(1) SFWA BOARD ADDRESSES STAFF CHANGES. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association today sent members a message with very general comments about recent changes in their professional and volunteer staff. At the top is yesterday’s resignation by President Jeffe Kennedy, whose office will be filled by Vice President, Chelsea Mueller until a special election is held. The message also says other issues are roiling the organization without identifying any of them specifically.

…Due to the nature of the employee/employer relationship, we do not feel it is ethical or appropriate to make these matters public. Our duties as Board members require us to work in the best interest of SFWA. Our responsibilities as compassionate human beings compel us to seek solutions reflecting our respect for our employees and volunteers. Sometimes, we may fall short, especially when things happen quickly and information is limited. Moving forward, we ask for your patience and trust as we do our best to fulfill our obligations….

…All members received the email from Jeffe Kennedy explaining her resignation as SFWA’s President on Aug 1, 2024. The Board is working with all relevant stakeholders to determine the timeline and process for a special election for president as outlined in the Bylaws. We will share those details as they are finalized. In the interim, SFWA’s elected Vice President, Chelsea Mueller, will fill the office of president.

The Board acknowledges there are several other issues, both ongoing and recent, that have been brought to our attention. Please know that we are listening and we will address your concerns and your suggestions as we move forward. At the center of many of these issues is the need for greater transparency. We cannot comment on legal matters or confidential matters such as Griefcom and the Emergency Medical Fund (EMF). Still, there are many aspects of this organization where we need to improve communications with our membership. There are many good suggestions on how to do this, but most will take time to implement.

Many topics brought to the forefront need to be considered by the Board of Directors with member input. The Board has scheduled upcoming board meetings focusing on and prioritizing these topics…

(2) BBC PULLS TENNANT ERA WHO EPISODE TO REDUB CAMEO BY PROSECUTED NEWS ANCHOR. “’Doctor Who’ Episode Featuring Huw Edwards Removed From BBC iPlayer” reports Deadline.

The BBC is starting to scrub Huw Edwards from its vast library of content.

The UK broadcaster has temporarily removed from iPlayer an episode of Doctor Who featuring the disgraced news anchor, who this week pleaded guilty to indecent child image charges.

No longer available to stream is Fear Her, an installment from Season 2 of the sci-fi drama starring David Tennant and Billie Piper. The episode is now being redubbed to remove Edwards, whose voiceover features during a news clip.

He features when Chloe Webber, a girl who is terrorized by a demonic version of her abusive dead father, makes everyone disappear in a sports stadium….

The BBC added: “As you would expect we are actively considering the availability of our archive. While we don’t routinely delete content from the BBC archive as it is a matter of historical record, we do consider the continued use and re-use of material on a case-by-case basis.”

It is perhaps unsurprising that executives looked at the Edwards episode, given the nature of his crimes and that Doctor Who has a young fan base. The Daily Mirror reported that the footage of Edwards would be edited out.…

… The BBC also appears to have removed an episode of The Great British Menu featuring Edwards as a guest judge. Season 17, Episode 28 is not currently available on iPlayer.

The BBC will face decisions over whether it can replay countless hours of archive footage of Edwards. He has been a mainstay for major national moments, including the Queen’s death.

There have also been questions over whether Edwards should be scrubbed from James Bond movie Skyfall, during which he appears as a newsreader.

(3) EKPEKI BOUND FOR SCOTLAND. Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki has got a visa and will attend the Glasgow 2024 Worldcon. He’s still looking for help with some of the expenses. The GoFundMe to “Help Oghenechovwe Ekpeki Attend the 2024 Glasgow Worldcon” raised over $1000 of the $3000 goal on the first day.

Guess who got a visa & will attend @Glasgowin2024. ????
Will do a reading, and present the @africansfs Nommo award holding there, in which I am a double finalist. My schedule below. You can toss a coin to your writer, at my Gofundme, to help with expenses https://t.co/pYfhhptuHY pic.twitter.com/OZEa8e8gXZ

— Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki (@Penprince_) August 2, 2024

(4) COVER REVEAL. And today Ekpeki shared the cover of Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction volume 3 by Cyrielle Prückner. The book can be preordered at Amazon.com.

(5) ROLL YOUR OWN INSULT. Ekpeki also has been playing with the Don Rickles of ChatGPTs:

???? https://t.co/Xs6siq2DSY pic.twitter.com/VT5hlTF7UN

— Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki (@Penprince_) August 2, 2024

(6) OCTOTHORPE. Episode 115 of the Octothorpe podcast is “I Like the Way Glasgow Did It”.

John is a busy bee, something’s bugging Alison, and Liz meets a wasp. We spend our episode this week digging into the WSFS Business Meeting in unprecedented detail, but hopefully we make it more transparent and at least somewhat funny. Let us know if you have any questions before the convention, and listen here!

An uncorrected transcript is available here.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

August 2, 1954 – Ken MacLeod, 70.

By Paul Weimer: When I first started reading MacLeod in the mid 1990s, it felt like a trangressive, even forbidden act.  As you know, Bob, I grew up in a relatively conservative (in many senses of the world) household. And while science fiction and fantasy (and really all of my reading) were escapes from that world, it wasn’t until I was an adult that I started to branch out and read things that felt…trangressive.

Like, for example, the Fall Revolution novels of Ken MacLeod.  Confronted with societies and ways of organizing nations and societies far removed from my normal reading or experience, was more than a bit of a wakeup call.  I had never actually read a socialist SF writer and a world both communist and libertarian and very different than what I was used to until I picked up The Star Fraction. His technological ideas, AI and Singularities and much more. I was struck, too how MacLeod seamlessly wove in concepts of alternate history and divergent choices right into his narrative. I was amazed that the fourth of the Fall books was in fact an alternate history to the first three. 

Although contemporary events overshadowed and made his world impossible, I am also a fan of a one shot technothriller/spy thriller/mindbender, The Restoration Game. It’s set in a Soviet Republic that no longer exists, and has a MMO player as a main character, who finds out that the real world is even stranger than the game and its epic story she is trying to use to brew revolution. It shows MacLeod loving to burst his work at the seams with ideas, with a truly wham moment in the denouement of the novel that I would not dream of spoiling. Fun stuff, and one of my early book reviews, back in the day. You can still find that review review online although I think I was in the end a bit too harsh on it. I continue to confront and engage with MacLeod’s work.

Lately. I’ve been highly enjoying his newest works, the Lightspeed Trilogy books. The use of plausible politics and the polities of Earth keeping FTL travel a secret at all costs, combined with time jumps, strange aliens and their plans (especially the Fermi), and a tangle of ideas and concepts.  MacLeod’s books, from the Fall Revolution to the Lightspeed books are bursting at the seams with ideas. Critics and fans who bemoan that modern SF books are lacking inventiveness in ideas and concepts simply have not been reading MacLeod’s work. I get that, because his politics can be a bit much and his works wear them on their sleeve, and proudly. 

(8) COMICS SECTION.

• Last Kiss recommends comic book lovers. In a manner of speaking.
• Eek! shows faster isn’t going to be better.
• Non Sequitur presents a writing challenge that’s hard to overcome.

(9) I BELIEVE. The Paris Review’s Jason Katz tells what it was like “At the Great Florida Bigfoot Conference”.

The evening before the fourth annual Great Florida Bigfoot Conference in the north-central horse town of Ocala, I was in a buffet line at the VIP dinner, listening to a man describe his first encounter. “I was on an airboat near Turner River Road in the Glades and I saw it there,” he said. “At first, I confused it with a gator because it was hunched over, but then it stood up. It was probably eight feet tall. I could smell it too. I froze. It was like something had taken control over my body.” His story contained a common trope of Bigfoot encounters: awe and fear in the face of a higher power.

I sat down at a conference room round table and gnawed on an undercooked chicken quarter, looking around at my fellow VIPs, or as the conference’s master of ceremonies, Ryan “RPG” Golembeske, called us, the Bigfoot Mafia. Most of the other attendees were of retirement age. Their hats, tattoos, and car bumpers in the parking lot indicated that many were former military, police, and/or proud gun owners. Many were Trump supporters—beseeching fellow motorists to, as one bumper sticker read, MAKE THE FOREST GREAT AGAIN, a catchphrase which had been written out over an image of a Bigfoot on a turquoise background in the pines, rocking a pompadour. The sticker was a small oval on the larger spare wheel cover of a mid-aughts Chinook Concourse RV. Above it and below it, in Inspirational Quote Font, was the phrase “Once upon a time … is Now!” The couple who owned the RV cemented their identities with a big homemade TRUCKERS FOR TRUMP window decal next to a large handicap sticker. As a thirty-six-year-old progressive, I was an outlier in this crowd. But, like many, I was a believer.

It bears repeating: I believe in the existence of the Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yeti, Wild Man, or, as it is called in South Florida, the Skunk Ape….

(10) MOTTO. I like this one.

(11) BETTER NOT TELL BLOFELD. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] If Ernst Stravo Blofeld can make a giant space laser with stolen diamonds, you better not tell him about this supposition… “Mercury could have an 11-mile underground layer of diamonds, researchers say” at CNN.

A layer of diamonds up to 18 kilometers (11 miles) thick could be tucked below the surface of Mercury, the solar system’s smallest planet and the closest to the sun, according to new research.

The diamonds might have formed soon after Mercury itself coalesced into a planet about 4.5 billion years ago from a swirling cloud of dust and gas, in the crucible of a high-pressure, high-temperature environment. At this time, the fledgling planet is believed to have had a crust of graphite, floating over a deep magma ocean.

A team of researchers recreated that searing environment in an experiment, with a machine called an anvil press that’s normally used to study how materials behave under extreme pressure but also for the production of synthetic diamonds….

(12) CERN AT WORK ON ITS PUBLIC IMAGE. “Angels & Demons, Tom Hanks and Peter Higgs: how CERN sold its story to the world” – PhysicsWorld looks back

“Read this,” said my boss as he dropped a book on my desk sometime in the middle of the year 2000. As a dutiful staff writer at CERN, I ploughed my way through the chunky novel, which was about someone stealing a quarter of a gram of antimatter from CERN to blow up the Vatican. It seemed a preposterous story but my gut told me it might put the lab in a bad light. So when the book’s sales failed to take off, all of us in CERN’s communications group breathed a sigh of relief.

Little did I know that Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons would set the tone for much of my subsequent career. Soon after I finished the book, my boss left CERN and I became head of communications. I was now in charge of managing public relations for the Geneva-based lab and ensuring that CERN’s activities and functions were understood across the world.

I was to remain in the role for 13 eventful years that saw Angels & Demons return with a vengeance; killer black holes maraud the tabloids; apparently superluminal neutrinos have the brakes applied; and the start-up, breakdown and restart of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Oh, and the small business of a major discovery and the award of the Nobel Prize for Physics to François Englert and Peter Higgs in 2013….

(13) JUSTWATCH TOP 10S. The JustWatch service has shared their list of the Top 10 streaming sff movie and TV shows in July 2024.

[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, Daniel Dern, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Steven French for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Thomas the Red.]