Tag Archives: Balticon

Pixel Scroll 4/12/25 Hey, Scroll. Take A Walk On The Filed Side

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(1) THE FATE OF U.S. WORLDCONS WEIGHED. Two editorials came out today addressing how Worldcons should react to the increased risks of international travel to the U.S.

The Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog’s post “Worldcon In An Age Of American Truculence” concludes:

…Because of the voter base, institutional knowledge, and enormous fan base, US Worldcons will and should always occur. But perhaps there should be an increased willingness among fandom to support overseas conventions in locations that present logistical hurdles for North American travellers. If we may be so bold, perhaps we as fans should encourage the practice of having a Worldcon outside of North America every second year.

In an age of US truculence, Worldcon needs to embrace friends and allies around the globe without turning its back on the generations of fans and volunteers who have built it as an institution.

Gary Westfahl’s “Op-Ed: ‘No More Worldcons in the United States?’” at File 770 starts with a more draconian conclusion:

The time has come to cancel or move the 2025 Seattle Worldcon.

And to cancel or move the 2026 Los Angeles Worldcon.

It has to be done, in order to honor a century-old tradition of science fiction….

(2) FRANK R. PAUL AWARDS. Frank Wu has announced that the 2025 Frank R. Paul Awards will be presented at Philcon (November 21-23). Due to the lateness of the convention in the calendar, he is extending the deadline for submissions for the Frank R. Paul Awards for another month, to May 15. All artists, publishers and editors are enthusiastically encouraged to submit their 2024 work to the main awards administrator, Frank Wu, at FWu@Frankwu.com Details are available here: “Frank R. Paul Awards”.

Frank R. Paul Award trophy. Photo by Rich Lynch.

(3) BALTICON SUNDAY SHORT SCIENCE FICTION FILM FESTIVAL 2025. [Item by lance oszko.] The Balticon Sunday Short Science Fiction Film Festival 2025 has curated 19 short films representing 8 countries. Featured are Short Stories adapted into Short Films.

Sunday 25 May 2025 7 p.m. to 11:30 p.m.

George RR Martin produced another Howard Waldrop film Mary Margaret Road Grader“. Estimated budget $2.2 Million. Director Steven Paul Judd is known for Dark Winds and Marvel’s Echo. It has a score by Game of Thrones composer Ramin Djawadi.

Italian Director Luca Caserta brings us The Reach. One of the last authorized Dollar Baby Stephen King Films.
With a song by Bruce Springsteen.

Director George Vatistas adapted The Hobbyist by Frederic Brown.

Actor Stacy Thunes (Nosferatu – Head Nurse) currently at Universal Studios, Japan stars in The Hairdo.

An Old Friend. Director Nuk Suwanchote. An imaginary friend (Jason Faunt) finds out his sole purpose is to bring happiness to his child, only to discover his child is a 90 year old man (Tom Skerritt) on his deathbed.

First time Local filmmakers were also selected in Twilight Zone and Animation motifs.

Horror and Fantasy round out our offerings.

(4) “I’M NOT A ROBOT” [Item by lance oszko.] The Balticon Sunday Short Science Fiction Film Festival could not arrange a screening, but still worthy of your attention. “Watch The Surreal Identity Crisis of ‘I’m Not a Robot’” in The New Yorker.

(5) SFF BOOKS OUT OF NAVAL ACADEMY LIBRARY. Allen Steele pointed out that the list of 381 books pulled from the U.S. Naval Academy library (reported at the top of yesterday’s Scroll) includes several works of sff (even though the vast majority are nonfiction about gender issues or racism). Steele asks, “Wonder what Robert Heinlein would have to say about the actions of his Alma mater?”

The three sff works I found on the list are:

  • Light From Uncommon Stars / RykaAoki.
  • Sorrowland / Rivers Solomon
  • A Psalm For The Wild-Built / Becky Chambers.

(6) AUSTEN IN INNSMOUTH. Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein finds much to enjoy in “’Innsmouth Park’ (2025) by Jane Routley”.

Jane Austen’s role in weird fiction is underappreciated, largely because she herself didn’t really write any (although Northanger Abbey is a biting satire of the Gothic novel, and a must-read for Gothic fans which even Lovecraft acknowledged, which has to at least classify Austen as weird fiction’s strange aunt.) Yet the world she described, the characters and milieu she envisioned, have been enduring and influential far beyond the genre she initially worked in. Generations of writers have called back to Austen, and mashups like Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters (2009) by Austen & Ben H. Winters, Regency Cthulhu (2023) by Andrew Peregrine & Lynne Hardy, and Secrets & Sacrifices: A Regency Cthulhu Novel (2024) by Cath Lauria all point to a similar rainy-day afternoon brainstorm:

Why not mix Austen and Lovecraft?…

(7) PEN AMERICA LITERARY AWARDS FINALISTS.  There are almost no nominees of genre interest among the 2025 PEN America Literary Awards Finalists. The one exception is in this category, a work of horror fiction.

PEN Translation Prize ($3,000)

For a book-length translation of prose from any language into English.

The Empusium, Olga Tokarczuk. Translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Riverhead Books)

(8) BBC COVERAGE OF BELFAST EASTERCON. Eastercon got a 15-minute slot on BBC Northern Ireland with Jo Zebedee and Ian McDonald doing an interview and chatting about it. “Saturday with John Toal – Puppets, Worms and Sci-fi”. Interview starts at 45m20s.

…As Belfast prepares to host a special Sci Fi convention Eastercon, for the first time in its 76 year history, John hears from two successful science fiction writers Ian McDonald and Jo Zebedee….

(9) STUNT OSCAR APPROVED. “Oscars Add Best Stunt Design Category Starting in 2027” – Variety has the story.

…“Since the early days of cinema, stunt design has been an integral part of filmmaking,” said Academy CEO Bill Kramer and Academy president Janet Yang. “We are proud to honor the innovative work of these technical and creative artists, and we congratulate them for their commitment and dedication in reaching this momentous occasion.”

In a statement, Leitch said, “Stunts are essential to every genre of film and rooted deep in our industry’s history—from the groundbreaking work of early pioneers like Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Charlie Chaplin, to the inspiring artistry of today’s stunt designers, coordinators, performers, and choreographers.” He went on to say, “This has been a long journey for so many of us. Chris O’Hara and I have spent years working to bring this moment to life, standing on the shoulders of the stunt professionals who’ve fought tirelessly for recognition over the decades. We are incredibly grateful. Thank you, Academy.”

…Category rules for eligibility and voting for the inaugural award will be announced in 2027 with the complete 100th Academy Awards Rules….

(10) BLACK MIRROR. “Black Mirror Season 7’s Tech Tales Come With a Knife-Twist of Emotion” — Gizmodo gets down to cases.

A new season of Black Mirror has arrived, and with it the usual cautionary tales (and screaming warnings) about technology’s darkest capabilities—wrapped in a deceptively alluring blanket of “Jeez, that would actually be really cool if it were real!” Across six episodes, season seven boasts some of the show’s all-time greatest performances, as well as its first sequel episode, which proves well worth the eight-year wait….

(11) MIDDLE-EARTH WAYFINDER. Wisconsin Public Radio profiles Karen Wynn Fonstad, “The Wisconsin cartographer who mapped Tolkien’s fantasy world”.

If you’ve ever wanted to explore the world of “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings,” the best place to start might be Oshkosh.

That’s where a Wisconsin cartographer created dozens of maps that went into “The Atlas of Middle-earth,” the official geographic guide to the world of author J.R.R. Tolkien. Her work went on to influence “The Lord of the Rings” movie trilogy.

Like many readers, Karen Wynn Fonstad fell in love with the fantasy series and went through multiple readings. Unlike most readers, she was trained as a cartographer, and came up with an ambitious plan to use the texts to create realistic maps from Tolkien’s texts.

Fonstad passed away 20 years ago. Now, her husband and her son — both geographers themselves — have embarked on a new quest: to digitize her original maps and find an archive to house them…

… “It’s a little bit of an overwhelming process because, first of all, there’s hundreds of maps. Secondly, the maps are built in such a way that they have many layers to them,” Mark said. “I barely scratched the surface this week.”

As we walk into the map library, we are surrounded by Middle-earth. Mordor, the Shire and all points in between are represented. And not just Middle-earth. Karen created works for other fantasy worlds — some never published.

How do you scan a collection of maps of varying sizes, some of them in delicate condition?

You need a big scanner, caution and some patience….

… In 1977, she called the American publisher of Tolkien’s work, Houghton Mifflin, to pitch the idea of an atlas. As Todd recalled, the person in charge of handling Tolkien’s work fell in love with the idea, and the Tolkien estate gave it the thumbs-up.

Then the work really began….

(12) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Mad Max film (1979)

By Paul Weimer: The quintessential post-apocalyptic movie, the one with the real breakthrough. Sure, A Boy and His Dog and Damnation Alley and others preceded it, but this was the movie, series of movies that made a star of Mel Gibson, and the scenes of the Australian desert became the cinematic language and landscape of what a post apocalyptic world should look like in three movies that it took dozens for, say, the American Western.

That’s the power of Mad Max, that’s the power of George Miller’s cinematography. One could approach these movies from all sorts of angles, from worldbuilding to characterization, to point of view. As an example-the second movie, Mad Max 2 (The Road Warrior) is not told from the point of view and perspective that you’d expect. It’s a recreation, a retelling, and that brings in all sorts of interesting questions about narrative and conventions and storytelling. 

Or one could explore Max as a character, from his end of the world cop, all through the damaged survivor in the latest Mad Max movie, where he literally is used as a resource. 

Or one could explore environmental themes, social themes, and the psychology of the survivors of the landscape, from the small to the mighty.

But I want to talk a bit about cinematography, as a person interested in image, you are not surprised. One thing that told me and showed me that Miller “Still had it” in Fury Road was the scene with the dust storm and the vehicles approaching it. You know the scene if you watched it. It was solid proof for me that Miller’s fantastic cinematography, to be able to bring the wildness of the Australian wasteland to life in the previous films, was still there. It recalled for me of many of the other iconic places and imagery used in the series, from Thunderdome back through the mean streets of Melbourne in Mad Max. The lack of dialogue in much of the films means that Miller’s storytelling in the films is necessarily what the movies are carried on. And it is indeed carried so effectively. You remember the visuals, the costumes, the sets, and of course the vehicles. How many gearheads were born from watching these movies?

One last fun note on Mad Max. The first bit of Mad Max I saw was not until the mid 80’s. I accidentally caught the last few minutes on a videotape recording of Mad Max 2 while trying to (don’t judge) see D.C. Follies. I wondered what the heck I had watched and looked it up in the TV guide…and then I recorded and watched The Road Warrior and was captivated.  Later, I found the original Mad Max…and then, of course Thunderdome.

Mad Max. A cinematic icon, four movies (5 if you count Furious) and counting.

(13) COMICS SECTION.

(14) TWO HEARTS AND TWO EARS. “Graham Norton to star in Eurovision-themed Doctor Who episode” reports BBC.

Graham Norton is to star in a new episode of Doctor Who, taking his Eurovision commentary duties to an Interstellar Song Contest.

Norton, the BBC’s voice of Eurovision, will meet Ncuti Gatwa’s Time Lord at the 803rd annual Interstellar Song Contest, where different planets compete to be crowned winner.

“And it’s not just a cameo,” showrunner Russell T Davies said. “He has a whole plot twist all to himself!”

The episode will also feature fellow Eurovision fanatic and broadcaster Rylan Clark as the event’s co-host, and will be broadcast on BBC One just before this year’s real-life grand final on 17 May….

(15) THOUGHT EXPERIMENT. “How might AI chatbots replace mental health therapists?” asks The Week.

There is a striking shortage of mental health care providers in the United States. New research suggests that AI chatbots can fill in the gaps — and be remarkably effective while doing so.

Artificial intelligence can deliver mental health therapy “with as much efficacy as — or more than — human clinicians,” said NPR. New research published in the New England Journal of Medicine looked at the results delivered by a bot designed at Dartmouth College.

What did the commentators say?

There was initially a lot of “trial and error” in training AI to work with humans suffering from depression and anxiety, said Nick Jacobson, one of the researchers, but the bot ultimately delivered outcomes similar to the “best evidence-based trials of psychotherapy.” Patients developed a “strong relationship with an ability to trust” the digital therapist, he said.

Other experts see “reliance on bot-based therapy as a poor substitute for the real thing,” said Axios. Therapy is about “forming a relationship with another human being who understands the complexity of life,” said sociologist Sherry Turkle. But another expert, Skidmore College’s Lucas LaFreniere, said it depends on whether patients are willing to suspend their disbelief. “If the client is perceiving empathy,” he said, “they benefit from the empathy.”….

(16) UPON FURTHER CONSIDERATION. “MIT study finds that AI doesn’t, in fact, have values” says TechCrunch.

A study went viral several months ago for implying that, as AI becomes increasingly sophisticated, it develops “value systems” — systems that lead it to, for example, prioritize its own well-being over humans. A more recent paper out of MIT pours cold water on that hyperbolic notion, drawing the conclusion that AI doesn’t, in fact, hold any coherent values to speak of.

The co-authors of the MIT study say their work suggests that “aligning” AI systems — that is, ensuring models behave in desirable, dependable ways — could be more challenging than is often assumed. AI as we know it today hallucinates and imitates, the co-authors stress, making it in many aspects unpredictable.

“One thing that we can be certain about is that models don’t obey [lots of] stability, extrapolability, and steerability assumptions,” Stephen Casper, a doctoral student at MIT and a co-author of the study, told TechCrunch. “It’s perfectly legitimate to point out that a model under certain conditions expresses preferences consistent with a certain set of principles. The problems mostly arise when we try to make claims about the models, opinions, or preferences in general based on narrow experiments.”

Casper and his fellow co-authors probed several recent models from Meta, Google, Mistral, OpenAI, and Anthropic to see to what degree the models exhibited strong “views” and values (e.g., individualist versus collectivist). They also investigated whether these views could be “steered” — that is, modified — and how stubbornly the models stuck to these opinions across a range of scenarios.

According to the co-authors, none of the models was consistent in its preferences. Depending on how prompts were worded and framed, they adopted wildly different viewpoints.

Casper thinks this is compelling evidence that models are highly “inconsistent and unstable” and perhaps even fundamentally incapable of internalizing human-like preferences….

(17) BIRD WORRIES. “Conservationists raise alarm over Air Force plan to land SpaceX Starships on bird sanctuary atoll” reports Space.com.

The U.S. military is considering Johnston Atoll, a remote Pacific island chain that serves as an important refuge for dozens of seabird species, for “two commercial rocket landing pads” to test giant cargo rocket landings for the Department of the Air Force’s (DAF) Rocket Cargo Vanguard program, and it’s getting push-back from environmentalists.

The Rocket Cargo Vanguard program aims to develop the technologies required to rapidly deliver up to 100 tons of cargo anywhere on Earth using commercial rockets. Though not explicitly named, Elon Musk’s SpaceX is currently the only company —commercial or otherwise — capable of manufacturing rockets designed for landing and reuse, and its Starship megarocket is DAF’s leading contender. The Air Force outlined its plans in a Federal Registry notice last month. Objections from the American Bird Conservancy (ABC), however, may hinder plans for the new landing pads on the South Pacific atoll.Johnston Atoll lies about 825 miles (1,325 kilometers) southwest of Hawaii, and is home to several different species of seabirds, including the largest known colony of Red-tailed Tropicbirds. It was designated a refuge for native bird populations in 1926, but suffered environmental degradation through 2004, due to its use by the U.S. military as a nuclear weapons testing and chemical weapons disposal site. Since the military’s departure from the islands, restoration efforts have helped raise Johnston Atoll’s bird population back to nearly 1.5 million.

(18) ARE YOU GOING TO BELIEVE YOUR LYING EYES? “Purple Isn’t Real, Science Says. Your Brain Is Just Making It Up” reports Popular Mechanics. If there is no purple, does that mean there can be no purple people eaters?

You might be today years old when you realize there is no purple in the rainbow. There is no P in ROYGBIV.

But wait, what about violet? Well, despite what you may have come to believe, violet is not purple. In fact, violet (along with the rest of the colors in a naturally occurring rainbow) has something purple doesn’t—its own wavelength of light. Anyone who ever ended up with a sunburn knows violet wavelengths are real, as the Sun’s ultraviolet (UV) radiation is the reason you need to wear sunscreen, even though you can’t see those wavelengths (more on that later). Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and indigo are all just as real.

But purple? Well, purple is just your brain’s way of resolving confusion.

That’s right. Red and blue (or violet) wavelengths are two opposite extremes on the spectrum. When you see both of these wavelengths in the same place, you eyes and brain don’t know what to do with them, so they compensate, and the clashing wavelengths register as the color we call purple. It doesn’t actually exist….

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Steven H Silver, lance oszko, Frank Wu, James Bacon, Allen Steele, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Dan’l.]

Sharon Lee Wins 2025 Robert A. Heinlein Award

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Sharon Lee, novelist, is the 2025 winner of the Robert A. Heinlein Award. The award is bestowed for outstanding published works in science fiction and technical writings that inspire the human exploration of space. This award is in recognition of her body of work of over 38 novels and short stories. A majority of her space themed work is in the Liaden Universe, written with her late husband Steve Miller, and features merchant families trading across the galaxy. The next Liaden Universe novel, Diviner’s Row, is forthcoming from Baen Books in April 2025.

The award will be formally presented during Balticon 59 opening ceremonies on Friday, May 23 at 8:00 p.m. Balticon, the 59th Maryland Regional Science Fiction Convention, will take place at the Renaissance Baltimore Harborplace Hotel in Baltimore Maryland. Lee will participate in the Balticon program across Memorial Day Weekend.

Balticon and the Robert A. Heinlein Award are both managed and sponsored by The Baltimore Science Fiction Society, Inc. BSFS thanks The Heinlein Society and the family of Dr. Yoji Kondo for providing funding for this award.

Sharon Lee and Steve Miller in 2017.

The Robert A. Heinlein Award is a sterling silver medallion bearing the image of Robert A. Heinlein, as depicted by artist Arlin Robins. The medallion is matched with a red-white-blue lanyard. In addition, the winner receives two lapel pins for use when a large medallion is impractical, and a plaque describing the award for home or office wall display. 

The Robert A. Heinlein Award selection committee consists of science fiction writers and was founded by Dr. Yoji Kondo, a long-time friend of Robert and Virginia Heinlein. Members of the original committee were approved by Virginia Heinlein.

Virginia Heinlein authorized multiple awards in memory of her husband. Other awards include the Heinlein Prize, which is fully funded by Virginia Heinlein’s estate, and a National Space Society award for volunteer projects.

More information on the Robert A. Heinlein Award, including past winners, can be found here.

Sharon Lee, who lives in Waterville, Maine, Lee maintains an official website.

More information on Balticon can be found at Balticon.org.

[Based on a press release.]

Jul Owings Passes Away

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Jul Owings. Photo by Patti Kinlock.

By Dale S. Arnold: Julianne Brandes Owings, 78, died on January 5, 2025 at the Little Family Care in Baltimore, Maryland from complications of a long-term illness which brought on a terminal case of pneumonia. This illness prevented her from participating in conventions and other SF Fan activities for many years. 

Jul served as program coordinator and/or literary program coordinator inventing panel topics for Balticon, the Maryland Regional Science Fiction Convention, for 22 years — from Balticon 21 in 1987 to Balticon 43 in 2009. Jul was active on the committee of ConStellation, the 41st Worldcon in 1983. She stepped up to be the con-chair of Balticon 23 in 1989.

Jul and her late husband Mark Owings attended many east coast science fiction conventions until his passing in 2010, and both pitched in as volunteers whenever needed.  She was known for starting conversations with the statement that she was just an old ex-hippie but… and then launching into a melodic discourse on some philosophical/historical topic leaving the listening fans enraptured and sometimes not quite sure how to respond. She was always a friend to everyone she met in fandom and is greatly missed.

A memorial celebration of Jul’s life will be held on January 25, 2025 starting at 7:30 p.m. inside the Baltimore Science Fiction Society Building in Baltimore, MD. Details at the BSFS website. All are invited.

BSFS Renames Poetry Contest for Steve Miller

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BSFS logo
Steve Miller

The Baltimore Science Fiction Society announced today that the BSFS Annual Poetry Contest has been renamed in honor of SF author Steve Miller. The official contest name is now the Steve Miller BSFS Annual Poetry Contest.

With the approval of Steve’s wife and collaborator, Sharon Lee, the BSFS membership voted to rename the contest. Steve passed away in February 2024.

The poetry contest was founded in 2008, and has continued annually since then, regularly garnering hundreds of entries from around the world. Winning poets receive a cash prize and have their poems published on the BSFS website and in the BSFAN, the souvenir book for Balticon, the annual convention sponsored by BSFS on Memorial Day weekend. They are also granted a full weekend membership and are invited to read their winning entries.

Complete rules and winning entries for previous years can be found here.

More information about Steve Miller and Sharon Lee and their work can be found at their website Korval.com.

More information about BSFS and Balticon.org can be found at the links.

[Based on a press release.]

Pixel Scroll 6/6/24 Any Way You Pixel, That’s The Way You Scroll It

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(1) STAR WARS AND SDI EXHIBIT. Longtime LASFSians may remember Jerry Pournelle telling about the meetings of the Citizens’ Advisory Council on National Space Policy he once organized at Larry Niven’s house, which contributed some ideas to the Reagan administration’s “Strategic Defense Initiative” (nicknamed “Star Wars”). Now the Reagan Presidential Library is combining memories of SDI with an exhibit of Star Wars memorabilia in “Defending America and the Galaxy: Star Wars and SDI”. It’s open through September 8.

This Oval Office scene probably won’t come as a surprise to many of you.

Star Wars may have been a transformative movie, but SDI transformed our national security.

Join us at the Reagan Library for a fun and informative exhibition on Star Wars – both the real-world technology of SDI, as well as items from the movie phenomenon.  The exhibition will include original items from SDI including an authentic Command Launch Equipment Console, as well as props, costumes, and concept art from the Star Wars franchise, including a Landspeeder made for A New Hope, master replicas of Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber made from the original mold of The Last Jedi, and an original script signed by Dave Prowse (actor who portrayed Darth Vader in the original trilogy). With special thanks to Propstore (propstore.com), Entertainment Memorabilia Auctions, the exhibit will also showcase an original dress worn by Princess Leia,  original  sketches  by George Lucas of the spaceships, and original helmets worn by Darth Vader, Stormtroopers and more.

(2) HUNGER GAME$ Variety brings word of a “New ‘Hunger Games’ Movie Set for 2026”. There will be a new book in the series, too.

A new “Hunger Games” prequel film will be released in theaters in 2026.

After last November’s “Hunger Games” prequel “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” charmed its way to $337 million at the box office, Lionsgate teased that moviegoers may not have seen the last of Panem, the dystopia where the story is set — even though the spinoff story covered the entirety of author Suzanne Collins’ 2020 novel of the same name….

… To that end, Collins is writing a new book, “Sunrise on the Reaping,” to be released in 2025. The film adaptation will hit theaters on Nov. 20, 2026. Francis Lawrence, who has helmed every “Hunger Games” installment since 2012’s “Catching Fire,” is in talks to direct.

(3) HPL ON THE BLOCK. Eighty-four pages of H. P. Lovecraft letters compose a lot in Heritage Auction’s June 27 offering Part I of the collection of Important English and American Literature from the library of William A. Strutz. “H. P. Lovecraft. Small archive of nine lengthy autograph letters”.

Nine autograph letters signed with six addressed envelopes (four signed “HPL”, four signed “E’ch-Pi-El”, and one signed “H.P. Lovecraft”)…

…[Lovecraft comments on] the inspirations and influences of his own writing style: “You are right in saying that Poe is my chief source & model – & I can assure you that I have never presumed to compare my stuff to his, qualitatively… That is why I dispute your statement that my tales suffer from a ‘lack of warmth’. I may not have the warmth – but tales of the sort I write don’t require such a thing. Indeed – I’ll go a step further & express the opinion that a romantic or especially human element in a weird tale is a definite defect & dilution. The weird writer must above all else be cosmic & objective – with no more sympathy for mankind & its petty values than for the daemons that oppose mankind. Without this impersonal independence & unconventionality, weird fiction sinks quickly into a namby-pamby condition…” (letter dated Aug. 28, 1931). And continues in his next letter of September 3, 1931: “I still insist that ‘warmth’ is an element not properly belong to weird fiction as a genre… What you term ‘coldness & formality’ of style is what I call objective plainness – the bold, neutral simplicity which includes as frills, trivialities, or irrelevancies, & of which treats all phenomena – cosmic, terrestrial, human, or otherwise – as of perfectly equal importance in an infinite, futile, & meaningless cosmos…”

(4) CONSERVATIVE IDEAS FAIL THE TEST SAYS TINGLE. Chuck Tingle took another victory lap over the Rabid Puppies today.

(5) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 111 of the Octothorpe podcast, “Slightly Lower Tolerance for Feelings”, John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty read the Hugo Award finalists for Best Novel.

We talk about each of the novels, what we liked and what we didn’t, and then we each say how we’re (currently) planning to rank them on the ballot.

Uncorrected transcript here.

John is in the bottom-left, sitting in a chair, wearing a blue shirt and purple trousers, holding a can, and reading an ebook. Alison is in the upper-middle, lying down upside down, wearing a purple shirt and stripy trousers, and reading an ebook. Liz is in the bottom-right, wearing a pink shirt with green trousers, holding a mug of a hot beverage, and reading a physical book. They are surrounded by floating beer bottles, books, the Moon, a mug with a moose on it, and two cats. The text “Octothorpe 111” and “Hugo Novels 2024” appears to the top and the bottom of the image.

(6) VIEW ONLINE. [Item by lance oszko.] Some items from the Balticon 58 Film Festival are publicly available. See links here: “Winner of Balticon 58 Short Film Festival 2024”.

(7) ALAN SCARFE (1946-2024). Alan Scarfe, the classically trained British Canadian actor known for his turns as bad guys in Double Impact and Lethal Weapon III and as Dr. Bradley Talmadge on the UPN sci-fi series Seven Days died April 28. The Hollywood Reporter profile includes these additional genre roles:

…Born in England and raised in Vancouver, Scarfe portrayed the Romulans Tokath and Admiral Mendak on episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1991 and 1993 and was another alien, the powerful Magistrate Augris, on a 1995 installment of Star Trek: Voyager.

“Science fiction on film and television, especially if you are playing some kind of alien character with fantastic make-up, is great for actors with a strong stage background,” he said in a 2007 interview. “The productions need that kind of size and intensity of performance. You can’t really mumble if you’re a Klingon.”…

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

June 6, 1950 — Gary Graham. (Died 2024.) I was trying to remember where first saw Gary Graham as a genre performer. What I remember him most for is in the recurring role of Soval, the Vulcan ambassador to Earth, in the Enterprise series. It was a most excellent performance by him. 

So it turns out that it was the Alien Nation franchise in which he played Detective Matthew Sikes, which aired from the late Eighties until mid-Nineties, where I first saw him. Great role by him it was indeed. 

Gary_Graham. Photo by Keith McDuffee.

He had the recurring role of Captain Ken Hetrick on what I think was the underappreciated M.AN.T.I.S. series. Yes, it was a slightly awkward merging of a police procedural and a SF superhero story but I liked it a lot. 

Finally he got involved in one of those fanfic Trek videos that CBS decided to ignore as long as they didn’t attempt to make them a commercial property, e.g. sell them as DVDs.  (Yes, this one asked CBS to sell them for them. You can guess the answer.) 

In Star Trek: Of Gods and Men and the web series that came off it he was Ragnar, a shape-shifter, who led a rebellion against the Federation.  Bet that didn’t end well.

They claim CBS authorized them to write it as a script for a new series. Of course neither CBS or Paramount ever publicly said anything about this. They didn’t block the use of the characters either. You’re welcome to watch here as it’s legal.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • Thatababy has a musical riddle.
  • Broom Hilda reveals the missing scene from a monster movie.
  • Boondocks finds a reason for making super soldiers.

(10) PERSISTENT TECHNOLOGY. The resurgence of interest in film photography leads to consideration of “The Lost Art of the Negative” by the New York Times. Customers who have been sent the photos often don’t return for the negatives.

…“The very-big-picture legal issue is the difference between ownership of the negatives and ownership of the copyright,” said David Deal, a former professional photographer who now practices copyright law. “When those two things are detached from one another, then all hell breaks loose.”

Put simply: Whoever has the negatives has the mechanism to reproduce the work but not the copyright to do so; the artist sans negatives has the right but not the means.

It’s a concept that has been battered in the age of digital cameras, then left for dead with the advent of iPhones. Dinosaurs of the photography game, negatives are the original images that are burned into frames when film loaded into an analog camera is exposed to light. They once were the primary deliverable when processing a roll of film.

In the digital age, most shops where people get their film developed will scan the negatives into a computer and just email the photographs to their customers.

“Negatives would’ve never been forgotten before, because people had to pick up the digital copy,” said Richard Damery, a developer who has worked at Aperture Printing in London for 15 years. “They can now have everything uploaded to them. They forget about the negatives.”

It can be hard for some to imagine (or remember) a time when a photograph involved more steps than just the instant gratification of looking down at a screen.

That’s especially true for much of Gen Z, the driving force behind the contemporary film resurgence. The industry has boomed in the years since the pandemic, and not just with upmarket brands like Leica; the classic Fujifilm disposables are back, too. For many young shooters, the anticipation and delayed payoff of film are a welcome salve to the 24/7 exposure of apps like Instagram….

(11) NO MORE DISCS DOWN UNDER? “Disney locks the Vault, ceases DVD distribution in Australia” reports A.V. Club.

In another win for Disney+, The Walt Disney Company has ceased DVD and Blu-ray distribution in Australia and New Zealand. As confirmed by a spokesperson for The Walt Disney Company in Australia and New Zealand, Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3 will be the final release from the Mouse House in the countries. However, we’ve been assured that viewers can watch Disney+ to enjoy Disney classics and new releases, such as Willow season one and Artemis Fowl. The only option for viewers looking to score a copy of the 4K release of Cinderella is through international retailers because once stock runs out in the country, Disney will not replenish.

As noted by The Digital Bits, which first confirmed the news, the move is not surprising. Disney has already stopped distributing DVDs in some Asian and Latin American countries. Physical media sales in the region are dismal, and as global retailers like Amazon suck up a market share of customers, Disney has fewer reasons to keep shelves stocked….

(12) DISTANCE LENDS DISENCHANTMENT. CBR.com claims there are “10 Ways The Hobbit Trilogy Has Aged Poorly”. The movie, that is.

9. There Is Too Much Emphasis on Azog

Spotlight on villains is often admirable, but in the case of The Hobbit, it works to the film’s detriment. To accommodate for the book’s lack of a recurring antagonist and to set up a final fight for Thorin, Azog was introduced. One of the many aspects wrong with Azog in the movies is his very presence, as he was killed years before Bilbo journeyed to the Lonely Mountain in Tolkien’s novel.

Overall, Azog adds little to the plot. He doesn’t differ from any other orc in a relevant way, nor does he serve a major purpose beyond fueling Thorin’s rage towards orcs. What makes his sizable amount of screentime more confusing is the fact that Bolg, the son of Azog, could have fulfilled his role as the orc chieftain of the trilogy without resorting to resurrection.

(13) STARLINER ARRIVES AT ISS. Overcoming some problems, including small helium leaks, “Boeing’s astronaut capsule arrives at International Space Station” reports AP News.

Boeing’s new capsule arrived at the International Space Station on Thursday, delayed by last-minute thruster trouble that almost derailed the docking for this first test flight with astronauts.

The 260-mile-high (420-kilometer-high) linkup over the Indian Ocean culminated more than a day of continuing drama for Boeing’s astronaut flight debut carrying NASA test pilots Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams….

The Starliner capsule already had one small helium leak when it rocketed into orbit with two NASA astronauts Wednesday. Boeing and NASA managers were confident they could manage the propulsion system despite the problem and that more leaks were unlikely. But just hours into the flight, two more leaks cropped up and another was discovered after docking.

Later, five of the capsule’s 28 thrusters went down. The astronauts managed to restart four of them, providing enough safety margin to proceed. By then, Starliner had passed up the first docking opportunity and circled the world for an extra hour alongside the station before moving in.

The thrusters problems were unrelated to the helium leaks, NASA’s commercial crew program manager Steve Stich said after the docking.

Going forward in the flight, “we have some tools in our tool kit to manage this,” Stich said.

Earlier in the day, before the thrusters malfunctioned, officials stressed that the helium leaks posed no safety issues for the astronauts or the mission.

Helium is used to pressurize the fuel lines of Starliner’s thrusters, which are essential for maneuvering. Before liftoff, engineers devised a plan to work around any additional leaks in the system. A faulty rubber seal, no bigger than a shirt button, is believed responsible for the original leak….

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

Pixel Scroll 5/30/24 Scrollfiler Park Is Melting In The Dark, All The Sweet, Green Pixels Flowing Down

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(1) THE STEPS LEADING TO RWA’S CHAPTER 11. Her Hands, My Hands today published a thorough roundup about the causes of Romance Writers of America’s evaporating membership: “RWA goes bankrupt; it’s not DEI, it’s the bigotry and racism.”

If you are new here: at the end of 2019, the then-second-largest-in-the-world professional writers organization, shot itself in the eye due to the baked-in racism of the people at the top. Within three months, the membership had dropped to a third of what it was, and many of those leaving predicted at the time that the annual conference venue contracts for the following years would bankrupt the organization.

Even though COVID so-called lockdowns postponed it for a bit, RWA has finally filed for Chapter 11–predictably, it’s blaming one woman of color for that….

…So yes, a professional trade organization founded by women, with a membership made up disproportionately of women, was the second largest of its kind in the world, and for a couple of decades at least. The most likely reason RWA grew so big was the incredible misogyny of the industry: genre romance authors and aspiring writers had nowhere else to go for advocacy or support. The most renowned publishers and authors have always been quick to distance themselves from genre romance and its readers, even as they benefit from marketing to them; from the “we don’t publish that shlock” to “I don’t write that” sneer.

…Why, you may ask, am I going on about the membership numbers drop after the ‘nice’ white ladies shat the RWA bed? Because of this:

Because they want to claim that it was Courtney Milan talking about racism, and the ‘woke’ push for DEI that led them to file for bankruptcy (Bloomberg link; also see footnote 7)…

(2) STATHOPOULOS IS 2024 ARCHIBALD PRIZE FINALIST. Professional artist Nick Stathopoulos, a ten-time Ditmar winner for his genre work, has just been named an Archibald Prize finalist for the ninth time.

The Archibald Prize is awarded annually to the best portrait, “preferentially of some man or woman distinguished in art, letters, science or politics, painted by any artist resident in Australasia”.

The story behind Nick’s entry, titled “The last picture show”, is explained in the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ introduction to the piece.

Nick Stathopoulos was a finalist in the 2008 Archibald Prize with an irreverent portrait of distinguished film critic David Stratton fast asleep in a cinema.

Sixteen years later, Stathopoulos decided to undertake a smaller, intimate, more serious work, choosing again to paint the now-retired Stratton in monochrome, but retaining the deep red of his cardigan – a cinematic device used to dramatic effect in the 1993 film Schindler’s list. The title of the painting references Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 film The last picture show.

The sitting for this portrait proved to be a happy one. ‘It was a bright, crisp Blue Mountains day, and we sat on David’s back porch talking movies (what else?) as I sketched in the final details. It also happened to be his wedding anniversary, and his wife Susie was keen to point out that she had knitted the red cardigan 40 years ago,’ says Stathopoulos.

An Archibald finalist on eight previous occasions, Stathopoulos won the People’s Choice in 2016 with a portrait of Sudanese refugee and lawyer Deng Adut.

(3) THE MAN FROM UNCLES. Publishers Weekly celebrates bookseller Don Blyly, owner of the reopened Uncle Hugo’s and Uncle Edgar’s: “The Uncles in Minneapolis Celebrate 50 Years of Bookselling Perseverance”.

…Even though the Uncles are now located on a side street, instead of a major thoroughfare, Blyly maintains that one reason sales are up is that “we see primarily people who are interested in what we’re selling,” rather than “people walking in who could not even figure out it was a bookstore; they came in to cause problems or to use the restroom.” There is also a lot of cross-pollination among the different bookstores’ customer bases. “A lot of people who are into sci-fi and fantasy and a lot of other things automatically go to both stores when they are in the neighborhood,” Blyly said. “And we’re selling a lot more kids books than in the old location; there are more families here. Two things I’m not happy about: it takes me longer to get here from my home, and there’s no good Chinese carryout nearby. Other than that, everything else is better.”

The new location of Uncle Hugo’s in 2022.

(4) NEW ARGUMENT TO UNDERMINE COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT CHARGE. “Nvidia denies pirate e-book sites are ‘shadow libraries’ to shut down lawsuit” at Ars Technica. However, Ars Technica can’t explain that terminology, or how not being a shadow library helps the defendants.

Some of the most infamous so-called shadow libraries have increasingly faced legal pressure to either stop pirating books or risk being shut down or driven to the dark web. Among the biggest targets are Z-Library, which the US Department of Justice has charged with criminal copyright infringement, and Library Genesis (Libgen), which was sued by textbook publishers last fall for allegedly distributing digital copies of copyrighted works “on a massive scale in willful violation” of copyright laws.

But now these shadow libraries and others accused of spurning copyrights have seemingly found an unlikely defender in Nvidia, the AI chipmaker among those profiting most from the recent AI boom.

Nvidia seemed to defend the shadow libraries as a valid source of information online when responding to a lawsuit from book authors over the list of data repositories that were scraped to create the Books3 dataset used to train Nvidia’s AI platform NeMo.

That list includes some of the most “notorious” shadow libraries—Bibliotik, Z-Library (Z-Lib), Libgen, Sci-Hub, and Anna’s Archive, authors argued. However, Nvidia hopes to invalidate authors’ copyright claims partly by denying that any of these controversial websites should even be considered shadow libraries.

“Nvidia denies the characterization of the listed data repositories as ‘shadow libraries’ and denies that hosting data in or distributing data from the data repositories necessarily violates the US Copyright Act,” Nvidia’s court filing said.

The chipmaker did not go into further detail to define what counts as a shadow library or what potentially absolves these controversial sites from key copyright concerns raised by various ongoing lawsuits. Instead, Nvidia kept its response brief while also curtly disputing authors’ petition for class-action status and defending its AI training methods as fair use.

“Nvidia denies that it has improperly used or copied the alleged works,” the court filing said, arguing that “training is a highly transformative process that may include adjusting numerical parameters including ‘weights,’ and that outputs of an LLM may be based, at least in part, on such ‘weights.'”…

(5) BALTICON SUNDAY SHORT SCIENCE FICTION FILM FESTIVAL (BSSSFFF) 2024. [Report by lance ozko.] Audience scores were from 0 to 5, with sum of values divided by number of votes. 

  • Best of Show. A retrospective screening of “Troll Bridge” from a short story by Terry Pratchett won Best of Show, edging out the George RR Martin production of Howard Waldrop’s “Night of The Cooters”. GRRM provided a new introduction to Howard Waldrop’s work, mentioning 4 films currently. 
  • Best Animated Film went to “Triskelion”, a Stop Motion Celtic Fable from Belgium by Jessica Raes.

Noteworthy were: 

  • “Siren” a comedy from Estonia with a Mermaid. Directed by Katariina Škurinski.
  • “Splinter” a Twilight Zoneish Episode filmed during the Hollywood Strike. Directed by Marc Bernardin.
  • “Falling Forward into an Unknown and Dangerous Future”  based on a verbatim  transcript of an A.I. conversation. Directed by  Mike Ambs.

Several selections were withdrawn between Balticon 57 and 58, as the festival windows did not coincide with Balticon.  Overall 1,010 films were considered. 

Coming last was a Horror Alien Abduction.  Next year we will lean into comedies. Another Howard Waldrop short film “Mary Margaret Road Grader”  is penciled in for 2025. 

(6) MOANA 2 TEASER TRAILER. Entertainment Weekly says “’Moana 2′ trailer reunites Auli’i Cravalho, Dwayne Johnson”.

…The trailer showcases the now-older Moana reuniting with Maui on a mission to reconnect her people “across the entire ocean,” she says, meeting all sorts of oceanic creatures and obstacles along the way….

(7) COLUMBIA RELIC. “Astronaut’s diary found among fallen Columbia space shuttle debris added to National Library of Israel” – Space.com has the story.

The handwritten journal pages of Israel’s first astronaut have been added to the country’s national library in Jerusalem, more than 20 years after they were found among the debris from the NASA tragedy that claimed his life.

Ilan Ramon wrote most of the diary while he was in orbit aboard the space shuttle Columbia, serving as an STS-107 payload specialist on the winged spacecraft’s last, ill-fated flight. The found pages document Ramon’s day-to-day life in space, from his hygiene routine to the research he performed on behalf of NASA and his home nation.

Also included were his notes on the Jewish practices that he was to demonstrate from high above Earth.

“Identified among the restored pages was the Friday night blessing over wine, with Ramon’s annotations. Apparently aware he was to broadcast the ‘Kiddush’ live from space, Ramon wanted to make sure he did not forget a single word,” read a release issued by the National Library of Israel on Wednesday (May 29).

(8) NEW SEASON OF UMBRELLA ACADEMY. Variety introduces “’Umbrella Academy’ Season 4 Trailer: The Hargreeves’ Final Countdown”.

Netflix has released the teaser trailer for the fourth and final season of its superhero series “The Umbrella Academy.” The footage, set to the tune of Europe’s 1986 song “The Final Countdown,” sees the Hargreeves siblings stepping out of their regular lives, prepping to band together one last time.

Based on the graphic novel series written by Gerard Way and illustrated by Gabriel Bá, the beloved series follows a family of adopted siblings with superpowers working to prevent the end of the world….

(9) DIGITAL HANDSELLING? The New York Times studies “How a Self-Published Book, ‘The Shadow Work Journal,’ Became a Best Seller”. (Note: this is a non-genre, nonfiction book.)  Link bypasses NYT paywall.

…The real creator of “The Shadow Work Journal” is Keila Shaheen, a 25-year-old writer from Texas with a background in marketing who self-published the book in 2021, and has since been crowned “the self-help queen of TikTok.”

After the journal blew up on TikTok, Shaheen went on to sell more than a million copies. Most of those — nearly 700,000 copies — were sold through the TikTok shop, and were marketed relentlessly by passionate influencers like Glay, who earn a 15 percent commission on each sale from Zenfulnote, Shaheen’s company.

Shaheen’s unusual path to bestsellerdom shows how radically book marketing and sales have been changed by TikTok. Over the past few years, publishers have frantically rushed to harness the power of the platform as viral videos and reviews by influencers have propelled sales for blockbuster authors like Colleen Hoover, Emily Henry and Sarah J. Maas.

But Shaheen is perhaps the first self-published nonfiction author to break out in a big way on the platform, a feat she accomplished by fully harnessing its potential not just for marketing, but for direct sales.

…“To think that she achieved a million copies sold in the United States alone, without a publisher, without any international expansion, without brick and mortar support, it breaks all the rules of what makes a best seller,” said Albert Lee, a literary agent with United Talent Agency, which represents Shaheen….

(10) MEDICAL UPDATE. MaryAnn Harris, wife of Charles de Lint, has been hospitalized since 2021 after contracting Powassan virus, an extremely rare tick-bourne illness. She has been dependent on a ventilator to breathe, and paralyzed except for a toe. Julie Bartel organized a Gofundme “de Lint Recovery Fund”. And the May 23 update begins by detailing further medical problems leading to a sad status report:

…However, all of this has taken a toll and MaryAnn is quite weak. As a result, her treatment has shifted since she returned to SVH, with a new focus on quality of life rather than full recovery. The palliative care team has been brought in, and there have been numerous conversations with MaryAnn about what comes next, and about concentrating on helping her feel comfortable and pain free.

Yesterday she had a desat that was bad enough that she is now on full oxygen again. Afterwards Dr. Kirby and one of the excellent palliative care doctors, Dr. Nick, explained just how fragile MaryAnn is and that her lungs may no longer be able to function adequately. They reiterated the need to focus on comfort and on keeping her as stable as possible and that’s what is happening now.

A very sad and difficult message to hear, but Lynn and Charles are confident the staff at SVH are doing all that they can to care for MaryAnn as well as possible.

We thought you all should know. Please keep MaryAnn in your thoughts, as she and Charles navigate the road ahead. As always, your love and support are a shining light during dark times.

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

May 30, 1922 – Hal Clement. (Died 2003.)   

By Paul Weimer. If hard science and physics could be considered “characters” in science fiction, Hal Clement is certainly the person who was able to make them so. Mission of Gravity is the premier look at this, giving an extremely weird and strange, and yet possible high gravity world. Do the characters he populates this world with work as individual characters? Not really, but what you read Clement for is the puzzles and the logic behind the hard science that makes a high gravity-distorted world like Mesklin (the planet of Mission of Gravity) possible in the first place. 

Hal Clement at ConFiction (1990). Photo by Frank Olynyk. From Fanac.org site.

Another novel in this vein that doesn’t get much play or notice, but I ironically read before Mission of Gravity, is The Nitrogen Fix. In this book, Earth’s atmosphere has changed, radically, with the free nitrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere having combined into a toxic and unbreathable mix of nitrogen oxides, carbon dioxide and water. Did the aliens who have come to Earth change and terraform Earth for their own purposes? In the end, the transformation of Earth’s atmosphere is a puzzle that is solved, and makes sense, with a big heaping sense of irony to it all. 

Although shared worlds are not a big thing anymore, back in the 1980’s, they were all the rage. I didn’t mention it back when I wrote on Ellison (way too much to write about him) but even Harlan Ellison did a shared world, Medea. His shared planet had a bunch of writers very interested in building a realistic planet and solar system. Clement not only provided an essay on worldbuilding the astrophysics of  Medea in the book, but also contributed a story. 

Once again, hard science as a character in Clement’s work. That’s what it means to me. 

(12) COMICS SECTION.

(13) UNOBTAINABLE TIMEPIECE. Hamilton Watch put together a prop watch for Dune: Part Two. You can’t buy that one. At the link they have a couple of items you can buy which echo some of its design ideas.

Collaborating with Prop Master Doug Harlocker, Hamilton Watch assisted in bringing this uniquely hardwearing Fremen device to the big screen in “Dune: Part Two”.

While the “Desert Watch” is only available on Arrakis, the creative influence behind it was too strong not to bring into our own world.

(14) OUT, OUT, DANGED SPOT. Space.com says “That giant sunspot that supercharged auroras on Earth? It’s back and may amp up the northern lights with June solar storms.”

…The first hint of AR 13697’s sunspots came into view late on May 27, with the full region visible end of May 28. Making an entrance worthy of its earlier reputation, the active region produced an X2.9 solar flare. Despite triggering fewer large flares from the sun’s backside, Monday’s X-class solar flare asserts that the region is still capable of producing these more noteworthy events. 

The active region will continue to rotate across the sun over the next two weeks, providing a view of any solar flares from the region during this window. The light from any solar flares in this window will reach Earth, with the potential to produce short-term radio blackouts. These are temporary disruptions to radio-wave propagation on the sun-facing side of Earth, lasting only an hour or so. 

As we experienced in mid-May 2024, some flares may also trigger the eruption of a CME. Unlike flares, CMEs are directional, and their potential impact on Earth relies heavily on the location of its source on the sun. For a CME to have the best odds of reaching Earth, it would need to erupt from the slight right of the sun’s center. AR 13697 will reach this location of optimum Earth connection around June 4-6, around one full solar rotation (27 days) since the mid-May solar flares. Eruptions close to this window will have the best odds of producing a geomagnetic storm and enhanced aurora display here on Earth….

(15) BIG GULP. “SpaceX fuels Starship megarocket again to prep for test flight” at Space.com. Sounds like a lot.

SpaceX has fueled up its Starship megarocket again, ramping up preparations for the huge vehicle’s upcoming test flight.

The operation, known as a wet dress rehearsal (WDR), occurred on Tuesday (May 28) at SpaceX‘s Starbase site in South Texas. The company pumped huge quantities of liquid oxygen and liquid methane into Starship‘s first and second stages, which are known, respectively, as Super Heavy and Starship (or just “Ship” for short).

“Starship and Super Heavy loaded with more than 10 million pounds of propellant in a rehearsal ahead of Flight 4. Launch is targeted as early as June 5, pending regulatory approval,” SpaceX said today (May 29) in an X post, which also shared photos of the procedure….

(16) MINECRAFT GETS SERIES. “’Minecraft’ Animated Series in the Works at Netflix” reports Variety.

Netflix is developing an animated series based on the wildly popular sandbox video game “Minecraft.” The streamer will produce the project alongside Mojang Studios, the Swedish developer of the game.

Plot details are not yet known, but according to Netflix, the series “will feature an original story with new characters, showing the world of ‘Minecraft’ in a new light.”…

[Thanks to Steven French, Teddy Harvia, Kathy Sullivan, Lance Oszko, Jim Janney, Ingvar Mattson, 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 Joe H.]

Pixel Scroll 4/19/24 Pixel And Her Friends

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(1) GET READY FOR SELF-PUBLISHED FANTASY BLOG-OFF 10. The ninth contest is about to wrap up, and sponsor Mark Lawrence warns there will be a quick turnaround to start SPFBO 10:

SPFBO 10 (SPFBOX) will open to entries on Friday the 10th of May 2024 at 1pm GMT. The link will be posted here.

The SPFBO 10 contest will start on the 1st of June 2024.

Since SPFBO 9 filled its 300 slots in ~40 minutes, a different system will be used this year so that people in some time zones don’t have to get up in the middle of the night. The entry form will stay open for 24 hours. After it’s closed 300, manuscripts will be randomly selected from the pool of those who have signed up….

(2) 2024 STURGEON SYMPOSIUM. The Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction will hold the third annual Sturgeon Symposium from October 24-25, 2024. Samuel R. Delany will be there.

We are delighted that Samuel R. Delany has accepted our invitation to speak at the symposium. As an innovative author, Delany has redefined the boundaries of SFF as well as literary criticism through his explorations of language, society, sexuality, and narrative form. This year’s symposium acknowledges his lasting impact on science fiction, speculative fiction, and literary criticism.

Delany will speak on the subject “Samuel R. Delany and Theodore Sturgeon: Exclusion, Loneliness and Difference”.

See the Call for Papers here.

(3) DORAN ILLUSTRATED GOOD OMENS DELAYED. Artist Colleen Doran announced “Good Omens Rescheduled” — to accommodate her recovery from cancer treatment.

A couple of weeks ago, Neil Gaiman gave me a call to let me know he was not worried about me flaming out on Good Omens despite my truly awful 2023, and if I needed more time or some help to please take it. Shortly before that, the folks at Dunmanifestin, the publishing arm of the Terry Pratchett Estate, dropped me a line to say the same.

I was very much hoping I’d spring back to normal life after my cancer treatment was finished, but no. I felt like I’d been hit by a truck. My mental and physical energy comes and goes. I told Neil I need to be working ten hour days but have trouble managing six.

Anyway, I nervously requested the dreaded deadline extension and got it. Frankly should have asked for a big(ger) one months ago, but having never had this kind of health issue before, I didn’t know what to expect re: recovery. Some people spring back quickly, and some don’t. I figure I’m fair to middlin’.

So, the Good Omens release date is set for spring next year…

Gaiman and Wilkins say:

As a team, we collectively support Colleen and the time and space needed to finish the graphic novel after the past year she has been powering on through, and have a quick note from both Neil Gaiman and Rob Wilkins, the manager of the Terry Pratchett Estate:

Neil: “I’ve been amazed and impressed by how much Colleen has done so far, despite dealing with health issues. We are proud of her and her dedication to adapting Good Omens with such care, and look forward to holding the finished books in our hands.”

Rob: “Colleen is doing a fantastic job bringing the graphic novel to life. We’re absolutely delighted with each and every page and it is essential she can work comfortably whilst giving the book the time it deserves. She has our full support and we can’t wait for you to see the results.”

(4) BALTICON SF FILM FESTIVAL. Balticon 58, taking place May 24-27, 2024 will feature the Balticon Sunday Short Science Fiction Film Festival. The festival will include “Night of The Cooters” (2022) produced by George RR Martin from a story by Howard Waldrop, directed by Vincent D’Onofrio.

On the program will be 19 Selections from 10 Countries. The showings run 4.5 hours with two intermissions.  Day rates are available for Sunday. 

(5) SCRAPER, NO SCRAPING! “Amazon is filled with garbage ebooks. Here’s how they get made.” according to Vox.

…Here is almost certainly what was going on: “Kara Swisher book” started trending on the Kindle storefront as buzz built up for Swisher’s book. Keyword scrapers that exist for the sole purpose of finding such search terms delivered the phrase “Kara Swisher book” to the so-called biographer, who used a combination of AI and crimes-against-humanity-level cheap ghostwriters to generate a series of books they could plausibly title and sell using her name.

The biographer in question was just one in a vast, hidden ecosystem centered on the production and distribution of very cheap, low-quality ebooks about increasingly esoteric subjects. Many of them gleefully share misinformation or repackage basic facts from WikiHow behind a title that’s been search-engine-optimized to hell and back again. Some of them even steal the names of well-established existing authors and masquerade as new releases from those writers. According to the Authors Guild, it would be impossible for anyone but Amazon to quantify these books — and that’s not information Amazon is sharing….

… It’s so difficult for most authors to make a living from their writing that we sometimes lose track of how much money there is to be made from books, if only we could save costs on the laborious, time-consuming process of writing them.

The internet, though, has always been a safe harbor for those with plans to innovate that pesky writing part out of the actual book publishing. On the internet, it’s possible to copy text from one platform and paste it into another seamlessly, to share text files, to build vast databases of stolen books. If you wanted to design a place specifically to pirate and sleazily monetize books, it would be hard to do better than the internet as it has long existed…

(6) JOHN G. TRIMBLE (1936-2024). Longtime LASFSian John Trimble, husband of Bjo Trimble, died April 19.  Lora Boehm, his daughter, made the announcement on Facebook. The Fancyclopedia notes that he co-chaired Westercon 18 and chaired Westercon 23, He worked on several Equicons, chairing one.

John Trimble in 2004.

He was a co-founder of the LASFS club newzine, De Profundis, for a time helped edit its genzine Shangri-L’Affaires. He also edited To the Stars, a short-lived newzine backed by Authors Services.

John and Bjo Trimble married in 1960 – having met under Forry Ackerman’s piano during a party at his house. Bruce Pelz published A Fanzine for Bjohn in their honor when they wed. (And paging through a copy at their 40th anniversary party I found it’s a highly entertaining read!)

Bjo and John Trimble at Star Trek: Discovery premiere in 2017.

They were early members of the Society for Creative Anachronism and served on its Board of Directors. Together they were Fan Guests of Honor at ConJosé, the 2002 Worldcon.

Lora’s obituary adds:

…Their 3 children, Kathryn, Lora and Jenn have been a constant joy and the addition of husband to Lora, Jason and Jenn’s husband Chris have completed the family.

In 1966 they found a group of people interested in mediaeval combat and arts. They joined the Society of Creative Anachronism (SCA) . John served 2 terms as a member of it’s board of directors, was a landed Baron of the first Barony. His arms were the very first to be registered with the college of Heralds and both John and Bjo have been members ever since. Later that year he said to his wife, “Gee it’s a shame a good science fiction show like Star Trek is going to be canceled. We should do something about that!” And the same Star Trek campaign was born. For over 58 years John and Bjo Trimble have been ambassadors for science fiction, the space program and the SCA. Meeting and hosting people from all walks of life, all over the world.

John has touched thousands of lives in a way that positive and full of joy. He will be greatly missed.

John Trimble and daughter at CostumeCon 1 (1983). Photo by Carl.
John Trimble wearing “The Glow and Rotate Vest” at CostumeCon 2 (1984). Photo by Carl.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born April 19, 1946 — Tim Curry, 78. Let me note upfront that this is very much not an overview of everything that he’s done but my picks of what I like most. 

So let’s start off with him as Cardinal Richelieu, the corrupt Cardinal who in charge of the Red Guards in The Three Musketeerswhich came out forty-one years ago from Disney. He magnificently costumed as you can see here and had the most devilish beard as well. It’s a wonderfully over the top role that works even that I think he only has than a handful of scenes. It won’t surprise anyone here for me to say he comes to a dramatic and wonderfully flamboyant demise.

Next up must be his role in that film. Need I say which one? I think not. He rose to prominence as Dr. Frank-N-Furter reprising the role he had originated in the 1973 London and 1974 Los Angeles musical stage productions. Good, that output, and that singing. What an amazing performance it was. I’ve seen it a number of times including yes in a theater at midnight. Seattle if memory serves me right. 

Tim Curry in Rocky Horror.

Would you like to know what my absolutely favorite Tim Curry performance is? That would be him in Clue. When I wrote it up here three years back, I noted that “It had a stellar cast of Tim Curry, Madeline Kahn, Christopher Lloyd, Michael McKean, Martin Mull. Lesley Ann Warren and Eileen Brennan. Tim Curry played The Butler.”  

Tim Curry in Clue

Such a role it was. Hyperkinetic, full of Bugs Bunny worthy action on his part and some of the best bouncing off all walls possible dialogue ever said by a Butler.

Siskel and Ebert hated the three alternative endings as different theatres originally got one of three though eventually all theatres got all of them. It still bombed. 

My final is him as Gomez Addams in Addams Family Reunion. Not perhaps the first person that you’d think of for the role given John Astin originated the role and Raul Julia had played him twice to that date, each being sharp-dressed gentleman, but he turned out to a rather splendid choice first the third outing as the director Tony Payne wanted this version of the character to be weird and Curry does weird oh very well.  

Tim Curry as Gomez Addams.

So there’s my choices. So what’s your favorite role by him? 

(8) MORE FALLOUT. Variety tells us “’Fallout’ Renewed for Season 2 at Amazon”.

“Fallout” has been renewed for Season 2 at Amazon Prime Video.

The announcement comes after Variety reported that a second season was set to receive $25 million in tax credits by relocating shooting to the state of California.

Based on the video game franchise of the same name, the series is set two hundred years after the apocalypse. The official description states it follows “the gentle denizens of luxury fallout shelters that are forced to return to the irradiated hellscape their ancestors left behind—and are shocked to discover an incredibly complex, gleefully weird, and highly violent universe waiting for them.”

(9) AVENGERS AND OTHERS ASSEMBLE. Here’s an amusing video – we’ll call it ”Superheroes stop for a traffic light”.

(10) A REASON TO MAKE A MARTIAN ODYSSEY. “NASA’s downed Ingenuity helicopter has a ‘last gift’ for humanity — but we’ll have to go to Mars to get it” says Live Science.

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter has beamed back its final message to Earth, which included a heart-warming goodbye to mission scientists. The record-breaking robot will now spend the rest of its days collecting data that could be used in future Mars missions — but only if future robots or astronauts go all the way to the Red Planet to get it.

The pigeon-size helicopter, or rotorcraft, first landed on the Red Planet on Feb. 18, 2021, alongside the Perseverance rover, and it successfully completed the first-ever powered flight on an alien world on April 19 of the same year. The Ingenuity mission’s initial goal was to fly five missions across 30 days. But the tiny chopper ended up flying 72 times on Mars, spending more than two hours in the air and traveling 14 times farther than initially planned, according to a statement by NASA.

According to NASA:

…If a critical electrical component on Ingenuity were to fail in the future, causing data collection to stop, or if the helicopter eventually loses power because of dust accumulation on its solar panel, whatever information Ingenuity has collected will remain stored on board. The team has calculated Ingenuity’s memory could potentially hold about 20 years’ worth of daily data….

(11) WHAT’S THE RECIPE FOR THESE PLANETS? “Uranus and Neptune aren’t made of what we thought, new study hints” reports Live Science. Whatever you expected to find on Uranus, look again…

Astronomers have long believed that the ice giants Uranus and Neptune are rich in frozen water. However, a new study suggests they may also have tons of methane ice.

The findings could help solve a puzzle about how these icy worlds formed.Much about Uranus and Neptune remains unknown. These ice giant worlds have had just a single spacecraft visitor, Voyager 2, which flew past them in the 1980s. As a result, scientists have only a hazy idea of the ice giants’ compositions — for example, that they contain significant amounts of oxygen, carbon and hydrogen.

… Of the various models they built, the astronomers found that those with methane fit their criteria, with the methane — either in solid chunks or, given the pressure, in a mushy state — forming a thick layer between the hydrogen-helium envelope and the water layer. In some models, methane accounted for 10% of the planet’s mass….

(12) TWO^H^H^H ONE NEW PITCH MEETINGS^H. [Item by Mike Kennedy.]

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

Kemi Ashing-Giwa Wins 2024 Compton Crook Award

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Kemi Ashing-Giwa

The Baltimore Science Fiction Society (BSFS) announced today that Splinter in the Sky (Saga Press) by Kemi Ashing-Giwa has won the 2024 Compton Crook Award for best debut SF/Fantasy/horror novel, a prize worth $1,000. Kemi Ashing-Giwa is the 42nd winner of the award.

Since 1983, BSFS has given the Compton Crook Award for best first novel in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres. The other finalists were: 

  • Deathwind: War of the Harbingers Book 1 by Brad Pawlowski (Sunquake Books);
  • How to Be Remembered by Michael Thompson (Sourcebooks Landmark); and
  • These Burning Stars by Bethany Jacobs (Orbit)

Judging for the award has two parts. First, members of BSFS picked four finalists by reading and rating debut novels published between November 1, 2022 and October 31, 2023. Then, in the finalist round, club members picked a winner.  

The award includes a framed award document and, for the novel’s author, a check for $1,000 and an invitation to be the Compton Crook Guest of Honor at Balticon (the BSFS annual convention) for two years. Balticon will be held this year in Baltimore over Memorial Day weekend, May 24-27.

Kemi Ashing-Giwa studied organismic and evolutionary biology, and astrophysics at Harvard, and is now pursuing a PhD in the Earth & Planetary Sciences department at Stanford. She has a novella, “This World Is Not Yours” scheduled for September 2024 from Tor Nightfire and a novel, The King Must Die scheduled for 2025 from Saga Press.

The Compton Crook Award was named in memory of Towson State College Professor of Natural Sciences Compton Crook, who wrote under the name Stephen Tall and died in 1981. Professor Crook was active for many years in the Baltimore Science Fiction Society and was a staunch champion of new works in the fields eligible for the award. For more details visit award webpage.

Past winners of the award have included Donald Kingsbury, Elizabeth Moon, Michael Flynn, Wen Spencer, Maria Snyder, Naomi Novik, Paolo Bacigalupi, Myke Cole, Charles Gannon, Fran Wilde, Ada Palmer, R.F. Kuang, Arkady Martine, and P. Djèlí Clark. Last year’s winner was Alex Jennings for his novel The Ballad of Perilous Graves.

Reading and rating books for the 2025 award will begin this summer. For more information contact comptoncrook@bsfs.org.

BSFS is a 501(c)(3), non-profit, charitable, literary and educational organization, dedicated to the promotion of, and an appreciation for, science fiction in all of its many forms. The Baltimore Science Fiction Society was launched on January 5, 1963 and has been holding Balticon since 1967.

Pixel Scroll 3/14/24 I Am The Go-Captain Of The Pixelfore

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(1) LIBBY BOOK AWARDS. Congratulations to Martha Wells and Rebecca Yarros, two of the 17 winners of the inaugural Libby Book Awards, chosen by a panel of 1700 librarians worldwide.

  • Fiction: The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, by James McBride
  • Nonfiction: The Wager, by David Grann
  • Young Adult: Divine Rivals, by Rebecca Ross
  • Audiobook: I Have Some Questions for You, by Rebecca Makkai
  • Debut Author: The House in the Pines, by Ana Reyes
  • Diverse Author: Camp Zero, by Michelle Min Sterling
  • Comic Graphic Novel: The Talk, by Darrin Bell
  • Memoir & Autobiography: Pageboy, by Elliot Page
  • Cookbook: Start Here, by Sohla El-Waylly
  • Mystery: Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, by Jesse Q. Sutanto
  • Thriller: Bright Young Women, by Jessica Knoll
  • Romance: Georgie, All Along, by Kate Clayborn
  • Fantasy: Fourth Wing, by Rebecca Yarros
  • Romantasy: Iron Flame, by Rebecca Yarros
  • Science Fiction: System Collapse, by Martha Wells
  • Historical Fiction: Let Us Descend, by Jesmyn Ward
  • Book Club Pick: Yellowface, by R. F. Kuang

(2) BOOK BANS SURGED IN 2023. “American Library Association reports record number of unique book titles challenged in 2023” at ALA.org.

Stack of books background. many books piles

The number of titles targeted for censorship surged 65 percent in 2023 compared to 2022, reaching the highest levels ever documented by the American Library Association (ALA). The new numbers released today show efforts to censor 4,240 unique book titles* in schools and libraries. This tops the previous high from 2022, when 2,571 unique titles were targeted for censorship. 

ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom documented 1,247 demands to censor library books, materials, and resources in 2023. Four key trends emerged from the data gathered from 2023 censorship reports: 

  • Pressure groups in 2023 focused on public libraries in addition to targeting school libraries. The number of titles targeted for censorship at public libraries increased by 92 percent over the previous year; school libraries saw an 11 percent increase.
  • Groups and individuals demanding the censorship of multiple titles, often dozens or hundreds at a time, drove this surge.  
  • Titles representing the voices and lived experiences of LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC individuals made up 47 percent of those targeted in censorship attempts. 
  • There were attempts to censor more than 100 titles in each of these 17 states: Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

“The reports from librarians and educators in the field make it clear that the organized campaigns to ban books aren’t over, and that we must all stand together to preserve our right to choose what we read,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. “Each demand to ban a book is a demand to deny each person’s constitutionally protected right to choose and read books that raise important issues and lift up the voices of those who are often silenced.  By joining initiatives like Unite Against Book Bans and other organizations that support libraries and schools, we can end this attack on essential community institutions and our civil liberties.”…

(3) PNH’S NEW POST AT TPG. “Patrick Nielsen Hayden to Become Editor-at-Large for TPG” reports Publishers Weekly.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden has assumed the title of editor-at-large for the Tor Publishing Group. Hayden has been with TPG for 35 years and most recently served as v-p, associate publisher, and editor-in-chief.

During his tenure, he has published the debut novels of authors such as Charlie Jane Anders, Corey Doctorow, John Scalzi, and Jo Walton, and has received three Hugo Awards and a World Fantasy Award for his editorial work. In 2020, he founded our Tor Essentials imprint, which highlights a new generation of SFF classics. 

As editor-at-large, he will continue to edit such authors as Scalzi, Doctorow, and Walton, and will continue to select and oversee the Tor Essentials. 

In announcing Hayden’s new role, TPG president and publisher Devi Pillai added that the company “will not be replacing Patrick in his previous position—he is one of a kind.”

Patrick Nielsen Hayden in 2013. Photo by Scott Edelman.

(4) WICKED WORLD’S FAIR FOLLOWUP. “Eventbrite Refutes Mach’s Claims About WWF Payouts, Hints at Possible ‘Actions’” at The Steampunk Explorer. The linked post adds a great deal more coverage after this introductory item:

Amid the fallout from the Wicked World’s Fair (WWF), show organizer Jeff Mach has repeatedly blamed Eventbrite, the online ticketing and event management platform, for his inability to cover the event’s expenses. But in a statement provided Wednesday to The Steampunk Explorer, Eventbrite refuted key aspects of his claims.

WWF was held Feb. 23-25 at the SureStay Plus hotel in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Mach used Eventbrite to manage ticket sales, as well as sales of vendor spaces. During the event, as a sound crew was awaiting payment and vendors were requesting refunds, he told them that Eventbrite had frozen his account, preventing use of the platform’s payout features.

In the weeks that followed, Mach continued to blame Eventbrite for payment issues at WWF. “I had repeated assurances from Eventbrite that the money would be forthcoming,” he remarked in one statement to The Steampunk Explorer. “Why Eventbrite had the account locked down, but refused to tell us, I don’t know.”

This was the company’s response on Wednesday: “Eventbrite offers, but does not guarantee, multiple ways to request funds ahead of the event date. Due to an error on the organizer’s end, we can confirm that a few of these advance payouts were delayed. This was quickly remedied, and the organizer received much of his payout ahead of the event and has now been paid out in full.”…

(5) I NEVER WANTED TO GO DOWN THE STONEY END. [Item by Danny Sichel.] Last month, Doug Muir did a piece about the impending death of Voyager 1, originally launched in 1977. “Death, Lonely Death” at Crooked Timber.

…Voyager has grown old.  It was never designed for this!  Its original mission was supposed to last a bit over three years.  Voyager has turned out to be much tougher than anyone ever imagined, but time gets us all.  Its power source is a generator full of radioactive isotopes, and those are gradually decaying into inert lead.  Year by year, the energy declines, the power levels  relentlessly fall.  Year by year, NASA has been switching off Voyager’s instruments to conserve that dwindling flicker.  They turned off its internal heater a few years ago, and they thought that might be the end.  But those 1970s engineers built to last, and the circuitry and the valves kept working even as the temperature dropped down, down, colder than dry ice, colder than liquid nitrogen, falling towards absolute zero.  

(Voyager stored its internal data on a digital tape recorder.  Yes, a tape recorder, storing information on magnetic tape.  It wasn’t designed to function at a hundred degrees below zero.  It wasn’t designed to work for decades, winding and rewinding, endlessly re-writing data.  But it did.)…

… We thought we knew how Voyager would end.  The power would gradually, inevitably, run down.  The instruments would shut off, one by one.  The signal would get fainter.  Eventually either the last instrument would fail for lack of power, or the signal would be lost.

We didn’t expect that it would go mad.

In December 2023, Voyager started sending back gibberish instead of data.  A software glitch, though perhaps caused by an underlying hardware problem; a cosmic ray strike, or a side effect of the low temperatures, or just aging equipment randomly causing some bits to flip.

The problem was, the gibberish was coming from the flight direction software — something like an operating system.  And no copy of that operating system remained in existence on Earth….

But all is not lost. Well, probably. But not necessarily. At the link you can read the rest of the story about the people trying to put the smoke back in the system from fifteen billion kilometers away.

(6) WEIMER GUESTS ON WORLDBUILDING FOR MASOCHISTS. Paul Weimer joins hosts Marshall Ryan Maresca, Cass Morris, and Natania Barron for  episode 124 of the Worldbuilding for Masochists podcast, “Worldbuilding in Review”.

We spend a lot of time thinking about how to work with worldbuilding as writers — but how does a reviewer approach the topic when they’re reading works of sci-fi and fantasy? Guest Paul Weimer joins us to share his insights as a prolific consumer and critiquer of speculative fiction! Paul talks about the details that he pays attention to, the things he looks for, and the things that draw his attention, as well as discussing the purpose of reviews and who they’re for (hint: it’s not the authors!).

In this episode, we spin things around to look at how we approach worldbuilding and narrative construction as readers — since we are, of course, readers as well as writers! We explore of aspects of how a writer can set and, hopefully, meet expectations through worldbuilding — and where that can sometimes become challenging as a series goes on. What makes a world exciting to enter in the first place? What grips a reader and keeps them with it? And how can you use worldbuilding to make your wizard chase sequence a more cohesive part of your world?

(7) ENTRIES SOUGHT FOR BALTICON SHORT FILM FESTIVAL. Balticon Sunday Short Science Fiction Film Festival has been revised and is looking for talented filmmakers. Full guidelines here: “Short Film Festival”. Entries must be submitted by April 10 2024.

In 2024, the Balticon Sunday Short Science Fiction Film Festival (BSSSFFF) will take place on Sunday evening at 7:00pm. We will thrill festival attendees with independently produced short films from around the region and across the globe. BSSSFFF features live action and animated films in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror from some of the best independent filmmakers this side of the Crab Nebula.

Awards will be given in both the Live Action and Animation category based upon audience preferences. Some of the history of this film festival can be found on the BSFS website.

(8) TRY SUNDAY MORNING TRANSPORT. Mary Robinette Kowal has posted a link valid for a 60-day free trial of Sunday Morning Transport.

(9) ONE SUPERHERO ACTOR CONS ANOTHER. “Simu Liu was scammed by a Hollywood Boulevard Spider-Man” at Entertainment Weekly.

Simu Liu is reflecting on an enemy he made during his first visit to Los Angeles: a not-so-friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.

During an interview with Jesse Tyler Ferguson on Dinner’s On Me, the Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings actor recalled an unfortunate encounter with a swindling web-slinger on Hollywood Boulevard. “I remember I was taking photos of the Chinese Theater and a Spider-Man came up to me and was like, ‘I’ll help you!’” the actor remembered.

Alas, Liu’s spider-sense didn’t alert him to the insidious plot that was about to unfold. “And then he took a bunch of photos of me, and then he took some selfies of himself, and then he was like, ‘That’ll be $20!’” the actor said. “And that was mortifying for me, because I didn’t have $20 to give him. Core memory, clearly.”

(10) INTELLECTUAL (?) PROPERTY. Jon Del Arroz tagged me on X.com about this. I clicked through and was fascinated to learn he has declared Sad Puppies is a movement “owned and led by JDA!”

OFFICIAL Sad Puppies merch is now live on the store! Show your allegiance to this great movement which is owned and led by JDA!

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born March 14, 1933 — Michael Caine, 91. On my list of favorite British performers of all time, Michael Caine is near the top of that list. Both his genre and non-genre performances are amazing. So let’s take a look at those performances.

Caine portrayed Alfred Pennyworth in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy. He was quite stellar in this role. And he was in The Prestige, a truly great film, as John Cutter, in Inception as Stephen Miles, Professor John Brand in Interstellar and Sir Michael Crosby in Tenet.

Did you see him in as Ebenezer Scrooge in The Muppet Christmas Carol? If not, go see it now. He’s wonderful and The Muppet take on the Dickens story is, errr, well actually touching. Really it is.

Definitely not genre is The Man Who Would Be King, based off the Kipling story, which starred him with Sean Connery, Saeed Jaffrey and Christopher Plummer. The two primary characters were played by Sean Connery — Daniel Dravot — and Caine played the other, Peachy Carnehan. A truly fantastic film. 

Michael Caine and Sean Connery in The Man Who Would Be King.

In the Jekyll & Hyde miniseries, he’s got the usual dual role of Dr Henry Jekyll / Mr Edward Hyde. He was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – in a Miniseries. He did win a Globe for Best Actor for playing Chief Insp. Frederick Abberline in the Jack Ripper miniseries airing the same time.

Nearly thirty years ago, he was Captain Nemo in a 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea miniseries. 

He’s in Austin Powers in Goldmember, third film in the franchise. He’s Nigel Powers, a British agent and Austin and Dr. Evil’s father. Can someone explain to me the appeal of these films? 

In Children of Men, he plays Jasper Palmer, Theo’s dealer and friend, Theo being the primary character in this dystopian film. 

He’s Chester King in Kingsman: The Secret Service. That’s off the Millarworld graphic novel of Kingsman: The Secret Service by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons.

I’m reasonably sure that’s all I need to mention about his career.

(12) COMICS SECTION.

  • Blondie anticipates tomorrow’s celebration of World Sleep Day.
  • Frazz figures out the anatomy involved in scientific advancement.
  • Does F Minus depict the dream of some File 770 commenters?
  • Non Sequitur imagines the earliest days of streaming.
  • Carpe Diem has a new origin story.

(13) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 105 of the Octothorpe podcast, John Coxon watches movies, Alison Scott walks on the Moon, and Liz Batty has special bonds. Listen here: “Scorching Hot Month-Old Takes”.

In this episode, we talk through your letters of comment with diversions into Zodiac podcasts, poetry collections, and Scientology. We discuss the BSFA Awards shortlist and return to the Hugo Awards for another round of head-scratching and bewilderment.

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 105” and “Liz has finished reading the latest Hugo Award exposés”.

(14) OUTSIDE THE BOX — AND INSIDE THE SHELVES. Harlan Ellison’s Greatest Hits can already be found in some bookstores, ahead of the official release date.

(15) GLIMPSE OF BLACK MIRROR. “Black Mirror Season 7 Will Arrive in 2025 With a Sequel to One of Its Most Beloved Episodes” – IGN has the story.

Netflix’s long-running bleak anthology series, Black Mirror, is coming back for Season 7 next year, and it’s bringing a sequel to fan-favorite episode USS Callister with it.

The streaming platform announced the news during its Next on Netflix event in London (via The Hollywood Reporter), later bringing public confirmation with a cryptic message on X/Twitter. The post contains a video teasing the six episodes, and judging by the familiar logo that appears, it sounds like the third will be the one to give us our USS Callister sequel.

(16) THE GANG’S ALL HERE. “Doctor Who’s Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat unite to support Chris Chibnall” – Radio Times cheers the gesture.

Doctor Who writers past and present have shared a photo together after Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat attended a performance of Chris Chibnall’s new play.

Recently returned showrunner Davies posted the image to his Instagram page alongside the caption: “A marvellous night out in Salisbury to see Chris Chibnall’s wonderful new play, One Last Push.”

And he added: “Also, we plotted Zarbi vs Garms”, referencing two classic Doctor Who monsters…

(17) TRUE OR FALSE? Radio Times reviews evidence supporting story that “Doctor Who’s Steven Moffat ‘returns to write 2024 Christmas special’”.

More than six years after his final episode of Doctor Who aired, it appears that former showrunner Steven Moffat may be returning to write a new episode of the sci-fi.

While the news has not yet been confirmed, it was picked up on Tuesday 12th March that producer Alison Sterling’s CV had been updated to note she had worked on the show’s 2024 Christmas special.

Underneath this, it was noted that the director of the episode is Alex Pillai, while it was stated that the writer is one Steven Moffat. The notes regarding the writer and director of the episode have since been removed….

One factor which may throw doubt on the idea that Moffat has written the special, is that Russell T Davies previously said that he himself was writing it back in 2022.

(18) STARSHIP HITS SOME MARKS. “SpaceX celebrates major progress on the third flight of Starship” – ArsTechnica has details.

… The successful launch builds on two Starship test flights last year that achieved some, but not all, of their objectives and appears to put the privately funded rocket program on course to begin launching satellites, allowing SpaceX to ramp up the already-blistering pace of Starlink deployments.

“Starship reached orbital velocity!” wrote Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO, on his social media platform X. “Congratulations SpaceX team!!”

SpaceX scored several other milestones with Thursday’s test flight, including a test of Starship’s payload bay door, which would open and shut on future flights to release satellites into orbit. A preliminary report from SpaceX also indicated Starship transferred super-cold liquid oxygen propellant between two tanks inside the rocket, a precursor to more ambitious in-orbit refueling tests planned in the coming years. Future Starship flights into deep space, such as missions to land astronauts on the Moon for NASA, will require SpaceX to transfer hundreds of tons of cryogenic propellant between ships in orbit.

Starship left a few other boxes unchecked Thursday. While it made it closer to splashdown than before, the Super Heavy booster plummeted into the Gulf of Mexico in an uncontrolled manner. If everything went perfectly, the booster would have softly settled into the sea after reigniting its engines for a landing burn.

A restart of one of Starship’s Raptor engines in space—one of the three new test objectives on this flight—did not happen for reasons SpaceX officials did not immediately explain.

Part rocket and part spacecraft, Starship is designed to launch up to 150 metric tons (330,000 pounds) of cargo into low-Earth orbit when SpaceX sets aside enough propellant to recover the booster and the ship. Flown in expendable mode, Starship could launch almost double that amount of payload mass to orbit, according to Musk….

Space.com has a video at the link: “SpaceX launches giant Starship rocket into space on epic 3rd test flight (video)”.

(19) FAILURE TO LAUNCH. Elsewhere, some bad news from Japan: “Space One’s Kairos rocket explodes on inaugural flight” reports Reuters.

Kairos, a small, solid-fuel rocket made by Japan’s Space One, exploded shortly after its inaugural launch on Wednesday as the firm tried to become the first Japanese company to put a satellite in orbit…

(20) TALKING TO NUMBER ONE. In Gizmodo’s opinion, “This New Robot Is So Far Ahead of Elon Musk’s Optimus That It’s Almost Embarrassing”.

As if Elon Musk needed yet another reason to hate OpenAI. Figure, a startup that partnered with OpenAI to develop a humanoid robot, released a new video on Wednesday. And it’s truly heads above anything Tesla has demonstrated to date with the Optimus robot.

The video from Figure, which is available on YouTube, shows a human interacting with a robot dubbed Figure 01 (pronounced Figure One). The human has a natural-sounding conversation with the robot, asking it to first identify what it’s looking at….

(21) MILLION DAYS TRAILER. “A Million Days” is available on Digital Platforms 18 March.

The year is 2041 and the next step in the future of humankind is imminent. After decades of training and research, the mission to create the first lunar colony is about to launch with Anderson as lead astronaut. Jay, an AI purpose built for the mission, has simulated every possible outcome for the expedition. Tensions arise when the chilling motives of Jay become apparent, sowing the seeds of distrust between Anderson, and the group that had gathered to quietly celebrate the launch. As the night descends into chaos, the group’s faith in one another and their mission begins to crack, with the knowledge that the decisions they make before sunrise, will change humanity forever.

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

Tom Doherty Wins 2024 Robert A Heinlein Award

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Tom Doherty. Photo (c) Robert Davis

Tom Doherty, founder of TOR Books and Chair of Tor Publishing Group, publishing under the Tor, Forge, Bramble, Tordotcom, Starscape, Tor Teen, and Nightfire imprints, is the 2024 winner of the Robert A. Heinlein Award. The award is bestowed for outstanding published works in science fiction and technical writings that inspire the human exploration of space. This award is in recognition of Mr. Doherty’s work in bringing the inspiring books of hundreds of authors writing about our future in Space to public awareness.

The award will be formally presented during opening ceremonies on Friday, May 24, 2024, 8:00 PM, for Balticon 58, the 58th Maryland Regional Science Fiction Convention. Balticon will take place at the Renaissance Baltimore Harborplace Hotel in Baltimore Maryland. Mr. Doherty will participate in the Balticon program across Memorial Day Weekend.

Balticon and the Robert A. Heinlein Award are both managed and sponsored by The Baltimore Science Fiction Society, Inc. BSFS thanks The Heinlein Society and the family of Dr. Yoji Kondo for providing funding for this award.

The Robert A. Heinlein Award is a sterling silver medallion bearing the image of Robert A. Heinlein, as depicted by artist Arlin Robins. The medallion is matched with a red-white-blue lanyard. In addition, the winner receives two lapel pins for use when a large medallion is impractical, and a plaque describing the award for home or office wall display.

The Robert A. Heinlein Award selection committee consists of science fiction writers and was founded by Dr. Yoji Kondo, a long-time friend of Robert and Virginia Heinlein. Members of the original committee were approved by Virginia Heinlein.

Virginia Heinlein authorized multiple awards in memory of her husband. Other awards include the Heinlein Prize, which is fully funded by Virginia Heinlein’s estate, and a National Space Society award for volunteer projects.

A biography of Tom Doherty provided by Tor Books can be found here. More information about Tom Doherty can be found at here.

[Based on a press release.]