De ansatte (The Employees) by Olga Ravn, (Gyldendal)
Novellette
“Krinoline og
kedsomhed“ (“Crinoline and Boredom”) by Gudrun Østergaard, (Krinoline
og kedsomhed, Science Fiction Cirklen)
Short story
“Verdensherredømme“
(“World Domination”) by Jakob Drud (Lige under overfladen 13:
De fremmede (Just Below the Surface 13: The Strangers)), Science Fiction Cirklen
“Sortskørt“
(“Black Skirt”) by Kenneth Krabat (Lige under overfladen 13:
De fremmede), Science Fiction Cirklen
The award is presented annually after
nomination and voting among Danish science fiction readers. This was the eighth
time the prize was given out.
The four categories cover shorter science fiction
texts (less than 40,000 words) published in Danish for the first time the
previous year.
Lise Andreasen of the Science Fiction Cirklen handles
the award logistics, and her blog is the primary information source.
Nominations are open for the 2020 Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund race, which will pick a North American fan to attend Concentric: Eastercon 2020 in Birmingham, UK. This will be the second consecutive eastbound race because, say the administrators, “Looking at the next five Worldcons and Worldcon bids, that makes the most sense, we think.” The nomination deadline is October 31.
Once
the nominations are settled, voting to elect the TAFF delegate will run from November
4 until January 12. The winner will
attend Concentric: Eastercon 2020 from April 10-13, 2020, and assume the duties of the next North American
administrator of TAFF upon returning home.
If any North American fan is considering standing for the 2020 TAFF race, now is the time to line up your nominators and have them contact the administrators informing them of the nominators’ intentions. This year candidates will need three North American fans and two European fans known to the Administrators to nominate you: these people must contact the current Administrators by October 31, 2019, informing them of whom is being nominated for this distinct honour. Potential delegates will also need to send an official statement of standing for TAFF to the administrators (contact information provided below) listing their nominators, plus a 101 word platform statement, and a $20 (USD) bond fee sent via PayPal to [email protected]. Again, the official nominating period will close on October 31, 2019.
More details about TAFF can be found at David Langford’s
excellent website, taff.org.uk
If you are
interested in standing for the 2020 TAFF Race or would like to nominate some
deserving fan, please contact North American Administrator Geri
Sullivan, at [email protected], or Johan Anglemark, the European
Administrator, at [email protected].
(1) A MATTER OF RESPECT. Edmund Schluessel has returned
from Fantasticon
2019, in Copenhagen, Denmark with a burden: “I attended as a Special Guest this
weekend in Copenhagen. There has been discussion within the Nordic countries’
fan community about the event’s poster and some other issues of insensitivity
and I discuss those here.” — “Saints
and people who do not think like us (Fantasticon 2019)”.
…Nisi [Shawl] was talking about altruism. They talked about being a saint. They talked about sacrifice, even putting yourself in harm’s way to protect someone who would do harm to you.
The Chair gave an impromptu speech just afterward. The poster was excellent, he told us all, and complaints about it all came from “people who do not think like us.”
Then started the filk sing-a-long. Only quick action by an observant program participant kept the projector screen from telling the whole banquet room that we’d be singing along to the tune of “The Darkies’ Sunday School.” That quick action did not prevent the flippant reference to rape in the lyrics. “It was like something from the ’70s,” that quick intervenor said later.
Why am I amped up to 11 about all this? At a fundamental level, fandom is about storytelling. And something I’ve seen in every single fan community I’ve interacted with, going back something like 25 years now, is that the story fandom always tells best is when it’s telling itself “we are tolerant, we are open, we accept everyone.” Too often that story is a myth.
The Afrofuturist authors whose work and ideas this convention we’re supposed to be celebrating — if we won’t listen to their message, are they “people who do not think like us”? The convention members who saw something wrong with the poster, whether or not they could clearly articulate it — are they not part of “us”? Am I not part of “us”? You put my name on the damned poster!
(2) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Where do you go for a Javanese
dinner? For Lisa Tuttle and interviewer Scott Edelman the answer was: Dublin. Join
them in Episode
105 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.
Lisa Tuttle
My guest this time around is the award-winning writer Lisa Tuttle, who I caught up with one night after she was done with a 7:30 p.m. reading, which meant that by the time we began our meal it was a later than usual dinner (for me, at least). We hopped in a cab and took off for at Chameleon, an Indonesian restaurant I’d found via Eater’s list of 38 essential Dublin restaurants. The restaurant offers set menus from various regions, including Sumatra and Bali. We decided to go with Java, but added to that some pork bell bao, and the 10-hour Javanese anise short rib of beef, a signature dish of theirs which turned out to be my favorite thing eaten all weekend.
Lisa and I both had wonderful experiences 45 years ago at the 1974 Worldcon in Washington, D.C., me because it was my first Worldcon, she because of winning the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. She’s accomplished a lot in the 4-1/2 decades since, including being awarded the 1982 Nebula for Best Short Story for “The Bone Flute.” She’s published seven short story collections, starting with A Nest of Nightmares in 1986 and most recently Objects in Dream in 2012, plus more than a dozen novels, the first of which was Windhaven (1981), written in collaboration with George R. R. Martin, who was my guest back in Episode 43. She was nominated for an Arthur C. Clarke award for her novel Lost Futures. She edited the pivotal anthology Skin of the Soul: New Horror Stories by Women (1990) as well as Crossing the Border: Tales of Erotic Ambiguity (1998).
We discussed the amusing series of mishaps which prevented her from learning she’d won the 1974 John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best New Writer as early as she should have, the first thing Harlan Ellison ever said to her, how the all-male table of contents for a major horror anthology inspired her to edit her classic female horror anthology Skin of the Soul, the way emigrating from the U.S. to the UK affected her writing, why an editor said of one of her submitted novels, “I love this book, but I could no more publish it than I could jump out the window and fly,” how she and George R. R. Martin were able to collaborate early in their careers without killing each other, what she’d do if she were just starting out now as a writer, the reasons contemporary acknowledgements sections of novels should be shortened — and so much more.
“Seventy years ago, Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier,” said Guillaume Faury, CEO of Airbus Helicopters. “We’re trying to break the cost barrier. It cannot be ‘speed at any cost.'”
The 96-year-old Yeager wasn’t happy. Last week, he filed a lawsuit in federal court, arguing that Airbus had infringed his rights by using his name without permission.
“By using Yeager’s name, identity, and likeness and federal registered trademarks in the infringing material, Airbus impaired the ability of General Yeager to receive his established earning potential,” Yeager’s lawyers wrote.
Yeager says that he visited Airbus in 2008 and told Airbus it would cost at least $1 million to use his name and likeness in promotional materials. Airbus refused his offer.
(4) VISUAL CONREPORT. Roberto Quaglia shares some great views in his video “Glimpses of an Irish Worldcon – Dublin 2019.”
(5) HARD SF. Here’s Rocket Stack Rank’s annual “Outstanding Hard Science Fiction of 2018” with 27
stories that were that were finalists for major SF/F awards, included in
“year’s best” SF/F anthologies, or recommended by prolific reviewers
in short fiction.
Included are some observations obtained from highlighting specific recommenders and pivoting the table by publication, author, awards, year’s best anthologies, and reviewers.
Among publications, it should be no surprise that Analog has the most hard SF stories here with 9 stories (33%), followed by the anthology “Twelve Tomorrows” with 4 stories.
Hard SF stories seem under-represented (8%) among SF/F awards with only 8 stories (and only 3 stories for major awards like Locus and Sturgeon) out of 101 total award-nominated stories from the 2018 Best SF/F. The only winner was “Bubble and Squeak” for the magazine-specific Asimov’s Science Fiction Readers’ Award.
As for RSR, we recommended 13 stories (3 award worthy), were neutral on 11 stories, and only recommended against 3 stories (view by RSR rating).
(6) NOT ALL TROLLS. “Neil
Gaiman On The Good Kind of Trolls” at Literary Hub is his introduction to The Complete and
Original Norwegian Folk Tales of Asbjørnsen and Moe in which Gaiman discusses his
love of Norway and Norwegian folklore.
You will meet youngest sons and foolish farmers, clever women and lost princesses, adventurers and fools, just as in any collection of folk stories from anywhere in Northern Europe. But the Norwegian Folktales come with trolls, and if Asbjørnsen and Moe did not see them, as Kittelsen did, then they got their stories from people who had, people who had seen the trolls walking in the mist at dawn.
(7) EMMY REMEMBRANCES. The 2019 Primetime Emmys included an
Memoriam segment. Some of the names of genre interest: Jan-Michael Vincent,
James Frawley, Ron Miller, Cameron Boyce, Rutger Hauer, Stan Lee, and Rip Torn.
(8) TODAY IN HISTORY.
September 23, 1846 — Planet Neptune was discovered.
September 23, 1962 — The Jetsons debuted its very first episode, “Rosey the Robot”. The series which was produced by Hanna-Barbera would run for three seasons.
September 23, 1968 — Charly was released, starring Cliff Robertson and Claire Bloom. Based on “Flowers for Algernon” which is a sf short story and a novel by Daniel Keyes. The short story, written in 1958 and first published in the April 1959 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1960. The novel was published in 1966 and was joint winner of that year’s Nebula Award for Best Novel with Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born September 23, 1897 — Walter Pidgeon. He’s mostly remembered for his role in the classic Forbidden Planet as Dr. Morbius, but he’s done some other genre work being in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea as Adm. Harriman Nelson, and in The Neptune Factor as Dr. Samuel Andrews. (Died 1984.)
Born September 23, 1908 — Wilmar House Shiras. Her story “In Hiding” was submitted in 1948 to Astounding Science Fiction, where it was published. She published two sequels in the magazine: “Opening Doors”, and “New Foundations”. The three stories would become the first three chapters in the novel, Children of the Atom. Other than a handful of short fiction, I think it’s her only work. Neither iBooks or Kindle carry anything by her. (Died 1990.)
Born September 23, 1920 — Richard Wilson. Not a writer of much genre fiction at all. His really major contribution to fandom and to Syracuse University where he worked as the director of the Syracuse University News Bureau was in successfully recruiting the donation of papers from many prominent science fiction writers to the Syracuse University’s George Arents Research Library. The list of those writers includes Piers Anthony, Hal Clement, Keith Laumer, Larry Niven and Frederik Pohl. And, of course, himself. It has been called the “most important collection of science fiction manuscripts and papers in the world.” (Died 1987.)
Born September 23, 1944 — Anne Randall, 75. She was Daphne, a servant girl in the original Westworld which if memory serves me correctly also had Yul Brynner in it. She’ll show also in Night Gallery in the “Tell David” episode as Julie.
Born September 23, 1956 — Peter David, 63. Did you know that his first assignment for the Philadelphia Bulletin was covering Discon II? I’m reasonably sure the first thing I read by him was Legions of Fire, Book 1—The Long Night of Centauri Prime but he’s also done a number of comics I’ve read including runs of Captain Marvel , Wolverine and Young Justice.
Born September 23, 1959 — Frank Cottrell-Boyce, 60. Definitely not here for his sequels to Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang. (Horrors!) He is here for such writing endeavors as Goodbye Christopher Robin, his Doctor Who stories, “In the Forest of the Night” and “Smile”, both Twelfth Doctor affairs, and the animated Captain Star series in which he voiced Captain Jim Star. The series sounds like the absolute antithesis of classic Trek.
Born September 23, 1963 — Alexander Proyas, 56. Australian director, screenwriter, and producer. He’s best known for directing The Crow (which is superb), Dark City, I, Robot (nor so superb) and Gods of Egypt. His first, shot in Australia of course, was Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds. It’s genre. Has anyone seen it?
Born September 23, 1957 — Rosalind Chao, 61. She was the recurring character of Keiko O’Brien with a total of twenty-seven appearances on Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. In 2010, a preliminary casting memo for Next Gen from 1987 was published, revealing that Chao was originally considered for the part of Enterprise security chief Tasha Yar.
(10) BURNING COLD. The second official trailer for Frozen
2 dropped today.
Take, for example, the 2017 flop Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. Luc Besson’s film, which is itself based on comics originating in the 1960s, spends way too much time explaining stuff that never becomes relevant. The eponymous City of a Thousand Planets is a space station broken down into multiple districts, as the exposition explains, but the action of the film barely takes place in any of them.
Flash Gordon, meanwhile, understands that drama is built between characters and then focuses on them. Everyone in the movie, from Flash to Ming to Flash’s larger-than-life ally Prince Vultan, has their own distinct wants, and the story emerges from these characters interacting and trying to reconcile these wants. This movie gets at the humanity behind these characters, even if they happen to be aliens
(12) ON THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. Pursuing a thought experiment
inspired by a list of 21st Century books, Peace Is My Middle Name started a hypothetical
list of “100 best books of the Twentieth Century” as if it had been compiled in
1919. Their titles
are in a comment and ought to have been mentioned yesterday, except the
comment landed in the spam and wasn’t spotted for hours. Well worth your time.
(13) FOR YOUR EARS. Several episodes of a reading of
Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments are available for listening at the BBC.
In this brilliant and long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood answers the questions that have tantalised readers for decades. In The Testaments, set fifteen years after the events of her dystopian masterpiece, the Republic of Gilead maintains its grip on power, but there are signs it is beginning to rot from within. Now the testimonies of three different women bring the story to a dramatic conclusion. Today we hear from the infamous Aunt Lydia, and Agnes, a young girl who has only known life in Gilead.
With the digital equivalent of trowels and shovels, archaeologists are digging into the code of early video games to uncover long forgotten secrets that could have relevance today.
“You and your team of archaeologists have fallen into the ‘catacombs of the zombies’.” A miserable situation, to be sure. But this was the chilling trial that faced players of Entombed, an Atari 2600 game, according to the instruction manual.
The catacombs were an unforgiving place. A downward-scrolling, two-dimensional maze that players had to navigate expertly in order to evade the “clammy, deadly grip” of their zombie foes. An archaeologist’s nightmare.
Released in 1982, Entombed was far from a best-seller and today it’s largely forgotten. But recently, a computer scientist and a digital archaeologist decided to pull apart the game’s source code to investigate how it was made.
…Like intrepid explorers of catacombs, Aycock and Copplestone sought curious relics inside Entombed. But they got more than they bargained for: they found a mystery bit of code they couldn’t explain. It seems the logic behind it has been lost forever.
Into the labyrinth
Maze-navigating games were very common back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but the method used to generate a maze varied, depending on the programmer. In the age of Atari, games had to be designed with incredible skill because the computer systems that ran them were so limited. (Read more about the mind of a maze-builder.)
Although the blocky, two dimensional mazes from entombed might look simple by the standards of today’s computer graphics, in 1982 you couldn’t just design a set of mazes, store them in the game and later display them on-screen – there wasn’t enough memory on the game cartridges for something like that. In many cases, mazes were generated “procedurally” – in other words, the game created them randomly on the fly, so players never actually traversed the same maze twice.
But how do you do get a computer program to avoid churning out a useless maze with too many walls, or an otherwise impenetrable floorplan?
(16) SNOWPIERCER
BACKSTORY. On September 24, Titan Comics will release Snowpiercer The
Prequel: Part 1: Extinction, a brand-new prequel graphic novel set before
the extinction incident that led to the events of the original Snowpiercer
graphic novel trilogy. It’s written by Matz (Triggerman, The Assignment),
with art by the original Snowpiercer graphic novel artist Jean-Marc
Rochette, shown in this promotional video creating an iconic scene from the book.
[Thanks to bill, JJ, Cat Eldridge, Chip Hitchcock, Martin Morse Wooster,
John King Tarpinian, Mike Kennedy, Edmund
Schluessel ,Eric Wong, and Andrew
Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing
editor of the day OGH.]
Imagine a world where your phone is too big for your hand, where your doctor prescribes a drug that is wrong for your body, where in a car accident you are 47% more likely to be seriously injured, where every week the countless hours of work you do are not recognised or valued. If any of this sounds familiar, chances are that you’re a woman.
Invisible Women shows us how, in a world largely built for and by men, we are systematically ignoring half the population. It exposes the gender data gap–a gap in our knowledge that is at the root of perpetual, systemic discrimination against women, and that has created a pervasive but invisible bias with a profound effect on women’s lives. From government policy and medical research, to technology, workplaces, urban planning and the media, Invisible Women reveals the biased data that excludes women.
The author and feminist campaigner who successfully pushed for Jane Austen to be featured on the UK’s £10 note, called her £25,000 win on Monday night a huge relief.
“Obviously it’s a huge honour, but mainly because it has the official endorsement of scientists and so it can’t be dismissed now, and that’s so important,” she said. “Writing this book was hellish. It really tested my mental strength to its limits, partly because it was a really emotional book to write because of the impact this is having on women’s lives and how angry and upsetting it was to keep coming across this gap in the data. But also it was very challenging because it was a book about the whole world and everything in it, and I had to work out how to synthesise that into something manageable.”
When she began writing, she said, she gave a talk at the launch of the women’s health all-party parliamentary group, during which she said “very innocuous things that are very well-known, like how women are more likely to be misdiagnosed with a heart attack, how female animals are not being included in studies, how women are having adverse drug reactions”. She received an angry response from some of the male doctors present.
“It was a real shock to me. As someone who doesn’t have a science background, I’ve always looked up to scientists as objective and rational. Even though I knew there was this bias in medical science, I thought that hearing the evidence, they would react in a ‘We need to fix this’ kind of way rather than a ‘What is this stupid woman talking about?’ kind of way,” she said. “I was really aware this book was going to ruffle feathers and I was very worried about how it would be received by people who might feel defensive about it, that I wasn’t going to be able to do justice to this incredibly important topic and that I would make a mess of it and it wouldn’t have the impact I knew it had to have.”
She is the fifth woman to win the prize in five years.
By Steve
Vertlieb: Here
is, perhaps, the most exciting moment of my recent pilgrimage to Los Angeles
and Hollywood, California. I’ve been a huge fan of character actor Nehemiah
Persoff for some sixty years. We’d begun a degree of correspondence in May
2019. I was watching an episode of tv’s The Untouchables during a
televised weekend retrospective in the late Spring and there, of course, was
the great Nehemiah appearing as a guest in three separate episodes of the
classic television series.
I
began to wonder whatever became of this marvelous actor and so, before retiring
for the evening, I started to research Mr. Persoff’s whereabouts on my
computer. As luck would have it, I found him and wrote him a rather hasty
letter of personal and lifelong admiration. To my shock and utter astonishment,
he responded within five minutes.
I
told him that I was coming West in a few months, and wondered if there was even
the most remote possibility that I could personally pay my respects. Born in
Palestine (now Jerusalem) on August 2nd, 1919, this gifted actor was about to
turn one hundred years old.
Mr.
Persoff generously consented to a visit and so, on Wednesday, August 28, 2019,
my brother Erwin and I commenced our long drive to his home. We spent two hours
at the feet of this remarkable human being, and shared a virtual Master Class
on the art and history of screen acting. He spoke reverently of working with
Marlon Brando at The Actor’s Studio, and in On The Waterfront, as well
as studying with Elia Kazan in the late nineteen forties.
When
Billy Wilder was casting Some Like It Hot, he’d chosen Edward G.
Robinson to play Little Bonaparte, opposite George Raft and Pat O’Brien. When
the two had a falling out, however, someone suggested Nehemiah Persoff for the
part. The rest, as they, is history. When Barbra Streisand sang the moving
“Papa, Can You Hear Me” in Yentl, she was singing to Nehemiah
Persoff in a performance that, I’d like to believe, most effortlessly captured
this remarkable actor’s gentle soul.
I
shall remain forever grateful to have spent such joyous hours with this blessed
soul … and for the gift of your friendship, dearest Nehemiah, I can only
express my heartfelt gratitude. God Bless and Keep You.
One of the greatest actors that the cinema has ever known … the fabulous Nehemiah Persoff at age 100 years.
Clutching the hand of greatness … A very wonderful moment with the great Nehemiah Persoff at his home on Wednesday, August 28th, 2019.
My little brother Erwin with the wonderful Nehemiah Persoff.
The
2019 Primetime Emmy Awards were presented September 22 in Los Angeles.
Game of Thrones claimed the Emmy
for outstanding drama series, the
fourth win for best drama, tying it with the other four-time victors in the
category — Hill Street Blues,L.A. Law, The West Wing and Mad Men.
Peter
Dinklage also took home his fourth Emmy for his role as Tyrion Lannister.
“This
all started in the demented mind of George R.R. Martin,” executive
producer David Benioff said on stage.
Outstanding Drama Series
Game of Thrones
Outstanding Comedy Series
Fleabag
Outstanding Limited Series
Chernobyl
Outstanding Drama Actor
Billy Porter (Pose)
Outstanding Drama Actress
Jodie Comer (Killing Eve)
Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series
Peter Dinklage (Game of Thrones)
Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series
Julia Garner (Ozark)
Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series
Bradley Whitford (The Handmaid’s Tale)
Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series
Cherry Jones (The Handmaid’s Tale)
Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series
Jason Bateman, Ozark —
“Reparations”
Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series
Jesse Armstrong, Succession —
“Nobody Is Ever Missing”
Outstanding Comedy Actor
Bill Hader (Barry)
Outstanding Comedy Actress
Phoebe Waller-Bridge (Fleabag)
Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series
Tony Shalhoub (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel)
Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series
Alex Borstein (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel)
Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series
Luke Kirby (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel)
Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series
Jane Lynch (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel)
Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series
Harry Bradbeer, Fleabag — “Episode
1″
Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series
Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Fleabag
— “Episode 1″
Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series
Jharrel Jerome (When They See Us)
Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series
Michelle Williams (Fosse/Verdon)
Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited Series
Ben Whishaw (A Very English Scandal)
Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited Series
Patricia Arquette (The Act)
Outstanding Directing for a Limited Series, Movie, or Dramatic
Special
Chernobyl
Outstanding Writing for a Limited Series, Movie, or Dramatic
Specia
Craig
Mazin, Chernobyl
Outstanding Television Movie
Bandersnatch (Black
Mirror)
Outstanding Competition Program
RuPaul’s Drag Race
Outstanding Structured Reality Program
Queer Eye
Outstanding Unstructured Reality Program
United Shades of
America with W. Kamau Bell
Outstanding Variety Talk Series
Last Week Tonight
With John Oliver
Outstanding Variety Sketch Series
Saturday Night Live
Outstanding Variety Special (Live)
Live In Front Of A Studio Audience: Norman Lear’s All In The
Family and The Jeffersons
Outstanding Variety Special (Pre-recorded)
Carpool Karaoke:
When Corden Met McCartney Live From Liverpool
Outstanding Directing for a Variety Series
Don Roy King, Saturday Night Live
— “Host: Adam Sandler”
Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series
Last Week Tonight
With John Oliver
Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special
Hannah
Gadsby for Hannah Gadsby: Nanette
Informational
series or special
Anthony
Bourdain Parts Unknown
[Apologies for any of these that were really given during the
Creative Arts Emmys broadcast last weekend, though I’ve tried to sort that
out.]
…Neither realized how difficult it would be to find, acquire and get permission to use the letters.
They searched archives at UCLA, AFI, the academy, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, the Library of Congress and the Kennedy Library at Boston University. They reached out to auction houses and families with personal collections.
Lang even hired private detective David Gurvitz to track down relatives for permission to publish the letters. “The copyright was with the writer, not the receiver,” he said.
(2) WE ASKED FOR IT. Saturday’s Scroll works hard for a
living linked to The Guardian’s list of best books of the 21st
Century, leading some of us to ask what a journalist would have picked in 1919
as the best books of the early 20th Century. The legendary Kyra took up the
challenge —
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz The Hound of the Baskervilles Five Children and It The Phoenix and the Carpet Peter Pan The Scarlet Pimpernel I Am A Cat The House of Mirth The Story of the Amulet The Enchanted Castle A Room With a View Anne of Green Gables The Man Who Was Thursday The Wind in the Willows The Secret Garden Howard’s End O Pioneers! The Valley of Fear My Antonia
(3) YE OLDE DAYS. Fanac.org just scanned and posted
9 of the 12 issues of my genzine Scientifriction
published between 1974 and 1983. I recommend Dave Locke’s column “Beyond the
Shift Key” in issue
#11 (1979) as perfectly illustrating the kind of faneditorial diplomacy I am
known for and alluded to in comments yesterday…. and provoked Dave to yank my
chain —
“What is your shtick this time” [Mike] queried me. “If I ask for fanhumor, what are you going to give me? Will you pretend to write a pain story while actually telling everyone why you think science fiction writers should be individually certified by the U.S. Department of Agriculture?”
“I’ve never believed that SF writers should – “
He waved his hand again. “It was just an example,” he said. “And if I show a preference for something that will bring in a little discussion, what then?” He looked at me in a severe manner. “Will you draw a framework to support the philosophy that fandom has many direct parallels with the practice of cannibalism, and somehow use it to talk about the time you fell out of a rollercoaster into the cotton candy concession?”…
(4) DRINK TANK. Or if you prefer a really fresh fanzine,
there’s The
Drink Tank 413 – “Dublin 2019” edited by Chris Garcia and Alissa McKersie.
Cover by Vanessa Applegate.
We take a look at the Dublin WorldCon through the eyes of Chairman James Bacon, Hugo nominee Chuck Serface, all-arounf good guy Fred Moulton, the photos of Jim Fitzpatrick, and a MASSIVE trip report by Chris! Cover is by Vanessa Applegate!
(5) INSIDE BASEBALL. Dorothy Grant raises a good question
about fictional realism in “How
long does recovery take?” at Mad Genus Club.
…In Science Fiction and Fantasy, we often employ handwavium – healing spells, regen(eration), nannites, divine favour, what have you. And that’s excellent, when needs must, the plot drives, and it’s worldbuilt in. (Who wouldn’t go to the clinic if they could?)
…Actually, that last sentence is an interesting source of complications. Who wouldn’t? Why would they be unable to get there, or to use it? What’s it like to be a person with more consequences for every risk than those around you, and how does that change their plans? As Brandon Sanderson put it in his Second Law of Magic, “Limitations are more interesting than powers.”
(6) MAIL EARLY FOR HALLOWEEN. The US Postal Service will release
its Spooky
Silhouettes stamp issue on October 11.
The Spooky Silhouettes stamps feature digital illustrations with Halloween motifs rendered as black silhouettes in eerily backlit windows. The images include a cat with an arched back beneath a raven perched on a bare tree branch, all against a yellowish-green background; two ghosts against an orange background; a spider and a web against a red background; and three bats against a purple background.
(7) COSMONAUT OBIT. [Item by Cora Buhlert.] Siegmund Jähn, the first German person in space, has died
aged 82. Because he was from East Germany and went into space with the Soviets,
his contributions to space explorations were sadly ignored in West Germany
until the unification. I had never even heard of Siegmund Jähn until the 1990s,
even though I shared the usual SFF geek’s interest in all things space.
Siegmund Jähn was also the first and likely
only person to officiate at a wedding in space. During his spaceflight in 1978,
Jähn took along a doll of Sandmännchen (Little Sandman), star of a popular East
German children’s program (though West German kids loved it, too, and I had a
Little Sandman doll as a kid, courtesy of my Great Aunt Metel from East
Germany). It just happened that his Soviet colleague Valeri Bykovski had also
brought along a toy, a doll named Masha from some Russian children’s program.
And on a lark, Jähn married the two dolls aboard Soyuz 31. The doll wedding was
apparently filmed, though the footage was never broadcast, because East German
television objected to Little Sandman getting married.
In addition to “Deep Space Nine,” Eisenberg also had roles in the TV movie “Amityville: The Evil Escapes” and the features “The Horror Show,” “Playroom” and “Beverly Hills Brats,” all in the late 1980s.
(9) TODAY’S DAY.
September 22 — Hobbit Day sponsored by the American Tolkien Society. “Tolkien Week is observed as the calendar week containing September 22, which is always observed as Hobbit Day. Tolkien Week 2019 will begin Sunday, September 22 and end Saturday, September 28.”
(10) TODAY IN HISTORY.
September 22, 1968 — Irwin Allen’s Land of the Giants aired “The Crash”, the first episode of the series. Starring Gary Conway and Don Matheson, it would last two seasons.
September 22, 1973 — The Canadian-produced series The Starlost aired its first episode. The program was originally conceived by Harlan Ellison, who changed his credit to “Cordwainer Bird” and ran away from it as fast as he could.
(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born September 22, 1917 — Samuel A. Peeples. Memory Alpha says that he’s the person that gave Roddenberry the catch phrase he used to sell Trek to the network: “[As] fellow writer Harlan Ellison has credited him with the creation of one of the most famous catch phrases in Star Trek-lore, ‘[Gene Roddenberry] got “Wagon Train to the stars” from Sam Peeples. That’s what Gene said to me. They were at dinner and Sam Peeples, of course, was a fount of ideas, and Gene said something or other about wanting to do a space show and Sam said, “Yeah? Why don’t you do Wagon Train to the stars?”’” (Died 1997.)
Born September 22, 1952 — Paul Kincaid, 67. A British science fiction critic. He stepped down as chairman of the Arthur C. Clarke Award in April 2006 after twenty years. He is the co-editor with Andrew M. Butler of The Arthur C. Clarke Award: A Critical Anthology. He’s also written A Very British Genre: A Short History of British Fantasy and Science Fiction and What It Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction.
Born September 22, 1954 — Shari Belafonte, 65. Daughter of Harry Belafonte, I first spotted her on Beyond Reality, a Canadian series that showed up when I was living in upstate Vermont. You most likely saw her as Elizabeth Trent in Babylon 5: Thirdspace as that’s her most well-known genre performance.
Born September 22, 1982 — Billie Piper, 37. Rose Tyler, companion to the Ninth and Tenth Doctors. She later starred as Brona Croft/Lily in the Penny Dreadful series. Not really genre, but she‘s in the BBC adaptation of Philip Pullman’s The Ruby in the Smoke and The Shadow in the North where she’s Sally Lockhart, a Victorian orphan turned detective.
Born September 22, 1971 — Elizabeth Bear, 48. I’ve enjoyed many of her novels down the years including Ancestral Nights. I’m also fond of her very early SF in the form of the Hammered, Scardown and Worldwired novels. And now you get you get to hear the very first time she read one of her stories, “The Chains That Refuse” as she let us put it up on Green Man.
Born September 22, 1981 — Maria Ashley Eckstein, 38. She’s voice of Ahsoka Tano on Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Star Wars Rebels, and Star Wars Forces of Destiny. She also voices Dagger on the Ultimate Spider-Man series. Did we mention she’s 38? Not 27 or 37? 38!
Born September 22, 1985 — Tatiana Maslany, 34. Performer of the multiple clones role in Orphan Black. Show won the Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form in 2015 for its “By Means Which Have Never Yet Been Tried” episode. She’s currently voicing in Aja & Queen Coranda in 3Below: Tales of Arcadia.
Born September 22, 2001 — Ghreat Revelation of Ghughle, age (if that’s really applicable) 17. As Fancyclopedia 3 puts it, “Ghughle is a new and obscure fannish ghod whose Ghreat Revelation occurred to Steven H Silver on September 22, 2001 at a SMOFCon planning meeting. Within five minutes, the first schism happened when Erik Olson insisted on spelling the ghod’s name “Ghugle.” The Ghospel of Ghughle first appeared in Argentus 2 (2002).
(12) COMICS SECTION.
Pearls Before Swine presents a reductio ad absurdum about sensitivity in publishing.
In the hills of western Massachusetts, the mid-summer breeze carries the scent of honeysuckle and the sound of genius. This is Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and of its best-known artist-in-residence, John Williams.
The maestro actually lives in Los Angeles, but he says Tanglewood is where he’s done some of his best work. “Its effect on me is very spiritual and very exciting,” he said. “And I’ve written so much music here, so many film scores in this place. Right here, I come every summer – ‘Star Wars’ films, ‘Indiana Jones’ and ‘Schindler’s List,’ ‘Harry Potter,’ a great percentage of that work done physically here.”
And what astonishing work it is.
Williams is the most-honored movie composer of all time, with five Academy Awards (so far). And he has 51 Oscar nominations, more than any other living person. Only Walt Disney has more.
“I know you’re a very modest man…” said correspondent Tracy Smith. “But do you ever allow yourself that moment to step back and say, ‘Wow. Look what I’ve done!'”
… Fresh, indeed: Williams has recently reworked some of his movie music for violin, specifically for the instrument of Anne-Sophie Mutter, one of the greatest violinists ever to pick up a bow.
(14) X-FILES IMPACT. “Geena
Davis just made children’s TV more feminist”, a piece by Ann Hornaday
in the Washington Post about the efforts of the Geena Davis Institute to
promote gender equity in Hollywood, has this paragraph quoting the institute’s
president, Madeline Di Nonno:
Di Nonno recalls being commissioned by 21st Century Fox in 2017 to validate the ‘Scully effect,’ wherein Gillian Anderson’s character in ‘The X-Files’ inspired girls and young women to go into scientific fields. ‘We found that 63 percent of the women who are working in STEM today attribute it to that character,’ Di Nonno says.
Receding water levels in Spain’s Valdecañas Reservoir has exposed a stone monument dating back to between 4,000 to 5,000 years ago.
Unusually warm weather produced drought conditions across much of Europe this past summer, including Spain. The lack of rain, while a headache for farmers and gardeners, has resulted in the complete re-emergence of an ancient megalithic site known as the Dolmen of Guadalperal, as reported in The Local.
Debut novelist Christina Dalcher has been awarded The Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award 2019 for her thought-provoking and suspenseful dystopian thriller VOX, which imagines a near future in which an evangelical sect has taken control of the US and women have been limited to speaking just a hundred words a day.
(17) PASTURES OF PLENTY. A catalog of links to these book reviews can be found at Friday’s Forgotten Books: The name of the reviewer comes first, then the name of what they reviewed.
Patricia/Abbott: Beautiful Ruins by Jesse Walter
Stacy Alesi: The G List: Fiction Reviews 1983-2013
Angie Barry: New Orleans Mourning by Julie Smith
Brad Bigelow: Angry Man’s Tale by Peter de Polnay
Paul Bishop: The Cowboy and the Cossack by Clair Huffaker
Les Blatt: Sealed Room Murder by Rupert Penny; The Case of the Fighting Soldier by Christopher Bush
Elgin Bleecker: Zero Avenue by Dietrich Kalteis
Joachim Boaz: Orbit 4, edited by Damon Knight
John Boston: Amazing: Fact and Science Fiction Stories, October 1964, edited by Cele Goldsmith Lalli
Brian Busby: The Silver Poppy by Arthur Stringer
Joseph J. Corn: “The First Successful Trip of an Airship” by A. I. Root, Gleanings in Bee Culture, 1 January 1905
Martin Edwards: Dear Laura by Jean Stubbs
Peter Enfantino: Atlas (proto-Marvel) horror comics, September 1952
Peter Enfantino and Jack Seabrook: DC war comics, September 1975
Will Errickson: The Nightrunners by Joe R. Lansdale; Slob by Rex Miller
José Ignacio Escribano: Murder in the Maze by “J. J. Connington” (Alfred Walter Stewart); Hallowe’en Party by Agatha Christie
Curtis Evans: Sudden Death by Freeman Wills Crofts
Olman Feelyus: The Girl from Nowhere by “Rae Foley” (Elinor Denniston); No Orchids for Miss Blandish by James Hadley Chase
Paul Fraser: New Worlds SF, August 1965, edited by Michael Moorcock (Jeremiah Cornelius)
Barry Gardner: Down in the Zero by Andrew Vachss
Kathleen George: Scoundrels edited by Gary Phillips
John Grant: This Sweet Sickness by Patricia Highsmith; The Courilof Affair by Irène Némirovsky (translated by Sandra Smith)
Aubrey Hamilton: The Gourmet Detective by Peter King; The Defendants by John Ellsworth
Bev Hankins: Thrones, Donations by Dorothy L. Sayers and Joan Paton Walsh; The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North; False Scent by Ngaio Marsh; The Case of the Ill-Gotten Goat by Claudia Bishop
Rich Horton: Tanith Lee stories; Why Do Birds? and stories by Damon Knight; Wil McCarthy stories; Howard Waldrop stories; Steve Rasnic Tem stories
Jerry House: The Silent Death by “Maxwell Grant” (Walter B. Gibson); originally in The Shadow Magazine. 1 April 1933, edited by John Nanovic; Thriller Comics Library, 6 November 1956, “Dick Turpin and the Double-Faced Foe” written by Joan Whitford, story illustrations by Ruggero Giovanni
Kate Jackson: Stairway to an Empty Room and Terror Lurks in Darkness by Dolores Hitchens; Postern of Fate by Agatha Christie and Agatha Christie’s Murder in the Making as edited by John Curran
Tracy K: More Work for the Undertaker by Margery Allingham
Colman Keane: Darwin’s Nightmare by Mike Knowles
George Kelley: The Great SF Stories 13 (1951) edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg
Joe Kenney: Omerta by Peter McCurtin; Fire Bomb by “Stuart Jason” (James Dockery)
Rob Kitchin: Don’t Look Back by Karin Fossum (translated by Felicity David); Tightrope by Simon Mawer
B. V. Lawson: Final Proof by Marie R. Reno
Evan Lewis: “Waterfront Wildcat” (text story) by Robert Turner, Crash Comics, November 1940
Steve Lewis: “Small Chances” by Charlaine Harris, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, September/ October 2016, edited by Janet Hutchings; The Wiseman Originals by Ron Goulart; Wedding Treasure by David Wilson
Mike S. Lind: The Madhouse in Washington Square by David Alexander
John O’Neill: The Quiet Invasion by Sarah Zettel
Matt Paust: Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov
James Reasoner: Stampede by “Yukon Miles” (Dan Cushman)
Richard Robinson: The Man in My Grave by Wilson Tucker
Sandra Ruttan: Sob Story by Carol Anne Davis
Gerard Saylor: Locked Doors by Blake Crouch
Steven H Silver: “The Button Molder” by Fritz Leiber, Whispers magazine, October 1979, edited and published by Stuart David Schiff; SF Commentary edited and published by Bruce Gillespie
Victoria Silverwolf: Worlds of Tomorrow, September 1964, edited by Frederik Pohl; Counterfeit World aka Simulacron-3 by Daniel F. Galouye
Kevin Tipple: Parker Field by Howard Owen
“TomCat”: Seeds of Murder by (F.) Van Wyck Mason; “The Case of Murder on D. Hill” aka “D zaka no satsujin-jiken” by “Edogawa Rampo” (Hirai Tar?), first published in Shin-Seinen, January 1925, and as translated by William Varteresian
Mike Tooney: Old-Time Detection, Summer 2019, edited by Arthur Vidro
David Vineyard: Prelude to a Certain Midnight by Gerald Kersh
Bill Wallace: The Day of the Monkey by David Karp; The White People by Arthur Machen; Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties & the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius by Gary Lachman
(18) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “Alive at the Autoplex”
on Vimeo, Zachary Loren Jones explains how bingewatching “Survivor”
can help you survive a cosmic catastrophe!
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, Cora Buhlert, Mike Kennedy, Darrah
Chavey, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, James Bacon, and Andrew
Porter for some of these stories. Title
credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Chip Hitchcock.]
Thanks to Tad Daley for this fine series of photos of the Rotsler Award exhibit at Dublin 2019. The rest of them follow the jump.
The Rotsler Award is for long-time wonder-working with graphic art in amateur publications of the science fiction community. The current judges are Sue Mason, Mike Glyer, and John Hertz. It’s named for Bill Rotsler (1926-1997), a long-time wonder-worker. The annual award is ordinarily announced at Loscon.
(1) A CENTURY OF TITLES FROM OUR CENTURY. The Guardian says
it’s time for another clickworthy list! “The
100 best books of the 21st century” includes both fiction and nonfiction
– I count about 16 sff works on it, with Jemisin, Gaiman, and Pullman among the
authors.
Dazzling debut novels, searing polemics, the history of humanity and trailblazing memoirs … Read our pick of the best books since 2000
Writer-director James Gray is nothing if not bold. He dared to tackle a non-cynical romantic triangle in Two Lovers and a return to “high adventure” in The Lost City of Z. Neither film found the audience it deserved. With Ad Astra he has ventured into outer space, fully aware of the pitfalls: being compared to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey or, more recently, Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity. He needn’t have worried.
In fashioning an intelligent space drama for grownups he found inspiration and a through-line in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and its modern-day equivalent, Apocalypse Now. He also found theperfect actor to serve as his space traveler. The part fits Brad Pitt like a glove, and he delivers one of his finest, most nuanced performances.
When asked what motivates her to keep editing anthologies, Datlow’s genuine love of reading and sharing shines through. “I love being the person who sometimes initiates the process of the creation of a brilliant new story (by soliciting new stories by writers whose work I love) and I love rediscovering/pushing stories that I think are amazing. I want everyone to discover stories they will love and admire as much as I do. I also enjoy working with all my authors.”
(4) A POURNELLE REDISCOVERY. Paperback Warrior, a blog that reviews old thrillers, mysteries, westerns, etc. just reviewed Red Heroin, a 1969 spy thriller that also happened to be Jerry Pournelle’s debut novel, written under the pen name Wade Curtis.
“Red Heroin” is a thinking-man’s espionage novel rather than a high-speed action killfest, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. The sequel “Red Dragon” (unrelated to Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lector novel) came out in 1970, and I will definitely check it out.
(5) WARMING UP FOR THE ABDICATION. On Facebook, Walter Jon
Williams shares what he thinks would be a much better story line for the
Downton Abbey movie. The idea may explain why they haven’t already
lined him up to do a media tie-In novel…
Cities across the world on Saturday marked Batman Day by flashing the Bat Signal across buildings and into the night sky, a nod to the Caped Crusader on his 80th birthday.
Fans of the DC Comics superhero spotted his famous distress call at 8 p.m. local time in Melbourne, Tokyo, Johannesburg, Berlin, Rome and London, among other major cities.
September 21, 1937 — J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit published.
September 21, 1996 — The Dark Skies series premiered as part of the NBC lineup. A “what if aliens were manipulating all of History” premise didn’t help it last past twenty episodes.
September 21, 2012 — The character of Judge Dredd returned with Dredd. Karl Urban played Dredd and Olivia Thirlby played Judge Anderson. To date, it’s not broken even. The Stallone Judge Dredd barely broke even
September 21, 2015 — Fox Television debuted their Minority Report series based off of the Philip K. Dick work. It lasted a scant ten episodes.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born September 21, 1866 — H. G. Wells. I really don’t need to tell y’all that he’s called the “father of science fiction” along with Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback. I’m not sure how much of his fiction beyond The War of the Worlds the reading world beyond fandom remembers these days. (Died 1946.)
Born September 21, 1895 — Norman Louis Knight. His most-remembered work is A Torrent of Faces, a novel co-written with James Blish and reprinted in the Ace Science Fiction Specials line. His only other writing is a handful of short fiction. Not surprisingly his short fiction isn’t available at iBooks or Kindle but neither A Torrent of Faces. (Died 1972.)
Born September 21, 1912 — Chuck Jones. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies creator (think Bugs Bunny). His work won three Oscars, and the Academy also gave him an honorary one in 1996. (Died 2002.)
Born September 21, 1935 — Henry Gibson. I’m going confess upfront that I remember best him as a cast member of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. In regards to his genre work, he showed up on the My Favorite Martian series as Homer P. Gibson, he was in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang as an uncredited dancer, in Bewitched twice, once as Napoleon Bonaparte, once as Tim O’ Shanter, he was the voice of Wilbur in Charlotte’s Web, in The Incredible Shrinking Woman as Dr. Eugene Nortz, and even in an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the “Profit and Lace” episode to be exact in which he was Nilva, a ferengi. (Died 2009.)
Born September 21, 1947 — Nick Castle, 72. He co-wrote with John Carpenter the scripts for Escape from New York and Escape from L.A., and he’s the director of The Last Starfighter. He also wrote the Hook script. He was Michael Myers in both 1978 Halloween and the later remake of that film, plus the forthcoming Halloween Kills. He also was the pianist in Escape from New York.
Born September 21, 1947 — Stephen King, 72. I once saw him leaning up against a wall in Bangor outside his favorite breakfast spot nose deep in a paperback novel. That’s how his native city treated him. Favorite by him? I’m not fond of his novels but I love his novellas and shorter fiction, so Different Seasons, Four past Midnight and Skeleton Crew are my picks.
Born September 21, 1950 — Bill Murray, 69. Scrooged is my favorite film by him by a long shot followed by the first Ghostbusters film. I’m also fond of his voicing of Clive the Badger in Fantastic Mr. Fox.
Born September 21, 1983 — Cassandra Rose Clarke, 36. I strongly recommend The Witch Who Came in from the Cold, a serial fiction story she coauthored with Max Gladstone, Lindsay Smith, Ian Tregillis, and Michael Swanwick. It’s quite brilliant. And The Mad Scientist’s Daughter, nominated for a Philip K. Dick Award, is equally brilliant.
Born September 21, 1990 — Allison Scagliotti, 29. One of the primary cast of Warehouse 13, a show that I really, really loved. Her first genre role was as Jayna, one of the Wonder Twins, on the Smallville series. And she showed in a crossover episode of Eureka, “Crossing Over”. Her current gig is as Camille Engelson on Stitchers which to my surprise is getting ratings.
The first Naruto runner has been spotted Naruto running towards Area 51 during a live news report.
… But just as he closed his news segment on KTNV, he was upstaged by the perfectly timed runner, which is a hilarious reference to the original event’s satirical description which said, ‘if we Naruto run, we can move faster than their bullets. Let’s see them aliens.’
About 75 people arrived early Friday at a gate at the once-secret Area 51 military base in Nevada — at the time appointed by an internet hoaxster to “storm” the facility to see space aliens — and one person was arrested, authorities said.
The “Storm Area 51” invitation spawned festivals in the tiny Nevada towns of Rachel and Hiko nearest the military site, and a more than two-hour drive from Las Vegas.
Lincoln County Sheriff Kerry Lee estimated late Thursday that about 1,500 people had gathered at the festival sites and said more than 150 people also made the rugged trip several additional miles on bone-rattling dirt roads to get within selfie distance of the gates.
Ever been to Stonehenge? Machu Picchu? Across time, people have marked the changes of seasons—sometimes in dramatic ways! Here are five amazing ancient sites aligned with the solstices and equinoxes.
Did you know that the equinoxes and solstices happens at the same moment around the world? Even though we all have different time zones, this is an astronoimical event, based on our planet’s orbit around the Sun and tilt on its axis.
Our ancestors lived amidst nature more than most of us do today. They observed the universe, marveling in its rhythms. They used the Sun and the Moon as a sort of calendar, tracking the Sun’s path across the sky. Here are some examples of the ancient sites and monuments that aligned with the solstice and equinox.
Our ancestors built the first observatories to track the sun’s progress…
Remember October 2001? If you’re around my age, this was the time when the new Superman refused to wear a cape and existed in a Dawson’s Creek-esque TV series called Smallville, which originally aired on a network called The WB. (Annoying frog mascot with a top hat.) But now, Tom Welling, the actor who played Superman/Clark Kent on Smallville is back in the Superman tights he avoided on Smallville for so long.
According to Deadline, Welling will reprise his role as Superman in a crossover event for the CW’s popular “Arrowverse” TV shows. This follows a similar return of fellow-Superman actor, Brandon Routh, who is also set to return as Superman on the CW. If you’re not following these shows (and really, you can’t be blamed if you’re not, they’re very confusing) the CW is apparently doing everything it can to get olds like me interested in tuning in again. Tom Welling played Clark Kent/Superman for a staggering 10 seasons on Smallville before the show finally ended in 2011.
Five people have beaten off competition from more than 200 people to run the UK’s most remote post office in Antarctica.
The team will man the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust’s post office at Port Lockroy for four months.
The first permanent British base to be established on the Antarctic Peninsula, it has been run as a museum and post office for tourists since 2006.
The new postmasters start work in November and return to the UK in March.
Each year, the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust, which is based in Cambridge, advertises for a new intake of seasonal postal workers.
Hundreds apply despite there being no running water or mains electricity and the job involving working in sub-zero temperatures 11,000 miles away from home.
As well as running the office, museum and shop, the chosen team monitors the island’s resident gentoo penguin population.
Several brooms are sent to the team each year to clean the penguin droppings outside the building – which the trust admits would otherwise look like “a penguin toilet”.
Nasa has finished assembling the main structural components for its largest rocket since the Apollo-era Saturn V.
Engineers at the agency’s Michoud Assembly Facility (MAF) in New Orleans connected the last of five sections that make up the core of the Space Launch System (SLS).
The rocket will be used to send an uncrewed Orion craft to the Moon, in a flight expected to launch in 2021.
This will pave the way for crewed missions, with a landing in 2024.
The last piece of the SLS’ 64m (212ft) -tall core stage was the complicated engine section. This will serve as the attachment point for the four powerful RS-25 engines, which are capable of producing two million pounds of thrust (9 meganewtons).
(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “Maestro” on Vimeo, Illogic
has hedgehogs, turtles, and birds, singing an aria conducted by a squirrel. (That’s
what it says–“Directed by Illogic”.)
[Thanks to Cora Buhlert, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ,
Cat Eldridge, Hampus Eckerman, Michael Toman, Chip Hitchcock, StephenfromOttawa,
John King Tarpinian, Contrarius, Greg Hullender, and Andrew Porter for some of
these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Peer.]
