Monthly Archives: February 2025

Pixel Scroll 2/28/25 Shatterday The Sluggoth Slept Late

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(0) LONG AFTERNOON OF THE SHORT SCROLL. Bot problems again. Even Cloudflare “Under Attack” making us all prove we are human (to the extent that can be done by clicking a box; don’t ask me) didn’t keep the site available. I’ve spent hours dealing with customer service instead of finishing the Scroll. If you’re reading this at all, great!

(1) MORE ON PROZINE OWNERSHIP CHANGE. Publishers Lunch ran this item today:

Must Read Magazines, a new division of Must Read Books Publishing, has acquired five genre magazines: Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. All editorial staff from the magazines will stay on.

The company writes that they plan “to bolster the magazines by expanding their distribution in trade bookstores, increasing their digital footprint, investing more in marketing the magazines to new readers and writers across channels, and using their platform to promote genre fiction authors in general.”

(2) WRITERS AND ARTISTS, GET READY. Dream Foundry is also looking ahead to their annual Writing and Art Contests which open to submissions from April 7 through June 2, 2025.

Prizes include $1500 USD for first place, in each contest (the art contest’s prize money as part of the Monu Bose Memorial Prize). Second place prize is $750 and third place prize is $400. 

The 2025 writing contest judges are C. S. E. Cooney and Carlos Hernandez, with contest coordinator Julia Rios.

Naomi Franquiz, Bex Glendining, and Jasmine Walls are the art contest judges, with Ilinica Barbacuta as the contest coordinator.

(3) BRANCHING OUT. The latest episode of the Center for Science and Imagination’s CSI Skill Tree is “Chrono Trigger with Aidan Moher and Troy L. Wiggins”. The Skill Tree series examines how video games envision possible futures and build thought-provoking worlds.

In this episode, we discuss Chrono Trigger, a time-hopping roleplaying adventure that unfolds its story through an alchemical blend of science fiction and fantasy elements. It’s often cited as one of the best and most influential video games of all time.

Our guests are Troy L. Wiggins, a writer and editor and cofounder of FIYAH, the award-winning magazine of Black speculative fiction, and Aidan Moher, a writer of speculative fiction and nonfiction, founder of the Hugo Award–winning blog A Dribble of Ink, and author of the book Fight, Magic, Items: The History of Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and the Rise of Japanese RPGs in the West.

 Also, here’s a YouTube playlist with all 17 of our Skill Tree episodes thus far.

(4) SPSFC STATUS. The Self-Published Science Fiction Competition, now in its fourth year, was started by Hugh Howey in 2021, and administered by Duncan Swan, however, it was publicly revealed earlier this month for the first time that neither has been involved with the contest for over two years. The leads of the volunteer judging teams and a few others have been keeping it going.

The reason for the public statement — “Let Me Speak to Your Manager” – was to keep Howey from becoming the focus of complaints about a controversy which he had no hand in creating. The day after SPSFC’s volunteer leaders posted their new “SPSFC Code of Conduct”, they got a lot of social media pushback.

One side contends an author’s book must be accepted in a contest even if his social media is filled with antisemtism, racism, misogyny, and/or transphobia.

The other side, the contest administrators, say they don’t have to potentially honor a book by such a person, or associate with them.

Reportedly a number of authors have withdrawn themselves from the competition – at least nine.

(5) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Roger Zelazny’s Damnation Alley (1969 novel, 1977 film)

Roger Zelazny’s Damnation Alley is a novel that I’ll admit that I do like.  As a novel it works rather well with protagonist, if that’s the right description for Tanner, a landscape that is truly horrendous and a story that is interesting. The film, well, I’ll deal with that eventually. There will be spoilers for that. 

It was published first in 1969 by G.P. Putnam’s Sons. The cover art (which I think is utterly wrong for the novel) is by Jack Gaughan. It was by no means as bad as what Paul Lehr did for the Berkley Medallion cover that was the next edition.  A recent edition is from a Greek publisher, Mnemos, and there it’s renamed Route 666, but I like its cover over any of the others done so far. 

I did not know until now that a novella length version of this was first published in the October 1967 issue of Galaxy. Who here can tell me how significantly different the two versions are? That novella is in The Last Defender of Camelot collection which is available from the usual suspects.

The novella was nominated for a Hugo at Baycon, the year “Riders of the Purple Wage” by Philip José Farmer won. Lord of Light did win a Hugo that year. That was also the year all Best Dramatic Presentation nominees were Star Trek episodes.

SPOILERS AND A RANT ABOUT THE FILM SO IF YOU’RE THE ONLY FAN WHO HAS NOT SEEN THIS, TIME TO GO READ SOMETHING. 

Now the film. May I quote Doctor Seuss’ The Grinch? I thought it stink, stank stunk. 

Two actors, George Peppard and Jan Michael Vincent are really extraneous. Neither is known for his acting skills. They are somewhere in a missile silo in the southwestern desert with a small army of extras fighting over Playboy magazines (no, I’m not kidding) in the aftermath of civilization destroying in World War III. Albany is the only city in the United States still functioning why Albany who knows. Maybe the dry deep snows every year protected it.

Those Playboy magazines? A fight will break out somehow leading to a fire that ignites missiles (don’t ask please), destroys the bunker, and kills everyone but the two leads. Naturally.

We will get bad special effects monsters including giant scorpions beyond belief. How the film how much cost who knows. It was supposed to cost around 6-1/2 million dollars that it was budgeted for but it went way over budget.

So that explains why I found it so distracted, so badly done because it really wasn’t a film. It was a collection of stock footage put together like a seamstress who didn’t know what she was doing working with bits and pieces of cloth creating the Frankenstein a patchwork  of costumes for a kid going on Halloween where it didn’t matter that didn’t look good. 

It didn’t help that the script was really a piece of shit. It certainly had very little to do with the original novel. I’m not sure they actually read the novel. I think somebody told them hey this is what it was and they went from there.

END OF SPOILERS. REALLY MY RANT IS OVER. 

Surprisingly Rotten Tomatoes give it a 34% rating. Of course it’s become a cult classic God forbid us some films are bad enough that happens and this one certainly is bad enough.

(6) PAY ATTENTION. “Marvel fans are just realizing a neat detail in Captain America: The Winter Soldier is different wherever you watch it” says GamesRadar+.

Some Marvel fans have just realized that there’s an interesting detail in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. The movie features a close-up of Steve Rogers’ notes about pop culture moments he missed, and one fan shared it on Reddit.

They wrote that their “headcanon” was that Rogers invested in Apple after he wrote it down on his list. However, then some viewers realized that the version of the list they’d seen in the movie was actually pretty different. “Interestingly, that list was different depending on where you watched the movie,” one user explained….

…A third pointed out that there is one thing that mostly stays the same on every list though. “All these lists just prove that Thai food rules everywhere,” they commented.

Some of the details on the US list include “Steve Jobs (Apple)”, “Nirvana (band)”, and “Disco” and in the UK, it features “The Beatles”, “World Cup Final (1966)”, and “Sean Connery”. Some other highlights from other countries include “Oldboy” in Korea, “Rafa Nadal” in Spain, and “Tim Tams” in Australia. You can see the variations of the list here….

(7) YOUR PLASTIC FUTURE. “Warner Bros DC & Mattel Ink Consumer Products Deal” – Deadline has the story.

Mattel, Inc. and Warner Bros. Discovery Global Consumer Products announced a global, multi-year licensing agreement utilizing DC’s entire library.

Through the partnership, Mattel is awarded the global licensing rights to develop and market a full range of DC-themed action figures, playsets, accessories, role play products, and adult collectibles starting in the second half of 2026. The agreement spans all DC stories and characters including Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, The Joker, Harley Quinn, and many more.

Nick Karamanos, SVP of Entertainment Partnerships at Mattel, said: “It is an incredibly proud milestone to welcome DC back to Mattel. We look forward to leveraging our Mattel Playbook approach to brand management, product design, and innovation to bring DC’s popular characters to life across all channels. This renewed partnership will reflect our shared passion for engaging and inspiring fans and collectors of all ages.”

[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Joey Eschrich, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Remembering Gene Hackman

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Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor in Superman

By Steve Vertlieb: How does one express grief at the passing of a stranger?  How do we examine our mourning over the death of someone we do not know, or have never met?  But we do know him.  We have met … many times. He has been a substantial part of our lives for sixty years.  Gene Hackman was a consummate actor, a consistent professional and endearing screen companion for more than half a century.  From his beginning presence on network television on shows like The United States Steel Hour, Naked City, and Route 66 in the early 1960’s to his explosive rendering of Clyde Barrow’s brother, “Buck,” alongside Warren Beatty in Bonnie and Clyde in 1967, Hackman grew in theatrical stature over the ensuing decades, offering a wide variety of emotional palates and characterizations in a virtual master class of dramatic growth as an actor.  His range of expression floated effortlessly from drama to comedy, while his intensity as an artist grew ever more startling and enduring with the ensuing decades.

As the son of an aging parent alongside Melvyn Douglas in I Never Sang for My Father in 1970, Hackman meticulously conveyed the anguish and frustration of an adult child having to deal with familial dementia, both loving and loathing his stern, unforgiving parent in the bitter throes of Alzheimer’s Disease.  Their anger exploding into raging tirades, Hackman fights for his own personal identity and pride, while trying to understand and respect the dominance of his overbearing and controlling father. The battle for survival of wills by both father and adult son is often too painful for either to endure.

It was in 1971 that the visage and intensity of Gene Hackman dominated both the screen and audiences around the world in his commanding performance of real-life cop “Popeye” Doyle in William Friedkin’s brilliant thriller, The French Connection. Raging recklessly through the streets and subways of New York in search of a notorious drug dealer, Hackman captured the hearts and devotion of millions with his theatrical intensity, unfettered bravado and abandonment of civility in bringing to justice a criminal warlord.

Hackman in The French Connection

The following year saw Hackman burn up the screen yet again as a conflicted clergyman, devoid of faith, finding strength and inspiration once more in his heroism, battling frustration and physical obstruction while saving a handful of survivors in a calamitous sea disaster.  Irwin Allen’s The Poseidon Adventure saw the rupture and nightmarish decimation of a luxury liner on New Year’s Eve, overturned in mid-ocean by a cataclysmic tidal wave.  His courage, determination, and eventual self-sacrifice provided the memorable thriller with its heart and spiritual soul.

In Francis Ford Coppola’s complex, frenetic thriller, The Conversation in 1974, Hackman plays Harry Caul, a paranoid surveillance expert discovering a murder plot, while eavesdropping for a client. Caul’s meticulous machinations, and obsessive-compulsive behavior, lead him down a path of deception, betrayal, and ultimate emotional self-destruction.  Hackman’s portrayal of Caul’s solitary intellectual dementia is a fascinating document of inner turmoil and mental sabotage.  It is a superb performance.

1974 saw one of Hackman’s most bizarre, inspired, and brilliant comedic characterizations in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein.  A cinematic tribute to James Whale’s singular horror classic, Bride of Frankenstein (Universal, 1935), Hackman’s uncredited satirical rendering of O.P. Heggie’s original poignant blind hermit characterization opposite Boris Karloff is unforgettable comic insanity and genius. With Peter Boyle enacting the role of the “Monster,” Hackman’s burlesque interpretation of the bungling backwoodsman, physically hidden below layers of silver facial hair, is quite simply a delectable, utterly hilarious tour de force, and undeniably among the most iconic comedy sequences in cinema history.

The first major big screen adaptation of Superman in 1978, directed by Richard Donner and starring Christopher Reeve as the “Man of Steel,” featured Gene Hackman in another satiric performance as Lex Luthor, Clark Kent’s wisecracking nemesis.  Over the top, yet funny as hell, Hackman’s sarcastic conman is comically reminiscent of Dan Ayckroyd’s often bizarre, sleazy characterizations on Saturday Night Live, yet more cunningly sophisticated and intelligent. 

Hoosiers in 1986 offered Hackman another outlet for his impassioned heroism as a small-town Indiana high school coach, daring his downtrodden basketball team to achieve greatness on the field.  With thrilling musical accompaniment by veteran composer Jerry Goldsmith, and Hackman’s stubborn, yet inspiring belief in the power of dreams, the film is a rousing, vibrant, thoroughly entertaining success.

In 1987’s No Way Out, a vague remake of The Big Clock (1948), Hackman plays a severely compromised government official who, after a jealous rage, murders his lover, devising an intricate plot to shield his guilt by falsely implicating another.  His insidious cowardice is his unwitting undoing.

Mississippi Burning, released in 1988 and directed by acclaimed filmmaker Alan Parker, is loosely based upon the 1964 investigation into the deaths of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, three young civil rights workers in Mississippi, violently slain by hooded members of the Ku Klux Klan. Hackman, in a deeply felt, powerful performance as an FBI agent assigned to the case, brings both passion and personal rage to his performance, elevating this factual story of bigotry and racism in the Deep South to unforgettable dramatic intensity. 

Hoosiers
Mississippi Burning
The Package (1989)
The Conversation

The Package, directed by Andrew Davis in 1989 is, in many ways, a companion piece to his fabulous 1993 remake of TV’s The Fugitive with Harrison Ford in the coveted role of iconic victim, Dr. Richard Kimble.  Hackman plays U.S. Army Green Beret Master Sergeant, Johnny Gallagher, caught up in a complex mystery thriller concerning espionage, impersonation, and murder. Davis, a superb visual director, guides his star through a series of exciting set pieces and nerve-wracking sequences in which mistaken guilt and confusion mask a darker truth and sinister reality.  Hackman’s believability as a military loyalist trying to climb his way out of a tunnel of intrigue and suspense is greatly enhanced by his sincerity and persona, making “The Package” an intense, involving, and believable political thriller.

Clint Eastwood’s 1992 revisionist western drama, Unforgiven, offered Hackman a gritty co-starring role opposite his director as vengeful, corrupted Sheriff,”Little” Bill Daggett, in a jagged reality showcase in which the actor joyously chews up the scenery with deliciously evil delight.  Daggett runs his town with an iron fist and loaded gun, intoxicated with personal power and little tolerance for open dissent.  In a violent finale to his cruelty, Daggett meets his end at the hands of an anti-hero, played to perfection by Eastwood.

The 1993 thriller The Firm starred Tom Cruise as a Harvard law graduate, enticed by Avery Tolar (Hackman) to join a celebrated boutique law firm with the promise of personal fortune and perks.  Hackman’s firm operates outside the law, leaving legal and personal integrity aside, while servicing money laundering schemes with mob affiliations.  Charming, yet deadly, Hackman fights his young protagonist with threats of assassination and professional disgrace when the younger Cruise discovers that what appears to be too good to be true, in all likelihood, is.

Lawrence Kasdan’s epic re-telling of the legend of Wyatt Earp in 1994 featured Hackman as the famed Marshall’s father, Nicholas Porter Earp, in a colorful character study of familial togetherness, loyalty and honor. While at times over long and ponderous, the film is highlighted by the actor’s always remarkable reliability and studied performance.  An outstanding cast of character actors supported the film’s noble, if sometimes awkwardly misguided, aspirations.

Crimson Tide, a 1995 political thriller eerily reminiscent of The Bedford Incident, filmed thirty years earlier, in which a conservative destroyer commander played by Richard Widmark battles the convictions of a liberal reporter played by Sidney Poitier, leading to nuclear disaster.  The latter film pits Hackman against Denzel Washington aboard a nuclear submarine as tensions flair against a backdrop of Russian/American relations and a dangerous battle for control of the vessel.  Hackman remains a potent, powerful nemesis of Washington, eloquently dominating both his scenes and characterizations. Their battle of wills determines the tense outcome of their perilous combativeness, journey, and division.

Hackman expressed his desire to become a working actor at the age of eight. While studying acting, both Hackman and fellow student Dustin Hoffman were voted by their classmates as the least likely to succeed at their chosen craft.  Gene Hackman was voted “Best Actor of the Year” by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his Oscar winning performance as “Popeye” Doyle in The French Connection in 1971 and, again in 1992, winning the Oscar for “Best Supporting Actor” in Unforgiven.

Gene Hackman died at age 95 on or about February 27th, 2025 under tragic circumstances.  We grieve for his loss … both to the arts and to the human spirit.

Deck Us All With Boskone Charlie: Dern’s Boskone 62 (2025) Con Report’n’Pix

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Boskone 62 Pocket Program (cover)
[Image by Theresa Mather]

By Daniel Dern: Until Arisia 2025 this January (which, per my File 770 report, I went to), I hadn’t been to a Con since Boskone 57 back in 2020, from a mix of COVID caution and pandemic anxiety (and for some of those years, many Cons not being IRL anyway). Halfway through this year’s Arisia, I decided that I wanted to also resume going to Boskone. (I’m a Boston-area local living near public-transit, so easy-enough decisions in terms of planning/convenience.) As this Scroll shows, I did, indeed go to Boskone 62…and had a good time.

Boskone 62 was held Friday, February 14 through Sunday, February 16, 2025 at the Westin Boston Seaport District hotel in Boston, with the semi-predicted snow holding off until late Saturday afternoon.

Approaching the Westin Boston Seaport Hotel
Sarah, On Stilts
You Are Here (Registration-level Floor Plan)

Boskone 62’s Featured Guests were:

Jasper Fforde
Theresa Mather
Kelley Armstrong
Madison Metricula Roberts
Heather Preston

And overall, there were 150+ Program participants (listed – at least half a dozen didn’t make it to the Con).

[The rest of Dern’s report and 40+ photos of the convention follows the jump.]

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International Film Music Critics Association Awards 2025 Winners

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The International Film Music Critics Association (IFMCA) announced the winners of the 2024 IFMCA Awards for excellence in musical scoring on February 27.

The award for Score of the Year goes to American composer Bear McCreary, for his score for the second season of the Amazon Prime fantasy television series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. The score also won the award for its genre, being named Best Original Score for Television, while McCreary was also named Composer of the Year. McCreary’s work in 2024 in addition to The Rings of Power includes the nostalgic 1980s comedy The 4:30 Movie, the horror flick Imaginary, and music for the latest seasons of multiple TV shows such as Outlander, Halo, and Masters of the Universe, which he wrote along with his staff composers at Sparks & Shadows.

IFMCA member Jon Broxton wrote that Season Two of The Rings of Power was “the equal of the score for Season One in every way, because not only does McCreary revisit each of his fantastic recurring themes, he augments them with a handful of brand new ones, and incorporates them all together to create a dramatically potent, musically compelling, emotionally satisfying, intelligently structured blockbuster that, to me, confirms why this type of leitmotivic approach to film scoring is the pinnacle of the art.”

This is McCreary’s second Score of the Year victory in three years, having previously won for the first season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power in 2022. These wins also take McCreary’s all-time IFMCA win tally to 12, making him the fifth most successful composer in IFMCA history after John Williams, Michael Giacchino, James Newton Howard, and Alexandre Desplat.

Also winning multiple awards in 2024 is American composer Alan Silvestri, who won the award for Best Original Score for a Drama film for Here, with that film’s end credits also being named Composition of the Year. The 20th collaboration between Silvestri and director Robert Zemeckis, Here is a fascinating ‘experiment’ film which tells the story of a specific place throughout time from the era of the dinosaurs through the ice age, to the dawn of humanity, pre-Columbian native Americans, and then after a house is built on that spot, the different families who live there, from the Colonial era to the present day.

Best Original Score For A Fantasy/Science Fiction Film went to John Powell and Stephen Schwartz for their work bringing the massively popular Broadway musical Wicked for the big screen. Robin Carolan won Best Original Score For A Horror/Thriller Film for the gothic vampire horror Nosferatu. Other genre winners included Kris Bowers for the animated adventure film The Wild Robot, Raphaël Dargent for the paleontology documentary Why Dinosaurs?, and Gordy Haab for the video game Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

The complete list of winners follows the jump.

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Pixel Scroll 2/27/25 All These Pixels Are Yours, Except Scrollropa. Attempt No Filing There

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(1) NO MORE US WORLDCONS DECLARES JO WALTON. Welsh-Canadian author Jo Walton, past winner of the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Otherwise Awards, called on Bluesky yesterday for an end to US Worldcons. She did so in response to a leaked State Department policy designed to implement Trump’s executive order “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government”.

Walton says she would prefer for the LAcon V committee to abandon its Anaheim, CA location and move outside the country. Setting aside that the bid was seated by a democratic site selection process, they’ve also made legal and financial commitments to secure their 2026 facilities. Breaking those contracts would involve paying large penalties. How much? Remember that when Arisia 2019 decided the principled stance was to move the con away from two strike-affected hotels they were planning to use that triggered approximately $150,000 in cancellation fees and anticipated attrition charges. Even under the settlement negotiated by Arisia’s lawyers they still had to pay over $40K, much of the money donated by fans to Arisia’s fundraising campaign.

(2) MAY THE BEST APE WIN. [Item by Olav Rokne.] The Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog is advancing a bit of an off-board pick for the Best Dramatic Hugo, but it’s a beguilingly bonkers and beautiful little movie. And I will maintain to my last breath that any movie in which there are 100,000 chimpanzees fighting with swords is at the very least magical realism, and consequently a genre work: “The Ape Star”.

In the climactic moment of Better Man, an anthropomorphic chimpanzee named Robbie Williams takes the stage at the Knebworth Festival in front of 125,000 fans to sing his pop anthem, “Let Me Entertain You.” Nearing the end of the song, he spots in the audience dozens — then hundreds — of younger and angrier chimpanzee versions of himself. Leaping into the crowd, he begins fighting them one-by-one, with each showdown getting bloodier and more outlandish.

With the leaping chimpanzees, the soaring camera work, and the colourful cinematography, it is as if the Battle of Isengard had been set on the Planet of the Apes and directed by Speed-Racer-era Wachowskis….

(3) PEN AMERICA REPORT ON BOOK BANS. “PEN America Report Zooms In on School Year 2023–2024 Book Bans” — Publishers Weekly has a synopsis.

In a new report out today called “Cover to Cover,” PEN America provides a comprehensive analysis of the 4,128 unique titles that it determined were removed from public schools nationwide during the 2023–2024 academic year—the result of more than 10,000 instances of school book bans over that time period. With this latest look at its data from 2023–2024, PEN America builds on the findings it released last fall with a goal of better understanding the wide-reaching impacts of this educational censorship being driven by politics and coordinated, well-funded groups.

For the “Cover to Cover” report, PEN’s team of staff researchers, expert consultants, and author volunteers reviewed each banned title across 37 variables. What they learned was that certain marginalized identities are “being removed from library shelves en masse.” The reviewers found that 36% of the books banned during the 2023–2024 school year feature characters or people of color and 25% include LGBTQ+ people or characters. Of those banned titles with LGBTQ+ representation, 28% feature trans and/or genderqueer characters.

PEN’s researchers noted that in terms of identity erasure, the numbers are even more stark within the different genres and formats of the banned books. For example, they found that 73% of banned titles that fall into the graphic and illustrated titles category feature LGBTQ+ representation, people or characters of color, or discussions of race/racism. Sixty-four percent of banned picture books depict LGBTQ+ characters or stories; and 44% of banned history and biography titles feature people of color.

“When we strip library shelves of books about particular groups, we defeat the purpose of a library collection that is supposed to reflect the lives of all people,” Sabrina Baêta, senior manager for PEN America’s Freedom to Read program, said in a statement. “The damaging consequences to young people are real.”…

(4) KATHLEEN KENNEDY REPLIES. She’s not retiring. In Deadline, “Kathleen Kennedy clarifies Lucasfilm future, Star Wars plans”. After Mike Fleming, Jr. takes the media to task for what was reported, he walks Kennedy through a Q&A session which begins:

DEADLINE: We’ve read all these speculative reports that you are out, that there’s a frenzy for the next person who’s going to take over Lucasfilm. What is the truth?

KATHLEEN KENNEDY: The truth is, and I want to just say loud and clear, I am not retiring. I will never retire from movies. I will die making movies. That is the first thing that’s important to say. I am not retiring. What’s happening at Lucasfilm is I have been talking for quite some time with both Bob and Alan about what eventual succession might look like. We have an amazing bench of people here, and we have every intention of making an announcement months or a year down the road. We are in lockstep as to what that’s going to be, and I am continuing. I’m producing Mandalorian the movie right now, and I’m also producing Sean Levy’s movie, which is after that. So I’m continuing to stay at Lucasfilm and looking very thoughtfully with Bob and Alan as to who’s stepping in. So that is all underway, and we have every right to make that announcement when we want to make it….

(5) OCTOTHORPE. John Coxon thought of something, Alison Scott is educational, and Liz Batty reads contracts in Episode 129 of the Octothorpe podcast. They discuss the Belfast Eastercon, Alison shakes her cane at John and Liz, and they talk a little about WSFS things before getting into picks. Listen here: “Deep in Annex A”. An uncorrected transcript is available here.

Words read “Octothorpe 129: Can you pin Thailand on the map?” above a black-and-white world map. The backs of John, Alison and Liz’s heads are shown. John is thinking “Yup!”, Liz is thinking “100%”, and Alison is holding Thailand and thinking “???”.

(6) FILK HISTORY ZOOM. Fanac.org has posted video of the Zoom session “Margaret Middleton – A Shaper of Modern Filk (Part 1 of 2), interviewed by Edie Stern”.

Description: FANAC History Zoom: February 2025: Named to the Filk Hall of Fame in 1996, and a long time officer of the Filk Foundation, Margaret Middleton has been instrumental in the shaping of modern filk, as well as a mainstay of Arkansas fandom. She’s published multiple fanzines, including Kantele, and was a founder of the first specialized filk convention, Filkcon 1. In Part 1 of this 2 part recording, we learn about her introduction to conventions and fandom, including a delightful story of the Icon elevator that may have changed her life. 

Margaret starts at the beginning, with her entry to fandom and how she started writing filk, and continues to the four bearded guys and how she came to pub her ish. A traveling fan with many convention stories, this Part 1 includes the origin story of Roc*Con in the grand fannish tradition, as well as tales of Big Mac (MidAmericon, 1976 Worldcon), and reminiscences of some of the filkers of the time (incuding the “Great Broads of the Galaxy”). The talk moves on to filkzines, specialized filk conventions, and filksing styles. It’s great fun, especially for those of us that remember filking in those days. Full Disclosure: the interviewer (me) is one of those people.

(7) HUNGER GAMES TRIBUTES WILL TREAD THE BOARDS. “’Electrifying experience’: stage version of The Hunger Games to open in new London theatre” reports the Guardian.

A new theatre in London’s Canary Wharf will open with the delayed world premiere of The Hunger Games, based on Suzanne Collins’ bestselling 2008 novel and the hit 2012 film version.

Irish playwright Conor McPherson’s adaptation of the dystopian adventure, which follows teenagers fighting to the death in a televised spectacle, will begin previews on 20 October. The purpose-built, 1,200-seat Troubadour Canary Wharf theatre is operated by the company behind the venue for the successful Starlight Express reboot in Wembley Park, where singing roller-skaters whiz among the audience. The Hunger Games has been similarly designed to place theatregoers amid the action.

Tristan Baker and Oliver Royds, joint CEOs and founders of Troubadour Theatres, said the show would offer “a transportive, electrifying experience that fully captures the scale, intensity and spectacle of Suzanne Collins’ world. Every element – from the staging to the technology – has been tailored to transport audiences right into the heart of the Games like never before.”…

(8) GENE HACKMAN (1930-2025). Actor Gene Hackman and his wife, pianist Betsy Arakawa, were discovered dead in their Santa Fe, NM home yesterday. Authorities are investigating their deaths, with Deadline’s most current information summarized here: “Gene Hackman & Wife Suffered ‘No External Trauma’, Police Say”.

…No cause of death has been determined so far for Gene Hackman and Betsy Arakawa, but New Mexico police say the situation “remains an open investigation.”

With affidavits, search warrants and statements calling the death of the two-time Oscar winner, his wife and their dog late Wednesday “suspicious enough in nature,” the Santa Fe Sheriff’s office is reiterating Thursday that “there were no apparent signs of foul play.”…

…“An autopsy was performed. Initial findings noted no external trauma to either individual,” they added. “Carbon monoxide and toxicology tests were requested for both individuals. The manner and cause of death has not been determined. The official results of the autopsy and toxicology reports are pending. This remains an open investigation.” 

Earlier today, the local coroner’s office said it could be 4-6 weeks before a full report on the 95-year-old Hackman and the 63-year-old Arakawa is complete….

…With that, the deaths of Hackman and Arakawa become all the more complicated by what wasn’t addressed in the latest statement by the Santa Fe police. While the late Wednesday night affidavit for a search warrant on the couple’s property mentioned both bodies being on the floor of the house in different rooms and a “pill bottle being opened and pills scattered next to the female,” there was zero mention of that in this afternoon’s release…

The actor won Oscars winner for his work on 1971’s The French Connection and 1992’s Unforgiven. Hackman and classical pianist Arakawa married in 1991. 

His work of genre interest included playing Lex Luthor in multiple Superman films, appearing in Young Frankenstein, Marooned, and in one episode of The Invaders TV series. He also voiced a character in the animated movie Antz.

(9) A TOAST. This is a good day for “Remembering GENE HACKMAN in YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1974)”.

(10) MEMORY LANE.

[Item by Cat Eldridge.]

Anniversary, TekWar: TekLab (1994)

Thirty-one years ago this evening TekWar: TekLab, the third of the TekWar episodes, aired. Created by William Shatner, the novels credited initially to him were actually ghost-written by Ron Goulart. I don’t know how much input Goulart had into the TV series. TekWar would be developed for television by Stephen Roloff who earlier had done the same for Friday the 13th: The Series and Beyond Reality which I liked, also filmed in Toronto, the site of other series such as Forever Knight. 

TekLab would take our detectives to London attend a ceremony at the Tower of London which marks the start of a campaign to restore the British monarchy. Before the film ends, much will happen including the appearance of Excalibur. 

The primary cast was Greg Evigan as Jake Cardigan, Eugene Clark as Sid Gomez, William Shatner as Walter Bascom, Michael York as Richard Stewart, Laurie Winger as Rachael Tudor and Maurice Dean Winter as Lt. Winger. 

I can’t say most critics loved this William-Shatner-created affair as they mostly did not, with who I’ll not quote by name to protect the guilty saying of the series that it was “bargain basement science fiction with a stale protagonist, a convoluted murder mystery, and a narrative that feels incomplete.” Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give this film specifically a thirty-six percent rating. 

It ran two seasons for a total of 22 episodes, films as well. Supposedly in production, there was an adult animated TekWar film (whatever the hell they meant by that and I’m definitely not speculating) which was announced five years ago but I can’t find any proof of it existing.

Unlike most of the critics, I liked this series as the lead protagonist, Jake, was developed enough to be a good character in that crucial story role and even Shatner in the role he was in was likable enough to be generally not annoying, the supporting characters made sense, the stories weren’t exactly the best science-fiction ever done, but they weren’t bad either and the setting made sense for what it was.

It is streaming, well, nowhere. It aired originally on the USA network before repeating on the Sci Fi network. The USA network is owned by NBC Universal, parent company of Peacock as well, so I’m surprised it is not there at least. 

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) BERLITZKRIEG. This bilingual joke has to have been around for a long time but today is the first time I’ve seen it. “Yo” is the Spanish counterpart to the English pronoun “I”.

The Spanish-language version of Asimov's sci-fi classic I, Robot sounds a lot more street.

— Rob McD (@yourfunnyuncle.bsky.social) 2025-02-27T22:20:11.197Z

(13) OUR MEGAFAUNA NEIGHBORS. TL;DR version: It took longer for humans to eat the last of them than previously thought. P.S. The article says that idea is actually wrong, no matter how much I like it. “Giant Megafauna Lived Alongside Humans As Recently As 3,500 Years Ago” says IFLScience.

….For a long time, the overall consensus has been that mammalian megafauna – giant mammals that roamed the Earth in the past, including species like mammoths, giant sloths and sabertoothed tigers – went extinct at the start of the Holocene. This is our current geological epoch, which started around 11,700 years ago, at the end of the last major glacial age.

However, some recent studies have obtained fossil evidence that challenges this consensus. In particular, the discovery that woolly mammoths were still alive 4,000 years ago helped undermine this idea. Now researchers have found other megafauna specimens, including giant sloths and camel-like animals, that survived in South America up to around 3,500 years ago.

This evidence raises questions about what really led to the planet’s most recent large animal extinction while also showing that it was not a homogenous event….

(14) NEWLYWED WALT. Animation Magazine alerts us that “Rare Early Disney Photos Go to Auction at Van Eaton Galleries”. And some of the photos can be viewed at the link.

(15) THE TECHNICAL TERM IS…. [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] And you want to know why AI shouldn’t replace people? “’Emergent Misalignment’ in LLMs” at Schneier on Security.

Interesting research: “Emergent Misalignment: Narrow finetuning can produce broadly misaligned LLMs“:

“Abstract: We present a surprising result regarding LLMs and alignment. In our experiment, a model is finetuned to output insecure code without disclosing this to the user. The resulting model acts misaligned on a broad range of prompts that are unrelated to coding: it asserts that humans should be enslaved by AI, gives malicious advice, and acts deceptively. Training on the narrow task of writing insecure code induces broad misalignment. We call this emergent misalignment. This effect is observed in a range of models but is strongest in GPT-4o and Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct. Notably, all fine-tuned models exhibit inconsistent behavior, sometimes acting aligned. Through control experiments, we isolate factors contributing to emergent misalignment. Our models trained on insecure code behave differently from jailbroken models that accept harmful user requests. Additionally, if the dataset is modified so the user asks for insecure code for a computer security class, this prevents emergent misalignment.

“In a further experiment, we test whether emergent misalignment can be induced selectively via a backdoor. We find that models finetuned to write insecure code given a trigger become misaligned only when that trigger is present. So the misalignment is hidden without knowledge of the trigger.

“It’s important to understand when and why narrow finetuning leads to broad misalignment. We conduct extensive ablation experiments that provide initial insights, but a comprehensive explanation remains an open challenge for future work.”

The emergent properties of LLMs are so, so weird.

[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Olav Rokne, John Coxon, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Steven French for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Olav Rokne.]

TAFF Library Grows a Pair

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Two additions to the TransAtlantic Fan Fund Free Ebooks collection are officially arriving on March 1. But you don’t have to wait!

Watto’s Wisom: Zine and Con Writing by Ian Watson.

As a major science fiction author active for well over half a century, Ian Watson needs no introduction. He has also been a regular contributor to SF fanzines and convention publications since the mid-1970s. This nonfiction volume presents a generous selection of more than fifty pieces first published thus: essays, reviews, memoirs, whimsies, polemic, convention reports, the secret histories of how several of his books were written, and brain-boggling speculations on UFOs and other arcana. One highlight is a long and surreally comic memoir of working with Stanley Kubrick on the film script which eventually became A.I.: Artificial Intelligence.

The 93,000-word book is available in multiple electronic formats from the Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund’s website, where they also hope you’ll make a little donation to the fund. Find it here.

As well as the free ebook there’s a trade paperback sold with all proceeds to TAFF. There are plans to have this on sale at Eastercon in Belfast, since Ian will be there with his favorite signing pen.

First published as an ebook for the TAFF site on 1 March 2025. Cover photograph of Ian Watson by Cristina Macía. Approximately 93,000 words.

GUFF: The Incomplete Chronicles. Edited by David Langford

This volume gathers up the chapters of GUFF reports that were unfinished or too short for standalone publication. Donations to GUFF rather than TAFF are encouraged for those who enjoy this one. Download it here.

This ebook brings together the known segments of unfinished Get Up-and-Over/Going Under Fan Fund trip reports. The GUFF winners represented are Joseph Nicholas (1981), Justin Ackroyd (1984), Irwin Hirsh (1987), Roman Orszanski (1990), Eva Hauser (1992), Paul Kincaid (1999), Damien Warman and Juliette Woods (jointly, 2005) and Ang Rosin (2007).

From the Introduction by David Langford

As with its ancestor fund TAFF, a long-standing tradition of GUFF is that returned winners administer the fund until replaced by their successor from the same hemisphere and if possible write a substantial trip report, both for sale in aid of the fund and for the entertainment and edification of fandom. This tradition goes back to before TAFF itself began. A special fund was organized to bring Walt Willis from Ireland to the USA and the World SF Convention in 1952 (an initiative which led directly to the founding of TAFF), and his report The Harp Stateside is regarded as a classic of fan writing.

Many GUFF winners since 1979 have likewise published full-length trip reports (click here for available downloads). Some were waylaid by the horrors of real life and failed even to begin a report; some published instalments in fanzines but didn’t finish. Joseph Nicholas drafted a very long report whose MS was lost in a house move. Irwin Hirsh has published ten instalments, enough to be called a completed report, but wants to add more and is represented here by two chapters about the UK Worldcon he attended. Otherwise, this ebook collects what remains of reports that have been abandoned, or are so brief that they couldn’t plausibly be published as a standalone fanzine in the tradition of The Harp Stateside. There’s a lot of fine fan writing here.

This GUFF-centred companion to the TAFF Trip Report Anthology (2017) is published as an Ansible Editions ebook for the TAFF site on 1 March 2025. Cover artwork by Ian Gunn. 73,000 words.

Pixel Scroll 2/26/25 Do Pixels Dream Of Scrolls That Will Be?

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(1) THREE MAJOR PROZINES CHANGE OWNERSHIP. Jason Sanford today reported “Asimov’s, Analog and F&SF purchased by new owner” on Patreon.

…The new owner of the magazines is Steven Salpeter and a group of investors. Salpeter is the president of literary and IP development at Assemble Media and previously worked as a literary agent for Curtis Brown.….

(2) ASTOUNDING AWARD’S FUTURE? Following the report that Asimov’s, Analog and F&SF have been purchased by a new owner, John Scalzi speculated about the fate of the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. Although voting is administered by the Worldcon, the Astounding Award belongs to Dell Magazines, publisher of Analog prior to this sale. Will Analog’s new owners continue the sponsorship? John Scalzi volunteered a landing place if one is needed in a post at Whatever:

 If the new owners of Asimov’s and Analog don’t want to take sponsorship of the Astounding Award (or the award is not otherwise folded into the responsibilities of WSFS/the individual Worldcons), we’ll take it on. The ideal plan would be for the Scalzi Family Foundation to act as a bridge sponsor while we set up an endowment that would allow the Astounding Award to be run indefinitely.

(3) EISNER HALL OF FAME INDUCTEES. Comic-Con International has announced 21 creators and industry figures who will be inducted into the Eisner Awards Hall of Fame this year.

In addition to these choices, voters in the comics industry will elect 6 persons from a group of 18 nominees proposed by the judges. Those nominees will be announced within the next week, and a ballot will be made available for online voting. 

(4) BEST ECOFICTION OF THE YEAR. Violet Lichen imprint editor-in-chief, Marissa van Uden has extended the call for submissions deadline for ECO24: The Year’s Best Speculative Ecofiction. She’s seeking reprint submissions from editors, publishers, and authors.

We’ve received more than 150 stories nominated by publishers, editors, and authors so far, and the range of stories, ideas, and perspectives has been so wonderful to read. As this is our first year of the anthology and our launch happened so quickly, we’ve decided to extend the submissions window out to Monday, March 17, to ensure that everyone publishing ecofiction gets a chance to submit….

…Ecofiction engages with some of the most urgent issues facing us today and also looks ahead to the possibilities of the future. Even when dealing with dark or tragic themes, ecofiction stories are expressions of our human connection to the most beautiful planet we know, and to all of earthlife….

(5) BOOK WITHIN A BOOK. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] BBC Radio 4 working weekday Women’s Hour had a second half (35 minutes in) largely devoted to two SF works.  The first was a play, a re-imagining of the Greek tragedy Oedipus but set in a dystopic, near-future, climate drought-ridden future…

And then the Nigerian-American SF author Nnedi Okorafor who was discussing her latest book Death of the Author (out from Gollancz). This is a sweeping story about a writer of a science fiction novel that becomes a global phenomenon… at a price. The future of storytelling is here. A book-within-a-book that blends the line between writing and being written. This is at once the tale of a woman on the margins risking everything to be heard and a testament to the power of storytelling to shape the world as we know it… This interview begins 50 minutes in.

Nigerian American science fiction author Nnedi Okorafor’s new book is Death of the Author. It follows the story of Zelu, a novelist who is disabled, unemployed and from a very judgmental family. Nnedi and Nuala talk about the book within her book, success, and the influence on her writing of being an athlete in her earlier years.

You can access the programme here.

(6) SANS AI. “James Cameron will reportedly open Avatar 3 with a title card saying no generative AI was used to make the movie” reports GamesRadar+.

James Cameron has reportedly revealed an anti-AI title card will open up Avatar 3, officially titled Avatar: Fire and Ash. The Oscar-winning director shared the news in a Q&A session in New Zealand attended by Twitter user Josh Harding.

Sharing a picture of Cameron at the event, they wrote: “Such an *incredible* talk. Also, James Cameron revealed that Avatar: Fire and Ash will begin with a title card after the 20th Century and Lightstorm logos that ‘no generative A.I. was used in the making of this movie’.”Cameron has been vocal in the past about his feelings on artificial intelligence, speaking to CTV news in 2023 about AI-written scripts. “I just don’t personally believe that a disembodied mind that’s just regurgitating what other embodied minds have said – about the life that they’ve had, about love, about lying, about fear, about mortality – and just put it all together into a word salad and then regurgitate it,” he told the publication. “I don’t believe that’s ever going to have something that’s going to move an audience. You have to be human to write that. I don’t know anyone that’s even thinking about having AI write a screenplay.”…

(7) IMAGINARY PAPERS. ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination has published the latest issue of Imaginary Papers, its quarterly newsletter on science fiction worldbuilding, futures thinking, and imagination.

In this issue, Sarah M. Ruiz writes about climate action, allegory, and solidarity in the 2024 film Flow; Libia Brenda writes about Crononauta, the quasi-mythical, short-lived 1964 magazine founded by Alejandro Jodorowsky and René Rebetez; and Rachael Kuintzle reports on a workshop on energy futures hosted by the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory in 2024.

(8) DARK DELICACIES TO CLOSE. SFGate is there when “After 30 years, California’s prince of horror hangs up his jacket”.

On April 5, a beacon for California horror fans will be snuffed out when legacy Los Angeles shop Dark Delicacies closes its doors. “We’ve been open for 30 years, and I could have happily died right here,” laughs co-owner Del Howison, “but my wife Sue wanted to have a life — whatever that is.”

Dark Delicacies is more than just a Southern California storefront selling ghoulish souvenirs. It’s been a destination for film buffs, horror genre diehards and celebrities from across the macabre spectrum for decades, and Howison himself has become a cult attraction for those with a love of Southern California’s darker corners.

The longtime horror curator plans to stay busy until the end. On a recent weekday, Howison is moving about his Burbank shop, taking pictures of vintage Spanish and Italian movie posters to sell online. He occasionally breaks to gesture at the Tiki mugs, shot glasses, board games, playing cards and action figures on the shelves. “We stopped calling them dolls, as guys didn’t like saying they were collecting dolls,” Howison says of his early days in business. “Of course, back then, there was no such thing as a horror convention.”…

(9) UK PAPERS PROTEST AI LEGISLATIVE PROPOSAL. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] A first this side of the Pond. Irrespective of their political leanings, all the papers came together on Tuesday in a campaign to stop British government proposals (yes, we have daft politicians over here just as you do in the US) to allow artificial intelligence (AI) free access to intellectual property so that it can be trained.  This is something that authors have been worried about. “UK newspapers launch campaign against AI copyright plans” in the Wandsworth Times.

Special wraps appeared on Tuesday’s editions of the Daily Express, Daily Mail, The Mirror, the Daily Star, The Sun, and The Times – as well as a number of regional titles – criticising a Government consultation around possible exemptions being added to copyright law for training AI models.

The proposals would allow tech firms to use copyrighted material from creatives and publishers without having to pay or gain a licence, or reimbursing creatives for using their work.

In response, publishers have launched the Make It Fair campaign, which saw newspapers put covers on the outside of their front page – criticising the Government’s consultation – organised by the News Media Association (NMA), and backed by the Society of Editors (SOE).

The message said: “The Government wants to change the UK’s laws to favour big tech platforms so they can use British creative content to power their AI models without our permission or payment. Let’s protect the creative industries – it’s only fair.”…

(10) SF AUTHOR ISHIGURO IS ALSO AGAINST IT. The Bookseller reports “Kazuo Ishiguro urges government to ‘reconsider’ AI ‘opt-out’ plan: ‘No-one believes it will work’”. (Behind a paywall.)

…In a statement shared with the Times, the Klara and the Sun (Faber) author said the country had reached a “fork-in-the-road” moment. “If someone wants to take a book I’ve written and turn it into a TV series, or to print a chapter of it in an anthology, the law clearly states they must first get my permission and pay me,” he said.

“To do otherwise is theft. So why is our government now pushing forward legislation to make the richest, most dominant tech companies in the world exceptions? At the dawn of the AI age, why is it just and fair – why is it sensible — to alter our time-honoured copyright laws to advantage mammoth corporations at the expense of individual writers, musicians, film-makers and artists?”

Ishiguro continued that “no one believes the proposed ‘opt-out’ system will work”, saying this is why “those lobbying on behalf of the tech giants favour it”….

(11) MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG (1985-2025). Actress Michelle Trachtenberg, known especially to fans for playing Dawn Summers in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, has died at the age of 39. According to the Guardian:

…Police sources confirmed her death to both ABC News and the New York Post. There is no cause of death yet known, with police saying on Thursday that the New York Medical Examiner is investigating but no foul play was suspected. She had recently undergone a liver transplant, according to sources….

A successful child actress, her first lead film role was in the comedy adventure Harriet the Spy (1996). Trachtenberg followed the film with a role in Inspector Gadget next to Matthew Broderick. Her role in Buffy the Vampire Slayer came in 2000 and continued til the show ended three years later. 

Trachtenberg continued to have an active career after that in non-genre productions.

(12) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Award-Winning Barbara Hambly

Barbara Hambly, one of my favorite writers of horror and mysteries, has won two Lord Ruthven Awards given by the Lord Ruthven Assembly, a group of scholars specializing in vampire literature who are affiliated with the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts. 

(This piece is about her fantasies and mysteries that I’m familiar with. I know she wrote some SF, do comment upon it if so inclined.)

Those Who Hunt in The Night, the first in her excellent John Asher series, won the Locus Award for Best Horror Novel. I think the series, eight long, might be concluded, as the last came out six years ago.

I’m also very impressed of her two novelizations done for one of my favorite TV series, Beauty and the Beast and and Beauty and the Beast: Song of Orpheus as it’s hard to write material off those series that’s worth reading.  I’ve read others which very quickly got really mawkish as they overly focus on the relationship, in my opinion of course, of the relationship of Catherine and Vincent to the exclusion of what could a fleshing out of that world. Not her. Wonderful novels! 

I’ve not tracked down her three Sherlock Holmes short story pastiches yet.

I listened to Bride of the Rat God, which is the only supernatural fantasy in theSilver Screen historical mystery series, and the next book which was not a fantasy, Scandal in Babylon. There are two more in the series so far. They likewise are not fantasy according to her.

And yes, there’s lots about her writing career I’ve not included here so feel free to tell me what you think I should have mentioned. If anybody has read her Abigail Adams or Benjamin January mystery series, I’d be interested in knowing what you think.

Barbara Hambly

(13) COMICS SECTION.

My latest @newscientist.com cartoon.

— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld.bsky.social) 2025-02-25T15:48:26.139Z

(14) GOING DARK. Publishers Weekly reports that “Dark Horse Digital Has Shut Down”.

Dark Horse Media has officially shut down Dark Horse Digital as of February 24, 2025, with comics no longer available for purchase on the platform. Online access to the DHD website, however, will still be available at least through this summer, and users can continue to log in and read the comics in their bookshelves.

Effective March 31, 2025, the Dark Horse Comics and Plants vs. Zombies Comics apps for iOS will also no longer be supported.

The move follows downsizing at Dark Horse Media earlier this month, and bookends DHD’s 14-year run.

(15) LOST MARVELS FACTS FOUND. “Fantagraphics Drops Out Of Free Comic Book Day, Pulls ‘Lost Marvels’” – Bleeding Cool has corrected details. With Diamond Comic Distributors having filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy, things are up in the air.

Eric Reynolds from Fantagraphics gets in touch to correct me. He says “Contrary to what you wrote, the comics were actually not printed yet. If they had been, we would have proceeded as planned. But since they weren’t, and given the uncertainty of whether Diamond will even exist come May (or be able to pay us for them), we made the difficult decision to pull the plug while we could. We may still produce the comic this year, bypassing FCBD. Things are, as you can probably understand, a bit fluid these days… The decision was made entirely based on the uncertainty of FCBD and had nothing to do with the Lost Marvels book series itself, which is otherwise proceeding as planned!”

(16) GANG AGLEY. The Guardian’s “Pushing Buttons” newsletter wonders: “Netflix’s games were once its best-kept secret – where did it all go wrong?”.

When Netflix first started adding video games to its huge catalogue of streaming TV shows and films, it did so quietly. In 2021, after releasing an impressive experiment with the idea of interactive film in Black Mirror: Bandersnatch in 2018 and a free Stranger Things game in 2019, Netflix began expanding more fully into interactive entertainment.

The streamer’s gaming offering, for a long time, was its best-kept secret. Whoever was running it really had an eye for quality: award-winningly brilliant and relatively little-known indie games comprised the majority of its catalogue, alongside decent licensed games based on everything from The Queen’s Gambit to the reality dating show Too Hot to Handle. Subscribers could play games such as Before Your Eyes, a brief and touching story about a life cut short; Spiritfarer, about guiding lost souls to rest and Into the Breach, a superb sci-fi strategy game with robots v aliens. The company bought or invested in several game studios known for making critically acclaimed work, including London-based Ustwo games (which was behind Monument Valley). It also established a studio in California to work on blockbuster games, staffed by veteran developers.

But it seems things are changing. That blockbuster studio has been closed, as first reported by Game File, before it could ever release a game. Its latest tie-in game, Squid Game Unleashed, absolutely sucks – it’s constructed around the celebration of slapstick violence, making it a terrible fit for a satirically violent show about capitalist exploitation. Funding a bunch of indie darlings and hiring big-name talent from the likes of Blizzard and Bungie for its game studio gave the impression that Netflix really was keen on becoming a part of the gaming industry, and doing it properly. Now that is very much in question.

The company has made layoffs across its gaming divisions, including at Night Studio – makers of weird-fiction supernatural teen horror series Oxenfree. It has cancelled plans for several forthcoming games that were due to join the service, including indie hits Thirsty Suitors and Don’t Starve Together, and promising-looking hobbit game Tales of the Shire. What’s going on?

(17) GWENDDYDD. [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] Did you know Merlin had a sister? I didn’t… and I know more about the Matter of Britain than all but about 30 people in the US. “Early poems about Merlin portray him as environmentalist, say scholars” in the Guardian.

He is probably most often thought of today as a wizard, a shape-shifter or a mentor to the young King Arthur.

But a detailed re-examination of Myrddin – Merlin – by Welsh scholars suggests he can also be considered an early British environmentalist deeply worried about human interaction with the natural world…

… The researchers have been combing through manuscripts in the National Library of Wales, in Aberystwyth, and also in the 15th-century Red Book of Hergest at Jesus College, Oxford.

They also discovered more about the importance of Merlin’s sister, Gwenddydd. Callander said: “Gwenddydd is a really important figure in Welsh Merlin poetry. She supports Merlin and also appears to be a prophet in her own right.

“We found hundreds of lines of poetry in her voice in dialogue with her brother. Merlin describes her as ‘fair Gwenddydd, summit of dignity’ and ‘refuge of songs’. One of the important aspects of the project is to throw light on this lost female voice from medieval Wales.”

Callander said it was surprising that early Merlin poems had been largely neglected. “These Welsh-language texts had not been edited or translated in full, meaning much material has been missed out.”…

(18) TIME TO VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE GIANTS. “Akiva Goldsman To Reimagine 3 Classic Irwin Allen Sci-Fi Titles For TV” – Deadline has the story.

 Akiva Goldsman is developing a new Universe at Legendary Television featuring three reimagined Irwin Allen sci-fi TV series. The Oscar-winning writer, producer and director will draw inspiration for the new TV shows from Allen’s catalog and focus on revitalizing Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Land of the Giants and The Time Tunnel.

… Legendary Television is focused on the three titles above and not Allen’s second TV series Lost in Space, which aired from 1965-68 on CBS and was reimagined by Legendary TV for a 2018-21 series on Netflix. 20th Century Fox produced all four of the original shows….

[Thanks to Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Jason Sizemore, Joey Eschrich, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, and SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]

Alternate Futures for the Astounding Award

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Following the report that Asimov’s, Analog and F&SF have been purchased by a new owner, John Scalzi speculated about the fate of the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. Although voting is administered by the Worldcon, the Astounding Award belongs to Dell Magazines, publisher of Analog prior to this sale. Will Analog’s new owners continue the sponsorship? John Scalzi has volunteered a landing place if one is needed.

Formerly named the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, it has been presented at the Worldcon since 1973, two years after Campbell’s death. The award was established by Conde Nast, publisher of Analog at the time. In 2019 it was renamed for the Golden Age prozine Campbell edited – Astounding — following a storm over the Campbell name catalyzed by Jeannette Ng’s award acceptance remarks about Campbell’s racism.

The new owners could keep on sponsoring the Astounding Award, of course. In case they don’t, John Scalzi made this offer in a post at Whatever:

 If the new owners of Asimov’s and Analog don’t want to take sponsorship of the Astounding Award (or the award is not otherwise folded into the responsibilities of WSFS/the individual Worldcons), we’ll take it on. The ideal plan would be for the Scalzi Family Foundation to act as a bridge sponsor while we set up an endowment that would allow the Astounding Award to be run indefinitely.

UPDATE: Scalzi has learned from Asimov’s editor Sheila Williams that the new owners will continue to sponsor the various awards their magazines have been giving:

Sheila Williams (editor of Asimov’s) says: “Analog and Asimov’s new owners fully intend to support the awards that we and the mystery magazines bestow each year. We are also grateful for your continued support and love that you are determined to help keep Analog’s legacy going.”

New Ownership for Asimov’s, Analog and F&SF

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Asimov’s, Analog and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction have been purchased by a new owner. Jason Sanford reported the transactions on his Patreon page.

Sanford says the new owner of the magazines is Steven Salpeter and a group of investors. More information about the buyers is in Sanford’s report.

The Asimov’s, Analog and several other Dell magazines changed their websites to identify the new ownership over the weekend. F&SF, which was owned separately by Gordon Van Gelder, has yet to make an update.

[Thanks to Jason Sanford for the story.]

International Booker Prize 2025 Longlist

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The 2025 International Booker Prize longlist was released February 25. Five of the thirteen books are stories with genre elements.

The longlist was selected by a panel of five judges: Booker Prize-longlisted author Max Porter; prize-winning poet, director and photographer Caleb Femi; writer and Publishing Director of Wasafiri Sana Goyal; author and International Booker Prize-shortlisted translator Anton Hur; and award-winning singer-songwriter Beth Orton.

The shortlist of six will be announced on April 8, and the winners of the prize will be named on May 20. 

Here are the works of genre interest.

Written by Hiromi Kawakami; Translated by Asa Yoneda; Original language: Japanese

In the distant future, humans are on the verge of extinction and have settled in small tribes across the planet under the observation and care of the Mothers. Some children are made in factories, from cells of rabbits and dolphins; some live by getting nutrients from water and light, like plants. The survival of the race depends on the interbreeding of these and other alien beings – but it is far from certain that connection, love, reproduction, and evolution will persist among the inhabitants of this faltering new world. 

Unfolding over geological eons, Under the Eye of the Big Bird is at once an astonishing vision of the end of our species as we know it and a meditation on the qualities that, for better and worse, make us human. 

Written by Mircea Cărtărescu; Translated by Sean Cotter; Original language: Romanian

Grounded in the reality of communist Romania, the novel grapples with frightening health care, the absurdities of the education system and the struggles of family life, while investigating other universes and forking paths. 

In a surreal journey like no other, we visit a tuberculosis preventorium, an anti-death protest movement, a society of dream investigators and a minuscule world of dust mites living on a microscope slide. Combining fiction and history with autobiography – the book is partly based on Cărtărescu’s experiences as a teacher – Solenoid searches for escape routes through the alternate dimensions of life and art, as various monstrous realities erupt within the present. 

Last May, this book won the €100,000 Dublin Literary Award.

Written by Gaëlle Bélem; Translated by Karen FleetwoodLaëtitia Saint-Loubert; Original language: French

On the island of La Réunion, two parents struggle with the legacy of their enslaved ancestors. But this context offers little solace to their neglected daughter. These parents have distanced themselves from their heritage, replacing ancestral rituals with the empty consolations of alcohol and tele­vision. For the unnamed narrator of There’s a Monster Behind the Door, their resentment at her existence is made clear by their daily indifference, at best, and malice, at worst. She describes them as “horrible Creole versions of the monosyllabic Bartleby coupled with that nutcase Lovecraft”. This latter reference is explained by their dedication to horror films, which they watch throughout her childhood, with no consideration for how this might affect her.

Written by Solvej Balle; Translated by Barbara J. Haveland; Original language: Danish

In the first part of Solvej Balle’s epic septology, Tara Selter has slipped out of time. Every morning, she wakes up to the 18th of November

She no longer expects to wake up to the 19th of November, and she no longer remembers the 17th of November as if it were yesterday. She comes to know the shape of the day like the back of her hand – the grey morning light in her Paris hotel; the moment a blackbird breaks into song; her husband’s surprise at seeing her return home unannounced.  

But for everyone around her, this day is lived for the first and only time. They do not remember the other 18ths of November, and they do not believe her when she tries to explain. 

As Tara approaches her 365th 18th of November, she can’t shake the feeling that somewhere underneath the surface of this day, there’s a way to escape. 

On the Calculation of Volume I is the first book of a planned septology. Five books have been published in Danish so far, with translations underway in over 20 countries. 

Written by Ibtisam Azem; Translated by Sinan Antoon; Original language: Arabic

What if all the Palestinians in Israel simply disappeared one day? What would happen next? How would Israelis react? These unsettling questions are posed in Ibtisam Azem’s powerfully imaginative novel

Alaa is haunted by his grandmother’s memories of being displaced from Jaffa and becoming a refugee in her homeland after the Nakba. Ariel, Alaa’s neighbour and friend, is a liberal Zionist, critical of the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza yet faithful to the project of Israel. When he wakes up one morning to find that all Palestinians have suddenly vanished, Ariel begins searching for clues to the secret of their collective disappearance. 

That search, and Ariel’s reactions to it, intimately reveal the fissures at the heart of the Palestinian question. Between the stories of Alaa and Ariel are the people of Jaffa and Tel Aviv – café patrons, radio commentators, flower-cutters – against whose ordinary lives these fissures and questions play out. 

Spare yet evocative, intensely intelligent in its interplay of perspectives, The Book of Disappearance – which was critically acclaimed in its original Arabic edition – is an unforgettable glimpse into contemporary Palestine as it grapples with both the memory of loss and the loss of memory.