The Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Associationannounced the results of the 2017 SFPA Speculative Poetry Contest on September 28. The contest raises awareness about speculative poetry and the SFPA, internationally, and rewards writers of extraordinary speculative poems. Entries are taken in three categories:
Speculative poets from around the world sent Contest Chair Mary McMyne nearly 350 entries (75 dwarf-length, 192 short, and 79 long poems). From those entries, JudgeNikia Chaney selected first- through third-place winning poems in each length category.
DWARF CATEGORY
1st place: “flight” by Kanika Agrawal
2nd place: “Archivore” by Adam Veal
3rd place: “Lace at the Throat” by Holly Walrath
Honorable Mention: “Hate Escapes” by Alicia Payne
SHORT CATEGORY
1st place: “On First Looking Into the Sculpture of the Song” by Jake Sheff
2nd place: “Rescue Mission” by Patricia Gomes
3rd place: “Schroedinger’s Lover” by B. Lynch Black
Honorable Mention: “Persephone” by Emma Gibbon
LONG CATEGORY
1st place: “The Fragmented Poet Files of a Police Report” by Stewart C. Baker
2nd place: “Auto-Biography of a Trans-dimensional Extraterrestrial” by Gary Lee Nihsen
3rd place: “Your Doppleganger’s Afterlife Dreams” by J.J. Steinfeld
Honorable Mention: “witches” by Holly Walrath
All placing poems will be published the SFPA website and on the Poetry Planet StarShipSofa podcast. The poets will receive $100, $50, and $25 cash prizes for first, second, and third place respectively.
The 2017 winners include a city poet laureate, natives of three continents, and residents of North America and Europe.
Dwarf Category first-place winner, Kanika Agrawal, is a doctoral student in English, a temporary alien of Indian origin, and a book hoarder. She lives with her toy fox terrier, Django, in Denver, Colorado.
First-place Short Category winner, Jake Sheff, is a major and pediatrician in the US Air Force. He currently resides in the Mojave Desert with his wife, daughter and four pets. His poetry chapbook is Looting Versailles (Alabaster Leaves Publishing).
The first-place Long Category winner, Stewart C Baker, is an academic librarian and author of speculative fiction and poetry. He was born in England and currently lives in Oregon with his family—although if anyone asks, he’ll usually say he’s from the Internet.
Bios for the runners up can be found at the SPECPO blog.
Nikia Chaney, this year’s judge, is the current Inlandia Literary Laureate in San Bernadino, California. The author of two chapbooks, Sis Fuss (Orange Monkey Publishing, 2012) and ladies, please (Dancing Girl Press, 2012), Her manuscript bite down, hum was the winner of the Marsh Hawk Robert Creeley Award in 2015. She has won grants and fellowships from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for Women, Poets & Writers, Squaw Valley and Cave Canem.
The 1982 sci-fi classic is back with a splashy sequel but Atari, Pan Am, RCA and other companies featured in the futuristic original struggled in the real world
Given this somewhat unorthodox approach to their pilot, it’s only natural that they would want to give viewers a taste of what’s to come, a sense of what the show is actually going to be on a weekly basis, now that it’s underway. This is especially so given that CBS hopes to use ‘Discovery’ to drive interest in their streaming service, CBS All Access. To that end, the network has released a “what’s next?” trailer for the show’s first season
(4) UNBEARABLE. BBC review of “Goodbye Christopher Robin”, which “looks sweet on the surface, but is quite depressing – ‘a wolf in teddy bear clothing,’ writes Nicholas Barber.”
Goodbye Christopher Robin is a strange proposition. It’s a film that won’t attract many viewers who aren’t already fans of AA Milne’s classic Winnie-the-Pooh books, and yet its explicit purpose is to ensure that anyone who sees it will never enjoy those books in the same way again. Remember Saving Mr Banks? Remember how it suggested that PL Travers wrote Mary Poppins because she had an alcoholic father and a suicidal mother? Compared to Goodbye Christopher Robin, that was a feel-good treat for all the family.
The Edward E. Marsh Golden Age of Science Fiction Room will open on Thursday, Sept. 28, giving San Diego State University and the local community access to one of the most comprehensive collections of science fiction in the United States. The opening celebration begins at 2 p.m. on the first floor of the Love Library on the SDSU campus. Eventually, the Marsh Room will serve as the main point of contact between the community and SDSU’s Special Collections and University Archives, which is home to Marsh’s collection.
Marsh, who attended SDSU in the 1960s, spent 30 years assembling his $2.25 million collection of signed and inscribed first editions by science fiction greats, including Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Included are the fiction and non-fiction writing of L. Ron Hubbard, founder of the Church of Scientology. Marsh gifted the entire collection to SDSU in 2013.
Donald Westbrook, who received a Ph.D. in religious studies from Claremont Graduate University in 2015, called the collection “a preeminent resource for scientology studies [which] continues to receive fuller academic attention as one of many American-born new religious movements.” His book about the Church of Scientology is due out next year from Oxford University Press.
Living history
The Marsh collection is a recent addition to SDSU’s Special Collections, a repository for more than 80,000 printed volumes, over 500 manuscript and archival collections, 800 linear feet of university records, plus numerous graphic and digital collections and ephemera.
[Gale Etschmaier, dean of the Library and Information Access] said relocating Special Collections to the library space in and around the Marsh Room will strengthen SDSU’s role as a source of “living history”—the documents, photos, letters, newspaper clippings and oral accounts that enable researchers to understand the past through their own critical senses rather than through another’s interpretation.
Another film writer, who goes by the online handle “sick__66” and wishes to stay otherwise anonymous, alleges that as recently as this May, Knowles harassed her on Twitter. The Miami resident, 23, was first approached by Knowles online in April, after he followed her on the social media platform and reached out via Twitter direct messages. The two have never met in person.
Over the course of a month, the pair shared a friendly conversation over direct messages about film history, with Knowles frequently sharing stories of his career and connections. (IndieWire reviewed the full history of these messages.) In the messages, Knowles writes frequently about things he’s done over the course of his work, name-dropping such celebrities as Kevin Smith, Peter Jackson, and Guillermo del Toro. (At one point, he sent “sick__66” a link to his wedding invite video, noting that it was directed by Jackson.)
After a month of communicating, Knowles asked “sick__66” to come to Austin, to which she did not respond, deeming the interaction “creepy.” …
We’re already seeing major changes in society from people having access to information through mobile devices. Paper maps and guides, which existed for thousands of years, are nearly extinct in some countries as people use their phones and GPS to navigate. Printed encyclopedias and dictionaries have also mostly disappeared, replaced by Wikipedia and other online resources. And social movements like the Arab Spring owed much of their power to the instantaneous sending of information between people by social media.
Those are merely the start of the changes we’ll see when every human has instant access to any information they desire. And one intriguing question I’ve been pondering is what this continual access to information will do to storytelling.
Here’s the issue: the vast majority of stories deal with an information gap between that story’s characters. This gap between what is known and not known by different characters helps create a story’s drama.
For example, in Romeo and Juliet a main character commits suicide because he believes his lover is dead. But what happens to that story when the characters can instantly find out they’re both alive?
Or what about Liam Neeson’s film Taken, where a father hunts for the people who kidnapped his daughter? What happens to that story when the father can instantly know the address where his daughter is being kept? Or his daughter can access an online database to learn of her kidnapper’s true nature when she first meets him?
Less than two hours later, one fan with an eagle eye named Paul Bateman recognized this carving and distressed ruin to be the language seen on a piece by the late Star Wars conceptual artist Ralph McQuarrie, who inspired the aesthetic for what we all visualize as the world of Star Wars. Bateman, also a concept designer and art director, called McQuarrie one of his friends.
@RealRonHoward this is as near as I can get you Ron, Ralph winged it as far as I know, but it was a font he came up with for Yavin 4. pic.twitter.com/qmOulMr38B
(9) BOARDING PARTY. News From ME’s Mark Evanier had a bad experience with an airline – not so unusual – but received a surprisingly frank answer when he complained, as he explains in “Fright Attendants” and “Fright Attendants: Part 2”.
What occurred is kind of difficult to explain but basically, one employee of the airline — a lady at the gate — told me something. A second employee — a flight attendant — told me something different during the boarding process. I said, “That’s not what I was told” and I repeated what the lady at the gate had told me and I even gave her name. The attendant accused me of…well, basically lying about her telling me that. “That’s contrary to our policies, sir,” she said. “No one would tell you that.” My traveling companion backed me up strongly and she was accused of being rude and suddenly this flight attendant was announcing that she had the power to have us both removed from the flight.
…The Customer Relations lady was totally with me and clearly frustrated. She said — and this is a quote — “When I fly now, I just do whatever they say, even when I know it’s wrong because you never know what’s going to set some of them off. If they somehow get it into their heads that you’re a threat to the flight, you’re in for a lot of trouble.”
This is a woman who works for this airline. She is in a position to receive and deal with complaints about flight attendants who misbehave. And she is afraid of the occasional flight attendant on that airline. She also told me that recently, they had two incidents where flight attendants ejected pilots’ wives.
Rhetorical Question: If you were a pilot and they thought maybe your wife was a threat to the safety of the flight, what does that say about you?
(10) ON WRY. Anatoly Belilovsky entertains with “Dear Editor” at the SFWA Blog. The story doesn’t lend itself to an excerpt, but his bio does —
Anatoly Belilovsky was born in a city that went through six or seven owners in the last century, all of whom used it to do a lot more than drive to church on Sundays; he is old enough to remember tanks rolling through it on their way to Czechoslovakia in 1968. After being traded to the US for a shipload of grain and a defector to be named later (courtesy of the Jackson-Vanik amendment), he learned English from Star Trek reruns and went on to become a pediatrician in an area of New York where English is only the fourth most commonly used language. He has neither cats nor dogs, but was admitted into SFWA in spite of this deficiency…
(11) TODAY IN HISTORY
September 27, 1967 — My Mother, The Car begins to air in France. Unlike Jerry Lewis, the French did not find any deep, previously unappreciated cultural significance in this export.
September 27, 1979 — Buck Rogers in the 25th Century began its regular episodic run (after the telefilm) with a show titled “Planet of the Slave Girls.”
September 27, 1985 – The Twilight Zone returns to television with brand new episodes.
(12) ON THE ROAD AGAIN. Our literary cartographer, Camestros Felapton, discusses how the territory and the story interact in “The Plot Elements of Fantasy Maps”.
There is a new good article on fantasy maps at The Map Room Blog: http://www.maproomblog.com/2017/09/the-territory-is-not-the-map/ The point being that much of the discussion of fantasy maps is not the map as such but rather the implausible territories that they depict. Fair point. However, I wanted to loop back to the post I made on the simplified Middle Earth map. A successful fantasy geography requires the terrain to shape the story and The Lord of the Rings does this well. It matters to the story whether the characters are in forests or towns/villages or mountains.
Roads, paths trails
These imply places where the story covers a greater distance. Travel is either uneventful or involves encounters with others. Leaving the path implies not only danger but a shift from the main objective. They are also (random encounters aside) boring but may also imply more personal conversation between characters. Outside of fantasy, a road trip has its own conventions and expectation of bonding between travellers.
When Hurricane Maria raked Puerto Rico last week as a Category 4 storm, it cut off electricity and communications island-wide, including at the Arecibo Observatory, one of the world’s largest radio telescopes.
Initial reports, received via ham radio, indicated significant damage to some of the facility’s scientific instruments. But Nicholas White, a senior vice president at the Universities Space Research Association, which helps run the observatory, tells NPR that the latest information is that a secondary 40-foot dish, thought destroyed, is still intact: “There was some damage to it, but not a lot,” he says.
“So far, the only damage that’s confirmed is that one of the line feeds on the antenna for one of the radar systems was lost,” White says. That part was suspended high above the telescope’s main 1,000-foot dish, which lost some panels when it shook loose and fell down.
(14) UNUSUAL ANIMATION. NPR says “‘Loving Vincent’ Paints Van Gogh Into A Murder Mystery”. It would be hard to pay homage to Vincent Van Gogh with more fervor or devotion than filmmakers Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman bring to Loving Vincent, in which they’ve not only created thousands of new oil paintings in his style, but also made him the subject of a murder-mystery.
It begins in 1891, a year after Van Gogh died, when a postman discovers an undelivered letter the artist wrote to his brother Theo, and sends his very reluctant, very drunk son to deliver it — a task that will prove difficult. The postman’s son discovers that Theo died soon after Vincent did, and then tries to find others who knew him, realizing as he goes that the death that was said to be a suicide, may not have been so cut and dried.
All of this is about what you’d expect of a film — in this case an animated film — that means to make a mystery of Van Gogh’s suicide. But if you’re picturing “animation” in the Disney-drawn or Pixar-computerized senses of the word, you’ll need to think again. In Loving Vincent, it’s as if the paint has leapt directly from Van Gogh’s canvases to the screen, and then started moving.
But US rapper B.o.B. is crowd-funding the launch of satellites to see if he can get some evidence to the contrary.
The rapper, whose real name is Bobby Ray Simmons Jr, has been a vocal proponent of the Flat Earth theory – the claim the Earth is, in fact, a disc and not spherical.
Some proponents of the Flat Earth theory claim NASA employees guard the edge of the world to prevent people falling off.
“In 60 seconds you have to consider 70 options,” says my rickshaw driver Raju, leaning over his shoulder as we weave through traffic. We’re navigating the infamous congested streets of Bangalore, and he’s explaining the rules of the road.
Having lived in India for two-and-a-half years, I get what he means. Not an inch of the road is wasted – if there’s a gap, a scooter will fill it. Vehicles travel bumper to bumper. Overtaking is attempted as frequently as possible. Indicators and wing mirrors are optional extras. Most drivers seem to rely on the incessant honking of nearby vehicles – almost a form of echolocation.
But there is method to the madness. Drivers deftly navigate around manoeuvres that would lead to accidents in the UK, and offenders rarely elicit more than a mutter. They’ve adapted to predictable unpredictability.
…Other companies, including Volvo, Jaguar Land Rover and Honda have made similar pledges.
These are undoubtedly ambitious plans – but it is important to recognise their limitations.
They are not saying they will get rid of diesel or petrol cars completely. They are simply promising to make electrified versions of them available.
It is also important to recognise what “electrified” actually means.
It can, of course, refer to fully electric battery powered vehicles. But it can also be used to describe hybrids – and hybrids come in many forms
(18) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Don’t Say Velcro” is a pretty wild musical in which Velcro® protects its trademark!
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Edd Vick, Keith Kato, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Cat Eldridge, and Chip Hitchcock for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Steve Davidson.]
I don’t know whether these are the only examples or just the ones I’ve found so far. A few writers also have retweeted others’ photos or added support in text messages.
By John Hertz: We met for lunch and disagreed. Sometimes we drank tea instead; he sometimes brewed it himself. We each kept saying we should meet more often.
From a letter I wrote on September 12th to Tom Sadler, of The Reluctant Famulus:
I’m still stunned by the loss in two days of Jerry Pournelle and Len Wein, the Cosmic Joker striking a right and a left. Both men were giants. How different. They had in common rising above a substantial time of physical suffering. Neither was daunted. Both went on with their work of creation, and indeed their joy in fellowship, not despite but regardless of what befell them.
Dum vivimus, vivamus.
You’ve seen the Latin tag (“while we live, let us live”) before; it’s in Heinlein’s Glory Road, that scathing satire of male folly. I don’t mean it satirically, it’s true enough. If you took Glory Road at face value, let’s talk about that another time. Wein too. I’ll talk about Pournelle here.
I didn’t know until his death that his church was St. Francis de Sales (Catholic), two miles from his house. I knew that his wife, now widow, sang in the choir. He must have known that St. Francis de Sales was the patron saint of writers and journalists.
Of course there was a bagpiper at the interment. He proved to be Eric Rigler, who had played at Ronald Reagan’s funeral. Rigler gave us “Going Home”, “Loch Lomond”, and “Amazing Grace”. Jennifer Pournelle and Phillip Pournelle took the flag from the coffin – an inter-Service courtesy; Jennifer and their father had been in the Army, Phillip in the Navy. A bugler gave us “Taps”. Phil paid the piper, and – I wondered if he would – said so.
Here’s a photo Alex Pournelle took of Phil, coat off, helping with a floral display.
At the house were fine white flowers from Cat Rambo the 30th President of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America on behalf of SFWA, acknowledging its 7th president, his leadership and his contribution.
The public memorial next day was a funeral Mass at St. Francis de Sales. Most of us were from the s-f community, fans or pros or both. I was particularly glad Toni Weisskopf could come. I sat in the back, behind Serena & Tim Powers, next to Keith Kato. The organ was a Rodgers pipe-digital hybrid. Here’s a photo Alex took from the front.
Jenny, the eldest child, gave the eulogy. She cited his generosity. When you achieved, she said, his respect was spontaneous. He was happiest if you went and lived your own dream.
She gave examples of his open hand and – I’ll say it – his big heart. I happen to be acquainted with cases where he helped people he could only have disapproved of. I don’t mean with crumbs, either. One thing can override another.
Afterward were at least three gatherings. For a few bad moments I thought I’d have to miss them all. I managed to reach two. Here’s another Alex photo. We’re at the Four and Twenty restaurant (no blackbird pies; I should have ordered rye bread) in Van Nuys. The man standing is Henry Vanderbilt, founder of the Space Access Society.
Jerry had four or five careers, some simultaneous. He did a lot in aerospace. He isn’t named in John Glenn’s 1999 memoir. The mind tends to submerge pain. When you heard the story of how Jerry tried to distract John who nevertheless kept a point of light centered in its target circle, I hope you thought of Matt Dodson’s tests in Space Cadet. The prize fool in that book too is a man.
If I said there were eight million stories in the great and terrible world of computers, I might be off several orders of magnitude. Jerry was big there. He must have written six thousand words a week for his column in Byte. That was just a summary of results; “We do this stuff so you won’t have to.” He continued from what may have been the first blog – in the sense of the World-Wide Web and Weblog; in another career, blog was a drink – and his house had become Chaos Manor. No computers, however, in the front room.
File 770 is in the world of a third career. Jerry was the first winner of the Campbell Award for best new writer; nine times a Hugo finalist. His work with Larry Niven didn’t start Niven collaborating – Niven had already done The Flying Sorcerers with David Gerrold – but it generated stories about stories. Not every pro must be active among fans, nor vice versa; but Jerry’s fannish history was long. He could silp a Nuclear Fizz in the Insurgent fashion. His vices were very fannish vices.
There are a lot of leftists in s-f, including me. Why? Let’s talk about that another time. We fans boast of tolerance. More accurately, I’ve groaned, we march behind a banner that says Tolerance. I’ve complained of Diversity for you but not for me – “you have to accommodate me, but I don’t have to accommodate you.” The death of Nat Hentoff in January reminded me Hentoff was there first, warning against Freedom of speech for me but not for thee.
Politically Jerry was a conservative. We did not give him an easy time of it. At his death some of us burst into flame. The suggestion there might be reason behind De mortuis nil nisi bonum (another Latin tag, “nothing but good of the dead”) was attacked as white-washing. To our credit Tom Whitmore said “May we remember him for the good he did.” Likewise among pros Spinrad, Silverberg, Rambo, Martin, to name just four who were plenty divergent from him.
Long-active Los Angeles fan Lee Gold – she edited Tom Digby’s Fan Guest of Honor book for the 51st World Science Fiction Convention – wrote this.
Back in the days of the second LASFS clubhouse [1977-2011; the L.A. Science Fantasy Society sold its third in April 2017], I was standing on the front porch chatting with friends, and Jerry came up to tell me that he’d been talking with the guys off at the side of the clubhouse and they’d decided that no writer had ever voluntarily retired from writing, they’d only stopped when editors or publishers had stopped buying their stuff. (I think I later read this in Campbell’s or Heinlein’s memoirs, but that’s another story [LG’s parenthesis]).
Anyway as a good would-be Arisian, I ran this generalization quickly down my Visualization of the Cosmic All [E.E. Smith allusions] – and said, “John Campbell.”
“You’re right!” cried Jerry Pournelle and strode back to tell the guys.
I turned back to my conversation.
Five or ten minutes later, Pournelle came back.
“I told the guys what you said,” he told us, “and we all agreed that you were right.”
I’ve been telling that story in Jerry’s honor for decades.
Not just that he was willing to admit that he’d been wrong – something that a lot of people find difficult.
But that he was willing to tell others that he and they had been wrong, and who had said so.
A woman. A younger woman.
I hope I always have that much intellectual integrity.
An Austin-area woman said Ain’t It Cool News founder Harry Knowles sexually assaulted her at an Alamo Drafthouse event — but the reason she’s speaking out now is she believes change is coming.
“Harry Knowles groped me, opportunistically, on more than one occasion,” said Jasmine Baker. “I cannot just stay silent. I am not interested in remaining silent.”
The specifics are described at the link. Knowles denied the accusations.
Alamo Drafthouse has severed ties with Harry Knowles, who had a business relationship with the owners, and had cofounded a convention with them.
(2) WRITING ABOUT HEINLEIN. Farah Mendlesohn answers some pointed questions about her forthcoming Heinlein book in “Q&A with Ken MacLeod”.
KMM: Heinlein is a hero to and an influence on the ‘right’ of the SF field. I remember many years ago being surprised to hear you being enthusiastic about Heinlein, and I probably asked you something like this: As a feminist of the left, why do you find Heinlein so intriguing?
FJM: Heinlein has always been a hero to parts of the left as well, particularly to the anarcho-left of which I am, loosely, a part both as a feminist and because I’m a Quaker (Quakers invented anarchist decision practice, and it’s interesting that anti-pacifist Heinlein has a soft spot for them). But to return to the question: at the age of 12-20 it was because he was pretty much the only male sf writer writing women who had jobs, adventures, access to engineering jobs, and who got to be spies and ornery grandmas, and be liked by men who weren’t as smart as they. Believe me, when you are a smart girl in school, that’s pretty reassuring. In my late teens and twenties I started to get annoyed with the requirement to be “sexy” but attracted to the arguments about consent; frustrated with the performativity of the romances, and irritated by everyone wanting babies but attracted to the arguments about the different ways to construct families. This time round I’ve been fascinated by the way it’s clear that Heinlein knows what his women are up against; I’ve ended up with very different readings of Podkayne, Friday and Maureen (To Sail Beyond the Sunset) in which all three of them become resisters of other people’s narrative of them.
The crowdfunding appeal has reached 80% of its goal as of today.
The “Ensign’s Prize” are multiple titles of pirated Heinlein works that Ginny Heinlein won in a lawsuit. She donated them to The Heinlein Society for fund-raising. Until now we have limited sales only to THS members, but as you can see in the link, purchases are now open to anyone while supplies last. There are different numbers of remaining copies of the various titles, and being a pirated version, the quality is what it is (though surprisingly not bad).
More info at the Society website:
There are some rare editions here to add to your collection. A prime example is the only known hardcover edition of The Notebooks of Lazarus Long with lettering by D.F. Vassallo.
The numbers of available individual copies varies by book with no individual copies of Methuselah’s Children. Only a handful of individual copies of Stranger in a Strange Land (5) are available. All individual copies will be offered for a suggested donation of $60 each except for The Notebooks of Lazarus Long which is offered for a suggested donation of $75 each with shipping & insurance on single books at $6.00 in the US. Overseas shipping will be determined at time of donation.
These books/sets are used as a fundraiser to support projects and programs of The Heinlein Society, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization dedicated to paying it forward. Proceeds from these books/sets will be used to support projects and programs of The Heinlein Society such as the scholarship program and Heinlein For Heroes.
This link will take you to a page where you can read a description of the books being offered and then click the “Details” link at the bottom of the page to be directed to the ordering site.
New Species of Dinosaur Is the Largest Land Animal to Ever Walk the Earth
One hundred million years ago, a colossal creature the size of a 737 thundered through the forests of South America, picking trees clean with its head extended five stories in the air and sending ferocious T. rex-like therapods scattering like mice below its trunk-sized legs. It’s the largest dinosaur ever found — a titanosaur so huge that its skeleton can’t even fit into a single room in its home at the American Museum of Natural History. Scientists this week unveiled their first study on the ancient beast alongside its new, official name, Patagotitan mayorum, or, The Giant from Patagonia. Astoundingly, the Big Apple’s biggest resident wasn’t even fully grown when it died (scientists don’t know if it was male or female) — and an even more whopping cousin could be waiting to be uncovered, experts said Wednesday. “This animal [hadn’t] stopped growing at the time of death,” said Diego Pol, an Argentina paleontologist who helped dig it up.
…The scientists reproduced the skeleton in 3-D models, but the specimen was too large to fit in any local museum, Pol said, so they sent a fiberglass cast to New York last year. It has been welcoming visitors to the museum’s dinosaur floor ever since — literally, because its massive skull extends all the way out into the elevator bay. “[It’s] probably one of the world’s great selfie spots,” said John Flynn, the museum’s curator of fossil mammals.
Mission plan: retrieve lost votes from deep within black hole of democratic disillusionment…
Cash’s statement says the agency “will be the anchor for our domestic coordination and the front door for our international engagement”, but there’s no detail on the agency’s name, budget, start date or anything else that would tell us what it will actually do. The fact that its future existence was first revealed to media in the city of Adelaide suggests one mission: help revive the city’s economy, which has struggled since auto-makers left in recent years (along with many votes for the governing Liberal Party).
(6) MAKE YOURSELF A GIBSON. Martin Morse Wooster says, “I finished Conversations With William Gibson and learned about this story, which was new to me. This is from an episode of the Geek’s Guide To The Galaxy podcast by John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley, who interviewed William Gibson in 2012. This probably took place in the early 1990s.
GEEK’S GUIDE: So when I first started going to science fiction conventions, I heard this funny story about you, and I’ve never been sure if it was true or if it happened the way I heard it, and I was wondering if you knew what I was talking about. It was this story where you go into a hotel to check in, and you say, ‘Hi, I’m Mr. Gibson,’ and everyone acts all shocked at the hotel.”
GIBSON: It was the Beverly Hills Hotel, and I don’t know, somebody had checked me in.It was when I had started doing some contact screenplay work after the ALIEN 3 script. So I got there, and it was like, you know, I couldn’t figure out what was going on. The desk people looked gobsmacked and really unhappy. So the bellman takes me up to this very fancy suite, and in this suite there’s a table lavishly arrayed with very expensive wines and liquors and expensive floral displays, and a bit thing that says, ‘The Beverly Hills Hotel welcomes Mel Gibson.'”
And so I looked at the bellman, and I said, ‘No, no, I’m not him. Take this stuff away.’ And he said, ‘No, no, no, you can keep it.’ And I said, ‘What am I supposed to do with it?” He said, ‘Call some friends, have a party.'”
…[DJ Jean] Shepherd decided that he wanted to get a book on the bestseller list—an imaginary book. “What do you say tomorrow morning each one of us walk into a bookstore, and ask for a book that we know does not exist?” he asked his listeners. The book they decided to ask for was I, Libertine, its author, Frederick R. Ewing, published by Excelsior Press, an imprint of Cambridge University Press. And ask they did…
…What is true, though, is that this book became real through sheer force of will. After only a few months, the story broke: I, Libertine was a hoax. But then it was un-hoaxed: Theodore Sturgeon, a friend of Shepherd’s, actually wrote the book, and Ballantine Books published it.
(8) TODAY’S DAY
Batman Day
The purpose of Batman Day is to celebrate the anniversary of the character’s first ever appearance, which was in Detective Comics #27 way back in May 1939. Since those early comic book appearances, Batman has grown into one of the world’s best-loved and most recognizable fictional characters, and is the focal point of television shows, animated cartoons, video games and Hollywood blockbusters.
(9) TODAY IN HISTORY
September 26, 1937 – The first episode of The Shadow was broadcast.
September 26, 1987 — Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered.
With Star Wars: The Last Jedi still upcoming, John Boyega let confirmation of a few major cameos — specifically, Princes William and Harry — slip out in an interview on BBC Radio (via Screen Rant). As he stated:
I’ve had enough with those secrets. They came on set. They were there. I’m sick of hiding it. I think it was leaked, anyway. There were images. Every time I get asked, I have to dodge it. I’m tired of dodging it. They were there. Tom Hardy was there too.
Hardy is certainly a major cameo. But he’s actually just one of many big names to show up in a film from the Star Wars franchise.
As fans look forward to the surprise appearances that are set to come in The Last Jedi, we take a look back at the history of celebrity cameos in the Star Wars franchise — including some you may not have noticed or heard about.
(12) FAN FEUDS. I was struck by David Gerrold’s observation about fan feuds, from a long post mainly about something else, although I’ve kept the first line for context. What he says about fan feuds is spot on.
Yes, I did ask Jody Wheeler and Carlos Pedraza to back off on the Axanar stuff — not just because of my respect for Alec Peters, but also because of my equal respect for Jody Wheeler and Carlos Pedraza, both of whom I have worked with. Fan-feuding helps no one. It hurts everyone. It destroys possibilities. It destroys opportunities. (I know of two entities who decided not to engage with Jody and Carlos because of their efforts in the anti-Axanar movement.) I speak from a half-century of direct experience on this.
But yeah, my bad. I should know better than to ask fans to disengage from a feud. Especially this one. I should have known better because internecine warfare is always more important than mutual support and partnership in any endeavor. It’s much more fun to have enemies — war is the most profitable human product, because it gives you not only the illusion of power and authority, it creates the opportunity to control how others think and act…
J.K. Rowling has been accused of idea theft, and vice versa, so many times that there’s a whole Wikipedia page for “legal disputes over the Harry Potter series.” The earliest was American writer Nancy Kathleen Stouffer, who sued Rowling for infringement in 1999, when only three of the books had been published (although it was already clear that the series was turning a handsome profit). Stouffer claimed that she’d invented the word “muggle” in her vanity-press book The Legend of Rah and the Muggles, and that another of her works featured a character named Larry Potter. This is thin enough—but the court didn’t just rule that the similarities were too vague to amount to much. It actually found that even Stouffer’s weak evidence may have been fabricated.
Two other cases involve Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight and Cassandra Clare’s Darkhunter series.
(14) ON OR OFF THE SHELF? The Washington Post’s Michael Cavna, in “Banned Books Week: Why are illustrated books being challenged more than ever?”, notes that the top two books in the American Library Association’s list of banned books for 2017 were graphic novels. He then looks at graphic novels that censors fund particularly irritating.
Some industry observers say that the spike in challenges to illustrated books can be attributed to the recent rise in the literary form’s popularity and accessibility on bookshelves, as well as the subject matter.
“Graphic novels are more popular and widely read than ever,” said Charles Brownstein, executive director of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, an advocacy organization. “Their authors are speaking directly to the real concerns of their audiences in an accessible way.”
Brownstein noted, too, that the illustrated form can attract challenges that other books might not.
“There are many other factors to weigh, including the medium’s reliance on the power of the static image,” he said. “Graphic novels are frequently reduced to a single image or sequence of images that can be removed from the larger context of the work, and used to justify censorship. Comics’ use of images and words give the stories added power that resonates with audiences, and makes works like ‘This One Summer’ and ‘Drama’ even more compelling. These works must be considered as a whole to be fully appreciated. When that happens, the complexity, nuance and sophistication of the stories can be fully appreciated.”
The CBLDF director pointed, as well, to how comics are perceived by many parents and officials. “In many cases, comics are still regarded as lesser reading,” he said. “Some people don’t expect comics to have the kind of complexity or depth that earned ‘This One Summer’ the Caldecott honor and ‘Drama’ a Stonewall honor. We’ve seen cases where comics are challenged because the conversations that they raise were unexpected.”
In this year of all things King, with nearly two dozen movies, TV shows or miniseries based on Bangor’s own horror-meister in production or on screens, it makes perfect sense to add another Stephen King-thing to what has become a total-immersion experience.
Enter “Sleeping Beauties,” a novel that’s a team effort by Stephen King and his son, Owen. Published by Scribner, it goes on sale on Tuesday, Sept. 25 ($32.50 hardcover).
The duo’s first tandem effort on a novel, “Sleeping Beauties” is an ambitious work that combines some age-old Stephen King themes — the potential end of the world, the battle between good and … well … not so good, if not evil — with a distinctly sci-fi premise.
Simply put: Women around the world are falling asleep, and being covered in wispy cocoons. They may never wake up (and in true Stephen King fashion, those who try to rouse the females from their slumber quickly learn that doing so was a big, bad, bloody mistake).
Is the human race’s demise insured? Will a world with no women become a reality (for a time)? Or is there another option that we just can’t see on this side of the story? Good questions, all
(16) UNDER THE HAMMER. The Daryl Litchfield Collection of Arkham House & H.P. Lovecraft goes on the auction block October 5. So do a great many volumes by Edgar Rice Burroughs and other sff authors.
More than 300 lots of fine literature, from the 18th through the 21st centuries, are included in this exciting auction. Headlining the sale is the Daryl Litchfield collection of Arkham House and H.P. Lovecraft. The collection includes the earliest work by Lovecraft and a near complete collection of Arkham House publications. Many other science fiction and fantasy first editions are also offered, including nearly fifty lots of Edgar Rice Burroughs novels, many in the rare original dust jackets. Also featured are more than fifty lots of Black Sparrow press limited editions of the writings of Charles Bukowski, many signed by the author. Other rare literary works from the last 300 years are also offered, including titles by Dickens, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Stowe, Twain, Wilde, and many others.
(18) VIDEO OF YESTERDAY. In March 1971, General Mills introduced the chocolate-flavored Count Chocula and the strawberry-flavored Franken Berry.
[Thanks to Keith Kato, Cat Eldridge, David K.M. Klaus, Martin Morse Wooster, Michael J. Walsh, Wendy Gale, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories.. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern, who inquires “Not having read all the Dune books (by Frank Herbert, and then the non-FH prequels), and not remembering all of those I did read… did any of the individual sandworms have names (i.e., not ‘Shai Halud’ (sp?), which was the general name). E.g. ‘Big Fella,’ ‘Spot,’ ‘Masterful Mighty Wriggler of Doom,’ ‘Fluffy’?”]
Historical Writers of American PastWords Award. Photo from Not A Blog.
The Historical Writers of America (HWA), an organization for all historical writers, fiction and nonfiction, presented the initial set of PastWords awards at a banquet in New Mexico on September 23.
HWA created the PastWords to recognize creators who have produced an outstanding body of work. The 2017 winners include:
Novelist Larry McMurtry;
Larry’s son, songwriter James McMurtry;
Fantasy writer George R.R. Martin;
Nonfiction author Hampton Sides;
U.S. Congressman John Lewis, writer Andrew Aydin and illustrator Nate Powell, the creative team behind the three-volume graphic novel, March.
Several of the winners are well-known to File 770 readers. Two I needed help recognizing are Sides and James McMurtry —
Acclaimed journalist and author Hampton Sides has written about Kit Carson, North Pole explorer George Washington De Long, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s killer in Blood and Thunder, In the Kingdom of Ice and Hellhound on His Trail.
Songwriter and guitarist James McMurtry’s albums include “Too Long in the Wasteland,” “Saint Mary of the Woods” and “Complicated Game.” Awards committee chair Paul Davis said, “McMurtry may not seem an obvious choice for a group focused on history, but his characters are often haunted by the past: a vanishing America, the dust kicked up by a Midwest combine, a rekindled romance in the old part of town. Stephen King called him one of America’s fiercest songwriters. We agree.”
George R.R. Martin was one of the few winners present to personally accept his award. He wrote on Not A Blog:
…I’m told the award was designed by Gage Prentiss, the artist who designed the H.P. Lovecraft Statue that’s to go up in Providence…
In any case, I appreciate the award, and all the kind words about my work. It’s kind of cool to learn that even writers of honest to god real historical fiction and non-fiction enjoy my own fake histories.
Flash Review: Star Trek Discovery “The Vulcan Hello” and “Battle at the Binary Stars”
By Chris M. Barkley: STAR TREK: Discovery, The Vulcan Hello and Battle at the Binary Stars, (4 out of 4 stars, 2017) with Sonequa Martin-Green (First Officer Michael Burnham), Doug Jones (Lieutenant Saru), Michelle Yeoh (Captain Philippa Georgiou) and James Frain (Ambassador Sarek). Created by Alex Kurtzman and Bryan Fuller, Story by Bryan Fuller and Alex Kurtzman. Teleplay by Bryan Fuller and Akiva Goldsman. Directed by David Semel (The Vulcan Hello) and Adam Kane (Battle at the Binary Stars).
When a Starfleet monitor goes silent on the edge of Federation space, the USS Shenzhou, commanded by Captain Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) is sent to investigate. The situation becomes complicated when an inspection of the monitor shows deliberate damage and an unknown object in a nearby asteroid field is obscured from their sensors. The First Officer, Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) performs a flyby of the object, which turns out to be a Klingon scout ship. The occupant attacks her without provocation, which in turn starts a cascading sequence of events that will bring the Federation and the Klingons to the brink of war…
I went into last night’s airing of Star Trek Discovery with very low expectations. While I was very familiar with the works of writer-producers Alex Kurtzman (Sleepy Hollow, Hawaii Five-O), Bryan Fuller (Hannibal, Pushing Daisies), Akiva Goldsman (Fringe) and director David Semel (House, Heroes), there was no guarantee any of them could crack and tame a vast franchise like Star Trek.
I have watched EVERY version of Star Trek over the past fifty plus years and I must say that I am far more excited by them than I was by the first three episodes of The Orville.
The first thing that I was impressed by was the way the dynamic was set between Commander Burnham and Captain Georgiou in the first sequence on the desert planet. Some complained that a captain and her XO on a long walk to perform a minor mission was about as unusual as those Kirk and Spock missions, I saw it as a chance for the show to set a tone with the main characters, which is clearly a master-apprentice situation.
With seven years of duty as a First Officer under her belt, I was beginning to think that the series was setting Burnham up to be the captain of her own vessel. But no, that rug got pulled out from underneath me right away when she’s nearly killed by a Klingon warrior and then nearly fried to death by radiation exposure. So I thought, hey, maybe she’s not ready for command after all.
By the time the third and fourth acts roll around, I was really in a tizzy; is Burnham actually thinking of doing something that very few characters have attempted in Star Trek… DID SHE ACTUALLY…Jose, Mary and Joseph! In the very first freaking episode? At the end of the second episode we find Burnham in a deep dark hole that is perfectly designed to tantalize viewers to come back for more.
After watching the pilot episode on Sunday, I immediately went to social media outlets to gauge the reactions of the fans. And, as I suspected people were polarized about nearly every single aspect of the show. Some of the more negative ones were:
It was too dark (both in the tone of the story and the lighting of the sets).
What, a war with the Klingons? That’s not what I signed up for.
Michael Burnham is not very likeable. The focus should have been on Captain Georgiou.
It’s a production design in search of a story.
Hey, those weird-looking Klingons aren’t canon.
Lens flare? REALLY?
And the inevitable, I don’t wanna pay for Star Trek!
Well people, you’re going to have to face up to a few facts: we don’t live in 1966, 1987, 1993 or 2005 anymore. Things change, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse and that applies to television drama, too. The best dramas challenge their audiences in every way. And in the crowded state of television today, ST: Discovery is going be competing for the time and attention of audiences against dozens of streaming, cable and network shows.
Having said that, I still think that ST: Discovery has a chance to be one of the best versions of Star Trek yet AND one of the best shows on television, period.
I remember not being very impressed by a good majority of the first season episodes of the Next Generation. But I stuck with it and was rewarded on the fifteenth episode, “11001001” one of the best of that season.
Similarly, with Deep Space Nine (which had an exceptionally brilliant pilot, BTW), Voyager and Enterprise, I’ve heard all of the same cycle of complaints. Look, my advice to the naysayers is this: either give the show a chance to find its sea legs or find something else to watch. If you don’t want to watch on CBS All Access, you’ll just have to wait for the release of the DVDs some point next year.
To the people who don’t want to pay for Discovery, fine. But I’ll just point out that an All Access subscription costs just $5.99 a month or $9.99 without those pesky commercials. If you pay streaming or cable fees for Shameless, Game of Thrones and Homeland, this is no different than paying for that. True, CBS has only two original programs streaming at the moment (the other being the Good Wife spinoff, The Good Fight) but they do have several thousand episodes of shows to watch anytime. And it’s a relatively low-cost monthly subscription that won’t tie you to a long-term contract.
CBS has the rights to Star Trek and they are demanding money from fans in order to produce a quality show on this scale. But the question remaining is will Discovery turn out to be a great entry into the pantheon of Star Trek lore or a bust?
I’ll end on this note; if Discovery had been just a another clone of the Original Series or the Next Generation with a weekly meet and greet of alien species, problem stories and planetary intrigue, I would have been incredibly disappointed. All I can say is that I am suitably impressed by the pilot and it far exceeded my own meager expectations. I believe that these creators know what they’re doing and are building a credible and, dare I say it, fascinating storyline that I am more than eager to follow.
And I’m willing to pay for it; I subscribed to CBS All Access earlier today.
When the season ends, I’ll be back with a full review.
(1) STAR TREK DISCOVERING. Camestros Felapton takes you from photon soup to Klingon nuts: “Thoughts on Star Trek Discovery Episodes 1 & 2”. Although not especially spoilery, good form still demands a SPOILER WARNING!
However, Russell T Davies made a smart move from which Discovery could have learnt. Set a new series in a time that follows a catastrophe that creates both a bridge to the previous series, and allows the viewers to re-encounter familiar protagonists in a new way. That doesn’t imply a new Star Trek would need to have a post-apocalyptic vibe, rather some sort of event that disrupted galactic civilisations sufficiently that the Federation is needing to rebuild (a gamma-ray burst, a contagion that spreads via transporter beams, a big-bad alien did more damage than usual).
Discovery hasn’t taken that option but the setting kind of looks like it did. The technology is both old and new, the spaceships look both updated and more grungy, some aliens are now more familiar and closer to humans (e.g. the Vulcans) while others have become even more alien and Star Fleet understands them less (the Klingons). The whole feel of the show implies a setting where change has occurred but which claims that it is about changes that will occur and I find that somewhat annoying.
The team behind Star Trek: Discovery could be forgiven for feeling under pressure. They had to deliver a show that satisfies one of the most rabidly pedantic fan bases out there, while still catering to normies only not really au fait with Trek beyond a few action movies about good-looking people having fights in space.
But, despite a reportedly troubled gestation, they’ve somehow managed to deliver, audaciously using their first two episodes to set up several seemingly key characters before wiping the slate clean in the closing moments. In truth, the first two episodes that arrive on Netflix today – ‘The Vulcan Hello’ and ‘Battle at the Binary Stars’ – function more as a standalone TV movie, setting up the tone and feel of the show while leaving about as much wiggle room for the future as conceivably possible.
(3) ROCKET SCIENCE. Video highlights of last Saturday’s Atlas V launch of NROL-42 from Vandenberg. Via United Launch Alliance.
Geek’s Guide to Britain I’m in a room that, in normal circumstances, is not fit for human habitation. It features a number of big red buttons surrounded by illuminated yellow rings – just in case. “Push button to switch off Jet. Press only in case of extreme emergency,” the signs read, informatively.
This is the Torus Hall, a 40,000m3 space the size of an aircraft hangar with two massive fly-towers that house 1,100-tonne doors to seal the room off from an adjacent assembly hall. The walls and ceiling are two metres thick. The atmospheric pressure inside the hall is kept lower than pressure outside so that in the event of a breach, air would be sucked in rather than vented.
The hall houses possibly the closest thing on Earth to the centre of a star: the Joint European Torus, the world’s biggest fusion reactor at the Culham Science Centre in Oxfordshire, UK. Jet is a tokamak, a circular structure shaped like a doughnut that employs powerful magnets to control that stuff of science fact and fiction: plasma.
…Jet is a European project involving 40 laboratories and 350 scientists. In 1997 it set a record, producing 16MW of fusion power from a total input power of 24MW.
Iter, however, is a scaled-up version of Jet currently under construction in the south of France planned to open in 2025 – a fusion reactor that aims to use 50MW to generate 500MW for 500 seconds. Iter, in turn, will pave the way for Demo, one or more proof of concept fusion power stations, with South Korea aiming to put a Demo live in 2037.
For now, however, Jet is the world’s biggest fusion device and proves that nuclear fusion can generate power – it’s just not big enough to create more power than it uses….
…So what does this all mean? Well, it means that for a non-self-pubbed author, often none of their annual earnings from a book are directly related to how many of those books sell in a year (or any other specified time frame). In fact, depending on how the advance is paid out, three-quarters or more (even all!) of the author’s earnings from a book are disbursed before the book has sold a single unit.
Like so:
Book is contracted: 40% of the advance (“signing installment”) goes to the author. Books sold to date: 0.
Book is turned in and accepted: 20% of the advance (“delivery and acceptance installment”) goes to the author. Books sold to date: 0
Book is published in hardcover: 20% of the advance (“hardcover installment”) goes to the author. Books sold to date: 0 (there may be pre-orders, but the sales don’t usually start being counted until this time).
Book is published in paperback: Final 20% of the advance goes to author. Books sold to date: Hopefully some! But even if the number is zero, the final installment gets paid out (if so few books are sold that the publisher foregoes the paperback release, there’s still usually the contractual obligation to pay out)….
THE RAZOR’S EDGE, GUILDS & GLAIVES, and SECOND ROUND: A RETURN TO THE URBAR anthology kickstarter is nearing its goal! If we can reach $20K by Noon, September 28th, EST, then there will be an open call for submissions for the remaining slots in the anthologies. If you have a story idea that fits one of the anthology themes, write it up, revise it, polish it, and send it in for consideration. I’ve posted the guidelines below. Note that the kickstarter still has a few days left and there are still some pretty awesome reward levels left…
“It was an impossible sell,” said Reiner. “The funny thing about it was that before I made ‘Stand by Me’ — I had made ‘Spinal Tap’ and ‘The Sure Thing’ — I had a meeting with this executive at Paramount. She said, ‘We love your films. What do you want to do next? I said, ‘Well, you don’t want to do what I want to do.’ She said, ‘No, that’s not true. I want to do what you want to do. I said, ‘No, no. You want me to do what you want to do.’ She said, ‘No, no. I want to do what you want to do. What is it?’ I said ‘The Princess Bride.’ She said, ‘Well, anything but that.’”
Helping each other deal with a difficult boss, Vizzini
Vizzini is clearly not an easy man to work for, and he doesn’t treat Fezzik or Inigo very well as his employees. After they kidnap Buttercup, Fezzik expresses his opinion that it’s not right to kill an innocent girl, but Vizzini isn’t interested in his hired help doing anything beyond what they are hired to do. He immediately insults Fezzik, and when Inigo voices his agreement with Fezzik, insults him as well before turning on Fezzik again. Once Vizzini walks away though, Inigo goes to Fezzik and the two rhyme together happily, much to Vizzini’s annoyance.
The scene captures how the two friends have each other’s back in this perhaps less than ideal work environment. Inigo didn’t have to voice his agreement with Fezzik after seeing Vizzini’s reaction, but he did. Then he tries to turn the mood around by doing something Fezzik enjoys and excels at: rhyming. It reminds Fezzik that he’s more than the dumb brute Vizzini wants him to be, and that Inigo recognizes his gifts, even if Vizzini does not.
(9) DONATIONS NEEDED. The father of Pierre Pettinger died recently due to a house fire, and Pierre has set up a Gofundme campaign to help cover the funeral expenses — Pierre Pettinger [Sr.] Funeral Fund. Their target is $13,000.
While it appears that insurance will cover the costs of repairing and restoring the home, the expenses for Dad’s funeral were significant and have put some strain on all the members of our family. Pierre will be administering the funds and will see to it that they go directly to the funeral home. The goal we have set represents the total cost, but any help you would care to offer would be received with gratitude.
Pierre the younger and his wife Sandy are Fan GoH for Worldcon 76. They’ve done wonders in Masquerades for years, winning many awards, and Pierre is Archivist for the International Costumers Guild.
(10) REED OBIT. SF Site News reports author Kit Reed (1932-2017) died on September 24 from an inoperable brain tumor.
Reed was a Best New Author Hugo nominee in 1959. Reed was up for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award three times, had a novel, Where, on the John W. Campbell Memorial Award shortlist, and received the ALA Alex Award for Thinner Than Thou. Reed’s most recent novel, Mormama, was published earlier this year.
(11) JACOBS OBIT. Harvey Jacobs (1930-2017), a 1998 World Fantasy Award nominee for his novel American Goliath, died September 24 from an infection brought on by brain cancer treatment. An author sometimes compared with Vonnegut and Roth, he published his first story in 1951, contributed regularly to New Worlds and F&SF in the Sixties, and continued to produce a modest number of sff stories thereafter.
(12) TODAY IN HISTORY
September 25, 1989 — Fox TV’s Alien Nation premiered.
(13) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOYS
Born September 25, 1930 — Shel Silverstein (author, humorist)
Born September 25, 1951 – Actor Mark Hamill
Born September 25, 1952 – Actor Christopher Reeve
(14) POURNELLE MEMORIAL. Jennifer Pournelle’s eulogy of Jerry Pournelle, delivered at the memorial service held September 16, has been posted at Chaos Manor.
He was generous as a husband. He adored his wife. He loved deeply, and passionately, and never anyone more than her. The parable of the widow’s alms teaches us the truest measure of generosity: when that of which you have the least, you give most freely. So by “generous,” here I do not mean with obvious things like, like gifts and jewelry and public events (though with those too). I mean that, although always awkward as a schoolboy in showing his feelings for her, he did his utmost with what he knew how to do: jokes, and puns, and praise, and respect, and walks, and stalwart support of her career, and four sons.
And especially—and this is most telling—by listening to her, and to her alone. Certainly not always. Probably not often enough. But I do not believe that any other human being on the planet had the capacity to tell him “no” and make it stick. Because of his generous love for her, he listened, and learned how to be a better father, and an outwardly more affectionate one. To say the words out loud. She taught him that the great light of a generous heart need not be hidden beneath a bushel. He listened, and let his generous light shine on her, and everyone around them.
It certainly shined on us, his children. He was generous as a father. OK, let’s start with the obvious. There was never a check he would not roll his eyes, groan, and write. School fees? Of course. Wrecked car? Harrumph. No problem. College expenses? Well, it’s your job to get the best deal you can. It’s my job to pick up the rest. Airplane tickets, tailored mess uniforms, personal sidearms? Here you go. Need a tool, a meal, a book, a computer, a printer, a place to sleep, a bottle of white-out? There’s one here somewhere in the house. Go find it. Help yourself.
But his real generosity was with imagination. He believed in space. He believed in adventure. He believed in deep truths in myth, and deep lessons in legend. He believed in science. He believed in nature. He believed in fun. And he combined them all. Road trips, hiking trips, shooting trips; flights of imagination; cooking (badly), reading (well), brainstorming plot lines, standing up to bluster, figuring out what you need to know, then figuring out who could tell you. He’d pick up a phone in a heartbeat if he thought he could marshal support or make a contact. He’d invite you to dinners across thresholds you’d never otherwise cross—and then always pick up the tab.
And when you finished what you started, or achieved what you’d aimed, or found success in your field, his outpouring of respect was spontaneous and generous—and never seeking to curry your favor….
(15) KEITH KATO. Keith Kato posted his own extensive memories of Jerry Pournelle and account of the memorial service at The Heinlein Society website.
Of course he knew not only all the Mercury astronauts, but also knew the candidates who did not make the cut. Jerry once told a funny story about turning John Glenn upside down and shaking him over a smoky fire, while fake-arguing with the staff, and dropping manhole covers on the floor. Glenn kept a dot in a circle, and his heartbeat remained rock steady (except for one momentary blip when the manhole covers landed), after which Glenn glaringly said “You son of a [redacted for the delicacy of our readers’ um…eyes?]!”
I learned this recipe from Walt Williams, whose debut book, Significant Zero, is all about the making of videogames. And also about the making of Walt Williams who, for years, has been involved (both seriously, tangentially, and in every way in between) with the production of some of the best videogames ever created: Bioshock, Star Wars Battlefront, Mafia II, Spec Ops: The Line. Mostly Spec Ops, which is one of the darkest, most haunting, and most narratively daring games I’ve ever played. Spec Ops was Williams’s masterpiece and Significant Zero is the story of everything it took to make it and everything it cost him — beginning years before, ending years after. Sure, it’s a workplace memoir (more or less): A writer writing about writing, which can be the most annoying thing in the world. Except for one thing.
He became so famous that Time magazine put his face on the cover without needing to mention his name, just the words, “It will not burn. It will not melt.”
What Leo Baekeland invented that July was the first fully synthetic plastic.
After nine days of parties, music and larger-than-life art installations, the 2017 season of Burning Man came to a close on 4 September. In theory, all evidence of “Black Rock City” – which attracted 70,000 attendees to the dusty desert – was supposed to vanish. One of the festival’s core tenets is “leave no trace”.
However, clean-up crews found thousands of perfectly useable bicycles abandoned by attendees. Bikes are the most common form of transportation around Black Rock City, and the way they are tossed aside at the end has long been a problem.
Burning Man partners with local charities to take, refurbish and sometimes donate the bikes to needy families, but this year, the sheer number of bikes overwhelmed even these partners. An estimated 5,000 bicycles were left behind.
However, an Oxford University spinout called Animal Dynamics, co-founded by zoologist Adrian Thomas, is spending £200,000 ($260,000) to do just that. Their craft, the Malolo, is a hydrofoil-like Decavitator. Unlike its rival, the Malolo’s design is inspired by the way whales swim through water – instead of a propeller, it has the kind of large, arched tail that you sometimes spot above the water when a whale dives.
Now two years after starting work on the project, the team have begun testing their third prototype off the south coast of England. According to Thomas, they have already reached speeds of about 12 knots (13.8mph/22km/h).
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Steven H Silver, Chip Hitchcock, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Nancy Sauer, Cat Eldridge, and David K.M. Klaus for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Peer.]
Copper Cylinder Award. Design created by Peter Halasz and Rebecca Simkin.
The winners of the sixth annual Copper Cylinder Awards have been announced by the Sunburst Award Society. The Copper Cylinder is an annual members’ choice award for Canadian literature of the fantastic.
Adult Award
Company Town by Madeline Ashby [Tor Books]
Young Adult Award
The Skids by Ian Donald Keeling. [ChiTeen]
Madeline Ashby is a science fiction writer and a strategic foresight consultant. Her debut series about killer robots included vN and the sequel, iD. Her essays and criticism have appeared at BoingBoing, io9.com, WorldChanging, Creators Project, Arcfinity, and Tor.com. Since late 2014, she has been a regular columnist for the Ottawa Citizen.
Ian Donald Keeling is an author and actor. His short fiction and poetry have previously appeared in Realms of Fantasy, On Spec, and Grain. He is also on the faculty for sketch and improv at Second City in Toronto.
