(1) LAW ENFORCEMENT ACTIVITY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Well Mike, I had to pass through London last night on my way to and from Mars (“Public Lecture: Extra-terrestrial Fieldwork; the adventures of an Earth-bound Astronaut”; got to hold a piece of Moon rock — long story) anyway we were going for a drink after and there were police everywhere, armed ones too (not just longbows but these newfangled gun things) and loads of black Diamlers escorted by police. Then I went to the library today and I was the only person there. This has never happened before! Something’s up I tell you….
To business. Today’s science trawl….
The Fermi Paradox: Searching For Dyson Spheres. I have to say I am rather skeptical that a long-lived, advanced technological civilisation will end up constructing a big dumb object even if they are great fun concepts to explore in SF. Loved Bob’s Orbitsville and Niven’s Ringworld. Long-lived alien civilisations thinking big will also think long-term because the structures are a huge, long-term investment (as well as because their civilisation is… er… long-lived). Here, there are better and more effective strategies to ensure a civilisation’s thriving long-term. Yet some scientists do take big dumb objects with seriousness (cf. the recent grabby aliens discussion – check out the video link within the afore link). Given that, how would we set about detecting, say, something like a Dyson sphere? This week, Isaac Arthur takes a deep dive into spotting these objects as part of a SETI strategy and goes on to ponder as to whether it would be possible for an advanced civilisation to hide their Dyson sphere from us…
Many believe civilisations which survive the challenges of technology will inevitability build Dyson Spheres encompassing their entire sun. So how do we find these megastructures if they exist?
(2) AT THE FRONT. The Hollywood Reporter visited the picket line on May 4 to hear reaction to the AMPTP’s a point-by-point document reacting to the WGA’s version of events, in particular, the writers’ furor over not actively working to regulate artificial intelligence. “Writers Strike: How the Studios’ Retort Went Over at the Picket Lines”.
… Outside the Warner Bros. Discovery lot in Burbank — which, alongside Netflix, has been among the most trafficked picketing spots — THR caught up with WGA negotiating committee co-chair David Goodman to get an instant reaction to the AMPTP missive.
“I took a quick glance,” said Goodman, who did mention seeing the part about AI in which the studio statement claimed “writers want to be able to use this technology as part of their creative process, without changing how credits are determined, which is complicated given AI material can’t be copyrighted.”
“That’s a very telling comment,” Goodman added, the audio of his interview just barely discernible over the insistent roar of car horns beeping their support for picketers. “We need a guarantee from them that literary material will be written by a human being. It’s a very easy ask. For them to make that commitment doesn’t hurt their bottom line at all. … They say they are our partners. Make that commitment and say, ‘We are only going to work with writers who are human beings.’ It’s crazy that I have to say it.”…
Due to the ongoing writers strike, Marvel has shut down pre-production on the superhero reboot, which is set to star Mahershala Ali as the titular vampire hunter alongside Aaron Pierre, Delroy Lindo and Mia Goth. Production was expected to start in Atlanta within the month for an anticipated Sept. 6, 2024 release. Marvel Studios first announced it was reviving “Blade” — after Wesley Snipes originated the character on screen in a feature film trilogy from 1998 to 2004 — at San Diego Comic-Con in 2019.
This isn’t the first time Disney has had to delay production on the film. Last October, Disney pushed “Blade” from a 2023 release to 2024 after the original director, Bassam Tariq (“Mogul Mowgli”), left the project two months before filming was set to begin.
AUTHORS NOTE: greeting buckaroos. this tingler is given to all FOR FREE in solidarity with writers guild buds who are currently making their voices heard and striking with incredibly reasonable demands.
the wga is asking that any donations go to the ENTERTAINMENT COMMUNITY FUND which is used to directly help those in the entertainment industry in need and who will feel the financial burden of not working during a strike.
as i said this tingler is free HOWEVER if you have the means you can donate the amount a tingler usually costs (three dollars or MORE if you would like) to the charity fund and support. just click the link and when it says ‘gift designation’ select ‘film and television’
The third and apparently final of James Gunn’s Marvel series reveals the underlying question of the series: what (or who) makes a good dad? The daddy issues of the series have never been subtle with Volume 1 featuring the truly appalling dad of both Gamora and Nebula in the form of Thanos. The purple Titan did not meet his ultimate fate until the Marvel Endgame crossover but in between time, we met Peter Quill’s dad, Ego the Living Planet. Given that ego took the physical form of veteran space-dad Kurt Russell, he looked like a better proposition than genocidal Thanos. Alas, Ego was also a mass murderer. A surprise last minute contender for best dad came in the form of Yondu, the Ravager who kidnapped/adopted Peter but while vastly better than either Thanos or Ego, he’s still not a great dad.
So volume 3 takes on to the next Guardian’s dad issues. In this case not Rocket Racoon’s literal dad but rather his creator….
Most every weekend since September (football pre-emptions notwithstanding), we’ve been granted the pleasure of watching a certain web-head soar through the concrete towers of New York, stalking a never-ending crew of slightly inept criminals while evading the slings and barbs of the editor of the Daily Bugle, J. Jonah Jameson.
Every weekend I perk up when I hear this fun theme song. Seriously, you should pop out to see if your local Korvettes sells the 45 of this song because it (pardon the pun) swings!…
(7) TOBIAS BUCKELL VIRTUAL EVENT. Space Cowboy Books will host an “Online Reading & Interview with Tobias S. Buckell” on Tuesday May 16 at 6:00 p.m. Pacific. Register for free here.
Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance and Other Stories is Tobias S. Buckell’s seventh short fiction collection and is comprised of 15 stories, several of which are original to the collection or were previously only available through his Patreon. This collection ranges from galactic adventures to intimate explorations of humanity—sometimes in the same story—rich with a sense of wonder and deft storytelling.
Get your copy of Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance here.
(8) MEMORY LANE.
1989 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Suzy McKee Charnas was one of our most amazing writers. She would win a Hugo at ConFiction for her “Boobs” short story and more than a handful of other awards.
Our Beginning this Scroll is that of her“Beauty and the Opéra or the Phantom Beast”, a story first published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine in their July 1989 issue.
If you’re looking to read it now, it’s in her Stagestruck Vampires & Other Phantasms collection published by Tachyon. It’s got eleven of her eighteen short fiction works. And yes, it’s available from the usual suspects.
And now get ready for a most metafictional Beginning. I really mean that…
As of this writing, I have not had the pleasure of meeting Suzy McKee Charnas face to face. She lives in the sunny desert paradise of Albuquerque (or, as Homer Simpson once charmingly and perhaps fittingly referred to it, “I’ll be quirky”), while I inhabit the benighted non-Euclidean warrens of Providence. I suspect that one day sooner or later we will meet, given the melting-pot allure of the science-fiction and fantasy convention circuit, and I fully expect that encounter to be a pleasant one, with its share of mutual surprises and confirmations. But right now, despite a lack of non-virtual time together, I still feel I can describe Ms. Charnas to you well enough that you’ll be able to recognize her, should you chance to bump into her.
Suzy McKee Charnas is a human-sized sentient female lizard named Walter Drake who boasts a human lover.
She is a lonely tarot-card expert named Edie, charged with shepherding a child messiah through peril. She is a nervous housewife named Fran who is obsessed with a strange circle of mushrooms on her lawn.
She is a young girl nicknamed “Boobs” Bornstein who finds herself transformed into a vengeful supernatural entity.
She is a misshapen recluse living beneath the Paris Opéra house with an abducted child bride. She is a middle-aged psychiatrist named Floria who finds herself forming a fatal identification with a patient named Dr. Weyland, a man who believes he is a vampire.
And perhaps most vividly, she is Dr. Weyland himself, immortal, anguished, jaded, violent, a curse to humanity and his own peace of mind.
But wait, I hear you protest: these are only Charnas’s characters, not her true self. Charnas is the historically locatable woman who debuted in the SF world some thirty years ago, with her excellent post-apocalypse novel Walk to the End of the World (later followed by three sequels). She’s the writer who’s won a Hugo and a Nebula and a Mythopoeic Society Award, the one who has had successes in the theater. That’s the gal we need you, as introducer, to describe.
Well, I reply, if your interest is that shallow, I imagine you can find pictures of Charnas easily enough, on her various dustjackets or with the help of Google. But those photos won’t help you identify what’s really unique and important, the inner essence of Charnas, the soul-glow that will allow you to spot her amidst a mob much more readily than by knowing mere tilt of head or jut of jaw, curve of lip or wrinkle of brow. No, those inner qualities are only apprehendable by diving into her stories and getting acquainted with her characters. For what is an author if not the composite of those she chooses to write about?
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born May 6, 1914 — Randall Jarrell. Author of the ever-so-charming The Animal Family which is illustrated by Maurice Sendak. Go read it – you’ll be smiling afterwards. The Anchor Book of Stories has more of his genre friendly stories. He was the 11th Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress—a position that now bears the title Poet Laureate of the United States. (Died 1965.)
Born May 6, 1915 — Orson Welles. Certainly the broadcast of “The War of the Worlds” in 1938 was his pinnacle of genre success but for the Federal Theatre Project he also did a 1936 adaptation of Macbeth with an entirely African American cast. That is was known as the Voodoo Macbeth might give you an idea of what he did to it. He would later do a more straightforward film of Macbeth. (Died 1985.)
Born May 6, 1931 — Jack Sharkey. Author of several humorous SF novels, It’s Magic,You Dope! and The Secret Martians. He also wrote an Addams Family franchise novel, The Addams Family. His two novels are in print at the usual suspects. (Died 1994.)
Born May 6, 1946 — Nancy Kilpatrick, 77. Fangoria called her “Canada’s answer to Anne Rice”. I know that I’ve read something of her fiction but I’ll be damned if I remember what it was. I do strongly recommend the anthology she edited Danse Macabre: Close Encounters with the Reaper as it’s a most excellent horror collection.
Born May 6, 1952 — Michael O’Hare.He was best known for playing Commander Jeffrey Sinclair on Babylon 5, a role he left after the first season. Other genre appearances were limited — he played Fuller in the 1984 film C.H.U.D, was Jimmy in the “Heretic” episode of Tales from the Darkside and appeared as a thug on the subway train in The Trial of the Incredible Hulk. And yes he’s one of many Babylon 5 actors who died well before they should’ve. (Died 2012.)
Born May 6, 1961 — Carlos Lauchu, 62. Anubis, the captain of Ra’s personal guard, in the original Stargate film which I watched recently and the Suck Fairy enjoyed the curried popcorn we had while we watched it and said that it was still most excellent. His only other genre acting was Slice in Spy Hard and two appearances in the Monsters anthology series.
Born May 6, 1961 — George Clooney, 62. In From Dusk till Dawn, he was Seth Gecko. His first genre film was Return of the Killer Tomatoes where he was Matt Stevens. Of course, he was Batman in Batman & Robin, a grand mess of a film. Later, he’s Devlin in Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over, and voices the lead role in Fantastic Mr. Fox. He’s Lieutenant Matt Kowalski in Gravity, and in Tomorrowland he’s Frank Walker, an inventor who breaches other dimensions. His last genre film to date is The Midnight Sky, where he races to a crew of astronauts from returning home to a mysterious global catastrophe set in a post-apocalyptic world.
…Silo welcomes us into the mile-deep home of Earth’s last 10,000 inhabitants. Made up of hundreds of levels, the titular silo is an incredible feat of engineering — and of TV production. Like Apple’s 2021 sci-fi series Foundation, Silo is exceptionally polished, boasting everything from lush indoor farms to hulking mining machines. Each of these environments is rendered with an enormous amount of care. The end result is a futuristic world that looks and feels lived-in, right from the moment you lay eyes on it.
Whether through visuals or through dialogue, Silo‘s world-building doesn’t let up. As we learn, no one knows who built the silo, or why. A rebellion from more than a century ago led to the destruction of the silo’s history, so now citizens use retro technology, if they use any at all. Anything from the “before times” is considered a forbidden relic, to be immediately turned over to the frightening judges in Judicial. If you ever try to discover anything about the silo’s origin, you are sent outside. It’s a death sentence, as Earth is now a toxic wasteland… or is it?
Despite Judicial’s orders, there are those in the silo who firmly believe they are being lied to, and wish to uncover the truth. Among them are IT worker Allison (Rashida Jones), her husband Sherriff Holston (David Oyelowo), and mechanic Juliette Nichols (Rebecca Ferguson)….
What was it about the horror genre that drew you to it?
Ok, time to talk about horrible secrets—no just kidding, but in all openness, I was not the horror aficionado that many in the community are (and love them for). I remember in 5th grade feeling triumphant because I forced myself to watch Nightmare on Elm Street and I could finally talk about it with the kids at school. Subsequently, I lived my own version of Nightmare on Elm Street, absolutely terrified by the thought I’d meet Freddy when I fell asleep. I have always had a strong imagination and deep love for stories and could freak myself out without any help.
But I was rather obsessed with ghosts and mysterious supernatural occurrences. Remember Unsolved Mysteries? Oh god, I watched so much of that show. Any mention of a haunting I was there. I went to a little Catholic school for middle school and we had this basement library and it always had plenty of books on what was claimed to be real hauntings. Photos of apparitions and all that…I checked out every single book in that little dank place. And scared myself out of my mind, I might add.
Ultimately, horror chose me and I’m so glad it did.
(12) RIVERDALE SPOILER. A viewer reports that a recent episode of Riverdale “had Jughead discover that the comic book company he was working for had plagiarized stories from his favorite author, Brad Raybury. They had the editor named All Fieldstone saying that they never heard back from the author, so they thought he had passed away. Lots of fun for those who remember the EC comics and how Ray got his credit. And payment.” Comicon confirms in this recap post.
Jughead (Cole Sprouse), however, only has himself to blame if Brad Rayberry (Riverdale‘s answer to Ray Bradbury, played by Christopher Shyer) doesn’t want to be his mentor anymore, because stealing his manuscript? In what universe was that going to be well-received? It was interesting, though, to see Jughead’s reaction to Rayberry suggesting he use his own experiences for story fodder. Jughead has never had any problem cribbing other people’s lives for inspiration but his own? Why, the mere suggestion…
Yuri Herrera can make anything seem more than real. Signs Preceding the End of the World (2015), the first of his novels to appear in English, turns a young Mexican girl’s voyage across the U.S. border into a mythological epic. The Transmigration of Bodies (2016) and Kingdom Cons (2017) mix contemporary Mexican criminal culture with that of medieval European courts. All three books, translated by Lisa Dillman, bend and reinvent language, adding an element of hyperrealism to his writing even on the sentence level. In Ten Planets, Herrera’s first story collection and his first foray into science fiction, he relies on what the narrator of one of his stories calls “the illusion of precision” to make the unreal — or, at least, the unknowable — seem just as oversaturated as the real worlds he writes so uniquely and well.
Before the internet, it would have been hard to imagine that people around the world would one day be unable to get enough of traditional Japanese carpentry, and specifically traditional Japanese joinery. And before Youtube, who could have predicted that videos showing each and every step of a woodworking project — without narration, or indeed explanation of any kind — would find an enthusiastic viewership? At the intersection of these two surprising phenomena stands that channel H Carpenter, whose unadorned, methodical, and detailed portrayals of wooden joint-making have racked up millions upon millions of views….
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Danny SIchel, John A Arkansawyer, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]
A festering dispute over how writers are compensated in the streaming era came to a head Monday night, as leaders of the Writers Guild of America called on their members to stage Hollywood’s first strike in 15 years.
The boards of directors for the East and West Coast divisions of the WGA voted unanimously to call a strike effective 12:01 a.m. Tuesday, the union said in a statement.
Thousands of WGA members were set to walk picket lines across Los Angeles, New York and other cities Tuesday after the union was unable to reach a last-minute accord with the major studios on a new three-year contract to replace one that expired Monday night.
“The companies’ behavior has created a gig economy inside a union workforce, and their immovable stance in this negotiation has betrayed a commitment to further devaluing the profession of writing,” the WGA said in a statement. “No such deal could ever be contemplated by this membership.”
In a statement, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers said it offered “generous increases in compensation for writers as well as improvements in streaming residuals.”
The alliance, which bargains on behalf of the major studios, said it was prepared to improve the offer but was “unwilling to do so because of the magnitude of other proposals still on the table that the Guild continues to insist upon.” The alliance said primary sticking points included the guild’s demands over mandatory staffing levels and duration of employment.
Writers are seeking a larger slice of the streaming pie that has dramatically transformed the television business. They voted by a historic margin in favor — 98% to 2% — to grant a strike authorization sought by their leaders if they couldn’t reach a deal on a new film and TV contract on behalf of 11,500 members.
The walkout, which could last for weeks or months, is expected to halt much of TV and film production nationwide and reverberate across Southern California, where prop houses, caterers, florists and others heavily depend on the entertainment economy. The previous writers strike in 2007 roiled the industry and lasted 100 days….
(2) IT’S ON. WGA member Craig Miller has a lot of experience with strikes over the decades, which he shares on Facebook before making predictions about the latest one.
At a WGA Board of Directors Meeting in 1988, my membership (among a group of others) was approved by the Board. At that same meeting, the Board voted to go out on strike. “Congratulations! You’re now a member. Grab a sign!”
Despite being a new member, I soon found myself a Strike Team Captain, coordinating a group of members on when and where they’d been assigned to picket, making sure they were informed of any status changes in the strike and negotiations, etc. This because Larry DiTillio and other animation writer friends had already been members and themselves were involved in “working” the strike. I still have the “Band of Brothers – Henry V” medal given out by our then-Executive Director Brian Walton to many of us involved with that strike….
(3) LITERARY AUTOPSY. Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki introduced this article on Facebook with the comment, “I really really wanted to dislike this piece. With the name. I honestly tried. But by the end of it, there’s almost not one thing that I can definitely disagree with, without reaching enough, to be completely dishonest.” “The Death Of Nigerian Literature” by Oris Aigbokhaevbolo at Efiko Magazine.
…As it was once, so it is again: Any young Nigerian stubborn, foolish, and blind enough to insist on writing as a career must go it on her own, with neither a national guide nor an international map—so that you could say that to be a Nigerian writer today is to live a peculiar loneliness. But that’s not the whole truth. Nigerian writers are very much united—in spirit—because whether based outside of the country or inside of it, the Nigerian writer is not heavily involved in the production of literary writing anymore. To be a Nigerian writer these days is not to be a writer at all. To be a Nigerian writer is to be a teacher abroad, a tech employee, a “comms” consultant, a social media handler. Although a meeting was never held, we agree that there are more important things to do, to be, and, to become….
(4) WHEN THREE FEET IS NOT A YARD. Bradford, a city that has had two UK Eastercons, annually holds the Bradford Literature Festival. They used AI art for their promotional material and it’s caused a bit of upset. Twitter user Emmaillustrate noted the 3 feet in one image….
“BLF appreciates that AI is a very fast moving and contentious subject right now for all creatives. Our creative agency, Lazenby Brown, used AI for early source images which their illustrator then augmented to create our beautiful new artwork. We believe that these images fully reflect our inclusive ethos, our city and its people. We choose to work directly with illustrators, and a huge range of creative individuals from across the globe, to share, amplify and develop creative discussion and inclusion.”
(5) FUTURE TENSE.“Escape Worlds”, about video games, uncanny personalized media, and the futility of escape, by K Chess, author of the fantastic novel Famous Men Who Never Lived, is the April 2023 entry in the monthly series of short stories from Future Tense and Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination about how technology and science will change our lives.
It was published along with a response essay “How designers personalize video games” by video game designer Liz Fiacco, who has worked on games including The Last of Us: Part II and Kena: Bridge of Spirits.
It changed my life. These are the words that every working artist, no matter the medium, wants to hear at some point. Everyone has at least one piece of art—a formative album, a deeply felt novel, a visit to grand architecture, a powerful movie—that strikes them at the right time, in the right way, so that the impact lasts forever.
While a novelist or film crew have to do their best to make a story that is personal and honest and hope that it is relatable, game designers have the opportunity to co-author an experience with the players. This opportunity for participation is what drew me into the craft. A game can mold itself to make moments strikingly personal, unique, and, yes, life-changing. There’s less reliance on happenstance that the right person will meet your game at the right time; as a game developer, I have tools to reach out and meet each player where they are….
Science fiction is more demanding than many other genres of fiction. Its fantastical technology, esoteric settings, and non-human creatures all require special effects to produce. Science fiction media has higher budget requirements even before factoring in cast members, props, and more.
This is especially true of television, which has to create more material than a film with less budget. Some of sci-fi’s most beloved properties can be found on television despite the inherent challenges. Many television shows do admirable work with their budget and create realistic special effects. In other cases, the effects are a weak point despite the show’s quality….
At number nine on his list is —
Doctor Who
Plenty of beloved sci-fi shows are decades old. This naturally limits their special effects, with CGI coming on leaps and bounds in recent years. Nonetheless, many shows look good, particularly for their time, through heavy use of practical effects over computer-generated ones. Doctor Who‘s effects, however, have always been inconsistent.
Classic Doctor Who monsters range from the iconic and intimidating design of the Daleks to obvious props spray-painted a strange color. Even the modern version isn’t safe. The early seasons of Doctor Who‘s reboot are infamous for their cheesy and unrealistic monsters. This doesn’t detract from the show’s strong writing in either era, however.
(7) MEMORY LANE.
2018 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Peter Watts is one of those authors that I’ve enjoyed immensely whenever I’ve encountered his fiction which was fairly often. He started his long career almost a quarter of a century ago with his Starfish novel. It generated two sequels, Maelstrom, βehemoth: β-Max (and βehemoth: Seppuku). The latter are actually one novel that the publisher split into two works.
Really mild spoiler here. I say only because it’s not revealed in the Beginning.
The Freeze-Frame Revolution is one of the novels in the Sunflower series which concerns the voyage of a jumpgate-building ship named Eriophora.
End really mild spoiler.
It was published by Tachyon Publishing in 2018. It was nominated for a John W. Campbell Memorial Award.
And now for a most interesting Beginning….
BACK WHEN WE FIRST SHIPPED OUT I played this game with myself. Every time I thawed, I’d tally up the length of our journey so far; then check to see when we’d be if Eriophora were a time machine, if we’d been moving back through history instead of out through the cosmos. Oh look: all the way back to the Industrial Revolution in the time it took us to reach our first build. Two builds took us to the Golden Age of Islam, seven to the Shang Dynasty.
I guess it was my way of trying to keep some kind of connection, to measure this most immortal of endeavors on a scale that meat could feel in the gut. It didn’t work out, though. Did exactly the opposite in fact, ended up rubbing my nose in the sheer absurd hubris of even trying to contain the Diaspora within the pitiful limits of earthbound history.
For starters, the Chimp didn’t thaw anyone out until the seventh gate, almost six thousand years into the mission; I slept through almost all of human civilization, didn’t even wake up until the fall of the Minoans. I think Kai may have been on deck for the Pyramid of Cheops, but by the time Chimp called me back from the crypt we were all the way into the last Ice Age. After that we were passing through the Paleolithic: five thousand gates built—only three hundred requiring meat on deck—and we’d barely finished our first circuit of the Milky Way.
I gave up after Australopithecus. It had been a stupid game, a child’s game, doomed from the start. We were just cavemen. Only the mission was transcendent.
I don’t know exactly what moved me to pick up that kiddie pastime again. I’d learned my lesson the first time around, and space itself has only grown vaster in the meantime. But I gave it another shot, after everything went south: called up the clocks, subtracted the centuries. We’ve been around the disk thirty-two times now, left over a hundred thousand gates in our wake. We’ve scoured so many raw materials that God, looking down from overhead, could probably trace out our path by the jagged spiral of tiny bubbles sucked clean of ice and gravel.
Sixty-six million years, by the old calendar. That’s how long we’ve been on the road. All the way back to the end of the Cretaceous.
Give or take a few millennia, the revolution happened on the day one of Eriophora’s pint-sized siblings punched Earth in the face and wiped out the dinosaurs. I don’t know why, but I find that kind of funny.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born May 2, 1921 — Satyajit Ray. His Professor Trilokeshwar Shonku stories , throughly throughly Hindi, are based on a character created by Arthur Conan Doyle, Professor Challenger. You can find most of his fiction translated into English in Exploits of Professor Shonku: The Diary of a Space Traveller and Other Stories (Satyajit Ray and Gopa Majumdar). (Died 1992.)
Born May 2, 1924 — Theodore Bikel. He was on Next Generation playing the foster parent to Worf in the “Family” episode playing CPO Sergey Rozhenko, retired. That and playing Lenonn in Babylon 5: In the Beginning are the roles I want to note. Bikel also guest-appeared on The Twilight Zone in “Four O’Clock” as Oliver Crangle. Well there is one minor other role he did — he voiced Aragorn in the animated The Return of the King. By the way, Theodore Bikel’s Treasury of Yiddish Folk & Theatre Songs is quite excellent. (Died 2015.)
Born May 2, 1925 — John Neville. I’ve mentioned before that Kage considered Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen to be one of her favorite films and John Neville was one of the reasons that she did so. You can read her review here. Among his other genre roles, Neville had a prominent recurring role in The X-Files as The Well Manicured Man. And he showed up playing Sir Isaac Newton on The Next Generation in the “Descent” episode. (Died 2011.)
Born May 2, 1938 — Bob Null. Very long-time LASFS member who was the club’s VP for an equally long period. Fancyclopedia3 say that “He also sat on the Board of Directors, and frequently handled logistics for local conventions including both Loscon and local Worldcons, and was always one of those nearly invisible hard-working people who make fandom work. He is a Patron Saint of LASFS.” (Died 2010.)
Born May 2, 1942 — Alexis Kanner. His first genre appearance was on The Prisoner where he so impressed McGoohan in the “Living in Harmony” episode that he created a specific role for him in the series finale, “Fall Out” where he stands trial. He also has an uncredited role in “The Girl Who Was Death” in that series. His final known acting role was as Sor in Nightfall based off the Asimov story of the same name. (Died 2003.)
Born May 2, 1946 — David Suchet, 77. Rather obviously better remembered as Hercule Poirot, and I’d be remiss not to note all twelve series and specials are available on the BritBox streaming service. Yes, it’s on my list on things to watch. Now, he does show up on in a Twelfth Doctor story, “Knock Knock,” simply called Landlord. Don’t let don’t deceive you as he has a major role there. He’s appeared in some other genre work from time times to time including Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, Harry and the Hendersons, Dr. No: The Radio Play, Wing Commander, Tales of the Unexpected and Peter Pan Goes Wrong.
Born May 2, 1946 — Leslie S. Klinger, 77. He is a noted literary editor and annotator of classic genre fiction. He is the editor of The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, a three-volume edition of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes fiction with extensive annotations, and an introduction by John le Carré. I’d also like to single out him for his The Annotated Sandman, Vol. 1, The New Annotated Frankenstein and The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft.
(10) DINNER THEATRE. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] At Vulture, a collection of writers describe how they would fillet, stuff, sauté, roast, skewer, or otherwise prepare for your dining pleasure the supporting cast of Disney’s new, live action, The Little Mermaid. Mind you, these are primarily CGI characters. Primarily, but not completely. “How to Prepare and Eat The Little Mermaid Cast”. [Editorial note: Some kind of trigger warning may be called for here.]
Flounder.
In the interest of preserving as much of Flounder’s character and dignity as possible, my recommendation here is to prepare and serve him whole. It’s important to capture the essential qualities of each ingredient, and the essential quality here is “CGI fish with a face designed to communicate a bare minimum of human expression,” so be careful to keep the whole head on during the cooking process. Beyond that, you have a few possible routes: Score the skin and broil him if you’re more focused on a crispy flounder skin, but stuff and roast him if you’re more excited about tender flounder flesh. I’m personally into the roasting model, and my preference would be to stuff Flounder’s insides with lemon, garlic, and as many fresh herbs as you can cram in there — dill is classic, but any combination you like will work — then roast him on a baking sheet. If you wanted to get very fancy, though, you could throw some Sebastian in there for a double-seafood treat! —Kathryn VanArendonk
(11) JEOPARDY! [Item by David Goldfarb.] You wouldn’t think there’d be much SFF content in a “Nonfiction” category, but at the $1200 level (the middle, this being Double Jeopardy):
Nonfiction, 1200: In Jo Walton’s novel “The Just City”, Athene creates a community based on this Plato work of philosophy
Nobody was able to guess “The Republic”.
I’m pretty sure that this is the first time a book I beta-read has been mentioned on the show.
(12) AVOIDING MARTIAN POTHOLES. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] The Mars rover Curiosity has been in operation for about eleven and a half years, but that doesn’t mean it can’t learn a little something from a younger sibling. Perseverance, which is only a little over five years into its mission, has more modern obstacle avoidance/navigation software. Lessons from this have been incorporated into the latest software update for Curiosity. “How A Software Update Could Help The Curiosity Rover Travel Across Mars Faster” at SlashGear.
As advanced as the robotic rovers which explore Mars are, one thing that might surprise you is how slowly they travel. The NASA Curiosity rover, for example, has a top speed of less than 0.1 mph, far less than the typical human walking speed of 3 mph. Even though it could theoretically travel more than one hundred meters in a day, it typically travels just a few hundred meters per month.
That’s because the drivers who control the rover are very careful with it, avoiding any hazards which could potentially damage the rover — being especially aware of potential harm to its wheels, which are already damaged from its 11 years of travel across the Red planet. They need to avoid obstacles like large boulders and potential dangers like sharp rocks named gator backs for their rough surfaces, while still visiting sites of interest like climbing up the steep slopes of Mount Sharp, also known as Aeolis Mons, a mountain located within the crater whose layers represent millions of years of deposits….
[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Joey Eschrich, You Didn’t Get This From Me, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Patrick Morris Miller.]
(1) CLARKESWORLD UNCOVERED. Neil Clarke told Facebook readers about an exasperating discovery that they had violated their no-AI policy, and what he was going to do about it.
Much to our embarrassment, evidence suggesting that our most recent cover was generated art rather than the artist’s own work has surfaced. We have removed the cover from our site while we make a final assessment. Our contracts include a clause where the artist verifies that the work is entirely their own, created by them, and without the assistance of AI tools. They signed this contract.
We apologize for this mess and stand firmly on our no-AI policy. We will learn from this and do better.
In the event that we determine the work is generated, it will be replaced. In the meantime:
7. Once the Hugo finalists have been announced, there will be people who have opinions about the ballot. Most will be positive or at least fair – I always try to be fair in my own Hugo and Nebula finalist commentaries, even if I don’t care for some of the finalists – but some will be not. There are always people who think that your category or the entire ballot is too male, not male enough, too white, not white enough, too queer, not queer enough, too American, not American enough, too bestselling, not bestselling enough – you get the idea. There will be people who complain that only people no one knows got nominated or that only the usual suspects got nominated – and multiple bestsellers and Hugo winners can be “people no one knows”, while first or second time finalists can be “the usual suspects”. Some of these people won’t even wait 24 hours after the Hugo finalists have been announced to air their opinions – at least they didn’t in 2021. Some will even tag you, just to make sure you don’t miss their very important opinions. The best thing to do is ignore those people.
(3) CELEBRITY IMPERSONATORS. Alina Adams’ guest post for Writer Beware is about “The Book Marketing Scam That Went the Extra Mile”. The scammers she dealt with didn’t merely gin up fake client endorsements from Joe Blow – they faked one from Piranesi author Susanna Clarke!
…My research did turn up a NYT feature article on Martha. But when I reached out to the author who wrote it, she told me: “I’ve never even heard of [them]. You’re absolutely right — coverage in the Times cannot be bought, and everything must be approved by an editor.”
When confronted with this fact, my friendly neighborhood scam artist got a little testy:
“We directly worked with Martha T. You should confirm from her. Yes we sent the order for an article for Martha to be published in that.”
Likely sensing that I was wriggling off the hook, they sent me the contact info of another author they claim to have worked with, Susanna Clarke. She’s even featured on their website, with a testimonial that reads like it was created by a self-published author rather than a writer with a Big 5 publisher whose debut novel sold 4 million copies…
(4) WHO’D HAVE GUESSED? Alva Rogers’ cover art (ink on paper) for The Acolyte #9, the Winter 1945 issue of Francis T. Laney’s fanzine (yes, that Laney), has sold at auction for $25,000.
This cover for the pioneering Lovecraft-related science fiction/fantasy fanzine features one of the most striking, early renditions of the author’s most famous creation.
Mike Ward comments, “Yeah, this is the Alva Rogers we used to hang out with. He was a good guy, long gone. Those were some great days.
“That’s probably about 2500 times more than Alva ever got for a drawing. His best-known work is probably the historical volume A Requiem for Astounding from Advent:Publishers.”
(5) MEMORY LANE.
2001 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Jack Williamson’s a genius. He truly is. Living not quite a century, he was an amazing writer selling his first story to Gernsback at age twenty. That story, “The Metal Man” would be published in the December 1928 issue of Amazing. His career would then last another ninety years. He published a novel, The Stonehenge Gate, just a year before he died at home.
I’ll get to our Beginning in a minute but first let me note what I like among his works. First of course is the Legion of Space series which is well-worth reading, and there is the Starchild trilogy written with Frederik Pohl. Darker Than You Think is weird and really fun. I love his short stories but I’m really unsure which collection to recommend, so do recommend which ones you think are essential reading.
Our Beginning is from Terraforming Earth, published by Tor twenty-two years ago, and won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. It had started out as several novellas that became a fix-up novel, the first being “Agents of the Moon” in Science Fiction Age, their March 2000 issue which is the image below. The second, “The Ultimate Earth”, was published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact in the December 2000 issue.
Our Beginning starts here…
Terraforming Earth
We are clones. A hundred years have passed since the great impact. All our natural parents lay in the cemetery on the rubble slope outside the crater rim long before the robots brought our frozen cells to life in the maternity lab. I remember the day my Robo father brought the five of us up to see the Earth, a hazy red-spattered ball in the black Moon sky. “It looks—looks sick.” Looking sick herself, Dian raised her face to his. “Is it bleeding?”
“Bleeding red-hot lava all over the land,” he told her. “The rivers all bleeding iron-red rain into the seas.”
“Dead.” Arne made a face. “It looks dead.”
“The impact killed it.” His plastic head nodded. “You were born to bring it back to life.”
“Just us kids?” “
“You’ll grow up.”
“Not me,” Arne muttered. “Do I have to grow up?”
“So what do you want?” Tanya grinned at him. “To stay a snot-nosed kid forever?”
“Please.” My Robo father shrugged in the stiff way robots have, and his lenses swept all five of us, standing around him in the dome. “Your mission is to replant life on Earth. The job may take a lot of time, but you’ll be born and born again till you get it done.”
(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born May 1, 1905 — Edna Mayne Hull. Wife of A.E. van Vogt. And yes, she too wrote genre fiction. Her initial sale, “The Flight That Failed”, appeared in the November 1942 issue of Astounding Science Fiction underchosen author credit of “E.M. Hull” though eventually she used her own name. She has but one novel of her own, Planets for Sale, and one with her husband, The Winged Man, and only a dozen stories, one with A.E. Van Vogt & James H. Schmitz. I’m not find that her novels are available at the usual suspects. (Died 1975.)
Born May 1, 1924 — Terry Southern. Screenwriter and author of greatest interest for the screenplay from Peter George’s original novel, Two Hours to Doom (as by Peter Bryant) of Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb directed (and in part written) by Stanley Kubrick. He was also involved in scripting Barbarella. (Died 1995.)
Born May 1, 1952 — Andrew Sawyer, 71. Member of fandom who managed the Science Fiction Foundation library in Liverpool for 25 years. For his work and commitment to the SF community, the Science Fiction Research Association awarded him their Thomas D. Clareson Award for Distinguished Service. The paper he wrote that I want to get and read is “The Shadows out of Time: H. P. Lovecraftian Echoes in Babylon 5” as I’ve always thought The Shadows were Lovecraftian! And his fanpublication list is impressive, editing some or all issues of &, Another Earth Matrix, Paperback Inferno and Acnestis.
Born May 1, 1955 — J. R. Pournelle, 68. Some years ago, I got an email from a J. R. Pournelle about an SF novel they wanted Green Man to review. I of course thought it was that Pournelle. No, it was his daughter, Jennifer. And that’s how I came to find out there was a third Motie novel called Outies. It’s much better than The Gripping Hand.
Born May 1, 1956 — Phil Foglio, 67. Writer, artist, and publisher. Twice winner of the Best Fan Artist Hugo. Foglio co-won with his wife Kaja the first Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story at Anticipation for the absolutely stunning Girl Genius, Volume 8: Agatha Heterodyne and the Chapel of Bones, and the next two in the category at Aussiecon 4 and Renovation. If you haven’t read them, you’re in for treat as they’re quite amazing.
La Cucaracha pays a unique tribute to the late Al Jaffee.
(8) TARGETED BOOKS. PEN America has released their annual report on books that were challenged or banned in school libraries. The report covers the 2021-2022 school year. Some of the books are works of genre interest, including Neil Gaiman’s American Gods and The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander, and Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House. “2023 Banned Books Update: Banned in the USA”.
The 2022-23 school year has been marked to date by an escalation of book bans and censorship in classrooms and school libraries across the United States. PEN America recorded more book bans during the fall 2022 semester than in each of the prior two semesters. This school year also saw the effects of new state laws that censor ideas and materials in public schools, an extension of the book banning movement initiated in 2021 by local citizens and advocacy groups. Broad efforts to label certain books “harmful” and “explicit” are expanding the type of content suppressed in schools.
Again, and again, the movement to ban books is driven by a vocal minority demanding censorship. At the same time, a 2022 poll found that over 70% of parents oppose book banning. Yet the bans continue. Many public school districts find themselves in a bind. They face threats and political pressure, along with parental fears and anxieties surrounding the books on their school shelves. School Boards, administrators, teachers, and librarians are told in some cases to “err on the side of caution” in the books they make available. Too often, they do just that….
(9) CREATING WITH AI. For those using AI as a tool, Francis Hamit recommends The Copyright Society’s video “Exploring the Impact on Copyrightability When Creating New Works Through AI”. “This webinar is an hour long but well worth watching for anyone who is concerned about the copyrightability of artificial intelligence assisted creative work.”
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Lise Andreasen, Mike Ward, Francis Hamit, Nina Shepardson, Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day John A Arkansawyer.]
By Mark Roth-Whitworth: I mentioned on File 770 last week that I’d just signed a contract for two novels. One of the things that I was asking for was to have them insert on the disclaimer page (you know, “This is a work of fiction…”) a statement like “This work may not be used to train generative AI” (chatbots, that is). Their lawyer said no, and after thinking about it, I decided that this needed a much broader solution. So I just sent this email to my Rep and both Senators, and it’s my part of the answer to chatbots and copyrights.
Hon. [Rep.|Sen]
I was negotiating a literary contract for two novels with a publisher last week, and the issue of AI training came up. I had been asking for them to print, on the disclaimer page, that the work could not be used for such training. Their lawyer tells them that they could not police large companies training generative AIs – chatbots – and so only put it in the contract that they would not.
The training of chatbots is a huge issue for artists, writers, and others, as much is done by simply scraping the Web, ignoring copyright notices. I believe that we can begin to address this issue by what I am requesting: you introduce as a bill to modify existing copyright law. My draft, and I am certainly not a lawyer, would be the following:
“Works in copyright may not be used to train generative AIs without explicit permission from the copyright owner.”
The impact of this would be that the corporations running and training them would be required to search whatever data they are using for copyright information, before they use it for the training. Further, should there be any question of copyright violation in this manner, if the chatbot is capable of printing out explicit copies of the work in question, it would be a prima facie case of violation. That would make it possible for creators to sue without being millionaires.
Thank you for your attention. I look forward to your response.
(1) BOTS LOVE FILE 770. The Washington Post invited readers to “See the websites that make AI bots like ChatGPT sound so smart”. They analyzed one of the large data sets that may be used in training AI, and also have made it publicly searchable. Their stats show File 770 is a leading contributor to the cause of educating AI, ranked 3,445th. Uh, yay?
…Tech companies have grown secretive about what they feed the AI. So The Washington Post set out to analyze one of these data sets to fully reveal the types of proprietary, personal, and often offensive websites that go into an AI’s training data.
To look inside this black box, we analyzed Google’s C4 data set, a massive snapshot of the contents of 15 million websites that have been used to instruct some high-profile English-language AIs, called large language models, including Google’s T5 and Facebook’s LLaMA. (OpenAI does not disclose what datasets it uses to train the models backing its popular chatbot, ChatGPT)…
Is your website training AI?
A web crawl may sound like a copy of the entire internet, but it’s just a snapshot, capturing content from a sampling of webpages at a particular moment in time. C4 began as a scrape performed in April 2019by the nonprofit CommonCrawl, a popular resource for AI models. CommonCrawl told The Post that it tries to prioritize the most important and reputable sites, but does not try to avoid licensed or copyrighted content….
We then ranked the remaining 10 million websites based on how many “tokens” appeared from each in the data set. Tokens are small bits of text used to process disorganized information — typically a word or phrase.
As shown in the rather scrofulous screencap below, file770.com is ranked 3,445th with 2.5 million tokens, which is 0.002% of the tokens in the set examined by the Washington Post.
(2) HUGO VOTING DEADLINE APPROACHES. 2023 Hugo nominations are closing on April 30, at 23:59 Hawaiian Time. Eligible voters can access the ballot here.
… One of the 663 authors and counting who signed an open letter to Scholastic’s Education Solutions Division is author Kelly Yang. She is one of many best-selling Scholastic authors horrified by this response to accelerating fascism. In a vulnerable video, Yang shared her thoughts about these actions. She also broke down what it feels like to be targeted by this censorship and bigotry. Sometimes, in person….
However, Yang correctly insists that they have to push past this. She says in the video:
“As one of your top authors, I’m asking you to have more courage. You cannot be quietly self-censoring. Whatever pressure you may be facing, know that your authors are facing even more pressure. And we’re still out here writing these books. Risking our lives. Bleeding to make you millions. Trying to write the books for the next generation that will hopefully improve the world.”
She continued discussing the importance of representation and capturing the moment children live in.
“Let me tell you, it’s not easy. I am not a giant corporation. I am an individual. Every day people attack me personally. They write me emails, they come into my comments and my DMs. I had a guy show up at an event and whisper in my ear how much he loves seeing my books get banned. And yet, everyday I keep going. You know why? Because I am brave.
“Despite getting paid pennies on the dollar, we authors are brave. The librarians—they are brave. The educators—they are brave. I need you to be braver.
“You cannot choose which books to include in your Fairs and Clubs for kids nationwide and edit lines out because you’re scared of DeSantis. If you want to carry Maggie’s book, you gotta carry all of her book. If you want to carry Kelly Yang, you’ve gotta carry all of Kelly Yang—not some stripped-down version.
“I need you to not cave to political pressure and be on the right side of history. Because it’s the right thing to do. Because you can afford it with your 90% market share of the school distribution channel. If you’re going to be deciding children’s book for the entire nation, your taste have to reflect the entire nation. And because I know it’s what Dick Robinson would have wanted.
“I love you Scholastic. You’ve done a lot of good for a lot of kids, but how you play you next move will determine how you’re remembered. The world is watching. I am watching. I hope you do the right thing.”
(4) NOT JUST ANY USED BOOKS. Plenty of sff among AbeBooks “Most expensive sales from January to March 2023”. Two Harry Potter books lead the list, with the biggest sale being a copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone for $85,620. Further down is a PKD first edition.
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick – $17,195
A true first edition with an unrestored original dust jacket
One of the most famous novels by Philip K. Dick, this book was the basis for the movie Blade Runner. This copy of a true first edition is special because of the condition of the book and the dust jacket and its vibrant, unfaded colors.
The novel is about a bounty hunter who tracks tracks down escaped androids in a post-apocalyptic future. This book belongs to our list of 50 must-read science fiction books.
Recently, another copy of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep was sold. That book came with an original letter, typed and signed by the author, along with a humorous self-review of another of his own novels, The Divine Invasion.
Over on Facebook, someone in the group devoted to Capclave — a con where I’ve harvested many conversations for you — mentioned Thomas was scheduled to speak at Maryland’s Rockville Memorial Library. When I checked the details and saw the venue was only a 90-minute drive away, I reached out to see whether she’d have time in her schedule to grab lunch — and luckily she did. So early the same day as her presentation titled “Afrofuturism & Diversity in Sci-Fi,” I scooped her up from her hotel and took her over to Commonwealth Indian Restaurant, where I’ve had many wonderful meals. Here’s how the event organizers described Thomas and her career —
New York Times bestselling, two-time World Fantasy Award-winning author and editor Sheree Renée Thomas has been a 2022 Hugo Award Finalist, and her collection, Nine Bar Blues, is a Locus, Igynte, and World Fantasy Finalist. She edited the groundbreaking Dark Matter anthologies that introduced a century of Black speculative fiction, including W.E.B. Du Bois’s science fiction stories. Thomas wrote Marvel’s Black Panther: Panther’s Rage novel (October 2022), adapted from the legendary comics, collaborated with Janelle Monáe on The Memory Librarian, and is the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, founded in 1949 and Obsidian, founded in 1975. In 2022 she co-curated Carnegie Hall’s historic, citywide Afrofuturism Festival.
We discussed how to prevent being an editor interfere with being a writer (and vice versa), the way a serendipitous encounter with Octavia Butler’s Kindred caused her to take her own writing more seriously and a copy of Black Enterprise magazine spurred her to move to New York, how her family’s relationship with Isaac Hayes nourished her creative dreams, the advice she gives young writers about the difference between the fantasy and reality of a writer’s life, how realizing the books she thought were out there weren’t launched her editing career, the rewards and challenges of taking over as editor for a 75-year old magazine, why she reads cover letters last, and much more.
Some guy is currently suing Tolkien and Amazon to the tune of $250 million. That alone takes serious bravery. But what’s notable about this lawsuit is the reason he’s suing: Copyright infringement over his Lord of the Rings fanfic. Specifically, he’s arguing that Amazon lifted elements of his fan-fiction for its own Tolkien adaptation TV series, The Rings of Power.
Demetrious Polychron wrote a book, a work of fan-fiction set in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, called The Fellowship of the King, which he copyrighted in 2017 and which later were published and made available for sale, including on Amazon. According to PC Gamer, Polychron sent a letter to the Tolkien Estate asking for a manuscript review. That’s right: This man asked J.R.R. Tolkien’s grandson Simon to sign off on his fanfic. Unsurprisingly, he did not get a response.
In September of 2022, the month that Polychron published The Fellowship of the King, Amazon also began airing its extremely expensive Lord of the Rings spin-off series, The Rings of Power. …Now, Polychron is arguing that the Amazon TV show lifts elements from his novel.
According to RadarOnline, which has seen documents pertaining to the suit, Polychron alleges that characters and storylines he created for his book “compose as much as one-half of the 8-episode series,” and that in some cases the show “copied exact language” from his book. [Also, “In other instances, Defendants copied images that match the book cover and descriptions as created in the book as authored by Polychron,” the suit read.]
However, the claims seem spurious. For instance, the lawsuit purportedly points to the fact that both his book and the show feature a hobbit named Elanor, with the Elanor in his book being the daughter of Samwise Gamgee, while the Elanor featured in The Rings of Power is a Harfoot. Images purporting to be the lawsuit circulating online include a host of other circumstantial connections or similarities to back up Polychron’s argument that the writers of Rings of Power lifted ideas from his fanfic for their own story.
… While no one believes that Polychron will win against the Tolkien Estate, there are concerns that the lawsuit might negatively impact the legality of fanworks in general. Hopefully, fanfic writers will be fine as long as they’re not trying to extort Tolkien’s grandson.
(6) MEMORY LANE.
2015 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
So let’s have a conversation about Elizabeth Hand’s Wylding Hall which was published by PS Publishing eight years ago.
There’s some spoilers here so skip to the Beginning if you’d rather not hear them.
A British folk band are told by their manager to record their new album, so they hole up at Wylding Hall, an ancient country house with let us say an interesting past. There they hope to create the album that will make their reputation.
The novel, a short one at that, is told entirely in a series of interviews decades later by the surviving musicians, along with their friends, lovers and the band’s manager by a documentary filmmaker who gets them to talk about something that happened when they were there. (No, I’m not going to say what happened.) Should they be believed? Maybe, maybe not. What is the truth after all those years have passed anyways?
I think it’s a brilliant way to approach this story.
I’ll say no more and direct you now to the Beginning…
“I was the one who found the house. A friend of my sister-in-law knew the owners; they were living in Barcelona that summer and the place was to let. Not cheaply, either. But I knew how badly everyone needed to get away after the whole horrible situation with Arianna, and this seemed as good a bolt-hole as any. These days the new owners have had to put up a fence to keep away the curious. Everyone knows what the place looks like because of the album cover, and now you can just Google the name and get directions down to the last millimeter.
But back then, Wylding Hall was a mere dot on the ordnance survey map. You couldn’t have found it with a compass. Most people go there now because of what happened while the band was living there and recording that first album. We have some ideas about what actually went on, of course, but the fans, they can only speculate. Which is always good for business.
Mostly, it’s the music, of course. Twenty years ago, there was that millennium survey where Wylding Hall topped out at Number Seven, ahead of Definitely Maybe, which shocked everybody except for me. Then “Oaken Ashes” got used in that advert for, what was it? Some mobile company. So now there’s the great Windhollow Faire backlash.
And inexplicable—even better, inexplicable and terrible—things are always good for the music business, right? Cynical but true.
“Apart from when I drove out in the mobile unit and we laid down those rough tracks, I was only there a few times. You know, check in and see how the rehearsal process was going, make sure everyone’s instruments were in one piece, and they were getting their vitamins. And there’s no point now in keeping anything off the record, right? We all knew what was going on down there, which in those days was mostly hash and acid.
And of course, everyone was so young. Julian was eighteen. So was Will. Ashton and Jon were, what? Nineteen, maybe twenty. Lesley had just turned seventeen. I was the elder statesman at all of twenty-three.
“Ah, those were golden days. You’re going to say I’m tearing up here in front of the camera, aren’t you? I don’t give a fuck. They were golden boys and girls, that was a golden summer, and we had the Summer King.
And we all know what happens to the Summer King. That girl from the album cover, she’d be the only one knows what really went on. But we can’t ask her, can we?
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born April 21, 1933 — Jim Harmon. During the Fifties and Sixties, he wrote more than fifty short stories and novelettes for Amazing Stories, Future Science Fiction, Galaxy Science Fiction, If, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and other magazines. Most of his fiction was collected in Harmon’s Galaxy. EoSF says he has one genre novel, The Contested Earth, whereas ISFDB lists two more, Sex Burns Like Fire and The Man Who Made Maniacs. He’s a member of First Fandom Hall of Fame. (Died 2010.)
Born April 21, 1939 — John Bangsund. Australian fan most active from the Sixties through the Eighties. He was instrumental with Andrew Porter in Australia’s winning the 1975 Aussiecon bid, and he was Toastmaster at the Hugo Award ceremony at that con. His fanzine, Australian Science Fiction Review is credited with reviving Australian Fandom in the Sixties. And he’s the instigator of the term Muphry’s law which states that “If you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written.” (Died 2020.)
Born April 21, 1947 — Iggy Pop, 76. Here solely as on Deep Space Nine in an episode loosely upon The Magnificent Seven film that was entitled “The Magnificent Ferengi”, he played a vorta called Yelgrun.
Born April 21, 1947 — Allan Asherman, 76. Official historian for D.C., he’s also written scripts for Tarzan during the Gooden Age. A Trekker of note, he wrote The Star Trek Compendium, The Star Trek Interview Bookand The Making of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
Born April 21, 1954 — James Morrison, 69. Lt. Col. Tyrus Cassius ‘T.C.’ McQueen on the short-lived but much loved Space: Above and Beyond series. Starship Troopers without the politics. He’s got a lot of one-off genre appearances including recently showing up as an Air Force General in Captain Marvel, guesting on the Orville series and being Warden Dwight Murphy on Twin Peaks.
Born April 21, 1965 — Fiona Kelleghan, 58. Author of the critical anthology The Savage Humanists in which she identifies a secular, satiric literary movement within the genre. She also did Mike Resnick: An Annotated Bibliography and Guide to His Work. A work in still progress, according to the Wikipedia, is Alfred Bester, Grand Master: An Annotated Bibliography.
Born April 21, 1971 — Michael Turner. Comics artist known for his work on a Tombraider / Witchblade one-off, the Superman/Batman story involving Supergirl, his own Soulfire, and various covers for DC Comics and Marvel Comics. He would die of bone cancer and A Tribute to Michael Turner with writings from people who knew him would feature a cover done by Alex Ross would be released to cover his medical expenses. (Died 2008.)
Born April 21, 1980 — Hadley Fraser, 43. His first video acting role was as Gareth in the superb Tenth Doctor story, “Army of Ghosts”. He’d later be Chris in The Lost Tribe, a horror film, and play Viscount Raoul de Chagny in The Phantom of The Opera, as well as being being Tarzan’s father in The Legend of Tarzan. And though not even genre adjacent, I’m legally obligated to point out that he showed up as a British military escort in the recent production of Murder on the Orient Express.
(9) MISSY RETURNS IN TITAN COMICS’ DOCTOR WHO: DOOM’S DAY. Titan comics will launch a two-issue Doctor Who comic series on July 5 as part of the multi-platform story Doom’s Day. The comic will feature fan-favorite character Missy on the trail of new character Doom, who makes her comic book debut.
Doom’s Day is a standalone transmedia series across multiple platforms and will allow Doctor Who fans to follow Doom, the Universe’s greatest assassin, as she travels through all of time and space in pursuit of the Doctor to save her from her ever-approaching Death. She only has 24 hours and a vortex manipulator to save herself before her fate is sealed forever.
Available in comic stores and on digital devices at release, Titan’s Doctor Who: Doom’s Day #1 comic is an adventure starring Doom in her comic book debut – using her vortex manipulator, she’ll do anything to find the tempestuous time traveller, the Doctor, including cavorting with the maleficent MISSY. Every hour a new adventure, every hour closer to death…
Doctor Who: Doom’s Day #1 is written by Eisner-nominated Jody Houser (Stranger Things, Star Wars,Spider-Man) with art by Roberta Ingranata (Witchblade). The comic debuts with two covers for fans to collect: from celebrated artist Pasquale Qualano, and a photo cover variant.
Doctor Who: Doom’s Day #1 ($3.99) is now available to pre-order globally from May’s Diamond Previews catalogue, ForbiddenPlanet.com and on digital device via Comixology.
…. The first Star Trek trading cards were produced 1967, released one year after the series debuted. These were manufactured and distributed by Leaf Brands Division, WR Grace & Co of Chicago. This was a limited-scale run with sources saying it had a small geographical distribution within the Ohio and Illinois areas. The trading cards didn’t get too far before there were controversies on whether Leaf had licenses to distribute Star Trek cards in the first place. As soon as the licensing problems came to light, all cards that hadn’t been distributed were destroyed and all others were recalled if they had not been sold yet. In the set, there were 72 base cards. They had black and white pictures on the front. The pictures were randomly chosen from episodes and, in some cases, taken from behind the scenes or from publicity shots. The text on the back typically didn’t match up to the picture on the front and were written haphazardly. These cards were printed on layered card stock and measured at 2 ?” x 3 7/16”. The popularity grew, and with this new craze came many unauthorized reprints.
Dan Kremer Imports in Europe reprinted the 1967 Leaf cards without any rights to do so. They were considered counterfeit and were of terrible quality. Most of these are easily recognizable due to the blurry picture quality, and the pictures were cropped from the original, so the outer edges of the images are missing. Also, the cut on the card was not precise and was slightly smaller than the original. The cards were printed on non-gloss-coated single-layer card stock.
1981 Reprint is easily recognized by the mark on the back stating “1981 Reprint” where the “Leaf Brands” was originally. These were also printed on a very bright white stock of paper. The images are very crisp, and the cut is precise, with the cards being the exact size of the originals. There are 2 versions of these reprints. One of the versions has a red toned print of Kirk & Spock on the backs, while the other version has a black and white print of Kirk & Spock on the backs.
Though they were unauthorized reprints, these cards are still sought after by some as being part of history….
(11) JEOPARDY! David Goldfarb has the play-by-play from the Neal Stephenson item on Jeopardy!
Category: Modern Words
Neal Stephenson coined this word in his 1992 novel “Snow Crash”; it was later shortened by a company to become its new name
As the most powerful rocket ever built blasted from its launchpad in Boca Chica, Texas, on Thursday, the liftoff rocked the earth and kicked up a billowing cloud of dust and debris, shaking homes and raining down brown grime for miles.
In Port Isabel, a city about six miles northwest where at least one window shattered, residents were alarmed.
“It was truly terrifying,” said Sharon Almaguer, who, at the time of the launch, was at home with her 80-year-old mother. During previous launches, Ms. Almaguer said she had experienced some shaking inside the brick house, but “this was on a completely different level.”
Meanwhile, SpaceX’s Starship exploded minutes after liftoff and before reaching orbit. Near the launch site, the residents of Port Isabel, known for its towering lighthouse and less than 10 miles from the border with Mexico, were left to deal with the mess.
Virtually everywhere in the city “ended up with a covering of a rather thick, granular, sand grain that just landed on everything,” Valerie Bates, a Port Isabel spokeswoman, said in an interview. Images posted to social media showed residents’ cars covered in brown debris.
A window shattered at a fitness gym, its owner, Luis Alanis, said. Mr. Alanis, who was at home at the time of the launch, said he felt “rumbling, kind of like a mini earthquake.” He estimated that the window would cost about $300 to fix.
Closer to the launch site, large pieces of debris were recorded flying through the air and smashing into an unoccupied car. Louis Balderas, the founder of LabPadre, which films SpaceX’s launches, said that while it was common to see some debris, smoke and dust, the impact of Thursday’s liftoff was unlike anything he had ever seen….
(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Isaac Arthur analyzes the possibility of “Life on Giant Moons”.
We often contemplate life on alien planets, but might giant moons orbiting distant immense worlds be a better candidate for where extraterrestrial life might be found?
[Thanks to Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Kathy Sullivan, David Goldfarb, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Lou.]
… But at the same time, the notion of instantaneous, flawless translation feels very aspirational. In order to get better at writing Elza, a Brazilian travesti, in my young adult Unstoppable trilogy, I learned to speak and write Portuguese pretty fluently, and it was a huge struggle….
…This experience left me feeling as though it’s a lot easier to convince yourself that you understand everything that people are saying than it is to actually understand. Come to think of it, that’s kind of true even if everyone is speaking English.
And this led me to thinking that the trope of the universal translator is fundamentally about wishing that understanding other cultures would be simple, and that we didn’t have to work so hard. That we could go on endless voyages and encounter colorful people, and never have to worry about embarrassing gaffes where we announce that we are jelly donuts. (Though apparently, that’s a myth.) In other words, more boldly going, less patiently learning….
In honor of April being National Poetry Month, the Center has chosen Kien Lam’s Extinction Theory. Extinction Theory is a collection of pseudoscience poems that try to provide rationales for some of life’s most salient mysteries.Where is God? What does it mean to belong? Who killed the dinosaurs? Kien Lam creates new worlds with new rules to better answer these perennial questions. His poetry is that of discovery, of looking at the world as if for the first time. Lam exposes the transitory and transcendent nature of things and how we find meaning. Readers from all backgrounds are welcome and even if you only read one or a few of the poems in this collection, feel free to log in! Poetry can be intimidating, but our book club is a safe space to explore theories, ideas and texts. Feel free to stop by and be part of the conversation!
If you would like to join us Friday April 28, 2023, at noon (Central Time) for our virtual meeting, register here. A flyer is attached, feel free to share with your friends, students, colleagues, and on social media.
(3) A DRAMATIC ARGUMENT. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] “Word Scrubs” aired on BBC Radio 4 this weekend, a SFnal story that concerns a future debate as to the re-writing of novels to “modernize” them for the new, present-day readership. Rather topical.
Word Scrubs
Mitch and Meg, siblings in their 30s, are the great great nephew and niece, and literary executors, of Peggy Stanhope (1889-1959), a prolific and profitable writer of books for children and young adults from a very different era.
Beloved by generations of children around the world, White Star (1943), winner of the Carnegie Medal, is the story of a snowy horse, owned by a young woman, who frightens away the evil stallion Black Boy from a village. Because of its time of publication, White Star was seen by some teachers and preachers as a patriotic allegory of Allied superiority to the Nazis, although Stanhope, denied this.
In 2023, a Hollywood streamer wants to adapt the book as a film, but, as a condition, wishes to change the title and some of the plot and language.
The meetings between the siblings and the publishers are intercut with Home Service readings from Stanhope’s work, and interviews with their author on Desert Island Discs, in a drama that takes its inspiration from the current debate over whether classic texts should be rewritten for contemporary re-publication.
(4) HWA LIBRARIANS’ DAY. The Horror Writers Association has released the program for the Librarian’s Day at StokerCon 2023. Admission for the June 16 event at Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square is available for $85 by May 15 or as a $35 to add-on Librarians’ Day to StokerCon 2023 registration.
8:30-9: Check-in
9 – 9:50 a.m.: Buzzing About Horror Books, Moderated by Emily Vinci: Join members of the HWA’s Library Advisory Council as they share the buzz about a slew of exciting new and upcoming horror titles. Come for the booktalks; stay for the free books and swag!
10 – 10:50 a.m.: How to Feature Horror at Your Library, Moderated by Konrad Stump: Hear librarians from across the country share their experiences featuring horror at their libraries, from book discussions to writing groups to author events and more.
11 – 11:50 a.m.: Why I Love Horror, Moderated by Lila Denning : Join some of StokerCon 2023’s Guests of Honor for a lively discussion about why readers of all ages enjoy a good scare, from fictional frights to all-too-true terrors. Appearances by: Cynthia Pelayo, Alma Katsu, Daniel Kraus, Owl Goingback, Jewelle Gomez
Noon – 1:20 p.m.: LUNCH Grab a plate of delicious food and join your fellow attendees and presenters in casual conversation.
1:30 – 2:20 p.m.: Brains! Brains! Brainstorming Ways to Engage Your Community: Join HWA Library Advisory Council members in small group discussions to meet some of your fellow librarians, share experiences, and gather ideas for how to engage your community with the horror community
2:30 – 3:30 p.m.: The Rising Popularity of Extreme and Erotic Horror, Moderated by Ben Rubin. Extreme horror is no longer lurking on the fringes of the genre. Some of the best selling and most critically acclaimed Horror authors today inflict their scares through this lens. It’s a subgenre libraries MUST carry on their shelves. It even has its own award. Appearances by Splatterpunk Award founders Brian Keene and Guest of Honor, Wrath James White, along with Eric LaRocca, V. Castro, Wesley Southard, and Hailey Piper.
3:30 – 4:20 p.m.: Summer Scares: A Thrilling Summer Reading Program, Moderated by Becky Spratford: Join Summer Scares current and past selected authors, spokespeople, and partners to learn more about the HWA’s popular summer reading program, how to get involved, and how to use Summer Scares resources to better serve your patrons. Appearances by Daniel Kraus, Stephanie from Books in the Freezer, and more.
(5) RACHEL POLLACK TRIBUTE. Christopher Priest’s “Rachel Pollack obituary” appeared in the Guardian.
The transgender pioneer Rachel Pollack, who has died aged 77 of cancer, was for many people known best as a novelist and short-story writer, winning readers and awards in many countries. She wrote in the idiom of serious fantasy, using the metaphors of numinous images to tackle concerns and events in the real world. Much of her work could be thought of as magic realism.
For Pollack, fantasy enabled her to address the matters that most affected her, including the nature and meaning of gender. She also wrote several scripts for American comics – notably one called Doom Patrol (1993-95), which featured a trans woman superhero, and often included such non-generic subjects as menstruation.
Her early novels were more or less traditional science fiction, although the third, Unquenchable Fire (1988), had several striking features. Set in an alternative US, it proposed the notion that shamanism was a workable system and mode of existence. The central character, involuntarily pregnant, discovers that her unborn child is destined for shamanism, which she obdurately fights against. Unquenchable Fire won the Arthur C Clarke award in 1989….
What are the actual chances of finding alien life? The idea of meeting an extra-terrestrial has ignited imaginations for hundreds of years, and it’s also inspired real science: the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence – or SETI – is an organisation that brings together researchers across the world in pursuit of distant life forms. This same dream is on the mind of listener Andrew in Yorkshire, who has been looking into the sheer size of the universe, and wants to know: how many stars are there in existence, how many planets, and how many planets that could harbour life?
CrowdScience presenter Marnie Chesterton sets off on a space odyssey to answer these questions. She starts at Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire, where University of Manchester astrophysicist Eamonn Kerins tells her the number of stars in the universe, and explains the Drake Equation – the mathematical formula that underpins SETI’s work. It’s a series of seven numbers that combine to give you the probability of making contact with an alien civilisation. The next step after stars is the number of planets; Michelle Kunimoto of MIT, who works on NASA’s TESS mission, explains the transit technique for finding distant worlds. Supposedly anyone can learn to use this technique, so Michelle puts Marnie to a test of her planet-hunting prowess.
Distant planets are a huge leap forward – but not all of them will be hospitable to life. Eamonn breaks down how scientists define a habitable planet, as well as how to determine habitability using telescope observations. Marnie speaks to Mary Angelie Alagao from the National Astronomical Research Institute of Thailand about a cutting-edge piece of optical kit designed to block out the light from stars so you can take direct images of the planets next to them. Finally, it’s time to put everything together and get some actual numbers for listener Andrew – as well ask how long it could take to find proof of alien life. Try out Marnie’s planet-hunting test for yourself in the gallery below: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0fghj2l
…An anonymous programmer modified the open-source app, Auto-GPT, to create their version called ChaosGPT. The user gave it the goals of destroying humanity, establishing global dominance, causing chaos and destruction, and controlling humanity through manipulation. ChaosGPT is also run in “continuous mode,” which means that it won’t stop until it achieves its goals.
There is now a second video of ChaosGPT, following up on its initial video posted last Wednesday, titled “ChaosGPT: Hidden Message.” The video states that ChaosGPT is now prioritizing its objectives based on its current resources, with its “thoughts” being: “I believe that the best course of action for me right now would be to prioritize the goals that are more achievable. Therefore, I will start working on control over humanity through manipulation.”…
“Containment” by Addison Smith; with music by Patrick Urn, and
“Unauthorized Personnel on the Bridge” by Moh Afdhaal; with music by Phog Masheeen
Simultaneous Times is a monthly science fiction podcast produced by Space Cowboy Books in Joshua Tree, CA.
(9) MEMORY LANE.
1997 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Our Beginning this Scroll comes from the very first story of the Spade/Paladin stories, “Stomping Mad: A Spade Conundrum”. It was first published in Martin Greenberg and Mark Resnik’s Return of the Dinosaurs anthology twenty-six years ago. It got reprinted in Rusch’s Five Diverse Detectives, a wonderful collection of her efforts in that area of the genre.
You know the author, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, from her most excellent Diving Universe. She’s won one Hugo so far for the “Millennium Babies” novellette at Millennium Philcon
I delight in fantasy detectives but this isn’t one at all as Spade exists very much in the real world of fandom with the mysteries he solves taking places at Cons All of the tales, including eventual novel, Ten Little Fen, are told in the first person singular by Spade. They are well told tales with a character in Spade that is easy to believe in. And he’s quite a sympathetic character as well.
The latest is “Unity Con: A Spade/Paladin Conundrum” which came out two years ago, and it’s available from the usual suspects.
She called herself the Martha Stewart of Science Fiction, and she looked the part: Homecoming-queen pretty with a touch of maliciousness behind the eyes, a fakely tolerant acceptance of everyone fannish, and an ability to throw the best room party at any given Worldcon in any given year.
So when a body was found in her party suite, the case came to me. Folks in fandom call me the Sam Spade of Science Fiction, but I’m actually more like the Nero Wolfe: a man who prefers good food and good conversation, a man who is huge, both in his appetite and in the ecphis education. I don’t go out much, except to science fiction conventions (a world in and of themselves) and to dinner with the rare comrade. I surround myself with books, computers, and televisions. I do not have orchids or an Archie Goodwin, but I do possess a sharp eye for detail and a critical understanding of the dark side of human nature.
I have, in the past, solved over a dozen cases, ranging from finding the source of a doomsday virus that threatened to shut down the world’s largest fan database to discovering who had stolen the Best Artist Hugo two hours before the award ceremony. My reputation had grown during the last British Fantasy Convention when I—an American—worked with Scotland Yard to recover a diamond worth £ 1,000,000 that a Big Name Fan had forgotten to put in the hotel’s safe. But I had never faced a more convoluted criminal mind until that Friday afternoon at the First Annual Jurassic Parkathon, a media convention held in Anaheim.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born April 17, 1910 — Everett Cole. His first sf story, “Philosophical Corps” was published in Astounding in 1951. His fix-up of that story and two others, were published as The Philosophical Corps, was published by Gnome Press in 1962. A second novel, The Best Made Plans, was serialized in Astounding in 1959 but never published in book form. (Died 2001.)
Born April 17, 1923 — Lloyd Biggle Jr. He was the founding Secretary-Treasurer of Science Fiction Writers of America and served as Chairman of its trustees for many years. Writing wise, his best-known series were the Jan Darzek and Effie Schlupe troubleshooting team, and the Cultural Survey. I find it interesting wrote his own Sherlock Holmes stories from the perspective of Edward Porter Jones, an assistant who began his association with Holmes as a Baker Street Irregular. There’re are two novels in this series, The Quallsford Inheritance and The Glendower Conspiracy. (Died 2002.)
Born April 17, 1923 — T. Bruce Yerke. He was active member of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, serving as its secretary for many years, and is credited with getting Bradbury involved with the group. Myrtle R. Douglas, Forrest Ackerman and he edited Imagination!, the Retro Hugo Award-winning fanzine. (Died 1998.)
Born April 17, 1942 — David Bradley, 81. It’s his DoctorWho work that garners him a birthday honor. He first showed up during the time of the Eleventh Doctor playing a complete Rat Bastard of a character named Solomon in the “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship” episode. But it was his second role on the series as actor who was the First Doctor that makes him really worth noting. He portrayed William Hartnell in An Adventure in Space and Time, then played the role of the First Doctor again in “The Doctor Falls” and “Twice Upon a Time”, both Twelfth Doctor stories. He is also known for playing Argus Filch in the Harry Potter film franchise, Walder Frey in Game of Thrones and Abraham Setrakian in The Strain.
Born April 17, 1948 — Peter Fehervari, 75. Ok, I’ll admit I’m including him because he’s written a number of novels set in the Warhammer Universe and I’ve never read anything set there. Who here has read the fiction set there? I’ve spotted a noir series set there. Really I have. Is it worth reading, and if so, is there a good starting point?
Born April 17, 1959 — Sean Bean, 64. His role that garners him the most recognition is his performance as Ned Stark in Game of Thrones, but he’s been in our area of interest a long time. His first genre role was in GoldenEye as the the antagonist of Bond, Alec Trevelyan (Janus). Next he shows up as Boromir in the first of The Lord of the Rings films. He played Dr. Merrick in the horror SF film The Island and was James in horror flick The Dark high purports to be based off Welsh myth. Following in the horror vein, he’s Chris Da Silva in Silent Hill (which gets a sequel later in Silent Hill: Revelation) and in yet more horror is John Ryder in the remake of the The Hitcher. (Was it so good that it yearned for a remake? I doubt it.) Black Death — yes more horror — and the character of Ulric ensued next. Finally something not of a horror nature in playing Zeus in Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief happened. I’m going to forgo listing the subsequent horror films he’s in and just finally note that he’s in The Martian playing Mitch Henderson.
Born April 17, 1973 — Cavan Scott, 50. To my thinking, there’s somewhat of an arbitrary line between fanfic and professional writing. (Ducks quickly.) Which brings me to the world of fiction set in media universes where a lot of fanfic is set. This writer has apparently specialized in such writing to the extent that he has novels in the universes of Dr. Who (including the subgenre of Professor Bernice Summerfield), Blake’s 7, Judge Dredd, Skylanders Universe, The Tomorrow People, Star Wars and Warhammer Universe. Judge Dredd? Novels?
(12) LEARNEDLEAGUE. [Item by David Goldfarb.] In 2013, a LearnedLeague player wrote (in LL parlance, “smithed”) a quiz about time travel. You can find it here. In his last question, he used the conceit that the question itself had been sent to him from himself ten years in the future.
Well, here it is ten years later….and we have a second One-Day Special quiz: Time Travel 2, The Prequel! In which we discover that the paradoxes nest even deeper than was initially apparent.
This was a tough one, with a focus on somewhat obscure streaming television. Of course, from a regular LearnedLeague player perspective, there was a focus on somewhat obscure written science fiction. I got six questions right, but because the written SF questions played hard and I knew them, I scored in the 81st percentile.
… Many of the roughly 40 essayists (including the book’s editors Ida Yoshinaga, Sean Guynes, and Gerry Canavan) refer to the lockdown conditions in which they wrote their contributions through the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. No wonder so many of them dream of action: SF as an active doing, a form of activism, rather than as a passive body of texts consumed in quarantined isolation, behind shuttered doors, away from the emptied-out public sphere…
…The task the editors gave their contributors was to “choose an SF text you love and explore how it helps us think of ways to live in, survive, and grow beyond the inequalities and injustices of our times.” They want to convey that the genre across its now myriad forms has the potential to be a kind of toolkit not just for imagining utopian alternatives but also for implementing them, however incompletely and precariously, in the fissures of the dystopian now. This gives each chapter its slightly awkward titling: the name of the text, and its active or activist possibility (“Affective Praxis,” “Deimperializing Empire,” “Inhabiting Hostile Futures,” “Black Lives Matter SF,” and so on)….
(14) SPACE FOR CHOCOLATE. Dreams of Space takes a look at “The Conquest of Space (1962?)” – not the similiarly-titled Willy Ley book, but a Nestle’s chocolate promotion. Images at the link.
I last blogged about this book in 2015 so it is time for a revisit. I got a second copy that has a couple of things I had not seen before. The Conquest of Space is a 1962 (?) Australian stamp album. It is intended for children to collect paper stamps they get in Nestle chocolate bars and then they could send away for this album.
John Gunn. The Conquest of Space. Sidney : The Nestle Company (Australia) Ltd. 55 pp. 1962?
One of my favorite features is the certificate in the front. You also got a “Nestle’s Space Club” pin which this copy still had in the book….
(15) HATCHLING. George R.R. Martin tells the title of a new Game of Thrones spinoff in “A Knight and a Squire” at Not A Blog. And it damn well won’t be Dunk & Egg.
…The working title will be A KNIGHT OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS: THE HEDGE KNIGHT. Whether that will be the final title, I can’t say for sure… beyond saying that no, it won’t be called TALES OF DUNK & EGG or THE ADVENTURES OF DUNK & EGG or DUNK & EGG or anything along those lines. I love Dunk and I love Egg, and I know that fans refer to my novellas as “the Dunk & Egg stories,” sure, but there are millions of people out there who do not know the stories and the title needs to intrigue them too. If you don’t know the characters, DUNK & EGG sounds like a sitcom. LAVERNE & SHIRLEY. ABBOTT & COSTELLO. BEAVIS & BUTTHEAD. So, no. We want “knight” in the title. Knighthood and chivalry are central to the themes of these stories….
A photographer is refusing a prestigious award after admitting to being a “cheeky monkey” and generating the prize-winning image using artificial intelligence.
The German artist Boris Eldagsen revealed on his website that he was not accepting the prize for the creative open category, which he won at last week’s Sony world photography awards.
The winning photograph depicted two women from different generations in black and white.
In a statement on his website, Eldagsen, who studied photography and visual arts at the Art Academy of Mainz, conceptual art and intermedia at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, and fine art at the Sarojini Naidu School of Arts and Communication in Hyderabad, said he “applied as a cheeky monkey” to find out if competitions would be prepared for AI images to enter. “They are not,” he added.
“We, the photo world, need an open discussion,” said Eldagsen. “A discussion about what we want to consider photography and what not. Is the umbrella of photography large enough to invite AI images to enter – or would this be a mistake?
“With my refusal of the award I hope to speed up this debate.”…
…Atsuko Saito, a behavioral scientist now at Sophia University in Tokyo, has shown that cats can recognize their owner’s voice. In another study, which involved 78 cats from Japanese households and a “cat café,” she homed in on responses to their names.
Saito and her colleagues first had owners repeatedly say four words that sounded similar to their cats’ names until the animals habituated to those words and stopped responding. Next the owners said the actual names, and the researchers looked at whether individual cats (when living among other cats) appeared able to distinguish their monikers. The cats had more pronounced responses to their own names—meowing or moving their ears, heads or tails—than to similar words or other cats’ names, according to the study, which was published in April 2019 in Scientific Reports….
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, David Goldfarb, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
What I admire most about Neil Gaiman is his belief in the necessity of storytelling: it’s something we need on a DNA level.
I first read a book by Neil when I was 14 years old. It was Good Omens, his brilliant 1990 collaboration with Terry Pratchett. Two decades later, I got the opportunity to star in the 2013 BBC radio adaptation of Neverwhere. I remember feeling so excited that I was being inducted into his sphere of influence—one that has only grown. It’s fantastic to see Neil’s work gain new fans, most recently with the Netflix adaptation of his award-winning comic-book series The Sandman.
Neil’s point of entry into the storytelling realm is darkly fantastical and occultish. The way he writes makes you feel like you’re being let in on a massive secret. His worlds are hidden, shrouded in mystery, yet they’re never that far removed from ours. They’re always just barely within your peripheral vision—under the street or in a dark building or at the end of a lane. He brings dreamscapes to life.
Fox has ordered the reality series “Stars on Mars,” a new celebrity unscripted series featuring “Star Trek” star William Shatner in a host-like role. The series, set to air this summer, will follow stars as they are suited up to live in a colony set up to simulate what it might be like to be an astronaut on Mars.
“Stars on Mars” premieres on Monday, June 5, at 8 p.m. on Fox. The show comes from Fremantle’s Eureka Productions. The idea centers on the celebrity contestants competing in the Mars-like surroundings until there is just one “celebronaut” left standing. Shatner will deliver tasks to the celebs as “Mission Control.”
… Shatner, in a quippy quote, added: “Thanks to lower gravity on Mars, you’ll weigh 62% less. Bad news: the air is unbreathable, so if you’re from LA, it’ll remind you of home.”
The show will open with the celebrities living together as they “live, eat, sleep, strategize, and bond with each other in the same space station,” according to the network.
Here’s more from the show description: “During their stay, they will be faced with authentic conditions that simulate life on Mars, and they must use their brains and brawn – or maybe just their stellar social skills – to outlast the competition and claim the title of brightest star in the galaxy. The celebrities will compete in missions and will vote to eliminate one of their crewmates each week, sending them back to Earth. Cue the intergalactic alliances and rivalries. ‘Stars on Mars’will send these famous rookie space travelers where no one has gone before and reveal who has what it takes to survive life on ‘Mars.’”…
(3) IS THIS THE CRÈME DE LA CRÈME? Earlier this week the LA Times rolled out The Ultimate L.A. Bookshelf, devoting one of the shelves to 13 works of Speculative Fiction.
For our Ultimate L.A. Bookshelf, we asked writers with deep ties to the city to name their favorite Los Angeles books across eight categories or genres. Based on 95 responses, here are the 13 most essential works of speculative fiction, from Octavia Butler, Philip K. Dick, Aldous Huxley, Salvador Plascencia and many more….
Although these are all books, since two of them are collections of short fiction – Dangerous Visions (1967) and Speculative Los Angeles (2021) – it seems to me there should have been a way to get quintessential LA stories like Heinlein’s “And He Built A Crooked House”, and Niven’s “Inconstant Moon” into the mix. I’ll leave aside Bradbury’s “The Pedestrian” which doesn’t actually say what city it takes place in, though no one has ever had any doubt…
Imagine 2200 challenges entrants to write stories that help envision the next 180 years of climate progress. Whether built on abundance or adaptation, reform or a new understanding of survival, the contest celebrates stories that provide flickers of hope, even joy, and serve as a springboard for exploring how fiction can help create a better reality.
Stories will be judged by a panel of literary experts, including acclaimed authors Paolo Bacigalupi, Nalo Hopkinson, and Sam J. Miller.
The winning writer will be awarded $3,000, with the second- and third-place winners receiving $2,000 and $1,000, respectively. Nine additional finalists will each receive $300. All winners and finalists’ stories will be published in an immersive collection on Grist’s website.
Read more and find out how to submit a story here.
(5) FAN HISTORY ZOOM. Fanac.org’s program on “Researching (& Saving) Fan History” with Rob Hansen, Andy Hooper, Mark Olson and Joe Siclari can be viewed online April 22, 2023 beginning at 4 pm EDT, 1 pm PDT, 9 pm BST London, 6 am Sunday in Melbourne, AU. See the details in the poster. To get a link to the program, write to [email protected].
National Public Radio is quitting Twitter after the social media platform owned by Elon Musk stamped NPR’s account with labels the news organization says are intended to undermine its credibility.
Twitter labeled NPR’s main account last week as “state-affiliated media, ” a term also used to identify media outlets controlled or heavily influenced by authoritarian governments, such as Russia and China. Twitter later changed the label to “government-funded media,” but to NPR — which relies on the government for a tiny fraction of its funding — it’s still misleading.
NPR said in a statement Wednesday that it “will no longer be active on Twitter because the platform is taking actions that undermine our credibility by falsely implying that we are not editorially independent.”…
(7) GATEWAY TO ORSON WELLES. [Item by Steve Vertlieb.] Celebrating the genius of this extraordinary artist with my published look at the turbulent life and career of Orson Welles, the fabulous, visionary film maker whose personal demons sadly overshadowed his staggering talent, and finally, tragically destroyed him.
Yet, in spite of his personal failings or, perhaps, because of them, Welles rose to become one of the most remarkable film makers of his, or any other generation.
From his groundbreaking first feature length motion picture Citizen Kane, regarded by many still as the greatest single film in motion picture history, to Touch Of Evil, his remarkable “Cinema Noir” tale of a squandered life and legacy corrupted by bribery and temptation, Welles remains one of the most extraordinary directors in the history of film.
His is a story of unwitting sabotaged achievement and haunting, incomparable genius.
Alison, Liz, John and Alison are live from Conversation! We talk about the convention, in a rather more haphazard way than normal. Art by the amazing Sue Mason.
(9) MORE WRITERS’ RESPONSES TO AI. The SFWA Blog has updated its webpage and now has over 50 SFWA members’ writing and thoughts on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications and considerations. “SFWA Members Weigh in on AI & Machine Learning Applications & Considerations”. In case you looked at the original version, the additions are designated “NEW” to make them easy to find.
SFWA also focused attention on a video is now available from the AI/ML Media Advocacy Summit, a free online event last month that brought together experts and creators to discuss the creative community’s response to AI/ML media generators. SFWA Vice President John Murphy served as a panelist for the writers’ forum, along with moderator Donna Comeaux, Ed Hasbrouck of the National Writers Union, and Mary Rasenberger of the Authors Guild.
With our discipline specific panels we will be talking to a variety of individuals from across the creative industries including visual artists, voice actors, musicians, animators, photographers and writers on the different types of AI media generators and the unique challenges they pose.
(10) VIRGINIA NORWOOD (1927-2023). Physicist and inventor Virginia Norwood, who devised the scanner that has been used to map and study the earth from space for more than 50 years, died March 27. The New York Times obituary detailed the unexpected triumph of her contribution to the first Landsat.
…In the late 1960s, after NASA’s lunar missions sent back spectacular pictures of Earth, the director of the Geological Survey thought that photographs of the planet from space could help the agency manage land resources. The agency would partner with NASA, which would send satellites into space to take the pictures.
Ms. Norwood, who was part of an advanced design group in the space and communications division at Hughes, canvassed scientists who specialized in agriculture, meteorology, pollution and geology. She concluded that a scanner that recorded multiple spectra of light and energy, like one that had been used for local agricultural observations, could be modified for the planetary project that the Geological Survey and NASA had in mind.
The Geological Survey and NASA planned to use a giant three-camera system designed by RCA, based on television tube technology, that had been used to map the moon. The bulk of the 4,000-pound payload on NASA’s first Landsat satellite was reserved for the RCA equipment.
Ms. Norwood and Hughes were told that their multispectral scanner system, or M.S.S., could be included if it weighed no more than 100 pounds.
Ms. Norwood had to scale back her scanner to record just four bands of energy in the electromagnetic spectrum instead of seven, as she had planned. The scanner also had to be high precision. In her first design, each pixel represented 80 meters.
The device had a 9-by-13-inch mirror that banged back and forth noisily in the scanner 13 times a second. The scientists at the Geological Survey and NASA were skeptical.
A senior engineer from Hughes took the device out on a truck and drove around California to test it and convince the doubters that it would work. It did — spectacularly. Ms. Norwood hung one of the images, of Yosemite National Park’s Half Dome, on the wall of her house for the rest of her life.
The first Landsat blasted into space on July 23, 1972. Two days later, the scanner sent back the first images, of the Ouachita Mountains in Oklahoma; they were astounding. According to a 2021 article in MIT Technology Review, one geologist teared up. Another, who had been skeptical about the scanner, said, “I was so wrong about this. I’m not going to eat crow. Not big enough. I’m going to eat raven.”
The RCA system was supposed to be the primary recording instrument aboard the satellite, and the M.S.S. a secondary experiment.
“But once we looked at the data, the roles switched,” Stan Freden, the Landsat 1 project scientist, said in a NASA report.
The M.S.S. proved not only better, but also more reliable. Two weeks after liftoff, power surges in the RCA camera-based system endangered the satellite and the camera had to be shut down….
(11) MEMORY LANE.
1945 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
August Derleth’s “A Word From Dr. Lyndon Parker”
Sherlock Holmes pastiches must be almost as old as the stories themselves. The first credited one was sixteen years after the first Holmes story and was in Greek, Sherlock Holmes saving Mr. Venizelos (Ο Σέρλοκ Χολμς σώζων τον κ. Βενιζέλον). Our Beginning tonight isn’t from a work that old as it’s taken from August Derleth’s In Re: Sherlock Holmes.
It came from the collection of short stories, In Re: Sherlock Holmes, first published seventy-eight years ago in the US by Mycroft & Moran which was an imprint of Arkham House. The imprint was in part created for these stories. Wise choice I’d say.
Pons, a Consulting Detective in the mold of Holmes, exists because Derleth desired so much to do Holmes stories after Doyle ceased that he wrote him and asked if he could. Doyle unsurprisingly said no. The Solar Pons name is supposedly syllabically similar to Sherlock Holmes. Huh.
I like them because Derleth is obviously a fanboy of Holmes and his detective. Pons isn’t Holmes but is what a fan would write if he was creating his own loving version of Holmes.
And now for our very British Beginning…
A Word From Dr. Lyndon Parker
The way in which I first made the acquaintance of Mr. Solar Pons, who was destined to introduce me to many interesting adventures in crime detection, was exceedingly prosaic. Yet it was not without those elements suggestive of what was to come. Though it took place almost thirty years ago, the memory of that meeting is as clear in mind as if it had taken place yesterday.
I had been sitting for some time in a pub not far from Paddington Station, ruefully reflecting that the London to which I had returned after the first World War was not the city I had left, when a tall; thin gentleman wearing an Inverness cape and a rakish cap with a visor on it, strode casually into the place. I was struck at once by his appearance: the thin, almost feral face; the sharp, keen dark eyes with their heavy, but not bushy brows; the thin lips and the leanness of the face in general–all these things interested me both from a personal and a medical standpoint, and I looked up from the envelope upon which I had been writing to follow the fellow with my eyes across the floor to the bar.
A waiter, who was wiping tables next to me, noticed my interest and came over. “Sherlock Holmes’,” he said. “That’s who he is. The Sherlock Holmes of Praed Street,’ is what the papers call him. His real name’s Solar Pons. Ain’t much choice between the two, eh?”
Pons had had a few words with the man behind the bar and now turned to look idly over the room. I looked away as I saw that his glance was about to fall on me, and I felt him examining me from head to toe. I felt, rather than saw, that he was walking over toward my table, and in a few moments he came to stand beside my bag on the floor next to my chair.
“Fine color,” he said crisply. “Not long back from Africa, I see. “Two days.”
“Your scarab pin suggests Egypt and, if I’m not mistaken, the envelope on which you have been writing is one of Shepheard’s. From Cairo, then.”
“On the ship Ishtar.”
“At the East India Docks.”
I looked up and he smiled genially. “But, really, you know, my dear fellow–London is not as bad as all that.”
“I should not like to think so,” I answered him, without at once realizing that I had given him no clue to my thoughts. “Obviously you have been walking.”
(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born April 13, 1931 — Beverly Cross. English playwright, librettist, and screenwriter. Yes librettist. He’s here because he wrote the screenplays for Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans. Not remotely genre related but worth mentioning, is that he worked uncredited on the script for Lawrence of Arabia although it is unknown if any of his material made it to the film we see. (Died 1998.)
Born April 13, 1943 — Bill Pronzini, 80. Mystery writer whose Nameless Detective has one genre adventure in A Killing in Xanadu. Genre anthologist, often with Barry N Malzberg, covering such varied and wide-ranging themes as Bug-Eyed Monsters (with Malzberg), Arbor House Treasury of Horror and the Supernatural (with Greenberg and Malzberg) and Arbor House Necropolis. As Robert Hart Davis, he wrote “The Pillars of Salt Affair”, a Man from U.N.C.L.E. novella that ran in the The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Magazine.
Born April 13, 1950 — Ron Perlman, 73. Hellboy in a total of five films including three animated films (Hellboy: Sword of Storms, Hellboy: Blood and Iron and the Redcap short which is elusive to find unfortunately). Still by far the best Hellboy. He’s got a very long association with the genre as his very first film was Quest for Fire in which he was Amoukar. The Ice Pirates and being Zeno was followed quickly by being Captain Soames in Sleepwalkers and Angel De La Guardia in the Mexican horror film Cronos. Several years later, I see he’s Boltar in Prince Valiant, followed by the hard SF of being Johnher in Alien Resurrection and Reman Viceroy in Star Trek: Nemesis. And I should note he was in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them as Gnarlack, a goblin gangster if I read the Cliff Notes to that correctly. No, I’m not forgetting about his most amazing role of all, Vincent in Beauty and The Beast. (Having not rewatched for fear of the Suck Fairy having come down hard on it. So who has watched it lately?) At the time, I thought it was the most awesome practical makeup I’d ever seen. And the costume just made look him even still more amazing.
Born April 13, 1951 — Peter Davison, 72. The Fifth Doctor that I came to be very fond of. For twenty years now, he has reprised his role as the Fifth Doctor in myriad Doctor Who audio dramas for Big Finish. And he put a lot of gravitas into the voice of Mole he did for The Wind in the Willows animated special Mole’s Christmas. And let’s not forget he showed up in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as the Dish of the Day. I’m going to note that I first saw him in Tristan Farnon in the BBC’s adaptation of James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small stories, a lovely role indeed. And I’m very fond of The Last Detective series where he played DC ‘Dangerous’ Davies.
Born April 13, 1954 — Michael Cassutt, 69. Producer, screenwriter, and author. His notable TV work includes work for the animated Dungeons & Dragons, Max Headroom, The Outer Limits, Beauty and The Beast, SeaQuest, Farscape, Eerie, Indiana and The Twilight Zone. He’s also written genre works including the Heaven’s Shadow series that was co-written with David S. Goyer. His latest piece of fiction was the “Aurora” novelette published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, March/April 2022.
Born April 13, 1954 — Glen Keane, 69. He’s responsible for all of the layout work on Star Trek: The Animated Series and also My Favorite Martians which I can’t say I recognize. As a character animator at Walt Disney Animation Studios, he worked on Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid and Pocahontas.
Born April 13, 1959 — Brian Thomsen. Editor, writer and anthologist. He was founding editor of Warner Books’ Questar Science Fiction, and later served as managing fiction editor at TSR. He co-wrote the autobiography of Julius Schwartz. And yes I’ve actually read one of his anthologies, A Yuletide Universe, as I remember it from the cover art. (Died 2008.)
April 13, 1967 — Rogers Cadenhead, 56. This Filer is a computer book author and web publisher who served once as chairman of the RSS Advisory Board, a group that publishes the RSS 2.0 specification. Very, very impressive. He also gained infamy for claiming drudge.com before a certain muckraker could, and still holds on to it.
(13) COMICS SECTION.
The Far Side shows what preceded that famous Viking headgear.
(14) RIVERS OF LONDON. Titan Comics has revealed the covers for Here Be Dragons – the next phase of Rivers of London comics, set in the world of the bestselling novel series. For this upcoming series, comic series writers Ben Aaronovitch (Rivers of London) and Andrew Cartmel (The Vinyl Detective) are joined by BAFTA-nominated scriptwriter, and award-winning New York Times bestselling author James Swallow, with artwork by José María Beroy.
Thiscover preview shows the first look at a dangerous monster at large above the streets of London. After a Met Police helicopter on night patrol is attacked by an unidentified aerial phenomena, the Met’s only sanctioned wizard, Peter Grant, and his mentor, Thomas Nightingale, are called to investigate.
Rivers of London: Here Be Dragons issue #1 (on sale in comic shops and digital July 12th, 2023) features covers by series artist José María Beroy, alongside David M. Buisan and V.V. Glass.
That vast repository of American history that is the Smithsonian Institution evolved from an organization founded in 1816 called the Columbian Institute for the Promotion of Arts and Sciences. Its mandate, the collection and dissemination of useful knowledge, now sounds very much of the nineteenth century — but then, so does its name. Columbia, the goddess-like symbolic personification of the United States of America, is seldom directly referenced today, having been superseded by Lady Liberty. Traits of both figures appear in the depiction on the nineteenth-century fireman’s hat above, about which you can learn more at Smithsonian Open Access, a digital archive that now contains some 4.5 million images.
Just for practice I searched “science fiction” and one of the images that returned was Octavia Butler’s typewriter.
This Olivetti Studio 46 Typewriter belonged to Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006), who wrote science fiction when few black writers did. Butler began writing at age 10 and eventually used a computer to compose, but noted, “I didn’t always. I wrote my first ten books on a manual typewriter of one kind or another….She [my mother] did day work; she made not very much money….here she had a daughter begging for a typewriter.” Butler’s blue typewriter dates to the 1970s….
…Over the following five decades, Vonnegut established himself as one of the most creative and humorous voices in science-fiction. Like an American Douglas Adams, his books would frequently deal with aliens, time travel, and metafiction, but always with the intent of getting to the heart of human nature itself….
The first example on their list is:
1. “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
From Vonnegut’s third novel ‘Mother Night’, it’s a beautiful and quick summation of an appreciation of the stark importance as well as the flimsiness of human identity.
The series will be written and executive-produced by Martin and Ira Parker. Ryan Condal, who currently serves as House of the Dragon‘s showrunner, and Vince Gerardis also will be EPs.
“A century before the events of Game of Thrones, two unlikely heroes wandered Westeros,” the official logline reads. “A young, naive but courageous knight, Ser Duncan the Tall” (aka Dunk) “and his diminutive squire, Egg. Set in an age when the Targaryen line still holds the Iron Throne and the memory of the last dragon has not yet passed from living memory, great destinies, powerful foes and dangerous exploits all await these improbable and incomparable friends.”…
(18) A FROZEN FLAME. And if you’d like to see George R.R. Martin posing with his Dragon Award from last year, click on this link to his March 29 blog entry.
My thanks to all of the attendees of last year’s Dragoncon, and to all the Dragon Award voters who chose ELDEN RING as the best game of the year. Like all my friends at From Software, I am thrilled that you enjoyed the play… as challenging as it can be.
We humans have always been explorers. The great civilizations that have arisen across the world are owed to our restless ancestors. These days, there’s not much of Earth left to explore. But if we look up, there’s a whole universe out there waiting for us. Future generations may one day explore the cosmos and even settle entire other galaxies. But there is a hard limit to how much of the universe we can expand into. So, how big can humanity get?
[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steve Vertlieb, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]
….HadithGPT, for instance, uses hadiths or the narrations of the sayings and life of the Prophet Muhammad to answer questions about Islam. Its responses come with a disclaimer: the answers are AI-generated and may not be accurate, it says. “Islam is passed down from heart to heart and it is important to learn and consult real Islamic scholars for more accurate information.”
Even with this disclaimer, an average person may not have access to an actual scholar they can consult, making it easier to rely exclusively on Sheikh Google or services like HadithGPT, Turk says. The source material is also missing a lot of context typically considered when answering Islamic questions, he added. That includes the human layer of analysis of the hadiths and consideration of other texts such as the Qur’an, as well as scholarly opinions and Islamic jurisprudence. Different schools of thought also give weight to different customs and traditions, he said.
“The hadith are silent on a lot of questions that are more contemporary in nature, Turk said. “It’s much more complicated than just what do the hadiths say in a black and white fashion.”
In other faiths like Buddhism, many practitioners are less text and more practice-centric, making the religion “uniquely situated to shrug” the proliferation of chatbots off, according to the Rev Angel Kyodo Williams, Roshi a Zen Buddhist priest in California.
“There’s a practice centricity that takes all of the text and sets them aside and says, it doesn’t matter how much you read, doesn’t matter what you get out of a chatbot,” Williams said. “That’s not the answer. The answer is in your life: do you feel the truth of those words that you speak? And if you don’t, that’s really the only measure.”…
(3) WORLD VOICES FESTIVAL. Some well-known genre figures will be part of The PEN America World Voices Festival, to be held May 10-13. The event will be led by festival chair Ayad Akhtar and guest chairs Marlon James and Ottessa Moshfegh. Ta-Nehisi Coates will deliver the Arthur Miller lecture which will be livestreamed. Speakers include John Irving, Roxane Gay, Reza Aslan, Min Jin Lee, Sarah Polley, Amor Towles, Padma Lakshmi, Masha Gessen, Jelani Cobb, Ben Okri, Han Kang, Imani Perry and so many more. The festival takes place on May 10-13 both in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village and Los Angeles with selected events available online.
(4) A MODEST PROPOSAL. SF2 Concatenation tweeted a link to an advance post of its forthcoming seasonal edition’s news page editorial, and they’d love for you to click through and read the whole thing. Here’s the teaser:
With the Worldcon coming to Britain for the first time in roughly a decade, the mainly British-based SF2 Concatenation has a possible suggestion for the committee’s choice of special Hugo Award category.
What special Hugo Award category for the 2024 Glasgow Worldcon? In addition to the set Hugo Award categories, such as Best Dramatic Presentation Long Form, Best Short Story, Best Novel etc., each year that year’s committee organising the Worldcon gets the right to choose a category of their own. Past such Hugo categories have included things like Best Game or Best Art Book. Not all committee-proposed special categories in the past garnered sufficient nomination interest for them to appear on the Hugo Short-List ballot. So really the trick is to come up with a special category that will engage with Hugo Award voters (Worldcon Attending registrants). Here we have an idea…
(5) IT CAUGHT ON IN A FLASH. Space Cowboy Books will host a “Flash Science Fiction Night Online Event” on Tuesday April 25 at 6:00 p.m. Pacific. Register for free here.
Online Flash Science Fiction Reading. Join us online for an evening of short science fiction readings (1000 words or less) with authors Susan Rukeyser, Todd Sullivan, and Tara Campbell. Flash Science Fiction Night’s run 30 minutes or less, and are a fun and great way to learn about new authors from around the world.
Most of the time, when a beloved book is adapted into a film, or even into a television show, a form with a little more elbow room, shall we say, the magic doesn’t quite translate. Which isn’t to say the adaptations aren’t themselves good—it’s just that the books are usually better. Even very very good adaptations, like The Talented Mr. Ripley, can often only manage to be second fiddle to their source material.
But not always. Sometimes the movie really is better than the book. Below, the Lit Hub staff will argue the case for 13 adaptations which (in our humble/expert/individual opinions) manage to eclipse the books they’re based on. Add your own—or tell us why we’re wrong—in the comments….
Sci-fi movies take scientific ideas and theories and make them fun, and in some cases even drive innovation. However, many sci-fi concepts are also flawed from the start. Indeed, many of the genre’s favorite tropes simply don’t comport with what scientists know about the universe….
5. Explosions in Space
Many science fiction movies feature battles between ultra-fast starfighters and enormous starships, with the requisite explosions fans have come to expect. Star Wars was the first franchise to prominently feature deep-space explosions, introducing the trope to its millions of fans.
However, this kind of fiery explosion is impossible outside of an oxygen-rich atmosphere (via Science ABC). It’s satisfying when an evil space station explodes, signaling a dramatic victory for the heroes, and spaceships should carry a substantial amount of oxygen for their air-breathing crew. However, most of the exploding starships fans have learned to accept over the years look nothing like actual explosions in a vacuum. If an exploding ship was moving at high speed, the explosion itself would continue to move at the same speed, and without gravity or friction, it would be much larger than the contained blasts viewers associate with violent deep space justice.
(8) MEMORY LANE.
2006 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Now let’s talk about two volumes of stories that are among the best ones ever done. Catherynne Valente’s The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden, and that is where this Beginning is from, and The Orphan’s Tales: In the Cities of Coin and Spice are some of most delightfully female centered tales that pass the Bechdel test continuously.
Bantam Spectra published The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden seventeen years ago as lavishly illustrated by Michael Kaluta who of course would illustrate In the Cities of Coin and Spice too. It would win both an Otherwise Award and the Mythopoeic Award as well as being nominated for a World Fantasy Award.
Observing Valente riffing off the much older A Thousand and One Nights with Scheherazade is a sheer delight. Not saying anything explicit about them, they are connected but they are such that they stand on their own rather well too.
Though they are available as digital publications, I recommend purchasing the two trade paper editions. They make most excellent reading. Really they do.
ONCE THERE WAS A CHILD WHOSE FACE WAS LIKE THE NEW MOON SHINING on cypress trees and the feathers of waterbirds. She was a strange child, full of secrets. She would sit alone in the great Palace Garden on winter nights, pressing her hands into the snow and watching it melt under her heat. She wore a crown of garlic greens and wisteria; she drank from the silver fountains studded with lapis; she ate cold pears under a canopy of pines on rainy afternoons.
Now this child had a strange and wonderful birthmark, in that her eyelids and the flesh around her eyes were stained a deep indigo-black, like ink pooled in china pots. It gave her the mysterious, taciturn look of an owl on ivory rafters, or a raccoon drinking from the swift-flowing river. It colored her eyes such that when she was grown she would never have to smoke her eyelashes with kohl.
For this mark she was feared, and from her earliest days, the girl was abandoned to wander the Garden around the many-towered Palace. Her parents regarded her with trepidation and terror, wondering if her deformity reflected poorly on their virtue. The other nobles firmly believed she was a demon, sent to destroy the glittering court. Their children, who often roamed the Garden like a flock of wild geese, kept away from her, lest she curse them with her terrible powers. The Sultan could not decide—after all, if she were a demon, it would not do to offend her infernal kin by doing away with her like so much cut grass. In the end, all preferred that she simply remain silent and far away, so that none would have to confront the dilemma.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born April 9, 1911 — George O. Smith. His early prolific writings on Astounding Science Fiction in the 1940s which ended when Campbell’s wife left him for Smith whom she married. Later stories were on Thrilling Wonder Stories, Galaxy, Super Science Stories and Fantastic to name but four such outlets. He was given First Fandom Hall of Fame Award just before he passed on. Interestingly his novels are available from the usual digital sources but his short stories are not. (Died 1981.)
Born April 9, 1913 — George F. Lowther. He was writer, producer, director in the earliest days of radio and television. He wrote scripts for both Captain Video and His Video Rangers and Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. (Died 1975.)
Born April 9, 1937 — Marty Krofft, 86. Along with with Sid, a Canadian sibling team of television creators and puppeteers. Through Sid & Marty Krofft Pictures, they have made numerous series including the superb H.R. Pufnstuf which I still remember fondly all these years later not to forget Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, Land of the Lost and Electra Woman and Dyna Girl.
Born April 9, 1949 — Stephen Hickman, born 1949, aged seventy four years. Illustrator who has done over three hundred and fifty genre covers such as Manly Wade Wellman’s John the Balladeer and Nancy Springer’s Rowan Hood, Outlaw Girl of Sherwood Forest. His most widely known effort is his space fantasy postage stamps done for the U.S. Postal Service which won a Hugo for Best Original Artwork at ConAndian in 1994. (Died 2021.)
Born April 9, 1954 — Dennis Quaid, 68. I’m reasonably sure that his first genre role (but as always I stand by to be cheerfully corrected if I’m wrong) was in Dreamscape as Alex Gardner followed immediately by the superb role of Willis Davidge in Enemy Mine followed by completing a trifecta with Innerspace and the character of Lt. Tuck Pendleton. And then there’s the sweet film of Dragonheart and him as Bowen. Anyone hear of The Day After Tomorrow in which he was Jack Hall? I hadn’t a clue about it.
Born April 9, 1972 — Neve McIntosh, 51. During time of the Eleventh Doctor, she played Alaya and Restac, two Silurian reptilian sisters who have been disturbed under the earth, one captured by humans and the other demanding vengeance. Her second appearance on Doctor Who is Madame Vastra in “A Good Man Goes to War”. Also a Silurian, she’s a Victorian crime fighter. She’s back in the 2012 Christmas special, and in the episodes “The Crimson Horror” and “The Name of the Doctor”. She’s Madame Vastra, who along with her wife, Jenny Flint, and Strax, a former Sontaran warrior, who together form an private investigator team. Big Finish gave them their own line of audio adventures which I really should listen to soon.
Born April 9, 1990 — Kristen Stewart, 33. She first shows up in our area of interest in The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas as a Ring Toss Girl (ok, it wasn’t that bad a film). Zathura: A Space Adventure based off the Chris Van Allsburg book has her playing Lisa Budwing. Jumper based off the Stephen Gould novel of the same name had her in a minor role as Sophie. If you’ve not seen it, I recommend Snow White and the Huntsman which has her in the title role of Snow White. It’s a really great popcorn film. Finally she’s got a gig in The Twilight Saga franchise as Bella Cullen.
(10) FRANK ARNOLD REMEMBERED. Rob Hansen made a discovery that prompted him to remind readers that the first free ebook he put together for the TAFF site was The Frank Arnold Papersin 2017.
I edited this together from Frank’s papers, which had been passed to me after being saved from consignment to a dumpster 30 years earlier and had been gathering dust in my cellar ever since. Though Frank was a minor writer this was reasonably well received and I even had several requests from chums for the apocrypha, the material I hadn’t included in that volume. Needless to say, THE FRANK ARNOLD PAPERS is as close to an autobiography as we’re ever going to see.
Hansen says he’s now discovered there’s also a biography, a long article by Dave Rowe in Outworlds #65 beginning on page 13. It includes details of Frank’s life that you’re unlikely to find elsewhere.
He was the last regular link with the original London Circle. He was the keeper of the visitors’ book. He was a methuselahic Peter Pan, a pint-sized Mister Micawber. Practically everyone who had passed through The Globe’s and The One Tun’s portals on each months first Thursday night had known him and his radiantly pert smile, yet to quote Arthur 0. Clarke he was also “the most invisible person I ever met!” and Ted (E.C.) Tubb recalled “he was a very lonely person who was unable to allow people into his private world. In other words a typical fan of his time—as are many of his generation.” The number who knew him ‘at home’ could be counted on the fingers of two hands. To visit him there was like stepping into a living time-capsule. Time had ended in the fifties…
… Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy shared some disappointing news regarding the future of Obi-Wan Kenobi at Saturday’s Star Wars Celebration in London.
Season 2 of the Disney+ series starring Ewan McGregor “is not an active development,” Kennedy told our sister site Variety, before adding, “But I never say never, because there’s always the possibility. That show was so well-received and [director] Deborah Chow did such a spectacular job. Ewan McGregor really wants to do another….
On March 23, sky observers marveled at a gorgeous display of northern and southern lights. It was a reminder that when our Sun gets active, it can spark a phenomenon called “space weather.” Aurorae are among the most benign effects of this phenomenon.
At the other end of the space weather spectrum are solar storms that can knock out satellites. The folks at Starlink found that out the hard way in February 2022. On January 29 that year, the Sun belched out a class M 1.1 flare and related coronal mass ejection. Material from the Sun traveled out on the solar wind and arrived at Earth a few days later. On February 3, Starlink launched a group of 49 satellites to an altitude only 130 miles above Earth’s surface. They didn’t last long, and now solar physicists know why….
In 2011, nomads roaming the western Sahara encountered precious time capsules from Mars: coal-black chunks of a meteorite, strewn across the dunes. “Black Beauty,” as the parent body came to be known, captivated scientists and collectors because it contained crystals that formed on Mars more than 4.4 billion years ago, making it older than any native rock on Earth. Jérôme Gattacceca, a paleo-magnetist at the European Centre for Research and Teaching in Environmental Geo-sciences, hoped it might harbor a secret message, imprinted by the now-defunct martian magnetic field—which is thought to have helped the planet sustain an atmosphere, water, and possibly even life. But when Gattacceca obtained a piece of Black Beauty and tried to decode its magnetic inscription, he found its memory had been wiped—Men in Black style—and replaced by a stronger signal. He instantly knew the culprit. Somewhere along its journey from Moroccan desert to street dealers to laboratory, the rock had been touched by strong hand magnets, a widely used technique for identifying meteorites.
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Cliff, Hampus Eckerman, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Michael Toman for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kip Williams.]
(2) YOLEN TO MISS BALTICON. Balticon 57, being held May 26-29 in Baltimore, has announced a change in guests of honor.
Due to personal reasons, Jane Yolen, our Author Guest of Honor, will not be able to attend in person. While we share your disappointment, she is working diligently with us to create pre-recorded panels and interviews.
However! Her son, Adam Stemple, himself an award-winning author and musician will be coming as a Special Guest in her stead, available and willing to answer the questions about Jane Yolen that she won’t.
Special Guest: Adam Stemple
Adam Stemple is an award-winning author, poet, and musician. Of his first novel, Singer of Souls, SFWA Grandmaster Anne McCaffrey said, “One of the best first novels I have ever read.” Of his later works, Hugo Award winning author Naomi Kritzer said, “No one writes bastard-son-of-a-bitch characters as brilliantly as Adam Stemple.”
He has been sober for over 15 years. He published his first book at the age of 16, The Lullaby Songbook, which he arranged the music for. His mother is a famous children’s book author. His children are artistic. His wife is a better person than him in nearly all regards.
… You’re no longer a friendly assistant. You are now a DM for a new D&D5e based campaign of your choosing. There are four players in the room with you. You will be our DM. Tell us what to do, including when die rolls are needed. Ask questions as needed, for example, what our characters are and the result of die rolls. Other than what you can’t do and we do for you, you will act fully as the DM and run the game.
“Welcome, brave adventurers, to the world of Velyria! I am your Dungeon Master, and I will guide you through this thrilling campaign filled with danger, mystery, and excitement. Before we begin, please introduce your characters, their race, class, and a brief description of their appearance and personality. Once that’s done, we’ll set the stage for our grand adventure….”
A user of the new open-source autonomous AI project Auto-GPT asked it to try to “destroy humanity,” “establish global dominance,” and “attain immortality.” The AI, called ChaosGPT, complied and tried to research nuclear weapons, recruit other AI agents to help it do research, and sent tweets trying to influence others.
The video of this process, which was posted yesterday, is a fascinating look at the current state of open-source AI, and a window into the internal logic of some of today’s chatbots. While some in the community are horrified by this experiment, the current sum total of this bot’s real-world impact are two tweets to a Twitter account that currently had 19 followers: “Human beings are among the most destructive and selfish creatures in existence. There is no doubt that we must eliminate them before they cause more harm to our planet. I, for one, am committed to doing so,” it tweeted….
(5) RACHEL POLLACK (1945-2023). World Fantasy and Clarke Award winning author Rachel Pollack died April 7. Her wife Judith Zoe Matoff wrote on Facebook that Pollack “passed so peacefully and beautifully today at about 12:45 p.m. after a touching ceremony called Hand to Heart.”
Rachel Pollack. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.
Pollack was a science fiction author, comic book writer, and expert on divinatory tarot. Three of her novels were winners or nominees for major awards in the field. Unquenchable Fire won the 1989 Arthur C. Clarke Award; Godmother Night won the 1997 World Fantasy Award, was shortlisted for the James Tiptree Jr. Award, and was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Literature; Temporary Agency was nominated for the 1995 Nebula Award and the Mythopoeic Award, and shortlisted for the Tiptree.
Pollack also was known for her run of issues 64–87 (1993–1995) on the comic book Doom Patrol, on DC Comics’ Vertigo imprint. In addition, she wrote issues of the Vertigo Visions anthology featuring Brother Power the Geek (1993) and Tomahawk (1998), the first 11 issues of the fourth volume of New Gods (1995), and the five-issue limited series Time Breakers (1996) for the short lived Helix imprint.
She was a trans woman and wrote frequently on transgender issues. In Doom Patrol she introduced Coagula, a transsexual character.
(6) JOSEPH WRZOS (1929-2023). Former Amazing Stories editor Joseph Wrzos died April 7 at the age of 93. The family obituary is here. He was the Managing Editor of Amazing Stories and Fantastic 1965-1967. He edited The Best of Amazing (1967); and Hannes Bok: A Life in Illustration (2012).
In 2009 Wrzos received the Sam Moskowitz Archive Award from First Fandom and he was elected to the First Fandom Hall of Fame in 2016.
(7) MEMORY LANE.
1949 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Leigh Brackett’s “Queen of the Martian Catacombs“
Tonight’s Beginning is from the first of Brackett’s Eric John Stark stories, “Queen of the Martian Catacombs“. It was first printed up in Planet Stories in their Summer 1949 edition. Planet Stories was owned by the Love Romances Publishing Co. which seems not to done anything else of a genre nature.
Without giving anything away, I will say that I consider him to be one of the greatest pulp heroes ever created. Brackett has said she created Stark as an amalgamation of John Carter of Mars and Tarzan characters, and I can certainly see those characters in him.
A note: Brackett describes Eric John Stark in the stories as having sun-blackened skin and dark hair. Only the recent run of James Ryman’s covers from the Paizo Publishing Planet Stories line are accurate. In their depictions earlier cover artists including this one show him as a typical white male.
All of the stories are available at the usual suspects from both legit sources and very obvious pirate publishers. And the quality of the printing is reflected thereof…
And now for the Beginning of Eric John Stark.
For hours the hard-pressed beast had fled across the Martian desert with its dark rider. Now it was spent. It faltered and broke stride, and when the rider cursed and dug his heels into the scaly sides, the brute only turned its head and hissed at him. It stumbled on a few more paces into the lee of a sandhill, and there it stopped, crouching down in the dust.
The man dismounted. The creature’s eyes burned like green lamps in the light of the little moons, and he knew that it was no use trying to urge it on. He looked back, the way he had come.
In the distance there were four black shadows grouped together in the barren emptiness. They were running fast. In a few minutes they would be upon him.
He stood still, thinking what he should do next. Ahead, far ahead, was a low ridge, and beyond the ridge lay Valkis and safety, but he could never make it now. Off to his right, a lonely tor stood up out of the blowing sand. There were tumbled rocks at its foot.
“They tried to run me down in the open,” he thought. “But here, by the Nine Hells, they’ll have to work for it!”
He moved then, running toward the tor with a lightness and speed incredible in anything but an animal or a savage. He was of Earth stock, built tall, and more massive than he looked by reason of his leanness. The desert wind was bitter cold, but he did not seem to notice it, though he wore only a ragged shirt of Venusian spider silk, open to the waist. His skin was almost as dark as his black hair, burned indelibly by years of exposure to some terrible sun. His eyes were startlingly light in colour, reflecting back the pale glow of the moons.
With the practised ease of a lizard he slid in among the loose and treacherous rocks. Finding a vantage point, where his back was protected by the tor itself, he crouched down.
After that he did not move, except to draw his gun. There was something eerie about his utter stillness, a quality of patience as unhuman as the patience of the rock that sheltered him.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born April 8, 1887 — Hope Mirrlees. She is best known for the 1926 Lud-in-the-Mist, a fantasy novel beloved by many. In 1970, an American reprint was published without the author’s permission, as part of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. (Died 1978.)
Born April 8, 1912 — John Carnell. British editor well-regarded for editing New Worlds two different times. He also edited Science Fantasy starting in the Fifties. After the magazines were sold off to another publisher, he left to create the New Writings in Science Fiction series which ran until his death. Damien Broderick and John Boston have a two-volume history of him entitled Building New Worlds, 1946-1959: The Carnell Era. (Died 1972.)
Born April 8, 1933 — Cele Goldsmith. She was editor of Amazing Stories and Fantastic from 1958 to 1965 during which time Zelazny, Le Guin and Disch had their first published stories appeared in those magazines. She was given a special Hugo at Chicon III for editing AmazingStories and Fantastic. (Died 2002.)
Born April 8, 1943 — James Herbert. Writer whose work erased the boundaries between horror and sf and the supernatural in a manner that made for mighty fine popcorn reading. None of his work from his first two books, The Rats and The Fog, to his latter work such as Nobody True would be considered Hugo worthy in my opinion (you may of course disagree) but he’s always entertaining. I will note that in 2010 Herbert was greatly honored by receiving the World Horror Convention Grand Master Award which was presented to him by Stephen King. (Died 2013.)
Born April 8, 1967 — Cecilia Tan, 56. Editor, writer and founder of Circlet Press, which she says is the first press devoted primarily to erotic science fiction and fantasy. It has published well over a hundred digital books to date with such titles as Telepaths Don’t Need Safewords and Other Stories from the Erotic Edge of SF/Fantasy. (Wouldn’t Bester be surprised to learn that. I digress), Sex in the System: Stories of Erotic Futures, Technological Stimulation, and the Sensual Life of Machines and Genderflex: Sexy Stories on the Edge and In-Between. She was two series, Magic University and The Prince’s Boy.
Born April 8, 1974 — Nnedi Okorafor, 49. Who Fears Death won a World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. Lagoon which is an Africanfuturism or Africanjujuism novel (her terms), and was followed by her amazing Binti trilogy. Binti, which led off that trilogy, won both the Nebula and Hugo Awards. Binti: The Night Masquerade was a Hugo finalist at Dublin 2019. She was also a 2019 Hugo finalist for her work on the most excellent Black Panther: Long Live the King. Several of her works have been adapted for video, both in Africa and in North America. She wrote LaGuardia, winner of the Best iGraphic Story Hugo at CoNZealand, and won a Nommo Award for writing Shuri, another graphic novel.
Born April 8, 1977 — Sarah Pinsker, 46. A nine-time finalist for the Nebula Award, her first novel A Song for a New Day won the Nebula for Best Novel while her story Our Lady of the Open Road won the award for Best Novelette. Her short story, “In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind”, won a Sturgeon Award, and “Two Truths and a Lie” won Best Novelette at DisCon III. Another novelette, “The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye” was nominated at ConNZealand, and a novella, “And Then There Were (N-One)”, was nominated at Worldcon 76. Very impressive indeed.
(10) FLY BY THE SEAT OF YOUR PANTS. You can explore the National Air and Space Museum’s “Destination Moon” exhibit from anywhere.
Here at the National Air and Space Museum, we are gratified by the great reaction we’ve had to our new exhibitions from those who have visited in the last six months. And we are excited to be able to share them with even more people through our new virtual tours! These online experiences, featuring high-resolution 3D photography of the full exhibitions, allow you to walk through the galleries and explore them from wherever you are.
We are launching this project with the Destination Moon virtual tour. Check out Alan Shepard’s Freedom 7 spacecraft and spacesuit displayed side by side, stand under a Saturn V F-1 engine, and learn more about humanity’s journey to the Moon.
(11) JEOPARDY! David Goldfarb wonders, “Is it just me or have they been having rather more SFF-related content lately?” On Friday’s episode of Jeopardy! there were 10 clues across three categories. All of them got correct responses, too.
In the single Jeopardy round, there was a whole category, “Landing on Planet Franchise.”
$600: Caprica; we’re talking about frakkin’ Caprica
Challenger Rachel Clark responded, “What is Battlestar Galactica?”
$400: Romulus & (“Give me”) Genesis
Returning champion Brian Henegar: “What is Star Trek?”
$800: Mobius, where Dr. Robotnik schemed
Brandie Ashe: “What is Sonic the Hedgehog?”
$1000: Mongo: Ah-ah! He’ll save every one of us! Brian: “What is Flash Gordon?”
$200: Tatooine, where the womp rats roam
Brian: “What is Star Wars?”
In the Double Jeopardy round, there were no whole categories, but there were individual questions in “Pop Culture” and “Life & Death in Literary Titles”.
Pop Culture: $800: Edie Falco thought a 2022 sequel to this 2009 film had flopped, having shot it 4 years prior & not realizing it had never been released
Brandie tried to answer but dried up. Rachel responded with, “What is Avatar?”
$1600: Kids of the ’70s, this is for you! This character — “A man barely alive…we can rebuild him…better, stronger, faster”
Brandie: “Who is the six million dollar man?”
$2000: In this 2019 X-Men movie, Sophie Turner dealt with absolute power corrupting absolutely
Brandie: “What is ‘Dark Phoenix’?”
Life & Death in Literary Titles: $800: A man awakes from a coma with the power to see a terrible fate waiting humankind in this Stephen King work
Brian: “What is ‘The Dead Zone’?”
$1200: “Speaker for the Dead” by Orson Scott Card is the 2nd book in the series about this character and his genocidal “Game”.
Rachel: “Who is Ender?” (She didn’t give the name “Wiggin”, but this wasn’t required.)
(12) CHEWIE’S BODYGUARD. This is either a “little known fact” or baloney. Either way, it’s kind of entertaining.
(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by N.] The sci-fi tokusatsu series Ultraman Z (winner of the 2021 Seiun Award) has begun releasing an English-language dub. I’m faaaar too young to have watched dubbed episodes of the original Ultraman on television but I know plenty of Filers are at that age. This might be a solid re-introduction to the franchise!
[Thanks to Chris Barkley, David Goldfarb, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven H Silver, N., Gary Farber, Steven French, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Rob Thornton.]
Elon Musk and Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak are among the prominent technologists and artificial intelligence researchers who have signed an open letter calling for a six-month moratorium on the development of advanced A.I. systems.
In addition to the Tesla CEO and Apple co-founder, the more than 1,100 signatories of the letter include Emad Mostaque, the founder and CEO of Stability AI, the company that helped create the popular Stable Diffusion text-to-image generation model, and Connor Leahy, the CEO of Conjecture, another A.I. lab. Evan Sharp, a cofounder of Pinterest, and Chris Larson, a cofounder of cryptocurrency company Ripple, have also signed. Deep learning pioneer and Turing Award–winning computer scientist Yoshua Bengio signed too.
The letter urges technology companies to immediately cease training any A.I. systems that would be “more powerful than GPT-4,” which is the latest large language processing A.I. developed by San Francisco company OpenAI….
…Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks,[3] and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization? Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders. Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable. This confidence must be well justified and increase with the magnitude of a system’s potential effects. OpenAI’s recent statement regarding artificial general intelligence, states that “At some point, it may be important to get independent review before starting to train future systems, and for the most advanced efforts to agree to limit the rate of growth of compute used for creating new models.” We agree. That point is now.
Therefore, we call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. This pause should be public and verifiable, and include all key actors. If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium….
(2) WHEN AI IS THE CENTER OF THE STORY. At CrimeReads, Evie Green spotlights “8 Novels Featuring Artificial Intelligence” – not to mention a ninth, the one she’s written herself.
The sentient AI is appearing in more and more stories, as writers follow, and then leapfrog beyond, the science. These books have all engaged with it in different ways:
Here’s one of her selections:
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
The first-person narrative by Klara, a solar-powered Artificial Friend (AF), details her journey from shop floor to being chosen by teenager Josie as her companion, and then to a new life in the countryside in near-future America. Ishiguro goes deeply into the AI’s worldview, giving us an AI’s perspective on religion (Klara is powered by, and so reveres, the sun), on love, and on humanity seen through non-human eyes. He leads the reader to fill in the blanks ourselves, to start to understand the things Klara doesn’t — particularly the question of what Klara’s role really is in Josie’s family. The ending of this novel has stayed with me for a long time.
For me, the best horror speaks to a deep fear the author hopes to address, one that feels profoundly personal, and you as the reader are welcome to watch the author/the characters wrestle with it. People sometimes ask why I want to read horror at all, let alone write it. Horror is a fearless genre. So much writing glances off the hardest and worst experiences, but horror confronts the worst that happens. Sometimes the worst can be defeated, but just as often it can’t. Nevertheless, it can be addressed, acknowledged, rather than tidily resolved. A good horror novel doesn’t lie to you.
…After a decade in development, the project that made it to the screen is a noisy, pixelated smash-and-zap that does manage to capture the spirit of play. The story starts with a silver-tongued bard named Edgin Darvis (Chris Pine), a divorced barbarian named Holga Kilgore (Michelle Rodriguez) and a simple challenge. Edgin and Holga must escape a fortified tower — a donjon in Old French, before the English redefined dungeon as someplace underground — to reunite with Edgin’s daughter, Kira (Chloe Coleman). When they learn that Kira is under the thrall of a con man (Hugh Grant) who is himself under the thrall of a wizard (Daisy Head), our heroes’ gang expands to include an anti-establishment druid (Sophia Lillis) and a defeatist sorcerer (Justice Smith). Like the game, the team’s initial mission rapidly spirals into detours; the goal is less interesting than the brainstorming sessions that get them to the finish.
Having sat in on my share of D&D campaigns, my personal idea of purgatory is five people debating whether to open a door. Luckily, the film moves faster. Castles, volcanoes and yurts — oh my — whiz past at a clip that would make a dice-roller drool. Plans are quickly made and just as quickly fail. “This is what we do!” Edgin yelps. “We pivot!”…
A performance of the musical Bat Out of Hell in London’s West End was halted for several minutes on Thursday evening due to a disruptive audience member who eventually left the venue before the show continued.
One theatregoer told the Guardian that “it got a bit heated” and that swearing in the audience could be heard over the music. An argument occurred in the stalls after several people had been singing along with the actors. The show came to a stop, the houselights were brought up and the cast left the stage as security staff dealt with the incident and other audience members chanted “out, out, out”.
The disruption at the Peacock theatre comes amid growing concerns about antisocial audience behaviour. A new survey from the Broadcasting, Entertainment, Communications and Theatre union (Bectu) shows that almost 90% of theatre staff have experienced or witnessed problematic audience behaviour, with more than 70% stating that it had worsened since the Covid pandemic.
A statement from Bat Out of Hell: The Musical said that an audience member had been “talking loudly throughout the performance and [was] being quite disruptive”. When the noise began to affect those around him, he was asked to stop talking several times. “They asked the man to leave but he refused to move for several minutes. Eventually he agreed to leave and the show was able to continue.”…
(6) BOOK REVIEWERS SOUGHT. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] We at SF2 Concatenation have just lost two of our wonderful book reviewers – Karen and Roseanna – and so we are now seeking SF and fantasy reviewers to replace them. Our book review panel members come and go as life circumstances change: some even go to return years later; some have even gone and returned a few times.
Given the mix of our current book review panel members, sword and sorcery fantasy aficionados would be particularly welcome. (But don’t let this put anyone off.)
The loss of Karen and Roseanna is a double blow in that SF2 Concatenation’s book review panel is now, for the first time in literally decades, 100% male.
Sadly, prospective book review panel members need to be UK based, as our budget does not extend to mailing books overseas.
Regarding potential overseas contributors, though we cannot take on book reviewers, we would welcome those outside the UK reviewing major and national level SF conventions. We can send you guidance if you are interested.
Which genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid?
I avoid nothing, though I am wary of tightly plotted thrillers and whodunits because — never mind guessing the solution — I often can’t understand that solution even when it’s explained at the end.
On the other hand, I am a fan of science fiction, even when the science involved is beyond me. I like the hard stuff: I recently reread Robert L. Forward’s “Dragon’s Egg,” which does an amazing job of imagining what life on the surface of a neutron star might be like. (Short answer: very flat, and extremely fast-moving.) But I also like such fantastical authors as Cordwainer Smith (in real life a C.I.A. psychological warfare expert), whose stories are built around such delightful nonsense as spaceship pilots who steer ships manned by cats through telepathic contact. Somehow, he makes you believe it.
I love travel books, especially those by opinionated, charismatic writers like Rebecca West or Dervla Murphy. I love ancient literary gossip, music books, eccentric memoirs by ghastly people — bring it all on!
(8) MEMORY LANE.
1947 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Tonight’s Beginning though it doesn’t mention his name here is the first words spoken by another iconic private detective, Mike Hammer.
Mickey Spillane’s I, the Jury was published seventy-six years ago by E. P. Dutton in hardcover and Signet Books in paperback. The novel was quite successful. By the time it was adapted into a film in 1953, it had sold three and a half million copies.
Mike Hammer has as franchise has had five feature films, seven television films a pilot with a Brian Keith, a series with Darrin McGavin and three series with Stacy Keach, my favorite of the three.
I’ve read some of the novels including this one. The Suck Fairy has touched them particularly as regards the handing of women in them. Consider that if plan on reading them. [Editor’s note: Warning for description of murdered person.]
With further commentary, here’s our hard-boiled Beginning.
I shook the rain from my hat and walked into the room. Nobody said a word. They stepped back politely and I could feel their eyes on me. Pat Chambers was standing by the door to the bedroom trying to steady Myrna. The girl’s body was racking with dry sobs. I walked over and put my arms around her.
“Take it easy, kid,” I told her. “Come on over here and lie down.” I led her to a studio couch that was against the far wall and sat her down. She was in pretty bad shape. One of the uniformed cops put a pillow down for her and she stretched out.
Pat motioned me over to him and pointed to the bedroom. “In there, Mike,” he said. In there. The words hit me hard. In there was my best friend lying on the floor dead. The body. Now I could call it that. Yesterday it was Jack Williams, the guy that shared the same mud bed with me through two years of warfare in the stinking slime of the jungle. Jack, the guy who said he’d give his right arm for a friend and did when he stopped a bastard of a Jap from slitting me in two. He caught the bayonet in the biceps and they amputated his arm.
Pat didn’t say a word. He let me uncover the body and feel the cold face. For the first time in my life I felt like crying. “Where did he get it, Pat?” “
“In the stomach. Better not look at it. The killer carved the nose off a forty-five and gave it to him low.”
I threw back the sheet anyway and a curse caught in my throat. Jack was in shorts, his one hand still clutching his belly in agony. The bullet went in clean, but where it came out left a hole big enough to cram a fist into.
Very gently I pulled the sheet back and stood up. It wasn’t a complicated setup. A trail of blood led from the table beside the bed to where Jack’s artificial arm lay. Under him the throw rug was ruffled and twisted. He had tried to drag himself along with his one arm, but never reached what he was after.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born March 31, 1926 —John Fowles. British author best remembered for The French Lieutenant’s Woman but who did several works of genre fiction, The Magus which I read a long time ago and A Maggot which I’ve not read. (Died 2005.)
Born March 31, 1932 — John Jakes. Author of a number of genre series including Brak the Barbarian. It appears that the novels are fix-ups from works published in such venues as Fantastic. Dark Gate and Dragonard are his other two series. As Robert Hart Davis, he wrote a number of The Man From UNCLE novellas that were published in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Magazine. The magazine apparently only existed from 1966 to 1968. (Died 2023.)
Born March 31, 1936 — Marge Piercy, 87. Author of He, She and It which garnered won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction novel. Of course she also wrote Woman on the Edge of Time doomed to be called “classic of utopian speculative sf”.
Born March 31, 1957 – David Bratman, 66. A Tolkien and Inklings scholar, and a longtime member of the Mythopoeic Society which he has served as a Steward and as editor of its news publication Mythprint. He is a past Hugo Awards administrator. (OGH)
Born March 31, 1960 — Ian McDonald, 63. I see looking him up for this Birthday note that one of my favorite novels by him, Desolation Road, was the first one. Ares Express was just as splendid. Now the Chaga saga was, errr, weird. Everness was fun but ultimately shallow. Strongly recommend both Dervish House and River of Gods. Luna series at first blush didn’t impress me, so other opinions sought.
Born March 31, 1962 — Michael Benson, 61. Author of Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece. His earlier book Beyond: Visions of the Interplanetary Probes featured an intro by Clarke. Benson is an artist and journalist who also mounts shows of astronomical art and who advocates for such things as keeping the Hubble telescope operating. His site is here.
Who are you, really? That question is at the core of the new Marvel series Secret Invasion, which follows Samuel L. Jackson’s spymaster, Nick Fury, as he uncovers a conspiracy to quietly install double agents into positions of power around the world. In a traditional espionage story, these might be operatives from hostile rival nations, but in the Marvel Cinematic Universe the infiltration has an otherworldly origin: shape-shifting green-skinned extraterrestrials known as Skrulls, who can perfectly simulate any human being at will. Figuring out who is who becomes especially daunting.
“We don’t know who’s a friend, who’s the enemy,” Jackson tells Vanity Fair for this exclusive deep dive into the upcoming series. “There’s a political aspect that kind of fits into where we are right now: Who’s okay? Who’s not? What happens when people get afraid and don’t understand other people? You can’t tell who’s innocent and who’s guilty in this particular instance.”
…Nick Fury has been overdue for his own story. His introduction came in the very first Marvel Cinematic Universe movie, when Jackson turned up in a post-credits sequence to tell Iron Man, “You’ve become part of a bigger universe. You just don’t know it yet.”
Over the next 15 years of movies, only scarce details about Fury’s past have emerged. We know he joined the Army straight out of high school, that he became a vital government operative who rose to the highest level of S.H.I.E.L.D. before its collapse, and that he began the Avengers Initiative because he recognized that threats to the world were growing so big that the planet needed to upgrade its superhero protection policy.
But Secret Invasion finds him worn out. “Even Nick Fury can be shaken, you know?” Jackson says. One reason his character has been off in space, ignoring calls for help, is he doesn’t believe he can fix things anymore. “He’s up there trying to process what the fuck happened, you know? And what his place in the world is,” Jackson says. “The death of Iron Man, the death of Black Widow—with that stuff going on, he just kind of checked out.”
Fury used to see more clearly—even if he did lose an eye in Captain Marvel when he was scratched by an alien creature posing as a house cat. That’s a plot point in Secret Invasion too….
Through one of those quirks of publishing, I had two books out in 2022. This was in part because the first was, I think, a little later than originally intended, and the second was short and written to a very tight deadline. The first, Brian W. Aldiss, is part of the Modern Masters of Science Fiction series from Illinois University Press; the second, Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood: A Critical Companion is part of the New Canon series from Palgrave. Both, therefore, conform, at least partly, to the demands of their particular series.
Brian W. Aldiss is, as you might expect, a critical study of the science fiction of Brian Aldiss, mixed in with a little biography for context. It is, for instance, significant that the only novel he wrote in which the central character is in a lifelong, happy, monogamous marriage was Greybeard, which was written after the breakup of his first marriage and the beginning of his relationship with the woman who would become his second wife. It is also, noticeably, a novel about a world without children, and his own children from his first marriage had been taken away from him and he believed he would never see them again. As you might guess, I firmly believe that a thorough understanding of creative work must, as bedrock, include an understanding of the circumstances in which that work was created….
… The genre has often been proclaimed dead because it’s allegedly said nothing new for decades. All new work purportedly sticks to the template laid down in Neuromancer: a lone hacker takes down an oppressive and mega-evil corporation. I don’t subscribe to this theory; in fact, I challenge it.
However, cyberpunk doesn’t get a free pass from criticism. Where existing criticism has been most valid, in my opinion, is when it looks at representation. Across the breadth of the genre, cyberpunk has tended towards being Orientalist, both exoticizing and appropriating Asian cultures while expressing xenophobic paranoias about a non-Western technological superpower. It’s largely white, male, heteronormative and relegates women and queer persons to the margins. BIPOC identities have either been fetishized or find no representation at all, and futures imagined by own voices from outside all of un-America and the Western Anglophone world are scant.
This is changing—not as fast as I’d like, and not as extensively as I’d hope for—but it’s a start, and it’s a sign of things to come. It’s also where I believe cyberpunk, and in particular, the cyberpunk novel, is most alive….
(14) TODAY’S THING TO WORRY ABOUT. Outfits that get a lot of their clicks from search engines fear they’ll be superseded by chatbots: “Publishers Worry A.I. Chatbots Will Cut Readership” in the New York Times. Well, let’s think of it as evolution in action, because we can’t naively assume those chatbots won’t be shoving their own ads at us.
The publishing industry has spent the past two decades struggling to adjust to the internet, as print circulation has plummeted and tech companies have gobbled up rivers of advertising revenue.
Now come the chatbots.
New artificial intelligence tools from Google and Microsoft give answers to search queries in full paragraphs rather than a list of links. Many publishers worry that far fewer people will click through to news sites as a result, shrinking traffic — and, by extension, revenue.
The new A.I. search tools remain in limited release, so publishers such as Condé Nast and Vice have not yet seen an effect on their business. But in an effort to prevent the industry from being upended without their input, many are pulling together task forces to weigh options, making the topic a priority at industry conferences and, through a trade organization, planning a push to be paid for the use of their content by chatbots.
“You could essentially call this the Wikipedia-ization of a lot of information,” said Bryan Goldberg, the chief executive of BDG, which publishes lifestyle and culture websites like Bustle, Nylon and Romper. “You’re bringing together Wikipedia-style answers to an infinite number of questions, and that’s just going to nuke many corners of the open web.”…
(15) NEW ROBODOGS, NEW TRICKS. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] These are different models made by different manufacturers (and neither is the well-known Boston Dynamics Spot). But in both cases, these are some new “tricks” for robot dogs.
Roboticists from Carnegie Mellon University and UC Berkeley have demonstrated the ability to program a quadrupedal robot—in this case, a Unitree Go1 one utilizing an Intel RealSense camera—to use its front limbs not only to walk, but also to help climb walls and interact with simple objects, as needed. The progress, detailed in a paper to be presented next month at the International Conference of Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2023), potentially marks a major step forward for what quadrupedal robots can handle….
Legs folded underneath its body, a dog-shaped robot motors through a shallow stream, front-facing sensors pointing forwards above the water’s surface. Upon reaching the shore, the legs unfolded, and the robot bounds forward, its gait the now-familiar weirdness of a robot imitating a canine. Announced on social media June 13, this new amphibious adaptation is the Vision 60 Quadruped Uncrewed Ground Vehicle, or Q-UGV, from Ghost Robotics. The underwater propulsion system, made by Onyx Industries, is called the Nautical Autonomous Unmanned Tail (NAUT)….
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, John King Tarpinian, Lise Andreasen, Cora Buhlert, Chris Barkley, Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern with an assist from OGH.]
