Tag Archives: Bear McCreary

Pixel Scroll 5/8/25 It’s Just A Scroll To The Left

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(1) FUTURE TENSE. April 2025’s Future Tense Fiction story is “The 28th,” by Mark Stasenko—a story about AI, bias, and the criminal justice system.

The response essay by legal scholar Elizabeth Joh, of the University of California Davis, is “Automated Justice?”

… Yet nowhere is the use of AI as fraught as it is in the criminal justice system, where adverse decisions lead to starkly life-altering outcomes. This isn’t a hypothetical future concern: criminal justice automation of varying degrees has already arrived. Local police agencies can turn to predictive technologies to help direct patrol resources and even generate police reports. A number of jurisdictions use risk assessment tools to decide who should be detained pretrial. Others permit judges to use algorithmic tools to determine criminal sentences. Parole boards can rely on automated assessments to identify who should be eligible for parole.

So AI is already present in the criminal justice system. But how far should it go?…

(2) INFLUENCE OF ‘CLOUD ATLAS’. Charlie Jane Anders explores the question “Has ‘Cloud Atlas’ Become a Genre?” at Happy Dancing. Here’s an excerpt:

…I also feel like Cloud Atlas has become a shorthand for “genre-hopping novel with literary aspirations.”

As I’ve said before, this is how genres happen: a book comes along that everybody loves so much, they want more of the same. And “more of the same” leads to the use of tropes or devices that are reminiscent of that influential work. 

To find out more, I talked to four authors of recent books that seemed to bear a clear influence from Cloud Atlas. Here’s what they told me.

Conscious influence

“I conceived of Down in the Sea of Angels as Cloud Atlas meets X-Men,” says Khan Wong of his brand new novel. Down in the Sea of Angels is about Maida Sun, who can touch any object and see the stories of anyone who’s interacted with it in the past. Maida’s story in 2106 becomes intertwined with stories of a girl in a 1906 brothel and a tech worker in 2006. Wong describes it as “a time-hopping dystopian fantasy about psychic powers, liberation, and our interconnectedness through time.”

Wong says that he started out doing something more similar to Cloud Atlas’ format of six storylines spanning vast periods of time. But as he developed the novel, he “scaled it back, “both in terms of the span of time and the number of storylines and genres.”…

(3) ADULTING NEEDED. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Cli-Fi is becoming an established sub-genre of SF no least with books like Kim Stanley Robinson’s  Ministry For The Future.  However most politicians simply don’t get it: some even deny it! Meanwhile scientists working in the area are suffering mentally. This is something of which I am acutely aware having worked in climate science for a number of years.  So this week’s Nature has  a very important editorial message on behalf of today’s youth….

“Adults should finally act like adults  on climate change”:

“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.” This rebuke to the delegates at the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York City in 2019 came from a tearful Greta Thunberg, founder of the children’s climate movement Fridays For Future. Then aged 16, she urged attendees to inject more urgency into keeping global warming to within 1.5 °C of pre-industrial levels. Since then, hundreds of thousands of children around the world have made similarly impassioned appeals to adults to heed the overwhelming evidence of the dangers of climate change. But so far, a grown-up sense of responsibility is lacking….

…Quantifying what climate change will mean for those being born now is an active topic of research. This week in Nature, one group of climate researchers reports findings (L. Grant et al. Nature 641, 374–379; 2025) that must surely make adults take more notice of what younger people are saying. Building on an earlier study (W. Thiery et al. Science 374,158–160; 2021), Luke Grant, a climate researcher at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and his colleagues report that children and young people born in the present decade face exposure to heatwaves, crop failures, floods, droughts, wildfires and tropical cyclones, in a way that their parents and grandparents never did — and that this applies pretty much anywhere in the world.

Non-PDF version of the editorial with links to this week’s relevant research  here.

(4) THE BIG THREE AND FRIENDS. Big Issue offers several examples in “These are all the times sci-fi writers predicted the future”.

…In a 1964 interview for the BBC’s Horizon program, another of the ‘Big Three’, Arthur C Clarke, said: “I’m perfectly serious when I suggest that one day we may have brain surgeons in Edinburgh operating on patients in New Zealand.” He expanded on this in his 1975 novel Imperial Earth, in which the protagonist explains the risks of telesurgery over a network experiencing high latency: “A half-second lag would not matter in conversation; but between a surgeon’s hand and eye, it might be fatal.”

Clarke’s vision became reality in (fittingly) 2001, when a New York-based surgeon removed the gall bladder of a patient in Strasbourg, 6,200km away. A medical robot called ZEUS cut the patient’s flesh; the surgeon’s movements reached ZEUS across a network designed to minimise lag times…. 

…Sometimes one sees a prediction coming true in real time, and asks: will we heed the warnings SF gave us? Jack Williamson’s 1947 novelette With Folded Hands tells of a new type of robot following a Prime Directive: “to serve and obey and guard men from harm”. Since the robots work for free, soon no one has a job. It gets worse. The robots take the “guard men from harm” directive too literally.

They ensure a person can’t do anything remotely dangerous. Before long, humans can do nothing except sit… with folded hands. We should not fear this scenario. But one can easily imagine a world in which creatives – writers, painters, musicians, photographers – twiddle their thumbs while AI spews out soulless content on demand.

Writers such as Williamson saw the threat eight decades ago. Don’t complain we’ve had no time to prepare.

(5) THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING GAMING NEWS SCENE. [Item by Steven French.] The Guardian’s “Pushing Buttons” newsletter laments further loss of authenticity in video games journalism: “When video games journalism eats itself, we all lose out”.

Last week was a bad one for video games journalism. Two key contributors to the veteran site Giant Bomb, Jeff Grubb and Mike Minotti, have announced their departure after a recent podcast was taken down. The 888th episode of the Giant Bombcast reportedly featured a section lampooning new brand guidelinesissued to staff and is no longer available online. Later this week, it was announced that major US site Polygon was being sold to Valnet, owner of the ScreenRant and GameRant brands, resulting in a swathe of job losses. This follows ReedPop’s sale, in 2024, of four high-profile UK-based sites – Eurogamer, GamesIndustry.biz, Rock Paper Shotgun and VG247 – to IGN Entertainment, owned by Ziff Davis, which also resulted in redundancies.

It’s sad how these long-standing sites, each with vast audiences and sturdy reputations, have been traded and chopped up like commodities. On selling Polygon, Vox CEO Jim Bankoff said in a statement: “This transaction will enable us to focus our energies and investment resources in other priority areas of growth across our portfolio.” It felt gross, to be honest, to see this decade-old bastion of progressive video games writing being reduced to an asset ripe for off-loading. Of its purchase Valnet said: “Polygon is poised to reach new editorial heights through focused investment and innovation.” Quite how it will do that with a significantly reduced staff is anyone’s guess….

(6) THIRD (SEASON) FOUNDATION. Gizmodo analyzes the Season 3 teaser: “Foundation Season 3 Shares a First Look for Lee Pace Fans (and Everyone Else)”. Returns on Apple TV+ on July 11.

…Here’s the official description for the season: “Set 152 years after the events of season two, the Foundation has become increasingly established far beyond its humble beginnings while the Cleonic Dynasty’s Empire has dwindled. As both of these galactic powers forge an uneasy alliance, a threat to the entire galaxy appears in the fearsome form of a warlord known as ‘The Mule’ whose sights are set on ruling the universe by use of physical and military force, as well as mind control. It’s anyone’s guess who will win, who will lose, who will live and who will die as Hari Seldon, Gaal Dornick, the Cleons, and Demerzel play a potentially deadly game of intergalactic chess.”…

(7) NOTES FROM BEAR MCCREARY. “‘The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power’ Composer Bear McCreary On ‘Limitless Palette’ Of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Work & ‘Pushing Boundaries’ For Season 3” at Deadline.

…With Season 2 and the rise of Sauron, McCreary was excited to musically explore parts of Tolkien’s world that haven’t been adapted to screen. “We go to this part of the map that no adaptation has ever done before, the lands of Rhûn, and I’ve always wanted to write for the Bulgarian women’s choir,” says McCreary. “They are singing in a language Tolkien himself devised, so they had to learn it phonetically. But they brought all the beautiful, unique things that come with that kind of music.”…

(8) TOMORROW PRIZE CEREMONY. The Omega Sci-Fi Project’s “Tomorrow Prize & The Green Feather Award: Celebrity Readings & Honors” will be held on Saturday, May 17, from 4:00-6:00 p.m. at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena. Free registration at the link.

Our line-up of incredible guest stars include:

Nana Visitor from Star Trek: Deep Space, Tim Russ from Star Trek: Voyager, Isabella Gomez from One Day at a Time, Marcelo Tubert from Star Trek: The Next Generation, Amy Tolsky from Jury Duty, and Rico E. Anderson from Star Trek: Renegades.

Students winners and honorees of the Omega Sci-Fi Project’s awards are publicly recognized at the incredible May culminating event, where celebrity actors perform dramatic readings of finalists’ stories that you won’t want to miss!

“The young writers are offered a wonderful chance at recognition for their creative work through the awards process. Often, students don’t even realize that creative writing is a meaningful way for them to explore a world they struggle to understand. That is, until they get to try it!” says Bodin Adler, a participating teacher from Hollywood High School.

This event culminates a season of classroom workshops led by trained writers and literary enthusiasts and are free to any educator who wishes to participate. Within these workshops, students get to explore the development, writing, and editing processes for crafting a short science fiction story, preparing them to submit their original work to The Tomorrow Prize or The Green Feather Award, the two competitions offered under the Omega Sci-Fi Project umbrella. 

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Sir Harry Paget Flashman VC, KCB, KCIE, 1822 – 1915

I grant he’s not even genre adjacent, but I’ll give you a tale in a minute that makes it relevant to us. Harry Flashman appears in a series of twelve George MacDonald Fraser’s books collectively known as The Flashman Papers. If Flashman had a birthday, the author says it would have been earlier this week, May 5. 

The first novel, Flashman, was published in 1969 and many readers here in the States thought it was a work of non-fiction. He’s certainly not the only fictional that readers have assumed was real. Or wished was so. Who would you would want to be? 

The books center on the exploits of Harry Flashman. He is a cowardly British soldier, rake and just generally disreputable character who is placed in a series of real historical incidents between 1839 and 1894. It must be noted that despite his cowardice and his attempts to flee danger whenever possible, he becomes a decorated war hero and rises to the rank of brigadier-general. 

There is a Chumbawamba  song, “Hanging on the Old Barb Wire”, which has the lyric 

If you want to find the general
I know where he is
He’s pinning another medal on his chest
I saw him, I saw him
Pinning another medal on his chest
Pinning another medal on his chest

(It’s a variant of a Great War song of the same name. As the band notes on their  English Rebel Songs 1381–1914 LP, “Hanging on the Old Barbed Wire was written by soldiers in the trenches in the first world war. Designed to be sung whilst marching the song is one of many showing the dissent and disgust at the way war perpetuates the inequalities of rich and poor—those with the money give the orders, those without money face the guns.”)

Royal Flash, the 1975 British film, is based upon the second Flashman novel of the same name. It stars a thirty-two year old Malcolm McDowell as Flashman. It was not well received as The Observer noted it left them “breathless not so much with enchantment as with boredom”. However audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give it a rating of sixty-four percent which isn’t bad at all. 

Here’s the trailer with a really funny narrator. As always, the standard warming about linking to copies of the film which is up on YouTube apply. You really don’t want to be defenestrated, do you? It can be rather painful or worse. 

Now for that genre connection that mentioned much earlier. No, I didn’t forget… 

Kage Baker didn’t actually write a Flashman novel, though we talked several times about her doing so, but the bones of one appeared in one of her novels as her sister Kathleen told me here: “Most of her notes she used in her last novel, Not Less Than Gods, which she wrote while she was sick, and that was published as she was dying. As far as I can tell, Kage and I were the only people in the world who liked it. A lot of it was panned because the reviewers didn’t get most of the satire, or hated Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax, or both. Anyway, even if you personally disliked the book, I think you can see the bones of a Flashman novel there.” 

Now the Green Man reviewer also liked it though he had a lump in his throat as Kage had just died as he wrote his review.

I’m pleased to say the entire series is available in hardcover, trade paperback, epub and audiobook.   As audiobooks, the narration as done by David Chase captures the character extraordinarily well. 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Or, if you prefer a smaller bookshop:

— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld.bsky.social) 2025-05-05T16:23:31.496Z

(11) SFF TO STREAM NOW. “’Godzilla Minus One’ and Other Science Fiction Movies to Stream” – recommendations from the New York Times. (Link bypasses paywall.) Here’s one of their picks.

‘Alienoid: Return to the Future’

Can’t decide if you want to watch a movie involving tentacled aliens or one with a sorcerer? Wire fu or time travel? How about ominous spaceships? The Korean director Choi Dong-hoon has you covered with his two-part “Alienoid” epic, which includes all of these elements. The second installment kicks off with a serviceable recap so newcomers can jump in, but having seen its predecessor, “Alienoid” (2022), makes the overall experience more enjoyable.

The madcap action goes back and forth between the 14th century and 2022 Seoul, when an alien menace going by the Controller is threatening to kill the entire population by unleashing a lethal gas. The key to defeat the Controller is in the past and involves a weapon called the Divine Blade. Even more important are the actions of a ragtag team that includes the spunky Ean (Kim Tae-ri, from “Space Sweepers”) and her possible love interest, Muruk (Ryu Jun-yeol). Choi keeps up a steady pace, peppered with goofy humor and surreal touches, as when Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” plays during a big moment. Narrative coherence is an afterthought in the “Alienoid” universe so it’s best to go with whatever wackadoo scenes the movies throw at you: What matters here is pure fun, and this installment delivers.

(12) SHAUN THE SHEEP 3. [Item by Steven French.] Who could resist a trip to Mossy Bottom?! “Aardman announces third Shaun the Sheep movie: The Beast of Mossy Bottom” – details in the Guardian.

A Halloween-themed third Shaun the Sheep film is in the works from Aardman Animations, following hot on the heels of the success of Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl.

“Expect smashed pumpkins, wayward science, and a wild hairy beast,” said Sarah Cox, chief creative director of Aardman, about the film, which launches international sales via studio StudioCanal at Cannes next week, but has already been acquired by Sky for UK distribution.

“Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom sees the residents of Mossy Bottom Farm looking forward to Halloween – until the clumsy farmer trashes the flock’s beloved pumpkin patch!” runs a synopsis for the film.

“When Shaun turns mad scientist to fix the problem, things rapidly spiral out of control … With the farmer missing and a wild beast roaming the woods of Mossingham, all the ingredients are in place for a monstrously fun family adventure.”

(13) LEGO AND LUNAR OUTPOST PARTNERSHIP. “Lego and Lunar Outpost to roll out ‘Moon Rover Space Vehicle’ in August” promises CollectSPACE.

The United States’ first teleoperated rover to reach the moon’s surface is rolling out as a Lego model this summer, together with two futuristic vehicles inspired by real-life robotic lunar explorers.

The new Lunar Outpost Moon Rover Space Vehicle is scheduled for release on Aug. 1, as part of Lego’s Technic line of advanced building kits. The $99.99 set is the result of a collaboration between the Danish toymaker and Lunar Outpost, a Colorado-based company specializing in lunar surface mobility, commercial space robotics and space resources.

“Inspired by real-life Lunar Outpost vehicles enabling humanity’s return to the moon, this Lego Technic Lunar Outpost Moon Rover Space Vehicle comes with a moon rover, mining rover and MAPP rover to inspire endless journeys of exploration,” reads the set’s description on Lego’s website.

The MAPP, or Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform, was the key part of Lunar Outpost’s Lunar Voyage 1 mission, which on March 6 arrived on the moon, making history. It would have made even more, had the commercial lander that delivered MAPP there not have immediately tipped over, trapping the rover inside its garage. It never had the chance to actually rove anywhere….

(14) ONE LAST LANDING ON THE GLOBE THAT GAVE IT BIRTH. “53-Year-Old Soviet Spacecraft Will Plummet Back to Earth This Week” reports Gizmodo.

Kosmos 482 has been trapped in Earth’s orbit for 53 years but its wandering journey is coming to an end. The failed Venus mission is expected to reenter through the atmosphere in a dramatic fall toward its home planet, where it may remain intact or scatter its bits across a still unknown location on either side of the equator.

The Soviet-era spacecraft will plunge through Earth’s atmosphere sometime between May 8 to 12. As of now, the exact location of where Kosmos 482 will crash-land on Earth is still unknown, with a preliminary estimate that stretches across large parts of the world on either side of the equator. It’s also unclear whether the spacecraft will remain in one piece or if it will break apart during reentry, raining down bits of debris.

Kosmos 482 launched on March 31, 1972 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome spaceport in what is know Kazakhstan. The mission was an attempt by the Soviet space program to reach Venus, but it failed to gain enough velocity to enter a transfer trajectory toward the scorching hot planet….

(15) DONE BY DAYLIGHT. “Lunar laser: China makes 1st daytime laser-ranging measurement from Earth to the moon” – Space has the story.

China has achieved a milestone feat, making the first-ever laser ranging measurement from Earth to the moon during the daytime.

Researchers at Yunnan Observatories under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) used an infrared lunar laser ranging system of a recently upgraded 1.2-meter (3.9 feet) telescope to ping a small laser retroreflector on the Tiandu 1 satellite orbiting the moon.

Laser ranging over lunar distances is challenging, requiring sending a high-power, precise beam over 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers) to hit a small corner retroreflector, which bounces the laser pulse straight back where it came from. The return signal then needs to be picked up by a telescope using ultra-sensitive detectors. Doing this in the daytime brings the added challenge of massive background “noise” from the sun….

(16) SQUAREPANTS TREK BLOOPERS. Animation Magazine is there when “Paramount+ Voyages Behind the Scenes of Crossover Spot ‘Patrick Starship Enterprise’”.

Following the debut of its new Star Trek: Strange New Worlds X SpongeBob SquarePants promo video (which you can watch here), Paramount+ has dropped a behind-the-scenes blooper reel full of illogical, astro-nautical amusement.

Starring Strange New Worlds cast members Ethan Peck (Spock), Anson Mount (Christopher Pike) and Celia Rose-Gooding (Nyota Uhura), the new video pokes fun at the making of the short and features some funny moments where we see the creative stand-in solutions for the animated characters, which include SpongeBob, Sandy and Mr. Krabs…

[Thanks to Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Steve Green, Joey Eschrich, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Mark Roth-Whitworth for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jim Janney.]

International Film Music Critics Association Awards 2025 Winners

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The International Film Music Critics Association (IFMCA) announced the winners of the 2024 IFMCA Awards for excellence in musical scoring on February 27.

The award for Score of the Year goes to American composer Bear McCreary, for his score for the second season of the Amazon Prime fantasy television series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. The score also won the award for its genre, being named Best Original Score for Television, while McCreary was also named Composer of the Year. McCreary’s work in 2024 in addition to The Rings of Power includes the nostalgic 1980s comedy The 4:30 Movie, the horror flick Imaginary, and music for the latest seasons of multiple TV shows such as Outlander, Halo, and Masters of the Universe, which he wrote along with his staff composers at Sparks & Shadows.

IFMCA member Jon Broxton wrote that Season Two of The Rings of Power was “the equal of the score for Season One in every way, because not only does McCreary revisit each of his fantastic recurring themes, he augments them with a handful of brand new ones, and incorporates them all together to create a dramatically potent, musically compelling, emotionally satisfying, intelligently structured blockbuster that, to me, confirms why this type of leitmotivic approach to film scoring is the pinnacle of the art.”

This is McCreary’s second Score of the Year victory in three years, having previously won for the first season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power in 2022. These wins also take McCreary’s all-time IFMCA win tally to 12, making him the fifth most successful composer in IFMCA history after John Williams, Michael Giacchino, James Newton Howard, and Alexandre Desplat.

Also winning multiple awards in 2024 is American composer Alan Silvestri, who won the award for Best Original Score for a Drama film for Here, with that film’s end credits also being named Composition of the Year. The 20th collaboration between Silvestri and director Robert Zemeckis, Here is a fascinating ‘experiment’ film which tells the story of a specific place throughout time from the era of the dinosaurs through the ice age, to the dawn of humanity, pre-Columbian native Americans, and then after a house is built on that spot, the different families who live there, from the Colonial era to the present day.

Best Original Score For A Fantasy/Science Fiction Film went to John Powell and Stephen Schwartz for their work bringing the massively popular Broadway musical Wicked for the big screen. Robin Carolan won Best Original Score For A Horror/Thriller Film for the gothic vampire horror Nosferatu. Other genre winners included Kris Bowers for the animated adventure film The Wild Robot, Raphaël Dargent for the paleontology documentary Why Dinosaurs?, and Gordy Haab for the video game Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

The complete list of winners follows the jump.

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Pixel Scroll 9/7/24 You Are Like A Pixel Scroll, There’s Files In Your Skies

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(1) SANS CLUE. Cora Buhlert declares, “The Guardian is Clueless about Masters of the Universe”.

…That said, the casting of Alison Brie has attracted more mainstream attraction than the casting of Galitzine and Mendes, probably because Brie is better known. And so Ben Child, who has a weekly geek media column in The Guardian, penned a spectacularly clueless article about the proposed live action Masters of the Universe movie.

Even the headline is terrible: “Can Travis Knight’s He-Man movie do for boys what Greta Gerwig’s Barbie did for girls?”

Yes, we all know how fiercely gendered the toy industry is, but must we really perpetuate those shitty stereotypes, especially when we know they’re wrong? Because in the 1980s, Mattel found to their own surprise that forty percent of all Masters of the Universe toys were sold to girls, which is what prompted the introduction of She-Ra. The 1980s Filmation cartoon was eagerly watched by both boys and girls and though Masters of the Universe fandom skews male, there are plenty of female fans, me among them. This isn’t surprising either, because Masters of the Universe has always featured plenty of impressive female characters such as Teela, Evil-Lyn, the Sorceress, Queen Marlena and of course, She-Ra and her entire supporting cast. Finally, there are plenty of male Barbie collectors as well….

… The main problem with the article is that Ben Child seems unable to view Masters of the Universe as anything other than a joke…

(2) FORMER BOARD MEMBER, NOW 404 ERROR. Sarah Gailey, who was on the NaNoWriMo “writers board” is no longer, as explained in “Some Thoughts on NaNoWriMo”.

…It’s reasonable for people to have reacted badly; the “statement” they released was very silly. To say “we will not take one of two positions, but we will say that one of those positions is classist and ableist” is not the deft rhetorical maneuver that NaNoWriMo seems to think it is. The arguments themselves around this so-called classism and ableism wave off the actual existence of writing communities, critique groups, beta readers, and critique partners; they also ignore the creative realities of the impoverished and disabled artists, marginalized authors, and indie authors who have been working all this time without the help of language learning model software that was trained on work stolen from their peers and colleagues. …

And this is the statement Gailey sent to Kilby Blades, Interim Executive Director of NaNoWriMo:

And Gailey said:

… I haven’t heard anything back. As of the time I’m writing this, the urls for the staff page and the Writers’ Board page are returning 404 errors. So does the url for my pep talk. …

(3) GOOD OMENS THIRD SEASON STILL HAPPENING. “’Good Omens’ season three on track at Amazon despite Neil Gaiman allegations” reports Screen Daily.

The third season of Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens is understood to be going ahead as planned at Amazon Prime Video, even though Disney has paused a feature adaptation of Gaiman’s novel, The Graveyard Book, following allegations of sexual assault against the UK author and screenwriter….

Amazon officially greenlit the third season of fantasy drama Good Omens in December 2023. Screen understands plans have not changed for the third season starring Michael Sheen and David Tennant to start filming in early 2025 in Scotland. Gaiman is executive producer, writer and showrunner of the series that is based on a book he co-wrote with Terry Pratchett.

Gaiman is also executive producer and a screenwriter on Anansi Boys, a Prime Video series based on Gaiman’s novel of the same name. While production wrapped on the series last year, no official release date has been set. Screen understands there are no plans to not stream the series….  

(4) CRIME ACTUALLY DOES PAY. For seven years! “FBI busts musician’s elaborate AI-powered $10M streaming-royalty heist” – Ars Technica tells how the scheme worked.

On Wednesday, federal prosecutors charged a North Carolina musician with defrauding streaming services of $10 million through an elaborate scheme involving AI, as reported by The New York Times. Michael Smith, 52, allegedly used AI to create hundreds of thousands of fake songs by nonexistent bands, then streamed them using bots to collect royalties from platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music.

While the AI-generated element of this story is novel, Smith allegedly broke the law by setting up an elaborate fake listener scheme. The US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Damian Williams, announced the charges, which include wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy. If convicted, Smith could face up to 20 years in prison for each charge.

Smith’s scheme, which prosecutors say ran for seven years, involved creating thousands of fake streaming accounts using purchased email addresses. He developed software to play his AI-generated music on repeat from various computers, mimicking individual listeners from different locations. In an industry where success is measured by digital listens, Smith’s fabricated catalog reportedly managed to rack up billions of streams.

To avoid detection, Smith spread his streaming activity across numerous fake songs, never playing a single track too many times. He also generated unique names for the AI-created artists and songs, trying to blend in with the quirky names of legitimate musical acts. Smith used artist names like “Callous Post” and “Calorie Screams,” while their songs included titles such as “Zygotic Washstands” and “Zymotechnical.”

…The district attorney announcement did not specify precisely what method Smith used to generate the songs….

(5) BULGACON. Начална страница (bulgacon.org) – Bulgacon, the Bulgarian national convention – takes place September 21-23 with Ian McDonald and Farah Mendlesohn as guests of honor. Dr. Valentin D. Ivanov reports, “Many panels will be in English and the committee is considering opening the online panels to everybody.”

(6) LEARNEDLEAGUE SFF: NARNIA AND MURDERBOT. [Item by David Goldfarb.] Question 1 on day 9 of the current regular LearnedLeague season asked us:

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Silver Chair, and The Magician’s Nephew are all books set in what mythical realm?

(I’ve spoiled the answer in my header, but I daresay very few Filers would have had any trouble with it.) This had a get rate of 89%, with no single wrong answer getting to 5% of the submissions.

In the most recent off-season there was a One-Day Special about File 770’s favorite rogue death machine: follow this link to see Murderbot for Everyone. As the title suggests, the questions try to include general-knowledge paths to the answers as well as knowledge of the books themselves. I actually didn’t do all that well on it: 9 right out of 12, and only 63rd percentile in the scoring. Filers may enjoy seeing if they could have done better.

(7) FLASH SF NIGHT. Space Cowboy Books of Joshua Tree, CA presents “Flash Science Fiction Night” online on Monday September 9 at 6:00 p.m. Pacific. Register to attend for free here.

This is the last Flash Science Fiction Night of the season! Join us online for an evening of short science fiction readings (1000 words or less) with authors Jenna Hanchey, Eric Fomley, and Marie Vibbert. Flash Science Fiction Nights run 30 minutes or less, and are a fun and great way to learn about new authors from around the world.

(8) SFWA TOWN HALL COMING. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association Board will conduct the organization’s first SFWA Town Hall for members on September 10, 2024.

This event is part of the ongoing effort to foster communication with the membership, talk about what the organization is current doing and planning, and to take an opportunity to listen.

By working together, the board can address concerns and begin writing the next chapters in the history of SFWA.

(9) TRIBUTE TO BROTHER. Inverse remembers, “40 Years Ago, a Cult Classic Sci-Fi Movie Beat John Carpenter to the Punch”.

…Compared to the bloated multiverse era where “less is more” is an alien concept, 1984 cult favorite The Brother from Another Planet seems like it’s been beamed in from an entirely different celestial body. Its $350,000 budget — a small sum even for the time — would be lucky to cover 30 seconds of a Marvel flick. Its special effects are limited to a few glowing lights and a deformed toe. And far from delivering any grandstanding speeches, its superhero is entirely mute.

The titular Brother, who’s not even given the luxury of a name, is an extra-terrestrial whose powers are far more intuitive (he can hear voices from the past by touching his surroundings) than communicative. But thanks to a nuanced performance from future Emmy winner Joe Morton, he still manages to convey the emotional complexities of the immigrant experience (just to make it clear the film is allegorical, his primitive spaceship crashlands on Ellis Island)….

(10) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Anniversary: Land of the Lost series (1974)

By Paul Weimer. “Marshall, Will and Holly, on a routine expedition…”

Before Buck Rogers, or Battlestar Galactica, or reruns of TOS Star Trek, the first genre shows I can recall watching, in the misty lands of the 1970’s, were reruns of the Sid and Marty Krofft TV shows, including and most especially, Land of the Lost. 

What was not to love in those days? The Marshall family trapped in another world. Dinosaurs! Lizardmen! Weird alien technology crystals? I watched the show avidly, until it fell away from TV screens, and other tv series took their place in my mind in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s.  And I mostly didn’t think about Land of the Lost for two decades.

Until Bubble Boy.

Bubble Boy was a 2001 film, and I can’t really counsel you to seek it out and watch it. It has a young Jake Gyllenhaal playing the titular immunocompromised character who goes on adventures despite being in a bubble. But he is as sheltered emotionally and otherwise as he is physically, having not been allowed to even watch much TV.  One of the shows he has been able to watch was, in fact, Land of the Lost…and very early in the movie, the titular character does a “punk rock version” of the theme song.  It brought me back immediately to my young watching of the show.  That song really is an earworm.

Later on, a few years later, I met a friend who was obsessed with the show, and insisted I watch it again. So, with the suck fairy an idea that had not formulated in popular culture, but was in my mind, I decided to rent it on Netflix DVDs and rewatch it. I was nervous it was more going to be than wasted time, that my fond distant memories of the show would burst like a bubble.

Yes the show is cheesy, the special effects not so much, and it is a kids tv show…but I was surprised at how much I liked the show for what it was. 

Watching the entire arc from start to finish, I saw the creative seeds of genius in the show (and also saw at least one episode I had missed back in the day. Crucially, an episode written by Larry Niven (!) where the Marshalls try to paddle out of the Land of the Lost, run into a Confederate Gold miner and discover they are, in fact, in an enclosed pocket universe. Combine that with the crystal powered pylons that allow time and space travel, a time loop episode and more, the strong SF roots of the show came to mind. 

And then there is Enik. Poor, poor Enik, the intelligent Sleestak..who thought he had traveled into the past to see the barbaric ancestors of his high-tech civilization. And the soul crushing realization he gets when he realizes that he has in fact traveled far to the future, and his high-tech civilization is doomed to fall to barbarism. Heady stuff for a kids TV show, eh?

Land of the Lost crops up again, visually and otherwise in fantasy novels and tv series. In the novel Paragaea, for instance, the main character, trapped on another planet, stumbles onto a jungle temple ruin, complete with Sleestaks, described exactly in terms of the tv series. 

But the remake movie with Will Farrell? Skip it. Just skip it. I’ve never seen the reboot series, either (that is apparently currently on Apple TV).

“When I look all around, I can’t believe the things I found…”

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) CAMPY CRANIUM. “New horror musical arrives in Ypsilanti just in time for Halloween” – The Eastern Echo has details.

Getting antsy for the spooky season? Kick off those calendars with the premiere of “The Brain That Wouldn’t Die!”, a new musical written by Ypsilanti-area vocalist and stage director Carla Margolis.

Inspired by the 1960s cult classic of the same name, the musical is a reimagining that takes audiences through the infamous, campy storyline with an all-new original soundtrack. When a brilliant yet, reckless scientist’s fiancé is decapitated in a car accident, he uses a magical serum to keep her head alive. The head, while completely immobile, keeps its ability to sing and talk.

Fans of the movie can expect a more serious look at the same themes found in the original. 

“It focuses on bodily autonomy for women; now that it’s more perilous than ever, I don’t really address it specifically, but there was definitely an inspiration. There’s a lot of misogyny baked into this story,” Margolis said. 

Margolis’ unique take is rooted in a time period when feminist themes were less accepted in media, and that elevates the script to new levels, they said….

(13) ALL ABOARD FOR ALL ALONG. “How Marvel expands ‘WandaVision’ corner of MCU with ‘Agatha All Along,’ ‘Vision Quest’” – Entertainment Weekly interviews a Marvel TV exec and a showrunner.

…These two shows will broaden what Schaeffer refers to as “the WandaVision corner” of the MCU, and Winderbaum says Agatha All Along, titled after Hahn’s chart-topping song of the same name as performed in that first series, “really led the charge.”

The premise kicks off when a mysterious goth teen who’s obsessed with witchcraft (Joe Locke) helps Agatha break free of Wanda’s spell, only now she’s completely left without her powers. This “Teen,” who’s been hexed by…someone so that he can never share his name or any identifying information with other witches, plants the idea of traversing the Witches’ Road, a mystical realm that faces wanderers with deadly trials. If conquered, Agatha could regain all her magic once more. She just needs a coven to pull it off. Enter Aubrey Plaza’s Rio Vidal, Patti LuPone’s Lilia Calderu, Sasheer Zamata’s Jennifer Kale, and Ali Ahn’s Alice Wu-Gulliver….

(14) SAIL SIGHTED. “NASA spacecraft captures 1st photo of its giant solar sail while tumbling in space” – Space has the story.

On April 23, NASA launched a solar sail protype to orbit around our planet — a piece of technology that could very well revolutionize the way we think about spacecraft propulsion. Then, on Aug. 29, the agency confirmed this sail successfully unfurled itself in outer space. Yet, we still didn’t have official photographic evidence of this for some time. 

Now, as of Sept. 5, we indeed do. NASA has released the first image of the open solar sail, formally called the Advanced Composite Solar Sail System, and stated that the spacecraft from which the sail was released will continue to send back more footage and data as time goes on….

… As NASA says in the statement, it’s important to first remember there are four wide-angle cameras in the center of the spacecraft anchoring the sail. 

Near the bottom of the image, one camera view shows the “reflective sail quadrants supported by composite booms” while at the top of the photo, we can see the back surface of one of the craft’s solar panels. Most spacecraft are lined with solar panels because that’s how they power themselves up: with sunlight.

“The five sets of markings on the booms close to the spacecraft are reference markers to indicate full extension of the sail,” the statement says. “The booms are mounted at right angles, and the solar panel is rectangular, but appear distorted because of the wide-angle camera field of view.”…

(15) WHIP IT. Gizmodo says “Bear McCreary Wants to Bring an Obscure Lord of the Rings Song to Rings of Power”.

The soundtrack for Amazon’s Lord of the Rings prequel has afforded composer Bear McCreary a canvas as vast as Middle-earth to play with: Howard Shore-ish riffs, unique orchestral pieces, and increasingly in season two, lots of song work. We already know the lumbering hill-troll Damrod is getting his own heavy metal infused piece this season, and this week, McCreary weaved one of Tolkien’s own poems into a beautiful song to welcome Tom Bombadil to the show. But the composer has a much more obscure, and much more intriguing ditty from the franchise’s adaptive past he wants to make a nod to.

That song? “Where There’s a Whip, There’s a Way” from the Rankin Bass adaptation of Return of the King. “I’m looking. I’m looking for the moment,” McCreary said in a recent Instagram live chat of his desire to bring the song to Rings of Power (via /Film). “It hasn’t happened yet but I would love to make that happen.”

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