(1) “A Halloween garden gnome” is what John King Tarpinian calls one of the pieces Tokyo University of Arts students created for a festival —
This massive work of art, which features a giant octopus wrapped around a Greek-style temple, has captured the attention of people across Japan. Now that the festival is over, though, the students are asking if anyone wants to buy it!
More photos of the work on parade at the Rocket News 24 website.
(2) Of course, being scientists, these folks had to do what every science fiction fan knows better than to do — revive the ancient giant virus.
It’s 30,000 years old and still ticking: A giant virus recently discovered deep in the Siberian permafrost reveals that huge ancient viruses are much more diverse than scientists had ever known.
They’re also potentially infectious if thawed from their Siberian deep freeze, though they pose no danger to humans, said Chantal Abergel, a scientist at the National Center for Scientific Research at Aix-Marseille University in France and co-author of a new study announcing the discovery of the new virus. As the globe warms and the region thaws, mining and drilling will likely penetrate previously inaccessible areas, Abergel said.
“Safety precautions should be taken when moving that amount of frozen earth,” she told Live Science. (Though viruses can’t be said to be “alive,” the Siberian virus is functional and capable of infecting its host.)
…The new virus isn’t a threat to humans; it infected single-celled amoebas during the Upper Paleolithic, or late Stone Age.
(3) Next step, Wolverine? Claws still required, and it’s titanium not adamantium, but… a Spanish hospital recent replaced a significant amount of a man’s rib cage and sternum with a titanium replacement.
Putting titanium inside people’s chests is nothing new, but what made this different was the implant was 3D printed to match his existing bone structure.
(4) Lost In Space first got lost on September 15, 1965. The Los Angeles Times visited with some of the original cast.
Fifty years after the CBS sci-fi series “Lost in Space” blasted into orbit on Sept. 15, 1965, the show’s five surviving stars are still very close. A few gather each year to have dinner to celebrate the birthday of Jonathan Harris, the late actor who played the diabolical and very funny Dr. Zachary Smith.
“We have stayed very much like a normal dysfunctional family,” said Bill Mumy, who played child prodigy Will Robinson during the series’ three-season run.
Baby boomers who grew up watching “Lost in Space” still have a strong connection to the campy show, which boasted a terrific early score from Oscar-winner John Williams, then billed as Johnny Williams.
“When I do these conventions, people are still so wrapped up in it,” said June Lockhart, who played matriarch Maureen Robinson. “The last time I did one, I said, ‘Excuse me.’ I looked out at the audience and said, ‘I must remind you: It was all pretend!'”
“Lost in Space” was created and produced by Irwin Allen, who went on to make such disaster film classics as “The Poseidon Adventure” (1972) and “The Towering Inferno” (1974).
The series revolved around the Robinson family — John Robinson (Guy Williams), his wife (Lockhart) and their children Judy (Marta Kristen), the brilliant Penny (Angela Cartwright) and Will.
On the anniversary date, Cartwright and Mumy released a new book, Lost (and Found) in Space, a memoir with rare photographs.
(5) Steven H Silver recreates a convention report of the 1976 Worldcon in Kansas City in “A Brief History of MidAmeriCon” at Uncanny Magazine.
Early projections seemed to indicate that Big MAC would have as many as 7,000 members and the committee knew they couldn’t handle a con that size. To ensure it didn’t happen, they introduced the sliding rate scale, making the con more expensive the later a fan bought a membership, they announced that they would not run an all–night movie room, and they also announced there would be no programming related to comic books, Star Trek, Planet of the Apes, or the Society for Creative Anachronism. All of these decisions were met with howls of protest. MidAmeriCon was clearly attempting to destroy fandom and the Worldcon.
Keller was also concerned that people would crash MidAmeriCon, so prior to the convention, he announced that the convention would have a foolproof way of ensuring that only paid members were in attendance. There was much speculation prior to the Worldcon that this meant holograms on the badges. Keller had something else in mind and each attendee was given a plastic bracelet that could not be put on again once it was taken off. Of course, foolproof doesn’t mean fanproof, and some fans set themselves the goal of subverting the security measure. They found a woman who was being released from the hospital and convinced her to continue to wear her hospital ID, so they could try to bring her to the various official functions of the convention. They succeeded.
(6) People are still hard at work mapping what parts of the universe SFWA controls.
…and yet again: pic.twitter.com/rrI8qPObo6
— Steven Gould (@StevenGould) September 4, 2015
(7) Ursula K. Le Guin is interviewed by Choire Sicha at Interview Magazine.
SICHA: There’s a sort of growing professional class of writers that may not have had access to being a professional. Before the internet, you would go to your terrible job and then you would write at night. I actually found that system really rewarding, separating out the money and the work.
LE GUIN: On the other hand, if it was a nine-to-five job, and if you had any family obligations and commitments, it’s terribly hard. It worked very much against women, because they were likely to have the nine-to-five job and really be responsible for the household. Doing two jobs is hard enough, but doing three is just impossible. And that’s essentially what an awful lot of women who wanted to write were being asked to do: support themselves, keep the family and household going, and write.
SICHA: And the writing was the first thing to go when things got tough, I’m sure.
LE GUIN: I had only a little taste of that. I did have three kids. But what my husband and I figured—he was a professor and teaching a lot—was that three jobs can be done by two people. He could do his job teaching, I could do my job writing, and the two of us could do the house and the kids. And it worked out great, but it took full collaboration between him and me. See, I cannot write when I’m responsible for a child. They are full-time occupations for me. Either you’re listening out for the kids or you’re writing. So I wrote when the kids went to bed. I wrote between nine and midnight those years. And my husband would listen out if the little guy was sick or something. It worked out. It wasn’t really easy but, you know, you have a lot of energy when you’re young. Sometimes I look back and I think, “How the hell did we do it?” But we did.
(8) A Kickstarter appeal seeks to fund the printing of 5,000 copies of Understanding Jim Crow: Using Racist Memorabilia to Teach Tolerance and Promote Social Justice by David Pilgrim.
David Pilgrim is the founder and curator of the About the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, MI.
For many people, especially those who came of age after landmark civil rights legislation was passed, it is difficult to understand what it was like to be an African American living under Jim Crow segregation in the United States. Most young Americans have little or no knowledge about restrictive covenants, literacy tests, poll taxes, lynchings, and other oppressive features of the Jim Crow racial hierarchy. Even those who have some familiarity with the period may initially view racist segregation and injustices as relics of a distant, shameful past. A proper understanding of race relations in this country must include a solid knowledge of Jim Crow—how it emerged, what it was like, how it ended, and its impact on the culture.
Understanding Jim Crow introduces readers to the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, a collection of more than ten thousand contemptible collectibles that are used to engage visitors in intense and intelligent discussions about race, race relations, and racism. The items are offensive. They were meant to be offensive. The items in the Jim Crow Museum served to dehumanize blacks and legitimized patterns of prejudice, discrimination, and segregation.
Using racist objects as teaching tools seems counterintuitive—and, quite frankly, needlessly risky. Many Americans are already apprehensive discussing race relations, especially in settings where their ideas are challenged. The museum and this book exist to help overcome our collective trepidation and reluctance to talk about race.
(9) In “An Interview With Jennifer Brozek” at Permuted Press, the author and editor is unflinching, positive and brave.
Permuted: With the Hugo Awards sparking so much debate this year, do you have any thoughts on the controversy in general as a nominated editor?
Jennifer: Awards are a funny thing. I’m honored to have been nominated. I’m glad my part in the controversy is over. I’m also really pleased that there is a renewed interest in the Hugo award itself. Talk about an adrenalin shot in the arm.
Permuted: Your protagonist in the NEVER LET ME series, Melissa, has bipolar disorder. Can you describe your experience writing a character with a mental illness?
Jennifer: As a high functioning autistic adult, I am very aware of how people in media are portrayed. Either the mental illness is a superhero power (Alphas, Perception) or it makes a person a psychopathic criminal. It is rarely shown in-between. It is rarely shown as it really is—something millions of people deal with every single day. There are a lot of physical aspects to mental illness as well as coping mechanisms. With Melissa, I wanted to show a protagonist who had mental illness but it was neither a “power” nor something that made her unable to cope with the world. She is medicated and it works. This is the goal of every person suffering from mental illness on meds.
(10) Light in the Attic Records has released soundtrack to the documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune. It is available in 2xLP and CD.
This is the soundtrack to the story about the greatest film that never was.
Jodorowsky’s Dune tells the tale of cult filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky’s unsuccessful attempt to adapt Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi novel, Dune, to the big screen. Composer Kurt Stenzel gives life to a retro-futuristic universe as fantastic as Jodorowsky’s own vision for his Dune–a film whose A-list cast would have included Salvador Dalí, Orson Welles, and Mick Jagger in starring roles and music by psychedelic prog-rockers Pink Floyd.
Building upon director Frank Pavich’s idea for a score with a “Tangerine Dream-type feel,” Stenzel lays out a cosmic arsenal of analog synthesizers that would make any collector green at the gills: among other gems are a rare Moog Source, CZ-101s, and a Roland Juno 6, as well as unorthodox instruments like a toy Concertmate organ and a Nintendo DS. “I also played guitar and did vocals,” says Stenzel, “some chanting… and some screaming, which comes naturally to me.” The score also features narration by Jodorowsky himself. As Stenzel notes, “Jodo’s voice is actually the soundtrack’s main musical instrument–listening to him was almost like hypnosis, like going to the guru every night.”
[Thanks to Rob Thornton, Will R., Mark, JJ, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kendall.]
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It is not every day that you see Luke Skywalker pulling a pint of Guinness.
Bejeppers.
The Man Who Mistook His Pixel for a Scroll.
The Pixels – Here Comes Your Scroll
Lost in Space is one of those shows I have a hard time re-watching now. It’s a lot like Gilligan’s Island in Space with them somehow having whatever they need for the plot. (I remember one episode where Dr. Smith was painting and he had a beret and a smock.) Maybe if Dr. Smith had remained an evil spy instead of a whining drain on the Robinson’s resources.
But we will always have Tybo the Carrot Man.
Where The Wild Pixels Are
The Scroll That Wraps the World Round
Past The Pixel and Into the Scroll.
To scroll would be a great adventure or second pixel to the left and straight on till worldcon.
Rocky Horror Pixel Scroll.
Pixels in the Night exchanging data
Re: Lost in Space–was this show originally marketed at very young children? Because I had never seen an episode until a local channel started airing reruns a couple of years back, and that show is some of the most brain-dead, worthless garbage I’ve ever seen. If this is the quality of television adults watched in the 1960s, then I’m shocked that we managed to avoid extinction via runaway Darwin Award.
I remember running home after school in about 1st grade so that I wouldn’t miss Lost in Space, and thinking it was the greatest show ever. Then fast forward to my freshman year in college and I found it airing on USA Network at about 1:00 a.m. and, well, let’s just say that was my first acquaintance with the Suck Fairy. (Who also seems to have taken time from her busy schedule to visit both Space: 1999 and Land of the Lost.)
Lucy in the Scroll with Pixels?
Above all else, the Pixels must Scroll.
(which is not to say that Lost in Space the TV series wasn’t still better than Lost in Space the movie. The one thing I liked about the movie: When they threw the Jupiter 5 into hyperdrive as it was skimming across the Sun’s surface, and it brought plasma with it when it emerged on the other side of the galaxy or whatever)
My Little Scrolly: Pixels are Magic.
@Darren Garrison
I take it you haven’t seen ‘My Mother the Car’ yet.
I actually don’t mind The Land of the Lost (I did watch that one as a child.) The FX is obviously primitive, and there are silly story elements, but I think it does actually have some depth for children’s programing. Lost in Space, on the other hand, on top of the horrible writing and acting, has some of the very worst science ever portrayed on television–and that is saying a lot. As just one instance, I remember one episode where Will Robinson was transported back to Earth and trying to convince other children who he was. They asked him 3 or 4 questions about space– Will basically says “that’s easy” and gave answers to those simple questions that were wildly, profoundly wrong. There was no plot-related reason for the answers being wrong–the writers simply gave too little of a shit to pick up a dictionary, an encyclopedia, or a telephone to find out the real answers–and did not themselves know even the most basic of facts about the genre that they were writing in.
(Oh, and I have a DVD with the full series My Mother the Car on it somewhere, but haven’t watched most of them yet.)
I was about 9 or 10 when “Lost In Space” was on and found it terribly unsatisfying, though still interesting because it was science fiction on some level. I found Dr. Smith extremely tiresome. A friend of mine told me about this great new show “Star Trek” which wasn’t broadcast in my area (we only got one channel at that time.) ST turned up locally the next year and I thought it was great (I was probably the perfect age for it.)
Lost in Space started out as Swiss Family Robinson in Space. (Even called them the Space Family Robinson.) They were stuck on the planet. They had limited resources. They had to deal with various unexpected threats. Plus they had a spy in their midst who was plotting against them.
Gradually the threats just got sillier and eventually they were able to leave the planet and get a new and now colorful adventure every week. (The show went to color in 1966.) Some have suggested that show became more campy to compete with Batman for ratings.
The one thing that I saw pointed out on a special about Irwin Allen, is that he reuses everything. Props, film clips, and costumes are used again and again in different episodes (and even across his different series.) One of those things you might ignore/not notice as a kid, but watching it as an adult makes it look really cheap.
On the plus side, Robby the Robot appears in three episodes.
I am reading a lot quicker since I got my Kindle. My mom says the same – she gets through a book a day (she doesn’t have a day job, although she is a good house person like I never was even when I had energy).
Anyway, today’s book is Europe in Autumn by Dave Hutchinson, which I picked up because the deep deep sorrow and angst that transpired from his tweet when he came into contact with JCW’s prose moved me to promote his book from the TBR pile to the Being Read pile (which is only slightly smaller, tbh).
I am having a great time with it. I have to say that the prose shines above all else, although both the description of a future Europe gently and undramatically fractioning (“like a glacier calving”), and the characterisation of the ordinary people making a living in the service industry in it are vivid and memorable. The plot, for now, is best described as “meandering”, but nobody has died of catastrophic pandemic illnesses yet, and no Gods have been murdered, so it sounds positively cheery.
I keep highlighting sentences just for the sheer joyful brilliance of them. No dragons or mechanical octopuses as of yet, but there’s still time.
Darren Garrison: Re: Lost in Space–was this show originally marketed at very young children? Because I had never seen an episode until a local channel started airing reruns a couple of years back, and that show is some of the most brain-dead, worthless garbage I’ve ever seen. If this is the quality of television adults watched in the 1960s, then I’m shocked that we managed to avoid extinction via runaway Darwin Award.
I remember as a small child seeing a few episodes of this in syndication, and even despite my young age, recognizing it as absolute shyte. It was so bad I just couldn’t bear to watch it. (Then, as now, a TV show had to be pretty damn good to compete with SFF books for my free time.)
However, there was another similar, but very different, show also in syndication, which I totally imprinted on: Star Trek. Despite the fact that I was the child of an incredibly racist and sexist father, that show probably played a huge part in making me into the SJW I am today.
Lost in Space was silly but amusing. It was goofy fun, OK as far as that went.
Back in the day, our neighbors the Pakistanis being the early TV adopters, the neighborhood kids would flock there. We got Lost in Space and sometimes even Dr. Who, probably tapes from Hong Kong. They would play whatever they could get I guess. I was too old for LIS but it went over well enough with our crowd. Dr. Who was much worse. Nobody got it and it wasn’t funny.
Warner Brothers cartoons and Three Stooges shorts were favorites, and they hold up too.
For the Scroll is Hollow and I have touched the Pixel
Is There in Scroll no Pixel?
And the Pixels shall Scroll Them
The Pixel on the Edge of Scrollever
Where No Pixel Has Scrolled Before
Land of the Lost, although visited by the Suck Fairy, still has much to recommend it — just stick with the episodes about using the Pylons to travel through time, mess up the weather, etc., and avoid the ones where Will & Holly learn the Value of Friendship.
I’m still upset at the Will Ferrell movie, not just because it was bad, but because it probably foreclosed the possibility of getting a non-campy revival of the series.
The one thing that I saw pointed out on a special about Irwin Allen, is that he reuses everything.
There’s an episode of Lost in Space where they meet Giants, and there’s a couple of simple (and slightly obvious 50 years on) tricks like where the Giant is on one side of the screen and Penny (maybe?) on the other, and a rock formation or something covering the middle where the join would be. Also filming the Giant from below and the Robinsons from above. I assume that this was what formed Allen’s methods for Land of the Giants.
International Pixel-Scroll Technopeasant Daily Roundup
I think celebrating International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day on April 23rd has rather gone by the wayside for the very best of reasons. There is so much free fiction out there now that every day is International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day. Yeah!!
(Hey you! Good to see you. It’s like 1990something in here!)
Me too. I keep telling friends and acquaintances that, and they find it hard to credit, but it’s made a huge difference, and what with parenthood/general business, I was starting to worry I’d lost that part of me. Which would be horrible for someone who thinks of “reader” as her nationality.
I think it’s the in-between-things reading that makes a difference (waiting for buses, standing in line, walking a familiar route). I’m not anywhere close to a book a day (even discounting that I also tend to have several going), but I feel better.
Oh. For some reason, reviews had led me to think this was an “important” book more than a pleasurable one. Adding it back to the pile of piles. Thank you, kind of 😉
Careful with that scroll, Eugene.
Several species of small, furry animals gathered together in a cave and scrolling with a pict.
To be honest, I’ve never gotten by the introduction of Land of the Lost. I’ve tried to watch it and just can’t. I did like the almost totally unrelated Land of the Lost movie which was a huge box-office failure. (Cost $100 million. Made about half that domestically.)
To be fair to Irwin Allen, most TV shows of that time reused a lot of props and costumes. Following the death of Yvonne Craig, I was noticing in “Whom Gods Destory,” all of Garth’s minions are obviously wearing costumes from earlier episodes of Star Trek. In some cases, they’ve mixed and matched alien and costumes.
The sculpture reminds me of the giant cthuloid they had attacking the Seattle Convention Center during PAX https://instagram.com/p/687OnjTSKB/
That was my reaction even as a little kid. I’d watch, hoping it was one of the good episodes and not just a bunch of badly animated dinosaur fights.
I seem to remember a cool series ending, too — where Holly meets her future self and in order to get out of the land they have to create the time loop that puts them in the land in the first place? I kind of want to re-watch, and yet, I’m afraid the Suck Fairy might have visited there, too.
I’ve seen one episode of Lost in Space, but not all the way through.
The Pixel That Japed?
I want that lawn sculpture. Would go nice next to the one I got from ThinkGeek of Godzilla eating Gnomes.
Read The Just City and Slow Bullets. Slow Bullets packs a lot of stuff into a small package, I think that’ll be a tough one to beat. Really dug The Just City, that’s on my personal shortlist of titles I’d nominate. Gotta get The Philosopher Kings now to see what happens next.
Puppy Horror Pixel Scroll?
I agree about The Just City.
Finished Shepherd’s Crown last night. Definitely not Pratchett at the height of his powers, but if the series had to end, then this seemed like a good place to end it.
Am now reading Amanda Downum’s Dreams of Shreds and Tatters and am intrigued. I liked her Necromancer Chronicles, and this is a very different sort of story (contemporary urban fantasy/horror rather than secondary world).
I saw isolated episodes of Land of the Lost and Lost in Space and neither made any sense to me. The sleestaks and the little furry kid thing in Land of the Lost weirded me out and every episode seemed to consist of running from dinosaurs and running into a cave and playing with a weird lit up chess table thing.
Doctor Smith on Land of the Lost was very creepy to me. Like the uncle kids shouldn’t be left alone with creepy. And I thought the robot was in all the episodes.
As for the state of tv in the 60s, Harlan Ellison’s collected TV reviews (originally published in the LA Free Press “underground” newspaper) are available in The Glass Teat and the Other Glass Teat (because he maintained that TV doesn’t suck, it IS sucked) and are interesting and often funny reading. I think they were published between 1968 and 1970 or thereabouts.
I think in the long run I am more a fan of Ellison’s non-fiction essays than I am of his stories. The books of his I have most re-read are the Glass Teat collections and An Edge in My Voice (book of essays published in the mid 80s).
Also, while I was trying to locate the title for the latter, I noticed that a large chunk of Ellison books are available on Amazon through Kindle Unlimited, if you have that, including Edge and both Glass Teat collections.
JJ: I, too, hated Lost in Space which I must have seen at about the right age, somewhere between twelve and fourteen. I hated Doctor Smith so much it made me nauseous. It was so unbelievably stupid in all its ways, and the fact that Smith got away with horrible, brutal, vicious behavior over and over again was deeply upsetting.
I was watching Star Trek in reruns at about the same time I first saw Lost in Space and I fell for Star Trek hard, hard, hard. It was from David Gerrold’s books about Star Trek that I found out that fandom existed. It would be years before I actually encountered it in real life, but Gerrold primed me to look for it.
Two different robots (though they’re frequently mistaken for one another). Robby the Robot is the “star” of Forbidden Planet et al; Robot B-9 was the one who’s arms flailed while shouting DANGER! DANGER!
The Lost in Space robot was in every episode. Robby the robot is the one from Forbidden Planet.
Finished Chuck Wendig’s Zeroes last night. Interesting and amusing fair with his patented snark. With Reagan, he amply demonstrates that the failure mode of clever is asshole/troll. Reminds me of Daniel Suarez’s Daemon and Freedom.
The opposition was interesting and I’m honestly surprised there’s going to be a second volume.
—
Currently Working On: Karen Memory (I usually love Bear’s stuff, but this one doesn’t grab me), The Fifth Season (interesting – fantasy thought all the way through, oddly reminding me of The Craft Sequence and Metropolitan) and Ghost Fleet by P.W. Singer and August Cole (just started – no impression yet). Old Venus – really uneven content. Some of the stories are strong, others are meh.
The confusion is pretty understandable. After Forbidden Planet, Robby got reused all over the place, films and TV. And, indeed, he did put in two appearances in Lost in Space – in two episodes and as two different characters in fact…
Well, that’s the first I knew that they were not the same robot. Today’s lucky 10,000.
Darren Garrison writes: If this is the quality of television adults watched in the 1960s, then I’m shocked that we managed to avoid extinction via runaway Darwin Award.
It does illustrate why original Star Trek was such a standout show.
Still, nothing was as good as those Gerry Anderson shows. I figure I was lucky growing up on repeats of Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, and UFO…
Typo seen in police report just now: “Passenger was in and out of conscientiousness…”
I loved Lost in Space.
I was seven when it came on.
And there was a huge amount of head canon involved in making it make sense.
I finished Just One Damned Thing After Another late last night. Thank you to whoever recommended this! It was the funniest thing I’ve read in a while. Also finished The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet recently. Another recommendation from here, and very good.
I held out on reading e-books for the longest time, but started doing so a year or so ago. Now I read practically everything on the tablet. I don’t quite read a book a day anymore, mostly because of the day job. I bought a Kindle paperwhite so I could share some with my mom, who is currently reading the Mrs Pollifax books on my kindle.
I can’t remember which SFF writer wrote this about special effects, but he was describing how his daughter just couldn’t watch anything SFF before Star Wars because the special effects were so bad (to her) that it pulled her out of the film. I wonder how much of the suck fairy for me is seeing improvements to not only special effects, but the quality of storytelling that gets on TV these days.
Indeed! I thought it might be you! It’s like Usenet, we even have killfiles. 😉
My kids howled with laughter when they saw Spock holding that dog dressed as an alien micro-unicorn.
But i was raised on Dr. Who and Ray Harryhausen, and crappy special effects just sail past me.
So the piece I just finished writing started with a quote from Barbie and ended with one from Sneakers. My work here is done.
Now to see if my editor lets those bits get through.
(In 5112 we all have editors sat on our shoulders, little robot companions making us sound funnier, smarter, and more impressive than we’d sound unenhanced. Sadly it’s like living in a Bloomsbury literary salon. Only without the cucumber sandwiches.)
I’ve never been into any of this SF on TV or film. Not as in books where I almost exclusively read SF, Fantasy or Horror if I read fiction. I don’t watch TV at all and movies has to compete with almost any kind of movies.
And space opera is not something I ever really liked. Of course I remember Star Trek, but just as one show among others. I never saw Lost in space at all. The only SF on TV that I have fond memories for is Flash Gordon which was GREAT! But I was very young when I saw it, so no idea of what it would look like now.
For some reason, my love for fantasy reached into the movies like SF never could.