Pixel Scroll 1/25/24 The Pixels Will Continue Until Morale Improves

(1) SWIMMING AGAINST THE TIDE. Malcolm F. Cross takes a deeply skeptical look at “AI, the Algorithm, and the Attention Economy” at Sin Is Beautiful.

…People using AI, even this theoretical ‘good’ kind, are shooting themselves in the foot and don’t know it.

Why? Most generative AI users are trying to participate in the attention economy – attempting to get eyes on their work, to get appreciative comments, sales, to build an audience for content that they produce.

When a generative AI user posts their image on social media, when they use it for their profile, for their website, for all the things art gets used for, they are competing for attention. And they are competing with everything else generated by AI. The same AI everyone else gets to use.

Generative AI for creating images has been big news since DALL-E’s first iteration was released in early 2021. By October 2022 it was generating two million images a day. DALL-E is only one player in the generative AI space for art.  It is estimated that in August 2023, 34 million images were being generated every day across the major generative AI art tools. 15 billion pieces of art, and that was about six months ago.

Assuming you only looked at the most excellent top 0.001% of those 15 billion images, that is still a hundred and fifty thousand images to look at….

… The best the AI artist can hope for in this ideal situation is to be a brief flicker in a constant feed of content we can barely remember.

If the ideas you were trying to express mattered, you wouldn’t have needed AI to win at the attention economy – you could have expressed them with stick figures and still won.

If your ideas actually are that good, then why obscure them by using generative AI?…

(2) AI AND THE FTC. Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission today announced it has launched an “Inquiry into Generative AI Investments and Partnerships”. However, apparently is the beginning of a study, not an action in response to a law violation.

…The FTC issued its orders under Section 6(b) of the FTC Act, which authorizes the Commission to conduct studies that allow enforcers to gain a deeper understanding of market trends and business practices. Findings stemming from such orders can help inform future Commission actions.

Companies are deploying a range of strategies in developing and using AI, including pursuing partnerships and direct investments with AI developers to get access to key technologies and inputs needed for AI development. The orders issued today were sent to companies involved in three separate multi-billion-dollar investments: Microsoft and OpenAIAmazon and Anthropic, and Google and Anthropic. The FTC’s inquiry will help the agency deepen enforcers understanding of the investments and partnerships formed between generative AI developers and cloud service providers….

(3) TOC OF ELLISON COLLECTION. J. Michael Straczynski had announced the table of contents for Harlan Ellison’s Greatest Hits.

  • “Repent, Harlequin,” Said the TickTockman
  • I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream
  • The Deathbird
  • Chatting with Anubis
  • The Whimper of Whipped Dogs
  • Jeffty is Five
  • Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes
  • Shatterday
  • Mefisto in Onyx
  • On the Downhill Side
  • Paladin of the Lost Hour
  • The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World
  • I’m Looking for Kadak
  • How Interesting: A Tiny Man
  • Djinn, No Chaser
  • How’s the Night Life on Cissalda?
  • From A to Z, in the Chocolate Alphabet
  • Eidolons All the Lies That Are My Life
  • With a Preface by me.
  • Foreword by Neil Gaiman
  • Intro by Cassandra Khaw

Straczynski also drew attention to a Barnes & Noble Exclusive Edition of the book.

(4) ANOTHER SFF FILM SHELVED. “Netflix Axes Halle Berry’s Sci-Fi Film ‘The Mothership’” reports Variety.

Netflix has scrapped the release of “The Mothership,” a science-fiction film starring Halle Berry.

The movie finished filming in 2021, but it couldn’t be completed after multiple delays in post-production, Variety has confirmed.

“The Mothership” is the latest Hollywood movie to disappear even though filming had wrapped. Since 2022, Warner Bros. has axed three movies — John Cena’s “Coyote vs. Acme,” the $90 million budgeted DC adventure “Batgirl” and the animated “Scoob! Holiday Haunt” — for the purpose of tax write-offs….

(5) LOVECRAFT’S MAIL. Bobby Derie explores “Her Letters To Lovecraft: Edith May Dowe Miniter” at Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein.

The details of Mrs. Miniter’s long career—a career inseparable from amateur journalism after her sixteenth year—will doubtless be covered by writers well qualified to treat of them. Reared in Worcester, taught by her poet-mother and at a private school, and given to solid reading and literary attempts from early childhood onward, the erstwhile Edith May Dowe entered amateurdom in 1883 and was almost immediately famous in our small world as a fictional realist. Controversies raged over her stories—so different from the saccharine froth of the period—but very few failed to recognize her importance. After 1890 she was engaged in newspaper and magazine work in the larger outside world, though her interest in amateur matters increased rather than diminished.

H. P. Lovecraft, “Mrs. Miniter—Estimates and Recollections” (written 1934) in Collected Essays 1.380

(6) REASONS TO READ. “25th Century Five and Dime #2: You Should Be Reading Judith Merril!” says columnist David Agranoff at Amazing Stories.

…One of the reasons I started this column is to share these discoveries. Early in the process of doing the show, I discovered the book The Future is Female edited by one of our most popular guests Lisa Yaszek. A few stories into the anthology I knew I had to have her on the show. That book has a similar mission to this column. While women like Octavia Butler and Ursula K. Leguin are famous now but The Future is Female as a book more importantly will introduce you to more obscure authors like Katherine Maclean and well known in her day Judith Merril. Her name was always a respected one in SF.

In that collection which collected the best of the pulp era SF ranging from the 20s to the end of the 60s was a story from the 40s by Merril that really stood out for me. “That Only a Mother.” The story of fall-out sickened children of atomic wars was a brutal and powerful stand-out. When Lisa gave us background on the story and author it was clear that JM was an important figure in the community and I needed to know more.

Since then, reading several histories from Fredrik Pohl, Damon Knight, Boucher, and Malzberg further made the point Judith Merril is an important voice in SF. Her role as a founding member of two major NYC clubs The Futurians and the Hydra club predates her publishing that began in 1948…. 

(7) RUBY SUNDAY MAYBE NOT GONE? RadioTimes’ Louise Griffin claims “Millie Gibson’s future on Doctor Who is still very bright”. Gibson plays Doctor Who companion Ruby Sunday.

Emotions have, understandably, been high as reports about Millie Gibson ‘being replaced’ in Doctor Who have rolled in.

First, let’s get the facts right. It’s been reported that Varada Sethu has been cast as the companion in season 15. Great news! Millie Gibson has not been “dropped” or “axed” – actually, the opposite as she’ll still be in season 15, just in a smaller role. But I think this is actually incredibly exciting….

(8) IN THE BEGINNING.  He wasn’t in it, he’s just telling the story: “Sylvester McCoy reminisces about first ever Doctor Who broadcast” in RadioTimes.

Sylvester McCoy has spoken of his fond memories of Doctor Who and reflected on the sci-fi’s first ever episode….

…He said: “It’s been 60 years now. I know where I was when it first came out, partly because I know where I was when John F Kennedy was shot, which happened the day before Doctor Who was broadcast.

“The BBC had to repeat the first episode of Doctor Who the following week because no one had watched it. They were all glued to the news about the Kennedy assassination and Doctor Who got pushed out. But when Doctor Who started, we had no concept it would go on forever and ever and ever.”…

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born January 25, 1926 Bob Clarke. (Died 2013.) Stepping not quite outside of genre, or maybe not at all, we have Bob Clarke. 

Clarke started at the age of seventeen according to the stories he tells as an uncredited assistant on the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! comic strip. Ripley himself traveled the world collecting his fantastic trivia tidbits and sent them back to Clarke who drew them, captioned them and circulated them. There’s no way to prove or disprove this story.

(It’s most likely true because years later, he illustrated MAD‘s occasional “Believe It or Nuts!” parody in that style.) 

Quite a few sources, briefly and without attribution, say he designed the label of the Cutty Sark bottle.

After two years with Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, Clarke joined the army, where he worked for the European edition of Stars and Stripes and met his wife. Clarke remained with Stars and Stripes after being discharged as a civilian contributor, before eventually returning to America and joining the Geyer, Newell, and Ganger (GNG) advertising firm. He was among the artists there who designed the box for the children’s game Candyland

Now to MAD Magazine. Clarke was one of the artists who took up the slack he after original MAD editor Harvey Kurtzman left MAD in an absolute rage, taking two of its three main artists Will Elder and Jack Davis, with him. He claimed working at GNG with its design needs was his best training for this endeavor —“I learned about typefaces and layouts, how to prepare comps in the styles of many artists and cartoonists.” 

In his first year alone there, he illustrated twenty-four separate articles; he would eventually draw more than six hundred. Yes, six hundred.  Here’s one of those illustrations from MAD magazine # 156.

And that doesn’t count myriad covers such as the one below. He was a principal artist of the magazine as it rose fast in circulation, being one of four general-purpose artists who took MAD through the late Fifties and early Sixties, arguably the best years of the magazine. 

(10) OH NO! File 770 contributor Steve Vertlieb had a close call but fortunately sustained just a small injury. He explained what happened on Facebook.

This has been a week from Hell. At approximately two o’clock in the afternoon on Monday, January 22nd, the proverbial “Kracken” was released onto the highway. I was driving to the post office, going North on Bustleton Avenue in Northeast Philadelphia, on “a wing and a prayer,” when an elderly woman of Russian descent, driving her car going South, took a dangerous left hand turn into opposing traffic in order to gain entrance to her apartment complex.

I was on the inside lane, and so my vision was obstructed by cars to my left. Suddenly, out of nowhere, her vehicle appeared directly in front of me, less than a car length ahead. I screamed in panic, and jammed my foot on the brakes, but it was too late. I crashed into the side of her vehicle with a sickening crunch that I’ll not soon forget.

My vehicle’s airbags deployed upon impact, hitting me in the chest, and grazing my right hand which was clutched on the steering wheel. Smoke filled my car, and fluid drained onto the street all around me.

It could have been worse, I suppose. I could have been seriously injured or killed. A bloody gash adorns the torn skin of my injured hand. My car was totaled. It was paid off, and running in fine condition. I’d taken it in for a four thousand mile checkup only several days earlier.

Now I’m facing an expensive search for a replacement vehicle, while literally stranded in my apartment for the better part of a week. I’m picking up a rental on Friday.

I’m grateful to be alive, yet wondering why my recent mini-stroke, or T.I.A., was followed in rapid succession with a nearly deadly car crash. I seem to be on a roll of late in health threatening catastrophies.

(11) ECHO OVERCOMES. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Prepare for the cries that “wokeness is out of control.“ This despite the fact that the Marvel character’s description (female, indigenous, deaf) is pretty darn well matched by the actor’s description (female, indigenous, deaf, amputee). Echo, starring Alaqua Cox, is on Disney+ and Hulu. “Alaqua Cox Was Bullied for Being Deaf and an Amputee, Now the Marvel Star Is ‘Proud’ to Prove She ‘Can Do Anything’” in People.

Preparing to play a formidable Marvel character is a notoriously demanding process that pushes actors to the pinnacle of physical fitness.

For Alaqua Cox, who’s making history as the first Native American star to lead a Marvel series in the new Disney+ show Echo, it meant training five days a week with a stunt team to learn a slew of butt-kicking moves.

“I grew up playing different kinds of sports — I would play one-on-one basketball with my older brother — so I love doing those kinds of physical things,” the actress, who, like her character Maya Lopez, is an amputee and has been deaf all her life, tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue.

Cox, 26, originated the ruthless role with her breakthrough performance opposite Jeremy Renner in the series Hawkeye. Echo, who debuted in Marvel comics in 1999, is a gifted fighter with superhuman strength and a thirst for vengeance.

(12) CALLING WOLF. Sam Sykes on X. I laughed.

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. 2023 Hugo Award finalist O. Westin has started a MicroSFF YouTube channel where a selection of their stories are read and presented in a simple format. For example:

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

Pixel Scroll 1/21/24 They Told Me The Pixel Was Safe To Scroll!

(1) WHEN YOU DISCOVER YOU’RE AN “INELIGIBLE”. Xiran Jay Zhao just got the news.

(2) ONLINE DISCUSSION OF CHENGDU WORLDCON HUGO NOMINATIONS REPORT. Hugo finalist Arthur Liu / HeavenDuke adds context to the 2023 Hugo Awards voting in an X.com thread that begins here. An excerpt:

(3) GRAPHIC EXAMPLES. Heather Rose Jones’ “A Comparison of Hugo Nomination Distribution Statistics” at Alpennia takes the 2023 Hugo Nominations report and the statistics from selected other years to create graphs that show just how anomalous the 2023 results are. A very helpful tool.

(4) RESPONSES TO STAT RELEASE BY THREE HUGO WINNERS.

Ursula Vernon said on Bluesky:

Seanan McGuire said on Bluesky:

Chris Barkley told Facebook readers this evening:

As someone who attended the Chengdu Worldcon AND was the recipient of Hugo Award in the Best Fan Writer category, I am upset, incensed and angry at the exclusion of R.F. Kuang’s Babel and my friend, colleague and peer, Paul Weimer from the 2023 Final Ballot. There were numerous other irregularities and outrages as well.

I don’t know for certain if Paul Weimer’s presence on the ballot would have may any difference in the outcome and to some extent, that has weighted heavily on my mind since Saturday’s release.

We may never know what actually happened here but I would like to thank the people who voted for me and have repeatedly reiterated their support for my fan writing and took the time to reassure me that my work was worthy of the award.

I also know that this incident, whether it was at the behest of the government of the People’s Republic or China or some other entity, will NEVER be forgotten and that doing something about preventing such a thing from happening again will be at the top of the agenda at the Glasgow Worldcon Business Meeting in August…

(5) IN TIMES TO COME. John Scalzi’s “What’s Up With Babel and the Hugos?” at Whatever includes some ideas about what should happen going forward.

4. Likewise, depending on what we learn about these disqualifications, next year’s Worldcon Business meeting would be a fine time to offer proposals for disqualification transparency (i.e., there have to be reasons detailed other than “because”) and for dealing with state censorship regarding finalists and the award process.

5. Even the speculation of state censorship should give pause to site selection voters regarding future Worldcons. For example, there is a 2028 Worldcon proposal for Kampala, Uganda, and while the proposed Worldcon itself offers a laudable and comprehensive Code of Conduct page, Uganda is a country with some of the most severe laws in the world regarding LGBTQ+ people, including laws involving censorship. If the state leaned hard on the local Worldcon regarding what was acceptable on the Hugo ballot, would it be safe for the organizers to ignore this pressure? This is now an issue we will need to consider, among the many others, in where the Worldcon lands every year.

(6) 2024 DEADLINE TO QUALIFY AS HUGO VOTER. If this weekend’s Hugo Awards discussion hasn’t convinced you there might be a better way to use your money, like throwing it in the ocean, and you want to be able to nominate for the 2024 Hugo Awards but weren’t a member of Chengdu, you need to get a membership in the Glasgow 2024 Worldcon by January 31: Memberships and Tickets. [Via Jed Hartman.]

(7) MEANWHILE, IN CHINA. [Item by Ersatz Culture.] Here are some Chinese user comments regarding the Hugo nomination news.  As these are (mostly) from regular fans or individuals, I’ve not included their usernames, but all are on public posts that anyone can access – I imagine stuff circulating in small private WeChat/Weixin groups (which I don’t have access to) will be much harsher than these.

All English translations via Google Translate, which doesn’t handle the slangy language used very well, so some of these are a bit opaque, but the general vibe should be pretty clear.  As yet, I’ve not come across any commentary about the works that just missed out on being finalists; hopefully that might appear once the initial controversies have died down a bit.

现在对国内的任何文学奖都失去信任,都不过是一小撮人自娱自乐地玩票而已。

Nowadays, we have lost trust in any domestic literary awards. They are just a small group of people playing for their own entertainment.

哈哈哈,目测你们没有审核机制,干的啥事啊

Hahaha, I guess you don’t have an audit mechanism, what are you doing?

令人不满在于数据披露拖延、不透明、疏忽大意,有呼声很高的作者和候选莫名被判定“不具备资格”,在于评奖数据显露出的组织管理混乱,而不是你以为的“烂作得奖”,只要符合规则,谁得奖都是该的,因为机制如此。所以我请你在开地图炮宣泄情绪之前,先了解一下始末

(replying to another user’s comment) The dissatisfaction lies in the delay, opacity and negligence in data disclosure. Some highly vocal authors and candidates were inexplicably judged to be “ineligible”. The dissatisfaction lies in the organizational and management chaos revealed by the award data, rather than the “bad work winning the award” as you thought. “As long as the rules are followed, whoever wins the prize deserves it, because the mechanism is like this. So I ask you to understand the whole story before opening the map cannon to vent your emotions.  [Note: I’m not sure what “opening the map cannon” is a euphemism for, but I think something like “setting off fireworks” might be a more reasonable translation,]

真丢脸,无话可说????对“环境污染”放任自流,各种花样层出不穷,无法理解这样的不作为。

It’s so shameful, I have nothing to say ???? Let’s let “environmental pollution” go unchecked, with all kinds of tricks emerging in endlessly, I can’t understand such inaction.

太丢人了

So embarrassing

丢脸

shameful

不是有stuff说了,公布一眼假的数据是为了表明他们也很无奈

Isn’t that what stuff said? The purpose of publishing fake data is to show that they are also helpless.

那到底有多无奈呢,总不会被枪指着头吧,感觉都是托词,总之不想负责

(reply to previous comment) So how helpless are you? You won’t have a gun pointed at your head. It feels like it’s all an excuse. In short, you don’t want to be responsible.

丢人丢到家了

I’m so embarrassed.

咋回事

What’s going on

一地鸡毛…控奖真是有点

It’s a piece of cake… Controlling awards is really a bit tricky

呵呵,这不明摆着么

Haha, isn’t this obvious? (note: I think this might make more sense translated as “blatant”)

国外网友表示雨果组织方所谓过去三个月仔细检查核准数据的说法难以让人信服,毕竟现在还有一个类别里同样的作品出现两次的错误(指最佳短中篇类别的《图灵大排档》)

Foreign netizens said that Hugo organizers’ claim of carefully checking the approval data in the past three months is unconvincing. After all, there is still a category where the same work has errors twice (referring to “Turing” in the best short and medium novel category). Food stalls》)

无非三个原因:商业运作,草台班子,不可说因素

There are no more than three reasons: business operation, grassroots team, and unspeakable factors

怕只怕有心人……

I’m just afraid of someone with a bad intention…

(8) CENSORS, CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM. “After national backlash, Florida lawmakers eye changes to book restrictions” at Politico.

Florida’s Republican-controlled Legislature wanted to keep obscene books out of the hands of kids. But some are now acknowledging they created a “logistical nightmare” that lawmakers are trying to rein in.

Legislators this month introduced a new idea to curb frivolous challenges to books — one of the first admissions the law, which tightened scrutiny around books with sexual content in K-12 schools, may have gone too far. The potential solution: allowing local schools to charge some people a $100 fee if they want to object to more than five books.

“I’m happy that we are digging in and trying to remove reading material that is inappropriate for our children,” said state Rep. Dana Trabulsy, a Republican from Fort Pierce who is sponsoring the legislation. “But I think [book challengers] really need to be respectful of the amount of books that they are pouring into schools at one time.”Florida’s Legislature in 2023 expanded education transparency laws by requiring books considered pornographic, harmful to minors or that depict sexual activity to be pulled from shelves within five days and remain out of circulation for the duration of any challenge. If school officials deem a book inappropriate, it can be permanently removed from circulation or restricted to certain grade levels.

The law caused a national outcry after local schools received hundreds of challenges to a wide range of books, leading to reviews of titles like Ernest Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and “And Tango Makes Three,” a kids book about a penguin family with two dads. It’s also led to multiple lawsuits against top education officials and local school boards asserting that the restrictions violate free speech. Florida, according to the free speech advocacy group PEN America, has “banned” more books than any other state — some 1,406 works total….

(9) MEMORY LANE. (A 1984 REFERENCE COULDN’T BE MORE TIMELY!)

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

1984 — On this day forty years ago, Apple (then know as Apple Computer) began selling its first Macintosh. It featured an 8 MHz processor and 128k of RAM in a beige all-in-one case with a 9-inch monochrome display — all for around $2,500. That’d be $7,380 today.

Now I’ll connect it to our genre, Apple for the Mac’s arrival with its 1984 commercial that aired during a break in the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII. That commercial was based of course on that George Orwell novel. It starts off with the opening of “On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.” 

Ridley Scott was the director. Steve Jobs hired him to do it just after Blade Runner came out. Though the press said Scott spent a million dollars on it, he has said in several interviews since that Apple budgeted it at a quarter of that so he got creative, meaning instead of performers in Britain (where he filmed it) who had Union standing and would have cost him serious money, those are actually skinheads playing all those drones.

(This being 1984, those Union performers that there was got the Union minimum of twenty-five dollars for a day’s work.)

Anya Major is the sledge hammer throwing runner. She beat all models and runners who tested in a London park, most couldn’t lift the hammer, and several threw nearby parked windshields.  And yes, that is actual glass that she smashes though of course it gets enhanced afterwards.

She has only one other video appearance as Natika in Elton’s 1985 “National” video. Well and the documentary done about this commercial. Of course there’s a documentary. When isn’t there? 

Naturally the lawyers got involved. Because the ad looked an awfully lot like a scene from the 1984 film — which I’ve not seen so I don’t know how much it looks like that film — the Estate sent a cease-and-desist letter to Apple, and the commercial never aired on television again. 

The commercial aired only twice on American television. It had been first screened in December 1983, right before the one am sign-off on KMVT in Twin Falls, Idoho, which made it eligible for advertising industry awards for that year. That’s why it got to win a Clio Award for Creative Excellence in Advertising and Design, a very high honor indeed. 

In addition, starting on January 17, 1984, it was screened prior to previews in movie theaters for a few weeks.

It’s on YouTube, though, so you can it see here.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born January 21, 1933 Judith Merril, (Died 1997). Yes, I know Judith Merril is a pen name but it’s the name on her writing, so it’s the only name that I’m interested in for this Birthday. Let us get started.

She was no doubt most excellent SF writer. Her first novel, Shadow in the Hearth, was written by herself.  It was published by Doubleday in 1950 with the scary cover art by Edward Kasper. Geoff Conklin said her first novel was a “masterly example of sensitive and perceptive story-telling”. And I agree. 

Gunner Cade was under her Cyril Judd pen name, written in collaboration with Cyril Kornbluth, as was Outpost Mars from Simon & Schuster just two years later, with a much more traditional SF cover. The novel itself is quite well done. 

Outpost Mars was also given a paperback edition from Dell that would get a very traditional SF cover by Richard Powers. It’s a great look at a Mars-based doctor, the colony, and their dealing and the Earth company and its meddling.

Eight years after Outpost Mars, her novels come to an end with The Tomorrow People. It is also her first novel not from a major house, being printed by Pyramid Books. 

(I’m going to leave it to someone here who’s more knowledgeable than me about fanzines to talk about them.)

Her short fiction is some thirty pieces deep, including a few collaborations. She co-wrote a story each with Kornbluth and Pohl. I’ve have read more than a few of her stories, there’s not a weak one, and even the ones written in the Forties still hold up very well. Which collection is a good question. That’s easy as NESFA, as always is our friend here publishing Homecalling and Other Stories: The Complete Solo Short SF of Judith Merril.

She was not nominated for any Hugos in her lifetime. She, along with Emily Pohl-Weary, granddaughter of her and Frederik Pohl, would win at Torcon 3 for Better to Have Loved: The Life of Judith Merril.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • Tom Gauld probably didn’t need to find out about this from the sff field, much as it applies.

(12) MAESTRO’S NAME OVER THE DOOR. Deadline is on hand when “Sony Pictures & Steven Spielberg Dedicate John Williams Music Building”. (Photo at the link.)

“The first time I came to this studio was 1940 when my father brought me here to show me the stage, and I was about 9 or 10 years old, and I thought, ‘Some day this will all be mine!’ It’s finally come to be – it’s only taken me 92 years to get here!” That’s what five-time Oscar winner and 53-time nominee John Williams said as the curtain was raised on the iconic Sony Pictures Entertainment lot’s newly renamed John Williams Music Building.

Joining in the celebration — and it was a celebration — were Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group Chairman and CEO Tom Rothman, SPE Chairman and CEO Tony Vinciquerra (who made opening remarks), filmmaker J.J. Abrams and of course, Williams’ longtime collaborator Steven Spielberg, who instigated the idea of putting the legendary composer’s name on the building where they have worked on 20 or their 29 films, as Spielberg noted….

(13) SHE’LL BE BACK. Did no one ever tell them that when it comes to a choice between the truth and the legend, print the legend? “Reacher Showrunner Shares the Surprising Story Behind That Terminator 2 Reference” at CBR.com.

Reacher Season 2’s reference to Terminator 2: Judgment Day had nothing to do with the casting of Robert Patrick.

In the second season of the hit Prime Video series, Patrick, who played the T-1000 in Terminator 2, played the role of Shane Langston, a foe to Alan Ritchson’s Jack Reacher. The Season 2 premiere included a cheeky reference to Terminator 2 when Frances Neagley used the alias Sarah Conner, a nod to Linda Hamilton’s Terminator franchise character. When he’s asked by a henchman, “Who’s Sarah Connor?,” Patrick’s Langston replied, “I don’t give a sh*t.” It’s a stark contrast to the character he played in Terminator 2, where killing Sarah’s son was the T-1000’s sole objective.

Per TVLine, showrunner Nick Santora revealed that the Terminator 2 reference was not written in to the show because of Robert Patrick’s casting. Santora wanted to make it clear, noting how “everyone thinks we’re so smart and funny for doing it,” but that the Sarah Connor line was “in there before Robert Patrick came in. I don’t want to lie; that’s the truth.“…

(14) ABOUT UGANDA. Fans are already concerned about the prospects of a Uganda Worldcon bid. Something more to keep in mind: “Ugandan internet propaganda network exposed by the BBC”.

…They all claimed to be Ugandan citizens – often women – whose accounts appeared to have the sole purpose of posting praise for the president and pushing back against critics.

The Ugandan Media Centre, which handles public communications on behalf of the government, did not respond to our requests for comment.

A sprawling network of fake accounts

By analysing those accounts’ behaviour, BBC Verify was able to map out a network of nearly 200 fake social media accounts operating on X and on Facebook (even though the latter has been blocked in Uganda since 2021).

The vast majority of these accounts used stolen images as profile pictures – often social media photos of models, influencers, and actresses from across the world. But none of the usernames used by them appeared to be linked to real individuals in Uganda or Tanzania….

(15) CALLING OUT MAO. Inverse recounts a bit of Chinese sff history in “44 Years Ago, a Revolutionary Sci-Fi Movie Ushered in a New Golden Age For the Genre”.

Imagine a world where scientists are banned from and even persecuted for practicing their research in technological advancement. This was the reality in China during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. Fueled by a desire to remove all forms of capitalism from their society, Mao’s followers destroyed laboratories and burned any literature related to science — including science fiction.

Science fiction author Enzheng Tong wrote Death Ray on Coral Island in 1964 but hid it for fear of being persecuted due to the belief that the genre was created by the West to corrupt the people of China. It wasn’t until 1978, under Xiaoping Deng’s reign, that science and technology became a national priority for the country and Tong published his short story. In 1980, director Hongmei Zhang took this opportunity to adapt Tong’s story into a film — keeping the original’s sense of nationalistic pride while taking other liberties to address the scientific failure of Mao’s rule.

(16) DEBOSE Q&A. “’I.S.S.’ Star Ariana DeBose Talks Shocking Ending, Returning To Broadway” in Variety. Beware spoilers.

“I.S.S.” is a thriller set in outer space, but the creative team was filled with pioneers in their own right. “Blackfish” director Gabriela Cowperthwaite helmed the project, with Oscar winner Ariana DeBose suiting up for the lead role — both creatives playing in a new genre for the first time.

The result is a fleet, pulpy film in which three American and three Russian astronauts are living and working together on an international space station. But things turn dire quickly when their governments declare war on each other and both groups are instructed to commandeer the space station by any means necessary….

What was the most challenging part about filming zero gravity realistically, for nearly the entire film?

Cowperthwaite: I just wanted it to look as real as possible. We tried different contraptions, some of which were a bit more comfortable, but unfortunately for the actors, they didn’t look as good. Now I understand why so many films don’t do zero gravity.

DeBose: To achieve this look and feel, we shot the movie in harnesses that are very tightly secured on our hips. Then there were tethers attached to them. We had about two weeks of training, where we learned how to balance our bodies. It’s very hard, but the especially challenging thing was when we had scenes that involved all six of us. That meant we were all in harnesses, and for every one of us, there were at least two or three people operating. While you don’t see the tethers, they were very much there, so shout out to VFX….

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

Pixel Scroll 11/4/23 Pixels Of The Night, From Pixelated Pixelvania

(1) APPRECIATING A FINE ANTIQUE. James Davis Nicoll has a new assignment for the Young People Read Old SF panel.

This month’s Young People Read Old Hugo Finalists features Bruce Sterling’s 1988 ​“Our Neural Chernobyl”. Sterling was, of course, a grand figure in science fiction at the time, being nominated and winning too many awards to list here. The Hugo was merely one of those awards….

Bruce Sterling’s early works are “old sff” now, but wow, where did the time go….

(2) SENIOR BRITISH DIPLOMAT ON MUSK AND SF. The author of “Does Elon dream of electric sheep?” at Medium is Julian Braithwaite, former Director General for Europe at the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, and past Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the UK Mission to the WTO, UN and Other International Organisations in Geneva.

One of the most interesting revelations from this week’s AI Safety summit in the UK was something I didn’t expect: the role science fiction plays in Elon Musk’s world.

Interesting to me at any rate, as a fan of the genre and what it says about each generation’s concerns and hopes for the future.

Musk is widely considered a voice of caution on AI, eloquently warning about the risks. The famous joint letter in March in which he and others called for a pause in the development of AI frontier models. His penchant for kill switches to shut down rogue AI.

So it was something of a surprise to find him sitting with Prime Minister Sunak on Wednesday, urging people to read Iain M Banks, the Scottish science fiction author, and his “Culture” novels.

Surprising for two reasons. First, because the AI depicted in these novels, the “Minds”, are incredibly powerful but benign partners for humanity, co-creators of a galaxy-spanning utopian civilisation based on individual freedom and superabundance. And second because, in the science fiction of AI, the benevolent Minds are very much an outlier….

(3) CHENGDU WORLDCON ROUNDUP. [Item by Ersatz Culture.]

How to access the online Chengdu Worldcon site from outside China

In Thursday’s Scroll, I wrote about how the con’s online site was no longer accessible outside China.  However, the error message reported by the browser made me think that there might be a workaround, and with the kind assistance of parties who will remain nameless, I can document a process whereby other con members can also regain access.

There is one slight caveat: I’m a Linux user, and haven’t had to touch OS X for over a year, and Windows for several years, so I can only reliably provide instructions for Linux.  I’m sure people who are more familiar with those other operating systems can provide addiitonal help in the comments.  (As for iOS or Android, I have absolutely no idea if or how you might be able implement a similar workaround.)  I’d also not be surprised if there is a more elegant solution to the problem than the one I’ve written up here; again, hopefully others can suggest things in the comments.

Basically, because DNS servers no longer have entries for online.worldcon.com to map it to an IP address, you have to add a manual override.  On a Linux machine, you can edit /etc/hosts to add a line “121.29.37.164 online.chengduworldcon.com” (no quotes) as shown in the screenshot.  You’ll need to do this via sudo, as that file should only be editable by the root user.

(Note that you can’t go directly to https://121.29.37.164/ in your browser; it just comes up with a “Forbidden” error.)

My recollection is that on current versions of OS X, you can do something pretty similar to the Linux /etc/hosts fix, but there’s perhaps some other faffing around you have to do to make sure the networking stack picks up your edits.

For the latest version of Windows that I was familiar with (10 I think?) the hosts file lived at C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts – whether that’s still the case, I have no desire to research into.  You would also need to edit this file with Administrator privileges.

A couple of things to note:

  • Whilst this manual override should be fairly benign, if the DNS record is restored and the site moves to a different IP address, then you wouldn’t be able to access the site, until you remove the override.  (And it should go without saying, you should be very wary about taking advice from random people on the internet about changing your network settings, without having a reasonable understanding about what the change actually does.)
  • Even when you get into the site and the “Live Planet” area where the videos reside, you might not be able to play the “Grasping the Future” video.  This is because the link to the underlying video file is a http:// URL, which by default are blocked when being accessed from https:// pages.  (Filers may remember a pretty much identical problem affecting Voter Packet downloads on the Hugo site…)
  • Related to the “bitrot” comments on that Scroll, just in case something similar happens to the other Chengdu sites, here are their IP addresses:

Con report published on Chinese government science site

This is quite an interesting con report, in that whilst it was published on a Chinese government science website, it’s clear that the author, Cao Wenjun, is a fan.  She covers areas that are of more interest to File 770 readers than the majority of the Chinese media coverage I’ve seen, which focusses more on the showbiz and business aspects of the event.  There’s a long section about what happened with RiverFlow, which is the first time I’ve seen any professional media mention that.

Some extracts (via Google Translate, with minor manual edits):

An insider told me beforehand that late-night snacking is the essence of all science fiction activities. This time I personally participated in them, and suddenly realized that this statement was true.

After the formal activities every day, groups of people in the science fiction circle always gathered together for late-night snacks. Sometimes groups of people who were working separately met each other in the hotel lobby or halfway, and they would gather together to form a larger late-night snack team, as if the stars in the universe attracted each other and converged to form a galaxy. In the circle, everyone was very familiar with each other, and those who have known each other from beforehand will treat each other as brothers. Occasionally, when a new face appears, everyone will get closer to each other immediately. After all, as long as you love science fiction, you’re part of the family. I had a busy schedule during the day and didn’t have much time to look for delicious food, so I experienced almost all the Chengdu delicacies during this trip at these late night snacks. At the late-night snack scene, I was fortunate enough to meet science fiction writers and critics such as Baoshu, [File 770 contributor] San Feng, A Que, Huihu, Xie Yunning, Jiao Ce, Wang Nuonuo, Wu Shuang, Qiyue, and Yang Wanqing [note: I corrected a couple of names there, but I’m sure others will have been mangled by machine translation]…

This international science fiction convention has many foreign writers and science fiction practitioners participating, and we often met them whilst having late-night snacks. Many domestic science fiction writers are also translators of foreign works. Inspired by the spirit of science fiction, everyone communicates smoothly and happily.

Probably because writers are often used to writing at night, even if they attend meetings all day long and eat late-night snacks until midnight, no one seems tired. Everyone raised their glasses and talked freely, congratulating the nominees, congratulating the winners, and congratulating everyone around them, and their drinking levels increased along with the mood. People talked about reading and writing, about work and life, and about the land, and the vast starry sky above their heads. During the night, rain fell, and the shopkeepers put up their awnings. The lights shone on the awnings stained with water drops and on the wet ground. The whole street looked like a spiral arm of the Milky Way, studded with colourful stars. The writers sat around the long table, surrounded by warm mist, chatting, laughing and clinking glasses, creating a dreamlike Chengdu night that will never be forgotten…

[After the Hugo ceremony] when I arrived at the hotel after returning from the hospital, I saw several people getting off the shuttle bus from the venue.  One of them was Hai Ya, who was holding a Hugo Award trophy. The SF people who were at the door of the hotel immediately expressed their congratulations to him, and Hai Ya did not hide his happiness. But I could see from his heavy breathing that he was still in a state of shock beyond belief.

Everyone was sitting around the tea table in the hotel lobby, and the Hugo Award trophy was placed on the tea table, allowing us to watch, touch and admire it. Hai Ya didn’t sit on the sofa, but sat cross-legged on the steps next to it. At that time, I didn’t know that he was wearing his work attire; I just thought that the clothes fit him well, but sitting on the steps like this was a bit strenuous. Someone asked him how he felt at this time. He took a long breath and said that he had imagined this moment when he learned that his story had been shortlisted, but that was just his imagination. It had really happened, and he felt incredible. Someone told him that his real name and workplace had been posted online. Hai Ya shrugged, appearing a little troubled and helpless. He said that when standing in the spotlight, people always have two sides. When you receive an honour, you will also lose something. He mentioned that he always writes after work, so his level of output is not high, but it was just as a kind of adjustment and relaxation. In subsequent news reports, many media asked this question, and he responded in the same way, but it seemed that many netizens did not understand.

What I learned is that most science fiction writers are actually like this. They have their own day jobs. Some are college teachers, some are engineers, some are journalists, and they are from all walks of life. Writing is just their side job…

When asked about how he planned to take such a big and heavy trophy back on the plane, because it might not be allowed on board, Hai Ya said, “Let’s leave it to my publisher. I have to rush back to work first.”  Several writers smiled understandingly on the spot, saying that they had taken a day or two off from work before they could attend the meeting, and they had to go back to work on Monday.

In my opinion, Hai Ya is not very familiar to many people in science fiction circles. He seems to have always fully separated his work life and hobbies, and protected them well. In the end, everyone took turns taking photos with him, including me. It was the first time I had taken a photo with a science fiction writer since attending the conference, and it also fulfilled a long-held wish…

At the venue, I spent some time observing the children who came to the venue. Some of them came with their families, and some came with their schools wearing their uniforms. They looked at everything in the venue with curiosity and excitement, stopped in front of every picture in the science fiction exhibition, and flipped through science fiction novels that they might not fully understand at the book signing counter. When it was getting dark, I saw a mother holding her child and saying she wanted to go home. The child moved reluctantly and asked: “Mom, can you come tomorrow? It’s so much fun here!”

My son is five years old and is very interested in everything related to science. I brought him along this time to let him experience the atmosphere of the World Science Fiction Convention. Like other children, he ran around in the open space on the first floor of the hall, interacted with people cosplaying science fiction characters, watched robots playing drums, experienced science fiction games in the theme exhibition hall, and received souvenirs and ribbons from each booth, looked at paintings drawn by other children, and watching the robot dog for a long time, without ever wanting to leave. When I was listening to a panel where Korean science fiction writers such as Kim Cho-yeop talked about Korean science fiction works, he also slipped into the venue at some point, wearing a simultaneous translator, and listened quietly for a long time. I asked him what he thought of science fiction conventions, and he shouted, “It’s fun!” …

In my opinion, science fiction needs to open its doors and let everyone participate, make it fun for children, and let the public play like children. Perhaps we don’t have to worry that the current science fiction traffic is concentrated on Liu Cixin, because his science fiction works are also an open door. Just like many science fiction authors and science fiction fans in the past started to get into science fiction from “Little Know-it-All Roams the Future”, Liu Cixin’s works are now the beginning of many people’s enlightenment on the road of science fiction, and they are also the future of Chinese science fiction.

What makes me happy is that after five days of reporting daily experiences to my circle of friends, many of them who hadn’t paid much attention to science fiction, began to ask me to recommend some SF novels for introductory reading.  Other friends were very interested in telling me about the science fiction novels they had recently read. I feel that I myself have become a small window of Chinese science fiction, opening up with enthusiasm, calling to and embracing everyone around me.

Xiaohongshu image galleries

I suspect most of the items in this Xiaohongshu image gallery,have already been seen in previous Scrolls, but I don’t think I’ve seen too many of the stamps, which are based on some of the con reports, that were popular amongst kids.

Similarly this one has many familiar sights, but also photos of a wall of Post-Its (I think at the Three-Body Problem event) and some author handprints, neither of which I’d previously encountered.

And this post continues the theme, although there are more photos of the props and exhibits than I’ve usually seen. The accompanying note is a short report that’s also worth reading; here’s the nearly the entire text via Google Translate, with manual edits:

The science fiction conference was fruitful and I was very happy.

The World Science Fiction Convention was really fun. I really gained a lot from those days. I was lucky enough to get autographs from Liu, Sawyer and [German author Brandon Q.] Morris, and saw all kinds of interesting exhibitions… But when it comes to science fiction-related topics, I feel very happy. Especially when participating in the panels, I felt that the atmosphere was super good and everyone was very happy.  After all, SF was a topic that everyone was very interested in but usually can’t find friends to discuss it with. 

The volunteers working the con were are all very friendly students. Not only were they very interested in science fiction, but they were also very passionate. It makes people feel the vitality of young people in the science fiction convention, and also makes people feel the friendliness of the city of Chengdu. 

The musical fountain at the weekend was also particularly good. It performed for half an hour after the Hugo Awards, and was really beautiful.

Although the entire conference did not feel perfect during the organization process, and the venue was indeed too far away. It still took two hours to get to the venue by bus and subway every day, but attending the con will remain an unforgettable memory

(4) CHENGDU CONREPORT BY NEXT YEAR’S GOH. Ken MacLeod, who will be a Glasgow 2024 Worldcon guest of honor, blogs about his experience at this year’s con in China: “Chengdu Worldcon: Meet the Future” at The Early Days of a Better Nation. The post includes many photos.

Last month I spent far too few days in China, at the Chengdu Worldcon, to which I was invited as an international guest. My travel, and accommodation for me and my wife, were covered by the Committee of the 2023 Chengdu World Science Fiction Convention, for which much thanks.

We had a wonderful time. The convention was a smashing success and easily the biggest, and most publicly celebrated, Worldcon ever….

…I took part in a couple of panels, one on Science Fiction and Future Science and one on cyberpunk, and was interviewed on video by an Italian documentary company and on voice recording for the Huawei news website. For two mornings I put in an hour or two at the Glasgow Worldcon stand. Never in my life have I been asked for so many autographs, or to pose with so many people for photographs. Nicholas Whyte, also at the stall, had the same experience, and others did too. Hardly any of the people whose notebooks and souvenirs we signed, or who stood beside us to have their photo taken, could have known who we were: that were overseas visitors with something to do with science fiction was enough. Among the few who did know us were some students from the Fishing Fortress College of Science Fiction in Chongqing. Our enthusiastic reception was nothing to that of Cixin Liu, author of the Three-Body trilogy and the story filmed as The Wandering Earth. His signing queue was like those I’ve seen for Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. Science fiction in China is taken very seriously and sincerely by its fans….

(5) WONKA BIG B.O. ANTICIPATED. [Item by Cat Eldridge.] Oh god, they made a third version! “’Wonka’: Timothée Chalamet Movie Eyes $20M+ Box Office Opening” reports Deadline.

Warner Bros‘ anticipated Paul King-directed feature musical Wonka has hit early tracking six weeks before its release on December 5, with box office analytics film The Quorum predicting a $20 million-$23 million opening. Note it’s still early in the campaign, so there’s potential for upside.

Unlike other tracking services that project three weeks before a movie’s release, Quorum is six weeks ahead.

In regards to Wonka‘s marketing campaign, there is material out there to move the needle: Two official trailers on the Warner Bros YouTube channel measuring at 31M and 9M views each, respectively; and lead star Timothée Chalamet will host Saturday Night Live on November 11 with the actor also on the cover of GQ. In addition, Warners has 17 one-sheets out there for the movie (in billboards, in-theater and online), and if there’s any barometer as to how much a studio is committing to a movie, it’s in the quantity of one-sheet posters….

(6) DOWNFOREVERYONE. “British Library Hit by Apparent Cyberattack” reports the New York Times.

On Saturday, the library was hit by what it is calling a “cyber incident.” Ever since, its website has been down and scholars have been unable to access its online catalog. The library’s Wi-Fi has also stopped working, and staff members haven’t been allowed to turn on their computers. 

In interviews this week, seven regular users of the library — including the author of a forthcoming book on classical music, a University of Cambridge lecturer, two postgraduate students and a Shakespearean scholar — said that the library had essentially gone back to a predigital age.

Now, according to a staff member in the library’s “rare books and music” reading room, ordering a book involves looking up its catalog number in one of several hundred hardback books or an external website, writing that number onto a slip of paper and then handing it to a librarian who, in turn, would check their records to see whether the book was available. Books are only available if they are stored at the main library location.

Any incident at the British Library tends to be high-profile news in Britain. 

Yet the British Library has issued only brief comments about the episode on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. On Tuesday, it posted a statement saying that the library was “experiencing a major technology outage as a result of a cyber incident. This is affecting our website, online systems and services, and some on-site services including public Wi-Fi.”

On Friday, a library spokeswoman said in an email that she could not provide further comment. She did not respond to questions on whether an attack had actually occurred….

(7) MICHAEL WHELAN ON AI-CREATED ART. “What Happens to Illustrators When Robots Can Draw Robots?” in the New York Times.

Michael Whelan has made a career painting aliens, dragons, robots and other fantastical creatures for books covers. While he finds A.I. tools useful for brainstorming, he is also concerned about its impact on younger illustrators….

The first time Michael Whelan was warned that robots were coming for his job was in the 1980s. He had just finished painting the cover for a mass-market paperback edition of Stephen King’s “The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger,” a gritty portrait of the title character with the outline of a tower glimpsed through the haze behind him.

The art director for the project told him to enjoy these cover-art gigs while he could, because soon they would all be done by computers. Whelan dismissed him at the time. “When you can get a good digital file or photograph of a dragon, let me know,” he recalled saying.

For the next three decades, Whelan kept painting covers the old way — on canvas, conjuring dragons, spaceships and, of course, robots for science fiction and fantasy giants including Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury and Brandon Sanderson.

Over time, Whelan forgot the art director’s name, but not his words. Now, he said, the day he was warned about is here. Robots have already started taking book illustration jobs from artists — and yes, they can paint dragons.

Over the past few months, users working with A.I. art generators have created hundreds of images in Whelan’s style that were slightly altered knockoffs of his work, he said, forcing him to devote considerable time and resources to getting the images removed from the web.

“As someone who’s been in this genre for a long time, it doesn’t threaten me like it does younger artists who are starting out, who I have a lot of concern for,” Whelan said. “I think it’s going to be really tough for them.”

While much of the discussion in publishing around generative artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT has focused on A.I.’s unauthorized use of texts for training purposes, and its potential to one day replace human authors, most writers have yet to be directly financially affected by A.I. This is not true for the commercial artists who create their book covers….

(8) FEARS OF THE FIFTIES. You can view “Atomic Attack”, an adaptation of Judith Merril’s novel Shadow on the Hearth, originally aired on The Motorola Television Hour in 1954.

In this sobering film, a family living 50 miles outside of New York must escape the fallout from a nuclear bomb dropped upon the Big Apple.

(9) MARVEL STUNTMAN DIES IN CAR CRASH. “’Avengers’ stuntman dies in car crash along with two children” at USA Today.

Taraja Ramsess will always be remembered by those who knew him best as a loving brother, a devoted father and a hard-working stuntman. 

The “Black Panther” stuntman was killed alongside two of his children in a car crash on Halloween night on an Atlanta highway, according to reporting by local affiliate WSB-TV.

The 41-year-old was making his way back home with his children around 11 p.m. when he crashed into a tractor-trailer that had broken down near an exit on the left-hand side of the highway….

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born November 4, 1912 Wendayne Ackerman. She was the translator-in-chief of 137 novels of the German space opera series Perry Rhodan, the majority published by Ace Books. She left Germany before WWII to escape anti-Semitism, working as a nurse in France and London. After the war she emigrated to Israel where she married her first husband and had a son. Following their divorce she moved to LA in 1948, and soon met and married Forrest J Ackerman. (Died 1990.)
  • Born November 4, 1917 Babette Rosmond. She worked as an editor at the magazine publisher Street & Smith, editing Doc Savage and The Shadow in the late Forties. Rosmond’s first story, co-written by Leonard M. Lake, “Are You Run-Down, Tired-“ was published in in the October 1942 issue of Unknown WorldsError Hurled was her only genre novel and she only write three short genre pieces. (Died 1997.)
  • Born November 4, 1920 Sydney Bounds. Writer, Editor, and Fan from Britain who was a prolific author of short fiction, and novels — not just science fiction, but also horror, Westerns, mysteries, and juvenile fiction. He was an early fan who joined Britain’s Science Fiction Association in 1937. He worked as an electrician on the Enigma machine during World War II, and while in the service, he started publishing the fanzine Cosmic Cuts. The film The Last Days on Mars (an adaptation of “The Animators”) and the Tales of the Darkside episode “The Circus” are based on stories by him. In 2005, two collections of his fiction were released under the title The Best of Sydney J. Bounds: Strange Portrait and Other Stories, and The Wayward Ship and other Stories. In 2007, the British Fantasy Society honored him by renaming their award for best new writer after him. (Died 2006.)
  • Born November 4, 1934 Gregg Calkins. Writer, Editor, and Fan. Mike Glyer’s tribute to him reads: “Longtime fan Gregg Calkins died July 31, 2017 after suffering a fall. He was 82. Gregg got active in fandom in the Fifties and his fanzine Oopsla (1952-1961) is fondly remembered. He was living in the Bay Area and serving as the Official Editor of FAPA when I applied to join its waitlist in the Seventies. He was Fan GoH at the 1976 Westercon. Calkins later moved to Costa Rica. In contrast to most of his generation, he was highly active in social media, frequently posting on Facebook where it was his pleasure to carry the conservative side of debates. He is survived by his wife, Carol.” (Died 2017.)
  • Born November 4, 1953 Kara Dalkey, 70. Writer of YA fiction and historical fantasy. She is a member of the Pre-Joycean Fellowship (which if memory serves me right includes both Emma Bull and Stephen Brust) and the Scribblies. Her works include The Sword of SagamoreSteel RoseLittle Sister and The Nightingale. And her Water trilogy blends together Atlantean and Arthurian mythologies. She’s been nominated for the Mythopoeic and Otherwise Awards. 
  • Born November 4, 1953 Stephen Jones, 70. Editor, and that is putting quite mildly, as he went well over the century mark in edited anthologies edited quite some time ago. The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror accounts for eighteen volumes by itself and The Mammoth Book of (Pick A Title) runs for at least another for another dozen. He also, no surprise, to me, has authored a number of horror reference works such as The Art of Horror Movies: An Illustrated HistoryBasil Copper: A Life in Books and H. P. Lovecraft in Britain. He’s also done hundreds of essays, con reports, obituaries and such showing up, well, just about everywhere. He’s won a number of World Fantasy Awards and far too many BFAs to count. 

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal brings a robot to debate how people with emotions interact with people without emotions.
  • Tom Gauld’s x-ray vision finds the truth is out there.

(12) CATGPT? “’AI can teach us a lot’: scientists say cats’ expressions richer than imagined and aim to translate them” in the Guardian.

If an unexpected meow, peculiar pose, or unusual twitch of the whiskers leaves you puzzling over what your cat is trying to tell you, artificial intelligence may soon be able to translate.

Scientists are turning to new technology to unpick the meanings behind the vocal and physical cues of a host of animals.

“We could use AI to teach us a lot about what animals are trying to say to us,” said Daniel Mills, a professor of veterinary behavioural medicine at the University of Lincoln.

Previous work, including by Mills, has shown that cats produce a variety of facial expressions when interacting with humans, and this week researchers revealed felines have a range of 276 facial expressions when interacting with other cats.

(13) IMPACT FACTOR. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] This week’s Nature cover story is “Impact Factor”.

The cover shows an artist’s impression of the collision between the protoplanet Theia and proto-Earth about 4.5 billion years ago. It has been suggested that it was this ‘Giant Impact’ that formed the Moon, but direct evidence for the existence of Theia remains elusive. In this week’s issue, Qian Yuan and his colleagues present combined results from simulations of the impact and mantle convection to explain why two large regions in Earth’s deepest mantle differ seismically and could be 2–3.5% denser than the surrounding mantle. The researchers suggest that the two dense areas are the remains of Theia’s iron-rich mantle that sank and accumulated above Earth’s core 4.5 billion years ago, surviving there throughout Earth’s history.

Primary research here “Moon-forming impactor as a source of Earth’s basal mantle anomalies”

(14) MARVELOUS MINI-MOON. [Item by Steven French.]  “Mini moon: Nasa spacecraft discovers asteroid orbited by its own tiny satellite” in the Guardian.

In one of the smallest, but still exciting, discoveries by Nasa in recent years, a spacecraft visiting a minor asteroid way out in the solar system has discovered that the chunk of space rock has its own tiny sidekick.

The spacecraft, called Lucy, was visiting asteroid Dinkinesh when it made the unexpected find of a moon companion.

The discovery was made during Wednesday’s flyby of Dinkinesh, 300m miles away in the main asteroid belt beyond Mars. The spacecraft snapped a picture of the pair when it was about 270 miles out.

In data and images beamed back to Earth, the spacecraft confirmed that Dinkinesh is barely a half-mile (790 meters) across. Its closely circling moon is a mere one-tenth of a mile (220 meters) in size.

Nasa sent Lucy past Dinkinesh as a rehearsal for visiting the bigger, more mysterious asteroids out near Jupiter.

Launched in 2021, the spacecraft will reach the first of these so-called Trojan asteroids in 2027 and explore them for at least six years. The original target list of seven asteroids now stands at 11.

Dinkinesh means “you are marvelous” in Ethiopia’s Amharic language….

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Matt O’Dowd over at PBS Space Time this fortnight takes a look at “How Will We (Most Likely) Discover Alien Life?”

The first discovery of extraterrestrial life will almost certainly NOT be when it visits us, nor when we visit it. It won’t be when we see its stray TV signals. It’ll be in the excruciatingly faint changes in the color of alien sunsets glimpsed hundreds of light years away. Today we’re going to talk about the first such hint, why it’s probably not aliens, and why there’s a tiny chance that it still might not not be aliens.

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

Pixel Scroll 2/26/23 If You’re Scrolling To Fan FifthFrisco, Be Sure To Wear Some Pixels In Your Hair

(1) TYPE FROM THE FEDERATION JOB BOX. [Item by Olav Rokne.] The typography of Star Trek has a more interesting history than I realized. 

(2) SHAKEN, NOT STIRRED. On the heels of the Roald Dahl controversy, Variety reports the “James Bond Novels Edited to Remove Racist Content”. The linked article includes examples.

A report in U.K. newspaper The Telegraph reveals that ahead of the reissue of the Bond novels in April to mark 70 years of “Casino Royale,” the first book in the series, rights holders Ian Fleming Publications Ltd commissioned a review by sensitivity readers.

Each book will carry the disclaimer, “This book was written at a time when terms and attitudes which might be considered offensive by modern readers were commonplace. A number of updates have been made in this edition, while keeping as close as possible to the original text and the period in which it is set,” The Telegraph said….

(3) AHEAD OF ITS TIME. The New Yorker reveals “What a Sixty-Five-Year-Old Book Teaches Us About A.I.” You’ve probably even read this book. I know I did. I just don’t remember anything about it.

…On the other, what’s the point of asking anyone to write anything anymore?

Luckily for us, thoughtful people long ago anticipated the rise of artificial intelligence and wrestled with some of the thornier issues. I’m thinking in particular of Jay Williams and Raymond Abrashkin, two farseeing writers, both now deceased, who, in 1958, published an early examination of this topic. Their book-the third in what was eventually a fifteen-part series-is “Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine.” I first read it in third or fourth grade, very possibly as a homework assignment….

(4) A QUICK VISIT TO 1963. Sff writers were among those who responded to these questions posed by a student in 1963: “Document: The Symbolism Survey” an article from The Paris Review (2011).

In 1963, a sixteen-year-old San Diego high school student named Bruce McAllister sent a four-question mimeographed survey to 150 well-known authors of literary, commercial, and science fiction. Did they consciously plant symbols in their work? he asked. Who noticed symbols appearing from their subconscious, and who saw them arrive in their text, unbidden, created in the minds of their readers? When this happened, did the authors mind?…

…The answers to the questionnaire were as varied as the writers themselves. Did Isaac Asimov plant symbolism in his work? “Consciously? Heavens, no! Unconsciously? How can one avoid it?” Iris Murdoch sagely advises that “there is much more symbolism in ordinary life than some critics seem to realize.” Ayn Rand wins the prize for concision; addressing McAllister’s example of symbolism in The Scarlet Letter, she wrote, “This is not a definition, it is not true—and, therefore, your questions do not make sense.” Kerouac is a close second; he writes, “Symbolism is alright in ‘Fiction’ but I tell true life stories simply about what happened to people I knew.” The apologies Bruce received from secretaries—including those of John Steinbeck, Muriel Spark, and Ian Fleming—explaining that they were traveling and unable to respond were longer than that.

Science-fiction writers—most notably Fritz Leiber, Lloyd Biggle Jr., Judith Merril, and A. J. Budrys—were the most expansive. Biggle sent a lengthy letter and then, nearly a year later, sent further thoughts. In the second letter, he advised McAllister to read an essay by Mary McCarthy, “Settling the Colonel’s Hash,” saying, “You will not want to do any kind of article on symbolism until you have read [this] … You will find much good material there, as well as an emphatic reinforcement for your viewpoint.” (McCarthy sent the same advice herself.) Judith Merril’s response is heavily mired in linguistics; she offers McAllister a chart to illustrate her semantic overview….

(5) MEMORY LANE.

1968[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

The Beginning for the Scroll this time is from Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonflight which was published by Ballantine Books in 1968. It won no Awards but “Weyr Search” which is the short story that started off this series won a Hugo at BayCon.

It led me to try to remember decades on just how far I got in that series. I know I got as far as the Harper Hall sub-series which means I got through the first six novels but I don’t remember going any further. For those of you who read deeper, what followed those novels? 

I thought those novels were splendid with interesting characters, both human and dragon, and a wonderfully realized setting, though I admit I’ve not revisited it so I don’t know how the Suck Fairy and her steel shod boots would treat them if I was to do so now given I was in my twenties when I last read them, thus over forty years ago. 

So now here’s that Beginning…

WHEN is a legend legend? Why is a myth a myth? How old and disused must a fact be for it to be relegated to the category “Fairy-tale”? And why do certain facts remain incontrovertible while others lose their validity to assume a shabby, unstable character? 

Rukbat, in the Sagittarian sector, was a golden G-type star. It had five planets, and one stray it had attracted and held in recent millennia. Its third planet was enveloped by air man could breathe, boasted water he could drink, and possessed a gravity that permitted man to walk confidently erect. Men discovered it and promptly colonized it. They did that to every habitable planet, and then—whether callously or through collapse of empire, the colonists never discovered and eventually forgot to ask—left the colonies to fend for themselves. 

When men first settled on Rukbat’s third world and named it Pern, they had taken little notice of the stranger-planet, swinging around its adopted primary in a wildly erratic elliptical orbit. Within a few generations they had forgotten its existence. The desperate path the wanderer pursued brought it close to its stepsister every two hundred (Terran) years at perihelion. 

When the aspects were harmonious and the conjunction with its sister planet close enough, as it often was, the indigenous life of the wanderer sought to bridge the space gap to the more temperate and hospitable planet. 

It was during the frantic struggle to combat this menace dropping through Pern’s skies like silver threads that Pern’s tenuous contact with the mother planet was broken. Recollections of Earth receded further from Pernese history with each successive generation until memory of their origins degenerated past legend or myth, into oblivion.

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born February 26, 1908 ­Tex Avery. An animator, cartoonist, director and voice actor beyond compare. Without him, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd and Porky Pig would not have existed. Avery’s influence can be seen in Animaniacs and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. (Died 1980.)
  • Born February 26, 1918 ­Theodore Sturgeon. Damn, I hadn’t realized that he’d only written six novels! More Than Human is brilliant and I assumed that he’d written a lot more long for fiction but it was short form where excelled with more than two hundred stories. I did read over the years a number of his reviews — he was quite good at those. (Died 1985.)
  • Born February 26, 1921 ­Bill Evans. First Fandom member who wrote a number of important works. With Bob Pavlat, Evans edited/published the Evans-Pavlat Fanzine Index during the Fifties, which he followed up with Index of Science Fiction Magazines 1926 – 1948 that Bob Petersen co-wrote. With Francis T. Laney, Evans published Howard Philips Lovecraft (1890-1937): A Tentative Bibliography. His final work was with Ron Ellik, The Universes of E. E. Smith. (Died 1985.)
  • Born February 26, 1945 ­Marta Kristen, 78. Kristen is best known for her role as Judy Robinson, one of Professor John and Maureen Robinson’s daughters, in the original Lost in Space. And yes, I watched the entire series. Good stuff it was. She has a cameo in the Lost in Space film as Reporter Number One. None of her other genre credits are really that interesting, just the standard stuff you’d expect such as an appearance on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
  • Born February 26, 1948 ­Sharyn McCrumb, 75. ISFDB lists all of her Ballad novels as genre but that’s a wee bit deceptive as how genre strong they are depends upon the novel. Oh, Nora Bonesteel, she who sees Death, is in every novel but only some novels such as the Ghost Riders explicitly contain fantasy elements. If you like mysteries, highly recommended.  Now the Jay Omega novels, Bimbos of the Death Sun and Zombies of the Gene Pool are genre, are great fun and well worth reading. They are in print which is interesting as I know she took them out of print for awhile.
  • Born February 26, 1958 ­Karen Berger, 65. She created the Vertigo imprint at DC, and served as the line’s Executive Editor for a decade. Some of my favorite works there are Fables, Hellblazer, Preacher, 100 Bullets and V for Vendetta. She currently runs Berger Books, an imprint of Dark Horse Comics.
  • Born February 26, 1963 ­Chase Masterson, 60. Fans are fond of saying that she spent five years portraying the Bajoran Dabo entertainer Leeta on Deep Space Nine which means she was in the background of Quark’s bar a lot. Her post-DS9 genre career is pretty much non-existent save one-off appearances on Sliders, the current incarnation of The Flash and Star Trek: Of Gods and Men, a very unofficial Tim Russ project. She has done some voice work for Big Finish Productions as of late.
  • Born February 26, 1965 ­Liz Williams, 58. For my money, her best writing by far is her Detective Inspector Chen series about the futuristic Chinese city Singapore Three, its favorite paranormal police officer Chen and his squabbles with Heaven and Hell. I’ve read most of them and recommend them highly. I’m curious to see what else y’all have read of her and suggest that I read.

(7) COMICS SECTION.

  • Get Fuzzy has a cat’s attempt to improve on Rodgers & Hammerstein. Doesn’t yours do this?

(8) LISTEN IN. Episode 5 of the Anime Explorations Podcast is “Today’s Menu for the Emiya Family”.

This month, Tora, David, and Alexander kick off the inaugural installment of Fate-uary with a discussion of our background with the franchise, and a look at Today’s Menu for the Emiya Family.

Today’s Menu for the Emiya Family is available for streaming on Crunchyroll: https://www.crunchyroll.com/series/GRP8KG9VR/todays-menu-for-the-emiya-family
The manga is available through RightStuf (Affiliate Link): https://www.shareasale.com/m-pr.cfm?merchantID=65886&userID=1469344&productID=1211531609

(9) KID$ LIT. I’ve owned a lot of these books — not these pricey editions, of course: “The world’s most valuable children’s books” from AbeBooks.

Are the books from your childhood packed in boxes in the basement? Old children’s books can be valuable if they are the right edition in the right condition. And condition is so important when considering children’s literature. Youngsters can love a book too much, reading it again and again, which results in extreme wear and tear. Crayon or pen markings, and torn or lost dust jackets all reduce the value of a book….

The biggest price tag is attached to —

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

Top of the pile is The Hobbit – the book that launched the fantasy genre – and we’re talking about the 1,500 first edition copies published in the UK on 21 September 1937 by Allen & Unwin. These copies are hard to find. If you discover one then it’s the equivalent of Bilbo Baggins finding Gollum’s ring in the depths of the goblin mountain. Peter Jackson’s movies and the Amazon Prime series have helped to maintain interest in Tolkien’s work.

Most expensive copy to sell on AbeBooks – a 1937 first edition sold for $65,000 in 2003.

Affordable alternative – The Harry Abrams 1977 deluxe illustrated edition, with artwork from Arthur Rankin Jr and Jules Bass, is gorgeous, and prices range from $90 to $350.

(10) VIDEO GAME MOVIE TRAILER OF THE DAY. “First trailer for Tetris movie could not be more ’80s if it tried” says MSN.com.

Apple has released the first trailer for its movie Tetris, which tells the extraordinary true story of the struggle between Western publishers, Nintendo, and the Soviet Union itself for the rights to Alexey Pajitnov’s classic puzzle game.

Taron Egerton plays Henk Rogers, the gaming entrepreneur who was instrumental in discovering Tetris and securing the console gaming rights, thus enabling its release on Nintendo’s then-revolutionary Game Boy handheld. To do so, he had to negotiate directly with the Soviet regime, since Communist law dictated that the game belonged to the people of the Soviet Union (read: the government) rather than Pajitnov himself. All sorts of Cold War skullduggery ensued….

[Thanks to Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Olav Rokne, Daniel Dern, Jennifer Hawthorne, Alexander Case, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]

Pixel Scroll 2/11/23 Do Pixels Prefer Coke Or Pepsi? No, It’s Scroll Soda For Them

(1) ONE ARTIST, INDIVISBLE. Charlie Jane Anders’ latest Happy Dancing newsletter is about “J.K. Rowling and ‘Separating the Art from the Artist’”.

… And that’s the thing : JK Rowling is the public face of the “Wizarding World.” She owns it and exercises complete control over it, and it’s pretty much impossible to talk about Harry Potter or the Fantastic Beasts movies without referencing her. In fact, she’s gone to great lengths to make her art inseparable from herself. Other authors seem to fade into the background a little bit more, especially as their books and adaptations get more and more prominence. I know tons of people who obsess about Murderbot, but who don’t know that much about Martha Wells, for example. JK Rowling made a choice to center herself in the discussion of her work, starting with how her “rags to riches” story was used to market her novels….

(2) MARSCON. Cass Morris has a wise commentary on the outcome of the MarsCon kerfuffle: “All* Are Welcome (*terms and conditions may apply)”. (What Morris means by DARVO can be learned from “A guide to DARVO, the gaslighting response people give when they’re called out” at Metro News.)

… a MarsCon regular guest very mildly voiced a concern, on FB, over whether or not he was the right choice for a con that claimed to want to be inclusive.

This GOH, and others like him, do not respond well to such statements. When they hear “Some people choose not to be around you because they find you unpleasant,” they perceive it as an attack, and they determine that a rabidly vitriolic response is not only warranted but necessary. (Again, DARVO).

The GOH wasted no time, it seems, in calling in his flying monkeys to harass the person who voiced concern, swiftly turning the FB threads into an unqualified shitshow. MarsCon responded by shutting down all comments and, rather than addressing the concerns that had just been proved entirely valid, doubling-down on their support for their aggressive GOH.

A whole choice.

MarsCon then made the choice to post a new “Interim Online Policy” claiming that “MarsCon is as it has always been an apolitical Science Fiction and Fantasy Convention. It is the firm stance of MarsCon that personal politics should be left outside of the convention. It will not allow itself to used as a place for anyone to try and forward their personal political views.”

There’s more to the statement and the word “political” is doing some heavy lifting throughout….

(3) PREPPER. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] This is great fun from BBC Radio 4. Be prepared for the end of the world. “Prepper, Series 1, The Kit in Your Head”. Pearl Mackie plays one of the leads.

Trump. ISIS. The Courgette Crisis. Signs of civilisation’s fragility are all around. No wonder the Doomsday Clock just nudged closer to midnight. In this fearscape, more and more ordinary people are wondering how they’d cope if everything we take for granted (law and order, access to healthcare, iceberg lettuces in Sainsburys) was taken away.

(4) ENGLAND SWINGS SF. Martin Wisse asks “Is it possible to buy too much science fiction?” at Wis[s]e Words. The answer is, not if the book has been on your want list forever.

…Among that stack of paperbacks is the perfect example of what I mean: Judith Merril’s England Swings SF, a book I’ve spent literal decades looking for. A book I’ve known about, have read about for decades I yesterday finally got to hold in my hands. England Swings SF is an incredibly important book in the history of science fiction. A key work of the New Wave, a defining statement of what New Wave science fiction was all about. It’s Judith Merril’s defining work, the jewel in the crown of her work as an editor. You know how important and controversial it was just from the publisher writing its own introduction washing its hands of the whole thing.

Though it may seem strange now, the New Wave was revolutionary, was controversial because it set out to deliberately undo science fiction’s dogmas, both literally and politically. Worse, as it originated in the UK and its most important early writers were British like Moorcock, Ballard and Aldiss, it also upset the natural order of America as the centre of the SF universe. When England Swings SF was released in 1968, the controversy had been raging for almost half a decade between the upstarts and the SF establishment…. 

(5) AI: A CREATOR’S TOOL OR RIVAL? Jason Sanford has put together a new column on what AI generated art and writing programs might mean for artists and authors. The column includes some predictions on how all this might play out in the coming years. “Genre Grapevine on What AI Generated Art and Writing Might Mean for Artists and Authors” a public post on Patreon.

… So far OpenAI hasn’t been very open about the works their programs are trained on.

The same with Midjourney, whose founder David Holz recently said he didn’t seek consent from living artists or those with work still under copyright because it was essentially too hard to do that. And don’t think this is a small issue – in an interview with Forbes, Holt admitted Midjourney was trained on at least a hundred million images without consent.

Because these AIs were trained on works by living artists, this can result in the programs creating images based on their art. For example, Deb JJ Lee discovered that someone had crafted an AI model to create art similar to Lee’s own distinctive work. Worse, when Lee pushed back on their art being used in this way, they were accused of being a “gatekeeper.”

As Lee said, “I never hide how I draw. I teach classes and share *everything*, from my layer structure to my inspirations to Gradient mapping. At Lightbox this year I would show my original files to ppl who come to my table to demonstrate how I do everything. I’m the opposite of a gatekeeper.”

Despite that, Lee was essentially blamed by a number of supporters of AI programs for daring to question the use of their own art in the training of machine learning programs.

It’s almost like, as Alasdair Stuart said, “the entire system is powered by artists but devalues them in every way.”…

(6) GRANTING AI UNLIMITED RIGHTS? At Writer Beware, Victoria Strauss considers the AI implications in contractual language: “Findaway Voices, Machine Learning, and the New Rights Frontier”.

Audiobook creation service Findaway Voices has become a popular alternative to Audible’s ACX, especially in the wake of #Audiblegate (the controversy over ACX’s author-penalizing returns policies that has generated at least one lawsuit).

In the past few days, though, authors and narrators have been drawing attention to this paragraph from Findaway’s Digital Distribution Agreement, which grants Apple–a third party–a license to use the rights holder’s audiobook files for “machine learning”, aka AI training…

…Unsurprisingly, there are now multiple lawsuits. Microsoft, Github, and Open AI are being sued for copyright-related issues over Github’s AI-powered coding assistant, Copilot. A group of artists has filed a class action suit against Stability AI (owner of Stable Diffusion), Midjourney, and DeviantArt for copyright violation and unlawful competition. Getty Images is also suing Stability AI, alleging that it scraped millions of copyright-protected images from Getty’s database. On a different side of the issue, computer scientist Steven Thaler is suing to overturn the US Copyright Office’s determination that AI art can’t be copyrighted. There will no doubt be much more legal action to come….

(7) NED BEAUMAN INTERVIEW. “Ned Beauman: ‘After reading Terry Pratchett, it feels like something is missing from most fiction’” in the Guardian.

My favourite book growing up
I devoured The Colour of Magic and at least 20 other Terry Pratchett novels as a child and consequently have never got over the feeling that there’s something pretty fundamental missing from nearly all “grown-up” fiction (ie jokes).

The book that changed me as a teenager
We perhaps expect novelists to feel a reverent fascination with human consciousness, how miraculous it is, sacred, ineffable, unique etc. But if you read too much Greg Egan at an impressionable age, all of that gets absolutely napalmed. A book like Permutation City is dangerous (and mind-expanding) stuff.

(8) EUGENE LEE OBITUARY. The New York Times profiles a stage and TV figure whose work you may have been seeing for years: “Eugene Lee, Set Designer for Broadway and ‘S.N.L.,’ Dies at 83”. “He won Tony Awards for Wicked and other shows while also overseeing the sets for the late-night franchise’s fast-paced sketch comedy.”

For decades it was possible for Saturday night theatergoers in New York to get a double dose of Eugene Lee’s work, though it’s likely that few would have realized they were doing so. They might have taken in “Sweeney Todd,” “Ragtime,” “Wicked” or other Broadway shows whose striking sets were designed by Mr. Lee, then could arrive home in time to tune into “Saturday Night Live” — a show for which he served as production designer when it began in 1975, and on which he was still working this season….

(9) MEMORY LANE.

1971[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

I’m very, very fond of SF genre short stories as I like them because they are often distilled versions of longer takes. Larry Niven I think in his prime wrote some of the best genre short stories ever done. 

He won Hugos for them — “Neutron Star”, “Inconstant Moon” and “The Hole Man” to be precise.  A collection, Convergent Series, one of my favorite collections to read, won a Locus Award.  Not bad at all. 

Not so with this story, Niven’s “For A Foggy Night” which was first published in the All the Myriad Ways collection published by Ballantine Books in 1971. 

Niven like the idea of alternative worlds and I believe wrote more than ones of these stories with another story I really like being “All Myriad Ways”.  It’s wonderfully done story that I won’t spoil as I suppose it’s possible that someone here hasn’t read it yet but to say that it has a great narration, fascinating story and a conclusion that makes perfect sense. 

And now the Beginning… 

The bar was selling a lot of Irish coffee that night. I’d bought two myself. It was warm inside, almost too warm, except when someone pushed through the door. Then a puff of chill, damp fog would roll in.

Beyond the window was grey chaos. The fog picked up all the various city lights: yellow light leaking from inside the bar, passing automobile headlights, white light from1971 frosted street globes, and the rainbow colors of neon signs. The fog stirred all the lights together into a cold grey-white paste and leaked it back through the windows.

Bright spots drifted past at a pedestrian’s pace. Cars. I felt sorry for the drivers. Rolling through a grey formless limbo, running from street globe to invisible street globe, alert for the abrupt, dangerous red dot of a traffic light: an intersection; you couldn’t tell otherwise . . . I had friends in San Francisco; there were other places I could be. But it wasn’t my city, and I was damned if I’d drive tonight.

A lost night. I’d finished my drink. One more, and I’d cross the street to my hotel.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born February 11, 1908 Tevis Clyde Smith. He’s a curious story indeed as he collaborated on three short stories with Robert E. Howard. Those stories are “Red Blades of Black Cathay”, “Diogenes of today” and “Eighttoes makes a play”. ISFDB suggests that he might have written other short stories and poetry. Anyone encounter these? (Died 1984.)
  • Born February 11, 1910 L. T. C. Rolt. English writer whose enthusiasm for heritage railways is writ large in his 1948 Sleep No More collection of supernatural horror stories which tend to be set in rural railways. (Simon R. Green may be influenced by him in his Ghost Finders series which often uses these railways as a setting.) Some of these stories were adapted as radio dramas.  Sleep No More is available from the usual digital suspects. (Died 1974.)
  • Born February 11, 1926 Leslie Nielsen. I know the comic, bumbling fool who delighted generations of film goers. But his first starring role was as Commander John J. Adams in one of the finest SF films of all time Forbidden Planet. I am most decidedly not a fan of his later films but I think he’s brilliant here. (Died 2010.)
  • Born February 11, 1939 Jane Yolen, 84. She loves dark chocolate. That I know as I just sent her some a few weeks ago. She wrote me into a novel as a character, an ethnomusicologist in One-Armed Queen to be precise in exchange for finding her a fairytale collection she wanted. Don’t remember now what it was other than it was very old and very rare. My favorite book by her is The Wild Hunt, and I love that she financed the production of Boiled in Lead’s Antler Dance which her son Adam Stemple was lead vocalist on. And yes she’s on the chocolate gifting list as well.
  • Born February 11, 1948 Robert Reginald. He’s here because of two Phantom Detective novels he wrote late in his career which are mostly popcorn literature. (The Phantom Detective series started in 1936 so he used the Robert Wallace house name.) He has two series of some length, the Nova Europa Fantasy Saga and War of Two Worlds. Much of what he wrote is available from the usual digital sources. (Died 2013.)
  • Born February 11, 1950 Alain Bergeron, 73. He received an Aurora Award for Best Short Story for “Les Crabes de Vénus regardent le ciel” published In Solaris number 73, and a Sideways Award for Alternate History for “Le huitième registre” (translated in English as “The Eighth Register” by Howard Scott).
  • Born February 11, 1953 Wayne Hammond, 70. He’s married to fellow Tolkien scholar Christina Scull. Together they’ve done some of the finest work on him that’s been done including J. R. R. Tolkien: Artist and IllustratorThe Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s CompanionThe Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book and The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • Eek! imagines what would happen if Skywalker Sr. was analyzed by Ancestry.com.
  • The Argyle Sweater mines Harry Potter for a horrible pun. Which of course I had to share.

(12) INSCRIBED TO THE DEDICATEE. Macmillan and HBG just raised starting salaries to $45,000. So you could say eBay is asking a year’s salary for this dedication copy of Rocket Ship Galileo signed by Heinlein. (Well, two Heinleins, actually.)

The dedication copy of the author’s first published novel, signed and inscribed by Robert A. Heinlein in the year of publication “with best wishes to my nephew Lawrence Lewis ‘Buddy’ Heinlein [signed] Robert Heinlein Nov. 1947” with an arrow pointing to Buddy’s printed name on the dedication page. Additionally signed by Lawrence Lewis Heinlein as “L. L. Heinlein” on the front free endpaper. Lawrence was the son of Robert’s brother.

(13) IT’S A WRAP! [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] This week’s Nature cover story has nothing on Boris Karloff. “How to make a mummy”.

The cover shows sarcophagi used to house the mummified remains of Ancient Egyptians in the Saqqara region of Egypt. Although the existence of mummies is well known, the details of how ancient embalmers practised their art have remained largely obscure. In this week’s issue, Maxime Rageot, Philipp Stockhammer and their colleagues draw on finds from an embalming workshop in Saqqara that dates to around 664–525 BC to reveal many of the details of the process. The researchers analysed 31 ceramic vessels found in the workshop. By combining biochemical analyses of the residues in the vessels with the inscriptions, such as “to be put on his head”, featured on many of them, they were able to establish which chemicals were used and how they were mixed, named and applied. The researchers also note that some of the embalming substances were imported from the Levant or even from south or southeast Asia, indicating that mummification might have helped to promote long-distance trade.

(14) FOOD: GHOSTLY OR GHASTLY? It’s Saturday, and today this sounded amusing enough to put in a Scroll: Ghostbusters: The Official Cookbook by Jenn Fujikawa and Erik Burnham.

Who you gonna call… to eat?! Featuring more than 50 recipes inspired by the beloved Ghostbusters 1984 film and continuing into present day with Ghostbusters: Afterlife, this cookbook celebrates the bold personalities of Egon, Venkman, Zeddemore, and Stantz, along with the spooks, spectres, and ghosts that tried to transform New York City to a Babylonian dystopia.

But they’re not alone — they’ve got company with a new generation of Ghostbusters like Phoebe, Trevor, Podcast, and Lucky that saved Summerville, Oklahoma from the second coming of Gozer! In fact, it’s Podcast’s, well, podcast that inspires this book! Now he and Ray are combing through the Ghostbusters archives and recording new episodes to bring the group’s favorite new and old foods to delicious life.

With luscious full-color photography and packed with the fun and spirit of the films, Ghostbusters: The Official Cookbook is a must-have for foodies and paranormal investigative fans alike.

(15) CLOUDS OF WITLESS. Sure, this couldn’t backfire: “There’s a Radical Plan to Cool the Earth With … Moon Dust” at Popular Mechanics.

A long time ago (in every sense of the phrase), a Mars-sized celestial object named “Theia” smacked into Earth and formed our moon. Now, 4.5 billion years later, scientists want to put that moon back to work by using its dust to cool down its fever-induced planetary neighbor.

Scientists from the University of Utah suggest that “ballistically eject[ing]” millions of pounds of lunar dust around Earth could help deflect the sun’s rays and cool down the planet. The idea follows similar solar geoengineering concepts like ejecting reflected sulfur dioxide (SO2) into the stratosphere to gain the same sun-reflecting benefits (but with less potential health concerns).

However, this research is decidedly more sci-fi as it would likely require lunar infrastructure, electromagnetic cannons, and even orbital space platforms. The results of the study were published in the journal PLOS Climate….

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

Pixel Scroll 1/22/23 Look At My Fingers: Four Pixels, Four Scrolls. Zero Pixels, Zero Scrolls!

(1) SPLATTERPUNK AWARDS DEADLINE RESET. Brian Keene and Wrath James White announced on Facebook that they have extended until January 29 the last date that readers can recommend eligible works at [email protected].

…Given that readers sent in recommendations ALL YEAR LONG, we assumed the community was aware.

Obviously, we were wrong about that. And we apologize for that. We would like to assure authors who expressed disappointment about this that there were indeed recommendations already made. And that is a very good thing. Six years into this process, that’s exactly what the community needs to see — that readers are recommending your work without you reminding them or drawing it to their attention.

To further address the communities concerns, Wrath and I have decided to pause the tallying process and reopen the nominations for another 7 days. We will accept recommendations for WORKS PUBLISHED IN 2022 until midnight on Sunday, January 29th. That way, everyone who has expressed concerns has the opportunity to inform their readers and fans.

So, again… the process has been extended to next Sunday. Email your recommendations to [email protected]. After next Sunday, we will then again be accepting recs for works published in 2023.

Our apologies for any stress or duress this may have caused, and our appreciation to those who expressed their concerns in good faith….

(2) MERRIL CENTENARY. [Item by Olav Rokne.] Toronto Public Library (which IIRC is actually the largest library system in North America?) posted a celebration of Judith Merril yesterday to mark her centennial. “100 Years of Judith Merril, Science Fiction Writer and Editor” at The Buzz…About Books.

… At the same time that Merril was publishing novels, she was getting more involved in editorial and review work. This book collects and reflects upon Merril’s editorial and non-fiction work. In particular, “her twelve Year’s Best anthologies, her thirty-eight ‘Books’ columns from F&SF, and three particularly important essays.” These works were originally published between 1956 and 1969. This period marks Merril’s shift from authorship to her editorial career.

To support her daughter Ann, who created artwork and posters in support of Eugene McCarthy, Judith Merril attended the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. Tensions were high due to the Vietnam War. After Merril witnessed the police response to the anti-Vietnam War protestors, she decided that she and her family needed to leave the United States. At the convention, a copy of the Toronto Anti-Draft Manual caught Merril’s attention. She had a friend in Toronto, a mathematics professor, and with their aid moved to Canada. She legally changed her name to Judith Merril when she become a Canadian citizen….

(3) SF ON SNL. Last night’s Saturday Night Live had two genre related segments:

(4) LOTS TO MEND. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Jeremy Renner, the MCU‘s Hawkeye, is back home after his snowplow accident. The latest pic and information released by the actor shows him undergoing PT at home and letting it be known that over 30 bones were broken in the incident. “Jeremy Renner Says His ’30 Plus Broken Bones’ Will ‘Mend’ After Accident” reports People.

…The actor, 52, shared a post on Instagram Saturday morning of himself in a bed receiving what appeared to be physical therapy.

In the caption of his post, Renner wrote, “Morning workouts, resolutions all changed this particular new years …. Spawned from tragedy for my entire family, and quickly focused into uniting actionable love.”

The Mayor of Kingstown star then said that he wanted “to thank EVERYONE for their messages and thoughtfulness for my family and I …. Much love and appreciation to you all.”

“These 30 plus broken bones will mend , grow stronger, just like the love and bond with family and friends deepens,” Renner concluded. “Love and blessings to you all…”

(5) NOVELIST SEEN FROM THE INSIDE. [Item by Steven French.] Co-screen writer of Matrix Resurrections revealed to be a massive Liverpool fan! “Aleksandar Hemon: ‘A book isn’t a car – not everything has to work’” in The Guardian.

…Tell us about your work as a screenwriter.
The sovereignty of being in my head as a novelist is enjoyable but gets burdensome. Lana and David are good friends with brilliant minds different from mine and there’s relief in that: whenever I watch The Matrix Resurrections, at no point do I think: “That’s mine, I did this,” because I never did it alone. So what I get out of screenwriting – apart from the money, which is nice – is doing something with others. The traditional bourgeois concept of literature is that it’s a way to be alone; there’s a Jonathan Franzen book of essays called How to Be Alone. But I don’t want to be alone. I want to be with people….

(6) FREE READ. Sunday Morning Transport encourages subscriptions with a sample by Benjamin C. Kinney: “The Work-Clock”.

(7) SFF PUPPETRY. “‘The Immortal Jellyfish Girl’ Review: A 26th-Century Love Story” in the New York Times.  

The first time Bug and Aurelia kiss is as romantic as can be, even if Bug has to get past his initial reaction. “That really hurts,” he says. “That stings so much!” Which is what you get when smooching a part-jellyfish humanoid.

Aurelia is the title character of “The Immortal Jellyfish Girl,” though if 23andMe still exists in her postapocalyptic world, it might locate traces of kangaroo, frog, naked mole rat and other beasties in her makeup. Above all, “she is also 100 percent puppet,” as the narrator, a mischievous masked fox in shorts and red tails, informs us.

Kirjan Waage and Gwendolyn Warnock’s play, devised with help from the ensemble and presented by Wakka Wakka Productions and the Norwegian company Nordland Visual Theater at 59E59 Theaters, is indeed a puppet show, and an ambitious one at that….

(8) MEMORY LANE.

2014 [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

One of my absolutely favorite works is Seanan McGuire’s Ghost Roads series. It’s a perfect example of how excellent McGuire is as a writer with splendid, believable characters, especially Rose Marshall, the hitchhiking ghost who was a sixteen-year old prom date who never actually made it to her prom but was killed on her way there and now hitchhikes forever on America’s highways, both the real ones and the ghosts ones, a absolutely fascinating setting and a compelling story that McGuire has developed oh so very well across three novels.

(There is also three shorter pieces set here, “Good Girls go to Heaven”, “Train Yard Blues” and “The Ghosts of Bourbon Street”.) 

One of those settings is the Last Dance Diner that exists on the Ghost Roads. Of it Rose says that, “When you die on the road, if you’re lucky, a phantom rider or a hitchhiking ghost will be there, waiting, to offer you directions to the Last Dance Diner. Best malts this side of the 1950s, pie to die for, and best of all, a chance to rest, for just a little while, before moving on . . . and everyone moves on, in the end.”

So the quote I’ve chosen is from the first novel of the series, Sparrow Hill Road, and concerns that Diner:  

They have good beer here, these routewitches do, and their grill is properly aged, old grease caught in the corners, the drippings of a hundred thousand steaks and bacon breakfasts and cheeseburgers scraped from a can and used to slick it down before anything starts cooking. The plate they bring me groans under a triple-decker cheeseburger and a pile of golden fries that smell like summer nights and stolen kisses—and they smell, even before the platter hits the table.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born January 22, 1858 Charles H. M. Kerr. He’s best remembered for illustrating the pulp novels of H. Rider Haggard. Some of his other genre-specific work includes the Andrew Lang-edited The True Story Book, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Wrong Boxand Arthur Conan Doyle‘s  “The Sign of the Four”. You can see the one of the H. Rider Haggard novels he did here. (Died 1907.)
  • Born January 22, 1906 Robert E. Howard. He’s best remembered for his characters Conan the Barbarian and Solomon Kane, less so for Kull, and is widely regarded as the father of the sword and sorcery subgenre. His Cthulhu mythos stories are quite good. I believe all of these were publish in Weird Tales.  If you’re interested in reading him on your slate, you’re in luck as all the usual suspects are deep stockers of him at very reasonable prices. (Died 1936.)
  • Born January 22, 1925 Katherine MacLean. She received a Nebula Award for “The Missing Man” novella originally published in Analog in 1971. She was a Professional Guest of Honor at the first WisCon. Short fiction was her forte and her two collections, The Diploids and Other Flights of Fancy and The Trouble with You Earth People, are brilliant. I can’t speak to her three novels, all written in the Seventies and now out of print, only Missing Man is available from the usual suspects, and I’ve not read it. (Died 2019.)
  • Born January 22, 1934 Bill Bixby. Principal casting in several genre series, first in My Favorite Martian as Tim O’Hara, a young newspaper reporter for the LA Sun who discovers that alien, and then as Dr. David Banner in The Incredible Hulk seriesand in both The Incredible Hulk Returns and The Death of the Incredible Hulk films.  He shows up in a number of other genre series including Fantasy IslandTales of the UnexpectedNight GalleryThe Ghost & Mrs. Muir and The Twilight Zone (original version). He also had the lead as Anthony Blake / Anthony Dorian in The Magician series but as he was a stage illusionist, I couldn’t count it as genre… (Died 1993.)
  • Born January 22, 1940 John Hurt. I rarely grieve over the death of one individual, but damn it I really liked him. It’s rare that someone comes along like Hurt who is both talented and is genuinely good person that’s easy to like. If we count his role as Tom Rawlings in The Ghoul, Hurt had an almost fifty-year span in genre films and series. He next did voice work in The Lord of the Rings (1978) as the voice of Aragorn, and later voiced General Woundwort in seven episodes of the Watership Down TV series.. He appeared as Kane, the first victim, in Alien (and had a cameo in Spaceballs parodying that performance.) Though not genre, I must comment his role as Joseph Merrick in The Elephant Man — simply remarkable. He had the lead as Winston Smith in 1984. He narrates Roger Corman’s Frankenstein Unbound and will later be one of two of the narrators of Jim Henson’s The Storyteller. That role is simply magnificent. Ok, I’m just at 1994. He’s about to be S.R. Hadden in Contact. Did you remember he played Garrick Ollivander in Harry Potter films? You certainly remember him as Trevor Bruttenholm in the Hellboy films, all four of them in total. He’s in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull asDr. Harold Oxley, one of the few decent things about that film. Series wise, he’s been around. I’ve got him in Spectre, a Roddenberry occult detective pilot that I’ve not seen. On the Merlin live action series, he provides the voice of the Great Dragon. It’s an amazing role for him. And fitting that he’s a dragon, isn’t it? And of course, he played The War Doctor. It, despite the brevity of the screen time, was a role that he seemed destined to play. Oh, for an entire series of stories about his Doctor! Big Finish, the audiobook company, had the singular honor of having him flesh out his character in a series of stories that he did with them just before his death. I’ve heard some, they’re quite remarkable.  If I’ve missed anything about him that you feel I should’ve touched upon, do tell me. (Died 2017.)
  • Born January 22, 1965 Diane Lane, 58. I’ve got her as Ellen Aim in Streets of Fire which I count as genre. She’s Chief Judge Barbara Hershey in Judge Dredd, a film I’ll freely admit that I actually like because it catches the pop culture feel of the 2000 A.D. comics in a way the second film doesn’t. Next up for her is playing Mary Rice in Jumper. She’s been playing Martha Kent in the DC Universe films as of late.
  • Born January 22, 1969 Olivia d’Abo, 54. She makes the Birthday Honors list for being Amanda Rogers, a female Q, in the “True Q” episode on Next Generation. Setting that gig aside, she’s got a long and extensive SFF series history. Conan the DestroyerBeyond the StarsAsterix Conquers AmericaTarzan & Jane and Justice League Doom are some of her film work, while her series work includes Fantasy IslandBatman BeyondTwilight Zone, Eureka and Star Wars: The Clone Wars.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

  • The Argyle Sweater was recommended by Rich Lynch because he thinks John Hertz will love it. Maybe you will, too?
  • Marmaduke keeps watching the skies – and it pays off!

(11) I’M SORRY, I’LL READ THAT AGAIN. Brian Keene says the says in his weekly Substack he’s been sorting through his and J.F. Gonzalez’s archives for things that will go to the University of Pittsburgh. In the middle of a paragraph this line caught my eye:

…There are some gems among the correspondence — letters between Richard Laymon and myself, letters between Robert Bloch and Jesus….

Well, Jesus was Gonzalez’s first name. But I knew Robert Bloch and for a moment I flashed on what seemed an unexpected discovery from his fertile imagination.

(12) DISNEY’S STAR WARS PLANS IN TROUBLE? [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Some aspects of Disney’s acquisition of Star Wars IP are working out great for them; others not so much. Because of underwhelming box office for several films, the concept of theatrical release for a movie a year has faltered. Partially counterbalancing that, the small screen Star Wars series on Disney+ have proved a buffer. 

Star Wars theme park attractions seem to be doing great business, but it now develops that the Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser theme hotel—where 2-night immersive experiences start at mid-four-figures—will be sitting empty part of the time. Disney has canceled several “voyages“ in July, August, and September. People who had already booked for those dates have been offered a 50% discount if they will accept a different date.

TheStreet.com has the full story. “Disney’s Huge Star Wars Bet May Be in Big Trouble”.

… “A number of our readers have also noticed Facebook posts which advertise the Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser and include lesser known characters. There appear to be quite a few “absolutely loved this” posts from people claiming they were guests on the Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser which if you look at their profiles have no info at all, no town, school, or jobs. This leads us to question their authenticity,” Theme Park Tourist alleged.

Overall, the cancellations are more troubling than potential fake reviews. It’s possible that Disney built an attraction with tremendous appeal, but a limited audience due to price and little reason for people to visit more than once. You can take your family on a Disney Cruise for 7 nights for less than what Galactic Starcruiser costs and that’s a lot easier to justify than a two-day trip.

(13) CLEANING UP AROUND THE HOUSE. Get your Digital Dishcloth: “May Godzilla Destroy This Home Last”.

PROTECTION FROM A GIANT LIZARD – This house blessing towel will definitely keep Godzilla from destroying your or your friend’s house! And not only that, it is also the perfect home decor for all lo

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] The genie makes it genre. The cat makes it perfect (???) for File 770. “Ryan George Compilation Part 1”.

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Steven French, Rich Lynch, Olav Rokne, Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jamoche.]

Pixel Scroll 12/9/21 They’d Rather Be Scrolled

(1) DIANA RIGG ESTATE. Bonhams is auctioning the Estate of the Late Dame Diana Rigg on December 14 starting at 10:00 GMT . You can inspect items online by using the search in this link: “Bonhams : Collections: Including: The Contents of Stanley House, The Estate of the Late John Schaeffer, The Estate of the Late Dame Diana Rigg”.

AN ITALIAN GUNNER’S STILETTO DAGGER

Early 17th century
With sharply tapering blade of triangular section graduated on one side from ‘1’ to ‘120’, hilt comprising writhen swelling iron quillons and pommel, and swelling writhen dark horn grip en-suite and set with numerous brass nails, 40cm (15 3/4in) long

(2) STOP AND SHOP. DisCon III has posted the Dealers Room Map for those who will be physically present.

(There also will be a Virtual Dealer’s Room.)

(3) CAN’T EVEN PREDICT THE PRESENT. In WIRED, Canadian sf writer Madeline Ashby denounced cyberpunk as antiquated. “It’s Time to Reimagine the Future of Cyberpunk”.

CYBERPUNK IS LIKE cyberspace: instantly recognizable, but so ubiquitous as to be intangible. An aesthetic movement and a commentary on capitalism, it can be a genre, a subjectivity, an adjective, a political approach, a time period. (Though the same could be said of the words Renaissance or Victorian.) It can tackle artificial intelligence, embodied identity, digital immortality, or simply, in the case of Pat Cadigan’s Synners, whether a marriage can survive electronic pornography addiction. Like the best fiction, cyberpunk still slips on like a pair of fingerless gloves, even if—in the 21st century, partially situated in the future it imagined—it’s hard to see where fiction ends and reality begins….

… Considering the world has caught up with, if not surpassed, the genre’s imagination, its place in fiction might be limited, or limiting, in the way that rehashing Tolkien might be limiting for a fantasy writer. This is one of the challenges of telling a future-set story: Eventually time catches up, like a rubber band snapping back into shape. And sometimes it stings. Readers often assume that authors are happy when they “predict” future events “correctly,” but rarely are we asked about the queasy feeling of watching one’s worst vision come to pass. Describing his debut novel for CrimeReads, Lincoln Michel says, “The Body Scout is an attempt to replace the ‘cyber’ in cyberpunk with flesh and look at what happens when the human body becomes the major realm of technological innovation and corporate control … These days, the greatest dystopian novel might be the evening news.”…

(4) HEX. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In the Financial Times behind a paywall, Sarah Hemming reviews Hex, a musical adaptation of “Sleeping Beauty” now playing at Britain’s National Theatre.

The theatre’s seasonal family show, Hex. is a new musical that flips the story (of Sleeping Beauty), reaching beyond the ‘happily ever after’ to give Princess Rose a chance to make some decisions and furnishing the prince with a back-story (his mother is an ogre with a taste for human flesh).

But most notably, Hex shifts the focus of the tale.  Here the ‘wicked fairy’ gets to tell her side of the story; it turns out that Fairy (played by Rosalie Craig) is not a mean old ratbag, but a lonely and loveable little comic oddball who longs to do good.  Rather than setting out to do mischief, she is summoned to the palace by an exhausted king and queen who are desperate to get their daughter to sleep.  What happens next depends on the subtle distinction between a blessing and a hex and is a mistake Fairy spends the next century trying to repair.

(5) CAN YOU DIG IT? [Item by Mlex.] Map a tunnel through the center of the earth in a 4D visualization. Another app you never knew you needed, and you do: SuperTunnel Simulator.

SuperTunnel is an educational tool that simulates a hole through Earth, indicating where in the world you would end up if you were to dig in a certain direction

(6) WHERE DOES THE EXPANSE GO FROM HERE? “The Expanse Season 6 Interview: Short Season, Future Plans?” at Gizmodo.

Cheryl Eddy, io9: If you had to sum up season six with a single overarching theme, what would it be?

Daniel Abraham: The necessity of normal people to do the good thing in order to get us through. I mean, so much of this is about not just one hero—not just finishing up a conflict with two guys having a fistfight on a catwalk. [It’s about] everybody just being a little bit better in order to make things better, recognizing people’s humanity, recognizing people’s place, giving room to each other, giving respect to each other—the kind of banal goodness that actually makes society better.

Naren Shankar: I think recognizing the inherent humanity in others is really part of the season in the big way. I’m trying to remember what we wrote on the board [in the writer’s room]. Remember we always would write the theme…

Ty Franck: Normally we would have had a theme looking at us every day as we worked. And this was the first year we didn’t do that. So now we’re just fumbling around like dumbasses [laughs].

(7) BURY ME NOT ON THE LONE PRAIRIE. Yahoo! reports “’Cowboy Bebop’ Canceled at Netflix After One Season”.

… The 10-episode series failed to find much love upon its debut, with both critics and audiences alike largely split on it. The show holds just a 46% critical approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 54% audience approval. In her review for Variety, Caroline Framke wrote “Netflix’s live-action remake of ‘Cowboy Bebop’ tries to be so much all at once, and appeal to so many different potential audiences, that it ends up struggling to forge an identity of its own….

(8) OCTOTHORPE. In Octothorpe episode 46, John Coxon is afraid, Alison Scott is in Portugal, and Liz Batty is an absolute unit. They discuss Smofcon, and Worldcon site selection, and picks. “And in the middle we have a worryingly serious conversation about COVID that you can skip if you want to.”

Listen here! “Is My Head Extremely Solid, Or What”.

(9) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.

2006 [Item by Cat Eldridge.] Fifteen years ago at L.A. Con IV where Connie Willis was the Toastmaster, Serenity, the film that wrapped up the short-lived Firefly series, won the Hugo for  Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form. Other nominated works that year were Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-RabbitThe Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the WardrobeBatman Begins and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Most critics agreed with Hugo voters, with Roger Ebert in particular saying that it was “made of dubious but energetic special effects, breathless velocity, much imagination, some sly verbal wit and a little political satire.” Unfortunately, the box office for it was dismal as it made forty million against production costs of, ooops, forty million. Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give it a near perfect ninety-one percent rating. 

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born December 9, 1900 Margaret Brundage. An illustrator and painter who is now remembered chiefly for having illustrated Weird Tales. Here is her first cover for them.  She’s responsible for most of the covers for between 1933 and 1938. Wiki claims without attribution that L. Sprague de Camp and Clark Ashton Smith were several of the writers not fond of her style of illustration though other writers were. She’d win the the Retro Hugo at CoNZealand for Best Professional Artist after being nominated four times before. And she’s a member of the First Fandom Hall of Fame. (Died 1976.)
  • Born December 9, 1902 Margaret Hamilton. Most likely you’ll remember her best as The Wicked Witch and her counterpart in Kansas in The Wizard of Oz. She would appear later in The Invisible Woman, along with much later being in 13 Ghosts, a horror film, and a minor role in The Night Strangler, a film sequel to The Night Stalker. (Died 1985.)
  • Born December 9, 1934 Judi Dench, 87. M in a lot of Bond films. Aereon in The Chronicles of Riddick, Queen Elizabeth in Shakespeare in Love which is at least genre adjacent, Society Lady in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and Miss Avocet in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. Her very first genre film in the late Sixties, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, was poorly received by critics and I recall her role being a mostly nude and sexy faerie.  No, I’m not mentioning Cats. Really I’m not.
  • Born December 9, 1944 Eric Saward, 77. Script editor and screenwriter during the Sixth Doctor’s time. He wrote “Earthshock”, “Resurrection of the Daleks” and “Revelation of the Daleks”.  He was forced to resign because he was blamed for numerous scenes of graphic violence and darker themes during the first season of the Sixth Doctor.
  • Born December 9, 1952 Michael Dorn, 69. Best remembered for his role as  the Klingon Worf in Trek franchise. Dorn has appeared on-screen in more Star Trek episodes and movies as the same character than anyone else. He also played at least one other character in the Trek universe. Though rumored to be appearing in the second season of Picard, that is not happening after all. In that, he joins a long list of actors so rumored. 
  • Born December 9, 1953 John Malkovich, 68. I was pondering if I was going to include him then decided that his performance in Being John Malkovich, which won him a New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Supporting Actor, was enough for me to include him. What a strange role that is! He also shows up in the dreadful Jonah Hex film and played Edward ‘Blackbeard’ Teach in the Crossbones series which is at least genre adjacent. He also appeared in Mutant Chronicles, though, and there was The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as well.
  • Born December 9, 1970 Jennifer Brozek, 51. She picked up a Hugo nomination at Sasquan for Best Editor Short Form for the Beast Within 4: Gears & Growl steampunk anthology (she also edited numbers 2 and 3 in the series). Her novel The Last Days of Salton Academy garnered a Stoker nomination.
  • Born December 9, 1970 Kevin Hearne, 51. I have really enjoyed the Iron Druid Chronicles in its audio narrative form.  Though I’ll confess that I’ve not yet read the spin-off series, Oberon’s Meaty Mysteries I’m planning to. Yeah it really, really does exist. Sausages figure prominently, a given as Oberon is a canine. 

(11) SCROLL TITLE EGOBOO. [Item by Daniel Dern.] This (substitute “your name” for YOURNAMEHERE, of course) seems to find (many) previous winners. (https://file770.com/?s=%22contributing+editor+of+the+day+YOURNAMEHERE%22&submit=Search) or, from the top of a scroll, in the search box, including the double-quotes “contributing editor of the day YOURNAMEHERE”.

Depending on your name, you might get some false positives, since OGH sometimes tweaks the fullname, e.g. “Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Streetcar-Named-Dern”, which is why I’ve just used my first name in my search string.

(12) YOUR JEOPARDY! HOSTS. It’s not forever, but they’re sticking around for now. “’Jeopardy!’: Mayim Bialik, Ken Jennings to Host Rest of Season 38”.

Mayim Bialik and Ken Jennings, who have been sharing hosting duties for season 38 following the Mike Richards debacle, will continue to serve in the same capacity into 2022. Producers Sony Pictures Television said Wednesday that the duo will remain hosts through the end of the syndicated game show’s current 38th season, which ends July 29. 

(13) BURSTING FORTH. In the Washington Post, Steven Zeitchik says that “3-D anamorphic outdoor ads” are about to become reality.  Amazon has begun advertising “The Wheel of Time” on Oceazn Outdoors’s 3-D  billboards in Picadilly Circus and  Times Square.  These ads could eventually be personalized based on “what a sensor picks up from passerrby.” “A ‘Wheel of Time’ 3D image could be the future of advertising”.

…Two weeks ago, the British agency that worked on the “Wheel of Time” spot, Amplify, brought it to Times Square. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

In that ad, actress Rosamund Pike, whose character Moiraine represents “the light,” reaches out her hand, beckoning for help. The Fade, an agent of “the darkness,” reaches out his mouth, looking for a city bus to devour. The effect can give passersby the impulse to duck and is a leap ahead of the area’s famous steaming cup of soup.

(14) NOT UNDEAD YET. Reboots: Undead Can Dance by Mercedes Lackey, just named as the 2021 SFWA Grandmaster, and Cody Martin, author of the Secret World Chronicle braided novel series, and two previous entries in the Reboots series, was released by Caezik Notables on November 30.

Say hello to Humph the Boggart, the principled, down-on-his-luck private detective, Skinny Jim the zombie, and Fred the werewolf, in this film noir style space opera.

Humans aren’t alone anymore—in fact, they share a planet with undead and near-dead beings, living in…semi-harmony, depending on who you ask!

This is the world of Reboots—where zombies, vampires, and werewolves live side-by-side with humans, taking whatever jobs they can in order to coexist peacefully. So, what better job to give almost-dead or dead beings, than one that consists of no air, cosmic radiation, and a lack of life-sustaining essentials?

In comes a cast of interesting, unique, and downright paranormal creatures as they travel through space.

(15) ADMIRATION SOCIETY. Scalzi was amused, too, and retweeted this discovery:

(16) ‘TOON BID. The facetious “Saskatoon in 2067 WorldCon Bid Progress Report 2021” begins —

Progress has been smooth, if nonexistent, on getting things in place for our filing (anticipated by the World-con Business meeting of 2062 at the latest.

We are making early preparations for a restaurant guide for the event, but have little luck identifying restaurateurs willing to commit to deals, menus, locations, or existing, in 2067.

We are currently seeking co-chair, preferably who will be under the age of 80 for the con, so born after 1987. There are a couple of candidates at the moment, but so far the youngest interested party is Jukka Halme, who will be 100 at the time of the con….

Read the whole thing at the link.

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Take a virtual tour of the Toronto Library’s “Spaced Out: 50 Years of the Merril Collection” exhibit, continuing through December 31 (more info here.)

This video is a guided tour of the library’s exhibit, Spaced Out: 50 Years of the Merril Collection, in the TD Gallery at the Toronto Reference Library, an exhibit showcasing some of the exciting, strange and wonderful things held by our Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation & Fantasy.

The Merril Collection dates back to 1970, when science-fiction author and editor Judith Merril donated 5,000 books to Toronto Public Library to found what was at first called the “Spaced Out Library”.

Visit the exhibit to learn more about the collection and speculative fiction, the literature of the “what-if.” This kind of literature explores the outer reaches of human imagination — our most spectacular dreams and darkest fears.

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Chris Barkley, Mlex, Michael J. Walsh, Kent Pollard, Daniel Dern, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Steve Davidson. This is the first in his suggested series “The Hugo Pixel Scroll Winners.”]

Pixel Scroll 1/28/21 And I Looked And Behold A Pale Pixel, And Their Name Who Sat On Them Was ´Scroll Title´

(1) ALL THAT JAZZ. Elle M. has a fascinating commentary on the difference between worldbuilding and lore. Thread starts here. A few quotes follow —

They also use the author of Harry Potter as a compelling example of where lore gets injected at the expense of worldbuilding.

(2) TRENDY PLACES. Sarah Gailey’s Stone Soup blog is hosting “Building Beyond,” an “ongoing series about accessible worldbuilding. Building a world doesn’t have to be hard or scary — or even purposeful. Anyone can do it. To prove that, let’s talk to both a writer and a non-writer about a worldbuilding prompt.” For “Building Beyond: Robot Dating”, editor Brian J. White and writer Suzanne Walker imagine where they’ve gone on a date with a giant robot.

Gailey’s dry synopsis should make you very curious to read the post:  

…Brian’s date is the foundation of a story about a robot who is learning to live in the world, and who just so happens to be inhabiting a city of decadences. Suzanne’s date is the beginning of a world in which robots and humans regularly go out together, and frogs have learned to cater to the complicated ecosystem of needs that arise in such relationships. 

(3) UNDER THE HARROW. Constance Grady and Vox’s critic at large Emily VanDerWerff undertake a “Harrow the Ninth discussion: profound grief and terrible puns” at Vox.

Constance Grady: I have a hard time working out exactly how I feel about volume two of this trilogy. Harrow the Ninth is a trickier book than Gideon the Ninth, in the same way that bitchy, conniving Harrow is a trickier protagonist than sweet basic jock Gideon.

First of all, there’s the problem of tone. Gideon mined enormous amounts of tension and humor out of the contrast between its lurid goth world and Gideon’s straightforward “it looks like a sword, I want to fight it” worldview and her dirty jokes. That’s part of what helps puncture the grandiosity of Muir’s worldbuilding and keep everything feeling accessible and human-scale, no matter how complicated the mythology might be.

But Harrowhark worships all the lurid skeletal nonsense around her with a religious intensity, and she considers boning jokes prurient. So the easy laughter of the first volume fades away: The jokes are meaner in Harrow than they were in Gideon, and darker….

(4) MRS. PEEL, WE’RE NEEDED. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In the January 23 Financial Times, Peter Aspden writes about the 60th anniversary of British TV series The Avengers, which was first broadcast in January 1960.

The plots (of The Avengers), in the meantime, got crazier.  In 1967’s ‘Epic,’ from the fifth season, Peel is kidnapped by a Teutonic film director named ZZ von Schnerk, who is filming a movie called The Destruction Of Emma Peel, for which he needs to kill her in real, or reel, life.  The self-referntiality was off the scale, now.  ‘Gloat all you like, but I am the star of his picture, says captive Peel to the villiainous director, and anyone interested in meta-texts.

Like so many of the fashions of the 1960s, Rigg only lasted a couple of seasons. She left to star in her own Bond Film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, in which she showed that her range extended further than understated self-mockery (in fairness, she had also already played Cordelia opposite Paul Scofield’s Lear) by providing one of the franchise’s few genuinely heartbreaking endings.  Peel’s farewell to Steed was itself a rare poignant moment, a peck on the cheek with a final piece of womanly advice:  ‘Always keep your bowler on it times of stress.  And watch out for diabolical masterminds.’

(5) SPLATTERPUNK AWARDS. [Item by Dann.] Nominations are open for the 2021 Splatterpunk Awards through February 14.  Brian Keene and Wrath James White have been experiencing….ummm…difficulties in getting valid nominations.  Someone nominated HP Lovecraft who, being dead, is ineligible.  Also, he hasn’t published anything new in the last year.  Also, also, he hasn’t published anything that is close to being Splatterpunk.

Midnight Pals over on Twitter has the theoretic exchange where Brian and Wrath try to explain how this is supposed to work.  (I’m pretty sure that Dean Koontz didn’t nominate HP Lovecraft.)

The awards will be presented during a ceremony at the 2021 Killercon Convention, taking place in Austin, Texas.

In addition to the Splatterpunk Awards, author John Skipp will receive this year’s J.F. Gonzalez Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to the field.

(6) FLOWER POWER. Galactic Journey’s Vicki Lucas encounters a classic of the Sixties: “[January 28, 1966] The Book as Rorschach Test (Flowers for Algernon)”.

…Try as I might, I have great difficulty thinking of this novel as a science-fiction story. It could be conceived of as a psychological thriller, but no one dies except a mouse. It is deeply psychological and delves as far into the brain as anyone can get right now, accepting Freudian analysis as routine, while it is Jung’s “individuation” that the main character, Charlie Gordon, seeks without a guide except for his reading.

…I recommend this book, no matter its genre, and hope that anyone who reads it finds him- or herself touched by the plight of both those who are “exceptional” on the low end and those “exceptional” on the high end.

What will you see in it?

I see five stars.

(7) TAPPING INTO TED WHITE. Fanac.org posted a second installment of Ted White’s livestreamed interview, conducted by John D. Berry.

Ted White has been a science fiction fan for over 70 years, as well as an artist, fanzine editor and publisher, professional writer, editor and jazz critic. Interviewer John D. Berry has known Ted for more than 50 years. 

In part 2 of the January 23, 2021 interview, Ted talks about how he began writing professional science fiction, and the influence of Marion Zimmer Bradley, Terry Carr, Bob Tucker and others. There are anecdotes of the New York Fanoclasts and of how the bid for the 1967 NyCon3 came about. 

Ted discusses “The Club House” column in Amazing Stories, responsible for bringing many into fandom in the early 1970s, and speaks of his many fanzine collaborations, along with challenges along the way. This Zoom interview was very well received by all the attendees, who clamored for more. Look for the next part of the interview.

(8) WATER UNDER THE BRIDGE. Camestros Felapton risked his eyeballs – will you? “I watched Star Trek – Lower Decks”.

…Pitched as humorous, adult-orientated animated series in the Star Trek universe, the series creator is Mike McMahan, a lead writer from Rick and Morty. However, the show’s humour is both less crude and less imaginative than that show, indeed overall it pitches itself at ‘amusing’ rather than ‘funny’. The obvious comparison is with The Orville, rather than Galaxy Quest or John Scalzi’s Redshirts….

(9) IMAGINARY PAPERS. ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination has published the fifth issue of Imaginary Papers, a quarterly newsletter on science fiction worldbuilding, futures thinking, and imagination. (Use this link to subscribe for future issues.)

Issue #5 features writing from games critic Emma Kostopolus, on the space opera game Mass Effect 3 (2012), and writer and educator Malik Toms, on John Sayles’ The Brother from Another Planet (1984), as well as a piece from me about the collection Scotland in Space (2019).

 (10) MEMORY LANE.

  • 2000 — Twenty one years ago at Chicon 2000, Galaxy Quest, a DreamWorks film, would win the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation. It would edge out The Matrix (which lost by just three votes), The Sixth SenseBeing John Malkovich and The Iron Giant. It was directed by Dean Parisot. Screenwriters David Howard and Robert Gordon worked off the story by David Howard. It’s considered by many Trekkies to the best Trek film ever made. 

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born January 28, 1820 – Vilhelm Pedersen.  First illustrator of Hans Christian Andersen; a hundred twenty-five in the five-volume 1849 edition.  Indispensable like Tenniel’s for Lewis Carroll.  Here is “The Top and Ball”.  Here is “The Flying Trunk”.  Here is “Hyldemor”.  Here is “Thumbelina”.  (Died 1859) [JH]
  • Born January 28, 1834 – Sabine Baring-Gould.  Anglican priest, author of fiction, folklorist.  Grandfather of the Holmes scholar.  Wrote “Onward, Christian Soldiers” (music by Sir Arthur Sullivan).  This edition including Curious Myths of the Middle Ages and Were-wolves appeared recently.  (Died 1924) [JH]
  • Born January 28, 1929 Parke Godwin. I’ve read a number of his novels and I fondly remember in particular Sherwood and Robin and the King. If you’ve not read his excellent Firelord series, I do recommend you do so. So who has read his Beowulf series? (Died 2013.) (CE)
  • Born January 28, 1931 – Komatsu Sakyô.  (Personal name last, Japanese style.)  Leading Japanese SF author.  Most famous for Japan Sinks.  Two shorter stories in this collection.  Author Guest of Honor at Nippon2007 the 65th Worldcon – of which, incidentally, you can see my report here (PDF).  (Died 2011) [JH]
  • Born January 28, 1957 – Joanne Findon, Ph.D., age 64.  Assistant Professor of English at Trent Univ. (Peterborough, Ontario).  Two novels for us.  “I blame my two lifelong passions – writing fiction and studying the past – on … Lloyd Alexander.”  More here.  [JH]
  • Born January 28, 1959 Frank Darabont, 62. Early on, he was mostly a screenwriter for horror films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream WarriorsThe Blob and The Fly II, allminor horror filmsAs a director, he’s much better known as he’s done, The Green MileThe Shawshank Redemption and The Mist.  He also developed and executive-produced the first season of The Walking Dead. He also wrote Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein that I like a lot. (CE) 
  • Born January 28, 1961 – Michael Paraskevas, age 60.  Illustrator and animation producer.  With his mother Betty, books and television Maggie and the Ferocious BeastMarvin the Tap-Dancing Horse.  MP encouraged BP, which I think is cool.  A score of books, some with her, some not.  Spaceships and many other things at MP’s Website.  [JH]
  • Born January 28, 1981 Elijah Wood, 40. His first genre role is as Video-Game Boy #2 in Back to the Future Part II. He next shows up as Nat Cooper in Forever Young followed by playing Leo Biederman In Deep Impact. Up next was his performance as Frodo Baggins In The Lord of The Rings and The Hobbit films. Confession time: I watched the very first of these. Wasn’t impressed.  He’s done some other genre work as well including playing Todd Brotzman in the Beeb’s superb production of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. (CE) 
  • Born January 28, 1985 Tom Hopper, 36. His principal genre role was on the BBC Merlin series as Sir Percival. He also shows up in Doctor Who playing Jeff during the “The Eleventh Hour” episode which would be during the time of the Eleventh Doctor. He’s also Luther Hargreeves in The Umbrella Academy which is an adaptation of the comic book series of the same name, created by Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá. (CE) 
  • Born January 28, 1986 – Dame Jessica Ennis-Hill, age 35.  This historic champion track & field athlete has recently written half a dozen children’s fantasies with Elen Caldecott, may the name be for a good omen.  Here’s the latest I know of.  [JH]
  • Born January 28, 1998 Ariel Winter, 23. Voice actress whose shown up in such productions as Mr. Peabody & Sherman as Penny Peterson, Horton Hears a Who!DC Showcase: Green Arrow as Princess Perdita and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns as Carrie Kelly (Robin). She’s got several one-off live performances on genre series, The Haunting Hour: The Series and Ghost Whisperer. (CE)

(12) COMICS SECTION.

At xkcd Randall Munroe has a couple more installments on his living in a scaled world series:

(13) SPACE UNICORNS SOUND OFF. You have until February 8 to make your voice heard: “Uncanny Celebrates Reader Favorites of 2020!”

We’ve set up a poll for Uncanny readers to vote for their top three favorite original short stories from 2020. (You can find links to all of the stories here.)

The poll will be open from January 11 to February 8, after which we’ll announce the results. We’re excited for you to share which Uncanny stories made you feel!

snazzy certificate will be given to the creator whose work comes out on top of  the poll!

(14) CON CALLS ON FANS FOR HELP. “Otakon Discusses Future, Asks for Donations” reports the Anime News Network. Their 2021 event is scheduled to be held at Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. from August 6 to 8. Last year’s Otakon was cancelled.

Otakorp president Brooke Zerrlaut announced in a newsletter on Thursday that the organization is requesting donations for the first time. The Otakon convention’s staff are continuing to evaluate plans for 2021 and noted that the event may “potentially close” permanently.

The newsletter explained that Otakorp, a volunteer-run non-profit organization, runs the annual Otakon convention dedicated to Asian culture. Because of the cancelation of Otakon 2020 due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the organization is in a “precarious position.”

(15) A WRITER’S BEGINNING AND END. Book and Film Globe in“The Tragedy of Karl Edward Wagner” reviews a documentary about the acclaimed fantasy writer and editor.

The makers of the new Vimeo documentary, The Last Wolf: Karl Edward Wagner, have trained their lens on an elusive horror and fantasy writer with a cult following. Besides the stories of supernatural and psychological terror collected in In a Lonely Place (1983) and Why Not You and I? (1987), Wagner spun tales about Kane, a hero sometimes compared to Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian, who wanders and fights his way through a fantasy realm peopled with brigands, thieves, sorcerers, monks, and shapeshifters. This body of work exceeds the better-known Conan mythos in its sexuality and violence, tropes that Wagner used with uneven results.

Wagner was also a longtime editor of the Year’s Best Horror Stories series, showcasing the work of Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, Harlan Ellison, Robert Bloch, Brian Lumley, Elizabeth Hand, David J. Schow, T.E.D. Klein, Charles L. Grant, Dennis Etchison, and dozens of others in the field. A few of these scribes appear in The Last Wolf, with especially vivid remembrances coming from Campbell and Etchison. Peter Straub, who wrote a foreword to In a Lonely Place, also has a lot to say.

…The sources interviewed in The Last Wolf render a portrait of an ambitious youth who collected paperbacks, became well known to the staff of a used bookshop in Knoxville through constant visits, and liked to freak out his nephews with spooky tales as they lay in their beds by an open window. While still in high school, Wagner meets a charming young woman, Barbara Mott, on a double date. He later marries her. His career enters high gear in the 1970s as he churns out stories, but not novels, and he stays busy writing and editing through the 1980s and 1990s, almost right up to his death.

“The Fourth Seal” is about a scientist looking to cure cancer. Wagner became the victim of something comparable its destructiveness. The Last Wolf doesn’t skirt around the plunge into alcoholism that drew growing concern on the part of Wagner’s peers in the weird field and led to the end of his marriage. Some of the recollections are hard to take. 

(16) BUY BUTLER. The London Review Bookshop’s Author of the Month is Octavia E. Butler.

Our Author of the Month for February is the American Science Fiction writer Octavia E. Butler.

In her many sometimes interlocking works Butler asks questions about race, gender and, pre-eminently, hierarchy in startling ways, and to offer equally startling versions of possible futures, often dystopian, that are uncannily like the present. This is extraordinary writing, written against the grain of gender and race prejudice and against the grain of Butler’s own persistent writer’s block.

Start with her masterpiece Kindred. We’re next to certain you won’t stop there.

(17) A GLIMPSE OF SF HISTORY. Samuel R. Delany reminisced about Judith Merril in a Facebook post.

Judith Merrill [sic] (Boston, 21 Jan 1923—Toronto, 12 Sept 1997), was—for the last years of her life, one of my best friends in the science fiction world, and thus, like all of her friends, to me she was “Judy” and I—to her—was “Chip.” We could never quite agree about where we met. During the time I was sharing a room with my friend, Bob Aarenberg, at the St. Marks Arms, on West 113th St., in NYC, and in our upstairs neighbor Randy Garrett took me to a party in Greenwich Village, where I met her and talked with her quite a while. But a few years later, she had no memory of that meeting. But as a kid I’d read her collaborations with C. M. [K]ornbluth (the Gunner Cade books), and thoroughly enjoyed them; I’d read a handful full of her stories—”Only a Mother,” which I felt was okay, but also “Dead Center” which I felt was much stronger (and still do after several rereadings of both and others)—but the writings of hers that meant most to me was her critical work….

(18) BUT THEY DID. James Davis Nicoll remembers “Five SF Empires That Seemed Too Big to Fail”, by authors Andre Norton, Phyillis Eisenstein, John Scalzi, Walter Jon Williams, and H. Beam Piper.

(19) FOR THE EAR AND THE EYE. Cora Buhlert’s spotlight series detours to visit with the creator of a semiprozine: “Not-a-Fanzine Spotlight: Simultaneous Times”.

Why did you decide to start your site or zine?

…The Simultaneous Times Newsletter started when the pandemic lockdowns started. Usually I’m at my bookstore six days a week, and since we specialize in science fiction, most of my conversations center around the genre. Immediately I began to miss the conversations and my customers, so I started the newsletter as a way to stay connected with science fiction fans. Since then it has just grown. But we still give free subscriptions. I thought people would prefer to get a letter in the mail over receiving an email.

What format do you use for your site or zine (blog, e-mail newsletter, PDF zine, paper zine) and why did you choose this format?

Several members of my team, including myself, have a background in radio. When we all started talking about starting a podcast we decided that we wanted to produce the program the way that radio shows were produced in the past. Really take the radio arts approach instead of going with modern trends in podcasting. Since then we’ve even teamed up with the radio station KZZH 96.7 in Northern California, so our program did end up on the air.

The Newsletter is print because I wanted to put something physical in people’s hands, especially during this time of not being able to see each other. That being said, I have started to put the back issues on our website, so the archive is available to everyone

(20) IT’S PEOPLE! Shiv Ramdas comments on a trending topic. Thread starts here.

(21) THE SINS OF STARSHIP TROOPERS. [Item by Dann.] The guys at Cinema Sins have  “Everything Wrong With Starship Troopers in 19 Minutes or Less”. (Parenthetically, I’m not looking for the 5,681st iteration of “The book is better than the movie” or the 12,259th iteration of “Verhoeven never read the book!”.  I like ’em both for different reasons.  And the Cinema Sins guys are great.)

(22) TINGLE REVIEWED IN THE GUARDIAN. [Item by PhilRM.] Here are words I never expected to read in the Guardian: “’My Antifa Lover’: I read the weirdest Trump-era erotica so you don’t have to” by J. Oliver Cromwell.

…In recent years, Amazon’s e-books market has nurtured a flourishing cottage industry of self-published romance and erotic literature – and the Trump years have inspired many to put pen to paper. The most successful authors (most write under pseudonyms) are known for their prolific publication, thesaurus-aided descriptions of the human anatomy, and responsiveness to current events.

The surreality of the past four years was particularly generative of their creative juices. With the Trump era now drawn to a chaotic close, we decided to review four of the most memorable entries in this niche literary genre.

I’m strangely drawn to the title “My Antifa Lover”, although slightly disappointed that Conroy opted to review Chuck Tingle’s Pounded In The Butt By The Handsome Physical Manifestation Of Tromp’s [sic] Twitter Ban That Should’ve Come Years Sooner But Fine Now That It’s Here High Five rather than the frankly superior Domald Tromp [sic] Pounded In The Butt By The Handsome Russian T-Rex Who Also Peed On His Butt And Then Blackmailed Him With The Videos Of His Butt Getting Peed On. No, I have no idea how the internet got us here either, really.

I feel compelled to note that the reviewer gave Tingle’s work 5/5.

(23) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In the 1780s, a charismatic healer caused a stir in Paris. An amusing video about the history of Mesmer’s methods and how he influenced medicine in the late 18th Century. Vox recalls The phony health craze that inspired hypnotism”.

Scientific progress in the 18th century in Europe, a period known as the “Age of Enlightenment,” was demystifying the universe with breakthroughs in chemistry, physics, and philosophy. But medical practices were still relying on centuries-old treatments, like leeching and bloodletting, which were painful and often ineffective. So when Franz Anton Mesmer, a charismatic physician from Vienna, began “healing” people in Paris using an alternative therapeutic practice he called “animal magnetism,” it got a lot of attention. Mesmer claimed that an invisible magnetic fluid was the life force that connected all things and that he had the power to regulate it to restore health in his patients. He was a celebrity figure until the King of France, Louis XVI, commissioned a group of leading scientists to investigate his methods in 1784. Benjamin Franklin headed the commission, and they debunked the existence of the magnetic fluid in the first-known blind experiment. Mesmer was ruined, but “mesmerism” didn’t end there. The report also acknowledged that Mesmer’s methods were making his patients feel better, which they attributed to the power of the human imagination. This experiment ultimately laid the groundwork for our understanding of the placebo effect and inspired an evolution of Mesmer’s practice into something more recognizable today: hypnotism.

[Thanks to JJ, Martin Morse Wooster, Dann, Andrew Porter, Cora Buhlert, Cat Eldridge, Michael Toman, John Hertz, Mike Kennedy, Mlex, Joey Eschrich, Rob Thornton, Michael J. Walsh, PhilRM, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Peer, who has ridden the fourth horse once before.]

Pixel Scroll 11/16/20 The Sith Who Sang

(1) UNPREDICTABLE QUESTIONS. On the 50th anniversary of the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation & Fantasy, the Toronto Public Library blog quizzes a trio of workers about their favorite memories: “Merril Collection at 50: Stories from the Spaced Out Library”. This is a wonderful Q&A.

The year 2020 will go down in history for many reasons. It also happens to be a major milestone for Toronto Public Library’s most far-out collection. In 1970, science-fiction author and editor Judith Merril donated 5,000 books to TPL to found the “Spaced Out Library.”

…To help mark the 50th anniversary of the Merril Collection, I asked Lorna Toolis (former Collection Head), Annette Mocek (Services Specialist) and Kimberly Hull (Librarian) to reflect on their favourite items and stories from the stacks. Together, they have 88.5 years of experience working with the collection! … 

What is the strangest or most memorable patron request you ever received?

Lorna: On my first day of work, a patron ran in and demanded “that book you have on UFOs, with the chart so that people can distinguish between the ones with round lights and the ones with square lights.” Other memorable questions included the Madonna of Lourdes as a UFO phenomenon, the possibility of pregnancy for vampires, Victorian era fiction involving carnivorous plants, transhumanism, etc. A recurring favourite question was the quest for H.P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon. Apocryphal books were always in demand. 

People tend not to remember the authors or titles of short stories. More patrons than I could count over the years wanted to know the title of the short story where someone travels back in time to hunt a dinosaur and kills a butterfly and everything changes. “The Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury was probably the most requested short story ever. 

(2) YOUR TV GUIDE. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Season 2 of HBO’s His Dark Materials starts tonight, Monday November 16.

I liked Season 1. My question: Will Lin-Manuel Miranda, playing rifle-packing aeronaut/balloonist Lee Scoreseby, get to sing, or at least say that he is not going to miss his shot?

(3) PKD THOUGHTS AND THEMES. Arthur B. analyzes the final novels and stories [Philip K.] Dick wrote from 1967 until “his transformative 2-3-74 experience” in “A Maze of Dick” at Fake Geek Boy. Quite interesting.

…This does not include A Scanner Darkly, which is properly placed among the novels written after 2-3-74; although begun in 1972, Dick would make extensive revisions to it until it was finally in a state he was satisfied with in 1976, and among those revisions were a number of additions and tweaks which worked in themes and imagery related to 2-3-74.

The Exegesis makes this explicit: Dick breaks down particular, identifiable scenes from A Scanner Darkly and directly says that he included them as a result of the experience, rather than those scenes informing the experience, and included them in a manner which was conscious and deliberate, as opposed to the inadvertent subconscious inclusion of such themes in pre-2-3-74 fiction which he occasionally believed had happened. (Those of us with more conventional understandings of cause and effect may instead conclude that the 2-3-74 experience, being a neurological incident produced by Dick’s mind, naturally ended up reflecting the themes and concepts that Dick had been thinking extensively about over his lifetime.)…

(4) BISHOP MEDICAL UPDATE. Michael Bishop shared about his cancer treatment in a public Facebook post on November 13. Much more at the link.

Had my first immunotherapy infusion yesterday at Emory University Hospital Midtown. No side effects yet, and I feel better this morning than I did yesterday morning. Even if it’s my imagination, I’m grateful….

One predictable side effect of my therapy, Dr. Read had told us, is a palpable energy deficit, and although it seemed too early for any such effect to kick in, I was totally dragged out by the time we got home. So I hit our bed upstairs and slept for almost two hours. All in all, a happy 75th birthday indeed.

(5) IN WORK TO COME. Editor Diana M. Pho introduces a WIRED Magazine series in “6 Sci-Fi Writers Imagine the Beguiling, Troubling Future of Work”.

…Today’s collaborative tension between humans and machines is not a binary divide between master and servant—who overthrows whom—but a question of integration and its social and ethical implications. Instead of creating robots to perform human labor, people build apps to mechanize human abilities. Working from anywhere, we are peppered with bite-sized names that fit our lives into bite-sized bursts of productivity. Zoom. Slack. Discord. Airtable. Notion. Clubhouse. Collaboration means floating heads, pop-up windows, chat threads. While apps give us more freedom and variety in how we manage our time, they also seem to reduce our personalities to calculations divided across various digital platforms. We run the risk of collaborating ourselves into auto-automatons.

First up, “‘Work Ethics,’ by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne”.

“SO YOU’RE TELLING me we’re going to be automated out of existence,” Romesh said. “I’m telling you that what you’re doing is wrong, wrong, wrong, and if you had any morals you’d shoot yourself.”

The complaint was made in a bar that was mostly cigarette smoke by this point, and to a circle of friends that, having gathered for their quarterly let’s-meet-up-and-catch-up thing, had found each other just as tiresome as before. Outside, the city of Colombo was coming to a crawl of traffic lights and halogen, the shops winking out, one by one, as curfew regulations loomed. Thus the drunken ruminations of Romesh Algama began to seem fundamentally less interesting….

(6) SUPPORT SUSAN PETREY SCHOLARSHIPS. Organizers Debbie Cross and Paul M. Wrigley are holding a fundraiser through eBay for the Susan Petrey Clarion Scholarship Fund, which has been helping people attend Clarion and the Clarion West Writer’s Workshops since 1982.

At present we award two scholarships & one fellowship annually. Our biggest fund raiser is at the OryCon science fiction convention which should have been held this past weekend. Instead we are running an Ebay auction with books, glass & jewelry,  many quilted items & artwork. The link is below, the auction runs through  Friday. We’ll ship everything but pickup in Troutdale is available.

100% goes to the charity.

 (7) MEET MARVEL’S CREATORS. Marvel’s Storyboards season 2 premieres today on their YouTube channel.

Marvel’s Storyboards is a 12-episode non-fiction series following Joe Quesada, EVP, Creative Director of Marvel Entertainment, as he explores the origin stories and inspirations of storytellers of all mediums, backgrounds, and experiences at their favorite spots throughout New York City and beyond. The series aired its first six-episode season this past summer, and continuing this second season, will showcase a variety of visionary, critically acclaimed storytellers including Sasheer Zamata (actress, stand-up comedian and former SNL), Ed Viesturs (high-altitude mountaineer), Nelson Figueroa (former MLB pitcher for the New York Mets), Gillian Jacobs (Community, Love), Samhita Mukhopadhyay (Executive Editor, Teen Vogue), and Taboo (Black Eyed Peas), adding to the first season’s featured guests Natalia Cordova-Buckley (Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.), Bobby Lopez (EGOT winning songwriter, Frozen, Avenue Q), Johnny Weir (former Olympic figure skater), Christian Borle (Something Rotten, Smash), Margaret Stohl (Life of Captain Marvel), and Hugh Jackman (Wolverine).

Marvel’s Storyboards Season 2 Episode Release Schedule:

  • Monday, November 16: Episode 1 feat. Gillian Jacobs
  • Friday, November 20: Episode 2 feat. Sasheer Zamata
  • Tuesday, November 24: Episode 3 feat. Samhita Mukhopadhyay
  • Tuesday, December 1: Episode 4 feat. Nelson Figueroa
  • Tuesday, December 8: Episode 5 feat. Taboo
  • Tuesday, December 15: Episode 6 feat. Ed Viesturs

(8) MEDIA ANNIVERSARY.

  • 1975 — Forty five years ago, Patricia McKillip’s Forgotten Beasts of Eld would win the World Fantasy Award over Poul Anderson’s A Midsummer Tempest and H. Warner Munn‘s Merlin’s Ring.  It would the nominated for the Locus Best SF Novel and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award as well. The wrap-around cover art was by Peter Schaumann. (CE)

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born November 16, 1862 – Edith Ogden Harrison.  Five novels, half a dozen collections, of fairy tales and other fantasy; retold Bible stories; travel; recollections.  Wife of five-term Chicago mayor, illustrated his memoirs.  The Lady of the Snows illustrated by J. Allen St. John.  (Died 1955) [JH]
  • Born November 16, 1907 Burgess Meredith. Brief though his visit to genre be, he had two significant roles. The first was in Twilight Zone: The Movie as Narrator although initially he was uncredited. One of his other genre roles was a delightful take as The Penguin in original Batman series. He also shows up in Tales of Tomorrow, an anthology sf series that was performed and broadcast live on ABC from 1951 to 1953, and on The InvadersThe Twilight ZoneFaerie Tale Theatre: Thumbelina (with Carrie Fisher!) and The Wild Wild West. Did I mention he he voiced Puff the Magic Dragon in a series of the same name? Well he did.  Ok, so his visit to genre wasn’t so brief after all… (Died 1997.) (CE)
  • Born November 16, 1942 – Milt Stevens.  Co-chaired L.A.con II the 42nd Worldcon, Westercon 33, and the first Loscon.  Fan Guest of Honor at Loscon 9, Westercon 61.  Among our finest fanwriters, in his own zine The Passing Parade and many letters of comment.  Our Gracious Host’s appreciation here.  Mine here (PDF; p. 7).  (Died 2017) [JH]
  • Born November 16, 1950 – P.J. Evans, 70.  A frequent Filer (which tested my typo-avoiding powers).  Her adventures on an electric bendy-bus have been reported elsewhere.  Her many other adventures in fandom I have not found documented, and I won’t rely on memory.  I think they included Reynolds Rat and Rat Masterson.  [JH]
  • Born November 16, 1952 Candas Jane Dorsey, 68. Canadian writer who’s the winner of the Prix Aurora Award and the Otherwise Award for Genre Bending SF for her Black Wine novel. She’s also won a Prix Aurora Award for her short story, “Sleeping in a Box”.  She’s one of the founders of SF Canada which was founded as an authors collective in the late Eighties as Canada’s National Association of Speculative Fiction Professionals. At the present time, she appears to have little available from the usual digital suspects. (CE) 
  • Born November 16, 1958 Marg Helgenberger, 61. She’s best remembered no doubt as Catherine Willows on CSI which might be treated as genre. She was Hera in the recent Wonder Woman, and also appeared in Conan: Red Nail which doesn’t even get ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, Species and Species II, not to mention Tales from the Crypt. Oh, and two Stephen King series as well, The Tommyknockers and Under the Dome. (CE) 
  • Born November 16, 1972 Missi Pyle, 48. Laliari in Galaxy Quest which is one of my fav SF films of all time. Let’s hope that a series never comes to be.  She’s also has been in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Percy Jackson: Sea of MonstersA Haunted House 2Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, Star Trek: The Next Generation,  RoswellThe TickPushing Daisies and Z Nation. (CE) 
  • Born November 16, 1959 – Jessica Rydill, 61.  Five novels, three shorter stories.  Here is her own cover for Malarat (there are other editions too).  In Winterbloom actual historical figures appear, including John Dee, whom I’ve always thought more interesting than Aleister Crowley, but what do I know?  With Cora Buhlert, edits Speculative Fiction Showcase.  [JH]
  • Born November 16, 1972 – Tobe Sunaho, 48.  (Her personal name last, Japanese style.)  Illustrator and character designer.  Here is Yurusa reshi itsuwari (“Forgiven and False”).  Here is Riviera.  Here are some images from Yggdra Unison (or Union).  Here is a Halloween greeting.  Here is an image from Shiueru’s Web.  [JH]
  • Born November 16, 1976 Lavie Tidhar, 44. The first work I read by him was Central Station which was the2017 John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel winner. It certainly deserved that accolade! The next work by him I experienced was The Bookman Histories in which Mycroft Holmes is murdered and, well, everything of a pulp nature gets tossed into alternate history England.  Both brilliant and annoying at times. I’ve just read Unholy Land, his telling of the founding of a Jewish homeland long ago in Africa, and I’ve got By Force Alone, his profane Arthurian retelling, on my TBR list. (CE) 
  • Born November 16, 1977 Gigi Edgley, 43. Though her genre experiences are varied, I think she’ll be only remembered for her role as Chiana, a Nebari who was a member of Moya’s crew on Farscape. Other genre appearances include BeastmasterThe Lost WorldQuantum Apocalypse and she has a role in the video fanfic Star Trek Continues in the “Come Not Between the Dragons” episode. (CE) 
  • Born November 16, 1988 – Samantha Bailly, 32.  Six novels for us, three shorter stories; nine other novels, three collections, manga.  Imaginales de Lycéens prize for her first novel Oraisons (French, “prayers”) at age 19.  [JH]

(10) COMICS SECTION.

  • Broom Hilda almost immolates some visitors to a small planet.

(11) TA-NEHISI COATES’ BLACK PANTHER RUN RETURNS. Ta-Nehisi Coates resumes his run on Black Panther in February. Featuring outstanding art by Daniel Acuña and Ryan Bodenheim, Black Panther #23 will continue to reveal Coates’ grand vision for the character of King T’Challa and the Kingdom of Wakanda.

Since taking over as writer in 2016, the acclaimed author has taken Black Panther and Wakanda to the stars and beyond. Across the multiverse, T’Challa discovered an alternate Wakanda, one ruled far differently than his own. Having abandoned their once peaceful ways, this Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda will stop at nothing to rule all of the cosmos. After initially being enslaved by the empire and then joining a rebellion against it, T’Challa has finally made his way back to Earth, but this twisted reflection of Wakanda is not far behind…

…Said editor Wil Moss, “I promise, these last three issues will be worth the wait — Ta-Nehisi and Daniel have been building to this finale for over two years now, and the ensuing battle between the forces of T’Challa’s Wakanda and Emperor N’Jadaka’s Intergalactic Empire is going to knock your socks off! Just wait’ll you see who shows up to help defend Wakanda…”

(12) NOT MANDALORIAN RFD. Yahoo! Life invites everyone to “Watch Bryce Dallas Howard’s sweet homage to her dad in last week’s Mandolorian”. (Luckily my first thought was wrong, that we were going to see a green Opie.)

This weekend, Baby Yoda wasn’t the only endearing Child of a doting father to turn up on The Mandalorian. Episode director Bryce Dallas Howard took the opportunity to remind the world—well, at least to remind Apollo 13 fans—that she, like Baby “The Child” Yoda, has a dad.

…Given the opportunity to pay a little homage to one of her dad’s better-known flicks, it seems that Bryce Dallas Howard couldn’t resist. And yes, technically this is her second go-round as one of The Mandolorian’s directors, but here she was given a chance to nod to Apollo 13 in a way that’s absolutely suited to the story she was telling. Miss the reference and it’s still a cool sequence.

(13) GIVE OR TAKE A COUPLE YEARS. Jacke Wilson’s The History of Literature podcast arrives at last at “The Real Golden Age of Science Fiction”.

In Part Two of our look at great literary genres, Jacke probes the development of science fiction, from ancient Greek travels to the moon to the amazing stories of the 20th century. Along the way, he chooses four candidates for the Mount Rushmore of Science Fiction, reads a passage from science fiction’s O.G., and sees if there is a secret to science fiction that he can discover.

Jacke Wilson: …[Hugo Gernsback] had a tumultuous career as a publisher and a lousy reputation in the industry. Writers couldn’t stand him. They thought he ripped them off. They thought he was a crook. He was a little sleazy. He didn’t pay writers well and he stole their rights. He himself tried writing stories and the results were not good. But his magazine, that first magazine especially, Amazing Stories, was transformative. There’s no denying that the stories in the magazine are what launched the genre as we know it today. These magazine stories led to the Golden Age of Science Fiction. They were there for a whole generation of young people to discover.

That’s sort of the joke about the Golden Age of Science Fiction. They say, what’s the Golden Age of Science Fiction? Answer: 14. Get it? We call the ’30s and ’40s and ’50s the Golden Age as magazines thrilled readers with stories about space travel and time travel and nuclear power and everything else. And this was the era of World War II and the Cold War, and we had Sputnik and all of that to fill the need of science, fill the gap that that our confusion and fear about the world was putting into place thanks to our existential threat. Well, science was there to fill that gap, and science stories were there, too.

But 14 is the Golden Age. That’s what people say when they tell this joke. The Golden Age is that these stories hit you when you’re 14, when you’re looking for answers, looking to absorb reality, looking to make sense of it, and looking for something else, too—which is what I’ll save until the end.

(14) STATION-TO-STATION. “SpaceX launches 2nd crew, regular station crew flights begin” – the AP has the story.

SpaceX launched four astronauts to the International Space Station on Sunday on the first full-fledged taxi flight for NASA by a private company.

The Falcon rocket thundered into the night from Kennedy Space Center with three Americans and one Japanese, the second crew to be launched by SpaceX. The Dragon capsule on top — named Resilience by its crew in light of this year’s many challenges, most notably COVID-19 — reached orbit nine minutes later. It is due to reach the space station late Monday and remain there until spring.

(15) NEW WONDER. Maria Andreeva, in the Deadline story “‘Wonder Girl’ TV Series With Latina Lead From Dailyn Rodriguez & Berlanti Productions In Works At the CW” says that “Wonder Girl,” based on characters developed by Joelle Jones for DC Comics, is currently in development at the CW.,

…This would mark the first Latina superhero title character of a DC TV series. Rodriguez, who is the daughter of Cuban immigrants, is executive producing with Berlanti Prods.’ Greg Berlanti, Sarah Schechter and David Madden. Berlanti Productions produces in association with Warner Bros. Television.

The series tells the backstory/origin story of the DC Comics character of Yara Flor, who was recently revealed as a new Wonder Woman. Yara will make her comic book appearance this January in Future State: Wonder Woman, part of DC’s Future State event written and drawn by Jones.

(16) GENE-IUS. “Uh-Oh, Scientists Used Human Genes to Make Monkey Brains Bigger” reports Yahoo! Finance.

In an experiment that could portend a real-life Planet of the Apes situation, scientists spliced human genes into the fetus of a monkey to substantially increase the size of the primate’s brain. And it worked.

Researchers from Germany’s Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Germany and Japan’s Central Institute for Experimental Animals introduced a specifically human gene, ARHGAP11B, into the fetus of a common marmoset monkey, causing the enlargement of its brain’s neocortex. The scientists reported their findings in Science.

The neocortex is the newest part of the brain to evolve. It’s in the name—“neo” meaning new, and “cortex” meaning, well, the bark of a tree. This outer shell makes up more than 75 percent of the human brain and is responsible for many of the perks and quirks that make us uniquely human, including reasoning and complex language.

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “Star Trek:  Into Darkness Pitch Meeting” on Screen Rant, Ryan George explains the reason Spock throws a cold-fusion machine into a volcano early in the film “was because it has ‘cold’ in the title.”

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

Freedom, Freedom

By John Hertz: (reprinted from No Direction Home 26)  We could take 2018 or 2019 as the 70th birth-anniversary year of Walt Kelly’s Pogo.  It began as a newspaper comic strip in 1948.  It was adopted for syndicated national distribution in 1949.  It ran through 1975.  Judith Merril put a Pogo sequence in her 6th annual Year’s Best S-F (1961).

I’ve recommended America’s Great Comic-Strip Artists, subtitled  from “The Yellow Kid” to “Peanuts” (R. Marschall, rev. 1997).  Kelly is penultimate (p. 255):

Fantasy was the specialty of Winsor McCay [1867-1934, Little Nemo in Slumberland 1905-1926 his magnum opus]; George Herrimann [1880-1944, Krazy Kat1913-1944] made it his bailiwick too, while staking ground in the realm of literary and intellectual expression.  Cliff Sterrett [1883-1964, Polly and Her Pals1912-1958] also appealed to intellectuals, as Charles Schulz [1922-2000] would later do in Peanuts [1950-2000].  Farce and parody were the domains of E.C. Segar [1894-1938, Popeye from 1929 (in Thimble Theatre; after 1938 continued by others, Hy Eisman since 1994)], and the graphic sense he lacked was displayed with seeming instinctiveness by Frederick Opper [1857-1937, Happy Hooligan 1900-1932].  Dialogue – incisive, distinctive – that revealed not only the personalities of the characters but also the world view of the cartoonist was the special gift of Al Capp [1909-1980, Li’l Abner 1934-1977].

In the company of great cartoonists such as these, one stands out as a monumental talent…. Walt Kelly [1913-1973] was master of all that could be surveyed, the many tools and techniques available to comic-strip artists.  Pogo… generously included elements of fantasy, literary and intellectual touches, farce and parody, graphic brilliance … wonderful dialogue … also … philosophy, politics, whimsy, poetry, metaphysics, social commentary, and good old-fashioned slapstick.

– o O o –

St. Nectarios Greek Orthodox Church, 20340 E. Covina Bl., Covina, CA 91724, held its annual festival 23-25 Aug.  On Saturday evening I went for a few hours.  I’ve told of another one.

Lots of different folks go to these Greek church festivals.  Vendors stock accordingly.  I saw displayed a pair of T-shirts, An Armenian Man Is Never Wrong and An Armenian Woman Is Always Right.  Alas, I did not see them on any husband & wife with the husband wearing Armenian Woman and the wife wearing Armenian Man.

– o O o –

At Hampton, Virginia, it was African Landing Weekend.  The 24th was African Landing Day.  In August 1619 “20 and odd” Africans from what is now the Republic of Angola arrived on the White Lion at Old Point Comfort, now Fort Monroe National Monument, Hampton, the first black slaves to land in English North America.

On Saturday, Governor Ralph Northam, Doug Wilder the first elected black Governor (66th Governor of Virginia 1990-1994, now 88 years old), Hampton Mayor Donnie Tuck, United States Representative Karen Bass (Democrat – California) chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, and 11-year-old Brycen Didly a pupil at Larkspur Middle School in Virginia Beach, were among those who spoke.  Two thousand people came.  The Norcom High School Choir from Portsmouth ended the program with “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (poem by James W. Johnson 1900, music by his brother John R. Johnson 1905; called the Negro national hymn by the Nat’l Ass’n for the Advancement of Colored People, 1916).

Governor Northam announced a new State Commission on African American History Education.  Didly, who got a standing ovation, said “There is another way that we can give back to our community.  We can start with how we treat one another.  Are you kind to others daily?”

– o O o –

August 20th would have been the 100th birthday of Rodrick W. Edmonds (1919-1985), who during World War II was a Master Sergeant in the 106th Infantry Division.

On 1 Nov 44 the 106th was assigned to VIII Corps, 1st United States Army, 12th Army Group; on 6 Dec moved to France, joining the Rhineland Campaign; 10 Dec crossed into Belgium; 16 Dec assigned to the Ardennes-Alsace Campaign.  On 19 Dec the 422nd Infantry Regiment, including Edmonds, was overrun by Germans in the Battle of the Bulge, and forced to surrender.  In fact the men of the 422nd were still green, with 19 days overseas training in England during November.

Edmonds was taken to Stalag IX near Ziegenhain (in the Rhineland-Palatinate).  Stalag was short for Stammlager, itself short for Kriegsgefangenen-Mannschafts Stammlager; Stamm is a stem, or a tribe, and like that; Lager is a camp; Krieg is war; gefangen is capturedMannschaft is a crew: a Stalag was a prisoner-of-war base camp – but not for officers, who were held separately.

Edmonds was the highest ranking NCO (noncommissioned officer, i.e. up through sergeant) of 1,275 U.S. soldiers held in Stalag IX on 27 Jan 45.  They had just arrived.  It was bitter cold.  A German officer, Major Siegmann, told Edmonds to identify the Jews by the next morning.

The next morning Edmonds ordered all the U.S. soldiers to assemble outside the barracks.  They did.  Major Siegmann was infuriated.  He walked up to MSG Edmonds snarling, in English, “I ordered the Jews to be separated, to be identified.”  Siegmann drew his Luger pistol and put it to Edmonds’ head.  “You are to identify the Jews, immediately.”

Edmonds did not flinch.  “We are all Jews here,” he said.  He told Siegmann that to shoot the Jews the Nazis would have to shoot everyone.  The Geneva Convention required prisoners only to give their name, rank, and serial number, not their religion. Edmonds said that if any of the prisoners were harmed, Siegmann would be hunted, tried for war crime, and convicted.  Siegmann holstered his Luger and left.  Three months later Allied forces freed these U.S. soldiers.

Edmonds had saved 200 Jews.  He never told the story.  After he died it was pieced together by his son Chris Edmonds, Pastor of the Piney Grove Baptist Church in Marysville, Tennessee.  On 2 Dec 15 Yad VaShem (Hebrew, “a place of memorial”; yad is a hand, shem is a name; Isaiah 56:4-5) the World Holocaust Remembrance Center recognized Edmonds as Righteous Among the Nations.  On 27 Jan 16 in a ceremony at the Israeli Embassy, with President Obama and Ambassador Dermer attending, Rabbi Israel Lau the Chair of the Yad VaShem Council (himself a Holocaust survivor: Buchenwald) presented Pastor Edmonds with Roddie Edmonds’ medal and certificate, the fifth American so honored.