The One Ring: Moria: Through the Doors of Durin (Free League, 2024)
By Warner Holme: The One Ring: Moria: Through the Doors of Durin is a source book for the role playing game based on the work of Tolkien. Like others, it takes certain liberties, albeit in expansion terms rather than deviation. It is also a wealth of art and writing simply for a fan of the setting or fantasy in general.
Much of the book is devoted to a detailed description of the mountains and mines of Moria. This includes not only interior tunnels and chambers, and the terrain which they are underneath, but also the groups and individuals inhibiting these or vying for power over them. It is a large assortment and includes a variety of characters mentioned in the classic works as well as new individuals extrapolating from fleeting mentions. The descriptions of the internals of the mountains and mines are similarly fleshed out, explaining locations seen and going into more detail about ones which would have been assumed.
There is material included which Tolkien probably wouldn’t have written himself, though it even feels fairly reverent.
One interesting aspect of this particular book comes from the assumption of familiarity. That is to say that the creative team is aware people playing might, and frankly most likely will, be familiar with certain twists like the meaning of the riddle at the doors and the nature of Durin’s Bane. While it treats them as their traditional nature throughout the book, it reserves some space to allow these to be changed if it is considered more entertaining (page 149 for the doors and page 62 for Durin’s Bane).
As an art book this is not the best volume one could get from Free League’s The One Ring series, but it is a good one. One of the chief flaws comes from the simple fact that page for page it has less of the large two-page color pieces that divide sections which the others sported. That said, the ones which are present are still most definitely beautiful. An evocative gloomy look at the doors in one frame to a stark and the illustration of the Balrog roaming in another both suit the book well. The latter even manages to do a decent job of keeping the wing question at least a little ambiguous, a nice Easter egg alone.
At the same time, the illustrations both major and minor continue contributing to the book as a beautiful and entertaining volume while not feeling overly reliant on the style of the films by Peter Jackson. Indeed the color and black and white illustrations of Durin’s Bane sport no resemblance to the version from the films which wouldn’t be acquired from the words of the original author. It is similar for most, if not all, of the other shared characters and places. Given the long arm those movies have had, any new interpretation separate from them is a greatly appreciated addition.
For fans of the game, this one cannot be missed. It is bursting with content that can expand on existing material, and in the process allows those involved access to a piece of the setting they have desired for some time. For non-gamers it is one of the higher interest books as well, including a lot new and wonderful art, some impressive expansions on classic Middle-Earth material, and clever thoughts on and categorization of earlier material.
(2) BRISBANE 28 BID NEWS. Random Jones, chair of the bid to hold the 2028 Worldcon in Brisbane, Australia, has submitted their answers to Smofcon 41’s questionnaire: “Worldcon 2028 ‘Aussiecon 5’” [PDF file.]
The event is free and open to the public. Pre-registration for this in-person event is not required. Participants and attendees who are not affiliated with the college will need to sign-in at the security desk before entering and walking down the hallway to the right to room A-105.
Workers at Strand Books — one of New York City’s most famous book shops — walked off the job Saturday as part of a labor strike demanding they make more than minimum wage.
The store’s 110 unionized workers went on strike in the middle of the busy holiday season, leaving the shop’s “18 miles of books” to be run by a skeleton staff made up of a mix of store managers, part time non-union workers and other non-union administrative staff, according to labor organizers. The union wants their base pay to increase from $16 an hour, which is minimum wage in New York City, to $18 an hour in the first year of the contract. The workers voted to authorize a strike late last month….
…Shop steward and bookseller Brian Bermeo said the union and management are hung up over wage proposals. The union has demanded a $2 hourly raise in their first year of the contract, followed by $1.50 per hour raise in each of the second and third years.
Strand Books’ management has offered 50 cents less for each year, according to Bermeo. The two sides are due back at the bargaining table on Monday, according to a spokesperson for the store.
Ruoxi Chen has joined Putnam as executive editor. Chen was most recently an editor at Tordotcom Publishing, where she spent seven years editing speculative fiction, including the Hugo Award–winning novels Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh, The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo, and Riot Berry by Tochi Onyebuchi. Chen has also been recognized by the Hugo Awards for her work as an editor.
In her new role, Chen will be acquiring crossover fantasy, romantasy, and science fiction. She will report to Putnam VP and editor-in-chief Lindsay Sagnette.
It is the film that never was – an unlikely sci-fi musical about aliens dreamed up by Paul McCartney half a century ago. The aliens would have landed in a flying saucer, but the project never got off the ground.
Now the former Beatle’s treatment for the film – and an expanded version by the American sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov that McCartney turned down – have been unearthed in a US archive by the authors Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair, while researching a forthcoming book.
…The Fab Four had made several films, including A Hard Day’s Night, and McCartney wanted his new band [Wings] to star in one. He came up with a story about a band of aliens who arrive on Earth, morphing into the members of Wings before challenging the real Wings musicians.
Spanning almost 400 words, his treatment began: “A ‘flying saucer’ lands. Out of it get five creatures. They transmute before your very eyes into ‘us’ [Wings]. They are here to take over Earth by taking America by storm and they proceed to do this supergroup style. Meanwhile – back in the sticks of Britain – lives the original group, whose personalities are being used by the aliens…”
“Nothing ever came of this because McCartney couldn’t recognize good stuff,” said Asimov in a grumpy handwritten note on the manuscript.
A man who changed his name to Luke Skywalker has sold his collection of Star Wars memorabilia after losing his job.
The sale included signed items from the films, life-sized models of the cast, creatures and droids from the films.
“I need to survive. This stuff is just in a warehouse just collecting dust all the time,” Mr Skywalker said.
The auction, at Wessex Auction Rooms in Chippenham, was described as “extremely unique”….
… Mr Skywalker said: “My van blew up last week and I need a new one, so I thought I’ve still got lots.
“I’ve got the memories and I’ve got the photos, you know?”
Some of the collection included rare replica helmets, Mr Skywalker said.
“They only released 200 each in the world,” he said.
Tim Weeks, director and auctioneer at Wessex Auction Rooms and Bargain Hunt expert, said: “We had a packed room and more than 500 live online bidders from around the world….
…Easy is a Black World War II veteran who fled the Jim Crow South for a better life in Los Angeles. In “Devil in a Blue Dress,” the 1990 classic that started both the series and Mosley’s career, Easy takes his first case so he can pay his mortgage and uses a windfall to add a rental property. The ups and downs of real estate continue as a recurring theme and story engine, especially in the early books, where the remedy for some tax lien or underwater mortgage is often to solve whatever mystery is driving the plot.
Now, two decades of buying and holding later, Easy is flush. As he explains in “Farewell, Amethystine,” his 12 buildings have a total of 101 rental units that a friend manages for a 0.8 percent fee. Subtract that commission along with mortgage payments and general upkeep, and his take-home is $26,000 a year in 1970 (the year the novel takes place), which, adjusted for inflation, would be about $217,000 today.
“I wasn’t rich,” Easy says. “But I sure didn’t need to be going out among the hammerhands and scalawags in the middle of the night.”
Let’s dispense with the obvious: Easy Rawlins is a fictional character [created by Walter Mosley]. Nevertheless, I’m here to tell you that his story has much to teach us about small landlording — America’s most enduring side hustle…
(9) TODAY’S DAY.
(10) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
By Paul Weimer: Once there was a shared world anthology. In a real sense, it was the ur-shared world anthology, created by several fantasy writers and written by many authors. A creation of one of the Great Cities of fantasy, a city of contradictions. A City on the edge of Empire. A city that was sprawling. A city that was cramped. A city with more reprobates, dark magicians, heroes, villains, witches, and more per square block than any other. A city of endless adventure.
That city, the City of Sanctuary, that anthology and its many sequels, was Thieves’ World, created by Robert Asprin which was published forty years ago.
I came to Thieves’ World in the first rush of playing AD&D in the early 1980’s. Thieves’ World was tailor-made for a D&D locale, and in fact my brother and I had the boxed set of the RPG module before we actually touched the module. That early module, as unforgiving and sometimes spartan as other modules of the time meant that we really had to read the books in order to understand the setting deeply, even given all the maps, encounter tables and the like (it really was and is one of the best setting modules) My brother read the first two, first, before I did. I remember looking at the cover of the first one and asking my brother who these people were (it’s the cover with Lythande, Hanse and a mystery character, with One Thumb ready to serve them a round) .
At the time, Discworld was an ocean away and I would not encounter it for more than a decade. There was of course Lankhmar (and, no surprise, we had that D&D module too) . So Thieves World was, for me, for many years, the definitive and one true fantasy city. Lots of invented fantasy cities in games I ran (and my brother ran) that didn’t take place in Sanctuary and its environs took place in expys of it.
And then there were the stories themselves. A wide range of fantasy authors, some of whom I followed into other work (Asprin, for instance, right into the Myth series) and others that would become heart authors later (like Poul Anderson). Janet Morris. Jody Lynn Nye. And many, many others, borrowing, using and changing these characters. My older brother, who played thieves in D&D more than I liked the shades of grey characters and series even more than I did. I was always interested in the high magic and magical doings in the stories. Hanse Shadowspawn, son of a God, who kills another God. Lythande, whom today we might call a trans man, keeping his birth gender a secret, but as a result having quite potent magical powers. The strange spell that hits One-thumb, a dastardly magical trap. Again, for many years, other than Lankhmar, and some of the work of Zelazny (whom I only learned recently was invited but didn’t get to write in Thieves World), Thieves’ World’s anthologies were the sword and sorcery standard for me, with an emphasis on the dark sorcery. My brother might have been interested in thiefly doings, dark magic and fighting (and sometimes using it) was my deal.
Eventually the series petered out after a respectable number of volumes, side novels and the like. It did inspire a lot of other shared world series (such as Heroes in Hell) , and very probably, the most enduring of the shared worlds, Wild Cards.
But it occurs to me that the story of Sanctuary, of an edge-of-the-empire garrisoned town (with apologies to Sting) in a Empire that itself eventually topples and falls, leaving Sanctuary to its own devices is a story that is timeless. And given very recent events (hello, Syria), ever-fresh.
Meet you for a drink at the Vulgar Unicorn? My treat. Just bring your sword (or if you have a handy spell, then that) and your wits, the Maze is a dangerous place.
The Upside Down continues taking over Broadway as the cast for the U.S. version of Stranger Things: The First Shadow continues to grow.
Louis McCartney will reprise his role of young Henry Creel/future Vecna from the London West End production when the show makes its stateside debut in New York next year. But among the new batch of casting unveiled Wednesday is Alex Breaux, who’s already playing a mysterious series regular character in Stranger Things season 5, which premieres on Netflix in 2025. Fans only caught a glimpse of him on the show in a behind-the-scenes sneak peek, revealing him in a black militarized uniform holding an automatic rifle.
On stage, Breaux will play the new Dr. Martin Brenner, a role played by Patrick Vaill in the London stage version and Matthew Modine on the Netflix series.
Another piece of interesting casting: Grey’s Anatomy alum and The Flight Attendant actor T.R. Knight will hit the stage as Victor Creel, Henry’s father. Horror icon Robert Englund played the character on the series, while Michael Jibson took the role for the London production.
Also joining the Broadway cast are Alison Jaye (Shameless) as young Joyce Maldonado, Burke Swanson (Back to the Future: The Musical) as young Jim Hopper Jr., Broadway newcomer Nicky Eldridge as young Bob Newby, Emmy nominee Gabrielle Nevaeh (Nickelodeon’s That Girl Lay Lay) as Bob’s sister Patty, Rosie Benton (Patriots) as Henry’s mother Virginia, and Andrew Hovelson (Lucky Guy) as Hawkins High Principal Newby.
The production will give U.S. audiences a look at the prequel to Stranger Things that also ties into the events of the highly anticipated fifth and final season of the show. The play follows Henry Creel’s arrival in town with his family in 1959 Hawkins. It’s based on an original story by Stranger Things creators Matt and Ross Duffer, Jack Thorne, and Kate Trefry. Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin serve as director and co-director, respectively….
(13) ABOUT TABLETOP GAMES. [Item by Steven French.] Tim Clare, who was diagnosed as autistic while researching a book on how games connect people, discusses how board games offer a refuge from a noisy, chaotic world and lists his top five: “’Playing games turns me into a person who makes sense’” in the Guardian.
As a phenotype, autism is very loosely defined (“If you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person,” goes the old saying). It has a lot in common with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s conception of games; there’s no single trait, he said, common to all games that excludes everything not a game. Rather, we must rely on “family resemblances”. The best we can do is point to a bunch of activities and say: “These things, and things like them, are games.”
Tabletop games are a vast, sprawling island chain of loosely federated states, each with its own laws and customs. Trying to sum them all up in a neat little Baedeker feels measly, incomplete. Again, there are miles of open water between chess and Crokinole, Dungeons & Dragonsand Votes for Women. Each offers me different ways to unmask and connect….
The Amazon-owned streamer has set a March 13 premiere date for the fantasy drama’s third season. Prime Video also released a first teaser for the coming season at São Paulo’s CCXP24 convention.
In the teaser (watch it below), Moiraine (Rosamund Pike) warns that she has seen “a thousand thousand futures” — and that there are none in which both she and Rand al’Thor (Josha Stradowski), the young man who may hold the future of humanity in his hands as the Dragon Reborn, survive….
…Solar power from space has been an interesting concept since Isaac Asimov first described it in the context of 1940s science fiction. The concept is simple: put solar panels in an area with constant daylight, and the transformed solar energy is converted to microwaves and transmitted to the earth, where it is transformed back to electricity.
This approach would provide a constant and uninterrupted power supply, unlike the ground-based solar power dependent on sunlight. Although it seems the perfect answer to the world’s energy problems, the technical and financial issues have proved too difficult.
NASA’s Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy published a catastrophic report on SBSP’s vision. The findings were clear: SBSP will not be economically feasible shortly. The report shows that the costs of deploying space-based solar power systems remain prohibitive, and current research indicates that prices can be as much as 80 times more costly than on-ground solar systems.
In this case, the total lifecycle cost of these systems would be astronomical and much higher than that of land-based renewable technologies such as solar and wind power. NASA’s report also discussed the environmental effects of SBSP….
Dick Van Dyke is the star of Coldplay‘s music video for the band’s latest single, “All My Love,” which sees the 98-year-old Hollywood legend dancing barefoot and duetting with frontman Chris Martin.
Directed by Spike Jonze and Mary Wigmore, the seven-minute video is more like a short film as Van Dyke — who turns 99 on Dec. 13 — reflects on his nearly eight-decade career….
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, N., Mark Roth-Whitworth, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, and Teddy Harvia for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel (cue Bert Lahr on vocals) Dern.]
By Warner Holme: Tomad Härenstam’s Dragonbane is the latest iteration of Sweden’s first roleplaying game. This publication comes in the form of a boxed set from Free League featuring a pair of hundred-odd page books titled Dragonbane Rules and Dragonbane Adventures. While there are some dice, cards, and standees included, it is for the most part the books and other printed material which is impressive.
The game is quite well explained, seeming noticeably less wordy than some volumes might and instead focusing largely on accessible terminology to a newcomer. The rules are somewhat more complicated than many beginning role-playing games, with skills and heroic abilities taking up a number of pages from 30 all the way to 40 in a volume only slightly over a hundred pages. Details about the history of the game are handled quite early on, and nice pieces of information about the setting and its denizens are sprinkled throughout, albeit slightly more heavily in the adventures volume.
Led by lead illustrator Johan Egerkrans, the aesthetic gives off vibes delightfully similar to a children’s fantasy book. In and of themselves each one is over the top and larger than life, but they never descend into the comical cartoonishness that would keep an individual from taking them seriously. The arguable exception to this is going to be the species of sapient ducks called Mallards. These are each Illustrated in much the same style as any other image throughout the book, keeping a nice and unified aesthetic where the box set cover image, also used on page 47, has essentially only the fact it is a anthropomorphic duck preventing it from seaming downright dark and foreboding to pretty much any audience.
This is equally true in both the Rules and Adventures volumes contained within, everything from detailed maps and images of objects to large tables of stands against dragons keeping up the aesthetic. Indeed on top of the booklets there is a smaller pamphlet about playing the game alone which is far less decorated and, as a result, far less interesting and eye-catching. There are also well-designed character sheets, the ones already filled out having gorgeous illustrations upon them. A double-sided battle map with a squared grid is included for both outdoor and indoor settings, as well as an extremely large map of one of the intended setting of The Misty Veil. In addition to being gorgeously drawn and carefully labeled and colored, this piece serves a function of thanking those who helped crowdfund this edition of the game by featuring a startling amount of names in very small print on the back.
There is a certain amount of reused imagery, page 108 of the adventures volume and Page 96 of the rules volume both giving the same image of a Undead body serving as an obvious example even if one skips the aforementioned duck illustration from the box back cover. Within a pre-boxed game this is slightly disappointing, but certainly understandable. There is a large amount of content and even if the volumes come together the pair of books are nonetheless their own entities.
While things like protective privacy screens and additional dice are available for this game, everything needed is definitely in the box. Indeed, given the large stack of already included Adventures this set does much better than most starter sets at giving new gamers sufficient content to enjoy it. Those looking at it strictly as a set of art books or Illustrated settings volume will find a certain matter of redundancy, but not enough to likely dissuade.
(1) SUSANNA CLARKE ON NATIONAL BBC RADIO. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] BBC Radio 4’s Book Club devoted its programme this Sunday to Susanna Clarke’s 2020 novel Piranesi. It was short-listed for the Hugo, Nebula, Kitschies, BSFA, World Fantasy, Dragon Awards, and won the Woman’s Book Prize. It also won Hungary’s Zsoldos Péter – ‘Best Translated Novel’.
Susanna Clarke
Its plot concerns Piranesi, whose house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls, an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house. There is one other person in the house – a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known…
Over four million copies have been sold worldwide. Currently, Oregon animation studio is adapting it for the big screen.
Susanna was interviewed in front of an audience who then got to ask questions.
Susanna Clarke won the Women’s Prize for Fiction with her novel Piranesi. She joins James Naughtie and a group of readers to answer their questions about this intriguing, tantalising novel.
…We didn’t know this information then because our power had failed, the internet was down, and our phones were out. A few hours later, our water stopped, and a week later, most of these services were still out. (Cellular reception is better in some areas but still not what it was.)
Completely disconnected
After the first day, it began to sink in just how disconnected we were — not just from the world but also from friends only half a mile away. It’s horrible when you start to realize how bad things are in your community and can’t reach people to see if they’re OK.
I’d expected my power and internet to be off — an ERC Broadband 100 gigabit per second fiber backbone cable was down in my front yard. However, I didn’t expect to lose my Verizon cellular service. More fool me.
Life is different without connections. I stay in touch with my friends, co-workers, and family through email, Slack, social networks, and, in a pinch, phone calls and texts. However, all of these communication methods were out. That also meant my loved ones, friends, and colleagues couldn’t reach me to ensure I was okay….
(3) HWA’S FUTURE. Mary SanGiovanni has published a wide-ranging discussion of her aspirations for the Horror Writers Association: “On the HWA” at A Writer’s Life.
So… I’d like to talk about writing organizations and the Horror Writers Association (HWA), from one professional writer to another, and to our industry at large. I have been plucking the strings of this particular harp for many years, and I think I may have, in the past, come across as critical, but that’s because I want to be proud of the HWA and see it do well. I have served as a Trustee, so I understand the inner workings to some extent. I am an Active member, and have been, on and off, for almost two decades. I see all that the organization could be and I can’t — I just can’t – give up on it without trying once more to generate some discussion about how to utilize the HWA to strengthen our position in the publishing world.
The following is what I would like the HWA or any other writing organization that I am a member of to be,- in a perfect world — or maybe just a fantasy world. If the HWA would like to use any of these ideas, please do so with my blessing and enthusiastic support. Also, please see the disclaimers which follow, as I imagine they will address any number of complaints people may have with the following essay….
Here’s an excerpt:
MISSION/FOCUS
Some years ago, the HWA opened the doors of its membership to Associate members, which, at the time, included editors, publishers, agents, booksellers, librarians, etc. Now, I absolutely think that it is crucial for writers (and for the organization as a representative of those writers) to work with people in other facets of the publishing industry. I believe the HWA should be able to facilitate such relationships through networking opportunities, introductions, directories, etc.
That being said, I also think that a writing organization should never lose sight of its primary goal, which is to protect the rights of and foster opportunities for writers. There are times (e.g. contracts) when the best interests of writers and the best interests of, say, publishers, may be at odds. It is important to have a steadfast supporter of writers to guide the business transactions and best practices whenever possible. That is harder to do if the writing organization’s loyalties are split between two factions. Maybe some rule or by-law (or general practice which governs decisions and official actions of the board) should generally reflect or default to writers’ interests. Perhaps the organization can find ways to work out compromises that all might be satisfied with, but writers’ interests should come first.
Also, I believe that a professional writing organization should foster an environment of professionalism — should insist on it, actually, at least in the spaces where the organization holds some dominion. Many of us think of our industry as a community or even a family of sorts, where business and pleasure in a sense often mix. Of course they do. We’re colleagues and co-workers, but also close and cherished friends, even lovers and spouses. There are people in this business I would take a bullet for. Of course we care about each other. BUT…
This is first and foremost an industry, a business. We need to treat it like one, and we need an organization, if called upon, to shepherd that professionalism. We need it to make wise and shrewd business decisions concerning the well-being of the membership. We need it to arbitrate in business matters, to support efforts of writers to demand fair treatment, equal pay (or hell, payment at all), and help navigate contractual snares, and to examine ways in which it can promote fairness and equality in the professional arena for all writers….
The stance requires one foot to be firmly on the lawn adjacent to the hedge. Day in, day out — it has amounted to quite a bit of wear and tear.
“We’ve always had an issue with our grass in general, so it’s not just that one area, but obviously because people do stand in that section…,” said Esther Park, who lives in the South Pasadena house with her family….
… The process of reseeding and fertilizing the entire front lawn is likely to take the next few months, estimated Park.
To alert those seeking photo ops, Park’s husband first put out plant labels asking folks to not step in the section, but recently had to upgrade to planting orange flags around it.
“I don’t know how much people really pay attention to that,” she said…
(5) JOSHI FELLOWSHIP TAKING APPLICATIONS. [Item by Michael J. Lowrey.] The John Hay Library at Brown University invites applications for its 2025 S. T. Joshi Endowed Research Fellowship in H. P. Lovecraft. The Fellowship is provided for research relating to H.P. Lovecraft, his associates, and literary heirs. The application deadline is January 17th, 2025.
The Hay Library is home to the largest collection of H. P. Lovecraft materials in the world, and also holds the archives of Clark Ashton Smith, Karl Edward Wagner, Manly Wade Wellman, Analog magazine, Caitlín Kiernan, and others. The Joshi Fellowship, established by The Aeroflex Foundation and Hippocampus Press, is intended to promote scholarly research using the world-renowned resources on H. P. Lovecraft, science fiction, and horror at the John Hay Library (projects do not need to relate to Lovecraft). The Fellowship provides a monthly stipend of $2,500 for up to two months of research at the library. The fellowship is open to students, faculty, librarians, artists, and independent scholars. Applications are encouraged for projects that make use of material not already available digitally through the Brown digital repository.
(6) HWA ANNOUNCES COMPLAINT RESOLVED. HWA’s Volunteer Coordinator Lila Denning published this statement about the resolution of complaints brought by Cynthia Pelayo and Clash Books.
In my official capacity as HWA Volunteer Coordinator, I was asked to share this information:
In response to official complaints filed by author member, Cynthia Pelayo, and publisher member, Clash Books, the HWA engaged its formal Anti-Harassment Policy and met with both parties. The HWA Board is pleased to report, that the complaint has been settled and both parties are in agreement with plans to go forward. While any terms are private between the two parties and the HWA, there are a few statements that, at the request of both parties involved, the HWA agreed to share with the larger HWA membership to eliminate confusion and/or speculation in the public sphere.
Clash would like to truly apologize for sharing untrue personal information about Pelayo, her family and representatives, while Pelayo would also like to publicly apologize for tagging authors and parties who had nothing to do with the situation on social media. Otherwise, all parties want to be clear that they are going to be at StokerCon in June 2025 and have no problem being in the same places in a professional setting. The parties involved appreciate their privacy in this matter and are ready to move on.
Finally, Pelayo, Clash Books, and the HWA Board would like to remind all members that the HWA is here to support their members. There is a formal process to deal with harassment. All parties want to encourage others in the HWA community to bring their concerns to the Board rather than taking their issues to social media.
… But over the Oct. 4-6 weekend, everyone at Warners, including the executive duo, were left reeling as Folie à Deux collapsed in its box office debut with a $37.8 million domestic opening after becoming the first comic book movie in history to receive a D CinemaScore. Phillips, according to one source, spent the weekend in seclusion on a ranch property he owns.
Domestically, Folie à Deux opened well behind DC’s 2023 The Flash ($55 million) and Marvel Studios’ The Marvels’ ($46.1 million), both of which were major bombs. It also came in behind Sony’s relatively inexpensive Morbius ($39 million).
“It is complete audience rejection,” says one source close to the film.
Overseas, Folie à Deux came in at an estimated $81 million, in line with expectations but still notably behind the first film.
While it is not the lowest North American opening for a pic based on a DC character, Joker: Folie à Deux is major stumble. Yet numerous sources tell THR that there’s no studio head in Hollywood — save perhaps for Sony Pictures’ Tom Rothman — who would have turned down making a sequel to a film that was both a commercial and critical hit. To boot, Abdy and De Luca were under orders by Warner Bros. Discovery chief David Zaslav to fill a bare cupboard after the studio’s Project Popcorn disaster, which alienated talent by sending its entire 2021 slate day-and-date to streaming service Max. Zaslav also is keen to exploit the company’s IP more fully.
“It is a collective failure, but it was right to make this movie,” says one top veteran producer and financier, who points out that Phillips is a brilliant directorwho has made Warners billions between the first Joker and The Hangover movies.
Still, observers wonder how De Luca and Abdy could have presided over a film that veered so far off course from what audiences wanted or expected.
One answer, perhaps: Phillips was given an extraordinary level of autonomy and final cut. There was no test screening, though insiders say this was a mutual decision between the filmmaker and Warners in order to preserve spoilers. That decision does stretch credulity, as the film does not have a particularly spoiler-heavy plot, and even spoilerific movies like Marvel Studios’ Avengers: Engdame had multiple test screenings…
(8) ROBERT J. COOVER (1932-2024). Author Robert J. Coover died October 5 at the age of 92. Honestly, to me, his most interesting book was The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968) about a fantasy baseball league, however, the Associated Press didn’t even mention it in their obituary:
…His notable works included “The Babysitter,” in which a night out for the parents multiplies into a funhouse of alternative realities; “You Must Remember This,” an X-rated imagining of the leads in “Casablanca,” and the novel “Huck Out West,” in which Coover continued the adventures of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.
“A lesson I learned from reading (Thomas Pynchon’s) ‘V’ has stuck with me all my life: All my work is basically comic,” he told the Boston Globe in 2014. “That’s the only thing I have ever written. Even though they’re not always viewed as such, the books are all meant as comic works.”…
The New York Times admired those books and some others, including The Public Burning.
…Political myths came into Mr. Coover’s cross hairs in “The Public Burning” (1977), a novel that reimagined the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the married couple who were convicted of conspiring to steal atomic bomb secrets for the Soviets and executed in 1953.
The novel featured the Rosenbergs and other historical figures, like Richard M. Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover, as well as two mythic characters, Uncle Sam and the Phantom, who represented the overheated rhetoric of Cold War antagonism.
…Mr. Coover was an aggressive purveyor of puns and other willfully playful devices (he once named a detective Philip M. Noir), a tendency that some critics found both energizing and exhausting….
(10) ‘ARCS’ BOARD GAME REVIEW. [Item by N.] A little late, but it seems that there was a delay on retail sales because of the East Coast port strike. Now that the strike is concluded, expect copies to show up at your local tabletop game store over the course of this month. “Arcs, from Leder Games, turns a folk card game into a space opera” at Polygon.
…Arcs: Conflict and Collapse in the Reach is yet another radical attempt at tabletop innovation. The end result, available at retail beginning Oct. 1, is a unique approach to single-session strategy wargaming that evokes classics like Risk and Twilight Imperium. But when paired with a massive day-one expansion, Arcs morphs into a mind-blowing three-session campaign game with evolving rules and curious in-fiction discoveries. It’s completely over the top in all the best ways, and there’s nothing yet released quite like it….
Film cans containing unseen footage of the Thunderbirds TV show have been found in a garden shed.
A family found the cans – light-tight containers used to enclose film – in a Buckinghamshire shed belonging to their father, who was an editor on the show and died recently.
Stephen La Rivière, from Century 21 Films which received the 22 old cans, said they mainly contained Thunderbirds material from the 1960s, including an alternative version of an episode that was never broadcast.
It is hoped the footage – filmed on the Slough Trading Estate in Berkshire – can be shown to the public as part of the series’ 60th anniversary next year….
… Carole Ann Ford, from Ilford, played Susan, granddaughter of the Doctor played by William Hartnell when the BBC show started in 1963. The character has been frequently mentioned in the recent series with Ncuti Gatwa.
During an appearance at Luton Comic Con, the actress said she wanted to return although she admitted it “would be very emotional.. very emotional”.
“I don’t know if I could survive the excitement actually, it would be intense beyond all intensity,” she said.
Carole Ann Ford, far right, says a return to Doctor Who will be emotional 60 years on
She said: “It’s not just returning, it would bring back all the memories of William Russell and Jackie and Bill [William Hartnell] and various other people who aren’t with us anymore.
“I might be a little bit overcome and start blubbing.
“I keep being reminded I’m the last one standing and it’s not something I’m happy to hear.”…
… Last year the character returned to screens in a newly colourised version of the 1963 episode, The Daleks, which was broadcast on BBC Four to mark the show’s 60th anniversary.
The actress encouraged fans to be vocal in their support of her return if there was any chance of her returning.
In an interview on BBC Three Counties Radio, she hinted that she had had “one or two” conversations about returning in the past.
“I’ve had many conversations about going back, maybe not with the right people, I don’t know,” she added.
When it was suggested her character could be recast, she joked: “They better not, I’d burn the studio down.”…
It’s difficult to make a decent military horror movie. If we want the audience to be scared, the good guys need to be scared, too — but the scariest things about life in the U.S. military are black mold in the barracks and jet fuel in the drinking water. Frightening? Yes, absolutely, but not in a Hollywood “scream queen” kind of way.
Still, a good military horror movie isn’t impossible. The stakes just need to be a bit higher, the monsters a bit bigger and the heroes a bit harder. And the terror most often isn’t from the supernatural: The biggest bogeyman for the military in horror movies is usually the government, just like in real life….
1. “Aliens” (1986)
“Alien” is probably the greatest sci-fi horror movie ever made, so it only stands to reason that a sequel that employs space Marines to fight the aliens is going to make for the best military horror movie ever. Indeed, “Aliens” has everything the original has: a scary monster (the Xenomorphs), a great hero (Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley) and a lot of people to shockingly kill off one by one. It’s even scarier because the audience knows exactly that, aside from the threat of getting ripped in half, what makes “Aliens” so frightening is being hunted and overrun by a swarming enemy — an enemy you know is going to impregnate you orally and stick you to a wall for the baby to exit via your chest. It doesn’t get much better (or worse, depending on who you ask) than that….
The Wall is maybe the most iconic setting in Game of Thrones. Constructed by Bran the Builder in the Age of Heroes, it marks the northern border of the Seven Kingdoms. Some three hundred miles long and several hundred feet high in most places, it is one of the wonders of the world. Of course, the wall is no normal wall; it is built of ice and carries potent magical protections.
Originally meant to keep the Others out of the Realms of Men, for most of its history, it instead kept the Wildlings of the North out of the Seven Kingdoms. The Wall is home to The Night’s Watch. This order of men sworn to defend the Wall and the Realms of Men has built a number of castles into the Wall. Along with the Red Keep, it is one of the major setting locations of the story.
The Wall has now been rendered in stunning detail in LEGO. Done by the talented Anuradha Pehrson (you can find their Flickr here), this immersive build has over 200,000 pieces. It’s a truly massive build and includes several sections of The Wall and vignettes combined into one. The model takes up a full 5 ft x 5 ft square and is about 4.5 ft tall. Due to having several elements and scenes, it is not consistent on one scale.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, N., Michael J. Walsh, Michael J. Lowrey, 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 Daniel Dern.]
(1) TOLKIEN CRITICISM. Some fannish references surprisingly creep into Dennis Wilson Wise’s reviews of The Literary Role of History in the Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien by Nicholas Birns and Representing Middle-earth: Tolkien, Form, and Ideology by Robert T. Tally Jr. in “Tolkien Criticism Today, Revisited” for the Los Angeles Review of Books. For example:
….Of these debates, Birns often takes the more challenging or counterintuitive side. For instance, most Tolkienists agree that Tolkien based his Rohirrim on the Old English kingdom of Mercia. Instead, Birns sees the Rohirrim as semimodern—not medieval—through their “civilizing” contact with Gondor. To say the least, this view enjoys questionable textual support, but as one goes through Birns’s book, a clear pattern begins to emerge. Over the last few years, the Tolkien community has endured its own shadow version of the Sad Puppies fiasco. In 2021, certain right-leaning fans (and at least one senior scholar) loudly decried the “wokeism” of a diversity-themed seminar hosted by the Tolkien Society, and with even greater toxicity, some people in Tolkien fandom have virulently attacked the multiracial casting in The Rings of Power, an Amazon Prime Video series that first aired in September 2022.
This is the cultural moment into which Birns wades, but for someone hoping to make an important political intervention, he frequently stumbles over several small, self-deprecating asides. One example involves race and representation. Before launching into the argument, Birns explicitly denies that, as a white male from an Anglo-American cultural background, he is “trying to act as an authority on those subjects.” Here, Birns is plainly attempting to acknowledge his positionality, a move often called for by progressive scholars, but his good intentions catch The Role of History in Tolkien in a performative quandary. They let right-wing crusaders dismiss his arguments out of hand; after all, this book wasn’t written by “an expert.”
But of course Birns isn’t really trying to show wayward young fascists the light. His real audience is the academic Left, and despite his principled humility, Birns clearly wants to provide his fellow leftists with scholarly ammunition against the anti-diversity crowd. Thus his various scholarly takes consist mainly in quashing claims of “Germanic primitivism” in Tolkien. Birns downplays not only Rohan’s clear connection to Mercia—the Old English people, remember, were originally Germanic—but also Tolkien’s overall admiration for the Gothic peoples. Additionally, Birns alleges that Tolkien took multicultural Byzantium as his model for Gondor, not imperial (and eventually Ostrogothic) Rome. Even more pointedly, although Birns laments how little Tolkien knew about the “traditions and cultural memory of non-European peoples,” he nevertheless claims to see some African influence on the legendarium. Allegedly, Tar-Míriel of Númenor bears a passing resemblance to Empress Zewditu of Ethiopia.
Even for readers who cheer his goals, these connections can seem far-fetched….
Earlier this week, A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin set off a drama bomb when he bluntly criticized HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon in a blog post….
But compared to some of the other authors who have criticized adaptations of their work, it was nothing. Below, let’s look at some authors who were unhappy with the screen versions of their books, and what they said and did about it…
The article leads off with Ursula K. Le Guin (Earthsea), and follows with Alan Moore (Watchmen), Stephen King (The Shining), P.J. Travers (Mary Poppins), Brandon Sanderson (The Wheel of Time) and Michael Ende (The Neverending Story).
Ursula K. Le Guin didn’t like the Sci-Fi Channel’s adaptation of Earthsea
Let’s begin our journey into dissatisfaction with Ursula K. Le Guin, the author of the beloved Earthsea books. Where high fantasy epics often involve war or other mass-scale conflict, the Earthsea novels are quieter and more complicated, with different books following different characters living on a string of islands where magic is practiced freely. When The Sci-Fi Channel announced that it was going to make an Earthsea miniseries based on the first book in the series, A Wizard of Earthsea, people were excited.
But that excitement evaporated when they saw the finished product, which ran back in 2004. Le Guin herself was already bracing for the worst. “When I saw the script, I realized that what the writer had done was kill the books, cut them up, take out an eye here, a leg there, and stick these bits into a totally different story, stitching it all together with catgut and hokum,” she wrote for Locusmagazine. “They were going to use the name Earthsea, and some of the scenes from the books, in a generic McMagic movie with a silly plot based on sex and violence.”
“I want to say that I am very sorry for the actors. They all tried really hard. I’m not sorry for myself, or for my books. We’re doing fine, thanks. But I am sorry for people who tuned in to the show thinking they were going to see something by me, or about Earthsea. I will try to be more careful in future, and not let either myself or my readers be fooled.”
While Le Guin had kind words for the actors, she had a major problem with the casting. In the Archipelago of Earthsea, almost all of the characters are people of color, including the wizard Ged, the closest thing the series has to a main character. But in the Sci-Fi show, pretty much everyone was white, something Le Guin did not appreciate. “In the miniseries, Danny Glover is the only man of color among the main characters (although there are a few others among the spear-carriers),” she wrote for Slate. “A far cry from the Earthsea I envisioned.”
“My color scheme was conscious and deliberate from the start. I didn’t see why everybody in science fiction had to be a honky named Bob or Joe or Bill. I didn’t see why everybody in heroic fantasy had to be white (and why all the leading women had “violet eyes”). It didn’t even make sense. Whites are a minority on Earth now—why wouldn’t they still be either a minority, or just swallowed up in the larger colored gene pool, in the future?”
Le Guin was a bit kinder about the 2006 animated movie Tales from Earthsea, although she was still disappointed it didn’t channel her books more. “It is not my book. It is your movie. It is a good movie,” she remembers telling director Goro Miyazaki. At least she didn’t hate it this time.
Greta Gerwig was beaming Wednesday night as she was honored as this year’s Pioneer Of The Year, and in the process also helped raised $1.4 million for the Will Rogers Motion Picture Pioneers Foundation at a sold-out dinner that packed the Beverly Hilton Hotel International Ballroom…
I last chatted with Jeffrey Ford — last for your ears, that is — eight years ago during the 2016 Readercon — in a conversation which appeared on Episode 17. Back then, I described him as a six-time World Fantasy Award-winning and three-time Shirley Jackson Award-winning writer whose new short story collection A Natural History of Hell had just been published. But now that it’s 2024 and we’re back for yet another Readercon, he’s an eight-time World Fantasy Award-winning writer and a four-time Shirley Jackson Award winner.
Jeffrey Ford
Since that previous meal, he’s also published the novel Ahab’s Return: or, The Last Voyage in 2018, A Primer to Jeffrey Ford in 2019, The Best of Jeffrey Ford in 2020, and Big Dark Hole in 2021, plus three dozen stories or so new stories.
We discussed why writing has gotten more daunting (but more fun) as he’s gotten older, the difficulties of teaching writing remotely during a pandemic, how he often doesn’t realize what he was really writing about in a story until years after it was written, the realization that made him write a sequel to Moby-Dick, why if you have confidence and courage you can do anything, the music he suggests you listen to while writing, the reason he thinks world building is a “stupid term,” the advice given to him by his mentor John Gardner, how the writing of Isaac Bashevis Singer taught him not to blink, why he prefers giving readings to doing panels, the writer who advised him if everybody liked his stories it meant he was doing something wrong, and much more.
We respond to your burning questions in our bumper mailbag episode! We spend a good long time going through your posts, and we briefly discuss the recent allegations against Neil Gaiman before moving onto happier topics. Listen here.
(6) BRITISH ROBOT PURCHASES BOOM. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Robot sales in Britain broke its own record in 2023 with 3,830 industrial robots sold according to the International Federation of Robotics. This represented a 51% increase over 2022.
However, Britain still lags behind France, Italy and the European leader Germany. In 2022 Germany installed 269,427 industrial robots.
I keep on warning folk that the machines are taking over, but no-one ever listens….
(7) UNSTUCK THE LANDING. Space-Biff! surprises us by revealing Kurt Vonnegut’s work creating board games in “So It Goes”. And one was finally published this year — Kurt Vonnegut’s GHQ: The Lost Board Game. (It seems to be available at Barnes & Noble®.)
Before he became a famous author, over a decade before Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut was a board game designer. A failed board game designer, with only a sheaf of notes, a single rejection note, and an unfinished patent to his name, but a board game designer nonetheless.
And now his sole surviving design is an actual board game you can buy and play and, if you’re anything like me, spend a few hours marveling at. Thanks to the efforts of the Vonnegut estate in preserving his notes and Geoff Engelstein in interpreting and tweaking them into a functional state, GHQ — short for “General Headquarters” — is, not unlike Billy Pilgrim, a thing unstuck in time, transported from 1956 to 2024….
… Is GHQ a good game? Sure. For its time. For its place. Had it appeared in 1956, it may well have become the third great checkerboard game. With its zones of control and special units, it might have helped shape the coming century’s approach to tabletop gaming….
(8) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Lis Carey.]
September 26, 1957 – Tanya Huff, 67.
By Lis Carey: Tanya Huff is a Canadian science fiction and fantasy writer, who made her first sale of two poems to The Picton Gazette for $10, at age ten.
Since then, she has given us several fantasy series, including the Keeper’s Chronicles, in which Claire Hansen, a Keeper, has unintentionally become responsible for a small hotel, and the not completely sealed hole to hell in its basement. She’s assisted, with some degree of befuddlement initially, by Dean, the young handyman and cook she found working there; Jacques, the ghost of a French-Canadian sailor who has haunted the hotel since he died there in the 1920s; and her not befuddled at all cat, Austin, who talks, and is the source of a great deal of often snarky advice. I’m currently enjoying the first volume, Summon the Keeper.
Tanya Huff
Other fantasy series include the Blood series, featuring a former police detective and a vampire, which was adapted for television as Blood Ties, and the Quarters series, with bards who travel the kingdom carrying both news and magical skills, and are faced with new challenges when the kingdom is invaded.
Tanya Huff has also given us the Valor Confederation series, a military sf series where Staff Sergeant Torin Kerr tries to keep both her superiors and her company of space marines alive while on lethal missions across the galaxy. I hear excellent things about it, but haven’t read any of it yet.
An interesting tidbit is that while studying at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto for her Bachelor of Applied Arts degree, she was in the same class as science fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer. They collaborated on their final TV Studio Lab assignment, a short science fiction show.
(10) WEST COAST AVENGERS INTRODUCES BLUE BOLT. This November, the Earth’s Mightiest Heroes are back on the best coast in an all-new run of West Coast Avengers from writer Gerry Duggan and artist Danny Kim. Led by Iron Man, the new roster includes Spider-Woman, War Machine, Firestar, a mysteriously redeemed Ultron, and another former villain seeking redemption— Blue Bolt!
An experienced Marvel henchman with unrefined lightning-based abilities, Chad Braxton, AKA Blue Bolt, makes his first appearance in WEST COAST AVENGERS #1 where he finds himself on loan to the Avengers through a new prison release program. Reckless, undisciplined, and downright rude, Blue Bolt may just be the biggest jerk in the entire Marvel Universe. Can the Avengers whip him into shape or will Blue Bolt’s abrasive attitude–and lack of morals–tarnish the team’s legacy forever? See him for yourself in Kim’s original design sheet for the character plus a promotional image by Todd Nauck.
On the unique role Blue Bolt will serve on the team, Duggan said, “The Avengers have seen a lot of rough customers over the years. Hell, even Deadpool and Wolverine have been Avengers at different points. But the Avengers haven’t seen a bigger @$!&^% than Blue Bolt. He’s mean, he’s self-centered, narcissistic, and he’s only on the Avengers West Coast squad to shave time off his sentence. And wait until you find out what he’s in jail for. Yeesh.”
(11) SFF ON LEARNEDLEAGUE: WILLIAM GIBSON. [Item by David Goldfarb.] Yesterday’s match day featured this question:
What is the portmanteau title of William Gibson’s seminal and influential 1984 cyberpunk novel, the first (and only) to win the Nebula, Hugo, and Philip K. Dick awards?
This had a 37% get rate league-wide, with no single wrong answer getting as much as 5% of the submissions.
(12) MY PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION NOMINATION. [Item by Francis Hamit.] My novel Starmen has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The nomination has been accepted by Columbia University. It awards the Pulitzers. Which is good but there is more to do.
Leigh Strother-Vien is also nominated for her great work editing the book. It’s a very long book: 620 pages in the print editions. Four years of work at a time when we were both disabled and sick a lot of the time. Just shows you what you can do when you try. But we are up against very big publishers with big marketing and publicity machines. There is a long list of distinguished and very busy jurors from Publishing and Academia who may not like the fact that we are, alas, self published.
We never thought of doing it any other way. Why? I’ll be 80 next week and Leigh is 70. We are disabled. And we are soldiers. There is a lot of prejudice between us and a traditional publisher. We don’t have an agent and the “over the transom” method was closed years ago. There is a generation of younger editors that are more concerned about politics than the quality of the writing. Publishing executives tend to chase the market and imitate what has been successful rather than take risks on “new” or “unknown” writers. Ageism and Ableism are just two of the many hoops our book would have to jump through to get a deal. We don’t have time for all of that. We are too sick and tired, both of us, to deal with it.
So we applied, got accepted, and we’re a bit of a charity case because of the Kickstarter appeal to raise funds for formatting the interior and the excellent cover donated by Markee Book Covers. I took a credit union loan to cover other expenses. We have been graced with almost entirely five star reviews and the endorsements of friends such as Jacqueline Lichtenburg and Glen Olsen. So far, so good. But now this is a battle for public attention, for sales, and for ratings and reviews on Amazon, Goodreads and other websites.
This novel is an experiment in genres. We use a lot of them packed into what is on the surface an adventure novel with more than a dozen principal characters, each fully formed. Thematically it moves from Historical/ Western/ Detective fiction to Espionage, Political Intrigue, and Apache Myths, that becomes surrealist Fantasy and Science Fiction, mixed with Romance, Witchcraft, Feminism, Quantum Mechanics, String Theory, and disquisitions on slavery in the Old South, the failure of Reconstruction, and the floating world of sex workers called the Demimonde. All are grist for the mill. A lot of research was needed. A lot of deep thinking since I had no outline. That would have been more of a hindrance than a help.
Instead I just start at the beginning with an accidental meeting of two Scots far from home, in a dusty border town called El Paso, and the appearance overhead of a large balloon carrying a traveling circus. One of the Scots is the local manager for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency (a forerunner of today’s FBI) and the other is a young anthropologist from Cambridge University, George James Frazer. You just know interesting things will happen.
So much for the tease. Buy the book for the rest.
There is another reason that I feel confident. I’m a very good writer. I’m also a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, the oldest and most prestigious graduate writing program in the world. Rather amazing for a kid who got Ds in high school English. I could not spell or punctuate worth a damn. Still can’t. I’m dyslexic, a condition unknown and unnamed in the 1960s. I began my career as a Drama major, and when I came to Iowa the first time, I had never heard of the Workshop. I soon met professors there and graduate assistants, some of whom were or would become famous. But it was a mandatory drama theory course, “Playwrighting”, that changed my life. I began writing fiction and was admitted to the Undergraduate Writers Workshop. Then I spent four years in the US Army, where I also learned journalism and began my professional career. Returning to Iowa I was in classes with writers who became very famous and also won Pulitzer Prizes. Jane Smiley, Tracy Kidder, and last year’s winner, Jayne Philips were among them. But it’s not the Iowa MFA that helps, but the Iowa workshop program, a trial by fire if there ever was one for literature. Iowa rigs the game. You don’t get in unless you are already at the top. Over 97% of all applicants fail. When you have done that getting your book published should be easy — and is, when you are young and have an agent and a publisher that can see decades of other books coming. At my age, not so much, and I have had agents tell me that to my face and others drop me because I wouldn’t imitate other writers that were best sellers.
Self-publishing is a long and honorable tradition in American letters. Willa Cather and Walt Whitman started that way. So once more I’m in good company. I am going to have to push myself and my book to prevail, but there is no long list or short list for the Pulitzers. Only winners and finalists. If it were not for so many top reviews we would not have entered, but now that we are here we can only try our best.
(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] “Trap Pitch Meeting”. Huh. Sounds pretty much like the review I read. Then again, with a plot this shallow/unbelievable and nepotism this blatant, it might be hard for a parody and a review to differ very much.
[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, David Goldfarb, Francis Hamit, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, and Kathy Sullivan for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Ellen Montgomery.]
In the 18th and 19th centuries, an obsession spread among bibliophiles for extra-illustrating or grangerizing books. Readers would supplement the pages of an already published book by inserting prints and related materials acquired from other sources. This process would often result in a huge expansion of the original volume, a ballooning that could easily stretch the book to bursting, requiring rebinding into additional volumes to hold the interleaved material. Where did this practice come from? Who thought of doing it in the first place?
In 1769, a country vicar named James Granger (1723–1776) published A Biographical History of England, from Egbert the Great to the Revolution. A guide for collectors of portrait prints, the book cataloged and gave brief descriptions of significant personages in British history as well as directed readers to the most desirable engraved portraits of those subjects for their collections.
Granger’s friend Richard Bull (1721–1805), a member of Parliament and an avid collector, went well beyond using the book to find and procure the recommended prints for his collection. Instead, he dismantled and cut up Granger’s text, placing relevant passages with the corresponding engravings on large backing sheets that served as new pages, and then he bound all these pages together. This process radically altered and expanded the structure and contents of the original book.
Granger’s A Biographical History of England, published as four quarto volumes 9 inches tall, expanded in Bull’s hands to 35 folio volumes with leaves 23 to 28 inches tall, filled with 14,500 portrait prints. What had once been a work free of images—except for Granger’s portrait—became a mixed-media compendium of British historical figures. Today, it is known as the Bull Granger. The Huntington holds all 35 volumes of this first-identified project of extra-illustration, traditionally defined….
(3) HAPPY BOOK BIRTHDAY. Cat Rambo’s Rumor Has It, sequel to You Sexy Thing and Devil’s Gun, was released today.
It's my book birthday! RUMOR HAS IT is out in the wild. Please pick it up from your favorite bookstore or get it from your library! And if you enjoy it, please spread the word. 🙂 pic.twitter.com/WFXHK9OZhn
(4) DREAMHAVEN BOOKS ACQUIRES ANOTHER STORE’S INVENTORY. Announced today on Facebook:
DreamHaven Books of Minneapolis is pleased to announce the acquisition of the remaining inventory of the 1990s Colorado bookstore, The Little Bookshop of Horrors. The Arvada Colorado bookstore specialized in Horror, Science Fiction and Mystery books and hosted frequent signings with authors. The owners, Doug and Tomi (Cheri) Lewis were also publishers of Roadkill Press who produced a number of chapbooks with the authors they would host.
The store closed after the death of Tomi Lewis in 1996 and Doug locked the doors and simply walked away. The store and it’s impressive inventory would sit for many years until it was more recently moved into a storage unit. Greg Ketter of DreamHaven Books agreed to purchase the remaining stock and has transferred it to his brick & mortar store in Minneapolis. The books are now being integrated into the store stock and certain items listed on ABE Books and eBay.
There are many signed books by Joe R. Lansdale, Dan Simmons, Edward Bryant, Harlan Ellison, John Dunning, Elmore Leonard, Donald Westlake and many others. Hundreds of limited edition and small press books are also included. Want lists are welcome (DreamHaven will not be able to quote books by phone; they are still sorting through hundreds of boxes of books).
(5) GET ON BOARD. The SFWA Blog continues its series on board game playtesting with “Playtesting TTRPG Stories”.
Don’t Help Playtesters
Give the material you’ve produced to a playtesting group without additional explanation or support. Effective game writing must stand without outside explanation.
A common error is supporting the players or gamemaster if they’re confused about how a narrative element should be presented or how some mechanics function. Observing playtests is a good source of data, but it’s best not to interfere directly. Watching someone get your game wrong is an important step in revising the text so that future customers will get it right….
After previously being exempt from inclusion in the ongoing video game actors strike, Riot Games‘ massively multiplayer online role-playing game “League of Legends” has been added to the list of blocked titles by SAG-AFTRA amid the union’s accusation of unfair labor practices against Formosa Interactive.
According to SAG-AFTRA, Formosa, a union signatory that provides voiceover services for “League of Legends,” is accused of trying to “cancel” one of its struck video games “shortly after the start of SAG-AFTRA’s video game strike” on July 26. SAG-AFTRA has filed a charge against the company with the National Labor Relations Board.
“When they were told that was not possible, they secretly transferred the game to a shell company and sent out casting notices for ‘NON-UNION’ talent only,” the union said. “SAG-AFTRA charges that these serious actions are egregious violations of core tenets of labor law – that employers cannot interfere with performers’ rights to form or join a union and they cannot discriminate against union performers. The unilateral and surreptitious transfer of union work to a ‘non-union’ shell company is an impermissible and appalling attempt to evade a strike action and destroy performers’ rights under labor law.”
It should be noted SAG-AFTRA is not accusing the Riot Games title of unfair labor practices, but rather calling for a strike against “League of Legends” because it is the most high profile title produced by Formosa Interactive.
In a statement Tuesday, “League of Legends” publisher Riot Games said: “‘League of Legends’ has nothing to do with the complaint mentioned in SAG-AFTRA’s press release. We want to be clear: Since becoming a union project five years ago, ‘League of Legends’ has only asked Formosa to engage with Union performers in the US and has never once suggested doing otherwise. In addition, we’ve never asked Formosa to cancel a game that we’ve registered. All of the allegations in SAG-AFTRA’s press release relating to canceling a game or hiring non-union talent relate to a non-Riot game, and have nothing to do with ‘League’ or any of our games.”…
…In The Fifty-Year Mission The First Twenty-Five Years by Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman, Gerrold was reported as having said that “all of the movies and all of the episodes hold together because Shatner holds it together.”
Gerrold pointed out that Spock [Leonard Nimoy] needed someone to play off of, and that was Captain Kirk. When Spock had scenes that didn’t involve the captain, he didn’t think they were interesting.
“The scenes where Spock doesn’t have Shatner to play off of are not interesting. If you look at Spock with his mom or dad, it’s very ponderous. But Spock working with Kirk has sthe magic and it plays very well, and people give all of the credit to Nimoy, not to Shatner.”…
(8) TERRY QUERY: WHERE’S ARNOLD? [Item by Daniel Dern.] My friend (and former boss) Paul Schindler is having no luck finding information, much less the online thing itself, of Sir Pterry’s story “Arnold, The Bominable Snowman” which is/was supposed to be published online this month (September 2024).
See Item 2 in the May 11, 2024 Pixel Scroll for more about the story proper, the onlineification, contest, etc:
(2) PTERRY SURPRISE. The Terry Pratchett website has announced “Another lost Terry Pratchett story found”
Thanks (on behalf of Paul, who I’ll advise of any follow-ups)
(9) TEDDY HARVIA CARTOON.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
Born September 24, 1934 – John Brunner. (Died 1995.)
By Paul Weimer: The man who saw our future. Or multiple futures. Yes, I know science fiction is really about the present much more than “predicting the future”, but take a look around at our year of 2024, with random violence, political instability, a kaleidoscope of fashions and trends, social divisions, global terrorism, extremism, billionaires running amok. And also, gay marriage, affirmative action, electric cars, the use of marijuana and more.
John Brunner
Aside from the fact that the random violence in the book is NOT gun-based, we seem to be living very much in the world of Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar. But that’s not all. In The Sheep Look Up, we get environmental degradation, a Republican President who says the answer to all our problems is “Deregulation”, a widening gap between rich and poor, and a degradation of quality of life across the board. Or The Jagged Orbit, where a cabal of Republicans are going to use computers to swing an election. Or The Shockwave Rider, showing a United Stated dominated by computer networks a la the internet, even as infrastructure crumbles and crumbles.
Reading (or rereading Brunner) in 2024 can be a lot.
Beyond the gloom and doom of Brunner’s trilogy, though, there is much lighter fare if you want to try one of SF’s greatest visionaries. Out of his large oeuvre, my favorite is The Squares of the City. Boyd Hakluyt is a traffic and systems engineer who is hired by a fictional South American country to resolve a traffic and transit problem. While there, he gets wrapped up in a plot between the government and the not so loyal opposition, in a literal chess match where Boyd finds himself a piece on the board. It’s a taut and fun political thriller that might be a bit light on the SF, but high on tension, drama, and if you like chess, you will love this book. And then there is The Infinitive of Go, which is the type of multiverse novel whose implications slowly creep on you.
(12) DIAL THAT DOWN. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] The folks behind HBO’s new “workplace comedy” about the creation of a superhero franchise movie claim they had to take what happens in real life movie making down a notch. Otherwise, they say, no one would believe them. It would just be too silly. The Hollywood Reporter has the story of The Franchise.
There’s a situation discussed in HBO’s upcoming series The Franchise — a comedy about the behind-the-scenes struggle to make a superhero movie — that sounds rather absurd: A director laboring away on a fictional Marvel-like film gradually realizes the studio brass has changed their mind about the project’s creative direction and started secretly shooting the “real” movie somewhere else, while he continues to film scenes destined to be scrapped.
Yet this has actually happened to at least one filmmaker working on a franchise movie, according to the show’s producers.
“All the research we did — and we did tons, we spoke to so many people — the actual chaos [on superhero films] was really surprising,” says The Franchise creator Jon Brown (Succession), who made the series along with Armando Iannucci (Veep) and Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes (1917). “People think these movies are laid out in neat phases for the next 10 years. Then you hear about a set where, in the morning, a limo literally pulls up, the window comes down, and they hand out new script pages. Or producers on set have eight versions of the same script open, and they go through each script, cherry picking lines, and then they Frankenstein a scene out of nothing. Or the studio sends an actor to the set in the morning and they basically rewrite the day’s entire scene [to accommodate the last-minute cast addition]. You would assume all this was decided two years ago, but it’s happened a lot across Marvel and DC movies.”
As a result, the writers of The Franchise found themselves in the rather odd position of sometimes making story choices for their show that were less wild than the real-life anecdotes they were hearing from industry insiders. “You think, ‘I know this is real, but it just seems too silly,'” Brown said. “So we sometimes have to take it back a step, because you don’t think people will believe it unless they know it’s true.”…
(13) COLLECTORS ITEM. Are you in the market for a complete run of Weird Tales? This one can be yours for $150,000. “RARE! Complete Set of Weird Tales” at eBay.
While it’s been a few months since the adventures of the Fifteenth Doctor and companion Ruby Sunday, the excitement lives on, as fans can now pre-order the Doctor’s trust sonic screwdriver!
The screwdriver is available to pre-order from Character Options at £39.99….
The Fifteenth Doctor’s sonic screwdriver boasts a completely revamped shape and design, with its curved edges, making it the most unique rendition of his favourite bit of tech yet.
The deluxe version, available only on Character online, boasts an exclusive ‘electro plated’ finish making it look like real polished steel and brass. It features two modes of operation, Open and Closed, as well as five brand new and totally unique sound and light effects, with each accessed by a different button sequence.
On this deluxe version of The Fifteenth Doctor’s device there are many new features including a uniquely shaped, swivel-out Power Core complete with flickering Power Crystal Chamber and on/off sounds. There are also three distinctly different sounds with accompanying light FX; a standard sonic sound, a data sound, and a lifeform scan sound. The spring-out and retract Emitter section also has its own sound and finally the slide out analyser comes with its own sound completing the sound FX.
The sonic comes beautifully presented in Regeneration style packaging and is the perfect piece of memorabilia to add to any Doctor Who collection.
Scientists, as well as Hollywood movie producers, have long looked to nuclear bombs as a promising form of defence should a massive asteroid appear without warning on a collision course with Earth.
Now, researchers at a US government facility have put the idea on a firm footing, showing how such a blast might save the world in the first comprehensive demo of nuclear-assisted planetary defence.
Physicists at Sandia National Laboratories, whose primary mission is to ensure the safety and security of the US nuclear arsenal, recorded in nanosecond detail how an immense pulse of radiation unleashed by a nuclear blast could vaporise the side of a nearby asteroid.
The event is so violent that it heats the surface to tens of thousands of degrees, producing a rapidly expanding ball of gas capable of nudging the asteroid off course. Do the sums correctly and the shunt should be sufficient to put doomsday on hold.
(16) TEN YEARS OF SCIENCE AND FUTURISM. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] As regular Filers may have spotted, I occasionally throw a link 770’s way to Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur’s YouTube Channel (among much other material). The video item on “Transcendence” last week on File770 actually marked the 10th anniversary of that channel but I failed to include a mention that and that that episode also happened to coincide with Isaac’s 44th birthday.
As Mike knows, but you most likely don’t, I am one of the rare, endangered western-nation species that is not on the internet at home (actually, in the UK currently some 35% UK households solely occupied by over 65s are not on the internet so actually I am not as rare a creature as many of you may suspect – so always respect digital access diversity – the recent Glasgow Worldcon was not). What happens is this, working almost next door for an hour three or four times a week at the library cybercafé, if I spot an item of likely interest to Filers and then pass it Mike’s way for him to decide whether or not to include. This is an important filter as usually I spot things without looking at them in depth (I do that later at home having downloaded whatever it is to memory stick), so some duff material can get through and Mike commendably filters that out. This survey of the landscape is no hardship on my part as I have to keep an eye out for material for the seasonal SF² Concatenation. That zine has just three principal editions a year, whereas Mike’s is daily, so it makes sense for File770 to have first dibs as it could be up to four months before anything I (and other providers) air in Concatenation. Mike only uses 0.01% of the stuff I send him, so if you want to see other SF (through more a European/British prism) & science coverage then feel free to drop in on SF² Concatenation just three times a year.
Meanwhile, back to Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur, the previously linked “Transcendence” episode was number 465 in Isaac’s run or actually 700 in that series if you include Isaac Arthur’s shorts, live-streams and specials. Ohio-based Isaac is also currently the incumbent President of the National (US) Space Society, which I guess is the US analogue of our British Interplanetary Society. As for Isaac’s future episodes, of applied science interest is a forthcoming one on “Is Privacy Going Extinct” on 26th September (2024), and of SFnal/science interest “The Fermi Paradox: Large Moons” on 3rd October. Then, in more of an SFnal vein there will be one on “Fungal Aliens” on 13th October. You can check these out at www.youtube.com/@isaacarthurSFIA. He has more background info at www.IsaacArthur.net.
I should point out that Isaac’s channel is not the only one I monitor. His channel has a few occasional items of SF/SF interest for my catholic taste, but as for some of my other favourites there is: for pure physics I enjoy Matt O’Dowd at PBS Space-Time; for palaeo-environmental science (which is fairly close to my own specialist area) PBS Eons; for astrophysics Dave Kipping at Cool Worlds; for astronomy Becky Smethurst at Doctor Becky and for the presentation of the sheer love of finding out about SF Moid Moidelhoff at Media Death Cult and that of the joy of SF book collecting Book Pilled. There are, of course, other channels out there, and I dare say Mike would welcome your recommendations in the comments…
(17) SECRET ORIGINS OF PLOKTA, PT. 1. The Fanac Fanhistory Zoom for September 2024 is online:
This fannish group (aka the Plokta Cabal) burst on the scene in May 1996 with the fanzine Plokta, which went on to receive two Best Fanzine Hugos, 2 Nova Awards for Best Fanzine, and Hugo nominations each year from 1999 to 2008. They are energetic, quirky and very, very funny. They are writers, artists, con runners, Worldcon bidders and fan fund winners.
In part 1 (of 2), Steve Davies, Sue Mason, Alison Scott and Mike Scott, recount how they came into fandom and found each other. They tell entertaining stories of their fannish lives, from convention newsletters to the celebrated Plokta to the glories of providing a unique in-joke badge to each member of a convention. You’ll learn what a SMURF is, hear strong opinions about staples, and find out just what voodoo board spam can be. Plokta was one of the first web fanzines, and came together differently than most other fanzines. The group dynamics and interactions that created it are on full display in this recording. It’s great fun to watch, and it’s very, very clear that it was great fun to live.
[Thanks to Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Gordon Van Gelder, Paul Weimer, Michael J. Walsh, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, and SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Bill.]
(1) BRISBANE IN ’28 MOVES PROPOSED DATE. The committee bidding to hold the 2028 Worldcon in Brisbane Australia today announced they have changed the planned dates to be the weekend after the total solar eclipse that will be passing through Australia. They now propose to hold the con from Thursday July 27 to Monday July 31, 2028.
(2) ROCKY HORROR AT 50 (PLUS 1). [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Listen closely, but not for very much longer…
Way back in 1973 the Rocky Horror show burst on to the stage and it was astounding! Time had barely the chance to be fleeting before the cinematic adaption came out in 1975.
I remember seeing the film in 1977 and then the play three or four times the next few years, one London screening of which I was pleasantly surprised when some Hatfield PSIFA alumni (all in just new, well paid jobs) treated me to the second last show on the final day of its London West End run. (British theatre tradition has it that the second last show on the final day is done for fun with the final show played dead straight. For example, some crew wag had secretly sewed up the sleeves of Brad’s lab coat and so he struggled (failing) to put it on. Such were the japes.)
Then in the 1980s one of SF² Concatenation’s co-founding editors, Tony Chester, was on the committee for Denton, a Rocky Horror Show convention, asked for my moral support. At it, I remember declining to go to see yet another screening and so spent the time in the bar with a rather nice lady. After 45 minutes of chat I asked her what brought her to the convention and she replied that she played Magenta in the show… (And I’ll skip over the tale of the coach of rugby supporters that pulled up outside the hotel in search of libation who spotted a chap coming out of the toilets wearing a bra and suspenders. ‘Get the nonce’, they shouted and chased him into the hall where they came face to face with a sea of folk similarly scantily dressed. The rugby fans beat a hasty retreat.)
Before all this get lost in time, and space, and meaning, I mention it to illustrate that I have a loose, but to me non-trivial, relationship with the show.
All of which brings us up to the present and BBC Radio 4’s Front Row arts programme whose Monday night edition saw the first 15 minutes feature an interview with the show’s creator, Richard O’Brien. He was promoting the show’s 50th anniversary tour: well, 50+1 because ill health prevented him from doing it last year.
Richard O’Brien and Jason Donovan on 50 years of the Rocky Horror Show… You can check out the first 15 minutes of the Front Row episode here and let madness take its toll.
Writing narrative content for board games is different from any other writing I’ve ever done. It’s even different than writing for video games or role-playing games. The reason is simple: length.
Novel and short story authors have plenty of space to tell a story. Even flash fiction generally gives you 500 to 1,000 words to work with. But board games provide at most 100 words per story beat—more often than not, you get fewer than 20 words to create an emotional impact.
It all comes down to space. Most board game narrative is presented on cards, which are ubiquitous game components. Sure, murder mystery and escape room games usually include booklets with everything from character bios to full scenes to read to players. Even these booklets must be concise, however, because paper, printing, and space in the box are the most expensive pieces of a game. You get a couple of paragraphs per story beat at most. Outside of murder mystery boxes, most storytelling games present their narratives via cards, which hold, at most, 50 words….
… The first thing to understand is that board game playtesting focuses on two main aspects: player engagement and players’ understanding of the game mechanics. Basically, did the players enjoy playing the game, and did they play the game correctly?…
(4) SAGA PRESS ANNOUNCEMENT. Motion and promotion at the Saga Press.
Tim O’Connell moves from Vice President, Editorial Director of Fiction at Simon & Schuster to Vice President, Publisher of Saga Press.
Throughout his career, O’Connell has edited and published acclaimed speculative fiction by prestigious authors such as Charles Yu, Ted Chiang, Naomi Alderman, Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, Paolo Bacigalupi, B. Catling, Omar El Akkad, Debbie Urbanski, and Karin Tidbeck. “My first fiction publication was Charles Yu’s Howto Live Safely in A Science Fictional Universe, and science fiction and fantasy have always been central parts of my list,” says O’Connell. “This is a tremendous opportunity to continue to build upon the fabulous Saga legacy, which is already decorated with award winners and bestsellers.” Among O’Connell’s forthcoming titles for Saga Press are multi-award-winner Daryl Gregory’s When We Were Real, writer for the hit Netflix show The OA Damien Ober’s groundbreaking space fantasy Voidverse, and viral horror sensation Eric LaRocca’s next novel The Unbecoming of Porcelain Khaw. He will continue to acquire literary fiction and select nonfiction for the Simon & Schuster list.
Joe Monti is promoted to Vice President, Associate Publisher and Editorial Director, reporting to O’Connell.
A publishing industry veteran who formerly worked as a literary agent, Barnes & Noble buyer, and sales rep, Monti founded Saga Press in 2015 and has helped cultivate it into one of the most revered publishers of genre fiction. He has worked with bestselling and esteemed authors such as Tananarive Due, Charlaine Harris, Stephen Graham Jones, Ken Liu, Rebecca Roanhorse, Andrew Joseph White, and R. A. Salvatore, and has long championed work by marginalized voices. “As Saga Press approaches our tenth anniversary, we have entered a new and exciting phase of growth,” says Monti. “This is a continuation of what I always hoped the imprint might become with a full and dedicated team of passionate genre expertise at every level.”
O’Connell will report to Simon & Schuster Vice President and Publisher Sean Manning.
“Since the Saga Press team joined Simon & Schuster in 2023, I’ve been awed by their deep expertise and inspired by their unabashed geeking out over their work,” says Manning. “Genre is now the hottest market in the literary landscape, and this growth ensures our commitment to leading the way.”
Ella Laytham joins Saga Press as Art Director.
Laytham started her publishing career as a designer for Atria/Gallery and has most recently worked at Penguin Random House. She specializes in sci-fi, fantasy, and horror, and her celebrated cover designs include the New York Times bestsellers The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones, A Fate Inked in Blood by Danielle L. Jensen, All Good People Here by Ashley Flowers, and Lady Macbeth by Ava Reid. Laythem will report to Simon & Schuster Art Director Jackie Seow.
(5) “INCORRECT” ANIMAL NOISES. This looks awfully good. The Wild Robot, in theaters September 27. Based on Peter Brown’s The Wild Robot.
The epic adventure follows the journey of a robot—ROZZUM unit 7134, “Roz” for short — that is shipwrecked on an uninhabited island and must learn to adapt to the harsh surroundings, gradually building relationships with the animals on the island and becoming the adoptive parent of an orphaned gosling….
A powerful story about the discovery of self, a thrilling examination of the bridge between technology and nature and a moving exploration of what it means to be alive and connected to all living things.
(6) COMICS SECTION.
Speed Bump is sure the future won’t change some things.
Candorville has a list of basic needs that’s not like everyone else’s.
(7) DOCTOR WHO. Titan Comics is bringing out Doctor Who: The Fifteenth Doctor #3 on September 25.
Join The Doctor in a new comic book adventure! FEATURING THE FIFTEENTH DOCTOR & RUBY SUNDAY! The Doctor and the Cybermen clash while Ruby faces an insectoid threat. But is everything as it seems? And what is the true nature of the terrifying evil that stands ready to unveil itself.
SpaceX’s latest mission — a bold and risky trek into Earth’s Van Allen radiation belts by a four-person crew of civilians who will also aim to conduct the first commercial spacewalk — just took flight.
The mission, dubbed Polaris Dawn, lifted off at 5:23 a.m. ET….
Since 1961, fewer than 700 people have been into space. Private space companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin hope to boost that number to many thousands, and SpaceX is already taking bookings for flights to Earth orbit.
I’m an astronomer who has written extensively about space travel, including a book about our future off-Earth. I think a lot about the risks and rewards of exploring space.
As the commercial space industry takes off, there will be accidents and people will die. Polaris Dawn, planned to launch early in September 2024, will be a high-risk mission using only civilian astronauts. So, now is a good time to assess the risks and rewards of leaving the Earth….
(9) FANTASY DIY PROJECT. [Item by Bruce D. Arthurs.] Caught a post on Mastodon by a talented fellow who built a remote-controlled walking table that reminds people of Terry Pratchett’s Luggage from the Discworld books. Amazing work. Here’s the blog post with photos and details about how it was built: “Carpentopod: A walking table project”.
(10) HAPPY 30TH ANNIVERSARY. [Item by N.] Mainframe Studios, the company behind the cult Canadian CGI series ReBoot, have released a remastered copy of the first episode for free, in celebration of its 30th anniversary: “ReBoot Season 1 Episode 1 – The Tearing”.
Originally aired on Sept 10, 1994, The Tearing is the very first episode of the classic series, ReBoot! Venture back to Mainframe with Bob, Dot, Enzo and your other favourite characters.
This all-new remaster was captured and upscaled by the team behind the new documentary series, ReBoot ReWind. Huge thanks to Jacob Weldon, Raquel Lin, Mark Westhaver of Disappearing Inc, Bryan Baker, Tanner McColeman and Linus Media Group.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, N., Lise Andreasen, Bruce D. Arthurs, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Steve Davidson.]
