(1) HWA’S USE OF NDA’S EXPLAINED. Horror Writers Association President John Edward Lawson explains why their organization requires elected officers and trustees, paid employees, and certain committee chairs or volunteers (but not all volunteers) to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements. Ten-part thread starts here.
(2) THE STATE OF HORROR. Ellen Datlow, Brian Keene, Lisa Wood, Lisa Kröger, Maxwell I. Gold, moderated by Angela Yuriko Smith, recently discussed “The State of Horror 2024”, part of the HWA “Halloween in July” program set up to help fund scholarships and educational programs year-round.
(3) SUCCESS! Good news. Chris Barkley reports the GoFundMe to “Help Oghenechovwe Ekpeki Attend the 2024 Glasgow WorldCon” has fully funded.
(4) EKPEKI PROGRAM. And he’s got a visa. Here’s his Glasgow 2024 schedule. Click for larger images.
(5) NOMMOS. He’ll be one of the hosts of the “Nommo Awards Winners Event” explained by JAYLit, the Journal of African Youth Literature.
An exceptional evening awaits guests of the forthcoming Glasgow 2024 Worldcon in a special evening dedicated to the 2024 winners of the Nommo Awards for the best in African Speculative Fiction.
The event will feature presentations by renowned African writers Tendai Huchu, Wole Talabi, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, and Nnedi Okorafor, with sponsorship from Tom Ilube.
The Nommo Awards, in their 7th edition, honour excellence in four categories: The Ilube Award for Best Speculative Fiction Novel, and the Nommo Awards for Novella, Short Story, and Graphic Novel. Finalists from Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, Senegal, Tanzania, and Sierra Leone highlight the diverse talent in African speculative fiction.
Organised by The African Speculative Fiction Society (ASFS), the awards celebrate works in genres like science fiction, fantasy, horror, and more. The event receives support from Dublin 2019 – An Irish Worldcon, Glasgow 2024, and the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA).
Join in celebrating the creativity and innovation of African writers at the Nommo Awards 2024 on Saturday, August 10, 2024, at 17:30, at the Lomond Auditorium. The ceremony will last for 60 minutes.
(6) RUH-ROH. “Warner Bros. Discovery Unplugging Boomerang Streaming Service” reports Deadline.
Warner Bros. Discovery is shutting down the Boomerang streaming service and moving some of its programming, which includes many classic cartoon series, onto Max.
The kids-and-family move is set for September 30, according to an email to subscribers.
It comes in the same year as a similar strategic shift by Paramount Global, which shuttered Noggin and moved its content onto flagship Paramount+.
Boomerang, which began as a cable network in 2000 featuring a range of animated classics like Scooby Doo, Tom & Jerry and Loony Tunes, became a streaming service in 2017. In more recent years, it expanded into original programming….
(7) SOME ARE MORE FANTASTIC THAN OTHERS. What did theme park blog AllEars hear? “’They Designed an Entire Land Around the Worst Movie I’ve Seen in My Life’ – Fans React to Latest Epic Universe News”.
Universal just revealed the first in-depth look at The Wizarding World of Harry Potter – Ministry of Magic, one of the five new lands coming to the new park. While many Universal and Harry Potter fans have been extremely excited to hear more about this new land, it appears that the announcement hasn’t exactly landed the way Universal wanted it to with some fans…
… It is true that the second and third Fantastic Beasts films did not do too well, especially compared to the first. The first film, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, has a 7.2/10 rating on IMDB, while the second film, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, has a 6.5/10 rating. The last film, Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, has the lowest rating of 6.2/10….
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
August 4, 1964 — Jaroslav Olša Jr, 60. That we doing the Birthday of Czech fan Jaroslav Olša Jr. is entirely the credit of Our Gracious Host as he will explain later on with a charming tale of their encounter.
Today’s the sixtieth birthday of Jaroslav who currently is the Czech Consul General in Los Angeles. (OK I’m foreshadowing why Mike will be telling a tale.) He’s also done diplomatic service in Zimbabwe, South Korea and the Philippines — very impressive.
In our corner of things. Jaroslav’s a SF editor, translator and bibliographer. That in itself is also quite impressive, isn’t it?
Let’s start off with his amateur work. Jaroslav started the major Ikarie XB fanzine back in the Eighties which turned into their sf monthly magazine Ikarie which had a twenty-year run before becoming the still published XB-1. He was assistant editor there for a time.
In the period after the Velvet Revolution of 1989. with Alexandre Hlinka he also started the AFSF press which was active until the late 1990s, publishing some seventy titles including such as selections of the best stories by SF writers and also novels by Robert A. Heinlein, Robert Silverberg and Kim Stanley Robinson to name a few.
If you were at Conspiracy ’87 in Brighton, you might have him as he was there. And he attended many other international conventions.
Finally, before I let Mike have the last words here, I should note that he was responsible for twenty years for the Czech Encyklopedie literatury science fiction (“Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Literature”, 1995) co-editing it with Ondřej Neff. He also has edited about a dozen sf anthologies; has compiled bibliographies of Czech and Slovak fanzines; and often contributed to Locus.
Mike: In 2019 Jaroslav Olša, jr. invited me to a nice lunch in Westwood – making sure we had the restaurant’s front window seat. That was nice. We discussed science fiction and what he could do in that line when he became Consul General of the Czech Republic in LA. And first thing, he gifted me with copies of several sff publications he’d helped produce, including a copy of XB-1, the longest-running monthly publication in the Czech Republic, which began life as Olša’s fanzine Ikarie XB (1986-1989). He also gave me a copy of a Czech SF anthology (English translation). Since then, he’s hosted a lot of cultural events in LA, including one in conjunction with an in-person LASFS meeting. A very fannish fellow!
(9) COMICS SECTION.
- Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal witnesses a close encounter of the disappointing kind.
- Eek! demonstrates how to predict a rampage.
- Foxtrot reinterprets the night sky.
- Frazz studies the moon.
- Frank and Ernest report elemental news.
- Jumpstart recycles tech trends.
- Non Sequitur understands why so little is known about early physics discoveries.
- Pearls Before Swine challenges you to solve a mystery.
- Thatababy sees a Star Wars character getting a summer buzz cut.
- The Argyle Sweater pitches more unwanted shows.
- Rhymes With Orange shows kaiju toys.
- Tom Gauld knows it isn’t easy to get the message just right.
(10) CLOSE ENOUGH FOR GOVERNMENT WORK. You may have seen it elsewhere, however, a Bluesky user recently posted a copy of the travel voucher Buzz Aldrin filed on his return from the Moon in 1969. Only $33.31, and the itinerary is a bit tongue-in-cheek.
(11) FAN MAIL FROM SOME FLOUNDER. Attention dads — having AI write your letter to your daughter isn’t cool. “Google pulls Gemini AI ad from Olympics after backlash” – The Verge has the story.
Google is not winning any gold medals for its Olympics ads this year. After days of backlash, the company has decided to pull its controversial “Dear Sydney” ad from Olympic coverage.
In the 60-second ad, a father seeks to write a fan letter on behalf of his daughter to her Olympic idol, US track star Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. The premise is the sort of treacly ad you’d expect to see at the Olympics, but things take a twist when instead of helping his daughter write a letter, he just has Gemini do it for them. “This has to be just right,” he says, before prompting Gemini to tell Sydney how inspiring she is, that his daughter plans to break her record one day, and to add a “sorry, not sorry” joke at the end.
(12) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Cool Worlds asks whether Dyson Spheres are possible…? I recall when Niven’s Ringworld and some bright wags from MIT (I think — though my memory may be dodgy) pointed out that it’d be unstable. So if true for a ringworld then must be too for a Dyson sphere….
The idea of a Dyson sphere was a radical proposal by the physicist Freeman Dyson, an enormous shell of material enveloping a star. Dyson’s idea may be over half a century old, but interest in looking for such objects has only grown in the decades since. But how would such structures work? Are they physically even possible? And what might someone use them for? Today, we dive into the physics of Dyson spheres.
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Lise Andreasen, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, and Teddy Harvia for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel “SJ Perlman” Dern .]
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Hi, there! Cider is hopeful about training me on the food project.
Can we go to Glasgow?
(1) I’m not a lawyer and I’m not American and I’m definitely not an American lawyer but:
That surely wouldn’t “all be legal” in the context given i.e. credit card numbers, real names, social security numbers, travel arrangements? Wouldn’t it be very illegal to use that information for purposes other than for the purpose it was given?
(10) I’ve seen photos online of their customs declaration when they returned to the US.
(11) I’ve seen numerous columns complaining about this one. Exactly the sort of thing you don’t want to automate. But then, how does the saying go? Sincerity is everything, if you can fake that you’ve got it made…
(9) I’ve heard from younger folks that a period at the end of a text is impolite – they might want to fix that.
12) Well, yes and no, sort of.
The Ringworld is gravitationally unstable in the plane of the ring, as described in The Ringworld Engineers. So, anything which unbalances it will make the ring’s surface closer to the central sun at one point in its orbit, farther away at the opposite point. But gravitational attraction increases as distance decreases, so the ring’s surface at the closer point gets pulled harder towards the sun… and gets closer stilll, which pulls it in harder still… and so on until sizzle.
Dyson spheres (the implausibly solid ones in SF) are slightly different, but not enough so to save them. Gravitational attraction to the interior surface of the sphere sums to zero – if you are standing on the interior surface, then there is a tiny, tiny fraction of the sphere’s mass pulling you down (in the direction of your feet, that is), a slightly larger fraction pulling you down and to one side (actually, to all sides, equally), and then the entire rest of the sphere’s mass is pulling you up (and to all sides, equally). So, everything on the inside of a Dyson sphere is effectively weightless, as far as the mass of the sphere is concerned….
However, Dyson spheres do tend to have a sun in the middle of them. And suns have mass – quite a lot of it, in fact. Presumably, your Dyson sphere is made of something that’s strong enough to to resist collapsing into the sun… but everything on the interior that isn’t securely attached, or moving at an appropriate orbital speed, is going to fall into the sun. This is one reason you don’t want to live on the inside of a Dyson sphere. Living on the outside, though, can be just fine, if you judge the mass of the sun and the diameter of the sphere correctly – you have to reach a point where the gravity is liveable and the surface of the sphere is warm enough to support things like gaseous air and liquid water. You’re not going to get much chance to work on your tan, though.
So, you are living happily on the outside of your Dyson sphere; at the centre is the sun, surrounded by nothing except the shell of the sphere, and there you are in the starlight, hoping for a passing supernova to give you enough light to read by. Unless, as with the Ringworld, something gives that system a nudge. Because there is absolutely nothing holding the sun in place at the centre of the sphere. So, given a sharp enough nudge, to either the sphere or the sun, the sun will drift away from its central position. And if nothing stops it, it will carry on drifting, until it comes into contact with the interior surface.
I’m honestly not sure what would happen if your Dyson sphere material is tough enough to take that. A solid object would just bounce off in another direction, but stars aren’t exactly solid. My best guess is that the compression of the material at the surface of the sphere would cause a massive rise in heat, and possibly additional fusion reactions, enough for the main mass of the star to be deflected away, with a nova-like flare of energy and probably the dispersal of a lot of mass, and the star would then ping-pong around the interior of the sphere, flaring and losing mass each time, until it finally wore out.
The more likely outcome, though, is that the sphere material melts and vaporizes as it gets close enough to the star, until there’s a hole big enough for the star to escape through. At this stage, your star is likely moving way over the escape velocity of the Dyson sphere’s own gravity (the sphere itself is massive, but not that massive, and it’s also distributed over a large volume) so, bye bye star. You now have a Dyson sphere with a massive hole in it, and no power supply (losing the star’s mass and energy output will mess up the sums you did to give yourself a habitable environment). And it’s still too dark to read.
Most of the above thinking comes from me writing a Star Trek Online fanfic set in the unlikely environment of, you guessed it, the inside of a Dyson sphere. How much rubber science, Treknobabble, and general desperate handwaving do you have to do, to make this setting even remotely plausible? The answer is a whole lot.
@Steve Wright
“Because there is absolutely nothing holding the sun in place at the centre of the sphere.”
The Sun’s gravity attracts the mass of the Dyson Sphere, does it not? Initially, the center of mass of the Dyson Sphere is coincident with the center of mass of the star. If the DS moves, it effectively moves “up” in the star’s gravity field, and the star’s gravity should pull it back “down” to where it becomes coincident again with the star’s center of mass, the point of lowest potential energy in that field.
Or am I missing something?
I’d assume that, inside a spherical shell, if the star starts to drift out of the center, or if the shell starts to move relative to the star, it would not self-correct — once begun, unless some countervailing force is applied, it’d just continue inexorably until the star contacted the shell. So you’d need to have some kind of station-keeping jets on the shell, just to be safe.
Yeah. A Ringworld is unstable, like a ball on top of an inverted bowl*
A Dyson sphere is neutrally stable – like a ball on a table. It won’t move due to gravity, but if something bumps it to start it moving, it will keep moving.
What you want is something robustly stable (like a ball in a bowl, so that a small disturbance causes an oscillation, not an exponentially growing motion (like a Ring) or a steady motion (like a Sphere))
actually the Ringworld is unstable only in the horizontal direction – the Ring can actually oscillate “up” and “down” stably due to gravitational attraction from the Sun – exciting!
I think in his Larger Than Worlds essay Niven suggested using the sun-bobbling in a ringworld to create seasons. (Well, technically it’d be the ring that was doing the bobbling, not the sun.)
EDIT: The Niven essay was called Bigger Than Worlds.
@Joe H.: And as Niven points out, you can do the same with an Alderson disc, except in that case the disc is so flipping massive that it is the star that bobs.
(Has anything besides Charles Stross’ Missile Gap involved an Alderson disc?)
@Patrick Morris Miller — I’m not sure, but I’ve been fascinated by Alderson discs ever since I first read that Niven essay.
(8) Congratulations to His Excellency (as he is properly styled in high society; he explained to me that “Ambassador” is closer to a rank than a function; having been an ambassador once — or thrice actually — he is an Ambassador forever, even though now just a mere Consul General ) and thanks for mentioning him.
In fact, I saw him less than two weeks ago, as he is in Prague for holiday (and launches of his most recent book on the history of Czech[oslovak] consulates in California); when I mentioned reading something at File 770, he immediately replied “yeah, I saw Glyer only once, he lives in some backwoods…”
A few details/corrections (I really should update Jarda’s entry in some encyclopedia):
AFSF (“Association of fans of SF”) was a somewhat peculiar nineties’ combination of a publisher, mail-order shop and (attempter) fannish organization a la N3F; the publishing arm lasted longest.
Also, the formulation “he was responsible for twenty years for the Czech … (“Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Literature”, 1995)” does not make sense. The book was prepared at the end of 1980s, then after a delay published and forgotten; there was no further work on it.
Alas, XB-1 is NOT “still published”; in June they announced transforming into quarterly anthologies, which remain yet to be seen.
Anyway, Jarda is indeed a great person, still bursting with fannish energy after all those decades; if you can, go and see him at Loscon, or (hopefully) the Seattle Worldcon. Or at the consulate (https://mzv.gov.cz/losangeles/en ), or some of its smaller events:
Recently he did much research on the Amazing author Miles J. Breuer, who was a Czecho-American and published much of his stories in Czech as well; a brochure / exhibition catalog in English is available at http://interkom.vecnost.cz/pdf/Amazing_Breuer-Katalog_(clr).pdf (and he may still have a few copies for those seriously interested).
And yes, one of the greatest projects he has been involved in lately is Bradbury’s Shadow: Chronicle of Czech Science Fiction, vol. 3: Fandom Authors of the 1980s (see some details at http://bradburyshadow.vostok.cz ). As it was published partly with a grant, it is sadly not available commercially, but again, he will find a way for anybody seriously interested.