Pixel Scroll 7/23/22 Filers, Tick Not, Now Or Ever, Where To Scroll Your Pixels Go

(1) AURORA AWARDS VOTING DEADLINE. Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association members have only a few minutes left to vote for 2022 Aurora Awards. The deadline is 11:59 p.m. EDT, on Saturday, July 23.

The awards ceremony will be held as a YouTube and Facebook live streaming event at 7:00 p.m. EDT on Saturday, August 13 at When Words Collide. 

(2) BEAUTIFYING THE BRICKS. DreamHaven Books showed off the progress on their new outside wall mural to Facebook friends. There’s also this smaller peek on Instagram.

(3) HEAR HEAR. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA) resumes its series with 2022 Rhysling Long Poem Reading Series Part 2.

(4) THE SPIRIT OF ’46. First Fandom Experience links up with Chicon 8’s “1946 Project” (which they’re doing instead of Retro Hugos). “Science Fiction and Fantasy in the Pulps: 1946” is a bibliography of sff published in that year.

…Presented here for your perusal and possible amusement is a fiction bibliography for science fiction and fantasy pulps issued in 1946. The list includes magazines that primarily published new works. Excluded are reprints of works published in prior years (most of Famous Fantastic Mysteries, all of Strange Tales). Non-fiction articles and editorials are also omitted. For brevity, we didn’t cite specific issue dates. For richness, we’ve transcribed the introductory blurbs that appeared in the Table of Contents or masthead for each story….

(5) DOODLER. [Item by Michael Toman.] “In a world where Franza Kafka became one of the first Big Name Fan Artists…?” “Kafka’s Inkblots” by J.W. McCormack, behind a paywall at New York Review of Books.

…Such an active imagination—the fever for annotation, familiar from Pale Fire or Flaubert’s Parrot, that distorts the inner life of the artist even as it seeks to illuminate it—is required of any reader hoping to get their money’s worth from Franz Kafka: The Drawings, a volume of the writer’s archival sketches and ephemera edited by Andreas Kilcher and Pavel Schmidt. A bearded maestro presides from the back of a business card. A stick figure seems to throttle a mass of squiggles. A harlequin frowns under the chastisement of an irate lump. Two curvilinear ink blots pass each other on a blank-page boulevard. A bushy-browed Captain Haddock-type glowers in profile on a torn envelope and, in the margins of a letter, a wrigglesome delinquent is bisected by a torture device that seems to clearly reference the one from “In the Penal Colony.” Limbs jut out cartoonishly from bodies, loopedy-loop acrobats snake up and down the gutter of a magazine, figures of authority preside in faded pencil, and then there are the stray marks on manuscript pages, neither fully letters nor drawings….

(6) BRICK BY BRICK. “E. E. Cummings and Krazy Kat” by Amber Medland at The Paris Review site puts the famous strip in perspective as an inspiration to all manner of creators of modern 20th-century literature and art.

…The Kat had a cult following among the modernists. For Joyce, Fitzgerald, Stein, and Picasso, all of whose work fed on playful energies similar to those unleashed in the strip, he had a double appeal, in being commercially nonviable and carrying the reek of authenticity in seeming to belong to mass culture. By the thirties, strips like Blondie were appearing daily in roughly a thousand newspapers; Krazy appeared in only thirty-five. The Kat was one of those niche-but-not-really phenomena, a darling of critics and artists alike, even after it stopped appearing in newspapers. Since then: Umberto Eco called Herriman’s work “raw poetry”; Kerouac claimed the Kat as “the immediate progenitor” of the beats; Stan Lee (Spider-Man) went with “genius”; Herriman was revered by Charles Schulz and Theodor Geisel alike. But Krazy Kat was never popular. The strip began as a sideline for Herriman, who had been making a name for himself as a cartoonist since 1902. It ran in “the waste space,” literally underfoot the characters of his more conventional 1910 comic strip The Dingbat Family, published in William Randolph Hearst’s New York Evening Journal….

(7) ANTICIPATION. Rich Horton abhors a vacuum, which is why he keeps his series going with “Hugo Nomination Recommendations, 1951”.

As noted, I’m planning to finish up my posts on potential Hugo nominees for 1950s Worldcons, including those that didn’t award Hugos. This is a case (as with 1954) where stories from the eligibility year (i.e. 1950) had a shot at Retro-Hugos, as Milliennium Philcon, the 2001 Worldcon, chose to award them. (Appropriate, I suppose, as the 1953 Philcon originated the Hugo Awards.) And in fact I wrote a post back in 2001 giving my recommendations for Retro Hugos that year. This appeared in SF Site here I am bemused to find that my recommendations from back then are almost exactly the same as I came up with surveying 1950s SF just now.

The 1951 Worldcon was Nolacon I, in New Orleans, the ninth World Science Fiction Convention. As noted, they gave no Hugo awards. This was the first year of International Fantasy Awards, and both were given to books published in 1949: fiction went to George Stewart’s, Earth Abides (surely a strong choice) and non-fiction to The Conquest of Space, by Willy Ley and Chesley Bonestell….

(8) LATHE OF HEAVENS. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] Hack writers get hackier with AI! The Verge blabs about “How independent writers are turning to AI”.

… Lepp, who writes under the pen name Leanne Leeds in the “paranormal cozy mystery” subgenre, allots herself precisely 49 days to write and self-edit a book. This pace, she said, is just on the cusp of being unsustainably slow. She once surveyed her mailing list to ask how long readers would wait between books before abandoning her for another writer. The average was four months. Writer’s block is a luxury she can’t afford, which is why as soon as she heard about an artificial intelligence tool designed to break through it, she started beseeching its developers on Twitter for access to the beta test. 

The tool was called Sudowrite. Designed by developers turned sci-fi authors Amit Gupta and James Yu, it’s one of many AI writing programs built on OpenAI’s language model GPT-3 that have launched since it was opened to developers last year. But where most of these tools are meant to write company emails and marketing copy, Sudowrite is designed for fiction writers. Authors paste what they’ve written into a soothing sunset-colored interface, select some words, and have the AI rewrite them in an ominous tone, or with more inner conflict, or propose a plot twist, or generate descriptions in every sense plus metaphor. 

Eager to see what it could do, Lepp selected a 500-word chunk of her novel, a climactic confrontation in a swamp between the detective witch and a band of pixies, and pasted it into the program. Highlighting one of the pixies, named Nutmeg, she clicked “describe.”…

(9) UP FROM THE UNDERGROUND. [Item by Dann.] This Reason Podcast focuses on the early days of comix in an interview with Brian Doherty regarding his newly published book Dirty Pictures: “Brian Doherty Talks Dirty Pictures, Comix, and Free Speech”.

Dirty Pictures: How an Underground Network of Nerds, Feminists, Misfits, Geniuses, Bikers, Potheads, Printers, Intellectuals, and Art School Rebels Revolutionized Art and Invented Comix, by Reason Senior Editor Brian Doherty, tells the story of how people such as Robert Crumb, Trina Robbins, and Art Spiegelman redefined not just what comic books were capable of but what gets counted as art.

(10) NOSTALGIC X-MEN SERIES. Yahoo! Entertainment is at SDCC when “’X-Men ’97’ Gets First Nostalgic Look, Fall 2023 Release and Season 2”.

Nearly 30 years after “X-Men: The Animated Series” debuted, many of the beloved characters are returning for Marvel Studios’ upcoming show “X-Men ’97,” coming to Disney+ in fall 2023 with a second season already confirmed.

“X-Men ’97” will continue the story of the original “Animated Series,” which ran from 1992 to 1997 on Fox Kids Network. “X-Men: The Animated Series” helped usher in the popularity of the mutant superheroes before Fox made the first live-action take on the team in 2000.

The new series will include Rogue, Beast, Gambit, Jean Grey, Wolverine, Storm, Jubilee and Cyclops. Magneto, now with long hair and a purple suit, will lead the X-Men. The animation, revealed at Comic Con on Friday, stays true to the original animated series, but looks more modern, updated and sleek.

Cable, Bishop, Forge, Morph and Nightcrawler will also join the X-Men onscreen. Battling them will be the (non-“Stranger Things”) Hellfire Club with Emma Frost and Sebastian Shaw, plus Mr. Sinister and Bolivar Trask will appear.

(11) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.  

1995 [By Cat Eldridge.] It is said that God made man in His image, but man fell from grace. Still, man has retained from his humble beginnings the innate desire to create, but how will man’s creations fair? Will they attain a measure of the divine or will they, too, fall from grace? — The Control Voice

Twenty-seven years ago, The Outer Limits’ “I, Robot” first aired on HBO. 

This is a remake of “I, Robot” that aired thirty-one years earlier. Leonard Nimoy, who played the reporter Judson Ellis in that episode, plays attorney Thurman Cutler in this version, a role played by Howard Da Silva in the original. This remake was directed by Nimoy’s son Adam Nimoy. 

Now “I, Robot” was written by Eando Binder, the pen name used by the SF authors, the late Earl Andrew Binder and his brother Otto Binder. They created a heroic robot named Adam Link. The first Adam Link story, published in 1939, is titled “I, Robot”. Adam Link, Robot, a collection of those stories, is available from the usual suspects. 

Robert C. Dennis who wrote the screenplay here would go on to write multiple episodes of Wild, Wild West and Batman. He was also one of the primary writers for the earlier Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born July 23, 1888 Raymond Chandler. He of the Philip Marlowe series who I hold in very high esteem is listed by ISFDB as doing some stories of a genre nature, to be exact, ”The Bronze Door”, “The King In Yellow”, “Professor Bingo’s Snuff” and “English Summer: A Gothic Romance”. I’ve neither heard of nor read these. So who here has read them? (Died 1959.) 
  • Born July 23, 1914 Virgil Finlay. Castle of Frankenstein calls him “part of the pulp magazine history … one of the foremost contributors of original and imaginative artwork for the most memorable science fiction and fantasy publications of our time.”  His best-known covers are for Amazing Stories and Weird Tales. “Roads”, a novella by Seabury Quinn, published in the January 1938 Weird Tales, and featuring a cover and interior illustrations by him, was originally published in an extremely limited numbers by Arkham House in 1948. It’s now available on from the usual suspects. (Died 1971.)
  • Born July 23, 1938 Ronny Cox, 83. His first genre role was in RoboCop as OCP President Dick Jones who comes to a very bad end. Later roles were Gen. Balentine in Amazon Women on the Moon in “The Unknown Soldier” episode, Martians Go Home as the President, Total Recall as Vilos Cohaagen, Captain America as Tom Kimball and a recurring role for a decade on Stargate SG-1 as Senator Robert Kinsey/Vice President Robert Kinsey. 
  • Born July 23, 1957 Gardner Dozois. He was founding editor of The Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology and was editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine for twenty years. He won fifteen Hugos for his editing and was nominated for others. He also won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story twice, once for “The Peacemaker” and once for “Morning Child”. Stories selected by him for his annual best-of-year volumes have won, as of several years ago, 44 Hugos, 32 Locus, 41 Nebulas, 18 Sturgeon Awards and 10 World Fantasy. Very impressive! (Died 2018.)
  • Born July 23, 1982 Tom Mison, 40. He is best known as Ichabod Crane on Sleepy Hollow which crosses-over into Bones. He’s Mr. Phillips in The Watchmen. It’s barely (if at all) genre adjacent but I’m going to note that he’s Young Blood in A Waste of Shame: The Mystery of Shakespeare and His Sonnets. Currently he’s got a main role in second season of the See SF series on Apple TV which has yet to come out. Apple hasn’t put out any publicity on it. 
  • Born July 23, 1989 Daniel Radcliffe, 33. Harry Potter of course. Also Victor Frankenstein’s assistant Igor in Victor Frankenstein, Ignatius Perrish in Horns, a horror film, and Rosencrantz in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at the Old Vic in London.  

(13) THIS ICE CREAM DOESN’T CUT THE MUSTARD. Well, actually, it does, and that’s the problem.The Takeout’s Brianna Wellen declares “This Grey Poupon Ice Cream Needs More Mustard”.

…As described in a press release sent to The Takeout, the Grey Poupon with Salted Pretzels is “An unexpected yet delightful blend of sweet ice cream, honey-dijon swirl, and salted pretzels.” It’s part of Van Leeuwen’s line of summer limited edition flavors, which also includes Campfire S’mores, Summer Peach Crisp, Honey Cornbread with Strawberry Jam, and Espresso Fior di Latte Chip. All of these flavors are available at Walmart until the end of the season.

… Even the smell of the ice cream was slightly mustardy—I was prepared for a real dijon bomb.

But the first scoop left some things to be desired. First, the mustard flavor is a little muddled and lost amidst the creaminess….

(14) STAR WARS SANS CULOTTES. Yes, it’s what you think it is: “I saw a ‘Star Wars’ strip show in SF, and I’m forever changed” says SFGate’s Ariana Bindman.

…With each draw of the curtain, we saw a series of burlesque acts that were visually decadent and tonally unique. Aside from Jabba the Hutt and captive Leia, my other personal favorite was when Sheev Palpatine — who looked absolutely grotesque thanks to a wrinkled blue-and-white skin suit — fully stripped and swung on a massive disco ball to Miley Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball.” Just before that, R2-D2, resident space pimp, made it rain by ejecting wads of cash into the air while a braggadocious Han Solo undulated to “Smooth Criminal,” making every goth and nerd in the audience scream like animals…. 

(15) IT’S ABOUT TIME. “Strange new phase of matter created in quantum computer acts like it has two time dimensions” at Phys.org.

By shining a laser pulse sequence inspired by the Fibonacci numbers at atoms inside a quantum computer, physicists have created a remarkable, never-before-seen phase of matter. The phase has the benefits of two time dimensions despite there still being only one singular flow of time, the physicists report July 20 in Nature.

This mind-bending property offers a sought-after benefit: Information stored in the phase is far more protected against errors than with alternative setups currently used in quantum computers. As a result, the information can exist without getting garbled for much longer, an important milestone for making quantum computing viable, says study lead author Philipp Dumitrescu….

(16) KEEP WALKING. Yahoo! introduces the trailer shown at SDCC: “’Tales of the Walking Dead’ Trailer Shows How the Zombie Apocalypse Is Kind of Like COVID”.

…The trailer features elements from several of the show’s standalone stories that all paint a very stark picture of how the world fell — and honestly we’re reminded of a ton of the drama from the COVID-19 era, particularly the denialism, rugged individualist posturing, and the scapegoating.

For example, we see Parker Posey as an apparently well-to-do woman who straight up refuses to believe reports of a zombie apocalypse… of course, until it runs right up and bites her. Crews meanwhile plays a survivalist who lives an isolated, paranoid life, until he (for an as-yet unrevealed reason) ends up sheltering with Olivia Munn and gets called out. Will he change? We’ll have to find out….

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In “Honest Game Trailers:  The Quarry,” Fandom Games, in a spoiler-packed episode, say this game about teenagers getting munched on in the quarry by monsters “is a B movie with AAA production values that has “two hours of story and eight hours of wandering around like a stoned teen.”  But the CGI is so lifelike that the characters are actors you almost recognize, including “That guy who was in the thing you saw once.”

[Thanks to JJ, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Chris Barkley, Rob Thornton, Dann, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kurt Busiek.]


Discover more from File 770

Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.

37 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 7/23/22 Filers, Tick Not, Now Or Ever, Where To Scroll Your Pixels Go

  1. More fool me. I thought people would enjoy seeing the art on the bookstore wall. Of course it’s far more important to raise hypothetical copyright questions. That’s why we named this blog “File Suit 770” after all.

  2. Ok, so maybe someone needs to walk into the WSFS meetings at Worldcon, and introduce a motion that fiction written more than 50% (this is negotiable) by an AI are not eligible for a Hugo.
    And that doesn’t begin to cover underground comics – the Freak Bros (and Fat Freddy’s Cat, who is arguably genre), along with a number of others (which I have) that are genre.

    Birthdays: Virgil Finlay was amazing, and brilliant, and sexy, and sensual, and absolutely among the best that have ever been published in the field.

  3. I enjoyed seeing it, and wondered about copyright because certain large corporate entertainment entities are known to seriously lack a sense of humor on such things. It’s not either/or; it’s both.

    But fear not. My brain has melted, so my thoughts may well lack coherence.

  4. Mike Glyer says More fool me. I thought people would enjoy seeing the art on the bookstore wall. Of course it’s far more important to raise hypothetical copyright questions. That’s why we named this blog “File Suit 770” after all.

    Mike, I raised it because the Pogo characters are under copyright as Walt Kelly died in 1973. We believe in copyright, don’t we?

  5. @Mike
    I enjoyed seeing that wall: Pogo, and Mamzelle Hephzibah!
    (I grew up on Pogo. I still slide into speaking that way.)

  6. Cat Eldridge: We believe in copyright, don’t we?

    “We” don’t believe we’re the copyright police. “We” don’t go out of our way to get bookstore owners in hot water. “We” in fact imagine that DreamHaven is probably selling inside the store works related to the art on the wall outside the store.

  7. Can confirm the Freak Brothers have traveled through time and their cat was abducted at least once by aliens seeking ultra concentrated starship fuel.

  8. Pogo: 10 books worth on the shelf a few feet away. One of my favorite bits was several chapters on what was grammatawocal, an’ what wasn’t. After that, I decided on my favorite tense of all: the future perfectable.

    Charon – and then there was Wyatt Winghead, super mutant acid freak, who got hit with a giant acid bomb, and was thrown forward into the 25th Century… and the artist REALLY worked hard at getting the style of the old Buck Rogers strip….

  9. @mark
    Did you also read “Natchural Gee-gronchic”
    (We had a box turtle named Churchy LaFemme. Female, it turned out, but she had beautiful brown eyes.)

  10. (11) I’ve had the Adam Link collection for many, many years and was pleased when the I, Robot story showed up on the original Outer Limits. (At that time, I was still getting used to the concept that people would adapt the stories I’d read in collections, rather than everything being original.)

  11. (12) “Ronny Cox, 83. His first genre role was in RoboCop”. Except for (going through IMDB) The Mind Snatchers and Tales of the Unexpected and The Car and Darkroom and The Beast Within.

  12. (2) I just wanted to say wow, that is so cool, art by Mark Bodé. But since it came up, Walt Kelly was really good at firmly tweaking the tails of the powers that be, in the nicest possible way, of course. This mural is very much in his spirit.

  13. (11) I’m pretty sure that Raymond Chandler’s The King in Yellow is not SF/F.

    Google books says: “It is a crime story in which the narrator has apparently read Chambers’ book and uses the phrase to describe one of the other characters.”

  14. One of the things that really bugs me about a lot of the AI generators is that in a sense they’re fast and innovative plagiarism.

    These things are trained on a corpus of data, which is generally not paid for or licensed for that use, which is then algorithmically shuffled. And yes, the shuffling is very fancy and artful and uses neural networks and all, and could even produce something kinda-sorta new, but it is fundamentally replicating and churning up that corpus.

    I really think the developers of these AI systems should be paying licensing fees to the creators of the data they use to train the algorithms.

  15. (15) From Stapledon’s Starmaker

    In his maturity the Star Maker conceived many strange forms of time. For instance, some of the later creations were designed with two or more temporal dimensions, and the lives of the creatures were temporal sequences in one or other dimension of the temporal “area” or “volume.” These beings experienced their cosmos in a very odd manner. Living for a brief period along one dimension, each perceived at every moment of its life a simultaneous vista which, though of course fragmentary and obscure, was actually a view of a whole unique “transverse” cosmical evolution in the other dimension.

  16. 12) Radcliffe has been known as a party trick (and on at least one talk show) to sing Tom Lehrer’s “The Elements” in its entirety; and I maintain that Lehrer is inherently One of Ours, as his works are frequently genre (“So Long, Mom!”) or at least adjacent.

  17. The Freak Brothers once met some aliens whose word meaning “greetings and peace” was “mariwanna”.

  18. Chandler and spec-fic – I’m pretty sure this has come up before….

    “The King in Yellow” – title is a shout-out to Chambers, yes, but the story itself is strictly mundane hard-boiled noir.

    “The Bronze Door” on the other hand, is genre – it appeared in Unknown, and naturally I covered it in my lengthy Unknown -reading project; you can see my thoughts on this story (and the issue it appeared in) here, if you want.

    “Professor Bingo’s Snuff” is genre, sort of – the “snuff” makes the recipient invisible.

    “An English Summer”… is debateable. Doomy Gothic romance, yes; elements of low-key weirdness at times, yes; supernatural weirdness, though, or just psychological? Depends on how you read it, I guess.

  19. Pingback: AMAZING NEWS FROM FANDOM: 7/24/22 - Amazing Stories

  20. I actually have encountered one of the writers eagerly embracing AI. But this is someone who is really into a lot of brain hacking stuff, and considers drafting in Vellum to be a nice shortcut. This person is hard-core into optimizing their brain for production and trying out new things to augment their creativity–so, should cyborging become a thing, or brain uploads, that’s one person who would be in line to try it out.

    (Note: I may write about such things, but I’m not ready to upload my brain or try to create a digital thought clone.)

    Shrugs. In any case, my perspective is that AI writing will work for some people, somewhat for others, and not at all for still others. Some of this AI writing is potentially popping up on Kindle Vella. Most of it isn’t the best writing, but there are others that will shine. My suspicion is that as AI writing shakes out, the difference between quality work and not-so-good will show up. After all, not all AI interfaces right now are of equal quality. It’ll come down to who can modify code most effectively and with artistic skill.

    So nope, not calling for any bans on AI writing in any circumstance.

    And if I’m wrong, well, about the time our AI overlords start inserting horses into relationship-driven SF, then I’ll worry.

  21. (15) The opening blurb from Phys.org is a bit misleading: what they have actually done is produce two time symmetries in the laser pulses in a way that can be considered as projecting from two dimensions into one dimension. It’s analogous to how you can produce Penrose tiling with five-fold rotational symmetry by projecting a five-dimensional cubic lattice into two dimensions. Calling it a new state of matter is, IMO, pretty hyperbolic: it doesn’t really have two time dimensions, any more than a Penrose-tiled floor has five spatial dimensions.

    Also, although I’m hardly an expert in QC, while this is a cool piece of physics, as I understand it doesn’t actually do anything to help with one of the major practical problems with QC, namely, the decay of qubits due to interactions with their surrounding: while it extends the life of the qubits (possibly arbitrarily) it does so at the cost of preventing you from actually using them for calculations. It’s a bit like finding a trick that lets you keep Schroedinger’s cat in superposition forever, but at the cost of forbidding you from ever looking in the box.

    @Andrew (not Werdna): clearly I really need to read Starmaker, because that’s just awesome.

  22. @PhilRM: Thanks for the physics details. I hope you get the chance to read Starmaker. I read it back in the 1980s. Might be a good time for me to reread it

  23. 4) I looked at the list of 1946 stories, and was a bit boggled by the number of Shaver stories Ray Palmer placed in his magazines. I knew Shaver became a major figure in Amazing, but not to this extent.

    As I may be on a panel at Chicon about fans in 1946, I’m wondering if all the zines listed by First Fandom had letter columns. That would be a rich source of info on what fans were talking about – as much so as the fanzines of the time.

  24. From what I’ve read, lettercols were in most if not all magazines because they filled pages for free and encouraged continuing purchases.

  25. @Jerry: Justine Larbalestier looked at some 1940s lettercols and found a lot of interesting stuff:

    https://justinelarbalestier.com/books/battle/letters/

    like this letter from a nurse who reads SF and passes the magazines to patients

    You’d be surprised how many women read magazines of this type. Even the pussy-cats who go for sticky romances makes a grab for a copy when I’m dealing out magazines to the patients at our hospital. The nurses read them too, as I said, to keep awake and think of something besides a cranky patient. So how about giving us females a thought when you are picking tales for futures issues? We like our men to be nice guys, maybe a bit bigger and handsomer than our real boy-friends, and our women we want to be nice guys too, good-looking but not soft. Sensible and good sports. (As we all imagine WE are).

  26. Having Mark Bodé paint a mural on your bookstore is cool. I wonder if Cobalt 60 or Cheech Wizard will make an appearance.

  27. (2) “”” “We” in fact imagine that DreamHaven is probably selling inside the store works related to the art on the wall outside the store. “””

    They do appear to be selling the Fantagraphics reprints: https://www.fantagraphics.com/collections/pogo

    The Kelly estate getting upset seems like it would be an awful poor move on their part. Disney could handle the backlash of people getting mad at them about that day care, but could Pogo?

  28. PhilRM, not saying your explanation is a bit over my head, but “a five-dimensional cubic lattice” sounds like something I’d try to order at Starbucks.

  29. @Malcolm F. Cross

    “replicating and churning up the corpus and producing something kinda-sorta new”

    I’ve seen more than one artist say that this is pretty much what they do.

  30. Andrew (not Werdna): I hope to find some 1946 letters as illuminating and interesting as the 1939 letters Justine Larbalestier has quoted. Thanks for the pointer!

  31. re:(15)
    My first thought was of J.W. Dunne and his book An Experiment with Time.
    re: PhilRM comment on (15): “what they have actually done is produce two time symmetries in the laser pulses in a way that can be considered as projecting from two dimensions into one dimension.”
    Didn’t Dunne believe that human beings, or at least their minds, existed along multiple time tracks, the full perception of which was not always apparent?
    – from the Wiki article: “The theory resolves the issue by proposing a higher dimension of Time, t2, in which our consciousness experiences its travelling along the timeline in t1. The physical brain itself inhabits only t1, requiring a second level of mind to inhabit t2 and it is at this level that the observer experiences consciousness.”

  32. (12) Raymond Chandler. I happened to read “The Bronze Door”, originally from Unknown, read in F&SF from 1953. “Fun but minor story of a bronze door that leads to nowhere, and the use it is put to by the owner. Not major, and 1st published in Unknown”.

  33. @K: J. W. Dunne is mentioned in Heinlein’s “Elsewhen”, along with Ouspensky. I should probably read the article.

Comments are closed.