Tag Archives: Aardman Animations

Pixel Scroll 5/8/25 It’s Just A Scroll To The Left

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(1) FUTURE TENSE. April 2025’s Future Tense Fiction story is “The 28th,” by Mark Stasenko—a story about AI, bias, and the criminal justice system.

The response essay by legal scholar Elizabeth Joh, of the University of California Davis, is “Automated Justice?”

… Yet nowhere is the use of AI as fraught as it is in the criminal justice system, where adverse decisions lead to starkly life-altering outcomes. This isn’t a hypothetical future concern: criminal justice automation of varying degrees has already arrived. Local police agencies can turn to predictive technologies to help direct patrol resources and even generate police reports. A number of jurisdictions use risk assessment tools to decide who should be detained pretrial. Others permit judges to use algorithmic tools to determine criminal sentences. Parole boards can rely on automated assessments to identify who should be eligible for parole.

So AI is already present in the criminal justice system. But how far should it go?…

(2) INFLUENCE OF ‘CLOUD ATLAS’. Charlie Jane Anders explores the question “Has ‘Cloud Atlas’ Become a Genre?” at Happy Dancing. Here’s an excerpt:

…I also feel like Cloud Atlas has become a shorthand for “genre-hopping novel with literary aspirations.”

As I’ve said before, this is how genres happen: a book comes along that everybody loves so much, they want more of the same. And “more of the same” leads to the use of tropes or devices that are reminiscent of that influential work. 

To find out more, I talked to four authors of recent books that seemed to bear a clear influence from Cloud Atlas. Here’s what they told me.

Conscious influence

“I conceived of Down in the Sea of Angels as Cloud Atlas meets X-Men,” says Khan Wong of his brand new novel. Down in the Sea of Angels is about Maida Sun, who can touch any object and see the stories of anyone who’s interacted with it in the past. Maida’s story in 2106 becomes intertwined with stories of a girl in a 1906 brothel and a tech worker in 2006. Wong describes it as “a time-hopping dystopian fantasy about psychic powers, liberation, and our interconnectedness through time.”

Wong says that he started out doing something more similar to Cloud Atlas’ format of six storylines spanning vast periods of time. But as he developed the novel, he “scaled it back, “both in terms of the span of time and the number of storylines and genres.”…

(3) ADULTING NEEDED. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Cli-Fi is becoming an established sub-genre of SF no least with books like Kim Stanley Robinson’s  Ministry For The Future.  However most politicians simply don’t get it: some even deny it! Meanwhile scientists working in the area are suffering mentally. This is something of which I am acutely aware having worked in climate science for a number of years.  So this week’s Nature has  a very important editorial message on behalf of today’s youth….

“Adults should finally act like adults  on climate change”:

“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.” This rebuke to the delegates at the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York City in 2019 came from a tearful Greta Thunberg, founder of the children’s climate movement Fridays For Future. Then aged 16, she urged attendees to inject more urgency into keeping global warming to within 1.5 °C of pre-industrial levels. Since then, hundreds of thousands of children around the world have made similarly impassioned appeals to adults to heed the overwhelming evidence of the dangers of climate change. But so far, a grown-up sense of responsibility is lacking….

…Quantifying what climate change will mean for those being born now is an active topic of research. This week in Nature, one group of climate researchers reports findings (L. Grant et al. Nature 641, 374–379; 2025) that must surely make adults take more notice of what younger people are saying. Building on an earlier study (W. Thiery et al. Science 374,158–160; 2021), Luke Grant, a climate researcher at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and his colleagues report that children and young people born in the present decade face exposure to heatwaves, crop failures, floods, droughts, wildfires and tropical cyclones, in a way that their parents and grandparents never did — and that this applies pretty much anywhere in the world.

Non-PDF version of the editorial with links to this week’s relevant research  here.

(4) THE BIG THREE AND FRIENDS. Big Issue offers several examples in “These are all the times sci-fi writers predicted the future”.

…In a 1964 interview for the BBC’s Horizon program, another of the ‘Big Three’, Arthur C Clarke, said: “I’m perfectly serious when I suggest that one day we may have brain surgeons in Edinburgh operating on patients in New Zealand.” He expanded on this in his 1975 novel Imperial Earth, in which the protagonist explains the risks of telesurgery over a network experiencing high latency: “A half-second lag would not matter in conversation; but between a surgeon’s hand and eye, it might be fatal.”

Clarke’s vision became reality in (fittingly) 2001, when a New York-based surgeon removed the gall bladder of a patient in Strasbourg, 6,200km away. A medical robot called ZEUS cut the patient’s flesh; the surgeon’s movements reached ZEUS across a network designed to minimise lag times…. 

…Sometimes one sees a prediction coming true in real time, and asks: will we heed the warnings SF gave us? Jack Williamson’s 1947 novelette With Folded Hands tells of a new type of robot following a Prime Directive: “to serve and obey and guard men from harm”. Since the robots work for free, soon no one has a job. It gets worse. The robots take the “guard men from harm” directive too literally.

They ensure a person can’t do anything remotely dangerous. Before long, humans can do nothing except sit… with folded hands. We should not fear this scenario. But one can easily imagine a world in which creatives – writers, painters, musicians, photographers – twiddle their thumbs while AI spews out soulless content on demand.

Writers such as Williamson saw the threat eight decades ago. Don’t complain we’ve had no time to prepare.

(5) THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING GAMING NEWS SCENE. [Item by Steven French.] The Guardian’s “Pushing Buttons” newsletter laments further loss of authenticity in video games journalism: “When video games journalism eats itself, we all lose out”.

Last week was a bad one for video games journalism. Two key contributors to the veteran site Giant Bomb, Jeff Grubb and Mike Minotti, have announced their departure after a recent podcast was taken down. The 888th episode of the Giant Bombcast reportedly featured a section lampooning new brand guidelinesissued to staff and is no longer available online. Later this week, it was announced that major US site Polygon was being sold to Valnet, owner of the ScreenRant and GameRant brands, resulting in a swathe of job losses. This follows ReedPop’s sale, in 2024, of four high-profile UK-based sites – Eurogamer, GamesIndustry.biz, Rock Paper Shotgun and VG247 – to IGN Entertainment, owned by Ziff Davis, which also resulted in redundancies.

It’s sad how these long-standing sites, each with vast audiences and sturdy reputations, have been traded and chopped up like commodities. On selling Polygon, Vox CEO Jim Bankoff said in a statement: “This transaction will enable us to focus our energies and investment resources in other priority areas of growth across our portfolio.” It felt gross, to be honest, to see this decade-old bastion of progressive video games writing being reduced to an asset ripe for off-loading. Of its purchase Valnet said: “Polygon is poised to reach new editorial heights through focused investment and innovation.” Quite how it will do that with a significantly reduced staff is anyone’s guess….

(6) THIRD (SEASON) FOUNDATION. Gizmodo analyzes the Season 3 teaser: “Foundation Season 3 Shares a First Look for Lee Pace Fans (and Everyone Else)”. Returns on Apple TV+ on July 11.

…Here’s the official description for the season: “Set 152 years after the events of season two, the Foundation has become increasingly established far beyond its humble beginnings while the Cleonic Dynasty’s Empire has dwindled. As both of these galactic powers forge an uneasy alliance, a threat to the entire galaxy appears in the fearsome form of a warlord known as ‘The Mule’ whose sights are set on ruling the universe by use of physical and military force, as well as mind control. It’s anyone’s guess who will win, who will lose, who will live and who will die as Hari Seldon, Gaal Dornick, the Cleons, and Demerzel play a potentially deadly game of intergalactic chess.”…

(7) NOTES FROM BEAR MCCREARY. “‘The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power’ Composer Bear McCreary On ‘Limitless Palette’ Of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Work & ‘Pushing Boundaries’ For Season 3” at Deadline.

…With Season 2 and the rise of Sauron, McCreary was excited to musically explore parts of Tolkien’s world that haven’t been adapted to screen. “We go to this part of the map that no adaptation has ever done before, the lands of Rhûn, and I’ve always wanted to write for the Bulgarian women’s choir,” says McCreary. “They are singing in a language Tolkien himself devised, so they had to learn it phonetically. But they brought all the beautiful, unique things that come with that kind of music.”…

(8) TOMORROW PRIZE CEREMONY. The Omega Sci-Fi Project’s “Tomorrow Prize & The Green Feather Award: Celebrity Readings & Honors” will be held on Saturday, May 17, from 4:00-6:00 p.m. at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena. Free registration at the link.

Our line-up of incredible guest stars include:

Nana Visitor from Star Trek: Deep Space, Tim Russ from Star Trek: Voyager, Isabella Gomez from One Day at a Time, Marcelo Tubert from Star Trek: The Next Generation, Amy Tolsky from Jury Duty, and Rico E. Anderson from Star Trek: Renegades.

Students winners and honorees of the Omega Sci-Fi Project’s awards are publicly recognized at the incredible May culminating event, where celebrity actors perform dramatic readings of finalists’ stories that you won’t want to miss!

“The young writers are offered a wonderful chance at recognition for their creative work through the awards process. Often, students don’t even realize that creative writing is a meaningful way for them to explore a world they struggle to understand. That is, until they get to try it!” says Bodin Adler, a participating teacher from Hollywood High School.

This event culminates a season of classroom workshops led by trained writers and literary enthusiasts and are free to any educator who wishes to participate. Within these workshops, students get to explore the development, writing, and editing processes for crafting a short science fiction story, preparing them to submit their original work to The Tomorrow Prize or The Green Feather Award, the two competitions offered under the Omega Sci-Fi Project umbrella. 

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Sir Harry Paget Flashman VC, KCB, KCIE, 1822 – 1915

I grant he’s not even genre adjacent, but I’ll give you a tale in a minute that makes it relevant to us. Harry Flashman appears in a series of twelve George MacDonald Fraser’s books collectively known as The Flashman Papers. If Flashman had a birthday, the author says it would have been earlier this week, May 5. 

The first novel, Flashman, was published in 1969 and many readers here in the States thought it was a work of non-fiction. He’s certainly not the only fictional that readers have assumed was real. Or wished was so. Who would you would want to be? 

The books center on the exploits of Harry Flashman. He is a cowardly British soldier, rake and just generally disreputable character who is placed in a series of real historical incidents between 1839 and 1894. It must be noted that despite his cowardice and his attempts to flee danger whenever possible, he becomes a decorated war hero and rises to the rank of brigadier-general. 

There is a Chumbawamba  song, “Hanging on the Old Barb Wire”, which has the lyric 

If you want to find the general
I know where he is
He’s pinning another medal on his chest
I saw him, I saw him
Pinning another medal on his chest
Pinning another medal on his chest

(It’s a variant of a Great War song of the same name. As the band notes on their  English Rebel Songs 1381–1914 LP, “Hanging on the Old Barbed Wire was written by soldiers in the trenches in the first world war. Designed to be sung whilst marching the song is one of many showing the dissent and disgust at the way war perpetuates the inequalities of rich and poor—those with the money give the orders, those without money face the guns.”)

Royal Flash, the 1975 British film, is based upon the second Flashman novel of the same name. It stars a thirty-two year old Malcolm McDowell as Flashman. It was not well received as The Observer noted it left them “breathless not so much with enchantment as with boredom”. However audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give it a rating of sixty-four percent which isn’t bad at all. 

Here’s the trailer with a really funny narrator. As always, the standard warming about linking to copies of the film which is up on YouTube apply. You really don’t want to be defenestrated, do you? It can be rather painful or worse. 

Now for that genre connection that mentioned much earlier. No, I didn’t forget… 

Kage Baker didn’t actually write a Flashman novel, though we talked several times about her doing so, but the bones of one appeared in one of her novels as her sister Kathleen told me here: “Most of her notes she used in her last novel, Not Less Than Gods, which she wrote while she was sick, and that was published as she was dying. As far as I can tell, Kage and I were the only people in the world who liked it. A lot of it was panned because the reviewers didn’t get most of the satire, or hated Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax, or both. Anyway, even if you personally disliked the book, I think you can see the bones of a Flashman novel there.” 

Now the Green Man reviewer also liked it though he had a lump in his throat as Kage had just died as he wrote his review.

I’m pleased to say the entire series is available in hardcover, trade paperback, epub and audiobook.   As audiobooks, the narration as done by David Chase captures the character extraordinarily well. 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Or, if you prefer a smaller bookshop:

— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld.bsky.social) 2025-05-05T16:23:31.496Z

(11) SFF TO STREAM NOW. “’Godzilla Minus One’ and Other Science Fiction Movies to Stream” – recommendations from the New York Times. (Link bypasses paywall.) Here’s one of their picks.

‘Alienoid: Return to the Future’

Can’t decide if you want to watch a movie involving tentacled aliens or one with a sorcerer? Wire fu or time travel? How about ominous spaceships? The Korean director Choi Dong-hoon has you covered with his two-part “Alienoid” epic, which includes all of these elements. The second installment kicks off with a serviceable recap so newcomers can jump in, but having seen its predecessor, “Alienoid” (2022), makes the overall experience more enjoyable.

The madcap action goes back and forth between the 14th century and 2022 Seoul, when an alien menace going by the Controller is threatening to kill the entire population by unleashing a lethal gas. The key to defeat the Controller is in the past and involves a weapon called the Divine Blade. Even more important are the actions of a ragtag team that includes the spunky Ean (Kim Tae-ri, from “Space Sweepers”) and her possible love interest, Muruk (Ryu Jun-yeol). Choi keeps up a steady pace, peppered with goofy humor and surreal touches, as when Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” plays during a big moment. Narrative coherence is an afterthought in the “Alienoid” universe so it’s best to go with whatever wackadoo scenes the movies throw at you: What matters here is pure fun, and this installment delivers.

(12) SHAUN THE SHEEP 3. [Item by Steven French.] Who could resist a trip to Mossy Bottom?! “Aardman announces third Shaun the Sheep movie: The Beast of Mossy Bottom” – details in the Guardian.

A Halloween-themed third Shaun the Sheep film is in the works from Aardman Animations, following hot on the heels of the success of Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl.

“Expect smashed pumpkins, wayward science, and a wild hairy beast,” said Sarah Cox, chief creative director of Aardman, about the film, which launches international sales via studio StudioCanal at Cannes next week, but has already been acquired by Sky for UK distribution.

“Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom sees the residents of Mossy Bottom Farm looking forward to Halloween – until the clumsy farmer trashes the flock’s beloved pumpkin patch!” runs a synopsis for the film.

“When Shaun turns mad scientist to fix the problem, things rapidly spiral out of control … With the farmer missing and a wild beast roaming the woods of Mossingham, all the ingredients are in place for a monstrously fun family adventure.”

(13) LEGO AND LUNAR OUTPOST PARTNERSHIP. “Lego and Lunar Outpost to roll out ‘Moon Rover Space Vehicle’ in August” promises CollectSPACE.

The United States’ first teleoperated rover to reach the moon’s surface is rolling out as a Lego model this summer, together with two futuristic vehicles inspired by real-life robotic lunar explorers.

The new Lunar Outpost Moon Rover Space Vehicle is scheduled for release on Aug. 1, as part of Lego’s Technic line of advanced building kits. The $99.99 set is the result of a collaboration between the Danish toymaker and Lunar Outpost, a Colorado-based company specializing in lunar surface mobility, commercial space robotics and space resources.

“Inspired by real-life Lunar Outpost vehicles enabling humanity’s return to the moon, this Lego Technic Lunar Outpost Moon Rover Space Vehicle comes with a moon rover, mining rover and MAPP rover to inspire endless journeys of exploration,” reads the set’s description on Lego’s website.

The MAPP, or Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform, was the key part of Lunar Outpost’s Lunar Voyage 1 mission, which on March 6 arrived on the moon, making history. It would have made even more, had the commercial lander that delivered MAPP there not have immediately tipped over, trapping the rover inside its garage. It never had the chance to actually rove anywhere….

(14) ONE LAST LANDING ON THE GLOBE THAT GAVE IT BIRTH. “53-Year-Old Soviet Spacecraft Will Plummet Back to Earth This Week” reports Gizmodo.

Kosmos 482 has been trapped in Earth’s orbit for 53 years but its wandering journey is coming to an end. The failed Venus mission is expected to reenter through the atmosphere in a dramatic fall toward its home planet, where it may remain intact or scatter its bits across a still unknown location on either side of the equator.

The Soviet-era spacecraft will plunge through Earth’s atmosphere sometime between May 8 to 12. As of now, the exact location of where Kosmos 482 will crash-land on Earth is still unknown, with a preliminary estimate that stretches across large parts of the world on either side of the equator. It’s also unclear whether the spacecraft will remain in one piece or if it will break apart during reentry, raining down bits of debris.

Kosmos 482 launched on March 31, 1972 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome spaceport in what is know Kazakhstan. The mission was an attempt by the Soviet space program to reach Venus, but it failed to gain enough velocity to enter a transfer trajectory toward the scorching hot planet….

(15) DONE BY DAYLIGHT. “Lunar laser: China makes 1st daytime laser-ranging measurement from Earth to the moon” – Space has the story.

China has achieved a milestone feat, making the first-ever laser ranging measurement from Earth to the moon during the daytime.

Researchers at Yunnan Observatories under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) used an infrared lunar laser ranging system of a recently upgraded 1.2-meter (3.9 feet) telescope to ping a small laser retroreflector on the Tiandu 1 satellite orbiting the moon.

Laser ranging over lunar distances is challenging, requiring sending a high-power, precise beam over 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers) to hit a small corner retroreflector, which bounces the laser pulse straight back where it came from. The return signal then needs to be picked up by a telescope using ultra-sensitive detectors. Doing this in the daytime brings the added challenge of massive background “noise” from the sun….

(16) SQUAREPANTS TREK BLOOPERS. Animation Magazine is there when “Paramount+ Voyages Behind the Scenes of Crossover Spot ‘Patrick Starship Enterprise’”.

Following the debut of its new Star Trek: Strange New Worlds X SpongeBob SquarePants promo video (which you can watch here), Paramount+ has dropped a behind-the-scenes blooper reel full of illogical, astro-nautical amusement.

Starring Strange New Worlds cast members Ethan Peck (Spock), Anson Mount (Christopher Pike) and Celia Rose-Gooding (Nyota Uhura), the new video pokes fun at the making of the short and features some funny moments where we see the creative stand-in solutions for the animated characters, which include SpongeBob, Sandy and Mr. Krabs…

[Thanks to Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Steve Green, Joey Eschrich, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Mark Roth-Whitworth for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jim Janney.]

Pixel Scroll 12/16/24 Baby Yoda Is Three

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(1) SOLVING FOR UNKNOWNS. Alec Nevala-Lee is editing a new bimonthly puzzle feature for Analog, called “Unknowns,” that will run original puzzles in every issue of the magazine. The inaugural installment features contributions from veteran puzzle constructors Scott Kim and Patrick Berry. Future issues will include crosswords, picture puzzles, math puzzles, and more. As Nevala-Lee writes in an editor’s note:

“If you’re a fan of Analog, there’s a good chance that you also like puzzles. At its best, hard science fiction—which often hinges on a clever idea that still plays by the rules of physics—appeals to the same part of the brain. With that in mind, we’re introducing a new feature, ‘Unknowns,’ that will offer a unique puzzle in every issue. (Our model is the puzzle column that the legendary Martin Gardner wrote for our sister magazine, Asimov’s Science Fiction, from 1977 through 1986.)”

(2) FATE OF THE SCIENCE FICTION BOOK CLUB? The Science Fiction Book Club (owned by Bookspan), has put up this notice:

“Tell me that 50 years of finding new SF every month is not coming to an end,” pleads Maria Markham Thompson, CPA, Treasurer of the Baltimore Science Fiction Society. “Some of my best months, back under Doubleday, were when I didn’t send a reply and a book I hadn’t ordered introduced a new author. This is a sad day in fandom. Please find out what has happened. What is happening?”

Unfortunately, File 770 isn’t been able to answer Maria’s question. Perhaps one of our readers knows more? 

Thompson says, “I went on the site, where it’s business as usual to sign up new members, and read the agreement – my best guess is that my back credits will die, so all I can do is just get busy ordering books. Someone has found a way to joy out of even that activity!”

(3) WHY NOT SAY WHAT HAPPENED? Episode 11 of Scott Edelman’s Why Not Say What Happened? podcast tackles “Stan Lee’s Problem with Iron Man’s Nose”.

Rummaging though a stack of mid-’70s memos has me remembering the time I attempted to convince Stan Lee to adapt Joseph Heller’s novel Something Happened, who was responsible for mutilating the contents of Marvel’s 1975 line of Giant-Size Annuals, how I repurposed a Winnie Winkle comic strip to resign from my staff job in the Bullpen, the day comic book fans ran a Baskin-Robbins out of ice cream, the meeting in which Stan Lee had a problem with Iron Man’s nose, Gerry Conway’s complaint to the Comics Code Authority about an Inhumans innuendo, and much more.

(4) IT’S A THEORY. CinemaBlend’s Dirk Libbey says, “I Just Found Out The Wild Reason Warner Bros. Reportedly Made That Anime Lord Of The Rings Film, And I Did Not See It Coming”.

It was a strange weekend at the box office considering that Moana 2 and Wicked continued to dominate theaters even though movies attached to major franchises like Spider-Man and Lord of the Rings debuted. Kraven The Hunter and The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, both bombed, which was not unexpected. For the former film, it reportedly spells the end of Sony’s Spider-Verse adjacent franchise. But it’s reportedly not a big deal for the anime-inspired Lord of the Rings movie.

You’d be forgiven for not even realizing that this past weekend saw an animated Lord of the Rings film release, set two centuries before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic. The movie wasn’t broadly promoted, and it only cost $30 million to make, a drop in the bucket when your average Disney or Pixar endeavor costs around $200 million. It’s claimed even the studio is only hoping the movie might break even. It feels like Warner Bros. didn’t care if anybody saw this movie, and actually, that may be the case….

…Peter Jackson is working on a pair of new live-action movies, with Andy Serkis set to star in and direct Lord of the Rings: The Hunt For Gollum. However, most deals between IP holders and studios have time limits and require that the IP be used regularly, or the rights revert to the original owner.

It’s been a decade since The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies opened in theaters and the new Gollum movie is at least two years away, likely more. While we don’t know exactly what the rights deal with WB is, it’s certainly possible that the time limit is close. Without a plan for more movies back when the anime movie was given the green light, one could see how a studio might spend a few million to get something out to have the opportunity to make millions, or billions, on something better later….

(5) STRIPES. “29 Years Later, Star Trek Just Fixed Its Most Insulting Oversight” huffs Inverse.

Throughout the entire seven-season run of Star Trek: Voyager, Ensign Harry Kim remained at the same rank. Yes in the alternate future of Endgame, Harry Kim was a captain, but that moment of ranking up is the exception that proves the rule; though he was a brave and innovative officer, Janeway (and the Voyager writers) never thought to give Kim a promotion beyond the basest of Star Trek ranks. And if Kim was given more overt authority on the show, it would sometimes be thanks to an alternate timeline.

And now, as Star Trek crosses the multiverse in the penultimate episode of Lower Decks with a slew of legacy character cameos, the most prominent returning character is none other than Harry Kim. And this time, one version of him is a full lieutenant.

“It is a bit of an apology,” Garrett Wang tells Inverse. “It’s a long time coming!”…

… In Lower Decks’ “Fissure Quest,” we quickly learn that Boimler’s covert multiverse ship, the Anaximander, is staffed by mostly alternate versions of Harry Kim, which they all refer to as “the Kim crew.” But when one Harry Kim arrives who has been promoted to lieutenant, the other Kims are totally freaked out. This leads to the basic conflict of the episode: The Harry Kim who has been promoted is suddenly mad with power, to the point where he nearly destroys everything. For Wang, this was a chance to do something that he almost never got to do on Voyager — go big with a certain kind of performance.

“In the beginning, we were told that as all the human characters, you need to stay as military, as two dimensional,” Wang says of the early days of Voyager. “The idea was that if we had flat line delivery, it would make the alien characters look more realistic. But in reality, when you’re that flat and that monotone, it just looks like you’re a bad actor! So, it’s nice to do something like Lower Decks where I felt free.”…

(6) HEROES WITH FEET OF CLAY. In “From hacked ‘smart gnomes’ to the revenge of Feathers McGraw: inside Wallace & Gromit’s joyous return”, the Guardian’s Tim Jonze chronicles his visit to Aardman’s studios.

…Aardman’s studios are a hive of productivity – down every corridor are little rooms in which people tinker away on replica canal boats or fiddle with tiny clay arms. I have to promise to be on my best behaviour. Apparently on one previous set visit a French journalist picked up a figure in a live scene meaning the whole thing had to be shot again from the start. “That was very upsetting,” says my guide.

… I’m whisked off to the art department, where “everything you see on screen that’s not puppets” is made. For Vengeance Most Fowl that means a scenic waterway designed for a high speed canal chase and an impressively ramshackle submarine made out of stolen garden items: bath planters, rakes, drain pipes for periscopes and so on. Part of the challenge is not to make anything too snazzy. “It shouldn’t distract from the characters,” says Matt Perry, the film’s production designer. When they first made the submarine it looked a little too fabulous for something supposedly compiled from garden detritus. So one member of the team got to work smacking dents into it, which alarmed passing visitors. “Weathering is also important,” adds Perry. “The police station’s desk has to have the right amount of rust for a desk of that era.”

As with all Wallace & Gromit films, eagle-eyed viewers are rewarded with all kinds of smart references. The submarine is a nod to Nautilus, Captain Nemo’s vehicle in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Seas. Elsewhere, lead graphic artist Gavin Lines entertains himself with all sorts of gags that might only flash on the screen for a second or two (Gromit’s record collection this time around contains Walkies on the Wildside). These days he follows strict rules – it has to be family friendly and it has to be legal. “I did get into trouble before,” he admits. Whereas Smeg have apparently always seen the funny side of their fridges being rebranded as Smug, Bosch were less than happy about Gromit using a “Botch” tool in Curse of the Were-Rabbit. “We weren’t allowed to use it on any promotional material,” says a chastened Lines…

(7) TEDDY HARVIA CARTOON.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born December 16, 1928 – Philip K. Dick. (Died 1982.)

By Paul Weimer: If any SF writers could have been said to have predicted our moment here in the 21st century, in all of its absurdity and weirdness, I’d pick two. The first would be John Brunner, whose novels like Stand on Zanzibar seem to all too well describe the madness of the second decade of the 21st century.

The other author is Philip K. Dick.  Not the Philip K. Dick of The Man in the High Castle, the first PKD I read (because, well, alternate history). That might be his most accessible, his best work. It’s the one where he has his full powers, the energy and vibrance of his early novels, and not yet the spiraling into his ultimately tragic end. 

But it is those later novels, and some of the earlier ones, that describe the worlds as it is today. A word of old technology and new, of people who you never thought in a rational world could or would occupy the White House, a world where technology seemingly has a half-mind of its own.  Can anyone deny that Chat GPT or Generative AI feel like some of the strange and out of control technologies from Dick’s work? Or the creepiness of the panopticon that our modern world is as reflected in A Scanner Darkly? 

This makes Dick’s work sometimes not comfortable, especially the later novels, where he becomes less and less coherent. The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick is at best disorienting and at worst, incomprehensible even to a deep reader of his work. There was a period where I was reading a PKD novel or story every month for over a year…and I still don’t “get” the Exegesis.  Maybe it’s a metaphor for our modern world after all–confused, strange, contradictory and ultimately incomprehensible.

His early short novels and stories show is endless invention. If there is anyone who embodies the idea of a pulp SF writer, it was 1950’s era Philip K Dick. It was a time and place where an idea could get you 90% of the way to a sale…and Dick achieved that again and again and again with his mutants, psionics, aliens, time travel stories, and so much more.  He did try to become a mimetic fiction writer, and I read the posthumously published Puttering About in a Small Land. It feels like a SF novelist trying to “go straight” and being frustrated by the effort. 

So it seems that he may have lost his true power…somewhere in the early 1970’s. He was not the writer that he was.  It is notable that Roger Zelazny co-wrote a novel with Dick, partly to help him out, called Deus Irae. That one does not entirely work as a story, but it is a novel with a fascinating end thesis, that may rather disturb readers if you think about it, and its relation to modern religions, too hard.  

But I hate to leave out this note, so I will tell you about my favorite Dick work.  It’s not Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, as brilliant as Blade Runner is (Blade Runner deserves a whole piece on its own, quite frankly but a few words here. The novel is not the movie. The movie is not the novel. The movie may be better than the novel in some ways (since we are dealing with late Dick here, this not surprising). 

My favorite PKD would “Faith of Our Fathers”. It’s a world where communism won, but our protagonist, moving slowly toward the center of power, finds out there is something very strange and very odd about the ruling party. The revelation of just what is going on, and the ending of the story is strange, weird…and entirely everything that you want in a Philip K. Dick story. It’s perfect, perhaps even more so than The Man in the High Castle. And I think, in general, shorter PKD works are better than his novels. 

Philip K. Dick. Photo by Anne Dick from his official website.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) THE SKY IS NOT THE LIMIT. Charlie Jane Anders’ “A Basket Full of Mini Rants!” at Happy Dancing includes this praise for cheap-looking productions.

It’s time for low-budget, DIY movies and TV

I just watched the first episode of a TV show called Davey and Jonesie’s Locker on Hulu, which I’ve been meaning to check out for ages. It’s an extremely silly comedy about female friendship and having an interdimensional portal in your high-school locker. It seriously looks like it was made for a tiny fraction of what an episode of House of the Dragon costs.

Lately, I just really crave TV and movies that look cheap. Bonus points if they’re silly and kind of outrageous. On the TV side, I’ve talked a lot about my love of Extraordinary and the Brazilian show Back to 15, and there are a handful of other low budget, goofy TV shows that I’ve loved lately. On the movie side, my two favorite films of the year are Hundreds of Beavers and The People’s Joker: they don’t have much in common, other than looking like they were made with sofa-cushion money and being completely off-the-chain. They both use virtual backgrounds that look amateurish as heck, and feature physical comedy in a surreal void. 

Why do I love DIY-looking TV and movies? Part of it is just a reaction to the fact that most Hollywood entertainment these days looks ridiculously expensive and lavish, which a lot of people are starting to get tired of. With high budgets often comes a certain blandness. But also, this defiantly indie/cheap aesthetic feels subversive in this age of corporate domination: it’s the equivalent of those direct-to-VHS movies that I obsessively watched as a youngster. I predict that the next few years will see a flowering of micro-budget, maximally-ambitious, utterly ridiculous entertainment. And I am here for it.

(11) UP ALL NIGHT. The Guardian shares “Galaxies, auroras and a cosmic bat: Southern Sky astrophotography exhibition 2024 – in pictures”. Photo gallery at the link.

The Southern Sky Astrophotography 2024 exhibition displays the top entries from the 20th David Malin awards for Australian astronomers and photographers. The images are on display at the Sydney observatory until 1 February.

(12) CAPTAIN AMERICA IN BRITISH TRANSLATION? Marvel has dropped a trailer for Captain America: Brave New World.  According to Gizmodo, the US and UK trailers differ slightly. Below is the UK version.

For whatever reason, Marvel UK has a longer, trailer-length version of the Brave New World video. We’ll got it here for you, and its key difference is a brief look at Sidewinder attacking Sam and no stinger teasing Joaquin becoming the Falcon, like in the shorter US version.

[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Maria Markham Thompson, CPA, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, and Kathy Sullivan for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 11/22/24 The Pixel Doesn’t Have Fur, Doesn’t Purr, And Can’t Walk Through Walls

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(1) IT CAUGHT ON IN A FLASH. Shelley Roche-Jacques considers “Flash fiction as a distinct literary form: some thoughts on time, space, and context” in a research paper available at Taylor & Francis Online.

…In this article, I consider what makes flash fiction qualitatively different from the short story. I demonstrate that the mobilisation of a story world is necessary for a text to function as flash fiction and that this can be a useful way of distinguishing the form from prose poetry. This is a new and necessary distinction, as critics and writers seem to have found the two forms very difficult to separate. I also consider how the interpretation of short texts is highly bound up with the context in which readers encounter them….

(2) NALO HOPKINSON Q&A. In Shelf Awareness for Friday, November 22, 2024, “Reading with…Nalo Hopkinson”.

…On your nightstand now: 

Honestly? I’m currently listening to the audiobook of my most recent novel, Blackheart Man. Hearing it in someone else’s words makes it almost like a different novel.

Favorite book when you were a child:

A two-parter: Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey. My dad had them in English translation from Homeric Greek. I skipped all the “boring” parts and just read the bits with monsters, witches, and ghosts in them. And I rooted for poor Ulysses to finally get home from the wars and be reunited with his wife, Penelope. Though I didn’t expect the way he would get rid of all the men who were eating and drinking him out of house and home while they clamored for Penelope to admit her husband was dead and marry one of them. Funny thing is, I tried reading The Iliad a couple of years ago, and I stopped. It was too difficult! As a kid, I didn’t get as frustrated at struggling through the language….

(3) ITALO CALVINO. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Italo Calvino is one of Italy’s SF grandmasters (but of course you knew that) and pioneer of Italian neo-realism.
He was the son of biologists and almost became an agricultural applied biologist when World War II loomed. He joined the Communist resistance (because they were the most organised.

His first book was speculative fiction. He did then try mundane ‘literary’ fiction but just could not do it and preferred to write what he wanted to read.  Also, he found that using speculative fiction metaphors was a useful way to discuss possibly controversial issues.

This week’s In Our Time on BBC Radio 4 takes a look at Italo Calvino and his work.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Italian author of Invisible Cities, If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, Cosmicomics and other celebrated novels, fables and short stories of the 20th Century. Calvino (1923 -1985) had a passionate belief that writing and art could make life better for everyone. Despite his parents being scientists, who dearly wanted him to be a scientist too, and his time fighting with the Partisans in Liguria in WWII during which his parents were held hostage by the Nazis, Calvino turned away from realism in his writing. Ideally, he said, he would have liked to be alive in the Enlightenment. He moved towards the fantastical, drawing on his childhood reading while collecting a huge number of the fables of Italy and translating them from dialect into Italian to enrich the shared culture of his fellow citizens. His fresh perspective on the novel continues to inspire writers and delight readers in Italian and in translations around the world.

With Guido Bonsaver (Professor of Italian Cultural History at the University of Oxford), Jennifer Burns (Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Warwick) and Beatrice Sica (Associate Professor in Italian Studies at UCL).

You can access the programme here.

Italo Calvino

(4) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to chow down on chicken tikka masala with Gareth L. Powell in Episode 241 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

Powell has twice won the British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Novel — in 2014 for Ack-Ack Macaque and in 2019 for Embers of War — and has become one of the most shortlisted authors in the award’s 50-year history. He’s also been a finalist for the Locus Award (twice), the British Fantasy Award, the Seiun Award, the Premios Ignotus, and the Canopus Award. His short fiction has appeared in the magazines Clarkesworld, Interzone, Galaxy, Worlds of IF, and others, and has been featured in numerous anthologies, including Shine: The Anthology of Optimistic Science Fiction, Solaris Rising 3: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Second Annual Collection.

As a freelancer writer, he has written a strip for long-running British comic 2000 AD, articles for The Guardian, Irish Times, Acoustic Magazine, and SFX Magazine, and currently writes a monthly column about future tech for The Engineer. He’s the Managing Editor of Stars and Sabers Publishing, the publishing imprint he founded with his spouse, the American author Jendia Gammon.


Gareth L. Powell

We discussed the way a Diana Wynne Jones critique of his teenaged writing was a complete revelation in how to write fiction, how an adversarial relationship with a university professor who didn’t want him writing science fiction actually ended up helping him, the New Year’s resolution which led to him to both kick smoking and write a novel, how reading William Gibson’s short story collection Burning Chrome shook him up and made him realize what kind of short stories he really wanted to write, the message he most wants to convey to beginning writers in his workshops, the importance of stepping outside your comfort zone, how to make a good impression when approaching an editor in a convention bar, the way he developed his propulsive writing style, why he’s so receptive to editorial suggestions, what it was like collaborating with Peter F. Hamilton and Aliette de Bodard, his techniques for deciding which of many story ideas you should write, the reason his mother refuses to read his books, why writing novels can be like telling a joke and waiting two years for somebody to laugh, and much more.

(5) APPLAUSE WITHHELD. [Item by Steven French.] I think it’s safe to say that Guardian writer Stuart Heritage isn’t a fan: “Pretentious, moi?: Josh Brolin’s poetry about Dune has landed, whether we like it or not”.

When it comes to pretension, Dune isn’t exactly left wanting. In print, the books are a progressively abstract and deranged space opera about a young man and his son, the 3,500-year-old god worm. Onscreen the films are long and portentous screensavers that seem to really hate bald people, or bafflingly bad HBO prequel shows. But two media where Dune has yet to hit full pretension are photography and poetry – until now.

Because next week, Dune cinematographer Greig Fraser and Dune actor Josh Brolin will present an exhibition of photography and poetry from Dune: Exposures. You may have heard of Dune: Exposures. It’s a £50 coffee table book of behind the scenes photography that came out in February. Not that you will necessarily know it as that, because the book bills itself as an “exploratory artistic memoir”.

So, for example, one page has a nice picture of Timothée Chalamet, but on the opposite page is this poetic description: “Your cheekbones jump toward what are youth-laden eyes that slide down a prominent nose and onto lips of a certain poetry.” It is less a traditional poem and more the sort of thing ChatGPT would blurt out if you asked it to describe a crayon drawing of a melting Cabbage Patch Kid. There’s also a photo of Florence Pugh sticking her tongue out, which inspired Brolin to write: “You can feel her cells preparing for a thinner air, a higher ground.” And you can’t, really, because it’s just a photo of a woman in her 20s killing time by arsing about a bit.

(6) YOUNGEST EXOPLANET FOUND… AND WHY IT IS IMPORTANT. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Go back to my youth – which is quite a while to around the start of Doctor Who – and we simply did not know that there were planets around other stars, let alone that virtually all at least solo stars and at least some binary stars have exoplanets: today we know that planets seem to be fairly universal about stars. All of which is good news for those hoping to find an Earth-like planet capable of supporting life elsewhere in our galaxy.

Now, our sun, the Sun, formed some 4.6 billion years ago. Meanwhile, the International Commission on Stratigraphy has it that the Earth formed 4.567 billion years ago. This means that the Earth formed somewhere around 40 to 60 million years into our star’s life.  Could it be that planets have to form real early in a star’s life for there to be enough time for life to evolve into complex life (capable of brewing and enjoying real ale)?

In the run up to 2018, astronomers found gaps in dust disks around proto-stars that were around a million years old. These gaps were interpreted as proto-planets ‘sweeping’ lanes in the dust disks around early stars.

Then in 2020, astronomers detected four clear lanes within a dust disk around a proto-stellar less than 500,000 years old and 470 light years away.

Importantly, we need to remember that gaps in dust lanes is not the same as actually detecting a planet, or a proto-planet.

This brings us up-to-date and the latest discovery which has been made using the NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). The star, which goes by the catchy moniker IRAS 04125+2902, is a member of the Taurus–Auriga star-forming region some 520 light years from the Brighton Worldcon. Importantly, it is only three million years old. The planet detected is Jupiter-sized in a short, 8.8-day orbit about the proto-star. The star itself is about 0.7 the mass of the Sun, which makes it a K-type star.

The discovery was lucky.  Normally, planets form out of the circumstellar dust cloud about a protostar and so they are in the same plane as the dust disc. TESS works by detecting the dip in light from stars when a planet passes (transits) in front of it. This means that detecting planets this way should not work in the presence of circumstellar dust discs as the dust hides both the planet and the star. However, for some reason the planet is orbiting in a different plane to the dust disc! The researchers themselves say, “the origin of this misalignment is unclear”.

Taking all the evidence together, we now have hard evidence that planets form really early in a star’s life!

Now, if it took 4.567 billion years for life on Earth to get to a point where it was capable to have the technology to create real ale and enjoyed, then this proof of an early start to planets makes it more likely that planets around stars that have anticipated lifetimes of six or seven or more billon years, then they will likely have the time for real ale generating, and enjoying, species to arise.

The primary research is Barber M. G., et al. (2024) A giant planet transiting a 3-Myr protostar with a misaligned disk. Nature, vol. 635, p574-577.

(7) THE MEAL OF YOUR DREAMS. Tim Burton-inspired holiday menu is being offered at a place in Long Beach, CA: “Broken Spirits in Long Beach goes all-in on ‘Nightmare Before Christmas’-themed holiday dinners” at Longbeachize.

Broken Spirits Distillery in Downtown Long Beach is getting into the holiday spirit with not jingly bells but in a more macabre way. The space has becomed filled with creepy takes on Disney characters with none other than Jack Skellington and the Oogie Boogie Man greeting you at the door.

On top of it all, a $75, five-course, three-cocktail, three spirit tastings, “Nightmare Before Christmas”-themed dinner will be served Monday through Friday nightly at 7PM….

The menu includes such things as:

Jack Skellington’s Prime Wagyu Slider: Snake River Farms American wagyu ground beef | House-made squid ink bun | New cheese | Smoked pork belly

Oogie Boogie Garlic Cajun Linguine: Squid ink linguine | Pana Pesca Chilean Mussels | Cajun sauce | Porchetta | Pecorino Romano

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Anniversary — Star Trek: First Contact (1996)

Twenty-eight years ago on this date, Star Trek: First Contact premiered. 

It was the eighth film of the Trek films, and the second of the Next Gen films following Star Trek Generations. The story was written by Rick Berman, Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore.   It was directed by Jonathan Frakes from the screenplay by Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore. 

It had the Next Generation cast plus Alfre Woodard, James Cromwell and Alice Krige, the latter as the Borg Queen. She reprised the role in Voyager and Picard, and recently voiced the role in Lower Decks. 

A lot of titles were tossed around — Star Trek: Borg, Star Trek: Destinies, Star Trek: Future Generations and Star Trek: Generations II were all considered before Star Trek: Resurrection was chosen and then abandoned when 20th Century Fox announced the title of the fourth Alien film as Alien Resurrection, so the film was finally Star Trek: First Contact.

It did very well at the box office making one hundred fifty million against a budget of fifty million. 

First Contact received generally positive reviews upon release. The Independent said “For the first time, a Star Trek movie actually looks like something more ambitious than an extended TV show.”  And the Los Angeles Times exclaimed, “First Contact does everything you’d want a Star Trek film to do, and it does it with cheerfulness and style.” 

Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give it a most excellent rating of eighty-nine percent. 

It was nominated for a Hugo at LoneStarCon 2, the year that Babylon 5’s “Severed Dreams” won. 

It is streaming on Prime Video but surprisingly is not on Paramount +.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • Eek! discusses a monster’s health insurance.
  • Dinosaur Comics saves a writer’s life – but at what cost?
  • Wumo doesn’t recommend “hands free” operating commands.
  • Chicken Wings Comics kisses ChatGPT’s butt.

(10) HOW THE CLAY SAUSAGE IS MADE. Deadline offers a look “Behind The Scenes On ‘Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl’”.

The prospect of creating a stop motion film is daunting, to say the least. The process of taking a photo, altering a scene slightly, then taking another photo, over and over can almost make the medium seem pointlessly complicated for a filmmaker… and yet, there is something about the handcrafted aesthetic of a stop motion film that can’t be matched by anything digital. And that special something is where Aardman Animations has made their mark….

… The tour begins with a stop in the puppet department, led by puppet designer Anne King. Here, we are introduced to the process of creating the puppets out of both silicone and clay. “The clay takes quite a long time to sculpt,” says King, “so if the animators on the studio floor have to do a big shot with Gromit walking across a set on all fours, getting it all looking perfect is actually very time consuming. So, we developed this silicone puppet so the animators can actually get a lot of movement out of it without going through all the sculpting.” However, since the silicone isn’t expressive like clay, they can’t use full silicone puppets for the stop motion. “With the clay, you can sculpt it to anything you want basically, so a lot of the hands and faces are of clay just to get that expressiveness.”

Even though silicone can’t be altered once cast, Park says the advancements in the technology have helped to maintain their handmade aesthetic. “The heart of our whole ethos is to keep everything handmade and keep the clay quality of it all, with the fingerprints and everything, which is the key to keeping the charm and the authenticity.”…

(11) ELIGIBLE FOR THE OSCAR. Animation Magazine reports these “31 Titles Are Eligible for the Animated Feature Film Academy Award This Year”. (With hotlinks to their articles about the films, if any.)

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences today announced feature films eligible for consideration in the Animated Feature Film, Documentary Feature Film and International Feature Film categories for the 97th Academy Awards.

Thirty-one features are eligible for consideration in the Animated Feature Film category this year. Some of the films have not yet had their required qualifying release and must fulfill that requirement and comply with all the category’s other qualifying rules to advance in the voting process. In 2023, 33 titles were eligible (a record high), and in 2022, 27 movies made the cut, while only 26 were considered in 2021….

The eligible animated features are:

(12) MY NAME IS INIGO MONTOYA. “No politics allowed at this sword-fighting club near Pittsburgh” at NPR.

…It’s a tournament — as well as a party — billed as Friday Night Fights.

There are plenty of rules in a sword fight. But there’s one rule that applies after the fighters have put down their weapons: no talk of politics.

The evolution of the rule started around 2016, when club owner Josh Parise says he was getting fed up with the rancor of political discourse in the U.S. — personal attacks were on the rise, even within families, as was cancel culture.

“I couldn’t tolerate the lack of decency between human beings,” says Parise, whose club focuses on historical European martial arts.

“None of it made sense anymore,” he says.

And then there were a few would-be sword fighters who came to the club and didn’t treat others well. Parise had to tell them to get on their horses and leave.

“It’s infuriating to me, so with this place, we just don’t allow that to happen,” Parise says….

(13) NOT THE DIAGRAM PRIZE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The Diagram Prize is for books with the oddest title of the year. But why should book readers have all the fun? What about academics? This week saw the publication in Science Advances of the paper entitled, “Stiffness-tunable velvet worm–inspired soft adhesive robot”.

There’s got to be more peculiar ones out there.  If you see any, do pass them on…

Schematic of the system showing the stellar orbit (a), the disk (b), and the planet’s orbit (c).

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Christian Brunschen, 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 Cat Eldridge.]