???? Congratulations to Claire Askew @OneNightStanzas who has won the inaugural Bloody Scotland Scottish Crime Debut of the Year with All the Hidden Truths!
NED KELLY AWARDS. The 2019 Ned
Kelly Awards, given by the Australian Crime Writing Association, were presented
on September 6.
Best True Crime
Eggshell Skull by Bri Lee
Best First Fiction
The Rúin by Dervla McTiernan
Best Fiction
The Lost Man by Jane Harper
DAVITT AWARDS. The winners of the 2019
Davitt Awards, handed out by Sisters in Crime Australia, were named on August
31. (List obtained with an assist from crime fiction news site Shots.)
Best Adult Crime Novel
The
Rúinby Dervla McTiernan (HarperCollins
Australia)
Best Young Adult Crime Novel
Small Spaces by
Sarah Epstein (Walker Books)
Best Children’s Crime Novel
Wakestone Hall by Judith Rossell (ABC Books)
Best Non-fiction Crime Book
The Arsonist by
Chloe Hooper (Penguin Random House)
Best Debut Novel
Eggshell Skull by
Bri Lee (Allen & Unwin)
Readers’ Choice
The Lost Man by
Jane Harper (Pan Macmillan Australia)
PINCKLEY PRIZES. The
2019
Pinckley Prizes for Crime Fiction, awarded by the Women’s National Book
Association of New Orleans, honor two women
writers. Both winners will receive both a financial award of $2,500 and a trip
to New Orleans to accept their prize at a ceremony on October 10.
(1) TIPTREE BIOGRAPHER COMMENTS FURTHER. Julie Phillips,
author of James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon
blogged about “On
Tiptree and naming” on September 17.
A number of people are reading the manner of Alli and Ting’s Sheldon’s death as an instance of caregiver murder, in which a person with a disability is killed by a person responsible for caring for them. There is a pattern of murders like this being downplayed or dismissed as “understandable” because the caregiver “must have been under such strain.” This is extremely upsetting and hurtful to people living with disabilities. You can read more about this here and here. (Content warnings: suicide; Americans’ appalling lack of access to heath care.)
Mostly I’ve been asked for factual answers: Did it happen? Did it not happen? It may be that a name that calls up painful associations should be changed in any case. But I believe it matters to talk about what we know and don’t know, and here are some thoughts about Ting’s and Alli’s choices.
… Topics such as pollution, overcrowding, and a warming Earth began to appear more frequently within the genre. Harry Harrison’s 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room! (later adapted—and firmly embedded in pop culture consciousness—as Soylent Green) examined the plight of an overcrowded Earth, though today the main drivers of climate change are far less attributable to rising populations in less developed areas of the world and far more to do with mass consumerism in the developed world.
J.G. Ballard’s 1962 novel The Drowned World specifically imagines a post-apocalyptic 2145 in which global warming (caused by solar wind heating the atmosphere, rather than specifically fossil fuel emissions) lead to sea-level rise, ruining London. Even nearly 60 years ago—long before “climate change” had become a source of widespread anxiety, it was a stark vision; reviewer Peter Brigg noted, “Ballard created in this novel the most pervasive demonstration of the frailty of ‘technological’ man.”
The Rumble Museum, in association with the Arthur C. Clarke Award, is delighted to announce a national science fiction competition for young people who would like to see their ideas turned into a short story by a professional science fiction author.
Anyone 15 years or younger can enter, and full entry details can be found here. Deadline for entries October 31.
HOW TO ENTER
To enter, please submit a premise and opening lines for a science fiction short story. We would like to see a description of the world or society your story is set in, an outline of the main characters and plot, and first 350 words or first page.
(4) SIXTY-FOUR
ON THE FLOOR. Galactic Journey contributors
assemble! A trio of reviewers comment on the latest (in 1964) novels from PKD,
Leiber, Bulmer and Farmer in this omnibus post: “[September
20, 1964] Apocalypses and other trivia (Galactoscope)”. Jason Sacks
begins —
…Like many fans, I first became really aware of Philip K. Dick after he won the 1963 Hugo Award for Best Novel for his remarkable The Man in the High Castle. That book dazzled in its chronicle of an alternate history in which the Nazis and Japanese won World War II (which opened up many areas of thought and conversation for me and my friends) as well as in its brilliant world-building and the fascinating, multifaceted characters at the heart of Dick’s award-winner.
High Castle was also an amazingly tight novel, packing a dense plot into its mere 240 pages. As many of us Dick fans have learned, not all of his works are quite so tightly plotted. I adored his Martian Time-Slip and Dr. Bloodmoney from last year, but those books tended to both delight and annoy in their meandering, nearly stream-of-consciousness styles.
The newest Philip K. Dick novel, The Penultimate Truth (just out in paperback from Belmont) fills a bit of the gap between his ’62 masterpiece and the challenging ’63 books. This thoroughly delightful book wanders a bit but always held me in its comforting grasp.
(5) LID O’CLOCK ROCK. Alasdair Stuart’s newest Full Lid embraces the profoundly weird career of
Gerard Butler, examines the Hot Zone and attends the Battle of Big Rock: “The Full Lid 20th September 2019”
The Full Lid 20th September 2019 – It's Full Lid'o'clock! This week, the surprisingly early (And good) Jurassic World 3 prequel! The weird and charming career of Gerard Butler! DROPS. OF MONKEY. Happy Friday! https://t.co/2YaLim2989pic.twitter.com/ZNcG8iUB1D
With its austere surfaces and jaundiced view of humanity’s interplanetary destiny, James Gray’s stirring sci-fi epic Ad Astra can’t help but evoke Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the paterfamilias of all “serious” space movies. But in fact it’s a closer cousin to another long-delayed, wildly over-budget spectacle that initially fared better with ticket-buyers than critics, only to be revealed in time as a masterpiece: Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.
Like Coppola’s surreal Vietnam War movie, Ad Astra is told to us by a haunted man on a mission into the unknown. After a thrilling set piece involving an unplanned high-altitude skydive from the “International Space Antenna,” Brad Pitt’s Major Roy McBride is dispatched to investigate the cause of a series of destructive cosmic ray bursts emanating from Neptune.
McBride is given the task because his superiors believe these disruptions might somehow have been caused by his father (Tommy Lee Jones), commander of an exploration mission that was presumed lost some 16 years earlier. In the event the old man has somehow survived and gone all Colonel Kurtz on them, they’re hoping his baby boy might be able to talk him down.
One needn’t have seen 2001 — or for that matter, last year’s undervalued Neil Armstrong biopic First Man — to grok that emotional availability is the one area in which McBride is seriously deficient. (His heart rate has never risen above 80, his dossier says.) In space, no one can hear you cry…
… though they are sometimes privy to your internal monologue. “We are the world-eaters,” McBride laments in voiceover as he takes in the Applebees and Hudson News shops that pimple the near side of the moon in the mid-to-late 21st century. The only thing Ad Astra shares with the comparatively upbeat adventure The Martian is a notion we might be wiser to leave space exploration to our robots. We see McBride file a psychological self-evaluation each time he’s getting ready to launch; only if the A.I. concurs with his assessment that he’s fit to fly is he permitted to go.
(7) TODAY IN HISTORY.
September 20, 1979 — The film version of Buck Rogers was edited for television as “Awakening” to serve as the very first episode of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. It would last two seasons.
September 20, 2006 — Jericho aired its pilot episode on CBS. It was cancelled after its first full season, because of poor ratings. A fan campaign persuaded the network to bring the show back for another season, of seven episodes, after which it was cancelled again. IDW has done two seasons in comic book form.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born September 20, 1935 — Keith Roberts. Author of Pavane, an amazing novel. I’ll admit that I’ve not read anything else by him, so do tell me about other works please. (Died 2000.)
Born September 20, 1940 — Jonathan Hardy. He was the voice of Dominar Rygel XVI, called simply Rygel, once the royal ruler of the Hynerian Empire, on Farscape. He was also Police Commissioner Labatouche in Mad Max, and he had a one-off in the Mission: Impossible series that produced in his native Australia in the “Submarine” episode as Etienne Reynard. (Died 2012.)
Born September 20, 1948 — George R. R. Martin, 71. I’ll admit that I’ve only read the first two volumes of ASOFI. I loved The Armageddon Rag and think that he’s a wonderful short writer. And no, I’ve not watched A Game of Thrones.
Born September 20, 1955 — David Haig, 64. He played Pangol in “The Leisure Hive” a Fourth Doctor story. He also showed up on Blake’s 7 in “Rumours of Death” as Forres, and was Colonel Bonnet in The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Tales of Innocence. He’s also General Vandenberg in the 2006 film remake of A for Andromeda. Finally, I should I should he’s The Player in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead done at The Old Vic a few years back.
Born September 20, 1959 — James Blaylock, 69. One of my favorite writers. I’d recommend the Ghosts trilogy, the Christian trilogy and The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives whichcollects all of the Langdon St. Ives adventures together as his best writing, but anything by him is worth reading.
Born September 20, 1986 – Aldis Hodge, 33. He plays Alec Hardison on Leverage. Ok, I know it’s not SFF but if there’s a spiritual descendant of Mission: Impossible, this series is it. Both the cast and their use are technology of that series are keeping with MI spirit. He’s also had one-offs on Charmed, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Supernatural, The Walking Dead, Star Trek Discovery’s Short Takes and Bones (which given that it crossed over with Sleepy Hollow…)
Born September 20, 1989 — Malachi Kirby, 30. He shows up on Doctor Who as Gastron in “Hell Bent”, a Twelfth Doctor story, and he’s on Black Mirror as Stripe in their “Men Against Fire” episode.
(9) MAKER MAKES NEWS. In the Washington Post, Patti Restivo profiles cosplayer Kyle
Wilhelm, whose crosstitiching on his costume as “Wolf Shaman” at the
Maryland Renaissance Festival was so good that he got an apprenticeship at
Outback Leather, whose clients include the Renaissance Festival, Medieval
Times, a nearby horse racing track, and several motorcycle clubs. “A
costume wizard brings his skills to Maryland Renaissance Festival”. Photo
gallery here.
…Like Sargent, Wilhelm describes himself as mostly self-taught. He said he trained as a blacksmith and in animal care-taking, and previously worked part-time gigs as an actor, model and stuntman.
For at least a decade, the 29-year-old said he did leather crafting in his basement before landing at Outback Leather with Sargent and finding his calling.
“Ron’s like my second dad,” Wilhelm said.
(10) HUGO LONG LIST. David Steffen says his “Long
List Anthology Volume 5” Kickstarter has now raised enough money to
acquire all the stories he could get the rights to.
After the Hugo Awards each year, the World Science Fiction Society (who administer the award) publishes a longer list of works that fans cast nomination votes for. The works on the ballot get a lot of attention, the purpose of this anthology is to get more readers for these other stories that were also loved by so many fans. The result each year is a big and ecclectic collection of fiction very different in tone and theme that can act as a sampler for work enjoyed by the Hugo voting audience.
This project is not endorsed by nor affiliated with the Hugo awards, WSFS, WorldCon, or any associated entities. The Hugo name is used with permission.
“It’s a really odd situation where I think the attraction is far more popular than the movie, in most ways,” Shawn Marshall of theme park site Parks And Cons said. “Probably for a lot of theme park fans, when you say ‘Waterworld,’ we’re all thinking of the Universal show moreso than the movie at this point.”
If you haven’t seen the show, it simplifies the movie’s story and packs it into 20 minutes of pure action. After a pre-show getting the crowd hyped and explaining/showing that you may get very, very wet if you’re in the splash zone, a deep voice comes on over the loudspeakers to explain the story.
(12) THIS IS GENIUS. Richard Paolinelli sent a DMCA
takedown notice to the Internet Archive requiring them to remove all saved
copies of pages from his blog. And they did. What a hack! Who would have
thought he had it in him.
Dystopian stories are, in essence, thought experiments. And few come as thoughtful as The Divers’ Game.
The latest novel from acclaimed author Jesse Ball depicts a world both unimaginably unjust and all too believably cruel: Society has been split into two distinct halves, the pats and the quads, with the former group given unchecked supremacy over the second. It isn’t the most original premise in dystopian fiction, but Ball clearly isn’t trying to reinvent any genre tropes. Rather, he’s plumbing the depths of a familiar conceit, attacking it from a fresh angle, and constructing a parable that’s jarring in its subtle complexity and profound, horrific revelation.
…Ball’s bombshell is undisguised and unapologetic: He’s taking dead aim at current U.S. policy in regard to immigration and the detention of asylum-seekers, and the repercussions he speculates upon leave no doubt as to his standpoint on the topic — even as he expresses them in nested sequence of vicious satire. But his series of modest proposals culminates in the second section of the book, in which the titular’s divers’ game is unveiled. It’s a game played by quad children, and it’s as much of a Shirley Jackson-esque premise as it is an exquisite probe of liminal zones and psychogeography between the privileged and the oppressed.
Robin Wright’s breakout role as Buttercup in The Princess Bride left a mark on a lot of childhoods, and it would be difficult to dismiss the importance of that role in her film career going forward. While she’s gone on to play a wide variety of complicated characters, it is also true that the no-nonsense and self-possessed attitude of Buttercup would be a defining characteristic, not just of Wright’s career, but of Wright herself.
More recently, Wright had the chance to play a new icon of feminine power for audiences of all ages with her role as General Antiope in Wonder Woman. In many ways, these are two incredibly different characters, but they both carry with them that sense of sustained defiance that audiences have come to admire in many a Robin Wright role.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, JJ, Chip Hitchcock, Andrew Liptak,
Michael Toman, Martin Morse Wooster, Mike Kennedy, Cat Eldridge, and Andrew
Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing
editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]
A Gwinnett County (GA) jury has
indicted Superior Court Judge Kathryn Schrader, and three men — private
investigator T.J. Ward, former Forsyth County sheriff’s detective Frank Karic, and
Dragon Con co-founder Ed Kramer — on three counts of computer trespass reports
the Gwinnett Daily Post (“Gwinnett Superior Court Judge Kathryn Schrader, three
others indicted for computer trespassing”.)
The indictments handed down Wednesday said Schrader and her three co-defendants “knowingly use[d] a computer network without authority and with the intent to interfere with the use of the Gwinnett County Justice Center computer network” without authority and “with the intent to alter the computer network” in violation of Georgia’s computer trespass statute. Each felony count carries a maximum of 15 years in prison.
Kramer was denied bond and remains in jail. Judge Schrader was released without having to pay bond after
turning herself in. Ward and Karic’s bonds have been set at $25,000.
Porter has said the judge claimed that he hacked her computer. Porter has vehemently denied having tried to access Schrader’s computer and said in an April hearing that her accusation raises questions about her ability to be impartial at the bench.
Court documents allege Schrader hired a private investigator in February because she suspected someone was trying to remotely access her county-issued computer outside of business hours. The investigator, T.J. Ward, hired Ed Kramer to monitor activity on Schrader’s computer.
Kramer, who hasn’t been involved with DragonCon for years, had previously worked for Ward as a computer forensic analyst. A “WireShark” monitoring device was placed on Schrader’s computer, which allowed Kramer to monitor it for any suspicious activity.
Investigators first discovered Kramer was working with Schrader after Kramer’s February arrest on unrelated charges. Kramer allegedly took a photo of a child at a doctor’s office, which is illegal because he is a registered sex offender. It also violated his probation related to a 2013 child molestation conviction. When police searched Kramer’s computer, officers found a file with Schrader’s name on it.
Judge Schrader has been recused from criminal cases since April, as DA Porter’s office handles those prosecutions, but she continued to oversee civil cases. The state Judicial Qualifications Commission will determine if she is allowed to stay on the bench while her own criminal case proceeds.
[Thanks to Nancy Collins and Ray Radlein for the story.]
(1) MATCHLESS
PROSE, WE HOPE. Will
Frank (scifantasy), Vice-Administrator of the 2016 Hugo Awards and Administrator of
the 2021 Hugo Awards, who also identifies himself as a fanfiction writer on AO3
and a trademark attorney, is
trying to pour some oil onto the stormy waters that separate parts of the
Worldcon community from parts of the AO3 community: “HugO3”. (Please
don’t strike a match.)
…If the Worldcon-running community doesn’t police use of the phrase, someone else–someone with less humorous, less celebratory, less free-spirited intent–might be able to plausibly argue that he can call his self-published book a Hugo Award Winner just because it was fanfic, or he has an AO3 account, because the term has lost all of its significance by not being protected.
Is that likely? Who the hell knows. Is it something the Worldcon-running community wants to risk, especially so soon after a concerted effort to undermine the award, not by fanfiction authors in celebration of their validation but by a group of politically-motivated writers with an axe to grind? Definitely not.
(I’ve also seen some people saying that there isn’t any prestige in a Hugo Award given some of the historical winners, and…well, get in line behind the Oscars and the Grammys and the others, I guess. The fact is that “Hugo Award” on the cover of a book does indeed help sales. It matters. There is still cachet in being a Hugo Award winner. Or even a finalist!)
So, no, the Worldcon-running community is not saying “Hey, don’t have fun.” It is saying, “please, don’t undermine our ability to stop people with malicious intent from poisoning the term Hugo Award.”
I’m not even telling you that you have to think I’m right. But at least, please know that this isn’t just a matter of “don’t have fun.” It’s a plea for your help.
(2) HEINLEIN’S OTHER VERSION. The Number of the Beast versus
Pursuit of the Pankera – not the same book at all. Arc Manor would be
delighted for you to put the claim to a test — http://www.arcmanor.com/as/Comparison.pdf
It is a different book. Of the 187,000 words in the new book, it shares the first 28,000. But then is totally different. The separation occurs in chapter XVIII and here is a side by side comparison of the chapters in the two books with the point of divergence clearly marked.
Wendy Pini does it all. In the 1970s Wendy used to hit the cons dressed as Sonja. She was born in San Francisco in 1951, and from an early age demonstrated the talents later to come to fruition as a professional illustrator, and eventually as the creator of Elfquest.
(4) CHANGES AT TOR. Shelf Awareness is reporting a couple
of promotions at Tom
Doherty Associates:
Theresa DeLucci has been promoted to senior associate director of marketing of Tor Books, Forge, and Nightfire.
Renata Sweeney has been promoted to senior marketing manager, Tor.
(5) ELLEN VARTANOFF INTERVIEW. From Small Press Expo 2017
(but just posted on YouTube today.)
Rusty and Joe talk to Ellen Vartanoff about her decades in the comics field and the early days of comic conventions!
(6) TODAY IN HISTORY.
September 19, 1952 — “Superman On Earth” aired as the pilot episode for The Adventures of Supermantelevision series starring George Reeves.
September 19, 1961 — On a return trip from Canada, while in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, Betty and Barney Hill claimed to have been abducted by aliens.
September 19, 1986 — The Starman series debuted with Jeff Bridges replaced in the role of The Starman with Robert Hays. The series lasted for twenty-two episodes.
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born September 19, 1867 — Arthur Rackham. English book illustrator who is recognized as one of the leading literary figures during the Golden Age of British book illustration. His work can be seen on genre fiction ranging from Goblin Market to Rip Van Winkle and The Wind in the Willows. Derek Huson’s Arthur Rackham: His Life and Work is one of the better looks at him and his art. (Died 1939.)
Born September 19, 1911 — William Golding. Though obviously best known for the Lord of The Flies novel, I’m more intrigued by the almost completed novel found in draft after his death, The Double Tongue which tells the story of the Pythia, the priestess of Apollo at Delphi. (Died 1993.)
Born September 19, 1922 — Damon Knight. Author, critic, editor. He is the author of “To Serve Man”, a 1950 short story which became a The Twilight Zone episode. It won a 50-year Retro-Hugo in 2001 as the best short story of 1950. Wiki says “He ceased reviewing when Fantasy & Science Fiction refused to publish a review.” What’s the story here? (Died 2002.)
Born September 19, 1928 — Adam West. Best known as Batman on that classic Sixty series, he also had a short role in 1964’s Robinson Crusoe on Mars as Colonel Dan McReady. The less said about his post Batman films, including a softcore porn film, the better. (Died 2017.)
Born September 19, 1928 — Robin Scott Wilson. Founder, with Damon Knight and others, of the Clarion Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop. He edited Clarion: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction and Criticism from the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, Clarion II and Clarion III. He wrote one genre novel, To the Sound of Freedom (with Richard W. Shryock) and a lot of short fiction. Alas, neither iBooks nor Kindle has anything by him available. (Died 2013.)
Born September 19, 1933 – David McCallum, 86. Gained fame as Illya Kuryakin in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and has rounded off his career playing medical examiner Dr. Donald “Ducky” Mallard in another TV series that is known by its initials, NCIS.
Born September 19, 1940 — Caroline John. English actress best known for her role as scientist Elizabeth “Liz” Shaw in Doctor Who as companion to the Third Doctor. She’d repeat her role in Dimensions in Time, a charity special crossover between Doctor Who and the EastEnders that ran in 1993. Her only other genre role was playing Laura Lyons in The Hound of the Baskervilles. (Died 2012.)
Born September 19, 1947 — Tanith Lee. I hadn’t realized that she wrote more than ninety novels and three hundred short stories in her career. And even wrote two Blake’s 7 episodes as well. I was more fond of her work for children such as The Dragon Hoard and The Unicorn Series than I was of her adult work. (Died 2015.)
Born September 19, 1952 — Laurie R. King, 67. She’s on the Birthday Honors List for the Mary Russell series of historical mysteries, featuring Sherlock Holmes as her mentor and later partner. She’s also written at least one genre novel, Califia’s Daughters.
Born September 19, 1972 — N. K. Jemisin, 47. Her most excellent Broken Earth series has made her the only author to have won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in three consecutive years.
(9) UNIDENTIFIED WALKING OBJECTS. Aliens have landed at the
convention hotel (a couple years early) reports the Tonopah
Nevada in 2021 for Westercon 74 page – see the photographic evidence there!
Starting to see some out of this world stuff in honor of Alien Weekend… these aliens came all the way from Michigan to check out the happenings…
Emergency sirens wailed on Hawaii’s Oahu and Maui islands Wednesday evening, warning of a tsunami, but the alert turned out to be a mistake, sparking anger from residents who recalled a similar false warning last year of an imminent ballistic missile attack.
Within minutes of the alarm going off shortly after 5 p.m. local time (11 p.m. ET) authorities were trying to calm the public by getting out word of the mistake.
The National Weather Service in Honolulu tweeted: “***NO TSUNAMI THREAT*** We have received phone calls about sirens going off across Oahu, but we have confirmed with the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center that there is NO TSUNAMI THREAT.”
Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell also took to Twitter. “Mahalo to everyone for taking appropriate action & tuning into local media,” he tweeted, adding that the sirens had been “inadvertently triggered” during Honolulu Police Department training.
… Burger King has decided to remove all plastic toys from its kids’ meals. Not only that but the initiative, created by agency Jones Knowles Ritchie and starting this week in the U.K., is also calling for people to drop plastic toys from meals past in “plastic toy amnesty bins” at Burger King locations to be melted down and recycled into things that are actually useful, like play areas and surface tools, which can be recycled many times over.
People in the U.K. who bring in toys to melt down next week will get a free King Junior meal when they buy any adult meal. To promote the project, Burger King has created a cast of melted-down plastic toy characters, including Beep Beep, a jeep-driving bunny, which the brand has installed a giant melting version of on London’s South Bank to promote the project.
Despite their giraffian proportions, giant azhdarchid torso were relatively tiny. Witton and Habib (2010) noted that, like many pterodactyloid pterosaurs, their torsos were probably only a third or so longer than their humeri, suggesting a shoulder-hip length of about 65-75 cm for an animal with a 10 m wingspan. That’s a torso length not much larger than your own, although they were considerably more stocky and swamped with muscle. Azhdarchid shoulders, in particular, are well endowed with attachment sites for flight muscles, as are (for pterosaurs) their pelves and hindquarters.
(13) JURASSIC SHORT. Battle at Big Rock on YouTube is an eight-minute video, set in the Jurassic
World universe one year after the events of Jurassic World: Fallen
Kingdom that premiered on FX last night and was put online today.
(14) BRADBURY INTERVIEW. Here’s a 9-minute video of Ray
Bradbury’s 1978 appearance on the Merv Griffin Show.
The always brilliant Ray Bradbury, one of the greatest sci-fi writers in history, talks with Merv about the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”, Steven Spielberg, his mission as a writer, the future of mankind, and ends by reading from his poem “If Only We Had Taller Been” from his collection “When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed.”
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Chip Hitchccock, JJ, Mike Kennedy, Kevin Standlee, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day JJ.]
The
latest Speculative Literature Foundation (SLF) Deep Dish Reading series was
held on August 8 at Volumes Book Cafe in Chicago, Illinois. Co-hosted by award-winning
author Mary Anne Mohanraj and Chris Bauer, the event featured readings by Scott
Woods, S.L. Huang and T.J. Martinson. Other readers included Dawn Bonanno,
Richard Chwedyk, Beth Kander and Aurelius Raines II.
These
periodic free events are sponsored by the SLF with assistance from SFWA grants.
The next reading will be held October 3, 2019, 7 p.m., at Volumes Book Cafe,
1474 N. Milwaukee; all are welcome. Readers will include Jane Rosenberg
LaForge, Siliva Moreno-Garcia and Sue Burke.
(1) BLOGGER BLOWS AWAY SHORT SFF REVIEW SITE. Jason McGregor of Featured Futures just announced he is going to quit promoting and reviewing short sff and has gone so far as to delete hundreds of posts from his site: “The Incredible Shrinking Blog”.
…I was discouraged from rushing back to do reviews by the John W. Campbell business. In many ways (especially socioeconomic) I’m a pretty liberal guy, but I have next to no patience with “political correctness” or historical “revisionism” or any number of the other manifestations of “theory” prevalent these days. This has always been a drag on my enjoyment of current SF and contributed to the burnout I was feeling which led to my falling behind in March, but I felt like I was ready to get back on the horse…. And while I was doing that, we got the Awards Formerly Known As Campbell. While the attack was vulgar and ignorant, it was also irrelevant to short SF. However, people who are relevant to short SF and should know better have not only failed to be voices of reason but have added to the unreason. It just underscores that I signed up to read a body of literature with a significant emphasis on creative ideas and positive visions of futures with technologically and rationally advanced natures and what I’ve been reading is mostly a subgenre of LGB,eTc. fiction[2] which is populated by Orwellian erasers of the giants whose shoulders they stand upon insofar as they are SF at all (or Wile E. Coyotes sawing off the limb they sit on). The great Katherine MacLean died recently. One guess as to who published her first story in 1949….
As a lover of the unpopular field of print science fiction and the even less popular field of short SF, I made the promotion of contemporary short SF the purpose of this blog, only to have to admit that short SF has become unpopular for very good reasons and I now wish to do anything but promote it.
…Capturing the sheer tumult of the times, rather than being washed away by it, is an artistic challenge that spans genres. In this case there’s a positive: It has become common ground in a slightly surreal online friendship played out on Twitter, featuring Hood and novelist William Gibson. On one side you have a band known for its obsession with the ways that the South’s history taints its present; on the other you have the futurist who coined the term “cyberspace” and revolutionized science fiction with his 1984 novel “Neuromancer.”
What most people don’t realize, Hood said, is that Gibson has Southern roots as well, having grown up in Virginia before moving to Canada during the Vietnam era….
I also had the terrifying experience in the afternoon of being summoned to meet James Bacon, the chair of Worldcon. I assumed that word about The Incident had finally percolated up to him and I was about to be removed from the Convention Centre with extreme prejudice. But before I could launch into an unconvincing attempt to explain myself, James revealed that he was actually presenting me with a Hero medal in recognition of my work for Worldcon both before and during the convention. This was something of a surprise and I was truly honoured to receive the medal, which I wore with pride for the rest of the convention.
THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE, about which historical ignorance, incapacity to reason, blindness to reality driven by ideology and just plain stupidity have produced an ocean of twaddle.
It should be blindingly obvious by now that the Electoral College is at best an antiquated institution which never matched the vision of it held by the Founding Fathers and has become an impediment to modern government. In times past, the reason most people shrugged off its grotesque features was because in practice it didn’t seem to make much difference. In the first two centuries of the nation’s existence, a candidate won the Electoral College while losing the so-called “popular vote” only three times (in 1824, 1876 and 1888). But it has happened twice in the past five elections (2000 and 2016), so now it has become a major topic of debate….
(5) GRAEME GIBSON OBIT. Writer and conservationist Graeme
Gibson, Margaret Atwood’s partner, has died at the age of 85 reports the CBC.
Margaret Atwood, Gibson’s longtime partner, said in a statement Wednesday issued by publisher Penguin Random House Canada: “We are devastated by the loss of Graeme, our beloved father, grandfather and spouse, but we are happy that he achieved the kind of swift exit he wanted and avoided the decline into further dementia that he feared.
“He had a lovely last few weeks, and he went out on a high, surrounded by love, friendship and appreciation. We are grateful for his wise, ethical and committed life.”
September 18, 1951 — The Day The Earth Stood Still had its theatrical premiere in New York City. Klaatu was played by Michael Rennie.
September 18, 2002 — The Twilight Zone, 3rd version, premiered on TV.
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born September 18, 1884 — Gertrude Barrows Bennett. She’s been called a pioneering author of genre fiction. She wrote a number of fantasies between in the late teens and early twenties, and has been called “the woman who invented dark fantasy”. Her short story, “The Curious Experience of Thomas Dunbar” which was published under G.M. Barrows in Argosy is considered first time that an American female writer published SF story using her real name. I’m pleased to say that both iBooks and Kindle are heavily stocked with her works. (Died 1948.)
Born September 18, 1888 — Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur. He is known primarily for his scholarly work on Beowulf and his translation of Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda for The American-Scandinavian Foundation, but also as a writer of pulp fiction having written The Altar of the Legion (with Farnham Bishop), He Rules Who Can and one short genre story, “The Golden Story”, though iBooks has The Adventures of Faidit and Cercamon for sale which may or may not be genre. (Died 1971.)
Born September 18, 1944 — Veronica Carlson, 75. She’s best remembered for her roles in Hammer horror films. Among them are Dracula Has Risen from the Grave, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed and The Horror of Frankenstein. She also shows up in Casino Royale as an uncredited blonde.
Born September 18, 1947 — Paul Seed, 72. Actor who’s now a director. He’s made the Birthday Honors list as he was Graff Vynda-K in “The Ribos Operation”, a Fourth Doctor story. That and an appearance on Tales of The Unexpected appear to be his only acting roles in the genre.
Born September 18, 1948 — Lynn Abbey, 71. She’s best known for co-creating and co-editing with Robert Lynn Asprin (to whom she was married for awhile) the Thieves’ World series of shared-setting anthologies. (Now complete in twelve volumes.) Her Sanctuary novel set in the Thieves’ World universe is quite excellent. I’ve not kept up with her later work, so y’all will not to tell me how it is.
Born September 18, 1949 — William Stout, 70. Illustrator who’s worked on projects as diverse as Manning’s Tarzan of the Apes strip, Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards, Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder’s Little Annie Fanny in Playboy and Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Born September 18 — Michael R. Nelson. Conrunner from the Baltiwash area who got into fandom in 1989. He chaired Disclave 41, Capclave 2002 and co-chaired the DC17 Worldcon bid. He is a member of the Washington Science Fiction Association.
Born September 18, 1955 — Gary Russell, 64. As a writer, he is best known for his work in connection with Doctor Who and its spin-offs in other media. He worked for BBC Wales as a Script Editor on The Sarah Jane Adventures and Torchwood. (Anyone here who’s watched the former series?) as a writer, he’s written nineteen Doctor Who universe novels and directed forty audioworks for Big Finish, one of which he wrote.
Born September 18, 1973 — James Marsden, 46. He was Scott Summers / Cyclops in the X-Men film franchise. He was gunslinger Teddy Flood, an android in Westworld. He plays Tom Wachowski in the forthcoming Sonic the Hedgehog film
Born September 18, 1984 — Caitlin Kittredge, 35. Wiki say she’s best known for her Nocturne City series of adult novels, and for The Iron Codex, a series of YA novels, but I think her best work is by far the Black London series. She’s also writing the current Witchblade series at Image Comics.
On Friday, September 13, a truck bound for the Georgia-based tabletop and video game company Trivium Studios took a turn too sharply, spilling 216,000 gaming dice onto Interstate 75 in Atlanta in what could be the biggest unintentional dice roll ever.
(10) MARK YOUR CALENDARS. Tomorrow is Talk
Like a Pirate Day. I guess I jumped the gun by running my “Aaaarrrrgggghhhh!”
post today.
Lillard said a recent hunt for clues on Google brought him an old photo from a California newspaper showing the Well of Scribes, a sculpture that disappeared in 1969 from the Central Branch of the Los Angeles Public Library.
“You could only see half of the well in the picture,” Lillard said. “That’s the half that I had.”
Lillard’s portion is one of three pieces that composed the entire sculpture. He said he has been in contact with the Los Angeles Public Library about bringing the sculpture home.
The final two pieces of the sculpture are still missing, but Lillard said he has hope they might still be found.
Whether you see Poe’s story as a reflection on mortality, or rather a tale of morality, it’s also important to remember that Poe himself was famously averse to didacticism in literature—so perhaps we should simply read the story for its own beauty and not try to imbue it with meaning? And “The Masque of the Red Death” is, indeed, a beautiful and classic work. A gothic masterpiece. The guests retire to “the deep seclusion” of a “castellated abbey.” The prince’s designs for the masquerade ball glow “with barbaric lustre”—being “grotesque” as they “glitter” with “piquancy and phantasm.” The story throbs with “something of the terrible” as the atmosphere of dread builds. Until, in true gothic style, we have the tragic ending, where all die in a “despairing posture.”
…Arby’s, for one, has not given up on the dream. In July, the chain showed its support for the viral cause by announcing that it would bring a special menu of Arby’s items to feed whoever was in attendance at Area 51’s storming. And today, not only did Arby’s confirm that it’ll still be there, but also announced what those otherworldly new items would be.
… The “Redacted on Rye Sandwich” is billed as “roasted turkey on a toasted marble rye bread with Swiss cheese, tangy slaw and thousand island dressing,” a further spin on the classic Reuben. The “E.T. Slider” will feature “a crispy chicken tender dipped in Bronco Berry Sauce.” “Arby’s Frying Objects” will be “Arby’s loaded curly fries topped with savory moon rocks.” And finally, the “Galaxy Shake” is described as a “purple cow meets a Sour Patch Kid—a blue sweet milkshake base that turns pink and tarter as you drink or stir it, topped with a fruit crunch.”
(15) 30-50 FERAL COOKIES. Meanwhile, John King Tarpinian
has sighted the Halloween Oreos in the field…
(16) WINDUP UP YOUR WATCHMEN. Quis custodiet ipsos
custodes? Everything begins 10/20 on HBO,
[Thanks to Nancy Sauer, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian,
Michael Toman, Chip Hitchcock, JJ, John A Arkansawyer, Cat Eldridge, Greg
Hullender, Martin Morse Wooster, Darrah Chavey, StephenfromOttawa, and Mike
Kennedy for some of these stories. Title
credit goes to File 770’s contributing editor of the day Anna Nimmhaus.]
There you can see Fox’s comment that I wouldn’t post here, rehearsing falsehoods, dodging significant questions, and working in some juvenile namecalling. He insists I should not have denied him the chance to defend himself at File 770. “I take the freedom of speech very seriously,” says Fox. He takes it very seriously — on other people’s blogs. Richard Fox doesn’t allow comments on his own blog.
Linking is not piracy. Fox’s deceptions start right in his
title. File 770 never hosted a copy of Fox’s story “Going Dark.” We
included a link to the Google Drive file, after seeing the URL on SFWA’s
public-facing Nebula Reading List.
Courts have long held that including a link is not the same as hosting the material yourself. The Ninth
Circuit Court of Appeals decided that in Perfect
10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc. (2007). The issue was also raised in a
suit against Boing Boing, dismissed
last year, analyzed at the Electronic
Frontier Foundation.
How links are chosen. File
770 runs features like JJ’s “Where To Find The 2018 Nebula Finalists For Free
Online” as a reader
service, impartially listing all the works available. We aren’t going to have
people coming back to ask “Why didn’t you link to Richard Fox’s story on the
SFWA site?”
Many online magazines post fiction free online, asking for subscriptions or Kickstarter support. That’s their business model. Many self-published authors post sample stories to publicize their work, another traditional marketing strategy.
Likewise, to attract attention to members’ work from all quarters,
SFWA changed the Nebula Reading List to a public facing part of its site in
2015 (see the press
release). It’s been public for four years. Whatever is linked to from there
is visible to the public. That ranges from links to Amazon sales pages to links
of the full text of works, as determined by the SFWA member involved.
How links get on the Nebula Reading List. SFWA has
two ways for members to share work, as their FAQ explains.
The Nebula
Reading List. This is visible to the public. Members must be logged into the
SFWA discussion boards to add new entries to the list.
SFWA
Members may also make work available in the SFWA Fiction section of
the Discussion Boards. This is accessible only to members who are logged in
to the Discussion Boards.
I asked Kate
Baker, SFWA’s Executive Director, how this works and was told —
A member or the author themselves can create a listing on both the public/private reading lists. This does not fall under SFWA Webmaster or the Nebula Award Commissioner’s duties.
The person who created it would not have the ability to remove it.
What was on the SFWA site was also just a link — they did not
host the file. They had no control over the files of “Going Dark” on the Google
Drive.
However, the page listing the links could only be removed with
SFWA’s assistance.
Pirate link on SFWA’S Nebula Recommended Reading List? According
to Fox:
When this year’s Nebula Awards were getting attention, I shared my short story GOING DARK with the password protected site that was only for Science Fiction Writers of America. Sharing this was only for their consideration, and never for the general public as I had the story in an anthology that was for sale.
I deleted the post after the Nebulas, but I put on several different versions.
Where did the links on the public Nebula Reading List come from?
Somewhere in this milieu, a Google drive file of the story was created and made available for outside of the password protected site….
At Camestros Felapton’s post “Larry Correia Endorses Richard Fox’s Piracy Claims”, Fox has by now made over 40 comments and given a convincing impression that he doesn’t know how the internet works. How can anyone rely on his notion of what happened or might have happened when he can’t assess the most basic facts?
You know who agreed with my position that linking to the story was piracy? Glyer’s ISP. Are you more experienced with that realm of internet management?
That is a complete misrepresentation of the law. If you fill out
your DMCA takedown notice correctly, and the ISP you send that to sees they are
hosting the targeted content, they are obligated to take it down and notify the
customer of his rights, which includes the right to file a DMCA counter notice.
The ISP is not the arbiter of the charge. They simply comply with the DMCA
statute to avoid forfeiting the safe harbor they receive for obeying it.
I filed a DMCA counter notice, starting the clock running that
gave Fox up to 14 days to file “an action seeking a court order to
restrain the subscriber from engaging in infringing activity relating to the
material on the service provider’s system or network.”
He didn’t follow through with any legal action because his
takedown notice was a prank, and one he could do for free. My post went back
online.
And it’s actually Fox who could be subject for damages under 17 U.S. 512(f) for his knowing misrepresentation that my link was infringing his copyright.
I’m ruler, said Yertle, of all that I see. Richard
Fox reasons, “It’s fairly evident
that I am the copyright holder of that story and if I say a link to something
is pirated…it really shouldn’t be much of a discussion.”
So then, should I have taken the action Richard Fox requested
anyway? I almost did. Then after I got a few more emails from him that amounted
to “Yes you #!@%! pirate stop stealing from me oh and by the way let me repeat
a few choice insults Larry Correia wrote about you, too” he convinced me it was
a better idea to keep enjoying my legal right to post a link to something on
the internet.
Larry has rushed in to try and prop him up. You’ve got to be impressed with Larry’s genuine humility in carrying water for guys like Richard Fox – because it doesn’t get any lower than that.
If you want a result, you ask like
a human being. If you want a kerfuffle, you make false charges, namecall, and rope
in renowned internet liars to echo your story – and the people who love that
kind of thing will love Richard Fox.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch. You know who else must have thought that Google Drive link was a valid public copy of Fox’s “Going Dark”? The SFWA Webmaster. Every work that made the 2018 Nebula Awards ballot got a dedicated page on the SFWA site. And it’s still online, still displays the same Google Drive link (though broken now) used in JJ’s post. (Just in case the original disappears five minutes after my post goes online, here’s a copy at the Internet Archive). A screenshot taken today shows the meta data about the link. (Click on the image for a larger version.)
Dublin 2019 distributed a goodbye newsletter to members today with
links to some interesting items.
The Souvenir Book.
A downloadable PDF of the souvenir book is now available as a free download. (Dropbox link, 21MB file)
Queue Survey Results. This is entertaining.
On Saturday and Sunday of the convention, 257 members participated in our queue survey. The results are summarized in our paper Revealed Preference Representations of Science-Fiction Fans Arrayed in Upright Linear Social Structures, which can be downloaded here.
The Art and Artistry of Dublin 2019. Dublin 2019 is also calling for help on a project –
Sara Felix, Iain Clarke and James Bacon are working on a post con publication, entitled ‘The Art and Artistry of Dublin 2019’ which will be made available as a PDF to download. With so much art created for the convention, bringing it together and talking to the artists seemed like a superb idea.
Many members may have also created, crafted or made art specifically for Dublin 2019, and we welcome hearing from anyone who has some art that could be considered for inclusion. Please email [email protected] for further information.
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away… a stormtrooper smashed their head on a door in the Death Star – and people have been wanting to know who it was ever since.
The scene occurs in Star Wars: A New Hope and has become a cult moment for Warsies (that’s what Star Warsfans call themselves apparently). Now, a filmmaker has taken it upon himself to make a mockumentary about the blunder, entitled The Empire Strikes Door.
Good news to all the insomniacs out there. Disney’s Bedtime Hotline returns from Sept. 16 to Sept. 30. The hotline which debuted last August, gave fans a chance to hear bedtime messages from the core Disney cast of Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Daisy, or Goofy.
The hotline returns for the next two weeks, this time with a lineup taking advantage of Disney’s full trove of IP. In addition to Mickey, callers can also get messages from Woody, Jasmine, and Elsa and Anna, as well as as some unexpected choices from Disney properties. Specifically Yoda and Spider-Man.
That’s right, Yoda is a Disney character and now he tells you about the importance of sleep as you curl up for the night.
Babylon 5 was a show that should never have been commissioned. Five seasons of the United Nations set in space, anyone? Well, set your phasers to stunned because while Star Trek gets all the glory – what with its big-name actors, great special effects and lasting cultural cachet – it was Babylon 5 that became every true sci-fi fan’s secret favourite.
In Akwaeke Emezi’s Pet, angels have rid the city of Lucille of all its monsters. That’s what Jam has been taught, and she has no reason to doubt it, as she lives a happy life surrounded by her loving parents and her best friend, Redemption. No reason, until a strange and frightening creature crawls out of one of her mother’s paintings, intent on hunt down a monster hiding in their midst. The creature is called Pet, and it tells Jam that her duty is to help search out the evil that has taken root in Redemption’s house. Jam isn’t sure she’s the right person for the task — but what choice does she have, when no one else will even admit that there may still be monsters lurking in the shadows?
…After making her entrance last year with The Light Between Worlds, which asked what happens to the children cast out of portal fantasies once the adventure is over, Laura Weymouth returns with A Treason of Thorns, a full-on alternate history fantasy that imagines an England that is home to Great Houses — sentient buildings that enrich or destroy their regions depending on how well they are managed by their human Caretaker.
The John Hay Library is now home to renowned recording artist, writer, and activist Janis Ian’s collection of personally inscribed works of science fiction and fantasy, many by women and LGBTQ authors.
The John Hay Library at Brown University is delighted to announce the acquisition of Janis Ian’s personal library, including collections of books of contemporary science fiction and fantasy authors inscribed to her. Among these authors are Anne McCaffrey, George R. R. Martin, Mercedes Lackey, Mike Resnick, Nancy Kress, Neil Gaiman, Connie Willis, Harlan Ellison, Jane Yolen, Tanith Lee, Diane Duane, and many others. In all, the Library received approximately 200 volumes from Ms. Ian’s collection.
(6) STALLMAN GONE. “Richard
Stallman Resigns from MIT” – Slashdot has the story.He’s
also resigned as President from the Free Software Foundation.
Multiple Slashdotters arereporting the unfortunate news that famed free software advocate and computer scientist Richard Stallman has resigned from MIT. Slashdot reader iamacat writes:
I am resigning effective immediately from my position in CSAIL at MIT. I am doing this due to pressure on MIT and me over a series of misunderstandings and mischaracterizations.
CSAIL is MIT’s Computer Science and
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
The Russian city of Arkhangelsk caused a stir by putting up a statue of the Grim Reaper on a roadside to put motorists off speeding, only for thieves to steal it later in the day….
The black-shrouded figure, made to order by a craftsman from local pine, was meant to “discourage drivers from speeding up on that stretch of road since it’s been repaired”, spokeswoman Tatyana Simindei told the site.
(8) TODAY IN HISTORY.
September 17, 1964 — Mothra Vs. Godzilla premiered in the U.S.
September 17, 1976 — NASA named its first Space Shuttle after a starship from some sci-fi TV show – Enterprise.
September 17, 1978 — The original Battlestar Galactica premiered on television. It would last but a single season.
September 17, 1982 — The Powers of Matthew Star first aired. It ran one season. Harve Bennett (Trek films II–V) was one of its creators and Leonard Nimoy directed the “Triangle” episode while Walter Koenig wrote the “Mother” episode. The original pilot, “ Starr Knight” as written by Steven E. de Souza, writer of The Running Man aired as the final episode.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born September 17, 1908 — John Creasey. English crime and SF writer who wrote well over than six hundred novels using twenty-eight different names. His SF writings were mostly in the Dr. Palfrey series, a British secret service agent named Dr. Stanislaus Alexander Palfrey, who forms Z5. I’ve not read them, so how are they as SF? None of these appear to be available from iBooks but they’re available from Kindle.
Born September 17, 1917 — Art Widner. He was a founding member of The Stranger Club which created Boston fandom. He chaired Boskone I and Boskone II which were held in 1941 and 1942, they being the very first two Boston cons. Fancyclopedia 3 has a very detailed look at him here. (Died 2015.)
Born September 17, 1920 — Dinah Sheridan. She was Chancellor Flavia in “The Five Doctors”, a Doctor Who story that brought together the First, Second, Third, Fourth and Fifth Doctors. Richard Hurndall portrayed the First Doctor, as the character’s original actor, William Hartnell, had died. (Died 2012.)
Born September 17, 1920 — Roddy McDowall. He is best known for portraying Cornelius and Caesar in the original Planet of the Apes film franchise, as well as Galen in the television series. He’s Sam Conrad in The Twilight Zone episode “People Are Alike All Over” and he voices Jervis Tetch / The Mad Hatter in Batman: The Animated Series. (Died 1998.)
Born September 17, 1939 — Sandra Gimpel, 80. Performer and stunt woman. Though you’ll literally not recognize her, she was the salt monster aka the M-113 creature (as it was called in the credits) in “The Man Trap” episode of the original Trek. In “The Cage” episode, she played a Talosian. As a stunt woman, she’s been on genre shows ranging from Lost in Space to Lucifer and even appeared on films like Escape from New York.
Born September 17, 1951 — Cassandra Peterson,68. Definitely better known as Elvira, Mistress of The Darkness, a character she’s played on TV and in movies, becoming the host of Elvira’s Movie Macabre, a weekly horror movie presentation in LA in 1981. She’s a showgirl in Diamonds Are Forever which was her debut film, and is Sorais in Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold.
Born September 17, 1962 — Paul Feig, 56. I see that he and Katie Dippold were nominated but didn’t win a Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation for their Ghostbusters film. How did it do in the actual voting?
Born September 17, 1965 — Bryan Singer, 54. Director of such genre film as including X-Men, Superman Returns, X-Men: Days of Future Past, and X-Men: Apocalypse.
Born September 17, 1973 — Jonathan Morris, 46. SFF television series are fertile grounds for creating spinoff book series and Doctor Who is no exception. This writer has only written four such novels to date but oh, the number of Big Finish audiobooks that he’s written scripts for now numbers in the high forties if I include the Companions and the Jago & Lightfoot series as well.
(10) LEGO’S NEW GLOBAL CAMPAIGN. From behind a paywall at The
Drum:
…The result is ‘Rebuild the World’, Lego’s most significant global brand campaign since the 90s, which was created by BETC in collaboration with The Lego Agency.
Ultimately, the push seeks to position the toy as something that can strengthen creative resilience and problem-solving capabilities in kids – an idea originally floated by BETC in a world where children are more likely to pick up an iPad than open a toybox.
Underpinned by bold, playful creative that will run across TV, online, OOH and cinema, Marcelli describes the campaign as “a new, modern expression of the true, deep foundations” of the brand, and the “perfect interpretation” of its mission to inspire future generations.
At the heart of the drive is a film directed by Traktor Creative, a duo who have previously worked with The Prodigy and Madonna, which shows what the world would look like if it obeyed the rules of Lego play.
On the face of it, NASA’s newest probe sounds incredible. Known as Dragonfly, it is a dual-rotor quadcopter (technically an octocopter, even more technically an X8 octocopter); it’s roughly the size of a compact car; it’s completely autonomous; it’s nuclear powered; and it will hover above the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan.
…”Almost everyone who gets exposed to Dragonfly has a similar thought process. The first time you see it, you think: ‘You gotta be kidding, that’s crazy,’ ” says Doug Adams, the mission’s spacecraft systems engineer. But, he says, “eventually, you come to realize that this is a highly executable mission.”
NASA reached that conclusion when, after a lot of careful study, it gave Dragonfly the green light earlier this summer. “This revolutionary mission would have been unthinkable just a few short years ago,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said when the roughly $1 billion project was selected in June. “A great nation does great things.”
For Shannon MacKenzie, a postdoc on the mission, there’s no destination that could be greater than Titan. The largest moon of Saturn, it has dunes, mountains, gullies and even rivers and lakes — though on Titan, it’s so cold the lakes are filled with liquid methane, not water.
“It is this complete package,” she says. “It’s this really unique place in the solar system where all of these different processes are coming together in a very Earthlike way.”
Russia likes to boast of its robots – but at the same time it seems to have a somewhat troubled relationship with them.
It has endured a series of very public robotic mishaps, but all is not lost.
Amid much fanfare and praise for the Roscosmos space agency, Russian robot Fedor was launched into space on board a Soyuz 14 spacecraft in August.
Fedor made history as the first such robot ever to be sent into space by Russia, and within moments he was reporting on his progress and all was apparently going to plan.But then, mission control in Houston broke the news that Fedor’s attempt to dock with the International Space Station (ISS) had to be aborted because of a technical problem.
Before his spaceflight, Fedor had been busy impressing observers with his activities. State TV showed him driving a car, firing guns and doing push-ups – but sceptics were critical. Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was scathing in a post on Twitter.
“This Fedor the robot is what the Putin regime is all about. The PR idiots at Roscosmos came up with the idea, and engineers had to send a hundred kilos of useless steel junk into orbit,” Navalny wrote…
Alyosha, Boris and Igoryok
Last year, a robot called Boris made an appearance on national television. He announced that he was good at mathematics, but added that he would like to learn how to compose music. He also danced.
Before Boris, Russian TV also reported excitedly about another robot, a huge steel thing called Igoryok, but nobody’s seen it move – or even do anything….
(14) FATHER AND SON
HORROR. Netflix has released
a trailer for In the Tall Grass, a film based on a novella by Stephen King and his son Joe
Hill. It becomes available October 4.
Some places have a mind of their own. Based on the novella by Stephen King and Joe Hill, when siblings Becky and Cal hear the cries of a young boy lost within a field of tall grass, they venture in to rescue him, only to become ensnared themselves by a sinister force that quickly disorients and separates them. Cut off from the world and unable to escape the field’s tightening grip, they soon discover that the only thing worse than getting lost is being found.
[Thanks to JJ, John King Tarpinian, John A Arkansawyer, Andrew
Porter, Martin Morse Wooster, Cat Eldridge, Chip Hitchcock, Steven H Silver,
and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770
contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]
The 2019 Creative Arts Emmy Awards were
held at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles on September 14 and 15. The two-night ceremony preceded the 71st
Primetime Emmy Awards which will be aired on September 22. Emmys were
handed out in technical and acting categories.
A team from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and SpaceX won in the category of Outstanding Interactive Program for multimedia coverage of Demonstration Mission 1, a test flight of the SpaceX Crew Dragon to the International Space Station – the first human-rated spacecraft to lift off from U.S. soil since the end of the Space Shuttle program in 2011.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, won Outstanding Original Interactive Program for the agency’s coverage – including news, web, education, television and social media efforts – of its InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) mission to Mars.
The winners of genre interest (plus NASA and Chernobyl, which
interest a lot of Filers) follow the jump.
