(1) JEMISIN IN KANSAS. KU’s Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction invites readers to join them on April 25, 2024 for the next “KU Common Book Lecture [VIRTUAL]: An Evening with N.K. Jemisin.” Learn more about the influence of Octavia E. Butler on Jemisin’s work. Register at the link.

The KU Common Book program is coordinated by the KU Libraries, the Hall Center for the Humanities, and the Division of Academic Success. Author N. K. Jemisin will visit campus in April to give the Common Book Lecture. The Common Book for the 2023-24 school year is Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler. Butler, who died in 2006, was influential to the career of Jemisin, a fellow science fiction writer, and Jemisin also wrote the forward to the most recent edition of Parable of the Sower.

(2) PEN AMERICA LITERARY AWARDS UNDER PROTEST. “Amid Mounting Criticism, PEN America Literary Awards In Limbo” reports Publishers Weekly.

Amid growing criticism over its response to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, freedom of expression nonprofit PEN America is facing questions over whether its Literary Awards ceremony, World Voices Festival, and Literary Gala, all scheduled to be held within the next month, can proceed as planned.

Last week, a number of nominees withdrew their books from consideration for PEN awards citing the organization’s response to the war in Gaza. Esther Allen, one of three cofounders of the World Voices Festival, declined this year’s PEN/Ralph Manheim Award for Translation. Since that time, nine of the 10 longlisted authors for this year’s PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, which comes with a $75,000 monetary prize, have withdrawn their books from consideration.

According to the activist organization Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG), a further 20 authors have withdrawn their longlisted books for other PEN awards including the PEN/Robert W. Bingham, PEN/Hemingway, PEN/Robert J. Dau, and PEN/Voelcker awards, as well as the PEN Translation Prize, PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant. The books have since been rounded up in a collection, “2024 PEN America Literary Awards Boycott for Palestine,” curated by WAWOG and currently featured on the homepage of Bookshop.org.

Furthermore, on April 17, 21 authors signed a letter of refusal addressed to the executive board and trustees of PEN America demanding, among other items, the immediate resignations of board president Jennifer Finney Boylan, CEO Suzanne Nossel, and the executive committee. Another nine signatories have pledged to donate prize money to mutual aid funds funds in Gaza. (Iliad translator Emily Wilson, who was not a signatory, also pledged to donate prize money in a tweet this morning.)…

…When contacted for comment, a PEN America administrator told PW that the organization is in touch with authors nominated for this year’s awards, and has paused announcing this year’s awards finalists as it deliberates on how to move forward with the upcoming awards ceremony, which is slated for April 29. The administrator added that the PEN/Jean Stein Award will not be awarded by default to the one remaining longlisted author, as the judging protocol for the award has not been changed in response to the withdrawals.

(3) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to sup on scallops with Arthur Suydam in Episode 223 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

It’s time to take a seat at the table for the first of two dinner conversations which took place during last month’s AwesomeCon in Washington D.C. — starting with Arthur Suydam, whose professional comics career began when he drew a story published in the May 1974 issue of House of Secrets for DC, right around the time my own comics career started at Marvel editing the British reprint line in June. We somehow never encountered each other as we navigated the comic community of the ’70s, and in fact, we never met until the Saturday of our meal.

After a bunch of those horror stories for various DC titles, Suydam moved on to Epic Illustrated, Heavy Metal, and other publications where he could do the kind of painted work most people know him for today, writing and drawing such features Mudwogs, The Adventures of Cholly & Flytrap, and others.

He’s perhaps most well known for his zombie work — which includes dozens of covers for the Marvel Zombie series and spin-offs — which earned him the nickname of “The Zombie King.” In 2008, Marvel even released a hardcover tribute titled Marvel Zombies: The Covers. His artwork has also appeared in such titles as Batman, Conan, Tarzan, Predator, and Aliens, and his cover art was featured on Ghost Rider, Hellstorm, Moon Knight, Wolverine, Marvel Zombies vs. The Army of Darkness, and many others. He’s also provided noir-ish, retro covers for the Hard Case Crime paperback line.

We discussed the way a lengthy hospital stay resulted in him falling in love with comics, what Joe Orlando said to convince him to start his comics career at DC instead of Warren, the permission he was granted upon seeing the ghastly artwork of Graham Ingels, what he learned from dealing with cadavers during his art student days, how Gil Kane hurt his feelings by chewing out his early work, the grief Frank Frazetta got out of dealing with Mad magazine, the way his work for Epic Illustrated made Archie Goodwin squirm, why Marvel teamed him up with Robert Kirkman for its Marvel Zombies project, his reason for avoiding social media like the plague, and much more.

(4) MEET DANGEROUS VISIONS. The new Patton Oswalt and J. Michael Straczynski introductions to the latest edition of Dangerous Visions can be read on Amazon. (The linked sample also includes the Michael Moorcock and Harlan Ellison forewords from the 2002 edition, and Ellison’s intro from the original 1967 edition.)

(5) CAITLIN THOMAS. Deepest condolences to the Thomases who lost their daughter Caitlin yesterday. For those looking to help, a GoFundMe is here.

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born April 18, 1971 — David Tennant, 53. Of the modern Doctor Whos, the one performed by David Tennant is my favorite by far. (It won’t surprise you that Tom Baker is my classic Doctor.) I liked him from the very first time that he appeared, in “The Christmas Invasion”.  (Spoiler alert from here out.) The fact that he won’t finish his transition until he inhales the fumes from a dropped flask of tea. Oh, what a truly British thing to have him do! 

Christopher Eccleston was good but I thought that he didn’t have long enough to fully settle into the role so I felt his character was more of a sketch than a fully developed character. His certainly would have been a better Doctor if he’d decided to stay around, but he didn’t. 

Tennant on the other hand had three series plus some specials, he’d also be the Doctor in a two-part story in Doctor Who spin-off, Sarah Jane Adventures, “The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith”. He got time to settle into his character.  And what a character it was — intelligent, full of humor, sympathetic and just alien enough in his quirkiness to believable that he wasn’t human. 

Oh, and the stories. So, so great. Those along with his companions made for ever so great watching. My favorite companion? Each had their strengths — Rose Tyler, Donna Noble and Martha Jones, all made fine companions in very different ways. 

If I could pick just one story from his run, it’d be “The Unicorn and The Wasp” with Agatha Christie as a character and Donna Noble as the companion. And it was a country manor house mystery! 

Yes, I know he came back as the Fourteenth Doctor. Or will. Not having Disney I’ve no idea which tense applies. I know I could look it up but I’m haven’t and not inclined to subscribe to that service just to watch this series and there’s nothing else there I’m that much interested in. 

It’s certainly not his only genre role,and yes he played several Doctor Who roles before being the Tenth Doctor. He had a role in the BBC’s animated Scream of the Shalka and appeared in several Big Finish Productions. I think I read he played a Time Lord in one of them. 

Now let’s see about his other genre roles… One of my favorite series, Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased), had him  up as Gordon Stylus in the “Drop Dead” episode. The Quatermass Experiment film had him as Dr. Gordon Briscoe. He was in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire as Barty Crouch Jr., a fine performance he gave there.

In How to Train Your Dragon and How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, which I think has awesomely cute animation, he voices Spitelout Jorgenson, a warrior of the Hairy Hooligan Tribe. Need I say more? I think not.  DreamWorks Dragons was another series in which he voiced this character. 

In Star Wars: The Clone Wars, he had a short run there as Huyang. 

Huh. He even voiced a character in a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series, one called Fugitoid, a sort of android figure.

He’s the voice of Dangerous Beans in The Amazing Maurice off Terry Pratchett’s The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents.

The last role I’ll mention is his Jessica Jones one and one that honestly made me not watch the series. No, I’ll not say why as that’d be a major spoiler. He was called Kevin Thompson / Kilgrave. 

(7) COMICS SECTION.

• Thatababy gets into kaiju algebra.
• Tom Gauld might be thinking of Pluto. Or not.

My latest cartoon for @newscientist#science #astrophysics pic.twitter.com/KCV01Lw0G7

— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) April 15, 2024

(8) SUNKEN CHEST. This is not how you expect a superhero to start out looking. Jason Aaron redefines the King of Atlantis in a new Namor comic book series that arrives July 17.

The eight-issue epic will forever reshape the seas and bare the dark history of Atlantis and its fiercest, most infamous defender. Stay tuned for more information.

(9) ONCE IN A LULLABY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Today’s Nature takes us somewhere over the rainbow with an exo-planet: “An exoplanet is wrapped in glory”.

Astronomers spot the first planet outside the Solar System to boast a phenomenon reminiscent of a rainbow.

The rainbow-like phenomenon called a glory (artist’s illustration) appears at the boundary between the day and night sides of the exoplanet WASP-76b.

Primary research here.

(10) BLATAVSKY, LINNAEUS, AND MERMAIDS, AND , OH MU! [Item by Steven French.] Oh, how I long for lost Lemuria! “Like Atlantis, Lemuria Is a Lost Land That Never Existed, But Became So Much Bigger” at Atlas Obscura. Lots of inventive maps at the link.

PHILIP SCLATER SHOULD HAVE STOPPED writing in 1858. That’s when he published one of the foundational texts of biogeography, the science that studies the distribution of species and ecosystems across space and time.

But there was one little primate that didn’t neatly fit into Sclater’s division of the world into six biogeographical realms. He had found fossils of lemurs in both Madagascar and India, even though those places belong to two wholly separate realms. (In today’s biogeographical parlance, those would be the Afrotropical and Indomalayan zones, respectively.)

So he did what other scientists of the day did when faced with similar disconnects: He proposed a vast land bridge that had once linked Madagascar to India. And he gave that hypothetical continent, now swallowed by the Indian Ocean, an appropriate name: Lemuria…

(11) YETI. That’s the mystery creature at the heart of Primevals.

(12) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Daniel Dern.]

From 12 years ago.  “Be sure to watch to the end,” says Dern. “The Best Star Trek Commercial Ever”.

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Kathy Sullivan, Daniel Dern, Scott Edelman, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Steven French for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jan Vanek jr.]