(1) CLARKE AWARD SUBMISSION LIST. The complete list of eligible books received by Arthur C. Clarke Award judges has been posted in “Carbon-Based Bipeds: Apr 22nd”. This year the judges received 117 eligible titles from 50 UK publishing imprints and independent authors.
(2) PEN AMERICA MAKES LITERARY AWARDS DECISIONS. “PEN America Cancels 2024 Literary Awards Ceremony” reports Publishers Weekly.
PEN America has canceled its 2024 Literary Awards ceremony, which was previously scheduled to be held at the Town Hall in New York City on April 29, although some awards will still be conferred. The move follows months of steadily mounting criticism of the organization over its response to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, which culminated last week in 28 authors withdrawing books from consideration for the awards, including nine of the 10 authors nominated for the organization’s top prize, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award.
“We greatly respect that writers have followed their consciences, whether they chose to remain as nominees in their respective categories or not,” PEN America literary programming chief officer Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf said in a statement. “We regret that this unprecedented situation has taken away the spotlight from the extraordinary work selected by esteemed, insightful and hard-working judges across all categories. As an organization dedicated to freedom of expression and writers, our commitment to recognizing and honoring outstanding authors and the literary community is steadfast.”
The $75,000 prize accompanying the PEN/Stein award will be donated, this year, to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund at the direction of the Literary Estate of Jean Stein….
The five finalists and winning titles for each of the more than 20 awards conferred by PEN America had already been selected by judges during deliberations held before the mass withdrawals, the organization said in a statement. As a result, the organization continued, the two winners who remained under consideration for their awards will receive their cash prizes. Those include Countries of Origin by Javier Fuentes (Pantheon), which was chosen to win the $10,000 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, and The Blue House: Collected Works of Tomas Tranströmer by the late Tomas Tranströmer, translated from the Swedish by Patty Crane (Copper Canyon Press), which was chosen to win the $3,000 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.
No winners will be announced if the winning title was withdrawn from consideration for the award,…
(3) CLARION WORKSHOP 2024. The Clarion Workshop at UCSD has announced the Clarion class of 2024:
The Clarion Workshop at UCSD also plans to bring back the Write-A-Thon this year.
Last summer we saw enormous success in our Indiegogo fundraising campaign, but we also missed joining in writerly solidarity with the larger Clarion community. That’s why we’re returning to our roots–but we’re also hoping to shake things up a little (more news on this soon!)
As always, this year’s Thon will run concurrently with the workshop (June 23 to Aug 3) to help Clarion raise scholarship money to support future students. The Write-a-Thon also helps participants commit to writing goals for the summer.
We’ll include more details for how to participate and contribute in our next newsletter. In the meantime, it’s time to start thinking about your writing goals for the summer. We can’t wait to hear more about them!
(4) THE X-MAN AND THE WHY-MAN. Deadline shares “’Deadpool and Wolverine’ Trailer”. Deadpool & Wolverine is set to arrive in theaters on July 26. Ryan Reynolds is Deadpool, and Hugh Jackman reprises his role of Wolverine in the Marvel film.
(5) READERS TAKE DENVER, AUTHORS GIVE IT BACK. [Item by Anne Marble.] On Threads, there are a lot of upset posts about Readers Take Denver — an event for authors and readers. If you see “RTD” trending, that’s why. This weekend, it was one of the top trending items on Threads. On Twitter, the Readers Take Denver posts were mostly positive — until later on Sunday. (On Twitter, if you search for RTD, you get mainly posts about Russell T Davies of Dr. Who, so I had a hard time finding information at first.) Here are some newer Twitter posts taking on the event:
On Threads, there are so many posts that “RTD” got its own tag on Threads: tag on Threads (registration required).
Here is a good starting place on Threads (registration not required): @charlottedaeauthor: “After scouring Threads for information regarding Readers Take Denver, here’s what I’m gathering”.
This Thread also has details: @storiesdontcare “Readers Take Denver is an absolute logistical atrocity. $300 for a ticket”.
How influencers were treated: @authorncaceres “Influencers received different treatment. 1st they were told not to film anywhere. Then they were…”.
There were also accessibility issues: @rinkrat702 “Readers take Denver. Accessibility: me when I signed up. ‘I’d love to be on the ADA team’”.
It’s mostly a romance event, but it included romantasy authors — including big names such as Rebecca Yarros (“Fourth Wing”). There was also a day for thriller authors, including Jason Pinter and Mark Greaney. It sounds as if the organizers got way in over their heads. They had something like 3,000 attendees. And a huge list of authors (“Attending Authors / Narrators – Readers Take Denver”). Many think they aimed too high and ended up with a logistical nightmare.
There are allegations that the registration line took 3 hours — Also, signing lines took a very long time as well — too many authors in a small space without enough time allotted for the event. Authors are alleging that items were stolen from them (such as boxes of books). I’ve read about at least one case where an author’s books were accidentally given away as “swag.”
Also, the organizers apparently ran out of lanyards (!) and swag bags. And they didn’t have enough bottled water for the authors. Many readers enjoyed the event and had no issues, but other readers felt that they were ripped off.
It sounds like they needed better security, too. Later on Sunday, sexual assault allegations emerged. Several men attending another event entered RTD (despite having no badges) and groped women at RTD.
(6) SOFANAUTS LAUNCHES. Tony Smith hosts a new podcast — Sofanauts. He says the podcast mixes science fiction and technology. Two episodes are already available.
…Each week I’ll be joined by futurist, educator, speaker and writer Bryan Alexander (Thursdays) to talk about science fiction and technology. We’ll be discussing our favourite books, movies, and TV shows, as well as the latest technological developments that are shaping the future from the the very books, films and TV shows we’ve watched and read over the years….
(7) RAY GARTON (1962-2024). [Item by Anne Marble.] Horror author Ray Garton passed away on April 21. The announcement came from Dawn Garton on his Facebook page:
On April 9, 2024, he had posted on Facebook that he was in the hospital with stage 4 lung cancer.
Garton was named a World Horror Convention Grand Master in 2006.
Among others, Stephen King posted about his death:
A GoFundMe was started earlier in April by a family friend. “Ray Garton~Beloved Master of Horror”.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born April 22, 1937 — Jack Nicholson, 87. My all-time must watch again performance by Jack Nicholson is that of him playing Daryl Van Horne in The Witches of Eastwick. I’ve refused to watch any of the later versions of The Witches of Eastwick simply because I can’t picture anyone else being that character.
Bill Murray had been cast in the role had dropped out before even preliminary filming began. Jack Nicholson expressed interest in playing the role of Daryl to the producers through his then-girlfriend Anjelica Huston who was then being seriously considered for a role there. (Apparently the role Susan Sarandon got according to several sites.) So thus we got The Devil in the form of him. Brilliant role.
Now his first role in the genre was in The Little Shop of Horrors, the true one of course, not the latter one, as Wilbur Force, The Dentist. Because Corman did not believe that The Little Shop of Horrors had any chance of making money at all after its first run, he did not bother to copyright it, resulting in the film entering public domain immediately, so I can show you this scene with him in that role.
His next film, another Roger Corman affair, The Raven, was better known forc who he was performing with than for him being in it, those performers being Vincent Price, Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff. He played Lorre’s son, Rexford Bedlo. Poe’s “The Raven” poem was very, very faintly the basis of this film. Think a drop of blood in a gallon of water.
He’s Andre Duvalier in The Terror. Here he’s a French officer who is seduced by a woman who is also a shapeshifting devil.
Now we come to what critics consider his best performance of all time, that of Jack Torrance in The Shining based off King’s novel which was produced and directed by Kubrick who co-wrote it with Diane Johnson. Look I can’t judge his role there as I do not do horror of that sort, so it’s up to the collective wisdom here to tell me how he was there. Go ahead, tell me.
Now I did see Batman. Several times. And yes, I like it a lot. And yes, I thought he made a most excellent Joker. And one of the best Jack Napiers as well, a role that is even harder to get right. (The animated B:TAS series did so by showing him smartly dressed and grinning evilly but not speaking after committing a cold blooded murder. They’d refer to him several times over the series and in The Mark of The Phantasm film which I highly recommend.) So it was a very good role for him.
In Wolf, he was Will Randall. A middle-aged chief editor who hits a wolf with his car who is actually a werewolf who bites him. A Very Bad Idea Indeed. He chews a lot of scenery here. A lot. And he can, as we saw in Batman, chew scenery really, really well. Actually he did so in The Witches of Eastwick brilliantly as well.
Finally there’s Tim Burton’s LoneStarCon 2 Hugo-nominated Mars Attacks! where he plays two roles, President James Dale and Art Land. I’ll be damn if I remember the latter role now nearly thirty years on after seeing it. One moment… Oh I see, he was the Galaxy Casino owner. No, that still didn’t help. The President James Dale character was fascinating if only as for being a much less in your face role than some of his other genre roles such as those of The Shining, Batman, and Wolf.
(9) COMICS SECTION.
- Free Range delivers a strict ruling.
- Nancy demonstrates scene changes.
- Non Sequitur suckers us into visiting a tourist attraction.
- Off the Mark hosts a nice meetup for Earth Day.
- Reality Check suggests an encounter will end badly for a fairy tale figure.
- Speed Bump is very meta about this search for a missing someone.
- The Argyle Sweater features a fashion maven’s ancestor.
- Rhymes with Orange has prevention worries.
(10) TEDDY HARVIA CARTOON. Another of Teddy’s Belphegor cartoons. “I must have sold my soul to the Devil to come up with such funny stuff.”
(11) X MARKS A LOT OF SPOTS. Check out the first half of Scott Koblish’s connecting cover that run across four upcoming X-Men titles: X-Men #35 (Legacy #700), X-Men #1, Uncanny X-Men #1, and Exceptional X-Men #1. (Click for larger image – though still might not see a lot of detail.)
It’s a great time to be an X-Men fan! In addition to their animated resurgence in Marvel Studios’ X-Men ’97, the X-Men’s comic book line is closing out its’ revolutionary Krakoan age of storytelling AND gearing up for the exciting all-new From the Ashes era this summer! To celebrate this iconic franchise’s recent milestone, acclaimed artist Scott Koblish has crafted an insanely epic connecting cover that will grace some of the most highly-anticipated upcoming X-Men comic releases….
Showcasing the entirety of the X-Men’s 60-year publication history, including core X-Men series as well as spinoffs and limited series, this breathtaking group shot spotlights A-List X-Men, obscure mutants, super villains, allies, super hero guest stars, and much more. Test your knowledge of the mutant mythos by finding your favorites and identifying as many characters as you can! For more information, visit Marvel.com.
(12) ASTEROIDS QUIZ. Brick Barrientos’ “Asteroids One-Day Special” went live on April 15. He says “Rich Horton was among my playtesters.” Here is the link to the quiz: https://www.learnedleague.com/oneday.php?5701.
The first question has audio which can only be heard by Learned League members – but you can eavesdrop on the copy hosted at Brick’s Google Drive:
1. What astronomer and composer of this piece first suggested the term “asteroid”, just after the discovery of Pallas, the next body discovered after Ceres? Although at that time, the term was intended to apply also to the moons; objects with a star-like point appearance.
(13) NOW, VOYAGER. [Item by PJ Evans.] In far-out news, Voyager 1 seems to be communicating again: “NASA’s Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth”.
…For the first time since November, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems. The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again. The probe and its twin, Voyager 2, are the only spacecraft to ever fly in interstellar space (the space between stars)….
…The team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory — including some of the FDS computer’s software code — isn’t working. The loss of that code rendered the science and engineering data unusable. Unable to repair the chip, the team decided to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. But no single location is large enough to hold the section of code in its entirety.
So they devised a plan to divide the affected code into sections and store those sections in different places in the FDS. To make this plan work, they also needed to adjust those code sections to ensure, for example, that they all still function as a whole….
(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. It’s a tight one. “Most awkward moments in superhero filming”.
Great power comes with… a painful costumes. Today, it’s about the unavoidable pain of being a superhero.
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, JJ, Anne Marble, Kathy Sullivan, Brick Barrientos, Teddy Harvia, 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 Cat Eldridge.]
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First!!!
13) Yeah!!! Not just ET Phones home.
(0) I would have thought the pixel walked through files…
(2) Sounds like a good decision.
(5) Argh. I am instantly reminded of the first Star Trek con. The one where they had Ticketmaster selling tickets… or as the cover of the zine about it, which I think was early Phil Foglio, had it, “ABANDON CON!”
(13) FAR THE FUCK OUT!!! “And a toast to the engineers who never leave the ground”.
(14) Sorry, but that’s all literally insane. And I have a lot of issues with it. For one, most superhero origin stories have them MAKING THEIR OWN COSTUMES. And no, I don’t believe Ma Kent made that, nor that she’d have expected Clark to wear it. And… I mean, really, Peter Parker made that himself?
ouch (That was my suspenders of disbelief snapping painfully.)
(5) I’ve read about some book events that went south, but this one went so far south that it ended up on the Kerguelen Islands — or perhaps in Antarctica.
As an explanation of how well this is going, the author who organized the event posted a statement that called the incident “bumpy bumps.” What the front lawn?!
In another statement, the organizer tried to place blame for some of the signing issues on Rebecca Yarros (yes, the author of “Fourth Wing” and one of their main guests). Very icky behavior.
So Yarros posted a detailed statement just an hour ago. Her statement is very open and honest — what a concept. Also, multiple verbal shots were fired in that statement.
https://www.facebook.com/authorrebecca.yarros/posts/pfbid0TdaM7S7QT1saTPnTrx8LFz77UPyey1APubqtPmNEQ67u71QouMrpXWGcB2ytWzyRl
What a “merde show.”
(7) Ray Garton wrote an essay about encountering Stephen King’s “Carrie” as a child in “an insular Christian sect.”
http://www.stephenkingrevisited.com/king-carrie-and-a-religious-revelation-by-ray-garton/
14) I always thought one of the greatest ideas in comics was in an early issue of Flash (Barry Allen version) where it was revealed there was a special tailor shop that designed and created the snazzy costumes for Flash’s many villains.
There are also, of course, the “off the shelf” costumes worn by some heroes and villains, with perhaps one or two particular items to distinguish it from ordinary street clothing. The Question, Phantom Stranger, The Spirit, Iron Munro, etc., all come to mind. And there’s Wild Dog, who cobbled his costume together largely from sports clothing and equipment. (Wild Dog’s hero-mobile was a pickup; a real “common-man” hero.)
mark said:
My first thought reading the title was that it referenced Robert Heinlein’s The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. The cat’s name is Pixel.
(8) Jack co-starred with Michelle Pfeiffer in both Wolf and The Witches of Eastwick. I went to school (7th-9th grades) with Michelle, so I was a big fan, and loved Jack in both, as well as some of the others mentioned. It’s been ages since I saw The Shining, but I’d read the book first, and while it was a horror movie, and I don’t care for horror anymore*, it wasn’t scary enough, in my opinion, to keep me from watching it.
*I used to be a huge Stephen King fan, and read everything I could, until Pet Sematary (yes it’s spelled that way) sort of freaked me out. Then Thinner made me quit reading him, as I couldn’t take it anymore.
(8) I quite like this fan-made trailer for that Jack Nicholson movie.
(13) it’s great to see the heroic work that’s going on to keep this project alive.
8) One of the screenwriters for Wolf was Jim Harrison, author of Wolf (no connection to the movie), Dalva, The Theory and Practice of Rivers, etc.. Early in Harrison’s career Nicholson, who had become friends with Harrison after being introduced by Tom McGuane, came to Harrison’s aid and gave him enough money to be able to take the time to write his novella Legends of the Fall. I imagine Harrison working on this screenplay was, to an extent, him returning the favor
After a party in which Harrison (a legendary gourmand) had fed his guests to the point of bursting, Nicholson advised him that “Only in the Midwest is overeating still considered an act of heroism.” As a Michigander, I can confirm this statement.
Arbysmom says My first thought reading the title was that it referenced Robert Heinlein’s The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. The cat’s name is Pixel.
Of course it is. Isn’t Heinlen’s Universe actually a Multiverse? So why would a Pixel not encounter more Pixels? Indeed infinite Pixels? Is it the same Pixel that comes back through the wall or is it a different Pixel?
I think I should stop now and eat chocolate.
Mm re Jack Nicholson, for moi, his ultimate scene is in The Shining. With a terrified Shelley D on the other side of that door, he uses an axe (“here’s Johnny!”) to break down the partition.. Indeed quite recently I’m told that that prop axe was sold in an auction..[ Wonders/thinks: how much is my stuff from The Prisoner (TV: 1967-8) or from The Wicker Man (Film: 1973) worth..mmm!! ] Best and BCNU!!
5) Wow. Just…wow.
Here’s a question for the etymologists amongst us: Is the computer term “pixel” from Heinlein’s eponymous cat, or is the cat named after the discrete point of light? Which came first?
(14) What’s with the bizarre grammar in the voiceover for this video? Is it a computer voice reading an AI-written script?
Sorry I gave it a click, if so.
According to Wikipedia, the first published use of pixel was in 1965, “by Frederic C. Billingsley of JPL, to describe the picture elements of scanned images from space probes to the Moon and Mars.” I have a graphics textbook from 1982 that describes it as a shortened version of picture element. Sometimes also shortened to pel, although that isn’t as fun to say.
CatE: Unless WWIII is about to be started, and you can stop it by DOING SOMETHING, stopping and eating chocolate is always a good choice.