(1) WE’LL BE GONE FOR YEARS AND YEARS AND THEN. Cass Morris tells what it was like aboard Disney’s Halcyon Starcruiser in “Together As One”, first in a series of posts where she’ll capture full details of this Star Wars immersive experience. And joining her vicariously will be your best opportunity because the attraction will close at the end of September.
… And there was just… there was so much. Especially on Day 2. Noah and I spent four hours in Batuu, and almost all of that time was completing missions. We were running around all over the Outpost. And then once back on the Halcyon, we had a little breather (and much-needed time to clean up, considering the effect that Batuu’s balmy climate has) followed by lightsaber training, but from 3:30 onward? It was just go-go-go. Of the four major paths available, I ended up on three of them. (Or, at least, pieces of each — there are sort of sub-tracks to at least the Resistance path, with different characters and objectives). My schedule was bonkers. I think I had seven alarms set on the evening of Day 2 to make sure I moved when I needed to.
If you’re willing to go hard, it pays off. You absolutely cannot do everything — many things are mutually exclusive just due to scheduling. But you can do a lot if you’ve got the energy, the focus, the time management skill, and the willingness to dash up and down a few flights of stairs many times.
Anyone who was inclined to mock the price tag has no idea just how much goes into creating something like this — both creating it in the first place and then running it on a daily basis. I have some idea, but the work I do is on such a smaller scale, to say nothing of a smaller budget. But I know how many documents it takes to get the story set, to plan the props and scenic elements, to train the performers for something that’s really just a couple of hours of “on” time, without the complex branching trees the Starcruiser has. To do something for a 45-hour long experience, with so many variables… it would have to be utterly gargantuan….
(2) WHERE’D IT GO? For the record, David A. Riley has deleted from his blog the two posts discussing the sale of his novelette to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. News of the magazine’s decision not to publish it is at the link.
(3) ABOUT BRADBURY. Issue 7 of The New Ray Bradbury Review is out, the first completely online, open access issue. Editor Phil Nichols tells what readers can expect in times to come.
…As we enter this new phase of the The New Ray Bradbury Review, we hope to explore the four cornerstones of Bradbury’s life and work which have informed the Bradbury Center’s mission. The first of these, underpinning many of the articles in this current issue, is the advancement of literacy, a cause which seems ever more timely in 2023, where we see the states of Florida and Texas enacting policies which restrict readers’ access—and especially young learners’ access—to diverse voices. The Ray Bradbury Center’s home state of Indiana is regrettably heading along a similar path, while there is a glimmer of light in the darkness in Illinois, which has legislated to ban book bans. The other three cornerstones of Bradbury’s life and work will be explored in future issues of NRBR: freedom of imagination and First Amendment rights; advocacy for space exploration; and the preservation of libraries…
(4) WORKAROUNDS. Joe Yao of the Chengdu Worldcon committee responded to concerns from those having difficulty logging into the website to purchase memberships, or vote for the Hugos and 2025 Site Selection. This is a diagnosis of one individual’s problem, but includes much general information.
…The credential message was sent by Tencent Cloud, which I believe is one of the leading IT companies with the most advanced technologies in China. However, there are still some of the email systems recognize it as spam. I have checked the back-end records trying to figure out this issue, and here is some information I would like to share with you.
There are 1,084 requests for credential emails since we opened the Site Selection and the Hugo Packet, not all of them were logging in for the purpose of voting but for other membership purchases, including the Chinese members to buy admissions. And 1,057 of the requests arrived at the email addresses successfully, in other words, the receiving rate is about 97.5%. Most of the emails that failed to arrive were BLOCKED by the receivers, which we have no way to help from my side and I believe it happens not only to Chengdu Worldcon.
The way I can help is suggest you use gmail account if possible to login and if you are a voting member in DisCon 3 or you have already purchased any memberships of Chengdu with other emails but cannot login right now, I can re-upload your gmail information to the system from my side….
(5) FILM OVER BOOK. A Buzzfeed writer names “17 Movies That Were 100 Times Better Than The Book”. Of course I had to click on that. Here’s one of the better entries:
5. “The Shining. One of my favorite movie facts is from The Shining. In the book, the Torrance family drives a red Volkswagen Beetle; in the movie, they drive a yellow one. Later in the movie, as Halloran is driving in the snowstorm, he passes a car accident where a semitruck has crushed a red Beetle. This is thought of as director Stanley Kubrick knowing he totally changed the story and was actively snubbing it with this shot.”
(6) ANOTHER WRITE-OFF? “Disney finishes shooting Spiderwick Chronicles series, decides not to air it” reports Fansided.
…And indeed, Disney shot six episodes, with a cast that includes Jack Dylan Grazer, Lyon Daniels, Noah Cottrell, Joy Bryant, Mychala Lee, and Christian Slater as the shape-shifting ogre Mulgarath. But as it ends up…nah.
According to The A.V. Club, Disney has opted not to air the show on Disney+, even though it’s basically finished. This is a phenomenon we’re seeing more and more of lately. Remember the furor that resulted when Warner Bros. Discovery decided not to release the Batgirl movie after it had already finished shooting? How about when Disney spent over $100 million making a TV show based on the fantasy movie Willow only to remove it from Disney+ after a few months? Why are these studios spending all this money if they’re not going to let people watch what they bought?
A lot of it has to do with the economics of streaming. Will airing The Spiderwick Chronicles get more people to subscribe to Disney+? If not, it may be more cost-effective for Disney to dump it and write off the expenses on its taxes. It’s not like they can sell commercials during episodes, and they probably won’t sell a home video version, so there’s little way for the show to make money by itself. It’s a weird world we’re in now, and studios are trying to figure it out….
However, this line in Variety’s report “Spiderwick Chronicles Series Adaptation Not Moving Forward at Disney+” blurs the part about who’s footing the production bill:
The completed six-episode series, which hails from Paramount Television Studios and 20th Television, is currently being shopped to other potential buyers.
(7) KEEPING THE DISCWORLD NICE AND ROUND. The Gamer defends how the Pratchett rights are handed: “The Terry Pratchett Estate Is Right To Turn Down Subpar Adaptations”.
…The Pratchett estate has likely been burned by its experience with The Watch, something which languished in adaptation limbo for a number of years after the rights were bought. While the Amazon adaptation of Good Omens has been received far better by fans, the star power and intoxicating chemistry of stars David Tennant and Michael Sheen help things along. It will also help that co-author and lifelong friend of Pratchett’s Neil Gaiman is credited as creating the show and serves as a hands-on showrunner as the series moves past the events of the novel. If anyone knows how to continue the Pratchett legacy, it’s him.
In response to a headline decrying Discworld as another huge franchise “going to waste”, the Pratchett estate posted a status to the social media platform formerly known as Twitter saying, “It’s not going to waste, it’s just very much wanting to do the right thing and definitely not do the wrong thing. Again.”
The account, run by Pratchett’s longtime assistant and business manager Rob Wilkins, followed up by saying, “Our nuclear weapon remains our ability to say no and you simply wouldn’t believe how often we still have to use it”, adding the hashtag #Narrativia, referencing Pratchett’s production company that owns the multimedia rights to all of the author’s work….
… Rhianna Pratchett responded too, saying that “we are more mindful than ever, than when we give the ‘yes’ it has to be right”. After the decidedly unPratchett adaptation of The Watch, she has every right to be cautious. While the books are timeless, and continuously prove that Pratchett was ahead of his time in more ways than you could ever imagine, a slew of poor quality adaptations could tarnish that legacy….
(8) ARLEEN SORKIN (1955-2023). Arleen Sorkin, known for voicing Harley Quinn in animated DC Universe productions, died August 26 at the age of 67.
…In 1992, Sorkin began voicing Harley Quinn in Batman: The Animated Series. She would reprise her role in other shows like Superman: The Animated Series, Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker, Gotham Girls, Justice League and Static Shock. Sorkin also lent her voice as Harley Quinn for DC video games like Batman: Arkham Asylum, DC Universe Online and DC Universe Online: The Last Laugh….
(9) CAREER INCLUDED HARRY POTTER FILM. Actress Matyelok Gibbs died August 14 at the age of 91.
…On film, she played Erik’s mum in Terry Jones’s Erik the Viking (1989) – Tim Robbins was Erik, discovering there might be more to life than raping and pillaging, with Mickey Rooney as Erik’s grandad – and Auntie Muriel Weasley in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2010), a gaudily attired, rude and gossipy great-great-aunt of the Weasley children resembling a bad-tempered flamingo….
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
- Born August 28, 1915 — Tasha Tudor. American illustrator and writer of children’s books. Her most well-known book is Corgiville Fair, published in 1971, the first of a series to feature anthropomorphic corgis. (Died 2008.)
- Born August 28, 1916 — Jack Vance. Where to start? The Dying Earth series? Or perhaps the Lyonesse trilogy? I think I’ll pick the Demon Princes series. Damn he was good. Hugos? Oh yes. Discon was his first for “The Dragon Masters” short story followed by winning one for “The Last Castle” novelette at NYCon 3. His autobiography, This is Me, Jack Vance! (Or, More Properly, This is “I”), Jack Vance, won at Aussiecon 4. Let’s not forget that he has a World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement as well. And a SFWA Grand Master Award, too. (Died 2013.)
- Born August 28, 1917 — Jack Kirby. Responsible for a goodly part of modern comics from Captain America and the X-Men to Challengers of the Unknown and the New Gods. (Another DC film that got cancelled, damn it.) I had forgotten that he created the Black Panther. (Died 1994.)
- Born August 28, 1925 — Arkady Natanovich Strugatsky.The Strugatsky brothers were well known Russian SF writers who were Guests of Honor at Conspiracy ’87, the Worldcon that was held in Brighton, England. Their best-known novel in the West, Piknik na obochine, has been translated into English as Roadside Picnic. It is available from the usual suspects with a foreword by Le Guin. (Died 1991.)
- Born August 28, 1948 — Vonda McIntyre. I’ve read a number of her works including Dreamsnake and The Moon and the Sun which are all phenomenal. The latter was based on a short story of hers done as a faux encyclopedia article “The Natural History and Extinction of the People of the Sea”, that was illustrated by Le Guin. Neat. (Died 2019.)
- Born August 28, 1951 — Barbara Hambly, 72. Author of myriad genre works including the James Asher, Vampire Novels, The Windrose Chronicles, and the Sun Wolf and Starhawk series. Some Trek work. Was married for some years to George Alec Effinger.
(11) COMICS SECTION.
- Tom Gauld has his own version of “Writer Beware!”
(12) CELEBRITY COMIC COLLECTION GOES UNDER THE HAMMER. “Kevin Smith is Auctioning His Personal Comic Book Art Collection” and CBR.com hits the highlights.
…A highlight of the auction is Green Arrow cover art by Matt Wagner from issues #1 – #12, estimated to bring in between $1500.00 and $3000.00 each. Additionally, the collection features one of Smith’s rarest gems, a page from Frank Miller’s Daredevil #161, penciled by Miller and inked by Klaus Janson, estimated to cost $20,000.00 to $40,000.00. Each lot in this historic auction will come with a Certificate of Authenticity (COA) from Bodnar’s and Smith’s autograph.
A percentage of the proceeds from the auction will be donated to a scholarship fund for the Joe Kubert School in Dover, New Jersey. Smith, in his characteristic manner, exclaimed, “My current reduction in home wall space is going to make some ardent comic collectors’ dreams come true!” He added, “This will be the sale of the century.”…
(13) PLANET STEWARDS. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has chosen eight books and a film for their Planet Stewards Book Club. Craig Russell’s climate-crisis novel, Fragment, was selected alongside the film Don’t Look Up and the work of many other excellent authors, including Pulitzer Prize winner, Annie Proulx. Dates and subjects of club sessions and video links are here.
(14) COVER ARTIST. The Guardian shares Matt Stevens’ work in “Cover version: films reimagined as vintage paperbacks – in pictures”.
…For his project Good Movies As Old Books , Matt Stevens combined two of his main interests: recreating his favourite films in the style of vintage paperbacks. The North Carolina -based designer and illustrator begins with iPad sketches before using Photoshop to create the effect of old paper and weathered cover textures. The first 100 designs were collected in a Kickstarter-funded art book, and a second one is in the works. “You have to be efficient with the visuals and really distil down the concept into something simple, while still making an impact,” he says. “I love the challenge of that.”…
Andrew Porter dropped the link with a note: “Stephens apparently has no idea that another James Gunn is an actual author of SF books… One of the cover designs looks suspiciously like it’s by Mike Hinge.”
(15) TIME CAPSULE. There are still 153 photos of fans and writers on Mike Resnick’s Facebook album, spanning the decades of his life in fandom. Moshe Feder pointed this out a few days ago.
(16) WHO DID YOU SAY YOU WERE? “TV Characters With Mystery Names” at TVLine. The genre examples are not the most interesting ones, but there are some.
…What follows is an extensive small-screen history consisting of the following:
Characters whose first, last or full names have never been revealed.
Characters whose names were kept secret for multiple seasons. (Angels, aliens and other inhuman entities were not included.)
Here’s one example:
AGENT 99, GET SMART
The name of Maxwell Smart’s partner-turned-wife was never disclosed. The show would later follow tradition when she gave birth to their twins — a boy and a girl — and never revealed the daughter’s name.
[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Naomi.]
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First?
@4, I was one of the people who was initially not receiving the login token to vote. I had to get Chengdu white-listed by the IT guy who maintains the domain my email is from. My best advise is check the spam filters, and if it’s not there, call any IT support that you have….
(6) Feels vaguely like Pohl’s Midas Plague world where machines take over consumption from humans. There’s a robot somewhere out there enjoying Spiderwick (Murderbot?) – even if we humans can’t
(6) Some people have suggested that we need a law to keep studios from doing this. There should be a way — previously, I’m pretty sure the law did not allow studios to refuse to release a movie and still write it off. (Or at least not to this extent.)
You’d think studios would have learned from the past. In the early days of moviemaking, many films were lost forever because the filmstock was fragile — but also because studios often destroyed their copies because they didn’t think anybody would ever want to see those movies again. (They thought nobody would want to see silent movies again once sound movies were available! And they thought nobody would want to see the original after a movie was remade!) Looking back at those mistakes, I’m sure studio heads now wish they had protected their copies of movies such as “London After Midnight” (sigh) so that they could (gasp) make money from them from later generations.
(8) 🙁 Arleen Sorkin was truly the first Harley Quinn. There was no Harley Quinn in the comic books until she appeared in “Batman: The Animated Series.” The character was inspired by a clown she played on Days of Our Lives!
(10) When I was in college, I sent Vonda McIntyre some fan mail (the old-fashioned way). She sent me an adorable cat postcard with a personal message. I pinned the postcard on my room’s bulletin board. But somehow, it got lost when I returned home. 🙁
Arleen Sorkin: I remember her well from her role as Calliope Jones Bradford on “Days of Our Lives” Calliope was a free-spirited wedding planner/dress designer who fell for eccentric shy Eugene Bradford. (Played by a pre-Star Trek: The Next Generation Jon DeLancie) Calliope set her sights on Eugene and slowly broke down his shyness and reticence with women and ended up marrying him. (In a wedding dress that light up) Later Eugene created a Time Machine and he and Calliope took off for adventures. Calliope made several visits to Salem her last being in 2010.
She did much more than just play Harley Quinn. A friend of hers was working on the animated Batman series and suggested her for a small part identified as “Jokers Henchwoman #1” in an episode. He remembered her playing Calliope dressed as a Harliquin in a Dream Sequence on DoOL and suggested that her character dress as a Harliquin. Mark Hamil in a remembrence of her pointed out that her characterization could be hilarious, heartbreaking and menacing all in a few moments of dialogue. There was such a reaction to her performance that they brought her back again and again and soon enough her character appeared in the DC Comic Books. Sorkin was indeed a formidable talent and will be missed.
Anne Marable: I have thought that if the studio writes off the production for tax purposes that they should have to turn over all elements to the Library of Congress and they should be placed into the Public Domain, thatway taxpayers would get something back for the tax deduction.
And this has been going on for a while. In the early 1930’s Charlie Chaplin wrote off a finished film that he was not pleased with and the IRS sent an inspector who watched as all copies, negatives and elements were burned in order for him to get the tax write off. Since “Batgirl” was shot digitally there have been reports that Warner Brothers Discovery deleted all the files.
As for “London After Midnight” there have been persistent rumors that there is a print held by a private collector that won’t emerge publicly until after Jan 1, 2024 when the movie enters the public domain and the collector can then make and sell copies.
Oddly enough of all the classic Hollywood Studios it is MGM that has a very high rate of survival of their Silent Films. MGM owned their own film developing and printing labs on the studio lot. In the early 1950’s when Nitrate Filmstock was replaced with Safety Stock Louis B. Mayer had the labs make copies of the studio’s library of Silent & Sound Films onto Safety Stock. Warmer Brothers lost almost all of their Silent Films to a Film Vault Fire in the early 1930’s and Fox lost most of theirs in a 1937 Film Vault Fire. MGM lost most of their Nitrate holdings to a Vault Fire in 1966. (Nitrate Film will sometimes spontaneously combust or even explode. If you want to see something spectacular search ‘Nitrate Film Fire’ on Youtube and there are films of Nitrate Films burning. When it gets going even submerging it under water won’t stop it, it will continue to burn under water)
Birthdays, Barbara Hamby. And how could anyone possibly forget her first, I think, trilogy, the Dark. The cover of the first book alone – a wizard, sitting in a kitchen with a can of beer…. (Even though a lot of us thought she wrote herself into a corner, and cheated to end the third book.)
@Thomas the Red
I looked up the John DeLance character just to find photos of Young Q. 🙂 (I needed something to read while I wait for the County crew to clean out our outside sewer cleanout. Again.)
I realize I probably first saw Arleen Sorkin in America’s Funniest People. (I used to watch all those things…)
I think the Library of Congress idea is great. It could be like open access for movies. If you get government money (in this case via the deduction), you have to share with the public.
Although it’s not the most famous lost film, I’d like to see Theda Bara East Lynne — because Theda Bara and because the book it’s based on is such a famous Victorian sensation novel. (It’s not technically lost because there is one copy in the Museum of Modern Art.)
Collectors can be weird. There are rumors of extremely rare pulp magazines (such as Strange Suicide Stories) that may or may not have existed — because the collectors who might have owned them refused to show them to anyone or even admit they owned them. The chances are pretty big that after those collectors died, their widows or children sent those precious pulps went to the dump. 🙁
(8)
One of my favorite lines ever in Batman: TAS, was when Harley and Batman watched a plane (carrying the Joker) crash.
“Puddin’ !” exclaims Harley (that being her nickname for the Joker).
Batman: “He is now.”
This tweet makes the Spiderwick news even worse:
https://twitter.com/OfficiallyAlly/status/1696256808287867038?s=20
Apparently, if the work is shelved, this means that the author can’t get their rights back. It ties the work up forever. (Some suggested that there might be a way to avoid this with a great contract, but … do you trust the big studios at this point?)
Anne, the work is not shelved. Paramount Television Studios and 20th Television own it and the former is actively shopping it around now. Disney+ can’t shelf it as they didn’t own it.
So I’m hoping Paramount finds someone interested in showing it, just as I’m hoping someone picks up their Prodigy series.
Comments I would have made, have been made by others. And I found some energy, but used it to write a review.
@Anne Marble “If you get government money (in this case via the deduction)”
A tax deduction is not government money. It is your money, that you don’t have to pay income taxes on because it represents no (net) income.
@bill
A tax write-off of at least $2 billion for canceling some movies and some TV shows sounds … sneaky … to me. It doesn’t sound the same as a tax incentive because the company isn’t building a stadium or building a new plant. They’re not creating something the public might be able to use (if they can afford stadium tickets!) or something that will create more jobs. They’re doing the opposite. (Sure, the people who made the movies were paid (once), but they’re not getting residuals; the theaters won’t be making money on popcorn if a movie is canceled; stores aren’t going to be selling Batgirl shirts; etc.)
Anne Marble: Part of the problem in understanding this issue is that we don’t know what method of accounting is involved, however, it would have to be one that requires deduction of costs to be delayed until some event — like the release of the production, or a decision to never release it (which would render those costs worthless).
4) Back when I was masochistic enough to admin my own mail server, I blacklisted China as a necessary act of self-defense.
13) Interesting. Annie Proulx, writing as E.A. Proulx, appeared in the September 1963 issue of IF with an odd little story called “The Customs Lounge.” Nice little tale with an O. Henry-esque twist at the end. Read and enjoyed it when I was 12 and wondered if this “IFirstory” of the month (Frederik Pohl had a one-new-author-per-issue policy) would result in a lot more good SF tales. Alas, it did not–or so say ISFDB and Wikipedia. Instead, she went on to write a good many first-rate Westerns.
Pohl’s policy did turn up a number of good repeat performers (Alexei Panshin comes to mind), but he didn’t hit big-time pay dirt until a young fellow named Larry Niven sent him a story (“The Coldest Place”, December 1964 IF).
14) Some of those have already appeared as old books, including The Prestige and The Iron Giant. Still pretty cool, though.
7) I rather liked The Watch. Although going with more of a punk asthetic than the steampunk feel of the various TV adaptations we are used to, and many changes to characters height, weight, gender etc, it absolutely nailed the Vimeness of Vimes.
Meredith Moment
City of Last Chances is a Kindle daily deal. I’ve heard nothing but good about it. Slightly annoyed that I’ve had to tell the library not to lend it to me until October because Hugo reading.
One critical thing that agents need to be demanding is that IF they pull this kind of dreck then all rights revert automatically. Twitter suggests that this is not the case here.
16) It’s easy enough to think of some genre examples – like Star Trek, where Sulu and Uhura didn’t get first names until well after the original series ended, Spock’s family name was unknown until Strange New Worlds, and so was Number One’s name in its entirety.
The Tomorrow People (1970s version) always called each other by their first names, and although we learned the family names of most of them, the three original Tomorrow People – the ones who had already “broken out” when the show started – were always just John, Carole, and Kenny.
Then there’s the Doctor. “Doctor Who?” you ask. Exactly. In the remake version, the character’s real name is some universe-threatening mystery; in the original… well, some background material suggested that Time Lords’ real names were mathematical formulae; based on Cockney Time Lord Drax’s comments in “The Armageddon Factor”, we can infer that the Doctor’s contains the symbols Theta and Sigma… but that’s all we’ve got, really.
The first example that popped into my mind isn’t genre, and also falls into the category of “characters who are frequently mentioned but never seen” – Arthur Daley’s wife in Minder, who is presumably Mrs. Daley, but who is always referred to as ‘er indoors. And the next one, also invisible, was “Diane”, the long-suffering recipient of Agent Cooper’s voice memos in Twin Peaks.
There’s bound to be more….
Nickpheas says One critical thing that agents need to be demanding is that IF they pull this kind of dreck then all rights revert automatically. Twitter suggests that this is not the case here.
And it’s bern reported, as I noted above, not Disney cannot shelve it as they do not own it. Here’s the Nerdist note on that:
The good news is that unlike Batgirl, we might still see the show. It was developed at Disney, but comes from Paramount Television Studios and 20th Television. They hope to find a new streaming home for The Spiderwick Chronicles. Paramount (who also made the 2008 film adaptation of the books) is said to be shopping it around to hopefully find a new home.
Other news sources say that Disney never actually picked up the option to show it so they didn’t cancel which actually makes more sense as Paramount Television Studios and 20th Television actually produced it.
If so, I’m not what they writing off.
It seems Nautilus is another Disney casualty:
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/aug/29/disney-plus-nautilus-tv-show-series-scrapped-gold-coast-why
2) Lame. They should have stuck to their guns and given the various screechers the option of not reading the story, the issue, or the magazine as their consciences dictated.
4) I see things continue to go swimmingly. I am beset with curiosity as to the extent of the Potemkin village we’re going to see erected by the CCP during the event itself and directly after…but not enough to actually go anywhere near this trainwreck.
5) ‘V For Vendetta’, or really any movie made from Moore’s work. 100% agree on ‘Fight Club’ and ‘The Shining.’ Also ‘American Psycho.’
7) If I were a billionaire who owned a streaming service (if I were a billionaire who didn’t own a streaming service I would buy and/or create one. Seems more fun and profitable than social media and it’s concomitant headaches) I would spend an embarrassing amount of time being the change I want to see in the world re: GOOD, ACCURATE adaptations of some of my favorite written works.
In re Barbara Hambly’s birthday notice: her Free Man of Color mysteries set in New Orleans circa 1840 are excellent and thoroughly researched. I also noticed that she’s thanked in the acknowledgements for historian Jeffrey Burton Russell’s THE DEVIL: PERCEPTIONS OF EVIL FROM ANTIQUITY TO PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY and LUCIFER: THE DEVIL IN THE MIDDLE AGES. Why did this come to my attention, you may ask? Because I’m working on an article about the iconography of Satan and Russell is a useful source.
(2) As someone who took part in marches against the National Front during the late 1970s, my view of that organisation and its successors should be fairly obvious. However, David A Riley quit his membership in 1983, and claims to have no involvement since. If the passage of 40 years isn’t long enough for his work to be considered on its own merits, when?
I’m glad I can continue subscribing to F&SF. I couldn’t accept the magazine publishing a white nationalist who continues to believe the same things he did as a National Front member, organizer and candidate for office in the 1970s and 1980s.
Aside from disputing that the National Front was fascist during a time when its leader was openly stating the goal of turning national populists into fascists, David A. Riley has not changed. His recent social media posts continue to express bigotry against people of color, Muslims and immigrants.
What Riley wrote about H.P. Lovecraft for a white nationalist newspaper in 1983:
What Riley wrote on social media in 2020:
In other film disaster news, if you couldn’t afford to buy one of the five copies in existence of the other Dune book, this can still be preordered at a reasonable price:
https://www.1984publishing.com/bookstore/a-masterpiece-in-disarray-david-lynchs-dune-an-oral-history
I agree with them on this part:
I always liked it. Especially the small font vocabulary worksheet they handed out as you walked into the theater. There should have been a quiz at the end.
(12) I can’t help but wonder what life changes are leading to Kevin Smith auctioning off his comic collection.
F&SF contributor Fatima Taqvi posted on Ex-Twitter a few days about about the Riley story acceptance.
16) “This is Carlton, your doorman.”
Wouldn’t it have better food then?
In 1980 the NF underwent a schism and by 1985 was under the control of a particularly weird brand of Nazis ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_National_Front_(UK)#The_Strasserite_faction ). Basically, its heyday was over by that point. It isn’t a particularly exonerating fact for Riley other than it being a long time ago.
The link to The Shining in (5) links to its entry in a totally different article: “12 Author’s Who Can’t Stand The Film Adaptations Of Their Work”.
Confused the hell out of me, as that was what I clicked first. 🙂
(Also, the entire thing is pasted over from a Reddit thread. Thought it looked familiar.)
Markle Sparkle: I gave the correct link to the quoted article. Why does your confusion require a comment looking for others to blame? Yes, the excerpt from Buzzfeed incorporates their link to another of their articles. No, my post is not taken from a Reddit thread. If it was, I would have cited Reddit.
MIke:
Re: the link in the article – apologies! Not trying to blame. I obviously need to be clearer. And drink more coffee.
Re: Reddit – I was meaning that the entire “12 Author’s Who Can’t Stand The Film Adaptations Of Their Work” article was just a copy-paste. Which was a pointless aside as it was not what you were posting about, so apologies (once again). I need to be clearer. And have even more coffee. Time to crawl back into my corner of the ether. :embarassed:
@Steve Wright:
I thought Theta Sigma was a cruel boarding school nickname for the Doctor.
Cliff, the article notes “Both Nautilus and The Spiderwick Chronicles are now being shopped around to other platforms, according to Deadline.”
So Disney essentially gets to claim a tax write for not showing these series but the series themselves having been paid for and completed are available for someone else to show.
I’m still puzzled why Paramount cancelled Prodigy. It’d made more sense to finish the second series and say they’d decided that was it.
(6) The Guardian has an article on the phenomenon too. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/aug/29/the-great-cancellation-why-megabucks-tv-shows-are-vanishing-without-a-trace
If I like something enough, I prefer to own a physical copy. Unfortunately, with Disney+, that is not possible since they chose to keep their new content streaming-only. We are basically at the whim of the big corporates who see more value in tax write-offs than allowing their products to be available to an audience. Yay capitalism?
At this point the tax write-offs look like a perverse incentive. On the other hand, if producers couldn’t write off genuinely unprofitable shows, they would be even more reluctant to take a chance on anything new. I’m not sure I want that either. The underlying problem is that everyone was throwing lots of money at streaming in the hopes of owning it, and now it turns out not to be that profitable after all. Fiddling with tax law won’t change that.
Although now that I think about it, something along the lines of reversing the much lamented Thor Power Tools decision might be a promising approach.
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