Tag Archives: Blade Runner

Pixel Scroll 4/5/25 Oh, Scroll Us The Way To The Next Pixel Bar, Oh Don’t Ask Why

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(1) PREVIEW OF COMING ATTRACTIONS. The 2025 Hugo finalists won’t be publicly announced until tomorrow at Noon, but Escape Pod has already posted their 2025 Award Voter Packet.

(2) NON-SCIENCE AND WORLDCON IMPLICATIONS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The Seattle Worldcon has expressed concern as to what the stricter US border controls will mean for fans and authors attending from overseas.  As a result it is giving advice and also plans for an enhanced, virtual, on-line attendance experience. In science there are similar concerns.  This week’s issue of Nature has a number of articles and news items on the new US presidency’s border policy impact on the nation’s science.

From the off an editorial spells out the problem of Trump’s funding cuts to science. Nature conducted a poll of over 1,600 US-based scientists and 1,200 said that they were considering leaving! Nature notes that this might not present an accurate picture of the feelings of all US-based scientists but it does, they say, provide a strong indication of the “despair” many feel. Those leaving gave Europe and Canada as their preferred destinations. Meanwhile, the EU is doubling the absolute maximum of two million Euros (US$2.2 million) relocation grant per applicant! (I understand that this is for senior scientists seeking permanent relocation, so don’t get your hopes up for some easy dosh.)

Then there is an article on the detention of visiting scientists at the US border which notes that researchers whose mobile smartphones have a record negative social media posts on them regarding US science policy have been barred from entry. Since 2019 visitor visa applicants to the US have had to provide details of their social media accounts and user names but these have rarely been used to bar anyone from entry. (I guess if I applied for a visa I’d be met with disbelief in not filling out those sections as I don’t have a home internet connection or smartphone – all my (by choice) limited online is done at local library and learned scientific society  cybercafés.) LGBTQAI+ scientists are also actively reconsidering travelling to the US for symposia, conferences and field trips. Meanwhile, several US universities have warned foreign students against unnecessary travel outside the US in case they have difficulty getting back in. Advice for visitors is to arrive in the US with a clean burner phone and/or a lap-top pad that has already been wiped of unnecessary files and social media history.

Elsewhere in this week’s Nature there is an article on the cuts to CoVID and climate change research. The past month some 400 National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention research grants have been cut.  Apparently, there was discussion in the NIH on potentially cancelling LGBTQAI+, gender diversity, equity and inclusion research. Meanwhile, the CDC is cutting US$11.4 billion in pandemic response science…! Yup, we have just had a global pandemic that has killed more than 7 million globally (a sure under-estimate as cause-of-death recording in less-developed nations is not that good) and 1.2 million in the US alone, so it might just be a bit of an idea to invest in ensuring lessons are learned and strategies are developed for use when the next pandemic comes… And it really is a case of ‘when’ not ‘if’…

Finally, there is piece on international food aid cuts. Here it is not just the US, which is dismantling its US Agency for International Development (USAID), but aid budgets in Britain (cut by 40%), France (37%), Netherlands (30%) and Belgium (25%) as money is diverted into military spend and support for Ukraine. Globally, severe malnutrition is responsible for up to 20% of deaths among the under five-year-olds.

Together, these articles from just one issue of the journal, paint a bleak, almost Orwellian, picture.  Goodness knows what forthcoming editions will hold?

Turning back to SF, there has been some discussion in certain fannish quarters as to whether the US should host the Worldcon under such a socio-political regimen?  While such a move may, for some, be controversial, it would not be impossible as in the coming years there are a number of serious bids from outside the US, plus few others. Montreal, Canada, is bidding for 2027. Brisbane, Australia is going for 2028. There is only one bid for 2029 and that’s Dublin, Ireland provided folk can all squeeze in (?). However, so far there are only US bids for 2030 and 2031. This may very well change.

If all this happens, it will see a massive – would ‘seismic’ be OTT? – change to the Worldcon. My first Worldcon was Brighton 1979. That was a great con with plenty of talks, a load of seasoned SF authors on the programme who’d been round the block several times and who had tales of their own encounters with other SF giants, and there was a solid film programme; a far cry from Glasgow and its mindless planorama computer package sifted, panel-led programme with few prepared talks and zero films (this last being a first for a British Worldcon). Back in 1979 I recall a bemused Christopher (Superman) Reeve astonishment at the cheer in the hall for Hugo-shortlisted Hitch-hikers’ Guide to the Galaxy: Superman won such was the N. America dominated Hugo-voting constituency as Hitch-hikers had yet to make it to the States.  That Worldcon spawned a four-part BBC documentary on Science Fiction with interviews of authors at that Worldcon: true heritage value. Throughout the subsequent 1980s all but two (Melbourne 1985 and Brighton 1987) were held in the US!  Since then the Worldcon has become more mobile but US-venued Worldcons still dominate. This could well end (for a while at least). The question is that in such times as these, what would a US venued Worldcon look and feel like? Almost certainly, there may well be fewer fans and pros from outside the US attending and if so might it be more like a NASFic than a Worldcon?  I don’t know, but we will see.

You can see the 1979 Worldcon part of the four-part documentary series below…

(3) GROWING UP SFF. [Item by Steven French.] Author Oisin Fagan on his teenage reading material: “Novelist Oisín Fagan: ‘I was at the altar of literature and had its fire in me’” in the Guardian.

As a teenager I read fantasy. Growing up in rural Ireland, I’d see an oak tree on a hill and think: my God, this is Robin Hobb, JRR Tolkien, Ursula K Le Guin. It gives you back these parts of your life and allows you to recognise them as magical. Then at 14, I was like: time to read Ulysses! At that age you’re always reading above your capabilities. Dostoevsky might resonate deeply, but you fundamentally don’t know what’s happening. You read Notes from Underground thinking: “Yes, he’s totally right! Finally someone understands!” Then you reread it: “Oh, this is a comedy?”…

(4) JUSTICE IN FANTASY. “Power and Punishment: Using the Language of Fantasy to Subvert Real-Life Oppression” at CrimeReads.

Power lies at the heart of all fantasy, written or imagined. To craft a novel of the genre is to visualize an expression of power and assign it to factions that will then weave and warp over the course of the story. Yet, our ability to conjure is naturally shackled by the limits of what we have seen, what we believe, and what we hope is possible. It is little wonder then, that fantasy gives us worlds that are altered, yet familiar—inversions, allegories, and warnings. With these carefully constructed societies come equally detailed punishment, for there can be no law without consequences for breaking it. And it is in this interplay between power, its exercise, and its fettering that the fantasy genre’s subversive nature shines.

Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series is a more conservative example of this subversion. The books center in great part around a schism in magic along biological sex. All who channel magic draw it from the One Power, the driving force of all creation that’s split into male and female halves. The male half was corrupted by the Dark One in an ancient battle that has since resulted in male channelers being driven to madness over the course of using their power. It isn’t a taint of their causing, but one that makes them extremely dangerous. Naturally, it falls to female channelers of an authoritative magical organization, known as the Aes Sedai, to hunt and gentle men—essentially castrating them of magic to such severe degree that it often results in their suicide.

It seems a little on the nose when stripped down to bare bones and certainly is conservative in its rigid adherence to a biological binary. Yet, the matriarchal Aes Sedai isn’t a giant middle finger aimed at men, but a cautionary tale to all social groups seeking power that maintaining it can require great evil. And while readers, especially women and those who have been societally designated as other, are encouraged to empathize with the plight of male channelers in this world, they are also shown the danger these men pose, in part because they have the literal power to threaten a millennia-old hierarchy as much as because of their tendency to destructive violence due to it. The Wheel of Time’s subversive beauty doesn’t lie in its inversion of the modern patriarchy, but the means it employs to examine two pertinent questions of every age—is the potential for destruction enough cause for punishment before crime? What happens when a faction is downtrodden for too long?…

(5) DAVID THOMAS MOORE Q&A. The Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog hosts an “Interview with Rebellion Editor David Thomas Moore”.

UHBCB:
Do you have any thoughts on the state of modern SFF?

Moore:
It’s great, to be honest! There’s such a richness and plurality of identities and voices now; when I started fifteen years ago stories by marginalised authors were marketed on that, because they were exceptional, but now it’s scarcely worth mentioning. And that’s reflected in the stories themselves — when most writers looked like me, most of the stories were the types of stories I’d tell, but now I get to read and work with stories, characters, language and structures that are completely out of my safety zone and I love it.

We’re challenging genre conventions (and mashing them up). We’re pushing the boundary between “literary” and “genre.” We’re trying new things out, questioning assumptions and experimenting. And we’re having fun — the younger crop of writers approach their work with such joy and love, it’s wonderful.

(6) A BIT OF CONVENTION LORE. Why you would want to know the history of The Gross-Out Contest? But if you do, Brian Keene has summed it all up in “Jack Ketchum, Jay Wilburn, and The Gross-Out Contest”, an unlocked Patreon post.

…The Gross Out Contest is purposely profane, purposely over-the-top, and purposely counter culture. It is intended to be shocking. It is intended — for those who’s sense of humor leans toward such things — to be hilarious….

(7) WORLD SF STORYBUNDLE. There are five days left to buy the 2025 World SF StoryBundle curated by Lavie Tidhar.

Join me for a trip around the world, from China to Nigeria, Luxembourg to the outer reaches of space. Hello – and welcome to the eighth annual World SF bundle! Can you believe we’re still here?

Things are definitely looking bleak everywhere you turn, which is why literature matters more than ever. What better way is there to reach across languages and cultures then to experience the stories people tell? The language of science fiction and fantasy is universal, and here I tried to bring together a group of remarkable writers from all corners of the world.

Support awesome authors by paying however much you think their work is worth!

The three basic books are:

  • The Bright Mirror: Women of Global Solarpunk by Future Fiction
  • The Siege of Burning Grass by Premee Mohamed
  • Sinophagia by Xueting C. Ni

Pay at least $20 to unlock another 7 bonus books, for a total of 10!

  • Ecolution: Solarpunk Narratives to Transform Reality by Francesco Verso
  • Jackal, Jackal: Tales of the Dark and Fantastic by Tobi Ogundiran
  • Breakable Things by Cassandra Khaw
  • The Golem of Deneb Seven by Alex Shvartsman
  • The Escapement by Lavie Tidhar
  • The Good Soldier by Nir Yaniv
  • The Pleasure of Drowning by Jean Bürlesk

(8) TOTAL ECLIPSE OF A STAR. “How Rutger Hauer Made Harrison Ford ‘Disappear’ in Blade Runner” — Inverse tells all about it.

In 2019, the legendary Dutch actor Rutger Hauer passed away. For cinephiles, his legacy was immense, ranging from films like Nighthawks to The Osterman Weekend, to Eureka, in which Hauer starred alongside the late Gene Hackman. And before his Hollywood breakthrough in Nighthawks, Hauer’s work in Dutch and German films was extensive. But, for science fiction and fantasy fans, his stardom is almost exclusively defined by his performance as the rogue replicant Roy Batty in the 1982 classic Blade Runner. Yes, fantasy fans and Ready Player One ‘80s completists will argue that Hauer’s turn in Ladyhawke is just as iconic, but history has proven that if there’s one role that truly became his legacy, it’s that of the baddie in Blade Runner.

Appropriately, a new documentary about the life of Rutger Hauer takes its title from a line from the movie, a line that Hauer himself helped craft. The documentary is called Like Tears in Rain, and it’s directed by Hauer’s goddaughter, Sanna Fabery de Jonge, who narrates the opening moments of the movie to give the documentary historical context. Naturally, this documentary isn’t only about Blade Runner or science fiction. And yet, the revelations and observations about how Hauer was eerily connected to Blade Runner are a huge part of the movie and, certainly, a must-see for any serious student of sci-fi cinema….

…But, just as the movie takes its title from Blade Runner, the discussions of that film and how Hauer changed it forever are central to what makes the documentary crucial for all future discussions about Blade Runner.

“He really turned that into a role for the ages,” Robert Rodriguez says in the movie. Meanwhile, Mickey Rourke asserts that, “He made Harrison Ford disappear. I’m sorry. No disrespect to Harrison Ford, but you couldn’t wait for the bad guy to come on the film.”…

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

April 5, 1917 — Robert Bloch. (Died 1994.)

By Paul Weimer: Psycho, and so so much more.

Psycho, the movie adaptation of his novel, is where I first got onto the Robert Bloch train, although I didn’t know I was doing so at the time (I thought I was on a Hitchcock train, I didn’t realize it was a shared train line). I was stunned by the movie, in a good way. It’s a bank robbery that turns into something far far darker. Sure you have seen the memes, but if you haven’t seen the original movie yet (don’t bother with the remakes). Do.

Bloch’s oeuvre and repertoire was usually crime and horror more than fantasy. He wrote Cosmic horror and cosmic horror adjacent work. I remember Nyarlathotep being in a number of his stories, he made good use of the Black Pharaoh. You might say that he punched his ticket in his early career. 

Later on, Bloch’s screenplay writing was the major way he got from stop to stop on the trainline of life and wrote for a wide variety of shows. “Wolf in the Fold” (the Jack the Ripper one) is the one that I vividly remember as being unusually putting us into the head of Scotty and the other members of the crew. It turns out the Ripper was a recurring theme, and Bloch made stop after stop at that particular station in his writing.

I haven’t read all that much of his crime fiction, except for an occasional story here and there (especially for a podcast). But his vivid pulp-fueled writing made every word on the page memorable and sometimes visceral on the rails of his plots and characters.  His mastery of the psychology of his victims and antagonists alike is what really set him apart from other similar writers. He got into the heads of his characters, and so his words got into the head of me, right along the old straight track of fears and doubts.

But why all these train metaphors. My favorite Bloch piece is “That Hell-Bound Train”, his Hugo award-winning short story. Our protagonist, Martin, is a drifter with a love of trains. He makes a deal with the devil, to stop time when he is happiest. The devil knows the essential indecision of a person means he will never do it, and thus he will claim Martin’s soul when he dies. But in a classic and amazing ending, Martin finally makes his choice to stop time…while on the train to hell itself. His eternity will be on a perpetual train ride, a fitting fate for a lover of trains.

Robert Bloch

(10) COMICS SECTION.

my HORRIFYING cartoon for this week’s @theguardian.com books

— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld.bsky.social) 2025-04-05T11:03:42.204Z

(11) TRON IS ON. “’Tron: Ares’ Trailer: First Look at Disney’s Sci-Fi Sequel” – Variety introduces the clip. Movie arrives in theaters October 10.

“Tron” is back, more than 40 years after the original sci-fi movie hit theaters.

Disney has released the first trailer for “Tron: Ares,” the third film in the “Tron” franchise after the 1982 original and the 2010 sequel “Tron: Legacy.”

Jared Leto leads the film, which includes original star Jeff Bridges back as Kevin Flynn. Leto plays Ares, one of the programs from the digital universe who is tasked to enter the real world….

(12) JURASSIC HOMAGE – OR PERHAPS FROMAGE. “The film fans who remade Jurassic Park​: how an Australian town got behind a $3,000 ‘mockbuster’” from the Guardian’s Australian edition.

This morning’s location: a field outside Castlemaine, Victoria. The air is thick with flies, attracted to the cow dung but ignoring the nearby dinosaur poo, sturdily constructed from papier-mache.

“Oh god,” Sam Neill groans – though these words aren’t actually uttered by Neill but local builder Ian Flavell, who has taken on Neill’s role as palaeontologist Alan Grant – and drops to his knees in front of an ailing triceratops.

This is Jurassic Park: Castlemaine Redux, a shot-for-shot remake (if you squint) of Jurassic Park, the 1993 blockbuster directed by Steven Spielberg. This film’s director is John Roebuck, the man with the vision and the $3,000 budget. Right now, he’s hunched over a monitor: some sheep walked into the last shot and screwed up the continuity….

…To Roebuck’s surprise, support for his project quickly grew, which meant he only wound up spending $3,000 of his own money – mainly on venue hire and catering. Jurassic Park Motor Pool Australia – a club for owners and enthusiasts of replica Jurassic Park vehicles – supplied some wheels and props. Local cameraman Kristian Bruce brought his professional gear, retiring the DSLR Roebuck had been using. A man in Texas saw the trailer and offered his VFX services. Castlemaine itself – a town that embraces sublimely ridiculous ideas, such as Castlemaine Idyll (a raucous take on Australian Idol) and the community dance-off Hot Moves No Pressure – leapt on tickets to the “world premiere”. There are four screenings of Jurassic Park: Castlemaine Redux at the Theatre Royal between 11 and 13 April….

(13) ROBOVALET. The New York Times prepares readers for the “Invasion of the Home Humanoid Robots” – link bypasses the paywall.

On a recent morning, I knocked on the front door of a handsome two-story home in Redwood City, Calif. Within seconds, the door was opened by a faceless robot dressed in a beige bodysuit that clung tight to its trim waist and long legs.

This svelte humanoid greeted me with what seemed to be a Scandinavian accent, and I offered to shake hands. As our palms met, it said: “I have a firm grip.”

When the home’s owner, a Norwegian engineer named Bernt Børnich, asked for some bottled water, the robot turned, walked into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator with one hand.

Artificial intelligence is already driving cars, writing essays and even writing computer code. Now, humanoids, machines built to look like humans and powered by A.I., are poised to move into our homes so they can help with the daily chores. Mr. Børnich is chief executive and founder of a start-up called 1X. Before the end of the year, his company hopes to put his robot, Neo, into more than 100 homes in Silicon Valley and elsewhere….

(14) ANCIENT SPACE MARINER. “Vanguard 1 is the oldest satellite orbiting Earth. Scientists want to bring it home after 67 years” – Space tells how they want to do it.

Decades ago during the heady space race rivalry between the former Soviet Union and the United States, the entire world experienced the Sputnik moment when the first artificial satellite orbited the Earth.

Sputnik 1‘s liftoff on Oct. 4, 1957 sparked worries in the U.S., made all the more vexing by the embarrassing and humiliating failure later that year of America’s first satellite launch when the U.S. Navy’s Vanguard rocket went “kaputnik” as the booster toppled over and exploded.An emotional rescue for America came via the first U.S. artificial satellite. Explorer 1 was boosted into space by the Army on Jan. 31, 1958. Nevertheless, despite setbacks, Vanguard 1 did reach orbit on March 17, 1958 as the second U.S. satellite.

And guess what? While Explorer 1 reentered Earth’s atmosphere in 1970, the Naval Research Laboratory’s (NRL) Vanguard 1 microsatellite is still up there. It just celebrated 67 years of circuiting our planet….

…A team that includes aerospace engineers, historians and writers recently proposed “how-to” options for an up-close look and possible retrieval of Vanguard 1….

Vanguard 1 could be placed into a lower orbit for retrieval, for instance, or taken to the International Space Station to be repackaged for a ride to Earth. After study, this veteran of space and time would make for a nifty exhibit at the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum….

…But there’s a major challenge of snuggling up close to the three pound (1.46-kilogram) Vanguard 1. It is a small-sized satellite, a 15-centimeter aluminum sphere with a 91-centimeter antenna span. It would be a delicate, ‘handle with care’ state of affairs.

As suggested by the study group, perhaps a private funder with historical or philanthropic interests could foot the retrieval bill….

(15) THE EARTH ONCE HAD RINGS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Everyone knows that Saturn has rings, but the Earth might have had them too.

Once – before the dinosaurs (whom I have never really forgiven for what they did to Raquel Welch) – the Earth may itself have had rings!

There is evidence of heavy meteorite showers half a billion years ago and, some scientists think, this may have been the remains of ancient rings orbiting our planet….

Matt O’Dowd, over at PBS Space Time looks at a paper that came out at the end of last year that runs with this idea….

Planet Earth is the jewel of the solar system—the shimmery blue oceans, the verdant green forests, the wispy whimsical cloud formations. Saturn is the only competitor for most gorgeous planet with that giant ring system. Hmm… what if we could put the jewel of the Earth in its own ring? Then no contest. Well, there’s an extremely good chance that Earth once DID have a ring system. At least, that’s the proposal by a recent study that has evidence that a mysterious burst in meteor activity nearly half a billion years ago was actually caused by that ancient ring system collapsing onto the Earth. And, you know, if we had a ring once maybe we can have one again.

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

Pixel Scroll 3/25/25 The Pixel Moon Is A Harsh Scrolless

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(1) CARDINAL NUMBERS. On this week’s Beyond Solitaire Podcast, Ada Palmer speaks about her papal election LARP at The University of Chicago–but also about historical research, her work as a sci-fi author, and how both history and fiction can help us talk about today’s world. “Beyond Solitaire Podcast 189: Ada Palmer on LARPing the Renaissance”.

(2) BANKRUPT COMIC DISTRIBUTOR FINDS BUYER. “Alliance wins bid to acquire Maryland-based Diamond Comic Distributors” reports The Baltimore Banner.

Alliance Entertainment Holding Corporation, a global distributor and wholesaler that specializes in media and collectibles, won a bid Tuesday to acquire the assets of Hunt Valley-based Diamond Comic Distributors.

Diamond, once the country’s top comic book distributor, filed for bankruptcy in January. The company began to lose its grip on distribution when the COVID-19 pandemic began, forcing Diamond to briefly suspend operations as other competitors popped up. More recently, the company struggled with delays in getting titles to comic stores on time.

Diamond warned in a federally mandated notice filed in January that if it didn’t find a buyer by April 1, it could face layoffs and the closure of its headquarters. Raymond James, a global financial services firm, hosted the auction in New York on Monday. There will be a court hearing Thursday to approve the sale….

…The acquired businesses support more than 5,000 retail stores, from independent game and comic shops to online stores and mass-market chains, according to the press release….

(3) POSTMASTER GENERAL DEJOY IS OUT. [Item by Andrew Porter.] I note that in late February I mailed a letter to my brother in Michigan. It took a mere 21 days to reach him… “US postmaster general resigns with immediate effect” in the Guardian. (Editor’s note: We old fanzine fans always seem more interested in this post than other government officials.)

The US postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, who said earlier this month that he had asked the government efficiency team led by Elon Musk for assistance with a number of issues, is resigning effective on Monday, the agency said.

DeJoy, who has headed the agency since 2020, in February said he had asked the US Postal Service (USPS) governing board to identify his successor but had given no indication in recent days that he planned to step down abruptly.

Donald Trump said in February that he was considering merging the United States Postal Service with the commerce department, a move Democrats said would violate federal law.

“Much work remains that is necessary to sustain our positive trajectory,” DeJoy said in a statement, adding that the deputy postmaster general, Doug Tulino, would head the agency until the postal board names a permanent successor. They have hired a search firm, he added….

(4) GEOFF RYMAN WORK DISCUSSED ON BBC. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Geoff Ryman’s book is covered in this week’s A Good Read on BBC Radio 4.

(By the way, looks like BBC shutting down overseas access to BBC Sounds.  As a Brit Cit citizen who pays an annual license to fund the BBC, I am allowed to say this… I think this is a retrograde step. First off it cuts off British ex-pats from Auntie and this is not good.  Second, the BBC has some great, ‘free’ (well, paid for by residents like me) public broadcast content. The BBC is therefore a British soft-power play and Britannia rules the air waves… Short rant over.)

Meanwhile, back at the plot…

Towards the end of the half-hour programme (last 10 minutes) we get comedian Sarah Mills choice of read, Ryman’s 235…

Sarah has selected 253 by Geoff Ryman, the novel originally published on the Internet which tells the stories of 253 passengers on a London Underground train.

A Good Read can be accessed at BBC Sounds here (for now…)

(5) SFWA REMEMBERS POURNELLE. Michael Capobianco chronicles an early SFWA president in “Jerry Pournelle: SFWA Historian” at the SFWA Blog. The “historian” tag comes from the institutional knowledge Jerry shared on GEnie, a pre-internet phone modem bulletin board service run by General Electric that offered access to published science fiction and fantasy writers.

…Many of Jerry’s anecdotes on GEnie showed that SFWA had accomplished much, and some showed its sillier and/or more combative side. What did we learn? We learned that Somtow Sucharitkul’s cat had peed in his box of important SFWA documents when he was SFWA Secretary in the mid-80s (the loss of which still bedevils the organization today). We learned that SFWA had conducted a mass audit of Ace Books that turned up a lot of money owed to SFWA members. We learned that SFWA had intervened to help get J. R. R. Tolkien’s US rights to The Lord of the Rings back (see Part 1 and Part 2 of “A Brief History of SFWA: The Beginning”). We learned there had been a long and vicious fight over creating an official SFWA tie (don’t ask) and a Fellowship membership category. 

Some SFWA wounds were still open after many years and were a touchstone for the organization in some quarters. On GEnie, one controversy that was often referenced but never fully explained was the Lem Affair. SFWA had awarded Polish SF writer Stanislaw Lem an honorary membership and then, after Lem attacked American science fiction and amid a long internal fight, had retracted it. Whether the retraction was political or simply happened because giving it to Lem was in violation of the bylaws (or, most likely, a combination of both) is still debated…

(6) GRACE PERIOD FOR EFF. The European Fan Fund has extended its nominations deadline to March 30. EFF is the European Fan Fund which transports European SF fans to Eurocons.

Apply to have your trip to Eurocon 2025 covered by the European Fan Fund or spread the word to fellow fans!

(7) DRAWN THAT WAY. “’Doctor Who’ S2 Teases Adventure in an Animated Universe” – Animation Magazine sets the frame.

Today, Disney+ unveiled a new trailer for Season 2 of iconic BBC sci-fi series Doctor Who, featuring the heroic Time Lord’s latest incarnation (portrayed by Ncuti Gatwa; Sex Education) and his new companion Belinda Chandra, a.k.a. The Nurse (Varada Sethu; Andor). New episodes launch April 12 on the streamer.

The new spot offers a glimpse of a delightful first for the long-running hit franchise: The Doctor’s travels to an animated reality! While “lost” episodes of vintage Doctor Who have been resurrected with animated visuals, this marks the first originally animated installment for the live-action show.

Disney-owned ABC News revealed that the season’s second episode will see The Doctor and Belinda encountering a strange cartoon character named Mr. Ring-a-Ding (voiced by Emmy winner Alan Cumming). As shown in the trailer, our time-traveling protagonists will get a 2D toon makeover reminiscent of vintage Saturday morning cartoon favorites like Scooby-Doo.

Mr. Ring-a-Ding is described as “a happy, funny, singalong cartoon, who lives in Sunny Town with his friend Sunshine Sally.”

“In 1952, after years of repeats in cinemas across the land, Mr. Ring-a-Ding suddenly looks beyond the screen and sees the real world outside — and the consequences are terrifying.”

Cumming previously guest starred in a 2018 episode of Doctor Who, “The Witchfinders,” as King James I.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cora Buhlert.]

March 25, 1939 — D.C. Fontana. (Died 2019.)

By Cora Buhlert: Dorothy Catherine Fontana, better known as D.C. Fontana, was born on March 25, 1939 in New Jersey. At age eleven she decided that she wanted to become a novelist. But while she would become a writer, her main body of work would be in television rather than novels.

Employment opportunities for women were limited in the late 1950s and early 1960s, so Dorothy Fontana went to work as a secretary after college. This was her entrance into the TV industry, because she found employment first at Screen Gems and then at Revue Studios, where she worked as a secretary for Samuel A. Peeples on the largely forgotten western series Overland Trail and The Tall Man. But Dorothy Fontana wanted more than just to type other people’s scripts. She wanted to write her own and in 1960, aged twenty-one, she managed to sell her first script for the episode “A Bounty for Billy” of The Tall Man. More sales followed.

In 1963, Dorothy Fontana went to work on a military themed TV show called The Lieutenant. The show only lasted for one season, but nonetheless it would change D.C. Fontana’s, as she was calling herself by now, life, because she wound up working as the secretary of Gene Roddenberry, creator of The Lieutenant. Roddenberry encouraged Fontana’s writing, leading to the publication of her first novel, a western called Brazos River.

When The Lieutenant was cancelled, Gene Roddenberry started working on a new show called Star Trek. D.C. Fontana accompanied him. Before working on Star Trek, D.C. Fontana had had no interest in science fiction, but this quickly changed as work on the new show progressed. D.C. Fontana wrote the teleplay for “Charlie X”, the second episode of Star Trek. By the end of season 1, she was the story editor of Star Trek and also wrote the scripts of such memorable episodes as “Tomorrow is Yesterday”, “Journey to Babel”, “This Side of Paradise” and “Friday’s Child”.

D.C. Fontana left as story editor before the third season of Star Trek, but continued to contribute to the series as a freelance writer. Her collaboration with Gene Roddenberry continued on The Questor Tapes and Star Trek: The Animated Series. By the 1970s, D.C. Fontana, who had never read a science fiction story before Star Trek, had become one of the go-to writers for science fiction television and worked on Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Logan’s Run, The Six Million Dollar Man, Fantastic Journey and Battlestar Galactica, an experience she disliked so much that she disavowed her screenplay. She also continued to work on non-genre shows such as The Waltons, The Streets of San Francisco, Bonanza, Kung Fu and Dallas.  

D.C. Fontana returned to Star Trek as story editor and associate producer on Star Trek: The Next Generation, for which she co-wrote the pilot “Encounter at Farpoint”. However, she left during the first season, following a fallout with Gene Roddenberry. Though D.C. Fontana was not completely done with Star Trek yet. She wrote Star Trek novels and contributed a script to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. She also wrote several screenplays for Deep Space Nine’s great rival Babylon Five.  

I don’t know what my first contact with D.C. Fontana’s work was. I know it wasn’t Star Trek, because she wrote none of the Star Trek episodes I saw as a young kid during a rerun on German TV in the late 1970s. And while I watched all of the science fiction series on which she worked, I didn’t see most of them until much later, when the floodgates of private television opened and many of these shows aired in Germany for the first time.

Indeed, it’s quite likely that my first contact with D.C. Fontana’s writing was a non-genre show, quite possibly The Waltons, which aired on Sunday afternoons and which my parents watched religiously. The Streets of San Francisco or Dallas are also possibilities, though I only got to see those shows sporadically during the holidays, since they aired in evening slots after my bedtime.

However, one story penned by D.C. Fontana that I definitely encountered early on is her sole contribution to the Filmation He-Man and the Masters of the Universe cartoon, the second season episode “Battlecat”, which tells the origin of Prince Adam’s “fearless friend” Cringer and his alter-ego Battlecat. The episode is basically one long flashback, recounting how a young Prince Adam rescues a tiger cub from a sabrecat stalking the little one. Adam takes the injured cub to the royal palace and nurses him back to health and the two are soon inseparable. However, Adam is mortified that is pet is terrified of everything, up to and including his own shadow, which also gains him the name Cringer, courtesy of Teela teasing Adam about his pet.

As for why Cringer is always so afraid, this episode never shows us what happened before Adam found Cringer, though we can guess from fact that Cringer is all alone in the jungle and being stalked by a predator that it was nothing good. In 2012 finally, a comic did tell what happened just before, namely that Cringer’s entire family and tribe were wiped out by a sabrecat attack. Baby Cringer was the only survivor and was hunted for days, until Adam drove off the predators and rescued him. So the reason Cringer is always terrified is because he is deeply traumatized.

When Adam gains the Power of Grayskull and becomes into He-Man, he makes sure never to transform in front of Cringer, until one day when Cringer follows Adam and chances to witness the transformation. Cringer is understandably terrified and when He-Man tries to reassure him that there’s no reason to be afraid and that he’s still Adam inside, he accidentally points the Sword of Power at Cringer and Battlecat is born. And not a moment too soon, because an eldritch horror has escaped from its tomb and needs to be stopped…

“Battlecat” is a highly memorable episode, especially since the Filmation He-Man cartoon rarely ever gave us origin stories for the various characters. We never even got to see how Adam first became He-Man, so it’s a treat to see how Cringer first became Battlecat and how Adam and Cringer met in the first place. The fact that Baby Cringer is one of the cutest creatures ever seen on screen doesn’t hurt either.

In many ways, this episode also illustrates D.C. Fontana’s strengths as a writer. Her episodes were inevitably memorable and often expanded the world of the story and gave backstory to characters who did not have a lot before, whether it’s introducing Spock’s parents in “Journey to Babel”, delving into the previous hosts of the Dax symbiont in “Dax” or recounting the origins of Cringer in “Battlecat”.

D.C. Fontana

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) RAIDERS CAST-SIGNED LASERDISC. If you can’t live without this you better get your bid in by Thursday: “’Raiders of the Lost Ark’ Cast, Director & Creator Signed Laser Disc Cover — Signed by Harrison Ford, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Karen Allen and Philip Kaufman — With Beckett COA” offered by Nate Sanders Auctions.

Extraordinarily rare ”Raiders of the Lost Ark” laser disc cover signed by all the principals of the iconic 1981 film. Large 12.5” square cover is signed by actors Harrison Ford and Karen Allen as well as by director Steven Spielberg and creators George Lucas and Philip Kaufman. All sign in blue felt-tip with excellent contrast against the cover. Includes actual laser disc, with bifold cover opening to show scenes from the movie. Light edgewear with dings to corners. Very good plus condition. With Beckett COA for all signatures.

(11) 13 IS AN ANSWER? [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] Let’s see: 6×9=42. Ah, but it is true… in base 13. Which perfectly explains why things are so screwed up – we use base 10, or 2… but not 13. This, of course, is demonstrated by the paper… “The secret behind pedestrian crossings—and why some spiral into chaos” at Phys.org.

Pedestrian crossings generally showcase the best in pedestrian behavior, with people naturally forming orderly lanes as they cross the road, smoothly passing those coming from the opposite direction without any bumps or scrapes. Sometimes, however, the flow gets chaotic, with individuals weaving through the crowd on their own haphazard paths to the other side.

Now, an international team of mathematicians, co-led by Professor Tim Rogers at the University of Bath in the UK and Dr. Karol Bacik at MIT in the US has made an important breakthrough in their understanding of what causes human flows to disintegrate into tangles. This discovery has the potential to help planners design road crossings and other pedestrian spaces that minimize chaos and enhance safety and efficiency.

In a paper appearing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team pinned down the precise point at which crowds of pedestrians crossing a road collapse from order to disorder.

The researchers found that for order to be maintained, the spread of different directions people walk in must be kept below a critical angle of 13 degrees.

When it comes to pedestrian crossings, this could be achieved by limiting the width of a crossing or considering where a crossing is placed, so pedestrians are less tempted to veer off track towards nearby destinations….

(12) RAISING ‘CANE. [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] Coming soon, oil from Martian dinosaurs, and the major push to get to Mars, funded by the petrochemical industry. “NASA’s Curiosity Rover Detects Largest Organic Molecules on Mars” reports NASA.

Researchers analyzing pulverized rock onboard NASA’s Curiosity rover have found the largest organic compounds on the Red Planet to date. The finding, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests prebiotic chemistry may have advanced further on Mars than previously observed.

Scientists probed an existing rock sample inside Curiosity’s Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) mini-lab and found the molecules decane, undecane, and dodecane. These compounds, which are made up of 10, 11, and 12 carbons, respectively, are thought to be the fragments of fatty acids that were preserved in the sample. Fatty acids are among the organic molecules that on Earth are chemical building blocks of life.

Living things produce fatty acids to help form cell membranes and perform various other functions. But fatty acids also can be made without life, through chemical reactions triggered by various geological processes, including the interaction of water with minerals in hydrothermal vents.

While there’s no way to confirm the source of the molecules identified, finding them at all is exciting for Curiosity’s science team for a couple of reasons….

(13) THE SECRET PREQUEL TO BLADE RUNNER. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Moid over at Media Death Cult takes a deep dive into the Blade Runner films. “The Secret Prequel To Blade Runner”.

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, amk, Michael J. Walsh, David Langford, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Peer.]

Pixel Scroll 11/4/24 There Were Three Files Scrolled Out Of The West, Their Pixels For To Try

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(1) DID YOU VOTE? I voted by mail two weeks ago, and was notified the ballot has been received and counted. However, the official LA County voter outreach service I registered with is still sending me email and text reminders to vote. They don’t want me to feel left out!

(2) DETROIT PUBLIC LIBRARY BRINGS BACK COLOR OF SCI-FI EXHIBIT.  The inaugural Color of Sci-Fi events occurred in 2023 at Detroit Public Library and will return this month by popular demand. Get “The Color of Sci-Fi” Tickets at Eventbrite.

DMJ Studio is curating an all-new exhibit celebrating people of color in science fiction. This year, the exhibit celebrates diversity within the world of science fiction with a special focus on Star Trek characters Captain Benjamin Sisko and Lt. Uhura, icons who have inspired generations through their portrayal by actors Avery Brooks and Nichelle Nichols.

COLOR OF SCI-FI EVENTS

November 9 | Opening Reception

Art Exhibition and Author Discussions

Featuring artists; April Shipp, Justin Perry, Kimberly Givens, Tia Nichols , Mandisa Smith, Anthea Calhoun, Miriam Uhura, Molouk Harp, and works by members of the DMJStudio team.

Authors Discussion | November 9

Steven Barnes – NY Times bestselling author of over thirty novels of science fiction, horror, and suspense, author of the Star Trek novel, Far Beyond the Stars.

Derek Tyler Attico – A speculative fiction author, essayist, and award-winning photographer. Author of The Autobiography of Benjamin Sisko.

Storytime for All Ages

Reading of To Boldly Go: How Nichelle Nichols and Star Trek Helped Advance Civil Rights by By Angela Dalton, Illustrated by Lauren Semmer.

(3) A BOOK BAN DEFEATED. “Freedom to Read Advocates Notch a Legal Victory in Alaska” – Publishers Weekly has details.

After a favorable legal ruling in August, freedom to read advocates in Alaska have scored a significant victory in court over would-be book banners. In an October 31 filing, the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District in Alaska agreed to pay $89,000 to settle claims that the district improperly removed dozens of books, including several works of classic literature, from school libraries.

“First the court, and now this settlement, confirm what these students and their parents have known all along: you cannot remove dozens of books from school libraries simply because a vocal minority dislike those books,” said Savannah Fletcher, attorney for advocacy group the Northern Justice Project, in a statement. “Our Constitution protects freedom of speech and freedom of ideas. After successfully having the majority of those books returned to school shelves, we hope the District has learned to not judge a book by its cover.”

First filed nearly a year ago, on November 17, 2023, against the Mat-Su school district, north of Anchorage, by eight local plaintiffs, the American Civil Liberties Union of Alaska, and the Northern Justice Project, the suit sought the return of 56 books that school officials ordered to be removed after a handful of parent complaints until a committee was established to review the allegedly offensive books….

(4) MOORCOCK WARNS ABOUT FRENCH PUBLISHER. Linda Moorcock is circulating this complaint:

EDITIONS L’ATALANTE:

This French company continues to sell books by Michael Moorcock ILLEGALLY. All Moorcock contracts have expired. Editions L’Atalante were refused renewal requests earlier this year after they illegally reprinted and put on sale one of the books they no longer had rights to.

If you are doing business with this company, at least be aware of how they have behaved towards Michael. We have repeatedly asked them to stop all sales and they continue to ignore us.

(5) PRO TIPS. Charlie Jane Anders advises “It’s Not About Making the Word Count, But Making the Work Count” at Happy Dancing. Anders seems to have been farther along than the point where Anne Lamott’s famous advice about getting down a “shitty first draft” applied. And at that point —

2) Your first draft doesn’t need to be total garbage.

I’m currently trying to finish something — it started as a novella, but I’m afraid it may have ballooned into a novel. Just last week, I hit a wall and spent a few days trying in vain to keep moving forward. I even beat myself up over the paucity of words I was producing, because I just could not get any purchase on the story.

At last, I reluctantly scrolled back in the document and found the problem: about 8,000 words earlier, there was a scene which set completely the wrong tone for a key relationship, and basically left the relationship no place to go. Without giving too many spoilers for something you might not read for a couple years, these characters had already reached a place in their relationship that they shouldn’t have reached until closer to the end of the story. This literally gave them no room to grow, no space for an arc, no way build out the story.

I completely scrapped that scene and replaced it with a brand new one, and then went about revising large chunks of the following 8000 words, until they had the beginnings of a proper arc to their relationship — one that started in one place and ended in a different place. As soon as that was done, I could once again start cranking out the rest of the story moving forward….

…And some of my earliest attempts at writing a novel got messed up, in large part, due to a mistaken decision that I made and never fixed, which ended up throwing the entire rest of the draft out of whack. Speaking from experience, it’s actually very hard to revise a first draft where everything is headed in the wrong direction and the basic character stuff doesn’t hold water.

I think of the first draft as being like the foundations of your house: if the foundations aren’t sturdy, the rest of the house is going to be rickety as heck. And going back and redoing the foundations later can sometimes be a lot more trouble….

(6) BOMBS DEFUSED. “’It’s the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen’: 10 film flops that became classics – ranked!” in the Guardian.

At number four:

4. Blade Runner (1982)

Budget: £21.6m. Worldwide gross: £32.2m

Not the biggest flop among all these, but still a galling disappointment for Ridley Scott and Warner Bros, not least given the sensational design. The same weekend The Thing tanked, this came a distant second to ET, and sank fast: word-of-mouth, at first, was more bewildered than awestruck. When Scott was allowed to revisit it for his 1992 director’s cut, one of seven versions that now exist, interest flourished and its reputation soared.

(7) UNIFORM TENDENCY. Camestros Felapton’s “Fashion Blog: Near Future Space Adventure” shows what the best-dressed space crew will be wearing.

… There you are in your new and yet somehow grungy spaceship/space-station facing the important questions of the future: what to wear that will be in keeping with the hot fashion of your community….

(8) AI TRANSLATION PLANS. [Item by Steven French.] The thin end of the wedge? “Dutch publisher to use AI to translate ‘limited number of books’ into English” reports the Guardian.

A major Dutch publisher plans to trial translating books into English using artificial intelligence.

Veen Bosch & Keuning (VBK) – the largest publisher in the Netherlands, acquired by Simon & Schuster earlier this year – is “using AI to assist in the translation of a limited number of books”, Vanessa van Hofwegen, commercial director at VBK said.

“This project contains less than 10 titles – all commercial fiction. No literary titles will nor shall be used. This is on an experimental basis, and we’re only including books where English rights have not been sold, and we don’t foresee the opportunity to sell English rights of these books in the future,” she added…

(9) UPSCALE BRANDING. Wayne Enterprises (at brucewaynex.com) encourages you to immerse yourself in Batman’s secret identity while selling you stuff at Bruce Wayne prices.  

Exclusively curated products—including many limited editions and capsule collections created only for the Wayne Enterprises Experience are inspired by the world of Bruce Wayne, who has access to the best of the best of tech, fashion, automobiles, art, multimedia, watercraft, residences, and much more.

Via this site and live events, we are placing retail at the center of a theatrical experience for the first time—and you can be a part of the Bruce Wayne story via these truly limited editions and collaborations.

Maybe you’d like to drive around on a set of Batman’s wheels? Price tag $2,990,000.

Limited production of 10 Wayne Enterprises Tumblers, fully functional iconic “Batmobile”, are exclusively being sold by invitation only. These highly collectable Tumbler Batmobiles are officially sanctioned by Warner Bros. and will be available for sale to an exclusive audience of avid car collectors.

(10) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

November 4, 1996 — Anniversary: DS9’s “Trials and Tribble-ations”

Twenty-eight years ago on this evening in most markets, DS9’s “Trials and Tribble-ations” first aired in syndication. 

A most delightful episode, it blended footage from the original “The Trouble with Tribbles” into the new episode in a manner that allowed the characters from DS9 to appear to interact with the original Trek crew. 

SPOLER ALERT 

 The story is that those meddlesome Agents from Temporal Investigations have arrived on Deep Space 9 and so Sisko is recounting how he and the crew of the Defiant traveled back in time to the 23rd century to prevent the assassination of Captain James T. Kirk during the original Enterprise’s mission to Space Station K-7.

END OF SPOILERS. REALLY. 

The story was by Ira Steven Behr, Hans Beimler and Robert Hewitt Wolfe with Ronald D. Moore and René Echevarria writing the actual script. It’s amazingly well done for that many hands being involved. 

So let’s talk about this episode to the Deep Space Nine.

It would digitally insert the performers from this series into the original  episode. I’m still amazed after watching a half dozen times how well they did this.  I’ve watched both shows back-to-back several times, which is well worth doing as they did a stellar job of making the DS9 characters work seamlessly in the old episode. (I know they weren’t actually there but still think they are there.) 

It was because of the complexity of these digital interactions, and may other things, the single longest shooting of any Trek episode. Just creating the footage for the fight with the Klingons in the bar would take almost a full week to shoot due to the number of separate shots involved, the complexity of staging, and other minor details.

And everyone loved that they brought Charlie Brill back to film new scenes. 

Every detail possible was attended to. The original model of station K-7 was long lost by the time this episode was being shot so the model here was created by watching the original episode over and over until they got just right says the modeling staff. Yes, almost everything here isn’t digital. 

For their model of the Enterprise, the staff consulted sketches made for the original series and had a special set of plans made for the new model’s construction. They couldn’t use the original model in Smithsonian as the restoration over the decades had altered the way it looked. 

I think can best have its attitude summed up in this conversation…

Sisko to Bashir: “Don’t you know anything about this period in time?” 

Bashir: I’m a doctor, not an historian.”

Dax in her red short skirt: “In the old days, operations officers wore red, command officers wore gold… (Looks at her outfit.) “And women wore less. I think I’m going to like history.” 

No wonder it got nominated for a Hugo at a LoneStarCon 2 but lost out to Babylon 5’s “Severed Dreams”. I personally think it should’ve won. 

Critics loved it. Really. Truly. They all turned into fanboys.  

Paramount promoted the episode by arranging the placement of around a quarter million tribbles in subways and buses across the United States. Anyone see one of these? 

A note: In the original episode, after Kirk opens the cargo hold door and is showered in tribbles, lone tribbles continue to fall on him one by one, every minute or so, for the rest of the scene. This episode provides the explanation as to why this happens: Sisko and Dax are hiding in the cargo hold, scanning all the tribbles and then tossing them out the door. Very neat.

It like almost everything Trek is available on Paramount+. 

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) SANS CULOTTES. “Kathryn Hahn Receives Award For Historic Marvel Nudity” — Giant Freakin Robot has coverage (well, not exactly).

Agatha All Along has proven to be one of the better Disney+ MCU shows, one featuring quirky characters, a fun cast, and plenty of dark laughs. All of these would be great reasons to tune in, but the first episode featured an additional incentive: our lead actor getting naked and flashing audiences her rear end. Recently, Jennifer Hudson decided to reward Kathryn Hahn for her fearless Marvel nudity with an (ahem) cheeky plaque that reads “First Woman To Show Butt in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.”

Before giving the star her award, Jennifer Hudson asked the Agatha All Along star if she realized she was “the first woman to show butt in the Marvel Cinematic Universe?” Kathryn Hahn clarified that she didn’t know that ditching her clothes was making Marvel history but that she is now happy to share this honor with Chris Hemsworth, who showed off his own godly glutes in Thor: Love and Thunder. “Thor and me,” Hahn quipped before receiving her plaque, “just our butts encased in gold — that’s my dream.”…

(13) CANCEL THE PARADE. John Barrowman says the announcement is fake:

If for some reason you want to see the fake news item at its source – click this Facebook link.

TORCHWOOD RETURNS!!! JOHNATHAN GROFF!!!

Prepare for an epic return in Torchwood Rogues as Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) and Gwen Cooper (Eve Myles) team up with Rogue (Johnathan Groff), a mysterious new character from Doctor Who. This eight-episode series, produced and directed by Russell T Davies, promises thrilling adventures and unexpected twists. Premiering in November 2024 exclusively on Disney+, Torchwood Rogues is a must-watch event from BBC Studios.…

(14) THE LESSON OF HAL. At Collider: “’It Warns Us What Happens If We Allow AI Into Our Universe’: Ridley Scott Explains How ‘2001 A Space Odyssey’ Predetermined The Future”.

RIDLEY SCOTT: I think Kubrick did a film that predetermines everything by 50 years with AI. He did 2001 [A Space Odyssey]. 2001 is an act of genius because it warns us what happens if we allow AI into our universe. It will take over, and all it has to do is switch [cellphones] off, and you’ve got chaos. It could switch that off for fun. If I’m gonna design an AI, I’m gonna say, “Okay, the first job for you is I want you to design another AI smarter than you are.” By the time you’re done with that, we’re in deep shit.

(15) RADIO DAYS. “NASA’s Voyager finally phoned home with a device unused since 1981” reports Mashable.

…Voyager’s problem began on Oct. 16, when flight controllers sent the robotic explorer a somewhat routine command to turn on a heater. Two days later, when NASA expected to receive a response from the spacecraft, the team learned something tripped Voyager’s fault protection system, which turned off its X-band transmitter. By Oct. 19, communication had altogether stopped. 

The flight team was not optimistic. 

However, Voyager 1 was equipped with a backup that relies on a different, albeit significantly fainter, frequency. No one knew if the second radio transmitter could still work, given the aging spacecraft’s extreme distance. Days later, engineers with the Deep Space Network, a system of three enormous radio dish arrays on Earth, found the signal whispering back over the S-band transmitter. The device hadn’t been used since 1981, according to NASA. 

“The team is now working to gather information that will help them figure out what happened and return Voyager 1 to normal operations,” NASA said in a recent mission update….

(16) THE UNDERWATER WAY TO OZ. “Scientists Found a ‘Yellow Brick Road’ at The Bottom of The Pacific Ocean” says ScienceAlert. You can get a good look beginning around 1:34 of the video below.

An expedition to a deep-sea ridge, just north of the Hawaiian Islands, revealed a surprise discovery back in 2022: an ancient dried-out lake bed paved with what looks like a yellow brick road.

The eerie scene was chanced upon by the exploration vessel Nautilus, while surveying the Liliʻuokalani ridge within Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument (PMNM).

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Steven H Silver, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, 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 Joe H.]

Pixel Scroll 5/7/24 Of Course It’s Not Real. You Think I’d Be Scrolling Here If I Could Afford A Real Pixel?

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(1) NEBULA AWARDS TOASTMASTER NAMED. Sarah Gailey, Nebula and Hugo finalist, will serve as toastmaster for SFWA’s 59th Annual Nebula Awards® Ceremony. The ceremony will take place in Pasadena, CA on June 8, 2024. The organization will be livestreaming the ceremony on YouTube.

Sarah Gailey

Sarah Gailey is a Hugo Award Winning and Bestselling author of speculative fiction, short stories, and essays. They have been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards for multiple years running. Their bestselling adult novel debut, Magic For Liars, was published by Tor Books in 2019. Their most recent novel, Just Like Home, and most recent original comic book series with BOOM! Studios, Know Your Station are available now. Their shorter works and essays have been published in Mashable, The Boston Globe, Vice, Tor.com, and The Atlantic. Their work has been translated into seven different languages and published around the world.

Honoring 2023’s outstanding SFF genre works, the Nebula Awards Ceremony will be a highlight of the hybrid 2024 SFWA Nebula Conference, taking place June 6-9, 2024, online and at the Westin Pasadena in Pasadena, CA. Aspiring and professional storytellers in the speculative fiction genres may benefit from attending the entire professional development weekend full of panels and networking opportunities.

Tickets for the Nebula Awards Ceremony banquet, which precedes the ceremony itself, are also available. Queries and banquet tickets may be purchased by emailing events@sfwa.org or visiting events.sfwa.org.

(2) SAMUEL R. DELANY PRIDE MONTH Q&A SCHEDULED. Author Samuel R. Delany will be interviewed live in Philadelphia in June: “Pride Month: How Science Fiction Dances to the Music of Time”. Saturday, June 15, 2024. 3:30 p.m. Eastern. In the Music Department at Parkway Central Library (1901 Vine Street (between 19th and 20th Streets on the Parkway), Philadelphia, PA 19103).

Samuel R. Delany

“A visionary novelist & a revolutionary chronicler of gay life” (The New Yorker), Samuel R. Delany speaks with Music Department library trainee & Hollywood indie film composer Mark Inchoco on the intersections between science fiction & music. Hear how great musicians, librettists, & musical events such as Cab Calloway, Pete Seeger, the Newport Folk Festival, Igor Stravinsky, Bob Dylan, Samuel Barber, Leontyne Price, & Macy Gray came into Delany’s art & life.

In conversation with Mark Inchoco, library trainee, conductor, & Hollywood indie film composer

Samuel R. Delany is a novelist, literary critic, & emeritus professor. He is the winner of four Nebula Awards, two Hugo Awards, the William Whitehead Memorial Award for lifetime contribution to gay & lesbian literature, & the Anisfield-Wolf book award. He was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2002. In 2013, he was named the 31st Damon Knight Memorial Foundation Grand Master by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America.

Delany’s novels include Babel-17, The Einstein Intersection, Nova, & Dhalgren. His collection, Tales of Nevèrÿon, contains the first novel-length story to address the AIDS crisis. His 2007 novel Dark Reflections won the Stonewall Book Award. He is the author of the widely taught Times Square Red / Times Square Blue, & his book-length autobiographical essay, The Motion of Light in Water, won a Hugo Award in 1989. His interview in The Paris Review’s “Art of Fiction” series appeared in spring 2012. In 2015 he was the recipient of the Nicolas Guillén Award for philosophical fiction. Delany retired from teaching literature & creative writing at Temple University at the end of 2015. He lives in Philadelphia with his partner, Dennis Rickett.

Mark Inchoco is a composer, conductor, & music librarian from Port Richmond. His film scores were screened at the Academy Award & BAFTA qualifying LA Shorts Festival & the Newport Beach Film Festival. His compositions were performed in the U.S. & Europe. In 2018, Inchoco was the first music historian laureate of the Cité Internationale des Arts by the French Republic. Currently, he is assistant conductor of the Lower Merion Symphony. Inchoco holds degrees in English & historical musicology from Temple & the University of California, Riverside.

Location: Montgomery Auditorium

(3) TIME’S UP. Variety has snaps of last night’s J.G. Ballard-themed event: “Met Gala 2024 Red Carpet Photos: The Best Celebrity Looks”. View the photo gallery at the link.

The theme of “The Garden of Time” is drawn from J.G. Ballard’s 1962 short story of the same name. The garden party theme is already in full bloom as the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s stairway is adorned with hundreds of fake flowers. This gala complements the Met’s current exhibit, “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion.”

The exhibit “which opened for press previews on Monday morning, features approximately 250 rare items drawn from the Institute’s permanent collection. Spanning over 400 years of fashion history, the pieces include designs by Schiaparelli, Dior, Givenchy, and more.”

(4) SF ENCYCLOPEDIA’S LATEST CENSUS. Yesterday John Clute delivered Facebook readers “Another periodic ruthless Encyclopedia of Science Fiction blurb”.

We’ve just gone over 7,000,000 words, almost 10 times the length of the 1979 edition, more than 5 times longer than 1993. We’re still a dozen short of 20,000 entries but hey. Have also reached 34,000 scans in the Picture Gallery, most of them of first editions (but also retitlings and revisions). We are homing in on 250,000 internal hyperlinks, way better than double the 2011 figure, when we went online with Gollancz.

—We’ll never change our title, which has been in our bones early and late, but our entries today do reflect the fact that genre sf is now a large raft in a huger flood….

(5) ON GENDER IN BAUM. Abigail Arnold analyzes “B-Sides: L. Frank Baum’s ‘The Enchanted Island of Yew’” at Public Books.

…The Enchanted Island of Yew (published in 1903, early in his Oz phase) stands out by any account. Yet this matter-of-fact tale of gender transformation has never received the buzz accorded to Baum’s more famous series. Perhaps what is most laudable about the book, in retrospect, is the unconcerned tone with which the narrative presents the subversive “gender trouble” at its heart.

The gender agnosticism of Baum’s work contrasts noticeably to the priorities of the world around him. In his 1906 children’s fantasy John Dough and the Cherub, Chick the Cherub, a young child, is never assigned a gender. When Baum’s publishers came after him about this, he allegedly replied, “I cannot remember that Chick the Cherub impressed me as other than a joyous, sweet, venturesome and loveable child. Who cares whether it is a boy or a girl?”1 Bad timing: in an era rife with threatening jeremiads about “the New Woman” and pressure on men to trade domesticity for adventure tales and sporting life,2 the publishers were dissatisfied with casual gender ambiguity. They launched a contest for child readers, offering prize money for the best answers as to whether Chick was a boy or a girl and why.3

Baum himself, though, did not succumb. While the world around him fixated on gender and instilled the ideas of conventional gender presentation in children from a young age—to the point of paying them to go along!—gender play is just one element among many that makes up his fantasy worlds….

(6) BEHIND CLOSED DOORS? “The Complicated Ethics of Rare-Book Collecting” in The Atlantic. Paywall surmounted, courtesy Brad Verter.

…The dilemma regarding the ethical placement of a rare book isn’t convoluted for Tom Lecky, who was the head of the rare-books and manuscripts department at the auction firm Christie’s for 17 years and now runs Riverrun Books & Manuscripts. When I mentioned the Hemingway manuscript of “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” that sold for $248,000 at Christie’s back in 2000, he pointed out that institutions had had “every bit the opportunity to buy it as a private individual.” Other singular works that have been up for auction are James Joyce’s “Circe” manuscript, Sylvia Plath’s personally annotated Bible, a serial printing of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the National Era newspaper, and the proofs of that first Great Gatsby dust jacket. In each case, I was captivated by their fate. The National Library of Ireland bought Joyce’s manuscript for $1.5 million and digitized it; Plath’s Bible went to an undisclosed buyer for about $11,000; so did the newspapers, for $126,000. Nobody placed a winning bid for the Gatsby cover art.

For Lecky, the ethical question we should be asking isn’t whether institutions should acquire rare books instead of collectors, but what happens when “a private owner owns something that no one knows that they have.” Lecky, like many others in the trade, works to dispel myths about how private collections work. Private collections tend to be temporary and books often jump between hands, but for the time that a collector owns a book, in my view, they should make efforts to share it. “Most collectors don’t think of it as possession but caretaking,” Lecky said. “They’re a piece of the chain in the provenance, not the end of it.”…

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born May 7, 1922 — Darren McGavin. (Died 2006.) How could I possibly resist doing the Birthday of Darren McGavin?

Before we get to very obvious reason why I’m doing him, let’s look at some of his other genre and perhaps not-so-genre work.

I’m fairly sure his earliest genre role was in the Tales of Tomorrow anthology series as Bruce Calvin in “The Duplicates” episode which was over seventy years ago. I’m reasonably sure that his next genre role is a decade later in Witchcraft in a major role as Fred. 

He has a lot of genre appearances, some of which I’ll note here. He’s in A Man from U.N.C.L.E. as Victor Karmak in “The Deadly Quest Affair” and yes, I remember him in that episode; the same year he shows up in Mission: Impossible as J. Richard Taggart in “The Seal”; several years later, he’d be in the pilot of Six Million Dollar Man as Oliver Spencer. I never did really get into that series, or that spin-off one. And he’s even in The Martian Chronicles as Sam Parkhill.  

He was also I think, and let me now go check, yes he was, in the first television series featuring  Mike Hammer as that character in Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer serieswhich was the  syndicated television series based on Spillane’s series. Though it only ran from January 7, 1958 through November 28, 1959, it had seventy-six half-hour episodes.  

Darren McGavin as Kolchak.

Fifty-one years ago, ABC aired The Night Stalker, the first of two films that preceded Kolchak: The Night Stalker series, the other being The Night Strangler. I’m reasonably sure that I’m seen them though I can’t remember seeing them. This is a casting decision when Darren McGavin was the only performer considered for the role. 

And oh did he ever settle into the role of Chicago reporter Carl Kolchak who investigates mysterious incidents. He encountered, to name some of his stories that his Editor didn’t believe, an alien stranded on Earth, a prehistoric ape-man created  from cell samples, vampires (of course he had to given the original character in the novel did), mummies, and a zombie. Even an android. I thought they did the headless motorcycle rider rather well. 

His character originated in an unpublished novel, The Kolchak Papers, written by Jeff Rice about a Vegas newspaper reporter named Carl Kolchak tracks down and defeats a serial killer who turns out to be a vampire. Yes, the novel is not available as an epub. And Rice wrote yet more novels based on this series.

What I hadn’t realized some fifty years on from first seeing it as a teenager and some thirty years since I last saw it was that of 26 episodes ordered, only 20 were produced. I could’ve sworn that I saw more episodes than that! There was a 2005 revival of 10 episodes, only 6 of which aired before ABC cancelled it due to abysmally bad ratings.

Carter wanted McGavin to appear as Kolchak in The X-Files, but McGavin was very adamant that he would not reprise the character for the series. However he would appear in several episodes as Arthur Dales, a retired FBI agent who was supposed to be the “father of the X-Files”. 

In the third episode of the 2016 revival series, a character prominently featured in the “Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster” episode is conspicuously attired in Kolchak’s trademark seersucker jacket, black knit tie, and straw hat. Why so, you ask? Well, you should ask. 

The episode can trace its origin back to a script entitled “The M Word” episode of the the Night Stalker. X-File’s executive producer Frank Spotnitz’s was also the executive producer for that series. So that script was reworked by a different writer into this script with Kolchak being given a nod.

The series is airing Peacock for free or Amazon for $1.99 an episode. Peacock has a lot of SF like Farscape, Primeval, the original Quantum Leap  and the now-cancelled reboot series, and Warehouse 13. Oh, and Columbo as well. I know it’s not genre, but I thought I’d mention it. Alas McGavin never appeared in a Columbo mystery. Too bad.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) REPLICANTS RETURNING. “Michelle Yeoh to Star in ‘Blade Runner 2099’ Series at Amazon” reports Variety.

The “Blade Runner” series in the works at Amazon Prime Video has cast Michelle Yeoh in a lead role, Variety has learned.

The series, titled “Blade Runner 2099,” was ordered at Amazon in September 2022. It serves as a sequel to both the original “Blade Runner” film and the followup film, “Blade Runner 2049.” Exact plot details are being kept under wraps, but sources say Yeoh will play a character named Olwen, described as a replicant near the end of her life…

(10) IT’S A PREQUEL AND A SEQUEL. But not a breath mint. Walt Disney Studios dropped a teaser trailer for Mufasa: The Lion King, in theaters December 20.

A lion who would change our lives forever. #Mufasa: The Lion King. “Mufasa: The Lion King” enlists Rafiki to relay the legend of Mufasa to young lion cub Kiara, daughter of Simba and Nala, with Timon and Pumbaa lending their signature schtick. Told in flashbacks, the story introduces Mufasa as an orphaned cub, lost and alone until he meets a sympathetic lion named Taka—the heir to a royal bloodline. The chance meeting sets in motion an expansive journey of an extraordinary group of misfits searching for their destiny—their bonds will be tested as they work together to evade a threatening and deadly foe.

(11) REALLY HARD SF. When you make the science hard enough, most science fiction goes out the window. But not all of it. “The Movies That Confronted the Scariest Challenges of Space Travel” at Den of Geek.

Space is great. It’s massive, it’s colorful, and you can have big fights with lasers there. It really does have everything you could want. But it also has problems—mainly, like we said, that it’s massive. In fact it’s so massive that if you want to go anywhere in it (apart from a few nearby planets with hardly anyone to shoot lasers at), by the time you get there, you’re dead. Now you might think that if you can just go fast enough, you’ll get there before you die, but there’s a problem.

That problem, as Albert Einstein tells us, is the speed of light….

Here’s one of the films that Den of Geek gives a passing grade:

Interstellar (2014) 

Christopher Nolan’s space exploration flick is probably the most famous take on time dilation. It is, it has to be said, a film that has done its homework. Although it uses a wormhole to get our astronauts into outer space, a combination of speed and veering too close to serious gravity wells means that decades pass at home while only a short time passes on board the ship. As well as portraying some of the realities of time dilation, this movie also gave us our most scientifically accurate visualization yet of a black hole.

It also, admirably, does not insist on a magic backward-time-travel fudge to restore a familial status quo at the end. The film ends with Matthew McConaughey reunited with his daughter, who is now an old lady, and there is no question of magically reversing that to let him watch her grow up. But even here, the scientifically accurate black hole allows Matthew McConaughey to send a message backward in time to his daughter’s childhood because of the cosmic power of love, or something, making the entire plot into a bootstrap paradox.

(12) QUANTUM CLICKBAIT. “’Warp drives’ may actually be possible someday, new study suggests” – well, not exactly, admits Space.com.

…Alcubierre published his idea in Classical and Quantum Gravity. Now, a new paper in the same journal suggests that a warp drive may not require exotic negative energy after all.

“This study changes the conversation about warp drives,” lead author Jared Fuchs, of the University of Alabama, Huntsville and the research think tank Applied Physics, said in a statement. “By demonstrating a first-of-its-kind model, we’ve shown that warp drives might not be relegated to science fiction.”

The team’s model uses “a sophisticated blend of traditional and novel gravitational techniques to create a warp bubble that can transport objects at high speeds within the bounds of known physics,” according to the statement. 

Understanding that model is probably beyond most of us; the paper’s abstract, for example, says that the solution “involves combining a stable matter shell with a shift vector distribution that closely matches well-known warp drive solutions such as the Alcubierre metric.”

The proposed engine could not achieve faster-than-light travel, though it could come close; the statement mentions “high but subluminal speeds.” 

This is a single modeling study, so don’t get too excited….

(13) ONE FOOT AT A TIME. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] How is Superman like you? According to the first official photo from the upcoming reboot movie, when he’s getting dressed it’s how he, um, re-boots. 

David Corenswet, 30, stars in the first official photo from the upcoming Superman reboot, directed by James Gunn. 

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

Pixel Scroll 9/15/22 One Fist Science Fiction, The Other Fantasy, If The Right One Don’t Get You, Then The Left One Will

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(1) JUSTICE FOR SYLVIA ANDERSON. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Last night’s BBC Radio 4 arts programme, Front Row, devoted a substantive amount of time to the airbrushing of Sylvia Anderson from Anderson productions by Gerry Anderson and then the Anderson estate. This included unlawful contracts that lost her many years of royalties. Absolutely shocking. “Richard Eyre’s The Snail House; Sylvia Anderson and women in TV; the late Jean-Luc Godard”.

The name Sylvia Anderson was recently invoked by Dr. Lisa Cameron MP, during a debate on gender equality in the media in Westminster Hall. The late Sylvia Anderson was a pioneer in the male dominated world of television, co-creating Thunderbirds in the 1960s with her then husband Gerry. But her family say her name has often been omitted from credits and merchandise in the years since then. Samira speaks to Sylvia’s daughter Dee Anderson and Dame Heather Rabbatts, Chair of Time’s Up UK, who are campaigning for her legacy to be restored and to Barbara Broccoli, producer of the James Bond films, who remembers Sylvia as her mentor.

(2) PIECES OF CHICON 8. In episode 66 of the Octothorpe podcast, “Thank You, Steven”, John Coxon is in the fanzine lounge, Alison Scott is under a bison hat, and Liz Batty is good, thank you.

We chat to people in the fanzine lounge at Chicon 8. (Sorry about the background noise, and normal service resumes next week.)

Alt text. A purple square with “OCTOTHORPE 66” written at the bottom and inset, a photograph of John, Alison, and Liz. John is wearing a grey suit with a Hugo Award finalist pin and a matching purple tie and mask; Alison is wearing a black mask, a burgundy dress, and has glitter on her temple, and Liz is wearing a green dress and matching mask, a necklace by Vanessa Applegate, and a yellow shrug. They are against a backdrop which has alternating Hugo Award logos and Chicon 8 logos.

(3) ABOUT WORKSHOPS. Morgan Hazelwood shares notes about the Chicon 8 panel “Is a Writer’s Workshop Right For Me?” at Morgan Hazelwood: Writer In Progress.

Whether you’ve been writing for a while or dreaming of getting away and actually having time to write, many of us have wondered if a writer’s workshop was right for us.

At WorldCon 80, otherwise known as ChiCon8, I attended the panel: The Writing Workshop Workshop where moderator Erin Underwood led panelists Ian Muneshwar, Tegan Moor, James Patrick Kelly, and Caroline M Yoachim in a discussion aimed at answering that very question….

Hazelwood also presents the information in this YouTube video.

(4) TAKING COUNSEL OF THEIR FEARS. [Item by Cora Buhlert.] The Atlantic has an interesting article about the backlash against casting actors of color in The Rings of Power, House of the Dragon, Sandman and all sorts of other things: “Fear of a Black Hobbit”.

Maybe you’ve heard that people are mad about Black actors being cast in Lord of the Rings. Or Game of Thrones. Or maybe it was Star Wars. Or perhaps Thor. Wait, maybe it was Titans, or Superman. The Witcher? Or maybe you heard that people are angry that Black Panther got made in the first place, because Wakanda is fictional, unlike one of those fantasy countries authors seem to think will seem more mysterious if you add enough accents or apostrophes, like Warthéréth’rién. (I just made that up.) Maybe you’re wondering why adults care about a Disney mermaid being Black.

Earlier this month, CNN published a news story featuring an interview with Brandon Morse, an editor for the right-wing website RedState, in which he complained that Amazon’s new Lord of the Rings show, The Rings of Power, is integrated: “He says ‘The Rings of Power’ producers have cast non-White actors in a story based on European culture and who look wildly different from how Tolkien originally described them,” CNN reported. “He says it’s an attempt to embed ‘social justice politics’ into Tolkien’s world.” Morse told CNN that “if you focus on introducing modern political sentiments, such as the leftist obsession with identity issues that only go skin deep, then you’re no longer focusing on building a good story.”

It’s worth noting how rapidly right-wing language about colorblind meritocracy melts away when it does not produce the desired results. Perhaps the actors cast were simply the most qualified? …

(5) RELATED WORK. Cora Buhlert’s new “Non-Fiction Spotlight” is about Story Matrices: Cultural Encoding and Cultural Baggage in Science Fiction and Fantasy a fascinating book about storytelling, writing, and worldbuilding by Gillian Polack.

What prompted you to write/edit this book?

Because I’m addicted to story, I wondered just how much of our invisible culture we carried in in the way we tell stories. I began to look at the world building we do and the paths we take when we tell stories and read them. What is the difference between story space for the reader and story space for the writer and, indeed, story space for the editor? As I addressed these questions, I discovered how very powerful genre literature is in our lives. Even those who have never read a science fiction novel have experienced the narratives we tell and the cultural material we embed into our stories.

I wanted to explain this: that genre literature is a powerful, powerful force, that culture is transmitted through story, that we can all think about story and through that thought have more control over what we accept from story. We can, in short, choose not to be bigots….

(6) WHAT’S AHEAD IN THE DESIGN FIELD? Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination’s  event “Designing the Future with Applied Sci-Fi” will take place on Thursday, September 29, from 12:00-1:00 p.m. Eastern. Panelists include design fiction pioneer Julian Bleecker, speculative designer Anab Jain, narrative designer Alex McDowell, strategic foresight practitioner Radha Mistry, and futurist Brian David Johnson. The event will also feature opening remarks from the renowned science fiction (and nonfiction) author Bruce Sterling.

The event is the second in a series for the Applied Sci-Fi Project at ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination, which seeks to understand the influence of science fiction on technology and the people who build it, and to study the ways that sci-fi storytelling can a tool for innovation and foresight. 

 The event is free and open to everyone. Here is the registration link.

(7) TAKING ANOTHER CUT AT IT. The Hollywood Reporter declares,  “Amazon’s ‘Blade Runner’ TV Series Officially Happening”.

Amazon’s Prime Video has given the green light to Blade Runner 2099, a limited series sequel to the iconic sci-fi film franchise. The series comes from Amazon Studios and Alcon Entertainment, which holds the rights to Blade Runner. Ridley Scott, who directed the classic 1982 film, will executive produce through his Scott Free Productions, while Silka Luisa (Apple TV+’s Shining Girls) will serve as showrunner….

Amazon announced it was developing Blade Runner 2099 in February. Its title implies it will be set 50 years after 2017’s film sequel Blade Runner 2049, directed by Denis Villeneuve, but story details are being kept quiet for now. The series will be the first live-action treatment of Blade Runner for TV; Adult Swim aired an anime series titled Blade Runner: Black Lotus that debuted in November 2021….

(8) A FONT OF KNOWLEDGE. Camestros Felapton is doing a highly scientific study to show that you can predict the genre of a book by the type face used on the cover. “The sans-serif genre axis part 2”. He’s not high, just his science is.

… “Science Fiction typically uses sans-serif fonts for titles” is a defensible claim — the proportion is high and the spread is relatively narrow compared with other genres….

(9) OUR MAN FLINT. The Alternate Historian does a beautiful tribute to the late author: “1632 by Eric Flint: What If Time Traveling Hillbillies Saved Europe?”.

Alternate historians love stranding people and places in the past because we want to see what happens when technology and ideas from the present are unleashed on earlier eras. And one novel would revolutionize these kind of stories and launch a new community of writers.

(10) MARGARET ANN BASTA (1951—2022). Margaret Basta who, with her twin sister Laura, published some of the earliest Star Trek fanzines, was found dead in her home on September 4. She was 69. Margaret was active in Detroit fandom in the Seventies, belonging to the Wayne Third Foundation. She and Laura were founders and officers of the Star Trek Association for Revival (S.T.A.R.). (Laura was nominated for a Best Fan Writer Hugo in 1974.) Margaret was later involved in Beauty and the Beast fandom.

Margaret died without provisions or funds for her burial and a friend has started a GoFundMe to pay for her burial expenses.

Hi, I’m Jan Feldmann; my best friend Margaret Basta died unexpectedly earlier this month. She left no provisions for a funeral or burial and her family cannot handle the expense. I loved her dearly for 50 years and want to see her ashes buried with dignity at Holy Sepulchre cemetary in Southfield MI. She was one of the first original Star Trek fans and organized several early ST fan conventions. She wrote fan fiction, collected and sold vintage jewelry, had a huge circle of friends all over the country, and made a lasting impression on countless people. Margaret was a wonderful lady and I hope you can help her on her final journey. $1500 will pay for the cremation and internment at Holy Sepulchre cemetary.

(11) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.  

1991 – [By Cat Eldridge.] Eerie, Indiana series

You remember Joe Dante who has served us such treats as the Gremlin films, a segment of the Twilight Zone: The Movie (“It’s A Good Life”) and, errr, Looney Tunes: Back in Action? (I’ll forgive him for that because he’s a consultant on HBO Max prequel series Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai.)

And Dante was the creative consultant and director on a weird little horror SF series thirty-one years ago on NBC called Eerie, Indiana. Yes, delightfully weird. It was created by José Rivera and Karl Schaefer. For both it would be their first genre undertaking, though they would have a starry future, their work including Eureka, Goosebumps, The Jungle Book: Mowgli’s Story and Strange Luck to name but a few genre series that they’d work on in a major capacity. 

SPOILER ALERT! REALLY I’M SERIOUS, GO AWAY

Hardly anyone there is normal. Or even possibly of this time and space. We have super intelligent canines bent on global domination, a man who might be the Ahab, and, in this reality, Elvis never died, and Bigfoot is fond of the forest around this small town. 

There’s even an actor doomed to keep playing the same role over and over and over again, that of a mummy. They break the fourth wall and get him into a much happier film. Tony Jay played this actor.

Yes, they broke the fourth wall. That would happen again in a major way that I won’t detail here. 

END SPOILER ALERT. YOU CAN COME BACK NOW. 

It lasted but nineteen episodes as ratings were very poor. 

Critics loved it. I’m quoting only one due to its length: “Scripted by Karl Schaefer and José Rivera with smart, sharp insights; slyly directed by feature film helmsman Joe Dante; and given edgy life by the show’s winning cast, Eerie, Indiana shapes up as one of the fall season’s standouts, a newcomer that has the fresh, bracing look of Edward Scissorhands and scores as a clever, wry presentation well worth watching.”

It won’t surprise you that at Rotten Tomatoes, that audience reviewers give it a rating of eighty-eight percent. 

It is streaming on Amazon Prime, Disney+ and legally on YouTube. Yes legally on the latter. 

(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born September 15, 1922 — Bob Anderson. He was the swordmaster who played Darth Vader in his fight scenes in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. He replaced David Prowse due to the actor’s unfortunate tendency to break lightsabers. Because of the height differences—Anderson was six one while Prowse was six inches taller, Anderson’s scenes were filmed from a lower angle to make him seem taller, or he stood on some small stilts or wore platform shoes. Anderson later did swordfighting choreography and training for films such as The Lord of the Rings trilogy (with Christopher Lee), the Zorro movies with Antonio Banderas and Die Another Day with stunt performer Jim Dowdall. (Died 2022.)
  • Born September 15, 1924 — Henry Silva, 98. Here for his genre work —  Buck Rogers in the 25th Century as Kane, Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold as Argon, Amazon Women on the Moon as Himself (the “Bullshit or Not” segment, Cyborg – Il guerriero d’acciaio as ‘Hammer’, and Dick Tracy as ‘Influence’.
  • Born September 15, 1925 — Carlos Rambaldi. Wnner of three Oscars: one Special Achievement Academy Award for Best Visual Effects in Seventies version of King Kong, and two Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects of Alien and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. He is best remembered for his work in those two last mentioned films, that is for the mechanical head-effects for the creature in Alien and the design of the title character of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. He designed the Worms in Dune. (Died 2012.)
  • Born September 15, 1940 — Norman Spinrad, 82. I’ll admit that the only novel I’ve read by him is Bug Jack Barron. My bad. And I was fascinated to learn he wrote the script for Trek’s “The Doomsday Machine” episode which is an amazing story. So how is it that he’s never won a Hugo? 
  • Born September 15, 1943 — John M. Faucette. Published five novels and one short story. He left seven unpublished novels in various states of completion at his death. Two of his novels; Crown of Infinity and Age of Ruin, were published in the Ace Doubles series. None of his works are in print in digital or paper format currently including his Black Science Fiction anthology which he as an African-American SF writer was very proud of. (Died 2003.)
  • Born September 15, 1956 — Elton T. Elliott, 66. Editor, publisher, reviewer. His solo fiction debut was “Lighting Candles on the River Styx” in Amazing (March 1991). His early novel-length work appeared in the 1980s in collaboration with Richard E.Geis under the pseudonym Richard Elliott. He edited Science Fiction Review from 1990 to 1992 which, yes, I remember reading at the time. 
  • Born September 15, 1960 — Kevin Roche, 62. Chaired Worldcon 76 in San Jose (2018). Prior to that he co-chaired Westercon 66 in Sacramento in 2013 and chaired Costume-Con 26 in San José in 2008. He’s a veteran costumer and masquerade emcee, who co-directed the 2011 Worldcon’s Masquerade as well as Masquerades at Anime Los Angeles, Westercon, and BayCon. Roche is a research scientist at IBM Research Almaden. He also was editor of Yipe! The Costume Fanzine of Record.
  • Born September 15, 1962 — Jane Lindskold, 60. My first encounter with her was through the Zelazny novel she finished, Donnerjack. It’s excellent though how much is Zelazny is open to vigorous debate. Of her own novels, I recommend The Buried Pyramid, Child of a Rainless Year and Asphodel as being very good. 

(13) COMICS SECTION.

  • Agnes has some pecadillos as a author that make me wonder if she’s a relative of Writer X. It seems even more possible after reading this later strip.
  • Lio shows that sometimes nature calls from very faraway places.
  • The Far Side offers wordplay of mythic proportions.  

(14) STUMPERS. In the Washington Post, Michael Cavna interviews Randall Munroe on how he went from being a NASA roboticist to an answerer of weird questions. “The world’s funniest former NASA roboticist will take your questions”.

…Other “What If? 2” situations ring of the perilous: What are your chances of death-by-geyser at Yellowstone Park? What would the daily caloric human-intake needs be for a modern T. rex gone rogue in the boroughs of New York? And how catastrophic would it be if, as the children’s tune goes, all the raindrops were lemon drops and gumdrops?…

(15) CURRENT EVENTS. “Colonizing the Cosmos: Astor’s Electrical Future” at The Public Domain Review. “During America’s Gilded Age, the future seemed to pulse with electrical possibility. Iwan Rhys Morus follows the interplanetary safari that is John Jacob Astor’s A Journey in Other Worlds, a high-voltage scientific romance in which visions of imperialism haunt a supposedly ‘perfect’ future.”

…Luckily, one of them told us exactly how he imagined the century to come. In 1894, New York publishers D. Appleton and Company released A Journey in Other Worlds: A Romance of the Future, written by John Jacob Astor IV, one of America’s wealthiest men. The Astor clan had originally made their fortune in the fur trade, and had added to their millions through investment in land and property. In 1897, John Jacob would build the Astoria Hotel in New York, next door to the Waldorf, owned by his cousin William. The hotel was both a symbol of the Astor family’s wealth and a honeypot for New York’s fashionables (Tesla himself lived there until he was turfed out for failing to pay his bills). It’s Astor’s authorship that makes the book such a fascinating insight into the Gilded Age’s fantasies about its prosperous tomorrows….

(16) TURN OF THE SEASON. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] SF2 Concatenation’s autumnal edition is now up.

Fiction Reviews

Non-fiction SF/F & Popular Science

(17) SAY CHEESE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.]  “Webb telescope wows with first image of an exoplanet” in Nature.

The James Webb Space Telescope has taken its first picture of a planet beyond the Solar System — opening a window to understanding other worlds and underscoring the telescope’s immense capabilities.

The image (shown) is of a planet called HIP 65426 b, an object similar to Jupiter, but younger and hotter, that lies 107 parsecs from Earth in the constellation Centaurus. Although it looks like a pixelated light bulb, it is the first exoplanet image ever taken at deep infrared wavelengths, which allow astronomers to study the full range of a planet’s brightness and what it is made of (the star symbol marks HIP 65426 b’s star, whose light the telescope blocked).

“It gives us wavelengths we’ve never seen planets at before,” says Beth Biller, an astronomer at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and a member of the discovery team. The image was reported in a paper on a preprint server on 31 August (A. L. Carter et al. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.14990; 2022); the study has not been peer reviewed.

Astronomers know of more than 5,000 exoplanets, but they have taken pictures of only around 20. Imaging exoplanets directly is difficult, because they are often lost in the glare of the star around which they orbit.

But observing them at infrared wavelengths, as Webb does, helps to boost the contrast between star and planet. “You’re in the regime where planets are brightest and stars are dimmest,” says Aarynn Carter, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and lead author of the preprint.

(18) SICK IN UTAH. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Someone had too good a room party…. “The Jurassic vomit that stood the test of time” at Nature.

Some 150 million years ago, towards the end of the Jurassic period, an unknown but probably small creature threw up a recent meal inside a pond in what is now Utah1.

Over the ages, the puke’s contents were fossilized and remained untouched. That is, until they reached the hands of John Foster at the Utah Field House of Natural History State Park Museum in Vernal and his colleagues.

The researchers found the fossil at the ‘Jurassic Salad Bar’, a site where they’ve unearthed more than 300 fossilized plants. The specimen is small, not much larger than 1 square centimetre in area. But it’s densely packed with more than 20 undigested bones and some puzzling items that might well be soft tissues or part of the vomit material.

Some of the bones, including some vertebrae, possibly belonged to a tadpole. Others were once part of frogs. And a tiny femur might have come from a salamander. Given the contents and the setting they were found in, researchers strongly suspect that a fish might have been the one to throw them up.

(19) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In “Honest Trailers: 300th Episode,” the Screen Junkies’s EPIC Voice Guy salutes Ryan George for his 300th episode of “Pitch Meeting” by saying Ryan George is “the Canadian Ryan who doesn’t have six-pack abs.”  George gets to repeat all the catchphrases from every episode (including “super easy, barely an inconvience”) and says that after 300 episodes the producer and the writer have turned from “poorly developed characters” into “psychopaths.”

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

Pixel Scroll 6/26/22 You Read 16 Scrolls, What Do You Get?

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(1) SURVIVAL THROUGH STORIES. John Wiswell’s Locus Award acceptance speech is well worth a moment to read: “’That Story Isn’t The Story’ wins the Locus Award for Best Novelette! Plus, my acceptance speech.” at Patreon.

…“That Story Isn’t The Story” is about growing while our trauma lives on inside of us, and while the sources of our trauma continue to live on around us, and often pursue us and belittle us. It’s about surviving by controlling our own stories, and the breath of life that comes from someone believing in you.

I’m certainly sitting here in part because of such believers….

(2) NOT SOMETHING SHE CONSIDERED A PREDICTION. In “Margaret Atwood: The Court Is Making Gilead Real “ the author comments on the draft decision of the ruling that was released this week.

…In the early years of the 1980s, I was fooling around with a novel that explored a future in which the United States had become disunited. Part of it had turned into a theocratic dictatorship based on 17th-century New England Puritan religious tenets and jurisprudence. I set this novel in and around Harvard University—an institution that in the 1980s was renowned for its liberalism, but that had begun three centuries earlier chiefly as a training college for Puritan clergy.

In the fictional theocracy of Gilead, women had very few rights, as in 17th-century New England. The Bible was cherry-picked, with the cherries being interpreted literally. Based on the reproductive arrangements in Genesis—specifically, those of the family of Jacob—the wives of high-ranking patriarchs could have female slaves, or “handmaids,” and those wives could tell their husbands to have children by the handmaids and then claim the children as theirs.

Although I eventually completed this novel and called it The Handmaid’s Tale, I stopped writing it several times, because I considered it too far-fetched. Silly me. Theocratic dictatorships do not lie only in the distant past: There are a number of them on the planet today. What is to prevent the United States from becoming one of them?

For instance: It is now the middle of 2022, and we have just been shown a leaked opinion of the Supreme Court of the United States that would overthrow settled law of 50 years on the grounds that abortion is not mentioned in the Constitution, and is not “deeply rooted” in our “history and tradition.” True enough. The Constitution has nothing to say about women’s reproductive health. But the original document does not mention women at all….

(3) STAKING A CLAIM. Emily Temple offers “A Close Reading of the Best Opening Paragraph of All Time” at Literary Hub. Surprise: it isn’t the first paragraph of Pride and Prejudice.

One hundred and one years ago today, Shirley Jackson was born. During her lifetime, she wrote “The Lottery,” and The Haunting of Hill House, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the latter of which features what I consider to be the best first paragraph of all time, or at least of any novel that I have ever read. Here it is:

“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.”

It almost seems like overkill to explain why this paragraph is so wonderful…. 

(4) PRESENT AT THE CREATION. Here’s Rich Horton’s latest look at potential Hugo winners and nominees from the 1950s — this time, stories published in 1952 (first eligibility year of the Hugos): “Hugo Nomination Recommendations, 1953” from Strange at Ectbatan.

Continuing my project of suggesting potential Hugo nominees (and winners) for the early years of the Hugo — basically, pre-1958. Here’s a look at 1952. This is the year covered by the very first Hugos, from the 11th Worldcon, Philcon II, in Philadelphia, in September 1953. The only Fiction Hugo actually awarded went to Alfred Bester’s novel The Demolished Man. Apparently there were plans to name a Short Fiction winner, but there were insufficient votes….

(5) FANZINES ARCHIVED AT HARVARD. The article doesn’t have that much to say, but that it appears in Harvard Magazine might interest you: “The Geeky Underground”.

BEFORE HE WAS the acclaimed author of The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury was just another teenage boy with a science-fiction zine. Pronounced “zeen,” these self-published, often-low-budget magazines are staples in subcultures and underground movements—including punk-rock devotees, palindrome-writers, and the riot grrrl feminists of the 1990s—but the medium first got its start in the 1930s, in the bedrooms and basements of devout sci-fi fans. Their zines, which helped launch genre legends like Bradbury and Robert A. Heinlein, were handmade, wacky, and delightful. A single issue might house a hand-drawn comic titled “The Return of the Space Boggle,” a poem about a ghost with dry skin, and an epistle from a teenaged sci-fi author on “the various problems connected with space travel that make it difficult to write up sex properly.”…

(6) SFF NONFICTION. Cora Buhlert’s new Non-Fiction Spotlight introduces us to By Your Side: The First 100 Years of Yuri Anime and Manga by Erica Friedman: “Non-Fiction Spotlight: By Your Side: The First 100 Years of Yuri Anime and Manga by Erica Friedman”.

Some people claim that the reason that SFF-related non-fiction books have increasingly been crowded out of the Best Related Work category at the Hugos is that there are not enough non-fiction books published every year to fill the Hugo ballot. This is wrong, since there is a wide spectrum of non-fiction books covering every SFF-related subject imaginable released every year. Today’s featured non-fiction book proves how wide that spectrum truly is, because it is a book about the history of lesbian relationships as portrayed in manga and anime.

Therefore I’m thrilled to welcome Erica Friedman, author of By Your Side: The First 100 Years of Yuri Anime and Manga to my blog today.

Tell us about your book.

My book is By Your Side: The First 100 Years of Yuri Anime and Manga.

Lesbian-themed animation and comics (and related media), known as “Yuri,” is the newest genre of Japanese pop culture. Even though it’s only been acknowledged as a separate genre for a little over a decade, Yuri has a literary and artistic history that can be traced back to the early 20th century. My book is a series of interlocking lectures and essays that trace that history and bring the story of Yuri to the present. I cover key series and creators, as well as the efforts by creators and fans to carve out a space for ourselves in the larger Japanese pop culture fandom.

(7) CROMCAST PODCAST COVERAGE OF HOWARD DAYS. The good folks of The Cromcast have posted yet more recordings of the 2022 Robert E. Howard Days.

This recording from Friday, June 10th includes academic papers delivered by Drs. Dierk Guenther, Gabriel Mamola, and James McGlothlin. The panel is moderated by Dr. Jason Ray Carney.

This recording is from Friday, June 10th, and is from the Robert E. Howard Celebration Banquet. The guest of honor is Fred Malmberg, who shares comments and stories about his years in the gaming industry, as well as the influence of Robert E Howard on the history of gaming. The guest of honor is introduced by Rusty Burke.

For this recording, Josh and Luke are joined by various attendees for afterhours conversations on Friday, June 10th.

(8) BEYOND GAME OF THRONES. [Item by Cora Buhlert.] The Guardian has a very extensive interview with Emilia Clarke, which is easy to miss, because it was posted in the theatre section rather than the film or TV sections: “Emilia Clarke: ‘The best place in the world is backstage at a theatre’”.

…The actor is no stranger to the divisive power of art – on which more later – but the spare and lean production marks a pronounced change from the jobs she has done since being catapulted into superstardom by Game of Thrones in 2011. Following the phenomenally successful HBO series, in which she portrayed Daenerys Targaryen, Clarke has starred alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator Genisys, played Han Solo’s love interest in Solo: A Star Wars Story and dressed as an elf in Paul Feig’s Emma Thompson-scripted romcom Last Christmas. She has won a Bafta Britannia award and been nominated for numerous Emmy, Screen Actors Guild and Critics’ Choice awards; in 2019, she was one of Time’s 100 most influential people….

(9) WOULD THAT BE A TOTAL OF SIX BODIES? Two adaptations of The Three Body Problem are moving forward.

“The Three-Body Problem: New Chinese Trailer, Key Art Poster Released”. Bleeding Cool covers new publicity for the Chinese adapation – see the poster at the link.

The Three-Body Problem by Chinese author Liu Cixin is the Science Fiction trilogy that’s made the biggest splash in the 21st Century, and a TV series adaptation is highly anticipated by fans. Just this week, Chinese studio Tencent released a poster and the second trailer for the Chinese TV adaptation.

…The first trailer for the Chinese version of The Three-Body Problem was released back in November 2021. So far, no premiere date for the series has been announced. Reports on Chinese social media suggest that the series is currently being re-edited to get approval from government censors before a release date can be determined. That means the whole series has been shot….

In the U.S., The Hollywood Reporter named new members of the cast: “Netflix’s ‘3 Body Problem’ Casts Another ‘Game of Thrones’ Alum”.

The drama series adapted from Liu Cixin’s Hugo Award-winning trilogy has added four more actors to its sprawling ensemble, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.

Jonathan Pryce (The Crown), Rosalind Chao (Better Things), Ben Schnetzer (Y: The Last Man) and Eve Ridley (Peppa Pig) have joined the show….

(10) THIS FILM HAS NO DICK. Den of Geek’s Ryan Britt and the headline writer did not have a meeting of the minds about his post “Blade Runner Became a Sci-fi Classic by Being a Terrible Philip K. Dick Adaptation”.

The title of the 1982 film Blade Runner is taken directly from a book. Well, from two books: the 1979 novella Blade Runner (a movie) by William S. Burroughs, which, in turn, was based on the 1974 novel The Bladerunner by Alan E. Nourse. Both of those books are science fiction stories set in the near future, but have nothing to do with escaped androids. Instead, the movie’s plot is based on the 1968 novel by Philip K. Dick called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It’s tempting to say that Ridley Scott’s science fiction masterpiece took the name Blade Runner and slapped it on a Philip K. Dick story, but the truth is, Blade Runner succeeds because it’s not really an adaptation of anything…. 

(11) MEMORY LANE. 

1963 – [By Cat Eldridge.] So fifty-nine years ago on this evening, like peanut butter and chocolate two great monsters united when King Kong Vs. Godzilla premiered. Really would I kid you? (Well I would and you well know it, but that’s why for a different discussion, isn’t it?)

Not at all surprisingly, this Japanese kaiju film was directed by Ishirō Honda, with the special effects by Eiji Tsuburaya. Nine years previously, Honda directed and co-wrote Godzilla of which Tsuburaya is considered the co-creator. 

The script was Shinichi Sekizawa, mostly known, again not surprisingly, for his work on the Godzilla films but he did some other genre work such as Gulliver’s Travels Beyond the Moon and Jack and the Witch.  

It started out as a story outline written by King Kong stop motion animator Willis O’Brien in the early Sixties in which Kong battles a giant Frankenstein Monster. The idea was given to the Tojo film company without his permission and they decided Godzilla would be a bigger draw. 

An individual by the name of Merian C. Cooper filed a lawsuit against the film showing here claiming he had exclusive right to the King Kong character in the United States, a claim that the film distributor quickly refuted as it turned out many individuals did.

It had already been the single most popular Godzilla film in Japan before it showed here and remains so to date. It made nearly three million here, not bad considering its tiny budget of four hundred thousand— two men in suits don’t cost much, do they? — so the film made twenty times that in its first run. Monsters rock! 

The Hollywood Reporter liked it: “A funny monster picture? That’s what Universal has in “King Kong Versus Godzilla.” Though the New York Times noted “The one real surprise of this cheap reprise of earlier Hollywood and Japanese horror films is the ineptitude of its fakery. When the pair of prehistoric monsters finally get together for their battle royal, the effect is nothing more than a couple of dressed-up stuntmen throwing cardboard rocks at each other.”

Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes give a so-so rating of fifty six percent.

(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born June 26, 1904 — Peter Lorre. I think his first foray into genre was in the Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea film as Comm. Lucius Emery though he was in an Americanized version of Casino Royale as Le Chiffre which was an early Fifties episode of the Climax! series. (James Bond was called Jimmy. Ooh the horror!) Other genre roles were in Tales of Terror as Montresor in “The Black Cat” story, The Raven as Dr. Adolphus Bedlo and The Comedy of Terrors as Felix Grille. (Died 1964.)
  • Born June 26, 1910 — Elsie Wollheim. She was one of the original Futurians of New York, and assisted them in their publishing efforts, and even published Highpoints, her own one-off fanzine. She married Donald A. Wollheim in 1943. When he started DAW Books in 1972, she was the co-founder, and inherited the company when he died. Their daughter Elizabeth (Betsy) now runs the company along with co-publisher and Sheila E. Gilbert. (Died 1996.)
  • Born June 26, 1950 — Tom DeFalco, 72. Comic book writer and editor, mainly known for his work at Marvel Comics and in particular on the Spider-Man line. He designed the Spider-Girl character which was his last work at Marvel as he thought he was being typecast as just a Spider-Man line writer. He’s since been working at DC and Archie Comics.
  • Born June 26, 1965 — Daryl Gregory, 57. He won a Crawford Award for his Pandemonium novel. And his novella We Are All Completely Fine won the World Fantasy Award and a Shirley Jackson Award. It was also a finalist for the Sturgeon Award. I’m also fond of his writing on the Planet of The Apes series that IDW published.
  • Born June 26, 1969 — Lev Grossman, 53. Most noted as the author of The Magicians trilogy — The Magicians, The Magician King and The Magician’s Land. Winner of the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. He wrote the screenplay for The Map of Tiny Perfect Things film which was based off his short story of that name. I hear his Magicians trilogy has been made into a series — who’s seen it? 
  • Born June 26, 1969 — Austin Grossman, 53. Twin brother of Lev. And no, he’s not here just because he’s Lev’s twin brother. He’s the author of Soon I Will Be Invincible which is decidedly SF as well as You: A Novel (also called YOU) which was heavily influenced for better or worse by TRON and Crooked, a novel involving the supernatural and Nixon. He’s also a video games designer, some of which such as Clive Barker’s Undying and Tomb Raider: Legend are definitely genre. 
  • Born June 26, 1980 — Jason Schwartzman, 42. He first shows up in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as Gag Halfrunt,  Zaphod Beeblebrox’s personal brain care specialist. (Uncredited initially.) He was Ritchie in Bewitched, and voiced Simon Lee in Scott Pilgrim vs. the Animation. He co-wrote Isle of Dogs alongwith Wes Anderson, Roman Coppola, and Kunichi Nomura. I think his best work was voicing Ash Fox in Fantastic Mr. Fox. 
  • Born June 26, 1984 — Aubrey Plaza, 38. April Ludgate on Parks and Recreation which at least one Filer has insisted is genre. She voiced Eska in recurring role on The Legend of Korra which is a sequel to Avatar: The Last Airbender. She was in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World as Julie Powers. And she was Lenny Busker on Legion.  

(13) COMICS SECTION.

  • Shoe today is about a cat, so of course it belongs in the Scroll.
  • Funky Winkerbean is about vows from a sacred text – of sorts.

(14) BELLE REVISIONED. “For the Most Complex Heroines in Animation, Look to Japan” says the New York Times.

At a time of widespread debate over the depiction of women in film, the top Japanese animators have long been creating heroines who are more layered and complex than many of their American counterparts. They have faults and weaknesses and tempers as well as strengths and talents. They’re not properties or franchises; they’re characters the filmmakers believe in.

… Because Japanese animated features are made by smaller crews and on smaller budgets than those of major American films, directors can present more personal visions. American studios employ story crews; Hosoda, Hayao Miyazaki, Makoto Shinkai and other auteurs storyboard entire films themselves. Their work isn’t subjected to a gantlet of test audiences, executive approvals or advisory committees….

(15) BOTTOM OF THE BARREL. Slashfilm curates the worst times to come:  “Dystopian Sci-Fi Movie Worlds Ranked By How Horrible They’d Be To Live In”.

We love dystopias. There’s something shuddery and intriguing about exploring a world that’s a lot like ours, but there’s something wrong with it. We fall to the allure of it. Sure, this brave new world is terrible, but how cool would it be to survive? Maybe even become a hero? And for many of our favorite dystopian stories, survivability feels possible — at least for a while. These scenarios borrow from today and hold warnings about what tomorrow could be unless we act. We feel prepared by watching them. We feel, for a little while, empowered.

… These stories are about people’s extraordinary efforts to thrive, and sometimes they fail. Let’s explore some of our favorite dystopias and imagine what it would be like to try and live in them.

5. Snowpiercer

Stylistically similar to Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil,” “Snowpiercer,” directed by Bong Joon-ho, is an adaptation of a French comic that foretells a world of few survivors on a frozen Earth. Society is packed into trains that run ceaselessly across the world. Classism allows the elite to feast on the plight of the poor. If you were trapped in a world like this one, imagine the smell. Even in the forward cars, people smell in closed quarters. Water is at a premium. The stink of the train’s oils and electricity will always be in the air.

As in “Elysium,” there’s a chance you might find yourself among the privileged, but it’s far likelier you’ll be in the cattle cars. Sure, there’s a guy that looks like Chris Evans, but your fate could be as simple as winding up an awful-tasting protein bar for your friends to eat. It’s life, of a sort, but it’s not desirable. The end of the film suggests that the world beyond the train is healing, and someone with a gift for survivalism and the right gear to keep warm might make it — but to do what? It’s going to be decades of hard living and starvation before the first villages thrive.

(16) UP AGAINST THE WALL-E. Proving that sf has plenty of painful futures to go around, this Inverse article is about one film that didn’t even make Slashfilm’s list: “The best post-apocalypse movie of the century reveals a dark debate over humanity’s future”.

… Released by Pixar in 2008, Wall-E was ahead of its time on AI sentience, automation of the workforce, and interstellar travel. But perhaps the movie’s most timely theme is its complicated environmental message.

While the climate crisis isn’t overtly mentioned, it’s probably safe to assume it had a role in turning our planet teeming with life into a barren wasteland devoid of sentient life — save for the garbage-collecting robot known as “Wall-E.” And in the years since, this kind of lifeless apocalyptic setting has become far more common in Hollywood sci-fi movies, reflecting the growing trend of “climate doom” in real life.

But what is “climate doom” and are we really doomed to the future seen in the movie. Or can climate optimism win out and save our planet before we turn it into a gloomy garbage heap a la Wall-E?…

(17) SPLAT. NASA spotted a couple new holes in the Moon, and they know what made them, but not who: “Rocket Impact Site on Moon Seen by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter”. Photo at the link.

Astronomers discovered a rocket body heading toward a lunar collision late last year. Impact occurred March 4, with NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter later spotting the resulting crater. Surprisingly the crater is actually two craters, an eastern crater (18-meter diameter, about 19.5 yards) superimposed on a western crater (16-meter diameter, about 17.5 yards).

The double crater was unexpected and may indicate that the rocket body had large masses at each end. Typically a spent rocket has mass concentrated at the motor end; the rest of the rocket stage mainly consists of an empty fuel tank. Since the origin of the rocket body remains uncertain, the double nature of the crater may indicate its identity.

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

Pixel Scroll 8/5/21 You’ve Got To Know When To Hodor’em, Know When To Scroll’em, Know When To White Walker Away

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(1) BURTON OUT OF JEOPARDY, UNFORTUNATELY. LeVar Burton won’t succeed the late Alex Trebek as host of the game show Jeopardy! According to Deadline, the show’s executive producer Mike Richards will be taking the job.  

LeVar Burton tweeted today:

I have said many times over these past weeks that no matter the outcome, I’ve won. The outpouring of love and support from family, friends, and fans alike has been incredible! If love is the ultimate blessing and I believe that it is, I am truly blessed beyond measure.

Here’s a look-back at a recent show when LeVar Burton presided over “The Science Fiction Category”.

(2) WHO’S ON FIRST. “Doctor Who’s next showrunner is more important than its next Doctor” insists Radio Times.

…But the showrunner is responsible for literally everything – from the tone of the show to its look, its casting, its music… even, to a lesser degree, its format and structure. Yes, making Doctor Who – and indeed, any show like it – is a massive team effort, but the showrunner picks (or is at least involved in the hiring of) their writers, the composer, the production designer, the make-up artists, the casting director… all those talented folk whose hard work goes into putting the show together.

Think how distinct the Russell T Davies era is from the Steven Moffat era, and how different both are to Chibnall’s show. Bar a few cosmetic changes, Doctor Who starring Christopher Eccleston and Doctor Who starring David Tennant are broadly the same series. But there’d be no mistaking Moffat’s Who for Davies’ – yes, they’re ostensibly the same programme, but the visuals are different, the humour is different, certain of the tropes are different… everything has regenerated, far more dramatically than when the show switches out one lead actor for the next. (That lead actor, of course, is also picked by the showrunner – pending BBC approval.)…

(3) HUGO HISTORY UPDATE. [Item by Kevin Standlee.] Ben Yalow located a copy of the 1993 Hugo Awards Nominating & Final Ballot Details report and I have updated the 1993 Hugo Awards entry at the official Hugo Awards site with a copy of it.

Note that the rules in 1993 were different than they are today, and this report included what was required under the rules as they existed at that time.

[Editor’s egoscanning note: I see File 770 came in second, as it was wont to do in the Nineties.]

(4) ON YOUR MARK. Tenth Letter of the Alphabet has combed through the Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office and assembled a vast collection of “Pulp Fiction Trademarks” like these —

(5) ANOTHER CONLANG. “What Language Does Leeloo Speak In The Fifth Element?” – let Looper tell you.

…A lot of time and effort, including the formation of a special language, went into crafting “The Fifth Element,” with Besson working on the project for around 15 years. What some might not know is that the unique language Leeloo speaks in the film is called the Divine Language, and it’s actually a personal creation of Besson’s, made solely for the movie. 

The Divine Language that was developed for “The Fifth Element” only has around 400 words in total, but that’s certainly enough to carry a conversation. According to an interview with i-D, Jovovich gives Besson complete credit for the language’s creation, stating that “He brought me a dictionary of words. We would write each other letters in the language, so I was getting used to communication and speaking it.”… 

(6) UNDERSTANDING SILKPUNK. BookRiot’s Lyndsie Manusos has some definite opinions about “Silkpunk: What It Is And What It Definitely Is Not”. “Silkpunk does NOT apply to every speculative, science fiction, or fantasy book inspired by Asian history or culture. Here’s what it is.”

…In the long history of speculative and SFF genres, silkpunk is pretty new. It was invented by Ken Liu to describe his 2015 novel The Grace of Kings. Liu coined the term, and wrote a post on his website to delve into its definition. Liu’s post begins with: “No, [silkpunk is] not “Asian-flavored steampunk.” No, it’s not “Asian-influenced fantasy.” No, it’s not…

(7) A PAIR OF ACES. Molly Templeton pointed out to Tor.com readers where they can “Watch Martha Wells and Becky Chambers in Conversation”.

… The two discuss outlining (or not); television watching (Wells, like all wise viewers, enjoys Elementary); how much time Chambers thought about tea while writing Psalm; writing with compassion for your characters; and how excellent it is that more voices are telling their stories in SFF….

(8) TOP 10. ScreenRant shared the list of “The American Film Institute’s 10 Best Sci Fi Movies”. Guess what is only number six!!

6. Blade Runner

A cerebral film with lofty existential themes, Blade Runner is a duly highly regarded sci-fi film and often noted as one of the best of the sci-fi genre. Another Ridley Scott film – one of his best science fiction films – Blade Runner follows an officer and blade runner named Deckard that is tasked with tracking down and destroying four replicants, which are sentient robots that were deemed illegal after a replicant uprising on a faraway planet.

On Deckard’s journey to destroy, or retire, the replicants, he is faced with questions of what it means to be human and the accuracy or inaccuracy of perception of reality. Further, the film paints a bleak portrait of a potential future with animals being extinct and a highly polluted atmosphere, connecting to concerns that modern audiences have for the environment.

(9) STONE SOUP. At “Building Beyond: Leaf Me Alone”, Sarah Gailey is joined by Stephen Rider and Amal El-Mohtar to play with this writing prompt:

The global forest community has decided to cut off all economic and trading ties with the outside world. From now on, forest-based resources are for the forest alone.

(10) MEMORY LANE.

  • 1970 – Fifty one years at Heicon ’70 where John Brunner was the Toastmaster, Ursula Le Guin wins the Hugo for Best Novel for The Left Hand of Darkness. It was first published in 1969 as Ace SF Special, Series 1.  Other nominated works that year were Robert Silverberg’s Up the Line, Piers Anthony‘s Macroscope, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Norman Spinrad‘s Bug Jack Barron. It would also win a Nebula Award and be nominated for a Ditmar Award as well. 

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born August 5, 1906 — John Huston. Yes, the Huston who directed  and wrote The Maltese Falcon graced our community. He was M in Casino Royale, and The Lawgiver in Battle for the Planet of the Apes. He was in Sherlock Holmes in New York as Professor Moriarty, and voiced Gandalf in The Return of The King. (Died 1987.)
  • Born August 5, 1929 — Don Matheson. Best remembered for being Mark Wilson in Land of the Giants. He also had roles in Lost in Space (where he played in an alien in one episode and an android in another episode), Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, an Alice in Wonderland film and Dragonflight. (Died 2014.)
  • Born August 5, 1935 — Wanda Ventham, 86. Mother of Benedict Cumberbatch. She’s been on Who three times, in “The Faceless Ones”, a Second Doctor story, in “Image of the Fendahl”, a Fourth Doctor story and finally in “Time and the Rani”, a Seventh Doctor story. She also had roles in The Blood Beast Terror, Project U.F.O and Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter. She was often on British TV series including Danger Man, The Saint, The Avengers and The Prisoner. And yes, she was on his Sherlock series where she played…his mother.
  • Born August 5, 1940 — Natalie Trundy, 81. First, she was one of the Underdwellers, named Albina, in Beneath the Planet of the Apes.  Next, she played Dr. Stephanie Branton, a specialist studying apes from the future who came into our present day in Escape from the Planet of the Apes.  Then in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes and Battle for the Planet of the Apes, she played the chimp Lisa.  As far as I can tell, she’s the only performer to play three different roles in the Apes films. 
  • Born August 5, 1947 — Élisabeth Vonarburg, 74. Parisian born, she’s been a Quebec resident for four decades. She was the literary director of the French-Canadian SF magazine Solaris. Her first novel, Le Silence de la Cité, was published in 1981. Since then she’s been a prolific writer of novels and short fiction. I’m pleased to say that the usual suspects is deeply stocked in her works. Her website, in French of course, is here. She’s won ten Prix Aurora Awards for the best Canadian science fiction and fantasy works and activities in English and French. Très, très impressionnant! 
  • Born August 5, 1961 — Tawny Kitaen. I first remember her in Hercules and the Circle of Fire as Deianeira, a role remarkable only for the minimalist costume she wore. She repeated the role throughout the series. Her first genre acting was actually in low budget horror flick Witchboard. And other than an appearance in a SF comedy series They Came from Outer Space, that’s it for her. (Died 2021.)
  • Born August 5, 1980 — JoSelle Vanderhooft, 41. Former Green Man reviewer with a single novel so far, Ebenezer, and several collections, Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories and Steam-Powered II: More Lesbian Steampunk Stories which the former were nominated for a Lambda Award. She also co-edited with Steve Berman, Heiresses of Russ 2011: The Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction.

(12) COMICS HISTORY. “Let Otto Binder show you how the mid-’60s comic book sausage was made” at Scott Edelman’s blog.

Two more treasures found in my late sister-in-law Ellen Vartanoff’s collection — mid-’60s scripts by the extremely prolific comics writer Otto Binder. Wikipedia claims he wrote 4,400 stories under his own name — and 160 more under the pen-name Eando Binder…

…His [Otto Binder’s] story in Creepy adapted of one of the 10 stories he wrote for Amazing Stories with his brother Earl Binder (under the pen name Eando Binder) about the intelligent robot Adam Link.

Someday I’ll scan and share the entirety of both scripts, but for now, here’s a comparison of the first page of the Mighty Samson one, as well as the published page, with art by Frank Thorne — who’s perhaps best-known for his work on Marvel’s Red Sonja….

(13) DRAWN THAT WAY. Studio co-founder Alvy Ray Smith tells IEEE Spectrum readers “The Real Story of Pixar” – “How a bad hardware company turned itself into a great movie studio.”

…The story… goes back to a time when I and other researchers in computer graphics scattered around the United States began to see the technology as allowing a new art form: the creation of digitally animated movies. A handful of us began talking about when somebody would make the first one—”The Movie,” we called it—and the massive computing power it would take to pull it off. That kind of computing power was not affordable in the mid-1970s. But with Moore’s Law cranking along at a steady pace, there was every reason to think that the cost of computing power would come down sufficiently within a decade or so. In the meantime, we focused on developing the software that would make The Movie possible.

By definition, The Movie could incorporate no hand drawing. The tools to build it emerged piecemeal. First came the software that enabled computers to create two-dimensional images and, later, virtual 3D objects. Then we figured out how to move those objects, shade them, and light them before rendering them as frames of a movie….

…We kept the possibility of The Movie alive during the next five years with a series of short films, including Luxo Jr. (1986), nominated for an Academy Award; Tin Toy (1988) winner of an Academy Award; Red’s Dream (1987); and Knick Knack (1989). These were four of the sparkling jewels that sustained us during these otherwise tough years.

Each one of these pieces represented continued improvements in the underlying in-house technologies. Luxo Jr., for example, incorporated the first articulated objects that self-shadowed themselves from multiple light sources. Red’s Dream showed off our Pixar Image Computer: the principal background for the piece, a bicycle shop, was the most complex computer graphics scene ever rendered at the time….

(14) THEY’RE COMING TO TAKE ME AWAY. “R2-D2 is now a Tamagotchi you’ll forget about” predicts Engadget. (See demos at the company’s own interactive info page: Star Wars R2-D2 Tamagotchi.)

Disney and Bandai have teamed up to bring Artoo to the pockets of fans who don’t mind training, cleaning and looking after a needy, digital version of the droid wherever they are. …As you might expect from a Tamagotchi, you’ll interact with the toy using three physical buttons.

There are 19 skills for Artoo to learn. You’ll need to keep him charged and clean. Unlike with other Tamagotchis, you won’t have to clear up any poop from R2-D2 (he’s a droid, after all). A Lucasfilm spokesperson told Engadget that if R2-D2 sits for too long, he’ll accumulate dust. You can clean that away with the press of a button.

There are nine mini-games you can play with him, including firefighting and Star Wars staple Dejarik (or holochess). If you don’t keep the droid happy, some Jawas might arrive to take him away….

(15) FROM OUTSIDE OF TIME. Episode 37 of Octothorpe 37, a podcast about science fiction and SF fandom from John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty, is available here.

 We didn’t record this week so this is the fabled EPISODE X, part of the SUMMER OF FUN (summer of fun). We discuss the Retro Hugo Awards and reading old books from a time when Graham Linehan was still on Twitter. Crazy.

(16) MINUS MEN. Y: The Last Man premieres September 13 — on FX on Hulu.

Based on DC Comics’ acclaimed series by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra, Y: The Last Man traverses a post-apocalyptic world in which a cataclysmic event decimates every mammal with a Y chromosome but for one cisgender man and his pet monkey. The series follows the survivors in this new world as they struggle with their efforts to restore what was lost and the opportunity to build something better.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EEQ5Lj-cXM

(17) THE STARS BYE DESTINATION. Gizmodo knows why “This Blasted Star Is Getting the Hell Out of the Milky Way”.

Careening through the Milky Way at nearly 2 million miles per hour, the star LP 40–365 shows no signs of stopping. A team of astronomers recently figured out that the star was propelled into its current speedrun by a supernova explosion millions of years ago.

LP 40–365 is unusual. It’s a white dwarf, a small, compact star at the end of its life, and it’s very rich in metals. LP 40–365 also has own atmosphere, which is mostly composed of oxygen and neon. But most important to this story is that the star is a runaway from a huge stellar explosion, which set in motion its dash out of the galaxy….

(18) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “Honest Game Trailers: Mario Golf”,  Fandom Games says this Mario Bros. line extension “turns the fusty game of golf into the PGA version of Death Race.”

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, N., John Coxon, Daniel Dern, Scott Edelman, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Michael Toman, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]

Pixel Scroll 7/25/21 The Pixel Unvanquishable, Save for Scrollnope

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(1) BE SEEING YOU. The trailer for the next season of Doctor Who was released at San Diego Comic-Con International today. As a YouTube commenter concluded, “The end was literally BBC saying to us: Any questions? No? See you soon.”

Radio Times adds details showrunner Chris Chibnall shared during that SDCC virtual panel: “Doctor Who series 13 to be serialised connected story”.

…However, it looks like the next series of Doctor Who will be particularly unusual for the “modern” (aka post-2005) era of the show, with showrunner Chris Chibnall revealing during a virtual panel that the upcoming season 13 (starring Jodie Whittaker, Mandip Gill and John Bishop, above) would be a single serialised story rather than the usual collection of self-contained episodes.

“The big thing we’re going to be doing this year is that it’s all one story – so every episode is a chapter in a bigger story,” Chibnall said during Doctor Who’s Comic-Con@Home panel. “And so we’ve changed the shape of the series for this year.

“It’s very much not a business as usual time,” he added, explaining the role that coronavirus restrictions had made on the decision.

“And I think the challenges of getting the show up and running.. […] there were two ways we could go. You could go ‘we’re just going to do lots and lots of tiny episodes in one room with no monsters. Or we can throw down the gauntlet and say we’re gonna do the biggest story we’ve ever done, and we’re going to go to all kind of different places, and have all different characters and monsters, and it’s all gonna be part of a bigger whole.

“I think it’s definitely the most ambitious thing we’ve done…it’s epic and ambitious and we do go to a lot of places.”

Notably, this serialisation ties into the casting of newly-announced series star Jacob Anderson, who is set to play a character called Vinder across a number of episodes and whose presence across the series hints at more shared elements between episodes than fans might be used to….

And here’s the full video of the panel:

(2) CHUCK TINGLE UPDATE. Chuck’s Twitter account is still out of commission. Here’s the update he gave to his Facebook readers.

(3) THE AI AFTERLIFE. “What Should Happen to Our Data When We Die?” asks the New York Times, raising the issue of posthumous privacy.  

The new Anthony Bourdain documentary, “Roadrunner,” is one of many projects dedicated to the larger-than-life chef, writer and television personality. But the film has drawn outsize attention, in part because of its subtle reliance on artificial intelligence technology.

Using several hours of Mr. Bourdain’s voice recordings, a software company created 45 seconds of new audio for the documentary. The A.I. voice sounds just like Mr. Bourdain speaking from the great beyond; at one point in the movie, it reads an email he sent before his death by suicide in 2018.

“If you watch the film, other than that line you mentioned, you probably don’t know what the other lines are that were spoken by the A.I., and you’re not going to know,” Morgan Neville, the director, said in an interview with The New Yorker. “We can have a documentary-ethics panel about it later.”

The time for that panel may be now. The dead are being digitally resurrected with growing frequency: as 2-D projections, 3-D holograms, C.G.I. renderings and A.I. chat bots….

(4) CHUTZPAH. Miguel Esteban’s memoir “Octavia Butler and the Pimply, Pompous Publisher” in the Los Angeles Review of Books reminds me of me trying to corral material from pros for my first fanzine earlier in the same decade – excluding offering to pay for it, of course.

…In 1979, when I was 14, I was determined to publish a biweekly, 24-page magazine of and about science fiction entitled Transmission. I commissioned Octavia, who was 32, to write an essay. (I do not believe I ever told her my age.) On July 28 of that year, I had heard her speak at the Fantasy Faire convention in Pasadena, California, where she participated in a panel debating the topic “How Science Fiction Handles Social Change.” [1] Pasadena was Octavia’s hometown.

… On August 3, 1979, I spoke and then wrote to Octavia, inviting her to contribute a 3,000-word essay to the inaugural (and ultimately only) issue of Transmission Magazine….

I offered her $50, which she accepted on the condition that she retain the copyright and the right to resell the essay three months after publication. “Since I am the only black woman writing sf, I have a feeling I’ll be needing this article again,” she explained.

At the end of the month, Octavia sent me her first draft, titled “Lost Races of Science Fiction.” We spoke over the phone, following which this cocky, 14-year-old editor sent his comments to an established and revered writer….

(5) LET’S BUNGLE IN THE JUNGLE. “’It’s Like a Joy Bomb!’ Emily Blunt and Dwayne Johnson Open Up About New Disney Jungle Cruise Movie” in Parade Magazine.

Who would fare better in a jungle, Dwayne Johnson or Emily Blunt? “I’d like to think I would be OK,” Johnson says, then points his finger at Blunt, his co-star in the new action-packed summer movie Jungle Cruise. “You would struggle.”

But the actress is not having it. “You would be lost without your lip balm!” she says. “And you wouldn’t have your soap. He’s the cleanest human being alive. He needs to shower about five times a day.” Blunt slams down her hand and looks at their interviewer. “Now, what else do you want to know?”…

(6) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.

  • 1953 – Sixty- eight years ago on this date, Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century, a Merrie Melodies cartoon starring Daffy Duck as space hero Duck Dodgers, premiered before films playing in the United States. This cartoon was the first of many appearances of the Duck Dodgers character including the Duck Dodgers series on the Cartoon Network. Porky Pig is here as a space cadet as is Marvin the Martian who first appeared very briefly in Haredevil Hare, a 1948 cartoon. It was directed by Charles M. Jones from a story by Michael Maltese and produced by Edward Selzer though he’s uncredited in the cartoon. 

George Lucas wanted it be shown before Star Wars during its initial run in theaters  but couldn’t get the rights.  At Noreascon 4, it was nominated for a Retro Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation — Short Form though The War of the Worlds (1953; Paramount) would win. Bits of the cartoon are on YouTube but the entire cartoon is not. You can purchase it on iTunes in a twofer with another Daffy cartoon, “The Scarlet Pumpernickel” for a buck ninety nine. Yeah I bought it. (And don’t get started me on the rabbit hole of watching Warner Brothers cartoons!) 

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born July 25, 1907 — Cyril Luckham. He played the White Guardian first in the Fourth Doctor story, “The Ribos Opperation”, part one and than twice more in the two part Fifth Doctor story, “Enlightment”.  He was also Dr. Moe in the Fifties pulp film Stranger from Venus, and also showed up in The Omega Factor, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) and Tales of The Unexpected. (Died 1989.)
  • Born July 25, 1910 — Kendell Foster Crossen. He was the creator and writer of the Green Lama stories.  He was a Buddhist crime fighter whose powers were activated upon the recitation of the Tibetan chant om mani padme hum. He also wrote Manning Draco series, an intergalactic insurance investigator, four of which are can be found in Once Upon a Star: A Novel of the Future. Kindle has a really deep catalog of his genre work, and the Green Lama stories have been made into audio works as well. (Died 1981.)
  • Born July 25, 1922 — Evelyn E. Smith. She has the delightful bio of being a writer of sf and mysteries, as well as a compiler of crossword puzzles. During the 1950s, she published both short stories and novelettes in Galaxy Science Fiction, Fantastic Universe and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Her SF novels include The Perfect Planet and The Copy Shop. A look at the usual suspects shows a two story collections but none of her novels. Interestingly there are myriad stories by her offered up separately for sale. (Died 2000.)
  • Born July 25, 1948 — Brian Stableford, 73. I am reasonably sure that I’ve read and enjoyed all of the Hooded Swan series a long time ago which I see has since been collected as Swan Songs: The Complete Hooded Swan Collection. And I’ve certainly read a fair amount of his short fiction down the years. He has but one English language Award, a BSFA for Best Short Fiction for “The Hunger and Ecstasy of Vampires” though he has a lot of nominations. The Hooded Swan series is available as separate novels from the usual suspects for two dollars and ninety-nine cents each. 
  • Born July 25, 1969 — D.B Woodside, 52. He has a recurring role as Principal Robin Wood on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, mostly in season seven.  Later he’s Amenadiel on Lucifer. He has one-offs in Prey which I’ve never heard of and Numb3rs.
  • Born July 25, 1971 — Chloë Annett, 50. She played Holly Turner in the Crime Traveller series and Kristine Kochanski in the Red Dwarf series. She was in the “Klingons vs. Vulcans” episode of the Space Cadets sort of game show. 
  • Born July 25, 1973 — Mur Lafferty, 48. Podcaster and writer. Co-editor of the Escape Pod podcast with Divya Breed, her second time around. She is also the host and creator of the podcast I Should Be Writing which won a Parsec Award for Best Writing Podcast.. She is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Escape Artists short fiction magazine Mothership Zeta. And then there’s the Ditch Diggers podcast she started with Matt Wallace which is suppose to show the brutal, honest side of writing. For that, It won the Hugo Award for Best Fancast at Worldcon 76, having been a finalist the year before.  Fiction wise, I loved both The Shambling Guide to New York City and A Ghost Train to New Orleans with I think the second being a better novel.
  • Born July 25, 1979 — Bryan Cogman, 42. He wrote eleven episodes of The Game of Thrones. He also acted in it, that being a cameo in “The Lion and The Rose” episode as a Dragonstone waiter. He would share a Hugo at Chicon 7 for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form for Game of Thrones, Season One. He’s writer and producer of the forthcoming The Sword in The Stone series on Disney+. He’s also a write and consulting producer for the forthcoming The Lord of The Rings on Amazon’s streaming service.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

  • Ziggy’s solves a problem and creates a neighborhood attraction.

(9) SLOUCHING TOWARD THE ISS. “Russian Module Headed for the ISS Is Still Having Problems” – Gizmodo has the details.

Russia’s newly launched International Space Station module Nauka is still in the fight as of Friday afternoon, as early reports indicate that the module’s backup engines have fired successfully. That’s a big relief for Roscosmos, which nearly saw its long-awaited module become a tragic piece of space trivia instead of the newest piece of the International Space Station. But it’s not out of the woods yet.

The first glitch in Nauka’s journey happened yesterday, when the spacecraft didn’t complete its first orbit-raising burn. This meant that the uncrewed Nauka wasn’t on track to actually intercept the ISS, which it’s scheduled to dock with on Thursday, July 29. The problem was attributed to a software issue in a computer aboard Nauka, which prevented the spacecraft’s main engines from firing. Nauka’s team was able to manage a remote course correction, but a second bout of course corrections were deemed necessary, and scheduled for today. One early report from journalist Anatoly Zak indicated that one of the spacecraft’s engines sputtered back to life in a mission. The “backup engine seems to have fired fine,” said Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in an email today, though he added that the status of the engines was not yet certain and it would likely be a few hours before a new dataset from Nauka verified the situation.

The thrusters are just one piece of the engineering puzzle, so the new module is hardly home free…. 

(10) CLOUDY, WITH A CHANCE OF HOMICIDE. Mashable introduces the trailer for a new animated series: “’Blade Runner: Black Lotus’ trailer: Adult Swim and Crunchyroll team up”.

A new trailer for the team-up between the Cartoon Network offshoot and anime streamer Crunchyroll serves us a first look at this CG take on the sci-fi dystopia dreamed up by filmmaker Ridley Scott. The 13-episode series stars, on the English-language side, Jessica Henwick (Netflix Marvel’s Colleen Wing) as a female replicant with a mysterious backstory and purpose.

(11) JOE DANTE RETROSPECTIVE. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In “Joe Dante’s Battle With Hollywood,” the Royal Ocean Film Society looks at the career of Joe Dante through three films:  Looney Tunes:  Back In Action, which Dante says took up a year and a half of his life and was micromanaged to death; Explorers, which has its moments but is essentially a rough draft, and Gremlins 2:  A New Batch, which is a crazy film that has Leonard Maltin killed on screen for writing a bad review and Robert Picardo marrying a gremlin!

(12) RARITIES. YouTube’s “The Auction Professor” calls these the “Top 20 Most Valuable Vintage Paperbacks”. Editions of Richard Bachman? Check. Something published by Vargo Statten – what? I didn’t know anybody outside of fanzines had ever heard of Vargo! As for the Star Wars and nonfiction books about Dune, I’m sorry to say I’ve never owned any of them! (If I own it, it’s not rare, predictably.) Don’t miss the “bonus” commentary following the credits.

[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Michael Toman, Will R., John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to contributing editor of the day Jim Janney.]

Pixel Scroll 6/24/20 Pretty Pixels In The File, They Twinkle On The Screen, And Then Get Refreshed So That New Ones Are Seen

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(1) JUMP ON THE TRUCK. In the Washington Post, Robert Zubrin and Homer Hickam have an opinion piece where they say that SpaceX Dragon’s success should make the preferred launch vehicle for a return to the Moon and NASA should shelve the Orion rocket as too unwieldy. “Send the SpaceX Dragon to the moon”.

In March 2019, Vice President Pence challenged NASA to land astronauts on the moon by 2024 “by any means necessary.” This was a potential breakthrough, because after nearly 50 years of drift, the White House was finally giving NASA’s human spaceflight program a concrete goal with a clear timeline and forceful support — a necessity for any progress and the restoration of the agency’s can-do spirit. The purpose for the mission itself is a blend of economic, scientific and world leadership goals designed to make the investment worthwhile to all Americans.

NASA’s response to Pence’s challenge was to proceed with what it already had in the pipeline: the Orion crewed spacecraft and the massive shuttle-derived Space Launch System (SLS) heavy-lift expendable booster rocket. SLS has been in slow-walk development since 2006, with more than $18 billion spent, but it is still years away from launch. Considering this track record, we unhappily doubt the SLS/Orion combination will meet the vice president’s challenge.

But now we have an alternative. The contract that resulted in the Dragon crewed spacecraft was issued by NASA in 2014. Six years and $3 billion later, it has flown astronauts into orbit. What SpaceX did was show that a well-led entrepreneurial team can achieve results that were previously thought to require the efforts of superpowers, and in a small fraction of the time and cost, and even — as demonstrated by its reusable Falcon launch vehicles — do things deemed impossible altogether. This is a revolution….

(2) RWA. The Romance Writers of America will hold a virtual RWA Conference from August 28-30. A full list of the RWA 2020 Conference Scholarships are at the link. Some new ones have been added.

RWA also has clarified a recent announcement about Dreamspinner Press to say they are available to advocate for non-members, too. Thread starts here.

(3) FROM THE CANOE. Elizabeth Bear posted “an open letter to my friends and acquaintances in the publishing community who have been outed as serial harassers, and to the ones who still think they’re getting away with something.”

It begins:

Hey there. I know you’re having a rough time right now, and I’m sorry to say you earned it. I wish I had known about your behavior sooner; I wish I had known that you weren’t just making rank jokes among friends, as we all do once in a while, but engaged in serious abuses of your power, engaged in harming people.

I am, needless to say, very very disappointed in you.

I’m saddened for the people you have hurt, and I’m really disappointed that you have turned out not to be the person I thought you were. Even more, I’m wondering if you even have the self-awareness to realize how much you have harmed not just the people you harassed or gaslit or backstabbed, but also the communities you were a part of. How much you have damaged the people who care about you and who have tried to be your friends, as well….

(4) STOKERCON UK. The StokerCon UK committee has announced a new set of dates for the Horror Writers Association event which has been chased around the calendar by the coronavirus. The post is here.

…Secondly, we are grateful to the majority of you who, since our previous announcement, have allowed us to get on with trying to save the convention—or at least a version of it—by rescheduling it.

To that end, we are pleased to let you know that, at the moment, we have agreed tentative dates for the event with the two convention hotels of 28-31 January 2021. With events and advice changing so quickly, the hotels have agreed to follow UK Government advice and are prepared to reassess or postpone the event once again nearer the time, depending on the spread and hopeful containment of the virus.

(5) YOU ARE HERE. Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes about this moment with empathy and wisdom: “Business Musings: Shock, Survival, and Forgiveness”.

… We now know where we are. We’re in that prolonged change. It’s a transition, and we’ve finally hit it. All of 2020 will be a year of half-measures, making do, and getting through.

Frankly, I find knowing where we are calming. I now know how to proceed day to day. I don’t like it, but I don’t have to like it.

I, you, all of us just have to survive it.

The knowledge of where we’re at, though, took me out of survival mode. I’m no longer obsessively reading the news every day, trying to figure out where we are. I’m donning my mask when I go out. I make that daily calculation—is it worth the risk to my health (and Dean’s health) to do whatever it is I am planning to do?

I can calculate risk now. And, more importantly, Dean and I are agreed. We consult if we’re going to do something outside of our usual schedule, based on the level of risk.

We are more or less staying home, but we did anyway, since we work here.  That sense of ease, that feeling of no longer being on the knife’s edge, has made it easier to focus, although not always easier to work.

I’m one of the few people I know who has made the mental transition out of survival mode. (If one of us gets sick, I know I’ll head right back into it.) Now that I know how we’re going to be living day to day, I’m willing to live day to day. I don’t need to be ever vigilante for another tow truck, coming at us out of the dark.

Because I’ve made this transition, I can see other folks who haven’t. In my various social media feeds, I’m watching writers talk about their process or their lack of one. Writers, discussing how their work has changed or just plain stopped. Writers, who can’t face any of their usual projects, and who are feeling lost and don’t exactly know why.

Everyone knows the changes in their writing habits come from the pandemic, but most don’t understand what to do. And many people are worried that the changes to their writing methods are permanent.

Are those changes permanent? It depends on the change. They seem to fall into two categories…

… We are in a new place. Like any new place, it will take time to learn all its ins and outs. We have to explore it and understand it—and survive the transition into it.

If you’re dealing with actual life and death issues, from someone being very ill in your life to a major loss of income or career, then give yourself time to recover. Take the pressure off your writing. There’s enough pressure in your life….

(6) MEDIA BIRTHDAY,

  • June 24, 1982 — Blade Runner premiered. It was directed by Ridley Scott, and was written by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples. It starred Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Edward James Olmos and Sean Young. It was based very loosely on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It would win the Best Dramatic Presentation at ConStellation, beating out The Wrath of Khan, E.T., The Dark Crystal and The Road Warrior. Critics were puzzled by it and t generated little street buzz nearly thirty years ago. It would vastly raise its stature over the years, now being considered one of the Best SF works ever done. It’s worth Warner Bros. released The Final Cut, a 25th-anniversary digitally remastered version; this is the only version over which Scott retained full artistic control.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born June 24, 1842 – Ambrose Bierce.  Four hundred short pieces, sixty poems.  A pioneer in realistic fiction; a great fantasist; a biting satirist.  When William Dean Howells said AB was among our three greatest writers, AB said “I am sure Mr. Howells is the other two.”  Translated into Croatian, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish.  (Died 1914, maybe) [JH]
  • Born June 24, 1915 – Sir Frederick Hoyle.  Coined the expression “Big Bang”, rejected the theory.  Radar research in World War II with more personnel than the Manhattan Project. Mayhew Prize, Balzan Prize, Crafoord Prize.  Founded the Cambridge Institute of Astronomy and resigned from it.  A dozen SF novels, two dozen shorter stories, some with co-authors; translated into Danish, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Japanese, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian,  Spanish, Swedish.  (Died 2001) [JH]
  • Born June 24, 1937 – Charles Brown.  Founded Locus (with Ed Meskys and Dave Vanderwerf) as a fanzine; it grew, changed, and “semiprozine” was invented to describe it; 29 Hugos by the time of his death.  You could disagree with him; on panels with him I opposed his “mainstream literature is about the past, science fiction is about the present, nobody can write about the future”; no one has outdone him.  Writers & Illustrators of the Future Award for lifetime achievement.  (Died 2009) [JH]
  • Born June 24, 1947 — Peter Weller, 73. Yes it’s his Birthday today too. Robocop obviously with my favorite scene being him pulling out and smashing Cain’s brain, but let’s see what else he’s done. Well there’s The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, a film I adore. And then there’s Leviathan which you I’m guessing a lot of you never heard of. Is it of the Naked Lunch genre? Well, Screamers based on Philip K. Dick’s short story “Second Variety” certainly is. Even if the reviews sucked.  And Star Trek Into Darkness certainlyqualifies. Hey he showed up in Star Trek: Enterprise! (CE)
  • Born June 24, 1948 – Kris Neri, age 72.Two novels for us; four more, sixty shorter stories.  After living in San Francisco, and Southern California, moved to Sedona (Arizona); now at home in Silver City (New Mexico).  Teaches writing through the U. Cal. L.A. Extension School.  Says her Samantha Brennan and Annabelle Haggerty magical mysteries feature “a questionable psychic who teams up with a modern goddess/FBI agent”.  Website here.  [JH]
  • Born June 24, 1950 — Mercedes Lackey, 70. There’s a line on the Wiki page that says she writes nearly six books a year. Impressive. She’s certainly got a lot of really good series out there including the vast number that are set in the Valdemar universe. I like her Bedlam’s Bard series better. She wrote the first few in this series with Ellen Gunn and the latter in the series with Rosemary Edghill. The SERRAted Edge series, Elves with race cars, is kinda fun too. Larry Dixon, her husband, and Mark Shepherd were co-writers of these. Lackey and Dixon are GoHs of this year’s Worldcon, CoNZealand. (CE)
  • Born June 24, 1950 — Nancy Allen, 70. Officer Anne Lewis in the Robocop franchise. (I like all three films.) Her first genre role was not in Carrie as Chris Hargensen, but in a best forgotten a film year earlier (Forced Entry) as a unnamed hitchhiker. She shows up in fan favorite The Philadelphia Experiment as Allison Hayes and I see her in Poltergeist III as Patricia Wilson-Gardner (seriously — a third film in this franchise?). She’s in the direct-to-video Children of the Corn 666: Isaac’s Return as Rachel Colby. (Oh, that sounds awful.) And she was in an Outer Limits episode, “Valerie 23”, as Rachel Rose. (CE)
  • Born June 24, 1961 — Iain Glen, 59. Scots actor who played as Ser Jorah Mormont in Game of Thrones, he’s also  well known for his roles as Dr. Alexander Isaacs/Tyrant in the Resident Evil franchise; and he played the role of Father Octavian, leader of a sect of clerics who were on a mission against the Weeping Angels in “The Time of Angels” and “Flesh and Stone”, all Eleventh Doctor stories. (CE)
  • Born June 24, 1970 – Nicolas Fructus, age 50.  Recently, comics and storyboard art for animated films and video games.  Worked with Moebius, Philippe Druillet; founded Delcourt publishing house.  Here is a cover for Bifrost.  Here is one for Kij Johnson’s novella “The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe”.  Here is A Year in the Air.  [JH]
  • Born June 24, 1982 — Lotte Verbeek, 38. You most likely know her as Ana Jarvis, the wife of Edwin Jarvis, who befriends Carter on Agent Carter. She got interesting genre history including being Geillis Duncan on the Outlander series, Helena in The Last Witch Hunter, Aisha in the dystopian political thriller Division 19 film and a deliberately undefined role in the now-concluded cross-world Counterpart series. (CE)
  • Born June 24, 1988 – Kasey Lansdale, age 32. Country music singer-songwriter who has been writing in our field with her father Joe Lansdale; six short stories with him, two alone; edited two anthologies, recently Impossible Monsters.  “Tremble” with JL was in Pop the Clutch from Dark Moon last year.   Website here.  [JH]
  • Born June 24, 1994 — Nicole Muñoz, 26. You’ll perhaps best remember her for role as Christie Tarr (née McCawley) in the Defiance series. Her first role was playing a Little Girl in Fantastic Four. Likewise she was A Kid with Braces in The Last Mimzy, and yes, Another Girl, in Hardwired. The latter was written by Michael Hurst, and has apparently nothing to with the Walter Jon Williams novel of the same same. (CE) 

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) STICK WITH IT. USPS announced “New Stamps Celebrating Bugs Bunny’s 80th Birthday Coming Soon to a Post Office Near You”.

The U.S. Postal Service will issue commemorative Forever stamps celebrating Bugs Bunny’s 80th birthday. The Postal Service and Warner Bros. Consumer Products are excited to dedicate these stamps at a virtual ceremony on July 27, the 80th anniversary of Bugs Bunny’s official screen debut.

Bugs has always been known for his impeccable impersonations and his masterful masquerades, so the soon-to-be-revealed 10 designs on this pane of 20 stamps each showcase a costumed Bugs Bunny in some of his most memorable getups.

(10) A BIG IDEA. Rosamund Lannin is “Searching for Body Positivity in Fantasy” at Tor.com.

I remember the first time I encountered an attractive fat woman in a fantasy novel. My heart flipped a little as I read about a woman was for-real fat. She wasn’t your usual fictional overweight woman, either: there was no zaftig or curvy or voluptuous to be found near the Scientist’s Daughter in Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. But she was definitely attractive. The narrator describes her as follows:

“A white scarf swirled around the collar of her chic pink suit. From the fullness of her earlobes dangled square gold earrings, glinting with every step she took. Actually, she moved quite lightly for her weight. She may have strapped herself into a girdle or other paraphernalia for maximum visual effect, but that didn’t alter the fact that her wiggle was tight and cute. In fact, it turned me on. She was my kind of chubby.”

(11) THE NEXT SHIFT. At The Mary Sue, Cree Myles advises: “If You Really Want to Unlearn Racism, Read Black Sci-Fi Authors”.

… Society generally views the science fiction genre as one of leisure. You read it because you have time, not because you want to learn something. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth. While all writers are charged with the task of creating a more empathetic society, science fiction writers have the additional burden of telling us what happens next.

Some of our best thinkers, and certainly our most comprehensive hopers, have been sci-fi writers. N.K. Jemisin has given us black female demigods who, despite their powers, still somehow suffer at the hands of an oppressive society. Octavia Butler has given us shapeshifters, time travelers, and voyagers who all had to react and survive under patriarchy and racism. Ursula K. Le Guin was creating entire non-binary societies … in the 1960s.

(12) IT’S IN THE OH! E. D. Ursula Vernon coins a word:

(13) BACK FROM THE FUTURE. “Segway: End of the road for the much-hyped two-wheeler”

Segway is ending production of its original two-wheeler, which was popular with city tour guides and some police forces – but not the public.

Launched in 2001, the much-hyped self-balancing vehicle promised to revolutionise personal transport.

The Segway, invented by US engineer Dean Kamen, debuted with much fanfare, but struggled to make a profit.

Accidents didn’t help with the Segway’s popularity, and the company was bought by Chinese rival Ninebot in 2015.

Made at a factory in New Hampshire, in the US, production of the Segway Personal Transporter will end on 15 July.

Announcing the news, Segway president Judy Cai said: “Within its first decade, the Segway PT became a staple in security and law enforcement, viewed as an effective and efficient personal vehicle.”

However, in the vehicle’s almost two decade-long history it has also been the subject of mockery and high-profile collisions as well as a tragic death.

(14) THE PASSENGER PIGEON OF VIDEO STORES. Atlas Obscura leads readers to something that’s the last of its kind: “Bend Blockbuster Video”.

In early summer of 2018, there were two Blockbusters left in Alaska and one in Oregon. The Alaska stores finally closed that summer, leaving the Bend store as the last one standing. National media attention soon followed and the Bend Blockbuster became a tourist site as well. And after the last Blockbuster Video in Australia closed in 2019, the Bend store became the only one left in the world. 

[Thanks to Microtherion, JJ, John Hertz, Lise Andreasen, Chip Hitchcock, John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kip Williams.]

Blade Runner Blog Tour
Begins 11/18

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Titan Comics will release Blade Runner 2019 Vol. 1: Welcome to Los Angeles on November 20.  

The first original comic series set in the iconic neo-noir world of Blade Runner! Detective Ash is a veteran Blade Runner, set on the trail of a kidnapped child in the streets of Los Angeles, 2019 – but as the bodies mount and Replicants crawl from the shadows, Ash’s own secrets come under fire! From writer Michael Green (screenwriter for Blade Runner 2049) and Mike Johnson (Star Trek), and illustrated by Andres Guinaldo (Justice League Dark, Captain America)!

The blog tour to publicize the comic starts tomorrow, November 18. File 770 will participate. Watch this space on December 5!