Glasgow 2024 has launched its Member Portal providing a single gateway to all online elements of the convention. The Member Portal is available to both in-person and online attendees aged 16 and over. The Portal is packed full of links to useful resources, as well as the link to join the convention Discord and to RingCentral Events where members will be able to stream a large proportion of the programme. Additional elements will be made available as the convention approaches, including the full convention schedule and the convention Newsletter.
The Member Portal is open to all Attending Members aged 16 or over, as well as all Online Members and Online Ticket holders. New joiners aged 16 or over can access the online convention by purchasing an Online Ticket at a cost of £40. Existing WSFS Members can upgrade to Online Membership at a reduced cost of £35.
Their Discord server is already open, offering a place to meet and chat with other attendees about the convention, programme items, and fandom in general, as well as coordinate plans, arrange ad hoc meetups, and play games together.
Starting on Saturday, July 27 they will be running pre-convention activities in the Discord server, including a scavenger hunt and a choose-your-own style adventure “If I Ran the Zoo Con” where the Discord members will run their own convention and see how “easy” it is. (We’ll be taking our chair, Esther MacCallum-Stewart, through the same questions at a future point and discovering whether she can do as well!).
We will be streaming many of our special events during the convention. These will include the Opening & Closing Ceremonies, the Masquerade, the Ian Sorensen play Nothing Nowhere, Never, Again, the Opera, the Worldcon Philharmonic Orchestra and of course the Hugo Awards Ceremony. (The Hugo Ceremony will also be broadcast publicly; the other events will only be streamed to members).
During the convention they will have up to 10 in-person rooms streaming at any given time, including purely in-person items and hybrid items with a mix of in-person and virtual participants. In addition, they will be hosting up to 4 purely online programme items at a time in peak hours.
Nnedi Okorafor, bestselling Nigerian American writer of Africanfuturist science fiction and fantasy for both children and adults. Best known for her Binti Series and the novels Who Fears Death, Zahrah the Windseeker, Akata Witch, and Remote Control, she has also written for comics and film and is the recipient of numerous awards including the Hugo Award, Nebula Award, Eisner Award, and World Fantasy Award.
Nicola Griffith, celebrated British American speculative fiction writer and activist, author of the Hild Sequence, Ammonite, So Lucky, Slow River, Spear, and more. Winner of the Nebula Award, Otherwise/Tiptree Award, World Fantasy Award, Los Angeles Times Book Prize, two Washington State Book Awards, and six Lambda Literary Awards.
Once upon a time, new SFFHoF inductees were picked by a cabal of industry insiders with fountain pens and agendas—and the results confirmed that. These days, it’s up to you!
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame was founded in 1996 by the Kansas City Science Fiction and Fantasy Society (KCSFFS) in conjunction with the J. Wayne and Elsie M. Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas.
The award, judged by a team at Goldsboro Books in London, is called “the only prize that rewards storytelling in all genres – from romance, thrillers and ghost stories, to historical, speculative and literary fiction.” It is given annually to “a compelling novel with brilliant characterization and a distinct voice that is confidently written and assuredly realized”.
The complete shortlist is at the link. The winner, who will receive £2,000 and a beautiful, handmade glass bell, will be named on September 26.
(1) CHRIS GARCIA ANALYZES THE AGENDA. In Claims Department 74 – “2024 Business Meeting”, Chris Garcia will be happy to tell you what he thinks about every proposal or amendment up for ratification at Glasgow 2024.
Welcome to another Claims Department, and this one is hella SMoFish, so if you got loins, you might wanna gird them….
There are things Chris is for, things he’s against, even one thing “I’m all the damn hell crap balls of the way for!” There’s another he disapproves of because “It’s clear to me that some people just hate fun”. And one piece of business he writes down with, “It’s garbage.”
However, all the commentary is substantial and well-informed.
The issue also includes a six-page Q&A session with Business Meeting Presiding Officer Jesi Lipp. For example, Lipp says about the items which are going to be confined in an Executive Session:
…I want to clarify a few misunderstandings that I’ve seen. First, if you are an attending member of WSFS, you don’t have to leave the room. Second, the rules around divulging what happens in executive session only apply to non-members. Any member at the meeting is free to discuss what happened with other WSFS members (so long as they do so in a way that does not also divulge the proceedings to non-members) because they also have an interest in the happenings of the society. Third, minutes are still recorded in executive session, they just don’t become a part of the publicly available minutes, but they will be retained and could be read at a future meeting (if that meeting was itself in executive session)…
There is no misunderstanding that the idea is to keep the transactions of the Executive Session from becoming known to the general public.
The attempt to rig the Hugos has appeared in the most influential and biggest Brazilian newspaper (about 10 million people read it monthly)???? I think it was one of the first times they talked about it. If anything, at least it's reaching new audiences. pic.twitter.com/tmMoE5PntZ
As a graduate student in Laramie, Wyo., in the 1990s, Sarah Mentock spent many weekends hunting for bargains at neighborhood yard sales. On one of those weekends, she spotted “The Lord of the Isles,” a narrative poem set in 14th-century Scotland. Brilliant green with a flowery red and blue design, the clothbound cover of the book – written by “Ivanhoe” author Walter Scott and published in 1815 – intrigued Mentock more than the story.
“It was just so beautiful,” she says. “I had to have it.”
For the next 30 years, “The Lord of the Isles” occupied a conspicuous place on Mentock’s bookshelf, the vivid green sliver of its spine adding a shock of color to her home. Sometimes she’d handle the old book when she dusted or repainted, but mostly she didn’t think too much about it.
Until, that is, she stumbled upon a news article in 2022 about the University of Delaware’s Poison Book Project, which aimed to identify books still in circulation that had been produced using toxic pigments common in Victorian bookbinding. Those include lead, chromium, mercury – and especially arsenic, often used in books with dazzling green covers.
“Huh,” Mentock thought, staring at a photo of one of the toxic green books in the article. “I have a book like that.”
Mentock shipped the book – tripled-wrapped in plastic – to Delaware. It wasn’t long before she heard back. The red contained mercury; the blue contained lead. And the green cover that captivated Mentock all those years ago? Full of arsenic.
“Congratulations,” the email she received said, “you have the dubious honor of sending us the most toxic book yet.”…
SAG-AFTRA will go on strike against major video game publishers, the actors union announced Thursday, following more than a year and half of negotiations, with the main sticking being protections against the use of artificial intelligence.
“Although agreements have been reached on many issues important to SAG-AFTRA members, the employers refuse to plainly affirm, in clear and enforceable language, that they will protect all performers covered by this contract in their A.I. language,” SAG-AFTRA said.
The strike was called by SAG-AFTRA national executive director and chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland and the Interactive Media Agreement Negotiating Committee. It will go into effect July 26 at 12:01 a.m….
The video game companies included in the strike are: Activision Productions Inc., Blindlight LLC, Disney Character Voices Inc., Electronic Arts Productions Inc., Formosa Interactive LLC, Insomniac Games Inc., Llama Productions LLC, Take 2 Productions Inc., VoiceWorks Productions Inc., and WB Games Inc….
“We’re not going to consent to a contract that allows companies to abuse A.I. to the detriment of our members,” SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher said. “Enough is enough. When these companies get serious about offering an agreement our members can live — and work — with, we will be here, ready to negotiate.”…
(6) WE ARE NOT AT THE SINGULARITY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.]Nature’s cover story this week “Garbage Out” looks at artificial intelligence. Apparently artificial intelligences (AIs) are really easy to induce to hallucinate if the AIs are trained by computer-generated data. One definition of a Singularity is that it is the point in time in which technology itself creates technology: such as robots building the computers and the computers programming the robots and themselves. Such a singularity was popularized by the mathematician and SF author Vernor Vinge…. The good news from this research is that humans are still key… (For now.)
The explosion in generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as large language models has been powered by the vast sets of human-generated data used to train them. As these tools continue to proliferate and their output becomes increasingly available online, it is conceivable that the source of training data could switch to content generated by computers. In this week’s issue, Ilia Shumailov and colleagues investigate the likely consequences of such a shift. The results are not promising. The researchers found that feeding AI-generated data to a model caused subsequent generations of the model to degrade to the point of collapse. In one test, text about medieval architecture was used as the starting point, but by the ninth generation the model output was a list of jackrabbits. The team suggests that training models using AI-generated data is not impossible but that great care must be taken over filtering those data — and that human-generated data will probably still have the edge.
(I do warn folk that the machines are taking over, but nobody ever listens…)
(7) DONATE TO DEB GEISLER AWARD. In honor of the late Deb Geisler, who died in March, her husband Mike Benveniste has established the Deb Geisler Award for Journalistic Excellence Fund at Suffolk University (where she taught) “to provide an annual stipend to a deserving student in the Communication, Journalism, & Media Department.”
Donations to the fund can be made online or by check: Link to give online: https://Suffolk.edu/Summa. By mail: Suffolk University, Office of Advancement, 73 Tremont Street, Boston, MA 02108. Attn: Kathy Tricca
(8) TOGETHER FOR A LUNCH “TREK” WITH THE FABULOUS NICK MEYER! [Item by Steve Vertlieb.] Together with the wondrous Nicholas Meyer on July 24, 2024. In addition to having directed the definitive “Star Trek” film … Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, as well as the last motion picture with the original television crew, Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country, Nick also directed the unforgettable romantic sci-fi fantasy, Time After Time, directed The Day After, the controversial telefilm predicting the devastating consequences of nuclear war, composed the screenplay for Star Trek: The Voyage Home, the teleplay for The Night That Panicked America (concerning Orson Welles radio production of “The War of the Worlds”) and authored The Seven Percent Solution.
He is a brilliant raconteur and conversationalist, as well as a charming and most delightful lunch companion. His newest Sherlock Holmes novel, SherlockHolmes and the Telegram from Hell, from the Reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D. is enjoying critical success and brisk sales.
Had the pleasure of chatting with Nick once more on Sunday afternoon following a screening of Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country at the Aero Theater, and spent an absolutely delightful two hours over lunch this afternoon, enjoying more quality time with this sublimely gifted artist who I’m honored to think of as my friend.
Nicholas Meyer and Steve Vertlieb
(9) SHINING MEMORIES. IndieWire cues up the trailer for Shine On — The Forgotten ‘Shining’ Location”, a new Kubrick documentary.
Few movie sets in Hollywood history have generated more interest than the Overlook Hotel from Stanley Kubrick‘s “The Shining.” The fictional Colorado hotel provides the backdrop for Jack Torrance’s (Jack Nicholson) descent into madness, and Kubrick devotees have spent countless hours analyzing symbolism in the production design and the disorienting effects created by the hotel’s impossible floor plan. The hotel sets, hailed by many as some of the defining craftsmanship of Kubrick’s filmmaking career, now get their moment in the spotlight in a new documentary set to be released on the late director’s birthday.…
…The film will see the collaborators revisiting some of the last remaining studio sets from “The Shining,” which were thought to have been destroyed years ago….
“There have been so many rumors about some of the sets from ‘The Shining’ still existing at Elstree Studios, but to actually find them and walk around them was like discovering a holy grail of film history,” [Paul] King said in a statement announcing the film…
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
July 25, 1973 — Mur Lafferty, 51.
By Paul Weimer: The Mighty Mur Lafferty, to be truthful. Back in the early days of the modern SFFnal internet, when before even blogs were quite a thing, there was Mur Lafferty, doing audio versions of stories, doing her podcast (I should be writing) and being one of the early adopters and early heralds of the SFFnal internet. I came into the SFFNal internet not long after, and thus discovered her work, and her podcast, just when I was getting my own start in writing reviews and such (this was in 2008 or so). I started with her Afterlife series and followed her career along. In those days, self-published work “didn’t count” for publication, which is why she managed to be a 2013 John C. Campbell Award nominee and then winner (now the Astounding Award) for Best New Writer, which was odd, because I’d been reading her for half a decade.
Mur Lafferty in 2017.
And it is heartwarming that she remembers me from those early halcyon days.
But besides the Afterlife novellas, and the Shambling Guides, and her fun twitter threads of pretending to watch minor league Baseball in the guise of a lady of Westeros come to North Carolina, I’ve been listening to her podcast, interacting with her on social media, meeting her at cons for a good long time. She’s played the long game in honing her skills, craft and writing abilities. Mur Laffery is simply the embodiment of the “10,000 hours” school of writing, getting better by writing and writing and writing. Mur proves the grind can work.
I think her Midsolar Murders novels (starting with Station Eternity) are probably the best place to begin with her work. I find her voice as a writer quirky, comfortable, and relentlessly entertaining, Although Six Wakes, which really marks the start of her more recent career (and a Hugo finalist) is a good single novel to take the measure of Mur’s work, if you want to try it.
And yes, Mur, yes, as you say, I should be writing. Happy birthday my friend.
(11) COMICS SECTION.
Broom Hilda exposes the reason behind some shortages.
The BBC’s annual report has praised the impact of Doctor Who – as ratings for the recently concluded season 14 continue to grow on BBC iPlayer.
The beloved sci-fi series was mentioned several times throughout the report, which spotlighted it as one of the shows driving the corporation’s “huge audiences”, while also mentioning its “economic impact” in Wales and across the UK….
… The 60th anniversary specials were also mentioned as one of the year’s “content highlights” alongside Eurovision coverage and the third season of Planet Earth.
The latest figures for the new season, as reported by The Times, now make it the highest-rated drama for young viewers (under 35s) across the BBC this year.
Overnight ratings for the season had been lower than is typically the case due to the show’s new release strategy – which saw each episode debut on BBC iPlayer at midnight on Fridays, several hours before the BBC One broadcast on Saturday evening.
But a spokesperson for the show explained that this had always been the expectation, saying: “Overnight ratings no longer provide an accurate picture of all those who watch drama in an on-demand world.
“This season of Doctor Who premiered on iPlayer nearly 24 hours before broadcast, and episode 1 has already been viewed by nearly 6 million viewers and continues to grow.”
To celebrate a quarter century of “SpongeBob SquarePants,” Nickelodeon pulled out all the stops at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, starting with an epic Hall H panel.
Mark Hamill made a surprise appearance to reveal that he’d be voicing The Flying Dutchman in the upcoming fourth SpongeBob film, “The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants,” out in 2025. “He’s the most fearsome goofball pirate you’ve ever seen. The movie is more cerebral. It’s more thoughtful, intellectually challenging. No, I’m just yanking your chain. It’s inspired silliness from start to finish.”…
Already more than a month late getting back, two NASA astronauts will remain at the International Space Station until engineers finish working on problems plaguing their Boeing capsule, officials said Thursday.
NASA’s commercial crew program manager Steve Stich said mission managers are not ready to announce a return date. The goal is to bring Wilmore and Williams back aboard Starliner, he added.
“We’ll come home when we’re ready,” Stich said.
Stich acknowledged that backup options are under review. SpaceX’s Dragon capsule is another means of getting NASA astronauts to and from the space station.
… The absence of evidence for aliens could be because they don’t exist or because our sampling depth is inadequate to detect them—a bit like declaring the entire ocean free of fish when none appear in a scooped-up bucket of seawater. Sampling depth refers to how thoroughly and keenly we can conduct a search. Fermi’s question is valuable because it narrows the possibilities down to two: either aliens are not present near Earth, or our current search methods are insufficient….
…From our privileged position in history, we know that advances in energy use often come with increases in efficiency, not simply increases in size or expansiveness. Think of the modern miniaturization of smartphones versus the mid-20th-century trend of computers that filled up whole rooms. Perhaps we should be looking for sophisticated and compact alien spacecraft, rather than motherships spewing misused energy….
Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a team of astronomers led by the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy imaged a new exoplanet that orbits a star in the nearby triple system Epsilon Indi. The planet is a cold super-Jupiter exhibiting a temperature of around 0 degrees Celsius and a wide orbit comparable to that of Neptune around the Sun. This measurement was only possible thanks to JWST’s unprecedented imaging capabilities in the thermal infrared. It exemplifies the potential of finding many more such planets similar to Jupiter in mass, temperature, and orbit. Studying them will improve our knowledge of how gas giants form and evolve in time….
What do we know about Eps Ind Ab?
“We discovered a signal in our data that did not match the expected exoplanet,” says Matthews. The point of light in the image was not in the predicted location. “But the planet still appeared to be a giant planet,” adds Matthews. However, before being able to make such an assessment, the astronomers had to exclude the signal was coming from a background source unrelated to Eps Ind A.
“It is always hard to be certain, but from the data, it seemed quite unlikely the signal was coming from an extragalactic background source,” explains Leindert Boogaard, another MPIA scientist and a co-author of the research article. Indeed, while browsing astronomical databases for other observations of Eps Ind, the team came across imaging data from 2019 obtained with the VISIR infrared camera attached to the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT). After re-analysing the images, the team found a faint object precisely at the position where it should be if the source imaged with JWST belonged to the star Eps Ind A.
The scientists also attempted to understand the exoplanet atmosphere based on the available images of the planet in three colours: two from JWST/MIRI and one from VLT/VISIR. Eps Ind Ab is fainter than expected at short wavelengths. This could indicate substantial amounts of heavy elements, particularly carbon, which builds molecules such as methane, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide, commonly found in gas-giant planets. Alternatively, it might indicate that the planet has a cloudy atmosphere. However, more work is needed to reach a final conclusion.
…It’s a property with no windows, no running water and no mod cons except for a phone line. But there is parking, the countryside is phenomenal and when Armageddon happens it could be perfect.
This week will bring the rare sale of a 1958 nuclear bunker in the Cumbrian Dales near Sedbergh…
(19) VIDEO OF THE DAY The YouTube channel Grammaticus Books has released another vintage SF video as part of the multi-YouTube-channel, Rocket Summer, event. This time his 9-minute review looks at the Robert Heinlein novel Tunnel in the Sky.
Tunnel in the Sky (1955). Arguably not his best book – it is a young adult coming of age story – it does though reveal some of the themes that recur in a number of his works including societal structure. This one has a bit of a Lord of the Flies feel: that novel came out the previous year. Grammaticus does pick up on something Heinlein does not openly convey but does hint at in a few places, is that the main protagonist is from an ethnic minority: remember, this novel was published in 1955 USA.
[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Paul Weimer, Rob Thornton, Steve Vertlieb, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, and Kathy Sullivan for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel “DD Not DDS” Dern.]
The Washington (DC) Science Fiction Association (WSFA) has announced the finalists for the 2024 WSFA Small Press Award for Short Fiction:
“Baby Golem” by Barbara Krasnoff, Jewish Futures: Science Fiction from the World’s Oldest Diaspora, ed. by Michael A Burstein, Fantastic Books (2023); and
“Better Living Through Algorithms” by Naomi Kritzer, Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 200 (May 2023) ed. by Neil Clarke
“A Bowl of Soup on the 87th Floor” by Kai Holmwood, Dreamforge Magazine, Issue 10 (March 2023) ed. by Scot Noel
“By the Works of Her Hands” by LaShawn M Wanak,Never Too Old to Save the World: A Midlife Calling Anthology, ed. by Alana Joli Abbott & Addie King, Outland Entertainment (February 2023)
“Interstate Mohinis” by M. L. Krishnan, Diaboloical Plots, Issue 100B (June 2023) ed. by Kel Coleman
“Machines” by Jennifer R. Povey, Game On!, ed. by Stephen Kotowych & Tony Pi, Zombies Need Brains (July 2023)
“Nothing But the Gods on Their Backs” by Alex T. Singer,Metaphorosis, (June 2023) ed. by B. Morris Allen
“Six Meals at Fanelli’s” by Annika Barranti Klein, Fusion Fragment, Issue 16 (April 2023) ed. by Cavan Terrill.
The award honors the efforts of small press publishers in providing a critical venue for short fiction in the area of speculative fiction, and showcases the best original short fiction published by small presses in the previous year (2023). An unusual feature of the selection process is that the voting is done with the identity of the author and publisher hidden so that the final choice is based solely on the quality of the story.
The winner is chosen by members of the Washington Science Fiction Association (www.wsfa.org), and the award will be presented at their annual convention, Capclave (www.capclave.org), held this year on September 27 – September 29 at the Rockville Hilton & Executive Meeting Center, 1750 Rockville Pike, Rockville, MD.
By Steven H Silver: Last night, Elaine and I saw The Lord of the Rings: A Musical Tale at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Although billed as running 2 hours and 45 minutes, including a 15 minute intermission, the show started at 7:00 and ended at 10:10. Originally billed as simply The Lord of the Rings when it debuted in 2006, it has been somewhat reworked from its original form and opened in Bagnor, UK last year. After its Chicago run ends on September 1, it will travel to Auckland, New Zealand.
While in the lobby, I got to hear a woman call out to a man “I like your ears” and he responded “I like yours, too.” Both were wearing elf ears and the woman was in full costume. Prior to the show, tickets holders were sent notes that cosplay was welcome, but no weapons or full masks were allowed and, although Hobbits went barefoot, audience members must wear shoes. In fact, the Hobbits on the stage wore sandals.
Perhaps fifteen minutes before the play was scheduled to begin, the cast began appearing on stage and moving through the audience, inviting members to play a ring toss game, juggle, or just chatting with the audience members. At one point, when Bilbo (Rick Hall) appeared in the audience, the cast led the entire audience in singing “Happy Birthday” to him. Bilbo even made his way up to the first balcony, where we were sitting. We also discovered that the couple next to us were attending because a friend of theirs, Ben Mathew, was playing Pippin. The cast would continue to move through the audience (including in the balconies) throughout the show.
The play opens with Bilbo’s birthday party and the first act, which ran 90 minutes took us to the breaking of the Fellowship. The second act condensed the final two volumes into 75 minutes. Much was excised, including the entire Theoden/Helm’s Deep story line. The play includes Treebeard (voiced by John Lithgow), but probably could have been omitted.
Discussing the play after it was over, Elaine and I agreed that it probably only makes sense to people who are familiar with the storyline from the books or the films, otherwise, the actions of Aragorn (Will James, Jr.), Legolas (understudied by Luke Nowakowski), Gimli (Ian Maryfield), Merry (Eileen Doan), and Pippin in the second act seem disjointed. Gimli and Legolas, especially do not seem to have a lot to do in this version.
The focus of the second act is really on Frodo (Spencer Davis Milford), Samwise (Michael Kurowski), and Gollum (Tony Bozzuto). Of the three, Samwise is the most engaging and Bozzuto owns his role as Gollum both physically and verbally, doing a wonderful imitation of Andy Serkis from the films, although I can’t imagine how he sings using that voice (especially since he was able to get across that he is a talented singer).
The subtitle is “A Musical Tale,” although the songs generally do not move the plot along and are incidental. A few are hummable, but many are forgettable. It may be the topic of the songs, but most of them would not feel out of place in a filk circle. There is no orchestra, instead the music is provided by the actors playing instruments on stage and nearly all of the major characters play instruments at some point.
Throughout the show, we visit the Shire, the Prancing Pony, Rivendell, Moria, Isengard, Lothlorien, Fangorn, Minas Tirith, Shelob’s lair, and Mount Doom. Unlike the films, we also get a taste of the Scouring of the Shire. Although there are minor changes to the set, the different settings were mostly handled with lighting and projection changes. Most of them worked, but there is one scene in which Galadriel sings while standing in a cut out circle of light that reminded me of the opening of many James Bond films.
Back in the 1980s, I was a regular attendee of the interactive play Dungeon Master and watching the actors move on the stage, I felt, at times, that I was watching a big-budget version of that show, perhaps because many of the fight scenes were staged in slow-motion. Speaking of the battle scenes, when Aragorn was attempting to rally his troops, you never got the feeling he was talking to more than a half dozen people. On the other hand, the five actors portraying the orcs (who seemed to me to be depicted as an inner city street gang) managed to appear to be a never-ending horde.
The fight choreography was stronger than the dance choreography. The fights seemed naturalistic, but dancing, aside from in the opening scene at the party, felt like it was choreographed specifically to put on a show for the watching audience and therefore felt staged and a little awkward.
The special effects were mostly well done, although the first, Bilbo’s disappearance, probably played better from the orchestra than it does from the balconies from where you can see the trap open. The Nazgul’s horses are depicted as enormous horse skull puppets with glowing red eyes and move throughout the audience. The Shelob spider puppet is incredibly well done as well.
I would recommend the show with some reservations. If you are not a Lord of the Rings fan, this is not the proper introduction for you. You’ll spend much of the show asking your companions what is happening and who people are, many of whom don’t really seem to have a purpose. Fans of The Lord of the Rings will enjoy it, filling in the parts that aren’t fully explained (and probably griping that their favorite parts or characters are given short shrift or omitted entirely).
The show also featured Tom Amandes as Gandalf, Suzanne Hannau as Rosie Cotton, Jeff Parker and Elrond and Saruman, Alina Taber as Arwen, Matthew C. Yee as Boromir, and Lauren Zakrin as Galadriel. Rick Hall not only played Bilbo, but also the Steward of Gondor.
The Helsinki Science Fiction Society has announced the winner of the 2024 Tähtifantasia Award, given for the best fantasy book published in Finnish during the previous year.
Jorge Luis Borges’ short story collection Kertomukset (published by Teos) Translated into Finnish by Anu Partanen
The English version of the award citation says:
The Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) was a poet, essayist and fantastic prose writer who exploited the possibilities of genre fiction. Borges did not receive the Nobel Prize for literature, but he did receive, among other things, the World Fantasy prize for his life’s work.
At the heart of the collection is the Fiktioita collection, published in the 1940s, whose most famous short story is The Library of Babel. In it, Borges describes the world as an endless library whose writings contain all possible worlds. In Borges’ stories, reality appears as a maze. Behind the apparent order lies chaos, emptiness and infinity. Still, the search is its own reward and in eternity every place is a vantage point.
Borges is a clear and pleasant narrator who knows how to describe realistically and atmospherically. He lures the reader into thought games and their extreme conclusions in easy-to-follow language. Borges creates believable characters and alternative worlds with just a few sentences. There is nothing too much and nothing too little in his text.
There is humor in the stories, which reminds us of relativity and the importance of attentiveness. In them you can find perspectives on historical and contemporary phenomena. For example, the spread of conspiracy theories and the influence of information can be thought of through the topics discussed by Borges, which are deception and self-deception and the search for identity and meaning.
The award jury is composed of critics Jukka Halme and Aleksi Kuutio, Osmo Määttä of Risingshadow.net and Niina Tolonen, a book blogger. Aleksi is the chair and is also on the Board of The Finnish Critics’ Association.
(1) SURVIVING THE TIMES. N.K. Jemisin tells Esquire readers “We Need Speculative Fiction Now More Than Ever” in this commentary excerpted from her introduction to Authority, by Jeff VanderMeer.
…Enter the Southern Reach books. At the time I first read Annihilation—during the run-up to the 2016 election—it was a welcome breath of fungal, fetid air. Other fiction of the time seemed determined to suggest there was no need for alarm, things couldn’t be so bad, anything broken could be fixed. Could it, though? As I watched my country embrace a stupid, incompetent, and blatantly criminal fascist while insisting that his spiteful, privileged sycophants somehow had a point…well. When you’re already queasy, sweet smells make the feeling worse.
It helped to read instead about the smells—and sights, and horrors, and haunting beauty—of Area X. It helped me to imagine that creeping, transformative infection, warping body and mind and environment and institution, because that was the world I was living in. It helped to meet the twelfth expedition’s nameless women, who were simultaneously individuals with selfish motivations and archetypes trapped in their roles: the biologist, driven by the loss of her mate and the need to integrate into a new ecosystem; the psychologist, a human-subjects ethics violation in human(?) flesh. We are dropped into danger with these women, immediately forced to confront an existential threat with courage and perseverance…and this, this, was what I needed from my fiction. The second book, Authority, was even more of what I needed. As we watched Control slowly realize he’s never been in control, and that things were a lot worse than his complacency allowed him to see, it just resonated so powerfully. His over-reliance on procedure and the assumed wisdom of his predecessor, his dogged refusal to see the undying plant in his office as a sign of something wrong… There was nothing of 2014’s politics overtly visible in the book, yet they were all over it, like mold….
The U.S. Postal Service is honoring late “Jeopardy!” host Alex Trebek with a new forever stamp and celebrated the pop culture icon in a dedication ceremony Monday.
The new stamps will be available in a set of 20 designed to resemble a “Jeopardy!” game board with its eye-catching, signature blue video screens. Each stamp features a clue, prompting collectors and letter-senders with the query, “This naturalized U.S. citizen hosted the quiz show ‘Jeopardy!’ for 37 seasons.” Its answer, “Who is Alex Trebek?” also appears underneath the clue in upside-down print….
(3) THE ATOMIC WAY. [Item by Jim Janney.] Ars Technica has a long article on the new NASA/DARPA combined research project for nuclear powered space ships, and includes a history of previous efforts starting in the 1950s. “We’re building nuclear spaceships again—this time for real”.
One of the plot points of Miss Pickerell Goes To Mars is that the crew member responsible for navigating the ship, and doing the essential calculations, gets left behind. They muddle through anyway, with the help of some sensible advice from Miss Pickerell and because, as one of the crew cheerfully says, “Don’t have to worry about that. Using atomic fuel.” Reading that in 2024 caused me to roll my eyes a little (and the question of reaction mass is never discussed), but it’s more plausible than I realized.
Phoebus 2A, the most powerful space nuclear reactor ever made, was fired up at Nevada Test Site on June 26, 1968. The test lasted 750 seconds and confirmed it could carry first humans to Mars. But Phoebus 2A did not take anyone to Mars. It was too large, it cost too much, and it didn’t mesh with Nixon’s idea that we had no business going anywhere further than low-Earth orbit.
But it wasn’t NASA that first called for rockets with nuclear engines. It was the military that wanted to use them for intercontinental ballistic missiles. And now, the military wants them again….
…DARPA’s website says it has always held to a singular mission of making investments in breakthrough technologies for national security. What does a nuclear-powered spaceship have to do with national security? The military’s perspective was hinted at by General James Dickinson, a US Space Command officer, in his testimony before Congress in April 2021.
He said that “Beijing is seeking space superiority through space attack systems” and mentioned intelligence gathered on the Shijian-17, a Chinese satellite fitted with a robotic arm that could be used for “grappling other satellites.” That may sound like a ridiculous stretch, but it was enough get a go-ahead for a nuclear spaceship.
And the apparent concern regarding hypothetical threats has continued. The purpose of the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO) project, stated in its environmental assessment, was to “provide space-based assets to deter strategic attacks by adversaries.” Dickinson’s worries about China were quoted in there as well.
“Let’s say you have a time-critical mission where you need to quickly go from A to B in cislunar space or you need to keep an eye on another country that is doing something near or around the Moon, and you need to move in very fast. With a platform like DRACO, you can do that,” said DARPA’s Dodson….
(5) HISTORIC BLOCH PHOTOS. The Robert Bloch Official Website has announced a big update: an entirely new, second gallery page. All photos supplied courtesy of Robert Unik, Elly Bloch’s great nephew. “Gallery 2”.
(6) FOR THE COAL BITERS AMONG US. [Item by Danny Sichel.] When he was in graduate school, earning his doctorate in Scandinavian Studies, Jackson Crawford took the time to compile a work called “Tattúínárdǿla saga”: Star Wars as an Icelandic saga. True, this was in 2010, but if you haven’t seen it, then it might as well be new.
…Tattúínárdǿla saga tells of the youth of Anakinn himingangari, beginning with his childhood as a slave in Tattúínárdalr, notably lacking the prolonged racing scene of the MHG version, and referring to the character of “Jarjari inn heimski” only as a local fool slain by Anakinn in a childhood berserker rage (whereas in the MHG version, “Jarjare” is one of “Anacen’s” marshals and his constant companion; Cochrane 2010 suggests that this may be because the MHG text is Frankish in origin, and “Jarjare” was identified with a Frankish culture hero with a similar name). After this killing, for which Anakinn’s owner (and implied father) refuses to pay compensation, Anakinn’s mother, an enslaved Irish princess, foresees a great future for Anakinn as a “jeði” (the exact provenance of this word is unknown but perhaps represents an intentionally humorous Irish mispronunciation of “goði”). This compels Anakinn to recite his first verse…
[Translation] “My mother said/ That they should buy me/ A warship and fair oars,/ That I should go abroad with Jedis,/ Stand up in the ship’s stern,/ Steer a magnificent X-Wing,/ Hold my course till the harbor,/ Kill one man after another.”
The etymology of “xwingi” (nom. *xwingr?) is unknown; numerous editors have proposed emendations, but none is considered particularly plausible. It is likely to be another humorous Irish mispronunciation of a Norse word….
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
July 24, 1895 – Robert Graves. (Died 1985).
Robert Graves
By Paul Weimer: Graves for me has always sat at the intersection of myth, mythology and ancient (secret) history. I first came across his work, although I didn’t know that he was the ultimate author of it, when I watched the BBC adaptation of his novel I, Claudius, which purports to tell the “True” story of Claudius and his ancestors from the perspective of the titular character. It gave me a somewhat distorted opinion, as well as a great appreciation, of the strangeness and wild nature of the Julio-Claudian dynasty and helped cement my interest in Ancient Rome for good. It would be a decade before I read the actual novel It took me years, after reading the book, to come to a better and more balanced opinion of Livia than what Graves inadvertently taught me. In similar fashion, his Count Belisarius gave me a skewed but interesting perspective on the titular Byzantine General. This novel once again (a bad theme in his work) gave me a skewed opinion and view of Belisarius’ wife Antonia. It’s well written (just like I, Claudius and Claudius the God) but is it good history? No, no it is absolutely not. The novels (all of them) should be taken with a huge heaping of salt.
Where Graves hits science fiction circles more directly is The White Goddess and his interest in Celtic spiritualism, myth and mythology. It’s most certainly a response and extension of Frazer’s The Golden Bough. By the time I came across The White Goddess (when I was studying all sorts of myth and mythology), I had had enough grounding in Graves and his work to be able to read it critically. Is it history? Is it at all accurate and represents real belief systems and systems of thought?
No.
Instead, The White Goddess, I felt, is an individualistic and idiosyncratic, and poetic and mythopoetic point of view on this Celtic flavored belief and spirituality. It has no actual value in exploring the real belief systems of the past, it’s not quite a fantasy so much as a demonstration of how one can construct and use belief systems. In that sense, it functions to show how one could go about worldbuilding a belief system for a secondary world fantasy setting based on iconography and interpretation and imagery. In that sense, as a tool for thinking about spirituality and how it might be created, The White Goddess is far more successful, and is on far firmer ground, than an actual depiction of ancient beliefs in any way whatsoever. I think the strong poetic writing of Graves, the keenness of word choice and imagery, here and elsewhere, gives his work a power that still resonates.
(8) COMICS SECTION.
Eek! reminds us that Star Wars is no Field of Dreams.
(9) MARS IN POPULAR CULTURE ONE-DAY SPECIAL. [Item by David Goldfarb.] LearnedLeague is at it again, with a One-Day Special quiz about “Mars in Popular Culture”. You can find the questions by following this link. As you might expect from the subject, it has a great deal of SFF content. I got 9 of the 12 questions right, and somewhat unusually for me, managed to pick the five questions that would play the toughest and so got the best possible score given those 9.
(10) KEEP THOSE DOGIES ROLLING. [Item by Daniel Dern.] (With a tip of the hat to the Firesign Theatre), “And there’s hot dogs [or perhaps, for scansion, “frankfurters”] all over the highway!” “Oscar Mayer Wienermobile rolls in crash on Chicago-area highway” at AP News.
An Oscar Mayer Wienermobile got into a pickle on a Chicago highway.
The hot-dog shaped Wienermobile hit a car Monday morning along Interstate 294 and its driver lost control and overcorrected, causing it to roll onto its side near the Chicago suburb of Oak Brook, Illinois State Police said.
No injuries were reported after the crash, which prompted the closure of the right lane of northbound I-294 for more than an hour, officials said.
Scientists in Brazil have come up with the first evidence that sharks are being exposed to cocaine.
Rachel Ann Hauser Davis, a biologist who worked on the study at Brazil’s Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, told NPR that they dissected 13 wild sharpnose sharks caught near Rio de Janeiro. All tested positive for cocaine in their muscles and livers.
“The key findings of the study are the presence of cocaine in sharks,” Hauser Davis says. “The actual high levels of cocaine detected in muscle is indicative of chronic exposure.”
Narcotraffickers being chased in the high seas often toss bales of cocaine overboard. But Hauser Davis says it’s more likely the sharks in the study were exposed to Rio de Janeiro wastewater contaminated with the drug.
“Probably the main source would be human use of cocaine and metabolization and urine and feces discharge, and the second source would be from illegal refining labs,” she says….
(12) WATER, WATER, EVERYWHERE. [Item by Steven French.] “Inventors on hunt for way to make clean water on moon” says the Guardian. One of the ‘contestants’ is the British Interplanetary Society whose former Chair was of course the inimitable Arthur C!
Inventors hope to crack how to create a reliable clean water supply on the moon – and it may involve a microwave oven from Tesco.
The goal to set up a crewed lunar base was launched many moons ago but has yet to come to fruition. With reliance on water supplies from Earth risky and expensive, one of the many challenges is how to extract and purify water from ice lying in craters at the lunar south pole.
Such a supply would not only provide a resource for drinking and growing crops, but the water could also be split into hydrogen, for use as rocket fuel, and oxygen for residents to breathe.
Now the UK Space Agency has announced that it is awarding £30,000 in seed funding, with expert support, to each of 10 UK teams who are vying to solve the problem….
As part of NASA’s commitment to foster responsible exploration of the universe for the benefit of humanity, the Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy (OTPS) is funding space sustainability research proposals from five university-based teams to analyze critical economic, social, and policy issues related to Earth’s orbit and cislunar space.
The new research awards reflect the agency’s commitment identified in NASA’s Space Sustainability Strategy to ensure safe, peaceful, and responsible space exploration for future generations, and encourage sustainable behaviors in cislunar space and on the lunar surface by ensuring that current operations do not impact those yet to come.
Three of the five awards will fund research that addresses the growing problem of orbital debris, human-made objects in Earth’s orbit that no longer serve a purpose. This debris can endanger spacecraft, jeopardize access to space, and impede the development of a low-Earth orbit economy.
The remaining two awards focus on lunar surface sustainability and will address key policy questions such as the protection of valuable locations and human heritage sites as well as other technical, economic, or cultural considerations that may factor into mission planning. ….
A panel of NASA experts selected the following proposals, awarding a total of about $550,000 to fund them:
Lunar surface sustainability
“A RAD Framework for the Moon: Applying Resist-Accept-Direct Decision-Making,” submitted by Dr. Caitlin Ahrens of the University of Maryland, College Park
“Synthesizing Frameworks of Sustainability for Futures on the Moon,” submitted by research scientist Afreen Siddiqi of Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Orbital Debris and Space Sustainability
“Integrated Economic-Debris Modeling of Active Debris Removal to Inform Space Sustainability and Policy,” submitted by researcher Mark Moretto of the University of Colorado, Boulder
“Avoiding the Kessler Syndrome Through Policy Intervention,” submitted by aeronautics and astronautics researcher Richard Linares of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
“Analysis of Cislunar Space Environment Scenarios, Enabling Deterrence and Incentive-Based Policy,” submitted by mechanical and aerospace engineering researcher Ryne Beeson of Princeton University
[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Jim Janney, Ersatz Culture, Rich Lynch, Danny SIchel, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Steven French for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Thomas the Red.]
Final ballot voting is restricted to comic book industry creative community — anyone involved in and credited with creating comics professionally.
In addition to Final Ballot categories, both Fan-Only Favorites from the nomination ballot and Hero Initiative Awards (The Hero Initiative Lifetime Achievement Award and The Dick Giordano Humanitarian Award) will be presented at the Mike Wieringo Comic Book Industry Awards ceremony the evening of September 21 as part of The Baltimore Comic-Con.
Best Cartoonist (Writer and Artist)
66 Shark Teeth
K. O’Neill
Ed Piskor
Jeff Smith
Jillian Tamaki
Best Writer
Dan Abnett
Ed Brubaker
Tom King
Mariko Tamaki
Kit Trace
Best Artist or Penciller/Inker Team
Elsa Charretier
Duncan Fegredo
Abdullah Hadia
Vincent Mallié
Sean Phillips
Peter Rostovsky
Best Letterer
Clayton Cowles
Taylor Esposito
Lucas Gattoni
Stephen Kok
Micah Myers
Stan Sakai
Best Colorist
Brad Anderson
Jordie Bellaire
Tamra Bonvillain
Stephan Franck
Jacob Phillips
Rico Renzi
Best Cover Artist
Colin Griffin
Tula Lotay
Dan Parent
Chris Samnee
Bill Sienkiewicz
Fiona Staples
Best Series
Geiger: Ground Zero, Image Comics
The Night Eaters, Abrams ComicArts
Phantom Road, Image Comics
Rare Flavours, BOOM! Studios
Sirens of the City, BOOM! Studios
Tower, A Wave Blue World
Best Single Issue or Story
Animal Pound #1, BOOM! Studios
By The Horns: Dark Earth #7, Scout Comics
Etheres, Source Point Press
Rare Flavours #1, BOOM! Studios
Somna, DSTLRY
Star Trek: Day of Blood – Shaxs’ Best Day, IDW Publishing
Best Original Graphic Novel
Monica, Fantagraphics
Parasocial, Image Comics
Roaming, Drawn & Quarterly
Slightly Exaggerated, Dark Horse Comics
Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller: The Man Who Created Nancy, Abrams ComicArts
Best Anthology
The Devil’s Cut, DSTLRY
Dwellings, Oni Press
Hairology, Lifeline Comics
Ice Cream Man, Image Comics
The Rocketeer One-Shot, IDW
Swan Songs, Image Comics
Best Humor Comic
Asterix and the White Lotus (Vol. 40), Papercutz
Betty & Veronica Friends Forever: Game On #1, Archie Comics
