Pixel Scroll 10/14/21 Pixel 10-10 Whose Gracious Presence Illuminates The File Like The Edgescroll Of A Knife

(1) DOCTORAL THESES. A roundup of Radio Times’ Doctor Who coverage.

The show’s official social media accounts posted a snap of the pair on the TARDIS set, holding a clapperboard, with an accompanying message that confirmed they’d “finished filming”.

Whittaker’s departure from Doctor Who was first announced, along with that of current showrunner Chris Chibnall, back in July.

Though this new post confirms that Gill has also “finished filming” on the next set of episodes, the BBC is yet to officially confirm if she will be departing her role as companion Yaz Khan.

Both stars will return for the show’s 13th series, set to air from 31st October on BBC One. This will be followed by two specials which will air in 2022, then one final feature-length adventure for Whittaker’s Thirteenth Doctor which will also mark the BBC’s centenary.

Speaking to Digital Spy, he explained: “It all depends. The moment you say yes to Doctor Who, even before you’ve done an episode, you’re being asked whether you’d go back after you finish. I don’t know if this happens to James Bonds. I don’t know if Pierce Brosnan gets asked if he’d go back to James Bond.

“Because there’s that element of fantasy, anything is ultimately possible. You should never say never to anything. I think that way madness lies.”

Well, that didn’t take long – Tennant is voicing the Doctor in a game:

David Tennant returns to the world of Doctor Who today with a special voice appearance in Doctor Who: The Edge of Reality, a video game that sees Tennant’s Time Lord sharing a screen with Jodie Whittaker’s incumbent version of the famous TV hero. But this return did come with a bit of “weirdness” thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic.

(2) FOLLOWING THE JUMP. Heavy.com revisits several efforts to revisit Star Trek’s Guardian of Forever in other iterations of the series: “How Spock Was Supposed to Meet Himself on ‘the Next Generation’”.

Fans cried during the airing of the “Star Trek” episode, “The City on the Edge of Forever.” This particular program would be proclaimed by many as the “greatest episode” in the franchise’s history. Written originally by science fiction scribe Harlan Ellison, “City” featured a story that taught the cruel lessons of time travel.

… Kirk, Spock, and McCoy (DeForest Kelley) were able to travel into the past with the help of a living machine known as the Guardian of Forever….  

(3) HITTING THE THEMATIC TARGET. Author and editor Michael A. Ventrella from the Pocono Liars Club chats with authors and editors Keith DeCandido and Randee Dawn on the topic of “Writing for Themed Anthologies” with lots of stories, laughs, and advice for writers and editors both!

(4) OCTOTHORPE. Octothorpe 42 is up now. Listen here: “I‘m Up for Running Controlcon”.

John Coxon used to have a different face, Alison Scott is going to Smofcon, and Liz Batty is in disguise. We talk about Douglas Adams, the SF Encyclopedia, and upcoming Worldcon bids.

(5) THE BIG TIME. [Item by Christian Brunschen.] I watched the most recent episode of the BBC quiz show Only Connect on BBC 2 – a quiz show where contestants have to find connections between clues, hosted by Victoria Coren Mitchell – and one of the combinations this time featured this combination.

[Note: iPlayer link only works in UK, but YouTube has the episode. This game segment comes after the 20-minute mark.]

(6) GUESS WHO’S A BIG JEAN-LUC FAN. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In the Washington Post, Travis M. Andrews and Roxanne Roberts say Jeff Bezos has been a Trekker since fourth grade, when he’s come home from school and watch classic Trek episodes.  Andrews and Roberts note that Bezos’s favorite captain is Jean-Luc Picard, and that he nearly named Amazon makeitso.com.  His current favorite sf writers are Alistair Reynolds, Ernest Cline, and Andy Weir and it’s not a coincidence that Amazon Studios saved The Expanse after the show was killed by Syfy. “Jeff Bezos and Star Trek: A love affair”.

…“For years, I have been begging Paramount, which is owned by Viacom, to let me be in a ‘Star Trek’ movie,” he said that year. “I am very persistent, and you can imagine the poor director who got the call: ‘You have to let Jeff Bezos be in your ‘Star Trek’ movie. ”

Bezos said he was willing to be unrecognizable but wanted a speaking part — and one that was central to the plot so it didn’t end up on the cutting-room floor.

Bezos appears in the first five minutes of the film as an alien Starfleet officer stationed at Yorktown Starbase in 2263 who scans Kalara as she pleads for help from Commodore Paris and Captain Kirk. “Speak normally,” Bezos tells her. The cameo role required such extensive makeup that he could only drink through a straw.

“He was awesome,” director Justin Lin told the Associated Press. “It was like a president was visiting, you know? He had a big entourage! But it didn’t matter because he was so into it. He had to wait around all day because it was one day we were shooting like three different scenes and, it was also credit to Jeff because … he just nailed it every time.”…

(7) YES BUCKS, YES BUCK ROGERS. I’m still catching up, and this seems a timely place to slip in Saturday Night Live’s “Billionaire Star Trek” sketch from a week ago.

(8) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.

  • 1926 – Eighty-five years ago, A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, was first  published in the United Kingdom. It is a collection of short stories with illustrations by E. H. Shepard. It was the first of two such collections, the second being The House at Pooh Corner. (Yes, it’d later be a song written by Kenny Loggins and performed by their Nitty Gritty Dirt Band on their 1970 Uncle Charlie & His Dog Teddy album but I digress.) The book was well-received at release, and was an extraordinary success, selling some one hundred fifty thousand copies before the end of the year. Winnie-the-Pooh has been adapted in other media, most notably by Disney beginning with Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree in the Sixties. Both books are free as part of the Audible Plus program. 

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born October 14, 1899 Martin Miller. He played Kublai Khan in the completed erased by the BBC First Doctor story, “Marco Polo”. He’s in the first Pink Panther film as Pierre Luigi, a photographer, and has roles in Danger ManDepartment SThe Avengers and The Prisoner. In the latter, he was number fifty-four in “It’s Your Funeral”. The Gamma People in which he played Lochner is I think his only true genre film though I’m obviously open to being told I’m wrong. (Died 1969.)
  • Born October 14, 1927 Roger Moore. Bond in seven films 1973 to 1985, a long run indeed. And he played Simon Templar in The Saint for most of the Sixties, an amazing one hundred eighteen episodes. Let’s not forget that he was in the Curse of the Pink Panther as Chief Insp. Jacques Clouseau!  He even got to play Sherlock Holmes in Sherlock Holmes in New York. (Died 2017.)
  • Born October 14, 1946 Katy Manning, 75. She was Jo Grant, companion to the Third Doctor. She also appeared in that role with the Eleventh Doctor on the Sarah Jane Adventures in a two-part story entitled “Death of the Doctor”. She appears as herself in the The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot.
  • Born October 14, 1949 Crispin Burnham, 72. And then there are those who just disappear.  He was the founder, writer and publisher of Dark Messenger Reader / Eldritch Tales from 1975 to 1995 as the publisher Yith Press. He was also a prolific essayist from 1973 to 1995, his final essay being a reflection on the life and career of Robert Bloch. There’s nothing to show him active after 1998 when the final part of his “People of The Monolith” was publishedin Cthulhu Cultus #13. Then he vanishes without a trace. 
  • Born October 14, 1953 Richard Christian Matheson, 68. Son of the Richard Matheson that you’re thinking of. A very prolific horror writer mostly of short stories, he’s also no slouch at script writing as he’s written for Amazing StoriesMasters of HorrorThe Powers of Matthew StarSplatterTales from the CryptKnight Rider (the original series) and The Incredible Hulk. Wiki claims he wrote for Roger Zelazny’s The Chronicles of Amber but IMDB shows no such series or show. The usual suspects  have a goodly number of story collections available for him.
  • Born October 14, 1953 Greg Evigan, 68. TekWar, one of Shatner’s better ideas, starred him as Jake Cardigan. I really liked it. Yes, Shatner was in it. He also shows up in DeepStar Six as Kevin McBride, as Will South in the horror film Spectre aka The House of The Damned, as Marcus Cutter in Cerberus: The Guardian of Hell, and on the Alfred Hitchcock Presents as David Whitmore in “In the Driver’s Seat”. 
  • Born October 14, 1963 Lori Petty, 58. Rebecca Buck – “Tank Girl” in that film. She was also Dr. Lean Carli in Cryptic, and Dr. Sykes in Dead Awake. She had one-offs in The HungerTwilight ZoneStar Trek: Voyager, BrimstoneFreddy’s Nightmares and Alien Nation, and voiced quite well Livewire in the DCU animated shows.
  • Born October 14, 1968 Robert C. Cooper, 53. He was an executive producer of all the Stargate series. He also co-created both Stargate Atlantis and Stargate Universe with Brad Wright. Cooper has written and produced many episodes of Stargate series as well as directed a number of episodes. I’m really impressed!

(10) COMICS SECTION.

2021: Let’s not do anything about the climate yet. – That’s a crazy bad idea.

2050: That didn’t work, I wonder what went wrong. – It was a crazy bad idea. 

(11) IATSE STRIKE IMMINENT. The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) will go on strike Monday, October 18 unless studios and streaming companies meet their demands reports Business Insider: “Hollywood Union President Declares Strike Ultimatum for Monday”.

Earlier this month, IATSE members voted to authorize a strike, with over 98% of members voting in favor for a strike. The union and producers resumed bargaining negotiations on Wednesday, according to Deadline, marking eight days since the strike authorization. The unions have been locked in multiple negotiations since July, but parties have repeatedly failed to reach a consensus on a deal….

The Washington Post sums up the reasons for the stike:

…Members of the IATSE contend that television and film studios have raked in massive profits during the coronavirus pandemic as consumers turn to streaming options to fill more time at home. But those gains have not extended to workers, they say, who now put in significantly longer workweeks…

David Gerrold also discussed what the high (98%) vote portends and urged his readers to support  IATSE.

And John Scalzi voiced his support, too.

(12) UNION FORMS. Meanwhile, Dicebreaker reports board game industry employees are organizing: “Workers at Paizo have announced the United Paizo Workers union”.

Over 30 Paizo staff members from several departments have signed a letter announcing the formation of the United Paio Workers union, in coordination with the Communication Workers of America. This effort is the first of its kind in both the tabletop RPG and board game industry.

The letter states that Paizo workers have been organizing for some time but were spurred to act by September firing of customer service and community manager Sara Marie and what they call the sudden departure of customer service representative Diego Valdez and several others in the recent past. Many former and current employees, as well as freelancers and contract workers, took the opportunity to share stories of abuse, harassment, mistreatment and hostile management.

“These events, as well as internal conversations among Paizo workers, have uncovered a pattern of inconsistent hiring practices, pay inequity across the company, allegations of verbal abuse from executives and management, and allegations of harassment ignored or covered up by those at the top,” the letter said. “These findings have further galvanized the need for clearer policies and stronger employee protections to ensure that Paizo staff can feel secure in their employment.”

(13) DUNE MOTHER. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In the Financial Times, behind a paywall, Raphael Abraham interviewed Rebecca Ferguson about her role in Dune.

(Timothee) Chalamet may be the star but Ferguson’s character is in many ways the story’s catalyst; her role amped up by (director Denis) Villeneuve–she has defied her mysterious religious order to bear a son and possesses supernatural powers that she attempts to impart to him.  And, while other main players are killed off or become separated from the hero, it is Paul’s mother who remains by his side, battling on foot across the inhospitable desert planet of the title, evading enemies and giant sandworms.  For Ferguson and Chalamet, this meant shooting under the Abu Dhabi sun in bulky space costumery.

‘We had to adapt to mother nature,’ the actress says. ‘We could only film for an hour and a half at dusk and dawn, and during the day we had to stay inside and not burn ourselves.  It was a struggle running uphill in stillsuits but it was also so lovely doing it in the real environment–no bloody studio!’

(14) MASSIVE ART INSTALLATION HONORS ASTRONAUT. The Smithsonian explains how “A Monumental Portrait of NASA Astronaut Stephanie Wilson Crops Up in Atlanta”, as designed by artist Stan Herd.

…Fittingly, for his next creation, which will debut today at Woodruff Park in downtown Atlanta, the 71-year-old crop artist is looking up to the sky for inspiration. Stretching 4,800 square feet in size, the piece coincides with the United Nations’ International Day of the Girl Child initiative and is also part of World Space Week, an annual event that celebrates global accomplishments in science and technology. Since this year’s theme is Women in Space, Herd has created a portrait of Stephanie Wilson, a veteran NASA astronaut with three space flights under her belt (she’s also the second African American woman to go into space), and one of 18 astronauts who are a part of Artemis, NASA’s lunar exploration program that is scheduled to send the first woman to the moon in 2024…

(15) DESKTOP SPACE BASE. John King Tarpinian is right when he says the S.T. Dupont Space Odyssey Prestige Collectors Set is “over the top.” But it’s priced to move! Now marked down to $9,596.

(16) GILLIAN ANDERSON VOICE ROLE. Robin Robin comes to Netflix on November 24.

Robin Robin, a holiday special from Aardman Animation, makers of Shaun the Sheep, Chicken Run and Wallace & Gromit. “Starring Gillian Anderson, Richard E Grant, Bronte Carmichael and Adeel Akhtar.” When her egg fortuitously rolls into a rubbish dump, Robin is raised by a loving family of mice. As she grows up, her differences become more apparent. Robin sets off on the heist to end all heists to prove to her family that she can be a really good mouse – but ends up discovering who she really is.

(17) MARTIAN MUD. The journal Science features a Red Planet discovery: “Perseverance rover reveals an ancient delta-lake system and flood deposits at Jezero crater, Mars”.

Perseverance rover reveals an ancient delta-lake system and flood deposits at Jezero crater, Mars

Observations from orbital spacecraft have shown that Jezero crater, Mars, contains a prominent fan-shaped body of sedimentary rock deposited at its western margin. The Perseverance rover landed in Jezero crater in February 2021. Researchers have analyzes images taken by the rover in the three months after landing. The fan has outcrop faces that were invisible from orbit, which record the hydrological evolution of Jezero crater. Researchers interpret the presence of inclined strata in these outcrops as evidence of deltas that advanced into a lake.

(18) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In this Saturday Night Live “Cut for Time” sketch, a dinner party (Owen Wilson, Kenan Thompson, Cecily Strong, Heidi Gardner, Alex Moffat, Ego Nwodim) disagrees on splitting a check. But wait! – There’s more, and it’s genre.

[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Nancy Sauer, Chris Barkley, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Lise Andreasen, John A Arkansawyer, Christian Brunschen, Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]

37 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 10/14/21 Pixel 10-10 Whose Gracious Presence Illuminates The File Like The Edgescroll Of A Knife

  1. I loved reading Pooh to my daughter. I’d love reading it to her again if she’d sit still for it, though now that she’s in college, probably not…

  2. @Mike: Wouldn’t hurt to ask.

    A young lady (who is also now very grown) once said to me “Pooh is the bear of the century!” (this was in the 90s). I could not but praise her wisdom.

    I have a boxed set of Pooh from sometime after I was much “too old” for it, and copies of the two “Winnie Ille Pu” books, because sometimes even a Bear of Very Little Brain can speak Latin. And a Bounce Around Tigger which I got for Christmas in my late 30’s.

    Also, go IATSE. They work stupidly long hours before and after the actors, and it’s not like I don’t have plenty of TV and movies to watch, plus there are these things called “books”.

  3. 10) Curiosity is busy in its slow ascent of Mount Sharp*, and if I were to imagine it having a will of its own, I wouldn’t think it would give this up until it either reaches the summit, or runs out of power.

    *Resting at the moment because the Sun is blocking its communication with Earth.

  4. Cat Rambo’s You Sexy Thing is a delightful read indeed. Highly recommend! Thanks Cat for sending it along! And do send me your address so I can send you some Really Great Chocolate.

  5. MEREDITH MOMENT: Open Road Media is doing a “Mega Sci-Fi Sale.” So if a Filer goes to their favorite ebook supplier and searches on Rick Shelly, Clifford Simak, William Dietz, Allan Steele, Jo Clayton, Philip Jose Farmer, Poul Anderson, and M.K. Wren, they will probably find some bargains.

  6. 12) I’m always happy to see more unions floating around. The more unions there are, the more power all of us in them have.

    I have a copy of Winnie-the-Pooh in Yiddish. (I don’t know any Yiddish; it was my grandfather’s. Although I’m not sure he knew Yiddish either even if he did get a more Traditional Jewish Upbringing than I did.)

    I’ve always been fascinated, though, with Milne’s poem on the subject of Pooh books:

    If a writer, why not write
    On whatever comes in sight?
    So — the Children’s Books: a short
    Intermezzo of a sort:
    When I wrote them, little thinking
    All my years of pen-and-inking
    Would be almost lost among
    Those for trifles for the young.

  7. I actually had one of my early stories appear in ELDRITCH TALES, back in 1995. Pretty slight, only 250 words. Which meant that with ET’s pay rate of one-fifth of a cent per word, my fifty-cent payment was less than the cost of sending the manuscript and including an SSAE.

    (I am very grateful for the rise of electronic submission methods since then.)

  8. Winnie-the-Pooh was published 95 years ago. That number is particularly significant for those of us in the US, since it means that the book will join the public domain on this upcoming New Years Day. And then anyone can make a free reading, translation, adaptation, or whatever else they like from it.

  9. John Mark Ockerbloom says Winnie-the-Pooh was published 95 years ago. That number is particularly significant for those of us in the US, since it means that the book will join the public domain on this upcoming New Years Day. And then anyone can make a free reading, translation, adaptation, or whatever else they like from it.

    Actually it’s not that simple as the Walt Disney Company controls usage of the characters. So you are not free to do whatever you want with the characters including, say, put them into a film of your scripting.

    The two books are in the public domain as of I believe October 2022 here. In countries with a life of author + 70 years copyright law (like in the EU), Winnie the Pooh becomes public domain in 2026, in other countries, like Japan, the books are already public domain as they had the fifty year rule.

    This obsession with public domain fascinates me. You can get both books for a very reasonable price. Why do you need them to be free?

  10. Winnie the Pooh is everywhere. I saw a copy in a hostel I was staying in Sri Lanka some forty years back. Now given that was a British colony that’s not a huge surprise but it was in Hindi which was. No idea if it was intended as a language learning instruction aid or not.

  11. Actually it’s not that simple as the Walt Disney Company controls usage of the characters. So you are not free to do whatever you want with the characters including, say, put them into a film of your scripting.

    Judging by how Tarzan and Conan have been used in comics after some of their stories became public domain, the characters could be used in a film or book but couldn’t be referenced in the title.

    Dynamite published the Lord of the Jungle comic about Tarzan for years without a licensing agreement with Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. It was based on the early stories that had become public domain. They eventually reached a deal and are now publishing licensed material.

    Ablaze is publishing The Cimmerian comic about Conan from public domain stories.

    This obsession with public domain fascinates me. You can get both books for a very reasonable price. Why do you need them to be free?

    My obsession with the public domain is as a writer, not a reader. I love the idea of classic stories and characters becoming part of the commons.

  12. rcade says Judging by how Tarzan and Conan have been used in comics after some of their stories became public domain, the characters could be used in a film or book but couldn’t be referenced in the title.

    This is Disney. You want to be the film maker that tries to invest in a Pooh film to prove that the Big Bad Mouse doesn’t own the characters? Good luck with that. That’s be an expensive mistake I’d say.

  13. @Cat Eldridge: No, that is not true. Trademark does not override copyright and later copyright does not override earlier copyright; the book versions of the characters will still be in the public domain. The inevitable lawsuits will hinge on whether any given portrayal uses elements from the films rather than only the original books. (Or from the couple of authorized sequels, which will also not be in the public domain yet.) It will wind up being much like the Sherlock Holmes things were not all of the books were in the public domain and therefore litigation over every portrayal where Holmes had feelings, since the ones where he demonstrated emotional depth were the ones still under copyright, but you will absolutely still be able to legally, say, write an unauthorized sequel to the original book or make your own movie, as long as your portrayal looks like the original illustrations and not the Disney ones.

    (Now, given Disney’s established propensity to ignore legalities as long as it can tie people up in court for long periods of time, I expect the initial non-Disney adaptations will be dependent on deep pockets, but that’s because Disney is an unethical corporation that ignores even its signed contractual obligations when it thinks it can get away with it, not because they legally have any right to anything.)

    As for why the public domain is important, it’s because of the way things blend into folklore. If everything stayed under copyright forever, so much of our rich veins of literature would be gone– you’d have no innovative remixing, you’d have no tradition for authors to draw from. Everything’s not original– everything old is new, and having a clear field for adaptation is important to the continued furtherance of interesting influences and reimaginings.

    It also matters for issues of preservation: there are video recordings which are literally disintegrating but which we can’t move to more stable mediums because that counts as Making A Copy for the purposes of copyright law. This is especially true with orphan films, which are covered by copyright but have no discernible copyright owner. Public domain makes it possible for materials that have become classics to be affordable to those who will need to read them, and allows for scholarship. There have even been instances of segregationists successfully silencing the publication of works depicting their unsavory history because it would have involved copyrighted photos that they took while they were committing injustices. (“Copyright law has succeeded in silencing what the segregationists could not.”)

    (Is Hollywood currently going way overboard on remakes? Yes. But that doesn’t mean public domain isn’t important. The way you get new, creative rethinkings of things is by making it so you don’t have to have deep pockets to do it.)

    …well, that got long.

  14. @Cat Eldridge

    The two books are in the public domain as of I believe October 2022 here. In countries with a life of author + 70 years copyright law (like in the EU), Winnie the Pooh becomes public domain in 2026

    In the US, it goes into public domain on the first Jan 1 after 95 years after the publication. It was published 14 Oct 1926 in the US, so enters public domain here on 1 Jan 2022. In the UK, copyright expires on 1 Jan 2027 (first Jan 1 after 70 years after death of author [31 Jan 1956]).

    (and “the two books”???? . . .)

  15. This is Disney. You want to be the film maker that tries to invest in a Pooh film to prove that the Big Bad Mouse doesn’t own the characters?

    Disney is rapacious about IP, but I’m not going to say that something is not allowed because a megacorporation would use its legal might to keep other media creators from exercising their rights.

    Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. is extremely aggressive about IP and sued Dynamite Entertainment for trademark infringement, but it ultimately was unable to stop a comics publisher from using the characters as depicted in the works that have made it to public domain.

  16. The various legal issues surrounding Conan, Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes are trademark rather than copyright cases, because in countries with a copyright duration of life plus 70, the works of Robert E. Howard, Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Rice Burroughs are all in the public domain by now. Under the 95 years after first publication rule in the US, all the Conan stories, some later Sherlock Holmes stories and many later Edgar Rice Burroughs stories are still under copyright.

    It would be legal for me (since I live in a life plus 70 country) to publish an edition of Robert E. Howard stories, Burroughs stories or Sherlock Holmes stories without paying royalties to the respective estates and that’s how the many fly-by-night public domain e-book editions on Amazon came to be. It would also be legal for me to translate the original stories into German and publish them, though I couldn’t use the existing translations, because those are still copyrighted.

    However, if I were to write my own Conan or Tarzan or Sherlock Holmes pastiche, I would get in trouble with the trademark holders, especially if there is anything that might have been drawn not from the original stories, but from later media adaptations or pastiches. Besides, the ERB and Conan Doyle estates are infamously litigatious. The current owner of the trademarks for the various Howard characters is fairly laid back and supposedly easy to get along with (I know some people who work on Conan games and even a few pastiche authors), but if you were to infringe on their trademark, they will have to go after you.

    So in short, it’s not worth it. File off the series numbers and create your own Holmes/Conan/Tarzan-like character, which is of course a time-honoured tradition. My Kurval stories originally came to be, because I liked the King Kull and King Conan stories and wished there would be more of them.

    The one character I’m eagerly awaiting to go into the public domain is the German supervillain Dr. Mabuse. The author of the original novels Norbert Jacques died in 1954, so his novels go into the public domain in 2024. However, Jacques sold the rights to a film studio which made a series of (very good) films in the 1960s and likely still has trademark rights, so I’d still tread carefully.

    BTW, if you’ve read Volker Kutscher’s Gereon Rath mysteries, the character of Marlow in the novels in very much Mabuse with the serial numbers filed off. That’s also why the character barely appears in the TV series Babylon Berlin and much of his role has been given to a different character.

  17. 9)Chrispin Burnham: There’s something fitting about an author in the Lovecraft tradition just . . . disappearing.

    9) Richard Christian Matheson: His creation of Bill and Ted and scripting the three films (with Ed Solomon) deserves mention.

  18. @bill said:

    (and “the two books”???? . . .)

    Winnie-The-Pooh and The House At Pooh Corner.
    When I was a kid, we had a box set of these two along with When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six, both of which (IIRC) have at least one poem referencing the Pooh characters. Those last two books instilled in me a lifelong love of poetry.
    The very first gift I gave my (now) wife was a single-volume tome of those four books, which we still have (and we also have all four books on Kindle).

  19. Mention of Pooh reminds me a charming little book called “Now We Are Six Hundred” with Milne-like poetry about a certain Time Lord.

  20. @Eric R. Franklin
    We had that set, minus the box. (When I had money, as an adult, I bought a set for me. “James James Morrison Morrison Wetherby George DuPree took great care of his mother, though he was only three”)

  21. @P J Evans
    There have been a number of box sets over the years. I suspect that the set we had when I was very young was my dad’s old set (making it something from the fifties). I’ve never seen its match for sale online or in bookstores (it was yellow, and so were all four volumes within).
    The poem that I best remember was “The Knight Whose Armour Didn’t Squeak.”

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