Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki finally received a visa to come to the 2022 Worldcon in Chicago, however, he missed his first flight for reasons explained below. He believes that problem will be overcome, however, he says the entire trip still depends on “a steady stream of miracles for the simplest things.” The thread starts here.
(1) A CRITIQUE OF NEAL STEPHENSON. In The New Atlantis: “The Supergenius at the End of the World”.
… And yet for all of sci-fi’s close attentiveness to arcane scientific ideas — say, the equivalence principle or the physics of traversable wormholes — the portrayals we see of how political actors might face such crises are rarely realistic. What we typically find instead are political arrangements in which knowledgeable technocrats are already comfortably ensconced in positions of authority, or narratives that leave politics offstage altogether.
In this sense, the renowned science fiction writer Neal Stephenson’s oeuvre may serve as a stand-in for the genre. For while his work draws heavily upon the tradition of political philosophy, and his plots make frequent dramatic use of catastrophic scenarios, he seems unable to present a serious account of politics as a venue for decision-making of the most consequential sort. And though he is attentive to the social and political tensions modern science often generates, particularly in democratic societies, his protagonists usually end up circumventing politics when faced with the kinds of disasters that set his plots in motion.
This is altogether a great loss. The genre of science fiction as we think of it today originally arose as part of a cultural response to the rise of scientific and technical mastery. But before it was ever a genre, it was part of a broader tradition of speculative philosophical and political thought. That today’s sci-fi — and a writer of Neal Stephenson’s caliber in particular — is unserious about crisis politics is a shame….
(2) CENSORS LOSE ROUND ONE. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In the Washington Post, Hannah Natanson says District Court Judge Pamela Baskervill (spelled that way) dismissed a lawsuit by two Virginia legislators that the graphic novel Gender Queer and the fantasy novel A Court Of Mist And Fury are obscene and can be banned from Barnes and Noble, but the legislators could sill appeal to the Virginia Supreme Court. “Virginia judge dismisses lawsuit challenging sale of two ‘obscene’ books”.
A Virginia judge on Tuesday dismissed a lawsuit brought by two Republicans that sought to limit how bookstores and public school libraries could distribute two books to minors, closing — at least temporarily — an unusual commercial strategy in what conservatives say is a campaign to protect students from age-inappropriate literature….
(3) ANDY DUNCAN ADVICE. Long-time Clarion West instructor Andy Duncan recorded six videos for their Flash Fiction Workshop as part of the 2022 Write-a-thon, and they’re now available to watch on the Clarion West YouTube channel. Dig into the first video here.
(4) CLARION WEST SCHOLARSHIP WINNERS. The 2022 Octavia E. Butler and Worldbuilder Scholars were profiled by Clarion West.
Two Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarships donated by the Carl Brandon Society went to Clarion West students. Naomi Day and Wen-yi Lee. Naomi was initially selected as a Butler Scholar in 2020, and Wen-yi was selected this year upon her acceptance.
Since 2007, the Carl Brandon Society has donated this scholarship in Octavia’s name to writers of color attending Clarion and Clarion West. Octavia attended the Clarion Writers Workshop in Pennsylvania in 1970 and taught at the Clarions for many years; this scholarship offers BIPOC writers a similar opportunity to emerge into the speculative fiction scene.
Naomi Day is a queer Black American writer who spends their time thinking about liminal experiences, mothers, and broken and found families. Her work has appeared in Black Warrior Review and The Seventh Wave, and she is an MFA candidate at The New School.
Wen-yi Lee is from Singapore and likes writing about girls with bite, feral nature, and ghosts. Her fiction has appeared in Uncanny and Strange Horizons, among others, and her non-fiction can be found on Tordotcom. She is currently working on a Singaporean historical fantasy.
George R. R. Martin awarded two Worldbuilder Scholarships this year. Tania Fordwalker, of Tasmania, was selected to receive a Worldbuilder Scholarship in 2020, and Yvette Lisa Ndlovu, of Zimbabwe, was selected this year upon her acceptance.
The Worldbuilder is a full scholarship funded by George R. R. Martin and anonymously judged by Martin’s team. The scholarship is awarded to a student with strong worldbuilding skills. Martin says: “Every great story requires interesting characters, an engrossing plot, evocative prose, an important theme… but epic fantasy also requires a memorable setting. A ‘secondary universe,’ as J.R.R. Tolkien termed it, a world both like and unlike our own, with its own rich history and geography and customs, its own beauties and terrors.”
Tania Fordwalker is an Australian living between chilly Tasmania and tropical Queensland with her spouse and cloud-shaped dog. She travels whenever she can, and writes because she’s incapable of holding down a real job. Her work has appeared in Lightspeed, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, PodCastle and more. Her first novel — the story of an escapee from a post-apocalyptic cult — is currently out on submission. She is very short and, in the way of all small things, will absolutely fight you. Find Tania at Fordwalker.com or on Twitter at @TaniaWalker.
Yvette Lisa Ndlovu is the Zimbabwean author of Drinking from Graveyard Wells (University Press of Kentucky, March 2023). She earned her BA at Cornell University and is an MFA candidate at UMass Amherst. Her work has been supported by fellowships from Tin House, Bread Loaf Writers Workshop, and the New York State Summer Writers Institute. She is the co-founder of the Voodoonauts Summer Fellowship for Black writers.
(5) RON LOGAN OBIT. Disney Legend Ron Logan, who as EVP and executive producer for Walt Disney Entertainment transformed live entertainment in its parks and helped bring Beauty and the Beast to Broadway, died August 30 at the age of 84.
… In his last role at Disney, Logan was EVP, executive producer, for Walt Disney Entertainment. He was responsible for creating, casting and producing all live entertainment products for the Walt Disney Company, including its resorts, The Disney Institute, Disney Business Productions, Disney Cruise Line, Disney Entertainment Productions and Walt Disney Entertainment Worldwide. He also was EVP of the Walt Disney Special Events Group, and EVP of Disney Special Programs Inc. He produced all live entertainment shows for the Disney Parks worldwide, as well as five Super Bowl halftime shows.
(6) MEMORY LANE.
1965 – [By Cat Eldridge.] Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising sequence.
Fire on the mountain shall find the harp of gold
Played to wake the Sleepers, oldest of the old;
Power from the green witch, lost beneath the sea;
All shall find the light at last, silver on the tree.
I suspect that most of you know something about this series, and further more that a lot of you have read this splendid undertaking. These five novels were intended for older children and young adults, published from 1965 to 1977, were written by the British author Susan Cooper, born May 1935.
Over Sea, Under Stone, the first was meant to be a solo novel but four followed. The series takes its name from the second novel The Dark is Rising. The final three were Green Witch, The Grey King and Silver on the Tree.
Cooper’s summation of the series is: “When young Will Stanton discovers he has come of age as the lastborn of the Old Ones, the immortal keepers of the force of the Light, he is swept up in the age-old struggle between the powers of Light and Dark. The battles against the last dreadful rising of the Dark are waged across time in the most ancient myth-haunted places of England and Wales. Will, his ageless master Merriman, and their allies and adversaries—human and mythic alike—seek the objects of power that will tip the uncertain balance of good and evil that exists throughout the world and within the mind of man.”
Cooper did a most splendid crafting of stitching together of Arthurian mythology, Celtic mythology, English folklore and Norse mythology. And I can say that they quite wonderful books indeed!
The American Library Association’s Margaret A. Edwards Award, which recognizes one writer and a particular body of work for significant and lasting contribution to YA literature, went to the full series. Solo books have been have honored as well — The Grey King picked up a Newbery Medal and Tir na n-Og while Silver on The Tree garnered a Tir na n-Og.
An adaptation was done, not at all successfully I’d say was a kind way to put it. Cooper didn’t like the film and has made that clear in interviews. It was called The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising and critics and the box office alike were hostile to it.
I swear there was a series made as well but I can’t find anything about it. I’ve got a Radio Times story from 2016 “Sky is developing a drama based on The Dark is Rising fantasy books” but nothing after that.
The audiobooks are read by Alex Jennings who does a most excellent job. He’s a British actor of the stage and screen who has worked mainly with the National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company. For his work with the London stage, he received three Olivier Awards given for My Fair Lady, Peer Gynt and Too Clever by Half.
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
(8) COMICS SECTION.
(9) A SECRET IDENTITY THAT WAS EVEN SECRET FROM ITS OWNER. “Did DC Once Produce a Superman Issue Hidden From the Editor of the Comic?” CBR.com says, of course, the answer is yes.
…Schwartz recalled the incident in his auto-biography:
“So comes the day [of his 70th birthday], and all of a sudden publisher Jenette Kahn’s administrative assistant Carol Fein comes in and says we’re having a special meeting in the conference room. I probably fretted as I walked down the hall wondering what the latest crisis was—and walked into the conference room to discover champagne on ice and Jenette handing me the first copy of SUPERMAN #411, and I see that I am depicted on the cover.”
The original art for the cover was then signed by LOTS of people, and Schwartz kept having people sign it over the years…
(10) MALTIN ON MOVIES. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] I listed to this podcast Leonard and Jessie Maltin did with animator Andreas Deja, who saw The Jungle Book when he was 10 or 11 in West Germany and decided he wanted to be an animator. He wrote to Disney asking what he had to do and they told him in a form letter to study anatomy and learn to draw animals in real life. He did this, went to Disney, and worked his way up to being a master animator in charge of a particular character. He stayed at Disney for 30 years and is now a Disney Legend, but left around 2010 when Disney decided to switch to CGI. Since then, Deja lectures on animation history with the aid of Disney’s unusually extensive archives and has worked on his own animated film, the 25-minute Mouschka which will feature 80 percent hand-drawn animation by him. This is a pretty deep dive into Disney animation but this is a subject Maltin knows very well so I thought it informative. “Maltin on Movies: Andreas Deja”.
(11) THE RADIANT AFTERGLOW. “The Atomic Café: The Cult Classic Documentary Made Entirely Out of Nuclear Weapons Propaganda from the Cold War (1982)” – discussed at Open Culture.
…It came out in 1982, when the public’s assumptions of American military benevolence — and its patience with the country’s seemingly permanent arms race against the Soviet Union — were running low. These decades-old clips of strenuously pious politicians, drawling bomber pilots, rambling Babbitts, and civil defense-ready nuclear (in both senses) families could hardly have met with more intense cynicism.
“I was an exact contemporary of those kids in this old documentary footage,” writes Roger Ebert in his review The Atomic Café. “Life magazine ran blueprints for fallout shelters, and Estes Kefauver barnstormed the nation with warnings about strontium 90 in the milk supply.” In one scene “girls in home ec classes display their canned goods designed for nuclear survival, and it is clear from their faces that they have no clue of how they would survive nuclear war, and little hope of doing so.” The film as a whole evokes a time when the United States “spent a good deal of its resources on addressing the possibility of nuclear war, however uselessly.” We no longer hear much about that possibility, perhaps because it has genuinely diminished, or perhaps because — as viewers of The Atomic Café will suspect even today — the propagandists are busy convincing us of something else entirely.,,,
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Anthony.]
The 2022 Mike Wieringo Comic Book Industry Awards final ballot has been released. The nominees were selected by the combined efforts of jury and public voting.
Final ballot voting is restricted to comic book industry creative community — anyone involved in and credited with creating comics professionally.
In addition to Final Ballot categories, both Fan-Only Favorites from the nomination ballot and Hero Initiative Awards (The Hero Initiative Lifetime Achievement Award and The Dick Giordano Humanitarian Award) will be presented at the Mike Wieringo Comic Book Industry Awards ceremony the evening of October 29 as part of The Baltimore Comic-Con.
BEST CARTOONIST (WRITER/ARTIST)
BEST WRITER
BEST ARTIST OR PENCILLER
BEST INKER
BEST LETTERER
BEST COLORIST
BEST COVER ARTIST
BEST SERIES
BEST SINGLE ISSUE OR STORY
BEST ORIGINAL GRAPHIC NOVEL
BEST ANTHOLOGY
BEST HUMOR COMIC
BEST WEBCOMIC
BEST HUMOR WEBCOMIC
BEST NON-FICTION COMIC WORK
BEST KIDS COMIC OR GRAPHIC NOVEL
BEST PRESENTATION IN DESIGN
Nigerian sff author and 2022 Hugo finalist Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki announced yesterday he was granted a visa to attend Chicon 8 after a second interview with the U.S. Embassy staff in Lagos.
The Chicon 8 committee issued a press release today:
Chicon 8, the 2022 World Science Fiction Convention, is delighted to announce that leading African SF author and 2022 Hugo Award Finalist Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki has been granted a visa and will be attending the convention in person. Details of Mr. Ekpeki’s convention appearance can be found in the Chicon 8 schedule.
Mr. Ekpeki is one of the rising global stars of science fiction and a leading figure in the rapidly expanding African SF field. His story “O2 Arena”, first published in Galaxy’s Edge magazine, has already won a Nebula Award and is now nominated in the Best Novelette category for the Hugo Awards. He has also been nominated in the Best Editor, Short Form category.
Mr. Ekpeki’s application for a visa was initially rejected by the U.S. Embassy in Lagos despite widespread support for his appearance from across the field. In addition to Chicon 8’s letter of invitation and other documentation, Mr. Ekpeki crowd-funded the full cost of his trip in a single day.
Mr. Ekpeki was granted a successful second interview by the Embassy after urgent appeals from Chicon 8 and many individuals. According to Chicon 8 Chairman Helen Montgomery, “we are delighted that Mr. Ekpeki was able to successfully re-apply for his visa. Our thanks go to Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and everyone who expressed their support for Mr. Ekpeki privately and publicly throughout the process”.
Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki wrote today on Twitter:
@miminality @File_770 @jasonsanford @drfionamoore @locusmag @effjayem @RimiBChatterjee @LaNovellaSerena @ABrooksdeVita
— Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki (@Penprince_) August 31, 2022
And everyone who added their voice to the clamour or contributed in any way. Thanks! ????????????
Sarah Avery, in a comment on File 770, added more details about a part of the overall effort she was aware of, getting help from Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen and his staff.
Many people wrote to their elected representatives. The only person I know for sure heard back is me. I have heard that some of the people organizing ChiCon got Senator Tammy Duckworth interested. I gather other people had different avenues they were working on, too. I hope people who know more will tell those stories.
I cut and pasted Mike [Glyer]’s letter, added a couple of paragraphs, and sent it to my whole congressional delegation. Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland) replied. He could write a letter of support if Ekpeki made a second application for the visa, because the previous decision could not be overruled, and if Van Hollen’s office received a bunch of specific documentation about the case.
I got in touch with Chris Barkley, whose post here was the reason I knew about Ekpeki’s predicament in the first place. Barkley started working with Ekpeki on the documentation. We all had some questions, so we followed up with an assigned member of Van Hollen’s staff. (The staffer has asked not to be identified, so I’m using they/them pronouns for them.) Everybody thought we had the weekend to get the paperwork ready so the letter could be written.
On Friday, Ekpeki got word that his reapplication appointment would be on Monday. Suddenly, that letter of support had to reach the embassy before Monday’s start of business hours in Lagos, which is several time zones ahead of DC. Barkley tried to reach the staffer and learned they were scheduled to be out of office for meetings all day. As far as we knew at the time, nobody else advocating for the visa was having better luck than we were. It looked like the only way forward was to get some live human to commit to sending that letter of support before the weekend. Because Barkley doesn’t live in Maryland and didn’t have a constituent’s claim on the rest of Van Hollen’s staff, I phoned every number I could find that had any connection with the senator’s office.
Of course, legislative staffers are awash in death threats from fascists these days, so you can’t get a live human on the first try. I left voicemail messages everywhere and made a cordial, courteous, but flagrantly undeterrable pest of myself. Basically, I did what I remembered from Indivisible’s advice back in 2016.
Ekpeki and Barkley got the documentation finished in a hurry. Barkley sent it all with a fresh email to the staffer who was our point of contact, imploring them to make time for that letter of support before the weekend.
I was preparing to phone All The Numbers again, when the point of contact staff person phoned me. Their colleagues had tracked them down because of my previous round with All The Numbers. They stepped out of a meeting in progress to tell me they had the news and would work on the letter of support over the weekend. It’s true what people say about the overtime legislative staffers put in. I confirmed that they had Barkley’s latest email and everything they needed.
On Sunday, they emailed Barkley and me to confirm that the letter had gone to the embassy in Lagos and been received.
Monday, Ekpeki let Barkley know that the second appointment had seemed to go better than the first, but it was still unclear what the final answer would be. So I emailed the staffer asking if one more nudge was possible. I didn’t hear back on that one.
This morning, Barkley texted me with the jubilant all-caps news: HE GOT IT! HE GOT IT! THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT!
Chris Van Hollen is a person who can hear about a situation like Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki’s and say, yes, that’s a kind of problem senatorial power should address. I owe my thanks especially to his staff member, because they looked at that initial email and said, yes, this was the kind of thing they wanted to bring to the boss’s attention. Many, many people who wrote their representatives would have pushed as hard as I did if their representatives and congressional staffers had given them any opening to work with.
And if I ever hit a wall of official indifference about something really important, I hope I have an advocate as determined as Chris Barkley.
[Cartoon by Teddy Harvia.]
(1) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to join writer David Ebenbach for cheesecake in D.C. on Episode 179 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.
David’s the author of eight books of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, the most recent being his novel How to Mars, published last year by Tachyon Press, and the short story collection The Guy We Didn’t Invite to the Orgy and Other Stories, published in 2017 by the University of Massachusetts Press. His short stories have appeared in such genre markets as Asimov’s, Analog, and Not One of Us, but he’s also been published in such literary markets as the Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, and New England Review.
His writing has won him the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, the Juniper Prize, the Patricia Bibby Award, and other awards. He works at Georgetown University, teaching creative writing and literature at the Center for Jewish Civilization and creativity through the Masters in Learning, Design, and Technology Program, and promoting inclusive, student-centered teaching at the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship.
We discussed the way he started writing science fiction without realizing he was writing science fiction, the final line of the worst thing he’s ever written, how his first scribbling as a kid was a violent spy novel about The Smurfs, why it’s important to root for an author and not merely our own reading experience, the cliches some in the literary and science fiction worlds believe about each other, the newspaper article which sparked his novel How to Mars, the way he’s managed to carve himself out a bifurcated writing life, the philosophical differences between those writing novels and short stories, and much more.
(2) KEEPING THE LAW GREEN. “Tatiana Maslany on ‘She-Hulk’, Joining Marvel, and LGBTQ Advocacy” in an ELLE interview.
… When she was announced as the next Marvel superhero, her cult following—which refers to themselves as the Clone Club—rejoiced. Maslany shielded both her pleasure and her apprehension well.
“I had always been wary of entering this universe or doing anything of this scale,” Maslany admits when we meet for the first time over Zoom. “There’s a part of me that always feels a bit more comfortable in a smaller piece. Just something that I can guarantee will be focused on character, guarantee will be collaborative.”
Her She-Hulk audition arrived “at this very raw, very interesting time for her,” says her best friend and Arrow actor Ben Lewis, who’s known her since they met in the early aughts on the set of the misguided Rob Lowe-led film Stir of Echoes: The Homecoming. (Lewis is reluctant to even name the film, but acknowledges Google maintains its existence.) When, during the height of the pandemic, Maslany told Lewis she planned to audition for She-Hulk, the idea of the 5’3” Maslany in a cape and tights—perhaps worse, as a derivative of the Incredible Hulk—seemed “incongruous” at best, Lewis says….
(3) COULD LIGHTNING STRIKE TWICE? Savannah Walsh’s Vanity Fair article recaps the teen dystopia’s rise and fall: “Nobody Ever Found the Next ‘Hunger Games’—But Boy, Did They Try”.
… “For years everyone tried to have the next Harry Potter and no one managed to do so, but that didn’t stop companies from trying,” Craig Dehmel, then head of international distribution for Fox, told TheWrap in 2015. “And in a sense, the Twilight and Hunger Games franchises were both born out of that pursuit.”
The first film both rode and inspired a wave of similar films as studios began clamoring to find the next Y.A. juggernaut. In 2013 and 2014, there were no less than eight teen-centered sci-fi/fantasy films based on best-selling books crammed into theaters: Ender’s Game, The Maze Runner, The Giver, The Host, Beautiful Creatures, Percy Jackson Sea of Monsters, The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, and Divergent.
These films all adhered to a similar formula: promising up-and-coming actors (Saoirse Ronan, Logan Lerman, Lily Collins) played heroic and/or divinely gifted teenagers with the power to stop a tyrannical leader and/or oppressive government structure. Some were set in the future, others in an alternate universe. Most lured in veteran stars for scenery-chewing supporting roles (Kate Winslet, Jeff Bridges, Viola Davis) or hedged in a watered-down love triangle. And all were angling for a piece of the Hunger Games pie….
(4) HOUSE OF THE DRAGON VIEWERSHIP GROWS. Lost Remote reports “House of the Dragon Continues to Light HBO Ratings on Fire”.
…On Sunday, Episode 2 of the Game of Thrones spinoff was up 2% from its debut, earning 10.2 million viewers domestically across HBO Max and linear telecasts, based on a combination of Nielsen and first-party data. HBO previously noted that Sunday night viewership for a series typically represents just 20-40% of the show’s total gross audience.
House of the Dragon’s debut on Aug. 21 was the largest in HBO history, reaching nearly 10 million viewers. That episode is now approaching 25 million viewers in the U.S., according to the company….
(5) TOUGH QUIZ. Book Riot challenges fans: “Can You Guess the Sci-Fi Book By Its Pixelated Cover?” I got zero, so bleep them! (Many are not what I think is the iconic cover for a particular title, but one was, and I still didn’t get it.)
So, you consider yourself a sci-fi expert. You’ve read the classics and keep up with new releases. Well, then I’m sure you know all of these titles. They’re a mix of the most well-known and enduring stories in the genre and some very popular new releases. There’s nothing here that a sci-fi fan hasn’t heard of — in fact, you’ve likely read many of them. The trick is: can you name the title and author based on a pixelated version of the cover? After all, it’s when you have to test yourself that every book title leaves your mind.
(6) THE FORCE IS DOOP WITH THIS ONE. “Futurama’s Silliest Character Highlights a Constant Flaw in Sci-Fi” according to CBR.com.
… Any time the stakes get high enough on Futurama, it’s not uncommon to see the show’s perpetual blowhard, Zapp Brannigan, enter the fray. An oafish commanding officer within the intergalactic peacekeeping force known as DOOP, Brannigan frequently gets his men slaughtered in a series of heartless decisions and strategies. When things get particularly dire, it’s not uncommon to see Brannigan arrive in the Nimbus — a truly massive spaceship that serves as the flagship for DOOP forces. But despite the inherent power of the ship, it’s frequently being shown as completely useless in combat missions….
Across multiple stories, films and shows, it’s often shown that truly massive spaceships like the Nimbus just aren’t all that useful. They lack maneuverability, making for easy targets. The Star Wars series in particular is full of these, with the Moon-sized Death Star being destroyed with a single well-placed shot, while a massive flagship Star Destroyer is brought down when a single A-Wing crashes into the bridge in Return of the Jedi. Shows like Battlestar Galactica focused on the massive populations and crews necessary to keep those ships floating — and highlighted how quickly supplies can quickly run out….
(7) MEMORY LANE.
1891 – [By Cat Eldridge.] Excerpt from J.M. Barrie’s Sherlock Holmes : My Evening with Sherlock Holmes pastiche:
I am the sort of man whose amusement is to do everything better than any other body. Hence my evening with Sherlock Holmes.
Sherlock Holmes is the private detective whose adventures Mr. Conan Doyle is now editing in the Strand magazine. To my annoyance (for I hate to hear anyone praised except myself) Holmes’s cleverness in, for instance, knowing by glancing at you what you had for dinner last Thursday, has delighted press and public, and so I felt it was time to take him down a peg. I therefore introduced myself to Mr. Conan Doyle and persuaded him to ask me to his house to meet Sherlock Holmes.
For poor Mr. Holmes it proved to be an eventful evening. I had determined to overthrow him with his own weapons, and accordingly when he began, with well-affected carefulness, “I perceive, Mr. Anon, from the condition of your cigar-cutter, that you are not fond of music,” I replied blandly, “Yes, that is obvious.
J.M. Barrie was a close personal friend of Arthur Conan Doyle, a fellow Scots. That was because Conan Doyle had worked on a new magazine called The Idler, which allowed him to meet other writers including James Barrie, the actual name of of J.M Barrie.
J. M. Barrie would write three pastiches about Sherlock Holmes : My Evening with Sherlock Holmes (1891), The Adventure of the Two Collaborators (1893) and The Late Sherlock Holmes (1893) where Dr. Watson is accused of the murder of Sherlock Holmes before being proven innocent when Holmes is found alive.
Otto Penzler, the expert on these matters, states that it is the earliest Holmes parody ever done.
So let’s look at the very first pastiche about Sherlock Holmes : My Evening with Sherlock Holmes. It was originally written anonymously by J. M. Barrie and published in The Speaker magazine on November 28, 1891, which was four months after the publication of the first Sherlock Holmes “A Scandal in Bohemia” story.
It’s an odd bit of writing as it’s narrated by Anon who’s determined to beat Holmes at his own game.
SPOILERS BE HERE!
The narrator, Mr. Anon, convinces Conan Doyle to introduce him to Sherlock Holmes. The narrator then proceeds to beat Holmes at his own game, deducing his recent movements and his plans for the rest of the evening.
He taunts Holmes like this, “Fool, fool! I have kept you in luxury for years. By my help you have ridden extensively in cabs where no author was ever seen before. Henceforth you will ride in buses!”
Angrily annoyed, Holmes leaves abruptly.
END SPOILERS
Barrie would write two more of these, The Adventure of the Two Collaborators and The Late Sherlock Holmes which Doyle really liked. They are available at the usual suspects though finding them takes a bit of Holmesian hunting.
They’re available in various collections, so you’ll just need to decide which one you want to download. Some are free, some are Meredith moments, and some are actually professionally produced therefore cost quite a bit. The latter actually are edited properly.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
(9) COMICS SECTION.
(10) PHONE HACKER. “Artist Turns Old Payphone Into Fantastical Sci-Fi Art Display: ‘It’s Generated A Lot Of Interest’” – Block Club Chicago has the story.
…The art display is named for its coordinates: 42.004587, -87.690123. It features an inscription with a cryptic quote attributed to St. Luna, another alias of the artist, saying, “Some day the words of an old, beloved song will go, “Parlin’s space is vast and so is time … .’”
The payphone is across the street from Warren Park, a few blocks from Luna Rail’s West Ridge home. One day, the artist took note of the payphone infrastructure that had been left to decay.
Luna Rail figured there could be a better use for it and conceived of the installation. The piece was installed in June.
“There’s so few of these left,” Luna Rail said. “I looked at it [and thought], ‘It’s perfect.’”
Luna Rail visits the display most days. He comes by at night to turn on lights connected to the installation. During the day, he fixes issues caused by weather or vandalism….
(11) DEATH FROM ABOVE. “The Giant Meteor Trope In Science Fiction, Explained” by GameRant.
… There is perhaps no simpler trope in science fiction. The giant meteor is what it says on the tin. A piece of a comet or an asteroid that once orbited the sun breaks and gets caught up in Earth’s gravity. As it enters the atmosphere, it reaches terminal velocity. When it hits the surface, it does so with cataclysmic force. The first recorded meteor strike witnessed by a person was in 1064, near Changzhou, China. Shen Kuo reported the sights, the sound, and his findings in the resulting crater. There are a few cases of meteorites landing in Europe in the 1400s to be studied by scientists. In 1980, a team of award-winning scientists concluded that the age of the dinosaurs ended in an impact event. Those elements, along with mankind’s general fear of the endless unknown that makes up outer space led to a tradition of tales about things falling from the sky…
(12) CAT GOT THEIR TONGUE? [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] The New York Times investigates whether AI tools can help SJWs figure out what their cat wants. “Did My Cat Just Hit On Me? An Adventure in Pet Translation”.
… MeowTalk, whose founders enlisted Dr. Ntalampiras after the study appeared, expands on this research, using algorithms to identify cat vocalizations made in a variety of contexts.
The app detects and analyzes cat utterances in real-time, assigning each one a broadly defined “intent,” such as happy, resting, hunting or “mating call.” It then displays a conversational, plain English “translation” of whatever intent it detects, such as Momo’s beleaguered “Let me rest.” (Oddly, none of these translations appear to include “I will chew off your leg if you do not feed me this instant.”)
MeowTalk uses the sounds it collects to refine its algorithms and improve its performance, the founders said, and pet owners can provide in-the-moment feedback if the app gets it wrong.
In 2021, MeowTalk researchers reported that the software could distinguish among nine intents with 90 percent accuracy overall. But the app was better at identifying some than others, not infrequently confusing “happy” and “pain,” according to the results….
(13) YESTERDAY’S TOMORROW. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] Kate Bellingham explains in 1994 how “something called the Internet” can let you watch movies and buy things and even write to politicians because she wrote President Clinton and got a response but British Prime Minister John Major didn’t have a modem. “1994: Are YOU Ready for the INTERNET?” from BBC’s Tomorrow’s World.
(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In “Honest Game Trailers: Xenoblade Chronicles 3,” Fandom Games, in a spoiler-filled episode, says that this game may be “the most Japanese thing” since the dude who sings “Pen Pineapple Apple Pen,” since you cosplay a character who spends a third of the time playing the flute for dead people, there’s a fat kid who dies, and a required friendship robot. “No one likes a game about the power of friendship more than a drudge who hasn’t seen an actual human being in weeks,” says the narrator.
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Jennifer Hawthorne, Scott Edelman, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Chris Barkley, and Michael Toman for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Joe H.]
Nigerian sff author Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki announced today he has been granted a visa to attend the 2022 Worldcon in Chicago this weekend after a second interview at the U.S. Embassy in Lagos. More information to follow. (For details about his first interview, see here.)
By Melanie Storm: We’re celebrating a year of Writer X with a giveaway! For three weeks from August 29 to September 12, simply leave a comment on upcoming Writer X fits for your chance to win an exclusive Writer X gift box at no cost to you. Supplies are limited so don’t wait. One gift box per household, please.
By Rich Lynch: Once in a while, just for the fun of it, I do Internet research to find out what happened to science fiction fans who were active in past decades. And with Chicon 8 now looming on the temporal horizon it seems appropriate to tell you about someone whose relatively brief stay in fandom began in the same year as the second Chicon.
His name is Joel Nydahl, and back about the time of that Chicon he was a 14-year-old neofan who lived with his parents on a farm near Marquette, Michigan. He was an avid science fiction reader and at some point in 1952 decided to publish a fanzine. It was a good one.
He named it Vega, after the bright star, and after a modest first few issues it gained enough acclaim where he was able to get contributions from some of the most famous fans of the day: Marion Zimmer Bradley, Dean Grennell, Juanita Wellons, Lynn Hickman, Bill Venable, Jack Harness, Wilkie Conner, Fred Chappell, Shelby Vick, Gregg Calkins, Bob Tucker, Robert Bloch, Bob Silverberg, and Harlan Ellison. By the middle of 1953, Vega had become known as the best monthly fanzine and for a crowning achievement (after huge amounts of effort and no small expense) Nydahl published his 12th issue as an over-the-top ‘annish’ to mark a full year of its existence. At 100 pages of top-notch material and with a wonderful three-color cover by Margaret Dominick it was something the likes of which had rarely ever been seen in fandom before.
But there had been a cost. Even though it had resulted in “letters of the wildest praise”, as Nydahl described it, there was never another issue after that – he dropped from sight and departed fandom. Nydahl much later wrote that “I remember only that once the Vegannish was in the mail, I had no interest in putting out a thirteenth issue; nor, strangely, did I have an urge to read any more science fiction.” His departure from fandom was so precipitous that the cause became known as ‘Nydahl’s Disease’, which according to Fancyclopedia 3 is “the diagnosis of any fan who gafiates amid or immediately after any big fannish project”.
Nothing further was heard from Nydahl for another 48 years and then, at the 2001 Philadelphia Worldcon, he resurfaced. Several weeks prior to the convention he had been located by an Internet search and had then been contacted via email by both Robert Lichtman and Ted White. This had intrigued him sufficiently to where he decided to attend Philcon because, as he described it, he found he was interested “in meeting old friends and rehashing old times with individuals whom I fondly remembered”. Nydahl was at the convention for only one day, but his presence was almost immediately noticed with amazement by several fanzine publishers and fanhistorians who were there. And after that he was gone again, back to his life in mundania as head of the English Department at Broward College in Florida. But he left us all a parting gift, an article in Lichtman’s fanzine Trap Door (issue 21, March 2002) which described in detail his brief career in fandom and what he had experienced during his one day at Philcon. It’s a good read.
And now, twenty years later, I found Joel Nydahl’s obituary in a web search – he had passed away on May 15, 2019 “following a brief illness”. Turns out that after departing fandom in 1953 he had turned his attention to academia and other interests. Following graduation from high school he went on to earn a degree in English from the University of Michigan and some years later a doctorate in American Studies. His obit describes him as having had a “sense of adventure and curiosity [which] took him from his hometown of Marquette, MI, to more than 15 countries around the world where he lived and taught English”. The obit concluded by stating that: “Joel had a terrific sense of humor, occasional corny jokes included, was a loving and sensitive husband and will be greatly missed and always loved by his wife and their many friends.”
I’m glad I got to meet him, if only briefly – I was one of those amazed fan publishers and fan historians at Philcon. We talked just for a couple of minutes, as he was heading off to try to find someone he knew during his days in fandom. I remember that Ted White took a photo of the two of us, but alas I can no longer find it. No matter, the memory of the encounter is enough.
I’m writing this because I want you all to remember him too. Vicariously, in this case, as I very much doubt there are many people left in fandom who have ever met him in person. Joel Nydahl was one of the many notable fans of the fabulous 1950s, and fandom was blessed by his presence. He was a bright shining star – just like Vega.
Note: You can read Joel Nydahl’s Trap Door essay at fanac.org: https://www.fanac.org/fanzines/Trap_Door/Trap_Door21.pdf. Issues of Vega are also online at fanac.org: https://fanac.org/fanzines/Vega/
By Hampus Eckerman: Hello everyone!
I have tried to compile a list of all Filers appearing in Programming. As I am certain I have missed several of you, please add in the comments if you are participating. Also, please add if you are only sitting at a desk somewhere, so we can walk by and say ‘hi’.
I have tried to place meetups where as few people seem to be occupied as possible, which also means avoiding having meetups during Business Meeting (Friday – Monday 10:00 – 13:00), Masquerade (Saturday 20:00 – 23:00) or Hugo Awards (Sunday 20:00 – 23:00).
MEETUPS
To make everyone feel as safe as possible with the Pandemic still ongoing, I have placed all of our meetings outside.
THURSDAY
10:30 — Directly outside the entrance of Hyatt Regency
This is just a short meetup for everyone to say ‘hi’ and for newcomers to get to recognize the faces of everyone, to make it easier to find company during the convention.
FRIDAY
13:00 — Millennium Park, in Wrigley Square, near the Millennium Monument
I’ll bring a few thermoses with hot water, tea bags, paper mugs and some cookies and candy, IKEA style.
SATURDAY
17:00 — We meet by the entrance to the Hotel, then we walk across the road to the The Northman Beer & Cider Garden. We have no booking, so we will have to hope for the best with the lines.
If you have a hard time finding us, I have the temporary phone number 313 265 0597 that you can call me on for help with directions.
PROGRAM SCHEDULES FOR KNOWN FILERS
Thursday, September 1
Friday, September 2
Saturday, September 3
Sunday, September 4
Monday, September 5
[Cartoon by Teddy Harvia.]
(1) THE SECOND TIME AROUND? Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki tweeted that he went to a new visa appointment today. He had not posted about the outcome as of this writing.
(2) OFFICIAL SOCIAL MEDIA FOR CHICON 8 – ACCEPT NO SUBSTITUTES. The Worldcon committee warns that some people are now trying to spoof their social media accounts. Please remember the only official Chicon 8 social media links are @chicagoworldcon — for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
If you spot any others, please feel free to tell them at either report@chicon.org or socialmedia@chicon.org so they can follow up.
(3) STAR CHART: THE OFFICIAL CHICON 8 NEWSLETTER. The 2022 Worldcon newsletter is primarily online and is now starting to publish things. Find it here: https://chicon.org/star-chart/
(4) FUTURE TENSE. The August 2022 entry in the Future Tense Fiction series, published this past Saturday, is “The Only Innocent Man,” by Julian K. Jarboe (author of the Lambda Award–winning collection Everyone on the Moon is Essential Personnel), a story about digital communities, privacy, and the ghosts of our online pasts.
It was published along with a response essay, “The plight of the former fanfiction author” by Casey Fiesler, a professor of information science who specializes in ethics, law, and privacy online.
I commonly start a lecture about online privacy by giving a room full of college students a task: In five minutes, who can find the most interesting thing about me on the internet?
Typically this exercise yields precisely what I intend—showcasing the variety of sources of information about all of us online. Someone once found the movie reviews I wrote for my college newspaper; a close family member’s obituary; my recipe for snickerdoodles that apparently once resulted in marriage proposals on Instagram. If it’s been a while since I’ve scrubbed it, my home address might appear on a public data website.
And one year, a student raised his hand and confidently announced, “Dr. Fiesler, I found your fanfiction!”…
(5) MIND TRICK. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] This “banned book list” fooled Mark Hamill: “Viral list of ‘banned’ books in Florida is satire” explains Politifact.
…Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, tweeted “books we have taught for generations,” alongside the list. She later said she should have “double-checked” before sharing.
“Star Wars” actor Mark Hamill also shared a screenshot of the list on Twitter — amassing more than 100,000 likes and 24,000 retweets.
The Florida Department of Education did not respond to PolitiFact’s request for comment. However, the governor’s office called the list “completely fictitious.”
“The image is fake,” said Bryan Griffin, DeSantis’ press secretary. “There is no banned book list at the state level. The state sets guidelines regarding content, and the local school districts are responsible for enforcing them.”
Griffin also noted that the state’s Benchmarks for Excellent Student Thinking, or B.E.S.T., standards recommend several of the books included in the “anti-woke” list.
“To Kill a Mockingbird” and Jack London’s “The Call of the Wild” are recommended to eighth graders in Florida. George Orwell’s “1984” is a suggested book for ninth graders, while John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” and William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies” is recommended for 10th graders….
(6) SLEAZY PUBLISHER NEWS. A YA fantasy novelist chronicles her encounters with a sleazy publisher for Literary Hub: “What Five Years with a Predatory Vanity Press Taught Me About Art and Success”.
…In truth, I did nothing so wrong, over a decade ago, when I signed the contract with the Oklahoma-based press that promised to fulfill my childhood dream of becoming a published author. It wasn’t my fault that the company went bankrupt after the CEO was discovered embezzling funds from the writers who paid to have their books poorly edited, cheaply bound, and narrowly distributed. It was probably my fault that I hadn’t done thorough research into the industry, but I was seventeen and couldn’t detect a scam tastefully disguised under a pretty contract and alleged Christian values….
(7) WHAT FILERS THRIVE ON. The Millions knows you will be looking for their mistakes after you read “How Many Errorrs Are in This Essay?”, an article about typos.
…A 1562 printing of the sternly doctrinaire translation the Geneva Bible prints Matthew 5:9 as “Blessed are the placemakers” rather than “peacemakers;” an 1823 version of the King James replaced “damsels” in Genesis 24:61 with “camels,” and as late as 1944 a printing of that same translation rendered the “holy women, who trusted God… being in subjection to their own husbands” in 1 Peter 3:5 as referring to those pious ladies listening to their “owl husbands.”…
(8) NECRONOMICON. The New York Times probably doesn’t run a con report very often, I bet. “A Festival That Conjures the Magic of H.P. Lovecraft and Beyond”.
There’s bacon and eggs, and then there’s bacon and eggs at the Cthulhu Prayer Breakfast. Named after the cosmically malevolent and abundantly tentacled entity dreamed up by Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the event, among the most popular at NecronomiCon Providence 2022, filled a vast hotel ballroom at 8 a.m. on a recent Sunday.
To the delighted worshipers, Cody Goodfellow, here a Most Exalted Hierophant, delivered a sermon that started with growled mentions of “doom-engines, black and red,” “great hammers of the scouring” and so on.
Then the speech took a left turn.
“I must confess myself among those who always trusted that a coven of sexless black-robed liches would change the world for the better,” said Goodfellow, who had flown in from the netherworld known as San Diego, Calif. “But the malignant forces of misplaced morality have regrouped from the backlash that stopped them in the ’80s, and the re-lash is in full swing.”…
(9) HUCK HUCKENPOHLER (1941-2022). [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] J.G. “Huck” Huckenpohler died on August 26 in Washington, D.C. He was born in 1941. He was a major figure in Edgar Rice Burroughs fandom, had a substantial collection of Burroughs material and attended many Burroughs conventions, as well as staffing tables promoting Burroughs fandom at Balticon and Capclave. He was an active member of the Panthans, the Burroughs Bibliophiles chapter in Washington, and the Silver Spring Science Fiction Society.
(10) JOSEPH DELANEY (1945-2022). Author Joseph Delaney died August 16 at the age of 77. The English writer was known for the dark fantasy series Spook’s, which included several arcs, The Wardstone Chronicles, The Starblade Chronicles, and The Spook’s Apprentice: Brother Wolf. And he wrote many other works.
(11) MEMORY LANE.
1947 – [By Cat Eldridge.] All good things must come to an end and thus it was with the Thin Man film series that concluded with its sixth installment, Song of the Thin Man, which premiered this weekend in 1947.
There was of course no Dashiell Hammett novel of the same name as Hammett never wrote a sequel, so everything here was up of made up of whole cloth. Steve Fisher and Noel Perrin were the scriptwriters who based it off a story by Stanley Roberts who had done, to put it mildly, a lot of westerns before this.
William Powell is Nick Charles and Myrna Loy is Nora Charles. The chemistry between the two is quite charming and is befitting what Hammett created in the original novel.
This story is set in the world of nightclub musicians, so naturally we see such performers as Jayne Meadows, Gloria Grahame and Phillip Reed.
Nick and Nora’s son shows up twice in the series. The first time has Richard Hall being credited as Nick Jr.; here an eleven year old Dean Stockwell is Nick Charles Jr. Surprisingly (to me at least) he had done eight films already.
The film cost cost $1,670,000 to make and grossed only $2,305,000. It lost $128,000. Those figures by the way came from Eddie Mannix who had a ledger in which he maintained detailed lists of the costs and revenues of every MGM film produced between 1924 and 1962, an important reference for film historians. Fascinating as a certain Trek officer would’ve said.
(In the next decade, The Thin Man television series aired on NBC from 1957–59, and starred Peter Lawford and Phyllis Kirk. It ran for seventy episodes.)
The Song of the Thin Man gets a rather stellar seventy one percent rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes.
(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
(13) ROBOSECURITY. [Item by Francis Hamit.] Any resemblance to a certain Dr. Who character is unintended. You note it does not have arms. I’ve owned shares in this company since 2017 and will security jobs going begging I think the company has a great future. Knightscope is listed on the NASDAQ as KSCP. Right now the shares are at an all-time low. They won’t be for long. Full disclosure: Finding new accounts is my side hustle. “Robot helps Northeast Portland hotel cut down on vandalism” reports KATU.
…General Manager Mike Daley says they got him because they were having a lot of issues with vandalism from homeless encampments in the area.
They tried hiring human security but had a lot of staffing issues, so they explored the robot as an option and say it’s work out really well.
Daley says that while the robot isn’t cheap, he provides a lot of security 24 hours a day for less money than it would cost to pay a human to do the same job.
“He patrols a lot, constantly, as you’ve seen,” he said. “He’s got 360-degree cameras, scans license plates. He’s got thermal imaging, so if he sees a guest or somebody that’s at a car, he will gravitate over to that person to check them out. He’s got a noise factor, so people know where he is and know he’s coming.”
Anytime he encounters someone, he immediately alerts the front desk. That person can then see what the robot sees, talk through the robot to anyone in the parking lot and can determine if further action is needed, such as calling 911.
He’s also popular among hotel guests. Daley says people like to get their picture taken with him.
(14) PIGS IN SPACE. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In the Washington Post, Christian Davenport explains why the politics of funding NASA ensured that Artemis was incredibly difficult to build, with “SLS” standing for “Senate Launching System” because NASA projects have to have pork for every district. “NASA SLS moon rocket readied for first launch as Artemis program begins”.
The rocket was late, again. The initial launch date, the end of 2016, was long gone. And in the spring of 2019, Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator at the time, was told it’d be another year or more before NASA’s Space Launch System would be ready.
He was furious and threatened to replace the rocket with one built by the fast-growing private space sector, such as SpaceX. But Bridenstine’s attempt to bench NASA’s rocketwas quickly rebuffed by the powerful interests, including Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), the chairman of the appropriations committee. Those interests had shepherded the SLS through thickets of controversy since its inception more than a decade ago.
Now, after years of cost overruns and delays, damning reports by government watchdogs and criticisms from space enthusiasts and even parts of NASA’s own leadership, the SLS endures, as only a rocket built by Congress could….
(15) ONE HELL OF A PICTURE. “An AI Was Asked To Draw What Hell Looks Like — The Results Are Naturally Disturbing” warns MSN.com
Come on, folks, what do you expect when you ask an artificial intelligence to draw what hell looks like?
That’s right, you get some seriously disturbing stuff to look at. In fact, one of the images riffs on classic paintings of Satan that somehow look even scarier now.
This is the link to the video: “AI generated image of hell” on TikTok.
(16) PLAYING IN THE SANDBOX. This trailer for a new Dune game dropped last week at gamescom: Dune: Awakening.
[Thanks to Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Joey Eschrich, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Rob Thornton.]