Jack Larson, who played Jimmy Olsen in the 1950s TV series Adventures of Superman, died September 20 in Los Angeles.
Larson was raised in Pasadena and attended Pasadena Junior College, just like future Superman actor George Reeves.
He was also for a while a part of the social circle in the 1950s that included James Dean and Montgomery Clift.
Little remembered is that Larson once acted alongside Leonard Nimoy, who had the title role in Kid Monk Baroni.
Movie still of Kid Monk Baroni. Jack Larson, left, Leonard Nimoy, right.
Having become typecast as Jimmy Olsen, when the Superman TV series ended Larson unfortunately had trouble getting roles. He had a bit part on Gomer Pyle USMC in 1965 and another in Law and Order: Special Victims Unit in 2010.
Many of his later credits came from appearing in subsequent versions of the franchise, playing an older Jimmy Olsen in an episode of Lois and Clark , an FBI agent (partnered with Noell Neill!) in the “Paranoia” episode of the Superboy TV series, and a bartender in the movie Superman Returns.
(In the “Paranoia” episode, when Superboy saves a woman who has jumped from a window, Larson’s character exclaims “Jeepers!” like Jimmy Olsen would.)
He donned the sweater once again to host a Superman festival on New York’s WOR Channel 9, on Thanksgiving in 1987.
There’s also a blurry, 30-second promo for his hosting gig that includes many brief clips of him in character on the show.
He was life partnered with writer/director James Bridges for a reported thirty-five years, until his passing in 1993, and collaborated as a producer on some of the filmmaker’s productions.
HBO’s Game of Thrones destroyed the Emmy record book tonight, winning a total of 12 Emmys (including eight won at the previously held Creative Arts Emmys).
Game of Thrones broke The West Wing’s single-year record of nine wins set in 2000.
Major category wins announced during the televised ceremony were:
Outstanding Drama Series
Outstanding Supporting Actor In A Drama Series: Peter Dinklage
Directing Emmy: David Nutter
Writing Emmy: David Benioff & D. B. Weiss
Finally “The Big One”: This was the first year that the HBO series, nominated five times as the Outstanding Drama, won in that category.
Complete list: 2015 Emmys won by Game of Thrones.
Outstanding Drama Series
Outstanding Supporting Actor (Peter Dinklage)
Outstanding Writing in a Drama Series (David Benioff and Dan Weiss, “Mother’s Mercy”)
Outstanding Direction in a Drama Series (David Nutter, “Mother’s Mercy”)
Outstanding Make-Up for a Single-Camera Series (Non-Prosthetic) (“Mother’s
Outstanding Single-Camera Picture Editing for a Drama Series (“The Dance of Dragons”)
Outstanding Production Design for a Narrative Contemporary or Fantasy Program (One Hour or More) (“High Sparrow,” “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken” “Hardhome”)
Outstanding Sound Editing for a Series (“Hardhome”)
Outstanding Sound Mixing for a Scripted Series (“Hardhome”)
Outstanding Special Visual Effects (“The Dance of Dragons”)
(1) Ernie Hudson has filmed a cameo for the new Ghostbusters. All was forgiven sometime after gave this interview (quoted on The Mary Sue)….
Back in October of last year, Hudson told The Telegraph, “If it has nothing to do with the other two movies, and it’s all female, then why are you calling it Ghostbusters? I love females. I hope that if they go that way at least they’ll be funny, and if they’re not funny at least hopefully it’ll be sexy. I love the idea of including women, I think that’s great. But all-female I think would be a bad idea. I don’t think the fans want to see that.”.
Overall, I agree with Mamatas that there’s an ethical issue in charging submission fees. We never instituted them at Electric Literature for Recommended Reading,Gigantic, or any other magazine I’ve worked on. Plenty of journals barely take any work from the slush, but even a magazine that only publishes slush is likely only taking 1-2% of submissions. So the majority of unpublished writers are funding the minority of published, which isn’t a great foundation. Imagine if every worker had to pay to get a job interview? (Or, since most magazines don’t pay, maybe the analogy is paying to get an unpaid internship.) The defense of submission fees is that the fee is pretty small, perhaps only as costly as snail mail postage. But $3 adds up quickly. I’ve often heard the average story gets rejected twenty times before an acceptance. 21 x 3 = $63. The Offing pays $20-50, meaning you’d expect to lose between 13 and 43 bucks per story. Literary writers can’t expect to make much money from quiet short stories about cancer and obscure poems about birds, but surely we don’t need to actively lose money to get published!
I’d like to note here that The Offing is hardly the only magazine to charge a fee. Missouri Review, Sonora Review, Crazyhorse and so many others charge that when I asked about this on Twitter, I was told it would be easier to make a list of those who don’t. And the fact that The Offing pays $20-50 already puts them ahead of the vast majority of lit mags who pay nothing at all…
Could it be that The Singularity is not engaged in some kind of literary war crime but, in comparison to other magazines that don’t pay contributors, deserves to be commended for not charging a submission fee? (Rocks incoming in 5…4…3…)
I use parts of Randy Ingermanson’s snowflake method for writing a novel. If you haven’t looked at this (I’ve mentioned it several times in the past), it’s worth a look–it probably takes only a few hours to figure out whether or not it’s something that’ll work for you.
The parts I use are the first few steps:
– The one-sentence summary of the novel. I want to nail the core conflict and the protagonist. Ingermanson suggests fewer than 15 words. I use that as a rough guideline–sometimes I have to go a little over because the plot needs some sf/f setting setup. But not much over.
– One-paragraph summary. You can use three-act structure or similar if you like that. Ingermanson suggests “three disasters plus an ending.” It’s not a bad starting place.
– One-page summary. At this point I’m just expanding things out. I sometimes skip this step.
I write down an unsorted list of elements and events that I want to make sure to include. Key scenes, particular relationships, cool tech toys, whatever.
Determination of POVs. Mostly I base this on:
– Characters who are going to have growth arcs.
– Coverage of plot events.
– Information control. For example, some characters can’t be POVs because they spoil the entire damn book to the reader.
There are other considerations that come into play sometimes but they tend to be edge cases.
I JUST want to know, cartoonist C. Spike Trotman joked, how she’s going to get those three bricks through airport security.
Trotman, as emcee of the Small Press Expo’s Ignatz Awards ceremony Saturday night, was quickly finding the funny as Sophia Foster-Dimino hit the brick trifecta, picking up three trophies — which are an inspired nod to George Herriman’s “Krazy Kat” — and leading the field for the esteemed indie award.
The night felt like a coronation for Foster-Dimino, who dazzled voters with her “Sex Fantasy” comic and was selected best Promising New Talent. At the lectern, the cartoonist looked genuinely moved by the moment. And how better to build a young career than brick by brick?
Sophie Goldstein also picked up multiple awards; her work “The Oven” was voted Outstanding Comic and Outstanding Graphic Novel. When Goldstein kept her remarks brief upon her second win, she warmly joked that she was following Foster-Dimino’s humbled lead.
In this week’s episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson chats with whistleblower Edward Snowden via robotic telepresence from Moscow. The two card-carrying members of the geek community discuss Isaac Newton, the difference between education and learning, and even how knowledge is created. They also dive into the Periodic Table and chemistry, before moving on to the more expected subjects of data compression, encryption and privacy. You’ll learn about the relationship between private contractors, the CIA, and the NSA, for whom Edward began working at only 16 years old. Edward explains why metadata tells the government much more about individuals than they claim, and why there’s a distinction between the voluntary disclosure of information and the involuntary subversion of individual intent. Part 1 ends with a conversation about Ben Franklin, the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the CIA’s oath of service, and government Standard Form 312, which is the agreement Snowden violated.
I’ve had the name “Noah Ward” registered as an official pseudonym with the Writers’ Guild since the late 70s. (I’ve actually used it twice.)
In the planning for the Hugo award ceremony, one of the gags in the script was that if No Award won, I would accept the trophy as “Noah Ward.” Tananarive would protest, and I would whip out the letter from the Writers’ Guild to demonstrate the official-ness of my pen name. Tananarive would then explain the difference between No and Noah and I would grumpily give up the trophy.
If a second category came in as No Award, I was prepared to do “You like me, you really like me.”
But …
As it became clear that we might be looking at as many as 5 categories with No Award and that the voters seemed to be heading toward a massive smackdown of the slates, that joke had to be jettisoned.
In retrospect, that was the right choice. No Award in any category is an uncomfortable moment, even if that’s the result you voted for. So any attempt to add a joke to the moment would have been in very bad taste. And as much as I love a tasteless joke, this wasn’t the place for it.
It was fun to think about, it was the kind of gallows humor that people indulge in to release energy and frustration, but when it came down to the final moments, it was obvious that it wouldn’t play.
Even when explained by somebody who thought the asterisks were a good idea, it’s impossible to see why it was a hard choice to cut this gag….
[Thanks to Michael J. Walsh, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 would-be contributing editor of the day Nigel.]
On December 3, 1972 many of the leading sf writers, artists, and scientists of their generation boarded Holland America’s cruise ship SS Statendam to view the launch of Apollo 17 and to discuss the future of space travel. This would be the last manned mission to the Moon — the rest of the Apollo series had been cancelled — but it was still too early for so many optimists to internalize that America was entering the doldrums of manned space exploration.
A documentary of the cruise, Voyage Beyond Apollo, was recently posted on YouTube.
Some of the most interesting figures on board were Isaac Asimov, the only two people Asimov would admit were more intelligent than he was, Carl Sagan and AI specialist Marvin Minsky, plus Richard Hoagland, Ben Bova, poet Berguet Roberts, artists Rick Sternbach and Don Davis, Harry Stine, Robert Heinlein, Frederik Pohl, Theodore Sturgeon, Fred Ordway, rocket designer and space visionary Krafft Ehricke, SETI pioneer and director of the Arecibo Observatory Frank Drake, and physicist Robert Enzmann. They were joined by a sprinkling of other comped celebrities – Norman Mailer and Katherine Anne Porter among them. All that was really missing were — paying passengers.
In the first of several posts he wrote about the cruise for The Way The Future Blogs,“The Ship of Foolishness, Part 1: The Foreplay”, Frederik Pohl said the three men who organized the cruise were an astronaut, a communications genius who used to work with Walter Cronkite, and a highly respected scientist, but 40 years having passed by the time he penned these memories Pohl decided the organizers deserved anonymity. He just called them “Jim, Joe and Jack.”
The trio knew a lot of people would like to view an Apollo launch, and had experienced what a pain it was to drive down to the Cape, book a hotel, and find parking near the site. One had an inspiration.
“Hey, what about watching it from a cruise ship anchored just offshore?”
And another one, maybe Jim, said, “Great idea! And, listen, if you really wanted to do it, maybe you could get a bunch of people like us to give lectures on the ship in exchange for free tickets.” And somebody, possibly Joe, said, “Why the dickens don’t we just go ahead and do it?”
They did. They talked to Holland America line (my own personal first choice among cruise companies), who loved the idea, only they wanted to make a real cruise out of it, with visits to four or five gorgeous tropical islands. Then they got busy compiling a guest list of leading science-fiction writers and assorted celebrities to attract hoi polloi. To all of which Holland America responded with approval and encouragement, and did they have any other ideas like that?
They invited Pohl and filled him in on who else would be there.
Things were going splendidly, they said. They had been working the invitation list. Robert Heinlein was coming, and Ted Sturgeon and Isaac Asimov and at least a dozen other top science-fiction writers, said Joe. And other celebrities, too, Jack added, people like Carl Sagan and Norman Mailer and Katherine Anne Porter, whose 1962 novel Ship of Fools had created a stir in the world of publishing (an invitation which produced quite a lot of joking from Jim and Joe when Jack mentioned the title).
“And,” Joe put in, giving me a grin, “of course everybody brings his wife or husband or main squeeze. And we’re all comped, for the whole cruise, courtesy of Holland America. In your case, Fred, you don’t even have to worry about air fare, because you live near New York and that’s where this cruise starts and finishes.”
…I don’t actually know what these follies cost Holland America. A figure I have heard mentioned was half a million 1972 American dollars. Jim, Joe and Jack might have been able to give a more precise figure, but we couldn’t ask them.
They hadn’t come aboard.
According to Up Ship, Katherine Anne Porter’s biographer reports only 100 people in total paid for the cruise. There were only 40 “premium tickets” sold for the conference itself. It seems that staggeringly few people wanted to pay the $400 for the conference on top of the $400-$900 for the cruise.
Of course, the guests had no need to think about that, they were there to have a good time, and in “The Ship of Foolishness, Part 2” Pohl assures everyone they did.
Well, enough of telling you about experiences you can’t have. Simply imagine that you’re at the best con you’ve ever attended, only it’s with fewer people than usual and it runs twice as long. And it takes place not in a hotel in some strange city but on board of some twenty thousand tons of steel that is chugging through blue waters under balmy skies. Put them together with a host of entertaining companions available on what is almost a twenty-four hour schedule, and you’ve got the picture.
The titles of the talks presented at the on-board conference are listed in Up Ship’s article about the cruise titled “The Conference That Vanished”.
Roger Caras: Earth the Teacher, Lessons learned from out 1st planet
Isaac Asimov: A heirarchy of niches from comets to Earthlike planets
Neil Ruzic: Development of the moon as a niche
Richard Sternbach: Experiment that failed
Don Davis: Paintings: Clones
PROPULSION INTELLIGENT MACHINES AND SOCIO-GENETIC CHANGE
Roger Caras: Co-chairman
Harry Stine: Co-chairman The Third industrial Revolution
Robert Heinlein: Genetic fitness, Social fitness, training & technology and communications Marvin Minsky: Artificial intelligence
Sarah Meltzoff: Universals, Cultural viability, economic specialization
Janet Jepperson: Psychological barriers to full realization
Linda Sagan: Comment: Ultimate Machines
Krafft Ehricke: Comment: Ultimate Machines
ENERGY AND PROPULSION
Donald Banks: Co-Chairman Energy
Ben Bova: Co-Chairman
Werner Rambauske: Observation of the Universe
Brude hunt: Propulsion
Robin Anderson: Plowshare: Big guns for the benefit of the people
Fred Pohl: The shape of shadows from the future
Carl Sagan: Interstellar probes and Pioneer 10
Neil Ruzic: Human acquisition of Moon and its effects on war and peace
THE GRAND DESIGN
Gillet Griffin: Co-chairman
Eric Burgess: of Mankind but no longer Men
Cassandra Boell: Space states and the howling of beasts
Harry Stine: Comment: Ultimate Machine
Robert D. Enzmann: Statement of grand design, & galactic fertile crescent
Robert Heinlein: The grand design
Theodore Sturgeon: Communications, The Cold Equations, and the grand design
Fred Pohl: Star flight and relativistic twins “lost in space”
Fred Ordway: Use of satellite systems for education
Marvin Minsky: Artificial intelligence and the grand design, have we nurtured “The Descent of Machines?”
Richard Sternbach: Paintings: Mankinds’ grand design
SCIENCE, ART, COMMUNICATION, AND COSMOLOGY
Neil Ruzic: Co-chairman
Eric Burgess: Co-chairman
Donald Burgy: Order theory: an art exhibit in the clipper room
Gillett Griffin: Migrations of men and their art
Isaac Asimov: stellar types and organic evolution
Robert D Enzmann: Force= dp/dt (F=/ma) and e=hv(1-d/D) That is an intellectual revolution
Ben Bova: galaxies and quasars
Norman Mailer: Revolutionaries of science and technology
Donald Davis: Paintings: Cupules and stick charts
Asimov told what it was like to witness the launch of Apollo 17 in his column for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, saying he —
… watched Apollo 17 rise into the air like the biggest firefly in creation. It lit the sky from horizon to horizon, turning the ocean an orange-grey and the sky into an inverted copper bowl from which the stars were blanked out.”
Slowly it rose on its tail of fire, and it was well up in the sky before the first shaking rumble reached us some forty seconds after ignition and shook us savagely.
Mankind was making its attempt to reach the moon a sixth time and place and eleventh and twelfth man upon it. It was the last launching of the Apollo series (and the only night launching, hence incredibly spectacular, and I was delighted to see it). It may be decades before mankind returns to the task – after establishing a space station that would make it possible to reach the Moon more easily, more economically, and more elaborately.
We saw something flaring around the base of the rocket. Then that whole precarious stack of thrusters and capsules began to ease itself upward.
We all blinked and squinted as the five great rocket nozzles on the Saturn 5 savaged our eyes with the five blinding supernovas of hydrogen burning in air. The blinding flames began moving upward with the rest of the train, slowly at first, then picking up speed. Everything moved straight up together until the thrusters were level with the little bridge the astronauts had walked on, then higher and clear of the launch tower entirely.
And then at last the sound of those five Saturn rockets reached us, over beach and water, from far away, but still making the ship’s lighting fixtures rattle and our ears hurt. Now the entire construct was overhead, the hydrogen fire stretching down toward us, but far away and getting rapidly farther. Now the departing assembly of space-going parts was vertically over our heads.
Every head was craned back, every face aimed at the spectacle above. I turned around to look at my companions behind me. There were the upturned faces of Bob Heinlein and Isaac and Ted Sturgeon and others, clustered like blossoms in a flower-shop bouquet, starkly lit by that super-sun that was sliding across the sky above them. I could have kicked myself, angry at my dimwitted absence of forethought for failing to stick a camera in my pocket to capture a shot of those faces in that wondrous light.
For space artist Rick Sternbach, the launch was all about visual images and color, “the repeating shockwaves off rocket, the blowtorch yellow-orange glow around the vehicle, the smoke and steam streaming away in every direction.” He had witnessed the daytime launches of Apollo 11 and Apollo 13, but this was an altogether different experience.
After the launch, the ship’s many bars filled with celebration and discussion. Ehricke estimated to a gathered crowd that the brightness of the night launch was about that of five hundred full moons. “Incomparably beautiful,” Robert Heinlein termed it. For Norman Mailer, “It was the one time when I wanted instant replay.” Eighty-two-year-old novelist Katherine Anne Porter, on assignment to cover the launch for Playboy magazine, never expected to witness anything like it in her life. “I came out of a world so primitive you can scarcely imagine it,” she said. “We barely had gaslight in New Orleans when I was a girl. When I saw them take off, I wanted with all my soul to be going with them.”
Fresh from his own rounds of celebration, Richard Hoagland commandeered the ship’s public address system to announce that “due to a lack of interest, tomorrow has been canceled” —as though the launch were so singular an event that all else lost meaning in its wake. The comment might have served as a final epitaph for the extraordinary Apollo program, except that the Statendam passengers had gathered precisely to consider “tomorrow” and how to fill its possibilities.
Jerry Pournelle is readying the first new There Will Be War anthology in 25 years. Castalia House will publish it.
Pournelle wrote me in an e-mail:
We are paying $200 on acceptance; that is an advance on pro rata shares of 25% royalties. (The original Tor TWBW series was paying on 10% royalties.) Also, we are buying nonexclusive anthology rights, not first serial or anything exclusive, so it’s a bit like finding the acceptance money in the street, with an excellent chance of getting a good bit more, possibly several times as much per year for a few years.
For the new volume we are paying $200 on acceptance regardless of length; I paid by the word in the original series. We’ll pay by adjusted length for the royalties on the new volume — adjustment to increase the amount going to shorter works. I always did that, particularly for poetry. Castalia is using my formulae. I’d like to pay more on acceptance, but that’s all I could get, and it’s more than anyone else offered.
Castalia made me the best offer, including the bookkeeping and royalty payments to contributors; no one else offered that. They have been a pleasure to work with.
I have a lot of things to do, including new fiction with Larry Niven and Steven Barnes — we’re doing another book in the Heorot series. The previous two were best sellers, and we think this is better. We’re working with Dr. Jack Cohen, who helped Annie design the dragons of Pern, and Terry Pratchett, and we have a wonderful new alien.
And John DeChancie and I are working on Lisabetta, a story of a young girl in space raised in good part by her ship’s Artificial Intelligence. She’s a strong character, and I think we’re contributing to understanding AI robots. John’s a very strong writer. I’m still learning to type again after the stroke, so most of my current work is collaborations; I’m very fortunate to have such skilled people to work with; but it leaves me little time to do management of projects like There Will Be War.
I’m vain enough to think it’s an important series, TWBW, and now that Iran is likely to have the bomb perhaps we need to think about the future of war. It seemed impossible to get out of the Cold War without at least a few atomic explosions, but we did it with containment, deterrence, and defense. I won’t live to see the end of the next phase, but I like to believe TWBW helped get people thinking about how to get out of the Cold War alive; maybe a couple of new volumes will help with these new dangers.
He also responded to the criticism of his choice of Castalia House as publisher.
I don’t pay attention to fan politics, and I have not followed whatever the latest have been. There seem to be denunciations of Castalia including public wishes for its CEO’s public execution without trial, which does not seem reasonable. I am not required to share political views with my publisher, which is as well because some of my publishers have been Communists, both foreign and American.
Submissions are open, but as Pournelle explained on Chaos Manor, he doesn’t have time for editorial handholding —
Please do not send me email about the new volume of There Will Be War. Please do not send me inquiries about submitting to There Will Be War. Send story submissions to [email protected]. We buy only nonexclusive anthology rights. We will publish a notice when submissions are no longer wanted. To get an idea of what the anthologies are like, see the already published volumes. Please do not ask me for advice on how to write for this anthology.
When I did the original There Will Be War anthologies, I had the services of Mr. Carr to work with prospective authors, and he was responsible for starting many new careers. Alas, John is on his own in Pennsylvania now, and I have neither time nor energy, nor do I have John’s talents.
Submit stories to [email protected]. Previously published is acceptable and far more usual than original. Alas I have not the time to discuss story ideas by mail.
BBCA America has made the Doctor Who season premiere “The Magician’s Apprentice” available free on YouTube.
Where is the Doctor?” When the skies of Earth are frozen by a mysterious alien force, Clara needs her friend. But where is the Doctor, and what is he hiding from? As past deeds come back to haunt him, old enemies will come face-to-face, and for the Doctor and Clara survival seems impossible.
(1) You might not have suspected that L. Frank Baum’s first book was about raising chickens.
At 20, Baum took on the then national craze—the breeding of fancy poultry. He specialized in raising of the Hamburg. In March 1880, he established a monthly trade journal, The Poultry Record.
At the base of Los Angeles’ Bradbury Building, a slender man in an impossibly clever suit considers the wrought-iron coils of the past that adorned the future of Ridley’s Scott’s neo-noir film. Tucked behind his Ray-Bans, the eyebrows that launched a thousand GIFs furrow.
Just so we’re clear, the 12th Doctor is standing in the “Blade Runner” building….
“It’s a marathon,” Capaldi says. “[Matt] knows what it is like, when you’re on Episode 10 and you’re really sort of dying on your feet. You’re thinking, ‘I’m not going to be able to learn any more lines, I’m not going to be able to pull anymore faces.’ [Matt Smith is] great because I can text him and say, ‘This is where I’m at. Can you help or do you remember this?’ He has totally been such a huge support. As David [Tennant, the 10th Doctor] has as well.”
The last regeneration from baby-faced Smith to the gray-locked Capaldi wasn’t just a change in character age, but in tone as well.
“I think The Doctor has become more and more accessible as the show has become more successful, and this sounds bad, but weirdly I want to make him more distant,” he says. “I don’t want to be so user friendly. I didn’t want to go out and say to the audience, ‘Love me.’ I wanted to be a more spikey character. Hopefully I’m a character that might be uncomfortable to be around. But interesting.”
Spoilers are deadly here — to the fun, certainly, but conceivably to the person who reveals them as well — but a few cats have officially been let out of the bag. There will be Daleks — yes, again and already — including what feels like a nod back to Coleman’s first appearance in the series, before she became a companion, back in “Asylum of the Daleks.”
There will be Missy (Michelle Gomez), the transgender reincarnation of the Master — news whose goodness the two-part opener, “The Magician’s Apprentice” and “The Witch’s Familiar,” penned by show runner Steven Moffat, only confirms. (One of Moffat’s great gifts to the series is a string of memorable women — indeed, all his best inventions have been female characters.)
Also, as trailers have shown, the Doctor will play an electric guitar with all the authority of a man — Capaldi, that is — who once led a Scottish punk band (Dreamboys, with Craig Ferguson — that Craig Ferguson — on drums). It’s a pointed, and explicitly pointed-out, reminder that David Tennant’s and Smith’s young and madcap Doctors still live within him: “It’s my party, and all of me are invited.” Said another way: He’s not as old as he looks. (Some 2,000 years of living notwithstanding.)
The Season 6 episode “The Doctor’s Wife” was guest written by Neil Gaiman, a man best known for writing Stardust, Coraline and The Sandman and his episode was awarded the 2011 Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation and the Best Dramatic Presentation at the 2012 Hugo Awards.
This episode sees The Eleventh Doctor, Amy Pond and Rory Williams receiving a distress call from a Time Lord and enter into a rift between Universes to try and save him or her. Where they end up is a void made up from trash and space debris where a group of people have salvaged a living from the junk. Also with them is an eccentric woman called Idris who pretty much jumps on The Doctor when she first sees him.
What made this episode such a delight was Suranne Jones’ performance as Idris, a unhinged woman who is completely batty and has a mysterious connection to The Doctor. Jones was fantastic, letting out her inner Helena Bonham Carter and injected a lot of humor in the episode. Gaiman’s written ensure that was a balance of drama and comedy and references the history of the show.
The episode, Mr. Big, introduced Agent 86, Maxwell Smart played by Don Adams and his partner, the inimitable Agent 99 (Barbara Feldon) as agents of CONTROL.
Headed by their boss, The Chief (Edward Platt), 86 and 99 worked together to fight the forces of KAOS. In the pilot, Mr. Big, we see the only actual appearance of the head of KAOS, played by little person Michael Dunn, before he is killed by episode’s end by his own Doomsday death ray.
Inspired by The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (which in itself was inspired by the James Bond craze of the early 60’s), Get Smart spoofed every aspect of spy culture including colorful villains, outrageous gadgets and ridiculous plots.
Sure, this is all for fun, and everybody’s entitled, but there are issues out there that we should be paying attention to: climate change, record refugee migrations, wealth distribution, a presidential election season being run by reality stars. (Somebody has probably actually predicted this somewhere along the line.) Why should we care if No Award got the Hugo for Best Short Story when right outside the auditorium record forest fires, fueled by unprecedented drought, made the air seem less like Spokane than Beijing?
And why isn’t anyone blogging about that?
I have a simple theory: It’s too big. We can’t handle this stuff. This is the sort of thing we elected those guys in Washington to solve for us. See how well that’s worked out.
But you know what? We’re Science Fiction. We think about the big issues, the future. Up until now, instead of the guys in Washington, we’ve let the guys in SFWA do the heavy lifting, so we can concentrate on nominating patterns and voting blocs. Except now the guys in SFWA are right down there with us. We’re letting a thousand ant-like problems distract us from the elephants in the room. Because it’s easier.
I’m not going to sit here at my computer and claim I have the way out. I’m not to claim that I’m any better than anyone else, that I’ve been fighting the good fight while everyone else sat at their bivouac. I don’t, and I haven’t. I’ve fed the monster of small concerns like a lot of others.
But it’s time to stop. It’s time for us in science fiction to stop squabbling about petty matters and get back to bigger things. The kind of looming apocalypses that we can imagine, because we’re not afraid to. The kind of doomsday scenarios that used to be science fiction.
Good science fiction may include politics of some sort, but despite what Brin asserts, that shouldn’t be its measure. Nor should “competence porn.” It is simply a myth that science fiction’s job is to correct any perceived tropes of the past.
Ken Burnside demonstrated an understanding of this very well in his Hugo award-nominated The Hot Equations. His counsel on the better implementation of physics into space combat is less focused on correcting tropes and is instead written entirely from the perspective of serving an underserved genre:
Thermodynamically limited space opera is a greatly underserved niche, in the overlapping circles of a Venn diagram between Hard SF and military science fiction. – Ken Burnside, The Hot Equations
Where Burnside is on target, Brin is off base. Brin’s argument is based on a premise: that in the future, Science Fiction depends on better political messaging and a commitment to progress.
Brin is half right: Science Fiction can be about an optimistic future that comes about through hard work and sound engineering. But does not, at its core only include that. Despite what Brin asserts, 1984 is not a positive self-denying prophecy. Orwell did not prevent a society that falls repeatedly under totalitarian thought policing – he merely provided a fictional setting that helped some readers identify it when it came for them.
(8) Amanda Palmer is a songwriter, musician and performance artist. She’s about to have her first child. She spoke with NPR’s Rachel Martin about the dueling demands of motherhood and art in “An Artist Worries: Will Motherhood Compromise Creativity?”
MARTIN: So you get this letter from your faithful fan. And you write in the response that this person essentially confirmed your deepest fears about being a mother and an artist. What a nice thing for this person to have done.
PALMER: Yeah, I mean, the part of the letter that confirmed my deepest fears wasn’t so much the are you tricking us into crowdfunding a baby. It was more of this fan’s terror that now that I was having a baby, I wasn’t going to be a good artist anymore.
MARTIN: And is the concern that having a baby – for obvious reasons, it changes your daily routines and your life in terms of how you use your time. But is your concern more about what will be the impact on your creativity?
PALMER: Yeah, I think so. I mean, it’s seems like there’s a paradox out there because on the one hand, so many artists who are parents will tell you that having children unlocks this unforeseen wellspring of creativity. On the other hand, some of the proof of concept (laughter) can fly in the face of that. And, you know, there’s definitely artists out there who kind of get boring after they have kids but seem to not be aware of it. So nobody’s anecdotal evidence can really prepare you for what’s going to happen. You just know that you’re going to change and you don’t know how.
(9) Best Related Work, Edible? Tattooed Bakers made this Groot Cake, a frosted Jupiter, and a cake referencing The Hobbit.
[Thanks to Will R. and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Iphinome.]
Three more volumes of Jerry Pournelle’s There Will Be War have been republished for the Amazon Kindle by Castalia House this summer.
There Will Be War, Volume II (originally titled Men of War), edited by Jerry Pournelle and John F. Carr, has 19 stories, articles, and poems. Notable entries are —
Eric Frank Russell’s “Allamagoosa,” winner of the 1955 Best Short Story Hugo.
“Superiority,” by Arthur C. Clarke, first published in 1951, depicts an arms race and shows how the side which is more technologically advanced can be defeated. The story once was required reading for an industrial design course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“Code-Name Feirefitz” by David Drake is a Hammer’s Slammers story.
There Will Be War, Volume III (originally titled Blood and Iron), edited by Jerry Pournelle and John F. Carr, and features 16 stories, articles, and poems. Notable entries are —
“The Spectre General” by Theodore Cogswell was voted by the Science Fiction Writers of America as one of the finest novellas prior to the introduction of the Nebula Awards in 1965 and included in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two anthology.
“The Miracle-Workers” by Jack Vance was a nominee for the 1959 Best Novelette Hugo.
Arthur C. Clarke’s oft-reprinted “Hide and Seek” tells the story of a single armed man pitted against a space cruiser, and succeeding.
“Silent Leges” by Jerry Pournelle is a Falkenberg’s Legion story.
There Will Be War, Volume IV (originally titled Day of the Tyrant), edited by Jerry Pournelle and John F. Carr, features 21 stories, articles, and poems. Notable entries are —
“The Cloak and the Staff” by Gordon R. Dickson, winner of the 1981 Best Novelette Hugo.
“No Truce With Kings” by Poul Anderson, winner of the 1964 Best Short Fiction Hugo.
Jerry Pournelle also wrote me a note about working with Castalia House —
I recently read your nice April piece about it nice April piece about [the reprints] and also read the comments which I don’t usually do. There seems to be some question about why Castalia is the publisher. It’s simple, really: they made the best offer. My first inclination for the whole series was to have my agent publish the whole series, but she was reluctant to do the bookkeeping and royalty payments to 20+ contributors per book for ten books; she hasn’t the office staff for that nor the computer skills to automate it.
Neither do I. I haven’t time for all that work and I wouldn’t be reliable or dependable — and it’s the contributors’ money, not mine. I don’t need and can’t do all that work, and I won’t take on the obligation, and no other publisher seemed interested. Then Castalia wanted to publish the 25 year old series, and when I said only if you do the bookkeeping and banking, they said yes; they thought it a prestigious series and they would do that.
When TOR published the original series, I paid the royalties to the contributors, and though John Carr was invaluable help, it was my obligation and I did it; even wrote a computer program to make it easier. Alas, that program is long gone, and if it weren’t I still would not take on the obligation.
Castalia contracted to do all that as publisher. Royalties are coming in, and Castalia is paying them, and I don’t have to do much but collect my share, as it should be.
Jenna Coleman will leave Doctor Who after the next season, which begins airing in the U.K. on Saturday.
The Hollywood Reportersays Coleman will take the lead in Victoria, an upcoming drama from ITV Studios, where she will portray Queen Victoria from the age of 18 as she ascends to the throne.
Coleman has been Doctor Who’s companion for three years, playing Clara Oswald alongside two different Doctors, actors Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi.
She told Radio 1 Breakfast show host Nick Grimshaw it had been “emotional” leaving the show and filming her last scenes as Clara Oswald with current Doctor Peter Capaldi.
“It’s been in the works for a very long time,” she said, “[Writer] Steven [Moffat] and I sat down a year and a half ago and tried to work out the best place to do it and tell a really good story.
“We’re not going to give any details but it will happen at some point this season… We worked out a really good story arc out so hopefully people will love it.”
