Here are 11 developments of interest to fans.

(1) Grantland may be a page at ESPN.com but its writers are wise in the ways of Game of Thrones:

In Westeros, a family isn’t something to love, it’s something to plug up the holes in the world, a tool you use for balance to keep yourself upright and everything else from falling over.

(2) And Grantland’s Katie Baker offers this advice for watching the show:

Then the third week I tried a tip from a friend of mine — to turn on closed captioning during the show — and it was honestly life-changing, albeit totally dorky. It’s great not even just for learning characters’ names, but for keeping straight where they are or where they’re going. I highly recommend it. The other night, it was all:

[castle doors click shut.]

[‘Rains of Castamere’ begins to play.]

(3) Neil Gaiman’s “Make Good Art”, his 2012 commencement address at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, is influencing a generation to express themselves and make choices that move them closer to their dreams. A full transcript is here:

Something that worked for me was imagining that where I wanted to be – an author, primarily of fiction, making good books, making good comics and supporting myself through my words – was a mountain. A distant mountain. My goal.

And I knew that as long as I kept walking towards the mountain I would be all right. And when I truly was not sure what to do, I could stop, and think about whether it was taking me towards or away from the mountain. I said no to editorial jobs on magazines, proper jobs that would have paid proper money because I knew that, attractive though they were, for me they would have been walking away from the mountain. And if those job offers had come along earlier I might have taken them, because they still would have been closer to the mountain than I was at the time.

(4) The current record for the most people wearing a Superman costume at the same time is 556, set at Sears Headquarters in Chicago a week ago.

Last weekend, Metropolis, IL failed in its attempt to regain the record. Only 268 Supermen showed up. Maybe the town needs more phone booths?

(5) The University of Southern California Libraries Digital Collection holds hundreds of negatives of photos published in the Los Angeles Examiner during the 1950s. Surprisingly, the paper covered the 1957 Westercon. Not surprisingly, it focused on babes-and-BEMs. Why, look — here is Marjii Ellers gazing at a bug-eyed monster.

Marjii Ellers at the 1957 Westercon.

(6) The earliest known use of iron in Egypt is a  5,000-year-old bead that analysis shows was made from a meteorite. The bead was found in a grave in Gerzeh, about 43 miles south of Cairo. An article in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science states:

The beads from the tombs at Gerzeh are older than any other iron artifact recorded in Egyptian history; they appear to be the most ancient example of worked metallic iron from a region and time with no known worked indigenous source of iron or contemporary record of trade in iron goods

The article also lists other examples of meteoritic iron artifacts archeologists have discovered: (1) Prehistoric American Indian iron beads found in the Hopewell burial mounds, Illinois, (dating to approximately 400 BCE), (2) two Chinese bronze weapons with meteoritic iron blades of the early Chon dynasty (approximately 1000 BCE) and (3) pieces of the Cape York meteorite worked into tools by prehistoric Inuit of Greenland.

(7) In the future, it will definitely take longer to get to and from the station than you’ll spend in transit, even when you’re going from coast-to-coast:

 A company called ET3 has plans in the works for the Evacuated Tube Transport, a high-speed transportation tube that uses magnetic levitation. The ETT can travel at speeds of up to 4,000 miles per hour, and each tube seats a maximum of six people and comes with a baggage compartment. How does it go so fast? It’s airless and frictionless and could have you from New York to Los Angeles in 45 minutes, as opposed to the nearly five hours a direct flight would take.

(8) Stephen King said in his memoir On Writing that he believes in God. In a recent NPR interview he advocated intelligent design:

During the exchange, King had some interesting words for atheists and those who are unsure about the existence of a higher power. In particular, he charged that these individuals miss all of the signs that overwhelmingly point to structure. 

“I choose to believe it. … I mean, there’s no downside to that. If you say, ‘Well, OK, I don’t believe in God, there’s no evidence of God,’ then you’re missing the stars in the sky and you’re missing the sunrises and sunsets and you’re missing the fact that bees pollinate all these crops and keep us alive and the way that everything seems to work together,” he said.

(9) King’s On Writing inspired a blogger to post his 20 favorite quotes. Number two is:

Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.

You mean – Dead Poets Society lied to me?

(10) Make that Archie with a Z:

It looks like Archie, Betty, Veronica and the rest of the gang in Riverdale may be finally coming to the big screen, but with one little twist – they’ve somehow landed into the middle of a zombie apocalypse. But it’s probably nothing Jughead can’t get through as long as he has a couple of sandwiches.

Warner Bros. will make a live-action Archie movie, with Jason Moore (Pitch Perfect) directing and a script by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (Glee, Big Love).

It’s Aguirre-Sacasa’s participation in the project that makes things especially interesting: he recently wrote the scripts for an “Archie” comic spinoff series called “Afterlife with Archie,” in which Jughead attempts to revive his dog Hot Dog after the pooch is hit by a car. Jughead accidentally transforms the dog into a zombie, and when Hot Dog bites a few people, suddenly everything in placid Riverdale is turned upside down as the living dead take over.

“We can only hope that this winds up in Development Hell (pardon the pun) and never gets made,” opines David Klaus.

(11) Out of fairness to Penguin books, Petréa Mitchell hopes you will look at Random Penguin and see it’s not all clip art, they honestly do some quite lovely covers. 

[Thanks for these links goes out to David Klaus, Petréa Mitchell and John King Tarpinian.]

Here are 11 developments of interest to fans:

(1) “Career Arc: Harrison Ford” by Alex Pappademas (at Grantland) is a fun read —

Should we start with carpentry? The fact that Harrison Ford spent some years working as a carpenter is one of the cornerstones — one of the load-bearing struts, you might say — of his mythos. He may still be the most famous ex-carpenter since Jesus.

***

“There’s nothing good about being famous,” Ford told an interviewer a few years ago. “It was unanticipated and I’ve never enjoyed it. You can get the table you want in a restaurant. It gets you doctor’s appointments. But what’s that worth? Nothing.”

Question: Can you imagine a less-appealing description of the upside of being a public figure than “It gets you doctor’s appointments”? No wonder Ford looks so glum all the time; he’s been in the game for 50 years and all it represents to him is the express lane to a colonoscopy.

(2) Another unhappy Star Wars vet is the maestro himself. Do you think the residents of Marin County are sorry they made George Lucas mad?

After George Lucas abandoned plans to build a movie studio along a woodsy road in Marin County, he complained about the permitting process in a place so environmentally friendly that hybrid-car ownership is four times the state average.

His next move, some here say, was payback for what Lucas described in a written statement as the “bitterness and anger” expressed by his neighbors.

The creator of “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” is working with a local foundation that hopes to build hundreds of units of affordable housing on a former dairy farm called Grady Ranch, where his studio would have risen.

Now MarinCounty is squirming at that prospect — and it is not a pretty sight.

(3) For 75 years, writers have injected Superman into American politics, from World War II to Vietnam, from race relations to the war on terrorism.

Remember Superman #168 in 1963 where President Kennedy agreed to put on a Clark Kent mask to protect Superman’s identity? A 1970 story called “I Am Curious (Black),” where “Lois steps into a handy Kryptonian Plastimold outfitted with Transformaflux technology that transforms her into a righteous African American woman who goes undercover to expose racial prejudice”? All this and more in the Washington Post op-ed by Glen Weldon, author of Superman: The Unauthorized Biography. 

(4) James Bacon applauds the slate of nominees in the Best Graphic Story Hugo category in a post at Forbidden Planet.

(5) Nolan Bushnell is not a very self-effacing guy, but the creator of Pong and co-founder of Atari is willing to pretend to be one if it will sell copies of his book Finding the Next Steve Jobs: How to Find, Hire, Keep and Nurture Creative Talent.

Pong offered a new kind of entertainment with with its black and white graphics and dials to control the on-screen action.

But Bushnell admits they did not even intend to make it.

“It was meant as a training project for one of my engineers,” he remembered.

“And we kept fiddling with it and doing slight improvements.

“One of the improvements all of a sudden made the game completely fun.”

At the time, Atari had been contracted by Bally Technologies – a company now based in Las Vegas and specialising in casino gaming – to create a driving game.

Excited by his new game, Bushnell offered Pong instead.

“We thought [Pong] is so fun, maybe they’ll take this and it will fulfill our contract.

“They said ‘no, we want the driving game’.”

(6) Did it take this long for somebody to finally read the entire 500-page transcript of conversations among the Apollo 10 astronauts? Because it was just last week a New York paper reported about the poop problem in the space capsule. The dialog between Stafford, Young and Cernan makes it sound like one of those Turkish galleys in a Patrick O’Brien novel (“turds everywhere”).

(7) Scott Turow’s New York Times op-ed “The Slow Death of the American Author” complains that emerging digital book technology is being treated as another excuse for publishers to scalp writers —

Take e-books. They are much less expensive for publishers to produce: there are no printing, warehousing or transportation costs, and unlike physical books, there is no risk that the retailer will return the book for full credit.

But instead of using the savings to be more generous to authors, the six major publishing houses — five of which were sued last year by the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division for fixing e-book prices — all rigidly insist on clauses limiting e-book royalties to 25 percent of net receipts. That is roughly half of a traditional hardcover royalty.

(8) Writers have been scuffling since, oh, forever, as Gardner Dozois told the Philadelphia Weekly.

You collaborate with George R.R. Martin in editing themed short-story anthologies. What’s it been like watching Martin’s already-strong genre popularity explode through the American mass culture since Game of Thrones hit HBO?
It’s been amazing watching George’s success. We started out as broke young writers together. I remember, back in the mid-’70s, going to a Nebula Award banquet in New York City with George and trying to find an editor who was willing to buy us dinner, because neither of us had any money; the best we could do was an editor who took us out in front of the hotel and bought us each a hot dog from a hot dog cart. Now he’s perhaps the best-known and most successful writer in the genre, even personally satirized in cartoons and on Saturday Night Live. It’s astounding—but he’s worked very, very hard for his success, and deserves every bit of it.

(9) Vanity Fair contributor Mark Seal’s follow-up comment about the Christian Gerhartsreiter guilty verdict includes the length of the potential jail sentence:

One juror told the media that he would suggest a lighter sentence if the defendant would lead authorities to Linda Sohus, which seems unlikely; among other things, it would mean that the imposter would have to break his silence and come clean. In the meantime, Gerhartsreiter will serve 27 years to life in federal prison, after his sentencing is handed down on June 26. And until then, he’ll receive what he always loved most: attention — though not, to his chagrin, as a Rockefeller.

(10) Guy Gavriel Kay is inspired by history:

Tell us about River of Stars for the reader who’s not familiar with your work.

River of Stars is inspired by history: the remarkable Northern Song dynasty of China (around 1100 A.D.). It moves from the tensions of a dangerous court to scenes involving the most ordinary people in villages so small they aren’t even on the map. One mother does the bravest thing in the book, perhaps, to try to save her beloved, very sick daughter… and all she does is walk, alone, to the neighbouring market town. These small moments in people’s lives are central to how I write.

The two main characters are a man and a woman who are each, in their own way, fighting what their time and world “allow” people to be. The role of women in this very “formal” society is a major theme. The book is pitched on a very large scale–war, peace, politics, intrigue–but I am always as interested in the inner lives and relationships of my characters. That means romantic love, parent-child dynamics, and even two brothers who are among my favorite figures in the novel. I want readers to care about these people and what happens to them.

(11) If you’re having a good day, listening to John Astin read “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe will take care of that…

 [Thanks for these links goes out to John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, Andrew Porter  and John King Tarpinian. (Hey, dude deserves double mention!)]

Here are 6 developments of interest to fans.

(1) Upside Down, judging by Peter Sobczynski’s review, does little more than inspire puns about a “willing suspension” of disbelief:

By all rational standards, “Upside Down” is one of the dumbest movies that you will see in your entire life. Right from the start, it takes its first giant misstep with a prologue that is meant to simultaneously set up the story and explain the physics of the twin world gimmick in ways that will more or less satisfy the average moviegoer or at the very least keep them from asking pesky questions about the apparent lack of orbits or how the twinned worlds can have sunrises, sunsets and the like.

(2) Everybody knows a digital text doesn’t cost as much to produce as a physical book, consequently people don’t want to pay for an ebook what what they’d pay for the print edition.

Forbes analyzed customer resistance to higher ebook prices and found people will even compare a used paperback version sold by a third party to the ebook when making a decision to purchase. (I certainly do!)

The magazine also learned consumers hate paying more than $9.99 for an ebook.

(3) Amazon.com, which knows a lot more than Forbes about getting people to pay for books but tells a lot less, came under fire for applying to be assigned high profile internet domain names like .book and .app. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will be handing them out and asked thousands of companies, individuals and agencies for input. The Daily Mail reports authors groups fear the outcome if Amazon receives control:

Scott Turow, president of the US-based Authors Guild, wrote in a letter to ICANN: ‘Placing such generic domains in private hands is plainly anticompetitive. ‘The potential for abuse seems limitless.’

He added that if Amazon gets what it wants then it would ‘move a few inches closer to a monopoly in the book business’ and give it an ‘enormous competitive advantage’.

(3) Robert J. Sawyer’s hardboiled detective novel Red Planet Blues arrives in hardcover on March 26 from Penguin in Canada and Ace in the US. It’s the twenty-second novel of his career. Read the opening chapters here. Listen to Sawyer being interviewed about the novel by SETI Institute astronomer Seth Shostak here [MP3 audio, 8 minutes].

Sawyer’s tour to promote the novel brings him to Los Angeles on April 16. Catch him at Mysterious Galaxy (2810 Artesia Blvd., Redondo Beach) starting at 7:30 p.m.

(4) The Wall Street Journal’s article about “useless machines”  that only exist to turn themselves off credits Marvin Minsky for inventing them. Arthur C. Clarke said they were “sinister.” Famous Monsters had a version with a creepy hand emerging from the box to turn the machine off.

The brains behind the original machine is Marvin Minsky, a professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Back in 1952 as a graduate student, he spent a summer at Bell Labs, the intellectual hive known for cranking out Nobel laureates.

Mr. Minsky’s job there was nebulous, he says today. “I got there and a manager said, ‘Don’t work on anything that will take less than 30 years—we like to take a long view.’ ”

On a lark, Mr. Minsky spent some time “inventing useless things,” he says, such as a “gravity machine,” a device that would ring a bell if the force of gravity changed. The bell never rang. The force of gravity is a “basic physical constant,” Mr. Minsky, 85, explains.

(5) Here’s a funny line from a report about the Big Bang Theory cast’s appearance at PaleyFest —

Parsons may play a genius, but he’s having a tough time getting his head around the show’s current success.

“There’s something impossible to fathom about viewers and numbers and things like that,” Parsons explained. “I can barely picture 20 people in one room. If you want to say 17 or 18 million, well you’ve lost me.”

(6) When people have a lot of time on their hands they can put together things like the Periodic Table of Comic Books that identifies references to the elements in comics and shows the pages where they were made. Hafnium, anybody?

[Thanks for these links goes out to John Mansfield, Martin Morse Wooster and John King Tarpinian.]

Here are 12 developments of interest to fans.

(1) The Lava Lamp is 50 years old. Smithsonian Magazine has all the strange details. John King Tarpinian was surprised: “Who knew this was invented by an English nudist accountant?”  If you bet this was the invention of an engineer who kept his pants on — you lost!

I really wanted a Lava Lamp when I was in the sixth grade. Don’t seem as interested now. So if youth is wasted on the young, are paychecks are wasted on the old…?

(2) Asimov’s “Bicentennial Man” won a Hugo in 1977 and was made into a movie. In spite of those recommendations it took a recent article to convince me the story has literary depth.

“Asimov’s Embarrassing Robot: A Futurist Fable” by Irving H. Buchen in The Futurist (scroll down a ways and you’ll find it) sees it as a gateway to understanding the “the technological Singularity and of the projected symbiotic human relationships with machines has been hailed rightly as an evolutionary crossover…”

It is curious that Asimov, in a sense, used his own craft as a model for Andrew’s development. The capacity to create or respond to art has fascinated science-fictionists. To prove that the aesthetic response is not acquired but innate in man, Mary Shelley, in Frankenstein, has the creature stop in his tracks one moonlit night on the moors and almost swoon with delight at the beauty of the sky. Kurt Vonnegut’s favorite form of survival is the artful dodger. And all of Arthur C. Clarke’s computer beings are adept at design. Thus, art functions, as it always has for humans, as the ultimate test of creativity and independence of thought and imagination—except, of course, Andrew is an android. Nevertheless, art also serves as the threshold for Andrew’s next stage of development: freedom.

(3) Stanley Kubrick worried about making IBM upset after they’d been so helpful with the production of 2001. Letters of Note says Kubrick asked a studio executive “Does I.B.M. know that one of the main themes of the story is a psychotic computer?” The answer, reports Slate was “so long as the company’s name was ‘not associated with the equipment failure,’ they had no problem with the movie.” That was a broadminded attitude for a big corporation to take in the Sixties. Nothing like, say, the builders of the S.S. Minnow for Gilligan’s Island — try finding their name in the credits.

(4) James Bacon in “Cosplay and Comics at Arisia” told Forbidden Planet readers there was a “superb convention” in Boston last month with a fine masquerade —

Let no one be deluded, these fans know their comics. The winners of the Novice category in the Masquerade, Antonia Pugliese and Raven Stern, were as excited about Gail Simone commenting on social media about their costumes, as any comic book blogger would be if they managed to get a comment from their favourite writer. Along with Julia Pugliese, their entry, The Birds of Prey, not only looked stunning, but their dance routine had the crowds cheering.

(5) DC Comics’ “New 52” celebrated love in a Valentine’s Day Special. A review by the prolific James Bacon.

(6) Andrew Liptak introduces a new generation to John W. Campbell in an article for Kirkus Reviews:

John W. Campbell Jr. was born in 1910, and had become a notable science fiction author in his own right throughout the pulp era. His first story, “When the Atoms Failed,” was published in the January 1930 issue of Amazing magazine and was followed by a number of other stories in a similar vein before shifting to a new, less campy style in 1934 under a pseudonym, Don A. Stuart. Along the way, he attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and Duke University in North Carolina, eventually earning a degree in physics in 1932. With few positions for physicists available, he continued to write, eventually producing some well-known stories, such as “Who Goes There?,” which would eventually be filmed three times as The Thing from Another World and The Thing (in 1982 and 2010).

And he takes the story through Campbell’s rise to the editorship of Astounding. Campbell literally put the “science fiction” in Astounding – the words weren’t originally part of the magazine’s title.

(7) Leslie Klinger is suing the Conan Doyle estate, hoping to end its practice of charging writers to use the Sherlock Holmes character in new stories.

On Valentine’s Day 2013, I made a big commitment: I filed an action in federal court in the Northern District of Illinois against the Arthur Conan Doyle Estate. The Estate has for some time been insisting that creators who want to use the characters of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson in their new creation pay the Estate not insubstantial amounts for “permission” to do so. I believe that this violates U.S. copyright laws. Although 10 of the Sherlock Holmes stories written by Conan Doyle remain protected by copyright for 95 years after publication date, the last expiring in 2022, 50 of the stories are in the public domain. Because the essential characteristics of Holmes and Watson are set forth in detail in those public domain stories, I believe that anyone can freely use the characters as they see fit. In particular, the Estate is trying to stop publication of a new anthology created by Laurie R. King and me, tentatively called “In the Company of Sherlock Holmes,” a second collection of stories inspired by the Sherlock Holmes Canon by an amazing group of writers.

Copies of the filing and exhibits are available at Free Sherlock.

Nate Hoffelder analyzes the case at The Digital Reader:

The Conan Dolye’s justification for their legal shakedown is at best questionable and is based on a not-entirely settled point of copyright law. Allow me to explain.

As you probably know, the vast majority of the Holmes stories are old enough that they are no longer in copyright in the US. (The author died in 1930, so his entire body work is public domain everywhere but the US.) In the US you can legally download nearly any of the Holmes stories from sites like Project Gutenberg. If you wanted to, you could then format the stories as ebooks or bind them into a paper book and sell the stories. This is completely legal.

But according to the Conan Doyle estate, one thing you cannot do is write a new story that features Sherlock Holmes. There is exactly one remaining Conan Doyle book,The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, that still contains copyrighted Sherlock Holmes stories – 10 stories, in fact. Because some of the original stories are still in copyright in the US, the estate believes that they can control who writes new stories. They are using that control to collect fees from publishers, studios, and anyone with deep pockets.

(8) Joy V. Smith’s first novel, Detour Trail, will be released February 25; it’s a western and will be available from Melange Books, the publisher, and online. She’s interviewed about Westerns generally and Detour Trail in particular at The Western Online.

Joy hopes her SF novels make it to the starting gate soon…

(9) John Williams wants to score Star Wars VII. Greg Brian says – give him a chance!

That isn’t easy for an established composer who’s already over 80 years old. So goes the same issue other legendary film composers endured when reaching their career sunsets. Movie composing legends such as Bernard Herrmann, John Barry, and Henry Mancini were sometimes unfairly overlooked for new, higher profile features once they were deemed composers from an older, classic era….

Let’s also not underestimate Williams possibly using new musical ideas to update his sound. He already knocked over his traditionalist streak when he used a new fingerboard instrument called a Continuum in 2008 for “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.” It proved his astuteness to newer sounds and how it can keep him relevant in film scoring for at least another decade.

(10) Here are two videos about the home office of the future. I’d say Walter Cronkite’s 1967 prediction of what a home office would look like in 2001 [YouTube] came much closer to hitting the target than AT&T’s image of the future from a 1993 TV ad.

In 2001 people needed different hardware for all these purposes, as shown – something that has changed since then. AT&T missed the target by assuming people with all this technology would use it to watch pages turning in a physical copy of a book. That prediction was already obsolete in 1993!

Not that we should be ungrateful for the other cheap thrills AT&T gave us along the road to the future. John King Tarpinian vividly remembers “going to the County Fair as a wee lad and the ATT Pavilion had a dial phone next to a touch tone phone. The test was to see if you could dial you home phone number faster than you could dial an unknown number on the touch tone phone.”

(11) Fred Lerner’s donation to Columbia University is a continuing source of wonder to the librarians working with it, as are the memories it evokes about the Columbia University SF club of his day —

The magazines that Green is now processing were donated in July by Fred Lerner ’66CC, ’81LS — a collection of two thousand or so copies of such titles as the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Astounding Science Fiction,and, of course, Amazing Stories. Lerner, as an undergraduate, had founded the Columbia University Science Fantasy Society (CUSFS), which in the 1970s morphed into today’s Columbia University Science Fiction Society, with an identical acronym affectionately pronounced “cuss-fuss.”

Since its inception, CUSFS has hosted mini-conventions; produced a newsletter of reviews, essays, and fiction called CUSFuSsing (with that peculiar capitalization); screened movies like Metropolis and Blade Runner; held birthday parties for hobbit extraordinaire Bilbo Baggins; and conducted virgin sacrifices to Cthulhu, a creation of H. P. Lovecraft (“It typically involved wrestling in a pool filled with fake blood,” recalls former CUSFS president Eugene Myers ’00CC).

(12) The sources of Orwell’s political vision are concisely traced in 1984: George Orwell’s Road to Dystopia, a BBC News article by David Aaronovitch:

Orwell’s opposition to totalitarianism, of left and right alike, was toughened up by his association with the novelist Arthur Koestler, a communist who had been imprisoned under threat of execution by the fascists in Spain.

Koestler later escaped to England where he published his novel, Darkness at Noon, in 1940.

This bleak story of an old Bolshevik who confesses to crimes he has not committed and is shot by the Soviet authorities, was to have a profound influence on Orwell.

His many book reviews also reveal much about his political influences, but one name, James Burnham, stands out.

An ex-communist, Burnham’s 1941 book, The Managerial Revolution, filled Orwell with both horror and fascination.

In the book, he found two of the crucial elements of his novel: a world ruled by three super-states, and the idea that the overlords of the future would not be demagogues or democrats, but managers and bureaucrats.

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

Here are 9 developments of interest to fans.

(1) The advocates for Baltimore’s Poe House did not waste the opportunity presented by the local team’s presence in the Super Bowl to blame the Ravens football franchise for not picking up part of the tab to preserve the famed writer’s house. Y’know, just like the Chicago Bears subsidize the architectural masterworks of Frank Lloyd Wright, the San Francisco 49ers pay for painting the Golden Gate bridge, and the New York Giants played host to Jimmy Hoffa’s gravesite under the old Meadowlands stadium. (Well, they may have actually done that last one, just nobody’s certain.)

(2) I first encountered the idea of solar sails in the story “Sunjammer” by Arthur C. Clarke in a 1963 issue of Boys Life. Almost at the same slow rate of acceleration provided by the sails themselves, this technological idea is gaining acceptance. NASA reports there will soon be an outer space demonstration:

The concept of a huge, ultra-thin sail unfurling in space, using the pressure of sunlight to provide propellant-free transport, hovering and exploration capabilities, may seem like the stuff of science fiction, but a NASA research team developing the Technology Demonstration Mission known as “In-Space Demonstration of a Mission-Capable Solar Sail” intend to prove the viability and value of the technology just a few short years from now.

The project is called Sunjammer in honor of the story. Or perhaps that should be stories, plural, for a few months after Clarke’s tale appeared, Poul Anderson’s unrelated adventure about the same technology, likewise titled “Sunjammer,” ran as an Analog cover story (under his pseudonym, Winston P. Sanders).

(3) Before They Were Giants, edited by James L. Sutter, reprints the first published stories of 15 major sf/fantasy authors, together with brand-new retrospective critiques and interviews discussing the stories’ histories and what they know now about writing that they wish they’d known then. The authors are: Ben Bova, Charles Stross, China Mieville, Cory Doctorow, David Brin, Greg Bear, Joe Haldeman, Kim Stanley Robinson, Larry Niven, Michael Swanwick, Nicola Griffith, Piers Anthony, R. A. Salvatore, Spider Robinson, and William Gibson.

(4) The word on the street is – don’t quit your day job even if you do sell your first genre novel. Galley Cat has the disillusioning figures —

Horror novelist Brian Keene gave a speech at Towson University’s Borderlands Boot Camp recently, laying out some frank statistics for aspiring genre novelists. Here is an excerpt:

The average advance these days, for a genre fiction novel, ranges between $2,500 and $10,000. That’s right. The novel you spent a year working on only earns you between $2,500 to $10,000 at first. When the book is published a year later, that advance will have long been spent. And you probably won’t see a royalty check until another year AFTER your book has been published (provided enough copies have sold to earn out your advance). So it will actually be two years from that advance check before you get paid again.

What’s really pathetic is that these numbers don’t seem to be any different than I heard writers throwing around 25 years ago. The low end of the range may have gotten worse, as far as that goes.

(5) People who live around Edgbaston in Birmingham know perfectly well where Tolkien got his inspiration for the towers that dominate Middle-Earth’s landscape:

The building is spectacular but perilous. It sways slightly in strong wind and its seven rooms – one on each storey – are the size of a hearth rug. But, said Bradley: “As it turned out, my CEO is a Tolkien fanatic, and so the deal was done.”

…The eyeball-shaped windows at the top of Perrott’s Folly look down in one direction on where JRR Tolkien lived as a child, and in the opposite direction on the Oratory, where he went to school. It also gives a spectacular view of the other tower he passed twice a day, the gothic ornamented chimney of the Edgbaston waterworks, which in the writer’s day would have belched smoke from the steam engines. To Tolkien true believers, there is no point looking further for the origins of the two sinister towers that loom over the world of his Lord of the Rings.

(6) A pity Ed Green wasn’t cast in this 30-second Powerball ad – he’d have done a great job with the lead character, and enjoyed the heck out of the commercial’s wild, science-fictional premise.

(7) Dale L. Skran Jr. evaluated predictions Gregory Benford made for a “Writers of the Future” time capsule in 1987, now posted on the web. Here’s one example, with the sf author’s follow-up comment as the last line:

Benford next throws out a snide little line about how “Most Americans are barely literate … just like today.” Although this statement is clearly intended to be witty, it turns out to be true. There seems little doubt that the increasing usage of computers and the playing of video games has decreased the general level of literacy, but, as Benford reminds us, it was never that high anyway!

Sad to be somewhat right on this one.

(8) There’s a lot of fun to behad generating faux pulp magazine covers with the Pulp-o-Mizer at Thrilling Wonder. I’ve seen a lot of amusing examples so far. My favorite is David Gerrold’s, posted on his Facebook page, which may well be a truth said in jest:

(9) Count me among the many who are outraged to read that author M. C. Hogarth is being persecuted by Games Workshop for using the term “space marine,” which it claims as a trademark despite the term having been a staple of sf stories decades beforeWarhammer 40K came along:

In mid-December, Games Workshop told Amazon that I’d infringed on the trademark they’ve claimed for the term “space marine” by titling my original fiction novel Spots the Space Marine. In response, Amazon blocked the e-book from sale [original post and update]. Since then, I’ve been in discussion with Games Workshop, and following their responses, with several lawyers.

To engage a lawyer to defend me from this spurious claim would cost more money than I have, certainly more than the book has ever earned me. Rather than earning money for my family, I’d be taking money from them, when previously my writing income paid for my daughter’s schooling. And I’d have to use the little time I have to write novels to fight a protracted legal battle instead.

Adam Whitehead has posted a helpful (and long) list of examples of prior use at The Wertzone (– quite a good blog, let me say too.)

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