Tag Archives: Tom Gauld

Pixel Scroll 1/21/24 They Told Me The Pixel Was Safe To Scroll!

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(1) WHEN YOU DISCOVER YOU’RE AN “INELIGIBLE”. Xiran Jay Zhao just got the news.

(2) ONLINE DISCUSSION OF CHENGDU WORLDCON HUGO NOMINATIONS REPORT. Hugo finalist Arthur Liu / HeavenDuke adds context to the 2023 Hugo Awards voting in an X.com thread that begins here. An excerpt:

(3) GRAPHIC EXAMPLES. Heather Rose Jones’ “A Comparison of Hugo Nomination Distribution Statistics” at Alpennia takes the 2023 Hugo Nominations report and the statistics from selected other years to create graphs that show just how anomalous the 2023 results are. A very helpful tool.

(4) RESPONSES TO STAT RELEASE BY THREE HUGO WINNERS.

Ursula Vernon said on Bluesky:

Seanan McGuire said on Bluesky:

Chris Barkley told Facebook readers this evening:

As someone who attended the Chengdu Worldcon AND was the recipient of Hugo Award in the Best Fan Writer category, I am upset, incensed and angry at the exclusion of R.F. Kuang’s Babel and my friend, colleague and peer, Paul Weimer from the 2023 Final Ballot. There were numerous other irregularities and outrages as well.

I don’t know for certain if Paul Weimer’s presence on the ballot would have may any difference in the outcome and to some extent, that has weighted heavily on my mind since Saturday’s release.

We may never know what actually happened here but I would like to thank the people who voted for me and have repeatedly reiterated their support for my fan writing and took the time to reassure me that my work was worthy of the award.

I also know that this incident, whether it was at the behest of the government of the People’s Republic or China or some other entity, will NEVER be forgotten and that doing something about preventing such a thing from happening again will be at the top of the agenda at the Glasgow Worldcon Business Meeting in August…

(5) IN TIMES TO COME. John Scalzi’s “What’s Up With Babel and the Hugos?” at Whatever includes some ideas about what should happen going forward.

4. Likewise, depending on what we learn about these disqualifications, next year’s Worldcon Business meeting would be a fine time to offer proposals for disqualification transparency (i.e., there have to be reasons detailed other than “because”) and for dealing with state censorship regarding finalists and the award process.

5. Even the speculation of state censorship should give pause to site selection voters regarding future Worldcons. For example, there is a 2028 Worldcon proposal for Kampala, Uganda, and while the proposed Worldcon itself offers a laudable and comprehensive Code of Conduct page, Uganda is a country with some of the most severe laws in the world regarding LGBTQ+ people, including laws involving censorship. If the state leaned hard on the local Worldcon regarding what was acceptable on the Hugo ballot, would it be safe for the organizers to ignore this pressure? This is now an issue we will need to consider, among the many others, in where the Worldcon lands every year.

(6) 2024 DEADLINE TO QUALIFY AS HUGO VOTER. If this weekend’s Hugo Awards discussion hasn’t convinced you there might be a better way to use your money, like throwing it in the ocean, and you want to be able to nominate for the 2024 Hugo Awards but weren’t a member of Chengdu, you need to get a membership in the Glasgow 2024 Worldcon by January 31: Memberships and Tickets. [Via Jed Hartman.]

(7) MEANWHILE, IN CHINA. [Item by Ersatz Culture.] Here are some Chinese user comments regarding the Hugo nomination news.  As these are (mostly) from regular fans or individuals, I’ve not included their usernames, but all are on public posts that anyone can access – I imagine stuff circulating in small private WeChat/Weixin groups (which I don’t have access to) will be much harsher than these.

All English translations via Google Translate, which doesn’t handle the slangy language used very well, so some of these are a bit opaque, but the general vibe should be pretty clear.  As yet, I’ve not come across any commentary about the works that just missed out on being finalists; hopefully that might appear once the initial controversies have died down a bit.

现在对国内的任何文学奖都失去信任，都不过是一小撮人自娱自乐地玩票而已。

Nowadays, we have lost trust in any domestic literary awards. They are just a small group of people playing for their own entertainment.

哈哈哈，目测你们没有审核机制，干的啥事啊

Hahaha, I guess you don’t have an audit mechanism, what are you doing?

令人不满在于数据披露拖延、不透明、疏忽大意，有呼声很高的作者和候选莫名被判定“不具备资格”，在于评奖数据显露出的组织管理混乱，而不是你以为的“烂作得奖”，只要符合规则，谁得奖都是该的，因为机制如此。所以我请你在开地图炮宣泄情绪之前，先了解一下始末

(replying to another user’s comment) The dissatisfaction lies in the delay, opacity and negligence in data disclosure. Some highly vocal authors and candidates were inexplicably judged to be “ineligible”. The dissatisfaction lies in the organizational and management chaos revealed by the award data, rather than the “bad work winning the award” as you thought. “As long as the rules are followed, whoever wins the prize deserves it, because the mechanism is like this. So I ask you to understand the whole story before opening the map cannon to vent your emotions.  [Note: I’m not sure what “opening the map cannon” is a euphemism for, but I think something like “setting off fireworks” might be a more reasonable translation,]

真丢脸，无话可说????对“环境污染”放任自流，各种花样层出不穷，无法理解这样的不作为。

It’s so shameful, I have nothing to say ???? Let’s let “environmental pollution” go unchecked, with all kinds of tricks emerging in endlessly, I can’t understand such inaction.

太丢人了

So embarrassing

丢脸

shameful

不是有stuff说了，公布一眼假的数据是为了表明他们也很无奈

Isn’t that what stuff said? The purpose of publishing fake data is to show that they are also helpless.

那到底有多无奈呢，总不会被枪指着头吧，感觉都是托词，总之不想负责

(reply to previous comment) So how helpless are you? You won’t have a gun pointed at your head. It feels like it’s all an excuse. In short, you don’t want to be responsible.

丢人丢到家了

I’m so embarrassed.

咋回事

What’s going on

一地鸡毛…控奖真是有点

It’s a piece of cake… Controlling awards is really a bit tricky

呵呵，这不明摆着么

Haha, isn’t this obvious? (note: I think this might make more sense translated as “blatant”)

国外网友表示雨果组织方所谓过去三个月仔细检查核准数据的说法难以让人信服，毕竟现在还有一个类别里同样的作品出现两次的错误（指最佳短中篇类别的《图灵大排档》）

Foreign netizens said that Hugo organizers’ claim of carefully checking the approval data in the past three months is unconvincing. After all, there is still a category where the same work has errors twice (referring to “Turing” in the best short and medium novel category). Food stalls》)

无非三个原因：商业运作，草台班子，不可说因素

There are no more than three reasons: business operation, grassroots team, and unspeakable factors

怕只怕有心人……

I’m just afraid of someone with a bad intention…

(8) CENSORS, CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM. “After national backlash, Florida lawmakers eye changes to book restrictions” at Politico.

Florida’s Republican-controlled Legislature wanted to keep obscene books out of the hands of kids. But some are now acknowledging they created a “logistical nightmare” that lawmakers are trying to rein in.

Legislators this month introduced a new idea to curb frivolous challenges to books — one of the first admissions the law, which tightened scrutiny around books with sexual content in K-12 schools, may have gone too far. The potential solution: allowing local schools to charge some people a $100 fee if they want to object to more than five books.

“I’m happy that we are digging in and trying to remove reading material that is inappropriate for our children,” said state Rep. Dana Trabulsy, a Republican from Fort Pierce who is sponsoring the legislation. “But I think [book challengers] really need to be respectful of the amount of books that they are pouring into schools at one time.”Florida’s Legislature in 2023 expanded education transparency laws by requiring books considered pornographic, harmful to minors or that depict sexual activity to be pulled from shelves within five days and remain out of circulation for the duration of any challenge. If school officials deem a book inappropriate, it can be permanently removed from circulation or restricted to certain grade levels.

The law caused a national outcry after local schools received hundreds of challenges to a wide range of books, leading to reviews of titles like Ernest Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and “And Tango Makes Three,” a kids book about a penguin family with two dads. It’s also led to multiple lawsuits against top education officials and local school boards asserting that the restrictions violate free speech. Florida, according to the free speech advocacy group PEN America, has “banned” more books than any other state — some 1,406 works total….

(9) MEMORY LANE. (A 1984 REFERENCE COULDN’T BE MORE TIMELY!)

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

1984 — On this day forty years ago, Apple (then know as Apple Computer) began selling its first Macintosh. It featured an 8 MHz processor and 128k of RAM in a beige all-in-one case with a 9-inch monochrome display — all for around $2,500. That’d be $7,380 today.

Now I’ll connect it to our genre, Apple for the Mac’s arrival with its 1984 commercial that aired during a break in the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII. That commercial was based of course on that George Orwell novel. It starts off with the opening of “On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.” 

Ridley Scott was the director. Steve Jobs hired him to do it just after Blade Runner came out. Though the press said Scott spent a million dollars on it, he has said in several interviews since that Apple budgeted it at a quarter of that so he got creative, meaning instead of performers in Britain (where he filmed it) who had Union standing and would have cost him serious money, those are actually skinheads playing all those drones.

(This being 1984, those Union performers that there was got the Union minimum of twenty-five dollars for a day’s work.)

Anya Major is the sledge hammer throwing runner. She beat all models and runners who tested in a London park, most couldn’t lift the hammer, and several threw nearby parked windshields.  And yes, that is actual glass that she smashes though of course it gets enhanced afterwards.

She has only one other video appearance as Natika in Elton’s 1985 “National” video. Well and the documentary done about this commercial. Of course there’s a documentary. When isn’t there? 

Naturally the lawyers got involved. Because the ad looked an awfully lot like a scene from the 1984 film — which I’ve not seen so I don’t know how much it looks like that film — the Estate sent a cease-and-desist letter to Apple, and the commercial never aired on television again. 

The commercial aired only twice on American television. It had been first screened in December 1983, right before the one am sign-off on KMVT in Twin Falls, Idoho, which made it eligible for advertising industry awards for that year. That’s why it got to win a Clio Award for Creative Excellence in Advertising and Design, a very high honor indeed. 

In addition, starting on January 17, 1984, it was screened prior to previews in movie theaters for a few weeks.

It’s on YouTube, though, so you can it see here.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born January 21, 1933 — Judith Merril, (Died 1997). Yes, I know Judith Merril is a pen name but it’s the name on her writing, so it’s the only name that I’m interested in for this Birthday. Let us get started.

She was no doubt most excellent SF writer. Her first novel, Shadow in the Hearth, was written by herself.  It was published by Doubleday in 1950 with the scary cover art by Edward Kasper. Geoff Conklin said her first novel was a “masterly example of sensitive and perceptive story-telling”. And I agree. 

Gunner Cade was under her Cyril Judd pen name, written in collaboration with Cyril Kornbluth, as was Outpost Mars from Simon & Schuster just two years later, with a much more traditional SF cover. The novel itself is quite well done. 

Outpost Mars was also given a paperback edition from Dell that would get a very traditional SF cover by Richard Powers. It’s a great look at a Mars-based doctor, the colony, and their dealing and the Earth company and its meddling.

Eight years after Outpost Mars, her novels come to an end with The Tomorrow People. It is also her first novel not from a major house, being printed by Pyramid Books. 

(I’m going to leave it to someone here who’s more knowledgeable than me about fanzines to talk about them.)

Her short fiction is some thirty pieces deep, including a few collaborations. She co-wrote a story each with Kornbluth and Pohl. I’ve have read more than a few of her stories, there’s not a weak one, and even the ones written in the Forties still hold up very well. Which collection is a good question. That’s easy as NESFA, as always is our friend here publishing Homecalling and Other Stories: The Complete Solo Short SF of Judith Merril.

She was not nominated for any Hugos in her lifetime. She, along with Emily Pohl-Weary, granddaughter of her and Frederik Pohl, would win at Torcon 3 for Better to Have Loved: The Life of Judith Merril.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • Tom Gauld probably didn’t need to find out about this from the sff field, much as it applies.

(12) MAESTRO’S NAME OVER THE DOOR. Deadline is on hand when “Sony Pictures & Steven Spielberg Dedicate John Williams Music Building”. (Photo at the link.)

“The first time I came to this studio was 1940 when my father brought me here to show me the stage, and I was about 9 or 10 years old, and I thought, ‘Some day this will all be mine!’ It’s finally come to be – it’s only taken me 92 years to get here!” That’s what five-time Oscar winner and 53-time nominee John Williams said as the curtain was raised on the iconic Sony Pictures Entertainment lot’s newly renamed John Williams Music Building.

Joining in the celebration — and it was a celebration — were Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group Chairman and CEO Tom Rothman, SPE Chairman and CEO Tony Vinciquerra (who made opening remarks), filmmaker J.J. Abrams and of course, Williams’ longtime collaborator Steven Spielberg, who instigated the idea of putting the legendary composer’s name on the building where they have worked on 20 or their 29 films, as Spielberg noted….

(13) SHE’LL BE BACK. Did no one ever tell them that when it comes to a choice between the truth and the legend, print the legend? “Reacher Showrunner Shares the Surprising Story Behind That Terminator 2 Reference” at CBR.com.

Reacher Season 2’s reference to Terminator 2: Judgment Day had nothing to do with the casting of Robert Patrick.

In the second season of the hit Prime Video series, Patrick, who played the T-1000 in Terminator 2, played the role of Shane Langston, a foe to Alan Ritchson’s Jack Reacher. The Season 2 premiere included a cheeky reference to Terminator 2 when Frances Neagley used the alias Sarah Conner, a nod to Linda Hamilton’s Terminator franchise character. When he’s asked by a henchman, “Who’s Sarah Connor?,” Patrick’s Langston replied, “I don’t give a sh*t.” It’s a stark contrast to the character he played in Terminator 2, where killing Sarah’s son was the T-1000’s sole objective.

Per TVLine, showrunner Nick Santora revealed that the Terminator 2 reference was not written in to the show because of Robert Patrick’s casting. Santora wanted to make it clear, noting how “everyone thinks we’re so smart and funny for doing it,” but that the Sarah Connor line was “in there before Robert Patrick came in. I don’t want to lie; that’s the truth.“…

(14) ABOUT UGANDA. Fans are already concerned about the prospects of a Uganda Worldcon bid. Something more to keep in mind: “Ugandan internet propaganda network exposed by the BBC”.

…They all claimed to be Ugandan citizens – often women – whose accounts appeared to have the sole purpose of posting praise for the president and pushing back against critics.

The Ugandan Media Centre, which handles public communications on behalf of the government, did not respond to our requests for comment.

A sprawling network of fake accounts

By analysing those accounts’ behaviour, BBC Verify was able to map out a network of nearly 200 fake social media accounts operating on X and on Facebook (even though the latter has been blocked in Uganda since 2021).

The vast majority of these accounts used stolen images as profile pictures – often social media photos of models, influencers, and actresses from across the world. But none of the usernames used by them appeared to be linked to real individuals in Uganda or Tanzania….

(15) CALLING OUT MAO. Inverse recounts a bit of Chinese sff history in “44 Years Ago, a Revolutionary Sci-Fi Movie Ushered in a New Golden Age For the Genre”.

Imagine a world where scientists are banned from and even persecuted for practicing their research in technological advancement. This was the reality in China during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. Fueled by a desire to remove all forms of capitalism from their society, Mao’s followers destroyed laboratories and burned any literature related to science — including science fiction.

Science fiction author Enzheng Tong wrote Death Ray on Coral Island in 1964 but hid it for fear of being persecuted due to the belief that the genre was created by the West to corrupt the people of China. It wasn’t until 1978, under Xiaoping Deng’s reign, that science and technology became a national priority for the country and Tong published his short story. In 1980, director Hongmei Zhang took this opportunity to adapt Tong’s story into a film — keeping the original’s sense of nationalistic pride while taking other liberties to address the scientific failure of Mao’s rule.

(16) DEBOSE Q&A. “’I.S.S.’ Star Ariana DeBose Talks Shocking Ending, Returning To Broadway” in Variety. Beware spoilers.

“I.S.S.” is a thriller set in outer space, but the creative team was filled with pioneers in their own right. “Blackfish” director Gabriela Cowperthwaite helmed the project, with Oscar winner Ariana DeBose suiting up for the lead role — both creatives playing in a new genre for the first time.

The result is a fleet, pulpy film in which three American and three Russian astronauts are living and working together on an international space station. But things turn dire quickly when their governments declare war on each other and both groups are instructed to commandeer the space station by any means necessary….

What was the most challenging part about filming zero gravity realistically, for nearly the entire film?

Cowperthwaite: I just wanted it to look as real as possible. We tried different contraptions, some of which were a bit more comfortable, but unfortunately for the actors, they didn’t look as good. Now I understand why so many films don’t do zero gravity.

DeBose: To achieve this look and feel, we shot the movie in harnesses that are very tightly secured on our hips. Then there were tethers attached to them. We had about two weeks of training, where we learned how to balance our bodies. It’s very hard, but the especially challenging thing was when we had scenes that involved all six of us. That meant we were all in harnesses, and for every one of us, there were at least two or three people operating. While you don’t see the tethers, they were very much there, so shout out to VFX….

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

Pixel Scroll 1/20/24 Are You There, Microcosmic God? It’s Margaret’s Mini-Me

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 (0) Today’s Scroll will be lean because I’ve spent my hours writing about the 2023 Hugo Award Stats Final report posted today on the official Hugo Awards website. My analysis is here: “2023 Hugo Nomination Report Has Unexplained Ineligibility Rulings; Also Reveals Who Declined”.

(2) NEIL GAIMAN. And here’s what he had to say on Bluesky about a couple of those ineligibility rulings.

(3) DIFFERENCE ENGINEER. [Item by Steven French.] “Play about computing pioneer Ada Lovelace wins Women’s prize for playwriting” reports the Guardian.

A play about the reincarnation of the Victorian computing pioneer Ada Lovelace has won this year’s Women’s prize for playwriting.

Intelligence, by Sarah Grochala, follows Lovelace’s attempts to forge a career for herself as a serious scientist in 1840s London and being continually obstructed by men.

But in an unexpected twist of fate, Lovelace finds herself repeatedly reincarnated and gets the chance to try for fame again, first as Grace Hopper (creator of COBOL) in 1940s America, and then as Steve Jobs in 1980s Silicon Valley. Eventually, confronted with the destruction of all her work by a shady tech billionaire, she realises that it is the very nature of intelligence that she should be fighting for….

(4) APPEAL TO CONSERVE PRATCHETT COVER ARTIST’S WORK. The Guardian tells that “Family of Discworld illustrator seek wealthy patron to conserve legacy of ‘one of the great artists of our time’”.

 Josh Kirby’s art has adorned hundreds of book covers – perhaps most notably dozens of Terry Pratchett novels, especially the bestselling Discworld series.

His body of work is far more wide-ranging, though – Kirby’s paintings have graced the covers of volumes by Ray Bradbury, Ian Fleming, HG Wells, Jack Kerouac, Herman Melville and Neil Gaiman, and he’s done posters for movies including the Star Wars franchise.

Now the family of the artist, who died in 2001, is looking for a philanthropist of the arts to keep the vast collection of original paintings together and make sure Kirby’s original artworks are preserved for posterity in one or more museums or galleries.

(5) MORE ON ROGER PERKINS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The British SF fan recently sadly died.  He was introduced to fandom through the ‘City Illiterates’, the Phil Strick SF class at the Sandford Institute in 1971 before moving to the City of London Institute of Literature (City Lit – hence the  ‘City Illiterates’). His first convention was Chessmancon in 1972 after which he was an Eastercon and Novacon regular.  He then became part of the BECCON (Basildon Essex Centre/Crest CONvention) team that ran series of biennial SE England regional conventions (1981, ’83 and ’85) conventions before running the BECCON ’87 Eastercon (Britain’s national convention) in Birmingham (which saw the launch of SF2 Concatenation as an annual print zine as one of a couple of the convention’s spin-offs).  Roger was BECCON’s treasurer for all four conventions. He went on to be a member of the 1989 Contrivance Eastercon. In their bid to host that year’s Eastercon, they held a fan vote on two sites: one on mainland Britain and one on the Jersey Channel Isles.  The vote for Jersey was decisive but nonetheless caused the usual ire of fandom’s vocal minority who claimed that as the Channel Isles were not part of Britain (it is a UK protectorate), they should not host the British national convention. Nonetheless, that convention was such a success that it prompted others to put on the 1993 joint Eastercon-Eurocon in the same venue a couple of years later.  Roger gafiated shortly after moving from NE London to Wales where he had a boat called Chrestomancy.

BECCON ’81 committee and GoH. From left: Peter Tyers, Simon Beresford, Jonathan Cowie (behind), Mike Westhead, Anthony Heathcote, Bernie Peek, Barrington J. Bayley (GoH), Kathy Westhead, Roger Robinson, John Stewart, Brian Ameringen, Simon Beresford, Charles Goodwin, Roger Perkins.

(6) WHO COMPANION SHOWN THE TARDIS DOOR. Deadline says after her first season “’Doctor Who’ Star Millie Gibson Dropped; Varada Sethu Joins BBC Show”.

Here’s a shocker: the BBC and Bad Wolf have reportedly replaced Millie Gibson as Doctor Who‘s companion after she filmed just one season as Ncuti Gatwa‘s sidekick.

The Daily Mirror’s Nicola Methven, who is well-sourced on Doctor Who, said Gibson would be replaced by Andor star Varada Sethu in Gatwa’s second season as the Time Lord.

The BBC and Bad Wolf did not respond to a request for comment. The story has not been denied and appeared to be confirmed by Gatwa on Instagram (see below)….

…The Mirror said the decision was made by Doctor Who showrunner Russell T Davies and Gibson will not appear in the 2024 Christmas special after her first full season, which premieres in May.

“Millie Gibson has all but left now and there’s a brand new companion, which is really exciting,” a source told the Mirror. “Russell is keeping things moving and isn’t letting the grass grow, that’s for sure.”

On Sethu, a BBC source added: “Varada is a real gem, Russell was just blown away by her talent. The cast and crew have really warmed to her and he’s sure the fans will too.”…

Here’s the Wikipedia on Varada Sethu.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born January 20, 1948 — Nancy Kress, 76. Another one of my favorite writers. Okay, I do like a lot of female writers. I also have a fair number who get chocolate. A coincidence? You decide. 

She has won two Hugos, the first for her “Beggars in Spain” novella — later a novel as well, both are excellent in their own way.  Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine published it first in April 1991 in three parts.  Avon than, after expanded it, adding three additional parts to the novel, published it two years. There followed Beggars and Choosers, and Beggars Ride. They make up the Sleepless series. 

Nancy Kress

She’s a prolific writer. The Probability Universe trilogy, or a trilogy so far, with an Earth wrecked by ecology disaster coupled with a stargate and an alien artifact of possible immense power is fascinating.

The Crossfire twofer reminds a bit of something Anderson might do if he was writing today with a colony finding that it’s sharing a world with an alien race. It’s excellent but then she’s a very, very good writer always.  

Under the pen name Anna Kendell, she wrote a trilogy of present day thrillers in a series called Robert Cavanaugh Genetic. Bit awkward I think but it gets some point across. 

Not to be outdone there, that name went all out fantasy in Soulvine Moor Chronicles Series where a man cross over to the land of the dead. It was set in imagined medieval times.

We’re back to her name and her fascination with genetics, so t Nebula Award-winning novella, the Yesterday’s Kin series, this purely SF looks the limits of human genetics.

Now for her short stories, oh my, I think she wrote, though I can’t count accurate that high, close to a hundred stories. So which collection is the best to get a reason sampling of these stories? That’s easy —the Subterranean Press’ massive 560 page The Best of Nancy Kress. 

(8) COMICS SECTION.

  • The Far Side has a writer in crisis.
  • Tom Gauld has gone revisionist.

(9) £1 MILLION COMICS. “First-edition Superman and Spider-Man comics sell for more than £3million” at Wales Online.

Heritage Auctions in Dallas, US, has sold a number of comics. A Superman> no. 1 went for £2,006,269 (US$2.34 million). The first Amazing Spider-Man from 1963 in mint condition fetched £1,086,990 (US$1.38 m) which is reportedly nearly three times the previous record for that title. Finally, an All-Star Comics no.8, which saw Wonder Woman’s debut, was sold for £1,182.166 (US$1.5m).

(10) MISSED CLOSE ENCOUNTER. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] I was disappointed to learn that I missed a close encounter with a UFO in central London this week: I was just several miles away and had I looked over the roof tops I would have seen it in the distance! “Massive Samsung drone show with colourful whirring lights ‘mistaken for UFO’ – and passerbys cry ‘call the Men In Black’” in The Sun.
 
The huge UFO seemed to have made it through the Moonbase interceptor shield, and evaded Sky Diver.  Over 100 feet across (police laser range finders put it at 100 cubits exactly), the UFO shone with many lights, some of which were presumably navigation landing lights.

The craft hovered and rotated for eight minutes before appearing to land on the River Thames.
 
So why did it pick Canary Wharf, London’s second financial centre and overflow from the city’s ‘Square Mile’?  Well, for us Brit Cit locals, who are used to seeing SHADO mobiles rumbling through green belt woodland, the prevailing view is that that location was picked to avoid the said SHADO mobiles as these are too bulky to operate in the city. (Besides, think of the damage a mobile cannon could do to the area’s opulent buildings.)

Of course, it wasn’t long before SHADO released its cover story. The UFO was composed of a hundred drones flying in formation to mark Samsung’s launch of its new AI powered Galaxy S smartphone. Believe that if you must.

The truth is up there.

(11) FOR YOUR BETROTHED. Manly Brands has plans for your wedding ceremony – give your spouse a selection from the “Lord of the Rings™ Ring Collection”. Others not shown include The Gollum and The Ringwraith. Fully endorsed by marriage counselors and divorce attorneys!

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

Pixel Scroll 1/2/24 It Was A Dark And Scrolly Night, Suddenly A Pixel Rang Out

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(1) THE ENEMY OF THE GOOD. Rachel Craft tells “How Writing Challenges Made Me a Better Writer” at the SFWA Blog. One of the ways is: they make her “Let go of perfection”.

…For me, one of the hardest parts of writing is deciding when a piece is finished and ready to submit. No matter how many rounds of revision I’ve been through, the perfectionist in me can always find something else to tweak. Sometimes I suspect it’s less about perfectionism and more about fear of rejection. As long as I never quite finish a story, it can never be rejected, right?

Writing challenges forced me to let go of perfectionism, fear of failure, and all the other things that usually keep me from saying “It’s done.” They also reframed this last step of the process. Submitting used to be a big, daunting task that loomed like a specter over the rest of my writing process—but in a writing challenge, submitting is actually a triumph. There’s nothing quite like the sense of accomplishment that comes from hitting “submit” as the clock ticks down after 24 hours of frenzied creativity. And even if your story doesn’t win or place in the challenge, you can go on to submit it elsewhere….

(2) MIDNIGHT ACQUISITIONS. Colin O’Sullivan tells his CrimeReads audience not to sleep through great raw material for their writing: “How to Corral Your Nightmares for Use in Your Next Novel” at CrimeReads.

Will robots dream of us in the same way that we dream about them? They say that AI can “hallucinate”, right? Hadn’t Philip K. Dick warned us about all this many years ago? Maybe we weren’t paying enough attention then. Maybe we aren’t paying enough attention now. What a strange world we are being thrust into… and are we ready?

Sunny, the titular robot character of my novel, was conceived in a dream. Several years ago, I tossed and turned in bed, unnerving visions unfurling in my head. In this nightmare I was being chased by a robot that I myself had programmed. The domestic robot had turned on me – and I had been under the illusion that it was merely a household appliance, there to help with the laundry, dust a shelf, or vacuum the floor. I was trying to access its “dark settings” in order to switch the damn thing off, but I wasn’t having much luck: I couldn’t find the manual that would provide me with the right set of instructions, and the machine was definitely out to get me. It was one of the nastiest nightmares I’ve ever had, so vivid, so real. I woke in the proverbial sweat, and was instantly relieved to realize we hadn’t yet reached that stage where the machines were taking over. Not yet, at least, not yet….

(3) IOWA BOOK BAN LAW REBUKED BY FEDERAL DISTRICT COURT. “Judge Blocks Key Provisions of Iowa Book Banning Law” reports Publishers Weekly.

In yet another legal victory for freedom to read advocates, a federal judge has blocked two key portions of SF 496, a recently passed Iowa state law that sought to ban books with sexual content from Iowa schools and to bar classroom discussion of gender identity and sexuality for students below the seventh grade.

In a 49-page opinion and order, judge Stephen Locher criticized the law as “incredibly broad” and acknowledged that it has already resulted in the removal of “of hundreds of books from school libraries, including, among others, nonfiction history books, classic works of fiction, Pulitzer Prize–winning contemporary novels, books that regularly appear on Advanced Placement exams, and even books designed to help students avoid being victimized by sexual assault.”

Specifically, Locher preliminarily enjoined two provisions challenged in two separate but parallel lawsuits. Regarding the law’s ban on books with any depictions of sex acts, Locher found that the law’s “sweeping restrictions” are “unlikely to satisfy the First Amendment under any standard of scrutiny.” In a rebuke, Locher said he was “unable to locate a single case upholding the constitutionality of a school library restriction even remotely similar to Senate File 496.”

Locher said that the law’s “underlying message” is that there is “no redeeming value to any such book even if it is a work of history, self-help guide, award-winning novel, or other piece of serious literature,” adding that with the law state lawmakers had sought to impose “a puritanical ‘pall of orthodoxy’ over school libraries.”

Furthermore, Locher suggested that the law was a solution in search of a problem. “The State Defendants have presented no evidence that student access to books depicting sex acts was creating any significant problems in the school setting, much less to the degree that would give rise to a ‘substantial and reasonable governmental interest’ justifying across-the-board removal,” he wrote….

(4) FROM ZERO COURANT TO AU COURANT. In “Scalzi on Film: When Fun Becomes Homework” at Uncanny Magazine, John Scalzi puts on his film critic’s hat and runs down the ridiculously large number of film and streaming series a person must have previously seen in order to fully appreciate the latest in certain Marvel Cinematic Universe or Star Wars properties. This is a lot like a job!

…We are nerds, and more than slightly obsessive—all the minutiae of created universes are our jam. But there’s a difference between salting in easter eggs to reward the faithful, and requiring hours of prep work—or at least the willingness to locate a wiki and dive in. And even the nerds have limits. I am a nerd by inclination and by profession—but I’m also a 54-year-old human who lives in the world and who requires at least some of my time and brain slots remain open for other things, like family and work and sleep and domain knowledge in other areas relevant to my life….

(5) FUTURES HISTORY. Professor Esther MacCallum-Stewart, Chair of Glasgow 2024, a Worldcon for Our Futures, posted a message on New Year’s Day: “Looking Ahead to 2024—Reflections from the Chair”.

…When I look up from writing this, I see original art on my wall by Iain Clarke, and an empty bottle of our gin, full of lights and on display in my bookcase. I see a mug that one of my team gave to me and a comic book that a Division Head sent this week to cheer me up. My phone is buzzing, because it always is, despite the fact that I said ‘This is the last week we have before the new year, you HAVE to all take breaks’. (Reader, my team absolutely has not let me do this, because there’s always one thing that needs addressing and, as a result, several of them have been forcibly told to take that break, because we really won’t get it from now on in.) I can see the official gavel of the convention, which is on my mantlepiece until next August. The gavel has been around the world multiple times, but for me, it will be next used to open Glasgow 2024, and five days later, it will be used to declare it closed. Another Chair told me once that closing their Worldcon with that gavel broke their heart a little bit. All of the Chairs cry in the Closing Ceremony. Because it’s five days to attend, but it’s years and years to build…. 

Any Chair that wants to cry should go right ahead. Do all Chairs? No.

(6) I KNOW SOMETHING YOU DON’T KNOW. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Or, so US House of Representatives members may claim after they leave this briefing: “Scoop: House members to receive classified UFO briefing” says Axios.

Members of the House Oversight Committee will receive a classified briefing on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), better known as UFOs, Axios has learned.

Why it matters: Congressional interest in the issue has grown in recent years, with a small but vocal group of lawmakers in both parties pushing for greater transparency from the government on the issue.

Driving the news: The members-only briefing will be held in the Office of House Security, according to a notice obtained by Axios.

The briefing is being provided by the Office of Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, the notice said….

(7) HURT IN NYC. A stuntwoman whose resume includes major MCU films was critically hurt by a hit-and-run driver on New Year’s Day: “Carrie Bernans Injured: Stuntwoman & Actress Hurt In NYC Hit & Run” – Deadline tells how it happened.

Actress and stuntwoman Carrie Bernans was critically injured during an alleged hit and run in New York City at 1:30 a.m. Monday.

Bernans, whose work includes 2023’s The Color Purple as well as Marvel’s Black Panther and Avengers: Infinity War/Endgame, was hurt along with eight others. Per her publicist, she was struck by a driver who crashed into an outdoor dining shed at Chirp, a Peruvian restaurant in Midtown Manhattan. That driver then backed up and rammed into another car before officers swarmed.

Bernans recently gave birth to a son, and luckily the newborn wasn’t with her but rather in a hotel with her family. Bernans was in stable condition and is undergoing surgery. Her mom posted details on the traumatic incident on Instagram and said Bernans is in rough shape….

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born January 2, 1920 — Isaac Asimov. (Died 1992.) I’m looking at Isaac Asimov this Scroll, one of the Big Three of SF, proclaimed so at the time along with Arthur Clarke and Robert Heinlein. 

Isaac Asimov. Photo by and © Andrew Porter.

Now let me note these selections are my personal picks, not a look at his entire career as that’s simply not possible given how prolific he was. One source says that he wrote five hundred books and I certainly wouldn’t say that’s impossible to believe!

Without a single doubt, I can state that the Foundation Trilogy which won a well deserved Hugo at NyCon 3 for All Time Best Series is my favorite work by him, and it is certainly the work by him that I’ve read the most down the years. Like everything by him, I’ve not watched any film adaptations that have been done. 

I am familiar with, and fond of, of his first two novels, Pebble in The Sky and The Stars, Like Dust.  It’s been decades since I’ve read either so I’ve no idea how they’ve fared with age. 

The Caves of Steel and the other Robot series novels I think are on the whole excellent. Now of course speaking of robots, I, Robot with Susan Calvin is simply awesome. Almost all of the Robot stories, all 32 of 37, can be found in the 1982 The Complete Robot collection. There also are six novels.

The Gods Themselves is an amazing and it stands up well when re-read. It would win a Hugo at Torcon II. 

Isaac Asimov. Photo by and © Andrew Porter.

That’s it for SF by him, but there’s one more tasty creation by him that being The Black Widowers stories which were based on a literary dining club Asimov belonged to known as the Trap Door Spiders. 

The Widowers were based on real-life Spiders, some of them well known writers in their own right such as Lin Carter, L. Sprague de Camp, Harlan Ellison and Lester del Rey.

There were sixty-six stories over the six volumes that were released. So far only one volume, Banquets of the Black Widowers, has been released as an ePub. And yes, I’ve got a copy on my iPad as they are well worth re-reading. 

Someone needs to get them collected in one ePub collection. Pretty please. 

So that’s what I like by him. What do you like? 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • The Far Side asks, if a tree falls on an exoplanet, does it make a sound?
  • Peanuts (published March 22, 1955) has one more Martian joke.
  • Moderately Confused lives up to its name – does the sign refer to the store or the books?
  • Oh my gosh – Tom Gauld revealed a secret message!

(10) YOUR LACK OF FAITH ETC. ETC. It’s not a very good omen that Entertainment Weekly’s “The 40 best alien movies of all time” can’t make up its mind about the very first film on the list.

1 of 40 Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 and 1978)

If you favor the later renditions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, we don’t blame you. And it may be cheating to double up on our list’s first entry, but the 1978 version (featuring Brooke Adams, Donald Sutherland, Jeff Goldblum, Leonard Nimoy, and Veronica Cartwright) is one of the rare examples of a remake living up to the legacy of its predecessor, which is all the more impressive when you consider the magnitude of industry legend Robert Wise‘s original. As an EW staffer previously wrote, the 1956 film is meant to be “a timely Cold War parable of takeover from within.” It ultimately “hit upon even deeper mass-marketing-age fears,” which helped it stand the test of time. Meanwhile, the follow-up flick harnesses that same dread and translates it to a new age without losing any punch.

At the center of these effective alien features is our fear of the Other. Most people don’t worry about little green men taking over their cities and suburbs, but most of us have watched some of our friends and family become bizarre shadows of their former selves practically overnight — which is exactly what transpires in Body Snatchers as the citizens of Earth are infiltrated by alien doppelgängers. In an age where paranoia and misinformation reign supreme, this tale of science failing to explain the chaos around us seems more timely (and more frightening) than ever before.

(11) SCREAMBOAT WILLIE. “Mickey Mouse horror film unveiled as copyright ends” and BBC is quick to point it out.

…A trailer for a slasher film, featuring a masked killer dressed as Mickey Mouse, was released on 1 January, the day that Disney’s copyright on the earliest versions of the cartoon character expired in the US.

“We wanted the polar opposite of what exists,” the movie’s producer said….

…Creatives have been quick to take advantage of the new rules, with a trailer (contains violent scenes) for a Mickey horror film dropping on the same day.

In the horror comedy thriller, called Mickey’s Mouse Trap, a young woman is thrown a surprise birthday party in an amusement arcade – but things quickly take a turn for the worse when she and her friends encounter a knife-wielding murderer in a Mickey costume….

(12) WIPER NO SWIPING! Meanwhile Disney’s lawyers are staying in shape by working over the owner of a Chilean car wash. Forbes analyzes the case in “Lucasfilm Sues ‘Star Wash’—A Car Wash In Chile—Claiming Plagiarism”.

Lucasfilm, the billion-dollar Disney-owned film and production company behind the “Star Wars” franchise, is suing a Chilean car wash known as “Star Wash,” arguing the small business is plagiarizing the wildly popular franchise with its branding, according to Reuters.

The law firm representing Matias Jara, the owner of “Star Wash,” told Reuters that Jara was in the process of registering his brand with Chile’s patent authority when he received a lawsuit from Lucasfilm seeking to block the registration of his business’s name.

Lucasfilm is claiming the business brand could confuse consumers into believing it’s affiliated with the studio, though it hasn’t taken issue with car attendants who can be seen on the “Star Wash” Instagram account dressed as characters like Darth Vader, Chewbacca and Boba Fett….

Once I looked at this Instagram ad for the business, though, I thought Disney had a point.

(13) MUSICAL ITEMS. [By Daniel Dern.] By the way, a third theremin video (not here) said that playing the trombone was the best preparation/way for learning to play the theremin.

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

Pixel Scroll 12/30/23 Always Cool To See A Reference To Big Pixel And The Scrolling Company

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(1) THUMB OUT, THUMBS DOWN.  The 1979 Best Dramatic Hugo race is analyzed by the Hugo Book Club Blog in “Death From Above (Hugo cinema 1979)”. In spite of everything going for it, this finalist did not win:

…Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy is rightly regarded as a classic of science fiction comedy. Those in our cinema club who love it, do so unreservedly … but it was not to everyone’s taste. Understated and ironic, some consider it a masterpiece of timing and laconic charm, despite the dialogue feeling loose and unstructured. Following an everyday Englishman who survives the destruction of planet Earth, the series meanders between various science fiction tropes before the protagonist uncovers the galactic conspiracy behind his planet’s demolition. There’s a reason this radio show spawned four sequels, was adapted into a television series, a movie, a video game, and a novelization that sold more than 14 million copies….

(2) URSULA VERNON’S GOOD NEWS.

(3) SMALL WONDERS. Issue 7 of Small Wonders, the magazine for science fiction and fantasy flash fiction and poetry, is now available on virtual newsstands here. Co-editors Cislyn Smith and Stephen Granade bring a mix of flash fiction and poetry from authors and poets who are familiar to SFF readers as well as those publishing their first-ever piece with us.

The Issue 7 Table of Contents and release dates on the Small Wonders website:

  • Cover Art: “Entrance” by Sarah Morrison
  • “Hikari” (fiction) by Morgan Welch (8 Jan)
  • “The Mummy Gets Adopted” (poem) by Amy Johnson (10 Jan)
  • “Quantum Eurydice” (fiction) by Avi Burton (12 Jan)
  • “Whispers of Ascension” (fiction) by Wendy Nikel (15 Jan)
  • “Lekythos” (poem) by Casey Lucas (17 Jan)
  • “The Sternum Ties it All Together” (fiction) by Janna Miller (19 Jan)
  • “Constellations of Flesh, Bone, and Memory” (fiction) by Timothy Hickson (22 Jan)
  • “Another Cemetery Wedding ” (poem) by Belicia Rhea (24 Jan)
  • “All the Dead Girls, Singing” (fiction) by Avra Margariti (26 Jan)

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

(4) MEDICAL UPDATE. Rusty Burke experienced a serious fall on December 16, resulting in severe head injuries and two subdural hematomas. Since then, he has been under intensive care, including intubation and sedation. There’s an extensive medical update at “The World of Robert E. Howard” on Facebook.

Rusty Burke is President of the Robert E. Howard Foundation, has edited several editions of Howard’s work, and has published countless articles on Howard for the academic and fan press. He founded The Dark Man: Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies.

(5) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listens to join Pat Murphy for lunch at “the single best restaurant in the world” in Episode 215 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

Pat Murphy

My guest this time around is Pat Murphy, who won the Nebula Award for her 1986 novel The Falling Woman, plus a second Nebula the same year for her novelette, “Rachel in Love.” She also won the Philip K. Dick Award for her 1990 short story collection Points of Departure, and the World Fantasy Award for her 1990 novella, Bones. For more than 20 years, she  and Paul Doherty cowrote the recurring Science column in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. She also co-founded the James Tiptree, Jr. Award in 1991. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

I’ve known Pat for a loooong time, and I can tell you exactly how long — we met on September 4, 1980, more than 43 years prior to the conversation you’re about to hear. If you want to learn exactly how and why I can pinpoint that date, well, the episode will reveal all.

We discussed the part of Robert A. Heinlein’s famed rules of writing with which she disagrees, why she felt the need to attend the Clarion writing workshop even after having made several sales to major pro markets, the occasional difficulties in decoding what an editor is truly trying to tell you, the importance of never giving up your day jobs, why she can’t read Dylan Thomas when she’s working on a novel, the differences between the infighting we’ve seen in the science fiction vs. literary fields, what we perceive as our personal writing flaws, a Clarion critiquing mystery I’ve been attempting to solve since 1979, the science fiction connection which launched her career at the Exploratorium, and much more.

(6) ATWOOD. Margaret Atwood has been revealing aspects of her life and writing to BBC Radio 4’s This Cultural Life. Download program at the link.

Margaret Atwood talks to John Wilson about the formative influences and experiences that shaped her writing. One of the world’s bestselling and critically acclaimed authors, Atwood has published over 60 books including novels, short stories, children’s fiction, non-fiction and poetry. She’s known for stories of human struggle against oppression and brutality, most famously her 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopian vision of America in which women are enslaved. She has twice won the Booker Prize For Fiction, in 2000 for The Blind Assassin and again in 2019 for her sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments.

Growing up in remote Canadian woodland with her scientist parents, she traces her career as a story-teller back to sagas that she invented with her older brother as a child, and her first ‘novel’ written when she was seven. She recalls an opera about fabrics that she wrote and performed at high school for a home economics project, and how she staged puppet shows for children’s parties. Margaret Atwood also discusses the huge impact that reading George Orwell had on her, and how his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four especially influenced The Handmaid’s Tale. She reveals how that novel – written whilst she was living in Berlin in 1985 – was initially conceived after the 1980 election of President Ronald Reagan and the resurgence of evangelical right-wing politics in America.

(7) ECSTASY OF HORROR. The BBC ruminates on “The Wicker Man: The disturbing cult British classic that can’t be defined”.

…At different times and from different perspectives, it can feel as though you’re watching a crime thriller, a fantasy, a celebration of alternate lifestyles or nature-centred folklore – or brilliantly conceived arthouse cinema. In the 2008 book Fifty Key British Films, Justin Smith considered The Wicker Man “a curious mixture of detective story and folk musical”.

The Wicker Man can also be watched as a challenge to orthodox religion – not least when Lord Summerisle defends his pagan ethos by wryly questioning Howie’s Christian worship of “the son of a virgin impregnated by a ghost”. Or perhaps it’s the first mockumentary in British cinema history, given an opening credit offering thanks to Summerisle residents “for this privileged insight into their religious practices and for their generous cooperation in the making of this film”….

(8) AT SWIM-TWO-BIRDS AND GRAHAM GREENE. [Item by James Bacon.] Irish science fiction fan Pádraig Ó Méalóid investigates the circumstances under which one of the leading novelists of the twentieth century, Graham Greene, came to write a blurb for the back cover of the first edition of Flann O’Brien’s debut novel At Swim-Two-Birds, published by Longmans, Green & Co. in 1939. “The Mexican Pas de Trois of Flann O’Brien, Graham Greene, and Shirley Temple: The Background to At Swim-Two-Birds’s Back Cover Blurb” at The Parish Review: Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies.

…Greene had worked as a publisher’s reader for Eyre & Spottiswoode in his younger days,13 but by the time At Swim-Two-Birds was published in 1939 he had already had eight novels published, including England Made Me (1935) and Brighton Rock (1938), so was probably both too busy and too successful to be working for anyone as a first reader for incoming manuscripts from first-time writers. At Swim-Two-Birds came to Longmans recommended by A.M. Heath, which might have meant that it would have started its journey on a higher rung than a book straight off the slush pile…

(9) ROGER HILL (1948-2023). “Roger Hill, Early Comics Fan, Historian and Scholar, Dies at 75” — The Comics Journal paid tribute. Here’s a brief excerpt:

… During the early 1990s, Roger worked with [Jerry] Weist as comic art advisor to the Sotheby’s Comic Book and Comic Art auctions in New York City.

Beginning in 2004, he edited and published his own fanzine called the EC Fan-Addict Fanzine. The fifth issue was published by Fantagraphics in November 2023, and a sixth, posthumous issue is due out in June 2024 (also from Fantagraphics). He was the art editor for Bhob Stewart’s 2003 book Against the Grain: MAD Artist Wallace Wood, writing several chapters as well. In 2010, Roger contributed an essay called “The Early Years” for the Éditions Déesse edition of the WOODWORK: Wallace Wood 1927-1981 catalog done for the Wally Wood exhibition presented by the Casal Solleric in Palma City, Spain. After Jerry Weist’s passing, in 2012 Roger and Glynn Crain finished assembling his book Frank R. Paul: The Dean of Science Fiction Illustration for IDW Publishing.

Roger’s first book, Wally Wood: Galaxy Art and Beyond, was published by IDW in 2016. His other books include Reed Crandall: Illustrator of the Comics (2017), Mac Raboy: Master of the Comics (2019), and The Chillingly Weird Art of Matt Fox (2023), all for TwoMorrows Publishing….

(10) TOM WILKINSON (1948-2023). [Item by Cat Eldridge.] Definitely one of ours — Shakespeare in Love as Hugh Fennyman, the fantasy film Black Knight in the role of Sir Knolte of Marlborough,  in the sublime Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as as Dr. Howard Mierzwiak, next is Batman Begins as Mafia boss Carmine Falcone, The Exorcism of Emily Rose has him playing Father Moore, he’s  a taxi driver in the romantic fantasy If Only and finally he’s James Reid in The Green Hornet.  

Late in his career, he had two animated genre voicing credits. First as The Fox in The Gruffalo’s Child based off  the picture book of the same name written by Julia Donaldson and illustrated by Axel Scheffler. It looks adorable. 

The second is yet another of the seemingly endless credits for Watership Down, this time for the character Threarah. 

Died December 30.

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born December 30, 1865 — Rudyard Kipling. (Died 1936.) Yes, Rudyard Kipling. I’ve not ever dealt with him at length so let’s do so now.

I think the works I like best by him are The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book, the 1894 and 1895 collections of stories. Most of the characters are animals such as Shere Khan the tiger and Baloo the bear, though a main character is a boy Mowgli. As with most of his work, it reflects strongly his Anglo-Indian heritage and upbringing. 

Rudyard Kipling

Up next for us is the Just So Stories for Little Children written eight years later. This collection of origin stories such as how the elephant got his trunk is considered a classic of children’s literature, and deservedly so.

Puck of Pook’s Hill borrows that character, and you know which character I mean, and drops him in 1906 Britain for a series of comical adventures with two children. Really, really fun stories.

He’s written at least two ghost stories, “The Phantom ‘Rickshaw” and “My Own True Ghost Story” published in his 1888 The Phantom ‘Rickshaw & other Eerie Tales collection.

Lastly he did write some SF. To wit, “With the Night Mail” a 1905 story and As Easy As A.B.C., a 1912 publication. (Both were set in the 21st century in Kipling’s Aerial Board of Control universe.)  The first was published in McClure’s Magazine in November 1905, and then in The Windsor Magazine in December 1905. In 1909 it was issued as a popular book, slightly revised and with additional poetry and faux advertisements and notices from the future. Both have anthologized repeatedly in the last one hundred and twenty-five years.

(12) COMICS SECTION.

  • Bizarro has that name for good reason, as this arrest for a peculiar game-related crime will show.
  • Nancy sounds like someone who went to the same school as Writer X.
  • Tom Gauld presents:

(13) SPARKLING DEBUT. This is who was named TVLine’s “Performer of the Week”: “Ncuti Gatwa’s Performance as the Fifteenth in ‘Doctor Who’ Special”.

…On top of it all, Gatwa also plays the more serious moments so well, mining them not just for the inherent drama (Ruby has mysteriously vanished from the timeline!) but also the emotion. Watch him watch the woman who left newborn Ruby at the church doorstep walk away, and you feel the conflict. The heartbreak. Perhaps a hint of recognition…? And then, Fifteen’s eventual resolve to stick to his plan.

Gatwa has stepped into this role with such elan and ease, while also infusing it with specific and fresh nuances, well, it’s almost as if he’s been playing it for 900 years.

(14) TOMB OF THE UNKNOWN ALIEN. Atlas Obscura takes readers to “1890s Alien Gravesite – Aurora, Texas”.

According to a story run in the April 19, 1897, edition of the Dallas Morning News a “mystery airship,” as UFOs were known in those days, came sailing out of the sky, smashing through a windmill belonging to Judge J.S. Proctor, before finally crashing into the ground. The debris also destroyed the good judge’s flower garden. Unfortunately the pilot was also killed in the collision, but locals were able to drag what was described as a “petite” and “Martian” body from the wreckage. The body was supposedly buried under a tree branch in the Aurora cemetery, observing good Christian rites….

…Today, the alien’s headstone has been stolen but all traces of the Wild West alien spot are not lost. The Texas state historical marker that commemorates the cemetery still mentions the Martian burial among the other honored (and real) dead buried at the site….

(15) HE’S GOT TO HAVE IT. “’I’d sell a kidney for a Jarvis Cocker Spitting Image puppet!’ The collectors who’ll do anything for a TV treasure” in the Guardian.

…Is there any piece of television treasure [TV writer Tom Neenan is] still holding out for? “There is a Spitting Image puppet of Jarvis Cocker from the 90s that’s really spindly and awesome. If that came up I’d consider selling a kidney or something to buy it,” says Neenan. “Oh and I’m building a Dalek at the minute. It’s based on the plans for the new series and it’s all built by me but I’m very jealous of people who have a screen-used Dalek.”

Ah yes, Daleks. Holy mackerel, there is a wealth of Doctor Who collectors, hunters and enthusiasts out there, meeting up in conference centres, museums and online message boards to compare their wares. It is on one such website that I first came across Chris Balcombe, a man who owned and restored an original 1960s Dalek….

(16) FRIGHTENINGLY NUTRITIOUS. This 1945 Cream of Wheat ad was illustrated by Charles Addams. (Click for larger image.)

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Olav Rokne, Rich Horton, Scott Edelman, James Bacon, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Tom Becker.]

Pixel Scroll 12/25/23 It’s Not My Pixel, Monkey Boy!

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(1) SCROLL LITE. I’m spending Christmas with my brother and his wife today, so this will be a short edition of the Scroll. I wish a happy holiday season to all of you!

(2) ‘TIL NEXT YEAR. Santa’s finished his rounds and can relax at his favorite intergalactic watering hole. (An Emsh cover for Galaxy Magazine.)

(3) DOCTOR BARBIE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] It’s Christmas and some science journals have festive light-heartedness…

The cover of the British Medical Journal (BMJ) relates to the fantasy film hit of the year Barbie. “Christmas 2023: Ideas for a new world”.

The cover of The BMJ’s Christmas issue this year shows a Barbie that challenges sexist and racist norms. Richard Hurley describes the other new ideas this Christmas issue presents.

See also: “This Barbie is a surgeon”.

In her elegant qualitative study, Katherine Klamer dares the reader to dream bigger for a rising generation of girls.1 In an analysis of nearly 90 Barbies, Klamer found that Barbie brand medical professional dolls largely treated children (63%, n=48/76), with only three dolls (4%, n=3/76) working with adults. 59% of the Barbie brand dolls were white, 28% black, and 6% East Asian, and none had any physical disabilities. All Barbie brand doctors appeared to have either no specialization or were paediatricians with no apparent sub-specialization. Analysis showed that the dolls’ personal safety accessories were inadequate for standard practice; 98% of the Barbie brand dolls came with stethoscopes yet only 4% had face masks. Overall, the group of Barbies showed only a very limited range of medical careers.1 As surgeons in decidedly male dominated fields, we support Klamer’s conclusion that Barbies should represent a more diverse field of medical and scientific professions and that safety comes before fashion. Surely, personal protective equipment (known as PPE) should be commonplace accessories in medical and scientist Barbies’ wardrobes. While the evolution of Barbie’s career options has expanded in recent decades, there is clearly still room for improvement….

The issue also includes an article about  “The space doctors”

Few doctors get to go on real space missions, but they do conduct space research, often in extreme…

What do you actually do on a mission?

SR: “You’re trying to simulate the conditions in an environment like the Moon or Mars or anywhere in space so that you can test out technologies and see how they stand up and whether they’re appropriate to be used by a group of isolated people. But you also train future astronauts.”

RV: “When I started in analogue missions (where researchers carry out field tests in places with physical similarities to space environments1 ) there was me and two other doctors in the whole discipline and that was it. Now analogue space medicine has grown into a bigger specialty, and I think that may be because of the Lunar Gateway (the planned extraterrestrial space station to orbit the Moon) plus multiagency/international collaboration planning an extraterrestrial space station on Mars. For that we need to have more testbeds for doing what we call ‘quick, fast, and fail’ to learn what works. To do that you need analogues.”…

(4) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

1980 — I assume most of you are familiar with the M*A*S*H series that ran eleven seasons starting in 1972. Based off of the Robert Altman film of the same name, it was supposed to be a comedy but a lot of very dark humor, pathos, tragedy and even quite moving deaths got in it as well. 

It did three Christmas-centered episodes of which I think only “Death Takes A Holiday” from the ninth season stands up as a truly interesting story. 

The secondary story which I’ll detail first has Charles Emerson Winchester the Third, our insufferable Bostonian surgeon, refusing to help salvage things after a party for orphans is cancelled. Everyone else digs into their rations from home and puts together a true military style Christmas party, but him. 

It turn out that Emersons don’t do public charity and he had given expensive chocolate that he got from his parents to that orphanage instead. Thus he’s understandably angry when he discovers the chocolate had made its way to the black market. So he takes the director aside and shouts at him, but the director says the candy was better used to purchase rice and cabbage, which the kids needed far more than candy.

So now for the main story.

A soldier shot by a sniper is choppered in on Christmas. It’s clear that there’s absolutely no hope of saving him as the surgeons know he is brain dead and will die no matter what they do. Just as they’re dropping life saving measures, they find a photograph of his family.

So Hawkeye, B.J., and Margaret decide to keep him alive, not indefinitely as not cannot happen even as a Christmas miracle, just until December 26th, so his family will never have to think of Christmas as the day their husband and father died. They succeed until after late evening, but he doesn’t make it to midnight. Finally, Hawkeye makes the decision to push the hands past midnight, and they agree to the list his time of death as early the next morning. 

So no Christmas miracles, just a lie that will help a family be just a little more happy come the next Christmas. Maybe. 

As our medical staff leave the dead behind and Father Mulcahy has administer the Last Rites, they are greeted by Potter as Santa. Potter says Santa knows they’ve “been very good boys and girls today” and has an elf, one of the orphans, give them the last four pieces of nurse Peg’s mother’s fudge from California.

Snow begins falling as they each take a piece and toast each other with it, wishing each other a Merry Christmas while the M*A*S*H staff  in the Mess Tent sing the last lines of “Silent Night”. 

Writing episodes was never a solitary enterprise for the series, so this episode was written by Mike Farrell, John Rappaport, Dennis Koenig, Thad Mumford, Dan Wilcox, and Burt Metcalfe and directed by Farrell. Mike Farrell played Captain B.J. Hunnicutt on the series. 

Colonel Potter here became the third and final member of the 4077th to play Santa Claus, after Hawkeye in “Dear Dad”, and B.J. in “Dear Sis”.

(5) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born December 25, 1924 — Rod Serling. (Died 1975.) Rod Serling is best remembered for the original and certainly extraordinary Twilight Zone series and its sequel series of sorts Night Gallery, with the former winning an impressive three Hugos. He was involved at some stage in Seven Days in May, as well as The New People series, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, UFOs: Past, Present, and Future and Planet of the Apes.

So let’s look at that work I listed above which is other than Twilight Zone and Night Gallery and what Serling had to do with them, if anything. 

Let’s start Seven Days in May, a very scary film indeed, which first in released in 1964. Director John Frankenheimer hired Serling to write the script off the novel of the same name by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II. It’s a solid piece of alternative history.

The New People series isn’t really anything he was involved in despite many websites listing him as being so. He was given the idea by Aaron Spelling about a group of young people who crash-land on a remote island and with everyone thinking they’re dead, they set out to form a new society.   

He said in a later interview that “He brought me the idea and I wrote the pilot script. Beyond that, I have nothing to do with it. The show is somewhere between Gilligan’s Island and San Francisco State. It may work. But not with me.” The original never-aired fifty-one minute pilot was screened at UCLA Film & Television Archive with a full Serling credit eleven years ago.

Now Serling again had nothingwith the final aired version of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde film. He was hired to write the script when it was to film in London but Jason Robards was unhappy with his script so it was moved because of a strike to Toronto and a new script by a new writer done. No idea what happened to that script. A pity as it might’ve been interesting.

UFOs: Past, Present, and Future was narrated by Rod Serling, Burgess Meredith, and José Ferrer who had been involved in The Twilight Zone. A documentary purportedly proving they were real. It is various claimed that officials at California’s Norton Air Force Base, the U.S. Department of Defense or the National Republican Party asked for this film. Serling had no role in it beyond narrating part of it. 

Planet of the Apes is an interesting story as the script he wrote was then modified by subsequent screenwriters. Even Serling himself disputes that much of his script remains in the final shooting script saying “The original script that I wrote was considerably different than the one they ultimately used” and whether iconic visual aspects of the film such as the hand of The Statue of Liberty were solely his idea. 

So The Twilight Zone and The Night Gallery which I just checked to make sure and yes Paramount + is still streaming the original Twilight Zone. 

The Twilight Zone as created, largely written by and presented by Rod Serling premiered on CBS with the “Where is Everybody?” episode sixty-four years ago. An earlier pilot was developed but it ended up airing on a different show, Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse, and was later adapted as a radio play. Serling served as executive producer and head writer; he wrote or co-wrote ninety-two of the show’s one hundred and fifty-six episodes. 

The series would run four seasons in total. It would win the Hugo at Pittcon and then again the next year at Seacon for Best Dramatic Presentation repeating that for a third year straight at Chicon III. It didn’t do that for a fourth year running at DisCon I as no Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo was awarded. 

Some of my favorite episodes? “Five Characters In Search of an Exit” for its minimalistic approach to, well, everything; “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” with Shatner of course which was actually written not by Serling but by Richard Mathewson; “The Mighty Casey” and “I Sing The Body Electric”, an episode based on a story by Ray Bradbury. Although Bradbury contributed several scripts to the series, this was the only one produced. 

Now for The Night Gallery. Unlike The Twilight Zone which has seeped into my consciousness and into my bones as well, I’ll willingly admit that although I’ve watched bits and pieces of it down the decades that I won’t say that’s it has gotten a firm hold on my consciousness like its predecessor. I think it’s that I’m just not interested in horror and suspense which was its focus, so what I saw just didn’t interest me the way the stories on The Twilight Zone always did.  It’s not just as pure a storytelling experience for me as that series is. Oh well. 

(6) COMICS SECTION.

Tom Gauld brings back a couple of his Good King Wenceslas variations.

(7) WHO WAS THAT MASKED DOG? CBR.com tells how “Batman: Ace the Bat-Hound Received an Award-Winning New Christmas Origin”.

It’s our yearly Comics Should Be Good Advent Calendar! This year, the theme is the Greatest Christmas Comic Book Stories Ever Told! I had you all vote for your all-time favorite comic book Christmas stories and I collected all the votes, and now I am counting down the results! Each day will spotlight the next story on the list as we count down from #24 all the way to #1!

Every day until Christmas Eve, you can click on the current day’s Advent Calendar post, and it will show the Advent Calendar with the door for that given day opened, and you can see what the “treat” for that day will be! You can click here to see the previous Advent Calendar entries.

And now, we open the sixteenth door on the calendar…

Who was the original Ace the Bat-Hound?

The best thing about Ace the Bat-Hound (created by Bill Finger, Sheldon Moldoff and Charles Paris) is that originally he wasn’t even Batman and Robin’s DOG!

When he debuted in 1955’s Batman #92, he was just a dog that they found with a distinctive mark on his forehead and Bruce Wayne advertised in the local newspaper that he found the dog. The dog then jumped into the Batmobile while Batman and Robin were on the way to a crime scene, and since Batman and Robin couldn’t very well be seen hanging around with the same dog that Bruce Wayne just advertised that he had found, Robin made him a mask to cover the distinctive mark, and so Ace the Bat-Hound made his debut!…

[Thanks to Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, 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 Andrew (not Werdna).]

Pixel Scroll 12/24/23 I’ve Got 99 Pixels But The Scroll Ain’t Fifth

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(1) WHAT HAPPENS IN TRISOLARIS — STAYS IN VEGAS. “Netflix to Stage ‘3 Body Problem’ Immersive Experience at CES 2024”. Variety tells what visitors at the Las Vegas event will encounter.

Next month, Netflix will have a booth on the main CES show floor for the first time — where it will stage an “immersive experience” for the “3 Body Problem,” the sci-fi drama series from “Game of Thrones” duo David Benioff and D.B. Weiss and Alexander Woo.

The streamer’s exhibit space at CES 2024 will be located at the Las Vegas Convention Center’s Central Hall, Booth #17048. Per Netflix’s description of the activation: “An otherworldly headset will transport CES attendees into the mysterious world of ‘3 Body Problem’ in a fun and experiential way, showcasing the series’ genre-bending high stakes.” The experience keys off a key narrative element in the “3 Body Problem” universe, in which a gaming headset is used by characters to transport into an unknown world.

In the wearable-display experience, CES attendees will be able to watch the series trailer for the very first time. And as they watch, Netflix says, “they are transported into an immersive, real-world extension of the series, revealing clues about the nature of the core threat in the ‘3 Body Problem.’”…

(2) BAD BUZZ ABOUT GOODREADS. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] The saga of Cait Corrain, et al., takes the lede in the Guardian story, “’It’s totally unhinged’: is the book world turning against Goodreads?”

For Bethany Baptiste, Molly X Chang, KM Enright, Thea Guanzon, Danielle L Jensen, Akure Phénix, RM Virtues and Frances White, it must have been brutal reading. All received scathing reviews on Goodreads, an online platform that reputedly has the power to make or break new authors.

But the verdicts were not delivered by an esteemed literary critic. They were the work of Cait Corrain, a debut author who used fake accounts to “review bomb” her perceived rivals. The literary scandal led to Corrain posting an apology, being dropped by her agent and having her book deal cancelled.

It also uncovered deeper questions about Goodreads, arguably the most popular site on which readers post book reviews, and its outsized impact on the publishing industry. Its members had produced 26m book reviews and 300m ratings over the past year, the site reported in October. But for some authors, it has become a toxic work environment that can sink a book before it is even published.

“It has a lot of influence because there are so many people now who are not in the New York ecosystem of publishing,” says Bethanne Patrick, a critic, author and podcaster. “Publishers and agents and authors and readers go to Goodreads to see what is everybody else looking at, what’s everyone else interested in? It has a tremendous amount of influence in the United States book world and reading world and probably more than some people wish it had.”

Goodreads allows users to review unpublished titles. Publishers frequently send advance copies to readers in exchange for online reviews that they hope will generate buzz. But in October, Goodreads acknowledged a need to protect the “authenticity” of ratings and reviews, encouraging users to report content or behaviour that breaches its guidelines.

Goodreads said: “Earlier this year, we launched the ability to temporarily limit submission of ratings and reviews on a book during times of unusual activity that violate our guidelines, including instances of ‘review bombing’. This kind of activity is not tolerated on Goodreads and it diminishes the community’s trust in people who participate.”…

(3) THE HAUNTENING. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] BBC Radio 4 has had a short comedy, thriller. When he gets a gift from his girlfriend, he does not realize that it is a deep fake powered by an artificial intelligence.  But the AI does not take well to criticism and things soon become personal… You can listen to it here. “The Hauntening”.

Travel through the bad gateway in this modern ghost story as writer and performer Tom Neenan discovers what horrors lurk in our apps and gadgets. In this episode, a celebrity birthday message from Joanna Lumley turns into a terrifying gift for Tom

Modern technology is terrifying. The average smartphone carries out three-point-three-six billion instructions per second. The average person can only carry out one instruction in that time. Stop and think about that for a second. Sorry, that’s two instructions – you won’t be able to do that.

But what if modern technology was… literally terrifying? What if there really was a ghost in the machine?

(4) POSTERIZED. Think of it as a start on next year’s shopping. Or simply a well-deserved gift for yourself.  “Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk (Millennium Records, 1977)” at Heritage Auctions. Bidding is only up to $16 at last look.

Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk (Millennium Records, 1977). Very Fine on Linen. All English Language Japanese Record Store Poster (20.25″ X 29.25″) Robert Rodriquez Artwork.

Even though its films take place in a galaxy far, far away, the Star Wars franchise has connected with audiences since the original film’s release in 1977. 20th Century Fox had no idea that the film would resonate so much with fans, so when George Lucas agreed to pass up a $500,000 directing bonus to attain merchandising rights, it seemed safe for the studio to do. However, Lucas, who had seen the merchandising blitz that came with his good friend Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, knew well the power that films had on consumers. George Lucas’ imagination led to a licensing goldmine of action figures, play sets, posters, board games, books, trading cards, costumes, and more. It’s been 45 years since Star Wars hit the screen, and the franchise has raked in over $29 billion in merchandise sales alone. Much more than the Joseph Campbell hero’s journey set in a space opera, the retail and promotional items made in conjunction with this multi-faceted property have brought tremendous joy to fans worldwide and remain coveted among collectors. The characters, the settings, and the galaxy continue to be beloved by Force believers, and here we present an extensive treasure trove of rare items dating from 1977 to today. May the Force be with you!

Offered in this lot is a rare all-English language Japanese record store poster for Meco’s best-selling album Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk, which reworked the Star Wars score into a disco and jazz fusion medley. A restored poster with bright color and a clean overall appearance. Minor touchup and color touchup is applied to several creases. Grades on all restored items are pre-restoration grades.

(5) VISION QUESTS. Deadline studies the rapid advancement in animation effects in “’Across The Spider-Verse’, ‘Nimona’ & ‘TMNT: Mutant Mayhem’ VFX”.

… Since the first Academy Award for Best Animated Feature was awarded in 2002 to DreamWorks’ Shrek, the animation industry has made incredible strides. This awards season, such films are pushing the boundaries of what animation can be, and VFX plays a huge part in infusing new artistic styles into every frame….

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse pushed the animated comic book style of the 2018 film even further with six new, distinct worlds and a visually complex villain. 

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse amazed everyone in 2018 with an interpretation of animated comics, and set a bar for what animation could look like. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse exceeded expectations with the introduction of six new worlds, each with a new style of animation. While these were all challenging in their own way, VFX supervisor Mike Lasker says the most challenging aspect of the film was the new villain, the Spot. 

“This was the culmination of every tool in our toolbox we had created over the course of production,” he says. “We had a lot of great reference paintings of him, and there were all these different, dark and evil sorts of purples and ink splattering off of him as he moved his limbs.” Using 2D tools integrated into the 3D animation software, Lasker’s team was able to add hand-drawn ink lines, paint strokes, distortion, and more to create the final look. “We ended up using the stroke system, ink splatter coming off the layers, heavy compositing, lighting, paint strokes—every area of the pipeline was involved.”

Lasker says look supervisor Craig Feifarek was an essential part of creating the final look of the Spot. “Craig actually lit and composited all of these shots,” he says. “He did a great job, but also the animation department did an amazing job prototyping how the Spot acts in the last shots of the film. They were able to create all these crazy flash frames… I look at this now and I’m still in awe of what they’ve done.”

(6) HERE’S MY NUMBER AND A DIME. Slashfilm says “A Chance Run-In With Ray Bradbury Helped Bring Blade Runner To The Big Screen”.

…Paul M. Sammon’s “Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner” provides an in-depth look at the genesis of “Blade Runner” and details Fancher’s attempts to seek out [Philip K. Dick] the man behind “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” Unfortunately, the search was proving fruitless at first, with Fancher claiming “it was just about impossible to learn anything about him.” The writer, eager to get going on a script, took a trip to New York in search of the mysterious author’s agents, who turned out to be unhelpful.

What happened next was complete luck, according to Fancher, who ended up “accidentally” running into an author not dissimilar to Dick: the legendary author Ray Bradbury. The man responsible for sci-fi classics such as “Fahrenheit 451” and “The Martian Chronicles” handed Fancher a lifeline during their chance encounter. Flipping through his address book, he found Philip K. Dick’s home phone number and promptly handed it over to Fancher.

As the future co-writer of the “Blade Runner” script recalled: “the next day, in fact, I called Phil about the book and we set up an appointment to meet in his apartment.” The two spoke at Dick’s Santa Ana home where they are said to have gotten along well despite Fancher sensing some “manic” and “self-reverential” tendencies in the author, who seemed initially wary of any Hollywood treatment of his novels….

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born December 24, 1910 — Fritz Leiber. (Died 1992.) Now in Birthdays we come to the matter of Fritz Leiber.

Fritz Leiber. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.

Warning: this is my list of favorite works by him, not a definitive look at him. 

I’ll  start with The Big Time as it has long been my favorite work by him, and I must say that it has magnificently held up over the years. No Suck Fairy has dared approach it lest she turn to dust on the winds of the Change Wars. 

First published sixty-two years ago as a novel by Ace Books, The Big Time started out as a two part-serial in Galaxy Magazine‘s in the March and April 1958 issues. It would win the Hugo Award for Best Novel or Novelette at Solacon. 

It was well-received with Algis Budrys liking it but he noted it was more of a play than an actual novel. One set, a small number of actors — perfect to be staged.

There were also the Change War stories, collected in Snakes & Spiders: The Definitive Change War Collection, published by Creative Minority Productions which I can’t say I’ve ever heard of. It is available from the usual suspects. And yes, I just got a copy as I can still read short stories fine even if novels are long beyond me. 

Next up without question are that barbarian and thief duo, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Leiber wrote it as a counterpoint he says in part to such characters as Conan the Barbarian, and I for one like them very much better. I think I’ve read all them, and they’re certainly his most entertaining writing by far.

I really like Conjure Wife which was awarded the Retro Hugo Award at Dublin 2019. A most delicious take on the premise that all women are witches, and told all so well. 

Yes, I like his short stories by I can’t remember which are my favorite ones other than the Change 

That’s my list of favorite Leiber works, what’s yours?

(8) COMICS SECTION.

  • Tom Gauld sends help to those hunting for last-minute gifts.

(9) AFTER THE CALAMITY. [Item by Steven French.] Read Jeff Vander Meer “On Sven Holm’s Novella of Nuclear Disaster” in The Paris Review. The post-apocalyptic story Termush,  originally published in 1967, was reissued earlier this year with a foreword by Vander Meer:

…In its treatment of the aftermath of nuclear war, Termush distinguishes itself from the so-called disaster cozies of the fifties, like the novels of John Wyndham, to occupy more urgent territory. In this genre, the dangers of some calamitous situation become entwined with an almost cheery disaster-tourism tone; more importantly, civilization always wins in the end, even if in an altered form. The militias may hold sway for a while, or the plague lay waste to whole towns, but by the novel’s close, equilibrium and balance, logic and order, always return to human endeavors. Not so much in Termush, which also eludes, through its particular focus and narrative velocity, echoes of Cold War conflict that otherwise might have dated the novella. Instead of a pervading sense of “the other” about to storm the gates, Holm delves into the psychology of the holed-up survivors and the hazards of societal breakdown….

… The right excerpt from Termush could easily have appeared in New Worlds, the seminal sixties magazine for the New Wave…

(10) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George takes us inside the “Wish Pitch Meeting”.

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

Pixel Scroll 12/23/23 He Was Scrolling Pixels When Scrolling Pixels Wasn’t Cool

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(1) FOR ART’S SAKE. If you want to read “Bodily Autonomy in the Murderbot Diaries: Martha Wells Interviews Herself and ART” you need to buy F(r)iction’s “The Bodies Issue (No. 20)” – digital for $12, print & digital for $20. But Murderbot, right?!

(2) GET READY FOR SMOFCON $ALE. Marah Searle-Kovacevic, Chair, Smofcon 41announced they will be having a post holiday membership sale! From December 26-31, attending memberships will be $65! Get yours, they’ll never be any lower! Sign up here starting next week: “Membership – Smofcon 41”

(3) WORLDCON BID Q&A SESSIONS. [Item by Kevin Standlee.] SMOFCon 40 allowed the Worldcon Events YouTube channel to extract the presentations from past and future Worldcons and from those bids who had representatives either in person or remotely.

I tried to trim these down to just the presentations/Q&A, not including the changeover time between presenters or any issues with getting the tech set up.

There were presentations from the following Worldcons and bids:

None of the other bids that have previously announced interest and that are currently listed on our Worldcon bids page (Tel Aviv in 2027, Brisbane in 2028, Texas in 2031, Minneapolis in 2073) had representatives at SMOFCon 40.

(4) TALKING ABOUT TOLKIEN. Tom Emanuel of the University of Glasgow is looking for nonreligious people to interview about Tolkien:

Are you a fan of The Lord of the Rings? Do you identify as nonreligious? Would you be interested in talking to me (Tom Emanuel) for 1-2 hours about why you love Tolkien?

If you answered “yes” I would love it if you filled out this questionnaire for my PhD research at the University of Glasgow!

Robin Anne Reid forwarded the request with a couple of links to Tom’s previous scholarship that is open-access if people are interested in seeing what sort of work he does in Tolkien scholarship. 

(5) GOBLIN SONG FALLING AFTER SPLASH DEBUT. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] After climbing to number 12 in its first week in release, Doctor Who’s “The Goblin Song” has now slipped to 52 on UK charts.

There had been a concerted campaign to make it number one.

(6) MIKE NUSSBAUM (1924-2023). [Item by Cat Eldridge.] Actor Mike Nussbaum was The Principal in Field of Dreams, Gentle Rosenberg in Men in Black, Yuri Rosanov in Early Edition, and Mr. Wallace in The Water Engine. Look the last one up, it’s fascinating. No series work at all of a genre nature save a character on the Twilight Zone Radio Dramas called Nathaniel Harris. 

Deadline’s complete tribute is here: “Mike Nussbaum Dies: Veteran Actor In ‘Men In Black’ And ‘Fatal Attraction’ Was 99”.

(7) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

December 23, 1960 — Twilight Zone’s “The Night of The Meek”

On December 23rd in 1960, Twilight Zone’s “The Night of the Meek” first aired. It was one of the six episodes of the second season which was shot on videotape in a failed attempt saved to cut costs. Networks and their bean counters.

This was a Christmas themed story with Art Carney as a Santa Claus fired on Christmas Eve who finds a mysterious bag that gives an apparently unlimited stream of gifts. But before we learn that we have this opening scene and narration:

As snow begins to fall, a drunk Henry Corwin ((Carney) wearing his Santa Claus suit, leans against a curbside lamppost. He is approached by two tenement children begging for toys, a Christmas dinner, and “a job for my daddy.” As he begins to sob, the camera turns to Rod Serling standing on the sidewalk:

This is Mr. Henry Corwin, normally unemployed, who once a year takes the lead role in the uniquely popular American institution, that of the department-store Santa Claus in a road-company version of ‘The Night Before Christmas’. But in just a moment Mr. Henry Corwin, ersatz Santa Claus, will enter a strange kind of North Pole which is one part the wondrous spirit of Christmas and one part the magic that can only be found… in the Twilight Zone.

The script would be used over in the Eighties version of this series and on the radio program as well. 

Serling ended the original broadcast with the words, “And a Merry Christmas, to each and all”,  but that phrase was deleted in the Eighties for reasons never made clear and would not be back until Netflix started streaming the series. The series runs on Paramount+ now in its original full, uncensored version. The line is still missing from all the DVD versions.

John Fielder who is Mister Dundee here would have a second Twilight Zone appearance in “Cavander is Coming” in which he has the lead as the Angel Harmon Cavender.

Oh, and let’s note that it’s a cat that mysteriously starts off this tale by knocking down a large burlap bag full of empty cans, which when Corwin trips over it, is then filled with gifts. See cats are magical! 

Serling ends with this narration:

A word to the wise to all the children of the Twentieth Century, whether their concern be pediatrics or geriatrics, whether they crawl on hands and knees and wear diapers or walk with a cane and comb their beards. There’s a wondrous magic to Christmas and there’s a special power reserved for little people. In short, there’s nothing mightier than the meek. And a Merry Christmas to each and all.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

  • Tom Gauld’s Christmas shopping advice.
  • Or maybe the person on your list has dropped a heavy hint?

(9) SNYDERVERSE’S LATEST. Camestros Felapton has a very wry way of telling everyone how little he thinks of Zack Snyder’s new production: “Review: Rebel Moon (Netflix)”. There are three or four lines even funnier than this:

…This is Part 1 of 2. The Seven Samurai haven’t got to the village yet, Thanos knows Gamora is leading them and Darth Vader isn’t actually dead (spoiler), so there is a lot to expect in Part 2 including the whereabouts of the magic space princess….

(10) THE VOICE-CLOCK SANG. The National Review pointed readers to “Ray Bradbury’s ‘There Will Come Soft Rains’” with a commentary by Luther Ray Abel that says in part:

…Something splendid this way comes from “Rains”: its treatment of the works of man. Even the seemingly immortal machines we build — contraptions subservient to our whims and intelligence that can operate without our input — will disappear in time, much faster than one would expect, even.

There’s this idea from the utopianists among us, many of them progressives, that technology will undergird the socialist state — that objects will remove the necessity for man to do and to make, and, ultimately, be answerable for anything. Scruton refuted this irrational optimism as only he could, “[Political optimists] ignore or despise the findings of experience and common sense. The millions dead or enslaved do not refute utopia, but merely give proof of the evil machinations that have stood in its way.”

There is nothing inherently wrong with technology, but with its false promises, we pick through the ruins of Babel and dream of raising her again. Man cannot save himself, even with infinite microprocessors and processes. To think of technology as anything other than a temporary salve — a way to soften the effects of the Fall — is folly; the family vaporized on the wall of their home consider the purported benefits of progress fatally unfulfilling….

(11) TYPE LIKE TOLKIEN. Slashfilm has its Eye on “Cool Stuff: Colorful Lord Of The Rings Custom Keyboards Come In Elvish, The Black Speech & More”.

Taking cues from the various realms of Middle-earth… Drop’s keyboards and keycaps utilize various fantastical languages, including Elvish, Dwarvish, and even the sparsely spoken Black Speech that adorns the Ring of Power, to give your mundane keyboard a beautiful upgrade. Don’t worry if you don’t speak any of those languages fluently; these keyboards still have English where needed to define keys you might not use frequently….

With another green color scheme, you might also be interested in the Elvish keyboard featuring custom artwork by OSHETART depicting the Two Trees of Valinor (because the time of the elves is not over)….

(12) CHECKING IT TWICE. Santa’s feeling the last-minute stress, too, in this old Emsh cover for Galaxy Magazine.

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

Pixel Scroll 12/16/23 To Say Nothing Of The Pixels

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(1) THE HILLS ARE ALIVE WITH THE SOUND OF MURDER. James Davis Nicoll assigned the “Young People Read Old SFF” panel a series of Hugo finalists to read. We’ve reached the end:

The final installment1 in Young People Read Old Hugo Finalists is Lois McMaster Bujold’s 1989The Mountains of Mourning. One of Bujold’s popular Miles Vorkosigan stories, Mountains is a murder mystery. Through Miles’ eyes, Bujold explores certain aspects of Barrayaran life generally kept off-stage thanks to the series’ focus on the aristocracy. 

Mountains won the Best Novella Hugo, beating The Father of Stones by Lucius Shepard, A Touch of Lavender by Megan Lindholm, Time Out by Connie Willis, and Tiny Tango by Judith Moffett. I’ve not read the other finalists so I cannot compare them to the winner. I can say that Mountains was the first Bujold I read. It is the reason I have a shelf full of Bujold novels.

Fans liked it. I liked it. But did the Young People like it?…

Nicoll says the next project, debuting in 2024, is Young People Read Old Nebula Finalists. 

(2) THEY LIVE! Galaxy is also being resurrected by the same company that has announced the relaunch of Worlds of IF. “Galaxy Science Fiction, February 1951 (FIRST-EVER WEBZINE REISSUE + new bonus content!)” at Starship Sloane Publishing.

I am happy to announce that this magazine, like its sister publication, Worlds of IF, is also being revived and relaunched by Starship Sloane Publishing Company, Inc.

This might be a slow process, as we are wonderfully busy with the booming relaunch of Worlds of IF already, and I have no desire to make things overly frenetic. The idea is to methodically breathe new life into Galaxy. It seems only fitting that these two magazines should walk hand in hand once again. I will be keeping this celebrated magazine skinny, minimalist in style, and highly selective. The quality of work will speak for itself….

… I do this for the love of creativity and science fiction. But I also strive for simplicity. If something becomes a self-imposed, burdensome form of work, I reevaluate. I will not place stressful expectations on myself here. A strict publishing schedule? Very unlikely. But semiannually sounds about right, I suppose…. 

(3) GONE IN POINT SIX SECONDS. The MinnPost believes people should be concerned with “Protecting physical media in an age of streaming”.

It’s been repeated, echoed and understood ad nauseam that we live in the streaming era.

We get it. Something that streamers may not understand, however, is that nobody owns their digital media.

The $12.99 spent through Amazon Prime Video to purchase “Barbie” is not “your” copy of the film. A person only has access to it until Amazon decides it doesn’t want to support the licensing anymore. This concept is not new or nuanced, but it is lost. The constant shuffling of online media between major streaming conglomerates has resulted in physical media’s futility in the eyes of the general public. We indeed live in the streaming age, but it’s also an age where the cultural impact of art preservation is needed more than ever.

This sentiment is not a condemnation against people using services like Netflix and Spotify. The convenience factor of these platforms is undeniable. However, combing through records, DVDs and books at local businesses should become something other than ancient practice.

Art preservation is at the forefront of this streaming puzzle because of the cultural significance of owning physical media. Much like artifacts, art has been replaced, lost and not protected. Now, instead of encouraging ownership of your favorite titles, businesses that still champion the physical media medium are fighting an uphill battle.

With all the revenue that floods in through streaming platforms, physical media becomes a nuisance to the profit margins of online Fortune 500s.

So, when a seemingly neglected and inevitable problem like this presents itself, the starting point of where to spark the renaissance can get blurred. Viewers, listeners, patrons and readers should look to local shops that allow physical media literacy to return to the mainstream….

(4) REVIEWERS’ PROTEST. Courtney Tonokawa told review blog readers ”I’m Participating in the St. Martin’s Press Reviewer Boycott!” in November at Courtney Reads Romance.

This is a brief post throwing my support behind the ongoing St. Martin’s Press reviewer boycott, which started in late October (as far as I’m aware; if anyone has more conclusive timeline information, please let me know). It is in response to a few major issues, like the general favoritism of white reviewers for ARCs over reviewers of color and, more recently, the behavior of a marketing employee in response to recent escalation in violence between Israel and Palestine, with said employee spewing Islamophobic and queerphobic rhetoric on their socials. All receipts and a more thorough recap of events can be found at the “Readers for Accountability” website here, along with a list of the boycott demands, screenshots, graphics, and all other relevant information.

But until those demands are met, in short addressing the actions of their employee and their action plan for the future, I am joining my fellow reviewers in withholding reviews and any other promo for St. Martin’s Press, and invite anyone else interested to join. 

As Courtney’s post says, the allegations are documented at the “Readers for Accountability” website. Their overview of the complaints follows:

The boycott of St. Martin’s Press, Wednesday Books, and other related imprints is a direct response to the publishers lack of accountability regarding one of their employees. This employee, who we will not name here, posted Islamophobic, Queerphobic, and anti-Palestinian content on their personal social media. This content was shared in Instagram stories and was brought to our attention by Palestinian activist and BookToker @vivafalastinleen. Leen noted that while she is on the St. Martin’s Press influencer list, she never seemed to receive any of the ARCs she requested. Additionally, Leen noticed that her white counterparts would receive ARCs regularly. She began to question if this was a symptom of the employee’s bigotry when she was sent screenshots of a marketing Islamophobic employee sharing racist, Islamophobic pink washing content to their stories.
Leen attempted to reach out to St. Martin’s Press when the employee’s posts came to light, but struggled to receive a response and was largely ignored. Other influencers and content creators reached out as well with similar results. However, Leen did eventually receive email from Brant Janeway. However, the response was dismissive and defensive with no action being taken to investigate.

The boycott was officially enacted after ten days of radio silence from St. Martin’s Press and Wednesday books. During those ten days, content creators were emailing, DMing, commenting, and making videos to demand that St. Martin’s Press make a statement to no avail. As such, Leen created a video that provided other creators with context for the boycott. This video also included a large amount of screenshots and context into why those screenshots are so dangerous. Twitter likes were also included so as to provide evidence of how deep the employee’s bigotry runs. Demands were issued for St. Martin’s Press and Wednesday Books in hopes and readers will continue to boycott the publishers and related imprints until those demands are met.

(5) WHO IS NUMBER ONE? Kim Ju-sŏng tells Guardian readers “’I repeatedly failed to win any awards’: my doomed career as a North Korean novelist”.

…I believe the reason my writing received poor evaluations lay primarily in my choice of genre. All of my stories took place in Japan, or had zainichi as the main characters. In North Korea these were dismissed as “foreign works”, the catch-all term for anything about the wider world. Like anywhere, in North Korean literary circles there is a fair amount of specialisation, and each writer has his or her own style and character.

The most highly regarded genre, it goes without saying, is No 1 literature – that is, works about members of the ruling Kim family. This is not a genre that just anybody can write. In order of esteem, the genres of North Korean literature are:

1) No 1 works: stories about the achievements and personalities of the Kim family.

2) Anti-Japan partisan works AKA revolutionary works: stories set within the colonial-era independence movement.

3) War works: stories set during the Korean war.

4) Historical works: stories set during the Yi, Koguryo or Koryo dynasties.

5) Real-life works: stories about ordinary society from the postwar to the present.

6) South Korean works: stories set in South Korea.

7) Foreign works: stories set anywhere outside Korea.

I was involved with foreign works. Aside from No 1 works, writers had free choice of any genre, and we were also free to move around and experiment between genres. But only the most elite, accomplished writers were permitted to produce No 1 works….

(6) STRANGER THAN FICTION (BUT NOT FOR LONG). [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] People have seen me complain that I didn’t sign up to live in the cyberpunk dystopia we live in now, and thought I was exaggerating.

Nope.

Brian Krebs is probably the premier computer security journalist in the US. As I understand it, he had a column in the Washington Post, until the Post’s editors got freaked out by the number of what the police, and perhaps the FBI, considered “credible death threats”. My favorite story is from one of his investigations, the FBI followed the target, then suckered him to travel from eastern Europe to Guam, where he was arrested, extradited, and spent several years in US jails.

If you want to see the kind of thing he does… “Ten Years Later, New Clues in the Target Breach” at Krebs on Security.

Then tell me I’m exaggerating.

I’ve actually got a short story based on him that I’ve been trying to sell, but I guess it’s not “character-driven” enough (that I sincerely hope never happens, although he and his family have been swatted several times).

(7) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES. Space Cowboy Books presents episode 70 of the Simultaneous Times podcast. Stories featured in this episode:

“I Hope I Call You Back” by Tara Campbell – Music by Phog Masheeen – Read by Heather Morgan

“The Escape” by Jean-Paul L. Garnier – Music by Fall Precauxions – Read by the author

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born December 16, 1917 — Arthur  C. Clarke. Sir Arthur C. Clarke is one of one of my of all time favorite writers, however, this will be not be an all-inclusive look at him, but what I like for his films and writings. So let’s me get started now…

As regards short works, Tales from the White Hart is without doubt the stories I like above all others. Like Niven’s Draco Tavern stories or those of Isaac Asimov’s Black Widowers, I adore stories told in a bar setting, and these are quite splendid.

Those are hardly his only great short stories. NyCon II would give him Hugo Award for “The Star” story which is wonderful, “The Nine Billion Names of God” got a well-deserved Retro Hugo at Noreascon 4, and Loncon 3 likewise honored “How We Went to Mars”.  And I loved “A Meeting with Medusa” as well. 

Arthur C. Clarke receives Hugo Award from chairman Dave Kyle at the 1956 Worldcon, NyCon II.

Which collection you pick up is your choice — The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke currently being published legitimately in ebook format by Open Road Media has somewhere around ninety stories in it and is an excellent choice. It has “The Nine Billion Names of God” in it, another story of his I should note I love.

Novels? Well let’s start with The Fountains of Paradise if only because I got to actually got to see the setting in Sri Lanka that it’s based off of. Every bookshop there had copies of it. And it certainly deserved the Hugo it got at Noreascon Two.

I also have on my reading list the Hugo-nominated A Fall of Moondust, one of the better lunar colonization novels ever written; and likewise The Sands of Mars is a worthy look at using and that planet. 

Now we come to Rendezvous with Rama which won a Hugo at DisCon II. Damn that’s a fascinating novel. I re-read maybe a decade back and I’m please to say that the Suck Fairy broke her toe trying to tarnish its reputation. 

So films. Well it in my mind’s eye, there is but one film only and that is 2001: A Space Odyssey. I’ve seen it in cinema once, many times on a small screen. It’s wonderful. Yes, it got a Hugo at St. LouisCon.

That’s it for him. Have a good evening. 

Alice Turner and Arthur C. Clarke. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • Tom Gauld remembers a school tradition.
  • And Gauld finds an ability to predict the future can have bittersweet results.

(10) TUTTLE ROUNDUP. Lisa Tuttle’s “The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – reviews roundup” for the Guardian includes The Reformatory by Tananarive Due; The Lost Cause by Cory Doctorow; Him by Geoff Ryman; and Audition by Pip Adam

(11) CURATED HORROR. Gabino Iglesias picked “The Best Horror Books of 2023”  for the New York Times. The column begins:

There were a ton of amazing horror books published in 2023, and as a genre, horror delivered so much — from fresh takes on vampire stories to historical works that looked at racism and misogyny. That made selecting just 10 titles for this list a formidable task. So consider this a personal pantheon of favorites from 2023.

Some of the books on this list are easy reads and some will challenge you. Some are long and multilayered while others have a great sense of humor or unfurl at breakneck speed. Some adhere to a classic understanding of horror and others aim to redefine it. The important thing is that they are all outstanding.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia is known for her ability to stylishly jump from genre to genre, and in SILVER NITRATE (Del Rey, 318 pp., $28), she goes full-blown horror. The book follows Montse, a sound editor navigating the macho culture of the film industry in Mexico City in the ’90s, and her best friend, Tristán, a soap opera star whose career is withering, as they help a horror director shoot a scene that’s really a ritual to break an awful curse. It’s a creepy, fast-paced tale filled with Nazis on the run and more. The novel is also Mexican to the core — it celebrates the country’s history, culture and films. This book pulls you in with its lovable, deeply flawed characters and gripping plot, and wows you with its eerie atmosphere and deft blend of historical fiction, horror and black magic….

(12) THE HOLE TRUTH IS OUT THERE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] In this week’s Science journal there is an interesting piece that may explain the dark matter conundrum. Could tiny, primordial black holes made during the Big Bang, hiding in stars account for the missing mass??? “Do tiny black holes from cosmic dawn hide within giant stars?”

“…Might itty-bitty black holes from the dawn of time be lurking in the hearts of giant stars? The idea is not so far-fetched “

This month, an enormous dark and cool spot, known as a coronal hole, opened up on the Sun’s surface—almost as if it were being swallowed by a black hole.

(13) CHRISTMAS SF BOOKS.  [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] It’s that time of year again to remind folk seeking SF/F books for themselves or as Christmas presents for others that the SF2 Concatenation seasonal news page has forthcoming Science Fiction and forthcoming fantasy book listings from the major SF/F book imprints over here in Brit Cit. Back when last season’s news page was posted, these titles were all forthcoming but now, with the festive season fast approaching, most of these are now out. With just six shopping days to Christmas, there’s just time to order from your favourite genre bookshop. Happy Crimble…

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

Pixel Scroll 12/4/23 Cool Carbonite Hand Luke 

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(1) POWELL ARRESTED. Longtime fan Rickland Powell was arrested December 1 in connection with “assaulting a female child who is known to him” according to the Middlesex (MA) District Attorney.  Their press release follows.

Powell is on the list of people who have been banned from Arisia. Prior to that he worked on Arisia over the past couple of decades in positions ranging from Division Head to logistics and art show help.

(2) UNCATCHABLE. Gideon Lewis-Kraus’ “Maybe We Already Have Runaway Machines”, a discussion of David Runciman’s The Handover: How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States, and AIs,  is a rather Strossian article in The New Yorker.

…Yet we citizens of modern states have always labored under the shadow of a partly mitigated alignment problem—a “mismatch between the drives of these artificial persons and the needs of the planet,” as Runciman describes it—that provides a frame, a vocabulary, and a sense of foreboding as we seek to process the automation on the horizon. The concern about unaligned machines is that even if we can program, so to speak, their ultimate ends, we can’t necessarily anticipate the instrumental subgoals they might pursue as an intermediate measure. If you instruct a machine to complete a task, the likeliest instrumental subgoal is to “gain control.” If the danger of the alignment problem seems indistinct or preposterous, Runciman suggests, you haven’t been paying attention….

“… States and corporations reflect two different sides of our contemporary fear of machines that have escaped human control. One is that we will build machines that we don’t know how to switch off, either because we have become too dependent on them or because we can’t find the off switch. That’s states. The other is that we build machines that self-replicate in ways that we can no longer regulate. They start spewing our versions of themselves to the point where we are swamped by them. That’s corporations….”

(3) FOLLOW-UP ON ALASKAN MUDSLIDE. Max Florschutz wrote in November that his mother survived the mudslide in his hometown of Wrangell, Alaska but at that time he did not know the fate of his father. Unfortunately, his father passed on. He has an update in “Emergency News and Classic Being a Better Writer: Horizontal and Vertical Storytelling” at Unusual Things.

(4) BEST XX. Esquire’s list of “The 20 Best Books of 2023” is topped by a genre work.

…Our selections range from debut works by emerging voices to new outings for canonical writers. They delve into everything from prisons to shipwrecks, ghost stories to extraterrestrials, American dreaming to American failures. Whether you’re into novels, short stories, memoirs, or nonfiction, we’ve covered the whole waterfront here with a bumper crop of incredible books. They’re all worth their weight in gold (believe us, we know exactly how much they weigh).

Below, here are Esquire’s 20 best books of the year…

Ranked number one:

Chain-Gang All-Stars, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Ever since his breakout debut, Friday Black, we’ve been eagerly awaiting Adjei-Brenyah’s sophomore outing. Nearly five years later, it arrived this past spring, and it surpassed all expectations. In a dystopian United States, the prison-industrial complex has gone private, leaving incarcerated people with no choice but to compete for their freedom in the Criminal Action Penal Entertainment system. Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker have traveled together for years as Links in the same Chain-Gang, but as Thurwar nears her freedom, she contemplates how to bring dignity to her multi-racial and multi-gendered coalition of fellow gladiators. Reading Chain-Gang All-Stars in a nation addicted to violent sports that brutalize athletes of color, Adjei-Brenyah’s acerbic vision lands like a lightning bolt of truth.

Read an exclusive excerpt here at Esquire.

(5) WILKINS GOFUNDME. Cory Doctorow signal boosted an appeal to help Pacific Northwest bookseller Duane Wilkins.

Nearly every sf writer who’s ever toured the west coast knows Duane – he’s the encyclopedically knowledgeable sf buyer for the U Washington Bookseller, who has organized some of the best sf signings in Seattle history. He’s a force of nature.

He’s also broke. A two-week hospital stay left him drowning in medical debt – despite being insured! – and now he’s being threatened by a collection agency.

Now, Duane is forced into participating in one of the most barbaric of contemporary American rituals, fundraising to cover his medical debt. He’s raised $6k of the $10k he needs (I just pitched in $100).

If you can afford to help out someone who’s done so much for our community, please kick Duane whatever you can spare.

Shawn Speakman, who set up the GoFundMe (“Please Help Duane Wilkins Pay His Medical Debt”) says there are reward for certain levels of donation. (Also note – as of this writing the appeal has brought in $15,567).

I told him that I’d help him relieve that debt and raise some extra funds for any future situation that might require aid.

That’s where you come in.

If you donate $10 or more, Grim Oak Press will email you free ebooks of our amazing anthologies Unfettered, Unfettered II, Unfettered III, Unbound, and Unbound II. These are filled with amazing SF&F short stories. Google them to view their incredible author line-ups.

And if you donate more than $20 to Duane’s GoFund Me, several of these writers are willing to give free ebooks of some of their novels. Starting with me and my newly-edited edition of The Dark Thorn.

I hope you will consider donating to Duane’s GoFundMe and help spread word about it. Together, we can help one of our best SF&F booksellers….

(6) MONSTER MASH. They’re at it again: Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire Official Trailer is coming to theaters April 12, 2024.

(7) FAITHFUL EEYORE. John Boston reviews the latest (in 1968) issue of Amazing at Galactic Journey. “[December 4, 1968] Sign Me Up (January 1969 Amazing)”.

In this January’s Amazing, on page 138, there is an editorial—A Word from the Editor, it says, bylined Barry N. Malzberg—which suggests a different direction (or maybe I should just say “a direction”) for this magazine.  First is some news.  There will be no letter column; Malzberg would rather use the space for a story.  Second, “the reprint policy of these magazines will continue for the foreseeable future,” per the publisher, but “A large and increasing percentage of space however will be used for new stories.”

Pointedly, the editor adds, “it is my contention that the majority of modern magazine science-fiction is ill-written, ill-characterized, ill-conceived and so excruciatingly dull as to make me question the ability of the writers to stay awake during its composition, much less the readers during its absorption.  Tied to an older tradition and nailed down stylistically to the worst hack cliches of three decades past, science-fiction has only within the past five or six years begun to emerge from its category trap only because certain intelligent and dedicated people have had the courage to wreck it so that it could crawl free. . . .  I propose that within its editorial limits and budget, Amazing and Fantastic will do what they can to assist this rebirth—one would rather call it transmutation—of the category and we will try to be hospitable to a kind of story which is still having difficulty finding publication in this country.”

As far as I know fifty years later Malzberg is still disappointed in science fiction. G.W. Thomas took inventory of some of his past predictions for the genre in “The Fate of Science Fiction According to Barry N. Malzberg” at Dark Worlds Quarterly.

(8) MEDICAL UPDATE. Erwin “Filthy Pierre” Strauss, who fell down some stairs at Smofcon thie weekend, suffered a broken wrist and was taken to New England Hospital, wrote Kevin Standlee yesterday. “They expect to keep him at least one more night. Sufford and Tony Lewis will retrieve him from the hospital when he is released.”

(9) TIM DORSEY (1961-2023). Crime novelist Tim Dorsey, who wrote about the eccentricities of Floridians long before Florida Man became a meme, died November 26. The New York Times obituary is here: “Tim Dorsey, Who Turned Florida’s Quirks Into Comic Gold, Dies at 62”.

…Mr. Dorsey gave his books comic titles that reflected the blend of Jimmy Buffett and Raymond Chandler that filled their interiors.

“The Maltese Iguana,” published this year, was Mr. Dorsey’s most recent book.via HarperCollins

He reveled in the diversity of Florida — the dog tracks and swamps around Miami, the Redneck Riviera along the Panhandle, the morass of state politics in Tallahassee, the nostalgic weirdness of the Keys.

His novel “Atomic Lobster” (2008), Mr. Dorsey said in an interview with Powell’s Books, was “the dissection of a Florida neighborhood populated almost entirely by degenerates, con men, the terminally dysfunctional, golf freaks, trophy wives, and prescription-abusing retirees in Buicks tying up traffic. In other words, a documentary.”

Some people considered Serge to be Mr. Dorsey’s alter ego, but he corrected them. Serge was, he said, his ego, living the kind of life and doing the sorts of things he would love to do if not constrained by conscience and the law….

(10) TODAY’S WISDOM.

From Wole Talabi:

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • The Flying McCoys wondered how to get hold of Batman if the Batlight went out.
  • Tom Gauld decodes some highly technical terminology so the layperson can understand it.

(12) LEGACY. Bobby Derie looks at an example of the Japanese Cthulhu Mythos in “The Cthulhu Helix (2023) by Umehara Katsufumi (梅原克文)” at Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein.

… Which is why The Cthulhu Helix works as a Lovecraftian novel. The characters are all conscious of Lovecraft’s legacy, but for them it’s all shorthand and metaphor, a way to frame and discuss these complex ideas and relationships without getting bogged down in Elder Signs and other minutiae. The particular approach Umehara took is fairly Derlethian, but that’s not surprising considering when and where it was published….

(13) SEEKING SUBSCRIBERS. Sunday Morning Transport’s free-to-read story for December is “Deconstruction in the Form of a Cat God” by LaShawn Wanak.

LaShawn Wanak opens with talking cats; then the tale only grows more wondrous — and we can think of nothing better

(14) CASTING CALL. Slashfilm tells readers “How David Tennant Ended Up Playing Huyang In Star Wars”.

… It’s brilliant casting, if I may gush for a moment. I love him in both franchises. I think part of the appeal is that David Tennant’s voice is pretty recognizable; “Doctor Who” fans have a built-in feeling that this is a wise person who has centuries of universal knowledge behind whatever he’s saying. I suppose you could say the same thing for fans of “Good Omens” (where he plays a fallen angel who has been around for all of time) who only discovered Tennant’s Huyang in “Ahsoka.” Of course, his performances are great across the board, but there is something to be said for many audience members having immediate feelings about him from his past work…. 

(15) IT’S GOOD FOR YOU. “Neuroscience Says 1 Rather Brainless Activity Can Lower Your Stress and Make You More Productive” says Inc.com. And we’re all into brainless activities, right?

…The activities included coloring in a mandala, doodling within or around a circle marked on a paper, and having a free-drawing session, each for three minutes, with rest periods in between. During all three activities, there was an increase in blood flow in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, which forms a part of the wiring for our brain’s reward circuit. 

“This shows that there might be inherent pleasure in doing art activities independent of the end results,” said the study’s lead author.

The advantages of creating art go beyond just the pleasure of the activity itself. According to surveys before and after the art-making activities, participants who engaged in art-making felt more creative and were better able to solve problems….

(16) AI CON GAME. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] BBC Radio 4’s documentary programme File on Four has taken a fascinating look at how artificial intelligence (A.I.) is being used by criminals to con victims. A crime that, if written as a story a decade ago, would be decidedly SFnal.  A.I.-generated deep fakes are no longer restricted to images but also to voices and even video.  In the programme, the presenter gets a researcher to train an A.I. to simulate the presenter’s voice and then gets the A. I. to phone his mother: someone who arguably best knows what his voice sounds like. His mother is completely taken in by the A.I. voice.

The programme reveals that the banks, which have been using voice identification as an added security measure, are in an arms race with criminals. One A.I. researcher has even refused to let his bank use voice identification on his account!

Artificial intelligence, or AI, makes it possible for machines to learn – and in the future it will perform many tasks now done by humans. But are criminals and bad actors ahead of the curve? AI is already being used to commit fraud and other crimes by generating fake videos and audio; fast emerging threats that form just part of a potential new crime wave. File on 4 investigates.

You can listen to the half-hour programme here: “File on 4, Artificial Intelligence: The Criminal Threat”.

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. How It Should Have Ended, strangely enough, has an opinion about how Transformers: Rise of the Beasts should have ended.

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

Pixel Scroll 12/2/23 I Was Watching A Pixel Walk Through A Wall

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(1) GET ON BOARD. Join the mission and have your name engraved on NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft as it travels 1.8 billion miles to explore Europa, an ocean world that may support life. Sign your name today to the… “Message in a Bottle”.

NASA’s Message in a Bottle campaign invites people around the world to sign their names to a poem written by the U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón. The poem connects the two water worlds — Earth, yearning to reach out and understand what makes a world habitable, and Europa, waiting with secrets yet to be explored. The campaign is a special collaboration, uniting art and science, by NASA, the U.S. Poet Laureate, and the Library of Congress.

The poem is engraved on NASA’s robotic Europa Clipper spacecraft, along with participants’ names that will be stenciled onto microchips mounted on the spacecraft. Together, the poem and names will travel 1.8 billion miles on Europa Clipper’s voyage to the Jupiter system. Europa Clipper is set to launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in October 2024, and by 2030, it will be in orbit around Jupiter. Over several years, it will conduct dozens of flybys of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, gathering detailed measurements to determine if the moon has conditions suitable for life….

(2) SURE, BUT DOES IT REALLY HAVE A FUTURE? “Alien nation: will the franchise’s new movie really cut all links to the past?” – the Guardian’s Ben Childtries to read the tea leaves.

…So what do you do when a sci-fi franchise has been poor to average for more than 30 years, yet everyone who has ever seen Ridley Scott’s gloomy yet exhilarating Alien (1979) or its all-American, gonad-swinging sequel Aliens (from James Cameron), is somehow still desperate for more? District 9 film-maker Neill Blomkamp clearly had the right idea in 2015, when without any apparent encouragement from Fox he decided he would make his own Alien film set in the wake of Aliens and before it all went wrong for Fincher. His idea was to bring back Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley (who died in Alien 3 but was restored as about a dozen freaky clones in Resurrection) along with Michael Biehn’s Hicks and potentially even Carrie Henn’s Newt.

It didn’t happen, not just because the original stars would all have been a bit ancient, but because Fox put the kibosh on the whole concept. But somebody somewhere at Disney (which bought Fox and the rights to Alien in 2017) was clearly paying attention. For what’s this we hear from a Variety report this week? The new Alien movie, Fede Alvarez’s Romulus, will be neither a sequel nor a prequel, but rather a new film set between Alien and Aliens.

Speaking at the Gotham awards, star Cailee Spaeny told the trade bible: “It’s supposed to slot in between the first movie and the second movie, adding: “They brought the same team from Aliens, the James Cameron film. The same people who built those xenomorphs actually came on and built ours. So getting to see the original design with the original people who have been working on these films for 45-plus years and has been so much of their life has been really incredible.”

How then, is this going to work? Well, there are 57 years between the events of the two movies, which Ripley spent drifting in space in a state of stasis. What might have happened in the meantime? …

(3) MEDICAL UPDATE. Erwin “Filthy Pierre” Strauss fell down 3-5 steps on flight of stairs while at SMOFCon and was taken by paramedics to a local Providence, RI hospital as a precaution.

Kevin Standlee reports, “I was the one on the scene when he fell (I was walking up the interior stairwell between the programming space and the ground floor of the Providence Marriott) while he was walking down the stairs and slipped, piling up in a heap on the landing. He never lost consciousness and remained alert and responsive, but after initially recovering a bid and starting to get up, announced that his neck hurt enough that he wanted me to call 911.”

Kevin has a longer post about it on his Dreamwidth blog. He adds, “I have no further update on his condition, but I’m hopeful that he’ll be okay. He reported nothing that sounded like anything broken, just bruised.”

(4) THEIR ONE DEMAND. “’Gay Furry Hackers’ Breached a Nuclear Lab to Demand Catgirl Research” reports Them.

A collective of self-professed “gay furry hackers” breached databases at a nuclear research laboratory in Idaho this week and released thousands of human resources records. Their only ransom demand? The lab must begin a catgirl research program.

SiegedSec, the hacker collective that attacked government systems in five states earlier this year, claimed responsibility for infiltrating the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) in a Telegram post on November 16. According to its website, INL is one of the country’s largest nuclear research facilities and maintains the Advanced Test Reactor, which is used for both medical and military programs.

The records, which contain names, addresses, and Social Security numbers of employees and other users, were released through SiegedSec’s Telegram channel and confirmed to be authentic by the INL and East Idaho News.

“meow meow meow meow meow meow meow […] woah so much crunchy data :3” SiegedSec wrote on Telegram. “we’re willing to make a deal with INL. if they research creating irl catgirls we will take down this post.”

SiegedSec rose to prominence in 2022 with several hacks protesting the overturning of Roe v. Wade. The hacker collective has since claimed responsibility for breaching government and NATO computer systems, as well as those of private companies, including software company Atlassian. They said their attacks on state governments earlier this year were in retaliation to those states’ anti-transgender laws. Since October, the group has also embarked on what it calls #OpIsrael, claiming responsibility for a string of cyber attacks on Israeli satellites, industrial systems, and telecommunications companies….

(5) UPDATED WSFS RULES AVAILABLE. The WSFS website has posted the latest draft of the Rules of the World Science Fiction Society with changes ratified by the Chengdu Worldcon Business Meeting. These include the Best Game or Interactive Work Hugo and its cross-references.

(6) DIAZ Q&A. [Item by Steven French.] From the Guardian’s interview with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist: “Hernan Diaz: ‘The Tintin books were problematic but they were also gorgeous and gripping’”:

The book I am currently reading

Sly Stone’s memoir, Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin). And today I also read the first chapter of Joanna Russ’s The Female Man.

Good choice!

(7) DOES THIS STORY DRAG ON? No, it apparently flies right along. “’House of the Dragon’: Season 2 Cast & Teaser Trailer Revealed” at Deadline.

… House of the Dragon is set 172 years before the events of Game of Thrones and tells the story of House Targaryen. The two released posters for Season 2 are setting up an epic war between the Targaryens and the Hightowers following the crazy Season 1 finale that saw tragedy befall the former (R.I.P Prince Lucerys Velaryon) at the hands of the latter (Prince Aemond Targaryen)….

And according to Gizmodo’s article “House of the Dragon’s Season 2 Trailer Is All-Out Dragon War”:

…The first season ended with Lucerys (Elliot Grihault) getting eaten by Vhagar and his mother Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) swearing revenge for her loss. Thus begins the Targaryen civil war known as the Dance of Dragons, which will run throughout the second season as the Green and Black factions of the family go head to head against one another. As the trailer shows us, there shall indeed be dragons and their riders engaging in fiery, bloody warfare, along with the requisite scheming, sex, and glares. And at least one gruesome part of the books is confirmed to be showing up in the new season, so longtime fans have that to look forward to….

(8) HOW NOT TO OPEN MOUTH AND INSERT FOOT. BookRiot knows “What Not To Say to Bookstore Employees”. Soon you will, too.

“Wow, you must love your job; you get to sit around and read all day. I am so jealous.” It’s a personal pet peeve of mine when people TELL you that “you must love your job.” Like, it’s a job. I am giving away my free time for money to be here. And people tend to say it to those of us who work in the arts — which, sure, maybe people who work in the arts DO more often love their jobs. But the work is chronically undervalued and underpaid, and so people constantly telling you that “you must love your job” when you work in the arts feels like the collective culture telling you that because you get so much joy from your job, you don’t even really need to be paid for it. You just do it for the passion!!! The more specific response to this sentence is that working in a bookstore is not the “I wish I could just be paid to read all day” utopia that we all imagine it to be. Yes, there are great parts of the job. But most people who work in bookstores don’t sit around and read all day. It’s still customer service, and it’s still inventory, and it’s still packing up returns and orders and creating spreadsheets and data entry and and and. You get it…. 

(9) ON THE ROAD AGAIN. The National Motor Museum at Beaulieu in the UK presents “Doctor Who’s futuristic Whomobile, Bessie and original Dalek feature in 60th anniversary display” through February 2024. The ClassicCars.com Journal tells more in a post here.

The National Motor Museum at Beaulieu is set to transport visitors through time and space with the unveiling of a new temporary display featuring the most iconic vehicles from the beloved British sci-fi series, Doctor Who. From the sleek and stylish Bessie to the futuristic Whomobile and a menacing Dalek, this collection marks the 60th anniversary of the series and opened to visitors on November 23, 2023.

Heading the line-up is none other than Bessie, the Third Doctor’s trusty yellow roadster. Bessie’s first appearance was in Doctor Who and the Silurians in early 1970 and appeared regularly with the Third Doctor, played by Jon Pertwee. It also made single appearances in Fourth, Seventh, Eighth and Eleventh Doctor stories. Familiar to fans of the classic era, Bessie has become synonymous with the Doctor’s adventures….

…Zooming in from the 1970s, the display presents the Whomobile, a custom-designed vehicle created for the Doctor by the brilliant minds at UNIT, the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce. A sleek blend of style and functionality, the Whomobile is a testament to the Doctor’s ability to traverse the cosmos. It made its first appearance in Invasion of the Dinosaurs broadcast in January and February 1974. The vehicle’s only other appearance was in Planet of the Spiders, which was the final adventure for Jon Pertwee’s Third Doctor and would see him regenerate as Tom Baker’s Fourth Doctor.

(10) WB RECOGNIZES ANIMATION UNION. Deadline reports “Warner Bros Discovery Welcomes WB Animation & Cartoon Network Unionization”.

David Zaslav has been preaching the gospel of Tinseltown labor peace since the SAG-AFTRA strike ended, and now the Warner Bros Discovery CEO is putting his money where his mouth is when it comes to his own backyard.

Almost five months after dozens of Warner Bros. Animation and Cartoon Network production workers began their efforts to unionize with The Animation Guild, WBD this week has recognized the move.

“After months of discussions with the studio, I am proud that we were able to reach an agreement with Warner/Discovery for representation of animation production workers at Warner Bros. Animation and Cartoon Network Studios,” said TAG IATSE Local 839 Business Representative Steve Kaplan to Deadline today.

(11) RETURN TO SENDER. “Never mind returning the Parthenon marbles – Britain wants this lot back!” The Guardian has a little list. “It’s all very well Greece wanting its rightful treasure – but the Brits have left some pretty good artefacts lying around the planet. Surely it’s time they came home?”

 As Rishi Sunak continued his war of words with the Greek government and threw a tantrum at PMQs on Wednesday, what cunning plan might he deploy to appease Tory headbangers and distract the electorate?

The row kicked off when Sunak cancelled a meeting with Greek PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis, after the latter said that Britain’s retention of a portion of the Parthenon marbles was like “cutting the Mona Lisa in half”. Mitsotakis was invited to see Oliver Dowden instead, to which he unsurprisingly replied “óchi efcharistó” (no thanks).

The ensuing furore may just have planted an idea in Sunak’s mind. After all, there are some on the Tory right who probably regret the Stone of Scone going north of the border in 1996 after centuries on display as Plantagenet war booty at Westminster Abbey.

The list of treasures actually stolen from the UK, given our former imperial power, is unsurprisingly small. But there are a number of either lost or stolen items, some entering the realm of mythology, others not. These include Excalibur, the earthly remains of Arthur, Alfred the Great, and Oliver Cromwell, the Three Crowns of East Anglia (immortalised in MR James’s A Warning to the Curious), Joseph of Arimathea’s staff and the Great Seal James II slung in the Thames during the Glorious Revolution of 1688. After his unfortunate death at the hands of Native Hawaiians, Captain Cook was supposedly baked (not to eat) and his bones hidden; also in the Pacific during the same era, The Bounty was scuppered and sunk at Pitcairn by the mutineers.

So what artefacts can the UK government demand the return of – even if we gave them away in the first place?

Here’s one of the items.

11. AA Milne’s actual Winnie-the-Pooh (New York)

Like Paddington Bear (isn’t he Peruvian?) Winnie-the-Pooh is an British icon. So to find the poor fellow and friends Tigger, Piglet, Kanga, and Eeyore on display in New York’s Public Library is nothing short of a disgrace. We say free the Pooh Five – prisoners in Manhattan since 1956!

(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born December 2, 1971 — Frank Cho, 52. And tonight, we have Frank Cho. Surely many of you are familiar with the delightful obviously genre Liberty Meadows strip which he wrote and illustrated with its cast of not quite charming talking beasties and resident therapist to them Brandy Carter who Cho says is artistic crossing between Lynda Carter and Bettie Page. It ran from ‘97 to ‘01 with some additional material for a few years after that.  Here’s a Liberty Meadows strip.

Only in The Dreaming Library does this exist…he stated his comic career working for  Penthouse Comix along with Al Gross and Mark Wheatley. The three of them, likely after a very long weekend, thought up  a six-part “raunchy sci-fi fantasy romp” called The Body, centering on an intergalactic female merchant, Katy Wyndon, who can transfer her mind into any of her “wardrobe bodies”,  mindless vessels that she occupies to best suit her mediations with the local alien races that she encounters while traveling the galaxy trading and trying to become wealthy. 

The story was never published for several reasons. Even Kathy Keeton at Penthouse who published the raunchiest comics I’ve seen this side of The Hustler wasn’t interested. 

And then there’s Jungle Girl Comics which was created by Frank Cho, James Murray, and Adriano Batista. Think a female Tarzan. Cho loves young females in bikinis that barely cover the parts that need covering.

Unlike Marvel, he wrote nothing at all, the cover art work he did there was definitely worth seeing, so at just let’s do just that. His work there, well, other than the Harley Quinn covers which are decidedly on the silly edge of things are traditionally skewed and the Green Arrow one I’ve choose is certainly is too. And here it is. Yes I’m a really big Green Arrow fan, he’s one of my favorite DC characters, particularly the modern take on him.  Here’s a variant cover he did for volume 8, number 1 of that series. 

Name a character, Hulk, Spider-Gwen, Hellboy, Red Sonja, New Avengers, Batman, Harley Quinn, and Cho has likely had a hand in it. 

(13) COMICS SECTION.

  • Grickle. Bruce D. Arthurs says, “Thought F770 readers might enjoy this cartoon from Graham Annable I came across on Mastodon. He’s also on Instagram & Tumblr. Quite a few genre-related cartoons.”
  • Tom Gauld squeezes in a lot of fun here:

(14) INTELLIGENT SFF ANIMATION. Camestros Felatpton would hate for you to miss “Pluto (Netflix)”.

…It is the future (and arguably an alternative history) and humanity lives side by side with intelligent robots. Some robots are big machines, others very human like and some shift bodies (giant mech at work and human-like body at home). Robots have only recently acquirred civil rights, including the right to have families and bring up robot children. The world in general is just getting over the trauma of a recent (three years prior) war in central asia between the nation of Persia (which is depicted more like Iraq than Iran) and the United States of Thracia (basically the USA).

Inspector Gesicht is a very human-like detective with Europol and is given the task of investigating two recent murders: a famous and popular Swiss robot and a human who was instrumental in securing civil rights for robots. In both cases the killer left the victims heads adorned with horns…

(15) BOOKEND. Cute as the dickens. “Bilbo Baggins Home” from Geometryk.

Refresh your bookshelf, add a charming little world to your room, and also a wonderful collection and decoration. Let’s stop using those old, ordinary bookends, okay?

(16) CELLING POINT. [Item by Steven French.] The beginning of The Rise of the Anthrobots:

Scientists have developed tiny robots made of human cells that are able to repair damaged neural tissue1. The ‘anthrobots’ were made using human tracheal cells and might, in future, be used in personalized medicine….

Levin and his team grew spheroids of human tracheal skin cells in a gel for two weeks, before removing the clusters and growing them for one week in a less viscous solution. This caused tiny hairs on the cells called cilia to move to the outside of the spheroids instead of the inside. These cilia acted as oars, and the researchers found that the resulting anthrobots — each containing a few hundred cells — often swam in one of several patterns. Some swam in straight lines, others swam in circles or arcs, and some moved chaotically.

To test the anthrobots’ therapeutic potential, Levin and his colleagues placed several into a small dish. There, the anthrobots fused together to form a ‘superbot’, which the researchers placed on a layer of neural tissue that had been scratched. Within three days, the sheet of neurons had completely healed under the superbot. This was surprising, says study co-author Gizem Gumuskaya, a developmental biologist also at Tufts, because the anthrobot cells were able to perform this repair function without requiring any genetic modification. “It’s not obvious that you’re going to get that kind of response,” she says….

From “Tiny robots made from human cells heal damaged tissue” in Nature.

(17) BLINDED BY THE LIGHT. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] This week’s Nature has a newsy article on space junk and its light pollution. Yes, it’s getting to be a problem, but for the most part the article is the same old, same old. (We at SF2 Concatenation even had a piece on space junk in our first (print) edition way back in 1987.)

However this week’s Nature news piece has a decidedly SFnal conclusion: our species might be trapping itself on Earth! (Behind a paywall.) “Bright satellites are disrupting astronomy research worldwide”.

Any collisions in orbit will release many pieces of debris travelling at several kilometres per second, which can cause further collisions, and could lead to a runaway collisional cascade referred to as the Kessler syndrome. This is the worst-case scenario: the onset of full Kessler syndrome would prevent the use of communication, weather, science and astronautical satellites in low Earth orbit for decades. And it is unclear whether a spacecraft could even be launched successfully through the debris shell to enable travel to other planets. Humans would effectively be trapped on Earth by space junk, with multiple tonnes of vaporised metal being added to the upper atmosphere every day through re-entry.

Below: An astronomical picture of a galaxy marred by satellite trails. The research article which instigated this piece is here.

(18) EYEBALL ATTRACTORS. JustWatch lists the top 10 streaming programs for November 2023.

(19) SPELL CHECKING. “The ‘Agatha: Darkhold Diaries’ Featurette is Online, and It Reveals What’s in Store for Agatha” – all explained at The Mary Sue.

So what does the preview reveal?

First off, we see Agatha in her new costume: an updated, more modern-looking version of her purple dress from WandaVision. However, we also see her in a couple of her Westview looks, including her ’80s-era workout leotard. The sets seem to be new, though, so it’s possible the show may reveal more of Wanda’s hex from WandaVision. After all, when WandaVision ended, Agatha was still caught in Wanda’s spell….

The slug with the video adds:

Emmy-nominee Kathryn Hahn reprises her role as Agatha Harkness for a brand new Disney+ Marvel series launching later in 2024. Agatha: Darkhold Diaries will reveal more about the character first introduced in Marvel Studios’ WandaVision. Jac Schaefer, who served as head writer and executive producer on WandaVision, returns for Agatha: Darkhold Diaries.

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