Jon Lomberg is one of the foremost artists inspired by astronomy. He did Emmy Award-winning work as Chief Artist for Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series. And he was Design Director of NASA’s Voyager Interstellar Record, the self-portrait of humanity now on its way to the stars.
The word cosmopolitan literally means a citizen of the Cosmos. Our generation is emerging into the Milky Way, and becoming a planetary species. Jon Lomberg shows some ways that an artist can respond to this amazing fact, combining physics and artistry to create the “cosmic perspective” advocated by Lomberg’s friend and long-time collaborator, Carl Sagan. He will feature a description of his unique Galaxy Garden.
The Galaxy Garden models the Milky Way to scale with a garden of living things. By now Lomberg’s plantings have reached full size.
A fountain in the middle of the garden marks the “gravity well” with a bimodal jet so water is going both directions. Out on the galactic arm corresponding to the position of our solar system, the place where the Sun would be is marked by a tiny jewel on a leaf. Driving home the scale involved, Lomberg says all the stars we can see with the naked eye are either on that same leaf or an adjoining leaf!
At Lomberg’s second appearance, the Galaxy Garden Workshop on December 7, he will explain how the garden is used to encourage science education, and demonstrate hands-on teaching activities that can be done indoors or outdoors using large-scale, explorable model galaxies.
This event, while open to anyone, is particularly designed to appeal to teachers in physical sciences grades 4-12, creators of informal science education activities, artists interested in novel art/science collaborations, gardening clubs and astronomy clubs.
The day’s activities will include building a model galaxy with fishing line grid, paper plates, spattered paint, toothpicks, and Play-Dough.
5. Don’t worry about selling out. Worry about buying in.
I was [happy that I didn’t win an Oscar for Pan’s Labyrinth]. Pan’s Labyrinth was becoming such a landmark for me, and I wanted a little bit of freedom. I said, ‘If it wins, it’s going to become the thing I have to keep trying to do again.’ And I really was relieved. It’s a perfect metaphor. At the end of the night, I said to my wife, ‘My shoes are too tight. My feet hurt.’ And the great relief of that night was removing my shoes and walking in my socks to the car. So in a way, winning can become a shoe that’s too tight and you may not want it.
Doris Lessing passed away at home November 17. She was 94. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, she was also a past Worldcon guest of honor, at Brighton in 1987.
Lessing authored more than 50 novels. Beginning with Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971), she began to write what she called “inner-space fiction.” Then, in the novel series Canopus in Argos: Archives (vol. 1–5, 1979–1984) Lessing wrote about the post-atomic war development of the human species.
“Lessing’s central sf achievement, the Canopus in Argos: Archives sequence places the crises of human self-striving – and the crises facing the planet of our birth – into a metaphysically conceived interstellar frame,” John Clute wrote in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia. “Everywhere the drive – sometimes thwarted – is towards literal union with universal principles (or God). The series exudes, at times, a piety not normally associated with sf; but at others the perspectives it opens are illuminating. In Lessing’s hands, the instruments of sf become parables: lessons in finding paths that may lead us out of the sour muddle of unenlightened worlds.”
When Lessing was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature, the citation called her “that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny.”
Not that she was impressed. She told the reporters who brought her the news, “Oh Christ, I couldn’t care less.” (Which may have been the very same thing Chesley Bonestell said about a Special Hugo Award he was given in 1974, before relegating it to his bathroom to sit on the lid of the toilet tank.)
Nor did that mean the literary world had finally relaxed its prejudices against the SF genre. Critic Harold Bloom belittled her selection for the Nobel Prize to a wire service reporter: “Although Ms. Lessing at the beginning of her writing career had a few admirable qualities, I find her work for the past 15 years quite unreadable … fourth-rate science fiction.”
In 1999 the Queen appointed Lessing a Companion of Honour, an exclusive order for those who have done “conspicuous national service.”She’d previously turned down the offer of becoming a Dame of the British Empire “because there is no British Empire.” Being a Companion of Honour, she explained, means “you’re not called anything – and it’s not demanding. I like that.” Being a Dame was “a bit pantomime.”
The text of her Conspiracy GoH speech is available in Worldcon Guest of Honor Speeches, edited by Resnick and Siclari. She also wrote a sidebar for the 1987 Worldcon souvenir book about how watching a TV documentary about nudism led her to think about the original creation of clothing, culture – and science fiction stories. It closed with an example of one of these ur-stories.
The storyteller said, “People, listen. One night the bravest young man of the tribe summoned Heru the owl and said, ‘Take me up on your back and fly with me to that floating ghost up there, just above the trees – quick, before it crosses the sky and goes down over the mountains. I want to ask it some questions. I want to say “Who are your people who grow slowly fat and then grow slowly thin? Where do you live? Why do you send one of you every night over our valley to watch us? We want to know who you are, what you are…’
“Very well, says Heru, I’ll take you but what will you give me in exchange?
“I’ll tell you a story as I sit on your back and we fly together, will that do?
“That will do, says Heru, and the brave young man climbs on his back and….”
Get double-autographed copies of Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curosities, co-written by Marc Scott Zicree, at Mystery & Imagination Booshop in Glendale.
(1) You’d think somebody who’s made a career as a comics artist could, you know, draw. “The 40 Worst Rob Liefield Drawings” shows in excruciating detail why that’s a bad assumption. (Rated R for spicy language – like, don’t read the article aloud at work.)
You know how people draw comics? Rob doesn’t do that. He had his own Levi’s commercial directed by Spike Lee in the 90s. He had best-selling comic books. He was a revolutionary and helped co-found Image Comics when all the hot artists ditched their classic gigs (like Spider-Man, the X-Men, and, uh, Guardians of the Galaxy) for creator-owned projects. But he doesn’t “draw” comics. Oh God, no.
…Okay. The #40 spot is a catch-all for “any time Rob Liefeld has ever drawn a woman.” We get more specific from here, but if we didn’t lump these together the entire list would be broken spines and colossal hooters.
Lucasfilm has announced the new date for the debut of the next Star Wars trilogy, and despite some script rewriting that is currently underway, the movie will not be pushed to later in 2016.
Fans can expect to revisit the galaxy far, far away on Dec. 18, 2015.
Since I have been tracking Tomorrowland I was interested in a second item that was packaged with the same announcement.
In announcing the shift, Disney also changed the dates for another major film on its slate, the Brad Bird-directed George Clooney sci-fi saga Tomorrowland (being co-written and co-produced by EW’s own Jeff Jensen.) Tomorrowland was originally set for Dec. 12, 2014, but now moves to May 22, 2015 — the previous berth of the new Star Wars film.
(3) Mining Cold War security dossiers for celebrity names is one of the hobbies of the age of the internet. And now we discover the FBI kept a file on Isaac Asimov. Should fans be surprised? (Think of the patriotic company he kept! He worked on secret war research with Robert Heinlein! He sold stories to John W. Campbell!) Or take the cynical approach? (What Boston academic wasn’t investigated by the FBI in the Sixties?) Your choice.
A 1965 memo notes that Asimov’s name appeared on a list maintained by the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) of individuals either contacted for recruitment or “considered amenable” to the party’s goals. An informant, who is noted as the chairman of the CPUSA, New England district, provided the list to the FBI’s Boston office. The list included an entry for “ISAAC ASIMOV, Boston University Biochemist,” but did not note whether the party had actually established contact…
“Boston is not suggesting that Asimov is ROBROF,” the memo concludes, but “he should be considered as a possibility in light of his background, which contains information inimical to the best interests of the United States.”
…The FBI’s file on Isaac Asimov ends at 1967, so it seems that their ROBPROF investigation steered toward other suspects.
Mobile applications for smartphones, tablets and other gadgets can turn just about anyone into a citizen scientist. App-equipped wireless devices give users worldwide the ability to act as remote sensors for all sorts of data as they go through their daily routines—whether it’s invasive garlic mustard weed in Washington State or red-bordered stinkbugs in Quintana Roo, Mexico.
Smartphones can automate data collection and incorporate many important data-gathering functions—such as capturing images, audio and text—into a single tool that can “stamp” the date, time and geographic coordinates associated with an observation, says Alex Mayer, a civil and environmental engineering professor at Michigan Technological University. Mayer is leading a project with Michigan Tech colleague Robert Pastel, an associate professor of computer science, and a group of students to develop new citizen science mobile apps.
(5) Stop asking “Where’s my flying car?” It’s here. David Klaus reacts, “I thought his concept was going to be a pipe dream, but apparently it’s about to happen.”
Instead of appearing as a small point of light, like most asteroids, this one has half a dozen comet-like dust tails radiating out like spokes on a wheel, said the report in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Let James H. Burns be the first on record to nominate this as an alien spacecraft.
(7) Speaking of aliens… Our Founding Fathers didn’t allow aliens to hold office. But these are more enlightened times. John Hertzler has been elected to the town board of Ithaca, NY, an actor who played eight different characters on Star Trek, including a Klingon and a Vulcan.
Hertzler said he has no ambitions to emulate Martok, who rose to be chancellor in the Klingon empire.
“I have no designs on the presidency,” Hertzler said. “But I do want to do my best in terms of serving the folks here.”
Nearby Ithaca College in Binghamton is where Rod Serling was once a faculty member. The locals seem to be more open-minded about these things than your average Founding Father.
(9) In his interview by the New York Times J.J. Abrams is called the creator of the novel “S” (though Abrams points out is was written by Doug Dorst). One thing we learn about Abrams is how eccentric his personal library is.
What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves?
My friend Sarah Vowell once looked at my bookshelves and asked, in that voice of hers, “Do you have any chapter books?” My shelves are filled mostly with ridiculous volumes that I love: magic books; film critique and movie “making of” books; design and font technique and collections; how-to, craft and construction books; and psychology texts. One of my favorites is “Sleights of Mind,” which talks about the neuroscience of our perception of magic. A very cool read.
(10) Honorable Whoredom at a Penny a Word collects 14 Harlan Ellison tales from the beginning of his career that have never appeared in any previous Ellison collection.
Several stories feature Jerry Killian – “that’s ‘kill-ee-uun,’ not ‘kill-yuun’” — Ellison’s hard-boiled insurance investigator. Another introduces Big John Novak, Ellison’s under-four-foot-tall private detective —
…Immortalized in a 1993 installment of Harlan Ellison’s Watching where the commentator referenced a story with a midget protagonist before exclaiming “I’m five-foot-five; I’m a little person! You’re a midget!” at the politically correct viewer.
The New York Public Library recently discovered a treasure trove of video games in its archives created by psychedelic evangelist Timothy Leary. Over 375 floppies (talk about flashbacks) containing a “dozen or so” games developed by the LSD-advocate in the ’80s — some are playable via emulation — are now on display in the library’s rare books and manuscripts division, according to The New York Times. The good doctor’s digital works had a self-help bend to them, advocating self-improvement by interactive means as opposed to pharmaceuticals, and apparently recreational drugs as well. If you fancy yourself a cyberpunk, Leary also had an in-progress project based on William Gibson’s Neuromancer, replete with writing by William S. Burroughs and a soundtrack by Devo.
These are being archived and made available to researchers and perhaps even to programmers who want to finish the projects.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, David Klaus, Andrew Porter and James H. Burns for these links.]
A Federal judge today dismissed the Authors Guild’s lawsuit over Google’s library book scanning project which has been in litigation for the last eight years.
Many of the books scanned by Google were under copyright, and Google did not obtain permission from the copyright holders its use of their copyrighted works, leading to the class action suit charging Google with copyright infringement.
In dismissing the case, reports Publishers Weekly, the judge enthusiastically praised Google’s project. The full text of the decision is here.
The judge was impressed with the technology in place to allow online users to look at snippets why preventing them from acquiring a complete copy of a scanned book.
Google takes security measures to prevent users from viewing a complete copy of a snippet-view book. For example, a user cannot cause the system to return different sets of snippets for the same search query; the position of each snippet is fixed within the page and does not “slide” around the search term; only the first responsive snippet available on any given page will be returned in response to a query; one of the snippets on each page is “black-listed,” meaning it will not be shown; and at least one out of ten entire pages in each book is black-listed…
An “attacker” who tries to obtain an entire book by using a physical copy of the book to string together words appearing in successive passages would be able to obtain at best a patchwork of snippets that would be missing at least one snippet from every page and 10% of all pages…. In addition, works with text organized in short “chunks,” such as dictionaries, cookbooks, and books of haiku, are excluded from snippet view.
And the judge said that Google satisfied the “fair use” standard of the copyright law.
In my view, Google Books provides significant public benefits. It advances the progress of the arts and sciences, while maintaining respectful consideration for the rights of authors and other creative individuals, and without adversely impacting the rights of copyright holders. It has become an invaluable research tool that permits students, teachers, librarians, and others to more efficiently identify and locate books. It has given scholars the ability, for the first time, to conduct full-text searches of tens of millions of books. It preserves books, in particular out-of-print and old books that have been forgotten in the bowels of libraries, and it gives them new life. It facilitates access to books for print-disabled and remote or underserved populations. It generates new audiences and creates new sources of income for authors and publishers. Indeed, all society benefits.
Similarly, Google is entitled to summary judgment with respect to plaintiffs’ claims based on the copies of scanned books made available to libraries. Even assuming plaintiffs have demonstrated a prima facie case of copyright infringement, Google’s actions constitute fair use here as well. Google provides the libraries with the technological means to make digital copies of books that they already own. The purpose of the library copies is to advance the libraries’ lawful uses of the digitized books consistent with the copyright law. The libraries then use these digital copies in transformative ways.
They create their own full-text searchable indices of books, maintain copies for purposes of preservation, and make copies available to print-disabled individuals, expanding access for them in unprecedented ways. Google’s actions in providing the libraries with the ability to engage in activities that advance the arts and sciences constitute fair use.
The Authors Guild said it plans to appeal the ruling. Its president, Paul Aiken told Publishers Weekly, “Google made unauthorized digital editions of nearly all of the world’s valuable copyright-protected literature and profits from displaying those works. In our view, such mass digitization and exploitation far exceeds the bounds of the fair use defense.”
Peter de Jong recently found a set of 27 photos taken at a 1981 party for LunaCon GoH James White, the Irish sf writer, and has posted them here.
The party, organized by Moshe Feder, was held at de Jong’s apartment in midtown Manhattan. Feder says he does not know who took the pictures.
James White wears his famous Saint Fantony blazer in photo #1.
Fans identified in the photographs are: Norma Auer Adams, Larry Carmody, Ross Chamberlain, Alina Chu, Eli Cohen, Genny Dazzo, Peter de Jong, Moshe Feder, Chip Hitchcock, Lenny Kaye, Hope Leibowitz, Craig Miller, Andrew Porter, Stu Shiffman, James White, Jonathan White, Peggy White, and Ben Yalow.
(There is also an unnamed fan in photo #4 I recognize. She occasionally looks at this blog and I will happily add her name to this article if she grants permission.)
[Thanks to Moshe Feder and Andrew Porter for the story.]
Artist Jon Lomberg, a speaker at the Starship Century Symposium last May, will return to the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at UCSD for two appearances in December.
