The man to whom one half … credited everything good in the country and to whom the other half attributed all the bad.
Alexandre Dumas, Le Chevalier de Sainte-Hermine ch. 31 (1870, unfinished at the author’s death 1870; C. Schopp ed. 2005; p. 219 in L. Yoder tr. The Last Cavalier 2007; of Napoleon in 1801)
The history of this book is itself like a Dumas novel.
Dumas (1802-1870), after its predecessors The Companions of Jehu (1857) and The Whites and the Blues (1867), seems to have rushed Le Chevalier into newspaper serialization; a short section at the end never appeared, presumably because the author had died. After that the book seemed lost.
The great Dumas scholar Claude Schopp (1943- ) recovered it hunting through archives a hundred thirty years later, as he tells in a seventy-page preface of which every word gladdens the hearts of researchers.
To say Dumas was huge in his lifetime is both figuratively and literally true – see his Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine (posth. 1873).
Today some of us know The Three Musketeers (1844) – I joke it’s so entitled because there are four of them, who fight with swords – maybe also The Count of Monte Cristo (1845).
But Musketeers has sequels Twenty Years After (1845) and The Viscount of Bragelonne (1847). And Dumas published 100,000 pages, including history and historical fiction; fantasy; essays; plays, which made him famous; travel; and the still excellent cookbook-encyclopedia.
His father was a great general (T. Dumas, 1762-1806; T. Reiss, The Black Count, 2012; Van 1413).
A son (1824-1895) was also a leading man of letters (author of e.g. The Lady of the Camellias 1848, adapted into Verdi’s opera La Traviata 1853) and thus known as Dumas fils (“the son”).
Dumas père (“the father”) is – literary present tense – a master of romance, both affaires du coeur (“of the heart”) and d’honneur; of story; of suspense; of characterization; of the telling detail.
We can learn from him – and we have; Monte Cristo inspired one of our finest novels, The Stars My Destination (A. Bester, 1956).
In Van 1422, I quoted Arrian’s Campaigns of Alexander (130; Sélincourt tr. 1958, Hamilton rev. 1971; of Alexander the Great 500 years earlier).
By James Bacon: John Coxon and Alissa McKersie joined Chris and James on a Journey Planet with a focus on The Mandalorian and Star Wars. Originally John suggested a Star Wars issue focusing on the sequel trilogy to James and Chris at the Dublin Worldcon, and then Alissa suggested expanding it to cover The Mandalorian. The groundwork for this zine was laid earlier in 2020, and then with determination and a huge amount of support at short notice over the holiday season from all contributors, the zine came together for a strong finish to the year.
The stylised cover by Auton Purser is joined by a selection of art from a number of professionals and fans, including 2000AD artist Patrick Goddard, Marvel Artist Ryan Brown, Star Wars cards artist Col-Art and Hugo and Chesley nominee Sara Felix. We also got to share a number of artists’ work, from Deviant Art. We are very grateful to Col Art as he is working over the season with the Northern Ireland Ambulance Service, in a voluntary capacity.
The editors were especially pleased to have contributions from younger fans, Rosie Gray who made a Mando costume and shared that experience with Anne and Brian Gray and Alex Heltzer who contributed to our instant fanzine section, with many others.
With articles by Carol Connolly, Abigail Nussbaum, Jacq Monahan, Warren Frey, Hamish Walker, David Ferguson, James Mason, Ken Marsden and two photo selections from Hedge Scout and Christine Burnham, we hope there is something for everyone here
Actor and comedian John Bishop will be joining the Thirteenteenth Doctor and Yaz on the TARDIS on the upcoming 13th season of BBC America’sDoctor Who. Season 13 began filming in November and is expected to premiere later in 2021.
Bishop will play Dan in the new season. As he becomes embroiled in the Doctor’s adventures, Dan will quickly learn there’s more to the Universe(s) than he could ever believe. Traveling through space and time alongside the Doctor and Yaz, he’ll face evil alien races beyond his wildest nightmares.
… 1925 was the year of heralded novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Virginia Woolf, seminal works by Sinclair Lewis, Franz Kafka, Gertrude Stein, Agatha Christie, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Aldous Huxley … and a banner year for musicians, too. Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, the Gershwins, Duke Ellington and Fats Waller, among hundreds of others, made important recordings. And 1925 marked the release of canonical movies from silent film comedians Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd.
As of today, every single one of those works has entered the public domain. “That means that copyright has expired,” explains Jennifer Jenkins, a law professor at Duke University who directs its Center for the Study of the Public Domain. “And all of the works are free for anyone to use, reuse, build upon for anyone — without paying a fee.”
On January 1 every year, a new batch of published works is liberated from the constraints of copyright. (For a long time, copyright expired after 75 years, but in 1998, Congress extended the date of copyright expiration for works published between 1923 and 1977 to 95 years.)…
NPR’s named some of the works entering public domain – the first four on their list are:
Ian — who may be the person with whom I’ve appeared on more panels than any other — is currently the owner, publisher, and editor-in-chief of Gray Rabbit Publications and its speculative fiction imprint, Fantastic Books. He began his genre career by working at both Analog and Asimov’s magazines for six years, starting out as an editorial assistant, and rising to be Associate Editor.
He left to launch his own magazine of science fiction and science fact Artemis, which he edited and published for four years. He’s twice won the Analog Readers Poll — both for his short fiction and a science fact article. He’s also quite a history buff, having published The Presidential Book of Lists, Ranking the Vice Presidents, and other political titles.
We discussed what he said upon meeting Isaac Asimov which caused the Grand Master to refuse to write him a limerick, why he prefers The Princess Bride novel to the movie, the reason his father advised him not to name his publishing company after himself, why the 1,000-word short story is his natural length, the question editor Stan Schmidt asked before purchasing his first story for Analog, the essay which so thrilled him he felt compelled to start his own magazine, the most difficult aspect of running your own publishing company, why ending a story too late isn’t as great a sin as starting one too early, how his fascination with presidential trivia began in the bathroom, and much more.
(5) ANIME OF THE YEAR. Anime News Network is running a series of posts under the heading The Best Anime of 2020. The first four are:
… As I said in my previous post, there was quite a bit of competition for the Fictional Parent of the Year Award in 2020, more than for the Darth Vader Parenthood Award in fact, which suggests that popular culture is moving towards portraying more loving parents, which is a very good thing.
So let’s take a look at the potential candidates…
(7) SFF’S TOP SHORT STORIES WEIGHED AND MEASURED. Mark Kelly, creator of the Science Fiction Awards Database, has devised a way to use his data to rank the all-time “Top SF/F/H Short Stories”. Will your mileage vary? The ranked stories are at the first link. Kelly’s explanation of how the numbers are crunched is here: Short Fiction Scoring Methodology.
… In Los Angeles, Taaq Kirksey was lost in a fog of grief, compounded by the nightmare reality that his dear friend lay in an unmarked grave thousands of kilometres away.
“The first few minutes, I literally had to remind myself of my own name and my age. ‘I’m Taaq Kirksey. I’ve got two kids and a wife and this is where I work and what I do.’ Because Imaro had been all I had known and all I had thought about really since 2002.”
He worked with a group of Saunders’s friends and collaborators in the U.S. and Canada, including several journalists at CBC, to right the wrong.
The group set up a fundraiser and within 24 hours, hundreds of people had donated thousands of dollars. The group ordered a tombstone for Saunders. They also created a stone monument to Imaro that will feature original artwork from Mshindo, a celebrated American artist of Afro-futurism who created iconic covers for the Imaro books. It will stand facing his grave.
“He had such community there to pick up the slack and say, ‘No, this has to get rectified,'” Kirksey says. “Charles’s life was so rich. He had a literary life that might have been global, but he was also a luminary in Nova Scotia, certainly a Black cultural luminary in Nova Scotia, and that was just as much a part as his literary pedigree.”
(9) STROUT OBIT. Urban fantasy author Anton Strout died suddenly and unexpectedly on December 30. Kij Johnson said on Facebook, “He was one of the most charismatic and funniest people I have ever known, and he will be missed by us all.” There’s a tribute at Tor.com.
… Strout was born in 1970, grew up Dalton, Massachusetts, and worked at Penguin Random House. His debut novel arrived in 2008 from Ace Books, an urban fantasy novel titled Dead to Me, which went on to spawn three sequels in the Simon Canderous series. The Once and Future Podcast launched in 2014, a passion project where readers and writers could enjoy book-centered content and discussion. The podcast has run for over 200 episodes….
(10) HOSSEIN OBIT. [Item by Cora Buhlert.] French actor, director and writer Robert Hossein died aged 93 of complications from COVID-19. Hossein’s lengthy career is at the very least genre-adjacent, because he worked at the famous Theatre de Grand Guignol and is probably best remembered for playing Jeoffrey de Peyrac in the Angelique movies of the 1960s. The Angelique novels by Anne Golon and their film adaptations were huge successes in 1960s Europe. I devoured the novels and movies as a teen. The novels and movies are historical adventure, but they are at the very least genre-adjacent, because the plots are so wild. Jeoffrey de Peyrac, the character played by Hossein, is a French count and alchemist who is executed for heresy and later becomes a pirate who rescues slaves from the Mediterranean slave trade. The protagonist of the movies and novels is his young wife Angelique. Like I said, it’s wild stuff.
He made his TV debut in Quatermass And The Pit (1958), and had roles in episodes of One Step Beyond, Dimensions Of Fear, Doctor Who (as “Marco Polo”), Out Of The Unknown, The Prisoner (as Number One Hundred, 1967), The Rivals Of Sherlock Holmes, the 1973 mini-series Jack The Ripper and Mark Gattiss’ Doctor Who tribute, An Adventure In Space And Time (2013). Eden co-starred with Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee, Barbara Steele and Michael Gough in Curse Of The Crimson Altar (1968).
(12) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.
January 1, 2007 — The Sarah Jane Adventures premiered on BBC. (It was originally going to be called Sarah Jane Investigates.) A spin-off of Doctor Who, focusing on Sarah Jane Smith as played by Elizabeth Sladen who was the Companion to the Fourth Doctor. She’s frequently voted the most popular Who companion by both Who fans and members of the general public. It would run for five series and fifty-three episodes before ending when Sladen passed on. A spin-off of the spin-off, Sarah Jane’s Alien Files, aired right after that series.
(13) MEDIA ANNIVERSARY.
1981 — Forty years ago, Robert Holdstock’s “Mythago Wood”, not the first volume of the Ryhope Wood series, but the novella of the same name that appeared in the September 1981 edition of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction wins the BSFA Award for Best Short Fiction, and three years later Mythago Wood will get the the BSFA Award for Best Novel. It would also win the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel the next year.
(14) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
Born January 1, 1888 – Chesley Bonestell. Designed the Chrysler and U.S. Supreme Court buildings. Applying what he knew to astronomy he got paintings of Saturn into Life Magazine – here is his Saturn as Seen from Titan – which led to The Conquest of Space with Willy Ley, The Art of Chesley Bonestell, six dozen covers for Astounding & Analog, Galaxy, Boys’ Life, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, five dozen interiors, a Hugo for Special Achievement, the SF Hall of Fame, and eponymity of the ASFA (Ass’n of Science Fiction & Fantasy Artists) Chesley Awards. (Died 1986) [JH]
Born January 1, 1918 – Ella Parker. The Parker Pond Fund brought her to Seacon the 19th Worldcon; she chaired Loncon II the 23rd. Her Orion won Best Fanzine in the Skyrack Readers Poll (which, incidentally, is Skyr-Ack the Shire Oak, ha ha Ron Bennett; read it here); she won again with The AtomAnthology and a third time as Fan Personality of the Year. (Died 1993) [JH]
Born January 1, 1926 — Zena Marshall. She’s Miss Taro in Dr. No, the very first Bond film. The Terrornauts in which she’s Sandy Lund would be her last film. (The Terrornauts is based off Murray Leinster‘s The Wailing Asteroid screenplay apparently by John Brunner.) She had one-offs in Danger Man, The Invisible Man and Ghost Squad. She played Giselle in Helter Skelter, a 1949 film where the Third Doctor, Jon Pertwee, played Charles the Second. (Died 2009.) (CE)
Born January 1, 1935 – Kadono Eiko, age 86. (Personal name last, Japanese style.) Famous for Kiki’s Delivery Service (Kiki is a witch in training). Six sequels. Three other books. Hans Christian Andersen Award; judges called her female characters “singularly self-determining and enterprising”. [JH]
Born January 1, 1935 – Bernard Kliban. “Extremely bizarre cartoons that find their humor in their utter strangeness and unlikeliness”, which shows that truth can be found even in Wikipedia. Michelle Urry, cartoon editor for Playboy, Good Housekeeping, and Modern Maturity – it’s stranger than fiction, too – got BK to a publisher for Cat, which led to Never Eat Anything Bigger Than Your Head, Two Guys Fooling Around with the Moon, The Biggest Tongue in Tunisia, and like that. (Died 1990) [JH]
Born January 1, 1954 — Midori Snyder, 67. I was most impressed with The Flight of Michael McBride, the Old West meets Irish myth novel of hers and hannah’s garden, a creepy tale of the fey and folk music. She won the Mythopoeic Award for The Innamorati which I’ve not read. With Yolen, Snyder co-authored the novel Except the Queen which I do recommend. (Yolen is one of my dark chocolate recipients.) She’s seems to have been inactive for a decade now. I will say that she has a most brilliant website: https://www.midorisnyder.com/ (CE)
Born January 1, 1957 — Christopher Moore, 64. One early novel by him, Coyote Blue, is my favorite, but anything by him is always a weirdly entertaining read. I’ve not heard anything about Shakespeare for Squirrels: A Novel, his newest work. Has anyone read it? (CE)
Born January 1, 1962 – Geoffrey McSkimming, age 59. Of course he’s interested in archeology. A score of Cairo Jim books, some including Jocelyn Osgood; half a dozen of Phyllis Wong, recently PW and the Crumpled Stranger. Married to the magician Sue-Anne Webster. Also poetry. [JH]
Born January 1, 1971 — Navin Chowdhry, 50. He’s Indra Ganesh in a Ninth Doctor story, “Aliens of London“. I also found him playing Mr. Watson in Skellig, a film that sounds really interesting. He was also Prince Munodi in the BBC Gulliver’s Travels series, and oh, and I almost forgot to mention that he was Nodin Chavdri in Star Wars: The Last Jedi. (CE)
Born January 1, 1972 — Jennifer Hale, 49. She’s a voice actor primarily showing up on such series as Green Lantern: The Animated Series, Star Trek: Lower Decks and all over the Star Wars universe. She played Killer Frost in Batman: Assault on Arkham, the animated Suicide Squad film that was infinitely better than the live ones were. (CE)
Born January 1, 1976 — Sean Wallace, 45. Anthologist, editor, and publisher known for his work on Prime Books and for co-editing three magazines, Clarkesworld Magazine which I love, The Dark which I’ve never encountered, and Fantasy Magazine which is another fav read of mine. He has won a very, very impressive three Hugo Awards and two World Fantasy Awards. His People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy co-edited with Rachel Swirsky is highly recommended by me. He’s finally beginning to be well represented at the usual digital suspects as an editor. (CE)
Born January 1, 1984 – Briony Stewart, age 37. Auraelis Award for Kumiko and the Dragon, inspired by the author’s grandmother – remember dragons are the good guys in Japan. Queensland Literary Award for Kumiko and the Shadow Catchers. One more Kumiko book, two others, illustrated three. Website. [JH]
(16) VIRTUAL BOSKONE. It’s not that far away — Boskone 58. a 3-day virtual convention, will be held February 12-14, 2021. Get full details here.
(17) SFF IN TRANSLATION. Rachel Cordasco announced a new theme – “Romanian SFT Month” – at her Speculative Fiction in Translation website.
Anglophone readers might think that Romanian speculative fiction in English is rare, but they’re wrong. In fact, if you start looking for it, you’ll find it everywhere….
(18) ON AN EMISSION MISSION. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] Dalvin Brown has a piece in the Washington Post about how researchers at Oxford have discovered a process whereby planes could take carbon dioxide from the air, mix it with catalysts and hydrogen, and turn the result into jet fuel, making flying carbon neutral. I don’t know if this is relevant but it seems like gosh-wow science to me. “Oxford researchers hope to convert carbon dioxide into jet fuel”.
… “We need to reuse the carbon dioxide rather than simply burying or trying to replace it in the aviation industry,” said Peter Edwards, a professor of inorganic chemistry at Oxford and a lead researcher on the project. “This is about a new and exciting, climate-conscious, circular aviation economy.”
Typically, jet fuel is derived from crude oil. It is a hydrocarbon, or nonrenewable organic compound consisting solely of hydrogen and carbon atoms. Jet fuel is similar to gasoline in that both come from fossil fuels. However, they go through different refining processes, which results in jet fuel being heavier, with a lower freezing point and more carbon atoms.
When the fuel is burned during travel, the hydrocarbons are released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Oxford researchers investigated to reverse-engineer that process, turning the gas back into a usable liquid via “organic combustion.”…
… Owned by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), the Arecibo Observatory went into service in 1963, and for nearly 60 years collected radio data used to make a variety of observations that included the world’s first evidence of the existence of exoplanets. The telescope also became integral to NASA’s search for near-Earth objects.
In her order, [Puerto Rica Governor] Vázquez Garced said that the $8 million would be used to fund debris disposal for the remnants of the collapsed telescope, as well as the design of a new radio telescope to replace it. That leaves funding to construct an actual replacement — a far more costly proposition than $8 million — a matter of future budgeting priorities from the NSF, which receives its research allocations from Congress.
….Books by the Foot, a service run by the Maryland-based bookseller Wonder Book, has become a go-to curator of Washington bookshelves, offering precisely what its name sounds like it does. As retro as a shelf of books might seem in an era of flat-panel screens, Books by the Foot has thrived through Democratic and Republican administrations, including that of the book-averse Donald Trump. And this year, the company has seen a twist: When the coronavirus pandemic arrived, Books by the Foot had to adapt to a downturn in office- and hotel-decor business—and an uptick in home-office Zoom backdrops for the talking-head class.
The Wonder Book staff doesn’t pry too much into which objective a particular client is after. If an order were to come in for, say, 12 feet of books about politics, specifically with a progressive or liberal tilt—as one did in August—Wonder Book’s manager, Jessica Bowman, would simply send one of her more politics-savvy staffers to the enormous box labeled “Politically Incorrect” (the name of Books by the Foot’s politics package) to select about 120 books by authors like Hillary Clinton, Bill Maher, Al Franken and Bob Woodward. The books would then be “staged,” or arranged with the same care a florist might extend to a bouquet of flowers, on a library cart; double-checked by a second staffer; and then shipped off to the residence or commercial space where they would eventually be shelved and displayed (or shelved and taken down to read).
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, John Hertz, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, JJ, Mike Kennedy, Cora Buhlert, Martin Morse Wooster, Lise Andreasen, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of New Year’s Day Jack Lint.]
Were a lot of people interested in reading the list of 2020 Stabby Award nominees picked by readers of Reddit’s r/Fantasy forum? Why yes, they were. Especially people who are nominated. It only took 18 hours for the list to become December’s top post.
Our tribute to Phyllis Eisenstein also was widely-shared by her many friends and the people who love her books.
The popular fanzine illustrator Atom’s lively report of his 1964 trip to the USA and Pacificon II – that year’s Worldcon, held in Oakland, California – was published in 1968… Our hero’s adventures include crossing the USA in a noisily dysfunctional car that eventually burst into flames, driving on the wrong side of Route 66, and being robbed of all his cash in a California motel – all paling into insignificance beside the terrors of the Sam Moskowitz Speech From Hell.
Cover art and selected interior illustrations by Atom himself, plus photos from the Vince Clarke collection. 35,000 words.
The Harpy Stateside byElla Parker and others
Ella Parker was a prominent, London-based British fan of the 1950s and 1960s who published the highly regarded fanzine Orion and made a long fannish tour of the USA and Canada in 1961. Mundane circumstances prevented the completion of her intended trip report, partly published as Parker‘s Peregrinations with the subtitle (nodding to Walt Willis) The Harpy Stateside.
Rob Hansen has expanded this account with writing by many other fannish hands, tracking Ella’s triumphal progress through North America as she visited various fan centres, stayed with fannish notables and attended two major conventions. 42,000 words, with cover artwork and interiors by Atom (Arthur Thomson).
Making books is better than what many idle hands are up to these days. Let David Langford start your New Year off right with his fannish additions to TAFF’s library of free downloads.
“2020 Hugo Awards” got more traffic than any other post this year, although not because people wanted to know who won the Hugos. George R.R. Martin left a comment on that post alternately explaining, defending, and apologizing for his choices as toastmaster of CoNZealand’s much-criticized Hugo Awards ceremony, a quote that was widely-linked by mainstream reports about the uproar. Many of those same articles also linked to GRRM’s old post answering criticism of his efforts to host Dublin 2019’s Hugo Losers Party, pulling it up the list right behind his 2020 comment.
The second top story is Andrew Porter’s obituary for Elyse Rosenstein, which went viral as fans across the spectrum realized you could point to the very person who had the idea for the original Star Trek convention.
And so here are the year’s 20 most-read posts according to Google Analytics.
As we close out the last week of turbulent 2020, there are 15 boxes stacked precariously on a couch in the small living room of this house. There are another 20 or so identical boxes crammed floor-to-ceiling in a dark corner of the basement. All of them contain what I refer to grandiosely as “my papers.”By that I mean a lifetime’s accumulation of letters, newspaper clippings, reporter’s notebooks, photocopied articles, three-ring binders, file folders, photographs, ID cards and driver’s licenses, magazines and journals (Gramophone, The Armchair Detective, Studies in Bibliography), drafts of short stories and poems — and even a few elementary school compositions and college essays. Everything has been stashed away higgledy-piggledy, a system that I’ve been known to rationalize by murmuring a line from poet Wallace Stevens: “A great disorder is an order.”
But I’m done with that. Having devoted chunks of this plague year to sorting and culling my books, I now face the more daunting task of weeding through all this memorabilia and paper clutter….
(2) REAL STINKERS. In The Guardian, columnist Louise Candlish has a particular character type in mind as she lists her “Top 10 most dislikable characters in fiction“ (literary fiction, that is). One genre work makes the cut for a group of characters (counted as a single entry for the author’s purpose)—Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. “Top 10 most dislikable characters in fiction”.
3. The other children in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl One way of signalling who your hero is in a children’s book is to make every other child deeply detestable. The Oompa Loompas explain far better than I can the vices of Charlie’s rivals: Veruca Salt is “the little brute”; Augustus Gloop is “unutterably vile”; and Violet Beauregarde is “some repulsive little bum”. Square-eyed Mike Teavee is the least offensive, so we’ll be kind and spare him.
(3) DOOM OBIT. “Rapper MF Doom dies at 49, wife says”. He styled himself after Doctor Doom and was a noted fan of comic books. The Chicago Tribune pays homage:
… Now calling himself MF Doom and wearing a metal mask inspired by the Marvel Comics villain Dr. Doom, Dumile released “Operation: Doomsday” in 1999. Produced by Dumile himself under the pseudonym Metal Fingers, the album couldn’t have been more out of step with hip-hop’s mainstream; featuring Dumile’s signature plainspoken flow and head-spinning volleys of intricate internal rhymes, off-the-wall cultural references and non-sequiturs, the album gained him a sizable cult following.
(4) MEDIA ANNIVERSARY.
December 31, 1987 — On this day in India, Superman premiered. It produced and directed by B. Gupta. The film stars Dharam Singh Deol more commonly known as Dharmendra, Puneet Issar, Sonia Sahni and Ranjeeta Kaur. Puneet Issar plays the role of Superman. It was not sanctioned by Warner Brothers., nor did they sue. It was unbelievably bad according to the critics who reviewed it, and yes you can watch it here as Warner Brothers doesn’t seem to care.
(5) TODAY IN HISTORY.
December 31, 1995: The last new Calvin and Hobbes cartoon strip was published.
(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
Born December 31, 1872 – Edith Olivier. The first Lady Mayor of Wilton. Decorated for her service during World War II. A novel and three shorter stories for us, four other novels, nonfiction, memoirs, journals. In a chapter “Things Past Explaining” she recounts waking one summer night to hear a thud on the floor by her bed – an oldfashioned tennis racket. Her windows and door were closed. “If it was an apport by a passing spirit, I can only say that the sense of humour of those in another world is very different from ours.” (Died 1948) [JH]
Born December 31, 1890 – Joe Sewell. Seventy interiors for “Riddles of Science” and “Scientific Mysteries” in Amazing. Those also serve who only sit and draw. (Died 1967) [JH]
Born December 31, 1931 – Bob Shaw. One of the Wheels of IF i.e. Irish Fandom. Two Hugos, three FAAn (Fan Activity Achievement) Awards, as Best Fanwriter. Toastmaster at Seacon ’79 the 37th Worldcon and ConFederation the 44th. Brought to Noreascon I the 29th Worldcon by the BoSh Fund; to Aussiecon Two the 43rd Worldcon by the Shaw Fund. Co-author of The Enchanted Duplicator which you can see here. You can also see “Fansmanship”. Rebel Award – lived variously in the U.K. and U.S. Doc Weir Award (U.K.; service). In fact this is all BoSh as you can see. (Died 1996) [JH]
Born December 31, 1943 — Ben Kingsley, 77. Speaking of Kipling, he voiced Bagherra in the live action adaptation that Disney did of The Jungle Book. He was also in Iron Man 3 as Trevor Slattery, a casting not well received. He’s The Hood in Thunderbirds (directed by Frakes btw), Charles Hatton in A Sound of Thunder and Merenkahre in Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb, the third of three great popcorn films. (CE)
Born December 31, 1945 — Connie Willis, 75. She has won eleven Hugo Awards and seven Nebula Awards for her work, a feat that impresses even me, someone who isn’t generally impressed as you know by Awards! Of her works, I’m most pleased by To Say Nothing of the Dog, Doomsday Book and Bellwether, an offbeat novel look at chaos theory. I’ve not read enough of her shorter work to give an informed opinion of it, so do tell me what’s good there. (CE)
Born December 31, 1949 — Ellen Datlow, 71. Let’s get start this Birthday note by saying I own a complete set of The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror which yes , I know it was titled The Year’s Best Fantasy for the first year. And I still read stories for them from time to time. If that was all she had done, she’d have been one of our all-time anthologists but she also, again with Terri Windling, did the Fairy Tale and Mythic Fiction series, both of which I highly recommend. On her own, she has the ongoing Best Horror of Year, now a decade old, and the Tor.com anthologies which I’ve not read but I assume collect the fiction from the site. Speaking of Tor.com, she’s an editor there, something she’s also done at Nightmare Magazine, Omni, the hard copy magazine and online, Sci Fiction webzineandSubterranean Magazine. (CE)
Born December 31, 1949 – Susan Shwartz, Ph.D., age 71. A score of novels, threescore shorter stories. Half a dozen anthologies. Essays, introductions and afterwords, letters, reviews in Analog, Ares, SF Review, SFWA Bulletin (Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America), Thrust. Interviewed by Darrell Schweitzer and Lesley McBain. Unable to resist writing “A Neopro’s Guide to Fandom and Con-Dom” for the Noreascon Three Souvenir Book (47th Worldcon) but made up for it with “Appreciating Esther Friesner” for Millennium Philcon the 59th, hello Susan. [JH]
Born December 31, 1953 — Jane Badler, 67. I first encountered her on the Australian-produced Mission Impossible where she played Shannon Reed for the two seasons of that superb series. She’s apparently best known as Diana, the main antagonist on V, but I never saw any of that series being overseas at the time. She shows up in the classic Fantasy Island, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, Bitch, Popcorn & Blood and Virtual Revolution. (CE)
Born December 31, 1958 — Bebe Neuwirth, 62. Ok she’s had but one television SF credit to her name which is playing a character named Lanel in the “First Contact” episode of the Next Gen series during season four but I found a delightful genre credential for her. From April 2010 to December 2011, she was Morticia Addams in the Broadway production of The Addams Family musical! The show itself is apparently still ongoing. (CE)
Born December 31, 1959 — Val Kilmer, 61. Lead role in Batman Forever where I thought he did a decent job, Madmartigan in Willow, Montgomery in The Island of Dr. Moreau, voiced both Moses and God in The Prince of Egypt, uncredited role as El Cabillo in George and the Dragon and voiced KITT in the not terribly well conceived reboot of Knight Rider. Best role? Ahhh that’d be Doc Holliday in Tombstone. (CE)
Born December 31, 1967 – Cynthia Leitich Smith, age 53. This Muskogee Creek Nation author with a Univ. Michigan law degree was just given the first Katherine Paterson Chair at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and the Neustadt Prize. A score of novels, young-adult, and children’s books, some comic, some fantastic (half a dozen for us), some realistic; essays, short stories, poetry, not to omit “A Real-Live Blonde Cherokee and His Equally Annoyed Soul Mate” in L. Carson ed., Moccasin Thunder. [JH]
Born December 31, 1982 – Remus Simian. (There should be, but the software won’t allow it, a cedilla under the S of Simian, indicating a sound like s in English sure.) One story, and that passably strange, in Paradox, the magazine of the H.G. Wells SF Society of Timisoara (that s should have a cedilla), Banat, Romania, twin club of the U.K. Phoenicians and thus of its successor the Northumberland Heath SF Group, all part of the Science Fact & Science Fiction Conctatenation – they use a superscript, I don’t know if they’d accept SF**2. (Died 2004) [JH]
Season 2. 8 episodes. The Boys, already the savviest show about the state of pop culture, went even darker and harder in its second season. Despite operating in the same genre as Marvel and DC, The Boys is less about world saving and more about greedy corporate entities that trade on public fears in order to sell their product—the product in this case being superheroes. This batch of episodes introduced You’re the Worst‘s Aya Cash as a no-bullshit feminist using the language of women’s rights for her own evil aims, a fucked up narrative not just there for shock value: It gets to the root of something genuinely insidious in the entertainment industry.—Esther Zuckerman
Raise your hand if you ever wanted to get beamed onto the transport deck of the USS Enterprise. Maybe we haven’t reached the point of teleporting entire human beings yet (sorry Scotty), but what we have achieved is a huge breakthrough towards quantum internet.
Led by Caltech, a collaborative team from Fermilab, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, Harvard University, the University of Calgary and AT&T have now successfully teleported qubits (basic units of quantum info) across almost 14 miles of fiber optic cables with 90 percent precision. This is because of quantum entanglement, the phenomenon in which quantum particles which are mysteriously “entangled” behave exactly the same even when far away from each other….
…Rocky is a great hunter, and for years he brought us gifts: birds (dead and alive), rabbits (dead and alive), lizards (dead) and ground squirrels (alive, always, and so hard to catch). At 19 pounds, Rocky is big enough that a friend once mistook him for a bobcat. Such sightings are not uncommon where we live, on the edge of the Phoenix Mountains Preserve. The danger of that terrain jolted me on a recent Friday, when I got a text from a neighbor accompanied by a picture of a baby Western diamondback rattlesnake. “Rocky thinks this is a toy,” she wrote.
I raced out the door, calling his name, my heart thumping, fearful of losing him in a year already marked by too much loss. Rocky emerged from behind a creosote bush and rushed toward me. As I scanned his body, I saw puncture wounds behind his left digits.
We have human health insurance but not pet insurance. I didn’t hesitate to give my credit card number to the animal hospital’s desk attendant, who asked for it as a condition of admitting him that night, when his left paw was already swollen as big as the head of a golf club. Four doses of antivenin, several blood tests to check his clotting time, three nights at the hospital, plus who-knows-what-else-because-I-lost-track brought the total to $6,200….
(11) CATS AND ELIOT. Before there was music, there were words….
So Cats was a weird movie, huh? Join me, Maggie Mae Fish (and my alternate cat personality), as I explore the weird origins of Cats in the poetry (and warped mind) of TS Eliot.
A childhood spent obsessing over Batman’s wonderful toys eventually transitions to a disappointing adulthood where you realize those gadgets just can’t exist in real life, even with a billion-dollar budget. That hasn’t stopped many from trying, and JT from YouTube’s Built IRL has come closer than most at recreating Batman’s grappling gun….
(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Camestros Felapton arrived in 2021 almost a whole day ahead of File 770. Not only has he survived the impact (so far), he sent his readers a video from the future:
[Thanks to JJ, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, N., John Hertz, Martin Morse Wooster, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Jeff Smith, Todd Mason, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jayn.]
The International Union of Writers has announced the finalists for the newly created London Literary Awards, a five-yearly award given in six categories to writers in the Russian and English literary communities.
The International Union of Writers (IUW), established in Paris in 1954, describes itself as the world’s largest organization of literary professionals. Since 2010, the main division is located in Moscow. The IUW unites writers’ unions in more than 40 nations, and works to protect the social and professional rights of writers and journalists.
Their press release says:
The goal of the London Literary Award is to encourage communication between English-language and Russian-language writers and two to create a common cultural space for sharing and understanding between these two great literary communities.
There are six categories of the London Literary Award:
The Charles Dickens Award for novels, short fiction, or journalism.
The Lord George Noël Gordon Byron Award for poetry or essays
The Samuel Johnson Award for criticism.
The William Shakespeare Award for dramatic works.
The Lewis Carroll Award for science fiction and fantasy.
The Mikhail L. Lozinsky Award for literary translation from Russian to English and English to Russian.
Each award will be presented in three categories: New Authors, Established Authors, and Grand Masters.
Their jury has compiled a preliminary list of finalists who they regard as deserving of the title, Best Author of the Year. From this, a shortlist of finalists (listed below) was chosen.
And since the works will be written in different languages, each award will be presented to both Russian and English-speaking authors.
Russian winners will receive a grant to translate their book so it can be published in the UK. For the winner of the William Shakespeare Award for Drama, the winner’s play will be produced on the stage of the Royal Court Theater.
The finalists in all categories follow the jump. NOTE: The names are copied from the press release. Some spellings have been corrected, but not all have been caught.
By JJ: To assist Hugo nominators, this post provides information on the artists and designers of more than 800 works which appeared in a professional publication in the field of science fiction or fantasy for the first time in 2020.
These credits have been accumulated over the course of the year from dust jackets, Acknowledgments sections and copyright pages in works, cover reveal blog posts, and other sources on the internet. This year, Filers Martin Pyne and Karen B. also collected this information, and though we had a lot of overlap, their extra entries have greatly increased the information we are able to provide you. My profound thanks go to Martin and Karen for all of their hard work.
You can see the full combined spreadsheet of Editor and Artist credits here (I will be continuing to update this as I get more information).
In this post I will display up to 8 images of artworks for each artist for whom I have identified 3 or more works which appeared in a professional publication in the field of science fiction or fantasy for the first time in 2020. Clicking on the thumbnail will open a full-screen version of each work; where I could find a version of the work without titles, that is the image which is linked.
3.3.12: Best Professional Artist. An illustrator whose work has appeared in a professional publication in the field of science fiction or fantasy during the previous calendar year.
3.2.11: A Professional Publication is one which meets at least one of the following two criteria:
(1) it provided at least a quarter the income of any one person or,
(2) was owned or published by any entity which provided at least a quarter the income of any of its staff and/or owner.
3.10.2: In the Best Professional Artist category, the acceptance should include citations of at least three (3) works first published in the eligible year.
Under the current rules, artwork for semiprozines and fanzines is not eligible in this category. You can check whether a publication is a prozine or a semiprozine in this directory (the semiprozine list is at the top of the page, and the prozine directory is at the bottom).
Please be sure to check the spreadsheet first; but then, if you are able to confirm credits missing 2020-original works and the names of their artists from Acknowledgments sections, copyright pages, or by contacting authors and/or artists, go ahead and add them in comments, and I will get them included in the spreadsheet, and if the artist is credited with at least 3 works, in this post. If you have questions or corrections, please add those also. Please note that works may or may not be added to the list at my discretion.
PLEASE DON’T ADD GUESSES.
Artists, Authors, Editors and Publishers are welcome to post in comments here, or to send their lists to jjfile770 [at] gmail [dot] com.
(warning: this post is heavily image-intensive, and will probably not work well on mobile devices: flee now, or prepare to meet your doom extremely slow page download)
…Speaking in a YouTube interview with Guardian columnist Owen Jones, the Welsh actor said he handed back an Order of the British Empire (OBE) that he received in 2009 for services to drama.
He quietly returned the honor in 2017 after conducting research on Wales’ relationship with England as part of delivering the Raymond Williams Society lecture. He referenced his unease with practices such as handing the Prince of Wales title to the heir to the throne, despite that individual being English.
…One recent Sunday, though, Jérôme Callais made €32. And there was a day that week when he made €4: a single paperback, he can’t even recall which. It has not, Callais said, sheltering from driving rain on an all but deserted Quai de Conti, been easy.
“In fact, it’s been terrible,” he said, surveying a long, long row of shuttered boxes. “The culmination of three disastrous years. First the gilets jaunes and their protests. Then the transport strikes last winter. And now Covid: travel bans, lockdowns, curfews. In financial terms, a catastrophe.”
Not that anyone ever became a bouquiniste for the money. Even in non-pandemic times, small-scale, secondhand bookselling in the era of smartphones, e-readers and Amazon is never going to be much of a money-spinner….
(4) PIXEL ADJACENT. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Learned by having just watched 10 Things You Didn’t Know About ‘A Christmas Story.
(The movie based on Jean Shepherd’s stories from his collection In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash, which many folks of my greying years listened to Shep read on his radio show over the years):
1, One of the 8,000 kids who auditioned for the role of Ralphie (Shep’s younger self) was Wil Wheaton. (This fact makes it sufficiently sf-adjacent to be a Scroll item.)
2, One of the auditioners for the role of the father was Jack Nicholson.
(5) THOMAS ON BRADBURY. This is from an interview with new F&SF editorSheree Renée Thomas in the December Locus:
I really loved Ray Bradbury because he often wrote about small towns. Even though I’ve lived in New York, I don’t really think of Memphis as a small town–it’s a big city with lots of different little towns in it–but I liked that Bradbury wasn’t patronizing and dismissive. He recognized, like so many other writers, that in these places great complexity, mystery, and human drama can be found. He had some problematic things in his work, but he was more progressive than some of his peers at the time. I loved his language and his characters,
There’s a big excerpt of the interview at the link (although this paragraph admittedly isn’t part of it.)
(6) STAGING FRANKENSTEIN. The New York Times revisits “A ‘Frankenstein’ That Never Lived”. Tagline: “On Jan. 4, 1981, the effects-heavy production opened and closed on the same night. Forty years later, the creators revisit a very expensive Broadway flop.”
… The show’s human stars included John Carradine, in what would be his last stage role, as the blind beggar.
GIALANELLA Carradine had been doing such crap — B movies, commercials. He was an old man, but he still had that deep, rich, whiskey voice. During previews, Joe rented a screening room and showed us “Frankenstein” and “Bride of Frankenstein” [from 1935, in which Carradine had an uncredited bit part]. Someone turned to him and said: “That’s such a great film. What’s your memory of it?” He stood for a minute and said, “Two days’ work.”
CARRIE ROBBINS, costume designer His hands were so riddled with arthritis he could not dress himself. I had a lovely small-of-stature dresser who was able to hide in the “fireplace” of the old man’s hut and help him out.
The role of Victor Frankenstein went to William Converse-Roberts, a recent Yale Drama School graduate who would be making his Broadway debut. After extensive auditions of other actors, the part of the Creature went to Keith Jochim, who had originated the role in St. Louis.
GIALANELLA Nobody was nailing it. I went to Joe and said, “You’ve got to bring in Keith.” They didn’t want to do it. They wanted someone with at least New York credibility.
MARTORELLA Keith’s audition was incredibly moving. We had 10 minutes, and he ended up reading for a half an hour. Then he came back in the afternoon in the makeup he had designed [for St. Louis]. I wrote in my diary, “He had totally transformed himself into a heap of horror.” I can still see the faces of Tom, Joe and Victor. They were in awe.
The show, began loading in at the Palace on Oct. 23, 1980. The crew started with 15 stagehands, which quickly swelled to three dozen. The start of previews was delayed by the complexity of Douglas Schmidt’s sets, which rotated on a giant turntable, and by issues with effects like the Tesla coil, whose full intensity was ratcheted up over the course of rehearsals.
JOHN GLOVER, actor The first time [the Tesla coil] went off, it scared the crap out of me. Instead of falling into the orchestra pit, I jumped all the way over it.
Gilligan’s Planet is based on the premise that the Professor had managed to build an operational interplanetary spaceship to get the castaways of the original series off the island. This series creates a different timeline for the Gilligan franchise, rendering the two Universal Television film sequels necessarily in a different continuity, as those films had integrated the cast back into society….
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
Born December 30, 1865 — Rudyard Kipling. Yea Kipling. He’s written enough of a genre nature such as the Just So Stories for Little Children stories like “How the Camel Got His Hump“ and “The Cat That Walked By Himself“ being wonderful stories with a soupçon of the fantastic in them that he deserves a Birthday. Or there’s always The Jungle Book which runs to far more stories than I thought. Yes, he was an unapologetic Empire loving writer who expressed that more than once but he was a great writer. (Died 1936.) (CE)
Born December 30, 1869 – Stephen Leacock, Ph.D. Forty short stories for us; he called some “nonsense novels”, but as to their length that is numerically nugatory. Lorne Pierce Medal. Governor General’s Award. Mark Twain Award. Eponym of the Leacock Memorial Medal. Admirer of Robert Benchley, admired by Groucho Marx and Jack Benny. A complicated conservative, a consummate comic. Let us at his left write so well. (Died 1944) [JH]
Born December 30, 1935 – David Travis, Ph.D. Bowler and mathematician. Five stories. Correspondent of Amazing, SF Review, Starship, hello Andy Porter. (Died 2011) [JH]
Born December 30, 1931 – Ilene Meyer. Artist Guest of Honor at Rustycon 3. Here is the Norwescon 8 Program Book. Here is the Jul 88 Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Here is the May 90. Here is the Jan 94. Here is Vance’s Chateau D’If. Here is the Fenners’ artbook on her. Covers for six volumes of P.K. Dick’s letters; here is 1980-1982. Here is The World Below; she did not live to complete The World Above. (Died 2009) [JH]
Born December 30, 1950 — Lewis Shiner, 70. Damn his Deserted Cities of the Heart novel was frelling brilliant! And if you’ve not read his Wild Cards fiction, do so now. He also co-wrote with Bob Wayne the eight-issue Time Masters series starring Rip Hunter which I see is on the DC Universe app. Yea! Anyone here that’s read the Private Eye Action As You Like It collection of PI stories I see listed on usual suspects with Joe Lansdale? It looks interesting. (CE)
Born December 30, 1951 – Avedon Carol, age 69. TAFF (Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund) delegate and thus Fan Guest of Honour at Eastercon 34, whereupon she married Rob Hansen (see her report here) and both were Fan Guests of Honour at Eastercon 40. AC also FGoH at Wiscon 11, Corflu 32 (fanziners’ con; corflu = mimeograph correction fluid; the FGoH is determined, um, idiosyncratically). Many fanzines, see here. [JH]
Born December 30, 1952 – S.P. Somtow, age 68. Thirty novels, ninety shorter stories, many interwoven, interdependent, international. Forty poems; a hundred essays (thirty in Fantasy Review), letters, messages, reviews, introductions to introductions – I’m not making this up, he is. Here is his cover for The Other City of Angels. Campbell Award (as it then was) for Best New Writer. Locus Award. World Fantasy Award. Composer, conductor (Golden W from the Int’l Wagner Society), founder of performing companies, and in fact a prince of a man. In person I last saw him playing piano four-hands with Laura Brodian Kelly-Freas (as she then was). Website. [JH]
Born December 30, 1959 — Douglas A. Anderson, 61. The Annotated Hobbit, for which he won the Mythopoeic Award, is one of my favorite popcorn readings. I’m also fond of his Tales Before Narnia: The Roots of Modern Fantasy and Science Fiction which has a lot of great short fiction it, and I recommend his blog as it’s one of the better ones on fantasy literature out there: Tolkien and Fantasy (CE)
Born December 30, 1976 — Rhianna Pratchett, 44. Daughter of Terry who now runs the intellectual property concerns of her father. She herself is a video game writer including the recent Tomb Raider reboot. For her father, she’s overseen and being involved several years back in The Shepherd’s Crown, the last Discworld novel. She’s a co-director of Narrativia Limited, a production company which holds exclusive multimedia and merchandising rights to her father’s works following his death. They of course helped develop the Good Omens series on Amazon. (CE)
Born December 30, 1980 — Eliza Dushku, 40. First genre role was Faith in the Buffyverse. Not surprisingly, she’d star in Whedon’s Dollhouse. I think her Tru Calling series was actually conceptualized better and a more interesting role for her. She voices Selina Kyle, Catwoman, in the animated Batman: Year One which is quite well done and definitely worth watching. She done a fair of other voicework, one of which I’ll single out as of note which is the character of Holly Mokri in Torchwood: Web of Lies. (CE)
Born December 30, 1986 — Faye Marsay, 34. Shona McCullough In a Twelfth Doctor story, “The Last Christmas”. She also was on A Game of Thrones for several seasons as The Waif. (Who that is I know not as I didn’t watch that series.) She also played Blue Colson in Black Mirror’s “Hated in the Nation” tale. Her theater creds include Hansel & Gretel, Peter Pan and Macbeth — all definitely genre. (CE)
Born December 30, 1993 – Kaley Bales, age 27. Visual artist. Illustrations for Michael Ezell, Peter Madeiros. Here is Why She Wrote. “My biggest sources of inspiration are the Pacific Ocean coastline, fresh produce, and any mainstream media made before the 1970s.” [JH]
…“God bless us, every one! A decade on, A Christmas Carol is still the Doctor Who festive special liable to turn even the greatest TV Scrooge into a true Christmas convert,” said Huw Fullerton, RadioTimes.com’s Sci-Fi and Fantasy Editor.
“Filled with Who-letide cheer, adventure, flying sharks and even a Katherine Jenkins solo, this episode really does have it all. Is it any wonder it’s still at the top of any Whovian’s Christmas list?”
Also starring Michael Gambon, Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill alongside Smith and Jenkins, the Steven Moffat-penned episode sees Smith’s Doctor try to evoke Charles Dickens’ classic tale to warm the heart of an old miser (Gambon), whose greed and apathy threaten the lives of countless people.
…Interestingly, the poll also recorded a high result for William Hartnell festive one-off The Feast of Steven (1965), which was actually the seventh part of the Daleks’ Master Plan serial, and saw the First Doctor break the fourth wall to wish everyone at home a Merry Christmas.
Considering this episode was irretrievably lost soon after broadcast and very few will have been able to see it, it seems likely fans were intending to show a general support for Hartnell’s Time Lord, and note his often-overlooked status as the first Doctor (and the only for 40 years) to have a Christmas special.
A Christmas Carol (2010) 13 per cent
The End of Time (2009/10) 11 per cent
The Christmas Invasion (2005) 10 per cent (higher vote)
The Feast of Steven (1965) 10 per cent
Resolution (2019) 8 per cent (higher vote)
The Husbands of River Song (2015) 8 per cent
Voyage of the Damned (2007) 8 per cent
Twice Upon a Time (2017) 7 per cent
The Runaway Bride (2006) 6 per cent
The Time of the Doctor (2013) 5 per cent
Last Christmas (2014) 5 per cent
The Snowmen (2012) 3 per cent (higher vote)
The Next Doctor (2008) 3 per cent
The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe (2011) 2 per cent
The Return of Doctor Mysterio (2016) 1 per cent
(11) GETTING READY FOR DISNEY+’S WANDAVISION SERIES. [Item by Daniel Dern.] This alone is enough to have me ready to subscribe to Disney+ (Yes, Loki also looks interesting, and as long as I (will) have a subscription, I will no doubt dip a mutant-clawed iron-armored toe into the other Marvel series). (And we’ll finally watch Hamilton: The Movie.)
Here’s the trailers. Yes it looks like it’s going to be a hopefully long strange trip.
In case you aren’t already sold, here’s a bit of background etc: (I assume there’s no spoilers, but can’t guarantee it.)
The show takes place after Avengers: Endgame (during which Vision died).
It takes (some of its) inspiration from Marvel’s House Of M event/story line (where W & V have young kids), and from Tom King’s superlative, heart-wrenching Vision 12-issue (2-15-2016) comic mini-series.
(King also, among other things, wrote the recent equally but differently moving Mr Miracle mini-series, for DC.)
And here’s several ways to get/read King’s series — worth doing for its own sake.
1, Buy the individual issues, or “graphic novels” (issues collected into book format), either The Vision (all 12 issues), or the done-in-two collections:
The Vision. 1, Little worse than a man (1-6)
The Vision. 2, Little better than a beast (7-12)
2, Read via Marvel’s Unlimited comics streaming service (https://www.marvel.com/unlimited). (All twelve issues are there — on the mobile app, easy to find via BROWSE/SERIES/VISION. I’m having trouble finding it via the web interface.)
(FREE) 3, Digital borrow from HooplaDigital.com (well, 2 borrows), assuming your library offers Hoopla as one of its digital services.
…Despite facing coronavirus-related setbacks, researchers made profound discoveries and helped people understand some startling realities. NASA’s OSIRIS-REx probe grabbed a piece of an asteroid, and the Japan Space Agency’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft returned samples of another asteroid to Earth. Scientists found signatures of water on the moon and nearby space rocks, and an obscure gas on our celestial neighbor, Venus. Meanwhile, other scientific endeavors—like climate change research at the poles—faced a freeze as the pandemic brought “normal” life here on Earth to a halt.
(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “Honest Trailers 2020,” the Screen Junkies say last year was “a live action version of The Book of Revelation, featuring fires, famine, rain, and other signs of the End Times.” Special Guest Patton Oswalt adds to the mirth.
[Thanks to JJ, Mike Kennedy, Daniel Dern, Cat Eldridge, Michael Toman, John Hertz, John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, Bill, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Joe H.]
