(1) LOOK OUT BELOW. To avoid the chance that the Cassini probe might crash into and contaminate a moon of Saturn, NASA plans to crash it into the planet.
“Cassini’s own discoveries were its demise,” said Earl Maize, an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) who manages the Cassini mission.
Maize was referring to a warm, saltwater ocean that Cassini found hiding beneath the icy crust of Enceladus, a large moon of Saturn that spews water into space. NASA’s probe flew through these curtain-like jets of vapor and ice in October 2015, “tasted” the material, and indirectly discovered the subsurface ocean’s composition — and it’s one that may support alien life.
“We cannot risk an inadvertent contact with that pristine body,” Maize said. “Cassini has got to be put safely away. And since we wanted to stay at Saturn, the only choice was to destroy it in some controlled fashion.”
(2) ON THE AIR. Hear Hugo nominees Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone on Ottawa radio program All in a Day.
(3) MUSICAL HUGOS. Pitchfork makes its case for “Why clipping.’s Hugo Nomination Matters for Music in Science Fiction”.
Earlier this week, Splendor & Misery—the sophomore album by experimental L.A. rap group clipping.—was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form. The Hugo is the highest prize in science fiction/fantasy, granted annually to the genres’ best literature, cinema, television, comics, and visual art. But the awards have never been particularly receptive to music. The last time a musical album was recognized by the Hugos was 1971, when Paul Kantner’s Blows Against the Empire was nominated. The Jefferson Airplane guitarist’s solo debut grandly envisioned a countercultural exodus to outer space, helping set the stage for many more sci-fi concept albums to come, starting with prog-rock’s explosion.
The storyline that winds through Splendor & Misery is just as political as Kantner’s. Set in a dystopian future, the LP revolves around a mutineer among a starship’s slave population, who falls in love with the ship’s computer. This Afrofuturist narrative, as rapped by Daveed Diggs, is matched by a dissonant yet sympathetic soundscape from producers William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes—one that evokes the isolation and complicated passion of the premise. Visually, this arc is represented in Hutson’s cover art: a spaceman with his pressure suit in tatters, revealing bare feet. “It’s a reference to how runaway slaves have been depicted in the U.S. in newspaper announcements and paintings like Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series,” Hutson says.
Diggs is no stranger to awards, having snagged both a Grammy and a Tony for his role in Hamilton, but clipping.’s Hugo nomination is just as profound….
(4) THE ROAD TO HELSINKI. Camestros Felapton begins his review of the nominees with “Hugo 2017: Fanwriter”.
Chunk one: established fan writers: Mike Glyer, Natalie Luhrs, Foz Meadows and Abigail Nussbaum. Chunk two: Jeffro Johnson, the Rabid nominee but one with a track record of informed fan writing on genre issues. Chunk three: the inimitable Dr Tingle. The discussion below is in no particular order.
(5) SF INFILTRATES LIT AWARD. China Miéville’s This Census-Taker is one of eight finalists for the Rathbones Folio Prize, given “to celebrate the best literature of our time, regardless of form.” All books considered for the prize are nominated by the Folio Academy, an international group of esteemed writers and critics. The three judges for the 2017 prize are Ahdaf Soueif (chair), Lucy Hughes-Hallett and Rachel Holmes. The winner will be announced on May 24 at a ceremony at the British Library.
(6) CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD. Filer and board game designer Peer Sylvester has been interviewed by Multiverse.
Q: THE LOST EXPEDITION comes out this year. What can you tell our readers about this board game (without giving too much away?)
PS: Percy Fawcett was arguably the most famous adventurer of his time. In 1925 he set into the Brazilian rainforest with his son and a friend to find El Dorado (which he called “Z”), never to return again. Speculations of his fate were printed in newspapers for years with a movie coming out this year as well.
The players follow his footsteps into the jungle. It’s a cooperative game (you can play two-players head-to-head as well) where you have to manage all the dangers of the jungle and hopefully come back alive. It has a quite unique mechanism that prevents “quarterbacking”, i.e. players dominating everyone else. The game features beautiful art by Garen Ewing. It will be, without doubt, my prettiest game so far. It has a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-Book vibe. But, unlike those books, different dangers come out at different times, so every decision is unique.
(7) GET YOUR KITSCH ON. Submissions for The Kitschies awards have opened and will continue until November 1. File 770 wrote a summary piece about the awards last month.
(8) CHUCK TINGLE’S NEW SITE. Time to troll the pups again!
cant believe that even after last year voxman and bad dogs blues forgot to buy https://t.co/d8mR544g7w guess it is anti-devilman site now
— Chuck Tingle (@ChuckTingle) April 6, 2017
Like last year, the DEVILS were so excited about being DEVILS that they forgot to register important website names of their scoundrel ways. This year they are playing scoundrel pranks again, but now instead of learning about common devilman topics like having a lonesome way or crying about ethics in basement dwelling, this site can be used to PROVE LOVE by helping all with identification of a REVERSE TWIN! …
THE POWER IS YOURS
Never forget, the most powerful way to stop devils and scoundrels in this timeline is to PROVE LOVE EVERY DAY. Use this as a reminder and prove love in some small way in your daily life. Pick up the phone and call your family or friends just to tell them you care about them and that they mean so much to you. Help pick up some trash around your neighborhood. Let someone go ahead of you in line. As REVERSE TWINS pour in from other timelines, we can do our part to make this timeline FULL OF LOVE FOR ALL, and the power to do that is in your hands with every choice that you make! YOU ARE SO POWERFUL AND IMPORTANT, AND YOU ARE THE BEST IN THE WHOLE WORLD AT BEING YOU! USE THIS POWER TO MAKE LOVE REAL!
(9) THIS YEAR’S PUPPY PORN NOMINEE. Meanwhile, io9 discovered Stix Hiscox is a woman: “Meet the Hugo-Nominated Author of Alien Stripper Boned From Behind By the T-Rex”.
So, who is Stix Hiscock? Is he some Chuck Tingle copycat riding on the coattails of scifi porn parody? Some right-wing heterosexual man’s answer to Tingle’s gay erotica, making science fiction great again (with boobs)? Or, better yet, is he Chuck Tingle himself? Turns out, none of the above.
(10) TODAY IN HISTORY
- April 7, 1989: Dystopian brawler Cyborg opens in theaters.
- April 7, 1933: The Eighth Wonder of the World appears to audiences nationwide
(11) CELEBRITY VISITS JIMMY OLSEN. Don Rickles,who passed away yesterday, and his doppelganger once appeared in comics with Superman’s Pal.
(12) CRAM SESSION. There are always 15 things we don’t know. ScreenRant works hard to fill those gaps, as in the case of “15 Things You Didn’t Know About Captain Picard”.
- Captain Picard Loved To Swear
Patrick Stewart is a great actor, but foreign accents are not his strong suit. Captain Picard hails from La Barre, France, yet Patrick Stewart chose to use an English accent for his portrayal of the character. He also used an English accent for Charles Xavier in the X-Men movies (who is American) and Seti in The Prince of Egypt (who is Egyptian). You cannot argue with results, however, and the Star Trek expanded universe has offered a few handwave solutions to why Picard speaks with an English accent. These range from everyone in France adopting the accent when English became a universal language, to him actually speaking in a French accent the whole time, but we hear it as English due to his universal translator.
There were a few instances of Picard’s Frenchness that Patrick Stewart snuck into the dialogue. Captain Picard would occasionally say “merde” when facing a nasty situation. This is the French equivalent to saying “shit” when it is being said in exasperation.
(13) ELEMENTARY. The names of four new elements have been officially approved.
The periodic table just got some new members, as the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry has officially accepted new names for four elements. Element numbers 113, 115, 117 and 118 will no longer be known by their placeholder names, and instead have all-new monikers decided upon by their discoverers.
The discoveries were first recognized about a year ago, and the proposed names for them were decided upon this past June. Now, chemistry’s highest group has decided they are valid and will move forward with the all-new labels.
- Nihonium (Nh), is element 113, and is named for the Japanese word for Japan, which is Nihon.
- Moscovium (Mc), element 115, is named for Moscow.
- Tennessine (Tn), element 117, is named for Tennessee.
- Oganesson (Og), element 118, is named after Yuri Oganessian, honoring the 83-year-old physicist whose team is credited with being the top element hunters in the field.
(14) NOT TED COBBLER. Pratchett fans will remember Jason Ogg, who once shod an ant just to prove he could in fact shoe anything (for which the price was he would shoe anything, including Death’s horse). A Russian artisan actually made a life-size flea with shoes.
In a supersized world, Prague’s Museum of Miniatures thinks small. Very small. In millimetres, in fact.
A short walk from Prague Castle, this odd museum houses wonders invisible to the naked eye. After entering the room filled with microscopes, I found a desert scene of camels and palms inside the eye of a needle, an animal menagerie perched on a mosquito leg and the Lord’s Prayer written on a hair.
(15) DON’T FORGET. Contrary to widely-held theories used in various SF stories, short-term and long-term memories are formed separately.
The US and Japanese team found that the brain “doubles up” by simultaneously making two memories of events.
One is for the here-and-now and the other for a lifetime, they found.
It had been thought that all memories start as a short-term memory and are then slowly converted into a long-term one.
Experts said the findings were surprising, but also beautiful and convincing….
(16) NOTHING BUT HOT AIR. Atmosphere is confirmed on an exoplanet.
Scientists say they have detected an atmosphere around an Earth-like planet for the first time.
They have studied a world known as GJ 1132b, which is 1.4-times the size of our planet and lies 39 light years away.
Their observations suggest that the “super-Earth” is cloaked in a thick layer of gases that are either water or methane or a mixture of both.
The study is published in the Astronomical Journal.
Discovering an atmosphere, and characterising it, is an important step forward in the hunt for life beyond our Solar System.
But it is highly unlikely that this world is habitable: it has a surface temperature of 370C.
(17) QUANTUM BLEEP. If you’re going to be taking part in one of history’s iconic moments, you’d better prepare a speech.
(18) ANIME PRAISED. NPR likes Your Name — not a Studio Ghibli production, but animation direction is by a longtime Ghibli artist: “’Your Name’ Goes There”.
In the charming and soulful Japanese anime Your Name, two teenagers who have never met wake up rattled to discover that they have switched bodies in their sleep, or more precisely their dreams. And it’s not just their anatomies they’ve exchanged, or even the identities-in-progress each has managed to cobble together at such a tender age. Mitsuha, a spirited but restless small-town girl of Miyazaki-type vintage, and Taki, a Tokyo high school boy, have also swapped the country for the city, with all the psychic and cultural adjustments that will entail.
(19) CARTOON OF THE DAY. “Are You Lost in the World Like Me?” is a Max-Fleischer-style cartoon on Vimeo, with music by Moby, which explains what happens to the few people who AREN’T staring at their smartphones all day.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, JJ, Carl Slaughter, Cat Eldridge, Chip Hitchcock, Martin Morse Wooster, Stephen Burridge, Peer Sylvester, and Chip Hitchcock for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Rev. Bob.]
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First, with nothing to say except I’m really looking forward to “Your Name.”
“Have fun scrolling the pixel!”
3) I was just reading a Blastr article on Electric Light Orchestra’s TIME, which probably, back in the day, should have been nominated for a Hugo. It’s still possibly my favorite album of all time…
ticky
Fifth!
@12: I always figured Picard went to some English “public” school, or was taught English by someone who’d grown up with that accent rather than a NorthAmerican one, but I never found out whether that fit the backstory — to the extent that there was a backstory when TNG first came out.
alternative fifth!
[godstalk]
I like to believe that Picard acquired his English accent in his teen years by listening to English pop songs.
Re (9) there’s a comment from a “Stix Hiscock” on Teddy’s slate announcement so either whoever they spoke to is a liar or that was a Teddy sockpuppet to make it seem like he had their support. Either seems equally likely.
popcorn-munching tick
I don’t personally know any French people who speak English without an accent but I’ve known a few Dutch people who do.
While I’m here, who would like to hear a horror story? It has an ending that will really frighten you all…
Once upon a 2017, a foolish meat robot lived in a far away land. He lived in an old house in need of much repair and one day a helpful builder told him to move out while the old house was fixed.
Now the foolish meat robot sought a house to rent but he sought out only the smallest of houses. “I have simple needs,” he said to himself, “A dry roof, warm walls, a humble kitchen and high speed internet.”
But when it came time to pack up ALL his things he realised one flaw in his plan. “Oh, I forgot that I’m a pathological hoarder of books and I actually have mountains of books and even unpacked boxes of books from when I first moved into the old house!”
Luckily, or so he thought, the house he was renting had an old garage at the end of a long driveway. “I can put my stuff in there for the moment!” thought the foolish meat robot, “Just while I sort myself out. I’ll move stuff into the house the first weekend after the move!”
Ah, but it had been a long hot summer, and sure as night follows day, a wet, wet fall must follow a long hot summer. Sure enough, the day after the meat robot moved in, it rained and the day after that and the day after that. It rained for weeks and weeks and weeks. In the end parts of this far away land even had a tropical cyclone and while the meat robot wasn’t anywhere near the path of that cyclone it did mean even more rain for even more days.
Finally, a weekend came which was both dry and sunny. The meat robot walked towards the garage. The ground squelched beneath his feet. Squelch, squelch, squelch. He slowly opened the garage door. He reached down to pick up a cardboard box BUT just as he reached down he could see through the open lid, that the box was overstuffed with 1990’s Vertigo & indie trade paperbacks. The very graphic novels that he’d fully intended to keep in the safe, warm house.
As he went to lift up the box, the bottom of the box gave way. It was sodden.
Graphic novels spilled everywhere – Alan Moore that way, Jamie Delano the other way…
The meat robot reached down gingerly. A copy of Sandman: Seasons of Mist just by his outstretched hand. He picked it up…only to see…
…that it was covered in MOLD!!!!!!!
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And how do I know this spooky tale of fungal infested books be true?
Why, dear reader, that foolish meat robot was….ME ALL ALONG!!!!!!
https://twitter.com/CamestrosF/status/850572102092468224
I’m finding the i09 story about Tingle’s reverse twin very unbelievable. I’m thinking it’s some Devilman no-goodery.
@Camestros — Ohhhhhhhhhhh noooooooooooooo!
I’m so sorry for your loss.
It’s not so much a garage – more of an outpost of Area X from the Southern Reach Trilogy.
@Camestros —
Been there/done that, though probably not on nearly such a dramatic scale!
Tragic! After reading about your loss I have lowered File 770 to half-staff.
Happy birthday (April 8) to Douglas Trumbull. I always had a soft spot for Silent Running and them li’l robots.
(and also to Robin Wright, of Princess Bride and Unbreakable and Toys, and to Patricia Arquette of Medium and Ed Wood)
@Mike: Wow, Thanks for the mention!
@Camestros: Sorry for the loss.
LOL!
So some trade paperback collections of Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing have had to go (although you’d think they’d be able to cope). Three Sandman volumes drying off and maybe salvageable along with (don’t tell Kurt) two volumes of Astro City.
Frank Miller: Dark Knight Returns and Ronin – totally dry and mold free. I think even air born fungi find Miller problematic.
Look after your books everybody!
“Maybe salvageable” is my personal credo.
No Lemmium. 🙁
/sleep-stalk
(4) THE ROAD TO HELSINKI.
…Is paved with soggy paperbacks?
(Sorry Camestros, that’s a genuinely terrifying story!)
(6) CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD
I like a good board game, but I’ve never played anything by Peer (sorry, Peer!) I mostly like cooperative games nowadays, because I either play with my family where skill levels are quite different and we all want to have an equally good time, or with my rpg group where competitive games can get a bit too competitive, so we play the various Cthulhu games or the Pathfinder card game. So The Lost Expedition sounds interesting.
(9) THIS YEAR’S PUPPY PORN NOMINEE
I have to admit to having assumed that this was yet another If you were a Dinosaur… parody thrown up on Amazon by a rabid fan. If VD genuinely just picked it out of the Amazon erotica slushpile because it had “dinosaur” in the title and a juvenile author name…..actually, that’s about his normal level of stupid, isn’t it?
So, if true, the great crusader against us SJWs nominating too many women etc etc….has nominated a woman.
(8) CHUCK TINGLE’S NEW SITE
I think Chuck and Stix need to get together to fight crime.
(13) ELEMENTARY
I’m still bitter about Octarine not getting in….
Still wish Nihonium had been named Godzillium.
Sympathies over the books; I’m still replacing water ruined books from a fire in the walls of my apartment a few years back (when standing across the street, I was thinking “Oh, firemen’s flashlights in my bedroom, that’s not good…and didn’t my bedroom used to have a window? And there’s a hose going in where that window used to be. And that was a chainsaw starting up in there. And they literally just threw one of the smaller bookcases out of where the window used to be….”
@Camestros Felapton: AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!! I told you, I’m not into horror stories! You have my sympathies. We once had a leak that rained down on some long boxes of comics; only some were ruined (yay for bagging & boarding), but it was a sad day, nonetheless. I feel your pain, for it was mine. Sometimes I hate water.
ETA: @Tom Galloway: YIPES! Another horror story – my sympathies to you, too!
P.S. Milestone for the day – I made our plane reservations for Helsinki, with a stopover in Reykjavík along the way. (I had to copy/paste “Reykjavík” to make sure I got it right. Blush.) 😀 We’ve planned what we’ll be doing in Finland (list of items; not specific days/times); next up: planning the Iceland part of the trip. W00T!
I already have a request from someone at work to pick up some tiny tower of syrups in flavors only found in Iceland. The mind boggles at what culinary delights we’ll experience on this trip. 🙂
@Tom Galloway: Gojirium, surely.
An interesting sequel to that Marvel “diversity doesn’t sell” article from a few scrolls ago. From the NY Times:
(The article also notes the Hugo nom for Ms Marvel.)
So, to no-one’s surprise, the original article was BS.
Mark: to no-one’s surprise, the original article was BS.
The original article was accurate. Marvel VP David Gabriel’s comments were the BS. 😐
Sorry to hear that, Camestros. I had some books damaged by a leaky air conditioning unit two years ago, so I feel your pain.
@Camestros,
Nöooooooo!!!
(Sympathies)
Camestros, that brings back the jollity of the water heater drenching the carpet of the room where we kept boxes of books till the bottom boxes lost their structural soundness.
Tom, that brings back coming home to our apartment to a number of small and large differences that eventually added up to, “Oh, we’ve been robbed.”
Kendall, true about the water. It’s like a jealous mistress. “I’ll save your life on a daily basis, and from time to time, I’ll just ruin your best stuff.” Though I’m not sure water was in the same league with small animals and bugs when it came to ruining my parents’ cherished storage items.
Sympathy with everyone. So much harrowing.
@Camestros — I feel your pain. Back in the summer of 1993, when the entire Midwestern US was flooding, the storm drain backed up in my parents’ house. My room was in the basement (although I was away at grad school at the time) and I lost multiple boxes of comics and the bottom shelf or two from multiple bookcases. The worst losses: A complete Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy hardcover that Douglas Adams had just signed for me, and pretty much my entire collection of classic Traveller RPG materials. Sigh. Hoping you can salvage and/or replace as appropriate.
@Cam Yikes.
A friend’s leak of their washer (they had turned it on, and left, and a fault just had it leak and leak) caused the leakage down into the basement, ruining a large collection of books and RPG games (and their poor dogs, down in a kennel/cage down there).
If we’re lucky, Stixhiscock will decide to decline the nomination. Someone needs to tell her that, in the past, that’s been the recipe for getting a lot of people to buy your story.
@ Camestros
Joining the list of people who have experienced similar losses. In my case it was the bookcase under the window that got soaked when we had a cloudburst while our roof gutters were being replaced. But many books remained readable!!
Thanks your piece about the fan writers. Links are very helpful.
What is the official flag for File 770? Two Ace Doubles Combatant? SJW Credential Sejant Erect? Ray Bradbury Rampant?
Three dice, two showing sevens and one showing a zero.
The corners of the dice are filed.
Thats OK, Im neither a full-time boardgame designer nor one of the “big guns” – the latter clearly the fault of the secret cabal of antisocial law warriors, that are running things and prohibited me to get a dragon award nomination. Next year I will strike back, when Ill form the defective kittens with the goal of slatemothing the whole thing 😉
(4) THE ROAD TO HELSINKI
My rough thoughts on Fan Writer (that will have to be provisional until the packet because many of them write in different venues that I might not have seen) are that any out of Mike, Luhrs, Nussbaum and Meadows could be worthy winners, and I won’t mind who. Tingle is an amusing nom and did some genuine (and funny!) fan writing last year so should beat NA this time, but I don’t see him as a winner. Leaving aside Mike for a moment b/c it’s pretty obvious that we all enjoy what he does, I follow the feeds of all three of Luhrs, Nussbaum and Meadows and like them all, but I think I prefer Nussbaum for her really good reviews.
On the thread on water leaks and damage – this is why my parents liked the water heater where any leak could drain harmlessly. (They preferred the heater outside the living area entirely, with good reason. They’d had a 50-gallon heater blow an inside seam, once, though it only leaked into the garden.)
Kip W., please accept this internet with my thanks.
I left the country for an unknown period of time with one suitcase, begging my family to put my things in the rafters of their garage. My family doesn’t read, so that probably explains why they put everything that wasn’t clothing in the shed with the animal food. Goats ate my books, all of my books, except for the copy of Little Women my godmother had given me, a Georgette Heyer novel and a couple of DAW paperbacks.
4) THE ROAD TO HELSINKI – I think it was Natalie Luhrs who led me here. I like her voice and I’ve been nominating her all along, but I’ve yet to become a fan of either Foz Meadows or Abigail Nussbaum, so that leaves Dr. Tingle in third place for me. Yeah, I think it’s weird too.
I watched Your Name (Kimi No Na Wa) when it was in cinemas in the UK in November last year, and absolutely loved it. I’ve pre-ordered the Blu-Ray. I strongly recommend it, for anyone. It is in places laugh-out-loud funny and in others sad, it has a story that has both depth and lighter parts, and I am glad that I watched it and am looking forward to seeing it again and sharing it with others. And I suggest that you not read too much about it in advance, since a lot of the experience was from encountering it without too many preconceptions.
I had a 2″ basement flood a couple of years ago. My books were… mostly… on shelves that started 2.5″ above the floor. But there were a few boxes of books on the floor for later filing that were utterly destroyed. (Books should not be black with mold….) And of course we lost a lot of other things, but it’s the books I mourn.
3) Does nobody remember that the album “Wicked Girls” was on the Hugo ballot in 2012?
@Greg Hullender: “If we’re lucky, Stixhiscock will decide to decline the nomination. Someone needs to tell her that, in the past, that’s been the recipe for getting a lot of people to buy your story.”
Heh, that may not generate sales quite as well in this case.
@Cheryl S.: “Goats ate my books, all of my books, except . . .” – Goats. It had to be goats. That’s one of the odder stories here, methinks.
My sympathies to all and sundry (as my mom would say, “Especially sundry.”) for floods, fires, pests, goats (!), etc. attacking our possessions.
I downloaded it from a torrent a couple-three months back, and while I liked it in general, I thought it became a bit too tangled and muddled towards the end. (That’s a common problem I find in lots of Japanese media–difficulty sticking the landing.)
@Camestros: I don’t personally know any French people who speak English without an accent but I’ve known a few Dutch people who do. But which accent would they speak with? Do any of them speak Strine(sp?), rather than something that your ear identifies as a native French speaker fluent in a 2nd language? AFAICT, Picard’s/Xavier’s accent is peculiar to a relatively small number of English; to my ear even the BBC’s current announcers are closer to what my mind takes as neutral/average English.
Sympathies on your books; we have been lucky in moving only to a larger house and checking before buying that the cellar was dry after a serious rain — and still lost a few books in a corner where the foundation had been altered and boxes were on the floor. Not fun.
Goats Ate My Books? Wasn’t that the album after Weasels Ripped My Flesh?
A preliminary ballot of Ditmar nominees is up.
(1) Having read the plans, the scientists working with Cassini reminds me of Lovecraft protagonists writing frenetically as the unspeakable comes closer, or of bloggers reporting while the zombies surround them.