(1) F&SF GOES QUARTERLY. Jason Sanford relayed this announcement from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
(2) WE INTERRUPT OUR PROGRAM. Remember the other day when we reported that Good Omens 3 was moving forward? Well, that’s changed: “’Good Omens’: Production Paused On Amazon Drama From Neil Gaiman” reports Deadline.
Production has been paused on the third and final season of fantasy drama Good Omens, the Neil Gaiman drama for Amazon that’s shooting in Scotland.
Deadline is hearing there are discussions about possible production changes. A spokesperson would not comment.
News about the future of Good Omen comes less than a week after Disney put a planned feature adaptation of Gaiman’s 2008 YA title The Graveyard Book on pause amid a series of sexual assault allegations against the award-winning author. (Insiders said multiple factors went into the decision). Gaiman has denied the allegations and said he was “disturbed” by them….
(3) WORLDCON AT THE MOVIES. There will be a Seattle Worldcon 2025 Film Festival – FilmFreeway and full details are on the Film Freeway site.
Seattle Worldcon 2025 is proud to dedicate a room for all five days of the convention exclusively for showcasing speculative fiction films. This room will be the home of the Seattle Worldcon 2025 Film Festival.
If you’re a cinephile, a filmmaker, or just a lover of speculative fiction, make sure to spend some of your time at the Worldcon in the festival room. The festival promises to be an exhilarating celebration of creativity, diversity, and the magic of the silver screen.
The Seattle Worldcon 2025 Film Festival is not your run-of-the-mill film event. It’s a carefully curated showcase of independent films that fall under the umbrella of speculative fiction. Whether you’re into mind-bending science fiction, epic fantasy, or spine-tingling horror, this festival has something for everyone. And the best part? It’s a judged festival, so you’ll be treated to the cream of the crop—films that push boundaries, challenge conventions, and transport you to otherworldly realms.Calling All Filmmakers
Are you a filmmaker with a passion for speculative storytelling? This is your chance to shine! The submission window for the Seattle Worldcon 2025 Film Festival opens on September 1, 2024 and closes on March 31, 2025. We encourage filmmakers from all backgrounds to submit their works. And here’s the icing on the cake: if you’re a BIPOC or a woman director, the submission fee is waived. So, dust off that camera, polish your script, and get ready to share your vision with the world. For more information on submitting films, please see the Seattle Worldcon 2025 Film Festival webpage on FilmFreeway.
(4) CHANGING TIMES. Joe of Compelling Science Fiction is signal-boosting Rich Larson’s new collection The Sky Didn’t Load Today and Other Glitches, which comes out tomorrow with a mix of new and reprint short stories.
For those of your who have never read Rich Larson, here’s the short version of what you need to know: he writes crisp, vivid scenes exploring messy human behavior in mostly near future SF contexts. His work often digs into the darker corners of technological advancement, examining how innovations might amplify or twist our existing flaws and desires. He also writes short, and fortunately for all of us, he writes a LOT.
Instead of belaboring how great his short fiction is, I want to tell you about the first time I met him in person. I was in the audience at a Worldcon panel (the topic of which I don’t remember). One of the panelists was a classic “old dude who doesn’t want the world to change” and he started editorializing about people clutching pearls ruining science fiction and fantasy.
The place devolved into mild pandemonium, with folks in the back yelling at the panelists, standard culture war stuff.
This was many years ago so I don’t remember the exact moment, but I had given a tshirt to Rich. He proceeded to take his shirt off and put mine on, and everyone was so incensed that nobody even noticed him shirtless in the auditorium.
That’s one of my favorite Worldcon memories, and is a Rich Larson signature: injecting humor into serious situations.
(5) DEEP PERSPECTIVE. At Reddit’s r/Fantasy forum, Janny Wurts chimed in and gave her informed perspective on the topic at hand, which was about changes in SFF book cover design trends over the past couple of decades. “WTF happened to book cover art?”
When I started painting cover art (and when my husband did) – the USA did full range portrait or figure style art. The UK tended to do landscapes – all painted. Digital art did not exist then.
The reasons given for this difference was market…UK, where life was more crowded, they claimed readers wanted to feel the other worldliness as an open landscape maybe with a castle or tiny figure.
The USA readers wanted to see character based.
Then one editor (Jane Johnson) shifted the metric – wanting to put Fantasy into a more ‘adult’ look – since many readers (she said) were tearing off the covers so that others wouldn’t see them reading in the genre…so she struck off in a new direction to make the books ‘appeal’ to a more adult audience, since so many books were not for younger readers anyway.
Then came digital art…and one publisher in the USA threw everything upside down…suddenly they realized they did not have to PAY for an artist at all. They could hire a design firm to do a simple cover design mostly based on typography – and use in house people doing photoshop (and therefore saving anywhere from 3000/7000 bucks per cover) to mere hundreds….
(6) POSTIVELY BEASTLY. Camestros Felapton shares “Timothy’s Bestiary of Mythical Creatures of Wonder” – probably so-called because you’ll wonder how Tim thought them up.
(7) BAEN CONTEST GETS NEW DIRECTOR. C. Stuart Hardwick told Facebook readers he has been selected as Contest Director for the Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Award, taking over for William Ledbetter after 18 years. Hardwick said:
In this competition, Bill and Toni Weisskopf have created something of real and lasting value to the industry, and I’m honored and excited to have a part in carrying on its legacy.
Contest opens for submissions on October 1, 2024 at 12:01am EDT.
Details at https://www.baen.com/contest-jbmssa
(8) KEEPING THE ‘Z’ IN FOLIO. If you’ve ever wanted an artisanal edition of Children of Dune (a snip at £80!) then this is for you: “TikTok meets Tolkien: how the Folio Society attracted gen Z readers” in the Guardian.
Founded in 1947, the Folio Society was once a membership club known for publishing classic tomes and history books, with a customer base of predominantly “old white men”, according to its boss.
Now, however, more than half the people who buy its books are aged between 25 and 44, and it is selling more sci-fi and fantasy titles, boosted by BookTok and growing gen Z interest in “artisanal” editions.
The publisher, which produces illustrated editions with elaborate covers, has seen sales soar 55% since 2017-18.
Joanna Reynolds, chief executive since 2016, said: “We’ve completely changed the sort of books that we sell. We developed fantasy, sci-fi and more children’s. Particularly the fantasy and sci-fi have made a massive difference to us. Game of Thrones was literally a gamechanger … It made so much money for us.”
Reynolds recalled that, when she joined, “the business was in freefall by every metric. It was losing money, losing customers. It was in a mess.”
She ditched the membership model, opened the company to new audiences and started asking them what they wanted.
One of the answers was more sci-fi and fantasy. The genres are a growing market in UK publishing, achieving a record year for sales in 2023. In the past year, the Folio Society’s three bestselling titles across all age groups are Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones, Dune by Frank Herbert and Jurassic Parkby Michael Crichton.
Last week, the society published Children of Dune, the third in Herbert’s series, and sold more than 1,000 copies of the £80 book in 24 hours. Younger audiences buy more Tolkien and Game of Thrones, while older readers want James Bond novels and classics such as The Wind in the Willows and Rebecca.
(9) JAMES EARL JONES (1931-2024). Actor James Earl Jones died at home in New York state on September 9 at the age of 93. Deadline’s tribute, “James Earl Jones Dead: Darth Vader Voice, ‘Field Of Dreams’ Star, EGOT Winner”, noted these career highlights:
…Among his more than 80 film credits, Jones’ other notable movies include as a B-52 bombardier in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 Cold War satire “Dr. Strangelove” (his feature film debut), as the first Black president of the United States in 1972’s “The Man,” as the fearsome villain in 1982’s “Conan the Barbarian,” as a reclusive author in 1989’s “Field of Dreams,” as a blind former baseball star in 1993’s “The Sandlot,” and as a minister living in apartheid South Africa in 1995’s “Cry, the Beloved Country.”…
He voiced Darth Vader in many Star Wars movies and innumerable live and animated TV productions and games. He also was Thulsa Doom in Conan the Barbarian (1982), King Jaffe Joffer from a mythical African country in Coming to America (1988) and Coming 2 America (2021) and appeared in Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold (1986). He appeared as himself in a 2014 episode of The Big Bang Theory.
(10) ROBERT SIDAWAY (1942-2024). Actor and documentary-maker Robert Sidaway died August 16 reports the Guardian. Fans saw him in several Sixties genre productions, including Doctor Who:
…His television credits included … Out of the Unknown (1965) and The Avengers (1968). The second of his two roles in Doctor Who – as the cheery, affable and dashing Captain Turner in the Patrick Troughton adventure The Invasion (1968) – involved him going up in a helicopter, being an original member of Unit (the army outfit that would become a mainstay of the series), and announcing one of the series’ most enduring sequences – the Cybermen bursting from the sewers and marching in front of St Paul’s Cathedral….
(11) COMICS SECTION.
- Close to Home shows a prehistoric practical joker in action.
- Thatbaby apparently does not need to apologize to everyone.
- Macanudo has a transcription of an early critic.
- Rubes is on hand for the last sign.
(12) HISTORIC COMPUTER ARTIFACTS. Christies auction of “Firsts: The History of Computing from the Paul G. Allen Collection” runs until September 12.
Firsts: The History of Computing from the Paul G. Allen Collection presents important milestones in the history of computing, some of which have been preserved in working order. Initially focused on recovering software for the DEC PDP-10, Paul Allen’s collection expanded to include hardware for many other systems as well. Iconic supercomputers such as the CDC-6500 and Cray 2 will be offered alongside early and influential microcomputers, like the Altair 8800 and Apple-1. These groundbreaking innovations were instrumental in shaping our modern world.
One of the items is this Tate’s Arithmometer (C & E Laytons, Circa 1892).
(13) NOT A BOMB. Denver fan Dana Cain’s musical The Android’s New Soul is praised by Front Row Center Denver.
I had the extreme pleasure of watching a dream come true tonight. Dana Cain as a teenager in 1974 had an idea for a musical that incorporated all the late-night movies she watched that were the aftermath of atomic bomb tests creating giant mutant bugs. She mixed in a hard rock beat like the groups she heard on the radio and MTV – ELO, Genesis, Kiss, Led Zeppelin. Robotics were in their infant stages but endlessly fascinating in their possibilities. Mix all this together with a beautiful medical technician as the lone survivor of a Big Bomb and you’ve got the outline for a rock musical that took fifty years to finish. But that is still as fresh, creative, and relevant as when it burst from her imagination. Her dream of seeing it come alive on a stage happened tonight at the appropriately named Bug Theatre. …
(14) IF YOU WANT TO DRIVE, GET SOME WHEELS. Idolator digs deep into the archives to bring us photos of “40 Of The Most Futuristic Concept Cars From The Past That Look Totally Bizarre Today”.
Automakers have often pushed the boundaries of creativity, resulting in concept cars that defied conventions and challenged the status quo. When these cars were first revealed, they dazzled everyone with their futuristic design and cutting-edge features… but now, they seem a bit strange and out of place compared to today’s standards.
However, despite all their eccentricities, these concepts have made a place in automotive history due to their quest for innovation. Let us have a look at some of the most futuristic concept cars from the past that look bizarre now…
Got to love this one:
Ford Nucleon (1958)
Back in the late 50s, it was believed that nuclear technology could be made small and cheap enough to replace gasoline. So, Ford came up with the bold idea to use it to power cars.
Unveiled in 1957, the Ford Nucleon featured a small nuclear reactor in the rear of the vehicle. The idea was to use uranium fission to power a steam engine, such as done in nuclear submarines. But it proved to be impractical, and the car could never advance beyond the concept stage.
(15) SAUSAGE GRINDHOUSE. “’The Franchise’: HBO Comedy Series Gets Premiere Date & First Trailer” says Deadline.
HBO has set Sunday, October 6 for the premiere of Sam Mendes and Armando Iannuccci’s comedy series The Franchise. The streamer also released the official teaser trailer which can be viewed above.
Created and executive produced by Jon Brown, The Franchise follows the crew of an unloved franchise movie fighting for their place in a savage and unruly cinematic universe. The comedy series shines a light on the secret chaos inside the world of superhero moviemaking, to ask the question — how exactly does the cinematic sausage get made? Because every f*ck-up has an origin story….
(16) A HOLE NEW TREK. Animation Magazine shares the link as “Paramount+ Debuts ‘Lower Decks’ Exclusive Clip for Star Trek Day”.
In celebration of Star Trek Day (Sept. 8), Paramount+ debuted an exclusive clip and the official key art for the fifth and final season of its hit animated comedy series Star Trek: Lower Decks. The new season will premiere on Paramount+ with two episodes on Thursday, October 24 in the U.S. and internationally. Following the premiere, new episodes of the 10-episode long season will drop every Thursday on the service leading up to the series finale on Thursday, December 19.
In Season 5 of Star Trek: Lower Decks, the crew of the U.S.S. Cerritos is tasked with closing “space potholes” — subspace rifts that are causing chaos in the Alpha Quadrant. Pothole duty would be easy for Junior Officers Mariner, Boimler, Tendi and Rutherford … if they didn’t also have to deal with an Orion war, furious Klingons, diplomatic catastrophes, murder mysteries and scariest of all: their own career aspirations….
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Jennifer Hawthorne, N., Joe, Jason Sanford, 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 Bill.]
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Damn, F&SF went quarterly, if only for awhile. I read that for a very long time when I was a lot younger. It’s always been the favorite for me of the genre magazines.
(1) Sorry to hear that they are cutting back on issues; glad to hear they are still around
1) I’ll certainly be happy to get my copy, and I’m glad to hear it’s coming. (I haven’t issue since the Jan 1965 issue that my folks gave me for Christmas 1964.)
(9) JAMES EARL JONES (1931-2024)
Sad news. Everyone remembers him as the voice of Darth Vader & Mufasa, but my first recollection of James Earl Jones was when he portrayed Alex Haley in “Roots: The Next Generations”. What a talent, what a career.
How many people who make pious remarks about how it’s a shame F&SF has dropped to quarterly, have bought a copy or subscribed to the zine at any time during this century?
(9) Somewhere in the great beyond, James Earl Jones is enjoying:
One forty-five caliber automatic; two boxes of ammunition; four days’ concentrated emergency rations; one drug issue containing antibiotics, morphine, vitamin pills, pep pills, sleeping pills, tranquilizer pills; one miniature combination Russian phrase book and Bible; one hundred dollars in rubles; one hundred dollars in gold; nine packs of chewing gum; one issue of prophylactics; three lipsticks; three pair of nylon stockings.
15) squeeee …
Look, there’s Jessica Hynes, from Spaced and Doctor Who
(1) That’s good news, that they’re staying alive. They are one of the three big ones.
(3) Balticon has had a fan film contest forever. First showing that I’m aware of in 1979, I think, of Hardware Wars.
(5) Missed the abstract art covers of the sixties.
(9) Tom Galway reminded me he was also in Roots (and if you weren’t around then, you have no concept of how huge that miniseries was)
(13) I’d love to find someone (preferably local to the DC/Baltimore area, to do a full-scale operatic production of Sassafrass’ Sundown, Echoes of Ragnarok (and yes, Ada gave me permission to look for a group to do it years ago).
(14) I want that Gyron.
Technically, I haven’t. (I purchased a lifetime subscription in 1977.)
(1) It’s a shame that they had to go quarterly. But I’m glad we will still be getting issues from them.
@Michael J. “Orange Mike” Lowrey
I was doing so for a while. But as with most SFF digests, I usually ended up reading just the editorials and book reviews.
(5) What freak tears off the covers of books so no one can tell they’re reading fantasy? Haven’t they heard of fabric book covers? Or of telling nosy people to fek off?
(9) Thanks to a high school field trip, I saw James Earl Jones live in Baltimore or Washington, D.C. — playing Othello with Christopher Plummer before the show went to Broadway. Both of them were great, of course.
It’s a shame I was too skittish about wearing my glasses back then, so the people were somewhat fuzzy. But with voices like those, who needs glasses?!
(9) Nicki and I saw Mr. Jones on stage at the Longacre Theatre in NYC at the beginning of 2015 in a revival of You Can’t Take It With You. Great production (Richard Thomas was also in the cast) and it was what I remember most about that visit to the Big Apple.
Seattle has a computer science museum with many Allen collection donations.—sadly closed now. gates or UW or MOHAI could step in but funding and storage is needed,.
5) I don’t know who tears off book covers to hide what they’re reading, but I do know that when my sister worked at Booksmith many years ago she would give me books for free by tearing off the covers. That’s what they did when they returned books that didn’t sell without having to ship the entire book—tear off the cover, scribble some numbers/ data on the back of it, send that back to the publishers to get the refund, and throw away the book itself. Or give it to little brothers who wanted to read a Robert Aspirin Mythadventure.
Are we sure it doesn’t still work like that, and better explains missing covers?
(9) thanks for everything, James Earl Jones. Sorry I never saw him on stage, or doing Shakespeare.
@Brian Jones — I hope he’s having a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff.
I first remember seeing James Earl Jones in the 1975 tv movie The UFO Incident about “alien abductees” Barney and Betty Hill. (Estelle Parsons was Betty.) Jones’ terror at recounting his story when he was otherwise calmly sitting under hypnosis really struck me, and I knew I had to start paying attention to him after that.
My wife still fondly remembers the scene in the first episode of the tv series Gabriel’s Fire, when, after twenty years in prison, he eats a hot dog from a street cart. The joy on his face was contagious.
(5) Book covers also hope to attract attention in digital storefronts. I strongly suspect that favors simple colors and typography rather than detailed art. Looking around in-person book stores lately shows me that the problem is not confined to SFF.
@Michael J. “Orange Mike” Lowrey: I’ve got a current subscription.
[1] Looking forward to somehow getting that issue of F&SF. My first issue was July, 1965 (Bonestell cover), and I have bought regularly since then (newsstand, bookstore, wherever, since I didn’t want mailing labels marring the covers!). I subsequently filled in all the back issues from number one. So yes, I have a stake in this!
(14) The nuclear-powered car sounds like a great idea till the first serious crash.
9) While not genre related, Mr. Jones attended the University of Michigan and was in the ROTC program. His activities included the UofM’s Scabbard and Blade unit – a collegiate honor society. He was eventually activated at the end of the Korean War and earned the Ranger tab.
Separately (and back in a genre direction) Miles Cameron’s “Deep Black” came out recently. It is one of the finer examples of MilSF to come along in a long while. The entire series appears inspired by old-world trade route conflicts and culminates with a space battle emblematic of several WWII naval battles.
Regards,
Dann
I don’t think I’ve met anyone with a stronger work ethic than Ray Charles. – Clint Eastwood
(1) F&SF seems to be having distribution problems as well as production problems. I’ve been buying it at newsstands and bookstores for years (my local B&N for at least the last decade), but for the past couple of years issues have been showing up 6 to 8 weeks behind their nominal publication date, and the Winter 2024 issue (the renamed January/February 2024 issue) never appeared at all. Hope they get that sorted out.
Someone must have used this already, but:
“NO, SCROLL, I AM YOUR PIXEL.”
(9) In the movie Sneakers (spoilers for a 32-year-old movie!) there was a government agent that interacted with the hacker group protagonists. Early in the movie they only communicated over the phone, and the agent’s voice was altered to disguise his identity. At the end of the movie he shows up in person and surprise! He was played by James Earl Jones, a man with one of the most distinctive voices in the business. Made me chuckle.
I became aware of James Earl Jones being nominated for an Oscar for The Great White Hope. He recited the alphabet on Sesame Street, still with that shaved head. Then I remember him on a live action kids show answering questions from an audience of tweens, still remembering him bald, reciting the alphabet on Sesame Street. By that time, he had hair and a beard, possibly for the Othello with Christopher Plummer.
I saw that car or a car like it when I went to the Seattle World’s Fair. I thought it was stupid when I was 10 or so. Broken Arrow on the 405 has come to mind several times.
1) Was very pleased to get the email from Weightless Books with the new issue. I was seriously thinking the Winter 2024 issue (renamed Jan/Feb) which came out in late February was going to be the last. Issues tended to run a little late in 2023 but not like this. I’ve had a digital subscription for about 10 years or so now.
@Ann Marble I usually just read the fiction with an occasional glance at the rest.
@PhilRM I haven’t seen F&SF, Asimov’s, or Analog on the B&N newstand in ages.
I’m a longtime subscriber to F&SF, Analog and Asimov’s. Just added Alfred Hitchcock’s and Ellery Queen’s too. If the era of print fiction magazines ends it won’t be because of me.
I haven’t seen F&SF, Asimov’s, or Analog on the B&N newstand in ages.
That hasn’t been my experience. I usually find them when I look.
@rcade
Maybe it’s just my B&Ns then or I get there after they’ve sold out.
The current CEO of B&N, an experienced bookseller, had a bright idea that I will paraphrase as “what if we let the local managers decide what to stock.” So we can plausibly expect some variation from store to store.
I haven’t found the magazines in bookstores either, because there are no more bookstores here.
@Laura @Jim Janney: Pre-pandemic, new issues of Asimov’s, Analog, and F&SF used to show up in my local B&Ns at about the same time (in substantial quantities, typically ~ a dozen copies of each). Post-pandemic, F&SF started lagging farther and farther behind its nominal publication date, but they would eventually show up (except for one issue last year, which never appeared). The last F&SF issue that showed up on the newsstand was December 2023, but Asimov’s and Analog show up as expected. (They – meaning Asimov’s and Analog – undoubtedly have the same distributor, as they’re both Dell publications.)
“I’m going back to Galli(frey)
I don’t think so!”
Torn covers: back in the day – I don’t know if they still do it, but given how few indie bookstores survive, I doubt it – I used to buy cut covers from a bookstore in downtown Philly. When you’re a teenager, and your parents ain’t well-off…
I have a real stake in it: F&SF has been my most consistent market since I sold my first story to them in 1964. I also maintain my subscription. Due to the AI crises they have not been accepting submissions for long periods of time, which is a shame because I am finally back at my writing lodge and producing, which I was not for the eight years after the Valley Fire destroyed it in 2015. –So I am back to working on novels.
Way back when I was a film critic for the newspapers one of my assignments was “The Great White Hope,” which drew an excited and enthusiastic review from me.
We have a great dearth of great thespians living long enough to develop their talents to such great heights. Take note, people, and when they come through your town find a way to see them: when you get old enough to die the things you regret are not the things you did but the things you did not do. I was too late to see Stravinsky conduct, I did not see Jones and Lansbury together on stage and I didn’t get to the Trips Festival.
When I get a time machine my itinerary will take me to see Mary Martin in “One Touch of Venus” and Gertrude Lawrence in “Lady in the Dark.” I was too young to see them in those days.
But the wonder of video did let me see “War Horse,” live on stage, and Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen in a Harold Pinter play.
And if you have not seen “Wicked,” live on stage…
1) Has anyone received their paper copies of this F&SF issue?
I’m still waiting for mine.
@John: I got mine a few days back.
Thanks. Sounds like there’s still hope.