By
Colleen McMahon: I had
a vague memory that I began this little column/project last November, and just
checked to make sure. Yes, the first “Wandering Through the Public Domain” was
posted on November 16, 2018, so this will mark my first anniversary here. Thank
you for reading and for your comments over the various columns, and thank you
so much to Mike Glyer for hosting my natterings!
It’s been a fun project
and I look forward to keeping it going for the foreseeable future. If you have
any feedback or suggestions, and especially if you have sought out and enjoyed
anything I’ve mentioned here, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
As so often happens, I
prepared to write today without any clear notion of what I wanted to do (though
I have a document with author and topic ideas to rev my brain up when needed).
And as so often also happens, I was gifted with a suggestion somewhat randomly.
A very recent Librivox
release (described in detail below) is An Earthman on Venus by Ralph
Milne Farley (1887-1963). When creating the listing for it, I had to look
up Mr. Farley to get his birth and death dates, and found something interesting
when I did. His Wikipedia entry was under the name Roger Sherman Hoar.
That in itself is not too
surprising, since many authors use pseudonyms. What did catch my eye was Mr.
Hoar’s day job — he was a state senator and assistant attorney general in
Massachusetts. He was descended from a distinguished American family. His
grandfather had served as a U.S. Attorney General, and his
great-great-grandfather was Roger Sherman, founding father and signer of the
Declaration of Independence.
Hoar was a graduate of
Harvard for both his undergraduate degree (1909) and law school (1911). The
same year that he finished law school, 1911, he began serving in the
Massachusetts state senate, although I could not find any detail about the
circumstances as to whether he was elected or appointed and how long he served.
He continued to have a distinguished career in law in Massachusetts and later
in Wisconsin, as well as taking a turn into engineering and teaching.
Hoar also began writing and publishing at a young age. He wrote multiple books
about law, mainly business law, under his own name. He published a tariff
manual in 1912 and a book about constitutional conventions in 1917.
Meanwhile, he was turning
out pulp fiction stories and novels, with most of his work being published
between the world wars. After he moved to Wisconsin, he joined the Milwaukee
Fictioneers, whose members also included Robert Bloch and Stanley G. Weinbaum
(both of whom were covered, coincidentally, in Wandering
Through the Public Domain #13)
His most famous works were
a series of “Radio Man” stories published through the 1920s and 1930s,
beginning with 1924’s “The Radio Man”. The stories began as serials in
magazines like Argosy and Amazing, but found a wider readership
when they were reprinted as paperback novels in the 1950s.
There are three Farley
works available through Project Gutenberg:
As mentioned below, An
Earthman on Venus was just released on Librivox, and The Radio Planet
is currently listed as “in progress”. “The Danger from the Deep” is included in
the recording of the complete August 1931
Astounding Stories issue.
When Myles Cabot accidentally transmitted himself to the planet Venus, he found himself naked and bewildered on a mystery world where every unguarded minute might mean a horrible death.
Man-eating plants, tiger-sized spiders, and dictatorial ant-men kept Myles on the run until he discovered the secret of the land—that humanity was a slave-race and that the monster ants were the real rulers of the world!
But Cabot was resourceful, and when his new found love, the Kewpie-doll princess Lilla, called for help, the ant-men learned what an angry Earthman can do.
An Earthman on Venus was originally published as The Radio Man in 1924.
Doctor John Dolittle is an animal doctor and famous naturalist whose success hinges on his ability to speak the languages of many different kinds of animals. This book, the second Dr. Dolittle adventure, is narrated by Tommy Stubbins, who meets the Doctor after finding an injured squirrel. Stubbins becomes interested in the Doctor’s work and has the opportunity to travel with him and several animal companions to a mysterious floating island called Spidermonkey Island.
A rip-roaring, pulpy and quirky space odyssey for your listening pleasure. Follow earth man Allen Green as his space ship fails and leaves him on a barbaric planet filled with other human descendants who have reverted to pre-technology existence. Naturally he is made a slave and must connive, plan, love and fight his way across 10,000 miles of danger to freedom. Full of strange beings, this planet highlights the amazing imagination of Philip Jose Farmer and his ability to make it scary and fun at the same time.
Spain’s Asociación Española de Fantasía, Ciencia Ficción y Terror has just added a throwback award category to its Premio Ignotus 2019 (2019 Ignotus Awards) slate – the Retro Ignotus 1989 for Novel.
Eligible for the award are —
Any work of science fiction, fantasy, terror or related subject of more than 17,500 words, originally written in one of the languages ??of the Spanish State and originally published in Spain in 1989…
Compilations of individual stories that form a series will not be considered novels.
Voting is open to members of AEFCFT
and Hispacon. All the award winners will be announced December 7 at the
convention.
Retro Ignotus 1989 Novel
Eligibility List
Cuando la lógica falla, el Sistema llama a… Zuk-1, by Jordi Sierra i Fabra (Ed. Pirene)
Doctor diabólico, by Ralph Barby (Ed. Olimpic)
El bastardo, by Ralph Barby (Ed. Olimpic)
El duende, by Pedro Gálvez Ruiz (Ed. Obelisco)
El jardí dels set crepuscles, by Miquel by Palol (Ed. Columna)
El regreso by Doble-P, by Fernando Lalana (Ed. Magisterio Español)
El regreso by Senuv, by Josefina Vañó by San Juan (Ed. L’estudi d’en Llop)
El viejo y la ninfa, by Ralph Barby (Ed. Olimpic)
La gaviota caníbal, by Ralph Barby (Ed. Olimpic)
La hacienda del ahorcado, by Donald Curtis (Ed. Astri)
Lágrimas calcinadas, by Ralph Barby (Ed. Olimpic)
Las islas by la guerra, by Ángel Torres Quesada (Ed. Ultramar)
Las islas del infierno, by Ángel Torres Quesada (Ed. Ultramar)
Las islas del paraíso, by Ángel Torres Quesada (Ed. Ultramar)
Las lágrimas del sol, by José María Merino (Ed. Alfaguara)
Las manos del muerto, by Donald Curtis (Ed. Astri)
Las trece campanadas, by José María Latorre (Ed. Montesinos)
Las últimas horas by Pincher Trumbo, by Jesús Pardo de Santayana Díez (Ed. Random House Mondadori)
Los gatos by Circe, by Ralph Barby (Ed. Olimpic)
Los rojos ganaron la Guerra, by Fernando Vizcaíno Casas (Ed. Planeta)
“Piel”, by Elia Barceló (en Sagrada, ed. Ediciones B)
Profanación, by Ralph Barby (Ed. Olimpic)
Querido muñeco, by Ralph Barby (Ed. Olimpic)
Ragnarok [artica], by Francisco Arellano (en Máser 14, ed. Juan José Parera)
“Sagrada”, by Elia Barceló (en Sagrada, ed. Ediciones B)
Shakanjoisha, by Jordi Sierra i Fabra (Ed. SM)
Sombras paralelas, by Vicente Muñoz Puelles (Ed. Tusquets)
(1) MUNROE
DOCTRINE. “Moon dust may not burn you, but
it’s no picnic.” In his debut “Good Question” column for The New York Times,“If
I Touched the Moon, What Would It Feel Like?”, science author Randall Munroe explores what would
happen if a person directly touched the moon.
Set on a Tatooine-like planet complete with speeder bike-style vehicles, the clip shows the trio alongside Chewbacca, C3PO, and BB-8 as they escape enroaching stormtroopers. Director and co-writer J.J Abrams recently teased that the ambition for the first entry of the sequel trilogy is at an all-time high. “What we set out to do was far more challenging,” he told Entertainment Weekly of the movie, which he admitted they had more “story adjustments” on than the previous entry he worked on, The Force Awakens.
(3) ICONIC SIXTIES COSTUMES ON THE BLOCK. Profiles in
History will auction
the Azarian Collection on December
17. Genre stuff galore!
John Azarian is the founder and curator of the Azarian Collection, which you can see at theazariancollection.com. As a child of the 60s and a fan of nostalgia, John began collecting iconic items from the shows and movies he loved in his youth. Some of his favorite childhood memories include the superb television shows of the 1960s, like his favorite TV show, Batman, starring Adam West and Burt Ward.
…The highlight of the collection just so happens to be the first items he ever purchased, coincidentally, from Profiles in History.
The only known pair of complete costumes from
The Dynamic Duo, Adam West’s “Batman” and Burt Ward’s “Robin” from the original
1960s TV series, Batman.
Adam West’s “Bruce Wayne” Shakespeare bust
with hidden switch that opens the entrance to the Batcave from Batman.
Adam West’s “Batman” hero working Batmobile
Batphone from Batman.
William Shatner’s “Captain James T. Kirk”
wraparound tunic from Star Trek: The Original Series.
William Shatner’s “Alternate Universe Cpt.
James T. Kirk” tunic from Star Trek: The Original Series, episode “Mirror,
Mirror”.
Leonard Nimoy’s “Evil Spock” tunic from Star
Trek: The Original Series, episode: “Mirror, Mirror”.
The I Dream of Jeannie signature Genie bottle.
“Jupiter 2” spaceship filming miniature from Lost
in Space.
“Space Pod” filming miniature Lost in Space.
Henry Winkler’s “Arthur ‘Fonzie’ Fonzarelli”
signature leather jacket from Happy Days.
Jeff Conaway’s “Kenicki” signature “T-Birds”
jacket from the “Greased Lightnin’” musical number in Grease
Lynda Carter’s “Wonder Woman” signature
superhero ensemble from Wonder Woman.
Barbara Eden’s “Jeannie” signature pink harem
costume from I Dream of Jeannie.
(4) LOADING THE CANON. Library of America interviews
editor Gary K. Wolfe about his selections for American Science Fiction: Eight Classic
Novels of the 1960s — The High Crusade, Poul Anderson; Way Station, Clifford D.
Simak; Flowers
for Algernon, Daniel Keyes; . . . And Call Me Conrad [This Immortal], Roger
Zelazny; Past
Master, R. A. Lafferty; Picnic on Paradise, Joanna Russ; Nova, Samuel R. Delany; and Emphyrio, Jack Vance. “Gary
K. Wolfe: Reinvention and revolution in 1960s science fiction”.
LOA:Appreciations of Delany’s Nova regularly note that it has roots in old-fashioned space opera, and in the next sentence mention how it anticipates cyberpunk. How does Nova simultaneously evoke science fiction’s past and anticipate its future?
Wolfe: As his own critical and autobiographical works make clear, Delany was a sophisticated and critical reader of science fiction from an early age, so it’s not surprising he would make use of his knowledge of the genre’s classic space opera tropes, just as he had made use of the post-nuclear apocalypse theme in The Jewels of Aptor or the generation starship theme in The Ballad of Beta-2. So while the huge planet-hopping canvas and the economic and corporate rivalries suggest classic space opera, the characters are quite different. While there are human-machine interfaces and implants in Nova, I think the more important way in which it anticipates cyberpunk has to do with these characters: racially diverse, often alienated outsiders like The Mouse or drifters like Dan.
Nova is set in a much more distant future—the thirty-second century—than novels like William Gibson’s Neuromancer, set in the reasonably near future, probably sometime in the twenty-first century. And while Nova does touch upon themes like body modifications and virtual reality, it’s less concerned with information technology, urbanization, and other earmarks of cyberpunk. But I’ve always felt that, despite the remarkable futuristic insights of Gibson, Sterling, Rucker, and others, the “punk” aspect of cyberpunk is what really gave rise to all the later variations like steampunk, dieselpunk, etc.—and that streetwise “punk” sensibility was certainly prefigured by Nova, along with a few other important works of the ’50s through the ’70s.
(5) LIVE FOREVER. The New Yorker’s Joan Acocella critiques
a new book’s strategies for “How
to Read ‘Gilgamesh’”.
… The poet and scholar Michael Schmidt has just published a wonderful book, “Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem” (Princeton), which is a kind of journey through the work, an account of its origins and discovery, of the fragmentary state of the text, and of the many scholars and translators who have grappled with its meaning. Schmidt encourages us to see “Gilgamesh” not as a finished, polished composition—a literary epic, like the Aeneid, which is what many people would like it to be—but, rather, something more like life, untidy, ambiguous. Only by reading it that way, he thinks, will we get close to its hard, nubbly heart.
(6) REFERENCE OF THE DAY. Now that you mention it….
(7) JURY DUTY. The Australian Science Fiction Foundation has put out a call for jurors for the 2020 Norma K Hemming Award – “eminent individuals in the Australian speculative fiction field.”
The award is designed to recognise excellence in the exploration of themes of race, gender, sexuality, class or disability in a published speculative fiction work. Jury members are generally appointed for a two year period, and no juror may judge the same category for more than four years. Expressions of interest are to be submitted via the online form by COBFriday December 6, 2019.
In a rare streaming-to-linear deal, the Greg Berlanti-produced superhero drama will air on The CW the day after episodes debut on WarnerMedia-backed subscription service DC Universe. Additionally, the Brec Bassinger-led drama will also be available to stream on The CW’s free digital platforms the day after their linear debut. The series will launch on DC Universe in the second quarter of 2020 with new episodes released weekly.
This is the latest effort to give a signal boost to a scripted original from the nice streaming service. In July, DC Universe renewed drama Doom Patrol for a second season with the sophomore order set to run on both DCU and WarnerMedia’s forthcoming subscription streaming service, HBO Max.
Stargirl follows high school sophomore Courtney Whitmore (Bassinger), who inspires an unlikely group of young heroes to stop the villains of the past. The project reimagines Stargirl and the very first superhero team, the Justice Society of America, in a fun, exciting and unpredictable series. Geoff Johns and Lee Moder created the character, who was named after the former’s sister, Courtney, who died in the 1996 explosion of TWA Flight 800. The character made her first appearance in July 1999’s Stars and S.T.R.I.P.E. #1.
(9) TODAY IN HISTORY.
November 25, 1915 — Albert Einstein formulated his general theory of relativity.
November 25, 1964 — Voyage To The End Of The Universe premiered. The feature starred Zdenek Stepánek and Frantisek Smolík. It’s actually a 1963 Czechoslovak called Ikarie XB-1 is and directed by Jind?ich Polák. The Americanized version has a very different end that the Czech version does.
November 25, 1983 — I predatori di Atlantide (The Atlantis Interceptors) premiered in Italy. Starring Tony King, Christopher Connelly, Gioia Scola, Michele Soavi and George Hilton. Directed by Ruggero Deodato who also directed the widely banned Cannibal Holocaust and Phantom of Death.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born November 25, 1920 — Ricardo Montalbán. Khan Noonien Singh and Mr. Rourke. Armando and Grandpa Valentin Avellan. I’m picking those as four most memorable roles he’s played and they just happen to all be genre in nature. Oh, and is Khan Noonien Singh the only occurrence of a non-crew character carrying over from the original series into the films? I suspect not but I can’t think of anyone other. (Died 2009.)
Born November 25, 1926 — Poul Anderson. My favorite ones by him? Orion Shall Rise for the mix of personal scale story with his usual grand political stories, and all of the Flandry and van Rijn stories. I also enjoy his Time Patrol stories as well, and the two Operation Luna are quite fun. He was quite honored with seven Hugo Awards and three Nebula Awards. (Died 2001.)
Born November 25, 1926 — Jeffrey Hunter. Best known for his role as Capt. Christopher Pike in the original pilot episode of Star Trek and the later use of that material in “The Menagerie” episode. Other genre work included Dimension 5, A Witch Without A Broom, Strange Portrait (never released, no print is known to exists), Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Journey into Fear and The Green Hornet. (Died 1969.)
Born November 25, 1941 — Sandra Miesel, 78. She has described herself as “the world’s greatest expert” on Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson. She’s written such works as Against Time’s Arrow: The High Crusade of Poul Anderson on Borgo Books and she’s written the front and back matter for many of their books. Oh, and she started out as a serious fan being nominated thrice for Hugos for her writing in zines such as Yandro and Granfalloon. She co-authored The Pied Piper of Atheism: Philip Pullman and Children’s Fantasy with Catholic journalist and canon lawyer Pete Vere.
Born November 25, 1947 — John Larroquette, 72. I think his best genre role is Jenkins in The Librarians. He’s also had one-offs in Almost Human, The Twilight Zone, Chuck, Batman: The Animated Series and Fantasy Island. He’s uncredited but present in Tales from the Crypt presents Demon Knight, Doing voice acting in Green Lantern: First Flight, the Klingon Maltz in The Search for Spock and the oddly named K.K.K. in Twilight Zone: The Movie. Did you know he was the narrator of two Texas Chainsaw Massacre films?
Born November 25, 1951 — Charlaine Harris, 68. She is best known for the Southern Vampire series starring Sookie Stackhouse which was adapted as True Blood. I know I’ve read several of this series and enjoyed them. She has two other series, nether genre or genre adjacent, the Aurora Teagarden and Lily Bard series.
Born November 25, 1953 — Mark Frost, 66. He’s best known as a writer for Hill Street Blues (I know it’s not genre but superb nonetheless) and as the co-creator with David Lynch of Twin Peaks in which he’s been involved with in other roles as well. He had a hand in writing both of the Fantastic Four films. He was also one of the Executive Producers of the very short lived All Souls series.
Born November 25, 1968 — Jill Hennessy, 51. Best known for being Dr. Marie Lazarus in RoboCop 3 which did not star Peter Weller despite my not noticing this for several viewings. She pops up elsewhere such as twice in the War of The Worlds series playing two different characters which she also foes in The Hitchhiker series, and amazingly being on Friday the 13th: The Series in four different roles!
Born November 25, 1974 — Sarah Monette, 45. Under the pen name of Katherine Addison, she published The Goblin Emperor which garnered the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel and was nominated for the Nebula, Hugo and World Fantasy Awards. She won the Spectrum Award in 2003 for her short story “Three Letters from the Queen of Elfland”. Her first two novels Mélusine and The Virtu are quite wonderful and I highly recommend her Iskryne series that she co-wrote with Elizabeth Bear.
(11) COMICS SECTION.
Tom Gauld has tapped into a theme that brings to mind Lafferty’s “Slow Tuesday Night.”
Gotham’s leading philanthropist has joined other billionaires, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerburg and hedge-fund billionaire Leon Cooperman, in opposing [Elizabeth] Warren. Wayne has even gone one step further, insisting a wealth tax could curb private spending on items such as hang glider capes, personally-branded boomerangs, and rodent-themed flood lights that illuminate the night sky.
(13) AU REVOIR? French sff news site ActuSF tweeted about
the recent conference in China —
“On November 24, Asian science fiction writers announced at the 5th International Science Fiction Conference in China that more international cooperation is expected in the Asian FS sector.”
— Prompting a despairing comment from Olivier Pacquet to another
French SF writer, Sylvie Denis:
“We can say goodbye to a Worldcon in France in 2023.”
Pope Francis was in Japan for a four-day visit on Saturday, Nov. 23 — his second papal visit to the country.
While greeting Catholics and the media on Monday, Nov. 25, the Pope, known for his unconventional background and unorthodox methods and comments, wore a Japanese coat called a “happi”.
…Words in different languages, such as Japanese and Spanish, can be seen on the “happi” as well.
Some of the Japanese phrases read “gratitude”, “let’s pray together”, “may there be peace”, “what can be done to give disaster victims hope”, and “we are glad that you’re the pope”.
Wikipedia amplifies:
A happi is a traditional Japanese straight-sleeved coat. They are usually worn only during festivals. Originally these represented the crest of a family, as happi were worn by house servants. Firefighters in the past also used to wear happi; the symbol on their backs referred to the group with which they were associated.
(16) LET NOTHING STAND IN YOUR WAY. This is wonderfully over the top. A Foot Locker commercial asks people how desperately do they want this shoe? “Would you do whatever it takes to get to the Week of Greatness and get the drop? Even if aliens attacked Earth during a zombie epidemic and a global meteor storm?”
[Thanks to John Hertz, John King Tarpinian, JJ, Chip Hitchcock,
Cat Eldridge, Martin Morse Wooster, Mike Kennedy, Lise Andreasen, Olav Rokne, and
Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing
editor of the day, our neighbor Jon Meltzer.]
(1) SCIENCE THROUGH ANOTHER EYE. Jenny Uglow, in “Beauty
in Ingenuity: The Art of Science”, leads readers through “The Art of
Innovation: From Enlightenment to Dark Matter” exhibit on view at London’s Science Museum through January 26, 2020.
… Across the room, the quest for new materials continues, with a wafting terylene dress from 1941, and a screening of the exuberant 1951 Ealing comedy The Man in the White Suit, with Alec Guinness as the naïve inventor of an indestructible textile fleeing from angry industrialists and workers, saved only when his magic material disintegrates around him. There’s a lot of fun, as well as science, in this show—and some joyous artistic accidents, like David Hockney’s encounter with a polaroid camera, which he used for the dazzling grid of Sun on the Pool, Los Angeles (1982). “Drawing with a camera,” he called it.
In the next section, “Human Machines,” the note of fear enters fully with the trauma of mechanized carnage in World War I. A case holds pioneering artificial limbs from the 1920s, and in Otto Dix’s Card Players (1920), three disfigured soldiers sit round a table, their torn limbs and missing jaws replaced by fantastical prosthetics. The destructive technology of warfare and the constructive skill of limb-makers have turned Dix’s men into monsters. Have they, perhaps, become machines themselves?…
(2) KGB. Ellen Datlow has posted photos from the November
20 Fantastic Fiction at KGB event where David Mack and Max Gladstone read
from their novels, entertaining a full house.
(3) TOOLBOX 2020. Applications for Taos Toolbox will be
taken beginning December 1. The two-week Master Class in
Science Fiction and Fantasy will be taught by Walter Jon Williams and Nancy
Kress, with special guest George R.R. Martin and special lecturer E.M. Tippetts.
The class runs June 7-20, 2020.
The Terran Award full attending Scholarship is available again
this year, sponsored by George R.R. Martin, to bring an aspiring SF writer from
a non-English-speaking country to the Taos Toolbox. The award covers all
tuition and fees to the Toolbox (but not meals or travel). Applicants
will need to speak and write in English, but must be from from a country where
English is not the primary language. WJW and the Toolbox staff will
select the winner.
(4) SHELF SHRINKAGE. Brenda Clough tells how she downsized
in “Curating
the Bookshelves” at Book View Café.
Seven years ago, my house had 20 floor-to-ceiling bookcases, and about the same number of half-sized bookcases — about 5000 books, excluding the comics. The house was essentially full of books and comic books. Today I have ten tall bookcases, and a couple short ones. What follows is the road map from here to there — halving the number of books in my life. I have been hearing of many friends having to smallify their space, and maybe this will help!…
(5) ROAR OF THE GREASEPAINT. It’s The Joker vs Pennywise in
the latest round of Epic Rap Battles Of History.
The Joker and Pennywise clown around in the eighth battle of ERB Season 6! Who won? Who’s next? You decide!
(6) TODAY IN HISTORY.
November 24, 1958 — Devil Girl From Mars premiered in Swedish theaters. It starred Patricia Laffan and Hazel Court, reviewers called this UK film delightfully bad. It however is considered just bad at Rotten Tomatoes with a 23% rating.
November 24, 1985 — Ewoks: The Battle for Endor premieredon ABC. Starring Wilford Brimley, Warwick Davis, Aubree Miller, Paul Gleason and Carel Struycken, the critics found it mostly harmless. It holds a 51% rating at Rotten Tomatoes.
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born November 24, 1882 — E. R. Eddison. Writer whose most well-known work by far is The Worm Ouroboros. It’s slightly connected to his much lesser known later Zimiamvian Trilogy. I’m reasonably that sure I’ve read The Worm Ouroboros but way too long ago to remember anything about it. Silverberg in the Millenium Fantasy Masterworks Series edition of this novel said he considered it to be “the greatest high fantasy of them all”. (Died 1945.)
Born November 24, 1907 — Evangeline Walton. Her best-known work, the Mabinogion tetralogy, was written during the late 1930s and early 1940s, and her Theseus trilogy was produced during the late 1940s. It’s worth stressing Walton is best known for her four novels retelling the Welsh Mabinogi. She published her first volume in 1936 under the publisher’s title of The Virgin and the Swine which is inarguably a terrible title. Although receiving glowing praise from John Cowper Powys, the book sold quite awfully and none of the other novels in the series were published at that time. Granted a second chance by Ballantine’s Adult Fantasy series in 1970, it was reissued with a much better title of The Island of the Mighty. The other three volumes followed quickly. Witch House is an occult horror story set in New England and She Walks in Darkness which came out on Tachyon Press is genre as well. I think that is the extent of her genre work but I’d be delighted to be corrected. She has won a number of Awards including the Mythopoeic Award for Adult Literature, Best Novel along with The Fritz Leiber Fantasy Award, World Fantasy Award, Convention Award and the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement. (Died 1996.)
Born November 24, 1916 — Forrest J. Ackerman. It’s no wonder that he got a a Hugo forfor #1 Fan Personality in 1953 and equally telling that when he was handed the trophy at Philcon II (by Asimov), he physically declined saying it should go to Ken Slater to whom the trophy was later given by the con committee. That’s a nice summation of him. You want more? As a literary agent, he represented some two hundred writers, and he served as agent of record for many long-lost authors, thereby allowing their work to be reprinted. Hell. he represented Ed Wood! He was a prolific writer, more than fifty stories to his credit, and he named Vampirella and wrote the origin story for her. Speaking of things pulp which she assuredly is, He appeared in several hundred films which I’ll not list here and even wrote lesbian erotica. Eclectic doesn’t begin to describe him. His non-fiction writings are wonderful as well. I’ll just single out Forrest J Ackerman’s Worlds of Science Fiction, A Reference Guide to American Science Fiction Films and a work he did with Brad Linaweaver, Worlds of Tomorrow: The Amazing Universe of Science Fiction Art. Did I mention he collected everything? Well he did. Just one location of his collection contained some three hundred thousand books, film, SF material objects and writings. The other was eighteen rooms in extent. Damn if anyone needed their own TARDIS, it was him. In his later years, he was a board member of the Seattle Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame who now have possession of many items of his collection. (Died 2008.)
Born November 24, 1948 — Spider Robinson, 71. His first story, “The Guy with the Eyes,” was published in Analog (February 1973). It was set in a bar called Callahan’s Place, a setting for much of his later fiction. His first published novel, Telempath in 1976 was an expansion of his Hugo award-winning novella “By Any Other Name”. The Stardance trilogywas co-written with his wife Jeanne Robinson. In 2004, he began working on a seven-page 1955 novel outline by the late Heinlein to expand it into a novel. The resulting novel would be called Variable Star. Who’s read it? Oh, he’s certainly won Awards. More than can be comfortably listed here.
Born November 24, 1957 — Denise Crosby, 62. Tasha Yar on Next Gen who got a meaningful death in “Yesterday’s Enterprise”. In other genre work, she was on The X-Files as a doctor who examined Agent Scully’s baby. And I really like it that she was in two Pink Panther films, Trail of the Pink Panther and Curse of the Pink Panther, as Denise, Bruno’s Moll. And she’s yet another Trek performer who’s done what I call Trek video fanfic. She’s Dr. Jenna Yar in “Blood and Fire: Part 2”, an episode of the only season of Star Trek: New Voyages.
Born November 24, 1957 — John Zakour, 62. For sheer pulp pleasure, I wholeheartedly recommend his Zachary Nixon Johnson PI series which he co-wrote with Larry Ganem. Popcorn reading at its very best. It’s the only series of his I’ve read, anyone else read his other books?
Born November 24, 1957 — Jeff Noon, 62. Novelist and playwright. Prior to his relocation in 2000 to Brighton, his stories reflected in some way his native though not birth city of Manchester. The Vurt sequence is a very odd riff off Alice in Wonderland that Noon describes as a sequel to those works.
Born November 24, 1965 — Shirley Henderson, 54. She was Moaning Myrtle in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. She was Ursula Blake in “ Love & Monsters!”, a Tenth Doctor story, and played Susannah in Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, a film that’s if because of the metanarrative aspect.
(8) GAHAN WILSON IN HIS PRIME. Andrew Porter shared three photos
of cartoonist Gahan Wilson from the Eighties and Nineties.
If you’re hip to fanziner jokes – maybe I should’ve said hep, many of them started in the 1940s and 1950s – and the Cosmic Joker just now led me to mistype started with a v instead of the second t – you know we send poctsarcds. If you don’t, you can look it up here. Or it’s a good occasion to consult A Wealth of Fable (H. Warner, Jr., rev. 1992; see here).
Once in my fanzine Vanamonde I sleepily let stand the mistyping – or mis-mistyping – “poctsacrd”. Jack Speer promptly sent a letter of comment “Nothing is sacrd.”
(10) WISHLIST DESTINATIONS. Paul Weimer got a huge response
to his tweet – here are two examples.
Since I have more space (and fewer limitations on things like spoilers) on my own blog, I’d like to elaborate a little on the review, and particularly the sense I got that the Wormwood trilogy changed as it expanded from a standalone to a series. When I first read Rosewater (and even more so when I reread it last month, in preparation for writing this review) I was struck by how clearly it belonged to the subgenre of “zone” science fiction. Originating with the Strugatsky brothers’ 1972 novel Roadside Picnic (and the 1979 Tarkovsky film, Stalker, inspired by it), “zone” novels imagine that some segment of normal space has erupted into strangeness, a zone where the normal rules of physics, biology, and causality no longer apply, and whose residents–or anyone who wanders in–are irretrievably altered in some fundamental way. The zone also represents a disruption to existing power structures, and the plots of zone novels often revolve around characters who have been dispatched by the state to infiltrate the zone in an attempt to control or at least understand it–an effort that is doomed to failure. Recent examples of zone novels include Jeff VanderMeer’s Area X trilogy and M. John Harrison’s Kefahuchi Tract trilogy (and particularly the middle volume, Nova Swing). I’ve even seen a persuasive argument that the HBO miniseries Chernobyl can be read as zone science fiction, because of its unreal, heightened depiction of the region around the exploded reactor, and because the effects that the unseen radiation it spews have on people, animals, and plant life in the surrounding areas track so closely with the subgenre’s central trope of cellular-level change.
I saw Frozen II last night. It’s an OK movie – I didn’t love the first one very much, but I do appreciate the attempt to expand the story into a broader fantasy epic (even if it seems to borrow shamelessly from Avatar: The Last Airbender with barely even a fraction of that show’s skill at constructing plot and themes). But I’ve been thinking about the film’s handling of the theme of ancestral wrongs and making reparations for them, and the more I do the angrier I get, so here are some spoilery observations.
No, no, it isn’t a chicken chip stuffed inside of a duck chip crammed inside of a turkey chip. There are three individual flavors, so it’s up to the snacker to determine the order.
An extremely rare and nearly perfect copy of the first comic book to feature the now-iconic “Marvel Comics” name was sold for a record amount at a Texas auction on Thursday.
The issue, Marvel Comics No. 1 — published in October 1939 by Timely Comics, which would later become Marvel in the 1960s — sold for $1.26 million, the highest price ever at public auction for a comic made by the company, according to a Heritage Auctions press release.
The comic was given a 9.4 rating out of 10 by Certified Guaranty Company, and is the highest-rated copy of the issue in existence.
(16) RAINBOW CONNECTION. “Cinema Classics: The Wizard of Oz” on Saturday
Night Live provides an alternate ending to the 1938 film.
[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, Chip Hitchcock, John Hertz, Michael
Toman, Cat Eldridge, JJ, John King Tarpinian, N., Mike Kennedy, Ellen Datlow, and
Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing
editor of the day Kurt Busiek.]
By
Steve Vertlieb: I had
the great pleasure of seeing Sony’s new release, A Beautiful Day In The
Neighborhood last evening. This sweet, lovely trailer both previews and
promises faithfully that this new film, based upon an incident occupying the
later years of Fred Rogers, will become the feel good movie of the year. Tom
Hanks is, as ever, a magical presence on the screen. It is, indeed, A
Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood when spiritual goodness is shared,
honored, and cherished by both film maker and audience.
However,
this lyrical and wondrous motion picture is so much more than I could ever have
imagined. It is loosely based upon the friendship between journalist Tom Junod
and television’s most beloved children’s host, after a jaded, embittered
magazine writer is assigned a purely “fluff” assignment to interview
Public Television’s “Mr. Rogers” for Esquire Magazine.
Convinced
that the character of “Mr. Rogers” is merely a scripted persona, the
writer goes about his work with both cynicism and restrained contempt … until
events in his own life force him to look inward toward the scarred, unhappy
soul that he has, perhaps, unknowingly, become. Rogers, a former Presbyterian minister,
gently pierces the bitter facade of his interviewer, subtly forcing the writer
to believe in his own inherent goodness, and in the deceptively hidden beauty
of the world and people around him.
Directed
with deep sensitivity by Marielle Heller from a screenplay by Micah Fitzerman
Blue and Noah Harpster, A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood features
sweet, lovely performances by Matthew Rhys as the troubled journalist, Chris
Cooper (in what’s sure to become an Oscar-nominated supporting performance as
his troubled father), Susan Kelechi Watson as his wife and, of course, Tom
Hanks in the role that he was, perhaps, born to play as Mister Rogers.
A
Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood is a tender, sweet parable about fathers
and sons, and about the absolute power of goodness. Heller’s direction of the
film plays with children’s perceptions of love and strength, while softly
interweaving them with the sadness, distrust, and cynicism which often, sadly,
replace the innocence of youth with the jaded wisdom of maturity. In these
deeply divisive and conflicted times, we truly need this sweet story of faith,
spiritual goodness, and the remarkable beauty and consequence of love and
forgiveness. To that end, A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood is a both
a revelation, and a miracle.
The Deutscher Phantastik Preis 2019 ceremony at BuchBerlin on November 23 honored creators
of speculative fiction published for the first time in German language during
the previous year.
In addition, history was made when a version of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince in Klingonese (simultaneously translated to German) won the Best Translation award. It was touted as being the first time a Klingon book ever won an award.
Bester deutscher Roman / Best German Novel
Das Vermächtnis der Grimms – Wer
hat Angst vorm bösen Wolf / Nicole Böhm / Drachenmond Verlag
Bestes deutschsprachiges Romandebüt / Best debut novel in German
Der fünfte Magier: Schneeweiß —
Christine Weber — Selfpublishing
Bestes deutschsprachiges Jugendbuch / Best German language youth
book
Loa – Die weiße Mambo — Petra
Reneé Meineke — Sad Wolf Verlag
Bester internationaler Roman / Best international novel
Elfenkrone — Holly Black — cbj
Verlag
Beste deutschsprachige Kurzgeschichte / Best German short story
Houston hat Probleme — Markus
Heitkamp — Talawah Verlag
Beste Deutsche Anthologie / Best German anthology
Noir Anthologie (1) — Mica Baram
u. a. — Sadwolf Verlag
Bestes deutschsprachiges Hörspiel/Hörbuch / Best German Language
Radio Play / Audiobook
Die Chroniken von Azuhr – Die
Weiße Königin — Bernhard Hennen — Wolfgang Wagner — Argon Verlag
Beste deutschsprachige Serie / Best German Language Series
Das Erbe der Macht — Andreas
Suchanek — Greenlight Press
Bester deutschsprachiger Grafiker /Best German-speaking Graphic
Artist
Die letzten Zeilen der Nacht —
Alexander Kopainski — Drachenmond Verlag
Bestes deutschsprachiges Sekundärwerk / Best German Language
Secondary Work (i.e., Related Work)
Es lebe Star Trek – Ein
Phänomen, zwei Leben — Björn Sülter — Verlag in Farbe und Bunt
Bester deutschsprachiger Comic / Manga / Best German Language
Comic / Manga
Capacitas — Marika Herzog —
Eigenproduktion
Sonderpreis 2019: Beste Übersetzung / Special Award 2019: Best
Translation
ta’puq mach – Der kleine Prinz
auf Klingonisch & Deutsch — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry – tr. Lieven L. Litaer
— Der Verlag in Farbe und Bunt
Two issues involving Audible’s ACX have come across my desk recently….
Rights Fraud
I’ve heard from several self- and small press-pubbed authors who report that they’ve found their books listed on ACX as open to narrator auditions…except that they, or their publishers, didn’t put them there. This appears to be an attempt to steal authors’ audio rights….
Promotional Code Shenanigans
Multiple authors have contacted me to report that they’ve received an email from ACX withdrawing their promotional codes. The cited reason: “unusual activity,” with no explanation of what that means….
In a newly released 30-second TV spot for The Rise of Skywalker, things are coming to a head. We see and hear some familiar things: Rey and Ben gearing up for a climactic confrontation, Luke imploring a listener (probably Rey) to face fear, as confronting fear is “the destiny of a Jedi.”
(4) WRITER ON THE EDGE OF FOREVER. Michael Chabon tells readers of The
New Yorker about writing for Star Trek while his father was dying: “The
Final Frontier”.
Ensign Spock, a young half-Vulcan science officer fresh out of Starfleet Academy and newly posted to the Enterprise, found himself alone in a turbolift with the ship’s formidable first officer, a human woman known as Number One. They were waiting for me to rescue them from the silence that reigns in all elevators, as universal as the vacuum of space.
I looked up from the screen of my iPad to my father, lying unconscious, amid tubes and wires, in his starship of a bed, in the irresolute darkness of an I.C.U. at 3 A.M. Ordinarily when my father lay on his back his abdomen rose up like the telescope dome of an observatory, but now there seemed to be nothing between the bed rails at all, just a blanket pulled as taut as a drum skin and then, on the pillow, my father’s big, silver-maned head. Scarecrow, after the flying monkeys had finished with him. His head was tilted upward and his jaw hung slack. All the darkness in the room seemed to pool in his open mouth….
…But my first experience with her work was about more than delight, admiration, or love. It was about transformation. The person I was on the way to becoming, in 1972—a particular coalescent configuration of synapses, apperceptions, and neural pathways—did not survive the encounter, at age nine, with A Wizard of Earthsea. The first volume of her Earthsea trilogy, the book was set in a richly realized and detailed imaginary topography of islands and ocean where the craft of language—the proper, precise configuring and utterance of words by a trained adept who knew their histories and understood their capabilities and thus could call things by their true names—had the power to alter reality, to remake the world.
But what really rearranged the contents of my skull was this: the book itself was a fractal demonstration of its own primary conceit. With nothing but language—lines on paper, properly configured—Ursula K. Le Guin conjured an entire planet into vivid existence, detailed and plausible from its flora to its weather to the dialects and ceremonies of its inhabitants. And while that world vanished the moment I closed the book’s covers, the memory of my visit, of young Ged’s searing struggle with his own malign shadow, remained. In Earthsea, the wielders of linguistic power were known as wizards, and they called their craft magic, but it was obvious to me, even at nine, that the true name of magic was writing, and that a writer like Ursula K. Le Guin was a mage.
(6) TALKIN’ ABOUT MY REGENERATION. Doctor Who has
posted an updated compilation of “All The Doctor’s Regenerations.”
From The Tenth Planet, all the way to Twice Upon A Time – Re-live ALL of the Doctor’s regenerations.
Toby Kebbell, who played Doctor Doom the poorly received 2015 Fantastic Four reboot, was asked by Movie Web if he had any advice for the next actor to essay that role. He did.
… he settled into a spartan 1950s bohemian life in New York, trying to break in but mostly accumulating rejections.
“Editors would take my drawings, laugh like hell, then hand them back and say, ‘Sorry, our readers wouldn’t understand,’” he told The Boston Globe in 1973.
Although he habitually delved into that dark funny corner that we associate with Charles Addams, his style was singular. He liked to depict ordinary folks encountering some kind of anxious terror, or experiencing the unthinkable in mundane places. It’s a man at a pizza counter hovering over an entire pizza—the man’s mouth the same oval shape, the same size, as the whole pie. It’s fishermen on a calm lake, with one about to be murdered by the other, who is removing a human mask to reveal his true monster self.
(9) MCPHEE OBIT. Former bookstore owner and NESFAn Spike
McPhee died November 13 in Cambridge, MA. Proprietor of the Science Fantasy bookstore
in Harvard Square from 1977 to 1989, McPhee was also an art collector, and avid
follower of science and space exploration news. He was a GoH at the 1990 Arisia.
Chip Hitchcock notes, “[Spike told] me some 40 years ago that he was the only fan to gafiate to
run a science-fiction bookstore; he’d been active in NESFA before then but the
store ate his time; I’ve lost track of whether Boston’s current genre store,
Pandemonium, is a literal descendant (from days in two other Harvard Square
locations) or just a successor.”
(10) TODAY IN HISTORY.
November 23, 1963 — Doctor Who first premiered with the airing of “An Unearthly Child”. Written by Anthony Coburn and C E Webber, it starred Carole Ann Ford as Susan Foreman, Jacqueline Hill as Barbara Wright, William Russell as Ian Chesterton, and William Hartnell as The Doctor. Critics were mixed with their reaction but generally favorable.
November 23, 2015 — The Expanse premiered on Syfy. Based on the novels by James S. A. Corey (collaborators Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck), it has now run three seasons, the latest on Amazon Prime. With a cast of seemingly hundreds, it has met with near unanimous approval, so much so that at Rotten Tomatoes, the third season had a score of 100%.itwas nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation at Dublin for “Abaddon’s Gate” but lost To The Good Place for their “Janet(s)” episode.
(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born November 23, 1887 — Boris Karloff. Where do I start? Well consider the Thirties. He portrayed Frankenstein’s monster in Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein and Son of Frankenstein, and Imhotep in The Mummy. And he played a great pulp character in Dr. Fu Manchu in The Mask of Fu Manchu too! Now let’s jump forward to the Sixties and the small screen adaptation of Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas which featured him as both the voice of The Grinch and the narrator of the story as well. I know I’ve skipped four decades of that means not a word about such as Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde where he was the latter. (Died 1969.)
Born November 23, 1914 — Wilson Tucker. Author and very well-known member of fandom. I’m going to just direct you here to “A Century of Tucker” by Mike as I couldn’t say anything about him that was this good. (Died 2006.)
Born November 23, 1916 — Michael Gough. Best-known for his roles in the Hammer Horror Films from the late Fifties and for his recurring role as Alfred Pennyworth in all four films of the Tim Burton / Joel Schumacher Batman series. His Hammer Horror Films saw him cast usually as the evil, and I mean EVIL! Not to mention SLIMY, villain in such films as Horrors of the Black Museum, The Phantom of the Opera, The Corpse and Horror Hospital, not to overlook Satan’s Slave. Gough appeared in Doctor Who as the villain in “The Celestial Toymaker” (1966) and then again as Councillor Hedin in “Arc of Infinity” (1983). He also played Dr. Armstrong in “The Cybernauts” in The Avengers (1965) returning the very next season as the Russian spymaster Nutski in “The Correct Way to Kill”. Gough worked for Burton in 1999’s Sleepy Hollow and later voice Elder Gutknecht in Corpse Bride. (Died 2011.)
Born November 23, 1955 — Steven Brust, 64. Of Hungarian descendant, something that figures into his fiction which he says is neither fantasy nor SF. He is perhaps best known for his novels about the assassin Vlad Taltos, one of a scorned group of humans living on a world called Dragaera. Ala are great reads. His recent novels also include The Incrementalists and its sequel The Skill of Our Hands, with co-author Skyler White. Both are superb. His finest novel? Brokedown Palace. Oh, just go read it. It’s amazing. And no, I don’t love everything he’s done. I wrote a scathing review of Cowboy Feng’s Space Bar and Grille. Freedom & Necessity with Emma Bull is decidedly different but good none the less and his Firefly novel, My Own Kind of Freedom, stays true to that series. He’s quite the musician too with two albums with Cats Laughing, a band that includes Emma Bull, Jane Yolen (lyrics) and others. The band in turn shows up in Marvel comics. A Rose For Iconoclastes is his solo album and “The title, for those who don’t know, is a play off the brilliant story by Roger Zelazny, ‘A Rose For Ecclesiastes,’ which you should read if you haven’t yet.” Quoting him again, ““Songs From The Gypsy” is the recording of a cycle of songs I wrote with ex-Boiled-in-Lead guitarist Adam Stemple, which cycle turned into a novel I wrote with Megan Lindholm, one of my favorite writers.” The album and book are quite amazing!
Born November 23, 1961 — David Rappaport. I remember him best as Randall, the leader of the gang of comically inept dwarves in Time Bandits who steal the map to Universe. I’m reasonably sure that it’s the only thing he’ll be remembered for of a genre nature having looked up his other works and found them to be decidedly minor in nature. Most of them such as The Bride, a low budget horror film, were artistic and commercial disasters. It is said that his death by suicide in 1990 is one of the reasons cited by Gilliam for there not being a sequel to Time Bandits. (Died 1990.)
Born November 23, 1966 — Michelle Gomez, 53. Best-known genre role is Missy, a female version of The Master on Doctor Who from 2014 to 2017, for which she was nominated for the 2016 BAFTA TV Award for Best Supporting Actress. I admit having grown up with Roger Delgado as The Master that later performers playing this role took a bit of getting used but she made a fine one. She is also Mary Wardwell in The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. She plays Talia Bauerin in Highlander: The Raven which apparently is a very short-live spinoff from the Highlander series. And she shows up in the Gotham series for two episodes simply as The Lady.
Born November 23, 1967 — Salli Richardson-Whitfield, 52. Best known genre role is as Dr. Allison Blake on Eureka which apparently in syndication is now called A Town Called Eureka. H’h? I’m reasonably sure her first genre role was as Fenna / Nidell in the “Second Sight” of Deep Space Nine but charmingly voiced the main human character on the animated Gargoyles series! Shes shows up as character named Dray’auc in “Bloodlines” on Stargate Sg-1 and had a role on a series called Secret Agent Man that may or may have existed. She’s was Maggie Baptiste in Stitchers, a series that lasted longer than I expected it would.
Born November 23, 1992 — Miley Cyrus, 27. She’s had three genre appearances, each ten years apart. She was in Big Fish as the eight-year-old Ruthie, she was the voice of Penny in Bolt and she voiced Mainframe on Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. And there’s the matter of A Very Murray Christmas which is at least genre adjacent…
…Robert Harris’s new book is concerned with questions of institutional power, hypocrisy and individual moral choices, but in a wholly different era of changed perceptions.
The Second Sleep is a pleasingly genre-bending novel that passes itself off as historical fiction in its early pages. Christopher Fairfax, a young priest, rides to Addicott St. George, a village in Wessex, with a rather simple mission: He is to carry out the funeral service for Addicott’s recently deceased Father Lacey. Quickly, however, reader expectations are wonderfully overturned as Fairfax examines, with some distaste, a display case full of ancient artifacts, including “pens, glassware, a plate commemorating a royal wedding …” (wait, what?) “… a bundle of plastic straws …” (huh?) and “what seemed to be the pride of the collection: one of the devices used by the ancients to communicate,” which has on its back “the ultimate symbol of the ancients’ hubris and blasphemy — an apple with a bite taken out of it.”
The year may be 1468, but it’s not the one in the past — Fairfax is, in fact, living in the future, one in which the Apocalypse is widely believed to have occurred just as it was prophesied in the New Testament, after which Christ rose anew and humankind was once again saved. The Church — a political as well as religious entity in this future England, closely tied to and seemingly far more important than the monarchy — started counting years anew after the Apocalypse, beginning with 666, the number of the beast.
As Fairfax learns more about Addicott’s dead priest, he becomes increasingly uncomfortable. It appears that Father Lacey was a collector of artifacts that have become, in the past couple of decades, illegal to own. Worse even than the plastic doodads and useless electronics in his possession, which Father Lacey found in the vicinity of the village, the priest had a library full of illegal books hypothesizing about the ancients who worshipped science and forgot God, bringing about their own downfall.
(13) THE MASTER LIST. Rex Sorgatz is compiling “Best of 2010’s” lists. It
includes several Best SF/F Books, Best Comics/Graphic Novels, Best Horror
Movies, etc. lists (and may pick up more as time goes by) — “LISTS: THE 2010s
DECADE”.
For the last hundred years, Americans have kept ghosts in their place, letting them out only in October, in the run-up to our only real haunted holiday, Halloween. But it wasn’t always this way, and it’s no coincidence that the most famous ghost story is a Christmas story—or, put another way, that the most famous Christmas story is a ghost story. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was first published in 1843, and its story about a man tormented by a series of ghosts the night before Christmas belonged to a once-rich, now mostly forgotten tradition of telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve. Dickens’ supernatural yuletide terror was no outlier, since for much of the 19th century, was the holiday indisputably associated with ghosts and the specters.
“Whenever five or six English-speaking people meet round a fire on Christmas Eve, they start telling each other ghost stories,” humorist Jerome K. Jerome wrote in his 1891 collection, Told After Supper. “Nothing satisfies us on Christmas Eve but to hear each other tell authentic anecdotes about spectres. It is a genial, festive season, and we love to muse upon graves, and dead bodies, and murders, and blood.”
Telling ghost stories during winter is a hallowed tradition, a folk custom stretches back centuries, when families would wile away the winter nights with tales of spooks and monsters. “A sad tale’s best for winter,” Mamillius proclaims in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale: “I have one. Of sprites and goblins.” And the titular Jew of Malta in Christopher Marlowe’s play at one point muses, “Now I remember those old women’s words, Who in my wealth would tell me winter’s tales, And speak of spirits and ghosts by night.”
(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Moses Goes Down” on Vimeo is Nina Paley’s take on Moses
leaving Egypt, with music by Louis Armstrong.
[Thanks to Lisa Goldstein, Chip Hitchcock, Bill, Cat Eldridge,
Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Michael Toman, and
Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770
contributing editor of the day Andrew.]
Ad campaigns for genre TV and movies dominated the Clio Entertainment Awards presentation on November 22 as Joker, Us, Game of Thrones and Legion all won big.
The jury for the award which recognizes entertainment marketing campaigns included Amazon Studios’ Mike Benson, WarnerMedia’s Chris Spadaccini, Twitch’s John Koller, Cirque du Soleil’s Kristina Heney, Warner Bros. Pictures’ Massey Rafani and others.
A partial list of winners follows. The full list,
along with other key information, can be found here.
Games: Innovation
GRAND WINNER: Changing the Game (Microsoft)
Games: Key Art
GRAND WINNER Key Art – Multi-use, Borderlands 3
Games: Original
Content
BRONZE WINNER: Visit Xbox: the birth of gaming tourism (Microsoft Xbox One X Enhanced)
(1) NYT’S PICKS OF THE YEAR. The editors of The NY Times Book Review choose the
best fiction and nonfiction titles this year in “The
10 Best Books of 2019”. Ted Chiang’s collection Exhalation is
one of them:
Many of the nine deeply beautiful stories in this collection explore the material consequences of time travel. Reading them feels like sitting at dinner with a friend who explains scientific theory to you without an ounce of condescension. Each thoughtful, elegantly crafted story poses a philosophical question; Chiang curates all nine into a conversation that comes full circle, after having traversed remarkable terrain.
The nonfiction selections include Midnight in Chernobyl by
Adam Higginbotham.
The beginning of modern science fiction lies in the age of Industrial Revolution, when the significance of science and technology steadily increased….
Daring, aren’t they?
(3) HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LID. This week, The Full Lid turns 3! Alasdair Stuart’s preview
of The
Full Lid 22nd November 2019 hits the highlights:
To celebrate we’ve got thematically resonant Lego, some thoughts about Gary Oldman and Jackson Lamb, a look at Karen Gillen’s extraordinary directorial debut and an advanced review of Ryan Ferrier and George Kambadais’ excellent horror noir comedy, I Can Sell You A Body.
In a windowless room at Walt Disney Animation Studios in Burbank, Calif., supervising sound editor Odin Benitez plays different sound effects for the creative team of Frozen II. Directors Jennifer Lee and Chris Buck are commenting on the wind sounds.
Wind — like water, air, earth and fire — is important to the story in Frozen II. Playful “Gale,” as she’s called, swooshes around an enchanted forest carrying with her a flurry of leaves that fly around to flute-like sounds. Angry Gale is loud and gusty and, at times, sounds almost like a “backwards inhale,” Lee says approvingly.
As Benitez plays different sounds, Buck and Lee talk about the importance of this anthropomorphic wind. When she’s angry, Buck says “she blasts that tree limb away from Anna.” When Gale interacts with Elsa, who has the power to make ice and snow, they need a sound that implies Gale is saying “You’re the magic,” Lee says.
Getting the sound effects for this short scene just right is a team effort, as is every other aspect of an animated Disney movie. “You go shot by shot, moment by moment, frame by frame, and discuss everything from the emotion to the effects to the camera,” Lee says.
Lots of make-believe Elsas and Annas are about to finally get their wishes when Frozen II hits theaters this weekend. The first Frozen melted young hearts around the world when it was released in 2013 — up until this year, it was the highest-grossing animated film worldwide. (The 2019 remake of The Lion King now holds the top spot.)
Also remarkable: Jennifer Lee co-directed and wrote the screenplays for both Frozen and Frozen II. She has since been named the chief creative officer of Walt Disney Animation Studios — the first woman to hold such a position.
When you’re drawing imaginary creatures that doesn’t exist, how do you make them look real?
You’re trying to get people to buy into an alternative world. The more you can seat it in apparent reality, the better it works.
On a more practical level, it’s much easier to draw if you have something in front of you. If it doesn’t exist, I make it. If there isn’t something in the wild or it’s not in a museum, I’ll try to make it out of clay or plasticene. I’m not one of those illustrators who can pull stuff out of my head, I’m afraid. I’m not that good.
“It’s much easier to draw if you have something in front of you. If it doesn’t exist, I make it,” Kay said.
(6) COLBERT AND PETER JACKSON. The comedy continues!
Stephen Colbert’s epic quest to become The Newest Zealander takes him to Peter Jackson’s top-secret Wellington studio, where Colbert convinces Jackson to direct a new trilogy centered around his character from “The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug.” Watch as the two debut the trailer for Stephen Colbert presents Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings series’ The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug’s “The Laketown Spy” is Darrylgorn in Darrylgorn Rising: The Rise of Darrylgorn The Prequel to Part One: Chapter One.
(7) POLLARD OBIT. Actor Michael J. Pollard, best known for
his work in the movie Bonnie and Clyde, died November 20 at the age of
80. As the Washington
Post summed up: “The film remained the pinnacle of Mr.
Pollard’s screen career, even as he continued working in dozens of films over
the next five decades, playing all manner of eccentrics and creeps.” His
TV work included episodes of Lost in Space, Star Trek, The Girl from
U.N.C.L.E., and Superboy (“Mr. Mxyzptlk”), The Ray Bradbury
Theater, and Tales from the Crypt.
(8) TRIVIAL TRIVIA.
The first ever product to be
purchased using a bar code was a 10-pack of Juicy Fruit gum at a Marsh
supermarket in Ohio on June 26, 1974.
(9) TODAY IN HISTORY.
November 22, 1968 — Star Trek’s “Plato’s Stepchildren” featured what is said to be the first interracial kiss in prime time television in the kiss between Kirk and Uhura. Memory Alpha disputes this with a listing of previous kisses.
November 22, 1989 — Back to the Future II premiered. Starring Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd and Lea Thompson, the critics gave it a mix response but it holds a solid 65% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
November 22, 1996 — Star Trek: First Contact premiered. Starring the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation andAlice Krige, this film did well at the box office and currently holds an 89% approval among viewers at Rotten Tomatoes. It was Jonathan Frakes first directing effort.
November 22, 1999 — Donkey Kong 64 was released, an adventure platform video game for the Nintendo 64 console.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born November 22, 1932 — Robert Vaughn. His best-known genre work was as Napoleon Solo in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. with other genre work being in Teenage Caveman, Starship Invasions, The Lucifer Complex, Virus, Hangar 18, Battle Beyond the Stars, Superman III, C.H.U.D. II: Bud the C.H.U.D. (seriously who penned that title?), Transylvania Twist and Witch Academy. God, did he do some awful films. Oh, and he wrote the introduction to The Man from U.N.C.L.E. series companion that came out a generation after the series aired. (Died 2016.)
Born November 22, 1940 — Terry Gilliam, 79. He’s directed many films of which the vast majority are firmly genre. I think I’ve seen most of them though I though I’ve not seen The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, Tideland, The Zero Theorem or The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. I’ve seen everything else. Yes, I skipped past his start as the animator for Monty Python’s Flying Circus which grew out of his for the children’s series Do Not Adjust Your Set which had staff of Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin. Though he largely was the animator in the series and the films, he did occasionally take acting roles according to his autobiography, particularly roles no one else wanted such those requiring extensive makeup. He’s also co-directed a number of scenes. Awards? Of course. Twelve Monkeys is the most decorated followed by Brazil with two and Time Bandits and The Fisher King which each have but one. My favorite films by him? Oh, the one I’ve watched the most is The Adventures of Baron Munchausen followed by Time Bandits.
Born November 22, 1943 — William Kotzwinkle, 76. Fata Morgana might be his best novel though Doctor Rat which he won the World Fantasy Award for is in the running for that honor as well. And his short stories are quite excellent too. Neither Apple Books or Kindle we particularity well stocked with his works.
Born November 22, 1949 — John Grant, 70. He’d make the Birthday list solely for being involved in the stellar Hugo Award winning Encyclopedia of Fantasy which also won a Mythopoeic Award. And he did win another well-deserved Hugo Award for Best Related Work for The Chesley Awards for Science Fiction and Fantasy Art: A Retrospective. Most of his short fiction has been set in the Lone Wolf universe, though I see that he did a Judge Dredd novel too.
Born November 22, 1958 — Jamie Lee Curtis, 61. Can we agree that she was the best Scream Queen for her film debut in the 1978 Halloween film in which she played the role of Laurie Strode? No? Well that’s my claim. She followed up with yet more horror films, The Fog and Prom Night. In all, she’s the only character that survives. She would reprise the role of Laurie in four sequels, including Halloween H20, Halloween: Resurrection, Halloween II and Halloween III: Season of the Witch. She shows up in up of my fav SF films, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension as Sandra Banzai but you’ll need to see the director’s extended version as she’s only there in that version. Is True Lies genre? Probably not but for her performance, Curtis won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy and the Saturn Award for Best Actress. Damn impressive I’d say. No, I’m not listing all her films here as OGH would likely start growling. [*growl*] Suffice to say she’s had a very impressive career.
Born November 22, 1967 — Mark Ruffalo, 52. Dr. Bruce Banner and The Hulk in the MCU film franchise. (Some silly SFF sites only credit him as the former saying the latter is all CGI.) He was The Boyfriend in Where the Wild Things Are, and was in the most excellent Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as Stan. Early on, he played two different roles in the Mirror, Mirror horror anthology series.
Born November 22, 1979 — Leeanna Walsman, 40. Spoiler alert. She’s best known as the assassin Zam Wesell from Attack of The Clones. Being Australian, she’s shown up on Farscape, a Hercules series (but not that series), BeastMaster and Thunderstone series and Spellbinder: Land of the Dragon Lord.
Born November 22, 1988 — James Campbell Bower, 31. He‘s best recognized for his roles in the Twilight franchise, the young Gellert Grindelwald in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1 and Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, Jace Wayland in The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones and playwright Kit Marlowe in the short-lived series and highly fictionalised Will.
(11) COMICS SECTION.
Not SF (except for the talking rat!) but I think a lot of Filers will understand the sentiment in today’s Pearls Before Swine.
Star Wars fans have made it clear: Baby Yoda (or whoever the cute little tyke actually is) is a massive hit. In fact, there is such a clamoring for the breakout star of Disney+ series TheMandalorian that bootleg merchandise has flooded the Internet, as nothing officially licensed has been released as of Friday.
A quick search on eBay for Baby Yoda results in a plethora of items, including shirts, mugs and stuffed toys. “He protects. He attacks. He also takes naps,” a shirt reads. A coffee mug proclaims “Adorable he is. Protect him, I will.”
The cast and crew of a Doctor Who episode that was filmed in Sheffield have accepted honorary doctorates from one of the city’s universities.
The opening episode of series 11, The Woman Who Fell to Earth, featured Jodie Whittaker as the first female Doctor.
Chris Chibnall, showrunner and executive producer on the series, was awarded the honour of Doctor of Arts by Sheffield Hallam University.
He said it was a “massive team effort” and praised the people of Sheffield.
“From the moment we made the decision for the Doctor to fall out of the sky into the streets and homes of Sheffield in 2018, the residents and the city have treated us brilliantly, on screen and off.
…“I can do what actors do, which is to use my imagination to trick myself into a reality, meaning that the mask is always reminding me . . . no one can really see what I’m doing with my face,” Nelson said. “If I play that reality, I get all the power and status that wearing a mask is meant to confer.
“There don’t need to be any histrionics, there don’t need to be any demonstrations of power. Everything can happen simply and quietly and with restraint, because the power is just there. What I’ve tried to do as a performer is just aggregate a stillness with Wade that I think is there in the writing.”
SpaceX’s Starship rocket prototype experienced a major failure during pressurisation testing on Wednesday.
A video from the scene in Texas showed the top part of the vehicle rupture.
Cryogenic propellants that were being loaded at the time dispersed across the Boca Chica facility in a huge cloud.
The US company bills Starship as an all-purpose transportation system of the future. It will be used to ferry people and cargo off Earth, and to destinations around the globe.
The Mk-1 prototype was due to begin practice flights to an altitude of 20km in the coming weeks.
In a tweet, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said that could no longer happen and the ship would be retired.
Development work is already being directed at another prototype, labelled the Mk-3.
When Rose McAdoo got back to New York after spending several months working as a sous chef in Antarctica, her friends had questions. Are there penguins? How do you get supplies? Are you, like, on an iceberg?
McAdoo set about answering their questions the best way she knows how: with cake.
“Cake is my canvas,” she says. “It’s my way of making big ideas literally digestible.”
The result was a series of descriptive desserts McAdoo developed to tell the story of life and work at McMurdo Station, a U.S.-run research station in Antarctica. She’s says she chose projects that showcase the diversity of the research that’s happening on the continent. She is now releasing photographs of the cakes, and the stories and science behind them, on her Instagram page.
[Thanks to Rich Horton, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Mike Kennedy,
Martin Morse Wooster, Rob Thornton, Andrew Porter, Chip Hitchcock, Daniel Dern,
Contrarius, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to
File 770 contributing editor of the day Kyra.]