Pixel Scroll 3/18/23 Pixel’s Cat, Neither Scrolling Nor Not Scrolling, You Decide

(1) DE LINT AND HARRIS STILL NEED SUPPORT. The Ottawa Citizen profiled MaryAnn Harris’s illness and fundraiser in “A tick bite, the Powassan virus, and MaryAnn’s struggle”.

… “They didn’t know what was wrong,” said Charles, a popular author of fantasy novels, a three-time Aurora Award winner, and a member of Canada’s Science Fiction Writers Hall of Fame. “They assumed it was a virus of some sort. It looked like they had 70 little machines feeding her different kinds of antibiotics.”

Today, more than a year and a half after falling ill, MaryAnn hasn’t been back home. She still breathes with a ventilator and remains nearly paralyzed.

The culprit? A tick bite that transmitted the rare but increasingly common Powassan virus, a potentially deadly pathogen that caused encephalitis.

“We were never aware of the bite. We never even saw the tick,” Charles said. MaryAnn fell ill during the lockdown and the couple hadn’t travelled anywhere.

They figure she picked up the tick bite either in the yard of their Alta Vista area home or during one of their frequent walks around the community gardens in Pleasant Park. And it’s hardly the only question that can never be answered.

“If she was going to get sick,” Charles asks, “why did it have to be something so rare?”

Powassan virus was first identified in 1958 when it infected and killed a young boy in Powassan, Ont., on the outskirts of North Bay, 200 km northwest of Ottawa. Until 1998, there had been only 27 cases in all of North America. Since then, the numbers have been rising: 5-10 cases a year in the U.S. from 2010 to 2015; and 25-30 a year since. Since 2017, there have been 21 cases in Canada. Most infections occur in the northeastern U.S., Eastern Canada and the Great Lakes region.

…The couple — Charles is 71 and MaryAnn is 70 — have been together for 47 years and married for 42. With their guitar and banjo, they are well-known in Ottawa’s folk and bluegrass music scene.Charles’s novels, many of them set in the fantasy city of Newford, have a worldwide following. MaryAnn is his business manager, editor and illustrator. Her illness has left Charles with little time to write since he now spends five hours a day at Saint-Vincent Hospital, six days a week. He pays for a caregiver on the seventh.

Friends, family and fans have rallied around the couple. Musicians have visited the hospital to play for MaryAnn. A GoFundMe started to help pay for the many expenses they now face has topped $90,000. Fans have also subscribed to Charles’s Patreon account to help support his writing.

One fan, Julie Bartel, manages the GoFundMe and posts regular updates on MaryAnn’s progress on social media. Bartel, 52, grew up in tiny Orem, Utah, and as a teenager immersed herself in Charles’s fantasy novels….

The GoFundMe is here: “Harris – de Lint Recovery Fund”.

See also Julie Bartel’s File 770 post “More Information About the Harris / de Lint Fundraiser”.

(2) DOUBLE THE DISPLEASURE. Victoria Strauss gets busy in “One Week, Two Fakes: American Booksellers Federation and The Acquisitions Guild” at Writer Beware.

As you’ll know if you’re a regular reader of this blog (and from your own experience if you’ve ever self-published), we are currently in the midst of a tsunami of scam companies that aggressively solicit authors with out-of-the-blue emails and phone calls touting phony services–“endorsement” to Big 5 publishers or major film studios, “nominations” for representation at book fairs or other costly-but-useless PR strategies, and more.

These ripoff artists often seek to boost their credibility–and stroke writers’ egos–by naming some made-up organization or group that has recommended or otherwise validated the author’s book. The Guild of Literary Agents, Book Acquisitions Guild of America, Book Acquisition Society, The Literary Arts Organization, Affiliation of Creator Agents, Hollywood Database, Literary Review of Books…I could go on, but you get the picture. Despite the official-sounding names, none of these so-called organizations (which I’ve seen referenced in multiple scam solicitations) exist–as even a cursory websearch will confirm.

Scammers, of course, are counting on writers not to check. But writers have become much more savvy about solicitation scams than they used to be–partly because there are now so many of them, and partly because there are so many warnings about them. This has caused some predators to up their game, attempting to create credibility for their made-up endorsement organizations by giving them actual websites.

I ran across two of these this week….

They are the American Booksellers Federation and The Acquisitions Guild.

(3) ROWLING INTERVIEW PODCAST CONTINUES. The Hollywood Reporter covers episode 5 of The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling podcast under the headline “J.K. Rowling: Criticism of Trans Stance Hit Different Than Christians”.

J.K. Rowling says that when it comes to the backlash she’s received around her Harry Potter books and her personal stances on the rights and identities of trans people, criticism from her “allies” hit differently than conservatives claiming she was promoting witchcraft.

“If it’s coming from people that you would, well, you would have thought were allies? Yes, that’s absolutely going to hit differently, but I don’t hold myself —” Rowling said before The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling host Megan Phelps-Roper cut her off in the podcast’s latest episode. “I would assume we share certain values. So yeah, that hits differently. Of course, it hits differently.”…

The podcast’s fifth episode, titled “The Tweets,” dropped March 14 and is largely dedicated to Rowling expounding on the motivation behind her past social media messages and essay regarding her position on trans women as women and their presence in women’s spaces.

“It is very biblical language that is used of women who say, ‘You know what? I think any measure that makes it easier for predators to get at women and girls is a bad idea,’” Rowling said of critics, who have said her refusal to acknowledge trans women as women is “evil.” She continued, “There are plenty of women who don’t even … identify themselves as feminists who are very concerned about this.”

During the episode, various voices, including Phelps-Roper, repeatedly read unattributed tweets allegedly sent to Rowling. But speaking to her own initial tweet in 2019, which ultimately sparked the first major wave of criticism against the author over her support of a U.K. woman embroiled in an employment case around language and discrimination in the workplace, Rowling said she notified her team ahead of time.

“I drafted the tweet, and then I was considerate enough to phone my management team and say, ‘You cannot argue me out of this,’” the author explained. “And I read out what I was about to say because I felt they needed warning because I knew it was going to cause a massive storm.”

At another point, she added that she “absolutely knew” that people who love her books would be “deeply unhappy” with her, but that “time will tell whether I’ve got this wrong. I can only say that I’ve thought about it deeply and hard and long, and I’ve listened — I promise — to the other side.”

On the larger response to her public stances, the author describes “fury and incomprehension” on one side and “a ton of Potter fans who were grateful that I had said what I said” on the other after sharing her first and subsequent tweets. But Rowling ultimately questions the motivations of the Harry Potter fans who didn’t stick by her. “What’s interesting is the fans that have found themselves in positions of power online, did they feel they needed to take this position because they themselves had followers? Possibly, I don’t know,” she said….

(4) THESE FANS LITERALLY KEEP WATCHING THE SKIES. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] In Nature, “Fan astronomers show pros how to help in asteroid collision”. “Astronomy, like other scientific fields, continues to benefit from working scientists collaborating with amateur colleagues.”

When NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft slammed into an asteroid on purpose last September, many telescopes were trained on this one-of-a-kind celestial event. Some were operated by teams of amateur astronomers — skilled skywatchers for whom astronomy is not their full-time day job (or, more accurately, night job). Three such teams on France’s Réunion island in the Indian Ocean, plus one in Nairobi, managed to watch the impact in real time.

These skywatchers are among the authors of a study in Nature that describes how the asteroid, named Dimorphos, became temporarily brighter and redder as the spacecraft hit it. One of five papers about the impact published in Nature15, it describes a real-time view of a cosmic collision — similar to that when Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 slammed into Jupiter in July 1994.

(5) JERRY SAMUELS (1938-2023). Singer Jerry Samuels, died March 10. Under the name Napoleon XIV, he recorded the 1966 novelty hit “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!” Listeners to Doctor Demento are likely familiar with it.

(6) MEMORY LANE.

2018[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

For these Beginnings I usually prefer to use the first novel in a series, so why use the twenty-first of twenty-three novels published to date? 

Because RobicheauxA Novel, published by Simon & Schuster five years ago, thirty-one years after the first novel by James Lee Burke in the series, The Neon Rain, came out, has one of the best Beginnings of all. 

It won’t spoil much to tell you that the series center around Dave Robicheaux, a former homicide detective in the New Orleans Police Department. He now lives in New Iberia, Louisiana, and he works as a detective for the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Office.

I’ve read around half the books so far. It’s a quite brilliant series where the characters, both principal and secondary, continue to evolve as the series goes on, the stories are complex if usually quite violent and not for the squeamish. And the setting? The story goes often into the squalid side of New Orleans and other places just as disgusting. Need I say more? 

Oh, and Will Patton narrates the series quite amazingly in terms of giving each character their own unique voice. If you listen to books, you’ll really enjoy these.

Now here’s our very interesting Beginning…

LIKE AN EARLY nineteenth-century poet, when I have melancholy moments and feel the world is too much for us and that late and soon we lay waste to our powers in getting and spending, I’m forced to pause and reflect upon my experiences with the dead and the hold they exert on our lives.

This may seem a macabre perspective on one’s life, but at a certain point it seems to be the only one we have. Mortality is not kind, and do not let anyone tell you it is. If there is such a thing as wisdom, and I have serious doubts about its presence in my own life, it lies in the acceptance of the human condition and perhaps the knowledge that those who have passed on are still with us, out there in the mist, showing us the way, sometimes uttering a word of caution from the shadows, sometimes visiting us in our sleep, as bright as a candle burning inside a basement that has no windows. 

On a winter morning, among white clouds of fog out at Spanish Lake, I would see the boys in butternut splashing their way through the flooded cypress, their muskets held above their heads, their equipment tied with rags so it wouldn’t rattle. I was standing no more than ten feet from them, although they took no notice of me, as though they knew I had not been born yet, and their travail and sacrifice were not mine to bear. 

Their faces were lean from privation, as pale as wax, their hair uncut, the rents in their uniforms stitched clumsily with string. Their mouths were pinched, their eyes luminous with caution. The youngest soldier, a drummer boy, could not have been older than twelve. On one occasion I stepped into the water to join them. Even then, none acknowledged my presence. The drummer boy stumbled and couldn’t right himself, struggling with the leather strap around his neck and the weight of his drum. I reached out to help him and felt my hand and arm sink through his shoulder. A shaft of sunlight pierced the canopy, turning the fog into white silk; in less than a second the column was gone. 

Long ago, I ceased trying to explain events such as these to either myself or others. Like many my age, I believe people in groups are to be feared and that arguing with others is folly and the knowledge of one generation cannot be passed down to the next. Those may seem cynical sentiments, but there are certain truths you keep inside you and do not defend lest you cheapen and then lose them altogether. Those truths have less to do with the dead than the awareness that we are no different from them, that they are still with us and we are still with them, and there is no afterlife but only one life, a continuum in which all time occurs at once, like a dream inside the mind of God. 

Why should an old man thrice widowed dwell on things that are not demonstrable and have nothing to do with a reasonable view of the world? Because only yesterday, on a broken sidewalk in a shabby neighborhood at the bottom of St. Claude Avenue, in the Lower Ninth Ward of St. Bernard Parish, under a colonnade that was still twisted out of shape by Katrina, across from a liquor store with barred windows that stood under a live oak probably two hundred years old, I saw a platoon of Confederate infantry march out of a field to the tune of “Darling Nelly Gray” and disappear through the wall of a gutted building and not exit on the other side.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born March 18, 1888 Alexander Leydenfrost. As an illustrator, he briefly worked for Planet Stories before being signed by Life magazine where the money was better. But his quite brief tenure at Planet Stories is credited with the creation of the enduring cliche Bug-Eyed Monster as that’s what his illustrations showed. (Died 1961.)
  • Born March 18, 1926 Peter Graves. Star of Mission Impossible and the short lived Australian-filmed Mission Impossible which if you’ve not seen it you should as it’s damn good. I’m reasonably certain his first genre role was on Red Planet Mars playing Chris Cronyn. Later roles included Gavin Lewis on The Invaders, Major Noah Cooper on Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Doug Paul Martin in Killers from Space and Paul Nelson on It Conquered the World. It’s worth noting that a number of his films are featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000 series. (Died 2010.)
  • Born March 18, 1932 John Updike. It might surprise you to learn that there are two Eastwick novels, The Witches of Eastwick and The Widows of Eastwick, the latter set some three decades after the first novel ended. He wrote a number of other genre-friendly novels including The Centaur, Brazil and Toward the End of Time.  (Died 2009.)
  • Born March 18, 1947 Drew Struzan, 76. Artist known for his more than a hundred and fifty movie posters which include films in Back to the Future, the Indiana Jones, and Star Wars film franchises. In addition, he designed the original Industrial Light & Magic logo for Lucas. My favorite posters? Back to the FutureThe Goonies and The Dark Crystal.
  • Born March 18, 1950 J. G. Hertzler, 73. He’s best known for his role on Deep Space Nine as the Klingon General (and later Chancellor) Martok. He co-authored with Jeff Lang, Left Hand of Destiny, Book 1, and Left Hand of Destiny, Book 2, which chronicle the life of his character. His very TV first role was a genre one, to wit on Quantum Leap as Weathers Farrington in the “Sea Bride – June 3, 1954” episode. Setting aside DS9, he’s been in ZorroHighlanderThe Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of SupermanCharmedRoswell and the Enterprise series;  for film genre work, I see The Redeemer: Son of SatanTreasure Island: The Adventure Begins and Prelude to Axanar (yet another piece of fanfic). In addition, he’s done a lot of video game voice acting, the obvious Trek work but such franchises as BioShock 2The Golden Compass and Injustice: Gods Among Us. 
  • Born March 18, 1959 Luc Besson, 64. Oh, The Fifth Element, one of my favorite genre films. There’s nothing about it that I don’t like. I’ve not seen Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets and comments leave me disinclined to do so. The Transporter is not genre but I recommend it as a great film none the less.
  • Born March 18, 1960 Richard Biggs. Another way too young death. On Babylon 5 as he appeared as Dr. Stephen Franklin, and reprised the role in the final aired episode of Crusade, “Each Night I Dream of Home”. Other genre roles included playing Roger Garrett on Tremors, Hawkes In The Alien Within, An Unnamed Reporter on Beauty and the Beast, Dr. Thomson on an episode of The Twilight Zone and a Process Server in an episode of The Magical World of Disney. (Died 2004.)
  • Born March 18, 1961 James Davis Nicoll, 62. A freelance game and genre reviewer. A first reader for SFBC as well. Currently he’s a blogger on Dreamwidth and Facebook, and an occasional columnist on Tor.com. In 2014, he started his website, which is dedicated to his book reviews of works old and new; and which later added the highly entertaining Young People Read Old SFF, where that group read prior to Eighties SF and fantasy, and Nicoll and his collaborators comment on the their reactions.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

  • Tom Gauld is at it again.

(9) FALLING BEHIND. The New York Times reports on “How Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant Lost the A.I. Race”.

On a rainy Tuesday in San Francisco, Apple executives took the stage in a crowded auditorium to unveil the fifth-generation iPhone. The phone, which looked identical to the previous version, had a new feature that the audience was soon buzzing about: Siri, a virtual assistant.

Scott Forstall, then Apple’s head of software, pushed an iPhone button to summon Siri and prodded it with questions. At his request, Siri checked the time in Paris (“8:16 p.m.,” Siri replied), defined the word “mitosis” (“Cell division in which the nucleus divides into nuclei containing the same number of chromosomes,” it said) and pulled up a list of 14 highly rated Greek restaurants, five of them in Palo Alto, Calif.

“I’ve been in the A.I. field for a long time, and this still blows me away,” Mr. Forstall said.

That was 12 years ago. Since then, people have been far from blown away by Siri and competing assistants that are powered by artificial intelligence, like Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant. The technology has largely remained stagnant, and the talking assistants have become the butt of jokes, including in a 2018 “Saturday Night Live” sketch featuring a smart speaker for seniors.

The tech world is now gushing over a different kind of virtual assistant: chatbots. These A.I.-powered bots, such as ChatGPT and the new ChatGPT Plus from the San Francisco company OpenAI, can improvise answers to questions typed into a chat box with alacrity. People have used ChatGPT to handle complex tasks like coding software, drafting business proposals and writing fiction.

And ChatGPT, which uses A.I. to guess what word comes next, is rapidly improving. A few months ago, it couldn’t write a proper haiku; now it can do so with gusto. On Tuesday, OpenAI unveiled its next-generation A.I. engine, GPT-4, which powers ChatGPT.

The excitement around chatbots illustrates how Siri, Alexa and other voice assistants — which once elicited similar enthusiasm — have squandered their lead in the A.I. race….

(10) STAR TREK INSIGHTS. Rachel Stott is on to something here.

(11) VIDEO OF THE DAY. The Library of America’s panel “Back to the Future Is Female!” can now be viewed on YouTube.

From Pulp Era pioneers to the radical innovators of the 1960s and ’70s, visionary women writers have been a transformative force in American science fiction. For Women’s History Month, acclaimed SF authors Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Pamela Sargent, and Sheree Renée Thomas join Lisa Yaszek, editor of LOA’s The Future Is Female!, for a conversation about the writers who smashed the genre’s gender barrier to create worlds and works that remain revolutionary.

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

Pixel Scroll 4/23/19 Le Pixel Sur Le Faire Défiler

(1) SIGN UP AND LINE UP. LAist says “You Can Reserve Star Wars Land Tickets At Disneyland Starting Next Week”.

Crowds are expected to be intense for Disneyland’s new section of the park, Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge. The company announced that you’ll need reservations (at least at first) to take this particular intergalactic journey. Now they’ve released details on just how and when you can score those reservations.

Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, aka Batuu, aka Black Spire Outpost, aka Star Wars Land opens Friday, May 31, and reservations open on May 2 — a week from Thursday. The reservations are free and are currently required to get into Galaxy’s Edge between opening day and Sunday, June 23.

Those reservations open May 2 at 10 a.m., and the park promises that full details on how to make those reservations will be released that morning at 8 a.m. You’ll be able to get those specifics via the Disney Parks Blog and Disneyland.com.

But “First visitors to Disney’s Star Wars land will get just four hours to see it all” warns the Los Angeles Times.

The opening of the 14-acre land is expected to create such a crush of fans that Disneyland engineers and landscapers have been working for several months to come up with ways to widen walkways and improve queueing systems to accommodate more visitors.

Disneyland managers announced last month that the efforts to ease congestion included removing several smoking areas from the resort and banning extra wide strollers by May 1.

The new land, which will resemble an out-of-the-way outpost on the planet Batuu, will feature two rides, four eateries, one space-themed cantina and five retail shops.

Only one of the two rides in the land — the interactive Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run — will operate when the land opens. The second attraction in the new land — Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance — will open later in the year.

(2) THEY DO NOT LIKE IT. The Guardian reports: “Tolkien estate disavows forthcoming film starring Nicholas Hoult”.

On Tuesday morning, the estate and family of Tolkien issued a terse statement in which they announced their “wish to make clear that they did not approve of, authorise or participate in the making of this film”, and that “they do not endorse it or its content in any way”.

A spokesperson for the estate told the Guardian that the statement was intended to make its position clear, rather than heralding future legal action.

John Garth, author of the biography Tolkien and the Great War, said he felt the estate’s response to the film was “sensible”.

“Biopics typically take considerable licence with the facts, and this one is no exception. Endorsement by the Tolkien family would lend credibility to any divergences and distortions. That would be a disservice to history,” he said. “As a biographer, I expect I’ll be busy correcting new misconceptions arising from the movie. I hope that anyone who enjoys the film and is interested in Tolkien’s formative years will pick up a reliable biography.”

(3) STOKERCON. StokerCon 2019 chair Brian W. Matthews wrote a stronger-than-average post about the convention’s antiharassment policy: “A Fellowship of Respect”.

…Reports of harassment at StokerCon™ 2019 will be followed up by the convention chairs, Lisa Morton and Brian Matthews. Anyone found to have violated these rules may be sanctioned, up to and including expulsion from the convention without refund, and if warranted, involvement of the Grand Rapids Police.

It pains me to have to state the obvious, let alone make it the subject of a blog post, but harassment exists, and it will not be tolerated. No one should be subjected to uncomfortable or unwanted attention. Ever. As a community, we understand horror. We write about it all the time. Protagonists. Antagonists. Good people put into terrible situations. Bad people out to cause harm. We live inside the heads of these characters. Frightened? Threatened? The feeling that you want to throw up? We get it.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but when it comes to StokerCon™ 2019, don’t be the villain. 

Be the hero.

(4) RETURN TO THE HAGUE. Reunicon 2020, the 30th anniversary celebration of ConFiction 1990, is building increasingly detailed memory webpages to attract prospective attendees.

It all started with a phone call from a fan in New York way back in 1984. Then it took three years of bidding to win the race in Brighton in 1987. Another three long years to make ConFiction1990 a fact in The Hague, the second World Science Fiction Convention on the continent of Europe.

We have created this website and social media avenues to preserve the past for the future and… to promote our intended Reunicon 2020 to commemorate 30 years after ConFiction 1990.

We look forward hearing from you or seeing you in 2020 in The Hague and till then, enjoy the memories we wish to like and follow or share with you all ConFiction1990.

(5) LEGO CATHEDRAL. In the Washington Post, Marylou Tousignant says the Washington National Cathedral, as a fundraiser, is building a Lego version of itself that will ultimately be 500,00 bricks in total.  Visitors can buy bricks for $2 and put them on the cathedral.  The project is patterned after a similar project at the Durham Cathedral in England. “At Washington National Cathedral, another church is rising — out of 500,000 Legos”.  

The website is cathedral.org/lego.

(6) LEARNING FROM TINGLE. Professor Sarah Uckelman (Durham University) tweeted the following from a seminar on “Computational Creativity Meets Digital Literary Studies.”

Access “DeepTingle” [PDF] here.

(7) ELLISON CALLBACK. Dwight Garner’s review in the New York Times “In Ian McEwan’s Latest, a Ménage à Trois — Software Included” – touches on some authors’ genre/not genre antagonism:

This touchiness runs in both directions. Who can forget Harlan Ellison’s obituary last year in this newspaper, in which he was quoted as saying: “Call me a science fiction writer. I’ll come to your house and I’ll nail your pet’s head to a coffee table. I’ll hit you so hard your ancestors will die.”

(8) AVENUE 5. Slate praises the casting of a forthcoming HBO sff series: “HBO Orders Armando Iannucci’s New Hugh Laurie Outer Space Tourism Comedy Avenue 5 to Series”

Iannucci’s verbally dazzling style of comedy often revolves around forcing characters who hate each other to be stuck in the same room, No Exit-style—meetings, plane flights, more meetings—and then letting them insult each other as elaborately and obscenely as possible. And “on a cruise ship surrounded by the deadly vacuum of outer space” is the most “stuck in the same room with people I loathe” that it’s theoretically possible for a character to achieve, so expect fireworks.

The cast also sounds exceptional: Hugh Laurie, who’s been killing it on Veep, will star as the captain of the space cruise ship Avenue 5. The Book of Mormon’s Josh Gad will play an egocentric billionaire who runs hotels and health clubs and the cruise ship Avenue 5; Suzy Nakamura from Dr. Ken will play his right hand woman. Gad’s other employees include Zach Woods from Silicon Valley as the ship’s head of customer service, Nikki Amuka-Bird as the head of mission control on Earth, and Lenora Crichlow as the ship’s second engineer. The Thick of It’s Rebecca Front will play one of the passengers. Best of all, judging from character description alone, is that Star Trek: Voyager  alum Ethan Phillips will play Spike Martin, a hard-drinking former astronaut who falsely claims to have been “the first Canadian to land on Mars.”

(9) MCINTYRE MEMORIAL. Announced on CaringBridge: Vonda N. McIntyre’s memorial will be held Sunday afternoon on June 9 at The Mountaineers Goodman Auditorium at 7700 Sand Point Way NE in Seattle, Washington. Doors will open at 1:45, an event will start at 2:30, and the memorial will end at 4:30pm.

(10) MCGOVERN OBIT. Guy H. Lillian III reports:“Tom McGovern, a long-term member of the Southern Fandom Press Alliance, whose article on leaving the Jehovah’s Witnesses made a strong article for my genzine Challenger, apparently died of cancer April 21 or 22.”

(11) TRIVIAL TRIVIA.

Several theories exist about the question mark’s origins but the most widely accepted version is that Alcuin of York, an English scholar and poet born in 735 and a member of Charlemagne’s court, created it. Originally named the “punctus interrogativus” or “point of interrogation,” this mark was a dot with a symbol resembling a tilde or lightning bolt above it, to represent the rise in pitch when a person asks a question. But it wasn’t until the mid-19th Century that it was first referred to as a “question mark.”

Source: Oxford English Dictionary

(12) TODAY’S DAY

April 23: World Book and Copyright Day. Pays tribute to authors and books and their social and cultural contribution to the world

(13) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born April 23, 1879 Talbot Mundy. English-born, but based for most of his life in the United States, he also wrote under the pseudonym of Walter Galt. Best known as the author of King of the Khyber Rifles which is not really genre and the Jimgrim series which is genre, much of his work was published in pulp magazines. (Died 1940.)
  • 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 were the like as The Phoenix and the Mirror or, The Enigmatic Speculum. (Died 1993.)
  • Born April 23, 1935 Tom Doherty, 84. Once publisher of Ace Books who left that in 1980 to found Tor Books. Tor became a subsidiary of St. Martin’s Press in 1987; it became part of the Holtzbrinck group, now part of Macmillan in the U.S. Doherty was awarded a World Fantasy Award in the Lifetime Achievement category at the 2005 World Fantasy Convention for his contributions to the fantasy field.
  • Born April 23, 1946 Blair Brown, 73. 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 was Kate Durning on Elementary.
  • Born April 23, 1956 Caroline Thompson, 63. 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
  • Born April 23, 1973 Naomi Kritzer, 46. Her 2015 short story “Cat Pictures Please” was a Locus Award and Hugo Award winner and was nominated for a Nebula Award. Ok, I’m impressed. Indeed, I just went and purchased Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories on iBooks so I could read it. So what else by her should I read? 
  • Born April 23, 1976 Gabriel Damon, 43. Remember Hob, the smart wise assed villain in Robocop 2? Well this is the actor who played him at the age of thirteen years old! I see he also was on Star Trek: Next Generation inThe Bonding” episode as Jeremy Aster, and on Amazing Stories in their “Santa ’85” episode as Bobby Mynes. 

(14) COMICS SECTION.

(15) BODILY EXPERIENCES. Ursula Vernon, suffering from some typical traveler’s ailments, has been receiving unsolicited medical advice. One friend suggested leeches. Another said —

(16) THROUGH THE YEARS. Standback recommends a project to Filers —

In Jewish tradition, we count each day of the seven weeks between Passover and Pentecost; 49 days. Sefer Ha’omer is posting a historical SF/F book review every day of the counting — reviewing a 1901 book on Day 1, a 1902 book on Day 2, and so on.

I’ve read some of the essays and really enjoyed them — and I like the historical literature tour, and the selection of lesser-known works by classic authors

Today is Day 4 of the Omer, and here’s the essay for H.G. Wells’ “The Food of the Gods and How It Came To Earth”.

Here’s the project’s Facebook page (2 daily posts, English and Hebrew).

(17) SF MILESTONES. James Davis Nicoll delivers “A Brief History of Pamela Sargent’s Women of Wonder Anthologies” at Tor.com.

…Sargent had been shopping the initial anthology around for several years without luck. Publishers generally felt the market for such an anthology would be small. She got a lucky break when Vonda N. McIntyre asked Vintage Books how it was that despite having done all-male anthologies, they’d never published an all-women one. Vintage was interested in the idea, provided that someone not on their staff did the editing. McIntyre introduced Sargent to the folks at Vintage and the rest is SF history.

(18) SIGNAL BOOST. “Parkinson’s results beyond researchers’ wildest dreams” – BBC has the story.

A treatment that has restored the movement of patients with chronic Parkinson’s disease has been developed by Canadian researchers.

Previously housebound patients are now able to walk more freely as a result of electrical stimulation to their spines.

A quarter of patients have difficulty walking as the disease wears on, often freezing on the spot and falling.

…Normal walking involves the brain sending instructions to the legs to move. It then receives signals back when the movement has been completed before sending instructions for the next step.

Prof Jog believes Parkinson’s disease reduces the signals coming back to the brain – breaking the loop and causing the patient to freeze.

The implant his team has developed boosts that signal, enabling the patient to walk normally.

However, Prof Jog was surprised that the treatment was long-lasting and worked even when the implant was turned off.

(19) NEW WAY TO LAUNCH SATELLITES. BBC video shows “New aircraft rises ‘like a balloon'”.

Researchers from the University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI) have helped create a revolutionary new type of aircraft.

Phoenix is an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) designed to stay in the air indefinitely using a new type of propulsion.

Despite being 15m (50ft) long with a mass of 120kg (19 stone) she rises gracefully into the air.

…As the project’s chief engineer, he has overseen the integration of Phoenix’s systems.

“It flies under its own propulsion although it has no engines,” he says.

“The central fuselage is filled with helium, which makes it buoyant so it can ascend like a balloon.

“And inside that there’s another bag with compressors on it that brings air from outside, compresses the air, which makes the aeroplane heavier and then it descends like a glider.”

…The point? To create a cheaper alternative to launching satellites.

…The oft-quoted rule of thumb in the space business is that putting a satellite into orbit costs its weight in gold.

(20) ELVES. BBC peeks “Inside the magical world of elves” .

Many people in Iceland believe in little hidden people – huldufólk – or elves. Or so surveys suggest. But do they really?

(21) THE YEAR AT THE UK BOX OFFICE. SF Concatenation has posted its “Science Fiction Films Top Ten Chart – 2018/19” – based on UK box office performance.

Remember, this is the UK public’s cinema theatre box office we are talking about, and not fantastic film buffs’ views. Consequently below this top ten we have included at the end a few other worthies well worth checking out as well as (in some years) some warnings-to-avoid. Also note that this chart compilation calculation did not include DVD sales or spin-off product earnings, and our chart is also subject to weekly vagaries.

(22) DC. Daniel Dern brings word that DC Universe upped its streaming library — now ~20,000 comics. (Marvel says they have 25,000 on theirs.) “Set eye balls to ‘glaze over’!” says Dern.

(23) INFINITY ROCKS. Avengers: Endgame Cast Sings “We Didn’t Start the Fire” on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.

The cast of Avengers: Endgame recaps the entire Marvel franchise by singing their own superhero version of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Heather Rose Jones, Alan Baumler, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Chip Hitchcock, Mike Kennedy, Cat Eldridge, Guy H. Lillian III, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Daniel Dern, Carl Slaughter, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]

Pixel Scroll 11/4/18 The Scrolled Fan and the Spree

(1) EDELMAN GOH SPEECH AT WFC44. World Fantasy Con GoH Scott Edelman has posted a video of his speech, which is a call for inclusiveness in many dimensions of conrunning and the sff community. Scott hired the ASL interpreter seen in the video at his own expense, reports Andy Duncan.

(2) ARISIA 2019 NEWS. Arisia Inc. announced that Bjo and John Trimble will remain as GoHs, as will artist Elizabeth Leggett, but not Daniel Older and Malka Older.

It is with respect and regret that we are confirming what Daniel Older reported in his social media; he and his sister, Malka Older will not be participating in Arisia 2019. We asked each guest to make the choice they felt most comfortable with, and Malka and Daniel let us know they could not participate as things stood.

Our Fan Guests of Honor, Bjo and John Trimble, have confirmed that they would like to continue to be our guests. Lastly, as we shared from her social media post earlier, Elizabeth Leggett will continue to be our Artist Guest of Honor.

On top of Arisia 2019’s other problems, their venue is one of seven Boston area Marriott hotels where workers are on strike, and Arisia leadership are creating contingency plans because they won’t hold the con there if the strike is still going on. An unofficial Facebook page published the text of the staff email on the subect:

We cannot hold a convention in a hotel that is striking. If the strike continues, we see two possible options, and are looking for your help to determine which one is best. We can either move the convention to another property, or cancel Arisia 2019. We will need to work together to determine a timeline to make the go/no-go decision, as well as which of the two outcomes we should choose in the event the strike continues….

(3) PARDON THE INTERRUPTION. Some booksellers are retaliating against a new AbeBooks policy: “Booksellers Protest Amazon Site’s Move to Drop Stores From Certain Countries” – the New York Times has the story.

More than 250 antiquarian book dealers in 24 countries say they are pulling over a million books off an Amazon-owned site for a week, an impromptu protest after the site abruptly moved to ban sellers from several nations.

The flash strike against the site, AbeBooks, which is due to begin Monday, is a rare concerted action by vendors against any part of Amazon, which depends on third-party sellers for much of its merchandise and revenue. The protest arrives as increasing attention is being paid to the extensive power that Amazon wields as a retailer — a power that is greatest in books.

The stores are calling their action Banned Booksellers Week. The protest got its start after AbeBooks sent emails last month to booksellers in countries including South Korea, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Russia to say that it would no longer “support” them. “We apologize for this inconvenience,” the company said….

(4) MORE MEXICANX. Stephen C. Tobin covered the MexicanX Initiative for Latin American Literature Today: “The Long-Overdue Recognition of Mexicanx Science Fiction at This Year’s WorldCon76”.

The Initiative sprang forth from the seedling of an idea by one of this year’s WorldCon76 Guest of Honor, illustrator John Picacio. In the past he has twice won a Hugo Award –the crown jewel of science fiction awards– and was also invited to be this year’s Master of Ceremonies for the Hugos. His being Mexican-American led him to discover that no Guest of Honor or Hugo Award MC had ever been a brown person. “I thought it’s great to be the first,” he said, “but who cares if you’re the last? That’s the question I kept thinking about: who would come behind me? I break the door down, but then who’s coming through the door after me?” Initially, he thought he would sponsor one or two people (i.e., pay for their membership fees) out of his own pocket, but then his friend and novelist John Scalzi said he would do the same. Shortly after, more people agreed to sponsor, and before long, when the number reached 10 people, the whole process gained the momentum of a sizable snowball just picking up speed down a mountain. At that moment, Picacio decided to aim for sponsoring 50 people and gave the project its official title of The Mexicanx Initiative. By convention time, approximately 15 Mexicanx nationals along with 35 Mexicanx-Americans held sponsorships. (A similar origin story lies behind the bilingual anthology A Larger Reality: Speculative Fiction from the Bicultural Margins, which was published just for the Initiative at WorldCon76 and receives an in-depth treatment in the prologue to the dossier.) Ultimately, Picacio said, this was not just merely some brown people getting together but “this was a human endeavor, like George R.R. Martin said [at the Hugo Awards after party]. It was all cultures getting together to bring in another that wasn’t really being included.”

(5) A DISTURBANCE IN THE FORCE.

(6) SUB SANDWICH. Quartzy posits “Nine sci-fi subgenres to help you understand the future”. The fifth is —

5. Solarpunk

“What does ‘the good life’ look like in a steady-state, no-growth, totally sustainable society?”

According to “On The Need for New Futures,” a 2012 article on Solarpunk.net, that’s the question this movement—which melds speculative fiction, art, fashion and eco-activism—seeks to answer. In the same post, Solarpunk’s anonymous founders warn, “We are starved for visions of the future that will sustain us, and give us something to hope for.” Yet what if we dreamed differently? What if we tried to answer a separate question: What does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?

As Olivia Rosane puts it, what if we tried to “cancel the apocalypse?”

Solarpunk is the opposite of cyberpunk’s nihilism, offering stories, the founders say, about “ingenuity, positive creation, independence, and community.” These narratives are often framed around infrastructure as both a form of resistance and as the foundations for a new way of life—the eponymous solar panels feature heavily.

What to read

Kim Stanley Robinson, Mars trilogy (beginning with Red Mars,1992)

“I’ve always written utopian science fiction,” says Robinson. He’s one of the best world-builders in contemporary sci-fi, and these stories of terraforming Mars are super worked-through, both technically and sociopolitically. They describe a future in which humans just might be able to achieve ecosystem balance.

Cory Doctorow, Walkaway (2018)

This is far less utopian than Robinson’s work, but perhaps, quietly, just as hopeful. In a world wracked by climate change and fully captured by corporate power, most people live grinding lives of toil in “Default” cities. Yet 3-D printing has created post-scarcity, and so Doctorow’s trio of characters simply secede and walk away into the lands in between, and start to rebuild the world. “The point of Walkaway is the first days of a better nation,” one says.

Check out Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation (2017, eds. Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland), the first English-language collection of solarpunk fiction . For stories from Brazil and Portugal, there’s Solarpunk: Ecological and Fantastical Stories in a Sustainable World (2014 / English 2018, ed. Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro).

(7) BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME. James Davis Nicoll wonders if we missed the chance at a real-life Rendezvous with Rama: “Recent Interstellar Asteroid May Have Been Alien Artifact, Speculates New Paper”.

… “Just what is ‘Oumuamua?” you may ask. I am so glad you asked. It’s the first ever verified interstellar object traversing our solar system. It was discovered in late 2017. Unlike Rama, it was only spotted over a month after its first and only perihelion. Also unlike Rama, there weren’t any space probes conveniently located where they could be diverted to take a close look. And of course, unlike Rama, we have NO nuclear-powered crewed spacecraft bopping around the Solar System, let alone one in the right place at the right time to visit ‘Oumuamua….

(8) MARTENSSON OBIT. “[Swedish fan] Bertil Mårtensson died this morning, from the effects of inhaling smoke and soot during a fire in his apartment kitchen last Thursday – he was weakened from other illnesses, and unable to escape from the apartment,” John-Henri-Holmberg announced on Facebook.

The Science Fiction Encyclopedia has an entry about his writing career here.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and JJ.]

  • November 4, 1920 – Sydney Bounds, Writer, Editor, and Fan from England who was a prolific author of short fiction, and novels — not just science fiction, but also horror, Westerns, mysteries, and juvenile fiction — from 1946 until his death in 2006. He was an early fan who joined Britain’s Science Fiction Association in 1937 and was active in fandom there. He worked as an electrician on the Enigma machine during World War II, and while in the service, he started publishing the fanzine Cosmic Cuts. The film The Last Days on Mars (an adaptation of “The Animators”) and the Tales of the Darkside episode “The Circus” are based on stories by him. In 2005, two collections of his fiction were released under the title The Best of Sydney J. Bounds: Strange Portrait and Other Stories, and The Wayward Ship and other Stories. In 2007, the British Fantasy Society honored him by renaming their award for best new writer after him.
  • November 4, 1934 – Gregg Calkins, Writer, Editor, and Fan. Mike Glyer’s tribute to him reads: “Longtime fan Gregg Calkins died July 31, 2017 after suffering a fall. He was 82. Gregg got active in fandom in the Fifties and his fanzine Oopsla (1952-1961) is fondly remembered. He was living in the Bay Area and serving as the Official Editor of FAPA when I applied to join its waitlist in the Seventies. He was Fan GoH at the 1976 Westercon. Calkins later moved to Costa Rica. In contrast to most of his generation, he was highly active in social media, frequently posting on Facebook where it was his pleasure to carry the conservative side of debates. He is survived by his wife, Carol.”
  • November 4, 1950 – John Vickery, 68, Actor of Stage and Screen. Wearing making makeup and prosthetics is something this performer did very well, as he appeared as a Cardassian military officer in Deep Space Nine’s “The Changing Face of Evil”, a Betazoid in Star Trek: The Next Generation’s “Night Terrors”, and a Klingon in Star Trek: Enterprise‘s “Judgment”. In Babylon 5 and its spinoff Crusade, he had dual roles, as Neroon and Mr. Welles, and he had guest parts in episodes of Medium and The Others. A veteran stage actor, he originated the role of Scar in The Lion King on Broadway.
  • November 4, 1955 – Lani Tupu, 63, Actor and Director from New Zealand. He’d be on the Birthday scroll just for being Crais on the Farscape series, but he’s actually been in several other genre undertakings, including the 1989 Punisher, Robotropolis, and Finders Keepers. He also had guest parts in episodes of Tales of the South Seas, Time TraxArthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, and the Australian remake of the Mission: Impossible series (which if you haven’t seen it, is quite excellent; I just found it in DVD format sometime in the past month).
  • November 4, 1953 – Kara Dalkey, 65, Writer and Musician. Author of YA fiction and historical fantasy. She is a member of the Pre-Joycean Fellowship (which, if memory serves me right, includes both Emma Bull and Stephen Brust) and the Scribblies. Her works include The Sword of Sagamore, Steel Rose, Little Sister, and The Nightingale; her Water Trilogy blends together Atlantean and Arthurian mythologies. She’s been nominated for Mythopoeic and Tiptree Awards.
  • November 4, 1953 – Stephen Jones, 65, Editor from England. He is a prolific Anthologist — and that is putting quite mildly, as he went well over the century mark in edited anthologies quite some time ago. The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror accounts for seventeen volumes by itself, and his editions of The Mammoth Book of (Pick A Title) run for at least another for another dozen. He has also authored a number of horror reference works, such as The Art of Horror Movies: An Illustrated History, Basil Copper: A Life in Books, and H. P. Lovecraft in Britain. He chaired the World Fantasy Conventions in 1988 and 2013, and has himself been a Guest of Honor at a World Fantasy Convention. His work has won a whopping 22 British Fantasy Awards, 5 Stoker Awards, and 3 World Fantasy Awards. In 2006, the British Fantasy Society recognized him with the Karl Edward Wagner Award for outstanding contribution to the genre.
  • November 4, 1965 – Kiersten Warren, 53, Actor who has had roles in Bicentennial Man, Independence Day, 13 Going on 30, The Astronaut Farmer, The Thinning, and The Invisible Mother, and guest roles on episodes of Night Man, Wolf Lake, and Fringe.
  • November 4, 1970 – Anthony Ruivivar, 48, Actor whose genre appearances include Starsthip Troopers and The Adjustment Bureau, along with a plethora of recurring roles in TV series Frequency, The Haunting of Hill House, American Horror Story, Scream, Revolution, and the new Beauty and the Beast, and recurring voice roles in Beware the Batman and Avengers Assemble.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

  • Brevity turns to Auric Goldfinger for a laugh.

(11) CHUCK TINGLE’S HALLOWEEN COSTUME. This has probably never been done before.

(12) HELP NEEDED BY LONGTIME ASFA, SFWA, WHC VOLUNTEER MAURINE DORRIS. “Medical for Maurine Dorris” is a fundraiser on Facebook started by Joann Cavitt Parsons. To date they’ve raied $1,000 of the $10,000 goal. Latest update is that her cancer is Stage 4, with widespread metastases.

Older fans, especially in the South, will remember Maurine Dorris as a force to be reckoned with. She and JoAnn Parsons ran more ASFA suites and SFWA suites than I can remember.  They started World Horror Convention, and ran the first two, in Nashville, TN.

Maurine fell at home last week and broke her hip. Happens to lots of us these days. Sadly, while in the ER for that, it came out that she has metastatic cancer in multiple sites.

Maurine has never been well blessed with money. The only insurance she has is Medicare Part A, because she felt that she couldn’t even afford Part B. She was widowed at an early age, and has only one son. She lives by herself, in a trailer on the property of her best friend JoAnn Parsons and her husband.

Maurine has decided not to treat the cancer, and to return home as soon as possible. Clearly, she will need help. JoAnn has started a GoFundMe account for her, which I hope that you will be kind enough to share.

(13) POWERFUL LINEUP. Joe Sherry recalls an influential 1975 Pamela Sargent anthology in “Feminist Futures: Women of Wonder” at Nerds of a Feather.

…How familiar readers are with the twelve writers of Women of Wonder likely depends on how well and broadly read they are with the overall field of science fiction. For many, Vonda McIntyre may only be known as the writer of one Star Wars novel (The Crystal Star) and five Star Trek novels. Other readers will know McIntyre from her three Hugo Awards and one Nebula Award.

Pamela Sargent put together a powerful lineup of writers (and stories), some of which have become absolute giants of the field. Anne McCaffrey. Ursula K. Le Guin. Joanna Russ. Marion Zimmer Bradley (more on her later)….

(14) FILE TYPE. Paul Weimer adds an entry to Ursula K. Le Guin’s dossier for Nerds of a Feather — “Feminist Futures: The Word for World is Forest”.

…Finally, there is our Athshean protagonist, Selver. It is from his semi-omniscient point of view that we get the major worldbuilding of the novel as regards to how the Athesheans see themselves, and how their societies actually work. Davidson and even Lyubov, for his sympathies for the native inhabitants, simply doesn’t see or know about….

Legacy: The novella’s polemic, strong, unyielding tone meant that it had an immediate impact on readers, especially since it was in the high profile Again, Dangerous Visions anthology edited by Harlan Ellison. It deservedly was nominated for and won a Hugo award. It’s anti-colonial and ecological themes were likely the greater focus of readers at the time, given the Vietnam War, and the realization and maturation of the work into recognition for its gender and feminist ideals is something that has become a function of seeing it placed within the Hain-verse. …

(15) BOOK LIFE. This time the author of The Traitor Baru Cormorant supplies the titles for Nerds of a Feather’s recurring feature — “6 Books with Seth Dickinson”.

  1. How about a book you’ve changed your mind about over time–either positively or negatively? Guns, Germs, and Steel. When I read it in high school I thought it was the smartest thing ever written. Now it’s pretty obviously reductionist. (I’m not, like, clever for figuring this out, there’s a bot on the history reddit whose only job is to post disclaimers about GG&S.)I used to think Pale Fire was a clever postmodern novel with a ‘true’ story hidden behind the one we’re given. Now I know that Zembla is real and John Shade failed its people.God, I can never remember enough books.

(16) AQUAMAN. They call this trailer “Aquaman – Attitude.”

[Thanks to JJ, John King Tarpinian, Marcia Kelly Illingworth, Mike Kennedy, Cat Eldridge, Martin Morse Wooster, Chip Hitchcock, Carl Slaughter, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jayn.]

Pixel Scroll 7/13/18 It Was The Time Of The Pixel In The Year Of Scroll One

(1) DALEK WITH A COIFFURE. Look familiar? No, it’s not Davy Crockett…

(2) W76 MEMBER COMMUNICATIONS ASSET. Kevin Roche, Chair of Worldcon 76 in San Jose, announced: “Several members of the convention volunteered to moderate a Worldcon 76 resource sharing/membership transfer group for us on FaceBook. We happily took them up on the offer!”

WorldCon 76 Membership Transfer and Resource Sharing

This is the official page for WorldCon76 attendees seeking to connect with each other in order to transfer memberships and to share resources and information.

(3) SUPER SHRINKAGE. Kinky Data compares “Superheroes’ Height Vs
the Actor’s Actual Height”
. (Carl Slaughter wonders, “How exactly did they discover the height of so many comic book superheroes?”)

(4) WITH NO CLINCHES. The author of Archivist Wasp explains it all to you at The Book Smugglers: “Alternatives to Romance: Nicole Kornher-Stace on writing platonic relationships in Archivist Wasp and Latchkey (& a Giveaway)”.

In the three years since Archivist Wasp was published, there’s one thing about it that keeps coming up in reviews and reader comments/questions again and again. Which is fine by me, since I haven’t gotten tired of talking about it yet! (Hilariously, after signing up to write this post, I got put on a Readercon panel on the same topic. They said: Tell us why you should be on this
panel
. I said: I never shut up about this topic. Ever. It is the soapbox I will die on. And they gave me the panel! Readercon = BEST CON.)

And so, without further ado! The full, entire, possibly long story of why I write all my close relationships as friendships instead of romances, the pros and cons of same, and how I wish more books/movies/shows/etc would do so. (I do. So much. Universe, take note.)

(5) VALUES. A WisCon panel writeup by KJ – “Creativity and ‘Productivity’: A Panel Report and Meditiation”.

…One of the most interesting things to happen was also one of the first: as the panelists were introducing themselves, the moderator, Rachel Kronick, wondered out loud why, in these situations, we introduce ourselves with our resumes. Whether she’d planned to say it or was struck by inspiration in the moment, it was the perfect thing to get me thinking about how much we in fandom tend to define ourselves by our work, by our accomplishments. An immediate mindset shift, in the moment. I only had one panel after this one, and although I still gave the “resume” introduction, it was definitely in my mind.

One of the first topics for the panelists was the source of productivity as a measure of worth. Capitalism came in for a lot of the blame, of course, but the panelists also brought up Puritanism: if something is fun, it can’t be valuable. It’s the work ethic baked into American society (which I’ve most often heard called the “Protestant work ethic“: a tenant of Calvinism claiming you can tell who will be “saved” by their dedication to hard work and frugal living). When we measure our value by how much we produce, and how much we are paid for that production (whether that be in money, goodwill, or fandom attention), it’s really easy to think of any time not spent “producing” as “wasted.” This is absolutely a trap that I fall into, and although I fight it, I know I don’t succeed very well.

On the flip side, we have fandom as a capitalist activity: measuring your dedication as a fan by how much money you spend on Stuff. Books, movie tickets, video and other media, branded merch, costumes, going to cons… fannishness can get really expensive, and too much gatekeeping goes on around activities that cost money and time. Although this didn’t come up at the panel, as I type up these thoughts now I see a tension between the work ethic that values austerity on one hand, and a culture that demands voracious consumption on the other. This double bind isn’t unique to fandom, of course, but I’ve never really thought to apply it in this context before.

(6) THREATS. CBR.com reports “Vertigo Writer Receives Veiled Death Threats Ahead of SDCC Appearance”.

Comic-Con International in San Diego is a place where fans from all across the world gather to share their love of all things pop-culture, from comic books to movies to video games, etc. However, some fans, sadly, choose to share hate instead, as evidenced by a social media post from Border Town writer Eric M. Esquivel.

“I woke up to death threats (‘We’re not sending I.C.E. to Comic Con, we’re sending exterminators’),” Esquivel’s tweet reads. Even in the face of verbal assault, though, the writer remained positive, instead choosing to focus on the joy of holding the first issue of his and artist Ramon Villalobos’ soon-to-be-released Border Town in his hands….

(7) WE INTERRUPT YOUR FOOTBALL. For this important announcement:

Comparable information appears in this brief commercial:

(8) PRISONER COLLECTIBLE. Titan Comics is publishing The Prisoner: Kirby & Kane Artist Edition HC Vol.1 this week, “a hard cover edition of never-seen-before work based on the iconic TV series, created by two legends of comic book art.”

This special oversized collectors edition will contain the entire 17 page Jack Kirby strip, the first six pages of which were inked and lettered by Mike Royer, as well as 18 pages of pencils drawn by artist Gil Kane. In addition to reprinting these rare pages, this collection also features unmissable bonus archive material including facsimiles of the original script as written by Steve Englehart.

This book is part of several releases from Titan to mark the 50th anniversary of The Prisoner – join us in celebrating this cult classic!

(9) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • July 13, 1984 The Last Starfighter premiered on this day

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

  • Born July 13, 1940 – Sir Patrick Stewart. Various Trek affairs but also roles in the X-Men franchise and Dune, and myriad voice work such as The Pagemaster, Steamboy, The Snow Queen and Gnomeo & Juliet. Yeah another animated gnome film.
  • Born July 13, 1942 – Harrison Ford. The Indiana Jones and Star Wars franchises, also Cowboys & Aliens and Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049.
  • Born July 13 – Steve McQueen, 30. Yes the grandson of that actor. Genre roles in The Vampire DiariesThreshold, Piranha 3D and the forthcoming Legacies series which apparently features werewolf / vampire hybrids.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • I read the news today — PVP.

(12) WALKING HOUSEPLANT.

(13) LANGUAGE CREATOR. Lauren Christensen takes you “Inside
J.R.R. Tolkien’s Notebooks, a Glimpse of the Master Philologist at Work”

in her New York Times review.

From Qenya to Gnomish to Sindarin, the “high elven-speech” J. R. R. Tolkien uses amply throughout the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy was the product of almost 40 years of what the English author once referred to as his “secret vice”: glossopoeia, or language creation. As Carl F. Hostetter writes in an essay in Catherine McIlwaine’s “Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth,” his was a labor “performed and preserved on thousands of manuscript pages containing Tolkien’s minutely detailed description and unceasing elaboration (and revision) of not just one but rather of a family of invented languages, which can be collectively called the Elvish tongues.”

Although not alone in this practice, Tolkien was the first philologist to establish such a network of evolving dialects that derive from one another “by slowly accumulating changes and divergences in form across time from a common ancestor species.” Tolkien drew this partial table of sound-correspondences among five Elvish languages — Qenya, Telerin, Noldorin, Ilkorin and Danian — around 1940….

(14) LOAD THE CANON. EpicPew gives a Catholic perspective on “Saint Tolkien’:
Why This English Don Is on the Path to Sainthood”
.

Evangelizing through beauty

J.R.R. Tolkien, in this writer’s opinion, has one of the best innate grasps of evangelizing through beauty of anyone writing in the 20th century. Why? Because his work is permeated with a Catholic understanding of beauty. That which is beautiful is pleasing to the senses, but doesn’t stop at a surface level, rather acting as an icon that draws you into deeper realities and encounter with the Divine.

The world Tolkien created in Middle Earth is steeped in this beauty and nobility that raises your mind upwards and calls you to higher things. You can’t readhis epic work without feeling stirred to your very bones to live a life of greatness, rather than comfort.

Is it possible that even Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI himself was thinking of the small hobbit Frodo Baggins when he exhorted us that “we are not made for comfort, but for greatness”?

Well, maybe not.

But it certainly applies, and the story is a grace of inspiration and encouragement for those who wish to take the path less traveled and embark on that narrower road which leads to salvation….

…Tolkien’s potential patronage

Who would turn to Tolkien with prayer requests? He’s the potential patron saint of the hopeless, the wanderers, and (of course) romantics.

(15) STRANGE HORIZONS. Charles Payseur’s short fiction reviews resume with: “Quick Sips – Strange Horizons 07/02/2018 & 07/09/2018”.

Two new issues of Strange Horizons means two new pieces of short fiction (one short story, one novelette) and two new poems, all of which look at distance and drive, humans and aliens. For the fiction, there’s not a whole lot to link the pieces together, one of which looks at language and abuse, the other at speed and drive and competition. Similarly, the poem isn’t incredibly similar either, one looking at the inhuman at the end of a long mission, the other at changes in body and relationship while also showing those changes striking toward a more stable truth. What does link everything together, though, is a wonderful and moving style, and a range of speculative visions all reflecting back the ways people are hurt by others, and the way people hurt themselves, all reaching for connection, community, and belonging. To the reviews!

(16) SHADOW SUN SEVEN. Paul Weimer has a “Microreview [book] Shadow Sun Seven by Spencer Ellsworth” posted today at Nerds of a Feather.

The complex tale of Jaqi, reluctant opposition to a Resistance that has in turn just toppled an oppressive human galactic empire, continues in Shadow Sun Seven, sequel to Spencer Ellsworth debut novella A Red Peace. This second novella jumps off not long after the first. It should be said that discussion of this second volume, a short novel, does necessarily spoil the first novella.

That novella, which posited, explored and depicted a wide ranging universe with half-Jorians, lots of biological weapons and creatures that would fit in a Kameron Hurley novel, and a net of complicated characters. By the end of the first novella, Jaqi, Half-Jorian, and Half Human pilot, had managed to spirit away two children from the Resistance that are looking for them at any cost, and had slowly started to learn that she has a destiny and power that she never knew, a destiny and power tied to the original, extinct race of which she is just a hybrid descendant gene engineered cross. Or is she?…

(17) WOMEN OF SFF IN THE SEVENTIES. James Davis Nicoll reaches names beginning with the letter R in “Fighting Erasure: Women SF Writers of the 1970s, Part IX” at Tor.com.

Pamela Sargent first caught my eye with 1976’s Cloned
Lives
, which takes a refreshingly mundane look at the lives of the world’s first clones.
Their unusual parentage does not confer on them any particular special abilities like telepathy or telekinesis. Her Venus terraforming epic (Venus of Dreams, Venus of Shadows, and Child of Venus) may have been denied its proper place in the public psyche due to a somewhat troubled publication history; all three are in print and worth consideration. Also of interest is Sargent’s Women of Wonder series (Women of Wonder, More Women of Wonder, and The New Women of Wonder, followed in the 1990s by Women of Wonder: The Classic Years, and Women of Wonder: The Contemporary Years). The difficulty of tracking down the rights at this late date probably precludes reprints, but used copies are easily obtained.

(18) HUGO NOMINEE RANKINGS. Joe Sherry’s series reaches the nonfiction: “Reading the Hugos: Related Work”. Surprisingly, he hasn’t read Ellison, but now he has read the Ellison bio —

A Lit Fuse: Here’s my genre confession: I can’t be sure if I’ve actually read Harlan Ellison before…

Nat Segaloff’s biography is necessarily a slanted one, biased towards Ellison. Segaloff doesn’t hide Ellison’s flaws, but he does minimize them and give them Ellison’s context and Ellison’s shading. As a biography, it’s a fairly well written and comprehensive one. If I were a fan of Ellison, I would probably be thrilled by detail of the man’s life. Also, a
person doesn’t need to be likeable to be interesting or to be worth writing about. This is good, because I’m not sure I would have liked him much. I’m quite sure he wouldn’t have liked me. The problem is that there is a bit of tedium to the writing and the recounting of Ellison’s life. Time will tell if A Lit Fuse turns out to be an important science fiction biography in the long run, but it is certainly a less vital and immediate work on the Hugo ballot.

(19) RETRO FAN HUGO RESOURCE. And when you’re all done with this year’s Hugo reading, you can get started deciding what to nominate for next year’s Retro-Hugos. The Fanac.org site has hundreds of zines already available.

Fan History Spotlight:

Next year’s Retro Hugos will cover 1943, and we’ve been focusing on that year as we put up additional fanzines. We have almost 250 zines from 1943 already online. Remember, before the internet, before inexpensive long distance phone calls, before air travel was common, the world came to your door by the mailbox, twice a day. The byplay, the chatting, the fannish flame wars were all conducted on paper. In 1943, FAPA (aka the Fantasy Amateur Press Association) sent out over 1,200 pages of fannish writing in 4 mailings. We have 1,196 pages of those online for you now. FAPA is a real window on the fannish world of that era, with contributions by all the BNFs of the time, including Ackerman, Ashley, Joquel, Laney, Shaw, Speer, Tucker, Warner, Widner, Wolheim and more. There’s the first publication of Lovecraft’s “Fungi From Yuggoth” Cycle. There’s a “Decimal Classification of Fantastic Fiction” by Sam Russell, and interesting in-context materials and commentary on Degler and the Cosmic Circle controversy. But wait! There’s more. See for yourself at http://www.fanac.org/fanzines/FAPA_Mailings/.

(20) 95 IS THE NEW 79. The Stan Lee hype machine gets back in gear – Syfy
Wire
has the story:“Stan Lee in first of new series of videos: ‘I’m back again with new energy'”

In a tweet posted on Thursday, Lee appeared in the first video since POW! Entertainment reasserted control over the creator’s social media channels. He joked about his age (“It’s taken me a while to get used to being 79 years old,” said the 95-year-old Lee) and promised his fans that he’s back.

(21) HARLAN STORIES. Ted White’s piece for the Falls Church News-Press,
“Remembering Harlan Ellison and His Place in My Life”, is not exactly a eulogy.

…Proximity to me reinforced in Harlan his need to settle his
debt to me. But Harlan was scuffling as a freelance writer; he had no regular income and coming up with an extra several hundred dollars wasn’t easy for him. But one August evening we went to a party in the Bronx and there encountered Ken, whom Harlan hadn’t seen in nearly five years. Harlan braced him for the money. Ken had effectively stolen the typewriter after all, and clearly owed Harlan, who owed me. Harlan was forceful in his demands, but Ken, still without a real income of his own (later he would edit a movie magazine), gave Harlan no
satisfaction.

But he did something else. He told his best friend about Harlan’s demand, and the colorful threats Harlan had made. His best friend told his mother. The mother was a crackpot who routinely complained to the FBI that her son’s antagonists were “Commies.” She called the NYPD and told them Harlan was a heroin dealer.

Ironically, Harlan did not use drugs or intoxicants of any kind, abstaining from both alcohol and caffeine (but he did sometimes smoke cigarettes or a pipe, I think for the image more than any other reason). When we went to jazz clubs together he ordered a glass of orange juice, which he could pass off as a Screwdriver.

When the police arrived at his door, Harlan was flabbergasted at the notion that he was a drug dealer, and freely allowed them to search his small apartment. In his closet, on a high shelf and in a box, they found three things: a small revolver, a set of brass knuckles, and a switchblade. They promptly arrested Harlan for possessing an unlicensed gun. New York City had very tough gun laws….

(22) TIME CAPSULE. Joe Siclari says the 1992 MagiCon time capsule will be opened this year in San Jose.

At closing ceremonies for MagiCon, the 1992 Worldcon, we created a time capsule. It was loaded with convention publications and the like, but at the ceremony something unexpected happened. Folks in the audience wanted to have their part of fandom memorialized in the time capsule, and came forward with all kinds of things to put in it. Well, at this year’s Worldcon, the time capsule will be opened. The contents will be put on exhibit. Has fandom really changed that much? If you are at the con, come and find out. We’ll also have a FANAC table with some interesting materials, so come get your contributor ribbon or sticker, and say hi.

(23) STALKED BY SFWA. Cue the Jaws theme…

(24) INSTANT MASTERPIECE. Camestros Felapton recently graced the comments section with this example of Bohemian Rhap Music:

Is this more sci-fi?
Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a pixel
No escape to reality
Open your files
Look up on the web and see…

I’m just a pixel
Not a John Williams symphony
Because I’m easy come, easy go
Scrolling high, scroll low
Any way the pix scrolls
Doesn’t really matter to me, to me

Mamaaa just filmed a cat
Put a phone just near its head
Pushed the shutter, as it fed
Mamaaa, my likes have just begun
But now I’ve gone and thrown them all away
Mamaaaaaa, ooooooooh
Didn’t mean to make you share
If I don’t tweet this time again tomorrow
Carry on, carry on as if nothing viral matters

Too late, my GIF has gone
Of cat shivers down its spine
Like it’s eating the sublime
Goodbye, everybody
I’ve got to mute
Gonna leave social media to face the truth
Mamaaaaaaaaaaaaaa, oooooooh (Anyway the pix scrolls…)
I don’t want these likes
Sometimes wish I’d never posted it at all

[Epic Guitar Solo]
[Sudden change of tempo]

I made an animated GIF of a dog
Scary pooch, Scary pooch, will you do the Fandango?
Bad contrast and lighting, very, very frightening me
(Galileo) Galileo (Galileo) Galileo, Galileo is irrelevant
Irrelevant-ant-ant
I’m just a pixel nobody loves me
He’s just a pixel from a scroll family
Spare him his life from this GIF travesty

Easy come, easy go, will you post this scroll?
Pixellah! No, we will not post this scroll
(Post this scroll!)
Pixellah! No, we will not post this scroll
(Post this scroll!)
Pixellah! We will not post this scroll
(Post this scroll!)(Will not post this scroll)
(Post this scroll!)(Will not post this scroll)
(Never, never, never, never)
Post this scro-o-o-oll
No, no, no, no, no, no, no
(Oh mama mia, mama mia) Mama Mia, ABBA is in this scroll!
The iTunes Store put soundtrack aside for me, for me, for me!

[Heavy rock break]

So you think you can quote me and make fun of my cat?
So you think you can repost that picture of it in a hat?
Oh, baby, can’t do this to me, baby
Just gotta get out, just gotta get right outta here

[Guitar Solo]
(Oooh yeah, Oooh yeah)

Nothing viral matters
Anyone can see
Nothing viral matters
Everything viral matters to me

Any way the pix scrolls….

[gong]

[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Hampus Eckerman, Cat Eldridge, Chip Hitchcock, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Carl Slaughter, Martin Morse Wooster, Dann, Mike Kennedy, Kevin Roche, James Davis Nicoll, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]

Women in Early SF

By Carl Slaughter: Collections featuring women in early science fiction, feminist speculative literature, and speculative art.

Women of Wonder, the Classic Years: Science Fiction by Women from the 1940s to the 1970s

Editor: Pamela Sargent.

women-of-wonder-classic-40-70Women of Wonder: The Contemporary Years, Science Fiction by Women from the 1970s to the 1990s

Editor: Pamela Sargent

women-of-wonder-70-90

The New Women of Wonder: Recent Science Fiction Stories by Women about Women

Editor: Pamela Sargent

women-of-wonder-the-new

More Women of Wonder: Science Fiction Novelettes By Women About Women

Editor: Pamela Sargent

women-of-wonder-more

Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women of Science Fiction

Editor: Lisa Yaszek and Patrick B. Sharp

sisters-of-tomorrow

 

The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women

Editor: Alex Dally MacFarlane

mammoth-book-of-women

Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology

Editors: Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

sisters-of-the-revolution

 

Women of Wonder: Celebrating Women Creators of Fantastic Art

Editor: Cathy Fenner

women-of-wonder-fenner