(0) Scroll lite today because I will be attending a dinner to celebrate my daughter’s graduation with a Master’s in Social Work. Congratulations Sierra!
(1) SANFORD HONORED AT MO*CON. [Item by Chris Barkley.] On May 3, 2025 Hugo Award Finalist Jason Sanford (Best Fan Writer and Best Related Work) was the recipient of the Sara J. Larson Award at MoCon 2025 in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Maurice Broaddus (L) and Jason Sanford
Mr. Sanford, the editor and primary reporter of Genre Grapevine, was honored by MoCon Chair and bestselling author Maurice Broaddus for “his continuing support of the Indianapolis science fiction community.”
The Sara J. Larson Award is named for a beloved member of the Indianapolis sf fan community and a enthusiastic supporter of MoCon, who passed away in March 2012. More information about the event is on Maurice Broaddus’ blog: MO*CON. All photos by Chris M. Barkley.
Jason Sanford MoCon welcome plaque
(2) NNEDI OKORAFOR’S WORLD SERVICE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The BBC’s World Service is a great early morning listen to on sleepless nights and last night was a joy with a programme on three writers, the third of whom was with the SF writer Nnedi Okorafor. Her interview revealed that during her youth she competitively played tennis facing occasional racial slurs on the court as some inferior opponents tried to put her off her game. However, her sports ambitions were curtailed during an operation to correct her scoliosis induced spinal curvature which left her (fortunately temporarily) paralysed from the waist down. It was this time that got her writing stories and then novels and then Marvel comics came calling. Her novels include Lagoon, The Book of Phoenix and recently Death of the Author.
“Becoming a writer was not the most straightforward journey for Nnedi Okorafor. Before her literary success she was a talented tennis player and dreamt of turning pro. However following a diagnosis of scoliosis, routine surgery to her spine left her temporarily paralysed. Confined to her hospital bed, Nnedi found solace in her vivid imagination and began writing for the first time. It was the start of a highly successful career as an author and led to a request from Marvel to write some of their comics. Over the years she has written characters including Spiderman, the X-Men and the Avengers. Nnedi is also the first woman to write the character of T’Challa – the Black Panther, as well as his tech-loving sister, Shuri.”
This article includes spoilers for “Daredevil: Born Again,” “Severance,” “The Last of Us” and “The White Lotus.”
As a longtime player of the Last of Us video game series, Sam Gaitan knew the death was coming. Still, the brutal murder of Joel in a recent episode of the HBO adaptation hit her hard. It was already midnight when she went on Tumblr to read fan reactions. Then, in a fit of inspiration, she started writing.
“I was a wreck, and I needed to get those strong emotions out,” Gaitan, a tattooist and artist, said in a recent phone interview. By 5 a.m., she had written 3,761 words featuring Joel and Red, an original character Gaitan had previously created, and an alternative scenario that spares Joel from his onscreen fate.
Writing under the alias oh_persephone, she posted the story on AO3, an online repository for fan fiction and other fan-created art, and crashed until her dogs woke her up the next morning.
“It probably wasn’t the most coherent thing I’ve written,” she said, laughing. “But I figured other people could use it as much as I did.”
Gaitan’s urge to change the narrative is a familiar one among a subset of fans who write fan fiction, or fanfic, original stories that borrow characters, plots and settings from established media properties and are published mostly online, on sites like AO3, Tumblr and FanFiction.net.
Increasingly, these fans are taking matters into their own hands by writing “fix-it fics,” or simply “fix-its,” which attempt to right the perceived wrongs of a beloved work — and often provide some measure of emotional succor.
“The Last of Us,” which killed off its male lead surprisingly early in a hotly anticipated second season — a lead played, no less, by “the internet’s daddy,” Pedro Pascal — has proved to be particularly generative. Real numbers can be hard to track because of inconsistent labeling, but more than 50 “The Last of Us” stories tagged “Fix-It” were uploaded to AO3 in the week after Joel’s death, ranging from about 300 words to almost 80,000.
But if a TV writer can dream of it, a fan can feel betrayed by it: Fix-its have appeared in recent months for series like “Daredevil: Born Again,” “Severance” and “The White Lotus,” all of which contained whiplash-inducing plot twists….
(4) L J SMITH OBIT ON BBC RADIO 4. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The passing of the author L. J. Smith is one of those commemorated in BBC Radio 4’s Last Word. The author of the ‘Vampire Diaries’ series, she inspired girls to be determined and self-reliant. The Vampire Diaries were adapted into a CW Network series that lasted for eight seasons
By Lis Carey: In 1956, Forbidden Planet burst upon our movie screens. It’s considered one of the greats of early science fiction films, and rightly so.
Starring Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis, and Leslie Nielsen, it also features the first appearance of Robby the Robot. Robby was the first movie robot that was more than just a prop, with a real personality and an important supporting role. This was also the first movie set entirely on a distant planet, with no scenes on Earth or in our solar system, and no direct contact with Earth. They were truly isolated. It’s also the first appearance of an FTL ship.
It’s also a lovely loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
The planet was Altair IV, and the ship’s mission was to find out what happened to the ship Bellerophon, and the scientists it carried, twenty years before. When they arrive, Dr. Edward Morbius (Walter Pidgeon), one of those scientists, warns them off for “safety reasons,” but Commander John J. Adams (Leslie Nielsen), sees it as his duty to land anyway. Morbius tells them that all the members of the expedition were killed by “a mysterious planetary force, one by one, except for himself, his wife, and his daughter, Altaira (Anne Francis). Their ship, Bellerophon, was destroyed by that “planetary force” when a few remaining members of the expedition tried to use it to escape. His wife, he says, later died of natural causes.
Do I have to say that, even as a child, watching it for the first time, I found his wife’s death fishy as heck? In fact, I may have been thinking other words, words I was not allowed to say.
The newly arrived ship and its crew start to suffer attacks. When the engineer is attacked by this force while trying to repair communications equipment, we know something very bad is going on. It’s a tense, exciting story, which I’ll assume everyone has seen.
So I’ll talk about what this film means to me.
Being born a year after its release, I never saw it in a theater. I saw it at home, on our very first color TV. It was also the largest screen we’d ever had—do not be impressed. It was the 1960s, and it was, what? 27 inches? And I watched it with my dad.
My mother either stayed busy in the kitchen, or took herself off someplace, because she did not share our enthusiasm for Saturday afternoon science fiction movies, even when they weren’t featured on Creature Double Feature. (We were devotees of Creature Double Feature.) Mom occasionally pointed out that those movies were objectively bad, in a variety of ways. We said that was a lot of the fun, and made popcorn. She went out.
She did not believe us that Forbidden Planet was different, and actually very good, and that she would like the story. She banned any mention of Shakespeare in connection with a science fiction movie. (Admittedly, she had seen a couple of the Creature Double Feature offerings with us before she implemented her Never Again rule—maybe that’s why?) She refused to watch it with us—ever. We watched it every time it came on. Dad pointed out all the bits that showed this was an adaptation of The Tempest. We analyzed everything the characters would maybe have picked up on as clues if they knew they were in The Tempest.
And for the Creature Double Feature movies, we picked out every zipper in the badly made monster costumes, the places where you could see that those rocks were not rocks, re-used fake scenery from other movies. The cheesy dialog.
Either way, it was a lot of fun. A wonderful bonding experience with my dad, the only one in the extended family who didn’t think I was a little weird. Because, you know, he was, too.
Both Forbidden Planet, and Creature Double Feature’s masterpieces that would have made Ed Wood proud, are fond memories.
In the summer of 1995, Robert Williams, then director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, which manages the Hubble Space Telescope‘s research program, was paid two visits by the renowned astronomer John Bahcall, considered one of Hubble’s founding fathers.
Bahcall had, in hindsight, a strange request.
He urged Williams not to train the powerful NASA telescope into an uncharted region of space, where the school bus-sized observatory would stare for days in an attempt to observe profoundly distant, never-before-seen galaxies. It was a proposed endeavor to capture an unprecedented “deep field” view of the cosmos, allowing humanity to look back billions of years, near the dawn of time.
Though Bahcall believed Hubble would make many astronomical advances, he didn’t think it would observe any new, undiscovered galaxies — even in its lofty position above Earth‘s image-distorting atmosphere. Crucially, a failed attempt would bring more shame to a telescope that was already an orbiting object of ridicule: After launching in 1990, a flawed mirror captured blurry images in what was then the most expensive science project in history, requiring astronauts to visit Hubble and install a refrigerator-sized instrument to act as Hubble’s “correcting eyeglasses.”
So Williams knew the deep field was indeed a risk. Still, he told Bahcall he was compelled to take it.
“I told him that I’m willing to fall on my sword,” Williams told Mashable.
Soon after those meetings, Williams directed Hubble — which, in April 2025, celebrated its 35-year anniversary of launching — to peer at a seemingly empty patch of space for 10 straight days. The space telescope beamed home iconic imagery, a “cosmic zoo” of some 3,000 galaxies. It changed everything….
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]
In a new paper published in the journal Qualitative Sociology, Ran Wang, a doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and the Penn Department of Sociology, explores how Chinese fanfiction writers responded to a wave of increased government censorship in February 2020.
Through interviews with 31 fanfiction writers in China, Wang documents how government censorship caused once-thriving fanfiction communities to break apart and forced fanfiction writers to find new ways to share their work.
Fanfiction — amateur-written stories based on existing media like television shows, video games, and books — first made its appearance in China in the late 1990s and has since gained a solid foothold in Chinese creative culture.
Inciting Incident
In February 2020, fans of television actor and musician Xiao Zhan mass-reported the U.S-based fanfiction site Archive of Our Own (AO3) to the Chinese government after “sensitive” LGBTQ-themed fanfiction featuring the actor gained popularity in China.
Following the incident, fanfiction apps were removed from the country’s Apple and Android app stores, and Chinese fanfiction sites adopted heightened censorship policies. Stories considered “sensitive” were hidden or deleted by these sites.
“As a fanfiction writer myself, I witnessed the suffering, despair, and anger of my fellow writers facing the sweeping censorship intensification,” Wang, a member of the Center on Digital Culture and Society at Annenberg, says. “While there was little I could do, I felt the responsibility to tell the story of my community and to let the world know both the destructive state power and the resilience of the fandom community.
The community had to reckon with ever-evolving censorship policies and quickly find ways to keep their writing communities alive, she says. “[Fanfiction platform] Lofter turned articles visible only to the author without notification on an unseen scale, and authors could not appeal to make articles public for more than three months.”
… According to Wang, censorship isn’t stopping creativity; it’s changing how and where it happens. Of all the writers interviewed, only one decided to stop writing fanfiction after the incident.
Fanfiction writers are finding new ways to create and connect — in small group chats dedicated to sharing stories, through printed fanzines, by talking to writing friends directly. They are also discovering new creative outlets, including painting, digital art, interactive text games, and original writing, Wang says.
(2) ORYCON TO SUNSET IN 2025. [Item by John Lorentz.] Next year’s OryCon (OryCon 45) will the last, at least in its present form. The statement below has been posted on the con’s Facebook page.
As many of you have heard by now, the OSFCI board of directors voted on the competing bids for OryCon 45. Both bids were given time to present their ideas and goals, and both were opened for questions and commentary from everyone present. The OSFCI board voted in favor of the bid I submitted; part of this bid was an agreement that OryCon 45 will be the final OryCon-branded convention supported by OSFCI.
Our reasoning for this condition is to create space for OSFCI and the fan community to innovate: new panels, new structures, new creative outlets. We want to foster an expansion of ideas, for what kind of convention you would like to see, even possibly a one-day event. There is room at the table for you. The world has changed since the birth of OryCon. Technology, social media, and our community has grown in so many ways.
I want to celebrate OryCon’s history by inviting as many past Guests of Honor as possible to be panelists. I want to remember the good times, the laughter, the community at large. I have assembled a staff of individuals who have the desire to share their love of the fan community, the authors, the artists, and the vendors. We want to bring this dream to you.
As the cliche says, when one door closes another opens. Another desire is that we mentor and prepare a younger generation to explore these new avenues of the expressions of our fandom. My vice-chair Louisa Ark is an example. A second-generation convention runner, she’s taking advantage of this opportunity to learn first hand what it takes to run a convention: what works, what doesn’t, and how they can improve upon what’s been done in the past to make any future project they work on shine.
We want your ideas of what innovations you see in the future of an Oregon Convention, new panels, new fandoms. Until then, our vision is to make OryCon 45 be the best one that we possibly can. Stay tuned for upcoming announcements of guests of honor and what we have in store for this year.
There are several reason for this: it’s been difficult to attract new people to run the convention, the attendance has been dropping over recent year, the hotels in Portland have recently been hard to with, and OryCon in general has seemed worn-out and behind the times to the younger fans. (I’ve still enjoyed it–and have been to every one, and have co-chaired or chaired five of them–but at 72, I’m certainly not one of the younger fans.)
December 17th is a very important date in the history of The Simpsons. It was on this day in 1989 that the first episode of the show debuted on Fox, telling a Christmas story about how the first family of Springfield came to get their pet dog, Santa’s Little Helper.
The episode was equal parts hilarious and heartwarming, and to celebrate its 35th anniversary, here are 35 trivia tidbits all about it…
No gaslighting here about when The Simpsons first hit TV – the first two items on their list make a full disclosure.
35 The Beginning, Sort of
While “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire” was the first half-hour episode of The Simpsons, the family debuted two-and-a-half years prior to it on April 19, 1987 as part of The Tracey Ullman Show.
34 The First Christmas
“Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire” also wasn’t the family’s first Christmas story. The short “Simpson Xmas” aired a year earlier. It was a rewrite of “The Night Before Christmas” by Clement Moore, narrated by Bart.
It’s official. “Sesame Street” is looking for a new home. This comes after Warner Bros. Discovery decided to not renew a deal for new episodes of the children’s show on HBO and Max. You will still be able to watch old episodes for a while. “Sesame Street’s” library will stay on Max through 2027, but the show’s future is up in the air. So we wanted to take a moment to reflect on the show’s legacy with Marilyn Agrelo. She’s the director of the 2021 documentary “Street Gang: How We Got To Sesame Street.”
…Wells used her time speaking at the March Cushing event to advise future writers. She told the crowd she grew as a writer as an anthropology major at Texas A&M by learning how cultures work together. She said her degree program also helped her see how small details fit into the larger picture.
“I wanted to be an author from really early on when I was a kid, but I didn’t know how to do it,” Wells said.
She entered the working world in the technology industry by designing databases, working with software and in computer support. She said that path helped immensely with developing background knowledge for the Murderbot Diaries. After holding other non-writing positions until 2006 to support her family, Wells concentrated on her writing career — what she called a long, arduous journey. She called writing “a calling.” Her perseverance led to honors as a New York Times bestselling author, including multiple Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards
“A lot of people think if you publish one novel, you’ll sell more, and your career is made,” Wells said. “But no. You have to work just as hard to sell the next novel every single time.”…
The first full Superman trailer will be here Thursday, but to tide us over for a bit, Warner Bros. released a short teaser which itself is now the first footage we’ve seen from the movie.
Written and directed by James Gunn, Superman stars David Corenswet as Clark Kent/Superman, Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane, Skyler Gisondo as Jimmy Olson, Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor, and many more. It’s coming this summer and now, here’s your first official look at footage from Superman…
Will & Harper, the Netflix documentary about comedic actor Will Ferrell and his friendship with SNL pal Harper Steele who came out as trans, earned a spot on the coveted Oscar documentary feature shortlist today.
It wasn’t the only shortlist honor for the film directed by Josh Greenbaum. The tune from the closing credits – “Will and Harper Go West,” written by SNL alum Kristen Wiig and Sean Douglas and performed by Wiig – got shortlisted for Best Original Song (Douglas is the son of actor Michael Keaton).
But another high-profile documentary in the running for the shortlist didn’t make the cut: Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story, about the late actor who was paralyzed in a horse-riding accident. That film, directed by Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui, recently won Best Documentary Feature at the Critics Choice Documentary Awards, and last week earned a nomination for the Producers Guild of America Award….
…From the beginning he set out to write for young people, having watched as the young adult genre blossomed in the US. He finished his first complete novel in just three weeks: So Much to Tell You, which was published in 1987, won many awards and would go on to be studied by countless Australian students.
Over the next 40 years he wrote and edited 40 books, including Letters from the Inside, The Rabbits and the hugely successful Tomorrow series, beginning with Tomorrow, When the War Began. The seven books in the series, published between 1993 and 1999, imagined a group of teenagers waging a guerrilla war on enemy forces surrounding their home town of Wirrawee.
Marsden said he first had the idea when he was a teenager, “fantasising about a world without adults, because pretty much all the adults I encountered were authoritarian, were not interested in fairness or justice … they were really a bloody nuisance”.
The series, along with the three books in a sequel series, were bestsellers in both Australia and the US and were translated into five languages. In Sweden, free copies of Tomorrow, When the War Began were distributed to hundreds of thousands of teenagers after it was voted the book most likely to inspire a love of reading….
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
Born December 18, 1913 — Alfred Bester. (Died 1987.)
By Paul Weimer:
Eight, sir; seven, sir; Six, sir; five, sir; Four, sir; three, sir; Two, sir; one! Tenser, said the Tensor. Tenser, said the Tensor. Tension, apprehension, And dissension have begun
That rhyming song is how I started a 2016 piece (an early “Mining the Genre Asteroid” column) I wrote on The Demolished Man, written by one Alfred Bester.
Alfred Bester
The Demolished Man, the first book I read of his, came just because it was part of my brother’s collection. I was hooked in immediately by the psionics and the working out of their powers and how society views them, deals with them, and vice versa.
Since I can never pass up a reference to it, I remember when Walter Koenig’s psi cop first appeared on Babylon 5 and his name was, inevitably, Bester. I practically shouted at the screen, “You did not!” in delight. It soon became clear through subsequent episodes that Stracyzski, possibly through the mediation of Harlan Ellison, perhaps through his own reading of it, borrowed a lot of the ideas about psionics from The Demolished Man.
It won the first Hugo award for Best Novel.
While psionics are relatively out of fashion in SFF today, even today, anyone who wants to put psionics in their SFF work would do well to look at Bester’s work. (I hesitate to recommend old “classics” as essential, but The Demolished Man qualifies) . Maybe Julian May’s Metaconcert and Pliocene Exile novels come close to the magic of The Demolished Man. Maybe.
Bester is also the author of the original and still strong Count of Monte Cristo in SFF take, The Stars my Destination. Gully Foyle is left for dead, and not making sure he was in fact dead turns out to be a very high price by those he takes in a roaring rampage of revenge. It’s glorious and hits all the right notes. I knew the Dumas story by osmosis at the time, but having since read and watched adaptations of Dumas, I can see how much The Stars my Destination hits its beats.
Between the definitive psionic novel, and the definitive take on a Dumas novel, those alone would make Bester memorable and readable for science fiction fans. He wrote a number of stunning and timeless short stories, too, including “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” which is a “take that” to the idea of changing history by time travel.
(10) TODAY’S NEXT BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born December 18, 1946 — Steven Spielberg, 78.
Steven Spielberg is one of my favorite directors ever. Not as risk-taking as say Terry Gilliam but definitely one who’s done a lot of work that I find pleasing and that in my book counts for a lot.
I’m going to do a rewatch of Columbo this winter, so I was delighted to discover that he directed the first non-pilot episode of the series, “Murder by the Book”. He is credited with giving us the mannerisms of the detective and the look of the series.
He got that gig for having worked with Rod Serling on The Night Gallery where in one episode he directed Joan Crawford, that being “Eyes”. What other episodes that he directed are unclear because as a new director credit may gone to more senior directors, so it is thought that “A Matter of Semantics” that featured Cesar Romero and was credited to Jack Laird might have been his work.
His first major hit was Jaws which is not my fish and chips so I’ll pass by it here as we’re discussing what I like by him.
He made up for Jaws with Close Encounters of the Third Kind which is simply brilliant, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial which still makes me sniff, and two out of three of the Indiana Jones trilogy.
No, I vehemently did not like the Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I saw it once and that was more than enough, thank you.
Now Jurassic Park is one of the best monster films ever. Why it was so excellent that it even won a Hugo at ConAdian! Who came and accepted that Hugo?
There is a lot of lot films next in his career that I didn’t care for until we come to the extraordinary undertaking that is The Adventures of Tintin from the French strip byHergé. A true treat in animation this was.
(Digression for a moment. He was an Executive Producer or Producer on way too many undertakings to list here that I liked. Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Gremlins, Animaniacs (both series), Pinky and the Brain, Freakazoid! — that’s just a few I like.)
Then there’s Hook with Robin Williams as an adult Peter Pan, Julia Roberts as Tinker Bell and the Dustin Hoffman as Captain Hook. Need I say more. Well there is the crocodile…
I think I’ll finish with The BFG, his adaptation of Roald Dahl’s children’s book. Fantastic film that’s true to the book, no mean feat.
Steven Spielberg
(11) COMICS SECTION.
Bizarro puts a guitar in the hands of the wrong Doctor Who.
Blistering barnacles! Thundering typhoons! Blue blistering barnacles in a thundering typhoon! Who knew there was a 300-year-old tomb in Essex that can be linked to Tintin’s boozy best friend Captain Haddock?
The little-known tomb of Mary Haddock, in a churchyard in Leigh-on-Sea, has been named as one of the quirkier places given listed status in 2024 by Historic England.
It has a fascinating Tintin link and is one of 17 “remarkable and unusual historic buildings and places” given protection and which, Historic England argues, collectively shine light on the diversity of England’s heritage.’
Mary Haddock’s son became an Admiral in the navy and was the inspiration for Tin-Tin’s irascible friend….
… Built in 1688, the tomb of Mary Anna Haddock is well crafted and, heritage experts say, “notable as a single monument to a named woman in a period of gender inequality”.
It is the name that will thrill Tintin fans. Mary married into the Haddock family, known for prominent seafarers such as her son Adm Richard Haddock. It was he and the wider family who inspired Hergé’s Captain Haddock character in The Adventures of Tintin comics.
Captain Haddock, as all Tintin fans know, was the young reporter’s short-tempered, generally seething best friend and protector with a brilliantly wild turn of phrase and a weakness for whisky….
“Secret Level” has been renewed for a second season at Amazon Prime Video.
The series is an adult animated anthology made up of short stories set in the world of various video games, such as “Pac-Man” and “Dungeons & Dragons.” Season 1 of “Secret Level” debuted with eight episodes on Dec. 10 with another seven set for Tuesday. Details about Season 2, including which video game worlds will be featured, remain under wraps.
Amazon says that “Secret Level” achieved the most-watched animated series debut of all time for the streamer within its first week, though exact viewership numbers were not provided. According to measurement from Luminate, the series was watched for 155.3 million minutes in the U.S. during its first week of availability, which translates to roughly 1.4 million views when divided by its 109-minute runtime….
…The project has an otherworldly origin story, according to Jennifer Hollenbeck, an electrical engineer at APL who first came up with the idea. She is an avid sci-fi fan and had been reading The Expanseseries of novels by the collaborative duo who publish under the pen name James S. A. Corey. Notably, The Expanse features alien technology capable of morphing to achieve different functions.
“It can heal itself, it can change shapes, and that was really the inspiration for this,” Hollenbeck says. “I was in the midst of one of those books and my boss asked me if I had any ideas for some research topics—and it just hit me.”…
They are easy to install, and knock chunks off electricity bills. It may not be Romeo and Juliet, but Spain’s balcony scene is heating up as the country embraces what has hitherto been a mainly German love affair with DIY plug-in solar panels.
Panels have already been installed on about 1.5m German balconies, where they are so popular the term Balkonkraftwerk (balcony power plant) has been coined.
Manufacturers say that installing a couple of 300-watt panels will give a saving of up to 30% on a typical household’s electricity bill. With an outlay of €400-800 and with no installation cost, the panels could pay for themselves within six years.
In Spain, where two thirds of the population live in apartments and installing panels on the roof requires the consent of a majority of the building’s residents, this DIY technology has obvious advantages.
With solar balconies, no such consent is required unless the facade is listed as of historic interest or there is a specific prohibition from the residents’ association or the local authority. Furthermore, as long as the installation does not exceed 800 watts it doesn’t require certification, which can cost from €100 to €400, depending on the area.
“The beauty of the solar balconies is they are flexible, cheap and plug straight into the domestic network via a converter, so you don’t have to pay for the installation,” says Santiago Vernetta, CEO of Tornasol Energy, one of Spain’s main suppliers….
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Andrew (not Werdna), John Lorentz, Lise Andreasen, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jon Meltzer.]
A Netflix adaptation of wildly popular Chinese sci-fi novel “The Three-Body Problem” has split opinions in China and sparked online nationalist anger over scenes depicting a violent and tumultuous period in the country’s modern history. …
Author Liu said in an interview with the New York Times in 2019 that he had originally wanted to open the book with scenes from Mao’s Cultural Revolution, but his Chinese publisher worried they would never make it past government censors and buried them in the middle of the narrative.
The English version of the book, translated by Ken Liu, put the scenes at the novel’s beginning, with the author’s blessing.
Ye Wenjie’s disillusionment with the Cultural Revolution later proves pivotal in the sci-fi thriller’s plot, which jumps between the past and present day.
All of this rancorous dissension surrounding the Netflix version of “The Three Body Problem” reminds me of what transpired after the airing of “River Elegy” (Héshāng 河殇), which was written during the latter part of the 80s. This was a six-part documentary aired by China Central Television on June 16, 1988 that employed the Yellow River as a metaphor for the decline of Chinese civilization. … I strongly believe that it was this artistic production created by Premier Zhao Ziyang’s (1919-2005) zhìnáng tuán 智囊团 (“think tank”) in an inclusive sense that precipitated the Tiananmen protests and massacre one year later …”
“The difference is that “River Elegy” was a documentary created in China by critical, progressive intellectuals, whereas the Netflix version of “Three Body” is a film adaptation of a Chinese sci-fi novel infused with Western ideas and standards by its American producers, making it a much more complicated proposition.
Let’s see if the chemistry is there in Netflix’s “Three Body” to cause the sort of ramifications that ensued from CNN’s “River elegy”.
(Dr. Mair’s history of the think tank, “River Elegy”, and the Tiananmen protests is here: “Thought Panzers”).
… As soon as I read the expression “sīxiǎng tǎnkè 思想坦克”, I had the exact same impression as Mark. It sounded bièniu 彆扭 (“awkward”), weird, unnatural. But I don’t think the person who translated the English term “think tank” into “sīxiǎng tǎnkè 思想坦克” was clever enough to add the extra military dimension consciously, though they may have done so sub/unconsciously ….
The BBC has “no plans” to use AI again to promote Doctor Whoafter receiving complaints from viewers.
The BBC’s marketing teams used the tech “as part of a small trial” to help draft some text for two promotional emails and mobile notifications, according to its complaints website, which was intended to highlight Doctor Who programming on the BBC.
But the corporation received complaints over the reports that it was using generative AI, it added.
“We followed all BBC editorial compliance processes and the final text was verified and signed-off by a member of the marketing team before it was sent,” the BBC said. “We have no plans to do this again to promote Doctor Who.”
…We later found out that the attack had actually peaked at 65 million requests per second. For context, the largest publicly announced HTTP DDoS attack by Cloudflare at the time was a 71 million request per second attack. Additionally, we received information that the attack originated from the Mirai botnet. However, Cloudflare did its job well and we saw very little, if any, impact….
(4) WOMEN ARTISTS HARD HIT AS NEWSPAPER CHAINS SHED PRINT COMICS. [Item by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.] Cartoonist Georgia Dunn discovered that Gannett has gotten rid of most of its diverse and female cartoonists, even if they’re making money for the syndicate.
The latest warning signs for some female artists began last fall. Suddenly, their work began disappearing from many American comics pages.
An announcement started hitting the pages of newspapers dotted around the country: the USA Today Network, owned by Gannett, was “standardizing” its comics across more than 200 publications. One of those newspapers, the Coloradoan, published a list of comics, batched in groups, that it said made up Gannett’s new lineup of options.
What began to concern some cartoonists and industry observers: None of the dozens of comics listed as print offerings for Gannett papers was actively being created by a woman artist.
Just three strips in Gannett’s list of print comics have a credited woman: “For Better or For Worse,” which creator Lynn Johnston says is in reruns; “Luann,” by writer-artist Greg Evans and his daughter, co-author Karen Evans; and “Shoe,” by artist Gary Brookins and Susie MacNelly.
As the changes rolled out at many Gannett papers between October and early this year, Hilary Price, creator of the long-running syndicated strip “Rhymes With Orange,” said she began to see a significant dip in her sales income.
Price said she is accustomed to encountering misogynistic reader responses to her work as an artist. What is becoming professionally demoralizing to her lately, though, is the sense that female artists are being removed from America’s comics pages as several newspaper chains have consolidated or contracted their print funnies in recent years.
Some female cartoonists say that as they endure double-digit percentage losses in their income from client papers, their representation in print, already historically unbalanced, is growing alarmingly, and disproportionately, small.
…Georgia Dunn, creator of the syndicated “Breaking Cat News,” said her income dropped substantially in recent months as a result.
“I don’t think it’s a Machiavellian plot — I don’t think it’s intentional,” Dunn said of the optics that female artists are being disproportionately affected by the industry’s changes. “But they overlook us a lot.”
…The “Breaking Cat News” creator shared with her readers the bad news that she might have to make some hard financial decisions as her client income dropped sharply. But “when I shared with them how this restructuring hit me, they made up my lost income overnight,” she said.
“I woke up and opened Patreon and started crying,” she continued. “I felt like George Bailey at the end of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life.’”…
And here’s Dunn’s follow-up post on GoComics. (Scroll beneath the cartoon itself) — Breaking Cat News – March 23.
(5) SAM I AM. John O’Neill’s “The Horrors of Sam Moskowitz” at Black Gate begins its discussion of a series of horror anthologies with this discussion of their fanhistoric editor:
…Moskowitz was an interesting character. A professional magazine editor, he edited the trade journals Quick Frozen Foods and Quick Frozen Foods International for many years, and he gradually put his professional skills to use in the genre, starting in 1953 with Science-Fiction Plus, Hugo Gernsback’s last science fiction magazine. He began editing anthologies with Editor’s Choice in Science Fiction, published by McBride in 1954, and produced two dozen more over the next 20 years.
Moskowitz (who sometimes published under the name “Sam Moscowitz,” maybe because the ‘k’ on his typewriter was worn out?), was just as well known as a critic and genre historian. While still a teenager, he was one of the key organizers of the first Worldcon, held in New York City in 1939 (where he famously barred several Futurians, including Donald A. Wollheim, Fred Pohl, Robert A. W. Lowndes, Cyril Kornbluth, and others).
His genre histories and biographies, including Explorers of the Infinite and Seekers of Tomorrow, are still well worth reading today — as is his legendary history of fannish feuds, The Immortal Storm, which fan historian Harry Warner Jr. summed up with,
“If read directly after a history of World War II, it does not seem like an anticlimax.”
First Fandom still presents an annual award in Moskowitz’s memory each year at Worldcon….
A federal judge tossed out a lawsuit brought by X/Twitter against a watching group that produced a study that examined the proliferation of hate speech on the platform.
U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer concluded that the platform, owned by Elon Musk, was attempting to chill the speech rights of the Center for Countering Digital Hate and other groups.
The judge wrote that X’s “motivation in bringing this case is evident. X Corp. has brought this case in order to punish [Center for Countering Digital Hate] for CCDH publications that criticized X Corp.—and perhaps in order to dissuade others who might wish to engage in such criticism.”
X/Twitter had sued the group, claiming that in doing their study, they unlawfully “scraped” the platform for its data that led to an exodus of advertisers.
“X disagrees with the court’s decision and plans to appeal,” the company said.
(7) CHECKING IN ON THE COPYRIGHT CLAIMS BOARD. At Writer Beware, Michael Capobianco suspends judgment about the effectiveness of the relatively new Copyright Claims Board: “To CCB or Not to CCB: The Question is Still Out”.
It’s been more than a year since my last post about the now not-so-new Copyright Claims Board (CCB).
Victoria covered the CCB when it first started hearing claims in June 2022, and her post gives a good summary of how it operates and what it is supposed to accomplish. The short version: The CCB was created as a judicial body under the US Copyright Office to administer small copyright claims that would be too expensive and/or time-consuming in federal court.
At the time I confess I was worried about an eventuality that fortunately hasn’t come true. There are vanishingly few copyright trolls trying to use the CCB to collect money from innocent or ignorant individuals by scaring them into paying settlements. On the other hand, it has worked for some business to business claims: Joe Hand Promotions, Inc., a company that “serves as the exclusive distributor of all Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) and select boxing pay-per-view programming” is by far the most frequent CCB claimant, with forty-five claims and counting, mainly against bars and restaurants, and many of those are withdrawn from consideration by the CCB and apparently settled privately.
What has happened in the intervening 20 months has been a disappointment for anyone hoping that the CCB would become a useful tool for writers seeking to get redress for infringement of their work. First of all, the number of “literary” claims is still very small, around 10% of total claims, and many of those, as we previously pointed out, are dismissed by the CCB because they weren’t filed correctly or have other flaws. Some are outright bizarre, and I may do a post about them in the future. With others the claimant doesn’t understand that a vendor selling used copies of their books is not a violation of their copyright….
…In short, even as its second birthday is only a few months away, it’s still too early to draw conclusions about the efficacy of the CCB when it comes to literary works, especially books. The majority of the claims that it has decided so far involve photographs and, in those cases, it generally is finding in favor of the photographer and awarding reasonable to low damages. But there are still only a handful of contested decisions and none of them involve the kinds of published material that Writer Beware usually deals with….
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born March 25, 1920 – Patrick Troughton. (Died 1987.) So let’s talk about Patrick Troughton, the Second Doctor.
(Digression: All of the classic Doctors are available on the BritBox streaming service. It’s $8.99 a month for a lot of British content including all of the Poirot mysteries. End of digression.)
The first time that I watched his run I wasn’t at all fond of him as I thought his characterization wasn’t that serious. Rewatching them a few years ago on BritBox, I realized that he was a much better actor than I thought he was and that his Doctor was a much better, more nuanced persona that I realized. No, he’s still not anywhere near my favorite Doctor but now I can watch him without cringing.
Patrick Troughton as the Second Doctor Who.
Ok I’m getting distracted…
Part of his problem, and yes of the first Doctor, and yes this is just my opinion, is that the scripts weren’t that good. It wasn’t until the Third Doctor that they started actually thinking about having decent scripts.
So what did he do? Well he had the distinct honor of being in The Gorgon, an early Sixties horror film with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing.
Horror films involving Dracula, Frankenstein, feathered serpents and demons would all see him make his appearance. He showed in a lot of mysteries including the Danger Man and The Saint series. And several Sherlock Holmes series as well.
I think Space: 1999 is the only other genre series he appeared in besides a lot of Robin Hood work in the Fifties, mostly on The Adventures of Robin Hood.
Non Sequitur doesn’t call it science fiction – you might.
(10) A CHANCE TO START AT THE BEGINNING. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The weekly 2000AD British anthology SF/F comic has its landmark 2,375 issue coming out next week. “New readers start here: jump on board with 2000 AD #2375”.
First up, it’s a little longer at 48 pages. Second, all the current stories ended this week, so the next, 2,375 prog will see the start of all new stories: so, no jumping into the middle of something. In short this is an ideal place for newcomers to give it a try. 2000AD is perhaps most noted for its Judge Dredd strip. But there is a Rogue Trooper film in the works….
The new issue of 2000 AD has been precision-tooled for those hungry to discover why it’s called the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic – with bitingly good stories from top comics talent!
2000 AD Prog 2375 is a 48-page special on sale from 27 March, with a bold new cover by Hitman artist John McCrea and colourist Jack Davies.
This latest issue is designed to make it easy for new readers to pick up 2000 AD, with a mix of brand new stories and ongoing series that showcase the best the GGC has to offer!
…Rincewind isn’t Conan, or Elric, or Gandalf (I’ve met Gandalf, and you sir, are no Gandalf). But while we love reading about the great heroes (or villains), we ‘get’ Rincewind….
(13) FUNNY VIDEO. [Item by Jennifer Hawthorne.] This clip showed up on Reddit. It’s apparently from the shooting set of Ford’s TV show, Shrinking. “Harrison Ford is too old for this shit”.
A NASA astronaut who had the honor of naming her spacecraft will fly items inspired by that name when she launches to the International Space Station next month.
Sunita “Suni” Williams, who is set to fly with fellow NASA astronaut Barry “Butch” Wilmore on Boeing’s first Crew Flight Test (CFT) of its CST-100 Starliner capsule, will reveal the “Calypso”-related items once she is in orbit.
“A little homage to other explorers and the ships they rode on, I think we are going to call her ‘Calypso,'” said Williams in 2019, when she announced the ship’s name just after it returned to Earth from flying its first uncrewed mission.
Boeing announced Williams’ intentions as it completed packing Calypso for the CFT launch, which is currently targeted for April 22. All that remains to be added to the vehicle are some late stow items and the astronauts, themselves.
The CFT Starliner will carry 759 pounds (344 kilograms) of cargo, including 452 pounds (205 kilograms) from Boeing and 307 pounds (139 kilograms) from NASA. Boeing will have 25 bags and NASA will have 11 bags stored in the cabin where Wilmore and Williams will be seated….
(15) MARK WATNEY’S HOME AWAY FROM HOME. View NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day at the link – a photo of a place you’ve probably read about already.
Ares 3 Landing Site: The Martian Revisited. Explanation: This close-up from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE camera shows weathered craters and windblown deposits in southern Acidalia Planitia. A striking shade of blue in standard HiRISE image colors, to the human eye the area would probably look grey or a little reddish. But human eyes have not gazed across this terrain, unless you count the eyes of NASA astronauts in the scifi novel The Martian by Andy Weir. The novel chronicles the adventures of Mark Watney, an astronaut stranded at the fictional Mars mission Ares 3 landing site corresponding to the coordinates of this cropped HiRISE frame. For scale Watney’s 6-meter-diameter habitat at the site would be about 1/10th the diameter of the large crater. Of course, the Ares 3 landing coordinates are only about 800 kilometers north of the (real life) Carl Sagan Memorial Station, the 1997 Pathfinder landing site.
Studio Ghibli Fest is back in theaters in its biggest year yet! Now, coming off the triumphant Oscar® win for Hayao Miyazaki’s latest feature The Boy and the Heron, celebrate this iconic studio with an all-new selection of fan favorites and iconic titles alike.
This year’s lineup highlights the works of studio co-founders Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, as well as directors Yoshifumi Kondo, Hiroyuki Morita, and Hiromasa Yonebayashi. In celebration of Hayao Miyazaki’s recent Oscar win, Studio Ghibli Fest 2024 kicks off with the acclaimed director’s previous Academy Award-winning feature, Spirited Away, which took home the Oscar in 2001.
[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Kathy Sullivan, Jennifer Hawthorne, JJ, Doctor Science, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Mark.]
By Anne Marble: Fanfiction is known for tropes like enemies-to-lovers. But some vendors have become the enemies of the fanfic community — by making a profit from fanfiction.
These vendors are breaking one of rules of the fanfiction world: Don’t make a profit from fanfic. Even worse, they’re making a profit from someone else’s fanfiction. And putting the whole fanfic community in jeopardy.
Along with many others, Diane Duane shared this post about people who are binding and selling fanfic:
The original post starts here. This thread shows lots of examples. You can find bound fanfic on Etsy and other vendors. You’ll find examples if you explore the fanfic category. There is even a Fanfiction Book Binding category.
Some vendors try to protect themselves by saying they are not selling the fanfic (as that’s illegal) — they are selling binding services. I am not a lawyer but that sounds like a grey area.
The important thing to note is that the fanfic writers are not behind this. They are not giving their permission — and they not getting compensated. Creators of fanart are also seeing their work sold on Etsy and other sites.
As a result of this, many established fanfic writers (and artists) have started pulling all their work from fanfic sites. So beloved stories and artwork that have been available to fans for free are now lost because somebody wanted to make money out of them.
It has also been pointed out that this endangers all fanfiction. The companies that own the rights to these characters and stories have been ignoring the fanfiction — because it does not make money. If that changes, they could very well go back to suing fanfic writers (and artists). (Point made by @ramsay_b_OFMD here.)
Fans used to print out their favorite fanfic, add their own artwork, and even share it with friends for free. This is not what is going on now.
(1) PRH PLANS EDITION OF A FAMOUS POTTER FANFIC. [Item by Anne Marble.] Penguin Random House (through Del Rey) is going to publish a revised version of “Manacled,” a very famous Harry Potter fanfic. This is a Hermione plus Draco (Dramione) fan fiction with a lot of trigger warnings. The author, SenLinYu, announcd this on Tumblr:
I’m excited to announce that I have signed a book deal with Del Rey at Penguin Random House in the US and Michael Joseph in the UK for my debut novel, Alchemised, a standalone dark fantasy set in a war-torn world of necromancy and alchemy, in which a healer with amnesia is taken as a prisoner of war and must fight to protect her lost memories and the secrets hidden among them. It will grapple with themes of trauma and survival, legacy, and the way that love can drive one to extreme darkness, and it is, as you may be able to tell, a reimagined version of Manacled.
I know I’ve been rather quiet about my publishing journey, and a lot of that has been because I didn’t want to spark any concerns or worry that I might be abruptly taking away a story that is such a deep part of myself and that I know has meant so much to so many people. This process has unfolded very slowly and quietly because I have tried to be mindful as I could be in every step of the way.
As most of you know, I have been a reader in fandom long before I ever began to write. Fanfiction is incredibly special to me, and I have tried to do my best not to undermine its legal protection or allow my works to do so either. During the last several years, there has been a growing issue with illegal sales of Manacled, putting both me and the incredible community that shares fanfiction freely in legal jeopardy.
After consulting with the OTW as well as other lawyers, it has grown clear that as a transformative writer I have limited options in protecting my stories from this kind of exploitation, but I wasn’t sure what to do; I didn’t want to just take the story down, in part because I worried that might only exacerbate the issue, but I didn’t know what other options I had. Then I suddenly had this idea of alchemy, which was peculiarly appropriate; an academic world filled with unique transmutational abilities, and a necromantic war against people who had discovered the secrets of immortality, and I could see a path to reimagining the story while still holding on to as much of the original spirit of Manacled as possible.
I began redrafting the concept privately around Christmas 2022, and then as if the universe had aligned, just as I was finishing, Caitlin Mahony and Rivka Bergman of WME reached out to me and were delightfully enthusiastic about concepts and ideas for my new alchemical world and the ways I had reimagined the story.
I’m thrilled to be working with Emily Archbold, my visionary editor at Del Rey, along with Rebecca Hilsdon at Michael Joseph in the UK, to polish this novel for publication in Fall 2025. I feel uniquely privileged that both my publishing teams are familiar with Manacled and understand how special it is to so many people, and how important it is that this reimagining captures the same spirit while also having its own wings.
Manacled is not going anywhere at present. It will remain online throughout 2024, at which point it will, if you’ll pardon the pun, alchemise for 2025 and be removed from AO3….
The revised version is described as “Alchemised, a standalone dark fantasy set in a war-torn world of necromancy and alchemy, in which a healer with amnesia is taken as a prisoner of war and must fight to protect her lost memories and the secrets hidden among them.” As far as I know, it will be published under the name SenLinYu — just like the original fan fic. A lot of people are happy for the author. They are happy she is finally going to get paid for her work. They also see it as Penguin Random House banking on the popularity of her fanfic.
senlinyu getting a publishing deal to make manacled a real book I’m so emotional rn she deserves this so much (and so do I for being victimized by her writing) pic.twitter.com/uKVAXIXGbk
One aspect that drove the author’s decision is that “Manacled” is so popular that some people have resold it online without the permission of the author. However, those sales are illegal, and they jeopardize both the original author and the fanfic community. The author mentioned that she consulted with the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) as well as lawyers about how to protect herself. So she decided to revise the fanfic and turn it into a new work. It will be sold in 2025. Until then, the original fanfic will still be available on A03. This news is not without its critics. First, a number of posts have accused the author of ripping off The Handmaid’s Tale alongside the Harry Potter elements. I haven’t read the fanfic, so I’m not sure how close it gets. From what I understand, there is a “concubine” element. (It seems a lot of dystopias have borrowed heavily from A Handmaid’s Tale in recent years.)
Manacled being published as official work feels so tacky to me considering it copied world building of two popular fictional works like harry potter and handmaid’s tale. If I was an author I would sue that shit so fast
One poster got truly angry about this upcoming publication, calling the author a “freak” and a “horrible person” for romanticizing abuse. I’m sure this won’t be the only complaint along these lines. I’m torn with that sort of take. Yes, maybe some readers might get the wrong idea from reading a very dark story. But maybe we’re not giving readers (even young ones) enough credit.
(2) DON’T LET KIDS GET SMARTER. “LeVar Burton’s Banned Book Rainbow” is a show-within-the-show on Jimmy Kimmel Live, beginning at the 11:05 mark:
(3) KGB. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Isabel Yap and Randee Dawn in person at the KGB Bar on Wednesday, February 14 starting at 7:00 p.m. Eastern.
ISABEL YAP
Isabel Yap is the author of Never Have I Ever: Stories, which was published by Small Beer Press in 2021, and was named one of the 2021 Best Books for Adults by the New York Public Library. Her work has appeared in venues including Tor.com, Lithub, and Year’s Best Weird Fiction. Her collection won the British Fantasy Award, and was a finalist for the Ignyte, Locus, Crawford, and World Fantasy Awards. By day she works in the tech industry as a Product Manager. She likes visiting museums, playing the ukulele, and commiserating with others about how hard it is to write books.
RANDEE DAWN
Randee Dawn is the author of the bestselling novel Tune in Tomorrow, which was a finalist in the 2023 Next Generation Indie Awards. Her latest story, “The Fifth Horseman,” appears in the new anthology The Four ???? of the Apocalypse. Her stories have also appeared in Soul Scream, Horror for the Throne, and Even in the Grave, and she is the co-editor of Across the Universe: Tales of Alternative Beatles. An entertainment journalist who writes for the Los Angeles Times, Variety, and other publications, Randee lives in Brooklyn with her spouse and a fluffy, sleepy Westie.
Location: KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003 (Just off 2nd Ave, upstairs)
(4) CHENGDU WORLDCON ROUNDUP. [Item by Ersatz Culture.]
Observations from Hugo winner Ling Shizhen regarding the trophies
As yet, I’ve not noticed any Chinese coverage of the core part of Chris M. Barkley’s interview with Dave McCarty on Weibo, perhaps because of the initial lack of transcripts making that less accessible to non-native speakers, plus I’m uncertain how accessible SoundCloud, Google Drive, etc are to Chinese users. (Google Drive I’m fairly sure is inaccessible in China without workarounds)
However, the notes at the end of Chris’ piece, regarding damage to the trophies that were shipped to the US, have garnered some discussion.
One of my Chinese SF friends made me aware that Best Fanzine co-winner Ling Shizhen had spoken on WeChat about the subject. I don’t personally have access to that app, nor did I have alternative contact details for Ling, so I reached out to RiverFlow to see if I could get more information which I might be able to share more widely.
Here is the the subsequent response from Ling via RiverFlow, firstly in the original Chinese, and then a machine translation via DeepL, with minor manual edits for phrasing.
On 22nd October 2023, I arrived in Chongqing from Chengdu [a journey of approximately 300km per Google]. During the journey, my bag was stuffed to the brim, so I basically held the trophy in my hand to prevent it getting damaged, and although it felt heavy, the trophy was fine.
When I returned to Shanghai from Chongqing [a distance of just under 1,700km per Google], I couriered back a large number of items I received at the 2023 Chengdu World Science Fiction Convention, so I thought it would be better to put the trophy in my backpack. After the trophy was properly placed, I was careful all the way, and it endured nothing worse than the inevitable bumps of walking and trains.
After arriving home, I found that there was a problem: the connection between the “stargate” and the base of the trophy had loosened up in a way that I had not been seen before, and the “stargate” was a bit shaky. It was only then that I realised that the “stargate” was not completely welded to the base of the trophy. So I think it would have been better to go all the way back to Shanghai from Chongqing carrying it by hand. At least my personal experience shows that this trophy is not very contact-friendly.
Many thanks to Ling Shizhen and RiverFlow for getting back to me so promptly, and for providing the information I requested.
Ling Shizhen and RiverFlow receiving the 2023 Hugo Award for Best Fanzine. Image from the 2023 Hugo Ceremony video streamClose up of the 2023 Hugo base, taken from the 2023 Worldcon Opening Ceremony video stream, previously published in the 2023-10-18 Pixel Scroll.
The story of a half fairy, half human woman has gripped UK book buyers this week, as a novel about the hybrid heroine shot to the top of the bestseller chart.
House of Flame and Shadow by Sarah J Maas, the third book in the Crescent City series featuring Bryce Quinlan, has become the third fastest-selling science fiction and fantasy title since records began since its publication on 30 January.
Maas sold 44,761 copies of the new title in the week of its launch, coming in behind Terry Pratchett’s 2011 book Snuff with 54,687 launch week sales and Rebecca Yarros’s Iron Flame which saw a record-setting 57,055 sales last November, according to the Bookseller.
Maas and Yarros are driving a surge in popularity of the “romantasy” genre, which blends elements of romance and fantasy and has attracted huge numbers of readers through social media recommendations, particularly via TikTok. Videos with hashtags related to Maas have been viewed more than 14bn times, her publisher Bloomsbury said.”
(6) USED OR OVERUSED? At the Fantast Author’s Handbook, Philip Athans challenges the use of particular word: “Active Search: Because”.
…I want to talk about the word “because.” I think “because,” which like all words is perfectly fine and in no way “banned,” sometimes—actually, fairly often—sounds clunky….
(7) COLLINS FUNDRAISER. Horror author, comics creator, and File 770 news contributor Nancy Collins was hospitalized earlier this week with blood clots in one lung, and as she says in the title of her GoFundMe, “What Doesn’t Kill Me Leaves Me With Medical Bills”.
This past Saturday (February 3rd, 2024) I woke up to discomfort in my left chest every time I inhaled. As the day went on I experienced increasing pain that radiated into my armpit and through my left shoulder, accompanied by extreme exhaustion. That evening I drove myself to the E.R. at a hospital near my house here in Macon, GA. By that point I thought I was having some kind of cardiac episode, as my mother’s side of the family had a long history of heart issues.
Within 30 minutes of being taken into the exam area, I was screaming in agony and could no longer sit up. Being kept prone helped alleviate the intensity of the pain, but breathing was still an issue.
An EKG, a set of Xrays, and a MRI scan later, I was told I wasn’t having a heart attack. However, I did have a blood clot in my lower left lung–actually, several small ones, according to the doctor. He said that if I hadn’t come in when I did Saturday night, odds are I would not have woken up Sunday morning.
They admitted me into the hospital, where I was ordered bed rest, pumped full of blood thinners, and then underwent several ultrasounds. They kept me over the weekend, finally releasing me Monday evening with several prescriptions and an outpatient appointment with a hematologist. I suspect I will be on blood thinners for the rest of my life. (I know, ironic for someone best known for writing vampire stories. Even more ironic–the clots appear to be the result of me sitting too long in front of my laptop while writing. )
I’m setting up this campaign to help with the medical bills from this unexpected reminder that I am no longer a spring chicken. While I have medical insurance, it ain’t all that and a bag of chips. I’m still on the hook for 25% of my treatment–possibly more, if it turns out any of the physicians, technicians, or laboratories who handled my case happen to be out-of-network.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born February 7, 1960 — James Spader, 64. How can I not do the Birthday of James Spader, the performer who played Dr. Daniel Jackson, Egyptologist in Stargate? Yes, I’m really fond of that film. And yes, I am equally fond of the Stargate SG-1 franchise.
His first SF film actually came as a starring role as Joey Callaghan in Starcrossed where an alien woman is running from a deadly enemy and tries to hide here. She meets a young mechanic (Joey), who helps her to go home and to be a freedom fighter there.
James Spader in 2014. Photo by Gage Skidmore.
A decade later, his next role is in Stargate one. I thought it was a great performance by him. And yes, the character as performed by Michael Shanks in Stargate SG-1 continuity is just as interesting, just completely different. His role I thought was more true to that of being an Egyptologist but the Stargate SG-1 continuity isn’t really concerned with the original premise, is it?
If you saw Avengers: Age of Ultron, and I will readily admit that I have not, he not only voiced Ultron but did the motion capture for it.
But his greatest role, and I readily admit that is not genre was in The Blacklist as Raymond “Red” Reddington, a former US Naval Intelligence officer turned fugitive who’s forced to become an FBI crime consultant. And I was surprised to learn that he was an executive producer for that series.
(10) TRACING THE ROOTS OF COMICS. At Colleen Doran’s Funny Business the artist takes her work on a Neil Gaiman book as the jumping-off point for a discussion of comic art history: “CHIVALRY: From Illuminated Manuscripts to Comics”.
One of the many reasons I wanted to adapt Neil Gaiman’s Chivalry into graphic novel form was to create a comic as a bridge and commentary re: comics and illuminated manuscripts.
We’re often told that the first comic was Action Comics #1 featuring Superman, a collection of Superman comic strips that morphed into comic books as an art form.
Sequential art predates Action Comics #1.
Action Comics popularized sequential art book storytelling that had already appeared in other forms in fits and starts throughout history. Comic books didn’t take off as a popular medium for several reasons, not least of which was the necessary printing process hadn’t been invented yet and it’s hard to popularize – and commercialize – something most people can never see.
You find sequential art in cave paintings and in Egyptian hieroglyphics. I’ve read that comics (manga) were invented by the Japanese in 12th century scrolls.
And sequential art appears over and over again in Western art going back well over 1000 years, and in book form at least 1100 years ago.
On an overcast day, the delicate pointed crown of the Brooklyn Tower is invisible in the clouds, as if a vengeful enemy has shrouded its superlative vantage in smoke. Nonetheless, over the low-rise flatlands that comprise most of the borough, the jagged edges rising along the dark shaft are present and unmistakable.
The Batman building, the Tower of Sauron — the nicknames write themselves. And why not? Better this than another squared-off tower that simply fiddles with the ratio of white solid to blue glass. Maybe I should hate it for its bigness, its blackness, its thrust — but I don’t. Skylines need punctuation. The designers of the Brooklyn Tower, SHoP Architects, threw everything at this to make it an exclamation point…
….“The idea was Gotham, it was Deco,” says Gregg Pasquarelli, founding partner of SHoP Architects. “Batman should live here.”…
Brooklyn Tower is the borough’s first supertall skyscraper. Photo: Max Touhey, courtesy of SHoP Architects
(12) OMG! The H Book Club blog on X.com made this gobsmacking observation:
If you'd asked me who would play Gene Wolfe on screen, I would never in a million years have guessed Chris Pratt.
A Go Fund Me drive has already raised more than $115,000 for Juan Carlos Osorio, the crewmember on Marvel’s WonderMan series who died Tuesday after falling from a catwalk at Radford Studios.
“On February 6th, 2024, our friend Spike lost his life on the set of Marvels WonderMan shoot at CBS Radford studios due to a potential structural failure,” reads the fundraise, started by Bill Martel. “We are hoping the Production Company, The Facility, MBS, Marvel Studios handles things properly, but expect a long road fraught with attorney fees and expenses. In the mean time, bills will be mounting and the widow, Boom Operator Joanne W. will be left to deal with everything. Help if you’re able, it’s greatly appreciated.”…
Disney is investing $1.5 billion in “Fortnite” developer Epic Games in what will be the Mouse House’s “biggest foray into the game space ever,” Disney CEO Bob Iger announced Wednesday.
…Per further information provided by Disney, “in addition to being a world-class games experience and interoperating with ‘Fortnite,’ the new persistent universe will offer a multitude of opportunities for consumers to play, watch, shop and engage with content, characters and stories from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Avatar’ and more. Players, gamers and fans will be able to create their own stories and experiences, express their fandom in a distinctly Disney way, and share content with each other in ways that they love.”…
(15) RARE UNFINISHED DOCUMENTARY FEATURE FILM TRAILER FOOTAGE FROM “THE MAN WHO ‘SAVED’ THE MOVIES”. [Item by Steve Vertlieb.] Here’s the original theatrical trailer for the never completed feature length motion picture documentary, The Man Who “Saved” The Movies, concerning over half a century of published writings…associations with actors, composers, writers, and directors…and some seventy-six years devoted to a passion for both films and film makers, while lovingly chronicling the life and career of film, and film music historian Steve Vertlieb.
Featuring appearances by Veronica Carlson, Philippe Mora, Paul Clemens, Juliet Rozsa, Lee Holdridge, Mark McKenzie, Patrick Russ, and Gregg Nestor, the film remains a work in progress. While financial difficulties have sadly plagued its production, it is my hope that it may one day reach completion.
… and, yes, that is me with Frank Sinatra, Johnny Mathis, Kirk Douglas, William Shatner, Jack Klugman, old friend and iconic American film director, Frank Capra, Oscar winning film composer, John Williams, Oscar winning film composer, Miklos Rozsa, famed science fiction author, Ray Bradbury, iconic special effects titan, Ray Harryhausen, “Psycho” author Robert Bloch, together with “The Time Machine” producer/director, George Pal, Hammer Films’ star, Peter Cushing, and screen hero/gold medal Olympian, Buster Crabbe.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ob6-t0MKXRY
(16) COLD WAR SURPLUS? “Remnants of a Nuclear Missile Are Found in a Garage” – in Bellevue, WA – reports the New York Times. “The police responded to a call from a U.S. Air Force museum that said a man had offered to donate a Cold War-era missile stored in his late neighbor’s garage.”
Members of the bomb squad in Bellevue, Wash., on Thursday were called to inspect parts of a military-grade missile in the garage of a resident.
Elements of the larger, intact missile, such as the warhead, were missing and the authorities deemed the piece to be inert and safe, the police said in a news release on Friday.
An Air Force museum in Dayton, Ohio, contacted the police in Bellevue on Jan. 31 to report that a resident had offered to donate the missile, which belonged to his late neighbor….
…The next day, the man was “surprised” to hear from the police because he had not called them but invited the bomb squad to inspect the missile remnant, Officer Tyler said.
Squad members identified the rocket as a Douglas AIR-2 Genie missile, designed to carry a 1.5-kiloton nuclear warhead….
…It was clear that the missile remnant did not pose a threat given that it was missing its warhead and did not contain rocket fuel, Officer Tyler said.
“It was essentially just a rusted piece of metal at that point,” he said. “An artifact, in other words.”…
The NYT news report reminds me that when I first got into fandom I heard tell about Russell Seitz, a fan who was famous for having acquired the components of an ICBM. The following is one version of that story:
In the late 70’s, when most of our nuclear arsenal was converted from liquid to solid fuel, the U.S. Government auctioned off a number of obsolete missile silos and their contents. Mostly the silos got bought by local farmers who converted them for grain storage. I only know what happened to one of the missiles. It was offered at sealed bid auction and a friend of mine, Russell Seitz, bought it. When you bid on something like this, you have to send in a check for 10% of your bid as a deposit. He looked at his bank account, and figured he could spare about $300 that month, so that’s what he sent. When he discovered that he’d won the bid, he had to scrounge up the rest. Now the buyer must pick up the goods himself, but he can request that his purchase be delivered, at government expense, to the nearest military base. Being an undergraduate at M.I.T. at the time, he had the missile shipped to Hanscom Airforce Base, about 12 miles away. He then arranged for a truck, and donated the missile to a local modern art museum (I forget which one). Tax laws were a little different in those days, and if you donated something to an art museum, you could deduct not the just the purchase price, but the original value of the object, which was considerable. Income averaging allowed him to spread the “loss” out over a number of years so that he didn’t have to pay taxes for a long time! He was legendary at M.I.T. for quite a while, and acquired the nickname “Missile” Seitz.
(17) EARLY RELEASE SUPER BOWL AD. Does having the Aquaman actor in it make this an item of genre interest? You decide! Zach Braff, Jason Momoa and Donald Faison appear in a Flashdance-themed Super Bowl commercial for T-Mobile.
(18) VIDEO OF THE DAY. The official trailer for Despicable Me 4 is out. The movie comes to theaters on July 3.
In the first Despicable Me movie in seven years, Gru, the world’s favorite supervillain-turned-Anti-Villain League-agent, returns for an exciting, bold new era of Minions mayhem in Illumination’s Despicable Me 4.
Following the 2022 summer blockbuster phenomenon of Illumination’s Minions: The Rise of Gru, which earned almost $1 billion worldwide, the biggest global animated franchise in history now begins a new chapter as Gru (Oscar® nominee Steve Carrell) and Lucy (Oscar® nominee Kristen Wiig) and their girls —Margo (Miranda Cosgrove), Edith (Dana Gaier) and Agnes (Madison Polan)—welcome a new member to the Gru family, Gru Jr., who is intent on tormenting his dad.
Gru faces a new nemesis in Maxime Le Mal (Emmy winner Will Ferrell) and his femme fatale girlfriend Valentina (Emmy nominee Sofia Vergara), and the family is forced to go on the run. The film features fresh new characters voiced by Joey King (Bullet Train), Emmy winner Stephen Colbert (The Late Show with Stephen Colbert) and Chloe Fineman (Saturday Night Live). Pierre Coffin returns as the iconic voice of the Minions and Oscar® nominee Steve Coogan returns as Silas Ramsbottom.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Anne Marble, Steve Vertlieb, Heath Row, 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 Thomas the Red.]
The weirdest Comic-Con in years continues to get weirder, today: Legendary has announced that its upcoming sci-fi sequel Dune: Part Two, one of the last live-action blockbusters scheduled for a panel at this year’s version of the long-running convention, has now dropped out. (Ditto the glimpse the studio was planning at the next installment of its Monsterverse franchise of films.) At the same time, at least three TV shows that were still holding out hope for the convention—Amazon’s Wheel Of Time, Freevee’s Jury Duty, and ABC’s Abbott Elementary—have all confirmed that they’re canceling their panels.
The reason, obviously, is the SAG-AFTRA actors strike: There’s not a lot of point in paying for an expensive panel in the Con’s famed Hall H if you don’t have any stars on hand to fill it out and pump up the crowds.
GRETA JOHNSEN, BYLINE: Meet Sarah Jaffe. She’s an executive producer at Penguin Random House Audio.
SARAH JAFFE: What that actually means is mostly – I think my 10-year-old self would be thrilled – I get paid to read books all day, talk to really brilliant authors and then do sort of the dream casting that I think we all do in our heads of like, OK, what kind of voice would I need to play this character? And then I get to find and hire that voice.
JOHNSEN: One of my favorite voices is this guy.
KEVIN R FREE: I am Kevin R. Free. I am a multi-hyphenate artist, and I suppose I’m on the Nerdette podcast because I am an audiobook narrator. That is the hat for which you are interviewing me.
JOHNSEN: Kevin has been wearing that hat since 2000. I love him because he narrates Martha Wells’ “Murderbot Diaries”…
For more than 20 years, Kit Loffstadt has written fan fiction exploring alternate universes for “Star Wars” heroes and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” villains, sharing her stories free online.
But in May, Ms. Loffstadt stopped posting her creations after she learned that a data company had copied her stories and fed them into the artificial intelligence technology underlying ChatGPT, the viral chatbot. Dismayed, she hid her writing behind a locked account.
Ms. Loffstadt also helped organize an act of rebellion last month against A.I. systems. Along with dozens of other fan fiction writers, she published a flood of irreverent stories online to overwhelm and confuse the data-collection services that feed writers’ work into A.I. technology.
“We each have to do whatever we can to show them the output of our creativity is not for machines to harvest as they like,” said Ms. Loffstadt, a 42-year-old voice actor from South Yorkshire in Britain.
… At Archive of Our Own, a fan fiction database with more than 11 million stories, writers have increasingly pressured the site to ban data-scraping and A.I.-generated stories.
In May, when some Twitter accounts shared examples of ChatGPT mimicking the style of popular fan fiction posted on Archive of Our Own, dozens of writers rose up in arms. They blocked their stories and wrote subversive content to mislead the A.I. scrapers. They also pushed Archive of Our Own’s leaders to stop allowing A.I.-generated content.
Betsy Rosenblatt, who provides legal advice to Archive of Our Own and is a professor at University of Tulsa College of Law, said the site had a policy of “maximum inclusivity” and did not want to be in the position of discerning which stories were written with A.I.
For Ms. Loffstadt, the fan fiction writer, the fight against A.I. came as she was writing a story about “Horizon Zero Dawn,” a video game where humans fight A.I.-powered robots in a postapocalyptic world. In the game, she said, some of the robots were good and others were bad.
But in the real world, she said, “thanks to hubris and corporate greed, they are being twisted to do bad things.”
(4) YOUR CHRIS BARKLEY HUGO PACKET. Chris M. Barkley has put links to the columns that will make up his entry in the packet here on Facebook.
I have submitted my selections of columns from File 770 for the 2023 Hugo Award Packet in the Best Fan Writer category. Although it will be a few weeks before the complete packet is released to members of the Chengdu World Science Fiction Convention to consider, I am pinning links to my columns from today until the close of voting period, September 30th.
(5) BUSINESS IS BOOMING. [Item by Steven French.] In advance of Oppenheimer hitting the cinemas, the Guardian presents its latest list, this time of ‘best’ films about the atomic bomb. Sadly there’s no mention of 1950 Brit movie Seven Days Until Noon (which recently appeared on TV here in the U.K.) About a scientist whose moral qualms about the atomic bomb lead him to threaten the destruction of half of London, it won an Academy Award for writers Paul Dehn and James Bernard. Dehn was a well regarded poet and referred to by John LeCarre as an ‘assassin’ following his war service in the SOE. He went on to co-author not only the movie version of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold but also several of the Planet of the Apes sequels. “Streaming: the best films about the atomic bomb”.
…But the legacy of the atom bomb, from its development to its impact to its all-round political aura, is a rich one, spanning everything from esoteric arthouse films to genre B-movies. For decades after the horrifying outcome of the Manhattan Project, through the long-lingering chill of the cold war, anxiety over nuclear warfare was the driving force behind any number of thrillers and war films. Comedies, sci-fi and even the odd film noir – see Robert Aldrich’s blistering Kiss Me Deadly (1955; Internet Archive), which culminates in a literally explosive allegory – got in on the paranoia….
(6) GREGG T. TREND OBITUARY. Longtime fanzine fan Gregg T. Trend passed away in hospice this morning Sunday, July 16 his wife Audrey announced on Facebook.
A Detroit fan active since at least the early 1960s, Gregg attended the 1963 Worldcon, Discon 1. He was a member of the Wayne Third Foundation and edited some issues of its clubzine Seldon’s Plan. He was a member and one of the OEs of MiSHAP.
The last time I saw him was during Renovation, the 2011 Worldcon, at the Faneds’ Feast in the Purple Parrot coffee shop, attended by Ed and Sandra Meskys, Katrina Templeton, Andrew Porter, Cathy Lister-Palmer, Murray Moore, Mary Ann Moore, Gregg and Audrey Trend, me, Milt Stevens, Alan Stewart, Marcy Maliniewicz, Jerry Kaufman, Mike Ward.
Andrew Porter adds, “I bought a piece of his artwork on the sketch table at Discon 1 in 1963, my first Worldcon, and knew him for many decades.”
Gregg Trend in 2003. Photo by Mike Glyer.
(7) MEMORY LANE.
1971 – [Written by Cat Eldridge from a choice by Mike Glyer.]
R. A. Lafferty is the writer of our Beginning, so let’s talk about him. A much loved writer in fandom with almost fifty Award nominations in over his fifty-year career (though only three Awards resulted — a Hugo at Torcon II for his “Eurema’s Dam” along with a Phoenix Award and a World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement.
I personally think that all of his fiction is worth a read but I’ll single out The Devil is Dead trilogy as one of his better works. Also worth noting is that he was a first rate writer of short fiction as noted by his having thirty-five collections published. Yes, thirty-five.
Mike picked his Past Master novel. It was published by Rapp & Whiting fifty-five years ago. It was nominated at St. Louiscon for a Hugo and garnered Ditmar and Nebula nominations as well.
AT THE TWENTY-FIFTH HOUR
THE THREE big men were met together in a private building of one of them. There was a clattering thunder in the street outside, but the sun was shining. It was the clashing thunder of the mechanical killers, ravening and raging. They shook the building and were on the verge of pulling it down. They required the life and the blood of one of the three men and they required it immediately, now, within the hour, within the minute.
The three men gathered in the building were large physically, they were important and powerful, they were intelligent and interesting. There was a peculiar linkage between them: each believed that he controlled the other two, that he was the puppeteer and they were the puppets. And each was partly right in this belief. It made them an interlocking nexus, taut and resilient, the most intricate on Astrobe.
Cosmos Kingmaker, who was too rich. The Heraldic Lion.
Peter Proctor, who was too lucky. The Sleek Fox.
Fabian Foreman, who was too smart. The Worried Hawk.
“This is Mankind’s third chance,” said Kingmaker. “Ah, they’re breaking the doors down again. How can we talk with it all going on?”
He took the speaking tube. “Colonel,” he called out. “You have sufficient human guards. It is imperative that you disperse the riot. It is absolutely forbidden that they murder this man at this time and place. He is with us and is one of us as he has always been.”
“The colonel is dead,” a voice came back. “I am Captain John Chezem the Third, next in command.”
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born July 16, 1882 — Felix Locher. He is considered the oldest Star Trek actor of all time by birth year, appearing in “The Deadly Years” episode. 0ther genre appearances included Curse of the Faceless Man, The Twilight Zone, Frankenstein’s Daughter, The Munsters, House of the Damned, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Mission Impossible. His entire acting career was from 1957 to 1969. (Died 1969.)
Born July 16, 1928 — Robert Sheckley. I knew that his short story “Seventh Victim” was the basis of The 10th Victim film but I hadn’t known ‘til now that Freejack was sort of based of his Immortality, Inc. novel. I’ve read a lot by him with Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming (written with Zelazny) being my favorite work by him. Sheckley is very well stocked on the usual suspects. He had two Hugo nominations, at NYCon II for his “Spy Story” short story, and at Detention for his Time Killer novel. His Seventh Victim novel was nominated for a Hugo at the 1954 Retro Hugos at Noreascon 4. (Died 2005.)
Born July 16, 1929 — Sheri S. Tepper. I think I’m going to start with her Marianne Trilogy (Marianne, the Magus and the Manticore; Marianne, the Madam and the Momentary Gods; Marianne, the Matchbox and the Malachite Mouse) as her best work. Both the setting and the characters are unique, the story fascinating. Nominated for an Astounding Award way back when, she had a long career, so I’m going to note Beauty, The Gate to Women’s Country, Six Moon Dance and The Companions as my favorites knowing very well that yours won’t be the same. (Died 2016.)
Born July 16, 1956 — Jerry Doyle. Now this one was depressing. Dead of acute alcoholism at sixty, his character Michael Garibaldi was portrayed as an alcoholic, sometimes recovering and sometimes not on Babylon 5. (Died 2016.)
Born July 16, 1951 — Esther Friesner, 72. She’s won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story twice with “Death and the Librarian” and “A Birthday”. I’m particularly fond of The Sherwood Game and E.Godz which she did with Robert Asprin. She won the 1994 Edward E. Smith Memorial Award for Imaginative Fiction, for lifetime contributions to science fiction, “both through work in the field and by exemplifying the personal qualities which made the late ‘Doc’ Smith well-loved by those who knew him,” presented by the New England Science Fiction Association. She’s well stocked at the usual suspects.
Born July 16, 1963 — Phoebe Cates, 60. Ok, her entire genre appearance credit is as Kate Beringer in Gremlins and Gremlins 2: The New Batch. (Well and romantic fantasy Date with an Angel.) It’s two films that I have an inordinate fondness for that the Suck Fairy cannot have any effect upon. She retired from film acting as she said there were no good roles and is doing theatre work.
(9) SOLDIER’S ICON. [Item by Susan de Guardiola.] Apparently Baby Yoda on body armor is becoming a thing in Ukraine, as shown on this volunteer of the Georgian Legion.
Also: “may feathers grow in the throats of our enemies” is a really excellent curse. No idea whether it’s a Georgian thing or a cultural reference I’m just oblivious to.
Ukrainian Defender from @georgian_legion tells what gifts she really appreciates.
In an industry where the boundary between reality and virtualization is increasingly blurred, a recent wave of controversy has hit the Hollywood sphere. A central figure in this ongoing discourse is none other than Lena Hall, the illustrious Tony Award winner and Grammy nominee, best known for her role in TNT’s Snowpiercer.
On the cusp of the show’s fourth season, Hall took a public stand on Twitter, lambasting the opaque nature of the utilization of full-body scan technology. The thespian recounted her experiences with the procedure, expressing her dismay at the lack of transparency and her perceived violation of consent.
Hall shared,
“So… Snowpiercer season 4 did a full body scan and full range of emotion capture of all the series regulars on the show not ever telling us the real reason why. NOW I know why and it’s really disturbing because I didn’t consent.”
“P.S. they told us it was for special effects but were very vague!”
… It’s not every day that someone is hit by a meteorite while trying to enjoy a cup of coffee with friends. In fact, it is an extraordinarily rare occurrence for someone to be struck by a meteorite anywhere on their body. But such was the case for the woman in France recently, and if confirmed would be the first person on record to be struck by a meteorite in nearly 70 years.
“I heard a big ‘Poom’ coming from the roof next to us. In the second that followed, I felt a shock on the ribs. I thought it was an animal, a bat!” the lady proclaimed in an interview with the French newspaper Les Dernières Nouvelles d’Alsace (DNA). She continued, “We thought it was a piece of cement, the one we apply to the ridge tiles. But it didn’t have the color.”…
(12) WHAT HARM COULD AI DO? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Over at BBC Radio 4, there has been a series of short (14-minute) episodes on artificial intelligence. The latest episode concerns whether or not we can control AI? and has some SFnal references. “Can we control AI?”
When so-called “generative” Artificial Intelligences like Chat GPT and Google’s Bard were made available to the public, they made headlines around the world and raised fears about how fast this type of AI was developing. But realistically, what harm could AI do to people? Is it an existential threat, or could it become one? And if things got really bad, couldn’t we just switch it off or smash it up with a hammer?
(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Here’s a trailer for a trailer for the new Beauty and the Beast adaptation: Belle.
Belle would do anything to save her ailing father. She journeys in search of a mythical rose believed to be a cure. As payment for the rose, she must surrender herself to a vicious beast and battle his spell.
[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Joyce Scrivner, Daniel Dern, Susan de Guardiola, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
Update 07/17/2023: Replaced a photo of Gregg Trend. The one originally provided by Andrew Porter was of someone else.
(1) DESTINATION FOR THE STARS? The New York Times’ Blake Gopnik reports that last week Christie’s auction house broke records by selling more than $1.5 billion in art from the estate of Paul G. Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft who died in 2018. Although a lot of high art went under the hammer, his pop culture holdings, including sf art, did not and may have a different fate.
… It all made me think of Allen as the kind of person who might have enjoyed buying, and owning, a $15 million Stradivarius violin and a $12 million Mickey Mantle baseball card and a $10 million stamp from British Guiana.
But there was one work in the sale — a real outlier — that meshed with stronger, more focused feelings that I seemed to glimpse when I met with Allen. Hanging among pieces by the certified geniuses of Western “high” art at Christie’s sat a dreamy, sunset scene of teen-girls-in-nature, painted in 1926 by the American Maxfield Parrish, best known for his truly great work in commercial illustration. It called to mind the tremendous excitement that Allen showed, a decade ago, when he had me look at a series of paintings that had been used, sometime in the 1950s or ’60s, I’d guess, for reproduction on the cover of science-fiction novels or magazines: I remember seeing weird Martian landscapes, galactic skies and maybe a rocket ship or two.
I can’t confirm those memories, right off the bat, because none of those pictures ended up at Christie’s. (Even though you could say that Allen’s Botticelli has some extraterrestrial strangeness to it, if only because of its distance from today’s culture, and that his paintings by Salvador Dalí and Jacob Hendrik Pierneef might work with stories by Philip K. Dick.) But I do remember that in our interview Allen’s enthusiasm for those objects from so-called “popular” culture seemed much more intense, and heartfelt, than the feelings he expressed for masterpieces that had cost him thousands of times more.
And that may be born out in the future that seems in store for those sci-fi objects, different from the fate of the ones sold into private hands at Christie’s. Last month, a spokesperson for Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture, founded by Allen in 2000 — his sister Jody Allen is its current chair — told The Times that more than 4,000 objects of un-fine art and culture from the Allen estate, valued at some $20 million, were due to end up among its holdings, and I can only hope that the sci-fi paintings will be among them. (A representative from Vulcan, the Allen company in charge of his estate, later weighed in to say that the bequest to MoPOP was not final and that Vulcan could not confirm the exact number or type of objects in it. As when their boss was alive, his Vulcans play their cards close to their chests.)…
Archive of Our Own is probably best known as the place to read fans’ carefully crafted Harry Potter prequels or Lord of the Rings stories millions of words long. But the fanfiction website also has a lesser known, though no less important mission: to save older fanfic that’s at risk of disappearing. A new initiative, the Fanzine Scan Hosting Project, aims to make fan stories and art from physical fanzines accessible through the Archive, preserving pieces of history previously confined to university libraries, scattered eBay sales, and forgotten corners of attics….
Over the last year or so, however, Open Doors’ Fan Culture Preservation Project has expanded, finally giving them room to launch the Fanzine Scan Hosting Project. So far, they’re making their way through the backlog of scans that Zinedom has already accumulated, which Dawn estimates is “a couple thousand.”
These came from various sources, with Dawn doing a lot of outreach herself simply by searching Facebook for names she came across in zines and making phone calls. Janet Quarton, a Scottish Star Trek zine publisher and preservationist, scanned about 500 zines herself in 2013. But even Zinedom’s digital collection is only a fragment of what’s out there. One Zinedom participant has a collection of around 8,000 physical zines from the Star Trek fandom alone, and digs out the appropriate copies if Dawn is contacted by someone looking to save something in particular.
Open Doors is now preparing to post on the Archive those zines from Zinedom’s backlog which they already have permission to share. Some of these overlap with online zine archives that they’ve been previously importing, like the Kirk/Spock archive. But new requests and permissions have also been coming in since the announcement, and it will be an ongoing process, with volunteers working hard to convert and edit each individual zine.
(3) THE RIGHT WORD? Nisi Shawl was still in search of an answer that hits the spot when I looked at Facebook this afternoon:
What’s the word for the kind of apology you get that blames you for what went wrong?
What role, if any, did reading and writing play during your military service?
I still have stacks of my journals from the whole nine-year period sitting on my bookshelf, unread to this day. I had written poetry and journaled most of my teenage years up to that point, but when I got out of the service I stopped journaling and writing almost completely for reasons I haven’t quite grasped. That was over 15 years ago. Reading, on the other hand is something I have never stopped doing. These combat deployments were well before I had anything like an e-reader, so it was physical books all the way. I must have lugged around a ridiculous amount of books with me. The big ones that hit me the hardest while deployed are still some of my favorites: Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, Epictetus’ The Enchiridion, my first readings of Ender’s Game and that series. I got my first copy of House of Leaves while deployed to Iraq and that copy is scrawled with my own footnotes and reflections, and is falling apart at the seams. And then of course, King finished out The Dark Tower while I was deployed so I had those tomes sent to me and to tote around as well. So, yeah, I filled my spare hours with both reading and writing, quite a bit of both.
(5) BOOKSTORE REBOUNDS FROM ARSON ATTACK. “L.A. book emporium the Iliad recovering from mysterious fire” reports the Los Angeles Times. The bookstore’s GoFundMe has been an enormous success. The owner asked for $5,000 to cover his insurance deductible. “The response has topped $34,000, sparing him the need to file a claim at all.”
…The cause of the blaze remains unknown. Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman Erik Scott said it has been ruled undetermined.
[Iliad owner] Weinstein said he believes an arsonist started the fire. It appeared that books the store leaves outside for the community to browse were stacked in a pyramidal shape next to the entry door and lit, he said.
An inscrutable motive was suggested by 15 to 20 copies of a flyer Weinstein said he found taped to the sides of the building. It was a collage of conspiratorial references — the Irish and South African flags, a photo of the burned-out cabin where policeman-turned-killer Christopher Dorner died, an address of a nearby home, and a handwritten letter attributed to Alex Cox, a deceased figure in a complex family homicide case depicted in a Netflix documentary….
… The cuts, earlier reported by the New York Times, would represent about 3% of Amazon’s corporate staff. The exact number may vary as businesses within Amazon review their priorities, the source told Reuters.
The online retailer plans to eliminate jobs in its devices organization, which makes voice-controlled “Alexa” gadgets and home-security cameras, as well as in its human-resources and retail divisions, the person said. Amazon’s time frame for informing staff remained unclear….
(7) THE ART OF FANHISTORY. Garth Spencer’s name was chosen from the hat to be Corflu Pangloss’ Guest of Honour. He has published the speech he gave “revealing the hideous basic truths of fandom” in Obdurate Eye #21.
…There was a time when I thought every other country seems to have a published fanhistory; why shouldn’t a Canadian fanhistory be published? Maybe I could compile it, from any information I could gather. Then I got strange responses like “Who are you? Why are you asking me questions? Who sent you? I’m not responsible!” So, I learned that There Are Things Fans Must Not Put on Record. More to the point, my search to find out what people can be expected to do, when to expect it, and how to defend yourself, is not the first thing people think of when they think of fanhistory….
(8) A MEMORY PROMPT. Daytonian in Manhattan’s “The Lost ‘Furness House’ — 34 Whitehall Street” is an article about the NYC headquarters building for the steamship line A. Bertram Chandler once worked for.
In 1891, Christopher Furness, owner of the Furness Line of steamships, and Henry Withy, head of the shipbuilding firm Edward Withy & Co., merged their businesses to form Furness, Withy & Co., Ltd. Starting out with 18 vessels, by the outbreak of World War I, it sailed more than 200–and it was ready for a new New York City branch office building….
Andrew Porter reminds readers that he published Chandler’s autobiographical “Around the World in 23,741 Days” in Algol 31. You can read it here.
…One very early—but remarkably vivid—memory I have is of a Zeppelin raid on London during World War I. can still see the probing searchlights, like the questing antennae of giant insects and, sailing serenely overhead, high in the night sky, that slim, silvery cigar. I can’t remember any bombs; I suppose that none fell anywhere near where I was. It is worth remarking that in those distant days, with aerial warfare in its infancy, civilians had not yet learned to run for cover on the approach of raiders but stood in the streets, with their children, to watch the show….
(9) READ COMPLETE MOORE REMARKS ON KEVIN O’NEILL. [Item by Danny Sichel.] At the request of the New York Times, Alan Moore wrote an obit for Kevin O’Neill which was too long to publish. Jeet Heer posted it to Twitter.(O’Neill did the art for Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.)
The New York Times asked Alan Moore for an obituary statement about his longtime collaborator Kevin O'Neill. Moore being Moore, he wrote a lovely 800 words far too long to use. Here it is. pic.twitter.com/GilMT3wGxV
(10) WOOSTER EULOGY. Philanthropy Daily, where he was a contributor, paid tribute to him in “Martin Morse Wooster, RIP”.
…In addition to writing for Philanthropy Daily, Martin was a senior fellow at the Capital Research Center, and contributed significantly to research on philanthropy and especially the issue of donor intent. Martin’s contributions to questions around philanthropy, charity, and donor intent can scarcely be overstated. How Great Philanthropists Failed remains the leading book on donor intent and the history of failed philanthropic legacies.
Martin’s work has appeared everywhere from the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Reason, and numerous other publications.
Martin will be sorely missed by all of us at Philanthropy Daily and countless others who have benefited from his important work.
(11) MEMORY LANE.
1985 — [By Cat Eldridge.]Shadow Chasers
Before we get started on talking about today’s essay, may I note that this was the day fifty-eight years ago that Santa Claus Conquers The Martians premiered was well? It was considered one of the worst genre films ever released, bar none.
Thirty-seven years ago this evening a series premiered on ABC, receiving almost no notice: Shadow Chasers. Let’s talk about the show before we turn to a brief autopsy on its numbers.
LOOK— I SEE BIGFOOT COMING WITH SPOILERS!
British anthropologist Jonathan MacKensie (Trevor Eve who played Peter Boyd in the excellent Waking the Dead forensic series) works for the fictional Georgetown Institute Paranormal Research Unit (PRU). MacKenzie’s department head, Dr. Julianna Moorhouse (Nina Foch), withholds a research grant to force him into investigating what she says is a haunting involving a teenage boy. He is paired with flamboyant tabloid reporter Edgar “Benny” Benedek.
Benny and Jonathan do not get along, but manage to solve the case without killing each other. The episodes continued in this vein, with Jonathan and Benny grudgingly learning to respect and admire each other, in the fashion of American cop shows.
LOOK IT WASN’T REALLY BIGFOOT, WAS IT?
Now for the rating autopsy I promised.
So understand that it was on ABC as I said for just ten episodes of its sad existence with the last four shows being broadcast solely on the Armed Forces network. Just how bad was its existence? It was the lowest-rated of a one hundred and six programs during the 1985-1986 TV season.
Why so, you ask? Well that’s easy. It was broadcast against NBC’s The Cosby Show and Family Ties and CBS’s Magnum P.I. and, later on, Simon & Simon on CBS. It didn’t stand a chance.
Indeed, local ABC affiliates within a few weeks in started preempting the series for other programming.
(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born November 14, 1907 — Astrid Lindgren. Creator of the Pippi Longstocking series and, at least in the States, lesser known Emil i Lönneberga, Karlsson-on-the-Roof, and the Six Bullerby Children series as well. In January 2017, she was calculated to be the world’s eighteenth most translated author, and the fourth most translated children’s writer after Enid Blyton, H. C. Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. There have been at least forty video adaptations of her works over the decades mostly in Swedish but Ronja, the Robber’s Daughter was an animated series in Japan recently. (Died 2002.)
Born November 14, 1932 — Alex Ebel. He did the poster for the first Friday the 13th film, and his cover illustration for The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin published by Ace Books in 1975 is considered one of the best such illustrations done. I’m also very impressed with The Dispossessed cover he did as well as his Planet of Exile cover too. His work for magazines includes Heavy Metal, Space Science Fiction and Fantastic Story Magazine. (Died 2013.)
Born November 14, 1950 — Elliot S. Maggin, 72. A writer for DC Comics during the Bronze and early Modern ages of comics where he helped shaped the Superman character. Most of his work was on Action Comics and Superman titles though he did extensive work elsewhere including, of course, on the Batman titles.
Born November 14, 1951 — Beth Meacham, 71. In 1984, she became an editor for Tor Books, where she rose to the position of editor-in-chief. After her 1989 move to the west coast, she continued working for Tor as an executive editor which she just retired from. She does have one novel, co-written with Tappan King, entitled Nightshade Book One: Terror, Inc. and a handful of short fiction. A Reader’s Guide to Fantasy that she co-wrote wrote Michael Franklin and Baird Searles was nominated for a Hugo at L.A. Con II. She has been nominated for six Hugos as Best Professional Editor or Best Editor Long Form.
Born November 14, 1959 — Paul McGann, 63. Yes, he only did one film as the eighth incarnation of the Doctor in the 1996 Doctor Who: The Television Movie, but he has reprised that role in numerous audio dramas, and the 2013 short film entitled The Night of the Doctor. He also appeared in “The Five(ish) Doctors” reboot. Other genre appearances include The Pit and the Pendulum: A Study in Torture, Alien 3, the excellent FairyTale: A True Story, Queen of the Damned and Lesbian Vampire Killers.
Born November 14, 1963 — Cat Rambo, 59 . All around great person. Past President of SFWA. She was editor of Fantasy Magazine for four years which earned her a 2012 nomination in the World Fantasy Special Award: Non-Professional category. Her novelette Carpe Glitter won a 2020 Nebula, and her short story “Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain” was a 2013 Nebula Award finalist. Her impressive fantasy Tabat Quartet quartet begins withBeasts of Tabat, Hearts of Tabat, and Exiles of Tabat, and will soon be completed by Gods of Tabat. She also writes amazing short fiction as well. The Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers is her long-standing school for writers that provides her excellent assistance in learning proper writing skills through live and on demand classes about a range of topics. You can get details here. Her latest, You Sexy Thing, was a stellar listen indeed and I’m very much looking forward to the sequel.
Born November 14, 1969 — Daniel Abraham, 53. Co-author with Ty Franck of The Expanse series which won a Hugo at CoNZealand. Under the pseudonym M. L. N. Hanover, he is the author of the Black Sun’s Daughter urban fantasy series. Abraham collaborated with George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois to write the Hunter’s Run. Abraham also has adapted several of Martin’s works into comic books and graphic novels, such as A Game of Thrones: The Graphic Novel, and has contributed to Wild Cards anthologies. By himself, he picked up a Hugo nomination at Denvention 3 for his “The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics” novelette.
(13) COMICS SECTION.
Speed Bump knows of one effect that’s not special at all!
(14) HAPPY NEW YEAR. Lois McMaster Bujold pointed out to her Goodreads followers that the next Penric book Knot of Shadows garnered a starred review in Publishers Weekly. The Subterranean Press hardcover is due to be released on January 1. [Update: Bujold’s author page shows the Kindle edition of Knot of Shadows came out last year in October, so this will be a new hardcover edition, but not a new release per se.]
Temple sorcerer Penric and demon Desdemona return in this page-turner fantasy mystery from Bujold, the 11th in the series (after The Assassins of Thasalon) and possibly the best yet. Penric and Desdemona, the chaos elemental who shares his body, are joined by Alixtra and her own demon, Arra, to help the healers of the Mother’s Order in Vilnoc with an unusual case: a corpse has revived and is now shouting gibberish. Penric discovers that the victim is not one but two dead people—a man slain by death magic and a ghost that has begun animating his body. Death magic is so rare that even Desdemona has never witnessed it performed. A supplicant offers their own life to ensure that the Bastard, Penric’s god, will kill their target. This ritual opens multiple quandaries: Who is the corpse? Were they the supplicant or the target? And where is the other party to the death prayer? Penric remarks that “this case is bound to get ugly and sad”—and indeed it does, in the most creative of ways. Bujold has her protagonists combine mundane and mystical investigative methods to unravel the questions at hand, creating a truly enticing mystery. Series fans and new readers alike will want to savor this intricate , unusual case.
… The challenge, Göransson says, was to find a new sound for the African kingdom of Wakanda and its grief-stricken people while also trying to imagine the sound of Prince Namor’s undersea kingdom of Talokan, whose origins lay in Mexico’s ancient Mayan civilization.
Göransson consulted musical archaeologists and spent two weeks in Mexico City collaborating with Mexican musicians. He auditioned “hundreds of ancient instruments,” from clay flutes to unusual percussion instruments, and saw paintings of Mayans playing on turtle shells, among dozens of similar musically inspirational moments. He discovered the “flute of truth,” a high-pitched whistle-like woodwind instrument, and vowed to incorporate the “death whistle,” which has a piecing sound like a human scream.
By day, Göransson recorded with Mexican musicians, and by night, he was recording with Mexican singers and rappers. “I was using the morning sessions to put together beats and songs that we would use later that day with the artists,” the composer reports….
(16) ON THE GRIPPING HAND. Leaflock™ The Ent™ from WETA Workshop is only fifteen hundred dollars… The image of this veteran of the attack on Isengard “Contains two (and a half) Orcs, squashed, pinned and/or crushed by the Ent’s wrath.”
…Assuming all of this is real, of course. Volkswagen has a recent history of lying to people. This time, the company seems to be fairly transparent that it’s a one-off marketing stunt, while also suggesting that “it will be available for test drives at various locations.” Hopefully that means citizens of Norway will soon be able to prove its capabilities….
(18) COMING FROM DUST. The short film Jettison will be released online December 7 by DUST & Film Shortage.
A restless young woman ships off to fight an interstellar war, only to struggle with the effects of being cut off from her home by both time and space.
…But for every icon of the macabre, there are a much larger number of deranged dentists, serial-killing Santa Clauses, and sorority house murderers who don’t quite rank as highly in the frightening food chain. In fact, it’s been a while since a character came along and asserted his or herself as the next count of the Carpathians or chainsaw-wielding maniac. Whoever steps up next has some big shoes to fill, because these are the crème de la crème when it comes to history-making evildoers….
1. Dracula
Dracula is the most influential horror villain of all time. The Count stalks like a slasher, murders in droves like a serial killer, and is the inspiration for every single vampire movie made after 1931. Dracula’s vast powers, and his immortality, make him the most formidable of any killer on this list, and while Bela Lugosi is most often associated with the character, it was Sir Christopher Lee who made the Count the vile, sadistic creature of the night.
Lee gave the character a grandiose feel thanks to his imposing height, and there was a sexuality the villain exuded which made him irresistible to women. Unlike his colleague and friend, Peter Cushing, Lee loathed reprising the role because Hammer wasn’t faithful to Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel. “I wanted to play Stoker’s character,” Lee explained. “It wasn’t remotely like the book.”
[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Danny Sichel, David Doering, Andrew (not Werdna), Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]
(1) STAR WARS AT 44. On the “realio trulio” Star Wars Day, Craig Miller posted two excerpts from his book, Star Wars Memories, on Facebook. Here’s a quote from the first part:
SAYING YES TO “STAR WARS” (FOX’S MARKET RESEARCH)
It wasn’t an easy sell to get a studio to okay production on “Star Wars”. George Lucas had made the extremely successful “American Graffiti” for Universal Studios. He had a three-picture deal with them. “American Graffiti” was the first. They wanted him to make more films for their studio. The whole purpose of a multi-picture deal, of providing on-going office space and services, is because the studio is betting that the films you make will be profitable and they want you to make those movies for them.
They turned “Star Wars” down.
The Readers Report, while generally favorable, included the phrase “Do we have faith that Mr. Lucas can pull this off?”. Obviously, Universal didn’t….
(2) TUCKERIZED TITANS. A new Teen Titans Go! episode titled ”Marv Wolfman and George Perez” will air this Saturday at 9 a.m. Pacific, featuring animated versions of their namesakes voiced by themselves. Marv and George were the co-creators of Raven, Starfire, and Cyborg, who were added to Robin and the other Titans.
Here’s a link to a scan of the print edition, where you can actually read the whole thing, though it’s still in German: “Neue Aussichten Auf die Rakete” (“New prospects for the rocket”).
In this episode of ‘Notes On A Scene,’ Director Zack Snyder breaks down a zombie heist scene from ‘Army of the Dead.’ Zack guides us through the nuances and challenges of working with CGI zombies, and explains how he was able to edit Tig Notaro into his ‘Army of the Dead’ universe.
Many months ago I found myself on r/fanfiction explaining the history of the AO3 tag “Serious Human Male/Handsome Gay Living Archive”, and made a mental note that it would make a good HobbyDrama post if I wrote it up more comprehensively….
— and ends a mere 2700 words later with a link to the Tingle-esque work involved.
(6) REAR GUARD ACTION. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] Isaac Asimov, in his autobiography In Joy Still Felt, discusses a Star Trek convention he went to in New York City in 1975.
The climax of the convention came on Sunday the twelfth (January 12, 1975), when William Shatner (Captain Kirk) spoke before a superenthusiastic audience of more than four thousand, who filled the seats and aisles to capacity. Shatner answered all questions with good humor and unpretentiousness and had everyone enthralled. When it was time to leave, he explained to everyone there was no way he could sign autographs for such huge a crowd and made ready to get off the stage.
At this point, the young man who organized the convention whispered in my ear, ‘Quick! Get on the stage and hold the audience so that Shatner can get away.’
I said, ‘They’ll tear me limb from limb.’
But he was physically pushing me onto the stage while one of his henchmen was busily announcing me.
I started talking–babbling, rather.I waited for a mad, furious rush on the part of disappointed ‘Star Trek’ fanatics, but it didn’t come. They seemed to be enjoying me, actually, and I was just beginning to relax and settle down when the organizer approached and said, ‘Shatner’s safely away. Get off, so we can get on with the program.’ So I got off.
All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka (Trans. Alexander O. Smith) (2004)
The aliens who dispatched the engineered lifeforms humans call Mimics did stop to consider the morality of xenoforming a world that might well be inhabited. But they concluded that xenoforming would be as ethically neutral as killing insects to make way for housing construction. No need to examine Earth before reshaping it.
Keiji Kiriya, human, thinks human needs are more important than alien schemes. Thus, his brief, glorious career in Earth’s defence forces. Thus his inevitable death the first time he encounters Mimics. His resurrection in the past—on the morning before the first battle—comes as an unexpected surprise. Alas, the results of the rerun battle are little better than the first. The same is true of the second. And the third…but by death 157, Keiji is getting the hang of the time loop in which he is trapped and well on his way to figuring out how he might save the Earth for humans.
In March, literary heavyweights Kazuo Ishiguro and Neil Gaiman — a Nobel laureate, and the beloved author of “American Gods,” “Sandman,” and “Good Omens,” respectively — convened at an independent bookstore event to discuss genre and science fiction.
They arrived at twin conclusions: one, that rigid genre distinctions between literary works promote an unproductive and false hierarchy of worth, and two, that the 21st century is a very tricky time to attempt to define “science fiction” at all. Gaiman said that he increasingly feels genre “slippage where science fiction is concerned” because, he says, “the world has become science fiction.” The hacking exploits in William Gibson’s novel “Neuromancer” or the sequencing of an entire genome overnight no longer belong to the realm of fantasy.
For MIT students, the permeable relationship between reality and science fiction is often familiar territory. In their labs and research projects, students and faculty experience personally the process by which imaginative ideas turn into new techniques, possibilities, medicines, tools, and technologies. (And they learn that many such new realities actually have had their origins in speculative literature.)
Students in the MIT Literature course 21L.434 (21st Century Science Fiction), taught by Assistant Professor Laura Finch, also discover that science fiction is a powerful, useful way to think about and understand the world we currently inhabit….
It felt good to love again, in that big empty house. Virginia Kellner got the cat last November, around her ninety-second birthday, and now it’s always nearby. It keeps her company as she moves, bent over her walker, from the couch to the bathroom and back again. The walker has a pair of orange scissors hanging from the handlebar, for opening mail. Virginia likes the pet’s green eyes. She likes that it’s there in the morning, when she wakes up. Sometimes, on days when she feels sad, she sits in her soft armchair and rests the cat on her soft stomach and just lets it do its thing. Nuzzle. Stretch. Vibrate. Virginia knows that the cat is programmed to move this way; there is a motor somewhere, controlling things. Still, she can almost forget. “It makes you feel like it’s real,” Virginia told me, the first time we spoke. “I mean, mentally, I know it’s not. But—oh, it meowed again!”
She named the cat Jennie, for one of the nice ladies who work at the local Department of the Aging in Cattaraugus County, a rural area in upstate New York, bordering Pennsylvania. It was Jennie (the person) who told her that the county was giving robot pets to old people like her. Did she want one? She could have a dog or a cat. A Meals on Wheels driver brought Virginia the pet, along with her daily lunch delivery. He was so eager to show it to her that he opened the box himself, instead of letting Virginia do it. The Joy for All Companion pet was orange with a white chest and tapered whiskers. Nobody mentioned that it was part of a statewide loneliness intervention….
(10) MEDIA ANNIVERSARY.
May 25, 1977 — On this day in 1977, Star Wars premiered. Later retitled as Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, it was written and directed by George Lucas. You know who the cast is so we’ll not list all of them here. Lucas envisioned the film as being in the tradition of Buck Rogers which he originally intended to remake but couldn’t get the rights to. Reception by critics and fans alike alike was fantastic with IguanaCon II voting it the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo over Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It holds a stellar ninety-six percent rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes.
(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
Born May 25, 1915 – DeeDee Lavender. Four decades an active fan with husband Roy Lavender. Together served a term as Secretary-Treasurer of the N3F (Nat’l Fantasy Fan Fed’n). They’re in Harlan Ellison’s forewords to his collections I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream and Angry Candy; they knew Leigh Brackett & Edmond Hamilton, and were guests at the B&H homes in Ohio and California. They were part of a Southern California fannish social group called the Petards, named by one of Rick Sneary’s famous misspellings, hoist for host. Here she is with Roy at a Petards meeting in 1983, and thirty years earlier in New York (L to R, Bea Mahaffey, Hannes Bok, DeeDee, Roy, Stan Skirvin). (Died 1986) [JH]
Born May 25, 1916 – Charles Hornig. Published his fanzine The Fantasy Fan in 1933, thus First Fandom (i.e. active by at least the first Worldcon, 1939), and hired, age 17, by Hugo Gernsback to edit Wonder Stories. Founded the SF League with HG; later edited Fantasy; also Future and Science Fiction (they eventually combined); SF Quarterly. See his notes on Nycon I, the first Worldcon, here. (Died 1999) [JH]
Born May 25, 1926 – Phyllis Gotlieb. Prix Aurora for A Judgement of Dragons (note spelling; she was Canadian). The Sunburst Award is named for her first novel. A dozen SF novels, a score of shorter stories, eight poetry collections – the first being Who Knows One? Among her husband’s Physics students was Cory Doctorow’s father. (Died 2009) [JH]
Born May 25, 1935 — W. P. Kinsella. Best I’d say known for his novel Shoeless Joe which was adapted into the movie Field of Dreams, one of the few films that Kevin Costner is a decent actor in, ironic as the other is Bull Durham. Kinsella’s other genre novel is The Iowa Baseball Confederacy and it’s rather less well known than Shoeless Joe is but it’s excellent as well. He also edited Baseball Fantastic, an anthology of just what the title says they are. Given that he’s got eighteen collections of short stories listed on his wiki page, I’m reasonably sure his ISFDB page doesn’t come close to listing all his short stories. (Died 2016.) (CE)
Born May 25, 1939 — Ian McKellen, 82. Best known for being Magneto in the X-Men films, and Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies. I’m fairly sure his first genre role was as Dr. Faustus in an Edinburgh production of that play in the early Seventies. He also played Macbeth at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre during that period. He’d played Captain Hook in Peter Pan at The Royal National Theatre, and was the voice of the Demon in The Exorcist in the UK tour of that production. Of course he was Dr. Reinhardt Lane in The Shadow, The Narrator in Stardust, Sherlock Holmes in Mr. Holmes, Cogsworth in Beauty and the Beast and finally he’s the Gus the Theatre Cat in the best forgotten Cats. (CE)
Born May 25, 1946 — Frank Oz, 75. Actor, director including The Dark Crystal, Little Shop of Horrors and the second version of The Stepford Wives, producer and puppeteer. His career began as a puppeteer, where he performed the Muppet characters of Animal, Fozzie Bear, Miss Piggy, and oh-so-patriotic Sam Eagle in The Muppet Show, and Cookie Monster, Bert, and Grover in Sesame Street. Genre wise, he’s also known for the role of Yoda in the Star Wars franchise. An interesting Trivia note: he’s in the Blues Brothers as a Corrections Officer, and is the Warden in Blues Brothers 2000. (CE)
Born May 25, 1949 — Barry Windsor-Smith, 72. Illustrator and painter, mostly for Marvel Comics. Oh, his work on Conan the Barbarian in the early Seventies was amazing, truly amazing! And then there was the original Weapon X story arc involving Wolverine which still ranks among the best stories told largely because of his artwork. And let’s not forget that he and writer Roy Thomas created Red Sonja as partially based on Howard’s characters Red Sonya of Rogatino and Dark Agnes de Chastillon. (CE)
Born May 25, 1950 – Kathryn Daugherty. Engineer. Married four decades to James Stanley Daugherty. At Bucconeer the 56th Worldcon, headed Contents of Tables; a typo made it “Contests of Tables”: in each newsletter I announced “Today’s winner is the Picnic”, “Today’s winner is the Periodic”. Chaired Westercon LIII, a hard one: it was at Honolulu, see my report here [PDF; p. 11]. Luckily not exhausted; she and JSD were Fan Guests of Honor at Baycon 2001, Loscon 36. OGH’s appreciation here. (Died 2012) [JH]
Born May 25, 1953 – Stan Sakai, age 68. Lettered Groo the Wanderer comics; since 1984, author of Usagi Yôjinbô comics about samurai rabbit Miyamoto Usagi, who has (wouldn’t you know it) crossed paths with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The rônin life is hard. During the most recent Year of the Rabbit (2011), the Japanese-American Nat’l Museum in Los Angeles had an Usagi Yôjinbô exhibit. Parents’ Choice award, an Inkpot, six Eisners, an Inkwell, two Harveys, two Haxturs (Spain), a Plumilla de Plata (Mexico), a Cultural Ambassador award, and a Nat’l Cartoonists Society award. [JH]
Born May 25, 1966 — Vera Nazarian, 55. To date, she has written ten novels including Dreams of the Compass Rose, what I’d called a mosaic novel structured as a series of interlinked stories similar in tone to The One Thousand and One Nights that reminds me more than a bit of Valente’s The Orphans Tales. She’s the publisherof Norilana Books which publishes such works as Catherynne M. Valente’s Guide to Folktales in Fragile Dialects, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword and Sorceress anthologies,and Tabitha Lee’s Lee’s Sounds and Furies. (CE)
Born May 25, 1982 – Bertrand Bonnet, age 39. Six dozen reviews in Bifrost (French-language prozine; European SF Society award for Best Magazine, 2016), of Blish, Herbert, Le Guin, Pohl (with and without Kornbluth), Resnick, Strugatsky, Tolkien (including the Letters, yay). [JH]
What is it like being a Marvel Comics artist? For Malaysian artist Alan Quah, it is nothing short of having a wish granted.
“It is a dream come true, because I collected Marvel Comics when I was really really young. When I became a teenager I drew comics for a living, then I left the [comics] industry for 15 years to venture into advertising. Then I came back and tried my luck drawing comics for the American market again,” said Alan Quah, who became a cover artist for Marvel Comics in late January this year.
The Petaling Jaya-based artist mainly does comic book covers for Marvel Comics in a work-for-hire agreement. In the United States, comics retailers may sometimes commission a cover for an issue of a comic. These covers are known as retailer exclusive variant covers. Comics retailers will liaise with Marvel Comics to determine the requirements and specifications of the cover art. Marvel Comics will then get in touch with Quah to create the artwork, along with all the relevant stakeholders.
Since joining Marvel Comics, he has worked on covers for the following titles: Alien, The Spider’s Shadow, Venom, and The Marvels (not related to the 1994 series Marvels, which was told from the perspective of man-on-the-street Phil Sheldon)….
(13) I KNOW — YOU’RE FROM THE SIXTIES! A teaser trailer forLast Night in Soho has dropped. Opens in theaters this October.
Edgar Wright’s psychological thriller about a young girl, passionate in fashion design, who is mysteriously able to enter the 1960s where she encounters her idol, a dazzling wannabe singer. But 1960s London is not what it appears, and time seems to fall apart with shady consequences…
(14) FASHION SHOW. Someone on eBay is selling thisUFO-themed “Space Shopping” Hermes scarf. They want $629 – but you can pay on monthly installments! This is not something to blow your nose on.
Spanish police are investigating the death of a 39-year-old man whose body was found inside a dinosaur statue.
Authorities were alerted on Saturday after a father and his son noticed a smell emanating from the papier-mâché figure in Santa Coloma de Gramenet, a suburb of Barcelona.
The father then saw the corpse through a crack in the Stegosaurus’ hollow leg.
Police said the man had been reported missing by his family, and no foul play is suspected.
Three fire brigade teams were called to scene after the body was discovered, and firefighters cut open the dinosaur leg to retrieve it.
Local media report the man – who has not been named – was trying to retrieve a mobile phone he dropped inside the statue. He then fell inside the decorative figure and was left trapped upside down, unable to call for help.
Rachel Bloom’s performance at Renovation, the 69th World Science Fiction Convention. She was at the convention because her song “Fuck Me Ray Bradbury” was nominated for a Hugo award. Sorry about the poor lighting. The room was set up for a disco, and Rachel gave a short performance.
(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “Honest Game Trailers: Pokémon Snap”, Fandom Games says that this Pokémon movie where you take photos instead of shooting people, is the gaming equivalent of “a little amusement park ride and some photos at the end.”
[Thanks to David K.M. Klaus, N., Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Michael Toman, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, Tom Galloway, Cora Buhlert, and John Hertz for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to contributing editor of the day Cat Rambo.]
…When aggregate storytelling is done unofficially, we call it “transformative work,” of which fan fiction is a major part.
An especially intriguing example of modern-day aggregate storytelling — from both an official and unofficial standpoint — is the TV show Supernatural, about two monster-hunting brothers and the found-family they make along the way. The show has enjoyed a voracious fanbase, which kept the series alive for fifteen seasons and spawned thousands and thousands of fan works (as of this writing, there are 243,690 entries related to Supernatural on Archive of Our Own alone. This is to say nothing of Tumblr, Twitter, etc.).
Starting with the season four episode “The Monster at the End of this Book,” the show began engaging with fan reactions through self-referential stories. Sam and Dean literally read fan fiction about themselves on screen, and the characters used vernacular created by the Supernatural fanbase throughout.
The fans didn’t simply consume the story. They changed the way the story was told. It would be difficult to argue that the author(s) should be considered as good as dead in terms of critical consideration when the author(s) were still actively creating in tandem with the audience’s reception…
Escape Pod is pleased to announce a new special project for 2021: Black Future Month, a month-long celebration of Black voices in science fiction, guest edited by Brent Lambert of FIYAH Magazine. Episodes will air in the month of October and feature two original works of short fiction as well as two reprints.
NOTE: For this special event, we are only accepting submission from authors of the African diaspora and the African continent. This is an intersectional definition of Blackness, and we strongly encourage submissions from women, members of the LGBTQIA community, and members from other underrepresented communities within the African diaspora.
Pay rate, format, and content will follow Escape Pod’s regular guidelines, with two exceptions:
Manuscripts do not need to be anonymized for this submissions portal.
Stories must be between 1,500 – 5,000 words.
(3) SFF POSTAGE STAMPS COMING. The UK’s Royal Mail has announced that on March 16 the Legend of King Arthur stamps will be released. This set will be followed by an April 15 issue celebrating classic science fiction. As of today, no images from either set have been posted. Norvic Philatelics speculates what might be commemorated in the Classic Science Fiction set:
This issue consists of pairs of 1st class, £1.70 and £2.55 stamps – with the usual additions of a presentation pack first day cover, and postcards.
Some research reveals that this is the 75th anniversary of the death of the author H G Wells, and the 70th anniversary of the publication of John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids”, so it seems likely that one of Wells’ books will feature on one stamp and Wyndham’s will appear on another.
(4) GOODBYE, MR. CHIP. The trailer dropped for HBO Max’s Made for Love. It’s sf, right? At least for another few minutes.
The classic story of boy meets girl, boy implants high-tech surveillance chip in girl’s brain… Featuring Cristin Milioti, Ray Romano, Noma Dumezweni, and Billy Magnussen, Made for Love is coming to HBO Max this April.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNrMMLOTdso
(5) IT’S GOING TO BE A BUMPY RIDE. Kristin Cashore shares my high opinion of this novel: “Bells and Echoes: The Craft of DOOMSDAY BOOK by Connie Willis”. The last time I praised the book here it caused an uproar. (And a few other consequences, one of which got nominated for a Hugo.)
…. Before I dive deep into Willis’s construction of parallel characters, I want to speak more generally about the potential for parallels — echoes — inside a book, when that book takes place in multiple timelines. Many books do take place in more than one timeline, of course, whether or not they involve time travel! And there’s so much you can do with that kind of structure. As you can imagine, life in Oxfordshire in 1348 is dramatically different from life in Oxford in 2054. But Willis weaves so many parallels into these two stories, big and small things, connecting them deftly, and showing us that some things never really change. I suppose the most obvious parallel in this particular book is the rise of disease. The less obvious is some of the fallout that follows the rise of disease, no matter the era: denial; fanaticism; racism and other prejudices; isolationism; depression and despair; depletion of supplies (yes, they are running out of toilet paper in 2054). She also sets these timelines in the same physical location, the Oxfords and Oxfordshires of 1348 and 2054 — the same towns, the same churches. Some of the physical objects from 1348 still exist in 2054. She sets both stories at Christmas, and we see that some of the traditions are the same. She also weaves the most beautiful web between timelines using bells, bellringers, and the significance of the sound of bells tolling.
Simply by creating two timelines, then establishing that some objects, structures, and activities are the same and that some human behaviors are the same across the timelines, she can go on and tell two divergent plots, yet create echoes between them. These echoes give the book an internal resonance….
Lisa and I have been getting increasingly antsy and wanting to get out of the house and go see things, but with no sign of a vaccine being available for us mere under-65s, we wanted something that would be away from other people and was close enough to be able to get back home the same day. So we decided to go see the site of the atomic test in our backyard….
I know it’s unlikely that anyone else will come visit this spot, but if somehow your travels take you across “The Loneliest Road,” you might consider a relatively short side trip to one of the few atomic bomb test sites you can visit on your own.
(7) FREE HWA ONLINE PANEL. The Horror Writers Association will present a free Zoom webinar, “Skeleton Hour 7: Writing Horror in a Post-Covid World” on Thursday, April 8, 2021 at 6 p.m. Pacific. Panelists will include: Richard Thomas (moderator), Sarah Langan, Usman T. Malik, Josh Malerman, A.C. Wise, and Lucy A. Snyder. Register here.
The Krakau found an Earth that has been overrun by the bestial survivors of a planetary plague. Still, better half a glass than an empty glass. The benevolent aliens retrieved suitable candidates from the raving hordes and applied suitable cognitive corrective measures. Lo and behold, humans were transformed from wandering monsters to trustworthy subordinates. Although perhaps not all that trustworthy. Humans are relegated to menial tasks.
Marion “Mops” Adamopoulos is in charge of Earth Mercenary Corps Ship Pufferfish’s Shipboard Hygiene and Sanitation team. Chief janitor, in other words. Not command crew. Except that an unexpected attack eliminates her Krakau commanders while most of Pufferfish’s humans revert into beasts. Mops has no choice but to take command of a ship neither she nor the remaining non-bestial humans know how to operate.
Tell, don’t show. Dump your information. Write in second person. Write in passive voice. Use adverbs. To heck with suspense. Rules mark what’s difficult, not what’s impossible. There’s a whole range of exciting storytelling possibilities beyond them. Not every story needs to be in second person, but when it’s the right voice for the right story, it can be magic. The right information dump, written perfectly, can become a dazzling gymnastic feat of beauty, fascination, or humor. “Break the Rules” will teach you inspirations and techniques for rowing upstream of common knowledge. You can break any rule–if you do it right.
Join award-winning speculative fiction writer Rachel Swirsky for a workshop in which she teaches you how and why to break the rules. Next class date: Sunday, April 4, 2021, 1:00-3:00 PM Pacific Time.
(10) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.
March 8, 1978 — The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was first broadcast forty-three years ago today on BBC Radio 4. It was written by Douglas Adams with some material in the first series provided by John Lloyd. It starred Simon Jones, Geoffrey McGivern, Mark Wing-Davey. Susan Sheridan and Stephen Moore. It was the only radio show ever to be nominated for a Hugo in the ‘Best Dramatic Presentation’ category finishing second that year to Superman at Seacon ‘79. It would spawn theater shows, novels, comic books, a TV series, a video game, and a feature film.
(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
Born March 8, 1859 — Kenneth Grahame. Author of The Wind in the Willows which it turns out has had seven film adaptations, not all under the name The Wind in the Willows. (Did you know A.A. Milne dramatized it for the stage as Toad of Toad Hall?) Oh, and he did write one other fantasy, The Reluctant Dragon which I’ve never heard of. Have any of y’all read it? (Died 1932.) (CE)
Born March 8, 1899 – Eric Linklater. The Wind on the Moon reached the Retro-Hugo ballot; it won the Carnegie Medal. Three more novels, nine shorter stories for us; two dozen novels all told, ten plays, three volumes of stories, two of poetry, three of memoirs, two dozen of essays & history. Served in both World Wars. Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. (Died 1974) [JH]
Born March 8, 1922 – John Burke. Co-edited The Satellite and Moonshine (not Len Moffatt’s fanzine, another one). A score of books including novelizations of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (okay, call it adjacent), fourscore shorter stories, for us; a hundred fifty novels all told. Correspondent of The Fantast, Zenith, and at the end Relapse, which I wish Sir Peter Weston hadn’t retitled from Prolapse, but what do I know? (Died 2011) [JH]
Born March 8, 1928 — Kate Wilhelm. Author of the Hugo–winning Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang. She also won a Hugo for Best Related Book and a Locus Award for Best Nonfiction for Storyteller: Writing Lessons and More from 27 Years of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. SFWA renamed their Solstice Award the Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award. She established the Clarion Workshop with her husband Damon Knight and writer Robin Scott Wilson. (Died 2018,) (CE)
Born March 8, 1932 – Jim Webbert, age 89. Among our better auctioneers – we raise money that way, few would pay what con memberships really cost. Collector of books, other art, model rockets. HO model railroader. Chemist. Three decades in the Army Reserve, often teaching. Often seen at LepreCon. Fan Guest of Honor at TusCon 1, CopperCon 9, Con/Fusion, Kubla Khan 20 (all with wife Doreen). [JH]
Born March 8, 1934 — Kurt Mahr. One of the first writers of the Perry Rhodan series, considered the largest SF series of the world. He also edited a Perry Rhodan magazine, wrote Perry Rhodan chapbooks and yes, wrote many, many short stories about Perry Rhodan. He did write several other SF series. Ok, what’s the appeal of Perry Rhodan? He runs through SF as a genre but I’ve not read anything concerning him. (Died 1993.) (CE)
Born March 8, 1939 — Peter Nicholls. Writer and editor. Creator and co-editor of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction with John Clute which won a Hugo twice. He won another Hugo for the Science Fiction Encyclopedia. His other publications were Science Fiction at Large, The Science in Science Fiction edited by Nicholls and written by him and David Langford, and Fantastic Cinema. He became the first Administrator of the United Kingdom based Science Fiction Foundation. He was editor of its journal, Foundation: The Review of Science Fiction, from 1974 to 1978. (Died 2018.) (CE)
Born March 8, 1948 – Jackie French Koller, age 73. Four novels, six shorter stories, for us; three dozen books all told. Watercolorist. Makes gingerbread houses. Her Website. [JH]
Born March 8, 1973 – Daniel Griffo, age 48. Lives in La Plata (a Silver Age artist?), Argentina, with wife, son, and two pets named Indiana and Jones. I am not making this up. Comics, lettering, 3-dimensional activity books, My Visit to the Acupuncturist (I’m not; why shouldn’t there be a children’s book about that?), two about Dragon Masters – here’s one of them, Future of the Time Dragon. Website. [JH]
Born March 8, 1976 — Freddie Prinze Jr., 45. I’m fairly sure his first genre role was in Wing Commander as Lt. Christopher Blair followed by the animated Mass Effect: Paragon Lost in which he voiced Lieutenant James Vega. Speaking of animated endeavors, I’ve got him in Kim Possible: A Sitch In Time voicing Future Jim / Future Tim followed by being in all in all four seasons of the animated Star Wars Rebels as Kanan Jarrus. And that’s a series which I highly recommend as it may well be the best Star Wars fiction ever done. (CE)
Born March 8, 1978 – Samanta Schweblin, age 43. Another Argentine, this one living in Berlin, writing in Spanish. Two novels, two shorter stories for us; three collections. Casa de las Americas Award. Juan Rulfo Prize. Tigre Juan Award, Shirley Jackson Award for Distancia de rescate, in English Fever Dream. [JH]
(12) COMICS SECTION.
The Far Side reveals the tragic conclusion of a nursery rhyme.
(14) ON BOARD. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In the March 3 Financial Times, gaming columnist Tom Faber looks at the appeal of board games during the pandemic.
For those who fancy themselves not Victorian engineers or colonial settlers but fantasy warriors and space explorers, games such as Twilight Imperium and Terraforming Mars hold more appeal. You can learn the rules of most within an hour or two, but there are some more elaborate offerings such as dungeon crawler Gloomhaven, which weighs 10kg and currently sits at the top of the ratings on the authoritative site BoardGameGeek. Games have grown in beauty as well as sophistication–see Wingspan, with its 180 gorgeous bird illustrations and pleasing tokens in the shape of pastel-shaded eggs.
As the games themselves have become more desirable, board game cafes such as Draughts in London and Snakes and Lattes in Toronto have sprung up and help legitimise board gaming, At the same time, the internet has facilitated the discovery of new games and willing opponents, as well as enabling the rising trend of board game crowdfunding–Frosthaven, the followup to Gloomhaven, raised almost $13m on Kickstarter.”
(15) PSA FROM WJW. Walter Jon Williams has shared “My Mask Policy” on his blog:
After having endured the horrors of Oklahoma and Kentucky, I’ve decided that I should announce my mask policy. I’m not a head of state or a governor, I’m just a guy, so there is no way to enforce my preferences on the world— except, of course, by way of sarcasm and mockery.
Just remember that I’m the guy that came up with several rules for living, including Williams’ First Law: Assholes Always Advertise.
So here goes:
While there is very little scientific data about how effective mask use is in preventing COVID, the wearing of masks in public is (at the very least) a courtesy to others, particularly those most vulnerable to the disease.
So if you’re in public and not wearing a mask, I’m not going to assume that you’re a brave iconoclastic thinker challenging accepted dogma, I’m going to assume that you are a complete asshole. And not only are you an asshole, you’re advertising yourself as such.
…On the positive side, I love the concept of the alien spaceship disintegrating as it enters the solar system. I’m frankly fascinated by the backstory of that, which sadly, in episode one at least, the series shows no signs of exploring, versus the “what does each piece of debris do this week” storytelling. I liked the way the program began, with the tiny shard of debris transporting an unfortunate maid from high up in a hotel to her death in the dining room, without marring any of the ceilings or floors she falls through. Grabbed my attention!
But there was very little about the alien technology or curiosity on anyone’s part about the aliens themselves or what destroyed the ship. No discussion about whether the debris is actually some kind of invasion or what might happen next. No one here seems to care if there was an FTL drive to be had. I frankly wished this was a series about going to explore what’s left of the hulk in space, rather than these cut and dried, solved in an hour individual cases….
(17) A LITTLE LIST. At the Hugo Book Club Blog, Olav Rokne has compiled a list of “Screen adaptations of Hugo-shortlisted works”. There are 47 so far. (The list excludes Retro Hugo awards as well as all Graphic Novels and comic book adaptations.)
The scrutiny also prompted some public libraries to review their Dr. Seuss collections.
A group of librarians across Toronto Public Library’s system will evaluate the titles in question and issue recommendations, according to a spokeswoman.
“Occasionally, children’s books written some time ago are brought to our attention for review,” Ana-Maria Critchley said in an email.
“If the review determines there are racial and cultural representation concerns the committee will recommend to either withdraw the book from our library collections or move the book from children’s collections to another location, such as a reference collection for use by researchers.”
The Vancouver Public Library is also launching reviews of each of the six Dr. Seuss titles.
Scott Fraser, manager of marketing and communications, said this process is usually initiated by a request from a patron, but the library made an exception given the “extremely unusual” decision by a rights holder to suspend publication.
Copies of the books will remain on the shelves while the review is underway, Fraser said, and officials will then decide whether to keep a title in the collection, change its classification or remove it from the stacks.
Vancouver Public Library previously reviewed “If I Ran the Zoo” in 2014 in response to a complaint about stereotypical depictions of Asians. A caption in the book describes three characters as “helpers who all wear their eyes at a slant.”
The library decided to keep the book on the shelves, but stop reading it at storytime, and only promote it as an example of how cultural depictions have changed….
…Prior to this discovery, Zhang and his research group had been pondering the possible existence of space hurricanes for years. The team’s research focus lies in the interactions between the ionosphere, an atmospheric layer that extends some 50 to 600 miles above Earth’s surface, and the magnetosphere, the region shaped by our planet’s protective magnetic field. At the poles, these interactions generate the magical and dazzling auroras that are popularly known as the Northern and Southern Lights.
Tropical hurricanes are driven in part by the movements of heavy air masses that generate strong winds; Zhang and his colleagues suspected a similar mechanism might be at work in the outer space environment close to Earth. In the case of space hurricanes, the solar wind, a stream of charged particles that flows from the Sun, slams into Earth’s upper atmosphere and transfers its energy into the ionosphere, driving the cyclone formation.
(20) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “WandaVision Pitch Meeting” on ScreenRant, Ryan George explains that Marvel fans will be frustrated by the slow drip of revelations about how WandaVision connects to the MCU that they’ll become really frustrated by the phrase “Please Stand By.”
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John Hertz, Martin Morse Wooster, Michael Toman, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, JJ, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Brian Z.]
(1) IF YOU LOVED THEM IN GOOD OMENS… A finalist for RadioTimes.com Awards 2021– TV Moment of the Year is Judi Dench slamming David Tennant and Michael Sheen in Staged, a British comedy series set during the COVID-19 pandemic and primarily made using video-conferencing technology.
David Tennant and Michael Sheen playing exaggerated versions of themselves (actors) in 2020 trying to get work is already hilarious, but add in Dame Judi Dench and you’ve got a work of art. Tennant and Sheen aren’t exactly enthusiastic about their new role in a play, and Dench is on hand to remind them they have said yes to a job so they should “stop f**king about” and “do the bloody job”. That’s them (and us) told.
The series premiered on BBC One last summer, and another eight-episode series was released January 4. The first series synopsis is —
David Tennant and Michael Sheen (playing themselves) were due to star in a production of Six Characters in Search of an Author in the West End. The pandemic has put paid to that, but their director (Simon Evans – also playing himself) is determined not to let the opportunity pass him by. He knows how big a chance this is for him and turns his attention to cajoling his stars into rehearsing over the internet. All they need to do is read the first scene, but throughout the series they come up against a multitude of oppositional forces: distraction, boredom, home-schooling and their own egos.
…Deciding whether to reopen the stores won’t be easy. At 70 years young, many assumed owner Don Blyly would retire from retail business after the fire. Such assumptions are premature, however. It takes a lot of drive to start over from nothing, but Blyly seems to be equal to whatever tasks he sets himself.
…He admits that he has a knack for bouncing back from adversity, “I’ve noticed that I seem to have more resilience than most other people and I’ve wondered why. Partly it is stubbornness. Partly it is because the more of a track record you have at overcoming previous difficulties, the more confidence you have of overcoming the latest difficulty.”
Blyly says the city has a lot to answer for when it comes to the uprising, “Back in 2015 the Department of Justice made recommendations for reforming the Minneapolis Police, but the City Council has done nothing to implement those recommendations. The judge in the trial of Mohamed Noor for the murder of Justine Damond raised issues about problems with the Minneapolis Police that have never been addressed.”
Since the uprising and subsequent looting, he’s concerned that many people think the area is too dangerous to visit, “About half of my sales were to people outside the I-495/ I-694 loop, and they are now scared to come to Minneapolis to spend their money. Customers in South Minneapolis told me that they would be scared to return to the Uncles if I rebuilt in the old location. The city is going to have to actually work on fixing the problems with the Minneapolis Police instead making ‘defunding’ speeches before people will feel comfortable about spending their money in Minneapolis again.”
(3) IT PAYS TO BE POSTHUMOUS. Julie Phillips, in “Born to Be Posthumous” at 4Columns, reviews Mark Dery’s Born To Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life And Mysterious Genius Of Edward Gorey.
By his mid-twenties, the artist and illustrator Edward Gorey had already settled on his signature look: long fur coat, jeans, canvas high-tops, rings on all his fingers, and the full beard of a Victorian intellectual. His enigmatic illustrations of equally fur-coated and Firbankian men in parlors, long-skirted women, and hollow-eyed, doomed children (in The Gashlycrumb Tinies, among other works) share his own gothic camp aesthetic. Among the obvious questions for a reader of Gorey’s biography are: Where in his psyche, or in the culture, did all those fey fainting ladies and ironic dead tots come from? And, not unrelatedly: Was Gorey gay?
…Gorey described himself as “undersexed” in a 1980 interview, and equivocated: “I’ve never said that I was gay and I’ve never said that I wasn’t. A lot of people would say that I wasn’t because I never do anything about it.” Did he reject a gay sexuality, or was his particular sexuality, perhaps asexuality, not yet on the menu? Dery isn’t out to judge, and encourages us instead to look at how Gorey’s arch imagery, flamboyant self-presentation, and “pantheon of canonically gay tastes” (ballet, Marlene Dietrich records, silent film) allow him to be read in the context of gay culture and history, whatever his praxis in bed….
… Since it first appeared in October 2019, “Sexy Times With Wangxian,” or STWW, has become notorious across AO3. That in itself is unusual, because most AO3 users stick to their own fandoms and don’t pay much attention to what’s happening in others. STWW belongs to the fandom for the wildly popular Chinese TV series The Untamed, and the “Wangxian” in the title refers to the ship name for the show’s beloved main romantic pairing. It’s a very long fanfic, over a million words, and contains more than 200 chapters of porn featuring The Untamed’s large cast in endless permutations and sexual scenarios.
All that, by itself, isn’t enough to make STWW remarkable — not on a website as wild and unpredictable as AO3. Yet the fic has become impossible for many AO3 users to ignore thanks to a unique quirk: Its author has linked it to more than 1,700 site tags (and counting).
A quick note about AO3’s tagging system: It is designed to let users tag creatively and freely. So you can add useful tags, like pairing labels and character names, but you can also toss in personalized tags for fun and creative expression, from “no beta readers we die like men” to “I wrote this at 4am on three bottles of Monster Energy and zero sleep don’t judge.”
The tagging system is in service of the site’s total permissiveness — you can write anything you want in tags. But for the site to function, tags still need to be useful for navigation. So AO3 has hordes of volunteers known as “tag wranglers” whose sole job is to sort through the massive number of fic tags on the site and decide which ones will actually help users find what they’re looking for.
Those tags are then made “canonical,” which means they’ll become universal tags that every user can sort through. They’ll also appear within a list of suggested tags as you type. If I start to type “hospital” while tagging a fic, AO3 will return canonical tag suggestions like “Alternate Universe — Hospital,” “Hospital Sex,” and “Hogwarts Hospital Wing.” That makes it easy to determine whether your fic fits tags the community is already using.
AO3’s tagging system is so organized and thorough that it has won widespread acclaim from fields like library science and internet infrastructure. But it still has its limits — and with more than 1,700 tags, “Sexy Times With Wangxian” has revealed what some of those limits look like — in some cases quite literally….
The tags are so numerous, they can’t fit into a single screenshot on a large monitor. Here’s a quick scroll through the entire thing…
(5) THEY’RE FEELING BETTER. Jen Chaney, in “No, They Weren’t Dead the Whole Time” at Vulture, has an oral history of the last episode of Lost, which reveals that showrunners Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof had the ambiguous ending in mind the whole time and that the show was so important that the State of the Union in 2010 was moved because it conflicted with the final season opening episode.
…When the finale aired, it sparked divided responses (understatement) from fans. Some loved the emotional way in which Jack’s journey and that of his fellow survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 came to a close. Others were extremely vocally angry about not getting more direct answers to the show’s many questions. Still others came away from it all convinced that the castaways had been dead the whole time. (They were not dead. They really weren’t.)
What was semi-clear at the time and is even clearer now is that the broadcast of the Lost finale would mark the end of something else: the truly communal broadcast television experience. Subsequent finales would be major events (see HBO’s Game of Thrones) and even draw larger audiences (2019’s final Big Bang Theory attracted 18 million viewers, compared to the 13.5 million who tuned in for the Lost farewell). But nothing else since has felt so massively anticipated and so widely consumed in real time the way that the end of Lost, the Smoke Monster Super Bowl, did in 2010.
Vulture did extensive interviews with writers, cast, and crew members, who reflected on the development of “The End,” the making of the still hotly debated episode, and the cultural conversation it continues to generate. Because, yes, of course, we had to go back.
(6) AT HOME WITH SFF. Aidan Moher conducts a lively and revealing Q&A with Yoon Ha Lee, Brian Staveley, Kate Elliott, Aliette de Bodard in “Blood Matters: Growing Up in an SF/F House” at Uncanny Magazine.
…An appreciation for speculative fiction isn’t always handed down from within a family. Sometimes it grows on its own, or is introduced by a friend or a teacher. Or a child is uninterested, despite their parents’ best efforts to sway them to the side of elves and proton cannons. I recently reached out to several writers to ask them about their experience growing up, their parents’ relationship to speculative fiction, and the impact that parenthood has had on them as writers….
…There are also emotional sacrifices that come along with parenthood. After the birth of her first child, de Bodard’s tolerance for stories featuring child abuse or endangerment “went from weak to zero” immediately. “I had to put off reading a book I was much looking forward to because I couldn’t get past the violence against a child.” As the father of a daughter, I’ve had a similar experience to de Bodard, and have also become even more aware of and angered by the pervasive sexism that continues to plague speculative fiction and fandom.
Personal writing of any sort reveals layers to a person that even their close friends and loved ones might not recognize. My wife often finds it odd to read my writing—not because of the subject matter, but because it’s told in a voice that doesn’t sound familiar to her ear.
“My children have all read at least some of my writing,” said Elliott. “I often consult them about plot, character, and world–building because I like to hear their feedback, because they know me so well, and because they have fascinating and deep imaginations. They are probably my most valuable writing resource, with my cherished writer and reader friends a close second.”…
My old Marvel Bullpen pal Jo Duffy had a lengthy, celebrated run back then on Power Man and Iron Fist, where she also wrote Conan the Barbarian, Fallen Angels, Star Wars, and Wolverine. She also wrote Catwoman for DC and Glory for Rob Liefeld’s Extreme Studios imprint of Image Comics. Additionally, she worked on the screenplays for the horror films Puppet Master 4 and Puppet Master 5.
We discussed why she knows what Superman will look like when he’s 100, the many reasons our kid selves both thought Marvel had D.C. beat, the genius of Marie Severin, how I may have inadvertently been responsible for her getting a job as an Assistant Editor in the Marvel Bullpen, what it was like to work with Steve Ditko, the firing she still feels guilty about 40 years later, how she approached the challenge of writing Power Man and Iron Fist, the letter she wrote to Stan Lee after the death of Jack Kirby, the two-year-long Star Wars story arc she was forced to squeeze into a few issues, the best writing advice she ever got, and much more.
(8) FIRST THERE IS NO MOUNTAIN, THEN THERE IS. Sarah Gailey, in “Building Beyond: Move Mountains” at Stone Soup, gets an assist from Alex Acks and nonwriter Kacie Winterberg to illustrate how easy a particular facet of sff creation can be:
Building Beyond is an ongoing series about accessible worldbuilding. Building a world doesn’t have to be hard or scary — or even purposeful. Anyone can do it. To prove that, let’s talk to both a writer and a non-writer about a worldbuilding prompt.
How do you go about communicating with a mountain to prevent it from pursuing its ambition of becoming a volcano?
(9) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.
February 26, 1977 — On this day in 1977, Doctor Who’s “The Talons Of Weng-Chiang, Part 1” first aired. It featured Tom Baker, considered the most popular of all the actors who’ve played The Doctor, and Leela, the archetypal savage that British Empire both adored and despised, played by Louise Jameson. The villain was most likely a not-so-accidental take off of Fu Manchu. Cat Eldridge reviewed the episode at A Green Man Review. You can watch the first part online here with links to the rest of the story there as well. (CE)
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
Born February 26, 1874 – Katherine Cameron. Member, Glasgow Society of Lady Artists (Women Artists after 1975). A dozen illustrated books for us. This is in Stories from the Ballads (M. Macgregor, 1906). Here are Snowdrop and the Seven Dwarfs. Here is Celtic Tales. Here is Undine. This is in The Enchanted Land. (Died 1965) [JH]
Born February 26, 1916 – Clifford Geary. A dozen covers, two dozen interiors for us; many others. Noteworthy in particular for illustrating Heinlein’s “juveniles”. Here is a frontispiece for Starman Jones. Here is an interior for Between Planets. This is in Space Cadet. Here is one from outside our field. (Died 2008) [JH]
Born February 26, 1918 — Theodore Sturgeon. I hadn’t realized that he’d only written six genre novels! More Than Human is brilliant and I assumed that he’d written a lot more long form fiction but it was short form where he excelled with more than two hundred such stories. I did read over the years a number of his reviews — he was quite good at it. (Died 1985.) (CE)
Born February 26, 1945 — Marta Kristen, 76. Kristen is best known for her role as Judy Robinson, one of Professor John and Maureen Robinson’s daughters, in the original Lost in Space. And yes, I watched the entire series. Good stuff it was. She has a cameo in the Lost in Space film as Reporter Number One. None of her other genre credits are really that interesting, just the standard stuff you’d expect such as an appearance on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. (CE)
Born February 26, 1945 – Alex Eisenstein, age 76; 1946 – Phyllis Eisenstein (Died 2020). Active fannish couple; P also an active pro, a dozen novels, twoscore shorter stories with A collaborating on half a dozen; so far as I know The City in Stone, completed, remains unpublished. AE co-edited Trumpet. Here is his cover for More Issues at Hand. PE was Guest of Honor at Windycon XXX, Capricon 26, ConQuesT 38; a soft-sculpture of her was part of the Fanzine Lounge at Chicon VI the 58th Worldcon. AE, a noted SF art collector, has organized many displays including that Chicon. [JH]
Born February 26, 1948 — Sharyn McCrumb, 73. ISFDB lists all of her Ballad novels as genre but that’s a wee bit deceptive as how genre strong they are depends upon the novel. Oh, Nora Bonesteel, she who sees Death, is in every novel but only some novels such as the Ghost Riders explicitly contain fantasy elements. If you like mysteries, all of them are highly recommended. Now the Jay Omega novels, Bimbos of the Death Sun and Zombies of the Gene Pool are genre, are great fun and well worth reading. They are in print and available from the usual suspects which is interesting as I know she took them out of print for awhile. (CE)
Born February 26, 1952 – Bob Devney, F.N., age 69. Eight-time finalist for Best Fanwriter. Fellow of NESFA (New England SF Ass’n; service). Lover of SF movies – some of them, anyway. When I remarked to him I hadn’t seen The Devniad in a while, he muttered something about Twitter; but quite possibly he still hasn’t recovered from Noreascon 4 the 62nd Worldcon, where he worked very hard, as I saw and maybe you did too. [JH]
Born February 26, 1957 – John Jude Palencar, age 64. A hundred ninety covers, five dozen interiors. Artbook Origins. Here is Rhinegold. Here is Kushiel’s Avatar. Here is The Dark Line. Here is Mind of My Mind. This picture led to The Palencar Project – David Hartwell did such things. Five Chesleys. American Water Color Society Gold Medal. Hamilton King Award. Spectrum Grand Master. Also National Geographic, Smithsonian, Time. [JH]
Born February 26, 1963 — Chase Masterson, 57. Fans are fond of saying that she spent five years portraying the Bajoran Dabo entertainer Leeta on Deep Space Nine which means she was in the background of Quark’s bar a lot though she hardly had any lines. Her post-DS9 genre career is pretty much non-existent save one-off appearances on Sliders, the current carnation of The Flash and Star Trek: Of Gods and Men, a very unofficial Tim Russ project. She has done some voice work for Big Finish Productions as of late. The series there features here as Vienna Salvatori, an “impossibly glamorous bounty hunter” as the publicity material including photos of her puts it. (CE)
Born February 26, 1965 — Liz Williams, 56. For my money, her best writing by far is her Detective Inspector Chen series about the futuristic city Singapore Three, its favorite paranormal police officer Chen and his squabbles with an actual Chinese-derived Heaven and Hell. I’ve read most of them and recommend them highly. I’m curious to see what else y’all have read of her and suggest that I read. (CE)
Born February 26, 1968 – Lynne Hansen, age 53. Half a dozen novels, ten dozen covers. Here is Strangewood. Here is Things That Never Happened (hello, Scott Edelman). Here is A Complex Accident of Life. Here is The High Strangeness of Lorelei Jones. [JH]
…We’re hearing that no director is attached as of yet and plot details remain under wraps. Additionally, the search for an actor to play Kal-El / Superman hasn’t started yet.
“To be invited into the DC Extended Universe by Warner Bros., DC Films and Bad Robot is an honor,” said Coates in a statement received only by Shadow and Act. “I look forward to meaningfully adding to the legacy of America’s most iconic mythic hero.”
“There is a new, powerful and moving Superman story yet to be told. We couldn’t be more thrilled to be working with the brilliant Mr. Coates to help bring that story to the big screen, and we’re beyond thankful to the team at Warner Bros. for the opportunity,” said J.J. Abrams in the statement to S&A.
“Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me opened a window and changed the way many of us see the world,” added Toby Emmerich, Chairman, Warner Bros. Pictures Group. “We’re confident that his take on Superman will give fans a new and exciting way to see the Man of Steel.”
…If you think Disney’s recent announcement that it will soon be charging $75 a head for the thrill of wandering around California Adventure to buy and eat things while admiring the entrances to still-closed rides is nuts, I am here to tell you that it is not.
…It was absolutely clear right away. Desperate for even the faintest tang of the Disney experience, thousands of us apparently are quite willing to settle for the elements of the Disney experience we normally complain about the most: waiting in line,overpriced food and the siren call of way too much Disney merch.
Late on a recent Wednesday afternoon, it was a 45-minute wait simply to enter the Downtown Disney area, 50 if you count the five-minute walk from the car, which cost 10 bucks to park.
To be fair, the line that snaked through an entire parking lot could be construed, at least in these coronavirus-plagued times, as a Disney experience in and of itself. The now-ubiquitous six-feet-apart marks created a socially distant conga line that involved far more walking than standing: “Well, we’re getting our steps in,” one of my daughters remarked.
…As the sun set over the Simba parking lot and our group advanced through the temperature-taking station and the bag-check station, then past a police presence prominent enough to make any mask-shirker think twice, one could at least imagine a world returning to something approaching normal.
Listen to the piped-in music! Yes, once upon a time it did indeed drive some of us insane. But now, after a yearlong lifetime of home-office work — concentration broken on an hourly basis by the maddening syncopated roar of leaf blowers and brain-drilling hum of the neighbors’ home improvement project — all those Disney tunes fell around us like the singing of a heavenly host….
…Beyond the plot reasons, I loved that it was more a cultural conflict because that concept is at the heart of this duology: the way the Empire doesn’t simply conquer via its military but swamps others with its pervasive, relentless, invasive cultural tentacles (hmm, sound familiar?), the way the question of “who counts as human” (or more broadly, who can be considered a person) runs throughout the Empire on a macro level, and throughout the relationship between Mahit and Three Seagrass on a micro level.
… It’s impossible to read these moments and not relate them to everyday existence for those forced to swim in the sea of a majority culture. This fraught tension is made all the richer for how Martine portrays (realistically) how seductive such cultural power is even for those it threatens to swamp, like falling in love with the waves that are trying to drown you. And then it gets under the skin and into the brain so it becomes almost second nature: “Mahit laughed, a raw sound … She couldn’t do it all. She thought in Teixcalaanli, in imperial-style metaphor and overdetermination. She’d had this whole conversation in their language.”
… It all came down to this month’s Analog. If it were superb, as it was last month, then we’d have a clean sweep across eight periodicals. If it flopped, as it often does, the streak would be broken.
As it turns out, neither eventuality quite came to pass. Indeed, the March 1966 Analog is sort of a microcosm of the month itself — starting out with a bang and faltering before the finish….
(15) FROM BROADWAY TO BROADBAND. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In the February 19 Financial Times, Sarah Hemming reviews “online interactive theatre shows” which try to capture some of the spontaneity of live theatre.
Collaboration is key to success with all these show: the quicker an audience learns to share tasks, the better. In Sherlock In Homes: Murder At The Circus (from the Wardrobe Theatre and Sharp Teeth Theatre), this turns out to be a group of small girls from Wales with a formidable line in questioning, (The same companies have also created Sherlock In Homes 2: Murder On Ice.)
Another Sherlock-inspired show, Murder At The Circus is a droll, family-friendly affair, low on tech high in audience-actor interaction. Sherlock is missing (again), leaving behind a rum case involving a dead circus clown and a plate of potted meat. We, the impromptu detectives, must quiz a line-up of dubious suspects with names like Glenda Flex (acrobat) and Rory McPride (lion tamer), all of whom are adept at juggling the truth.
After several rounds of unfocused interrogation from our team, the Welsh 10-year-olds spring into action. “Where were you location-wise when you were kissing?’ demands one, sternly, of a particularly evasive character, It would take a hardened criminal not to crack.”
David must have done something right because author Barry Malzberg was willing to sit down for a lengthy phone conversation with him. In this interview, Barry leads David through his experiences with multiple authors including PKD, the in’s and out’s of the publishing industry of the 60s and 70s, and more. Also, don’t forget to check out part 2 of our Barry Malzberg Spectacular where author James Reich joins David in an in-depth look at the award-winning novel Beyond Apollo, which garnered the first ever John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.
…One of the promotions tied to Gaga’s cookies is a Sing It with Oreo feature. You can make personal recordings, transform them into “musical messages of kindness” and send them to folks you love and support. The pink foil packaging for Gaga Oreos features a QR code, which provides instant access to the recording function. You probably have to give up countless pieces of personal information in the process, but go ahead, “Just sing from the heart, and make someone’s day a little brighter.”
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, JJ, John Hertz, Andrew Porter, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
