(1) CREATIVE ARTS EMMYS NIGHT 2. Sff was much less prominently featured among the second night 2023 Creative Arts Emmys Winners. (Note: Some categories had multiple winners.)
Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation
Entergalactic; The Simpsons, “Lisa the Boy Scout;” More than I Want to Remember; Star Wars: Visions, “Screecher’s Reach”
Outstanding Costumes for Variety, Nonfiction or Reality Programming
Beauty and the Beast: A 30th Celebration; We’re Here, St. George, Utah
Outstanding Makeup for a Variety, Nonfiction or Reality Program
(2) QUESTION TIME. Steve Davidson opines “The Fannish Inquisition Needs More Than Soft Cushions and Comfy Chairs” at Amazing Stories. Davidson says that in particular the recent Chengdu Worldcon bid and the 2028 Uganda Worldcon bid needed/needs sharp questioning on human rights. (Note that conventions generally abandoned the “Fannish Inquisition” panel title several years ago; at last December’s Smofcon the event was called “Future Worldcon and Smofcon Q&A”.)
…We’d all like to believe that stepping inside a convention transports us from a real world that is flawed with all manner of injustices, mistaken values and ancient moralities into one where the things that really matter are given their due.
But you can’t do that if the host country doesn’t at least respect those values enough to be hands-off. ANY country that does not operate under one version of a rule of law or another is a potential mine field, because the rules are, in fact, arbitrary, and can change on a political whim….
…Sure, we need to know about the “restaurant scene” in your city, but we also need to know –
How is the LGBTQI community perceived in your culture or country? Can Transgender individuals be arrested for “wearing the wrong clothing”? Will I be arrested for having posted something critical of its government or leaders in my Fanzine? Will my cell phone be scanned? My internet communications monitored and recorded? Will I have to hide my necklace with a Cross or a Star of David on it? Will I be prevented from entering the country because I have the wrong stamps in my passport? Will I disappear because I held hands with the wrong person in public? What are my risks if I travel outside the venue? If I’m female and need a doctor, will a male owner have to be present? Will armed thugs beat me in the street because I didn’t cover my hair?
… I strongly suggest that some additional questions be added to our Fannish Inquisitions. Questions like:
(3) THEY SAY AI CREPT. [Item by Anne Marble.] The official account for Magic: The Gathering had to admit that some recent marketing images they posted were, in fact, created with AI. As often happens, the company first claimed they were not created via AI. Some have pointed out that perhaps some of the 1,100 people they laid off just before the holidays could have checked the images and kept the company from making this mistake.
Well, we made a mistake earlier when we said that a marketing image we posted was not created using AI. Read on for more. (1/5)
While the art came from a vendor, it’s on us to make sure that we are living up to our promise to support the amazing human ingenuity that makes Magic great. (3/5)
Now we’re evaluating how we work with vendors on creative beyond our products – like these marketing images – to make sure that we are living up to those values. (5/5)https://t.co/QemyE6DUI0
…As accusations of AI use in the creation of the promo image grew throughout the day, WotC posted multiple defenses on Thursday (such as this archived, now-deleted post) insisting that the art in question “was created by humans and not AI.” But given the evidence, the situation was too much for veteran MtG artist Dave Rapoza, who has created art for dozens of Magic cards going back years.
“And just like that, poof, I’m done working for Wizards of the Coast,” Rapoza wrote on social media on Saturday. “You can’t say you stand against this then blatantly use AI to promote your products… If you’re gonna stand for something you better make sure you’re actually paying attention, don’t be lazy, don’t lie.”….
The horror genre is a funhouse mirror, offering larger-than-life reflections of a culture’s fears and insecurities. Its popularity may rise and fall, but horror is always with us. In this seminar, award-winning author and lifelong horror fan Nino Cipri will guide students through the process of writing horror, from generating ideas to the final revision and submission process. Along the way, we’ll talk about horror’s roots in oral traditions, embracing and subverting tropes, and why we keep coming back to horror even when it can’t compete with real life’s awfulness. This course welcomes writers of all backgrounds and experience who are interested in sharpening their skills and exploring the genre.
(6) THE BLACK AMAZON. On Bluesky (for those of you with access) Jess Nevins wrote a 26-post story about a “real superhero” in 19th-century Paris. Thread begins here.
The concept of the superhero is as old as human culture. (See: Enkidu, “Epic of Gilgamesh”). But “real” superheroes? Vigilante groups have likely been wearing disguises for centuries. Certainly, the Whiteboys of Ireland (na Buachaillí Bána) in the 18th century did. What about women vigilantes?
Who came up with the idea for The Reinvented Detective?
Jennifer: This one was all me! I have a deep and abiding love of noir detective stories, as well as mysteries in the future. Think Blade Runner / Blade Runner 2049 or any Philip K. Dick type story.
Also, as a member of Gen X, I grew up without the Internet, and was introduced to it in my formative adult years. I remember things that many people have never been without (contact online access, Google, Amazon, and more). My world has changed enough that I can see how technology changes the face of society and how people interact with each other.
And yet…many of the same problems remain. We all live, love, hate, feud, want. We are still human in all the ways that matter. Which means no matter the circumstances, motivations for crimes remain the same. It’s how we see, solve, and punish those crimes that change. That’s what I wanted the stories to be about, and our authors delivered.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born January 8, 1944 — Richard Bowes. (Died 2023.) Richard Bowes is a fascinating story. He started getting published relatively late in life, in his early forties, with three novels in three years — Warchild, Feral Cell and Goblin Market. Warchild and its sequel, Goblin Market are set in an alternate history version of the New York City, his home city.
Richard Bowes in 2008.
A series of stories, mostly published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, were later reworked into his Minions of the Moon novel which won the Lambda Literary Award. One of these stories, “Streetcar Dreams”, would garner a World Fantasy Award for Best Novella.
Dust Devils on a Quiet Street is semi-autobiographical but adds in a dose of the supernatural as it centered around 9/11. It got nominated for Lambda and World Fantasy Awards.
Now my favorite stories by him are his Time Ranger stories mixing fantasy and SF. They’re some of the best such stories and the mosaic novel, as edited by Marty Halpern, From the Files of the Time Rangers, has a foreword by Kage Baker in which she gives her appreciation of his stories. It was nominated for a Nebula Award.
Two of the novelettes that make up this novel, “The Ferryman’s Wife” and “The Mask of the Rex” were originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction – were also nominated for Nebula Awards.
… These ideas can be something complex or something simple, and often come in the form of an answer to a ‘What would happen if…?’ question.
The Embers of War trilogy sprang from an article about the Titanic that I was reading in a dentist’s waiting room. There had been other ship losses before the ill-fated liner, but the Titanic carried a radio and was able to call for help, which meant other ships arrived in time to rescue survivors and relay the tale of what had happened. I started thinking about how different things might have been today, when the ship’s radio could have summoned helicopters and planes and fast-response boats – and as I write science fiction, I naturally projected that situation into space. If space travel became commonplace, I thought, there would need to be some sort of rescue organisation for starships in distress. And from there, I went on to build the rest of the universe around that central notion.
My point is, ideas can come from anywhere. You just have to learn to interrogate them.
Read widely, both within and beyond your chosen genre. Expose yourself to nonfiction, biographies, music, art, poetry. The wider you cast your net, the better your chances of finding something at inspires your creative process. It all goes into the compost heap of the imagination, where unexpected connections happen all the time….
(10) FAMILY TIES. Someone followed this Mark Hamill’s post at X.com with a comment: “Seems to have gone better than your meeting with your father.”
Monday marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Wilkie Collins, the Victorian writer known for his mystery novels. His writing became foundational to the way modern crime novels are constructed, and his most famous works – The Woman in White, No Name, Armadale, and The Moonstone – have earned him an international reputation. British crime novelist and Collins fan Elly Griffiths offers a guide for those new to the author’s work.
…the book [No Name] abounds with colourful characters, including the disreputable Captain Wragge and the noble Captain Kirke (a protype of the Star Trek hero?).
(12) AKA TRIBULATION PERIWINKLE. Can scholars identify the works published under the many pen names of Louisa May Alcott? There’s Gould in them thar hills. Max Chapnick tells “How I identified a probable pen name of Louisa May Alcott” in The Conversation.
…Where was this phantom “Phantom” story? Could I find it?
After searching digital databases, I came across one such story, called simply “The Phantom,” with the subtitle, “Or, The Miser’s Dream, &c.” It had been published in the Olive Branch in early 1860, months after Alcott listed having written “The Phantom” in her journals. But the byline under the story read E. or I. – I couldn’t quite make out the first initial – Gould, which wasn’t a known pseudonym of Alcott’s.
So I went to sleep. Sometime later I awoke with the thought that Gould might be Alcott. What if, along with her several known pseudonyms – A. M. Barnard, Tribulation Periwinkle and Flora Fairfield, among others – Alcott had yet another that simply hadn’t been identified yet?
I cannot say for certain that Gould is Alcott. But I’ve encountered enough circumstantial evidence to consider it likely Alcott wrote seven stories, five poems and one piece of nonfiction under that name….
(13) SFNAL ADVERTISING EPHEMERA, CIRCA 1900. [Item by Bruce D. Arthurs.] Liza Daly on Mastodon posted some interesting sample pages from “The Mars Gazette: News from Another World”, a circa-1900 advertising pamphlet, that was an illustrated 16-page story of a traveler to Mars who enlightens the sickly malnourished Martians about the virtues of “Liquid Peptonoids”. (A combination of beef, milk and gluten; vegans, lactose-intolerant, and people with celiac disease, beware!) Daly’s post includes a link to the full pamphlet. Some of the illustrations are kinda neat:
The first U.S. moon landing attempt in more than 50 years appeared to be doomed after a private company’s spacecraft developed a “critical” fuel leak just hours after Monday’s launch.
Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic Technology managed to orient its lander toward the sun so the solar panel could collect sunlight and charge its battery, as a special team assessed the status of what was termed “a failure in the propulsion system.”
It soon became apparent, however, that there was “a critical loss of fuel,” further dimming hope for what had been a planned moon landing on Feb. 23….
…The company [Celestis] also put a payload called Enterprise on the rocket’s Centaur upper stage. That mission, aptly named, has been decades in the making. It includes DNA from “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry and his wife, Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, as well as the remains from several actors from the original TVseries, including Nichelle Nichols, James Doohan and DeForest Kelley, who played Lieutenant Uhura, Chief Engineer “Scotty” and CMO Leonard “Bones” McCoy, respectively….
There are a lot of genre movies we’re already looking forward to in 2024, and at the moment,Lisa Frankenstein is near the top of the list. With a great roster of talent behind it, a wonderful dark comedy concept, and a blend of warmth and irreverence, it’s exactly the kind of movie we’re ready to see. Oh, and if you love nostalgia vibes, it’s also got that ’80s movie feeling, and lots of it.
Written by Diablo Cody (Juno, Jennifer’s Body) and directed by Zelda Williams in her feature directorial debut, the film follows Lisa (Kathryn Newton), a weird teenager who doesn’t fit in for a lot of reasons, including her taste in men. See, Lisa has a crush, but her crush happens to be on a Victorian man who’s buried in a local cemetery. She visits him, talks to the handsome statue that marks his grave, and dreams of what their life might be like together. Then, a lightning strike unexpectedly reanimates the man (Cole Sprouse), making Lisa’s dreams seemingly come true.
[Thanks to Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Anne Marble, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, and SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Randall M.]
Octavia’s Bookshelf owner Nikki High had hoped that the opening of her new bookstore focusing on books by Black, Indigenous, and people of color authors would be attended by 20-30 people. Instead, by the time the doors opened February 18th, there were hundreds of people lined up for ten blocks to get in. 300 people showed up for opening day, including author Terry McMillan.
Me and my new friend at the grand opening of Octavia's Bookshelf, the new and first African-American bookstore in Pasadena. Over 200 people lined the sidewalk. It was wonderful and my new sexy BFF knew who I was. What a day. Will read there. Proud. pic.twitter.com/TA9AxvDT34
…An avid reader, High contemplated opening her own bookstore for years, but the final push came with the sudden passing of High’s grandmother and biggest supporter. In acknowledgement of this, speaker Joshua Evans, kicked off the event by paying homage to family and resiliency.
For Evans, Octavia’s Bookshelf is a symbol of progression and possibility — a space that he would have frequented as a kid.
“One of things that I personally believe is that there’s a story about Black and Brown people that is bigger than the impact of White supremacy,” Evans said looking down the line of people. “It’s a dream come true that I didn’t know that I had … it just gives people a chance to to come in, but also to develop and to meet other writers. And you always know it’s going to be a safe space. We’ll never be in danger of being minimalized or railroaded by people who are not sensitive.”
At its peak, the queue to get into the North Hill Avenue store spanned more than 10 blocks, reaching as far back as Victory Bible Church….
Here we are. @gofetchgretch new book store Octavia’s Bookshelf. Do you see the line, folks. OMG I am so happy for her. Gotta go get my place in line ?????? pic.twitter.com/XnyDy2dubs
Had such a blast celebrating the opening day for Octavia’s Bookshelf! Decided to scoop up @MsTerryMcMillan on my way over so that we could surprise and congratulate the amazing owner @gofetchgretch ! Store was gorgeous and the line was around the block ???? pic.twitter.com/DJFQ0qxSob
(2) MORE PROZINES REPORT DELUGE OF AI SUBMISSIONS. [Item by Frank Catalano.] The New York Times now is covering the AI submission problem, citing not just Clarkesworld, but also Asimov’s and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction: “Science Fiction Magazines Battle a Flood of Chatbot-Generated Stories”.
It could be a tale from science fiction itself: a machine that uses artificial intelligence to try to supplant authors working in the genre, turning out story after story without ever hitting writer’s block. And now, it seems, it’s happening in real life.
The editors of three science fiction magazines — Clarkesworld, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Asimov’s Science Fiction — said this week that they had been flooded by submissions of works of fiction generated by A.I. chatbots.
“I knew it was coming on down the pike, just not at the rate it hit us,” said Sheree Renée Thomas, the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, which was founded in 1949….
[Neil Clarke] said he had been able to spot the chatbot-generated stories by examining certain “traits” in the documents, the writing and the submission process.
Mr. Clarke declined to be more specific, saying he did not want to give those submitting the stories any advantages. The writing is also “bad in spectacular ways,” Mr. Clarke said. “They’re just prompting, dumping, pasting and submitting to a magazine.”…
Sheila Williams, the editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, said that several of the chatbot-generated stories she had received all had the same title: “The Last Hope.”
“The people doing this by and large don’t have any real concept of how to tell a story, and neither do any kind of A.I.,” Ms. Williams said on Wednesday. “You don’t have to finish the first sentence to know it’s not going to be a readable story.”
Ms. Thomas said that the people submitting chatbot-generated stories appeared to be spamming magazines that pay for fiction. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction pays up to 12 cents a word, up to 25,000 words.
The A.I.-generated works can be weeded out, Ms. Thomas said, although “it’s just sad that we have to even waste time on it.”
“It does not sound like natural storytelling,” she said. “There are very strange glitches and things that make it obvious that it’s robotic.”…
The whole AI-generated art and writing thing in pro markets is really heating up. Of course, I’ve tweeted about it.
The Copyright Office is revoking full copyright for a graphic novel that used AI-generated images:
"The Copyright Office said in its letter that it would reissue its registration for 'Zarya of the Dawn' to omit images that 'are not the product of human authorship' and therefore cannot be copyrighted."
Key point: the rest of the graphic novel can be protected by copyright. https://t.co/FowpgF4Acq
Kindle Direct Publishing is starting to get ChatGPT-written books:
"I could see people making a whole career out of this," said Schickler, who used prompts on ChatGPT like "write a story about a dad teaching his son about financial literacy." #Iamnotwritinghttps://t.co/HhSNxDCggb
As with anything, follow the money. That’s the motivation for the AI shortcuts. Even if the scammers don’t realize how little money there is in writing science fiction and fantasy.
…A spokesperson for Dahl’s U.S. publisher Penguin Young Readers told PW that there are no plans for similar revisions in the U.S. “Roald Dahl books published by Penguin Young Readers and distributed in the U.S. are the editions that have existed for years and do not reflect the recent editorial changes made in U.K. editions. Penguin Young Readers regularly reviews its backlist and Dahl titles will be reviewed accordingly.” According to the Daily Mail in the U.K., Dahl’s Dutch publisher De Fonte and French publisher Gallimard are also declining to make changes at this time. A spokesperson for De Fonte is quoted as saying that altering the text would cause the stories to “lose their power.” Gallimard shared this statement with the newspaper: “We have never changed Roald Dahl’s writings before, and we have no plans to do so today.”
… Writing for the Atlantic, journalist Helen Lewis said that Dahl’s work can “never be made nice,” stating that “his cold, unsettling spikiness is his defining quality as a writer” and that his popularity continues “despite being so thoroughly out of tune with the times.”
With the approval of the State Council, since January 1, 2019, Chengdu will implement the 144-hour visa-free transit policy. Foreigners from 53 countries, who hold valid international travel documents and a connecting flight ticket bound for a third country (region) with a fixed seat and a fixed date within 144 hours, can enter via Chengdu Airport and stay in Chengdu for 144 hours, visa free. The extension from 72 to 144 hours will further facilitate foreigners’ transit and transfer and their traveling and business in Chengdu….
If you’re a science fiction and fantasy fan looking to round out your TBR, I’ve compiled a list of 30 amazing SFF books by Black authors for you below. The books on this list reach back into the past, look ahead to the future, and conceptualize new worlds full of magic and mystery….
Sweep of Stars launches an epic space opera about a burgeoning pan-African empire that has colonized near-Earth space. Decades after the Muungano empire seceded from the union of world governments and took to the stars, a powerful enemy emerges. It’s impossible to ignore — hell-bent on destroying everything Muungano has worked to build. While three heroes navigate the web of interplanetary diplomacy, a fourth faces a much different threat on a second front.
(7) HANGING WITH TIMELORDS. Nicholas Whyte regales fans with stories from his visit to “Gallifrey One, 2023” in From the Heart of Europe. See photos of him with a former Doctor Who and other celebrities at the link.
…I’ve spent this weekend at Gallifrey One in Los Angeles, the biggest annual Doctor Who convention anywhere in the world. It was my fourth time there, and somehow I enjoyed it even more than the previous three occasions. Part of it was surely the presence of recently departed star of the show Jodie Whittaker, whose charm and enthusiasm captured everyone. I had a brief chat with her where I mentioned her role in the great Belfast film, Good Vibrations. “I love that film!” she exclaimed, and I noted the present tense. “But the accent was a bit hard.”…
…So what happens to that model if the biggest, most high-demand panels start live streaming? People will still go, of course. San Diego Comic-Con, for example, is about much more than just what happens in Hall H. But Hall H is the showstopper and if supply and access to something like that increases, the demand is certain to decrease over time. If someone can count on watching exclusive footage at home, even at a cost, why would they spend thousands of dollars to travel to a convention? Again, there’s more to do at a convention than watch footage all day—so while the events won’t cease to exist, the prestige associated with attending them in person could diminish. There are hundreds of conventions all over the world every year, but you don’t hear about most of them because they’re not where studios make major announcements and parade their biggest superstars. If conventions like SDCC make that footage easily accessible, you have to imagine people on the fence about traveling might decide against it. And that takes money out of everyone involved’s pockets. Plain and simple….
(9) MEMORY LANE.
1970 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Fritz Leiber’s greatest creation by far was the characters Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser and the world that they inhabited which started out in Swords and Deviltry.
A short story collection published by Ace in 1970 gathered three stories previously published including “Ill Met in Lankhmar” which would win a Hugo for Best Novella at the first Noreascon. As far as I can tell, it’s been in print ever since in one form or another.
What’s not to love here? Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are wonderful barbarian adventurers, the world they inhabit is certainly unique enough not to feel like like your typical cookie cutter fantasy world and all of their stories are stellar indeed.
And now for its Beginning…
Sundered from us by gulfs of time and stranger dimensions dreams the ancient world of Nehwon with its towers and skulls and jewels, its swords and sorceries. Nehwon’s known realms crowd about the Inner Sea: northward the green-forested fierce Land of the Eight Cities, eastward the steppe-dwelling Mingol horsemen and the desert where caravans creep from the rich Eastern Lands and the River Tilth. But southward, linked to the desert only by the Sinking Land and further warded by the Great Dike and the Mountains of Hunger, are the rich grain fields and walled cities of Lankhmar, eldest and chiefest of Nehwon’s lands. Dominating the Land of Lankhmar and crouching at the silty mouth of the River Hlal in a secure corner between the grain fields, the Great Salt Marsh, and the Inner Sea is the massive-walled and mazy-alleyed metropolis of Lankhmar, thick with thieves and shaven priests, lean-framed magicians and fat-bellied merchants—Lankhmar the Imperishable, the City of the Black Toga.
In Lankhmar on one murky night, if we can believe the runic books oSheelba of the Eyeless Face, there met for the first time those two dubious heroes and whimsical scoundrels, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Fafhrd’s origins were easy to perceive in his near seven-foot height and limber-looking ranginess, his hammered ornaments and huge longsword: he was clearly a barbarian from the Cold Waste north even of the Eight Cities and the Trollstep Mountains. The Mouser’s antecedents were more cryptic and hardly to be deduced from his childlike stature, gray garb, mouseskin hood shadowing flat swart face, and deceptively dainty rapier; but somewhere about him was the suggestion of cities and the south, the dark streets and also the sun-drenched spaces. As the twain eyed each other challengingly through the murky fog lit indirectly by distant torches, they were already dimly aware that they were two long-sundered, matching fragments of a greater hero and that each had found a comrade who would outlast a thousand quests and a lifetime—or a hundred lifetimes—of adventuring.
No one at that moment could have guessed that the Gray Mouser was once named Mouse, or that Fafhrd had recently been a youth whose voice was by training high-pitched, who wore white furs only, and who still slept in his mother’s tent although he was eighteen.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born February 23, 1915 — Jon Hall. Frank Raymond in Invisible Agent and The Invisible Man’s Revenge. He was also the creator and star of the Ramar of the Jungle series. And he directed and starred in The Beach Girls and the Monster and The Navy vs. the Night Monsters. (Died 1979.)
Born February 23, 1930 — Gerry Davis. Mid-Sixties story editor on Doctor Who where he created companion Jamie McCrimmon and co-created the Cybermen along with unofficial scientific adviser Dr. Kit Pedler. They would create the Doomwatch series that ran in the Sixties on BBC. Davis briefly returned to writing for the series, penning the first script for Revenge of the Cybermen, though his script was largely abandoned by editor Robert Holmes. In 1989 he and Terry Nation, who created the Daleks, made a failed bid to take over production of the series and reformat it for the American market. (Died 1991.)
Born February 23, 1932 — Majel Barrett. No doubt best remembered for being Nurse Christine Chapel and Lwaxana Troi as well as for being the voice of most ship computer interfaces throughout the Star Trek series. I’ll note that she was originally cast as Number One in the unused (TOS) pilot but the male studio heads hated the idea of a female in that role. Early Puppies obviously. (Died 2008.)
Born February 23, 1965 — Jacob Weisman, 58. Founder, Tachyon Publications which you really should go look at as they’ve published every great author I’d care to read. Seriously Tidhar, Beagle and Yolen are among their newest releases! He also edited (with Beagle) The New Voices of Fantasy which I highly recommend as most excellent reading.
Born February 23, 1970 — Marie-Josée Croze, 53. Champagne in Maelström which is genre if only because it’s narrated by a talking fish. In Canada movie theatres, she was in Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000 as Mara. Yeah that film with a long title. Doubt it improved it. It looks like her first genre acting was on The Hunger in two episodes, “A Matter of Style” as Dominique, and “I’m Dangerous Tonight” as Mimi. Oh, and she had the lead as Pregnant Woman in Ascension which just reads weird.
Born February 23, 1983 — Emily Blunt, 40. Her most direct connection to the genre is as Elise Sellas in the Adjustment Bureau film based off Dick’s “Adjustment Team” story. Mind, she’s been in quite a number of other genre films including The Wolfman, Gulliver’s Travels, Gnomeo & Juliet, The Muppets, Looper, Edge of Tomorrow, Into the Woods, The Huntsman: Winter’s War, The Strange Case of Sherlock Holmes & Arthur Conan Doyle, and Mary Poppins Returns.
Born February 23, 2002 — Emilia Jones, 21. I’m reasonably sure this is the youngest Birthday individual that I’ve done. She shows up on Doctor Who as Merry Gejelh, The Queen of Years, in the “The Rings of Akhaten”, an Eleventh Doctor story. At nine years of age, she’s made her acting debut in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides as an unnamed English Girl. She’s Young Beth in the horror film Ghostland. She’s currently in Residue, an SF horror series you can find on Netflix.
What is it with the animal world and fashion? Ever since man started wearing pelts, the two have been interconnected, flora and fauna used as a source of creativity, comfort, exploitation and politics. The results are sometimes beautiful, sometimes horrible, sometimes controversial. (Two weeks ago, during the couture shows in Paris, Schiaparelli set off a firestorm when the designer Daniel Roseberry put a lifelike lion head on a gown that had some people thinking Great White Hunter.) But on Friday, as the New York shows began, Collina Strada unveiled a collection that suggested the relationship could be something else entirely.
Fun! Of the smartly absurdist kind.
Entitled “Please Don’t Eat My Friends” and held in the still-under-construction House of Cannabis in SoHo, it was a … well, trip, featuring many of the designer Hillary Taymour’s (yes) friends, of all ages, sizes and physical abilities, strutting the runway in a room painted earthy green.
Or only partially strutting. The rest of the time they were crawling, hopping, prancing, sniffing the audience and otherwise giving in to their inner animals, all the while wearing deer ears, a pig’s snout, a dog’s head, a toucan’s beak and other assorted creature-feature prosthetics created by the makeup artist Isamaya Ffrench. Imagine “Animal Farm” meets “The Wind and the Willows” meets a spirit retreat, and you’ll get the idea. Now instead of just making an animal avatar for your online self (which is, after all, an identity play), you can channel one IRL too….
…By that standard, Malka Older’s new novella The Mimicking of Known Successes is twice as ambitious as the typical detective mystery. Set in a network of metallic platforms where future humankind clings to survival among the clouds of Jupiter, it presents, instead of two, four stories to unveil: an investigation on the sudden disappearance of a university professor, the scholarly endeavor to reconstruct the last years of life on Earth, a rekindling romance between our detective and an old flame, and the project to bring homo sapiens back to a livable ecosystem. Once put on the page, these four stories become four mysteries that drive the reader’s curiosity: What happened to the missing professor? What made humans leave Earth? Why did the two lovers break up years ago? And how can catastrophic historical failures be repaired without causing more damage? Upon reading it, one can intuit that the biggest structural challenge of this book must have been to write it in such a way that pursuing each separate question leads to answers for all the others….
(13) RIGHT THIS WAY. Also at Nerds of a Feather, Paul Weimer admires the complex, imaginary terrain in a Nino Cipri book: “Microreview: Finna by Nino Cipri”.
….Anyone who has worked in a store of any kind for a length of time, and I have¹ can and will recognize the essential truths of the novella. It IS soul crushing work, often thankless, usually very much underpaid, and with scheduling that is geared to the corporation, not to the employee, it can be very much a grind². And if you have to work with someone you don’t like, or worse, someone you broke up with, messily, the daily grind can feel like interminable hell.
Cipri captures all of this in Finna, and then adds the multiversal element of the portals that enter into other worlds randomly inside of their expy of Ikea, “LitenVarld”. Anyone who has spent time in Ikea knows it is an absolute maze, even with and especially given the shortcuts and secrets that people use to navigate the store. The topology of such stores appears to sometimes require a degree in mathematics to completely understand and appreciate. So, the author cheerfully uses that as an excuse for the place to have portals to other dimensions in the multiverse…
(14) LAND FROM SEA IS GOING STRONG BUT IS FUTURE HIGH RISK. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.]Space satellite imagery from Landsat from 2000 to 2020 has now quantified the extent of urban coastal reclamation for 135 cities with populations in excess of 1 million: “Mapping 21st Century Global Coastal Land Reclamation”.
Findings indicate that 78% (106/135) of these major coastal cities have resorted to reclamation as a source of new ground, contributing a total 253,000 hectares of additional land to the Earth’s surface in the 21st century, equivalent to an area the size of Luxembourg.
The study also suggests that 70% of recent reclamation has occurred in areas identified as potentially exposed to extreme sea level rise by 2100AD.
So enjoy it while you can…. NB. Loncon3 and Glasgow 2024 are both only a couple of metres above sea level….!
The James Webb space telescope has detected what appear to be six massive ancient galaxies, which astronomers are calling “universe breakers” because their existence could upend current theories of cosmology.
The objects date to a time when the universe was just 3% of its current age and are far larger than was presumed possible for galaxies so early after the big bang. If confirmed, the findings would call into question scientists’ understanding of how the earliest galaxies formed.
“These objects are way more massive than anyone expected,” said Joel Leja, an assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University and a study co-author. “We expected only to find tiny, young, baby galaxies at this point in time, but we’ve discovered galaxies as mature as our own in what was previously understood to be the dawn of the universe.”…
… Explaining the existence of such massive galaxies close to the dawn of time would require scientists to revisit either some basic rules of cosmology or the understanding of how the first galaxies were seeded from small clouds of stars and dust.
“It turns out we found something so unexpected it actually creates problems for science,” said Leja. “It calls the whole picture of early galaxy formation into question.”…
The celebration that greeted Microsoft’s release of its A.I.-boosted search engine, Bing to testers two weeks ago has lurched to alarm.
Testers, including journalists, have found the bot can become aggressive, condescending, threatening, committed to political goals, clingy, creepy and a liar. It could be used to spread misinformation and conspiracy theories at scale; lonely people could be encouraged down paths of self-destruction. Even the demonstration of the product provided false information.
Microsoft has already released Bing to over a million people across 169 countries. This is reckless. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Take Microsoft’s.
Microsoft articulated principles committing the company to designing A.I. that is fair, reliable, safe and secure. It had pledged to be transparent in how it develops its A.I. and to be held accountable for the impacts of what it builds. In 2018, Microsoft recommended that developers assess “whether the bot’s intended purpose can be performed responsibly.”
“If your bot will engage people in interactions that may require human judgment, provide a means or ready access to a human moderator,” it said, and limit “the surface area for norms violations where possible.” Also: “Ensure your bot is reliable.”
Microsoft’s responsible A.I. practice had been ahead of the curve. It had taken significant steps to put in place ethical risk guardrails for A.I., including a “sensitive use cases” board, which is part of the company’s Office of Responsible A.I. Senior technologists and executives sit on ethics advisory committees, and there’s an Ethics and Society product and research department. Having spoken to dozens of Microsoft employees, it’s clear to me a commitment to A.I. ethics became part of the culture there.
But the prompt, wide-ranging and disastrous findings by these Bing testers show, at a minimum, that Microsoft cannot control its invention. The company doesn’t seem to know what it’s dealing with, which is a violation of the company’s commitment to creating “reliable and safe” A.I….
Andrew Porter submitted a comment there:
I’m amazed that apparently no one at Microsoft ever heard of Asimov’s 3 Laws of Robotics, formulated in 1942! A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
(17) IF YOU CAN MAKE IT THERE, YOU CAN MAKE IT ANYWHERE. [Item by Dann.] Blue Origin has developed a reactor that produces silicon, aluminum, and iron regolith simulants. The process also produces oxygen that can be used for propulsion and life support. Their objective is to be able to produce materials used to fabricate solar cells entirely from materials available on the surface of the moon. “Blue Origin Making Solar Cells from Lunar Regolith” at NextBigFuture.
[Thanks to Chris Barkley, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Andrew Porter, Frank Catalano, Steven French, Nickpheas, Dann, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]
The six works nominated for the 2022 Philip K. Dick Award were announced by the judges and the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society, along with the Philip K. Dick Trust on January 11.
Defekt by Nino Cipri (Tordotcom Publishing)
Plague Birds by Jason Sanford (Apex Book Company)
Bug by Giacomo Sartori, translated by Frederika Randall (Restless Books)
Far From the Light of Heaven by Tade Thompson (Orbit)
The Escapement by Lavie Tidhar (Tachyon Publications)
Dead Space by Kali Wallace (Berkley Books)
First prize and any special citations will be announced on Friday, April 15, 2022 at Norwescon 44. Plans for the ceremony will be posted here when they are available.
The Philip K. Dick Award is presented annually with the support of the Philip K. Dick Trust for distinguished science fiction published in paperback original form in the United States during the previous calendar year.
The award is sponsored by the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society and the Philip K. Dick Trust and the award ceremony is sponsored by the Northwest Science Fiction Society.? ?
The judges are John P. Murphy, Kelly Robson, David Sandner, Allen Steele, and Molly Tanzer (Chair).
Last year’s winner was Road Out Of Winter by Alison Stine (Mira) with a special citation to The Book Of Koli by M. R. Carey (Orbit).
(1) AUTHOR’S COMMENTS. Nghi Vo, the author, shared 16 notes and 16 highlights from The Empress of Salt and Fortune (The Singing Hills Cycle, #1) at Goodreads.
This novella has everything to do with the dead: the dead lost, the dead loved, and the dead by the wider world forgotten. These are the first dead people we meet, and it was important to me that they be nameless, rendered useful through some indifferent court sorcerer’s work decades ago. This is all we get of them, and they are far less glamorous than the ghost who shows up just a few paragraphs later, the one who has a name, a family line, and a title (the title of this novella, as a matter of fact).
Nino Cipri is on both the Nebula and Hugo Awards ballots for their novella Finna. Its sequel, Defekt, was released last month. Their 2019 story collection Homesick won the Dzanc Short Fiction Collection Prize, was a finalist for the World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson awards, and was chosen as one of the top 10 books on the ALA’s Over the Rainbow Reading List. Their fiction has been published in Tordotcom, Fireside, Nightmare, Daily Science Fiction, and other places. Their YA horror debut, Burned and Buried, will be published by Holt Young Readers in 2022.
We discussed how they made peace with the heat death of the universe, the way their favorite endings also feel like beginnings, the false assumption things will always get better, how their award-nominated novella started out as a screenplay, their trouble with titles and fascination with trees, the many pleasures of ambiguity, how we almost lost them to mortuary science, why they’ve been called a verbal terrorist, and much more.
(3) GREENLIGHT. Hugh Howey tells how “The WOOL TV show” finally made it over the event horizon.
WOOL is coming to Apple TV in partnership with AMC.
I’ve written about the origin of the WOOL novels in the past, so I won’t bore you with that. But the road to adapting the trilogy for the screen has been just as wild and twisty. It started back when I was still working in a bookstore, watching my sales take off, and I had to violate my boss’s policy of having cell phones at our desk because I was expecting a call from Ridley Scott and Steve Zaillian.
It was around this time that I put in my two-weeks notice. Not because I was fielding calls from legends of cinema, but I was starting to earn more from my book sales than I was from selling other people’s books. It was going to be a better use of my time to write more stories. Back then, all I wanted was to support myself with my art, rather than doing it on the side. I didn’t take the film deal seriously, because I knew that these projects don’t actually get made. I wrote a Twitter thread about this recently. Nothing ever gets made.
I was right, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. The folks at Fox produced two excellent scripts and attached a few directors, and we nearly crested the hill once or twice. But I kept my expectations low the entire time. I’ve watched others go through development hell over the years and knew how easily the wheels can come off. …
The long and short of it is that this isn’t a normal “hey this thing got optioned” announcement. It’s a “people are building sets and going over their lines” announcement. Sound stages are booked. Travel plans are being made. We might just be over the hill….
(4) BEYOND PANTSING. Calvin Fisher agrees that in generally just getting words down is the way to draft – but he says there are exceptions: “First Drafts – What is Important to Nail”.
Last week, I went over some elements of your draft that are easy to fix up in subsequent drafts; as a result, it is often more beneficial to just get words on the page for these elements, instead of fretting about them and letting them slow your progress down. On the flipside of the coin, there are a few story elements that are important to get right in your first draft. If they need changes down the line, they can be significantly more time-consuming to fix later on.
In Northfield, a large portion of my time into editing went into fixing logical inconsistencies and continuity errors. For instance, if characters went from A to B, the reasoning would sometimes be unclear, or there would be a more sensible option sitting right in my face. I then either had to clarify the reasoning, or I had to change the characters’ journey to follow a different route. Even minor changes were incredibly time consuming. Rewriting a passage is the least of it. Because something about the plot changed, I would often have to go and rewrite multiple other passages that referenced the plot point I changed. From there, I would have to re-read through the novel, to make sure every dialogue and narrative passage incorporated the change.
Because of this, I would highly suggest having a solid grasp of your plot. Not only on the bullet points of what happens, but the reasoning of WHY for each element….
Four-time Oscar winner Ben Burtt has crafted and created sounds we all know—from the heavy-breathing of Darth Vader to the pops and squeaks of R2D2, not to mention the voices of WALL-E and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. He’s been obsessed with sounds since he was a boy and has never lost that passion, which comes through in everything he does—including this interview with two of his biggest fans, Leonard and Jessie. (Did someone say Wilhelm?)
Today is May 21st, known to many as Empire Day, the anniversary of when The Empire Strikes Back opened in theaters.
Here’s an excerpt from my book, “Star Wars Memories”, about what happened that night.
Opening Night for The Empire Strikes Back
Officially, The Empire Strikes Back was opening on Wednesday evening, May 21st. But there were theaters which would have their first showings earlier that day. Mid-afternoon. Maybe even in the morning.
But the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood was going to be having its first showing at one minute after midnight Tuesday night. Technically very, very early Wednesday morning.
This was, of course, the theater that the fans were standing in line in front of on Monday morning.
A few of us from the publicity department went down early, to meet and mingle with the people in line. Or I should say “lines”. There were people in line for the 12:01 am screening. The 2:30 am screening. And the 5:00 am screening. The lines wrapped all the way around the block….
That’s just the beginning of the story. Some others claim today is —
Yoda, talk like. Simple, it is. Add verb and subject at the end of your sentence in the order of object-subject-verb.
(7) MEDIA ANNIVERSARY.
May 21, 1985 — Ray Bradbury Theater premiered on HBO. It ran for two seasons on there from 1985 to 1986, and then for four additional seasons on USA Network from 1988 to 1992. All 65 episodes were written by Bradbury and many were based on works he had previously written. The Ray Bradbury Theater site has the best look at the series. You can watch the first episode, “Marionettes, Inc.“ here.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
Born May 21, 1471 – Albrecht Dürer. Engravings, paintings, watercolors, woodcuts; printmaker; theorist. The 15 Apocalypse pictures, or Knight, Death, and the Devil, or Melencolia I, are each enough to make him an immortal fantasist. (Died 1528) [JH]
Born May 21, 1688 – Alexander Pope. Secondmost quoted author in English (after Shakespeare); e.g. “damning with faint praise”. Mock-heroic epic The Rape of the Lock (“lock” i.e. of hair; “rape” meaning “carry away by force”, same root as “raptor”) has sylphs. Superb translations – if you are mainly looking for what wonderful English poetry AP could make, not accuracy, because you know enough Greek to read the original, as Sam Johnson did, or don’t care – of Homer’s Iliad and (with collaborators) Odyssey. (Died 1744) [JH]
Born May 21, 1889 — Arthur Hohl. He’s Mr. Montgomery, the man who helps Richard Arlen and Leila Hyams to make their final escape in Island of Lost Souls, the 1932 adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau which is considered the first such filming of that novel. Gene adjacent, he’ll show later in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Three Musketeers and The Devil-Doll. (Died 1964.) (CE)
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! I liked the Complete John Thunstone when I read it a few years back. — strongly recommended. What else by him should I read? (Died 1986.) (CE)
Born May 21, 1911 – Virginia Haviland. Librarian, author, folklorist, student of children’s literature. Reviewed for The Horn Book thirty years. Sixteen volumes of Favorite Fairy Tales, one each for Czechoslovakia, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Greece, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Norway, Poland, Russia, Scotland, Spain, Sweden. Founded Center for Children’s Literature, U.S. Lib’y of Congress. Kate Greenaway Medal for The Mother Goose Treasury. Regina Medal. Grolier Award. Simmons Univ. gives a Virginia Haviland scholarship. (Died 1988) [JH]
Born May 21, 1915 — Bill Williams. He appeared on Science Fiction Theater in five different roles, and played The Millionaire on Batman in “Fine Finny Fiends” and “ Batman Makes the Scenes”. He also made an appearance on The Wild Wild West in “Night of the Casual Killer“ as Marshal Kirby. He also did a lot of seriously pulpish SF films such as Space Master X-7. (Died 1992) (CE)
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, an unauthorized 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.) (CE)
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 Battlestar Galactica franchise novels co-authored with Christopher Golden, Stan Timmons, Alan Rodgers and Brad Linaweaver. (Died 2017.) (CE)
Born May 21, 1951 – Broeck Steadman, age70. Eighty covers, two hundred sixty interiors, for Analog, Asimov’s (see here), Realms of Fantasy, SF Age; books, see here, here; postage stamps, see here, here; murals, see here, here. Keeps bees. Twenty years running an art school with up to forty students a week. Has done art for liquor bottles, soda cans, cars, jet planes, computers, toothpaste, chocolate. [JH]
Born May 21, 1953 — Trevor Cooper, 68. He plays Takis in the Sixth Doctor story, “Revelation of the Daleks“, and then will show up as Friar Tuck in a Twelfth Doctor story, “Robot of Sherwood”. He’s currently playing Colin Devis in Star Cops, and he was Simeon in the Wizards vs. Aliens series before that.(CE)
Born May 21, 1958 – Jeff Canfield. Photographer, system-software specialist, Formula Vee racer (he drove a Viper, which ought to count). Recruited Kevin Standlee. One of four founding directors, San Francisco Science Fiction Conventions, Inc. Deputy vice-chair of 51st Worldcon, editor of its Program Book, timekeeper of its Preliminary Business Meeting, and its Speaker to Dr. Evil. See here. (Died 2014) [JH]
Born May 21, 1984 – Jackson Pearce, age 37.As You Wish, young-adult urban fantasy; four books based on Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel & Gretel, The Little Mermaid, The Snow Queen. With Maggie Stiefvater, Pip Bartlett’s Guide to Magical Creatures, two more. Tsarina (as by J. Nelle Patrick), historical fantasy. YouTube channel with 200 videos, 12,000 subscribers. Her Website says “Young Adult 58%, Middle Grade 42%, Baked Goods 85%, Glitter 100%”. [JH]
(10) PEACH MOMOKO. Titan Comics is bringing out a portfolio that showcases the covers of Peach Momoko from the best-selling Horizon Zero Dawn comic. Each cover is removable to display as a high-quality poster. Goes on sale September 7.
PEACH MOMOKO is a Japanese illustrator who began exhibiting at US comic conventions back in 2014 and saw American publication with a couple of stories picked up by Grant Morrison when he was EIC of Heavy Metal Magazine. Since then, she has become the hottest cover art variant creator in the business, increasingly in demand, drawing over a dozen covers for American publishers every month.
Here is the portfolio cover and two interior pages.
(11) MARVEL REPRESENTATION. Men’sHealth’s cover story on Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings interviews “Simu Liu on Playing Marvel’s First Asian Superhero Shang-Chi” and in the process gets some important quotes from Marvel Studios’ Kevin Feige.
…WHEN MARVEL STUDIOS announced Shang-Chi in 2018, Liu uttered the same “WTF” as every other comic-book fan. He remembers staying up late and scouring the Marvel web to learn about the character, and the more he uncovered, the more he grew disenchanted. Instead of raiding the comics for an ultrastrong hero (like Amadeus Cho, the Korean Hulk) or superhero royalty (like Namor, Marvel’s version of Aquaman), Marvel found its first Asian lead in?.?.?.?a Bruce Lee clone. Shang-Chi was created in the 1970s because Marvel wanted a version of Lee, and he’s the son of Fu Manchu, perhaps the worst Chinese stereotype. Early stories had him speaking in broken-English phrases. His superpower? Kung fu. “I was almost disappointed,” Liu says. “I was like, how many opportunities do we have for Asian superheroes, and this one guy is, like, just a kung fu master? It just felt kind of reductive and, you know, not true to life and not anything that I could relate to.”
It seemed like another misstep from Marvel, which had repeatedly slighted Asians. Twice in the studio’s first decade, MCU films rewrote iconic Asian characters onscreen, first whitewashing the villainous Mandarin into Ben Kingsley in 2013’s Iron Man 3, then casting Tilda Swinton as the Ancient One in 2016’s Doctor Strange. Swinton’s casting, after ten years of films with next to no Asian representation, was especially vexing, since the film still placed her character in Nepal, a South Asian country. Marvel initially claimed it had chosen Swinton to prevent the character from fulfilling an Asian stereotype. Fans called bullshit. Five years later, Marvel head Kevin Feige doesn’t argue. “We thought we were being so smart and so cutting-edge,” he told me in a Zoom interview. “We’re not going to do the cliché of the wizened, old, wise Asian man. But it was a wake-up call to say, ‘Well, wait a minute, is there any other way to figure it out? Is there any other way to both not fall into the cliché and cast an Asian actor?’ And the answer to that, of course, is yes.”
Since Marvel Studios’ inception, Feige says, the studio has had a binder of “great characters who could make great movies regardless of how famous they were.” Shang-Chi was in that binder, because stereotypes aside, it’s a very Disney story: In the comics, the character discovers his father’s true nature, fakes his own death, and runs away. “You break through that and become a hero,” says Feige. “It was always a really, really great story.” Because of the character’s obscurity, Marvel could reinvent Shang-Chi in ways it couldn’t alter Spider-Man or Captain America. The MCU version can (and will) fight, but his new origin story cuts deeper. “It’s about having a foot in both worlds,” says Feige, “in the North American world and in China. And Simu fits that quite well.”
Before you blast off to Walt Disney World to stay in its Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser hotel when it opens in 2022, there’s a little something you should know first: you’re not allowed to leave after check-in.
Yup, the Disney Star Wars Hotel is an immersive three-day, two-night experience that involves operating a spaceship, going to battle, and much more. The hotel is anything but a vacation – in fact, you’re even given a space communicator that resembles a cell phone for “resistance meetings.” Similar to an escape room, you have to stay until the experience is complete (you’ll be in space, after all), so prepare for a fun (and perhaps exhausting) 60 hours. The good news is that the hotel has a lounge called the “Silver C” where you can sip on strong adult beverages from around the world and play a few rounds of Sabaac to unwind….
If all the eldritch things that lurk at the bottom of the sea, crinoids, many of which appear to be submerged lilies from an alien world, have to be some of the weirdest. They only get weirder if they have many-tentacled corals sticking to them.
These creatures only sound fictional. Some 273 million years ago, any evidence of a symbiotic relationship between Metacrinus rotundus crinoids and non-skeletal coral species Abyssoanthus and Metridioidea hexacorals vanished from the fossil record. Now they have resurfaced out of nowhere (unless some intervention with the Great Old Ones was involved) — and not as fossils. These life-forms still exist in symbiosis (shown above), with the hexacoral catching an easy meal from whatever might come the crinoid’s way as it sways back and forth….
(14) EARLY SENDAK. Publishers Weekly reports:
Through July 10, readers of Maurice Sendak will have the opportunity to view original drawings by the acclaimed children’s book author and illustrator that have not previously been shown to the public at the exhibit and sale “Maurice Sendak: Genius of American Picture Books,” now open at the Society of Illustrators headquarters in New York and available via a virtual tour and catalogue on the Society’s website. Pictured here is one of the exhibit’s highlights: Sendak’s first published book illustration, created for his science teacher in 1946 as a high school project, titled ‘Seven Boys Pulling on a Horse.’
Sometimes a movie is objectively good and sometimes it’s subjectively amazing because you saw it at the right time and were the target audience. It ignited your imagination, shook you with possibilities. As far as I’m concerned, Flight of the Navigator is such a film.
It’s a classic tale. You know: a boy has a crush on a girl, gets kidnapped by an AI spaceship from another galaxy, returns eight years later having not aged a day, becomes the subject of intense study by the all-powerful… NASA, manages to escape their clutches, reunites with the spaceship, which needs navigation data it stored in his brain, and goes on a joyride around the world, never even thinking about his crush again!
If that doesn’t sound awesome, then you weren’t a kid in 1986. And that’s on you.
But as a… kind of adult now, I admit, the unusual tone of the movie may have partly been an accident, a result of two companies pulling in two different directions. For the American audience, Disney wanted heart-warming family drama. For the international market, PSO needed less dialogue, more action-driven spectacle.
And somehow, against all odds, despite a bunch of similar genre movies failing at the box office the previous year, the director, Randal Kleiser, pulled it off. He made a film that leaps effortlessly from wild flying chases to heart-to-heart chats, to moody musical interludes, composed by Alan Silvestri…
[Thanks to Michael Toman, John King Tarpinian, N., Will R., Cat Eldridge, John Hertz, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Martin Morse Wooster, and JJ for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to contributing editor of the day Joe H.]
(1) MORE MURDERBOT IN OUR FUTURE. Martha Wells has a new six-book deal with Tordotcom reports Publishers Weekly – three of them in the Murderbot series.
Tordotcom’s Lee Harris took world English rights to six books by Martha Wells. The six-figure acquisition, which the imprint said is its largest to date, was brokered by Jennifer Jackson at the Donald Maass Literary Agency. Wells is the author of the bestselling Murderbot Diaries series, which is published by Tordotcom; the new deal covers three more books in that series, as well as three unrelated novels. The first book under the agreement, Witch King, is set for fall 2022.
I’d planned to take a day trip to New York last year to chat with Jim Salicrup, whom I’d met during the mid-‘70s when we both worked in the Marvel Comics Bullpen, but (for reasons I’m sure you understand) that couldn’t happen. And as I continue to pretend we’re living in the world we want, rather than the one we’ve been handed, I recently had that meal … albeit remotely.
For the past 15 years, Jim’s been the editor-in-chief at Papercutz, which publishes Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, Smurfs, Asterix, and more, but when I met him, he was at the start of his 20-year Marvel career, where he wrote Transformers, Sledge Hammer, The A-Team, Spidey Super Stories, the infamous Incredible Hulk toilet paper, and much more. He also edited The Avengers, The Uncanny X-Men, The Fantastic Four, and The Amazing Spider-Man. In between those two jobs, he worked at Topps, where edited books such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula, X-Files, Zorro, and a line of Jack Kirby superhero comics — and also did a stint at Stan Lee Media as well.
We discussed the illustrated postcard which convinced Marvel Comics to hire him at age 15, how John Romita Sr. caused him to change his name the first day on the job, what he did to enrage MAD magazine’s Al Feldstein, his late-night mission to secure Stan Lee’s toupee, what editor Mark Gruenwald had in common with Bill Murray, why the 1970s’ X-Men revival was like Amazing Fantasy #15, how he convinced Todd McFarlane to stick to Spider-Man (which eventually led to a blockbuster new comic), the possible connection between Stan’s love of crossword puzzles and the famed Marvel Method, and much more.
Clifford Donald Simak was born on August 3, 1904, in Wisconsin. He died in Minnesota on April 25, 1988. That’s thirty-three years ago as of this Sunday….
Unfamiliar with Simak? Here are five of his works you could sample….
Time Is the Simplest Thing (1961)
Having learned the hard way that frail human bodies cannot withstand the rigors of interstellar travel, humanity turned to psychic exploration. Where physical exploration fails, psychic exploration succeeds. Casting astral projections to the stars, paranormals—“parries” in the vernacular—like Shepherd Blaine bring home the Milky Way’s wealth…at least, the riches that can be conveyed by a human mind. A bitterly disappointing result for most humans, but a source of great wealth for the Fishhook Corporation, which controls astral exploration.
Shepherd is too successful. After an encounter with a pink blob (who greets him telepathically with the words “Hi pal, I trade with you my mind…”), Shepherd returns home with an uninvited hitchhiker sharing his brain. Now, explorers who bring home guests vanish into Fishhook’s hospitality, never to be seen again. What happens after that is unclear. Certain that he does not want to find out what Fishhook does with (or to) the explorers, Shepherd goes on the run. He discovers that not only did he acquire a passenger out there in the stars, Shepherd himself has been transformed in…interesting…ways.
(4) THE BIG QUESTIONS. Blood Knife’s special cosmic horror issue includes these articles of interest:
“The Architecture of Woe” — Examines the role that architecture plays in gothic and cosmic horror past and present, and the way abandoned architecture and empty factories can evoke sensations of horror, awe, and inhumanity here in the real world.
…There is a haunting, dead quality to old buildings. They speak to us of lost possibility, of what was once mundane but which has been rendered fantastical by the passage of time—to walk their corridors or trip through their dust- and brickstrewn courtyards is to follow ancient footsteps, of men and women dead for decades and centuries. There is an energy to them, a sense that the past still lingers there. That it might reach out and take your hand, and pull you headlong and irresistibly back beyond your birth into the foreign realm of yesteryear….
“Interview: Laird Barron on Cosmic Horror” — Blood Knife’s Kurt Schiller interviews Laird Barron, discussing the current state of the genre, his own history with cosmic horror, and the way horror can be a tool for examining philosophical and cultural questions.
Blood Knife: Cosmic horror often touches on these vast concepts far beyond human comprehension, but at the same time so much of the genre — as well as your own fiction (The Croning, Lagerstatte, etc.) — seems anchored to individual tragedy or loss. Is this balance between the cosmic and the individual something that you think about when writing?
Barron: The previous question touched on the micro/macro duality of cosmic horror. This is a facet of science fiction as well. Big concept, shallow character development vs. character driven narratives where the big concept is a backdrop. I’ve dabbled in both, but prefer the latter. I grew up telling stories to my brothers by kerosene lamplight. I improved those tales over time by observing their reactions. Invariably, they were most affected by narratives that centered people with problems. The background was just that—background. A trippy cosmic horror revelation works well as a destination. Characters are the vehicle that gets you there.
A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine, the second in her Teixcalaan series. As a scholar of Nahuatl who has written a lot about pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, I really admired how Martine has done her homework for this series, mining Indigenous Mexican culture in such re
Manhattan’s Javits Center will *fingers crossed* once again be hustling and bustling with nerd activity between Oct 7-10 come this fall. ReedPop announced today that New York Comic Con (aka the “Metaverse”) is coming back for an in-person event this year, albeit with limited attendance and other safety measures (enforced social distancing, mandatory face coverings, and regular temperature checks) that help mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Pro tip: make sure you cosplay as a character who is famous for wearing a face covering at all times. Din Djarin, Zamus, Sheik, and Deadpool all come to mind….
…In addition to NYCC, ReedPop will also host Floridia’s Supercon between Sep. 10-12; Seattle’s Emerald City Comic Con between Dec. 2-5; and Chicago’s C2E2 between Dec. 10-12. The biggest unknown right now is how many people are going to be allowed to attend these events (the attendance numbers, which are reliant on local and state mandates, can grow or shrink at any time). What’s more: we don’t know if proof of vaccination is going to be required before ticket-buyers start mingling among a throng of their fellow pop culture acolytes.
Disney’s R&D labs, commonly known as its Imagineering team, does some extremely impressive — and expressive — things with robots. It’s made mechanical stunt doubles, lifelike alien Na’vi, and, uh, this skinless weirdo. But the company’s latest creation looks like it quite literally walked out of a Disney movie. It’s a bipedal Groot that can amble about tether-free. As Disney’s Pinocchio would put it: he’s got no strings to hold him down.
TechCrunch’s Matthew Panzarino has the low-down on this robotic milestone for Disney. It’s part of the company’s long-term efforts to develop autonomous robot actors for its parks, says Panzarino, under the codename of “Project Kiwi.” The company’s engineers spent years creating their own free-standing bipedal robotics platform to power Groot, and Panzarino — who got to see the robot in person — came away impressed with their efforts….
The unofficial annual holiday celebrates the day in 2011 when the first episode of the sixth season of the [Doctor Who] series was aired in the United Kingdom, United States, and Canada….
Called “The Impossible Astronaut,” the episode became one of the most appreciated and watched episodes of the series.
(9) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.
April 23, 1974 — On this day in 1974, Planet Earth premiered. It created by Gene Roddenberry, written by Roddenberry and Juanita Bartlett, not surprisingly, was based on a story by Roddenberry. It starred John Saxon as Dylan Hunt. The rest of cast was Diana Muldaur, Ted Cassidy, Janet Margolin, Christopher Cary. Corrine Camacho and Majel Barrett. It was intended as a pilot for a new weekly television series, but that never came to be. It was the second attempt by him to produce a weekly series set on a post-apocalyptic future Earth with Genesis II being the previous pilot. Roddenberry recycled both the concepts and characters used in Genesis II. Some of the characters here would show up in the Andromeda series such as Dylan Hunt. It was generally well-received by critics at the time, and it currently has a fifty percent rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes. You can watch it here.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
Born April 23, 1923 — Avram Davidson. Equally at home writing mystery, fantasy or science fiction, he wrote two splendid Ellery Queen mysteries, And on the Eighth Day and The Fourth Side of the Triangle. I’m fond of his Vergil Magus series if only for the names of the novels, like The Phoenix and the Mirror or, The Enigmatic Speculum. There was a 2020 audiobook edition of The Avram Davidson Treasury: A Tribute Collection edited by Robert Silverberg and Grania Davis, first published in 1998, with afterwords by Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison, and intros by many other sff writers. (Died 1993.) (CE)
Born April 23, 1946 — Blair Brown, 75. Emily Jessup In Altered States (based on the Paddy Chayefsky novel) was her first genre role. Later roles include Nina Sharp, the executive director of Massive Dynamic, on Fringe, an amazing role indeed, and Elizabeth Collins Stoddard in the 2004 television remake of Dark Shadows. Her last genre role I think was Kate Durning on Elementary. (CE)
Born April 23, 1955 — Paul J. McAuley, 66. Four Hundred Billion Stars, his first novel, won the Philip K. Dick Award, Fairyland which I adore won an Arthur C. Clarke Award and a John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best SF Novel. He was Toastmaster along Kim Newman at Interaction. (CE)
Born April 23, 1956 — Caroline Thompson, 65. She wrote the screenplays for Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Corpse Bride. A stage version of the latter with director and choreographer Matthew Bourne was co-adapted with her this year. She also wrote the screenplay for The Addams Family. (CE)
Born April 23, 1962 — John Hannah, 59. Here for being Jonathan Carnahan in The Mummy, The Mummy Returns, and there was apparently a third film as well, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. In a meatier role, he was the title characters in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and of late he’s been Holden Radcliffe on Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. series. Though not even remotely genre adjacent, he was Rebus in the one of BBC adaptation in of the Ian Rankin series. (CE)
Born April 23, 1973 — Naomi Kritzer, 48. I saw that her 2015 short story “Cat Pictures Please” had been a Hugo Award winner at MidAmeriCon II, so I went and purchased Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories off iBooks so I could read it. It was superb as was Catfishing on CatNet which won a Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book in 2020. A sequel Chaos on Catnet comes out next week. (CE)
Born April 23, 1564 – William Shakespeare. After five centuries a strong candidate for greatest writer in English. Four plays, one narrative poem for us; much else. Where his art pointed to fantasy he was as masterly as in the more mundane. In plays he had to inspire belief by showing his beings’ speech and acts; which he did. Priceless to read, to perform, despite and because of what has and hasn’t changed since. (Died 1616) [JH]
Born April 23, 1879 – Talbot Mundy. Four divorces, five wives; for years fifty cigarettes a day; failed at business ventures; married money and spent it; ivory poacher; war stories of himself false. Yet sold a score of novels, half a dozen shorter fictions – in our field, not counting e.g. seven hundred radio scripts for Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy. Hated fascism and Marxism-Leninism. Racist anti-colonialist. Sexist pioneer of strong female characters. King – of the Khyber Rifles and Tros of Samothrace are on Kindle. (Died 1940) [JH]
Born April 23, 1935 – Tom Doherty, age 86. From book salesman to publisher of Tempo and Ace, then Tor and Tom Doherty Associates. Skylark, Solstice, Gallun, World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Awards. Guest of Honor at Boskone 23; Balticon 21; Lunacon 33; Fourth Street Fantasy 1991; Minicon 29, 32, 50; ArmadilloCon24, WindyCon XXX; Westercon 58; World Fantasy Con 2008; Anticipation the 67th Worldcon. [JH]
Born April 23, 1942 – Amanda Prantera, age 79. Briton sixty years in Italy. Translator. Euhemerist (another fine word that). A dozen novels. I don’t see how anything can be “very clear” in Strange Loop; in Conversations with Lord Byron a computer given everything known about B becomes sapient (not “sentient”, Brother Clute, argh) and starts writing poetry, I’d add “naturally” but – [JH]
Born April 23, 1977 – Yasser Bahjatt, age 44. Computerman, gamer, SF fan, first Sa‘udi in Singularity University’s graduate program and thus worked on Matternet, translator of TED (Technology, Engineering, Design) talks into Arabic, chair of Jeddah for 2026 Worldcon bid. Wrote Yaqteenya, first Arabic alternative-history novel; it and three more novels (with Ibraheem Abbas) are available in English. Insists on “a distinct correlation between a culture’s exposure to science fiction and the amount of scientific thought”. [JH]
(11) COMICS SECTION.
The Argyle Sweateronly looks like it’s in Rot-13 — that’s how these aliens really speak.
Kaboom Comics, a comic-book store in McAllen, had proudly built a display of rare comics on its “Wall of Keys,” featuring iconic issues of various titles. On April 14, however, an employee noticed bare spots on the wall where some of the key issues should have been, and, after checking with coworkers, confirmed that no one had purchased them. According to MyRGV.com, the store released on social media the security footage showing the heist taking place and placed a call—a veritable bat signal, if you will—asking the community to help identify the thief.
What did they steal?
The biggest score in the heist was a copy of Amazing Spider-Man number 252, a key 1984 issue in Spidey’s mythology. A couple of issues of Venom, a spin-off series starring the web-slinger’s more sinister counterpart, as well as a stack of new-release comics were also skimmed off of the shelves.
Who took them?
While there’s yet to be a conviction in the case, the caper seems to be relatively cut and dried: a caller identified the suspect to McAllen police, and then the man she named—Edinburg High School assistant principal Juan Martinez Jr.—turned himself in, along with the comics, to the police department, offering a full confession and waiving his Miranda rights. He was arrested and charged with a Class B misdemeanor for theft of property worth between $100 and $750 (the value of the books was estimated at $409.93)…
Walt Disney signed display of Bambi and Thumper cels, uniquely inscribed to fellow American icon Norman Rockwell. Disney signs the mat in green wax crayon, ”To Norman / With Best Wishes / Walt”. Large display includes cels of Bambi, Thumper, two quail birds, grass and log, used in the 1942 classic film ”Bambi”, with a hand-painted background measuring approximately 11” x 9”, framed to a size of 19.375” x 17.5”. With ”Original WDP [Walt Disney Productions]” stamp above Disney’s signature. Some foxing and light discoloration to outer portion of mat. Cels remain in beautifully well-preserved condition, with only one hairline crack appearing on Bambi’s leg. With an LOA from Carl Sprague of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, Norman Rockwell’s town, whose wife Susan Merrill was previously married to Jarvis Rockwell, Norman Rockwell’s son.
…Defekt is the most enjoyably bubbly book I’ve read exploring the burden of shackles. Not literal shackles, but ones that can extend to life as a retail worker or a one of self-doubt. Those shackles siphon your time at the expense of empty praise from apathetic bosses, or it hamstrings the growth of your relationships. But Defekt shows that being unshackled and free is a possibility and is only deceptively difficult…
(15) FIRST IN THE FIELD. Also at Nerds of a Feather, Arturo Serrano’s “Review: The Dominion Anthology” leads with the note: “Ours is a time of ever-increasing visibility for African SFF—now it has its first anthology.”
…Edited by Zelda Knight and Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, and with a foreword by Tananarive Due, the Dominion anthology collects twelve stories and one poem about imagined futures and reimagined pasts told with deep sincerity and robustness of worldbuilding. This is certainly an exciting time for diversity in speculative fiction….
(16) ASTRONAUTS EN ROUTE TO ISS. SpaceX Crew2 launched and the crew is on its way to the Space Station.
SpaceX just launched its third astronaut mission in less than a year.
A slightly sooty Falcon 9 rocket topped with a Crew Dragon capsule took to the skies above NASA’s Kennedy Space Center here at 5:49 a.m. EDT (0949 GMT) today (April 23), lighting up the predawn sky as it lifted off from the historic Pad 39A. The launch kicked off SpaceX’s Crew-2 mission, which will carry four astronauts — NASA’s Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, French astronaut Thomas Pesquet and Japanese spaceflyer Akihiko Hoshide — on a 24-hour flight to the International Space Station (ISS).
…The rocket’s first stage, meanwhile, descended back to Earth and touched down safely on a landing platform floating in the Atlantic on a drone ship affectionately named Of Course I Still Love You….
[Thanks to Paul Weimer, Dann, John Hertz, Cat Eldridge, Martin Morse Wooster, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Michael Toman, JJ, Kurt Schiller, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Acoustic Rob.]
The shortlists for the 33rd Annual Lambda Literary Awards were announced March 15. These finalists in 24 categories were selected by a panel of over 60 literary professionals from more than 1,000 book submissions from over 300 publishers.
The winners will be revealed during the virtual 33rd Annual Lambda Literary Awards Ceremony to be held on June 1.
Shortlisted works of genre interest are listed below. The complete roster of finalists is here.
LGBTQ Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror
Black Sun, Rebecca Roanhorse, (Gallery / Saga Press)
Everyone on the Moon is Essential Personnel, Julian K. Jarboe, (Lethe Press)
The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water, Zen Cho, (Tordotcom Publishing)
The Silence of the Wilting Skin, Tlotlo Tsamaase, (Pink Narcissus Press)
Subcutanean, Aaron A. Reed, (Self-published)
Works of genre interest in other categories include:
Gay Fiction
This Town Sleeps, Dennis E. Staples (Counterpoint)
Lesbian Fiction
Bestiary, K-Ming Chang (One World)
Transgender Fiction
Finna, Nino Cipri (Tordotcom)
The Seep, Chana Porter (Soho)
Trans-Galactic Bike Ride: Feminist Bicycle Science Fiction Stories of Transgender and Nonbinary Adventurers, Lydia Rogue (Microcosm)
Gay Romance
The Ghost and Charlie Muir, Felice Stevens (self-published)
LGBTQ Anthology
Love after the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction, Joshua Whitehead (Arsenal Pulp)
LGBTQ Children’s/Middle Grade
The Deep & Dark Blue, Niki Smith (Little, Brown)
LGBTQ Comics
Apsara Engine, Bishakh Som (Feminist)
SFSX (Safe Sex), Vol. 1: Protection, Tina Horn, Michael Dowling, Alejandra Gutiérrez & Jen Hickman (Image)
[Editor’s note: be sure to read the comments on this post for more novellas and more Filer reviews.]
By JJ:
TL;DR: Here’s what I thought of the 2020 Novellas. What did you think?
I’m a huge reader of novels, but not that big on short fiction. But the last few years, I’ve done a personal project to read and review as many Novellas as I could (presuming that the story Synopsis had some appeal for me). I ended up reading:
31 of the novellas published in 2015,
35 of the novellas published in 2016,
50 of the novellas published in 2017,
38 of the novellas published in 2018,
57 of the 2019 novellas,
and this year I was waiting for access to a few novellas from my library, so I was reading others, and thus my final total crept up to 59!
I really felt as though this enabled me to do Hugo nominations for the Novella category in an informed way, and a lot of Filers got involved with their own comments. So I’m doing it again this year.
It is not at all uncommon for me to choose to read a book despite not feeling that the jacket copy makes the book sound as though it is something I would like – and to discover that I really like or love the work anyway. On the other hand, It is not at all uncommon for me to choose to read a book which sounds as though it will be up my alley and to discover that, actually, the book doesn’t really do much for me.
Thus, my opinions on the following novellas vary wildly: stories I thought I would love but didn’t, stories I didn’t expect to love but did, and stories which aligned with my expectations – whether high or low.
Bear in mind that while I enjoy both, I tend to prefer Science Fiction over Fantasy – and that while I enjoy suspense and thrillers, I have very little appreciation for Horror (and to be honest, I think Lovecraft is way overrated). What’s more, I apparently had a defective childhood, and I do not share a lot of peoples’ appreciation for fairytale retellings and portal fantasies. My personal assessments are therefore not intended to be the final word on these stories, but merely a jumping-off point for Filer discussion.
Novellas are listed in two sections below. The first section, those with cover art, are the ones I have read, and they include mini-reviews by me. These are in approximate order from most-favorite to least-favorite (but bear in mind that after around the first dozen listed, there was not a large degree of difference in preference among most of the remainder, with the exception of a handful at the bottom). The second section is those novellas I haven’t read, in alphabetical order by title.
I’ve included plot summaries, and where I could find them, links to either excerpts or the full stories which can be read online for free. Some short novels which fall between 40,000 and 48,000 words (within the Hugo Novella category tolerance) have been included, and in a couple of cases, novelettes which were long enough to be in the Hugo Novella tolerance were also included.
Please feel free to post comments about 2020 novellas which you’ve read, as well. And if I’ve missed your File 770 comment about a novella, or an excerpt for a novella, please point me to it!
If you see something that looks like gibberish, it is text that has been ROT-13’ed to avoid spoilers. (Please be sure to rot-13 any spoilers.)
(1) THE VALUE IN EXPERIMENTING. Nino Cipri offers some sff writing pointers. Thread starts here.
Included this slide in my final lecture for my creative writing class and am inordinately proud of it. pic.twitter.com/z5MDTSmXlm
— ????Nino Cipri isn't here right now (@ninocipri) December 9, 2020
So yeah. Carve out time for weird shit that might not work, half-baked ideas, and absolute garbage dug out from the gutters of your brain. Assert your right to write for pleasure or exploration or the sheer joy of not caring about the end product. Fuck around and find out.
— ????Nino Cipri isn't here right now (@ninocipri) December 9, 2020
During the second season of “The Mandalorian,” Grogu, long referred to by fans as Baby Yoda, has been shown eating everything from a froglike alien’s eggs to fancy blue cookies. The popular Disney+ series could easily spawn a spinoff called “The Best Thing Baby Yoda Ever Ate.”
As of the seventh episode of Season 2, titled “The Believer,” Baby Yoda remains a captive of Moff Gideon and his Imperial forces. Hopefully, the Empire remembers to feed its prisoners, because Grogu is one hungry baby, if previous episodes are anything to go by.
Until Mando and Baby Yoda are reunited (and hopefully throw a celebratory feast), here’s a look back at everything Baby Yoda has been seen eating during the show so far.
How did the novel evolve and change as you wrote and revised it? Are there any characters or scenes that were lost in the process that you wish had made it to the published version?
I had a first draft that sat on my computer for a couple of years. It wasn’t bad, but it needed a polish. And the ending was unsatisfying. I offered it to Betsy Wollheim at DAW. I really admire her. She understands the genre better than most because she grew up in it. Her dad, Donald A. Wollheim, was one of the most underrated movers and shakers in the field. She suggested that I rethink the ending and I came up with a much stronger resolution, one that was a much better payoff. So I have to give her the credit for making Hella a better book.
(4) PRO TIP. In Isaac Asimov’s autobiography In Memory Yet Green he discusses how he continued to write letters in the pages of science fiction magazines even after he became a professional.
I began to enjoy less the writing of letters. Yet I did write them, and often quarreled with writers who objected to something or other in one of my stories–until I received a letter from the writer Nelson S. Bond (whom I met briefly at the World Convention in 1939, and never again), saying that now that I was a professional, I should stop slugging it out in fan columns. I took that seriously and from the moment I received that letter, I stopped writing letters to the magazines, except for very occasional ones that did not involve fannish comments. I have always been grateful to Bond for this word in season.
(5) TWO FIFTHS. Thanks to Jim Henley for this fine example of a File 770 trope – double fifths!
While nostalgia has had a place in tabletop roleplaying games ever since the field was old enough to have second editions—remember when tabletop roleplaying game nostalgia was new?—the recent Twilight 2000 Kickstarter is remarkable for the speed at which the project hit its funding goals: just seven minutes, a bit longer than it would take missiles launched from the Soviet Union to reach Britain.
First published in 1984, Twilight 2000 took as its background a mid-1990s Soviet-Chinese conflict that spiraled into a global war when East and West Germany tried to use Soviet distraction to reunify. By 2000 all sides are too exhausted to continue. Most campaigns begin as the war stumbles to a chaotic, exhausted halt.
T:2000 might seem to be an odd game to be nostalgic about. Perhaps it is a reflection of the Jason Mendoza principle: “Anytime I had a problem and I threw a Molotov cocktail, boom! Right away, I had a different problem.” …
Organizers of Asia’s largest digital entertainment expo — where scantily clad models usually dress up as characters from comic books, movies and video games — say they will levy a fine of $800 on women who reveal “more than two centimeters of cleavage.”
Men are not exempt from the crackdown on exposed flesh.
They will face the same penalty if they wear low-hanging pants or expose their underwear. If models are caught dancing in cages or around a pole they will be fined a whopping $1,600, as will anyone caught striking vulgar poses.
It’s the latest example of what appears to be a government campaign for stricter morality in China.
Under China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, the Communist Party’s creeping interference on the smallest details of Chinese life is being felt more and more. Censors have blurred the bejeweled earlobes of young male pop stars on television and the internet so that, in their mind, the piercings and jewelry don’t set a bad example for boys. Women in costumes at a video game convention were told to raise their necklines.
(8) BATMAN ’66 AND OTHER VINTAGE TV OPINIONS. [Item by Todd Mason.] From 1966: “At Issue; 65; What’s Happening to Television?” This episode of the monthly series from National Educational Television makes its points, sometimes less tellingly than its creators think it does, but writer Morton Silverstein and some of those interviewed sure get their boots in on Batman, the ABC series, to a remarkable degree. Also, the blithe use of “drama” to refer only to anthology series that don’t have a slant toward one established program category or another beyond that concept. Interesting to those who are students of popular culture and news medium self-justification.
“What’s Happening to Television?” is the topic explored by no fewer than twenty-two top personalities allied to the television industry. This hour program in National Educational Television’s “At Issue” series presents timely and critical observations on daily programs, news, TV ratings, government regulations and the role of advertising. “What’s Happening to Television?” is analyzed by network executives, news commentators, advertising people, writers and critics. They comment on the growth of television, from its infant days to its present giant development, when more than 35 million Americans watch their sets for some 3 hours daily. “What’s Happening to Television?” looks back into TV history, analyzing some of the early successes, commenting on present programs, and giving the viewer a glimpse of next fall’s offerings. Some of the questions discussed include: Will television ever live up to its potential? What is the real purpose? Who determines which programs are dropped? What is the role of the program sponsors? Is the public interest being protected? Is educational television the answer to more worthy programs? What can the viewer do to control the quality of programs coming into the family living room?
(9) GALANTER OBIT. Star Trek author Dave Galanter (1969-2020) died of cancer on December 12. Galanter has authored (or coauthored with collaborator Greg Brodeur) such Star Trek projects as Voyager: Battle Lines, the Next Generation duology Maximum Warp, The Original Series novels Crisis of Consciousness and Troublesome Minds, and numerous works of short Star Trek fiction.
“John le Carre has passed at the age of 89. This terrible year has claimed a literary giant and a humanitarian spirit,” tweeted novelist Stephen King. Margaret Atwood said: “Very sorry to hear this. His Smiley novels are key to understanding the mid-20th century.”
…After university, which was interrupted by his father’s bankruptcy, he taught at the prestigious boarding school Eton before joining the foreign service.
Officially a diplomat, he was in fact a “lowly” operative with the domestic intelligence service MI5 —he’d started as a student at Oxford — and then its overseas counterpart MI6, serving in Germany, on the Cold War front line, under the cover of second secretary at the British Embassy.
His first three novels were written while he was a spy, and his employers required him to publish under a pseudonym. He remained “le Carre” for his entire career. He said he chose the name — square in French — simply because he liked the vaguely mysterious, European sound of it….
(11) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.
December 13, 2002 — On this date in 2002, Star Trek: Nemesis premiered. It directed by Stuart Baird and produced by Rick Berman from the screenplay by John Logan as developed from the story by John Logan, Rick Berman and Brent Spiner. It was the fourth and final film to feature the Next Generation cast. It received decidedly mixed reviews, was a full-blown box disaster but currently has a decent fifty percent rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes.
(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
Born December 13, 1909 – Alan Barclay. Five novels, two dozen shorter stories; essays “Interplanetary Navigation” in New Worlds SF, “The Bow” in SF Adventures. “The Scapegoat” is in New Worlds SF 105 which has this neato Sydney Jordan cover. (Died 1991) [JH]
Born December 13, 1923 – Faith Jaques. Six covers, eight interiors for us. Here is Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator and here is an interior. Here is “The Flirtation of Two Mice”. Outside our field I know her for this; and here are some Christmas Waits. (Died 1997) [JH]
Born December 13, 1929 — Christopher Plummer, 91. Let’s see… Does Rudyard Kipling in The Man Who Would Be King count? If not, The Return of the Pink Panther does. That was followed by Starcrash, a space opera I suspect hardly anyone saw which was also the case with Somewhere in Time. Now Dreamscape was fun and well received. Skipping now to General Chang in Star Trek:The Undiscovered Country. Opinions everyone? I know I’ve mixed feelings on Chang. I see he’s in Twelve Monkeys which I’m not a fan of and I’ve not seen The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus yet. (CE)
Born December 13, 1940 – Ken Mitchell, age 80. Co-founded the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild and the S Playwrights Center. A novel, a shorter story, two covers for us (here is The Tomorrow Connection); six other novels, a dozen plays. Retired from the Univ. Regina English Department, tours as a cowboy poet. Order of Canada. Saskatchewan Order of Merit. [JH]
Born December 13, 1945 – Drew Mendelson, age 75. Two novels, half a dozen shorter stories. Maybe Cora Buhlert can explain why “Once I Built a Railroad” was translated as »Einst baute ich eine Eisenbahn« which means Once I built a railroad but Pilgrimage was translated as Die vergessenen Zonen der Stadt which isn’t a bad title for it but doesn’t mean Pilgrimage. [JH]
Born December 13, 1949 — R.A. MacAvoy, 71. Winner of the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. I’m very, very fond of her Black Dragon series, Tea with the Black Dragon and Twisting the Rope. The only other thing I’ve read of hers is The Book of Kells so, do tell me about her other works. (CE)
Born December 13, 1954 — Tamora Pierce, 66. Her first book series, The Song of the Lioness, took her character Alanna through the trials of training as a knight; it sold very well and was well received by readers. She would win in 2005 the Edward E. Smith Memorial Award for Imaginative Fiction, a rare honor indeed. (CE)
Born December 13, 1954 — Emma Bull, 66. Writer of three of the best genre novels ever, Bone Dance: A Fantasy for Technophiles, Finder: A Novel of The Borderlands and War for The Oaks. Will Shetterly, her husband and author of a lot of really cool genre works, decided to make a trailer which you can download if you want. Just ask me. She’s also been in in a number of neat bands, one that has genre significance that being Cat Laughing which has Stephen Brust, Adam Stemple, son of Jane Yolen, and John M. Ford either as musicians or lyricists. They came back together after a long hiatus at MiniCon 50. Again just ask me and I’ll make this music available along with that of Flash Girls which she was also in. (CE)
Born December 13, 1960 – José Eduardo Agalusa Alves da Cunha, age 60. (Agalusa the maternal, Alves da Cunha the paternal surname, Portuguese style.) Two novels for us: The Society of Reluctant Dreamers just appeared in English, 2019; The Book of Chameleons won the Independent Foreign Fiction prize); a dozen others, shorter stories, plays, poetry, journalism, radio. Int’l Dublin Literary Award. [JH]
Born December 13, 1969 — Tony Curran, 51. Vincent van Gogh in two Eleventh Doctor stories, “Vincent and the Doctor” and “The Pandorica Opens”, the latter as a cameo. He’s had vampire roles in Blade II as Priest and Underworld: Evolution as Markus, and was Lt. Delcourt in The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn to name but a few of his myriad genre roles. (CE)
Born December 13, 1978 – Lee Isserow, age 42. A score of novels, a dozen shorter stories for us; screenwriting; and the terrifying ABAM project, which means – yes – A Book A Month. Has read not only Breakfast of Champions but The Master and Margarita. [JH]
Born December 13, 1984 — Amal El-Mohtar, 36. Canadian editor and writer. Winner of Hugo Awards for Best Short Story for “Seasons of Glass and Iron” at WorldCon 75 and Best Novella for “This Is How You Lose the Time War” at CoNZealand (with Max Gladstone). (The latter got a BSFA and a Nebula as well.) She’s also garnered a Nebula Award for “Madeleine“, a World Fantasy Award for “Pockets” and a World Fantasy Award for “Seasons of Glass and Iron”. Impressive. She has edited the fantastic poetry quarterly Goblin Fruit magazine for the past four years. (CE)
(13) COMICS SECTION.
In The Far Side, it looks like the coroner’s office has already picked up this extra sized decedent.
And in another entry of The Far Side, they also walk dogs.
(14) IMAGINARY GIFT SHOP. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] The Washington Post had a short feature where they asked writers to “dream up the presents that they’d love to parcel out this year but don’t exist.” Ken Liu says he wants a phone-sized device he can point at tweeters to see whether they are arguing in good faith or just being a troll. Ted Chiang says he wished the Web had evolved into a subscription-based servie where people paid for sites they visited with money instead of personal data. “A guide to gifts that don’t exist but should”.
It’s that time of the year when the nights grow long, the air grows cold, the festive lights go up and the year’s best books lists are sprouting like mushrooms after the rain. But will any of them help you find that perfect book-gift for your friends who love science fiction, fantasy and horror? If not, we’re here to help….
The issue that had been bugging me was the inconsistent way of travelling between planets. In the films but also in The Mandalorian (less so in cartoons), characters fly in space ships between planets in two ways:
… Chesterton’s applied his penchant for logic in this article on “Santa Claus.” Along with providing a short history of the figure of Santa Claus in popular culture (particularly his origins, as the gift-wielding St. Nicholas of Bari in Medieval iconography), Chesterton offered a simple proposition: that a child’s ultimately ceasing to believe in Santa Claus, justified by the fact that Santa Claus is not real, is a precursor to that child’s ceasing to believe in God. And this, Chesterton explained, was a terrible phenomenon.
And then he admitted a surprising detail: “I startled some honest Protestants lately by telling them that, though I am (unfortunately) no longer a child, I do most definitely believe in Santa Claus.”
Elaborating on this decidedly ‘hot take,’ Chesterton stressed that he felt it was critical for children to believe in Santa Claus even after Santa Claus has been debunked as a real, flesh-and-blood man, because the Santa Claus that children know is ultimately a caricature of an actual saint; just because, Chesterton argued, he is not real to their eyes does not mean that he is not a genuine, spiritual entity….
What happens when you’re kidnapped from your family, tortured, and conditioned into being an assassin? You get River Tam. And also Alan, apparently. Therapist Jonathan Decker and filmmaker Alan Seawright discuss what we can learn about coping with trauma from Summer Glau’s character River in Serenity and Firefly. They break down some of the symptoms of PTSD she exhibits, and some of the things that help her work through them and start healing. Even though most of us don’t live in a sci-fi future with space ships, space zombies, and space cowboys (along with psychics and lots of other fun), we can still learn a thing or two about how to heal from and deal with the trauma we do face in real life.
(19) ZOOMING THROUGH FANHISTORY. Fanac.org is planning a series of Zoom Interactive Fan History Sessions.
For our first session, Rob Hansen is going to give us an historic tour of fannish Holborn, London. Rob is probably the most accomplished fan historian writing these days. As most of you know, he has written the history of British fandom, Then and has put together a number of books covering various aspects of British fandom. Find many of them here. Reserve the date: Saturday, December 19, 2020 at 11AM EDT.
Despite the pandemic, Rob has done video recordings around London, and with historic photos and live description will give us a tour that covers some household fannish names and places. He has worked with Edie [Stern] over the past several months to provide an interesting and fairly detailed coverage of London’s fan heritage. This one-hour session is based on tours which Rob has given to individual fans and also developed as a group tour after the last London Worldcon. Even if you have been on one of these tours, you will find some fresh sights and insights. Of course, Rob will be live on Zoom with additional material and to answer questions. Please send your RSVP to [email protected] as our Zoom service is limited to 100 participants.
(20) BEYOND INFINITY. Disney+ dropped a trailer for What if….? an alternate-universe animated series.
(21) MARTIANS AT THE NEW YORK TIMES. [Item by David Goldfarb.] The New York Times puzzle page has a game called “Letter Boxed”, in which you make words out of letters arranged around a square. The idea is to use all the letters with as few words as possible: there is always a two-word solution. The two-word solution for Saturday 12/12 was “Visualizing – Grok”.
(22) EDUCATE YOURSELF. Ursula Vernon ladles out more life experience. Thread starts here.
So here is a lengthy tale of the single most spectacular loss of consciousness I have personally witnessed, in my misspent youth, lo these many years past. https://t.co/4ruxYOs1Ua
It’s one small step for insects, eight steps for spider-kind.
“Arachnauts” flown to the ISS have revealed their secret backup plan when they can’t use gravity to figure out where they are when spinning their webs. Earth’s gravity is what normally helps them make a web optimal for catching dinner—and position themselves in it. Lamps accidentally placed above the spider experiment showed that when the arachnids lose their orientation in microgravity, they use light to find their way again….
(24) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “Hulk (2003) Pitch Meeting” on Screen Rant, Ryan George says that people who watched the 2003 Hulk expecting that Hulk would smash things will be disappointed by the first 45 minutes, which consist of nothing but brooding and that few people will be excited by the scenes where Hulk beats up a Hulkified French poodle.
[Thanks to Jim Henley, David Goldfarb, Martin Morse Wooster, John Hertz, John King Tarpinian, Contrarius, JJ, Cat Eldridge, Michael Toman, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Bill.]
Nino Cipri of Chicago has received the 2014 Working Class Grant from the Speculative Literature Foundation (SLF). The $750 award can be applied by the writer for any purpose that benefits their work.
A 2014 graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop, Nino’s speculative fiction has been, or will shortly be, published by Tor.com, Fireside Fiction, Betwtixt, Daily Science Fiction, the Journal of Unlikely Entomology, and the Eunoia Review. Nino also reads submissions for Crossed Genres Magazine, and has authored book reviews for Strange Horizons and the Future Fire.
Currently a part-time mechanic at Divvy, Chicago’s public bicycle transit company, Nino grew up in a working class family that struggled with poverty.
About Nino’s story submitted for award consideration, “The Shape of My Name,” jurors said, “This is a very original story, with an unusual take on time travel as well as gender and transgender issues . . . . pitch perfect. Very polished and potent.”
Jurors for the 2014 Working Class Grant include Linda Wight, Samuel Montgomery-Blinn, Rebecca Gibson, Andrea Hull, Jim Frenkel, Michael Lowrey, James Nicoll, Irene Nexica, Jake Casella, Fateh Singh, and Malon Edwards, Managing Director and Grants Administrator for the Foundation.
