25 It Takes A File Of Pixels To Make A Scroll A Home

Posted on March 26, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) SALAM AWARD OPENS FOR ENTRIES. The Salam Award for Imaginative Fiction, which recognizes emerging speculative fiction writers of Pakistani origin or residence, is taking submissions through July 31. Full guidelines at the link.

Eligible for consideration are original, previously unpublished English-language stories of 10,000 words or less by persons residing in Pakistan, or of Pakistani birth/descent. The full guidelines are at the link.

The Salam Award for Imaginative Fiction is named for Dr. Albus Salam, one of the pioneers of science in Pakistan.

(2) TIME FOR NOMMO AWARDS NOMINATIONS. The African Science Fiction Society has announced the 2025 Nommo Awards nominations are now open for works published in 2024.

Only works of speculative fiction by an African published between 1 January 2024 and 31 December 2024 anywhere in the world are eligible.

ASFS members have until May 5 to make nominations. Please read the Nommo Awards eligibility and rules on this link here.

(3) NOTE ABOUT WORLD FANTASY AWARDS SUBMISSIONS. With the June 1 deadline not far off, Peter Dennis Pautz of the World Fantasy Awards Administration has issued a reminder:

I’ve heard from all the World Fantasy Awards judges and their receipt of submissions has been extremely inconsistent, i.e. not all judges have received the same submissions.

As the deadline draws near, we are especially concerned about the lack of submissions from the larger publishers, both in the US and UK.

If you have already sent in your submission, please check your records to ensure that a copy of every work was sent to each judge, in their preferred formats, as detailed in the attachment.

If you haven’t sent your submission as yet, please do so as soon as possible to allow full consideration to your works.

Finally, the judges have also asked that you not send drop box, zip files, or wetransfer links. The links often expire before the judges get to them, and it requires a lot of time to open the links and side load the files to ereaders. Sending three or four titles at a time by email is preferable/

As always, thank you all for your support, your thoughtfulness, and your help.

See the list of judges and their contact information here: “2025 World Fantasy Awards Judges Announced”.

(4) JUDGE’S RULING PAUSES IOWA CENSORSHIP. [Item by Andrew Porter.] “Iowa law banning books including 1984 and Ulysses blocked by US federal judge” reports the Guardian. Books unconstitutionally caught up in the law include Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, and 1984 by George Orwell.

A lawsuit brought by publishers and authors including John Green and Jodi Picoult has led to a portion of a law banning Iowa school libraries and classrooms from carrying books depicting sex acts being halted.

On Tuesday, a federal judge temporarily blocked the measure, writing that it had been applied unconstitutionally in many schools and that books of “undeniable political, artistic, literary, and/or scientific value” had been caught up in it, including Ulysses by James Joyce, Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, Beloved by Toni Morrison and The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.

This is the second time that US district judge Stephen Locher, a Joe Biden appointee, has blocked the ban. The law, Senate File 496, was first approved by Iowa’s Republican-led legislature and governor Kim Reynolds in 2023, however, Locher placed an injunction on it in December 2023 after authors and publishers sued the state.

The preliminary injunction was reversed by the US Eighth Circuit appeals court last August, leading publishers and authors to file a second complaint, arguing that the ban violates free speech and “goes far beyond prohibiting books that are obscene as to minors because it prohibits books with even a brief description of a sex act for students of all ages without any evaluation of the book as a whole”.

In his decision, Locher wrote that the ban has resulted in “forced removal of books from school libraries that are not pornographic or obscene”, and that unconstitutional applications of the law “far exceed” constitutional applications….

(5) DIVERSITY TAKES STEP BACK IN UK PUBLISHING. The Guardian learns “UK publishing less accessible to Black authors now than before 2020, industry names say”.

UK publishing is less accessible to Black authors now than it was five years ago, according to some of the biggest names in the industry.

The Black Lives Matter movement of 2020 led to many publishing houses making commitments to address the longstanding racial inequality in the industry. But, ahead of the Black British book festival (BBBF) this weekend, a number of Black literary figures say there has been a noticeable downward shift in the number of Black writers being published.

Selina Brown, who founded BBBF in 2021, said the number of Black authors being pitched to her has dropped dramatically in the last 18 months. She also believes the number of books being published by Black writers has “plummeted”….

…Sharmaine Lovegrove, cultural strategist at Hachette UK, one of the country’s leading publishing houses, co-founded The Black Writers’ Guild and established Hachette’s Dialogue imprint, which focuses on books by, about and for marginalised communities. She said things are harder for new Black authors now than they were pre-2020….

Lovegrove said the industry hasn’t been able to build new, diverse audiences and struggled to talk and cater to Black authors who were often labelled “difficult” for advocating for themselves.

Lovegrove said: “The biggest mistake was seeing it as a trend as opposed to an opportunity to cultivate something meaningful that was missing.”

“It’s as if the industry is saying: ‘It’s all very difficult and these books haven’t done very well so we’re literally not going to try again with someone from the same background’,” she added. “It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.”

A report by PA found that “ethnic minority” representation across the industry fell from 17% to 15% in 2024, with a decline in the numbers of Asian and British Asian staff. The number of Black staff remained at about 3% during the same period.

There have been success stories. After selling more than a million copies of Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, Reni Eddo-Lodge launched her Monument Books imprint at HarperCollins last year, with the specific goal of finding writers “who can help us understand our past, navigate our present and map new futures”.

But Brown says the impetus of 2020 has faded and new Black authors have often seen their books marketed the same way as other authors despite publishers speaking of wanting to “reach new audiences”….

(6) TOLKIEN’S CARTOGRAPHY. “It’s Tolkien Reading Day” – a Facebook post from yesterday by the Bodleian Libraries. (Click for larger image.)

It’s Tolkien Reading Day, so we wanted to share with you a rather magical treasure from our Tolkien archives and invite you to share your favourite moments as a Tolkien reader.

Pictured is an annotated version of a fold-out map which was included in early editions of the Lord of The Rings. The map shows readers Tolkien’s fantasy world ‘Middle-earth’.

The annotations are by Tolkien himself, and were for the benefit of Pauline Baynes, an artist who was creating an illustrated poster map of Middle-earth.

Baynes ripped the map out of her own 1954 copy of Lord of the Rings and took it to Tolkien, who covered it with notes, including many extra place names that do not appear in the book. Since most were in his own invented Elvish language he helpfully translated some: ‘Eryn Vorn [= Black Forest] a forest region of dark [pine?] trees.’

The annotations give an insight into how vividly Tolkien pictured Middle-earth in his mind, and how thorough his research was. They include a series of geographical pointers about the latitude of key locations: ‘Hobbiton is assumed to be approx. at latitude of Oxford,’. ‘Minas Tirith is about latitude of Ravenna (but is 900 miles east of Hobbiton more near Belgrade). Bottom of the map (1,400 miles) is about latitude of Jerusalem.’

Pictured: MS. Tolkien Drawings 132. copyright Tolkien Estate / Williams College Oxford Programme 2018

(7) MAPPING GENRE LOVE. “The Most Popular Book Genre In Each State” – BookRiot says a research firm came up with a rationale for assigning them. Map at the link.

Are there different preferences for book genres depending on what state you’re in? According to new research from Cloudwards, there are trends in book preferences based on location.

Utilizing Google Trends data over the last 12 months, Cloudwards explored the most searched genre in each of the 50 states, plus the District of Columbia. All searches were limited to Google Trends “Books and Literature” category, and the researchers used a variety of common genre terms to determine the frequency of interest in them by state. Some of the genre categories were a little unconventional for the average reader–how do you determine the difference between “fiction” and “family” as terms–but the major genres were included, including romance, fantasy, mystery, and so forth….

… Romance dominated in terms of genre popularity across the US, with 22 states seeing it as their top searched genre. In terms of geographic region, romance was especially popular in the south, with states like Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia ranking it as their top genre.

Fiction and poetry tied for next most popular genres, each either nine states reporting it as the most searched genre. The researchers note that these findings aren’t surprising, given that fiction is broad and encompassing. As for poetry, it is likely not surprising to see people looking for more information about poetry; the research here isn’t about poetry being the most read genre, but rather, one of the most researched genres….

(8) REASON TO BE SCARED BY THE PHONE BILL. Atlas Obscura remembers “The Heyday of Horror Hotlines and Why We Still Love to Fear the Phone”.

IT’S NO ACCIDENT FREDDY KRUEGER is the most famous monster of the last 50 years….

…So of course Freddy would capitalize on one of his decade’s definitive devices: the telephone. In the late 1980s you could communicate with Krueger on your home phone (after you “get your parents’ permission,” of course) through the awesome telecommunicative power of the hotline. Dialing 1-900-909-FRED connected brave teens to a running tape of short ghost stories, each introduced by Freddy Krueger like a malevolent MTV VJ throwing to Paula Abdul videos…

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. IT’S TIME FOR ANOTHER ONE OF FREDDY’S FAVORITE BEDTIME STORIES. AND THIS ONE’S A DREAM—MY KIND OF DREAM: THE KIND YOU DON’T WAKE UP FROM…

You can listen to 40 consecutive minutes of this stuff on YouTube, thanks to some intrepid young Gen-Xer who owned a tape deck and I guess was willing to catch hell from their parents when the phone bill arrived….

(9) L.J. SMITH (1958-2025.) L. J. Smith, author of The Vampire Diaries, died March 8 at the age of 66.

Her first book, The Night of the Solstice, written during high school and college, was published by MacMillan in 1987.

The New York Times obituary explains that the Vampire Diaries publisher eventually moved on from Smith to a ghostwriter, and how Smith recovered her characters by writing fanfiction.

…The first three books in The Vampire Diaries series were published by HarperCollins in 1991, and a fourth was released in 1992. But Ms. Smith — whose first agent was her typist, who had never represented a client — told The Wall Street Journal that she had written the trilogy for an advance of only a few thousand dollars without realizing that it was work for hire, meaning she did not own the copyright or the characters….

…In 2009, “The Vampire Diaries” were adapted into a dramatic television series that lasted for eight seasons on the CW Network….

…By 2014, the “Vampire Diaries” book series had sold more than five million copies, but Ms. Smith was no longer writing the authorized version: Alloy Entertainment fired her in 2011 over what its president and founder, Leslie Morgenstein, told The Wall Street Journal were creative differences.

A ghostwriter and then an author using the pen name Aubrey Clark were brought in to complete the final six books in the series. Ms. Smith said in interviews that she had believed that Alloy and HarperCollins wanted shorter books more closely associated with the TV series. They continued to put Ms. Smith’s name prominently on the cover of the books as the series’ creator….

…Eventually, Ms. Smith found an outlet to reclaim her characters — fan fiction, which book lovers have long written and posted, spooling out their own amateur versions of stories and characters even though they did not own the intellectual property and it was often not strictly legal.

In 2013, Amazon created Kindle Worlds, an online service that gave writers of fan fiction permission to write about certain licensed properties, including Alloy’s “Vampire Diaries” series, and to earn money for their ventures.

In 2014, Ms. Smith became the rare celebrated author to produce fan fiction as a way to recoup characters and story arcs she had lost, publishing a novel and novella in an informal continuation of the “Vampire Diaries.” (Kindle Worlds was discontinued in 2018)….

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Item by Paul Weimer.]

March 26, 1931 — Leonard Nimoy. (Died 2015.)

By Paul Weimer: It is fitting that Leonard Nimoy’s birthday should only be a couple of days after William Shatner’s. Sure, like Shatner himself, Nimoy is much more than his Star Trek character. But then again, he is the one who felt it necessary to write a book called I am Not Spock. Shatner never had to do the same for Kirk.

Why that is is because Nimoy brings a human alienness to Spock that no iteration of him since has quite managed. There are several Spocks running around now in movie and series history, but Nimoy’s is the one that sticks, the one that is the definitive article. The brainiac logic-fueled half human…who nevertheless shows real passion and anger in “Amok Time”, and especially at the utter joy that Kirk has in fact survived after all. Or learning the limits of logical action in “The Gaileo Seven”. Nimoy’s Spock was always learning, always growing, always becoming better (a lesson Spiner would apply to Data). The whole journey of Spock’s death, resurrection, and return to normal through the Star Trek movies shows a whole gamut of emotions and character growth. Nimoy sells all of that.

But Nimoy was more than that. He was the narrator of In Search Of, and I remember watching that for the first time and wondering why the voice was familiar on the episode, and only learning a couple of months later it was, in fact, “Spock”. I also enjoyed his secondary role in the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He also directed a number of movies as well, and became a producer, later, in the bargain. When I finally got to watching the original Mission Impossible (which I had only seen scattershot growing up), I was delighted to find he was there, too, as a master of disguise and immersion, Paris.

Later in life, he had a role in a number of episodes of Fringe.

On top of all that, you probably know about his music, if for nothing else than “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins.”. But did you know he was also a rather good photographer? In a world next door, he pursued that to the fullest rather than acting. As it is, the work he has done has been exhibited in major museums.

Such a diverse and strong and polymathic artistic talent. I wish I could have met him, but he died in 2015. Requiescat in pace.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

Dinosaur Comics poses a past/future riddle.
Jerry King has an employer with a risky idea.
Tom Gauld finds a place that didn’t believe in “safety first”.

(12) INTRODUCING BETWEEN A ROCKET AND A HARD SPACE. The International Space Station (ISS) National Laboratory is launching Between a Rocket and a Hard Space, the official ISS National Lab podcast. This podcast series dives deep into the discoveries, innovations, and people shaping the future of space, with the first episode now available.

The podcast’s name is a nod to the challenges and complexities of exploring the space environment, with recognition of the far-reaching benefits space-based R&D may bring. Going beyond the launch pad, Between a Rocket and a Hard Space offers exclusive insights from scientists, engineers, and visionaries leveraging the unique environment of low Earth orbit to push the boundaries of research and technology development. But that’s just the beginning. We’ll also hear from policymakers driving the industry forward, financial experts fueling the space economy, and communicators working to inspire the next generation of explorers.

In the first episode, host Patrick O’Neill sits down with ISS National Lab Chief Scientific Officer Michael Roberts to explore the groundbreaking science happening on the orbiting outpost and its real-world impact on medicine, technology, and industry. Roberts will provide an insider perspective into how microgravity is unlocking advancements in drug development, regenerative medicine, advanced materials, and in-space manufacturing.

Episodes of Between a Rocket and a Hard Space will be available through many major listening platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, Alexa, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Castro, and Castbox.

(13) KEEP YOUR EYE ON THE HOLE. “’So Much Good Science’: The Black Hole Visuals In Christopher Nolan’s $759M Oscar-Nominated Sci-Fi Movie Called ‘One Of The Most Accurate Depictions Of The Environment’ By Expert, Who Gives It A Near-Perfect Score” at ScreenRant.

… An expert speaks about the black holes in Intersellar. The 2014 sci-fi movie tells the story of a former NASA pilot named Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) who re-enters space exploration in order to help locate a new planet for humans when Earth becomes uninhabitable. The film features a leading cast including McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Matt Damon, John Lithgow, Jessica Chastain, and a young Timothée Chalamet. Interstellar made over $758 million at the box office, and ultimately ended up as one of Nolan’s lower-rated films in terms of Rotten Tomatoes score, getting a 73%…

… Speaking with Insider, astrophysicist Paul M. Sutter discusses Interstellar‘s black hole visuals, giving them a high accuracy rating. Sutter said there is “so much good science in the black hole image,” noting how well Nolan’s film maps the behavior of light in relation to a black hole. The expert also explains how Newton’s third law impacts how Cooper is acting in the key black hole scene. Ultimately, he gave Interstellar‘s black hole accuracy a 9 out of 10. Check out the full quote from Sutter below:

So much good science in the black hole image. Light follows the curves, the hills and valleys of spacetime. And these curves are set by massive objects. This is one of the earliest tests of Einstein’s theory of relativity. And black holes bend space a lot, and so what we are seeing is there’s a thing disk called an an accretion disk surrounding the black hole. But if you’re standing on one side of the black hole, light from the back end — which normally you wouldn’t see because you know, black hole in the way — there’s light that’s going up this way but then gets bent and curves right to you.

Newton’s third law is for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. And this is in the fundamental basis for space travel. We push against the air to get our airplanes to go. But in space there’s no ground, there’s no air. So we can only push against ourselves. If we throw something away from us, that propels us in the equal and opposite direction. So what I think he’s going for, old Cooper, is to get him away from that orbit, if he pushes something towards the black hole, that will nudge the spacecraft away from that orbit, and give it a safe escape.

The event horizon is the one way barrier. This is the edge of the black hole. This is the point of no return. That if you cross the event horizon, that gravity is so strong, that nothing, not even light can escape.

When Cooper first falls through the black hole, then he goes ‘oh, everything’s black.’ No, like you’re not the only thing falling into a black hole. There’s light from the entire rest of the universe that’s falling in with you. For a supermassive black hole like this, like Gargantua in the movie, you’ve got a handful of seconds from the moment you cross the event horizon to the time you hit the singularity.

That was an incredibly accurate depiction. In fact, it is one of the most accurate depictions of the environment around a black hole ever made. I would give it a 9. Okay a point off because it is not actually dark in there. But honestly, we don’t know what actually happens inside of a black hole, so that’s fair game….

(14) IS THIS A SPOILER? It is if the fan is right. “43 years later, John Carpenter has hinted at who turns into The Thing in the horror movie and one eagle-eyed fan has worked it out” at GamesRadar+

It’s been 43 years since legendary director John Carpenter’s The Thing hit screens, but the mystery behind which character turns into the fearsome monster has remained shrouded in secrecy, until now. And one fan has worked it out.

At a special 4K screening of The Thing at David Geffen Theater on March 22, Carpenter revealed that a scene in the middle of the movie reveals whether Kurt Russell’s R.J. MacReady or Keith David’s Childs is The Thing. “I think I found that hint,” said Joe Russo (a film fan not the Marvel director) on Twitter.As pointed out by Russo, MacReady is informed that The Thing can replicate at the cellular level, so to be safe they should only drink and eat what they have prepared themselves. Despite the warning, toward the end of the movie, MacReady shares a bottle of liquor with Childs, which could mean that he is either rather forgetful or he is, in fact, The Thing. “As soon as Childs drinks from the bottle, The Thing has won. It’s beaten its most skeptical, final threat,” says Russo…

Pixel Scroll 9/26/24 What A Knitted Sweater Would Look Like If I Scrolled One And Pixel Two

Posted on September 26, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) TOLKIEN CRITICISM. Some fannish references surprisingly creep into Dennis Wilson Wise’s reviews of The Literary Role of History in the Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien by Nicholas Birns and Representing Middle-earth: Tolkien, Form, and Ideology by Robert T. Tally Jr. in “Tolkien Criticism Today, Revisited” for the Los Angeles Review of Books. For example:

….Of these debates, Birns often takes the more challenging or counterintuitive side. For instance, most Tolkienists agree that Tolkien based his Rohirrim on the Old English kingdom of Mercia. Instead, Birns sees the Rohirrim as semimodern—not medieval—through their “civilizing” contact with Gondor. To say the least, this view enjoys questionable textual support, but as one goes through Birns’s book, a clear pattern begins to emerge. Over the last few years, the Tolkien community has endured its own shadow version of the Sad Puppies fiasco. In 2021, certain right-leaning fans (and at least one senior scholar) loudly decried the “wokeism” of a diversity-themed seminar hosted by the Tolkien Society, and with even greater toxicity, some people in Tolkien fandom have virulently attacked the multiracial casting in The Rings of Power, an Amazon Prime Video series that first aired in September 2022.

This is the cultural moment into which Birns wades, but for someone hoping to make an important political intervention, he frequently stumbles over several small, self-deprecating asides. One example involves race and representation. Before launching into the argument, Birns explicitly denies that, as a white male from an Anglo-American cultural background, he is “trying to act as an authority on those subjects.” Here, Birns is plainly attempting to acknowledge his positionality, a move often called for by progressive scholars, but his good intentions catch The Role of History in Tolkien in a performative quandary. They let right-wing crusaders dismiss his arguments out of hand; after all, this book wasn’t written by “an expert.”

But of course Birns isn’t really trying to show wayward young fascists the light. His real audience is the academic Left, and despite his principled humility, Birns clearly wants to provide his fellow leftists with scholarly ammunition against the anti-diversity crowd. Thus his various scholarly takes consist mainly in quashing claims of “Germanic primitivism” in Tolkien. Birns downplays not only Rohan’s clear connection to Mercia—the Old English people, remember, were originally Germanic—but also Tolkien’s overall admiration for the Gothic peoples. Additionally, Birns alleges that Tolkien took multicultural Byzantium as his model for Gondor, not imperial (and eventually Ostrogothic) Rome. Even more pointedly, although Birns laments how little Tolkien knew about the “traditions and cultural memory of non-European peoples,” he nevertheless claims to see some African influence on the legendarium. Allegedly, Tar-Míriel of Númenor bears a passing resemblance to Empress Zewditu of Ethiopia.

Even for readers who cheer his goals, these connections can seem far-fetched….

(2) CAN’T GET NO SATISFACTION. “6 sci-fi and fantasy authors who hated the screen adaptations of their books” at Winter Is Coming.

Earlier this week, A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin set off a drama bomb when he bluntly criticized HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon in a blog post….

But compared to some of the other authors who have criticized adaptations of their work, it was nothing. Below, let’s look at some authors who were unhappy with the screen versions of their books, and what they said and did about it…

The article leads off with Ursula K. Le Guin (Earthsea), and follows with Alan Moore (Watchmen), Stephen King (The Shining), P.J. Travers (Mary Poppins), Brandon Sanderson (The Wheel of Time) and Michael Ende (The Neverending Story).

Ursula K. Le Guin didn’t like the Sci-Fi Channel’s adaptation of Earthsea

Let’s begin our journey into dissatisfaction with Ursula K. Le Guin, the author of the beloved Earthsea books. Where high fantasy epics often involve war or other mass-scale conflict, the Earthsea novels are quieter and more complicated, with different books following different characters living on a string of islands where magic is practiced freely. When The Sci-Fi Channel announced that it was going to make an Earthsea miniseries based on the first book in the series, A Wizard of Earthsea, people were excited.

But that excitement evaporated when they saw the finished product, which ran back in 2004. Le Guin herself was already bracing for the worst. “When I saw the script, I realized that what the writer had done was kill the books, cut them up, take out an eye here, a leg there, and stick these bits into a totally different story, stitching it all together with catgut and hokum,” she wrote for Locusmagazine. “They were going to use the name Earthsea, and some of the scenes from the books, in a generic McMagic movie with a silly plot based on sex and violence.”

“I want to say that I am very sorry for the actors. They all tried really hard. I’m not sorry for myself, or for my books. We’re doing fine, thanks. But I am sorry for people who tuned in to the show thinking they were going to see something by me, or about Earthsea. I will try to be more careful in future, and not let either myself or my readers be fooled.”

While Le Guin had kind words for the actors, she had a major problem with the casting. In the Archipelago of Earthsea, almost all of the characters are people of color, including the wizard Ged, the closest thing the series has to a main character. But in the Sci-Fi show, pretty much everyone was white, something Le Guin did not appreciate. “In the miniseries, Danny Glover is the only man of color among the main characters (although there are a few others among the spear-carriers),” she wrote for Slate. “A far cry from the Earthsea I envisioned.”

“My color scheme was conscious and deliberate from the start. I didn’t see why everybody in science fiction had to be a honky named Bob or Joe or Bill. I didn’t see why everybody in heroic fantasy had to be white (and why all the leading women had “violet eyes”). It didn’t even make sense. Whites are a minority on Earth now—why wouldn’t they still be either a minority, or just swallowed up in the larger colored gene pool, in the future?”

Le Guin was a bit kinder about the 2006 animated movie Tales from Earthsea, although she was still disappointed it didn’t channel her books more. “It is not my book. It is your movie. It is a good movie,” she remembers telling director Goro Miyazaki. At least she didn’t hate it this time.

(3) GERWIG HONORED. Deadline is there as Barbie director “Greta Gerwig Accepts Motion Picture Pioneer Of The Year Award”.

Greta Gerwig was beaming Wednesday night as she was honored as this year’s Pioneer Of The Year, and in the process also helped raised $1.4 million for the Will Rogers Motion Picture Pioneers Foundation at a sold-out dinner that packed the Beverly Hilton Hotel International Ballroom…

(4) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to chow down on cheesy garlic bread with Jeffrey Ford in Episode 237 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

I last chatted with Jeffrey Ford — last for your ears, that is — eight years ago during the 2016 Readercon — in a conversation which appeared on Episode 17. Back then, I described him as a six-time World Fantasy Award-winning and three-time Shirley Jackson Award-winning writer whose new short story collection A Natural History of Hell had just been published. But now that it’s 2024 and we’re back for yet another Readercon, he’s an eight-time World Fantasy Award-winning writer and a four-time Shirley Jackson Award winner.

Since that previous meal, he’s also published the novel Ahab’s Return: or, The Last Voyage in 2018, A Primer to Jeffrey Ford in 2019, The Best of Jeffrey Ford in 2020, and Big Dark Hole in 2021, plus three dozen stories or so new stories.

We discussed why writing has gotten more daunting (but more fun) as he’s gotten older, the difficulties of teaching writing remotely during a pandemic, how he often doesn’t realize what he was really writing about in a story until years after it was written, the realization that made him write a sequel to Moby-Dick, why if you have confidence and courage you can do anything, the music he suggests you listen to while writing, the reason he thinks world building is a “stupid term,” the advice given to him by his mentor John Gardner, how the writing of Isaac Bashevis Singer taught him not to blink, why he prefers giving readings to doing panels, the writer who advised him if everybody liked his stories it meant he was doing something wrong, and much more.

(5) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 119 of the Octothorpe podcast, “Only One of Them Is My Bludgeoning Hand, John” –

We respond to your burning questions in our bumper mailbag episode! We spend a good long time going through your posts, and we briefly discuss the recent allegations against Neil Gaiman before moving onto happier topics. Listen here.

There’s a transcript at the link.

A famous photograph of Margaret Hamilton standing beside printed outputs of the code that took the Apollo spacecraft to the Moon, overlaid with the words “Octothorpe 119” and “Our Listeners Write In”.

(6) BRITISH ROBOT PURCHASES BOOM. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Robot sales in Britain broke its own record in 2023 with 3,830 industrial robots sold according to the International Federation of Robotics. This represented a 51% increase over 2022.

However, Britain still lags behind France, Italy and the European leader Germany. In 2022 Germany installed 269,427 industrial robots.

I keep on warning folk that the machines are taking over, but no-one ever listens….

You can read about it here: “IFR press release World Robotics 2024”.

(7) UNSTUCK THE LANDING. Space-Biff! surprises us by revealing Kurt Vonnegut’s work creating board games in “So It Goes”. And one was finally published this year — Kurt Vonnegut’s GHQ: The Lost Board Game. (It seems to be available at Barnes & Noble®.)

Before he became a famous author, over a decade before Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut was a board game designer. A failed board game designer, with only a sheaf of notes, a single rejection note, and an unfinished patent to his name, but a board game designer nonetheless.

And now his sole surviving design is an actual board game you can buy and play and, if you’re anything like me, spend a few hours marveling at. Thanks to the efforts of the Vonnegut estate in preserving his notes and Geoff Engelstein in interpreting and tweaking them into a functional state, GHQ — short for “General Headquarters” — is, not unlike Billy Pilgrim, a thing unstuck in time, transported from 1956 to 2024….

… Is GHQ a good game? Sure. For its time. For its place. Had it appeared in 1956, it may well have become the third great checkerboard game. With its zones of control and special units, it might have helped shape the coming century’s approach to tabletop gaming….

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Lis Carey.]

September 26, 1957 – Tanya Huff, 67.

By Lis Carey: Tanya Huff is a Canadian science fiction and fantasy writer, who made her first sale of two poems to The Picton Gazette for $10, at age ten.

Since then, she has given us several fantasy series, including the Keeper’s Chronicles, in which Claire Hansen, a Keeper, has unintentionally become responsible for a small hotel, and the not completely sealed hole to hell in its basement. She’s assisted, with some degree of befuddlement initially, by Dean, the young handyman and cook she found working there; Jacques, the ghost of a French-Canadian sailor who has haunted the hotel since he died there in the 1920s; and her not befuddled at all cat, Austin, who talks, and is the source of a great deal of often snarky advice. I’m currently enjoying the first volume, Summon the Keeper.

Other fantasy series include the Blood series, featuring a former police detective and a vampire, which was adapted for television as Blood Ties, and the Quarters series, with bards who travel the kingdom carrying both news and magical skills, and are faced with new challenges when the kingdom is invaded.

Tanya Huff has also given us the Valor Confederation series, a military sf series where Staff Sergeant Torin Kerr tries to keep both her superiors and her company of space marines alive while on lethal missions across the galaxy. I hear excellent things about it, but haven’t read any of it yet.

An interesting tidbit is that while studying at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto for her Bachelor of Applied Arts degree, she was in the same class as science fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer. They collaborated on their final TV Studio Lab assignment, a short science fiction show.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Thatababy features a crossover.
The Argyle Sweater depicts that unknown first attempt at Troy.

(10) WEST COAST AVENGERS INTRODUCES BLUE BOLT. This November, the Earth’s Mightiest Heroes are back on the best coast in an all-new run of West Coast Avengers from writer Gerry Duggan and artist Danny Kim. Led by Iron Man, the new roster includes Spider-Woman, War Machine, Firestar, a mysteriously redeemed Ultron, and another former villain seeking redemption— Blue Bolt!

An experienced Marvel henchman with unrefined lightning-based abilities, Chad Braxton, AKA Blue Bolt, makes his first appearance in WEST COAST AVENGERS #1 where he finds himself on loan to the Avengers through a new prison release program. Reckless, undisciplined, and downright rude, Blue Bolt may just be the biggest jerk in the entire Marvel Universe. Can the Avengers whip him into shape or will Blue Bolt’s abrasive attitude–and lack of morals–tarnish the team’s legacy forever? See him for yourself in Kim’s original design sheet for the character plus a promotional image by Todd Nauck.

On the unique role Blue Bolt will serve on the team, Duggan said, “The Avengers have seen a lot of rough customers over the years. Hell, even Deadpool and Wolverine have been Avengers at different points. But the Avengers haven’t seen a bigger @$!&^% than Blue Bolt. He’s mean, he’s self-centered, narcissistic, and he’s only on the Avengers West Coast squad to shave time off his sentence. And wait until you find out what he’s in jail for. Yeesh.”

(11) SFF ON LEARNEDLEAGUE: WILLIAM GIBSON. [Item by David Goldfarb.] Yesterday’s match day featured this question:

What is the portmanteau title of William Gibson’s seminal and influential 1984 cyberpunk novel, the first (and only) to win the Nebula, Hugo, and Philip K. Dick awards?

This had a 37% get rate league-wide, with no single wrong answer getting as much as 5% of the submissions.

(12) MY PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION NOMINATION. [Item by Francis Hamit.] My novel Starmen has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The nomination has been accepted by Columbia University. It awards the Pulitzers. Which is good but there is more to do.

Leigh Strother-Vien is also nominated for her great work editing the book. It’s a very long book: 620 pages in the print editions. Four years of work at a time when we were both disabled and sick a lot of the time. Just shows you what you can do when you try. But we are up against very big publishers with big marketing and publicity machines. There is a long list of distinguished and very busy jurors from Publishing and Academia who may not like the fact that we are, alas, self published.

We never thought of doing it any other way. Why? I’ll be 80 next week and Leigh is 70. We are disabled. And we are soldiers. There is a lot of prejudice between us and a traditional publisher. We don’t have an agent and the “over the transom” method was closed years ago. There is a generation of younger editors that are more concerned about politics than the quality of the writing. Publishing executives tend to chase the market and imitate what has been successful rather than take risks on “new” or “unknown” writers. Ageism and Ableism are just two of the many hoops our book would have to jump through to get a deal. We don’t have time for all of that. We are too sick and tired, both of us, to deal with it.

So we applied, got accepted, and we’re a bit of a charity case because of the Kickstarter appeal to raise funds for formatting the interior and the excellent cover donated by Markee Book Covers. I took a credit union loan to cover other expenses. We have been graced with almost entirely five star reviews and the endorsements of friends such as Jacqueline Lichtenburg and Glen Olsen. So far, so good. But now this is a battle for public attention, for sales, and for ratings and reviews on Amazon, Goodreads and other websites.

This novel is an experiment in genres. We use a lot of them packed into what is on the surface an adventure novel with more than a dozen principal characters, each fully formed. Thematically it moves from Historical/ Western/ Detective fiction to Espionage, Political Intrigue, and Apache Myths, that becomes surrealist Fantasy and Science Fiction, mixed with Romance, Witchcraft, Feminism, Quantum Mechanics, String Theory, and disquisitions on slavery in the Old South, the failure of Reconstruction, and the floating world of sex workers called the Demimonde. All are grist for the mill. A lot of research was needed. A lot of deep thinking since I had no outline. That would have been more of a hindrance than a help.

Instead I just start at the beginning with an accidental meeting of two Scots far from home, in a dusty border town called El Paso, and the appearance overhead of a large balloon carrying a traveling circus. One of the Scots is the local manager for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency (a forerunner of today’s FBI) and the other is a young anthropologist from Cambridge University, George James Frazer. You just know interesting things will happen.

So much for the tease. Buy the book for the rest.

There is another reason that I feel confident. I’m a very good writer. I’m also a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, the oldest and most prestigious graduate writing program in the world. Rather amazing for a kid who got Ds in high school English. I could not spell or punctuate worth a damn. Still can’t. I’m dyslexic, a condition unknown and unnamed in the 1960s. I began my career as a Drama major, and when I came to Iowa the first time, I had never heard of the Workshop. I soon met professors there and graduate assistants, some of whom were or would become famous. But it was a mandatory drama theory course, “Playwrighting”, that changed my life. I began writing fiction and was admitted to the Undergraduate Writers Workshop. Then I spent four years in the US Army, where I also learned journalism and began my professional career. Returning to Iowa I was in classes with writers who became very famous and also won Pulitzer Prizes. Jane Smiley, Tracy Kidder, and last year’s winner, Jayne Philips were among them. But it’s not the Iowa MFA that helps, but the Iowa workshop program, a trial by fire if there ever was one for literature. Iowa rigs the game. You don’t get in unless you are already at the top. Over 97% of all applicants fail. When you have done that getting your book published should be easy — and is, when you are young and have an agent and a publisher that can see decades of other books coming. At my age, not so much, and I have had agents tell me that to my face and others drop me because I wouldn’t imitate other writers that were best sellers.

Self-publishing is a long and honorable tradition in American letters. Willa Cather and Walt Whitman started that way. So once more I’m in good company. I am going to have to push myself and my book to prevail, but there is no long list or short list for the Pulitzers. Only winners and finalists. If it were not for so many top reviews we would not have entered, but now that we are here we can only try our best.

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] “Trap Pitch Meeting”. Huh. Sounds pretty much like the review I read. Then again, with a plot this shallow/unbelievable and nepotism this blatant, it might be hard for a parody and a review to differ very much.

[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, David Goldfarb, Francis Hamit, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, and Kathy Sullivan for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Ellen Montgomery.]

Pixel Scroll 8/1/24 Yes, Those Pixels Are Looking At You Reading This Scroll, So Be Good

Posted on August 1, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) JEFFE KENNEDY RESIGNS AS SFWA PRESIDENT. Science Fiction and Fantasy Association President Jeffe Kennedy announced to members today that she has resigned the office. Her statement says in part:

…I’ve served in this role for over three years and on the Board of Directors for more than seven years. It has been a privilege and an honor to serve this organization.

However, the last several months have been particularly demanding in my personal life, and I have come to the realization that I can no longer provide the focused attention SFWA needs from its President. Without going into too much detail, I continue to be the sole caregiver and financial support for my disabled husband, whose progressive condition is worsening. In addition, my stepfather of twenty years passed away suddenly, widowing my elderly mother for the third time, and I am in the process of taking over all of her finances and care. These family obligations will require far more attention than I could have anticipated when I accepted the nomination to serve a second term as SFWA President.

My legal and fiscal responsibility to SFWA—and my own personal integrity—prevent me from commenting on any issues related to SFWA’s administration and operations. Throughout my tenure I did my best to serve the organization and all of its constituents with sincerity and respect, and to fulfill all of the duties I was elected to perform. Now it is time for me to step back….

(2) OGHENECHOVWE DONALD EKPEKI TRAVEL FUNDRAISER. Chris Barkley has opened a GoFundMe to “Help Oghenechovwe Ekpeki Attend the 2024 Glasgow Worldcon”.

…The African Speculative Fiction Society has provided sponsorship to attend but Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki is still in need of funding for other travel and visa expenses, hence this GoFundMe effort. He would like to raise $7500.00.

He has won the Nebula, Locus, Otherwise, Nommo, British & World Fantasy awards and was a finalist in the Hugo, Sturgeon, British Science Fiction and NAACP Image awards.

He is a finalist in the Nommo Award in two categories, best short story and best novella, which will be presented at the Worldcon in Glasgow this year….

(3) GREATNESS REMEMBERED. Rich Horton reviews “An Infinite Summer, by Christopher Priest” for Strange at Ecbatan.

To repeat myself: The late Christopher Priest (1943-2024) was one of the greatest SF writers of his generation. He made an early splash with novels like Inverted World and A Dream of Wessex (aka The Perfect Lover), followed by The Prestige, which was made into a successful movie by Christopher Nolan, and then by any number of stories and novels in his Dream Archipelago sequence. I wrote an obituary of him for Black Gate here….

(4) HE SHOT FIRST. [Item by Steven French.] From the Guardian’s readers interview with Malcolm McDowell: “‘Kubrick had stewed pears and sour chicken for lunch because Napoleon did’”.

If they ask you to appear in Star Trek again, would you say yes? Nicens_boi

I mean, you can’t top killing Captain James T Kirk. I suppose I could go back and kill old Patrick Stewart … I got a lot of flak from unhappy Trekkies, but there were also a lot of happy Trekkies who’d had it with old Bill. I think he overstayed his welcome. It was good for him to move on. I’m a great admirer of Shatner. He’s 90-odd. He’s still working. He’s been an astronaut. Good god, he wipes the floor with us young guys. I once made a surprise visit when he was being interviewed on stage. They introduced me: “And the one that killed Captain Kirk.” He went: “You shot me in the back.” I never thought the producers got it right, because they didn’t send him off in a glorious manner. Shot in the back on a bridge that collapses was not a noble end to a great character.

(5) BBC COVERS VIDEO GAME ACTORS STRIKE. “SAG-Aftra strike: ‘They’re crushing human beings beneath their feet’”.

When actor Jennifer Hale talks, you listen. Her delivery is measured and surgically precise, yet her tone has a warmth that most ASMR creators would envy. She could read the phone book and you’d pay attention.

It’s unsurprising, then, that her voice is her livelihood, and that she takes the threat to her industry posed by AI so seriously.

“They see that the work of our souls is nothing more than a commodity to generate profits for them,” she says of several of the major gaming companies. “They don’t see that they’re crushing human beings beneath their feet in blind pursuit of money and profit, it’s disgusting.”

From Commander Shepard in the Mass Effect series to Samus Aran in the Metroid titles, Hale’s list of gaming credits is as long as your arm and her voice is familiar to millions.

Hale is one of the most high-profile voice actors in the world. She’s joined 2,500 members of the US actors union SAG-AFTRA who perform in games, by striking until games divisions of prominent companies like Activision, Warner Brothers, Walt Disney and EA agree to protections around the use of artificial intelligence (AI)….

(6) WHERE AI ACTUALLY WORKS? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Last night’s BBC Radio 4 programme Front Row had a rather disturbing item on AI and film script selecting. “Dramatizing MPs, Jon Savage on LGBTQ and music, Stirling Prize shortlist, Screenwriters v AI”

Apparently, it typically takes a week to read and assess and write a report on a submitted film script and proposal but now an AI can do it in five minutes!!!! They did a trial run and it seems to work even if it is not quite there yet… but you can bet it will be soon.

This was the last item on the programme so skip to the final 10 minutes

With voice actors and motion capture performers in the US currently on strike over AI protections, the place of AI in the culture industries remains highly contested. The Writers Guild of America may have settled their strike but film critic Antonia Quirke explores whether screenwriters still have something to fear from the algorithm…

(7) WHO WINKED. If the TARDIS can travel anywhere in time and space, surely it can do this: “Doctor Who boss says breaking the fourth wall is ‘part of the show going forward’” in Radio Times.

While Doctor Who has not been afraid to break the fourth wall in the past, and have characters speak directly to the viewers watching at home, Russell T Davies’s new era has been notable for its particularly prominent usage of the device.

Not only has Ncuti Gatwa’s Fifteenth Doctor done it, winking to camera near the end of The Devil’s Chord, but Anita Dobson’s mysterious Mrs Flood has done it on multiple occasions, including at the very end of the most recent season.

Now, speaking at San Diego Comic-Con, Davies has addressed these fourth wall breaks, saying: “It’s part of the show going forward, breaking the fourth wall.”…

(8) CHRISTMAS SPECIAL CLIP. “Doctor Who debuts first-look at 2024 Christmas special with Nicola Coughlan” – a video shown last week at Comic-Con is shared by Radio Times.

…The clip was introduced by guest star Nicola Coughlan, who confirmed that the episode’s punning title refers to her character Joy, “a determined woman whose life is changed forever when she meets the Doctor”.

The sequence – which you can watch below – sees the Doctor zip from Manchester in 1940 to Italy in 1962, then to Mount Everest in 1953 and finally to London in 2024, where he meets Joy.

Coughlan’s character is, of course, attempting to fend off a Silurian with a hair dryer when the Time Lord appears to deliver a ham and cheese toastie and a pumpkin latte… only in Doctor Who….

(9) TARAL WAYNE (1951-2024). Eleven-time Best Fan Artist Hugo finalist Taral Wayne, Fan Guest of Honor at the 2009 Worldcon, died July 31. Steven Baldassarra, who had heard from him earlier in the day and was bringing over a few things, says when he arrived there was no answer to his knock at the door or to phone calls. The building superintendant was asked to open the door and check. They found Taral lying down in his living room, unresponsive. Paramedics were summoned but were unable to revive him.

Baldassarra’s announcement ends with this fine tribute:

I knew Taral for just over 30 years. And while some people may have known Taral for being curmudgeonly, stubborn, fractious, and condescending, I also got to know the man who was also genuinely warm, gentle, impish, thoughtful and even vulnerable.

Taral had a ferocious intellect and was an exceptionally talented graphic artist; I could see how hurt he was for not getting his chance in the sun in becoming a financial success with his graphic work and illustration. But despite all that, Taral did what he had loved, and was contented living by the beat of his own drum.

Taral was truly a wonderful friend, and I am truly blessed to have had known him and having had him as part of my life.

I knew Taral for 45 years and will miss him a lot. File 770’s obituary will appear later this evening.

(10) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

August 1, 1986 – Howard the Duck film (1986). Thirty-eight years ago a certain cigar-smoking fowl was let loose upon unsuspecting film goers. Many of whom promptly left the cinemas they were in. That was Howard the Duck based on the Marvel Comics character of the same name.

He was hatched from the minds of writer Steve Gerber and artist Val Mayerik. The former says that he based him off his college friend Howard Tockman. One assumes very, very loosely off that individual. His first comic appearance was fifty-one years ago so he’s a very old duck at this point.

Before we get to the film, we should know that he has appeared elsewhere. Starting in 2014, the character, voiced by Seth Green, appeared in cameos in several Marvel films, to wit the first Guardians of the Galaxy film and the last of those (at least so far) as well the fantastic animated Guardians of the Galaxy series also voiced by Green) and Ultimate Spider-Man (voiced by Kevin Michael Richardson there), and finally the What If…? Series where he was also voiced by Green.

I’m thinking there’s a live action appearance by him after the Howard the Duck film rather recently but I’ll be buggered if I can remember what it is. Anyone remember what it was? It was brief that I know and I can almost picture it. I remember there was a female next to him so I must’ve seen the film if I remember that. But that is all I remember.

Now for how Howard the Duck, the film. It came out the year that Aliens, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Little Shop of Horrors, and Labyrinth came out. Tough competition indeed. And wasn’t that a fantastic year for genre films? Every film I’ve mentioned here got nominated Conspiracy ’87 with Aliens winning the Hugo. Only Big Trouble in Little China and The Fly aren’t here, and they, too, came out that year.

So the film, yes I am getting it now, was written by rather unusually by the producer Gloria Katz and the director George Huyck. I’ve seen that particular combination do a script before. They certainly had the credits as writers, she having written the scripts for American Graffiti and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom; his scripts were the same as they were a couple that scripted together.

So you now know who directed and produced this film. Lucas co-produced it. It was Lucas who suggested adapting the comic book following the production of American Graffiti which they were of course involved in. (He wrote it with them. Talented man that he is.) Lucasfilm was the production company.

Ok I can’t defend it, I really can’t. There’s nothing about the film that’s not considered a rotten, smelly sulphurous mess. Its humor was considered juvenile at best, the performances, well, just awful and the story cringingly bad. In the years since, I’ve deepened my belief that it’s among the worst films ever made. It currently holds a thirteen percent rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes. Ouch. Really ouch.

However, one criticism I am puzzled by to the day. The vast majority of comments online plus professional and amateur critics take umbrage at what Howard the Duck looks like. This makes no sense. Given the limitations of translating a two-dimensional comic duck into an actual physical creature, I thought that they did a fine job.

Remember almost thirty years on, they’d avoid this need with the Rocket Raccoon creature by simply being an entirely digital being. Today Howard would be the same. So yes, a much better one for that.

What they did was create a rather large custom puppet, which had an individual inside. That being Jordan Prentice in his first, errr, acting gig. He however didn’t provide the voice as that was the work of Chip Zien who was The Baker in the original Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods musical. The film version is well-worth seeing.

If I remember correctly it’s the worst film Lucas ever produced both from a critical viewpoint and certainly from a financial as well. It cost at least thirty-seven million dollars to produce (not counting distribution costs including the millions to print up films) and had box office receipts of that amount. Now keep in mind that Roger Ebert did an essay on it whereas his research said it was an even split, so Lucasfilm would’ve made back eighteen million thereby losing eighteen million on this. Ouch. Really ouch.

I keep hearing rumors of a sequel but I can’t imagine Disney who owns the rights now having any interest in doing so as they’ve been losing money on a lot of their MCU series right now.

I saw it once in the theatre. Did I want to ever see it again? What do you think? It’s worse than the Super Mario Bros was and that’s saying quite a bit.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

Brewster Rockit continues its alternate story.
Lola has more elf complaints.
Speed Bump updates a play.
Thatababy has a guest plumber.
The Argyle Sweater demonstrates why to never ask a writer.
Carpe Diem illustrates preparation.
Rhymes with Orange expands on the idea.
Rubes turns around the term.
Strange Brew has an adorable visit.

(12) AVENGERS DISSEMBLE! “Jeremy Renner Says Robert Downey Jr. Kept His Marvel Return a Secret From the Original ‘Avengers’ Cast: ‘The Son of a B—- Didn’t Say Anything!’” – so he tells Variety.

… “No! I had no idea. The son of a bitch didn’t say anything to me,” Renner said. “We’re good friends. There’s the Avengers family chat. The original six. He said not a peep. I got online and started blowing up his phone like, ‘What’s going on? You’ve been hiding this from us the whole time?’ It’s exciting news. I’m really, really excited about it.”…

(13) HOLLYWOOD RELICS. Atlas Obscura pinpoints “11 Horror Film Sets Where You Can Revisit Your Greatest Fears”.

There’s no better way to get into the Halloween spirit than turning off the lights and scaring yourself out of your skin with a good horror flick. But if watching them (and rewatching them) on the small screen just isn’t enough any more, why not try to see some of the real-life locations where these cult classics were filmed?

In Washington, D.C., 75 steps offer a shortcut between Prospect Street NW and Canal Road NW, and if you visit at night you’ll recognize the site where Father Karras plummeted to his death in the 1973 film The Exorcist. The steps were padded with rubber during filming, and they have since been designated a historic landmark. In Morocco, just outside Ouarzazate, in a place known as Hollywood’s “door to the desert” sits a desolate, American-style gas station, home to rusted-out vehicles and dust covered props. It was plopped there for the 2006 remake of the Wes Craven classic, The Hills Have Eyes, and now just confuses anyone who sees it without knowing the backstory….

(14) SKELETON CREW. “Star Wars: Skeleton Crew Release Date Finally Revealed” at ScreenRant.

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew‘s release date has finally been confirmed by Lucasfilm…. As one of many upcoming Star Wars TV shows, Skeleton Crew naturally has a lot of hype surrounding it. This excitement is only bolstered by Skeleton Crew‘s place in the Star Wars timeline, with the show expected to tie into the likes of The Mandalorian and Ahsoka.

… Lucasfilm has finally confirmed the release date for the show via People. As evident, anyone interested in the continuation of Star Wars’ New Republic era will not need to wait much longer with Skeleton Crew‘s confirmed release date of December 3, 2024. With confirmation of when the show will be released on Disney+ finally being provided, the wait for more updates and the show’s eventual premiere will only grow in both difficulty and anticipation….

(15) BATTLESTAR GALACTICA NO LONGER A PEACOCK TALE. Variety reports “’Battlestar Galactica’ Reboot No Longer in the Works at Peacock”.

The project was first announced back in 2019 ahead of Peacock’s official launch as part of the streamer’s initial slate of original programming. It was never formally ordered to series, though, and has been in development ever since. Exact story details never emerged, but the show was said to be set in the same continuity as the 2003 “Battlestar Galactica” series.

The reboot was a passion project for Sam Esmail, who was executive producing via Esmail Corp. under the company’s overall deal with studio UCP. Chad Hamilton of Esmail Corp. was also an executive producer. Michael Lesslie had originally come onboard as the writer of the reboot in 2020, but it was reported that he left the project in 2021…

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

Pixel Scroll 11/1/23 Eat, Pray, Jaunt

Posted on November 1, 2023 by Mike Glyer

(1) 4 YOUR LISTENING PLEASURE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] SF book lovers had an hour of delight on BBC Radio 4 last Sunday with two half-hour programmes.

First up there was Open Book that saw a led discussion of a panel of three authors that looked at artificial intelligence (AI) in their work as well as the possible effects of AI on novels writing.

The overall drift – of what was an interesting conversation – was that AI is not developed enough at the current moment to have a significant impact on (commercial) writing/publishing but there is clearly a trajectory and that in a few years time things could well be different..

One point made was that eventually AI writing might possibly induce a revolution in writing with a new type of novel. The panel took this notion further and said it may be that in the future some AI writing will only be able to be appreciated by AI (non-human) readers.

You can listen to the programme here,

Elizabeth Day and Johny Pitts present a special edition of the programme exploring AI and the novel.

Recorded at the London Literary Festival at the Southbank Centre; novelists Naomi Alderman, Adam Thirlwell and Julianne Pachico join Elizabeth and Johny on stage to discuss depictions of AI in their fiction – and what AI might mean for fiction.

Naomi Alderman’s new novel, The Future, is the tale of a daring heist hatched in the hope of saving the world from the tech giants whose greed threatens life as we know it. Adam Thirlwell’s The Future, Future takes us from the salacious gossip of pre-revolutionary Paris to a utopian lunar commune, and Julianne Pachico tells the story of a young girl raised by artificial intelligence in her novel Jungle House.

The second programme was The Exploding Library that in this episode looked at Angela Carter’s Night at the Circus.

“Am I fact or am I fiction?”

So asks the six-foot-something winged woman, Fevvers, the acclaimed aerialiste at the heart of Angela Carter’s epic, Nights at the Circus. It’s a question that has haunted almost every performer who’s stepped onto a stage and seen their ‘real’ self and ‘stage’ selves blur.

Yet a woman with wings with the world at her feet is almost run-of-the-mill in this extravaganza. There’s dancing tigers, murderous clowns, shamanic visions in the Siberian wilderness, and the odd pair of stinky tights.

Labels and genres are flung around – gothic, magical realism, fantasy – but the book, like Angela Carter’s writing in general, evades categorisation at every turn. Twist the kaleidoscope and another vision emerges, twist again and the human condition is re-revealed.

Kiri Pritchard Maclean runs off with the circus to consider the performer underneath the greasepaint, and find out what happens when the performance comes to an end. (Plus chickens).

You can listen to the programme here.

(2) CHENGDU WORLDCON ROUNDUP. [Item by Ersatz Culture.]

Two part convention report by Chengdu fan/business owner

(via SF Light Year)

I’m not exactly sure who Huawen is; I think they are a fan who set up an SF-related company/museum/library (?) based in Chengdu. (Per the website URL listed in the leaflet image listed in the leaflet image, “[their company] was established in 2021 in Chengdu, Sichuan Province. It is a media company dedicated to promoting excellent science fiction culture.” Per the first part of their report, had some involvement in the early days of the Chengdu bid/con organization, but dropped out.

Part 1; Part 2

Extracts from Part 1 of their report, via Google Translate with manual edits.

I was a little afraid of the World Science Fiction Convention. Previously, I’d only heard about this science fiction convention which has lasted for more than 80 years, from news reports and a few words from friends. There was always a sour grapes mentality of “looking at what other people’s families were doing”.

But now after experiencing it personally, I feel more or less disenchanted. Let me expand upon this first.

First of all, the Worldcon has a long history and many traditions. This is the 81st edition. With 80 previous events, it has accumulated a lot of experiences and traditions. I had never participated in it before, and felt that it would always be a bit of a mystery to me.

And then there’s the scale. Every time, thousands of science fiction fans and practitioners participate, with hundreds of stalls and hundreds of activities. Such a large scale has never been seen before in China.

Then there is the difficulty of organization. The complexity and organizational difficulty increases exponentially with the increase in scale. What’s more, except for a few members of the organizing committee, almost all of them are involved for just a short time. This level of difficulty is simply hellish. Think about it – it’s scary…

I saw from the WeChat official account of the convention that collections related to the history of science fiction were being solicited. I was originally thinking of doing a big presentation, but I succumbed to procrastination. However, if I rushed to catch up with my preparations, maybe the visual effect could be good? …

In the end, as an exhibitor, I briefly displayed a small collection in two cabinets, and fortunately everyone reported that they had good impressions of it.

Therefore, my main participation in this conference was as an exhibitor, and secondarily as a guest 1, 3, and 5. [I think this is a reference to the badge numbering, about what access individual attendee types had?] I constantly switched between the two identities whilst at the con.

Precisely because of the resource-draining nature of being an exhibitor, I was unable to participate in many activities, and was unable to observe the full picture of this convention, which really was a pity. If I had been able to attend more events, there would definitely be more [in this report]. However, I can summarize my experiences, to learn from [them in the future]

1. The venue is the basic determining factor for almost any event / Unparalleled, beyond imagination, 900 million yuan [approx $123m USD] can convince people with reason…

The venue and facilities were so good, but my preparations were so unsatisfactory, and I completely underestimated the scale of this conference.

2. The youth trend is obvious, directly reversing the aging trend of the World Science Fiction Convention

I heard a long time ago that the participants at foreign world science fiction conventions are mainly middle-aged and elderly people, with only a small proportion of young people. This phenomenon is not recent; it has a history of at least more than 20 years.

The same is true from my observations at my table. The foreign science fiction fans who came to the conference are generally older. I never saw any children or teenagers, and young people in their twenties and thirties were also relatively rare. [Note: the default Google Translate output says, “…were relatively preferred”, which didn’t make much sense to me. I’ve taken the liberty of replacing that with something that makes more sense to me.]

By contrast, the clear main participants of this Chengdu Science Fiction Convention are minors, mainly primary school students, followed by junior high school students, and many high school students. Excluding the parents and adults accompanying children, the proportion of adult science fiction fans attending the conference was a long way down – less than one tenth….

I speculate that the average age of all participants this time was most likely no more than 18 years old. Science fiction makes people young, if I’m honest.

I bet that no subsequent World Science Fiction Convention in the next fifty years will be able to gather such a group of tens of thousands of primary and secondary school science fiction fans – no, a hundred years.

I think foreign science fiction fans will have received a little shock from Chengdu 🙂

3. We ran out of materials and lacked preparations. We really couldn’t squeeze out another drop …

All the books that I planned to sell were sold out on the first or second day.

The three new commemorative medals made for this science fiction convention were almost completely out of ink the next day, and I had to replenish them twice a day. [Note

Not only were there not enough badges, but the 3,000 ribbons prepared for the previous 2,000 people did not last until the end, even with the restriction that “each person could only choose one.”

The only thing that I still had some inventory of, was a leaflet that had 5,000 copies printed.

I have skim read the second post, but haven’t had time or energy to do a similar write-up; it will probably appear in tomorrow’s Scroll.

The caption on this photo in the linked post says Huawen is ‘the newbie in the corner’, but that doesn’t help much to identify them.

The Space-Time Painter and the Hugos being used in school work and tests

I spotted these Xiaohongshu posts earlier today (1), (2). There are other unusual references to this Hugo winner that I’ll include in a future Scroll.

Photos from Shanghai Halloween

These have absolutely nothing to do with the Worldcon, but they came up in my Xiaohongshu default feed late last night, and I thought they might be of mild interest to Filers. Sorry that there’s no link to the source post, but I was afraid that if I spent too long looking at that post, the algorithmic feed might determine that this is the sort of content that it should continue to show me in future… There’s more in a short Twitter video from the Chinese news site Sixth Tone, and also a three-minute English-language explainer video on YouTube.

(3) MARVEL’S PROBLEMS. “Crisis at Marvel: Jonathan Majors Back-Up Plans, ‘The Marvels’ Reshoots, Reviving Original Avengers and More Issues Revealed” in Variety.

…[E]veryone at Marvel was reeling from a series of disappointments on-screen, a legal scandal involving one of its biggest stars and questions about the viability of the studio’s ambitious strategy to extend the brand beyond movies into streaming. The most pressing issue to be discussed at the retreat was what to do about Jonathan Majors, the actor who had been poised to carry the next phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe but instead is headed to a high-profile trial in New York later this month on domestic violence charges. The actor insists he is the victim, but the damage to his reputation and the chance he could lose the case has forced Marvel to reconsider its plans to center the next phase of its interlocking slate of sequels, spinoffs and series around Majors’ villainous character, Kang the Conqueror.

At the gathering in Palm Springs, executives discussed backup plans, including pivoting to another comic book adversary, like Dr. Doom. But making any shift would carry its own headaches: Majors was already a big presence in the MCU, including as the scene-stealing antagonist in February’s “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.” And he has been positioned as the franchise’s next big thing in this season of “Loki” — particularly in the finale, which airs on Nov. 9 and sets up Kang as the titular star of a fifth “Avengers” film in 2026.

“Marvel is truly fucked with the whole Kang angle,” says one top dealmaker who has seen the final “Loki” episode. “And they haven’t had an opportunity to rewrite until very recently [because of the WGA strike]. But I don’t see a path to how they move forward with him.”

Beyond the bad press for Majors, the brain trust at Marvel is also grappling with the November release of “The Marvels,” a sequel to 2019’s blockbuster “Captain Marvel” that has been plagued with lengthy reshoots and now appears likely to underwhelm at the box office….

(4) MORE LEARNEDLEAGUE. [Item by David Goldfarb.] Some One-Day Special quizzes that Filers might enjoy:

(Xena has gods and sorceresses; Randall Munroe has won a Hugo Award, so I claim that both of these are at least genre-adjacent.)

(5) HWA SUMMER SCARES SPOKESPERSON IS CLAY MCLEOD CHAPMAN. The Horror Writers Association yesterday announced their Summer Scares Reading Program 2024 Spokesperson and Timeline.

The Horror Writers Association (HWA), in partnership with United for Libraries, Book Riot, Booklist, and NoveList®, a division of EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO), is proud to announce the fifth annual Summer Scares Reading Program. Summer Scares is a reading program that provides libraries and schools with an annual list of recommended horror titles for adult, young adult (teen), and middle grade readers. It introduces readers and librarians to new authors and helps start conversations extending beyond the books from each list and promote reading for years to come.

Summer Scares is proud to announce the 2024 spokesperson, author Clay McLeod Chapman:

“To this day, I still have vivid memories of my grandmother escorting six-year-old me through our local library — Go, Bon Air! — and striking a deal: Pick two books, any two books, one for her to read to me and one for me to read to myself. When we both finished our individual reads, we could always come back and pick another pair. I can still list off practically every book I selected — beginning with “Monsters of North America” by William A. Wise — returning to the library to replenish our endless reservoir of reading every week of my childhood. Now I feel as if I’m returning to the library all over again, thanks to Summer Scares, where the deal this time is to pick those books that continue to make an impact on me and share them with as many readers as humanly possible.”

Chapman is joined by a committee of six library workers who, together, will select three recommended fiction titles in each reading level, totaling nine Summer Scares selections. The goal of the program is to encourage a national conversation about the horror genre, across all age levels, at libraries around the world, and ultimately attract more adults, teens, and children interested in reading. Official Summer Scares designated authors will also make themselves available at public and school libraries.

The committee’s final selections will be announced on February 14, 2024, Library Lover’s Day. Chapman, along with some of the selected authors, will kick off Summer Scares at the 8th Annual HWA Librarians’ Day, Friday, May 31st, during StokerCon® 2024 at the San Diego Mission Bay Marriott….

(6) HOWARD STATEMEN DEATH LEARNED. [Item by Rick Kovalcik.] Howard “Howeird” Statemen (1950-2022) was a past Boskone participant. In response to an email, his sister informed us that Howard passed away last year on October 5, 2022 of an aneurysm. Here’s the link to his memorial presentation on YouTube. He also had a website which may be of interest to some people: Howeird Dot Com at WMP.

(7) SHERRIE R. CRONIN (1954-2023). Author Sherrie R. Cronin died October 23 at the age of 68. The SFWA Blog has posted a tribute.

…A geophysicist by trade and extensive traveler by passion, Cronin lived in seven cities and visited forty-six countries, while staying dedicated to her writing. Cronin wrote 13 works within the “46. Ascending” and “The War Stories of the Seven Troublesome Sisters” series. Additionally, she was dedicated to writing and blogging about world peace, empathy, and what she called intra-species harmony. She joked that she’d love to tell these stories, stories of peace—or be Chief Scientist Officer—on the Starship Enterprise, and admitted to occasionally checking her phone for a message from Captain Picard. Just in case….

(8) MEMORY LANE.

1939 — [Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Our Beginning is not from a genre work this time, but from a mystery, that of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. We do cover mysteries here, so I thought I’d look at Chandler and this work.

He turned to writing mysteries relatively late at age forty four after losing his job as oil company exec during the Great Depression. “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot”, his first story, was published in 1933 in Black Mask, one of many mystery stories he’d write. The Big Sleep, his first novel, followed six years later.

The Big Sleep would first be published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1939. It is based off of two Black Mask stories, “Killer in the Rain” (published in 1935) and “The Curtain” (published in 1936) as Chandler based his novels off previously written material. Well, he said “cannibalised” those stories.

It would be made into two films, the 1946 film that Leigh Brackett helped write the screenplay and which co-started Humphrey Bogartand Lauren Bacall, and a 1978 one that’s remembered mostly, well, for Robert Mitchum being at sixty twice as old as the character he playing, Philip Marlowe. Mitchum had previously been an aging Philip Marlowe in Farewell, My Lovely, a 1975 release.

The 1946 film’s 38-year-old Marlowe played by Bogart who was 44 at the time. Why the script aged him by five years is unknown.

There was a television adaptation starring Zachary Scott, who had done mostly Westerns, as Marlowe, that was broadcast on September 25, 1950. I can’t find any record of it existing now.

Oh, and none of Chandler’s novels will move into the public domain until 2034, the year the rights to The Big Sleep are set to expire.

And now our Beginning…

IT WAS ABOUT ELEVEN O’CLOCK in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying.

There were French doors at the back of the hall, beyond them a wide sweep of emerald grass to a white garage, in front of which a slim dark young chauffeur in shiny black leggings was dusting a maroon Packard convertible. Beyond the garage were some decorative trees trimmed as carefully as poodle dogs. Beyond them a large green house with a domed roof. Then more trees and beyond everything the solid, uneven, comfortable line of the foothills.

On the east side of the hall a free staircase, tile-paved, rose to a gallery with a wrought-iron railing and another piece of stained-glass romance. Large hard chairs with rounded red plush seats were backed into the vacant spaces of the wall round about. They didn’t look as if anybody had ever sat in them. In the middle of the west wall there was a big empty fireplace with a brass screen in four hinged panels, and over the fireplace a marble mantel with cupids at the corners. Above the mantel there was a large oil portrait, and above the portrait two bullet-torn or moth-eaten cavalry pennants crossed in a glass frame. The portrait was a stiffly posed job of an officer in full regimentals of about the time of the Mexican war. The officer had a neat black Imperial, black mustachios, hot hard coalblack eyes, and the general look of a man it would pay to get along with. I thought this might be General Sternwood’s grandfather. It could hardly be the General himself, even though I had heard he was pretty far gone in years to have a couple of daughters still in the dangerous twenties.

I was still staring at the hot black eyes when a door opened far back under the stairs. It wasn’t the butler coming back. It was a girl.

She was twenty or so, small and delicately put together, but she looked durable. She wore pale blue slacks and they looked well on her. She walked as if she were floating. Her hair was a fine tawny wave cut much shorter than the current fashion of pageboy tresses curled in at the bottom. Her eyes were slategray, and had almost no expression when they looked at me. She came over near me and smiled with her mouth and she had little sharp predatory teeth, as white as fresh orange pits and as shiny as porcelain. They glistened between her thin to taut lips. Her face lacked color and didn’t look too healthy.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born November 1, 1897 — Naomi Mary Margaret Mitchison, Baroness Mitchison, CBE (née Haldane). Author of many historical novels with genre trappings such as The Corn King and the Spring Queen which Terri Windling called “a lost classic” and The Bull Calves but also SF such as Memoirs of a Spacewoman. She was also a good friend of Tolkien, and was one of the proofreaders of The Lord of the Rings. (Died 1999.)
Born November 1, 1917 — Zenna Henderson. Her first story was published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1951. The People series appeared in magazines and anthologies, as well as the stitched-together Pilgrimage: The Book of the People and The People: No Different Flesh. Other volumes include The People Collection and Ingathering: The Complete People Stories. She was nominated for a Hugo Award at Detention for her “Captivity” novelette. Her story “Pottage” was made into the 1972 ABC-TV movie, The People. “Hush” became an episode of George A. Romero’s Tales from the Darkside which first aired in 1988. (Died 1983.)
Born November 1, 1923 — Gordon R. Dickson. Writer, Filker, and Fan who was truly one of the best writers of both science fiction and fantasy. It would require a skald to detail his stellar career in any detail. His first published speculative fiction was the short story “Trespass!”, written with Poul Anderson, in the Spring 1950 issue of Fantastic Stories. Childe Cycle, featuring the Dorsai, is his best known series, and the Hoka are certainly his and Poul Anderson’s silliest creation. I’m very fond of his Dragon Knight series, which I think reflects his interest in medieval history. His works received a multitude of award nominations, and he won Hugo, Nebula, and British Fantasy Awards. In 1975, he was presented the Skylark Award for achievement in imaginative fiction. He was Guest of Honor at dozens of conventions, including the 1984 Worldcon, and he was named to the Science Fiction Hall of Fame and the Filk Hall of Fame. The Dorsai Irregulars, an invitation-only fan volunteer security group named after his series, was formed at the 1974 Worldcon in response to the theft of some of Kelly Freas’ work the year before, and has provided security at conventions for the last 34 years. (Died 2001.) (JJ)
Born November 1, 1923 — Dean A. Grennell. Writer, Editor, Firearms Expert, Conrunner, and Fan who edited numerous fanzines including La Banshee and Grue, which was produced sporadically from 1953 to 1979 and was a finalist for the Hugo Award in 1956. He published several short fiction works, and even dabbled in fanzine art. He ran a small U.S. gathering held the same weekend as the 1956 UK Natcon which was called the Eastercon-DAG, and another called Wiscon, which preceded the current convention of that name by more than twenty years. He is responsible for the long-running fannish joke “Crottled Greeps”. (Died 2004.) (JJ)
Born November 1, 1942 — Michael Fleisher. A writer best known for his work at DC Comics of the Seventies and Eighties, particularly for the Spectre and Jonah Hex. He wrote Hex for over a dozen years, both as an Old West and a SF character. Fleisher wrote three volumes of The Encyclopedia of Comic Books Heroes, doing some research on-site at DC Comics. (Died 2018.)
Born November 1, 1959 — Susanna Clarke, 64. Author of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell which I think wins my award for the most-footnoted work in genre literature. It won a World Fantasy, Nebula, Mythopoeic and of course a Hugo Award, that being at Interaction. It was adapted into a BBC series, most likely without the footnotes. The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories collects her short works and is splendid indeed with artwork by Charles Vess. Her Piranesi novel as nominated for a Hugo at Discon III, the year that Martha Wells Network Effect got it.

(10) HWA INDIGENOUS HERITAGE MONTH. “Un-Settling Horrortellers: Introduction to Indigenous Heritage Month 2023” by Shane Hawk kicks off another Horror Writers Association blog series.

…The HWA has put great effort into recognizing the need for diversifying Horror and the association itself over the last few years. It’s been so wonderful to see. Owl Goingback has earned the Lifetime Achievement Award and won two Stokers, Jewelle Gomez also has earned a Lifetime Achievement Award, Stephen Graham Jones has won four Stokers, and the HWA has highlighted Indigenous writers just outside of the Horror genre like Daniel H. Wilson, Darcie Little Badger, and Tim Tingle.

Indigenous Horror is a small space to spill blood on the ground, smell the organ meat slopping out of the clawed-open abdomen, but it is growing at a nice pace. My main mission with Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology was to increase that small percentage and rid ourselves of that pesky “less-than” mathematical symbol when it came to describing Indigenous market share of genre works. The anthology has only been out for six weeks, but its status as an international bestseller since its first week (and every week since) has proven that there is an absolute hunger for Indigenous Horror and dark fiction. Over are the days of the non-Native genre writer killing us off after we help the white folks understand the monster’s weaknesses, exploiting our religions, our traumas, our cultures, our “esoteric” folklore. Also, the days wherein Holt McCallany of Mindhunter fame sported brownface to become Navajo in Creepshow 2 are over (“What the hell was that?” all the Natives asked in unison). Like I wrote in the original proposal sent to Penguin Random House: Now it’s our turn. (Or like Barkhad Abdi sternly told Tom Hanks in that one Boat Movie, “We’re da captain now…”

(11) OFF TO THE RACES. Mark Hamill helps plug the “Star Wars scheme for Bubba Wallace at Phoenix”.

Bubba Wallace will run a special Star Wars X-wing fighter scheme on his No. 23 Toyota this weekend for the NASCAR Cup Series Championship Race at Phoenix Raceway.

The scheme is inspired by Columbia Sportswear’s Star Wars collection.

Knock, knock. @BubbaWallace and @23XIRacing found the ultimate wingman in @MarkHamill with the No. 23 “X-wing” Toyota Camry TRD inspired by Columbia’s latest STAR WARS™ collection unveiling tomorrow at https://t.co/B83yS0S236 pic.twitter.com/sRPoBdvicI
— columbia1938 (@Columbia1938) October 31, 2023

(12) WILEY POST’S EERIE PRESSURE SUIT. The National Air and Space Museum’s podcast AirSpace devotes its latest episode “Jetstream” to an item of history-making pilot wear.

No, this isn’t a spooky Halloween costume. It’s one of the earliest pressure suits.

In the 1930s, aviation icon Wiley Post reached the stratosphere for the first time in his Lockheed Vega Winnie Mae. The aircraft didn’t have a pressurized cabin, so he wore a pressure suit and helmet designed for him by the B.F. Goodrich Company.

***

We get it—the early days of aviation were full of outlandish characters, and it can be a little exhausting. But trust us on this one—it’ll be worth it. Wiley Post was an oil-worker and armed robber-turned-record breaking pilot who discovered the jet stream while wearing a sweet eye-patch and a suit straight out of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (it was a lewk). That should be enough but wait! There’s more! That steampunk getup, which Wiley designed and built with tire company BF Goodrich, was the very first successful pressure suit. And it did more than unlock the stratosphere, it laid the groundwork for the first spacesuits—and modern spacesuits aren’t much different. This tall tale keeps getting higher, but again—trust us (we’ve got the suit!). Special thanks to Tested’s Adam Savage, whose answer for “history’s most important spacesuit” was both unexpected and absolutely on the mark.

(13) ROBOBOOKS ON THE WAY. According to Publishers Weekly, “Kindle Direct Publishing Will Beta Test Virtual Voice–Narrated Audiobooks”.

In a post today in the Kindle Direct Publishing community forum, the self-publishing giant announced that it has begun a beta test on technology allowing KDP authors to produce audiobook versions of their e-books using virtual voice narration. The ability to create an audiobook using synthetic speech technology is likely to result in a boom in the number of audiobooks produced by KDP authors. According to an Amazon spokesperson, currently only 4% of titles self-published through KDP have an audiobook available.

Under the new initiative, authors can choose one of their eligible e-books already on the KDP platform, then sample voices, preview the work, and customize the audiobook. After publication, audiobooks will be live within 72 hours, and will distributed wherever Audible titles are sold. Prices can be set between $3.99 and $14.99 and authors will receive a 40% royalty. All audiobooks created by virtual voice, the post says, will be clearly labeled and, as with any audiobook, customers can listen to samples….

(14) A FRIGHTENING COINCIDENCE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Moid over at the Media Death Cult YouTube Channel has a short, 10-minute video on “The History Of Science Fiction Horror”. Funny that this should come out Halloween week. Spooky or what?

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Disney+ Shares ‘LEGO Marvel Avengers: Code Red’ Poster” – Animation World Network has the story and a gallery of images from the production.

…In the special, the Avengers assemble to save New York City from the threat of the Red Skull and his Hydra forces. Amid the battle, the Avengers are unexpectedly joined by Black Widow’s father, Red Guardian, which doesn’t go over well with Natasha.

In the show, after an argument with his daughter about his well-intentioned helicopter parenting, Red Guardian disappears under mysterious circumstances. As Black Widow and the Avengers investigate, they discover that the villainous Collector is kidnapping every character who has “red” in their name. But despite their best efforts, the Avengers are unable to stop the Collector from kidnapping his next victim, their friend Red She-Hulk….

Here’s the trailer:

[Thanks to Ersatz Culture, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, David Goldfarb, JeffWarner, Rick Kovalcik, 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 6/30/23 “What Is The Use Of A Scroll,” Thought Alice, “Without Pixels Or Conversation?”

Posted on June 30, 2023 by Mike Glyer

(1) A FINE IDEA. “Fake reviews are illegal and subject to big fines under new FTC rules” says the Washington Post’s article about a Federal Trade Commission notice of proposed rulemaking.

Fake reviews are ruining the web. But there’s some new hope to fight them.

The Federal Trade Commission on Friday proposed new rules to take aim at businesses that buy, sell and manipulate online reviews. If the rules are approved, they’ll carry a big stick: a fine of up to $50,000 for each fake review, for each time a consumer sees it.

That could add up fast.

It’s the biggest step to date by the federal government to deter the insidious market for buying and selling fake reviews, though the FTC’s rules don’t do as much to hold big review sites like Yelp, Google, Tripadvisor and Amazon directly accountable. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post. Interim chief executive Patty Stonesifer sits on Amazon’s board.)…

Here’s the FTC press release: “Federal Trade Commission Announces Proposed Rule Banning Fake Reviews and Testimonials”.

…In its notice of proposed rulemaking, the Commission cited examples of clearly deceptive practices involving consumer reviews and testimonials from its past cases, and noted the widespread emergence of generative AI, which is likely to make it easier for bad actors to write fake reviews.

The Commission is seeking comments on proposed measures that would fight these clearly deceptive practices. For example, the proposed rule would prohibit:

Selling or Obtaining Fake Consumer Reviews and Testimonials: The proposed rule would prohibit businesses from writing or selling consumer reviews or testimonials by someone who does not exist, who did not have experience with the product or service, or who misrepresented their experiences. It also would prohibit businesses from procuring such reviews or disseminating such testimonials if the businesses knew or should have known that they were fake or false.
Review Hijacking: Businesses would be prohibited from using or repurposing a consumer review written for one product so that it appears to have been written for a substantially different product. The FTC recently brought its first review hijacking enforcement action.
Buying Positive or Negative Reviews: Businesses would be prohibited from providing compensation or other incentives conditioned on the writing of consumer reviews expressing a particular sentiment, either positive or negative.
Insider Reviews and Consumer Testimonials: The proposed rule would prohibit a company’s officers and managers from writing reviews or testimonials of its products or services, without clearly disclosing their relationships. It also would prohibit businesses from disseminating testimonials by insiders without clear disclosures of their relationships, and it would prohibit certain solicitations by officers or managers of reviews from company employees or their relatives, depending on whether the businesses knew or should have known of these relationships.
Company Controlled Review Websites: Businesses would be prohibited from creating or controlling a website that claims to provide independent opinions about a category of products or services that includes its own products or services.
Illegal Review Suppression: Businesses would be prohibited from using unjustified legal threats, other intimidation, or false accusations to prevent or remove a negative consumer review. The proposed rule also would bar a business from misrepresenting that the reviews on its website represent all reviews submitted when negative reviews have been suppressed.
Selling Fake Social Media Indicators: Businesses would be prohibited from selling false indicators of social media influence, like fake followers or views. The proposed rule also would bar anyone from buying such indicators to misrepresent their importance for a commercial purpose.

(2) NICOLA GRIFFITH WINS FIRST ADCI LITERARY PRIZE. The inaugural ADCI (Authors with Disabilities and Chronic Illnesses) Literary Prize went to Nicola Griffith for Spear (Tordotcom Publishing), “a lyrical, queer reimagining of Arthurian legend, in which ‘those usually airbrushed from history take centre stage’” (Via Ansible.)

The prize, launched in 2022 to encourage greater positive representation of disability in literature, was announced alongside ten other prizes which make up the annual Society of Authors’ Awards. The SoA Awards is the UK’s biggest literary prize fund, worth over £100,000, this year shared between 30 writers, poets and illustrators.

The ADCI Literary Prize. Sponsored by Arts Council England, ALCS, the Drusilla Harvey Memorial Fund, and the Professional Writing Academy, the ADCI Literary Prize is awarded to a disabled or chronically ill writer, for an outstanding novel containing a disabled or chronically ill character or characters. Judged by Penny Batchelor, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, Nydia Hebden, Karl Knights, Julia Lund, Nii Ayikwei Parkes, Vikki Patis and Chloe Timms.

(3) CON OR BUST GRANT OPPORTUNITIES. Dream Foundry’s Con or Bust program for creators and fans of color makes direct cash grants to assist with travel, food, registration, and other expenses associated with attending industry events.

If you’re a person of color planning to go to a convention this year and need support, our Con or Bust program is here for you. Right now we have memberships to the following conventions for any Con or Bust qualifying application.

Readercon (July 13-16, 2023)
Pemmi-con, aka Nasfic (July 20-23, 2023)
Capricon (February 1-4, 2024)

If you want one of these memberships, or need other support from this program, you can apply on the Con or Bust page.

(4) DIAL OF DESTINY. Los Angeles Times’ Mary McNamara joins Harrison Ford on a lap of his marathon promotional tour: “’Indiana Jones’: There will never be another Harrison Ford”.

…That said, his desire for “Dial of Destiny” to succeed feels quite personal.

“I wanted to be ambitious, for those things we have not necessarily done in such measure,” he said. When asked what he means by “those things,” he explains in that instantly recognizable, back-straightening “take this seriously” tone. “I mean take a chance on telling the story of an older character, take a chance on introducing your character in present day in a totally anti-iconic way, reducing him to his underwear and a La-Z-Boy with a glass in his hand.

“That moment in film,” he says, relaxing into a laugh, “may be one of my favorite things I’ve ever done in a movie. That and grabbing a baseball bat and going out to the neighbors’.”

… Mostly, he said, he wanted to see Indy “inveigled into one last adventure. I wanted to see him at the nadir, where we could pick him up and kick him in the ass. I know what age is about. I wanted to bring that into the story. If I was going to be the actor playing this guy, I wanted the reality of my age.”

But first, in the film’s opening scene, he had to play a younger Indy, which made the contrast of past and present more striking. Ford’s face was de-aged through the miracle of artificial intelligence and Lucasfilm’s trove of images from the earlier films, but “the mouth is my mouth, the eyes are my eyes,” he said. “The voice is me talking in a higher register because age lowers the voice, and the body language I had to act. But he moves like I move and I remembered.”…

(5) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to bite into a baconless BLT with Jordan Kurella in Episode 201 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

This episode’s guest is Jordan Kurella, who was a Nebula Award nominee this year in the category of Best Novella for I Never Liked You Anyway, which was also longlisted for the BSFA award. His stories have appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Apex, Mermaid Monthly, Glitter + Ashes, Strange Horizons, and many other magazines and anthologies. Some of these were gathered in his short story collection, When I Was Lost, published by Trepidatio in December. In his past lives, he was a photographer, radio DJ, and social worker, and he has also taught at Iowa State University and Rambo Academy.

We discussed which ice cream flavor he chose to celebrate his Nebula Award nomination, the way readers can tell which stories writers had the most fun writing, how all he needs to pants a story is the first line, what caused him to say “it’s not write what you know, it’s write what you’re embarrassed about,” why he doesn’t like to reread his own published work unless he has to, how to avoid getting stuck in rabbit holes of research, the ways writing a book can be like spending time with your best friends, his rule about story titles, why we’re both so attracted to writing love stories, how playing the violin in public prepared him for surviving rejection, why he published only a single piece of literary fiction before realizing the fantastic was where he belonged, and so much more.

(6) SWATTING. NBC News’ report “The FBI has formed a national database to track and prevent ‘swatting’” includes a long Q&A with Patrick Tomlinson.

Author Patrick Tomlinson and his wife, business owner Niki Robinson, have been “swatted” at their home in Milwaukee more than 40 times, often resulting in police pointing guns at their heads. Their tormentors have also called in false bomb threats to venues using their names in three states. Yet law enforcement hasn’t been able to stop the calls.

The couple’s terror comes as these incidents appear to be on the rise in the U.S., at least on college campuses. In less than a single week in April, universities including Clemson, Florida, Boston, Harvard, Cornell, Pittsburgh, Rutgers and Oklahoma, as well as Middlebury College, were targeted by swatters.

To combat the growing problem, the FBI has begun taking formal measures to get a comprehensive picture of the problem on a national level.

Chief Scott Schubert with the bureau’s Criminal Justice Information Services headquarters in Clarksburg, West Virginia, told NBC News that the agency formed a national online database in May to facilitate information sharing between hundreds of police departments and law enforcement agencies across the country pertaining to swatting incidents.

… Security expert Lauren R. Shapiro, who is an associate professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said: “Swatting involves people making fraudulent 911 calls reporting serious-level criminal threats or violent situations like bomb threats, hostages, killing, etc. to fool the police into raiding the house or business of somebody who is not actually committing a crime.”…

… Tomlinson’s troubles began after he posted a casual remark on Twitter in 2018 saying he’d never personally found the comedian Norm Macdonald very funny. As The Daily Beast reported, the tweet caught the attention of online trolls who soon began to harass, stalk, impersonate and defame Tomlinson and his wife, using a website of their own along with social media accounts on Reddit, Twitter and YouTube to target the couple and invite others to pile on.

Their harassers mostly converge on a website that’s cloned elsewhere so participants can migrate rapidly if their forum is ever banned by a service provider.

Since The Daily Beast report, the harassment escalated both online and offline.

The couple was mostly recently swatted at their home on Tuesday, bringing the total of swatting incidents to 43. Tomlinson’s parents, who are senior citizens, also suffered swatting at their home about 2 hours outside of Milwaukee this year…

Whether the FBI’s database will lead to any results is open to question based on past performance.

… At a federal level, Tomlinson filed a complaint with the Internet Crime Complaint Center in November 2020. He never saw a reply to that, so in early May 2022, he went to the Milwaukee branch of the FBI in person to file a new one.

An FBI special agent was assigned to evaluate his case. He says the agency already had a file on Tomlinson because of a false bomb threat that swatters had called into a hotel outside of Detroit in April 2022, a few weeks prior to a presentation he was scheduled to give. The presentation, part of PenguiCon, was titled,”Elon Musk is Full of S—.”

Since then, “There has been nearly zero communication by the FBI,” Tomlinson said.

One agent has requested more evidence from his family by email on rare occasions. But the agency has not brought him or his wife in for an interview, and have not arrested people who the couple identified as participants in their harassment and swatting…

(7) CALIFORNIA AVENGERS. Critic Todd Martens tells how “Broadway-style ‘Rogers: The Musical’ charms at Disney’s California Adventure” in the Los Angeles Times.

“Rogers: The Musical” started as a joke in the Disney+ series “Hawkeye,” which presented a challenge for the Disneyland Resort’s live-entertainment team. How, in a 30-minute, heavily condensed Broadway-style show, do you bring a little heft to a production in which fans will be clamoring for cheese? Sure, there’s Captain America, Iron Man, Black Widow and the Hulk, among others, but these are superheroes who spend more time flexing jazz hands than muscle.

In the show opening today, directed by Disney’s Jordan Peterson with a book from Hunter Bell, known best for Broadway’s “[title of show],” the answer was simple: heartbreak.

The story of Steve Rogers’ transformation into Captain America is framed by longing — for better days, for acceptance and for love. It allows the production, which veers close to overt patriotism in its opening moments, to find a sense of personal grounding. When an actor playing a young Rogers is framed by an Uncle Sam military recruitment poster, he gets all wistful and rejected: “What’s a guy to do when ‘I want you’ doesn’t mean you?”

Don’t worry, the production doesn’t stay down for long. “Hawkeye” introduced fans to the over-the-top corniness of the song “Save the City,” a work written by Broadway vets Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, and it pops up multiple times, each one leaning into the showtune parody that it is. When it wants to, “Rogers: The Musical” embraces its silliness….

…The musical features five original songs, not counting the previously heard “Save the City” and “Star Spangled Man,” which dates to the film “Captain America: The First Avenger.” The new works are credited to composer Christopher Lennertz, with lyrics by Peterson, Lennertz and Alex Karukas. None quite reach the heights of “Save the City,” which went all out in its showtune glitz. “Rogers: The Musical” comes off as a series of puzzle pieces constructed around that signature number.

Lennertz, a composer with a lengthy résumé of film and television credits, including Marvel’s “Agent Carter,” plays it more low-key. The new works largely attempt to take “Rogers” out of parody mode, a decision that accounts for a series of tonal shifts and results in a theatrical mood that’s not quite serious yet not fully goofy.

(8) CSI SKILL TREE. The latest episode in the ASU Center for Science and Imagination’s Skill Tree series on video games, possible futures, and worldbuilding is out, featuring the award-winning science fiction roleplaying game Citizen Sleeper (2022). This episode’s guests are Gareth Damian Martin, the game’s developer, and Phoebe Wagner, a speculative fiction author, researcher, and editor of three solarpunk anthologies, including Sunvault. Here’s a link to the entire Skill Tree playlist, with 12 episodes so far.

(9) ALAN ARKIN (1934-2023). Four-time Oscar nominee Alan Arkin, who won Best Supporting Actor for Little Miss Sunshine (2007), died June 30 at the age of 89. He was perhaps best known for playing Yossarian in Catch-22 but his other three Oscar nominations honored his portrayals of deaf-mute Singer in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Russian Lt. Rozanov in one of my favorite movies, The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming, and the has-been producer Lester Siegel in the genre-adjacent Argo.

In Argo (2012), Arkin played the fictional producer of a fake sff movie that provided cover for a CIA operation to rescue Americans caught up in the Iranian Revolution of 1979. He acted in collaboration with a character based on real-life Planet of the Apes makeup man John Chambers, played by John Goodman.

Within the sff genre Arkin did a lot of voice work late in his career – including Dumbo (2019) and Minions: Rise of Gru (2022), but early on voiced Schmendrick in The Last Unicorn (1982).

He’s been in a Muppets movie, in The Monitors (1969), in the film adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night (1996), played Detective Hugo in Gattaca (1997), The Chief in the movie Get Smart (2008). He had parts in The Seven Percent Solution (Dr. Sigmund Freud — 1976) Edward Scissorhands (1990), and The Rocketeer (1991).

Arkin also won a Tony for his Broadway debut in 1963’s Enter Laughing.

(10) MEMORY LANE.

1989 – [Written by Cat Eldridge from a choice by Mike Glyer.]

This time Mike picked one of my favorite writers, Sheri S. Tepper. Her series have too many exemplary books to list them all and her standalone novels such as Singer from the Sea and The Companions are excellent as well.

She’s been nominated for a lot of Awards but garnered only two, one of which is the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement. Grass, the source of our Beginning this time, was published by the Doubleday Foundation in 1989 (one of their first books was Asimov’s Prelude to Foundation), and was a Hugo finalist at ConFiction.

And it has an absolutely stunning Beginning as you can read here…

Millions of square miles of it; numberless wind-whipped tsunamis of grass, a thousand sun-lulled caribbeans of grass, a hundred rippling oceans, every ripple a gleam of scarlet or amber, emerald or turquoise, multicolored as rainbows, the colors shivering over the prairies in stripes and blotches, the grasses—some high, some low, some feathered, some straight—making their own geography as they grow. There are grass hills where the great plumes tower in masses the height of ten tall men; grass valleys where the turf is like moss, soft under the feet, where maidens pillow their heads thinking of their lovers, where husbands lie down and think of their mistresses; grass groves where old men and women sit quiet at the end of the day, dreaming of things that might have been, perhaps once were. Commoners all, of course. No aristocrat would sit in the wild grass to dream. Aristocrats have gardens for that, if they dream at all.

Grass. Ruby ridges, blood-colored highlands, wine-shaded glades. Sapphire seas of grass with dark islands of grass bearing great plumy green trees which are grass again. Interminable meadows of silver hay where the great grazing beasts move in slanted lines like mowing machines, leaving the stubble behind them to spring up again in trackless wildernesses of rippling argent.

Orange highlands burning against the sunsets. Apricot ranges glowing in the dawns. Seed plumes sparkling like sequin stars. Blossom heads like the fragile lace old women take out of trunks to show their granddaughters.

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born June 30, 1902 — Lovat Dickson. Australian-born publisher and author who wrote a biography of H G Wells, H G Wells: His Turbulent Life and Times. He was the first Canadian to have a major publishing role in Britain. (Died 1982.)
Born June 30, 1905 — Nestor Paiva. Sometimes it only takes one film or series for a performer to get a Birthday write-up from me. Paiva makes it for Lucas the boat captain in The Creature from the Black Lagoon and its oft-forgotten sequel Revenge of the Creature. Though that was hardly his only genre role as his first role was in the early Forties as an uncredited prison guard in Tarzan’s Desert Mystery and he’d be in many a genre film and series over the decades as Prof. Etienne Lafarge in The Mole People, as the saloon owner in (I kid you not!) Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter, Felicity’s Father in The Spirit Is Willing, Captain Grimby in “The Great Treasure Hunt” of The Adams Family and a Doorman in the “Our Man in Leotards” episode of Get Smart. (Died 1966.)
Born June 30, 1920 — Sam Moskowitz. SF writer, critic, and historian. Chair of the very first World Science Fiction Convention held in NYC in 1939. He barred several Futurians from the con because they threatened to disrupt it in which was later called the Great Exclusion Act. In the Fifties, He edited Science-Fiction Plus, a short-lived genre magazine owned by Hugo Gernsback, and would edit several dozen anthologies, and a few single-author collections, most published in the Sixties and early Seventies. His most enduring legacy was as a historian of the genre with such works as Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of “The Scientific Romance” in the Munsey Magazines, 1912–1920 and Hugo Gernsback: Father of Science Fiction. (Died 1997.)
Born June 30, 1959 — Vincent D’Onofrio, 64. His long running-role is Detective Goren on Law and Order: Criminal Intent which is in no way genre. He was Kingpin in Wilson Fisk / Kingpin in four television series of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Edgar the Bug in the only truly great Men in Black film to date and Vic Hoskins in Jurassic World. He also was Jason Whitney / Jerry Ashton in The Thirteenth Floor, loosely based upon Simulacron-3, a early Sixties novel by Daniel F. Galouye.
Born June 30, 1963 — Rupert S. Graves, 60. Here because he played Inspector G. Lestrade on that Sherlock series. He also appeared on Doctor Who as Riddell in the Eleventh Doctor story, “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship”. He had one-offs in The Nightmare Worlds of H. G. Wells: The Moth, Twelve Monkeys, Krypton and Return of the Saint.
Born June 30, 1966 — Peter Outerbridge, 57. Dr. David Sandström in what I think is the terribly underrated ReGenesis series as well as being Henrik “Hank” Johanssen in Orphan Black and a recurring role on Millennium as Special Agent Barry Baldwin. He’s currently in two series, The Umbrella Academy with a recurring role as The Conductor, and as Calix Niklosin in V-Wars, yet another Netflix SF series.
Born June 30, 1972 — Molly Parker, 51. Maureen Robinson on the Lost in Space series. One-offs in Nightmare Cafe, The Outer Limits, The Sentinel, Highlander: The Series, Poltergeist: The Legacy, Human Target and she appeared in The Wicker Man as Sister Rose / Sister Thorn. She also was Alma Garret on Deadwood. No, not genre but Emma and Will love the series.

(12) COMICS SECTION.

The Far Side shows a marriage that is no longer super…

(13) WIDOWMAKER. Sarah Gailey will be writing Marvel’s White Widow comic reports The Mary Sue: “Yelena Belova Fans, Our Time Is Now With This New ‘White Widow’ Comic!”

Being a fan of Yelena Belova keeps getting better and better. The younger sister of Natasha Romanoff, Yelena is also a widow and is everything that a sassy younger sister could be. And now she’s getting her very own time in the spotlight with a new comic series! First appearing in 1998, Belova quickly became a popular character for fans of Nat but she gained a new level of fame when Florence Pugh took on the role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Getting her own comic storyline is just exciting evidence of how popular Yelena Belova has grown throughout the last twenty-five years. As someone who relates to Yelena Belova a lot (and she’s one of my all-time favorite Marvel characters), this comic makes me incredibly excited for the future of her character!

Called White Widow, the series is created by writer Sarah Gailey and they worked along side artist Alessandro Miracolo to bring her to life. David Marquez gave us a perfectly Yelena cover and the entire reveal is a dream come true for fans. Sometimes, you wait a long time to see a character you love get their time in the spotlight and that’s exactly what is happening with White Widow. She’s not the little sister in Nat’s shadow anymore with this series!

(14) AI IN CINEMA. [Item by Steven French.] The Guardian seems to be having a bit of a bout of listmania these days but this one contains some interesting recommendations: “The best films about AI – ranked!”

16. Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

The first Avengers sequel isn’t particularly good, but at least it introduced cinema to the AI lifeform Ultron. Tasked with sparing the Avengers from having to suit up whenever a new baddie rolls into town, Ultron quickly realises that the greatest threat to world peace is humanity and – in time-honoured AI fashion – attempts to eradicate it himself. The moral of Age of Ultron is clear: trust AI less than the irresponsible billionaires who invented it.

(15) FUTURE TENSE. The June story in the Future Tense Fiction monthly series is “The Big Four v. ORWELL,” by Jeff Hewitt, about a copyright lawsuit against a prolific AI author.

The response essay is by sff novelist Ken Liu, “The Imitation Game”.

… But what about ChatGPT-5, ChatGPT-15, or ChatGPT-55? Assuming this goes on, in classic science fiction fashion, the LLMs will surely continue to blur the lines between artificial and “real” authors. That blurriness is the setup for Jeff Hewitt’s “The Big Four v. ORWELL,” a courtroom drama in which a group of publishers sue ORWELL, an A.I. that has become a prolific author, for copyright infringement.

I have my doubts that the current approach to building LLMs, essentially an exercise in statistically predicting the most likely next “token” given a string of tokens, can lead to the holy grail of artificial general intelligence, an imagined state of crafted cognition capable of accomplishing any intellectual task a human can. (ORWELL definitely appears to be an AGI.) Symbol manipulation alone, without more, must plateau at some point short of “true” intelligence—or so I tell myself (using strings of symbols, of course, smug with irony). To be sure, there is reason to be humble here. Decades ago, when I was studying A.I. in college, the idea that anything resembling the current brute-force approach could construct a virtual entity that could tutor you on any subject you liked, compose college essays, and even answer personal ads would have seemed like handwavium sci-fi. And yet, here we are. So, maybe I’m wrong about the future this time too….

(16) SERVING KAIJU CHOW. “Taiwan restaurant launches ‘Godzilla’ crocodile ramen” reports Taiwan News. These days there’s always a suspicion that such a photo is produced with AI, but the ingredient seems plausible.

A restaurant in Douliu City, Yunlin County debuted its “Godzilla” ramen featuring crocodile meat as its main ingredient.

Nu Wu Mao Kuei (女巫貓葵) announced on Facebook the launch of its “Godzilla” ramen, which is prepared by steaming or braising the front leg of a crocodile. In a clip, a young female customer samples both flavors and describes the dish as surprisingly delicious.

She says the steamed version of the dish resembles chicken, while the braised meat has a taste similar to pork feet. The soup contains over 40 spices, and the owner reportedly learned how to make the spicy “witch soup” during a trip to Thailand, SETN reported

The crocodiles used for this dish are sourced from a farm in Taitung. The owner was inspired by the giant isopods ramen, which went viral at another restaurant.

(17) TYPECASTING. [Item by Tom Becker.] Womprat is a bold font, inspired by the classic “STAR WARS” text on the movie poster. But that is just the beginning. There are alternate character sets, ligatures, symbols, and special glyphs galore. It is clearly the work of obsessive font geeks who are also massive Star Wars fans. It is a delight just to browse the glyphs or the free desktop background at http://womprat.xyz

(18) VIDEO OF THE DAY. From Good Omens’ second season: “What’s The Point Of It All? – Season 2 Sneak Peek”.

A brand new Good Omens Season 2 clip from the upcoming return of Amazon Studios’ fantasy comedy series has been released, featuring David Tennant as Crowley. The next installment will be available for streaming on July 28 on Prime Video.

The video confirms Crowley’s current status in Hell as persona non grata, as the fan-favorite demon continues to question the point of Heaven and Hell. It also features Miranda Richardson’s newest character, who has now assumed the role of Hell’s representative in London after previously playing the role of Madame Tracy in Season 1.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Steven French, Juli Marr, Tom Becker, Lise Andreasen, Joey Eschrich, Michael Toman, 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 Jayn.]

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

Posted on March 24, 2023 by Mike Glyer

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

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

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

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

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

I appreciate the kind words and support.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Middle grade (9+) and Young Adult.

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

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

Read ChatGPT’s hapless guess at the link.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(9) MEMORY LANE.

2016 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

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

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

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

And now for our most perfect Beginning…

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

A djinn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But where did it … the blood … go?”

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

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

(11) COMICS SECTION.

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

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

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

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

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

This substance powers spaceships on “Star Trek”

A triple stumper.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The primary research paper with the explanation is here.

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

Get Your First Look At Avengers #1 Covers And Interior Art

Posted on February 11, 2023 by Mike Glyer

Just in time for the title’s 60^th anniversary, a new run of Avengers will launch on May 17 by superstar creators, writer Jed MacKay and Marvel’s Stormbreaker artist C.F. Villa. Today, check out an all-new Hidden Gem Variant Cover by legendary artist Paul Smith and get your first glimpse at interior artwork from the debut issue! The breathtaking pages showcase Captain Marvel, Thor, Iron Man, Black Panther, Captain America, Scarlet Witch, and Vision assembling against classic Avengers foe Terminus, the first of many epic challenges that await the team in the title’s opening issues.

In MacKay and Villa’s Avengers saga, the team will embrace a new divine purpose after they’re gifted with knowledge of The Tribulation Events, a series of grand-scale disasters that will spark upheaval throughout the known universe. Fans got their first glimpse at MacKay’s overarching Avengers plan in last month’s year-ending one-shot, Timeless, where readers followed Kang in his hunt for the unobtainable “Missing Moment.” Now, a dangerous game is afoot and the prize is greater than anything imaginable… Will the Avengers be able to triumph in the face of the Tribulation Events and learn the connection behind these earth-shattering threats and Kang’s quest? Or will they be reduced to mere pawns in an extraordinary scheme beyond their comprehension?

Check out the covers and interior art following the jump. Stay tuned for more Avengers #1 news in the coming months, including the reveal of variant covers by Marco Checchetto, Skottie Young, and Mark Brooks! For more information, visit Marvel.com.

[Based on a press release.]

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The Original Avengers Assemble For A War Across Time

Posted on September 17, 2022 by Mike Glyer

Two industry legends team up for the greatest Kang saga of all time in Avengers: War Across Time, a new limited series starting in January. Set during Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Don Heck’s original groundbreaking run of Avengers, this extraordinary saga will be a love letter to Avengers history just in time for the team’s 60^th anniversary.

Joined by fellow superstar Alan Davis, Eisner Hall of Famer Paul Levitz, known for his storied career at DC Comics, writes his first-ever Marvel Comics story in this five-issue limited series. Avengers: War Across Time will see the original Avengers at their very best as they battle an onslaught of powerful and strange new threats that strike at the very heart of the team. At the center of it all will be Kang the Conqueror, reaching back from the furthest reaches of time to destroy the Avengers legacy!

Thor! Iron Man! Captain America! Giant-Man & The Wasp! It’s the classic Avengers against the Hulk on the streets of New York, and the beginning of a showdown with Kang the Conqueror that will span the centuries!

“I learned much of my writing craft from The Avengers, and it’s been a delight to pay homage to my old friends Stan, Jack and Don by trying to do something that might have been an extended issue #11.1,” Levitz explained. “We’ve been cooking this up for a long time, and I hope readers have as much fun with it as I did.”

On Sale 1/11/23. For more information, visit Marvel.com.

Avengers Assemble Brings Jason Aaron’s Avengers Era To An End

Posted on September 8, 2022 by Mike Glyer

Starting in November, Marvel Comics visionary Jason Aaron will conclude his incredible work on the Avengers mythos in Avengers Assemble.

For nearly five years, the superstar writer has penned an epic Avengers story across over 60 issues of Avengers as well as titles like Avengers Assemble and Avengers of 1,000,000 BC and now he’ll wrap things up in style in one epic crossover! Avengers Assemble will kick off in November’s Avengers Assemble: Alpha one-shot before crossing over between issues of Avengers and Avengers Forever beginning in December. Aaron will be joined by a trio of astounding comic talents including artist Bryan Hitch as well as regular Avengers and Avengers Forever artists Javier Garrón and Aaron Kuder.

From throughout time and the far corners of the Multiverse, the Mightiest Heroes of All the Earths are assembling as never before for a battle beyond all imagining. A war that will take us from the prehistoric beginnings of an Earth under assault by the greatest villains who’ve ever lived to the watchtower that stands at the dark heart of the all and the always, where an army of unprecedented evil now rises. The biggest Avengers saga in Marvel history is on the horizon and right now, fans can see how the story will unfold come December!

In AVENGERS #63, it’s the showdown fans have been waiting for—THE BATTLE OF 1,000,000 BC! The Avengers stand face-to-face with their prehistoric counterparts, the Avengers of 1,000,000 BC! But if the two groups cannot work together, they have no hope of defeating Doom Supreme and his marauding band of Multiversal Masters of Evil, who have come to erase all of Marvel history as we know it..

In AVENGERS FOREVER #12, witness THE SIEGE OF INFINITY TOWER! The all Steve Rogers Howling Commandos. The interstellar air force that is the Carol Corps. The Star Panther. The God of Fists. The Invincible Ant-Man, Tony Stark. Together, they are the greatest army of Avengers ever assembled. But will they be enough to protect the Avengers Tower at Infinity’s End? Because Mephisto has come to claim that tower’s secrets, and he’s brought an army of his own.

“Four years of Avengers stories. Threads from really every major series I’ve worked on throughout my last decade and a half at Marvel, from Ghost Rider to Thor. It all leads to this. The biggest Avengers story I could possibly imagine,” Aaron said. “Featuring a cavalcade of characters from across creation. And I’m so deeply thrilled and honored that it all kicks off with an oversized Alpha issue that’s being drawn by the legendary Bryan Hitch, who I’m getting to work with here for the very first time. Avengers Assemble. Say the words like a prayer. It’s the only thing that can save you.”

Check out the covers following the jump and stay tuned for more news about Avengers Assemble in the weeks ahead! For more information, visit Marvel.com.

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All-Star Artists Celebrate 750th Issue Of Avengers

Posted on September 30, 2021 by Mike Glyer

Marvel Comics presents the 750th issue of Avengers in November. Continuing Jason Aaron’s Marvel Universe-reshaping run, Avengers #750 will be a 96-page supersized issue consisting of multiple game changing stories by an all-star lineup of creators. To celebrate this milestone, some of the industry’s top artists have turned outstanding variant covers.

Marvel’s Stormbreaker Carmen Carnero brings to life one of the Avengers’ greatest romances in her beautiful depiction of Scarlet Witch and Vision. Rob Liefeld continues to team up his legendary creation with every corner of the Marvel Universe in his latest Deadpool 30^th Anniversay variant cover. Series artist Ed McGuinness showcases the Multiversal Masters of Evil, the startling new group of villains that will be introduced in this giant-size epic. And more from artists Ron Lim, Simone Bianchi, and Marcos Martin.

The startling future of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes kicks off in AVENGERS #750 on November 17.

See the variant covers following the jump.

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Tag Archives: Avengers

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Get Your First Look At Avengers #1 Covers And Interior Art

The Original Avengers Assemble For A War Across Time

Avengers Assemble Brings Jason Aaron’s Avengers Era To An End

All-Star Artists Celebrate 750th Issue Of Avengers