Monthly Archives: March 2025

Pixel Scroll 3/24/25 I’m Still Big; It’s The Pixels That Got Small

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(1) OVERSEAS VISITORS TO U.S. WARNED. “Some European countries and Canada issue advisories for travelers to the U.S.” – Minnesota Public Radio has the story.

Some European countries, as well as Canada, are warning their citizens who travel to the United States to strictly follow the country’s entry rules or risk detention as the Trump administration cracks down on immigration enforcement.

Denmark, the United Kingdom, Germany, Finland and Canada have revised their guidelines at a time when some travelers from these countries have been detained by immigration officials….

…The heightened advisories come after citizens from European countries have been detained and deported by immigration officials while traveling to the United States. Some of the warnings also note that the State Department has also suspended its policy allowing transgender, intersex and nonbinary people to update the sex field on their passports — eliminating the X marker as an option.

“We will enforce visa rules and other conditions of entry,” a State Department spokesperson told NPR on Saturday. “Prohibiting travel into the United States by those who might pose a threat or violate conditions of their visa is key to protecting the American people.”

On Friday, Germany’s Foreign Office adjusted its travel advisory after several of its citizens were reportedly arrested and detained by immigration authorities while entering the U.S., according to local media reports. The country is warning citizens that entering the U.S. through the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) or a visa does not guarantee the right to enter the country.

The foreign office’s guidance says that, because U.S. border officials have the final authority to make decisions about whether someone can enter the country, there’s nothing that the German government can do to reverse a denial of entry. It recommends that travelers be able to provide proof of their return trip home, such as a plane ticket.

A German official on Saturday told NPR the country’s consulates general are aware of cases of citizens being detained and are in contact with their families as well as U.S. officials.

The United Kingdom is also warning its residents to comply with all entry rules or they “may be liable to arrest or detention.” The move comes after a tourist from the U.K. was reportedly arrested and detained by ICE at the U.S.-Canada border earlier this month.

Both Denmark and Finland have updated their travel guidance regarding people’s gender markers on their travel documents….

…On Friday, Canada also updated its travel guidelines for entering the U.S. Canadians and foreign nationals who visit the U.S. longer than 30 days “must be registered with the United States Government,” the government’s website warns — and that failure to comply could lead to “penalties, fines, and misdemeanor prosecution.”

(2) CANADIAN BOOKSELLERS CHALLENGE UNEXPECTED CONSEQUENCES. Publishers Weekly reports “Canadian Booksellers Unite in Tariff Fight”.

Canadian booksellers have joined forces to ask that Prime Minister Mark Carney exempt books from the 25% counter-tariffs scheduled to take effect on April 2 on $125 billion worth of goods imported from the U.S.

In an unusual collaboration, Laura Carter, executive director of the Canadian Independent Booksellers’ Association (CIBA), and Heather Reisman, CEO of chain bookseller Indigo Books & Music, sent a letter to the Prime Minister on March 20 urging the exclusion of books from the impending tariffs.

Carter and Reisman said in their letter that imposing tariffs on books would have “devastating consequences for Canadian readers, our businesses, and our cultural landscape,” reported the Quill & Quire.

The letter highlights a significant industry concern: that books by Canadian authors printed in and distributed through U.S. warehouses would be subject to the additional tariff, as the majority of books sold in Canada are published by Canadian divisions of multinational publishers.

“Unlike interchangeable consumer goods we know that readers will not likely substitute a book arriving via the U.S. for a Canadian printed and warehoused book,” Carter and Reisman said in the letter. “At this time there is nowhere near the capacity in Canada to handle all of our printing and warehousing. This tariff threatens the survival of bookstores and the livelihoods of thousands of Canadians.”…

(3) NNEDI OKORAFOR PROFILE. BBC Sounds makes available Outook’s feature on Nnedi Okorafor,“Making Marvel magic: The creative spark from my hospital bed”.

Nnedi Okorafor is an award-winning, Nigerian-American author of fantasy and science fiction. 

Becoming a writer was not the most straightforward journey for Nnedi. Before her literary success she was a talented tennis player and dreamt of turning pro. However following a diagnosis of scoliosis, routine surgery to her spine left her temporarily paralysed. 

Confined to her hospital bed, Nnedi found solace in her vivid imagination and began writing for the first time. It was the start of a highly successful career as an author and led to a request from Marvel to write some of their comics. Over the years she has written characters including Spiderman, the X-Men and the Avengers. Nnedi is also the first woman to write the character of T’Challa – the Black Panther, as well as his tech-loving sister, Shuri. Her latest book is called Death of the Author. 

(4) CHALLENGER HISTORY RECOGNIZED. The National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced March 20. The complete list of honorees is at the link. The only work of genre interest is the nonfiction winner.

Adam Higginbotham won the nonfiction award for Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space. As committee chair Jo Livingstone stated, “Surprisingly propulsive in form and shocking in the facts it reveals, Challenger is a story of incompetence fostered when government agencies are invaded by corporate decision-makers.” 

(5) THEY WERE EXPENDABLE. “Review: Mickey 17” from Camestros Felapton.

…While Timo manages to secure a nice position on the crew of the colony ship, Mickey fails to read the paperwork and ends up being the designated “Expendable”: a person who has elected to be digitised so that new copies of him can be printed out each time he dies. For various reasons (explained in the film), the ship is only allowed the one expendable and only one copy of Mickey at a time. Thus he ends up being a living crash test dummy/human Guinea pig for scientists on the ship. Each death and reprinting leads to a new number….

(6) EL-MOHTAR’S NEW BOOK. Dina praises “A Fairy Tale With Teeth: Amal El-Mohtar – The River Has Roots” at SFF Book Reviews.

…I loved everything about this little book. The plot itself – that of two sisters who stumbled into Faerie as children, but have come out again – was fast-moving and surprisingly exciting for such a short novella. The language was pure poetry, not just on a line by line basis, but also because it includes snippet of songs and actual poems. The beautiful etching illustrations are just the cherry on top of the gorgeous SFF novella sundae.
Perhaps most impressively was the way El-Mohtar managed to make her characters come to life….

(7) MYSTERY UNLOCHED. [Item by Steven French.] Here’s a fun piece on the various media appearances of the Loch Ness monster, prompted by a musical about to premiere in Scotland: “From The Simpsons to Werner Herzog: the coolest, craziest, scariest Nessies ever” in the Guardian.

It is the UK’s largest body of fresh water, its volume totalling more than all the lakes of England and Wales combined. It is also the UK’s greatest source of daft stories. For the best part of a century, Loch Ness has used its monster-adjacent status not only to finance a healthy tourist economy, but also to generate a small industry in Nessie-related fiction, from the inspired to the crackpot. The Simpsons sent Mr Burns to do battle with the creature in an episode called Monty Can’t Buy Me Love. From the pen of poet Ted Hughes came Nessie the Mannerless Monster, who was tired of being told she does not exist. And indie folkster Matilda Mann has a song called The Loch Ness Monster, containing this advice: “Stay right down there.” Not wanting to be left out, the Royal Mail has just honoured Nessie with a fine, if rather unscary, stamp.

To these slithery ranks we will shortly be able to add Nessie, a family musical written and composed by Glasgow’s Shonagh Murray and about to premiere in Edinburgh and Pitlochry. Murray was reluctant to tackle such a familiar Scottish icon, until a challenge from her father drew her in. “I had just finished doing a couple of shows about the women behind Robert Burns,” she says. “I was joking with my dad that I needed to find something a wee bit less Scottish. He was like: ‘Oh, there’s loads of Scottish stories that have been told – but not to their full potential. You should do a Nessie musical.’ On a dare, I wrote an opening number. The more I was writing, the more I liked it. There was something charming and special about it.”

I never met the monster, said the writer of The Secret of the Loch after her research, but I did find a wonderful whisky

Despite claims to the contrary, the story goes back no further than May 1933. That was when hotel proprietor Donaldina Mackay and her husband John, driving along the north shore of the loch, claimed to have seen a large creature on the surface. They said it resembled a whale and described it rolling for a minute before disappearing. Their testimony, reported by the Inverness Courier, set off a summer of sighting claims. At the time, the dinosaur-battling King Kong was becoming a monster hit in cinemas, but here was a fearsome creature on Scotland’s very own soil (or loch)….

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Mike Glyer.]

Born March 24, 1946 – Andrew Porter, 79. File 770’s indispensible Scroll contributor Andrew Porter got into sf fandom in the Sixties. He published a major genzine, Algol/Starship (1963–83), which received five Hugo nominations and won in 1974. And he has been a leading sf news writer for even longer — his first news-related column on upcoming paperbacks appeared in James V. Taurasi’s Science Fiction Times in 1960. Later in the decade he started his own newzine, S.F. Weekly (1966–68), and returned in the Eighties with Science Fiction Chronicle (1980–2002), a 21-time Hugo nominee and won in 1993 and 1994.

Andrew Porter in 1993 with his Hugo Award.

Porter was assistant editor on The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction from 1966–74, and associate editor at Lancer Books in the late 1960s. Outside the sf field he also worked as a trade magazine editor and advertising production manager on such titles as Rudder, Quick Frozen Foods (under editor Sam Moskowitz), QFF International, Construction Equipment, and Electro-Procurement.

He has independently published nonfiction collections such as The Book of Ellison, Dreams Must Explain Themselves by Ursula K. Le Guin, Exploring Cordwainer Smith, and Experiment Perilous: The Art and Science of Anguish in Science Fiction and The Fiction of James Tiptree, Jr. by Gardner Dozois. He was honored with a Special British Fantasy Award in 1992.

He was Fan Guest of Honour at ConFiction, the 1990 World Science Fiction Convention held in The Hague, Netherlands. The audio of his speech is available at Fanac.org.

He also was recognized by Chicon V (1991) with a Special Committee Award for Distinguished Semiprozine Work. And he was honored with the Big Heart Award in 2009.

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Rainbow Mars by Larry Niven (1999)

Twenty-six years ago Rainbow Mars was published by Tor. It is my absolutely favorite work by Larry Niven, with Ringworld being my second. After that, it’s the Gil the ARM stories. Because of what the stories are, it hasn’t been touched by the Suck Fairy at all.

It contains six stories, five previously published and the longest, “Rainbow Mars”, written for this collection, plus some other material. It is about Svetz, the cross-reality traveler who keeps encountering beings who really should not exist including those Martians. He travel back in time  but it isn’t really time but alternative realties to retrieve animals as now in 3050 of them save dogs are extinct, but he never gets it right. 

SPOILER HERE. Horses are unicorns, Gila monsters are, monsters of sort in the form of fire breathing dragons, and, well, guess, that bird? No a phoenix is certainly not a great idea, is it? END OF SPOILER, REALLY IT IS. 

Now in the afterword, Niven notes, “Time travel is fantasy. But the only way to get fun out of it is to treat it as Analog–style science fiction. Keep it internally consistent. Lay out a set of rules and invite the reader to beat you to the consequences.” So these stories are to him SF, not fantasy. 

The first story, “Get A Horse!” was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in October 1969. That was followed by “Bird in the Hand” in the same magazine, October of the next year. Surprisingly the third story, “Leviathan!” was published in Playboy in August of that year. 

Yes, I know Playboy did a lot of SF, it’s just that I wouldn’t have expected this story to show up there. It fits F&SF better in my opinion. Your opinion on that matter of course may differ.

Then “There’s a Wolf in My Time Machine” was published in October of that year in the fine zine that printed the first two. 

Finally the last story that got printed at that time, “Death in a Cage” was published in Niven’s The Flight of the Horse collection in September of 1973 which collected these stories as well. (The Flight of the Horse also had “Flash Crowd” which I like a lot and “What Good is a Glass Dagger?” which is fantastic.) 

Now we get Rainbow Mars, the novel, yes novel as Tor insists it is, that finishes out this delightfully silly volume. I think it’s a novella but y’all can give me your opinion on that. 

Some of Pratchett’s idea from a conversation he had with Niven remain in the final version of Rainbow Mars, mainly the use of Yggdrasil, the world tree. Though there’s Norsemen as well…

There’s two other two short pieces, “The Reference Director Speaks”, in which Niven speaks about his fictional sources for the Mars he creates, and “Svetz’s Time Line” which is self-explanatory. 

An afterword, “Svetz and the Beanstalk”, rounds out the work in which Niven talks about the fictional sources for Rainbow Mars as a whole.

The fantastic cover art, which was nominated for a Chelsey Award, is by Bob Eggleton who has won, if my counting skills are right tonight, an impressive nine Hugos, mostly for Best Professional Artist though there was one for Best Related Work for his most excellent Greetings from Earth: The Art of Bob Eggleton. 

I once, a long time ago, heard a pirated copy of the audiobook when the internet was a lot easier place to find such things. There were Zelazny novels there read by him. Sigh… 

Postscript: We also recommend John Hertz’ “Interview with Hanville Svetz (Larry Niven, co-author)” first published in Argentus, 2004, and available in Dancing and Joking on page 34.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) DON’T PANIC. “Netflix’s $275 Million ‘The Electric State’ Has Fallen Flat. No Matter?” The New York Times explains the reasons for the company’s sang froid. (Behind a paywall.)

Netflix spent over $275 million to make “The Electric State,” a sci-fi action adventure film starring Millie Bobby Brown, Chris Pratt and a slew of sentient robots. Had it opened in theaters, instead of on its service as it did on March 14, the film would almost certainly be declared a giant disappointment.

Reviews have been dismal. And though the movie debuted at No. 1 on the streaming giant’s weekly chart of most-watched movies, it had far fewer views (25.2 million) than other expensive features, including “The Gray Man” (41.2 million), which was made by the same directors, the brothers Joe and Anthony Russo.

But there was little hand-wringing inside Netflix this week. No marketing chief was blamed. No production executive packed up her office.

Instead, the movie demonstrates how different Netflix is from the traditional studios — and how easily the company can spend so much for a middling result without Wall Street’s noticing. (Its stock is up slightly this week.)

Truth is, no one piece of content moves the needle at Netflix in either direction. “Squid Game 2” was the most-watched title in the company’s most recent engagement report, with 87 million views, but it accounted for only 0.7 percent of total viewing. Rather, the $18 billion that the company spends each year on movies and shows is meant to reach a worldwide audience with different tastes and interests. The budget for “The Electric State” represents 1.5 percent of what the company will spend on content this year….

(12) KEY OBSERVATIONS. Olivia Waite opens the door to “Science Fiction, Locked Room Mysteries, and the Joy of Literary Games” at CrimeReads.

Let me be very obvious at the start and say: a murder victim can’t tell you who the killer is. Locked-room mysteries are puzzling because the only person you’re sure was in the room is the one person you can’t ask for testimony. That’s also what makes locked-room plots such challenging things to read or write — a baffling impossibility turns out to be an illusion with a material explanation. An airgun from the empty house across the street, a serpent in the ventilator, a disguise or an accomplice or a clock hand nudged to display a fraudulent time.

Chandler famously objected to how this makes murder into something like a game — and he’s not wrong, ethically or aesthetically — but he does overlook the crucial fact that games are extremely fun. And my god do we need whatever fun we can scrape from these times….

… The great rebellious joy of sci-fi is that it rewrites the rules of our universe: faster than light travel, sentient mechanical beings, aliens and wormholes and alternative timelines and mirror universes and all. You must only touch the ball with your hands becomes you must never touch the ball with your hands. You transform a fact so you can explore the consequences — the propulsive and then what? that keeps the fictional pages turning. Humans colonize Mars — and then what? Robots can have feelings — and then what?

A corpse can tell you who killed them — and then what?…

(13) STOP THEM SCRAPERS! [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] All the “by clicking on this, you accept our terms”… ever want to set your terms (my son’s working out such a “by my use of your software, you you agree…”)? Well, here’s an IEEE proposed standard for it. “Doc Searls Proposes We Set Our Own Terms and Policies for Web Site Tracking” at Slashdot.

…Basically your web browser proffers whatever agreement you’ve chosen (from a canonical list hosted at Customer Commons) to the web sites and other online services that you’re visiting.

“Browser makers can build something into their product, or any developer can make a browser add-on or extension…” Searls writes. “On the site’s side — the second-party side — CMS makers can build something in, or any developer can make a plug-in (WordPress) or a module (Drupal). Mobile app toolmakers can also come up with something (or many things)…”MyTerms creates a new regime for privacy: one based on contract. With each MyTerm you are the first party. Not the website, the service, or the app maker. They are the second party. And terms can be friendly. For example, a prototype term called NoStalking says “Just show me ads not based on tracking me.” This is good for you, because you don’t get tracked, and good for the site because it leaves open the advertising option. NoStalking lives at Customer Commons, much as personal copyrights live at Creative Commons. (Yes, the former is modeled on the latter.)…

(14) SUNK COST. Adam Rowe discusses depictions of “Atlantis” at 70s Sci-Fi Art.

Much like the Bermuda triangle, Bigfoot, and the psychic powers of plants, serious discussions of Atlantis seem to have dwindled down to nothing since the ’70s and ’80s. But maybe it would be more fair to say that they’ve gotten less fun because, much like any other conspiracy theory, belief in Atlantis is now an on-ramp to harmful views like climate change denial or white supremacy….

… Now that I’ve gotten all the sensible opinions out at the front of this post, I have to admit that I really enjoy all this pseudo-historical nonsense. I devoted a whole chapter of my sci-fi art book to cryptozoology and the paranormal – while it was clearly distinct from science fiction, it was a thriving genre with plenty of crossover, including many big-name artists….

Here’s an example by David Hardy.

(15) ANDOR. Disney+ has dropped a trailer for the final season of Andor, which begins streaming on April 22.

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, John Hertz, Mark Roth-Whitworth, 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 Andrew (not Werdna).]

Updated Edition of TAFF Report Anthology Added to TAFF Free Library

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Orphans no more! David Langford has assembled installments of the reports written by twenty-seven winners of the Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund in the TAFF Trip Report Anthology: Second Edition.

The update arrives seven years after Langford published the TAFF Trip Report Anthology. This 2025 revision of the original 2017 ebook brings together segments of abandoned, undersized or as yet unfinished TransAtlantic Fan Fund trip reports, plus other related material.

The TAFF winners represented are Wally Weber (1963), Terry Carr (1965), Elliot K. Shorter (1970), Peter Weston (1974), Roy Tackett (1976), Terry Hughes (1979), Stu Shiffman (1981), Avedon Carol (1983), Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden (1985), Greg Pickersgill (1986), Lilian Edwards and Christina Lake (1988), Robert Lichtman (1989), Pam Wells (1991), Jeanne Bowman (1992), Abigail Frost (1993), Dan Steffan (1995), Ulrika O’Brien (1998), Maureen Kincaid Speller (1998), Randy Byers (2003), Steve Green (2009), Anne and Brian Gray (2010), Curt Phillips (2014), John Purcell (2017), Michael Lowrey (2020) and Sandra Bond (2023).

Second-edition updates comprise the removal of now-redundant sample chapters by Jeanne Gomoll (1987 – full report published 2020), John Coxon (2011 – full report published 2020), Jim Mowatt (2013 – full report published 2018); a newly unearthed chapter on Greg Pickersgill; and more recent chapters by John Purcell, Michael Lowrey and Sandra Bond.

The cover design incorporates the TAFF eastbound and westbound logos designed by Anne Stokes in 2006. 134,000 words.

This new collection is available from the TAFF Library as a free download, however, in hopes your generosity will be inspired by the delegates’ accounts of their adventures, the page is equipped with TAFF donation buttons ready to take any of three currencies!

The volume will be officially released on April 1, but you don’t actually have to wait, thanks to David Langford who has allowed a soft opening for File 770 readers.

Warner Holme Review: The Corset and the Jellyfish

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The Corset and the Jellyfish by Nick Bantock (Tachyon, 2023)

By Warner Holme:  This is a book-length collection of the extremely short story subgenre known as drabble. 

Each story is illustrated, a delightful set that with the exception of certain choices made in designing the cover and interior are all also by the author. Each of these is placed on the page opposite the story it illustrates, allowing clear connection in the mind of the reader. 

Among the most appropriate illustrations is that for “Surrealist Chess” As it resembles nothing more than a pair of red and black playing pieces which have begun to twist and merge. Even a basic reading of the story will notice that the coloring of one set of pieces and it is white. However the nature of the rest of the narrative and the very title will make the difference in coloration seem only all the more appropriate rather than a discontinuous issue.

Sometimes the connection is not exactly clear, as is the case with “Looking Back.” Is this short piece comes early in the collection, and features an illustration of a figure with a bow and arrow on a hill pointing it towards a star. The short piece on the other hand gives an amusing look at the eccentricities of a professor of archaeology and her personal history. While one could argue for the historical context of an individual sporting a bow and arrow regardless, it still feels extremely odd as a choice

“The Rag Doll” has a more fitting illustration with a figure that isn’t exactly humanoid but couldn’t the less be the titular object. This short is very much in the more horrific area of tales in the collection, strange and weird with bad things happening. The fact that there is an arguable moral, and definite definite course of events might lead some to see it more like a fairy tale by Grimm.

Others like the lynching give very much a look at reality in its darker sense, With the brutal murder in the implied style of an individual of color for a non crime that may have served to be completely unrelated to his actions. Aside from featuring a visually dark figure, this one joins the collection with barely if at all involved illustrations.

None of this is, of course, to say that the illustrations are bad. If one enjoys the style of them they will likely enjoy most if not all of the weird little scribblings so carefully chosen throughout. Instead it is merely a notice that many of them will seem decidedly divorced from these stories they might be intended to illustrate. At the same time looking at them truly separately would be largely inappropriate, the various pieces having been selected for connection.

How well a reader will enjoy this book isn’t so much connected to their enjoyment of the ultra-short 100 word form it is constructed out of as it is the entire matter. Fans of the author are more likely to appreciate it than those who do not like him, of course, However while it retains the charm of much of his work it is very different in resultant effect. Curious parties would do well to check it out as it is a very short read However it is unlikely to convert anyone into lovers of the drabble art form.

Pixel Scroll 3/23/25 Sometimes, Scrolls Just… Break, Their Pixels Spraying Everywhere, Like Beads In A Bottle, Just More Cluesome

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(1) COMIC CREATOR BURKE’S ICE ORDEAL. From downthetubes.net: “Comic Creator RE Burke: Her Visa Story”.

The family of comic creator RE Burke, aka Becky Burke, have issued a detailed statement about her recent detention nightmare in the United States, asking for it to be shared so that the many thousands who offered support after her family’s appeal for Becky’s return can see it.

“We want everyone to know how grateful we are for their support, prayers and help in raising the profile. It is the reason she is home with us now, thank you,” they explain.

As we previously reported, comic creator RE Burke, aka Becky Burke, is home after her detention nightmare in the United States, detained by the United States by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for over two weeks for travelling with wrong visa. She is now back in the UK.

Becky, 28, was denied entry into Washington State after US immigration officials accused her of travelling on the wrong visa, her plight prompting a massive campaign to free her, which we reported here.

A GoFundMe campagn fund raised over £9000 to cover legal Becky’s costs. No more donations are being taken. Any surplus will be donated to charities in the Seattle area helping people in similar situations….

After 19 harrowing days in ICE detention due to a visa mix-up, our daughter Becky has finally returned home to the UK. Instead of allowing her to take an immediate flight back, Homeland Security detained her in handcuffs at a Tacoma, WA facility under harsh conditions. The current immigration crackdown and systemic delays exacerbated her ordeal, worsened by a shortage of immigration judges. Becky’s nightmare ended on March 18th, and she is now beginning to recover….

Did she overstay the 90 day limit on the ESTA tourist visa?

No. She had only been in the USA for 50 days when she had planned to travel by bus to Canada, she was planning to spend 2 months in Canada and then fly home to the UK.

Did she break the rules of the ESTA?

The ESTA is for tourists only. For work or study a specific visa is required. Becky did a lot of research before she went and what she had planned was classed as tourism. This was accepted when she entered the US on 7th January. It was also accepted in 2023 when she spent two weeks in San Francisco, with a host family. On the 26th February, US border officers suddenly decided staying with host families and joining in with household chores was now classed as work. Our US Immigration Lawyer said they got their definition of work wrong.

Was she given a chance to return to the UK at her own cost?

No, this was not offered at the border despite this being the usual protocol for tourists. ICE had the chance to offer this at any stage during her detention, her parents even had a flight home booked for her at one point, in the hope they would let her take it, but they didn’t.

Does she have a criminal record?

No. She also has many people who testify to her good character and her gentle soul.

Was she allowed to let family know when she was being deported?

No. One of the other detainees had to call us to say she had left. Even the British Consulate were not told that she had boarded the flight. We were only certain when she arrived at Heathrow.

Was she treated with ‘dignity and respect’ as written in ICE policy.

No. She was handcuffed when she was transferred from the border to the facility. When inside the facility ICE did not communicate where she was in the process, all her possessions were confiscated, lights were on 24/7 and there were four head counts each day during which they were forced stay on their bunk for at least an hour. When she was eventually transferred to Seattle airport to fly home she was taken in leg and waist chains and handcuffs, and was escorted to the plane.

We wish Becky and her family well after this ordeal….

(2) BEING ORWELL’S SON. [Item by Steven French.] On the 80th anniversary of 1984, the Guardian has an illuminating interview with Orwell’s son Richard Blair on his father’s attitude towards women, his antisemitism and his (Blair’s) mother: “George Orwell and me: Richard Blair on life with his extraordinary father”.

…Most memorable was the time Orwell misread the tide when they were out in the hazardous Gulf of Corryvreckan, home to one of the world’s biggest whirlpools. Their dinghy overturned and they almost drowned. Did that shock Orwell? “I think it gave him a hell of a shock, yes, absolutely.” Was his father as reckless with you as with himself? Blair smiles. “Well, health and safety didn’t really rear its ugly head in those days, did it? And yet we survived.”

There was one precaution Orwell did take. “He said I had to have a pair of decent, stout boots, because of the snakes. Jura has got a lot of adders. They’re not desperately poisonous, but he had a thing about snakes, probably because of his days in Burma.” Was he scared of them? “Yes, to a degree, but not scared enough that he wouldn’t stamp on them and kill them.” Orwell treated his son as a mini-adult, perhaps not surprisingly, as he had little experience of children and there were no other kids around….

(3) FRENCH BOOKSTORE RESISTANCE. “Mutiny brews in French bookshops over Hachette owner’s media grip” — the Guardian has the story.

A conservative Catholic billionaire and media owner is facing an independent bookshop rebellion in France over his influence in the publishing world.

Dozens of independent booksellers are trying to counter the growing influence of Vincent Bolloré, whose vast cultural empire includes television, radio, the Sunday paper Le Journal du Dimanche, and also, since 2023, the biggest book publishing and distribution conglomerate in France, Hachette Livre.

“Books matter,” said Thibaut Willems, owner of Le Pied à Terre independent bookshop in Paris’s 18th arrondissement and one of the booksellers taking a stand by limiting their orders of Hachette Livre books and placing them on lower shelves….

… As well as the moves by some booksellers, protest groups on the left have started a “bookmark rebellion”, where individuals hide bookmarks inside paperbacks in large commercial stores with messages such as “boycott Hachette”, detailing the scale of the Bolloré empire….

(4) ART DIRECTOR SWINGS AND MISSES. Michael Whelan analyzes an example of “When the Client Gets It Wrong”.

Preliminary concepts for THE DEMON OF SCATTERY

The Cover and What Could Have Been

ME: There’s one concept that stood out to me for The Demon of Scattery—one of my all-time favorite prelims—and I’ve always been curious how the AD passed on choosing it because the composition is so dynamic. It would have been a slam dunk of a cover.

MRW: I couldn’t agree more!

Back then I felt that it was on me to offer comps that would generate a good cover for a book, and if any of them didn’t make for a good painting that was my fault for not realizing the full potential of the original concept.

In retrospect, I often find myself asking a variation of the same question you posed: “Why on Earth did I submit any other options when THIS concept is so obviously the best of the bunch?”

The answer, of course, is that it wasn’t obvious to me at the time.

Also, as a cover artist I felt it incumbent on me to present a range of options, attempting to reflect what the publisher [and occasionally, even the author ????] wanted emphasized in the image. The editors called the shots more often than not, and being human, they often made regrettable decisions.

And on more occasions than I would like, the people who really called the shots were marketing idiots who thought THEY knew better than anyone else what the public would be looking for. Most of the banal or downright crappy covers one sees are the result of that aspect of the corporate bookselling machine.

While a few of the concepts submitted were strong, my favorite is pictured above—and not simply because it was the most polished of the lot. The composition is sinuous and alive with action.

There are so many subtle points of connection that bring eyes where they need to be. Placed off-center right, the warrior provides an easy entry point with the lines of his body directing attention to the serpent and the sorceress. The curve of the rocks forms a bowl, a solid foundation to leap into the image.

(5) NO AI. The Ursa Major Awards has posted a “Temporary notice regarding AI content”.

…We’ve been asked about our AI policies, which is the purpose of my message today!

Our current statement, although not final, is that AI/LLM generated content is not allowed. This includes art, text, and covers for things like books or music. The only exception is an event where an author has an AI generated image attributed to their work by their publisher without their permission. I’ve been told this does happen!

Regarding this year’s content, to the best of my awareness, none of the accepted entries break this rule. Should that not be the case, please do not hesitate to talk to me about it!

(6) ALIEN ROMANCE AND TEA. Clarion West will host “Steamy in Seattle 2025” on May 10. Tickets available here.

Meet authors Ann Aguirre and Elizabeth Stephens as they discuss the alien romance genre, science fiction and fantasy worlds, and what writing romance has taught them! Paranormal romance author Jasmine Silvera to moderate. 

Join us at Seattle’s beautiful Nordic Museum for a traditional high tea, featuring a delightful selection of savory finger sandwiches, scones, salad, and delectable sweet treats catered by Lovely Night Catering — and a custom tea blend provided by Friday Afternoon Tea. 

Time to pick out your favorite fascinators and elegant gowns to wear or get your fedora ready in preparation for this utterly romantic opportunity to support the literary arts! 

This event is not just a fundraiser; it’s a celebration of emerging and underrepresented writers — particularly women in the field of speculative fiction. Steamy in Seattle raises money for our annual programs, sliding scale tuition, and scholarship programs. 

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cora Buhlert.]

March 23, 1904 — H. Beam Piper. (Died 1964.)

By Cora Buhlert: Content warning: Discussion of suicide

 Considering how well regarded he was and still is as an author, we know surprisingly little about him. For example, we don’t know whether the H stands for Henry, Horace or Herbert. And while we know how he died, we don’t know exactly when or why.

H. Beam Piper never received a formal higher education, because he considered the college experience unpleasant, but instead educated himself in science, engineering and history. He worked as a laborer and later as a night watchman at the railroad yard in his hometown.

H. Beam Piper

At some point, Piper began to write and in 1947 at age 43 he sold his first story “Time and Time Again” to John W. Campbell at Astounding Science Fiction. More stories followed, both for Astounding and other magazines. In 1961, finally, Piper published his first novel, the juvenile Four-Day-Planet. On the planet Fenris, a year is only four days long, but each of those days lasts four thousand hours with extreme temperatures. Giant whale-like creatures roam the seas of Fenris and are hunted for their valuable tallow wax, which makes for excellent radiation shielding. Protagonist Walt Boyd is a seventeen-year-old boy reporter, who gets entangled in a conflict between the whalers guild and the corrupt mayor of Fenris and some equally corrupt business people. Basically, this is Tintin and the Space Whalers with a bonus message about the importance of formal education, which is ironic considering Piper’s own life. I have read Four-Day-Planet and enjoyed it quite a bit as a fun science fiction adventure.

However, my introduction to Piper’s work was not Four-Day-Planet, but what is probably his best known work, the 1962 novel Little Fuzzy. I discovered the book as a teenager at Storm, the one bookshop in town with an extensive foreign language section. Most of that foreign language section actually consisted of dictionaries. There was also a table where one could peruse the huge Books-in-Print catalogues as well as a special order desk, where you could order any book listed in those giant catalogues. That special order desk was always busy with university students ordering otherwise unavailable textbooks and literature. Annoyingly, those students also kept staring at me, especially the male ones, and I was sure that they were judging my reading choices. Yes, I was quite dense.

The foreign language section at Storm also has two spinner racks with mass market paperbacks. The paperbacks in those spinner racks were almost entirely genre fiction. Romance, crime and mystery and of course science fiction, fantasy and horror. Whenever I was in the city center, I would stop at Storm (which still exists, though much diminished), head up to the foreign language section on the first floor and check out the spinner racks for anything that caught my eye, all the while dodging annoying male students staring at me. I discovered a lot of great authors and books in those spinner racks. And one day, I discovered Little Fuzzy, the 1980s Ace Books edition with the Michael Whelan cover of protagonist Jack Holloway surrounded by Fuzzies. The books caught my eye at once, because the Fuzzies were not only cute, but they looked just like the Ewoks from Return of the Jedi. Indeed, Little Fuzzy is widely considered to be the inspiration for the Ewoks and the parallels are quite obvious. The cover intrigued me enough that I plopped down my hard earned pocket money to buy the book. And English language mass market paperbacks were expensive in the 1980s due to the bad exchange rate and high import duties.

On the planet Zarathustra, prospector Jack Holloway discovers a furry alien creature he names Little Fuzzy. Little Fuzzy takes Jack to meet the rest of his tribe and Jack realizes that the Fuzzies are intelligent. This causes a problem for the mining company that has set up shop on Zarathustra to exploit the planet’s natural resources, because if the Fuzzies are declared an intelligent species, they and their habitat will be protected by law and the company will lose their mining rights. Being an unscrupulous company in a science fiction novel, they will of course do everything to prevent this, up to and including murder.

My teen self enjoyed Little Fuzzy a whole lot and it’s easy to see why. The plight of the furry aliens and their human protector against the big bad mining company is highly compelling. Though I never read any of the sequels, neither Piper’s own nor those by other authors, mostly because I didn’t know they existed.

One H. Beam Piper novel I did read, though several years later, was Space Viking, which was serialized in Analog from November 1962 to February 1963 and then appeared as a paperback in 1963. Once again, it was the cover – a glorious Michael Whelan cover with the titular space Vikings in front of a bright purple background – which attracted me along with, “Oh, it’s by H. Beam Piper. Cool. I liked Little Fuzzy.”

The protagonist of Space Viking is Lucas Trask, an aristocrat from the planet Gram. Trask is about to marry Lady Elaine, when a spurned former suitor of Elaine’s crashes the wedding and proceeds to gun down the wedding party (shades of the Red Wedding from A Song of Ice and Fire and the Moldavian wedding massacre from Dynasty, though Space Viking predates them both). Elaine is killed but Trask survives and vows revenge. He joins the Space Vikings, a group of space-faring raiders, to go after the killer, who has escaped aboard a stolen spaceship. In the process, Trask winds up establishing a little galactic empire of his own and also finds a new love. And yes, he gets his man, too, in the end. 

I enjoyed Space Viking, though not nearly as much as Little Fuzzy. Part of the reason may simply be that I was older when I read Space Viking and more critical. The novel offered plenty of adventure and thrills, but also some irritating politics, including a very American view of emigration and colonization that is common, but also plain wrong. In fact, I remember wondering at the time, “Was Piper always like this and I just didn’t notice?”

Little Fuzzy, Four-Day-Planet and Space Viking are all part of a future history series called the Terro-Human Future History along with the 1963 novel The Cosmic Computer and several pieces of short fiction. The Terro-Human Future History chronicles the rise and fall and rebirth of a galactic civilization and was clearly influenced by the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. 

Piper also wrote the Paratime series, which chronicles the adventures of the Paratime Police who can move between timelines and alternate histories. The Paratime series consists of several pieces of short fiction and one novel, Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen, which was published in 1965 and would be Piper’s final novel. 

This brings us to the sad part of this birthday note, namely Piper’s untimely death. It is widely known that Piper committed suicide, but both the reason and the exact date of his death are not known. 

What is known is that Piper dated the last entry in his diary November 5, 1964. On November 8, his body was found. Piper had apparently shut off the power and water to his apartment, covered the walls and floors with tarp and shot himself with a handgun from his extensive collection. He left behind a note saying “I don’t like to leave messes when I go away, but if I could have cleaned up any of this mess, I wouldn’t be going away.”

What mess precisely Piper was referring to is not known. The most common explanation is that Piper had financial problems. He had just gone through a painful and costly divorce and his agent was not replying to his letters and calls – due to having died – so Piper assumed his writing career was over. Another explanation is that Piper wanted to prevent his ex-wife from collecting his life insurance payment, so he took his own life to make sure that the insurance company would not pay. Most likely, the reason for his death was a combination of these factors.

More than sixty years after Piper’s death, the legacy that remains is a remarkable body of work, much of which is not only still in print, but is still receiving sequels and prequels written by other authors to this day.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) AT THE SHOW. The boys were whoopin’ it up in the Malamute Saloon – er, the Glendale Civic Auditorium – during today’s LA Vintage Paperback Show. Photos by John King Tarpinian.

About 20 minutes before opening.
Ten minutes after opening.

(10) DO YOU KNOW THE WAY TO MILTON KEYNES? [Item by Steven French.] A sci-fi graphic novel from ten years ago is reissued and reviewed (by someone who seems to hold, sadly, some rather stereotypical attitudes towards the genre): “There’s No Time Like the Present by Paul B Rainey review – a funny, unpredictable and wild comic” in the Guardian.

People who enjoy science fiction love to imagine the future: time travel, spaceships, something wobbly with a green face. But what if those fans really had access to it – the future, I mean – courtesy of something very similar to the internet? This is the possibility Paul B Rainey floats in There’s No Time Like the Present, in which a crowd of misfits from Milton Keynes (once the future itself) are able, if not to visit Mars, then at least to watch episodes of Doctor Who that have not yet been screened.

Mordant and misanthropic in almost equal measure, Rainey’s book has three central characters, each one somewhat stuck, unable fully to escape their childhood. Barry, an obnoxious lazybones, still lives at home with his parents; he makes his living selling bootleg recordings of TV shows he has lifted from the “ultranet”, which provides entry to the future. Cliff, Barry’s friend, and a yoghurt-addicted woman called Kelly live together in her new house, but they’re not a couple; while he secretly pines for her, he’s only her tenant. In the evenings, they watch, with varying degrees of guilt, future episodes of their favourite series (Doctor Who in his case, Emmerdale in hers): tapes pressed on them by the grisly Barry….

(11) BRICKS GALORE. “Huge LEGO ‘Game of Thrones’ The Wall Has 200,000 Pieces – Is Very, Very Cool” according to Bell of Lost Souls.

The Wall is maybe the most iconic setting in Game of Thrones. Constructed by Bran the Builder in the Age of Heroes, it marks the northern border of the Seven Kingdoms. Some three hundred miles long and several hundred feet high in most places, it is one of the wonders of the world. Of course, the wall is no normal wall; it is built of ice and carries potent magical protections.

Originally meant to keep the Others out of the Realms of Men, for most of its history, it instead kept the Wildlings of the North out of the Seven Kingdoms. The Wall is home to The Night’s Watch. This order of men sworn to defend the Wall and the Realms of Men has built a number of castles into the Wall. Along with the Red Keep, it is one of the major setting locations of the story.

The Wall has now been rendered in stunning detail in LEGO. Done by the talented Anuradha Pehrson (you can find their Flickr here), this immersive build has over 200,000 pieces. It’s a truly massive build and includes several sections of The Wall and vignettes combined into one. The model takes up a full 5 ft x 5 ft square and is about 4.5 ft tall. Due to having several elements and scenes, it is not consistent on one scale….

(12) A WHIFF OF HOLINESS. Smithsonian Magazine says“Ancient Greek and Roman Statues Were Not Only Beautiful, but Also Smelled Nice, Too”.

In ancient Greece and Rome, statues not only looked beautiful—they smelled good, too.

That’s the conclusion of a new study published this month in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology. Cecilie Brøns, who authored the study and works as an archaeologist and curator at the Glyptotek art museum in Copenhagen, finds that Greco-Roman statues were often perfumed with enticing scents like rose, olive oil and beeswax…

… While reading ancient Greco-Roman texts, Brøns noticed a handful of references to sweet-smelling statues. She was intrigued, so she decided to go looking for even more mentions of scented sculptures.

Brøns was surprised to find lots of evidence in texts by Cicero, Callimachus, Vitruvius, Pliny the Elder and Pausanias, among other writers. Several of these texts mentioned anointing statues of Greek and Roman deities—including one depicting Artemis, the Greek goddess of wild animals, in Sicily. Statues of rulers, such as Egypt’s Berenice II, were also perfumed, Brøns finds.

The statues were anointed in different ways. In some instances, they were covered in a mixture of waxes and oils through a process known as “ganosis.” In others, they were coated in olive oil as part of a process called “kosmesis,” which was meant to help protect the sculptures from the elements…

(13) DON’T LOOK UP. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] In this week’s Nature more on space junk… “Space debris is falling from the skies. We need to tackle this growing danger”.

At 3 p.m. on 30 December last year, residents of Mukuku village in Makueni county, Kenya, were startled by a loud crash. In the middle of a field lay a mysterious, smouldering metal ring, 2.5 metres across and weighing nearly 500 kilograms. Elsewhere, in western Uganda in May 2023, villagers reported seeing streaks of fire in the sky before debris rained down, scattering wreckage across a 40-kilometre-wide area. These were no ordinary meteorites — they were remnants of a defunct satellite and spent rocket stage, returning to Earth without warning.

These events are not isolated. Across the world, from Texas to Saudi Arabia, from Cape Town to the Amazon rainforest, objects launched into low Earth orbit (LEO) are now falling back to Earth. Some burn up harmlessly in the atmosphere, but others — especially those made of titanium and heat-resistant space-age alloys — survive re-entry and slam into the ground, sometimes in populated areas. The problem is getting worse. With the rapid expansion of commercial space flight, thousands of satellites are being launched each year. Yet few owners have plans to remove them from orbit in a controlled way….

(14) WILL WE SURVIVE THE FUTURE? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Look, the dinosaurs didn’t survive (and I have never really forgiven them for what they did to Raquel Welch)  and I keep on telling people that the machines are taking over, but no-one ever listens…  All of which begs the question as to whether we will survive the future…?

Well, over at PBS Eons  they have been asking just that…

Just because our ancestors have made it through every major period of upheaval in the Earth’s history so far doesn’t mean that our survival through future changes is guaranteed. Humans have become a force of nature, but will we survive ourselves?

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

Jared Pechaček Wins 2024 Crawford Award

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The 2024 Crawford Award, given by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (IAFA) for the best first fantasy book, has been presented to —

 Jared Pechaček — The West Passage (Tor)

A book of compelling contrasts. Unflashily elegant prose set against detailed, bizarre illuminations. A distinct sense of whimsy and humour alongside some quite visceral body horror. A deeply weird world to grapple with, sketched out in the course of a clear bildungsroman narrative. And all of this coheres to great effect. Shades of Mervyn Peake but entirely its own thing, the West Passage is a truly surprising, confident debut.

The Honour List for the Crawford Award is:

  • Meihan Boey — The Formidable Miss Cassidy (ONE)

A deceptively complex take on a magic governess tale, with the perspective wrested away from the colonisers. Charming, insightful, and creepy in turn.

  • Gareth Brown  — The Book of Doors (William Morrow/Transworld)

An original and well-written take on magical portals hidden in plain sight, with compelling reflections on the burdens of grief.

  • Ricardo Chavez Castañeda (text)/Alejandro Magallanes (art)/Lawrence Schimel (translator) — The Book of Denial (Enchanted Lion)

An adult picture book that makes a compelling case for this sort of storytelling in the horror space, it makes a deep and lasting impression.

  • Cécile Cristofari  — Elephants in Bloom (Newcon)

A collection of stories with a poignant balance of hope and loss which deftly use fantastic and science fictional elements to complement and enhance the themes.

  • L B Hazelthorn — Rare birds (Allegorie Press)

An interwar mystery steeped in queerness, myth, and archaeology. The authorial voice and deft command of interpersonal dynamics between the characters were particularly compelling.

  • Sung-il Kim (trans. Anton Hur) — Blood of the Old Kings (Orbit)

Familiar tropes reconfigured creatively to build an engagingly different, vibrant fantasy world, with lean and effective storytelling which grabs the reader from the start and does not let go.

  • John Wiswell — Someone You Can Build A Nest In (DAW Books)

An unusual and ambitious book with a distinctive voice. Darkly funny and eventually urprisingly moving, especially for a book about a people-eating monster.

This year the Crawford Award received 59 submissions from over 30 publishers, by authors from 20 different countries. 11 of the submitted novels were translations.

This year’s judges were Brian Attebery, Eddie Clark, Candas Jane Dorsey, Mimi Mondal, and Yilin Wang. The Administrator was Farah Mendlesohn, who is standing down to assume another role in the organization and will be replaced by Kelly Robson.

The submission period for the Crawford Award runs from March 30 to December 31 each year, for titles published during the year. A title must be the author’s first fantasy book; it is permissible for an author active in a different genre to be submitted, as long as this is their first fantasy book. Children’s fiction and YA are eligible, as are poetry and short story collections.

To propose a new writer for consideration for the award for next year, fill out this form.

Chinese Science Fiction Database (CSFDB) Recommended List 2024

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Reported by Arthur Liu & Feng Zhang: The Chinese Science Fiction Database (CSFDB)’s 2024  Recommended List  has been announced.

The list is divided into 7 categories: Domestic/Translated Novels, Domestic/Translated Stories, Anthologies, Collections, and Related Works. A total of 57 entries are selected, covering 11 countries/regions. Hopefully some of these could get translated into English.

Of the 13 works in the international short and medium length category, nearly half are Japanese science fiction.

The complete list in bilingual form is as follows: 

DOMESTIC NOVEL

  • Why Is It Endless by Keyao42 (Jiangsu Phoenix Literature and Art Publishing House, November 2024)
NOVEL

 TRANSLATED NOVELS

ANTHOLOGIES
  • Empire V (Ампир V), by Viktor Pelevin, translated by Zhu Liling (Chongqing Publishing House, January 2024)
  • Permutation City, by Greg Egan, translated by Qin Peng (Jiangsu Phoenix Literature and Art Publishing House, March 2024)
  • Chasm City, by Alastair Reynolds, translated by He Rui (Hunan Literature and Art Publishing House, March 2024)
  • Hummingbird Salamander, by Jeff VanderMeer, translated by Qin Ruiyu (China Translation and Publishing House, July 2024)
  • Pale Morning Moon (残月記), by Oda Masakuni, translated by Dingdingchong (Science Fiction World: Translations magazine, October 2024)
  • The Physics of Sorrow (Физика на тъгата), by Georgi Gospodinov, translated by Chen Ying (Shanghai People’s Publishing House, October 2024)

 DOMESTIC STORIES

  • Twelve Piece Puzzle, by Dan Shi (Galaxy’s Edge Vol.17: The Truth About You, New Star Press, January 2024)
  • The Cycle, by Li Pin (Science Fiction World magazine, February 2024)
  • The Dragon Society, by Han Song (Non-Existent SFF, February 10, 2024)
  • The Tile Beetles, by CoCu Fish (Non-Existent SFF, March 14, 2024)
  • Regarding Why Humans Have to Seek Dragons by Bao Shu (Science Fiction World magazine, April 2024)
  • Ah, Mars, by Pan Haitian (Galaxy’s Edge Vol.18: Ah, Mars, New Star Press, May 2024)
  • Three Repetitions at Luo Hu, by Tan Que (Non-Existent SFF, May 22, 2024)
  • Eternal Objects, by Zhu Yue (La mer Imaginaire, Beijing United Publishing Company, July 2024)
  • Transforming into a Dragon, by Wang Xiaohai (Easternwood.co, August 2024)
  • Nine Purple Departing Fires, by Chen Qiufan (Fiction World magazine, May 2024)
  • Curbing the Flood, by An Hao (Galaxy’s Edge Vol.20: Curbing the Flood & Splitting Bamboo, New Star Press, December 2024)

 TRANSLATED STORIES

COLLECTIONS
  • Dollhouse’s Dancer (ドールハウスのダンサー), by Takano Kazuki, translated by Zhang Jingqiao (Six Hours Later You Will Die, China Friendship Publishing Company, January 2024)
  • Life Is Beautiful (인생은 아름다워), by Kim Kyung-uk, translated by Jin Ran (The Young Never Grow Old, China Friendship Publishing Company, January 2024)
  • Pi in the Sky, by Fredric Brown, translated by Tiantian (Knock: Classic Stories of Fredric Brown, Southern Publishing House, February 2024)
  • First, Make the Cows into Spheres. (まず牛を球とします。), by Isukari Yuba, translated by Dingdingchong (Science Fiction World: Translations magazine, April 2024)
  • The Juvenile Sea (Ювенильное море), by Andrei Platonov, translated by Xu Zhenya (The Juvenile Sea, Zhejiang Literature and Art Publishing House, April 2024)
  • The Next Day of Sunday Is No Longer the Same (日曜日の翌日はいつも), by Aikawa Eisuke, translated by Mu Hai (Galaxy’s Edge Vol.18: Ah, Mars, New Star Press, May 2024)
  • The Saga of the Bamboo Cutter (竹取戦記), Sanpou Yukinari, translated by You Ning (Trans-Human Gamma-Ray Burst Fantasies, Taiwan Strait Publishing House, July 2024)
  • Hero, by Joe Haldeman, translated by Fu Bin (Galaxy’s Edge Vol.19: The Night Before She Arrived, New Star Press, July 2024)
  • The Concrete Jungle, by Charles Stross, translated by Wang Di (Science Fiction World: Translations magazine, September 2024)
  • Tantie Merle and the Farmhand 4200, by R.S.A. Garcia, translated by Wang Maila (Science Fiction World: Translations magazine, November 2024)
  • God’s Doorbell, by Naomi Alderman, translated by Wang Jiamin (A Cage Went in Search of a Bird: Ten Kafkaesque Stories, CITIC Press, November 2024)
  • The Emissary (献灯使), by Tawada Yoko, translated by Lei Ke (The Emissary, Guangxi Normal University Press, December 2024)
  • 〇, by Saruba Tsukasa, translated by Mu Hai (Galaxy’s Edge Vol.20: Curbing the Flood & Splitting Bamboo, New Star Press, December 2024)

 ANTHOLOGIES

  • Weird Tales: A Century’s Best Vol.1, edited by Alapha Culture Ltd., translated by Cangshuyu (SDX Joint Publishing Company, June 2024)
  • Songs of the Dying Earth: Stories in Honor of Jack Vance, edited by George R.R. Martin & Gardner Dozois, translated by Huang Linsong & Bing Cun et al. (Chongqing Publishing House, November 2024)
  • There are Pines and Moonlight in My Hometown Mountains: Future Dreams from Chinese Science Fiction Nostalgia, edited by Cheng Jingbo & Shi Yi (Science Popularization Publishing House, May 2024)
  • Future Parent-Child Files: A Selection of Chinese Sci-Fi Family Literature, edited by Bao Shu (Jiangsu Phoenix Literature and Art Publishing House, May 2024)

 COLLECTIONS

  • Nothing Happened in the Universe: The Best Short Stories of Fredric Brown, by Fredric Brown, translated and selected by Yao Renjie (Beijing United Publishing Company, June 2024)
  • Creators of the Stars (星を創る者たち), by Tani Kōshū, translated by Dingdingchong (New Star Press, June 2024)
  • The Lives of Things (Objecto Quase) by José Saramago, translated by You Yuping (Beijing Daily Publishing House, August 2024)
  • The Emissary (献灯使), by Tawada Yoko, translated by Lei Ke (Guangxi Normal University Press, December 2024)
  • Odyssey of Spring, by Bai Shu (Guangxi Science and Technology Press, January 2024)
  • To the Land of Unknown, by noc (Guangxi Science and Technology Press, January 2024)
  • Tasting the Future Delicacy Three Times, by Bao Shu (New Star Press, August 2024)
  • 2181 Overture, by Gu Shi (New Star Press, August 2024)
RELATED WORKS

 RELATED WORKS

  • Can We Change the Direction of the Tide, by Chen Qiufan (Shenzhen Publishing House, November 2024)
  • Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture, by Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, translated by Zhu Jinjie (Sichuan People’s Publishing House, January 2024)
  • J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, by Humphrey Carpenter, translated by Mu Dong, proofread by Dai Guqiu (Shanghai People’s Publishing House, February 2024)
  • Margaret Atwood: Starting Out, by Rosemary Sullivan, translated by Chen Xiaowei (CITIC Press, April 2024)
  • Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes: The Official Biography, by Rob Wilkins, translated by Chi Xiaoyao (Sichuan Science and Technology Publishing House, May 2024)
  • Creatures: Paintings, Drawings, and Reflections, by Shaun Tan, translated by Huang Yue (Guangdong People’s Publishing House, July 2024)
  • Of This and Other Worlds, by C.S. Lewis, translated and annotated by Deng Junhai & Yue Xiang, proofread by Hu Jinyang (East China Normal University Press, July 2024)
  • A Complete History of Weird and Bizarre Mystery Fiction (怪異猟奇ミステリー全史), by Kazama Kenji, translated by Zhou Xiaoqing (Oriental Publishing House, August 2024)
  • Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals (動物化するポストモダン――オタクから見た日本社会), by Hiroki Azuma, translated by Chu Xuanchu, proofread by Wang Fei (Shanghai People’s Publishing House, September 2024)
  • Prince Tatsuhiko’s Travels: A Biography of Shibusawa Tatsuhiko (龍彦親王航海記：澁澤龍彦伝), by Isozaki Junichi, translated by Liu Jianing (Guangxi Normal University Press, October 2024)
  • Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology, by Adrienne Mayor, translated by Wu Liping (Jiuzhou Press, November 2024)
  • The Weird and the Eerie, by Mark Fisher, translated by Wang Zhixia (Shanghai People’s Publishing House, November 2024)
  • Earthfire in the Sky: A Decade of Chinese Science Fiction Studies (2011-2020), edited by Li Guangyi (Chongqing University Press, March 2024)
  • Inheritance, Expansion, and the Pulse of the Times: A Study of Chinese Science Fiction during the Seventeen-Year Period (1949-1966), by Xiao Han (Beijing Normal University Press, May 2024)

Pixel Scroll 3/22/25 Inside Of The Internet No One Can Prove You Aren’t A Robot Dog

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(1) LEVAR BURTON FEATURED AS ALTADENA LIBRARY REOPENS. LAist is there as “Altadena Library reopens to the community for fun, games and a LeVar Burton reading”.

Today marks the grand reopening of the Altadena Library. The beloved community space was spared by the Eaton Fire, and after a short period of closure for fire-related clean up, it’s welcoming hundreds of Altadenans who gathered to celebrate its return.

“We wanted to have a really big carnival feel,” Altadena Library director Nikki Winslow said. “Free food, giveaways… also Clifford the Big Red Dog, so it should be a really fun event.”

The day’s main attraction is story time by education advocate and actor LeVar Burton….

… Thousands of Altadena residents lost their homes in the Eaton Fire, and many more were displaced. But today felt like the community getting back on its feet, says Jean Courtney, a long time resident whose home was destroyed….

…Burton, the Star Trek star turned children’s book author, said he was here today to keep the spotlight on the Altadena community as they begin to rebuild.

“Altadena traditionally is one of those communities where people who looked like me were welcomed and could purchase homes,” Burton said. “The American dream is alive and well in Altadena – today, tomorrow, and every day.”…

(2) ARIZONA CON CLOSED BY HEALTH AUTHORITIES. Wild West Con has been required to shut down in the middle of the weekend they announced on Facebook today. The steampunk-themed event being held in a Tucson, AZ casino opened on Thursday. It is reported the congers have been told to go but the other casino patrons have not.

Due to ongoing medical concerns, we regret to inform all interested that Wild Wild West Con has been shut down by Casino Del Sol.

Unfortunately, we do not have any further information to provide but will give updates as soon as they’re available.

There was an additional statement on Bluesky.

(3) SFWA ON META AI TRAINING. Yesterday SFWA President Kate Ristau sent members this comment after the Atlantic made it easy to search LibGen data to discover whether their work being used by Meta to train its AI.

Opening up the Atlantic article yesterday was a shock. So many of us scrolled down to search the Library Genesis data set for our own names. According to the article, Meta (Facebook) used millions of pirated works to train its AI. I found two of my works, and started searching for other SFWA members as well. 

That little blue box has been all over social media this morning. 

As the Atlantic notes, “millions of books and scientific papers are captured in the collection’s current iteration.”

Personally, I did not give permission for my work to be used. Did you?

SFWA’s number one principle in regards to AI is that Creators must be compensated for the use of their work. If you were not compensated, what can you do?

We recommend you follow Author Guild’s list of actions, including protecting your work. There are other actions that may fit your personal circumstances as well. 

As an organization, SFWA will continue to fight for our principles. Writers must be paid, credited, and protected, following expected norms. 

We will follow up with more information as we investigate further and take next steps.

(4) SOCIETY OF AUTHORS REACTION. The UK’s Society of Authors has also issued a statement: “The LibGen data set – what authors can do”.

Yesterday (20 March 2025), The Atlantic published a searchable database of over 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers. This data set, called Library Genesis or ‘LibGen’ for short, is full of pirated material, and all of it has been used to develop AI systems by tech giant Meta.

The Atlantic says that court documents show that staff at Meta discussed licensing books and research papers lawfully but instead chose to use stolen work because it was faster and cheaper. Given that Meta Platforms, Inc, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has a market capitalisation of £1.147 trillion, this is appalling behaviour.

According to The Atlantic, Meta argued that it could then use the US’s ‘fair use exception’ defence if it was challenged legally.

It is not yet clear whether scraping from copyright works without permission is unlawful under the US fair use exception to copyright, but if that scraping is for commercial purposes (which what Meta is doing surely is) it cannot be fair use. Under the UK fair dealing exception to copyright, there is no question that scraping is unlawful without permission.

As a matter of urgency, Meta needs to compensate the rightsholders of all the works it has been exploiting.

This is yet more evidence of the catastrophic impact generative AI is having on our creative industries worldwide. From development through to output, creators’ rights are being ignored, and governments need to intervene to protects authors’ rights…

(5) PEN AMERICA LONGLISTS. PEN America has announced the 2025 PEN America Literary Awards Longlists. The complete list is at the link. There do not appear to be any works of genre interest in the lists. The books up for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award are —

The PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award celebrates writing that exemplifies literary excellence on the subject of the physical or biological sciences and communicates complex scientific concepts to a lay audience. The winner receives a cash award of $10,000.

  • The Burning Earth: A History, Sunil Amrith (W. W. Norton & Company)
  • Playing with Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World, Kelly Clancy (Riverhead Books)
    All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today, Elizabeth Comen (Harper)
  • Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (Princeton University Press)
  • The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with Our Wild Neighbors, Erika Howsare (Catapult)
  • The Big Freeze: A Reporter’s Personal Journey into the World of Egg Freezing and the Quest to Control Our Fertility, Natalie Lampert (Ballantine)
  • Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life, Jason Roberts (Random House)
  • The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives, Ernest Scheyder (Atria)
  • Waves in an Impossible Sea: How Everyday Life Emerges from the Cosmic Ocean, Matt Strassler (Basic Books)
  • The Living Medicine: How a Lifesaving Cure Was Nearly Lost—and Why It Will Rescue Us When Antibiotics Fail, Lina Zeldovich (St. Martin’s Press)

(6) WE LIE HERE, OBEDIENT TO THEIR WORDS. “Nasa drops plan to land first woman and first person of color on the moon” reports the Guardian.

Nasa has dropped its longstanding public commitment to land the first woman and person of color on the moon, in response to Donald Trump’s directives to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices at federal agencies.

The promise was a central plank of the space agency’s Artemis program, which is scheduled to return humans to the lunar surface in 2027 for the first time since the final Apollo mission in December 1972.

The Artemis landing page of Nasa’s website previously included the words: “Nasa will land the first woman, first person of color, and first international partner astronaut on the Moon using innovative technologies to explore more of the lunar surface than ever before.”

The version of the page live on the website on Friday, however, appears with the phrase removed…

(7) TAPE DELAY. “US blocks Canadian access to cross-border library, sparking outcry”. The Guardian has the story.

The US has blocked Canadian access to a library straddling the Canada-US border, drawing criticism from a Quebec town where people have long enjoyed easy entry to the space.

The Haskell Free Library and Opera House is located between Stanstead, Quebec, and Derby Line, Vermont. It was built deliberately to straddle the frontier between the two countries – a symbol of cooperation and friendship between Canada and the US.

The library’s entrance is on the Vermont side. Previously, Canadian visitors were able to enter using the sidewalk and entrance on the American side but were encouraged to bring documentation, according to the library’s website.

Inside, a line of electrical tape demarcates the international boundary. About 60% of the building, including the books, is located in Canada. Upstairs, in the opera house, the audience sits in the US while the performers are in Canada.

Under the new rules, Canadians will need to go through a formal border crossing before entering the library.

“This closure not only compromises Canadian visitors’ access to a historic symbol of cooperation and harmony between the two countries but also weakens the spirit of cross-border collaboration that defines this iconic location,” the town of Stanstead said in a press release on Thursday…

(8) MORE US TRAVEL CAUTIONS. The Guardian reports “Denmark and Finland urge caution for US-bound transgender people”.

Denmark and Finland have updated their US travel advice for transgender people, joining the handful of European countries that have sought to caution US-bound travellers in recent weeks as reports emerge of ordeals at the American border.

Denmark said this week it had begun advising transgender travellers to contact the US embassy in Copenhagen before departure to ensure there would be no issues with travel documents.

The change came after Donald Trump made a priority of rolling back trans and non-binary rights, announcing that the US would only recognise two genders and signing off on executive orders that sought to exclude transgender people from the US military, limit their access to sport and curtail gender-transition procedures for people under the age of 19….

(9) PETER MABEY (1926-2025). [Via Alison Scott.] British fan Peter Mabey, winner of the first Doc Weir Award, died February 19.

The Doc Weir Award history site says of him:

Peter was one of the first members of the Cheltenham Circle and the BSFA, acting as Librarian of the BSFA lending library when the collection was also held at Cheltenham; he later served as a BSFA committee member after the organisation’s incorporation.

He was one of the founders of the Order of St. Fantony and was presented, in his absence, with the first Doc Weir Award at the 1963 Eastercon (Bullcon). Peter was a member of the organising committee for the 1965 Worldcon (Loncon II) and was responsible for its publications.

He continued to attend conventions well into his 90s.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

March 22, 1931 — William Shatner, 94.

By Paul Weimer: The face that launched a hundred soap operas. 

I find it interesting that like B5 would find out thirty years later, Star Trek’s first shot at a crew and a leading man, Jeffrey Hunter, wasn’t quite what a viewing public particularly wanted in a leading man of a space opera SF series. Poor Michael O’Hare and Jeffrey Hunter both weren’t quite right to be the full-on leading actors for such a series. 

But like Bruce Boxleitner three decades later, William Shatner proved to be.  I mean, sure, lots of Spock fans out there, McCoy fans, and other characters. And the whole “trio” of Kirk-Spock-McCoy has been documented to enormous detail. But it is William Shatner’s complex Captain Kirk, who was more cerebral and outwitting of his opponents than you remember, more nuanced, more interesting than the flanderized stereotype that has been parodied to the moon and back ever made him out to be. Sure, his diction and acting were, charitably melodramatic, but that is a feature, not a bug that got him through the series, and seven movies. 

Outside of genre space, he did shows like T J Hooker, and Rescue 911, and Boston Legal (although the fourth wall breaking Boston Legal might actually BE a genre show. I leave the comments to decide that). He’s done music (oddly, that doesn’t make him unique among the TOS crew). He was the voice of Priceline.com in its early days on the Internet. He co-wrote the TekWar novels. He breeds horses. (Wonder why he is horse riding in Star Trek Generations? Now you know.) 

You might think that “Nightmare at 30,000 feet” might be my favorite non-Star-Trek genre performance Shatner has done. And you would be almost right. It is a classic in paranoia, perception, fear, and it does show that his acting style does have range, and ability and even with his unusual cadence, it can work in a situation like this. The episode itself is a masterpiece and Shatner’s performance is a big part of that.

But I like “Nick of Time” a bit more. It’s a more hopeful and positive story, as we see Shatner as part of a married couple who wind up briefly in thrall to a fortune telling machine that seems to tell the future — but really just makes people dependent on its easy, cryptic answers. The utter triumph of the episode as Shatner and his wife break free of their dependency is enough to make you cheer…until you see the coda, and see a couple who have not been so fortunate, or possessing as much fortitude as Shatner’s Don S. Carter and Patricia Breslin’s Pat Carter finally manage to show.

And Shatner has been to space.

Get a life? William Shatner, in and out of Star Trek, certainly has.

William Shatner

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • Loose Parts proves it depends on which wolf you feed.
  • Nancy unintentionally contributes to an essay.
  • Off the Mark has a sensitive palate.
  • Strange Brew asks for the origin story.
  • Tom Gauld flips the script.

My cartoon for this week’s @theguardian.com books

— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld.bsky.social) 2025-03-22T11:06:11.676Z

(12) WHERE’S THE BEEF? NASA remembers the “Fallout from the Unauthorized Gemini III Space Sandwich”.

“I hid a sandwich in my spacesuit,” Astronaut John W. Young confessed in the April 2, 1965, issue of Life Magazine. The conversation about and the consumption of the sandwich, which lasted only about 30 seconds during the Gemini III flight, became a serious matter that drew the ire of Congress and NASA’s administrator after the crew returned home. Congress was particularly upset and brought the matter to leadership’s attention at hearings about NASA’s 1966 budget. Representative George E. Shipley was especially disgusted, knowing how much money and time NASA had spent to prepare the Gemini III spacecraft for launch. The fact that a crewmember brought something into the crew cabin, which Shipley likened to a “surgeon’s operating room,” put the techniques used to prevent a spaceflight mission from failing at risk; crumbs could have made their way behind instrument panels interfering with the operation of flight equipment and the loss of the mission and its crew. Shipley called Young’s antics “foolish” and asked NASA leaders to share their thoughts….

…Young never received a formal reprimand for the incident but was made aware of Congress’s frustration. Others in the corps were advised to avoid similar stunts and to focus on the mission. The decision to bring a sandwich onboard did not have a negative impact on Young’s career. He was the first astronaut to fly to space six times —two Gemini missions; two Apollo missions, including the dress rehearsal for the first lunar landing; and two space shuttle missions including STS-1, known as the bravest test flight in history. He also served as chief of the Astronaut Office for 13 years.

(13) SIDE EFFECTS OF ANTI-AGING REGIME. Futurism reports “Anti-Aging CEO’s Test Subjects Reportedly Suffered Unpleasant Side Effects”.

An alarming new investigation by the New York Times accuses youth-obsessed tech mogul Bryan Johnson of covering up some unpleasant side effects experienced by participants testing his line of supplements.

Johnson — who was an early investor in Futurism, but hasn’t had any involvement for years — has gone to extreme lengths to slow down or even “reverse” his “biological age” through a series of sometimes extreme self-experiments, like using his teenage son as a “blood boy” and measuring his nighttime erections.

He’s parlayed that hype into a line of supplements and meals called “The Blueprint Stack,” bolstered by what the company says were promising study results.

But the NYT‘s reporting makes that study sound very dubious. Out of the roughly 1,700 participants, a whopping 60 percent experienced at least one side effect, according to documents viewed by the newspaper. Blood tests showed that some participants saw their testosterone levels drop or developed prediabetes.

The food regimen also reportedly had undesirable side effects.

“Longevity mix: A lot of comments about hating this as it is making them sick, vomit, have heartburn, etc.,” one Blueprint employee told a colleague in early 2024, as quoted by the newspaper.

“TONS of people saying it’s causing nausea, bloating,” another employee wrote, referring to allulose, a sugar alternative that Johnson has previously sung the praises of.

Thanks to a litany of confidentiality agreements employees reportedly had to sign, many felt afraid to speak up.

(14) PITCH MEETING. Ryan George takes us inside “The Electric State Pitch Meeting” – whether we want to be there or not!

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Walk, Run, Crawl, RL Fun” from Boston Dynamics.

In this video, Atlas is demonstrating policies developed using reinforcement learning with references from human motion capture and animation. This work was done as part of a research partnership between Boston Dynamics and the Robotics and AI Institute (RAI Institute).

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Jeffrey Smith, Cora Buhlert, Paul Weimer, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, 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.]

Cora Buhlert Review: The Secret of the Sword

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By Cora Buhlert: On March 22, 1985, the animated movie The Secret of the Sword was released in theatres in the US, introducing She-Ra: Princess of Power to the world. The full movie is available on YouTube here. 

In 1984/1985, Masters of the Universe was at the peak of its popularity and Mattel‘s highest selling toy line, outselling in-house rivals Barbie and Hot Wheels. The Filmation He-Man cartoon, which had debuted in 1983, was watched by millions of kids and quite a few adults every afternoon.

To their infinite surprise, Mattel found that approximately forty percent of all Masters of Universe toys were sold to girls and their families – even though Masters of the Universe was marketed as a boy brand in the highly gendered toy market of the 1980s. Meanwhile, the He-Man cartoon was watched enthusiastically by both boys and girls.

In retrospect, this isn’t overly surprising, because Masters of the Universe featured several strong and complex female characters and particularly the cartoon was demolishing gender stereotypes right, left and center and gave us a female warrior who physically outperformed most of the male characters in Teela, a muscle-bound hero who was not afraid to show his sensitive side and was frequently shown engaging in female coded activities like baking, cooking and reading in Adam/He-Man, and a woman who chose a demanding career as Sorceress of Grayskull over motherhood; plus a loving single father who somehow managed to combine an equally demanding career as Man-at-Arms with parenthood; and – last but not least – a female NASA astronaut turned queen of an alien planet in Queen Marlena well before Sally Ride became the first American woman in space. 

Mattel might have been surprised that little girls were ignoring the gender stereotypes of the toy industry and clamoring for He-Man toys, but they were also quick to seize an opportunity to make even more money. So they decided to introduce more female characters into what had been a very male dominated toy line (by 1985, there were only two female characters in the Masters of the Universe toyline, Teela and Evil-Lyn. A third, the Sorceress, would not be released until 1987) and came up with the idea of creating a female counterpart to He-Man in She-Ra, the most powerful woman in the universe. Eventually, this idea turned into a whole a spin-off toy line as well as a sister show to the He-Man cartoon called She-Ra: Princess of Power. 

Mattel and Filmation collaborated closely on the development of She-Ra, her world, her friends and enemies. The She-Ra series bible was written by Filmation writers J. Michael Straczinski and Larry DiTillio, both of whom would later go on to other great things, including Babylon 5. DiTillio also wrote the screenplay for The Secret of the Sword, together with Bob Forward who had penned some of the most memorable episodes of Filmation‘s He-Man cartoon.

Alas, the powers that were at Mattel still found it hard to let go of gender stereotypes and handed the Princess of Power toy line over to the girls’ group rather than the team that worked on the He-Man line. As a result, the Princess of Power toy line took a lot of cues from Barbie, such as rooted hair that could be styled, interchangeable clothes and a lot of pink, gold and pastel colors. Some characters had their designs changed at the eleventh hour, because a blue and gold and red and black outfit were considered “not feminine enough”. The vintage Princess of Power dolls have a certain beauty of their own, but even though they were in the same scale as the He-Man figures, they never meshed very well. What is more, the Princess of Power toy line only had two villainous characters – Catra and Entrapta – because it was assumed that girls did not like conflict and wouldn’t buy the evil characters. Meanwhile, all the male villains from the cartoon, including She-Ra’s archenemy Hordak, were released in the He-Man toy line, because it was assumed that girls would not want to buy monster characters. These outdated gender assumptions harmed both toy lines back then and continue to harm Masters of the Universe to this day. 

The Princess of Power toy line was revealed at New York Toy Fair in early 1985, but the wider public first became aware of the character when The Secret of the Sword, a 91-minute animated movie, was released in US theatres on March 22, 1985.

When rewatching The Secret of the Sword as an adult, I found that I remembered several scenes, so I must have seen it at some point. However, I never saw the film in the theatre, because it was not released theatrically in West Germany until the fall of 1987, one and a half years after its US premiere, and also had twenty minutes of runtime cut, because it was believed that children could not handle a ninety-minute movie. The Secret of the Sword was also chopped up and rebroadcast as the first five episodes of the She-Ra: Princess of Power cartoon, so that’s likely how I first saw it.

The Secret of the Sword starts with a bang. The Sorceress of Grayskull is having one hell of a nightmare and sees a monstrous being – Hordak, though the audience doesn’t yet know this – stealing a baby. Hordak laughs and declares that he may have been defeated, but that his pursuers will never see the child again. Then he fires at the Sorceress, who is shielded by a young Man-at-Arms in an early hint that these two are secretly a couple (confirmed many years later), and vanishes through a portal with the baby to parts unknown.

The Sorceress wakes up – alone, by the way – to see a strangely familiar sword that looks a lot like He-Man’s power sword, only with a gem in the hilt, hovering in midair before her. The sword leads her to one of the many mysterious doors inside Castle Grayskull, which opens to reveal a glowing portal. “Could it be, after all this time?” the Sorceress wonders.

The Sorceress telepathically contacts Prince Adam a.k.a. He-Man, who is in the process of baking his “famous spiced bread” (I do want that recipe now) and asks him to come to Castle Grayskull immediately. Once there, the Sorceress hands Adam the sword and tells him go through the portal and find the person it is intended for. Adam even remarks that the sword looks a lot like his own. 

The Sword of Protection, twin to He-Man’s Sword of Power, was first glimpsed hanging on the wall of Castle Grayskull in the He-Man episode “The Origin of the Sorceress”, which also introduced the Evil Horde in the form of a Horde scout ship that lands on Eternia, where its crew occupies a village and bullies the inhabitants. This sort of foreshadowing was rare in 1980s cartoons, especially syndicated ones, where episodes were often shown out of order.

Adam, understandably, has more questions for the Sorceress such as where the portal leads to and who exactly the person he’s looking for is. The Sorceress, however, won’t tell Adam anything except that the sword will guide him to the person he seeks.

Even as a kid, I thought that it doesn’t make any sense that the Sorceress doesn’t tell Adam who he is looking for. As an adult, it still doesn’t make any more sense, but then the Sorceress has a habit of withholding crucial information from others. For example, she won’t tell Teela either that she is her mother. Besides, if the Sorceress told Adam whom he’s supposed to find, it would ruin the reveal later in the movie. Coincidentally, the scene is also cleverly written, because the Sorceress never uses any pronouns when referring to the person Adam seeks, so neither Adam nor the audience knows that the intended recipient of the sword is female.

So Adam and his pet tiger Cringer a.k.a. Battle Cat step through the portal into a brand-new world named Etheria to encounter a whole new cast of characters, both good and evil. Adam’s quest takes him to a village inn, where he chances to observe three Horde Troopers, the foot soldiers of the Evil Horde who are occupying Etheria, harassing the locals. Always a hero at heart, Adam intervenes and promptly finds himself embroiled in a barroom  brawl. Hereby, it’s notable that Adam does not transform into He-Man, but proceeds to deal with the Horde Troopers in his civilian identity. In the He-Man cartoon and the various mini-comics, Adam is often portrayed as something of a buffoon, but it’s also clear that this is an act to keep his civilian identity separate from He-Man and that Adam is a very capable fighter, if necessary, though he rarely shows it. However, on Etheria, Adam is free to show his prowess, because there is no risk of anybody recognizing him as He-Man. 

 Adam gets unexpected help from Bow, crack archer and mainstay of the She-Ra cartoon and toy line. Together, they make short work of the Horde Troopers and then escape together with their animal companions Cringer and Kowl, a rainbow colored flying critter. Bow takes Adam and Cringer into the Whispering Woods, a magical forest, which serves as the hideout of the Great Rebellion against the Horde’s rule. Though the name “Great Rebellion” is pretty much hyperbole, because – as the snarky Kowl points out – it’s actually a very small rebellion.

Here, Adam meets the other members of the rebellion who would become important supporting characters in the She-Ra cartoon. In addition to Bow and Kowl there is Glimmer, Princess of Bright Moon and founder of the Great Rebellion, the scatterbrained witch Madame Razz and her flying and talking broom imaginatively named Broom as well as the Twiggets, humanoid woodland creatures who live in the Whispering Woods.

However, The Secret of the Sword does not just introduce new heroes, but also a whole new faction of villains called the Evil Horde. The Horde is your stereotypical galactic empire hellbent on conquering anything in its path, only that all the main members are basically classic movie monsters with a Masters of the Universe twist. Hordak, the leader (well, deputy leader, since the supreme ruler of the Horde Empire is Hordak’s older brother Horde Prime, who would be introduced in a later episode of the cartoon) is Nosferatu, only that he can also transform his body into a rocket, a tank, a drill, cannon or whatever is needed at the time. The evil sorceress Shadow Weaver is every evil witch from every classic Disney cartoon ever. The cat shifter Catra is Irina from Cat People, The energy sucking reptilian Leech is the Monster from the Black Lagoon. The furry prison warden Grizzlor is the Wolf-Man. Mantenna, the alien with the pop out eyes, is every bug-eyed monster ever and the scorpion woman Scorpia looks as if she stepped right out of a 1950s B-movie or a drag queen show. Their base, the Fright Zone, is a Giger-esque industrial nightmare surrounded by a polluted and monster-infested wasteland, providing a strong contrast to the past-coloured woodlands of Etheria.

Finally, there is Force Captain Adora, Hordak and Shadow Weaver’s adopted daughter. Blonde and beautiful, Adora looks as out of place among the more monstrous members of the Horde as Marilyn Munster did among her family in The Munsters. However, Adora is just as ruthless as the rest of the Horde. When we first meet her, Adora is overseeing the population of an entire village taken prisoner and about to be shipped off to the Horde’s slave mines. 

 When the rebels attack to free the villagers, Adora comes face to face with He-Man (dealing with a squad of classic movie monsters is too much for Adam, so he transforms into He-Man) and they get embroiled in a sword fight. When He-Man drops his own sword and reaches for the Sword of Protection, the jewel in the hilt begins to glow, indicating that Force Captain Adora is the one He-Man had been sent to find. In true ruthless Horde fashion, Adora takes advantage of his momentary confusion to shoot He-Man in the back. 

 When he comes to again, He-Man finds himself chained up in the Horde prison on Beast Island, a fortress constructed from the bones of giant monsters. He is questioned by Adora who insists that the Horde are the rightful and just rulers of Etheria. He-Man replies that the Horde are cruel oppressors and asks Adora to see for herself how the Horde is treating the population. Adora scoffs at this suggestion, but she does go out on a mission to see the true Etheria. To no one’s surprise except her own, she witnesses citizens being abused and enslaved, their houses burnt down and their crops stolen. Considering that this was a cartoon aimed at children, The Secret of the Sword and the She-Ra series in general are quite frank about the horror of life under occupation. Later episodes of the She-Ra cartoon show the Horde destroying villages, burning books that do not teach approved Horde history and attempting to poison the Whispering Woods in an episode that’s eerily reminiscent of the deployment of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. 

In general, there is a remarkable amount of horror lurking just under the surface of this seemingly bright and cheery cartoon designed to sell toys to kids. When Adora confronts Hordak and Shadow Weaver over the atrocities committed by the Horde against the civilian population of Etheria, Shadow Weaver erases Adora’s memories of what she witnessed, brainwashing her into being a loyal Horde soldier again. In later iterations and expansions of the story, we learn that several of Hordak’s underlings experienced a similar fate, had their memories and even their entire personalities altered and erased and were brainwashed into serving the Horde.

After escaping from and thoroughly trashing the Horde prison on Beast Island, He-Man bids farewell to the rebels and decides to go after Adora. He steals a Horde Trooper’s armor (the Horde Troopers were portrayed as robots in later episodes of the She-Ra cartoon, allowing He-Man and She-Ra to smash them with impunity, but they are clearly living beings in armor here) and sneaks into the Fright Zone to confront Adora. But because Adora has been brainwashed by Shadow Weaver, she no longer remembers what she saw outside the Fright Zone. So she shoots He-Man in the back – again – and He-Man finds himself imprisoned by the Horde – again. This really isn’t his day.

But things are about to get even worse for He-Man, because Hordak subjects He-Man to his latest invention – a weapon powered by extracting the lifeforce of Horde prisoners. Continuing the overall horror theme, there is a lot of vampiric imagery associated with the Horde. Two Horde members, Leech and Mosquitor, have the ability to suck out the lifeforce of their opponents. Mosquitor never appeared in the cartoon, but Leech demonstrates his abilities on Bow and Glimmer in The Secret of the Sword. In the Masters of the Universe comics published by DC between 2012 and 2016, the Fright Zone itself even sucks the lifeforce out of the planet, which explains the polluted wasteland surrounding the Horde’s fortress. It’s a not very subtle metaphor for colonialism and imperialism.

It appears that He-Man is doomed, steadily growing weaker in Hordak’s extraction chamber. However, her contact with He-Man as well as the Sword of Protection have caused cracks in Adora’s conditioning that even Shadow Weaver could not completely erase. And so Adora is suffering from unquiet dreams, which drive her to visit the much weakened He-Man in the extraction chamber, where both the captured Sword of Power and the Sword of Protection are kept as well. The Sword of Protection is glowing, so Adora picks it up and the Sorceress appears before her and tells Adora that she was always destined to be a champion of good, that the Horde brainwashed her and stole her from her parents as baby. The Sorceress also reveals that Adora had a twin brother, He-Man, and that he needs her help right now.

Viewed through the eyes of an adult, Adora accepts that Sorceress’ words a little too easily, especially since she has no real reason to believe a woman speaking to her from sword. However, any lingering skepticism quickly evaporates when Adora holds aloft the Sword of Protection, speaks the magic words and transforms into She-Ra for the very first time. The moment is made even more powerful by the fact that by this point we never saw Adam transforming into He-Man for the first time, though later cartoons did show Adam’s first transformation.

Once He-Man and She-Ra have disabled Hordak’s weapon of mass destruction and escaped the Fright Zone on Adora’s horse Spirit who has been transformed into the flying unicorn Swift Wind, the Sorceress finally comes clean to both of them. King Randor and Queen Marlena of Eternia had twins, Adam and Adora, both destined for great things. When the twins were only babies, the Horde invaded. Hordak learned of the twins’ destiny and decided to kidnap the babies and raise them both as Horde members. So Hordak snuck into the royal palace with the help of his acolyte Skeletor.

But things didn’t go according to plan. Hordak managed to grab baby Adora, but Queen Marlena dispatched Skeletor with a judo throw before he could steal Adam. Marlena raised the alarm, Man-at-Arms and the Royal Guard burst into the nurseryand Hordak escaped through the window with Baby Adora, leaving Skeletor behind. To save his own neck, Skeletor revealed the location of Hordak’s base. The Sorceress and Man-at-Arms went after Hordak, but couldn’t prevent him from escaping with Adora through a portal to parts unknown as seen in the flashback at the beginning of the movie.

The whole thing is a retcon, of course, but a skilfully handled one. There’s even an explanation for why no one ever mentioned Adora before, namely that Adam was deliberately kept in the dark about the fact that he once had a sister to spare him the pain of losing her. 

But the revelation of the Sorceress not only changes the status quo of the royal family of Eternia, but also gives us some backstory for Skeletor, who had very little up to this point. Some people feel that the introduction of Hordak as Skeletor’s former teacher and master diminished the Lord of Destruction, but I believe it gives Skeletor’s character more complexity and also explains why Hordak and Skeletor really, really don’t like each other – namely because each believes that the other betrayed him – with good reason.

Indeed, we get to see the first of many insult-laden confrontations between master and student shortly thereafter, when Hordak pursues Adam and Adora through the dimensional portal back to Eternia and teams up with Skeletor to recapture Adora. Not that Skeletor has any intention of keeping his end of the bargain.

The reunion between Adora and her family on the one side and Hordak and Skeletor on the other are some of my favourite scenes in this movie, especially because we don’t really see Adora interacting with any members of her extended family except for Adam in the regular She-Ra cartoon. The moment where the royal family is finally reunited is very sweet with hugs all around and tears on the faces of both men and women. Besides, King Randor finally tells Adam that he is proud of him, something Adam almost never gets to hear from his father.

Of course, the domestic bliss doesn’t last long before Hordak and Skeletor spoil the reunion to kidnap Adora once again. He-Man, Teela and Man-at-Arms set off to rescue her, but Adora has already managed to free herself, transform into She-Ra and thoroughly trash Snake Mountain in the process. “A female He-Man,” Skeletor laments, “This is the worst day of my life.”

Though Skeletor will not have to deal with both He-Man and She-Ra for long, because She-Ra elects to return to Etheria in the end to free the planet from the Horde’s oppression.

The Secret of the Sword is not a perfect film, but has its share of flaws. Because the script was designed to work both as a ninety-minute movie and five separate half-hour cartoon episodes, the structure is somewhat choppy and episodic, particularly when He-Man and She-Ra go on an almost episode-long side quest to rescue Queen Angella of Bright Moon from her captor Hunga the Harpy. Moreover, the rebels are very quick to accept Adora – who was after all a Horde Force Captain – as one of their own.

However, the story also handles the foreshadowing and planting of clues well, until the truth about Adora is finally revealed. And yes, Adam and Adora are again very quick to accept that they are siblings and never question the Sorceress’ word, but then neither does the viewer. From the moment that Adora hold up the Sword of Protection onwards, we accept that she is She-Ra.

The Secret of the Sword would change Masters of the Universe forever and introduce elements that continue reverberate through the franchise to this day. The relationship between He-Man and She-Ra on the one hand and Skeletor and Hordak on the other would be explored in many future versions of the story.

One of the greatest strengths of Masters of the Universe has always been that even though the situations are outlandish, the characters have always been relatable. Adam’s wish for his father to see him for who he is and be proud of him, Teela’s desire to always be the best to prove herself worthy of love and acceptance, Cringer being always afraid and yet wanting to be brave, Orko who can do everything in theory and always messes up in practice – these are issues that the young viewers can relate to. She-Ra introduces another story that is both relatable and empowering for young viewers, namely that of a child who grows up in an abusive home with parents who gaslight her and who manages overcome her abusive upbringing to become something greater. Justine Danzer, who created some of the earliest designs of She-Ra for Mattel, is an abuse survivor herself and has said that She-Ra was always intended to be someone who overcomes an abusive background.

Because She-Ra’s story is so powerful, it has been retold several times. The best known is probably the 2018 Netflix series She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. The 2018 cartoon took several liberties in reinterpreting the characters and their world – most of which do have their roots in throwaway moments in the Filmation cartoon – but  stuck to the basic story of Adora, a Horde soldier since childhood, overcoming her conditioning to join the rebellion, find true friends and true love and become the heroine she was always meant to be. 

The biggest change is – no, not Adora’s sexual orientation – but the absence of He-Man. Because due to the problematic gender policies of Mattel in the 1980s, He-Man and She-Ra are considered two separate properties. Mattel fully owns the rights to He-Man, but the She-Ra rights were partially owned by co-creators Filmation. Now, several mergers and takeovers later, they are with Universal/Dreamworks. The result is that it is exceedingly difficult for He-Man and She-Ra to appear in each other’s stories and indeed the Eternian twins of power have not been seen together on screen since the 1980s. Masters of the Universe: Revolution, which aired on Netflix last January, did strongly hint at the introduction of She-Ra in its post-credits teaser, but so far no third series has been announced.

And so the only places where He-Man and She-Ra have appeared together are the  various toy lines as well as the mini-comics and the 2012 – 2016 DC Comics run. The DC Comics also feature my favorite reinterpretation of She-Ra’s story. For while the Filmation cartoon depicted Adora as sticking out like a sore thumb among the various monstrous Horde members, in the comics Adora – now renamed Despara – fully believes herself to be the daughter of Hordak and Shadow Weaver and wears a mask of her “father’s” face. When first introduced, Despara is an out and out villainess. She commits war crimes, stabs Teela and slits the throat of her own brother (he gets better). Her road to redemption is a lot more rocky than Adora’s ever was in the cartoon, but the unwavering faith and love of her brother Adam and of Teela eventually turn her life around, making the moment when she finally transforms into She-Ra that much sweeter.

 Both the She-Ra cartoon and toyline were not the huge success that He-Man was, probably because both debuted into a much more crowded market than her twin brother had three years before. But She-Ra remains an icon of female and also queer empowerment to this day. And it all started forty years ago with The Secret of the Sword, when Adora first uttered the immortal line “For the Honour of Grayskull.”   

2024 Ursa Major Awards Nominees

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The nominations for the 2024 Ursa Major Awards have been finalized. The Ursa Major Award is presented annually for “excellence in the furry arts.” Anyone may nominate and vote for candidates for the Awards. The 2024 Ursa Major Awards final ballot will be open for voting from March 21 to April 19 on the UMA website.

MOTION PICTURE

Live-action or animated feature-length movies.

  • The Wild Robot 
  • Sonic the Hedgehog 3     
  • Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
  • Flow      
  • Kung-Fu Panda 4              
  • Robot Dreams   

DRAMATIC SHORT WORK

One-shots, advertisements or short videos.

  • Horny   
  • Bun Hunting: Overture   
  • Dungeon Flippers PILOT: The Ace of Wands           
  • Catching Up (Pilot)          
  • Celine & Cheswick | 2D Animated Short Film         

DRAMATIC SERIES

TV or YouTube series

  • Beastars             
  • Helluva Boss      
  • Bluey    
  • Hazbin Hotel      
  • The Amazing Digital Circus           

NOVEL

Written works of 40,000 words or more. Serialized novels qualify only for the year that the final chapter is published.

  • The Varcross Key             
  • Chain Unbroken
  • Far Flung             
  • Executioner’s Gambit      
  • A Chronicle of Lies: Part 1: The Dark Sculptor         

SHORT FICTION

Stories less than 40,000 words, poetry, and other short written works.

  • A Different Kind of Make-Believe
  • Sun Runner: An Imbrium Novella 
  • The Frog Wife    
  • The Three-Piece Giant    
  • Monarch of Monsters     

GENERAL LITERARY WORK

Story collections, comic collections, graphic novels, non-fiction works, and serialized online stories.

  • Awoo!: Volume 2             
  • Lauren Ipsum Throws the Book At You      
  • Swords and Sausages: Volume Two           
  • The Shapeshifter’s Guide              
  • Work “Fur” Hire 

NON-FICTION WORK

  • Fur and Loathing Podcast              
  • “Fur Affinity owner Dragoneer and Hugo Nominated Vootie artist Taral Wayne pass away” — World in RooView            
  • Opening Ceremonies ShifterCon  
  • “Fur Affinity hacked following Dragoneer’s passing” — World in RooView   
  • “Celebrating 85 Years of Conventions – From Worldcon 1939 to Anthrocon 2024” — Con History 

GRAPHIC STORY

Includes comic books, and serialized online stories.

  • Projection Edge –Thomas K. Dye
  • Swords and Sausages — Jan          
  • Freefall — Mark Stanley  
  • Tamberlane — Caytlin Vilbrandt and Ari Noble       
  • 21st Century Fox — Scott Kellogg

COMIC STRIP

Newspaper-style strips, including those with ongoing arcs.

  • Lauren Ipsum — Charles Brubaker              
  • Carry On — Kathy Garrison            
  • Foxes in Love —  Toivo Kaartinen
  • Nine To Nine — Jan          
  • Pixie and Brutus — Pet Foolery    

MAGAZINE

Edited collections of creative and/or informational works by various people, professional or amateur, published in print or online in written, pictorial or audio-visual form.

  • Dogpatch Press — Patch O’Furr    
  • Flayrah — GreenReaper  
  • Furry Weekly — Yeshua, Carkas   
  • Gaming Furever
  • InFurNation — Rod O’Riley            

PUBLISHED ILLUSTRATION

General artwork, may include illustrations for books, magazines, convention program books, cover art for such, T-shirts, coffee-table portfolios.

  • Adventurers & Explorers — Royz  
  • Shopping Simulator — Squiddy     
  • Round 8: Le Mans 1973 — Elly      
  • High Orbit Serpent — _x 
  • Untitled — NessieMooo 

GAME

Computer or console games, role-playing games, board games.

  • WEBFISHING     
  • ANIMAL WELL   
  • Nine Sols             
  • Black Myth: Wukong       
  • Another Crab’s Treasure 

WEBSITE

Online collections of art, stories, and other creative and/or informational works. Includes galleries, story archives, directories, blogs, and personal sites.

  • Furaffinity          
  • Fluffle   
  • E621     
  • The Belfry WebComics Index       
  • Wikifur 

FURSUIT

Only one qualifying entry was given more than a single vote, therefore the category has been dropped for 2024.

MUSIC

Musical works such as singles and albums.

  • 808 Compact     
  • Bicycle 
  • Sad, Drunk and Needy (18+)         
  • Monarch of Monsters (18+)          
  • Olympics in Space