(1) CLARION WEST 2025 INSTRUCTORS. The instructors for Clarion West’s 2025 Six-Week Summer Workshop have been named: Maurice Broaddus, Malka Older, Diana Pho, and Martha Wells. It will be an online workshop running from June 22-August 2. Applications planned to open December, 2024. Scholarships available.
(2) ALL GLORY IS FLEETING. T. Kingfisher’s Chengdu 2023 Hugo arrived in pieces, but at least they all arrived at the same time.
(3) PROCESS OF ELIMINATION. Zoë O’Connell created colored graphs to illustrate the flow of votes in the Hugo Awards automatic runoff process. Thread starts here on Mastodon.
Visualising the #Worldcon #Hugo2024 voting results.
Alternative Title: Why ranked voting matters.
As a quick explanation, the last placed candidate in each round is eliminated and their votes transferred to the next candidate on each ballot.
Here’s the graph for Best Fanzine. Two other finalists held the lead before finishing behind the winner Nerds of a Feather. (Click for larger image.)
(4) SLOWLY, THE STARS WERE GOING OUT… Variety reports the squeeze is on: “Paramount Television Studios Shut Down by Paramount Global Cost Cuts”. Last week, company leaders announced that they would reduce Paramount’s U.S.-based workforce by 15% in an effort to save $500 million in annual costs. Several genre/related projects will move from the Paramount TV studios brand to under the CBS Studios umbrella.
…All current series and development projects made under the Paramount Television Studios umbrella will move to CBS Studios.
Paramount Television marked the second time Paramount Pictures tried to move into the TV business — separate from the storied shingle that was built on the Desilu production studio founded by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. That studio, which backed such TV treasures as “I Love Lucy” and “Star Trek,” eventually became the center of Paramount Studios after an acquisition by Gulf + Western, and would be inherited by CBS after its split from the company formerly known as Viacom Inc. in 2005….
… Under its aegis, the company produced “The Offer,” an insider tale of the making of the landmark movie, for Paramount+; and series based on Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan character for Amazon Prime Video. Other series it produced include “The Spiderwick Chronicles for Roku and a revival of the Terry Gilliam movie “Time Bandits” that is now a series on Apple’s streaming service….
(5) DID I MENTION, RESISTANCE IS FUTILE. “Warner Bros. Discovery pretty much wiped the Cartoon Network website” reports The Verge.
Warner Bros. Discovery has updated Cartoon Network’s website to remove basically everything and turn it into a page pointing to the Max streaming service. Before the change, the website let you watch free episodes of shows like Adventure Time and Steven Universe. The switchover appears to have happened on Thursday, Variety reports, and follows Warner Bros.’ announcement last week that it would be shutting down Boomerang, its streaming service for classic Warner Bros. cartoons.
“Looking for episodes of your favorite Cartoon Network shows?” reads a message that pops up on Cartoon Network’s website. “Check out what’s available to stream on Max (subscription required).”…
(6) A DISH OVERSERVED COLD. Sarah A. Hoyt is seeing so much “Vengeance” fiction she tried to apply the brakes at Mad Genius Club.
…No matter how angry people are, feeding on a straight diet of revenge fantasies will just make it worse and worse and worse.
Okay, so you’re not a missionary, and you just want to make money, what do you care if you’re making people crazier.
Because you’ll train yourself to write very bad fiction. And because a lot of it is very very bad fiction which no one really wants to read, no matter how furious they are.
Particularly because — trust me — it’s disproportionate and worse, it doesn’t make for a good story. Even worse, unless you are an experienced author who knows precisely how to convey how mad you are and how much these evil people deserve their comeupance, revenge is not an easy plot to write.
It seems easy, because it’s a strong emotion. And if you feel the need to see someone being sliced to little bits, and aren’t picky about who it is, particularly if the person being sliced up is entirely fictional….
(7) TED TALK. I believe I missed this issue…. In 1964, Theodore Sturgeon wrote a story for Sports Illustrated: “How To Forget Baseball”. [Via Paul Di Filippo.]
Once upon a possible (for though there is only one past, there are many futures), after 12 hours of war and 40-some years of reconstruction; at a time when nothing had stopped technology (for technological progress not only accelerates, so does the rate at which it accelerates), the country was composed of strip-cities, six blocks wide and up to 80 miles long, which rimmed the great superhighways, and wildernesses. And at certain remote spots in the wilderness lived primitives, called Primitives, a hearty breed that liked to stay close to nature and the old ways. And it came about that a certain flack, whose job it was to publicize the national pastime, a game called Quoit, was assigned to find a person who had never seen the game; to invite him in for one game, to get his impressions of said game and to use them as flacks use such things. He closed the deal with a Primitive who agreed to come in exchange for the privilege of shopping for certain trade goods. So…
(8) ROMANTASY ON THE MATURE SIDE. The New York Times hypothesizes “Why Romantasy Readers Pine for 500-Year-Old ‘Shadow Daddies’”. “Disappointed by swipe culture and, perhaps, reality, some readers pine for the much (much) older ‘shadow daddies’ of romantasy novels”. Gift article link bypasses NYT paywall.
… With the arrival of megahits like “A Court of Thorns and Roses,” a series by Sarah J. Maas, romantasy has garnered a huge fan base. Many readers dissect characters like Feyre Archeron, the protagonist in “A Court of Thorns and Roses,” who is about 19 when she meets her 500-year-old “mate,” a mysterious faerie; they swap theories; and they rate sex scenes on a “spiciness” scale. Among them, there has been a recurring point of debate: Is it acceptable for a 19-year-old to date a 500-year-old?
Some say it is not only acceptable — it’s aspirational.
“I’ve made poor decisions with regular men,” said Asvini Ravindran, 31, a social media specialist who lives in Toronto and has a TikTok about books, including romantasy. “Why not make them with an immortal man with magical powers?”
Fans of the genre refer to such ancient love interests as “shadow daddies.”…
(9) THE EPONYMOUS RING. CBR.com answers the question “What Was the One Ring Made of in The Lord of the Rings?” Of course, some of you won’t need to read to the end because you remember.
The One Ring from The Lord of the Rings had many supernatural abilities; it could render its wearer invisible, extend the lifespan of those in its presence, corrupt even the noblest hearts, and most importantly, dominate the other Rings of Power. Yet its bizarre physical properties were just as significant. The One Ring was practically indestructible, as it did not bend, break, scratch, or lose its shine, even after spending thousands of years at the bottom of a river. The only way to harm the One Ring was to melt it, and even then, no ordinary fire or even the breath of a great dragon like Smaug would suffice; it could only melt when dropped into the lava of Mount Doom, where the Dark Lord Sauron forged it. Additionally, it could change its size and weight at will, an ability it used to slip on and off the fingers of its wearers….
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born August 14, 1965 — Brannon Braga, 59. Brannon Braga was, not at the same time or always, the writer, producer and creator of the Next Gen, Voyager, Enterprise, The Orville, as well as of the Generations and First Contact films. He written quite a number of the Trek films — Generations, First Contact, Insurrection and Nemesis.
Those four films he’s written. Is that more than anyone else? I could look it up, but I figure I’d ask the great pool of Trek fans here instead.
Confession time — I’ve still not watched The Orville. Now that it’s been canceled, shall I go ahead and watch all of it? Opinions please.
He has written more episodes of the many Trek series than anyone else — four hundred and forty-four to date, many of course co- written. I really don’t think he’ll be writing any more as his last scripts were for Enterprise.
He was responsible for the Next Generation series finale “All Good Things…” which won him a Hugo Award at Intersection for excellence in SF writing, along with Ronald D. Moore.
He was nominated at LoneStarCon2 for Star Trek: First Contact for the screenplay along with Ronald D. Moore, and the story by Rick Berman and Ronald D. Moore; Torcon3 saw him pick up two nominations for Enterprise stories — first for the “Carbon Creek” story along with Rick Berman and Dan O’Shannon, and the wonderful “A Night in The Sick Bay” with Rick Berman.
(Digression. Ok, I like Enterprise a lot. For me, everything there worked. And the Mirror Universe finale worked for me though it got a lot of criticism.)
Aussiecon 4 saw him pick up only his non-Trek related Hugo nomination or Award. It was for writing FlashForward’s “No More Good Days” with David S. Goyer.
There’s a great quote by him after he stopped being Roddenberry’s replacement as head of the Trek franchise: “It’s not an easy task. On the other hand, I have nothing to be ashamed about. We created 624 hours of television and four feature films, and I think we did a hell of a job. I’m amazed that we managed to get 18 years of the kind of work that everyone involved managed to contribute to, and it’s certainly more than anyone could have asked for.” (Star Trek Magazine)
(11) COMICS SECTION.
- Close to Home believes in accurate simulations.
- Mannequin on the Moon depicts Renaiassance marital counseling.
- Thatababy rewards someone who knows the entire Asimov quotation.
- One Big Happy invents a new planetary mnemonic.
- Rhymes With Orange has an unsettling trophy.
- Wumo presents an AI threat.
(12) IN X-CESS. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Just what we all need, another list of somebody’s opinion about “best of…“ The Hollywood Reporter gives us “Best X-Men Movies, Ranked”. And as you might expect, it’s more fun to pan than to praise.
13. X-Men: The Last Stand (2006)
Brett Ratner was never anyone’s first choice to direct an X-Men film. And from the film itself, and the stories that followed, it’s not hard to see why. The Last Stand smashes together Chris Claremont and John Byrne’s The Dark Phoenix Saga, widely considered to be the best X-Men story, along with the Gifted storyline from Joss Whedon and John Cassaday’s then-more recent Astonishing X-Men. The film doesn’t serve either story well, and it all too hastily kills off Cyclops (James Marsden), sidelines several mainstays like Mystique (Rebecca Romijn) and Rogue (Anna Paquin), and introduces a bunch of new characters audiences had been clamoring to see — Kitty Pryde (Elliot Page), Beast (Kelsey Grammer), Angel (Ben Foster) and Juggernaut (Vinnie Jones), none of whom get much time to shine (although Grammer’s Beast is a welcome addition).
Famke Janssen does well with what the film decides to do with the Phoenix, which is to make her into a kind of demonically possessed powerhouse, and Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen all remain stalwarts of the franchise. A third act that features Magneto lifting the Golden Gate Bridge and Logan professing his love for Jean, while she tries to incinerate him, are highlights, along with John Powell’s score. But all in all, there’s just something a bit too studio-mandated and manufactured about it.
(13) NEW ISSUE OF SF COMMENTARY. Bruce Gillespie has released SF Commentary 117, July 2024. Covers by Alan White and Dennis Callegari. Poems by Alan White. Articles by Janeen Webb and Cy Chauvin. Columns by Bruce Gillespie, Colin Steele, Anna Creer, Tony Thomas, John Hertz. Reviews by John Litchen and William Sarill.
Download from eFanzines or at Fanac.org.
(14) THAT’S ALL, FOLKS. R. Graeme Cameron accepted the Auora Award for Best Fan Writing and Publication for Polar Borealis, its fifth win, then announced on Facebook that he is recusing the publication from future Aurora consideration.
…The purpose of the Auroras is to celebrate the diversity of Canadian talent in as inclusive a manner as possible. Five is a good, solid number. It’s time to make room for others, especially the new talent coming along.
Therefore, I state for the record that I am requesting CSFFA to no longer consider Polar Borealis for nomination or ballot status from this date forward.
Not that I am adverse to winning further Aurora awards for other things….
…Main thing is for Polar Borealis to stop hogging the limelight.
(15) AN ARCHITECTURAL TRIUMPH. You can take an online tour of the fabulous McKim Building that houses the Boston Public Library. It’s gorgeous!
…The McKim Lobby, from its Georgia marble floor inlaid with brass designs to its three aisles of vaulted ceilings, continues a grand procession into the heart of the building. The ceilings, clad in mosaic tile by Italian immigrant craftsmen living in Boston’s North End, bear Roman motifs and the names of thirty famous Massachusetts statesmen.
The mosaic ceiling tiles clad vault work by Rafael Guastavino, a Spanish builder who specialized in Mediterranean-style ceramic tile-vaulted ceilings that were lightweight, fireproof, self-supporting, and strong. Guastavino’s collaboration with Charles Follen McKim throughout a number of ceilings in the Central Library represented his first major American commission, the starting point for a company that would go on to construct vaults in over 600 buildings throughout the country….
(16) RINGS OF POWER RETURNS. “War is coming to Middle Earth,” begins the final pre-launch trailer before The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 2 drops on August 29.
(17) APPRENTICED TO A PIRATE. From six years ago. “How Sir Paul McCartney acts in film Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales”.
Co-directors Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg explain all the details on Sir Paul McCartney’s transformation to a pirate.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Paul Di Filippo, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]
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I tried to go back in time and post before the scroll dropped, but it didn’t work. Causality prevails . . .
@Cat, “The Orville” is worth your time.
(2) Finally. Not well delivered, but at least delivered.
(3) Nifty data presentation.
We are the Pixel makers and we are the Scrollers of Scrolls.
(2) I do not know whether to be delighted or appalled, that Oor Wombat has finally received her (broken, and through no fault if her own, questionable) Hugo. Nettle & Bone was a worthy Finalist, and a deserving winner.
If the Chengdu Hugos had been designed as a set of Legos for winners to assemble, arriving in pieces wouldn’t have been a big deal. (Future Worldcons take note.)
@Cat, you should go on and watch “The Orville”. When it premiered on the Fox TV Network, I almost didn’t watch it as the promos made it look awful, but I watched it and was surprised how much I enjoyed it. You can tell watching it that McFarland is a huge fan of Trek, and unlike some of the recent Trek series, The Orville caught some of the Sense of Wonder and Adventure that was a hallmark of ST:TOS.
As the series went on the Characters were fleshed out and became interesting and the performances by the cast are very good. And after all, what SF series has had a guest appearance by Dolly Parton which turns out to be pivotal to the plot.
(2) Alas, no amount of superglue can put the broken process back together again.
(2) Good grief! (And 2023 really is the Charlie Brown of Hugo trophies.)
(4) At this rate, they’re going to reinvent cable…
(5) Argh! There oughta be a law.
(6) I will let Thomas Kyd, William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, Stieg Larsson, Joe Abercrombie, and many many others know.
(8) A mere 500 years old? Pshaw! I wrote a story where the hero was at least 10,000 years old. But the heroine had reincarnated multiple times during that time period, so she was probably the wiser one.
@Cat: The first season of The Orville is entertaining but rather uneven, as Seth MacFarlane evidently couldn’t decide whether he was trying to make Star Trek or Galaxy Quest. But for seasons two and three he clearly decided on Star Trek, with very good results. It’s a shame it was cancelled.
(9) I had somehow assumed the Ring was made from white gold.
There is talk that the Orville will have a season 4. Scott Grimes (Lt. Malloy) apparently confirmed production will begin in early 2025. How accurate that is, of course, debateable.
3) What marvelous graphs. Thank you, Zoë O’Connell. One more reason for me to wish that Seth Goldberg were still around: he’d delight in these.
(2) maybe it could have a big hat added (proportional to the rocket size). I loved Nettle and Bone.
(6) good discovery: living in a fountain of rage is bad for one.
(10) Had to do a double take there, because no way Braga is 79. And he isn’t, he was born in 1965, not 1945. He also wasn’t involved in either Insurrection or Nemesis. And that episode count of 444 is too much. He worked on more than 370 episodes (4 seasons of TNG, 7 of VOY, 4 of ENT), but actual episodic writing credits only number around 100 – which still is the franchise record.
(6) The vengefic’s problem is that the reader-viewer-whatever can usually see the ending from the start. When the outcome is fixed, the writer-showrunner-whatever has to come up with something pretty bloody (haha) amazing by way of compensation. John Wick’s elaborately-choreographed set pieces come to mind.
Hoyt’s reaction to a fictional character whose life has collapsed in ruins is, by her admission, metaphorically to slam the door in their face. Yet this scenario is exactly the premise of Drop Dead Fred (1991). Main character Elizabeth’s response to her troubles is to unleash a chaos agent in the form of Fred, her imaginary childhood friend. It’s an interesting failure of a movie, and I have fond memories of it.
c4c
The Orville. Eww.
Sorry, but if you aren’t a fan of Seth MacFarlane’s work (I very very very much dislike Family Guy and his other cartoons), you probably won’t be a fan of this. The first few episodes had too many echoes of the cartoon MacFarlane style for my enjoyment.
Mileage varies, and I realize I’m an outlier in this opinion.
The Orville changed over the course of its run. At first it leaned hard into McFarlane-style humor, but that decreased over time and it became a really interesting and thoughtful science fiction series. By the end I thought it was one of the great all-time SF shows and I’m still holding out hope that it continues.
I looked for confirmation of cancellation but instead found stories about how McFarlane is hoping they kill off Captain Ed Mercer and continue without him.
One of the projects McFarlane wants to do instead is a new adaptation of Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War.
Yeah, I’m sorry, but I’m not a TV/video person and if I have to endure a bunch of stuff I don’t like to get to the good stuff…it’s like a book that turns me off in the first hundred pages and I DNF it.
Joyce Reynolds-Ward:
It is variable. I like the Orville very much. And I’ve never seen any other series or work by Seth McFarlane that I though rose above execrable.
Braga was never, ever, this.
You’ve confused him with Rick Berman, who was.
Braga also had zero to do with VOYAGER. Again, you’ve confused him with Rick Berman.
In general, much of this write-up is about Berman and not Branna Braga. This piece ostensibly about Braga reads as if it were written by AI, it’s so confused and full of misinformation that a moment’s glance at Wikipedia would have corrected.
Gary Farber: What is wrong with you today, Gary?
You say: “a moment’s glance at Wikipedia would have corrected”
Okay — here’s the Wikipedia article about Brannon Braga. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brannon_Braga
Gary says: Braga also had zero to do with VOYAGER. Again, you’ve confused him with Rick Berman.
Wikipedia says:
But to give you your due, the Wikipedia’s Rick Berman article — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Berman — does say of him
Both I and your entry writer mixed up people, Mike: your writer was mixing up Brannon Braga with Rick Berman and I was mixing up Brannon Braga with Ronald D. Moore. But I did it once and your writer did it with almost everything Braga is given credit for here.
Braga never ever ever ran the ST franchise. I was correct in correcting that. It was Rick Berman who ran it — solo –and that is just an enormous mistake; it’s like crediting Arthur C. Clarke with the Foundation Trilogy. There are an tremendous number of books, let alone articles, about the history of STAR TREK, and about Berman, and Braga, one of the most infamous names in Trek history.
Also, every single credit to Braga above gives him solo credit for each job, and in every single case, that’s wrong. In every single case where Braga is correctly credited, he had a “co” credit, not a solo credit as given here: “co-creator,” “co-producer,” “co-writer,” etc., not “creator.”
Perhaps I’m just baffled by the syntax of this overly complex sentence: “Brannon Braga, 59. Brannon Braga was, not at the same time or always, the writer, producer and creator of the Next Gen, Voyager, Enterprise, The Orville, as well as of the Generations and First Contact films. ”
But I was incorrect in saying Braga had nothing to do with Voyager. In that I was thinking of Ronald D. Moore. My apologies for my single error.
Braga, however, was never a “creator” of ST: VOYAGER. Period. VOY was created by Rick Berman, Michael Piller and Jeri Taylor.
Nor was Braga a creator of ST:NG in any way, co or otherwise. Nor did Braga get any creator credit whatever on THE ORVILLE. That was created by Seth McFarlane. I wouldn’t even know that, not being a fan of the show, except that I bothered to look at Wikipedia, which your writer clearly did not bother to do. That’s all it takes. If one is bothering to write a profile of someone, it’s the least a blog writer should do.
I’m a drive-by commenter, and this is a blog-of-record; you should be held to a higher standard than I am. But this entry about Braga is still a huge mess and heavily misinformative and it’s about one of the four most famous creators in STAR TREK history, not some obscure historical figure. There are still no corrections made to the article, either. People googling for information will still find your article, and they’re not apt to go read the comments to look for corrections, and they still wouldn’t find them if I didn’t bother to put them here. Twice.
The thing is, you’re not welcome to lash out and insult my contributors. You don’t have that privilege. And when you don’t even bother to read the source you’re pounding over someone’s head, you don’t get any cookies for coming back two weeks later to try and overwrite your mistake.