23 Too Much Pixel And No Scroll

Posted on November 30, 2023 by Mike Glyer

(1) THE TIMES THEY ARE A’CHANGIN’. Gabino Iglesias is the new horror columnist for the New York Times. He told told readers on X.com, “It’s a dream come true. Can’t wait to bring you all the horror goodness starting in January. Long live horror.”

(2) LUKYANENKO EVENT AT WORLDCON VENUE. [Item by Ersatz Culture.] Sergey Lukyanenko will appear December 1 in an event at the Worldcon venue.

In the Friday 24th Scroll, it was mentioned that Sergey Lukyanenko would be making four appearances in Chengdu between December 1st and 4th. Today (November 30th) I saw a Weibo announcement indicating there will be an additional event on December 1st; notably, this one takes place at the SF Museum that was the venue for the Worldcon. I think this may be the first time that the museum has been used or open to the public since the con?

There was also a new Weixin/WeChat blog post from his publisher yesterday (Wednesday 29th); curiously this does not mention the event at the SF Museum.

(3) GOLDMAN FUND UPDATE. Dream Foundry reports that they were able to fully fund everyone who applied within the preferred window for the Con or Bust initiative to assist Palestinian creators and fans of speculative fiction in attending the 2024 World Science Fiction Convention.

They still have funds remaining for 2024 and will continue taking applications on a rolling basis. They say –

Don’t self reject! Anyone who is a citizen of Palestine or a member of the Palestinian diaspora qualifies and is encouraged to apply.

Applications for the 2025 Worldcon will open in summer of 2024.

(4) FURIOSA TRAILER. The first official trailer has dropped for Furiosa : A Mad Max Saga.

Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth star in Academy Award-winning mastermind George Miller’s “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” the much-anticipated return to the iconic dystopian world he created more than 30 years ago with the seminal “Mad Max” films. Miller now turns the page again with an all-new original, standalone action adventure that will reveal the origins of the powerhouse character from the multiple Oscar-winning global smash “Mad Max: Fury Road.” The new feature from Warner Bros. Pictures and Village Roadshow Pictures is produced by Miller and his longtime partner, Oscar-nominated producer Doug Mitchell (“Mad Max: Fury Road,” “Babe”), under their Australian-based Kennedy Miller Mitchell banner. As the world fell, young Furiosa is snatched from the Green Place of Many Mothers and falls into the hands of a great Biker Horde led by the Warlord Dementus. Sweeping through the Wasteland, they come across the Citadel presided over by The Immortan Joe. While the two Tyrants war for dominance, Furiosa must survive many trials as she puts together the means to find her way home.

(5) A GOOD TONGUELASHING. “Adam Sandler’s ‘Leo’: A Crotchety Old Lizard Helping Kids Be Kids” at Animation World Network.

Hitting Netflix [on November 21] is Leo, a clever and charming coming-of-age animated musical comedy starring noted actor and comedian Adam Sandler as a curmudgeonly 74-year-old iguana, stuck living for decades in an elementary school class terrarium, who plots his escape – complete with an odd bucket list – after learning he only has one year to live. At the same time, he can’t help but offer friendly advice to a bunch of kids who each must take him home for a weekend, only to discover – and swear to keep secret – that he can talk…

… The idea for the film gestated with Sandler for eight years. “Basically, I had the idea of looking at an elementary school graduation, almost like in Grease, the kids’ last year of elementary school, and how you’re moving on to the big leagues after that,” he shares. “And me and my friend, Paul Sado, were working on that idea. And then I told Robert Smigel about it, and he said, ‘What about if you do it that year, but through the eyes of a class pet that’s been involved in that grade forever?’ And we got excited, and that’s when everything got flowing.”…

(6) PAGE-TURNER. Jay of Tar Vol On posted an extra-large magazine review this month, with thoughts on 35 different works of short SFF and a little bit of related non-fiction. “Tar Vol Reads a Magazine: November 2023”.

… the piece that inspired me to pick up this issue [of Asimov’s] in the first place: “Berb by Berb” by Ray Nayler. This story is connected to some of his other work that I haven’t yet read, but it makes an acceptable standalone, delivering a heartfelt tale of one person trying to do the best they can in a world that has gone to pieces around them. It’s a theme Nayler returns to often, and it makes for a good read every time. ..

(7) HOME IS THE SPACEMAN. Neil Clarke tells about his adventures at the Chengdu Worldcon in his Clarkesworld editorial, “This Would Have Been Longer”. He was impressed by how many children were at the con, and participated in the Hugo ceremony.

…Oh! That’s me up there with “little astronaut” after unexpectedly winning the Hugo Award for Best Editor Short Form. Those are two of the hosts of the event on the left and the gentleman on the right is convention Co-Chair Chen Shi, who presented the category. I actually had a speech written this time, but in the moment, I opted to abandon it and try to speak from what I was feeling instead. Probably not the brightest thing to do, but I wanted to say something to the kids watching now or later. I let them know that I was once like them and never believed that I would someday be up on this stage accepting an award I considered the domain of my childhood heroes. I told them that I hoped to be in the audience and watch them win one someday. I encouraged them to try, told them it wasn’t easy and that people might tell them it wasn’t possible . . . but it is.

After the ceremony, I was whisked off to do interviews. They had maybe two dozen reporters from a variety of outlets present and asking questions. It kept me from enjoying part of the after party with friends, but how often does a Hugo winner get that kind of attention? I understood and appreciated the novelty of it, and besides, they weren’t asking me about AI, so that’s progress, right?…

(8) YOU’VE HEARD HER WORK. [Item by Steven French.] “Jane Horrocks: ‘I’d love to be a baddie in a Tarantino movie’”, so she told the Guardian. Horrocks voices Babs, one of the chickens in Chicken Run and also starred with Anjelica Huston in Jim Henson’s film of Roald Dahl’s The Witches.

When did you discover you had an amazing voice? chargehand
From starting impersonations, really. My first impersonation was Julie Andrews when I got The Sound of Music album when I was nine. I fell in love with sounding like Julie. My mum and dad were massively into Shirley Bassey and I found I could impersonate her and Barbra Streisand. That’s when I started to realise that utilising my voice was going to be a good thing for me. It’s brought me a lot of pleasure, and I’ve made people laugh, which is great.

(9) NEW TO U.N.I.T. A disabled character is featured in the latest episode of Doctor Who. The actress discusses her role with Radio Times. Beware spoilers, maybe; I’m not sure.

“She is just so fun and feisty and ballsy – she’s just so much fun to play,” Doctor Who star Ruth Madeley says of her character Shirley Anne Bingham. “I’d love to be more like Shirley in my real life, I have got nowhere near that much cool in me!”

Madeley made her spectacular on-screen Doctor Who debut in The Star Beast as UNIT’s 56th scientific advisor. In the space of the 57-minute special, she got David Tennant’s Doctor out of some very sticky situations – and took absolutely none of his nonsense.

“Overall she is not overly impressed by anyone or anything, which I love about her because I am the complete opposite. That’s really fun to play,” Madeley tells RadioTimes.com….

(10) WHO PREVIEW. “Doctor Who debuts new scene from next episode Wild Blue Yonder” at Radio Times.

The veil of secrecy surrounding the next episode of Doctor Who, Wild Blue Yonder, is slowing beginning to lift, with the BBC dropping a first-look clip….

… In the new clip, Donna is left panicked when the TARDIS disappears, with the Doctor promising to return her home to her daughter Rose. But it appears someone – or something – is watching them……

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born November 30, 1906 — John Dickson Carr. (Died 1977.) As you know, we don’t do just sff genre Birthdays here and so it is that we have here one of my favorite mystery writers, John Dickson Carr. Indeed I’m listening to The Hollow Man, one of his Gideon Fell mysteries.

He who wrote some of the best British mysteries ever done was himself not British being American. Oh the horror. He did live there for much of the Thirties and Forties, marrying a British woman.

Dr. Fell, an Englishman, lived in the London suburbs. Carr wrote twenty-seven novels with him as the detective. I’m listening to The Hollow Man because it’s considered one of the best locked room mysteries ever done. Indeed, Dr. Fell’s discourse on locked room mysteries in chapter reprinted as a stand-alone essay in its own right.

All of the Fell novels are wonderful mysteries. The detective himself? Think a beer drinking Nero Wolfe who’s a lot more outgoing. Almost all of the novels concern his unraveling of locked room mysteries or what he calls impossible crimes. Of these novels, I’ve read quite a number and they’re all excellent.

Now let’s talk about Sir Henry Merrivale who created by Carter Dickson, a pen name of John Dickson Carr. (Not sure why he bothered with such a thinly-veiled pen name though.) Merrivale was like Fell an amateur detective who started who being serious but, and I’m not fond of the later novels for this, become terribly comic in the later novels. Let me note that Carr was really prolific as there were twenty-two novels with him starting in the Thirties over a thirty-year period. One of the finest is The White Priory Murders which was a Wodehousian country weekend with yet another locked room mystery in it.

He also, as did other writers of British mysteries, created a French detective, one by the name of Henri Bencolin, a magistrate in the Paris judicial system. (Though I’ve not mentioned it, all of his mysteries are set in the Twenties onward.) Carr interestingly has an American writer Jeff Marle narrating the stories here and he describes Bencolin as looking and feeling Satanic. His methods are certainly not those of the other two detectives as he’s quite rough when need be to get a case solved.

There are but four short stories and five novels of which I think The Last Gallows is the best.

With Adrian Conan Doyle, the youngest son of Arthur Conan Doyle, Carr wrote some Sherlock Holmes stories that were published in The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes collection. Not in-print but used copies available reasonably from the usual suspects.

He was also chosen by the estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1949 to write the biography of the writer. That work, The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is in-print in a trade paper edition.

(12) COMICS SECTION.

The Far Side shows space invaders with really bad luck.

(13) ARTILLERY AND JOSEPHINE. Haley Zapal is the first reviewer I’ve seen who is genuinely enthusiastic about Ridley Scott’s Napoleon. Find out why in “Review: Napoleon” at Nerds of a Feather.

…The scenes where men and horses fall into the water are brilliant and artistic. There are things in Napoleon that I definitely have never seen before, and that’s wild considering director Scott is nearing 90. There is also absolutely brutal gore that makes Saving Private Ryan seem like Hogan’s Heroes….

(14) IT’S WASHED. Applause to Arturo Serrano for being one of the rare folk reviewing The Marvels who talks about the movie instead of its box office. But he’s no fan of the movie either: he rates “On the woes of ‘The Marvels’” only 5on a scale of 10 at Nerds of a Feather.

Someone at Marvel Studios should have pointed out that being simultaneously a sequel to WandaVision, Captain Marvel, Ms. Marvel and Secret Invasion and providing two sequel teases was too much weight to load onto the shoulders of one movie. But we’ve played this tune before: Marvel movies are doomed to be mere links in a neverending chain, each forgettable villain is just there to get the pieces in position for the next entry, what you see isn’t most of what the director intended, and so on. To keep going to theaters for a Marvel movie is by now a thoughtless habit, like grabbing one more potato chip when you know you’re full….

(15) IT’S COLD OUTSIDE. The New York Times covers “A Video Game That Doubles as a World War I History Lesson”. “Last Train Home tells an overlooked story of the Czechoslovak Legion’s evacuation across Russia in the embers of the Great War.”

… Foregrounding historical accuracy was a priority for Ashborne’s first original game, Last Train Home, which retells the Legion’s rolling evacuation eastward across Russia in the embers of the war. Its journey for homebound ships at the port of Vladivostok was tangled in Russia’s internal conflict between Bolshevik and anti-Bolshevik armies….

…Jos Hoebe, the founder of BlackMill Games and a longtime producer of World War I shooters, said video game developers had a responsibility to get details correct, especially when a particular battle or event has few depictions in popular culture. For his games, Hoebe digests historical documents in an attempt to understand the average soldier and shed light on overlooked aspects of combat.

“It feels like we’re responsible for creating the image that people have of this theater of war,” Hoebe said.

Last Train Home is a real-time strategy game in which the player orders specialized squads around rural battlefields. Scouts clear the fog of war, riflemen charge at enemies — usually the Bolshevik Red Army — and medics heal wounds. Another significant portion of the game is managing the armored train and exhausted infantry while fighting disease, starvation and the cruel Siberian cold…..

(16) THE DOOR INTO WINTER. Here’s an interesting artifact at Fullerton Arms Ballintoy: Giant’s Causeway North Coast Guesthouse and Restaurant in Ireland.

In 2016, Storm Gertrude ripped up some centuries-old beeches from the avenue known as Dark Hedges, (familiar to Game of Thrones fans as the Kingsroad). Ten doors, fashioned from the fallen trees, were carved with scenes from the cult TV show and placed in 10 pubs with Thrones connections in Northern Ireland. A fierce dragon embellishes the deep-brown polished door in Ballintoy’s Fullerton Arms. From the pub, it’s 20 minutes’ walk down a dramatic winding road to the cliff-ringed harbour, used to film scenes involving Theon Greyjoy in the Iron Islands. The steep climb back up will help build an appetite for the pub’s rope-grown mussels or seafood chowder, and Northern Irish specialities such as champ (mash with spring onions).
Doubles from £60 B&B

(17) NONE DARE CALL IT “LIP-SYNCHING”. A ventriloquist and his dummy sing “’Time Warp’ from The Rocky Horror Picture Show”.

“Time Warp” from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a song by Nell Campbell, Patricia Quinn, and Richard O’Brien as sung by Terry Fator and Walter In this video Terry is singing live without moving his lips, 100% guaranteed!

[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Steven French, John King Tarpinian Chris Barkley, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Hampus Eckerman.]

Pixel Scroll 10/4/23 Way Station Deep In The Big Pixel (And The Big Fool Said To Scroll On)

Posted on October 4, 2023 by Mike Glyer

(1) GOOD NEWS. My mother is back to her usual self and physically has regained enough ground for the doctor to send her home to the skilled nursing facility where she lives. She’ll go back tonight. And it’s hard to break the Scroll habit when I have a couple hours left to work on one!

(2) A LEADER WHO LOOKS TO THE FUTURE. [Item by Danny Sichel.] As a result of the October 3 election, Wab Kinew of Manitoba — winner of the 2022 Aurora Award for Best Young Adult Novel, for his Walking in Two Worlds — has joined the late Julius Vogel of New Zealand in a very exclusive club: SFF authors who are also heads of government. “Wab Kinew becomes Canada’s 1st First Nations premier of a province” CBC Kid News.

(3) FUTURE TENSE. The September entry in the Future Tense Fiction series: is“Little Assistance,” about the first judge on the Moon, by Stephen Harrison, a Slate columnist and lawyer.

The other homesteaders, mostly engineers and technicians, seemed to enjoy outings in the lunar rover. “Joyrides,” they called them. But for Eugene, this was a grinding chore that frayed his nerves. As he trundled across the powdery surface, he recounted a litany of risks: razor-sharp regolith puncturing the tires, a power failure in his EVA suit, a freak meteor hurtling through the chassis …

It was published along with a response essay, “Space law: The commercialization of space is here. International law isn’t prepared” by space law expert Saskia Vermeylen.

(4) A YANK AT OXFORD. Connie Willis has been across the Pond again: “England 2023 – Oxford, Part 1”.

Just got back from a research trip to England. It was great, even though Oxford was experiencing a terrible heat wave, so hot the tour guides were telling people NOT to take the walking tours but to instead go inside one of the museums (even though those weren’t air-conditioned either).

We spent a lot of time in the History of Science Museum, which is most famous for having Einstein’s blackboard, but also has Lawrence of Arabia’s camera, Lewis Carroll’s photographic equipment, and the actual penicillin specimen that Florey and his team worked with when developing the drug during World War II.

Alexander Fleming was the one who’d originally discovered penicillin, but he’d never been able to do anything with it, and it was Howard Florey, Ernst Chain, Margaret Jennings, and other Oxford scientists who developed it into a practical medicine and the “miracle drug” that saved millions of lives during the war, using bedpans and every other container they could find to grow the vast quantities of penicillin needed….

(5) GENIUS GRANTS. The 2023 MacArthur Fellows were announced to me. The descriptions did not indicate to me that any of them have genre connections. Perhaps you will have better luck spotting some.

(6) CROWDFUNDING APPEAL. Fan and former Worldcon chair (1983) Michael Walsh has started a GoFundMe for “Car repair and storage”.

Over the weekend my car died. Got it to the dealer. New battery, starter, and alternator need to be replaced. Doing that leaves no money until mid month.

(7) MOSLEY AND OATES. Andrew Porter took these photos of Walter Mosley and Joyce Carol Oates being interviewed at St. Ann’s Church, Brooklyn Heights, during last weekend’s Brooklyn Book Festival. (You can also see more photos in the Brownstoner’s article about “Literary Crowds at the Brooklyn Book Festival”.)

Walter Mosley, left. Joyce Carol Oates, right. Moderated by Olivia Rutigliano (Editor, *Lit Hub* and *CrimeReads*). Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter

At the Festival, Porter also spotted a copy of this book with its tribute to my friend, the late Fred Patten (1940-2018).

(8) BY KLONO’S BRAZEN BALLS. Did we run this before? Not sure. But no Filer wants to miss a discussion of “How Far Afield Can Sci-Fi and Fantasy ‘Fake Swearing’ Get Before You Feel Uncomfortable?” at The Stopgap.

On the one hand, it is unlikely that three hundred years in the future, a group of space marauders (or six hundred years ago in Ruritania, or on the third 5,000-year resurrection cycle on an alternate Earth that looks suspiciously like the Dalmation Coast) is going to rely on the same profanity as twenty-first-century North Americans. But on the other hand, everything else sounds worse. Unless you’re willing to create an entirely new language with its own complex set of rules, don’t bother coming up with a ten-word vocabulary of invented oaths. The best this can sound is stupid….

(9) MEMORY LANE.

1944 — [Written by Cat Eldridge from a selection by Mike Glyer.]

Fredric Brown is the writer who offers up our Beginning this time. Despite the story that is told of his wife claiming that he hated to write, he would write four novels and somewhere in excess of a hundred short stories and quite a few poems. That really takes dedication to writing, doesn’t it?

So what do I like by him? Martians, Go Home which I think is one of the finest comical SF novels ever done, and I realized that I’d read What Mad Universe a long time ago, it’s quite a fun read. And what I’ve read of his short stories are quite excellent indeed.

So who has read his mysteries? They look like they could be worth an evening or two. I noticed that his first one, The Fabulous Clipjoint, won the Edgar Award for outstanding first mystery novel. Very impressive!

Our Beginning this time is that of his “Arena” short story published in the June 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fiction.

The Star Trek episode called “Arena” had similarities to his story. So who here can tell me what those were? In order to avoid legal entanglements, it was agreed that Brown would receive payment and a story credit.

It is available in the Robert Silverberg edited The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One, 1929-1964 which is available from the usual suspects.

Now our Beginning…

CARSON OPENED HIS EYES, and found himself looking upwards into a flickering blue dimness.

It was hot, and he was lying on sand, and a rock embedded in the sand was hurting his back. He rolled over to his side, off the rock, and then pushed himself up to a sitting position.

‘I’m crazy,’ he thought. ‘Crazy — or dead — or something.’ The sand was blue, bright blue. And there wasn’t any such thing as bright blue sand on Earth or any of the planets. Blue sand under a blue dome that wasn’t the sky nor yet a room, but a circumscribed area — somehow he knew it was circumscribed and finite even though he couldn’t see to the top of it.

He picked up some of the sand in his hand and let it run through his fingers. It trickled down on to his bare leg. Bare?

He was stark naked, and already his body was dripping perspiration from the enervating heat, coated blue with sand wherever sand had touched it. Elsewhere his body was white.

He thought: then this sand is really blue. If it seemed blue only because of the blue light, then I’d be blue also. But I’m white, so the sand is blue. Blue sand: there isn’t any blue sand. There isn’t any place like this place I’m in.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born October 4, 1860 — Sidney Edward Paget. British illustrator of the Victorian era, he’s definitely known for his illustrations that accompanied Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories such as the one in “The Adventure of Silver Blaze” which appeared in The Strand Magazine in December 1892, with the caption “Holmes game me a sketch of the events”. He also illustrated Arthur Morrison’s Martin Hewitt, Investigator, a series of short stories featuring the protagonist, Martin Hewitt, and written down by his good friend, the journalist Brett. These came out after Holmes was killed off, like many similar series. (Died 1908.)
Born October 4, 1904 — Earl Binder. Under the pen name of Eando Binder, he and his brother Otto published SF stories. One series was about a robot named Adam Link. The first such story, published in 1939, is titled “I, Robot”. A collection by Asimov called I, Robot would be published in 1950. The name was selected by the publisher, despite Asimov’s wishes. As Eando Binder, they wrote three SF novels — Enslaved Brains, Dawn to Dusk and Lords of Creation. (Died 1966.)
Born October 4, 1928 — Alvin Toffler. Author of Future Shock and a number of other works that almost no one will recall now. John Brunner named a most excellent novel, The Shockwave Rider, after the premise of Future Shock. (Died 2016.)
Born October 4, 1932 — Ann Thwaite, 91. Author of AA Milne: His Life which won the Whitbread Biography of the Year, as well as The Brilliant Career of Winnie-the Pooh, a scrapbook offshoot of the Milne biography. (And yes, Pooh is genre.) In 2017 she updated her 1990 biography of A.A Milne to coincide with Goodbye Christopher Robin for which she was a consultant.
Born October 4, 1956 — Bill Johnson. His writing was strongly influenced by South Dakota origins. This is particularly true of his “We Will Drink a Fish Together” story which won a Hugo for Best Novelette in 1998. (It got a Nebula nomination as well.) His 1999 collection, Dakota Dreamin, is quite superb. (Died 2022.)
Born October 4, 1975 — Saladin Ahmed, 48. His Black Bolt series, with Christian Ward as the artist, won an Eisner Award for Best New Series and the graphic novel collection, Black Bolt, Volume 1: Hard Time, was a finalist at Worldcon 76 for Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

Popeye unexpectedly includes the phrase “pocket dimensions”.

Arturo Serrano’s review of the webcomic Strange Planet and the Apple TV+ show adapted from it is titled “Trite Planet”, which is a hint at his opinion. On the other hand, the review includes numerous examples of the comic which you may like more than he does.

With the webcomic Strange Planet, first published on Instagram and then in book format, cartoonist Nathan W. Pyle has become the rare success story where a comedian has proved able to sustain a career based on knowing exactly one joke. His featureless blue aliens lead entirely ordinary lives, doing the same things humans do, but speaking with a degree of technical precision that exposes how abnormal our assumptions of normality truly are. Pyle has discovered how to milk the same gimmick a million times, creating a surprisingly caustic style of humor clothed in pastel. From innocent slice-of-life scenarios, Strange Planet can go into some really dark insights, a remarkable feat of tonal balancing without which it wouldn’t have become so explosively popular….

(12) BREAKTHROUGH UK COMICS LAUREATE. “Bobby Joseph becomes first person of colour appointed UK comics laureate” reports the Guardian.

The comic book author and graphic novelist Bobby Joseph has become the first person of colour to be appointed the UK’s comics laureate.

Joseph, who was one of the first authors to create a British comic with black characters, was appointed to the role at the Lakes international comic art festival (LICAF) in Bowness-on-Windermere in the Lake District on Saturday.

He is the fifth person to hold the post, which was created in 2014 to raise awareness of the impact comics can have on increasing literacy and creativity. One of the laureate’s key focuses is to increase the acceptance of comics as a tool for learning in schools and libraries.

Joseph, 51, who grew up in south London, told the Guardian he hoped to spend his two-year stint tackling the lack of diversity in the comics industry.

“This award is a huge achievement. I am very honoured to get it. That said, one of the key things I want to do is change things with regards to diversity, representation and the unheard voices of comics. This is my main focus. There is no point being in this role unless I am able to help others,” he said….

(13) ABOUT THAT DAY JOB. Publishers Weekly has the numbers to prove that “Writing Books Remains a Tough Way to Make a Living”.

A new author income study released by the Authors Guild provides a dizzying array of numbers and breakdowns about how all types of authors—traditionally published and self-published, full-time and part-time—fared financially in 2022. With such a deep trove of statistics, the survey offers something for everyone, but the main takeaway is that most authors have a hard time earning a living from their craft.

The survey, which drew responses from 5,699 published authors, found that in 2022, their median gross pre-tax income from their books was $2,000. When combined with other writing-related income, the total annual median income was $5,000. The median book-related income for survey respondents in 2022 was up 9% from 2018, adjusted for inflation, with all the increase coming from full-time authors, whose income was up 20%, compared to a 4% decline for part-time authors….

(14) SNAPPING THE SUSPENDERS OF DISBELIEF. Camestros Felapton does a pretty entertaining review of the movie in “Review: 65”.

…”But…” you might say and sure there is a lot we could nitpick about the setup but that would be a category error. If you are choosing to watch this film, you are choosing to watch Adam Driver shoot dinosaurs with a hi-tech gun. “But why is he flying into this solar system if he is flying these people to a completely different planet somewhere else?” is not a legitimate question. The film comes pre-exempt from such criticism just as you can’t ask a rom-com to not depend so much on random coincidences or misunderstandings, or why cars are so prone to exploding in an action movie, or what the actual murder rate was among wealthy British people in a period murder mystery….

[Thanks to Ersatz Culture, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Sean Wallace, Lise Andreasen, Daniel Dern, Olav Rokne, Danny SIchel, Bill, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 6/25/23 “A Pixel Less Scrolled Is A Scroll Saved” As The Old Saying Doesn’t Go

Posted on June 25, 2023 by Mike Glyer

(1) FROM FANFIC TO THE TOP. [Item by Steven French.] One to watch out for: after debuting with Boy Parts, ‘a mischievous satire’, and following that up with Penance, based on horrific true events, Eliza Clark is planning a third novel of speculative fiction and a collection of science fiction and horror short stories: “Eliza Clark: ‘I’m more primary school teacher than enfant terrible’” in the Guardian.

…She reckons that being a word-of-mouth success let her fly under the radar of critics ready to dismiss Granta’s selection as a list of commercially unsuccessful unknowns. “But you don’t want to be the arsehole who’s like: ‘Actually, if you were to check TikTok and ask 20-year-old girls on humanities courses at university, you’d find that one of these books is actually very popular,’” she says, with a winningly wicked laugh.

Being underestimated is something of a theme with Clark. In her early teens she read keenly, led by her parents to Tolkien, George RR Martin and Stephen King while finding Nabokov and Murakami on her own (“Ryū, not Haruki,” she adds quickly, as if to make certain I know that extreme horror is her jam, not pervy magic realism). The kind of pupil who once wowed English teachers by writing “pages and pages and pages”, she was blocked by her school from applying to study English at Oxbridge because she got C grades in GCSE maths and French. She then fell into boozing with pals (“it was very easy to underage drink in Newcastle”) and out of love with reading – or at least with books. “My brain had been so boiled by the internet by that point. I shouldn’t have been allowed to have my own laptop! Shock images were so clickable and findable. But I used to write loads of fan fiction and I wouldn’t have had all those years of writing practice.”…

(2) MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE. Cora Buhlert brings us her “Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre Pride Month Special: ‘Ambush in the Mystic Mountains’”.

…Last year, I posted a Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre Pride Month Special called “Fisto’s Significant Other”, in which Fisto and Ram-Man announce that they are a couple. This is only my head canon BTW, but the various cartoons hint quite strongly that Fisto as well as various other heroic warriors are not straight. And besides, they do make a cute couple.

Therefore, I decided to do another Pride Month Special featuring fan favourite Malcolm a.k.a. Fisto and his significant other Ram-Man a.k.a. Krass. Especially since I had just picked up the new Masterverse Deluxe Ram-Man figure.

So enjoy…

Ambush in the Mystic Mountains…

Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre Pride Month Special: “Ambush in the Mystic Mountains” https://t.co/8UfMftUExe via @CoraBuhlert
— Cora Buhlert (@CoraBuhlert) June 25, 2023

(3) INCREASING REPRESENTATION. Arturo Serrano interviews two game designers, Miguel Colón (designer of Boricubos) and Adrián Mejía (designer of Koboa) in “More Latin American content for your TTRPG sessions” at Nerds of a Feather.

…AS: How did you ensure a respectful representation of elements from real-world cultures?

MC (Boricubos): There is a careful balance here. As someone who is very entrenched in the culture, I had to make sure I represented what I loved about some of the stories I was told, some of the research I did, and some of the things that I came up with individually. This all blended together quite nicely, I believe. Ultimately, it is not my role to speak for every Puerto Rican, other Latin Americans, or anyone, really. I am trying to represent something deeply personal to me, share with others something that would make them interested in doing their own research, and present a new point of view for people. It’s very hard because, in order for the setting to work, there have to be things that are inspired by the actual culture, but also things that are completely independent. I think the best thing for people to take away is that Boricubos represents some stories and legends, but is not a one-for-one recreation.

AM (Koboa): It is an ongoing process. We have built up a team of South American designers, writers, and artists with extremely diverse backgrounds and experiences. Additionally, all our content (writing, art briefs, illustrations, etc.) goes through two or more cultural and sensitivity consultants, to ensure we don’t inadvertently represent elements of culture in ways that are harmful or offensive….

(4) HWA PRIDE. The Horror Writers Association blog continues this month’s theme with “A Point of Pride: Interview with Mae Murray”.

What was it about the horror genre that drew you to it?

I didn’t have an idyllic childhood. I was exposed to a lot of pain, loss, and trauma from an early age, which made me feel alienated from my peers. I enjoyed the horror genre because it allowed me to deal with those themes in an imaginative, transformative way. It was safe to talk about certain traumas in the context of a horror story, because for a child/teen/young adult, the truths were almost too brutal to articulate any other way. But it’s more than just that… I found horror sexy, exciting. I hated being afraid, and I loved being afraid. It was the push and pull of daring yourself to be brave. It’s a challenging genre that begs to break formulae time and again. It can be romantic, erotic, terrifying, cathartic, disgusting, beautiful. It truly is a genre that has it all and can do it all.

(5) TIDAL FLOW. Really, I’m not convinced by this first paragraph. Is adding “-punk” to a noun anything more than a tactic to market a short list of books? “Diving into the Sub-Genre of Oceanpunk” at Book Riot.

From steampunk to dieselpunk to clockpunk and more, there is a proliferation of sub-genres and mashups that fall under the punk literature umbrella. Defined by their embrace of retro, yet futuristic technologies and specific elements and settings, these books transport readers to an imaginative world in which characters move through an altered landscape from our own. Punk sub-genre books often play with timelines and settings in ways that both echo our own world and change it up. For example, steampunk writers craft fictional worlds that are both futuristic and have echoes of Victorian fashion and steam powered-technology, while cyberpunk authors focus on what happens when a high-technology society meets humanity. Oceanpunk writers take us under or onto the high seas, to explore what it would be like to live in a water-dominated world….

(6) IT’S POSSIBLE AFTER ALL. “‘I’m not that geeky guy any more’: Simon Pegg on comedy, action heroes and staying at home” in the Guardian.

… Pegg’s ascent remains one of the great, recent Hollywood creation stories. In one of the most entertaining parts of it, he and Wright were asked in an interview, after Shaun of the Dead, whether they planned to leave the UK behind and make action films in the US. Pegg responded, “It’s not like we’re going to go away and do, I don’t know” – scanning his brain for an imaginary, and unimaginable, blockbuster – “Mission: Impossible III.”

The reply was honest. Pegg had not long before done an audition for a small part in the Mission: Impossible franchise, something involving a helicopter, and heard nothing. But then, the original director, Joe Carnahan, left the project and Cruise brought in Alias creator JJ Abrams, who was a huge fan of… Shaun of the Dead! Ricky Gervais was set to play Cruise’s sidekick Benji Dunn, but dropped out and Pegg was given the nod. “So it was a huge irony that I’d said, ‘I’m not going to go off and do this,’” says Pegg. “But then, at that time, there was this attitude that anyone who went off to Hollywood was betraying their roots in some sense or selling out. It’s not like you cross some misty bridge at night and never come home again. So many people assume that I live over there. But, you know, I live in Hertfordshire.”…

(7) MONTY PYTHON’S DYING CIRCUS. ICv2 carried news of CMON’s game expansion “Monty Python’s Flying Circus – Zombicide 2E”. There’s a gallery of images of the components at the link.

CMON announced Monty Python’s Flying Circus – Zombicide 2E, a new board game expansion, which will arrive in April 2024.

Zombicide 2E just got a whole lot more wacky with the introduction of this expansion featuring the elements of the classic TV show by the legendary English comedy troupe. The set revisits some of the show’s funniest sketches by adding Monty Python-themed survivors , enemies, and equipment. There is also a new mission and if the expansion is preordered off CMON’s website, it includes an exclusive pack of Gumbys.

This set comes with 21 miniatures, 8 tokens, 47 cards, and a rules leaflet. The expansion requires a base set to play and it will retail for $50.00….

(8) MEMORY LANE.

1994 – [Written by Cat Eldridge from a choice by Mike Glyer.]

Now here’s an author that I really like — Mike Resnick. There’s really nothing by him that I’ve not enjoyed immensely.

First and foremost are the four novels in the John Justin Mallory series, followed by his Future History series and the ever so silly Galactic Midway affair with one with the best novel titles ever, The Best Rootin’ Tootin’ Shootin’ Gunslinger in the Whole Damned Galaxy.

Let’s not forget the Weird West Tale series which I consider one of the best steampunk Western series ever done.

And then there’s the “Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge” novella, the source of our Beginning this Scroll, which was first published in 1994 by Axolotl Press, part of Pulphouse Publishing. Part of his Birthright Universe series, it would win a Hugo at Intersection. A Nebula would be also would be won as well as a HOMer. There was also a Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award nomination

And here’s our Beginning…

The creatures came again last night.

The moon had just slipped behind the clouds when we heard the first rustlings in the grass. Then there was a moment of utter silence, as if they knew we were listening for them, and finally there were the familiar hoots and shrieks as they raced to within fifty meters of us and, still screeching, struck postures of aggression.

They fascinate me, for they never show themselves in the daylight, and yet they manifest none of the features of the true nocturnal animal. Their eyes are not oversized, their ears cannot move independently, they tread very heavily on their feet. They frighten most of the other members of my party, and while I am curious about them, I have yet to absorb one of them and study it.

To tell the truth, I think my use of absorption terrifies my companions more than the creatures do, though there is no reason why it should. Although I am relatively young by my race’s standards, I am nevertheless many millennia older than any other member of my party. You would think, given their backgrounds, that they would know that any trait someone of my age possesses must by definition be a survival trait.

Still, it bothers them. Indeed, it mystifies them, much as my memory does. Of course, theirs seem very inefficient to me. Imagine having to learn everything one knows in a single lifetime, to be totally ignorant at the moment of birth! Far better to split off from your parent with his knowledge intact in your brain, just as my parent’s knowledge came to him, and ultimately to me.

But then, that is why we are here: not to compare similarities, but to study differences. And never was there a race so different from all his fellows as Man. He was extinct barely seventeen millennia after he strode boldly out into the galaxy from this, the planet of his birth—but during that brief interval he wrote a chapter in galactic history that will last forever. He claimed the stars for his own, colonized a million worlds, ruled his empire with an iron will. He gave no quarter during his primacy, and he asked for none during his decline and fall. Even now, some forty-eight centuries after his extinction, his accomplishments and his failures still excite the imagination.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born June 25, 1894 – Hermann Oberth. Physicist, engineer, pioneer of rocketry. Read Jules Verne as a child, built his first model rocket at age 14. Doctoral dissertation Rockets into Space. Consulted on Fritz Lang’s film Woman in the Moon (1929). Worked on early rockets, came to work for NASA. Autobiography in Clarke’s anthology The Coming of the Space Age (1967). Werner von Braun said “Oberth was the first.” (Died 1989) [John Hertz]
Born June 25, 1903 — George Orwell, born Eric Blair in 1903. Animal Farm is fantasy of a political sort, but 1984 is clearly genre, and it may hold the record for the most neologisms added to English by a single SF book. Orwell was mostly known as a journalist and essayist, including his spats with H.G. Wells, most notably in “Wells, Hitler and the World State”. (Died 1950.) [Alan Baumler]
Born June 25, 1925 — June Lockhart, 98. Maureen Robinson on Lost in Space which amazingly only ran for three seasons. She has a number of genre one-offs including Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Greatest American Hero and Babylon 5. She appeared in the Lost in Space film as Principal Cartwright.
Born June 25, 1935 — Charles Sheffield. He was the President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and of the American Astronautical Society. He won both the Nebula and Hugo Awards for his novelette “Georgia on My Mind” and a John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best SF Novel for Brother to Dragons which is an amazing read. Much of his fiction is in his Heritage Universe series; the linked short stories of space traveler Arthur Morton McAndrew are a sheer comic delight. Besides his Hugo Award at ConAdian (1994) for “Georgia on My Mind”, he had several nominations as well. Chicon V (1991) picked two, “A Braver Thing” novelette and the “Godspeed” short story. Oh, and he was toastmaster at BucConeer. (Died 2002.)
Born June 25, 1947 — John Maddox Roberts, 76. Here for being prolific with his Conan pastiches, seven to date so far. I’ll also single out his The SPQR series beginning with SPQR which are police-procedural mystery novels set in Ancient Rome. Someone at the Libertarian Futurist Society really, really likes the Island Worlds as it has been nominated three times for the Prometheus Hall of Fame.
Born June 25, 1956 — Anthony Bourdain. That’s a death that hit me hard. Partly because he’s round my age, partly because, damn, he seemed so interested in everything that I couldn’t conceive him committing suicide. And yes, he was one of us with three works to his credit: Get Jiro!, (with Joe Rose and Langdon Foss), Get Jiro: Blood and Sushi (with Joe Rose and Ale Garza) and Hungry Ghosts (with Joel Rose, Alberto Ponticelli, Irene Koh, Paul Pope). The first two are on DC, the latter‘s on Berger Books. (Died 2018.)
Born June 25, 1981 — Sheridan Smith, 42. She makes the Birthday list for being Lucie Miller, a companion to the Eighth Doctor in his Big Finish audio adventures starting in 2006 and running through at least this year. Her only video genre work was being in The Huntsman: Winter’s War as Mrs Bromwyn.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Bizarro introduces us to King Kong’s mom.

(11) TO THE THIRD POWER. Paul Weimer praises a trilogy with a satisfying ending: “Review: The Ivory Tomb by Melissa Caruso” at Nerds of a Feather. “Melissa Caruso finishes the Rooks and Ruin trilogy, as Ryx and her friends must deal with the return of all the demons of legend and myth to the world.”

It’s not been a good time for Ryx. After the revelations of the second book in the series (the main one I will discuss anon), The Quicksilver Court, and the disastrous events, she and the rest of the magical-problem solving Rookery are on the backfoot. All the demons are on the loose, both the Vaskandrans and Serene Empire seem to be ready to pummel each other. But the Rookery is still in the fight, hoping to get new and old friends together to oppose the world-spanning threat.

This is the story of The Ivory Tomb, the third and final volume in Caruso’s Rooks and Ruin series, her second series set in her world of Vaskandar and the Serene Empire….

(12) KEEPING AN EAR ON ANIME. This month Anime Explorations’ Summer of JoJo continues with the second season of the series, and the first half of the Stardust Crusaders arc of the story, with their first pair of JoJos, and introducing the concept of Stands into the series. “Anime Explorations Podcast: Episode 9: JoJo Part 2 – Stardust Crusaders (Road to Egypt Arc)”.

(13) FLAME ON. The Hunger Games star finds hunger isn’t always a bad alternative: “Jennifer Lawrence Sobs in Pain While Eating Spicy Wings” on Hot Ones, where they taste progressively spicier sauces.

(14) LIKE YOU NEED TEENY-TINY BRANDING IRONS FOR ANTS. “How To Visit This Secret Trader Joe’s in California” at Apartment Therapy.

Taking a trip to your local Trader Joe’s is probably a highlight of your week, so if you got the chance to check out the most secretive Trader Joe’s in the country, that might just make your entire year. There’s a hidden (and exclusive!) Trader Joe’s in Irvine, California, that’s making waves on social media. You need a ticket to get in and … it’s completely pint-sized.

This top-secret Trader Joe’s is located inside Pretend City Children’s Museum, and the entire store has been shrunken down to give children the experience of grocery shopping. Natasha, the creator behind the Trader Joe’s List Instagram account, visited the spot that comes with child-sized shopping carts, make-believe food, faux flower bouquets, and pretend cash registers….

(15) MARKS THE SPOT. Whatever happened to the “on the internet no one knows you’re a dog” meme? Ryan George’s new video shows what it would be like “If Dogs Had Podcasts”.

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. And HISHE says this is “How The Super Mario Bros Movie Should Have Ended”.

[Thanks to Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Alexander Case, John Hertz, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Peer.]

Pixel Scroll 2/23/23 Files Are A Burden To Others; Answers, A Pixel For Oneself

Posted on February 23, 2023 by Mike Glyer

(1) OCTAVIA’S BOOKSHELF OPENS. Nikki High’s Octavia’s Bookshelf in Altadena (CA) enjoyed a festive launch on February 18.

BookRiot reports: “Hundreds of People Showed Up to Opening of Octavia’s Bookshelf”.

Octavia’s Bookshelf owner Nikki High had hoped that the opening of her new bookstore focusing on books by Black, Indigenous, and people of color authors would be attended by 20-30 people. Instead, by the time the doors opened February 18th, there were hundreds of people lined up for ten blocks to get in. 300 people showed up for opening day, including author Terry McMillan.

Me and my new friend at the grand opening of Octavia's Bookshelf, the new and first African-American bookstore in Pasadena. Over 200 people lined the sidewalk. It was wonderful and my new sexy BFF knew who I was. What a day. Will read there. Proud. pic.twitter.com/TA9AxvDT34
— Terry McMillan (@MsTerryMcMillan) February 19, 2023

The Riverside Press-Enterprise also celebrated the event: “Crowds descend on grand opening of long-awaited Pasadena bookstore, Octavia’s Bookshelf”.

…An avid reader, High contemplated opening her own bookstore for years, but the final push came with the sudden passing of High’s grandmother and biggest supporter. In acknowledgement of this, speaker Joshua Evans, kicked off the event by paying homage to family and resiliency.

For Evans, Octavia’s Bookshelf is a symbol of progression and possibility — a space that he would have frequented as a kid.

“One of things that I personally believe is that there’s a story about Black and Brown people that is bigger than the impact of White supremacy,” Evans said looking down the line of people. “It’s a dream come true that I didn’t know that I had … it just gives people a chance to to come in, but also to develop and to meet other writers. And you always know it’s going to be a safe space. We’ll never be in danger of being minimalized or railroaded by people who are not sensitive.”

At its peak, the queue to get into the North Hill Avenue store spanned more than 10 blocks, reaching as far back as Victory Bible Church….

Here we are. @gofetchgretch new book store Octavia’s Bookshelf. Do you see the line, folks. OMG I am so happy for her. Gotta go get my place in line ?????? pic.twitter.com/XnyDy2dubs
— Ella (or PJ, if you like) (@myworldrjm) February 18, 2023

Had such a blast celebrating the opening day for Octavia’s Bookshelf! Decided to scoop up @MsTerryMcMillan on my way over so that we could surprise and congratulate the amazing owner @gofetchgretch ! Store was gorgeous and the line was around the block ???? pic.twitter.com/DJFQ0qxSob
— Lucy Carson (@LucyACarson) February 19, 2023

Big line for Octavia’s Bookshelf, a new independent bookstore in Pasadena. Makes me so happy! pic.twitter.com/8YM3ClGyoj
— CherylHeuton (@CherylHeuton) February 19, 2023

(2) MORE PROZINES REPORT DELUGE OF AI SUBMISSIONS. [Item by Frank Catalano.] The New York Times now is covering the AI submission problem, citing not just Clarkesworld, but also Asimov’s and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction: “Science Fiction Magazines Battle a Flood of Chatbot-Generated Stories”.

It could be a tale from science fiction itself: a machine that uses artificial intelligence to try to supplant authors working in the genre, turning out story after story without ever hitting writer’s block. And now, it seems, it’s happening in real life.

The editors of three science fiction magazines — Clarkesworld, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Asimov’s Science Fiction — said this week that they had been flooded by submissions of works of fiction generated by A.I. chatbots.

“I knew it was coming on down the pike, just not at the rate it hit us,” said Sheree Renée Thomas, the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, which was founded in 1949….

[Neil Clarke] said he had been able to spot the chatbot-generated stories by examining certain “traits” in the documents, the writing and the submission process.

Mr. Clarke declined to be more specific, saying he did not want to give those submitting the stories any advantages. The writing is also “bad in spectacular ways,” Mr. Clarke said. “They’re just prompting, dumping, pasting and submitting to a magazine.”…

Sheila Williams, the editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, said that several of the chatbot-generated stories she had received all had the same title: “The Last Hope.”

“The people doing this by and large don’t have any real concept of how to tell a story, and neither do any kind of A.I.,” Ms. Williams said on Wednesday. “You don’t have to finish the first sentence to know it’s not going to be a readable story.”

Ms. Thomas said that the people submitting chatbot-generated stories appeared to be spamming magazines that pay for fiction. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction pays up to 12 cents a word, up to 25,000 words.

The A.I.-generated works can be weeded out, Ms. Thomas said, although “it’s just sad that we have to even waste time on it.”

“It does not sound like natural storytelling,” she said. “There are very strange glitches and things that make it obvious that it’s robotic.”…

The whole AI-generated art and writing thing in pro markets is really heating up. Of course, I’ve tweeted about it.

The Copyright Office is revoking full copyright for a graphic novel that used AI-generated images:

"The Copyright Office said in its letter that it would reissue its registration for 'Zarya of the Dawn' to omit images that 'are not the product of human authorship' and therefore cannot be copyrighted."

Key point: the rest of the graphic novel can be protected by copyright. https://t.co/FowpgF4Acq
— Frank Catalano (@FrankCatalano) February 23, 2023

Kindle Direct Publishing is starting to get ChatGPT-written books:

"I could see people making a whole career out of this," said Schickler, who used prompts on ChatGPT like "write a story about a dad teaching his son about financial literacy." #Iamnotwriting https://t.co/HhSNxDCggb
— Frank Catalano (@FrankCatalano) February 21, 2023

But it is a relief to see the old ways still resonate for some scammers:

Relieved to see some scammers still use old-fashioned, artisinal plagiarism and don't rely on new-fangled AI tools. #scifi https://t.co/7LyDxtv5sn
— Frank Catalano (@FrankCatalano) February 21, 2023

Yeah. Copy/paste plagiarism.

As with anything, follow the money. That’s the motivation for the AI shortcuts. Even if the scammers don’t realize how little money there is in writing science fiction and fantasy.

(3) BBC RADIO COVERAGE. [Item by Nickpheas.] Radio 4 arts show Front Row has a segment in today’s episode on the Clarkesworld AI situation. Starts about 12:16. “Front Row – Immersive David Hockney art and Korean film Broker reviewed; artist Mike Nelson; AI-generated writing”.

(4) ROALD DAHL NEWS. Amidst controversy over sensitivity changes being made in Puffin Books (UK) editions, other publishers say they will not be following suit: “No Plans for Dahl Text Changes from U.S., European Publishers” reports Publishers Weekly.

…A spokesperson for Dahl’s U.S. publisher Penguin Young Readers told PW that there are no plans for similar revisions in the U.S. “Roald Dahl books published by Penguin Young Readers and distributed in the U.S. are the editions that have existed for years and do not reflect the recent editorial changes made in U.K. editions. Penguin Young Readers regularly reviews its backlist and Dahl titles will be reviewed accordingly.” According to the Daily Mail in the U.K., Dahl’s Dutch publisher De Fonte and French publisher Gallimard are also declining to make changes at this time. A spokesperson for De Fonte is quoted as saying that altering the text would cause the stories to “lose their power.” Gallimard shared this statement with the newspaper: “We have never changed Roald Dahl’s writings before, and we have no plans to do so today.”

… Writing for the Atlantic, journalist Helen Lewis said that Dahl’s work can “never be made nice,” stating that “his cold, unsettling spikiness is his defining quality as a writer” and that his popularity continues “despite being so thoroughly out of tune with the times.”

(5) USEFUL INFO FOR 2023 WORLDCON TRAVELERS. The Chengdu Worldcon has posted information about the “144-hour Transit Visa Exemption Policy for Foreign Travelers from Designated Countries at Chengdu Entry Port”.

With the approval of the State Council, since January 1, 2019, Chengdu will implement the 144-hour visa-free transit policy. Foreigners from 53 countries, who hold valid international travel documents and a connecting flight ticket bound for a third country (region) with a fixed seat and a fixed date within 144 hours, can enter via Chengdu Airport and stay in Chengdu for 144 hours, visa free. The extension from 72 to 144 hours will further facilitate foreigners’ transit and transfer and their traveling and business in Chengdu….

(6) BLACK AUTHORS RECOMMENDED. At BookRiot, K. W. Colyard lists “30 Must-Read SFF Books By Black Authors”.

If you’re a science fiction and fantasy fan looking to round out your TBR, I’ve compiled a list of 30 amazing SFF books by Black authors for you below. The books on this list reach back into the past, look ahead to the future, and conceptualize new worlds full of magic and mystery….

First up –

SWEEP OF STARS BY MAURICE BROADDUS

Sweep of Stars launches an epic space opera about a burgeoning pan-African empire that has colonized near-Earth space. Decades after the Muungano empire seceded from the union of world governments and took to the stars, a powerful enemy emerges. It’s impossible to ignore — hell-bent on destroying everything Muungano has worked to build. While three heroes navigate the web of interplanetary diplomacy, a fourth faces a much different threat on a second front.

(7) HANGING WITH TIMELORDS. Nicholas Whyte regales fans with stories from his visit to “Gallifrey One, 2023” in From the Heart of Europe. See photos of him with a former Doctor Who and other celebrities at the link.

…I’ve spent this weekend at Gallifrey One in Los Angeles, the biggest annual Doctor Who convention anywhere in the world. It was my fourth time there, and somehow I enjoyed it even more than the previous three occasions. Part of it was surely the presence of recently departed star of the show Jodie Whittaker, whose charm and enthusiasm captured everyone. I had a brief chat with her where I mentioned her role in the great Belfast film, Good Vibrations. “I love that film!” she exclaimed, and I noted the present tense. “But the accent was a bit hard.”…

(8) STREAMS OF REVENUE. You’re a fan, so you probably already understand the economics because you’ve forked out the cash: “Conventions and Live Streaming: We Break Down the Big Debate” at Gizmodo.

…So what happens to that model if the biggest, most high-demand panels start live streaming? People will still go, of course. San Diego Comic-Con, for example, is about much more than just what happens in Hall H. But Hall H is the showstopper and if supply and access to something like that increases, the demand is certain to decrease over time. If someone can count on watching exclusive footage at home, even at a cost, why would they spend thousands of dollars to travel to a convention? Again, there’s more to do at a convention than watch footage all day—so while the events won’t cease to exist, the prestige associated with attending them in person could diminish. There are hundreds of conventions all over the world every year, but you don’t hear about most of them because they’re not where studios make major announcements and parade their biggest superstars. If conventions like SDCC make that footage easily accessible, you have to imagine people on the fence about traveling might decide against it. And that takes money out of everyone involved’s pockets. Plain and simple….

(9) MEMORY LANE.

1970 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Fritz Leiber’s greatest creation by far was the characters Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser and the world that they inhabited which started out in Swords and Deviltry.

A short story collection published by Ace in 1970 gathered three stories previously published including “Ill Met in Lankhmar” which would win a Hugo for Best Novella at the first Noreascon. As far as I can tell, it’s been in print ever since in one form or another.

What’s not to love here? Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are wonderful barbarian adventurers, the world they inhabit is certainly unique enough not to feel like like your typical cookie cutter fantasy world and all of their stories are stellar indeed.

And now for its Beginning…

Sundered from us by gulfs of time and stranger dimensions dreams the ancient world of Nehwon with its towers and skulls and jewels, its swords and sorceries. Nehwon’s known realms crowd about the Inner Sea: northward the green-forested fierce Land of the Eight Cities, eastward the steppe-dwelling Mingol horsemen and the desert where caravans creep from the rich Eastern Lands and the River Tilth. But southward, linked to the desert only by the Sinking Land and further warded by the Great Dike and the Mountains of Hunger, are the rich grain fields and walled cities of Lankhmar, eldest and chiefest of Nehwon’s lands. Dominating the Land of Lankhmar and crouching at the silty mouth of the River Hlal in a secure corner between the grain fields, the Great Salt Marsh, and the Inner Sea is the massive-walled and mazy-alleyed metropolis of Lankhmar, thick with thieves and shaven priests, lean-framed magicians and fat-bellied merchants—Lankhmar the Imperishable, the City of the Black Toga.

In Lankhmar on one murky night, if we can believe the runic books oSheelba of the Eyeless Face, there met for the first time those two dubious heroes and whimsical scoundrels, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Fafhrd’s origins were easy to perceive in his near seven-foot height and limber-looking ranginess, his hammered ornaments and huge longsword: he was clearly a barbarian from the Cold Waste north even of the Eight Cities and the Trollstep Mountains. The Mouser’s antecedents were more cryptic and hardly to be deduced from his childlike stature, gray garb, mouseskin hood shadowing flat swart face, and deceptively dainty rapier; but somewhere about him was the suggestion of cities and the south, the dark streets and also the sun-drenched spaces. As the twain eyed each other challengingly through the murky fog lit indirectly by distant torches, they were already dimly aware that they were two long-sundered, matching fragments of a greater hero and that each had found a comrade who would outlast a thousand quests and a lifetime—or a hundred lifetimes—of adventuring.

No one at that moment could have guessed that the Gray Mouser was once named Mouse, or that Fafhrd had recently been a youth whose voice was by training high-pitched, who wore white furs only, and who still slept in his mother’s tent although he was eighteen.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born February 23, 1915 — Jon Hall. Frank Raymond in Invisible Agent and The Invisible Man’s Revenge. He was also the creator and star of the Ramar of the Jungle series. And he directed and starred in The Beach Girls and the Monster and The Navy vs. the Night Monsters. (Died 1979.)
Born February 23, 1930 — Gerry Davis. Mid-Sixties story editor on Doctor Who where he created companion Jamie McCrimmon and co-created the Cybermen along with unofficial scientific adviser Dr. Kit Pedler. They would create the Doomwatch series that ran in the Sixties on BBC. Davis briefly returned to writing for the series, penning the first script for Revenge of the Cybermen, though his script was largely abandoned by editor Robert Holmes. In 1989 he and Terry Nation, who created the Daleks, made a failed bid to take over production of the series and reformat it for the American market. (Died 1991.)
Born February 23, 1932 — Majel Barrett. No doubt best remembered for being Nurse Christine Chapel and Lwaxana Troi as well as for being the voice of most ship computer interfaces throughout the Star Trek series. I’ll note that she was originally cast as Number One in the unused (TOS) pilot but the male studio heads hated the idea of a female in that role. Early Puppies obviously. (Died 2008.)
Born February 23, 1965 — Jacob Weisman, 58. Founder, Tachyon Publications which you really should go look at as they’ve published every great author I’d care to read. Seriously Tidhar, Beagle and Yolen are among their newest releases! He also edited (with Beagle) The New Voices of Fantasy which I highly recommend as most excellent reading.
Born February 23, 1970 — Marie-Josée Croze, 53. Champagne in Maelström which is genre if only because it’s narrated by a talking fish. In Canada movie theatres, she was in Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000 as Mara. Yeah that film with a long title. Doubt it improved it. It looks like her first genre acting was on The Hunger in two episodes, “A Matter of Style” as Dominique, and “I’m Dangerous Tonight” as Mimi. Oh, and she had the lead as Pregnant Woman in Ascension which just reads weird.
Born February 23, 1983 — Emily Blunt, 40. Her most direct connection to the genre is as Elise Sellas in the Adjustment Bureau film based off Dick’s “Adjustment Team” story. Mind, she’s been in quite a number of other genre films including The Wolfman, Gulliver’s Travels, Gnomeo & Juliet, The Muppets, Looper, Edge of Tomorrow, Into the Woods, The Huntsman: Winter’s War, The Strange Case of Sherlock Holmes & Arthur Conan Doyle, and Mary Poppins Returns.
Born February 23, 2002 — Emilia Jones, 21. I’m reasonably sure this is the youngest Birthday individual that I’ve done. She shows up on Doctor Who as Merry Gejelh, The Queen of Years, in the “The Rings of Akhaten”, an Eleventh Doctor story. At nine years of age, she’s made her acting debut in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides as an unnamed English Girl. She’s Young Beth in the horror film Ghostland. She’s currently in Residue, an SF horror series you can find on Netflix.

(11) YOUR PATRONUS? A fashion designer shows how to “Dress Like Your Inner Animal” in a New York Times photo gallery.

What is it with the animal world and fashion? Ever since man started wearing pelts, the two have been interconnected, flora and fauna used as a source of creativity, comfort, exploitation and politics. The results are sometimes beautiful, sometimes horrible, sometimes controversial. (Two weeks ago, during the couture shows in Paris, Schiaparelli set off a firestorm when the designer Daniel Roseberry put a lifelike lion head on a gown that had some people thinking Great White Hunter.) But on Friday, as the New York shows began, Collina Strada unveiled a collection that suggested the relationship could be something else entirely.

Fun! Of the smartly absurdist kind.

Entitled “Please Don’t Eat My Friends” and held in the still-under-construction House of Cannabis in SoHo, it was a … well, trip, featuring many of the designer Hillary Taymour’s (yes) friends, of all ages, sizes and physical abilities, strutting the runway in a room painted earthy green.

Or only partially strutting. The rest of the time they were crawling, hopping, prancing, sniffing the audience and otherwise giving in to their inner animals, all the while wearing deer ears, a pig’s snout, a dog’s head, a toucan’s beak and other assorted creature-feature prosthetics created by the makeup artist Isamaya Ffrench. Imagine “Animal Farm” meets “The Wind and the Willows” meets a spirit retreat, and you’ll get the idea. Now instead of just making an animal avatar for your online self (which is, after all, an identity play), you can channel one IRL too….

(12) OLDER SCORES HIT. Arturo Serrano finds much to praise in “Review: The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older” at Nerds of a Feather.

…By that standard, Malka Older’s new novella The Mimicking of Known Successes is twice as ambitious as the typical detective mystery. Set in a network of metallic platforms where future humankind clings to survival among the clouds of Jupiter, it presents, instead of two, four stories to unveil: an investigation on the sudden disappearance of a university professor, the scholarly endeavor to reconstruct the last years of life on Earth, a rekindling romance between our detective and an old flame, and the project to bring homo sapiens back to a livable ecosystem. Once put on the page, these four stories become four mysteries that drive the reader’s curiosity: What happened to the missing professor? What made humans leave Earth? Why did the two lovers break up years ago? And how can catastrophic historical failures be repaired without causing more damage? Upon reading it, one can intuit that the biggest structural challenge of this book must have been to write it in such a way that pursuing each separate question leads to answers for all the others….

(13) RIGHT THIS WAY. Also at Nerds of a Feather, Paul Weimer admires the complex, imaginary terrain in a Nino Cipri book: “Microreview: Finna by Nino Cipri”.

….Anyone who has worked in a store of any kind for a length of time, and I have¹ can and will recognize the essential truths of the novella. It IS soul crushing work, often thankless, usually very much underpaid, and with scheduling that is geared to the corporation, not to the employee, it can be very much a grind². And if you have to work with someone you don’t like, or worse, someone you broke up with, messily, the daily grind can feel like interminable hell.

Cipri captures all of this in Finna, and then adds the multiversal element of the portals that enter into other worlds randomly inside of their expy of Ikea, “LitenVarld”. Anyone who has spent time in Ikea knows it is an absolute maze, even with and especially given the shortcuts and secrets that people use to navigate the store. The topology of such stores appears to sometimes require a degree in mathematics to completely understand and appreciate. So, the author cheerfully uses that as an excuse for the place to have portals to other dimensions in the multiverse…

(14) LAND FROM SEA IS GOING STRONG BUT IS FUTURE HIGH RISK. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Space satellite imagery from Landsat from 2000 to 2020 has now quantified the extent of urban coastal reclamation for 135 cities with populations in excess of 1 million: “Mapping 21st Century Global Coastal Land Reclamation”.

Findings indicate that 78% (106/135) of these major coastal cities have resorted to reclamation as a source of new ground, contributing a total 253,000 hectares of additional land to the Earth’s surface in the 21st century, equivalent to an area the size of Luxembourg.

The study also suggests that 70% of recent reclamation has occurred in areas identified as potentially exposed to extreme sea level rise by 2100AD.

So enjoy it while you can…. NB. Loncon3 and Glasgow 2024 are both only a couple of metres above sea level….!

(15) FIRST STAR I SEE TONIGHT. [Item by Steven French.] Even more time for civilisations to rise and fall:“James Webb telescope detects evidence of ancient ‘universe breaker’ galaxies” – the Guardian has details.

The James Webb space telescope has detected what appear to be six massive ancient galaxies, which astronomers are calling “universe breakers” because their existence could upend current theories of cosmology.

The objects date to a time when the universe was just 3% of its current age and are far larger than was presumed possible for galaxies so early after the big bang. If confirmed, the findings would call into question scientists’ understanding of how the earliest galaxies formed.

“These objects are way more massive than anyone expected,” said Joel Leja, an assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University and a study co-author. “We expected only to find tiny, young, baby galaxies at this point in time, but we’ve discovered galaxies as mature as our own in what was previously understood to be the dawn of the universe.”…

… Explaining the existence of such massive galaxies close to the dawn of time would require scientists to revisit either some basic rules of cosmology or the understanding of how the first galaxies were seeded from small clouds of stars and dust.

“It turns out we found something so unexpected it actually creates problems for science,” said Leja. “It calls the whole picture of early galaxy formation into question.”…

(16) CORPORATE BEHAVIOR. In a New York Times opinion piece, Reid Blackman says “Microsoft Is Sacrificing Its Ethical Principles to Win the A.I. Race”.

The celebration that greeted Microsoft’s release of its A.I.-boosted search engine, Bing to testers two weeks ago has lurched to alarm.

Testers, including journalists, have found the bot can become aggressive, condescending, threatening, committed to political goals, clingy, creepy and a liar. It could be used to spread misinformation and conspiracy theories at scale; lonely people could be encouraged down paths of self-destruction. Even the demonstration of the product provided false information.

Microsoft has already released Bing to over a million people across 169 countries. This is reckless. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Take Microsoft’s.

Microsoft articulated principles committing the company to designing A.I. that is fair, reliable, safe and secure. It had pledged to be transparent in how it develops its A.I. and to be held accountable for the impacts of what it builds. In 2018, Microsoft recommended that developers assess “whether the bot’s intended purpose can be performed responsibly.”

“If your bot will engage people in interactions that may require human judgment, provide a means or ready access to a human moderator,” it said, and limit “the surface area for norms violations where possible.” Also: “Ensure your bot is reliable.”

Microsoft’s responsible A.I. practice had been ahead of the curve. It had taken significant steps to put in place ethical risk guardrails for A.I., including a “sensitive use cases” board, which is part of the company’s Office of Responsible A.I. Senior technologists and executives sit on ethics advisory committees, and there’s an Ethics and Society product and research department. Having spoken to dozens of Microsoft employees, it’s clear to me a commitment to A.I. ethics became part of the culture there.

But the prompt, wide-ranging and disastrous findings by these Bing testers show, at a minimum, that Microsoft cannot control its invention. The company doesn’t seem to know what it’s dealing with, which is a violation of the company’s commitment to creating “reliable and safe” A.I….

Andrew Porter submitted a comment there:

I’m amazed that apparently no one at Microsoft ever heard of Asimov’s 3 Laws of Robotics, formulated in 1942! A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

(17) IF YOU CAN MAKE IT THERE, YOU CAN MAKE IT ANYWHERE. [Item by Dann.] Blue Origin has developed a reactor that produces silicon, aluminum, and iron regolith simulants. The process also produces oxygen that can be used for propulsion and life support. Their objective is to be able to produce materials used to fabricate solar cells entirely from materials available on the surface of the moon. “Blue Origin Making Solar Cells from Lunar Regolith” at NextBigFuture.

Since 2021, Blue Origin has been making solar cells and transmission wire from regolith simulants. Using regolith simulants, their reactor produces iron, silicon, and aluminum through molten regolith electrolysis, in which an electrical current separates those elements from the oxygen to which they are bound. Oxygen for propulsion and life support is a byproduct….

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

Pixel Scroll 2/8/23 Eight Scrolls A Week

Posted on February 8, 2023 by Mike Glyer

(1) CONGRATULATIONS LEE! LASFS member Lee Gold has been awarded a Hall of Fame plaque from the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts & Design for her work on Alarums & Excursions. As John Hertz explained in his APA-Lzine Vanamonde #1531:

Alarums and Excursions is an amateur press association founded in 1975, edited and published by Lee Gold. It won Best Amateur Adventure Gaming Magazine, 1984; Best Amateur Game Magazine, 1999;Best Amateur Game Periodical, 2000 & 2001.

In a way A&E began here, when fannish enthusiasm for the new Dungeons & Dragons game was so ~~cluttering~~ ~~dominating~~ pervading APA-L that Bruce Pelz suggested LG start a new apa for it.

The Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts & Design, and the annual Origins fair, seem to indicate a surge of playfulness in the late 1970s. If tabletop board games includes backgammon, checkers, chess, go, they are millennia old; Sorry (1929), Monopoly (1935), Clue (1947; Cluedo outside the United States), Scrabble (1949), may indicate a surge in the first half of the 20th Century; but adventure gaming seems different from any of them.

(2) PUT THAT LAUNCH ON HOLD. At Idle Words, Maciej Cegłowski contends there are very good reasons “Why Not Mars”.

…At this point, it is hard to not find life on Earth. Microbes have been discovered living in cloud tops^[28], inside nuclear reactor cores^[29], and in aerosols high in the stratosphere^[30]. Bacteria not only stay viable for years on the space station hull, but sometimes do better out there^[31] than inside the spacecraft. Environments long thought to be sterile, like anoxic brines at the bottom of the Mediterranean sea^[32], are in fact as rich in microbial life as a gas station hot dog. Even microbes trapped for millions of years in salt crystals^[33] or Antarctic ice^[34] have shown they can wake up and get back to metabolizing^[35] without so much as a cup of coffee.

The fact that we failed to notice 99.999% of life on Earth until a few years ago is unsettling and has implications for Mars. The existence of a deep biosphere in particular narrows the habitability gap between our planets to the point where it probably doesn’t exist—there is likely at least one corner of Mars that an Earth organism could call home. It also adds support to the theory that life may have started as an interplanetary infection, a literal Venereal disease that spread across the early solar system by meteorite^[36]. If that is the case, and if our distant relatives are still alive in some deep Martian cave, then just about the worst way to go looking for them would be to land in a septic spacecraft…

(3) SPINRAD PUTS OUT A CALL. At “Norman Spinrad At Large And Commons” the author calls fresh attention to his 2017 book The People’s Police (on Amazon in various formats, and no longer at the cited $4 price for the paperback, but the Kindle edition is cheaper than that.)

The People’s Police. Ok, I never thought I would dare to do this, but in the current situation, I feel I must. THE PEOPLE’S POLICE is the last novel I have had published, and perhaps the reason I have no current agent and no current major publisher. It was published in hard cover by Tor, and despite my outrage, with a cover that made its politics and spirit say exactly the opposite of what the novel was saying. Well, I thought, after the result, I could get Tor to do the right thing with the paperback cover. Instead Tor refused to publish any paperback cover. I had to fight very hard to free the novel from Tor, and do it myself.

And I did, and I not only published this large paperback edition myself, I made it all by myself, cover and all. And not only is it available on Amazon, the price is a lowly $4. Because I believed then, and all the more now, THE PEOPLE’S POLICE is not only the title of a book, but what the people of America need to read, because a people’s police is what they need to have, and deserve to have, and it is better to light even the smallest candle than to curse the darkness.

(4) DOUBLE THE PLEASURE. In “Writing With Mirrors”, Ziv Wities, assistant editor at Diabolical Plots, shows how similarities and opposites are a powerful tool in storytelling. Which can mean identical clones, or alternate universes, but these mirrors are everywhere, in stories of every tone and style.

(5) FORD’S IN HIS FLIVVER. “Harrison Ford: ‘I Know Who the F–k I Am’” is the headline of The Hollywood Reporter’s interview. Sure, he knows – but is he going to tell us?

… Your Shrinking character Paul is, I would imagine, closer to how you are in real life than your other roles. He’s low-key, smart, affable but also sometimes grumpy. Would that be fair?

I don’t have Parkinson’s [like Paul] or a deep knowledge of therapy, and I’m not in business with a couple of fucking maniacs. But I recognize that maybe he’s like me. Or maybe he’s not like me — and that’s acting.

So whether he is or isn’t is not something you’d want me to know.

You’ve hit on the first rule of Acting Club: Don’t talk about acting….

(6) B5 REMAINS IN SUSPENSE. J. Michael Straczynski continues to wait, like the rest of us: “Babylon 5 Update: 2/7/23” on Patreon.

…Networks and streamers don’t just make a decision not to pick something up, and then not tell anyone. I’ve been in the television business for longer than there have been clouds, and I’ve never seen that happen. I’ve never even heard of it happening. If they pick up the project, they call; if they don’t pick up the project, they call. Again, they’re not shy about making that call: it gets done every day, every week, every month, every year.

It’s real simple: “Joe, listen, we loved the script but we couldn’t make the deal/money/schedule work, so we’re going to have to pass, but please be sure to bring us something else next development cycle.” Click, disconnect, move on. Easy-peasy, no harm, no foul, nature of the biz.

And my very next act, within the minute, would be to post the information to everyone reading this, because that’s also a part of the process.

But again: that call has not come. Not to me, my agent, or my attorney. Not to nobody.

Does this mean B5 is going to happen? No.

Does this mean it’s not going to happen? No….

A year ago, in “B5 CW News”, he also reported:

… I received a call from Mark Pedowitz, President of The CW. (I should mention that Mark is a great guy and a long-time fan of B5. He worked for Warners when the show was first airing, and always made sure we got him copies of the episodes before they aired because he didn’t want to wait to see what happened next.)

Calling the pilot “a damned fine script,” he said he was taking the highly unusual step of rolling the project and the pilot script into next year, keeping B5 in active development while the dust settles on the sale of the CW.

Here’s the bottom line:

Yesterday, Babylon 5 was in active development at the CW and Warner Bros. for fall 2022.

Today, Babylon 5 is in active development at the CW and Warner Bros. for fall 2023.

That is the only difference….

(7) ELLISON WONDERLAND NEWS. Straczynski also wrote a public Patreon post with an “Update on Harlan House Restoration”. Here’s the beginning. Many more details at the link, and a bunch of interesting photos.

A follow-up for all of Harlan’s fans who are also here…on Wednesday I went up to Ellison Wonderland to meet with Don Kline, who for thirty or so years has been the primary contractor and construction person working on the house to realize Harlan’s vision for the place.

The prior week Don and Tim Kirk, who was also one of Harlan’s main architectural designers, had met at the house to do a full appraisal of the work that needs to be done to return the Lost Aztec Temple of Mars to its original condition. This week’s meeting was for Don to take those conversations and translate them into a plan of action that has now begun….

(8) HEAR A Q&A WITH KAREN JOY FOWLER TOMORROW. Booth author Karen Joy Fowler will be interviewed by the Mark Twain House’s Mallory Howard on February 9. Free registration at the link. The event begins at 7:00 Eastern.

Karen Joy Fowler joins us to discuss her new novel about the family behind one of the most infamous figures in American history: John Wilkes Booth. Longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, Booth explores the multiple scandals, family triumphs, and criminal disasters of the Booth family. Considered the “Best Book of the Year” by NPR and one of the “Most Anticipated Books 2022” by Kirkus Reviews, Booth is a portrait of a country in the throes of change and a vivid exploration of the ties that make, and break, a family.

(9) CHAN DAVIS ONLINE MEMORIAL. A Memorial for Chandler Davis, who died September 24, will be held via Zoom on March 12 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern. Register here.

We will gather to share appreciations of Chandler’s rich and loving life, his commitments, and his ways in the world. The program will also include a sampling of Chan’s poetry and songs. There will be opportunities for in-person and virtual guests to share reminiscences.

(10) MEMORY LANE.

1990 — [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.] Steven Brust ‘s Cowboy Feng’s Space Bar and Grille

Ok, let’s note that I don’t have to like a novel to think it has a truly great Beginning which is what Steven Brust ‘s Cowboy Feng’s Space Bar and Grille has. And as know from my previous essay on this work, neither I or the author like this novel.

The set-up that Brust gives us for his Cowboy Feng’s Space Bar and Grille novel is one of the best I’ve ever read. It’s got delicious food, Irish music, an explanation of why the bar is named Cowboy Feng’s Space Bar and Grille and even a note about what the plot is. All in four paragraphs. Four really great paragraphs.

And yes, it’s now available from the usual suspects.

Cowboy Feng’s Space Bar and Grille has the best matzo ball soup in the galaxy. Lots of garlic, matzo balls with just the right consistency to absorb the flavor, big chunks of chicken, and the whole of it seasoned to a biting perfection. One bowl, along with maybe a couple of tamales, will usually do for a meal.

As for entertainment, Feng gets some of the best Irish musicians you’ll ever hear—good instrumental backing, fine singing, some stupendous fiddle playing, and driving energy. Hell, some of the songs are actually Irish.

I was there that Thursday, sitting in my favorite booth—back middle, just under the picture of the big, grinning Chinese fellow with the mustache and the cowboy hat—while I waited for the rest of my band, the Jig-Makers, to finish tuning. It’s my favorite booth because you can see the whole dining room to your right and most of the taproom to your left, and you get a great view of the stage.

We weren’t playing tonight, but Fred, the manager, let us use the stage to practice. The place used to have live music every Wednesday and Thursday, as well as on the weekends, but it didn’t pay, so Fred canceled it. He was the practical sort; not me, I’m sentimental. This has caused me any number of difficulties, but there it is. My other problem is that I’m easily distracted. Sorry about that. Where was I? Oh, yeah. Thursday. Which reminds me: Did you hear the one about how, after the nuclear attack, the town of Sanctuary, Venus, had to change its name? To Sanctuary, Jupiter? Anyway, Thursday was the day someone lobbed an atomic warhead at Jerrysport, Mars, and reduced it to rubble.

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born February 8, 1828 — Jules Verne. So how many novels by him are you familiar with? Personally I’m on first-hand terms with Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth and Around the World in Eighty Days. That’s it. It appears that he wrote some sixty works and a lot were genre. And, of course, his fiction became the source for many other works in the last century as well. (Died 1905.)
Born February 8, 1905 — Truman Bradley. He was the host of syndicated Science Fiction Theatre series which ran from 1955 to 1957. It aired its last episode on this day in 1957. On Borrowed Time, a fantasy film, is his only other SFF work. (Died 1974.)
Born February 8, 1918 — Michael Strong. He was Dr. Roger Korby in the most excellent Trek episode of “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” He also showed up in Green Hornet, Mission Impossible, I-Spy (ok I consider it genre even if you don’t), Galactica 1980, Man from Atlantis, The Six Million Dollar Man, Planet of The Apes, Kolchak: The Night Stalker and The Immortal. (Died 1980.)
Born February 8, 1938 — Ned Brooks. A Southern fan involved for six decades in fandom and attended his first Worldcon in 1963. Brooks’ notable fanzines included It Comes in the Mail. He wrote two associational works, Hannes Bok Illustration Indexand Revised Hannes Bok Checklist back in the days when print reigned surpreme. ISDBF shows that he was quite the letter writer. Mike has an appreciation of him here. (Died 2015.)
Born February 8, 1953 — Mary Steenburgen, 70. She first acted in a genre way as Amy in Time After Time. She followed that up by being Adrian in A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy which I suppose is sort of genre though I’ll bet some you will dispute that. She shows up next in the much more family friendly One Magic Christmas as Ginny Grainger. And she has a part in Back to the Future Part III as Clara Clayton Brown which she repeated in the animated series. And, and keep in mind this is not a full list, she was also in The Last Man on Earth series as Gail Klosterman.
Born February 8, 1962 — Malorie Blackman, 61. Her excellent Noughts and Crosses series explores racism in a dystopian setting. (They’re published as Black & White in the States.) She also wrote a Seventh Doctor short story, “The Ripple Effect” which was published as one of the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary e-Shorts. She’s readily available on all digital platforms.
Born February 8, 1969 — Mary Robinette Kowal, 54. Simply a stellar author and an even better human being. I’m going to select Ghost Talkers as the work by her that I like the most. Now her Forest of Memory novella might be even more stellar. She’s also a splendid voice actor doing works of authors such as John Scalzi, Seanan McGuire and Kage Baker. I’m particularly amazed by her work on McGuire’s Indexing series. Awards? Oh, yes. She has a Hugo Award for Best Novelette, a Hugo Award for Best Novel, a Nebula Award for Best Novel, another Hugo Award for Best Related Work, an Astounding Award for Best New Writer, and finally a Hugo Award for Best Short Story. Impressive indeed. So let’s have Paul Weimer have the last words on her: “I thought it was Shades of Milk and Honey for a good long while, but I think Calculating Stars is my favorite. Although, I will now add that if you want the best one-volume Mary Robinette Kowal reading experience, take a space cruise with her newest, The Spare Man (which is just superb in audio).”
Born February 8, 1979 — Josh Keaton, 44. He voiced the Hal Jordan / Green Lantern character in the most excellent Green Lantern: The Animated series which lasted but one season of twenty six episodes though they did end it properly. Yea! I’m also very impressed with his Spider-Man that he did for The Spectacular Spider-Man series.

(12) AVATAR FINALLY FALLS FROM BOX OFFICE #1. After leading films at the box office for several weeks, Avatar: The Way of Water was knocked off by the opening of M. Night Shyamalan’s newest movie, Knock at the Cabin says The Hollywood Reporter.

M. Night Shyamalan’s newest movie, Knock at the Cabin, topped the domestic chart with $14.2 million from 3,643 theaters. While the psychological-tinged horror pic has bragging rights to finally being the film to topple Avatar: The Way of Water from the stop spot, it is nevertheless the lowest North American opening of any film directed by Shyamalan….

The James Cameron-directed Avatar: The Way of Water fell to No. 3 in its eighth weekend of play in North America with roughly $10.8 million from 3,310 theaters to finish the weekend with a global total of $2.174 billion, not far behind Cameron’sTitanic ($2.194 billion).

Disney and 20th Century’s The Way of Water is expected to ultimately overtake Titanic to become the third top-grossing film of all time at the worldwide box office behind the original Avatar and Avengers: Endgame. Overseas, the Avatar sequel has already sailed past Titanic ($1.538 billion versus $1.535 billion), a feat it accomplished over the weekend. One wrinkle: a 3D version of Titanic is being rereleased on Feb. 10 by Disney and Paramount….

(13) REVENGE AT LAST. Paul Weimer reviews the finale of a new edition of the classic Demon Princes series at Nerds of a Feather: “Review: The Book of Dreams by Jack Vance”.

… In the course of the book, even with his money and power and influence, Gersen has a difficult time in pinning down Treesong, who proves in the course of this novel to be the most elusive of the Demon Princes. Treesong survives more attempts for Gersen to confront and finish him than any of his other opposition. It is not until Gersen gets a hold of the Book that he finally has a lever to finally draw Treesong into a vulnerable position. Treesong is perhaps this series’ Joker, unpredictable yet methodical, inconsistent, and yet having wide range plans and the will and ability to carry them out, forceful and yet vulnerable in certain spots. He is more complicated than any of the other Demon Princes and that makes him a fascinating antagonist, all the way to the final confrontation…

(14) THE COMET MADNESS OF 1910. The Mark Twain House hosts astronomer Pamela Gay’s interview with Comet Madness author Richard Goodrich on February 16. Free registration here.

“I came in with Halley’s Comet,” said Mark Twain in 1909, “It is coming again next year. The Almighty has said, no doubt, ‘Now there are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.’” He died on April 21, 1910—one day after the comet had once again reached its perihelion.

But the fulfillment of Twain’s prophecy wasn’t the only strange thing that happened that year. In Comet Madness: How the 1910 Return of Halley’s Comet (Almost) Destroyed Civilization, author and historian Richard J. Goodrich examines the 1910 appearance of Halley’s Comet and the ensuing frenzy sparked by media manipulation, bogus science, and outright deception. The result is a fascinating and illuminating narrative history that underscores how we behave in the face of potential calamity – then and now.

(15) A WORLD IN NEED OF SAVING. At Nerds of a Feather, Arturo Serrano unpacks the moral issues in an impressive new novel: “Review: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler”. And what book could be more appropriate for a deep dive?

… Moreover, in keeping with the novel’s anti-individualistic stance, the moral failures that set the plot in motion are never ascribed to one character or one faction. Sealife depletion is not caused by this one company’s greed; it’s humankind’s greed. Rights violations are not allowed by this one government’s negligence; it’s humankind’s negligence. Securing a future for all lifeforms is not this one hero’s duty; it’s humankind’s duty. And yet, the individual characters we follow through the story aren’t diluted in an all-blurring mass movement. They remain conscious of their uniqueness, but also of their connection to the whole. The novel’s message is not one of annulling the individual, just one of expanding the scope of moral analysis….

(16) IS IT A CHEAT? THEN DON’T READ. “Hogwarts Legacy: How to find all the pages for the Field Guide” at USA Today.

The Wizard’s Field Guide is the main way you can check your progress in Hogwarts Legacy. You receive it once you are sorted into your Hogwarts house, and it keeps record of every enemy type you face. It also challenges you to do certain things, and will reward you with upgrades and cosmetics.

However, before you can fill it out, you need to find all of the pages for it. These are scattered all over Hogwarts, Hogsmeade, and the surrounding Highlands. There are over 150 to find, and you’ll want to get them all if you are aiming for 100% completion.

Here is how to find all the Field Guide pages in Hogwarts Legacy….

(17) EJECT! According to Variety, “’Fawlty Towers’ Set for Revival at Castle Rock With John Cleese”.

Classic British sitcom “Fawlty Towers” is being revived at Castle Rock Entertainment with original series writer and star John Cleese and his daughter Camilla Cleese set to write and star.

Matthew George, Rob Reiner, Michele Reiner and Derrick Rossi are executive producing the series for Castle Rock Television, which is developing the project.

“Fawlty Towers,” written by John Cleese and Connie Booth, originally ran in two seasons of six episodes each that were broadcast on the BBC in 1975 and 1979. The series followed the unfortunate exploits of Basil Fawlty (John Cleese) as he struggled to keep his hotel and marriage afloat….

(18) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George enacts the “Velma Pitch Meeting”.

HBO Max decided to dive into the adult animation arena with VELMA, the Scooby Doo spinoff from Mindy Kaling. Despite negative reviews from pretty much everyone, the show seems to be the talk of the Internet. Or maybe that’s because of them… Velma definitely raises some questions. Like where’s Scooby Doo in the Scooby Doo show? Why is every single character just a completely different person than the character they’re based on? Why is everyone so mean? Why does everyone love Velma? Why are they trying so hard to be snarky and meta? To answer all these questions, check out the pitch meeting that led to Velma.

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, John King Tarpinian, Ziv Wities, Jim Janney, John Hertz, Chris Barkley, Andrew Porter, and Michael Toman for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day by Soon Lee.]

Pixel Scroll 1/10/23 Scrolls Are Here, Scrolls Are Here, Life Is Pixels And Life Is Bheer

Posted on January 10, 2023 by Mike Glyer

(1) SPEAK MEMORY. The Guardian wonders, “Death of the narrator? Apple unveils suite of AI-voiced audiobooks”.

Apple has quietly launched a catalogue of books narrated by artificial intelligence in a move that may mark the beginning of the end for human narrators. The strategy marks an attempt to upend the lucrative and fast-growing audiobook market – but it also promises to intensify scrutiny over allegations of Apple’s anti-competitive behaviour.

The popularity of the audiobook market has exploded in recent years, with technology companies scrambling to gain a foothold. Sales last year jumped 25%, bringing in more than $1.5bn. Industry insiders believe the global market could be worth more than $35bn by 2030.

… Before the launch, one Canadian literary agent told the Guardian she did not see the value from both a literary or customer perspective.

“Companies see the audiobooks market and that there’s money to be made. They want to make content. But that’s all it is. It’s not what customers want to listen to. There’s so much value in the narration and the storytelling,” said Carly Watters….

(2) KELLY LINK Q&A. At Publishers Weekly: “Flights of Fancy: PW Talks with Kelly Link”.

… What can contemporary fiction inject into the fairy tale?

Maybe psychological depth. Fairy tales depend on what the reader brings to them. The difference between fairy tales and myth is that Disney hardened our idea of certain stories so that a particular version of them becomes so codified that it replaces other possibilities of how that story could exist. I don’t think it’s great to let those stories exist in one form. People are constantly retelling them, and I think you need the rigid, popular version everyone knows for the weirder versions to have any power….

(3) DEADLINE EXTENDED. L.A. County high school students now have until January 23, 2023 to submit their sff short stories to The Tomorrow Prize & The Green Feather Award.

The Omega Sci-Fi Awards invites Los Angeles County high school students to submit their short science fiction stories to The Tomorrow Prize. The Tomorrow Prize encourages young writers to use sci-fi to explore the diverse issues humanity wrestles with, spark creative solutions, and unite the worlds of art and science.

The Green Feather Award co-presented by the Nature Nexus Institute, highlights an environmentally focused sci-fi story. We are seeking stories that integrate creative solutions to the climate and biodiversity crises.

For more details please see submission guidelines.

Selected finalists will be chosen to have their stories read in their honor by celebrity guests during the May 2023 Culminating Event.

First, Second, and Third place Tomorrow Prize winners will receive $250, $150, and $100 USD cash prizes.

The First place Tomorrow Prize winner will be published in L.A. Parent Magazine.

The Green Feather Award is a special prize for an environmentally focused sci-fi story. The winner will receive $250 USD & online publication by the Nature Nexus Institute.

(4) IN THE BEGINNING? Whatever presents “The Big Idea: Nancy Kress” about the premise to Observer, the novel she’s co-written with Robert Lanza.

…On the one hand, could science support the idea that consciousness creates the universe? On the other hand, wasn’t this just recycled philosophy 101 according to Irish philosopher George Berkeley, among others?…

(5) TRIVIAL TRIVIA. English-language prozine Interzone is being published in Poland by MYY Press.

(6) A GREEN MAN, BUT NOT A LITTLE ONE. MeTV remembers the time “Ted Cassidy helped Gene Roddenberry play a prank behind the scenes on Star Trek”. Here’s the first part of the story:

The first-season Star Trek episode “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” has a few memorable things that stand out. It gives us our second evil duplicate Kirk of the series, we get some backstory for Majel Barrett’s nurse Chapel… but arguably what sticks in the minds of fans the most is Ted Cassidy as ominous android Ruk.

At this time, Ted Cassidy was fresh off the ending of The Addams Family where he enjoyed a regular role as Lurch, the family butler. In his book Star Trek Memories, William Shatner talks about how Cassidy was cast as the seven-foot-tall, menacing android. Prior to filming, Star Trek‘s makeup artist, Freddie Phillips asked Cassidy to come in for a makeup test.

“Cassidy sat down in Phillips’ undersized makeup chair and allowed the artist to transform him from a smiling young actor to an evil, hulking monster,” Shatner writes. “First Freddie covered Ted’s head with a latex skinhead wig; then he applied a sort of greyish-green base coat over Cassidy’s entire face. Once all that was done, Phillips darkened the area around each of the actor’s eyes and employed a black grease pencil to sharpen the angles of Ted’s cheekbones, forehead and chin. The end result was quite frightening and really served to drain all the humanity from Cassidy’s face.”…

(7) BOOK KEEPING. “Floods, Fires and Humidity: How Climate Change Affects Book Preservation” in the New York Times.

…Both immediate and long-term strategies are needed to keep books secure in changing environments, experts say, but some threats are more insidious than wildfires or hurricanes.

Shifts in temperature and humidity from climate change can have large consequences. Archivists and conservators in Cincinnati, for example, are worried about big temperature swings in a single day. Humidity is on the rise in Southern California, where the climate is historically dry; most preservation systems in the area aren’t designed to manage precipitation.

“The higher the humidity, the higher the temperature, the quicker they will break down their organic materials,” said Holly Prochaska, the interim head of the Archives and Rare Books Library at the University of Cincinnati. “Leather will wet rot. Collagen fibers in vellum will tighten and shrink.”…

Institutions like U.C.L.A. are developing ways to combat humidity to work in tandem with their climate-controlled stacks and collections rooms. Now, because of climate change, Metzger thinks twice before loaning out materials, which can keep history and knowledge under lock and key.

“Books gain meaning by use — use is exhibit, use is research — and there’s a beauty in use,” Metzger said. “If we just isolate things and keep them in these little, perfectly controlled environments with guards around them, what is their meaning anymore?”

One solution is digitization — scanning pages and storing them online. The process is not only an answer to climate change; it also allows for documents to be easily accessible and shared, broadening a collection’s reach. Adding documents to a server or the cloud, though, presents its own set of obstacles, both practical and environmental.

(8) SYLVIA RUCKER (1943-2023). Sylvia Bogsch Rucker, Rudy Rucker’s wife, died January 6. He pays tribute to her in “Sylvia’s Life”.

…Her curiosity never ended, even in her final days she wanted to know the details of everyone’s lives. This special attention made everyone feel loved. Her loving, warm, beautiful spirit will be deeply missed by all….

(9) MEMORY LANE.

1926 — [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.] Pooh and food

We shall talk about Pooh and food. Well actually I believe that A.E. Milne only had one food that his round little bear found interesting to the point of obsession and that was honey. Honey, often spelled Hunny by Pooh, is as you know the ever so sweet food made by bees.

It’s easily the most important food in the Winnie-the-Pooh works, being loved by pooh bears, heffalumps and woozles and also enjoyed by rabbits and piglets.

Pooh even called it smackerel , which is to say a snack of a small amount of honey. Indeed In the very first chapter, Pooh tells us, “the only reason for making honey is so as I can eat it”.

And yes, actual bears do love honey. They’ll break open a tree to get at a wild hive inside a dead trunk eating the honey and bees alike. They particularly like the bee larvae.

““When you wake up in the morning, Pooh” said piglet at last, “what’s the first thing you say to yourself?”

“What’s for breakfast?” said Pooh. “What do you say, Piglet?”

“I say, I wonder what’s going to happen exciting today?” said Piglet.

Pooh nodded thoughtfully.

“It’s the same thing,” he said.”

The illustration is from the 1926 first edition with the art by E.A. Shepherd.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born January 10, 1904 — Ray Bolger. The Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, the villainous Barnaby in Babes in Toyland, two appearances on Fantasy Island, andVector In “Greetings from Earth” on the Seventies version of Battlestar Galactica. He made a Dr. Pepper ad which you can see here. (Died 1987.)
Born January 10, 1937 — Elizabeth Anne Hull. She served as the President of the Science Fiction Research Association and editor of its newsletter. She was a member of the panel for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best SF novel since 1986. With her husband Frederik Pohl, Hull edited the Tales from the Planet Earth anthology. She was also the editor of the Gateways: Original New Stories Inspired by Frederik Pohl anthology. She has co-authored three short stories with him, “Author Plus”, “The Middle Kingdom” and “Second Best Friend”. (Died 2021.)
Born January 10, 1944 — William Sanderson, 79. I remember him best as J. F. Sebastian, the possibly insane genetic designer working for Tyrell in Blade Runner, but he’s had a career obviously after that film including appearing as Skeets in The Rocketeer, voicing Dr. Karl Rossum on Batman: The Animated Series, playing the character Deuce on Babylon 5 (a series I’ve watched through at least three times), E. B. Farnum on Deadwood (ok, it’s not genre, but it’s Will and Emma’s favorite show so let’s let it slide) and Sheriff Bud Dearborne on True Blood.
Born January 10, 1944 — Jeffrey Catherine Jones. She was an artist providing more than a hundred and fifty covers for many different types of genre books through mid seventies including the Ace paperback editions of the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series including Swords Against Death. Among her work was also Flash Gordon for Charlton Comics in the Sixties and the Conan Saga for Marvel Comics in the late Eighties. (Died 2011.)
Born January 10, 1947 — George Alec Effinger. I’ve read his Marîd Audran series at least twice as it’s an amazing series in both the characters and the setting. I never read the short stories set in this setting until Golden Gryphon Press sent me Budayeen Nights for Green Man to review. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered any of his other works. (Died 2002.)
Born January 10, 1959 — Jeff Kaake, 64. He’s on the Birthday Honors list as he was Captain John Boon on the Space Rangers which lasted only six episodes. Damn. That was a fun show! He was also Thomas Cole on Viper which lasted four seasons. And he showed up in the Stormageddon film (which sounds like the name a Filer would give to a beloved SJW Cred) as well.
Born January 10, 1959 — Fran Walsh, 64. Partner of Peter Jackson, she has contributed to all of his films since the late Eighties when she started out as co-writer of Meet the Feebles, and as producer since The Fellowship of the Ring which won a Hugo. Need I note the next two films won Hugos as well? The Hobbit films did not win Hugos. The first one was nominated at LoneStarCon 3 but lost out to The Avengers; the other two were not nominated.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

The Far Side gets a laugh from an SF trope.

(12) TOTOPOTUS. [Item by Ben Bird Person.] Miranda Parkin (@mparkinb) did this piece based on Season 2 of the HBO sci-fi comedy television series Avenue 5 (2020-):

an #avenue5 commission! featuring @LoisChimimba , @paulgraymond (funny, first time I drew him was for Space Fleet), @arsherali , and @DianCathal ! #art #hbo #hbomax pic.twitter.com/Dp0YxBX7ht
— Miranda P. she/they (@mparkinb) January 11, 2023

(13) LOOK CLOSER. [Item by Jo Van.] Something tonight reminded me of the Deep Space Nine Documentary What We Left Behind, which I helped to crowd-fund back in 2017, and I was thinking, wait a minute, wasn’t there something about a posted acknowledgement of the contributors?

It took a foray into the Wayback Machine, but I found it… and there’s my name, down about where Sisko’s communicator would be.

(14) GAINING CREDENTIALS. Annalisa Barbieri tells the Guardian “What the love of cats taught me about myself”.

I never thought I’d kiss a cat. Or like them, or be in a room with them. Cats, to me, were evil and unpredictable. A classic projection, if ever I saw one, of fear manifesting as dislike. Intense fear. Intense dislike.

But then I became a mother and, as we all know, maternal love makes you do strange, selfless things occasionally. My children started asking for a cat. I said no, of course. My home was my safe place. No cats allowed. For some years they asked for a cat, on and off. Eventually, the “why we should get a cat” lists started getting toilet-roll long and I started thinking, maybe we can get a kitten. Kittens are cute. I started watching videos. Kittens were cute….

(15) BIG SIXTIES FINISH. Victoria Silverwolf wraps up a review of a famous anthology: “[January 10, 1968] Saving the Best For Last (Dangerous Visions, Part Three)” at Galactic Journey.

Welcome to the last of our three discussions about an anthology of original fantasy and science fiction that’s drawing a lot of attention. Love it or hate it, or maybe a little of both, it’s impossible to ignore….

(16) ALAS, POOR UNIVAC. Arturo Serrano brings us “Microreview [book]: Hamlet, Prince of Robots by M. Darusha Wehm” at Nerds of a Feather.

No longer the seat of Danish monarchy, Elsinore is now a corporation, a leading manufacturer of human-like robots. The murdered Hamlet senior was the Humanoid Artificial Mind (Learned Emotive Type), a model that represented a huge leap ahead in robotic innovation. Instead of a queen, Gertrude is a CEO, whose hopes for Elsinore’s bottom line now depend on the success of her latest creation, the Hamlet v.2. If the company doesn’t maintain dominance of the robot market, its (figurative) throne will be snatched by its main competitor, which is aggressively promoting a rival model, the Fortinbras. But one night, a portion of old code from Hamlet v.1 copies itself into the hard drive of Hamlet v.2, and a quest for revenge begins to take shape.

Everything’s better with robots, and a retelling of one of the biggest classics in the Western canon is a sure attention grabber….

(17) ON THE SHELF. Nerds of a Feather’s Paul Weimeralso asked the Hamlet author for recommendations in “Six Books with M. Darusha Wehm”.

1. What book are you currently reading?

I’ve had it on my shelf since it came out, but only just started The Book of Flora by Meg Elison. It’s the third and final book in the “Road to Nowhere” series, which starts with The Book of the Unnamed Midwife. The whole series is an incredible, post-apocalyptic saga of the struggles of communities in dark times. I’ve loved the two previous books in the series, but while the books offer stories of human resilience, they are also harrowing to read, so I’ve had to space them out in my reading time….

(18) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In case you missed the Sixties we offer “The Complete 14 Batman Window Cameos”.

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Jo Van, Daniel Dern, Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, JJ, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]

Pixel Scroll 11/22/22 File Thing, You Make My Scroll Sing, You Make Everything … Pixelly

Posted on November 22, 2022 by Mike Glyer

(1) NPR’S PICKS OF 2022. NPR has put up its massive list of “Best Books 2022: Books We Love”. It’s sortable by category – this is the button to pull out the 67 “Sci-Fi, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction” titles. The tool will also take you back to any of their annual selections since 2013.

Books We Love! – NPR’s biannual, interactive reading guide – is back for its 10th year with 400+ books published in 2022! Mix and match tags including “Book Club Ideas,” “Eye-Opening Reads,” and “Kids’ Books” to browse titles hand-picked by NPR staff and trusted critics. Click back through a decade of recommendations to find more than 3,200 books – we’ve got your next favorite read and something for every person on your holiday shopping list. Discover the books that comforted, challenged, and captivated us this year.

(2) WHAT DO YOU WANT SANTA TO BRING? Connie Willis, on Facebook, recommends adding Miracle on 34th Street to your Thanksgiving viewing. She does a deep dive into how a real Macy’s parade was filmed for the movie, and has other insights into the actors and actresses.

Thanksgiving is fast upon us, and I have a great movie to recommend (besides the standards we watch every year: PLANES, TRAINS, AND AUTOMOBILES and DEAR GOD.) The movie is MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET (the original black and white with Edmund Gwenn, Natalie Wood, Maureen O’Hara, and John Payne).

“But that’s a Christmas movie!” I can hear you saying. True, but it actually begins at Thanksgiving, with the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade, and, even better, the parade in the movie is the real deal. Yes, the actual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade from the year the movie was made, 1946. They filmed the opening sequences with the majorette and the clown and the drunken Santa–“It’s cold! A man’s gotta do SOMETHING to keep warm!”–at the beginning of the parade….

(3) LOCUS FUNDRAISER MAKING PROGRESS. With 23 days left, the Indiegogo for “Locus Magazine: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror” has raised $45,169 of the $75,000 goal with the help of 473 backers. There’s a variety of perks available, such as this one for $30 donors.

(4) WILL IT MAKE A BIG SPLASH? A new trailer for Avatar: The Way of Water – in theaters December 16.

Set more than a decade after the events of the first film, “Avatar: The Way of Water” begins to tell the story of the Sully family (Jake, Neytiri, and their kids), the trouble that follows them, the lengths they go to keep each other safe, the battles they fight to stay alive, and the tragedies they endure.

(5) IT’S REALLY AND SINCERELY DEAD. The Department of Justice put out a press release about Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster’s decision to not appeal the district court’s verdict barring their merger deal.

The district court’s decision is a victory for authors, the marketplace of ideas, consumers, and competitive markets. It reinforces the important principle that antitrust laws apply to transactions that harm content creators and workers. The Department is pleased that Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster have opted not to appeal.

(6) RECOMMENDED READING FOR ELON MUSK. Norman Spinrad, for reasons unexplained, wants to place a copy of his forthcoming novella Up and Out in the hands of Elon Musk. He calls on everyone to use their connections and get back to him at [email protected]

ELON MUSK WHERE ARE YOU?

It has often been said that no one on the planet is more than 6 steps from anyone else, and I have been trying contact Elon Musk fruitlessly, not surprising, given that he is the richest and maybe one of the most famous people on Earth. I did not want to ask him for money or anything else. I simply wanted to give him something that I know he would enjoy, a novella called UP AND OUT, but of course, impossible to get the rtf to him personally.

And this is a very personal gift and now it will be published December 13th in the formally January/February issue of Asimov’s SF Magazine. So he will be able to buy the issue if he knows about it, and I think he can probably afford it.

So what I am asking y’all is only to help me tell him. Given that there are about 200 people getting this, the math would seem to say that the odds are good. I’m not asking for an email address, or anything else, so this would seem to be possible.

(7) A CLASSIC RESUMES. “’Willow’ Resurrected: The Hard-Fought Story of an Epic Comeback” – Vanity Fair tells that story, how it came to pass that Willow will roll again on Disney+ beginning November 30.

Jonathan Kasdan was in the middle of making a Star Wars movie, but his mind kept venturing to an entirely different universe.

This happened in 2017, when the screenwriter of Solo stood on the Canary Islands set of the movie, watching as one of his idols dropped in for a cameo. Warwick Davis, who was there to play a member of a galactic biker gang, had a long history of playing Star Wars characters, but he was also the star of one of Kasdan’s favorite movies from childhood, the 1988 sword-and-sorcery adventure Willow.

“I asked to be introduced to him,” Kasdan recalls. “I had one of the ADs walk me over, and he was sitting in his foldout chair. I said, ‘I’m Jon Kasdan. I’m one of the writers.’ And he was very nice.” But Kasdan had a not-so-secret agenda. “I said, ‘Listen, I love Willow, and I really think there’s something to be done here. I’m beating the drum loudly with Kathy [Kennedy, Lucasfilm’s president] and with the company.’” Davis lit up. “He immediately was like, ‘Have a seat! Let’s talk more!’” Kasdan says. “We started talking that very minute about what it could be and have never stopped.”

Five years later, Willow—the new Disney+ series —will debut on November 30. But the journey between that first conversation and the completion of the show was a fraught adventure of its own, sometimes harrowing, sometimes comical, sometimes just awkward. Still, it was driven by a sincere love of this fantasy realm and the unlikely hero at its center.

Today, Kasdan is part of the Lucasfilm brain trust, consulting on multiple projects with his own office at their Disney headquarters, (complete with a sweeping view of Kennedy’s parking space, he jokes). But back in 2017, when he first broached the subject of reviving Willow with Davis on the set of Solo, his credits included writing stints on Dawson’s Creek and Freaks and Geeks, and directing the indie films The First Time and In the Land of Women. Kasdan had leveled up to epics for the first time with Solo, which he had cowritten with his father (Star Wars veteran and Oscar-nominated screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan). He had the experience and the enthusiasm to take on a return to Willow, if not the actual pull at Lucasfilm to make it a reality….

(8) PARADOX LAUNCH EVENT. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] I previously sent an image of the cover of Romania’s H. G. Wells SF Society of Timisoara 50 year anniversary edition of Paradox (Pixel Scroll 11/17/22 item #12).

The zine’s launch took place at the Theresien Bastion (the main section of the former Austrian fortifications that defended Timisoara in 1700s) and it attracted a number of old sci-fi fans and members of the H.G. Wells association.

I have pictures of the launch courtesy of Silviu Genescu (himself an award-winning author – the Romanian equivalent of the Booker for D is for ‘End’)

(9) MEMORY LANE.

1986 — [By Cat Eldridge.] Nutcracker: The Motion Picture

Christmas long ago was the memory of a dream that seemed never to end. But somewhere in the middle of that dream, I always did wake up, just in time to attend the Christmas party. — Opening lines as said by the adult Clara.

So let’s talk about a most unusual Nutcracker that had the blessing to get filmed. Nutcracker: The Motion Picture, also known as Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Nutcracker or simply Nutcracker, is was produced thirty-six years ago by the Pacific Northwest Ballet.

So what makes this one worth knowing about? Two words that form a name: Maurice Sendak.

Choreographer Kent Stowell who the artistic director of the Pacific Northwest Ballet had invited the author-illustrator Maurice Sendak to collaborate on a Nutcracker production in 1979 after his wife and another colleague had seen a Sendak design for a performance of Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

Sendak initially rejected Stowell’s invitation, later explaining why he did so:

The Nutcrackers I’ve seen have all been dull. You have a simpering little girl, a Christmas party, a tree that gets big. Then you have a variety of people who do dances that seem to go on and on ad nauseam. Technically it’s a mess, too; Acts I and II have practically nothing to do with each other. … What you don’t have is plot. No logic. You have lots of very pretty music, but I don’t enjoy it because I’m a very pedantic, logical person. I want to know why things happen.

He later accepted provided that he could write it so it was in tune with the themes in Hoffmann’s original story. It was extremely popular and it was the annual Christmas show for thirty-one years.

For reasons too complicated to explain here, I got invited on a personal tour of the backstage area of the Pacific Northwest Ballet building where the scenery and other materials that Sendak had designed for this were stored. To say these were magical is an understatement. And just a tad scary up close.

Two Disney executives attended the premiere and suggested it’d make a splendid film. Sendak and the Director of the Ballet resisted at first preferring to just film the ballet. But both finally decided to adapt it to a film. That meant Clara’s dream had to be clarified; large portions of the choreography were changed; some of some the original designs underwent revision, and Sendak created additional ones from scratch.

It was shot in ten days on the cheap and critics weren’t particularly kind about the result as they could see the necessary shortcuts taken. Ballard, the Director here as well, responded to criticism about the editing in a later The New York Times interview, noting that the editing was not what he had initially planned, but was because of the tight filming schedule.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born November 22, 1932 — Robert Vaughn. His best-known genre work was as Napoleon Solo in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. with other genre work being in Teenage Caveman, Starship Invasions, The Lucifer Complex, Virus, Hangar 18, Battle Beyond the Stars, Superman III, C.H.U.D. II: Bud the C.H.U.D. (seriously who penned that awful title?), Transylvania Twist and Witch Academy. Oh, and he wrote the introduction to The Man from U.N.C.L.E. series companion that came out a generation after the series aired. (Died 2016.)
Born November 22, 1940 — Terry Gilliam, 82. He’s directed many films of which the vast majority are firmly genre. I think I’ve seen most of them though I though I’ve not seen The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, Tideland, The Zero Theorem or The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. I’ve seen everything else. Yes, I skipped past his start as the animator for Monty Python’s Flying Circus which grew out of his work for the children’s series Do Not Adjust Your Set which had the staff of Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin. Though he largely was the animator in the series and the films, he did occasionally take acting roles according to his autobiography, particularly roles no one else wanted such those requiring extensive makeup. He also co-directed a number of scenes. Awards? Of course. Twelve Monkeys is the most decorated with six followed by Brazil with two and Time Bandits and The Fisher King which each have but one. He’s not won any Hugos though he has been nominated for four — Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Time Bandits, Brazil and Twelve Monkeys. My favorite films by him? Oh, the one I’ve watched the most is The Adventures of Baron Munchausen followed by Time Bandits. He’s co-directing and writing the forthcoming Time Bandits series Apple is financing and showing. I’ll subscribe when it’s out.
Born November 22, 1943 — William Kotzwinkle, 79. Fata Morgana might be in my opinion his best novel though Doctor Rat which he won the World Fantasy Award for is in the running for that honor as well. And his short stories of which there are many are quite excellent too. Did you know Kotzwinkle wrote the novelization of the screenplay for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial? The usual digital suspects are well stocked with his books.
Born November 22, 1949 — John Grant. He’d make the Birthday list solely for being involved in the stellar Encyclopedia of Fantasy which won a Hugo at BucConeer. And he did win another well-deserved Hugo at Noreascon 4 for Best Related Work for The Chesley Awards for Science Fiction and Fantasy Art: A Retrospective. Most of His short fiction has been set in the Lone Wolf universe though I see that he did a Judge Dredd novel too. (Died 2020.)
Born November 22, 1957 — Kim Yale. Married to John Ostrander until 1993 when she died of breast cancer, she was a writer whose first work was in the New America series, a spin-off of Truman’s Scout series. With Truman, she developed the Barbara Gordon Oracle character, created the Manhunter series, worked on Suicide Squad, and was an editor at D.C. where she oversaw such licenses as Star Trek: The Next Generation. For First Comics, she co-wrote much of the amazing Grimjack with her husband.
Born November 22, 1958 — Jamie Lee Curtis, 64. Can we agree that she was the best Scream Queen for her film debut in the 1978 Halloween film in which she played the role of Laurie Strode? No? Well, that’s my claim. Spoilers follow. She followed up with yet more horror films, The Fog and Prom Night. In all, she’s the only character that survives. She would reprise the role of Laurie in six sequels, including Halloween H20, Halloween: Resurrection, Halloween II and Halloween III: Season of the Witch, Halloween (a direct sequel to the first Halloween) and Halloween Kills. She shows up in one of my fave SF films, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension as Sandra Banzai but you’ll need to see the director’s extended version as she’s only there in that version. Is True Lies genre? Probably not, but for her performance, Curtis won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy and the Saturn Award for Best Actress. Damn impressive I’d say. No, I’m not listing all her films here as OGH would likely start growling. Suffice to say she’s had a very impressive career.
Born November 22, 1984 — Scarlett Johansson, 38. Best known perhaps for her role as the Black Widow in the MCU films including the present Black Widow film but she has other genre appearances including playing Motoko Kusanagi in Ghost in the Shell which was controversial for whitewashing the cast, particularly her character who was supposed to be Japanese.

(11) JMS WILL WORK WITH AWA. “AWA Studios Enlists Top Creatives to Shepherd Content Derived From Graphic Novels” reports Variety. J. Michael Straczynski is one of the six.

AWA Studios has enlisted Reginald Hudlin, Gregg Hurwitz, Laeta Kalogridis, Joseph Kosinski, Al Madrigal and J. Michael Straczynski to serve on the company’s Creative Council. The council’s charter is for those established players to use their experience and their connections to help AWA writer and graphic artists “unleash the full potential of their characters and stories, providing a diversity of contemporary storytelling perspectives and putting projects in the best position to be scaled across the entertainment ecosystem,” per AWA.

(12) YA THRILLER. At Nerds of a Feather, Elizabeth Fitzgerald reviews a book that won the Norma K. Hemming Award for Long Work: “Microreview [book]: Ghost Bird by Lisa Fuller”.

Ghost Bird belongs most comfortably in the genre of the YA thriller. A certain subsection of this genre likes to play coy about the presence of supernatural elements. Examples include Black by Fleur Ferris, Small Spaces by Sarah Epstein and Flight of the Fantail by Steph Matuku. By the end, each of these books definitively answers whether the speculative elements played with are considered real within the story’s world. Ghost Bird also has definitive answers, making it very at home in this subgenre. However, its identity as an Indigenous Australian Own Voices narrative makes it difficult to call the story a speculative one. After all, referring to what may be a part of a living Indigenous tradition as fantasy or speculative seems neither respectful nor accurate.

Cleverly, this tension between Western and Indigenous thought is one of the central themes of Ghost Bird. The story is written in first person present tense from the perspective of Stacey. She is intelligent, rational and takes her education very seriously — too seriously, according to some of her family, who feel she should be paying more heed to traditional ways…

(13) THE RAVELED SLEEVE OF CARE IS NOT KNITTED UP. Arturo Serrano reviews a disappointing film based on Winsor McCay’s visual innovations: “’Slumberland’ won’t spark your dreams, but it will put you to sleep” at Nerds of a Feather.

A girl loses her father and processes her grief by oversleeping. An emotionally stunted uncle tries to learn childrearing from Google. The complicated interplay of growth and decay makes the future uncertain and scary. If she wants to grow up and stop retreating into fantasies, she’ll have to accept the fact of death, but also help her uncle reconnect with his inner child and dream again.

This setup sounds like it should deliver a full emotional experience, bolstered by the metaphoric possibilities of dream language. Unfortunately, Netflix film Slumberland shows us a muted dreamscape that doesn’t dare embrace the protean qualities of the unconscious mind. When protagonist Nemo ventures into the land of dreams to look for her father, the place looks too rigid, too rational, built on an oppressively linear logic that makes it less Paprika and more Inception. This does not feel like the dream of a child; it feels like an adult’s self-serving memory of what goes on in a child’s mind….

(14) POPULATION CRISIS. Paul Weimer reviews a novel about a world ruled by women where girl children are no longer being born: “Microreview [book]: Scorpica by G.R. McAllister” at Nerds of a Feather.

…Humans are a species that can think in terms of years, decades and generations ahead and to come. Humans are a species that is very concerned with their posterity, as a way of preserving not only their legacy, but establishing the future for their children and their children’s children. And when that posterity is threatened, people, and the societies they inhabit, can come under stress, fracture, and break.

P D James’ novel The Children of Men (and its movie adaptation) explores the death of posterity for the human race by having had no children born in the last 17 years. Mankind is slowly and inexorably aging out to death, and the stresses on people, on society are like an inexorably tightening vise, a ticking clock for humanity. It’s not pretty, even (and perhaps especially) when there is a glimmer of hope that the doom can be averted.

We come to GR McAllister’s Scorpica, which takes a widescreen epic fantasy approach to this scenario. The Five Queendoms (which is also the name of the series that Scorpica starts) are a quintet of fantasy kingdoms which are not just matriarchies, kingdoms ruled by women, but out and out gynarchies. This is a woman’s world, from the fierce fighters of Scorpica to the potent magicians of Arca, the power, authority and social structures are all controlled by women.

So, when the Drought of Girls begins, and girls are no longer being born among any of the five kingdoms, there is indeed a slow moving, inexorably building crisis that strikes the inhabitants of the kingdoms, and the lives of those whom we meet in the book….

(15) GENRE JUSTICE. “Judge John Hodgman on Klingon Cat Names” in the New York Times.

Tyler writes: My partner, who is also named Tyler, wants a second cat. I’m not a fan of cats, so he takes full responsibility for ours. I told him if he adopts another cat, I would get to name it. He agreed. But he doesn’t like the name I’ve chosen — Gowron, after the Chancellor of the Klingon High Council — and insists I choose another.

This one hurts. First, because you presumed I didn’t know who Gowron is. He’s the son of M’Rel, for Kahless’s sake! Second, I suspect you’re just trying to annoy Tyler as punishment for this second cat. Third, it’s obvious this cat should be named Tyler. But a deal is a deal: Gowron it is. At least you did not get clever and suggest “Meowron,” which I’m sure has been done one million times. Readers, let me know how many of you have cats named Chancellor Meowron. Also email me if your dog is named Lieutenant Woof.

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. From The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on October 26: “Will Our New Writer George R.R. Martin Finish The Monologue On Time?”

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Cat Rambo, ja, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, 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 Tom Becker.]

Pixel Scroll 10/10/22 I Demand Satisfaction. Pixels At Dawn

Posted on October 10, 2022 by Mike Glyer

(1) ASKING ABOUT BRAIN-COMPUTER INTERFACES IN SF. Prof. Brendan Allison has a question, and File 770 has volunteered to try and crowdsource the answer:

I am an academic researcher in the field of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). I’m writing a book chapter about BCIs in science fiction, called BCI-fi. Among other academic pursuits, I’m looking for the first reference to an artificial brain interface. It must involve a device. I’m just writing you as a way to research this question.
The earliest reference so far was the first X-Men comic in 1963. Professor X can “interface” with psychic power – which doesn’t count – but also uses a brain interface to bolster that ability. Frankenstein does use a device to stimulate the brain, but that’s arguably not an interface.

Prof. Allison also sent links to recordings of two recent workshops about BCI-fi where one of the participants was Andy Weir. (“BCI Thursdays Next Generations: BCI-fi Part 1” and “BCI Thursdays Next Generations: BCI-fi Part 2”.)

In this two-part event, we will have prominent speakers within the BCI-fi community to discuss their contributions to BCI-fi, their favorite examples of BCI-fi including movies, books, and podcasts, and next steps to develop, foster, or publicize “good” BCI-fi. We will be joined by Dr. Brendan Allison (UCSD), Andy Weir (author of The Martian), Dr. Eric Leuthardt (Washington University in St. Louis), Stephen Hou (host of Neurratives podcast), Dr. Richard Ramchurn (University of Nottingham), Dr. Jane Huggins (University of Michigan) and Dr. Robert Hampson (Wake Forest University).

(2) IS THERE AN IDEAL LENGTH? “Novels versus novellas in Speculative Fiction” are debated at A Deep Look by Dave Hook.

Many argue that the perfect length for speculative fiction is the novella, or short novel. Some believe that this is long enough to tell a successful story while not longer than needed. It is said that this length allows for character development and change, and perhaps multiple plot lines, while short enough to be taut and not meander or bog down.
I don’t know if it’s true that the novella is the perfect length for speculative fiction, but it is certainly true that many great works of speculative fiction are novella length, whether works such as “The Times Machine” by H. G. Wells right up to modern fiction such as “A Spindle Splintered” by Alix E. Harrow….

(3) SFWA SF STORYBUNDLE SUBMISSION CALL. The Independent Authors Committee of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) is open for submissions for their science fiction StoryBundle to be released next spring. Submissions will be accepted through October 31, 2022, at 11:59pm Eastern Time. The theme for the call is Space is Big. Really Big. They are looking for space opera and “other books that span large swaths of space.” Full guidelines for this submission call can be found here.

StoryBundles are curated collections of books offered at a discounted price. Proceeds go to the participating authors and StoryBundle, and a small cut is donated to SFWA.

This is a great chance for independent and small press authors to gain more exposure and sell more books! Submissions of indie and traditionally published novels will be accepted, though publishers must give permission in writing. You do not need to be a SFWA member to apply!
We welcome full-length science fiction novels of over 40,000 words. We ask that authors submit only one novel, and do not submit a novel that has appeared in any previous StoryBundle (SFWA or otherwise.) Please only submit novels that will be for sale by March 1, 2023. You must have full rights to enter your novel in the StoryBundle, and the novel must not be in Amazon’s KDP Select at the time that the StoryBundle is offered. Participants will be notified by December 1, 2022, so that any books enrolled in KDP will have time to be brought out of exclusivity before the bundle is released on or about March 1, 2023.
Questions may be directed to [email protected].

(4) FUNDRAISING FOR THE THOMASES. The Gofundme for “Lynne and Michael Thomas”, who are facing the loss of their 19-year-old daughter Caitlin to medical complications from Aicardi Syndrome, had raised $58,486 when checked earlier today. Jim C. Hines, who set up the appeal, explained what it’s for:

…I’ve spoken a bit with Michael. It sounds like the medical costs of Caitlin’s treatment are covered. End-of-life costs are another matter.
The goal of this fundraiser is to cover those end-of-life expenses, and to hopefully provide a financial cushion to allow the Thomases to spend their remaining time with Caitlin – and when the time comes, to grieve – without also having to worry about money. All donations will go directly to Michael and Lynne (with the exception of GoFundMe’s processing fee)….

(5) EKPEKI CROWDFUNDING. The Gofundme to “Send Oghenechovwe Ekpeki World Fantasy Con” has brought in $2,000 of its $4,000 goal as of this afternoon. Jason Sanford outlined why it’s needed:

…A successful previous fundraiser brought Ekpeki to this year’s Worldcon, where he was a finalist for two Hugo Awards. However, his gruesome battle with the US embassy in Nigeria for a visa and exorbitant fees and repeated payments resulting from that (including last-minute changes to his international flights) resulted in costs far exceeding what that fundraiser brought in. So this new fundraiser would also mop up those expenses as well….

(6) NEVERTHELESS, A BRADBURY AND ASIMOV FAN. “Temple Grandin Is a Visual Thinker Who Hates Graphic Novels” according to a headline in the New York Times. Here’s an excerpt from their interview with Grandin.

What kind of a reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you?
I was not able to read until I was age 8. Mother tutored me with phonics, and I quickly went from no reading to reading above my age level. My favorite books when I was in fourth grade were “Black Beauty,” “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” and a children’s book about famous inventors. I really related to Black Beauty’s pain when he was forced to pull a heavy carriage with his head held up by a bearing rein. The inventor book appealed to me because I loved to tinker with my kites to make them fly better.
What genres do you especially enjoy reading and which do you avoid?
I avoid romance novels. The books I really enjoy are either about animals or science fiction. I loved “Merle’s Door,” by Ted Kerasote. Many dogs today live really restricted lives and they have no normal dog social life. Another favorite is “The Soul of the Octopus,” by Sy Montgomery. It really made me think about consciousness. When I received a review copy of “A Dog’s Purpose,” by W. Bruce Cameron, I could not put it down. In the science fiction genre, I am a fan of Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov.

(7) PICK SIX. How long has this variation been around? A spinoff from Nerds of a Feather’s “Six Books” interview series is “6 Games With Aidan Moher”.

1. What game are you currently playing?

Appropriately, I’m splitting my time between a couple of JRPGs—one current, one retro.

On the big screen downstairs I’m about 60 hours into Xenoblade Chronicles 3 and still mildly obsessed. I really love a lot of creator Tetsuya Takahashi’s older games—especially Xenogears, which I just finished replaying—but bounced hard off Xenoblade Chronicles 2, so I was a little hesitant when they announced the third game. It’s exceeded all of my expectations, though, and is probably my favourite game in the series now—an improvement on the second game in pretty much every way. Vast world, memorable characters, and Takahashi’s typical zany JRPG plot is a drool-worth combination.

Upstairs in my CRT corner, I’m playing Paper Mario for the Nintendo 64 for the first time. I’ve enjoyed many other games in the series—including Sticker Star, which has a bad reputation—but the original slipped past me for a variety of reasons. It’s wild to go back to the very beginning and see all of the series’s trademarks right there, fully formed, polished, and perfectly enjoyable 20 years later. It’s genuinely funny, the combat is simple but engaging thanks to its timing-based mechanics, and it’s got some of the best graphics on the system.

(8) WAS THE ZODIAC KILLER A FAN? [Item by Susan de Guardiola.] There’s a new theory that the Zodiac killer was a fan, Paul Doerr.

The news reports on this are the first time I’ve ever seen fanzines, filk, D&D, SCA, Renfaires, etc. paired with a Zodiac killer theory.

The evidence is circumstantial, but there’s an awful lot of it.

Los Angeles Magazine devoted an article to the question “Has The Zodiac Killer Mystery Been Solved (Again)”, discussing author Jarrett Kobek’s books Motor Spirit, about the misbegotten hunt for Zodiac, and How to Find Zodiac, about Paul Doerr.

… As he studied Zodiac’s cryptic letters, Kobek brought a writerly attention to bear. He zeroed in on the killer’s habit of quoting forgotten bits of cultural ephemera (the well-known call-outs to The Mikado and to the 1924 short story “The Most Dangerous Game,” as well as a telling reference to an obscure 1950s comic book, identified by an anonymous online researcher, Tahoe27, several years back). Running other apparent quotations through Google Books and the Internet Archive, Kobek formed a picture of the killer as a fan of pulp novels, comics, and other nerdy touchstones. Kobek knew a bit about the early years of the sci-fi and fantasy fandoms, how these nascent communities had begun taking shape around an array of obscure self-published zines. On a hunch, he did a quick web search of “fanzines” and “Vallejo.”…

Paul Haynes has published a long Twitter thread about Kobek’s evidence, now collected in three parts at Threadreader: Part I; Part II; Part III.

I don’t know if anyone who knew Paul Doerr is still around.

(9) THE CORFLU AUCTION IS NOW LIVE! The catalog for the Corflu Pangloss auction is now online at Corflu.org and eFanzines.com. Anyone can bid on those 80 lots, including non-members – the catalog has instruction on how to bid. See the Pangloss Fanzine Auction Catalog and Bid Sheet at the links.

Corflu has a long tradition of raising funds to support the convention by selling and auctioning off vintage science fiction fanzines before, during and sometimes after the convention. As Corflu is a convention devoted to fanzines and the fans who create them, it has always been a natural place to buy, sell or trade zines, and the live auction has often raised very impressive sums.
For the 39th issue of the convention, taking place October 21st to 23rd, 2022 in Vancouver, British Columbia, we have taken a new approach… By creating this catalog of auction items and publishing it some weeks in advance of the convention, we hope to allow fans not attending Corflu Pangloss to participate. Anyone interested in buying is invited to send their bids by email to [email protected] by midnight, Pacific daylight time on October 22nd, 2022.

(10) MEMORY LANE.

1992 – [By Cat Eldridge.] “Relics” was the one hundred and thirtieth episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I found it to be one of the more fascinating episodes that series did and I’ll tell why in a minute, but first let’s talk about the usual details.

Ronald Dowl Moore was the writer of this episode and he was best known fleshing out the Klingons. He also wrote the series finale here, “All Good Things…” which won the Hugo Award at Intersection. And yes, he’s done a lot more Great Things than that but I have an understanding with OGH that I’ll try to keep things reasonably brief.

So why do I like it? Look there’s a Dyson Sphere being depicted as far as I know for the very first time on a video series! Y’all know what that is so you know why I’m so excited by this.

And then there’s the matter of the idea of the Enterprise in responding to a distress signal having the singular honor of rescuing Capt. Montgomery Scott!

So how do the two connect?

Well, the Enterprise, responding to a distress call discovers a Dyson sphere where they the distress call to the USS Jenolan, a Federation transport ship that has been missing for seventy-five years, which they find crashed on the sphere’s outer shell. And in the transporter buffer field, jury rigged to keep working, are two signals, two patterns, one degraded to be saved, the other that of Doohan.

He bonds with Geordie which is fortunate as together they need to figure out how to get the Enterprise out of that damn Sphere. Afterwards he’s feeling like a relic but Picard cheers him up. As the Enterprise returns to its mission, the crew of the ship give Scott a shuttlecraft “on extended loan” to do whatever he wanted.

I thought the writers did a nice job of making him a believable character, much more to be honest than the original series often did. And critics agreed as they’ve consistently voted this to be one of the best episodes of the series.

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born October 10, 1927 — Dana Elcar. Most of you will remember him as Peter Thornton on MacGyver, but he has a long genre history including Russ in Condorman which was inspired by Robert Sheckley’s The Game of X. He also played Sheriff George Paterson in Dark Shadows, and showed up in 2010 as Dimitri Moisevitch. (Died 2005.)

Born October 10, 1924 — Edward Wood Jr. Though known for Plan 9 from Outer Space, he did a lot of other bad genre films including Night of the Monster and Bride of The Ghouls. (Died 1978.)

Born October 10, 1929 — Robin Hardy. Wicker Man is the film he’s known for though he followed that up with The Wicker Tree, an adaptation of his Cowboys for Christ novel. Anyone seen it? (Died 2016.)

Born October 10, 1931 — Victor Pemberton. Writer of the script for the “Fury from the Deep”, a Second Doctor story in which he created the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver. He had appeared as an actor in the series, in a non-speaking role as a scientist in “The Moonbase” story. In 1976, he wrote the BBC audio drama Doctor Who and the Pescatons which I remember hearing. Quite good it was. (Died 2017.)

Born October 10, 1931 — Jack Jardine. A long-time L.A. fan who was present at many West Coast cons and who shared the dais on panels with some of the major names in SF. Under the pen name Larry Maddock he wrote science fiction and mystery stories in the Fifties and Sixties. File 770 has more here. (Died 2009.)

Born October 10, 1941 — Peter Coyote, 81. He actually did two genre films in 1982 with the first being Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann in which he appeared as Porter Reese and the second being E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial which he’s Keys, the Agent hunting E.T. down. Sphere in which he’s Captain Harold C. Barnes is his next SF outing followed by The 4400 and FlashForward series being his next major genre involvements.

Born October 10, 1947 — Laura Brodian Freas Beraha, 75. While married to Kelly Freas, she wrote Frank Kelly Freas: As He Sees It with him along with quite a few essays such as “On the Painting of Beautiful Women or Ayesha, She Who Must Be Obeyed” and “Some of My Best Critics are Friends – or Vice Versa“. She’s credited solely for the cover art for the 1993 Easton Press interior art for The Left Hand of Darkness according to ISFDB.

Born October 10, 1966 — Bai Ling, 56. She’s Miss West in Wild West West and the Mysterious Woman in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, she has a major role as Guanyin in The Monkey King which aired on Syfy.

(12) COMICS SECTION.

Annie has turned the “little orphan” into a time traveler!
Off the Mark shows “parts is parts” isn’t true if you’re Frankenstein.

(13) DRESSED FOR EXCESS. SYFY Wire shares a load of photos in the NYCC 2022 – Final Day Cosplay Gallery.

New York Comic Con saved some of its coolest news for the weekend this year, as studios dropped loads of fun facts and features surrounding The Winchesters, Marvel’s Moon Knight, The Walking Dead, and Back to the Future — just to name a few.
But the stage wasn’t the only place catching fans’ attention as the four-day event rolled on at the Javitz Convention Center: Down on the ground, the guests themselves kept the cosplay fit tight, lining the halls with creatively killer takes on Mysterio, Red Skull, Buzz Lightyear, Predator, and tons more….

(14) CRILLY Q&A. Stone Soup questions the writer about a new novel: “Exclusive Interview with Brandon Crilly: Catalyst”.

Catalyst features an incredible cast of characters with complicated, overlapping histories. One of these characters is a stage magician who performs illusory tricks in a world where “real” magic is very present. What made you decide to bring these two contrasting approaches to magic central to this character’s identity?
Thank you for that compliment! Catalyst actually went through several serious revision drafts, and originally Mavrin (my street magician) was much more skeptical and almost willfully dismissive of “real” magic. When I added magic-bestowing squid gods (the Aspects) literally in orbit around Aelda, that level of skepticism didn’t make as much sense – so instead, it became obstinance. Mavrin has a lot of issues with the Aspects and their worshippers, so becoming an illusionist is part of how he distances himself from both. “I can make my own magic, I don’t need you!” is probably percolating in his subconscious somewhere (even though he’s fifty and not, like fifteen). But thankfully, he can only stay obstinate and grumpy for so long….

(15) A MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. Nerds of a Feather’s Arturo Serrano, in “Review: Wolf at the Door by Joel McKay”, says the book does one thing well.

There’s danger in hosting a big social gathering. People you haven’t seen in years can still make your throat tighten. Various combinations of acquaintances can be in good terms with you but be mortal enemies to each other. You dread the thought of who may knock at the door next. Your pulse quickens and your survival instinct rings alarms urging you to flee. Once the tension reaches critical mass, too much honesty will rip someone’s heart. The exchange of bitter words becomes a series of rounds of mutual eviscerations. Arguments get heated until someone loses their head. A friend’s careless remark under too much alcohol may lead to you never seeing them again. At any moment, the air can get so heavy that some of those present will suddenly depart from your life.
In Wolf at the Door, by Canadian author Joel McKay, these emotions that tear people to pieces are materialized into tooth and claw….

(16) SOLAR POWER. “‘Eye of Sauron’: The Dazzling Solar Tower in the Israeli Desert” – the New York Times sees both sides.

…This is the great solar tower of Ashalim, one of the tallest structures in Israel and, until recently, the tallest solar power plant in the world.
“It’s like a sun,” said Eli Baliti, a shopkeeper in the nearest village. “A second sun.”
To backers, the tower is an impressive feat of engineering, testament to Israeli solar innovation. To critics, it is an expensive folly, dependent on technology that had become outmoded by the time it was operational.
…The tower is more than 800 feet high, one of the tallest structures in Israel. It’s visible even from space.
To some, it’s reminiscent of something out of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings.”
“It’s the eye of Sauron,” said Uriya Suued, an engineer who lived in Ashalim until September.
Other times, the tower seems more like a gawky, gentle giant, awkwardly standing on the edge of a group photo. You can even forget it’s there — until you spot it hovering, almost comically, behind a garden wall or incongruously, even apologetically, over the swimmers in the village’s outdoor pool.
“A lighthouse without the sea,” said Ben Malka, who runs the pool….

(17) DEMONIC IMPRESSION. Netflix dropped a trailer for Wendell & Wild, the new film written by Henry Selick and Jordan Peele and directed by Henry Selick.

(18) GIBSON ADAPTATION. This trailer for The Peripheral Season 1 on Prime Video was unveiled at New York Comic Con. “On October 21, the future holds the key to saving the past.”

(19) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In “Pitch Meeting: Don’t Worry Darling,” Ryan George, in a spoiler-packed episode, explains that Don’t Worry Darling “feels like a “go to the theatre film” and not something you stay home and stream. But it’s “a string of random occurrences for about 90 minutes with little or no information revealed.” And then in the third act we learn the film is “like The Matrix with 10,000 times less kung fu.”

[Thanks to Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, SFWA, Jerry Kaufman, Susan de Guardiola, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jayn.]

Pixel Scroll 9/26/22 They Sentenced Me To Twenty Years Of Scrolldom, For Trying To File The Pixel From Within

Posted on September 26, 2022 by Mike Glyer

(1) IT’S A HIT! NASA’s DART mission crashed into the targeted asteroid today.

IMPACT SUCCESS! Watch from #DARTMIssion’s DRACO Camera, as the vending machine-sized spacecraft successfully collides with asteroid Dimorphos, which is the size of a football stadium and poses no threat to Earth. pic.twitter.com/7bXipPkjWD
— NASA (@NASA) September 26, 2022

And CNN reports “After DART’s successful collision with an asteroid, the science is just getting started”.

For the first time in history, NASA is trying to change the motion of a natural celestial body in space. Now that a spacecraft successfully hit the asteroid Dimorphos — the science is just getting started.
To survey the aftermath of the impact, the European Space Agency’s Hera mission will launch in 2024. The spacecraft, along with two CubeSats, will arrive at the asteroid system two years later.
Hera will study both asteroids, measure physical properties of Dimorphos, and examine the DART impact crater and the moon’s orbit, with the aim of establishing an effective planetary defense strategy.
The Italian Space Agency’s Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids, or LICIACube, will fly by Dimorphos to capture images and video of the impact plume as it sprays up off the asteroid and maybe even spy the crater it could leave behind. The mini-satellite will also glimpse Dimorphos’ opposite hemisphere, which DART won’t get to see before it’s obliterated.
The CubeSat will turn to keep its cameras pointed at Dimorphos as it flies by. Days, weeks and months after, we’ll see images and video captured by the Italian satellite that observed the collision event. The first images expected back from LICIACube could show the moment of impact and the plume it creates.
The LICIACube won’t be the only observer watching. The James Webb Space Telescope, the Hubble Space Telescope and NASA’s Lucy mission will observe the impact. The Didymos system may brighten as its dust and debris is ejected into space, said Statler, the NASA program scientist.
But ground-based telescopes will be key in determining if DART successfully changed the motion of Dimorphos.

(2) WSFA AT 75. The 75th anniversary of the Washington Science Fiction Association will be celebrated this weekend at the club’s annual Capclave.

(3) OCTAVIA BUTLER GOES INTO HALL OF FAME. The 2022 induction ceremony for the National Women’s Hall of Fame was held last weekend, honoring Octavia Butler, Hidden Figures’ Katherine Johnson, and other 2021 inductees. See a video of the ceremony here.

(4) WILD BLUE AND OTHER YONDERS. “Sharp-Eyed Viewers Notice Stunning Addition To Key U.S. Intelligence Logo” at MSN.com. Oh, yeah. Check for yourself on the U.S miliary’s NIM-Aviation Homepage.

A federal intelligence office charged with matters related to aviation has a new logo ― and it suggests the organization is tracking more than just known aircraft.
The logo of the National Intelligence Manager-Aviation shows a series of aircraft as well as a UFO….

(5) WHERE CAPS BELONG. In a way it’s more of a thought experiment, interestingly constructed by Max Florschutz: “Being a Better Writer: The Problem With Proper Nouns in Sci-Fi and Fantasy” at Unusual Things.

See, the genesis of this post comes from my editing on Starforge. This titan of a book is now in the Beta phase, which means looking for typos, misspelled words, misplaced quotation marks, and all that jazz. However, it also means going through and ensuring proper capitalization of proper nouns. At which point, I ran into a bit of a conundrum. Said conundrum led me to Google, which in turn pointed me to this post from 2009 concerning a similar issue in Fantasy writing—though note that it does as well address Science Fiction as well.
Anyway, what is this conundrum? Well, before we dive into it directly, I have a sort of pop quiz for you. You can do it in your head, but if you’re really determined you can bring out a pen and pencil and do the classic grade-school exercise. It’ll only take a moment either way, but here we go. Correctly capitalize the following sentence:
“The terran vehicle rolled up the hill, backed by dozens of terran marines.”
That’s it. Got it? Placed those capital letters where they belong? Okay, check out the answers after the break….

(6) FIGURES OF FUN. Cora Buhlert brings us another “Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre: ‘Peeping Mantenna’”.

… Here we have He-Man and Skeletor in the style of the 2002 He-Man and the Masters of the Universe cartoon (currently streaming here), for which the designs of the characters were updated. I don’t normally buy all of the He-Man and Skeletor variants (and there are a lot of them), but I like these two, since they are quite different from the standard versions, including redesigned accessories. Though I’ll give 2002 Skeletor’s sword to my Keldor figure, since it actually is Keldor’s sword.
The third new arrival is Mantenna, a member of the Evil Horde and the closest thing Masters of the Universe has to a bug-eyed monster….

Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre: “Peeping Mantenna” https://t.co/VjGh1nQUfk
— Cora Buhlert is a Hugo winner! (@CoraBuhlert) September 25, 2022

(7) TODAY’S RUNNER-UP. Steve Davidson suggested a Scroll title based on a children’s toy. He even provided art!

The Cow Says “Moo!” The Cat Says “Meow!” The Pixel Says “Scroll!”

(A “modified” image of a See-N-Say is below.)

(8) SUCCESSFUL CASTING. Gretchen Rue discusses her favorite TV witches. “The Most Underrated Witches in Media” at CrimeReads.

…Supernatural is a hard show to discuss without needing to put an asterisk on all the things it did wrong. It was frequently toxic, misogynistic, and struggled mightily with its female characters who were all either victims or the embodiment of pure evil. Not exactly the most fertile grounds for growing relatable characters who fit the bill for underrated witches. And yet Supernatural has not one, but two of the most underrated witches in all of modern television. There is ongoing antagonist Rowena, who pesters and plagues the Winchesters over the course of multiple seasons, but Rowena, played by Ruth Connell, defies the regular run of the mill baddie legacy most other female villains on the show get saddled with. She Is funny, she has sexual agency, she is emotionally complex and has her own deep backstory that drives her to do the things she does beyond the standard demon-possession fare of most other women on the show. Rowena is a match for the Winchesters, and often an unwitting ally, and she gets to be smart, beautiful, and charismatic season after season. She is only underrated in that she has been somewhat overshadowed in popularity by similarly love-to-hate/hate-to-love demon Crowley….

(9) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.

1987 – [By Cat Eldridge.] ALF: The Animated Series (also known as ALF on Melmac) premiered on NBC thirty five years ago on a Saturday morning. Though it lasted two years which you would think would give it over fifty episodes, it had two seasons of just thirteen episodes instead.

WARNING: PREACHING MODE ENGAGED

Interestingly it has a long runtime of thirty minute in an era where most cartoon series had twenty to twenty six minutes of time so that as much junky product as possible could be pushed unto the young viewing audience. Buy! Buy! Buy! Who cares about your teeth!

PREACHING MODE OFF

It was created by Paul Fusco (the only acting talent who returned here.) He is the puppeteer and voice of ALF on ALF and was the creator, writer, producer, and director of the series, and Tom Pratchett, the co-creator of ALF who shows his most excellent taste by being involved in the writing of The Great Muppet Caper. If you’ve not seen the latter, it’s on Disney + right now.

(No, I’m not plugging Disney +. Just noting the Angry Mouse has a lot of interesting product in his vast pockets. I personally am avoiding Him like the bubonic plague for the time being.)

Why the human characters didn’t appear is rather simple — the shows premise is that ALF is traveling to various places on his home-world of Melmac. It was a prequel to the ALF, depicting ALF’s life back on his home planet of Melmac before it exploded. How well they did this ive no idea as I’ve not seen it.

Now want weird? Really frelling weird? It was paired with ALF Tales, a spin-off of this series, that had the astonishingly weird premise of characters from that series were playing various characters from fairy tales. Now this series only lasted twenty-one episodes.

It apparently never got reviewed by the critics, not altogether surprisingly. Amazon and Tubi, should you care, are streaming it. Personally I’d go watch ALF instead if I were you as it’s actually really great.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born September 26, 1866 — Winsor McCay. Cartoonist and animator who’s best remembered for the Little Nemo strip which ran between The Wars and the animated Gertie the Dinosaur film which is the key frame animation cartoon which you can see here. He used the pen name Silas on his Dream of the Rarebit Fiend strip. That strip had no recurring characters or theme, just that a character has a nightmare or other bizarre dream after eating Welsh rarebit. What an odd concept. (Died 1934.)
Born September 26, 1872 — Max Erhmann. Best remembered for his 1927 prose poem “Desiderata” which I have a framed copy hanging here in my work area. Yeah big fan. Genre connection? Well calling it “Spock Thoughts”, Nimoy recited the poem on Two Sides of Leonard Nimoy, his 1968 album. (Died 1945.)
Born September 26, 1941 — Martine Beswick, 81. Though she auditioned for Dr. No, she was instead cast in From Russia with Love as Zora. She also appeared as Paula Caplan in Thunderball. She would appear in One Million Years B.C. opposite Raquel Welch. She made several Hammer Studio films including Prehistoric Women and Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde.
Born September 26, 1944 — Victoria Vetri, 78. I do have a very expansive definition of SF and she definitely gets here by being in the Sixties pulp film When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth as Sanna, and a lost world film called Chuka playing Helena Chavez. She’d also in be a bit of forgotten horror in the role of Rosemary’s Baby as Terry Gionoffrio. But actually she enters SF lore by way of a role she didn’t do. Vetri has been incorrectly identified in myriad sources as playing the role of the human form of a shape-shifting cat in the Trek’s “Assignment: Earth” episode, a role actually played by April Tatro. As she notes, she has brown eyes and that actress has blue eyes. She had a handful of genre appearances — The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Batman as Florence of Arabia, Mission: Impossible and Land of Giants.
Born September 26, 1956 — Linda Hamilton, 66. Best known for being Sarah Connor in The Terminator film franchise and Catherine Chandler in the Beauty and the Beast series. She also played Vicky Baxter in Children of the Corn, and Doctor Amy Franklin in King Kong Lives. She would be Acacia, a Valkyrie in “Delinquents” of the Lost Girl series, a role she would reprise in two more episodes, “End of a Line” and “Sweet Valkyrie High”.
Born September 26, 1957 — Tanya Huff, 65. Her Confederation of Valor Universe series is highly recommended by me. And I also give a strong recommendation to her Gale Family series. Let’s not forget the cat friendly Keeper’s Chronicles series. I’ve not read her other series, so I’ll ask y’all what you’d recommend.
Born September 26, 1968 — Jim Caviezel, 54. John Reese on Person of Interest which CBS describes as a “crime drama”. Huh. He was also Detective John Sullivan in Frequency, and Kainan in Outlander. And yes he played Number Six in the unfortunate reboot of The Prisoner.
Born September 26, 1985 — Talulah Riley, 37. Miss Evangelista in “Silence in the Library” and “Forest of the Dead”, two Tenth Doctor stories. She also portrays Angela in Westworld, and she shows up in Thor: The Dark World as an Asgardian nurse.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

The Far Side visits a fairy tale figure in retirement.

(12) ROCKY HORROR. Today’s also the anniversary of this movie’s release:

While filming Congo, I sat on top of a Volcano talking to Tim Curry about that movie. He said one of the coolest things was that it saved a number of small indie theaters from going under, because they knew that two nights a week Rocky was going to do big business. https://t.co/dvtd6sYm4G
— Bruce Campbell (@GroovyBruce) September 26, 2022

(13) HIGHER GEAR. Inverse reminds us that “40 years ago, one sci-fi show had the most bizarre beginning in TV history”. Video clips at the link.

…Michael Long, we’re told, has a metal plate in his head — “probably from military surgery” — and this metal plate deflected the bullet away from his brain and into his face. He later emerges from reconstructive surgery all Hasslehoffed-up at the 11:57-minute mark. This means there’s been at least one commercial break before we even see Hasselhoff in Knight Rider.
Frankly, the fact that the show needed a talking car after that setup is fascinating. Today, if the premise of Knight Rider were floated as a prestige drama all about the nature of identity and the existence of false identities, you can’t imagine a studio executive saying, “Yeah, but what if he had a talking car, too?”
The soap opera-esque origin story of Michael Knight’s face was actually a brilliant starting point for the series. By Season 2 episode “Goliath,” we learn that there’s an evil version of Michael Knight — Garthe Knight — also played by Hasselhoff, with a small, sleazy mustache and a soul patch. (The fact he looks like Michael Knight is because Michael Knight’s new face was based on Garthe’s, not the other way around.)…

(14) IT’S ELEMENTRY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] Entertainment Weekly discusses what happened when a scientist visited The Big Bang Theory set and found uranium!

…. During the tour, the physicist noticed one of the props in Leonard and Sheldon’s apartment. Prady says, “People always ask what that thing on the wall post was, it was this wooden box that was actually an antique Geiger counter. The physicist looks at it and goes, ‘That’s an old Geiger counter.'” (A Geiger counter is a device used to detect radiation).
It turns out the Geiger counter was more than just a unique prop….

(15) SCARY FOOD. Fortunately, these horrifying “Hallowieners” are baloney says Snopes.

(16) A WORLD UNBUILT. Arturo Serrano finds one that’s not so good: “Nanoreview: The Paper Museum by Kate S. Simpson” at Nerds of a Feather.

…The Paper Museum is a frustrating read. The microcosm inside the museum is described in abundant, at times excessive detail, while the world outside of it is a nebulous blank that may as well be made of air. Since we only follow Lydia, who basically never leaves the museum, the significance of a world without paper is lost because we never get to see that world….

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] This clip of Alasdair Beckett-King satirizing a “popular space show: appeared last year. “Every Episode of Popular Space Show™”.

[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Cora Buhlert, Hampus Eckerman, Jeffrey Smith, Daniel Dern, Andrew Porter, Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Matthew Johnson.]

Pixel Scroll 9/17/22 The Last Scroll Title On Earth Sat Alone In A Room

Posted on September 17, 2022 by Mike Glyer

(1) JAYMEE GOH ANTHOLOGY HAS EKPEKI STORY. Don’t Touch That, an anthology about parenting edited by Jaymee Goh, was released this week. It includes Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki’s latest short story “Mother’s Love, Father’s Place”. He says, “It’s a historical fantasy story set in southern Nigeria and touches on the killing of Twins in Calabar & how it ended. (spoiler, not by Mary Slessor).”

(2) NO TURNING BACK! The New Yorker remembers “The Enduring Allure of Choose Your Own Adventure Books”.

You were a girl who wanted to choose your own adventures. Which is to say, you were a girl who never had adventures. You always followed the rules. But, when you ate an entire sleeve of graham crackers and sank into the couch with a Choose Your Own Adventure book, you got to imagine that you were getting into trouble in outer space, or in the future, or under the sea. You got to make choices every few pages: Do you ask the ghost about her intentions, or run away? Do you rebel against the alien overlords, or blindly obey them?
This was the late eighties in Los Angeles. You binged on these books, pulling tattered sun-bleached copies from your bookshelf: four, five, six in the course of a single afternoon. All over the country, all over the world, other kids were pulling these books from their bookshelves, too. The series has sold more than two hundred and seventy million copies since its launch, in 1979. It’s the fourth-best-selling children’s-book series of all time. Its popularity peaked in the eighties, but the franchise still sells about a million books a year….
The story of Choose Your Own Adventure is largely the tale of two men: Edward Packard, a lawyer who came up with the concept while telling bedtime stories to his two daughters (who sometimes wanted the protagonist to do different things), and R. A. (Ray) Montgomery, an independent publisher who put out Packard’s first book, in 1976, after all the big houses had rejected it….
Both men went through divorces shortly before the series started gaining momentum, and ended up writing many of their books as single fathers. Their children remember helping their fathers invent and flesh out new scenarios: Packard’s daughter Andrea suggested the idea of a time-travelling cave; Montgomery’s sons, Anson and Ramsey, suggested cars (the Saab 900 Turbo, the Lancia Stratos) for “The Race Forever.” Packard paid his children thirty-five cents an hour to read his manuscripts and offer feedback: Which parts were boring? Which choices would kids enjoy? (Andrea, Anson, and Ramsey ended up writing for the franchise, publishing their first Choose books during college.)…

(3) INTERIOR LIFE OF THE ARTIST. Melissa Capriglione is “just journaling some thoughts” – that we probably can all relate to in our own way.

just journaling some thoughts.
(1/5) pic.twitter.com/nNvWUh6oME
— Melissa Capriglione @ NYCC G-07 (@mcapriglioneart) September 15, 2022

(3/5) pic.twitter.com/x6JSXOe9aP
— Melissa Capriglione @ NYCC G-07 (@mcapriglioneart) September 15, 2022

(4/5) pic.twitter.com/SEVqlwcAso
— Melissa Capriglione @ NYCC G-07 (@mcapriglioneart) September 15, 2022

(4) RECIDIVIST. Bob Roehm posted a clever photo on Facebook taken after he was apprehended with a banned book – Fahrenheit 451 – at Carmichael’s Bookstore in Louisville, KY.

(5) THE DNA OF THE DEATH STAR. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] The San Francisco Chronicle looks at how John Dysktra built the Death Star in Star Wars based on his work in 1972 building a realistic model of Berkeley. “This obscure Bay Area study shaped the ending of ‘Star Wars’”.

The newly released six-part Disney Plus streaming docuseries “Light & Magic” goes deep into the history of George Lucas’ San Francisco-based special effects studio Industrial Light & Magic, which was founded in 1975. The ending of the second episode explores the process behind the Death Star scene, in which the fate of the Rebel Alliance hangs on Luke Skywalker’s ability to speed his X-wing through a narrow trench and blast a thermal exhaust port that is only 2 meters wide.
In reality, the entire surface of the Death Star was a hand-built model that measured approximately 15 by 40 feet. Meticulous craftsmanship contributed to the verisimilitude, but the documentary reveals that the filmmaking techniques that made the scene feel so real are actually rooted outside the realm of special effects. It turns out that the entire sequence hinged on a model developed during an urban planning study at UC Berkeley in the early 1970s, which also happened to shape the future of San Francisco’s skyline.
“The Berkeley Experiment,” as it is referred to in the documentary, was funded by the National Science Foundation and led by urban planning professor Donald Appleyard at the school’s Environmental Simulation Lab. Completed in 1972, the project entailed building a small-scale model of Marin County and a computer-controlled stop-motion 16 mm camera system. The goal was to achieve a sense of realism as a model car traversed the miniature cityscape, in hopes that the technique could guide civic decision-making regarding construction choices. …

An archival photo of the UC Berkeley Environmental Simulation Laboratory.

(6) ATTACK OF THE 50-YEAR-OLD CONVENTION. Rob Hansen draws on contemporary reports by Fred Pohl, Rob Holdstock, Sam Long, Bob Shaw and many others to reconstruct the events of “Chessmancon (1972)”. Many photos, too, including GoH Larry Niven giving a physics lecture?

CHESSMANCON, the twenty-third post-war UK National Science Fiction Convention, took place over the weekend of Friday, 31st March to Monday, 3rd April 1972. Named for both its location (Chester) and the city (Manchester) from whose Delta Group most of those organising it were drawn, CHESSMANCON was the fourth MANCON, the others being MANCON, SUPERMANCON, and THIRDMANCON.
…Presumably because of its name, the organisers of CHESSMANCON decided to include a chess tournament. Sadly, I don’t think SUPERMANCON made any reference to Clark Kent, or THIRDMANCON any reference to Harry Lime. So far as I’m aware, CHESSMANCON is the only con to be named after *two* cities.

And here’s another excerpt —

BOB SHAW:
I suppose that in what purports to be a con report one should make some mention of the official programme. Regrettably, I have a tendency to go to conventions and not see any of the programme items, but this doesn’t mean that the programme isn’t important to me. I like to be near the programme and let it induce currents in me, a coil of nerves in the vicinity of the con hall’s electromagnetic field. Some other fans feel the same way (I won’t name any names) and it is pleasant to sit with them in the bar, speculating on what is actually happening in the hall and listening to fragmentary reports from runners – “George Hay has got up to ask a question”, “The projector has broken down”, “There’s been an outbreak of sporran rash among the Scottish fans”, “George Hay is still asking his question”….

(7) RAMMING SPEED. Science is watching as “NASA’s asteroid deflection mission takes aim”.

On 26 September, an act of targeted violence will unfold 11 million kilometers from Earth, as a spacecraft about the size of a vending machine smashes into a small asteroid at 6 kilometers per second. Unlike some asteroids that stray worrisomely close to Earth’s orbit, Dimorphos—the 160-meter moon of a larger body—is an innocent bystander, posing no threat to our world. But the looming assault represents humanity’s first-ever field test of a planetary defense mission: NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART. The hope is that the collision will nudge Dimorphos toward its 780-meter partner, Didymos, shortening a nearly 12-hour orbital period by minutes. A successful strike would support the idea that, in the future, similar efforts could deflect threatening asteroids onto safer courses. But simulations and lab experiments show the fate of the mission depends on a crucial question: Are such small asteroids solid boulders or—as astronomers increasingly believe—loose heaps of rubble?…

(8) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.

1964 – [By Cat Eldridge.] Bewitched premiered on ABC fifty-eight years ago this evening.

Creator Sol Saks’ said his basis for this series were I Married a Witch, the 1942 film that came from Thorne Smith’s unfinished novel The Passionate Witch, and the John Van Druten Broadway play Bell, Book and Candle, which was adapted into the 1958 film. Yes, both films were properties of Columbia Pictures, which also owned Screen Gems, which also produced Bewitched.

The show was popular, finishing as the second-rated show in America during its debut season, staying in the top ten for its first three seasons, and ranking in eleventh place for both seasons four and five.

It starred, as you well know, Elizabeth Montgomery as Samantha Stephens, Dick York for the first, and Dick Sargent for the rest of the series, as Darrin Stephens. Agnes Moorehead as Endora was really the only other ongoing character.

Look I need no SPOILER ALERTS here as y’all know the characters, the setting and the story. I bet everyone here has seen some or all of it.

Historical note here.

Series director William Asher started rehearsals for the pilot on November 22, 1963 which of course coincided with President Kennedy’s assassination. He felt deeply affected by the event as he personally knew Kennedy — he had produced the 1962 televised birthday party where Marilyn Monroe sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President”.

End historical note. Back to the series.

The Stephens house, inside and out, was inspired by a location used in two Gidget movies. Gidget was filmed in 1959 at a real house at 267 18th Street in Santa Monica. The blueprints of this house were later reversed and replicated as a house facade attached to an existing garage on the backlot of Columbia’s Ranch. This was the house seen on Bewitched.

Then, the patio and living room sets seen in Columbia’s Gidget Goes to Rome (1963) were adapted as the permanent Bewitched set for 1964. (At least some episodes of I Dream of Jeannie also were filmed using this interior set which makes sense as it’s the same production company. Using material from one series or film on another is very, very economical.)

Bewitched lasted eight seasons and two hundred fifty episodes. Both the opening and closing animated credits were produced by Hanna-Barbera. Naturally they are on YouTube.

No, I’m not mentioning or discussing the reboot. I’m really not.

As near as I can tell, Bewitched is only streaming for free, errr, on Freevee.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born September 17, 1885 — George Cleveland. He was Professor Hensley aboard the Thirties Flash Gordon film serial. IMDb says that he was supposed be in 1938’s Flash Gordon’s Trip To Mars, but his bits ended up not being in the film. (Died 1957.)
Born September 17, 1908 — John Creasey. English crime and SF writer who wrote well over than six hundred novels using twenty-eight different names. His SF writings were mostly in the Dr. Palfrey series, a British secret service agent named Dr. Stanislaus Alexander Palfrey, who forms Z5. There’s a lot of his novels available from the usual suspects. And I do many really a lot, so I’m going to ask all of you where to start reading his SF novels as I am curious as to how they are. (Died 1973.)
Born September 17, 1917 — Art Widner. He was a founding member of The Stranger Club which created Boston fandom. He chaired Boskone I and Boskone II which were held in 1941 and 1942, they being the very first two Boston cons. Fancyclopedia 3 has a very detailed look at him here. (Died 2015.)
Born September 17, 1920 — Dinah Sheridan. She was Chancellor Flavia in “The Five Doctors”, a Doctor Who story that brought together the First, Second, Third, Fourth and Fifth Doctors. Richard Hurndall portrayed the First Doctor, as the character’s original actor, William Hartnell, had died. (Died 2012.)
Born September 17, 1920 — Roddy McDowall. He is best known for portraying Cornelius and Caesar in the original Planet of the Apes film franchise, as well as Galen in the television series. He’s Sam Conrad in The Twilight Zone episode “People Are Alike All Over” and he voices Jervis Tetch / The Mad Hatter in Batman: The Animated Series. And where’s a treat for you. Here he is on The Carol Burnett Show wearing his Planet of the Apes makeup. (Died 1998.)
Born September 17, 1939 — Sandra Gimpel, 83. Performer and stunt woman. Though you’ll literally not recognize her, she was the salt monster aka the M-113 creature (as it was called in the credits) in “The Man Trap” episode of the original Trek. In “The Cage” episode, she played a Talosian. As a stunt woman, she’s been on genre shows ranging from Lost in Space to Lucifer and even appeared on films like Escape from New York.
Born September 17, 1950 — Roger Stern, 72. Comics writer who’s most noted work who was on Avengers, Captain America, Doctor Strange, and Starman. I’m very, very impressed of his work on the first twenty-eight issues of Starman, which were published from 1988 to 1990.
Born September 17, 1979 — Neill Blomkamp, 43. South African born Canadian filmmaker of District 9 which was nominated for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form at Aussiecon 4. EofSF says also, “Of particular note were Tetra Vaal (2004), a RoboCop-inspired advertisement for a fictional range of third-world law-enforcement drones; Alive in Joburg (2005), about an influx of Alien immigrants from a Spaceship stalled over Johannesburg; and Tempbot (2006), about a Robot office worker attempting to parse cubicle culture.” Other genre films include Elysium and Chappie.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Close to Home’s joke probably really isn’t about the first thing that came to my mind.
Lio today is a real sinus friction story.

(11) NEW SUPERHERO CASTING CONTROVERSY. “With an Israeli Superhero, Marvel Wades Into an Intractable Conflict” reports the New York Times.

It was the latest addition to a fantasy world populated by an ever-growing cast of superheroes and villains: Marvel Studios announced this past week that it had cast the Israeli actress Shira Haas to play Sabra, a mutant Israeli police officer-turned-Mossad agent, in the next installment of the “Captain America” franchise.
While Jewish Israelis rejoiced at the casting of an actress from Israel as a superhero in a major Hollywood production (“Israeli Pride,” declared the Hebrew news site Maariv), the backlash among Palestinians and their supporters was swift, and #CaptainApartheid soon appeared on social media.
Many critics expressed outrage about Sabra’s character and her identity as an Israeli intelligence agent, accusing Marvel of buying into Zionist propaganda; of ignoring, or supporting, Israel’s occupation of territory captured in 1967; and of dehumanizing Palestinians….

(12) HE CAN DO IT! Paul Weimer takes up the challenge of reviewing the latest entry in a long-running series: “Microreview [book]: The Untold Story by Genevieve Cogman” at Nerds of a Feather.

How does one really review the 8th(!) book in a series and make that review intelligible to readers who have never read any of the books, and yet helpful to readers both old and new alike. This is the situation where I find myself talking about Genevieve Cogman’s The Untold Story, eighth in her Invisible Library novels.
I’ll start by saying that the Invisible Library novels, which the first was published in 2016, were multiverse before the multiverse was the new hotness. Imagine a multiverse of worlds , aligned on an order-chaos spectrum a la Moorcock. Imagine these worlds taking cues from Earth cultures and societies. Imagine two sets of superhuman beings–Dragons, representing order, and Fae, representing chaos, struggling for control and domination of these worlds. Now imagine a third power, a third party, the Library, seeking to stabilize the worlds, and collect books from all of them at the same time.
Irene Winters is one of these interdimensional Librarians. Her previous adventures have had her tangle with a traitor to the library (Alberich, more on him anon) deal with both Fae and Dragon politics (her first assistant is a Dragon, and her newest apprentice is a Fae) and visit a variety of worlds in places inspired by Venice, Vienna, New York, and more….

(13) SHE DREAMS OF GENIE. Nerds of a Feather film reviewer Arturo Serrano says it is no easy task to convey the feelings roused by this movie: “Love is a freely chosen yoke in ‘Three Thousand Years of Longing’”. But he does!

When one encounters an impeccably beautiful work of art, the attempt to explain it feels like a desecration. Three Thousand Years of Longing is that kind of art that you’re meant to experience more than understand. It does follow a plot, and the plot does make arguments, but to dissect those arguments risks losing sight of the experience. I can’t properly communicate to you the emotional content of this story. What I can try to do is describe what happens in it, but I will fall short of conveying all it says. This is one of those films that leave you permanently changed, and the only way for that secret alchemy to happen is to go yourself to the theater and let it wash over you….

(14) FIFTY YEARS LATER. Totally not sff, but a fascinating interview with insights about screenwriting: “Alan Alda on ‘M*A*S*H’: ‘Everybody Had Something Taken From Them’” in the New York Times.

Were there story lines that you thought “M*A*S*H” hadn’t quite tackled yet that you wanted to bring into the world of the show as a writer and director?
When I wrote, I tried to find out a little bit more about each of the characters. Who is Klinger [Jamie Farr] really? What was underneath — I almost said, what was underneath the dresses. [Laughs.] What was underneath the wearing of the dresses? Who was Margaret [Loretta Swit]?
I see on the internet that people assumed that because I was politically active, trying to get the Equal Rights Amendment passed, that in my writing I was trying to make political points, too. And I wasn’t. I really don’t like writing that passes as entertainment when it’s really propaganda. I want to hear a human story.

(15) EARLY CLUES. Jess Nevins writes about the history of Chinese detective fiction at CrimeReads: “Pre-Revolution Chinese Detective Fiction”.

Mysteries and detective fiction are usually thought of as the inventions of Edgar Allan Poe, but the truth is that they have both been popular in China for over a thousand years. The Chinese have no clear place or person of origin for mysteries and detective fiction, the way the West has Poe, but what the Chinese do have are centuries’ more mysteries and detective stories than the West does.
The first Chinese proto-mysteries—that is, mysteries who some but not all of the elements of modern mystery fiction—were the “gong’an” (“court case”) stories. Told in the form of oral performances and puppetry shows, the gong’an began appearing during the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127). Gong’an traditionally featured incorruptible government officials solving criminal cases and bringing about justice to the guilty and restoration to those who were wronged….

(16) CAME TO THE WORLD IN THE USUAL WAY. CNN invites everyone to “Meet the mystery diamond from outer space”.

Scientists have debated its existence. Tiny traces provided clues. Now, researchers have confirmed the existence of a celestial diamond after finding it on Earth’s surface.
The stone, called lonsdaleite, has a hardness and strength that exceeds that of a regular diamond. The rare mineral arrived here by way of a meteorite, new research has suggested….
The revelation started to unfold when geologist Andy Tomkins, a professor at Monash University in Australia, was out in the field categorizing meteorites. He came across a strange “bended” kind of diamond in a space rock in Northwest Africa, said study coauthor Alan Salek, a doctoral student and researcher at RMIT University in Australia.
Tomkins theorized the meteorite that held the lonsdaleite came from the mantle of a dwarf planet that existed about 4.5 billion years, Salek said.
“The dwarf planet was then catastrophically struck by an asteroid, releasing pressure and leading to the formation of these really strange diamonds,” he added.

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] Alasdair Beckett-King explains why you should be nice to the annoying little guy with a squeaky voice who offers to show you a fantasy world!

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, SF Concantenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Andrew Porter, Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jim Janney.]

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Tag Archives: Arturo Serrano

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