Pixel Scroll 4/7/24 Pixels En Scrollgalia

(1) HOLMES & WATSON. At Brandon O’Brien’s Afternoon Tea the author takes up the Elementary series: “Lapsang Souchong: Two People Who ‘Love’ Each Other”.

I’ve been thinking about this topic idly in my skull for quite some time, and since there are no real good places to put it—less than an essay, more than a tweet—I figured a good test of my discipline would be drafting it for a newsletter. So here’s me rambling about one of my favourite idle obsessions: the 2010s CBS procedural Elementary, in particular why its portrayal of the relationship between Holmes & Watson is one of my favourites. BIG SPOILERS, of course that goes without saying, but you’re already here, so…

(2) TINGLE Q&A. The Geekiary came back from the con with more proof that love is real! “WonderCon 2024: Interview with the Legendary Chuck Tingle”.

… “You don’t hear this so much anymore, but back in the day, conservatives had this sort of slippery slope dang baloney argument about ‘if we let gay people get married then what’s next? You gotta marry a tree? Are you going to marry a dang dinosaur?’ And I think that I always heard those arguments and I always thought why not? What would be wrong with someone marrying whoever, whatever, how many different people, different combinations. There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, as long as you’re talking about consenting adults, the world would be a much better place if you took this conservative nightmare to the extreme, it would actually probably be more of a utopia.

“And so the Tingleverse in general, is kind of that conservative nightmare realized in that actually, it would be a really beautiful place full of love, and acceptance. And so, from the very first story, it is an unusual combination of lovers. But you realize if you read the book, ‘Oh, actually, that’s a really wholesome, beautiful, wonderful place that conservatives seem to just be terrified of.’”…

(3) “TRAD PUBLISHING IS LITERALLY FAILING AT DOING ITS JOB”. Lili Saintcrow cuts loose about the current WTF state of traditional publishing — “We Gotta Talk About (Trad) Publishing”. (Saintcrow’s fireworks are inspired by Lorraine Wilson’s analysis, “Is there a book submission arms race”, an article that Saintcrow praises as “perfectly lovely and … a hundred percent accurate”.)

…Publishing has always been an awfully exploitative business. For a long while the level of fuckery in trad pub was low enough for plenty of writers to make a reasonable gamble by submitting by the rules and building a career, but this is no longer the case. Which is not solely or even mostly a function of the pandemic, mind you–the problems were already there well before 2020 rolled around, but conditions since ~2016 have absolutely poured jet fuel on the fire and now we’ve got a multiple-alarm blaze. (You could even trace the problems to Amazon’s strong-arming, or further back to Reagonomics, but that’s a whole ‘nother blog post.)

The Big Five/Four have already offloaded the brute work of marketing onto individual authors, hollowing out their own marketing departments in order to line C-suite pockets. Now the crunch has reached editorial departments, where even salaried folk traditionally protected from a lot of industry bullshit are being ruthlessly overworked, underpaid, and just generally mistreated. (No, this is not a “pity the poor editors” screed, just a fact.) Consequently a lot of folk are leaving, and those who remain–or the shiny new ones coming in, thinking they’re going to score a good job–find it impossible to pick up the slack. The article linked above is absolutely correct that editors at the big houses are now being used as draft-horse project managers, which does not work with novels or nonfiction books. It just…doesn’t….

And there’s a lot more at the link.

(4) IN THE YEAR 2025. The 2025 UK Eastercon – named Reconnect — will be held April 18-21, 2025 in Belfast, co-chaired by James Bacon and Tommy Ferguson, with Deputy Chair Jo Zebedee. Get more information at the Eastercon Belfast website.

(5) GLASGOW 2024 PUBLISHES NEW PROGRESS REPORT. Glasgow 2024 today published Progress Report 4 (their fifth; the first was numbered as Progress Report 0). Anyone can download the PDF file from the Glasgow 2024 website.

The cover for Progress Report 4 (PR4), ‘Badger Finds A Charmawow’ is by Chris Baker (a.k.a. Fangorn), one of the Guests of Honour.

PR4 includes news from all areas including:

PR4 also features a look back at the London Worldcon of 2014, the final entry in their history of British Worldcons.

(6) WILL GLASGOW CAP ATTENDING MEMBERSHIPS? Progress Report #4 includes this information:

… Our current projections are for between 6,500 and 8,000 purchased in-person registrant types (including 1- and 2-day tickets). This upper number, if everyone turns up, is probably above the maximum holding capacity for the site. So, there is a chance we may need to cap in-person attending registrant purchases, if we are not to get overcrowded. So, we are advising folk to join as early as possible to avoid this possibility effecting your enjoyment of the convention….

(7) TEXAS-SIZED COLLECTION. Morgan Dawn recommended Bluesky readers watch a 2022 video about the “Huge Science Fiction and Fantasy Collection”, which explores the sff collection at the Texas A&M Library, and takes viewers back to the early days of the university’s Cepheid Variable club and their annual AggieCon.

(8) A BELFAST BOOK. “Michael Magee: ‘There’s a disbelief at how I’ve ended up’”, so he tells a Guardian interviewer.

Michael Magee, 33, won this year’s Nero debut fiction award for Close to Home, now out in paperback, as well as last year’s Rooney prize for Irish literature (previously awarded to Anne Enright and Claire Keegan). Set in west Belfast, where Magee grew up, the book follows Sean, a working-class graduate who falls foul of the law as he struggles to make a life in the shadow of violence both political and domestic….

What did you read growing up?
In my later teens I had a very good English teacher who gave me Barry Hines’s A Kestrel for a Knave, which was the first instance where I’d read something that reflected my own reality. I didn’t grow up in a bookish house and didn’t start reading in my spare time outside education till I was about 12 or 13. Lord of the Rings was my gateway drug. As a teenager I wrote a ripoff of it, drawing maps that I dabbed with wet teabags and burned at the edges to age them. But I did all this on the shy! You couldn’t be seen reading books in the company I was keeping. As a young man I felt impelled towards toughness, inexpressiveness, which was at odds with who I was, and who I am. It took me a very long time to disentangle myself from that.

You must run into people who knew you back then.
Of course, all the time. There’s a disbelief at how I’ve ended up – I ask myself the same question – and also a kind of piss-taking, which is completely deserved: “Still writing your wee books, Mick, are ye?”…

(9) IF YOU GIVE A MOUSE A BATH. Forbes believes they know “The Real Reason For Disney’s $11 Billion Streaming Losses”.

… For a number of months in 2020, Disney was almost entirely reliant on Disney+ and it came into its own. As people were stuck indoors during lockdown, the popularity of the platform surged and was hailed as Disney’s white knight. It was almost unthinkable that it could actually end up bringing the company to its knees but that is exactly what happened over the following years.

As subscriber numbers soared far beyond Disney’s forecasts, the Mouse got drunk on its own success and ploughed billions of Dollars into exclusive Disney+ content. By the time it was released, there was a vaccine for covid and the pandemic had receded. Consumers were left picking up the tab for blockbuster furlough payments creating a global cost of living crisis that endures to this day. It led to people cutting their streaming subscriptions and left Disney with a loss-making platform….

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born April 7, 1934 Ian Richardson. (Died 2007.) I do these Birthdays by seeing who I recognize and then doing a deep dive to see how interesting a given individual is. It’s not just what they did in our community that interests me but what they’ve done else as well. And Ian Richardson had an interesting career both here and elsewhere.

Ian Richardson

Where to start? He was at the right age, just about fifty, when he played Holmes in The Sign of Four and The Hound of the Baskervilles, a pair of made for television films. He also starred in BBC’s Murder Rooms: The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes playing Arthur Conan Doyle’s mentor, Dr. Joseph Bell.

What next? How about him being in Brazil? (I had to watch it three times before I liked it.)  He plays Mr. Warren, works in a rabbit-warren style place, a maze of Endless Corridors. A perfect bureaucrat he was.

He’s the Narrator of Dark City which was nominated for the Hugo Award at Aussiecon Three the year The Truman Show won.

In Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, he’s Polonius. In the play by Shakespeare, Polonius is a verbose, faltering and pathetic old man whose servile devotion to Claudius renders him untrustworthy in the eyes of Hamlet. Here he portrays that character perfectly. Yes, I do love the film. 

He’s The Wasp in Alice Through The Looking Glass. You really, really need to see the yellow wig that they gave to represent him being a wasp. 

Ian Richardson as the Wasp in a Wig and Kate Beckinsale in Alice Through the Looking Glass (1998).

He’s in From Hell as Sir Charles Warren, an actual historical figure, an Officer in the British Royal Engineers who was one of the first archaeologists. 

Finally he’s in that Midsummer’s Night Dream. You know the one that Ian Holm, Helen Mirren, Diana Rigg, David Warner and Judi Dench in it? He plays Oberon here. 

Wait, though, as I do feel obligated to note his two extraordinary performances outside the genre. He played Tory politician Francis Urquhart in the House of Cards series — oh so magnificently — and he was British spy Bill Haydon in the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy series. 

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) YES, YOU. Steve Lieber shared an unforgettable memo from Jim Shooter to the staff.

(13) THEY MADE THE SHIP THAT MADE THE KESSEL RUN. [Item by Steven French.] Atlas Obscura tells us the genre connection of Wales’ “Pembroke Dock Heritage Centre”.

THERE WAS SOMETHING DIFFERENT ABOUT the last ship to leave Pembrokeshire’s massive dock complex.

Following the success of the original Star Wars film in 1977, director George Lucas wanted a full-scale model of Han Solo’s fabled spaceship, the Millennium Falcon, for the filming of the next installment in the series, The Empire Strikes Back.

The job of constructing the 88-foot vessel fell to a team working out of the historic maritime dock complex at Pembroke Dock, Pembrokeshire…

Sadly, the model was sold for scrap.

(14) MAKE YOUR SPEED WORF FACTOR THREE. [Item by Dann.] “From the Starfighter to the Enterprise NCC-1701-D” in FLYING magazine.

From the late 1980s through the 1990s, Klingon Lt. Cmdr. Worf was one of the most visible characters on the popular TV shows Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Actor and pilot Michael Dorn, who was cast as Worf, made the character his own and ended up appearing in 276 episodes, the most of any other cast member in the Star Trek franchise’s history.

To Dorn, morphing into Worf each day was a lengthy process because of the amount of makeup and prosthetics required to bring the character to life. But when the cameras stopped rolling, it wasn’t the starship Enterprise that drew Dorn’s attention, it was a Cessna 172 Skyhawk. But there was a problem.

You see, Michael Dorn likes airplanes that go fast. Really fast. After moving through a few general aviation airplanes, he began buying and flying a long list of former U.S. military fighter jets. This desire to go fast also explains why he drives a Tesla Model X P100D today. “It has ‘Ludicrous’ mode,” Dorn says. “I live for on-ramps!”…

The list of aircraft Michael has owned includes:

Civilian aircraft

  • Cessna 172
  • Cessna 310
  • Cessna 340A
  • Citation 501SP
  • SOCATA Trinidad TB-20
  • Beechcraft Baron 55

Military (or military-grade) aircraft

  • HA200 Saeta  (Spanish and Egyptian Air Forces)
  • Lockheed T-33  (USAF, USN, Japanese Air Self-Defense Force, German Air Force)
  • North American F-86C (USAF, Japan Air Self-Defense Force, Spanish Air Force, Republic of Korea Air Force)
  • North American Sabreliner 40A (USAF, USN, & USMC operated military configurations)
  • Lockheed F-104 Starfighter (USAF, German Air Force, Turkish Air Force, Italian Air Force)

(15) TRUE GRIT. “Life Beyond Earth: What Awaits Humanity on the Moon”Literary Hub makes it sound a lot less fun than Robert A. Heinlein used to.

…Moondust is a huge problem. Apollo astronauts were vexed by the sharp-edged powder, which got under their fingernails and into their noses, lungs, mouths, and eyes. Apollo 12’s Alan Bean said residual dust in the LM cabin “made breathing without the helmet difficult, and enough particles were present… to affect our vision.” The stuff is like “silty sand… [but] sharp and glassy,” according to the Lunar Sourcebook. Coughing and itching are nuisances, but simulated long-term exposure, in one study’s words, revealed “significant cell toxicity in neuronal and lung cell lines in culture, as well as DNA damage.” Mitigating the dust is a significant challenge, but astronauts and their equipment could be protected with invisible electrodes that activate what researcher Carlos Calle calls an “Electrodynamic Dust Shield”—shifting electric fields that keep the dust from sticking to a surface…

(16) NASFiC ECLIPSE. Joseph T. Major reminds us about a previous celestial experience:

 In 2017, too late to do anything about it, Mike Glyer had an interesting thought.  Why not have NASFiC in Nashville, during the August 21 eclipse?  But Ken Moore, the man who could have organized it, had died in 2009.

Nevertheless, there was a possibility.  Bob Embler annually held Outsidecon, where fans got in tent and socialized.  What was so important about that?

Every year, in Kelly, Kentucky, there is Little Green Men Festival, commemorating the close encounter there in 1955.  In 2017, the Festival ran a day over, so the flying saucer people could see the eclipse.  And they stayed in tents, too, because hotel bills were $300 a day and a minimum of three days’ stay.

If Mike and Bob had got together, they could have organized a Kelly Outdoor NASF­iC bid for the 18th through the 21st.  Now that would have been better than the San Juan NASFiC.

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Elle Cordova delivers “Real footage of the #eclipse”.

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

Pixel Scroll 4/20/21 Because A Pixel Softly Filing, Left More Books As I Was Whiling

(1) A LITTLE SMACK, BUT WHERE? Andrew Hoe advises about “Spec-Fic-Fu: How to Make Aliens and Robots Fight Better” at the SFWA Blog.

…The prevalence of human-to-humanlike alien combat in sci-fi has even been lampooned in Star Trek: Lower Decks, where First Officer Jack Ransom needs only his barrel roll and double-handed swinging-fist to throw down–good-natured pokes at the limited repertoire Captain Kirk demonstrates when fighting an anthropomorphic Gorn (TOS, “Arena”) Yet people in the speculative fiction galaxy aren’t cookie-cutter humanoid, and their fighting styles shouldn’t be either.

Enter: Spec-Fic-Fu—the art of using martial philosophy to create enhanced sci-fi battles.  

 Primary Targets

First, consider an attacker’s primary targets. What must be protected? What should be attacked? Do your alien characters have the equivalent of Kung Fu paralysis points? Is your robot’s CPU located in its abdomen, making that a primary area to attack?…

(2) WHY AREN’T THERE MORE NOVELLAS? Lincoln Michel’s previous three posts in this series are quite interesting. The latest one is, too, but has definite flaws and oversights. “Novels and Novellas and Tomes, Oh My!” at Counter Craft. (You probably know Connie Willis wrote the 2011 award winner named in the excerpt.)

…So why are most novels published in a relatively narrow range of 60k to 120k words?

Or to put it another way: why doesn’t anyone publish novellas in America? Novellas as a form thrive in many parts of the world. They’re very popular in Latin America and Korea, and hardly uncommon in Europe. Yet it’s almost impossible to find a book labeled “a novella” in America outside of small press translations or classics imprints….

…Three quick notes on this chart. In 2012, the Pulitzer board refused to pick a winner from the finalists (justice for Train Dreams!). In 2019, the Booker co-awarded Bernardine Evaristo and Margaret Atwood so I averaged their page lengths. The 2011 Nebula and Hugo winner was Blackout / All Clear by Jo Walton, a single novel published as two books of 491 and 656 pages individually. Since the two were awarded as one book, I’ve combined the page count.

To be honest, I expected the page counts to be a bit more bloated than they are. Although the average (mean) for each award was in the tome territory of low 400s for the lit awards and high 400s for the SFF awards, excepting the NBA which came in at a longish-but-not-a-tome average of 321 pages.

The chart does add a data point to the anecdotal evidence that SFF books tend to be longer than literary fiction ones. Although the average (mean) lengths weren’t that different, there is far more variation of length in the lit awards including many shorter books below 300 pages.  Between the Hugo and Nebula, only one book—Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation—is under 300 pages versus seven from the three lit world prizes. The median lit award novel was 336 pages vs. 432 pages for the SFF awards….

(3) HURLEY COLLECTION COMING NEXT YEAR. Apex Publications announced the acquisition of Future Artifacts: Stories by Kameron Hurley, the award-winning author and trained historian specializing in the future of war and resistance movements. Her books include The Light BrigadeThe Stars are Legion, and The God’s War Trilogy, among others.

Future Artifacts is Kameron Hurley’s second short fiction collection and is comprised of 18 stories, many of which were previously only available through her Patreon. These stories include:

“Sky Boys”
“Overdark”
“The Judgement of Gods and Monsters”
“The One We Feed”
“Broker of Souls”
“Corpse Soldier”
“Leviathan”
“Unblooded”
“The Skulls of Our Fathers”
“Body Politic”
“We Burn”
“Antibodies”
“The Traitor Lords”
“Wonder Maul Doll”
“Our Prisoners, the Stars”
“The Body Remembers”
“Moontide”
“Citizens of Elsewhen”

Future Artifacts: Stories is slated to be released in the first quarter of 2022.

(4) BALTIC RESIDENCY. The BALTIC, an art gallery in North East England, released its “BALTIC Writer/Curator Residency Announcement 2021” yesterday.  

We’re pleased to announce that Alice Bucknell will participate in BALTIC’s Writer/curator Residency in Alnmouth, Northumberland in collaboration with Shoreside Huts.

Alice Bucknell’s interdisciplinary practice spans writing, video, and 3D design to develop ecological world-building strategies. Drawing on the work of feminist science fiction authors including Octavia E. Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin, she is interested in the potential of emerging technologies including artificial intelligence and game engines in building alternative more-than-human futures.

Bucknell is currently a staff writer at Elephant Magazine and the Harvard Design Magazine, and her writing is published in titles including Flash ArtfriezeMoussePIN-UP, and The Architectural Review. During the BALTIC Writer/curator Residency, she will be laying the groundwork for ‘New Mystics’, a hybrid curatorial-editorial project that draws together the expanded practices of twelve artists fusing properties of mysticism and magic with advanced technology. The project will continue to be developed at Rupert in Lithuania in May and launched in summer 2021.

(5) HE LOOKED INSIDE. Rich Horton makes “A Delightful Discovery Inside an Old Book” at Black Gate. Let’s not spoil the surprise, but here’s a tiny clue:

…I have an ongoing interest in Twayne Triplets*, even though only two were ever published, so I grabbed my used copy of Witches Three eagerly many years ago. But while I’ve leafed through it before, I haven’t read it, partly because I already had copies of the other stories….

(6) Q&A ABOUT EARLY STAR TREK FANDOM. Fanac.org’s Edie Stern outlines what was discussed in April 17’s interview with two founders of Star Trek fandom. See the hour-plus video on their YouTube channel.

In this Fan History Zoom (April 2021), fan historian Joe Siclari interviews Ruth Berman and Devra Langsam about early Star Trek fandom. Ruth and Devra speak candidly about their introductions to fandom, the origins of their seminal fanzines T-Negative, Spockanalia and Inside Star Trek, and how the first Star Trek convention came to be. Hear the first hand stories of the reactions of science fiction fandom to Star Trek, before, during and after the run of the original series. How did fan fiction become so prominent in Trek fandom? Where did slash fiction come from? How did clips from the show make their way into the community? With contributions by Linda Deneroff, and others, along with an excellent Q&A session, this recording provides an entertaining and informative look at the beginnings of the first real media fandom, and how it grew.

(7) ALL IN THE SKYWALKER FAMILY. “Darth Vader ‘Star Wars’ script reveals how huge secret was preserved”CNN says it will be auctioned on May the Fourth—“Star Wars Day”

A script for “Star Wars: Episode V — The Empire Strikes Back” reveals how a pivotal plot twist in the movie franchise was considered to be such a secret that it was not reflected in the lines provided to actors.

The script, which belonged to Darth Vader actor David Prowse, will be auctioned next month by East Bristol Auctions in the UK. The actor died in November aged 85.

Prowse wore the black suit and helmet to play Vader in the original “Star Wars” trilogy.

But it was the actor James Earl Jones who provided the character’s voice — and who delivered one of Vader’s most famous lines to Luke Skywalker, telling the young Jedi: “I am your father.”

However, the script provided to Prowse omits this key revelation and shows different lines in its place.

“Luke, we will be the most powerful in the galaxy. You will have everything you could ever want… do not resist… it is our destiny,” the script given to Prowse reads….

Prowse’s incomplete copy of the “The Empire Strikes Back” script, which is marked “Vader” at the top of each page, is expected to sell for between £2,500-4,000 ($3,490-5,580) at auction alongside other “Star Wars” memorabilia.

(8) SHOOTING PROMPTS ANOTHER LOOK AT BRONIES. EJ Dickson, in a Rolling Stone article reposted by Yahoo!, asks: “Do Bronies Have a ‘Nazi Problem’? FedEx Shooting Shines Light on Faction of Subculture”.

It is a sad reflection of the times we live in that mass shootings in the United States tend to follow a specific pattern. In the hours after a shooting, reporters tend to comb through the shooter’s social media presence, usually revealing a lengthy history of anonymous message-board postings and far-right indoctrination. Following the April 15th attack on the FedEx ground facility in Indianapolis, which resulted in the deaths of nine people including the gunman, there was a slight variation on this pattern: The 19-year-old gunman was revealed to be affiliated with the brony subculture.

According to The Wall Street Journal — which cited internal memos circulated by Facebook in the wake of the attack — the gunman primarily used his Facebook accounts to discuss his love for My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magica children’s cartoon series featuring magical ponies; male fans of the show are often referred to as “bronies.”

Though the memo was quick to state that there was no indication that brony culture played a role in the attack, the gunman posted about his love of a tawny pony named Applejack, one of the main characters of the franchise, less than an hour before the rampage. “I hope that I can be with Applejack in the afterlife, my life has no meaning without her,” he wrote. “If there’s no afterlife and she isn’t real then my life never mattered anyway.” The gunman also reportedly had a history of posting far-right content, such as a meme suggesting Jesus had been reincarnated as Hitler, the memo stated.

It’s important to note that the brony fandom is highly misunderstood, and it is not inherently racist or white supremacist; the majority of members of the fandom are simply fans of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. Members of the community have also rallied to raise money for the victims with various GoFundMe campaigns circulating on social media. Yet the shooter’s social-media presence has drawn renewed attention to a disturbing trend within the community, which has been infiltrated by far-right forces since its beginning….

(9) CATASTROPHIC LIBRARY LOSSES. “Wildfire Deals Hard Blow to South Africa’s Archives” reports the New York Times.

Firefighters in Cape Town battled a wildfire on Monday that had engulfed the slopes of the city’s famed Table Mountain and destroyed parts of the University of Cape Town’s library, a devastating blow to the world’s archives of Southern African history.

… the fallout from this fire was also felt across the region after towers of orange and red flames devoured Cape Town University’s special collections library — home to one of the most expansive collections of first-edition books, films, photographs and other primary sources documenting Southern African history.

“We are of course devastated about the loss of our special collection in the library, it’s things that we cannot replace. It pains us, it pains us to see what it looks like now in ashes,” Mamokgethi Phakeng, vice chancellor of the University of Cape Town, said on Monday. “The resources that we had there, the collections that we had in the library were not just for us but for the continent.”

She added: “It’s a huge loss.”

By Sunday evening, a special-collections reading room at the university’s library had been gutted by the blaze, according to university officials. The reading room housed parts of the university’s African Studies Collection, which includes works on Africa and South Africa printed before 1925, hard-to-find volumes in European and African languages and other rare books, according to Niklas Zimmer, a library manager at the university.

A curator of the school’s archive, Pippa Skotnes, said on Monday that the university’s African film collection, comprising about 3,500 archival films, had been lost to the fire. The archive was one of the largest collections in the world of films made in Africa or featuring Africa-related content.

The library will conduct a full assessment of what has been lost once the building has been declared safe, university officials said.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born April 20, 1848 – Kurd Laßwitz, Ph.D.  First major SF writer in German.  One novel, seven shorter stories available in English; poetry; a dozen nonfiction books; four dozen essays; four hundred twenty works all told.  Eponym – swell word, that – of the Kurd Laßwitz Award.  (Died 1910) [JH]
  • Born April 20, 1914 – Karel Thole. (“tow-leh”) Best known as cover artist for Urania 233-1330; seven hundred sixty more covers, five dozen interiors.  Here is Urania 247 (L’altra faccia di Mister Kiel “The other face of Mister Kiel” is J. Hunter Holly’s Encounter).  Here is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?  Here is The End of Eternity.  Here is The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton (tr. as “The third hand”).  Here is White Queen.  (Died 2000) [JH]
  • Born April 20, 1917 – Terry Maloney. Twoscore covers.  Here is Sinister Barrier.  Here is The Last Space Ship.  Here is New Worlds 50.  Here is the Apr 57 Science Fantasy.  Here is New Worlds 62.  (Died 2008) [JH]
  • Born April 20, 1926 – June Moffatt.  First fannish career with husband Eph (“eef”) Konigsberg, then flourishing with 2nd husband Len Moffatt: TAFF (Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund) delegates, Fan Guests of Honor at Loscon 8, Evans-Freehafer Award (service to LASFS, Los Angeles Science Fantasy Soc.), co-editors with me of Button-Tack; First Fandom Hall of Fame; next door in detective-fiction fandom, co-founders of Bouchercon, named for Anthony Boucher who excelled there and in SF.  Our Gracious Host’s appreciation of JM here; mine here and here.  (Died 2018) [JH] 
  • Born April 20, 1935 – Mary Hoffman, age 86. A score of novels, two dozen shorter stories, a dozen collections for us; seven dozen books all told.  Outside our field Amazing Grace was a NY Times Best-Seller (1.5 million copies sold); its 2015 ed’n has an afterword by LeVar Burton.  Here is Quantum Squeak.  Here is Women of Camelot.  Website.  [JH]
  • Born April 20, 1937 George Takei, 84. Hikaru Sulu on the original Trek. And yes, I know that Vonda McIntyre wouldn’t coin the first name until a decade later in her Entropy Effect novel.  Post-Trek, he would write Mirror Friend, Mirror Foe with Robert Asprin. By the way, his first genre roles were actually dubbing the English voices of Professor Kashiwagi of Rodan! The Flying Monster and the same of the Commander of Landing Craft of Godzilla Raids Again. He also was Kaito Nakamura on Heroes. And later he got to play his character once again on one of those video fanfics, Star Trek New Voyages: Phase II. (CE) 
  • Born April 20, 1939 Peter S. Beagle, 82. I’ve known him for about fifteen years now, met him but once in that time. He’s quite charming. (I had dinner with him here once several years back. His former agent is not so charming.)  My favorite works? A Fine and Private PlaceThe Folk of The AirTamsinSummerlong and In Calabria. He won the Novelette Hugo at L.A. Con IV for “Two Hearts”. And he has the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement. (CE) 
  • Born April 20, 1943 Ian Watson, 78. He’s won the BSFA Award twice, first for his novel, The Jonah Kit, and recently for his short story, “The Beloved Time of Their Lives“. He also got a BSFA nomination for his charmingly-titled “The World Science Fiction Convention of 2080”.  (CE)
  • Born April 20, 1949 John Ostrander, 72. Writer of comic books, including GrimjackSuicide Squad and Star Wars: Legacy. Well those are the titles he most frequently gets noted for but I’ll add in The Spectre, Martian Manhunter and the late Eighties Manhunter as well. His run on the Suicide Squad isavailable on the DC Universe app as is his amazing work on The Spectre.  (CE) 
  • Born April 20, 1951 Louise Jameson, 70. Leela of the Sevateem, companion to the Fourth Doctor. Appeared in nine stories of which my favorite was “The Talons of Weng Chiang” which I reviewed here. She segued from Dr. Who to The Omega Factor where she was the regular cast as Dr. Anne Reynolds. These appear to her only meaningful genre roles. And she like so many Who performers has reprised her role for Big Finish productions. (CE) 
  • Born April 20, 1959 Carole E. Barrowman, 62. Sister of John Barrowman. John and Carole co-wrote a Torchwood comic strip, featuring Jack Harkness, entitled Captain Jack and the Selkie. They’ve also written the Torchwood: Exodus Code audiobook. In addition, they’ve written Hollow Earth, a horror novel. She contributed an essay about her brother to the Chicks Dig Time Lords anthology which is lot of fun to read. (CE) 
  • Born April 20, 1971 – Ruth Long, age 50.  Author and librarian.  Half a dozen novels, three shorter stories, some under another name.  Spirit of Dedication Award from Eurocon 37.  [JH]

(11) ACTIVITY IN SPITE OF IT ALL. In the Washington Post, Steven Zeitchik looks at the Paramount Plus series No Activity and all the technical problems when it went from being a live-action comedy to an animated series as a result of the pandemic. “The Paramount Plus show No Activity has gone animated for a fourth season because of the pandemic”.

… After all, to make animated TV, actors needed equipment that would normally be at the studio. So kits containing boom microphones, advanced screens and other digital implements were sent to dozens of them around the world, complete with a snake’s den of colorful wires they had to untangle.

“It was a suitcase full of tech with Ikea-level instructions,” Farrell said.

“Actors aren’t usually the head of IT,” said Danny Feldheim, senior vice president of original content for ViacomCBS’s Paramount Plus, who oversees the show.

Hollywood stars decoding Fig B and Input C was only the start of the trouble. Producers and the animation company they hired, Flight School Studio from Dallas, needed to turn around eight half-hour episodes of animation in 11 months to make the Paramount Plus launch. (It can often take 18 months to do that.) The budget also couldn’t grow even though animation can be expensive….

(12) SET YOUR COURSE. At Psychology Today, Zorana Ivcevic Pringle Ph.D. extracts “Creative Leadership Lessons from Female Star Trek Captain Janeway”.

… Captain Janeway’s leadership style is different from other captains in the Star Trek universe. She is more measured than Captain Kirk and less aloof than Captain Picard. She is an immensely successful leader, succeeding in bringing Voyager home and solving problems never seen before. How she did it offers four main lessons about creative leadership.

1. Leading with emotional intelligence

Emotionally intelligent leaders are skilled in four ways related to dealing with one’s own and others’ emotions. First, they are skilled at accurately reading emotions, such as realizing when someone is frustrated or disappointed. They are not only aware of emotions but acknowledge them explicitly. Second, emotionally intelligent leaders help their staff channel feelings, even difficult ones, toward achieving important goals. They inspire enthusiasm and lead by hearing and considering both optimistic and pessimistic voices (or, concerns and hopes behind them). Third, emotionally intelligent leaders understand how their decisions or other events affect staff. And finally, they successfully manage their own emotions, as well as help staff when they are discouraged….

(13) TREK DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKERS. There will be a Zoom panel “Star Trek Deep Space Nine What We Left Behind Documentary Filmmaking with 455 Films and G-Technology” on May 20 from 5:00-6:00 p.m. Eastern. Click on this link to join the webinar. Passcode: 599833?

The production team at 455 Films will be discussing and showcasing the process behind the scenes in creating their recent documentary film “What We Left Behind” about the legacy of the Star Trek Deep Space Nine television series. Come learn how they created this documentary, from start to finish. They will be discussing how they came up with the idea, crowdsourced the financing, obtained legal approvals and contact with the actors and producers for filming, developed the film’s story and content throughout the whole process, and used G-Technology storage solutions during the filming and editing phases. There will also be a sneak peak of the current documentary they are working on for the Star Trek Voyager series. And there will be a raffle at the end of the event for a G-Technology hard drive. 

(14) WORF NEWS. [Item by rcade.] Michael Dorn set all the planets of the federation ablaze with a tweet Monday afternoon.

Dorn played Worf for 272 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine as well as four movies. But the project doesn’t involve anything for Paramount+, according to TrekMovie.Com: “Confirmed: Michael Dorn’s Cryptic Tweet About Starfleet Return Isn’t For A Star Trek Show Or Movie”.

While Dorn’s tweet about being summoned back into action by Starfleet could be seen as a hint related to his Captain Worf show, or possibly one of the three live-action or two animated Star Trek series currently in development, it appears that isn’t the case. TrekMovie has confirmed with sources that whatever this is, it isn’t related to a Paramount+ Star Trek project.

It probably doesn’t involve a movie either. Go back to your lives, citizens.

(15) RISE AND SHINE. Yahoo! advises, “The Lyrid meteor shower will leave ‘glowing dust trains’ across the sky on Thursday. Here’s how to watch.”

… The best time to glimpse the Lyrids is in the wee morning hours on Thursday, April 22, before the sun rises.

Waiting until the waxing moon sets – about 4 a.m. on the US East Coast – will make it easier to spot the meteors and their dust trains. Otherwise, the bright glow from the almost-full moon (it’ll be 68% full on Thursday) may obscure the meteor streaks.

Head to an area well away from a city or street lights, and bring a sleeping bag or blanket. No need to pack a telescope or binoculars, since meteor showers are best seen with the naked eye….

(16) BEAUTIFUL BALLOON. “The First Flight On Another World Wasn’t on Mars. It Was on Venus, 36 Years Ago” at Air and Space Magazine.

The world was thrilled this week as NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter pulled off something truly novel (see video above)—the first powered, controlled flight on another planet. But if you paid close attention, the precise wording of that accomplishment included qualifiers. Like the Wright brothers’ airplane, the Mars helicopter was preceded by balloons. In Ingenuity’s case it was a pair of aerobots that rode along with the Soviet Vega 1 and 2 Venus spacecraft and flew through the Venusian atmosphere in 1985. The episode is recounted in Jay Gallentine’s lively 2016 history of planetary exploration, Infinity Beckoned, from which the following excerpt is adapted….

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. You can speak to a digital Albert Einstein thanks to UneeQ’s “digital human platform.”

On the 100th year anniversary of Albert Einstein winning the Nobel Prize for Physics, one of the smartest minds and most recognisable personalities in modern history is stepping back into the fray. Digital Einstein is a realistic recreation of his namesake, embodying the great man’s personality and knowledge – multiplied by the power of conversational AI and powered by UneeQ’s digital human platform.

(18) VIDEO OF THE NIGHT. In “Honest Game Trailers: Balan Wonderworld” on YouTube, Fandom Games says that Balan Wonderworld is so weird that it has “the deeply cursed vibes of a failed Kickstarter” and “might drive you insane H.P. Lovecraft-style if you play it too long.”

[Thanks to Meredith, John Hertz, Mike Kennedy, Lorien Gray, Steven H Silver, Andrew Porter, Martin Morse Wooster, Michael Toman, JJ, rcade, John King Tarpinian, Jason Sizemore, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Joe H.]