(0) I opened a ticket with Jetpack customer service yesterday after the eighth consecutive post without a subscriber notification. They’re looking into it.
(1) UP, UP AND AWAY. The ‘full length’ Superman Official Teaser Trailer dropped today.
(2) A SUPERBOY AND HIS DOG. Deadline follows up the trailer with: “’Superman’: James Gunn On Superhero’s ‘Complicated’ Relationship With Krypto; ‘He’s Not Nearly The Best Dog’”.
In a moving moment in the trailer, a bloodied Superman who has fallen to a snowy Earth suddenly whistles and out of the blue we see a storm in the distance as Krypto the dog comes to some form of a rescue.
Said Gunn at a presser for the trailer about including the canine in this live-action version of Superman: “I think we’re seeing that from the beginning we’re seeing a little bit of a different side of Superman than what we’ve seen.”
“This movie at the end of the day is not about power. This movie is about a loose term of the word a human being and who he is as a person and virtually struggling in his day-to-day life, and we see a different aspect of him in the beginning.” [says James Gunn]
“His relationship with Krypto is complicated. He’s not nearly the best dog. There’s a lot more to Krypto than you see in this trailer.”…
(3) YOUR FACE BELONGS TO US. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Your Face Belongs to Us by Kashmir Hill is BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week.
What if you could be identified by anyone with just a blurry photo..? Now, we (SF fans) are surely all aware of the Orwellian nightmare of social control and identity. In Your Face Belongs to Us Kashmir Hill looks at the ClearView AI… and it’s not really that good…
Today ClearView AI declares that it has a database of 50 billion facial images sourced “from public-only web sources, including news media, mugshot websites, public social media, and many other open sources.” Your face may well belong to them.
Your Face Belongs To Us was shortlisted for the Royal Society Science book prize 2024 and described by the Financial Times as “A parable for our times”. According to The Economist, “A walk down the street will not quite feel the same again.”
You can download the following episodes: Episode 1, Episode 2, Episode 3, Episode 4, and Episode 5.
(4) JEOPARDY! [Item by David Goldfarb.] I started taking notes when the Jeopardy round had a clue about a File 770 favorite:
That’s Weird, $600: Weird Tales magazine published his story “The Black Ferris”, which formed the basis for “Something Wicked This Way Comes”
Challenger Eric Weldon-Schilling was up on his Bradbury.
That’s Weird, $1000: It’s the formal & familial, though maybe not terribly polite way to address the trio of witches in “Macbeth”
After a noticeable pause, challenger Sarah Rosenthal rang in and tried, “What are ‘The Weird Sisters’?” and this was right.
The Jeopardy! round had a category “Poli Sci”. Double Jeopardy had “Poli Sci-Fi”.
There was a little bit of SFF content elsewhere, too.
Victorian Verse, $400: The Victorians loved these supernatural little creatures, often spelled with an “E” in place of an “I”, as in Yeats’ “The Stolen Child”
Eric got it: “What are faeries?”
Poli Sci-Fi, $400: Located somewhere in the Rockies, the capitol of this country dominates its 12 surrounding districts.
Champion Ashley Chan had read her “Hunger Games” and responded, “What is Panem?”
$800: George Lucas said of this “Return of the Jedi” guy, “Richard M. Nixon was his name. He subverted the Senate & finally took over”
Eric knew it: “Who is Emperor Palpatine?”
$1200: Secretary of Education Laura Roslin suddenly ascends to the presidency of the 12 colonies on this series
Eric, perhaps a fan, got this too: “What is ‘Battlestar Galactica’?”
$1600: This “Star Trek” organization, the UFP for short, has a president, a federal council & a supreme court
Eric again: “What is the United Federation of Planets?” And he then went to the last question in the category.
$2000: A prominent member of the Ape National Assembly, this doctor is both Minister of Science & Chief Defender of the Faith
Ashley came in here with “Who is Caesar?” but this cost her $2000.
Sarah and Eric didn’t try it — it was Dr. Zaius.
(5) JUDGE SIGNALS A LOSING CASE. “Florida Court Urges School District To Settle In Book Banning Case” reports Publishers Lunch.
A federal judge in Florida has urged the Escambia County School Board to settle a book-banning case brought by PEN, PRH, and others, mindful that it has cost local taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars. As of last September, the school board had already spent more than $440,000 on attorneys’ fees. District Judge T. Kent Wetherell II wrote in the footnote of a court order that a settlement, “should be particularly important to (the school board) because it is spending taxpayer money to defend this suit and it could end up having to pay all or part of Plaintiffs’ attorney’s fees on top of its own attorneys’ fees if Plaintiffs prevail in this case.”
Escambia County banned 1,600 titles from school libraries, including dictionaries and encyclopedias. In December, the parties attempted mediation but came to an impasse after eight hours. Additionally, the Tallahassee Democrat reports that Escambia County school officials have spent almost $200,000 in another lawsuit over the removal of picture book And Tango Makes Three. (Nassau County was also sued over the removal of this book and it was restored to shelves in September.)
Last January, Wetherell wrote, “The Court simply fails to see how any reasonable person would view the contents of the school library (or any library for that matter) as the government’s endorsement of the views expressed in the books on the library’s shelves.”
(6) FORTY WHACKS. Camestros Felapton continues to map out his plan for cashing in on a literary trend in “Dahrk Snarl II: The Romantasy of the Blood-Axe”.
[Simon Goquickly] Dear Mr Snarl, or may I call you Dahrk? So lovely to have you back.
[Snarl] You said you had a job for me.
[Simon Goquickly] I do, I do!
[Snarl] It had better not be one of them barbarianistas that make hot mud drinks. If I wanted to drink hot mud I’d fight the geyser golems of Gahst.
[Simon Goquickly] My, my, you fought the geyser golems of Gahst?
[Snarl] It was a misunderstanding see? I thought they said it was a “geezer” and I thought how hard could it be to fight some regular geezer? Turned out it was a ‘omonid.
[Simon Goquickly] A homonym?
[Snarl] That as well….
(7) BARRY MALZBERG (1939-2024). Author and editor Barry Malzberg died December 19. Following a series of medical problems, of which the last were pneumonia and a bacterial infection, a few days ago he was moved into hospice care. His daughter, Erika, informed friends today: “ My dad passed away this evening, around 4:30pm. My sister had been with him for a few hours and I was just getting back after having visited with my mother. He took his last breath almost the moment I arrived. It was very, very peaceful and we are so grateful.”
His first science fiction story, “We’re Coming Through the Window”, was published in the August 1967 issue of Galaxy.
Many of his science short stories and novels in the late 1960s were published under the pseudonym “K. M. O’Donnell”.
His novel Beyond Apollo won the inaugural John W. Campbell Memorial Award (1973).
His nonfiction works won two Locus Awards: The Engines of the Night (1983), and Breakfast in the Ruins: Science Fiction in the Last Millennium (2008).
Malzberg collaborated with Mike Resnick on more than 50 advice columns for the SFWA Bulletin. They have been collected as The Business of Science Fiction.
(8) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
A Clockwork Orange
By Paul Weimer:
…or, Paul gets snakebit by looking at acclaimed films.
I’ve mentioned in earlier columns how I started to in the early to mid 90’s to read SFF books that had been nominated and won awards. I did the same thing for a while with films as well. Although I was not and would not be interested in photography as something for me to do for another decade, in retrospect, my interest in image started earlier, even more subconsciously, than I realized.
Anyway, I had heard of the brilliance of A Clockwork Orange, and I had been watching a number of 70’s films, and so a trip to the video store (remember those?) meant that it was time for me to engage with Kubrick’s film. I had already seen Dr. Strangelove (I had won a copy in an early online contest) and of course, 2001. So I thought I knew what I was in for when I watched A Clockwork Orange.
Reader, I was not and did not.
Much of the film I was enthralled by. I had not yet read the Burgess book, but the worldbuilding, the dark future of Britain was enthralling. The movie is well acted, even if it is hard to take (poor, poor Alex’s reconditioning). The score, even if I was and am not a music fan, was memorable (and I bought the soundtrack on CD). It’s a dark future but an enthralling one.
But that scene. You know the scene. The imagery. Alex’s break-in, his deadly sexual assault with that gigantic sculpture of a helpless woman. THAT I had not signed up for. That was hard to take. That I had not been warned about. I’ve only watched the movie a few times since, as brilliant as it is…and I skip that scene. Every single time after the second time, where I stopped and froze the cascade of images that we see in the height of the assault. But I don’t need to see this scene anymore. So it goes.
But I still do use the phrase a “bit of the old ultraviolence” now and again. The movie is unforgettable, and revolutionary.
(9) COMICS SECTION.
- Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal extrapolates (or interpolates) whole new vistas for the English language.
- Free Range notes that discovery means taking the risk of standing in the right spot.
- Ink Pen plays ‘guess the hair piece’.
- Non Sequitur reveals an eleventh commandment.
- Spectickles features reindeer physics.
- Strange Brew looks at the chart.
(10) LONDON CRITICS’ CIRCLE. [Item by Steven French.] Feminist body-horror movie The Substance is nominated in the London Critics’ Circle awards. “Anora and The Brutalist lead London film critics’ award nominations” – the Guardian has details. It appears this is the only film of genre interest in contention, except for the Technical Achievement category:
Film of the year
- The Substance
Director of the year
- Coralie Fargeat – The Substance
Screenwriter of the year
- Coralie Fargeat – The Substance
Actress of the year
- Demi Moore – The Substance
Supporting actress of the year
- Margaret Qualley – The Substance
Technical achievement award
- The Substance – makeup, Stéphanie Guillon & Pierre-Olivier Persin
- Beetlejuice Beetlejuice – visual effects, Angus Bickerton
Also worth mentioning is the animated feature category.
Animated feature of the year
- Flow
- Inside Out 2
- Memoir of a Snail
- Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
- The Wild Robot
(11) LIKE SANDS THROUGH AN HOURGLASS. Didn’t you predict this? “’Dune: Prophecy’ Getting Season 2” reports Deadline.
HBO‘s Dune: Prophecy will be returning for a second season. The news was announced today during a virtual press conference with showrunner EP Alison Schapker, and stars Emily Watson and Olivia Williams.
The prequel series to Legendary’s Denis Villeneuve-directed Dune movies will air its Season 1 finale on Sunday….
(12) WHAT IF AI WAKES UP? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] In today’s Christmas Nature: “What should we do if AI becomes conscious? These scientists say it’s time for a plan”.
Look, I keep on telling folk that the machines are taking over, but no-one ever listens! Indeed, some say we should be concerned for any putative, war-mongering AIs welfare….
We all know what happened with the Forbin Project and younger fans will be well aware of issues with Skynet. Well now someone is calling us to have AI care policies….
Researchers call on technology companies to test their systems for consciousness and create AI welfare policies.
A group of philosophers and computer scientists are arguing that AI welfare should be taken seriously. In a report posted last month on the preprint server at arXiv, ahead of peer review, they call for AI companies not only to assess their systems for evidence of consciousness and the capacity to make autonomous decisions, but also to put in place policies for how to treat the systems if these scenarios become reality.
(13) MOON’S BIRTHDAY QUESTIONED. “You don’t look a day over 4.35 billion! Here’s the moon’s anti-aging secret” – Laist shares a theory.
The Moon has long been the Earth’s close companion, but researchers have struggled to understand exactly when the moon formed, because tiny crystals in the moon rocks brought home by astronauts suggested two different ages.
Now, a study in the journal Nature argues for the earlier age, saying that the ancient Moon also went through a period when it got hot and partially remelted, producing new rocks about 4.35 billion years ago.
The rock-melting heat came from early gravitational interactions with the Earth, which stretched and squeezed the Moon, warming it up.
This process is called “tidal heating.” It is how Jupiter currently heats up its moon Io, the most volcanically active spot in the solar system….
… Nimmo says that lab workers have analyzed moon rocks brought back by the Apollo astronauts and found that almost all of the samples were 4.35 billion years old, suggesting they formed around 200 million years after the solar system started.
The trouble is, he says, simulations of the solar system’s evolution suggest the Moon had to have emerged earlier than that-–because at 200 million years, pretty much all of the material winging around had already been swept up into planets….
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, David Goldfarb, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
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I guess they must have seen something…
So sad to hear of Malzberg passing. I just finished reading The Falling Astronauts this morning. He was brilliant.
7) His Gather in the Hall of the Planets, published under the O’Donnell name, is set in an NYC worldcon, and offers a less than flattering portrait of SF writers and SF fandom in general; and O’Donnell’s Dwellers of the Deep, with propellor-beanie wearing BEM on the cover, does the same for prozine collectors and dealers, and again for fandom.
(0) Better than Fearfully Fahrenheit.
(1) sigh Why do they keep giving Superman a created suit, not the one Martha made for him? And…no, no, not Krypto. Crisis on Infinite Earths, thirty years ago, got rid of superdog, cat, rabbit, roach…
(5) I’d have attended a school board hearing to start, and argue against banning books. By now, I’d have gone back and told them I REFUSED to pay any school taxes other than for running the schools, and if they needed more for their pseudo-religious-based crap (that’s unConstitutional) they could tax only GOP-registered voters.
(7) Damn. I wasn’t big on his writing, but,,, damn.
Memory lane: I don’t get why people go to modern blood-spattered horror movies to enjoy them, but when the violence looks real, they’re upset. Not a nice scene. But then, in my 11,000 Years, I have a truly violent scene… but it was required. It’s been a while since I saw Clockwork Orange on video, but it’s another “required”.
Comics, Sat Morning… reminds me of the thing that’s been (mis-, I believe) attributed to Mark Twain, “On the rationalization of the spelling of English” (or something like that.
(12) And how, exactly, do you decide if it’s self-aware/conscious? Time to reread Stand on Zanzibar.
(6) In Iceland, the Golden Circle tour takes you first to… Geyser. That’s the one that every other one in the world is named after. And… yep, it’s pronounced geezer. (Is that why I blow off steam every so often? I ask, you decide.)
Very sad to hear of Barry Malzberg’s passing. His distinctive style of fiction sometimes led to parodies, but his essays and commentary on writing and writers and the publishing world were something I always appreciated. (There’s a writing project that, if I ever pull it together, will have an epigraph from Malzberg’s ENGINES OF THE NIGHT.)
(8) Paul, really, you should have listened to my father.
Granted, you had no opportunity to do so, but that’s a poor excuse, for a science fiction fan.
When the movie came out, my parents went to see it. When they came back, my dad rather strongly expressed his regret for that decision, and explained why. I have, honestly, never been tempted to see this particular classic.
In other news, it’s dark. And a few hours ago, the darkness was making it seem much later than it was. This is not my favorite time of year. Give me fluffy stories with happy endings, because I need them.
You’ll need to send them forward to the year 6044 C.E., because the time machine is back in action.
(1) That’s not Superman.
4) I guess she didn’t see the musical.
(8) Lis, I would see it years later at some point when it shown in revival at one of those arts theatres.
It is absolute horrifying. I’d read the book in High School, yes in a High School class, so I wanted to see how well it was adapted as a film. It made the book seem harmless.
PJ – agreed. If nothing else, no curl of hair. And… he’s fumbling as Clark. He’s played like, I dunno, someone from a rom-com. Clark’s more self-assured.
Lis Carey: I remember seeing A Clockwork Orange at Grauman’s Chinese Theater (which it still was then) in Hollywood. And I remember the five people sitting in front of me all got up and left when that scene started getting rough.
(7) I remember enjoying his strange time travel novel Chorale
(8) The movie tones down some of the incidents from the book as I recall
Goodbye Barry. Thanks for all of your assistance with Anazing Stories, both before and during my time.
Barry certainly let you know what he thought about, and he pulled no punches. But he was also right most of the time. Not always, but mostly.
I personally really enjoyed Gather in the Hall of the Planets and Dwellers in the Deep. Barry told me he wrote both of those without any experience of Fandom or conventions. Though I remain skeptical, I believe him.
Fun if you enjoy Star Wars and electric guitars. (And if you don’t, what’s the matter with you!?)
Requiescat in pace. A great loss.
@Lis Indeed. @cat there is an additional visceral nature to the film vis a vis the book. yeah.
I’ve been on that tour, too. (If you ever get to Iceland, book one of the many tours that run that circle. It’s an all day trip and very much worth it.) The original Geysir is dormant, although its neighbor Strokur erupts every ten minutes or so and you can get pretty close to it. (I felt some of the spray after taking the linked photo.) You can get even closer to Litli-Geysir, a bubbling hole just a couple of meters off the path from the visitor center. If a geyser could be described as “cute,” this would be it.
Purely by coincidence, I’d (finally) started to read my copy of Collecting Myself: The Uncollected Stories of Barry N. Malzberg yesterday morning, only to learn of the news early last evening.
With Barry’s passing, SF has lost another of its great writers, historians, and opinionators… and many of us (sorry, can’t think of the original story citation) have lost a friend.
I’ve already Scrolled my main Malzberg anecdote/story, back in 2018, How Barry Malzberg Got His F&SF Special Issue, and, more recently, written about his third sf-histories/opinions column/essays collection, The Bend at the End of the Road .
Daniel
(7) Sad news. Although I never met Barry in person, he very kindly sent me encouragement by email in a dark time. I wish I could have known him better. Peace to his memory.
Meredith Moment: Naomi Novik’s excellent collection Buried Deep and Other Stories is $2.99 at many of the usual suspects.
I saw the movie. It was an…experience.
Need to read the book.
Regards,
Dann
Make Orwell fiction again.
2: I wondered about the blood in the trailer. Supe evidently wasn’t unsupered, since he survived the crash. Was he partly unsupered, so that he crashed and could bleed? The only other possibility I see is that part of his super body banged into another part and that was enough to cause the bleeding. (Or the movie is messing with the canon, or the canon has changed since I last paid attention, in which case it’s just fantasy and not the one true canon.)
How much is that shoggoth in the attic?
The one with the horrifying tale.
As Asimov Iis reported to have said about objections to Superman’s ability to travel faster than light: “Professor Einstein’s statement is based on theory. Superman’s speed is based on fact”
@ Patrick McGuire: Supes didn’t appear particularly bothered by hitting the ground at terminal velocity. I suspect he may have been beaten by something with Superman level strength. Or magic, or the ol kryptonite.
I wonder now if he gets attacked by the other supers: I saw Guy Gardner (boo!), Hawkwoman (yay!), Mr. Terrific (yay!), Metamorpho (hmm), Engineer (???). So what role that pay in the film will be interesting.
Also Lex Luther had a suspiciously large pistol. Billionaires shouldn’t be allowed to own suspiciously large guns.