By Steve Vertlieb: Robert Eggers’ lavish remake of Nosferatu is a love letter from Hell, a provocative, profoundly disturbing adult horror masterpiece. Infusing elements from Bram Stoker’s literary classic, Dracula, with imagery from F.W. Murnau’s original 1922 cinematic nightmare, as well as Francis Ford Coppola’s brooding interpretation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, this latest re-telling of the infamous fantasy brings together fabled folklore and deeply troubling Germanic mythology to form a masterful visual presentation steeped in spectacular gothic landscapes, and sumptuous sensuality. Tales told over haunted centuries in hushed whispers ‘neath European campfires enshrouded in darkness. Tales of depravity and bestiality hovering menacingly within the darkest corners of ancient fears and imagination. These grim fairy tales divide the invisible lines of separation between rationality and insanity for, despite our pretense of civilized and mannered society, a frightening undercurrent of disruption and horror lies just beneath the surface of imagination. What lies waiting in darkness, beyond our fragile grasp of the pretense of reality, may ultimately drown us beyond redemption in a sea of madness and depravity.
It is our lost adolescent frailty, and fear of things that “go bump in the night” that forge the fragile bonds of smug maturity, and refusal to return to the mythology of childhood dreams and nightmares. Within the conflicted spectrum of adult conceit lies the tantalizing fascination with both cinematic and fictional horror, historically consuming our senses, in the often delusional belief that once we leave the theater and turn the lights back on, that our lives will return safely and securely to a world of wholesome normality. This has been the basis of our lifelong fascination with horror. To stick our toes into the darkness for a fleeting moment, and then retreat quickly into the reassuring, if deceptive, light of comfort and warmth, is somehow reassuring. It is an affirmation of life and security, a protection from the ancient forces of darkness that momentarily threaten our semblance of reality. It is our symbolic crucifix to ward off evil.
Nosferatu, written and directed by Robert Eggers, is a frightening reincarnation of the vampire legend. A larger than death interpretation of Stoker’s Dracula, Eggers cinematic fairy tale is a traumatic descent into demonic possession, filmed in grand guignol style and imagery, with devotional stylistic tributes to both Charles Dickens and L. Frank Baum.
Robert Eggers
Based upon F.W. Murnau’s unauthorized variation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (UFA, 1922), this newest and perhaps definitive reincarnation of the original silent classic is a horrifying realization of our deepest, most troubling nightmares. The tale is as old as time. An innocent young man is sent by his firm to the wild, untamed mountains of Transylvania to arrange for the purchase of a decaying castle in England and passage by ship to London by a mysterious count whose presence in his native land is both feared and abhorred by the simple peasantry surrounding his property. Count Orlok is a scourge upon the land, a loathsome creature of the night whose nocturnal wanderings have infected the local village with dread. Infants have gone missing, while young, chaste women have been attacked and savaged. Orlok’s command of ravenous wolves and fearsome rats stalking the woods have both cautioned and terrified the neighboring citizenry whose doors are barred after dark, shielded by ancient religious artifacts protecting the innocent. Superstitions guard against infestations of evil, as a cloud of death envelops the lands adjoining the broken battlements of a once proud castle, while ghastly apparitions saturate unholy ground.
Upon his arrival in this strange, depraved land, Thomas Hutter is warned away by anxious peasantry, fearful for his spirit. Hutter is a young newlywed in need of an infusion of funding for his marriage and not dissuaded by the fearful concerns for his safety. After all, he has traveled for weeks to arrive at his destination, and must complete his work in order to return home to his recent bride. Compelled to walk through the deeply menacing woods toward the forbidding edifice, a dark carriage arrives among the shadows to aid in continuing his journey. The bewildering ravages of the brooding countryside invite their unwary guest into the courtyard of a nightmarish structure, embattled by centuries of disrepair, its very foundations rotting into the scorched Earth. Welcomed by a monstrous visage, shrouded in darkness, Count Orlok welcomes his unwary prey into the dungeons of depravity that will soon become his agonized imprisonment. While Ellen Hutter waits anxiously for word of her new husband’s arrival, his torturous captivity within the walls of the ancient castle have painfully begun.
While Dracula’s guest is left to languish within the prison walls of growing madness, Count Orlok departs for alien shores. Having seen a photograph of his captive’s bride, the heinous vampire determines to find and possess her. Thrust into the comparatively mannered pretense of Victorian sense and sensibility, the malevolent prince of darkness arrives by ship at the coastal community amidst a malignant plague of vermin infesting the seaside wharf, its impending evil suffocating the innocent populace.
Written by Robert Eggers, while faithfully adhering to its literary roots, screen credit is given both to author Bram Stoker, as well as original scenarist Henrik Galeen for the Murnau silent classic from which Eggers’ film adaptation is derived. The sumptuous, softly muted, often spectacular look of the film is credited to cinematographer Jarin Blaschke and set decorator Beatrice Brentnerova, while the crisp, often shocking editing of the film is devised by Louise Ford, as overseen by the director. The musical score by composer Robin Carolan is eerily chilling.
Variations of the Dracula novel have seen numerous times since its publication in 1897, including a tepid 1979 remake directed by Werner Herzog with Klaus Kinski in the title role, eerily adapting the distinctive look of the vampire created originally by Max Schreck in the signature 1922 production, Nosferatu – Eine Synphonie des Grauens, or “A Symphony of Terror’ for its English language release. Renfield, a dark, comedic telling of the story, released in 2023, featured Nicholas Cage as the vampire, with actor Nicholas Hoult in the dubious title role of the creature’s slave. The proverbial fates conspired to bring the actor back to the thrice-told tale, as Nicholas Hoult once again assumes a commanding, intensely frightening performance as Thomas Hutter, among the leading protagonists in this newest incarnation of the story, along with gifted, physically exquisite actress Lily-Rose Depp (daughter of actor Johnny Depp) as Count Orlok’s noble prey, Ellen Hutter. One must not forget Shadow of the Vampire, an embarrassing 2001 conceit in which German actor Max Schreck as the original Nosferatu is actually a vampire posing as an actor whose physical makeup is too startling to be artificially conceived.
Both Lily-Rose Depp and Nicholas Hoult deliver unnervingly powerful performances in the leads, while Bill Skarsgard dominates the screen as Count Orlok, his guttural voice and demeanor creating much of the most striking, haunting visual, as well as vocal, imagery. If there is a single disappointment in the film, it is director Eggers’ decision to abandon the physical appearance of Max Schrek’s rodent like features in favor of a more human, if towering, presence. Willem Dafoe is compelling as the aged professor and scientist recognizing the threat of the “Vampyr,” yet needlessly over the top in his performance during the film’s final sequences. Still, it is Eggers’ direction, striking visual style and lead performances that elevate the classic tale of Nosferatu to near cinematic perfection as a classic nightmare, and ultimate “Symphony of Terror.”
(1) POSSIBLY AMONG THE BEST SF BOOKS AND FILMS OF 2024? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.]SF² Concatenation has just posted its annual team poll as to the possibly best SF books and films of 2024 (well some of SF² Concatenation team members liked them). This is an annual bit of fun and is not to be taken too seriously. Having said that, its past January team picks have seen some go on to be short-listed, and even win, some major SF Awards (scroll down the page to see these).
(3) ON THE FRONT. Literary Hub asked 54 designers to share their favorite covers of the year, and has posted a gallery of the 167 covers on their lists: “The 167 Best Book Covers of 2024”. At the top are the covers from The Southern Reach series.
(4) CLARKE AWARD WINNER ON QUIZ SHOW. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Last night’s Christmas University Challenge BBC2 30th Dec, saw Queens College Cambridge vs Emmanuel College Cambridge.
On the Queens team was SF author and Clarke Award winner Richard Morgan of Altered Carbon fame among much else.
Richard Morgan.
The Queens team members seemed to equally contribute to their collective score. Richard helped early on getting the 2nd starter question for 10 points right. He also demonstrated a knowledge of the film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as well as Bonnie Prince Charlie.
Mr. Carter made energy policy one of his top concerns. His presidency arrived after several years of oil shortages and price spikes that had roiled the economy.
He established the Department of Energy, which was also responsible for managing the nuclear weapons stockpile, and famously installed 32 solar panels on the West Wing of the White House to promote renewable sources. To his disappointment, Ronald Reagan had them removed. (The National Park Service quietly added new panels for secondary buildings on White House grounds in 2002, and the Obama administration revived solar power on the main structure in 2014.)
The Carter family got the Marvel Comics treatment by the artist John Tartaglione to encourage — along with Captain America — energy conservation. This illustration, signed by Stan Lee, Marvel’s publisher, is on display at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum in Atlanta.
The beloved sci-fi anthology The Twilight Zone (airing regularly on SYFY) is full of iconic quotes — like “It’s not fair… there was time now,” “Wish it into the cornfield,” and “It’s a cookbook!” — but the one that’s most associated with the classic show has to be from creator Rod Serling: “Submitted for your approval.”
When you picture Serling, appearing before the camera to introduce whatever twist-filled tale The Twilight Zone has in store, you can hear him saying that phrase. If you’re trying to do an impression of Serling, it’s almost mandatory that you say, “Submitted for your approval.”
But would it surprise you to learn that Serling only says that catchphrase three times across all of The Twilight Zone’s 156 episodes?
It is with profound sadness that I bring you the news of the death Barb Gilligan She and our friend Pat H started on an adventure cruise in the Sea of Cortez, but after a few fun days, Barb became ill. Her condition worsened, and the ship turned around to take her to a medical facility. From there she was airlifted to a larger hospital in San Jose del Cabo. Her condition continued to worsen, she was intubated, and never recovered. She was taken off life support on Saturday, December 28th. Her brother-in-law flew in and joined Pat to be there with Barb at the end.
Pat was a rock through all of this, working tirelessly to help and advocate for her friend in a country where she didn’t speak the language.
Barb was kind, adventurous, and always had a twinkle in her eye. She is survived by her dog Lily, and siblings, Cathy, Janice, David and James, and many friends.
(8) ANGUS MACINNES (1947-2024). Actor Angus MacInnes, whose active screen career included roles in many genre productions, died December 23 at the age of 77.
…He made his first on-screen appearance in 1975’s Rollerball.
His most notable role was in director George Lucas’ 1977 film Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, which saw him play Gold Leader/Jon “Dutch” Vander. He later reprised his role in 2016’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, directed by Gareth Edwards.
“For Angus, the fans of Star Wars held a special place in his heart. He loved meeting you at conventions, hearing your stories, and sharing in your passion for the saga,” the family added in their statement. “He was continually humbled, delighted, and honored by the admiration and passion of the fans and convention community.”
MacInnes’ other acting credits included Space: 1999 (1977), Atlantic City (1980), Outland (1981), The Littlest Hobo (1980-81), Witness (1985), Half Moon Street (1986), Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988), Sleepers (1991), Roughnecks (1994), Judge Dredd (1995), Space Island One (1998), Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Formula 51 (2001), Hellboy (2004), The Black Dahlia (2006), Vikings (2013) and Captain Phillips (2013).
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
Born December 31, 1949 – Ellen Datlow, 75.
By Paul Weimer: Ellen Datlow is an Empress of short fiction editing.
Although I didn’t pay attention to it at the time, I’ve been reading fiction edited by Datlow for most of my science fiction reading life. That is to say, Omni Magazine. Datlow was the Omni Magazine (and later Omni Online) fiction editor. So the stories I enjoyed in those early halcyon days of short fiction reading were under her editorial hand — Omni was the first SF magazine I read and for a while was the only one before I transitioned into magazines like Asimov’s and Analog. So some of my early favorite SF stories, like “The Infinite Plane” by Paul Nahin, were thanks to her editorial direction. But young me didn’t even think of looking up editors in those halcyon days.
After her stint in Omni, and more famously, Datlow’s short fiction editing transitioned to a goodly number of anthologies. And this, friends, is where Datlow as a name came to my reading attention. Her editorial work on many volumes of books like The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, The Best Horror of the Year and others have been staples of my reading for years. Datlow has also won a number of Hugo and World Fantasy awards for her short fiction and for some of her one-off anthologies, such as the fantastic The Green Man.
Datlow also co-hosts the speculative fiction reading series held on the secondWednesday of every month at the KGB Bar in Manhattan.
Among the undated offerings from HBO and Max are Seasons 2 of “The Last of Us,”
the latest “Game of Thrones” offshoot, “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” and the “It” prequel series “Welcome to Derry” (which we’re already scared of based on a sneak peak!).
Over on Hulu, the sixth and final season of the Emmy-winning “The Handmaid’s Tale” will premiere sometime in the spring, and will reveal what June (Elisabeth Moss) and Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski) can do now that they’ve joined forces to take down Gilead.
Amazon’s Prime Video service…Season 2 of “Gen V,” the brilliant spinoff of “The Boys”
Last but not least, we come to FX. …Noah Hawley’s “Alien: Earth,” which was first announced in December 2020, will at last be unveiled, and will likely be one of the biggest shows of the year.
A week before Christmas, a man returned a copy of Igor Stravinsky’s 1936 autobiography to a clerk at The New York Public Library’s 455 5th Ave. location.
The clerk immediately contacted the branch’s director.
“They called and said, ‘hey, are you able to come down?’” said Billy Parrott, director of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library.
The book was 72 years overdue, making it the most overdue book Parrott has ever heard of being returned to the branch.
“We routinely get stuff [returned], all the time, from the ‘80s or the ‘90s but rarely stuff from mid-century,” said Parrott, who loves learning the stories behind such superlatively overdue items….
… It was April 4, 1952. The book was due back two weeks later.
On Feb. 9, 1953, the tardy patron was mailed a formal notice, signed by the NYPL’s private investigator Herbert Bouscher (who later became head of its microfilm services, according to an obituary), requesting she return the book to the branch she borrowed it from and pay the fine of 1 cent per day plus a handling charge, which together came to $3.25.
Although she went on to work for a time at an NYPL location in the Bronx, she never did return the book, or pay the fine, said Parrott.
…Some scientists question whether human astronauts are going to be needed at all.
“Robots are developing fast, and the case for sending humans is getting weaker all the time,” says Lord Martin Rees, the UK’s Astronomer Royal. “I don’t think any taxpayer’s money should be used to send humans into space.”
He also points to the risk to humans.
“The only case for sending humans [there] is as an adventure, an experience for wealthy people, and that should be funded privately,” he argues.
Andrew Coates, a physicist from University College London, agrees. “For serious space exploration, I much prefer robotics,” he says. “[They] go much further and do more things.”
They are also cheaper than humans, he argues. “And as AI progresses, the robots can be cleverer and cleverer.”
But what does that mean for future generations of budding astronauts – and surely there are certain functions that humans can do in space but which robots, however advanced, never could?…
… In her 2024 Booker Prize-winning novel Orbital, author Samantha Harvey puts it more lyrically: “A robot has no need for hydration, nutrients, excretion, sleep… It wants and asks for nothing.”…
A lunar rock collected by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on humanity’s first trip to the Moon in 1969 was accidentally destroyed in a fire after spending three years in an Irish basement, it has emerged.
The rock was collected on Nasa’s Apollo 11 mission and gifted to Eamon de Valera, the Irish president at the time, in 1970.
Previously confidential documents from the Dublin National Archives reveal the historic item was left in bureaucratic limbo for three years, with civil servants unable to decide where it should be displayed….
… “This piece of Moon rock had lain in the basement for three-and-a-half years due to indecision as to where it might best be displayed,” a memo from 1984 seen by the PA news agency reads.
“It was decided to give the Moon rock to Dunsink when it became known that a second gift was to be made by the US government, and it was thought that some embarrassment would be caused if the first piece was not already on display.”
The lunar rock completed a 236,000-mile trip back to Earth on Apollo 11, only to spend three years in a dark room before being consumed by flames and accidentally disposed of with the rubble. “The first piece was destroyed during a fire at Dunsink on October 3, 1977,” documents confirmed.
The second piece of Moon rock, from Apollo 17, was gifted by the US in 1973, accompanied by a special plaque featuring the Irish tricolour.
(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Here are the special effects that explain “How They Made Hagrid Big” in the Harry Potter movies.
[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Paul Weimer, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Peer.]
Kazuo IshiguroStephen Fry. Photo by Elena Ternovaja.Tom Baker
More than 1,200 people have been honoured in the UK’s New Year Honours List 2025. Some of those who have done notable genre work are listed below.
Insignia of a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour
The Order of the Companions of Honour
Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, O.B.E., Author and Screenwriter. For services to Literature.
Ishiguro won the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature. Many of his works have fantastic elements. The Companions of Honour are a select group which is limited to 65 people at any one time.
Knights Bachelor
Stephen John Fry, President, Mind and Vice-President, Fauna & Flora International. For services to Mental Health Awareness, the Environment and to Charity.
His acting career includes many productions of genre interest, including Blackadder and the films V for Vendetta and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug and The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE)
Dr. Anthony Freeman, Scientist and Engineer, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA. For services to UK/US Relations in Space and Earth Science.
Member of the Order of the British Empire
Thomas Stewart BAKER, Actor and Writer. For services to Television
He played the Fourth Doctor in the Doctor Who series.
Anne Reid MBE. Actor. For services to Drama. (London, Greater London)
Reid’s notable film roles include the voice of Wendolene Ramsbottom in Wallace and Gromit: A Close Shave (1995).
Anne-Marie Duff. Actor. For services to Drama. (London, Greater London)
Ma Costa in the series His Dark Materials (2019)
Edward Maurice Charles Marsan. Actor. For services to Drama. (London, Greater London)
Voiced the Manticore in the Merlin episode “Love in the Time of Dragons”. Appeared as the practical magician Gilbert Norrell in the BBC period drama Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Played the main villain in the 2008 superhero film Hancock. Was Inspector Lestrade in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes.
Stephen John Fry, President, Mind and Vice-President, Fauna & Flora International. For services to Mental Health Awareness, the Environment and to Charity.
His varied acting career includes such productions of genre interest as TV’s Blackadder and the films V for Vendetta and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug and The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies.
Member of the Order of the British Empire
Thomas Stewart BAKER, Actor and Writer. For services to Television
He played the Fourth Doctor in the Doctor Who series.
Kazuo IshiguroStephen Fry. Photo by Elena Ternovaja.Tom Baker
(2) F IS FOR FAKE. Silvia Moreno-Garcia today sent this warning to her newsletter readers:
I was going to try to show a newspaper for proof of life, but who gets newspapers these days? Anyway, it’s December 30, 2024 and there has been a scammer going around Facebook pretending to be me and trying to join writer groups. So this is a reminder:
1. All my official social media channels are listed via my website. 2. I do not direct message people, nor do I read or respond to direct messages. 3. I do not conduct business via social media or without my agent. 4. I do not offer personal advice via social media.
Don’t accept any messages from suspicious accounts! Stay safe!
…I’m thrilled to announce that the winner of the 2024 Retro Darth Vader Parenthood Award for Outstandingly Horrible Fictional Parents is…
Drumroll
Fire Lord Ozai
As voiced by Mark Hamill in the animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender and played by Daniel Dae Kim in the eponymous live action series, Fire Lord Ozai is the supreme ruler of the Fire Nation and a genocidal tyrant. His grandfather already wiped out the Air Nomads, while his father Fire Lord Azulon set his sights on the Earth Kingdom and Northern and Southern Water Tribes. Fire Lord Ozai, meanwhile, continues his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps and tries to conquer or wipe out all other nations. He succeeds, too, and – granted near unlimited power by a passing comet – crowns himself the Phoenix King, ruler of his entire world.
After another Fire Lord accepts on his behalf –
…Scattered applause can be heard around the auditorium from those audience members who accepted the award on behalf of their parents. Hans Beimer is about to boo again, but Luke Skywalker, who’s sitting in the front row in full Jedi robes, uses a mild Force choke on him, just enough to shut him up.
At the bar in the back, Tyrion Lannister, who’s already quite drunk, calls out, “Well spoken, lad. You tell ’em, kid.”
(4) WEIRD AND WILD SCIENCE. Ian Tregillis has revealed that the “Wild Cards” universe is the basis of forthcoming article co-credited with George R.R. Martin. As he told readers of the Albuquerque Science Fiction Society newsletter:
…My last several blog posts for the Wild Cards website documented the step-by-step development of silly, yet increasingly sophisticated mathematical models for distilling the fundamental premise of Wild Cards into a concise, self-consistent physics framework. (Laying aside the unanswerable question of how any virus, extraterrestrial or otherwise, could imbue people with a panoply of physics-abusing powers.)
The work eventually reached a level where instead of writing another stupid blog post, it was worth attempting to turn the whole thing into a serious physics research article. I pitched this notion to George R.R. Martin and Melinda Snodgrass back in March.
“Ergodic Lagrangian Dynamics in a Superhero Universe”, by I. L. Tregillis & George R. R. Martin, will appear in the American Journal of Physics in early 2025.
Tregillis has previously used these thoughts to put together a whimsical (math-light, meme-heavy) hour-long presentation that takes a lay-audience through the development of this model, from first principles to the final result. To date he’s presented “The Math (& Physics) of Wild Cards” to the Albuquerque Science Fiction Society (November, 2023) and at Bubonicon 55 (August, 2024).
…Star Wars may be playing catch-up on representation, but science fiction fandom has been a safe space for queer expression since its modern beginnings. At the USC Fisher Museum of Art, an exhibition titled “Sci-Fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation” explores queer history in sci-fi, starting from the 1930s through to the 1960s. Art, literature, and other ephemera have been carefully curated by ONE Archives, the largest repository of LGBTQ+ materials in the world. According to Alexis Bard Johnson, the Curator at the ONE Archives and USC Libraries, the starting point for the exhibition came from noticing the sheer volume of science fiction material in the archive. Many of the items on display come from the collections of Lisa Ben and Jim Kepner. Both were queer activists who were heavily into sci-fi fandom and members of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society.
It’s important to note that there are two ways of looking at the word queer. One way is a person of one gender who has attraction and desire for someone of the same gender. Another definition of queer is someone who exists outside of the mainstream. In the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, people with queer identities could inhabit both of those definitions. In this way, it became a space to fit in a little more comfortably when it was not very safe to be out.
The other factor that made sci-fi fandom a haven at the time was the proliferation of fanzines. Lisa Ben and Jim Kepner learned how to produce fanzines during their time in the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society. The club even had printing machinery for members to use. Lisa Ben published the first lesbian publication in the U.S., Vice Versa. Jim Kepner had his own zine called Toward Tomorrow. Having a means of production for outsider ideas along with the community built through a love for science fiction was an incredibly powerful way for queer people to find each other….
In io9’s annual “in memoriam” post, we pay tribute to actors, directors, artists, composers, writers, creators, and other icons in the realms of horror, sci-fi, and fantasy that have passed. Their inspiring work has impacted the lives of so many and will live on through their legacies in the worlds of genre entertainment….
(8) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
One Million B.C. (Raquel Welch version)
By Paul Weimer: Or, WPIX strikes again.
I’ve mentioned WPIX, an independent station in NYC (channel 11) was responsible for me first seeing this movie¹. It was around when I was first watching Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, so it was around 1980 or so.
The movie is sheer nonsense. I had cause to rewatch it a couple of years ago, randomly during the height of the pandemic (big mood) when I tried to, and failed, to work from home due to technological limitations. I wanted to have something mindless on. And of all the things I could have picked, I delved into my youth and went with One Million B.C. I wound up watching more of the movie than I intended, as my laptop and my internet connection glacially struggled and my work production was minimal. (I would soon go back to the office, and in an office of 120 people, be one of ten in the building for weeks on end.)
So while I remembered a lot about this movie (and not just Raquel Welch in the famous fur bikini), there was a lot that I didn’t remember so much and got to see on the refresher. I remembered there was a big climatic battle between the two factions, for example, but the volcano erupting in the middle of it in a deus ex volcana was not something I had actively recalled. But the Triceratops fight against the small meat-eating dinosaur? I think that made a big impression on me back in the day and is why the trike is in my top three dinosaurs.
And sure, humans and dinosaurs never co-existed together, ever. But I do wonder if Stirling’s The Sky People, which is set in a universe with a habitable Venus and Mars wasn’t inspired by this film. While his Mars is all ancient civilizations, his Venus is jungles…with dinosaurs…and, cavemen (and beautiful cave women, too as it so “coincidentally” happens).
Fun fact: Apparently there is an earlier 1940 version in black and white. No fur bikinis in that one. Not only because of the mores of the 1940’s…but bikinis themselves had not yet been invented yet! I’ve never seen it. I wonder if any Filer has?
Anyway, the remake is mindless fun, still.
¹ The luxury of pre-cable TV in New York was in retrospect incredible: CBS (2), NBC (4) ABC (7). Independent stations on 5 (later, Fox) 9 (later the CW), and WPIX 11 the biggest of the independents (later WB). 13 was PBS, and then there were other PBS stations including 21, and 50 (50 showing the Doctor Who “movies” I’ve mentioned before). So the Independents really could specialize and WPIX specialized in movies. They called themselves “New York’s Movie Station” and meant it.
While solving quests in Dungeons & Dragons, the gamers who role-play as elves, orcs and halflings rely on the abilities and personalities of their custom-made characters, whose innate charisma and strength are as crucial to success as the rolls of 20-sided dice.
That is why the game’s first significant rule changes in a decade, which became official this fall as it celebrated its 50th anniversary, reverberated through the Dungeons & Dragons community and beyond. They prompted praise and disdain at game tables everywhere, along with YouTube harangues and irritated social media posts from Elon Musk.
“Races” are now “species.” Some character traits have been divorced from biological identity; a mountain dwarf is no longer inherently brawny and durable, a high elf no longer intelligent and dexterous by definition. And Wizards of the Coast, the Dungeons & Dragons publisher owned by Hasbro, has endorsed a trend throughout role-playing games in which players are empowered to halt the proceedings if they ever feel uncomfortable.
“What they’re trying to do here is put up a signal flare, to not only current players but potential future players, that this game is a safe, inclusive, thoughtful and sensitive approach to fantasy storytelling,” said Ryan Lessard, a writer and frequent Dungeons & Dragons dungeon master.
The changes have exposed a rift among Dungeons & Dragons players, a group as passionate as its pursuit is esoteric, becoming part of the broader cultural debate about how to balance principles like inclusivity and accessibility with history and tradition.
Robert J. Kuntz, an award-winning game designer who frequently collaborated with Gary Gygax, a co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, said he disliked Wizards of the Coast’s efforts to legislate from above rather than provide room for dungeon masters — the game’s ringleaders and referees — to tailor their individual campaigns.
“It’s an unnecessary thing,” he said. “It attempts to play into something that I’m not sure is even worthy of addressing, as if the word ‘race’ is bad.”…
(11) BY GEORGE. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Ryan George took Christmas week off, so to speak, but strung together his 10 favorite episodes from 2024 in a one-hour Pitch Meeting compilation. “Pitch Meeting: Ryan George’s Picks For 2024”.
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Daniel Dern, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, 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 Jim Janney.]
Was the year too heavy, deep, and real? Yes, but it was also rich in creativity, humor, and shared adventures. It’s a gift and privilege for me to be continually allowed to publish so many entertaining posts. Thanks to all of you who contributed!
COLUMNS
CHRIS BARKLEY
[Note: Some of Chris’ columns don’t appear below because they are listed in the annual news roundup.]
In addition to reviewing comics and graphic novels, James used his camera and descriptive abilities to take us along on visits to all kinds of fascinating exhibits and pop culture events.
The saga of Sheriff Trigger Snowflake, the lovely Coraline, and the shenanigans of the Solarian Poets Society added several chapters this year that were not so much ripped-from-the-headlines as amused by the news.
Stormm continued her humorous series about the misdirected emails she gets from Writer X throughout 2024, braiding together comedy, horror, and the pitfalls of being a writer.
(0) Once again this site is being hammered by bots (AI scrapers? Who knows.) So to keep it available at all I have turned out Cloudflare’s “Under Attack” mode. Which means you will have to at least pretend to be human to get in.
…Thinking about writing about the early fiction of Julian May led me to both reread “Dune Roller” and to do some research into her life and career as an author.
My reread of “Dune Roller” led me to upgrade it to a 3.8/5, or “Great” rating. After having read a very significant amount of fiction from the 1940s and 50s recently, for me this first story compares very favorably with a lot of the fiction of the era. While the idea of the story was not novel, it was very well executed with great characters and setting. I was also surprised to notice that the story’s illustrations were by J. C. May!
I was wondering how Julian May was able to produce such a great story as “Dune Roller” for her first published story at age 19 (she apparently sold the story to John W. Campbell, Jr., in 1950). I still don’t feel I have a solid answer on that….
…In addition to rebinding and restoring old books, Mr. Riley has also done about 100 of what the trade calls design bindings, his own creative, modern takes on volumes. They have won several of the specialized field’s top awards, including the 2013 Sir Paul Getty Bodleian Bookbinding Prize, a 10,000-pound (now about $13,050) award for the cover he created for “Pyramus and Thisbe,” an excerpt from Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” (“You’re not supposed to, but I love competitions,” he said during a later video interview from his home studio. It was one of several discussions we had in recent months.)
The book, chosen from 285 entries, was bound in chocolate brown leather. Its title was spelled in stars that Mr. Riley punched onto the cover, which also featured leather inlays of stylized tree trunks and a full moon. The Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford in England, a sponsor of the contest, now has the volume in its collection….
…The men recently have been working on a two-book commission from an American collector: rebinding a first edition and a first American edition of Mary Shelley’s novel “Frankenstein,” initially published in London in 1818. “We do not know the value of the book,” Mr. Riley said. “But we may assume it is quite high. It is in a very poor state and we have been entrusted by the owner to bring it back to life — ironic choice of words given the subject.”…
(3) PETER PAN CRUNCHY. This American Life aired on KQED today. The focus was on “Fiasco!”. The shows starts with a two segments on a small town production of Peter pan that went totally off the rails: “Fiasco! – This American Life”.
Jack Hitt tells the story of a small-town production of Peter Pan in which all the usual boundaries between the audience and actors dissolve entirely.
(4) MORE ABOUT AI AND MUSIC. [Item by John A Arkansawyer.] It’s a long transcript. To get to the relevant portion, search for “Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, the AI robots are coming for your music”: “How AI and Algorithms Are Transforming Music” at WNYC Studios.
Brooke Gladstone: Yep, that infamous jingle was a Mark creation. When he left the show 14 years ago, it was to pursue a career in music, and it kind of worked out. He started scoring films and making commercials for clients like Google, PayPal, and Ford. He’s also made music for podcasts like Serial Startup, This American Life, and Homecoming. As he says, he’s not a rock star, but he’s made a decent living making music, until now. Over the past few months, Mark has become terrified of and fascinated by AI music generators, particularly one that launched in April of this year.
When he first encountered it, Mark realized his work would never be the same.
Mark Henry Phillips: I know this sounds dramatic, but the first time I played around with this AI music generator, it caused an existential crisis. I literally lost sleep staring at my ceiling in the middle of the night wondering, “Will this be my last year making money as a musician?” Okay, what happened? I stumbled across a track by a user named Man or Monster. He was trying to recreate a Toots and the Maytals track and had typed in some lyrics along with Soulful Reggae, Ska, 1969 Hammond organ male vocalist and out popped this.
[MUSIC]
Mark Henry Phillips: I don’t want to admit it, but it’s good. Like, really good. It doesn’t feel like it was created by AI in a data center somewhere. It feels like it was made in a makeshift studio in Jamaica on a hot summer night in 1969. It feels real. Of course, this brings up all sorts of copyright issues because this sounds a lot like Toots, also known as Frederick Hibbert, also known as a real live human being. I would wager to bet that sounds that good because Toot’s entire catalog was used in this AI music generator’s training data.
Let’s ignore that for now. Instead, let’s just focus on how good this sounds.
[MUSIC]
Mark Henry Phillips: Girl is not a good one for you. I know that you must feel it too. AI generated images often have glitches like pictures of people often have extra fingers. In AI text, it also has its subtle tells that make it feel not quite human, but this track, it might not be perfect, but it feels like real music. If it feels real, that has big implications. Like what, you ask? Let me give you a hypothetical. You’re an ad exec making a beer commercial. You want a track that sounds like it was recorded in Jamaica in 1969, but you don’t want to deal with all the money and legal back and forth that comes with light licensing a vintage track.
So you turn to a composer like me, you pay me. Not as much as you’d pay Toots or Desmond Dekker, but still enough that it’d be worth my while. Boom. You get a commercial and I have a job. Years ago, that’s exactly what happened to me. I was hired to make a song that sounds like an early rock steady tune from 1969 Jamaica. Essentially, I was given the same prompt as that AI track, and here’s what I came up with.
[MUSIC]
Mark Henry Phillips: It took me a couple days, and it’s pretty good, fine, mediocre. It’s a little embarrassing to play it now, and I was actually going to take the vocals out because that part is super embarrassing, but if we’re going to do a comparison, it’s kind of relevant. So here they are.
[MUSIC]
Whatever you think of my track, the vocals on the AI version just sound so much better, in that legally and morally dubious type of way. Don’t get me wrong, there are many musicians out there who could have produced something way better than me or the AI but the vocals, here’s that AI generated track again.
[MUSIC]
Mark Henry Phillips: To get something like this, you’d kind of have to hire or be an amazing Jamaican legend with a group of amazing backup singers. Even if you were, you know, Toots himself, you couldn’t write, produce, record, and mix a track in under a minute. That’s the crazy thing. Our hypothetical ad exec can now make this track. Hell, 10 tracks like this in under five minutes, and it’s free. See why I was having that existential crisis? A lot has changed over the past decade, and the money has been on a steady trajectory downward, but now, post AI, I think a lot of composers are going to be without a job, including me.
If you’ve messed around with these services, you might be thinking, “They’re interesting, but they’re not that good without, what’s this dude talking about?” but you’re probably not using it to make the same stuff I make. AI isn’t going to replace Billie Eilish or Radiohead, at least not for a while, but my bread and butter theme songs, commercial music score, yes, it could replace me, like today. I don’t think that’s necessarily true yet with other AI products like ChatGPT or Dall-E. They’re definitely cool or scary, depending on your orientation, but they’re not really replacing professional humans quite yet….
(5) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
December 29, 1967 — “The Trouble with Tribbles”
Fifty-seven years ago this evening, “The Trouble with Tribbles” first aired on NBC, as written by David Gerrold and directed by Joseph Pevney, with some of the guest cast being Charlie Brill as Arne Darvin, Stanley Adams as Cyrano Jones, Whit Bissell as Station Manager Lurry, Michael Pataki as Korax.
Memory Alpha says “Wah Chang designed the original tribbles. Hundreds were sewn together during production, using pieces of extra-long rolls of carpet. Some of them had mechanical toys placed in them so they could walk around.” Well walk isn’t how I’d describe their movement…
Memory Alpha also notes Heinlein had Martian flat cats in The Rolling Stones that were similar to these and Roddenberry called to apologize for these being so similar. My understanding is that they brought the issue to Heinlein’s attention and asked for permission to continue. To their surprise, he granted it in exchange for a signed copy of the episode’s script.
(I know that Heinlein’s authorized biography contradicts this story. Really contradicts this story.)
It would come in second in the Hugo balloting at BayCon to “The City on the Edge of Forever” written by Harlan Ellison. All five final Hugo nominees at BayCon were Trek episodes with others being written by Jerome Bixby, Norman Spinrad and Theodore Sturgeon.
David Gerrold wrote a book on his experiences in the creation of this episode, The Trouble with Tribbles: The Birth, Sale and Final Production of One Episode. He did a children’s book as well, Too Many Tribbles! Which I’d really like to listen to.
There would be two more Trek stories done with Tribbles. “More Tribbles, More Troubles”, the fifth episode of the first season of the animated series riffed off them. And of course Deep Space Nine would revisit the story in “Trials and Tribble-ations” which blended seamlessly footage from the original episode with new video including the Charlie Brill character. It, too, would be nominated for a Hugo, this time at LoneStarCon 2. (Babylon 5’s “Severed Dreams” won.)
Tribbles have been also seen in other Trek episodes and films, including The Search for Spock and the rebooted Star Trek and Star Trek Into Darkness. They also appeared in Enterprise’s “The Breach”. Phlox uses them as food for his creatures in sickbay. Which is either truly disgusting or really appropriate given how prolific they are. Or both.
Their final appearance so far is in the animated Below Decks series.
Finally, I should note the opening volume of IDW’s second Alien Spotlight series is called Tribbles. It concerns the initial discovery of the Tribbles by, errr, the Klingons. We discover why they dislike them so very much… and vice versa. Especially vice versa.
Hundreds of pieces of Lego lost at sea off a cargo ship 27 years ago have been found this year, including the first ever shark.
A freak wave swept 62 shipping containers of Lego off the Tokio Express cargo ship 20 miles (32km) off Land’s End on 13 February 1997, one of which held 4,756,940 pieces, much of it sea-themed.
Since then, Lego parts have been found in south-west England, the Channel Islands, Wales, Ireland and as far away as the Netherlands and Norway.
Tracey Williams who founded the project Lego Lost at Sea said this year had seen a rise in the number of yellow spear guns found of the 53,120 that were lost….
…Ms Williams said fishermen and women tended to find the larger plastic items in their nets such as door frames, windows and life rafts, while beachcombers were more likely to find lighter pieces like cutlasses, life jackets and spear guns.
She said no Lego magic wands, dragon wings or witches’ hats lost from the ship had yet been reported to have been found.
Ms Williams’ Lego Lost at Sea project was awarded Rescue Project of the Year in the Current Archaeology Awards 2023….
…The first NASA flight to produce a mission-specific patch worn by crew members was Gemini 5. It flew in August 1965, carrying astronauts Gordon Cooper and Pete Conrad on an eight-day mission inside a small Gemini spacecraft. At the time, it was the longest spaceflight conducted by anyone…
…Skylab was NASA’s first space station, and it was launched into orbit after the final Apollo lunar landing in 1972. From May 1973 to February 1974, three different crews occupied the space station, which had been placed in orbit by a modified Saturn V rocket.
Due to some problems with leaky thrusters on the Apollo spacecraft that carried the second crew to Skylab in 1973, NASA scrambled to put together a ‘rescue’ mission as a contingency. In this rescue scenario, astronauts Vance Brand and Don Lind would have flown to the station and brought Alan Bean, Jack Lousma, and Owen Garriott back inside an Apollo capsule especially configured for five people.
Ultimately, NASA decided that the crew could return to Earth in the faulty Apollo spacecraft, with the use of just half of the vehicle’s thrusters. So Brand and Lind never flew the rescue mission. But we got a pretty awesome patch out of the deal….
National Reconaissance Office
The activities of the US National Reconnaissance Office, which is responsible for the design and launching of spy satellites, are very often shrouded in secret.
However, the spy satellite agency cleverly uses its mission patches as an effective communications tool. The patches for the launch of its satellites never give away key details, but they are often humorous, ominous, and suggestive all at the same time. The immediate response I often have to these patches is one of appreciation for the design, followed by a nervous chuckle. I suspect that’s intended by the spy agency….
(9) YOU’RE A BLUEBIRD ON A TELEGRAPH WIRE. A New York Times opinion piece points at “The 19th-Century Technology That Threatens A.I.” (link bypasses paywall). Whether the possibility that something threatens AI is necessarily a bad thing I leave up to the readers.
Whatever you hear about the United States as a fading power, it is ahead in the race to gain dominance in artificial intelligence over China, its major rival. That’s a product of Silicon Valley’s unique ability to bring together scientists, entrepreneurs and risk capital. Yet the prospect of continuing dominance in this 21st-century technology hinges on harnessing a 19th-century one: electricity.
That’s where America has a long way to go.
The development of advanced A.I. systems requires vast amounts of energy. At the heart of training these systems are large numbers of specialized computer chips. One estimate suggested that training GPT-4, the latest ChatGPT A.I. system, consumed roughly the same amount of electricity as several thousand U.S. households use in a year.
These extraordinary demands are already pushing up against real-world constraints. America’s power grid, hindered by decades of underinvestment and regulatory logjams, isn’t equipped for the rapid growth in A.I.’s electricity needs. Across the country, energy investors are waiting to develop 2.6 terawatts of new electrical capacity, mostly in wind, solar and battery farms. The total generating capacity that is not connected to the grid and is waiting to be connected has grown roughly eightfold since 2014. Adding that would about triple national generating capacity and help address the future needs of A.I.
In Virginia — a hotbed for data centers — the wait time for data centers to connect to the grid could be seven years. Some counties in the state are introducing limits on data centers….
When the scientist and inventor Prof Archibald Montgomery Low predicted “a day in the life of a man of the future” one century ago, his prophecies were sometimes dismissed as “ruthlessly imaginative”.
They included, reported the London Daily News in 1925, “such horrors” as being woken by radio alarm clock; communications “by personal radio set”; breakfasting “with loudspeaker news and television glimpses of events”; shopping by moving stairways and moving pavements.
One hundred years after Low’s publication of his book The Future some of his forecasts were spot on. Others, including his prophecy that everyone would be wearing synthetic felt one-piece suits and hats, less so.
Researchers from the online genealogy service Findmypast, have excavated accounts of Low’s predictions from its extensive digital archive of historical newspapers available to the public and included them in a collection on its website of forecasts made for 2025 by people a century ago.
In 1925, he predicted how home loudspeakers and “a television machine” would replace “the picture paper” – or newspapers – for information and on demand entertainment; access to global broadcasting at the press of a button; and the use of secret cameras and listening devices to catch criminals.
He foresaw the use of moving pavements and stairs, essentially the escalators and travelators of today, as well as “automatic telephones” with the benefit of getting the right number every time, as opposed to the 1920s rotary dial phones.
Some outlandish imaginings included new ways of illuminating streets by herbs (1926), jets of electrically charged water to replace cavalry (1923) and mind-to-mind electrical communication (1925). Others, such as women in trousers becoming the norm (1924) and sex determination before birth (1926) are very much on the mark….
[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Dave Hook, Mark Roth-Whitworth, John A Arkansawyer, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jeff Smith.]
Voting will open on New Year’s Day to choose the 2025 Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund delegate. The winner will travel from Europe to North America and attend the 2025 Worldcon in Seattle.
The three candidates are Zi Graves from the UK, Mikołaj Kowalewski from Poland (now living in Denmark) and Jan Vaněk jr from the Czech Republic.
Sandra Bond, European TAFF administrator, says that voting opens on January 1, 2025 and closes on April 23.
Read more news about the fund in the administrators’ latest newsletter Taffluorescence! #7.
… Don’t worry; we’ve got you covered. Anything on this list is worth reading/watching. Just peruse the Journey library, settle into your coziest chair, and enjoy the week before New Year’s!…
The story of an American POW during World War 2, culminating in the Dresden firebombing. Vaguely SFnal, such trappings are really there so the author could approach the traumatic material at a distance. Big for a reason.
One of Dick’s less comprehensible and yet somehow more compelling works, combining a grab-bag of innovations, commentaries on commercialism, and questionings of reality.
We’ve got it all: fantasy, science fiction, satire, psychedelia. And more sex than ever. There’s nothing really “conventional” or “traditional” here. Even the Anderson is more outré than usual.
(2) MORE FOWL, LESS JOY ON UK TV AT CHRISTMAS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl was the second most-viewed TV programme in Brit Cit over Christmas 2024.
In fact, the top ten most watched programmes in the UK were all BBC including Doctor Who Christmas episode “Joy to the World”.
At 4.11 million viewers, it was not as popular as the King’s Christmas broadcast at 6.82 million.
On a recent visit to Aardman’s Bristol studio, the design of the project — from the puppetry to the set pieces — revealed (as one would expect) a healthy mix of Ealing comedy and Hollywood homage, with the impeccable artistry taking place one frame at a time!…
…With the task of managing large crews, and given the time and effort involved in making a feature-length stop-motion film, Park usually shares directorial duties — with Peter Lord on the first Chicken Run and Steve Box on The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. This time he partnered with Crossingham, who for the last 10 years has been creative director of the Wallace & Gromit brand. “Merlin was always one of the top animators on all our projects,” recalls Park, “but he also seemed to get things really quickly and has done some of the best bits in the Wallace & Gromit films of late. Also, he’s good at directing and good at humor. So, when it came [time] for me to think about whom I would share the journey with, a fellow visionary, the choice wasn’t difficult really.”
At the studio, we were shown initial artwork before we saw the puppets, which are the perfect amalgamation of craft and engineering. Each detail and iteration of the designs are approved by Park and Crossingham before scans are produced for the 3D-printed molds that are used for both hard and softer materials to build onto the characters’ armatures. Over time, the techniques have evolved as more animators have worked on productions. For instance: Wallace’s jumper was originally clay and is now foam latex. Depending on what a character is doing, only heads and hands are clay, or, depending on articulation, silicone appendages are used, which is easier to maintain….
… A human-made look and feel is a vital part of Aardman animation, but the studio is not averse to technology, something Park reflects on further. “The tactile quality is the spirit of it all, really. But we work with technology a lot. It’s funny, when Toy Story came out we were asking: ‘How long have we got left?’ But there has been a genuine resurgence of stop motion, and we’ve contributed to that.”…
… But another version predates all of those: “Peter Pan,” a silent film released 100 years ago this month, becoming a blockbuster in its day.
The 1924 film, which The New York Times called “a pictorial masterpiece,” was considered a pioneer in selling movie-related merchandise. But it fell out of sight after talkies replaced silent films and Walt Disney bought the film rights to make his own “Peter Pan.” Many feared it lost until it was rediscovered in the 1940s by a film preservationist who found a copy at a theater in upstate New York that had trained organists to play along with silent movies….
… Some elements of the film would have been familiar to people who had seen the play written by Barrie and first performed in 1904. The Darling children fly with the help of wires, and their canine nurse, Nana, is played by a man in a dog suit (George Ali, reprising his stage role). But its director, Herbert Brenon, also sprinkled cinematic pixie dust on the story: Captain Hook’s ship flies out of the water, Peter Pan sweeps away tiny fairies with a broom and there are close-ups of a minuscule Tinker Bell, who is usually depicted on stage as a light….
We have entered an era of AI slop. Periodicals are struggling with floods of submissions cooked up by ChatGPT rather than human imaginations, while readers downloading ebooks from Amazon are faced with the possibility of their latest purchase being the churned-out product of AI masquerading as actual creativity or scholarship.
While science fiction is no more affected by this than any other genre, its duty to predict the future (albeit often through an escapist lens) puts it in a unique position. SF has always had an ambivalent relationship with the real world’s scientific and technological advances; never before, though, has the genre been faced with a development that offers such a direct existential threat. So, as publishers are faced with deluges of machine-generated hackwork and technology actively strips itself of romance, what futures are SF authors dreaming up?
There are many works that can serve as answers to this question, and when the Hugo Awards were presented earlier this year, they pointed out two particularly relevant examples: namely, the pair of contrasting yet thematically overlapping stories by Naomi Kritzer which won the Best Short Story and Best Novelette categories. Even though neither addresses ChatGPT or other pseudo-creative AI directly, both stand as strong-minded retorts to our era of ever-encroaching digitisation….
…In the early 1890s Karl Brown forsook the Edenic little world of Oxford [Ohio] and moved to hustling and bustling Cincinnati, then a burgeoning metropolis of some 300,000 people (about the same size as it is today). There in 1894 he married Emma Graham, daughter of a railroad mail clerk, when he was twenty-two and she was twenty. After a dozen years of marriage—quite a long delay—Emma bore the couple’s only child, whom they named “Fredric” without the second “e” and the “k,” like actor Fredric March….
…To work with “Nature’s stern but reasonable surrender terms,” Vonnegut advised the following:
1. Reduce and stabilize your population.
2. Stop poisoning the air, the water, and the topsoil.
3. Stop preparing for war and start dealing with your real problems.
4. Teach your kids, and yourselves, too, while you’re at it, how to inhabit a small planet without helping to kill it.
5. Stop thinking science can fix anything if you give it a trillion dollars.
6. Stop thinking your grandchildren will be OK no matter how wasteful or destructive you may be, since they can go to a nice new planet on a spaceship. That is really mean, and stupid.
Doc Savage – The Man of Bronze, leaps off the pages of pulp fiction and into the One:12 Collective!
The One:12 Collective Doc Savage is decked out in his iconic rugged safari shirt, jodhpurs and high-boots with secret compartments. Also included are a ripped shirt option, his trusted utility vest and two wristband options. The Man of Bronze features four interchangeable head portraits, including one with side-parted hair from the pulp era, and the others showcasing his buzzcut with a widow’s peak as seen in pocket novels and comics.
Fully equipped and ready for action, Doc Savage carries an array of weapons and gadgets, including night vision goggles, a gas mask, an infrared lantern, a bowie knife, a mini periscope, a folding grapple hook, multiple grenades, and his Super Machine Pistol paired with ammo rounds and blaster FXs.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
Born December 28, 1932 – Nichelle Nichols. (Died 2022.)
By Paul Weimer: A woman of color on the bridge of the USS Enterprise. Unpossible.
Possible, and Nichelle Nichols made it happen.
Even watching The Original Series in reruns in the late 70’s and early 1980’s, I could see how revolutionary, iconic and important her role as Lt. Uhura really was. Like Koenig’s Chekov and Takei’s Sulu, her presence helped solidify that the future of space and the world was not exclusively the province of white men doing white manly things.
Certainly, she was often underserved by scripts and reduced usually to a glorified telephone operator, but when she did get the chance to shine, did she shine. “Mirror, Mirror”, particularly, she is essential to helping keep the Mirror Universe crew off balance and allowing them all a chance to get home.
And of course, there was that kiss in “Plato’s Stepchildren” with Kirk, the kiss that drew the ire of the conservatives of the American South. Reportedly, the plan was to film the scene with and without the kiss, but Nichols conspired with Shatner to mess up every non-kiss take, and so the scene had to be included.
Even so, she nearly left the series early, but Dr. Martin Luther King asked her to stay on the series, emphasizing the importance of her place on the bridge. She did, and I am very glad that she did.
But my favorite Nichelle Nichols Uhura moment wasn’t in the original series, or the first two movies. No, it comes in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. Kirk has to managed to steal the Enterprise to go after Spock, whose soul is lodged in Dr. McCoy (and none too happy about it). Uhura is crucial to the plan to getting control of the transporter and allowing Kirk and the others to get onto the Enterprise and steal it. “Mr Adventure” (the bored transporter officer bowled over by Nichols’ Uhura) never knew what hit him. Like in “Mirror, Mirror”, you underestimate Nichols’ Uhura at your peril. Subsequent depictions of the character have taken Nichols’ direction and lead in this regard and run with it.
Outside of Star Trek, her work with NASA helped recruit numerous people to the astronaut program, particularly women and people of color. I figure it was a way of her paying things forward.
She died in 2022. Requiscat in pace.
Nichelle Nichols
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY, TOO.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
Born December 28, 1922 – Stan Lee. (Died 2018.)
By Paul Weimer: The ultimate comic book fan and creator.
I’ve mentioned in other essays that I am a Marvel over a DC fan when it comes to comics as well as the movies. This was true long before Iron Man started the MCU, this goes back to my first comic reading in the 1980’s. I didn’t start my comic reading in DC, I started with Marvel.
And the man who made that all possible was Stan Lee. His characters, his worlds, his ideas appealed to me more. Yes, I am talking about Spiderman, the ultimate misunderstood young man, co-created by Lee and Steve Ditko. So it was thanks to Lee’s co-creation of Spiderman that I started reading comics, and those comics were Marvel. And while Superfriends the cartoon was fun enough…it was Spiderman and his Amazing Friends that was the cartoon that I liked even more.
My first actual comic book was a Spiderman and a Wasp issue. I didn’t have issues before or after, and I am not sure how I got it. I just remember it involved the mercenary superhero Paladin, who had an American Express card in the name of his superhero name.
Finally, I enjoyed the many cameos that Lee managed in the Marvel movies, from Iron Man all the way to Guardians of the Galaxy. For his creation or co-creation of so many characters and aspects of the Marvel verse, it amused me for Lee in so many faces to show up again, and again, and yet again. He was the creator of the Marvel verse…and its biggest fan at the same time. Like a Hitchcock film, spotting Stan Lee in a Marvel movie was a spectator spot for me.
…During the 1960s, Air Force lieutenant colonel Jack L. Hartley served at Brooks Air Force Base, where he studied the problem of what to do if an astronaut got a toothache while in space. As a result, Hartley developed the science of astrostomatology (space dentistry), along with a portable astronaut dental kit for the Aerospace Medical Division of the Air Force Systems Command.
Hartley published numerous papers about his research, which got him noticed by the media. He also promoted astrostomatology and his astronaut dental kit through appearances on television shows like What’s My Line, To Tell the Truth, and The Tonight Show. When he presented Johnny Carson with a real human skull, to show how to give injections to the upper and lower jaws to make them numb, Carson couldn’t resist holding up the skull and intoning: “Alas, poor Yorick!”
I was able to track down Hartley’s daughter, Patricia, a retired archivist who worked at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. Patricia explained her late father’s role in the creation of Star Trek: “He collaborated a fair amount with Roddenberry. He [Roddenberry] was really very good about trying to get things right, in spite of the fact that he had a very limited budget. And he didn’t have a lot of tools to show. But he created a whole lot of things. And Dad was just one of the ones that he was talking to help him design this stuff.” …
… Maguire was visiting Beatrix Potter’s farm in Cumbria, England, and thinking about “The Wizard of Oz,” which he had loved as a child and thought could be an interesting basis for a story about evil.
“I thought ‘alright, what do we know about ‘The Wizard of Oz’ from our memories,'” he said. “We have the house falling on the witch. What do we know about that witch? All we know about that witch is that she has feet. So I began to think about Glinda and the Wicked Witch of the West…
“There is one scene in the 1939 film where Billie Burke comes down looking all pink and fluffy, and Margaret Hamilton is all crawed and crabbed and she says something like, ‘I might have known you’d be behind this, Glinda!’ This was my memory, and I thought, now why is she using Glinda’s first name? They have known each other. Maybe they’ve known each other for a long time. Maybe they went to college together. And I fell down onto the ground in the Lake District laughing at the thought that they had gone to college together.”…
…Start spreading the news — charming Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) is leaving today to go to Shiz University in this deleted scene from the blockbuster musical “Wicked.”
Most popular Shiz student Galinda (Ariana Grande) literally gets hit with the news as The Shiz Gazette, proclaiming Prince Fiyero’s arrival, flies into her beautiful face.
The dazzling scene that follows the floating newspaper around the buzzing university didn’t make it into director Jon M. Chu’s adaption of the beloved Broadway musical, which clocked in at 2 hours and 40 minutes (and it was only the first of two parts).
However, the moment and other deleted scenes will be featured on the “Wicked” digital release, due Dec. 31…
(15) BLINDED BY THE LIGHT. [Item by Steven French.] Those of us who have to drive around in low winter sun (like right now, here in the North of England!) will certainly sympathise with future astronauts: “Astronauts face unique visual challenges at lunar south pole”.
Humans are returning to the moon—this time, to stay. Because our presence will be more permanent, NASA has selected a location that maximizes line-of-sight communication with Earth, solar visibility, and access to water ice: the Lunar South Pole (LSP).
While the sun is in the lunar sky more consistently at the poles, it never rises more than a few degrees above the horizon; in the target landing regions, the highest possible elevation is 7°. This presents a harsh lighting environment never experienced during the Apollo missions, or in fact, in any human spaceflight experience.
The ambient lighting will severely affect the crews’ ability to see hazards and to perform simple work. This is because the human vision system—which, despite having a high-dynamic range—cannot see well in bright light and cannot adapt quickly from bright to dark or vice versa.
Two days after a historic Christmas Eve sun flyby that flew closer to the star than any spacecraft in history — taking the car-sized spacecraft nearly a tenth as close to the sun than Mercury — the Parker Solar Probe phoned home for the first time since its solar encounter. The space probe sent a simple yet highly-anticipated beacon tone to Earth just before midnight late Thursday (Dec. 26).
Scientists on Earth were out of contact with the Parker Solar Probe since Dec. 20, when the spaceraft began its automated flyby of the sun, so the signal is a crucial confirmation that the spacecraft survived, and is in “good health and operating normally,” NASA shared in an update early Friday (Dec. 27).
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Gideon Marcus, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
Last year, a romance publisher took an expensive gamble on the latest novel by the best-selling author Rebecca Yarros.
To help the novel, “Fourth Wing,” stand out in the crowded fantasy-romance genre, the publisher, Entangled, invested in a limited deluxe edition with a bold metallic cover and black sprayed edges featuring dragons.
It worked: All 115,000 copies of the deluxe edition sold out almost everywhere within a week.
“My only regret is that I printed too few,” said Liz Pelletier, Entangled’s publisher.
When the next novel in the series, “Iron Flame,” came out, Entangled was prepared, and printed a million copies of the deluxe edition. Once again, they quickly sold out.
For the third book in the series, “Onyx Storm,” which comes out in January, Entangled is printing two million copies of the deluxe edition, which has stenciled artwork and black and silver edges adorned with flying gold and black dragons, along with a smaller print run of 500,000 standard copies. More than a million “Onyx Storm” deluxe editions have already sold….
(2) KGB. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Jacob Weisman and Ben Berman Ghan on Wednesday, January 8, 2025. Starts 7:00 p.m. Eastern. KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003 (Just off 2nd Ave, upstairs).
Jacob Weisman
Jacob Weisman is the publisher at Tachyon Publications, which he founded in 1995. He is a World Fantasy Award winner for the anthology The New Voices of Fantasy, which he co-edited with Peter S. Beagle. His writing has appeared in The Nation, Realms of Fantasy, The Louisville Courier-Journal, The Seattle Weekly, and The Cooper Point Journal. Weisman’s first novel, Egyptian Motherlode co-authored with David Sandner, was recently published by Fairwood Press. He lives in San Francisco, CA.
Ben Berman Ghan
Ben Berman Ghan is a PhD Candidate in English and creative writing at the University of Calgary. His debut collection of fiction, What We See in the Smoke, was published in 2019, his novella Visitation Seeds was published in 2020, and his novel The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits was published with Buckrider Books in 2024. His prose, poetry, and essays have been published in Clarkesworld Magazine, Strange Horizons, Filling Station Magazine, The Blasted Tree Publishing Co., Pinhole Poetry, and The Ancillary Review of Books.
(3) MEDICAL UPDATE. Barry Longyear told Facebook readers today what he’s trying to accomplish despite debilitating cancer.
A little update is in order. It is cancer, It is gobbling up my energy before I can log it in, pain too. I haven’t done any writing since September 10th when this nightmare began, they are dangling chemo and radiation in my future, apparently I am too frail to withstand the preferred operation. So, as always, The future is a mystery. I wish I had enough energy to tell you about all of the fine and quite inspiring men and women I’ve met along the way, but suffice it to say that they are there. The ticket to their company is to reach out. My most recent hospital stay was in a rehab/nursing home packed with patients with the most heartbreaking handicaps one can imagine. And they laugh and joke and point out I am still on this side of the grass. We’ll see what I can get done on the three books I want to get done, The Moman Omniquel, Rope Tricks (the concluding Joe Torio Mystery), and I am going to try my hand at an autobiography: The Superfluous Earth Man or I was an Extra Terrestrial. If I can get all that done before Uncle Reaper comes to collect. Perhaps I can wade through your comments, friend requests, and such. In any event, Disney is moving forward with The Enemy Papers, I have talked with the fellow in charge, and I have high hopes “Enemy Mine” will come out better than the previous version. HAPPY HOLIDAYS, friends, and remember. If the planet Earth didn’t suck we’d all fall off.
(4) DECK THE HALLS OF THE TARDIS. Camestros Felapton assays the Doctor Who Christmas special: “Doctor Who: Joy to the World”.
It is Doctor Who Christmas Special time and if this time of year is about indulging to excess in sugar and sentimentality Russell T. Davies and Stephen Moffat are up for that.
Fluffy, silly, and a remix of some familiar Moffat themes (The Doctor forced to live a more mundane existance for a period, time paradoxes and uploaded minds as an after life) the plot also hits you with some emotional gut punches….
(5) ALL ALONG THE WATCHTOWERS. Tom Nichols remembers “Star Trek’s Cold War” in The Atlantic (behind a paywall)
…But to appreciate the Cold War setting of Star Trek, you need only to understand that the Earth-led United Federation of Planets (a free and democratic association committed to equality among all beings) was NATO. Captain James T. Kirk—born and raised in Iowa, according to the show—commanded its finest flagship, the USS Enterprise. The bad guys, standing in for the Soviet Union, were the Klingons, whose empire was a brutal and aggressive dictatorship.
Two Cold War themes run through Star Trek: the risks of great-power confrontation, and the danger of ultimate annihilation. In “The Omega Glory,” a mediocre episode that Roddenberry pushed to have produced, the Enterprisefinds an underdeveloped planet where Asian-looking “Kohms” oppress the white “Yangs.” Turns out it’s a planet that developed just like Earthin every way—there is some sci-fi hocus-pocus to explain how planets sometimes do this—including an America and a Red China (Kohms and Yangs, Communists and Yankees, get it?), and then wiped itself out with biological warfare.
Other episodes were a bit more sophisticated. In “The Return of the Archons,” Kirk encounters a society that is run like a beehive by a single leader named Landru, who demands that all citizens be “of the body.” (Spoiler: He’s a computer. Out-of-control computers were another common theme.) As Cushman notes, the crushing of the individual for the good of the collective was an intentional statement about life under communism.
Likewise, just as the U.S. and the Soviet Union competed against each other in the developing world of the 20th century, the Klingons and the Federation were often at odds with each other over developing planets in the future….
You have two books about magic out in one month, is this mere scheduling kismet or part of some great working you’ve had in plan for decades?
I never have great workings planned even days in advance. So, no this is purely just the way things have worked out. I started working on the Moon & Serpent Bumper Book of Magic fifteen years ago, around 2010 or so, back then we were expecting it to be out in a couple of years. Then the project expanded and Steve passed away, and we realised that although we’d got all the writing done for it we hadn’t got any of the art commissioned. So that’s what the last few years have been about, getting it all drawn.
As for The Great When, it wasn’t deliberate so much as a coincidence of scheduling but, yes, it’s two books about magic that even have some crossover. Well, the bumper book is about magic, whereas The Great When has got some magicians in it, but it isn’t really anything that is traditional magic — I was prepared to just make most of it up. The Bumper Book is an encyclopaedic history of magic and all sorts of other things as well, but we’ve got characters like Austin Osman Spare, Aleister Crowley and Dion Fortune in both.
So, there’s a tiny bit of overlap, but the intents of both books are different. One is to explain magic as it is and as it has been, and the other is an attempt to try and create something new in fantasy, without relying upon all the magical tropes you get reiterated so often in fantasy novels.
(7) DONALD BITZER (1934-2024). The New York Times reports (in a tribute behind its paywall): “Donald Bitzer, an electrical engineer whose groundbreaking computer system PLATO, developed in the 1960s and ’70s at the University of Illinois, was a telegram from the digital future that combined instant messaging, email, chat rooms and gaming on flat-screen plasma displays, died on Dec. 10…”
…Dr. Bitzer, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois, began developing PLATO in 1960 as a tool for educators to create interactive, individualized coursework. It swiftly evolved into “a culture, both physical and online,” Mr. Dear wrote, “with its own jargon, customs and idioms.”
PLATO, an acronym for Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations, initially ran on television-like screens connected to the university’s ILLIAC I computer, a five-ton machine powered by 2,800 vacuum tubes.
To increase interactivity, in 1964 Dr. Bitzer, along with a fellow professor, H. Gene Slottow, and a graduate student, Robert Willson, invented a plasma display illuminated by gas-infused pixels — the same technology that would later power flat-screen televisions.
Thousands of PLATO terminals, radiant with bright orange text and graphics, were installed around the University of Illinois campus and eventually at other universities and high schools throughout the country.
Connected via phone lines, the touch-screen terminals were a kind of first draft of social networking that presaged the way digital devices now dominate daily life. Students learned math, Spanish and other subjects on them during the day, and at night they played games against one another, communicated in chat rooms and became pen pals.
“It was kind of crazy,” Ray Ozzie, a former student of Dr. Bitzer’s who later became Microsoft’s chief technical officer, said in an interview. “It was a little peek into what the internet would later become, and it was all fostered by Don’s vision, by him creating an environment for innovation.”
(8) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
December 27, 2000 – Gosford Park
Twenty-four years ago this weekend, Gosford Park premiered. It was directed by Robert Altman from the script by Julian Fellowes, who went on to be the driving force behind the Downton Abbey series. It came together when Director Balaban suggested an Agatha Christie-style whodunit to Altman and introduced him to Julian Fellowes, with whom Balaban had been working on a different project.
It is a country manor house mystery in the style of Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, which I just reviewed, and in keeping with that kind of mystery had a very large ensemble cast: Eileen Atkins, Bob Balaban, Alan Bates, Charles Dance, Stephen Fry, Michael Gambon, Richard E. Grant, Derek Jacobi, Kelly Macdonald, Helen Mirren, Jeremy Northam, Clive Owen, Ryan Phillippe, Maggie Smith, Kristin Scott Thomas, and Emily Watson.
I’ll just single out Stephen Fry as Inspector Thompson as the cast is far too large to detail here. He seems to really believe he has something in common with the McCordles and their guests. However, Sylvia, one of the family, doesn’t even bother to learn his name, and makes it very clear through not so subtle airs that he’s working class and beneath all of them.
It was filmed mostly on location using three different manor houses, though sound stages were built to film the scenes of the manor’s downstairs area. Apparently it was also filmed in three different countries — the United Kingdom, the United States and Italy with production costs of nearly twenty million in total. It did very well at the box office with it bringing in nearly ninety million. It was Altman’s second most successful film after M*A*S*H.
Critics truly loved it with Roger Ebert wringing for the Chicago Sun-Times said it was “such a joyous and audacious achievement it deserves comparison with his very best movies.” And Nell Murray at the Verge summed it up perfectly noting that “For a film about homicide and class conflict, Gosford Park is surprisingly congenial.”
Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give it an excellent rating of seventy-eight percent.
I’ve watched it more than a few times and consider it to be quite excellent. That reminds me that I should write up Knives Out.
(9) NEXT DOOR AT MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Rod Serling Statue (Update)
And perhaps across his mind there will flit a little errant wish, that a man might not have to become old, never outgrow the parks and the merry-go-rounds of his youth. — ending words of “Walking Distance”
“Not all statues, no matter how much they deserve to exist, actually exist. At least yet. Such it is with this for the creator of the Twilight Zone series, Rod Serling.” That’s what I knew when I wrote several years ago. Now has transited from the Twilight Zone to this reality.
In doing this extended look at the statues of fantastic creatures, mythic beings and sometimes their creators, I continually come across quite fascinating stories. Such it is with this story. And this one was no exception.
In the “Walking Distance” episode of The Twilight Zone, a middle-aged advertising executive travels back in time to his childhood, arriving just a few miles away from his native town. That episode was based on Binghamton, New York, the hometown of Serling as he graduated from Binghamton Central High School in 1943.
I had come upon news stories that the town in conjunction with the Rod Serling Memorial Foundation and The State of New York had decided Serling should be honored by his hometown.
The Serling Memorial Foundation said it will use the grant and additional fundraising to place the Serling statue in Recreation Park next year. Note that this is the second fundraising effort as the first, a Kickstarter for $90,000, failed.
I couldn’t find any update on the actual production of this statue, so I wouldn’t swear than it was going to happen in the time frame stated. The website for the Serling Memorial Foundation was at that point, to put delicately, a bloody mess and said nothing about that project at all. Now they have a page showing the dedication of the statue with video and quite a bit of detail about the project.
So go here for all the details on this extraordinary project.
…This book is significantly shorter than its predecessor, and feels less of a “pressure cooker” than the first novel, showing that even by keeping the chassis of the first book, Hunt wants to and does experiment with some new things. Sean proves to be well connected, and those connections and his social skills give him some new options and ideas that were not in the first book. Now, given that Sean is dealing with his thought-to-be-dead sister, and some of the fallout from the first book, this gives the book a much more social feel to the conflicts in the narrative than the first. Sure, there are plenty of action sequences like the first novel, although our field of play is generally set in locations within a city, and there are no monsters this time other than the human ones (and yes, some of those are bad enough). So Sean really shines in this book in a way he didn’t in the first book….
…By the time I was nine I already loved vampires. I had seen the Lugosi film often and had been Dracula for Halloween the year before; there’s a photo of me with a painted widow’s peak and plastic fangs too big for my mouth. I was also nine when I first saw Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922). This was a truly frightening vampire makeup design. The nails, the hunch, the shape of the pointed skull. As a child, it felt as if Max Schreck commanded the screen like a real vampire. The degraded quality of the 16mm VHS transfer made the film seem as if it was disinterred from its grave, unearthed from the past, adding to its authenticity. And this adaptation stripped Stoker’s story of its over-stuffed Victoriana and distilled it to its essence: that simple enigmatic fairytale.
About 10 years ago I embarked on writing the screenplay for my own adaptation of Nosferatu. In taking on the most influential horror film, based on the most influential horror novel, I felt a responsibility to make the vampire as scary as possible. This could not be a sparkling vampire….
…Enter the 2022 movie Linoleum. It was never advertised as a remake, but it so cleverly deconstructs the plot of American Beauty that it might as well have openly acknowledged the extent of its debt. Similarly set in the late 1990s, it proposes a more empathetic alternative to the earlier movie’s cynicism. And from this point on I’m going to need to spoil the secrets of Linoleum….
The reason for Aoshima’s nickname was clear before we had set foot on the island. As our tiny vessel slowed to a halt and its handful of passengers prepared to disembark, the quayside was alive with orangey-white blurs – a whiskered welcome party that forms as soon as its members hear the hum of an approaching motor.
The only human here to greet us is Naoko Kamimoto, appropriately dressed in a pinafore with feline designs, who secures the boat with a rope as half a dozen cats swirl around her feet.
A 35-minute ferry ride off the coast of Ehime prefecture in Shikoku – the smallest of Japan’s four main islands – Aoshima is the best-known of the country’s 11 “cat islands”. Despite the absence of a single shop, restaurant or guesthouse, this speck in the Seto Inland Sea has become a must-see for visitors intrigued by a remote community where cats easily outnumber humans.
But Aoshima’s days as a feline-fixated tourist destination are numbered. A decade ago there were about 200 feral cats here – the descendants of animals enlisted by fishers to destroy rodents who were gnawing through the nets they used to catch huge quantities of sardines.
Kamimoto, who moved to the island after she married Hidenori, a local man, believes the number is now closer to 80. They are all aged over seven, and a third are battling illnesses, including blindness and respiratory diseases, caused by decades of inbreeding….
… The decline in the cat population is about more than the passage of time, however. Aoshima is the victim of a demographic crisis that is afflicting thousands of rural and island communities across Japan. Almost 900 people lived here just after the second world war, but the number had dropped to 80 around a decade ago, as ageing fishers and their spouses moved to the mainland, leaving their cats behind. By 2017, there were just 13 residents. Today, four are left: Naoko and Hidenori, and another couple who prefer to keep out of the spotlight….
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Joel Zakem, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
The 62nd issue of Uncanny Magazine, winner of seven Hugos, plus a British Fantasy Award, a Locus Award, and World Fantasy Award, will be available on January 7 at uncannymagazine.com.
Hugo Award-winning Publishers Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas are proud to present the 62nd issue of their seven-time Hugo Award-winning online science fiction and fantasy magazine, Uncanny Magazine. Stories from Uncanny Magazine have been finalists or winners of Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Sturgeon, and World Fantasy Awards. As always, Uncanny features passionate SF/F fiction and poetry, gorgeous prose, provocative nonfiction, and a deep investment in the diverse SF/F culture, along with a Parsec Award-winning monthly podcast featuring a story, poem, and interview from that issue.
All of Uncanny Magazine’s content will be available in eBook versions on the day of release from Weightless Books, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google Play, and Kobo. Subscriptions are always available through Weightless Books. The free online content will be released in 2 stages- half on day of release and half on February 4.
“The Uncanny Valley” by Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas
Fiction
“Kaiju Agonistes” by Scott Lynch (1/7) “Six People to Revise You” by J.R. Dawson (1/7) “For Whom the Hair Grows” by Tia Tashiro (1/7)
“The Flaming Embusen” by Tade Thompson (2/4) “With Her Serpent Locks” by Mary Robinette Kowal (2/4) “Men with Tails” by Rati Mehrotra (2/4)
“Your Personalized Guide to the Museum of the Lost and Found” by AnaMaria Curtis (1/7)
Nonfiction
“The Hugo Awards” by Nicholas Whyte (1/7) “Homes to Remember and Forget” by Ai Jiang (1/7)
“Accessibility Toolkit for When Things Go Wrong” by A. T. Greenblatt (2/4) “Everything You Didn’t Know You Needed to Know about Writing Swords” by Suzanne Walker (2/4)
Poetry
“Nymph” by Kailee Pedersen (1/7) “Care for Lightning” by Mari Ness (1/7)
“Love Letter in Cobra Pose” Shankar Narayan (2/4) “Cassandra” by E. N. Díaz (2/4)
Interviews
Scott Lynch interviewed by Caroline M. Yoachim (1/7)
Rati Mehrotra interviewed by Caroline M. Yoachim (2/4)
Podcasts
Episode 62A (1/7): Editors’ Introduction; “Six People to Revise You” by J.R. Dawson, as read by Erika Ensign; “Care for Lightning” by Mari Ness, as read by Erika Ensign; and Lynne M. Thomas interviewing J.R. Dawson.
Episode 62B (2/4): Editors’ Introduction; “The Flaming Embusen” by Tade Thompson, as read by Matt Peters; “Love Letter in Cobra Pose” by Shankar Narayan, as read by Erika Ensign; and Lynne M. Thomas interviewing Tade Thompson.
