(0) SCROLL LITE. I’m not feeling well today, so let’s make this a do-it-yourself Scroll. Add links in the comments to things we should be covering.
(1) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
- Born August 26, 1911 — Otto Oscar Binder. He’s best remembered as the co-creator with Al Plastino of Supergirl and for his many scripts for Captain Marvel Adventures and other stories involving the entire Marvel Family. He was extremely prolific in the comic book industry and is credited with writing over four thousand stories across a variety of publishers under his own name. He also wrote novels, one of which was The Avengers Battle the Earth Wrecker, one of the series created by writer-editor Stan Lee and artist and co-plotter Jack Kirby. (Died 1974.)
- Born August 26, 1912 — Gerald Kersh.He wrote but one genre novel, The Secret Masters, and two genre stories in his Henry the Ghost series. So why’s he here, you ask? Because Ellison declared “you will find yourself in the presence of a talent so immense and compelling, that you will understand how grateful and humble I felt merely to have been permitted to associate myself with his name as editor.” (Died 1968.)
- Born August 26, 1936 — Francine York. Her last genre performance was on Star Trek: Progeny. Never heard of it? Of course not, as it was yet another fan project. It’s amazing how many of these there are. Or were before the lawyers at Paramount and their Hell Hounds descended upon them and ate their ability to create anything. Before that, she appeared in Mutiny in Outer Space, Space Probe Taurus and Astro Zombies: M3 – Cloned. (Died 2017.)
- Born August 26, 1949 — Sheila E Gilbert, 74. Until she retired on June 30 of this year, co-editor-in-chief and publisher of DAW Books with Elizabeth R (Betsy) Wollheim. For her work there, she has also shared the Chesley Awards for best art director with Wollheim twice, and received a solo Hugo award at MidAmeriCon II as best professional editor
- Born August 26, 1958 — Wanda De Jesus, 65. She’s Estevez in Robocop 2, a film that had its moments but rarely, and she has two other film genre roles, Lexie Moore in Captain Nuke and the Bomber Boys, and Akooshay in Ghosts of Mars. Series wise, she has a number of one-offs including Babylon 5, Tales from The Darkside, SeaQuest DSV, Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales for Every Child and voicing a character on one of the Spider-Man series.
- Born August 26, 1970 — Melissa McCarthy, 53. Yes, I know she was in the rebooted Ghostbusters. I’m more interested in Super Intelligence in which she plays a character that has an AI who has decided to take over her life. It reminds me somewhat of Kritzer’s “Cat Pictures Please” premise except a lot darker. (And we are not talking about The Happytime Murders she was in. Really we are not.)
- Born August 26, 1980 — Chris Pine, 43. James T. Kirk in the current Trek film franchise; also Steve Trevor in the Wonder Woman film franchise as well as voicing Jack Frost in Rise Of The Guardians. He was Peter Parker / Spider-Man in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse which won a Hugo at Dublin 2019.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, 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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Get well soon, Mike. Being sick is never a good thing.
Geez, and another friend says she’s been sick, intestinally. Feel better soon.
Birthdays: Otto Binder… and let’s not forget the books he wrote with his brother, under the pen name of Eando Binder.
Feel better soon, Mr. Glyer.
(0) Hope you’re feeling better soon.
Thanks for the Title Credit (and Harry Chapin will provide a lot of possibilities for further Titles).
(1) Otto was also half of Eando Binder, who together wrote about Adam Link.
Feel better soon!
Feel better soon
(1) Happy birthday to Sheila E Gilbert! I’m trying to imagine how many books she has edited… Wow.
Speaking of DAW… I went to B&N yesterday — hoping to buy a small trade paperback at the most. But then, I realized they had Gryphon in Light, and I remembered the Lis Carey review posted here. So that magically ended up in my hands, and I started it last night…
Anne Marble says Speaking of DAW… I went to B&N yesterday — hoping to buy a small trade paperback at the most. But then, I realized they had Gryphon in Light, and I remembered the Lis Carey review posted here. So that magically ended up in my hands, and I started it last night…
Lis is a stellar book review.er. And the same for dragons, fire lizards and chocolate as well.
@Anne Marble–We all know I am a Bad Influence.
I’m glad Mike has decide to rest.
I hope you will feel better soon, Mike.
I saw my osteopathic therapist yesterday and she agreed that the level of pain in my three broken ribs plus the fact that the displaced one is now making a very noticeable sound and feels like it’s moving warrants a visit to an osteopathic surgeon.
Not my present one as he does not do ribs, only knees and shoulders. Yes, I know that sounds weird.
She got a large bag of Lindt dark chocolate.truffles. And she, like all my female care team team there gets chocolate and house plants.
Hope you feel better soon Mike!
Hope you feel better soon, Mike
Feel better soon, Mike!
Just up for a moment. Thanks everyone for the good wishes, they mean a lot.
Rest up!
Get well soon, Mike!
Otto Binder: One of my favorite books when I was around 9 was a Golden Library of Knowledge book titled “Planets.” It was my first introduction to the Solar System, and I loved that book. Its author was Otto Binder. There was a companion book to it called “Space Flight.” This one was by Lester Del Rey. Later, I noticed those names when I began to explore science fiction in book form.
Feel better soon, Mike!
Gerald Kersh wrote more than two genre stories. Several of the stories in Nightshades and Damnations (the collection of his stories edited by Harlan) are, at the very least, weird fantasy. At least one is weird science fiction.
Mike and Cat — hope you both feel better soon (!).
Get well, Mike! At least Jetpak did their thing today!
And Gerald Kersh’s a good one.
Feel better, everybody who needs to feel better!
Hope you feel better soon.
The entry for Melissa McCarthy mentions not wanting to mention HAPPYTIME MURDERS, so perhaps I shouldn’t mention 2021’s THUNDER FORCE. (Two women accidentally gain superpowers.) It performs the remarkable feat of scoring lower on Rotten Tomatoes than HAPPYTIME; 22% to HM’s 23%. The disparity is even greater on IMDB’s ratings, 4.5 to 5.5.
= = = = =
An item of possible interest for tomorrow’s scroll:
Narratess is offering 300 self-published ebooks on sale this weekend from $0 to $1.99. (Similar, I gather, to other clustered book offers I’ve seen, but those are usually about 10-12 books; this is on a much larger scale.) I recognize some authors’ names (J.S. Fields, Stephanie Burgis, Joyce Reynolds-Ward). There are some interesting-sounding books in the list, and I’ll probably pick up a few. Sale runs from August 26-28th. Link: Narratess Indie August Sale
(1) Chris Pine was also in Unstoppable which isn’t SF or Fantasy or anything like that. But it is a very good movie if you’re looking for something to watch which has a good story, is well-cast, and isn’t part of some franchise or licensed series of Intellectual Property.
He’s the man, the man with the pixel touch.
He scrolls so much.
@bill: Scrolledfinger!
Also, feel better to Cat as well, and maybe Lis. Repeat as needed.
Rest well and get better, Mike
“He loves only Scrolls”
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Feel better, Mike.
If we have seen further, it is by standing on the strollers of filers.
(1) Otto Binder was half of the fraternal writing team Eando Binder; his brother Earl was the other half (E and O … get it?). Long before Otto came to comics, the pair were among the most prolific contributors to early Amazing, Astounding, and Wonder Stories. After Earl stopped writing sometime in the mid-30’s, Otto continued using their shared byline. Not one of the outstanding SF pulpsters, but delivered some entertaining stories nonetheless; PUZZLE OF THE SPACE PYRAMIDS (Curtis, 1971) is a fun collection of his 30’s space opera (though the cover is laughably bad) . Best known for the short story “I, Robot”, an Asimovian story published in Amazing about an intelligent robot accused of murder that came out several years before Asimov began writing about the same topic; Martin Greenberg appropriated the Binder story title for the Asimov mosaic novel, much to Asimov’s embarrassment.
Feel better, Mike; Cat, I must have missed an earlier note about broken ribs; hope your new bone surgeon gets that sorted out!
Anybody have any advice. I am a member of Chengdu Worldcon. I nominated things for the Hugos so it worked back then. Now I cannot get them to send me a code so that I can pay for and vote in site selection. I contacted site selection and they said go to help at Chengdu. I never get any responses from them. Thankfully, I can join Seattle Worldcon after they are voted in but how do I get some help? I do want to vote in the Hugos.
As an absolute fiend for vintage books about UFOs, I feel compelled to note that Binder wrote two in the late ’60s — Flying Saucers are Watching Us & What We Know About Flying Saucers.
Off the top of my head, admittedly several hours from full wakefulness (assuming I achieve that state later today … if ever), the only other sf author I can think of who authored a volume on the subject was he dabbler Gerald (H.F.) Heard, whose Is Another World Watching?: The Riddle of the Flying Saucers appeared in 1950 — the first British book on UFOs & one of the first couple or three anywhere, period.
Feel better, Mike and Cat!
@Linda Robinette, I had the exact same problem. My tokens (and other emails from Chengdu) were being caught by an upstream spam filter. Check your spam folder and if they’re not there and you have access to any other spam filters check those too. Good luck! (My email was through a private domain; I had to get the domain administrator to whitelist it for me. For what that’s worth. If you’re using gmail or hotmail or yahoo or one of those big email companies, I have no useful advise, I’m afraid.)
Mike, Cat – hope you’re both feeling better soon. (Cat: ouch!)
Gerald Kersh: to amplify Dan’l Danehy-Oakes point, On an Odd Note from Valancourt Press (edited by Nick Mamatas) collects 13 genre (or very genre-adjacent) stories by Kersh, and I have an anthology of supernatural short stories which contains two more not included in the Mamatas-edited collection. I’m pretty sure that way back in the day I read at least a couple of fantasy/horror anthologies that were edited by Kersh.
@dan bailey: You can add Jack Womack’s 2016 book Flying Saucers Are Real! to that short list. Despite the title, Womack does not believe UFOs are real; the book is more of an extended, heavily illustrated riff on Womack’s enormous collection of UFO literature. Sadly, Womack seems to have quit writing fiction.
PhilRM — Yep, I’ve got Womack’s book. Utterly delightful.
Cassy B. asks Feel better, Mike; Cat, I must have missed an earlier note about broken ribs; hope your new bone surgeon gets that sorted out!
Six weeks, I got up in the night to head to the bathroom , got dizzy (which I still do despite my anti-seizure meds) and feel on the wooden chest that was in my bedroom (it’s now in the closet).
I heard them crack but knew I’d be at my primary care provider later that week so I didn’t head to the ER the next day. I did call to the primary care provider to get and an X-ray set up. (They did that without checking with my PCP. I obviously am too well known to them.) Samantha, my osteopathic therapist, read it, said I had broken ribs, but that I need an official diagnosis by the radiologist.
So that afternoon Samantha, Samantha’s RN, called me to tell me that I needed to get to the ER as I had fluid on the left lung where the ribs were damaged. Oh joy. I spend nearly six hours there awaiting and getting a CAT-SCAN, seeing a resident and eventually a doctor. No real amount of fluid but three ribs broken, one displaced.
So I too hope the new bone surgeon can figure out why they still hurt so much. The displaced one is apparently doing things it should not be doing.
@Cat
Cracked a couple of ribs once, on a Monday morning. For reasons, it was Saturday before I could get to a doctor. He said “Yep, broken” – he’d had it happen to him – and got me a rib belt. They ached for a couple of months. But they weren’t displaced or anything worse.
I hope they can fix yours so they don’t hurt and stay where they should be.
Cracked ribs — owie.
I was once sitting on the end of sofa, playing “pounce on the pen” with the host’s cat. The cat snagged my finger in a way that caused me to drop the pen. I lunged forward and to the side to get it, and cracked a rib against the hard end of the sofa’s armrest.
So, my sincere sympathy for having multiple!
Commiserations on the unwellosity, Mike. At our age (you have 3 years on me) it’s always more concerning than when we were younger and more resilient.
Sympathies also to Cat. Somehow, I’ve managed to last this long without ever breaking a bone. I’m sure it won’t last.
Regarding Gerald Kersh, ISFDB currently lists 132 of his short stories as genre (and another 80 as non-genre), while The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction says “Many of his numerous short stories (some 400 were published, over 100 of them never collected in his lifetime) are sf or fantasy.”