Here are 9 developments of interest to fans.

(1) The faannish proclivity to improve on English by adding an extra “a” or an extraneous “h” springs from the same impulse our ancestors had to tack odd characters onto the tail of the language, as Mental Floss shows in “12 Letters That Didn’t Make the Alphabet”. Here’s one of the most familiar examples —

Have you ever seen a place that calls itself “ye olde whatever”? As it happens, that’s not a “y”, or, at least, it wasn’t supposed to be. Originally, it was an entirely different letter called thorn, which derived from the Old English runic alphabet, Futhark.

Thorn, which was pronounced exactly like the “th” in its name, is actually still around today in Icelandic. We replaced it with “th” over time—thorn fell out of use because Gothic-style scripting made the letters y and thorn look practically identical. And, since French printing presses didn’t have thorn anyway, it just became common to replace it with a y. Hence naming things like, “Ye Olde Magazine of Interesting Facts” (just as an example, of course).

Did Foo write in Futhark?

(2) I was enthralled by the Alien Abduction Lamp so it’s only natural I cracked up when I saw the Cow Abduction website.

(3) After satirizing the D-box vibrating movie seat experience Jordan Jeffers settles down to deliver a well-phrased critique of Peter Jackson’s use of Tolkien in “The Hobbit and the Watchful Dragons of Our Hearts” —

For Lewis, Christian fantasy is like Bilbo Baggins, an invisible burglar that can sneak the message of Christ past the “watchful dragons” of our hearts. And this is the biggest difference between Lewis and his good friend and fellow Christian fantasist Tolkien. When Lewis writes a fairy story, he’s always concerned with what a thing means: Aslan means Jesus; the Stone Table means the Law of Moses; the White Witch means Satan (or perhaps sin).

Tolkien is far more interested in what a thing is. Here is a forest, and a dragon, and an evil ring. Here is a hobbit, and a beautiful jewel, and a dwarf full of greed. Tolkien is a storyteller, a myth maker, for he believed that myths demonstrated truth, that truth cannot actually be understood apart from myth. We can have no true vision of the stars unless we can first see them as “songs of living silver,” no true understanding of the earth until we can first understand it as our mother. Our myths matter a good deal, and how we think of elves is of vital importance to how we think of ourselves.

Jackson’s Hobbit movies have so far managed to miss this Tolkien essential almost completely. Jackson is neither a communicator nor a mythmaker. He is a spectacle maker, a ringmaster, a showman. And he is very, very good at this.

(3) A fan has made even less pure use of “Common People” by William Shatner from his album Has Been, though for obvious reasons no one has been complaining…

(4) “What do Indiana Jones, Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter and the Muppets have in common? A creator of iconic images,” is the hook in a 2008 article about film industry artist Drew Struzan —

Guillermo del Toro is among the filmmakers who rave about Struzan’s ability to expand the world of a movie through his pictures — images that, while printed, hardly seem static. “What Drew does isn’t really distilling the elements of a movie,” says Del Toro, who has enlisted Struzan to do posters for “Hellboy” and its upcoming sequel, as well as a limited-edition piece for “Pan’s Labyrinth.” “It’s almost alchemy. He takes images and makes them quintessentially cinematic. His style has been copied so many times in a bad way, people don’t realize until they revisit his posters just how powerful the pure Struzan style is, how purely filmic it is.”

An exhibit of poster art by Drew Struzan and Bob Peak is on display in the Forest Lawn – Glendale Museum from January 24-May 26. They did the poster art for everything from Blade Runnerto Harry Potter, Star Wars and The Walking Dead.

(5) Jay Lake had made his entire genetic sequence open source through the Personal Genome Project. Money to do the sequencing came from Sequence a Science Fiction Writer. The work was done in an effort to reveal a new treatment path for Lake’s colon cancer. Lake’s cancer has been diagnosed as terminal, but by releasing his genome online he hopes to help others to study and defeat the disease.

(6) George T. McWhorter is the curator of the Edgar Rice Burroughs Memorial Collection at the University of Louisville’s Ekstrom Library.

The Burroughs Memorial Collection contains all first editions in dust jackets, as well as reprints in 35 languages, pulps, comics, newspapers and extensive periodical files, clippings and scrapbooks, toys and games, biography and bibliography, including the working papers of Irwin Porges and Erling B. Holtsmark, and a reference collection of films, filmstills and scripts, original art and sculpture, posters, correspondence and memorabilia.

He talks about his life and interests in an interesting 15-minute video “A Conversation With George T. McWhorter” [Vimeo file]. The guy can even sing!

(7) Two fellows have created a car from Legos powered by a 256-cylinder compressed air engine. Would you like to guess what the biggest problem was in designing the first full-size Lego car? Well, I’ll tell you anyway.

Sammartino and Oaida say that the hot rod is capable of 20-30 kph, but that they drive it slowly as they’re scared of a ‘giant Lego explosion.’ Presumably there is a hard limit on how much air pressure the Lego cylinders can withstand, and thus how high the engine can rev. Or considering the blocks are almost certainly glued together, maybe the limiting factor is heat dissipation — those pistons, without any kind of real air or liquid cooling, are probably generating a fairly large amount of heat.

(8) Some of you have other reasons for wanting to go to Las Vegas. John King Tarpinian says this is his – The Sci-fi Center, at 600 East Sahara Ave. They also keep a Facebook page.

(9) Bill Higgins’ article “Antimatter’s Science Fiction Debut” in a 2008 issue of Symmetry: Dimensions of Particle Physics traces where and when this scientific discovery first cropped up in an sf story.

News accounts of the controversy introduced [Vladimir] Rojansky’s word “contraterrene” to a wider public, along with the idea that contraterrene asteroids or comets might orbit the Sun.

This sparked John Campbell’s restless imagination. He imagined that space-going miners might pursue contraterrene asteroids as a rich source of energy, despite the deadly radiation risks in handling untouchable material.

He handed off the idea to Jack Williamson, who eventually turned it into his Seetee series.

[Thanks for these links goes out to John King Tarpinian, David Klaus, Ed Green and Bill Higgins.]

Update 01/09/2014: Removed the extra b in alphabet, per comment.

Here are 11 developments of interest to fans. Oh, the humanity!

(1) Maggie Thompson knows why it is a “proud and lonely thing to be a fan” and wonders why today’s fans don’t.

“But, hey,” I said, “I know the references involved. They were common knowledge in the world of science-fiction fandom in the 1950s!” Weird thing: Apparently, common knowledge to a generation of people devoted to the wonders of the future has not been universally transferred from survivors of that generation to the future that is our present.

(2) In a move clearly aimed at neutralizing Finland’s challenge to Japan for the 2017 Worldcon, there are plans for a Moomin theme park in Japan:

First published in 1945 in Swedish, the Moomin books and comic strips were adapted into several anime properties, and remains popular worldwide.

(3) Tim Kreider asks in The New Yorker: “Kim Stanley Robinson: Our Greatest Political Novelist?” —

If historians or critics fifty years from now were to read most of our contemporary literary fiction, they might well infer that our main societal problems were issues with our parents, bad relationships, and death. If they were looking for any indication that we were even dimly aware of the burgeoning global conflict between democracy and capitalism, or of the abyssal catastrophe our civilization was just beginning to spill over the brink of, they might need to turn to books that have that embarrassing little Saturn-and-spaceship sticker on the spine. That is, to science fiction…

(4) Sharknado will not be the apotheosis of Western civilization explains Grantland’s Holly Anderson:

Sharknado will be surpassed, someday. Those who would say that’s impossible are forgetting the lessons of Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus. Humanity’s capacity for invention is limitless, as limitless as the possible combinations of dangerous animals and threatening weather spectacles.

(5) Tarpinian already understands this. I know, because he sent me a link to this photo of the most terrifying culinary creation of all time – the Cthurkey.

(6) No wonder I was in the mood to enjoy reading Matt Molgaard list of “Today’s Top 10 Horror Authors”.

07. Jonathan Maberry: Jon is probably the least appreciated artist to be featured in this list, which is a bit strange. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a very successful author, but the truth of the matter is, he deserves a wealth more respect than he’s already extended. The guy is damn good, to be blunt. A versatile author, Maberry’s pumped out some terrifying tales. Just check out the entire Pine Deep trilogy, his Joe Ledger series (Patient Zero is great) and if you dig the current zombie craze, don’t pass on Dead of Night.

(7) Let’s split California into six states urges technology investor Tim Draper: “It is about time California was properly represented with Senators in Washington. Now our number of Senators per person will be about average.” He plans to file a ballot initiative allowing voters to divide up California.

Just ignore party-pooper Rick Hasen who believes this is legally impossible to do through an initiative .

The California Supreme Court would almost certainly rule that such a measure cannot go on the ballot as an initiative because one can only amend, but not revise, the state Constitution. Under the state supreme court’s test for revisions (most recently in a case involving the Proposition 8 anti-same sex marriage measure), splitting the state into six would count as a revision.

(8) Then, after California is split, “Get ready to tie up your boat to Idaho” as the old song goes. Drownyourtown, a Tumblr site, visualizes cityscapes flooded as a result of icecaps melting. There are views for San Diego, San Francisco, and Oakland, among others.

(9) Chiller Theater an autograph convention with many washed-up celebrities, drew 13,000 to Parsippany, NJ last October.

“Keir Dullea, gone tomorrow,” Noël Coward once quipped about the handsome actor, who is probably best known for playing the astronaut in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

But not only is Mr. Dullea, 77, still here, he was signing autographs not long ago with his “2001” co-star Gary Lockwood, greeting fans who paid to meet the sci-fi legends and walk away with a personalized still photograph from the film.

The competition, however, was stiff.

“He doesn’t have that much of a crowd,” a scruffy looking attendee noted. Well, it may not have been as big as Corey Feldman’s, but he seemed to be drawing more than the janitor from “The Breakfast Club.”

(10) Can you imagine bestselling author Dan Brown as a cartoon superhero?

The “battle action” story Bung? Stray Dogs centers around a league of literary figures with supernatural powers….  Brown himself will have the power of “Inferno” — the ability to compose a three-line poem that offers a glimpse of “hell.” The “hell” is actually a reflection of what the real world would be like, 33 minutes from now, so anyone who can decipher the poem can predict the future. Unfortunately, “only Brown himself has the historical and religious knowledge to decipher the poems.” (Not coincidentally, Brown’s latest novel, Inferno, debuted in English and Japanese this year.)

(11) But wait! This is how Star Trek: Into Darkness should have ended (superseding all previous attempts along that line.) Given the power, David Klaus would rename this HISHE video — Star Trek Into Torchwood: Miracle Day.

[Thanks for these links goes out to Dan Goodman, Willard Stone, Petréa Mitchell, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian and David Klaus.]

Here are 9 developments of interest to fans.

(1) Now we know – The Green Slime is really black. And it’s living inside the Chernobyl reactor!

Like out of some B-grade sci fi movie, a robot sent into the [Chernobyl] reactor discovered a thick coat of black slime growing on the walls. Since it is highly radioactive in there, scientists didn’t expect to find anything living, let alone thriving. The robot was instructed to obtain samples of the slime, which it did, and upon examination…the slime was even more amazing than was thought at first glance.

This slime, a collection of several fungi actually, was more than just surviving in a radioactive environment, it was actually using gamma radiation as a food source. Samples of these fungi grew significantly faster when exposed to gamma radiation at 500 times the normal background radiation level. The fungi appear to use melanin, a chemical found in human skin as well, in the same fashion as plants use chlorophyll. That is to say, the melanin molecule gets struck by a gamma ray and its chemistry is altered. This is an amazing discovery, no one had even suspected that something like this was possible.

(2) And it seems only appropriate to follow that lead-in with the revelation that the genuine, commercially-available product named Soylent is neither green (it’s beige) nor made of people.

Every morning, Rob Rhinehart prepares a wholesome breakfast, lunch, and dinner—in about a minute. He mixes cold water (plus a splash of vanilla extract or a pinch of cinnamon) with 4.2 cups of a flavorless beige powder in a few 32-ounce bottles—and that’s it. The 24-year-old Bay Area engineer subsists mostly by sipping on a cocktail of 31 nutrients until he hits 2,000 to 2,500 calories. He believes the powder, which he playfully named Soylent after the food rations in the seventies sci-fi flick Soylent Green (his product is not made of people), could one day solve world hunger. And Rhinehart isn’t the only one drinking the Soylent Kool-Aid: Earlier this year, during a crowdhoster.com campaign to make the product widely available, fans pledged $100,000 in three hours—and within three weeks, 4,000 backers had put up more than half a million dollars. A one-month supply of Soylent is available for $230 at campaign.soylent.me.

(3) In Africa, only one in six rural inhabitants has access to electricity but Scientific American reports that could change through the creative marketing of solar energy on a pay-as-you-go basis:

…Across the U.S. and U.K. electricity from a utility costs between 10 to 15 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh). A villager in rural Kenya or Rwanda, however, pays an equivalent cost of $8 per kWh for kerosene lighting. Often 30 percent or more a family’s income is spent on kerosene. Charging a mobile phone is even more expensive. That same villager would pay nearly 400 times more to charge a mobile phone in rural Kenya than in the U.S. Solar-powered charger kits are a promising alternative, but many rural families cannot afford the up-front cost of these systems, which start at $50.

With a Pay-As-You-Go model (PAYG) for solar kits, on the other hand, customers can instead pay an up-front fee of around $10 for a solar charger kit that includes a two- to five-watt solar panel and a control unit that powers LED lights and charges devices like mobile phones. Then they pay for energy when they need it—frequently in advance each week—or when they can (say, after a successful harvest). In practice, kits are paid off after about 18 months and subsequent electricity is free to the new owner. PAYG customers are finding that instead of paying $2 to $3 a week for kerosene, they pay less than half that for solar energy. The PAYG concept is a familiar one for hundreds of millions of Africans who purchase mobile phone minutes and kerosene fuel incrementally

“This story is truly kind of thrilling (replete with echoes of some dreams of Arthur C. Clarke and others)!” says James H. Burns. “But it also raises an interesting question:  If a member of a third world nation dials customer support, does he get a phone bank in Dubuque?”

(4) Burns also requests:

If anyone has any video copies of the local Manhattan cable show Comics Quiz, one of the area’s first fantasy/sf/comics cable “talk shows,” please get in touch! I have none of the series’ first batch of episodes, the ones I was involved with, and the producer says he wiped out the master tapes, to save money and use for blanks/rerecording!

(5) Here’s something you didn’t know about me and Stephen Hawking – we each went out for our university’s rowing team. I lasted only a few weeks. I was the right height but too heavy. Hawking, on the other hand, was the perfect size to be a successful coxwain –

Biographer Kristine Larsen writes about how Hawking faced isolation and unhappiness during his first year or so at Oxford. The thing that seems to have drawn him out of this funk was joining the rowing team.

Even before being diagnosed with a physically disabling illness, Hawking didn’t have what one would call a large or athletic build. However, row teams recruited smaller men like Hawking to be coxswains — a position that does not row, but rather controls steering and stroke rate.

Because rowing was so important and competitive at Oxford, Hawking’s role on the team made him very popular.

(6) Sixty years ago Alice Kober, a classics professor at Brooklyn College, played a key role in deciphering Linear B, the 3,400-year-old script on tablets unearthed amid the ruins of the Minoan civilization of Crete. While most of these turned out to be tax records, they were not without charm.

Thanks to the decoded script, we are introduced to an island where people worshiped familiar gods like Poseidon alongside intriguing ones like the Mistress of the Labyrinth, and where folks were walking around with names like Gladly Welcome, Snub-Nosed and — here’s the guy who must have been the life of Knossos back in the day — Having the Bottom Bare.

(7) I was tempted to steal this line from a Grantland story on Devious Maids and paraphrase it in a book review if somebody ever really pissed me off —

The show, which is based on the Mexican telenovela Ellas son la Alegria del Hogar, was created by Marc Cherry, a longtime Hollywood person most famous for holding Satan’s butt cheeks apart while Desperate Housewives fell out.

(8) I don’t think this is an absurd concern at all. It’s something that might have been used in an sf story if the National Security Agency wasn’t already doing it for real:

Not limiting their activities to the earthly realm, American and British spies have infiltrated the fantasy worlds of World of Warcraft and Second Life, conducting surveillance and scooping up data in the online games played by millions of people across the globe, according to newly disclosed classified documents.

Fearing that terrorist or criminal networks could use the games to communicate secretly, move money or plot attacks, the documents show, intelligence operatives have entered terrain populated by digital avatars that include elves, gnomes and supermodels.

The spies have created make-believe characters to snoop and to try to recruit informers, while also collecting data and contents of communications between players, according to the documents, disclosed by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden. Because militants often rely on features common to video games — fake identities, voice and text chats, a way to conduct financial transactions — American and British intelligence agencies worried that they might be operating there, according to the papers.

[Thanks for these links goes out to James H. Burns, Andrew Porter and John King Tarpinian.]

Here are 13 developments of interest to fans plus one horrible pun.

(1) Charles Pierce discovered while visiting his mother’s hometown in Ireland there’s one truth about writers everyone knows:

John Brendan Keane was a poet, a novelist, a playwright, an essayist, and a pubkeeper. (One of his plays, The Field, was made into a movie that got Richard Harris an Academy Award nomination.) He spent his entire life in Listowel, and he died there in 2002. Half the county turned out for the funeral. The first time I ever went to Listowel, I sat at the bar and ordered a pint from Mr. Keane. He asked me what I did for a living. He then pulled me another pint free of charge. “Take this,” he said. “You’re a writer. You have no money.”

(2) And not only writers — comic book collectors need charity, too. Detcon 1 guest of honor Kevin J. Maroney explains in a Yahoo Finance story why the comics market is in a tailspin.

He’s not the only would-be investor who’s discovered in recent years that his comic collection isn’t worth nearly as much as he’d hoped. Kevin J. Maroney, 47, of Yonkers, N.Y., decided to sell 10,000 comics, roughly a third of his collection, on consignment with various comic book stores in Manhattan. Thus far, fewer than 300 have sold for a total of about $800. He’s not surprised by the lack of interest. “A lot of people my age, who grew up collecting comics, are trying to sell their collections now,” says Maroney, who works in IT support for Piper Jaffray. “But there just aren’t any buyers anymore.”

(3) On Veterans’ Day I learned from Neatorama that Alec Guinness commanded a landing craft in WWII:

Alec Guinness (1914-2000) played Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars. During World War II, he was an officer in the Royal Navy Reserve. He was trained on the HMS Raleigh, a “stone frigate” or naval base in 1941, and then at a similar establishment in Hampshire, before completing his training on Loch Fyne. After getting practical experience on the HMS Quebec, Guinness sailed to Boston in January 1943 to pick up his first command, a landing craft designated LCI(L) #124. He took his ship through strafing runs by German aircraft to North Africa, where he prepared for the Allied invasion of Sicily. On 9 July, he landed 200 men on Cape Passero. Due to a communications breakdown, he did not receive a message that the landings had been delayed an hour, and consequently, his ship arrived at the Sicilian beach alone. Further miscommunication led a Royal Navy commander on the scene to accuse Sub-Lt. Guinness of not being early, but being late, and insinuated that the young officer’s acting career had not adequately prepared him for his military duties. Guinness responded:

And you will allow me to point out, sir, as an actor, that in the West End of London, if the curtain is advertised as going up at 8:00 PM, it goes up at 8:00 PM, and not an hour later, something that the Royal Navy might learn from.

(4) Meanwhile, the fake zombie wars of The Walking Dead have inspired Grantland’s Andy Greenwald to suggest an improvement on the season’s story arc —

I think that the current season of The Walking Dead should have made itself into a sitcom (like Hogan’s Heroes) about life on a human against zombie internment camp. Thoughts?

(5) Coincidentally, Veteran’s Day (November 11) was also the date of the dedication ceremony for Professor Norm Hollyn’s endowed chair.

Film Editor Michael Kahn first worked with Steven Spielberg on 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In the years since then they have collaborated on most of the director’s films including Schindler’s List (1993), Saving Private Ryan (1998), for which they both won Oscars, and last year’s Lincoln. On Monday November 11th, the Director honored their 37-year relationship by dedicating the Michael Kahn Endowed Chair in Editing at the School of Cinematic Arts.

(6) “I ran across a new sort of breakfast in the supermarket today,” reports Sam Long, “Erewhon brand gluten-free cereals of several sorts, distributed by Erewhon Markets. This company sells many sorts of natural/health foods of many sorts, including free-range turkey for the holidays.  Angelenos are probably aware of this company, but I’ve never run across them before.

“I wonder what Samuel Butler, the English author whose best known work is his utopian novel titled Erewhon (‘Nowhere’ backwards and slightly modified) would think of that.”

The Serutan advertising campaign convinced my parent’s generation that things spelled backwards are healthy. I leave identifying the connection as an exercise for the reader…

(7) Did you know that in the 1920s the government built a series of giant concrete arrows pointing the way for mail delivery planes, with searchlight installations to illuminate them at night? A few still exist.

In 1924, the federal government funded enormous concrete arrows to be built every 10 miles or so along established airmail routes to help the pilots trace their way across America in bad weather conditions and particularly at night, which was a more efficient time to fly.

Painted in bright yellow, they were each built alongside a 50 foot tall tower with a rotating gas-powered light and a little rest house for the folks that maintained the generators and lights. These airway beacons are said to have been visible from a distance of 10 miles high.

(8) When Roger Ebert interviewed L. Q. Jones about a Boy And His Dog in 1976, the filmmaker gave more credit to the dog than to Harlan Ellison:

The real star of “A Boy and His Dog,” he said, was the dog; a trained animal named Tiger.

“The son of a bitch did better than I did,” he said. “Had his own car, his own motel room. And where we were shooting, the mosquitoes were so big, the only sleep you got was when they lifted up to the ceiling; you could doze off on the way down, before you hit the floor.

“That dog knew 40 or 50 words. Once it did six tricks in a row, without us having to cut, and that’s unheard of for a dog. He works all over the place. He was in the Brady Bunch, now he’s on the Cher show . . . but I think he liked our picture best, because in the farewell scene, he cried. And those were real tears, too.”

And Harlan is still rankled, says Don McGregor, in “A Boy, A Dog, A Woman – and L.Q. Jones and Harlan Ellison: A Writer’s Wounds 40 Years Later”.

(9) Hammacher Schlemmer is offering a life-size (I think) plush talking Yoda for $99.95. Since this is a kid’s toy I hope Yoda’s repertoire includes warnings like, “Sit on my head do not!”

(10) Weird Tales is looking for fiction for a theme issue involving Nicola Tesla.

(11) It turns out our space program has discovered a new lifeform – in spacecraft clean rooms.

(12) FX has ordered 13 episodes of Guillermo del Toro’s The Strain. Ironically, the series ended up being adapted from a book only because del Toro originally couldn’t get the idea made as a TV show —

FX is looking at July 2014 to premiere the series, which will star Corey Stoll (Midnight in Paris, House of Cards) as Dr. Ephraim Goodweather (fancy!) investigating a viral, soon-to-be-vampiral outbreak in New York.

(13) And when del Toro gets finished with The Strain, he’s slated to begin filming Crimson Peak:

Guillermo del Toro’s gothic thriller Crimson Peak begins shooting February 2014 once the director has wrapped work on The Strain for FX, reports THR.

Charlie Hunnam, Tom Hiddleston, Jessica Chastain and Mia Wasikowska are set to star.

According to the outlet, an April 2015 release month is being eyed for the film.  Legendary Pictures is shepherding the production.

When we spoke to Del Toro earlier this year, he told us:

“Crimson Peak is a much, much, much smaller movie, completely character-driven.  It’s an adult movie, an R-rated movie, pretty adult.  Shockingly different from anything I’ve done in the English language.  Normally, when I go to do a movie in America for the spectacle and younger audience, for Blade or whatever.  This movie’s tone is scary and it’s the first time I get to do a movie more akin to what I do in the Spanish movies.”

(14) Lastly, James H. Burns says he heard this joke from George Wells:

“Do you know why Thor likes to ride the subway?

“He has a Loki-motive.”

[Thanks for these links goes out to John King Tarpinian, Bob Vardeman, David Klaus, Martin Morse Wooster and James H. Burns.]

Update 11/26/2013: Corrected incredibly embarassing misspelling of headlined aircraft. And while I’m at it I suppose I should take the “x” out of Alec Guiness’ first name before somebody notices that, too. What a maroon I am. P.S. The number 127 was the registration number assigned to the Graf Zeppelin.

Here are 11 developments of interest to fans.

(1) You’d think somebody who’s made a career as a comics artist could, you know, draw.  “The 40 Worst Rob Liefield Drawings” shows in excruciating detail why that’s a bad assumption. (Rated R for spicy language – like, don’t read the article aloud at work.)

You know how people draw comics? Rob doesn’t do that. He had his own Levi’s commercial directed by Spike Lee in the 90s. He had best-selling comic books. He was a revolutionary and helped co-found Image Comics when all the hot artists ditched their classic gigs (like Spider-Man, the X-Men, and, uh, Guardians of the Galaxy) for creator-owned projects. But he doesn’t “draw” comics. Oh God, no.

…Okay. The #40 spot is a catch-all for “any time Rob Liefeld has ever drawn a woman.” We get more specific from here, but if we didn’t lump these together the entire list would be broken spines and colossal hooters.

(2) If you can’t live without knowing the release date for the first film in the next Star Wars trilogy rest easy, your life is no longer in jeopardy.

Lucasfilm has announced the new date for the debut of the next Star Wars trilogy, and despite some script rewriting that is currently underway, the movie will not be pushed to later in 2016.

Fans can expect to revisit the galaxy far, far away on Dec. 18, 2015.

Since I have been tracking Tomorrowland I was interested in a second item that was packaged with the same announcement.

In announcing the shift, Disney also changed the dates for another major film on its slate, the Brad Bird-directed George Clooney sci-fi saga Tomorrowland (being co-written and co-produced by EW’s own Jeff Jensen.) Tomorrowland was originally set for Dec. 12, 2014, but now moves to May 22, 2015 — the previous berth of the new Star Wars film.

(3) Mining Cold War security dossiers for celebrity names is one of the hobbies of the age of the internet. And now we discover the FBI kept a file on Isaac Asimov. Should fans be surprised? (Think of the patriotic company he kept! He worked on secret war research with Robert Heinlein! He sold stories to John W. Campbell!) Or take the cynical approach? (What Boston academic wasn’t investigated by the FBI in the Sixties?) Your choice.

A 1965 memo notes that Asimov’s name appeared on a list maintained by the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) of individuals either contacted for recruitment or “considered amenable” to the party’s goals. An informant, who is noted as the chairman of the CPUSA, New England district, provided the list to the FBI’s Boston office. The list included an entry for “ISAAC ASIMOV, Boston University Biochemist,” but did not note whether the party had actually established contact…

“Boston is not suggesting that Asimov is ROBROF,” the memo concludes, but “he should be considered as a possibility in light of his background, which contains information inimical to the best interests of the United States.”

…The FBI’s file on Isaac Asimov ends at 1967, so it seems that their ROBPROF investigation steered toward other suspects.

(4) Become a citizen scientist by installing a data-collecting app on your smartphone suggests Scientific American.

Mobile applications for smartphones, tablets and other gadgets can turn just about anyone into a citizen scientist. App-equipped wireless devices give users worldwide the ability to act as remote sensors for all sorts of data as they go through their daily routines—whether it’s invasive garlic mustard weed in Washington State or red-bordered stinkbugs in Quintana Roo, Mexico.

Smartphones can automate data collection and incorporate many important data-gathering functions—such as capturing images, audio and text—into a single tool that can “stamp” the date, time and geographic coordinates associated with an observation, says Alex Mayer, a civil and environmental engineering professor at Michigan Technological University. Mayer is leading a project with Michigan Tech colleague Robert Pastel, an associate professor of computer science, and a group of students to develop new citizen science mobile apps.

(5) Stop asking “Where’s my flying car?” It’s here. David Klaus reacts, “I thought his concept was going to be a pipe dream, but apparently it’s about to happen.”

(6) The Hubble telescope photographed a strange asteroid with multiple rotating tails between Mars and Jupiter.

Instead of appearing as a small point of light, like most asteroids, this one has half a dozen comet-like dust tails radiating out like spokes on a wheel, said the report in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Let James H. Burns be the first on record to nominate this as an alien spacecraft.

(7) Speaking of aliens… Our Founding Fathers didn’t allow aliens to hold office. But these are more enlightened times. John Hertzler has been elected to the town board of Ithaca, NY, an actor who played eight different characters on Star Trek, including a Klingon and a Vulcan.

Hertzler said he has no ambitions to emulate Martok, who rose to be chancellor in the Klingon empire.

“I have no designs on the presidency,” Hertzler said. “But I do want to do my best in terms of serving the folks here.”

Nearby Ithaca College in Binghamton is where Rod Serling was once a faculty member. The locals seem to be more open-minded about these things than your average Founding Father.

(8) C. S. Lewis with a beard?

(9) In his interview by the New York Times J.J. Abrams is called the creator of the novel “S” (though Abrams points out is was written by Doug Dorst). One thing we learn about Abrams is how eccentric his personal library is.

What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves?

My friend Sarah Vowell once looked at my bookshelves and asked, in that voice of hers, “Do you have any chapter books?” My shelves are filled mostly with ridiculous volumes that I love: magic books; film critique and movie “making of” books; design and font technique and collections; how-to, craft and construction books; and psychology texts. One of my favorites is “Sleights of Mind,” which talks about the neuroscience of our perception of magic. A very cool read.

(10) Honorable Whoredom at a Penny a Word collects 14 Harlan Ellison tales from the beginning of his career that have never appeared in any previous Ellison collection.

Several stories feature Jerry Killian – “that’s ‘kill-ee-uun,’ not ‘kill-yuun’” — Ellison’s hard-boiled insurance investigator. Another introduces Big John Novak, Ellison’s under-four-foot-tall private detective —

…Immortalized in a 1993 installment of Harlan Ellison’s Watching where the commentator referenced a story with a midget protagonist before exclaiming “I’m five-foot-five; I’m a little person! You’re a midget!” at the politically correct viewer.

(11) Dr. Timothy Leary was working on several software projects before he became too ill to continue. They have been rediscovered in the New York Public Library

The New York Public Library recently discovered a treasure trove of video games in its archives created by psychedelic evangelist Timothy Leary. Over 375 floppies (talk about flashbacks) containing a “dozen or so” games developed by the LSD-advocate in the ’80s — some are playable via emulation — are now on display in the library’s rare books and manuscripts division, according to The New York Times. The good doctor’s digital works had a self-help bend to them, advocating self-improvement by interactive means as opposed to pharmaceuticals, and apparently recreational drugs as well. If you fancy yourself a cyberpunk, Leary also had an in-progress project based on William Gibson’s Neuromancer, replete with writing by William S. Burroughs and a soundtrack by Devo.

These are being archived and made available to researchers and perhaps even to programmers who want to finish the projects.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, David Klaus, Andrew Porter and James H. Burns for these links.]

Here are 14 developments of interest to fans.

(1) Alex Pappademas, writing for Grantland, is ridiculously confident about his ideas for transforming Boardwalk Empire into a show that makes even more money:

The show’s not broken, but if HBO is at all concerned with its relative lack of buzz, I’m pretty sure I know how to fix it.

Two words:

Boardwalk Vampire.

That’s right. You heard me. You saw that I wrote those words in a one-sentence paragraph, which indicates that I am not kidding around. It’s time for this show to evolve from a period drama about the American criminal underworld of the 1920s into a period drama about the American criminal underworld of the 1920s in which the characters occasionally encounter the bloodthirsty undead.

I know what you’re thinking: “This is an incredible idea and I already agree with you.” But hear me out.

(2) An 11-year-old boy is set to become the first person to brew beer in space.

Michal Bodzianowski, from Colorado, won a national competition which called for proposals on experiments which could be conducted in space. But rather than examining the effect of zero-gravity on gerbils or making ice lollies using the freezing vacuum of space, he decided that astronauts might like to get a bit tipsy as they circled the Earth.

His proposal claims that the experiment is a trial for a “future civilization, as an emergency backup hydration and medical source”. The spaced-out brewer also suggested that beer was important for “both medical and survival reasons”, although we suspect neither of these capture the real reason astronauts might want to make a homebrew.

You trufans immediately realized, of course, how much quicker the beer can tower to the Moon will be finished if astronauts are doing their share of the drinking.

(3) “Has Isaac Asimov’s name has been mentioned anywhere around the new series Almost Human?” asks James H. Burns. “Ah, well… Perhaps someone rubbed it out, with BRILLO…”

(4) However, Asimov is getting his due publicity in a new Foundation manga adaptation. The rough translation of the Japanese title is "A History of the Galactic Empire" --

The first compiled volume of a manga adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s The Foundation novel series was released on September 20. The manga (named Ginga Teikoku Koboshi after the Japanese title for the series), has illustrations by Uzuki and Keitaro Kumazuki. The original source material is translated by Hiroyuki Okabe, and is compiled by Side Ranch. The book is published by the Seldon Project.

(5) Superman is now on Ohio license plates.

 An Ohio lawmaker and relatives of Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster unveiled a new state license plate bearing the super hero’s image.

State Rep. Bill Patmon stood outside the Cleveland home Monday where Superman was created more than 75 years ago and unveiled the new license plate, alongside family members of the creators and members of the board of directors of the Siegel and Shuster Society…

Society President Michael Olszewski read a letter at Monday’s ceremony from Jerry Siegel’s daughter, Laura Siegel Larson.

“My father, his artist/collaborator Joe Shuster, and my mother would have been absolutely thrilled about this,” Siegel Larson wrote. “I can just imagine them driving around Cleveland and excitedly pointing out the plates as they spotted them.”

(6) Maybe Elon Musk will get Superman plates if he ever drives his new acquisition in Lake Erie? He bought the Lotus submarine car prop from a James Bond movie and plans to convert it into a real car that transforms into a sub — with the benefit of a Tesla electric powerplant.

(7) Sunjammer, the world’s largest solar sail, passed a key test for its 2015 launch. The mission is named for an Arthur C. Clarke story illustrating the idea.

A NASA plan to launch the world’s largest solar sail into space and unfurl it like a giant parasol has passed a major test as the mission moves closer to a planned January 2015 launch. Sunjammer mission successfully deployed part of its huge solar sail in a test on Sept. 30, revealing the craft should be ready to function successfully following its January 2015 launch.

(8) We think of the digital age as having made everything available – but according to a writer at RogerEbert.com you still cannot get the full-length version of The Wicker Man.

While that tape with “The Slime People” et al had long since gone into the dumpster, I kept that copy of “The Wicker Man” through several moves as if it were some runic script on a piece of old parchment that had to be passed down from generation-to-generation. As VHS gave way to DVD, there were a few special editions of “The Wicker Man,” but all of them—even the 2-disc set from the reputable Anchor Bay—fell far short of the the version that I had preserved on a hand labeled videocassette.

Unfortunately, this newly restored version that’s making its way through a limited theatrical release right now is just 92-minutes long, dashing my hopes that I could retire that old home-recorded tape.

Nobody complained because not a second of Britt Eklund’s time onsceen was ever cut in any version.

(9) What is the right order for watching all the Star Wars movies?

There is only one proper way to watch the series, and it’s not from Episode 1 to Episode 6. There are lots of story arcs in the “Star Wars” saga that matter. The one that matters most, and every movie touches on, is the rise, fall, and redemption of Anakin Skywalker, also known as Darth Vader, also known as Luke’s dad.

Because of that, the best order to watch the movies is the original “Star Wars,” then “Empire Strikes Back,” then the second prequel, then the third, and then the final movie in the original trilogy, “Return of The Jedi.”

Watched that way, you get a story that introduces a hero and a terrible all-powerful monster, reveals that the monster is the hero’s father, goes back in time to show how the father became a monster, and ends with the monster redeeming himself.

(10) Cat Rambo outlines “How Writers Can Use Wikis” on the SFWA Blog.

One interesting way to use a wiki is to document the details of your fictional universe in an interesting form on your website. You can choose to restrict access level to yourself and chosen editors, or you can crowdsource its creation and let your fans build it with you. The latter engages fans more deeply with your universe, which in theory should make them more eager to consume new books set in it.

Rambo lists Wiki resources, and also links to several examples, such as The Trek Initiative Wiki sanctioned by Roddenberry Entertainment, which hopes to unite all of the various Star Trek fan communities.

More of Rambo’s helpful and provocative viewpoints are available on her personal blog, including her surprising post “Do Writers Need to Blog? No.”

I keep reading articles that say blogging is mandatory for writers nowadays. That agents and editors won’t take you on if you don’t already have a platform. This is hooey.

Let me repeat that. Hooey.

Who can resist the flat contradiction of some widely-accepted bit of writerly wisdom?

(10) Let’s see, if I place a Vox Day quote right after one from the SFWA Blog will this post self-destruct? Regardless, I found his observation about Iain M. Banks’ “Culture” series pinpointed a seismic fault running through what I otherwise praise highly as a collection of brilliantly-written stories in an ingeniously-conceived universe.

The problem with the Culture series is the same problem that Star Trek has faced for decades. First, imagine that all the Earth’s problems are solved! Okay… so now what?

…It’s remarkable how much war and violence there is in these officially peaceful cultures, is there not? Why, it’s almost as if the alternative it literally too boring to imagine!

Because he was considerably more talented and imaginative than Roddenberry and his heirs at the helm of the Star Trek franchise, Banks’s Culture feels much more rationally credible than Roddenberry’s UN Stormtroopers in Space nonsense, but it is still, at the end of the day, an artistic and imaginative failure. In fact, it is a testament to the man’s skill as a science fiction writer that he managed to make such a comprehensive failure so interesting.

(11) Singer Lou Reed died October 27. “Wasn’t there some type of science fiction connection, aside from the avant garde, with Lou Reed?” asks James H. Burns.

Sort of. Here’s what I found in his Wikipedia bio —

In 2003, he released a 2-CD set, The Raven, based on “Poe-Try.” Besides Reed and his band, the album featured actors and musicians including singers David Bowie, Laurie Anderson, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, The Blind Boys of Alabama and Antony Hegarty, saxophonist Ornette Coleman, and actors Elizabeth Ashley, Christopher Walken, Steve Buscemi, Willem Dafoe, Amanda Plummer, Fisher Stevens and Kate Valk. The album consisted of songs written by Reed and spoken-word performances of reworked and rewritten texts of Edgar Allan Poe by the actors, set to electronic music composed by Reed. At the same time a single disc CD version of the albums, focusing on the music, was also released.

(12) Continuing Snapshots’ music segment, if you’d like to hear an example of how ancient Greek music sounded, check this BBC article.

The music of ancient Greece, unheard for thousands of years, is being brought back to life by Armand D’Angour, a musician and tutor in classics at Oxford University. He describes what his research is discovering.

The instruments are known from descriptions, paintings and archaeological remains, which allow us to establish the timbres and range of pitches they produced.

And now, new revelations about ancient Greek music have emerged from a few dozen ancient documents inscribed with a vocal notation devised around 450 BC, consisting of alphabetic letters and signs placed above the vowels of the Greek words.

The Greeks had worked out the mathematical ratios of musical intervals – an octave is 2:1, a fifth 3:2, a fourth 4:3, and so on.

The notation gives an accurate indication of relative pitch: letter A at the top of the scale, for instance, represents a musical note a fifth higher than N halfway down the alphabet. Absolute pitch can be worked out from the vocal ranges required to sing the surviving tunes.

While the documents, found on stone in Greece and papyrus in Egypt, have long been known to classicists – some were published as early as 1581 – in recent decades they have been augmented by new finds. Dating from around 300 BC to 300 AD, these fragments offer us a clearer view than ever before of the music of ancient Greece.

(13) And completing the rule-of-three is a CBS News post about the inventor of the theremin:

It just might be world’s strangest, spookiest musical instrument. You can see it . . . you can hear it . . . but you can’t touch a Theremin.

“It’s like you’re fingerpainting in space,” says Rob Schwimmer. “Playing Theremin is like having sex with ghosts.”

…The Theremin is named for its inventor, Leon Theremin. Glinsky says his story is as mysterious as the instrument that bears his name, Russian scientist and musical savant Leon Theremin.

“Leon Theremin was a Russian scientist, [and] he was a spy,” said Glinsky. “And inventor of what is probably the most unusual musical instrument ever invented. You’re actually moving your two hands through two electromagnetic fields that are around two antennas.”

In 1919, 23-year-old Leon Theremin invented his namesake by accident.

“He was working in a laboratory in Russia as a young scientist, he was actually working on a gas meter to measure the density of gases,” Glinsky said. “So as he brought his hand closer to the gas meter, he heard kind of a higher squeal. And as he brought his hand back to his body and away from the machine, it was a slower squeal.

“And he started to play melodies on this thing. And lab assistants and his boss in the lab started to gather around and said, ‘Well, this is amazing.'”

(14) Although I have read Moby Dick, I admit never having heard of the true story that inspired Melville’s novel.

Herman Melville also left the cannibalism out of his novel, but this being the 21st century I think we can count on hearing plenty about it in two movies now in production about the life and death aboard the Essex. One of them, The Heart of the Sea, is directed by Ron Howard and stars Chris Helmsworth and Cilian Murphy.

Hard to believe anybody starved to death with that much beefcake aboard.
Here’s the trailer for Nathaniel Philbrick’s nonfiction book —

[Thanks for these links goes out to John King Tarpinian, James H. Burns, The Chronicles of the Dawn Patrol, Petréa Mitchell and David Klaus.]

Here are 11 developments of interest to fans. Especially fans with facial hair.

(1) Grantland columnist Charles P. Pierce interrupts his paen of praise to Boston Red Sox closer Koji Uehara for a comment about the Red Sox players’ beards —

This is a not-inconsiderable feat on [Uehara’s] part, since the 2013 Red Sox have decided that they would win largely through starting pitching and eccentricity, expressed primarily through luxuriant beards that make the dugout look like the final scene in Witness, when the little kid starts ringing the bell and the whole town comes out.

(As someone with facial foliage myself, I, of course, applauded this development. No damn goatees. No Don Johnson filigree. Real damn beards. Civil War photo beards. Ten Commandments beards. However, apparently, the latest thing among the Red Sox is to rub your bat on a teammate’s beard for luck. I believe, as Bill Murray says in Tootsie, that we’re getting into a weird area here.)

(2) Beards also figure in Dorkly’s cartoon series about “people you see at every nerd convention” – Fifteen people you’ll see at every nerd convention, More people you see at every nerd convention and 17 more people you see at every nerd convention.

I identify with the blogjournalist in the third set — I write on the internet, surely you must know me…?

(3) Today you have to order something like this special-made from an outfit like Captain Company —

ANOVOS offers the Command Division Gold Tunic uniform / costume piece from Star Trek™ The Original Series’ Third Season, as worn by Captain James T. Kirk.

ANOVOS’s focus is on providing the most accurate representation of the 60’s era top using decades worth of accumulated research and access to original pieces (special thanks to CBS, Paramount, Roddenberry Productions and Greg Jein). The result is this exacting replica of Captain James Tiberius Kirk’s tunic, right down to the Captain’s braid, the Command Division Delta Shield Enterprise patch, and is available for pre-order now.

Yet I remember that style of velour shirt was the fashion of the day when I was in grade school. I had a friend who convinced his parents to buy one for him as close as possible to the same color Kirk wore. You couldn’t buy a Star Fleet logo yet, but it was there in our imaginations.

(4) Speaking of the Captain, there will be live performances of the songs on William Shatner’s new album Ponder the Mystery at three Southern California venues this month —

He’ll get the chance with three live performances he’ll give in Southern California venues at the end of the month: Oct. 23 at Saint Rocke in Hermosa Beach, Oct. 24 at the Canyon Club in Agoura Hills and Oct. 25 at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano. He’ll be accompanied by Circa, the prog-rock band that includes Sherwood and Kaye along with bassist Rick Tierney and drummer Scott Connor. They plan to perform the “Ponder the Mystery” album in its entirety, all 15 songs from start to finish.

(5) Looks like Tolkien’s Fall of Arthur is inspiring some kind of Inklings unified field theory. Check out this call for papers from editor Sørina Higgins

The recent publication of The Fall of Arthur, an unfinished poem by J.R.R. Tolkien, revealed a startling aspect of the legendarium. The key is found in notes Tolkien left about how he intended the fragmentary Fall of Arthur to continue (included in Christopher Tolkien’s editorial matter). After Arthur was carried away for healing, Lancelot would follow him into the West, never to return.
In other words, Lancelot functions like Eärendel. He sails into the West, seeking a lost paradise. If Tolkien had finished this poem, he could have woven it together with The Silmarillion so that his elvish history mapped onto the legends of Arthur, forming a foundation for “real” English history and language. In addition, he could have collaborated with Lewis, Williams, and Barfield, creating a totalizing myth greater than any they wrote individually.
The publication of this extraordinary poem thus invites an examination of the theological, literary, historical, and linguistic implications of both the actual Arthurian writings by the major Inklings and of an imaginary, composite, Inklings Arthuriad.

(6) Which science fictional universe boasts the biggest starships? The “Museum of Speculative Fiction inspired Spaceships” at Starship Dimensions is the place to find out.

(7) Rusty Ward, creator of the Science Friction video series, shows how close the military is to matching weapon capabilities first imagined in sf —

It’s time you got your laser gun. Since Star Trek Into Darkness is coming out, this episode of Science Friction deals with laser weapons. How are lasers currently being used by the military? What handheld laser weapons are available today and what will the future of laser technology hold? Find out.

(8) Even already-existing weapons have bizarre capabilities when the right artist chooses to demonstrate them:

In this video published by British street artist Banksy, a group of what appear to be Islamist rebels are seen firing a rocket into the sky and cheering wildly … before Disney’s flying elephant character Dumbo falls to the ground. The artist wrote on his website: ‘I’m not posting any pictures today. Not after this shocking footage has emerged.’ Banksy is starting a month-long ‘residency’ on the streets of New York

(9) And never forget, the author of 1984 once was shot with a plain old sniper rifle:

The socialist writer was picked out by a sniper while he helped fight against fascism during the Spanish Civil War in 1937.

…”Orwell was shot in the throat and was very lucky to survive. His neckscarfs were taken by the doctor at the time who removed the bullet from his neck.

“He took them home to England and gave them to his wife before he died and they ended up with Mr Bateman.

“They are mainly red, white and black, which are strong socialist colours.

“The scarf the bullet went through is white with red polka dots. It has a shredded hole, not a clean bullet hole.”

The scarves were auctioned earlier this month.

(10) Visitors to LA’s Griffith Park now have the pleasure of sharing the park with a mountain lion – who had to cross two freeways to get there.

For more than a year and a half, the solitary mountain lion known as P-22 has made himself right at home in Griffith Park within view of Hollywood’s Capitol Records building.

By night, he cruises the chaparral-covered canyons, dining on mule deer, raccoon and coyote. By day, while tots ride the Travel Town train and hikers hit the trails, he hunkers down amid dense vegetation.

To researchers’ knowledge, the 125-pound 4-year-old is the most urban mountain lion in Southern California and possibly beyond — surviving and thriving in a small patch of habitat surrounded by freeways and densely packed human beings that he reached, somewhat miraculously, by crossing the 101 and 405 freeways.

The charming part is that they actually had the cat trapped – and all they did was tag and release it. Since there have been incidents in Orange County of trail bikers being attacked by a mountain lion, I sure don’t understand that decision.

(11) Maybe those scientists deserve to be shortlisted for the Ig Nobel Prize:

Founder of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony Marc Abrahams said the prize honors achievements that “make you laugh, then make you think.”

The achievements that have been celebrated at the awards (and can be viewed in the above video) range from a bra that can be turned into an emergency face mask to a study which asked: Are cows more likely to lie down the longer they stand?

[Thanks for these links goes out to David Klaus, Andrew Porter, James Bacon and John King Tarpinian.]

Here are 10 developments of interest to fans.

(1) Baltimore bookstores are adding booze and food says Publishers Weekly. Mencken would have approved.

For Benn Ray, co-owner with Rachel Whang of 21 year-old Atomic Books, adding beer just made sense. When the space next door occupied by doubledutch boutique opened up in May, they nabbed it and more than doubled in size from 700 to 1,500 sq. ft. “Sales are very good. In the past year or two, things have been gradually improving,” says Ray… The biggest difference is that it no longer offers beer at events that was purchased and “sold” by donation. “That was a money-losing proposition,” says Ray, who has been surprised by what he describes as the “unbelievable margins” on alcohol bought wholesale. “Staffing is the trickiest part,” says Ray, who had to get an alcohol-awareness license. “All of our booksellers are bartenders.”

Gone are the days when people got bombed on books – now they have to get bombed to buy books.

(2) It’s remarkable how much trouble the IRS got into for spending $60,000 on a fake Star Trek video. Now we learn the Army spent who knows how much to create a real intelligence center modeled after the bridge of the Enterprise —

According to a recent profile, the current head of the NSA ran the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command from a room designed to look [like] the bridge from Star Trek: The Next Generation.  Keith Alexander has come under photon torpedo fire for operating out of room resembling a movie set built by taxpayer dollars.

(3) Joy V. Smith is collecting cool images about exploring outer space on her new Pinterest board.

(4) Keith Stokes has posted over 400 superb photographs from WorldCon at the Midamericon photo archive.

(5) MIT researchers Dan Novy and Sophia Brueckner argue that the works of authors such as Philip K. Dick and Arthur C. Clarke can not only can help us come up with ideas for new gadgets, but anticipate their consquences, a notion that will not be in the least surprising to fans:

Science fiction, in the written form, is an even earlier and easier form of prototyping these ideas and a more forgiving sandbox or petri dish than even the hot glue and duct tape prototypes created in excited all-nighters here at the Lab.

Novy mentions a work by Neal Stephenson while surprisingly giving no indication of knowing about Stephenson’s work with Hieroglyph, where they use sf as the source of compelling innovations, presented in a way that a scientist or engineer can organize their work around.

(6) Want your good Martian news or your bad Martian news first?

The good news is that there is plenty of water:

NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has found that surface soil on the Red Planet contains 2 percent water by weight. That means astronaut pioneers could extract roughly 2 pints (1 liter) of water out of every cubic foot (0.03 cubic meters) of Martian dirt they dig up, scientists said.

The bad news is that the soil also contains perchlorate, which is bad for people.

Perchlorate is known to exist in Martian dirt; NASA’s Phoenix lander spotted it near the planet’s north pole in 2008. Curiosity has now found evidence of it near the equator, suggesting that the chemical is common across the planet. (Indeed, observations by a variety of robotic Mars explorers indicate that Red Planet dirt is likely similar from place to place, distributed in a global layer across the surface, Leshin said.)

The presence of perchlorate is a challenge that architects of future manned Mars missions will have to overcome, Leshin said.

(7) Meanwhile, back on Earth, a 7.7 earthquake thrust up a new island off the coast of Pakistan.

Several of these islands have appeared off the 700-kilometer-long Makran coast in the past century noted Eric Fielding, a tectonics scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He explained that the Makran coast is where the Arabian tectonic plate is pushed northward and downward to go underneath the Eurasian continental plate. The thick layer of mud and rock on the Arabian Plate is scraped off and has formed the land in southwestern Pakistan, southeastern Iran, and the shallow underwater area offshore.

“Atlantis in reverse,” suggests David Klaus.

(8) When the San Francisco Opera performed Tobias Picker’s new opera based on Stephen King’s “Dolores Claiborne” it  was a disappointing draw —

Picker’s “Dolores Claiborne” is, however, not very King-like. The 1992 novel is one of the novelist’s rare forays into realistic fiction, but King himself has had nothing to do with the opera and has demonstrated little interest in it. He approved Picker’s theatrical approach and signed over the rights for $1, but he did not attend the premiere last week.

Nor has King been magic at the box office. The performance Wednesday was the third of six, and the War Memorial Opera House was not full, despite the ready approachability of the work.

Poet J.D. McClatchy’s libretto gives workable theatrical shape to a novel written as a single 300-page monologue. Picker’s score, the best of his five operas, is imaginatively moody. James Robinson’s production, with effective projections as backdrops, never confuses the issue. The singers are outstanding.

(9) E. E. King survived meeting Harlan Ellison at the Bradbury library dedication (“How do you know my alley Bitch?” he answered her greeting) which means she remains on schedule to do a reading at the launch party for her new collection of short fiction Another Happy Ending, at Mystery and Imagination Bookstore — Bradbury’s favorite – on October 20 at 2:00 p.m. She’ll also perform bits of her first novel Dirk Quigby’s Guide to the Afterlife, all you need to know to choose the right heaven. The address is — 238 N. Brand Blvd. Glendale, CA 91203.

(10) From Grantland’s profile about the game Myst on its 20th anniversary on its 20th anniversary:

“I don’t think Robyn and I were trying to make some kind of statement. We certainly didn’t have an agenda, but we were trying to say, ‘Well, man, it’s just frivolous if there’s not a little something here.'” The theme of power and power corrupting did come in part from growing up with a community leader for a father, Rand said, but mostly because of the good example he set in that position. “We loved the idea of being subcreators” — the phrase J.R.R. Tolkien coined to describe an act of creation by a being that is itself a creation — “and the idea that we are subcreators, and that it’s a really powerful thing,” Rand said. “And it’s good to stay a little bit humble with a powerful thing.”

[Thanks for these stories goes out to John King Tarpinian, David Klaus, Chronicles of the Dawn Patrol and Joy V. Smith.]