(0) I’m off to attend a college ceremony my daughter’s featured in, so today’s Scroll is a little light. Add in the comments anything else I should have included!

(1) PHILIP PULLMAN ON RADIO 4. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Philip Pullman was on Tuesday’s BBC Radio 4’s World At One news programme talking about his final Dust book. No spoilers, but it is about imagination.

Plus, Sir Philip Pullman gives us his only interview about the final book of the His Dark Materials series.

The 45 minute programme is here but you need to go to 5 minutes before the end as it’s the last item.

(2) TUNNEL VISION. James Davis Nicoll invites fans to dig into “Five SFF Novels Featuring Tunnels” at Reactor. Here’s one of his recommendations.

Above by Leah Bobet (2011)

Deep beneath Toronto’s streets, mutants thrive. Or at least, survive. The so-called Beasts who live in Safe each have their own special gifts. Some control electricity; some can converse with ghosts; one can even become a bee when she wills it so. Few would be welcomed if they were foolish enough to leave Safe for the surface world. So history says, and Matthew the Teller would never doubt what he has been taught.

An exile’s return brings violence and calamity to once-safe Safe. As Shadows invade, Matthew is forced to flee. Trapped on the surface, Matthew learns that the truth is more complicated than he knew.

I don’t think that the name “Toronto” ever appears in the novel’s text, but the descriptions and the street names strongly suggest a Toronto setting. So does the cover, although I suppose that could be any Canadian city with a CN Tower⁴.

(3) AS CLEAR AS IS THE SUMMER SUN. Kayla Allen and Linda Deneroff say they have “concluded that Westercon simply doesn’t have enough interest anymore, and rather than just have it fizzle out completely, we should try to organize an orderly shutdown by repealing the Bylaws and handing the convention’s ‘charter’ back to LASFS.” They are submitting this motion to the Westercon Business Meeting being held at BayCon in Santa Clara this year.

Short Title: Retire Westercon

Moved, to repeal the Westercon Bylaws.

Provided, That any Westercon selected under the current Bylaws at the conclusion of the Westercon where this motion is ratified shall be held and such Westercons shall be bound by those portions of Article 1 applicable to the convention. Such Westercons shall not conduct a Business Meeting or a Site Selection.

Proposed by: Kayla Allen, Linda Deneroff

Discussion: If the consensus is that Westercon no longer has a purpose and should retire, the most orderly way to do so would be for the members of Westercon to vote to repeal its own bylaws. This would have the effect of “handing in the charter” to the owner of the Westercon service mark, LASFS. The LASFS could then decide what it wanted to do with Westercon, which could include abandoning the service mark so that anyone who wished to do so could hold their own convention under the name “Westercon.”

Amendments to the Bylaws take effect as of the end of the Westercon where they are ratified. A motion to Repeal the Bylaws is similar to an amendment; therefore, if this motion is passed by the Westercon 77 Business Meeting in 2025 and ratified by the Westercon 78 Business Meeting in 2026, the Bylaws are repealed as of the end of Westercon 78. However, this motion provides that should sites be selected for Westercon 79 and 80, those two conventions shall still be held, but they will not conduct Site Selection or host a Business Meeting. As of the conclusion of Westercon 80, there will be no future sites selected for Westercon. LASFS, as owner of the Westercon service mark, could decide what to do with the name. They could abandon it, sell it, form a new convention, apply it to an existing convention, or otherwise dispose of it as they wish.

(4) GOOD GRIEF. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more unappealing book cover. Unfortunately, it’s All Systems Red’s new ebook cover.

(5) BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD. NPR discovered a “UFO ‘watchtower’ in Colorado that started as a joke now draws thousands per year”.

Some cattle ranchers opened a UFO “watchtower” 25 years ago in a remote Colorado valley to make some extra money. Now it draws about 10,000 visitors a year and made one who started it a believer….

DAN BOYCE, BYLINE: The San Luis Valley is a vast, high desert plain ringed by sweeping mountain ranges. It’s just a little bit smaller than the state of New Jersey, but only about 50,000 people live here. And back in the late ’90s, Judy Messoline and her partner were out here barely getting by raising their 75 cows.

JUDY MESSOLINE: They don’t eat sand real well, ’bout broke us from having to buy the hay for them.

BOYCE: They weren’t sure what they were going to do.

MESSOLINE: And one of the farmers came in one day and he said, you know what? You need to put up that UFO watchtower you giggled about. You’d have fun…

… Beside the highway, a green alien made of sheet metal points the way….

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

April 30, 1973 — Naomi Novik, 52.

By Paul Weimer: It begins with Dragons, of course. Unsurprising to be sure.

The high concept of Temeraire…Napoleonic Wars with Dragons, drew me to that series immediately. How could I resist a logline like that. While I eventually was a little disappointed in how little alternate historical content there was in the series (history trending toward ours, even with Dragons, always felt to me like a missed opportunity), the Dragons themselves always captivated and excited me. It’s still a high concept with legs, and the many varieties and personalities of the various dragons in the series helped to keep me reading book after book in the series. And even as recent as last year, it still spawns books set in the Napoleonic era with magic of various kinds. Magicians with the Napoleonic Wars. Vampires with the Napoleonic Wars. Magical Romance with the Napoleonic Wars. Temeraire helped birth and nurture an entire host of sub-sub-genres. The long simmering interest in the period and its genre-adjacent nature was dragged forever into the SFF orbit thereby. Dragons and Napoleonic Wars. What a concept.

But Naomi Novik is far more than Dragons, even if Uprooted has a very different Dragon, it is much more in the mold of a fairy tale. Spinning Silver, of course, showed me that Novik could go full on fairy tale and make it stick and make it real and make it gorgeous. It’s diametrically different in tone and writing than the Temeraire books, and yet, indubitably her work. 

The Scholomance books, however, I truly and complete appreciate. After the awful taste in my mouth by a certain broken step of a billionaire author, I admit that I a bit hesitant to go for another magical school book, even from Novik. Could Novik actually help redeem the sub-sub-genre for me? I waited a bit on A Deadly Education, first in the series. The poisoned tree of the sub-sub-genre after all. And could the book escape the shadow of its huge predecessor? It turns out to be absolutely yes, by having older protagonists, and a literally feral feel to the titular school. 

This is not a happy school of light magic, hijinks and camaraderie, but a deadly proving ground that getting out of is not as easy as you think. There are hungry things in the school, deadly competition from fellow students, and the school itself might be trying to eat you and your tasty magic. The whole idea of young magicians drawing all sorts of nasty in their broadcasting reminds me a bit of how magic works in the Stross Laundry Files verse and those books may have colored my perception a bit of the Scholomance as an institution. 

And of course, by the third book, once out, our protagonist has to do something even harder and El must find a way back into the deadly school. It is a neat circular path from the first book and it completes the series very nicely. 

Magical Schools are viable again (c.f. The more recent and forthcoming The Incandescent by Emily Tesh) but I maintain that it is Novik’s series that has helped pull it out of the much of the aforementioned billionaire’s grasp and given new and recent models for magical schools (not to forget older models such as Diane Duane of course).  

The forthcoming Summer War sounds like another coming of age story from Novik (she is rather practiced and good at them, no?) and I look forward to it.

(7) COMICS SECTION.

• Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee needs the right jolt of power. 
• Eek! finds Doctor Frankenstein surprised at what else his lab can make. 
• Loose Parts defends poetry, but not too warmly. 
• Speckticles has to make do. 

(8) SCALES OF JUSTICE. “Judge Rejects Lawsuit With Dragon Logo, Calling It ‘Juvenile and Impertinent’” reports the New York Times (behind a paywall).

A federal magistrate judge in Michigan called the use of this logo on every page of a lawsuit “distracting.”Dragon Lawyers

A purple dragon dressed in a business suit seemed like a natural choice for a logo when Jacob A. Perrone, a lawyer in East Lansing, Mich., recently opened a new firm and named it Dragon Lawyers.

He noted that some lawyers liked to call themselves “bulldogs” and said the dragon symbolized “aggressive representation.”

But a federal magistrate judge, Ray Kent, was not impressed. He was so disgusted by the dragon that he struck a lawsuit filed by Mr. Perrone on behalf of an inmate who had accused jail officials in Clinton County, Mich., of being “deliberately indifferent” to her when she started vomiting last year.

In a brief order issued on Monday, Judge Kent noted that “each page of plaintiff’s complaint appears on an e-filing which is dominated by a large multicolored cartoon dragon dressed in a suit, presumably because she is represented by the law firm of ‘Dragon Lawyers PC © Award Winning Lawyers.’”

“Use of this dragon cartoon logo is not only distracting, it is juvenile and impertinent,” Judge Kent wrote. “The Court is not a cartoon.”…

… The judge’s order prompted some amusement in legal circles after it was reported by The Volokh Conspiracy blog under the headline, “Exit the Dragon.” Another legal blog, Lowering the Bar, also picked up the story, and commented, “So many things people shouldn’t be doing, so little time.”…

(9) BLOWN UP, SIR. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] The iPhone footage embedded in the story is kind of neat. “Thunderbolts’ Director Released Explosion-Filled Phone Footage From The Making Of The Movie, And Yes, I Am Even More Hyped Now” at CinemaBlend.

…The cast of Thunderbolts* is already strong, with Florence Hugh and Sebastian Stan leading a team of Marvel’s anti-heroes. As with any superhero movie, we can expect lots of amazing digital effects to make the impossible come to life, but what’s exciting about this film is just how much of it was shot practically. Video footage shot on an iPhone by director Jake Schreier and posted to Instagram shows that a lot of the stunts and action were done in camera….

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[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Rich Lynch, N., Lloyd Penney, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, and Kathy Sullivan for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Patrick Morris Miller.]