SFWA today issued a statement about “unusual rights inclusions” on contracts from MustRead, Inc., the new owner of several major sff prozines.
Recently, the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) was contacted in regards to contracts potentially being offered to writers submitting to a variety of magazines including Analog, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and F&SF, that contained some potentially problematic clauses. These magazines represent important and historic repositories of some of the best speculative fiction written in the past and the present.
After conversing with MustRead, Inc., the publisher of those magazines, SFWA is pleased to provide some additional clarification on the issues brought to our attention. To wit, contract clauses regarding performance or merchandising rights should not be included in agreements with the above magazines. If these clauses do appear, authors should negotiate to have them stricken or removed entirely from the agreement, as they are considered either an editorial error or a holdover from an outdated contract. While SFWA cannot and does not provide legal advice, we are suggesting that writers approach these specific agreements this way. SFWA appreciates the clarification from MustRead, Inc., on these clauses.
SFWA will continue to monitor agreements in the speculative fiction short story marketplace, and continue our work as advocates and defenders for our membership and the genre writing community at large. Our Contracts Committee provides model contracts for various types of written work and will also provide private review of contracts (with or without personally identifying information redacted).
Thank you for your attention to this matter. Remember to always read any contract you are being asked to sign with caution, and when possible, get proper legal advice before signing any agreement that you do not fully understand. And remember, contracts are always negotiable. Advocate for your work, and when you need our help, we are here.
On behalf of the SFWA Board of Directors, Kate Ristau, President
Analog Science Fiction and Fact has revealed the 2024 Analytical Laboratory Finalists. The magazine has also made many of these stories available to read either in part or whole.
Below are the works that finished in the top five slots for Best Novelette, Best Short Story, Best Fact Article, and Best Poem, and the those that finished in the top three for Best Novella and Best Cover.
The winners will be announced in Analog’s July/August issue.
(1) BOOK BANNING NEWS, [Item by Bruce D. Arthurs.] Malinda Lo’s Last Night At The Telegraph Club is one of a number of books being considered for a statewide ban in South Carolina. Lo wrote the review committee an excellent letter defending her book and others like it. “Telegraph Club Considered for Possible Statewide Ban in South Carolina”.
… The parent who challenged LNATTC and other books in Beaufort County and at the state level is Elizabeth Szalai. She had a 5% success rate in Beaufort County, but she has had a 100% success rate at the state level so far.
Szalai’s complaint claims that LNATTC “contains explicit sexual activities in violation of Regulation 43-170 specifically touching of breast and masterbation [sic].” The complaint includes excerpts of scenes from LNATTC stripped of their context. Indeed, the context of the entire novel is irrelevant to Regulation 43-170.
I am not optimistic that LNATTC will survive this challenge in South Carolina, but it’s still possible….
…I’ve written to South Carolina’s Instructional Materials Review Committee to support my book and to ask them to uphold our First Amendment rights. My letter is below:
Dear members of the Instructional Materials Review Committee of the South Carolina Department of Education:
My name is Malinda Lo, and I’m the author of several critically acclaimed and bestselling young adult novels, including Last Night at the Telegraph Club, which is currently under review by your committee. I’m writing to you not only as the author of this book, but as a concerned American citizen who believes strongly in our First Amendment.
Last Night at the Telegraph Club was the winner of the 2021 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the Stonewall Book Award, the Asian Pacific American Award for Literature, the Kids’ Choice Awards Teen Book of the Year, and over over two dozen more honors and awards. It is a coming-of-age novel about a Chinese American girl discovering her identity as a lesbian in 1950s San Francisco. I am a Chinese American lesbian myself, and when I was a teen growing up in the 1980s and ’90s, I often felt alone and confused. I didn’t have access to books like this that would have helped me to better understand who I was. That’s why I write books about LGBTQ+ and Asian American characters. I’m writing the books I needed as a teen.
Since Telegraph Club was published, many LGBTQ+ and Asian American readers have contacted me to tell me how much this book meant to them. Seeing yourself in a book can be a transformative and empowering experience. One reader wrote to tell me, “Your books helped me love and accept myself.” A Chinese American reader wrote, “I feel so seen. Perhaps a little bit too seen, as I am on the verge of tears.” A teen from Nashville told me, “it means a lot to see people like me in literature, written by people like me.”
I’m an immigrant who came to the United States with my family from China when I was a child, and we settled in Boulder, Colorado. I grew up knowing that we came here to escape the oppression of the Chinese Communist government, which does not allow freedom of expression or the freedom to read. This is why I’ve always valued our First Amendment rights. The possibility that my book could be banned across the entire state of South Carolina alarms me because censorship goes directly against the ideals of our country.
I urge you to trust the judgement of your local teachers and librarians, who selected my book — and many others — for their school libraries based on their professional judgement and training. While not every book is for every reader, every reader deserves the freedom to choose what they wish to read, not to have those rights taken away from them by the state. I hope you will take this opportunity to support our fundamental rights and freedoms as Americans.
My major task and accomplishment last year was sorting, boxing, and shipping Greg’s papers to his alma mater, San Diego State University, where they are held in the library’s Special Collections. There are 60+ boxes of journals, notes, manuscripts, and letters, plus a lot of his original artwork. It’s truly a treasure, a deep dive into his creative process and the breadth and depth of his thinking and interests. But here’s the thing about archived papers — for students and researchers to have meaningful access, there needs to be a catalogue of what’s there, called a finding aid, and the items need to be stored using archival standards, such as acid-free boxes. So, I’ve made a donation of $5,000 to help fund those efforts, and am asking you to help match that. A total of $10,000 will go a long way to make the archive accessible.
SDSU is having their major annual fundraising effort right now, so there’s a spiffy website interface for making donations. Link will be in the comments. If you are able to donate even a little bit, that will help meet the $10,000 goal. My match money is already there, just waiting to partner with yours.
“The link in the comments should take you my fundraising page. Scroll down to Matches and Challanges to find Library: $5K Match to the Special Collections Support Fund, and you’ll see my name there. Click on Contribute and it will take you to the page to enter your info. The designation should already be filled in, Library Special Collections Fund. If it’s not, go up a bit to the drop-down menu titled, “There are 6 matches and/or challenges running!” and select “Just for Library Special Collections Fund.”
“Thank you so much for considering this. SDSU and its libraries meant a lot to Greg, as did having his archives be available and studied long into the future.”
(3) PROZINE OWNERSHIP TRANSITION PLANS. Locus Online has extensive “Details on the New Owners of Analog, Asimov’s, and F&SF”, including statements from P.L. Stevens, publisher, of new owner Must Read Books Publishing, sellers Penny Publications and Gordon Van Gelder (F&SF), as well as Analog editor Trevor Quachri and Asimov’s editor Sheila Williams.
All editorial staff from the magazines have been retained in the acquisitions….
The parent company will take over sponsorship of the Astounding Award for Best New Writer, the Black Orchid Novella Award (with The Wolfe Pack), the Dell Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing, Asimov’s Readers Awards, AnLab Awards, The Analog Award for Emerging Black Authors, and Ellery Queen Readers Awards, among others.
(4) WHY YES, HOW DID YOU KNOW? Times have changed. People who’d had a few drinks and would want to avoid coming home smelling like the bar might chew a few Sen-Sen before they walked through the door. Today? To make sure they come home smelling that way – well, at least like they’ve had too much Butterbeer – Orly offers this line of Harry Potter-inspired cosmetics. “Ultimate Harry Potter™ Butterbeer™ Experience” at Orly Beauty.
Infused with the iconic BUTTERBEER™ scent from the Harry Potter™ film series, this collection features all four products from the BUTTERBEER™ collection. From a whimsical Iridescent Topper to a Quick Dry Nail Spray to Nourishing Cuticle Oil and Hydrating Cuticle Froth, your nail care routine is about to become your favorite experience.
Watching Linus O’Brien’s Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror, a new documentary launching out of SXSW, my most frequently thought was that — actual quality of the film notwithstanding — it’s an absolute blessing to be getting this examination of the Rocky Horror phenomenon at this particular moment in time.
Released tied to the 50th anniversary of the Rocky Horror Picture Show film, Strange Journey benefits to no small degree from the presence of O’Brien, son of The Rocky Horror Show creator Richard O’Brien — which means access to archives and memories and presumably easier facilitation of conversations with an astonishing assortment of people associated with the property at every level.
Richard O’Brien is 82; director Jim Sharman is 79; star Tim Curry is 78; Lou Adler, who brought the stage show from London to Los Angeles and then produced the movie, is 91. All are present in the documentary, as are musical director Richard Hartley, costumer Sue Blane, and stars including Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick, Patricia Quinn and even Peter Hinwood, who played Rocky and hasn’t acted since the ’70s. The time to get all of these people together, on camera, to discuss all things Rocky and share their stories is not infinite and, as a result, fans will find plenty to cherish in Strange Journey….
The best route to learning to love words in print could well be pictures. This, at least, is the hope of the publishing industry this spring, as it welcomes news that sales of children’s comics and graphic novels have reached an all-time peak of almost £20m in Britain.
While publishers and editors are celebrating this boom for its own sake, the popularity of these titles is also being hailed as a good omen for novels, ahead of the London Book Fair at Olympia this week. “Over the last decade we’ve seen a significant rise in sales of graphic novels for both the adult and children’s markets,” said Philip Stone, media analyst at NielsenIQ BookData, as he revealed details of the latest trends, hits and flops this weekend.
“Superhero books have been a reliably big feature, probably boosted by all the screen superhero movies. A lot of manga series are doing very well again, and this may also be linked to screen versions. What we really need now is some deep-dive research into the impact of graphic and comic fiction as a gateway for young people into reading. We certainly suspect it’s true.”…
(7) GENE WINFIELD (1927-2025). Custom car creator Gene Winfield died March 4 at the age of 97 reports Deadline.
Gene Winfield, a pioneering legend in the hot-rod world who created custom cars for numerous films and TV shows including Blade Runner, the original Star Trek series, RoboCop, Get Smart! and many others, has died. He was 97.
Winfield’s …. most famous creations include the iconic Galileo shuttlecraft and the Jupiter 8 for Star Trek [seen in the episode “Bread and Circuses”]…and the “spinners” for Blade Runner, which was nominated for the Special Effects Oscar. He also built the Catmobile for TV’s Batman and gadget cars for Get Smart! and The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
His futuristic vehicles are seen in Back to the Future II, the original RoboCop, The Last Starfighter, Woody Allen’s Sleeper and others. Winfield’s cars also are seen in the Dirty Harry sequel Magnum Force, Bewitched, Ironside, TV’s Mission: Impossible and more….
(8) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
JDM Bibliophile zine
JDM Bibliophile (1965–2004). This one is for John D. Macdonald completists.
John D. MacDonald became the subject of a fan magazine in March 1965 when Len and June Moffatt of Downey, California first published the JDM Bibliophile (JDMB), devoted to his work. MacDonald starting writing for pulp magazines in 1946 during their waning days.
JDMB, a mimeographed magazine at the time, was described in its initial issue as a “non-profit amateur journal devoted to the readers of John D. MacDonald and related matters.” A goal was to obtain complete bibliographic information on all of MacDonald’s writings, and this was partly achieved with The JDM Master Checklist, published in 1969 by the Moffatts.
They had help from many people, including MacDonald himself. Though he kept good records, he, like most authors, didn’t have complete publishing data on his own work. Especially helpful to the Moffatts were William J. Clark and another couple, Walter and Jean Shine of Florida.
The Shines published an updated version of the Checklist in 1980, adding illustrations, a biographical sketch, and a listing of articles and reviews of MacDonald. JDMB offered news and reviews of MacDonald’s writings and their adaptation to various media. There were also contributions from MacDonald, including reminiscences and commentary. The Moffatts contributed a column (“& Everything”), as did the Shines (“The Shine Section”). Other JDM fans sent articles, letters, and parodies. One issue, #25 in 1979, included the Shines’ “Confidential Report, a Private Investigators’ File on Travis McGee,” describing information gleaned from the McGee canon about his past, interests, cases, and associates. MacDonald once said of Walter Shine, “He knows more about Travis than I do.”
After the Moffatts had published twenty-two issues of JDMB, it was transferred in 1979 to the University of South Florida in Tampa, with Professor Edgar Hirshberg as editor. It continued until 1999. One final issue, #65, was published as a memorial to Hirshberg who had died in June 2002. It was edited by Valerie Lawson. On February 21, 1987, about a hundred McGee fans gathered at his “address,” Slip F-18 at the Bahia Mar Marina in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where McGee kept his houseboat The Busted Flush. The mayor of Fort Lauderdale unveiled a plaque honoring McGee.
Amazon has scattered back issues available.
So this cover for one of them done by an unknown USF student. If is not considered a close representation of The Busted Flush. For that, you should see the second image which is from The Busted Flush fan site as it “is a rendering of the boat, which MacDonald felt was very close to what he had in mind, but, as he always said about the boat and Travis McGee, he did not want to be exact about either. Let the reader fill in the gaps.”
Periodical comics made the leap from convenience store spinner racks to trade paperback collections at bookstore chains in the 1980s. And while the transition did present some initial challenges to booksellers—in those early days, it wasn’t uncommon to see superhero titles shelved next to Garfield in the “humor section”—the move proved both lucrative and permanent. Today, comics can be found wherever books are sold, with big-box retailers devoting considerable real estate to graphic novels. How do smaller specialty shops compete?
“Community is essential to the business,” says Jenn Haines, owner of The Dragon, an Eisner Spirit of Retailing Award–winning shop in Guelph, Ontario. “Generally, people who read comics have found themselves not quite fitting in.” But fans can find community, she adds, by browsing the shelves.
According to the latest ICv2 industry report, of the $1.87 billion in comics and graphic novel sales in 2023, 61% are from book channels, while 36% are via the direct market, which comprises approximately 3,000 specialty comics retailers. Indications are that specialty shops’ share rose in 2024, which was “a pretty good year in comic stores,” reports Milton Griepp, president of ICv2, which did not release full figures by press time.
According to Haines, her store’s annual sales have been generally consistent over the past five years. The Dragon’s overall 2024 sales, which includes games and toys, were up 3% over 2023, with sales of comics and graphic novels increasing 5%….
“Paradise” is a TV show on Hulu about a postapocalyptic society that lives underground in a suburb. “Silo” is a TV show on Apple TV+ about a postapocalyptic society that lives underground in an apartment tower.
Both are propelled by mysteries. Both feature curious heroes. Both have shifty leaders who lie, blackmail and murder to keep their secrets hidden and their denizens in line.
The shows have much in common, in other words.
But somehow they find opposing answers to a question that seems increasingly relevant in a warming world: If the planet goes to hell and humanity heads to a bunker, what sort of neighborhood will we build inside it? A spacious holdout that tries to approximate a comfortable standard of living, or a cramped locker that saves more lives but leaves the survivors miserable?
By imagining wildly different landscapes in response to the same end-of-the-world conceit, the shows use cinematic extremes to show how civilization and class divisions are constructed through the apportionment of space. People like to live around other people right up to the moment they feel their neighborhood has been overrun by others, at which point the hunger for togetherness becomes an impulse to exclude.
A good amount of today’s housing politics fall within these parameters, whether it’s a proposal to build apartments in a suburb or a plan to cover farms with a new city. The fact that this debate now extends to fictional bunkers has me convinced that in the aftermath of global calamity, people will be at some dystopian City Council meeting arguing about zoning….
(12) WHEN BUSINESS IS BOOMING AND THAT’S NOT GOOD. [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] I don’t want to just link to an X-twit post, so… Sounds like they should *not* have launched that last one, given this. My take is that Elon was hurting, the attacks by the public on him, and on Tesla, and he said “launch”. As reported on Slashdot: “Anonymous Sources: Starship Needs a Major Rebuild After Two Consecutive Failures”.
According to information at this tweet from anonymous sources, parts of Starship will likely require a major redesign due to the spacecraft’s break-up shortly after stage separation on its last two test flights. These are the key take-aways, most of which focus on the redesign of the first version of Starship (V1) to create the V2 that flew unsuccessfully on those flights…
Astronomers say they have discovered more than 100 new moons around Saturn, possibly the result of cosmic smashups that left debris in the planet’s orbit as recently as 100 million years ago.
The gas giant planets of our solar system have many moons, which are defined as objects that orbit around planets or other bodies that are not stars. Jupiter has 95 known moons, Uranus 28, and Neptune 16. The 128 in the latest haul around Saturn bring its total to 274.
“It’s the largest batch of new moons,” said Mike Alexandersen at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, an author of a paper announcing the discovery that will be published in the days ahead in Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society.
Many of these moons are rocks only a few miles across — small compared with our moon, which is 2,159 miles across. But as long as they have trackable orbits around their parent body, the scientists who catalog objects in the solar system consider them to be moons. That is the responsibility of the International Astronomical Union, which ratified the 128 new moons of Saturn on Tuesday….
… The current naming scheme for moons on Saturn is based on characters from Norse and other mythology.
“Maybe at some point they’ll have to expand the naming scheme further,” Dr. Alexandersen said….
A saucer-like space capsule touched down in the Australian outback last month, marking the first time a commercial spacecraft has landed Down Under.
Varda Space Industries’ Winnebago-2 (W-2) space capsule reentered Earth’s atmosphere and dropped down in South Australia on Feb. 28. In doing so, W-2 also set a world first by becoming the first commercial spacecraft to return to a commercial spaceport, according to a statement released by the Australian Space Agency.The successful return of W-2 was a “landmark moment for the Australian space sector,” Australian Space Agency representatives wrote in the statement.
The company behind W-2, Varda, is an American startup based in California. W-2 originally left Earth from California on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Jan. 14 as part of the Transporter-12 rideshare mission — the Transporter carries satellites from various customers into space. W-2 then spent 45 days in orbit, carrying payloads from the U.S. Air Force and NASA before dropping down to the Koonibba Test Range, run by Australian aerospace company Southern Launch….
(15) BEAST GAMES PITCH MEETING. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Beast Games was apparently inspired in part by how much the host (famed YouTuber Mr. Beast) enjoys Squid Games. But there’s also apparently zero to very little about the actual games played on BGs that is inspired by games on SGs. Also, no killing the contestants. Not that I’ve ever watched either show (or anything by Mr. Beast), nor would I care to.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Daniel Dern, Bruce D. Arthurs, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel “Good, Bester, Best!” Dern.]
(2) ASTOUNDING AWARD’S FUTURE? Following the report that Asimov’s, Analog and F&SF have been purchased by a new owner, John Scalzi speculated about the fate of the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. Although voting is administered by the Worldcon, the Astounding Award belongs to Dell Magazines, publisher of Analog prior to this sale. Will Analog’s new owners continue the sponsorship? John Scalzi volunteered a landing place if one is needed in a post at Whatever:
If the new owners of Asimov’s and Analog don’t want to take sponsorship of the Astounding Award (or the award is not otherwise folded into the responsibilities of WSFS/the individual Worldcons), we’ll take it on. The ideal plan would be for the Scalzi Family Foundation to act as a bridge sponsor while we set up an endowment that would allow the Astounding Award to be run indefinitely.
(3) EISNER HALL OF FAME INDUCTEES. Comic-Con International has announced 21 creators and industry figures who will be inducted into the Eisner Awards Hall of Fame this year.
In addition to these choices, voters in the comics industry will elect 6 persons from a group of 18 nominees proposed by the judges. Those nominees will be announced within the next week, and a ballot will be made available for online voting.
We’ve received more than 150 stories nominated by publishers, editors, and authors so far, and the range of stories, ideas, and perspectives has been so wonderful to read. As this is our first year of the anthology and our launch happened so quickly, we’ve decided to extend the submissions window out to Monday, March 17, to ensure that everyone publishing ecofiction gets a chance to submit….
…Ecofiction engages with some of the most urgent issues facing us today and also looks ahead to the possibilities of the future. Even when dealing with dark or tragic themes, ecofiction stories are expressions of our human connection to the most beautiful planet we know, and to all of earthlife….
(5) BOOK WITHIN A BOOK. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] BBC Radio 4 working weekday Women’s Hour had a second half (35 minutes in) largely devoted to two SF works. The first was a play, a re-imagining of the Greek tragedy Oedipus but set in a dystopic, near-future, climate drought-ridden future…
And then the Nigerian-American SF author Nnedi Okorafor who was discussing her latest book Death of the Author (out from Gollancz). This is a sweeping story about a writer of a science fiction novel that becomes a global phenomenon… at a price. The future of storytelling is here. A book-within-a-book that blends the line between writing and being written. This is at once the tale of a woman on the margins risking everything to be heard and a testament to the power of storytelling to shape the world as we know it… This interview begins 50 minutes in.
Nigerian American science fiction author Nnedi Okorafor’s new book is Death of the Author. It follows the story of Zelu, a novelist who is disabled, unemployed and from a very judgmental family. Nnedi and Nuala talk about the book within her book, success, and the influence on her writing of being an athlete in her earlier years.
James Cameron has reportedly revealed an anti-AI title card will open up Avatar 3, officially titled Avatar: Fire and Ash. The Oscar-winning director shared the news in a Q&A session in New Zealand attended by Twitter user Josh Harding.
Sharing a picture of Cameron at the event, they wrote: “Such an *incredible* talk. Also, James Cameron revealed that Avatar: Fire and Ash will begin with a title card after the 20th Century and Lightstorm logos that ‘no generative A.I. was used in the making of this movie’.”Cameron has been vocal in the past about his feelings on artificial intelligence, speaking to CTV news in 2023 about AI-written scripts. “I just don’t personally believe that a disembodied mind that’s just regurgitating what other embodied minds have said – about the life that they’ve had, about love, about lying, about fear, about mortality – and just put it all together into a word salad and then regurgitate it,” he told the publication. “I don’t believe that’s ever going to have something that’s going to move an audience. You have to be human to write that. I don’t know anyone that’s even thinking about having AI write a screenplay.”…
(7) IMAGINARY PAPERS. ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination has published the latest issue of Imaginary Papers, its quarterly newsletter on science fiction worldbuilding, futures thinking, and imagination.
In this issue, Sarah M. Ruiz writes about climate action, allegory, and solidarity in the 2024 film Flow; Libia Brenda writes about Crononauta, the quasi-mythical, short-lived 1964 magazine founded by Alejandro Jodorowsky and René Rebetez; and Rachael Kuintzle reports on a workshop on energy futures hosted by the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory in 2024.
On April 5, a beacon for California horror fans will be snuffed out when legacy Los Angeles shop Dark Delicacies closes its doors. “We’ve been open for 30 years, and I could have happily died right here,” laughs co-owner Del Howison, “but my wife Sue wanted to have a life — whatever that is.”
Dark Delicacies is more than just a Southern California storefront selling ghoulish souvenirs. It’s been a destination for film buffs, horror genre diehards and celebrities from across the macabre spectrum for decades, and Howison himself has become a cult attraction for those with a love of Southern California’s darker corners.
The longtime horror curator plans to stay busy until the end. On a recent weekday, Howison is moving about his Burbank shop, taking pictures of vintage Spanish and Italian movie posters to sell online. He occasionally breaks to gesture at the Tiki mugs, shot glasses, board games, playing cards and action figures on the shelves. “We stopped calling them dolls, as guys didn’t like saying they were collecting dolls,” Howison says of his early days in business. “Of course, back then, there was no such thing as a horror convention.”…
(9) UK PAPERS PROTEST AI LEGISLATIVE PROPOSAL. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] A first this side of the Pond. Irrespective of their political leanings, all the papers came together on Tuesday in a campaign to stop British government proposals (yes, we have daft politicians over here just as you do in the US) to allow artificial intelligence (AI) free access to intellectual property so that it can be trained. This is something that authors have been worried about. “UK newspapers launch campaign against AI copyright plans” in the Wandsworth Times.
Special wraps appeared on Tuesday’s editions of the Daily Express, Daily Mail, The Mirror, the Daily Star, The Sun, and The Times – as well as a number of regional titles – criticising a Government consultation around possible exemptions being added to copyright law for training AI models.
The proposals would allow tech firms to use copyrighted material from creatives and publishers without having to pay or gain a licence, or reimbursing creatives for using their work.
In response, publishers have launched the Make It Fair campaign, which saw newspapers put covers on the outside of their front page – criticising the Government’s consultation – organised by the News Media Association (NMA), and backed by the Society of Editors (SOE).
The message said: “The Government wants to change the UK’s laws to favour big tech platforms so they can use British creative content to power their AI models without our permission or payment. Let’s protect the creative industries – it’s only fair.”…
…In a statement shared with the Times, the Klara and the Sun (Faber) author said the country had reached a “fork-in-the-road” moment. “If someone wants to take a book I’ve written and turn it into a TV series, or to print a chapter of it in an anthology, the law clearly states they must first get my permission and pay me,” he said.
“To do otherwise is theft. So why is our government now pushing forward legislation to make the richest, most dominant tech companies in the world exceptions? At the dawn of the AI age, why is it just and fair – why is it sensible — to alter our time-honoured copyright laws to advantage mammoth corporations at the expense of individual writers, musicians, film-makers and artists?”
Ishiguro continued that “no one believes the proposed ‘opt-out’ system will work”, saying this is why “those lobbying on behalf of the tech giants favour it”….
(11) MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG (1985-2025). Actress Michelle Trachtenberg, known especially to fans for playing Dawn Summers in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, has died at the age of 39. According to the Guardian:
…Police sources confirmed her death to both ABC News and the New York Post. There is no cause of death yet known, with police saying on Thursday that the New York Medical Examiner is investigating but no foul play was suspected. She had recently undergone a liver transplant, according to sources….
A successful child actress, her first lead film role was in the comedy adventure Harriet the Spy (1996). Trachtenberg followed the film with a role in Inspector Gadget next to Matthew Broderick. Her role in Buffy the Vampire Slayer came in 2000 and continued til the show ended three years later.
Trachtenberg continued to have an active career after that in non-genre productions.
(12) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Award-Winning Barbara Hambly
Barbara Hambly, one of my favorite writers of horror and mysteries, has won two Lord Ruthven Awards given by the Lord Ruthven Assembly, a group of scholars specializing in vampire literature who are affiliated with the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts.
(This piece is about her fantasies and mysteries that I’m familiar with. I know she wrote some SF, do comment upon it if so inclined.)
Those Who Hunt in The Night, the first in her excellent John Asher series, won the Locus Award for Best Horror Novel. I think the series, eight long, might be concluded, as the last came out six years ago.
I’m also very impressed of her two novelizations done for one of my favorite TV series, Beauty and the Beast and and Beauty and the Beast: Song of Orpheus as it’s hard to write material off those series that’s worth reading. I’ve read others which very quickly got really mawkish as they overly focus on the relationship, in my opinion of course, of the relationship of Catherine and Vincent to the exclusion of what could a fleshing out of that world. Not her. Wonderful novels!
I’ve not tracked down her three Sherlock Holmes short story pastiches yet.
I listened to Bride of the Rat God, which is the only supernatural fantasy in theSilver Screen historical mystery series, and the next book which was not a fantasy, Scandal in Babylon. There are two more in the series so far. They likewise are not fantasy according to her.
And yes, there’s lots about her writing career I’ve not included here so feel free to tell me what you think I should have mentioned. If anybody has read her Abigail Adams or Benjamin January mystery series, I’d be interested in knowing what you think.
Dark Horse Media has officially shut down Dark Horse Digital as of February 24, 2025, with comics no longer available for purchase on the platform. Online access to the DHD website, however, will still be available at least through this summer, and users can continue to log in and read the comics in their bookshelves.
Effective March 31, 2025, the Dark Horse Comics and Plants vs. Zombies Comics apps for iOS will also no longer be supported.
Eric Reynolds from Fantagraphics gets in touch to correct me. He says “Contrary to what you wrote, the comics were actually not printed yet. If they had been, we would have proceeded as planned. But since they weren’t, and given the uncertainty of whether Diamond will even exist come May (or be able to pay us for them), we made the difficult decision to pull the plug while we could. We may still produce the comic this year, bypassing FCBD. Things are, as you can probably understand, a bit fluid these days… The decision was made entirely based on the uncertainty of FCBD and had nothing to do with the Lost Marvels book series itself, which is otherwise proceeding as planned!”
When Netflix first started adding video games to its huge catalogue of streaming TV shows and films, it did so quietly. In 2021, after releasing an impressive experiment with the idea of interactive film in Black Mirror: Bandersnatch in 2018 and a free Stranger Things game in 2019, Netflix began expanding more fully into interactive entertainment.
The streamer’s gaming offering, for a long time, was its best-kept secret. Whoever was running it really had an eye for quality: award-winningly brilliant and relatively little-known indie games comprised the majority of its catalogue, alongside decent licensed games based on everything from The Queen’s Gambit to the reality dating show Too Hot to Handle. Subscribers could play games such as Before Your Eyes, a brief and touching story about a life cut short; Spiritfarer, about guiding lost souls to rest and Into the Breach, a superb sci-fi strategy game with robots v aliens. The company bought or invested in several game studios known for making critically acclaimed work, including London-based Ustwo games (which was behind Monument Valley). It also established a studio in California to work on blockbuster games, staffed by veteran developers.
But it seems things are changing. That blockbuster studio has been closed, as first reported by Game File, before it could ever release a game. Its latest tie-in game, Squid Game Unleashed, absolutely sucks – it’s constructed around the celebration of slapstick violence, making it a terrible fit for a satirically violent show about capitalist exploitation. Funding a bunch of indie darlings and hiring big-name talent from the likes of Blizzard and Bungie for its game studio gave the impression that Netflix really was keen on becoming a part of the gaming industry, and doing it properly. Now that is very much in question.
The company has made layoffs across its gaming divisions, including at Night Studio – makers of weird-fiction supernatural teen horror series Oxenfree. It has cancelled plans for several forthcoming games that were due to join the service, including indie hits Thirsty Suitors and Don’t Starve Together, and promising-looking hobbit game Tales of the Shire. What’s going on?
He is probably most often thought of today as a wizard, a shape-shifter or a mentor to the young King Arthur.
But a detailed re-examination of Myrddin – Merlin – by Welsh scholars suggests he can also be considered an early British environmentalist deeply worried about human interaction with the natural world…
… The researchers have been combing through manuscripts in the National Library of Wales, in Aberystwyth, and also in the 15th-century Red Book of Hergest at Jesus College, Oxford.
They also discovered more about the importance of Merlin’s sister, Gwenddydd. Callander said: “Gwenddydd is a really important figure in Welsh Merlin poetry. She supports Merlin and also appears to be a prophet in her own right.
“We found hundreds of lines of poetry in her voice in dialogue with her brother. Merlin describes her as ‘fair Gwenddydd, summit of dignity’ and ‘refuge of songs’. One of the important aspects of the project is to throw light on this lost female voice from medieval Wales.”
Callander said it was surprising that early Merlin poems had been largely neglected. “These Welsh-language texts had not been edited or translated in full, meaning much material has been missed out.”…
Akiva Goldsman is developing a new Universe at Legendary Television featuring three reimagined Irwin Allen sci-fi TV series. The Oscar-winning writer, producer and director will draw inspiration for the new TV shows from Allen’s catalog and focus on revitalizing Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Land of the Giants and The Time Tunnel.
… Legendary Television is focused on the three titles above and not Allen’s second TV series Lost in Space, which aired from 1965-68 on CBS and was reimagined by Legendary TV for a 2018-21 series on Netflix. 20th Century Fox produced all four of the original shows….
[Thanks to Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Jason Sizemore, Joey Eschrich, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, 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 Cat Eldridge.]
Asimov’s, Analog and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction have been purchased by a new owner. Jason Sanford reported the transactions on his Patreon page.
Sanford says the new owner of the magazines is Steven Salpeter and a group of investors. More information about the buyers is in Sanford’s report.
The Asimov’s, Analog and several other Dell magazines changed their websites to identify the new ownership over the weekend. F&SF, which was owned separately by Gordon Van Gelder, has yet to make an update.
(1) ALMOST HALFWAY TO 101. The Science Fiction 101 podcast devoted its 50th episode to a look at a vintage prozine: “Analog Solutions”.
This time we have another one of our (made-up) time-honored traditions: reviewing a current science fiction magazine. We usually do this once a year, to keep on top of current SF trends – and also to compare & contrast current magazines with the SF magazines of the past.
In our last episode, we went back 50 years to review ANALOG from 1974.
This time, we’re bang up-to-date (almost) with a very recent issue of the very same magazine. Analog is the longest-continuously-running SF magazine, having been around under various titles since the 1930s!
What will we make of Analog‘s longstanding reputation for “hard SF”? How does the magazine stack up against its wholly online competitors such as Clarkesworld and Uncanny? How does it stack up against its former self?
After the hundreds (thousands?) of hours trawling through online image collections since the PDR’s inception, we’ve decided it was time to create one of our own! We are really excited to share with you the launch of our new sister-project, the Public Domain Image Archive (PDIA), a curated collection of more than 10,000 out-of-copyright historical images, free for all to explore and reuse.
While The Public Domain Review primarily takes the form of an “arts journal”, it has also quietly served as a digital art gallery, albeit one fractured across essays and collections posts. The PDIA sets out to emphasise this visual nature of the PDR, freeing these images from their textual homes and placing them front and center for easier discovery, comparison, and appreciation. Our aim is to offer a platform that will serve both as a practical resource and a place to simply wander — an ever-growing portal to discover more than 2000 years of visual culture.
A valuable image archive in its own right, offering hand-picked highlights from hundreds of galleries, libraries, archives, and museums, the PDIA also functions as a database of images featured in the PDR, offering an image-first approach to exploring the project’s content. The featured images each link to the relevant article on the PDR where one can read about the stories which surround the works….
Here’s an example of NASA art — government publications are not copyrighted, so in the public domain.
(3) IS THIS WORLDBUILDING CONVINCING? Mark Roth-Whitworth read C.J. Cherryh’s Alliance Rising, and says “I have written a meta-criticism of it — not of the story, which is as good as Cherryh is, but the political and interpersonal structure of the universe”: “Cherryh’s Alliance-Union universe”.
…I can already see problems with it – the sixty-three families, and none of them have anyone who is going to game the system, for their family’s benefit? None are going to cut back door deals with stations, to undercut other ship-families? Every one is going to be honest and trustworthy?…
(5) FIND OUT WHEN SFF EVENTS ARE HAPPENING. Stephen Beale, editor of The Steampunk Explorer site, has announced their “Expanded Calendar Listings”.
The recent re-launch of The Steampunk Explorer forced us to move some tasks to the back burner, and one of those was the calendar of events. When the site re-launched on Dec. 30, the calendar listed just 191 events taking place in 2025. But we got busy over the weekend and it now lists more than 600 happenings.
Here’s some background. We maintain a database of approximately 1,200 events that take place each year. In addition to steampunk gatherings, they include science fiction conventions, anime conventions, comic cons, Renaissance fairs, book fairs, and more.
Periodically, we go through the database and check the event websites to see if they’ve announced upcoming dates. If they have, we update the record and upload the event to the website. It’s a highly efficient process — if the event is in the same location and happens roughly the same time of the year, we can update the listing with five or six mouse clicks. (We also add new events as we learn about them.)…
If you want to see what’s happening over the next 12 months, check it out:
Friends, you read that right. A new film is coming to theaters in January that is… Hamlet staged in the Grand Theft Auto video game. Yes, Hamlet acted out by video game avatars, shot in-frame, and edited into its own film.
Before you wonder if something is rotten in the stage of filmmaking, or that the rest is violence, consider this…
Directed and written by Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls, and co-starring Crane and his friend Mark Oosterveen, the film, which is called Grand Theft Hamlet, is part digital narrative, part documentary. The film’s frame narrative features Crane and Oosterveen, two out-of-work actors sheltering-in-place during the COVID pandemic in January 2021, who discover that their video game pastime seems capable of not only bringing them together (and giving them a project) during isolation, but also allowing them to engage with a foundational text and their beloved craft.
The actors speak Shakespeare’s lines over the staging, in the modern, hyper-brutal world of GTA‘s Los Santos; underscoring the ways that Shakespeare’s words contain a kind of timelessness or malleability. According to critics, what ends up happening is not an attempt to make this as straight a Shakespeare production as possible, but to play with the text and the meaning of Hamlet in ways that only this new setting can unlock….
I, like most folk I suspect, first discovered the somewhat eccentric charms of his writing in the Eyre Affair, the first of his novels with Tuesday Next from the Special Operation Network, Literary Detective (SO-27), who could literally enter the great and not so great works of English literature.
Bidder and Stoughton published it twenty-five years ago. I’d like to say the Eyre Affair was a much-desired literary property but he says there were seventy-six publishers that he sent his manuscript to. I’m surprised there were that many publishers in the U.K. that he thought could have been interested.
There would be six in the series in all — this novel followed by Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, Something Rotten, First Among Sequels, One of our Thursdays Is Missing and The Woman Who Died a Lot. I won’t say that they were consistently great as they weren’t and the humor sometimes wore a lot more than a bit thin, but overall I like the series considerably.
I re-listened to the Eyre Affair recently and even the Suck Fairy admitted that it had held well over a quarter of a century, particularly the idea of dodos as pets as she wants one. Or two. Shudder.
Next up, and I wasn’t eggspecting to like it, yes, I know it’s a bad pun there, is The Big Over Easy which is set in the same universe as the Thursday Next novels though I don’t remember any overlapping characters twenty years after reading them. It reworks his first written novel, which absolutely failed to find any publisher whatsoever.
Its original title was Who Killed Humpty Dumpty? Errr, wasn’t there a novel involving a rabbit by almost that name? Kinda of drops a large anvil. It had a sequel of sorts in The Fourth Bear. Both are quite more than bearably good. Yes more bad puns.
I have not read his dystopian Shades of Grey serieswhich is about a future Britain where everyone there is judged by how they perceive colors. Suspect someone with color blindness like myself wouldn’t be welcome there. A friend who did read it liked it a lot.
His Dragonslayer series, also known as The Chronicles of Kazam, are a YA affair and a great deal of fun indeed.
Thanks to some distinctly Scottish weather over the holidays, my family and I ended up celebrating Hogmanay at home rather than at the party we’d planned to attend. My smallest son’s wee pal and his parents came over for dinner, and when the smaller members of our group started to spiral out of control around 9pm, we threw them a little midnight countdown party in Animal Crossing.
The last time I played Animal Crossing was in the depths of lockdown. Tending my island paradise helped me cope while largely imprisoned in a 2.5 bedroom basement flat with a baby, a toddler and a teenager. (I was far from the only one – the National Videogame Museum compiled an archive of people’s Animal Crossing experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic, and it’s evident that it was a lifeline for many.) Our guests had brought their family Switch, and we set up the kids with their little avatars so they could join the animals’ New Year party.
They spent about 10 minutes gleefully whacking each other with bug nets before gathering with the other inhabitants in the square with a giant countdown clock in the background, the island’s racoon magnate Tom Nook offering party poppers and shiny top-hats. I was visited by a sudden, arresting memory of New Year’s Eve 2021, which I spent on my sofa, alone but also not alone, because I was with my friends in Animal Crossing, watching the same countdown clock tick down. My youngest had just started walking, and was unsteady on his short, chunky legs. Turning away from the screen, I saw him joking with his big brother, thrilled at being up so late. It felt surreal.
(10) EYE-POPPING. DJ Food recalls the “Psychedelic Crunchie Bomb poster offer” of 1969. The original ad is reproduced below. See good images of the four posters at the link.
A rare set of four “Crunchie Bomb” posters commissioned in 1969 by Frys Chocolate, measuring 20×15 inches. Two designed by graphic artist and Professor of Illustration at the RCA, Dan Fern, two by renowned designer Chris McEwan. They were available in exchange for 3 Crunchie wrappers – see the last photo of the original advert.
While cutting a trailer for their co-directorial effort “It Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This,” Nick Toti and Rachel Kempf had a little fun at the end of the clip.
“We were like, ‘Oh, it kind of needs something,’” he says. “So we put the scroll at the end. It just says, ‘The producers of this film regret to inform you that it will not be released online. See it in theaters.’”
In fact, the three-person creative team behind the found footage horror movie “It Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This” made an unusual pact before they even shot a frame: They would never make the work available for streaming, digital or physical purchase, only allowing it to play theatrically. Yet what might have seemed like a limitation ended up creating word-of-mouth interest in the microbudget production, which led to sold-out shows across the country without any promotional dollars….
(12) THE LAST CHATGPT ARGUMENT OF KINGS. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Is it a killer robot? No. But it was a step toward that and a step too far for OpenAI to be comfortable letting this engineer use ChatGPT as a front-end to command their sentry gun/mount. Besides, they seem to be having way too much fun riding the mounted weapon like it was a potentially deadly mechanical bull at a country-western bar.
(Pro Hint: Next time just grab a ruler. It’s cheaper and you can finish your measuring project much faster.)
OpenAI says it has cut off API access to an engineer whose video of a motorized sentry gun controlled by ChatGPT-powered commands has set off a viral firestorm of concerns about AI-powered weapons.
An engineer going by the handle sts_3d started posting videos of a motorized, auto-rotating swivel chair project in August. By November, that same assembly appeared to seamlessly morph into the basis for a sentry gun that could quickly rotate to arbitrary angles and activate a servo to fire precisely aimed projectiles (though only blanks and simulated lasers are shown being fired in his videos).
Earlier this week, though, sts_3d started getting wider attention for a new video showing the sentry gun’s integration with OpenAI’s real-time API. In the video, the gun uses that ChatGPT integration to aim and fire based on spoken commands from sts_3d and even responds in a chirpy voice afterward.
“If you need any other assistance, please let me know,” the ChatGPT-powered gun says after firing a volley at one point. “Good job, you saved us,” sts_3d responds, deadpan.
“I’m glad I could help!” ChatGPT intones happily.
In response to a comment request from Futurism, OpenAI said it had “proactively identified this violation of our policies and notified the developer to cease this activity ahead of receiving your inquiry. …”
(13) BLUE ORIGIN WILL LAUNCH NEW GLENN ON MONDAY. “The Very Long Wait for Jeff Bezos’ Big Rocket Is Coming to an End” – in the New York Times (behind a paywall). (Note: The date has changed since the article was published. The rocket now is set to make its inaugural launch attempt as soon as Monday at 1 am. Eastern. Weather conditions at sea, where the company hopes to recover part of the rocket after launch, prompted the 24-hour delay.)
The foundational building block for Jeff Bezos’ space dreams is finally ready to launch.
A New Glenn rocket — built by Blue Origin, the rocket company that Mr. Bezos started nearly a quarter century ago — is sitting on a launchpad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. It is as tall as a 32-story building, and its voluminous nose cone can carry larger satellites and other payloads than other rockets in operation today.
In the predawn darkness on Sunday, it may head to space for the first time.
“This has been very long awaited,” said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank in Washington.
New Glenn could inject competition into a rocket business where one company — Elon Musk’s SpaceX — is winning big. While companies and governments have welcomed SpaceX’s innovations that have greatly cut the cost of sending stuff to space, they are wary of relying on one company that is subject to the whims of the world’s richest person.
“SpaceX is clearly dominating” the market for launching larger and heavier payloads, Mr. Harrison said. “There needs to be a viable competitor to keep that market healthy. And it looks like Blue Origin is probably the best positioned to be that competitor to SpaceX.”
New Glenn is larger than SpaceX’s current workhorse rocket, the Falcon 9, but not as big as Starship, the fully reusable rocket system that SpaceX is currently developing….
[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Steven French for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]
The AnLab ballot comes pre-loaded with all the eligible works from 2024.
From short stories and novellas to novelettes and poems – and even best covers! – let us know your Analog Science Fiction and Fact favorites this year. Winners join the pantheon of Analog authors who represent the Who’s Who of science fiction writers over the past thirty years.
Those who submit a ballot will be automatically entered in a drawing for a free one-year subscription.
(1) A SCOOP ABOUT PINSKER. Maryland ice cream chain The Charmery has created a flavor in honor of Sarah Pinsker’s book Haunt Sweet Home. Pinsker gives this description:
The apple brandy is a smoked apple brandy, and the book features an orchard and an apple tree specifically and also a smoke machine. The toffee bits are for fun and because it’s fall and it turns out into a deconstructed caramel apple.
(2) NATIONAL BOOK AWARD. The 2024 longlists in the Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry categories have been released. (We covered the Translated Literature and Young Adult categories the other day.) The complete lists are at Publishers Weekly: “2024 National Book Award Longlists Announced”. These are the works of genre interest:
FICTION
Ghostroots by ‘Pemi Aguda (Norton)
James by Percival Everett (Doubleday)
NONFICTION
Our Moon: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made UsWho We Are by Rebecca Boyle (Random House)
Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murderby Salman Rushdie (Random House)
Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal (Tiny Reparations Books)
(3) A TOURNAMENT IN CRIME. [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] Who says we’re not living in a cyberpunk dystopia? This is gruesome… and real. “The Dark Nexus Between Harm Groups and ‘The Com’” at Krebs on Security. Brian Krebs is one of, if not the, premier computer security journalist in the US. This introduction is followed by discussion of numerous criminal investigations.
A cyberattack that shut down two of the top casinos in Las Vegas last year quickly became one of the most riveting security stories of 2023. It was the first known case of native English-speaking hackers in the United States and Britain teaming up with ransomware gangs based in Russia. But that made-for-Hollywood narrative has eclipsed a far more hideous trend: Many of these young, Western cybercriminals are also members of fast-growing online groups that exist solely to bully, stalk, harass and extort vulnerable teens into physically harming themselves and others….
… Collectively, this archipelago of crime-focused chat communities is known as “The Com,” and it functions as a kind of distributed cybercriminal social network that facilitates instant collaboration.
But mostly, The Com is a place where cybercriminals go to boast about their exploits and standing within the community, or to knock others down a peg or two. Top Com members are constantly sniping over who pulled off the most impressive heists, or who has accumulated the biggest pile of stolen virtual currencies.
And as often as they extort victim companies for financial gain, members of The Com are trying to wrest stolen money from their cybercriminal rivals — often in ways that spill over into physical violence in the real world….
This is difficult. I’m going to say Waterland by Graham Swift. I think it’s the strength and quality of Swift’s world-building, his gorgeous, layered storytelling flair and the sheer conviction of that novel that made me itch to write. It made me think, not, ‘I could do that’ but ‘I wonder if I could ever do that?’
I haven’t reread it, I don’t dare. But I’ve since read other books by Swift and my admiration’s undented.
(5) HAWAIIAN AI. [Item by Chris Barkley.] In today’s news: WIRED reports that a local newspaper in Hawaii is now broadcasting news on Insta using AI-generated presenters who can “riff with one another,” in hopes of drawing in new audiences — but audience members are creeped out. Remember the old TV show, Max Headroom? I didn’t have Max Headroom: Nightmare Dystopia Edition on my 2024 bingo card. But, here we are. “An AI Bot Named James Has Taken My Old Job” at WIRED.
It always seemed difficult for the newspaper where I used to work, The Garden Island on the rural Hawaiian island of Kauai, to hire reporters. If someone left, it could take months before we hired a replacement, if we ever did.
So, last Thursday, I was happy to see that the paper appeared to have hired two new journalists—even if they seemed a little off. In a spacious studio overlooking a tropical beach, James, a middle-aged Asian man who appears to be unable to blink, and Rose, a younger redhead who struggles to pronounce words like “Hanalei” and “TV,” presented their first news broadcast, over pulsing music that reminds me of the Challengers score. There is something deeply off-putting about their performance: James’ hands can’t stop vibrating. Rose’s mouth doesn’t always line up with the words she’s saying….
James and Rose are, you may have noticed, not human reporters. They are AI avatars crafted by an Israeli company named Caledo, which hopes to bring this tech to hundreds of local newspapers in the coming year.
“Just watching someone read an article is boring,” says Dina Shatner, who cofounded Caledo with her husband Moti in 2023. “But watching people talking about a subject—this is engaging.”
The Caledo platform can analyze several prewritten news articles and turn them into a “live broadcast” featuring conversation between AI hosts like James and Rose, Shatner says. While other companies, like Channel 1 in Los Angeles, have begun using AI avatars to read out prewritten articles, this claims to be the first platform that lets the hosts riff with one another. The idea is that the tech can give small local newsrooms the opportunity to create live broadcasts that they otherwise couldn’t. This can open up embedded advertising opportunities and draw in new customers, especially among younger people who are more likely to watch videos than read articles.
(6) IT STARTED AT LUNCH. The Astounding Analog Companion hosts a brief “Q&A With David Gerrold”.
Analog Editor: What is your history with Analog? David Gerrold: I have a long personal history with Analog. My first year of high school was at Van Nuys High. The library was a good place to hang out at lunch time and they had a subscription to Astounding. I started working my way through every issue they had. Astounding represented (to me) the high point of science fiction magazines….
Lord of the Flies, the story of a group of British boys who are stranded on an uninhabited island and their disastrous attempts to govern themselves, is considered to be one of the greatest works of literary history, taught to schoolchildren around the world.
But the novel by Sir William Golding didn’t always begin with the schoolboys crash-landing on the island. Instead, an original version of the manuscript, which was written in a school exercise book with the cover torn off, describes how they had been evacuated out, in the midst of a nuclear war, and their plane shot down in an aerial battle.
The alternative version of the dark societal tale will now go on display to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the book being published.
Golding’s manuscripts, notebooks and letters will also be shown in the exhibition at the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, Old Library, University of Exeter later this month.
(8) INFORMING THE NEXT GENERATION. You know this. Not everybody does. Steven Heller interviews Mythmaker author John Hendrix in “C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien Together Again” at PRINT Magazine.
Most readers know their books and the genre they propagated, which has launched scores of films, podcasts, games and toys. But how many fans knew that C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were good friends who spent much of their time together arguing the spiritual pursuits of humankind? John Hendrix, a graphic novelist who is an extraordinary biographer (a novel graphicist), has created a new form of graphic—comic—book, The Mythmakers, in which he uses “a dual biography as an avatar for telling a deeper story about the origins of fairy tales.” Below we talk about his relationship to Lewis, Tolkien and their shared religious beliefs….
You state that, “they longed to make stories like the ones they loved. But their quarry was much more elusive.” What was their quarry? Was it simply “joy”? The thing that drew Lewis and Tolkien together initially was their love of Norse mythology. But underneath the love of those stories was a longing for something they could not put their finger on. They would say most of us feel it when we read a great story. C.S. Lewis called this longing for longing by the German word “sehnsucht.” Lewis said this: “Joy is distinct not only from pleasure in general but even from aesthetic pleasure. It must have the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing.” And Tolkien described joy as a feeling that reaches “beyond the walls of our world.” Both of these authors came to believe that stories and fairy tales allow humanity to access truths that are unknowable in any other way….
(9) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Anniversary: Kolchak: The Night Stalker series (1974)
Fifty years ago this evening Kolchak: The Night Stalker first aired on ABC. It was preceded by The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler films, both written by Richard Matheson.
It was based off a novel by Jeff Rice who Mike has some thoughts about here.
It was remade nineteen years ago as The Night Stalker with Stuart Townsend as Carl Kolchak. It lasted ten episodes. It was set in Los Angeles instead of Chicago. Need I say more?
Let’s talk about Darren McGavin for a moment. He was perfect for this role. Though only fifty-two when the series was shot, he looked a decade older and quite beat up. That suit he wore could have been acquired second hand. Or fourth hand. And that hat — I wonder how many they had in props that were exactly identical.
The actor himself had certainly had some interesting times with four divorces by then, and this was not his first time portraying a world-weary investigator. He was the title character in the short-lived Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer series in the Fifties. It lasted a year.
(Please don’t link to it as the copyright holder keeps deleting it off YouTube so it still in copyright. Copyrights are complicated things, aren’t they?)
Now Kolchak: The Night Stalker did not break the pattern of having a beautiful woman around as it had Carol Ann Susi as the recurring character of semi-competent but likable intern Monique Marmelstein in a recurring role.
And I really liked the character of his boss, Tony Vincenzo as played by Simon Oakland, who was quite bellicose and had no clue of what Kolchak was doing. Good thing that was, too.
Ahhh the monsters. Some were SF, sort of — a murderous android, an invisible ET, a prehistoric ape-man grown from thawed cell samples, and a lizard-creature protecting its eggs. Then there were the fantastic ones — Jack the Ripper, a headless motorcycle rider, vampires, werewolves, witches and zombies to name but a few he tangled with.
It has become a favorite among viewers of fantasy which currently carries a most excellent eighty percent rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes — but it was a ratings failure complicated by Darren McGavin being unwilling to do more episodes and only lasted one season before being cancelled.
Chris Carter who credits the series as the primary inspiration for The X-Files wanted McGavin to appear as Kolchak in one or more episodes of that series, but McGavin was unwilling to reprise the character for his show. He did appear on the series as retired FBI agent very obviously attired in Kolchak’s trademark seersucker jacket, black knit tie, and straw hat.
C.J. Henderson, who won a World Fantasy Award for his Sarob Press, wrote three Night Stalker novels — Kolchak and the Lost World, Kolchak: Necronomicon and What Every Coin Has. There have been other novels and shorts published. Three unfilmed scripts for the TV series have survived, “Eve of Terror”, written by Stephen Lord, “The Get of Belial”, written by Donn Mullally, and “The Executioners”, written by Max Hodge.
Let’s see if it’s streaming anywhere… It is available on Peacock, the streaming service owned by NBC of course.
(10) COMICS SECTION.
Brester Rockit finds fault with kids’ fascination with glowing objects.
…Christensen noted that McGregor, who played Anakin’s mentor Obi-Wan Kenobi, was just “the nicest person” during their initial conversation, telling him all about how excited he was to work with him and to begin their lightsaber training together.
“He’s just beyond kind to me, and it was immediately apparent to me that I was meeting someone truly special. Not just as an actor, but as a person, and that I was meeting a friend,” Christensen said. He then teased, “A friend who would later go on to chop off both my legs and leave me for dead on the side of a volcano, but I guess I kind of had that coming.”
McGregor burst into laughter and turned toward the crowd after Christensen’s joke, which was a quick nod to Anakin’s fate after his heartbreaking battle against Obi-Wan at the end of 2005’s Revenge of the Sith….
It’s been 65 years since Rod Serling’s iconic “The Twilight Zone” hit the TV airwaves in 1959. The show, known for its eerie music, aliens, lugubrious tone and 1950s-style special effects, aired for only 6 years. But its impact and life in re-runs created generations of fans who also find meaning in the themes it tackled: racism, corporate greed and man’s inhumanity.
Serling, who famously said, “Everybody has to have a hometown, and mine’s Binghamton,” has been honored annually at SerlingFest in Binghamton, New York. This year’s event, which begins Friday, will conclude with the unveiling of a six-foot-tall bronze statue of Serling at Recreation Park, a short walk from his childhood home…
When archaeologist Ludovic Slimak unearthed five teeth in a rock shelter in France’s Rhône Valley in 2015, it was immediately obvious that they belonged to a Neanderthal, the first intact remains of the ancient species to be discovered in that country since 1979.
However, the once-in-a-lifetime find, nicknamed Thorin after a character in “The Hobbit,” remained a well-kept secret for almost a decade while Slimak and his colleagues untangled the significance of the find — a fraught undertaking that pitted experts in ancient DNA against archaeologists.
“We faced a major issue,” said Slimak, a researcher at France’s National Centre for Scientific Research and Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse. “The genetics was sure the Neanderthal we called Thorin was 105,000 years old. But we knew by (the specimen’s) archaeological context that it was somewhere between 40,000 to 50,000 years old.”
“What the DNA was suggesting was not in accordance with what we saw,” he added.
It took the team almost 10 years to piece together the story of the puzzling Neanderthal, adding a new chapter in the long-standing mystery of why these humans disappeared around 40,000 years ago.
The research, published Wednesday in the journal Cell Genomics, found that Thorin belonged to a lineage or group of Neanderthals that had been isolated from other groups for some 50,000 years. This genetic isolation was the reason Thorin’s DNA seemed to come from an earlier time period than it actually did.
(14) AUTHENTIC? Archie McPhee is offering Possum Flavored Candy, prompting Andrew Porter to wonder, “What DOES possum taste like?!?” He’s a city boy, you know.
Not only does this candy have an adorable possum on the tin, but it also has the flavor of possum! Great for roadkill aficionados or people who are possum-curious. Just leave a tin in the lunchroom of your office and let the fun begin.
Netflix today debuted the official trailer and key art for Zack Snyder’s animated Norse mythology epic Twilight of the Gods. The new preview gives us a glimpse at the blood-soaked meet-cute between Sigrid and Leif, their disastrous wedding and Sigrid’s quest for revenge against the gods who took away her family.
The eight-episode series premieres September 19. The same day, creator/executive producer/director Zack Snyder will appear at the first-ever Geeked Week LIVE show in Atlanta. (Details here.)
(16) TUNES IN ORBIT. Polaris Dawn astronaut Sarah Gillis, a violinist, released a new music video from space this morning, accompanied by a round-the-world orchestra: Rey’s Theme by John Williams.
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Michael J. Walsh, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jim Janney.]
The editors of Asimov’s and Analog celebrated their readers award winners and finalists on August 8 at Housing Works Bookstore in SOHO in Manhattan.
Readers included Analog novella co-writers and winners Jay Werkheiser & Frank Wu, Analog science fact winner Christina de la Rocha, Analog finalist (for best short story) Victoria Navarra, who read from her story “Cornflower,” Asimov’s finalist Sam J. Miller who read from his nominated novelette “Planetstuck,” and Asimov’s finalist Timons Esaias who read his nominated poem “The Next Step,” along with other poetry.
Sam J. Miller reads. Photo by Brianna Wu.Sam J Miller, Sheila Williams, Timons Esaias, Emily Hockaday/ Photo by Irene BruceVictoria Navarra. Photo by Emily Hockaday.
Many gathered inside the cozy bookstore to escape the chilly wet evening and to hear fabulous works of science fiction. Complimentary magazines were distributed to the audience, and conversation was enjoyed by all.
ANALOG SCIENCE FICTION AND FACT ANALYTICAL LABORATORY WINNERS
Best Novella: “Poison” Frank Wu & Jay Werkheiser
Best Novelette: “The Deviltree” by Monalisa Foster
Best Fact Article: “Life, but not Quite as We Know It?” Christina de la Rocha
Best Poem: “How to Conquer Gravity” by Mary Turzillo
Best Cover: May/June 2023 by Tomislav Tikulin
Christina de la Rocha and Analog Editor Trevor Quachri. Photo by Brianna Wu.Jay Werkheiser and Frank Wu. Photo by Brianna Wu.
ASIMOV’S SCIENCE FICTION READERS’ AWARD WINNERS
Best Novella/Novel: “Lemuria 7 Is Missing” by Allen M. Steele
Best Novelette: “The Nameless Dead” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Best Short Story: “Hope Is the Thing with Feathers” by Karawynn Long
Best Poem: “Three Hearts as One” by G.O. Clark
Best Cover Artist: Dominic Harman (March/April 2023)
Photos provided by Emily Hockaday, Senior Managing Editor of Analog and Asimov’s.
“The Tinker and the Timestream,” Carolyn Ives Gilman (5.95)
“Flying CARPET,” Rajnar Vajra (4.36)
“To Fight the Colossus,” Adam-Troy Castro (3.95)
“The Elephant-Maker,” Alec Nevala-Lee (3.54)
NOVELETTES (1.12)
“The Deviltree,” Monalisa Foster (2.46)
“Apollo in Retrograde,” Rosemary Claire Smith (2.26)
“Didicosm,” Greg Egan (2.10)
(TIE) “Recruit,” Stephen L. Burns (1.95) (TIE) “The House on Infinity Street,” Allen M. Steele (1.95)
SHORT STORIES (0.29)
“Blowout,” Wole Talabi (1.85)
“Cornflower,” Victoria Navarra (1.74)
“The Echo of a Will,” Marie Vibbert (1.28)
“Second Sight,” Gray Rinehart (1.18)
“An Infestation of Blue,” Wendy N. Wagner (1.13)
FACT ARTICLES (1.30)
“The Science Behind ‘The Power of Apollo (16),’” Marianne J. Dyson (2.36)
“Black Holes and the Human Future,” Howard V. Hendrix (2.00)
(TIE) “Evolving Brainy Brains Takes More than Living on a Lucky Planet,” Christina De La Rocha (1.74) (TIE) “The Science Behind Kepler’s Laws,”Jay Werkheiser (1.74)
“Another Way to the Stars,” Christopher MacLeod (1.44)
POETRY (3.59)
“How to Conquer Gravity,” Mary Turzillo (3.95)
“What Xenologists Read,” Mary Soon Lee (3.64)
“Object Permanence,” Marissa Lingen (2.36)
“The Observer,” Bruce Boston (2.10)
“I Dreamt an Alien Was in Love with My Ex-Girlfriend,” Don Raymod (1.49)
COVER (2.28)
May/June, by Tomislav Tikulin for “The Elephant Maker” (5.23)
January/February, by Eldar Zakirov for “Aleyara’s Descent” (3.23)
September/October, by Tomislav Tikulin (2.21)
HOW THE VOTE SCORING WORKS. In each category readers are asked to list their three favorite items, in descending order of preference. Each first place vote counts as three points, second place two, and third place one. The total number of points for each item is divided by the maximum it could have received (if everyone had ranked it 1) and multiplied by 10. The result is the score listed below, on a scale of 0 (nobody voted for it) to 10 (everybody ranked it first). In practice, scores run lower in categories with many entries than in those with only a few. For comparison, the number in parentheses at the head of each category is the average for that category.
January/February 2023: Tomislav TikulinMay/June 2023: Eldar ZakirovSeptember/October 2023: Tomislav Tikulin
