(1) TERRY BROOKS ANNOUNCES SEMI-RETIREMENT. Shannara series author Terry Brooks is stepping back. Delilah S. Dawson will be producing future installments. “Easy Come, Easy Go” at Terry Brooks Online.

Let’s start with a few life facts that I have come to accept and just recently decided to address. I am now eighty-one years old. I have been writing in the Shannara series since 1968 – which is more than fifty years. I have written steadily with no breaks save for vacations and illnesses. I have a total count of just under fifty books to my name as of today. In all that time, I have been writing at least one book or often two at the same time.

I am still writing regularly, but I noticed recently that my physical and mental abilities have diminished. Not that I am derailed in any measurable way from what I was, but my endurance, concentration, attention span and memory are not what they once were. All this is a function of what aging involves and living requires of us at one point or another. I knew this was coming, but I did not expect it when it arrived and have spent my eightieth year coming to terms with its presence. Whatever happens, I do not want to be one of those writers who is remembered for going on a bit too long than his or her faculties could tolerate and thereby produce books that are less than my best work.

Accordingly, I have decided to step back from my intense writing lifestyle and settle down into a form or semi-retirement. This was a hard choice to make. I hate to admit that I don’t have the abilities I once had.  But better to face up to your diminishments than pretend they don’t exist. Better to make some adjustments to account for the onset of those diminishments before the readers you rely on to support your efforts begin to point them out.

Beginning immediately, with the publishing of my new book GALAPHILE, I am stepping back in my author role and engaging help from another writer in steering the series in the proper direction with the necessary amount of care. I will no longer be doing the primary writing. My new co-author will take on that task. Instead, I will offer what help I can with providing storyline ideas, revisionary plot suggestions and a thorough overview that will help my co-author to continue to give you the kind of book you would expect of me. I know her well and have been friends with her for years. Both my editor and I have agreed that she is the right choice to take on the task of continuing SHANNARA. That she can provide the skills and inventiveness that is needed to accomplish this is something of which I am sure. She is every bit as professionally capable and committed as I am. What help and support I can give her, I will. That she will give you what you want and expect is something I am certain she will do.

Her name is Delilah Dawson, and she is a skilled professional writer and a delightful person.  If you haven’t read any of her work to date, I encourage you to do so now….

(2) WORLDS OF IF #178. Justin T. O’Conor Sloane, Editor-in-Chief of the Starship Sloane Publishing Company, has announced that the second issue of Worlds of IF, the relaunched classic science fiction magazine, is available to order: Buy Worlds of IF: Science Fiction #178. Click here to see the Table of Contents.

The cover art is by Rodney Matthews (front) and Marianne Plumridge (back).

(3) SCIENCE WRITERS CONFERENCE CANCELLED. [Item by John A Arkansawyer.] Carnegie Mellon and Pitt were trading hosting duties. Now they’re not, thanks in part to budget cuts: “Pitt, CMU pull out of hosting conference for science writers” from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Citing federal funding cuts, the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University have pulled out of a prior commitment to host a science conference that would have brought around 1,000 visitors to the city.

The ScienceWriters conference, put on by the National Association of Science Writers and the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing, has been an annual mainstay for science journalists and communicators for years. Pitt and CMU had agreed on Nov. 6 to host and fund the conference and act as the hosting city, which rotates each year, per a Wednesday statement from the association.

“On Feb. 13, 2025, representatives of both universities informed CASW that they were withdrawing their commitment, including the financial support, for the conference,” per the statement. “Despite our efforts, subsequent discussions have not led to a resolution.”

Both Pitt and CMU said the decision to step away from the conference was directly related to federal cuts to research funding, saying those cuts cinched resources that would have otherwise made the hosting doable….

(4) SEVERAL TOP NASA STAFF CHOPPED. “NASA Eliminates Chief Scientist and Other Jobs at Its Headquarters” reports the New York Times.

NASA is eliminating its chief scientist and other roles as part of efforts by the Trump administration to pare back staff at the agency’s Washington headquarters.

The cuts affect about 20 employees at NASA, including Katherine Calvin, the chief scientist and a climate science expert. The last day of work for Dr. Calvin and the other staff members will be April 10.

That could be a harbinger of deeper cuts to NASA’s science missions and a greater emphasis on human spaceflight, especially to Mars. During President Trump’s address to Congress last week, he said, “We are going to lead humanity into space and plant the American flag on the planet Mars and even far beyond.”

Mr. Trump did not give a timeline for astronauts to reach the red planet, and during an interview on Fox News on Sunday, he said it was not a top priority. “Is it No. 1 on my hit list?” he said. “No. It’s not really.”

He added, “It’d be a great achievement.”

The administration sent notice to Congress on Monday that NASA was abolishing the Office of the Chief Scientist and the Office of Technology, Policy and Strategy….

(5) FANS REACT TO NEW YASSIFIED SHREK. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Hey, sometimes an ogre of a certain age just needs a bit of, shall we say, touch-up, to feel and look their best. “Did Shrek Get a Nose Job?” asks New York Magazine.

Shrek might live in Far Far Away, but he looks like he just came back from somewhere even Farther Away: Turkey. In a newly released trailer for the highly anticipated Shrek 5, Shrek, Fiona, and their daughter (voiced by Zendaya), and Donkey all gather to scroll through ogre-thirst-trap memes with mister Mirror Mirror on the Wall. There’s no time to discuss how on the nose this is, because Shrek and Fiona have visibly undergone radical, off-putting facial reconstruction. I don’t care that these ogres are a mere amalgamation of zeros and ones inside some DreamWorks animator’s computer. This is serious.

Donkey somehow looks the same level of goofy as before, but Shrek’s and Fiona’s new faces are … jarring. Their noses are shaped differently, their philtrums are less pronounced and longer, their lips and smiles curve in odd ways, and both of them have seemingly larger eyes. It’s like they both got processed through Alix Earle’s favorite TikTok smoothing filter, or as one user on X wrote: “rhinoplasty, lip filler, cheek implants, jaw shave, chin reduction, face lift, blepharoplasty, buccal fat removal, botox, eye lift, cheek filler.”…

(6) DOCUMENTARY TRACKS THE LAST OF STAN LEE. [Item by N.] The framing here seems similar to Abraham Riesman’s nonfiction book True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee (nominated for Related Work in 2022). Will this bring the situation to a wider audience? “Stan Lee Doc Alleges Exploitation in Final Years of His Life” at IndieWire.

A new documentary on Marvel Comics co-creator Stan Lee claims that Lee was mistreated and exploited by some of those in his inner circle during the last few years of his life.

Jon Bolerjack, a comic book artist and a former assistant to Lee during the last four years of Lee’s life, filmed the documentary and on Tuesday launched a Kickstarter campaign looking for funding to complete the film, titled “Stan Lee: The Final Chapter.” In a trailer for the movie, Bolerjack says Lee spent “his final years enduring mistreatment, manipulation, and betrayal at the hands of a few very bad actors.”

At this writing, the Kickstarter has raised $29,079 of its $300,000 goal.

Bolerjack says the film includes interviews with other witnesses close to Lee and with comic book creators like Rob Liefeld and Roy Thomas. It also concludes with a string of interviews with other comic book artists who have seen an early cut of the footage discussing what they say are some of the shocking details.

“Seeing Stan in that situation, being taken advantage of, was really hard to watch,” artist Tyler Kirkham says in the trailer.

“I had no idea how badly he had been exploited, and that’s a message people need to hear,” comic book writer Mark Waid added.

Lee, who passed away in 2018 at age 95, was the subject of an investigation from THR shortly before his death in which it was claimed that he was the victim of elder abuse and had other individuals improperly influencing his family members and worked to gain control of his assets and money. Lee’s estate in 2023 lost an elder abuse lawsuit on a technicality against a former attorney, but Bolerjack’s documentary claims to explore other aspects of Lee’s exploitation.

The trailer for the documentary does not name any individuals specifically, but it has several sequences involving Max Anderson, Lee’s former road manager for many of his convention appearances. Anderson was named in THR’s 2018 investigation, though he has denied wrongdoing…

(7) WHEN THE WICKED WITCH LANDED ON SESAME STREET. The Wikipedia explains why you probably haven’t seen “Episode 847”.

Episode 847 (commonly known as the “Wicked Witch episode“) is the 52nd episode from the seventh season of the American educational children’s television series Sesame Street. It was directed by Robert Myhrum and written by Joseph A. Bailey, Judy Freudberg and Emily Kingsley, it originally aired on PBS on February 10, 1976. The episode involves the Wicked Witch of the West, from the film The Wizard of Oz (1939), losing her broomstick over Sesame Street and causing havoc as she attempts to recover it. Margaret Hamilton, who portrayed the witch in the film, reprises her role in the episode. Produced as the 52nd episode of the series’ seventh season, the episode was created to teach children how to overcome their fears.

Shortly after its premiere, the creators of the series and Children’s Television Workshop received numerous letters from angry parents, who said that the Wicked Witch had frightened their children. Due to this, the episode was pulled from rebroadcast and was not seen by the public again until 2019, when clips of the episode were shown during a “Lost and Found” event celebrating Sesame Street’s 50th anniversary and the full episode was archived in the Library of Congress. It was then only available for private viewing until June 2022, when it was leaked online by an unknown individual.

Scribbles To Screen is one of the YouTubers who have analyzed the episode: “Wicked Witch Sesame Street Episode Found”.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

March 11, 1952 – Douglas Adams. (Died 2001.)

By Paul Weimer: Douglas Adams is an author who competes with the equally late Terry Pratchett as the greatest humorist in science fiction and fantasy history. 

I think of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy as a sort of ever being re-written palimpsest. You have surely heard the stories that Adams was writing some of the original radio scripts right before the actual BBC broadcast. While this shows his ability to produce on the cutting edge of a deadline, it does mean that the polish wasn’t there. But the genius, secret of Adams was that he could write, and rewrite his work, changing it, tweaking it, altering it, reflecting it. 

The core story is always there. An ordinary human (or at least he starts ordinary), Arthur Dent, winds up on an adventure in time and space when his house, and then his planet are scheduled for demolition. The details change from iteration to iteration, from radio plays, to novels, to the TV series, to the video game (one of the hardest Infocom games!  That damned Babel fish!) to the movie. But the main throughline is the same. A humorous irrepressible set of characters, situations and ideas that he continually and enthusiastically refined and refined.  Just like Greek Mythology is not a monolith, neither is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

A person who hated and despised me in High School had exactly one thing in common with me–we were perhaps the only two people in the entire school who knew what a Vogon was. I had seen the TV show first, then read the novel, then played the game, and then only some years later when they came available on the internet, actually got to listen to the versions of the radio plays and learned the real story. I remember being upset at the changes, but have mellowed and come to see the genius of his endless reinvention and updating of the material. 

And then there was Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, which is such a weird and unusual bird of an idea, and it was born, as it were, from the unfinished Doctor Who episode “Shada” that he wrote.  (Yes, he wrote two of my favorite DW episodes, “The Pirate Planet” and “City of Death”. “Shada” would have been his second).  Ghosts, time travel, changing history, and wry British humor.  And of course, in Adams fashion, there are TV and audio adaptations of Dirk Gently, where, again, the work is changed, refined, and the palimpsest nature of his writing and humor and creations comes to light again. 

Thinking of his work, in any of its iterations, always brings to me a smile. He died in 2001. Requiescat in pace. I raise a Pangalactic gargle blaster to you, good sir.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

• Speed Bump tests serums
• Strange Brew looks beyond the lone prairie.
• Thatababy must have borrowed some of that serum.
• A New Yorker cartoon introduces a bummed out time travler.
• Bizarro shows a rescue.

(10) DAVID EHRLICH TAKEDOWN. “’The Electric State’ Review: Another Lifeless Netflix Mockbuster” accuses IndieWire’s critic David Ehrlich.

Whatever your expectations for a (supposedly) $320 million Russo brothers Netflix movie starring Chris Pratt as a Chris Pratt type, Millie Bobby Brown as a wannabe Edward Furlong, and Woody Harrelson as the voice of an animatronic Mr. Peanut, I would recommend that you lower them.

A derivative, self-impressed, and seriously confused adventure set in the aftermath of a global war between humans and the talking robots that were “invented” by Walt Disney to amuse tourists at his theme parks (suck it, William Grey Walter!), “The Electric State” is essentially a feature-length adaptation of the argument its directors have been making in the press since “Avengers: Endgame,” the scale and success of which seemed to convince them it was the ultimate film in every sense of the word, and thus inspired them to proselytize about how cinema as we know it is about to be replaced by AI holograms of Tom Cruise or whatever. …

… Truth be told, there isn’t a single laugh — or even a knowing smile — to be found in this relentlessly stale ordeal, which does for sci-fi adventure comedies what “The Gray Man” did for action thrillers: absolutely nothing….

(11) GRRM CAMEO. Did you catch these George R. R. Martin and Robert Redford cameos in the Season 3 premiere of Dark Winds? “High Stakes Chess feat. George R. R. Martin and Robert Redford!” New episodes premiere Sundays at 9:00 p.m. on AMC and AMC+.

Dark Winds is an American psychological thriller television series created by Graham Roland. Based on the Leaphorn & Chee novel series by Tony Hillerman… Executive producers include Roland, McClarnon, George R. R. Martin and Robert Redford.

(12) ON THE ROAD. And Michael Cassutt, in a “Not-A-Blog Guest Post” tells what he’s doing for GRRM.

This is not your occasional message from George or the minions of Fevre River, but a new addition to the team – I’m Michael Cassutt, writer of fiction, non-fiction, lots of television (TWILIGHT ZONE, MAX HEADROOM, EERIE INDIANA, more recently THE DEAD ZONE and Z-NATION).  Since October I’ve been working with George as his “creative director,” helping to shape and advance non-HBO TV, film and game projects and even some publishing. (No, I’m not “helping” George with his writing.)

Last spring and early summer I directed a short film titled THE SUMMER MACHINE, based on a lost TWILIGHT ZONE TV concept by George, from my script. We shot for eight days in Alamagordo and Las Cruces, New Mexico, with a cast led by Lina Esco, Charles Martin Smith and Matt Frewer, and just recently finalized the cut.

This is the fifth film that George has produced, following four adaptations of stories by his great friend Howard Waldrop: NIGHT OF THE COOTERS, HEIRS OF THE PERISPHERE, MARY MARGARET ROAD-GRADER and THE UGLY CHICKENS. Four are complete.

So what do you do with a short film? Theatrical exhibition is always a goal, but difficult for even feature-length projects these days.

Streaming? Yes, but you have a short film, under 40 minutes in length. Where does it fit on Netflix, Amazon, Apple+ etc.? Almost nowhere.

But you want your film seen, so . . . .

You hit the festival circuit….

(13) STEVE VERTLIEB Q&A. Interfleet Broadcasting brings viewers “75 Years Of Cherished Reflections And Memories From A Nearly 80 Year Old ‘Monster Kid’”. Steve’s segment begins 48 minutes into the video. Originally aired on Leap Day last year.

Join us for an interview with actor writer and Film Journalist Steve Vertlieb. He has spent most of his life around film makers!. John 1 hosts with the Tipsy Toaster since NY Pete is exploring and trying to find his way. Tiny Bean is also on Deck that is if those pesky internet people fix the lines after an Arcta class storm.” I was both honored and humbled on February 29th, 2024 to do a ninety-minute interview with the folks at Interfleet Broadcasting that I hope you’ll find interesting. We discuss Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror Films and Literature, as well as Ray Harryhausen, Ray Bradbury, “King Kong,” Boris Karloff, Robert Bloch, Peter Cushing, Buster Crabbe, Frank Sinatra, the early years of television, and the history of Music for the Movies, with such composers as Bernard Herrmann, Miklos Rozsa, and John Williams. I’d like to thank the hosts of the program for their most gracious kindness toward me. You’ll find the interview some forty-eight minutes into the broadcast.

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, N., Steve Vertlieb, John A Arkansawyer, Justin T. O’Conor Sloane, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, and Teddy Harvia for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel “Good, Bester, Best!” Dern.]