By Cat Eldridge: Over at Green Man, we’ve been reviewing Folkmanis puppets since, oh, before this millennium was born. So I asked Mike if he was interested in running these reviews first and he said yes. So this is how this review came to be.
First let’s start off with a look briefly at Folkmanis. The company was over forty years by a couple whose last name we, no surprise, Folkmanis. As their site said it was , “Conceived as a ‘cottage industry’ business in Watertown, MA., in the late 1960’s and nurtured among the street vendors lining Berkeley’s famed Telegraph Avenue, Folkmanis® Puppets are the expression of Judy Folkmanis’ active imagination, sewing wizardry, and love of nature.”
If you watched closely, you’d have spotted them in The Last Mimzy as decoration in the child’s room, Lawnmower Man as the Bee Puppet, the Peacock in 30 Rock and NCIS as Bert the Farting Hippo.
Forty years on, they’ve done some two hundred puppets and Green Man has reviewed over twenty a lot of them as the same publicist has been there the entire time.
Now let’s about talk the ever cute Mini Collared Lizard finger puppet. First thing you should know is it’s truly a life-size lizard at fourteen inches from his head to the end of his quite long tail. I’ve reviewed a number of Folkmanis creatures such as The Mouse with Cheese and have two wonderful Autumnal creatures, The Mouse in A Pumpkin and The Worm in Apple but this is first one that looks like it’s intended to be life-like.
The Folkmanis site describes it as having “realistic detail while still being cute, soft and cuddly, this stuffed animal toy puppet is a delight for any reptile fan.” The puppet is realistic as far as the design goes and the colors as you’ll see from the image here of an actual Collared Lizard are very realistic. I was really surprised.
So the puppet itself is a perfect hand puppet which even fits on my hand though admittedly it’d fit much better on a child’s much smaller hand. It has a movable mouth but my fingers are just too large to manipulate it properly.
I am keeping it as it is far too cute not too.
As I said, we’ve reviewed a lot of Folkmanis and I’ve seen the designs of their products as they came through here to be distributed to reviewers. The hair is substantially better now than it was twenty years ago, the dyes look better and the faces are a less cartoonish. The face of this Collared Lizard looks like the image above.
So if you like puppets, I’d strongly recommend it; if you’ve got grandchildren that like such things, oh do gift them with this.
…Presently, more and more writers are experimenting with the genre. While only a handful of SF novels have thus far been traditionally published in India every year, a slate of new science and speculative fiction domains is giving space to new voices and ideas, like the magazine Mithila Review and the feminist collection Magical Women (2019).
Vandana Singh, Anil Menon, Samit Basu, Mimi Mondal, and Gautam Bhatia, among others, headline discussions on Indian SF today. Their storylines expose the chaos, upheavals, and power structures of an ethnically, religious, and linguistically diverse India.
Unique to Indian SF is the manner in which mythology and folklore undergird much of the storytelling. From the Vedas and Puranas to the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, historical plots continue to have relevance in Indian SF. As a result, science fiction from India is emerging as a singular genre rich with its own vernacular lexicon….
…The “AI as McKinsey” piece also articulates an underlying capitalist critique in your work. You clearly hold a lot of skepticism about the idea that Silicon Valley can provide magic fixes for social ills; you wrote thisBuzzFeed News essay in 2017that was so saucy. When reading “Seventy-Two Letters,” your short story from 2000, I gravitate toward this conversation between a craftsman and an inventor trying to create labor-saving robots, where the craftsman tells the inventor:
“Your desire for reform does you credit. Let me suggest, however, that there are simpler cures for the social ills you cite: a reduction in working hours, or the improvement of conditions. You do not need to disrupt our entire system of manufacturing.”
At a moment when we’re being promised “labor-saving” AI, this feels…relevant.
There’s this saying, “There are two kinds of fools. The first says, ‘This is old and therefore good.’ And the second one says, ‘This is new and therefore better.’” I think about that a lot. How can you evaluate the merits of anything fairly without thinking it’s good simply because it’s new? I think that is super difficult.
There probably was a time in history where most people were thinking, “This is old and therefore good,” and they carried the day. Now I think that we live in a time where everyone says, “This is new and therefore better.” I don’t believe that the people who say that are right all the time, but it is very difficult to criticize them and suggest that maybe something that is new is not better….
I was a kid playing Atari with my best friend when she informed me, as she sent her frog darting through traffic, that Nostradamus had predicted the world would end in nookuler destruction in August of that year. The exact date she named happened to be my birthday. Since Nostradamus lived hundreds of years ago and didn’t even know what nookuler was, she continued confidently, he must have had special powers and his predictions were therefore true. It was the early eighties and we had no internet, so I accepted her logic and spent the remaining weeks of summer assuming I would die before the leaves fell.
If you were born in the 1970s, like me, or the sixties or the fifties, the Cold War was the backdrop of life, like wallpaper. It had no beginning and no end. It just was. You trundled to school each day under partly cloudy skies and a chance of nuclear annihilation, and when you went to the bookstore or the movie theater you found spy novels, spy movies that pitted Us against Them—the Soviet Union. In these stories, men chased each other around the world while some bomb ticked somewhere, some web of loyalties required untangling. Their manly brows furrowed under the weight of so much responsibility. Their wives worried cluelessly at home. The hot girl in the black sequined dress with the cleavage turned out to be a honey trap….
During an ample period of growth for the LucasArts division of Lucasfilm Limited, the company began experimenting with the new games centered around their tentpole properties; as the Star Wars franchise began developing the initial Rebel Assault and Super Star Wars games, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis was pitched as a canonical sequel to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The game takes place in 1939 during which Indy discovers that his former archeological collaborator Sophia Hapgood has given up her profession to become a psychic. Fearing that she’ll be targeted by the Nazis, Indy teams up with his old flame on an adventure to discover the ancient city of Atlantis and unlock its secrets before the Nazis take it for themselves to use as weaponry in World War II.
Compared to Lucasfilm’s Star Wars franchise, the Indiana Jones saga doesn’t quite have the same extensive expanded universe. While there are a few novel series, comic storylines, and adventure games focused on different aspects of Indy’s life, they’re merely a fraction of the massive expanded timeline developed in the Star Wars “Legends” and modern canon sagas. However, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis didn’t just expand upon the character and tease a new chapter of his story; it developed Indy’s motivations under dire circumstances and featured a compelling storyline that actually surpassed some of the cinematic installments. Even if it never hit theaters, it’s easy to rank Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis among the best projects in the Indiana Jones universe….
(5) GOODER ENGLISH. [Item by Danny Sichel.] The mention of Downbelow Station in Monday’s file reminded me of the “lost in translation” thread from rec.arts.sf.written back in, oh god, 1999.
In particular, it reminded me that Susan Stepney did an archive thereof, which Filers may find amusing. “Lost in the Translation”.
Certain competition threads start spontaneously on the science fiction newsgroup rec.arts.sf.written. One of my favourites was about title/author pairs that can be read as a single phrase (with possibly the best being The Sheep Look Up John Brunner). In May 1999 someone quoting an alleged funny mistranslation, by a translator who missed the point, of a well-known SF book title A Very Important Mission, and a thread took off from there. Below are some of the submissions I’ve collected from that thread, and from ones sent to me later. (The contributors of the titles – either the devisers themselves, or telling of titles they remember from earlier competitions – are noted afterwards.) I’ve also provided answers – but no peeking before trying to work them out – that’s most of the fun!…
…Gene Roddenberry, writing in 1967, was clearly reacting to various stories from the “Star Trek” set claiming William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy were on their worst behavior. It seems they were swapping lines, taking dialogue from co-stars, and going all-out to get as much screen time as possible. “Star Trek,” unlike some other shows at the time, had an open-door policy at [NBC], allowing actors to air grievances, explore ideas, and examine characters earnestly with those at the top. By Roddenberry’s description, this privilege was being abused. Shatner and Nimoy would cause delays in shooting and their characters would start to change on camera. Roddenberry, wanting to put the kibosh on his prima donnas, wrote the following letter, which was addressed to both actors equally:
“Toss these pages in the air if you like, stomp off and be angry, it doesn’t mean that much since you’ve driven me to the edge of not giving a damn. […] No, William, I’m not really writing this to Leonard and just including you as a matter of psychology. I’m talking to you directly and with an angry honesty you haven’t heard before. And Leonard, you’d be very wrong if you think I’m really teeing off at Shatner and only pretending to include you. The same letter to both; you’ve pretty well divided up the market on selfishness and egocentricity.”
Roddenberry knew that actors all have egos and that petty grievances would indeed arise from time to time. Gene evidently instructed the production offices to overlook any foul moods from the cast, as tensions can run high and forgiveness will keep hackles lowered and production smooth. But after too many complaints, Roddenberry admitted, “‘Star Trek’ is going down the drain.”…
(7) IMPOSTOR PRODROME. Writer Beware’s Victoria Strauss warned Facebook readers about fraudsters trying to use her name.
So…after years of reporting on impersonation scams (rampant right now), the scammers have done me the ultimate honor: impersonating ME.
In case you were wondering whether the quote was correctly attributed, see the information at this link.
(9) MEMORY LANE.
1983 – [Written by Cat Eldridge from a choice by Mike Glyer.]
Our Beginning tonight is a true one as Bruce Bethke tells us the origin story of a now familiar word and the story that he’d use it in.
The essay and story itself were published in Amazing Science Fiction, November 1983. If after reading the Beginning here, you can do so at Infinity Plus where it is up with the permission of the author.
In the early spring of 1980 I wrote a little story about a bunch of teenage hackers. From the very first draft this story had a name, and lo, the name was —
Cyberpunk
And you can bet any body part you’d care to name that, had I had even the slightest least inkling of a clue that I would still be answering questions about this word nearly 18 years later, I would have bloody well trademarked the damned thing!
Nonetheless, I didn’t, and as you’re probably aware, the c-word has gone on to have a fascinating career all its own. At this late date I am not trying to claim unwarranted credit or tarnish anyone else’s glory. (Frankly, I’d much rather people were paying attention to what I’writing now –e.g., my Philip K. Dick Award-winning novel, Headcash, Orbit Books, 5.99 in paperback.) But for those folks who are obsessed with history, here, in tightly encapsulated form, is the story behind the story.
The invention of the c-word was a conscious and deliberate act of creation on my part. I wrote the story in the early spring of 1980, and from the very first draft, it was titled “Cyberpunk.” In calling it that, I was actively trying to invent a new term that grokked the juxtaposition of punk attitudes and high technology. My reasons for doing so were purely selfish and market-driven: I wanted to give my story a snappy, one-word title that editors would remember.
Offhand, I’d say I succeeded.
Art accompanying the short story Cyberpunk in Amazing Stories by Bob Walters
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born July 4, 1883 — Rube Goldberg. Not genre, but certainly genre adjacent. Born Reuben Garrett Lucius Goldberg, he was a sculptor, author, cartoonist, engineer, and inventor who’s certainly best known for his very popular cartoons showing overly complex machines doing simple tasks in a terribly convoluted manner, hence the phrase “Rube Goldberg machines”. The X-Files episode titled “The Goldberg Variation” involved an apartment rigged as a Goldberg machine. (Died 1970.)
Born July 4, 1900 — Guy Endore. Writer of The Werewolf of Paris which is said by Stableford in the St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers as “entitled to be considered the werewolf novel”. He also wrote “The Day of the Dragon” which Stableford likes as well. He was a scriptwriter hence for writing Mark of the Vampire starring Bela Lugosi. He also the treatment for The Raven but never got credited. (Died 1970.)
Born July 4, 1910 — Gloria Stuart. She was cast as Flora Cranley opposite Claude Rains in The Invisible Man in 1933, and 68 years later she played Madeline Fawkes in The Invisible Man series. She was in The Old Dark House as Margaret Waverton which is considered horror largely because Boris Karloff was in it. And she was in the time travelling The Two Worlds of Jennie Logan as well. (Died 2010.)
Born July 4, 1949 — Peter Crowther, 74. He is the founder (with Simon Conway) of PS Publishing where he’s editor now. He edited a series of genre anthologies that DAW published. And he’s written a number of horror novels of which I’d say After Happily Ever and By Wizard Oak are good introductions to him. He’s also done a lot of short fiction but I see he’s not really available in digital form all that much for short fiction or novels.
Born July 4, 1974 — Kevin Hanchard, 49. Canadian actor best known for his major role in Orphan Black as Detective Art Bell, whose partner’s suicide kicks off the whole show. He also had a significant role in the first season of The Expanse as Inspector Sematimba, Det. Miller’s old friend from Eros. Other genre roles include appearances in the movies Suicide Squad and the made-for-TV Savage Planet, and shows The Strain, Hemlock Grove, Wynonna Earp, and Impulse, among others. (Xtifr)
Born July 4, 1977 — David Petersen, 46. Writer and illustrator of the brilliant Mouse Guard series. If you haven’t read it, do so — it’s that good and it’s still ongoing. It almost got developed as a film but got axed due to corporate politics. IDW published The Wind in The Willows with over sixty of his illustrations awhile back. I’d have love to seen that!
Disney+ has removed Crater from its platform just seven weeks after it premiered.
The sci-fi adventure follows Caleb Channing (Isaiah Russell-Bailey), a young boy who was raised on a lunar mining colony and is about to be moved to a distant planet following the death of his father.
But despite its $50 million (£39 million) budget, the film – directed by Kyle Patrick Alvarez – can no longer be watched on Disney+….
Crater, which debuted on May 12, scored a respectable 64% on aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes….
(12) LITTLE ICE AGE. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in “Painting Climate Change in the 17th Century”, discusses art that documents a historic climate fluctuation.
The world has warmed by more than one degree Celsius since the late 19th century, and it is on course to warm by another two degrees by the end of this century. The combination of the speed, likely magnitude, and human cause of this global warming make it unprecedented in the history of our species.
Yet this is not the first time Earth’s climate has changed. In the 13th century, the climate of the Northern Hemisphere started to cool due to natural causes. Although cooling varied over time and from place to place, in general it persisted for several centuries. This period is commonly referred to as the Little Ice Age. Global temperatures declined by just a few tenths of a degree Celsius—significantly less dramatic a change than our current warming trend. Nevertheless, regional effects were often severe, including catastrophic droughts, torrential rains, and entire years in which winter never fully gave way to spring and summer.
…Some of the disasters of the Little Ice Age may sound familiar. Indeed, many scholars study how people of the past coped with extreme weather to better understand how our societies might respond to global warming. The 17th-century Low Countries (modern Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands) provide striking models of just how adaptive and resilient people can be in the face of a changing climate. But they also provide warnings about how climate resilience can create or worsen inequality.
Fortunately, the 17th century has furnished us with a unique resource: millions of paintings, prints, and drawings, created by thousands of artists across the Low Countries, that depict elements of everyday life. By 1650 the inhabitants of Holland—the wealthiest province of the Dutch Republic, the precursor state to today’s Netherlands—collectively owned around 2.5 million paintings. Many of these paintings seem to reflect the presence of the Little Ice Age and record its consequences for ordinary people. Some remarkable examples are included in the National Gallery’s collection.
These include stunning winter landscapes, which seem to recreate, with plausible detail, real-life gatherings in frigid weather. For example, Adam van Breen painted Skating on the Frozen Amstel River amid a sequence of chilly winters in the Low Countries, and in 1646—when Jan van Goyen painted Ice Scene near a Wooden Observation Tower—winter was even colder.
Although there were forces other than climate change that influenced how artists chose and depicted their subjects, icy landscapes do shed light on how the Dutch adapted to a cooler climate. The coastal Low Countries were crisscrossed by waterways that allowed for the efficient transportation of goods, people, and information.
Paintings like those of Van Breen and Van Goyen accurately portray how ordinary people across the Low Countries used sleds and ice skates—a Dutch invention—to keep these transportation networks open in cold weather. To maintain crucial shipments of goods that were easier to send by water, intrepid traders even designed specialized icebreaker ships.
(13) ENGRAVED IN MEMORY. Catherynne Valente told Facebook readers why this quote is familiar.
OH MY GOD LOOK WHAT I JUST FOUND IN THE #BAYCON DEALERS’ ROOM!
I’m so completely delighted! I, big dumb #Trekkie, wrote that thing back when Twitter was fun! Ahh!
(14) THE END OF THE WORLD, AGAIN! [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] There nothing like the end of the world. It is spectacular. It is catastrophic. It has bags of sense-of-wonder. It is anything but mundane. What’s not to like..? Having said that, I prefer my ends of the world to be firmly in science fiction or alternatively in the future: certainly beyond my time; I’m dead sure I would not be personally partial to it and if I were I’d shortly be dead… On that cheery thought, it is time to check out Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur as he explores ‘Earth After Humanity’.
Isaac Arthur notes that there are many ways humanity’s world could end, but picks six basic scenarios:
An extinction-level natural catastrophe
Mass destruction by nuking ourselves or dystopian industrial scenarios
A super plague
Artificial Intelligence kills us off
Aliens
Humanity abandons Earth.
Isaac opines that a global-level natural catastrophe – say an asteroid hundreds of miles across – would be unlikely to thread the needle between wiping out humanity, but leave lesser creatures such as plants and insects alive from which the biosphere might recover. Along the way, he touches on problems such as genetic bottle-necking in recovering sparsely distributed, very small populations.
With a super plague, he notes that it would not be instantaneous, and almost certainly there would be time to land planes and turn-off nuclear power plants (though here I note that Ukraine has demonstrated that that is not as easy as Isaac suggests). So the planet would continue without humanity and wildlife would reclaim our farms and cities.
Isaac is more optimistic when it comes to considering whether an AI would want to take out humanity. He hovers between AI possibly being ‘human-like’ as we would create it, and AI being completely alien to us.
With regards to aliens coming along and killing us off, Isaac thinks they would be likely to value life even if they were ruthless about wiping out potential competitors, so again, life other than humanity would survive. Having said that, he reminds us that the first rule of warfare (the physicist Isaac served in the US forces) is that there is no such thing as overkill.
One issue would be our pets. Could larger dogs survive and evolve even better predatory skills? He does wonder who would end up at the top of the food chain?
Finally, Isaac cannot easily see us simply abandoning Earth (unless there was an existential threat). Some humans would not leave…
…By the way, this was the 401th episode of Science & Futurism with the 400th milestone happening the other week.
[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Danny Sichel, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]
By Rich Lynch: It happened about a half century ago, back in 1962 or 1963 I think. My parents had brought me, along with my brother and sisters, on a visit to my aunt and uncle. They had lived in the northern New York town of Adams Center, about 20 miles from where we were in Chaumont, and it was far enough away that we really didn’t see them very often. And sometime in the interval between that visit and the previous one they had gone out and done something that my 12-or-13-year-old self back then had probably considered to be almost science-fictional. They had purchased a device which had brought them into what I had thought of as the World of the Future.
I remember that we all gathered around it when my uncle turned it on. It sprang to life, showing the cartoonish image of a multi-colored bird as it spread its tail feathers. And then a disembodied voice solemnly proclaimed: “The following is brought to you in living color on NBC.” It was the very first time I’d ever watched a color TV.
An RCA color TV from 1963
Until then my television viewing had been limited to the black-and-white set my parents owned which had brought us TV programs from just three television broadcast stations – one in nearby Watertown and two in Syracuse. I’d been aware that color television sets existed, of course, but they were expensive and not something that my parents felt they could afford. And for that reason I don’t think that I or any of my siblings had ever campaigned for them to get one – saving up for holiday gifts and summer activities was a far greater priority. That the situation was different for my aunt and uncle was, I guess, a revelation to me – I hadn’t realized they were that better off than us. Or maybe it was just a different set of priorities for them. In the end it hadn’t mattered – I’d just been happy that they’d shared the experience with us.
It wasn’t until sometime in the early 1970s that a color television finally came into my parents home and I remember that I was the instigator – there had been a spectacular NASA Apollo launch scheduled during a week when I was going to be home from college and I had used that as an excuse to convince my older sisters to help me underwrite most of the cost. My first color TV came a few years after that, after I had married Nicki and we were living in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The inducement was an even more grandiose space spectacular, though it was a movie and not real life: one of the broadcast networks was going to show Silent Running and I had thought, you know, the planet Saturn would probably look glorious in color. And hey, it did!
It was all a long time ago and I guess I’m a bit surprised to realize that my two sense-of-wonder color TV experiences bracketed a time span of only about a dozen years – Nicki and I have had our flat screen TV for longer than that! And now I can only wonder what televisions will be like a half century from now. Already we’re being inundated with promotional material for advanced TVs with newer technology than what was available when we had bought our flat screen: first there was 4K, 8K and UHD; now there are the even more cutting-edge OLED and QLED, whatever the heck they are. I have no doubt that decades from now we’ll have media streaming technologies that will make even these current-day innovations seem very old-fashioned in comparison. But you know, I’m still pretty sure there’s always gonna be one thing that will never change. Whatever the technology turns out to be, it will always be presented…in living color.
… Ultimately, Qven’s determination to have eir pronouns recognized is fundamental to the entire story: whether you can be recognized on your own terms, or whether you must have categories of identity (such as gender, ethnicity, species, and legal citizenship) inflicted upon you or withheld from you by others, is the central problem the book addresses. But for Qven, everything comes down at key moments to the way Pirate Exiles inspires em to joyfully envision emself as “a princex in disguise,” like Kekubo. “What would a princex in disguise do?” Qven asks emself multiple times as the novel builds toward its climax, and eir most important decisions are consistently influenced by the inspiration they draw from identifying with Kekubo.
This thematic emphasis—the way that small details (like a character’s obsession with trashy adventure serials) can ultimately shape and influence the largest possible events (such as the fall of an empire)—is one of the hallmarks of Leckie’s work. Her recurring argument is that minor details, events, actions, and influences are never truly minor: everything has consequence, even if it is not immediately visible….
(2) SAFETY LAST. Evgeny Morozov, author of To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism, wrote an opinion piece about “The True Threat of Artificial Intelligence” for the New York Times.
…The mounting anxiety about A.I. isn’t because of the boring but reliable technologies that autocomplete our text messages or direct robot vacuums to dodge obstacles in our living rooms. It is the rise of artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., that worries the experts.
A.G.I. doesn’t exist yet, but some believe that the rapidly growing capabilities of OpenAI’s ChatGPT suggest its emergence is near. Sam Altman, a co-founder of OpenAI, has described it as “systems that are generally smarter than humans.” Building such systems remains a daunting — some say impossible — task. But the benefits appear truly tantalizing.
Imagine Roombas, no longer condemned to vacuuming the floors, that evolve into all-purpose robots, happy to brew morning coffee or fold laundry — without ever being programmed to do these things.
Sounds appealing. But should these A.G.I. Roombas get too powerful, their mission to create a spotless utopia might get messy for their dust-spreading human masters. At least we’ve had a good run.
Discussions of A.G.I. are rife with such apocalyptic scenarios. Yet a nascent A.G.I. lobby of academics, investors and entrepreneurs counter that, once made safe, A.G.I. would be a boon to civilization. Mr. Altman, the face of this campaign, embarked on a global tour to charm lawmakers. Earlier this year he wrote that A.G.I. might even turbocharge the economy, boost scientific knowledge and “elevate humanity by increasing abundance.”
This is why, for all the hand-wringing, so many smart people in the tech industry are toiling to build this controversial technology: not using it to save the world seems immoral.
They are beholden to an ideology that views this new technology as inevitable and, in a safe version, as universally beneficial. Its proponents can think of no better alternatives for fixing humanity and expanding its intelligence.
But this ideology — call it A.G.I.-ism — is mistaken. The real risks of A.G.I. are political and won’t be fixed by taming rebellious robots. The safest of A.G.I.s would not deliver the progressive panacea promised by its lobby. And in presenting its emergence as all but inevitable, A.G.I.-ism distracts from finding better ways to augment intelligence….
… In the stellar neighborhood of American letters, there have been few minds as generous, transgressive, and polymathically brilliant as Samuel Delany’s. Many know him as the country’s first prominent Black author of science fiction, who transformed the field with richly textured, cerebral novels like “Babel-17” (1966) and “Dhalgren” (1975). Others know the revolutionary chronicler of gay life, whose autobiography, “The Motion of Light in Water” (1988), stands as an essential document of pre-Stonewall New York. Still others know the professor, the pornographer, or the prolific essayist whose purview extends from cyborg feminism to Biblical philology.
There are so many Delanys that it’s difficult to take the full measure of his influence. Reading him was formative for Junot Díaz and William Gibson; Octavia Butler was, briefly, his student in a writing workshop. Jeremy O. Harris included Delany as a character in his play “Black Exhibition,” while Neil Gaiman, who is adapting Delany’s classic space adventure “Nova” (1968) as a series for Amazon, credits him with building a critical foundation not only for science fiction but also for comics and other “paraliterary” genres….
…After ET came out in 1982, life was never the same for Thomas, who had only appeared in one film before being cast in Spielberg’s smash hit. Now 51,he recalls a six-year-old Drew Barrymore tottering over to him on set to ask how many films he had been in. “Oh, you poor thing,” she answered airily. “I’ve been in four.” But aside from reading lines and knowing his cue, the little boy from rural Texas didn’t really know what acting was, let alone fame. “It was a total unexpected side-effect of doing this fun thing I had wanted to do,” he says now, from his home in Oregon. “I had no clue that my life would change in any way. I worked on this movie, then I’m back on the farm, I’m back at school – but now people are pointing at me in the street.”
Even as a child, he was aware that his mother, Carolyn, resented how his fame was impacting the whole family. She would take him to auditions and shoots until his late teens, and always felt the need to protect him. “She was doing the best job that she knew how to do,” he says. “My whole family weren’t really well equipped to deal with anything like that. And other than a few precautions, we didn’t change our lives that much. Consequently, we got a lot of weird visitors to our residence and things like that, phone calls.”
Complete strangers would want to speak to a little boy? He nods. “We had to call the authorities a few times. ET was a real sensation, some people were fanatical about it.”
Former child actors are often asked: would you let your children act? Thomas, who has three children, has given varying answers over the years, but he’s resolute when I ask. “Pursue it when you’re older,” he says. “I still don’t think it’s a great way to grow up. It was exciting for me, I went to some strange locales and met some interesting people. But it was also very disruptive to my parents’ marriage. Our social life got weird. You get famous and suddenly every cousin that you never knew looks you up. People are strange, they do weird stuff. As a kid, that’s a lot to deal with. And when you’re an adult [too], but at least then you have all of the faculties, hopefully, to deal with fame.”
(5) MEMORY LANE.
1981 – [Written by Cat Eldridge from a choice by Mike Glyer.]
At Chicon IV in 1982 where Marta Randall was Toastmaster, C. J. Cherryh would win the Best Novel Hugo for Downbelow Station whichwas set in her Alliance–Union universe during the Company Wars period.
It was published by DAW forty-two years ago and originally had been called The Company War by the author with the cover art by David B. Mattingly. The format was paperback.
It is, I believe, a splendidly written novel that has aged rather well. Is it the best novel in the series? I think so, though there’s an argument that can be made for Cyteen which won the Hugo at Noreascon 3.
Now for her Beginning…
EARTH AND OUTWARD: 2005–2352
The stars, like all man’s other ventures, were an obvious impracticality, as rash and improbable an ambition as the first venture of man onto Earth’s own great oceans, or into the air, or into space. Sol Station had existed profitably for some years; there were the beginnings of mines, the manufacturies, the power installations in space which were beginning to pay. Earth took them for granted as quickly as it did all its other comforts. Missions from the station explored the system, a program far from public understanding, but it met no strong opposition, since it did not disturb the comfort of Earth.
So quietly, very matter of factly, that first probe went out to the two nearest stars, unmanned, to gather data and return, a task in itself of considerable complexity. The launch from station drew some public interest, but years was a long time to wait for a result, and it passed out of media interest as quickly as it did out of the solar system. It drew a great deal more attention on its return, nostalgia on the part of those who recalled its launch more than a decade before, curiosity on the part of the young who had known little of its beginning and wondered what it was all about. It was a scientific success, bringing back data enough to keep the analysts busy for years . . . but there was no glib, slick way to explain the full meaning of its observations in layman’s terms. In public relations the mission was a failure; the public, seeking to understand on their own terms, looked for material benefit, treasure, riches, dramatic findings.
What the probe had found was a star with reasonable possibilities for encouraging life; a belt of debris, including particles, planetoids, irregular chunks somewhat under planet size with interesting implications for systemic formation, and a planetary companion with its own system of debris and moons . . . a planet desolate, baked, forbidding. It was no Eden, no second Earth, no better than what existed in the sun’s own system, and it was a far journey to have gone to find that out. The press grappled with questions it could not easily grasp itself, sought after something to give the viewers, lost interest quickly. If anything, there were questions raised about cost, vague and desperate comparisons offered to Columbus, and the press hared off quickly onto a political crisis in the Mediterranean, much more comprehensible and far bloodier.
The scientific establishment on Sol Station breathed a sigh of relief and with equal quiet caution invested a portion of its budget in a modest manned expedition, to voyage in what amounted to a traveling miniature of Sol Station itself, and to stay a time making observations in orbit about that world.
And very quietly, to further imitate Sol Station, to test manufacturing techniques which had built Earth’s great second satellite . . . in stranger conditions. Sol Corporation supplied a generous grant, having a certain curiosity, a certain understanding of stations and what profits could be looked for from their development.
That was the beginning.
(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born July 3, 1898 — E. Hoffmann Price. He’s most readily remembered as being a Weird Tales writer, one of a group that included Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith. He did a few collaborations, one of which was with H. P. Lovecraft, “Through the Gates of the Silver Key”. Another work, “The Infidel’s Daughter”, a satire on the Ku Klux Klan, also angered many Southern readers. (Died 1988.)
Born July 3, 1926 — William Rotsler. An artist, cartoonist, pornographer and SF author. Well, that is his bio. Rotsler was a four-time Hugo Award winner for Best Fan Artist and one-time Nebula Award nominee. He also won a “Retro-Hugo” for his work in 1946 and was runner-up for 1951. He responsible for giving Uhura her first name, created “Rotsler’s Rules for Costuming”, and well, being amazing sounding. (Died 1997.)
Born July 3, 1927 — Tim O’Connor. He was Dr. Elias Huer in Buck Rogers in the 25th Century for much of its run. (I really, really liked that series.) Other genre appearances were on The Six Million Dollar Man, The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Wonder Woman, Knight Rider,Next Gen and The Burning Zone. (Died 2018.)
Born July 3, 1927 — Ken Russell. Film director whose Altered States based off of Paddy Chayefsky’s screenplay is certainly his best-remembered film. Though let’s not overlook The Lair of the White Worm he did off Bram Stoker’s novel, or The Devils, based at least in part off The Devils of Loudun by Aldous Huxley. (Died 2011.)
Born July 3, 1937 — Tom Stoppard, 86. Screenplay writer, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead which is adjacent genre if not actually genre. Also scripted of course Brazil which he co-authored with Terry Gilliam and Charles McKeow. He also did the final Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade rewrite of Jeffrey Boam’s rewrite of Menno Meyjes’s screenplay. And Shakespeare in Love which he co-authored with Marc Norman.
Born July 3, 1943 — Kurtwood Smith, 80. Clarence Boddicker in Robocop, Federation President in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, and voiced Kanjar Ro in Green Lantern: First Flight. He’s got series appearances on Blue Thunder, The Terrible Thunderlizards, The X-Files, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, Men in Black: The Series, 3rd Rock from the Sun, Todd McFarlane’s Spawn, Judtice League, Batman Beyond, Green Lantern and Beware the Batman. His last role was as Vernon Masters as the superb Agent Carter.
Born July 3, 1946 — Michael Shea. Shea’s first novel, A Quest for Simbilis was an authorized sequel to the first two of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth novels. Vance was offered a share of the advance but declined it. (It was declared non-canon when the next novels in the series were written by Vance.) A decade, he’d win a World Fantasy Award for his Nifftthe Lean novel, and a second twenty years later for a novella, “The Growlimb.” (Died 2014.)
Born July 3, 1948 — Marc Okrand, 75. A linguist in Native American languages who’s the creator of the Klingon language. He first applied it by dubbing in Vulcan language dialogue for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and then was involved in the Search for Spock, The Final Frontier, The Undiscovered Country, and the both rebooted Trek films. Later he developed the language for the Kelpien race in the second season of Discovery.
(7) COMICS SECTION.
Loose Parts shows why pirate cosplay is difficult for certain aliens.
(8) IT’S TIME. Moses Ose Utomi’s “My Little Time Demon” is a free read at Sunday Morning Transport, offered to encourage subscriptions.
I have a sixth sense: I can tell when someone’s given up on life. In this case, though, the guy’s ice-cream-cone face tattoo says enough….
(9) GUEST MESS. Charon Dunn went to BayCon where “a staff member misunderstood the concept behind a ‘VIP and Guest Welcoming Event’ and 86’d me and a few other guests from it, so I’m doing my alchemical ‘turning BS into art’ thing.” “Mister Gatekeeper”: Here’s first stanza.
Mister Gatekeeper You sent me back into the crowd Mister Gatekeeper You told me that I was not allowed According to my badge, I was on the list But you turned me away, and now I’m pissed Mister Gatekeeper, someday that gate’s gonna slam on you It’s true Mister Gatekeeper, someday that gate’s gonna slam on you
Between 540 million and 485 million years ago, during the Cambrian period, so many new, complex animal life forms arose that paleontologists speak of the Cambrian Explosion or the Biological Big Bang. But by 400 million years ago, almost all of those species disappeared, eventually replaced by the ancestors of most modern animals. There have been few clues about what happened in between, but fossils from 462 million years ago recently discovered in a quarry in central Wales are filling in that gap, researchers report today in Nature Ecology & Evolution.
“It is wonderful,” says Douglas Erwin, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History who was not involved with the work. There are “some beautiful specimens, including some surprising discoveries.”
The Welsh fossils, discovered by a paleontologist couple who live near the quarry, reveal some Cambrian life forms held on for millions of years longer than paleontologists had thought before going extinct, and certain classes of modern animals got their starts earlier than expected. There are also some familiar creatures, including arthropods such as crustaceans and horseshoe crabs, as well as sponges, starfish, and worms. Many of them by that point already had long histories and continue to thrive to this day, so their presence among the fossils isn’t surprising. But the quarry also holds strange creatures thought to have arisen and vanished during the Cambrian period, such as opabiniids, which had five eyes and a long proboscis, and scaly slugs called wiwaxiids. Newcomers spotted in the deposits include modern families of glass sponges and a group of crustaceans called horseshoe shrimp, which were thought to have arisen much later….
(11) IN BRIT CIT, IT WAS THE END OF THE WORLD ON B. BEEB CEEB RADIO 4 THIS SUNDAY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The BBC aired an audio SF play. Following a global plague, in a future where there is no longer communication between countries, some of humanity seeks solutions, perhaps to seek a new home, and Britain’s Albion has discovered a habitable planet…
Yes, this is a re-run of a previously aired radio play, but for those into SFnal audio-drama, it is one arguably worth noting. You can download the programme here: “The Goldilocks Zone”
Further information:
Astrophysicist Sofia Khaled’s discovery of a potentially habitable planet opens up painful memories for her but a startling new truth for humanity.
When future Earth discovers an uncorrupted “cosmic” truth, data finally becomes a force for good as a cover-up with catastrophic global impact is revealed in this thrilling drama spanning fifty years.
The Goldilocks Zone by Tanika Gupta was developed through OKRE Experimental Stories. The consultant scientists were Professor Caswell Barry and Dr. Adam Kampff.
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Michael Toman for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kip WIlliams.]
“Too many notes” Mozart was told, and there are 2023 Hugo finalists being told something comparable.
The version of the 2023 Hugo ballot released yesterday – promptly withdrawn as incorrect by the Hugo Administrator, and explained as a byproduct of IT testing – nevertheless confirmed reports that the Chengdu Worldcon Hugo team wants to restrict how many names may be listed as finalists for works produced by large groups of creators and editors.
File 770 had already been alerted to this issue and tried over the weekend to learn directly from the committee the answers to the following questions. No answer was given.
(1) Are the 2023 Hugo Administrators (or the committee) limiting the number of names that can be listed as finalists for works that have multiple creators, or teams of editors, etc.?
(2) If there is a limit, what is the maximum number of names being accepted?
(3) If there is a limit, what is the reason for it?
That there actually has been an attempt to impose a limit in the Semiprozine and fan Hugo categories was apparent from the draft ballot where one finalist was credited as the “Strange Horizons Editorial Collective”, while others’ lists of six or seven names were followed by “and the [fill-in-the-blank] Team”. That this is a policy rather than one of the errors to be corrected has been confirmed by the committee sending further communications to enforce the limit.
In contrast Chicon 8, the 2022 Worldcon, shaped its policy to avoid the troubles experienced by the 2021 committee, DisCon III, which had attempted to impose limits. Last year’s Chicon 8 Hugo finalist press release carried the names of dozens of Strange Horizons staff, plus extended lists of editors and staffers for many other entries such as Escape Pod (10, plus “and the entire Escape Pod team”), FIYAH Magazine (20), Podcastle (8, plus the “entire team”), and Journey Planet (10).
DisCon III had originally announced in January 2021 they would “list a maximum of four names for each finalist on the 2021 Hugo Final Ballot (both printed and online), the visuals used during the Hugo Award ceremony, and the plaques on the Hugo trophies. Where a finalist does not wish to limit their list of named persons on the ballot to four or fewer, they will be listed as “[Title] by the [Title] Team” or agreed equivalent.” After an intensely negative response on social media these limits were repudiated the next day by then-DisCon III co-chair Bill Lawhorn (see “DisCon III Abandons Previously Announced Hugo Policy”). DisCon III then suffered two rounds of resignations by volunteers connected with the Hugos while trying to settle its policies about the perks of finalists (name on the ballot and in publications; souvenir pins; admission to the pre-Hugo Reception; program participant invitations, etc.) (One group of volunteers returned after Mary Robinette Kowal became chair.)
After paying such a high price to learn these lessons it is reasonable to ask why a Worldcon runner is trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle.
[Introduction: Melanie Stormm continues her humorous series of posts about the misdirected emails she’s been getting. Stormm is a multiracial writer who writes fiction, poetry, and audio theatre. Her novella, Last Poet of Wyrld’s End is available through Candlemark & Gleam. She is currently the editor at the SPECk, a monthly publication on speculative poetry by the SFPA. Find her in her virtual home at coldwildeyes.com. Wipe your feet before entering.]
PRE-STOLEN IDEAS
Hello All! Melanie here.
Last week, writing homeostasis was achieved, and Writer X began working on an entirely new epic fantasy series! Her latest yet unfinished novel features elves in spaceships. [[[ NEW GENRE UNLOCKED ]]] This is an exciting development.
There’s just one problem: a new television show called Plight of Stars also happens to feature a spaceship-traveling elf whose adventuring party flies from planet to planet searching for survivors from a mysterious, planet-consuming force called The Blight.
Don’t you hate it when other people become famous for your idea just when you are getting started with it?
Tryxy continues to be secretive about what he’s up to, running around with angels, and the Traveling Carnival that’s come to Cradensburg is experiencing weather delays. Cradensburg seems to be getting as much rain as the New Hampshire of our reality. Well, slightly more.
The process of writing a single book is arduous and full of uncertainty. Thinking that you have an idea that is so original as to guarantee the book’s success can be a Dumbo’s Magic Feather approach that gets you through the draft.
But seeing other people with similar magic systems or technologies doesn’t have to slow you down. When I was a teen, I remember reading a book of writing advice, and someone said: “One idea doth not a novel make.” You can take a shared idea and make it a unique read thanks to various elements of fiction: plot, character, dialogue, setting, conflict, theme…and the list goes on.
OR…you can do what Writer X is doing.
Without further ado…
Subject: NON PROFIT CONTRIBUTIONS
Dear Gladys,
How are you holding up in the flooding rains???? I thought I saw your car float by in the currents outside Mr. Morgan’s Food Emporium and Things Nicely Priced, I waved and honked my horn but I don’t think you heard me.
In other great news, I think our little angel situation has completely dried up!!! Which is good, because my boyfriend and I were worried about an angel being a bad influence on Tryxy.
AFter my letter last week, I’m sure you are shaken to the core about the way some people can proactively steal my ideas before I really get the chance to think of it. But there is now something you can do to help bring an end to things like this.
I have started a small non-profit organization consisting of like minded individuals who are against Writers Stealing Other Writer’s Ideas Before They Get To Be Famous For Them First.
We’re called IAWSOWIBTGTBFFTF but please don’t say it out loud because I showed the name to Tryxy and he says he’s pretty sure that’s the name of a demon who, when summoned, either gives the summoner a kind of flesh-eating bacteria or irritable bowel syndrome, he couldn’t remember which.
Our membership is set to DOUBLE as soon as you join. There’s a lot of work to be done to stop this nefarious activity that is thwarting up-and-coming writers’ careers so don’t delay in signing up!!!
This week, I’ve done LOADS of research on this little known epidemic. For example, did you know that Strider from LOTR had his name STOLEN FROM A HORSE?????? I’m as big a fan of J.R.R. Tolkien as the next person, but you’d think that since he’s invented a genre and achieved immortality and now has lived for the last 50 or so years at a very nice fishing cottage in Moseley Bog, he could have at least sent the horse a thank you card!!!
Oh, it doesn’t stop there. I have to be careful, Gladys, or I may rob you of all your heroes. But did you know that in THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR, Tad Williams STOLE THE IDEA of a red headed hero from a boy he went to Junior High with? STOLE THE VERY RED OFF HIS HEAD. That’s not all. By the end of the trilogy, a perfectly good junior high schooler was rendered COMPLETELY BALD by MEMORY, SORROW, AND THORN.
As president of IAWSOWIBTGTBFFTF, I have take the liberty of writing to Mr. Tad Williams about this very infraction with the following demands.
1.) That he give his former classmate his hair back
2.) That he signs all my dogeared copies of Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn and goes on an extended all-expenses-paid vacation with me to Moseley Bog. HE’S MY HALL PASS, GALDSY!!!!
Look. Look at this face. Can you believe those dreamy eyes are the ones that conceived To Green Angel Tower????????
Remember that time in high school when I carried around all of his books in my bookbag for three or four years???? Fortunately that chiropractor in Bleakwood was able to correct the damage or else the sciatica would have completely ended my hobby of competitive hot air ballooning.
GLADYS!!!!!!! I just noticed. Tad Williams is BALD!!!! Do you think he shaved all his hair off because he secretly felt guilty for STEALING THE HAIR OFF SOMEONE ELSE’S HEAD?????
This only makes me love him more. You know I’m a sucker for an anti-hero!!!! He reminds me of my other hall pass: award nominated fantasy writer Tod Boadkins!!!!!
But it gets WORSE. Gladys, I’m not sure you’re going to recover from what I’m about to tell you. This might be too much.
STEPHANIE MEYER, THE CREATOR OF TWILIGHT, stole the whole scene where Bella and Ewadiddle get married and have sex on the beach????? It’s true.
Now, I know I told you that I was going to hire a Juju person to fix this whole thing, but with all the floods, the local carnival has been on pause. But that’s okay because my work with IAWSOWWIBBTGTBFFFFFTF has given me LOTS to do!!!!
Gladys, do you think you could build me a website??
I also have taken the initiative of writing a letter to Congress to inform them of this awful epidemic affecting writers and junior high schoolers everywhere. I haven’t finished it yet. The first fourteen pages simply detail the STRUGGLE I’ve experienced as a writer as a result of PLIGHT OF STARS.
Whatever you do Gladys, DON’T WATCH PLIGHT OF STARS. THis is BARELY safe for me to do!!! You can’t have both of us sending their ratings through the roof!!!
In fact, I’m so busy gathering information on all the ideas Plight of Stars has PRE-STOLEN from me, that I need you to pause in building that website and come and take me to my gastroenterology appointment. I accidentally said IAWSOWIBTGTBFFTF out loud three times and now the cheese pizza I inhaled is OUT TO KILL ME!!!!!
Paddle over!!! I’ll wait on my roof for you to pick me up!!!!
…The strike affects roughly 15,000 cooks, room attendants, dishwashers, servers, bellmen and front-desk agents at hotels in Los Angeles and Orange counties, including the JW Marriott in the L.A. Live entertainment district and luxury destinations like the Fairmont Miramar in Santa Monica….
Anime Expo is held at the LA Convention Center, however, many attendees stay in nearby hotels.
…Attendees of Anime Expo — the largest anime convention in North America, which kicked off Saturday — passed the striking workers on the way to the Los Angeles Convention Center. Some waved in support…
(2) BISHOP MEDICAL UPDATE. Michael Bishop told Facebook readers his medical battle is nearing the end.
…Earlier this week I consigned myself to hospice care, with the advice and consent of my family. I did so to escape the maddening anxiety-producing roller-coaster of contemporary medical care.
This doesn’t mean that I am at death’s door, only that I recognize the inevitability of its opening for me in the (relatively) near future. I hope, for example, to last at least as long as our hospice-pent (albeit at home) former president Jimmy Carter. But there are no guarantees.
I wish you all well and hope to create at least one more Fairwood Press title, with the help of my nearly lifelong friend, Michael Hutchins, something like “Stolen Faces and Other, Briefer Science Fiction Tales.” Blessings on you all.
David Hartwell and Jeri & Michael Bishop at the ABA Convention. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.
(3) FLYNN MEDICAL UPDATE. Author Michael Flynn is in a hospital ICU with a bad infection his daughter, Sara, told Facebook readers.
… “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” the final adventure to star Harrison Ford as the swashbuckling explorer, added $70 million at the international box office for a global start of $130 million. That’s worse than “The Flash,” which misfired with $75 million internationally and $139 million globally and cost $100 million less to make.
In terms of its domestic debut, the latest “Indiana Jones” didn’t come close to matching its predecessor, 2008’s “Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” which opened 15 years ago to $100 million. Audiences and critics were lukewarm on “Dial of Destiny,” which earned a “B+” CinemaScore and holds a 68% on Rotten Tomatoes….
There’s an old, old show-business maxim that encourages performers to leave their audiences wanting more. Apparently that concept is unknown to many of today’s movers and shakers.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny has everything money can buy and then some. If one hair-raising, high-speed chase through narrow city streets is good, two should be better. How about three? The motto seems to be “more is more” as the film piles on set-piece after set-piece in a full-throttle attempt to exhaust us in the audience.
What began as an homage to the Saturday matinee serials that George Lucas grew up watching on TV (a generation after they were made in the 1940s) has wound up as a bloated vehicle for the still-charismatic Harrison Ford….
(6) CLARION WORKSHOP FUNDRAISER. The Clarion Workshop 2023 Fundraiser is live today. “Clarion SF & Fantasy Writers Workshop ’23 Campaign”. They want to raise at least $20,000in order to bridge the gap in funding for operational costs and for student scholarships.
(7) MEMORY LANE.
2022 – [Written by Cat Eldridge from a choice by Mike Glyer.]
We all know who T. Kingfisher is, the author of our Beginning this Scroll, so let’s just wish her a speedy and successful recovery from her illness.
I’d pick something that I particularly liked by her but I’ve really, really liked everything I’ve read by her. She’s brilliant, really she is. Having said that, may I say that A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking was particularly stellar? Five Awards ? Nice.
Our Beginning this time is that of What Moves The Dead, the first book of the two novel Sworn Soldier series. It was published by Tor Nightfire by 2022 with the cover illustrated by Christina Mrozik. It won a Locus Award for Best Horror Novel, and picked up a Goodreads nomination.
So now we come to our Beginning this time…
The mushroom’s gills were the deep-red color of severed muscle, the almost-violet shade that contrasts so dreadfully with the pale pink of viscera. I had seen it any number of times in dead deer and dying soldiers, but it startled me to see it here.
Perhaps it would not have been so unsettling if the mushrooms had not looked so much like flesh. The caps were clammy, swollen beige, puffed up against the dark-red gills. They grew out of the gaps in the stones of the tarn like tumors growing from diseased skin. I had a strong urge to step back from them, and an even stronger urge to poke them with a stick.
I felt vaguely guilty about pausing in my trip to dismount and look at mushrooms, but I was tired. More importantly, my horse was tired. Madeline’s letter had taken over a week to reach me, and no matter how urgently worded it had been, five minutes more or less would not matter.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born July 2, 1908 — Rip Van Ronkel. Screenwriter who won a Retro Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation at Millennium Philcon for Destination Moon. He also produced the earlier Destination Space movie for television, and wrote the screenplay for The Bamboo Saucer. I’ve not seen the latter but I’ll admit it sounds, errr, odd. Audience reviewers at Rotten really don’t like it giving an eighteen percent rating. (Died 1965.)
Born July 2, 1914 — Hannes Bok. He’s a writer, artist and illustrator who created nearly one hundred and fifty covers for various detective, fantasy and sf fiction magazines. He shared one of the inaugural 1953 Hugo Awards for science fiction achievement for Best Cover Artist with Ed Emshwiller. He also wrote a handful of novels, the best known being The Sorcerer’s Ship, The Blue Flamingo and Beyond the Golden Stair. (Died 1964.)
Born July 2, 1931 — Robert Ito, 92. Though you’ll best remember him as being in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension as Professor Hikita, his first genre role was actually an uncredited role in Get Smart!, the first of a lot of genre roles including, but not limited to, Women of the Prehistoric Planet, Soylent Green, Roller Ball, The Terminal Man, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: The Next Generation and more voice work than I can possibly list here though he had a long recurring role as The Mandarin on Iron Man.
Born July 2, 1949 — Craig Shaw Gardner, 74. Comic fantasy author whose work is, depending on your viewpoint, very good or very bad. For me, he’s always great. I adore his Ballad of Wuntvor sequence and highly recommend all three novels, A Difficulty with Dwarves, An Excess of Enchantments and A Disagreement with Death. Likewise, his pun filled Arabian Nights sequence will either be to your liking or really not. I think it’s worth it just for Scheherazade’s Night Out.
Born July 2, 1948 — Saul Rubinek, 75. Primarily of interest for being on Warehouse 13 as Artie Nielsen, but he does show rather often else on genre series and films including going on Eureka, Masters of Horror, Person of Interest, Beauty & the Beast, Stargate SG-1, The Outer Limits and Star Trek: The Next Generation. Memory Run and Death Ship are seeming to be his only only genre films.
Born July 2, 1950 — Stephen R. Lawhead, 73. I personally think that The Pendragon Cycle is by far his best work though the King Raven Trilogy with its revisionist take on Robin Hood is intriguing. And I read the first two of the Bright Empires series which very much worth reading.
Born July 2, 1956 — Kay Kenyon, 67. Writer of the truly awesome The Entire and the Rose series which I enjoyed immensely as a listening experience a few years back. I’ve not read her Dark Talents series, so opinions please. And she was nominated for three Endeavour Awards which is very impressive.
Born July 2, 1970 — Yancy Butler, 53. Detective Sara Pezzini on the Witchblade series which would’ve been awesome with current CGI, but sucked then. She was later Avedon Hammond in Ravager, Captain Kate Roebuck in Doomsday Man, Angie D’Amico in Kick-Ass and Kick-Ass 2, Reba in Lake Placid 3 and Lake Placid: The Final Chapter, Officer Hart in Hansel & Gretel Get Baked (also known as Black Forest: Hansel and Gretel and the 420 Witch) (given the latter, a career low for her) and Alexis Hamilton in Death Race 2050. Series work other than Witchblade was a recurring role as Sgt. Eve Edison in Mann & Machine inher first genre role.
…From dragons and ogres to yetis, sharks, and even aliens, DreamWorks Animation continues to connect with global audiences by turning monsters to heroes that viewers young, old, and even real-life heroes themselves can look up to. And while many studios are looking for ways to do things differently in animation, the team behind the new 3DCG DreamWorks feature Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken, which releases in U.S. theaters today, June 30, continues to live by the age-old saying, “If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.”
“I love to think that when people think of Krakens, they’ll think of Ruby,” says Ruby Gillman producer Kelly Cooney Cilella, also known for serving as a production supervisor on Shrek The Third, as well as a production manager on Puss in Boots and Trolls. “Finding Ruby’s design specifically as a giant Kraken was probably one of the biggest challenges of the movie because she’s a sea monster and yet we wanted her to feel aspirational. We wanted her to feel feminine. We wanted her to be something that a little girl could look at, and go, ‘I want to be that.’ It took some iteration.”
The heartfelt action comedy follows sweet, shy, and awkward 16-year-old Ruby Gillman (Lana Condor, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before) who is just trying to fit in at her high school and keep her crush on the school skater boy (Jaboukie Young-White, Ralph Breaks the Internet) a secret. Suddenly, she discovers that she’s part of a legendary royal lineage of mythical sea Krakens and that her destiny, in the depths of the oceans, is bigger than she ever dreamed.
While growing 300 feet tall with glowing in bioluminescence and laser eye powers goes entirely against Ruby’s mission of staying ordinary and out of the limelight, she realizes she’ll need her powers to stand up to the school’s beautiful, popular new girl, Chelsea (Annie Murphy, Schitt’s Creek) who also happens to be a mean-girl mermaid….
[Thanks to Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day OGH. It’s entirely likely to have been used before, but I’m telling you after today’s Hugo debacle I’m ready for it.]
Tammy Coxen relayed a request to me from Hugo Administrator Dave McCarty to remove the post with the finalists released on the Chengdu Worldcon website today because “it was released in error and not correct.”
There will be a new post here when a correct list is available.
Dave McCarty has written on his Facebook page:
So yes, IT people are nightmares all over the world.
They share that.
If you saw it, be aware, that is *NOT* a correct list.
I can’t apologize enough.
Helen Montgomery further explained:
Official statement is that the list was posted in error by IT as part of their set up / testing process, but it is an earlier version of the ballot and is not correct.
Review by Steve Vertlieb: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny began production in 2021 and had been scheduled by Disney and Paramount to have been released during June 2022. As the hills were alive with the sound of money last Summer, the studio decided to wait an additional year before releasing the film, fearing that it might become lost amidst of a slate of blockbusters waiting to take off that season. Additionally, its star, Harrison Ford, had been injured during the filming, delaying the picture’s completion still further. A year of anticipation and waiting both baffled and irritated organized fandom, while a social media backlash had already begun building months before the picture’s re-scheduled release date. Rumors abounded with stories of scripting problems, and ill-conceived structures and concepts. Frustration had only grown over the ensuing months, and speculation festered in the minds and hearts of jaded movie goers that this final film in the “Indiana Jones” franchise would be a catastrophe, either worse than, or on a par with the disastrously received Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in 2008. The sad reality of the beloved series was that there hadn’t been a universally well received entry in the saga since Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in Spring, 1989. Not only had the public grown weary of Indy’s most recent exploits, but the film’s director, Steven Spielberg, had seemingly run out of ideas and inspiration. Both the director and his star appeared aged and tired in the fourth and seemingly final entry in the series. Indeed, when the fifth and definitively final film in the forty-year-old franchise was initially announced, with Harrison Ford once again starring, but with a new director, James Mangold at the helm, the trepidation among the film’s targeted audience was palpable.
When the film premiered in Spring 2023, reviews were decidedly mixed, with critical reaction either lukewarm, or openly hostile. Decades of expectation had seemingly ruined the picture for audiences yet to come, while preview critiques had deemed the film a failure, sadly derivative, tired, and bereft of inspiration. The long, hopelessly frustrating wait seemed to indicate that the film, despite its whispered lofty ambitions, would be dead on arrival at the box office when it opened finally on June 30th. Happily, and perhaps beyond reasonable expectations, this last entry in the “Indiana Jones” series is anything but a failure.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is a joyous throwback to another time, a happily full-blooded adventure thriller that harkens memories of the most memorable moments from the original series, as well as the Thirties Universal, Mascot, and Republic serials that first inspired them. James Mangold, whose impressive credits include directing Logan, thereby reinventing the “Wolverine” franchise, as well as the delightfully charming time travel romance, Kate and Leopold, has breathed new life into the George Lucas/Steven Spielberg “cliff hangers” with a fresh new take on the reality of time, age, and psychological expiration. Henry Jones no longer looks forward to another adventure, but has succumbed to the relative boredom of complacency, and almost numbing retirement. His lectures to his final group of students have become boring, forgetful, and strictly by the numbers, causing infectious slumber within the now torturous confines of his once exhilarating classroom. When subjected to a decidedly half-hearted retirement party, attended by only a small handful of colleagues, his resignation to, and acceptance of, the end, rather than the beginning, is one of involuntary inevitability. He is tired … tired of teaching, and tired of living a life that has become both stagnant and routine.
Mads Mikkelsen, Harrison Ford, James Mangold, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge at opening.
The boredom of his present reality is made all the more excruciating by memories of his younger self, a bold adventurer whose intoxicating exploits are brought wonderfully to life once more in the opening sequence of the film, a thrilling joy ride aboard a roaring train, a “Hurricane Express” on which a younger adventurer races atop precarious cars and engines to salvage a precious artifact, rescued from antiquity, from the Nazis amidst the Second World War. Indy is a hero for the ages, a daring archaeological champion risking everything to save history. Versatile character actor Toby Jones is his delightfully goofy colleague, feigning innocence when arbitrarily captured by the marauding enemy. Visually, the controversial de-aging photographic process is stunning, returning star Harrison Ford to his comparative youth four decades earlier, while the journey is joyfully reminiscent of the young “Indiana Jones” sequence aboard a speeding train that begins Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
When Indy’s goddaughter unexpectedly appears late in his life, seductively enticing him back into the promise of new adventures and intrigue, his decidedly world-weary traveler is at first reluctant to respond to the alluring call of the wild. Helena, as imagined by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, is a feisty feminist adventurer whose motives are vague and subject to question. However, the lure of just one more adventure is simply too much for an embittered octogenarian to resist, as the proverbial fountain of youth beckons Indiana Jones yet again to go out in a final blaze of glory before his candle burns out, consigning him to his own assortment of molding antiquities.
Returning to the wonderful Wizardry and land of Oz, Indy must rescue the legendary “Dial of Destiny,” a mystical treasure invented by Archimedes, capable of transporting its user through precarious portals in time. Mads Mikkelsen as Doctor Voller is a worthy adversary for Indiana, a NASA scientist and former Nazi, whose relentless quest for the magical artifact would transport him back through the decades to win the Second World War, restoring Nazism to its ultimate glory, to overpower and dominate civilization. Mikkelsen is a venomous villain, chewing the scenery to sinister delight.
John Rhys-Davies returns all too briefly as Sallah, Indy’s former companion in intrigue, to bid him a final glorious adieu, while Antonio Banderas enlivens the scenario with a deep sea diving expedition reminiscent of previous explorations, while recalling Indy’s desperate hatred for snakes. There’s barely a quiet interlude in this frenetic fable in which both Harrison Ford and his beloved alter ego aren’t thrown headlong into a miraculous restoration of energy, exultation, and youth. It’s a thrill ride for the ages, a sweet recollection of a time gone by when knighthood was in flower, and the world was young. The final sequence of the film in which both Indy and his nemesis reach the inevitable conclusion of their journey, while criticized by some as presenting entirely too fanciful a finale, is in truth no less, yet no more imaginative, than the mystical resolution beneath the tombs and destruction of ancient caves from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in which the unbelievable becomes believable, and time is itself a relic of antiquity. Those elder youngsters and “fans” whose cynical criticisms have sadly eroded the magic of this masterwork of wonder and imagination have, indeed, grown up … yet forgotten how to grow “down.”
Steven Spielberg at opening.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is a joyous return to those “thrilling days of yesteryear” when time was gloriously embellished with valiance and heroism, and swashbucklers reigned triumphant over villainy, rescuing their ladies fair from the jaws of treachery. This is, at last, the “Indiana Jones” film that we’ve waited for these endless decades. Following Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, this final adventure must be counted among this classic character’s most wondrous exploits. Harrison Ford is remarkably youthful in his final performance as this iconic hero whose astonishing exuberance and vitality remain an inspiration to all those who have allowed themselves to grow old before their time. Karen Allen as Marian Ravenwood, Indy’s first love, returns during the age defining moments concluding Indy’s melancholy journeys through time and space, recalling tender romance and adoration that refuse the restrictive boundaries of physicality and age.
John Williams and Steve Vertlieb
Composer John Williams whose intrepid themes and motifs have wondrously illustrated these journeys and adventures for the past four decades has returned for one final compositional triumph and recording session, filled with breathtaking thrills and heart rendering interludes, richly textured and worthy of Indiana Jones’ truly last crusade. Cinematically, it’s an exhilarating finale and salutation to the exhaustive careers of both this legendary film composer, and remarkable fictional characterization. Look for them only on film, for they represent a world of irresistible fantasy … sadly “gone with the wind.”
