(1) THREAT ASSESSMENT. The U.S. State Department issued a “Worldwide Caution” for Americans overseas today, warning about potential threats to LGBTQ+ travelers and other violence.

Location: Worldwide

Event: Due to the potential for terrorist attacks, demonstrations, or violent actions against U.S. citizens and interests, the Department of State advises U.S. citizens overseas to exercise increased caution.  The Department of State is aware of the increased potential for foreign terrorist organization-inspired violence against LGBTQI+ persons and events and advises U.S. citizens overseas to exercise increased caution.  U.S. citizens should:

• Stay alert in locations frequented by tourists, including Pride celebrations and venues frequented by LGBTQI+ persons.
• Enroll in the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program (STEP) to receive information and alerts and make it easier to locate you in an emergency overseas.

(2) HELP RETURN AN ITEM. Is this yours? Marcia Kelly Illingworth would like to return an item that was given to her at the 1996 Worldcon.

Sorry to call on you for something so insignificant, but it’s important to me, and to at least one other fan out there. In order to be sure this gets in the right hands, there will be some detail left out.

My first Worldcon dealing experience was in 1996 in Anaheim/Los Angeles. I was beginning to make my own jewelry at that time, and felt very flattered when a woman came to me with a treasured memento of a beloved pet, and asked me to make it into a piece of jewelry for her. I agreed, and dutifully took her details and the item. 

This was all during the time that I was burning up the airways, back and forth between Tennessee and London, which eventually turned into a happily ever after, and a long term move. During all of this, the details became separated from the item, and I didn’t know how to contact the owner. I hoped every year that she would return to a table where I was dealing. That hasn’t happened.  

Some of you may be aware that after the 2016 MidAmericon, I had a catastrophic illness, which landed me in emergency surgery to remove my colon, during which I arrested and had to be resuscitated, and in critical condition on a ventilator. I’m apparently too stubborn to even stay dead, but I digress. I went on to survive breast cancer and a bilateral mastectomy four years later.

What I haven’t been as open about is the toll it has taken on my life. My lungs were damaged, leaving me with ongoing breathing issues. My brain was affected, more than I was willing to admit, leaving me with memory deficits and personality changes. These appear to be progressing, unfortunately, so I’m trying to tie up as many loose ends as possible. 

I have intentionally not said what the sentimental item is, so that the right person is the one who contacts me for its return. You can reach me through Facebook Messenger. I’m still, as far as I can ascertain, the only Marcia Kelly Illingworth there is.  Please help me finish this task.

(3) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to chow down on cryptid pizza with Lesley Conner in Episode 225 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

Longtime listeners will have heard Lesley’s voice way back in 2017 on Episode 53 when she took part in a Horror 101 roundtable. Back then, she shared the microphone with five other creators, but a lot has changed for her over the past seven years, and now that she’s the Chief Editor at Apex magazine, I thought she deserved a spotlight of her own.

You’ll understand why Lesley was the right dining companion for such a place just from the titles of the anthologies in which her fiction has appeared — all horror-focussed such as Mountain Dead, Dark Tales of Terror, Big Book of New Short Horror, Ruthless, and A Hacked-Up Holiday Massacre. Her horror novel The Weight of Chains was released in 2015. In addition to being the Chief Editor over at Apex magazine, she’s also co-editor of the anthologies Do Not Go Quietly and Robotic Ambitions, as well as of the upcoming The Map of Lost Places.

We discussed why horror is where she feels the most comfortable as a writer, how her role at Apex magazine grew from Social Media Manager to Chief Editor, her “Price is Right” method of filling out an issue’s word count, why she hardly ever reads cover letters, the trends she’s seen in the slush pile and what they mean, the key difference between editing magazines vs. anthologies, her longtime obsession with serial killers, how to go on writing after one’s writing mentor passes away, and much more.

(4) ONLINE FLASH SCIENCE FICTION NIGHT. Space Cowboy Books will host an online Flash Science Fiction Night with KC Grifant, Laura Blackwell, and Denise Dumars on Tuesday May 21 at 6:00 p.m. Pacific.

Join us online for an evening of short science fiction readings (1000 words or less) with authors KC Grifant, Laura Blackwell, and Denise Dumars. Flash Science Fiction Nights run 30 minutes or less, and are a fun and great way to learn about new authors from around the world.

Register for free at Eventbrite.

(5) GETTING AHEAD. Kathryn Adams is working through this year’s finalists a piece at a time. Here’s an excerpt from the first of her very good reviews of “Three More Novelettes” at Pixelated Geek.

The last three of the 2024 Hugo-nominated novelettes go from dystopian to near-utopian (with a lot of work from devoted neighbors), to a fantasy set in the outskirts of the jazz area.

I AM AI – Ai Jiang

…AI has found a surprising niche in order to make a living as a writer and pay off her parents’ and aunt’s debt: pretending to be an AI herself. Working anonymously in an internet cafe on the outskirts of the city, she scrapes together paying jobs by undercutting the fees that actual AI’s charge and churning out content that has the “surprisingly human for an AI” feel that AI subscribers are looking for.

Ai has to keep up a relentless pace, and she’s been gradually replacing parts of herself with tech so she can work a little faster, keep writing for a little longer into the night….

(6) BACK TO THE STACKS. “’The Librarians’ Spinoff on The CW: First Look at ‘Next Chapter’ Team” at TVLine.

The Librarians are ready to make some noise again, by way of a spinoff coming to The CW — and TVLine has your exclusive first look at the brand-new team, above.

A spinoff of TNT’s three movies-and-four seasons franchise, The CW’s The Librarians: The Next Chapter centers on Vikram Chamberlin (played by Jamestown‘s Callum McGowan), a protean genius, swashbuckler and Librarian from the year 1847 who accidentally time-travels to present-day Central Europe and now finds himself stuck here. When Vikram returns to his castle, which is now a museum, he inadvertently releases magic across the continent. He in turn is given a team of talented young people to help him clean up the mess he made by reclaiming magical artifacts from those who would abuse them.

The Librarians are ready to make some noise again, by way of a spinoff coming to The CW — and TVLine has your exclusive first look at the brand-new team, above.

A spinoff of TNT’s three movies-and-four seasons franchise, The CW’s The Librarians: The Next Chapter centers on Vikram Chamberlin (played by Jamestown‘s Callum McGowan), a protean genius, swashbuckler and Librarian from the year 1847 who accidentally time-travels to present-day Central Europe and now finds himself stuck here. When Vikram returns to his castle, which is now a museum, he inadvertently releases magic across the continent. He in turn is given a team of talented young people to help him clean up the mess he made by reclaiming magical artifacts from those who would abuse them.

The question is: Will Vikram keep his oath to the Library (and his new team), or will he attempt to travel back to his own time where unfinished business — and his heart — remain?…

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born May 17, 1955 — Bill Paxton. (Died 2017.) Let’s talk about Bill Paxton. He worked with Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando, The Terminator and True Lies. I know only The Terminator is genre but I actually like the other films as well. He’s also in Predator 2 but Schwarzenegger went walkabout by then on hunting those aliens.

None of those roles were as major as the next role I’m going to mention which is his Alien one as Hudson, a boastful but ever so panicky Colonial Marine private. He’s known for this choice piece of dialogue, after the team’s dropship is destroyed, he exclaims, “That’s it, man! Game over, man! Game over! What the fuck are we gonna do now? What are we gonna do?”

He’s Chet Donnelly in John Hughes’ wonderfully offbeat Weird Science. Of course everything John Hughes does is either offbeat or just plain weird. This film I think stayed on this side of the former.

Slipstream has him co-starring with Mark Hamill in post-global apocalypse bounty hunter thriller. It gets a decent rating at Rotten Tomatoes at forty-three percent audience approval rating. 

Yes, he had a lead role in Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 as Lunar Module Pilot Fred Haise. It’s a really stellar film. 

Finally he had a recurring role in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. as John Garret. He was a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent who was left for dead, only to survive as he became the first Deathlok. Let’s just say his story becomes even more complicated from there. 

No, I forgot one role, though it’s definitely not genre. He was in my beloved Tombstone as Morgan Earp, the Tombstone Special Policeman present at that gunfight where he helped his brothers Virgil and Wyatt, as well as Doc Holliday, confront the outlaw Cochise County Cowboys. 

(8) BONUS BIRTHDAY. [Item by Lis Carey.]

Born May 17 — Mark Leeper.

Avid and active sf fan Mark Leeper became enraptured by TV’s Commando Cody at the age of six, and never looked back. He’s been publishing movie reviews online since 1984, and began attending conventions with Boskone VI in 1969. In the years since, he has been on panels and conducted popular origami workshops at many conventions.  Mark and his wife Evelyn founded a science fiction club at Bell Labs in New Jersey in 1978, and maintained it until their retirement in 2001. Their fanzine, the MT VOID, also began in 1978, and is still being published—pretty impressive for a zine published weekly. Along with Mark’s editorials and reviews, it also features reviews and comments by others.

Mark has been an active fan for decades, and is still contributing to our community. Wish him a happy birthday!

(9) COMICS SECTION.

• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal predicts the rise and departure of AI.
• Bliss covers mental care in the Hundred Acre Woods.
• Speedbump asks the question.

(10) END AT THE BEGINNING. Camestros Felapton’s review concludes “X-Men97 is a good argument against new X-Men movies”. But that doesn’t mean you should skip his review!

I only got around to watching the X-Men97 finale yesterday. It was tremendous and ridiculous fun. Lots of angst, weird morality and piles of people fighting each other with mutant and techno-virus super-powers. As a series, it just got better and better but so much of it was weaponising nostalgia as its mutant superpower. The story morphed from nostalgia about the original cartoon to nostalgia for how the comics at the time felt but using the same chopping up of comic plot lines into its own story….

(11) ORDER IN THE FOOD COURT. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Sfnal it aint…but it does address certain aspects of one of the major burning issues of our time. Just what is a sandwich? “Are tacos and burritos sandwiches? A judge in Indiana ruled yes.” reports the Washington Post.

… Are tacos considered sandwiches?

According to one judge in Fort Wayne, Ind., the answer is yes. And he says burritos are sandwiches, too.

Allen County Superior Court Judge Craig J. Bobay wrote in a ruling Monday that tacos and burritos are “Mexican-style sandwiches.” Bobay made the decision in a case reviewing whether a restaurant, “Famous Taco,” could open a new location at a Fort Wayne shopping center.

The zoning policy for the property prohibits fast food, but allows exceptions for restaurants whose primary business is to sell “made-to-order” or Subway-style sandwiches. A city commission denied the request.

But Famous Taco, Bobay ruled, is allowed at the shopping center because it would serve “Mexican-style sandwiches,” and the zoning policy “does not restrict potential restaurants to only American cuisine-style sandwiches.” Hypothetically, other restaurants that serve made-to-order items, including “Greek gyros, Indian naan wraps or Vietnamese banh mi,” would also be allowed, Bobay wrote in his decision….

…With that, at least for now, the judge seems to have wrapped up the sandwich beef in Fort Wayne.

(12) JEOPARDY! [Item by David Goldfarb.]. Another day, another round of reporting on SFF on Jeopardy! and Jeopardy! Masters. I’m covering the regular game on Thursday, May 16, and Masters for Wednesday the 15th, and there was a fair amount.

Jeopardy! 5/16/2024

Single Jeopardy round:

Here Be Monsters, $1000: 1939’s “Son of Frankenstein” was the third in the series to feature the monster, and the last with this actor playing the role

Returning champion Grant DeYoung asked: “What’s Karloff?” (Like Matt Amodio, he seemed to just use “What’s” for all responses.)

Here Be Monsters, $200: In one of his many big-screen battles for Earth’s survival, he fought against Hedorah, the smog monster

Grant got it again: “What’s Godzilla?”

Anagrammed Authors, $400: Author born Eric Blair: gore lower leg

Grant was in again with “What’s George Orwell?”

Double Jeopardy round:

TV “Q”, $1200: On “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”, this Ferengi bar owner was up, then down as his flavorful crew unionized

Still Grant! “What’s Quark?”

TV “Q”, $800: This NBC reboot tapped Raymond Lee to play time-traveling physicist Ben Song

Other contestants did buzz in sometimes, but you wouldn’t know it from reading this: Grant responded, “What’s ‘Quantum Leap’?”

Jeopardy! Masters 5/15/2024

In Game 1, the Double Jeopardy round:

Music in Books, $2000: The sinfonietta by Czech composer Leos Janaček features prominently in this Murakami book partly set in a world with 2 moons

Yogesh Raut came up with, “What is ‘1Q84’?”

Movie Memes: Who Said It, $2000: 2001: “One does not simply walk into Mordor”

Matt Amodio got it right: “What’s Boromir?” Ken noted, “Lord of the Rings!”

In Conceivable (i.e., words you can make using the letters in the word “conceivable”), $1200: In “Foundation” Isaac Asimov pithily wrote that this “is the last refuge of the incompetent”

This was a triple stumper! I’d expect most Filers to know this, but just in case I’ll say that the “this” is violence.

Movie Memes: Who Said It, $1200: 2002: “I don’t like sand”

Yogesh knew that it was gritty and gets everywhere: “Who is Anakin?”

Ken Jennings expanded on this: “Yes, in Star Wars!”

Movie Memes: Who Said It, $400: 1993: “Life finds a way”

Yogesh: “Who is Dr. Ian Malcolm?” Ken Jennings: “In ‘Jurassic Park’. You got it.”

Game 2:

The Single Jeopardy round had a whole “Science Fiction” category. I’ll present the clues in the order they were encountered.

Science Fiction, $600: Takeshi Kovacs has his consciousness downloaded into a new body in this “organic” Richard K. Morgan book from 2002

Victoria Groce successfully responded, “What is ‘Altered Carbon’?”

Science Fiction, $800. The Daily Double in the round, which went to Victoria, who bet all of the $1400 she had amassed. In novels by Dan Simmons, the planet Hyperion has a capital named for this poet who wrote an epic about the sun god Hyperion.

Victoria got it right: John Keats.

Science Fiction, $1000: The title virus in this Neal Stephenson cyberpunk classic affects users offline & online, but Hiro Protagonist is on the case

Amy Schneider got in ahead of Victoria with, “What is ‘Snow Crash’?”

There was one bit of SF-adjacent content in another category:

Floating on a Stream of TV, $600: We’d watch this Netflix title character deal with life and death(s) at Nevermore Academy any day of the week

Victoria asked, “Who is Wednesday?”

Science Fiction, $400: The title hero of this 1985 novel is a boy genius (last name Wiggin) on his way to Battle School & who might just be Earth’s savior

Amy got this one: “What is ‘Ender’s Game’?” (Which technically is not the response to the clue, but was accepted.)

Science Fiction, $200: In an 1897 H.G. Wells tale, these invaders were killed by “disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared”

Mattea Roach got in on this one. I wondered whether “What is ‘The War of the Worlds?” would be accepted, but in the event she responded to the clue as given with “Who are the Martians?”

(13) LEFT ON THE DRAWING BOARD. “A mega egg in Paris, a hovering hotel in Machu Picchu, an hourglass tower in New York, a pleasure island in Baghdad … we reveal the architectural visions that were just too costly – or too weird.” “How the world could have looked: the most spectacular buildings that were never made” – an architecture commentary in the Guardian.

…Did you know that, if things had gone differently, the Pompidou Centre could have been an egg? In the 1969 competition for the Paris art centre – ultimately won by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, with their inside-out symphony of pipework – a radical French architect called André Bruyère submitted a proposal for a gigantic ovoid tower. His bulbous building would have risen 100 metres above the city’s streets, clad in shimmering scales of alabaster, glass and concrete, its walls swelling out in a curvaceous riposte to the tyranny of the straight line.

“Time,” Bruyère declared, “instead of being linear, like the straight streets and vertical skyscrapers, will become oval, in tune with the egg.” His hallowed Oeuf would be held aloft on three chunky legs, while a monorail would pierce the facade and circle through the structure along a sinuous floating ribbon. The atrium was to take the form of an enclosed globe, like a yolk.

“Between the hard geometries,” Bruyère added, “comes the sweetness of a volume [with] curves in all directions, in contrast to these facades where the angle always falls right from the sky, always similar. So, the egg.” Sadly, it wasn’t to be. His ovular poetry didn’t impress the judges and Paris got its high-tech hymn to plumbing instead.

L’Oeuf de Pompidou is one of many astonishing schemes to feature in Atlas of Never Built Architecture, a bulging compendium of dashed hopes and broken dreams that charts a fascinating alternative universe of “what ifs”. It is a world of runners-up and second bests, an encyclopaedia of hubristic plans that were too big, expensive or weird to make it off the drawing board….

(14) TYRANNOSAURUS FLASH MOB. Yahoo! invites everyone to “Watch: High turnout turns dino record attempt into Tyrannosaurus wreck”.

A Canadian city’s attempt to break the Guinness World Record for the largest gathering of people dressed as dinosaurs was disqualified due to the unexpectedly high turnout.

Travel Drumheller, the tourism organization for the Town of Drumheller, Alberta, said in a Facebook post that the April 27 record attempt in the city’s downtown attracted more than 3,000 people in dino-dress, but officials “could not obtain an exact measurement” of participants.

Keri Looijen, marketing manager for Travel Drumheller, said a Guinness World Records adjudicator was present during the attempt.

“He recorded 3,000 people through numbered bracelets or wristbands, which far exceeded what we had originally thought,” Looijen told CBC News.

She said photos and videos from the attempt indicate there may have been “close to double” that number of people, but an accurate count could not be obtained due to officials being unprepared for such a massive turnout.

“We weren’t entirely prepared for that many people to come,” Looijen said. “Guinness said that there were people that they had witnessed leaving the area after they had been wrist-banded, so they weren’t following what the volunteers had told them by staying in the space. They had to be all together in the area for one solid minute.”

The attempt was disqualified, despite very handily beating the current record of 252 people, which was set in Los Angeles in 2019.

Looijen said the city is hoping to make the “Jurassic Jamboree” an annual event, and it will be better prepared for the next official world record attempt.

(15) CONTINUED PROGRESS IN LONG MARCH TO FUSION POWER. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Abundant, clean energy is something of an SF trope powering civilizations of the future and a post-scarcity society….

This week’s Nature sees a rather dry paper but one that is still of importance as progress continues to be made in the long march to develop fusion power.

A group of largely US-based researchers have theoretically created tokamak plasmas with a line-averaged density approximately 20% above the Greenwald density and an energy confinement quality of approximately 50% better than the standard high-confinement mode.

Human made fusion power works by confining a plasma, creating such high plasma densities that atoms fuse to release energy with the creation of helium.

The confinement is done through a magnetic bottle. The very simplest confinement would be a tube with electric coils creating a magnetic field.  However, such a simple arrangement would see the plasma leak out of each of the tube’s ends.

To get around this you can turn the linear tube into a circular tube joining the former tube’s ends together, which gets rid of end-of-tube leakage as there are now no ends from which leakage can take place.

Such a circular ring, or donut-shaped ring, is the basis of the Tokamak design, which is what the researchers used.

Fusion power is oft ridiculed because it has long been predicted to be available to us in a few decades time but never seems to happen: tomorrow never comes. This is a little unfair as in the last decades of the 20th century a road map to commercial fusion was created and funding pledges made by various nations.  However, successive governments from various nations were repeatedly slow to provide this funding. Further, there were bureaucratic, administrative hurdles.  I recall around the turn of the millennium, that while the land in France for the US$22-billion ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) – scheduled to be operational next year – had been slated, the current landowners refused surveyor access!). This reactor will be the world’s largest Tokamak: it will weigh 23,000 tonnes and is designed to generate 10 times the power that it consumes.

We are getting there, albeit slower than we all had hoped.  Meanwhile, this is another milestone.

OK, so we are not there yet.  The researchers themselves point out that their experimental theory does not take into account the metal walls to carry away the heat used for electricity generation. Nor can it deal with the helium waste. But it is still a significant progress that should help ITER operation.

The researchers themselves say: “The operating regime we report supports some critical requirements in many fusion reactor designs all over the world and opens a potential avenue to an operating point for producing economically attractive fusion energy.”

Their paper itself concludes with: “The experimental achievement and the increased understanding reported in this paper may open a potential avenue to an operating point for producing economically attractive fusion energy.”

You can see the primary research paper here.  Though no-one seems to have picked up on this paper, Nature has made it open access (most research papers in Nature are not open access.)

(16) BILL AND NEIL’S EXCELLENT CONVERSATION. On Star Talk, “William Shatner Has Questions for Neil deGrasse Tyson”.

What is the value of curiosity? Neil deGrasse Tyson sits down with William Shatner to explore the nature of spacetime, Star Trek, human curiosity, loneliness, and more. How would warp drive work? What is William Shanter’s favorite Star Trek episode? Learn about the question Stephen Hawking had for Bill and the secret power of science fiction. Bill talks about what it was like to watch Neil Armstrong walk on the moon after Star Trek was originally canceled. We discuss Artemis, our return to the moon, and how we can create a base there. Will there be enough water on the moon for people to use? Neil breaks down how water can be used for fuel and how humans have harnessed the power of physics. We discuss Bill’s new documentary You Can Call Me Bill and some philosophical points about science. Are electrons lonely? We explore the difference between being lonely and being alone and the nature of curiosity. Is human curiosity a double-edged sword? Is there anything left on Bill’s bucket list? Plus, Bill asks if living beings like mycelia could be analogs for the universe’s structure. Why is it spacetime and not space and time separately? What is the vacuum of space made of? Discover virtual particles and how the fabric of spacetime may be a web made of wormholes. We break down dark energy and dark matter, and why their names may be misleading. To end, we discuss old age and wisdom: do they go together?

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, David Goldfarb, Lis Carey, Marcia Kelly Illingworth, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Teddy Harvia, Kathy Sullivan, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]