(1) KEN MACLEOD Q&A.  The latest Clark Award newsletter, “Carbon-Based Bipeds: Aug 5th”, includes an interview with Worldcon Guest of Honour Ken MacLeod discussing the publication of his first short story collection in 18 years, A Jura for Julia published by NewCon Press, which will be launched at the Con.

…HAL: My memory circuits recall my first Worldcon as a glorious blur. Do you have any recommendations for first time attendees to make the most of their experience at an SF con?

KEN: A glorious blur is a good way to remember a Worldcon! If a Worldcon is your first SF convention, it’s a blast! To make the most of it, look at the programme beforehand and pick what items you’d like to go to. If you don’t know anyone who is going, a quick way to meet new people is to volunteer. Cons always need volunteers, for however long or short a time you have to offer. Don’t be shy. Use the party or conference conversation trick: one person might want to be alone, two might be having a personal conversation, three or more talking and you can wander up and wait for someone to speak to you (or wander off if no one does). It works! …

(2) FOUND IN TRANSLATION. Martin Wisse’s question isn’t really petty at all: “What gets translated and what doesn’t — Martin’s increasingly petty rules about translation” at Wis[s]e Words.

Why does senpai gets to be used untranslated, but kouhai gets translated to junior? You could make the case that it’s just that much less known than senpai that it still needs to, but for a series like this I’d expect the audience to already know it. This isn’t Pokemon after all, but a very dialogue heavy mystery show, one that’s not shy about using proper honorifics or the correct, Japanese name order either. A strange choice either way when you’d normally expect both terms to be translated or kept intact as a pair.

It raises the question of what you translate and what not, what the expectations are for things that English doesn’t really have an equivalent for, like the whole idea of senpai/kouhai, or the use of honorifics to refer to people. I was reminded of what writer/translator Zack Davisson said on the subject of food names two years ago:

“One of my Translation Rules: Thou Shall not Translate Food Names. Food names, as a general language rule in the modern era, are kept in their native language. We collectively learned to say pho. We learned to say pasta primavera. We can say onigiri. Time to retire ‘rice balls.’”

(3) PLAYING MONOPOLY. “Google loses major antitrust case over search monopoly” – the LA Times has the story.

In a major blow to Google, a federal judge on Monday ruled that the tech giant violated antitrust laws by illegally maintaining a monopoly on web searches.

The much-anticipated decision marks a significant victory for federal regulators trying to rein in the power of Big Tech and could send shock waves through the tech world. Other firms, including Apple, Meta and Amazon, also face federal antitrust lawsuits.

“After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta wrote in his opinion.

The ruling did not include a remedy for Google’s conduct.

Kent Walker, president of Google Global Affairs, said in a statement that the company plans to appeal.

“This decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available,” he said. “As this process continues, we will remain focused on making products that people find helpful and easy to use.”

Regulators alleged that Google maintained a monopoly on web searches by reaching agreements with browser developers, phone manufacturers and wireless carriers to pre-load their products with the Google search engine as the default….

(4) MAKING A HOUSE A HOME FOR DRAGONS. The New York Times learns “How ‘House of the Dragon’ Turns Fiery Fantasy Into TV Reality”. Link bypasses NYT paywall.

For Ryan Condal, the co-creator and showrunner of HBO’s “House of the Dragon,” the creatures are key to the show’s magic, literally and figuratively.

“They are the one fantasy element that we’ve allowed ourselves,” he said. “In our world, in this period, the magic is these dragons.”

But they are also death incarnate. “It’s all metaphor, all allegory for nuclear conflict,” Condal said. “You take the city with an army if you want it to be standing afterward. You can’t do anything surgical with a dragon.”

The ongoing second season of the “Game of Thrones” prequel has included more of these beautiful, terrible beasts than any other in the franchise, including spectacular air battles in the fourth episode, “The Red Dragon and the Gold.” Sunday’s installment, “The Red Sowing,” in which aspiring dragon riders claim new mounts — or die trying — was more grounded, but it presented the most complicated challenge yet.

… “In a big way, Season 1 was proof of concept for the series to come,” Condal said. “We designed Season 1 to tell this hopefully compelling Shakespearean family drama that would build to this final act where we would see the first dragon fight.”

In the resulting skirmish in the Season 1 finale, the young Prince Lucerys Velaryon and his small dragon, Arrax, are killed by Vhagar, the enormous, centuries-old beast ridden by the one-eyed warrior Prince Aemond Targaryen.

“Vhagar fighting Arrax is like a rhino versus a house cat,” Condal said. “But it had the elements: It was a chase, it had two dragons, you had two actors riding on saddles and everything else was digital. It was an entirely virtual sequence, essentially….

(5) DEADPOOL CAMEO SPOILERS. If they haven’t already been spoiled for you, Variety would like to perform that service: “Shawn Levy Explains ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ Spoilers and Cameos”. And I guess I can’t pull an excerpt of this one….

(6) GENRE ADJACENT POSSIBILITY FOR FUTURE PRISONER SWAP. [Item by Patrick McGuire.]  I read the below-linked Reuters piece about remaining possibly-swapable prisoners after the recent spy swap between Russia and the West (CNN).

One of the names was Boris Kagarlitsky, a onetime politician, later a sociologist and dissident. I knew something about him, but I had lost track and had not known he had been arrested.   As far as I know, he has no sfnal connection himself — but his father was Yulii (or Julius) Kagarlitsky, a once-prominent Soviet/Russian sf scholar who knew English. 

I thought Julius was fairly well known in American scholarly sf circles in his day, although today I found little about him online in English.  I met Boris, for all of a “hello, goodbye,” as a kid of 13 or 14 the one time I visited the family apartment to interview his father, in probably 1975, when I spent academic 1974-75 in the USSR doing dissertation research. 

Reuters: “Who are the prisoners who could feature in a future East-West swap?”

…RUSSIAN OR BELARUSIAN DISSIDENTS:

BORIS KAGARLITSKY:

A left-wing academic and Soviet-era dissident, Kagarlitsky was in 2023 charged with “justifying terrorism”, related to his opposition to the war in Ukraine. In February, the 65-year-old was sentenced to five years in prison….

On his father Yulii, who went by Julius in his English publications. Unfortunately, the only Wikipedia citation that I could find for him is in Russian (unless you prefer Ukrainian or Hungarian): “Кагарлицкий, Юлий Иосифович”  

But here is a mention in Science Fiction Studies from March 1984:

Professor Kagarlitsky “Disciplined”

On November 2, 1983, the Moscow correspondent of the London Times reported that Professor Julius Kagarlitsky had been arraigned before a disciplinary panel at the Lunacharsky Theatrical Institute and removed from his post. Sources said the move was linked to dissident activities on the part of Professor Kagarlitsky’s son, Boris, who took part in a “new left” discussion group criticizing Soviet society from a Marxist standpoint.                

Kagarlitsky, who is the recipient of the Pilgrim Award for 1972 and an Honorary Vice-President of the H.G. Wells Society, needs no introduction to SFS readers. His friends have been aware of the threat to his position for some time—even though his son, who had been held by the KGB for several months, was released without trial in the spring of 1983.               

Experience has shown that the Soviet authorities are swayed by international criticism of their actions. It is hoped that SFS readers will make known their feelings about this case, which deals a devastating blow to Soviet scholarship and criticism in our field. We must hope that the victimization of Professor Kagarlitsky will be lifted, and that he will be promptly reinstated in his post. —Patrick Parrinder

Here he is in the Internet Science Fiction Database — Юлий Кагарлицкий (Julius Kagarlitsky) — which, however, lacks mention of his book What Is Science Fiction? (in Russian only), one of his two major books on sf, the other being the biography of H.G. Wells cited in ISFDB, which has an English translation.

(7) JOE ENGLE (1932-2024). Test pilot and astronaut Joe Engle died July 10 at the age of 91. The New York Times obituary says, “He was the first to touch the edge of space and later to go beyond it in two different aircraft, an X-15 and a shuttle. But the moon, to his disappointment, proved out of reach.”

…Mr. Engle was an Air Force captain in 1962 when he was accepted into the Aerospace Research Pilot School, an advanced training ground for astronauts. It was run by Chuck Yeager, the renowned test pilot who had broken the sound barrier in a Bell Aircraft X-1 in 1947.

But Mr. Engle’s application to join a group of astronaut recruits was pulled by an Air Force officer, who told him that he was being selected for another role; he had to wait until school ended in 1963 to learn that he had been assigned to the X-15 program.

The reassignment “thrilled me to death,” he said in a 2004 NASA oral history interview, “because it was a chance to get into place, to fly into space and to do it with a winged airplane, with a stick and rudder.” And he was still young enough to reapply to NASA in the future.

Three experimental X-15 aircraft were flown 199 times by a dozen pilots from 1959 to 1968, each designed to reach the boundary of space, more than 50 miles above sea level, traveling at speeds of up to 4,520 miles per hour. They collected critical data on the effects of hypersonic aerodynamics on men and machines.

Mr. Engle was the last surviving X-15 pilot….

…He earned his astronaut wings on June 29, 1965, when he took the X-15 to an altitude of 280,600 feet, or 53 miles, at 3,431 m.p.h….

…He was part of the support crew for Apollo 10 in May 1969, two months before the first moon landing by Apollo 11. He went on to train as the backup lunar module pilot for Apollo 14 in 1971 and was assigned to to the crew of Apollo 17 in December 1972.

Mr. Engle had expected to walk on the moon with Eugene Cernan in Apollo 17. But he was replaced by Harrison Schmitt, a geologist-astronaut (and future U.S. senator from New Mexico), so that NASA could take a scientist into space. Mr. Schmitt had been scheduled to fly on Apollo 18, but that mission was canceled because of budget cuts.

“It’s a lot like when you lose someone very dear to you to something like cancer,” Mr. Engle said in a news conference in August 1971, about being replaced. He added, “It’s a pretty empty feeling.”…

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

August 5, 1966 — James Gunn, 58. Director James Gunn, who you surely know if only for the Guardians of the Galaxy films, has a very interesting career which we’ll look at tonight.

His first film, decidedly not genre, was Tromeo and Julietwhich I’m sure you can figure what its source material was. It definitely would’ve made Shakespeare pale it as quite extreme levels of sex and violence characteristic of almost every Troma film, not to overlook Gunn revised the ending. Anyone here seen it? It has a rather decent 61% rating among audience reviewers over at Rotten Tomatoes. 

Far sillier and not at all likely to offend lovers of classic literature, he scripted next Scooby –Doo and slightly later Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed. Really he did. Rotten Tomatoes gives them, well, let’s just say stink, stank, stunk ratings, but sandwiched in between these, and definitely not silly, he penned Dawn of the Dead. Versatile writer, eh?

His first directing gig (which he scripted as well) was Slither in which the plot such as it is has a meteorite bringing an intelligent alien parasite to Earth. Naturally I looked it up on Rotten Tomatoes — it has a strong sixty percent rating among critics and audience reviewers with Allison Shoemaker of Fox 10 Phoenix saying, “Slither is a visceral experience from the first, but as the creature grows, so does the film’s daring.”

So what next? His final work before the film you him know for was Super, described as a black comedy superhero film, again was written and directed by him. A short order cook becomes a superhero without actually any superpowers. Huh. Let me repeat. Huh. It gets a decent 50% at the usual place. 

Ok now Disney hires him to write (the first with Nicole Perlman who picked this film because her loved of science fiction, the next two by himself) and direct the Guardians of the Galaxy films. He entered negotiations just two years prior to the film premiering with the possible directors including future MCU directors Peyton Reed and the duo Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck.

Need I say all three films were extraordinarily successful films? At Rotten Tomatoes right now, they carry audiences review ratings of 92%, 87% and 82%. Yes, they did fall off slightly with each film, but an average of 87% is damn good.   

Two years ago, Warner Bros. Discovery hired Gunn and Peter Safran to become co-chairmen and co-CEOs of DC Studios. That means they’re overseeing yet another reboot of the DC Expanded Universe. (I’ve lost track of how often this has occurred.) This starts with Superman out next year which, no surprise, he’s writing and directing.

Oh, remember that Warner Bros. Coyote v. Acme film still being a Schrödinger’s Roadrunner? (Try to catch that one!) He along with Jeremy Slater and Samy Burch wrote the story for it. Not the script as Burch did that. 

What else should I mention? Well, he was one of the Executive Producers on Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame; he’s the motion capture for Baby Groot in the first two of the Guardians films; and finally he was Doctor Flem Hocking in The Toxic Avenger IV. Yes, Troma Films produced The Toxic Avenger films.

So why am bringing this film to your attention? Because it is where we connect Gunn to Marvel. The narrator of this film was none other than Stan Lee himself so we can assume that two of them met and spent some time together while filming this, a reasonable assumption indeed. 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is an early example of using robots for everything.
• Brewster Rockit says beware what fashion statement you’re making.
• Free Range has an explanation.
• The Argyle Sweater attends a monster’s therapy session.
• Rubes introduces a new CSI.

(10) BAD EXAMPLES. CBR.com contends they can point you at “10 Real World Inspirations Behind Batman’s Villains”.

… With the group of foes slowly conceptualized over the years, each had a wider variety of sources that were pulled from— from classic literature to mascots— to build the foundations of these now-iconic characters…

10. Ra’s al Ghul Was Inspired By Two Iconic Dracula Actors

According to Neal Adams, the artist and co-creator of Ra’s al Ghul, the visual design of the head of the League of Assassins was heavily influenced by the iconic actors Jack Palance and Christopher Lee. Both actors are renowned for their portrayals of Count Dracula— for different reasons that both appear in Ra’s.

Palance brought an intense presence to the dark count, while Lee performed with a commanding and aristocratic demeanor. Adams drew inspiration from both of these performances to craft Ra’s al Ghul’s distinct appearance, with the character’s sharp features, piercing eyes, and aura of sophisticated menace echoing the attributes that Palance and Lee brought to their Dracula roles. This inspiration helped to imbue Ra’s al Ghul with a sense of timelessness and an imposing presence, fitting for a character who is not only a master tactician and warrior but also an immortal adversary of Batman.

(11) WILL AI MAKE THEIR JOBS DOA? “Movie Editors and Animators Fear A.I. Will Kill Jobs” – so they tell the New York Time. Link bypasses NYT paywall.

For most of his four-plus decades in Hollywood, Thomas R. Moore has worked as a picture editor on network television shows.

During a typical year, his work followed a pattern: He would spend about a week and a half distilling hours of footage into the first cut of an episode, then two to three weeks incorporating feedback from the director, producers and the network. When the episode was done, he would receive another episode’s worth of footage, and so on, until he and two other editors worked through the TV season.

This model, which typically pays picture editors $125,000 to $200,000 a year, has mostly survived the shorter seasons of the streaming era, because editors can work on more than one show in a year. But with the advent of artificial intelligence, Mr. Moore fears that the job will soon be hollowed out.

“If A.I. could put together a credible version of the show for a first cut, it could eliminate one-third of our workdays,” he said, citing technology like the video-making software Sora as evidence that the shift is imminent. “We’ll become electronic gig workers.”…

(13) CLEVER COMPOSITE. Today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day is “Milky Way Over Tunisia” by Makrem Larnaout, and it definitely will be recognized by Star Wars fans. Photo at the link.

Explanation: That’s no moon. On the ground, that’s the Lars Homestead in Tunisia. And that’s not just any galaxy. That’s the central band of our own Milky Way galaxy. Last, that’s not just any meteor. It is a bright fireball likely from last year’s Perseids meteor shower. The featured image composite combines consecutive exposures taken by the same camera from the same location. This year’s Perseids peak during the coming weekend is expected to show the most meteors after the first quarter moon sets, near midnight. To best experience a meteor shower, you should have clear and dark skies, a comfortable seat, and patience.

(14) DERRY TEASER. “First Trailer for Welcome to Derry Teases Chilling Prequel to It” at the Express-Tribune.

The highly anticipated prequel to Stephen King’s It, titled Welcome to Derry, has dropped its first trailer, offering a glimpse into the horror that awaits fans. The teaser presents fleeting scenes of the eerie town of Derry, Maine, known for its sinister reputation in King’s universe.

(15) HBO SMORGASBORD. “The Last of Us Season 2 Teaser Features Pedro Pascal in New Footage”: Comicbook.com sets the frame.

“I can’t walk on the path of the right because I’m wrong,” a guitar-strumming Ellie sings in The Last of Us Part II video game. But in HBO’s The Last of Us season 2 — which just dropped its first footage (below) in a trailer for what’s still to come on the Max streaming service in 2024 and 2025 — it’s Joel (Pedro Pascal) who has done wrong. “Did you hurt her?” Catherine O’Hara’s unnamed character can be heard asking in the teaser, referring to Ellie (Bella Ramsey). “No,” a tearful Joel answers. “I saved her.”

The footage, which is featured alongside new looks at HBO Original Series The Penguin, The White Lotus, The Gilded Age, Dune: Prophecy, It: Welcome to Derry, and the Game of Thrones spinoff A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, also offers a glimpse at season 2 cast members Gabriel Luna, Isabela Merced, and Jeffrey Wright, who reprises his role from the game as Isaac Dixon….

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Patrick McGuire, Lise Andreasen, 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 Daniel Dern.]