Tag Archives: Alex Ross

Pixel Scroll 3/28/24 Did You Ever Dance With The Pixel In The Pale Scroll Light?

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(1) JAMES A. MOORE (1965-2024). [Item by Anne Marble.]Horror and fantasy author James A. Moore died March 27. Christopher Golden made the announcement in a concise obituary on Facebook.

Celebrated horror and fantasy author James A. Moore passed away this morning at the age of 58. Moore was the author of more than fifty horror and fantasy novels, including the critically acclaimed Fireworks, Under The Overtree, Blood Red, the Serenity Falls trilogy (featuring his recurring anti-hero, Jonathan Crowley) and the grimdark fantasy series Seven Forges and Tides of War. Moore also co-wrote many novels and stories with his longtime collaborator Charles R. Rutledge. 

His early career highlights included major contributions to White Wolf Games’ World of Darkness, and he was especially proud of his first comic book script sale, to Marvel Comics original series set in the world of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser. A prolific and versatile writer, Jim wrote novels based on various media properties, including Alien, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and The Avengers. 

He was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award three times, for his novel Serenity Falls, in the long fiction category for Bloodstained Oz, a collaboration with Christopher Golden, and as editor (with Golden) for the groundbreaking horror anthology The Twisted Book of Shadows, for which the pair won the Shirley Jackson Award. 

Beyond his work, Jim Moore was a much-beloved figure in the horror community, a tireless champion of other writers and their work, who mentored dozens of new writers, relentlessly urging them to pursue their desire to tell stories. He is survived by his wife, Tessa Moore, and his legions of readers. No wake or funeral is planned, but a celebration of life will be held sometime in April.

And on his own blog Golden has written a longer and more personal remembrance: “James A. Moore”.

Many writers are remembering Moore as a supportive friend and a mentor.

A couple of GoFundMe campaigns were established by Camp Necon to help James A. Moore (and his family). There was one established to help him during a cancer battle, and there was a more recent one established to help both him and his wife with medical expenses after he beat cancer: “Fundraiser for James A. Moore by Camp Necon : Please Help Jim & Tessa Moore (COVID-19 Expenses)”.

Now a GoFundMe has been started for his memorial expenses.

“Fundraiser by Christopher Golden : James A. Moore Final Wishes and Memorial Expenses”.

This is hard to do. Jim would’ve hated it. He received so much help from so many of you over the past five years, through cancer and Covid and surgeries and job loss and housing loss and amputation. We did two major GoFundMe campaigns during that time. Over the past year, there were moments we talked about doing a third one, but Jim hated the idea of asking again, no matter how much trouble he was in. Sympathy fatigue is real, and so many other people needed help, too.

Jim is going to be cremated. The expense for that is nothing compared to a funeral and a casket and a burial plot, but it’s still costly. I also want to be able to gather everyone together to have a Celebration of Life in a way that honors him. If we could wait a few months, we could risk doing it outside, but I know that everyone is feeling raw and would like to do it sooner. I’d like to do it on a Saturday or Sunday in April.

I’ve set the goal of this GFM to $6K to pay for both his cremation (and associated expenses) and the memorial gathering. I’m not sure it will be enough, but we’ll see. PLEASE NOTE that any monies received over and above the costs of those two things will be given directly to Jim’s wife, Tessa, to help her as she sorts out her next steps. These years have been hard enough, and we’d like to do all we can to help at this time.

(2) WORLDBUILDING ON EARTH. “Arkady Martine in Singapore: On Sci-Fi City Planning and What Makes a ‘City of the Future’” at Reactor.

…Usually in a sci-fi setting, the city functions as a snapshot in time that helps to illustrate how characters engage with their environment; for Martine, this might involve how long it takes for a character to get to their job, or if they even have a job to get to at all. It is not so much concerned with planning, or what drives planning decisions. “Fiction in general, and science fiction specifically, is bad at thinking about city planning as a discipline,” she explains. “Mostly because it feels absolutely dull, it’s worse than economics. I say this as someone who’s trained as a city planner and who loves it very much and actually finds it deeply fascinating and exciting and horrifically political.” More often than not, she finds that the idea of a constructed, planned city in science fiction—with some exceptions—is simply a given. 

“In the US they go on and on…that planning is some kind of neutral process, and that the point of a planner is to be a facilitator,” says Martine. “This is why I ended up in politics and policy and not in planning, because to be perfectly honest, it’s bullshit.” She cites the origins of Victorian infrastructure as a starting point for the western view that the constructed environment determines behavior, “which is that there are too many people and too little space and it’s not sanitary, which is all true.” The solution is not actually ‘everyone has to live in a perfect little garden house,’ but that’s the ideal that is constructed.”…

(3) PURPLE FRIENDS AND OTHERS. “’IF’ Trailer — Ryan Reynolds’ Imaginary Friend Comes to Life” – Collider introduces the movie, which arrives in theaters on May 17.

IF focuses on a young girl with the unique ability to see not only her own imaginary friends but also those of others, particularly the ones left behind by their human companions. These forgotten imaginary beings, once vital to the lives of many children, find themselves lonely and at risk of being forsaken indefinitely. In their desperation, they ally themselves with the girl, seeing her as their last chance to be recalled and cherished again before it’s too late.

(4) OCTOTHORPE. Episode 106 of Octothorpe promises a “Fitter Happier Healthier Eastercon”. Which, of course, you want, right?

Octothorpe 106 is now available! You can listen to it while at Eastercon, while travelling to Eastercon, or in defiance of the occurrence of Eastercon. We discuss, er, Eastercon. We talk about transcripts a little, too, before discussing awards, science fiction, cricket, and games. It’s basically a pretty representative episode, is what we’re saying.

Three ponies in the style of My Little Pony adorn the cover. The left-hand one is orange, and has a six-sided die as a cutie mark. The central one is teal, and has a rainbow Apple logo for a cutie mark. The right-hand one is blue, and has a Hugo Award for a cutie mark. They look like they are having a nice time. The words “My Little Octothorpe 106” appear at the top, and the words “Podcasting Is Magic” appear at the bottom.

(5) PASSING THE PLATE. 13th Dimension ranks “13 Delectable ALEX ROSS Collector Plates”. A whole gallery of images here, naturally.

3. Christmas with the Justice League of America (Warner Bros. Studio Store, 2000). Harking back to some of the classic covers of DC’s Christmas With the Super-Heroes specials, Ross creates a jubilant yuletide scene, literally framed with a bit of melancholy. The classic satellite era League (along with Ross favorites Captain Marvel and Plastic Man) celebrate in their own unique ways: The toast between Martian Manhunter and Red Tornado; Black Canary hanging on Green Arrow’s shoulder; Hawkman and Hawkgirl observing the strange Earth custom of decorating the tree; and my favorite, Green Lantern making the tree lights with his power ring. But all of this is superseded by the Man of Steel beckoning the Dark Knight to let his often-lonely crusade rest for the night, and come inside and join the celebration.

(6) LIADEN UNIVERSE® NEWS. Sharon Lee announced that the  eARC (electronic Advance Reading Copy) of Ribbon Dance is now available from Baen Books.

Also, a spoiler discussion page has been set up for those folks who have read the eARC and Want To Talk About It. Here is that link.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born March 28, 1912 — A. Bertram Chandler. (Died 1984.) Tonight’s Scroll features a Birthday for a writer from Australia — A. Bertram Chandler. 

Did you ever hear of space opera? Of course you have. Well, the universe of Chandler’s character John Grimes was such. A very good place to start is the Baen Books omnibus of To The Galactic Rim which contains three novels and seven stories. If there’s a counterpart to him, it’d be I think Dominic Flandry who appeared in Anderson’s Technic History series. (My opinion, yours may differ.) Oh, and I’ve revisited both to see if the Suck Fairy had dropped by. She hadn’t.

A. Bertram Chandler

Connected to the Grimes stories are the Rim World works of which The Deep Reaches of Space is the prime work. The main story is set in an earlier period of the same future timeline as Grimes, a period in which ships are the magnetic Gaussjammers, recalled with some nostalgia in Grimes’ time. 

But that’s hardly all that he wrote. I remember fondly The Alternate Martians, a novella that he did. A space expedition to Mars that find themselves in the worlds of H.G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Otis Adelbert Kline. Why he chose the latter I know not as I’d never heard of him. It’s a great story well told. And fun to boot. It was first published as an Ace Double, The Alternate Martians / Empress of Outer Space. Gateway has released it as a separate epub for a mere buck ninety nine at the usual suspects. 

He wrote a reasonably large number of stand-alone-alones, so what did I like?  For a bit of nicely done horror, you can’t beat The Star Beasts — yes, I know that there’s nothing terribly original there but it’s entertaining to read; Glory Planet has a watery Venus occupied by anti-machine theocracy opposed by a high-tech city-state fascinating; and finally I liked The Coils of Timeenin which a scientist has created a Time Machine but now needs a guinea pig, errr, a volunteer to go back through time and see what’s there —  did it go as planned? Oh guess.

I see that he’s written but a handful of short stories, none of which I’ve read other than the ones in To The Galactic Rim. So who here has? 

He’s won five Ditmars and The Giant Killer novel was nominated for a Retro Hugo. 

All in all, I like him a lot. 

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) SOUNDS FAMILIAR. From the New York Times: “Like My Book Title? Thanks, I Borrowed It.” Just like the Scroll item headlines here, yes?

You see it everywhere, even if you don’t always recognize it: the literary allusion. Quick! Which two big novels of the past two years borrowed their titles from “Macbeth”? Nailing the answer — “Birnam Wood” and “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” — might make you feel a little smug.

Perhaps the frisson of cleverness (I know where that’s from!), or the flip-side cringe of ignorance (I should know where that’s from!), is enough to spur you to buy a book, the way a search-optimized headline compels you to click a link. After all, titles are especially fertile ground for allusion-mongering. The name of a book becomes more memorable when it echoes something you might have heard — or think you should have heard — before.

This kind of appropriation seems to be a relatively modern phenomenon. Before the turn of the 20th century titles were more descriptive than allusive. The books themselves may have been stuffed with learning, but the words on the covers were largely content to give the prospective reader the who (“Pamela,” “Robinson Crusoe,” “Frankenstein”), where (“Wuthering Heights,” “The Mill on the Floss,” “Treasure Island”) or what (“The Scarlet Letter,” “War and Peace,” “The Way We Live Now”) of the book.

Somehow, by the middle of the 20th century, literature had become an echo chamber. Look homeward, angel! Ask not for whom the sound and the fury slouches toward Bethlehem in dubious battle. When Marcel Proust was first translated into English, he was made to quote Shakespeare, and “In Search of Lost Time” (the literal, plainly descriptive French title) became “Remembrance of Things Past,” a line from Sonnet 30.

(10) YOU’VE GOT TO BE KIDDING. “Liu Cixin: ‘I’m often asked – there’s science fiction in China?’” he told the Guardian.

…Science fiction was a rarity in China when Liu was growing up because most western books were banned. Living in a coal mining town in Shanxi province as a young man, he found a book hidden in a box that once belonged to his father. It was Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne, and Liu read it in secret, and in doing so forged a lifelong love of science fiction….

(11) BREAD FOR CIRCUSES. “The film fans who refuse to surrender to streaming: ‘One day you’ll barter bread for our DVDs’” in the Guardian. Anybody who’s bought an ebook from Amazon doesn’t need a natural disaster to convince them about the advantages of owning physical media.

When a hurricane struck Florida in 2018, Christina’s neighborhood lost electricity, cell service and internet. For four weeks her family was cut off from the world, their days dictated by the rising and setting sun. But Christina did have a vast collection of movies on DVD and Blu-ray, and a portable player that could be charged from an emergency generator.

Word got around. The family’s library of physical films and books became a kind of currency. Neighbors offered bottled water or jars of peanut butter for access. The 1989 Tom Hanks comedy The ’Burbs was an inexplicably valuable commodity, as were movies that could captivate restless and anxious children.

“I don’t think 99% of people in America would ever stop to think, ‘What would I do if I woke up tomorrow and all access to digital media disappeared?’ But we know,” Christina told me. “We’ve lived it. We’ll never give up our collection. Ever. And maybe, one day, you’ll be the one to come and barter a loaf of bread for our DVD of Casino.”…

(12) IN SPACE NOBODY CAN HEAR YOU LAUGH. “Spaceballs: 12 Behind the Scenes Stories of Mel Brooks’ Ludicrous Sci-Fi Adventure” at Moviemaker. Here’s one I never thought of:

Spaceballs Was Also Inspired by It Happened One Night

One of the biggest reference points for Spaceballs wasn’t a sci-fi film, but a Frank Capra classic, 1934’s It Happened One Night. The film was the first to sweep the top five Oscar categories — Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor and Best Actress.

The film follows an heiress (Claudette Colbert) who flees her dull groom on her wedding day and falls for a cool regular guy played by Clark Gable. “We took that same basic plot and shot it into space!” Brooks wrote in his memoir.

In Spaceballs, Princess Vespa of Planet Druidia (Daphne Zuniga) flees her dull groom, Prince Valium, on her wedding day, and falls for a cool regular guy named Lone Starr (Bill Pullman).

(13) DON’T ASK? “Artemis astronauts will carry plants to the moon in 2026” reports Space.com. Strangely, neither this article nor the NASA press release it’s based on say what specific plants will be part of the experiment.

The first astronauts to land on the moon in more than half a century will set up a lunar mini-greenhouse, if all goes according to plan.

NASA has selected the first three science experiments to be deployed by astronauts on the moon’s surface on the Artemis 3 mission in 2026. Among them is LEAF (“Lunar Effects on Agricultural Flora”), which will study how space crops fare in the exotic lunar environment.”LEAF will be the first experiment to observe plant photosynthesis, growth and systemic stress responses in space-radiation and partial gravity,” NASA officials wrote in a statement Tuesday (March 26) announcing the selection of the three experiments….

(14) WAS HE LOST IN SPACE? Dan Monroe investigates “Whatever Happened to ROBBY The ROBOT?”

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Slashfilm covers (and uncovers) “The Most Controversial Costumes In Sci-Fi History”.

The worst superhero costume in history, space bikinis, and a leather trenchcoat that sparked a media frenzy — sci-fi costumes don’t get much more controversial than this.

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Anne Marble, Kathy Sullivan, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]

Pixel Scroll 1/22/24 Encounter at Fargo

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(1) KUANG ON BABEL’S HUGO INELIGIBILITY. Rebecca F. Kuang decided that saying nothing isn’t an option. “Rebecca F. Kuang: ‘statement’” at Bluesky.

(2) ANOTHER WAY TO RUN A RAILROAD. Answering some writers’ renewed cry that the Hugo Awards be taken away from the Worldcon, Cheryl Morgan has drafted a proposal. It’s explained in “Decoupling the Hugos” at Cheryl’s Mewsings. Morgan’s draft can be downloaded at “Independent-Hugo-Administration.pdf”.

In amongst all of the discussion as to what to do about the Chengdu Hugo issue has been one suggestion that can actually be implemented, albeit over a number of years. That is decoupling Hugo Award Administration from the host Worldcon, so that the laws of the host country cannot interfere with the voting process….

… WSFS already has an organization called the Mark Protection Committee (MPC), which is responsible for maintaining the service marks that WSFS owns (in particular “Hugo Award” and the logo). I suggest renaming this the Independent Hugo Award Administration Committee (IHAAC) and giving it, rather than Worldcon, the job of administering the voting process. The IHAAC would recruit experienced administrators in much the same way that Worldcon does, but there would be a lot more consistency from year to year.

Worldcon would still have the option of staging a Hugo Award ceremony, and creating a distinctive trophy base, but equally it could decline to do that and pass the job back to the IHAAC.

Kevin [Standlee] and I cannot take this proposal forward ourselves. Kevin is a member of the MPC, and I effectively work for them in maintaining the WSFS websites, so we both have a vested interest. Our involvement could easily be portrayed as a power grab. But we are happy to provide help and advice to anyone who does want to take this forward at Glasgow….

(3) DON’T MAKE CHANGES THAT TAKE VOLUNTEERS FOR GRANTED. Abigail Nussbaum has a remarkably insightful post about the current crisis: “The 2023 Hugo Awards: Now With an Asterisk” at Asking the Wrong Questions.

… Even taking this most charitable view of events, however, there comes a point where honest mistakes corrupt a result too thoroughly to be distinguishable from malice, and that’s before we even get into those three still-unexplained ineligibility rulings. Unless Chengdu steps forward with more information, there is, unfortunately, no avoiding the conclusion that the 2023 Hugo results are irreparably tainted.

On the matter of those three disqualifications, the assumption that many people are making—and which, again, seems like the most plausible conclusion until and unless Chengdu starts answering questions—is that all three were struck off for political reasons. This might mean outright government interference, or someone on the Hugo team complying in advance, or an independent but politically-motivated actor among the award’s administrators striking off work they don’t approve of. This may also explain the silence from the Hugo team, who may fear reprisals towards themselves or their teammates. At this point it is possible that we will never know the whole story of what happened to the 2023 Hugo Awards. Which means the important question before us is how to move forward.

That question is complicated by the erratic, increasingly rickety superstructure of the Hugos and the Worldcon as a whole. Put simply, there is no Worldcon organization. Each convention is its own corporate entity charged with holding the convention and administering the Hugos, and bound only by the WSFS constitution. Said constitution is discussed and amended in the annual Business Meeting, a sclerotic, multi-day affair administered under rules that seem designed to baffle new participants and slow change to a creeping pace. What this means, among other things, is that there is no actual oversight over any individual Worldcon’s behavior, and no mechanism to claw back either the convention or the Hugos if it appears that they are being mismanaged.

It’s not at all surprising that the reaction of many people upon learning these facts, and especially in the present context, is to immediately leap to the conclusion that this entire system should be scrapped and replaced with a centralized authority. This, I think, is to ignore some very basic facts: the Worldcon is a fully volunteer-run organization. The free labor that goes into administering it, and the Hugos specifically, probably runs to tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of dollars in value. The idea that one can simply erect a super-organization under those same conditions is hard to imagine….

(4) LECKIE ON THE HUGOS. If you happen to be on Bluesky, Ann Leckie has a thread with a lively discussion. It begins:

(5) MORE CHINESE SOCIAL MEDIA RESPONSES. [Item by Ersatz Culture.] Some more anonymized online reactions to social media posts about the Hugo nomination report, some of which are based on coverage of the continued Anglosphere reactions, such as John Scalzi’s blog post about Babel.

English translations are all via Google Translate unless otherwise indicated, with minor edits or commentary in square parentheses.  Some of the smileys haven’t come through, so bear in mind that some of these should be read in a sarcastic tone.

怎么感觉雨果奖次次都有瓜

Why does it feel like the Hugo’s have a melon every time? [Note: “melon” is Chinese slang – maybe “drama” is a reasonable translation in this context?  Also, this translation is via DeepL; Google Translate comes up with a less literal result, but which I think is incorrect]

2023这次应该是“中国雨果奖”吧。

This time in 2023 it should be the “China Hugo Award”. 

雨果奖到底怎么了

What happened to the Hugo Awards?

看到这新闻心里没有一丝波澜，甚至觉的这事发生在这里太正常辣，出现正面新闻才令人惊讶呢。外国人对真实的种花家还是了解太少

When I saw this news, I didn’t feel any emotion at all. I even thought it was too normal for this to happen here. It was surprising to see positive news. Foreigners still know too little about real flower growers [Note: “flower growers” = China]

太可惜了

What a pity

然而巴别塔还在国内出中译了，就很神奇 很迷惑

However, [Tower of] Babel has been translated into Chinese in China, which is amazing and confusing

到底为什么呀怎么感觉这么大的事情国内平台都没几个声？？

Why on earth do you feel that there are not many domestic platforms talking about such a big thing? ?

因为雨果奖怎么样并不算大事，国内的雨果奖获奖作品能给媒体带来多少收入才是大事

[replying to previous comment] Because it’s not a big deal how the Hugo Award is, but how much income the domestic Hugo Award-winning works can bring to the media is a big deal

真实了，我记得之前国内作者获得雨果奖的时候大小媒体都在采访

[A further reply] It’s real. I remember when a domestic author won the Hugo Award, all the media were interviewing him.

我推测并不是CN康的审查而是主办方自身某种私心（虽然我不知道具体是什么动机），要知道《巴别塔》本身有一种强烈的“早产的列宁主义”的意味，在这边不要太正确。当然，我坚决拥护斯卡尔齐老师对办会章程的建议！

I speculate that it is not CN Kang’s censorship but some selfish motives of the organizer (although I don’t know the specific motivation). You must know that “[Tower of] Babel” itself has a strong sense of “premature Leninism”. Don’t be too correct. Of course, I firmly support Mr. Scalzi’s suggestion on the rules of the conference!  [I’m not sure what “CN康” is, Wikipedia says “CN” is “virgin”, but that doesn’t seem to make any sense in this context.]

????所以呢？在其他地方举办世界科幻大会没有按国外的审美标准就是存在疑问及不适合的？

????So what? Is it questionable and inappropriate to hold the World Science Fiction Convention elsewhere if it does not follow foreign aesthetic standards?

毕竟是有关国家信誉的大事，别只写获奖不写争议吧咱就说

After all, it is a major matter related to the credibility of the country. Don’t just write about the awards and not the controversies. Let’s just say  [This comment cced in half-a-dozen news organizations, some of which are ones that I recognize from earlier coverage of the con, I think some of which was linked in prior Scrolls]

《巴别塔》批判殖民主义，还以英国为背景，咋不猜是英国通过某些手段干预了提名[smiley]

“[Tower of] Babel” criticizes colonialism and is set in the United Kingdom. Why don’t you guess that the United Kingdom interfered with the nomination through certain means [smiley]

去年看的巴别塔，前不久看的Yellowface，Rebecca F. Kuang就是很灵秀啊，23年雨果奖怎么搞的评委最清楚啦

I [read] [Tower of] Babel last year and Yellowface not long ago. Rebecca F. Kuang is so smart. The judges of the [2023] Hugo Awards know best

《巴别塔》明明是歌颂中国人民反殖民主义的努力的啊，被雨果奖错过太可惜了

“[Tower of] Babel” obviously praises the Chinese people’s anti-colonial efforts. It would be a pity to miss out on the Hugo Award.

这，别人也倒罢了，她不是参与过联名抵制成都科幻大会吗？现在觉得自己被除名还应该给个具体原因了？

[Re. Xiran Jay Zhao] This is just for others. Didn’t [they] participate in a joint boycott of the Chengdu Science Fiction Conference? Now you feel like you should [be given] a specific reason for being removed?

赵希然，写武则天开机甲的那个华裔女科幻作家。她说唐代是中国的荡妇时代。

Zhao Xiran, the Chinese science fiction writer who wrote about Wu Zetian’s mecha. [They] said that the Tang Dynasty was the era of sluts in China. [referring to this Tweet]

Kuang特别棒 熬夜读完了1/4的巴别塔

Kuang is awesome. I stayed up late and read 1/4 of Tower of Babel.

(6) MAP CANNON. Yesterday’s China roundup by Ersatz Culture included the term “map cannon”, for which made an approximate English translation. Thanks to Gareth Jelley for finding a Baidu Encylopedia article that explains it in detail.

The map cannon originally refers to a map attack type weapon in the “Super Robot Wars” series. It first appeared in the “Second Super Robot Wars” in the Magic Machine God’s Sebastian , and was later used to refer to some mass destruction weapons. weapons or magic. On the Internet, the extended meaning of “map cannon” is the act of verbally attacking a certain group. On the Internet, it often refers to geographical attackers , or the behavior of a few people is used to deny the behavior of a certain group.

Since in many anime works, the map cannon exists as a weapon with great power and large area of ​​destruction, so in some forums (such as NGA), the map cannon is extended to large-scale indiscriminate deletion of posts, banning IDs, and punishing users. Behaviors such as this also often refer to some moderators who often delete and ban people on a large scale and indiscriminately.

It can also express prejudice against certain things. There is often a label that summarizes the whole based on the characteristics of the part. Prejudice against different groups of people will always exist. However, there are also some “facialization” who are willing to be accepted by others – if they think they are at the top of the discrimination chain. The rise of the Internet has redefined the standards of “us” and “them” for the first time.

(7) COMIC RELIEF KERFUFFLE. Doctor Who fandom blew up yesterday. The first one got almost 300K views. The second is one of the more entertaining replies.

(8) YOUR SF TAXONOMY. Horst Smokowski lists “All the Types of Science Fiction”: at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. There are fifty of them. The first three are:

1. Check this place out, it’s dope

2. Technology solves problems ???? (future good)

3. Technology creates problems ???? (future bad)

(9) EXTREME SUFFRAGE. Looking for more sff awards you can vote for? (Oh, you glutton for punishment!) Rocket Stack Rank has a roundup here: “SF/F Ballots For Stories From 2023”.

Here are links to ballots for various SF/F awards, 5 that are open to all, and 4 that are open to members of a convention or association. Highlighted awards are currently open for voting.

The magazine-specific awards come with a longlist link to all stories published by each magazine, with blurbs to help you remember the ones you’ve read and scores to guide further reading….

(10) FREE READ. Marie Brennan’s “Embers Burning in the Night” is a free-to-read story at Sunday Morning Transport, offered to encourage new subscriptions.

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born January 22, 1970 — Alex Ross, 54. So Alex Ross, eh? A fantastic, in all senses of that word, comic book illustrator and writer whose first work with comic book writer Kurt Busiek, the four-issue The Marvels for, er, Marvel Comics would been a highlight of anyone else’s career.

Not Ross though.  Another four-issue run, Kingdom Come, this time for DC, under their Elseworlds imprint, told of an aleternate DC  universe that might have happened. One of my favorite DC stories. It was written by Mark Waid and him. 

Yes, he can do pulp as he illustrated the John Layman written series, Red Sonja/Claw:  the Unconquered Devil’s Hands,  that  was co-published with Dynamite Entertainment where Red Sonja and Claw, a  cursed warrior I had never heard of before this, had a series of adventures that showed Red Sonja’s assets very well. 

He’s just not interested in the costumed superheroes. Over at his website, you’ll find the prints he’s done for the Universal Monsters – Dracula, Wolf Man and so forth, they’re all there. The prints look fantastic bad they can be yours if your pocket change is deep. 

Here’s my favorite piece of art by him. 

(12) COMICS SECTION.

  • Frazz is for editors.
  • Last Kiss breaks the fourth wall.
  • Annie mentions science fiction, and also might be a reference to this B.C. strip.

(13) THE SGT. MAJOR’S MARSCON REPORT. [Item by Dann.] Mike Burke is a retired US Marine Corps Sergeant Major.  Mike operated under the nom de plume (or perhaps nom de guerre) of “America’s Sergeant Major” for several years.  He has led Marines in peace and in war.  Since his retirement, he has written fiction and nonfiction for the US Naval Institute.  The USNI is a non-profit organization with the purpose of providing an “independent forum for those who dare to read, think, speak, and write in order to advance the professional, literary, and scientific understanding of sea power and other issues critical to global security.”

Sgt. Maj. Burke has started writing on Substack as Spearman Burke and is a self-professed “noob” at the profession of writing.

He recently attended Marscon in Norfolk, VA and has a report from the con.  He was able to meet Ben Yalow, David Weber, Kacey Ezell, and a few other notable authors.  One of Kacey’s stories was what inspired Mike to pursue his next career as a genre author.  He scored a contract to submit a short story for an anthology at the con.

(14) CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. AP News says “Reformed mobster who stole Judy Garland’s ruby slippers from ‘Oz’ wanted one last score”. Now they’re about to drop the big house on him.

The aging reformed mobster who has admitted stealing a pair of ruby slippers that Judy Garland wore in “The Wizard of Oz” gave into the temptation of “one last score” after an old mob associate led him to believe the famous shoes must be adorned with real jewels to justify their $1 million insured value.

Terry Jon Martin’s defense attorney finally revealed the 76-year-old’s motive for the 2005 theft from the Judy Garland Museum in the late actor’s hometown of Grand Rapids, Minnesota, in a new memo filed ahead of his Jan. 29 sentencing in Duluth, Minnesota.

The FBI recovered the shoes in 2018 when someone else tried to claim an insurance reward on them, but Martin wasn’t charged with stealing them until last year….

(15) ROBERT BLOCH WEBSITE UPDATE. Jim Nemeth of the Robert Bloch Official Website announced a major update.

At the (fantastic) suggestion and immense help of Mr. David J Schow (DJS) we now have a new Gallery page, showing just about every/all sides of our beloved Bob.

(16) THE REMNANT OF HUMANITY IS COMING HOME. Friends of Fred Lerner will be excited to hear that his book In Memoriam will be released by Fantastic Books And Gray Rabbit Publications on July 2.

David Bernstein is a 17-year-old member of the Remnant of Terra, the descendants of the 2,000 people who survived the Cataclysm that destroyed human life on Earth. For two centuries the Remnant has lived among the Wyneri, who rescued the few survivors and brought them to their world. Although the Wyneri are physically and psychologically very similar to Terrans, the two species interact only when they must. The Remnant earn their keep among their alien hosts, but otherwise remain apart, devoting themselves to preserving the cultural heritage of Terra.

David, however, is fascinated with the Wyneri and their culture, an interest shared by none of his contemporaries. Attending a Wyneri performance he meets a Wyneri girl his own age, and he and Harari strike up a taboo friendship.

While David learns about his Terran heritage, he feels very much alone in trying to also learn about the history of the Terran-Wyneri relationship. Violent Wyneri xenophobia drives David to intensify his studies, and to dig into the mysteries surrounding the Cataclysm, the rescue, and the ensuing two centuries of cover-ups. He begins to suspect a long-lived cabal that has spent the years working in secret, preparing for a return to Earth.

Harari’s murder crystallizes David’s need to explore the Terran-Wyneri history. Her posthumous message proving that the Cataclysm was caused by rogue Wyneri military personnel leads David to the Remnant’s leaders, who confirm it as genuine. Their conclusion? The time has come for Terrans to separate from the Wyneri. They enlist David’s help to persuade the Remnant to return to Earth, and to encourage the Wyneri to help them.

(17) RED PLANET WINGS. “Nasa plans to fly giant solar-powered Mars plane to look for water on Red Planet” reports The Independent.

Nasa has received its first set of funding to develop a giant airplane that could fly high in the planet’s atmosphere and look for signs of water on the Red Planet.

The solar-powered vehicle, called Mars Aerial and Ground Intelligent Explorer or Maggie, is expected to fly in the Martian atmosphere with vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) capability similar to Nasa’s pioneering Ingenuity Mars helicopter.

With fully charged batteries, the Mars airplane could fly at an altitude of 1,000m for about 180km with its total range over a year on Mars expected to be over 16,000 km, the space agency said earlier this month.

Using the aircraft, Nasa hopes to conduct three studies on the Red Planet’s atmosphere and geophysical features, including the hunt for water, research on the origin of the planet’s weak magnetic field as well as tracing the elusive source of methane signals on Mars….

(18) HIDDEN HISTORY. Constellation comes to Apple TV+ on February 21.

“Constellation” stars Noomi Rapace as Jo — an astronaut who returns to Earth after a disaster in space — only to discover that key pieces of her life seem to be missing. The action-packed space adventure is an exploration of the dark edges of human psychology, and one woman’s desperate quest to expose the truth about the hidden history of space travel and recover all that she has lost.

(19) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Isaac Arthurs has just had his monthly sci-fi weekend and asks who would win: robot or alien?

We often worry that humanity might be attacked by Aliens or AI, but which is worse and which would win in a battle between them?

[Thanks to Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Andrew (not Werdna), Gareth Jelley, Dann, Rich Lynch, Daniel Dern, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, and SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jim Henley.]

Pixel Scroll 3/24/23 First Fandom: The Next Generation

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(1) WIRED DOES A JOB ON SANDERSON. In his WIRED article: “Brandon Sanderson Is Your God”, Jason Kehe slags Sanderson, his writing, his fans, his business, his religion, his taste in movie musicals, and anything else that comes to mind — and it really feels like puppy-kicking – in the original sense, not that Sanderson is/was a Sad Puppy.

…Sanderson, when I eventually meet him in person, makes versions of these excuses, plus others, for his writerly obscurity. It’s kind of fun to talk about, until it isn’t, and that’s when I realize, in a panic, that I now have a problem. Sanderson is excited to talk about his reputation. He’s excited, really, to talk about anything. But none of his self-analysis is, for my purposes, exciting. In fact, at that first dinner, over flopsy Utah Chinese—this being days before I’d meet his extended family, and attend his fan convention, and take his son to a theme park, and cry in his basement—I find Sanderson depressingly, story-killingly lame.

He sits across from me in an empty restaurant, kind of lordly and sure of his insights, in a graphic T-shirt and ill-fitting blazer, which he says he wears because it makes him look professorial. It doesn’t. He isn’t. Unless the word means only: believing everything you say is worth saying. Sanderson talks a lot, but almost none of it is usable, quotable. I begin to think, This is what I drove all the way from San Francisco to the suburbs of Salt Lake City in the freezing-cold dead of winter for? For previously frozen dim sum and freeze-dried conversation? This must be why nobody writes about Brandon Sanderson.

So, recklessly, I say what’s on my mind. I have to. His wife is there, his biggest fan, always his first reader, making polite comments; I don’t care. Maybe nobody writes about you, I say to Sanderson, because you don’t write very well….

There’s such an uproar that Sanderson’ has posted a letter to his fan community about the WIRED story on his sub-Reddit — “On The Wired Article” — in which he expresses his own confusion about the article but asks his fan community not to harass Jason Kehe over it (apparently this has been happening on Twitter.)

I appreciate the kind words and support.

Not sure how, or if, I should respond to the Wired article. I get that Jason, in writing it, felt incredibly conflicted about the fact that he finds me lame and boring. I’m baffled how he seemed to find every single person on his trip–my friends, my family, my fans–to be worthy of derision.

But he also feels sincere in his attempt to try to understand. While he legitimately seems to dislike me and my writing, I don’t think that’s why he came to see me. He wasn’t looking for a hit piece–he was looking to explore the world through his writing. In that, he and I are the same, and I respect him for it, even if much of his tone seems quite dismissive of many people and ideas I care deeply about.

The strangest part for me is how Jason says he had trouble finding the real me. He says he wants something true or genuine. But he had the genuine me all that time. He really did. What I said, apparently, wasn’t anything he found useful for writing an article. That doesn’t make it not genuine or true.

I am not offended that the true me bores him. Honestly, I’m a guy who enjoys his job, loves his family, and is a little obsessive about his stories. There’s no hidden trauma. No skeletons in my closet. Just a guy trying to understand the world through story. That IS kind of boring, from an outsider’s perspective. I can see how it is difficult to write an article about me for that reason….

(2) NEW AWARD COMPETITION. The Oxford Centre for Fantasy and Pushkin Children’s Books announced creation of The Oxford/Pushkin Children’s Fantasy Prize for fantasy novels aimed at Middle Grand and YA. (Entry fee: £5)

Calling all fantasy novelists at the beginning of their career to a new adventure. To mark this 50th Anniversary year since the death of J R R Tolkien, we are looking for fresh ideas and new voices in the fantasy genre. This is your chance to win our brilliant prize of £2000, as well as the incredible opportunity for mentorship with an editor at Pushkin Children’s Books.

Four runners-up will win further prizes to help them develop their writing skills.

… We will be looking for finalists writing novels for the following reading ages:

Middle grade (9+) and Young Adult.

(3) NO BETTER AT THIS THAN HUMANS. “We asked AI to predict when The Winds of Winter will come out, and it was completely useless” says Natalie Zamora at Winter Is Coming.

…When chatting with AI today, I decided I needed to know whether or not it could give me a good answer to one of our most burning questions here at Winter is Coming. Could it tell me, or even just predict, when George R.R. Martin will release The Winds of Winter? We’re going on 12 years now since the last entry in the A Song of Ice and Fire book series was released, so maybe I’m a little desperate to find out. Does AI know something we don’t? Well… no. I discovered that it doesn’t….

Read ChatGPT’s hapless guess at the link.

(4) READING THE ROOM. “’These are my stomping grounds’: the first Black-owned bookstore opens in Octavia Butler’s home town”. The Guardian is fascinated by this story, too, and ran a profile of bookseller Nikki High.

… Inside Octavia’s Bookshelf is a carefully curated set of books and non-book items that High has sourced from mainly independent Bipoc-owned businesses – “not on Amazon”, she emphatically said. Beyond books, Octavia’s Bookshelf has everything from quirky book-nerd socks to prayer candles dedicated to iconic Black women literary figures such as Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde.

“I had been thinking about [this bookstore] for about 10 years, but not in a way where I was ready to leave my job and do it,” said High, who managed communications for 15 years at Trader Joe’s.

But what pushed High to lean into her dream was the May 2022 death of her grandmother, who had always championed her granddaughter’s pursuits. High took the leap a few months later in October of that year and began the process of starting her own business….

(5) “ALWAYS TO CALL IT RESEARCH”. “Is the Train board game creator due credit in Gabrielle Zevin’s novel?” ponders the Washington Post.

The central relationship in Gabrielle Zevin’s best-selling novel “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” is the lifelong creative partnership between Sam and Sadie, childhood friends who go on to start a video game company. The novel depicts the exhilarating highs and enraging lows of collaboration, including fights over recognition — that is, how Sam and Sadie see each other’s contributions to their work compared with how the world sees them.

One of the games they develop together, “Solution,” is now caught up in a real-life debate about artistry and credit.

On Thursday, game designer Brenda Romero wrote in a Twitter thread that Zevin had drawn on the ideas and structure of her board game Train without acknowledging its inspiration.

“A theme in the book is how women struggle to get credit for their work,” Romero wrote….

(6) REPRESENTATIONAL REGRESS. “GLAAD report finds almost a third of LGBT+ characters will disappear from screens next year” – The Independent has details.

Nearly a third of the LGBT+ characters to have featured on US TV over the past year will not be returning in future, a new report has revealed.

Over the period between 1 June 2022 and 31 May 2023, a total of 596 LGBT+ characters were featured on scripted TV.

Of these, 175 will not be returning in the following season, as a result of series being cancelled or coming to a pre-agreed end. The majority of these characters (140) are the result of series being cancelled.

The statistics are taken from the annual report published by the US media monitoring organisation GLAAD (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation).

The report takes into account LGBT+ characters across scripted primetime broadcast networks, scripted primetime cable networks, and scripted series on the eight major US streaming platforms: Prime Video, Hulu, Netflix, Apple TV+, Disney+, HBO Max, Peacock, and Paramount+.

Sarah Kate Ellis, CEO of GLAAD, describes the significant cancellation rates of LGBT+ “disappointing”.

“Some of the year’s biggest hits have been LGBTQ-inclusive series – including HBO’s The Last of Us, ABC’s Abbott Elementary, FX’s What We Do in The Shadows, Showtime’s Yellowjackets, Netflix’s Stranger Things, and HBO Max’s Hacks, to name only a few,” she wrote in a statement….

(7) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to settle in for arancini with Annalee Newitz in Episode 194 of his Eating the Fantastic podcast.

Annalee Newitz

I invite you to take a seat at the table with my guest Annalee Newitz at Tony and Elaine’s, a casual, old school, Italian red sauce restaurant in the North End of Boston.

Annalee is the author of three novels — The Terraformers (just out in January), The Future of Another Timeline, and their debut novel Autonomous, which won the Lambda Literary Award, and was nominated for the Nebula and Locus Awards. Their short story “When Robot and Crow Saved East St. Louis” won the 2019 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award.  Their nonfiction books include Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age, which was a national bestseller and was praised in The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The New Yorker, and Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction, which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize in science.

They’re also the co-editor of the essay collection She’s Such A Geek (Seal Press), and author of Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture (Duke University Press). They’re the co-host with Charlie Jane Anders of the Hugo Award-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct, and in addition to having been the founder of io9, served as the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.

We discussed how difficult (and disappointing) it would have been to eat a trilobite, what writing their non-fiction books taught them about creating the arcs of novels, why their brain seems more suited for novels than short stories, how best to include a message in fiction without the soapbox overwhelming the story, the greatest bad review one of their books ever got (it involved creamed corn), how to inhabit characters who are hundreds of years old, fun facts they learned about moose which helped make their new book better, the music they blasted to rev up for one of the novel’s big action scenes, how to make the growth of a fictional romance believable to readers, the serendipitous way in which Ken McLeod rekindled their love of science fiction, and much more.

(8) NBCC. The National Book Critics Circle Awards for the publishing year 2022 have been announced, however, I did not recognize any genre works among the winners. If I missed any, drop a comment to fill me in!

(9) MEMORY LANE.

2016 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Our Beginning this Scroll is one of P. Djèlí Clark’s Dead Djinn Universe stories, to wit A Dead Djinn in Cairo which has as its central character Fatma el-Sha’arawi, a fascinating Muslim woman who will show up again in his Hugo nominated A Master of Djinn novel.

This was published on the Tor website in 2016. There’s a third story here so far, The Haunting of Tram Car 015, also first published by Tor. 

It’s a perfect Beginning in my mind as it very nicely introduces us to Fatma el-Sha’arawi and the Djinn in all their chilling awesomeness. 

And now for our most perfect Beginning…

Fatma el-Sha’arawi, special investigator with the Egyptian Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities, stood gazing through a pair of spectral goggles at the body slumped atop the mammoth divan.

A djinn.

An Old One, at that—near twice the size of a man, with fingers that ended in curved talons, long as knives. His skin was a sheath of aquamarine scales that shifted to turquoise beneath the glare of flickering gas lamps. He sat unclothed between tasseled cushions of lavender and burgundy, his muscular arms and legs spread wide and leaving nothing to the imagination.

“Now that’s impressive,” a voice came. Fatma glanced back at the figure hovering just over her shoulder. Two long graying whiskers fashioned in the style of some antiquated Janissary twitched on a plump face. It belonged to a man in a khaki uniform that fit his thick frame a bit too tightly, particularly around the belly. He jutted a shaved round chin at the dead djinn’s naked penis: a midnight-blue thing that hung near to the knee. “I’ve seen full-grown cobras that were smaller. A man can’t help but feel jealous, with that staring him in the face.” 

Fatma returned to her work, not deigning to reply. Inspector Aasim Sharif was a member of the local constabulary who served as a police liaison with the Ministry. Not a bad sort. Just vulgar. Cairene men, despite their professed modernity, were still uncomfortable working alongside a woman. And they expressed their unease in peculiar, awkward ways. It was shocking enough to them that the Ministry had tapped some sun-dark backwater Sa’idi for a position in Cairo. But one so young, and who dressed in foreign garb—they’d never quite gotten used to her. 

Today she’d chosen a light gray suit, complete with a matching vest, chartreuse tie, and a red-on-white pinstriped shirt. She had picked it up in the English District, and had it specially tailored to fit her small frame. The accompanying walking cane—a sturdy length of black steel capped by a silver pommel, a lion’s head—was admittedly a bit much. But it added a flair of extravagance to the ensemble. And her father always said if people were going to stare, you should give them a show.

“Exsanguination,” she declared. Fatma pulled off the copper-plated goggles and handed them over to a waiting boilerplate eunuch. The machine-man grasped the instrument between tactile metal fingers, folding it away with mechanical precision into a leather casing. She caught her reflection in its featureless brass countenance: dark oval eyes and a fleshy nose set against russet-brown skin on a slender face. Some might have called it boyish, if not for a set of full, bold lips passed on by her mother. As the boilerplate eunuch stepped away, she used her fingers to smooth back a mop of cropped black curls and turned to the constable. Aasim stared as if she’d just spoken Farsi.

“Those markings.” She tapped the floor with her cane, where curving white script engulfed the divan in a circle. “It’s an exsanguination spell.” Seeing Aasim’s blank look, she reached down to her waist to pull her janbiya free and placed the tip of the knife at the djinn’s thigh before sliding it beneath a scale. It came back out clean. “No blood. Not a drop. He’s been drained.” The inspector blinked, catching on.

“But where did it … the blood … go?”

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born March 24, 1834 — William Morris. Credited with creating the modern fantasy literature genre, he certainly wrote some of it its earlier works, to note his epic poem The Earthly Paradise, The Wood Beyond the World and The Well at the World’s End, plus his entire artistic motif fits nearly within a fantasy literature as it looks as if it was created by the Fey Themselves. (Died 1896.)
  • Born March 24, 1874 — Harry Houdini. His literary career intersects the genre world in interesting ways. Though it’s not known which, many of his works were written by his close friend Walter B. Gibson who as you know is the creator of The Shadow. And one famous story of his, “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs”, was actually ghost-written by Lovecraft! ISFDB lists another piece of genre fiction for him, “The Spirit Fakers of Hermannstad.” (Died 1926.)
  • Born March 24, 1924 — Peter George. Welsh author, most remembered for the late Fifties Red Alert novel, published first as Two Hours To Doom and written under the name of Peter Bryant. The book was the basis of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. (Died 1966.)
  • Born March 24, 1941 — Henry Glassie, 82. Folklorist who’s the author of one of my all-time fav Christmas books, All Silver and No Brass: An Irish Christmas Mumming. I was delighted to see that ISFDB say he has two works of genre fiction, “Coals on the Devil’s Hearth“ and “John Brodison and the Policeman”. Both are to be found in the Jane Yolen anthology, Favorite Folktales from Around the World which is available at all the usual digital suspects.
  • Born March 24, 1946 — Andrew I. Porter, 77. Editor, publisher, fan.  Major member of NYC regional fandom starting in the early Sixties. APA publisher and editor of Algol: The Magazine About Science Fiction (later renamed Starship) which won the Best Fanzine Hugo in 1974 (in a tie with Richard E. Geis’ SFR.) He also won two Best Semiprozine Hugos for his news publication Science Fiction Chronicle which he started in 1980 and ran for over 20 years. He has won myriad awards, including the Big Heart Award. He has attended hundreds of science fiction conventions and most Worldcons since his first in ‘63. He has been Fan Guest of Honor at several conventions, including the 1990 Worldcon. And he is an indispensible daily contributor to the Pixel Scroll!
  • Born March 24, 1946 — Gary K. Wolfe, 77. Monthly reviewer for Locus for 27 years now and, yes, I enjoy his column a lot. His brief marriage to Ellen R. Weil, which ended with her tragic early death, resulted in them co-writing Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever.  Old Earth Books has reprinted many of his reviews done between 1992 and 2006. He’s also written several critical looks at the genre, Critical Terms for Science Fiction and Fantasy and The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction. Finally I’ll note that he’s involved with editor Jonathan Strahan on the stellar Coode Street podcast

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • Eek! remembers the time Dr. Frankenstein made a mistake…
  • Hi and Lois makes a rare genre joke.
  • Crankshaft shows an elder comparing his age to that of comics characters.
  • Bizarro visualizes aliens in ancient Rome.

(12) AVENGERS AT 60. Alex Ross celebrates the 60th anniversary of the Avengers and the X-Men with new connecting variant covers that will run on various titles, starting with August’s UNCANNY AVENGERS #1. For more information, visit Marvel.com.

“In the case of the Avengers, I wanted to capture something of the era I grew up with, but also something extensive,” Ross said. “So I captured the first 30 years of that team, from the ‘60s through the ‘80s. I end where 1989 closes. I’m trying to make sure my work is aligning with how the character looked and also the attitudes the characters had.”

(13) JEOPARDY! Last night David Goldfarb watched the contestants strike out against this Jeopardy answer:

In the Double Jeopardy round, “TV Lingo” for $1600:

This substance powers spaceships on “Star Trek”

A triple stumper.

(14) BRAIN POWER. Meanwhile, Daniel Dern sends along a trivia challenge of his own:

Q: What (at least) two SF works does this NPR news segment, ahem, call to mind? – “Teen who lost half her brain when very young shows the power of neuroplasticity”.

A: (1) Peter Watts’ Blindsight (protagonist Siri Keaton, who has only one organic hemisphere; (2) (IMHO) Gene Wolfe’s story “The Island of Doctor Death And Other Stories,” Tackman Babcock (has both hemispheres, but they’re not connected fully).

(15) WATCH WHERE YOUR GAVEL HITS. “Jack Daniel’s Condemns Poop-Themed Dog Toy Before Supreme Court” and The Takeout is there.

Jack Daniel’s wants you to know that its shit doesn’t stink. Because it doesn’t poop. Sort of. NPR reports that the whiskey distiller made its case to the Supreme Court on Wednesday that a poop-themed dog toy resembling a bottle of Jack was an issue of trademark infringement.

The dog toy is made to look like a square Jack Daniel’s whiskey bottle, and its label says “Bad Spaniels” instead of “Jack Daniel’s.” Where a normal Jack Daniel’s label notes that it’s “40% alcohol by volume,” Bad Spaniels reads “43% poo” and “100% smelly.” Jack Daniel’s took issue with the toy because it’s potentially equating itself with the whiskey brand in the eyes of the consumer….

VIP Products, the company that makes the dog toy, retorted that a reasonable person would not mix up the two, and that it’s just a joke. The brand also manufactures dog toys spoofing beer, wine, and soda, with products like Dos Perros (instead of Dos Equis), Kennel-Relax’n (instead of Kendall-Jackson), and 7Pup (goes without saying)….

(16) BROTHER, CAN YOU SPARE AN ASTEROID? [Item by Daniel Dern.] Or, this fan now really is a heavenly body: “Centuries of Stargazing Leave Jesuit Names Written in the Heavens”. Brother Guy Consolmagno is in (and named in the photo).

…There are institutions like the Pontifical Academy of Science that tell the Vatican what’s going on in the world of science, but we actually do the science,” said Brother Guy Consolmagno, an asteroid honoree (4597 Consolmagno) and director of the observatory, whose website tagline is “faith inspiring science.”

(17) BIG DUMB OBJECT? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] It is never aliens except when it is aliens…. “A compelling explanation for the enigmatic small object ‘Oumuamua”: Research reported in Nature presents a simple and realistic framework for understanding the object’s many peculiarities…

Interstellar objects have long been thought to transit our Solar System. Planetary systems eject large quantities of small bodies during the initial phases of their formation and, once ejected, these small ‘planetesimals’ travel through interstellar space for millions of years. It stands to reason that some of their paths will pass by the vicinity of the Sun. When ‘Oumuamua was first discovered, astronomers therefore expected it to behave like one of these fragments — not too dissimilar from the comets that form on the outskirts of our own Solar System.

From the beginning, however, something was amiss. ‘Oumuamua did not look like a comet and did not display the usual defining features of comets — a tail and a fuzzy envelope called a coma, both made from gas and dust. Instead, it resembled an inactive object, like an asteroid, which moves mainly as a result of gravity. However, it soon became evident that the motion of ‘Oumuamua was not exclusively due to gravity: it was being pushed along its path in a similar way to that routinely observed in comets, which are subject to an acceleration caused by the recoil of emitted gas and dust. How was it possible that this object looked inactive, but was showing indirect evidence of activity?…”

The primary research paper with the explanation is here.

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Jennifer Hawthorne, Bill, David Goldfarb, Daniel Dern, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Andrew Porter, and Michael Toman for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Camestros Felapton.]

Alex Ross Depicts Stunning Portraits Of Marvel’s First Family In New Fantastic Four Variant Covers

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The Fantastic Four are about to enter an all-new era. The upcoming run by writer Ryan North and artist Iban Coello will be ripe with mystery and overflowing with suspense as it finds the team separated after a devastating incident back in New York. The first three issues will deliver exciting standalone adventures starring Ben Grimm and Alicia, Reed and Sue, and Johnny before the team’s heartbreaking and revelatory reunion in February’s Fantastic Four #4!

In addition to gracing the series with breathtaking main covers, legendary artist Alex Ross will mark this major milestone with a series of variant covers for the opening four issues. Presented in striking black and white and capturing the team’s timeless appeal, the iconic Fantastic Four artist has crafted classic portraits of all four members of the team in these solo variant covers.

Discover what happened to the Fantastic Four and find out what it will take to bring them back together when Ryan North and Iban Coello’s Fantastic Four begins on November 9. For more information, visit Marvel.com.

FANTASTIC FOUR #1: Written by RYAN NORTH; Art by IBAN COELLO; Solo Variant Cover by ALEX ROSS; On Sale 11/9

FANTASTIC FOUR #2: Written by RYAN NORTH; Art by IBAN COELLO; Solo Variant Cover by ALEX ROSS; On Sale 12/7

FANTASTIC FOUR #3: Written by RYAN NORTH; Art by IBAN COELLO; Solo Variant Cover by ALEX ROSS; On Sale 1/4

FANTASTIC FOUR #4: Written by RYAN NORTH; Art by IBAN COELLO; Solo Variant Cover by ALEX ROSS; On Sale 2/15

[Based on a press release.]

Marvel Comics’ New Era of Fantastic Four

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The next adventures of Marvel’s first family arrive November 9. Writer Ryan North and artist Iban Coello launch an all-new run of Fantastic Four where they’ll take this beloved team of super hero icons to exciting new places throughout the Marvel Universe and beyond. This bold new era will kick off with the team spread across the country after a devastating event takes place back in New York. North and Coello will craft separate adventures spotlighting each member of the team before bringing in the band back together in epic fashion at the end of the book’s first arc. The debut issue will star Ben Grimm and Alicia Masters as they embark on a road trip that takes a very weird turn…

Something terrible has happened to the Fantastic Four and the Thing and Alicia are traveling across America to leave it behind. But when they stop in a small town for the night and wake up the morning before they arrived, they find themselves caught in a time loop that’s been going on since before they were born… That’s been going on since before they were born… That’s been going on since before they were born…

“I want to do these smaller, self-contained stories in the vein of ’60s Star Trek where they go down to a planet, find a weird thing, fix the weird thing, and move on,” North said of his approach in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “Having these four weirdos roll into town where there’s a mystery or a problem or some sci-fi thing, solve the problem, and then move on struck me as a very interesting way to position the Fantastic Four and tell stories that would feel fresh and not like a retread of what we’ve seen before.”

Whatever happened to the Fantastic Four? Get your first hints in the all-new interior artwork that follows the jump. For more information, visit Marvel.com.

Continue reading →

Pixel Scroll 10/3/22 My Positronic Brain It Teems With Endless Subroutines

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(1) FANTASTIC FICTION AT KGB FUNDRAISER. Fantastic Fiction at KGB is a monthly speculative-fiction reading series held on the second Wednesday of every month at the KGB Bar in Manhattan, hosted by Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel. Admission is always free. To cover the next round of guest expenses, they have launched their first fundraiser in three years, with a $6,000 goal: “Fantastic Fiction reading series at the KGB Bar Gofundme”.

The monthly series, which has been running since the late 1990s , serves as a salon, where writers, editors, agents, and fans of science fiction, fantasy, and horror can co-mingle in a shared event space. The series also served a vital social function during multiple Covid lockdown periods, when we featured authors from all over the globe on our live YouTube channel, and people who were isolated due to the lockdown could keep in contact with the writing community. We also release a free podcast, where we post audio recordings of the monthly readings.

Running the series costs us money. We pay a stipend to our guests, we pay for their drinks at the bar, and we also take them out to dinner after the readings. At present, the series costs about $2,000 per year to run. Unfortunately, we are almost out of money from our last fundraiser three years ago. We hope to raise at least $6,000, which will fund the series for three more years. It would be great if we could raise more.

(2) BLACK PANTHER. “Show them who we are.” A new trailer for Marvel Studios’ Black Panther: Wakanda Forever dropped today. See it only in theaters beginning November 11.

(3) CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS — JOURNEY PLANET: ANTHROPOCENE RUMINATIONS. [Item by Olav Rokne and Amanda Wakaruk.] When Chris Garcia and James Bacon approached us to guest edit an edition of their Hugo-winning fanzine Journey Planet, they asked us “what subject would you most like to tackle?”

The answer was easy: climate fiction.

Climate change is the defining crisis of our age. Given that the causes of climate change are rooted in technological transformations celebrated by the past century of science fiction, enthusiasts like us have some responsibility to grapple with what it means.

The upcoming “Anthropocene Ruminations” will contain some of the various ways in which SFF fans are grappling with a rapidly heating and chaotic planet: through fiction, through art, through poetry, and through critical discourse. 

We’re hoping to have reviews of books depicting climate change, discussions of historical trends, and examinations of aspects of climate change that may have been neglected by genre fiction. 

We’d love to hear article and art pitches from across the fandom community (that means all y’all). Send us your ideas before October 15 (email BOTH of us at amanda.wakaruk at gmail dot com and olavrokne at gmail dot com). We’re aiming to have the finished works submitted by November 15. 

Will “Anthropocene Ruminations” singlehandedly solve climate change? It’s too early to say for certain. What it’s not too early to say is that it will contain some pieces by Hugo-finalist and Hugo-winning fanwriters.

Drop us a line. Amanda & Olav. Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog co-editors

(4) KEEPING UP WITH CORA BUHLERT. The alumni newsletter of Bremen University, Kurzmeldungen, listed Cora Buhlert’s Hugo win.

Issue Zero of New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine published Cora’s article about C.L. Moore and Jirel of Joiry, as well as fiction and non-fiction by Howard Andrew Jones, Brian Murphy, Milton J. Davis, Nicole Emmelhainz, David C. Smith, Dariel R.A. Quiogue, Remco van Strane and Angeline B. Adams, Bryn Hammond, J.M. Clarke, T.K. Rex, Robin Marx and editor Oliver Brackebury. The digital edition is free, the print editions are fairly cheap.

And Cora has an essay about anime in West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s in Rising Sun Reruns: Memories of Japanese TV Shows from Today’s Grown-Up Kids.

In these pages you will find glowing memories of flights of fancy such as Ultraman, Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot, Astro Boy, Battle of the Planets, Space Giants, Speed Racer, Robotech, and many, many more—including a few you may never even heard of!

(5) NOBEL PRIZE FOR PHYSIOLOGY OR MEDICINE. “Svante Pääbo Wins Nobel Prize for Unraveling the Mysteries of Neanderthal DNA” – Smithsonian Magazine has the story.

The Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine awarded the field’s top prize on Monday to Svante Pääbo, a Swedish geneticist who determined how to extract and analyze DNA from 40,000-year-old Neanderthal bones. Pääbo’s decades of research have made it possible for scientists to begin probing differences between today’s modern humans and their ancient ancestors.

Pääbo, who is 67, has spent decades pioneering and perfecting new methods of extracting Neanderthal DNA, an extremely complex and challenging process. Over time, very old DNA degrades and can become polluted with the DNA of bacteria, and modern scientists can also easily contaminate it with their own genetic material.

But time and again, Pääbo found ways around these and other issues. In 2010, after years of painstaking work, Pääbo and his team published the sequenced Neanderthal genome, a feat that at one time was considered impossible, reports the New York Times’ Benjamin Mueller. As Elizabeth Kolbert wrote in her book The Sixth Extinction, the process was like trying to reconstruct a “Manhattan telephone book from pages that have been put through a shredder, mixed with yesterday’s trash, and left to rot in a landfill.”

…On Monday morning, Pääbo was just finishing a cup of tea when he got a call from Sweden. He assumed the call was bad news about his family’s summer home in Sweden and was instead surprised to learn he’d won the Nobel Prize. When asked whether he ever envisioned winning science’s most prestigious prize, Pääbo humbly replied that he “somehow did not think that this really would… qualify for a Nobel Prize,” per an interview posted on the Nobel Prize website….

Here’s a further excerpt from the Nobel’s “Svante Pääbo – Interview”.

…AS: Your work is of course on the sequencing of these early hominins. What does our knowledge, your knowledge of the genetic makeup of those species tell us about our relationship with them.

SP: Well, it does tell us that we are very closely related, first of all, and we’re actually so closely related that they have contributed quite directly, 50, 60 thousand years ago, DNA to the ancestors of most people today, those who have their roots outside Africa. And that variation that, sort of, those variants do have an influence, and influence many things in our physiology today.

AS: Do you think that changes our view of ourselves, knowing that?

SP: In some sense, I do think it does so, the sort of realisation that until quite recently, maybe 14 hundred generations or so ago there were other forms of humans around and they mixed with our ancestors and have contributed to us today. The fact that the last 40 thousand years is quite unique in human history, in that we are the only form of humans around. Until that time, there were almost always other types of humans that existed.

(6) A MOMENT IN SFF HISTORY. “Science Fiction In Communist Bloc Changed Forever 40 Years Ago” writes Jaroslav Olsa Jr., the Consul General of the Czech Consulate in Los Angeles.

In October 1982, the first issue of FANTASTYKA, Polish science fiction monthly reached its first readers. This was the first real science fiction magazine in the former Soviet bloc! And it had an enormous impact on science fiction in other neighbouring countries as the situation in Eastern Europe was significantly different than in Western Europe as all publishing business in Soviet bloc was under strict control of each state and its leading (often Communist) party. The publishing houses were operated and owned predominantely by state ministries or its subsidiaries, controlled more or less visibly by various types of censorship bodies and though in some Soviet bloc countries in different times publishing was allowed greater freedom (e. g. Yugoslavia, Hungary and/or 1980s Poland), there was never allowed a free press.

And thus even publishing SF fanzines was a sort of risky adventure…

Thank you late Adam Hollanek, late Maciej Parowski, late Andrzej Krzepkowski, Jacek Rodek, Andrzej Wójcik and many many others, who gave us Fantastyka, and who helped us to open the window to science fiction in the West and internationalize science fiction – something then a real novelty….

(7) MICKEY MOUSE CAPITALISM. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In the Financial Times behind a paywall, Elaine Moore discusses how Disney CEO Bob Chapek is concerned that people who show up at a Disney park every week are crowding out the occasional visitor who will spend a lot of money on stuff.

The problem is that super fans don’t spend as much per visit as occasional park visitors.  There are only so many Minnie Mouse headbands a person can wear.  For some, the annual pass that allows buyers to visit Disney parks throughout the year is extremely good value too.  A one day trip to Disney World in Florida is $109.  The annual Incredi Pass is $1,299 plus tax. Visit once a month and you break even.  Go every week and you’d save over $4,000.  The mismatch has shades of the MoviePass debacle, in which subscribers paid less than $10 per month for multiple cinema trips.  MoviePass guessed they might visit once or twice a month.  But their willingness to go day after day left the company bankrupt…

…At the recent D23 Expo there were complaints that passes were still suspended.  Unluckily for them, Chapek used to run the parks division.  He knows that demand is far higher than supply and is sufficiently unsentimental to take advantage.  Prices would double and visitors would pay them.  Disney fans may moan but they will still keep coming back.”

(8) ANTI-MUSLIM SENTIMENTS. The culture war is engulfing Bollywood reports the Guardian: “Bollywood under siege as rightwing social media boycotts start to bite”.

…For decades, India’s Hindi film industry, known as Bollywood, has been one of the country’s most popular products, for Indians themselves and the world at large. But the consolidation of Hindu nationalism under the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has marked a cultural shift.

Laal Singh Chaddha stars, and is produced by, Aamir Khan, one of Hindi cinema’s trio of superstar Khans (Shahrukh and Salman are the other two, all unrelated). On its release, social-media platforms witnessed a tidal wave of targeted attacks calling for a boycott of the movie. The resurfacing of remarks made by Khan on the rise of “intolerance” in India in 2015, as well as clips from his 2014 film PK (which criticised blind-faith belief) were coupled with targeted tweets. Laal Singh Chaddha has fared poorly at the box office, but the calls for a boycott have not stopped. Other movies, such as Vikram Vedha, Dobaara, Shamshera and Brahmastra, are also in the line of fire, the last two owing to the recirculation of 11-year-old remarks by the lead actor, Ranbir Kapoor, on eating beef….

(9) SALES FIGURES. In the Washington Post, David Betancourt looks at the process that Hasbro uses to make 32-inch action figures that cost $399,99.  (The latest, Galactus, will be “a towering 32-inch monstrosity of plastic articulation.”)  Betancourt says Hasbro uses a crowdfunding method of deciding which giant action figures to make; they greenlit the huge Galactus last summer after 14,000 people agreed to buy it.) “Would you buy a $400 Marvel action figure? Thousands of people can’t wait.”

In comic books,Galactus is known as the devourer of worlds. When it comes to action figures, Galactus is now the destroyer of wallets.

Hasbro decided that its newest figure depicting the giant planet eater from Marvel’s Fantastic Four wouldn’t be the typical six-inch toy that retails inthe $20 to $30 range and decorates work desks and bookshelves. This Galactus,with a design based on the art of famed Marvel writer-artist John Byrne, would be a towering 32-inch-tall monstrosity of plastic articulation. The figure, scheduled for release some timethis fall, is the biggest toy Hasbro has ever built for its Marvel line, which is fitting, given Galactus’s gigantic stature….

(10) A FREE-TO-READ STORY. Sunday Morning Transport presents “A Hole in the Light” by Annalee Newitz, “an astounding new world wrapped around a stellar story of grief and growth.”

Arch had never been to a ritual of dissolution for someone who mattered.

Of course, there were distant kin who had died. But when they dissolved, it felt like they had moved to the next village: poignant, but not a disaster. The artificiality of the ritual made her more uncomfortable than their loss. Well, perhaps that wasn’t quite true. She had genuinely suffered when her physics teacher had died, and she could no longer ask questions about what lay beyond the village of Slope-Toward-Sea, on the planet Skiff, wrapped in the mottled glow of the eroding firmament. Even when her teacher dissolved, though, the ritual had seemed absurd….

(11) MEMORY LANE.  

2016 – [By Cat Eldridge.] Six years ago on NBC the Timeless series debuted. (Yes, I do delve into the recent past on occasion). It would last but two seasons. (Yes, two seasons. Read below for why it was only two seasons, really.)

Not terribly original in concept, it involved a group that attempts to stop a mysterious organization from changing the course of history through time travel. 

It was created by Eric Kripke who of Supernatural series fame along with the later The Boys, and Shawn Ryan who’s done nothing else they genre wise but has created S.W.A.T. that I love and Lie to Me, a rather odd crime drama series I also like a lot. Yes, I have odd tastes.

Project Lifeboat, among its members, had a history professor, a Delta forces soldier, a computer programmer and a creator of the Lifeboat time machines. Ok I did say it wasn’t a terribly original concept, didn’t I so guess what? NBC got sued by the Spanish series El ministerio del tiempo (The Ministry of Time), which follows the adventures of a three-person team made up of two men and a woman who travel to the past with a view to preserving past events.  

It went to court but eventually “their attorneys of record hereby stipulate that the entire civil action may be and hereby is dismissed with prejudice, with each party bearing that party’s fees and costs of suit.” One assumes that large sums of money were involved. Isn’t there always money involved when such things need to be settled?

Getting back to the series, it was cancelled after the second season but a massive, and I do mean massive, fan campaign sort of saved it, so it got a special two-part finale. It originally didn’t make the cut for the next fall season but when they started getting a pushback from fans, NBC responded saying “And then we woke up the next morning, heard the outcry (from fans). We went back to the drawing board, with our partners at Sony, and we found a way to bring it back. It’s extraordinarily well produced and deserved to come back.”

Unlike many similar series, it was allowed a proper wrap-up. Fandango noted, “A fitting farewell, Timeless wraps with a fun, festive finale that ties up loose ends and provides enough fan service to satisfy.”

It carries a most excellent seventy-seven percent rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes. It does not appear to be streaming for free anywhere. 

(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born October 3, 1933 — Norman Adams. The SF Encyclopedia says genre wise that “Adams may be best known for his cover for the first edition of Larry’s Niven’s World of Ptavvs” on Ballantine Books in 1966.  I must say having looked at his ISFDB listings that their assessment is absolutely right. (Died 2014.)
  • Born October 3, 1927 — Don Bensen. Best-known for his novel And Having Writ… which is not in print in form digitally or in hard copy — damn it. Indeed, nothing by him is. Huh. (Died 1997.)
  • Born October 3, 1931 — Ray Nelson, 91. SF writer best known for his short story “Eight O’Clock in the Morning” which was the basis of John Carpenter’s They Live.  He later collaborated with Philip K. Dick on The Ganymede Takeover. In the 1940s Nelson appropriated the propeller beanie as a symbol of science fiction fandom. His fannish cartoons were recognized with the Rotsler Award in 2003. He was inducted to the First Fandom Hall of Fame in 2019.
  • Born October 3, 1935 — Madlyn Rhue. She on Trek’s “Space Seed” as Lt. Marla McGivers, Khan Noonien Singh’s (Ricardo Montalbán) love interest. Other genre appearances included being on the original Fantasy Island as Lillie Langtry in “Legends,” and Maria in the “Firefall” episode of Kolchak: The Night. (Died 2003.)
  • Born October 3, 1944 – Katharine Kerr, 78. Ok I’m going to confess that I’ve not read her Deverry series so please tell me how they are. Usually I do read such Celtic tinged series so I don’t know how I missed them.
  • Born October 3, 1964 — Clive Owen, 58. First role I saw him in was the title role of Stephen Crane in the Chancer series. Not genre, but fascinating none the less. He’s been King Arthur in film of the same name where Keira Knightley was Guinevere. He’s also was in Sin City as Dwight McCarthy, and in The Pink Panther (though weirdly uncredited) as Nigel Boswell/Agent 006. I’ll also single him out for being Commander Arun Filitt in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.
  • Born October 3, 1973 — Lena Headey, 49. Many of you will know her as Cersei Lannister on Game of Thrones, but I liked her sociopathic Madeline “Ma-Ma” Madrigal on Dredd better.  She was also Angelika in The Brothers Grimm, a film I’m sure I’ve seen but remember nothing about. 

(13) COMICS SECTION.

(14) SURPRISE BEGINNING. John Grayshaw of the Middletown PA Public Library arranged for questions about Murray Leinster to be answered for his Online Science Fiction Book Club by Steven H Silver and the author’s daughter, Billee Stallings. See the Q&A here: “Interview about Murray Leinster”. Note: Murray Leinster was the pen name of Will Jenkins, but I never knew til now that H.L. Mencken was behind his decision to use one.

Damo Mac Choiligh: A trivial question perhaps, but where did he get the pseudonym ‘Leinster’? The word is the English version of the name of a region of Ireland, well known to any Rugby fans.

Billee: When Will was published in Smart Set magazine in his teens, H. L. Mencken put down the other magazines he was selling to and said he should use a pen name and save his own for the “good stuff” (ie; Smart Set). Dad selected Murray from his mother’s maiden name (Murry. Wyndham Martyn, an English writer for the magazine, suggested Leinster. Martyn (known for the Anthony Trent novels) told him the Fitzgeralds (Dad’s middle name) were descended from the Dukes of Leinster.

(15) A DIFFERENT KIND OF TIMELESS NEWS. In 2020, Alex Ross crafted over 30 extraordinary depictions of Marvel’s most beloved super heroes in a beautiful art piece known as Timeless. This iconic imagery was used to produce a best-selling variant cover program and now… it’s the villains turn.

The legendary artist’s newest art piece deviously unites 37 of Marvel’s classic villains! Capturing the menace, danger, and allure of characters like Green Goblin, Doctor Doom, and Thanos, this stunning group shot represents the definitive takes on Marvel’s deadliest foes straight from one the industry’s most revered talents! Look for this beautifully painted artwork to be used for a new series of variant covers starting in March 2023.

“The passion I held for illustrating many of Marvel’s heroes in a timeless representation was easily matched by the passion I felt for illustrating the villains,” Ross said. “Marvel clearly has some of the greatest concepts in the realm of supervillains as well as heroes.”

Find more information about Alex Ross’ new piece including which titles it’ll grace the covers of at Marvel.com.

(16) HERE THEY COME AGAIN. “’The Rings of Power’ Season 2 Has Started Filming” in the UK says The Hollywood Reporter.

The news follows the first official Nielsen ratings being released Thursday for the Prime Video series, showing The Rings of Power topped the streaming charts for its debut week with 1.3 billion minutes viewed (likely an Amazon series record given that only two hours were released).

The first season of the show was filmed in New Zealand over an epic stretch of 18 months during the pandemic. For season two, which will consist of eight episodes, Amazon switched the show’s production to the U.K., which is considered more economical and is also where the company is establishing a multishow hub….

(17) SCREEN TIME. Here are JustWatch’s September’s Sci-Fi Top 10 lists:

Rank*MoviesTV shows
1NopeQuantum Leap
2Everything Everywhere All at OnceThe Handmaid’s Tale
3Jurassic World DominionSeverance
4MoonfallWar of the Worlds
5AvatarThe Twilight Zone
6PreyOrphan Black
7Jurassic World: Fallen KingdomDoctor Who
8The ThingLa Brea
9Jurassic WorldThe X-Files
10Crimes of the FutureMoonhaven

*Based on JustWatch popularity score. Genre data is sourced from themoviedb.org

(18) MORE HOLLYWOOD BUZZ. The teaser trailer for the new Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania movie dropped Friday.

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Olav Rokne, Kate Yeazel, Kathy Sullivan, Andrew Porter, Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 9/7/22 The File Is In The Mail

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(1) FILER SUMMIT MEETING. I got to meet Steve Vertlieb and his brother Erwin for the first time today! Steve was visiting from the East Coast. His earliest contributions to File 770 date to 2009. I’m glad we finally got together.

Steve and Mike
Erwin and Mike

(2) GILLER PRIZE. The 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist was released September 6. The Prize is a celebration of Canadian literary talent. There are two works of genre interest:

  • Kim Fu’s story collection Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century
  • Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour

The complete longlist is here.

(3) KGB. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Nicholas Kaufmann and Naseem Jamnia in-person at the KGB Bar on Wednesday, September 14 at 7:00 p.m. Eastern.

Nicholas Kaufmann

Nicholas Kaufmann is a Bram Stoker Award-nominated, Thriller Award-nominated, Shirley Jackson Award-nominated, and Dragon Award-nominated author. He’s written numerous works of horror and fantasy, including the bestsellers 100 Fathoms Below (written with Steven L. Kent) and The Hungry Earth. His short fiction has appeared in Cemetery Dance, Black Static, Nightmare Magazine, Interzone, and others. In addition to his own original work, he has written for such properties as Zombies vs. Robots, The Rocketeer, and Warhammer. He and his wife Alexa live in Brooklyn, NY.

Naseem Jamnia

Naseem Jamnia is the author of The Bruising of Qilwa (Tachyon Publications), which introduces their queernormative, Persian-inspired world. Their work has appeared in The Washington Post, Cosmopolitan, The Writer’s Chronicle, The Rumpus, and other venues. They’ve also received fellowships from Lambda Literary, Bitch Media, and Otherwise, and were named the inaugural Samuel R. Delany fellow. A Persian-Chicagoan, Naseem now lives in Reno with their husband, dog, and two cats.

At the KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003 (Just off 2nd Ave, upstairs) on September 14 at  7:00 p.m. Eastern.

(4) 3DOA. Austin McConnell looks at the 2004 Indian film Aabra Ka Daabra, a Harry Potter imitation that featured 3D gimmicks, dancing, and some incredibly intrusive product placements and bombed spectacularly.“Why Bollywood’s Harry Potter Was A Box Office Bomb”.

(5) STRAUB’S DAUGHTER PAYS TRIBUTE. [Item by Andrew Porter.] Emma Straub wrote about her father on Twitter. Includes never-before-seen by us photos. Thread starts here.

Emma Straub will be one of the many writers at the Brooklyn Book Festival 2022 to be held from September 25 through October 3. She and A. M. Holmes will be on the “Alternative Histories” panel on October 2.

(6) PHILLIP MANN (1942-2022). New Zealand sff author Phillip Mann died September 1. His first science fiction novel, The Eye of the Queen appeared in 1982. His novel The Disestablishment of Paradise was a 2014 finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award and John W. Campbell Memorial Award.

Her wrote four novels in the A Land Fit for Heroes series, and two in the Gardener series.

He celebrated his 80th birthday last month at the launch of his most recent novel Chevalier & Gawayn: The Ballad of the Dreamer with family, friends, colleagues and former students.

He won the Sir Julius Vogel Award for services to science fiction, fantasy and horror in 2010. In 2017, he was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to theatre and literature.

(7) MEMORY LANE.  

1985 – [By Cat Eldridge.] Star Wars Ewoks (1985 – 1987)

The Star Wars video universe is vast and full of series that likely you didn’t know existed. Such is the case with the animated Star Wars Ewoks series that lasted but two years thirty-seven years ago. Panned by many critics at the time as excessively cute, and well it was, it was a children’s show after all.

The press kit at the time described it thusly: “A stand-alone collection of stories, Star Wars Ewoks focuses on the fur-balls from Return of the Jedi and their many misadventures into the unknown, the magical and downright absurd. So is the life of an Ewok.”

It was released the same time as Star Wars Droids which I think was better series but – alas — lasted but a single season. 

It featured the characters introduced in Return of the Jedi (yes, I won’t used the revisionist titles later introduced) and further known through Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure and its sequel Ewoks: The Battle for Endor. 

I was surprised to discover Paul Dini along with Bob Carrau were involved in this project and Star Wars Droids was his only work in this universe.  It had an extensive voice cast with Cree Summer who I recognize from Batman: The Animated Series work being the only one knew.

Critics either were hostile or just didn’t like it. Syfy thought it was a market scheme to sell toys, toys and more toys. Well if it was meant to do that it failed as the ratings were poor and it was cancelled after two seasons. Oh, and ironically it was later broadcast in reruns on Sci-Fi Channel’s Cartoon Quest where it was used to sell product. 

Was it any good? Really? You’re asking me? I’m not the right person to ask that but yes, I’ll say that they did a reasonable job with storytelling here. 

It lasted two seasons and twenty-six episodes. It is now on Disney + as is all is all such material.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born September 7, 1795 — John William Polidori. His most remembered work was “The Vampyre”, the first modern vampire story published in 1819. Although originally and erroneously accredited to Lord Byron, both Byron and Polidori affirmed that the story was his. Because of this work, he is credited by several as the creator of the vampire genre of fantasy fiction. (Died 1821.)
  • Born September 7, 1937 — John Phillip Law. He’s probably best remembered as the blind angel Pygar in the cult film Barbarella which featured Jane Fonda in that bikini. He shows up in Tarzan, the Ape Man as Harry Holt, and he’s in a South African SF film, Space Mutiny, as Flight Commander Elijah Kalgan, that’s set on a generation ship. Look actual SF!  (Died 2008.)
  • Born September 7, 1955 — Mira Furlan. Another one who died far, far too young. She’s best known for her role as the Minbari Ambassador Delenn on the entire run of Babylon 5, and also as Danielle Rousseau on Lost. She’s reunited with Bill Mumy and Bruce Boxleitner at least briefly in Marc Zicree’s Space Command. She had a recurring role as The Traveller in Just Add Magic YA series. (Died 2021.)
  • Born September 7, 1960 — Christopher Villiers, 62. He was Professor Moorhouse in “Mummy on the Orient Express”, a Twelfth Doctor story. It’s one of the better tales of the very uneven Capaldi run. He’s also Sir Kay in First Knight and is an unnamed officer in From Time to Time which based on Lucy M. Boston’s The Chimneys of Green Knowe.
  • Born September 7, 1966 — Toby Jones, 56. He appeared in “Amy’s Choice”, an Eleventh Doctor story, as the Dream Lord. In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, he voiced Dobby the house elf. And in Finding Neverland, Mr. Smee, Captain Hook’s bo’sun. Guess what work that film was based on. Finally, I’ll note that he was — using motion capture — Aristides Silk in The Adventures of Tintin. 
  • Born September 7, 1973 — Alex Kurtzman, 49. Ok, a number of sites claim he destroyed Trek. Why the hatred for him? Mind you I’m more interested that he and Roberto Orci created the superb Fringe series, and that alone redeems them for me. Fringe is streaming now on Amazon Prime and HBO Max. 
  • Born September 7, 1974 — Noah Huntley, 48. He has appeared in films such as 28 Days Later, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (excellent film), Snow White and the Huntsman (a truly great film), Event Horizon (surely you’ve something else to do) and Dracula Untold (woo, not so great). He’s Gawain in The Mists of Avalon series (ok, so he’s got a truly mixed track record) and shows up as Donovan Osborn in the CW series Pandora which, I’m not kidding, got a Rotten Tomatoes zero percent approval rating, a phenomenal thing to do. Ouch. 
  • Born September 7, 1993 — Taylor Gray, 29. He’s best known for voicing Ezra Bridger on the animated Star Wars Rebels which I highly recommend if you’re into Star Wars at all as it’s most excellent.  He also played Friz Freleng in Walt Before Mickey. 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Headline: Not at all costs. 

Text: I still think it’s a good idea that we insisted that climate projects shouldn’t decrease the level of jobs and welfare.

(10) FANTASTIC FOUR. This month, Ross returns to the Marvel comics universe with Fantastic Four: Full Circle, a long-awaited passion project. Publishers Weekly interviewed him about it: “Alex Ross Comes Full Circle”.

Why was it important for you to be the artist as well as the writer for this work?

For one main reason: Jack Kirby. Jack plotted his comics and did not work from full scripts for the majority of his career, but he wasn’t able to get that autonomy of single-creator status on the Fantastic Four because he did develop it with Stan Lee and it became identified with Stan’s style of voice. He yearned to take the reins of everything, and it didn’t happen on that book, despite the fact that the creative contribution he gave to it was so extensive and unfortunately underappreciated. It’s his work history and example that drove me to make sure that the work I do here and all storytelling I personally draw in the future benefits from his experience. I will still collaborate with others, but my fully drawn works need to be just me so there is no confusion as to whom to attribute the effort.

(11) WE’RE NOT EVOLVED TO LIVE IN SPACE. Which you already know. Space.com reports “Astronauts’ blood shows signs of DNA mutations due to spaceflight”.

Astronaut cancer risk needs careful monitoring, concludes a study that stored spaceflyer blood for 20 years.

All fourteen astronauts in the study, from NASA’s space shuttle program, had DNA mutations in blood-forming stem cells, a Nature Communications Biology study(opens in new tab) Aug. 31 concluded. The mutations, though unusually high considering the astronauts’ age, was below a key threshold of concern, however.

While the study is unique for keeping astronaut blood around for so long, the results are not show-stopping. Rather, the researchers suggest that astronauts should be subject to periodic blood screening to keep an eye on possible mutations. (And it should be considered in context; another 2019 study, for example, found that astronauts are not dying from cancer due to ionizing space radiation.)…

(12) ROARING OTTER. Did we hunt these guys out of existence, too? “In Ethiopia, scientists identify a fossil otter the size of a lion” – Phys.org has the specifications.

Scientists have identified a new species of long-extinct otter in Ethiopia that was the size of a modern lion. Weighing an estimated 200 kilograms, or 440 pounds, it is the largest otter ever described; it would have rubbed elbows, and possibly competed for food, with our much smaller ancestors when it lived alongside them 3.5 million to 2.5 million years ago. A paper describing the animal just appeared in the French scientific journal Comptes Rendus Palevol.

“The peculiar thing, in addition to its massive size, is that [isotopes] in its teeth suggest it was not aquatic, like all modern otters,” said study coauthor Kevin Uno, a geochemist at the Columbia Climate School’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “We found it had a diet of terrestrial animals, also differing from modern otters.”

(13) FORWARD, MARCH! [Item by Daniel Dern.] Another “I’ll take ‘What could possibly go wrong?’ for $200…” “Scientists Create Cyborg Cockroaches Controlled By Solar-Powered Backpacks” – Slashdot restrains its enthusiasm.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET:

In a new study, published Monday in the journal npj Flexible Electronics, an international team of researchers revealed it has engineered a system to remotely control the legs of cockroaches from afar. The system, which is basically a cockroach backpack wired into the creature’s nervous system, has a power output about 50 times higher than previous devices and is built with an ultrathin and flexible solar cell that doesn’t hinder the roach’s movement. Pressing a button sends a shock to the backpack that tricks the roach into moving a certain direction.

Cockroach cyborgs are not a new idea. Back in 2012, researchers at North Carolina State University were experimenting with Madagascar hissing cockroaches and wireless backpacks, showing the critters could be remotely controlled to walk along a track….

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In “Honest Game Trailers:  Cult of the Lamb,” Fandom Games says this “well-crafted Indy” begins with the premise:  what happens if cuddly animal characters were bloodthirsty advocated of evil?   The characters are “adorable idiots you can manipulate” So in one game you can have huggable characters and grisly human sacrifice.

[Thanks to Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Daniel Dern, Lise Andreasen, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jack Lint.]

Pixel Scroll 12/13/21 It’s A Big Time For A Case Of Pixels

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(1) LODESTAR BASE. Sara Felix today previewed the spectacular base she’s created for the 2021 Lodestar Award, and the pins for finalists.

(2) NIGHT OF THE COOTERS. A minute-long snip from the project is available on YouTube.

George RR Martin Presents – Howard Waldrop’s Night of the Cooters. Lumenscapes and Trioscope Studios have teamed up to present Vincent D’onofrio’s film adaptation of the classic short story in glorious “Trioscope”. NIGHT OF THE COOTERS tells the tale of townsfolk in Pachuco Texas in the 1800’s rallying around one cause, survival against the unwelcome visitors from “up there”. Join the townsfolk on their journey to figure out what the hell is going on in the big hole at the edge of town. With a screenplay by the one and only Joe Lansdale, and music by the prolific Ramin Djwadi get ready for a ride like no other through the mind of the great Howard Waldrop.

(Clarkesworld hosts Waldrop’s story if you haven’t read it yet.)

(3) OCTAVIA BUTLER. According to The Portalist, “These Are All the Octavia Butler Adaptations Currently in Development”. One movie, four TV series, and a graphic novel.

 Octavia Butler was a science fiction writer like no other. Her works are essential for their prescient, intricate worldbuilding, empathy, and gripping characters. It’s no surprise that more and more adaptations of her novels have moved ahead in recent years. From a soaring opera to bestselling graphic novel retellings, her work continues to find new fans through diverse mediums. 

But what of the adaptations to come? 

(4) HOMAGE. Vanity Fair’s Cassie Da Costa give a fuller overview of this new wave of adaptations in “The Second Coming of Octavia E. Butler”.

…It’s a tremendous amount of interpretation by an impressive slate of Black talent, a gift that seems to have fallen from the heavens. Merrilee Heifetz, Butler’s former agent and current literary executor from Writers House, handles the options for Butler’s oeuvre alongside the author’s cousin Ernestine Walker. When I ask what she expects from all these adaptations, she says, “All you can do is try to bring it to people whose vision you feel you can trust. And you look at someone like Janicza [Bravo], her visual style is incredible. I can’t wait to see what she does.” Years ago, when Heifetz saw that Jacobs-Jenkins was interested in writing a Kindred adaptation, she went to see his play Everybody at the Signature Theatre in New York and was impressed. Jacobs-Jenkins, who worked on the HBO miniseries Watchmen, became a huge Butler fan in high school, and when Breaking Bad was in its heyday, he realized Kindred would make a great show. He told his agent he wanted the rights….

(5) 1884. That’s when Zamyatin was born – and the last two digits seem prescient. The New Yorker’s Masha Gessen revisits We, “The Russian Novel That Foresaw—but Underestimated—Totalitarianism”.

…Every year when I read Yevgeny Zamyatin’s “We” with my students, I wish the psychiatric-ward schedule were hanging in the classroom, because Zamyatin’s novel imagined a regimented way of life, and because it, too, seemed to subvert the flow of time. Born in 1884, Zamyatin was a revolutionary, indeed a Bolshevik; he was imprisoned and sent into internal exile in the tsar’s Russia, and then moved for a time to England, returning just a month before the Bolsheviks came to power. Three years later, he wrote his dystopia, possibly revising it in 1921 or 1922. By the time he had completed a final draft, the Bolsheviks had already imposed censorship and created the secret police. It took them a few years to establish Soviet rule over most of what had been the Russian Empire, to expropriate most property and to build its first concentration camp, and it took longer to establish a reign of terror. But Zamyatin had already written a novel that described many of the specifics of that terror, and of other terrors to come in the twentieth century….

(6) 1940. First Fandom Experience has published a 52-page digital sampler for Volume Two of The Visual History of Science Fiction Fandom. See it at the link. The full book is over 450 pages.

As 1940 dawned, America was recovering, poised between the Great Depression and entry into World War II. Science fiction fandom was growing up.

With maturity came new levels of confidence and accomplishment. Fans asked profound questions of themselves and their peers: Are we special in some way, smarter or more perceptive than others? If so, what does that mean for our role in society? How should we respond to the troubles in Europe? Should we unite under a single banner? 

Fans traveled more often, and farther. The central event of the year – the 1940 World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago – spurred sojourns from both coasts and across mid-America. Fans gathered and traditions that persist to modern times were established.

All of this comes to life through the words of fans as they wrote them at the time, the passions and fears and aspirations they voiced, the images they drew and the journeys they described. As rich a year in the life of fandom as ever there was, and as richly told by those who lived it.

(7) SOCIAL MEDIA V. BOOK SALES. Interesting publishing industry info here, but no sff names in the New York Times article “Millions of Followers? For Book Sales, ‘It’s Unreliable.’”

… It’s difficult to predict whether a book will be a hit. A jar of tomato sauce doesn’t change that much from year to year, making demand reasonably predictable. But every book is different, an individual work of art or culture, so when the publishing industry tries to forecast demand for new titles, it is, however thoughtfully, guessing. Because there are so few reliable metrics to look at, social-media followings have become some of the main data points publishers use to try to make their guesses more educated.

An author’s following has become a standard part of the equation when publishers are deciding whether to acquire a book. Followings can affect who gets a book deal and how big an advance that author is paid, especially when it comes to nonfiction. But despite their importance, they are increasingly seen as unpredictable gauges of how well a book is actually going to sell.

Even having one of the biggest social-media followings in the world is not a guarantee.

“The only reliable part about it,” said Shannon DeVito, director of books at Barnes & Noble, “is that it’s unreliable.”…

(8) ANNE RICE. Andrew Porter shared his photos of Anne Rice taken at the 1988 American Booksellers Association Convention. Rice died December 11 (NPR’s tribute is here.)

  • Anne Rice. Photo by and © Andrew Porter
  • Anne Rice. Photo by and © Andrew Porter

(9) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.

1985 — [Item by Cat Eldridge.] On this date thirty-six years ago, Clue premiered. It was directed by Jonathan Lynn from the screenplay he wrote based on his story off from the Clue game created in 1943 by British board game designer Anthony E. Pratt. (It’s called Cluedo – or Murder at Tudor Close in Britain.) It was produced by Debra Hill, best known for producing various works of John Carpenter.  It had a stellar cast of Tim Curry, Madeline Kahn, Christopher Lloyd, Michael McKean, Martin Mull. Lesley Ann Warren and Eileen Brennan. Tim Curry played The Butler. 

Most critics did not like it, with both Siskel and Ebert dissing it. Most particularly hated the three alternative endings. It barely broken even at the Box Office despite costing only fifteen million to make. 

It was novelized as Clue The Novel, written by Michael McDowell. It includes the three endings from the movie, plus a fourth ending not in the movie.

It however has a stellar rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes of eighty-eight percent. Clue is currently airing on Paramount+. You can purchase it at Amazon and iTunes for six dollars right now. I think it’s a fine holiday film, and an equally excellent film to watch any time of year. 

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born December 13, 1915 — Ross Macdonald. He who writes the most excellent hard boiled deceive novels is here because ISFDB lists three of his short stories as being genre: “The Bearded Lady”, “Gone Girl” and “Guilt-Edged Blonde”. Now I’m seriously doubting that Macdonald wrote any genre, but I’m hoping one of y’all has read them and can confirm, whether or not they are genre. And yes, I’m a big fan of his Lew Archer novels. (Died 1983.)
  • Born December 13, 1929 — Christopher Plummer. Let’s see… Does Rudyard Kipling in The Man Who Would Be King count? If not, The Return of the Pink Panther does. That was followed by Starcrash, a space opera I suspect hardly anyone saw, which was also the case with Somewhere in Time. Now Dreamscape was fun and well received.  Skipping his role as General Chang in The Undiscovered Country. Opinions everyone? I know I’ve mixed feelings on Chang. I see Plummer’s in Twelve Monkeys and I’ve not seen The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus yet. (Died 2021.)
  • Born December 13, 1935 — Gary Combs, 86. Though originally uncredited, he was the Gorn Captain in the “Arena” episode of Trek. As a stunt double for Shatner, he appeared on “Operation – Annihilate!”, “Space Seed” and “The Galileo Seven”. He did stunts on The Wrath of Khan as well. He eventually rose to become a stunt coordinator on such films as The Hollow Man.
  • Born December 13, 1925 — Dick Van Dyke, 96. Bert/Mr. Dawes Sr. in Mary Poppins followed shortly by being Caractacus Pott in the film adaptation in Ian Fleming’s novel Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang. (No it’s not the same character as he is in the book.)  He voices the lead character in the animated Tubby the Tuba film and plays D.A. Fletcher in Dick Tracy. He narrates Walt: The Man Behind the Myth whose subject matter you can guess. Played Commissioner Gordon in Batman: New Times as well. Shows up in both of the Night at the Museum films which sort of interest me. And yes, he has a role as Mr. Dawes Jr. in Mary Poppins Returns.
  • Born December 13, 1949 — R. A. MacAvoy, 72. Winner of the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. I’m very, very fond of her Black Dragon series, Tea with the Black Dragon and Twisting the Rope.  (Tea with the Black Dragon was nominated for a Hugo at L.A. Con II, the year David Brin’s Startide Rising won.) The only other thing I’ve read of hers is The Book of Kells, so do tell me about her other works. 
  • Born December 13, 1954 — Tamora Pierce, 67. Her first book series, The Song of the Lioness, about her character Alanna going through the trials of training as a knight, sold very well and was well received by readers. That series is set in Tortall, a world akin to the European Middle Ages. What I’ve read of it I like a lot. She won the Edward E. Smith Memorial Award for Imaginative Fiction in 2005, a rare honor indeed. 
  • Born December 13, 1954 — Emma Bull, 67. Writer of three of the best genre novels ever, Bone Dance: A Fantasy for Technophiles, Finder: A Novel of The Borderlands and War for The Oaks. Will Shetterly, her husband and author of a lot of really cool genre works, decided to make a trailer which you can download if you want. Just ask me.  She’s also been in a number of neat bands, one that has genre significance that being Cats Laughing which has Stephen Brust, Adam Stemple, son of Jane Yolen, and John M. Ford either as musicians or lyricists. They came back together after a long hiatus at MiniCon 50. Again just ask me and I’ll make this music available along with that of Flash Girls which she was also in. And she’s on the dark chocolate gifting list. 
  • Born December 13, 1984 — Amal El-Mohtar, 37. Canadian edition and writer. She won Hugo Awards for Best Short Story for “Seasons of Glass and Iron” at WorldCon 75 and Best Novella for “This Is How You Lose the Time War” at CoNZealand (with Max Gladstone). (The latter got a BSFA, an Aurora and a Nebula as well.) She’s also garnered a Nebula Award  for “Madeleine“, a World Fantasy Award for “Pockets” and a World Fantasy Award for “Seasons of Glass and Iron”. Very impressive. She has edited the fantastic poetry quarterly Goblin Fruit magazine for the past five years. 

(11) BIG COMICS NEWS. “Alex Ross Writes and Illustrates First Graphic Novel, Fantastic Four: Full Circle (Exclusive)“ reports Comicbook.com.

…”This is the Fantastic Four story I have been wanting to tell for years, and visually it is one of the greatest artistic experiments I have attempted,” says Alex Ross. “I’m excited to share this work with everyone, as it unites the two great publishing forces of Marvel and Abrams ComicArts in a bold new collaboration.”…

(12) MARKETING FACTS. Seanan McGuire hopes readers will pick up the latest book in the InCryptid series despite its appearing as a trade paperback. She was concerned by something she read online that people might hold back. Thread starts here.  

(13) WHAT’S SUPE. The Washington Post’s David Betancourt says these are the “10 best Christmas superhero movies and shows you can stream”.

Even a superhero can’t escape the holidays.

As masks, capes and interconnected universes have become more mainstream, so too have the number of superheroofferingsthat include Christmas tree decor and Santa Claus hats. Animation, network television, streaming andeven the Marvel Cinematic Universe have all made room for the spirit of the winter season….

(14) VIRTUALLY PIXELLATED. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Can we create a perfect virtual reality? Or are we living in one?

BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week has explored the questions arising out of virtual reality technology. The programme can be listened to or downloaded for a month after broadcast. See the programme episode page here.

Living in the Matrix

What if virtual worlds become indistinguishable from the real one? In 1999 the science fiction film, The Matrix, depicted a dystopian future in which people are unknowingly trapped inside a simulated reality, run by intelligent machines. As the fourth film, The Matrix Resurrections, is about to be released, the writer Naomi Alderman considers the influence this movie franchise has had in the last two decades, and how far virtual reality has become part of everyday life.

The philosopher, David J Chalmers, proposes that the Matrix scenario could be the future, but that rather than trapped, humanity can lead a meaningful life in virtual reality. Chalmers is one of the leading thinkers on consciousness. In his latest book, Reality+ he provocatively argues that VR is not escapism. And that we may even be living in a computer simulation already – and if that is true, it’s not so bad.

Philippa Garety is Professor of Clinical Psychology at Kings College London and has been at the forefront of treatments for problems associated with psychosis, including hearing voices and hallucinations. She is currently working on innovative treatments using digital technology, including avatars and virtual reality, to alleviate suffering. In a clinical setting VR can be managed as a safe environment for patients who struggle in the real world, as a place they can confront and understand their delusions.

All of which is reminiscent of a neat little ultra-short SF film mentioned on File 770 over the summer (but worth a view if you missed it first time around):

Meanwhile, Isaac Arthur recently used virtual realities as an explanation for the Fermi Paradox

Many believe the future of humanity is to go Digital, uploading our minds to computers, living in virtual worlds that are vastly more efficient and compact. If we might do this, might distant alien empires too? And if so, might this be the reason we don’t see them?

(15) HE KNOWS THE ANSWER. Yahoo! sets the frame for The Batman starring Robert Pattinson: “The Riddler Unmasks Batman In Upcoming Film’s New International Trailer”.

The Riddler has unmasked the Caped Crusader in the upcoming The Batman‘s latest international trailer.

With his ominous voice booming through the entirety of the trailer, we hear Paul Dano‘s Riddler proclaiming that he’s “here to unmask the truth about this city,” before a long sequence of violence and villainy from the troublemaker. Just as the trailer ends, we find out that Edward Nashton ultimately discovers who the man behind the cowl is, calling Bruce Wayne out by name.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, and JJ for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Steve Davidson, part of “The Hugo Pixel Scroll Winners” series.]

Pixel Scroll 7/27/20 Sir! I’ve Isolated The Reverse Pixel Flux Coupling!

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(1) CAN VIRTUAL CONS BE MADE BETTER? In “What Lessons Can Future Conventions Learn From Virtual San Diego Comic-Con?”, Io9 staffers Beth Elderkin, Jill Pantozzi, Cheryl Eddy, James Whitbrook, Charles Pulliam-Moore, and Germain Lussier assess what didn’t work about SDCC 2020, “from a lack of support for the artists and vendors who would usually be on the show floor, to the lack of fan involvement, to how to create a sense of energy that the convention’s swath of ‘family Zoom call’ style pre-recorded panels were lacking.” 

(2) LOVECRAFT COUNTRY. HBO showed its Lovecraft Country trailer to San Diego Comic-Con’s @Home audience.

(3) TRAILER PARK. Ars Technica offers “An Ars roundup of the many trailers unveiled this weekend during Comic-Con@Home” where you can see all the others.

People might not be able to flock to San Diego Comic Con this year in person, but the virtual convention, Comic-Con@Home, has been running all weekend, with countless panels, sneak peeks, and teasers and trailers for upcoming TV shows—but not many films, because let’s be honest: it’s not looking so good for major theatrical film releases in the fall. On Thursday alone, we got the full trailer for Bill and Ted Face the Music, a teaser for the Simon Pegg/Nick Frost horror comedy Truth Seekers, and the first trailer for S2 of HBO’s His Dark Materials. Rather than continue to cover each individually, we decided to compile the remaining trailers of interest into a single roundup post.

(4) A CAUTIONARY TALE. Linda D. Addison offers her experience with Covid-19 as a warning in this public Facebook post.

I’m sharing what my life has been like since June 8 because I’ve seen too many people not taking Covid-19 serious. This virus is real. If sharing this wakes even one person up, it’s worth it.

I’ve been as safe as possible, going to the supermarket every two weeks for supplies, wearing a mask, sanitizing everything, however, 7 weeks ago I got very sick for 9 days with symptoms of mild coronavirus, talked to my doctor and stayed in self isolation for more than 2 weeks. I was fortunate that my temp never went high enough or my breathing bad enough that I had to go to the hospital. Since then, I’ve lived with continued cough, fatigue, shortness of breath (using inhaler from doctor helps).

This is happening to many people in recovery (look up Covid Long Haulers). So I’m sleeping a lot, healing will come, but this is so new there’s not much the medical field can do at this point. I’m ok. My friend, Jill, lives around the corner and has been helping by dropping off stuff.

PLEASE, wear a mask (if not for yourself, for anyone who crosses your path)!

(5) TANGLED UP IN BLUE. Vulture’s Mark Harris, in “The Neverending Story of Those Neverappearing Avatar Sequels”, contends that although James Cameron says Avatar 2 has been delayed because of the coronavirus, the guy is suh a perfectionist that it’s highlyunlikely we will see Avatar 3,4, or 5.

…The wait for more Avatar has become something of a running joke, so much so that a Twitter thread I started when it was already a running joke is now well into its sixth year. The first sequel was originally announced almost a decade ago, in October 2010, with a projected release date of December 2014. Since then, its opening date has, at regular intervals, been moved back one year at a time — except once, in 2017, when it moved back two years. But the film has also morphed from a two-sequel series into a four-sequel series, with a lingering sense that the mountain was being made bigger as a way of justifying the length of the climb. 

(6) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.

  • July 27, 1997 — Stargate SG-1 premiered on Showtime where it would run for its first five seasons. The show which was created by Brad Wright and Jonathan Glassner. It’s based rather loosely off the Stargate film. The initial core cast was Richard Dean Anderson, Michael Shanks, Amanda Tapping and Christopher Judge.  It would run for a decade with the last five years being on Sci Fi. Two spinoff series, Stargate Atlantis which would run five seasons, and Stargate Universe which would last two seasons. Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give it a stellar 91% rating. (CE)

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born July 27, 1870 – Hilaire Belloc.  Orator, poet,correspondent,sailor, satirist, soldier, activist.  Cautionary Tales for Children includes “Jim, who ran away from his nurse, and was eaten by a lion” and “Rebecca, who slammed doors for fun and perished miserably”; 1907 readers would quickly recognize the parody.  A hundred fifty books; we can claim half a dozen novels (illustrated by G.K.Chesterton!), as many shorter stories.  (Died 1953) [JH] 
  • Born July 27, 1874 — Frank Shannon. He’s best remembered now as the scientist Dr. Alexis Zarkov in the three Flash Gordon serials starring Buster Crabbe between 1936 and 1940.  The serials themselves were Flash Gordon, Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars and Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe. (Died 1959.) (CE)
  • Born July 27, 1891 – Ruth Plumly Thompson.  Following Frank Baum’s death, she wrote two dozen Oz books.  Three other novels, six dozen shorter stories, ten dozen poems.  Also wrote for The Smart Set, The Saturday Evening Post, Ladies Home Journal, Jack and Jill.  Many regard her as a worthy successor.  (Died 1976) [JH]
  • Born July 27, 1908 – W.I. Van der Poel, Jr.  Art director for Galaxy 1950-1960.  A score of covers – but not, it seems, appearing there.  He is however on this famous 1952 Emshwiller cover – see the key here.  Look at The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag.  (Died 1987) [JH]
  • Born July 27, 1927 – Mel Hunter.  A hundred book and magazine covers, eight dozen interiors.  Here is the May 53 Galaxy.  Here is The End of Eternity.  Here is Double Star – the Great Lorenzo at right.  Here is the Jun 58 If.  Here is the Mar 61 F & SF.  (Died 2004) [JH]
  • Born July 27, 1938 — Gary Gygax. Game designer and author best-known for co-creating  Dungeons & Dragons with Dave Arneson. In addition to the almost-beyond-counting gaming modules he wrote, he wrote the Greyhawk Adventure series and the Dangerous Journeys novels. (Died 2008.) (CE)
  • Born July 27, 1939 — Sydney J. van Scyoc, 81. Her first published story was “Shatter the Wall” in Galaxy in 1962. She continued to write short stories throughout the Sixties and Seventies, and published Saltflower, her first novel in the early Seventies. Over the next twenty years, she published a dozen novels and likewise number of short stories. For all practice purposes, she’s not available in digital format. (CE)
  • Born July 27, 1948 — Juliet Marillier, 72. She’s a New Zealand born and Western Australian resident fantasy writer focusing entirely on historical fantasy. She has a number of series including Blackthorn & Grim which at two volumes is a good introduction to her, and Sevenwaters which at seven volumes is a serious reading commitment. She’s a regular contributor to the fiction writing blog, Writer Unboxed.
  • Born July 27, 1949 – Cora Lee Healy, 71.  Fanartist, has done some pro work.  Here is a cover for Algol.  Here is “Starward”.  Here is another astronomical.  She has been in Energumen and Granfalloon; she did the Ace of Cups in the Fantasy Showcase Tarot Deck (see this review by a Tarot collector; although the reviewer says the Deck is out of print; copies can still be obtained; if all else fails, ask me, John Hertz, 236 S. Coronado St., No. 409, Los Angeles, CA 90057).  [JH]
  • Born July 27, 1950 — Simon Jones, 70. He’s well known for his portrayals of Arthur Dent, protagonist of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. He first portrayed the character on radio for the BBC and again on television for BBC Two. Jones also featured in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy film in a cameo role. He’s in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, Brazil and 12 Monkeys as well.  (CE) 
  • Born July 27, 1952 – Bud Webster.  Our Gracious Host has done better than I could.  (Died 2016) [JH] 
  • Born July 27, 1958 – Kate Elliott, 62.  Two dozen novels (some under another name), a dozen shorter stories; interviewed in Apex, Lightspeed, Locus, Mindsparks.  “The Sword of Heaven [in two parts, An Earthly Crown and His Conquering Sword] I call my Mozart novel because of the speed it flowed out of me….  my Beethoven novel The Law of Becoming was like hacking through the jungle into unknown country….  Being a parent has made me a better writer.”  Unconquerable Sun just released this month.  Mills College woman.  [JH]
  • Born July 27, 1968 — Farah Mendlesohn, 52. She’s an historian and prolific writer on genre literature, and an active fan. Best works by her? I really like her newest work on Heinlein which I’m reading now, The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein which is up for a Hugo next week. Her work Diana Wynne Jones: Children’s Literature and the Fantastic Tradition is a fascinating read. And I highly recommend her Rhetorics of Fantasy as we don’t get many good theoretical looks at fantasy. (CE)
  • Born July 27, 1979 – Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, 41. Three dozen short stories; poems; essays, reviews, interviews, in Analog, Clarkesworld, Foundation, NY Review of SF, Strange Horizons.  Anthology (with Robert Silverberg), When the Blue Shift Comes.  Traveler of Worlds, conversations with Silverberg.  Good moderator of the Asimov centenary panel at Loscon 46.
  • Born July 27, 1984 – Hao Jingfang, Ph.D., 36.  Vagabonds just appeared in English and Spanish this year.  A score of shorter stories; Best-Novelette Hugo for “Folding Beijing”, first won by a Chinese woman.  Translated into English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Spanish.  Interviewed in Lightspeed, Monde chinois (in French).  [JH]

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) NEW TUNES TOON. SYFY Wire’s points out you can watch the new cartoon as part of this Comic-Con@Home video panel: “Boo! Looney Tunes Cartoons Debuts New Porky And Daffy Short At Comic-Con@Home”,

“We wanted to tap into the zany energy of the 1940s stuff,” added supervising producer Alex Kirwan. “That was our favorite era of the shorts and we just wanted more of that. We didn’t want to set out to reinvent it and we didn’t want to set out to put new sensibilities on it … What we love about the shorts is that they’re wonderful slapstick humor and we just wanted to get back to [that] and be really true to the way they paired the characters and the way they built comedy dynamics.”

(10) WATCH ALEX ROSS AT WORK. Over the last two months, Marvel has revealed 28 “Timeless” variant covers created by Alex Ross, which will begin to hit local comic shops in September. See Ross craft his iconic painted covers, and see how his timeless imagery was made into a magnificent mural in Marvel’s NYC offices in this video.

(11) FROM BACK STORY TO NO STORY. “Peter Shinkoda says Marvel exec claimed ‘nobody cares’ about Asian people” – BBC has the story.

Daredevil actor Peter Shinkoda says his storyline was cut after a Marvel executive said “nobody cares about” Asian characters.

Shinkoda played Nobu in the Marvel Netflix series, which was cancelled at the end of 2018.

But he says his character’s “back story was dropped” on orders from former Marvel Television head Jeph Loeb.

“I’m kind of reluctant to say this, but… I’m going to take this moment,” Shinkoda said during a virtual talk.

“Jeph Loeb told the writers’ room not to write for Nobu and Gao – and this was reiterated many times by many of the writers and show runners – that nobody cares about Chinese people and Asian people,” he alleged.

The Canadian actor, who was taking part in a #SaveDaredevil roundtable discussion with actors from the show, said a storyline about Nobu’s journey to America ended up being dropped.

(12) THE SUN SHINES ON EVERYBODY. And some take more advantage of that than others:“What the heroin industry can teach us about solar power”

If you have ever doubted whether solar power can be a transformative technology, read on.

This is a story about how it has proved its worth in the toughest environment possible.

The market I’m talking about is perhaps the purest example of capitalism on the planet.

There are no subsidies here. Nobody is thinking about climate change – or any other ethical consideration, for that matter.

This is about small-scale entrepreneurs trying to make a profit.

It is the story of how Afghan opium growers have switched to solar power, and significantly increased the world supply of heroin.

(13) RETURN TO SENDER. “Nasa Mars rover: Meteorite to head home to Red Planet”.

A small chunk of Mars will be heading home when the US space agency launches its latest rover mission on Thursday.

Nasa’s Perseverance robot will carry with it a meteorite that originated on the Red Planet and which, until now, has been lodged in the collection of London’s Natural History Museum (NHM).

The rock’s known properties will act as a calibration target to benchmark the workings of a rover instrument.

It will give added confidence to any discoveries the robot might make.

This will be particularly important if Perseverance stumbles across something that hints at the presence of past life on the planet – one of the mission’s great quests.

“This little rock’s got quite a life story,” explained Prof Caroline Smith, head of Earth sciences collections at the NHM and a member of the Perseverance science team.

“It formed about 450 million years ago, got blasted off Mars by an asteroid or comet roughly 600,000-700,000 years ago, and then landed on Earth; we don’t know precisely when but perhaps 1,000 years ago. And now it’s going back to Mars,” she told BBC News.

(14) I FIND YOUR LACK OF FAITH DISTURBING. NPR reports “Lottery Winner In Jamaica Avoids The Spotlight Dressed As Darth Vader”.

It’s not uncommon for lottery winners to want to avoid the spotlight, right? But showing up dressed as Darth Vader to collect your check is a new one. It happened in a galaxy not so far away, in May Pen, Jamaica, when a man claimed his $95 million prize in a dark lord of the Sith costume. 

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Pitch Meeting” on ScreenRant, Ryan George explains that Saruman is spinning Gandalf around, he “forces Gandalf to learn breakdancing against his will.”

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, JJ, Cat Eldridge, Andrew Porter, John Hertz, Michael Toman, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, Mlex, and Chip Hitchcock for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jayn.]

Marvels Epilogue Sneak Peek

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Hitting comic shops this July – an all-new addition to the classic Marvels graphic novel written by Kurt Busiek and fully painted by Alex Ross. And it’s a “Marvels” look at the “all-new, all-different” X-Men of the 1970s!

In this 16-page story, Alex and Kurt bring Marvel’s world to brilliant, realistic life one last time, as the now-retired Phil Sheldon and his daughters, in Manhattan to see the Christmas lights, find themselves in the middle of a clash between the outsider heroes and the deadly Sentinels, giving them a close-up perspective on the mutant experience. Also featuring a behind-the-scenes look at the making of this special story, and other bonus features.

For more information on Marvels Epilogue, visit Marvel.com.