Tag Archives: Bobby Derie

Pixel Scroll 5/1/25 If You’re Looking For That Pixel, It’s Over In That Scroll, Not This One

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(1) FOR WHOM CTHULHU TOLLS. Quotes from Lovecraft’s correspondence touching on Hemingway feature in Bobby Derie’s “Harsh Sentences: H. P. Lovecraft v. Ernest Hemingway” at Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein.

It is just possible that Ernest Hemingway knew the name H. P. Lovecraft. Though they moved in very different literary circles and Hemingway was not known to have ever picked up a copy of Weird Tales. Yet they both earned three-star ratings in Edward J. O’Brien’s The Best Short Stories of 1928, Hemingway for “Hills Like White Elephants,” Lovecraft for “The Color Out of Space.” They both made The Best Short Stories of 1929, too. For Hemingway, that was the likely the beginning and end of their association; there are no mentions of the master of the weird tale in Hemingway’s letters. It was easy, in the 1920s and 30s, to know nothing about Lovecraft.

For H. P. Lovecraft, missing Hemingway would have been much more difficult—nor did he….

…While vastly different in style, that both men shared an appreciation for some of the same authors and works, or at least recognized their importance, should not be surprising. They were only nine years apart in age, both white men raised in America, voracious readers who loved literature. One notable fantasy writer that they both appreciated was Lord Dunsany, who was a major influence on Lovecraft:

“Often a wonderful moon and the guy’s would have me read Lord Dunsany’s Wonder Tales out loud. He’s great.” —Ernest Hemingway to Grace Quinlan, 8 Aug 1920, LEH 1.237

(2) EFFORT TO STOP IMLS LAYOFFS. Plaintiffs move to prevent layoffs ordered for the Institute of Museum and Library Services: “In D.C.’s District Court, ALA Battles to Preserve IMLS” at Publishers Weekly.

At the first hearing in ALA v. Sonderling, held April 30 at the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia, the American Library Association and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees pushed for the court to put an immediate halt to the ongoing gutting of the Institute of Museum and Library Services before the majority of its staff is laid off this weekend.

The ALA and AFSCME hope to block the implementation of a White House executive order that has hollowed out the IMLS, reduced staffing to a minimum, and imposed delays and outright terminations on the agency’s statutory and discretionary grants. In a brief filed April 28, the organizations argued that the defendants, including IMLS acting director Keith Sonderling, have made “arbitrary” and “unconstitutional” changes at the agency. The defendants contend they must comply with the EO to fulfill “the President’s priorities.”…

(3) AI BS. T. R. Napper cuts loose on “the oft-repeated lies and the self-serving greed of an industry that, at its core, seeks to destroy art” in “It’s the People, Stupid (Human Art in a Company World)”.

The Will to Anthropomorphise

This dishonesty of the tech industry is particularly acute in the field of generative AI models, where obscurantist tech language tries mightily to anthropomorphise the machine. Where we are told, for example, that mistakes made by Large Language Models are ‘hallucinations’, or that chatbots can serve us as mentors, coaches, cheerleaders, counsellors, and even as romantic interests.

Let’s make this clear from the outset. A large language model has the same sentience as a toaster. It thinks about language about as much as a toaster does toast: that is, not at all. These are not coaches or counsellors, they are products. They are instruments of surveillance and data extraction for some of the most venal and amoral corporations on earth. The products don’t care about you, they don’t think about you. They don’t think about you because ‘they’ don’t exist as a consciousness.

When AI-driven search engines have a 60% error rate, they are not ‘hallucinating,’ they simply aren’t working. If you had a car that didn’t work 60% of the time, you’d take it back to the dealership…

(4) MEANWHILE, BACK AT AI MONETIZATION. The Verge tells how – with the estate’s permission — “The BBC deepfaked Agatha Christie to teach a writing course”.

BBC Studios is using AI to recreate the voice and likeness of late detective story author Agatha Christie for the purpose of featuring it in digital classes that teaches prospective writers “how to craft the perfect crime novel.” A real life actor, Vivien Keene, is standing in for Christie, with her appearance augmented by AI to resemble the author.

The new class, called Agatha Christie Writing, is available today on BBC Maestro, the company’s $10-per-month online course service that usually gives you access to content from living professionals teaching things like graphic design, bread making, time management, and more.

Deepfaked Agatha Christie’s teachings are “in Agatha’s very own words,” her great-grandson James Prichard said in a press release. It uses insights from the real Christie and is scripted by academics — so the actual content appears to be human-made and not generated from a model that’s been fed all of her work. BBC collaborated with Agatha Christie Estate and used restored audio recordings, licensed images, interviews, and her own writings to make this all happen….

(5) UNSPOILED PRAISE. Camestros Felapton tells us why “Andor Season 2 is really good [no spoilers]”.

…One of the things that I really like about this show that, if anything, is even stronger this season, is the way the Imperial bad guys are treated as fully realised complex characters BUT without any suggestion that somehow they are decent people who are just on the wrong side of things. We spend a lot of time with Imperial agent Dedra Meero of the Imperial Security Bureau and the uptight but emotionally fragile Syril Karn. They really are not nice people both as people and in terms of the powers that they serve but they are very definitely people, with complex lives and difficult emotions, trying to navigate their own lives….

(6) IN FOR A POUND. ER, FIFTEEN. The Guardian reports “New book prize to award aspiring writer £75,000 for first three pages of novel”. But it’s “pay to play”.

A new competition is offering £75,000 to an aspiring writer based on just three pages of their novel.

Actor Emma Roberts, Bridgerton author Julia Quinn and Booker-winning Life of Pi author Yann Martel are among the judges for The Next Big Story competition, run by online fiction writing school The Novelry.

Roberts, who co-founded the book club Belletrist, said: “There’s nothing more euphoric than being immersed in the world of a good book and to get lost in the words of a brilliant author. This is a groundbreaking new writing prize and I’m thrilled to be included on this panel of esteemed luminaries.”

Martel said: “We all need stories to make the world new, and I’m looking forward to seeing what’s out there.”

Along with the cash prize, The Novelry will support the winner for a year to develop their idea into a full book….

… Entrants from the UK, US, Canada and Australia are invited to submit the first three pages of their novel via The Novelry’s website by 31 July. Each entry costs £15 and there is no limit on the number of entries each writer can submit. A shortlist selected by a team at The Novelry will be put to a public vote from 28 September. Guided by the public vote, the judging panel will pick a winner, to be announced on 12 October. The prize is funded by The Novelry….

(7) CASHING IN ON SUPERHEROES. “Superman gets a U.S. Coin—Batman and more coming soon” reports AIPT Comics. (See full information at the U.S. Mint’s “Comic Art Coin and Medal Program” webpage.)

The United States Mint (Mint) has announced it’s launching a coin series featuring Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman in collaboration with Warner Bros. Discovery Global Consumer Products (WBDGCP). Designed by Mint Chief Engraver Joseph Menna, these are genuine American coins.

It’s said the coins are meant to celebrate the American values and heroic ideals that these characters represent.

The first hero getting the coin treatment is Superman, first revealed during a ceremonial strike event held at the Mint in Philadelphia.

The coins come in gold and silver. Check out the Superman coins below….

(8) ICG RIP 2025. The International Costumers Guild has posted the “Costuming Community Video Memorial 2025” — see the video on YouTube. Note: The photo listed as “William Rotsler” is actually Tim Powers. They do accurately list Rotsler’s year of death as 1997; they don’t say why he’s included.

This video premiered during the virtual Single Pattern and Future Fashion shows on April 12, 2025 when Costume-Con had been cancelled. Once again, we recognize people who may not have worn (m)any costumes and/or competed in masquerades, but still made some significant impact within the greater costuming community. If you know of a costumer or someone else who has either passed away recently or years earlier, please contact us at icg-archivist @ costume.org. The people remembered in this video are: John Stopa, William Rotsler, Jim Inkpen, John Trimble, Jim Davis, Tonya Adolfson (aka Tanglwyst de Holloway), Jay Smith and “Miki” Dennis.

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Star Trek pilot, “The Cage” 

By Paul Weimer: The original Star Trek pilot, “The Cage”, starred Jeffrey Hunter as Captain Pike.

I saw pieces of it before I got to see the entire thing, of course, in the two-part Star Trek episode “The Menagerie” which has Spock recall the events of the episode. My opinion of “The Cage” was thus an incomplete opinion until I finally got to see the complete “The Cage” on TV on a TV special just before The Next Generation debuted.  

It was a fascinating experience to see the entire pilot at last, without any Kirk or the rest of his era, and all of the missing material. I came to see how even more progressively radical for its time that the original pilot for Star Trek was. Mind you, I saw how Jeffrey Hunter ‘s Christopher Pike was really Jeffrey Sinclair before his time…a lead that was good, but not quite what audiences would want in the main. I could see the swing from Hunter to Shatner, Pike to Kirk. I could sadly see why having a female Number One in the early 1960’s was a non-starter, either.

The real poleaxe was Spock. The Spock of “The Cage” is a very different Spock than the Spock we see in every subsequent iteration. A smiling Spock, an emotional Spock, a Spock that is fundamentally less alien in many ways than the Spock we come to know and love. And of course one that is just a moderate officer on the Enterprise, not the first officer, not part of the Heroic Trio of Bones, Kirk and Spock. And no Heroic Trio as well. (Good old Jon Lormer as Dr. Theodore Haskins is no McCoy, but it’s clear that he’s the model for McCoy). And of course, once we have gotten to Strange New Worlds, the conception of what an Enterprise Bridge could be has changed. 

So in the end, we will never know what might have resulted…but I strongly suspect Star Trek would not have survived as long as it did, if “The Cage” had gone forward and become the actual TV series. But again (c.f. Babylon 5 again), it was a prototype that made the real version possible, and magical. 

(10) BELATED BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

April 30, 1938 — Larry Niven, 87. 

By Paul Weimer: Larry Niven was one of the early SF authors I read, once I was out of my initial burst of Asimov and Clarke, in the early 1980’s. My brother had a couple of copies of various short story collections set in Known Space, as well as Ringworld. And so I was set for a while on Niven and his works. I loved some of the crafty puzzling aspects of some of his stories, the variety of aliens, and the exploration of consequences of technologies. 

I kept following Niven’s work, and it was his collaboration with Pournelle (The Mote in God’s Eye) that got me into Pournelle’s work for a good long time. Similarly, his collaborations with Steven Barnes (Dream Park) got me into Barnes’ own work. Niven was a great facilitator of introducing me to authors, directly and indirectly. I first heard of Georgette Heyer through an anecdote that he relates in N-Space, for example. 

Still, Niven has multiple worlds that enthralled me. Known Space. The novels of his Smoke Ring duology. The Magic Goes Away verse. Dream Park (until the last novels which retconned and changed the technology and ruined the concept for me). The Heorot verse. His contributions to Pournelle’s Future History. 

The luster of Niven slowly faded, as his politics and mine diverged, perhaps on his part, and certainly in mine. It started in Fallen Angels, and his very anti-Environmental stance that, as cool as it was to have Glacier spushing out of Canada, started to turn me off. I think it was The Burning City, set in his Magic Goes Away verse, that finally had the politics overwhelm the storytelling, the writing, and the ideas, to their detriment for my own personal reading. I did try Bowl of Heaven (with Gregory Benford) a decade ago…but the magic had gone away, for me. Alas.

For all of my love of early Niven Known Space and the like, “Inconstant Moon” remains my favorite Niven story. It’s a love story at its heart, even as Niven kills most of the planet in the process. 

Larry Niven

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) NEW FRAZETTA ART BOOK. Frazetta Girls is taking pre-orders on their website for a book of Frank’s drawings: “Frank Frazetta: Fine Lines Art Book”

It includes essays about Frazetta’s illustrations for the Canaveral Press, the Lord of the Rings portfolio, the Science Fiction Book Club, and others.

(13) COSTUME DESIGN. [Item by Andrew Porter.] Really fascinating costuming and clothing article. “Costume Secrets of Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light” at PBS.

In Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, a character’s success is measured in silks, stitching, and the symbolism of a regal headpiece. In an interview with MASTERPIECE, costume designer Joanna Eatwell talks about dressing the Tudors from the inside out, channeling 16th-century portraiture, and which actor most fully inhabits her meticulously crafted designs….

JOANNA EATWELL: … And in Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, we were given the greatest gift ever. And that is Hans Holbein and his court paintings. …Holbein did primarily paint the court, because portraiture was incredibly expensive to have done. And he did a couple of pet portraits of Henry’s servants. And from those, we can get liveries, the King’s guards, we understand how they worked. But he paints fabrics. He’s extraordinary. And I think we’d be lost without him….

(14) WHAT’S MY LINE? At Entertainment Weekly, “Kit Harington recalls Bella Ramsey helping him with ‘Game of Thrones’ lines”.

Kit Harington and Bella Ramsey are reminiscing about working on Game of Thrones together — and recalling how one of them helped the other remember their lines.

In a recent conversation for Interview, Ramsay told Harington their earliest memories of playing Lyanna Mormont opposite his Jon Snow in season 6 of the HBO fantasy series. 

“I don’t know whether you remember this, but I remember it quite vividly and have some remorse for it now, but during that scene I was mouthing your lines to you,” the Last of Us star said. “Now I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, how awful.’ But at the time it came from a very innocent place of being like, ‘Kit’s struggling with his line and I know it, so let me just mouth it to him.'”

Harington then shared his side of the story. “I do remember you helping me out and it being quite humiliating,” he recalled. “But yeah, thanks for that. I’ve probably chosen to forget it.”

Ramsey said they now regret the move. “You’re welcome. No, I think I need to forget it, because that’s so annoying,” they said. “Like, how annoying is that?”

Harington reassured his former costar: “It wasn’t at all. If anything I was like, ‘Oh god, I’ve got to up my game. I came here not really being comfortable enough with my lines, in the arrogance of however old I was, thinking I’m just opposite some child. And then that child actor is wiping me off the screen.’ Not that it’s a competition, but you’re like, ‘Oh, I’ve got a bit too comfortable in my Jon Snow-ness.'”…

(15) RESIDENT ALIEN SEASON 4 WILL BE SIMULCAST. “’Resident Alien Gets Season 4 Premiere Date & Trailer On USA & Syfy” reports Deadline.

Almost a year after Resident Alien moved from Syfy to NBCUniversal sibling USA Network with a suspenseful Season 4 renewal, a premiere date has been set for said Season 4 and, surprisingly, it involves both the sci-fi comedy-drama’ new and old homes.

The new season of Resident Alien will debut June 6 as a simulcast on USA and Syfy….

… As Deadline reported last spring, Resident Alien, facing cancellation at Syfy, moved to USA for a fourth season with a significant budget reduction. The USA/Syfy simulcast model was previously used for Chucky during its three-season run….

(16) A LITTLE LIKE A MYSTERY THEATRE 3000 MOMENT. “Almost 30 years later, Ben Affleck says his iconic Armageddon DVD commentary might be his best work: ‘It is an achievement I’m proud of’”  at GamesRadar+.

Ben Affleck has no shortage of career highlights, from starring in modern classics like Pearl Harbor and Gone Girl and playing Batman in the DCEU to his directorial work in award-winning movies like Argo. His best work, however, might be his brutally honest Armageddon’s DVD commentary, according to Affleck himself.

“In retrospect, now, I feel like maybe my best work in my career is the commentary on this disc,” he said during a Criterion’s Closet Picks video after finding Michael Bay’s thriller on the shelf.”People approach me to talk about the commentary in this disc as much as they do movies that I’ve been in,” Affleck continued. “And it’s because I didn’t know any better than to be really honest. But I won’t spoil it for those of you who are interested. It is an achievement I’m proud of and didn’t intend to be as good as I now think it is.”

In the most famous part of his commentary, Affleck argued that it’s illogical to train oil drillers to be astronauts instead of the other way around. “How hard can it be? You just aim the drill at the ground and turn it on,” he commented back then, not afraid to mock his own film….

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

Pixel Scroll 4/23/25 Pixeler on the Roof

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(1) 2025 HUGO VOTING BEGINS. Seattle 2025 opened Hugo Awards voting today. All ballots must be received by July 23 at 11:59 p.m. PDT.

Voting by surface mail is also an option. Download a printable ballot. Print the ballot and follow the included instructions.

(2) HUGO VOTER PACKET. You can find out “What’s In The 2025 Hugo Voter Packet?” in File 770’s compilation of the HVP category indexes.

(3) NOTES FROM BELFAST. “Eastercon Reconnect” by SJ Groenewegen is a fine conreport.

… Next up was The Doctor Will See You Now, with Esther MacCallum-Stewart, Brian M. Milton, Fiona Moore, Nicholas Whyte and Catherine Sharp (moderator). The description read, ‘We’ve seen dramatic events in the Whoniverse in the last year, both in-canon and in production, from bi-generation and new companions to the return of Russel T. Davies and the first Doctor Who Christmas Specials since 2017. Our Whovian panel will discuss the highs and lows of the new era of New Who, the relationship it has to previous canons, Ncuti Gatwa’s playing of the Doctor so far, and more.’ Catherine began the panel by asking each panellist whether they were doctors… and all answered in the affirmative. An entertaining and knowledgeable discussion followed….

(4) SEMIPROZINES. The Semiprozine Directory is still being maintained by Neil Clarke at Semiprozine.org.

(5) EARLY C.L. MOORE. “Deeper Cut: C. L. Moore Before The Pulps” is discussed by Bobby Derie at Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein. Here’s an excerpt from Moore’s 1934 letter to R.H. Barlow.

Ever since we were about nine a friend and I have been evolving a romantic island kingdom and populating it with a race which, inevitably, is a remnant of Atlanteans. We’ve a very detailed theology and mythology, maps all water-colored and scroll-bordered and everything, a ruling house whose geneology and family tree and so forth has been worked out in tbales and charts from the year minus—oh, just about everything that two imaginative girls could think of over the space of fifteen years. (Heavens, has it been that long?) We have songs and long sagas of heroes, and a literature full of tradition and legends, and we even made and colored a series of paper dolls to illustrate the different types and their costumes, and then there were wars and plans of battle, and we have the maps of all our favorite cities, and we’ve written a good deal of history. And that history is what I take seriously….

(6) RELIGION IN WORLDBUILDING. Last night the Chicago Public Library hosted a panel of sff writers to discuss “American Prophets: Making New Gods”. A recording can be viewed on YouTube.

Four contemporary fiction writers – N.K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, Nghi Vo and Matthew Kirby – talk about religion in their writing, the importance of considering socio-spiritual systems when world-building and how these influence the ways their characters move through the worlds they create.

(7) MORE ABOUT DAMIEN BRODERICK. Rich Horton has written a tribute – “Damien Broderick, April 22, 1944 – April 19, 2025” – for Black Gate.

…Damien Broderick was an outstanding science fiction writer – and, to my mind, a somewhat underappreciated one. He was a tireless advocate of Australian SF, in both his anthologies and his critical work. He was an intriguing and rather iconoclastic science writer, very interested in the far future and in very speculative scientific ideas, including paranormal powers….

(8) SIMPSONS IN THE WILD. Animation Magazine is there when “’The Simpsons’ Exclusive Episode ‘Yellow Planet’ Launches on Disney+”

Today, Disney+ announced that an all-new episode of The Simpsons is now streaming exclusively on the streaming service. The full-length episode, titled “Yellow Planet,” is the show’s latest exclusive episode to hit the streamer this season, joining previous installments “The Past and the Furious” and “O C’mon All Ye Faithful.”

In “Yellow Planet,” The Simpsons are reimagined as animals in a National Geographic-style nature mockumentary. Homer and Marge navigate the ocean as whales from different series, Bart hatches as an iguana struggling to survive, and Lisa leads her flock as a finch. Along the way, familiar Springfield faces appear in unexpected roles, shaping their journeys in the wild….

(9) EARLY CLI-FI. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Changing Climates Radio 4 Extra. This short series looks at climate change through the prism of science fiction.  (Meanwhile, always seek out good sources of climate change science. 😉 )

The meteorologist, John Hammond explores the way that science fiction has served as a barometer for our wonder, curiosity and sometimes anxiety about the environment. With expert insight from Sarah Dillon – Professor of Literature and the Public Humanities and Professor of Human Geography, Mike Hulme, we find out how writers imagined – sometimes very accurately – the changing world around them.

Today, we focus on the early decades of the 20th century, a period rich in technological optimism and environmental unease.

First, we hear E.M. Forster’s chillingly prescient ‘The Machine Stops’;

A world in which people can only communicate through a machine sounds like the internet today. But this story, written in 1909, takes us to a future where the machine has become an all-powerful God.

EM Forster’s story dramatised by Gregory Norminton and first broadcast in 2001.

You can access the episode here.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Lis Carey.]

April 23, 1973 — Naomi Kritzer, 52.

By Lis Carey: Naomi Kritzer first came to my attention with the delightful short story, “Cat Pictures, Please,” about a bored, rogue, AI who identifies as a cat, enjoys cat pictures, and decides to help out those silly humans, whose lives it knows so much more about than they do. What does it want in return? More cat pictures, please!

What I didn’t know then was that this new-to-me writer had been publishing since 1999, with two trilogies, some standalone novels, and quite varied short fiction. Along the way, having grown up in Wisconsin and attended college in Minnesota, she found time to live in London and Nepal.

There were more stories of the rogue Cat AI, committed in its own way to making the world a better place for good people who like cats. These include two novels. Catfishing on CatNet is about a teenage girl, Steph, who, with her mother, is constantly moving to escape her dangerous stalker father. She has a flipphone, no smartphone, is not allowed to make friends, and has no outlet except her online friends, in the friendly atmosphere of CatNet, run by the wise, kind, and completely anonymous CheshireCat. On CatNet, Steph is “Brown Bat,” and her friends, the members of her “clowder,” have similarly anonymous names. They all have fun and companionship, and with CheshireCat’s very intelligent but inexperienced in the real world (CheshireCat has only been active for five years, and is still learning about humans), pull off a prank that winds up attracting unwanted attention to Steph, her mom, and the other kids.

Chaos on CatNet has Steph and her mother settled in Minneapolis, Steph enrolled in a high school she can expect to graduate from. She’s also making real-world friends in addition to her online clowder. One of those friends, Nell, has her own complicated family history, and a very different kind of online community, which Steph starts to explore with her. CheshireCat is also getting messages from what he believes is another AI like himself, but he doesn’t trust the AI’s approach. Of course things get complicated. Another enjoyable, satisfying book.

But Naomi has other fiction that’s very different. A short story about a “Little Free Library” where one user, instead of leaving books in exchange for books, leaves little bits of artwork, and notes, and gradually, we find out who this strange visitor is, and what’s going on in their world.

“The Year Without Sunshine,” a novelette, is another very different kind of story. The world has undergone a series of smaller disasters, followed by a catastrophe that leaves clouds thick enough to block all sunshine. We follow one community struggling to make things work with a few days of electricity a week, intermittent delivery of life-critical medications by (apparently) federal authorities, and other such intermittent and not necessarily reliable outside support. When the internet goes down, Alexis and a neighbor, Tanesha, set up a booth, “WhatsUp,” to help keep communication going among neighbors who previously relied on WhatsApp. Then someone suggests it might be good to go door to door, and find out both what people need, and what they might have that they don’t need anymore—and a bigger project, and network, starts to form.

On her list to be is Liberty’s Daughter. Beck Garrison lives on a seastead, built out of constructed platforms and old cruise ships, to be a libertarian paradise. She’s grown up comfortable and privileged, but has started doing odd jobs for pocket money. Beck is hired by a woman from the other side of the waterline, to find her missing sister. She starts to learn things she never suspected, about the seastead, her father, herself, and the world. Some people don’t want her to say anything,  or ask any more questions. This is a young adult novel, with a bright, good teenager learning to grow up in a hurry and make some big decisions.

Naomi Kritzer is a really interesting writer, who doesn’t do the same thing all the time, and somehow manages to be both realistic and positive about people. Truly a delight to read.

Naomi Kritzer

(11) NAOMI KRITZER Q&A. [Item by Cat Eldridge.] Naomi Kritzer’s CatNet at this point consists of “Cat Pictures Please” which won a Hugo at MidAmeriCon II, Chaos on CatNet and Catfishing on CatNet. As one who likes this series enough that I had her personally autograph the Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories collection, I wanted to know the origin of CatNet, so I asked. Well, I also gifted her with a birthday chocolate treat, sea salt dark chocolate truffles. 

Here’s her answers: 

Naomi: The original short story was basically the collision of two things:

1. The line, “the Internet loves cat pictures,” which made me imagine a central internet-based intelligence that wanted pictures of cats.

2. Getting myself a smartphone for the first time (I was a late adopter), and discovering some of its quirks, and coming up with anthropomorphic explanations for things like bad directions. 

I mean, the Internet clearly does love cat pictures — although “the Internet” is “the billions of people who use the Internet,” not a secret sentient AI, though!

Cat: I went on to ask her how CatNet came to be…

Naomi: Do you mean in the story, how it got created? I was very vague about it in the short story but sort of heavily implied it was the result of something someone did at Google. In the novel CatNet was an experimental project from a company that was again, heavily implied to be Google.

Way, way cool in my opinion.

While putting this Birthday together, I noticed that she had two other series from when she was starting out as a writer, so I asked her to talk about them. Both are available on Kindle.

Cat: Let’s talk about your first series, Eliana’s Song.

Naomi: Eliana’s Song is my first novel, split into two pieces. I rewrote it really heavily multiple times, and each time I tried to make it shorter and it got longer. When Bantam bought it, they suggested that I split it into two books and expand each, which is what I did. 

The book actually started out as a short story I wrote while in college. It garnered a number of rejections that said something like, “this isn’t bad, but it kind of reads like chapters 1 and 36 of a novel.” I eventually decided to write the novel, and struggled for a while before realizing I could not literally use the short story as Chapter 1, I had to start over writing from scratch.

Cat: And your second series, Dead Rivers.

Naomi: Sometime around 2010 I picked up the Scott Westerfield Uglies series and really loved it. Uglies in particular followed a plotline that I really loved, in which someone is sent to infiltrate the enemy side, only to realize once she’s there that these are her people, far more than her bosses are. But she came among them under false pretenses, and she’d have to come clean! And she almost comes clean, 

doesn’t, of course is discovered and cast out, and and then has to spend the next book (maybe the next two) demonstrating her worthiness to be allowed to come back. I read this series and thought, “dang, I love this plot — I loved this plot as a kid, and reading it now is like re-visiting an amusement park ride you loved when you were 10 and finding out that even when you know where all the turns and drops are, it’s still super fun.” Like two days after that I suddenly remembered that I had literally written that plotline. It’s the plotline of the Dead Rivers trilogy. I really really love this plot, it turns out! So much that I’ve written it!

I’m not sure how well it’s aged. We were not doing trigger warnings on books yet when it came out, and the fact that the book has an explicit and fairly vivid rape scene took a lot of readers by surprise. It’s also a story that’s very much about whether someone can start out a bad guy and work their way to redemption.

Cat: Now unto your short stories. I obviously believe everyone should read “Cat Pictures Please” and Little Free Library”, both of which I enjoyed immensely. So what of your short story writing do you think is essential for readers to start with?  

Naomi: That is a good question but one I find very hard to answer about my own work! It’s a “can’t see the forest because of all the trees” problem, I think.

“So Much Cooking” would probably be at the top, though (with the explanatory note that I always attach these days — I wrote this in 2015.) And then probably “Scrap Dragon” and “The Thing About Ghost Stories.”

To date, she has two short story collections, Gift of the Winter King and Other Stories which is only available as an epub, and of course Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories which is also available in trade paper edition. 

(12) COMICS SECTION.

  • Dinosaur Comics  plans an alternate version of space travel.
  • Eek! compares villains’ brands.  
  • The Argyle Sweater envisions a medical Dr. Seuss.  (Don’t miss the poster on the wall!)
  • WaynoVision recalls an artist’s school days. 

(13) QUEEN’S OWN. A royal gift from the Boer War: “’It’s got a bit of a whiff’: Chocolate bar made in 1900 is on sale” reports BBC.

…The Queen commissioned manufacturers J S Fry & Sons, Cadbury Brothers Limited, and Rowntree and Company Limited to produce the special tins in 1899, Auctioneum said.

The tins bear the words “I wish you a happy new year”.

By the end of 1900, more than 120,000 tins had been distributed to soldiers….

Mr Stowe said while most of the chocolate bars were eaten straight away, some were sent home to loved ones or to hospitals for wounded soldiers.

“It is incredibly rare,” Mr Stowe said. “If you think over 125 years what that tin has been through – there’s been several world wars, it’s probably travelled back and forth over the Atlantic a couple of times.”

He said the chocolate bar, which is valued between £250 and £400, appealed to bidders who “might want an important piece of social history” or just a “talking point at a dinner party”.

(14) HIRING OBSTACLES. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] My brother Jim, who brought this to my attention and is a late boomer himself, commented that the “Original poster is too young to have any idea what it was like before fandom became mainstream.” “Entitled coworker rejects job candidate because she’s a fan of Stark Trek: ‘She made the mistake of mentioning her hobbies during [the] interview’” at Cheezburger.com.

Keep scrolling below for this tale of an unfortunately biased manager who thought a candidate was weird and unfit simply because she was a Star Trek fan.

(15) CAT FURNITURE. [Item by Daniel Dern.] The credential credenza at Viral News Flare.

(16) WHY DIDN’T ANTIMATTER DESTROY THE UNIVERSE? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] When the Universe began you might have thought that matter and anti-matter would be produced in equal quantities resulting in a bigger BANG but with no physical matter left for galaxies, stars, you, me and pints of real ale at the con bar. However Matt O’Dowd over at PBS Space Time suggests we now have an answer…

At one-one-thousandth of a second after the Big Bang, the great annihilation event should have wiped out all matter, leaving a universe of only radiation. Why still don’t know why any matter survived. Well, a new finding from the LHC brings us one step closer to understanding why there’s something rather than nothing.

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Danny Sichel.] Steve Shives’s Starfleet Guidance Counselor is amazing. Actually, so is everything in his “Starfleet Jobs” series: “Starfleet Historian”, “Starfleet Chaplain”, “Starfleet Lawyer”…

Trying to educate children under the constant threat of violent death presents certain challenges.

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

Pixel Scroll 3/29/25 Ya Scroll Sixteen Files And What Do Ya Get? A Pixel-Day Older And Deeper In Debt

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(1) WRONG IMMORTALS? At Speculiction Jesse Hudson declares “Close But No Cigar: Response to Library of America’s Nine Classic Science Fiction Novels of the 1950s”.

A decade ago, the Library of America released the set Nine Classic Science Fiction Novels of the 1950s. The series was edited, or perhaps more accurately, curated by Gary Wolfe. Wolfe is a genre personage who I often disagree with, but a person who I respect, particularly his knowledge of 20th century science fiction. Wolfe is a proper scholar and a person to be trusted when looking to curate such a series. Nevertheless, differences in opinion there are, and it’s in those differences that my views have been percolating for ten years, waiting until I’ve read enough sf from the 50s to have an informed rebuttal. With more than thirty-five novels from the decade under my belt (and this post sitting in my drafts folder for all that time) I think I’ve reached that point. In the very least I will introduce you to some old school science fiction that perhaps wasn’t on your radar before…

The nine novels Wolfe selected were: Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants; Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human; Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow; Richard Matheson’s The Shrinking Man; Robert A. Heinlein’s Double Star; Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination; James Blish’s A Case of Conscience; Algis Budrys’ Who?; and Fritz Leiber’s The Big Time

Hudson doesn’t disagree with all of Wolfe’s picks, and sometimes the reasons for disagreement are highly nuanced. For example:

Theodore Sturgeon’s More than Human – Sturgeon is one of the great voices of the 50s and fully deserving of a place in the volume. But I have qualms about More Than Human. Style-wise, it’s impeccable. American science fiction writers rarely produce prose of such amazing quality, even today. The first Act of More than Human reads like a mythic dream. Substance-wise, however, it’s less amazing. The book’s conception, that humanity could evolve and exist in harmony via telekinetic gestalt, is a few steps over the line. Spaceships, blasters, and aliens one can consider, telekinesis less so. To be fair, telekinesis was a common device of the time; it was something closer to ‘possible’ than it is today. But the most important reason I have qualms is I do not think More Than Human is Sturgeon’s best book of the 1950s. Stay tuned.

And among the books Hudson would have picked instead is this one:

James Blish’s They Shall Have Stars – First novel in the Cities in Flight tetralogy, They Shall Have Stars may be the quintessential expression of Modernist human hopes (expectations?) for the stars. The book contains a fair bit of drama, but rather than alien encounters, space ship blasters, or laser pistols, the book focuses on the human aspect of leaving Earth for space: finances, technology, pharmaceuticals, socio-economics, etc. It’s literally anti-pulp. Blish tries to be realistic in his presentation of the possibilities (or lack thereof) for human life beyond our stratosphere, and should be lauded for it. I just think A Case of Conscience is the better novel given how transcendent the theme is.

(2) OUR FANTASTIC PAST. Shannon Chakraborty tells New York Times readers “Historical Fantasy Novels Offer a Magical Escape Into the Past” and lists several favorites. The article is behind a paywall so we can’t share the notes, but we can name the titles.

People have been telling fantastical tales about the past since, well … most likely long before our ancestors began painting caves with wild beasts that danced in the firelight. A ragtag collection of Bronze Age skirmishes is transformed into the Trojan War, where gods meddle and great heroes are dispatched on quests we’re still retelling. Alexander the Great, already pretty remarkable, ends up a larger-than-life character in romance tales across Africa, the Middle East, Europe and Asia that have him battling centaurs and searching for the fountain of life (inspired by even older tales of Gilgamesh). If the past were a foreign country, clearly a great number of us would be eager to plan a trip….

The recommended books are: Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin; She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan; The Bird King by G. Willow Wilson; The Pasha of Cuisine; by Saygin Ersin; A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark; Moonshine by Alaya Johnson; Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia; Siren Queen by Nghi Vo; and Flying Snakes and Griffin Claws by Adrienne Mayor.

(3) WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW MORE? El País writer Miquel Echarri, very much a fan of the Verhoeven version, is alarmed by Sony’s announcement they want to remake the film — “’Starship Troopers’: The $100-million movie adaptation of a ‘very right-wing book’”.

Science fiction cinema has presented us with two genocides, both met by their indirect victims with startling indifference. The first occurs in Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, where Alderaan — no mere lost island or remote desert village, but an entire planet with millions of inhabitants — is destroyed. In what Wookieepedia describes as “one of the most cruel and vile acts of the Galactic Empire,” Grand Moff Tarkin, admiral of the Death Star, obliterates an entire celestial body in an instant, sending “an intense shock to the Force,” yet Leia Organa, princess of Alderaan, accepts the annihilation of her homeworld with remarkable stoicism.

The second catastrophe is the destruction of 23rd-century Buenos Aires in Starship Troopers. This time, the perpetrator is an arachnid force from outer space, which causes a mere mild annoyance in two of the film’s protagonists, Juan Rico (Casper van Dien) and Carmen Ibáñez (Denise Richards), both from Buenos Aires province. However, they curiously speak English. Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges once described Buenos Aires as “as eternal as water and air,” but in Paul Verhoeven’s irreverent film, the city is erased from the map in an instant, without the slightest reverence….

… By the spring of 1996, Verhoeven knew he was putting his Hollywood career on the line with one final gamble, and that gamble was Starship Troopers. Given the circumstances, it seemed logical to follow what the production companies, TriStar Pictures and Touchstone, were asking of him: use the more than $100 million available to turn Heinlein’s novel into a fast-paced, straightforward action blockbuster. But Verhoeven and Neumeier insisted on taking a different approach — a balance between spectacle and sharp social satire, a path they had already explored together in RoboCop….

Anyone considering adapting Heinlein’s Starship Troopers at this point should be acutely aware that they’re dealing with sensitive, potentially radioactive material, and should not lose sight of Verhoeven’s example. Therefore, Columbia’s attempt to faithfully adapt the novel is, at the very least, questionable. What will remain of this formidable satire if you strip away the irony that gave it its meaning?

(4) WHAT’S YOUR TOP SF SCREEN MOMENT? ScreenRant nominates the “10 Most Epic Moments In Sci-Fi Movies”. What does it tell you about the heightened impact as you make your way up this list that this scene is only sixth!

6. Spock’s Death

Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan (1982)

What contributes to making Spock’s death such a pivotal scene, besides the performances given by both Nimoy and William Shatner as Captain Kirk, is the fact that it happens right under Kirk’s eyes. The relationship between Kirk and Spock has always been the core of Star Trek, and this scene, with Spock slowly succumbing to radiation poisoning just one clear door away from Kirk, brings that relationship to a new level of emotional closeness.

(5) MICHAEL COLLINS AWARD. The winners of the Michael Collins Trophy have been announced by the National Air and Space Museum. The award was established in 1985 and was renamed in honor of Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins in 2020.

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT

  • MARGARET HAMILTON

Software engineer Margaret Hamilton played a pivotal role in 20th-century aerospace innovation, particularly through her contributions to Project Apollo. Leading the team that developed the onboard flight software for the Apollo missions, her meticulous work and groundbreaking approach to software design were crucial to the success of the Moon landings and fundamentally reshaped the field of software engineering. Hamilton’s expertise extended beyond Apollo to projects like Skylab and the Space Shuttle, and her legacy continues to influence modern aerospace software development while demonstrating the profound impact women engineers have had in the field.

CURRENT ACHIEVEMENT

  • The OSIRIS-REx Team

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission marked a significant milestone by achieving the first U.S. asteroid sample return, securing the largest amount of material ever collected from beyond the Moon. After orbiting the ancient asteroid Bennu—earning a Guinness World Record for the closest orbit of a planetary body—the spacecraft successfully collected over 120 grams of rock and dust in 2020 and returned it to Earth in 2023. This precious sample, a “time capsule” from the early solar system, is now being analyzed by scientists worldwide (including at the Smithsonian) to uncover secrets about the origins of life on Earth, with preliminary findings already emerging.

(6) RETAILING THE WEIRD. Bobby Derie chronicles a certain kind of foreign agent in “Her Letters to August Derleth: Christine Campbell Thomson” at Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein.

… Thomson scored a small coup when she sold Derleth’s story “Hawk on the Blue” (based on a story in a letter from Robert E. Howard) for 8 guineas (although after various costs, this came out to a bank draft for $26.94). Other stories were met with various comments; Regarding “Muggridge’s Aunt,” Thomson wrote: “I am not quite certain whether it is horrible enough for Not at Night, the readers of which like their blood laid on with a soupladle” (Thomson to Derleth, 24 Sep 1934). About “Gus Elker and the Fox,” Thomson wrote “we feel that it is too American to place over here” (Thomson to Derleth, 12 Oct 1934)….

(7) IAN WILLIAMS (1948-2025). UK fan and sf writer Ian Williams died March 28. He had been hospitalized for a fall on March 16 and never recovered.

Ian Williams was especially well-known in the Seventies among international fanzine fans, not that he wasn’t prominent later.

He was a founding member of The Gannets, a club in the north-east of England formed after the 1970 Eastercon, which initially met at his house in Sunderland. First called the North East Fan Group (NEFG), when they switched to meeting at a subterranean pub called The Gannet Greg Pickersgill coined their new name, Gannetfandom, and so they were known thereafter. In addition to publishing fanzines, they ran several conventions. Besides Williams, other early members included Harry Bell, Ian Penman, Jim Marshall, Thom Penman, Ritchie Smith and Ian Maule.

Williams was the first editor of Maya (1970-1971).

His novel, The Lies That Bind, appeared in 1989.

He worked as a librarian. He was married, for a time, to Susan Hardy. His fondness for cats infused his Facebook posts, and he was a co-founder of an animal rescue charity.

[Based on Williams’ Fancyclopedia 3 entry.]

Rob Jackson adds: Ian was in effect the prime mover in founding the Gannets, though Harry Bell preceded him as active in fandom.  Slightly later-arriving Gannets who are still active include – in chronological order – myself, Kevin Williams (no relation) and Dave Cockfield among others.  The later editors of Maya were Ian Maule (1972-1975) and myself (1975-1978).  Ian’s personalzine Siddhartha went through two incarnations: a traditional mimeo run in the Seventies and a much later online version.

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

March 29, 1968 – “Assignment Earth” Star Trek episode

Captain’s log. Using the light-speed breakaway factor, the Enterprise has moved back through time to the 20th century. We are now in extended orbit around Earth, using our ship’s deflector shields to remain unobserved. Our mission – historical research. We are monitoring Earth communications to find out how our planet survived desperate problems in the year 1968.

Fifty-seven years ago on this evening, Star Trek’s “Assignment: Earth” first aired on NBC as part of the second season. Guest starring Robert Lansing as Gary Seven and Terri Garr as Roberta Lincoln, our crew which has time-travelled to 1968 Earth for historical research encounters an interstellar agent and Isis, his cat, who are planning to intervene in Earth history. 

It was directed by Marc Daniels whose first break in the business was directing the first thirty-eight episodes of I Love Lucy which was produced at the Desilu studio which became Paramount. This was one of fifteen Trek episodes he’d direct. He won a Hugo at NYCon 3 with Gene Roddenberry for Best Dramatic Presentation for “The Menagerie”. 

The story is by Art Wallace and Gene Roddenberry. Wallace, who also did the teleplay, is best remembered for his work on the soap opera Dark Shadows. Oh, and he did some scripts for Tom Corbett, Space Cadet.

It was intended as a pilot for an Assignment: Earth series that Gene Roddenberry planned but that never happened. Roddenberry’s intent was that Lansing and Garr would continue in the series if it was commissioned, but since NBC was not involved in casting the backdoor pilot, it could and well might have been that NBC would have insisted on changes or even completely recast the series had it picked up. 

Interesting note: The uncredited human form of Isis was portrayed by actress, dancer, and contortionist April Tatro, not Victoria Vetri, actress (in Rosemary’s Baby under the name of Angela Dorian) and Playboy Playmate of the previous year, as would become part of Trek lore. Her identity was unknown until 2019 when The Trek Files podcast cited a production call sheet for extras dated the fifth of January for the year of broadcast.  For decades fans had believed that the very briefly seen human form of the cat Isis was portrayed by actress Victoria Vetri. Many articles and websites treat that belief as revealed truth. Recently Vetri herself confirmed that she was not in the episode. No idea why the rumor started. 

Barbara Babcock, best remembered as Grace Gardner on Hill Street Blues, a most excellent series, was the Beta 5 computer voice (uncredited at the time) and she did the Isis’ cat vocalizations as well. Speaking of that cat, it was played by Sambo as you can see by this NBC memo. Interestingly Lansing though would later contradict that claiming that there were actually three black cats involved. I can’t confirm his claim elsewhere. 

Though this backdoor pilot did not enter production as a television series, both Seven and Roberta were featured in multiple stories and they were spun-off into a comic book series from IDW Publishing, Star Trek: Assignment: Earth by John Byrne. And there was the excellent novelization of the episode that Scott Dutton did for Catspaw Dynamics. I’ve read it and it’s quite superb.  

In addition, according to Memory Alpha, the source for all things Trek, “Seven and Lincoln have appeared in several Star Trek novels (Assignment: Eternity and the two-volume series, The Eugenics Wars: The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh by Greg Cox) and short stories (“The Aliens Are Coming!” by Dayton Ward in Strange New Worlds III, “Seven and Seven” by Kevin Hosey in Strange New Worlds VI and “Assignment: One” by Kevin Lauderdale in Strange New Worlds VIII).”

The plot concept of benevolent aliens secretively helping Earthlings was later resurrected by Roddenberry for The Questor Tapes film. That film was one of a series of television movies in which Roddenberry was involved — Genesis II, Planet Earth, Strange New World and Spectre. Need I say none made it past the stage of the initial television movie which served as a pilot? 

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

March 29, 1957 — Elizabeth Hand, 68.

By Paul Weimer: I once told Elizabeth Hand that I felt unqualified to read her books. She was gently bemused by this. 

Elizabeth Hand

When I have engaged with her work, I have found Hand’s work incredibly literate, immersive, enthralling and syncretic. She pulls ideas, motifs, images, and ideas from everywhere, especially music and other arts, into her work. A lot of her characters and settings involve music, theater, creative folks in all sorts of guises.  I didn’t quite bounce off Wylding Hall so much as I thought I didn’t get so much of it as would someone else more in tune and inclined to the musical arts, and the whole musical scene. Hand has a passion for infusing music and mythology and magic into her work. The Glimmering has a Christian rock singer as her protagonist in the middle of a climate change apocalypse. Waking the Moon dumps the reader into a world of a dark goddess, witchcraft and magic right from the world go. It felt like a dive into a deep pool trying to read the book.   

The city of trees in the Winterlong books is surreal, chimerical, and has a main character who can walk in dreams. Maybe that’s the right metaphor for Hand’s work. A walk into her dreams, but with more sense and cohesion than actual dreams, but with the unusual skewed version of reality that one gets. Black Light, with its entry for the protagonist into a world of Gods and Monsters far more terrifying than the parties her godfather was throwing.  That’s something of a slower burn than Waking the Moon, sometimes you get immersed into the pool rather than jumping into her worlds feet first. 

But no matter which Hand book you read, be it in a sudden dive or by slow steps, she enthralls you with her myth, creation and magic.  I still think I am not quite the right person to read her books (a theater kid with a passion for fantasy is, frankly, her target audience).  But I still try, nevertheless, because her work is absolutely worth it.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

  • Bliss finds the same easy pleasure some of you take from File 770. 
  • Brevity remembers the competition. 
  • Lio knows things. 
  • Off the Mark assembles. 
  • xkcd knows the back story.

(11) THIS ONE’S A HIT. Shawnerly tells of a checkered past when it comes to liking the works of T. Kingfisher. “#BookReview: A Sorceress Comes To Call |T. Kingfisher Horror |Feminism in the 1800’s” at She’s Reading Now.

…Things are touch and go with Kingfisher and I. I’ve DNF’d What Moves The Dead and What Feasts At Night. But, I thought, 2023’s A House With Good Bones, was a 4 star read! The issue is probably me. Sometimes I just don’t get her style of gothic horror storytelling. I keep trying though, and that should count for something! I finished her latest romp A Sorceress Comes To Call – and gave it 4 stars! Let’s chat about it!…

(12) FOR SEVERANCE FANS. “Apple’s Mac Site Features Fictional ‘Lumon Terminal Pro’”, but MacRumors cautions it’s a bait-and-switch.

Apple is going all out with promotions for the popular Severance Apple TV+ show today, and as of right now, you’ll find a new “Lumon Terminal Pro” listed on Apple’s Mac site.

The Lumon Terminal Pro is designed to look similar to the machines that Severance employees like Mark S. and Helly R. use for macrodata refinement. The Terminal features a blue keyboard, a small display with wide bezels, and a trackball for navigation purposes.

Unfortunately, you can’t actually buy a Lumon Terminal Pro, though it would undoubtedly sell well to Severance fans. Apple’s page links to the company’s actual Macs, and to a behind the scenes editing video that Apple shared this morning.

(13) CLEANING UP SPACE. Keep B.O. “far, far away” with “The Mandalorian 4-Pack + Soap Saver” from Dr. Squatch. (And that black thing below is not the monolith from 2001, that’s the “soap saver”.)

(14) IT’S OBVIOUSLY AN ATTACK FROM SPAAAAACE! [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] ScienceAlert says “NASA Is Watching a Huge, Growing Anomaly in Earth’s Magnetic Field”.

NASA has been monitoring a strange anomaly in Earth’s magnetic field: a giant region of lower magnetic intensity in the skies above the planet, stretching out between South America and southwest Africa.

This vast, developing phenomenon, called the South Atlantic Anomaly, has intrigued and concerned scientists for years, and perhaps none more so than NASA researchers.

The space agency’s satellites and spacecraft are particularly vulnerable to the weakened magnetic field strength within the anomaly, and the resulting exposure to charged particles from the Sun.

The South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA) – likened by NASA to a ‘dent’ in Earth’s magnetic field, or a kind of ‘pothole in space’ – generally doesn’t affect life on Earth, but the same can’t be said for orbital spacecraft (including the International Space Station), which pass directly through the anomaly as they loop around the planet at low-Earth orbit altitudes.

During these encounters, the reduced magnetic field strength inside the anomaly means technological systems onboard satellites can short-circuit and malfunction if they become struck by high-energy protons emanating from the Sun.

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

Pixel Scroll 1/29/25 Take The Bits And Pixels, Put Your Old Phone Down

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(1) SPINRAD RETIRING ASIMOV’S BOOK COLUMN. Norman Spinrad today told his mailing list that his “On Books” column, which has appeared in Asimov’s since 1983, soon will end its run.

I thought it would be best to be the one to announce that “Speculative Literature?” will be the last “On Books” that it would be the last column to be published in ASIMOV’S magazine rather than have the editor Sheila Williams do it. First because I made the decision myself after almost half a century, not her or anyone else did it. 

Not fired for any economical reason or anything but literary reasons which I think anyone who reads my last two “On Books” will under[stand] why when they read them whether they agree or not.

Dona could not live to see “Speculative Literature?” published but she lived to read it, and it was the last thing she worked with me one way or another and something she told me was that most real true literature these days was seldom appreciated by the masses, it was only fully appreciated and moved by truly literary readers and that has always been so.

Maybe so, but literature was central to the creation of culture, and cultures without speculative culture sooner or later end in the tarpits.

(2) CORALINE MUSICAL PRODUCTION CANCELLED. In the UK, “Stage adaptation of Coraline cancelled after allegations against Neil Gaiman” reports the Guardian.

A stage version of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline has been cancelled after allegations of sexual misconduct against the author.

The musical was to have been staged at Leeds Playhouse from 11 April to 11 May before touring to Edinburgh, Birmingham and Manchester.

In a joint statement on Wednesday, the co-production partners Leeds Playhouse, Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh, Birmingham Rep and Home Manchester said: “We have decided our production of Coraline – a Musical will not proceed. After careful consideration, we feel it would be impossible to continue in the context of the allegations against its original author. Ticket holders have been contacted directly via email.”…

YouTuber MickeyJo Theatre devotes a 17-minute video not only to “Why the CORALINE musical is cancelled” but to considering why stage productions by or based on the work of Roald Dahl, J.K. Rowling – themselves now controversial – have gone ahead.

(3) WGA LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD. “David Lynch To Posthumously Receive Writers Guild Laurel Award” – Deadline has the story.

Screenwriter and director David Lynch, who died this month, has been named the recipient of the Writers Guild of America West’s 2025 Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement.

The guild says he was aware of the honor and accepted several weeks before his January 15 passing. It will be presented by his Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks star Kyle MacLachlan at the WGA Awards ceremony on February 15 .

The guild’s lifetime achievement award is presented to members who have “advanced the literature of motion pictures and made outstanding contributions to the profession of the screenwriter.”

(4) A LIKING FOR LYCANTHROPY. Doris V. Sutherland does a fine review of “Wolf Man (2025)” as part of “Werewolf Wednesday”.

… Where the 1941 film did much to codify the werewolf genre, the new film makes a point out of throwing away many of the conventions initiated by its ancestor.

This is not a story concerned with deadly silver, ghostly pentagrams or rhymes about the brightness of the Autumn moon. Having pared down the cinematic lycanthrope, does Wolf Man ‘25 bring any innovations to the table?…

(5) MAIL CALL. Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein analyzes another correspondence between two Weird Tales figures in “Her Letters to August Derleth: Everil Worrell”.

…In one, she describes a meeting of the League of American Pen Women, which concludes:

“At the end of this meeting, I found myself trying to give them a slight glimpse into the Cult of Chulthu [sic]! Although I was never much more than a “Square” observer on the C of C, I did my best—since there seemed to be a “Need to Know.” I’m more at ease with ordinary witchcraft, vampirism and demonology—perhaps. But, leave us all hang together. (And now I’m one of the Old Ones myself, chronologically speaking.)

N’Gai ? ?
—Everil Worrell to August Derleth, 12 Mar 1967”

(6) WRITING CONTESTS RESPOND TO LA FIRES. The Tomorrow Prize and Green Feather Award submission deadline has been extended to February 28. The competitions are open to LA County high school students – see full Submissions & Guidelines at the link.

(7) WALLY WEBER (1929-2025). Chair of the 1961 Worldcon Wally Weber died January 23 at the age of 95 reports Seattle Worldcon 2025. Entering fandom in 1947, he joined Seattle’s “Nameless Ones” group when it began around 1949.

Weber co-edited Cry of the Nameless, three-time Hugo nominee and winner of the 1960 Best Fanzine Hugo. (F.M. Busby, Elinor Busby, and Burnett Toskey were the other co-editors.)

He chaired the 1961 Worldcon, Seacon, held in Seattle. In 1963 he was voted the Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund delegate.

Above all he made fandom fun, sometimes at the expense of its more earnest practitioners as in this example from a 1963 issue of Cry: “The Farley File Menace, exposed by Wally Weber”.

…Bruce [Pelz] refers to the caper as, “Farley File on Fandom,” and describes it as a project in which information about fans is recorded on punched cards in such a manner that standard sorting machines (to which both Pelz and [Ron] Ellik are supposed to have access) can be used to pick out those fans included in the file who have whatever it might be the sorter is searching for. Suppose, for example, you live in New York and you want to write a letter to Bruce Pelz in Los Angeles, but after you have sealed the envelope you discover you don’t have a stamp. Before the age of the farley file you would have had to go out in the cold (assume it’s five o’clock in the morning and it’s snowing like crazy outside), find a place that is open where you can buy a stamp, and pay for one. But now, with the farley file in existence, you can avoid this. You just call Bruce on the phone (it will only be two o’clock in the morning in Los Angeles) and ask him for the names of the fans in New York who have an accumulated collection of stamps. Bruce then gets dressed, drives over to the UCLA campus, lets himself in the building where the sorter is located, goes back home to pick up the punched cards he forgot, remembers Ron Ellik had borrowed them to make duplicates to replace the set the FBI had taken from Ron, drives to wherever it is that Ron lives, breaks into Ron’s home since Ron is gone for the weekend, gets reported by the neighbors and captured by the police, and by the time he gets out of jail the weather has cleared up in New York, you’ve been able to obtain a new supply of stamps at your leisure, and the letter has been delivered to Bruce right along with his last paycheck from UCLA where he has been fired for not showing up for work for two weeks….

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

January 29, 1964 — Dr. Strangelove (premiered on this date)

By Paul Weimer: I had heard about Dr. Strangelove for years without ever quite managing to see it, in those early days before streaming took off. My family seemed lukewarm to the idea of me renting a videotape.  And so I read about it, heard about it and wondered about it. 

Finally in the late 90’s I got my chance. In the halcyon days of the early internet, I won a random contest for people who responded to an early column transplanted from the newspaper to the internet about movies that were less than two hours long. My comment won me a DVD copy of Dr. Strangelove.

Happy day, I could finally see the film. 

I was stunned by the interesting angles and cinematography. I also had had no real conception that the movie was in black and white–I figure all the stills I saw were taken with a B&W camera, but I didn’t realize that the movie itself was in monochrome throughout. And my conception of the plot was a little off, too. 

And then there was Fail-Safe. I had managed to see Fail-Safe and so when I saw Dr. Strangelove, I saw the similarities and parallels immediately. They are both extremely interesting movies, with different takes on the same question of Mutual Assured Destruction. But Strangelove I think is superior and that’s because of the humor. 

The humor!  It’s probably my favorite dark comedy of the period, and I had had heard it was darkly humorous but to see it on screen. Peter Sellers in three roles. George C. Scott. Sterling Hayden and his precious bodily fluids. Slim Pickens riding a bomb to glory and destruction. Mine shaft gaps. And on, and on.

And yes, it is in black and white, and the camera choices, angles, and cinematography are revelatory, powerful and considered at all times. The movie is one of the best filmed I’ve ever seen. Not quite as revolutionary as Citizen Kane, say, but that same sort of boldness. 

It was robbed at the Oscars. Can you even remember My Fair Lady, the Best Picture winner that year?

And in our day and age (I need not explain more, do I?), the movie is ever more relevant, funny and true.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) SEE IMAGINARY BOOKS. [Item by Steven French.] We’ve been here before but if any Filefolk happen to be in New York before Feb 15 or in San Francisco after March and have a hankering to see a reproduction of Death’s memoirs from the Discworld novels, then this is the exhibition for you: “Inside a Collection of ‘Imaginary’ Books” at Atlas Obscura.

ON A SNOWY SUNDAY AFTERNOON at the Center for Book Arts in Manhattan, Reid Byers is sitting in front of a group of students who have gathered for a very particular kind of book-making class.

Surrounded by the sturdy-looking tools of bookbinding—giant sheets of paper, a pegboard of hammers, a row of heavy book presses lining the windowsill—it’s easy to feel grounded in the materiality of the medium. But on the projector screen, a slide reads, “Collecting the imaginary”.

(11) THE CLAWS THAT CATCH. “AI haters build tarpits to trap and trick AI scrapers that ignore robots.txt” – Ars Technica really shares little about how it’s done in the article, but it does suggest where you could learn more.

Last summer, Anthropic inspired backlash when its ClaudeBot AI crawler was accused of hammering websites a million or more times a day.

And it wasn’t the only artificial intelligence company making headlines for supposedly ignoring instructions in robots.txt files to avoid scraping web content on certain sites. Around the same time, Reddit’s CEO called out all AI companies whose crawlers he said were “a pain in the ass to block,” despite the tech industry otherwise agreeing to respect “no scraping” robots.txt rules.

Watching the controversy unfold was a software developer whom Ars has granted anonymity to discuss his development of malware (we’ll call him Aaron). Shortly after he noticed Facebook’s crawler exceeding 30 million hits on his site, Aaron began plotting a new kind of attack on crawlers “clobbering” websites that he told Ars he hoped would give “teeth” to robots.txt.

Building on an anti-spam cybersecurity tactic known as tarpitting, he created Nepenthes, malicious software named after a carnivorous plant that will “eat just about anything that finds its way inside.”…

… “A link to a Nepenthes location from your site will flood out valid URLs within your site’s domain name, making it unlikely the crawler will access real content,” a Nepenthes explainer reads….

According to ZADZMO code, “It [Nepenthes] works by generating an endless sequences of pages, each of which with dozens of links, that simply go back into a the tarpit. Pages are randomly generated, but in a deterministic way, causing them to appear to be flat files that never change. Intentional delay is added to prevent crawlers from bogging down your server, in addition to wasting their time. Lastly, optional Markov-babble can be added to the pages, to give the crawlers something to scrape up and train their LLMs on, hopefully accelerating model collapse.”

Returning to Ars Technica:

…When software developer and hacker Gergely Nagy, who goes by the handle “algernon” online, saw Nepenthes, he was delighted. At that time, Nagy told Ars that nearly all of his server’s bandwidth was being “eaten” by AI crawlers.

Already blocking scraping and attempting to poison AI models through a simpler method, Nagy took his defense method further and created his own tarpit, Iocaine. He told Ars the tarpit immediately killed off about 94 percent of bot traffic to his site, which was primarily from AI crawlers. Soon, social media discussion drove users to inquire about Iocaine deployment, including not just individuals but also organizations wanting to take stronger steps to block scraping.

Iocaine takes ideas (not code) from Nepenthes, but it’s more intent on using the tarpit to poison AI models. Nagy used a reverse proxy to trap crawlers in an “infinite maze of garbage” in an attempt to slowly poison their data collection as much as possible for daring to ignore robots.txt….

Taking its name from “one of the deadliest poisons known to man” from The Princess Bride, Iocaine is jokingly depicted as the “deadliest poison known to AI.” While there’s no way of validating that claim, Nagy’s motto is that the more poisoning attacks that are out there, “the merrier.” He told Ars that his primary reasons for building Iocaine were to help rights holders wall off valuable content and stop AI crawlers from crawling with abandon.

(12) CONTEMPORARY COMBAT IMAGINED. “Robot dog battles drone in fireworks fight, sparking future warfare concerns”. (View the video on YouTube here: “Future of #war”.)

A robotic dog fighting an aerial drone is the future of warfare that one would expect in science fiction.

But a video depicting this real-life scene has gone viral on social media sites in China and brought up discussions about a future where machines engage in warfare and what it would take to become the ultimate victor.

Fighting with drones has gone from futuristic to a common theme in warfare. At the turn of this century, the US flew its first drones with wings as wide as 66 feet (20 m) and a cruising altitude of 50,000 feet (15,000 m), but it cost millions of dollars to build one.

In just over two decades, drones have become smaller, nimbler, and so inexpensive to produce that they have become dispensable.

Last month, the Ukrainian defense ministry confirmed that its armed forces used more than 1.2 million drones in 2024 during the ongoing Russia-Ukraine War. On its part, Russia has produced over 1.4 million drones as both sides deploy hundreds of drones in their attacks….

(13) WHEN “SF” STANDS FOR STICKY FINGERS. Collider chronicles “How the Only Star Trek Prop To Survive Two Movies Made Its Way to the Small Screen”.

It’s not uncommon for actors to take home a prop that holds special significance for their character once filming wraps, or for eager fans to snatch up iconic items at an auction. The captain’s chair from the Enterprise bridge might seem like a less obvious — and more unwieldy — prop for someone to take home, but hauling a large piece of furniture around apparently hasn’t stopped certain people from snatching up Captain James T. Kirk‘s (William Shatner) chair over the years. Only one captain’s chair ever made it from one Star Trek movie to the next without being stolen, and that same chair lived long enough to unconventionally grace the small screen.

In 2013, actor and stand-up comedian Darrin Rose starred in a car insurance commercial tied to director J. J. Abrams‘ second Star Trek reboot film, Star Trek: Into Darkness. The ad — also starring Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Blue Eye Samurai’s Maya Erskine — spoofed the frequent ship-to-ship battles for which the franchise is known. After an alien vessel bumps into a Federation starship, the crew prepares for a hostile battle. Instead, the other captain awkwardly apologizes for grazing them and offers to trade insurance information.

According to a dual post on Rose’s Facebook and Instagram, the ad used the same captain’s chair prop from Abrams’ 2009 Star Trek movie as well as its follow-up, Into Darkness. Because Abrams’ company, Bad Robot, produced the commercial, they automatically had access to the movies’ props, costumes, and makeup, and replicated a high-budget starship bridge — which makes the already clever tie-in commercial even funnier. As for how Chris Pine‘s Enterprise chair factors into the ad, Rose learned during filming that every other captain’s chair from previous Trek movies had met an unfortunate end….

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

Pixel Scroll 11/27/24 The Scrollcycle Of Software Pixels

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(1) JAMES SALLIS Q&A. [Item by Bruce D. Arthurs.] Readers may find this recent interview with James Sallis on CrimeReads of interest. Includes a useful term, “arealist fiction”, I don’t think I’ve heard before. “Digging Deep, Staying with It: James Sallis on Writing, Reality, and the Danger of Creative Work”.

…For those readers familiar with Sallis primarily as the author of Drive (later adapted into an ultra-violent, neon-infused film with Ryan Gosling) and the Lew Griffin mystery novels, Bright Segments contains one big surprise: many of the stories are science fiction, a genre that Sallis has explored deeply throughout his life, bending it to his whims in all kinds of ways. There’s something in here for everyone, from the bleakly comedic “The Invasion of Dallas” (aliens find relationships just as confusing as humans) to the disquieting “New Teeth” (which comes off as a more ghostly “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”)….

…Q: You’ve said that the act of writing involves always challenging yourself, always pushing into new and potentially uncomfortable territory. What makes you uncomfortable on the writing front right now? What don’t you know what to do that you’re experimenting with?

JS: On the first day of every class I taught, I’d tell my writers “If you’re serious about this, if you dig in deep and stay with it, you will never be happy with what you write, you’ll always still be reaching.” The greatest danger of any creative work, it seems to me, lies in becoming professionalized, in learning how to do things, in failing to reach. The last time you wanted some effect or another, you did this—so you do it again, instead of taking this on as a new challenge to creativity. Stop. Let the cursor blink away. Put the paint brush down….

(2) BRADBURY 100. Phil Nichols is back with a new series of Bradbury 100 podcast episodes. Beginning with “Ray Bradbury on Stage!” (Direct Soundcloud link: “Bradbury 100 – Episode 58 – Ray Bradbury on Stage”.)

I get things started with a look at Ray Bradbury as a playwright, tracing his career asa theatre writer from the 1950s to the 2010s. I cover both successes and failures, and discuss both “faithful” and “playful” adaptations of his own work.

I have touched on some of this before – see episode 12, where I talked about Colonial Radio Theatre’s audio performances of Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes, which both used Ray’s plays (rather than his books).

And elsewhere on Bradburymedia you will find a review of a performance of Fahrenheit 451.

(3) NAME TO CONJURE WITH. Jules Burt encounters Glendale Paperback Show organizer (and legendary collector) Tom Lesser at the 21-minute mark of his video about “The London PAPERBACK + PULP Book Fair”.

The London PAPERBACK + PULP Book Fair – November 24th 2024 – What An AMAZING Show! Friends, in today’s video we take a look back at the incredible London Paperback and Pulp Fair as held on November 24th 2024. What an outstanding show. Incredible books, immense crowds, happy collectors! We have multiple interviews with dealers, collectors, authors and the show organisers. This is awesome! Thanks to Kim at etcfairs, Dorset Bob, Maurice at AllYouNeedIsBooks, Neil Pettygrew, Stephen Jones, Rian Hughes, Steve Holland of Bear Alley Books, Mick Cocksedge, Tom Lesser and everyone who came along and said hello – I salute you!

(4) VINTAGE PAPERBACK COLLLECTORS SHOW. And March 2025 is not that far away! Follow developments on Facebook.

(4) COULD BE A VERY FINAL FRONTIER. “The Most Dangerous Locked Room of All? Space!” At CrimeReads, Lauren A. Forry finds, “Five reasons to take the traditional locked-room mystery to the stars.”

First reason:

1) Everyone is a suspect.

Yes, yes—in any mystery, many of the character are designed to be suspects. But when you have a murder in an isolated space— in literally isolated space—it really could be any one of them. They were the only ones there. No one could’ve snuck in. No one could have gotten away. There is no one else. It makes it that much more fun when you have to imagine that every character, even the ones that you love and are rooting for, could be the one that did it. And this makes the characters even more fun to write.…

(6) YOUNG LOVECRAFT ON ROBERT E. LEE, AND THE CLANSMAN. Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein brings us “H. P. Lovecraft, Three Letters to the Editor, 1909”. They are more or less rabidly racist, so be warned. These excerpts are from Bobby Derie’s analysis.

A nervous breakdown and poor attendance prevented H. P. Lovecraft from graduating high school in 1908. A spat in the letter columns of the Argosy led to Lovecraft joining amateur journalism in 1914. The period in between these events are the most mysterious of Lovecraft’s adult life. It is the era when we have the fewest letters to guide us on his daily activities, when he seems to have been the recluse that he later pretended to be….

…So it is always interesting to run across “new” letters from Lovecraft in this period. The digital archive of the Providence Journal in Rhode Island have revealed three letters from Lovecraft to the paper published in 1909….

… Although Lovecraft would not live to see the lies of Thomas Dixon, Jr. [author of The Clansman] overturned, Lovecraft would be around the birth of the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan in 1915, see its meteoric rise and its tremendous fall from grace. In time, the reactionary, pseudohistorical image of the American Civil War which emphasized States’ rights and de-emphasized the horrors of slavery would diminish. The Civil Rights Movement would push to complete the work begun during Reconstruction, and though great progress has been made, it has not been without decades of perseverance, violence, and setbacks. Racism is still deeply entrenched in U.S. culture.

An editor read this long letter from a 19-year-old Lovecraft and chose to publish it. Perhaps they agreed with him, perhaps they merely wished to cater to “both sides” in the debate over The Clansman play and book…

(7) TRINA KING. Longtime fan Trina King died November 21. At her request, this message was posted posthumously to her Facebook account.

To all of you, I offer my sincere and deepest apology for any wrongs I may have done to you. From the advantage of my old age, I cringe at how selfish and inconsiderate some of my behavior might have been. At the time, I was too insensitive to see how I was too self-contained to understand my words and actions.

So all I can do is hope you remember me as a better person than I really was.

Also, for those of you who think you could have talked me out of this, the answer is NO. This has been planned for years. I never wanted someone else to decide when I die. I always knew when the pain got too much and I could no longer take care of myself, then that was it. It has been too many years of living poorly.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born November 27, 1907 — L. Sprague de Camp. (Died 2000.)

Let’s start with his excellent The Incorporated Knight series comprises some 1970s short stories by de Camp and two novels written in collaboration with his wife Catherine Crook de Camp, The Incorporated Knight and The Pixilated Peeress. The early short stories were reworked into first novel.

Next let me praise his Harold Shea and Gavagan’s Bar stories, both written with his friend Fletcher Pratt.  There are five stories by them, another ten stories are written forty years later but not by them and I’m not at all fond of those. The original stories were first collected in The Compleat Enchanter: The Magical Misadventures of Harold Shea. Treasure them. 

They say Gavagan’s Bar were patterned after Lord Dunsany’s Jorkens stories and that certainly makes sense. These are quite extraordinary tales. It appears the last printed edition is Tales from Gavagan’s Bar in 1980 on Bantam Books. Orion did a UK epub just several years ago and this year released one in the U.S. 

Robert Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp, and Isaac Asimov, Philadelphia Navy Yard, 1944. Heinlein and Asimov were two of The Big Three. Who was the third?

They did a lot of Really Good Stuff, say The Incomplete Enchanter and The Land of Unreason. An amazing writing partnership it was. 

So, what’s good by him alone. Surprisingly his Conan tales are damn good. Now stop throwing things at me, I’m serious. Some are stellar like “The Frost Giant’s Daughter” and “The Bloodstained God”. (Yes, I’ve a weakness for this fiction.) The three Conan novels co-written with Lin Carter (Conan the Barbarian was also written with Catherine Crook de Camp) are remarkably resistant to the Suck Fairy. 

Shall I note how excellent his Viagens Interplanetarias series is? Well, I will. Adventurous and lighthearted SF with great characters and fun stories, novels (much of which was written with his wife) and stories alike are great reads. I read a few stories a while back and even the Suck Fairy still liked them. All of his fiction holds up remarkably well despite being written upwards of six decades ago. 

Well, that’s my personal reading history with him. What’s yours? 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) HOGARTH ON SFWA. Author M.C.A. Hogarth has written a long thread at X.com intending to correct the record about why she stopped being an officer of SFWA. (See also File 770’s post from 2017, “SFWA VP M.C.A. Hogarth Steps Down; Hartshorn Fills In”, and Carl Slaughter’s interview from 2016, “M. C. A. Hogarth: Peltedverse Creator, Artist, and SFWA VP”.) Hogarth’s commentary begins:

(11) WELCOME TO DYSTOPIA. Tr!llMag’s Charlott Batson’s “Our World Is A Mirror Of Dystopian Novels. Here Is Why” uses five very well-known books as illustrations.

Imagine waking up in a world where the lines between reality and dystopian fiction blur — where the fears once confined to the pages of classic novels now seep into our daily lives. Following the recent US election, is the world echoing the chilling warnings of authors like Orwell, Bradbury, and Atwood?

George Orwell has two books on this list. You don’t need to be told the first. The second one is –

Animal Farm by George Orwell

George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a story that explores how power can corrupt. The book tells the tale of farm animals that overthrow their human owner, as they feel they are not being compensated for all their hard work.

Part of their reasoning is that they work so hard, only to be slaughtered by man and never taste the fruits of their labor. However, this uprising is only focused on freedom for a short while before all animals end up under the harsh rule of the pigs. This change shows how even good intentions can lead to corruption.

Even today, the themes in Animal Farm are still relevant, as power and corruption begin to control our lives. The story shows how leaders can become selfish and betray the ideals they once supported. The pigs’ rise to power and their betrayal of the other animals highlight the need to hold leaders accountable.

This is particularly relevant following the recent US presidential election, where issues of corruption and the influence of money in politics were and continue to be hot topics.

Many people, predominately citizens of the US, are concerned about the potential for political leaders to prioritize their interests over those of the public. Animal Farm pictures and explains the horrors that this produces.

(12) WELL, WELL, WELL. [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] I forsee oil companies funding space… “There May Be 5,000-Mile Deep Oceans On Uranus And Neptune, Scientist Says” – Forbes has the story. (May be paywalled.)

…Published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a new study relying on computer simulations proposes that inside Uranus and Neptune — far below their thick, bluish, hydrogen-and-helium atmospheres — are layers of material that, like oil and water, don’t mix.

Over the years, planetary scientists have suggested that the ice giants contain diamond rain within them. The new theory suggests that instead, a deep ocean of water lies just below layers of clouds in the hydrogen-helium atmosphere. Below the water, goes the theory, is a layer of hydrocarbons — a highly compressed fluid of carbon, nitrogen and hydrogen. The layers are about 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometers) thick….

[Thanks to Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Bruce D. Arthurs, Joey Eschrich, Mark Roth-Whitworth, 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 Rob Barrett.]

Pixel Scroll 10/20/24 Pixel Rain

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(1) SEATTLE WORLDCON 2025 ROOM BLOCK WILL OPEN 10/24. The 2025 Worldcon has announced their room block will open for reservations at 12:00 p.m. Pacific on Thursday, October 24.

(2) WORLD FANTASY AWARDS. The 2024 World Fantasy Awards were presented today in Niagara Falls, NY.

(3) ENDEAVOUR AWARD. The winner was announced this weekend at OryCon: “Margaret Owen Wins 2023 Endeavour Award” — for Painted Devils (Henry Holt).

(4) BACK IN PRINT. “Books So Bad They’re Good: The Return of John M. Ford (fall rewind)” at Daily Kos.

…John M. Ford was part of a gifted group of SF/fantasy writers that came along in the late 1970’s/early 1980’s and included luminaries like Diane Duane, Charles de Lint, Lois McMaster Bujold, and Guy Gavriel Kay.  An immensely talented poet and even better novelist/short story writer, Ford began writing for Asimov’s before he was out of college, and by 1980 he’d published several beautifully crafted short stories, a slew of game reviews, and proto-cyberpunk novel Web of Angels.  Soon came his best-known work, The Dragon Waiting, and the next two decades saw a steady stream of finely written poems, novels, gaming supplements, and contributions to the Liavek shared-world series.  

Not all was writing — like so many authors, Ford had to take day jobs as an editor, computer consultant, and even hospital orderly to pay the bills — but by the time Ford died unexpectedly in the mid-000’s he’d won several major awards, become a fannish celebrity thanks to his long-running “Ask Dr. Mike” routine, and acquired a reputation as “writer’s writer” who had never achieved great success despite immense talent.  His place in science fiction and fantasy seemed assured, and most fans thought it was only a matter of time until a small press began reissuing his works.

Except that this didn’t happen.

Just why is still in dispute.  The late Tor editor David Hartwell claimed that Ford, who died intestate, had been estranged from his SF-hating family who thought science fiction and fantasy were immoral and refused to let the books be reprinted on religious grounds.  Ford’s life partner claimed that he’d planned to revise his will to cut his family out and appoint her as his executrix, but since the version he left was never witnessed it wasn’t legally binding, plus they had never actually married beyond a self-penned Klingon ceremony.  No one knew how to contact his heirs, and if Hartwell was to be believed, Ford’s family hadn’t approved of his work, his personal relationships, or pretty much anything  he’d done as an adult, so why even bother?

It wasn’t until 2018, when Slate’s Isaac Butler began digging into the story, that the truth came out.  Ford’s family, far from disapproving of his work, had repeatedly written to his agent inquiring about republication.  They had not known that his life partner was more than a friend, nor that the agent, overwhelmed by personal problems and grief-stricken by Ford’s death, had basically withdrawn from the industry completely.  They were not happy with the rumors that had circulated about them deliberately withholding Ford’s works from publication, and it took nearly a year of negotiations by Tor Books’ editor Beth Meacham for them to change their mind….

(5) BREVITY. Bill Ryan considers Ramsey Campbell and the power of the short story in horror writing in “Horror in Brief” at The Bulwark.

ONCE, YEARS AGO, I POSTED something on the internet about my disappointment in a novel by the revered, almost superhumanly prolific, Liverpudlian horror writer Ramsey Campbell. The details of what I said then are not relevant here; what is relevant is that someone responded to what I wrote by recommending that I read a particular short story by Campbell called “The Companion.” As it happened, I owned a collection of Campbell’s short fiction that contained the story, so, with some skepticism, I read it. “The Companion” instantly became one of the best horror stories I had ever read, and it remains so to this day.

I shouldn’t have been all that surprised at the sharp contrast between what I felt about the novel by Campbell and my intense admiration for that short story. I’ve long maintained that horror fiction thrives in the short form, and that horror novels can often stretch an idea beyond its breaking point. 

(6) JEFF VANDERMEER Q&A. “Jeff VanderMeer Talks About His New ‘Southern Reach’ Novel” — link bypasses New York Times paywall:

A lot of readers wanted to learn what happens after the end of the trilogy, when the situation is pretty dire: Area X is spreading uncontrollably and looks like it will colonize the planet. Why did you decide to go back into the past instead?

To describe what happens after “Acceptance,” when Area X takes over, would be almost impossible. It would be so alien or removed that it felt like a perspective I couldn’t really write. But this book is kind of like a prequel, contiguous with the prior few books, and it’s also sneakily a sequel. So it kind of allowed me to do what I didn’t feel like I could do directly, and that was exciting.

Why do you think you and so many of your readers are still thinking about Area X?

I think because it did come so deeply out of my subconscious. The fact that I was sick when I wrote it, recovering from dental surgery, and the fact that I was still unpacking its meaning in my mind after it was written, and then it took on so many different meanings from other people. There have been so many different interpretations, because of the ambiguity in the books. So people can see a lot of different things in the books, and then when they reflect it back at me, it makes me think about the books differently as well…

(7) IN THE DAYS OF THE DEROS. No science fiction fan’s education is complete without having learned about The Shaver Mystery. Bobby Derie brings readers up to speed with “H. P. Lovecraft & The Shaver Mystery” at Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein.

What follows is an extended deep-dive into the history of one of the most contentious affairs in pulp science fiction in the 1940s, the Shaver Mystery, and its interactions with H. P. Lovecraft’s Mythos, which was also beginning to coalesce in the same period. The ramifications of their interactions would spill over into science fiction fandom, conspiracy circles, and occult literature, with long-lasting effects on popular culture….

(8) BLOCH ON THE AIR. The Robert Bloch Official Website has added new radio episodes scripted by the author. Listen in at “Radio”.

Bloch spent little time working within the medium of radio. Aside from penning radio scripts resulting from participation in Milwaukee political candidate Carl Zeidler’s 1940 bid for mayor and for a few local shows in the Milwaukee area, Bloch’s only commercial foray into radio broadcasting came in 1945, with the debut of Stay Tuned for Terror. A program devoted to horror and the supernatural in the same vein as Lights Out, Terror’s initial, and only season, featured 39, 15-minute radio plays. The scripts, all written by Bloch, consisted of eight originals, with the remainder adapted from his own stories, primarily from Weird Tales, who promoted the radio show within their pages. Sadly, this radio program is for the most part “lost,” apart from, to date, four episodes that have only recently been discovered…

(9) I’M JUST A POE BOY. “The Ghost Of Edgar Allen Poe And Other Strange True Facts About The Master Of The Macabre” – the Idolator begins its collection of oddities with this —

His Obituary Was Full Of Lies

Just two days after Edgar Allan Poe’s death, the New York Daily Tribune posted an obituary about him written by a man who called himself “Ludwig.” This wasn’t the kind of loving obituary most people might see in the newspaper. Ludwig made comments such as, “He walked the streets, in madness or melancholy, with lips moving in indistinct curses,” among other claims.

As it turns out, Ludwig was a fake name used by Poe’s rival Rufus Wilmot Griswold, an enemy Poe had made during his time as a critic. Griswold would later write a biographical article on Poe titled “Memoir of the Author” which made further false statements or spread half-truths to taint Poe’s image.

(10) NYCC COSPLAY. “SEE IT! New York Comic Con brings out amazing cosplayers and pop culture icons” in amNewYork. Twenty-three photos at the link.

The 2024 Comic Con wrapped up Sunday after four days that saw thousands of pop culture lovers travel to the Big Apple from all across the country.

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born October 20, 1882 — Bela Lugosi. (Died 1956.)

By Paul Weimer: I’ve mentioned in this space before watching movies on WPIX in New York as a formative experience. I got to see lots of old movies that way and be exposed to a wide range of films. It is no wonder that the work of Bela Lugosi came to mind. I (except for his first appearance ifor me) seemed to always be seeing him in movies with Boris Karloff, just like I saw endless movies with Christopher Lee paired with Peter Cushing. Lugosi was Dracula, of course, his most iconic role, but I didn’t see him there first. 

The first time I saw him (and heck, the first time I saw Dracula period) was, don’t laugh, Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein.

Yes, by the vicissitudes of chance, I got to see Lugosi play Dracula in a comedic variation and derivation of his original role, as well as seeing a number of the Universal monsters at the same time.  WPIX would later give me the aforementioned Lugosi/Karloff movies and I began to understand what the comedy was making fun of. Lugosi’s Dracula is chilling, sui generis and the template that every other Dracula performer has to measure up against, since.

(12) COMICS SECTION.

  • B.C. has an unexpected crash.
  • Frazz discusses the length of a day.
  • Jumpstart introduces a new superhero.
  • The Argyle Sweater lists things that are seldom seen.
  • Carpe Diem cleans up.
  • Tom Gauld shows why there’s little time left for doing science:

(13) WHO TELLS YOUR STORY. “Mass shooting survivors turn to an unlikely place for justice – copyright law” — the Guardian’s tagline: “The approach aims to ‘avoid rewarding’ assailants and prevent trauma reliving. Could it be a viable solution?”

In a Nashville courtroom in early July, survivors of the 2023 Covenant school shooting celebrated an unusual legal victory. Citing copyright law, Judge l’Ashea Myles ruled that the assailant’s writings and other creative property could not be released to the public.

After months of hearings, the decision came down against conservative lawmakers, journalists and advocates who had sued for access to the writings, claiming officials had no right to keep them from the public. But since parents of the assailant – who killed six people at the private Christian elementary school, including three nine-year-old children – signed legal ownership of the shooter’s journals over to the families of surviving students last year, Myles said releasing the materials would violate the federal Copyright Act….

… But the approach is also a response to the frustration that survivors and victims’ families feel. The ways shooters have historically been portrayed in the media, they say, has been damaging; oversight over the distribution of harmful materials online – including video footage of deadly shootings – has been virtually nonexistent; and free rein over shooters’ names and intellectual property has enabled outside actors to profit from their reproduction.

Together, these elements speak to the need for greater care over how the stories of mass shootings are retold, survivors and advocates say, so that victims – rather than their killers – are remembered….

(14) PROBLEM OR SOLUTION? “’It’s quite galling’: children’s authors frustrated by rise in celebrity-penned titles” reports the Guardian.

A modern classic by Keira Knightley” reads the provisional cover of the actor’s debut children’s book, I Love You Just the Same. Set to be published next October, the 80-page volume, written and illustrated by Knightley, is about a girl navigating the changing dynamics that come with the arrival of a sibling.

The Pirates of the Caribbean star is the latest in a long list of celebrities to have turned to writing children’s books. McFly’s Tom Fletcher and Dougie Poynter have been hovering at the top of the bestseller chart since the publication last month of their latest book The Dinosaur that Pooped Halloween!. Earlier in the year, David Walliams dominated with his newest book Astrochimp. The entertainer has sold 25m copies of his children’s titles in the UK alone, according to Nielsen BookData.

… “These celebrities do not need any more money or exposure, but plenty of genuine writers do,” says the author, poet and performer Joshua Seigal.

When news broke of Knightley’s book deal, authors expressed frustrations online; in one viral tweet, the writer Charlotte Levin joked about deciding to become a film star….

… Some argue that celebrity-backed titles help keep the industry healthy. “Attention paid to any children’s book creates a rising tide that lifts the entire publishing industry,” says the author Howard Pearlstein.

Books written by celebrities can also help increase representation in children’s fiction. “Celebrity fiction has been one of the key ways to get Black and brown characters on shelves in recent years,” says Jasmine Richards, a former ghostwriter of celebrity fiction and founder of StoryMix, which develops fiction with inclusive casts of characters to sell to publishers….

(15) A SERIOUS CASE OF LUPINE. “Wolf Man Official Trailer: Watch Now” advises SYFY Wire.

Watch out, Brundlefly! You might just meet your match in writer-director Leigh Whannell’s take on lupine monsters in the upcoming Wolf Man.

The film’s official trailer, which dropped during the Blumhouse panel at New York Comic Con Friday, gives off some serious Cronenberg vibes, teasing a werewolf infection akin to a deteriorative disease that eats away at the body and turns the mind into primal mush….

(16) ATTRACTIVE NUISANCE? [Item by Steven French.] Don’t go near this if you’ve got any metal in your body! “China builds record-breaking magnet — but it comes with a cost” according to Nature.

China is now home to the world’s most powerful resistive magnet, which produced a magnetic field that was more than 800,000 times stronger than Earth’s.

On 22 September, the magnet, at the Steady High Magnetic Field Facility (SHMFF) at the Chinese Academy of Science’s Hefei Institutes of Physical Science, sustained a steady magnetic field of 42.02 tesla. This milestone narrowly surpasses the 41.4-tesla record set in 2017 by a resistive magnet at the US National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (NHMFL) in Tallahassee, Florida. Resistive magnets are made of coiled metal wires and are widely used in magnet facilities across the world.

China’s record-breaker lays the groundwork for building reliable magnets that can sustain ever-stronger magnetic fields, which would help researchers to discover surprising new physics, says Joachim Wosnitza, a physicist at the Dresden High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Germany.

The resistive magnet — which is open to international users — is the country’s second major contribution to the global quest to produce ever-higher magnetic fields. In 2022, the SHMFF’s hybrid magnet, which combines a resistive magnet with a superconducting one, produced a field of 45.22 tesla, making it the most powerful working steady-state magnet in the world….

(17) THE ORIGINAL SPACE JUNK. [Item by Steven French.] “Most meteorites traced to three space crackups” says Science.

The bombardment never stops. Each day, up to 50 meteors survive the fiery descent through Earth’s atmosphere and reach the surface as meteorites. Researchers and collectors have recovered more than 50,000 of these rocks, which are prized in part for the mystery of where they came from.

Now, researchers have eliminated some of the mystery. They have traced most meteorites to just three Solar System bodies that shattered to form families of asteroids in the belt between Mars and Jupiter, plus countless smaller fragments that sometimes reach Earth.

Until now, a source was known for only 6% of meteorites; now, more than 70% have a known origin, says Miroslav Brož, an astrophysicist at Charles University who led one of three related studies published recently in Nature and Astronomy & Astrophysics. “It feels like a lifetime discovery.”…

(18) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Ryan George chops it up with a “Guy Who Is Definitely Not Cursed”. ((HINT: Yes he is.))

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

Pixel Scroll 10/18/24 G-L-O-R-I-A Road

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(0) TODAY’S TITLE INSPIRATION. Daniel says he found retroactive inspiration in the fact that the group Them which performed “G-L-O-R-I-A” included Van Morrison.

(1) WEIRD NATURE. “The author has no problem embracing the inscrutable and uncanny; it’s what fuels his fiction” says Publishers Weekly: “Jeff VanderMeer Journeys into the Unknown”.

…The fantastical petri dish of Area X springs largely from VanderMeer’s experiences with nature and wild spaces. His parents were Peace Corps volunteers in Fiji when he was a boy. “It was pretty much what you’d expect from a tropical paradise,” he says. He would marvel at the eels and frogs at the local botanical gardens, and his father, an entomologist, would take him out to see the rhinoceros beetles on the region’s outer islands. He learned at an early age to experience a certain awe of the natural world. But he also suffered from serious asthma attacks and allergies.

“There was this weird contrast between things being so beautiful and also sometimes feeling very physically miserable,” he says. “That was a juxtaposition that I think comes through in the work, where you have really beautiful things, and then things that are disturbing or unsettling at the same time.”…

(2) GOOD OMENS SCUTTLEBUTT. Social media outlets are echoing this basic story today: “According to various sources but still pending official confirmation, the last instalment of Good Omens could take the form of a TV movie….” at Good Omens News on Instagram.

The Sun took the same scanty information and turned it into this headline – “Huge TV show with two A-list Hollywood star lead ‘axed’ after creator is ‘cancelled’ over scandal” – however, in the body of the article it also said the project may be converted to a TV movie.

Behind a paywall, UK Production News has posted this information:

(3) TEN DEEP CUTS. At Bluesky, Bobby Derie of Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein shares “Ten facts about Lovecraft that might need more explanation.” Thread starts here

The first item is:

1) "The Dunwich Horror" may have been inspired by a horror novel from the author of THE VELVETEEN RABBIT.deepcuts.blog/2022/04/09/t…

— Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein (@deepcuts.bsky.social) 2024-10-18T12:16:44.158Z

(4) ELLIPTICAL THOUGHTS. [Item by Steven French.] Here’s Kate Gardner’s review of Samantha Harvey’s Booker & Ursula LeGuin Prize nominated novel Orbital in Physics World: “Around the world in 16 orbits: a day in the life of the International Space Station”.

The ISS is almost a time capsule, hearkening back to the end of the Cold War. It now looks likely that Russia will pull out – or be ejected – from the mission before its projected end date of 2030.

Viewed from the ISS, no borders are visible, and the crew joke comfortably about their national differences. However, their lives are nevertheless dictated by strict and sometimes petty rules governing, for example, which toilet and which exercise equipment to use. These regulations are just one more banal reality of life on the ISS, like muscle atrophy, blocked sinuses or packing up waste to go in the next resupply craft….

…Harvey manages to convey that these details are quotidian. But she also imbues them with beauty. During one conversation in Orbital, a character sheds four tears. He and a crew mate then chase down each floating water droplet because loose liquids must be avoided. It’s a small moment that says so much with few words.

Orbital has been shortlisted for both the 2024 Booker Prize (winner to be announced on 12 November) and the 2024 Ursula K Le Guin Prize for Fiction (the winner of which will be announced on 21 October). The recognition reflects the book’s combination of literary prose and unusual globe-spanning (indeed, beyond global) perspective. Harvey’s writing has been compared to Virginia Woolf – a comparison that is well warranted. And yet Orbital is as accessible and educational as the best of popular science. It’s a feat almost as astonishing as the existence of the ISS….

(5) NO JOKE. “Why did Joker 2 lose so much money? And how on earth did it cost so much in the first place?” The Guardian sets out to find the answers.

To quote Heath Ledger’s version of the clown prince of crime, maybe some wag should be scrawling “Why so serious?” on glass-fronted offices at Warner Bros Discovery this week, as executives there contemplate the box-office implosion of Joker: Folie à Deux. A catastrophic $37.7m opening weekend, the largest second-weekend drop for a DC film (81%), a worldwide take currently standing at a piddling $165m … how has the studio gone from the 2019 original, a billion-grosser that was then the highest earning R-rated film, to this?

If nothing else, the Joker is proving true to his reputation as an agent of chaos. But he is also the most beloved of comic-book villains from a storied franchise; a draw almost on par with Batman himself, making the disaster all the more unthinkable. With bubonic word of mouth, Joker: Folie à Deux is now projected to lose $125m-200m, depending on whose budget estimate you believe. If it’s the $300m figure being generally touted for production and marketing, then this is clearly what has hobbled the film; it would leave it needing as much as $475m to break even. Risky reinventions of hallowed pop-cultural icons are a lot more feasible on the first film’s sensible $60m budget.

… But chastising the fanbase so openly is tantamount to box office self-harm (probably why the director refused to test-screen Joker: Folie à Deux). The impunity of a $300m budget seems to have led Phillips to mistake this for an auteur film, and shooting during a period of regime change at both Warner and DC reportedly allowed him to operate with weak oversight. According to Variety, he refused to liaise with new DC heads James Gunn and Peter Safran, saying: “With all due respect to them, this is kind of a Warner Bros movie.” But he also pushed back on new Warner president David Zaslav’s suggestions for lowering the budget, including moving the shoot to London rather than Los Angeles….

(6) DON’T CHANGE THAT CHANNEL. The 2026 Worldcon has a mascot: “Introducing Fuzzy: The LAcon V Channel Island Fox Mascot”.

The Channel Island fox is pure California: an animal unique to the coastal islands in the southern part of the state, whose habitat, once threatened to the point of extinction, is now thriving due to conservation. Fuzzy, the playful Channel Island fox depicted at right, exemplifies the spirit of California and joins us on our expedition to LAcon V in 2026 as our official convention mascot.

Artist Teddy Harvia has captured Fuzzy’s likeness so elegantly, yet so playfully, through many illustrations yet to be revealed by LAcon V. Fuzzy will join us throughout the next two years on all our adventures, all hand-drawn by Teddy.

Fuzzy has been named in honor of our friend and colleague, Marilyn “Fuzzy Pink” Niven, a long-time participant in Southern California and American science fiction fandom and the wife of celebrated author Larry Niven. Fuzzy Pink Niven passed away in December 2023, leaving behind a legacy of friendship and service to fandom that can never be replaced. We could think of no greater tribute to her than to bring her spirit along with us on our adventure, and we are very grateful to Larry for his blessing….

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by John Hertz, Laura Molesworth and Mike Glyer.]

Born October 18, 1924 — Voltaire Molesworth. (Died 1964.) Vol Molesworth was an Australian fan historian and small press publisher. In 1939 he co-founded the Futurian Society of Sydney – which suffered endless keruffles, like so many fan groups — and started the fanzine Luna. The next year he also published Cosmos.

Being a diabetic, Vol (as he was known) was ineligible for service in World War II but during these years he gained his wide experience in all aspects of journalism. He also wrote fiction. By the time he was 20 Vol had written a number of short novels published in paperback, the most widely known being his science fiction novel The Stratosphere Patrol.

He led a revival of the Sydney Futurians in 1947, becoming one of the leading Australian fans in the 1950s. He played a major role in the three Australian Natcons held in Sydney during the ’50s. He founded and operated the Futurian Press.

Molesworth wrote A History of Australian Science Fiction Fandom 1935-1963 and the earlier An Outline History of Australian Fandom I.

Outside of fandom, he was a mathematician and amateur radio operator and managed the University of New South Wales’ radio station. He was married to Laura Molesworth.

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Anniversary — Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars (2005)

Once upon a time, a beloved SF series got cancelled, and yes there is absolutely nothing unusual in that happening, it happens more often than it should. What is extremely unusual is that it got a second chance to have a proper ending in the Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars, seventeen years ago. 

So let’s tell the tale of how that happened. Farscape arrived here twenty-three ago when Deep Space Nine was just wrapping up and Voyager was well into its seven-year-run. It started fine and ratings were strong until the fourth season and that, combined with regime change here in the States on who was picking up the tab for the two million dollars per episode led an abrupt end. 

Fans being fans weren’t going to let things end that way, nor should we. (Yes, I loved the show. Deeply, unreservedly. I think it was one of the best series ever made, if not the best.) A massive campaign was undertaken with of course emails, letters, phone calls, and phone calls pleading with the network to reverse the cancellation. 

Even Bill Amend who created the Fox Trot series had his Jason Fox character direct his ire at SciFi and demand that they change their mind.

Well, they did, sort of. A fifth season didn’t happen after all. What did happen in some ways I think was even better though I know that isn’t a popular opinion among those who wanted a full season. 

What we got was the two episode, one hundred-and eighty-minute Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars which I thought splendidly wrapped things up. Every single storyline that wasn’t dealt with during the series was during this film.

SPOLER ALERT HERE.

We got a baby too. Yes, our Peacekeeper gives birth in a fountain in the middle of a firefight, insists she’s married while in labor, carries her baby unscathed through a battle. I assume that the baby was a puppet from the Henson labs. It was terribly cute.

END OF SPOILERS

I’ve watched it at least a half dozen times, probably more, in the last fifteen years. The Suck Fairy in her steel toed boots is obviously scared of those Aussie actors (and the non-Aussie one as well) as she slinks away to harass someone else. 

Just looked at Rotten Tomatoes — not at all surprisingly, it carries a ninety-two percent rating among audience reviewers there. It’s streaming at Amazon Prime and Peacock. .

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) ANOTHER STAN LEE CAMEO. “DOT announces limited sale of commemorative ‘Stan Lee Way’ street signs to honor Bronx-born comic book legend” reports the Bronx Times.

The New York City Department of Transportation announced it is selling a limited number of “Stan Lee Way” commemorative street signs through the Department of Citywide Administrative Services’ CityStore. The master comic book writer grew up in the Bronx, attending DeWitt Clinton High School.

“A cultural icon, Stan Lee, has gifted the world with stories that captivate, inspire, and make us believe in the heart of a hero,” said NYC DCAS Commissioner Louis A. Molina. “With this sign release, you have a chance to gift yourself or the superhero in your life a piece of history.”

In 2021, the city co-named a portion of University Avenue between Brandt Place and West 176th Street where he lived, “Stan Lee Way”. The Bronx native revolutionized the comic book world by developing complex characters with relatable flaws and layered plot lines.

(11) BIRD WORDS. The Hollywood Reporter is there when “The Penguin’s Colin Farrell, Cristin Milioti Tease Episode 5 at NYCC”.

The Penguin star and executive producer Colin Farrell was joined on Thursday at New York Comic Con for a mid-season discussion by showrunner and fellow EP Lauren LeFranc, as well as co-stars Cristin Milioti, Rhenzy Feliz, Deirdre O’Connell, Michael Kelly, and Clancy Brown, where they debuted two sneak peaks for the crowd for episode five, before going in-depth on what’s motivating the characters.

In the first clip, Oz (Farrell) and Victor (Feliz) share a sentimental moment where they discuss their relationship loyalty, while Oz’s car burns in the background. “It’s you and me now, kid until the end,” Oz says, before he and his henchman make a surprise visit to rough up Sal’s (Brown) son, before paying him and his wife a visit in prison to set up an exchange… 

(12) MILLIE BOBBY BROWN SFF. “’The Electric State’ trailer is all Millie Bobby Brown and robots in an alternate sci-fi ’90s” – Mashable sets the scene.

Robots are in exile and Millie Bobby Brown is on the road to revenge in Netflix’s star-studded sci-fi adventure, set in the apparently “retro” ’90s (fml).

Based on Simon Stålenhag’s graphic novel and directed by the MCU’s Anthony and Joe Russo, The Electric State sees Brown in the lead as Michelle, a teen without a family who meets a robot called Cosmo. But surprise, Cosmo is controlled by a human — her long lost brother no less! He’s across the country somewhere, and there’s sinister circumstances afoot, so Michelle and Cosmo hit the road to find him….

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

Pixel Scroll 10/13/24 Pixels, Hardworking And Honest, Need The Support Of Their Scrolls

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(1) UNCANNY DELUGED WITH AI SUBMISSIONS. Michael Damian Thomas of Uncanny Magazine announced on October 10 that the volume of AI submissions has caused a delay in their responses to writers.

Then he later followed up with these additional thoughts:

(2) EARLY SERIALIZATIONS OF DRACULA. At Deeper Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein, Bobbie Derie makes “A Survey of Dracula Newspaper Serials in English (1899-1928)”.

The research for Deeper Cut: Lovecraft, Miniter, Stoker: the Dracula Revision required an examination of the history of the Dracula manuscript and an evaluation of the textual variations in order to evaluate whether there was any place in the timeline for Edith Miniter, as Lovecraft alleged, and to judge Bram Stoker’s involvement with changes to the text before and after publication.

One of the most notable developments in Dracula studies in recent years has been the discovery of and translation into English of the 1899 Swedish translation Mörkrets Makter (translated into English as Powers of Darkness), which was serialized in in the newspaper Dagen, and 1901 Icelandic edition Makt Myrkanna (also translated into English as Powers of Darkness) serialized in the newspaper Fjallkonan. What has become apparent, however, is that there were also numerous Dracula serializations in English-language newspapers in the period 1899-1928. Thanks to the digitization of old newspaper archives and online subscription services, these newspaper serials, which have received rather scanty attention, are more accessible today than they were previously. Enough that a survey of the extant texts is warranted….

… There may well be additional newspaper serializations of Dracula besides these; these are just the serials available via newspapers.com as of the time of this writing. Links will be to the full pages, as clips tend to come out illegible….

(3) JOY DAVIDMAN AT THE LONDON CIRCLE. Rob Hansen has assembled excerpts of fannish memoirs about “C.S. Lewis & The London Circle” at Fiawol.org. A great deal of it is about Joy Davidman’s attendance at pub meetings of the London fan group.

[SAM YOUD, who wrote as “John Christopher”] …Joy herself I got to know quite well. We drank bitter together and argued endlessly through those Thursday evenings. Joy never stopped arguing, and we derived much mutual pleasure from the exercise.

She had endured a cruelly-hard childhood, involving a range of diseases that included curvature of the spine, exaggerated insulin secretion resulting in excessive appetite and a weight problem, and Grave’s disease – hyperthyroidism. For the last she was treated by a doctor who required her to wear a radium collar around her neck, weekly for a year. It appeared to cure the condition, but one can speculate on the cost in later life. I did not know any of this before reading AND GOD CAME IN, her biography by Lyle Dorsett, published in 1983. Nor did she talk about her achievements as an award-winning poet, her authorship of two well-regarded novels, or her stint in Hollywood as a screenwriter. Perhaps she did not want to belittle our petty triumphs in sales to Astounding Stories or Galaxy or New Worlds….

(4) NOBEL PEACE PRIZE. “2024 Nobel Peace Prize goes to Japanese atomic bomb survivors’ group” – NPR has details.

A Japanese anti-nuclear weapons group made up of survivors of the atomic bombings in Japan during World War II has won the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee said it has awarded the Japanese organization Nihon Hidankyo “for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again,” sending a message to countries that are considering acquiring or threatening to use them.

Committee Chair Jørgen Watne Frydnes said Nihon Hidankyo, made up of survivors of the August 1945 nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nakasaki by the United States, has been instrumental in the global movement that has kept nuclear weapons from being used in conflict for 80 years….

… At a press conference in Hiroshima, Nihon Hidankyo’s co-chair, Toshiyuki Mimaki, 81, held back tears and pinched his cheeks when the award was announced. “I can’t believe it’s real” he told reporters.

Mimaki is a Hiroshima survivor and said the award helped recognize the group’s work. “It would be a great force to appeal to the world that the abolition of nuclear weapons can be achieved,” he said.

He said the idea that nuclear weapons bring peace to the world is wrong.

“It has been said that because of nuclear weapons, the world maintains peace. But nuclear weapons can be used by terrorists,” he said. “For example, if Russia uses them against Ukraine, Israel against Gaza, it won’t end there. Politicians should know these things.”…

(5) SOME OF THE ORIGINAL MONSTERS. Atlas Obscura introduces us to “The Wendigo and 6 Other Ancient Monsters From Indigenous Folklore”.

…Around the world, Indigenous communities have passed rich storytelling traditions from one generation to the next from time immemorial. Many of the stories have been lost in the upheaval and destruction of the colonial era. Selfless heroes and bold tricksters alike have been forgotten, or faded to a mere wisp of collective memory. But the monsters, ah, the monsters. Ferocious, fanged, skulking, slithering, they seem to have endured better than most. These beings still haunt—and hunt—from Australia to Brazil, Lake Victoria to Lake Winnebago. Here are some of the most memorable ancient terrors from Indigenous lore that still send chills down our spines.

First on the list:

Beware the Wendigo, the Frostbitten Flesheater of North America’s Chilly Heartland by J.W. Ocker

Few monsters from Indigenous folklore can boast of making it in Hollywood. There’s Krampus, a modern amalgamation of deeply ancient Central European traditions, and the wendigo, which first terrorized the Algonquin, Ojibwe, and other Anishinaabe peoples around the North American Great Lakes. We’ll leave it to you to decide whether the 2021 movie Antlers does justice to the wendigo’s ferocity, but we’re betting the wendigo doesn’t care. It’s too busy looking for its next victim. A potent symbol of human greed, the emaciated creature is insatiably hungry and appears in the lean and desperate season of winter. In the 19th century, some documented regional cases of cannibalism and other unspeakable acts were chalked up to individuals “going wendigo.”

(6) FANTASY STUDY. Adam Roberts, winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Jack Glass, a three-time BSFA Award winner, and Professor in Nineteenth Century Literature and Culture at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK, will have a nonfiction book Fantasy: A Short History out in April 2025 from Skylight Books.

One of the most popular genres of modern times, fantasy literature has as rich a cultural and literary heritage as the magical worlds that so enrapture its readers. In this book, a concise history of the genre, Adam Roberts traces the central forms and influences on fantasy through the centuries to arrive at our understanding of the fantastic today.

Pinning the evolution of fantasy on three key moments – the 19th-century resurgence of interest in Arthurian legend, the rise of Christian allegory, and a post-Ossian, post-Grimm emergence of a Norse, Germanic and Old English mythic identity – Roberts explores how the logic of ‘the fantastical’ feeds through into the sets and trappings of modern fantasy. Tracking the creation of heroic and high fantasy subgenres through antiquarian tradition, through C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien and into the post-Tolkien boom in genre fantasy writing, the book brings the manifestation of the fantastic beyond literature into art, music, film and TV, video games and other cultural productions such as fandoms. From Tennyson and Wagner, through Robert Graves, David Jones, Samuel Delany, Dungeons and Dragons, Terry Pratchett and Robin Hobb, to the Game of Thrones, Skyrim, The Witcher and The Lord of the Rings media franchises, the book digs into the global dissemination and diversity of 21st-century fantasy. Accessible and dynamic, wide-ranging but comprehensive, this is a crash-course in context for the most imaginative form of storytelling….

(7) TEDDY HARVIA CARTOON.

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Anniversary: Star Trek’s “Mudd’s Women” (1966 on this date)

By Paul Weimer: Harry Mudd is, for all being a reprobate, cheat, con man, and sneak, is one of the iconic characters of all of Star Trek. In a supposedly glorious Federation, it is heartwarming in a way to see a character as mercilessly mercenary as Harry Mudd come on screen. 

“Mudd’s Women” is his first appearance. (he would be in one more TOS episode, an animated episode and surprisingly, also on Discovery (before they go to the future).   

“Mudd’s Women” itself is a con man scheme involving a drug to make women appear more beautiful, and Mudd trying to marry them off to settlers while on the drug, and reap the profits. It shows the early “Wagon Train in Space” roots of Star Trek to the fullest, because with just some changes, this could easily be an episode of Bonanza or another Western. And if you look at Mudd’s getup (and that hat), you can totally see it. And Kirk’s clever use of a placebo in the denouement is a positive message that beauty drugs, in the end, pale to self-confidence and real inner beauty. 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) LEFT-HANDED COMPLIMENT. From 2018: David Williams tells us about the time: “They Tried to Ban Fahrenheit 451 and Replace It With. . . My Book” at Literary Hub.

So it was no surprise when from Santa Rosa County in the panhandle of Florida this past month there came familiar news. A parent, discovering their child was reading something they found problematic, approached a school board and asked that Fahrenheit 451 be removed from the curriculum.

“Filth,” that parent called Bradbury’s work, as she pressed for it to be removed from an eighth grade reading list. The concerned mom leading the banning effort didn’t see its prophetic relevance. All she saw was a vulgarity, the word “bastard,” which she felt was inappropriate for her 13-year-old daughter. “I’m just trying to keep my little girl a little girl,” she said.

This kind of book-banning effort isn’t unusual, but this one was a gut punch. Why? Because the parent organizing the banning effort suggested that Bradbury’s work should be replaced with something more acceptable to her.

Among her suggestions for more “suitable” material: my own dystopian novel, When the English Fall.

I cannot imagine receiving a more troubling and heartbreaking endorsement.

Sure, my Amish protagonist and narrator doesn’t use vulgarity in the face of the world’s collapse. Because he’s Amish. Old Order Mennonites don’t tend to swear like sailors. But my story contains its fair share of death and murder and human horror, at least as graphic as anything you’ll find in Bradbury.

The mother bringing the complaint was concerned at the violence in the book, and worried that the book wasn’t “safe,” and suggested that kids might read about murder and violence and become murderous and violent themselves. As a pastor, I preach the Bible every Sunday, and teach it in classes. My gracious, I can’t imagine a less “safe” book than the Bible. Try reading Genesis sometime. That’s a rough, rough book. My Adult Ed class has been discovering this last month as we’ve been reading it together. Murder? Rape? Betrayal? Incest? Ray Bradbury’s got nothing on the Word of God….

(11) THEY MAKE A DESOLATION. “SpaceX wants to go to Mars. To get there, environmentalists say it’s trashing Texas” reports NPR.

…Musk might see Starship as an ark for all God’s creatures, but environmentalists tell a different story. As Starship prototypes have begun flying from SpaceX’s launch pad in Boca Chica, Texas, they say the company has shown little regard for the wildlife Musk has said he wants to protect.

Now, a review of state and federal records by NPR, including some obtained through a freedom of information request, shows how SpaceX has sometimes ignored environmental regulations as it rushed to fulfill its founder’s vision. With each of its launches, records show, the company discharged tens of thousands of gallons of what regulators classify as industrial wastewater into the surrounding environment.

In response to the discharges of water from the pad, both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) have determined that SpaceX has violated the Clean Water Act. Both agencies levied fines totaling more than $150,000 against the company in September….

(12) EMBRACEABLE YOU. Meanwhile, “SpaceX pulls off unprecedented feat, grabs descending rocket with mechanical arms” – CBS News has the story.

In one of the most dramatic, high-risk space flights to date, SpaceX launched a gargantuan Super Heavy-Starship rocket on an unpiloted test flight Sunday and then used giant “mechazilla” mechanical arms on the pad gantry to pluck the descending first stage out of the sky in an unprecedented feat of engineering.

The Starship upper stage, meanwhile, looped around the planet and re-entered the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean as planned, enduring temperatures nearing 3,000 degrees as it descended to a controlled, on-target splashdown.

The spacecraft came through the hellish heat of re-entry in relatively good condition, protected by improved heat-shield tiles and beefed-up steering fins that worked as needed while engulfed in a fireball of atmospheric friction.

But the jaw-dropping first stage capture back at the launch pad, using pincer-like arms more familiarly known as chopsticks, was the clear highlight of the giant rocket’s fifth test flight.

Snagging the descending 23-story-tall Super Heavy booster with the mechazilla arms represented an unprecedented milestone in SpaceX’s drive to develop fully reusable, quickly re-launchable rockets, a technological tour de force unmatched in the history of earlier space programs relying on expendable, throw-away rockets….

(13) PIRATE SITE CHANGES NAME. “Aniwatch, World’s Biggest Anime Piracy Site, Rebranded to HiAnime” reports CBR.com.

The world’s biggest anime piracy site, Aniwatch, has recently rebranded itself following a huge rise in infamy.

The popular site “Aniwatch” has changed its domain name to “HiAnime” this week. Users attempting to access Aniwatch received the message: “Aniwatch is being rebranded to HiAnime. You will be redirected to the new HiAnime website in 10 seconds. Or you can also click here to go to HiAnime now.” According to Similarweb, “Aniwatch” is the #1 most accessed anime piracy site worldwide with 136.2 million visitors in January 2024. It’s also 16th overall in the “Streaming and Online TV” category. Aniwatch does not provide an official explanation for the rebranding.

A new report by Torrent Freak adds that a recent ‘dynamic+’ site blocking order in India may have motivated this. This refers to a court-ordered instruction to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block access to a website, with the theory proving especially likely given that India is Aniwatch’s biggest user base…

(14) VIDEOS OF YESTERDAY. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Last night’s Saturday Night Live had several items that could be considered anything from genre adjacent to vaguely kind of sort of adjacent to genre adjacent. It depends on how you look at it. And how hard you squint.

This one is definitely horror. But not supernatural horror or anything else that’s really SF-adjacent. More like serial murderer horror. Although, the fantasy talking furniture, bookcases, etc. DO lend more credibility as genre related. I think it’s extremely well-made, considering they (presumably) had less than a week to put it together. “My Best Friend’s House”.

Oh, this one is absolutely solidly genre IMO. You just have to watch it all the way to the end to see why. “The Hotel Detective”.

[Thanks to Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Paul Weimer, Lise Andreasen, 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 Lis Carey.]

Pixel Scroll 5/1/24 Pak Up Your Pixels In An Old Scrith Bag And Smile, Smile, Smile

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(1) A SHAMELESS PLUG FOR “THE AI SONG,” A PARODY BY MY FRIEND (AND COLLEAGUE) PAUL SCHINDLER. [Item by Daniel Dern.] My friend, colleague, and former-boss — briefly (at Byte.com) — Paul Schindler, knowing that I’m a frequent File770 contributor/suggester (from my periodically alerting him to Terry Pratchett and other Scrolls/Items here) asked me to submit as a potential item his recent song parody:

“Inspired by a spate of recent news stories about Artificial Intelligence (including one about a fake Supreme Court decision), I have written (with Clark Smith), “The AI Song” (“P.S. A Column On Things: The AI Song”), including a YouTubing.”

I’m happy to do so, but thought Paul also deserves a (brief-for-me) introduction, particularly since it looks like this will be his first appearance in an Item in a Scroll (as, for the benefit of those coming here via Paul, and other newcomers), File770 posts, and enumerated entries, are irrespectively called):

Paul is (among other things) a (now-former) tech journalist. In terms of AI, Paul notes/recalls, “During the early 1970s, when Daniel and I were fellow undergrads—including working on the student newspapers–at MIT, I interviewed Marvin Minsky several times about AI. This was back when it took very large machines to implement very small models. I remember asking Minsky how many millions of rules it would take to make an AI as smart as a five-year-old.”

While editor of Byte.com, Paul worked with/“managed” the late Jerry Pournelle, notably regarding Jerry’s Chaos Manor column – and post-Byte.com, stayed friends with Jerry. (See Paul’s P.S. A Column On Things post, “My Pal Jerry”). (Note: Byte.com was where Paul was my boss — see my March 2001 “Dern Bids Farewell To Byte.com”).

Additionally, Byte.com-wise, Jerry was the regular, primary guest on the Byte.com Week In Review/Audio Review: The Worldʼs First Podcast, with Paul as the host. (I was involved in a few episodes.) Among other things, Jerry would tell some tales from his variegated past. (It looks like there’s a few episodes on the Internet Archive, per links in Paul’s post.)

More generally, Paul is an sf reader/watcher (among other stuff).  In “My Pal Jerry,” he says, “I read all the science fiction in my childhood branch library and subscribed to the Science Fiction Book Of The Month Club (my premium was The Foundation Trilogy.” Another data point: He cites Joe Haldeman’s The Hemingway Hoax in a footnote to one of his PSaCoTs: “An Open Memo To My Muse”.

(2) GOOD LUCK! When Nick Stathopoulos delivered this year’s Archibald Prize entry to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, they posted a snapshot on Facebook. The 10-time Ditmar Award winner won the prize in 2017.

Nick Stathopoulos holding his portrait of David Stratton.

(3) SMALL WONDERS #11. Issue 11 of Small Wonders, the magazine for science fiction and fantasy flash fiction and poetry, is now available on virtual newsstands here. Co-editors Cislyn Smith and Stephen Granade bring a mix of flash fiction and poetry from authors and poets who are familiar to SFF readers as well as those publishing their first-ever piece with them.

The Issue 11 Table of Contents and release dates on the Small Wonders website:

  • Cover Art:”Meywa Sowen” by M. A. Del Rosario
  • “Celestial Bodies” (fiction) by Mar Vincent (6 May)
  • “Music of the Seraphim” (poem) by Angel Leal (8 May)
  • “What You Sow” (fiction) by Holly Schofield (10 May)
  • “Eloīse” (fiction) by Albert Chu (13 May)
  • “Kannaki Contemplates” (poem) by Tehnuka (15 May)
  • “Up From Out of Clay” (fiction) by Eris Young (17 May)
  • “Unbending My Bones” (fiction) by Sierra Branham (20 May)
  • “Swan’s Song” (poem) by Colleen Anderson (22 May)
  • “The Stars That Fall” (fiction) by Samantha Murray (24 May)

Subscriptions are available at the magazine’s store the magazine’s store, Patreon, and Weightless Books.

(4) SOFT SF. If only reading social media was always this much fun: Premee Mohamed at Bluesky.

(5) AMAZING STORIES WANTS WHAT IT’S OWED. Steve Davidson is trying to get NBC to pay attention – and pay the money they’ve owed Amazing Stories since 2020. He’s asking anyone who’s willing to signal boost the statement he posted on Facebook.

This is VERY important and I would appreciate reader’s doing two things (if they agree and are comfortable doing so):

First – share this as far and wide as you can. You are granted permission to copy the original text, in its entirety and without alteration, in order to share it elsewhere.

Second – if you are a professional in the field and support this effort, I would like to hear from you personally via PM.

OK – here goes:

Last week I was informed by NBC representatives that I would have a communication from them regarding my missing payments on Tuesday (April 30) of this week.

That email was in response to a query I sent to them regarding this non-payment issue.

In the email, I stated that in the past, the only way(s) in which it seemed that I was able to get any action out of them was to go public with the issue.

Twice previously I had to engage in such actions in order to get breaches of the contract cured through renegotiation.

Major Hollywood personalities and production entities were embarrassed, upset and angered at the time by my accurate and truthful statements.

Tuesday has come and gone with nary a whisper.

I (and by extension, Amazing Stories) have been owed contractually negotiated fees since October of 2020.

Read that date carefully. Later this year, non-payment will have gone on for FOUR years.

While the funds owing are not great by Hollywood standards, they are great by Amazing Stories’ standards and affect its ability to pay authors and artists and others appropriate amounts. The absence of those funds has also negatively affected Amazing’s ability to promote and market its offerings as well.

I informed NBC representatives that if I did not hear back from them (with progress) when they had promised to do so, I would be launching a crowd funding campaign to see if we could raise the missing dollars elsewhere.

I also informed them that, out of necessity, that crowd funding effort would have to explain the entire history of my dealings with NBC (since 2015).

Not included in my email to NBC representatives was my additional intention to encourage NBC to voluntarily give up the rights I licensed to them.

When the contract was in breach (and NBC notified of termination – a notice that they also did not respond to until after I had gone public) I contacted several production studios with the idea of licensing them to do a show under that name.

Several responded in the affirmative, even to the point of discussing a production partnership, in which Amazing Stories would have production credit and direct creative input into the show (after I pitched them the idea that I would be seeking Science Fiction authors with script writing experience to create episodes, as well as to script existing classics of the genre), but that they could not move forward until the “legal encumbrances” had been settled.

The point being that, if free, the name could be used to (attempt) to produce a television show that would have great respect for the genre, would involve contemporary authors with proven story telling and script writing chops, would have ties to the magazine version and, obviously, the greater public footprint that a television show would bring.

(Some may be familiar with the radio shows Dimension X and X Minus 1, where episodes were based on short stories drawn from the magazines of the era. This is what we believe we could do with television.)

I will be forwarding a copy of this FB post to my contacts at NBC (again, who promised response by yesterday which was not forthcoming) and will begin putting together the crowd funding effort that I hope my friends and fellow fans here and elsewhere will support, either by contributing or helping to spread the word.

That effort will be seeking funds to support the legal action of terminating the licensing agreement.

Initial filings in pursuit of that goal are expected to cost approximately 15 to 20k. Some or all of those funds may be recoverable, depending upon a legal ruling.

AGAIN. It is important for this statement to gain wide distribution if it going to have the desired effect. The crowd funding campaign will include additional details and suggestions as to how folks can help advance this effort, but starting here on FB will give it a boost.

Thank you.

“I can’t be ignored. I won’t be ghosted. I can no longer be bargained with. I feel no remorse or fear. And I absolutely will not stop, ever, until this matter is settled to my satisfaction!”

(6) TENTACULUM #4 IS A FREE DOWNLOAD. The special Weird West issue of The Tentaculum is now available for all to download for free.

Featuring short fiction from Cedrick May, Arthur H. Manners, Sasha Brown, and Avra Margariti. This issue also includes nonfiction from Cedrick May and returning contributor Bobby Derie.

Edited by Cameron Howard and designed by Braulio Tellez. Cover and story illustrations by Tristan Tolhurst.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born May 1, 1946 — Joanna Lumley, 78. Quick, tell me who appeared as a member of The Avengers, the real Avengers who have class, not the comic ones, was in a Bond film, and was Doctor Who as well. Now that would be the woman with the full name of Dame Joanna Lamond Lumley. 

Her first genre role was a very minor one as it was essentially in the background as an English girl as she would be credited in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

 I certainly don’t remember her there but I confess I’ve only seen it once I think. 

Joanna Lumley in 2015.

(She’ll have a very minor role in the horror film Tam-Lin shock will get repackaged as The Ballad of Tam-Lin, The Devil’s Widow and The Devil’s Woman as well. I doubt it bears but the faintest resemblance to the actual ballad. 

Her first significant genre role was on The New Avengers as Purdey, a former Royal Ballet member who said her high kicks were from her training there (a dubious claim). (And yes, Patrick Macnee was back as Steed.) Along with Mike Gambit as played by Gareth Hunt who had appeared in the Doctor Who’s “Planet of the Spiders”, that was the team on the New Avengers. 

It lasted but two seasons and twenty-six episodes. Yes, I loved it. The chemistry between the three of them was excellent, perhaps better than it had been Steed and some of his solo partners. 

Her second genre role was in Sapphire & Steel. She played Sapphire and David McCallum was Steel. It was considered a supernatural series. I’ve not seen it though I should watch it on YouTube as it legally up there courtesy of Shout Factory which is the company that now has the distribution license for it, so you see the first episode here.

She’s appeared in two Pink Panther films, Trail of the Pink Panther as Marie Jouvet and Curse of the Pink Panther       as Countess Chandra. I’m amazed how many of those films there have been! 

She voiced Aunt Spiker in James and the Giant Peach. Likewise, she’s Madame Everglot in Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride.

Finally, she played Doctor Who in The Curse of Fatal Death, a Doctor Who special made for the 1999 Red Nose Day charity telethon. It was Stephen Moffat’s first Who script. She was simply The Female Doctor.  I’d like to link to the copies on YouTube but I’m absolutely sure they’re all bootlegs so please don’t offer up links to them.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) HE-MAN HAS APPOINTMENT WITH THE BIG SCREEN. “’Masters of the Universe’ Finally Hitting Theaters Summer 2026” reveals Deadline. We predict Cora Buhlert will buy a ticket to see it!

The power of Greyskull is happening on June 5, 2026 when Amazon MGM Studios’ and Mattel Films’ finally bring their live-action reboot of Masters of the Universe to theaters.

As Deadline first told you, Bumblebee filmmaker Travis Knight is directing off Chris Butler’s screenplay (the initial draft written by David Callaham, and Aaron and Adam Nee). Mattel Films’ Robbie Brenner, and Escape Artists’ Todd Black, Jason Blumenthal, and Steve Tisch are producing.

The movie follows ten-year-old Prince Adam who crashed to Earth in a spaceship and was separated from his magical Power Sword—the only link to his home on Eternia. After tracking it down almost two decades later, Prince Adam is whisked back across space to defend his home planet against the evil forces of Skeletor. But to defeat such a powerful villain, Prince Adam will first need to uncover the mysteries of his past and become He-Man: the most powerful man in the Universe….

(10) CALL HER AGENT. Inverse is listening as “5 Years Later, Billie Lourd Pitches the Star Wars Spinoff We Need Right Now”.

…Lourd first appeared as Resistance Lieutenant Kaydel Ko Connix in The Force Awakens, and has only become more involved in the franchise since. Following Fisher’s passing in 2017, Lourd has become the “keeper” of Princess Leia, standing in for a younger version of the character in a Rise of Skywalker flashback. Returning to that galaxy far away has been a “difficult” experience for Lourd, but nowadays, the actress is keen to reprise her role as Connix.

“I would do anything to come back to any Star Wars franchise. I am absolutely available,” Lourd tells Inverse. “Getting to play Connix was such a gift, and to get to do it again would just be insane.”…

(11) THREE-BODY SCIENCE. [Item by Steven French.] “The science of 3 Body Problem: what’s fact and what’s fiction?” “Nature spoke to the sci-fi program’s adviser and two other researchers about the portrayal of PhD scientists and their technologies.”

…An alien civilization spying on humans using quantum entanglement. A planet chaotically orbiting three stars. Nanofibres capable of slicing through Earth’s hardest substance, diamond. Despite being chock-full of hardcore science, 3 Body Problem, a television series released on 21 March by the streaming service Netflix, has been a hit with audiences. So far, it has spent five weeks straight in Netflix’s list of the top-three programs viewed globally.

The story follows five young scientists who studied together at the University of Oxford, UK, as they grapple with mysterious deaths, particle-physics gone awry and aliens called the San-Ti who have their sights set on Earth. But how much of the science in the sci-fi epic, based on the award-winning book trilogy Remembrance of Earth’s Past by the Chinese writer Cixin Liu, reflects reality, and how much is wishful thinking? To find out, Nature spoke to three real-world scientists.…

(12) NOT ONLY IN WASHINGTON. “Is Alien Abduction Insurance a Thing in Washington State?” asks KPQ.

…Before we get into Washington’s take on the subject, it’s worth mentioning that this peculiar form of insurance coverage is associated with the Saint Lawrence Agency in Altamonte Springs, Florida.

Founded in 1987, this agency is famous for being the pioneering provider of alien abduction insurance policies. Over the years, the agency has made headlines and garnered both support and skepticism for its alien abduction policy.

The Saint Lawrence Agency reports to have sold thousands of these policies worldwide.

The policy costs $19.99 and pays out 10 million dollars if you get abducted. It’s important to note that, you’ll need an alien signature to verify your claims….

Newsweek read the fine print.

…The alien abduction scheme says it provides $10 million compensation in the event the policyholder is beamed up. It covers medical issues (all outpatient psychiatric care), sarcasm coverage (immediate family members only) and double indemnity coverage to the sum of $20 million in the event aliens insist on conjugal visits or the extraterrestrial encounter results in offspring.

St. Lawrence told WFLA last month his business has sold upwards of 6,000 policies since 1987. He says there have been two claims since the company formation—and only one big payout. The catch is in the fine print: cash is paid in installments of $1 per year for 10 million years….

(13) CALLS X-FILES SCENE “CRINGEY”. File 770 readers may be interested in this thumbnail self-retrospective of Gillian Anderson’s career produced by Vanity Fair. Of particular interest, of course, will be the first segment discussing The X-Files. But one of her other roles covered (as the psychiatrist in Hannibal) is at least genre adjacent. “Gillian Anderson Rewatches The X-Files, Sex Education, Scoop & More”.

(14) SHELL GAMES. Here is a cute stop motion video featuring a crossover of Masters of the Universe and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Cora Buhlert, Stephen Granade, Teddy Harvia, Kathy Sullivan, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]

Pixel Scroll 3/16/24 And The Riverbank Scrolls Of The Pixels Of March

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(1) SEE SAMATAR’S EPIC LECTURE. Sofia Samatar will deliver the 2024 Richard W. Gunn Memorial Lecture on Monday, March 18, at 4:00 p.m Central. The lecture is virtual and you can register here. She will be speaking on the relationship between epic poetry and fantasy:

What is the relationship between ancient epic poetry and the contemporary genre known as epic fantasy? This talk offers five answers to that question, from the perspective of a speculative fiction writer. Sofia Samatar is the author of six books, including the memoir The White Mosque, a PEN/Jean Stein Award finalist. Her works range from the award-winning epic fantasy A Stranger in Olondria to Tone, a collaborative study of literary tone with Kate Zambreno.

(2) THE FIRST GREEN HILLS. Bobby Derie filled in a previously unsuspected gaping hole in my knowledge of sff history with “Quest for the Green Hills of Earth (1995) by Ned Brooks” at Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein. Originally I was just checking to see if he was talking about the Ned Brooks I knew – he was. Then – bang! – I discovered that C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner are at the root of a famous verse tradition.

…Who wrote this bit [in “Quest of the Starstone”]? Moore was the poet of the pair, but Kuttner was no slouch, and the title itself is a callback to two previous tales. In “Shambleau” Moore wrote: “[…] he hummed The Green Hills of Earth to himself in a surprisingly good baritone”; and in “The Cold Gray God” (1935):

“No one sang Starless Night any more, and it was the Earth-born Rose Robertson’s voice which rang through the solar system in lilting praise of The Green Hills of Earth.”

That could be the kind of detail that a good pasticheur like Kuttner would pick up and expand upon. Yet it wouldn’t be surprising if they both had a hand in the final version of this scene….

…However, Sam Moskowitz claims:

“When Robert Heinlein read the story, he never forgot the phrase which became the title of one of his most famous short stories and of a collection, The Green Hills of Earth.” — Sam Moskowitz, Seekers of Tomorrow (1967), 312

“The Green Hills of Earth” ran in The Saturday Evening Post for 8 Feb 1947, and provided the title for Heinlein’s 1951 collection of science fiction. Heinlein did not reiterate Moore & Kuttner’s verses, but came up with his own—and attributed it to an author, the blind poet Rhysling….

Ned Brooks later produced a chapbook based on these works:

…This is where Quest of the Green Hills of Earth (1995) comes in. Edited by Ned Brooks and illustrated by Alan Hunter, this is the kind of standalone chapbook that is a hallmark of science fiction and fantasy fandom. It reprints “Quest of the Starstone” in its entirety, Heinlein’s verses from “The Green Hills of Earth,” and three fan-made versions—one by Chuck Rein, George Heap, “and other fans of the 1960s”; one by Don Markstein (“late 60s”), and one by Steve Sneyd (Oct 1992)….

(3) SPIRITED GIVING 2024. Spirited Giving, a horror-themed fundraiser serving as the official kickoff to StokerCon 2024, takes place May 29, 2024 beginning at 3:00 p.m. in the San Diego Central Library. Full details at the link.  

It’s a night of author readings, live performances, meet and greets, and book signings, all while raising funds for the San Diego Library Foundation, particularly the Books Unbanned Initiative.

The event will feature readings from: Clay McLeod Chapman, Jamie Flanagan, Ai Jiang, Vincent V. Cava, Danger Slater, and Bridget D. Brave. And a special one-hour live performance by YouTube Horror Narrator Mr. Creepypasta.

To attend the event, get Spirited Giving Tickets at Eventbrite.

(4) IF NOT NEWS TO YOU, IT WILL BE NEWS TO SOMEONE. At Literary Hub Debbie Berne makes her case — “Not Just Covers, But Every Page: Why Writers Should Talk About Book Design Early On”.

… Interior design is both micro and macro. It involves technical prowess and creativity. There is line-by-line typesetting and there is translation of vibe.

Take, for instance, chapter openers. Most books are divided into chapters and an author has decided if they each have chapter titles or just numbers, or both, or neither, or additional info like a subtitle or time stamp or narrator name or geographic locator or setting-up-an-idea pull quote.

The designer, then, must figure out how to make those pieces of text—many or few—look nice and clear on the page and put forward an aesthetic, bringing visual voice to the writing voice. Which font? How big? How bold? Italic? Centered or no? In a single line, neatly stacked, cascading? Each decision is literal and expressive….

(5) HOW MUCH WAS C-3PO’S HEAD WORTH? Read the answer reported in Friday’s Birmingham (UK) Mail.

(6) SPRINGTIME FOR WONKA. Everyone is going to make money off this disaster except the people who perpetrated it. (Would you have it any other way?) “Viral Willy Wonka Glasgow event to be turned into musical” at BBC.

A new musical satire based on a Glasgow Willy Wonka experience that went viral is in the works.

The show’s lead producer, Richard Kraft, has assembled a team of writers and producers for the project titled Willy Fest: A Musical Parody.

The event in February gained notoriety after angry families, who paid up to £35 to attend, demanded their money back.

Kraft says he hopes people watching the show “won’t be left in tears.”

The creative team working on the musical includes Emmy-nominated actor and comedian Riki Lindhome who tweeted, “I’m so excited,” along with screenshots of an article.

Others attached to the project include Broadway songwriters Alan Zachary and Michael Weiner.

Kraft is known for producing and directing a Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory concert at the famed Hollywood Bowl.

He told the BBC it was his idea to turn the Glasgow event into a musical and that the writing team was “assembled in less time than it takes for someone to sing the first verse of ‘Oompa Loompa Doompa-Dee-Do’.”

He hopes to launch the musical later this year….

…Asked why the Glasgow event might be ripe for the musical theatre treatment, Kraft said: “It is about desperate dreamers who actually have fragments of a great idea, just executed beyond their budget and abilities.”

He said he loved shows “about big-hearted flim-flam artists in musicals like The Music Man, The Greatest Showman, and The Producers. At the core they are romantics who get in over their heads.”…

(7) THREE-BODY, BUT NOT JUST ONE PROBLEM. “’3 Body Problem:’ How Netflix’s new sci-fi saga employs the legendary Wow! signal” – Space.com is sure you’ll want to know.

The Wow! signal is one of the great astronomy puzzles of the past 50 years, but it’s not so mysterious in the sci-fi universe of “3 Body Problem.”

Netflix’s new eight-episode alien invasion saga “3 Body Problem” uses the famous SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) signal as a prominent plot device in its wild centuries-spanning narrative.

The Wow! signal was an intense narrowband radio signal detected on the night of Aug. 15, 1977 by Ohio State University’s Big Ear Radio Observatory and the North American Astrophysical Observatory (NAAPO) during a standard SETI search. No personnel were on duty at the time, yet the strong 72-second-long signal was recorded by a computer printer….

Beware spoiler:

… “3 Body Problem,” which drops on March 21, puts its own spin on the signal. In the series, Wow! is a real message from intelligent aliens beyond Earth. A Chinese astrophysicist responds to the translated signal by inviting the aliens to visit Earth — to humanity’s detriment, as we later learn….

(8) SIGNING TIME. John King Tarpinian has the Glendale Civic Auditorium all prepared to welcome tomorrow’s influx of dealers to the 2024 LA Vintage Paperback Collectors Show & Sale.

(9) JON STOPA (1935-2024). Longtime Chicagoland fan Jon Stopa died March 4 at the age of 88. See the family obituary in the Kenosha News at the link. (The family obituary spells his first name “John”. In the sff field he was known as “Jon” except for the few instances when he used “John” in the credits for his book cover art for Advent:Publishers).

Jon Stopa

Fancyclopedia 3’s article about Jon records that he made his first sf short story sale to Astounding at age 22, “The First Inch” published in 1957, followed by two more appearances in Campbell’s magazine in 1958. Jon’s fourth and last fiction credit was in 1973 with “Kiddy-Lib” in Eros in Orbit.

He co-founded Advent:Publishers in 1955 with Earl Kemp, Robert Briney, Sidney Coleman, James O’Meara, George Price, and Ed Wood. The company produced nonfiction books about the sf field, the first of which was Damon Knight’s essay collection In Search of Wonder (1956).

A Jon Stopa-designed Advent book cover.

Stopa met Joni Cornell at the 1960 Worldcon (Pittcon). They married in 1962 and lived at Wilmot Mountain, Stopa’s family ski resort in Wilmot, WI, where they began hosting Wilcon, a three-day long invitation-only relaxacon.

Jon appears as a bartender in the video Faans (1983) (around the 18:50 mark) in a scene shot at the lodge at Wilmot Mountain.

Throughout the 1960s, the Stopas entered and won many convention masquerades. In the early 1970s, the couple helped found the conrunning group ISFiC.

The Stopas were Fan GoHs at Chicon V, the 1991 Worldcon.

Jon’s survivors include his grandson, Keanen (Kim) Burns; sister, Diane Reese; great-granddaughter, Kinsley Burns; and nieces: Tiffany and Amanda Stopa. Along with his parents and wife; John was preceded in death by his daughter, Deb Burns; and brothers: Walter Jr. and Conrad (Karen) Stopa.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born March 16, 1920 — Leo McKern. (Died 2002.) Pop culture is wonderful, isn’t it? And Leo McKern was definitely part of it. 

The Prisoner where he was Number Two in three of the seventeen episodes is definitely his best remembered SF role. He played that role more than any of the other seventeen credited actors. That is if you consider The Prisoner to even be SF and not merely a spy series gone very weird. Just tossing that idea out here.

Leo McKern as Number Two in The Prisoner.

Next up is The Adventures of Robin Hood where he was Sir Roger DeLisle, usurper of the Locksley manor and lands, and Herbert of Doncaster, a corrupt moneylender. It was an early Fifties series and his of earliest acting roles. 

Sliding on later in his career is one of my favorite roles by him, Horace Rumpole, a London barrister on Rumpole of the Bailey. He was a great  character to watch, the cases were interesting and the supporting cast was well thought out.

Slipping on over to his radio work, he was the voice of Captain Haddock in the 1992 and 1993 BBC Radio Hergé’s The Adventures of Tintin.

He was “Mac” MacGill in X the Unknown, a Fifties horror SF film from Hanmer Productions; and he’s got a lead role as Bill McGuire in The Day the Earth Caught Fire, an end of the world Sixties film.

The final role I want to mention is in The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother where he gets to be Professor Moriarty. I’m almost certain that I’ve seen it. 

(11) COMICS SECTION.

And we’re overdue to catch up with Tom Gauld!

(12) STAND AND DELIVER. [Item by Steven French.] Sally Wainwright is a national treasure over here in the U.K. so her writing a new fantasy show set in the 18th century (featuring Louisa Harland formerly of Derry Girls as a gender fluid highwaywoman with superpowers!) is a Big Deal: “’I never dreamed I’d get this role!’: Derry Girl Louisa Harland on Sally Wainwright’s thrilling new heroine” in the Guardian.

When Louisa Harland was cast as the lead in the new Sally Wainwright drama, Renegade Nell, the director told her: “Nell needs to be one of those characters, even when she’s on the screen so much, you still want the audience to miss her when she’s not.” It’s quite an ask: Nell is a massive Doctor Who of a role, swashbuckling, always with a new accent or cool pyrotechnics or punch in the face, and Harland fills the screen every second she’s on it. Somehow, though, you do miss her when she isn’t. Meeting the 31-year-old in central London, I can see exactly why she was chosen for Nell, even though almost the first thing she says is “I never in my wildest dreams thought I would get this role. My parents still think it is so random.”

Renegade Nell is a rebel and a chancer, an 18th-century tomboy in a constant life-or-death scenario of some other bugger’s making. The year is 1705, and she’s just lost her husband in a battle that has left her both widowed and superhuman, but only sometimes. The show has a lush period feel and is a closely observed love affair with the British countryside (Harland describes the incredibly precise location scouts combing through forests searching for trees that would have been mature by 1705), but it is powered by mischief – fight scenes, disguises, magic monsters and highway robbery after highway robbery….

(13) JAPANIMATION’S SUICIDE SQUAD. Animation Magazine introduces Warner Bros. Japan LLC’s updated trailer featuring the anime-styled anti-heroes of Suicide Squad ISEKAI.

Synopsis:  In the crime-ridden Gotham city, Amanda Waller, the head of A.R.G.U.S., has assembled a group of notorious criminals for a mission: Harley Quinn, Deadshot, Peacemaker, Clayface and King Shark. These DC Super-Villains are sent into an otherworldly realm that’s connected to this world through a gate. It’s a world of swords and magic where orcs rampage and dragons rule the skies — an “ISEKAI!”

Harley and others go on a rampage after arriving in ISEKAI but are captured by the Kingdom’s soldiers and sent to prison. They only have 72 hours before the bomb on their neck explodes.

The deadline is fast approaching. After negotiations with Queen Aldora, the condition for liberation was the conquest of the hostile Imperial army. They have no choice but to throw themselves head-first into the front line of battle.

They run; they die. They lose; they die. With their lives on the line, can Harley Quinn and The Suicide Squad survive in ISEKAI? Brace yourselves for the pulse-pounding saga of the elite task force known as the “Suicide Squad” as they embark on a jaw-dropping adventure! Let the party begin!

(14) THE HOBBIT DIET EXPLAINED SCIENTIFICALLY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Filers may have noted “(10) NO MICHELIN STARS FOR MORDOR.  CBR.com chronicles ‘Every Meal Hobbits Eat In Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings’” in “Pixel Would Like A Word With Engineering”. It strikes me that there is a very logical, biological reason for Hobbits requiring more meals than us, larger, humans!

It centres on the fact that scale is size specific: a cube does not have the same spatial properties at any scale – its surface area to volume ration is scale specific. For example, to depart slightly from a simple cube, a single cube might have a volume of one unit and a surface area of six square units: a cube has six sides. However, a cube of volume of two cubic unites only has a surface area of ten square units. (You can easily create a volume of two cubic units by joining two one-cubic-volume cubes together and in the process cover two, one cubic square sides leaving just ten cubic squares as the surface area.)

What this all means is that smaller creatures have proportionally more surface area from which to lose heat.

Hobbits are smaller than humans and so must lose more heat assuming they have the same blood temperature. Proportionally losing more heat means that they must consume proportionally more food, hence require more meals.

Jus’ sayin’.

Second breakfast anyone?

(15) POOR LITTLE MERCURY! Space.com says “Mercury slammed by gargantuan eruption from the sun’s hidden far side, possibly triggering ‘X-ray auroras’”.

A gigantic, fiery eruption around 40 times wider than Earth recently exploded from the sun’s hidden far side. The eruption hurled a massive cloud of plasma into space that later smashed into Mercury, scouring the planet’s rocky surface and potentially triggering “X-ray auroras” on the unprotected world.

The eruption was likely triggered by a powerful solar flare, which occurred around 7 p.m. ET on March 9, Spaceweather.com reported. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) spotted a large, partially obscured plasma filament exploding outward from behind the sun’s northeast limb. Based on the amount of visible plasma, the eruption likely spanned around 310,000 miles (500,000 kilometers) across.

SDO data showed that the explosion, which likely left behind a massive “canyon of fire” on the sun’s surface, also released a large coronal mass ejection (CME) — a fast-moving cloud of magnetized plasma and radiation — that collided with Mercury on March 10.

Mercury is often blasted with CMEs due to its proximity to our home star. The small planet has no atmosphere left as a result of this bombardment and is fully exposed to the full force of these solar storms. …

(16) HOT TIMES CLOSER TO HOME. “The Staggering Ecological Impacts of Computation and the Cloud” at The MIT Press Reader. “Anthropologist Steven Gonzalez Monserrate draws on five years of research and ethnographic fieldwork in server farms to illustrate some of the diverse environmental impacts of data storage.” (A full version of this article, as well as a bibliography, can be accessed here.)

…The molecular frictions of digital industry, as this example shows, proliferate as unruly heat. The flotsam and jetsam of our digital queries and transactions, the flurry of electrons flitting about, warm the medium of air. Heat is the waste product of computation, and if left unchecked, it becomes a foil to the workings of digital civilization. Heat must therefore be relentlessly abated to keep the engine of the digital thrumming in a constant state, 24 hours a day, every day.

To quell this thermodynamic threat, data centers overwhelmingly rely on air conditioning, a mechanical process that refrigerates the gaseous medium of air, so that it can displace or lift perilous heat away from computers. Today, power-hungry computer room air conditioners (CRACs) or computer room air handlers (CRAHs) are staples of even the most advanced data centers. In North America, most data centers draw power from “dirty” electricity grids, especially in Virginia’s “data center alley,” the site of 70 percent of the world’s internet traffic in 2019. To cool, the Cloud burns carbon, what Jeffrey Moro calls an “elemental irony.” In most data centers today, cooling accounts for greater than 40 percent of electricity usage….

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Physicist Matt O’Dowd at PBS Space Time this week takes a dive into a decidedly SFnal trope, that of the possible need to hide humanity from aliens as they themselves may be doing so?

Dark Forest: Should We NOT Contact Aliens?

In 1974 we sent the Arecibo radio message towards Messier 13, a globular cluster near the edge of the Milky Way, made up of a few hundred thousand stars. The message was mostly symbolic; we weren’t really expecting a reply. Yet surely other civilisations out there are doing the same thing. So, why haven’t we heard anything? What if the silence from the stars is a hint that we shouldn’t be so outgoing? What if aliens are deliberately keeping quiet for fear that they might be destroyed?

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