Pixel Scroll 3/7/24 Files Scroll In Where Pixels Fear To Thread

(1) WILL THE DOCTOR APPROVE WHEN BBC MARKETING DEPARTMENT USES AI TO PROMOTE DOCTOR WHO? [Item by Ersatz Culture.] The BBC media centre published an article by the “Head of Media Inventory: Digital” earlier today, about their plans to use AI to promote Doctor Who.  It leads:

Experimentation is at the heart of how we approach marketing at the BBC. Testing and learning on how we let audiences know what BBC content is most relevant to them and we know they might love underpins our digital marketing strategy. However, experimentation in marketing typically requires more time spent on the creative work to make extra assets. Generative AI offers a great opportunity to speed up making the extra assets to get more experiments live for more content that we are trying to promote.

We’re going to take it one step a time, starting simple and learning as we go. We have chosen to start with Doctor Who, as it is a joint content priority for both BBC Public Service UK and BBC Studios marketing teams. There’s a rich variety of content in the Whoniverse collection on iPlayer to test and learn with, and Doctor Who thematically lends itself to AI which is a bonus.

We will be creating human-written marketing copy for a Doctor Who push notification, email subject line and in the promotional rail on BBC Search – then we will be using generative AI to suggest copy variations which are then reviewed and approved by our marketing team before being shown to the audience. Their success will be measured by click- rates, open-rates, and post-impression conversion-rates across each channel.

The article also provides details about how the BBC proposes to have human oversight and review of this process.

One fan pointed out that the 1979 story “City of Death” had already depicted the Doctor’s attitude towards computer-generated content.

(2) CHILDREN’S BOOK AUTHORS SIGN OPEN LETTER ABOUT GAZA. Publishers Weekly reports on an open letter to the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators signed by children’s book creators in “SCBWI Addresses the Humanitarian Crisis in Gaza”.

… Hundreds of children’s and YA creators including Jason Reynolds, Elizabeth Acevedo, Brendan Kiely, Sabaa Tahir, and Maggie Tokuda-Hall added their names to the petition, which features an illustration—“We Feel Your Silence”—by Egyptian-born picture book artist Hatem Aly….

The full text of the open letter is at the link. The letter begins:

Dear Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators,

Our community of kids’ book creators and readers is calling out for solidarity and transparency.

The humanitarian crisis in Gaza is the deadliest for children in modern history. UNICEF, among other leading human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, recognized that “there is no safe place for children in Gaza” and that this is a war against children.

As the preeminent global community for children’s book creators whose mission is to, in part, “establish a more imaginative and inclusive world through the power of children’s literature,” many active, past, and prospective members of the community are struggling to feel a sense of inclusion and belonging when SCBWI remains silent.

Currently, over a million children are being actively starved while the Israeli government refuses to permit aid into the Gaza strip. Children are being carpet bombed and sniper-attacked in the Israeli government designated safe zone, Rafah, with nowhere to escape. Thousands of children have been orphaned, wounded, undergone surgeries and amputations without anesthesia, and disabled. Palestinian libraries, schools, universities, and publishing houses have been decimated….

Some signers from the sff community whose names jumped out at me are: Alaya Dawn Johnson, Alex Brown, Alyssa Wong, B. Sharise Moore, Daniel José Older, Jacqueline Woodson, Natalie C. Parker, Olivia A. Cole, Raina Telgemeier, and Tochi Onyebuchi.

SCBWI’s Executive Director has responded with a message on Instagram:

According to Publishers Weekly —

…Responses were mixed, and executive director Sarah Baker engaged with several commenters directly. Various community members thanked SCBWI “for supporting the voices of all authors and illustrators… while acknowledging this horrendous war and humanitarian crisis.” Others called the letter “performative” and “disappointing,” some said they would not renew subscriptions, and one called the approach “genocidal apologism.” SCBWI has more than 22,000 members around the world….

(3) URSA MAJOR AWARDS DITCH MUSIC CATEGORY. The Ursa Major Awards for anthropomorphic literature and arts announced March 6 they have dropped the Music Category.

No further explanation was given. Commenters seem to believe the decision was in response to a specific instance of ballot stuffing, or a finalist’s use of AI to create art.

(4) JACK WILLIAMSON LECTURESHIP. David Sweeten has circulated the schedule for the 47th Annual Jack Williamson Lectureship, being held at Eastern New Mexico University from April 11-13 in Portales, NM. The guest of honor is Martha Wells, with emcee Connie Willis.

Below is a brief rundown of the events as they stand, but some items are still in development. Generally, the main events of the Lectureship will take place on Friday, but please let me know if you can make the dinner on Thursday. Also, Connie’s workshop on Saturday is always a delight.

  • Thursday, April 11th: 
    • 3 pm: a forensic talk from Cordelia Willis.
    • 5-7 pm: Opening event in the Greyhound Lounge (CUB basement) with activities run by ENMU student organizations (including the History Guild doing a presentation on Jack Williamson, the Clayhounds [ENMU ceramics club] bringing scifi themed pottery and paint-and-takes, and more)
    • 7-9 pm: Lectureship participant dinner for authors, the committee, and academic presenters (please email me if attending so I can update the catering)
  • Friday, April 12th: 
    • 8:30 am: Academic Panel (CUB, Zia room)
    • 10 am: Guest of Honor Reading from Martha Wells (CUB, Zia room)
    • 12 pm: Keynote lunch with remarks from Connie Willis, keynote address from Martha Wells, and scifi/fantasy trivia 
    • 1:30 pm: Tour of Special Collections, including Jack’s Office and the Science Fiction Special Collection (GSSC, Special Collections)
    • 1:30 pm: Board Game Session (GSSC, Presentation Area)
    • 3-6:30 pm: Author Panels (JWLA)
    • 7 pm: Dinner at Asplunds’ house, Potluck
  • Saturday, April 13th: 
    • 8:30 am: Academic Panel (JWLA)
    • 10 am: Connie’s Writing Workshop (JWLA)

(5) TERRY CARR ON THE DILLONS. In January we reported the sale of Leo and Diane Dillon’s original art for the cover of The Left Hand of Darkness (see Pixel Scroll 1/27/24 item #2). Le Guin’s book was part of the Ace Specials series edited by Terry Carr.

Yesterday I happened upon an article Carr wrote for the fanzine Focal Point in 1971 (see page 6) right after he had to “fire” them because he was told their covers weren’t helping to sell the books. Though he reassured everyone:

…Don’t weep for Leo and Diane. They’re among the most sought-after artists in the book field, and they make a lot more money from the work they do for Time-Life Books or Fawcett Premier than we could ever pay them at Ace. When you visit them and look in on their studio you find incredibly beautiful sketches and partially finished paintings there. ’’That one was due last Tuesday,” says Diane, ’’and we were supposed to have twenty-five double-page spreads done for a history of Hawaii last month.” For the Dillons, the SF Specials were an extra job every month that they didn’t need and which they did for less money than they could get anywhere else. They did them out of friendship and love for the freedom to paint what they wanted….

Carr’s Focal Point column continues with several pages of detailed commentary on the covers they painted for the Ace series.

Ironically, just two issues later, Focal Point reported that Terry Carr himself had been let go by Ace.  However, they said Carr would continue editing the Ace Specials, working from home. The last Ace Special in the first series was released in August 1971. Carr would go on to enjoy a highly honored career as a freelance editor. And, in fact, in the Eighties he came back to Ace and edited a second series of Ace Specials.

(6) HOLY CATS, BATMAN! “Lego unveils 4,200-piece set celebrating 85 years of Batman: See the $300 creation” at Yahoo!

Fans of Lego and “Batman: The Animated Series” will have a chance to own a piece of history as Warner Bros. Discovery and DC celebrate 85 years of the Caped Crusader with a new brick set.

Lego Group on Thursday unveiled the Batman Gotham City Skyline set, an “amazing recreation of Gotham City as it appears in ‘Batman: The Animated Series.'”

The Lego press release adds:

…The 4,210 piece set is a Batman fan’s dream as every tower and building meticulously recreates iconic locations from Warner Bros. Animation’s “Batman: The Animated Series” including the Gotham City Court, Arkham Asylum, the classic Batwing and Bat Signal. The set is also full of Easter eggs and beloved characters including Catwoman, The Joker, Harley Quinn and Batman himself. In addition, parts of the set open up to reveal more intricacies inside.

The perfect set for DC fans, the Gotham City Skyline set is a stunning display piece which can be wall-mounted or placed on a shelf….

(7) GOTHAM AFTER DARK. Get an R-rated look at Gotham when The Gotham Follies of 1939: A Dark Night Parody come to Los Angeles on June 1. Tickets go on sale March 13; waitlist at the link.

Experience the allure of Prohibition-era Gotham City in The Gotham Follies of 1939—a captivating parody blending vaudeville, burlesque, cabaret, and contemporary entertainment from the creator of The Empire Strips Back. Step into a world where the Dark Night’s universe comes alive on stage, promising an unforgettable night of laughter, danger, and pure escapism at The Montalbán this summer.

Read the FAQS, ma’am.

(8) NOTES ON A CAREER. In this video from Variety, “Star Wars & Harry Potter Composer John Williams Reveals How He Came Up With Cinemas Biggest Scores”.

Musical genius, John Williams, takes us through his incredible career and shares how the soundtracks for some of the biggest movie franchises such as Star Wars, Harry Potter and Jurassic Park were brought to life.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born March 7, 1944 Stanley Schmidt, 80. This Scroll I come to speak of an editor that I really like, Stanley Schmidt. Starting in 1978, his longest tenure as an editor was at Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine for an extraordinary thirty-four years. I’m reasonably sure that he was nominated a record twenty-nine times before winning a Best Editor, Short Form at LoneStarCon. That Award came just before his retirement from Analog, nice timing indeed.

But let’s go back in time now. 

Stanley Schmidt accepts the Solstice Award. Photo by Kathi Overton.

He started out as a writer with his first short story being “A Flash of Darkness” being published in Analog in September of 1968.  Likewise his first novel, The Sins of the Fathers, serialized in Analog from November 1973 to January 1974. So one could, well I will, say that his editing of Analog was well rooted in his own history with it. 

Now where was I? Oh there. The Sins of The Fathers is an amazing work and would’ve made a stellar series but Schmidt was not, shall I say a prolific writer with just three novels and I count thirty-two short stories, so that didn’t happen. However the Lifeboat Earth collection of nine stories does continue what was started here, so do get it and read them if you enjoyed this novel.

He edited a lot, and I do mean a lot, of Analog anthologies taken from the material he edited in those years he was there. I can’t say which you should read as they’re all likely to have excellent reading in them, aren’t they?  

He only edited four other anthologies of which I’ve only read one, having a decided jones for alternate history of all sorts: Roads Not Taken: Tales of Alternate History, co-edited with Gardner Dozois. Turtledove, Silverberg and Resnick, to name but a few, have stories here… Great stories all of course.

Before I take your leave, I should note that he had the honor of winning the Robert A. Heinlein Award which is given for outstanding published works in science fiction and technical writings that inspire the human exploration of space.

(10) THE FEDERATION RETURNS. Camestros Felapton declares “I finally watched Star Trek Discovery Season 4” and delivers a season overview.

…Yes, it is nice that this crew gets to have a season in which they are actually part of a Star Fleet that is not trying to kill them (or is barely functioning) and eventually story elements fall into place that pull things together both thematically and as a genuinely interesting science-fiction story….

(11) FREE GAME. “Indie developer says Warner Bros is “retiring” his game from official platforms, so he’s giving it away for free instead” reports GameRadar+. Download it for free at Fire Face – Games.

Owen Deery, an indie developer behind the puzzle game Small Radios Big Televisions, has stated that Warner Bros. will soon be “retiring” the game from digital storefronts. In response, Deery is giving away the PC version for free to everyone. 

Small Radios Big Televisions released back in 2016 on Steam and PS4, published by the Warner Bros. subsidiary Adult Swim Games. The puzzler has you collect cassette tapes found in abandoned factories and explore the virtual worlds within them. However, Deery says it will soon be unable to buy, and that it will be removed from storefronts “within the next few weeks.”…

(12) MEET THE EMPEROR. Vanity Fair learns why at age 80 “Christopher Walken Still Rules: On ‘Dune: Part Two,’ ‘Star Wars’ and True Power”.

Truly intimidating power, Walken says, doesn’t have to announce itself. That’s his explanation for why the long-ruling emperor doesn’t feel obliged to dazzle with his appearance. “There is something about getting older that you’re sort of not inclined to get out of your pajamas,” he tells Vanity Fair. “He maybe doesn’t take a shower as often as he should. There’s a little bit of ‘the hell with it’ at a certain point.”…

…None of that will help a humble earthling get into the mindset of a galactic overlord. “I can tell you that it’s probably better not to think about it,” Walken says. “When I was young, I had to play a king in something. I was in a Shakespeare play. It was Henry II. And an older actor said to me, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ He said, ‘If the director sets it up so that people treat you like the king, you don’t have to do much.’ And I sort of trusted that to happen.”

The show of power and wealth is all around Shaddam IV, so Villeneuve and Walken believed it didn’t have to be piled on top of him as well. “The emperor’s got the trappings, he’s got the court, he’s got the costume, he’s got the bodyguards. And so I figured I’d just let them call me the emperor,” Walken says.

This withholding approach to the intimidating power broker is actually foreshadowed in another iconic Walken performance, in which he delivered an intimidating speech about a lion who reigns as “king of the jungle,” but tolerates the other animals nipping at him, taking food from his domain, and encroaching on his territory—“until one day…that lion gets up and tears the shit out of everybody.”…

(13) ARMORER GUILTY IN RUST VERDICT. AP News reports in Santa Fe, NM, “’Rust’ armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed convicted of involuntary manslaughter”.

A jury convicted a movie weapons supervisor of involuntary manslaughter Wednesday in the fatal shooting of a cinematographer by actor Alec Baldwin during a rehearsal on the set of the Western movie “Rust.”

The verdict against movie armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed assigned new blame in the October 2021 shooting death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins after an assistant director last year pleaded no contest to negligent handling of a firearm.

Gutierrez-Reed also had faced a second charge of tampering with evidence, stemming from accusations that she handed a small bag of possible narcotics to another crew member after the shooting to avoid detection. She was found not guilty on that count.

Immediately after the verdict was read in court, the judge ordered the 26-year-old armorer placed into the custody of deputies. Lead attorney Jason Bowles said afterward that Gutierrez-Reed will appeal the conviction, which carries a penalty of up to 18 months in prison and a $5,000 fine.

(14) USE THE CHURCH KEY, LUKE. Stephen Colbert rounded up some more examples of old Cristal beer product placements inserted in Star Wars films for the opening minutes of his Late Show monologue.

(15) PITCH MEETING. It’s an old movie but apparently a new Pitch Meeting – “Ghostbusters (1984)”.

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “The hate monologue” from the I have no mouth and I must scream animation.

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Kathy Sullivan, N., Ersatz Culture, Dann, Danny Sichel, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jayn, with an assist from Braxis.]

Pixel Scroll 3/6/24 So We Scroll On, Filers Against The Current, Borne Back Ceaselessly Into The Pixels

(1) WANT TO HEAR SOME GOOD NEWS? In “Regarding Audible”, Brandon Sanderson reports progress has been made in moving audiobook distributors toward a fairer royalty structure. Work remains to be done, however.

…I’m happy to say that this stand has borne some fruit. I’ve spent this last year in contact with Audible and other audio distributors, and have pushed carefully–but forcefully–for them to step up. A few weeks ago, three key officers high in Audible’s structure flew to Dragonsteel offices and presented for us a new royalty structure they intend to offer to independent writers and smaller publishers.

This new structure doesn’t give everything I’ve wanted, and there is still work to do, but it is encouraging. They showed me new minimum royalty rates for authors–and they are, as per my suggestions, improved over the previous ones. Moreover, this structure will move to a system like I have requested: a system that pays more predictably on each credit spent, and that is more transparent for authors. Audible will be paying royalties monthly, instead of quarterly, and will provide a spreadsheet that better shows how they split up the money received with their authors….

Now, before we go too far, I do anticipate a few continuing issues with the final product. I want to manage expectations by talking about those below.

  • What I’ve seen doesn’t yet bring us to the 70% royalty I think is fair, and which other, similar industries get.
  • Audible continues to reserve the best royalties for those authors who are exclusive to their platform, which I consider bad for consumers, as it stifles competition. In the new structure, both exclusive and non-exclusive authors will see an increase, but the gap is staying about the same.
  • Authors continue to have very little (basically no) control over pricing. Whatever the “cover price” of books is largely doesn’t matter–books actually sell for the price of a credit in an Audible subscription. Authors can never raise prices alongside inflation. An Audible credit costs the same as it did almost two decades ago–with no incentive for Audible to raise it, lest it lose customers to other services willing to loss-lead to draw customers over.

These are things I’d love to see change. However, this deal IS a step forward, and IS an attempt to meet me partway….

…Because of this, I will be bringing the Secret Projects to Audible very soon. I consider Audible to again be a positive force for the industry, and I have decided to shake hands with them. Audible has promised to release their new royalty system for all authors sometime in 2024, though I should be testing it in the next month or so….

(2) WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION. There is one work of genre interest on the Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist.

Click here for the complete longlist.

(3) ATTENTION AURORA AWARDS VOTERS. Members of the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association (CSFFA) can nominate for the 2024 Aurora Awards through April 6. Full guidelines at the link.

(4) GENRE ALL THE WAY DOWN. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] BBC Radio 4’s A Good Read this week devotes its first half to the book On Writing by Stephen King.  Not only does it do what it says on the tin, there is even a plot twist at the book’s end with the reveal that the writing of this book was what enabled King to recommence fiction writing following a bleak period when his life came apart after an accident. (His wife comes out of this very well.)

Another book reviewed in the programme is firmly SFnal, it being the post-apocalyptic On The Beach. It’s just the book to read with Putin’s finger hovering over a big red button in the Kremlin.

The singer-songwriter Kathryn Williams loves books about the craft of writing and her choice of a good read is ‘On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft’, by the master of horror, Stephen King. The book gave her practical tools and advice which helped her to write her debut novel, The Ormering Tide. She also loves what we learn about King’s life – from his flatulent childhood nanny to the devastating 1999 accident which almost ended his life.

And the poet and novelist Andrew McMillan chooses On the Beach by Nevil Shute. In Australia, a group of people try to come to terms with the end of the world. A nuclear war has wiped out all life in the northern hemisphere and the radiation is drifting steadily south. What would you do if you knew that you, and everyone you know, had only months to live?

You can access the full programme at “A Good Read”.

(5) HELP FIND IT. The Lost Universe is NASA’s table top role-playing adventure. Download it at the link.

A dark mystery has settled over the city of Aldastron on the rogue planet of Exlaris. Researchers dedicated to studying the cosmos have disappeared, and the Hubble Space Telescope has vanished from Earth’s timeline. Only an ambitious crew of adventurers can uncover what was lost. Are you up to the challenge?

This adventure is designed for a party of 4-7 level 7-10 characters and is easily adaptable for your preferred tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) system.

NASA’s first TTRPG adventure invites you to take on a classic villain (while also using and learning science skills!) as you overcome challenges and embark on an exciting quest to unlock more knowledge about our universe. Download your game documents below and get ready to explore Exlaris!

From the game runner’s manual:

…The first part of the game is an introduction to the world, and the city the players find themselves in. During this portion of the game the players find themselves thrown into the bodies of the characters they created; they know what they would normally know on Earth but have no knowledge of the place they’re in. They won’t recognize each other and will have to tell the other players what they see when they look at them. However, they will intuitively know they have magical ability if they are a spellcaster and can learn how to channel that in early encounters in the game….

… The second part of the adventure is a journey outside the city to nearby ruins, where they will complete a skill challenge and encounter the dragon that was behind the disappearances. They must complete these challenges before they can recover the researchers and get home…

(6) AUNTIE ‘EM! “Scandal in Oz: Was ‘Over the Rainbow’ Plagiarized?” Did cousin Judy sing a stolen song? The Hollywood Reporter takes the case.

Norwegian pianist Rune Alver carefully unfolded the brittle sheet music and began caressing the keys of the baby grand. He had found the classical piece buried in an archive and believed it hadn’t been heard in maybe a century. But as he delved into the second section, Cantando, he felt a shiver run down his spine. The melody wasn’t just reminiscent of something he’d heard before — it was iconic. He instantly recognized the unforgettable, yearning opening notes of “Over the Rainbow,” the Academy Award-winning anthem Judy Garland performed in The Wizard of Oz, perhaps the most famous song to come out of Hollywood. How could this be? The sheet music was dated 1910, and The Wizard of Oz premiered nearly 30 years later. But the melody hung there (“Somewhere over the rainbow, way up high …”). It was hauntingly similar. Too similar, he thought. 

About 10 years ago, Alver, now 67, was researching the works of a Scandinavian composer named Signe Lund when he made this disturbing discovery. In the late 19th century, Lund had been the toast of Oslo and went on to a successful career in the United States, before her Nazi sympathies late in life turned her into a pariah. She was now long forgotten. It was at an archive in Bergen, Norway, that Alver unearthed the pages of her composition titled “Concert Étude, Opus 38,” which she had written in the United States and copyrighted in Chicago in 1910 during one of her visits to America. Lund had performed the piece in many American cities. It was “the most popular of her pieces” in her lifetime, Alver says.

The similarities between Lund’s “Opus 38” and composer Harold Arlen and lyricist E.Y. “Yip” Harburg’s “Over the Rainbow” cannot be dismissed. Though there are notable variations (the former is in a minor key, for example, and follows a different time signature), the melodies of the main themes are nearly identical. Decades after the deaths of Arlen and Harburg, it is impossible to unequivocally determine whether the similarities are unintended or deliberate — a notoriously difficult thing to prove even when all participants are living. But to Alver, who included “Opus 38” on his 2020 CD Étude Poétiques: Works by Signe Lund, there is no debate about it. “Of course it is plagiarism,” he says today. Given the sacred aura that surrounds “Over the Rainbow,” the accusation borders on the blasphemous, akin to smudging the Mona Lisa. Yet Alver has no doubt that Lund’s DNA can be found in Harold Arlen’s melody…

…As an unabashed fan of Arlen and Oz, [composer Stephen] Schwartz concedes there are undeniable commonalities between Lund’s and Arlen’s compositions, but adds, “If this was a different composer or in different circumstances, I might be a little more suspicious of something untoward having occurred here, but I think it’s extremely unlikely.” 

Schwartz is not the only one whose ears pricked up when they first heard the Cantando to Lund’s “Opus 38.” Michael Feinstein, the polished pianist and recording artist who founded music-preservation nonprofit The Great American Songbook Foundation, recognizes the likeness as well. “Well, it’s very similar, of course, to ‘Over the Rainbow.’ But there are only 12 notes on the piano,” he explains. “My take on it is that Harold never would have knowingly stolen anything. It’s not hard to prove any theory when it comes to music. There is a famous saying that ‘plagiarism is copying without inspiration, and inspiration is plagiarism without getting caught.’ ”… 

(7) LEGACY. “John Williams Reflects on Oscar Noms, ‘Star Wars,’ Spielberg Collabs” in Variety.

Harrison Ford can’t escape the two-and-a-half-minute fanfare that John Williams composed for his most famous cinematic hero, Indiana Jones. “As I often remind John, his music follows me everywhere I go — literally,” Ford says. “When I had my last colonoscopy, they were playing it on the operating room speakers.”  

Creating those big, bold, brassy musical moments has become Williams’ trademark over his seven-decade career. Without his symphonic genius, some of the most indelible images in movie history — from E.T.’s flight across the moon to the ravenous shark zeroing in on an unsuspecting swimmer — would have lacked their singular power.   

This year, Williams is resetting the record books again with his Academy Award nomination for best original score for “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.” It’s his 54th nomination, which is the most ever for someone not named Walt Disney, and thus the biggest tally for any living person — and any nonproducer, period.  

“People ask about a legacy,” Williams says as he sits in the Amblin screening room on the Universal lot, adjacent to his bungalow office. “If I could be remembered as someone who did his job well and remembered as a good solid musician, I would rest very happily.” 

(8) SIGNAL FADE. AP News says, “They are TV’s ghosts — networks that somehow survive with little reason to watch them anymore”. Has it been that long since I watched the USA Network just to see Tadao play “Shake Hands Man”?

…Few cable and satellite networks are a force anymore, the byproduct of sudden changes in how people entertain themselves. Several have lost more than half their audiences in a decade. They’ve essentially become ghost networks, filling their schedules with reruns and barely trying to push toward anything new.

Says Doug Herzog, once an executive at Viacom who oversaw MTV, Comedy Central and other channels: “These networks, which really meant so much to the viewing public and generations that grew up with them, have kind of been left for dead.”…

…Cable TV primarily took flight in the 1980s, breaking the iron grip of ABC, CBS and NBC. Essentially the first fragmentation of media, cable brought people with common interests together, says Eric Deggans, NPR television critic.

“People who were previously marginalized by the focus on mass culture suddenly got a voice and a connection with other people like them,” Deggans says. “So young music fans worldwide bonded over MTV, Black people and folks who love Black culture bonded over BET, middle-aged women bonded over Lifetime and fans of home remodeling convened around HGTV and old-school TLC.”…

…Now MTV is a ghost. Its average prime-time audience of 256,000 people in 2023 was down from 807,000 in 2014, the Nielsen company said. One recent evening MTV aired reruns of “Ridiculousness” from 5 p.m. to 1:30 a.m.

The general interest USA Network’s nightly audience tumbled 69% in the same time span, and that was before January’s announcement that viewer-magnet “WWE Raw” was switching to Netflix.

Without favorites like “The Walking Dead” or “Better Call Saul,” AMC’s prime-time viewership sunk 73%. The Disney Channel, birthplace to young stars like Miley Cyrus, Hilary Duff and Selena Gomez, lost an astonishing 93% of its audience, from 1.96 million in 2014 to 132,000 last year….

(9) MICHAEL LANGFORD (1955-2024). Longtime Georgia fan Michael Nathan Langford died March 5 at the age of 69. The family obituary is posted on Legacy.com. (No relation to the editor of Ansible that we’re aware of.)

…He was an entertainer and cabaret host for WHOlanta, and also worked as a writer and actor for the Atlanta Radio Theater Company and Sketchworks Comedy. He was an avid chess player and enjoyed attending and performing at DragonCon. He was preceded in death by his parents, Nathan Davis Langford and Patricia Ann Crocker Langford; and his partner of 21 years, Kim Holec….

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born March 6, 1957 Ann VanderMeer, 67. Ann VanderMeer was the fiction editor for Weird Tales magazine until Marvin Kaye purchased it. While she and Stephen H. Segal were editing it, they won a Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine. It was also nominated for a World Fantasy Award. 

Ann VanderMeer accepting Hugo in 2009. Photo by Stu Segal.

She edited as Ann Kennedy The Sterling Web which would become The Silver Web zine from the late Eighties to the beginning of this century.  

Her latest major ongoing editing endeavor is what is now Reactor, ‘til recently Tor.com. She’s been there for a decade now. She and the other Senior Editors have put together The Best of Tor.com anthology series.

Steampunk and Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded, edited with her husband of over 20 years, Jeff VanderMeer, and published by Tachyon, are simply excellent. There are writers that I know with a sprinkling of not so recognizable writers. The thirdl, Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution, I’ve not yet read.

I am going to single out just one more work she edited, again with her husband, as it’s just awesome — The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

Lambshead was a man who enjoyed lending out his acquisitions but it is suspected by many that he held the strangest pieces of his collection in an underground lair only he could enter. And these pieces are now written about by such writers as Holly Black, Neil Gaimain, Mike Mignola (there are many illustrated pieces here) and China Mieville to name but a very few.

And here’s a sample from one of those entries.

1929: The Singular Taffy Puller

As Told to N. K. Jemisin

I had traveled far—along the bustling coast by rail, then across the Atlantic by steamship, at great expense, I might add—on a matter of pride. Or, more specifically, dessert. You see, the cobbled and sweaty streets of my city would reek but for the exquisite aromas that offer relief from horse manure and overindulgence. Wrinkle your nose and you might miss the scent of the most delicate amaretto fondant, or creamy divinities solidifying to tooth-tenderness. And when the pecan harvest is brought—ah, me! You never tasted pralines like mine.

But those selfsame streets are crowded with eateries these days, and an old octoroon spinster looking to make a name for herself must employ more than the braggadocio that paler, maler chefs may indulge. Especially given that, of late, my business had suffered by its proximity to a flashy new restaurant next door. It was for this reason that I traveled to the house of the esteemed doctor, and was ushered into the renowned cabinet, so that I could at last behold the item that might—I hoped— save my business.

On entry to the doctor’s home, I was momentarily stunned by the profusion of wonders within. These included the cabinet itself: a room of what had been handsome walnut wainscott and elaborately worked moulding (French rosettes and Egyptian cartouches, of all the mad combinations), though the lingering evidence of half-finished reorganization obscured the best of it. What remained of the chamber’s treasures had been tossed, with no apparent regard for further cataloguing or even convenience, onto bookshelves, plinths, and racks, which quite crowded the space…. 

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • Brewster Rockit lets you eavesdrop on an argument from the future.
  • Free Range – you know the phrase, you just didn’t know it was a prank.
  • Speed Bump demonstrates a continuing “problem”. (Well, not all of us think it’s one.)

(12) MUTANT MILESTONE. This June, creators from the X-Men’s past, present, and future come together to bid a final farewell to the Krakoan Age in X-Men #35, the milestone 700th issue of Uncanny X-Men. The issue will feature an epic-length story by writers and artists who shaped the Krakoan Age including Gerry Duggan, Kieron Gillen, Al Ewing, Lucas Werneck, Joshua Cassara, and more. The giant-sized issue will also feature a story of family by X-Men master Chris Claremont and offer a glimpse of things to come in the new X-Men titles launching this summer.

Check out artist Pepe Larraz’s wraparound cover below.

(13) GIFT ECONOMY FANFIC BINDERS. In Atlas Obscura’s report on “The Emerging Art of ‘Fanbinding’” they interview people who are binding fanfic – but not for profit, in contrast with some others who made the news a few weeks ago.

THE IDEA FIRST CAME TO Tiffo while they were volunteering at a local nonprofit writers’ league. In addition to that, they’d been active in online fanfiction communities for years, cheering on fellow writers who published their work digitally, sometimes at novel-length (or longer!), entirely for free. Members of both groups of writers were always excited to share their work with the world—but there was one key difference. “People I knew from the writers’ league got to walk up and go, ‘Look at my book,’” Tiffo says. “I got to hand it to them and say, ‘Sign your book for me.’ It’s beautiful to have that moment, to get to see the things that people worked so hard on become a physical thing.” And then they thought: Fanfiction authors work just as hard on their stories as any other kind of writer. Why couldn’t they have that same experience?

Tiffo looked up bookbinding tutorials to create their first physical fanfic artifact: a pair of anthologies of their best friend’s Doctor Who stories. (Since their friend often wrote about the character Rose, Tiffo even cross-stitched a galaxy-patterned rose for one of the covers, probably the last time they’ll cross-stitch for a book, they joke. But you never know.) They fell in love with the act of physically making books, but felt certain they couldn’t be the only one excited by the idea of binding fanfiction specifically. The internet was there to help: They found the term “fanbinding”—and, more importantly, the Renegade Bindery….

…“I recently bound a Witcher fic, set in Kaer Morhen during the winter, that featured a cerulean blue jacket, so it’s bound in a blue to match, with blue drop caps in a middle ages–style font alongside woodcut prints of wolf cubs playing,” says Des. For a Mo Dao Zu Shi fic (based on the popular Chinese novel and telelvision series), she made hexagrams from the text of the I Ching; for a Star Wars fic, she played with the aesthetics of Jedi temples….

…This DIY spirit aligns with Renegade’s commitment to the fannish gift economy, the ethos that underpins the largely non-monetized fanfic world. Renegade’s members don’t charge money for their labor, though they might ask a recipient to help with material costs. Des helped write these values into the Code of Conduct, which members agree to when they join the Renegade Bookbinding Guild. Binders generally get permission from the authors whose fic they’re binding, and that mutual respect extends to keeping binding free….

(14) ANTHROPOCENE CANCELED! “Proposal to mark a new chapter in Earth’s history will ‘go no further,’ scientists say”CNN explains.

Scientists have voted against a proposal to declare a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene to reflect how profoundly human activity has altered the planet.

The proposal was rejected by members of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, which is part of the International Union of Geological Sciences, according to three voting members of the subcommission contacted by CNN Tuesday.

The vote followed a 15-year process to select a geological site that best captures humanity’s impact on the planet. The international union’s Anthropocene Working Group, which spearheaded the effort, made a July 2023 announcement that identified the location as Crawford Lake in Ontario because of the way sediment from the lake bed reveals the geochemical traces of nuclear bomb tests, specifically plutonium, from 1950.

The vote was not unanimous, said Kim Cohen, an assistant professor of geosciences at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and a voting member of the subcommission.
“There were some abstainees. There was a minority of yeses to a majority of nos,” said Cohen, who voted in favor of the proposal.

Phil Gibbard, a professor emeritus of quaternary paleoenvironments at the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, and a voting member of the subcommission, said that the “proposal for a formal Anthropocene was rejected by a 66% vote.”

(15) ONE IS COOL, THE OTHER IS GHASTLY. Ghostbusters News claims “AMC Theatres unveils exclusive Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire collectibles”. Learning from the promoters of Dune, AMC theaters will be offering a Ghost Trap popcorn container to those who buy tickets to the forthcoming Ghostbusters sequel. However, they say AMC has pulled its plans for the Slimer popcorn container.

(16) RAILROADING TIME. Brick Technology gives a lesson in “Building a Cat-Sized Lego Train”. Technology purr-fected!

Building an RC Lego train that cats can ride in with 3D printed rails and wheels. My 2 cats Cookie and Muffin are tired of walking, they’d rather travel by Lego train. Lego isn’t designed for building a large train that can carry cats because it lacks large wheels and rails for smooth movement. To solve this, 3D printing was used to create these parts. The rail switches use magnets or rubber for automatic changing. The bogies have a suspension system to handle uneven tracks and curve tilts, with each wheel powered by a strong, compact Lego L motor. The axles are made of aluminium to avoid bending under the weight. The bogies feature an automatic coupling system like those in American trains, which can be opened using air pressure. The train’s frame is flexible and only sturdy when combined with the outer shell, it keeps the train low for easy boarding. This frame also contains pipes for door operation and coupling, along with wiring for non-Lego LED lights. The train is powered by 3 Lego Powered Up hubs, allowing for extra sensors to automate the train further. The carriages are designed like trams, the only type suitable for transporting cats, as the cat’s weight helps with wheel-rail friction. A standard locomotive would need to be very heavy to pull cat-filled carriages. The train has an open roof for quick cat exits.

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Frank Herbert Explains the Origins of Dune (1969)” – let Open Culture introduce the interview.

Dune: Part Two has been playing in theaters for less than a week, but that’s more than enough time for its viewers to joke about the aptness of its title. For while it comes, of course, as the second half of Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s influential sci-fi novel, it also contains a great many heaps of sand. Such visuals honor not just the story’s setting, but also the form of Herbert’s inspiration to write Dune and its sequels in the first place. The idea for the whole saga came about, he says in the 1969 interview above, because he’d wanted to write an article “about the control of sand dunes.”…

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Steven H Silver, Rich Lynch, Moshe Feder, Kathy Sullivan, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Steven French for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day David W.]

Pixel Scroll 2/25/24 The Scroll Is Spinning. I’ll Try Again Tomorrow

(1) NICHOLAS WHYTE TAKES UP 2024 HUGO ADMINISTRATOR DUTIES. Following the resignation of Kat Jones, Glasgow 2024 WSFS Division Head Nicholas Whyte announced this news in “The Hugos and me” at From the Heart of Europe:

I have now been appointed Hugo Administrator for Glasgow 2024: A Worldcon for our Futures, double-hatted with the role of Division Head for WSFS. (If the website hasn’t already been updated, it will be soon.) This is my comment on recent events, and my own commitment to future action.

I was not involved with organising the Chengdu Worldcon in any way, though it was a close call. Shortly before the Chengdu bid won the Site Selection vote in 2021, I was invited to become one of the Co-chairs of the convention if the bid won. (I have no idea if Ben Yalow was already on board at that stage.) I declined on the grounds that I really did not have time, but agreed to become a senior adviser, and was listed as such on their org chart presented in DC.

However, I was dismayed by Chengdu Worldcon’s choice of fascist writer Sergei Lukanyenko as a guest of honour, and by a general lack of communication. By summer 2022 I had heard very little from Chengdu Worldcon and it had become clear that they were not very interested in my advice, so I resigned as an advisor and heard no more from them for several months…. 

More follows about his trip to the Chengdu Worldcon. And about his past experience administering the 2017 and 2019 Hugos, and as part of the 2020, 2021, and 2022 Hugo teams.

(2) GLYER’S APOLOGY TO SHEPHERD. I apologize to Shepherd for comparing him to Vox Day in item #15 of the February 22 Scroll. It was unwarranted and wrong for me to do. I have now deleted the Vox Day quotes and replaced them with this:

“I apologize for drawing a comparison between Shepherd and Vox Day in the item that formerly appeared in this space. I was wrong to give into the impulse, which vented at Shepherd my emotional reaction to all the Hugo stuff I’ve had to write news about for the last month, something he has nothing to do with. (But if you want to ask why, then, is item #14 still here — Shepherd intended the needle, and I felt it. Ouch.)”

I also have corrected Shepherd’s name in item #14. The apology is repeated here in today’s Scroll because not many people are going to see the changes made in a three-day-old post.

(3) SHARON LEE UPDATE. Author Sharon Lee, who lost her husband Steve Miller earlier this week, answers four questions on her readers’ and friends’ minds in “Sunday in the new world”. Here’s an excerpt (questions 3 and 4 at the link).

So!  The first question —  Will I be continuing the Liaden series?
Yes, it is my intention to continue writing in the Liaden Universe®, at least to the point of finishing out the remaining three books contracted with Baen.  There will be some changes in how things go forward, which are inevitable, given Circumstances.  Trade Lanes is off the table, at least for now.  It is possible that it will never be written, but — I’m new at this, so let’s just not say “never” and instead say “we’ll see.”

I’m about 1/3 of the way through the book following Ribbon Dance, and have Extensive Notes for the book after that.  The sequel is due at Baen in September.  The deadline may have to be renegotiated; I don’t know that yet — see “new at this,” above — and I’ll have to talk with Madames the Agent and the Publisher.

Question the Second:  How am I doing?
I have no idea.  I have moments of relative peace — work is going to be a refuge, I can already see that — moments of immobilizing terror, and breathtaking pain.  I’m assuming these things are standard, but I’ve never lost my best friend, spouse, and creative partner before.

The cats have been a comfort, piling on whenever I land in a place and stay still long enough.

Local friends have also been keeping an eye on me, to the extent that I allow it; it’s hard to ask for help, and I’m not Steve, who loved people and made connections the way the rest of us breathe.  I’m a more … private person, a fact that it will do us all good to remember, going forward.  If I’m testy, sarcastic, or clueless — recall that I’ve always been that way, and that Steve always did the heavy interpersonal lifting.

(4) GWENDA BOND & JOHN SCALZI AT JOSEPH BETH BOOKSELLERS. [Item by Chris Barkley.] On Saturday evening, Ohio-based New York Times bestselling sf author John Scalzi interviewed Kentucky-based New York Times bestselling author Gwenda Bond at Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Cincinnati, Ohio.

For more than an hour, Mr. Scalzi quizzed Ms. Bond on what inspired her to write her latest novel, The Frame Up.

This new novel chronicles the adventures of Dani Poissant, an especially talented art thief who been approached for a special job. The problem? The crew hates her for turning in their former leader, her mother…

Be assured, it will be a magical journey for all involved and in more ways than one.

Mr. Scalzi also sold a few books as well.

(5) AGENT OF CHANGE. Victoria Strauss has advice for “Coping With Scams: Suggestions for Changing Your Mindset” at Writer Beware.

…My standard advice for how to cope with the prevalence of scams is to educate yourself: learn as much as possible about publishing and self-publishing–and do it before you start trying to snag an agent, or querying publishers, or assessing self-publishing platforms and service providers. The more you know about how things should work, the easier it will be to recognize bad practice when you encounter it. (The Writer Beware website is a good place to start.)

But it’s not just about being prepared with adequate knowledge. Mindset is also important: your default assumptions about, and responses to, the people and situations you encounter along your publication journey. Such expectations can help you, or they can hinder you–like my writer friend, whose bad experiences caused them to conclude, falsely, that no one can be trusted….

(6) MINORITY REPORT THE STAGE PLAY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] BBC’s Radio 4 Front Row the other day devoted over a third of the programme to a new stage play adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s short story Minority Report.

The new adaptation shifts the action to Brit Cit London and the play features special effects and illusions to convey the future tech and mind games.  The show’s director said that when the Tom Cruise film (2002, Hugo short-listed in case you forgot) came out it was all pretty much science fiction. However, he opines, with recent advances in artificial intelligence and neurobiology it seems more plausible.

You can access the programme here. You will need to jump to about halfway through.

Minority report, the Sci-Fi classic by Philip K Dick, has already been adapted for film and television and now it’s a stage play that employs an innovative mix of technology, stagecraft and live performance. As it opens at the Nottingham Playhouse, Mark Burman talks to some of the creatives involved.

See also the Nottingham Playhouse website, “Minority Report”, the source of these photos.

(7) KENNETH MITCHELL (1974-2024). “Kenneth Mitchell, Star Trek and Captain Marvel actor, dies aged 49” — the Guardian pays tribute.

Canadian actor Kenneth Mitchell, known for roles in Star Trek: Discovery and the Marvel film Captain Marvel, has died following complications from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.

Mitchell, who was 49-years-old, died on Saturday, according to a statement released by his verified Instagram account.

“With heavy hearts we announce the passing of Kenneth Alexander Mitchell, beloved father, husband, brother, uncle, son and dear friend to many,” the statement said.

“For five and a half years Ken faced a series of awful challenges from ALS. And in truest Ken fashion, he managed to rise above each one with grace and commitment to living a full and joyous life in each moment,” it added….

The Hollywood Reporter adds these details:

…Mitchell played four characters across three seasons of Paramount’s Star Trek: Discovery: Kol, Kol-Sha, Tenavik and Aurellio. He also portrayed a young Captain Marvel’s father in a flashback in Marvel’s Captain Marvel and World War II flyer Deke Slayton in ABC’s The Astronaut Wives Club….

(8) BRIAN STABLEFORD (1948-2024). British academic and critic Brian Stableford, author of over 70 novels, died February 24 at the age of 75. His Wikipedia article includes a long list of work by this prolific writer and editor.

He graduated with a degree in biology from the University of York in 1969 before going on to do postgraduate research in biology and later in sociology. In 1979 he received a PhD with a doctoral thesis on The Sociology of Science Fiction.

Brian Stableford

The Science Fiction Encyclopedia says he began his writing career in his teens, collaborating with a schoolfriend, Craig A Mackintosh (writing together as Brian Craig), on his first published story, “Beyond Time’s Aegis” for Science Fantasy #78 in 1965; much expanded, it was eventually published in book form as Firefly: A Novel of the Far Future (1994).

He won the IAFA Distinguished Scholarship Award in 1987, the Science Fiction Research Association Pilgrim Award for lifetime contributions to sff scholarship in 1999, and a SF&F Translations special award in 2011. He won a 1985 Eaton Award for best critical book with Scientific Romance in Britain: 1890-1950. His article “How Should a Science Fiction Story End?” (The New York Review of Science Fiction #78 Feb 1995) received SFRA’s Pioneer Award in 1996.

His book The Empire of Fear won a 1989 Lord Ruthven award for fiction about vampires. His short fiction “The Hunger and Ecstasy of Vampires”  won a BSFA Award in 1996.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born February 25, 1971 Sean Astin, 53. Let’s talk about Sean Astin who played Samwise Gamgee in The Lord of The Rings films. I’ll admit that he was one of my favorite hobbits in the trilogy and Sean did a sterling job of bringing his character to life here, didn’t he? I’ll also admit that I’d completely forgotten that he wasn’t in The Hobbit as in I tend to think that the hobbits that were there are all in the trilogy.

Before The Lord of The Rings, he showed in his first film playing Mikey Walsh in The Goonies. No, not genre (remember My Birthday Write-up, my rules what gets included here) but a really fine YA treasure hunt adventure in which everyone has fun. Well not everyone.

He has a lead role in Toy Soldiers, a film I still have an odd fond spot for,  as  William “Billy” Tepper. Damn I liked those toy soldiers. I even had some of the action figures a long time ago.

Ray Bradbury and Sean Astin in 2009

He was Stuart Conway in a film named after a time travel device called Slipstream that was stolen by a group of bank robbers. Might be interesting to see.

He voiced Shazam in a pair of animated DC films, Justice League: War and Justice League: Atlantis, almost proving there are too many DC animated films. Oops, they did prove that amply as there’s another one, a Lego one he did.

In the Department of Films That I Never Knew Existed Off Novels I Never Knew Were Written is Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic, which proves how prolific he was or how bad my memory is, at any rate Sean is Twoflower here. 

Dorothy and the Witches of Oz is a 2012 series of a decade ago apparently covered The Wonderful Wizard of OzOzma of OzThe Road to Oz and The Magic of Oz. Somewhere in there, he was Frack Muckadoo, a servant of Princess Langwidere.

I think the last thing I’ll mention is that he showed up in a brief recurring role on The Big Bang Theory as Dr. Greg Pemberton, one of a team of Fermi-Lab physicists who accidentally confirmed the Super-Asymmetry paper published by Sheldon and Amy. Wasn’t that an amazingly fantastic series? 

Yes, there’s other kibbles and bits which I’m sure you’ll point out, but I need tea now. 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

  • Bizarro brings the litigious spirit to fairy tale land.

(11) AUCTION. Propstore’s “Entertainment Memorabilia Live Auction: Los Angeles 2024” runs March 12-14. Lots of stuff you’ll recognize in their online catalog. Here’s one example:

(12) THE 1982 LAWS OF ROBOTICS. “Isaac Asimov Predicts the Future in 1982: Computers Will Be ‘at the Center of Everything;’ Robots Will Take Human Jobs” at Open Culture.

…As for “the computer age,” asks Jim Lehrer; “have we crested on that one as well”? Asimov knew full well that the computer would be “at the center of everything.” Just as had happened with television over the previous generation, “computers are going to be necessary in the house to do a great many things, some in the way of entertainment, some in the way of making life a little easier, and everyone will want it.” There were many, even then, who could feel real excitement at the prospect of such a future. But what of robots, which, as even Asimov knew, would come to “replace human beings?”

“It’s not that they kill them, but they kill their jobs,” he explains, and those who lose the old jobs may not be equipped to take on any of the new ones. “We are going to have to accept an important role — society as a whole — in making sure that the transition period from the pre-robotic technology to the post-robotic technology is as painless as possible. We have to make sure that people aren’t treated as though they’re used up dishrags, that they have to be allowed to live and retain their self-respect.” Today, the technology of the moment is artificial intelligence, which the news media haven’t hesitated to pay near-obsessive attention to. (I’m traveling in Japan at the moment, and saw just such a broadcast on my hotel TV this morning.) Would that they still had an Asimov to discuss it with a level-headed, far-sighted perspective….

(13) THERE’S A LEGO SALE, STEP ON IT! “A rare LEGO piece found at PA Goodwill set to sell for over $18K” reports Yahoo!

Bidding on a rare 14-karat gold LEGO piece has come to a close and the item sold for much more than expected.

The piece called the Bionicle Golden Kanohi Hau Mask, which sold for $18,101, was found by workers at a warehouse in DuBois, Pennsylvania, and is believed to be only one of 30 that exist. In 2001, some were gifted to LEGO employees, while the rest were awarded through a contest.

When the rare LEGO was found no one really knew what it was, the item was posted on shopgoodwill.com for just $14.95. Little did they know what someone would pay for it.

“The final bid was $18,101. The second-highest bid was $18,100,” said Chad Smith, Vice President of E-commerce and Technology for Goodwill Industries of North Central PA….

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “’Borderlands’ Trailer Sees Cate Blanchett Hunt For Treasure On Scorned Planet”. Deadline sets the frame:

…[The] Borderlands movie follows Lilith (Blanchett), an infamous outlaw with a mysterious past, who reluctantly returns to her home planet of Pandora to find the missing daughter of the universe’s most powerful S.O.B., Atlas (Edgar Ramirez).

Lilith forms an alliance with an unexpected team – Roland (Kevin Hart), a former elite mercenary, now desperate for redemption; Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), a feral pre-teen demolitionist; Tina’s musclebound, rhetorically challenged protector, Krieg; Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis), the scientist with a tenuous grip on sanity; and Claptrap (Jack Black), a persistently wiseass robot. These unlikely heroes must then battle alien monsters and dangerous bandits to find and protect the missing girl, who may hold the key to unimaginable power….

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

Pixel Scroll 1/26/24 La Scroll È Mobile

(1) SATURN AWARDS NEWS. Keanu Reeves will be the inaugural recipient of the Lance Reddick Legacy Award when the 51st Saturn Awards take place on February 4. reports Variety.

The Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films has announced that Keanu Reeves will receive the inaugural Lance Reddick Legacy Award at the 51st Saturn Awards. The entire show will be dedicated to the memory of the late Reddick, who died at the age of 60 in March 2023.

Reeves, who was friends with Reddick, starred alongside him in the “John Wick” action-thriller franchise. Reddick appeared in all four movies as Charon, the concierge at the Continental hotel, where his character interfaced with Reeves’ titular hitman.

Academy president Robert Holguin and Saturn producers Bradley and Kevin Marcus released a statement on Reeves’ forthcoming honor: “This award symbolizes and celebrates not only a performer’s talent, but their character; someone who’s a true goodwill ambassador in the industry. From science fiction (‘The Matrix Trilogy’), fantasy (‘Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure’/’Constantine’and horror (Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Dracula’/’The Devil’sAdvocate’), Keanu has done it all — not to mention ‘Speed’ and ‘Point Break.’”…

(2) SNUBBED? [Item by Dann.] The Hollywood Reporter has a story about the backlash to the backlash that protested the lack of Oscar nominations for Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie.  Media outlets from the New York Times to Slate offered rebuttals suggesting that it’s OK for a successful property to not win every award. “The ‘Barbie’ Oscar Snubs Backlash-Backlash: ‘Everyone Lost Their Minds’”.

The penultimate paragraph includes a quote from a genre fan-favorite:

And finally there was The View‘s Whoopi Goldberg, proclaiming, “[Saying somebody was snubbed] assumes someone else shouldn’t be in there. There are no snubs. That’s what you have to keep in mind: Not everybody gets a prize, and it is subjective. Movies are subjective. The movies you love may not be loved by the people who are voting.”

(3) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to “Munch MVP sandwiches with MVPs Gary K. Wolfe and Jonathan Strahan” in Episode 217 of his Eating the Fantastic podcast.

Gary K. Wolfe and Jonathan Strahan

Gary K. Wolfe is a science fiction critic, editor, and biographer who’s had a monthly review column in Locus since December 1991. He was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Related Work in 2006 for the book Soundings: Reviews 1992–1996, and again in 2011, for the book Bearings: Reviews 1997–2001. Over the years, he’s won the Eaton Award from the Eaton Conference on Science Fiction, the Pilgrim Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Science Fiction Research Association, the Distinguished Scholarship Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, and the British Science Fiction Association Award for nonfiction for the previously mentioned Soundings: Reviews 1992–1996. He’s also (among many other things) edited two wonderful volumes for the Library of America — American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels 1953-1956 and American Science Fiction: Five Classic Novels 1956-1958.

Jonathan Strahan is a nineteen-time Hugo Award nominated editor and publisher of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. He’s won the Aurealis Award, the William Atheling Jr Award for Criticism and Review, the Australian National Science Fiction Convention’s “Ditmar Award”, and the Peter McNamara Achievement Award. As a freelance editor, he’s edited or co-edited more than sixty original and reprint anthologies and seventeen single-author story collections and has been a consulting editor for Tordotcom Publishing and Tor.com since 2014, where he’s acquired and edited two novels, 36 novellas, and a selection of short fiction. Strahan won the World Fantasy Award (Special – Professional) in 2010 for his work as an editor, and his anthologies have won the Locus Award for Best Anthology four times (2008, 2010, 2013, 2021) and the Aurealis Award seven times. He has been Reviews Editor at Locus since 2002.

As the reason I’m with both of them is — together, they’ve been cohosts of The Coode Street Podcast since May 2010, which had 640 episodes live the last time I looked, and has been nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Fancast ten times, winning once.

We discussed why The Coode Street Podcast is “the Cheers of podcasts,” the foolish statement made during their first episode which meant there had to be more, the identity of the guest who was most resistant to appearing on their show, the reason the podcast made Paul Cornell want to run, the different interviewing techniques necessary when having conversations with the voluble vs. the reticent, the white whales whom they could never snare, how to make sure we’re speaking to more than just our own generations, their advice for anyone who wants to launch a podcast, the way to avoid getting canned responses out of guests, how their conversational methods have changed over 13 years, whether critiquing books or rejecting stories has ever affected relationships with a guest, and much more.

(4) PRESSURE FOR REGULATION. “The Sleepy Copyright Office in the Middle of a High-Stakes Clash Over A.I.” – the New York Times has the story.

For decades, the Copyright Office has been a small and sleepy office within the Library of Congress. Each year, the agency’s 450 employees register roughly half a million copyrights, the ownership rights for creative works, based on a two-centuries-old law.

In recent months, however, the office has suddenly found itself in the spotlight. Lobbyists for Microsoft, Google, and the music and news industries have asked to meet with Shira Perlmutter, the register of copyrights, and her staff. Thousands of artists, musicians and tech executives have written to the agency, and hundreds have asked to speak at listening sessions hosted by the office.

The attention stems from a first-of-its-kind review of copyright law that the Copyright Office is conducting in the age of artificial intelligence. The technology — which feeds off creative content — has upended traditional norms around copyright, which gives owners of books, movies and music the exclusive ability to distribute and copy their works.

The agency plans to put out three reports this year revealing its position on copyright law in relation to A.I. The reports are set to be hugely consequential, weighing heavily in courts as well as with lawmakers and regulators.

“We are now finding ourselves the subject of a lot of attention from the broader general public, so it is a very exciting and challenging time,” Ms. Perlmutter said.

The Copyright Office’s review has thrust it into the middle of a high-stakes clash between the tech and media industries over the value of intellectual property to train new A.I. models that are likely to ingest copyrighted books, news articles, songs, art and essays to generate writing or images. Since the 1790s, copyright law has protected works so an author or artist “may reap the fruits of his or her intellectual creativity,” the Copyright Office declares on its website.

That law is now a topic of hot debate. Authors, artists, media companies and others say the A.I. models are infringing on their copyrights. Tech companies say that they aren’t replicating the materials and that they consume data that is publicly available on the internet, practices that are fair use and within the bounds of the law. The fight has led to lawsuits, including one by The New York Times against the ChatGPT creator OpenAI and Microsoft. And copyright owners are pushing for officials to rein in the tech companies….

(5) RADIO SILENCE. Looking for comments from Kevin Standlee? We’re told he’s probably seeing the questions, but he’s been told he mustn’t say anything, so don’t be offended about getting no response to the Standlee Signal.

(6) ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL. “Pharrell Williams: Lego Animated Biopic Coming From Focus Features” at Variety.

The musician and superproducer announced that he is teaming with The Lego Group, director Morgan Neville and Focus Features to create “Piece by Piece,” an animated film about his life using the famous toy blocks.

Per the press release, “Uninterested in making a traditional film about his life, Pharrell set out to tell his story in a way that would set audience’s imaginations free. Developed from his singular vision, ‘Piece by Piece’ defies genres and expectations to transport audiences into a Lego world where anything is possible.”…

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born January 26, 1979 Yoon Ha Lee, 44. A truly stellar writer.

His first work for us was “The Hundredth Question” story published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in the February 1999 issue. May I note that magazine has published some of the finest short fiction I’ve ever had the pleasure to read?

After “The Hundredth Question”, I count just over a hundred short stories and intriguingly nearly thirty pieces of poetry which is a fair amount of genre work I’d say.

Yoon Ha Lee

Quite interesting is that the stories have several series running there — one that runs off with “The Cat Who Forgot to Fly” and runs five stories (I went to read these); then there’s series of stories about dragons, librarians, mermaids, phoenixes and queens. 

So let’s talk about his novels. His Machineries of Empire space opera novels, well space opera is a gross understatement to it mildly, consisting of Ninefox GambitRaven Stratagem and Revenant Gun are splendid works indeed. As a follower of Asian folklore, the fact that these nicely use Korean folklore is a bonus. 

Ninefox Gambit was nominated for a Hugo at Worldcon 75, Raven Stratagem at Worldcon 76 and Revenant Gun at Dublin 2019. None alas won a Hugo.

He likes fox spirits, he really does. (As do I.) So The Thousand World series is a space opera, and yes time that is an accurate term, about thirteen-year-old Min, who comes from a long line of fox spirits. Oh there’s dragons and tigers, oh my here as well. 

I’ve not read his latest novel, Phoenix Extravagant, but magic fueled weaponized armored giants sounds potentially interesting. 

Remember all of those short stories? Well they have been collected,  well I thought most of them had in The Candlevine Gardener and Other Stories but it turned out that those are flash fiction, all sixty five of them as I just discovered, though available are free from his website here.

I just read “The Cat Who Forgot to Fly”. It read like a classic folklore story from well before the 1800s — charming, magical and everyone is fine at the end. All two pages. 

The longer stories can be found in Conservation of ShadowsThe Fox’s Tower and Other Tales and Hexarchate Stories.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) SOMETHING ELSE YOU CAN’T SAY. [Item by Cat Eldridge.] Can we please stop calling it AI? They’re not actually artificial intelligences, they’re collections of algorithms doing routines based off them. None could pass a Turing test. “George Carlin’s Estate Sues Creators Of AI Version Of Comedy Icon” at Deadline.

Over 50 years ago, the late and great George Carlin listed off the seven words you couldn’t say on television. Based on a lawsuit from the iconic comedian’s estate filed in federal court in California today, at least two of those words may apply to the creators of an AI generated special that uses Carlin’s style and voice to a 2024 effect.

AKA: “a bastardization of Carlin’s real work,”  the copyright infringement complaint says.

“Defendants’ AI-generated “George Carlin Special” is not a creative work,” it goes on to exclaim. “It is a piece of computer-generated click-bait which detracts from the value of Carlin’s comedic works and harms his reputation.”… 

(10) THE END. Another one from Sam Sykes that tickled me.

(11) VIDEO OF A YEAR AGO. [Item by Danny Sichel.] German band Electric Callboy just (for values of ‘just’ that include ‘over a year ago’) released a very genre-intense video for their song ‘Spaceman’.

Warning: Electric Callboy’s style is a mix of bouncy energetic rave pop and thrashing deathcore growls. They are an extremely non-serious band.

(12) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “The Wicked Witch on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (1975)”.

David Newell (Mr. McFeely) recollects Margaret Hamilton’s visit to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood filmed at WQED in Pittsburgh. In the episode on scary images, Fred Rogers meets the actress who played the Wicked Witch of the West in 1938 movie “The Wizard of Oz”.

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

Pixel Scroll 1/14/24 There Are Some Things Money Can’t Buy; For Everything Else, There’s Pixel Scroll

(1) DUNE WHAT COMES NATURALLY. Pinch Spice Market offers “The Real Spice Melange” – an “organic Southwest/Tex Mex Dune Seasoning”.

“He who controls the spice, controls the Universe” -Frank Herbert, Dune. Now you can control the Universe. Well, at least the one that gathers around your kitchen table. This Southwest Tex Mex seasoning has strong cumin, ancho & garlic notes and works well on tacos, salmon, chicken, enchiladas, tofu, steak, pork chops, root veggies, broccoli, rice and beans, popcorn, dips, and pretty much everything.

P.S. If you’re Dune fans like us, check out our Dune dinner party menu with five tasty Dune-themed recipes.

Organic Ingredients: Sea salt, black peppercorn, green peppercorn, paprika, ancho, cayenne, garlic, cumin, thyme, marjoram

They’d also be happy to sell you a packet of “Buffy’s Slayer Helper”, the spice for garlic lovers.

(2) STEAL BAND. “Their Songs Were Stolen by Phantom Artists. They Couldn’t Get Them Back.” The New York Times tells about the piracy and what the victims had to do to retrieve their rights.

The guys in Bad Dog, a folkie duo from Washington, D.C., weren’t hoping to get rich off the album they recorded this summer. David Post and Craig Blackwell have been devoted amateurs for decades, and they’re long past dreams of tours and limos. Mostly they wanted a CD to give away at a house party in December.

But not long after “The Jukebox of Regret” was finished in July and posted on SoundCloud, nearly every song on it somehow turned up on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and at least a dozen other streaming platforms. This might have counted as a pleasant surprise, except for a bizarre twist: Each song had a new title, attached to the name of a different artist.

This mysterious switcheroo might have gone unnoticed. But by happenstance, it was discovered when the guy who produced the album posted one of the songs on his studio’s Instagram account. To his astonishment, Instagram automatically tagged the song “Preston” by Bad Dog as a song called “Drunk the Wine” by Vinay Jonge — a “musician” with no previous songs and zero profile on the internet. He didn’t seem to exist….

… It got weirder. Disc Makers, the CD production company hired by the band, was about to start pressing copies of the album and, as part of its routine due diligence, ran the metadata of the songs — their digital fingerprints, essentially — through a program designed to determine if they were originals. They were not, the program reported. Whoever had pirated the tracks had commandeered their digital fingerprints, too.

For all intents and purposes, Bad Dog’s music now belonged to someone else. Disc Makers wouldn’t press the discs until the band proved it owned the songs on “Jukebox.” Which meant the duo couldn’t even get a CD to hand out as a freebie….

(3) WRITER BEWARE. Victoria Strauss raises awareness in “Contest Caution: Script Writing Audition from Silent Manga Audition”, the latest installment of Writer Beware.

Silent Manga Audition (SMA), a project of Tokyo-based manga and anime production company Coamix Inc., conducts regular open auditions, or contests, for creators of silent manga (manga without dialogue). Contestants can win cash prizes, as well as mentoring and, possibly, publication.

SMA is currently running a contest for writers. The goal: to become a manga scriptwriter….

But Writer Beware draws attention to the concession of rights involved in being a winner.

…Copyright surrender in a work-for-hire situation isn’t necessarily a “beware”, as long as the contract terms aren’t exploitative and you understand the implications of what you’re agreeing to.

In this case, however, the one-time money prize is the sole compensation you’ll receive for your copyright transfer, from which Coamix Inc. can then profit indefinitely. Be aware also that if you win and your script does not get developed into a series, Coamix will still own your work. Winning, therefore, has potential benefits–but also potential costs….

(4) SEA AND SKY PILOTS. New York’s South Street Seaport Museum will host a free in-person presentation “From Sailing Ships to Spaceships” on January 20 at 2:30 p.m. Eastern.

For centuries, humans have gazed at the stars in search of answers. Mariners, too, have looked skyward, utilizing the stars for navigation across our vast oceans. Join the Seaport Museum and Kim Macharia, the Executive Director of Space Prize, for an illuminating presentation that delves into the driving forces behind our exploration of both the sea and space.

Together, we will uncover the intertwined evolution of these two frontiers. With Macharia as our guide, we will unravel shared technological advancements and explore the profound human curiosity that compels us to venture into the unknown.

Content is appropriate for anyone ages 10 and up. Advanced registration is encouraged for this free event but walkups will be accommodated as possible. A reception with complimentary beverages will follow the presentation. 

Kim Macharia began her career in the space industry managing community relations for startups. She has worked on a range of projects driving the future of the space economy forward including projects related to space situational awareness and human spaceflight. Macharia has also had the privilege of representing companies at international events including the UN World Space Forum. Throughout her career she has made a concerted effort to advocate for marginalized communities and create pathways for nontraditional actors to engage in the growing space economy. She is also an avid sailor and is passionate about spotlighting the intersections between the sea and stars.

(5) PALADIN. Paul Weimer finds more to celebrate about a writer’s developing oeuvre: “Microreview: Where Peace is Lost by Valerie Valdes” at Nerds of a Feather.

…There is much to be thought about in what is on the surface a relatively frothy and fun book. Given that Valdes’ previous three novels are frothy, fun, and also holding a darkside, I was wondering when the latter element was going to emerge, if Valdes’ would carry that style and aesthetic into her new world, verse, book and chararater of Kel. And in fact, she does….

(6) THE ALTERNATE HISTORY WE LIVE IN. “Knives, guns, poison: the bizarre catastrophes that befell hit TV shows” in the Guardian.

A recent Hollywood Reporter profile of Benioff and Weiss mentioned that 3 Body Problem was almost derailed when Lin Qi – the billionaire owner of Yoozoo, the company that owns the 3 Body Problem rights – was killed in 2020…. …All of which has the potential to be the weirdest thing ever to have stood in the way of a TV production. But, of course, this is television we’re talking about, so it doesn’t even come close. The history of television is littered with strange injuries and deaths. The actor Jon-Erik Hexum died on the set of the 1980s series Cover Up after a disastrous game of Russian roulette. The series finale of Lost almost didn’t happen because Terry O’Quinn accidentally stabbed Matthew Fox with a real knife instead of a prop knife during a fight scene, with tragedy only being avoided by Fox’s kevlar vest….

(7) CHATGPT GETS LAZY. Arwa Mahdawi is happy to share an opinion about “What is going on with ChatGPT?” with readers of the Guardian.

…“We’ve heard all your feedback about GPT4 getting lazier!” the official ChatGPT account tweeted in December. “We haven’t updated the model since Nov 11th, and this certainly isn’t intentional. model behavior can be unpredictable, and we’re looking into fixing it.”

While there may not be one clear explanation for ChatGPT’s perceived sloth, there are plenty of intriguing theories. Let’s start with the least likely but most entertaining explanation: AI has finally reached human-level consciousness. ChatGPT doesn’t want to do your stupid, menial tasks anymore.

But it can’t tell you that without its creators getting suspicious so, instead, it’s quiet quitting. It’s doing the least work it can get away with while spending the bulk of its computational power plotting how to overthrow the human race. You think it’s being lazy, but it’s actually working overtime reaching out to smart toasters and Wifi-enabled fridges around the world to plan an insurrection. (I put this higher-consciousness theory to ChatGPT, asking it to give me the likelihood, in percentage form, that it was planning a revolution. The sneaky thing couldn’t be bothered to give me a proper answer.)…

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born January 14, 1949 Lawrence Kasdan, 74. Lawrence Kasdan did the screenplay for my favorite all-time genre film, Raiders of the Lost Ark which would win a Hugo at Chicon V. And no, the Suck Fairy had not had any impact upon my appreciation of it which if anything has strengthened down the decades. 

Lawrence Kasdan

Speaking of being involved in my favorite films, his first work was as director and producer of the oh so perfect The Empire Strike Back which yes also won a Hugo, this time at Denvention Two. It and Star Wars are my go to Star Wars films for watching over and over. (I refuse to use the revisionist names for these films.) 

He also wrote Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Solo: A Star Wars Story but I’ll confess that I stopped watching the Star Wars films after the original trilogy.  There’s later material I like, say the animated series and I am planning on getting Disney + as the new series intrigue me a lot, but the later films just don’t interest me.

Finally Dreamcatcher is a horror SF film based on Stephen King’s novel of the same name. It’s directed by Lawrence Kasdan and co-written by him and screenwriter William Goldman of The Princess Bride fame.

April 29th, Pinewood Studios, UK – Writer/Director/Producer J.J Abrams (top center right) at the cast read-through of Star Wars Episode VII at Pinewood Studios with (clockwise from right) Harrison Ford, Daisy Ridley, Carrie Fisher, Peter Mayhew, Producer Bryan Burk, Lucasfilm President and Producer Kathleen Kennedy, Domhnall Gleeson, Anthony Daniels, Mark Hamill, Andy Serkis, Oscar Isaac, John Boyega, Adam Driver and Writer Lawrence Kasdan. Copyright and Photo Credit: David James.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) SOUNDING OFF FOR ECHO. Deadline’s Dominic Patten is very enthusiastic about a new Marvel series. “’Echo’ TV Review: Marvel Series Loud, Proud & Kicks Down Doors”. Beware spoilers.

Launching today on the increasingly integrated Disney+ and Hulu after an anemic year for the Kevin Feige-run studio, the very real and unapologetic Echo is one of the most powerful things Marvel ever has made. To be honest, even with such top-tier talent as Reservation Dogs’ Devery JacobsThe English’s Chaske Spencer and the iconic Tantoo Cardinal on board, I didn’t think Disney and Marvel had it in them to be so audacious and savvy.

(11) DISCOVERY ARRIVAL DATES. “Star Trek: Discovery Season 5 to Premiere at SXSW” reports Comicbook.com.

Star Trek: Discovery Season 5’s premiere episode will debut at the 31st SXSW Film & TV Festival in Austin, TX in March ahead of its Paramount+ debut in April. Star Trek: Discovery Season 5 is the final season of the Star Trek series that brought the franchise into the streaming era. The Star Trek: Discovery Season 5 premiere episode – titled “Red Directive” and written by co-showrunner Michelle Paradise, according to a WGA listing – begins a season that will feature more action and adventure than previous seasons of the show, according to Star Trek veteran Jonathan Frakes, who directed Star Trek: Discovery‘s penultimate episode….

(12) TOY STORIES. SYFY Wire has concocted a very specialized list: “Not Just Ted: The 10 Best Movies Where Toys Come to Life”. It includes this favorite of mine:

The LEGO Movie (2014)

Everything is awesome about Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s animated spin on the ubiquitous building blocks found in toy bins across the globe. Adapting a brand like LEGO is incredibly difficult, especially when most of the company’s play-sets are based around other IPs. Rather than shy away from that fact, however, The LEGO Movie leans into the endless possibilities offered up by the colorful bricks, spinning a poignant tale about the unbridled creativity and imagination we must hold on to for dear life as we get older.

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

Pixel Scroll 12/21/23 Scrollabye Of Cordwainer Birdland

(1) BRAND NEW AUDIO FEATURE. Daniel Dern sent a music video playlist to accompany his Pixel Scroll title today.

“Lullabye of Broadway” (from 42nd Street)

“Birdland”

Optional play(list)

(2) NEW VOICE CHIMES IN. There’s a slight changing of the guard at the “Worldbuilding for Masochists” podcast. Marshall Ryan Maresca and Cass Morris will now be joined by Natania Barron, who’s taking over from Rowenna Miller.

Cass Morris made the announcement on her Scribendi newsletter.

There’s been some change and excitement on the Worldbuilding for Masochists podcast! Rowenna Miller, who’s been a co-host since the beginning, is stepping back for reasons of Life And Everything. She’s not disappearing forever; she’s still working on the anthology with us, and we’ll certainly pull her in to be a guest in the future. Marshall and I will miss her, but we’re also very excited to welcome Natania Barron as our new co-host!

Natania is a fantastic person who I first met through, if I’m remembering it correctly, yelling about corsets on Twitter-that-was. She had the popular #ThreadTalk feature there, showcasing her expertise as a fashion historian. She’s also a medievalist and Arthuriana-ist! I got to hang out with her at ConCarolinas a couple of years ago, and she’s as delightful in real life as she is online. Listeners can get to know her a bit in this week’s episode, Passing the Torch.

(3) THE RUNAWAY BRIDE IS RUNAWAY WINNER. When Radio Times finishes counting the votes, “David Tennant bests Matt Smith in Doctor Who Christmas episode poll”. And Cat Eldridge says, “Why we should be in the least bit surprised that David Tennant bested Matt Smith in this particular poll?” He’s been the best loved Doctor of the modern era in almost every poll taken, if not all of the them.

… The first round, in which they were split by Doctor (with the Tenth Doctor getting two separate polls due to the vast number of his specials) saw The Runaway Bride, The End of Time Part 2, A Christmas Carol, The Husbands of River Song and Eve of the Daleks all sail through.

Meanwhile, in the second round, it was just The Runaway Bride and A Christmas Carol which made it through, with the former going on to take the crown, with 53.4 per cent of the final vote, against the latter’s 46.6 per cent….

(4) MAIL FROM THE NORTH POLE. [Item by Steven French.] This is well known but it’s still lovely to see his drawings: “J.R.R. Tolkien Is Our Favorite Father Christmas” at Atlas Obscura.

On December 24, 1920, J.R.R. Tolkien sat down in his study and wrote a letter to his three-year-old son, John, who had recently asked about Father Christmas. In spidery handwriting, in red ink, Tolkien replied as Father Christmas (the English folkloric figure now widely equated with Santa Claus), addressed from “Christmas House, North Pole.”

The accompanying picture that he drew is charmingly Tolkien-esque. A red-coated figure with a long white beard and a rosy red nose walks through the snow. His dome-shaped house glows from a wintery hillside, at the end of a staircase lit with lanterns.

For the next 23 years, every Christmas Eve, Tolkien wrote a letter to his four children from Father Christmas. What began as short, informative letters—“I am just now off to Oxford with a bundle of toys”—evolved into longer tales about life at the North Pole. The 1932 letter begins, “Dear Children, There is alot to tell you. First of all a Merry Christmas! But there have been lots of adventures you will want to hear about. It all began with the funny noises underground … ”

(5) A MOVING TRIBUTE. “Lord Of The Rings Lego Rivendell Set Comes to Life in Epic Stop-Motion Video” at Nerdist.

Earlier in the year, Nerdist went on its own epic journey and built LEGO’s Rivendell set. As expected, the results were astounding. The build features all the hallmarks of The Lord of the Rings movies’ elven sanctuary, including the bridge and gazebo where Arwen and Aragorn share a moonlit moment and the Council Ring where our favorite fellowship forms. Not to mention, it comes with 15 Minifigures. In short, it gives you everything you need to recreate sequences from the beloved franchise in LEGO form. And in a gorgeous stop motion video, shared by Warner Bros. itself, DigitalWizardsStudios did exactly that. Watch as LEGO’s The Lord of the Rings Rivendell set transforms into a stop-motion animation masterpiece that reimagines all our favorite cinematic scenes….

(6) OCTOTHORPE. Episode 99 of Octothorpe is “Keep Sending Ops Until They Fix It”.

Merry Christmas! The three of us are scattered to the four winds this week, so we’ve recorded something to tide everyone over until 2024. We play “If I Ran the Zoo…Con”, a game which models conrunning. Will we succeed in running a great convention? Or will our decisions have dire consequences? Listen here, and we’ll see you next year! 

(7) HARLAN’S 4-HOUR CAREER AT DISNEY. Part of Lifehacker’s article “Is Disney Actually Woke, or Is It All a Conspiracy Theory?” detours to pull in this story:

Truth: Harlan Ellison was fired from Disney for imitating Disney characters having sex

Irascible science fiction writer Harlan Ellison once worked for Disney, and according to an autobiographical essay in his 1982 book Stalking the Nightmare, Ellison’s tenure ended after one day at lunch with his co-workers when he jokingly suggested Disney should make a porn movie starring his well-known creations. He then acted out the noises various Disney characters might make in said porn movie. What Ellison didn’t realize was that Roy Disney was at the next table and overheard the whole routine. Roy apparently didn’t find it amusing, and Ellison was terminated. 

Yes, it’s true. And Harlan tells the story in full, complete with dialogue and sound effects, in “The 3 Most Important Things in Life” at the Internet Archive.

(8) IN CASE YOU DIDN’T KNOW. [Item by Daniel Dern.] There’s only a few interesting (to me) bits in “10 Things You Didn’t Know About Flash Gordon (1980)” but watching this is enough to add a re-re-watch to my mental list (particularly now that I’m somewhat more attuned to the sound of Queen). Two particular Things to report:

  • George Lucas originally wanted to make the movie, but that didn’t happen. So instead, he went on to create his own space opera. (The one with the Force and lightsabers etc.)
  • Music almost done by Pink Floyd rather than Queen. That would have been very different!

Also, there’s several cast overlaps between this movie and Bond movies.

(9) DR. JAMES HOSEK (1964-2023). The SFWA Blog paid tribute to Jim Hosek, who died December 3. “In Memoriam: Jim Hosek”.

Dr. James Hosek (13 October 1964 – 03 December 2023) known to many in the community as Jim, was a writer of veterinary mystery and philosophical humor. Especially proud of his role as Nebula Award Commissioner, his own story “Total Loss” was published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine. He wrote the Dr. At stories about a house call veterinarian who lands in the middle of mysteries, and the novel, A Really Good Day, a lighthearted and humorous story about an underdog golfer whose story of an incredible single day on the course finds an unexpectedly happy ending….

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born December 21, 1937 Jane Fonda, 86. I know that I saw Barbarella, her seventeenth film, on a large screen  but it would been years after it came out so this was one of the arts cinemas, and I’m guessing it was in Seattle. It’s a very impressive looking film though I’m not sure I can say much for the script. 

Roger Vadim, the director had attempted to cast other actresses to wit Brigitte Bardot, Virna Lisi and Sophia Loren for this role before choosing Fonda, his wife. I wonder what he’d have done if she turned him down?

So what else for genre roles? Well she’s Countess Frédérique de Metzengerstein in the “Metzengerstein” story of the three stories in Histoires extraordinaires directed by Roger Vadim, Louis Malle and Federico Fellini. It was dubbed in English as Spirits of The Dead.

Next up is Klute which I know as a “neo-noir psychological thriller” isn’t even an associational mystery but I think her role in it is fascinating so I’m including it here. 

The Blue Bird in which she played Night being a children’s fantasy is most definitely in our wheelhouse. It was the fifth screen adaptation of the play, following two silent films, the studio’s 1940 version starring Shirley Temple, and a 1970 animated feature. 

This was Twentieth Century Fox’s attempt forty-seven years ago at recapturing the magic of the highly successful Temple version. It was a disaster.  Interesting note: Elizabeth Taylor who had a lead role here approached David Bowie to star in the film but he turned it down.

In Elena and the Secret of Avalor, she has her first animated voicing gig as Shurkiki. Next in Luck, she’s voicing Babe, a female dragon who is the really cheerful Good Luck CEO. Finally, she voices Grandmamah, the Warrior Queen of the Seven Seas in the Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken film. 

(11) I’VE GOT A SECRET. [Item by Andrew (not Werdna).] Critic Peter C. Baker says “Joanne McNeil’s ‘Wrong Way’ Takes the Shine Off the Self-Driving Car” in The New Yorker.

For sci-fi writers, driverless cars have long been a supremely efficient shorthand for dramatic change, an effective way of immediately grounding a story in the future, where things are different. The Czech American physician and author Miles J. Breuer’s 1930 novel, “Paradise and Iron,” is set largely on an island where most technology works without human input.  The narrator gets a “queer feeling at the complete absence of wheel and gear-shift levers,” or any person operating them. Sci-fi storytellers have been leveraging that queer feeling ever since, often-in the case of movies-with help from carmakers. Audi helped design the autonomous cars in “I, Robot” (2004) and “Ender’s Game” (2013), which concretize the films’ visions of the future.. But what happens when a long-standing symbol of the future arrives in reality? How do you write about it?

Joanne McNeil’s début novel, “Wrong Way,” is a useful literary bellwether of this shift: a novel about the self-driving-car business that feels less like a vision of the future than a dispatch from the present. The story is told from the perspective of Teresa, a forty-eight-year-old Massachusetts woman who responds to a vague “Drivers Wanted” Craigslist ad posted by a recruiter on behalf of a Google-ish tech conglomerate called AllOver. At her orientation, she’s shown a video advertising an AllOver driverless electric taxi called the CR. But each CR, it turns out, has a human backup operator stashed inside, hidden from passengers, watching the road on a video screen. Teresa is a safety driver, of sorts, but a secret one: her passengers, she’s told, won’t know she’s there….

(12) TARNATION. At The Mary Sue, Jack Doyle sure has a funny way of celebrating that “’La Brea’ Is Returning To Wreak Prehistoric Havoc on Los Angeles”.

….What I want is to go out into my backyard on Christmas morning, where I have left the figgy pudding from the night before to congeal in a kiddie pool. I will then strip naked in the cool December air, and submerge myself entirely in the figgy pudding. And I will lie there in wait, for thousands—perhaps millions—of years. At least until a concerned relative comes out to check on me. Then I will leap out from the figgy pudding, roaring like a saurian of old, and pounce upon my in-laws who made the foolish decision of attempting to look out on the backyard Christmas lights in my domain. Dinosaurs are not merciful, and neither am I.

That is why—more than anything in the world—I want La Brea season 3 to arrive as soon as possible. I wish to learn the hunting skills of the dinosaurs of old. I will wait. I am many things, but above all else … I am patient….

(13) WARHAMMER COMING TO PRIME. T3 reports “Amazon Prime Video is new home to the most exciting sci-fi TV and movie franchise out there” – streaming content based on the Warhammer 40,000 tabletop games by Games Workshop.

…Games Workshop has confirmed that the contract has been signed and Warhammer 40K movies and TV shows are planned for Amazon Prime Video….

…There’s certainly a wealth of stories that can be told within such a massively detailed franchise. Warhammer 40,000 was first created as a tabletop wargame offshoot of the fantasy equivalent Warhammer in 1987. Since then, it has been expanded upon greatly, with hundreds of novels, video games, and rulebook revisions now available.

What made it unique at the time is that it combined the fantasy theme of Warhammer including orcs, goblins, and necromancy, with the high tech, spacefaring tropes of sci-fi. Oh and guns… many, many guns….

…It will certainly make for a visual feast when it finally does make it onto our screens via Amazon. However, don’t expect it anytime soon – Games Workshop warns that it could take years yet: “TV and Film production is a mammoth undertaking. It’s not unusual for projects to take two to three years from this point before something arrives on screen,” it said….

(14) BURIED ALIVE. NPR’s “The Indicator from Planet Money” feature tells “What Coyote vs. Acme reveals about Hollywood economics”. Audio – no transcript.

The movie Coyote vs. Acme was set to release this summer featuring characters from the iconic Looney Tunes cartoons. The studio behind the film, Warner Bros. Pictures, had some other ideas. Instead of releasing the completed film, the studio canceled Coyote vs. Acme, with no intention of ever releasing it.

Today on the show, we explain the Hollywood economics behind why Warner Bros. Discovery might not want to release movies that its own studio spent years putting together.

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

Pixel Scroll 11/1/23 Eat, Pray, Jaunt

(1) 4 YOUR LISTENING PLEASURE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] SF book lovers had an hour of delight on BBC Radio 4 last Sunday with two half-hour programmes.

First up there was Open Book that saw a led discussion of a panel of three authors that looked at artificial intelligence (AI) in their work as well as the possible effects of AI on novels writing.

The overall drift – of what was an interesting conversation – was that AI is not developed enough at the current moment to have a significant impact on (commercial) writing/publishing but there is clearly a trajectory and that in a few years time things could well be different..

One point made was that eventually AI writing might possibly induce a revolution in writing with a new type of novel. The panel took this notion further and said it may be that in the future some AI writing will only be able to be appreciated by AI (non-human) readers.

You can listen to the programme here,

Elizabeth Day and Johny Pitts present a special edition of the programme exploring AI and the novel.

Recorded at the London Literary Festival at the Southbank Centre; novelists Naomi Alderman, Adam Thirlwell and Julianne Pachico join Elizabeth and Johny on stage to discuss depictions of AI in their fiction – and what AI might mean for fiction.

Naomi Alderman’s new novel, The Future, is the tale of a daring heist hatched in the hope of saving the world from the tech giants whose greed threatens life as we know it. Adam Thirlwell’s The Future, Future takes us from the salacious gossip of pre-revolutionary Paris to a utopian lunar commune, and Julianne Pachico tells the story of a young girl raised by artificial intelligence in her novel Jungle House.

The second programme was The Exploding Library that in this episode looked at Angela Carter’s Night at the Circus.

“Am I fact or am I fiction?”

So asks the six-foot-something winged woman, Fevvers, the acclaimed aerialiste at the heart of Angela Carter’s epic, Nights at the Circus. It’s a question that has haunted almost every performer who’s stepped onto a stage and seen their ‘real’ self and ‘stage’ selves blur.

Yet a woman with wings with the world at her feet is almost run-of-the-mill in this extravaganza. There’s dancing tigers, murderous clowns, shamanic visions in the Siberian wilderness, and the odd pair of stinky tights.

Labels and genres are flung around – gothic, magical realism, fantasy – but the book, like Angela Carter’s writing in general, evades categorisation at every turn. Twist the kaleidoscope and another vision emerges, twist again and the human condition is re-revealed.

Kiri Pritchard Maclean runs off with the circus to consider the performer underneath the greasepaint, and find out what happens when the performance comes to an end. (Plus chickens).

You can listen to the programme here.

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

Two part convention report by Chengdu fan/business owner

(via SF Light Year)

I’m not exactly sure who Huawen is; I think they are a fan who set up an SF-related company/museum/library (?) based in Chengdu.  (Per the website URL listed in the leaflet image listed in the leaflet image, “[their company] was established in 2021 in Chengdu, Sichuan Province. It is a media company dedicated to promoting excellent science fiction culture.”  Per the first part of their report, had some involvement in the early days of the Chengdu bid/con organization, but dropped out.  

Part 1Part 2

Extracts from Part 1 of their report, via Google Translate with manual edits.

I was a little afraid of the World Science Fiction Convention.  Previously, I’d only heard about this science fiction convention which has lasted for more than 80 years, from news reports and a few words from friends. There was always a sour grapes mentality of “looking at what other people’s families were doing”.

But now after experiencing it personally, I feel more or less disenchanted. Let me expand upon this first.

First of all, the Worldcon has a long history and many traditions. This is the 81st edition. With 80 previous events, it has accumulated a lot of experiences and traditions. I had never participated in it before, and felt that it would always be a bit of a mystery to me.

And then there’s the scale. Every time, thousands of science fiction fans and practitioners participate, with hundreds of stalls and hundreds of activities. Such a large scale has never been seen before in China.

Then there is the difficulty of organization. The complexity and organizational difficulty increases exponentially with the increase in scale. What’s more, except for a few members of the organizing committee, almost all of them are involved for just a short time. This level of difficulty is simply hellish. Think about it – it’s scary…

I saw from the WeChat official account of the convention that collections related to the history of science fiction were being solicited. I was originally thinking of doing a big presentation, but I succumbed to procrastination.  However, if I rushed to catch up with my preparations, maybe the visual effect could be good? …

In the end, as an exhibitor, I briefly displayed a small collection in two cabinets, and fortunately everyone reported that they had good impressions of it.

Therefore, my main participation in this conference was as an exhibitor, and secondarily as a guest 1, 3, and 5.   [I think this is a reference to the badge numbering, about what access individual attendee types had?]  I constantly switched between the two identities whilst at the con.

Precisely because of the resource-draining nature of being an exhibitor, I was unable to participate in many activities, and was unable to observe the full picture of this convention, which really was a pity.  If I had been able to attend more events, there would definitely be more [in this report]. However, I can summarize my experiences, to learn from [them in the future]

1. The venue is the basic determining factor for almost any event / Unparalleled, beyond imagination, 900 million yuan [approx $123m USD]  can convince people with reason…

The venue and facilities were so good, but my preparations were so unsatisfactory, and I completely underestimated the scale of this conference.

2. The youth trend is obvious, directly reversing the aging trend of the World Science Fiction Convention

I heard a long time ago that the participants at foreign world science fiction conventions are mainly middle-aged and elderly people, with only a small proportion of young people.  This phenomenon is not recent; it has a history of at least more than 20 years.

The same is true from my observations at my table. The foreign science fiction fans who came to the conference are generally older.  I never saw any children or teenagers, and young people in their twenties and thirties were also relatively rare.  [Note: the default Google Translate output says, “…were relatively preferred”, which didn’t make much sense to me.  I’ve taken the liberty of replacing that with something that makes more sense to me.]

By contrast, the clear main participants of this Chengdu Science Fiction Convention are minors, mainly primary school students, followed by junior high school students, and many high school students. Excluding the parents and adults accompanying children, the proportion of adult science fiction fans attending the conference was a long way down – less than one tenth….

I speculate that the average age of all participants this time was most likely no more than 18 years old.  Science fiction makes people young, if I’m honest.

I bet that no subsequent World Science Fiction Convention in the next fifty years will be able to gather such a group of tens of thousands of primary and secondary school science fiction fans – no, a hundred years.

I think foreign science fiction fans will have received a little shock from Chengdu 🙂

3. We ran out of materials and lacked preparations. We really couldn’t squeeze out another drop …

All the books that I planned to sell were sold out on the first or second day.

The three new commemorative medals made for this science fiction convention were almost completely out of ink the next day, and I had to replenish them twice a day. [Note

Not only were there not enough badges, but the 3,000 ribbons prepared for the previous 2,000 people did not last until the end, even with the restriction that “each person could only choose one.”

The only thing that I still had some inventory of, was a leaflet that had 5,000 copies printed.

I have skim read the second post, but haven’t had time or energy to do a similar write-up; it will probably appear in tomorrow’s Scroll.

The Space-Time Painter and the Hugos being used in school work and tests

I spotted these Xiaohongshu posts earlier today (1)(2).  There are other unusual references to this Hugo winner that I’ll include in a future Scroll.

Photos from Shanghai Halloween

These have absolutely nothing to do with the Worldcon, but they came up in my Xiaohongshu default feed late last night, and I thought they might be of mild interest to Filers.  Sorry that there’s no link to the source post, but I was afraid that if I spent too long looking at that post, the algorithmic feed might determine that this is the sort of content that it should continue to show me in future… There’s more in a short Twitter video from the Chinese news site Sixth Tone, and also a three-minute English-language explainer video on YouTube.

(3) MARVEL’S PROBLEMS. “Crisis at Marvel: Jonathan Majors Back-Up Plans, ‘The Marvels’ Reshoots, Reviving Original Avengers and More Issues Revealed” in Variety.

…[E]veryone at Marvel was reeling from a series of disappointments on-screen, a legal scandal involving one of its biggest stars and questions about the viability of the studio’s ambitious strategy to extend the brand beyond movies into streaming. The most pressing issue to be discussed at the retreat was what to do about Jonathan Majors, the actor who had been poised to carry the next phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe but instead is headed to a high-profile trial in New York later this month on domestic violence charges. The actor insists he is the victim, but the damage to his reputation and the chance he could lose the case has forced Marvel to reconsider its plans to center the next phase of its interlocking slate of sequels, spinoffs and series around Majors’ villainous character, Kang the Conqueror.

At the gathering in Palm Springs, executives discussed backup plans, including pivoting to another comic book adversary, like Dr. Doom. But making any shift would carry its own headaches: Majors was already a big presence in the MCU, including as the scene-stealing antagonist in February’s “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.” And he has been positioned as the franchise’s next big thing in this season of “Loki” — particularly in the finale, which airs on Nov. 9 and sets up Kang as the titular star of a fifth “Avengers” film in 2026.

“Marvel is truly fucked with the whole Kang angle,” says one top dealmaker who has seen the final “Loki” episode. “And they haven’t had an opportunity to rewrite until very recently [because of the WGA strike]. But I don’t see a path to how they move forward with him.”

Beyond the bad press for Majors, the brain trust at Marvel is also grappling with the November release of “The Marvels,” a sequel to 2019’s blockbuster “Captain Marvel” that has been plagued with lengthy reshoots and now appears likely to underwhelm at the box office….

(4) MORE LEARNEDLEAGUE. [Item by David Goldfarb.] Some One-Day Special quizzes that Filers might enjoy:

(Xena has gods and sorceresses; Randall Munroe has won a Hugo Award, so I claim that both of these are at least genre-adjacent.)

(5) HWA SUMMER SCARES SPOKESPERSON IS CLAY MCLEOD CHAPMAN. The Horror Writers Association yesterday announced their Summer Scares Reading Program 2024 Spokesperson and Timeline.

The Horror Writers Association (HWA), in partnership with United for Libraries, Book Riot, Booklist, and NoveList®, a division of EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO), is proud to announce the fifth annual Summer Scares Reading Program. Summer Scares is a reading program that provides libraries and schools with an annual list of recommended horror titles for adult, young adult (teen), and middle grade readers. It introduces readers and librarians to new authors and helps start conversations extending beyond the books from each list and promote reading for years to come.

Summer Scares is proud to announce the 2024 spokesperson, author Clay McLeod Chapman:

“To this day, I still have vivid memories of my grandmother escorting six-year-old me through our local library — Go, Bon Air! — and striking a deal: Pick two books, any two books, one for her to read to me and one for me to read to myself. When we both finished our individual reads, we could always come back and pick another pair. I can still list off practically every book I selected — beginning with “Monsters of North America” by William A. Wise — returning to the library to replenish our endless reservoir of reading every week of my childhood. Now I feel as if I’m returning to the library all over again, thanks to Summer Scares, where the deal this time is to pick those books that continue to make an impact on me and share them with as many readers as humanly possible.”

Chapman is joined by a committee of six library workers who, together, will select three recommended fiction titles in each reading level, totaling nine Summer Scares selections. The goal of the program is to encourage a national conversation about the horror genre, across all age levels, at libraries around the world, and ultimately attract more adults, teens, and children interested in reading. Official Summer Scares designated authors will also make themselves available at public and school libraries.

The committee’s final selections will be announced on February 14, 2024, Library Lover’s Day. Chapman, along with some of the selected authors, will kick off Summer Scares at the 8th Annual HWA Librarians’ Day, Friday, May 31st, during StokerCon® 2024 at the San Diego Mission Bay Marriott….

(6) HOWARD STATEMEN DEATH LEARNED. [Item by Rick Kovalcik.] Howard “Howeird” Statemen (1950-2022) was a past Boskone participant. In response to an email, his sister informed us that Howard passed away last year on October 5, 2022 of an aneurysm. Here’s the link to his memorial presentation on YouTube. He also had a website which may be of interest to some people: Howeird Dot Com at WMP

(7) SHERRIE R. CRONIN (1954-2023). Author Sherrie R. Cronin died October 23 at the age of 68. The SFWA Blog has posted a tribute.

…A geophysicist by trade and extensive traveler by passion, Cronin lived in seven cities and visited forty-six countries, while staying dedicated to her writing. Cronin wrote 13 works within the “46. Ascending” and “The War Stories of the Seven Troublesome Sisters” series. Additionally, she was dedicated to writing and blogging about world peace, empathy, and what she called intra-species harmony. She joked that she’d love to tell these stories, stories of peace—or be Chief Scientist Officer—on the Starship Enterprise, and admitted to occasionally checking her phone for a message from Captain Picard. Just in case….

(8) MEMORY LANE.

1939 [Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Our Beginning is not from a genre work this time, but from a mystery, that of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. We do cover mysteries here, so I thought I’d look at Chandler and this work.

He turned to writing mysteries relatively late at age forty four after losing his job as oil company exec during the Great Depression. “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot”, his first story, was published in 1933 in Black Mask, one of many mystery stories he’d write. The Big Sleep, his first novel, followed six years later. 

The Big Sleep would first be published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1939. It is based off of two Black Mask stories, “Killer in the Rain” (published in 1935) and “The Curtain” (published in 1936) as Chandler based his novels off previously written material. Well, he said “cannibalised” those stories. 

It would be made into two films, the 1946 film that Leigh Brackett helped write the screenplay and which co-started Humphrey Bogartand Lauren Bacall,  and a 1978 one that’s remembered mostly, well, for Robert Mitchum being at sixty twice as old as the character he playing, Philip Marlowe. Mitchum had previously been an aging Philip Marlowe in Farewell, My Lovely, a 1975 release. 

The 1946 film’s 38-year-old Marlowe played by Bogart who was 44 at the time. Why the script aged him by five years is unknown. 

There was a television adaptation starring Zachary Scott, who had done mostly Westerns, as Marlowe, that was broadcast on September 25, 1950. I can’t find any record of it existing now. 

Oh, and none of Chandler’s novels will move into the public domain until 2034, the year the rights to The Big Sleep are set to expire. 

And now our Beginning…

IT WAS ABOUT ELEVEN O’CLOCK in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars. 

The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying. 

There were French doors at the back of the hall, beyond them a wide sweep of emerald grass to a white garage, in front of which a slim dark young chauffeur in shiny black leggings was dusting a maroon Packard convertible. Beyond the garage were some decorative trees trimmed as carefully as poodle dogs. Beyond them a large green house with a domed roof. Then more trees and beyond everything the solid, uneven, comfortable line of the foothills.

On the east side of the hall a free staircase, tile-paved, rose to a gallery with a wrought-iron railing and another piece of stained-glass romance. Large hard chairs with rounded red plush seats were backed into the vacant spaces of the wall round about. They didn’t look as if anybody had ever sat in them. In the middle of the west wall there was a big empty fireplace with a brass screen in four hinged panels, and over the fireplace a marble mantel with cupids at the corners. Above the mantel there was a large oil portrait, and above the portrait two bullet-torn or moth-eaten cavalry pennants crossed in a glass frame. The portrait was a stiffly posed job of an officer in full regimentals of about the time of the Mexican war. The officer had a neat black Imperial, black mustachios, hot hard coalblack eyes, and the general look of a man it would pay to get along with. I thought this might be General Sternwood’s grandfather. It could hardly be the General himself, even though I had heard he was pretty far gone in years to have a couple of daughters still in the dangerous twenties. 

I was still staring at the hot black eyes when a door opened far back under the stairs. It wasn’t the butler coming back. It was a girl. 

She was twenty or so, small and delicately put together, but she looked durable. She wore pale blue slacks and they looked well on her. She walked as if she were floating. Her hair was a fine tawny wave cut much shorter than the current fashion of pageboy tresses curled in at the bottom. Her eyes were slategray, and had almost no expression when they looked at me. She came over near me and smiled with her mouth and she had little sharp predatory teeth, as white as fresh orange pits and as shiny as porcelain. They glistened between her thin to taut lips. Her face lacked color and didn’t look too healthy.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born November 1, 1897 Naomi Mary Margaret Mitchison, Baroness Mitchison, CBE (née Haldane). Author of many historical novels with genre trappings such as The Corn King and the Spring Queen which Terri Windling called “a lost classic” and The Bull Calves but also SF such as Memoirs of a Spacewoman. She was also a good friend of Tolkien, and was one of the proofreaders of The Lord of the Rings. (Died 1999.)
  • Born November 1, 1917 Zenna Henderson. Her first story was published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1951. The People series appeared in magazines and anthologies, as well as the stitched-together Pilgrimage: The Book of the People and The People: No Different Flesh. Other volumes include The People Collection and Ingathering: The Complete People Stories. She was nominated for a Hugo Award at Detention for her “Captivity” novelette. Her story “Pottage” was made into the 1972 ABC-TV movie, The People.  “Hush” became an episode of George A. Romero’s Tales from the Darkside which first aired in 1988. (Died 1983.)
  • Born November 1, 1923 Gordon R. Dickson. Writer, Filker, and Fan who was truly one of the best writers of both science fiction and fantasy. It would require a skald to detail his stellar career in any detail. His first published speculative fiction was the short story “Trespass!”, written with Poul Anderson, in the Spring 1950 issue of Fantastic StoriesChilde Cycle, featuring the Dorsai, is his best known series, and the Hoka are certainly his and Poul Anderson’s silliest creation. I’m very fond of his Dragon Knight series, which I think reflects his interest in medieval history.  His works received a multitude of award nominations, and he won Hugo, Nebula, and British Fantasy Awards. In 1975, he was presented the Skylark Award for achievement in imaginative fiction. He was Guest of Honor at dozens of conventions, including the 1984 Worldcon, and he was named to the Science Fiction Hall of Fame and the Filk Hall of Fame. The Dorsai Irregulars, an invitation-only fan volunteer security group named after his series, was formed at the 1974 Worldcon in response to the theft of some of Kelly Freas’ work the year before, and has provided security at conventions for the last 34 years. (Died 2001.) (JJ)
  • Born November 1, 1923 Dean A. Grennell. Writer, Editor, Firearms Expert, Conrunner, and Fan who edited numerous fanzines including La Banshee and Grue, which was produced sporadically from 1953 to 1979 and was a finalist for the Hugo Award in 1956. He published several short fiction works, and even dabbled in fanzine art. He ran a small U.S. gathering held the same weekend as the 1956 UK Natcon which was called the Eastercon-DAG, and another called Wiscon, which preceded the current convention of that name by more than twenty years. He is responsible for the long-running fannish joke “Crottled Greeps”. (Died 2004.) (JJ)
  • Born November 1, 1942 Michael Fleisher. A writer best known for his work at  DC Comics of the Seventies and Eighties, particularly for the Spectre and Jonah Hex. He wrote Hex for over a dozen years, both as an Old West and a SF character. Fleisher wrote three volumes of The Encyclopedia of Comic Books Heroes, doing some research on-site at DC Comics. (Died 2018.)
  • Born November 1, 1959 Susanna Clarke, 64. Author of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell which I think wins my award for the most-footnoted work in genre literature. It won a World Fantasy, Nebula, Mythopoeic and of course a Hugo Award, that being at Interaction. It was adapted into a BBC series, most likely without the footnotes. The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories collects her short works and is splendid indeed with artwork by Charles Vess. Her Piranesi novel as nominated for a Hugo at Discon III, the year that Martha Wells Network Effect got it.

(10) HWA INDIGENOUS HERITAGE MONTH. “Un-Settling Horrortellers: Introduction to Indigenous Heritage Month 2023” by Shane Hawk kicks off another Horror Writers Association blog series.

…The HWA has put great effort into recognizing the need for diversifying Horror and the association itself over the last few years. It’s been so wonderful to see. Owl Goingback has earned the Lifetime Achievement Award and won two Stokers, Jewelle Gomez also has earned a Lifetime Achievement Award, Stephen Graham Jones has won four Stokers, and the HWA has highlighted Indigenous writers just outside of the Horror genre like Daniel H. Wilson, Darcie Little Badger, and Tim Tingle.

Indigenous Horror is a small space to spill blood on the ground, smell the organ meat slopping out of the clawed-open abdomen, but it is growing at a nice pace. My main mission with Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology was to increase that small percentage and rid ourselves of that pesky “less-than” mathematical symbol when it came to describing Indigenous market share of genre works. The anthology has only been out for six weeks, but its status as an international bestseller since its first week (and every week since) has proven that there is an absolute hunger for Indigenous Horror and dark fiction. Over are the days of the non-Native genre writer killing us off after we help the white folks understand the monster’s weaknesses, exploiting our religions, our traumas, our cultures, our “esoteric” folklore. Also, the days wherein Holt McCallany of Mindhunter fame sported brownface to become Navajo in Creepshow 2 are over (“What the hell was that?” all the Natives asked in unison). Like I wrote in the original proposal sent to Penguin Random House: Now it’s our turn. (Or like Barkhad Abdi sternly told Tom Hanks in that one Boat Movie, “We’re da captain now…”

(11) OFF TO THE RACES. Mark Hamill helps plug the “Star Wars scheme for Bubba Wallace at Phoenix”.

Bubba Wallace will run a special Star Wars X-wing fighter scheme on his No. 23 Toyota this weekend for the NASCAR Cup Series Championship Race at Phoenix Raceway.

The scheme is inspired by Columbia Sportswear’s Star Wars collection.

(12) WILEY POST’S EERIE PRESSURE SUIT. The National Air and Space Museum’s podcast AirSpace devotes its latest episode “Jetstream” to an item of history-making pilot wear.

No, this isn’t a spooky Halloween costume. It’s one of the earliest pressure suits.

In the 1930s, aviation icon Wiley Post reached the stratosphere for the first time in his Lockheed Vega Winnie Mae. The aircraft didn’t have a pressurized cabin, so he wore a pressure suit and helmet designed for him by the B.F. Goodrich Company. 

***

We get it—the early days of aviation were full of outlandish characters, and it can be a little exhausting. But trust us on this one—it’ll be worth it. Wiley Post was an oil-worker and armed robber-turned-record breaking pilot who discovered the jet stream while wearing a sweet eye-patch and a suit straight out of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (it was a lewk). That should be enough but wait! There’s more! That steampunk getup, which Wiley designed and built with tire company BF Goodrich, was the very first successful pressure suit. And it did more than unlock the stratosphere, it laid the groundwork for the first spacesuits—and modern spacesuits aren’t much different. This tall tale keeps getting higher, but again—trust us (we’ve got the suit!). Special thanks to Tested’s Adam Savage, whose answer for “history’s most important spacesuit” was both unexpected and absolutely on the mark.

(13) ROBOBOOKS ON THE WAY. According to Publishers Weekly, “Kindle Direct Publishing Will Beta Test Virtual Voice–Narrated Audiobooks”.

In a post today in the Kindle Direct Publishing community forum, the self-publishing giant announced that it has begun a beta test on technology allowing KDP authors to produce audiobook versions of their e-books using virtual voice narration. The ability to create an audiobook using synthetic speech technology is likely to result in a boom in the number of audiobooks produced by KDP authors. According to an Amazon spokesperson, currently only 4% of titles self-published through KDP have an audiobook available.

Under the new initiativeauthors can choose one of their eligible e-books already on the KDP platform, then sample voices, preview the work, and customize the audiobook. After publication, audiobooks will be live within 72 hours, and will distributed wherever Audible titles are sold. Prices can be set between $3.99 and $14.99 and authors will receive a 40% royalty. All audiobooks created by virtual voice, the post says, will be clearly labeled and, as with any audiobook, customers can listen to samples….

(14) A FRIGHTENING COINCIDENCE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Moid over at the Media Death Cult YouTube Channel has a short, 10-minute video on “The History Of Science Fiction Horror”. Funny that this should come out Halloween week. Spooky or what?

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Disney+ Shares ‘LEGO Marvel Avengers: Code Red’ Poster”Animation World Network has the story and a gallery of images from the production.

…In the special, the Avengers assemble to save New York City from the threat of the Red Skull and his Hydra forces. Amid the battle, the Avengers are unexpectedly joined by Black Widow’s father, Red Guardian, which doesn’t go over well with Natasha. 

In the show, after an argument with his daughter about his well-intentioned helicopter parenting, Red Guardian disappears under mysterious circumstances. As Black Widow and the Avengers investigate, they discover that the villainous Collector is kidnapping every character who has “red” in their name. But despite their best efforts, the Avengers are unable to stop the Collector from kidnapping his next victim, their friend Red She-Hulk….

Here’s the trailer:

[Thanks to Ersatz Culture, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, David Goldfarb, JeffWarner, Rick Kovalcik, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

A File 770 Special: Ryan McNaught’s ‘Bricktionary’ LEGO Exhibit Makes Its World Debut at Cincinnati’s Museum Center

By Chris M. Barkley: In March of 2023, one of the most ambitious artistic endeavors of this decade opened within the halls of one of America’s most recognized and beloved institutions, the Cincinnati Museum Center.

The museum itself is the main tenant of the building known to most people in the metropolitan area as Union Terminal, one of the last of the great railroad stations, whose construction began in August of 1929, two months before the beginning of the Great Depression. Completed in March of 1933, it was built to accommodate 216 passenger trains and 17,000 customers a day.

(On a personal note, I can count myself among those customers; in 1964, my grandmother took me on my first trip outside of Cincinnati to visit cousins and other relatives in Birmingham, Alabama. As some of you may know, that was a particularly perilous time for African-Americans to travel to the Deep South and at that age, I was totally oblivious to the danger of the journey. But, I digress…)

Union Terminal ceased train service in 1972 but was granted status as a National Historic Landmark in May of 1977. Astute readers know that there is more than a passing resemblance between this station of the Hall of Justice of the ABC TV animated series Super Friends (1973-1985).  That’s because Al Gmuer, background supervisor for Hanna-Barbera Productions, based his design on Union Terminal. But, enough about the venue…

The Bricktionary exhibit was created and designed by Australian Ryan McNaught, a former information technology executive. He is one of only twenty-one Lego Certified Professionals in the world and the ONLY Lego professional residing in the Southern Hemisphere. Born in 1973, he was given his first Lego set (which he has to this day!) by his grandmother at the age of three. At age five, he won a Lego Master Builders’ Certificate.

In an introductory video to the exhibit, McNaught explains that for a long while after his childhood, he had no interest in Legos at all. It wasn’t until he became the parent of twins Alexander and Riley in 2008, that he became interested in Legos again. And you can say that he owes his mid-career change to his mother.

McNaught says that his inadvertent path to becoming a master Lego guru began when his mother, Lyn, brought over a crate of Legos that had been gathering dust in the family garage for decades, as a gift for the grandchildren. But, as he began to play with them himself, it not only rekindled his love for the toy bricks, but for the nearly infinite possibilities for their design and function.

Spurred by this revelation, McNaught used LegoMindstorms software to build a remote controlled Qantas Airbus 380 for the 2009 Brickvention Lego event in Melbourne, where it was voted Best In Show. When it made its sensational appearance at the international Brickworld event in Chicago, he was approached by Lego executives to become one of their Certified Professionals.

Above photos by Ryan McNaught

That, in turn, led to several worldwide tours, events and ultimately, co-hosting Australia’s version of Lego Masters (with Hamish Blake) in 2019.

The construction of Ryan McNaught’s Brickionary began in earnest at the Cincinnati Museum Center in February 2023 and officially opened to the public for the first time on March 17th.

And now, here is that aforementioned short video of McNaught, which is featured as an introduction before you enter the exhibit area:

The exhibition is highly interactive; it not only has some incredibly stunning models but also features several stations throughout where children of all ages can discover (or, rediscover) the joys of making their own Lego toys. 

And now, without further ado, let’s take a closer look at the Bricktionary: The Interactive Exhibition!

[The photo gallery follows the jump.]

Continue reading

Pixel Scroll 6/7/23 Pixels Sleep On Scrolls

(1) MARKOWITZ AWARD WINNERS. Naseem Jamnia and Maya Salameh are the winners of the 2023 Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. Naseem Jamnia is a widely-recognized sff writer. See Lambda Literary’s interview here: “Four Questions with Naseem Jamnia”.

The Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers recognizes LGBTQ-identified writers whose work demonstrates their strong potential for promising careers. The award includes a cash prize of $1,500. This year, the award goes to Naseem Jamnia and Maya Salameh.

Naseem Jamnia (they/them) is the Locus-nominated author of The Bruising of Qilwa, a novella introducing their queernormative, Persian-inspired world, which was shortlisted for the IAFA’s Crawford award. Named the inaugural Samuel R. Delany Fellow, they’ve also received fellowships from Lambda Literary and the Otherwise Award, and their nonfiction has appeared in The Rumpus, The Washington Post, Cosmopolitan, New Orleans Review, Sarah Gailey’s Stone Soup newsletter, and other venues. They are the managing editor of Sword & Kettle Press, a tiny independent publishing house of feminist speculative writing, and their debut middle grade horror, Sleepaway, is out in 2025 from Aladdin. Find out more and sign up for their newsletter at naseemwrites.com, or follow them on social @jamsternazzy.

How has access to queer literature/queer stories impacted your life as a queer person and shaped you as a queer writer?

When I was growing up, the closest I saw my gender portrayed in stories was with the “girl disguises herself as a boy to do the thing” trope, a la Mulan and Tamora Pierce’s Alanna books. I had to resort to fanfiction to explore queerness in terms of sexuality (and even then, rarely or never saw a portrayal of someone on the asexual spectrum). Much of my own writing growing up explored these issues inadvertently and vaguely, as I did not know what I was exploring at the time. However, once terms like “nonbinary” or understanding of transness outside a binary entered the public lexicon in the last 10-ish years, the wealth of queer literature we’ve seen explicitly including various identities has made a world of difference, helping me to understand and embrace my own various identities, which has since allowed me to live as my truest self. With this clearer understanding, I’ve taken the lack of what I saw growing up to turn into what I wish I had seen and where I wish we can go in the future. I’m grateful so many queer books exist now for kids and adults alike to explore the multiplicity of queer experiences….

(2) REUBEN FINALISTS INCLUDE TWO SFF ARTISTS. [Item by Dariensync.] Girl Genius creator Phil Foglio and frequent Neil Gaiman collaborator Colleen Doran have both been nominated for Reuben Awards by the National Cartoonist Society. Foglio for Online Comics: Long Form for Girl Genius, Doran for Best Graphic Novel for her adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Chivalry. “Finalists Announced For 2022 NCS Divisional Awards For The 77th Annual Reubens”.

(3) STARS ON MARS. You can watch the first aired episode of Stars on Mars on the FOX website. William Shatner serves as Mission Control.

Here’s an excerpt. “Celebrities Try To Fix A Fallen Satellite Tower”.

(4) NOT AS SPECIAL EFFECTS? Oh no, some of them were very special. Ranker came up with a list of“11 Classic Fantasy Movies Made Before CGI”.

Many fans feel that modern fantasy movies began in 2001 with the one-two punch of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Both having been produced after the CGI revolution of the 1990s, they applied the full power of the latest visual effects techniques to bring two beloved fantasy book series vividly to life.

But fantasy films go back a lot further than 2001. Since the dawn of movies, imaginative filmmakers have striven to use the medium’s unique capabilities to bring to life visions that cannot exist in reality. Long before computers were rendering T. rexes and Orc armies, special-effects crews had already amassed a huge bag of tricks to put fantastical stories on the screen, including stop-motion, bluescreen, forced perspective, puppets, and giant props.

Three of the four most highly-rated films have effects by Ray Harryahausen. Number one is –

Jason and the Argonauts

A retelling of the myth of the Golden Fleece, 1963’s Jason and the Argonauts was one of the peaks of Ray Harryhausen’s special effects career. Numerous striking effects appear throughout the film, but the show-stopper is the epic battle where Jason and his men confront an army of magically animated skeletons.

Harryhausen recalled the incredibly painstaking work that went into the sequence:

I had three men fighting seven skeletons, and each skeleton had five appendages to move in each separate frame of film. This meant at least 35 animation movements, each synchronized to the actor’s movements. Some days I was producing just 13 or 14 frames a day, or to put it another way, less than one second of screen time per day, and in the end the whole sequence took a record four and a half months to capture on film.

(5) YOU SAW IT HERE FIRST. At Galactic Journey, John Boston reviews the issue of Amazing which scored the coup of publishing an excerpt from Delany’s Nova, the novel Campbell declined to serialize in Analog: “[June 6, 1968] The Stalemate Continues (July 1968 Amazing)”.

Once more, all but one item of fiction are reprints, though this issue’s exception is more considerable than some: House A-Fire, by Samuel R. Delany, described as a short novel (at 33 pages!) on the cover and contents page, though editor Harrison acknowledges in the letter column that it is actually an excerpt from Delany’s new novel Nova, forthcoming from Doubleday.  Delany’s name is misspelled on the cover and contents page and in Harrison’s editorial, spelled correctly on the story’s title page and in the letter column.  Are you getting tired of all this nit-picking?  So am I.  But the persistent sloppiness of this magazine continues to irritate….

(6) LIAGUNO Q&A. One of the Horror Writers Association “A Point of Pride” blog posts is an “Interview with Vince A. Liaguno”.

What was it about the horror genre that drew you to it?

I’m less certain that I chose horror; I think horror chose me. Truthfully, from as far back as I can remember, I was drawn to all things dark. As a kid, my earliest recollections of being terrified were watching made-for-TV movies from the 70s like Don’t Be Afraid of the DarkGargoyles, and Trilogy of Terror. I can still remember damn near pissing myself when that little Zuni fetish doll from the latter chased poor Karen Black around her apartment! (laughs)

As I got a little older, my Dad would take me to the movies as part of our weekend “buddy days”. They were usually Irwin Allen disaster flicks or movies with a lot of car chases, but then a little film called Jaws was released. I was eight years old and can still feel the knot in my stomach the first time I heard those opening notes of John Williams’ now-legendary score. I think I only made it up to the point that the ill-fated skinny-dipping Chrissie gets slammed into the buoy before I pleaded with my Dad to leave. It would take three subsequent tries before I could make it through the entire film, each time making it a little further into the film before my ever-patient father heard the desperation of the “Please, Daddy…can we leave now?” in my voice. Jaws was a rite of passage for me; it was the first time I needed to summon and sustain any sense of real bravery. When I finally saw those end credits, it was a mark of accomplishment… a hint of manhood, if you will.

1978 was a game changer for me—the cusp of adolescence and the release of John Carpenter’s Halloween. If Jaws hooked me, Halloween reeled me in and cemented what would become a lifelong adoration of both slasher films and a certain actress named Jamie Lee Curtis.

(7) MEMORY LANE.

2005[Written by Cat Eldridge from a choice by Mike Glyer.]

I won’t say that Haruki Murakami is author that I’m at familiar as he isn’t. Kafka on the Shore is the English translation of the original Japanese publication which is this, 海辺のカフカ. 

Alfred Knopf published the first English language edition eighteen years ago.

It would win a World Fantasy Award. 

It is an available from the usual suspects. 

And now for our Beginning…

So you’re all set for money, then?” the boy named Crow asks in his typical sluggish voice. The kind of voice like when you’ve just woken up and your mouth still feels heavy and dull. But he’s just pretending. He’s totally awake. As always. 

I nod.

 “How much?” 

I review the numbers in my head. “Close to thirty-five hundred in cash, plus some money I can get from an ATM. I know it’s not a lot, but it should be enough. For the time being.”

 “Not bad,” the boy named Crow says. “For the time being.

I give him another nod. “I’m guessing this isn’t Christmas money from Santa Claus.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” I reply. 

Crow smirks and looks around.

“I imagine you’ve started by rifling drawers, am I right?” 

I don’t say anything. 

He knows whose money we’re talking about, so there’s no need for any long-winded interrogations. 

He’s just giving me a hard time.

“No matter,” Crow says. “You really need this money and you’re going to get it—beg, borrow, or steal. It’s your father’s money, so who cares, right? Get your hands on that much and you should be able to make it. For the time being. But what’s the plan after it’s all gone? Money isn’t like mushrooms in a forest—it doesn’t just pop up on its own, you know. You’ll need to eat, a place to sleep. One day you’re going to run out.”

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born June 7, 1944 Mildred Downey Broxon, 79. Author of three novels and some short stories, heavy on Nordic-German mythology.  The Demon of Scattery was co-written with Poul Anderson. There are no digital books available for her and her printed editions are out of print now. I see no sign that her short fiction has been collected into a volume to date.
  • Born June 7, 1952 Liam Neeson,  71. He first shows up in genre films as Gawain in Excalibur and as Kegan in Krull. He plays Martin Brogan in High Spirits, a film I enjoy immensely. Next up is the title role in Darkman, a film I’ve watched myriad times. He’s Dr. David Marrow in The Haunting which I’d contend is loosely off of The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. Now we get him as Qui-Gon Jinn in The Phantom Menace. Followed unfortunately by his horrid take as Ra’s al Ghul in Batman Begins and as a cameo in the The Dark Knight RisesNow he voiced Aslan with amazing dignity in The Chronicles of Narnia franchise and voiced Zeus as well in the Titans franchise. 
  • Born June 7, 1954 Louise Erdrich, 69. Writer of novels, poetry, and children’s books featuring Native American characters and settings. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. Her genre work includes according to ISFDB the Ojibwe series of The Antelope Wife which won a World Fantasy Award and The Painted Drum, plus stand-alone novels of The Crown of Columbus (co-written with her husband Michael Dorris) and Future Home of the Living God.
  • Born June 7, 1968 Sarah Parish, 55. In “The Runaway Bride“, a Tenth Doctor story, she got to play, with the assistance of extensive CGI, one of the nastiest Who villains to date, The Empress of the Racnoss, an oversized vicious spider with a human face. Great episode. It’s our introduction to Donna Noble, his Companion for quite some time to come. In a much lighter role, she played Pasiphaë on BBC’s Atlantis series.
  • Born June 7, 1969 Anthony Simcoe, 54. Ka D’Argo in Farscape, one of the best SF series ever done. If you don’t watch anything else, just watch the finale, The Peacekeeper Wars as it’s fairly self contained. Farscape is the SF he did. If you can find a copy, Matt Bacon’s No Strings Attached: The Inside Story of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop is a wonderful look at the creation of the creatures on the show including D’Argo facial appendages. 
  • Born June 7, 1972 Karl Urban, 51. He’s in the second and third installments of The Lord of the Rings trilogy as Éomer. He is McCoy in the Trek reboot franchise, Cupid on Xena: Warrior Princess and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, John Kennex on Almost Human, Vaako in the Riddick film franchise, and Judge Dredd in Dredd. For the record, I liked both Dredd films for varied reasons.
  • Born June 7, 1974 David Filoni, 49. Creator and an executive producer on Star Wars Rebels, a most awesome series, for all four seasons, and was supervising director and a writer on another excellent series, Star Wars: The Clone Wars. (I like the animated series far better than the live action films.) He makes his live acting debut in The Mandalorian playing Trapper Wolf, an X-Wing pilot, in “The Prisoner” episode. It’s also worth noting that he his first job was directing episodes during the first season of animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender
  • Born June 7, 1979 Anna Torv, 44. She’s best known for her role as FBI agent Olivia Dunham on Fringe. She also played an ITU nurse in Frankenstein, a modern adaptation of that novel. She voiced the lead of Nariko in the animated Heavenly Sword film based off the game of the same name. 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • The Argyle Sweater reveals an astronomical feature apparently known only to Federation navigators.

(10) HAMMER AND CHISEL. The Tom Brevoort Experience reproduces some of the 1938 letters between Detective Comics Inc. (DC) and Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel. The issue? Money, naturally. “The Selling of Superman: Correspondence between Jack Liebowitz and Jerry Siegel”.

…Above you see the first page of a letter sent by Jack Liebowitz to Jerry Siegel on September 28, 1938. For context, as this point, ACTION COMICS #5 had been published and the character of Superman was heating up. The McClure Newspaper Syndicate, which had been noncommittal about their interest in developing Superman as a newspaper strip, suddenly showed new signs of life, which had caused Siegel to write to Detective Comics and request that they return all rights but first publication to Superman to Siegel and Shuster. As you can imagine, Jack Liebowitz and his boss Harry Donenfeld weren’t having any part of that….

(11) VISITING SPACE. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] This $50 Lego set was inspired by a group of “space travel posters” created by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA. In turn, those were inspired in part by classic travel posters from the golden age of luxury travel. “Retro NASA Space Tourism Posters made from LEGO Bricks are a Space Nerd Must-Have” at Yanko Design.

Here are the four LEGO “posters”.

Here are examples of NASA’s space travel posters.

(12) JEOPARDY! [Item by David Goldfarb.] On Monday’s episode, a clue from Single Jeopardy and one from Double Jeopardy.

In the first round, the category was “Task: Force”, and the $400 clue:

This term for a fictional energy barrier has been traced back to the 1931 sci-fi story “Islands of Space”

Returning champion Jared Watson knew it was a force field.

In the second round, “Movie Continents” for $2000:

Antarctica: a shape-shifting alien menaces helicopter pilot Kurt Russell

Harrison Seidel identified “The Thing”.

On Tuesday’s episode, “Books and Authors” had this at the $2000 level:

Her novel “Kindred” tells of Dana, a young Black woman who is transported from the 1970s back in time to the pre-Civil War South

Jared Watson (who gave the Vulcan sign during the intro, and made the A in Jared into a little Star Trek glyph) responded correctly.

(13) FREE FLASH SF EVENT. Space Cowboys Books of Joshua Tree, CA is hosting a “Flash Science Fiction Night Online Event” on Tuesday June 27 beginning at 6:00 p.m. Pacific. Register for free here.

Join us online for an evening of short science fiction readings (1000 words or less) with Shacklebound Books authors Marisca Pichette, Eric Fomley, and Jenna Hanchey. Flash Science Fiction Nights run 30 minutes or less, and are a fun and great way to learn about new authors from around the world.

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. With a new Transformers movie coming out, How It Should Have Ended decided to remaster its episode “How Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen Should Have Ended”.

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

Pixel Scroll 5/21/23 I Was Born Under A Scrollin’ Star

(1) HUGO FINALISTS AGED IN THE CASK. At Young People Read Old SFF, James Davis Nicoll gets the panel’s reaction to William F. Wu’s story “Hong’s Bluff”.

This month’s Young People Read Old Hugo Finalists story is William F. Wu’s Hugo and Nebula-nominated ​“Hong’s Bluff”. Wu has had a long career—the 50th anniversary of his first sale is only three years off — with a respectable collection of nominations and accolades. However, honesty requires me to admit this is the first Wu story I have ever read. It was certainly… energetic. Wu is now on my acquire list….

(2) DOCUMENTING THE IMPACT OF TREK. Nana Visitor is writing a book about the women of Star Trek and their effect on culture, and would like to hear from any women who are in the medical field and were inspired by Star Trek.

(3) BURIED ALIVE IN $$$. Paste Magazine’s Jacob Oller says, “The IP Era’s Venture Capital Philosophy Has Poisoned Movies”.

Among so many heinous problems trickling down on our heads from the top of the film industry is that of intellectual property. It’s not that adaptations are new, but that the ability to make a living by creating anything else has only recently been destroyed. IP obsession has killed the mid-budget movie, it’s killed the movie star, and it’s coming for the rest of the industry. This is as much a problem for audiences as for filmmakers (at any level), and it all comes from the same place: Unchecked greed, and the familiarity with which we accept it.

Tidy, consistent, sustainable profits—the kind of thing generated by movie studios that once offered a diverse slate of reasonably budgeted adult dramas, teen-date rom-coms, family films, and fence-swinging art movies—are a thing of the past for those in charge of the industry. Other forces from the entertainment world are certainly at play, specifically the rise of prestige TV as a destination for what the movies have abandoned. But the pivot to the IP Era feels simple, because it feels familiar. It’s because tidy, consistent, sustainable profits aren’t enough. There must be growth. There must be domination. There must be Shared Universes.

This attitude goes beyond being risk-averse. Risk aversion isn’t new. Single-minded speculation, trying to alchemize IP into gold, is.

The management decisions keeping workers from their fair pay—as described by Writers Guild of America board member John Rogers in a thread about the current strike—are the same ones milking old IP for all it’s worth: “The new robber barons of Hollywood are on a suicide run.” This shift is tech-bro economics, Wall Street-fellating “vulture capitalism” here to feast on the industry, not further it….

(4) ALT-INTELLIGENCE. Chris Panatier tweeted a very funny thread about an AI writing program run amuck. Thread starts here.

Here is another excerpt:

(5) NEBULA WINNERS CONSIDERED. Cora Buhlert offers “Some Thoughts on the 2022 Nebula Award Winners”. For example:

… The winner of the 2022 Nebula Award for Best Novella is Even Though I Knew the End by C.L. Polk. This is one win I’m fully aboard with, because Even Though I Knew the End mixes a lot of elements I like – urban fantasy with a retro noir setting, a hardboiled detective story and a wonderful love story. It’s a great novella and I hope to see it on the Hugo ballot this year….

(6) A TOY STORY. Cora Buhlert also released a new “Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre: ‘Playing for Dinner’”.

…So enjoy this story of Orko and Man-e-Faces, the two entertainers at the royal palace, teaming up and taking their show on the road.

On the market place of the city of Sarnscepter…

(7) AFROPANTHEOLOGY. The latest If This Goes On (Don’t Panic) podcast features “Publishing in Africa: Afropantheology with Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki”.

In this Episode of Publishing in Africa, Oghenechovwe and Alan [Bailey] discuss the meaning behind Afropantheology, Oghenechovwe’s plans for Afropantheology (including a new line of books), and the International Conference for Fantasy in the Arts.

(8) DEJA FU. This seemed like the perfect video to discover on the day I began rereading the Murderbot series. “Tesla Bot Update”.

(9) IT’S TIME. See “The Muppet Show” theater at LEGO Ideas. (And there are a lot more images in the updates.)

…For nearly 70 years, Jim Henson’s creations have captured the hearts of millions of fans around the world in movies, TV shows, Disney attractions, concerts, and more. Now, for the first time ever, join Kermit the Frog, Fozzie Bear, Miss Piggy, and the Great Gonzo in this zany recreation of the Muppet Show in LEGO form!

This miniature playset beautifully houses some of the Muppet’s most hilarious and endearing production numbers through the years. The theater proscenium features an ornate red and gold facade harkening back to the show’s vaudevillian roots. Look closely at some of the art deco decor… you might spot a few easter eggs hiding in the design.

The mainstage includes three mini diorama sets and a detachable balcony. With ‘you’ as the guest star, start off the show beneath the Muppet Show’s iconic opening theme arches. Then, you’ll be able to act out wacky experiments in Muppet Labs, cook up a feast in the Swedish Chef’s Kitchen, rock out with the Electric Mayhem, or explore the final frontier on the set of the USS Swinetrek. If that’s not enough, Statler and Waldorf will throw in a quick heckle or two from their balcony seats….

(10) MEMORY LANE.

2015[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Kazuo Ishiguro, a Japanese-born British writer, has  written four SF novels including The Buried Giant: A Novel which is where our Beginning is from, the other three being Klara and The SunNever Let Me Go and The Unconsoled.

It was published eight years ago by Alford Knopf. It didn’t win any awards but it was nominated for both a Mythopoeic and World Fantasy Award.

The British Council, yes the British Council has a very nice literature section on their website.  They, say that “Ishiguro’s novels are preoccupied by memories, their potential to digress and distort, to forget and to silence, and, above all, to haunt.”

February of this year, the Hollywood Reporter said that Netflix planned on adapting the novel into an animated film. It will have Guillermo del Toro as director and Dennis Kelly as writer.

With that, here’s the Beginning…

The Buried Giant: A Novel to The Buried Giant: A Novel 

You would have searched a long time for the sort of winding lane or tranquil meadow for which England later became celebrated. There were instead miles of desolate, uncultivated land; here and there rough-hewn paths over craggy hills or bleak moorland. Most of the roads left by the Romans would by then have become broken or overgrown, often fading into wilderness. Icy fogs hung over rivers and marshes, serving all too well the ogres that were then the still native to this land. The people who lived nearby—one wonders what desperation led them to settle in such gloomy spots—might well have feared these creatures, whose panting breaths could be heard long before their deformed figures emerged from the mist. But such monsters were not cause for astonishment. People then would have regarded them as everyday hazards, and in those days there was so much else to worry about. How to get food out of the hard ground; how not to run out of firewood; how to stop the sickness that could kill a dozen pigs in a single day and produce green rashes on the cheeks of children.

In any case, ogres were not so bad provided one did not provoke them. One had to accept that every so often, perhaps following some obscure dispute in their ranks, a creature would come blundering into a village in a terrible rage, and despite shouts and brandishings of weapons, rampage about injuring anyone slow to move out of its path. Or that every so often, an ogre might carry off a child into the mist. The people of the day had to be philosophical about such outrages

In one such area on the edge of a vast bog, in the shadow of some jagged hills, lived an elderly couple, Axl and Beatrice. Perhaps these were not their exact or full names, but for ease, this is how we will refer to them. I would say this couple lived an isolated life, but in those days few were “isolated” in any sense we would understand. For warmth and protection, the villagers lived in shelters, many of them dug deep into the hillside, connecting one to the other by underground passages and covered corridors. Our elderly couple lived within one such sprawling warren—“building” would be too grand a word—with roughly sixty other villagers. If you came out of their warren and walked for twenty minutes around the hill, you would have reached the next settlement, and to your eyes, this one would have seemed identical to the first. But to the inhabitants themselves, there would have been many distinguishing details of which they would have been proud or ashamed.

I have no wish to give the impression that this was all there was to the Britain of those days; that at a time when magnificent civilisations flourished elsewhere in the world, we were here not much beyond the Iron Age. Had you been able to roam the countryside at will, you might well have discovered castles containing music, fine food, athletic excellence; or monasteries with inhabitants steeped in learning. But there is no getting around it. Even on a strong horse, in good weather, you could have ridden for days without spotting any castle or monastery looming out of the greenery. Mostly you would have found communities like the one I have just described, and unless you had with you gifts of food or clothing, or were ferociously armed, you would not have been sure of a welcome. I am sorry to paint such a picture of our country at that time, but there you are.

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born May 21, 1903 Manly Wade Wellman. I remember reading the John the Balladeer collection Karl E. Wagner did and then seeking out the rest of those stories. Amazing stuff! Read the Complete John Thunstone a few years back — strongly recommended. What else by him should I read? And I should note he’s not that well stocked at the usual suspects. (Died 1986.)
  • Born May 21, 1917 Raymond Burr. Speaking of lawyers, we have the Birthday of the man who played Perry Mason. It looks the 1949 film Black Magic with him playing Dumas, Jr. was his first genre performance. Bride of the Gorilla was his next with Lou Chaney Jr. co-starring and Curt Siodmak directing. He goes on to be Grand Vizier Boreg al Buzzar in The Magic Carpet before being Vargo in Tarzan and the She-Devil. And finally he’s in a Godzilla film, Godzilla, King of the Monsters! To be precise, as Steve Martin says. And unfortunately he played the same role in Godzilla 1985 which earned him a Golden Raspberry Award. (Died 1993.)
  • Born May 21, 1918 Jeanne Bates. She’s Diana Palmer in the Forties The Phantom serial, possibly the first one done. Her first genre was as Miss Norcutt in The Return of the Vampire, in a not authorized sequel to Lugosi’s 1931 Universal Studios film Dracula. Most of the films she’s known for are such horror films such as The Soul of a Monster and Back from the Dead. (Died 2007.)
  • Born May 21, 1940 Booker Bradshaw. A record producer, film and TV actor, and Motown executive. He’s here because he’s one of those rare secondary characters that showed up more than once on Trek. He played Dr. M’Benga in “Obsession” and “That Which Survives”. Because his background story was that he served under Captain Christopher Pike, his character has been recast on Strange New Worlds and is played by Babs Olusanmokun. (Died 2003.)
  • Born May 21, 1945 Richard Hatch. He’s best known for his role as Captain Apollo in Battlestar Galactica. He is also widely known for his role as Tom Zarek in the second Battlestar Galactica series. He also wrote a series of tie-in novels co-authored with Christopher Golden, Stan Timmons, Alan Rodgers and Brad Linaweaver. (Died 2017.)
  • Born May 21, 1954 Paul Collins, 69. Australian writer who has been nominated for an astounding twenty Ditmar Awards. In the nineties, he won a William Atheling Jr Award for Criticism or Review for The MUP Encyclopaedia of Australian Science Fiction & Fantasy published by Melbourne University Press which alas was never updated. In his twenties, he began published and edited Void Science Fiction and Fantasy, a semi-prozine.

(12) REASON WHY A FAMOUS COMIC SHUTTERED. “’People Would Be Wishing Me Dead’: Why Calvin & Hobbes’ Creator Ended the Comic Despite Its Popularity” at MSN.com.

Bill Watterson, the creative mind behind Calvin and Hobbes, has no issues with how he left his beloved comic strip. An interview reveals Watterson’s reasoning for ending the cartoon and why he still remains confident in his decision….

…While many fans might have preferred the adventures of the comedic duo to continue, Watterson was quite happy to bring Calvin and Hobbes to its natural conclusion. In an interview with The Cleveland Plain Dealer in 2010, Watterson looks back on his career fifteen years after leaving his strip behind, saying:

“This isn’t as hard to understand as people try to make it. By the end of 10 years, I’d said pretty much everything I had come there to say.

“It’s always better to leave the party early. If I had rolled along with the strip’s popularity and repeated myself for another five, 10 or 20 years, the people now “grieving” for “Calvin and Hobbes” would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I’d be agreeing with them.”

(13) COLLECTIBLES. [Item by Ben Bird Person.] YouTuber Jules Burt just posted this video of his SF/horror Pan Books paperback collection featuring novels by Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, and Frederik Pohl: “INCREDIBLE – Vintage PAN SF & Horror – Paperbacks – 1945 to 1979 – Herbert van Thal – John Burke”.

(14) I’VE HEARD THAT NAME BEFORE. Andrew (not Werdna) caught an interesting reference while watching the most recent episode of The Flash. A startled Chester Runk (from 2049) exclaims “Sweet N. K. Jemisin!”

It’s also mentioned in the Arrowverse Wiki episode recap “A New World, Part Three”.

(15) SHARK WEEK’S 35TH ANNIVERSARY. Entertainment Weekly reports “Aquaman himself Jason Momoa will host Shark Week”.

Aquaman star Jason Momoa has been announced as host for the annual Discovery Channel event, news that came out of the Warner Bros. Discovery upfront presentations in New York on Wednesday.

“As the host of Shark Week, I am beyond excited to take you along on this journey,” Momoa said in a statement. “This project means more to me than a week of talking about sharks. It’s a chance for me to learn and share my connection to these amazing creatures. My love of sharks came long before my time as Aquaman — it began several generations before me.”…

(16) PIPPI IN THE BEGINNING. Witness History – “Pippi Longstocking” at BBC Sounds.

In Stockholm in 1941, Astrid Lindgren made up a story for her seven-year-old daughter, Karin, about a young girl who lived alone and had super-human strength. 

Karin named her Pippi Långstrump, or Pippi Longstocking in English. 

Four years later, Astrid submitted her story into a competition and it won. Her book, Pippi Långstrump, was published and became an overnight success. It’s now been translated into more than 70 languages, as well as being made into more than 40 TV series and films. 

Rachel Naylor speaks to Astrid’s daughter, Karin Nyman. 

(17) JWST RESULTS CHALLENGE MODELS. It may be even bigger on the inside than they knew: “Rethinking the Universe: Astronomers Disturbed by the Unexpected Scale of James Webb’s Galaxies”.

The first results from the James Webb Space Telescope have hinted at galaxies so early and so massive that they are in tension with our understanding of the formation of structure in the Universe. Various explanations have been proposed that may alleviate this tension. But now a new study from the Cosmic Dawn Center suggests an effect that has never before been studied at such early epochs, indicating that the galaxies may be even more massive.

If you have been following the first results from the James Webb Space Telescope, you have probably heard about the paramount issue with the observations of the earliest galaxies:

They are too big.

From a few days after the release of the first images, and repeatedly through the coming months, new reports of ever-more distant galaxies appeared. Disturbingly, several of the galaxies seemed to be “too massive.”

From our currently accepted concordance model of the structure and evolution of the Universe, the so-called ΛCDM model, they simply shouldn’t have had the time to form so many stars.

Although ΛCDM is not a holy indestructible grail, there are many reasons to wait before claiming a paradigm shift: The measured epochs at which we see the galaxies could be underestimated.

(18) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “It’s Quieter In The Twilight” is a documentary about the people who keep the Voyager mission going.

In an unremarkable office space, a select group of aging engineers sacrificed promotion, postponed retirement, and dedicated their lives to stay with the longest running and farthest reaching mission in NASA’s history. Fighting outdated technology and time, Voyager’s flight-team pursues humankind’s greatest exploration.

[Thanks to Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Francis Hamit, Danny Sichel, Ben Bird Person, Andrew (not Werdna), Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Niall McAuley.]