(1) SO FEW REMAIN. George R.R. Martin calls these “Dark Days” at Not a Blog.

 …2023 was a nightmare of a year, for the world and the nation and for me and mine, both professionally and personally.   I am very glad that it is over.

Unfortunately, so far 2024 looks to be even worse….

…I am famous and I am wealthy and, supposedly, I have a “big platform.”  Whatever that is.  But I have grown more and more cynical about this supposed “power” that people keep telling me I have.   Has anything I have ever written here ever changed a single mind, a single vote?  I see no evidence of that.  The era of rational discourse seems to have ended.

And death is everywhere.   Howard Waldrop was the latest, and his passing has hit me very very hard, but before him we lost Michael Bishop, Terry Bisson, David Drake… from my Wild Cards team, Victor Milan, John Jos. Miller, Edward Bryant, Steve Perrin… I still miss Gardner Dozois and Phyllis Eisenstein and my amazing agent Kay McCauley… Len Wein is gone, Vonda McIntyre, and Harlan Ellison… Greg Bear too, and… oh, I could go on.    I look around, and it seems as though my entire generation of SF and fantasy writers is gone or going.  Only a handful of us remain… and for how long, I wonder?  I know I have forgotten people in the list above, and maybe that is the destiny that awaits all of us… to be forgotten.

For that matter, the entire human race may be forgotten.   If climate change does not get us, war will.  Too many countries have nukes….

(2) FLASH MOB. The term Larry Niven coined for his stories of a world with transport booths is in the mainstream now. Shelf Awareness’ headline about this crime is: “Deadtime Stories, Lansing, Mich., Victim of ‘Flash Mob Robbery'”.

…Owner Jenn Carpenter wrote that around 2:30 p.m., a van pulled up to the corner of Washington and South St., and five teenagers wearing backpacks, carrying a big black trash bag, got out and entered the bookstore, where they remained for approximately 15 minutes. 

“During this time, they took turns asking me questions and keeping me occupied on the bookstore side of the shop, while the rest of them stuffed their backpacks with over $1,300 worth of merchandise,” she continued…

The WILX story has more details: “Lansing’s Reotown store ‘Deadtime Stories’ victim of theft, catches individuals on security footage”.

“The very first clip that I pulled up was them stuffing hundreds of dollars of merchandise in backpacks,” said Jenn Carpenter.

In Lansing’s Reotown, a well known book store, Deadtime Stories, fell victim to a theft. The owner, Jenn Carpenter says she had no idea she had been stolen from until another store owner asked her to check her security footage.

In the security footage, you can see a group of people stuffing store merchandise in a backpack, purse, and even in their pants.

“We lost more yesterday in stolen than we made in sales,” said Carpenter,“This brazen like an entire group of people coming in and just stuffing hundreds of dollars worth of merchandise in their bags and leaving… I’ve never seen anything like it.”

The business across the street, Vintage Junkies, also fell victim to the thefts. The owner says the group took more than $700 in merchandise, even stealing a lamp.

(3) STUDYING OCTAVIA BUTLER. Lois Rosson, a historian of science, is The Huntington’s 2023–24 Octavia E. Butler Fellow. She is currently working on a project about the depiction of outer space over the course of the Cold War titled Scientific Realism and American Astrofutures: Octavia Butler and the Space Environment. “Interview with Octavia E. Butler Fellow Lois Rosson” at The Huntington.

Durkin: You have noted that Octavia E. Butler grew up in Pasadena, not far from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. How do you think that informed her work? And how does that inform your scholarship?

Rosson: For me, this is one of the most interesting parts of my project. The triangle formed by JPL, the Hollywood special effects industry, and commercial aerospace in Southern California has had an outsized impact on the look of outer space. A lot of the illustrators I write about found work in these three industries, and they often moved from one to another.

As you’ve noted, Butler grew up in the northwest part of Pasadena, in close physical proximity to JPL. That said, the scientific and technical expertise concentrated in the region was parsed out socially, not geographically. Pasadena’s public schools were segregated until as late as 1970 and officially desegregated only because of a federal court order. In fact, Pasadena was the first city outside of the South that needed such a mandate. Butler graduated in 1965 from John Muir Technical High School, which was then a vocational school serving the area’s growing African American population.

So, there’s a moment in my story when the illustrators I write about and many of their scientific collaborators are concentrated around JPL, Caltech, and Hollywood, and they are using a frontier model to articulate the landscapes of the outer solar system. Butler is living in the same environment at the same time and forming very different ideas about how society should be organized in space. Unsurprisingly, the arid landscapes of the West take on a different meaning in her work. In her Parable series of novels, outer space represents an escape from the degradation of Earth’s landscapes. In Butler’s work, space settlement looks more like diaspora, which upends the frontier logic we’re used to. Casting space as something other than a frontier helps us understand the persistence of the metaphor more clearly and rethink how we relate to space as an environment.

(4) AWARD FOR CALIFORNIANS. The 2024 Golden Poppy Awards were presented by the California Independent Booksellers Alliance on January 25. The 14 categories include a sff award. 

• Octavia E. Butler Award for Sci Fi/Fantasy/Horror: Maeve Fly by CJ Leede (Tor Nightfire)

(5) OCTAVIA BUTLER MURAL. Publishers Weekly’s January 29 “Picture of the Day” shows authors Sherri L. Smith (l.) and Elizabeth Wein (r.) celebrating the launch of their book American Wings: Chicago’s Pioneering Black Aviators and the Race for Equality in the Sky (G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers), with a visit to Octavia E. Butler Magnet STEAM Middle School in Pasadena, Calif.

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(6) CHENGDU WORLDCON ROUNDUP. [Item by Ersatz Culture.]

A Chinese fan writes in English about recent events and their impact

The author of this was OK for me to link to the source, but after a brief discussion with them, I am presenting their original unedited English language text here instead.  We did not discuss any of the things that they allude to in this text; I am more interested in conveying to a wider audience the sort of thing that (I imagine) many Chinese fans are feeling, than getting into the weeds of the specifics.

The problem is not that Chinese SF is without hope. I won’t be disappointed if that is the case because there would not be any hope at the very beginning. The problem is that, people who actually care about Chinese SF, who make every effort to make it shine, who knows this industry, who want this explained fairly, are being dishonored, silenced, denied, warned. They even had to warn each other about potential cost: it’s not worth it to hang on anymore. 

So, that’s it. The opportunity was cast away for a generation at least. People who had cherries picked got their fruits and headed for the next big one. The catastrophe was left behind for writers, publishers, mag editors to deal with.

As a SF reader for nearly 20y but not one who read Chinese SF for years, I was not familiar with many candidates before con. But I just heard too many familiar stories of what the survivors have to worry about afterwards.

The dishonesty, like a thorns crown, was forced on the winners’ head. Few would expect blood trailing from behind, but the bleeding will not go away easily. It was never the fault of the winners, but penalty is put on them.

I hate it. 

Mike has been provided with the link to the original source, just so that he can verify that this isn’t something I’ve invented myself.

Fact-checking Babel’s status in China

Regarding all the discussion about why Babel was declared ineligible, here’s an attempt at rumour-control of the specific issue of whether it is legally published and available within China.  This isn’t intended to prove or disprove if or why any censorship or interference took place in the Hugo nominations, but just to clarify whether the work is available.

On January 22nd, Yin Harn Lee pointed out on Twitter that Babel had been published and was available for purchase in China.  I replied with a link to a Tweet I’d made a couple of days earlier, referring to the fact that it had recently ranked 4th in a list of the top 10 SFF books of 2023 on Douban.  (I’m not sure how that list was generated – from sales, user activity, a judging panel, or something else.  Also, I’d only come across that list via a post from a Chinese Twitter user, but their tweets are protected, so I can’t really credit the “real” source for that info.)

A few days later, I did a bit more digging.  Per Douban (which is China’s equivalent of Goodreads/IMDB/etc), the publisher of that translated edition is 中信出版集团, which can be translated as something like CITIC Press.  I’ve since had it confirmed that CITIC Press is ultimately part of CITIC Group, and their Wikipedia article has some interesting nuggets about their founding and ownership.

Note: CITIC being the publisher of Babel explains a comment on Weibo I saw shortly after the Hugo finalists were announced.  My quite probably incorrect recollection is that it translated as something like “CITIC won’t be happy”, which didn’t make any sense to me at the time, even after I’d read the Wikipedia article linked above.  In retrospect, I’m guessing that by the time the finalists were announced, Babel had already been announced as an upcoming publication by CITIC.  Given all the buzz about it, CITIC would likely be expecting to gain a lot of publicity and enthusiasm from the Hugo nomination that many of us were assuming was a dead certainty.

(7) FUTURE TENSE. The January 2024 entry in the Future Tense Fiction series is “Sad Robot,” by E.R. Ramzipoor. The story is about what happens when a globally crucial AI system is in need of therapy. Future Tense Fiction is a monthly series of short stories from Future Tense and Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination about how technology and science will change our lives.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born January 30, 1955 — Judith Tarr, 69. Did you know Judith Tarr breeds Lipizzan horses at Dancing Horse Farm, her home in Vail, Arizona? They figure into her romantic fantasies that she wrote under the name Caitlin Brennan which she used for her White Magic series, The Mountain’s Call and sequels, and the House of the Star novel.  Yes, romantic fantasies.

Her Hound and the Falcon trilogy (The Isle of Glass, The Golden Horn and The Hounds of God) is set in twelfth and thirteenth century Europe. With elves. Yes elves. Why not?

Her Epona series (White Mare’s Daughter, The Shepherd Kings, Lady of Horses and Daughter of Lir) is set in prehistoric Europe. It takes the theories of archaeologist Marija Gimbutas that a matriarchal society existed in Paleolithic Europe. I’ve read her rationale on that — it’s interesting. The novels are a good read though perhaps a bit dogged at times.

Now Household Gods co-written with Harry Turtledove is a rollicking good novel that’s fun to read. Time travel, ancient Roman gods, a feisty female character — wharf’s not to like?

The next one being His Majesty’s Elephant. Charlemagne. A gift of magical elephant. A supernatural plot afoot. 

A Wind in Cairo allows her to show her love of horses as one of the characters is a male who for his transgressions is transformed by a sorcerer into a magnificent stallions in medieval Cairo where one of victims is now his jockey. 

Finally there’s Living in Threes which Book Cafe quite nice sums up this way, “Three lives. Three worlds. Three times. Three young women, past, present, and future, come together to solve an age-old mystery and save a world..” A novel where you don’t need the Bechdel test. 

She’s written some fifty shorter pieces of fiction, none collected, save those in, and try not to be surprised, in her Nine White Horses: Nine Tales of Horses and Magic collection. 

(9) BRAIN CHIP. “Elon Musk’s Neuralink implants brain chip in first human” reports Reuters.

The first human patient has received an implant from brain-chip startup Neuralink on Sunday and is recovering well, the company’s billionaire founder Elon Musk said.

“Initial results show promising neuron spike detection,” Musk said in a post on the social media platform X on Monday.

Spikes are activity by neurons, which the National Institute of Health describes as cells that use electrical and chemical signals to send information around the brain and to the body.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration had given the company clearance last year to conduct its first trial to test its implant on humans, a critical milestone in the startup’s ambitions to help patients overcome paralysis and a host of neurological conditions.

In September, Neuralink said it received approval for recruitment for the human trial.

The study uses a robot to surgically place a brain-computer interface (BCI) implant in a region of the brain that controls the intention to move, Neuralink said previously, adding that its initial goal is to enable people to control a computer cursor or keyboard using their thoughts alone….

(10) NO RELATION TO THAT FLYING SQUIRREL. Atlas Obscura remembers “How NASA Got Involved With Parachuting Beavers”.

IF YOU WERE WANDERING THE wilds of the Wasatch National Forest in Utah in September 2023, you might have encountered a strange sight: a line of slowly marching horses, with beavers saddled on their backs. Unfortunately, the rodents were not wearing tiny cowboy hats and boots. They were inside carriers, but their journey via horseback was still a fairly Wild West–type of solution to a problem. These beavers were headed to a new home—a battleground in the fight against drought and wildfires in the region….

…For decades, people have gone out of their way to move beavers across great distances. Today’s preferred methods—hiking, humping, and horseback rides—are an improvement over 1948, when beavers were parachuted out of planes in Idaho. Back then, Idaho Fish and Game had loaded the animals into boxes designed to spring open upon landing, and then dropped them over the Sawtooth Mountain Range….

…However, the reason behind all of this shuttling beavers around has completely reversed since the 1940s. Then, they were being sent to remote locations because humans didn’t want them around. Today, in Idaho, Utah, and other sites, they’re being brought back. Beavers are ecosystem engineers—and the ecosystems they create happen to be key to limiting wildfires and managing drought conditions. The mini-paratroopers have been revealed to be mini-firefighters, and it was the results of that aerial feat in 1948 that helped kick it all off, at least once NASA took notice….

(11) DESERT SONG. “Dune Spice Opera 2024 remaster” available for sale at Bandcamp.

From the first Dune 1991 game, reworked in 1992 with Philippe Ulrich, a classic of 90’s Electronic music now available in a qualité never Heard before!

Carefully remastered using modern tools, this 2024 version features spectrally enhanced sound, wider stereo, and clearer dynamics, rendered in Hi-Res Audio 96/24 format.
Includes also a special bonus: The full game OST in a yet unveiled quality!

(12) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Deadline sums up the “’Ministry Of Ungentlemanly Warfare’ Trailer”.

The Ministry Of Ungentlemanly Warfare will be released on April 19. Think Ritchie meets Magnificent Seven and Inglourious Basterds….

…The true story covers Winston Churchill and Ian Fleming’s secret WWII combat organization. The clandestine squad’s unconventional and ‘ungentlemanly’ fighting techniques against the Nazis helped change the course of the war and gave birth to the modern Black Ops unit.

The script by Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson, Arash Amel and Ritchie is based on war correspondent and military historian Damien Lewis’ best-selling book of the same name. Tamasy and Johnson initiated the project and sold it as a pitch to Bruckheimer and Paramount in 2015….

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