Causgrove.  Prominent fan in the U.S. Midwest, then Southern California.  For Bruce Pelz’ Fantasy Showcase Tarot Deck she did the Knight of Cups; each card by a leading fan or pro (or both) artist of the day, styles quite various; see the whole deck here (PDF; scroll down to Cups; you can get a deck from Elayne Pelz, or if you don’t know how to do that, write to me, 236 S. Coronado St., No. 409, Los Angeles, CA 90057).  With Bruce Gillespie, administered the Tucker Fund that sent Bob Tucker to Aussiecon I the 33rd Worldcon.  One of her fanzines (as J. Franke) was Dilemma, illustrated by her; see here.  Fan Guest of Honor at Chambanacon 5, Confusion Pi.  (Died 1998) [JH]
  • Born May 27, 1971 – Vilma Kadleckova, age 50.  (The character after the e should have a little v over it for the sound of ch in English “church”.)  A dozen SF novels and shorter stories, half a dozen local prizes.  Four novels so far in her Mycelium series; the first two won Book of the Year and Original Czech/Slovak Book from the SFFH Acad. in Prague; second and third available in English.  In Vector 166, contributed “The View from Olympus” with Carola Biedermann and Eva Hauser.  [JH]

(10) COMICS SECTION.

  • Carpe Diem shows Vader doing a good deed.
  • The Flying McCoys illustrates one of the seven deadly sins, which this character presumably does all of sooner or later.

(11) SEKRIT MESSAGE IN HUGO EMAIL. Andrew Porter clued me into the presence of an invisible last line in the email DisCon III sent to members today announcing the opening of Hugo voting. I found it in mine. Check it out.

(12) THE SOLUTION. What to do when there’s not enough of the stories you want to read? “The Big Idea: Christian Klaver” at Whatever.

The Big Idea: We needed more Narnia.

Shadows Over London was born out of reading to my daughter before bedtime. Katie was five or six at that time, and destined to become a voracious reader. (She’s just this month finished her Masters in Library Science.) I was just getting divorced at the time and had Katie every weekend, but not during the week, so we did chapter one of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe or “The Lucy Book,” as she dubbed it, the first night. Then chapter two the second, but then she had to wait five days to get chapters three and four.

She loved the first and second installments, but this had a very short duration for two reasons:  Reason #1: It was really only the first three books. Try explaining to a child that age that the “Lucy Books” didn’t have Lucy in them after book three! She wanted to know why and I had no answer that didn’t fall flat. Even the second book: Prince Caspian has a long stretch without the main characters. (Don’t even get me started about the alternate order for these! That just makes it worse, in terms of storytelling.) Reason #2: while we were still in books 1-3, of which we had copies at both her mother’s house and mine, she couldn’t resist and read by herself during the week, so we finished those first three that first month.

So, the first chapter of Shadows Over London, complete with serene, crunchy snow and a Faerie King waiting underneath moonbeams slanting through darkened trees, all came from trying to write something that felt as magical as Narnia did…

(13) YA CHALLENGES. The Rite Gud podcast discusses “Writing for Young Audiences with Celine Kiernan”.

“If someone is mad enough to publish my weird shit, I am going to do my utmost to be a little bit more complex.”

In this episode, middle grade horror/fantasy author Celine Kiernan joins us to talk about writing fiction for young people. How do you handle dark, difficult topics? How do you fight the censors? How do you bridge the generation gap between author and audience? How do you temper your language for inexperienced readers? What do writers owe young people? What does it mean to exploit your audience?

Celine Kiernan is the author of The Moorehawk Trilogy, Into the Grey, Resonance, and The Wild Magic Trilogy. She is also a freelance editor. She lives in Ireland.

(14) THE LAWS OF PHYSICS AREN’T JUST A GOOD IDEA, DARN IT. The Atlantic says “If Aliens Are Out There, They’re Way Out There”.

…This is real; the videos are real; UFOs, in the most basic sense, are real. The military has spotted objects flying in the sky, and it has not identified what they are. These objects, whatever you want to call them, are worth close examination. But there’s no reason to think they’re alien.

Why not? Jason Wright, an astronomer at Penn State University, gets this question a lot, especially recently. Wright works in the field of SETI—the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. His job is to look for signs of alien technology, so it seems logical that he might have some thoughts on UFOs and their rumored extraterrestrial origins. But ufology and SETI are two entirely different fields.

SETI operates on the principle that extraterrestrials follow the laws of physics as we know them, but what makes these UFO videos so enticing is precisely the opposite—whatever is captured in them seems to be moving in a way that appears to defy those exact laws. Guided by known physics, SETI astronomers look for aliens deep in space, rather than in the clouds overhead—because if the truth is out there, it’s way, way out there, around stars many light-years away. Even after decades of research, the SETI community has yet to find evidence of aliens, probably for the same reason that extraterrestrial beings, should they exist, would be unlikely to visit our planet—the space between stars, let alone galaxies, is unfathomably vast. And astronomers are just starting to understand the planets around other stars. “Every star could have an intelligent, technological civilization like Earth and we wouldn’t know it,” Wright told me. He sees no problem with the desire to better understand our airspace and investigate unexplained phenomena, “but why drag astronomers into it?”

Perhaps because the alternatives to aliens are much more boring.

(15) LIFTOFF. Watch video of the launch at USA Today: “SpaceX launches more broadband satellites”.

SpaceX has launched another fleet of Starlink broadband satellites into orbit. The Falcon 9 rocket with 60 satellites took off from Florida on Wednesday (May 26)

(16) ARE HUMANS BUILT FOR THIS ADVENTURE? Gloomy predictions about space travel from Future Tense at Slate: “Deep-space human travel is a lose-lose proposition”.

… Then there’s sleep. Between 2007 and 2011 the European Space Agency worked with Russia to simulate the conditions of a trip to Mars, particularly as a psychological isolation experiment. Called Mars500, the longest part of this study ran between 2010 and 2011, and revealed a significant degradation of the simulacral explorers’ sleep patterns. While on wide-body airliners, a business class cocoon seat can deliver comfort (and even luxury) during an overnight flight, such ergonomic palliatives won’t be as easy for a yearlong journey. Space travel to Mars is supposed to be a bold and daring adventure. But what if it ends up feeling more like a superlong red-eye flight?

For years, Musk has compared his rockets to airliners, using the familiar sizes and thrust capacities of Boeing 737s and 747s as reference points for his future-bound ships. These comparisons circulate on social media, by way of making SpaceX craft both more graspable and more impressive. But the analogies are telling. As much as the goal is to reduce the time of feeling trapped inside a cramped cabin, the endgame is in fact more of this time. And let’s be honest: A hab on Mars is not going to be a whole lot more spacious than the interior of the ship.

If the dream of space travel involves new horizons and feelings of unbound freedom—to explore, to discover, to spread humanity—a nightmare lurks just around the corner of consciousness. There will be no real “arrival” on this fantasy trip: It’s enclosures and pressurized chambers all the way down. When it comes to human space travel, the destination really is the journey. And the journey will be long, and claustrophobic. As far as “quarantine” goes, spacefaring may feel familiar to those who lived through the COVID pandemic—and certain survival tactics may crossover.

Musk wants to send humans to Mars (and beyond) because he believes that the species is doomed on Earth, sooner or later. This bleak assessment belies two haunting presuppositions: The miserable masses will wither on a climate-scorched and ecologically damaged planet back home; meanwhile, the spacefaring select will find themselves in a whole new purgatory of cramped isolation, en route and wherever they “land.”…

(17) OCTOTHORPE. John Coxon is insidious, Alison Scott is simmering, and Liz Batty was on committees in Episode 32 of Octothorpe: “Maybe This Conversation Can Go Down a Vortex”.

We discuss letters of comment, and then the BSFA and SFF, before moving onto <checks notes> new-fangled publications called fanzines.

(18) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Watch as “Zack Snyder Directs A Dark, Gritty Reboot Of The Late Show”. The Hollywood Reporter provides the warm-up.

…For Colbert’s monologue, Snyder says he was hoping to deliver what Zack Snyder fans have been “demanding for years… Another classic Zack Snyder slow-motion shot.” To offer some action, Snyder threw a knife at the late-night host, which was filmed in slow-motion. “Directing is all about keeping talent out of their comfort zone,” Snyder said, with Colbert adding that a lot of blood was lost that day.

When considering “Zack Snyder leads,” Colbert says he was “flattered” for Snyder to help him given the director works with leading men considered to be “Gods among mortals.”

Because Colbert “fills out his clothes like lentils fill out a sandwich bag,” Snyder explains that he enlisted an “elite Hollywood personal trainer” to help Colbert in his fitness regimen but it ended with “unbelievable” results such as actually losing muscle mass….

[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, Joel Zakem, Mlex, JJ, Michael Toman, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, John Hertz, Mike Kennedy, Sumana Harihareswara, R.S. Benedict, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 5/22/21 In Odin Days, A Glimpse Of Stalking

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(1) THE MARS MY DESTINATION. “China’s Zhurong Mars rover kicks off roving mission after driving off landing platform” – Global Times has the story.

Named after an ancient fire god of Chinese mythology, the 1.85-meter-tall and some 240-kilogram Zhurong Mars rover safely drove off the landing platform and reached the surface of Mars at 10: 40 am on Saturday, kicking off its roving mission, the Global Times learned from the China National Space Administration (CNSA).

China has become the second country in the world to successfully deploy a robotic rover onto the surface of Mars, breaking up US’ monopoly in the field, Chinese space analysts hailed.

The rover will carry out environmental perception and scientific detection in the patrol area as planned. At the same time, the orbiter will operate in the relay orbit to provide stable relay communication for the rover’s patrol and exploration. The orbiter is serving as a data relay station for communications between Zhurong and mission controllers on Earth.

(2) HERE WOLF, THERE HASSLE. The question of what an author would want done with a work like this by his estate is always interesting: “John Steinbeck’s estate urged to let the world read his shunned werewolf novel” in The Guardian.

Years before becoming one of America’s most celebrated authors, John Steinbeck wrote at least three novels which were never published. Two of them were destroyed by the young writer as he struggled to make his name, but a third – a full-length mystery werewolf story entitled Murder at Full Moon – has survived unseen in an archive ever since being rejected for publication in 1930.

Now a British academic is calling for the Steinbeck estate to finally allow the publication of the work, written almost a decade before masterpieces such as The Grapes of Wrath, his epic about the Great Depression and the struggles of migrant farm workers.

“There would be a huge public interest in a totally unknown werewolf novel by one of the best-known, most read American writers of the 20th century,” said Professor Gavin Jones, a specialist in American literature at Stanford University…

… But Steinbeck’s literary agents, McIntosh & Otis, told the Observer they would not be publishing the novel. “As Steinbeck wrote Murder at Full Moon under a pseudonym and did not choose to publish the work during his lifetime, we uphold what Steinbeck had wanted,” they said. “As the estate’s agents, we do not further exploit the works beyond what had been the author and estate’s wishes.”

(3) TAKE THE CASH AND LET THE REDDIT GO. “Wanda Sells AMC Theatres Stake For $426 Million” – The Hollywood Reporter sums up the transaction.

Chinese conglomerate Wanda Group has sold off essentially its entire stake in AMC Theatres, officially exiting the U.S. theatrical exhibition business.

Wanda has had a controlling stake in the exhibition giant since 2012, but January’s Reddit-fueled rally saw the company trade in its super-voting Class B stock for Class A common stock, giving up control but giving it the option to cash out.

And cash out it did. On Friday, AMC disclosed that Wanda sold all but 10,000 shares in the past week, netting $426.7 million. It previously sold three tranches last month for $220 million.

(4) SELF-PUBLISHED FANTASY BLOG-OFF 7. Mark Lawrence starts SPFBO 7 – the Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off 2021 – PHASE 1 with a full board, titles listed at the link. He shared some statistics about the 300 entrants.

A list of most of the entries is on Goodreads thanks to Hiu Gregg.

From the list I discovered that:

40 entries ~13% have 100+ ratings on Goodreads.

 97 of the entries have 25+ ratings.

 0 of the books were published 10 or more years ago – the oldest is 9 years old.

 0 of the books have more than 1,000 pages. The longest is 986 pages.

 5 of the books have over a 1,000 ratings, the most ratings is 3,769.

(5) SOUVENIR BOOK. If you happened to take in the World’s Fair while you were in New York for the first Worldcon, here is a nifty souvenir book you could have bought, reproduced in full by Past Print: ”New York World’s Fair / Souvenir Book / 1939”.

Donald Deskey’s superb design of this World Fair book must have made it one of the more worthwhile souvenirs amongst the of hundreds cheaply made commercial items. Perhaps the best souvenir of all was the plate (right) designed by Charles Murphy for the Homer Laughlin company, unfortunately I don’t have one.

    Deskey is probably better known as a furniture designer of the streamline era but his graphic work appeared in every household across the land because he designed the Tide soap box with the red, orange and yellow bulls eye and boxes for Oxydol and Cheer. The design for Crest toothpaste was also his.

    The design of this book with 144 (unnumbered) pages still looks fresh today, seventy plus years after they were printed. Large photos and graphics, angled text and the clever use of ten short pages to introduce the various sections work really well and provide enough visual interest to keep turning the pages. I particularly liked these short intro pages that used spot color and cleverly designed to blend into the page underneath. Turning over the cover to reveal a bird’s eye view of the complete Fair with color on the left and mono on the right seems rather unusual design choice though.

(6) FREITAG OBIT. The New York Times commemorates Ruth Freitag (1924-2021), a librarian renowned for her knowledge of science, technology, and astronomy: “Ruth Freitag, Librarian to the Stars, Dies at 96”.

Isaac Asimov was enthralled with her and wrote her a limerick. Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan wrote in their introduction to “Comet” (1985) that “one of the most pleasant experiences in writing this book” was meeting her. Numerous other science writers acknowledged their debts to her in forewords to their books.

Ruth Freitag, a reference librarian at the Library of Congress for nearly a half-century, was unknown to the general public. But she was, in more ways than one, a librarian to the stars.

Known for her encyclopedic knowledge of resources in science and technology, Ms. Freitag (pronounced FRY-tog) was sought out by the leading interpreters of the galaxy. She developed a particular expertise in astronomy early in her career.

Her learnedness became so comprehensive that she opened up new worlds to Mr. Asimov, the pre-eminent popular science writer of his day, and Mr. Sagan, the astronomer who introduced millions of television viewers to the wonders of the universe.

(7) MEDIA ANNIVERSARY.

  • May 22, 2012 — On this day in 2012, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls premiered. The fourth film in the franchise to date, it was directed by Steven Spielberg and was released nineteen years after the last film. Produced by Frank Marshall from a screenplay by David Koepp off of the story by George Lucas and Jeff Nathanson. And starring Harrison Ford, Cate Blanchett,  Karen Allen,  Ray Winstone, John Hurt, Jim Broadbent and Shia LaBeouf. Despite the myth around it in the net that it was a critical failure, critics overwhelmingly loved it though admittedly the audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes give it a mediocre fifty three percent rating. 

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born May 22, 1813 – Richard Wagner.  His fantasies The Flying Dutchman (“fly” in the sense we still have in “flee”), Tannhäuser, The Ring of the Niebelung (four-opera series), Parsifal, are masterworks of music and theater.  Complicated life and opinions less admirable.  (Died 1883) [JH]
  • Born May 22, 1859 — Arthur Conan Doyle. I’ve read all the Holmes stories a long time ago. My favorite is The Hound of the Baskervilles as it allows him to develop a story at length. Favorite video Holmes? Jeremy Brett.  Looking at ISFDB, I’m see there were more Professor Challenger novels than I realized. And the Brigadier Gerard stories sound suspiciously comical… (Died 1930.) (CE) 
  • Born May 22, 1938 — Richard Benjamin, 83. He’s here because he was Adam Quark on the all too short lived Quark series. He also was Joseph Lightman in Witches’ Brew which was based off Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife novel (winner of the 1944 Retro-Hugo Award at Dublin 2019) though that’s not credited in the film. And he was in Westworld as Peter Martin. Finally he did a stint on the Ray Bradbury Theatre as Mr. Howard in “Let’s Play Poison” episode. (CE)
  • Born May 22, 1914 – Sun Ra.  In the avant-garde of jazz he played keyboards and sang, led a variously-composed band under names more or less like “The Solar Arkestra”, still performing; recorded dozens of singles and a hundred full-length albums with titles like We Travel the Spaceways, Space Is the Place, Strange Celestial Road.  Said he was taken to Saturn in a vision, changing his life and art.  (Died 1993) [JH]
  • Born May 22, 1922 – Bob Leman.  Fanzine, The Vinegar Worm; two pieces in The Best of Fandom 1958.  Fourteen short stories in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, one added in collection Feensters in the Lake.  With Gerald Bishop, “Venture Science Fiction Magazine”, a Checklist of the First American Series and the First British Series.  (Died 2006) [JH]
  • Born May 22, 1939 — Paul Winfield. He’s best remembered as Capt. Terrell in The Wrath of Khan, but he was also in the Next Gen episode “Darmok” as the signature character.  He showed up in Damnation Alley as a character named Keegan and in The Terminator as Lt. Ed Traxler. Oh, and let’s not forget that he was Lucien Celine In The Serpent and the Rainbow which surely is genre. (Died 2004.) (CE) 
  • Born May 22, 1943 – Arlene Phillips, age 78.  Dancer, choreographer including the film Annie and the Royal Shakespeare production of A Clockwork Orange, judge for Strictly Come Dancing and the U.K. version of So You Think You Can Dance?  Six Alana, Dancing Star children’s books.  [JH]
  • Born May 22, 1964 — Kat Richardson, 57. Her Greywalker series is one of those affairs that I’m pleased to say that I’ve read every novel that was been published. I’ve not read Blood Orbit, the first in her new series, yet. Has anyone here done so? (CE) 
  • Born May 22, 1968 — Karen Lord, 53. A  Barbadian writer whose first novel, Redemption in Indigo, won the Carl Brandon Parallax Award and Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature for its inventive use of Senegalese folklore. I’d also recommend her The Best of All Possible Worlds novel as it’s as well done as her earlier novel but different and fascinating in its own right. Lord was Toastmistress of Worldcon 75 in 2017. (CE)
  • Born May 22, 1979 — Maggie Q, 42. She portrayed Tori Wu in the film adaptation of Veronica Roth’s novel Divergent, a role she reprised in its sequels, Insurgent and Allegiant. She played a female agent in a comedic version of the Jackie Chan fronted Around the World in 80 Days. And she’s in the recent remake of Fantasy Island that critics hated but was a box office success. On a brighter note, she voices Wonder Woman on the Young Justice series. (CE) 
  • Born May 22, 1979 – Kagami Takaya, age 42.  (Personal name last, Japanese style.)  Nine light novels available in English.  Here is the most recent I know of; see here.  [JH]
  • Born May 22, 1985 – Arwen Mannens, age 36.  Three novels; so far I find them only in Dutch.  Samples of her 2006 and 2021 drawing here.  [JH]

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal – the word Carbonite should be enough….

(10) DISNEY PLUS WITCHES. “Bette Midler announces that ‘Hocus Pocus 2’ is happening: ‘We’re back!’” says Yahoo! Entertainment.

Here’s yet another reason why you should always bet on Bette (Midler). Last year, the acting and singing icon confirmed to Yahoo Entertainment that she would “absolutely” be back for Hocus Pocus 2 — the long-rumored sequel to Disney’s 1993 Halloween favorite — alongside her witchy onscreen sisters Kathy Najimy and Sarah Jessica Parker. “As soon as we sign on the dotted line,” Midler promised at the time. 

Flash-forward a few months, and it looks like that dotted line isn’t blank anymore. Hocus Pocus 2 will start production later this year for a 2022 premiere on the Disney+ streaming service. And all three Sanderson sisters promptly confirmed the news on social media. “It’s been 300 years… but we’re BACK!” Midler teased on Instagram. 

(11) GET THE LEAD OUT. Past Print takes you on a visual tour of its collection of “Type tools before the pc”. I remember using a hand-held composing stick in Print Shop back in nineteen-ought-sixty-eight.

(12) NOT LOST, JUST THROWN AWAY. CrimeReads’ Keith Roysdon decided to rewatch the bad final season of LOST. He explains why he thinks it was bad and notes the many mysteries of the show that were never answered: “Coming To Terms With ‘Lost,’ All These Years Later”.

…Like millions of other viewers, I found the series riveting television. I loved the characters and situations and twists. The polar bear. The hatch. The slowly-unfolding story of the Dharma Initiative. And I was never more horrified at a TV plot point than when “the Others” kidnapped young Walt.

The intense reaction the series inspired in me and others backfired, though, when “Lost” ended with a disappointing final season and a two-part finale that didn’t just disappoint but outraged some.

I was so disappointed that, in the 11 years since the finale aired on May 23, 2010, I’ve never revisited it, never rewatched the DVD set that collects dust on a shelf. I’ve never gone back to revisit the cult ABC series on streaming….

… It’s not just the failure of the show to answer many of its mysteries that is so off-putting. Remember that scene in the cult movie “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension” when Jeff Goldblum’s character asks about a watermelon in a complicated piece of machinery and Clancy Brown’s character says, “I’ll tell you later” but then never does? That did not ruin “Buckaroo Banzai” for me.

But “Lost’s” mysteries were so many and some were so largely unanswered….

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Out of the Inkwell: The Fleischer Story is a documentary, narrated by Carl Reiner, about the Fleischer studios which explains why Max and Dave Fleischer were great cartoonists. It first appeared around 1990. Leonard Maltin and Mark Evanier are two of the talking heads.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, Lise Andreasen, John Hertz, Mike Kennedy, Will R., Andrew Porter, Brian Z., Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, and Michael Toman for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to contributing editor of the day Daniel “Anything Geas” Dern.]