Pixel Scroll 7/20/22 The Whoopee Cushions Of Isher

Today I drove to Ventura to play Risk with my brother, one of his sons, and his grandson. (The son won, I finished third.) There are Scrolls that have been published even later than this one, if you can believe that!

(1) DON’T CALL IT QUIDDITCH ANYMORE. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] Jo Yurcaba, in the NBC News story  “Quidditch Changes Its Name To Distance Itself From Harry Potter Author J.K. Rowling” says that the International Quidditch Association is officially changing its name to “quadball” because they don’t like J.K. Rowling and because of IP issues with Warner Bros. over the name “quidditch.”

(2) TONOPAH WESTERCON MAKES THE NEWS. [Item by Kevin Standlee.] Westercon 74 got a nice write-up that will appear in this week’s edition of the Tonopah Times-Bonanza & Goldfield News, the town’s weekly newspaper: “How tiny Tonopah beat out Phoenix to host the Westercon sci-fi convention”. I had a nice conversation with a stringer for the newspaper during Westercon 74 and I showed her around the convention and explained what our convention was about and how we ended up holding it in such an unlikely place as Tonopah. It appears that “punching above our weight” and being selected over a more traditional bid and site like Phoenix impressed them.

The initial version published online had some misspellings and misidentified where next year’s Westercon will be, but we wrote to them pointing them out, and the editor made the corrections online right away and told us that the print edition going out tomorrow will have the correct version.

(3) RECORDED ON AN EARLIER THRONE. House of the Dragon’s official trailer dropped today. It’s based on George R.R. Martin’s book Fire & Blood,

(4) MEDIEVAL FANTASY. The Getty Museum in Los Angeles invites you to acquire a book that will let you “Take a Journey Through Imaginary Medieval Worlds with Fantasy of the Middle Ages”. It’s being published to accompany an exhibit that is running through September 11.

This abundantly illustrated book is an illuminating exploration of the impact of medieval imagery on three hundred years of visual culture. From the soaring castles of Sleeping Beauty to the bloody battles of Game of Thrones, from Middle-earth in The Lord of the Rings to mythical beasts in Dungeons & Dragons, and from Medieval Times to the Renaissance Faire, the Middle Ages have inspired artists, playwrights, filmmakers, gamers, and writers for centuries. Indeed, no other historical era has captured the imaginations of so many creators. This volume aims to uncover the many reasons why the Middle Ages have proven so applicable to a variety of modern moments from the eighteenth through the twenty-first century. These “medieval” worlds are often the perfect ground for exploring contemporary cultural concerns and anxieties, saying much more about the time and place in which they were created than they do about the actual conditions of the medieval period. With over 140 color illustrations, from sources ranging from thirteenth-century illuminated manuscripts to contemporary films and video games, and a preface by Game of Thrones costume designer Michele Clapton, The Fantasy of the Middle Ages will surprise and delight both enthusiasts and scholars. This title is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from June 21 to September 11, 2022.

(5) PIECES OF EIGHT. Octothorpe episode 62 is available to listeners: “Do You Want to Talk About Lesbians?”

John has superpowers, Alison is an alien in a human suit, and Liz likes cats. We’ve read all six Hugo Award finalists for Best Novel, and we chat about each of them before we discuss our consensus picks. Art by Sue Mason. Listen here!

(6) MEMORY LANE.  

1992 [By Cat Eldridge.] No, it didn’t premiere on this day, this is just a fan letter to one of my favorite series. Nightmare Cafe, all six episodes of it, ran from January to April 1992. I caught it on NBC and loved the premise of waterfront cafe that gives its staff missions.  The premise is Frank Nolan and Fay Peronivic find themselves in an all-night diner following a brush with death which was actually fatal and have been brought back to life by the diner. Frank and Fay are given the opportunity to fix what went wrong the first time, and after that works, they will stay on as the diner’s new staff.

So have the mysterious proprietor Blackie played by Robert Englund which we all know from Freddy Krueger in the Nightmare on Elm Street film franchise. Is Blackie generated by the Cafe? Possibly. 

The other two characters are as Frank Nolan as played by Jack Coleman and Fay Peronivic as played by Lindsay Frost. They weren’t really as well fleshed out as Blackie, but that’s not surprising.

The setting is great as it’s a diner on the waterfront. The cafe is sentient and has a sense of humor, at one point locking Blackie out until he apologies to the Cafe. And the Cafe picks their missions as I noted above. 

I thought it looked like a real diner and indeed it was built with a ceiling, unusual for television at the time where filming often was done from above, and each of the booths was given an authentic feel with its own table jukebox which had been rented from a private collector.

It only lasted six wonderful episodes. The network claims it was cancelled because of poor ratings but really is six episodes enough to say how any series is going to do? I think not. 

Nightmare Cafe is not available for streaming, nor is it available for purchase.

Usual caveat: please don’t link to online copies of the episodes as they are pirated. We will just remove your post. Really we will. 

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born July 20, 1924 Lola Albright. Though she’s best remembered best known for playing the sultry singer Edie Hart, the girlfriend of private eye Peter Gunn, she did do some genre performances. She’s Cathy Barrett, one of the leads in the Fifties film The Monolith Monsters, and television was her home in the Fifties and Sixties. She was on Tales of Tomorrow as Carol Williams in the “The Miraculous Serum” episode, Nancy Metcalfe on Rocket Squad in “The System” episode, repeated appearances on the various Alfred Hitchcock series, and even on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. in the episodes released as the feature length film The Helicopter Spies. She was Azalea. (Died 2017.)
  • Born July 20, 1930 Sally Ann Howes. Best remembered as being Truly Scrumptious on Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. She was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Lead Actress in a Musical for her performance in Brigadoon. And I’ll note her playing Anna Leonowens In The King & I as Ricardo Montalbán played the lead role as that’s genre as well. (Died 2021.)
  • Born July 20, 1931 Donald Moffitt. Author under the pseudonym of Paul Kenyon of the Baroness thriller series with such pulp titles as Sonic Slave, somewhat akin to Bond and Blaise. Great popcorn literature. Some SF, two in his Mechanical Skyseries, Crescent in the Sky and A Gathering of Stars, another two in his Genesis Quest series, Genesis Quest and Second Genesis, plus several one-offs. The usual suspects have pretty much have everything he did. (Died 2014.)
  • Born July 20, 1938 Diana Rigg, née Dame Enid Diana Elizabeth Rigg. Emma Peel of course in The Avengers beside Patrick Macnee as John Steed. Best pairing ever. Played Sonya Winter in The Assassination Bureau followed by being Contessa Teresa “Tracy” Draco di Vicenzo Bond on On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. By the Eighties, she’s doing lighter fare such as being Lady Holiday in The Great Muppet Caper and Miss Hardbroom in The Worst Witch, not to mention The Evil Queen, Snow White’s evil stepmother in Snow White. Next she would get a meaty role in Game of Thrones when she was Olenna Tyrell. Oh, and she showed up in Dr. Who during the Era of the Eleventh Doctor as as Mrs. Winifred Gillyflower in the “The Crimson Horror” episode. (Died 2020.)
  • Born July 20, 1949 Guy H. Lillian III, 73. Fanzine publisher notable for having been twice nominated for a Hugo Award as best fan writer and having been nominated twelve straight times without winning for the Hugo for best fanzine for his Challenger zine. As a well-known fan of Green Lantern, Lillian’s name was tuckerized for the title’s 1968 debut character Guy Gardner.
  • Born July 20, 1959 Martha Soukup, 63. The 1994 short film Override, directed by Danny Glover, was based on her short story “Over the Long Haul”. It was his directorial debut. She has two collections, Collections Rosemary’s Brain: And Other Tales of Wonder and The Arbitrary Placement of Walls, both published in the Nineties. She won a Nebula Award for Best Short Story for “A Defense of the Social Contracts”. “The Story So Far” by her is available as the download sample at the usual suspects  in Schimel’s Things Invisible to See anthology if you’d liked to see how she is as a writer. 
  • Born July 20, 1977 Penny Vital, 45. Uncredited role as Old Town Girl in Sin City, Sox in Zombie Strippers (which also stars Robert Englund and Jenna Jameson), Astrid in the very short lived Star Chicks series, Sabula in Monarch of the Moon and Annette DeFour in the Dreamkiller shooterwhich I think is genre.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

  • Six Chix brings radical monster diet news.

(9) MARVEL’S SHADY MATH. [Item by Olav Rokne.] If you ever wondered if the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a faithful adaptation of the source material, they’re even going so far as to copy some of the comic book company’s shady underpayment of comic book creators. As documented in the Hollywood Reporter, they’re using disingenuous logic and weird math to weasel out of contracts just like iconic Marvel editor Stan Lee was famous for doing. “Marvel Movie Math: Comic Creators Claim It’s ‘Bait and Switch’” in The Hollywood Reporter.

In July 2021, Scarlett Johansson stunned Hollywood with a lawsuit accusing Disney of breach of contract for sending Black Widow day-and-date to Disney+, a move her lawyers said diminished its box office (and the star’s backend compensation). As that legal battle stretched into the summer, two other Black Widow stakeholders were quietly seeking what they believed they were owed. The comic book creators behind Yelena Belova, the character played by Florence Pugh, spent months in a back-and-forth with Marvel to receive payment for her appearance in the film.

Writer Devin Grayson and artist J.G. Jones believed they would take home $25,000 each for her appearance in Black Widow thanks to paperwork they signed outlining how much they would receive for films, TV shows, video games and action figures featuring Yelena. But when Grayson and Jones, who created Yelena in 1999, eventually received payment in November, that $25,000 dwindled to about $5,000 without explanation.

(10) GENTLEMEN, BE SEATED. David Grigg and Perry Middlemiss, in episode 77 of Two Chairs Talking, wander through “A Forest Of Hugo Awards”.

David and Perry complete their review of all of the fiction nominated for this year’s Hugo Awards by discussing the Best Novel category. Then Perry and Lucy Sussex investigate the controversy around the novel which was withdrawn from this year’s Miles Franklin Award.

(11) THE GRAVEYARD BOOK. “Disney is set to rescue another Neil Gaiman project from development hell” reports MSN.com.

Released in the autumn of 2008, The Graveyard Book has been a huge success for Gaiman. It won both the British Carnegie Medal and the American Newbery Medal – both of which recognized the year’s best children’s books – as well as the annual Hugo Award for Best Novel from the World Science Fiction Convention….

(12) PUPPETS BEHAVING BADLY? Puppet Up! – Uncensored will be doing shows in LA in August. More videos at this link.

Puppet Up! – Uncensored is a night of outrageous, off-the-cuff comedy…

…featuring 80 of the Miskreant puppets brought to life by a cast of world-class comedian puppeteers from The Jim Henson Company. Created by legendary puppeteer and award-winning director Brian Henson and directed by Patrick Bristow (Ellen, Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Whose Line Is It Anyway?), Puppet Up! – Uncensored is never the same show twice.

Based on suggestions from the audience, Patrick and his team of expert puppeteers create a hilarious two-shows-in-one: the improvised puppet action projected live on screens above the stage, with the puppeteers racing around below in full view of the audience. The show also features recreations of classic pieces originally created by Jim and Jane Henson, and Frank Oz that haven’t been seen by live audiences in decades.

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] Adam Savage’s Tested sends a reporter (not Adam Savage) to San Francisco’s Bricks By The Bay convention to interview someone who has made an Airbus A380 (the world’s largest airplane) out of Legos.)

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Daniel Dern, Kevin Standlee, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 7/19/22 A Phlogiston Of Filers

(1) AKO CAINE PRIZE. Kenyan writer Idza Luhumyo has been awarded the 2022 AKO Caine Prize for African Writing for her short story “Five Years Next Sunday”, published in Disruption (Catalyst Press and Short Story Day Africa, 2021). The story is about “a young woman with the unique power to call the rain in her hair. Feared by her family and community, a chance encounter with a foreigner changes her fortunes, but there are duplicitous designs upon her most prized and vulnerable possession.”

Okey Ndibe, Chair of the 2022 AKO Caine Prize Judging Panel, announced the winner at an award ceremony at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. Luhumyo’s story was described by Ndibe as ‘an incandescent story – its exquisite language wedded to the deeply moving drama of a protagonist whose mystical office invites animus at every turn.’ 

Judging the Prize alongside Ndibe this year were French-Guinean author and academic Elisa Diallo; South African literary curator and co-founder of The Cheeky Natives Letlhogonolo Mokgoroane; UK-based Nigerian visual artist Ade ‘Àsìkò’ Okelarin; Kenyan co-founder of the Book Bunk Angela Wachuka. 

Luhumyo takes the £10,000 prize, beating 267 eligible entries in a record year of submissions. She will be published in the 2022 AKO Caine Prize anthology later this year by Cassava Republic Press. She is the fifth Kenyan writer to win the award after Binyavanga Wainaina (2002), Yvonne Owuor (2003), Okwiri Oduor (2014) and Makena Onjerika (2018).

(2) AUCTION RESULTS. The “Hollywood Legends” event organized by Julien’s Auctions rang up some big numbers for these items of genre interest:

…Other top sellers included the red, white and blue shield handled by Chris Evans’ Captain America in the 2012 superhero blockbuster “The Avengers,” which went for $200,000.

A Stormtrooper helmet used in 1977′s original “Star Wars” movie sold for $192,000, while a hammer wielded by Chris Hemsworth’s titular superhero in 2013′s “Thor: The Dark World” made $51,200….

(3) BUZZ LIGHTYEAR FOREVER. The USPS invites postal service users to “’Go Beyond’ Your Typical Forever Stamps with Buzz Lightyear”. The first day of issue will be August 3. There will be a ceremony that day at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood.

The iconic image of Buzz Lightyear has been captured in the newest Forever stamps from the U.S. Postal Service and Disney and Pixar.

Go Beyond is a colorful pane of 20 stamps arranged in four horizontal rows of five stamps featuring the image of Buzz Lightyear, a Space Ranger marooned on a planet 4.2 million light-years from Earth.

Greg Breeding was the stamp art director using illustrations from Pixar Animation Studios.

The release joins the Charles M. Shulz (and the gang) and James Webb Space Telescope stamps coming this year, and the already available Shel Silverstein stamp.

(4) ALONG CAME JONES. Stephen Jones, the British editor, had some things to say about pronouns yesterday that have since been taken private (or offline), therefore cannot be quoted here. However, some of the knock-on discussion he had about them was screencapped.

Hillary Monahan doesn’t name the person they light into in this thread, but everybody knew who it was. Thread starts here.

The Midnight Society thought the situation called for a satire. Thread starts here.

The social media discussion also reminded people of some of Jones’ history, such as:

(Jones’ remarks can be viewed on the 2021 Bram Stoker Awards ceremony video around the 1:23 mark.)

(5) PERSONAL DEFINITIONS. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] Contributors to the horror anthology Other Terrors explain what they think “other terrors” means to them. “A Roundtable Discussion on The Meaning of ‘The Other’” at CrimeReads.

Eugen Bacon: As an African-Australian author who is black, female, migrant and a single mother, I have struggled with identity and being ‘different’. I think, as humans, intrinsically, we want to belong, to be integral to the worlds we live in.

‘Other’ is anyone who looks different, feels different, thinks different, acts different, lives different, owns different (possessions), is perceived different—there’s a whole spectrum of othering, which is what makes the theme of Other Terrors very relatable and easy to respond to. More so in the safe space that speculative fiction offers for engaging with difference, even in acts of subversive activism….

(6) WESTERCON 74 EVENTS ONLINE. [Item by Kevin Standlee.] All of Westercon 74’s Events — anything that happened in the Main Hall or on the Main Stage of the Tonopah Convention Center, as distinct from Programming that happened in function rooms of the TCC or the other convention buildings — are now online on a newly-minted Westercon 74 YouTube channel in the Events playlist:

This includes, in the order that they happened:

  • Friday: Opening Ceremony
  • Saturday: Match Game SF
  • Sunday: Westercon Business Meeting, Committee of the Whole on Site Selection, Kuma’s Korner Stuffed friends gathering
  • Monday: Closing Ceremony

In addition, the channel includes separate recordings of the opening and closing title videos that we played during the opening and closing ceremonies.

Programming will post those online and hybrid items that we recorded to a separate playlist on this channel when they are able to do so. The head of online/hybrid programming, Michelle Weisblat-Dane, came down with COVID-19 immediately after the convention, which has slowed production.

(7) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.  

1965 [By Cat Eldridge.] Forty-seven years ago, The Tenth Victim premiered in Ireland. An international co-production between Italy and France, it is based on Robert Sheckley’s 1953 short story “Seventh Victim” which was nominated for a Retro Hugo at Noreascon 4. No, I’ve no idea why it became the Tenth Victim.

It was directed and co-written by Elio Petri who had spent five years trying to get this filmed. In filming it, he made some major changes. Sheckley told his story from the point of view of a man hunting his seventh target, a woman, whereas in the movie she is the hunter. And as most reviewers note, the film is largely a chase story. It’s been a very long time since I read it so I don’t know how much it deviates from the original text.

The French-Italian production was fairly expensive to make at a cool million. That’s ten million now. Absolutely no idea what they spent that much money on making what was a chase film. Very expensive cars? Crates of champagne? Caviar? 

The movie company insists that it lost money, some ten million. They needed to have drank a lot less champagne.

Coming full cycle, there’s a Sheckley novelization of the film. Algis Budrys in his June 1966 Galaxy Science Fiction review said it was “a reasonably good chase novel”. 

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born July 19, 1883 Max Fleischer. Animator, film director and producer. He brought such animated characters as Betty Boop, Popeye and Superman to the screen and was responsible for a number of technological innovations including the Rotoscope and Stereoptical Processes. You can see Betty’s first screen appearance here in the 1930 Cartoon, “Dizzy Dishes”. (Died 1972.)
  • Born July 19, 1904 Groff Conklin. He edited forty anthologies of science fiction, one of mystery stories. His book review column, “Galaxy’s Five-Star Shelf”, was a core feature in Galaxy Science Fiction from its premiere issue in October 1950 until the October 1955 issue. He was nominated at NyCon II for a Best Book Reviewer Hugo, and at Millennium Philcon, he was nominated for a Retro Hugo for Best Professional Editor. (Died 1968.)
  • Born July 19, 1927 Richard E. Geis. I met him at least once when I was living out there in Oregon. Interesting person. He won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer twice; and whose science fiction fanzine Science Fiction Review won Hugo Awards for Best Fanzine four times. The Alien Critic won the Best Fanzine Hugo (once in a tie with Algol), and once by himself. And yes, I enjoyed reading the Science Fiction Review. I’ve not any of his handful of genre novels, and certainly haven’t encountered his soft-core porn of which there’s a lot. (Died 2013.)
  • Born July 19, 1938 Jayant Vishnu Narlikar, 84. He and Fred Hoyle developed the Hoyle–Narlikar theory, which Stephen Hawking would prove is incompatible with an expanding universe. He would write two genre novels, The Return of The Vaman (translated from Marathi) and The Message from Aristarchus. His autobiography is My Tale of Four Cities: An Autobiography.
  • Born July 19, 1950 Richard Pini, 72. He’s half of the husband-and-wife team responsible for creating the well-known Elfquest series of comics, graphic novels and prose works. They are also known as WaRP (as in Warp Graphics). It’s worth noting that characters based on works by the Pinis appear in the first issue of Ghost Rider.
  • Born July 19, 1963 Garth Nix, 59. Writer of children’s and young adult fantasy novels, to wit the Keys to the KingdomOld Kingdom, and Seventh Tower series. The Ragwitch which I read quite some time ago is quite excellent and being a one-off can give you a good taste of him without committing to a series.
  • Born July 19, 1969 Kelly Link, 53. First, let me note that along with Ellen Datlow, she and her husband Gavin Grant were responsible for the last five volumes of The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror. They all did an absolutely magnificent job. All of her collections, Pretty MonstersMagic for Beginners and Get in Trouble are astonishingly good. And she’s much honored having three Nebula Awards, a World Fantasy Award, an Otherwise Award, a Sturgeon Award and received a MacArthur Genius Grant. She was a finalist for a 2016 Pulitzer Prize. And Hugos. She won a Hugo at Interaction for her “Faery Handbag” novellette, her “Magic for Beginners” novella was nominated at L.A. Con IV, and finally Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet was nominated at Nippon 2007 for Best Semi-Prozine (her husband Gavin Grant was also nominated). 

(9) HARD TO KEEP CURRENT. Goodreads lists “The 72 Most Popular Fantasy Novels of the Past Three Years” based on reader info. I’ve actually read three and expect to read two more of these. I was sure my score would be zero.

Fantasy literature is arguably the single oldest genre in all of storytelling. Contemporary fantasy has its roots, overtly or not, in world mythology and folklore, which in turn have their roots in oral traditions that extend back beyond recorded history. Old!
 
But today we’re interested in new fantasy. Gathered below are the most popular fantasy books of the past three years, as determined by reader shelvings and reviews. All books listed here were published in 2019 or later, in the U.S., and for fantasy series with multiple titles (ArmentroutButcherMaas!) we’ve listed the first series book published in that time period.

(10) FUTURE ERIC FLINT TITLES COMING FROM BAEN. [Item by Andrew Porter.] Toni Weisskopf wrote to me, “His last email to me was the delivery of revision of THE TRANSYLVANIAN DECISION; that’s already on the schedule. There’s a few more, which I expect collaborators will finish. Credit will vary, depending on how much input Eric had already given.”

(11) FUNDRAISER FOR FLINT FAMILY. The GoFundMe set up for Eric Flint’s wife Lucille – “Eric Flint” – has already made its $10,000 goal, having raised $11,627 at this writing.

My name is Debbie and my sister, Lucille Robbins, just lost her beloved husband of 21 years, Eric Flint. For the last six months Eric has been fighting the fight of his life, but unfortunately his body could no longer sustain the battle and he succumbed to the infections that robbed him of the final years of life. Eric had so many plans, right up to the end. He wanted to live and to keep writing and to keep reaching out to everyone in the Science Fiction community, but here we are. Unfortunately Eric has not been able to write while he has been sick and Lucille lost many hours of work taking care of Eric. As you know writers have to keep writing to make money and right now Lucille and family could use some help financially with the costs of memorial services. Any donation will be greatly appreciated.

(12) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In “Honest Trailers: Hulk v. Thor (1988)” the Screen Junkies narrator notes, “no one wanted this.  You’ve got to trust us.”  The movie isn’t even called “Hulk v. Thor,” it’s “The Incredible Hulk Returns,” the first of three made-for-TV Hulk movies.  This ripe piece of ’80s cheese has Bruce Banner hiding out as “Bruce Banyon” when he isn’t turning into Lou Ferrigno and “gruntflexing.”  But Hulk DOES fight Thor. They even dance around a sparkly machine while fighting.  And Thor has a drinking problem. “I’m thirsty,” Thor says in the laboratory. “Is there nothing to drink in this alchemist’s den?”

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Daniel Dern, Kevin Standlee, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Chris Barkley, and Michael Toman for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 7/14/22 You’ve Got To — Accentuate The Positronic

(1) SMACK IN THE MIDDLE (EARTH) WITH YOU. Amazon Prime put out “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” main teaser today.

Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power brings to screens for the very first time the heroic legends of the fabled Second Age of Middle-earth’s history. This epic drama is set thousands of years before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and will take viewers back to an era in which great powers were forged, kingdoms rose to glory and fell to ruin, unlikely heroes were tested, hope hung by the finest of threads, and the greatest villain that ever flowed from Tolkien’s pen threatened to cover all the world in darkness. Beginning in a time of relative peace, the series follows an ensemble cast of characters, both familiar and new, as they confront the long-feared re-emergence of evil to Middle-earth. From the darkest depths of the Misty Mountains, to the majestic forests of the elf-capital of Lindon, to the breathtaking island kingdom of Númenor, to the furthest reaches of the map, these kingdoms and characters will carve out legacies that live on long after they are gone.

(2) WESTERCON COVID TALLY. Westercon 74, held in Tonopah, asked that any person who contracted COVID-19 during the con or for one week following send them an email so they could track any outbreak.  Kevin Standlee reports that at the end of the week 11 members reported positive COVID-19 tests. That represents 7% of the members who picked up their badges and attended the convention. The contact reports by those who gave permission to have their information published are at http://westercon74.org/covid/.

(3) STOKING THE FLAMES. LitReactor interviewed Bram Stoker Awards administrator James Chambers to find out “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Bram Stoker Awards® | LitReactor

Each year there’s an official Stoker reading list. I have used this list a lot both to make recommendations and to read recommended works. A few questions about the list: Is it open for public viewing?

Yes, a public version of the list for works published in 2022 is available here. Members recommend works they think merit consideration for a Bram Stoker Award, and we share their selections with the public. It’s a great resource for anyone looking for reading suggestions or wondering what’s new that year. Libraries sometimes refer to this list to make book selections for their patrons. Anyone, HWA member or not, can view this record of horror publishing from year to year. Last year’s list is available here.

Who is allowed to recommend books to the list?

Any member of the HWA in good standing may recommend books….

(4) GETTING TO KNOW YOU. Kelley Armstrong discusses the historical research she did for her time travel mystery A Rip Through Time in “Adventures in Writing Time Travel” at CrimeReads.

…I decided to try a time-travel mystery… with a modern detective, transported into the body of a housemaid working for an undertaker-turned-early-forensic-scientist in 1869 Edinburgh. That meant researching domestic service, undertaking, law enforcement, medicine, forensics and so much more, all of it in Scotland while most of the resources are English.

I quickly learned that secondary resources aren’t necessarily reliable. I spent the first quarter of the book referring to my local police detective as Inspector McCreadie, based on secondary sources that insisted that was the proper title in both England and Scotland. Then I started poring over firsthand police accounts and contemporary newspapers, only to discover the correct title was Detective….

(5) PUPPY PUPPETRY [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In the Financial Times behind a paywall, Sarah Hemming discusses a new musical version of 101 Dalmatians, which is playing at the Open Air Theatre (openairtheatre.com) in Regent’s Park through August 28.  She interviews the theatre’s artistic director, Timothy Sheader.

“There is the matter of 101 spotty dogs. And that’s before you get to the canine alliance that springs into action to rescue the stolen pups.  A pack of hounds on stage, park or no park, seems inadvisable, so while there might be a fleeting glimpse of a real puppy–‘things may get changed in previews,’ says Sheader — the vast majority of dog action will be down to puppets and children — ‘We have 96 puppets, four children, and a dog.’

For Sheader, puppets are not just a practical solution:  they also invite you to identify with the dogs.  ‘What the cartoon does brilliantly is what the novel does:  it manages to be from the perspective of the dogs,’ he says. ‘And when you go to (actual) dogs that can’t talk, they get sidelined.  We have managed to control the dogs like the cartoon. What I like about puppetry is the invitation to an audience to use their imaginations.'”

(6) A FAMILY TRADITION. “Long before Frank Oz brought many Muppets to life, his father, an amateur Dutch puppeteer, made a Hitler marionette as an act of defiance. He buried it during the war.” “The Saga of a World War II Ancestor of Miss Piggy, Bert and Yoda” in the New York Times.

A marionette of Hitler that was created in the 1930s as an instrument of parody by Frank Oz’s father, Isidore (Mike) Oznowicz, will be displayed at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco.via Frank Oznowicz, Jenny Oznowicz and Ronald Oznowicz; Jason Madella

The puppet stands 20 inches tall, hand-painted and carved out of wood, its uniform tattered and torn. But for all it has endured over more than 80 years — buried in a backyard in Belgium at the outset of World War II, dug up after the war and taken on a nine-day cross-Atlantic journey, stored and almost forgotten in an attic in Oakland, Calif. — it remains, with its black toothbrush mustache and right arm raised in a Nazi salute, immediately and chillingly recognizable.

It is a depiction of Hitler, hand-carved and painted in the late 1930s by an amateur Dutch puppeteer, Isidore (Mike) Oznowicz, and clothed by his Flemish wife, Frances, as they lived in prewar Belgium.

The Hitler marionette, an instrument of parody and defiance, offers an intriguing glimpse into the strong puppetry tradition in the family of the man who retrieved it from that attic: Frank Oz, one of its creators’ sons, who went on to become one of the 20th century’s best-known puppeteers, bringing Cookie Monster, Bert, Miss Piggy and others to life through his collaborations with Jim Henson, and later becoming a force in the Star Wars movies, giving voice to Yoda. The marionette will be shown publicly for the first time later this month at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco….

(7) CHECKED OUT FOR GOOD. A local library is a casualty of the culture wars. “What’s Happening With The Vinton Public Library” asks the Iowa Starting Line.

Residents of a small Iowa town criticized their library’s LGBTQ staff and their displaying of LGBTQ-related books until most of the staff quit. Now, the town’s library is closed for the foreseeable future.

After having the same library director for 32 years, the Vinton Public Library can’t seem to keep the position filled anymore. Since summer 2021, the Vinton Public Library has gone through two permanent directors and an interim director who has served in that role twice. 

Located about 40 miles northwest of Cedar Rapids, the doors of the Vinton Public Library—housed in a brick and stone Carnegie—have been open to the public since 1904, but were shuttered on Friday, July 8, while the Vinton Library Board tries to sort out staffing issues seemingly brought on by local dalliances with the national culture wars….  

(8) MEMORY LANE.  

1999 [By Cat Eldridge.] Muppets in Space which premiered on this day was the first film released after the death of Jim Henson. As such, it came with great hope and quite a few individuals expected it to, well, fail as it didn’t have the magic of Jim Henson in it. 

It was written by written by Jerry Juhl, Joseph Mazzarino, and Ken Kaufman. Juhl wrote every Muppets films that had been done as well as the chief writer on The Muppets, Mazzarino was the chief writer on Head Writer and Director on Sesame Street.  So serious writing creds here. Well excepting Kaufman who had none.

SPOILERS HERE! 

The plot is an SF one with Gonzo being told by a pair of cosmic knowledge fish, that he is an alien from outer space. Yes, I’m serious as he really as we will see an entire ship full of gonzo beings. Now having said that very weird tidbit, I’m not going to say another word about the story.

SPOILERS END!

One of the co-writers, Mazzarino. has repeatedly said that he left the film before shooting started, due to changes made to his draft of the screenplay. He said that his draft included parodies of AlienContact and  Men in Black but most of that got removed on the request of the studio. 

Reception was decidedly mixed. Robert Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Tribune said, “Muppets from Space is just not very good.” However, Robin Rauzi of the Los Angeles Times exclaimed “The magic is back.” Frank Oz, who was not there for the filming, kvetched that it was “not the movie that we wanted it to be.”   

Indeed, it lost money, not much, as it made just about two million less than the twenty-four that it cost to make.   

Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes give it an excellent sixty-three percent rating.   

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born July 14, 1906 Abner J. Gelula. One of the many authors* of Cosmos, a serialized novel that appeared first in Science Fiction Digest in July 1933 and then has a really complicated publication that I won’t detail here. It was critiqued as “the world’s most fabulous serial,” “one of the unique stunts of early science fiction,” and conversely “a failure, miserable and near-complete.” The entire text, chapter by chapter, can be read here. [*To be precise, Earl Binder, Otto Binder. Arthur J. Burks, John W. Campbell, Jr., Lloyd Arthur Eshbach, Ralph Milne Farley, Francis Flagg, J. Harvey Haggard, Edmond Hamilton, David H. Keller, M.D., Otis Adelbert Kline, A. Merritt, P. Schuyler Miller, Bob Olsen, Raymond A. Palmer, E. Hoffmann Price and Edward E. Smith. Gulp!] (Died 1985) 
  • Born July 14, 1910 William Hanna. American animator, voice actor, cartoonist, and who was the co-creator with Joseph Barbera of Tom and Jerry as well as the creator of the animation studio and production company Hanna-Barbera. He’s also responsible for The Flintstones and Jetsons. (Died 2001.)
  • Born July 14, 1926 Harry Dean Stanton. My favorite genre role for him? The tarot card player in them video for Procul Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale”. No, I’m not kidding.  He also played Paul of Tarsus in The Last Temptation of Christ, Harold “Brain” Hellman in Escape from New York, Detective Rudolph “Rudy” Junkins in Christine, Bud in Repo Man, Carl Rod in Twin Peaks twice, Toot-Toot in The Green Mile, Harvey in Alien Autopsy and a Security Guard in The Avengers. He didn’t do a lot of genre tv, one episode of The Wild Wild West as Lucius Brand in “The Night of The Hangman” and a character named Lemon on Alfred Hitchcock Presents in the “Escape to Sonoita” episode. (Died 2017.)
  • Born July 14, 1943 Christopher Priest, 79. This is the Birthday of the One and True Christopher Priest. If I was putting together an introductory reading list to him, I’d start with The Prestige, add in the Islanders (both of which won BSFAs) and its companion volume, The Dream Archipelago. Maybe Inverted World as well. How’s that sound?  What would you add in? 
  • Born July 14, 1964 Jane Espenson, 58. She had a five-year stint as a writer and producer on Buffy the Vampire Slayer where she shared a Hugo Award at Torcon 3 (2003) for her writing on the “Conversations with Dead People” episode, and she shared another Hugo at Chicon 7 (2012) for Game of Thrones, season one. She was on the writing staff for the fourth season of Torchwood and executive produced Caprica. And yes, she had a stint on the rebooted Galactica.
  • Born July 14, 1966 Brian Selznick, 56. Illustrator and writer best known as the writer of The Invention of Hugo Cabret which may or may not be genre. You decide. His later work, Wonderstruck, definitely is. The Marvels, a story of a traveling circus family is magical in its own right though not genre. His next work, Kaleidoscopic, due out this autumn looks to just as fantastic. 
  • Born July 14, 1987 Sara Canning, 35. Major roles in A Series of Unfortunate Events, Primeval: New World and The Vampire Dairies, she also appeared in Once Upon a TimeWar for the Planet Of The ApesAndroid EmployedSupernatural and Smallville to name some of her other genre work.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

  • Some JWST humor from Shane Bevin.

(11) NARRATIVE HOOK. Molly Odintz interviews Liz Michalski “Liz Michalski On Peter Pan, Motherhood, and the Meaning of Perpetual Youth” at CrimeReads.

In Darling Girl, Wendy Darling was merely the first of many generations of women to be visited by the perpetually youthful Pan. Is this a stand-in for generational trauma?

I was thinking more along the lines of the Me Too movement and what a struggle it has been for women to be heard. Peter Pan’s story has been told for years — now it’s the turn of the Darling women.

(12) USUAL THINGS. Once again – don’t let people work con security who want to work con security: “’Stranger Things’ Fans Brought Joseph Quinn to Tears After Security Yelled at Him for Speaking to Them”Yahoo! relays the latest example why.

Stranger Things” breakout Joseph Quinn broke down in tears during a recent appearance at London Film and Comic Con. The actor, who became an instant fan favorite thanks to his performance as Hellfire Club leader Eddie on the fourth season of the Netflix series, couldn’t hold tears back after a fan stood up to thank him for sharing his time with fans.

Reports surfaced on social media during London Film and Comic Con that security hounded Quinn for interacting with fans for too long while signing memorabilia (via BuzzFeed). The event reportedly oversold tickets to Quinn’s meet-and-greet, and thus wanted to filter guests in and out quickly. Quinn apparently was chatting with his fans for longer than security would have liked.

“The way Joseph Quinn was treated at LFCC is fucking disgusting,” one attendee wrote on social media “Staff fully yelled at him to shut the fuck up and to just sign and not to interact with fans [because] they over sold and couldn’t get all people seen.”

During a larger Q&A session with Quinn, one fan stood up and said, “Mine’s not really a question, it’s just more an extension of gratitude. A lot of us have heard of what happened yesterday, whether it’s true or not, about how you were treated. I really want to say, we’re really grateful that you’re sharing your time. Thank you for signing our things, for spending time with us and making our summer.”

(13) OVERDRAWN AT THE BLADE BANK. “House of the Dragon Iron Throne prop had to borrow swords” says SYFY Wire.

We regret to inform you that the supply chain issues caused by the COVID-19 health crisis have finally reached Westeros. Speaking with Entertainment Weekly for a lengthy feature about the upcoming House of the Dragon (premiering on HBO and HBO Max late next month), co-showrunner, executive producer, and series director Miguel Sapochnik estimated that around 2,500 swords were used to build the show’s interpretation of the coveted Iron Throne.

Construction on this prop required so many blades, in fact, that the Game of Thrones prequel was forced to borrow a few sabres from other fantasy projects like Netflix’s The Witcher and Duncan Jones’ Warcraft movie.

The resultant amalgamation of steel representing the epicenter of Targaryen power isn’t just a harmless bit of set dressing — it could actually take an eye out. “Literally we had to put [up] fences when we first built it,” Sapochnik revealed. “Some of them are real swords. It is as dangerous as it is [described] in the books.” While the crew could have gotten away with recycling the Iron Throne created for GoT, they decided to build something that felt more accurate to the one described in the books penned by George R.R. Martin.

(14) ALTERNATIVE TO RUSSIAN LAUNCHER. “Successful debut flight for Europe’s Vega-C rocket” reports BBC News.

The medium-lift vehicle was sent up from French Guiana to deliver seven satellites to orbit, the largest of which will test Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

Vega-C has enormous importance for Europe’s continued access to space.

It’s needed to fill a big gap in capability now that Russian rockets are no longer available because of the war in Ukraine.

The withdrawal from the market of Moscow’s Soyuz launchers earlier this year left European institutional and commercial satellites scrambling for alternative rides.

Vega-C will be the obvious option for many, although even before Wednesday’s successful maiden flight, the new Italian-led rocket system was fully booked through 2023, 2024 and 2025.

And there’s a further reason why Vega-C’s entry into the launcher business is critical. Its first stage, the segment of the vehicle that gets it up off the ground, is also going to be used on Europe’s forthcoming heavy-lift rocket, the Ariane-6.

Sharing the stage technology across both launcher systems is expected to lead to significant cost savings…

(15) THIRD FIFTH. The Season 5 teaser for The Handmaid’s Tale dropped today.

In Season 5, June faces consequences for killing Commander Waterford while struggling to redefine her identity and purpose. The widowed Serena attempts to raise her profile in Toronto as Gilead’s influence creeps into Canada. Commander Lawrence works with Aunt Lydia as he tries to reform Gilead and rise in power. June, Luke, and Moira fight Gilead from a distance as they continue their mission to save and reunite with Hannah.

(16) SPLISH SPLASH. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] It could be Waterworld Part II  if Kevin Costner, Dennis Hopper, Jeanne Tripplehorn, et al. were anime characters. (Well, I hope I’m mistaken.): “Netflix’s ‘Drifting Home’ trailer introduces a mysterious, water-filled anime world”. Available to stream on September 16.

…The film follows two childhood friends who go to play in the now-abandoned apartment building where they grew up, only to suddenly find themselves floating through a watery world with their old neighbourhood no longer in sight.

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In “Honest Trailers: Stranger Things (Season 4),” the Screen Junkies say that Stranger Things has run out of Stephen King material to copy, so they’re riffing off of heavy metal album covers and ’90s movies.  The character David Harbour plays “should be dead.  But someone wanted David Harbour tortured–a lot.”  And what rocker in the ’80s preferred Kate Bush to Lynyrd Skynyrd?

[Thanks to JJ, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Todd Mason, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Jennifer Hawthorne, Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daneel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 7/4/22 The Scroll Will Come Out Tomorrow, Bet Your Bottom Pixel That Tomorrow, There’ll Be Scrolls

(1) GREEN BONE GETS RED LIGHT. A TV series adaptation of Fonda Lee’s Green Bone Saga will not be produced: “Peacock has canceled an award-winning fantasy epic and fans are up in arms” reports TechRadar.

Peacock has canceled its planned TV adaptation of bestselling and award-winning fantasy trilogy, The Green Bone Saga. 

The Universal-owned streaming service revealed in 2020 that it had begun developing the show, which was due to be based on the first novel in the series, Jade City. Dave Kalstein, who’d most recently overseen Bourne spin-off Treadstone, and Breck Eisner, director of Vin Diesel-led fantasy adventure The Last Witch Hunter and many episodes of The Expanse, were in the charge overseeing the series. 

However, The Green Bone Saga author Fonda J. Lee, revealed that Peacock executives have now changed their minds and will not be moving forward with their show. 

(2) NEARLY-FINAL WESTERCON MEMBERSHIP FIGURES. [Item by Kevin Standlee.] Assuming nobody shows up in the next 3 hours to buy an at-the-door membership or pick up their pre-registered badge, the numbers at “Membership Count by Location/Class – Westercon 74” are pretty much the final membership stats. (Includes breakout by country and state.)

Total Memberships all types: 338; Attending: 278; Child: 1; Supporting: 59

Badges picked up: 158 (57% of Attending+Child)

Meanwhile, the hoax issue of the Westercon 74 daily newzine has posted: Tonopah Telegraph issue Π.

(3) ALERT THE MEDIA! Congratulations to Sharon Lee and Steve Miller on collaborative Opus 100!

(4) A CLOUD OF WITNESS. The Hugos There podcast assembled a panel to discuss the 2022 Best Short Story Hugo finalists. The panelists are host Seth Heasley, Ann Spangler, Rob Tomshany, Amanda Wakaruk, Lisa McCarty, JW Wartick, Ivor Watkins, Cora Buhlert, Lori Anderson, Haley Zapal, Sarah Elkins, and Juan Sanmiguel. Here is the audio link. Or view on YouTube:

(5) 1940 ASF COVER RENEWED. The Conservation Center describes the restoration of an original pulp cover painting by Hubert Rogers: “Astounding Science (non) Fiction! Conserving a Pulp Fiction Painting”.

… “Astounding was the leading science fiction pulp magazine of the late 1930s and 1940s. The artist, Hubert Rogers, was their primary cover artist from the late 1930s until he left to return to his native Canada and assist in the war effort. The story this illustrates, “Space Guards,” was written by Philip Francis Nowlan. Nowlan’s name may not be remembered today, but in 1928 he created Buck Rogers.” The owner of this painting, a true pulp art and science fiction fan, found this Roger’s painting in need of conservation. “I bought this painting at an estate sale, where it had apparently been stored for decades in a closet. I don’t know how it ended up there – back then, pulp art often was given to folks who worked at the publisher, or given to science fiction conventions to be auctioned off to help raise money for the convention. Rogers was one of the few artists who did manage to get a great deal of his original art back. Obviously, it was in dire need of conservation, as it had suffered greatly over the years.”…

(6) ROOTS OF A CAREER. Oliver Brackenbury interviews David C. Smith in episode 44 of the So I’m Writing A Novel podcast: “Interview with David C. Smith (Part One)”.

David C. Smith is an author whose career began in the 1970’s during the second wave of sword & sorcery, he still writes to this very day, and Oliver felt very lucky to get the chance to have this epic, first-ever two-part interview with him!

In this first part we cover David’s original aspirations to work in film, the incredible role having the right English teacher can play in your life, discovering Conan, the real life model for Norman Bates, how Lord of the Rings helped David see Robert E Howard more clearly, the grounded nature of sword & sorcery and how it contrasts to make the weird elements shine brighter, too many elephants in too many towers, “when everything is special than nothing is”, the 70’s fanzine community and the role it played in David’s career…

(7) THE DAYS LINGER ON. The Cromcast continue their Howard Days recording with a recording of the “What’s Up with REH?” panel, where a representative of the Conan rights owners tells what is planned (Conan novels by big names like Brandon Sanderson, Stephen King or GRRM apparently, even though Sanderson and King are not at all suited to Conan): “Howard Days 2022 – Part 8 – What’s Up with REH?”

The panelists discuss the latest news regarding Howard publishing, entertainment and how his influence continues. Panelists include Joel Bylos, Paul Herman, Matt John, Fred Malmberg, Matt Murray, Steve Saffel, and Jay Zetterberg.

And the final installment from Howard Days is an interview with Matt John of the Rogues in the House podcast: “Howard Days 2022 – Part 9 – A Chat with Matt John of Rogues in the House!”

Hile, Cromrades! For our final episode from Howard Days 2022, we present a most excellent crossover event! In this recording from Saturday, June 11, Josh and Luke are joined by Matt John of Rogues in the House Podcast, Monolith Games, and Modiphius Entertainment!

(8) BIBLIOGRAPHIC DYNAMOS. [Item by Cora Buhlert.] At ‘Do You Write Under Your Own Name?’, Martin Edwards talks about his work on indexing fiction magazines, including SFF mags: “Crime Indexes and Phil Stephensen-Payne”. I mostly know Edwards as a crime and mystery specialist — he’s the current president of the Detection Club, edits the British Library Crime Classics series and was chair of the CWA – but I had no idea he was also active in SFF.

…By now (2000), the Internet was beginning to be a “thing” so I decided to create a small (!) website that focussed on author bibliographies ( http://www.philsp.com/authors.html) and also had a simple list of which magazines had been indexed (and where).

By coincidence (“steam engine time”) Doug Ellis and John Locke had just produced their first checklist of pulps and Dave Pringle and Mike Ashley had produced a checklist of significant “fiction magazines”. With permission from all parties I merged these two lists and added all the SF magazines indexed in the various SF magazine indexes and produced the first pass of the magazine list part of the website ( http://www.philsp.com/magazines.html). Having expected to list a few hundred magazines at most, this had already grown to 4000 magazines (and has since grown to just under 11,000)….

(9) MEMORY LANE

1984 [By Cat Eldridge.] Call me a mercenary. Call me an assassin. Call me a villain. I am all that and more. My name’s John Gaunt, but out on the streets of Cynosure, I am called Grimjack — Grimjack

His first appearance was the tenth issue of Starslayer: The Log of the Jolly Roger as published by First Comics. He was created by John Ostrander and Timothy Truman, but the setting, the all-dimensional city of Cynosure, which plays an important role in the life and deaths of this character, predates him.

He, the mercenary with a heart of gold at times and very much not at other times, was the creation of writer John Ostrander and artist Timothy Truman. It was sold well enough to be spun off into its own series, lasting eighty-one issues, though First’s nasty bankruptcy, see the Conan debacle, prevented any new material from being published until 2005.

Cynosure crosses all the time lines so anything can happen. One of my favorite stories was the one involving the Really Big Rabbits, “Night of The Killer Rabbits” which if you’re interested, a Grimjack fan has detailed here. There’s a panel in that story where Grimjack, when told of the existence of these, errr, bunnies flatly refused to believe they exist. Oh they do.

Would any such series be complete without a bar full of weird characters including a drunk lizard? I think not. Our sort of hero owns Munden’s and he spends a lot of time there drinking and brooding. It’s run by Gordon Munden, the Manager who owns the bar following Gaunt’s first and, presumably, second death. Death isn’t permanent in this multiverse.

It’s a wonderfully weird series in which Grimjack gets into many adventures, both SF and not so SF. Yes, I’ve read the entire run of him, or least pretty much all of them save some of those early Starslayer appearances which I’d would dearly to get my hands on at a reasonable price. 

So if you’ve not read it yet I will recommend you do so.  It was resurrected, yes pun intended, in Grimjack: Killer Instinct and The Manx Cat in the Nineties, both excellent. (Those are quite superb introductions to the character and readily available.) The hardcover omnibuses, though not cheap, are stellar publications. 

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born July 4, 1883 — Rube Goldberg. Not genre, but certainly genre adjacent as I could argue that MacGyver is direct descendent of him. Born Reuben Garrett Lucius Goldberg, he was a sculptor, author, cartoonist, engineer, and inventor who’s certainly best known for his very popular cartoons showing overly complex machines doing simple tasks in a terribly convoluted manner, hence the phrase “Rube Goldberg machines”. The X-Files episode titled “The Goldberg Variation” involved an apartment rigged as a Goldberg machine. (Died 1970.)
  • Born July 4, 1901 — Guy Endore. American novelist and screenwriter whose 1933 The Werewolf of Paris novel holds the same position in werewolf literature as does Dracula does for vampire literature. It was filmed as The Curse of The Werewolf for which he wrote the screenplay. Stableford also praises his horror story, “The Day of the Dragon”. He worked on the screenplay for Mark of the Vampire starring Bella Lugosi. (Died 1970.)
  • Born July 4, 1910 — Gloria Stuart. She was cast as Flora Cranley opposite Claude Rains in The Invisible Man in 1933, and 68 years later she played Madeline Fawkes in The Invisible Man series. She was in The Old Dark House as Margaret Waverton which is considered horror largely because Boris Karloff was in it. And she was in the time travelling The Two Worlds of Jennie Logan as well. (Died 2010.)
  • Born July 4, 1949 — Peter Crowther, 73. He is the founder (with Simon Conway) of PS Publishing where he’s editor now. He edited a series of genre anthologies that DAW published. And he’s written a number of horror novels of which I’d say After Happily Ever and By Wizard Oak are good introductions to him. He’s also done a lot of short fiction but I see he’s readily available in digital form for much of short fiction or novels at the usual digital suspects. 
  • Born July 4, 1960 — Joyce Agu, 62. Background characters are fascinating. She played Ensign Gates on the Next Generation, a role she did for forty-seven episodes! She later showed up as an Excelsior crew member in The Undiscovered Country thought it’s not certain it’s the same character. 
  • Born July 4, 1974 — Kevin Hanchard, 48. Canadian actor best known for his major role in Orphan Black as Detective Art Bell, whose partner’s suicide kicks off the whole show. He also had a significant role in the first season of The Expanse as Inspector Sematimba, Det. Miller’s old friend from Eros. Other genre roles include appearances in the movies Suicide Squad and the made-for-TV Savage Planet, and shows The StrainHemlock GroveWynonna Earp, and Impulse, among others. (Xtifr) 
  • Born July 4, 1977 — David Petersen, 45. Writer and illustrator of the brilliant Mouse Guard series. If you haven’t read it, do so — it’s that good and it’s still ongoing. It almost got developed as a film but got axed due to corporate politics. IDW published The Wind in The Willows with over sixty of his illustrations several years back. 

(11) CLICK ON THE INTERNOPE. “Nope: Viral website tours Jordan Peele’s movie amusement park” reports SYFY Wire. The website link: “Get out of this world at Jupiter’s Claim”.

With only two weeks and change before Jordan Peele’s Nope finally blows into theaters on an ill-omened wind, the clouds that’ve obscured a clear bird’s-eye view of Peele’s secret-shrouded horror flick are finally starting to part. Fans can now pan for buried nuggets of pre-release movie lore, thanks to a new viral website that mines Nope’s old west-style setting to tease a Gold Rush-era good time that’s pretty much guaranteed to go bad.

Moseying on over to the site brings guests to a family-friendly marketing come-on for Jupiter’s Claim, the movie’s fictional B-grade theme park celebrating the flaky, fake filmography of Nope’s former kid-cowboy star Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun). Now an opportunistic adult in the movie, Jupe’s still trapping wayward tourists who head up the park’s remote dusty trail…but as the film’s final trailer suggests, he delivers on the promise of an otherworldly spectacle that more than makes up for the price of admission….

Universal has dropped a number of behind-the-scenes clips recently – here’s one:

(12) DEMON PRINCES REVIVAL. In 2021, Jack Vance’s estate (Spatterlight Press), published Matthew Hughes’s Barbarians of the Beyond, an authorized companion novel to Vance’s iconic revenge series, The Demon Princes.  The book prompted George R.R. Martin to say, “Hughes does Jack Vance better than anyone except Jack himself.”

Twenty years ago, five master criminals known as the Demon Princes raided Mount Pleasant to enslave thousands of inhabitants in the lawless Beyond. Now Morwen Sabine, a daughter of captives, has escaped her cruel master and returns to Mount Pleasant to recover the hidden treasure she hopes will buy her parents’ freedom.

But Mount Pleasant has changed. Morwen must cope with mystic cultists, murderous drug-smugglers, undercover “weasels” of the Interplanetary Police Coordinating Company, and the henchmen of the vicious pirate lord who owns her parents and wants Morwen returned. So he can kill her slowly…

Joining GRRM in praising Hughes’ novel are other major sff writers. David Gerrold says, “Lock the door, turn off the phone, get into a comfy chair, and deep-dive into a marvelous continuation of Jack Vance’s Demon Princes series. Matthew Hughes is a treasure and Barbarians of the Beyond is a terrific adventure.”  Robert J. Sawyer opines, “Matthew Hughes follows nimbly in Jack Vance’s footprints, then breaks some fresh trail. First-class space opera.”And Kurt Busiek is just as enthusiastic: “Engaging and enchanting…a fine companion adventure to Jack Vance’s The Demon Princes series, told with Matthew Hughes’s excellent sense of charm, ethical complexity and exotic worldbuilding. Let’s hope this is just the beginning!”

Available from Amazon and Amazon.ca.

(13) DON’T BLAME CTHULHU. Charles Fort would have been disappointed by the real answer: “Mysterious Incident of Fish Raining From The Sky May Have Been Solved”.

Did it rain fish in Texarkana, Texas/Arkansas, last December? Or did a massive gulp of cormorants spontaneously hurl their payloads? Sharon Hill, an independent researcher from Pennsylvania, and Paul Cropper, an author from Australia, investigated the odd phenomenon and have come to a conclusion: It was the regurgitating gulp….

(14) KEEP WATCHING THE WEBB. NASA says July 12 is the date we’ll get to see the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope. This press release tells when and where to view them.

The public release of Webb’s first images and spectra is July 12 – now less than two weeks away! The Webb team has confirmed that that 15 out of 17 instrument modes are ready for science, with just two more still to go. As we near the end of commissioning, we wanted to let you know where you can see the first Webb science data and how to participate in the celebration of Webb science! Here are all the ways you can #UnfoldTheUniverse with Webb:

Countdown: How many minutes left? The official countdown is at https://webb.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/countdown.html

Watch: See the images revealed in real-time and hear from experts about the exciting results on NASA TV at 10:30am Eastern on July 12: https://www.nasa.gov/nasalive

View: Just interested in the amazing imagery? You will be able to find the first images and spectra at: https://www.nasa.gov/webbfirstimages

(15) ARGON, AYE. In “3-D Printing Grows Beyond Its Novelty Roots” the New York Times throws out some impressive numbers.

The machines stand 20 feet high, weigh 60,000 pounds and represent the technological frontier of 3-D printing.

Each machine deploys 150 laser beams, projected from a gantry and moving quickly back and forth, making high-tech parts for corporate customers in fields including aerospace, semiconductors, defense and medical implants.

The parts of titanium and other materials are created layer by layer, each about as thin as a human hair, up to 20,000 layers, depending on a part’s design. The machines are hermetically sealed. Inside, the atmosphere is mainly argon, the least reactive of gases, reducing the chance of impurities that cause defects in a part.

The 3-D-printing foundry in Devens, Mass., about 40 miles northwest of Boston, is owned by VulcanForms, a start-up that came out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It has raised $355 million in venture funding. And its work force has jumped sixfold in the past year to 360, with recruits from major manufacturers like General Electric and Pratt & Whitney and tech companies including Google and Autodesk….

(16) MAN OF MYSTERY. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Murdoch Mysteries — ‘Pendrick’s Planetary Parlour’ (S15 E20)”

In the 1890s [more like a few years into the new century by this episode], William Murdoch uses radical forensic techniques for the time, including fingerprinting and trace evidence, to solve some of the city’s most gruesome murders.

Even if you haven’t watching this show (S1E1 involved some of the Edison-Tesla AC/DC wars), this one’s a tech hoot, anticipating/using everything from Nigerian Prince scams to naught-video blackmail, encryption, backdoors, and more that I can’t offhand remember.

Other episodes have had everything from (was or appeared to be) moon launch cannons and hyperloop tunnels to Martian invasions, robots, time travel, with historic guests including Houdini, Sir Arthut Conan Doyle, Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter and bunches more I can’t remember. (Including Mark Twain, played by William Shatner.)

(Toronto fan Yvonne Penney even had a walk-on in an episode that aired in 2013.)

(17) DR. EVIL’S CONTRIBUTIONS TO CULTURE. [Item by JJ.] In June 1999 Mike Myers released the movie Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. In it, his Dr. Evil villain character describes his megalomaniac plans for a time machine, which he calls “Time Machine”, and a laser, which he calls “The Alan Parsons Project”.

Part 1:

Part 2:

In September 1999, Alan Parsons released a new album with the theme of H.G. Wells’ Time Machine. The bonus track is a cut of the title song… remixed with samples of Dr. Evil speaking in it.

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

Salt Lake City Bids for 2024 Westercon

By Kevin Standlee: A Salt Lake City-based group has announced a write-in bid to host the 2024 West Coast Science Fantasy Conference (Westercon 76). If selected, they plan to host Westercon 76 at the Doubletree by Hilton SLC Airport over the weekend of July 4-7, 2024. The election to choose the site of Westercon 76 will be held at Westercon 74 in Tonopah, Nevada over the weekend of July 1-4, 2022, with voting closing on July 2. There are no bids on the ballot, nor do there appear to be any other candidates vying to host Westercon 76.

The Utah in 2024 Westercon bid is led by Chair Charles R. Galway and Treasurer Cheryl A. Sneddon. Both have experience with the Salt Lake City-area convention CONduit and other volunteer events ranging from CONduit to Westercon and larger non-genre events. They are in the process of finalizing their bid filing with Westercon 74 in Tonopah, and they expect to file their bid before the close of voting at Westercon 74. Representatives of the bid will be at Westercon 74 in Tonopah to answer questions.

No bids filed by the deadline to appear on the ballot for the 2024 site selection election. Under Westercon rules, groups may file as write-in bids until the close of voting. Any site that files the necessary documents required by the Westercon Bylaws can be selected through the election process at Westercon. Should no validly-filed bid win the election, the Westercon Business Meeting can select a committee. If the Business Meeting is unable to select a committee, the selection of the site falls to the Board of Directors of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, owners of the Westercon service mark.

The Site Selection election at Westercon 74 to select the site of the 2024 Westercon will be held on the first two days of Westercon 74 in Tonopah, Nevada. Westercon 74 will be held July 1-4, 2022 at the Tonopah Convention Center and area hotels. The Westercon 74 website is http://westercon74.org/. Voting to select the site of Westercon 74 will close at 7 PM Pacific Daylight Time on July 2, 2022. All supporting or attending members of Westercon 74 are eligible to vote, although due to the deadline for advance voting by mail, votes will need to be cast at Westercon 74.

Any member of Westercon 74 in Tonopah can vote in the election to choose the site of the 2024 Westercon upon payment of a $20 voting fee, which entitles the voter to at least a supporting membership in the 2024 Westercon. Information about the 2024 Site Selection election is available at the Westercon 74 website here. There is no electronic voting, and voting fees may not be paid by credit card. Members unable to attend Westercon 74 in person may arrange for other persons to deliver their ballots on their behalf to the Site Selection voting desk at Westercon 74 in Tonopah.

Anyone who joins Westercon 74 as a Supporting member by June 25, 2022 will also have access to the convention’s Virtual Program, http://westercon74.org/whats-on/programming/virtal-program/. To register as a member of Westercon 74, see the convention’s registration page here. Advance registration for Westercon 74 ends at the end of the day on June 25.

Westercon Site Selection is governed by the Westercon Bylaws, which are available online here.
The results of 2024 Westercon Site Selection voting will be announced at the Westercon 74 Business Meeting on Sunday, July 3 at 11 AM PDT in the Tonopah Convention Center. Should no eligible bid win the election, the Westercon Business Meeting can select a committee under the provisions of the Westercon Bylaws.

Get Ready for the 2022 Westercon in Tonopah

“What’s On?” gives a preview of Westercon 74, to be held July 1-4 in Tonopah, NV. Chair Kevin Standlee reports the con currently has 320 members. The guests of honor are Kevin Andrew Murphy and Myrna Donato.

Kevin says:

For the benefit of people who don’t have time to read through the entire progress report or search around the website, we have updated our What’s On page to give people a better idea of what will be happening at Westercon 74 and when. With the doors opening at 10 AM on Friday, July 1 and the final scheduled item being the Alien Autopsy Party (scheduled to end just before Midnight on Monday, July 4), and with the Convention Center open around-the-clock the entire time in between — none of this “it’s 6 PM, get out” stuff we’ve sometimes faced at other facilities — I suggest anyone who wants the full experience of the “Wild, Wild Westercon” to arrive at least the day before and not plan to leave until July 5.

The convention just sent out Progress Report 5 (a free download).

Did you know Westercon has an online component?

  • There will be online programming starting at 8 AM each day of the convention including Friday.
  • Online programming is available to all members, including supporting members. Information on how to access online programming will be sent to all members who have registered an email address with the convention closer to the convention dates.

The online program’s list of international participants is impressive! Lauren Beukes, Mike Carey, Ashraf Fagih, Fábio Fernandes, Stark Holborn, Lucy Holland, Cristina Jurado, Ken MacLeod, Juliet E. McKenna, Cheryl Morgan, Noura Al Noman, Gareth L. Powell, and Adrian Tchaikovsky.

The in-person side includes John Hertz running two “Classics of Science Fiction” items.

Classics of Science Fiction

By John Hertz: We’ll discuss two Classics of Science Fiction at Westercon LXXIV, one discussion each. Come to one or both as you like. You’ll be welcome to join in.

Our working definition of a classic  is “A work that survives its own time. After the currents that might have sustained it have changes, it remains, and is seen to be worthwhile for itself.” If you have a better definition, bring it.

Each work is famous in a different way. Each may be more interesting now than when first published Have you read them? Have you re-read them?

  • The Door Into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein (1956). If you don’t know who Petronius Arbiter was, it wouldn’t hurt you to look him up. That’s what Dan named his cat, so you’ll learn something about Dan. There’s plenty going on. You’ll meet people coming and going. Please don’t worry about whether the year 2000 really turned out this way. Carl Sagan said our book was tautly constructed; that matters. So does the title.
  • Judgment Night by C.L. Moore (1943). Poetry. Combat. A Galactic Empire. Rebellion. An Amazon. Throughout all, the author manages an almost palpable sense of inevitability; as things happen, you knew that they would — a tribute to her vision and narration. A.J. Budrys called our book an Astounding tour de force. So it is.

Pixel Scroll 4/26/22 I Don’t Want A Pixel. I Just Wanna Scroll On My Motorcycxel

(1) WANT TO HOST A WESTERCON? The 2024 con has no takers at the moment: “Westercon 76 Site Selection Open; No Bids Filed by Deadline” reports Westercon 74 chair Kevin Standlee.

No group filed a bid by the April 15, 2022 deadline to host Westercon 76 (the 2024 West Coast Science Fantasy Conference). Bids can still file up until the close of voting (7 PM PDT, July 2, 2022) to be eligible as a write-in bid to win the election.

Site Selection voting is now open. See our Site Selection page for more information and to download a ballot. The ballot will also be distributed to members as part of Progress Report 5, scheduled for publication sometime in May.

Meanwhile, the fate of the 2023 event, Westercon 75, is still up in the air, too.

Note that no bid was selected to host Westercon 75 (the 2023 Westercon) at last year’s convention, but a committee was formed to attempt to find a group to host the convention. As of now, no groups have come forward prepared to host Westercon 75. It is likely that the determination of arrangements for both Westercons 75 and 76 will be up to the members of Westercon at this year’s Business Meeting. If the Business Meeting is unable to make a decision, the determination of arrangements for Westercon will be left up to the board of directors of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, owners of the Westercon service mark.

(2) REGENERATE YES, REINCARNATE NO. A RadioTimes.com poll shows “Doctor Who fans want new actor, not David Tennant, as 14th Doctor”.

…However, in the comments, viewers were quick to make clear they would like Tennant back for cameos and guest appearances, with one respondent saying: “Love David and I’d be more than happy to see him back in the role as many times as possible- that fits the story, more than happy for cameos or a special but I think it would be best to stick to someone else for a full series.”…

(3) WANT STORIES ABOUT DEMOCRACY. Omenana Speculative Fiction Magazine is looking for 15 speculative short stories that explore the theme “Positive Visions of Democracy”. Full details at the link. “Call for submissions from artists and writers for special edition of Omenana Speculative Fiction Magazine”. Stories should be centred around an African experience and can be set anywhere in a near or far future, other place, other world. If you can imagine it, let’s see it. Submission deadline is April 30.

As we put pen to paper, it was literally raining coups in Africa.

From Sudan to Mali, from Burkina Faso to Equatorial Guinea to Niger, one hears either of violent truncation of government or an attempt at seizing the reins of power by gun wielding soldiers who purport to act for the greater good of the country. 

Democracy, the system of governance that best serves the interest of the individual by allowing them a say in who governs them and how they are governed, is in peril. With this backdrop, Omenana Speculative Fiction Magazine in partnership with the National Democratic Institute (NDI) – a US-based non-governmental organisation that works to strengthen democracy – is calling for submissions for a special themed edition that explores positive visions of democracy.

(4) LITERARY LADDERSHIP FOR EMERGING AFRICAN AUTHORS. “Nigerian Author Suyi Davies Okungbowa Endows Fellowship for Emerging African Authors”Brittle Paper has the story. See full details at the African Author Literary Laddership website. Applications open May 4 and close May 31.

African writers in the early stages of their career are invited to apply for the “Literary Ladder Fellowship for Emerging African Authors.”

The fellowship is an initiative of Nigerian novelist Suyi Davies Okungbowa, author of the acclaimed novels Son of the Storm and David Mogo, Godhunter. The fellowship aims to “support, elevate and connect emerging fiction authors of Black and/or African descent, based primarily on the African continent and writing in English”

The fellowship offers:

a funded ($500 each) three-month digital residency,

membership in a private community of practice,

continuous support through the publishing ecosystem….

(5) TURNING BACK THE CLOCK OR ERASING TIMES? A Slate article written by Stitch, “Turning Red: The Pixar movie has one huge blind spot when it comes to fandom”, says “The Pixar movie’s depiction of fandom may be relatable, but some of us know it’s also unrealistic.”

…Turning Red is perhaps the closest that the mainstream has come to showing how women and other marginalized folks both participate in and are mistreated for their interest in fandom too. And it does so without also making them the butt of the joke. At first, the school bully Tyler and his friends make fun of Meilin for her art; later, when Meilin and her friends capitalize upon her ability to turn into an adorable, giant red panda in order to fund their concert dreams, Tyler is one of the people who line up to hang with the cute panda. (Tyler eventually also proves to be a 4*Town fan.) Meilin’s transformation sparks a form of fandom among the students in their school, who come to be downright obsessed with Meilin’s red panda form. Some of the same people who mocked Meilin’s group for its intense fixations, it turns out, are now experiencing fixations of their own.

This angle and its turn of events are both the triumphs and the failings of the film. 

…But that portrait is one that either forgets or ignores what fandom was really like then and now. Participating in fandom of any kind was never an experience where everything was nice and fans all bonded over their shared love—especially for people of color. Nostalgia reimagines the way that fans remember early online fandom, suggesting it was a place where no one fought, where everyone minded their business, and where no one was a bigot. It’s a sunny contrast to what many agree is the situation now: Online hate mobs, browbeating, and social media–facilitated backlash are publicly acknowledged. Yet the early 2000s, around the same time that Meilin and her friends were getting into 4*Town, were full of now-legendary tales of discriminatory fandom drama…. 

(6) FLORIDA OUTLAWS RANKED CHOICE VOTING. [Item by Steven H Silver.] A new law just passed in Florida that establishes an election police force also makes it illegal in Florida for any government jurisdiction to use ranked balloting to determine winners.  Any cities or counties that already use it may no longer do so according to the new law. “Florida bans ranked-choice voting in new elections law”.

…Senate Bill 524 specifically said it was “prohibiting the use of ranked-choice voting to determine election or nomination to elective office; voiding existing or future local ordinances authorizing the use of ranked choice voting.”

This means cities or counties can’t pass their own laws on ranked-choice voting.

In a ranked-choice voting system, voters rank candidates by preference on their ballots rather than selecting just one.

The candidate with the majority of first-choice votes wins outright. However, if no candidate gets a majority of first-choice votes, an “instant runoff” takes place. That means that the candidate who finished last is eliminated, and that candidate’s voters ballots are redistributed to their second-choice pick. This process continues until there is a clear majority winner or candidate won with more than half of the vote….

(7) YEOH Q&A. “Actor Michelle Yeoh wants to change the way we think of superheroes” NPR learned in a conversation with her.

On Everything Everywhere All At Once originally being written for Jackie Chan as the lead and Michelle Yeoh as his wife – but the Daniels rewrote it

They realized, I think, we’re telling the same old story if it was really Jackie Chan and myself as playing the husband and wife, and he is the one who goes on the multiverse thing. But I think the good news was … the Daniels are surrounded by very, very strong women. … I think it’s an homage to all the strong women who are around them. … So I think that cemented the mother and daughter story a lot more. I think it’s much more relatable. It’s much more emotional on many levels.

(8) SECOND INNING. The vampire is playing a bat, again. “Robert Pattinson Returning for ‘The Batman’ Sequel” reports Yahoo!

The Batman” is getting a sequel, with Robert Pattinson set to return as Gotham’s fiercest defender.

Warner Bros. revealed its plans for another Caped Crusader story during its Tuesday evening presentation at CinemaCon, the annual trade show for theater owners. “The Batman” director Matt Reeves was on hand to announce the news that he will write and direct the follow-up, but he did not provide any details about what the movie will entail….

(9) YES, DEATH WILL NOT RELEASE YOU. “Sony confirms new ‘Ghostbusters’ movie – how it could work”SYFY Wire shares what they know.

… At the end of its CinemaCon presentation on Monday, Sony Pictures dropped a sizzle reel that included peeks at a number of upcoming projects we already knew about, including the long-awaited Kraven the Hunter movie, as well as reveals of a couple of things we didn’t know about just yet. Those reveals included a title card teasing a third Venom film, and confirmation that a new Ghostbusters installment is in the works. 

Though the project is officially still untitled, and Sony offered no clues as to casting or story for the project, the announcement of a fifth Ghostbusters movie likely means a direct sequel to 2021’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife,…

(10) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.

2010 [Compiled by Cat Eldridge] Twelve years ago the sequel to the highly successful and quite popular Iron Man film premiered. Unimaginatively titled Iron Man 2, it was directed by Jon Favreau who had done the first film, and written by Justin Theroux, who had not done the first film (which had been written by a committee of Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, Art Marcum and Matt Holloway. Hey it worked, didn’t it?) The first film got nominated for a Hugo at Anticipation (2009). 

Iron Man 2 premiered at the El Capitan Theatre, a fully restored movie palace in Hollywood. This theater and the adjacent Hollywood Masonic Temple (which are now known as the El Capitan Entertainment Centre) are owned by the Disney Company and serve as the venue for a majority of the Disney film premieres.

Although fandom is very fond of saying it did substantially worse than the first film at the box office that’s a lie as it actually did better. Iron Man did five hundred and eighty million against one hundred and forty million in costs, whereas this film took in six hundred and thirty million against the same production costs. 

So how was it received by critics at the time? Anthony Lane at the New Yorker liked it better than its competitors Spider-Man and Superman: “To find a comic-book hero who doesn’t agonize over his supergifts, and would defend his constitutional right to get a kick out of them, is frankly a relief.” And Roger Ebert writing for the Chicago Sun-Tribune was impressed: “Iron Man 2 is a polished, high-octane sequel, not as good as the original but building once again on a quirky performance by Robert Downey Jr.”

Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give it a rather good seventy-one percent rating. 

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born April 26, 1564 William Shakespeare. World’s greatest playwright and perhaps one of our earliest fantasy writers was born today. Possibly. Or baptized today. Opinions differ. What I do know is that the supernatural is a commonplace thing in his plays from ghosts to fairies. So which fantasy-tinged work by him do you like the best? I go for “A Midsummer’s Night Dream”. (Died 1616.)
  • Born April 26, 1922 A. E. van Vogt. Ok I admit it’s been so long since I read him that I don’t clearly remember what I liked by him, though I know I read Slan and The Weapon Makers.  I am fascinated by the wiki page that noted Damon Knight disliked his writing whereas Philip K. Dick and Paul Di Filippo defended him strongly. What do y’all think of him? And the Science Fiction Writers of America named him their 14th Grand Master in 1995. No Hugos and only one Retro Hugo at MidAmericaCon for Slan though he’s had myriad Retro Hugo nominations. He picked a Nebula Grand Master Award. (Died 2000.)
  • Born April 26, 1943 Bill Warren. American film historian, critic, and one of the leading authorities on science fiction, horror, and fantasy films. Bill launched his writing career in the Sixties. His 1968 short story “Death Is a Lonely Place” would be printed in the first issue of the magazine Worlds of Fantasy. During the Seventies , he also wrote scripts for Warren Publishing’s black-and-white comic books CreepyEerie, and Vampirella. He was a leading light of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society and which he and his wife Beverly were very much involved in. With Allan Rothstein he wrote a murder mystery Fandom is a Way of Death set at L..A. Con II which was distributed at the convention, and featured many fans including Forrest J Ackerman. The first edition of his film reference guide Keep Watching the Skies! American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties came out in 1982; it would be revised and expanded several times, the latest in 2009. It is available from the usual suspects. (Died 2016.)
  • Born April 26, 1945 Charles Platt, 77. British writer who’s a naturalized U.S. citizen. I’m very impressed with The Silicon Man which nominated for the Campbell Memorial and Prometheus Award, and also with his nonfiction Dream Makers volumes about the genre which were both nominated for the Hugo, The Uncommon People Who Write Science Fiction by Charles Platt at Devention Two (1981) and The Uncommon Men & Women Who Write Science Fiction at L.A. Con II (1984). 
  • Born April 26, 1948 Marta Randall, 74. First woman president of SFWA.  With Robert Silverberg, Randall edited two volumes of the New Dimensions series, the eleventh and twelfth volumesI’ve not read her novels but I do remember the New Dimensions series fondly. 
  • Born April 26, 1978 Marie Bilodeau, 44. Canadian writer nominated for an amazing fifteen Aurora Awards. She’s won two, one with Derek Künsken as the 2019 co-chair of Can-Con, and another the next year with him for again hosting that Con. Who here has read her fiction?
  • Born April 26, 1985 Falk Hentschel, 37. Two of my favorite characters in the DCU are Hawkman and Hawkgirl. He played Hawkman in the Arrowverse on The FlashArrow and most noticeably Legends of Tomorrow. If you have not seen him there, here’s an image of them from Flash. He has one-offs on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and The Jouneyman.

(12) COMICS SECTION.

  • Frank and Ernest learn what happens to Mr. Potato Head when he needs a therapist!

(13) DEEP ROOTS. Nicholas Barber drills down to find “Doctor Strange and the historical roots of the multiverse” at BBC Culture.

Remember when saving the world was enough for any self-respecting film character? These days, they have to think bigger. In 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, Earth’s mightiest heroes went as far as saving the Universe – or half of it, anyway. But since then, even a feat as impressive as that seems woefully short of ambition. In 2022, superheroes are expected to navigate their way around a whole labyrinth of different universes. The multiverse is the place to be….

The scientific possibility of the multiverse

To answer that question, you could go back to the discussions of other realities in ancient Greek philosophy and Hindu and Persian mythology. Plenty of books have been set in two or more realms, too: CS Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, for instance. But the notion of countless co-existing universes was posited as a scientific possibility in 1957 by Hugh Everett, a mathematician from Washington DC….

(14) YOU NEED LITTLE TEENY EYES FOR READING LITTLE TEENY PRINT. “A Tiny Brontë Book, Sold for $1.25 Million, to Return Home” – the New York Times has the good news.

The last of the two dozen miniature books made by the young Charlotte Brontë to remain in private hands, which resurfaced last month after nearly a century, will soon be heading home to the remote parsonage on the moors of northern England where it was made.

“A Book of Rhymes,” which contains 10 previously unpublished poems by the 13-year-old Brontë, was a star attraction over the weekend at the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair, where it was offered for $1.25 million. At the fair’s preview last Thursday, a red dot indicating it had been sold appeared on the label inside the specially constructed display case, setting off speculations about the buyer.

On Monday, it was revealed that the buyer is the Friends of the National Libraries, a British charity, which is donating it to the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, Yorkshire, home to one of the world’s largest collections of Brontë manuscripts.

… The miniature books and magazines created by the young Charlotte. Emily, Anne and Branwell Brontë in the 1820s have long been objects of fascination for ordinary people and deep-pocketed collectors alike. Initially created to entertain their toy soldiers (and sewn together from sugar packets, wallpaper scraps and other stray bits of paper), the tiny volumes reflected the rich imaginary world they created in the isolation of the family home, which fed into novels like Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre” and Emily’s “Wuthering Heights.”

“A Book of Rhymes,” a 15-page volume smaller than a playing card made it 1829, was last seen at auction in 1916 in New York, where it sold for $520. It then disappeared from view, its whereabouts — and even its survival — unknown….

(15) STILL NOT EASY BEING GREEN. “’Wicked’ Split Into Two Movies As Universal Unveils Release Dates” announces The Hollywood Reporter. But no hurry, right? Universal has been developing the project since 2004. 

“One Short Day” in the Emerald City is turning into two longer stays. 

The Wicked film will now come to theaters as two films, rather than one production, director Jon M. Chu announced Tuesday. The first film has set a premiere date of December 2024, with the second premiering the following Christmas. 

“As we prepared the production over the past year, it became increasingly clear that it would be impossible to wrestle the story of ‘Wicked’ into a single film without doing some real damage to it. As we tried to cut songs or trim characters, those decisions felt like fatal compromises to the source material that has entertained us all for so many years,” Chu wrote in a statement on Twitter. 

(16) WHERE IT’S NOT TOO BRIGHT. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] I have no idea what language this film is in, but it’s sf and has come to Netflix!

Escaped from the sun, took shelter in a submarine… Is it safe now? Yakamoz S245.

After disaster strikes Earth, a marine biologist on a submarine research mission must fight to survive with the crew as a conspiracy comes to light.

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In “Honest Trailers: Moonfall,” the Screen Junkies‘ narrator notes that many people want an Honest Trailer for The Batman.  But there’s an oxygen breach in the Screen Junkies’ compound, and the narrator’s swimming in brain fog.  But Moonfall — “That’s just stupid enough to work!  But why is the script written in crayon?”  And why do the astronauts in this film discover there’s a white dwarf at the center of the moon and their eyes aren’t fried seeing it?

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Andrew Porter, Steven H Silver, Jennifer Hawthorne, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, and JJ for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Adam Rakunas.]

Pixel Scroll 2/26/22 Comments Have Spoken, Like The First Filing; Pixels Have Woken, Like The First Scroll

(1) HOW THE WEB MAKES CRIMINALS OF US ALL. The Guardian tells about the revamped Tolkien Estate website in “Unseen JRR Tolkien paintings, photographs and video clips released”. (Andrew Porter reminds us that the artwork in the article is not new.)

Unseen photographs and paintings of JRR Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings fantasy books, have been released by the writer’s estate, along with draft manuscripts and letters.

Its website has been relaunched with new material, including sections on Tolkien’s calligraphy and a timeline of his life.

Audio recordings and video clips featuring both Tolkien, who died in 1973, and his son Christopher, who died in 2020, are among the new material.

The relaunch date of 26 February is significant in Tolkien lore because 26 February 3019 was the date in the Third Age when the Fellowship of the Ring was broken at Amon Hen and Frodo and Sam set out on their lonely and terrifying journey to Mordor.

Perusing the site’s “Frequently Asked Questions and Links” I discovered this jarring information:

Can I publish a Tolkien Fanzine?

The name TOLKIEN is a registered trademark and may not be used without permission. Unfortunately permission cannot be given for publications which use the name TOLKIEN or the Tolkien Estate’s Copyright Materials.

Are a lot of you faneds who don’t spell it T*****n hearing from lawyers?

(2) THEY’VE GOT THE DROP ON US. “Russia’s space chief responds to new sanctions by suggesting that the ISS would no longer be prevented from crashing into the US or Europe” – originally reported by Business Insider.

According to CNN, Biden further stated that the sanctions “will degrade (Russia’s) aerospace industry, including their space program.”… 

In response, Rogozin said on Twitter: “If you block cooperation with us, who will save the ISS from an uncontrolled deorbit and fall into the United States or Europe?” 

He added: There is also the option of dropping a 500-ton structure to India and China. Do you want to threaten them with such a prospect? The ISS does not fly over Russia, so all the risks are yours. Are you ready for them?” 

Rogozin also mentioned that the ISS’s location and orbit in space are controlled by “Russian Progress MS cargo ships.” 

NASA did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment made outside of normal working hours.

In a statement to Euronews, however, NASA said that it “continues working with Roscosmos and our other international partners in Canada, Europe, and Japan to maintain safe and continuous ISS operations.”

It added: “The new export control measures will continue to allow US-Russia civil space cooperation.”

(3) PURLOINED LETTER TECHNIQUE. Radio Times’ Sab Astley says this is the place to look for clues to Doctor Who’s next phase: “Doctor Who Russell T Davies teases from his book on writing”.

…Now, with Davies’ surprise return to Doctor Who looming, everyone is searching for potential clues as to RTD’s approach to his second run – and unusually, the acclaimed screenwriter might have already given us a pretty good idea of what he’s planning thanks to a little book called The Writer’s Tale.

The Writer’s Tale is a tome of correspondence between Davies and Doctor Who Magazine contributor Benjamin Cook, taking place over the pre-production of season 4 right up to the final shots of Tennant’s last special between 2007 and 2009…

The Next Doctor

14th Doctor speculation is currently at an all-time high, with names like Michael Sheen, Michaela Coel, T’Nia Miller and Olly Alexander mentioned. However, one name that hasn’t arisen, which might just be a strong contender to bet on: Russell Tovey.

Davies makes no secret of his love for Tovey, and in a discussion over potential 11th Doctor castings, RTD states that Tovey is “amazing – I think I’d make him the eleventh Doctor”. Since then Tovey has starred in Davies’ Years & Years, and currently all of his upcoming projects are in post-production – making it the perfect time for RTD to nab Tovey if he so wishes.

Alternatively, if we look at Davies’ choice of actors in the years since The Writer’s Tale, the choice becomes clear: Lydia West. She’s clearly a favourite of RTD’s, starring in both Years & Years and It’s A Sin, and could follow in Jodie Whittaker’s footsteps as a female Doctor (and the first ‘lead’ Doctor to be played by a Black actor, though Jo Martin’s Fugitive Doctor technically got there first).

Altogether, based on RTD’s creative patterns and the insight of The Writer’s Tale it seems Russell Tovey or Lydia West are strong options for the 14th Doctor. However, there is a third possibility – the return of David Tennant…..

(4) FUTURE TENSE. “Good Job, Robin”, JoeAnn Hart’s short story about love, earth, and eating crickets, is this month’s installment of Future Tense Fiction, a series from Future Tense and Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination published on Slate.

Ahimsa waves an elbow at me, keeping her hands firmly cupped. “Isaura! Look!” She shouts to be heard over my earplugs, and I panic thinking she’s woozy again. But no, she only wants to show me something. I lean across the sorting table to look, and with a smile she opens her tawny hands like a flower, just enough so I can peek inside. Two stamens wiggle in the darkness.

Not stamens. Antennae. Out come the earplugs. “It’s just a cricket, Ahimsa. One of a billion crickets under this dome, every one of them chirping like an insect possessed.”…

Christy Spackman, an expert on the future of food, responds to JoeAnn Hart’s story in “Crickets could be the food solution that saves us all.”

…The first time I seriously considered crickets as the food of the future was in late 2015 during a presentation by undergraduates. Their policy proposal outlining how the adoption of insect protein in the Los Angeles Area could help insulate the region from some of the impacts of climate-change included a tasting of a recent-to-market, paleo-friendly, cricket-based protein bar. As I sunk my teeth into the slightly gummy, peanut-buttery bite being passed around the classroom, my mind flashed between the grim food futures presented in science fiction novels and the much smaller collection of hopeful fiction portrayals of delicious future feasts. What is it about our contemporary anxieties that makes it so easy to imagine such dystopic food futures?…

(5) HEAPS OF FUN. The New York Times’ A.O. Scott considers how successive American generations have different ways of arriving at the same destination — mortality: “Shelf Life: Our Collections and the Passage of Time”.

…The things you loved when you were young will never be able to make you young again. The reluctant acceptance of this fact is the source of nostalgia, a disorder that afflicts every modern generation in its own special way. Members of Generation X grew up under the heavy, sanctimonious shadow of the baby boom’s long adolescence, among crates of LPs and shelves of paperbacks to remind us of what we had missed. Just as baby boomers’ rebellion against their Depression- and war-formed parents defined their styles and poses, so did our impatience with the boomers set ours in motion. But I’m not talking so much about a grand narrative of history as about what Aksel might call the useless stuff — the objects and gadgets that form the infrastructure of memory….

Every cohort has these. A CD in a plastic jewel box is not intrinsically more poetic than a vinyl LP in a cardboard sleeve. On the internet and in television shows like “PEN15,” a robust millennial nostalgia fetishizes AOL chat rooms, Dance Dance Revolution, Tamagotchis and other things that I was already too old for the first time around. Gen Z will surely have its turn before long, even if its characteristic cultural pursuits don’t seem to be manifested in physical objects….

(6) SLF GRANT NEWS. The Speculative Literature Foundation has announced the final two winners of the SLF Convention Support Grants.

Over the course of the year we gave out $10,000, in grants of $500 – $1000 each, to science fiction and fantasy conventions.

These grants are intended to support conventions both in developing their online presences (through the purchase of tech, training costs, hosting costs, etc.) and making in-person gathering safer once it’s appropriate. Read on for more information about how each convention will use the funding.

WisCon is a feminist science fiction and fantasy convention held annually in Madison, Wisconsin. Founded in 1976 as the world’s first feminist speculative fiction convention, it has since grown into a robust and dedicated community of fans, artists, and scholars. The convention is hosted by the Society for the Furtherance and Study of Fantasy and Science Fiction a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization in Madison, Wisconsin, which aims to create a safe and inclusive environment for everyone.

WisCon will use the grant funds to cover the costs of equipment and equipment rental to make their con more accessible.

The Outer Dark Symposium on the Greater Weird is a progressive speculative fiction conference that focuses on contemporary Weird fiction. The con actively seeks to create spaces that allow for the kinds of conversations and connections that chart the future of boundary-breaking speculative fiction, as well as being an inclusive, safe and welcoming place for women, LBGTQ+, and writers of color. To meet this mission, they consider each dimension of access (fiscal, disability, equity, etc) with care to inform every decision they make, from where programming is accessed to how it’s structured.

A key focus for their 2022 convention is making sure they have easily accessible virtual spaces, as well as safe future events during the pandemic, which includes travel, catering, and technology costs that they anticipate will increase significantly this year.

(7) GAIMAN ADAPTED. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] Behind a paywall in the Financial Times, Nilanjana Roy reviews Chivalry, a graphic novel written by Neil Gaiman and drawn by Colleen Doran and based on a short story from Gaiman’s collection Smoke And Mirrors.

[Colleen Doran’s] stunning artwork turns Arthur’s knight into the kind of dashing, courtly hero who is obliged to seduce a maiden.  Doran’s illustrations, drawing from a soft palette of blues, pinks, and greens that flare unto sudden glorious bursts of crimson and gold at need, are what will make Chivalry a perennial Christmas gift.  Famous Authors are often at risk of having their old work briskly repackaged by clever marketing departments but Doran, a Gaiman fan since her youth has, for complicated rights reasons, waited over two decades to work on this short story…

,,,The question as to whether a single short story taken from a far more varied fantasy collection is satisfying as a standalone graphic novel remains.  Certainly,Gaiman and Doran’s book feels too slight on its own to measure up to the best of Gaiman’s output.  Still, Chivalry reminds you that, some days, all you need is to believe in impossible quests.

(8) UNDERSTANDING OCTAVIA BUTLER. “Black History Month: Octavia Butler’s sci-fi dystopia still relevant”USA Today profiles the author.

…Butler rose to prominence in the traditionally white bastion of science fiction. She was the first to write about prominent Black characters in science fiction settings, using dystopias, time travel and other tropes. 

Science-fiction author Nisi Shawl recalls meeting the “Kindred” author in 1999 during a convention in Seattle when she was tasked with writing a profile on Butler. The two became acquainted and a friendship later blossomed in 2002. 

“One thing that she really instilled in me was the idea that you should write about things that bring up strong emotions in you, things that you fear, things that you loathe, things that you cherish, but things that you are passionate about in one way or another,” Shawl tells USA TODAY, adding that Butler inspired her to write the short story “Momi Watu.” …

(9) MEMORY LANE.

2007 [Item by Cat Eldridge] Barbara Hambly, one of my favorite writers of horror, has won two Lord Ruthven Awards (1996 and 2007) given by the Lord Ruthven Assembly, a group of scholars specializing in vampire literature who are affiliated with the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts. 

Those Who Hunt in The Night, the first in the excellent John Asher series, won the Locus Award for Best Horror Novel.

I’m also very impressed of her two novelizations done for one of my favorite tv series, Beauty and the Beast and and Beauty and the Beast: Song of Orpheus as it’s hard to write material off those series that’s actually worth reading.  She wrote three Trek novels and several Star Wars too but I’ve not read them. 

And yes, there’s lots about her writing career I’ve not included here so feel free to tell me what you think I should have mentioned. 

Barbara Hambly

(10) 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 genre novels! More Than Human is brilliant and I assumed that he’d written a lot more long form fiction but it was short form where he excelled with more than two hundred such stories. I did read over the years a number of his reviews — they were quite good. (Died 1985.)
  • Born February 26, 1945 Marta Kristen, 77. 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, 74. 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, all of them are 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 and available from the usual suspects which is interesting as I know she took them out of print for awhile. 
  • Born February 26, 1957 John Jude Palencar, 65. Illustrator whose artwork graces over a hundred genre covers. In my personal collection, he’s on the covers of de lint’s The Onion Girl and Forests of the Heart (one of my top ten novels of SFF), Priest’s Four & Twenty Blackbirds and Le Guin’s Tehanu: The Last Book of EarthseaOrigins: The Art of John Jude Palencar is a perfect look at his work and marvelous eye candy as well.
  • Born February 26, 1958 Karen Berger, 64. 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, 1965 Liz Williams, 57. For my money, her best writing by far is her Detective Inspector Chen series about the futuristic city Singapore Three, its favorite paranormal police officer Chen and his squabbles with an actual Chinese-derived 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.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) 45TH BIRTHDAY ISSUE OF 2000 AD. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] This week the 45th birthday issue of 2000 AD is out. It includes a zarjaz strip of the Command Module droids travelling through the thrillverse collecting 2000 AD characters to help Tharg compose a birthday hit single. It also features the start of a new Judge Dredd story that teases that the Judges are trying to silence someone who claims to have a secret concerning the truth of Judge Dredd!

Splundig!

(13) I SEE BY YOUR OUTFIT THAT YOU ARE A COWBOY. Kevin Standlee says Westercon 74 sent out the following announcement to its members today regarding COVID-19. The short version:

Vaccination required

Masks required

For the long version, click here – “COVID-19 Health and Safety Policy”.

As a reminder, the 2022 Westercon will be held in Tonopah, Nevada from July 1-4.

(14) PURINA BAT CHOW. “Doorbells, chicken and special edition biscuits: why are The Batman’s tie-ins such a joker?” asks the Guardian. “Someone on the merchandising team is working overtime to turn the serious new Robert Pattinson movie into Sonic the Hedgehog.”

…Then there is all the food. The Oreos we have covered; they have a picture of Batman’s face on them, because we all know that nothing is more delicious than wolfing down an effigy of agonising mental torment. Papa John’s is also in on the act. Its pizzas currently come in commemorative The Batman boxes (because who doesn’t love using used food receptacles as keepsakes?) and there is also a new side – black ghost chilli chicken wings – that also apparently have something to do with Batman. Meanwhile, in the US, Little Caesars has made a “calzony” (a kind of folded pizza) that’s shaped like the Batman logo, allowing customers to grab themselves a slice of gooey, unresolved trauma.

Caffè Nero has subverted the pattern a little by focusing on the Riddler. It has launched a new hot chocolate, with a mysterious new flavour. If you can guess the flavour – which is to say, if you can stomach spending your money on a product that for the purposes of suspension of disbelief was designed by a nightmarish BDSM goblin – you can win a trip to a theme park.

Again, I’m barely touching the sides here….

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Dream Foundry has shared the Flights of Foundry 2021 panel “Making Your Reader Hungry: Food in SFF” with Nibedita Sen and Shweta Adhyam, moderated by Cora Buhlert. (Watch the video at the link.)

For a long time, speculative fiction rarely engaged with food. Over on the science fiction side of the fence, protagonists lived on food pills or ordered “Tea, Earl Grey, hot” from the replicator, while fantasy characters subsisted on the ubiquitous stew and quaffed tankards of ale. However, this has changed in recent times and now detailed food descriptions are a lot more common in SFF. Nor are we just seeing only stereotypical western and American food anymore, but also dishes from non-western cuisines and food traditions. This panel will discuss how food is portrayed in science fiction and fantasy and how this parallels real world developments, whether it’s meal replacement products like the unfortunately named Soylent or trends like pandemic baking.

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Chris Barkley, Irene Bruce, Rob Thornton, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, 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 Joe H.]

Pixel Scroll 2/6/22 I Thank Whatever Gods There Be, For My Unpixelable Scroll

(1) WFC ADDS GOH. World Fantasy Con 2022 has announced Iris Compiet is their Artist Guest of Honor.

Iris Compiet

Iris is an award-winning traditional artist and illustrator who makes her home in the Netherlands. Her client list includes Netflix, Magic the Gathering, and Harper Collins, among others. She’s the illustrator of the Dark Crystal Bestiary, the Labyrinth Bestiary, and Faeries of the Faultlines, which offers her fans a glimpse into the world she created by the same name. To learn more about Iris, see her page on the WFC 2022 website, and follow the links to her website and social media.

(2) ATTENTION WESTERSMOFS. [Item by Kevin Standlee.] The Westercon Bylaws & Business page, including the minutes of the 2021 Westercon Business Meeting, current version of the Westercon Bylaws (including Standing Rules and Draft Agenda for 2022), and links to the video of the 2021 Westercon Business Meeting, are updated here: Bylaws & Business – Westercon. I thank Linda Deneroff and Lisa Hayes for their work creating the documents and recording the video.

(3) ORIGIN STORY. In “The Surprising History of the Comic Book”, The Nation’s J. Hoberman reviews Pulp Empire: The Secret History of Comic Book Imperialism by Paul S. Hirsch.

Blame the comic book. Cheap and transportable, a trove of infantile fantasy and psychosexual Pop Art, often spiced with egregious stereotypes and nativist aggression, this humble medium was for a time the United States’ most ubiquitous cultural ambassador. Such is the thesis of Paul S. Hirsch’s Pulp Empire: The Secret History of Comic Book Imperialism, an engaging account of the ways in which comics variously served or confounded official interests.

Vividly illustrated and enjoyably hyperbolic, Pulp Empire tells its tale as a kind of horror comic. Recounting the emergence of comic books during the Depression, Hirsch details how the medium was drafted during World War II to play its own modest part in defeating the Axis, then cues the scary music…

(4) MARVEL LOADS UP FOR FREE COMIC BOOK DAY. Marvel Comics will celebrate Free Comic Book Day on May 7 this year with three free one-shots. The third comic to be announced is Free Comic Book Day: Avengers/X-Men #1.

Packed with three stories, Free Comic Book Day: Avengers/X-Men will offer fans new and old an exciting entry point into some of Marvel’s biggest upcoming stories and characters!

Free Comic Book Day: Avengers/X-Men #1 will also mark the exciting debut of a new hero that Marvel has big plans for this year! Meet BLOODLINE in an introduction story by writer Danny Lore and artist Karen Darboe! 

(5) EARTHSHAKING CELEBRATION. Sideshow is a sales site, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t be interested in all the promotions they have planned for “Sideshow’s Frank Frazetta Day 2022” on February 9.

Frank Frazetta was a legendary fantasy and science fiction artist who created some of the most iconic images in the 20th century. And on Wednesday, February 9, 2022 — Frank Frazetta’s birthday! — Sideshow is going to celebrate his life and legacy with an exciting event day. Read on for the schedule, list of giveaways, and livestream details.

Frank Frazetta Day honors Frank Frazetta’s many contributions to speculative fiction. There will be contests, games, and Sideshow Rewards. Plus, tune in for a special LIVE tour through the Frazetta Art Museum in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, led by Lori and Frank Frazetta Jr.

(6) PASSPORT TO FANTASY. “Tintin’s world adventure: comic strip hero joins the Smurfs on new Belgian passport” – the Guardian has the story.

Trees, eagles, bears, turrets and towers: passport designs used to follow certain conventions. Not any more. From Monday, all new Belgian passports will feature Tintin, the Smurfs and other heroes of Belgian comic-strip art.

With a 34-page standard passport, Belgian travellers will be accompanied by Lucky Luke, Blake and Mortimer, and Bob and Bobette. Many images are from the original strips, such as the 1954 Tintin serial, Explorers on the Moon, where the intrepid boy reporter took his first steps on the lunar surface 15 years before Neil Armstrong. Others were specially designed for the passport, such as a Smurf contemplating a globe, with its knapsack and maps spread on the ground.

… “There is a little bit of Belgian humour here,” Wouter Poels, a foreign ministry spokesman said. “It’s always nice if you can link what is functionable to something that is enjoyable. But a passport is and remains an administrative document,” he said referring to 48 new security features, such as barcodes, laser-engraved photographs and the polycarbonate ID page.

The passport scenes are inspired by travel and unsurprisingly avoid controversies, such as Tintin in the Congo, which is no longer sold in children’s sections of bookstores in the UK over its racist stereotypes. Nor does Lucky Luke smoke a cigarette. The cowboy, created in 1947 by Maurice de Bevere, also known as Morris, quit in 1988….

(7) RICHARD DEAN STARR (1968-2022). Writer Richard Dean Starr, who wrote many media tie-ins, died of Covid on February 4.

He was named Special Projects Coordinator for Moonstone Books in 2007. Starr edited Tales of Zorro, the first anthology of original Zorro short fiction ever authorized by Zorro Productions, Inc. The second volume, More Tales of Zorro, was released in the summer of 2011. In 2016, Starr co-authored a comic book team-up featuring Kolchak: The Night Stalker and Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I. with New York Times bestselling author Kevin J. Anderson

(8) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.

1974 [Item by Cat Eldridge] Forty-eight years ago this day, Zardoz premiered. It was written, produced, and directed by John Boorman of Excalibur fame who was nominated for a Hugo for that work at Chicon IV. It was produced by his company, John Boorman Productions Ltd. He had decided to make the film after his abortive attempt at dramatizing The Lord of the Rings. He wrote Zardoz with William (Bill) Stair, a long time collaborator. 

It starred Sean Connery, Charlotte Rampling, Sara Kestelman and John Alderton. It was shot entirely in County Wicklow where Excalibur was produced, so most of the supporting cast and crew was Irish. Indeed many of the extras were played by members of Irish Travelling community. It was made on a shoestring budget of one point six million and made one point eight million at the Box Office, so it didn’t even break even after marketing costs were figured in. 

So how was the reception for it? Well it was nominated for a Hugo at Aussiecon though Young Frankenstein won that year. Flesh Gordon, yes Flesh Gordon, finished second ahead of it in the balloting. 

Roger Ebert for the Chicago Sun-Times I think summed it up nicely when he said it was “a genuinely quirky movie, a trip into a future that seems ruled by a perpetually stoned set decorator”. Though William Thomas of Empire Magazine was less kind: “You have to hand it to John Boorman. When he’s brilliant, he’s brilliant (Point BlankDeliverance) but when he’s terrible, he’s really terrible.” It currently holds a fifty-three percent rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes.

It is not streaming for free anywhere but it’s available for purchase just about everywhere from AppleTV to YouTube for the same price of three dollars and ninety-nine cents. 

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born February 6, 1922 Patrick Macnee. He was best known as the secret agent John Steed in The Avengers, a role he reprised in the New Avengers. Avoid the putrid Avengers film which he is not in at to peril of your soul. And your sense of decency. He made his genre debut as Young Jacob Marley in Scrooge. He then starred as Derek Longbow in Incense for the Damned. Next up is an uncredited role voicing Imperious Leader on the original Battlestar Galactica.  He played Captain John Good R.N. in King Solomon’s Treasure based rather loosely on the H. Rider Haggard source material.  What else? Let’s see… he shows up in The Howling as Dr. George Waggner. Next up for him is another toff named Sir Wilfred in Waxwork and its sequel. Yes, he wears a suit rather nicely. At least being Professor Plocostomos in Lobster Man from Mars is an open farce.  I hope it isLet me note that he had a voice only role in the absolutely awful remake of The Avengers as Invisible Jones, a Ministry Agent. I do hope they paid him rather well. His last film work was genre, too, The Low Budget Time Machine, in which he started as Dr. Bernard. (Died 2015.)
  • Born February 6, 1925 Patricia S. Warrick, 97. Academic who did a lot of Seventies anthologies with Martin Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander with such titles as Social Problems Through Science FictionAmerican Government Through Science Fiction and Run to Starlight, Sports Through Science Fiction. She did write two books of a more serious nature by herself, The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction and Mind in Motion: The Fiction of Philip K. Dick.
  • Born February 6, 1932 Rip Torn. First genre work that comes to mind is of course RoboCop 3 and his Men in Black films. His first dip into our world comes as Dr. Nathan Bryce in The Man Who Fell to Earth. And he shows up in The Beastmaster as Maax. Actually if you count Alfred Hitchcock Presents, he’s been a member of our community since his twenties. He also shows up on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. as well. (Died 2019.)
  • Born February 6, 1947 Eric Flint, 75. I really like his Assiti Shards series, and the Heirs of Alexandria as well. Worth noting is that he is a co-founder and editor of the Baen Free Library.

(10) SUPERDOWNTIME. Defused showcases “40 Hysterical Comics Showing What Superheroes Do When They Are Not Out Saving The World” by artist Lucas Nascimento.

People who don’t read comics and only watch superhero movies don’t know what these heroes do when they are not saving the world from imminent destruction. I mean, don’t get me wrong it wouldn’t be a very interesting movie if we saw batman trying to keep up his persona and going g through his daily life. However, these heroes are not like us. How many of us can say that we made a whole persona out of our fear or that we are from an alien planet?

So it stands to reason that their daily problems wouldn’t be as usual as normal people. And that is the idea behind these comics which the artist by the name Lucas Nascimento has brought us. Not only does he manage to capture the unique personalities of each hero but he also draws them in his own style which is spectacular. So buckle up and get ready to go on a wild ride. Just scroll below to take a look for yourself….

(11) A RINGING ENDORSEMENT. Rich Horton’s had time to refine his thoughts about a novel he read a year ago: “Review: Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke”.

Piranesi bears almost no resemblance to Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. It is far shorter, It is set in what seems roughly the present day, not an alternate Regency. It is almost claustrophobic in setting (though strangely not despite being mostly set in a single building) and for much of the novel the main character is completely alone. For all that, it is as good as its predecessor…

(12) VERDANT READING. Paul Weimer analyzes the second book in The Green Man series: “Microreview [book]: The Green Man’s Foe by Juliet McKenna” at Nerds of a Feather.

Being mortal, but also the son of an otherworldly being isn’t all that it is cracked up to be. Ask Daniel Mackmain. After dealing with a threat to a wood and coming in contact with a very powerful supernatural entity, the titular Green Man, it is no wonder that his success in dealing with a rather nasty problem (that had some unfortunate consequences for him with the press and with the police) has resulted in the Green Man calling him on again.  At a new construction job site in the lovely Cotswolds, a mysterious figure seems to be influencing the local kids…and trying to get into the job site Daniel has been hired for. But what is he after? And why?

This is the second story of Daniel Mackmain, The Green Man’s Foe….

(13) GAMING IN STYLE. In the Washington Post, Shannon Liao looks at how “companies such as XBox and Nintendo are now releasing products such as nail polish and eye shadow for gamers.” “Tetris eyeshadow and Xbox nail polish: What’s behind the latest beauty and gaming trend”.

… While many of the most famous and recurring gaming partnerships, including fast food and energy drink brands, are aimed at men ages 18 to 30, the billion-dollar gaming and beauty industries have increasingly teamed up in recent years. Colorpop, a California-based cosmetics brand, worked with Nintendo’s Animal Crossing franchise last January to release eyeshadow palettes and glittery gold gel reminiscent of the island’s in-game currency, Bells. Xbox previously worked with Mac Cosmetics last October to create three Halloween looks, recreating characters from “Sea of Thieves,” “Psychonauts” and “Halo.”

“We’re in this moment of really overcoming that idea of the gamer being just that one demographic, that preconceived notion of the gamer being in the basement, and usually a man, 18 to 30-something,” said Marcos Waltenberg, global partnerships director at Xbox. “It’s much more than that now. … We’re now tasked with talking to a lot more people than we used to as a company, a few years ago.”…

(14) SPEAKING OF METEORS. What’s most important: What we are or what we feel we are? Chosen began running on Netflix on January 27, 2022.

(15) COINCIDENCE DAY. Just by coincidence, Lise Andreasen is taking a poll.

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Chris Barkley.] The Cincinnati Pops Orchestra honors mater composer john Williams on this 90th Birthday, which is this coming Tuesday. The video of the Pops’ performance of “Music of John Williams” is available through Monday, February 7 at 2:00 p.m.

Happy Birthday, John Williams! Pops Principal Guest Conductor Damon Gupton and the Pops treat us to a slice of John Williams’ most beloved scores—just in time for his 90th birthday. Experience selections from Superman, Star Wars, E.T., Jaws, Witches of Eastwick and more by one of the greatest composers of our lifetime.

[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Lise Andreasen, Kevin Standlee, Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Danny Sichel.]

Pixel Scroll 1/17/22 In Five Years, The Pixel Will Be Obsolete, Said The Salesman

(1) MORE AMAZON SHENANIGANS. Nick Cole says Galaxy’s Edge had its account nuked by Amazon over the weekend. The action has since been undone. “CTRL ALT Revolt FLASH REPORT”. He plays it the way his readers like to hear it.

Spent all weekend dealing with a situation on Amazon. Saturday night we got a letter saying our Galaxy’s Edge account was terminated and we were permanently banned.

This morning the books are back up. Was it a purge, a hacker running amok, the AI screwing up… I have thoughts.

But for now this is my official statement :

“We don’t know anything concrete. This happened on Saturday night on a 3 day weekend.

That sounds suspiciously like a hacker got into Amazon. Also, a few other people have had it happen to them.

But the times are crazy due to the leftists strangling everyone’s small business and acting like some kind of woke mafia within major corporations and so it must be considered, that until Amazon says different, this was some kind of Purge.

We are hoping Tuesday morning sees a resolution. Until then our cash flow has been destroyed, our customers are upset, and potential new customers are being lost forever….

(2) LIFE INFLUENCES ON LEM. [Item by Tom Becker.] Two recent books by Polish authors make clear how much Lem’s wartime experience weighed on him. In Agnieszka Gajewska’s deeply researched “Holocaust and the Stars,” translated by Katarzyna Gucio (Routledge) … and “Lem: A Life Out of This World,” a lively, genial biography by Wojciech Orlinski, which has yet to be translated into English. “A Holocaust Survivor’s Hardboiled Science Fiction” in The New Yorker. [Note: The Latin “l” is used in Lem’s first name because WordPress does not support the special character.]

In “His Master’s Voice,” a 1968 sci-fi novel by the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem, a team of scientists and scholars convened by the American government try to decipher a neutrino signal from outer space. They manage to translate a fragment of the signal’s information, and a couple of the scientists use it to construct a powerful weapon, which the project’s senior mathematician fears could wipe out humanity. The intention behind the message remains elusive, but why would an advanced life-form have broadcast instructions that could be so dangerous?

Late one night, a philosopher on the team named Saul Rappaport, who emigrated from Europe in the last year of the Second World War, tells the mathematician about a time—“the year was 1942, I think”—when he nearly died in a mass execution…..

Privately, Lem told people that he had witnessed the executions described by his fictional character. “Dr. Rappaport’s adventure is my adventure, from Lwów 1941, after the German army entered—I was to be shot,” he wrote to his American translator Michael Kandel. When Orlinski asked Lem’s widow which elements in the scene were drawn from life, she replied, “All of them.”…

(3) LIGHTNING STRIKING AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN. You knew it all along – the creators of the term “squeecore” graduated from the “I made you look! I win!” school of clickbaiting. Whose graduates always try to get John Scalzi to say their names, or failing that, they announce to the world he paid some attention to them. Yay them.

And here’s that big, succulent dose of attention:

That was it. Show’s over.

(4) THE SOUND AND THE FURY. Or is it? Camestros Felapton is convinced there’s more candy left in that piñata, as he argues in “Yeah, but”.

I was going to write something else today but as squeecore arguments are still raging on my social media I wanted to pull out some of my own views on where the discussion is, partly because there’s a lot of directions the arguments are going.

      1. Is there’s a dominant style in SFF in the sense of the works that critical buzz and award nominations? Yes, so long as we a generous with both “dominant” and “style” but it is fairly nebulous (as was New Wave for example.
      2. Is there a dominant style in SFF (in the sense above) that is so ubiquotous that is pushes out nearly everything else? No unless you define “style” so expansively that it can’t not to be true i.e. the claim becomes tautological.

He reaches number eight before he’s done.

(But wait! If you use a sufficiently high-powered vacuum, there might be more candy yet! Camestros reacts to Reddit’s discussion of the topic: “A log entry in the voyage of genre name looking for a genre”.)

(5) I SEE A LITTLE SILHOUETTO.  Meanwhile, Doris V. Sutherland has interesting points to make in “’Squeecore’ and the Cartoon Mode in SF/F” – thoughts that deserve to be discussed without the handicap of being attached to this arbitrary term.

…There’s an old rule in animation that a cartoon character should have a readily-identifiable silhouette — think of Mickey Mouse’s ears or Bart Simpson’s spiky hair. In the strongest examples these silhouettes incorporate not only the character’s body and/or clothes but also a posture that tells us something of their personality: Bugs Bunny casually leaning back as he chomps on a carrot; Spongebob excitedly waving his arms about. This is a visual counterpart to the old rule in writing that says you should hook the reader with the first line.

With that in mind, take a look at the opening line to Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth, the novel about the teenage lesbian necromancer who likes comic books and porn mags:

In the myriadic year of our Lord—the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the kindly Prince of Death!— Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth.

Succinct, funny, comprehensible in a flash — this is the prose equivalent of a cartoon character’s silhouette.

Can these stories, as wholes, be described as cartoonish? That’s more debatable. The purest examples of the aesthetic I’m talking about are in short stories like Vina Jie-Min Prasad’s “Fandom for Robots” and “A Guide For Working Breeds” or Naomi Kritzer’s “Cat Pictures Please”, each of which uses its cartoon-character-silhouette as the basis for its entire narrative trajectory. This is harder to sustain in a full-length novel. There are novels built wholly around the cartoon mode, but they fit into a narrow genre of giddy, goofy comedies (David Wong’s Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick is a good example)….

(6) THINKING INSIDE THE BOX. In case you were still wondering what hopepunk is: “The sci-fi genre offering radical hope for living better” at BBC Culture.

…In the midst of current political, economic and environment uncertainty, many of us may have noticed a tendency to fall into cynicism and pessimism. Could hopepunk be the perfect antidote?

If you feel wary of optimism, you are far from alone. Writers and philosophers across human history have had ambivalent views of hope. These contradictory opinions can be seen in the often opposing interpretations of the Pandora myth, first recorded by Hesiod around 700 BC. In his poem Works and Days, Hesiod describes how Zeus created Pandora as a punishment to humanity, following Prometheus’s theft of fire. She comes to humanity bearing a jar containing “countless plagues” – and, opening the lid, releases its evils to the world. “Only Hope remained there in an unbreakable home within the rim of the great jar,” Hesiod tells us….

(7) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.

2002 [Item by Cat Eldridge.] Twenty years ago this day, the musical Chicago premiered. I just rewatched it on HBO Max which is why you are getting it as the Anniversary piece tonight. Well that and that Mike is extremely generous in what I can cover in this feature. Extremely generous. You are forewarned as to what the future might hold. 

I first saw this film at the theater when it came out. It’s based off the 1975 stage musical of the same name which had music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, and book by Ebb and Bob Fosse. That in turn was based off Chicago, a very successful 1926 play written by Maurine Dallas Watkins. 

This film was directed by Rob Marshall and produced by Martin Richards from the screenplay by Bill Condon.  Fosse was contracted to direct this but died before he could do so. The film marked the directorial debut of Marshall, who also choreographed the film, with music by Kander and lyrics by Ebb, both had worked on the Fosse musical. Marshall would later direct Into the Woods and Mary Poppins Returns.

Chicago was primarily set in Cook County Criminal Court Building and Jail. And this is a musical which means we get to a stellar cast sing including performers I swear I never knew could do so —  Richard Gere, Renée Zellweger, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Queen Latifah, John C. Reilly, Lucy Liu, Taye Diggs, Colm Feore and Dominic West.  Gere in particular is very, very impressive though the women performers are great in part because they pass the Bechdel test in that much of the script is dialogue between women smartly done without men present. 

Reception for Chicago was almost unanimously positive. I think Robert Ebert summed it up best when he called it “big, brassy fun” which it definitely is.  It gets a most excellent eighty-six rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes.  Oh, and though costly to produce at almost fifty million, it made over three hundred million. 

And yes we can tie the film into the genre as Mike pointed out to me that “?Chicago is the source of a tune Maytree used to create one of the best-ever Puppy satire filks” — here.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born January 17, 1899 Nevil Shute. Author of On the Beach. It originally appeared as a four-part series, The Last Days on Earth, in the London weekly Sunday Graphic in April 1957.  It was twice a film. He has other SF novels including An Old Captivity which involves time travel and No Highway which gets a review by Pohl in Super Science Stories in 1949. There’s In the Wet and Vinland the Good as well. (Died 1960.)
  • Born January 17, 1927 Eartha Kitt. Though you’ll have lots of folks here remembering her as Catwoman from the original Batman, she appeared in but four episodes there. Genre wise, she was in such series as I-SpyMission: ImpossibleMatrix, the animated Space Ghost Coast to Coast and the animated My Life as a Teenage Robot. Film wise, she played Freya in Erik the Viking, voiced Bagheera in The Jungle Book: Mowgli’s Story and was Madame Zeroni In Holes. (Died 2008.)
  • Born January 17, 1931 James Earl Jones, 91. His first SF appearance was in Dr. Strangelove as Lt. Lothar Zogg.  And I think I need not list all his appearances as Darth Vader here. Some genre appearances include Exorcist II: The HereticThe Flight of DragonsConan the Barbarian as Thulsa Doom and I actually remember him in that role, and Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold. Did you know the 1995 Judge Dredd had a Narrator? Well he’s listed as doing it, and Fantasia 2000 as well.
  • Born January 17, 1949 Donald Palumbo, 73. Well someone has to take us seriously. In this case, it’s this scholar. He’s done such studies as Chaos Theory, Asimov’s Foundations and Robots, and Herbert’s Dune: the Fractal Aesthetic of Epic Science FictionEros in the Mind’s Eye: Sexuality and the Fantastic in Art and Film and Worlds Apart?: Dualism and Transgression in Contemporary Female Dystopias. He has an interesting essay, “Reiterated Plots and Themes in the Robot Novels: Getting Away with Murder and Overcoming Programming” in Foundation, #80 Autumn 2000 . His latest work is A Dune Companion: Characters, Places and Terms in Frank Herbert’s Original Six Novels. Huh. I’d like to see that. 
  • Born January 17, 1952 Tom Deitz. He’s best remembered for the David Sullivan series which ran for nine novels, plus The Gryphon King, which technically isn’t part of that series. The Soulsmith is quite excellent as well. He was founding member of the SCA’s Barony of Bryn Madoc, and he won the Phoenix Award for lifetime achievement in promoting Southern fandom. Fitting for a lifelong resident of Georgia. He’s reasonably well stocked at the usual suspects. (Died 2008.)
  • Born January 17, 1962 Jim Carrey, 60. His first genre film is Once Bitten whose content is obvious from its name and which get a mere thirty-nine percent rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes. The ‘dorable Earth Girls Are Easy was next followed up by Batman Forever in which he played a manic Riddler that I rather liked, then there’s the The Truman Show which was way cool. So may we not talk about How the Grinch Stole Christmas?  (SHUDDER!) We settled several years ago that we think that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is genre.  And I think that I’ll stop there this time. 
  • Born January 17, 1970 Genndy Tartakovsky, 52. Like Romulnan Ale, animation style is a matter of taste. So while I like his work on Samurai Jack and Star Wars: Clone Wars, I can understand why many SW fans don’t as it’s definitely an acquired taste.  He also is responsible for directing the animated  Hotel Transylvania franchise. You can see a sample of his Clone Wars animation here.
  • Born January 17, 1989 Kelly Marie Tran, 33. Best known as Rose Tico in Star Wars: The Last Jedi  and  Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. She voices the same character in the Star Wars Forces of Destiny animated series. She also voiced Raya in Raya and the Last Dragon and Dawn Betterman in The Croods: A New Age

(9) FAMILY FAREWELL. Christopher Rice wrote a long Facebook post about Anne Rice’s funeral in New Orleans, including the text of his eulogy.

Dearest People of the Page. We have brought Anne home. On Saturday January 15th, as we rolled to a stop on the tarmac at New Orleans International Airport, the heavens opened, and the thunder rolled, and it was as if the spirit world had heralded her return to the city of her birth, the city that always held her heart. The service was quiet and private, and a chance for close family to express their grief. The public celebration of life we will hold later in the year will be open to all of you, and it will be loud enough for Anne to hear us in heaven. She has now joined my father in the tomb in Metairie Cemetery she designed for him after his passing; their marriage, unbroken for decades, has entered immortality. My sister resides with them as well. I share with you now a portion of the eulogy I read graveside as the rain drenched our tent and a flock of blackbirds took to the sky behind me….

(10) DEL TORO’S HISTORY. “Guillermo Del Toro: ‘I saw real corpses when I was growing up in Mexico’” – the director is profiled by the New York Times.

Guillermo Del Toro used to describe Hollywood as “the Land of the Slow No”. Here was a place where a director could die waiting for a project to be greenlit. “The natural state of a movie is to be unmade,” he says over Zoom from his home in Los Angeles. “I have about 20 scripts that I lug around that no one wants to make and that’s fine: it’s the nature of the business. It’s a miracle when anything at all gets made.”

Nevertheless, Del Toro has established himself as this century’s leading fantasy film-maker, more inventive than latter-day Tim Burton and less bombastic than Peter Jackson (with whom he co-wrote the Hobbit trilogy). From the haunting adult fairytale Pan’s Labyrinth and the voluptuously garish Hellboy romps to his beauty-and-the-fish love story The Shape of Water, which won four Oscars, he is the master of the glutinous phantasmagoria….

(11) LENSMAN LOVE. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Parody ranks somewhere in there, too.“Foist Lensman: Early Fan Pastiche From the Works of Edward Elmer Smith, Ph.D.”First Fandom Experience has scans of a half dozen examples.

Fans love to pay tribute to the authors they love most. This takes the form of flattery and at times, its most sincere cousin: imitation. Imitation can stray accidentally or venture boldly into parody. The works of Edward Elmer “Doc” Smith, Ph.D. attracted all of this.

The earliest instances of fan pastiche based on Smith’s Skylark and Lensman novels appeared in fanzine that have largely been lost to history. Spurred by an inquiry from the Online Science Fiction Book Club, FFE has endeavored to make these works available. For Smith enthusiasts, we hope this is fun.
Click any image for a full-screen view.

“The Skylaugh of Space” by “Omnia”
Fantasy Magazine, v3n3, May 1934 and v3n4, June 1934
(The identity of “Omnia” is unclear. The author is described in the July 1934 issue of Fantasy Magazine as “a young chap who has shown promise in the science fiction field, having already sold stories to Wonder and Amazing. Besides, he is editor of his college humor magazine…”)

(12) WSFS. Kevin Standlee tells LiveJournal readers he has finished “Updating WSFS Documents” with changes from DisCon III. (The Business Meeting minutes are still in progress.)

The WSFS Rules website is now mostly updated. The 2021-22 WSFS Constitution and Standing Rules are updated, as is the Resolutions and Rulings of Continuing Effect, a cumulative list of resolutions passed by the WSFS Business Meeting that are likely to have an ongoing effect and rulings made by the Chair (or sometimes rulings made that were overturned on appeal) on various procedural matters.

The Minutes of the Business Meeting and the Business Passed On to the 2022 WSFS Business Meeting are nearing completion, and when they’re finished and certified by the 2021 meeting officers, I’ll update those as well.

(13) THE SHOW MUST GO ON. The New York Times says thanks to omicron “Now Is the Winter of Broadway’s Discontent”. Includes this item of genre interest —

… Now, producers have figured out how to keep shows running, thanks mainly to a small army of replacement workers filling in for infected colleagues. Heroic stories abound: When the two girls who alternate as the young lioness Nala in “The Lion King” were both out one night, a 10-year-old boy who usually plays the cub Simba went on in the role, saving the performance.

…And then there was “The Lion King,” where the young Simba went on as young Nala (uncostumed, and after a preshow explanation to the audience).

“I didn’t want the show to close,” explained the child actor, who performs as Corey J. “I was nervous at first, but then the person who plays Shenzi winked at me, and I wasn’t nervous anymore.”

In the wings between scenes, cast members cheered him on, and at the end of the show, the cast gave him the honor of the show’s final bow….

(14) BIGBUG. Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s next film is going to be released by Netflix next month.

A group of bickering suburbanites find themselves stuck together when an android uprising causes their well intentioned household robots to lock them in for their own safety.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Alan Baumler, Dann, Tom Becker, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, and JJ for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day David Shallcross.]