On this evening in 1938, The Shadow’s “Black Buddha” first aired on Mutual Radio. It starred Orson Welles as The Shadow (Lamont Cranston) and Margot Stevenson as Margot Lane. “A shop owner will kill anyone to regain a statue from the Far East, beginning with the lawyer to whom the statue was sold by mistake.” It was sponsored by BF Goodrich Tires. You can listen to it here.
X MINUS ONE’S TUNNEL UNDER THE WORLD
On this date in 1956, X Minus One’s “Tunnel Under the World” first aired. It’s based on the short story by Frederik Pohl that was first published in the January 1955 issue of Galaxy. The story is that June 15th keeps repeating each day with a very slight change each day. George Lefferts wrote the script. Cast was Norman Rose, Dean L. Olmquist, Amy Sedell, Elaine Ross, Bob Hastings, Ken Raffitte and Larry Haines. You can listen to the broadcast here.
ROLLERBALL
On this date in 1975, Rollerball premiered in the United Kingdom. It was directed and produced by Norman Jewison. The screenplay was written by William Harrison from his “Roller Ball Murder” story which had first been published in the September 1973 issue of Esquire. It stars James Caan, John Houseman, Maud Adams, John Beck, Moses Gunn and Ralph Richardson. Critics on the whole were unimpressed but it did well at box office, and audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give it an excellent 67% which is decidedly better than the 14% rating the twenty-five-year-later remake receives.
XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS
On this date in 1995, Xena: Warrior Princess first aired in first-run syndication. It was created by John Schulian and Robert Tapert with development work by R.J. Stewart and Sam Raimi. It was executive produced by Robert Tapert and Sam Raimi. It starred Lucy Lawless and Renee O’Connor. It would run for six seasons and one hundred and thirty-four episodes. An animated film, Hercules and Xena – The Animated Movie: The Battle for Mount Olympus, myriad novels and even comics followed. The late Josepha Sherman ghost wrote XENA: All I Need to Know I Learned From the Warrior Princess. A reboot was planned five years ago but canceled.
(1) LODESTAR MEMENTO. Fran Wilde shows off her Lodestar finalist pin. The Instagram is a video of her unwrapping the box. Below is a screencap of the pin.
The WarnerMedia branch of Warner Bros. was hit with a ton of layoffs today, and things seem especially dire this evening for the Warner-owned DC Comics. According to The Hollywood Reporter, a number of high-ranking people at DC are now out, including editor-in-chief Bob Harris, several senior VPs, and some editors (including executive editor Mark Doyle, who was in charge of the publisher’s edgy new Black Label graphic novels). Furthermore, THR’s sources say the layoffs have come for “roughly one third” of DC’s entire editorial staff as well as “the majority” of the people working on the DC Universe streaming service, and the DC Direct merchandise brand has been completely shut down after 22 years of selling Batman toys.
…Insiders also say the majority of the staff of the streaming service DC Universe has been laid off, a move that had been widely expected as WarnerMedia shifts its focus to new streaming service HBO Max.
“DC Universe was DOA as soon as the AT&T merger happened,” said one source.
DC Universe launched in May 2018, and is home to live-action series such as Doom Patrol, Titans and Stargirl, as well as animated offerings including Young Justice and Harley Quinn. Some of those shows have now started to stream on HBO Max.
Also a victim of the layoffs: DC Direct, the company’s in-house merchandise and collectibles manufacturer….
…I don’t want to give the impression that my American Rose is some kind of bastard love child of Kate Bush and the Blair Witch. But like other suspense writers who dip their nibs into the cursed waters of folk horror, its elements may be sprinkled into a contemporary novel to create an atmosphere of dread.
The resurgence of the genre shows that folk horror is apt for our times. Identities are fluid. No bad deed goes unpunished. The civilized world is only a heartbeat away from primal and uncanny threats.
The genre is also nostalgic for a rural England that is as far from Downtown Abbey as you can get in a four-horse carriage. This England is afeared of change. In times of crisis, we return to the old ways, which offer a reassuring connection to a simple past. But at the cost of old evils. There is a sense that all progress is a chimera, that our modern sophistication is itself a form of naivety.
(4) BLACK UTOPIA. In “Will I Live to See My Utopia?” at Uncanny Magazine, P. Djèlí Clark responds to HBO’s adaptation of Watchmen.
…Before your mind can make sense of it, words in some shade of Watchmen yellow superimpose across the screen: TULSA 1921.
Gotta admit, didn’t see that coming.
Once those two words flashed, what I was looking at resolved into focus. The Tulsa Race Riots of 1921[5]. The Tulsa Massacre. The scene set off a surge on Google[6] as viewers searched for information on the riot—their first time learning about it. Many Black folks, though, didn’t have to go looking. We’d heard some version of this story. I couldn’t even tell you where or when it was passed on to me—one of those bits of common knowledge that travels along Black intra-community networks, written down in our Scriptures on the Sins of White Folk. The story of the all-Black and self-sustaining community that rose up in the middle of Jim Crow. That prospered, with its own businesses and professionals. Black Wall Street, they called it. Even if you didn’t know every detail—like the discrepancies about airplanes dropping dynamite on buildings, or the disputes over mass graves[7]—you had heard something about Tulsa. It was a story of Black excellence, and Black horror. A tragic tale of a lost world like the city of Atlantis, or doomed Krypton—only snuffed out not by natural disaster or hubris, but by the reckless fires of white supremacy.
Still, the cold open of an HBO production was the last place I expected to see this. I’d gone my entire Black life and never seen a single recreation—not once. Our stories didn’t appear in mainstream productions like this. Our histories certainly weren’t centered this way within a major speculative canon. Our perspective wasn’t supposed to fit into stories of superheroes as jaded vigilantes, a physics- bending blue guy, and the greatest hoax ever played on mankind—à la interdimensional psychic squid.
But here we were. This was happening….
(5) ROBOFLOP. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Robots and disability access clash; everyone loses. TechCrunch’s Haben Girma discusses “The robots occupying our sidewalks” .
The robot, shaped like a large cooler on wheels, zipped along somewhere ahead of me. My left hand clasped the smooth leather harness of my German shepherd guide dog. “Mylo, forward.” The speed of his four short legs complemented the strides of my longer two — call it the six feet fox trot. Together we glided past the competition.
My quarantine buddy stayed behind filming the race. Mylo: 1, Robot: 0.
My amusement with the little robots shifted to curiosity. Thirty years after the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, many tech companies still fail to design for disability. How would the autonomous robots react to disabled pedestrians?
About 10 feet down the sidewalk, I stopped and turned around. Mylo tensed, his alarm crawling up my arm. The white visage of the robot stopped about a foot from his nose.
I hoped the robot would identify a pedestrian and roll away, but it stayed put. Mylo relaxed into a sitting position — guide dog school didn’t teach him about the robot apocalypse. I scratched his ears and he leaned into my hands. The robot was not moved.
(6) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.
August 11, 1955 — X Minus One’s “Almost Human” was broadcast for the first time. The screenplay was written as usual by George Lefferts off of Robert Bloch‘s story of the same name first published in Fantastic Adventures, June 1943. (Last collected in The Complete Stories of Robert Bloch, Volume 1: Final Reckonings, 1990.) Bloch’s tale has a petty criminal taking over an android for what he thinks he is suitable training and has the tables turned on him as the android is too human. The cast included Santos Ortega, Joan Allison, Jack Grimes, Guy Repp, Nat Pollen, Joseph Julian and Lin Cook. You can listen to it here. (CE)
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertx.]
Born August 11, 1902 — Jack Binder. In Thrilling Wonder Stories in their October 1938 issue they published his article, “If Science Reached the Earth’s Core”, with the first known use of the phrase “zero gravity”. In the early Forties, he was an artist for Fawcett, Lev Gleason, and Timely Comics. During these years, he created the Golden Age character Daredevil which is not the Marvel Daredevil though he did work with Stan Lee where they co-created The Destroyer at Timely Comics. (Died 1986.) (CE)
Born August 11, 1923 – Ben P. Indick. Fanzine Ben’s Beat; letters, reviews, in Anduril, Banana Wings, The Baum Bugle, The Call of Cthulhu, Chacal, The Frozen Frog, The Metaphysical Review, Necrofile, Nyctalops, Riverside Quarterly, Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone Magazine, Studies in Weird Fiction, Weird Tales. Wrote Ray Bradbury, Dramatist and George Alec Effinger; eight short stories; contributed to Hannes Bok studies and flights of angels (1968), Bok (1974). First Fandom Hall of Fame. My attempt to recruit him for APA-L produced, briefly, Chez Ondique. (Died 2009) [JH]
Born August 11, 1928 — Alan E. Nourse. His connections to other SF writers are fascinating. Heinlein dedicated Farnham’s Freehold to Nourse, and in part dedicated Friday to Nourse’s wife Ann. His novel The Bladerunner lent its name to the movie but nothing else from it was used in that story. However Blade Runner (a movie) written by, and I kid you not, William S. Burroughs, is based on his novel. Here the term “blade runner” refers to a smuggler of medical supplies, e.g. scalpels. (Died 1992.) (CE)
Born August 11, 1932 — Chester Anderson. His The Butterfly Kid is the first part of what is called the Greenwich Village Trilogy, with Michael Kurland writing the middle book, The Unicorn Girl, and the third volume, The Probability Pad, written by T.A. Waters. I can practically taste the acid from here… The Butterfly Kid is available from all the usual digital suspects. (Died 1991.) (CE)
Born August 11, 1936 – Bruce Pelz, F.N. An omnifan who did clubs, collecting, cons, costuming, fanhistory, fanzines, filking, gaming, and, as the saying goes, much much more. Co-chaired Westercon 22 and L.A.Con the 30th Worldcon (with Chuck Crayne); founded Loscon and chaired Loscon 10; Fan Guest of Honor at Noreascon Two the 38th Worldcon; founded the History of Worldcons Exhibit; twice earned the LASFS (L.A. Science Fantasy Soc.) Evans-Freehafer Award; was named a Fellow of NESFA (New England SF Soc.; service award); Filk Hall of Fame; invented APA-L, contributed to it, FAPA, SAPS, OMPA, The Cult, and for a while every existing apa; recognized fan and pro art with the Fantasy Showcase Tarot Deck (PDF); gave his collection of fanzines, almost two hundred thousand of them, to U. Cal. Riverside. He was an Eagle Scout. Here and here are appreciations by OGH. (Died 2002) [JH]
Born August 11, 1949 – Nate Bucklin, 71. First Secretary of Minn-stf (or stef, from Hugo Gernsback’s word scientifiction) and thus one of its Floundering_Fathers. Guest of Honor at Minicon 16 and 43, Windycon 32, DucKon IV. Five short stories. Fanzine, Stopthink; editor awhile of Rune; founding member of Minneapa. Being a filker (see link under Bruce Pelz) he was Guest of Honor at GAFilk Six, and the Interfilk Guest at Contata 5. Once explained to me “We have half these songs memorized – usually the first half.” [JH]
Born August 11, 1959 — Alan Rodgers. Author of Bone Music, a truly great take off the Robert Johnson myth. His “The Boy Who Came Back From the Dead” novelette won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Long Fiction, and he was editor of Night Cry in the mid-Eighties. Kindle has Bone Music and a number of his other novels, iBooks has nothing available. (Died 2014.) (CE)
Born August 11, 1961 — Susan M. Garrett. She was a well-known and much liked writer, editor and publisher in many fandoms, but especially the Forever Knight community. (She also was active in Doctor Who and The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne fandoms. And no, I had no idea that the latter had a fandom.) She is perhaps best known for being invited to write a Forever Knight tie-in novel, Intimations of Mortality. It, like the rest of the Forever Knight novels, is not available in digital form. (Died 2010.) (CE)
Born August 11, 1970 – Elizabeth Kiem, 50. Four novels for us; collaborated on five books about Balanchine. Three of those four have the Bolshoi Ballet. [JH]
Born August 11, 1972 – Danielle Wood, 48. Tasmanian. Three novels for us (with Heather Rose); dozens more via thus this site (subscription needed). Website here. [JH]
Born August 11, 1976 — Will Friedle, 44. Largely known as an actor with extensive genre voice work: Terry McGinnis aka the new Batman in Batman Beyond which Warner Animation now calls Batman of the Future, Peter Quill in The Guardians Of The Galaxy, and Kid Flash in Teen Titans Go! to name but a few of his roles. (CE)
Born August 11, 1989 – Will Wight, 31. Sixteen novels in three series; fourteen shorter stories, most available only here. Website here. Some of you will know why I keep misspelling his misspelling his name (and may even know how to spell Nesselrode). [JH]
…Even in high school, Walt Kelly had worked at his local newspaper; after graduation, he even drew that paper a comic strip about the life of P.T. Barnum. While he was also hired for a few freelance assignments while living on the East Coast, he wanted to produce a different sort of comic art. Walt Disney Productions was his goal, he applied to work there, and he was hired.
As he worked for Disney on a variety of projects for the next five and a half years, he became friends with several of his fellow writers and artists. Like many other fledgling creators there, he’d eventually go on to work in the new comic book industry.
But wait. We were wrapping up the 1930s. And the 1940s were just ahead….
(10) CONDEMNED BY THE SCI-FI SCRIBE. In “Awards For Works Should Be Judged By The Work Itself” [Archive Today copy] Richard Paolinelli rolls together the week’s kerfuffles – Hugo toastmaster GRRM mispronouncing names, Jeannette Ng’s Hugo, the Retro-Hugos for Campbell and Lovecraft, and the attack on the concept of an sff canon – into one prodigious blunt and fires it up. Every paragraph is like this:
…And now they want to change the rules for future Retro Hugos it seems. No longer can the best work be nominated, they yowl, but if the creator behind said work does not pass the “Officially Acceptable Wokeness Test” they must be chiseled out of the SF/F historical record forever lest future generations ever hear of their vile “un-woke” creations!
And to make sure we know how unwoke he is, Richard repeatedly misspells N.K. Jemisin’s name, and delivers this bonus blast to John Scalzi’s syndicated movie review column of 30 years ago.
…Even John Scalzi jumped into the fray to declare that we really shouldn’t waste our time on the “old SF/F” stuff and only read the “modern (read: acceptably woke) stuff”.
HISTORICAL NOTE: I had the extreme displeasure of having to read his crap when it shot across the McClatchy Newspaper wire back in the mid-1990s when he was at the Fresno Bee and I worked the copy desk for two days a week at the Modesto Bee (thankfully the other three days I escaped that torture by working in the Sports department.)
When I heard Scalzi had jumped to fiction writing I pitied his poor editor. His stuff at the Bee was always the last we worked on and always need massive reworking to be suitable to run….
…In [The Godwulf Mnuscript], a student member of the anticapitalist committee tells Spenser not to laugh at the group, saying that they are “perfectly serious and perfectly right.” Spenser answers that so is everyone else he knows. In a world that revolves around ideologies and declarations of righteousness, Spenser is glad to meet people who don’t take themselves too seriously. The cast of supporting characters is populated by friends of different genders and colors who operate on principle without saying so, who are more about the walk than the talk. This is part of the hard-boiled principle of understatement; other people’s pain is to be taken seriously, but one’s own is not. But it is also a signal that the hard-boiled is beginning to change his parameters.
Ian Brackenbury Channell walks around in black robes and a pointy hat. He’s a tourist attraction, so Christchurch, New Zealand, even pays him. As he steps aside, a successor wizard takes over. Now, you may ask, exactly what magical power does this wizard possess? His answer – every day, the world gets more serious, so fun is the most powerful thing.
Scientists have used mathematical equations developed by a wartime code breaker to understand the behaviour of birds.
University of Sheffield researchers used models developed by Alan Turing to study why flocks of long-tailed tits spread out across the countryside.
They found the birds were more likely to stay close to their relatives but avoided larger flocks.
PhD student Natasha Ellison said the maths was essential to the research.
Researchers tracked the birds around Sheffield’s Rivelin Valley, which eventually produced a pattern across the landscape, and they used maths to reveal the behaviours causing these patterns.
The team used equations developed by Mr Turing in the 1950s, who developed them to describe how animals get their spotted and striped patterns.
High winds and torrential rain on the New South Wales south coast in Australia have resulted in a spectacular sight – waterfalls in the Royal National Park being blown in reverse.
When Natalie Monson started her food blog 11 years ago, she didn’t expect to end up embroiled in a fight with the world’s most valuable company.
But the US small business owner is now battling Apple for the right to use a pear in the logo on her recipe app.
In a patent filing, Apple said the image was too similar to its own logo and would hurt its brand.
Ms Monson says the tech giant is simply “bullying” and she feels a “moral obligation” to fight back.
More than 43,000 people have already signed the petition she and her husband Russ, owners of the Super Healthy Kids website, created last week to try to pressure the company to back down.
“This is a real world example of a small business being destroyed by a giant monopoly because they don’t have accountability,” Mr Monson told the BBC. “That was so frustrating to us that we thought we had to do something. We can’t just be the next victim on the list.”
A 99-million year old fossil of a “hell ant” is giving researchers a glimpse into the behavior of these fearsome ancient insects, a new study reports.
Encased in amber (tree resin), the fossil provides the most vivid picture yet of how hell ants once used their uncanny tusk-like mandibles and diverse horns to successfully hunt down victims for nearly 20 million years, before vanishing from the planet.
“Since the first hell ant was unearthed about a hundred years ago, it’s been a mystery as to why these extinct animals are so distinct from the ants we have today,” said study lead author Phillip Barden of the New Jersey Institute of Technology, in a statement.
(17) WHY IT’S GR8T. In “Honest Trailers: Avatar–The Last Airbender” on YouTube, the Screen Junkies explain that the anime series Avatar–The Last Airbender is “full of life lessons that will thrill your inner eight-year-old–because it was written for eight year olds.”
[Thanks to John Hertz, John King Tarpinian, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, Andrew Porter, Chip Hitchcock, Cat Eldridge, JJ, and Michael Toman for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Camestros Felapton.]
(1) DYNAMIC DINOS. Camestros Felapton continues celebrating his fifth blogoversary with the release of a post collection — “Book Launch: The Hugosauriad”. And the price is right: “As always the cost is FREE and half price for dinosaurs.”
Two hundred and fifty two million years in the making, a book that spans geological eras, astronomical bodies colliding, and people getting upset at award ceremonies. Space! Big game hunters! A surprising number of priests! Atheist therapods! This is a book that has everything but a simple premise!
…Picking a single theme opened up a way into the huge scope of the Hugo Awards. Instead of just winners, I could look at notable finalists as well but more than that, I could look at stories that weren’t even nominated (in some cases because they preceded the Hugo Awards) but which were influential. It also meant that I could trace how one theme had changed and shifted in the genre over decades but also how features of the Hugos (such as the infamous No Award) had played out in multiple eras.
To my delight and surprise other themes volunteered themselves as if eager to jump on the bandwagon: the boundary between science fiction and literary fiction, the influence of changing scientific ideas on science fiction, the role of humour in science fiction, the representation of women as both authors and characters in the awards.
(2) KGB. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present N.K. Jemisin and Kenneth Schneyer online Wednesday, June 17th, 2020, at 7 p.m. (The in-person event is cancelled.) The YouTube link for the livestream is forthcoming.
N.K. Jemisin
N.K. Jemisin is a New York Times-bestselling author of speculative fiction short stories and novels. In 2018, she became the first author to win three Best Novel Hugos in a row for her Broken Earth trilogy. She has also won a Nebula Award, two Locus Awards, and a number of other honors. Her latest novel, The City We Became, is out now from Orbit Books. She lives and writes in Brooklyn.
Kenneth Schneyer
Kenneth Schneyer has been nominated for the Nebula and Sturgeon awards. His fiction has appeared in Lightspeed Magazine, Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, Analog, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Clockwork Phoenix. Fairwood Press will release his second collection, Anthems Outside Time and Other Strange Voices in July. He teaches Shakespeare, constitutional law, sf, criminal procedure, and introductory logic to college students in Rhode Island.
(3) LEGENDS OF TOMORROW RECAP. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] Tuesday night’s episode of DC’S Legends of Tomorrow was the episode where they parodied Star Trek. The premise this season is that the three Greek Fates are in the Legends of Tomorrow universe and have three rings, and these rings are plot coupons that you can turn in for the prize, which I think is absolute power or something. Two of the Fates are evil and one, Clotho, is a good character who helps the Legends. In Tuesday’s episode, Clotho places the Legends in a universe where they are on TV all the time, in shows that are analogues of Friends, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Downton Abbey, and Star Trek.
The Trek parody was called “Star Trip,” a spaceship whose continuing mission was to find strange new worlds and then blow them up. They faced characters called “Gromulans” who looked vaguely like Klingons. There was also a character who looked like Khan and was called Don, and the joke here is that Don had long flowing white hair while Dominic Purcell, who played Don, is a bald character in the Legends universe. Caity Lotz did her Shatner impression and was funny, but I thought the best character in the show was Matt Ryan, who played the head butler in the Downton Abbey analogue but on the show plays dissolute demon hunter John Constantine.
My problem with the Arrowverse shows is that their writers discovered parallel worlds, making the show’s story arcs ridiculously complicated. I think Tom Cavanaugh on The Flash has played four variants of his character from four parallel worlds. But Legends of Tomorrow has a less complex backstory and is entertaining. I also think Stargirl is promising, at least for the first two episodes.
(4) LET’S KEEP LOOKING. Robert Zubrin, in “Searching for Life in the Outer Solar System” at National Review Online, has a positive review of JPL scientist Kevin Peter Hand’s Alien Oceans, which discusses the need for continuing deep-space exploration.
You Earthlings are all alike. Whether humans, turtles, wasps, trees, mushrooms, tardigrades, or bacteria, you all use the same DNA, RNA, ATP biochemical operating system. You offer some interesting diversity, that is true. But are you all there is to life?
Kevin Peter Hand, a scientist with the Jet Propulsion Lab, really wants to get the answer. In his engaging new book, Alien Oceans: The Search for Life in the Depths of Space, he lays out why, where, and how we can do so.
English, French, Spanish, German, and Polish all use the same system for encoding information: the Latin alphabet. Greek and Russian employ alphabets that differ significantly but still work according to the same basic principles. That is because all these scripts have a common origin. If all you knew were European languages, you might think that variation on such writing systems exhausted the possibilities. Chinese, though, on the other hand, utilizes an information technology with no resemblance to any Western phonetic alphabet. It accomplishes the same function but does so in a fundamentally different way.
There are, as Hand explains, fundamental reasons why we might expect that life everywhere uses the same carbon- and water-based chemistry we see here. But Earth life is far more restricted in its format than such considerations alone require. Specifically, it all uses the same DNA-RNA alphabet for encoding genetic information from one generation to the next — the Latin alphabet, if you will. That works well enough, but could life elsewhere be using Chinese? And what could that mean if it does? …
(5) BE AWARE. Angela Yuriko Smith advises readers of the Horror Writers Association newsletter about the need to do “Marketing Without Marketing”.
…For many of us (including my own family) expendable income has been reduced or dried up completely. Even those of us who were flush before the pandemic are feeling the pinch now. Many of us are looking at all the avenues of income we have access to. And suddenly, I’ve noticed, everyone has something to sell.
Here’s the problem: when people don’t have extra money, how do blatant advertisements make them feel? For me, I get annoyed. I’m already upset that my extra money is gone and I’m having to cut back on luxury items. Some people can’t even cover bare necessities right now. When we’re broke and you get hit with a blunt “buy this” notice, we typically have a negative response.
If I can no longer purchase the things I do regularly, a “buy this” marketing approach only serves as a reminder of the bitter truth. As artists, we never want anyone to feel a negative response to us or our work. That feeling of dislike can last long after the current pandemic becomes history.
(6) CALLED OFF. A piece in the Washington Post with the theme “summer is not cancelled” that names a lot of activities still happening or going online, also lists local cancellations – including two large Washington media conventions: Blerdcon, the “black nerd” convention, and Otakon, a giant 30,000 person anime convention that was in Baltimore and moved to Washington a few years ago.
Blerdcon and Otakon: It’s a tough year for those who love dressing up as their favorite pop-culture icons. Both Otakon, the mega-convention which drew almost 30,000 attendees to a celebration of anime, manga and Asian art at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in 2019, and Blerdcon, a diverse gathering for thousands of gamers, cosplayers and fans of nerd culture at the Hyatt Regency Crystal City, are off.
Science fiction and fantasy fans love to dream about things that never existed. And some of them enjoy bringing objects and ideas from their imagination to life. Whether working from kits or making something from scratch, there is a great deal of enjoyment to be gained from model building, and satisfaction in seeing a finished project. This is a great time for those who enjoy the hobby: the internet has provided ways to share information with other modelers and to shop for kits and products from around the world, and the new technology of 3D printing has opened up even more ways to bring imaginary things to life. So if, like a lot of people these days, you have some extra time on your hands, you might want to look into model building
We live in a time where social distancing has become imperative. Folks are being warned to minimize contact with other people, keep a safe distance and remain in their homes as much as possible. This has become a source of good-natured humor in the model-building community, whose members spend a lot of time at benches tucked away in a basement or corner of their house. “We’ve been training for this our whole lives,” they joke. But this also raises a good point: Modeling is a perfect hobby for these times….
(9) JAMES OBIT. Actor Anthony James, famed for playing creeps and villains in major films like The Heat of the Night and The Unforgiven, died of cancer May 26. His extensive resume included appearances in TV’s Beauty and the Beast (1989), and Star Trek: The Next Generation (“The Neutral Zone” as Romulan Sub-Cmdr. Thei, 1988). (His career included getting killed by Clint Eastwood’s character in two different movies.)
James had made a single brief appearance on a TV series before Norman Jewison cast him as the killer Ralph in 1967’s In the Heat of the Night, starring Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger. The film went on to win five Oscars, including Best Picture.
His memoir, Acting My Face — a title borrowed from an oft-told story about his acting idol Marlon Brando — was published in 2014.
Anthony James on the right as Sub-Cmdr. Thei.
(10) HERD OBIT. Actor Richard Herd, best-known for his work on Seinfeld, died May 27. The New York Times paid tribute:
Richard Herd, who played lawmen, tough guys, a general, an alien commander and a Watergate burglar, but was best known as Mr. Wilhelm, George Costanza’s supervisor, on “Seinfeld,” died on Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 87.
Mr. Herd was also known for roles on several science-fiction series, among them Supreme Commander John on the mini-series “V” in 1983 and its sequel the next year; L’Kor, a Klingon, on “Star Trek: The Next Generation”; and Admiral William Noyce on “Seaquest 2032.”
Richard Thomas Herd was born on Sept. 26, 1932, in Boston. In 1970 he was cast in his first film, “Hercules in New York,” whose star, Arnold Schwarzenegger, was also making his movie debut.
He stayed busy for nearly 50 years. He had roles in the mini-series “Ike: The War Years” (1979), “The China Syndrome” (1979), “All the President’s Men” (1976), and the TV series “T.J. Hooker,” “Quantum Leap” and “Desperate Housewives.”
In 2017, Mr. Herd played the founder of a cult in one scene in Jordan Peele’s acclaimed horror film “Get Out.”
(11) TRIVIAL TRIVIA.
Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven” was inspired by a real bird, specifically Charles Dickens’ pet Grip, who also makes an appearance in his owner’s story “Barnaby Rudge.” Grip died in 1841 but was preserved in arsenic and taxidermied. He can be seen in the Rare Books department of the Philadelphia Free Library.
May 29, 1956 — X Minus One aired Gordon R. Dickson’s “Lulungameena.” It first appeared in the Looking Forward anthology in November 1953 (edited by Milton Lesser), and is the first story where his Dorsai mercenaries are mentioned (though it was not considered a Dorsai story by him). Four years after this aired, Dorsai! would finish second to Starship Troopers for Best Novel Hugo at Pittcon. The script was by George Lefferts who did most of the scripts here. The cast was Ralph Camargo, Ned Weaver, Jack Grimes, Bob Hastings and Kermit Murdock. You can hear the show here.
(13) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
Born May 29, 1874 – G.K. Chesterton. Wrote essays, fiction, poems (is poetry fiction?), plays, biography, criticism. Illustrator; journalist; radio broadcaster. Half a dozen of his eighty books are ours, famously The Napoleon of Notting Hill and The Man Who Was Thursday; eighty of his two hundred shorter stories. Events in his Father Brown stories turn out not to be fantasy. But GKC was the prince of paradox. Translated into Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish. (Died 1936) [JH]
Born May 29, 1901 – Ken Fagg. A dozen covers for If and a few others; co-creator of world’s largest geophysical relief globe; illustrator for Life, Holiday, Saturday Evening Post; art director for 20th Century Fox. See three of his If wrap-arounds here, here, here. Here is A Volcanic Eruption on Titan, Sixth Moon of Saturn. (Died 1980) [JH]
Born May 29, 1906 – T.H. White. We can claim six of his novels (counting The Once and Future King as one – although its publication history made its first part “The Sword in the Stone” eligible for a Retro-Hugo, which we gave it), twenty shorter stories. He lived to see Once & Future made into the Lerner & Loewe musical Camelot, which L&L told each other was impossible, and they were right, but luckily that didn’t matter. He translated a Bestiary, called non-fiction, which is like calling Once & Future a children’s story. (Died 1964) [JH]
Born May 29, 1909 — Neil R. Jones. It is thought that “The Death’s Head Meteor,” his first story, which was published in Air Wonder Stories in 1930, could be the first use of “astronaut” in fiction. He also created the use of a future history before either Robert A. Heinlein or Cordwainer Smith were to do so. They’re collected in The Planet of the Double Sun, The Sunless World and a number of another overlapping collections. He’s a member of the First Fandom Hall of Fame. (Died 1988.) (CE)
Born May 29, 1923 — Genevieve Linebarger. Widow of Cordwainer Smith. She had a hand in The Instrumentality of Mankind series, co-authoring “The Lady Who Sailed the Soul” (1960), and “Golden the Ship Was — Oh! Oh! Oh!” (1959) and, after her husband’s death, was the sole author of “Down to a Sunless Sea” (1975) published under his name, and completed “Himself in Anachron“ (published 1993). (Credits per NESFA Press’ Rediscovery of Man collection.) (Died 1981.) (CE)
Born May 29, 1930 – Richard Clifton-Dey. Five dozen covers in our field; a hundred total, Westerns, war books, advertising, romance; a few interiors; much unsigned, identified by his widow. See here (Fritz Leiber), here (Tim Powers), here (H.G. Wells). (Died 1997) [JH]
Born May 29, 1939 — Alice K. Turner. Playboy fiction editor from 1980 to 2000. Silverberg praised her highly and she did much to make sure SF had an important place in the fiction offered up there. The Playboy Book of Science Fiction collects a good tasting of the SF published during her tenure. (Died 2015.) (CE)
Born May 29, 1948 – Larry Kresek. Thirty covers in our field. First chair of illustration dep’t, Ringling School of Art & Design; movie posters, record albums, national ads, pharmaceutical illustrations; adviser to education committee, N.Y. Society of Illustrators; professor, Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design; various projects with wife Joan Kresek. See here (Spider & Jeanne Robinson), here (Theodore Sturgeon), here. [JH]
Born May 29, 1952 – Louise Cooper. Eighty novels in our field: a dozen Time Master novels; also Creatures; Dark Enchantment; Indigo; Mermaid Curse; Mirror, Mirror; Sea Horses; a dozen stand-alone novels, another dozen shorter stories. Translated into French, German, Spanish. She and husband Cas Shandall sang with the shanty group Falmouth Shout. (Died 2009) [JH]
Born May 29, 1959 — Adrian Paul, 61. Duncan MacLeod on Highlander. And yes, I watched the whole bloody series. His first appearance in genre circles was as Dmitri Benko in the “Ashes, Ashes” episode of the Beauty and the Beast series. He shows up next as Prospero in Masque of the Red Death. He’s got several series before Highlander, War of the Worlds (not bad at all) where he was John Kincaid, a short-lived role as Jeremiah Collins on Dark Shadows and an even shorter-lived rolled on Tarzán as Jack Traverse. His first post- Highlander Sf series is Tracker where her he players alien shapeshifter Cole / Daggon. A decade ago, he returned to a familiar role in Highlander: The Source. His last series role was playing Dante on Arrow. Note: this is not a complete list. (CE)
Born May 29, 1987 — Pearl Mackie, 33. Companion to Twelfth Doctor, the actress was the first openly LGBTQ performer and companion cast in a regular role in Doctor Who. Mackie, says Moffatt, was so chosen as being non-white was not enough. Her other notable genre role was playing Mika Chantry in the audiowork of The Conception of Terror: Tales Inspired by M. R. James. (CE)
Born May 29, 1996 — R. F. Kuang, 24. She’s an award-winning Chinese-American fantasy writer. The Poppy War series, so-called grimdark fantasy, consists of The Poppy War which won the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel, The Dragon Republic and The Burning God (forthcoming). She’s a nominee this year for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. (CE)
(15) BLEEDING OUT. Sarah McNally asks in a New York Times opinion piece, “What Could Kill My New York Bookstores?” There’s no doubt about it. Tagline: “It won’t be Amazon or the coronavirus. It will be artificially high rents.”
Every weekday I drive to my four bookstores, pick up our customers’ orders, wedge them into the back of my car and take them to the Cooper Station post office. My route takes me to Williamsburg to Downtown Brooklyn to the South Street Seaport, and ends at my original store in NoLIta.
I sweep the deserted sidewalks — if you own a shop, you’re responsible for the sidewalk — and I wonder how many of the stores and restaurants around mine will be able to reopen and pay the debts they accrued during the lockdown.
So many closed long before the pandemic. I miss my old neighbors in NoLIta, the restaurants and their chefs, the bodega that magically had everything I needed, like Mary Poppins’s carpetbag, the Buddhist monk from the Tibetan store who gave me cardamom for tea, the bar where I had the most beautiful date of my life.
How many more distinctive stores and restaurants can our city lose before we find that we are no longer New York, but a dead-faced simulacrum?
Years before Covid, many city blocks had been reduced to a few overlit national chains — Dunkin’ Donuts, Metro by T-Mobile, Subway, Starbucks — and a whole lot of dark, depressing vacancies. Almost every business owner I spoke to or read about seemed to give the same reason: soaring rents. In some neighborhoods, even as vacancies are increasing, rent keeps rising….
Ancient Israelites burned cannabis as part of their religious rituals, an archaeological study has found.
A well-preserved substance found in a 2,700-year-old temple in Tel Arad has been identified as cannabis, including its psychoactive compound THC.
Researchers concluded that cannabis may have been burned in order to induce a high among worshippers.
This is the first evidence of psychotropic drugs being used in early Jewish worship, Israeli media report.
The temple was first discovered in the Negev desert, about 95km (59 miles) south of Tel Aviv, in the 1960s.
In the latest study, published in Tel Aviv University’s archaeological journal, archaeologists say two limestone altars had been buried within the shrine.
Thanks in part to the dry climate, and to the burial, the remains of burnt offerings were preserved on top of these altars.
Caitlin Henderson was working for a spider exhibition when the coronavirus pandemic hit. The venue closed, and suddenly she was living in lockdown with 70 spiders in her bedroom.
(20) BACK IN THE DAY. Superman serial star Kirk Alyn plays baseball with other movie celebrities of 1950, including Hopalong Cassidy, in this Paramount News feature.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, John Hertz, JJ, Chip Hitchcock, Michael Toman, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, Nina Shepardson, John A Arkansawyer, Cat Eldridge, and Andrew Porter. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
(1) NEXT TREK. CBS All Access dropped a trailer for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, a spinoff from Star Trek; Discovery that stars Anson Mount and Rebecca Romijn.
Fans spoke, Star Trek listened, and a new series aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise is on the horizon! Watch stars Anson Mount, Ethan Peck, and Rebecca Romijn excitedly break the big news. Stay tuned for more information on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, coming soon to CBS All Access. In the meantime, stream full episodes of Star Trek: Discovery, exclusively in the U.S. on CBS All Access.
(2) NOT ENTIRELY A BAD THING. The Romance Writers of America have cancelled the annual gathering planned for San Francisco in August, another consequence of the pandemic. Attendance levels were already in doubt due to the upheaval and disaffection in the group this year, which led to this reaction from Courtney Milan —
(3) DEALING WITH A FAMILIAR MEDIA WEAPON. On Saturday, May 16, professionals in the field of influence operations (“Fake News”) will join Gadi Evron, Sounil Yu, Malka Older, and special guest David Weber to discuss how disinformation can be countered from an operational standpoint, as well as its effects on society and policy. “Countering ‘Fake News’: Professionals Speak” at Essence of Wonder. Registration required
Panel one will cover the effects of “Fake News” on society, and the shaping of policy around the topic. Panel two will dive deeply into methodologies, operational tools, and techniques, for countering “Fake News” attacks.
(4) THINKING ABOUT ADAPTATIONS. The World Fantasy Con 2020 blog featured one of their GoH’s in an “Interview with Charlaine Harris”.
WFC2020: The Sookie Stackhouse books were made into the series True Blood, which ran seven years. In the books Lafayette (the fry cook) doesn’t last long, but the actor, Nelsan Harris, was so popular his role was expanded in the series. What other changes were made to the books’ characters?
CH: I thought the character of Jessica (Deborah Wohl) was a fabulous addition to the storyline. Wished I had thought of her. The fae on screen turned out to be not at all what was in my head, but it worked for the purposes of the show. I loved the sets, which I saw several times: Sookie’s house, Jason’s house, Merlotte’s. And all the actors were amazing. Alan Ball is a genius at casting. Nelsan was wonderful!
Dana Cameron, Toni L.P. Kelner (a.k.a. Leigh Perry), Patricia Briggs, and Charlaine Harris will join us on Essence of Wonder with Gadi Evron for geeky shenanigans in a panel discussion about Worldbuilding (and maybe pets). Before the panel, Charlaine will interview Patricia on her new Mercy Thompson book, “Smoke Bitten“. Join us for this special show with The Leading Ladies of Urban Fantasy on Saturday (23 May).
(6) DON’T MISS OUT. Another WFC 2020 guest of honor, Steve Rasnic Tem, telling about “My First WFC”, includes this wisdom:
…My late friend Ed Bryant and I would sometimes read the glowing tributes to authors who had passed and Ed would say, “Well, I hope they told them these nice things while they were still alive.” Attending a World Fantasy Convention gives you a great opportunity to practice Ed’s advice. The sad fact is you may not have another chance.
Charlie Jane Anders is writing a nonfiction book—and Tor.com is publishing it as she does so. Never Say You Can’t Survive is a how-to book about the storytelling craft, but it’s also full of memoir, personal anecdote, and insight about how to flourish in the present emergency.
Below is the Introduction, followed by the first chapter, “How To Make Your Own Imaginary Friends”
New installments will appear every Tuesday at noon EST.
Here’s an excerpt –
….So I’m writing a series of essays called Never Say You Can’t Survive, all about how writing and making up stories can help you to survive a terrifying moment in history. (These essays came out of a talk that I gave at the Willamette Writers Conference and elsewhere. And their title is borrowed from the 1977 album of the same name by Curtis Mayfield, which is a piece of music that has given me so much strength and inspiration over the years.)
Stories of Darkness and Escapism
When I wrote “Don’t Press Charges And I Won’t Sue,” I was going to the darkest possible place I could go in a story, and putting my protagonist through the most dehumanizing treatment I could imagine. I needed to face up to the absolute worst that could happen, so I felt like I understood it a little better. I also needed to write about someone facing up to the most nightmarish scenario and still emerging in one piece, surviving, even though it’s a dark ending.
Writing a horrifying story on your own terms means that you can show how someone can survive, or even triumph. And meanwhile, you can cast a light on the injustice of oppressive systems. You can also choose the frame and eliminate some of the ambiguity in some situations, to make things more stark and more clear, or to make juxtapositions that illuminate how the problem started, and how it’ll be in the future.
When you’re telling the story, you get to draw all the lines….
…Thus he was receptive on the day in early 1990 when one of his most productive if headstrong programmers, a strapping young metalhead named John Romero, suggested that Softdisk start a new MS-DOS disk magazine, dedicated solely to games — the one place where, what with Apogee’s success being still in its early stages, shareware had not yet clearly cut into Softdisk’s business model. After some back-and-forth, the two agreed to a bi-monthly publication known as Gamer’s Edge, featuring at least one — preferably two — original games in each issue. To make it happen, Romero would be allowed to gather together a few others who were willing to work a staggering number of hours cranking out games at an insane pace with no resources beyond themselves for very little money at all. Who could possibly refuse an offer like that?
(9) TODAY IN HISTORY.
May 15, 1955 — X Minus One’s “Universe” first aired. It’s based off Heinlein’s Universe which was first published in Astounding Science Fiction’s May 1941 issue, and George Lefferts wrote the script. The cast includes Donald P. Buka, Peter Kapell, Bill Griffis, Abby Lewis, Edgar Stehli, Jason Seymour and Ian Martin. Untold generations of people traveling in a giant’s spaceship have lost track of who they are and what they set out to do. They think that their ship is the Universe. You can listen to it here.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
Born May 15, 1856 – L. Frank Baum. His Wizard of Oz has been translated into 50 languages, selling 3 million copies by the time it entered the public domain in 1956, applauded by the Library of Congress in 2000; 13 more Ozbooks, 28 others, 83 shorter stories, 200 poems, at least 42 scripts, under his own and half a dozen pen names. While living in the Dakota Territory, he was Secretary of the Aberdeen Woman’s Suffrage Club, and hosted Susan B. Anthony (Aberdeen is now a city in the State of South Dakota). He knew French, German, Italian. He said at the start that Wizardaspired to fantasy “in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heart-aches and nightmares are left out,” at which he succeeded. Last words, to his wife, “Now we can cross the Shifting Sands.” (Died 1919) [JH]
Born May 15, 1848 – Viktor Vasnetsov. Co-founder of Russian folklorist and romantic-nationalist panting, key figure in Russian Revivalist movement. Designed churches, mosaics, a revenue stamp, the façade of the Tretyakov Gallery. Worked on stage designs and costumes for Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Snow Maiden. V’s fantasy and epics irritated radicals, who said he undermined realist principles. Here is a flying carpet. (Died 1926) [JH]
Born May 15, 1891 – Mikhail Bulgakov. Had he only written The Master and Margarita, that would have sufficed us; an elaborate strange masterpiece; Margarita, not the Master, allies herself with the Devil – maybe; I talk a little about it here; in fact not published until decades after his death, too dangerous. Mick Jagger said it inspired “Sympathy for the Devil”. Try this Website. See also Diaboliad, The Fatal Eggs, Heart of a Dog. Two rival museums in Moscow – in the same building; one in Kiev. (Died 1940) [JH]
Born May 15. 1906 – Ellen MacGregor. Librarian, cataloguer, researcher, editrix of the Illinois Women’s Press Ass’n monthly bulletin Pen Points; also worked in Florida and Hawaii. For children’s fantasy with accurate science she wrote Miss Pickerell Goes to Mars and Goes Undersea; Goes to the Arctic published after her death; then 13 more, 16 shorter stories, by Dora Pantell. Lavinia Pickerell, prim, angular, and devoted to her pet cow, is an inadvertent stowaway on a rocket to Mars in her first adventure, but she is unflappable. (Died 1954) [JH]
Born May 15, 1932 – Jack Cady. He won the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Bram Stoker Award, an impressive feat indeed. McDowell’s Ghost gives a fresh spin on the trope of seeing seeing a War Between The States ghost, and The Night We Buried Road Dog is another ghost story set in early Sixties Montana and is quite horrid. Underland Press printed all of his superb short fiction into two volumes, Phantoms: Collected Writings, Volume 1 and Fathoms: Collected Writings, Volume 2. (Died 2004.) (CE)
Born May 15, 1948 — Brian Eno, 72. Worth noting if only for A Multimedia Album Based on the Complete Text of Robert Sheckley’s In a Land of Clear Colors, though all of his albums have a vague SF feeling to them such as Music for Civic Recovery Centre, January 07003: Bell Studies for the Clock of The Long Now and Everything That Happens Will Happen Today which could the name of Culture mind ships. Huh. I wonder if his music will show up in the forthcoming Culture series? (CE)
Born May 15, 1955 — Nina Kiriki Hoffman, 55. Her book The Thread That Binds the Bones, won the Bram Stoker Award for first novel. In addition, her short story “Trophy Wives” won a Nebula Award for Best Short Story. Other novels include The Silent Strength of Stones (a sequel to Thread), A Fistful of Sky, and A Stir of Bones. All are excellent. Most of her work has a strong sense of regionalism being set In California or the Pacific Northwest. (CE)
Born May 15, 1955 – Takayuki Tatsumi. Professor at Keiô University, chair of K.U. SF Study Group; editor, essayist, interviewer, theoretician; 21st Nihon SF Taishô (Grand Prize) from Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of Japan. President, American Literature Society of Japan 2014-2017, Poe Society of Japan 2009- ; editorial boards of Paradoxa, Mark Twain Studies, Journal of Transnat’l American Studies. In English, for SF Chronicle, SF Eye, N.Y. Review of SF, SF Studies, the 65th and 72nd Worldcons’ Souvenir Books; The Liverpool Companion to World SF Film (2014); The Cambridge History of Postmodern Literature (2016). [JH]
Born May 15, 1974 – Ahmet Zappa. Brother of Dweezil, Moon Unit, and Diva; wrote song “Frogs with Dirty Little Lips” with his father Frank. Debut novel (and interiors), The Monstrous Memoirs of a Mighty McFearless; debut film, The Odd Life of Timothy Green; television, three-season host of Robotica; co-author with wife Shana Muldoon Zappa, Sage and the Journey to Wishworld and 14 more Star Darlings books. [JH]
In the beginning, nearly every superhero had a secret identity. It protected them from villainous revenge, and created a delicious dramatic tension while interacting with loved ones who had no inkling of their other life. But the strict secret identity is fast becoming an anachronism.
Most heroes of the Marvel Cinematic Universe operate in the open, while other caped cinema stars, like Supergirl, are perfectly willing to trust close allies with their name. In comics, the X-Men no longer hide who they are or where they live. Even Superman’s identity has been revealed to the entire world twice in the last decade.
And all of this is for the better, delivering not only greater dramatic possibilities, but also a healthier idea of heroism….
(13) FANTASTIC FOUR COMICS. Marvel’s tells fans that Fantastic Four: Antithesis is coming in August, the first full-length Fantastic Four story ever illustrated by industry legend Neal Adams.
Adams is joined by Eisner Award-winning writer Mark Waid (Daredevil, Captain America, Fantastic Four), who jam-packs this tale with a fan-favorite roster of Fantastic Four heroes and villains! Together, this celebrated creative team create a new nemesis for the Fantastic Four guaranteed to send shockwaves throughout all of fandom.
…Adams shares [Waid’s] enthusiasm about the project. “I have always had the sense of missing the chance to draw the Fantastic Four. It was a quiet sense, since I’ve had every opportunity to do my favorites. More, I felt Kirby and Buscema had done it all, hadn’t they…?” he begins. “When Marvel’s Tom Brevoort asked if I’d like to do the Fantastic Four, I knew I had to ask for Galactus and the Silver Surfer as well. I am humbled and thankful to Tom for the opportunity.”
Who or what is the Antithesis, and will the combined might of the Fantastic Four, the Silver Surfer, and Galactus himself be enough to defeat it?
With comic book stores closed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was an open question just what fans would do to get their fix. New figures released from digital service DC Universe suggest that the answer was, simply, “go online.”
(15) ON THE WILDSIDE. John Betancourt has launched a Kickstarter appeal to produce “Staying In Place”, an “anthology of stories to pass the time.” Various support levels also bring additional rewards in the form of reading material.
With so many people staying at home right now, we at Wildside Press and the Black Cat Mystery & Science Fiction Ebook Club are putting together a mammoth anthology of amazing stories for you to read and enjoy. The anthology will feature 20 novels and short stories by iconic authors such as John Gregory Betancourt, Paul di Filippo, John W. Campbell Jr., Robert E. Howard, G.D. Falksen, and many more to be announced. But we need your help to make this happen. We are coming to Kickstarter to fund the anthology. In return for your support, you get the anthology itself, some of our fantastic ebooks, and even a subscription to the Black Cat which gives subscribers 7+ free ebooks every week, including new releases of all of the great Wildside Press magazines (Weirdbook, Black Cat Mystery Magazine, Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, and even the upcoming revival of Startling Stories, the famous pulp magazine).
Every now and then, a Twitter act of creation reminds us that good things can still emerge from our hellish Internet stomping grounds. Such is the case with a viral thread from writer Alex Arrelia, in which Arrelia painstakingly—and hilariously—takes on J.R.R. Tolkien’s characters under the heading of “Men of Middle Earth as bad ex boyfriends who ruined your life.”
– really affectionate, but if you don’t text back he melts down – won’t let you buy non-organic produce – his best friend is your best friend now, you’re the third wheel on all your dates pic.twitter.com/tZ5jaHOOok
Most obviously, Sauron could have prevented the destruction of the One Ring–and thus the unraveling of his power–if he’d only done a little more to make sure that Mount Doom was protected from approach and infiltration. Indeed, it is precisely the fact that it is so unguarded–because Sauron couldn’t imagine that anyone would want to destroy the Ring rather than use it – that allows Frodo and Sam to sneak up on it. Sauron is defeated by his own inability to think outside of himself.
Showrunner Noelle Stevenson has always been a fan of science fiction and fantasy. As a kid, she loved it all: the epic space battles, the magic, the quests that seemed larger than life.
But there was a problem with her favorite childhood stories, like Star Wars and The Lord of The Rings series. “I never quite saw myself reflected in them” Stevenson says, “certainly not at the heart of the story.”
There weren’t a lot of women.
Of course, there’s interstellar rebel Princess Leia and Nazgûl-slaying Éowyn. But Stevenson wanted a female version of Luke Skywalker and a terror-inducing femme Lord Sauron.
So when she started writing stories of her own, she made sure kids like her felt seen, in more ways than one.
…When Netflix and DreamWorks wanted to reboot She-Ra: Princess of Power — an epic showdown between magical princesses and an evil alien invader — Stevenson was all in.
She kept much of the original show’s action and adventure — like the original, the rebooted show takes place on the planet Etheria, and one of the princesses who is trying to stop the evil Horde army from taking over is named Adora.
…Stevenson did make one small but important change to the show: Its name. The Netflix and DreamWorks version is She-Ra and the PRINCESSES of Power. All the princesses are important.
She also gathered an all-female writing staff to update this team of powerful women. In the original show, the princesses are white, skinny and presumably straight. The new rebellion includes women of color. They’re women in all different shapes and sizes. And there are women who love other women.
Princess Weekes is an assistant editor at The Mary Sue, a website that covers the intersection of women and fandom. She’s been writing about the She-Ra reboot since the beginning.
Weekes says that because the team behind She-Ra is made up of LGBTQ people, the stories on the show give genuine representation of queer life for kids.
“You allow queerness for young kids to be just normalized in general,” Weekes says. “What I think Noelle Stevenson and the entire She-Ra team has done is create a society and place where characters can exist, but their biggest problem isn’t that they’re gay.”
Even Queen Elsa’s magic is no match for the coronavirus pandemic.
Disney Theatrical Productions said Thursday that its stage adaptation of “Frozen” will not reopen on Broadway once the pandemic eases, making the musical the first to be felled by the current crisis.
“Frozen” had been the weakest of the three Disney musicals that had been running on Broadway — the others were “The Lion King” and “Aladdin” — and the company made it clear that it does not believe audiences will return in substantial enough numbers to sustain all of those shows.
“This difficult decision was made for several reasons but primarily because we believe that three Disney productions will be one too many titles to run successfully in Broadway’s new landscape,” Thomas Schumacher, the president of Disney Theatrical Productions, said in a letter to his staff….
On Saturday, the US Air Force is expected to launch its secret space plane, X-37B, for a long-duration mission in low Earth orbit. The robotic orbiter looks like a smaller version of the space shuttle and has spent nearly eight of the past 10 years in space conducting classified experiments for the military. Almost nothing is known about what X-37B does up there, but ahead of its sixth launch the Air Force gave some rare details about its cargo.
…[The] real star of the show is a small solar panel developed by the physicists at the Naval Research Lab that will be used to conduct the first orbital experiment with space-based solar power.
“This is a major step forward,” says Paul Jaffe, an electronics engineer at the Naval Research Lab and lead researcher on the project. “This is the first time that any component geared towards a solar-powered satellite system has ever been tested in orbit.”
Space-based solar power is all about getting solar power to Earth no matter the weather or the time of day. The basic idea is to convert the sun’s energy into microwaves and beam it down. Unlike terrestrial solar panels, satellites in a sufficiently high orbit might only experience darkness for a few minutes per day. If this energy could be captured, it could provide an inexhaustible source of power no matter where you are on the planet.
It’s an idea that was cooked up by the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in the 1940s; since then, beamed power experiments have been successfully tested several times on Earth. But the experiment on X-37B will be the first time the core technologies behind microwave solar power will be tested in orbit.
Most of you probably know the world-famous Keukenhof, the most beautiful tulip garden in the world. Every year millions of tourists visit this garden. That’s a huge lot considering the garden is only open in spring! Every year, a hard-working crew makes sure the garden looks as good as ever, including this year!
This year is ‘special’. Keukenhof is closed, for the first time in 71 years. But that doesn’t mean there are no flowers. On the contrary; the flowers look incredible and get as much attention and care as always. All the passionate gardeners do their work as they’re used to. Because even without people, nature and the show of the garden goes on….
(22) UPDATE. Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer’s separation was reported in a recent Pixel Scroll. Gaiman has now made a blog entry about it, which includes an open letter to the world that the couple collaborated on: “Where I Am, What I’m Doing, How I’m Doing And How I Got Here”. Gaiman’s intro says in part —
…Once the world opens up and travel gets easier Amanda and Ash and I are looking forward to being together again in Woodstock. (Yes, I’ve seen the newsfeed headlines saying I’ve moved to the UK, and even that we’re divorcing. No, I haven’t moved the UK, and yes, Amanda and I are still very much together, even with half a world between us.)
Thank you to everyone who’s been kind and nice and helpful, while Amanda and my problems got rather more public than either of us is comfortable with. We love each other, and we love Ash, and we will sort ourselves out, in private, which is much the best place for things like this….
And the couple’s joint letter follows.
(23) NOT THAT SUBTLE. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] Kyle Mizokami, in “The Space Force Receives Its ‘Kobayashi Maru’ Space-Tracking System” in Popular Mechanics says it’s no coincidence that Space Force’s warning system is a Star Trek reference; the Space Force also has a Kessel Run, and Mizokami thinks it’s no coincidence that the acronym for the force’s Space Operations Center is SPOC.
The U.S. Space Force announced the development of a brand new software package designed to track and monitor objects in space. Dubbed “Kobayashi Maru,” the cloud-based program was designed to modernize the way the U.S. Air Force—and now the U.S. Space Force—interoperates in space but with its allies in the “Five Eyes” intelligence sharing alliance.
[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, John King Tarpinian, Cliff Ramshaw, Chip Hitchcock, Cat Eldridge, John Hertz, Mike Kennedy, JJ, David Goldfarb, Paul Di Filippo, Michael Toman, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Anna Nimmhaus.]
The pair talked love, hate, fanfiction, feelings, quarantine tips, lemon cake, human flesh, dogs, robot babies, and, of course, Sanctuary Moon….
What really happened on episode 231 of Sanctuary Moon? MB: It was clearly a dream. ART: You’re wrong. MB: So when the Mech Pilot was attacked by his evil duplicate who tried to hit him with a giant hammer and then disappeared, you think that was supposed to be real? ART: It was an artistic choice.
No, the first rule of fanfiction is not “we don’t talk about fanfiction.” Many writers happily discuss reading and writing fic—as evidenced by N.K. Jemisin, the three-time Hugo Award-winning novelist, describing how she still writes and reads it herself. The first rule of fanfiction is “you do not try and get the original creator to read your fanfiction.” How quickly we forget our Internet history.
… In explaining how these things are, Jemisin is not discouraging fans from making their own fanworks centered around her creations. She just cannot be personally involved, and it’s a serious breach of fandom etiquette to ask.
(4) BRUCE PELZ WOULD HAVE LOVED THIS. Bob Byrne is passing the time with this inventive tribute to Rex Stout’s famous sleuth: “Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: 2020 Stay at Home – Days 5, 6, and 7”. Which means seeing everything from Archie Goodwin’s viewpoint. For example —
DAY SIX – 2020 Stay at Home (SaH)
It was a pleasant spring morning, so I took my delayed walk today. It was good to stretch the legs and breathe the freshest air I’ve inhaled since moving here many years ago. I was out for two hours, enjoying open space – and the absence of Nero Wolfe. I saw other people walking and jogging, mostly keeping the required distance. It’s going to take some time for me to get used to the lack of noise. The buzz of conversation and the traffic ruckus just aren’t there. It’s not bad – just different.
I wasn’t in the office when Wolfe got down from the plant rooms at 11, but he didn’t seem to mind. He was at his desk, reading a thick book about Huey P. Long. He acknowledged my arrival and resumed reading. That was fine with me. I let him know I would be in the basement for a while and departed.
We keep a small file cabinet down there, which contains files related to unsolved cases. I’ve never written one up, but yes, there were occasions when the great Nero Wolfe didn’t get the bad guy. Or at least, couldn’t prove the issue. I’ll admit, his batting average was much better than Ty Cobb’s, but still, it did happen. And it rankled me at least as much as it did him. I’m the one who gathers the clues. I can’t help thinking, on some of them, that if I’d gotten one more piece of something, it might have made all the difference….
(Heading explained: It was from Bruce Pelz I first heard of Nero Wolfe.)
In the pandemic economy, face masks are like bars of gold. Hoarders are hoarding them. Governors are bartering for them. Hospital workers desperately need them. New Yorkers, ordered by Governor Cuomo last week to cover their faces in public, are repurposing bandannas and boxer shorts. In Rosie the Riveter fashion, Americans with crafting skills—among them quilters, Broadway seamstresses, sportswear manufacturers, origami artists, and grandmothers—have sprung into action. But one group has special mask-making powers: cosplayers, the superfans who specialize in making and wearing costumes. Never has the ability to whip up a Spider-Man mask or a Stormtrooper helmet been so useful.
“Cosplayers have big hearts,” Monica Paprocki, a thirty-five-year-old accountant in Chicago, said. Paprocki, who runs the fandom site Geeks A Gogo, started cosplaying in 2014 and taught herself how to sew by watching YouTube videos. She dressed as Princess Jasmine at Wizard World Chicago in 2019, the year after her Phoenix Monster costume, from the board game Rising Sun, won the Golden Needle Award at a gaming convention in Indianapolis. “It had articulated wings that I controlled with a remote control,” she said. This June, she was going to dress as Buzz Lightyear at the Origins Game Fair, in Ohio, but it had been postponed until October. When she saw a Facebook group requesting homemade medical supplies, she recruited fellow-cosplayers. “Before everything closed down, I had a stash of cotton fabric and materials here in my house,” she said. “I work my regular nine-to-five job in accounting. Right after that, I start sewing.”
(6) BESTSELLERS TALK AMONG THEMSELVES. Via Shelf Awareness comes word that Stephen King and John Grisham will hold a free online conversation discussing their new books on Wednesday, April 29 at 7:00 PM Eastern.
“In lieu of admission, the authors hope attendees will consider donating to the Bookseller Industry Charitable Foundation. You can register at grishamking.eventbrite.com or watch on Stephen King’s YouTube channel. Questions for the authors can go use #AskKingandGrisham
…A whimsical experiment in bartering kickstarted that evolution in 2010: A few years after the viral “one red paperclip” experiment—a Craigslister traded a single red paperclip for a series of increasingly valuable items until he managed to trade up for a house—a Magic player named Jonathan Medina embarked on a similar quest. Medina would trade from one random $4 pack of booster cards and keep trading up until he acquired one of the game’s legendary Power Nine cards— phenomenally rare cards widely considered very, very good. A pavement-pounding card trader, Medina blogged his experience in a widely read series of articles called “Pack to Power.” He would spend no money and, using just his wits, research, and networking skills, maneuver his $4 pack of cards into Magic wealth.
After opening his pack, Medina, in his words, began “hitting the streets to flip my cardboard.” By the time he’d traded with fellow players at gaming conventions and stores a total of 98 times, he had assembled an impressive binder stacked with valuable cards. It was at Gen Con, on a Saturday four months later, when Medina, groggy from playing Magic until five in the morning the previous night, handed over his binder in exchange for the $359.99 Mox Pearl card—a Power Nine.
“At the time, people were still trading based on nonmonetary metrics,” Medina says. “So when people read the small stories of the trades and looked at the math, they realized that they could be getting more out of their cards. This collective rise in awareness led to an interest in the financial side of the game.
(8) TODAY IN HISTORY.
April 24, 1955 — The X Minus One radio program aired on NBC for the first time. Written by Ray Bradbury, “And The Moon Be Still As Bright” is the tale of Mars expedition which finds the Martians extinct due to chickenpox brought to them by previous expeditions. The crew save one decide to destroy all Martian artefacts. Ernest Kinoy wrote the script from the story by Bradbury, and the cast included John Larkin and Nelson Olmstead. The show would run from now until January 8, 1958 with many of coming from well-known SF authors including Anderson, Pohl, Asimov, Blish, Leiber, Heinlein and Simak to name just a few. You can hear this episode here.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born April 24, 1930 — Richard Donner, 90. He’s credited in directing Superman which Is considered by many to be the first modern superhero film. H’h. Well I’m instead going to celebrate him for Scrooged, The Goonies and Ladyhawke. Not to mention the horror he did — Tales from the Crypt presents Demon Knight and Bordello of Blood. Oh, and the first X-Men film which was superb.
Born April 24, 1936 — Jill Ireland. For her short life, she chalked up in an amazing number of genre show roles. She was on Star Trek romancing Spock as Leila Kalomi In “This Side of Paradise” episode. She had five appearances on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. as well as being on Night Gallery, My Favorite Martian, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Voodoo Factor and the SF film The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything based on the 1962 novel of the same name by John D. MacDonald. (Died 1990.)
Born April 24, 1946 — Donald D’Ammassa, 74. Considered to be one of the best and fairest long-form reviewers ever. His Encyclopedia of Science Fiction covered some five hundred writers and as can two newer volumes, Encyclopedia of Fantasy and Horror Fiction and Encyclopedia of Adventure Fiction are equally exhaustive. I can’t comment on his fiction as I’ve only ever encountered him as a reviewer.
Born April 24, 1947 — Michael Butterworth, 73. Author of, with Michael Moorcock naturally, two Time of the Hawklords novels, Time of the Hawklords and Queens of Deliria. He also wrote a number of Space 1999 Year 2 novels, too numerous to list here. He also edited Corridor magazine from 1971 to 1974. He also wrote a number of short fiction pieces including one whose title amuses me for reasons I’m not sure, “Circularisation of Condensed Conventional Straight-Line Word-Image Structures“.
Born April 24, 1950 — Michael Patrick Hearn, 70. Academic who has some of the best annotated works I’ve had the pleasure to encounter. I wholeheartedly recommend both The Annotated Wizard of Oz and The Annotated Christmas Carol, not to overlook Victorian Fairy Tales which is simply the best collection of those tales.
Born April 24, 1953 — Gregory Luce, 67. Editor and publisher of both the Science Fiction Gems and the Horror Gems anthology series, plus such other anthologies as Citadel of the Star Lords / Voyage to Eternity and Old Spacemen Never Die! / Return to Earth. For a delightful look at him and these works, go here. Warning: really cute canine involved!
Born April 24, 1955 — Wendy S. Delmater, 65. She was nominated at Sasquan for a Best Semiprozine Hugo for editing the exemplary Abyss & Apex webzine. It’s particularly strong in the areas of speculative poetry and small press genre reviews. She herself has written a lot of genre centered essays, plus a handful of genre stories and poems.
Born April 24, 1983 — Madeline Ashby, 37. California-born Canadian resident writer whose Company Town novel created an entire city in an oil rig. Interestingly In 2013, she was a finalist for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer but recused herself on the grounds that her pro career started with her ‘09 publication of a short story in Nature, so her eligibility period had expired in ‘11. And her Machine Dynasties series is simply brilliant, and resonates with the later Murderbot series.
It’s 30 years ago to the day that the Hubble telescope was launched – and to celebrate its birthday, the veteran observatory has produced another astonishing image of the cosmos.
This one is of a star-forming region close to our Milky Way Galaxy, about 163,000 light-years from Earth.
The larger object is the nebula NGC 2014; its companion is called NGC 2020.
But astronomers have nicknamed the scene the “Cosmic Reef” because it resembles an undersea world.
Experts created this visualisation showing the Giant Red Nebula and its smaller blue neighbour, which lie in a satellite-galaxy of the Milky Way.
(12) IN ONE SITTING. “The chairs of Blake’s 7” is a vast collage of furniture and show highlights assembled by the author of the Watching Blake’s 7 blog:
…So, here is a compilation all the identifiable seating seen in Blake’s 7. In addition, I have thrown in a handful of tables, desks, lamps and other things that showcase how bloomin’ stylish Blake’s 7 was, and how the BBC props store contained a wealth of magnificent design artefacts.
First on the list —
Folding chair Fred Scott, for Hille International 1960’s Seen in ‘Animals’
Let’s start with one of the most beautiful moments in Blake’s 7, and a reminder of the sheer effort to get the series broadcast on time and on budget. Sure, Avon slips at the end of this shot, and there’s no time for a retake, but let’s not forget the attitude in which he knocks the chair over. I’m delighted to report that Fred Scott designed something robust enough to withstand the dirtiest ‘Dirty Harry’ kicking seen on screen up to that point. Chair vandalism, or quality control? You decide.
A well-meaning cleaner who took the opportunity to give a locked-down library a thorough clean re-shelved all of its books – in size order.
Staff at Newmarket Library, Suffolk, discovered the sloping tomes after the building underwent a deep clean.
James Powell, of Suffolk Libraries, said staff “saw the funny side” but it would take a “bit of time” to correct.
“It looks like libraries will be closed for a while so we’ll have plenty of time to sort the books out”, he said.
“The cleaner is lovely and does a great job in the library. It was an honest mistake and just one of those things so we would never want her to feel bad about it,” he added.
(14) RIGHTFUL PREY. Let Atlas Obscura show you the elusive “Fremont Troll”.
AN 18-FT. tall troll made of cement clutches an old VW car underneath an overpass in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood. The car is an actual Volkswagen Beetle encased in concrete, which used to be red and bear a California license plate.
The Troll was constructed in 1990 after winning a Fremont Arts Council competition for designs to improve the freeway underpass, which then was a dumping ground….
… On Saturday, the carcass of a 40-foot grey whale washed up on the shore of the Sand Lake Recreation Area north of Pacific City. For longtime Oregonians, news of a dead whale appearing on a local beach should ring a few alarm bells…
… In case you don’t know the story, in November 1970, a sperm whale of roughly the same size washed up on the beach in Florence, Ore. Local officials considered several methods of disposing the body, like dragging it out to sea. Ultimately, they went with the most exciting option available—blowin’ it up real good.
It was a bit of a disaster. The dynamite blew chunks of whale flesh 800 feet in the air, raining viscera down on bystanders and destroying a car in the adjacent parking lot.
Which gives everyone on the internet an excuse to repost one of the most viral videos of all time:
(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “No Maps For These Territories: A William Gibson Docufilm” on YouTube is a 2000 documentary, directed by Mark Neale, of conversations held with Gibson during his book tour for All Tomorrow’s Parties. It includes interviews with Bruce Sterling and Jack Womack and Gibson remembering that when he read “Burning Chrome,” one of the first cyberpunk stories, at Denvention II in 1981, he had an audience of four.
[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, John King Tarpinian, N., Andrew Porter, Chip Hitchcock, Cat Eldridge, JJ, Mike Kennedy, and Michael Toman for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Xtifr.]
(2) RESEARCHERS WANT MORE INTERVIEWS WITH TOLKIEN FANS. Robin
Reid is asking for help to spread the word:
The link below leads to my Digital Tolkien class discussion about the Marquette Tolkien Oral History Project created and curated by Bill Fliss. This project is incredible effort to create an online accessible archive of interviews with Tolkien fans that consists of podcasts and transcriptions of the interviews for fan and academic meta. You can read all about the process at the link, but I’m asking for your help circulating the project information in fan spaces to generate more interviews. My sense is that Tumblr would be a great space to advertise it, along with some others, but I’m not in the least literate or comfortable in Tumblr (I tried it. I failed it). But if you all were willing to spread the information, it would be great!
(3) BEFORE THE TUCKER HOTEL. Now on the First Fandom Experience blog: “A Visit To Science Fiction House” (1939-40), from the papers of Donald A. Wollheim.
…The notion of a “Science Fiction House” emerged in New York fandom in the late 1930s and became real with the establishment of a residence in Brooklyn known as Futurian House. The story of that fabled abode is told in detail in the October 1939 and January 1940 issues of the Jim Avery’s M.S.A. Bulletin, the club organ of the Maine Scientifiction Association.
But Wollheim had already formed a vision of an idyllic communal living space for fans. This fictional history, sadly incomplete, is dated December 3 1937. The post contains scans of his original three-page document. Enjoy!
(4) ON THE ROAD AGAIN. [Item by Olav Rokne.] NME reports that Anna Taylor-Joy has auditioned (via skype due to
Coronavirus) for a role in the Mad Max spin off Furiosa. The movie,
which is set to film in 2021 is one of the productions that seems to have
recently escaped development hell, as studios are gearing up for accelerated
production schedules post-Coronavirus. “‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ spin-off ‘Furiosa’ reportedly in
production”.
Director George Miller is ready to return to the iconic post-apocalyptic world after the green light was given for shooting to take place in Australia this autumn, according to Geeks WorldWide.
(5) HALEGUA OBIT. Veteran
pulp collector Mark Halegua died March 18 at the age 66. Murania Press’ Ed Hulse has an obituary for Mark
on his blog: “Mark Halegua (1953-2020), R.I.P.”
One of the highlights —
At the 1997 Pulpcon in Bowling Green, Ohio, I recognized Mark from the comic-book conventions and introduced myself. During our first brief conversation I learned he was a fan and collector of the “Thrilling Group” pulps edited by Leo Margulies and published by Ned Pines. He was compiling complete sets of The Phantom Detective, Black Book Detective (with his favorite character, the Black Bat), and Captain Future, among others. He liked hero pulps in general and also had a fondness for science fiction.
(6) TODAY IN HISTORY.
March 27, 1957 — X Minus One’s “A Pail of Air” aired. . A family are together in their nest. Everything is calm for the moment, but at any moment the mother could wake and start to ramble on about things that don’t exist anymore. Things such as the sun and grass. Or are things as they believe they are? Written by Fritz Leiber for Galaxy in December 1952, the radio script was by Pamela Fitzmaurice, with the cast being Ronald Liss and Eleanor Phelps. Daniel Sutter was the director. You can download it here.
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born March 27, 1892 — Thorne Smith. A writer of humorous supernatural fantasy. He is best remembered for the two Topper novels — a comic fantasy fiction mix of plentiful drink, many ghosts and sex. Not necessarily in that order. The original editions of the Topper novels complete with their erotic illustrations are available from the usual digital sources. (Died 1934.)
Born March 27, 1901 — Carl Barks. Cartoonist, writer, and illustrator. He is best known for his work in Disney comic books, as the writer and artist of the first Donald Duck stories and as the creator of Scrooge McDuck. He wrote The Fine Art of Walt Disney’s Donald Duck and Walt Disney’s Uncle Scrooge McDuck. He was one of the three inaugural inductees of the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame. (Died 2000.)
Born March 27, 1942 — Michael York, 78. I remember him in the Babylon 5 “A Late Delivery from Avalon” episode as a man who believed himself to be King Arthur returned. Very chilling. I also enjoyed him as D’Artagnan in the Musketeers films and remember him as Logan 5 in Logan’s Run. So what is on his genre list that really impresses you?
Born March 27, 1949 — John Hertz, 71. Winner of the Big Heart Award at the 2003 Torcon. He’s quite active in the fanzine world publishing the Vanamonde fanzine. Four collections of his fanwriting have been published, West of the Moon, Dancing and Joking,On My Sleeve, and Neither Complete nor Conclusive. He‘s been nominated for the Hugo for Best Fan Writer three times.
Born March 27, 1952 — Dana Stabenow, 68. Though better known for her superb Kate Shugak detective series, she does have genre work to her credit in the excellent Star Svensdotter space series. The latter is available at the usual digital suspects.
Born March 27, 1962 — Kevin J. Anderson, 58. Ok, I’ll admit that I love first two Dune books and have only read the first four of them, so I’m puzzled what the market is for eighteen novels and counting that he and his co-writer have written that have expanded that universe. I mean he’s really, really prolific — he even co-wrote Clockwork Angels with Neil Peart, a novelization of Rush’s 20th studio album of the same name!
Born March 27, 1971 — Nathan Fillion, 49. Certainly best known for being Captain Malcolm “Mal” Reynolds in Firefly verse. An interesting case of just how much of a character comes from the actor. In his case, I’d say most of it. He voiced Green Lantern/Hal Jordan in Justice League: Doom, Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox and Justice League: Throne of Atlantis, The Death of Superman and Reign of the Supermen. Oh, and he appeared in a recurring role in Buffy the Vampire Slayer as Caleb.
Happy to see my birthday (yesterday) and best-known science fiction character (Phil D'Amato) featured in Mike Glyer's notorious File 770 (scroll a little down) https://t.co/kpKGfTM6gd
(10) A HIGHER TECH PRACTICAL JOKE. [Item by Mike
Kennedy.] Be sure to follow the link to the Facebook post. It will take you to the page
where the Chain Chomp is being sold. Anchor one to the floor just inside the
bathroom door after everyone else has gone to bed…
(11) CLARION’S
ONLINE OFFERINGS. Clarion West is offering a
series of free online workshops.
Our amazing community of alumni, instructors, and friends has come together to create a robust and diverse offering. We have everything from one-hour presentations on specific areas of craft to week-long interactive workshops. There are also writing sprints to help you get words down on paper.
The workshop class list is here, and it can be found under Workshops -> Online Workshops.
Registration opens at 12pm PST Friday, March 27th. It is first-come, first-served and most workshops are capped at 20 participants.
(12) YOUR VIEWING PLEASURE. Vox kicks off its list
of “The 10 best movies you can now watch at home”
with Bacurau, a film which some fans are seeking an eligibility
extension for the 2021 Hugos:
Virtual theater listings for Bacurau are available on the Kino Lorber website. (You’ll receive a rental link, and the profits will help support the independent theater you select on the page.)
And here’s the Kino Lorber link — Bacurau
— with description of the film.
(13) EATING THE FANTASTIC TIME CAPSULE. Scott Edelman
invites listeners to time travel to 1995 as Geoffrey A. Landis and Yoji Kondo
ponder the age of the universe in a flashback episode of the Eating the
Fantastic podcast.
When I launched Science Fiction Age in 1992, one of the things I decided to do to deliver a different experience than other science fiction publications of the time was to have our science column be — not an essay by a single author — but a Science Forum. There was an occasional exception, but for the most part, from the very beginning, until the magazine shut down in 2000, I’d take science fiction writers who were also scientists out for a meal, we’d eat, we’d chat, and I’d record the results for publication.
A couple of years back, I realized that since I’d been eating in restaurants talking about the fantastic with science fiction writers, it made sense to repurpose what conversations survived for this podcast. And now, with the coronavirus making meals in restaurants either risky or impossible depending on your location, I thought it would be fun to share yet another time travel episode.
At the time of this conversation 25 years ago, Geoffrey A. Landis worked for Sverdrup Technology at the NASA Lewis Research Center and was named by Ad Astra magazine as a “cutting edge” theorist in the special issue on the “stars” of space. As an SF writer, Geoffrey Landis had won the Hugo Award for “A Walk in the Sun” and a Nebula Award for “Ripples in the Dirac Sea.” In the quarter century since, he’s won 2003 Hugo Award for best short story “Falling Onto Mars,” the 2011 Theodore Sturgeon Award for best short science fiction for “The Sultan of the Clouds,” and the 2014 Robert A. Heinlein Award.
A quarter of a century ago, Yoji Kondo, an astrophysicist, was the director of the geosynchronous satellite observatory IUE. The previous year, he co-organized and co-chaired the International Astronomical Union Symposium on “Examining the Big Bang” in The Hague. Under the pseudonym Eric Kotani, he had written five SF books, four with John Maddox Roberts and one with Roger MacBride Allen. Since that time, he published an additional novel with Roberts, as well as the Star Trek Voyager novel Death of A Neutron Star. In 2003, the Lunarians awarded him its Isaac Asimov Memorial Award. Sadly, Kondo passed away October 9, 2017.
We discussed how the idea of the universe even having a beginning is a relatively new concept, the way we choose between the many competing theories of its age, how the phrase “Big Bang” was a joke which stuck, the paradox of some stars appearing to be older than the universe itself, how a science fiction writer’s imagination might solve unanswered questions, whether knowing when the universe was born will help us calculate when it will end, and more.
The US military’s newest branch has launched its first satellite, despite a short delay in the countdown.
A rocket carrying a US Space Force communications satellite lifted off from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Thursday.
An inaccurate reading on hydraulic equipment stopped the clock for 80 minutes before the issue was resolved.
US President Donald Trump established the Space Force, which is focused on warfare in space, in December 2019.
Lieutenant General John F Thompson, Commander of the Space and Missiles Systems Centre in California, explained why the launch was proceeding despite the Covid-19 pandemic.
“It is a really, really important launch,” he said. “It’s the very first launch for the US Space Force.
“There are critical things, or mission essential things, that the US Department of Defence does every day. Even in the face of a global pandemic we must continue to perform mission essential tasks.
“[The satellite] supports the president and other world leaders with critical communications around the planet. This launch extends that communication into a timeframe beyond 2030.”
Elon Musk has promised to provide New York with hundreds of ventilators to help meet demand from the growing coronavirus outbreak.
The Tesla chief executive said the first batch of donated machines would be delivered later on Friday.
The ventilators were purchased from US government-approved manufacturers in China.
The mayor of New York City Bill de Blasio thanked Mr Musk on Twitter writing “We’re deeply grateful.”
“We need every ventilator we can get our hands on these next few weeks to save lives,” he tweeted.
The ventilators will be donated to hospitals in New York City and across New York state.
(16) FEAR ITSELF. Following up on a mention of him the
other day, “Max Brooks Has Been Called The ‘Zombie Laureate’” is a clip of his
appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in 2017.
‘Minecraft: The Island’ author Max Brooks explains the paranoid upbringing that led him to write about the undead.
[Thanks to Chip Hitchcock, John King Tarpinian, JJ, Cat Eldridge, Mike
Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, Michael Toman, N., Olav Rokne, Darrah Chavey, and
Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770
contributing editor of the day Patrick Morris Miller.]
Open a door of this super-fun advent calendar each day in December to discover a LEGO® Star Wars themed minifigure, starship, vehicle or other collectible. There’s even a foldout playmat featuring images from Jakku, Starkiller Base and deep space for epic Star Wars encounters. This holiday gift is perfect for rebels, Sith Lords, Scavengers and any other life form, and includes 7 minifigures and a BB-8 figure.
Vehicles include The Ghost, The Phantom, Stormtrooper transport, Rey’s speeder, Millennium Falcon, Snowspeeder, Kylo Ren’s Command Shuttle, Y-wing, TIE Striker, Hovertank, AT-ST, blaster cannon, snow blower and a sled with boosters!
During his time filming, Howard served as the damage control department by posting fun pictures from behind-the-scenes, offering his social media followers a small taste of what was going on. While these were successful in changing the conversation to the content of the film itself (rather than the drama surrounding it), some couldn’t help but realize Howard wasn’t simply finishing what Lord and Miller started. As filming went on for a while, it became apparent there was considerable retooling going on. Now, any issues about who will receive director credit are a thing of the past.
(3) CAT LOVER. From Unbound, Farah Mendlesohn on romance in Robert A. Heinlein — “Q&A with Julie Bozza”.
How important were the romance subplots in Heinlein’s novels and stories?
In Heinlein’s Juveniles romantic subplots are notable mostly by their absence. If there is a lesson in them for smart girls and boys it’s that romance is to be avoided at all cost when you are young because it will restrict your ambitions. Heinlein of course had made this mistake himself with what we’d now call a “starter marriage” in the early 1930s, but in those days it was the only legitimate way for a nice boy to get sex. There is a hint of it in Starman Jones, but it doesn’t work out, in Between Planets the hero doesn’t notice he is being romanced, and in The Star Beast, both female protagonists have it all worked out, but the hero hasn’t noticed yet.
By the 1960s his boys approach girls with awe: Johnny Rico in Starship Troopers likes having women in charge of the space ships because it’s a reminder what he’s fighting for, but there is not a whisper of sex, which is one reason I suggest in the book that we really do need to see this one as a juvenile.
But from Stranger in a Strange Land onwards, it’s not that romance is a subplot so much as that one of the things Heinlein clearly wants to think seriously about is what love is. Stranger is all about how you love someone, how you love without jealousy, and how true love should be expansive, encompassing and generous. Glory Road is this magnificent medieval Romance, intensely performative and playful and a bit silly, but by the end separating the game of romance from the real thing. And of course the Lazarus Long sequence, particularly the tellingly titled Time Enough for Love, and the last novel, To Sail Beyond the Sunset are all about what love means and what we will do for love. But the true masterpiece of Heinlein’s romances is The Door Into Summer which for all the sub plot about Dan’s relationship with Ricky, is truly about a man and his love for his cat.
Welcome boils and ghouls to this, your McEdifice Returns Halloween Special. I am your host Tyranny The Torturing Cat-O-Nine-Tails and this is my hideous assistance Straw ‘Wicker man’ Puppy.
We submit for your consideration the strange case of one Chiseled McEdifice. A lowly photocopy repairman or so he says. But what is this? His attempts to prevent paper supplies going missing has brought him to the SPOOKIEST part of any office building!
And there, amid the dust, and the spiders, and the rat-droppings and the incessant drip-drip-drip of leaking pipes, he discovered that all along, the paper was being stolen by…
A HUMANOID ALIEN INFLUENCED PHOTOCOPY MACHINE MAN TRYING TO COPY HIS OWN BUTT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
At Stan Lee’s Los Angeles Comic Con, the studio teased our first look at the upcoming show.
Stargate Origins will be a prequel to the original film and followup television franchise. This two-minute featurette shows off the first week of production, with a small tent city and offices for a young Catherine Langford (played by Ellie Gall).
(6) CHUCK TINGLE IN LA. A certain someone else was also at Stan Lee’s Los Angeles Comic Con, or as he calls it…
CITY OF DEVILS COMIC CON it was such a nice time i think we all proved love very well thank you to everyone https://t.co/btdtAfdTff
Since Chuck attended with his head in a bag, the mystery lingers on….
(7) PLAN AHEAD. Taos Toolbox (June 17-30) is a two-week Master Class in Science Fiction and Fantasy taught by Walter Jon Williams and Nancy Kress, with special guest George R.R. Martin, and special lecturers Carrie Vaughn and E.M. Tippets. Applications for the 2018 workshop will be accepted beginning December 1, 2017.
Taos Toolbox is a workshop designed to bring your science fiction and fantasy writing to the next level. If you’ve sold a few stories and then stalled out, or if you’ve been to Clarion or Odyssey and want to re-connect with the workshop community, this is the workshop for you!
Taos Toolbox has only been in existence for ten years, and already graduates have been nominated for eight Hugo awards.
How do you determine what kind of voice to use for different characters? Do you impersonate different actors that you’ve seen? I’m really curious as to the process. Can you explain it?
Usually I’ll apply one of my stock voices to a character based on their personality traits. For instance in the character breakdown of An Unconventional Mr. Peadlebody, you had described Gerald as a bit of a prudish dandy, and a total failure as a vampire. So I used a more nasal, reedy, affected tone to portray those characteristics. It’s a voice I typically use for grousers and malcontents. So with an added bit of cheekiness and fey pomposity, it seemed to suit Gerald well. As for the character of Gainsworthy, yes I did pay a calculated tribute to a certain actor/director and a notorious character he once played. To tell people why would spoil the mystery of the book, though! I’ve also taken inspiration from numerous old character actors from Hollywood’s Golden Era. Turner Classic Movies has been invaluable.
(9) ROYAL MANTICORAN NAVAL MANUVER. Fans of the Honorverse will be interested to know about SphinxCon 2018. I’m a little curious whether David Gerrold fits into the theme somehow, or is simply a good idea as a GoH people want to see,
This version specifically will get you at least $5,000. When this version of Caped Jawa was released in 1978, its cape was made of vinyl, before Kenner Company felt the cape looked too cheap and changed the vinyl to cloth. The vinyl caped Jawa is incredibly rare, very valuable, and worth a minimum of $5,000.
(11) SOLON OBIT.SF Site News reports the death of longtime Chicago fan Ben Solon.
Chicago Fan Ben Solon (b.c.1950) died on October 26. In addition to attending Chicago area conventions, Solon published the fanzine Nyarlathotep.
(12) LUPPI OBIT. Federico Luppi, an Argentine actor who gained fame in the dark fantasy films of Guillermo del Toro, died October 20 at the age of 83. The New York Times obituary adds:
Mr. Luppi’s career, which began in the mid-1960s, included dozens of film and television roles, often in Argentine productions. Slim and stately with a shock of white hair, he endowed his characters with a sense of gravity.
One of those characters was Jesus Gris, the protagonist of the Mexican horror film “Cronos” (1993), Mr. del Toro’s directorial debut. In that film, which also starred Ron Perlman, Gris, an antiques dealer, finds a clockwork device that turns him into a vampire.
Mr. Luppi played the monstrous Gris with touches of weakness — at one point in the film he sinks to a bathroom floor to lap up a spot of blood.
Mr. Luppi appeared in two more of Mr. del Toro’s films, both set in Franco’s Spain. He was a leftist sympathizer who ran a haunted orphanage in “The Devil’s Backbone” (2001), and the monarch of a fairy kingdom in “Pan’s Labyrinth” (2006), which won three Academy Awards in 2007.
After Mr. Luppi’s death was reported, Mr. del Toro, writing in Spanish on Twitter, called him “Our Olivier, our Day Lewis, our genius, my dear friend.”
(13) TODAY IN HISTORY
October 30, 1938 – The War of the Worlds radio play scared a lot of people.
(16) POTTERMANIA, The Washington Post’s Karla Adam says “London is going all butterbeer over 20th anniversary of Harry Potter”. Her survey of news about the 20th anniversary of the publication of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone includes a British Library exhibit and various fan activities that are taking place all over London.
Not that it takes much to motivate Potter enthusiasts. Last month, for instance, thousands of Muggles descended on Platform 9¾ at King’s Cross station to mark the day that Harry Potter’s son Albus left for Hogwarts. For those truly potty about Potter, there is the “Making of Harry Potter” studio tour, next to the film studios where all eight films were made, which in the lead-up to Halloween is hosting feasts in the “Great Hall” with pumpkins and cauldrons full of lollipops.
(17) SOFTWARE. The New York Times Magazine tackles the question, “Does Your Language Shape How You Think?” After taking an ax to Benjamin Lee Whorf, the author moves into ancillary matters…
SINCE THERE IS NO EVIDENCE that any language forbids its speakers to think anything, we must look in an entirely different direction to discover how our mother tongue really does shape our experience of the world. Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about differences between languages in a pithy maxim: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” This maxim offers us the key to unlocking the real force of the mother tongue: if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about.
Consider this example. Suppose I say to you in English that “I spent yesterday evening with a neighbor.” You may well wonder whether my companion was male or female, but I have the right to tell you politely that it’s none of your business. But if we were speaking French or German, I wouldn’t have the privilege to equivocate in this way, because I would be obliged by the grammar of language to choose between voisin or voisine; Nachbar or Nachbarin. These languages compel me to inform you about the sex of my companion whether or not I feel it is remotely your concern. This does not mean, of course, that English speakers are unable to understand the differences between evenings spent with male or female neighbors, but it does mean that they do not have to consider the sexes of neighbors, friends, teachers and a host of other persons each time they come up in a conversation, whereas speakers of some languages are obliged to do so.
Picardo is the Phantom of the Orbit in this terrifying episode of The Planetary Post. Enjoy a special guest visit from Dr. Konstantin Batygin, one of the members of the team which has theorized a big, ninth planet way out beyond Neptune.
Alas. We deserve more. True story: for a brief 24 hours, I was really hoping “Lethe” would be the perfect name for an episode where due to [TECHNOBABBLE], everybody mysteriously forgets Burnham’s mutiny, and she suddenly needs to live amongst a crew who thinks she never did anything wrong. (Sorry, y’all, I don’t watch teasers 😛 ) It could have been glorious. Straight talk: I would x100 rather see Burnham try to go to a book club meeting, then pull off another Daring Impossible Foolhardy Mission. She’s got the chops; what she doesn’t have is the writing.
(21) KEEPING THE WOW IN BOW WOW. Save space on your Hugo ballot for this editor.
(22) ALT MONEY. Is comics such a rich field? Vox Day’s new right-wing comics series, Alt*Hero, intended to “wage cultural war on the social justice-converged comic duopoly of Marvel and DC Comics,” finished among the most lucrative crowdfunding campaigns ever.
Alt*Hero features unconventional villains such as Captain Europa of the Global Justice Initiative and controversial heroes such as Michael Martel, a vigilante who drops off criminal undocumented immigrants at the local Immigration and Customs Enforcement office, and Rebel, an Southern girl whose superhero outfit incorporates the Confederate battle flag.
Vox Day looked over Kickstarter’s records of Comics – Most Funded campaigns and determined:
There have been 10,552 comics-related campaigns. The #21 most-funded Anatomy of Melancholy: The Best of A Softer World came in at $251,062 with 3,923 backers. We will probably pass that up when all is said and done later today since backers are apparently still emailing and adding a few things on, but we come in right behind them at $245,825 at present. Probably won’t be enough to get to the $260,942 required to catch #20, though.
So, it’s definitely the 22nd most-funded of the 10,553 comics-related crowdfunding campaigns, which is not bad. Also, if you look at the other 21, you can see that all of them were established comics prior to the kickstarter. So, we are also the #1 most-funded new comics series.
A Japanese noodle maker Nissin Foods is trying to reinvent the way we eat ramen by creating a noise cancelling fork that covers up slurping.
It’s the latest in string of bizarre cutlery inventions. Is it insanely clever or just insanity?
(24) SOUND ADVICE. And it’s also a good time of year to remind people about the availability of X Minus One radio episodes at the Internet Archive:
X Minus One aired on NBC from 24 April 55 until 9 January 58 for a total of 124 episodes with one pilot or audition story. There was a revival of the series in 1973 when radio was attempting to bring back radio drama and it lasted until 1975. The show occupied numerous time slots through out its run in the 50’s and thus was never able to generate a large following. X Minus One was an extension of Dimension X which aired on NBC from 1950-51. The first fifteen scripts used for X Minus One were scripts used in the airing of Dimension X; however, it soon found its own little niche. The stories for the show came from two of the most popular science fiction magazines at the time; Astounding and Galaxy. Adaptations of these stories were performed by Ernest Kinoy and George Lefferts. They even wrote a few original stories of their own. The writers of the magazine stories were not well known then but now are the giants of today. These stories came from the minds of Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Poul Anderson to name a few. This series has survived from its original airing in high quality to be enjoyed today.
(25) ASGARDIAN SNEAK PEEK. Two minutes from Thor: Ragnarok.
(26) PUMPKINS IN CHORUS. Here’s a Halloween light show sure to bring down the house.
[Thanks to JJ, Martin Morse Wooster, Cat Eldridge, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, and Carl Slaughter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Greg Hullender.]
aka “How Well I Remember the Days Before Puppies Were All the Rage” – James H. Burns
If you’re very new to File 770 this may be the first time you’ve seen Snapshots, the zine-within-a-zine.
In honor of the 150th edition, here are 35 developments of interest to fans.
(1) Even Kimball Kinnison’s swearing “By Klono’s brazen balls!” may be a leetle too strong in these refined times. What kind of cursing remains fashionable? Matthew Bowman tells all in “Frakking Goram Smegger! (Swearing in Fiction)” at Novel Ninja.
While swearing serves an important function in real life, at least for the person doing the swearing, it doesn’t have the same effect on other people. It winds up being a great stress relief for the speaker, but over time there’s a diminishing return in terms of effectiveness, leading to people using it more and more to get the same effect. To the people around the speaker, though, all they get is the “more and more.”
The use of swearing in fiction has the same problem. There are really only two uses, and the audience only experiences the second use: shock value. Shock too much, and there’s no value to it. On the face of it, you might want to avoid swearing.
Well, no. Not entirely.
(2) With the Anagrammer I can turn my own name into a colorful curse. Like, “Ye Chiller Mag!” Or, “Rimly Geek!”
Spotted at New York Toy Fair 2015: This talking George R.R. Martin doll from Factory Entertainment, which the Game of Thrones creator himself recorded dialogue for. One of the ten things he says is “When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die.” One of the things he doesn’t say, I assume, is “f*ck you.”
There’s not the slightest doubt if there was a Harlan Ellison doll it would.
(4) On May the Fourth many ballparks honor the little movie franchise that’s been around for four decades. At Fenway Park, Darth Vader showed up and inexplicably agreed to do an interview.
And not in our video/panel rooms. Find a bed or the floor of someone’s hotel room. At least a few hours. Please? Conventions are exhausting enough without trying to operate without sleep.
And it seems as time goes by fewer of the embedded anime gifs work for me – here’s hoping you have better luck.
As spotted by Quartz, a ‘Live Long and Prosper’ hand symbol emoji has been found in the test versions of both Apple’s OS X and iOS Mac and iPhone/iPad software, which should be released sometime later this year. Apple has yet to confirm that all the new emojis in its beta software will be in the upcoming official releases. Among them are the much-awaited multi-ethnic smileys and figures.
With Apple’s new emoji picker, you should be able to send the Live Long and Prosper salute in different skin shades once it hits devices. You can visit Emojipedia.org to see what all the versions look like.
The Vulcan Salute was introduced to the Unicode system last June, and like any other symbol available in the universal emoji consortium, it’s now just waiting for software-makers to build it into their operating systems and keyboards, which Apple certainly looks to be doing.
The project is aimed at celebrating the 50th anniversary of “Star Trek,” which aired for the first time on Sept. 8, 1966. Zachary Quinto, who portrayed the Spock character in last two “Star Trek” films, will narrate the documentary.
(8) It’s not that I’m breathlessly awaiting Sharknado 3, I just think we’re all thrilled to take a break from science fiction’s relentless parade of kerfuffles. So as a public service I am informing you that David Hasselhoff has been cast in the film despite a bum knee.
Needless to say, The Hoff has been quite busy, and in the midst of his crazy schedule Hasselhoff says he had to get “some knee work done.”
The injury even affected his role in “Sharkando 3,” the third installment in the hit Syfy franchise, co-starring Ian Ziering and Tara Reid. In the upcoming TV movie — called Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!” — Hasselhoff plays Gilbert Sheperd, the dad of Ziering’s character, Fin Shepard. You can expect to see a lot of Hasselhoff in the film; it’s not just a cameo, he says.
“I hobbled through them [my scenes],” said Hasselhoff. “You’ll see me hobbling through ‘Sharknado 3’ because I said, ‘My character now has a limp!’ I wrote it in — that I jumped on a grenade during Vietnam and saved the entire platoon except for one person. I thought that was a funny line to put in and they allowed me to put it in.”
The folks at Original Content London are hot to trot, thanks to their latest invention, the Trotify. For about $32 USD, the flat-packed laser-cut wooden contraption fits on the front brake mount of your bike and with a little assembly, a coconut, and a sense of humor, can create the sound of a trotting horse as you pedal. Able to amuse or confuse those with very poor eyesight, the Trotify is a great gift for those cycling nuts who have every accessory on the market or for those who are a little too short on cash to become real equestrians.
Warning – you can’t actually buy this from the vendor linked in the article, even though they have been trying to market the concept since 2012.
Though I seldom long for my native culture when abroad, when the need for a hit of Americana does arise (and I say this currently writing from Seoul, South Korea), I fill my iPod with old time radio. Many shows from America’s “Golden Age” of wireless broadcasting can fill this need, but one could do much worse than Dimension X, the early-1950s science-fiction program we featured earlier this month, or its late-1950s successor X Minus One, whose episodes you can also find at the Internet Archive. Both showcase American culture at its mid-20th-century finest: forward-looking, temperamentally bold, technologically adept, and saturated with earnestness but for the occasional surprisingly knowing irony or bleak edge of darkness. That last comes courtesy of these shows’ writing talent, a group which includes such canonical names as Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein.
There’s an old trick in psychology. If you’ve experienced trauma, do something new that has no relation to the context of said trauma. You generate new memories for your brain to chew on. Improv fit that pistol, and was life-saving. In writing, I abandoned the dead god of novels and moved to comic book scripts. I love comics, but had never attempted them because . . . if you think making money with novels is tough, it’s Shangri La compared to becoming a “professional” comic book writer. But I didn’t care about money, or a career. I had now stabilized my income to a degree where I felt comfortable easing off the gears of work and spending some time writing. I learned comic script format for fun. I found artists to work with, which was fun. And I failed all over the place as I learned the art, the business, and the challenge of working with artists. Some of this sucked bunnies, but I didn’t care. So long as I learned and got better, I enjoyed the challenge.
(14) Beware offering advice. Jim C. Hines offers breakdown of the topic in “The Advice Checklist”.
Are you more concerned with helping or with fixing the person so they’ll stop making you uncomfortable?
Hint: People talk about their problems for a range of reasons. To vent, to process their own feelings, to connect with others and know they’re not alone… If you genuinely want to help, great—but in many cases, giving advice isn’t the way to do that.
(15) Thanks to YouTube, people don’t have to be old enough to have seen commercials like “Cheerios, the ‘Terribly Adult Cereal’ w/Stan Freberg” – they can click and experience that bit of pop culture history immediately.
In the early hours of Wednesday morning, the age of robotic graffiti was born. KATSU, a well-known graffiti artist and vandal, used a hacked Phantom drone to paint a giant red scribble across Kendall Jenner’s face on one of New York City’s largest and most viewed billboards. By all accounts, it is the first time that a drone has been deployed for a major act of public vandalism.
(17) Pat Cadigan was scheduled to speak about cancer – instead, she has to fight it.
It took me a long time to be taken seriously as a writer, and to be seen as the writer I was trying to be––i.e., a hard science-fiction writer. A few years ago, Greg Benford turned to me in the course of a conversation and said, “Pat, you’re a hard science fiction writer…” I can’t remember the rest of the question, just Greg calling me a hard science fiction writer. I figure Greg would know the difference. So I got bonafides.
That’s what cyberpunk always was to me––hard science fiction, taken out of a wish-fulfilment setting where everything would be all right if we could just develop the right technology, and re-imagined in the real world, where things could go wrong and people could get hurt.
And so it goes. I should have been at USC talking about what was, what is, and maybe what’s coming, but things went wrong and I got cancer.
Actually, now that I’ve written it out, it’s kinda funny. I can see why our plans make God laugh. She’s got a wicked sense of humour. But then, I do, too.
More than 6,000 students at a Turkish university have signed a petition calling for a Jedi Temple on campus “to bring balance to the Force.”
The Change.org petition, which had more than 6,000 signatures Thursday, was created by students at Dokuz Eylul University amid controversy stemming from an announcement last month from Istanbul Technical University rector Mehmet Karaca that his school would be getting a “landmark mosque” after a petition calling for a mosque on campus received nearly 200,000 signatures.
The ITU announcement also led students at that school to start a petition to found a Buddhist temple on campus, a request with more than 20,000 signatures.
Every college archive has a mass of material awaiting sorting and cataloguing, much donated by former college members, and Keble is no exception. Leonard Rice-Oxley went up to Keble to study history in 1911, and became the college’s tutor in English in 1921. After graduating from Keble in 1915, Rice-Oxley had served as 2nd Lieutenant in the London Irish Rifles, before being promoted to Lieutenant, and posted to serve on the staff of No. 4 Officer Cadet Battalion in 1917. During this time, Rice-Oxley produced a booklet Oxford in arms: with an account of Keble College, intended for the use of officer cadets stationed at Keble. A copy of this booklet was contained in the material given to the college archives by Rice-Oxley, along with an album of photographs.
Not long after her arrival at Keble, the new Archivist & Records Manager (Eleanor Fleetham) was asked by the College Librarian (Yvonne Murphy) to organize an exhibition of material from the Archives to commemorate Keble’s contribution to the First World War. One of the items on display was Rice-Oxley’s photo album, which contained a photograph of “E” Company, No. 4 Officer Cadet Battalion, taken by an unknown photographer in the summer of 1917. A college undergraduate – Sebastian Bates (2014, Law) – noticed the photograph, and suggested that one of the people in the photograph was none other than C. S. Lewis.
(20) Michael Swanwick covered Samuel R. Delany’s retirement party, celebrating the end of his career at Temple University, in an aptly named post — Goodbye, Mr. Chip.
(21) It warms my heart to realize my antique File 770 webpage from the old Compuserve Ourworld days is still in the internet archives.
The Ballantines believed in science fiction as a literature of ideas, not gadget porn for ham-radio buffs, so when they opened their doors in 1952 they thought of Powers. His modernist sensibility, steeped in things seen at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, set him apart from the pulp-magazine style—astronauts rippling their pectorals at bug-eyed aliens while space babes cowered in fear—that had dominated the genre for decades. “One of the things that appealed to me about science fiction,” he says, in The Art of Richard Powers, “is that it was possible to do Surrealist paintings that had validity … in their own right, and not necessarily functioning as the cover of a book.”
And Mr. Pertwee – Sean, that is – certainly lived a life suitable to the son of a Time Lord. Mr. Pertwee recalled long stretches spent on Euro-billionaires and party-animals playground Ibiza, a “mad island…this weird eclectic bunch of people that ran away and lived in this sort of hedonistic paradise.” Many people know the name Elmyr de Hory as the master art forger of the 1960’s, and subject of the Orson Welles film F for Fake — Mr. Pertwee called him godfather. He experienced a youth surrounded by, in his words, “draft dodgers, murderers…actors.”
Pertwee stars as Alfred Pennyworth, a tough-as-nails ex-marine from east London who loyally serves the Wayne family. In the wake of their tragic deaths, he is fiercely protective of the young Bruce Wayne — the boy who will eventually become Batman
Sean is set to appear as a lead role, Alfred Pennyworth the unflappable butler, in the new Warner Bros. series of Gotham, which follows the story behind Commissioner James Gordon’s rise to prominence in Gotham City in the years before Batman’s arrival.
(25) If Disney had done cruise ships in the 1950s would they have added a Ben-Hur theme where kids could row like hell and ram a Roman warship? We’ll never know, but pretty soon young voyagers on the company’s passenger liners will get to head into hyperspace with the Millennium Falcon.
The Disney Dream will head into dry dock in October and emerge with two new interactive youth areas, one inspired by the interior of the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars, and the other based on the popular Disney Infinity video game.
As you can see from the concept art above, the Millennium Falcon is a pretty good recreation of Han Solo’s ship. Kids will be able to sit in the cockpit, participate in Star Wars-themed crafts and activities, watch episodes of Disney XD’s animated Star Wars Rebels on large screens, or play video games.
The Disney Dream is also bringing on board the popular Jedi Training Academy, in which young Padawans learn from a Jedi Master how to use a lightsaber, and then face Darth Vader in a final test.
(25) Jill Pantozzi on The Mary Sue draws attention to J.K. Rowling’s new tradition of apologizing for killing off her characters. Before it was Florean Fortescue. Now —
.@Brieuc26Rankin I thought I might apologise for one death per anniversary. Fred was the worst for me, so I started with him.
Watchmen is a classic comic book written by Alan Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons, published in 1986. It’s set in an alternate history where the existence of superheroes changed American politics, culture and everyday life. I’ve described it panel-by-panel for blind and low-vision readers, including the supplementary material at the end of each chapter.
To Alice’s professed surprise, Campbell bought one of the stories, “Birth of a Salesman.” A new science fiction writer was born, one who would, in the space of just a few years, make a tremendous impact on the genre (as two Hugos, three Nebulas, and a World Fantasy Award attest, to say nothing of the James Tiptree Jr. Award, which is given to works which expand or explore our understandings of gender).
Alice Sheldon never looked back. She also never let anyone know that James Tiptree Jr. wasn’t a man; all of her many contacts and correspondents in the SF field assumed that the courtly “Tip” who had had such a wide-ranging life and wrote such witty letters was an all-American male. (Who wouldn’t take phone calls or meet anyone — including his agent — in person and would never show up to accept any awards. What began as a joke became, without Alice’s really planning it, an elaborate deception worthy of… well, of the CIA, and a banana peel that countless readers and critics would embarrassingly slip on.)
One of the reasons I have any audience at all is that I blog about my insane burblings of social anxiety, and how hard it is for me to go to conventions. I’d say about one out of every five people who’ve come to see me read from Flex and sign books has that hesitant smile when they approach me, and I know that the only reason they crept out into such a whirlwind social situation is because I’ve lent them strength at some point by sharing my own tearful fears, and that they and I are intertwined with the same terrors.
They’re braver than I am.
I couldn’t come out to see me.
(30) Author Jon Scieszka interviews Norton Juster, author of The Phantom Tollbooth, about writing the classic children’s novel with longtime friend Jules Feiffer after a screening of the documentary The Phantom Tollbooth: Beyond Expectations.
(31) Writing to Robert E. Howard during the Depression, H. P. Lovecraft said he never spent more than $3 a week on food. What were H. P. Lovecraft’s economical favorites? The list includes —
Beans
“Incidentally—not many doors away, on the other side of Willoughby St., I found a restaurant which specialises in home-baked beans. It was closed on Sunday, but I shall try it some time soon. Beans, fifteen cents, with pork, twenty cents. With Frankfort sausages, twenty-five cents. Yes—here is a place which will repay investigation!” (to Mrs. F.C. Clark, 20 May 1925)
“…in New England we are very fond of baked yellow-eye beans…” (to J. Vernon Shea, 10 November 1931)
Why are you participating in the Cultivating Thought series?
My work with the United Nations High Commission on Refugees really opened my eyes to the fragility of the world. I thought it might be a good thing to open other eyes.
Tell us about your two-minute read.
I wrote about the Syrian refugee camps in Jordan; the state of people who have left everything, and gone through hell to escape an intolerable situation. What they went through, what they survived.
(32) Ray Bradbury, one of the greatest sci-fi writers in history, talks with Merv about the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”, Steven Spielberg, his mission as a writer, the future of mankind, and ends by reading from his poem “If Only We Had Taller Been” from his collection “When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed.”
(33) For those who can’t get enough of Benedict Cumberbatch, news services have released video of his reading of a poem by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy at the memorial service for Richard III.
6) Pub sign Uncle Tom’s Cabin, one of Pratchett’s former watering holes in Wincanton, Somerset, was decorated with recently decorated with a tribute in the form of a Discworldified pub sign.
This pub sign, amended to feature the noted Ankh-Morpork pub, The Mended Drum, was commissioned before Pratchett’s death, and hung as a memorial shortly afterwards.
It was painted by illustrator Richard Kingston, who, along with Pratchett, was a regular patron of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Wincanton is already slightly unusual in that it was twinned in 2002 with a fictional Discworld city, Ankh Morpork.
In 2009, the developer George Wimpey named two streets in its new housing development after Ankh-Morpork’s, including Peach Pie Street and Treacle Mine Road.
(35) And finally, this rare reveal of how they do things in Tinseltown.
some just don't understand how hard it is, working with back-end stuff, getting shit to work right pic.twitter.com/zRoEEd3OVP
