(1) THE DAY OF HER RETURN. “Susanna Clarke Wrote a Hit Novel Set in a Magical Realm. Then She Disappeared” – an unlocked New York Times article.

The book, “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell,” instantly launched Clarke as one of the greatest fantasy writers of her generation. Critics placed her in the pantheon alongside C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien; some compared her sly wit and keen social observations to those of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen. Readers devoured the novel, which went on to sell more than four million copies.

“I had never read anything like it in my life,” said Alexandra Pringle, the former editor in chief of Bloomsbury, which commissioned a first print run of 250,000 copies. “The way that she created that world, a world apart from our world but absolutely rooted in it, was so utterly convincing and drawn with such precision and delicacy.”

The novel reshaped the fantasy landscape and blurred the boundaries with literary fiction, making the Booker Prize long list and winning a Hugo Award, a major science fiction and fantasy prize. Clarke went on tour across the United States and Europe, and Bloomsbury later gave her a hefty contract for a second novel….

… Not long after the novel’s release, Clarke and her husband were having dinner with friends near their home in Derbyshire, England. In the middle of the meal, she felt nauseated and wobbly, got up from the table, and collapsed.

In the years that followed, she struggled to write. Her symptoms — migraines, exhaustion, sensitivity to light and fogginess — made working for sustained periods impossible. She wrote scattered fragments that never cohered; sometimes she couldn’t finish a single sentence. At a low point, she was bed-bound and mired in depression.

Clarke stopped thinking of herself as a writer….

… Now, two decades after her groundbreaking debut, Clarke is returning to the magical world of Strange and Norell….

… Clarke, who is deeply private and found the experience of sudden fame “very, very peculiar,” planned to write a sequel once things quieted down. But not long after her book tour, she collapsed, and never quite recovered. Over the next decade, she lost faith in her ability to write at all.

“You’ve got the years when you haven’t written kind of weighing on you,” she said.

Over time, Clarke slowly found her way back to writing. She learned to manage her symptoms, and discovered she could stay on track by working in 25-minute bursts. Her brain fog receded….

(2) FREE HARRYHAUSEN EXHIBIT IN UK. The Guardian shares “Cyclops, Martians and Myths: the art of Ray Harryhausen – in pictures” from a free exhibition at Waterside’s Lauriston Gallery in Sale, Greater Manchester (UK) which opened today. It examines the workings of Ray Harryhausen, the great animators, and is inspired by filmmaker John Walsh’s book Harryhausen: The Lost Movies. Plenty of artwork at the Guardian link.

(3) MOORE HASN’T CHANGED HIS MIND. [Item by Steven French.] Alan Moore is a tad scathing about current fandom in this Guardian essay: “’Fandom has toxified the world’: Watchmen author Alan Moore on superheroes, Comicsgate and Trump”.

About a decade ago, I ventured my opinion that the adult multitudes queueing for superhero movies were potentially an indicator of emotional arrest, which could have worrying political and social implications. Since at that time Brexit, Donald Trump and fascist populism hadn’t happened yet, my evidently crazy diatribe was largely met with outrage from the fan community, some of whom angrily demanded I be extradited to the US and made to stand trial for my crimes against superhumanity – which I felt didn’t necessarily disprove my allegations.

Ten years on, let me make my position clear: I believe that fandom is a wonderful and vital organ of contemporary culture, without which that culture ultimately stagnates, atrophies and dies. At the same time, I’m sure that fandom is sometimes a grotesque blight that poisons the society surrounding it with its mean-spirited obsessions and ridiculous, unearned sense of entitlement….

…There are, of course, entirely benign fandoms, networks of cooperative individuals who quite like the same thing, can chat with others sharing the same pastime and, importantly, provide support for one another in difficult times. These healthy subcultures, however, are less likely to impact on society in the same way that the more strident and presumptuous fandoms have managed. Unnervingly rapidly, our culture has become a fan-based landscape that the rest of us are merely living in. Our entertainments may be cancelled prematurely through an adverse fan reaction, and we may endure largely misogynist crusades such as Gamergate or Comicsgate from those who think “gate” means “conspiracy”, and that Nixon’s disgrace was predicated on a plot involving water, but this is hardly the full extent to which fan attitudes have toxified the world surrounding us, most obviously in our politics….

(4) YES, ACTUALLY READ THEM. The McConnell Center is launching the “Why You Should Read Series” of YouTube lectures and podcasts touting well-known books.

Over the next year, the McConnell Center invites you to join us on the project to discover our next great reads. We are asking authors and experts to tell us why WE should read the books that helped shape them or those that have significantly impacted human history. 

We all know we need to read more, and millions of books are on shelves with new ones printed daily. How do we sort through all the possibilities to find the book that is right for us now?

The schedule includes lectures about these works of genre interest:

Oct. 29 – “Why You Should Read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,”  Dr. Amy Sturgis

Nov. 29- “Why You Should Read Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower,” Dr. David Anderson 

Dec. 03- “Why You Should Read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451,” Dr. Gary Gregg

Dec. 05- “Why You Should Read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World,” Dr. Gary Gregg

Dec. 12- “Why You Should Read Mary Shelley’s The Last Man,” Dr. Amy Sturgis

(5) DRAGONS IN THE FAMILY. Hear Witness History’s episode “My dad created Dungeons & Dragons” at BBC Sounds.

In 1970, father of five Gary Gygax was fired from his job as an insurance underwriter in Chicago, in the United States of America. It may sound like a mundane event to read about but, believe it or not, this moment actually changed the gaming industry forever. 

Gary is the creator of table-top roleplay game, Dungeons & Dragons. In the 50 years since its release, D&D has generated billions of dollars in sales and now boasts more than 50 million players worldwide. 

However, Gary’s story is not one of riches and success. Luke Gygax witnessed the incredible highs and lows of his father’s life first hand. He shares his memories of that time with Matt Pintus.

(6) VANDERMEER Q&A. “Jeff VanderMeer on How Scientific Uncertainty Inspires His Weird Fiction” – he tells the story in Scientific American.

This month VanderMeer continues this weird saga with the publication of the fourth Southern Reach novel: Absolution. …“I’m interested not only in science but in the narrative of science, how science corrects itself over time,” he says in a video call from his home in Tallahassee, Fla. Like weird fiction, he adds, “science can’t ever explain everything because we are continually learning new things.”…

You write in a tradition called weird fiction. Uncertainty about how the universe works is a hallmark of the genre. Do you see any similarities between weird fiction and science?

At its best, weird fiction actually does something entirely different than what science does; it provides a venue outside of philosophy, science and religion to explore the unknown while incorporating elements of all three. At the same time, it features a lot of what you might call “scientific expeditions” into the unknown, where characters try, through rational methods, to know the unknowable. If they fail, it’s not necessarily a failure of science but a failure of the tools they were using or of the composition of the expedition. I find that quite interesting because failure exists in science, too, which sometimes appears in the form of bias. One of the more obvious examples is the pervasive idea that a fertilized human egg is a passive thing, that it’s the man that provides the active component of conception, when the relationship is much more complex than that. But because a lot of male scientists were the first to research this phenomenon, the more passive narrative persists.

Another outlandish example of bias can be found in a book called Penguins from the 1960s, which starts out as a beautiful, general book about penguins. But by chapter three, it is incredibly clear that the researcher who wrote the book hates this other [penguin] researcher. He’s writing about evolution but starts to make the book more about proving this other scientist wrong. In a way, this book of science also becomes a work of fiction because it’s shot through with the idiosyncrasies of the person writing it.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born October 26, 1971 — Jim Butcher, 53.

By Paul Weimer: I could spend this entire memorial talking about the Dresden Files, very easily one of the tentpoles of modern urban fantasy, but even though I own a version of the RPG, it is not one of my heart series. Urban fantasy is only a secondary or even tertiary interest of mine in the urban fantasy landscape, and while he made his reputation with it, I think Jim Butcher’s work turns more interesting when he moves away from Harry Dresden.

Such as the Codex Alera. I got to hear the first two books in the Codex Alera in early audiobook form–when you had to change CD after CD to listen to the book. Given that I was driving thousands of miles to the Canadian National Parks with my friends, we had a lot of time for audiobooks (and in fact, this was the trip that convinced me that listening to audiobooks was the best way to eat up miles on the long drives I would soon start taking on my own). 

And so, on this trip, I was introduced to Tavi (short for Octavian) and his secondary world fantasy world. I picked up immediately the world seemed Roman-flavored and wondered right from the beginning if this was a parallel world…or it was in fact a disguised portal fantasy. (In fact, Butcher combined the ideas of a lost Roman Legion and Pokemon to do the worldbuilding). Tavi’s coming of age, his growing relationship with Kitai (whom he accidentally gets bonded to) and the fact he starts from an inability to do magic (he gets better) makes him very different, and very appealing, as a protagonist.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

• Non Sequitur is present at the beginning of a now familiar problem.
• The Argyle Sweater criticizes bad comics language.
• Diamond Lil watches a series of monster films – or is it a medical documentary?
• Rhymes with Orange finds a problem you can solve without a spoonful of sugar.
• Wumo breaks some bad news to Netflix subscribers.
• Tom Gauld has already started celebrating:

An early Halloween cartoon for @GuardianBooks pic.twitter.com/q70gqbRR7I

— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) October 26, 2024

(9) THE GODS THEMSELVES. [Item by Steven French.] Kate Gardner from Physics World pulls from the archives a book review that Isaac Asimov wrote for the magazine and recalls her own engagement with his fiction: “Gems from the Physics World archive: Isaac Asimov”.

I was introduced to Asimov through what remains the most “hard physics”-heavy sci-fi I have ever tackled: The Gods Themselves (1972). In this short novel, humans make contact with a parallel universe and manage to transfer energy from a parallel world to Earth. When a human linguist attempts to communicate with the “para-men”, he discovers this transfer may be dangerous. The narrative then switches to the parallel world, which is populated by the most “alien” aliens I can remember encountering in fiction.

Underlying this whole premise, though, is the fact that in the parallel world, the strong nuclear force, which binds protons and neutrons together, is even stronger than it is in our own. And Asimov was a good enough scientist that he worked into his novel everything that would be different – subtly or significantly – were this the case. It’s a physics thought experiment; a highly entertaining one that also encompasses ethics, astrobiology, cryptanalysis and engineering.

(10) THE FIRST SPACE OPERA BY A BLACK SCIENCE FICTION AUTHOR TO BE REPUBLISHED. The Experimenter Publishing Company, home of Amazing Stories, has announced plans for the November release of The Martian Trilogy: John P. Moore, Amazing Stories, Black Science Fiction and the Illustrated Feature Section.

 In 1930, Black science fiction author John P. Moore wrote and submitted three interconnected stories and he sold them to The Illustrated Feature Section, a syndicated insert published in many Negro newspapers throughout the U.S.

His stories were featured under the insert’s “Amazing Stories” section heading.

 Now, for the first time in 94 years, John P. Moore’s story is available once again, along with compelling commentary from Lisa Yaszek, Regents’ Professor of Science Fiction Studies at Georgia Tech and editor of the ground-breaking anthology The Future is Female; Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, famed Nigerian author and editor (02 Arena, The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction, Nebula, WFA); Brooks E. Hefner, Professor of English at James Madison University; author of Black Pulp: Genre Fiction in the Era of Jim Crow; Steve Davidson, publisher of Amazing Stories, along with graduate and undergraduate students at Georgia Tech contributing supporting research, biographical and historical materials.

John Jennings, UC Riverside Professor of Media & Cultural Studies, Hugo Award-Winning artist (Octavia E. Butler’s The Parable of the Sower: A Graphic Novel Presentation) has crafted a fantastic cover honoring Aaron Douglas, a pioneering figure in the Harlem Renaissance and reflecting the spirit of Black imagination expanding into the cosmos.

With the release of these rediscovered stories, we learn that not only was there a Black Amazing Stories published during the formative years of the genre, but that Black Science Fiction is not a newcomer to the field. Rather, it enjoys as rich and deep a history as the science fiction we are more familiar with, and one that found its beginnings in its own Amazing Stories!

The Martian Trilogy gathers together three interconnected space opera tales featuring the first trip to Mars, the civilizations discovered there, interwoven with a tale of love and loss.

 Additional features include an examination of the Illustrated Feature Section, biographies of the editors and publishers – including William Bernard Ziff Jr., who would come to be the publisher of the more familiar Amazing Stories a few short years following the release of The Martian Trilogy – a critique of the stories, a reflection on the impact of this rediscovery on the history of the genre, historical timeline, and bibliographic materials.

The Martian Trilogy: John P. Moore, Amazing Stories, Black Science Fiction and the Illustrated Feature Section will be released November 9^th, 2024, available through the Amazing Stories website, and can be ordered from most independent bookstores and will be available through B&N, Amazon, and other online book outlets. It will be published in print, electronic, and audiobook editions.

(11) A VAMPIRE IS RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT: THANK GOD! Fantastic Books  is releasing a new edition of Bloodsuckers right now, timed to coincide with “the most consequential presidential election in American history.” But aren’t they all?

It’s been a horrific election season. Supporters on both sides are quite certain the other candidate can’t be human. Maybe we’d be better off voting for an actual monster!

Should being outed as a real vampire disqualify one from running for the presidency of the United States? Michael A. Ventrella’s hilarious Bloodsuckers answers that question.

Disgraced journalist Steven Edwards considers the “Batties”—the loonies who believe that vampires are real and Norman Mark is one—just another crazy tin-foil-hat extremist group. Then someone shoots at Mark, changes into a bat, and flies away before Steve’s eyes, leaving him as the prime suspect. With the help of the Batties, Steve goes underground. The only way he can establish his innocence is by proving vampires exist—not an easy task while on the run from both the FBI and the bloodsuckers.

(12) RAQUEL PLEASING BIG IMPACT! [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.]

There have been a number of large meteor strikes on the Earth with arguably the most famous being the one that wiped out the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago… (I have never really forgiven the dinosaurs for what they did to Raquel Welch…) That asteroid was estimated to be about six miles across. However, there have been much larger impactors much earlier in the Earth’s history. Here, a problem for scientists has been that the longer back in time one goes, the less surviving strata there is (plate tectonics subducts and re-mixes old surface crust).

Yet rocks of the Archaean Eon (4 – 2.5 billion years ago) record at least 16 major impact events, involving asteroids larger than the dinosaur one (and I have told you about Raquel Welch – I really have never forgiven them).

Researchers have now analysed the Fig Tree Group strata in South Africa which features impact geology from a 20 – 35 mile wide asteroid that hit 3.26 billion years ago: it was some ~50 to 200 times larger (a real Raquel pleaser) than the dinosaur impactor. They looked at carbon isotopes. Most carbon is in the form of C-12 isotope but some is in the form of C-13 (we can forget C-14 which is radioactive and used in carbon dating, but as that has a half-life of under 6,000 years there is none in geology billions of years old). The thing is that photosynthesis preferably selects for C-12 so carbon from life has even less C-13 even if early life used different photosynthesis from the sort plants use today. Using such carbon isotopic analysis, researchers have shown that the impact 3.26 billion years ago had a detrimental affect on Earth’s primordial life (well, that was always going to be a tad obvious) but surprisingly life rebounded and did even better than before! This, the researchers suggest, is because the asteroid churned up iron from deep in the Earth and this iron early photosynthesisers could use and the benefits took place just a few thousand years after the impact (see far left of diagram below for estimated time frames)

The primary research is Drabon, N., et al (2024) Effect of a giant meteorite impact on Paleoarchaean surface environments and life. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 121 (44), e2408721121 and is open access.

This story appears in the daily File770 ahead of coverage in seasonal SF² Concatenation just in case you could not wait. (Gosh, we don’t half look after you….)

Why is this research important SFnally? Well, the larger the biosphere – the more living biomass there is – the greater the opportunities for speciation, hence biological evolution. So it could be that large asteroid impacts early in Earth’s history could have helped evolution in its long march from simple Prokaryotes, through Eukaryotes, to multicellular species like you. If other Earth-like planets have a similar history with large, early asteroid strikes, as seems likely, then this could reflect part of the commonality of the rise of life on Earth-like planets elsewhere in the Galaxy.

(13) PRICE OF STADIUM FOOD. Here’s Vincent Price handing out Dodger Dogs at Dodger Stadium in 1965.

One reason there have always been questions about what Dodger Dogs are made from….!

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Steve Davidson, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Ian Randal Strock, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jim Janney.]