Pixel Scroll 4/21/19 A Scroll Without A Pixel Is Like A Walrus Without An Antenna

(1) LITERARY DIVE. Juliette Wade and her Dive Into Worldbuilding team interview “Caroline Ratajski”. There’s a detailed synopsis you can read at the link, and a video recording you can see on YouTube.

…We asked how writing a chapter every two weeks for an audience affects her writing process. It does put certain limits on her. She can’t revise anything that came before. She needs to give events a runway, wants to avoid writing a specific year when events occurred, etc. She has an outline, and she has an outline of how the characters should interact and grow over time. She also has a sense of how she wants the garden to develop, and what she wants the climax to look like.

Carrie [Caroline] described this as the “fanfic model of writing.” She used to write fanfic, so it works for her. The response of the audience buoys her. She says this has all the advantages of fanfic, and also The Secret Garden is out of copyright, so that saves a lot of trouble. Patreon is a good vehicle for serial storytelling. Carrie said she wasn’t reinventing anything. The original book was also a serial that was collected into a book. Carrie explained that she is not echoing the chapter structure, but following the narrative beats pretty closely. Lennox does meet her cousin in secret. She does have a somewhat combative relationship with her maid, though in the retelling, the maid is not Dickon’s sister.

(2) PRE-WEDDING ALBUM. Kurt Erichsen, 2002 Rotsler Award winner, has published a collection of his strips in Murphy’s Manor – the 30-Year Wedding.

Of all the cartoon projects I’ve drawn, by far the biggest is my LGBT comic strip, Murphy’s Manor. It was syndicated in local Gay and Lesbian newspapers from 1981 to 2008 – 1,183 comic strips total.

I’m happy to announce a new collection of Murphy’s Manor comic strips in a self-pub book, distributed through Amazon. The title is Murphy’s Manor – the 30-Year Wedding. It includes cartoons about gay relationships, ultimately leading to marriage, with or without approval of the government. All told, there are 120 comic strips: 98 from the strip’s original run, and 22 new ones. Front and back covers are in color; the interior comic strips are black and white.

In 2015 when John and I were able to get married legally, I decided to proceed with the book. It was slow going – can you believe it took me nearly 4 years to put it together?? Most of which was in production of the new cartoons. I used to produce 4 strips a month!

Click on this link: Murphy’s Manor – the 30 Year Wedding. I am also working on an eBook (Kindle) version. This is a new format for me, and working out all the kinks could take a bit of time. Hopefully not another four years.

(3) TINTINNABULATION. Open Culture reveals“How Andy Warhol and Tintin Creator Hergé Mutually Admired and Influenced One Another”. Bet you didn’t know about that.

The field of Tintin enthusiasts (in their most dedicated form, “Tintinologists”) includes some of the best-known modern artists in history. Roy Lichtenstein, he of the zoomed-in comic-book aesthetic, once made Tintin his subject, and Tintin’s creator Hergé, who cultivated a love for modern art from the 1960s onward, hung a suite of Lichtenstein prints in his office. As Andy Warhol once put it, “Hergé has influenced my work in the same way as Walt Disney. For me, Hergé was more than a comic strip artist.” And for Hergé, Warhol seems to have been more than a fashionable American painter: in 1979, Hergé commissioned Warhol to paint his portrait, and Warhol came up with a series of four images in a style reminiscent of the one he’d used to paint Jackie Onassis and Marilyn Monroe.

(4) <ROLLEYES>. Dear Simon & Schuster, There is no such thing as a Hugo Award for Best New Writer.

(5) PULP BOWIE. “Artist Reimagines David Bowie Songs as Old Pulp Fiction Book Covers” at My Modern Met.

When LA-based screenwriter Todd Alcott isn’t writing for feature films, he’s working on his artistic side project. He merges his love of pulp fiction with music to create David Bowie-inspired vintage comic book covers.

Alcott uses pre-existing vintage paperbacks as his starting point, before digitally altering the text and parts of the image to create his mashup prints. These once loved, now tattered and worn books have been given a new lease on life, and Alcott has chosen no better subject to grace their covers than the equally beloved Starman. And best of all, Bowie’s fascination with sci-fi, his outlandish fashion, and his love of the antihero make him a natural fit as a graphic novel protagonist.

(6) A COMING OF AGE STORY. Middle age, that is. Past TAFF winner Jim Mowatt’s confession begins —

My wife often teases me about my being associated (married) with a woman who has attended an Oxbridge institution, is the daughter of a civil servant and eats avocado. A fruit that has become so closely associated with privileged millennials. To provide his wife with the foodstuffs she desires, working class Jim from Leeds has to creep into a supermarket, buy an avocado and escape from the store without been seen in the possession of this pompous fruit.

However, I now wonder whether I am reaching the stage where I must embrace the fact that I’m no longer Jim from the block and that I have reached that rather unnerving state of being that enables me to buy ridiculous fruit, not always worry about the price of things and enjoy gentle middle England humour. It’s a terrifying thought but maybe I should just relax and drown in the crocheted gentility of it all.

(7) D&D. In “How Dungeons & Dragons somehow became more popular than ever”, Washington Post writer Gendy Alimurung discusses how Dungeons and Dragons has evolved to attract Millennials, including finding other players through Meetup groups, and having the fifth edition of the D&D manual in 2014 attract more women by being less sexist (women’s strength is no longer always less than men’s and no “sexist artwork–no more armored bikinis, no more monsters with breasts, no more topless ladies (unless her character really, really calls for it” that ensures that 38 percent of D&D players are now women.

(8) BOWEN OBIT. The English writer John Bowen (1924-2019) reportedly died April 18 at the age of 94. Matthew Davis sent this tribute:

Bowen wrote numerous offbeat thrillers (in a territory between Angus Wilson and Patricia Highsmith), and “After the Rain” (1958) is about an apocalyptic flood, but he has a small cult reputation in British fantasy and science fiction television. His 1970 TV play “Robin Redbreast” has been rediscovered and championed as a contemporary folk horror equal to “The Wicker Man”. He wrote half of the episodes of the outstanding 1971 Orwellian dystopian TV series “The Guardians”, and also contributed several fine ghost stories during the form’s 1970s TV heyday. Not Sfnal at all are the episodes he wrote of the TV mystery series “Hetty Wainthrop Investigates” – the original book was written by his partner David Cook

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born April 21, 1928 Dee Hartford, 91. Miss Iceland, companion of Mister Freeze in two episodes of the Sixties Batman show.  Also had appearances on Time Tunnel, Lost in Space, Land of The Giants, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. Yes, she was very pretty and that really counted in that time.
  • Born April 21, 1939 John Bangsund, 80. Prominent Australian fan in the Sixties through Eighties. A major force with Andrew I. Porter behind Australia winning the right to host the 1975 Aussiecon, and he was Toastmaster at the Hugo Award ceremony at that convention.
  • Born April 21, 1945 Takao Koyama, 74. Japanese anime scriptwriter. He is one of the most influential individuals in anime, due to his seminal scripts and his teaching of the next generation of writers. Works that he’s done scripts for which are available with subtitles include The Slayers, Dragon Ball Z and Spirit Hero Wataru.
  • Born April 21, 1954 James Morrison, 65. Lt. Col. Tyrus Cassius ‘T.C.’ McQueen on the short-lived but much remembered Space: Above and Beyond series. Starship Troopers without the politics. He also appeared as Warden Dwight Murphy in the third season of Twin Peaks.  He’s got far too many one-off genre appearances to list here, so do your favorite.
  • Born April 21, 1965 Fiona Kelleghan, 54. Author of the critical anthology The Savage Humanists In which she identifies a secular, satiric literary movement within the genre. She also did Mike Resnick: An Annotated Bibliography and Guide to His Work. A work in progress by her is Alfred Bester, Grand Master: An Annotated Bibliography.
  • Born April 21, 1979 James McAvoy, 40. In the Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune series, he was Duke Leto II Atreides. Later roles included Mr. Tumnus in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Professor Charles Xavier in X-Men film franchise, Victor Frankensteinin Victor Frankenstein and Bill Denbrough in It – Chapter Two

(10) COMICS SECTION.

  • Free Range has Scully and Mulder pursuing the truth about Easter.

(11) A CAT NAMED GOOSE. Dana Marquez tells Sideshow readers “Everything You Need to Know About Captain Marvel’s Cat”. Feel free to eavesdrop.

So what’s up with the Goose the cat anyway? Unless you’ve followed the comics, the film may have lost you there when it introduced the flerken’s surprise powers and alien backstory. She’s not just Nick Fury’s soft spot; she’s a beast- literally! Read along for more information on Goose’s true comic origin and to find out just what the heck a flerken really is.

(12) BAY WATCH. BayCon 2019 is a month away:

(13) LAW ENFORCEMENT ACTIVITY. This crimebreaking headline comes from SYFY Wire: “Norwegian police ‘arrest’ Night King on grounds of animal cruelty and destruction of property”.

In a parody Facebook post from a few days back, the upstanding police officers of Trondheim, Norway proudly announced that they had apprehended the White Walker leader on grounds of animal cruelty and appalling rumors of wall destruction. These are obvious references to the villain’s actions in Season 7, where he killed one of Dany’s dragons (before turning it into an ice zombie) and destroyed The Wall, allowing his undead army to march into the territory of living humans.

“This particular post was meant to be funny; these kind of posts generate a lot of attention and new followers for us. That’s useful when we later ask for help i.e. solving crime or search for missing persons,” the Trondheim police told SYFY Wire in a statement. “Behind the mask is one of our younger officers, handpicked for the job.”

In addition, the post included photos of the Night King (dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit, of course) posing for a mugshot and being led into a solitary jail cell. The arresting officers, jokingly referred to as Trondheim’s night’s watchmen, also accused the Night King of turning once-fruitful regions into desolate wastelands.

(14) HUGO REVIEWS. Steve J. Wright has completed his Hugo Short Story Finalist reviews (and they are excellent reviews, as usual).

(15) NOT COMPLETELY FORGOTTEN. Todd Mason sends along  “Friday’s ‘Forgotten’ Books and More: the links to the reviews: 19 April 2019” – you’ll find links to all these reviews in his post (reviewer’s name first, title and author/editor’s name last).

This week’s books and more, unfairly (or sometimes fairly) neglected, or simply those the reviewers below think you might find of some interest (or, infrequently, you should be warned away from); certainly, most weeks we have a few not at all forgotten titles…

  • Patricia Abbott: News of the World by Paulette Jiles
  • Barbara Barrett: The Edge of Tomorrow by Howard Fast
  • Joachim Boaz: New Worlds SF, April 1964, edited by John Carnel
  • John Boston: Amazing: Fact and Science Fiction Stories,  May 1964, edited by Cele Goldsmith Lalli
  • Ben Boulden: “Hawksbill Station” (novella version) by Robert Silverberg
  • Brian Busby: The March of the White Guard by Gilbert Parker
  • Susanna Calkins: Death and the Joyful Woman by “Ellis Peters” (Edith Pargeter)
  • Martin Edwards: Marion aka Murder Off the Record by John Bingham
  • Peter Enfantino: (Proto-Marvel) Atlas Horror Comics, March 1952
  • Will Errickson: Dead White by Alan Ryan
  • José Ignacio Escribano: La berlina de Prim (“Prim’s Carriage”) by Ian Gibson
  • Curtis Evans: The Cases of Lieutenant Timothy Trant by “Q. Patrick” (Richard Webb and Hugh Wheeler); “Mrs. B’s Black Sheep” by “Q. Patrick”; Speaker of Mandarin by Ruth Rendell
  • Olman Feelyus: Frankincense and Murder by Baynard Kendrick
  • Paul Fraser: Astounding Science-Fiction, September 1943, edited by John W. Campbell, Jr. 
  • John Grant: A Line of Blood by Ben McPherson
  • Aubrey Hamilton: The Dogs of War by Frederick Forsyth
  • Rich Horton: Take a Girl Like You by Kingsley Amis; The Story of Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting; Reduction in Arms and The Barons of Behavior by Tom Purdom; Rachel Swirsky’s short fiction; The Stepsister Scheme by Jim C. Hines; Gene Wolfe, 1931-2019; Fandom Harvest and other fannish writing by Terry Carr
  • Jerry House: The Vanguard of Venus by Landell Bartlett; Eh!, November-December 1954 (Charlton Comics’ first imitation of Mad)
  • Kate Jackson: The Noonday Devil by Ursula Curtiss; Love Lies Bleeding by Edmund Crispin
  • Tracy K.: The Shortest Way to Hades by Sarah Caudwell; Entry Island by Peter May
  • Colman Keane: Deep Cover and Recoil by Brian Garfield
  • George Kelley: The Best of Li’l Abner by Al Capp
  • Joe Kenney: The Great God Now by Edward S. Hanlon; American Avenger #1: Beat a Distant Drum by “Robert Emmett” (Robert L. Waters)
  • Rob Kitchin: IQ by Joe Ide
  • B. V. Lawson: Death on Remand by “Michael Underwood” (John Michael Evelyn)
  • Evan Lewis: “The Ghost of Dutch Emil”  and “Right Hook to Tokyo” by Ed Lacy (prose content in Rangers Comics August 1946 and December 1945 respectively)
  • Steve Lewis: “Murder, 1986” by P. D. James (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, October 1970, edited by Frederic Dannay); “A Madonna of the Machine” by Tanith Lee (Other Edens II edited by Christopher Evans and Robert Holdstock); Spit in the Ocean by Shelley Singer; “Long Shot” by Vernor Vinge (Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, August 1972, edited by Ben Bova); The Saint in New York by Leslie Charteris; Spider-Woman, June 1978, written and illustrated by Marv Wolfman, Carmine Infantino and Tony DeZuniga; “Skin Deep” by Kristin Kathryn Rusch (Amazing Stories, January 1988, edited by Patrick Price)
  • Lawrence Maddox: the Assignment: novels by Edward S. Aarons
  • John F. Norris: Dangerous to Me by “Rae Foley” (Elinore Denniston)
  • John O’Neill: The Nightmare and Other Stories of Dark Fantasy by “Francis Stevens” (Gertrude Barrows Bennett)
  • Matt Paust: Smoke Detector by Eric Wright 
  • James Reasoner: Captain Shark #2: Jaws of Death by “Richard Silver” (Kenneth Bulmer)
  • Richard Robinson: G Stands for Glory: The G-Man Stories by Norvell Page  
  • Gerard Saylor: Directorate S by Steve Coll
  • Jack Seabrook and Peter Enfantino: DC War Comics, October 1974
  • Steven Silver: “Build Your Own A-Bomb and Wake Up the Neighborhood” by George W. Harper (Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, April 1979, edited by Stanley Schmidt)
  • Victoria Silverwolf: Worlds of Tomorrow, April 1964, edited by Frederik Pohl
  • Dan Stumpf: The Screaming Mimi by Fredric Brown
  • Kevin Tipple: …A Dangerous Thing by Bill Crider, “TomCat”: The Complete Cases of Inspector Allhoff, V. 1 by D. L. Champion; “An Urban Legend Puzzle” by Rintaro Norizuki (translation by Beth Cary), Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, January 2004, edited by Janet Hutchings; The 3-13 Murders by Thomas B. Black

(16) POWERS NOT USED FOR NICENESS. The Boys premieres on Amazon July 26, 2019.

THE BOYS is an irreverent take on what happens when superheroes, who are as popular as celebrities, as influential as politicians and as revered as Gods, abuse their superpowers rather than use them for good. Subscribe to tvpromosdb on Youtube for more The Boys season 1 promos in HD!

[Thanks to JJ, Martin Morse Wooster, Bonnie McDaniel, Matthew Davis, Chip Hitchcock, Rich Lynch, Hampus Eckerman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, John King Tarpinian, Todd Mason, Carl Slaughter, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kip WIlliams.]

Pixel Scroll 1/15/18 Scroll Down, You File Too Fast, You Got To Make The Pixels Last

(1) KURT ERICHSEN’S RETIREMENT MAKES THE NEWS. The Toledo Blade has published a superb article about fanartist Kurt Erichsen, who is retiring from his day job as vice president of water quality planning for Toledo Metropolitan Area Council of Governments after a 34-year career. I learned all kinds of things I never knew about his work on getting the Ottawa river cleaned up, and was pleased to see they also covered some of the fannish things I did know about the 2002 Rotsler Award winner —

Mr. Erichsen’s passion for environmental planning wasn’t his first calling in life, though. He was fascinated with drawing since he was young. He might have pursued a career as an illustrator if his parents hadn’t convinced him otherwise, but he never gave up his passion for drawing.

From 1980 to 2008, he produced a comic strip called “Murphy’s Manor.” It focused on the lives of gay men living in the fictional town of Black Swamp, Ohio. That series and others he produced, including “The Sparkle Spinsters” and “GLIB Talk,” appeared in as many as 70 publications marketed to homosexuals, resulting in awards from the Gay/?Lesbian Press Association.

“I was trying to be entertaining while making a point,” Mr. Erichsen said.

Mr. Erichsen also has produced artwork for fans of science fiction fanzines and conventions.

(2) COMES THE MILLENNIUM. Congratulations to James Davis Nicoll, who sent a link to his review of Elizabeth Hand’s Winterlong – captioned “And Rain Keeps Falling Like Helpless Tears” – with the note that it is his 1000th review.

Elizabeth Hand’s 1990 debut novel Winterlong is the first volume in her Winterlong Trilogy.

Nuclear war and germ warfare have left Washington a shadow of its once glorious past. A handful of administrators, descended from self-appointed curators, control the relics of America’s lost past, defending the remnants from the diseased, mutated, and simply unlucky inhabitants of the surrounding sea of ruins….

(3) VERSE AS SWORD AND SHIELD. Middle-Earth Reflections’ new post “On the songs of power” discusses how they work in The Silmarillion.

Among many powerful notions in the world of Arda few are more potent than music and language. Music is the essential element of Arda, its heart and soul, as the world was created and shaped by the majestic Music of the Ainur. And it was the word of Ilúvatar — Eä! — that brought the created vision to life.

The power of words in Middle-earth cannot be overestimated. If used masterfully, with subtlety and skill they can inspire others to do incredible things. It is especially prominent when words are put into verse: songs can become something a lot more potent than mere poetic recitals. I have already spoken about the songs of challenge in The Silmarillion: sung in the situations of dire need and despair, they bring hope and salvation against all the odds. A special place in the story is occupied by the songs of power. They are very effective verses able to create or destroy, be used as a weapon or for defence.

It is by means of a song that Yavanna brings to life the Two Trees of Valinor and, later, the last fruit and flower from them used for creating the Sun and the Moon after the Trees’ destruction. Finrod duels with Sauron on the songs of power. Lúthien sings an equally powerful song to make Tol-in-Gaurhoth tremble and be heard by Beren trapped in Sauron’s dungeons.

(4) HANDMAID’S TALE. Hulu previews the second season.

Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard. The Handmaid’s Tale Season 2 returns April 25.

 

(5) ATWOOD’S FEMINISM. Margaret Atwood answers her own question, “Am I a bad feminist?”, in an op-ed at the Toronto Globe and Mail.

So let us suppose that my Good Feminist accusers, and the Bad Feminist that is me, agree on the above points. Where do we diverge? And how did I get into such hot water with the Good Feminists?

In November of 2016, I signed – as a matter of principle, as I have signed many petitions – an Open Letter called UBC Accountable, which calls for holding the University of British Columbia accountable for its failed process in its treatment of one of its former employees, Steven Galloway, the former chair of the department of creative writing, as well as its treatment of those who became ancillary complainants in the case. Specifically, several years ago, the university went public in national media before there was an inquiry, and even before the accused was allowed to know the details of the accusation. Before he could find them out, he had to sign a confidentiality agreement. The public – including me – was left with the impression that this man was a violent serial rapist, and everyone was free to attack him publicly, since under the agreement he had signed, he couldn’t say anything to defend himself. A barrage of invective followed.

But then, after an inquiry by a judge that went on for months, with multiple witnesses and interviews, the judge said there had been no sexual assault, according to a statement released by Mr. Galloway through his lawyer. The employee got fired anyway. Everyone was surprised, including me. His faculty association launched a grievance, which is continuing, and until it is over, the public still cannot have access to the judge’s report or her reasoning from the evidence presented. The not-guilty verdict displeased some people. They continued to attack. It was at this point that details of UBC’s flawed process began to circulate, and the UBC Accountable letter came into being.

A fair-minded person would now withhold judgment as to guilt until the report and the evidence are available for us to see. We are grownups: We can make up our own minds, one way or the other. The signatories of the UBC Accountable letter have always taken this position. My critics have not, because they have already made up their minds. Are these Good Feminists fair-minded people? If not, they are just feeding into the very old narrative that holds women to be incapable of fairness or of considered judgment, and they are giving the opponents of women yet another reason to deny them positions of decision-making in the world.

The #MeToo moment is a symptom of a broken legal system. All too frequently, women and other sexual-abuse complainants couldn’t get a fair hearing through institutions – including corporate structures – so they used a new tool: the internet. Stars fell from the skies. This has been very effective, and has been seen as a massive wake-up call. But what next? The legal system can be fixed, or our society could dispose of it. Institutions, corporations and workplaces can houseclean, or they can expect more stars to fall, and also a lot of asteroids.

If the legal system is bypassed because it is seen as ineffectual, what will take its place? Who will be the new power brokers? It won’t be the Bad Feminists like me. We are acceptable neither to Right nor to Left. In times of extremes, extremists win. Their ideology becomes a religion, anyone who doesn’t puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic or a traitor, and moderates in the middle are annihilated. Fiction writers are particularly suspect because they write about human beings, and people are morally ambiguous. The aim of ideology is to eliminate ambiguity.

(6) VENUS IF YOU WILL. At Galactic Journey, The Traveler reports on the wealth of information collected by the latest (in 1963) Venus probe — “[January 15, 1963] Venus’ true face (Scientific Results of Mariner 2)”.

Getting there is half the fun

Before I talk about Mariner’s encounter with Venus, it’s important to discuss what the spacecraft discovered on the way there.  After all, it was a 185 million mile trip, most of it in interplanetary space charted but once before by Pioneer 5.  And boy, did Mariner learn a lot!

For instance, it has finally been confirmed that the sun does blow a steady stream of charged particles in a gale known as the “Solar Wind.”  The particles get trapped in Earth’s magnetic field and cause, among other things, our beautiful aurorae.

Mariner also measured the interplanetary magnetic field, which is really the sun’s magnetic field.  It varies with the 27-day solar rotation, and if we had more data, I suspect the overall map of the field would look like a spiral.

Why is all this important?  Well, aside from giving us an idea of the kind of “space weather” future probes and astronauts will have to deal with, these observations of the sun’s effect on space give us a window as to what’s going on inside the sun to generate these effects.

One last bit: along the way, Mariner measured the density of “cosmic dust,” little physical particles in space.  It appears that there’s a lot of it around the Earth, perhaps trapped by our magnetic field, and not a lot in space.  It may be that the solar wind sweeps the realm between the planets clean….

(7) LAST JEDI DOES NOT IMPRESS CHINESE. According to The Hollywood Reporter, “China Box Office: ‘Jumanji’ Clobbers Competition With $40M, ‘Last Jedi’ Crashes and Burns”.

Dwane Johnson’s Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle roared into China over the weekend, racking up a strong $40 million.

The Sony tentpole finally toppled runaway Chinese hit The Ex-File 3: The Return of the Exes, which earned $25.3 million in its third frame, bringing its local total to $272 million. Globally, Jumanji, also starring Kevin Hart, has earned $667 million.

Disney’s and Lucasfilm’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi, meanwhile, didn’t even put up a fight. Only in its second weekend on Chinese screens, The Last Jedi pulled in a paltry $2.4 million — a 92 percent decline from its disappointing $28.7 million debut, according to data from EntGroup.

The Star Wars franchise, never popular in China, appears to be on a precipitous decline in the Middle Kingdom, the world’s second-largest film territory.

…The global picture is far better, of course: As of Sunday, Last Jedi had a worldwide haul of $1.264 billion, making it the biggest film of 2017.

Looper attempts to explain the disappointing numbers –

(8) BINTI ARC CONCLUDES. The B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog points out how Binti: The Night Masquerade Is the Epic Climax to a Deeply Personal Saga”.

Each of the previous two books in Dr. Nnedi Okorafor’s coming-of-age story saw Binti faced with tremendous change and exposed her to new truths that widened her world, and made it smaller. She’s taken on attributes of the (sometimes) murderous and very alien Meduse, and come to understand there’s more to the seemingly uncivilized desert people of her homeland than she’d ever imagined. The Night Masquerade is the conclusion of her journey, and the title refers to a spectre of change that appears to significant people at times of great crisis. It’s wonderfully evocative of the climactic nature of the story, and Binti will face a great deal more turmoil before hers is done.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY

  • Born January 15, 1935 – Robert Silverberg

(10) COMICS SECTION.

  • Mike Kennedy says Pearls Before Swine showed him an excellent reason (or three) to keep the closet closed
  • John King Tarpinian discovered the consequences of making a Flintstones reference in B.C.
  • Mike Kennedy learned news happens whether you know it or not in this installment of Nonsequitur.
  • The Flying McCoys explore what would happen to Batman if a certain supervillain lived up to his name.

(11) WHAT GOES UP. The BBC talks to “The astronaut fighting to save our home in space”:

The International Space Station (ISS) is humanity’s most expensive structure – and in just six years’ time, it may vanish, plunging into the Pacific Ocean. BBC Future meets the man trying to save it.

… “I’ve been very, very, very, very lucky,” he says, laughing. “Most astronauts are very jealous of me, which is probably why I won’t get to fly in space again!”

Most famously, Foale was on board Mir in June 1997 when an un-crewed Progress supply ship ploughed into the station, smashing a solar panel and breaching the hull. With the master alarm sounding, air leaking, power failing and the station spinning, Foale worked with his two Russian crewmates to prepare their Soyuz escape capsule and close off the damaged module.

By holding his thumb to a station window and examining the movement of stars, Foale used his physics training to estimate the spin rate of the station, so mission control could fire thrusters to bring it back under control.

(12) MUST COME DOWN. Someone hit the center divider on the road, went airborne and crashed into the SECOND floor of a dental business —

Which inspired this Harry Potter reference from “Typical Girl” —

(13) MIXED MARTIAL ARTS. In “Bruce Lee Lightsabers Scene Recreation,” Patrick Nan asks, “What if Bruce Lee fought with lightsabers?”

(14) COMMITMENT. Laura Resnick continues a series about her volunteer work — “Cat Rescue, Part 3: Return to Sender”.

I’m writing a series of blog posts about my volunteer work in cat rescue with Cat Adoption Team (C.A.T.). Part 1 discusses how I got involved and outlines how it works. Part 2 talks about the happy endings that are so rewarding in this work, as well as the sad ones (and also the appallingly infuriating ones) that make some days very hard.

There is another kind of outcome to pet adoption, too. Despite good people trying hard, sometimes things just don’t work out. A cat turns out to be a bad fit for a family, or the family’s life changes in tragic ways that make keeping the cat impossible… and they return them to C.A.T.. This is sad for everyone, but it is absolutely the right thing to do in such circumstances.

I cannot stress this strongly enough: if family decides not to keep a pet, they should return the animal to us (and any responsible rescue group has this same policy). The most important thing to us is that the cat should always be safe. By rescuing the cat, we made a promise that we will never abandon this animal or allow it to return to the condition from which we rescued it, alone and forsaken in the world. Do not break our promise by abandoning the animal we entrusted to you at the time of adoption. Return it to us.

(15) CLASSIC WEIRD. Jared pays tribute to “Jane Gaskell, First Lady of the Weird” in a compelling review article at Pornokitsch. Here’s an excerpt:

The Atlan Series: The Serpent (1963), Atlan (1965), The City (1966), Some Summer Lands (1977)

Note: To keep things complicated, later printings split The Serpent into two volumes (The Serpent and The Dragon)

This series – Gaskell’s epic fantasy saga – is batshit crazy.

It follows Princess Cija, as she meddles in the politics of Atlantis. She goes from princess to prisoner to conqueror to spy to Chosen One to fugitive to back again… It is bonkers, risque and occasionally befuddling.

In a way, the Atlan saga is an even more extreme version of Strange Evil, exacerbated, perhaps, due to its epic length. Cija, like Judith, lacks agency. She is notable because she is desired, rather than possessing any strong desires of her own. She’s passed from hand to hand (to paw), partner to partner. Her bloodline is important, her presence is ‘destined’, but, again, we find in Cjia a distressing subversion of a Chosen One. She is one that has been Chosen, rather than having any control over her fate. This is the Epic Fantasy with the princess-in-the-tower as the first person protagonist, and it can make for harrowing reading: to be the prize and not the hero is, unsurprisingly, kind of dark.

Atlan also has an utterly ridiculous setting – packed with ‘SPACE AGE’ SF, mad science, dragons, monsters, death rays, lizard people, whatever. It feels almost deliberately pulpy, in a way that makes its sneaky-dark message all the more sinister.

Michael Moorcock included the series in Fantasy: The 100 Best Books (1988), and admires – slightly sarcastically – the over-the-top pulpy elements. He refers to the series’ “bewildering status changes” and “breathless peregrinations”, and his summary gleefully points out how silly the whole thing is. But he eventually concludes “Too much? Never! Stirring stuff, all of it.”

Others also (mostly) approve – John Clute describes it with lukewarm praise: “In genre terms the series – sometimes uneasily, but at points with real panache – marries sf and the popular romance; it is full of vigorous and exuberant invention and occasionally overheated prose.” (It is worth noting that late 1960s ‘popular romance’ was pretty bleak stuff – this isn’t a sappy love story, but a harrowing tale of self-actualisation [or… semi-reluctant acceptance].)

(16) ROBOTS V. FAIRIES. SF Bluestocking’s Bridget McKinney isn’t high on this new collection — “Book Review: Robots vs. Fairies edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe”.

Robots vs. Fairies is my first reading disappointment of 2018. I loved Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe’s first anthology, 2016’s The Starlit Wood, so I was very hyped for this one when it was announced. Unfortunately, Robots vs. Fairies is a bit of a sophomore slump for the editing pair, with a theme that feels more questionable the farther one reads into the collection, stories that largely feel a little too written to spec, and not enough that’s new and interesting to recommend it on those scores. It might work as sort of comfort reading for those who find its table of contents—filled with some of the hottest short fiction writers currently working in SFF—appealing, but if you’re looking for exciting, fresh, innovative work, there’s not much of that here.

(17) JDA TODAY. Jon Del Arroz tries to defend against the Jim C. Hines compilation without mentioning the author by name in “The Ever-Changing Narrative And Double Standards Show They’re Disingenuous” (link to the Internet Archive).

In the past couple days, with that Narrative being such bad publicity for the convention because of the double standard they applied over political affiliation, it’s shifted to “he’s mean on the internet!”  NYT Bestsellers have been swearing about me on their twitter, lower-selling midlist authors are cheering and congratulating each other over spreading rumors and gossip like this is a high school clique rather than professionals. This strategy is going to backfire as well, because first, being mean on the internet is not a crime. No one has been banned from conventions over being mean on the internet before. And it applies to these folk in a massive double standard way. I don’t go around being nearly as mean or cruel as they are.

(18) MEDIC, I’M HIT! I was bitterly disappointed that Jim C. Hines showed in comments today that he reviewed the evidence with JDA about his doctored “Goodbye Jon” email conversation with me (which actually happened in this order) only to conclude —

The summary: We have several possibilities here.

  1. Jon is faking his screenshots.
  2. Mike is lying.
  3. Jon’s Sent Mail shows a different Sent Time than the email(s) Mike received from him.

(19) CHOPPAGE. At Pedestrian, Ben McLeay reports the latest antics of men’s rights activists – erasing women from The Last Jedi — “MRAs Make 46-Minute Cut Of ‘The Last Jedi’ That Edits Out All The Women”.

It is utterly tragic that MRAs aren’t given the respect they deserve. It’s truly galling that just because their entire worldview was formed around a profound sense of entitlement induced by watching thousands of hours of harem anime, no one takes them seriously. It’s heartbreaking to think that people dismiss them out of hand just because – instead of addressing actual issues like the rates of suicide and depression among men – they focus on dumb shit like editing out all the parts of The Last Jedi that aren’t centred around men.

If that last thing sounded too ridiculous to be true, you have clearly forgotten which time it is that we live in and the corresponding fact that pretty much nothing now is too ridiculous to be true. We live in the most aggressively ridiculous timeline. Accordingly, the self-described “chauvinist cut” of TLJ is very, very real, and exactly as dumb as it sounds.

Uploaded to The Pirate Bay yesterday by an anonymous user, the “The Last Jedi: De-Feminized Fanedit” is, according to their own description “basically The Last Jedi minus Girlz Powah and other silly stuff“.

(20) HARD-HITTING JOURNALISM. WIRED delivers a less-than-stunning revelation: “Cantina Talk: The Last Jedi’s Shirtless Kylo Is Proving a Problem for Cosplayers”.

So, About Kylo’s High-Waisted Tights…

Source: The Wall Street Journal, of all places

Probability of Accuracy: They did get a high quality still of shirtless Kylo, so there’s no denying that they know what they’re doing.

The Real Deal: Perhaps the most surprising Last Jedi story to appear in recent weeks is this Wall Street Journal piece about the high-waisted tights Kylo wore in that one super-uncomfortable scene of him Force-communicating with Rey. (Don’t pretend like you know know exactly which one we’re talking about.) For one, it was surprising because it was in the Journal, but also because it focused on how hard Shirtless Buff Kylo Ren was to pull off for cosplayers. The piece even quotes Last Jedi costume designer Michael Kaplan, who said, “The world of Star Wars is not our world… Kylo Ren is not some hipster in hip-hugging jeans. Think Errol Flynn swashbuckling coolness as a point of departure. Hide that navel!” So, now you know. (Also, let’s be honest: Kylo Ren most definitely is some hipster in hip-hugging jeans, even if his wardrobe doesn’t reflect it.)

(21) BLACK PANTHER. Ruth Carter “‘Black Panther’ Costume Designer Talks Tribal-Tech Inspirations” in The Hollywood Reporter.

Ruth Carter has created costumes for some epic films, Amistad, Malcolm X and Selma among them, but nothing prepared her for the size and scope of Black Panther. For the super-stylish superhero film opening Feb. 12, she imagined a new African diaspora with 700 costumes fusing futurism, indigenous dress and high fashion, using research that spanned from the Rose Bowl Flea Market to textile dealers in Accra, Ghana.

The Ryan Coogler-directed film brings to the big screen Marvel Comics’ first black superhero, reinventing the circa 1966 character for today. Black Panther is depicted as T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), who rules over the fantastical African country of Wakanda, rich with vibranium, a mythic metal that is woven into the superhero’s sleek black, repeating triangle-pattern suit (designed by Marvel’s Ryan Meinerding), and has allowed the population to make technological advances nearly a century ahead of the rest of the world. The fight for vibranium is at the heart of the story, with T’Challa defending the kingdom against Michael B. Jordan’s Erik Killmonger.

Carter worked with five illustrators, 14 designers, mold makers, fabric dyers, jewelry makers and more. “It was an army,” the costume designer says. On her mood boards were images of African dress from the Maasai, Tuareg, Turkana, Xhosa, Zulu, Suri and Dinka peoples (including a men’s glass bead, animal skin and cowry shell corset from the Metropolitan Museum of Art), as well as piercings and body art, and more abstract examples of drapery and beading. She also examined fashion by avant-garde pleating master Issey Miyake, African-style vintage pieces by Yves Saint Laurent and Donna Karan.

(22) STARTS TOMORROW. CW released a clip from Black Lightning — The Resurrection Scene 2 – a show that premieres January 16.

About BLACK LIGHTNING: Jefferson Pierce is a man wrestling with a secret. Nine years ago, Pierce was gifted with the superhuman power to harness and control electricity, which he used to keep his hometown streets safe as the masked vigilante Black Lightning. However, after too many nights with his life and his family on the line, he left his Super Hero days behind. Almost a decade later, Pierce’s crime-fighting days are long behind him…or so he thought. But with crime and corruption spreading like wildfire, Black Lightning returns — to save not only his family, but also the soul of his community.

 

[Thanks to JJ, Chip Hitchcock, John King Tarpinian, ULTRAGOTHA, Carl Slaughter, Cat Eldridge, Martin Morse Wooster, Michael J. Walsh, James Davis Nicoll, Dann, Will R., and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day John From GR.]

Worldcon Sunday Funnies

Chicon 7 achieved Fan Guest of Honor Peggy Rae Sapienza’s vision of giving Worldcon members a special Sunday morning edition of the daily newzine.  “The Sunday Funnies”  is now available at eFanzines.

Edited by Kurt Erichsen, the four-pages of color comics were created by Randy B. Cleary, Phil Foglio, delphyne woods, Richard Chwedyk, Alan F. Beck, Sheryl Birkhead, Kurt Erichsen, Steven Vincent Johnson, Howard Tayler, Anne Trotter, Kurt Erichsen, Taral Wayne and Spring Schoenhuth.