(1) HE FALL DOWN BUT NOT GO BOOM. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Job #1 — Stick the landing. Oops. “Odysseus: Moon lander tipped over at touchdown, limiting the data it’s sending”.– AP News has the story. (Captain Kirk was not available for comment.)
A private U.S. lunar lander tipped over at touchdown and ended up on its side near the moon’s south pole, hampering communications, company officials said Friday.
Intuitive Machines initially believed its six-footed lander, Odysseus, was upright after Thursday’s touchdown. But CEO Steve Altemus said Friday the craft “caught a foot in the surface,” falling onto its side and, quite possibly, leaning against a rock. He said it was coming in too fast and may have snapped a leg.
“So far, we have quite a bit of operational capability even though we’re tipped over,” he told reporters.
But some antennas were pointed toward the surface, limiting flight controllers’ ability to get data down, Altemus said. The antennas were stationed high on the 14-foot (4.3-meter) lander to facilitate communications at the hilly, cratered and shadowed south polar region….
(2) FAMOUS LA MOVIE THEATER NOW HAS FAMOUS OWNERS. The New York Times learns “Star Directors Buy Los Angeles Cinema With Plan for ‘Coolest AV Club’”.
With the moviegoing experience under threat from streaming services and ever-improving home entertainment options, a group with a passionate interest in its preservation — three dozen filmmakers who create their works for the big screen, to be enjoyed in the company of large audiences — has decided to do something about it.
The group of directors, led by Jason Reitman — whose films include “Juno,” “Up in the Air” and “Ghostbusters: Afterlife” — announced Wednesday that it had bought the Village Theater in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, which was put up for sale last summer to the concern of film buffs. The group, which also includes Christopher Nolan, Steven Spielberg, Lulu Wang and Alfonso Cuarón, among others, plans to restore the 93-year-old movie palace, which features one of the largest screens in Los Angeles.
“I think every director dreams of owning a movie theater,” Reitman said in an interview. “And in this case, I saw an opportunity to not only save one of the greatest movie palaces in the world, but also assembled some of my favorite directors to join in on the coolest AV club of all time.”
The announcement of the directors group buying the Village Theater, which has long been a favorite venue for premieres, follows on the heels of Quentin Tarantino’s recent purchase of the Vista Theater in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Los Feliz….
(3) TO MESSIAH OR NOT TO MESSIAH, THAT IS THE QUESTION. [By Mike Kennedy.] David Fear, writing for Rolling Stone, seems absolutely agog over Dune: Part Two. And eager for Part Three.
His review is chock full of spoilers if you don’t know the plot already (but I suspect most of you do). It’s easily arguable, though, that there are some spoilers for elements of the movie itself. So, read the review at your own risk. “‘Dune: Part Two’ Is Bigger, Bolder — and Yes, Even Better — Than Part One”. Here’s a non-spoilery excerpt:
… For some, these names may ring bells way, way back in your memory banks; mention that they’re characters played by Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Oscar Isaac, and a who’s-who of equally recognizable actors, and you’ll see the lights go on in their eyes. For others, the heroes and villains, mentors and monsters that populate Frank Herbert’s 1965 cult novel are old friends, their exploits etched into readers’ brains like gospel. One of the great things about Dune, Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 partial adaptation of that original book, was that you could take in its story and swoon over its imagery regardless of where you fell on the scale. It’s a classic hero’s-journey tale of — to paraphrase author/film professor Howard Suber — a kid rescued from his fate and put on the path toward his destiny. And it was the sort of faithful yet bold, properly bonkers realization of the novel for the screen that fans had been dying to see, the perfect melding of artist and material….
(4) CHINESE FAN ANALYZES SOME OF THE CHINESE WORKS ON THE NOMINATION REPORT. An English language blog post by Chinese fan Prograft follows on from the Heather Rose-Jones/Camestros Felapton report, covering the Chinese works that appeared in the prose fiction categories, excluding those in the SF World recommendation list. “More on Other Chinese Hugo Nominations, based on ‘Charting the Cliff’”.
They suggest that perhaps some of the Chinese works that appeared in the “Validation” report for Best Series, but not in the nomination statistics, may not have been eligible according to the Best Series rules. This, of course, would not explain why those works disappeared between the “Validation” spreadsheet and the actual nomination statistics report.
Prograft’s article also links to (Chinese language) Weibo posts from early March 2023, which discuss why there had not been much by way of self-promotion by Chinese authors at that point in time. (The SF World list did not appear until April; another from 8 Light Minutes was published on March 27.)
(5) MEANWHILE, BACK AT 2014. Camestros Felapton says, “Larry is cross that I’m not writing about him”.
… From time to time key Puppy figures would dally with the idea that the way the Hugo vote was administered was rigged against them, particularly when they lost, but the repeated substance of their complaint was that the MEMBERSHIP was rigged against them, i.e. it was cliques of voters and publisher buying memberships for the vast number of employees that they imagined publishers have.
So no, Larry didn’t “warn us” nor has the 2023 Hugo scandal validated the core of his complaints about the Hugo Awards.
(6) CLIFF NOTES. Noreascon II in 1980 was the first Worldcon required by the WSFS Constitution to report the Hugo voting statistics (though not the first to disclose some of them). Kevin Standlee, with the help of The Hugo Award Book Club, discovered File 770 issue 24 published partial 1980 Hugo Award final voting and nominating statistics. He’s uploaded a copy to the Hugo Awards website and added a link to the 1980 Hugo Awards page. This quote about the margin for error caught my eye:
Note on counting procedure. After initial validation of the ballots, the data were keypunched by a commercial firm, (Only in the Gandalf [Award] vote was every ballot proofread against the printout; but nearly all keypunching errors were flagged by the computer, and in any other category the residual errors should be less than about 5 cards.) The votes were then counted by computer, using a counting program written by Dave Anderson.
There were 1788 valid final ballots cast that year. The reason for proofing the Gandalf votes is that it was the only category which ran close enough for a potential five-vote error to change the winner. Ray Bradbury ended up outpolling Anne McCaffrey 747-746.
(7) STAR TREK: DISCOVERY SEASON 5. Paramount+ dropped a trailer for Star Trek: Discovery Season 5.
(8) NOW WE KNOW WHO WROTE THE BOOK OF LOVE. Amal El-Mohtar reviews Kelly Link’s The Book of Love in the New York Times: “Kelly Link Returns with a Dreamlike, Profoundly Beautiful Novel”.
A certain weight of expectation accrues on writers of short fiction who haven’t produced a novel, as if the short story were merely the larval stage of longer work. No matter how celebrated the author and her stories, how garlanded with prizes and grants, the sense persists: She will eventually graduate from the short form to the long. After an adolescence spent munching milkweed in increments of 10,000 words or less, she will come to her senses and build the chrysalis required for a novel to emerge, winged and tender, from within.
Now Kelly Link — an editor and publisher, a recipient of a MacArthur “genius grant” and the author of five story collections, one of which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist — has produced a novel. Seven years in the making, “The Book of Love” — long, but never boring — enacts a transformation of a different kind: It is our world that must expand to accommodate it, we who must evolve our understanding of what a fantasy novel can be.
Reviewing “The Book of Love” feels like trying to describe a dream. It’s profoundly beautiful, provokes intense emotion, offers up what feel like rooted, incontrovertible truths — but as soon as one tries to repeat them, all that’s left are shapes and textures, the faint outlines of shifting terrain….
(9) RETURN TO NEW WORLDS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] SF² Concatenation has an advance post up ahead of next season’s edition. An October 1955 edition of New Worlds provides an excuse to explore that magazine’s history and some of the SF professionals of that era.
You never know what is around the corner. There I was, at my local SF group, quietly enjoying a pint, when a friend brings in a copy of New Worlds magazine, issue no. 40 dating from October 1955 and this opened a window into Britain’s SF scene of that time. Let me share…
Click here for the full “New Worlds magazine revisited” article.
(10) CHRISTOPHER NOLAN AND KIM STANLEY ROBINSON CONSIDERED. Imaginary Papers Issue 17 is out. The quarterly email newsletter from the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University covers science fiction worldbuilding, futures thinking, and the imagination.
In this issue, Erin K. Wagner writes about the interplay between art and science in Christopher Nolan’s films, especially Oppenheimer and Interstellar; Joe Tankersley celebrates the “subtle utopia” of Kim Stanley Robinson’s 1990 novel Pacific Edge; and we discuss the Necessary Tomorrows podcast, which pairs original science fiction stories with nonfiction analysis of sociotechnical issues.
Subscriptions are free.
(11) RAMONA FRADON (1926-2024). “Comic Book Creator Ramona Fradon Has Died, Aged 97” reports Bleeding Cool. She only just retired in January!
Comic book creator Ramona Fradon has died at the age of 97. Her agent, Catskill Comics, posted the news earlier today. “It comes with great sadness to announce that Ramona Fradon has passed away just a few moments ago. Ramona was 97 and had a long career in the comic book industry, and was still drawing just a few days ago. She was a remarkable person in so many ways. I will miss all the great conversations and laughs we had. I am blessed that I was able to work with her on a professional level, but also able to call her my friend. If anyone wishes to send a card to the family, Please feel free to send them to Catskill Comics, and I’ll be happy to pass them along. You can send cards to Catskill Comics “Fradon Family”, Po Box 264, Glasco, NY 12432″
(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born February 24, 1957 — Edward James Olmos, 67. Where I first experienced the acting of Edward James Olmos was as Detective Gaff in Blade Runner, a role I see he reprised in Blade Runner 2049.
No, I’ve not seen the latter film, nor do I have any intention in doing so as I consider Blade Runner one of the finest SF films ever done and nothing will sully that for me. We gave it a Hugo at ConStellation, so there later films!
It wasn’t his first genre film as that was the Japanese post-apocalyptic science fiction film Virus (1980), but his first important role came in Wolfen (1981), a fascinating horror film about, possibly, the idea that werewolves are real, or maybe not, in which he was Eddie Holt who claims to a shapeshifter.
He has an almost cameo appearance in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues as a musician at the barbecue.
It was supposed to have a theatrical release but that was not to be, so Ray Bradbury’s The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit was released directly to video. In it Olmas was Vámonos. I’ve not seen it. It sounds, well, intriguing. Who’s seen it?
He’s in the debacle that was The Green Hornet in one of the primary roles as Mike Axford, the managing editor of The Daily Sentinel.
As you most likely know, he was William Adama on the rebooted Battestar Galactica. At seventy-three episodes, it didn’t even come close to his run on Miami Vice as Lt. Martin Castillo which was one hundred and six episodes. Now there was an interesting character!
I’ll end this Birthday note by note noting he had a recurring role on Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. as Robert Gonzales.
(13) COMICS SECTION.
- Non Sequitur provides a break.
- Pearls Before Swine has a reaction to a publisher.
- Reality Check demonstrates the danger of nitpicking.
(14) SHRINKAGES AND DISAPPEARANCES. [Item by Kathy Sullivan.] Paper newspapers have been dropping comic strips. But the latest cuts are those by women creators. The Daily Cartoonist explains why “The Real Gannett Conspiracy = Chauvinism”.
In one of my answers in the comments section of The Great Gannett Comics Conspiracy I sarcastically said, “It’s like saying Gannett dropped Between Friends because they are misogynistic.”
Further analysis suggests that may not be far from right….
(15) MARVEL MUST-HAVES. Announced at ComicsPRO the Comic Industry Conference, Marvel Comics’ MARVEL MUST-HAVES! These FREE issues collect multiple iconic issues that spotlight the Marvel characters and comic book series currently at the forefront of pop culture. These stories have been handpicked to get fans in-tune with current Marvel adventures, and act as perfect jumping on points for new readers too. That’s more than 80 pages of comic book adventures for free, available at comic shops next month. [Based on a press release.]
SPIDER-MAN/DEADPOOL #1 (2016)
It’s action, adventure and just a smattering of romance in this epic teaming up the Webbed Wonder and the Merc with a Mouth! Talk about a REAL dynamic duo! Brought to you by two Marvel superstars—Joe Kelly and Ed McGuinness—it’s a perfect tale for those looking forward to the Deadpool’s return to the big screen.
Dive into the full story in SPIDER-MAN/DEADPOOL MODERN ERA EPIC COLLECTION: ISN’T IT BROMANTIC? TPB (9781302951641)
IMMORTAL THOR #2 (2023)
An Elder God of the Utgard-Realm had marked Thor for destruction – and a city with him. Yet the only power that could prevail carried its own terrible price. This is the story of THE IMMORTAL THOR…and the hour of his greatest trial. Following his masterful work on Immortal Hulk, Al Ewing is breaking mythology yet again in this acclaimed new run of the God of Thunder. Featuring breathtaking artwork by superstar Martin Coccolo.
Dive into the full story in IMMORTAL THOR VOL. 1: ALL WEATHER TURNS TO STORM TPB (9781302954185)
MS. MARVEL: THE NEW MUTANT #1 (2023)
Resurrected back into this world of hate and fear, Kamala Khan has a secret mission to pull off for the X-Men, all the while struggling to acclimate to this new part of her identity! Co-written by the MCU’s own Kamala, Iman Vellani, and Sabir Pirzada of both Dark Web: Ms. Marvel and her Disney+ series! Don’t miss this exciting evolution for one of Marvel’s brightest young heroes!
Dive into the full story in MS. MARVEL: THE NEW MUTANT VOL. 1 TPB (9781302954901)
(16) THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY? Or just a ripoff. Behind a paywall at The Sunday Times: “BBC accused of plagiarising new series from Spanish drama”. Brief excerpt:
The Ministry of Time bears a striking resemblance in title and plot to El Ministerio del Tiempo
The BBC will be asked for “explanations” from the Spanish state broadcaster after allegations of plagiarism over a new British television series.
The commissioning of the BBC’s The Ministry of Time was announced this week, described as an “epic sci-fi, romance and thriller” that is “utterly unique”.
Based on an as yet unpublished debut novel by Kaliane Bradley, it is about a newly established government department, the Ministry of Time, which gathers “expats” from across history to experiment how viable time travel would actually be.
The striking resemblance, however, in title and plot to the Spanish series El Ministerio del Tiempo — The Ministry of Time — created by Javier and Pablo Olivares and broadcast by RTVE between 2015 and 2020, has prompted allegations of plagiarism.
The allegations have been made by Javier Olivares, who said that the BBC “had not changed a hair” of his creation, and also by scores of social media users….
(17) FLORIDA LEGISLATION WOULD RESTRICT SOME TEEN ACCESS. “Florida Passes Sweeping Bill to Keep Young People Off Social Media” – details in the New York Times.
New Florida rules would require social networks to prevent young people under 16 from signing up for accounts — and terminate accounts belonging to underage users.
…Florida’s Legislature has passed a sweeping social media bill that would make the state the first to effectively bar young people under 16 from holding accounts on platforms like TikTok and Instagram.
The measure — which Gov. Ron DeSantis said he would “be wrestling with” over the weekend and has not yet signed — could potentially upend the lives of millions of young people in Florida.
It would also probably face constitutional challenges. Federal courts have blocked less-restrictive youth social media laws enacted last year by Arkansas and Ohio. Judges in those cases said the new statutes most likely impinged on social media companies’ free speech rights to distribute information as well as young people’s rights to have access to it.
The new rules in Florida, passed on Thursday, would require social networks to both prevent people under 16 from signing up for accounts and terminate accounts that a platform knew or believed belonged to underage users. It would apply to apps and sites with certain features, most likely including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube.
Last year, Utah, Arkansas, Texas and Ohio enacted laws that would require social media platforms to get permission from a parent before giving an account to a minor under 18 or under 16.
Florida’s effort would go much further, amounting to a comprehensive ban for young people on some of the most popular social media apps. It would also bar the platforms from showing harmful material to minors, including “patently offensive” sexual conduct….
(18) UP ALL KNIGHT. From The Hollywood Reporter: “‘Game of Thrones’ Spinoff ‘The Hedge Knight’ Gets 2025 Release Date”.
… Dunk and Egg keep journeying closer to their HBO debut.
On Friday, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav gave an update on the next Game of Thrones spinoff series: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight (a title that seems destined to be changed to something that doesn’t have “Knight” twice).
“[Creator and executive producer] George R.R. Martin is in preproduction for the new spinoff, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which will premiere in late 2025 on Max,” Zaslav said.
The show is expected to begin production sometime this year.
Given that House of the Dragon is launching its second season this summer, the Knight of the Seven Kingdoms date next year raises the possibility of HBO settling into a flow of having a Thrones drama each year (assuming both shows can turn around their next seasons within two years)….
(19) ACADEMIC REPORT ON THE LANGUAGE USED BY THE CHENGDU BUSINESS DAILY. [Item by Ersatz Culture.] As is hopefully well-known by now, the Chengdu Business Daily organization – also known as Chengdu Economic Daily, which I believe is their “official” English name – provided a number of staff for the Chengdu concom in senior roles, including a Co-Chair, an Honorary Co-Chair, and members of the Hugo team.
I don’t want to get into why what is nominally a newspaper was so involved in running a science fiction convention here, but earlier today I came across a piece of academic research from 2017 that investigated how their journalistic output was summarized on Chinese social media. Although the authors of this report appear to be Chinese nationals from a Chengdu university, the study is in English.
A couple of extracts give examples of how CBD news stories were covered on their social media accounts. (The text from the study is left unaltered, other than reformatting for readability, and the censoring of an English language swear word.)
In all these samples, there were 23 cases of non-standardization, accounting for 7.7% of the total samples, including 10 cases of using ambiguous words, 6 cases of insufficient sentence composition, 3 cases of vulgar words, 2 cases of exaggerated titles, 1 case of non-standardized proverbs, 1 case of ambiguity. Specific reports are listed below. Such as
- “Ball-Hurting! #One Man Tied 7 Cars On His Testis# [sic] And Pulled Cars 8 Meters.” (“@Chengdu Economic Daily” April 1st)
- “It Is Said That The Relevant Agencies Have Organized The Second Mental Identification Towards The Guilty Driver.” (@Chengdu Economic Daily” on March 1st)
- “Two Small UAVs Were Artificially Installed Artillery That May Be Firecrackers And Attacked Each Other For Fun.” (“@Chengdu Economic Daily “February 1st).…
After combing the entire sample, this article also found that the use of spoken language is very common. “@Chengdu Economic Daily” accounted for 22.2% and “@Chengdu Evening Post” accounted for 30.00% (see Table 3). Such as:
- “Easy To Learn: Home-Made Pickle-Fish Is Super Cool.”(@Chengdu Economic Daily January 1st)
- “F*ck Off. Just Get Off. Why You Not Just Get Off.” (@Chengdu Economic Daily January 1st)
- “Old Lady Started Stall Besides Street While City Inspectors Helped Her.” (@Chengdu Evening Post January 1st)
- “A Lady Shouting At A Naughty Child Was Beat By His Parents.”(“@Chengdu Evening Post” March 1st)
The use of network buzzwords and verbal expressions, with the characteristics of freshness and populism, usually adopts irony, ridicule, exaggeration and populist expressions to report and comment on events or peoples, and the contents conveyed are thoughtful, active and critical.
(20) AI’S ELECTRIC BILL. “Generative AI’s environmental costs are soaring — and mostly secret” reports Kate Crawford in Nature.
Last month, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman finally admitted what researchers have been saying for years — that the artificial intelligence (AI) industry is heading for an energy crisis. It’s an unusual admission. At the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Altman warned that the next wave of generative AI systems will consume vastly more power than expected, and that energy systems will struggle to cope. “There’s no way to get there without a breakthrough,” he said.
I’m glad he said it. I’ve seen consistent downplaying and denial about the AI industry’s environmental costs since I started publishing about them in 2018. Altman’s admission has got researchers, regulators and industry titans talking about the environmental impact of generative AI.
So what energy breakthrough is Altman banking on? Not the design and deployment of more sustainable AI systems — but nuclear fusion. He has skin in that game, too: in 2021, Altman started investing in fusion company Helion Energy in Everett, Washington.
Most experts agree that nuclear fusion won’t contribute significantly to the crucial goal of decarbonizing by mid-century to combat the climate crisis. Helion’s most optimistic estimate is that by 2029 it will produce enough energy to power 40,000 average US households; one assessment suggests that ChatGPT, the chatbot created by OpenAI in San Francisco, California, is already consuming the energy of 33,000 homes. It’s estimated that a search driven by generative AI uses four to five times the energy of a conventional web search. Within years, large AI systems are likely to need as much energy as entire nations….
(21) AN EARLIER ‘GREAT WALL’. “Great ‘Stone Age’ wall discovered in Baltic Sea”. “Megastructure stretching nearly 1 kilometre long is probably one of the oldest known hunting aids on Earth.”
Divers have helped to reveal the remnants of a kilometre-long wall that are submerged in the Baltic Sea off the coast of Rerik, Germany. The rocks (pictured) date back to the Stone Age.
Primary research paper here.
(22) LICENSE PLATE FRAME OF THE DAY. “Bigfoot doesn’t believe in you either.”
(23) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes arrives in theaters May 10.
Director Wes Ball breathes new life into the global, epic franchise set several generations in the future following Caesar’s reign, in which apes are the dominant species living harmoniously and humans have been reduced to living in the shadows. As a new tyrannical ape leader builds his empire, one young ape undertakes a harrowing journey that will cause him to question all that he has known about the past and to make choices that will define a future for apes and humans alike.
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Ersatz Culture, Martin Easterbrook, Kathy Sullivan, Joey Eschrich, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kevin Harkness.]
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(4) This is very exciting. I was hoping the report and spreadsheet of data would enable other people to explore the topsy-turvy world of the 2023 stats. A big missing piece was understanding the dynamic of different publishers and communities in China.
Imagine trying to make sense of the Puppy conflict but not having a sense of the dynamics between Tor and Baen.
(6) No hanging chads from the keypunch?
(12) Cat Eldridge, I’m curious why you think watching Blade Runner 2049 would sully the original? I think it’s an astounding follow-up, with a few really stand-out performances. And I don’t think that’s a minority view.
Now, if only we could convince Hollywood to finance huge budget slow-and-moody noir science fiction more than once every few decades. Sadly I don’t think it’s ever going to be a profitable genre, but I’d be OK with Hollywood suits more frequently deluding themselves into thinking it is
1) Didn’t the Japanese one fall over, too?
12) Not genre, but he was excellent in ‘Zoot Suit.’
Regarding the ancient File 770 report on the Noreascon Hugo numbers … the entire issue was a blast from the past. People gone …sigh
10) Somehow in this article I think the stated peak circulation of Analog, back then, or even now, is off considerably. It was not ten thousand, then, easily researched by double-checking Mike Ashley’s studies on this matter. And it is Lan Wright, not Ian Wright, and Wright is definitely listed in a number of places. John Carnell was more often than not referred to as Ted Carnell. And New Worlds is still remembered as one of the major venues for the New Wave movement.
16) It used to happen all the time that the basic idea for a TV series that was successful in one country would be adapted in other countries.
For example, the British sitcom Til Death Do Us Part became All in the Family in the US, Ein Herz und eine Seele in West Germany and a show the name of which I have forgotten in Austria. They all have the same basic set-up, reactionary and racist patriarch, his very stupid wife, a daughter who looks good in mini-skirts and a progressive son-in-law and neighbours who are some kind of Other. In the US, they’re black, in West Germany, they’re Socialists.
Another example is the Columbian telenovela Yo Soy Betty La Fea a.k.a. Ugly Betty which had more than a dozen adaptations around the world, all with the basic premise of not very attractive girl moves to the big city and nabs a rich and handsome dude, once she takes off her glasses and braces.
There are more examples. The BBC’s own Life on Mars/Ashes to Ashes had several variations around the world, including a US version which borrowed the names and basic set-up, but had a different resolution, as well as a Spanish and two German versions which applied the basic set-up of the cop travellering back in time, but applied it to specific local issues, e.g. in the Spanish version the cop is stuck in the Franco era, while in one of the German versions the cop ends up in East Germany before the fall of the Wall. The other West German version reversed the premise and had a macho cop from the 1980s wake up from a coma after 30 years in a completely new world.
A lot of the time, the original inspiration is never acknowledged, e.g. the West German All in the Family never acknowledged that it borrowed its basic premise from a British and a US show that came before and most Germans are very surprised to hear this.
So in short, this is done all the time, the BBC are often the ones who have their ideas borrowed/stolen, and its really no big deal. The most interesting thing is often how the shows are adapted to their new setting.
21) I initially assumed that the wall that was found in the Baltic Sea near Rerik was located in the Haff (I have no idea what Haffs are called in English or if there even is a word for it, but they’re a type of almost enclosed bay common on the Baltic Sea coast – San Francisco Bay seems to be a similar formation), but it’s not inside the Haff, but 10 kilometres off the coast, which is why we know it must have been built before the level of the Baltic Sea rose, submerging the wall.
(2) “Threat from …home” Yeah, don’t go out with other people, a lot of whom you don’t know, and have a shared experience. Do it alone (that way, we can sell it many more times, and not have to pay for theaters). Hell, no – I’d not trade my memories of seeing 2001, or Star Wars, or Star Trek, in a theater for any lousy 54″ screen.
(5) Awww, poor little snowflake, everybody voted against him and his puppies…
(14) The reason a lot of us are now reading the Guardian: the newpapers are becoming infotainment. Sorry, some already have. My partner made the mistake of subscribing to the Baltimore Sun, and I’ve been after her to cancel. The Sunday Sun, that she subscribed to, had nothing but ads and entertainment, period. News? HA!
(17) And exactly how are they going to enforce it? Right, people who claim to be for “smaller government”… but want increased enforcement sizes.
(19) Maybe I’m misreading that, but to me, it comes across as a miscegenation between CNBC and the NY Post. Wonderful
And they had staff on the committee, and the Hugo committee? HELL, NO.
(23) Y’know, it was a clever short story, originally. I’ve not seen any of the movies, but… Wait, the humans are wearing clothing, but the apes don’t guess they’re intelligent. I mean, unless it’s a cover for white supremacists looking at US blacks. And why is that one woman wearing modern running clothes?
@Cora Buhlert TV series and movies get adapted and re-made for different regions all the time. But as a rule they are official adaptations, with credits and payments to the original creators. This doesn’t sound like that.
It’s no different from an official translation of a book for a foreign market vs a foreign publisher copying books without authorization
Sean, the 2023 Locus Year in Review said that they had an 8,436 average print subscriptions per month in 2022 and 8,400 digital, for a total of 16,836, down from a combined number of 18,134 the previous year, but didn’t indicate how many the previous year were print.
8,436 total print subscribers means they’ve shed a significant number of those subscribers but digital subscriptions are actually more profitable as print is expensive these days.
Sean Wallace: You’re right about Analog’s circulation. In the Wikipedia article about the magazine it shows in 1983 the circulation was 110,000. As you know, publications using the US Postal Service’s magazine rate (whatever class that was) were required to publish in the magazine an annual statement of their circulation figures, so this information was not hard to come by.
I remember doing some fanzine article in the Seventies where I used the Analog stats, and that it was around 100K then.
I also remember Robert Moore Williams showing me an old Ziff-Davis Amazing — from the Thirties? — with their circulation statement and it was some multiple of Analog at it’s highest. When the pulps were at their peak as a mass entertainment medium.
@Sean Wallace
At its peak, Analog had about 100K issues per month, many to subscribers, but also over the counter. (I always read the annual circulation numbers, which usually were in the October issue.)
Analog circulation – and in their ads in the mag, they said that on average, 3 people read each copy…
So mark says Analog circulation – and in their ads in the mag, they said that on average, 3 people read each copy…
Yeah every publication used a variation on that claim. Life magazine used to say that an entire family of up tofive read every issue, so advertisers were getting immense value from their adverts, particularly food ones.
(20) AI’s Electric Bill: This is terrifying. In an apocalyptic future where AI and bitcoin steal all the power, science fiction writers will have to burn excess commas to keep warm!
Which is fair because, they were the ones, who imagined them, into being.
And thanks for the title credit.
(12) Stand and Deliver. Marvelous movie. Not genre, but neither was Miami Vice.
(16) All in the Family, at least was properly licensed, not just ripped off. What German TV may have done with it, I have no idea, but it’s difficult to see how German TV doing a ripoff of a British show a few decades ago would be a good defense of the BBC ripping off a current or recent Spanish show.
(17) Yup, the “small government” folks are at it again.
Kevin Harkness: In an apocalyptic future where AI and bitcoin steal all the power, science fiction writers will have to burn excess commas to keep warm!
You, will have to pry, my Oxford commas, from my cold, dead, lifeless, and dessicated hands.
Commas. If you read my first novel, 11,000 Years, in the acknowledgements*, you’ll have seen that the book would have been thousands of characters longer, but my #1 beta read forced me to take them out. grump I want them the way Johnson used them, in the first English dictionary – as pauses in speech.
*And there’s no acknowledgement in my upcoming Becoming Terran – I forgot to include it in the mss, and when I remembered, I was told “too late”. So, I guess if all of you buy it, and I break 1k books sold, then I’ll be able to get them to add it for a second edition…
You could follow the lead of Timothy Dexter, who
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Dexter
Ryan H: in the nineties, someone posted to usenet that he’d gotten into the DoD’s code for SDI*. He said he couldn’t post it for national security reasons, but he did post the last five lines. It was five lines of ). (If you know lisp, you’ll get the joke.)
Stop calling it Star Wars. I saw the rerun of the original Battlebarf Galaxative where the Galatica found this world with two superpowers, who hit The Button, and the Galactica zapped all 30,000 missiles (just a randomly chosen number, right?). The proper name for SDI should be Battlestar America.
(6) CLIFF NOTES.
My profuse apologies to Kevin and to those of you who are into Hugo Stats neepery.
In 2018-2019 I undertook a project to retrieve as many as possible of missing Hugo statistics from the mists of time (mostly from old fanzines and Usenet posts). I was able to resurrect around 20 years of missing stats, which got transcribed, if possible, and uploaded to The Hugo Awards’ website.
I transcribed Noreascon Two’s Hugo Statistics PDF to text back in 2019, with full titles and names expanded, and organised properly to correct where they shoehorned things into different places to use all the space and take up fewer pages.
But apparently I never got it uploaded to the site. I’ve just now reviewed it for accuracy of the numbers. I’ve left the link to the copy of File 770‘s version of the stats on the 1980 Hugo Awards page, and have now included links to the original Noreascon Two document and my transcribed version.
Noreascon Two’s newsletter version of 1980 Hugo Stats
Transcribed version of 1980 Hugo Statistics document
1) “I’ve Fallen and I can’t…”
Landing level on the Moon now seems much harder that we previously thought it could be.
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/17822/did-any-of-the-apollo-lunar-modules-land-significantly-off-level
Apollo 15 landed at an angle and dented the Descent Engine nozzle.
2) “I want to speak to the Owner!” sez Karen. “I’m a big fan…”
Speaking of Commas, Oxford or otherwise;
“Yeets Scrolls and Leaves”
(16). On the BBC series The Ministry of Time:
The owners of the Spanish series El Ministerio del Tiempo previously sued over the NBC TV series Timeless in 2016. Archived news stories say the suit was settled quietly.
I saw about half of the run of Timeless and read quick plot summaries for the Spanish series, which seems to have a more complicated setup. In both series, the travelling team is made up of a soldier and a scientist (medic in the Spanish story), both guys, and a woman scholar. But in the Spanish series, each team member is from a different era.
I would have liked to have had time for the Spanish series. I saw about 10 minutes on a streaming service and I was interested.
(12) Blade Runner 2049 was another unnecessary movie. A lot of them are. Not even the soundtrack was anything much.
(14) Nancy is written and drawn by a woman who uses the pseudonym Olivia Jaimes, and who completely revamped the strip when she took it over in 2018. It is quite good nowadays.
(2) No paywall and better photo here from 4 days ago:
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/westwood-fox-village-theater-new-owners-christopher-nolan-steven-spielberg-bradley-cooper-1235832169/
@Lis: There was one episode of “Miami Vice” that had probable aliens in it, written by Thomas M. Disch. It definitely had James Brown, and a very young Chris Rock as a UFO enthusiast.
@Cora: It was well publicized in the US at the time that “All in the Family” was based on a British TV show. I think that was even in the credits? (Also “Sanford and Son”.) I guess West Germany decided there was no need for the people to know.
@Mike: One of your stories and numbers has an interesting correspondence. ISWYDT.
(16). On the BBC series The Ministry of Time, again:
The source novel by Kalianne Bradley is to be released in both the US and UK in May, so some reviews and plot summaries are out there. To me, it doesn’t look like the book draws on the same ideas as El Ministerio del Tiempo. In the book, an officer from Franklin’s doomed arctic exploration is retrieved from 1847 to the present day. He is paired with a “bridge”, a civil servant to help him adapt. Others have also been retrieved from the past.
The book does look interesting, so I pre-ordered it.
(16) obviously I have seen neither series.
As summarised here, neither seems entirely original.
There’s a time travel RPG called Timewatch, which I backed on Kickstarter in 2014 about an agency using people plucked from time to protect history. I’m sure it could be elevator pitched to sound essentially the same. I can think of two other, older games with the same premise, but can’t remember their names.
A soldier, a scientist, a medic. Add a rebellious alien super soldier and you get Stargate SG1.
And then there The Big Time, which I am a bit ashamed to say I’ve never read…
Speaking of Hugo Awards gone by, I just popped over to the Hugo Awards website to look at the full nomination and voting statistics from Ausiecon III, and discovered that THEY STILL HAVEN’T SPELLED MY NAME RIGHT in the Fan Writer longlist.
I pointed out the typo at the time when Aussiecon released the nomination totals, and they promptly fixed it; but somehow that change utterly failed to propagate downstream to subsequent listings, I guess?
This is, obviously, the greatest scandal in Hugo Awards history
That was one of the years I dug up from the Wayback Machine, so I have the Word doc, and have re-generated a corrected PDF for you, LOL.
As you might guess from that Wayback URL, I had to do a hell of a lot of digging before I managed to find those. IIRC, rather than storing them on the con’s website, the Hugo Admin had posted them on his personal directory of his employer’s website, and the Aussiecon Three convention website only linked to those files — which were long defunct, 20 years later.
But an embryonic version of this web blog had at one point posted them. File 770 saves the day again.
I saw a few seasons of El Ministerio del Tiempo on Amazon Prime and it’s entertaining but quite determinedly focused on Spanish history and culture. I wouldn’t expect a BBC production to have much in common, other than the basic idea. For example, Captain Alatriste is hugely popular in Spain but not well known elsewhere.
@Jo Van:
I think they might have been posted to rec.arts.sf.fandom at the time as well, but Google’s newsgroup coverage gets increasingly spotty as you go back before Y2k.
That year was also the first year in while that Locus didn’t print the full nomination totals, as I discovered when I eagerly flipped through its pages looking to see my name in tiny, tiny print.
A lot of the stats I unearthed were from rec.arts.sf.fandom and rec.arts.sf-lovers. But Google Groups, especially the latter, started attracting a significant amount of NSFW posts, and Google eventually blocked the groups which were receiving the worst of it — though I think I managed to find everything there was to find before that happened.
I’m glad that I looked when I did, though. A lot of the Usenet stuff I was able to access then is no longer accessible.
I would like to once again beg for anyone who has access to Sept/Oct/Nov 1977 issues of Locus Magazine to let me know. In 1977 the Hugo Admin refused to release the stats to any of the fanzine publishers and only released them to Locus (which is why the WSFS Constitution was amended in 1980 to require that the Hugo Admin make the statistics public, available to everyone, within 90 days after the convention).
We are still missing the Hugo Nomination and Voting Statistics for 1977. If anyone is able to provide them, it would be so very much appreciated.
16) Definitely a case of “more information needed”, here. The coincidence of the titles is a bit alarming – though, of course, you can’t copyright a title. Nor can you copyright ideas, only the expression thereof. And, well, people have been snatched out of the past or the future to defend the timelines since (at least) 1938, when Jack Williamson’s The Legion of Time was serialized. (Actual SF historians, please feel free to provide earlier examples.) And teams of three agents figure in a lot of popular TV – I could think of four examples right off the top of my head, of the “two blokes and a chick” format. (Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), The Champions, Department S and The Protectors, as if you wanted to know.)
So, if the allegation of plagiarism is to be borne out… we’re going to need much more specific examples of the BBC following the Spanish series’s lead. If they really have “changed not a hair” – if slabs of this thing are evidently just the Spanish series translated into English – then, yep, that’s plagiarism. Otherwise, it’s pretty doubtful. As for being “utterly unique” – well, I’m sure we’ve all seen that claim before, usually attached to some lame knock-off (“it’s Star Trek, but this time THE CAPTAIN IS LEFT-HANDED!!” Utterly unique. Sure.)
Great title!
(1) Ack!
(5) “Totally honest.” OK, Larry.
(17) And how can are they going to enforce that? It looks like it’s another law passed to make it look like they’re doing something.
20.) I’m somewhat disappointed that the only commentary on this facet of A.I. has been snark. The previous electricity hog, crypto–well, it’s still continuing though advocates say its energy use is declining–had some significant impact on small hydroelectric-based co-ops in the Pacific Northwest. But this facet of A.I. deserves much more concern and attention than it’s getting.
@Joyce Reynolds-Ward : I agree. The generative algorithms (they are not “artificial intelligence*) use an incredible amount of computing power — which of course means an incredible amount of energy.
Expensive, polluting energy.
Not to mention the staggering amount of water they consume as coolant.
They are an ecological disaster. They would be even in a time that was not teetering on environmental and climatological catastrophe.
16 @Nick The Pelgrane Press game done by Kevin Kulp, right?
Nickpheas on February 25, 2024 at 1:01 am said:
(16) …There’s a time travel RPG called Timewatch, which I backed on Kickstarter in 2014 about an agency using people plucked from time to protect history.
I assume you mean this Timewatch… I’m a friend of the author (and of their dogs). I’ll make sure Kevin knows he’s gotten a shout-out here (in case he hasn’t already been alerted).
Re (11) Ramona Fraden: e-borrowable via HooplaDigital: The Art of Ramona Fradon by Howard Chaykin, illustrated by Ramona Fradon
@Paul W – whoops, you beat me to name-that-author (I hadn’t noticed as I typed’n’clicked a few minutes ago). I’d seen the item last night but rarely ‘keyboard’ from my iPad, if it isn’t time-critical. (Yes, I do have blueteeth keyboards, but that would mean getting up to get to it…)
1) Those surprised about this have never played Kerbal Space Program, where your first Mün landing is a giant crash, your second is a slower crash, and your third one lands softly but then falls over. It is practically a right of passage in KSP. When I saw the animation of the “anomalous positive yaw” I was fully expecting the “Reverting Flight” popup to appear.
@JeffWarner Apollo 15 was the first “J” mission – three day, three EVA surface missions with the Rover, the LEM was modified with a longer nozzle on the descent engine and more fuel/water/oxygen. It wasn’t surprising that they dented the nozzle in A15, but it happened because Dave Scott stopped the engine almost immediately when the contact light illuminated and they fell the rest of the way. He did so because he was warned that if the longer nozzle was too close to the ground when burning, it would likely split from the pressure buildup.
LMP Jim Irwin’s comment at landing, from the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal
104:42:29 Irwin: Contact. (Pause) Bam!
Most landed at around 3-3.5 feet per second, Neil Armstrong landed at 1.7fps….and Dave Scott at 6.8fps.
(sorry about the feet per second but this was the US in the 1960-70s so even NASA used US units.)
(4) Whether or not the Qidian works that appeared on the leaked list were eligible for Best Series does require some judgment calls, but I think they clearly do.
(It should be noted that this argument is kind of irrelevant: that wasn’t the reason for why they didn’t show up on the final ballot, given that 3 of the works do appear on the final long list we were given without any note that they were disqualified. However, I think it’s worth addressing, simply to avoid the Chengdu Hugo discussion getting muddied with “Well, some of the deletions might have been legitimate, so maybe they just made some bad judgment calls on the other ones?”)
For context, because I’m sure many readers here haven’t run into these before: Chinese webnovels are generally published sequentially on a daily (or more usual, multiple times per day) basis for a few years, with total chapters that might end up in the thousands and word-counts in the millions. They’re monetized by micro-transactions as you buy individual chapters. The most popular site for such webnovels is Qidian, for whom the only analogy I can come up with is a version of Amazon that didn’t even bother pretending that it had morals or scruples.
It is common for arcs in a webnovel to be given sub-titles (e.g., Vol. 5: Something), and when a work like this is published in the West, to be split into multiple books based on those designations. For example, one popular webnovel, I Shall Seal the Heavens, was published sequentially for two-ish years under that name, but actually contains content equal to about 10 GRRM-sized novels, and when published in print, is broken down into 10 separate volumes.
So, I would consider these webnovels to meet the spirit of what the Best Series category is looking for.
But, I don’t think we need to even get that far, because it clearly meets what the WSFS constitution says the rules are: “A multi-installment science fiction or fantasy story, unified by elements such as plot, characters, setting, and presentation, appearing in at least three (3) installments consisting in total of at least 240,000 words by the close of the previous calendar year, at least one (1) installment of which was published in the previous calendar year…”
A webnovel that is published in, e.g., 1000 daily chapters totaling 1M+ words, with at least one chapter published during 2022, meets all of the standards set by the WSFS constitution. Each chapter is a separate part of a serialized story and so meets the ordinary definition of “installment”; in fact, under the standard monetization scheme, each chapter is purchased independently. The installments don’t need to be separate individual stories on their own–in fact, the very definition (“a multi-installment science fiction or fantasy story”, singular) is to the contrary.
Basically a webnovel is just as eligible for the Best Series category as is a series of short stories published once per month in Analog that managed to meet the word-count requirements. It’s just that a webnovel’s publication schedule is more condensed.
Personally, I think a lot of the deletions from the leaked ballot to the final version we saw have more to do with garden variety corruption than anything China-specific.
The original Best Series set of noms from the leaked list… there’s no direct comparison between how webnovels vs. traditionally-published novels are seen in China (some webnovels go on to become TV series or movies), but imagine if, in a normal Worldcon year, 5 out of the 6 Hugo noms in one category were all Patreon-supported books published on Kindle Unlimited. I would imagine you would have some number of fans who would consider that de facto evidence that something wrong had happened, and would find some way to “fix” things.
There’s a certain level at which I think we’re treating what happened in Chengdu as this strange and China-specific thing which is difficult to understand because of different cultural norms, when honestly, the answer may be that this is actually what McCarty specifically and many Western fans in general would have liked to do in past, but they’re usually surrounded by people with ethics who don’t allow that to happen.
To me, the most chilling part of the leaks is the part that’s ‘Oh, yeah, as things started disappearing, we were told that they had identified ballots that were part of a slate and eliminated them’ and apparently everyone just nodded and went on as though this was a perfectly normal statement for McCarty to make.
The part I fear the most is the idea that Chengdu was simply McCarty playing Icarus and being too blatant in fixing things to his own liking, but it was more “a step too far” rather than “no Hugo admin has ever gone down this path before.”
I would like to believe that we went directly from 100% integrity to “I’m going to blatantly insert hundreds of ballots that say what I want them to say, and release numbers so ridiculous that they cry out for scrutiny” with zero in the way of intermediate steps in-between, but the degree of brazenness shown in how the nominations were fixed and the extent to which McCarty is trying to claim this is all just business as usual, make it tougher for me to do so than I would like.
@Peace Is My Middle Name
And most of it is just “AI” for the sake of “AI”: unnecessary and unwanted.
I used to play lunar lander on, yes, a paper teletype. After a while I gave up on landing safely and just tried to see how small a crater I could make. Then I started trying to see how big a crater I could make…
@mark: “I’ve not seen any of the [current Planet of the Apes] movies, but… Wait, the humans are wearing clothing, but the apes don’t guess they’re intelligent”
The movies are IMO quite good, and are doing their own thing that’s tangential to the original. The new one is the first to take place at a time when our world has passed from living memory, but based on how the premise was set up earlier, the idea isn’t that the humans are entirely unintelligent; it’s that (due to a brain-damaging virus) humans have lost the use of language, so they’re very limited in what they can do beyond a survival level, and the apes would naturally find it hard to believe that that’s who built the old civilization. And since it’s only a couple hundred years out, I assume any modern-looking artifacts are just old non-perishable items that were scavenged.
@Jim Janney: I did the same! Also played it on a calculator. Though it was more fun on the teletype to play Star Trek — it was easier and you got to blow up Klingons. If we could get the rare slot on the one CRT, it was always xyzzy time.
James Davis Nicoll is reporting that Brian Stableford is gone.
https://mastodon.social/@[email protected]/111993843557256717
@Brian : Worth nothing that there is public account of McCarty wanted to disqualify a “slate” and the rest of the Hugo Subcommittee said they would all resign immediately if he did.
He backed down then.