(1) TWO BIDS FOR BRITISH EASTERCON. Many times British Eastercon bids have been put together at the last minute, but the committees interested in running the 2026 and 2027 editions are giving fans plenty of advance notice.

2026. The 2026 Eastercon will be held in Birmingham and named Iridescence if this bid is successful. The committee is led by chair Phil Dyson, joined by Phil Nanson, Caroline Mersey, Virginia Preston, James “JT” Turner, and James Shields.

2027. A bid to hold Eastercon in Glasgow is being advanced at the moment by an unidentified “group of fans — some old hands, some newcomers. Mainly Scottish (but not exclusively).” They also haven’t picked a hotel yet. But they do have a webpage, so, hey! (You used to be able to run a WHOIS search to help unravel these mysteries. Folks are too clever now.)

(2) 2025 GRAMMY NOMINEES. The traditional huge list of Grammy Award nominees was released by the Recording Academy® on November 8. The winners will be revealed in a televised ceremony on February 2, 2025. Click here to see all the nominees. You may spot more works of genre interest – please drop a comment with your additions. Meanwhile, here are the ones I recognized.

Best Song Written for Visual Media

• “Can’t Catch Me Now” [From The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes] — Daniel Nigro & Olivia Rodrigo, songwriters (OliviaRodrigo)

Best Opera Recording

• Moravec: The Shining – Gerard Schwarz, conductor; Tristan Hallett, Kelly Kaduce & Edward Parks; Blanton Alspaugh, producer (Kansas City Symphony; Lyric Opera of Kansas City Chorus)

(There’s a website for this adaptation of the King novel: https://operatheshining.com/)

Best Compilation Soundtrack For Visual Media

• Deadpool & Wolverine — (Various Artists)

Best Score Soundtrack For Visual Media (Includes Film And Television)

• Dune: Part Two — Hans Zimmer, composer

Best Score Soundtrack for Video Games and Other Interactive Media

• Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora — Pinar Toprak, composer
• God of War Ragnarök: Valhalla — Bear McCreary, composer
• Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 — John Paesano, composer
• Star Wars Outlaws — Wilbert Roget, II, composer
• Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord — Winifred Phillips, composer

(3) SLF 2024 GULLIVER GRANT. The Speculative Literature Foundation is accepting applications for the 2024 Gulliver Travel Grant through November 30, 2024. For more information and to apply, visit speculativeliterature.org/grants.

Since 2004, the Gulliver Travel Grant has been awarded annually to assist writers of speculative literature in their non-academic research. These funds are used to cover airfare, lodging, and other travel expenses. Travel may be domestic or international. Grants may be used for travel to take place at any point in the following year. Grant applications are open to all: you do not need to be a member of SLF to apply for or receive a grant.

(4) STEPHENSON REPLAYS THE THIRTIES. In his novel Polostan,“Neal Stephenson Jumps From Speculative Fancy to Strange History” says Literary Hub.

…So keen is Stephenson’s anticipatory knack, he’s been hired at companies like Blue Origin and Magic Leap just to sit around and think—working at the latter, an augmented reality startup, his title was “Chief Futurist.” It’s therefore surprising that, twenty pages into his latest excursion (then fifty, then seventy), the speculative takes a backseat to history.

The novel, Polostan, is a detective story set mainly in the 1930s, in a slew of cities and rural outposts scattered across the US and USSR. Unlike Stephenson’s previous opuses, which resemble multiple books sandwiched into gigantic tomes—Cryptonomicon and Reamde both clock in at over 1,000 pages—this one is slim, about a third of that size, and boasts a correspondingly streamlined plot….

… Polostan, the first novel in a cycle entitled Bomb Light, features a succession of increasingly intimidating nuclear brainiacs, up to and including the physicist Niels Bohr, whose appearance produces a classic Stephenson cramming session: Chadwich, Joliot, Curie, the discovery of the neutron. “The chain of reasoning,” Stephenson writes, “though long, wasn’t that difficult to follow.” (If you say so!)…

… Stephenson’s scientific narrative shines in a meeting of upper-echelon Russian secret police. It’s the winter of 1934, and they’ve called in some young experts to brief them on atomic physics outside of a labor camp in frigid Magnitogorsk, an industrial town 1,000 miles east of Moscow. “We live in this intermediate layer of medium-sized nuclei that are stable enough to form complicated molecules that support life. Bellow us, massive nuclei are decaying in a hellish sea of lava. Above us, light nuclei are combining to make starlight…”…

(5) HELP DECIDE THE DIAGRAM PRIZE. The shortlist for The Bookseller Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year 2024 was released November 8, and is now open for a public vote on The Bookseller website here. Voting will close December 2, with the winner revealed December 6.

In contention: The Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year 2024

Boston’s Oldest Buildings and Where to Find Them
In this updated edition of Boston’s Oldest Buildings and Where to Find Them, the city’s archaeologist takes you on a whirlwind tour of Beantown, including the delights of the Lemuel Clap House. 

Hell-Bent for Leather: Sex and Sexuality in the Weird Western
The mass media discussed in Hell-Bent for Leather: Sex and Sexuality in the Weird Western includes “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre”, “BioShock Infinite” and A A Carr’s erotic vampire/monster slayer western Eye Killers.

How to Dungeon Master Parenting
Shelly Mazzanoble invites mums and dads to “level up” their child-rearing in How to Dungeon Master Parenting, arguing lessons learned from “Dungeons & Dragons” can help them “win at their most challenging role yet”.

Killing the Buddha on the Appalachian Trail
John Turner wrestles with the elements, self-doubt and ageing while he hikes the nearly 2,200-mile path from Georgia to Maine in Killing the Buddha on the Appalachian Trail.

Looking through the Speculum: Examining the Women’s Health Movement
Judith Houck’s Looking through the Speculum: Examining the Women’s Health Movement is an “eye-opening” examination of the struggles and successes of “bringing feminist dreams into clinical spaces”.

The Philosopher Fish: Sturgeon, Caviar, and the Geography of Desire
“A wild upstream adventure”, raved the New York Post about The Philosopher Fish: Sturgeon, Caviar, and the Geography of Desire—a “high-stakes cocktail of business, crime… and the dilemmas of conservation”. 

(6) SNAPSHOT OF THE BUSINESS. Publishers Weekly has released “The 2024 PW Publishing Industry Salary & Jobs Report”. Median pay is up. Company usage of AI has jumped.

2023 Median Compensation

Respondents from across the industry earned more on average in 2023 than in 2022. The median compensation, which includes base salary plus bonuses and commissions, rose 7.3% over 2022, to $75,000. That increase could be due in part to the success unions and other employee groups had in getting major New York publishers to raise entry-level pay beginning in 2022. Indeed, the share of respondents earning less than $50,000 per year fell to 12% in 2023, from 17% in 2022….

AI Rising

This year’s survey found a huge jump in the percentage of employees who said their companies are using AI: 53%, compared to 23% in 2022. But like everyone else, publishing employees are uneasy about the new technology. Only 25% of survey respondents believe AI will have a positive impact on their jobs, while 40% believe it will have a negative impact. Respondents were even more concerned about how AI will affect the industry in general: only 13% said they believe AI will change publishing for the better, while 56% think the technology will make it worse…

(7) PLAINTIFF WHIFFS AGAINST OPENAI IN COPYRIGHT ACTION. [Item by Francis Hamit.] The Federal Bench hates copyright cases because of their complexity. AI is copyright poison. “Will AI Copyright Claims Keep Standing After New Ruling?” asks Copyright Lately.

…After TransUnion [v. Ramirez, in 2021], legal experts warned that this break from precedent could have sweeping effects, particularly for statutes that provide for statutory damages without proof of actual harm—like the Copyright Act. For copyright claims involving AI, TransUnion could also make it significantly harder for copyright owners to bring claims against AI companies for using their creative works in training data—at least without specific examples of infringing output.

That scenario began to unfold last week, as TransUnion played a starring role in the dismissal of Raw Story Media v. OpenAI (read here). Southern District of New York Judge Colleen McMahon ruled that the plaintiffs failed to show any concrete harm caused by OpenAI’s alleged removal of copyright management information from their articles, which they claim were then used to train ChatGPT’s language model. If Judge McMahon’s reasoning is adopted—or even extended—by other courts, AI-related copyright claims could find themselves on shaky ground, facing stricter standing requirements across a broader range of cases.

Raw Story Media v. OpenAI

In the Raw Story Media case, two digital news organizations, Raw Story and AlterNet, claimed that OpenAI violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by using their copyrighted articles—stripped of copyright management information (CMI), such as author names and copyright notices—to train ChatGPT. The plaintiffs argued that this violated section 1202(b) of the DMCA, which prohibits the removal or alteration of CMI when the party knows that doing so will facilitate future infringement.

But Judge Colleen McMahon dismissed the case, finding that the plaintiffs failed to allege a “concrete injury-in-fact”—a requirement for Article III standing, which is a threshold question in every federal case…

… The Raw Story Media ruling, with its reliance on TransUnion, raises significant questions about the future of copyright law in the context of AI. If other courts follow Judge McMahon’s lead, copyright owners may find it increasingly difficult to bring cases involving AI training data, particularly if they can’t show concrete harm from the outset.

For now, copyright holders may need to rethink their approach to AI-related claims. Gathering clear evidence of actual harm—such as instances where AI models produce outputs that closely mirror expressive elements from the original copyrighted material—may be essential. In any event, plaintiffs will need to show a real-world impact from the AI’s use of their work or risk seeing their claims fall short.

(8) SFF ON LEARNEDLEAGUE: SCIENCE OF SCIENCE FICTION AND ST:TNG. [Item by David Goldfarb.] The final week of the current “off-season” in LearnedLeague saw two SFF-related One-Day Special quizzes.

Science of Science Fiction 2 had 979 players; I got 10 right and came in 32nd. (Never having read any Alastair Reynolds hurt me.)

Star Trek: The Next Generation had 1412 players; I got 10 right and came in 632nd(!). (Evidently LL players [or LLamas, as we sometimes call ourselves] really remember this show.)

(9) CLARION WEST HOSTS MARATHON NOVEL WRITING WORKSHOP. From now through December 15, applications are open for the Nine-Month Novel Writing Workshop with instructor Samit Basu. 

Course Dates: March 10, 2025, to November 17, 2025

Whether you’ve outlined extensively or are navigating by instinct, Clarion West’s nine-month virtual workshop is designed to guide you from conception to completion of your novel.

Led by author and Six-Week Workshop instructor Samit Basu, with the support of the Clarion West team, this program is built around finding your unique process. 

(10) TEDDY HARVIA CARTOON.

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born November 11, 1922 — Kurt Vonnegut. (Died 2007.)

By Paul Weimer: My first encounter with Kurt Vonnegut was not actually through his work, but through a movie. Not the movie of Slaughterhouse Five, his best known (an adaptation of perhaps his best novel), although that would come later. No, it came, in all places, in the Rodney Dangerfield movie Back To School. In that movie, Dangerfield, a successful businessman who doesn’t have a college degree, goes to college in order to inspire his son, who is not doing well at the university. But Dangerfield’s character figures he can buy his way to a grade.  So, when he needs to do a paper on the work of Kurt Vonnegut…he hires Kurt Vonnegut, who shows up in a cameo in the movie.  Dangerfield’s tactic backfires, when his professor tells him “whoever wrote this doesn’t know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut”

Friends, I didn’t know who Kurt Vonnegut was at the time. My high school had not taught him, and I had missed him in my still growing education into SF. But, if you know me by now, I had to know who he was. And so I read Slaughterhouse Five, and Breakfast of Champions, and a variety of other things by him. His biting and unrelenting humor has stayed with me ever since, and “So it goes” is part of my vocabulary.

Speaking of which, funny thing, when I got around to reading Pournelle and Niven’s Inferno, I was shocked and surprised to find that Vonnegut had a particularly prominent place in hell. I think that the reason they put him there as they did (Vonnegut was still alive when they wrote Inferno) is because Vonnegut (like, say, Margaret Atwood or Joyce Carol Oates) vociferously and vocally denied he wrote science fiction, despite all evidence to the contrary. 

I am certain that Vonnegut wrote science fiction, but to put him in hell for not saying so…badly done, indeed.  But…so it goes. 

(12) COMICS SECTION.

• Bizarro modernizes Camelot.
• Carpe Diem needs a bigger room.
• Zach Hill creates a superhero for today.

(13) THUNDERBOLTS. Marvel Studios’ Thunderbolts*, a D23 Brazil Special Look. In Theaters May 2, 2025.

And what’s the deal with that asterisk in the title? AV Club is grateful that “New Thunderbolts* trailer finally addresses that damn asterisk”.

…But can we just say how relieved we are that the new look at Marvel’s Thunderbolts*—dropped this afternoon at D23 Brazil—finally, kinda, addresses that stupid asterisk in the title? Marvel added the mark to the movie’s name a few months back, and it’s been irritating the hell out of us; from the trailer, it’s apparently just intended as a joke, denoting the black ops super-team’s overall rejection of the goofy name slapped on them by enthusiastic member Red Guardian. So that’s a relief….

(14) MI:8. “’Mission: Impossible — Final Reckoning’ trailer reveals bigger stunts” – Entertainment Weekly sets the frame.

Ethan Hunt is back in action, and his latest mission officially has a name: Mission Impossible — The Final Reckoning.

The first trailer for the eighth film in the massively successful spy franchise dropped Monday. With it came the new title, new characters, and a look at more insane stunts by star Tom Cruise in Ethan’s latest mission.

As Ethan hangs from planes and explores submarines, he’s told that “the fate of every living soul is your responsibility,” and that there are consequences for the fact that he refuses to sacrifice those he loves. But as Ethan says, “I need you to trust me … one last time.”

(15) WICKED INDEED. “’Wicked’ Dolls: Mattel Apologizes for Linking to Porn Site on Packaging” says The Hollywood Reporter. The web address listed on the boxed dolls is wicked.com, instead of wickedmovie.com. 

Wicked movie merchandising turned into a nightmare for Mattel over the weekend as news broke that a web address listed on the packaging for character dolls took consumers to an adult pornographic site.

The toy company apologized later Sunday…. “We deeply regret this unfortunate error and are taking immediate action to remedy this. Parents are advised that the misprinted, incorrect website is not appropriate for children. Consumers who already have the product are advised to discard the product packaging or obscure the link and may contact Mattel Customer Service for further information.”

By Sunday afternoon, the entire Mattel-manufactured doll collection had been pulled at Target, and the products with the incorrect website address were being taken off the shelves at other retailers.

But others hope this mistake has only added value in the eyes of discriminating collectors:

…The character dolls being sold with the erroneous address include Grande’s Glinda and Erivo’s Elphaba. The products with misprinted websites have already popped up on eBay for $100 to $800. (The dolls retail for $24.99 to $39.99.)…

(16) THINKING INSIDE THE BOX. [Item by Steven French.] If readers are ever in Western Australia: “TARDIS Bus Shelter – Narrogin, Australia” at Atlas Obscura.

ON A RURAL ROAD IN Western Australia, tucked back next to a driveway, there is a traditional London police call box. If you watched the television series Doctor Who, you might suspect that it’s bigger on the inside. This a full-size replica of the TARDIS, the time and space travel machine hidden inside a call box. This one is electrified, with lights and a working control panel. Be careful of the button labeled, “Don’t press this.”

The replica TARDIS is the work of Narrogin local Rob Shepherd, who originally built it as a bus shelter for his daughter. But the distinctive blue call box took on a life of its own and has become something of a pilgrimage site for fans of the show.

Shepherd used plans for a 1947 London police box to design the bus shelter, which went up in 2018. In the years that it has been up on the roadside, the TARDIS has drawn visitors not just from Australia, but all over the world. Shepherd and his family check the guest book inside every time they catch the bus to see where their ever-growing list of visitors have come from…

[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, David Langford, Francis Hamit, David Goldfarb, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, and Kathy Sullivan for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (Not Werdna) who may know what the title means.]