Pixel Scroll 9/5/23 Scrolling Away In Pixelville, Looking For My Lost Emails Of Posts

(1) IAFA 45 GUESTS. The 45th International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts will meet March 13-16, 2024 at the Orlando Airport Marriott Lakeside in Florida. Guests of Honor are Mary Turzillo and C. E. Murphy, and Guest Scholars are Woppa Diallo and Mame Bougouma Diene. The theme is “Whimsy”.  

Whimsy, as a genre of fantastic and speculative fiction, celebrates the playfulness, imagination, and the sheer joy of storytelling. It embraces the fantastical, the absurd, and the unconventional, creating worlds where the ordinary collides with the extraordinary. Whimsical narratives often blur the boundaries between reality and fantasy, challenging conventional storytelling norms and inviting readers into a realm of limitless possibilities. This call for papers invites scholars and writers to explore the various facets of whimsy within the genre of fantastic and speculative fiction. 

(2) FANAC.ORG’S UPCOMING ZOOM EVENTS. All interest fans are invited to attend the next Fan History Project New Zoom History Series. The coming year’s programs will again cover a wide range of fannish areas from Boston to Australia, from women you should know but probably don’t, to how Amateur Press Associations have been a backbone of fandom and they’ll talk with some of the best fan artists ever. The next session is:

Boston in the 60s, with Tony Lewis, Leslie Turek and Mike Ward, moderated by Mark Olson
September 23, 2023 at 4PM EDT (New York), 1PM Pacific (PDT), 9PM London (BST) and 6AM Sept 24 in Melbourne

Boston in the 60s was a generative hotbed of fannish activities, with long lasting consequences. The first modern Boskone was held in 1965 by the Boston Science Fiction Society, as part of its bidding strategy for Boston in ’67. NESFA began in 1967, and the first Boston Worldcon was held in 1971. MIT provided a ready source of new fans, and they made themselves heard in fanzines, indexes, clubs and conventions (and invented the micro-filk). What was Boston fandom like in the 60s? How was it influenced by MIT? Who were the driving forces and BNFs? What were the impacts of the failed 67 bid? What made Boston unique?

Please write to Edie Stern, [email protected], FANAC Webmaster to sign-up for the “Boston in the 60s” program.

Schedule for Future sessions

  • September 23, 2023 – 4PM EDT, 1PM PDT, 9PM London – Boston in the 60s, with Tony Lewis, Leslie Turek and Mike Ward, moderated by Mark Olson
  • October 15, 2023 – Evolution of Art(ists) – Grant Canfield, Tim Kirk and Dan Steffan
  • December 9, 2023 – 2PM EST, 11AM PST and 7PM London GMT – APAs Everywhere – Fred Lerner, Christina Lake, Amy Thompson and Tom Whitmore
  • February 17, 2024 – 7PM EST, 11 AM Feb 18 Melbourne AEDT – Wrong Turns on the Wallaby Track Part 2, with Leigh Edmonds and Perry Middlemiss
  • March 16, 2024 – 3PM EDT, 2PM CDT, 7PM London (GMT) – The Women Fen Don’t See – Claire Brialey, Kate Heffner, and Leah Zeldes Smith

To be included on Fanac.org’s Fannish Viewers List and be notified of all their programs, write to [email protected] with ZOOM in subject line.

Eighteen past Zoom History Sessions have covered many aspects of science fiction fan history. All are available on their YouTube Channel here along with nearly 150 other programs.

(3) SMALL WONDERS. Issue 3 of Small Wonders, the new magazine for science fiction and fantasy flash fiction and poetry, is now available on virtual newsstands here. Co-editors Cislyn Smith and Stephen Granade bring a mix of flash fiction and poetry from authors and poets who are familiar to SFF readers as well as those publishing their first-ever piece there.

The Issue 3 Table of Contents and release dates on the Small Wonders website:

  • Cover art: “Magic Turtle”, by Patricia Bingham
  • “Festival” (flash fiction), by Christine Hanolsy (4 Sep)
  • “Seducing the Supervillain” (poem), by H. V. Patterson (6 Sep)
  • “So You Want to Eat an Omnalik Starfish” (flash fiction), by Brian Hugenbruch (8 Sep)
  • “Once In As Many Lifetimes” (flash fiction), by Luc Diamant (11 Sep)
  • “Shears” (poem), by Devan Barlow (13 Sep)
  • “A Gardener Teaches His Son to Enrich the Soil and Plan for the Future” (flash fiction), by Jennifer Hudak (15 Sep)
  • “How My Sister Talked Me Into Necromancy During Quarantine” (flash fiction), by Rachael K. Jones (18 Sep)
  • “Let Us Dream” (poem), by Myna Chang (20 Sep)
  • “To Persist, However Changed” (flash fiction), by Aimee Ogden (22 Sep)

    Subscriptions are available at the magazine’s store and on Patreon.

    (4) STARFIELD. NPR takes listeners “Inside the making of Bethesda’s Starfield — one of the biggest stories ever”. (The game site is here.)

    It’s a Wednesday night, and I’ve found my way to Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. Its surface is harsh and uninviting. If I were to remove my spacesuit, I’d die. But inside an airlocked space station, a small colony of human settlers call this place home.

    Bill, a cheerful tour guide, greets me at the kitschy museum, full of artifacts from Earth. He explains that in 2130, Titan was the first place humans colonized after they left the blue planet. Down a flight of stairs, there’s an industrial-looking set of rooms filled with rusty shipping containers. This, we soon learn, is where some of Titan’s inhabitants live.

    “Space is extremely limited,” Bill remarks. “So you’ll notice some overflow here.”

    A woman nearby sees this area differently, suggesting things might be a bit more complicated than Bill has let on.

    “The crates are what we call the living quarters of the poor people,” she says. “Like me.”

    Welcome to Starfield, a new video game decades in the making. The studio behind it says it has 3 million words of dialogue and includes more than 1,000 environments players can explore across multiple galaxies.

    It’s no exaggeration to say this might be one of the biggest stories ever told — in any medium. It also has real life consequences for the developers who are banking on the game’s success being as grand as their vision.

    … Design director Emil Pagliarulo, who oversaw much of the game’s lore and quest design, understands that with a video game like Starfield, fun comes first.

    “We’re making a video game,” he says. “We’re not making Anna Karenina.”

    So Pagliarulo and the team made it their mission to create an “escapist fantasy” where everything fun that could conceivably happen in space is possible: smuggling cargo; getting in your spaceship and defending the Federation; being a space pirate….

    (5) TURTLEDOVE FAMILY UPDATE. Harry Turtledove explains his new appearance while telling readers the medical problems his wife, Laura Frankos, is dealing with. Thread starts here.

    (6) BEYOND THESE PRISON WALLS. [Item by Steven French.] It’s perhaps not such a surprise but fantasy novels can help inmates cope with prison life: “How I turned prisoners’ misery into reading pleasure: the brilliant story of Bang Up Books” in the Guardian.

    …Dan Barwell spent nine months in … HMP Wandsworth for drug offences, and his cell was a regular stop for the book trolley run by the prison chaplain Liz. “I read 164 books in prison, which is more than I had in my whole life before that. I got really into fantasy novels, the Wheel of Time series were over 1,000 pages each, which ate up a lot of hours,” he told me. “When I was reading I was no longer inside.”

    I recently visited the open prison where our books are sorted and shipped, and spoke to some of the men working on the scheme. They understandably get first dibs on new titles as a perk of the job, and thus have hotly contested positions. One of our recruits showed me a glossy hardback of a computer game bible that he’d recently obtained, and what excited him most was that it was a brand-new copy, with all the smell, texture and feel of pages that were hot off the press. So much in prison is old, worn and tired, so there is a real joy to holding something that has never been opened before….

    (7) APPEAL TO A HIGHER COURT. [Item by John King Tarpinian.] In 1931, 14-year-old Forrest J. Ackerman wrote a letter to Edgar Rice Burroughs, author of Tarzan and the John Carter of Mars series, informing him of an argument he had with his teacher regarding Edgar’s books.

    (8) MICHAEL D. TOMAN OBITUARY. By Alan Brennert [reprinted with permission.] My friend Michael D. Toman—science fiction writer, reference librarian, and the kindest, most generous man I have ever known—passed away sometime last week in his sleep, of natural causes, only a month shy of his 74th birthday. His body was discovered by his longtime friend William F Wu on September 2.

    I met Michael at the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop in 1973; it was a definitive moment in his life, as it was for many of us. He had a voracious, eclectic appetite to read and to learn: he could discuss Proust and Dostoyevsky as easily as he could the nuances of Toho Godzilla movies (he wrote a wonderful unpublished poem called “Seven Ways of Looking at Godzilla”) and, of course, sf and fantasy, which he loved. We bonded instantly and became close friends and confidants for the next fifty years.

    Michael D. Toman

    He was a fine writer, especially adept at literary pastiche, and his stories appeared in Science Fiction Emphasis #1 edited by David Gerrold, Cold Shocks edited by Tim Sullivan, Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine edited by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Fantasy Tales, Fantasy Macabre, and the French anthology Univers 13. His story “Quarto” was purchased by Harlan Ellison for The Last Dangerous Visions, and in the 2000s Harlan gave him permission to submit part of it to a writing competition judged by John Updike. Updike awarded Michael’s story first prize and Michael was thrilled to receive it in person from an author whose work he had long admired. The story has been dropped from the forthcoming TLDV, but I hope to find a publisher for it; it’s a hell of a good story.

    But what is largely unknown about Michael is the degree of support he championed other writers, usually behind the scenes. Michael brought Harlan Ellison’s story “The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore” to the editors of The Best American Short Stories. It was Ellison’s first appearance in this distinguished series, and it would likely not have happened but for Michael.

    When I was working on the 1980s Twilight Zone, Michael recommended two stories to me—Bill Wu’s “Wong’s Lost and Found Emporium” and Greg Bear’s “Dead Run”—that we promptly adapted into fine episodes. He championed my own work, especially my novel Moloka’i, emailing hundreds of “suggestions to purchase” to libraries across the country, helping to sell out the small hardcover print run. He bought classified ads in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction to promote the work of our mutual friend Mel Gilden and also championed the work of his friend Ron Kurchee. As a librarian he bought titles by Michael Bishop, Theodore Sturgeon, R.A. Lafferty, and many more, hoping to bring them new readers. He loved books and loved sharing them with others.

    Michael is survived by his sister Christine, and by scores of friends who treasured his sense of humor and his kindness. Goodbye, Michael. Paulette and I will always love you, and always miss you. You made this world a better place.

    (9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

    [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

    • Born September 5, 1914 Stuart Freeborn. If you’ve seen Yoda, and of course you have, this is the man who designed it, partly based on his own face. Besides being the makeup supervisor and creature design on the original Star Wars trilogy, he did makeup on The OmenDr. Strangelove2001: A Space Odyssey and all four of the Christopher Reeve-fronted Superman films. (Died 2013.)
    • Born September 5, 1936 Rhae and Alyce Andrece. They played twin androids in I, Mudd, a classic Trek episode I’d ever there was one. (And really their only significant role.) Both appeared as policewomen in “Nora Clavicle and the Ladies’ Crime Club” on Batman. That’s their only genre other appearance. They appeared together in the same seven shows. (They died 2009 and 2005.)
    • Born September 5, 1939 Donna Anderson, 84. She was Mary Holmes in On The Beach, based on Neville Shute’s novel. She also appeared in, and I kid you not, Sinderella and the Golden Bra and Werewolves on Wheels. The first is a Sixties er, the second is a Seventies exploitation film. She last shows up in a genre role series in The Incredible Hulk
    • Born September 5, 1939 George Lazenby, 84. He is best remembered for being James Bond in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. His turn as Bond was the shortest among the actors in the film franchise and he is the only Bond actor not to appear beyond a single film. (He was also the youngest actor cast as Bond, at age 29, and the only born outside of the British Isles.) Genre wise, he also played Jor-El on Superboy and was also a Bond like character named JB in the Return of the Man from U.N.C.L.E. film. He voiced the Royal Flush King in a recurring role in the Batman Beyond series. 
    • Born September 5, 1940 Raquel WelchFantastic Voyage was her first genre film, and her second was One Million Years B.C. (well, it wasn’t exactly a documentary) where she starred in a leather bikini, both released in 1966. She was charming in The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers. She has one-offs in BewitchedSabrina the Teenage WitchThe Muppet ShowLois & Clark: The New Adventures of SupermanHappily Ever After: Fairy Tales for Every Child and Mork & Mindy. (Died 2023.)
    • Born September 5, 1946 Freddie Mercury. Now you know who he was and you’re saying that you don’t remember any genre roles by him. Well there weren’t alas. Oh, Queen had one magnificent role in the 1980 Flash Gordon film starring Sam J. Jones, a film that has a seventy percent rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes. But I digress as only cats can do. (Prrrr.) Queen provided the musical score featuring orchestral sections by Howard Blake. Most of Blake’s score was not used. Freddie also composed the music for the first Highlander film. And Freddie was a very serious SJW. He cared for at least ten cats throughout his life, including Delilah, Dorothy, Goliath, Jerry, Lily, Miko, Oscar, Romeo, Tiffany and Tom. He was adamantly against the inbreeding of cats and all of them except for Lily and Tiffany, both given to him as gifts, were adopted from the Blue Cross. (Died 1991.)
    • Born September 5, 1959 Carolyne Larrington, 64. Norse history and culture academic who’s the author of The Land of the Green Man: A Journey Through the Supernatural Landscapes of the British Isles and Winter is Coming: The Medieval World of Game of Thrones. She also wrote “Norse gods make a comeback thanks to Neil Gaiman – here’s why their appeal endures” for The Conversation.

    (10) MISSION PROBABLY POSSIBLE. Cass Morris continues the detailed account of her adventures at Disney’s Star Wars-themed Starship Halcyon at Scribendi: “Day One on the Halcyon, Part 2”.

    4:55pm: Lt Croy slid up into my DMs! I tried to play it as coy as possible (such as the pre-set dialogue options will allow). I actually gave a scoundrel answer to one of his questions, because I didn’t want to pledge loyalty to him or give away my affiliation with the Resistance.

    5:30pm: Captain Keevan followed up with a message about making a deal with Gaya to capture and split some coaxium on its way to the First Order. At this point I realized I was going to have a fine line to dance, since I very much wanted to help the Captain and Raithe and Gaya.

    5:40ish: Completed a task for Lenka, overwriting some systems on the ship to help hide information from Croy. We needed to cover up some tweaks to the personnel files, because as it turns out, mechanic/engineer Sammie wasn’t actually crew with the Chandrila Star Line! He was a new Resistance recruit that Lenka brought on-board….

    (11) REBEL APPREHENDED. “Mark Hamill’s First Star Wars Meeting With George Lucas Ended In The Back Of A Cop Car” and Slashfilm has the story.

    …Can you imagine? Plus, the movie wasn’t out yet, so it’s not like he could just say, “But do you know who I am? I’m Luke Skywalker!” Not that Mark Hamill is a guy who would do that, but still. It obviously worked out, but that’s quite a way to start….

    Funny they should frame it that way because a year before the film came out Mark Hamill was at the 1976 Worldcon, hanging around the Star Wars exhibit, where he told LA’s Bill Warren, “I’m the star of a major motion picture only nobody knows it!” I’ve never forgotten that.

    (12) LAST WORD. “’Healthy or downright weird?’: how I helped publish my husband Christopher Fowler’s posthumous book” by Pete Chapman at the Guardian. “My author spouse never let me read anything he wrote before it was finished. But after his death from cancer, I found myself choosing funeral flowers at the same time as covers for his memoir, Word Monkey.

    It is strange to be married to an author. At least, it was to me. I inhabited a corporate world, whereas my husband Chris – professionally known as Christopher Fowler – wrote more than 50 novels, from thrillers and crime fiction to fantasy and horror. I was impressed when we started dating and I found out he wrote the immortal line for my favourite film, Alien: “In space no one can hear you scream.” It was not something with which he particularly liked to be associated and he did not trumpet it. He wanted people to remember what he considered to be his real work: his books.

    The cancer diagnosis came as a shock. It also came the week before lockdown. It was a very strange period, and one I’m not going to talk about – Chris does that very beautifully in his book Word Monkey. I could never do a better job of it than him. What I can do is talk about what happened afterwards….

    (13) I REALLY DON’T KNOW CLOUDS AT ALL. “Neptune’s Clouds Have Vanished, and Scientists Think They Know Why” says the New York Times.

    Each planet of the solar system has its own look. Earth has aquamarine oceans. Jupiter has panchromatic tempests. Saturn has glimmering rings. And Neptune has ghostly clouds — at least, it used to. For the first time in three decades, the electric-blue orb is almost completely cloud-free, and astronomers are spooked.

    Neptune’s cloud cover has been known to ebb and flow. But since October 2019, only one patch of wispy white has been present, drifting around the planet’s south pole.

    “It was the first time anybody had ever seen this,” said Imke de Pater, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley. “There’s just nothing there. What’s going on?”

    To crack the case of the vanishing clouds, scientists spooled through 30 years of near-infrared images of Neptune made with ground-based observatories and the Hubble Space Telescope. In a study published in June in the journal Icarus, Dr. de Pater and her colleagues named the prime suspect in this cloud cleansing: the sun….

    (14) EXSQUEEZE ME. [Item by Steven French.] Well, who doesn’t enjoy a burp after a good meal …?! “Up to half black holes that rip apart stars and devour them ‘burp back up’ stellar remains years later” says Live Science.

    … Cendes and the team don’t know what’s causing black holes to “switch on” after many years, but whatever it is definitely does not come from inside the black holes.

    Black holes are marked by an event horizon, the point at which gravity is so strong that not even light can escape.”Black holes are very extreme gravitational environments even before you pass that event horizon, and that’s what’s really driving this,” Cendes said. “We don’t fully understand if the material observed in radio waves is coming from the accretion disk or if it is being stored somewhere closer to the black hole. Black holes are definitely messy eaters, though.”…

    (15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget hatches on Netflix on December 15.

    For Ginger and the flock, all is at stake when the dangers of the human world come home to roost; they’ll stop at nothing even if it means putting their own hard-won freedom at risk to save chicken-kind. This time, they’re breaking in!

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

    Pixel Scroll 2/9/18 Pixel, Pixel, Scrolling Bright, On The Servers Through The Night

    (1) THE COURSE OF TRUE LOVE. Evil Mad Scientist has released downloadable “Evil Mad Scientist Valentines: 2018”.

    This year’s set features parallel lines, friction, and activation energy:

    What could be more romantic than telling someone that the second derivative of your potential energy is at its minimum when you’re around them?

    Evil Mad Scientist has been doing this for awhile:

    You can download the full set here, which includes all 36 designs from all six years (a 1.6 MB PDF document).

    (2) WHERE APES HAVE GONE BEFORE. There will be a “50 Years of Planet of the Apes Exhibit and Film Retrospective” at the University of Southern California in LA through May 13.

    The USC School of Cinematic Arts has partnered with 20th Century Fox Film to host an exclusive exhibit and retrospective celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Planet of the Apes franchise titled 50 Years of Planet of the Apes.

    A vast collection of props, costumes, photos, posters and artwork from across all iterations of the longstanding franchise will be on display in the Hugh Hefner Exhibition Hall at USC this spring. The exhibit will be available to visit as a work-in-progress from January 26th – February 8th and all final displays will be open from February 9th through May 13th, 2018. A series of panels and screenings will complement the exhibit, including all feature films from the Planet of the Apes universe.

    The exhibit is in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of the 1968 release of the first Planet of the Apes film, the original installment of the still expanding franchise that now includes four sequels, a TV series, an animated series, comic books, merchandise, and 20th Century Fox Film’s highly successful prequel film series Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and War for the Planet of the Apes.

    There is a schedule of associated film screenings at the link.

    (3) ROOSTING. Watch the two Falcon Heavy boosters come booming back to Earth in this video at digg: “Seriously Cool Amateur Footage Of The Simultaneous Falcon Heavy Booster Landing”.

    (4) ROASTING. Falcon Heavy’s third booster didn’t make it home intact: “SpaceX confirms it lost the center core of the Falcon Heavy”.

    What’s more, it landed the two flanking boosters in perfect synchronized formation. But the fate of the core booster was unclear; now it appears that the center booster, which was supposed to land on a drone ship, was lost.

    Elon Musk said on a conference call with reporters that the launch “seems to have gone as well as one could have hoped with the exception of center core. The center core obviously didn’t land on the drone ship” and he said that “we’re looking at the issue.” Musk says that the core ran out of propellant, which kept the core from being able to slow down as much as it needed for landing. Because of that, the core apparently hit the water at 300MPH, and it was about 100 meters from the ship. “It was enough to take out two thrusters and shower the deck with shrapnel,” Musk said. That should be worth seeing on video: “We have the video,” Musk confirmed, “it sounds like some pretty fun footage… if the cameras didn’t get blown up as well.”

    (5) SFWA AUCTION. Steven H Silver tells about a SFWA fundraiser:

    Did you miss our charity auctions in December? Good news! SFWA will be auctioning off five new items every month on Ebay. Available items in February include an autographed uncorrected proof copy of Fevre Dream by George RR Martin, uncorrected proof  13th Annual Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (signed by Ellen Datlow), and a rare signed copy of This Island Earth by Raymond F. Jones.

    The bidding began on February 5th and will run through February 12: Ebay.com/usr/sfwa65

    All auction proceeds will be earmarked for the SFWA Givers Fund which is used to disperse grants to deserving applicants, along with bolstering the existing Emergency Medical (EMF) and Legal Funds.

    For more information about our funds and what they support, please visit sfwa.org/donate. If you have items you would like to donate for future SFWA Charity Auction fundraisers, please contact Steven H Silver at [email protected] for more information.

    Use this search to find items.

    (6) BOSKONE PROGRAM. Look forward to the panels and participants discussing “Black Science Fiction at Boskone”, February 16-18 in Boston.

    This year Boskone features a program with a strong selection of panels and discussions dedicated to black science fiction authors, publishers, and fans. Our program includes everything from black publishers and Afrofuturism to works by authors such as Octavia Butler, science panels that include the future of medicine, writing discussions that tackle young adult fiction, and much, much more!

    Here’s a quick list of some of our program items with an emphasis on black science fiction and the authors who will be joining us from across the country. For the full set of program items, view the Boskone 55 program….

    (7) VOLCANO IN TOWSON. Scott Edelman’s Eating the Fantastic podcast visits with Norman Prentiss to sample the volcano shrimp at a Chinese restaurant in Towson, MD.

    And who is this episode’s guest? Why, it’s Norman Prentiss, who won the 2010 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Long Fiction for Invisible Fences, and the 2009 Stoker for Superior Achievement in Short Fiction for “In the Porches of My Ears.” His powerful, personal fiction has been reprinted in both Best Horror of the Year and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, and his poetry has appeared in Writer Online, Southern Poetry Review, and A Sea of Alone: Poems for Alfred Hitchcock.

     

    Norman Prentiss

    We discussed the day he wowed the other kids on his school playground by reading them Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the movies a Catholic Church newsletter’s warnings made him want to see even more, the supernatural superhero comic that led to a lawsuit against Harlan Ellison, the upside and (surprising) downside of having won a $35,000 college writing prize, how the freebies he got at a Horrorfind convention goosed him to start writing fiction again, why he wrote the last part of his novel Odd Adventures with Your Other Father first, how he’s been able to collaborate with other authors without killing them, what can be taught about writing and what can only be learned, why he ended up writing horror instead of science fiction, and much, much more.

    (8) WONDER ANNUAL POWERS, ACTIVATE! Rich Horton announced the contents of
    The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2018 Edition so Jason went to work at Featured Futures and finished his “Collated Contents of the Big Year’s Bests (2017 Stories, with Links!)”

    Last year, I collated and linked to the webzine stories picked by Clarke, Dozois, Horton, and Strahan for their annuals. This year, I’ve collated all the selections. (I’ve also noted whether I’ve read them and, if so, whether they got an honorable mention, a recommendation, or were recommendations which made my Web’s Best Science Fiction or Web’s Best Fantasy.)

    (9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

    • Born February 9, 1960 – Laura Frankos

    (10) FRANKOS. Steven H Silver celebrated Frankos at Black Gate with “Birthday Reviews: Laura Frankos’s ‘A Late Symmer Night’s Battle’”.

    … When a follow-up attack of reremice occur, the fairies must question what they are fighting for and what makes a race worthwhile. While Frankos could have told the story with tremendous amounts of gravitas, the venue for its publication was looking for more lighthearted fare and she managed to deliver, sprinkling her tale with wonderful puns….

    (11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY UNIVERSE. The BBC has the snapshot: “Marvel Cinematic Universe celebrates its 10th birthday with an epic cast photo”.

    Over the past decade Marvel has brought us 18 films, starting with Iron Man in 2008 and including Thor, The Avengers and Captain America.

    The class photo of 76 actors appeared on Twitter on Thursday.

    It includes major players in the films like Robert Downey Jr, Vin Diesel, Scarlett Johansson and Letitia Wright.

    The picture was shortly followed by a behind the scenes video.

    It begins with Thor’s Chris Hemsworth saying: “It was sort of like being at the Academy Awards or something, every person had been in one or all of my favourite films.”

     

    (12) COMICS SECTION.

    • Mike Kennedy asks, “Is Gumby genre? Perhaps so…” — The Flying McCoys.
    • And Mike learned from  Basic Instructions, “If you wish to be an evil Emperor, do not waste time taunting your nemesis. Especially in falsetto.”
    • Cath found another cat/book/humor connection in today’s Breaking Cat News.
    • Cath also knows I need proofreading advice —

    (13) YOUTH WANTS TO KNOW. Is the work of comic book colorists inherently apolitical?

    (14) MORE ON ACKERMAN. Adam-Troy Castro heard about Forrest J Ackerman’s behavior in 1997:

    Yes, I knew about Forry Ackerman twenty years ago.

    I was part of the committee that gave him the Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award. I need you to know that I was outvoted. We were giving two awards that year and the Ackerman partisans were given what they wanted in order for those who were against the citation to be given what they wanted. Even so, the hell that went on behind the scenes was intense and lasted for months after the official announcement was made. But yes, one of the things that came up during the hellish brouhaha that followed was that he had, quote, “a house full of child pornography.”

    The months of invective that went on, back and forth, behind the scenes, amounted to the worst period of my writing career….

    (15) WET WORK. Beneath the waters of the Gulf: “Long-Buried Ice Age Forest Offers Climate Change Clues”.

    Scientists say it’s a remarkable discovery.

    “The underwater forest is like the Garden of Eden underwater,” says Christine DeLong, a paleo-climatologist at Louisiana State University. She says tests date the forest to be between 50,000 and 70,000 years old.

    “It’s a huge deal,” DeLong says. “Because here we have this like perfectly preserved time capsule of an ice age forest.”

    (16) LIGHTEN UP. Thanks to French scientists and a NASA probe, “Secrets of solar flares are unlocked”.

    Flares can occur on their own, or be accompanied by powerful eruptions of plasma (charged gas) from the Sun.

    If charged particles from these eruptions reach Earth, they can create havoc with infrastructure, such as satellite systems and power grids.

    Now, researchers in France say the interaction of distinct magnetic structures controls these outbursts from our star.

    Generally speaking, solar eruptions are caused by a sudden, violent rearrangement of the Sun’s magnetic field.

    At a deeper level, the process is controlled by two types of structures that form in the magnetic field of the Sun: ropes and cages.

    The rope is confined within the magnetic cage. If the cage is strong, it can contain the rope’s contortions, but when the cage is weak, an eruption can take place.

    (17) WATER SIGN. Sydney has a unique solution to trucks trying to get into tunnels they’re too tall for: a water wall as a screen for a giant projected STOP sign. (Video at the link.) “That will stop them in their tracks! Virtual barrier made from curtain of water halts lorries from driving through too small tunnels”.

    They had tried flashing signs, neon signs and staggered signs.

    But when lorry drivers continued to keep on driving their over-sized trucks though low tunnels, Australian authorities took the extreme measure of warning drivers with water signs.

    Drivers are greeted with a curtain of water falling from the entrance of tunnels with a huge ‘stop’ sign projected on to them….

    Laservision said that the Sydney Harbour Tunnel has experienced more than 10,000 incidents of vehicles hitting the structure since it opened.

    The damage caused by too large vehicles crashing into the overhead of the tunnel affected up to 12,000 motorists at peak time, the company said.

    There’s also this TV clip of the sign in action –

    And the manufacturer’s writeup: “Activated 8 times in 8 weeks, with 100% success!”

    (18) BUGEYED. “What Scientists Learned From Putting 3-D Glasses on Praying Mantises”: The Atlantic has the story.

    One might assume that any animal with two forward-facing eyes would automatically have stereopsis, but that’s not true. It’s a sophisticated skill that requires a lot of processing power and a complex network of neurons—one that not every animal can afford to build. Indeed, after stereopsis was first confirmed in humans in 1838, it took 132 years for scientists to show that other species had the same ability. Macaque monkeys were the first confirmed member of the stereopsis club, but they were soon joined by cats, horses, sheep, owls, falcons, toads—and praying mantises. In the 1980s, Samuel Rossel placed prisms in front of these insects to show that they do triangulate the images from both eyes to catch their prey.

    When Jenny Read, from Newcastle University, first read about this, she was amazed. How could an insect pull off such a complicated trick with a brain that contains just 1 million neurons? (For comparison, our brains have 100,000 times that number.) To find out, she and Nityananda set up their mantis 3-D cinemas….

    They presented the insects with screens full of black and white dots, with a slightly different pattern projected to each eye. Against these backgrounds, a small circle of dots—a target—would slowly spiral inward from the outside. “It’s meant to be like a little beetle moving against a background,” says Read.

    By tweaking the dots, the team could change how far away this target would appear to the watching mantises. And they found that the insects would start to attack the target when it seemed to get within striking distance. Clearly, the insects have stereopsis.

    But their stereopsis is not our stereopsis. We use brightness as a cue to align and compare the images that are perceived by our two eyes. Scientists can confirm this by presenting one eye with an image that’s a negative of the other—that has black dots where the other has white ones, and vice versa. “For us, that’s incredibly disruptive. We really can’t match up the images anymore, so our stereopsis falls apart,” says Read. “But the mantises are completely unfazed.” Brightness clearly doesn’t matter to them.

    (19) THUMBRUNNERS. I’m not sure “parts is parts” when they’re human — “Special Report: U.S. body brokers supply world with torsos, limbs and heads”.

    Demand for body parts from America — torsos, knees and heads — is high in countries where religious traditions or laws prohibit the dissection of the dead. Unlike many developed nations, the United States largely does not regulate the sale of donated body parts, allowing entrepreneurs such as MedCure to expand exports rapidly during the last decade.

    No other nation has an industry that can provide as convenient and reliable a supply of body parts.

    (Larry Niven once said he preferred Alexei Panshin’s “thumbrunners,” but having been beaten to the term, he’d come up with his alternative, “organleggers.”)

    (20) SPACE MOUNTAIN. You get a glimpse inside the illusion created by a popular Disneyland attraction in this Orange County Register piece: “Space Mountain fan gets the roller coaster’s 87-year-old designer to ride it one last time at Disneyland”

    How fast do you think you’re traveling when you’re in the rockets on Space Mountain?

    Think of the speed of a car on the freeway. Is Space Mountain faster than that? Slower? Is it 100 miles per hour, like Bill Watkins has heard people telling each other?

    Watkins contemplated the speed question for years in the early- to mid-1970s. He built his first Space Mountain at Walt Disney World in Florida. But it was bigger – a 300-ft. circle on two tracks. When the Disneyland Space Mountain opened in 1977, Watkins had completed what he always saw as a giant math problem.

    Space Mountain is a gravity coaster. Unlike the Matterhorn, which relies on thrusters to help move its vehicles forward, Space Mountain simply starts up and goes down. Technically, it’s 75 seconds of free fall.

    At its maximum speed (which can vary slightly depending on the combined weight of the riders) the car you’re riding in Space Mountain is traveling about 40 feet per second.

    That’s 27.27 miles per hour.

    That seems really slow.

    But Watkins somehow made it just right. More than 250 million people have ridden Space Mountain since it opened. And while it’s unclear if it’s the best – Disneyland’s public relations department would only say that Space Mountain is, according to guests, “a top 10 attraction” – how many are better?

    It is certainly arguable that Bill Watkins created the most popular roller coaster of all time.

    “I seldom meet anyone who hasn’t ridden it,” he said.

    (21) BEST PRO ARTIST RESOURCE. Rocket Stack Rank’s  “2018 Professional Artists” page is designed —

    To help people make nominations for the 2018 Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist, we have set up a “lightbox” system to let fans quickly flip through the works of over 113 artists listed below and to set aside the ones they particularly liked.

    Greg Hullender says —

    This is aimed at helping people pick artists to nominate, based on covers for magazines and for books containing original novels or anthologies. We don’t have pictures for reprints.

    Where possible, we have links to the artists’ portfolios, so readers can get a broader idea of any particular artist’s work. To simplify that a bit, for eligible artists who had just a few works published in 2017 we’ve padded their list of pictures with their art from earlier years. (They’re marked by date for the benefit of those who only want to see works published in 2017.)

    (22) ROBOTECH RETURNS. Titan Comics will publish a new graphic novel based on the classic Robotech saga.

    A mysterious ship crashes on a remote island… 10 years later, the ship’s ‘Robotechnology’ has helped humanity advance its own tech. But danger looms from the skies and an epic adventure is set to begin…

    The world-famous, fan-favorite animated epic returns to comics with a classic transforming-jetfighters-versus-giant-aliens adventure! Written by Brian Wood (Star Wars, Briggs Land, X-Men), with art from Marco Turini (Assassin’s Creed) and colorist Marco Lesko! Return to the fan-favorite Macross Saga that began the classic Robotech franchise, as hotshot Veritech pilot Roy Fokker and skilled rookie Rick Hunter are pulled into an intergalactic war when the Earth is invaded by the insidious Zentraedi! Whether you’ve seen the classic cartoon to the point you can quote every episode, or whether you’ve never experienced Robotech before, this graphic novel collection is for you!

     

    [Thanks to JJ, Martin Morse Wooster, Cat Eldridge, John King Tarpinian, Scott Edelman, Mike Kennedy, Chip Hitchcock, Cath, Andrew Porter, Will R., David K.M. Klaus, and Carl Slaughter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day evilrooster.]

    John Hertz: Loscon XXXVI Report
    November 27-29, 2009

    By John Hertz, from Vanamonde 863-865: About 1,100 attended Loscon XXXVI, our local convention, currently at the L.A. Int’l Airport Marriott Hotel; Author Guests of Honor Steven Barnes & Tananarive Due, Artist GoH Tim Rickard, Fan GoH Christian McGuire; Art Show sales $6,800 by 47 artists.

    In the Art Show, building the Rotsler Award exhibit of the 2009 winner Dan Steffan, I had the help of Jan Bender & Gary Echternacht, Robert Jansen, and Wolfcat. I found Rickard finishing his exhibit and brought him over. Drawing Brewster Rockit since 2004 he knew not our community. “That’s professional,” he said; “you mean this guy is an amateur?” Chris Garcia’s Fanzine Lounge was full of fanzines, fanart displays, and fanziners; España Sheriff and Leigh Ann Hildebrand hosted the Fanzine Lounge by Night on the party floor. I finally brought something Hildebrand would drink.

    On Friday afternoon I moderated “Women in S-F,” D.M. Atkins, Due, Shauna Roberts, Sharan Volin. Roberts said publishers think boys won’t read about girls but girls will read about boys. Atkins said her 13-year-old son was very particular. Due said she had a 17-year-old protagonist who was indecisive, like other 17-year-olds. Volin said some games let one pick a female or a male character. A woman in the audience said she missed femmes fatales. Then a book talk on The Man in the High Castle. Bruce Briant in the audience said “Where’s the science?”; in ch. 7 Betty & Paul Kasoura take up that very point. We noted the wealth of falsities: even Mr. Tagomi has an empty briefcase.

    After Regency Dancing, I took Sheriff who was off duty awhile to the party Paul Turner threw in memory of Bill Rotsler, though we missed Jerry Pournelle and Tim Powers. Then Keith Kato’s chili. Then the Seattle for Westercon LXV bid party. Two a.m. in Operations, Chinese-style Mah Jongg going strong. Someone said “I’m sorry I didn’t say goodbye to you, I was talking to the police.”

    Saturday morning at 10, to moderate “Blurring the Lines,” Atkins, Laura Frankos, Val Ontell. Atkins said different genres have different expectations. I noted how Frankos’ husband de-Anglicized his name to Turteltaub for a different book. Computers, she said, look at an author’s name, and order according to how many the last book over that name sold. Ontell noted how the 2001 book Seabiscuit drew interest outside the horse genre.

    Toni Weisskopf took my tour of the Art Show. I was glad to see a set of woodwork spaceships by Johnna Klukas. One, dark as the void, gleamed with stars. Guessing right I used my magic tour-leader power to open the ships: they were boxes. “For the rest of you,” I said, “try this only at home.” Then a talk on From the Earth to the Moon. We liked the pace and wit. It detailed conceiving the project, building, and firing, then ended. I loved Michel Ardan’s superb four words “I won’t come back.”

    At 2:30 to moderate “There’s a Bimbo on the Cover of My Book,” Laura Brodian, Amy Casil. Brodian, widow of Kelly Freas, said he read all he illustrated, often several times; yet authors might not grasp illustration, and he used to crack “I prefer my authors dead.” Casil with a lapsize computer showed 200 color images of book and magazine covers suitable to the topic. Then Lisa & Harold Harrigan’s 32nd-anniversary party, where pleasant signs explained 32 = 24 + 42 and 11 + 22 + 33. Then España Sheriff’s Art Show tour. Then shopping with co-hosts Becky Thomson and Tom Veal for the Prime Time Party at which, every Loscon from 1 a.m. Sunday till dawn, we try for good food, drink, talk.

    Ten a.m. Sunday, to moderate “World Domination,” Brad Lyau, V.J. Waks, she saying everyone had an internal ape that made us dominate, he full of overseas experiences which, like Lao Tzu, said maybe not. Then a talk on Brain Wave. We praised its poetry, in both the small sense of its choice of words, and the large sense of its choice of incident. We discussed whether its vignettes, which carried breadth, left loose ends. This was a book of pain and hope. Then cleaning, the Dead Dog party and another in the Fanzine Lounge by Night, and eventually home.