(1) STOKERCON 2024 ADDS GOHS. The Horror Writers Association has announced two new Guests of Honor for StokerCon, Justina Ireland and Nisi Shawl. They join Paula Guran, Jonathan Maberry and Paul Tremblay, with a sixth guest soon to join them.

(2) SCHOLARSHIP FROM HELL. Applications are open for the Horror Writers Association’s annual Scholarship From Hell through March 1. Full details at the link.

This scholarship puts the recipient right into the intensive, hands-on workshop environment of Horror University.  Horror University takes place during HWA’s annual StokerCon. The winner of the Scholarship From Hell will receive domestic coach airfare (contiguous 48 states) to and from the StokerCon venue, $50 for luggage reimbursement, a 4 night stay at the convention,  free registration to StokerCon, and as many workshops as you’d like to attend!

(3) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to join Izzy Wasserstein for Kansas City BBQ in episode 216 of his Eating the Fantastic podcast.

The guest you and I will be breaking bread with this time around is Izzy Wasserstein, who’s published fiction in Analog, Apex, Lightspeed, Fantasy, Fireside, and many other magazines, plus such anthologies as A Punk Rock Future, Resist Fascism, Future Fighting for the Future: Cyberpunk and Solarpunk Tales, Glitter + Ashes: Queer Tales of a World That Wouldn’t Die, and more.

Many of those stories have been collected in her marvelous short story collection All the Hometowns You Can’t Stay Away From, which was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. Her poetry collections include When Creation Falls and This Ecstasy They Call Damnation. Her forthcoming debut novella These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart will be released by Tachyon in March, and you should preorder it right now.

We discussed the way Sarah Pinsker sparked her lightbulb moment, why it’s important for her to learn your chosen D&D character, which Star Trek: The Next Generation characters caused her to take her first stab at writing, the change she’d make in her life if she were independently wealthy, why we both miss those paper rejection slips from publishing’s pre-electronic days, the disconnect between the way we feel about certain stories of ours and how readers respond, the most important gift she was given by the Clarion writing workshop, our perverse love for second-person present-tense stories, how surprised she was when she sold a story to Analog, and much more.

(4) TBRCON PANEL. Gareth L. Powell alerted fans to an upcoming event. It’s free to watch.

As part of TBRCon, I will be participating in an online panel discussion with Ai Jiang, Max Gladstone, Sadir S, Samir, Nicholas W. Fuller, and Jendia Gammon.

The panel will stream LIVE on: the FanFiAddict YouTube channel, the TBRCon Twitter feed, the SFF Addicts Twitter feed, and the FanFiAddict Facebook page.

It takes place on Jan 25 at 11.00am CST / 12.00pm EST / 17.00pm GMT and is absolutely FREE to watch.

Additional information can be found here:
https://fanfiaddict.com/tbrcon2024/

(5) FANAC FANHISTORY ZOOM SERIES. Fanac.org kicks off a new year in its zoom programming next week when they interview Joe Green, fan, sff writer, and NASA spokesman.

Next Zoom Session: An Interview with Joe Green

Please Note: NEW TIME to better accommodate our attendees requests from around the world. Graphic poster attached.

January 20, 2024 – 3PM EST, Noon PST, 8PM London GMT and 7AM Jan 21 in Melbourne

Joe Green has traced an amazing arc through fandom, prodom and the space program. Joe was a fan in the 50s, is a professional science fiction writer with his first stories having appeared in the early 60s, and later became a NASA spokesman, specializing in educating the public about the space program. Host of many a legendary launch party, Joe has lived the dream of many a young science fiction fan.

Send a note to [email protected] with “Zoom” in the title to subscribe.

View past sessions on the FANAC Fan History YouTube channel.

(6) THE GREAT TIME WAR. “Doctor Who Season 15 Trailer Brings Back a Classic Companion for a New Time War Scene” – Den of Geek tells what to look for.

 [The] announcement trailer for Doctor Who: The Collection – Season 15 …features a whole new scene starring former companion Leela. In the short “Leela vs. the Time War,” Leela, played again by Louise Jameson witnesses the final moments of the Great Time War on Gallifrey. As she watches the Daleks decimate the remains of the Time Lord capitol, a soldier arrives with a gift from the Doctor, forcing her to make a decision. Check out the full scene here:

(7) STAN MATTSON (1937-2024). J. Stanley Mattson, who founded the C.S. Lewis Foundation in 1986, died January 9. He is survived by his wife Jean.

A past member of the faculty of Gordon College and of the faculty and administration of the University of Redlands, Dr. Mattson also served as Headmaster of The Master’s School of West Simsbury, CT.

One of the C.S. Lewis’ Foundation’s first projects was the restoration of Lewis’ house, The Kilns, in Headington Quarry, Oxfordshire, England. It’s now a study center for visiting academics.

(8) DAVID J. SKAL (1952-2024). A Clarion graduate and sf novelist whose greatest fame came from his film scholarship, David J. Skal died January 1 in an auto accident in Los Angeles. According to his nephew, he was struck by a drunk driver. Steve Vertlieb calls Skal “brilliant beyond mere words, and an historian of immeasurable scope and substance. He towered above most film scholars, and was an inspiration to all those who write about motion picture history.”

Skal’s science fiction novels were Scavengers (1980), When We Were Good (1981) and Antibodies (1987). He wrote numerous nonfiction works about Dracula, vampires, and monsters: Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web Of Dracula From Novel To Stage To Screen (1990); The Monster Show: A Cultural History Of Horror (1993); V Is For Vampire (1995); Dark Carnival: The Secret World Of Tod Browning (1995,with Elias Savada); the Norton Critical Edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1996, co-edited with Nina Auerbach); Screams Of Reason: Mad Science And Modern Culture(1997); and the monumental anthology Vampires: Encounters With The Undead (2001).

As a documentary filmmaker he wrote and co-produced segments for the A&E’s series Biography, and contributed scripts chronicling the lives and careers of Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney, Jr. and Angela Lansbury (with whom he had worked during his theatre career).

In 1999, he wrote, co-produced and co-directed a behind-the-scenes chronicle of the Academy Award-winning film Gods and Monsters. The same year, he contributed to a Universal Studios Home Video series of twelve original DVD documentaries exploring the legacies of the studio’s classic horror and science fiction films. His DVD work has continued with Disney Home Video’s Jules Verne and Walt Disney: Explorers of the Imagination (2003) and the feature commentary for Warner Home Video’s special-edition release of Tod Browning’s Freaks (2004).

Other projects include Claude Rains: An Actor’s Voice, Romancing The Vampire, and Citizen Clone: The Morphing Of America.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born January 12, 1980 — Kameron Hurley, 43. So I’ve been listening to Kameron Hurley’s space opera The Stars are Legion as I write this Birthday essay. A most excellent story indeed. It was nominated first a Campbell Memorial Award.  

Her time travel novel which I listened to recently, The Light Brigade, is one the best works in that sub-genre I’ve encountered. It was nominated for a Hugo at CoNZealand. 

Her first novel which I need someday to listen to (if it’s in audiobook format) is the start of her matriarchal Islam culture Bel Dame Apocrypha biopunk trilogy. Her term, not mine. 

The Worldbreaker trilogywhich begins with The Mirror Empire I find delightful with its merging of hard SF underpinned by magic in a space opera setting. Now that shouldn’t work, should it? Really. But it magnificently does.

And let’s talk about her non-fiction. The Geek Feminist Revolution which garnered a BFA is a collection of previously published blog posts and none news essays written for here. One of the first, “We Have Always Fought’: Challenging the ‘Women, Cattle and Slaves’ Narrative” got a Hugo for Best Related Work at Loncon 3, and she also won a Hugo for Best Fan Writer.

Her exemplary short stories have been collected so far in Meet in The Future and Future Artifacts.  Meet in The Future was nominated for an Otherwise Award. 

Of course everything she’s written is available from the usual suspects. 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

• Candorville has another detail on the difference between Star Trek and Star Wars.

(11) WOMEN WORKING IN ASTRONOMY. Atlas Obscura tells how researchers are “Uncovering the Forgotten Female Astronomers of Yerkes Observatory”. It all started with a group photo featuring Albert Einstein.

…Nearly a century later, a group of researchers at the University of Chicago evaluating the photograph (below) recognized that distinctive coif first: It was, unmistakably, Albert Einstein, on a whirlwind tour of the United States in the early days of his global fame. Some of those gathered around the physicist were also well-known to the researchers. The distracted-looking man with his tie askew was Edwin B. Frost, the then-director of the observatory. The white-haired man with the walrus mustache was Edward E. Barnard, an astronomer known for his photographs of the Milky Way. “And then someone in the room asked a deceptively simple question,” recalls Andrea Twiss-Brooks of the University of Chicago Library. “Who are all the women in the photograph?”

Of the 19 people documented alongside Einstein that day eight were women. They stand shoulder to shoulder with the men in this hallowed space of scientific exploration, an unusual sight in the 1920s. Even more surprisingly, while their presence at the observatory has been forgotten in the intervening decades, they were not overlooked in 1921. In the margin of another copy of the photograph in the University of Chicago archives, someone identified each person by last name. “Once we had names,” says Twiss-Brooks, “being a librarian, I knew what to do.”

Over the last three years, Twiss-Brooks and her team—including historian Kristine Palmieri and a group of undergraduate students—have rediscovered the lives of many of these women and the story of this unique place in Williams Bay, Wisconsin. In the first half of the 20th century, when men dominated the world of scientific research, Yerkes Observatory employed more than 100 women, some as secretaries; some as “computers,” solving mathematical equations; and many as astronomers. At Yerkes, women scientists could reach for the stars.

(12) WITCHER ADDS FISHBURNE. The Hollywood Reporter tells readers, “Netflix’s ‘The Witcher’ Season 4 Casts Laurence Fishburne as Regis”.

Netflix‘s The Witcher has cast acclaimed actor Laurence Fishburne in a major role.

Fishburne (the Matrix and John Wick franchises) has joined season four as Regis, a fan-favorite character from The Witcher books and games.

The character is in saga creator Andrzej Sapkowski’s novel Baptism of Fire as “a world-wise Barber-surgeon with a mysterious past” who will join Geralt (now played by Liam Hemsworth, taking over for Henry Cavill) on his adventures….

(13) HOT ON THE TRAIL. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Scientists have spotted a “hot Jupiter” exoplanet with a tail longer than the distance from the Earth to the Moon.

WASP 69-b is in a close orbit that takes it around its home star in under 4 days. The heat from the primary is driving helium off in concentrations sufficient to be detected from our vantage point about 160 light years away. The helium forms a tail lagging behind the planet as it orbits. “Scientists find planet with a tail 150 times longer than the Mississippi” at Mashable.

There are some strange planets out in deep space.

Now, scientists have found a planet with a tail at least 350,000 miles (563,270 kilometers) long. That’s longer than the distance between Earth and the moon, and about 150 times longer than the Mississippi River. Helium gas is escaping from the Jupiter-sized planet WASP-69b, located 160 light-years away from Earth. With observations from the giant W. M. Keck Observatory atop Hawaii, researchers detected this planetary leak has created an expansive tail.

“Previous observations suggested that WASP-69b had a modest tail, or no tail at all,” Dakotah Tyler, an astrophysics doctoral candidate at UCLA and first author of the research, said in a statement. “However, we have been able to definitively show that this planet’s helium tail extends at least seven times the radius of the giant planet itself.”…

[Thanks to, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Kathy Sullivan, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Thomas the Red.]