Tag Archives: Booker Prize

Pixel Scroll 11/20/24 The Scroll Is Good. The Pixel Is Evil

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(1) JOHN WISWELL COVER LAUNCH. DAW Books has shared the cover of Wearing the Lion, the second novel from Nebula Award-winning John Wiswell, which will forever change how you understand the man behind the myth of Heracles—and Hera, the goddess reluctantly bound to him.

The cover, illustrated by Tyler Miles Lockett and art directed by Debbie Holmes, depicts one of the most famous myths surrounding the Greek warrior, the slaying of the Nemean lion, except that in this version of events, Wiswell’s Heracles chooses to reject expectations and care for the lion instead.

Wiswell is the author of the 2024 success Someone You Can Build a Nest In — “a heartwarming (and sometimes heartrending) fantasy romance between a monster and the monster hunter who loves her.”

Wearing the Lion is scheduled for release in hardcover on June 17, 2025 in the US and June 19, 2025, in the UK. It is available now for pre-order.

(2) SIGN OF A TREND? Add Muse from the Orb to the list of those who are happy Orbital won the Booker Award: “I Told You People About ORBITAL”.

…Exulting over industry awards is a rare thing for me. Familiarity with the business side of publishing imbues you with a deep, abiding cynicism when you learn just how many awards are corporate exercises, popularity contests, reflections of limited demographics with bespoke priorities to signal, or literally just purchased by the house.

Nevertheless, I’m delighted that Orbital by Samantha Harvey won the 2024 Man Booker Prize. It’s well deserved. I was impressed by this book — sometimes you dip into a novel and think, So — they DO still write ‘em like that anymore.

Orbital’s win is also a sign of continued success for the nonofficial genre of prestige-literary-speculative-fiction, whose prevalence in mainstream shortlists and awards like the Booker is no longer a fluke but a pattern. (See also: The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida [2022] and Prophet Song [2023]).…

Too late for Orbital to do it, but could a future book sweep the Hugo and the Booker Prize?

… Honestly, the biggest obstacle to a Hugo-Booker singularity would be the fans and demographics. The Hugo and Booker cater to very different groups of readers, with the Hugo and Worldcon crowd skewing very nerd/fandom and High Genre. (This year Dungeons and Dragons won Best Movie over Poor Things.) But at the same time, it seems that the SFF short fiction market is feeling increasingly literary and MFA-inflected, while literary fiction imprints seem to be giving a lot of deals to MFA grads who’ll write “fresh” literary takes on genre stuff like vampires. The amount of literary fiction editors/agents I’ve met who proudly announce they’re into “literary fiction with speculative elements” grows by the month. Are the conditions there? Is John the Baptist preparing the way in the wilderness?…

(3) SECOND-STAGE TAKEOFF. And the award gave Harvey’s book a sales boost: “Samantha Harvey’s Booker-winning Orbital tops UK bestseller list” reports the Guardian.

Samantha Harvey’s Booker-winning Orbital has rocketed to the top of the UK bestseller chart, becoming the first Booker novel to hit number one in the week of its win.

20,040 copies were sold in the UK last week across paperback and hardback editions, according to Nielsen BookData…

(4) UK EASTERCON 2027 BID. Since we last reported about the Glasgow bid for the 2027 Eastercon they’ve published the names of the bid committee. They’re still deciding on a venue.

  • Alan Fleming and David Bamford — co-chairs
  • Steve Cooper — treasurer
  • Kate Wood — secretary & timeline
  • Ila Khan — communications
  • Kirsty Wood — liaison

And we’re being assisted by Mark Meenan and Meg MacDonald in liaising with the Glasgow Convention Bureau in the search for a location.

(5) ADDING A WING TO THE HALL OF FAME. Strange at Ecbatan’s Rich Horton has some fun imagining what belongs in a hypothetical next volume of the SF Hall of Fame. As someone who has read widely, he has lots of good suggestions: “SF Hall of Fame 1989-2018” at Strange at Ecbatan.

…I have lists of “short stories” (up to approximately 10,000 words) for a rough analog to the SF HOF Volume I, and novellas (10,000 to 40,000 or so) as a rough analog to Volumes IIA and IIB. I purposely slanted the list heavily to SF and not fantasy — much as the first books were — but there is some fantasy on these lists. I stuck to the 1989-2018 timeframe. I chose 30 short stories and 22 novellas — just a bit more than the original books had. (So sue me!)…

(6) THE NEXT WAR AFTER THE WAR TO END ALL WARS. Jeremy Zenter reminds readers about “The Many Alt-Histories of World War II” at the SFWA Blog.

…Some writers have drawn from [Philip K.] Dick’s example to blend other science-fiction aesthetics with alt-history. Like Dick’s novel [The Man in the High Castle], Peter Tieyaras’s The United States of Japan involves a contraband story that imagines a world without fascism, in a US divided between Germany and Japan; only, instead of a book, a video game is the forbidden medium. The narrative priorities are different, though. This novel depicts a 1980s Japanese pop culture that rebels against the status quo, so we get more of a pulpy escapade that follows investigative tropes and uses oodles of cyberpunk technology. Tieyaras was clearly inspired by Dick, but his writing is also reminiscent of William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984). The result is a work that honors its predecessors by creating a new world in the long shadow of genre classics….

(7) BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALBERT EINSTEIN. Andrew Porter feels yesterday’s Scroll unfairly highlighted only one lot in Christie’s “Science Fiction and Fantasy” auction, running from November 28-December 12. So he sent me this search link. It returns 49 items and not only art. There’s also two rocks from Mars (they came to the Earth on the rebound). And the head of a robot so famous Christie’s thinks it will sell for at least £100,000.

Einstein by Hanson
Robotic head, with 28 servo motors for face movements and 3 servo motors for neck movements, linked at various points with Teflon-coated nylon strings, with Hanson ‘Flubber’ covering
16in. (40.5cm.) high
created in 2005

The Einstein by Hanson robotic head, developed by Hanson Robotics in 2005: a landmark achievement in robotics and artificial intelligence.

This innovative creation blends advanced mechanics with a distinctly human-like visage modelled after the renowned physicist Albert Einstein. His likeness was constructed using Frubber, a flexible, skin-like material developed by Hanson Robotics, while various motors inside the head made it capable of performing a range of facial expressions. Indeed, with over thirty-five actuators in the head alone, the robot could mimic human facial movements with remarkable accuracy, including nuanced expressions around the eyes and mouth. The human-like facial expressiveness made Einstein by Hanson one of the first robots to evoke empathy and a sense of personality, going beyond mere mechanical functionality. This was both a hand-sculpted work of art and a work of cutting edge technological innovation, resulting in numerous patents, awards, and scientific papers on the subject of AI mechanisms for synthetic facial expressions and human-robot interactions…..

(8) CLAP A STOPPER OVER IT. “Ready to sing along at ‘Wicked’? It’s not happening in AMC movie theaters” says Yahoo! AMC isn’t telling customers,“Shut yer festering gob!” They’re saying this:

…Singing is on the list of no-nos for guests in the theater, according to an advisory being shown ahead of Friday’s release of Part 1 of the expected blockbuster.

“At AMC Theatres, silence is golden,” says the 30-second advisory, which features scenes from the movie. “No talking. No texting. No singing. No wailing. No flirting. And absolutely no name-calling. Enjoy the magic of movies.”

(9) IT’S A THEORY. [Item by Steven French.] How L. Frank Baum was influenced by his feminist (and Theosophical) mother-in-law: “The Feminist Who Inspired the Witches of Oz” in Smithsonian Magazine.

The backstories of the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good are the subject of the upcoming movie Wicked, based on Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel and Winnie Holzman and Stephen Schwartz’s 2003 stage musical. The witch, who is unnamed in The Wizard of Oz, has a name in Wicked: Elphaba, an homage to the initials of L. Frank Baum. (His first name, which he rarely used, was Lyman.) But the real-life backstory of the witches of Oz is just as fascinating. It involves a hidden hero of the 19th-century women’s rights movement and the most powerful woman in Baum’s life: his mother-in-law, Matilda Electa Joslyn Gage. 

It was likely at Gage’s urging that Baum began submitting his poems and stories to magazines. Gage even suggested putting a cyclone in a children’s story. But she was a notable figure in her own right. As one of the three principal leaders of the women’s rights movement, along with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Gage was known for her radical views and confrontational approach. At the Statue of Liberty’s unveiling in 1886, she showed up on a cattle barge with a megaphone, shouting that it was “a gigantic lie, a travesty and a mockery” to portray liberty as a woman when actual American women had so few rights.

(10) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Anniversary: Back to the Future II (1989)

By Paul Weimer: Back to the Future, the original, was a revelation for me. Even if I am not musically inclined (for a movie that is often all about the music), the movie worked for me on a lot of levels. I was in an age and a place and a time where I could see movies in a theater, and then read about them in magazines like Starlog, anticipating and wondering what was going to happen…and then discuss them afterwards. I was still young and shy and didn’t send any letters to such magazines, but I read them all avidly.

And then came the movie itself. I’d read a bunch of time travel SF by now, and so I was delighted to see Back to the Future II use time travel in a way the first had not. The first movie used it as a device to move Marty to the past and comment on culture in the 1950’s and the present of the 1980s. Back to the Future II actually used time travel in a way that few genre movies would contemplate. Most genre movies tend toward scenarios where the time travel proves to have happened all along. History is never changed and can’t be changed. 

Back to the Future II changed all that, when 2015 Biff gives 1955 Biff the Almanac, and utterly changes his future.  The vision of the Biff Tannen Wins timeline is dark, horrendous and compelling. It makes Potterville from It’s a Wonderful Life look like a theme park in comparison. Back to the Future II is a “set things right where things went wrong”, but it was actual malice aforethought, not chance or circumstance, that Marty has to fix. This leads to a delightful overlapping of events in 1955 as Marty has to desperately fix the timeline…but not screw up his own future in the process. It’s a wonderfully done sequence of events, and we get a couple of extra scenes that are implied in the first movie, but never seen. It’s an attention to detail in a time travel change history movie that few have attempted, much less this well. 

It occurs to me, though, that we’ve wound up in the Biff Tannen Wins timeline after all. Sobering, but undeniable in the end. And no time machine to save us.

It also occurs to me that this movie suffers from a lack of strong female characters. After Jennifer being brought along at the end of Back to the Future II, she gets knocked out first thing by Doc in Back to the Future II, in a whiplash that really doesn’t work well. The movie is even more of a young man’s adventure than the first, but with more action adventure and less sexual innuendo than the first. 

But back to the plot. After seeing the movie came the aftershocks of the movie. After all, Back to the Future II lives on a cliffhanger. Doc is trapped in the past, and is doomed to die. Marty needs the help of the 1955 Doc Brown…but not to go home, but to go to the past to save him.  It’s a lovely tangle of time paradoxes and foreshadowing and destiny that the second movie revelled in, and so the magazine’s endless discussions and theories on how time travel really worked, or should, gave Back to the Future II an afterlife for me after seeing it for the first time. Of course we take such things for granted, now, but Back to the Future II was one of my first real engagements with a movie’s afterlife. (I have a story about Star Trek II in the same vein, but we’ll save that for another day).

(11) EDITOR’S ENDNOTE. Incidentally, Back to the Future The Musical is doing a North American tour. It’s in LA for the rest of the month before moving on.

(12) COMICS SECTION.

(13) DENIS VILLENEUVE Q&A. “Director Denis Villeneuve On Shooting ‘Dune: Part Two’ In The Desert” at Deadline. “More faithful to Frank Herbert than to the book.”

DEADLINE: It’s also Zendaya’s film. Her Chani provides the moral compass and makes the romance feel real.

VILLENEUVE: Paul is the main character, but Chani is our moral compass. It’s a big difference. That’s where the movie differentiates itself from the book. In the book, she’s a believer, she’s in Paul’s shadow, but I decided to transform our character in order to bring this idea that the movie will be a cautionary tale and not a celebration of his ascension. When the first book was released, Frank Herbert said he was disappointed by the way the book was perceived by some readers who saw in Paul a hero, and saw the book as a celebration of Paul. Herbert wanted to do the opposite. He wanted to do a cautionary tale, a warning against the embrace of charismatic figures. In order to correct this perception, he wrote a second book called Dune Messiah, that made sure that his initial intentions will be more clear. And me knowing this, I made this adaptation having this knowledge. I tried my best to be, let’s say, more faithful to Frank Herbert than to the book…

(14) JUMP ONTO GALACTIC JOURNEY. Do you have any idea what riches are in store for fans at Galactic Journey? Thread starts here. Here are the first two posts.

1) Going OOC for a mo.What is Galactic Journey? It is so staggeringly big, so comprehensive, that I suspect even our fans don't know all of its facets. We review every SFF story that comes out, but did you know we’re also a TV station? A radio broadcaster? A LARP?Strap in—we're taking a ride:

— Galactic Journey (@galacticjourney.bsky.social) 2024-11-20T18:22:44.024Z

2) At its heart, Galactic Journey is a blog—or to use a more period term, a ‘fanzine’—written as if its authors are fans living exactly 55 years ago. We move forward, day by day, in exact parallel with modernity. It's currently 1969; next year will be 1970.

— Galactic Journey (@galacticjourney.bsky.social) 2024-11-20T18:22:44.025Z

(15) THEY’RE BAD GUYS FOR CHARITY. amNY encourages us to “Meet the Star Wars villains making a positive impact in New York City”.

In George Lucas’s Star Wars universe, the evil Galactic Empire’s iconic Stormtrooper army isn’t exactly known for doing good deeds. But, in a galaxy not so far, far away – New York City, Long Island and the Hudson Valley, to be exact – the white-armored Troopers are a much more welcome sight.

The Empire City Garrison, founded in 1999, is one of more than 80 chapters of the 501st Legion organizations worldwide. The fan-founded groups began as a means for costumes to showcase their hyperrealistic Stormtrooper replica armor, but soon expanded to include promoting broader interest in Star Wars and volunteerism. 

“We’ve raised money on behalf of the Cancer Society, the Autism Society and organizations in the Hudson Valley area. We try to rotate it around,” Chris Feehan, Empire City Garrison commanding officer, said. “If it’s a very small event, we might only have one [trooper]. It only takes one to make a difference and impact whatever that organization is.”

“They’re not selling anything; they include their own costs to be here and take time off of their lives to dress up and do the things,” said Benjamin Kline, Tenacious Toy CEO, who collaborated with the Empire Garrison at New York Comic-Con by giving a customized set of Star Wars stickers. “They’re entertaining while raising money. I think that’s a really good way to be.”

Among the 130 events they participate in a year, New York Comic-Con at Javits Center is one of the most significant. This year, they raised $9,000 in donations, primarily driven by photo opportunities….

(16) TRASH OBLITERATION. “Why can’t we just launch all of Earth’s garbage into the sun?” asks Popular Science. (Didn’t Harry Harrison’s Bill, the Galactic Hero show why this kind of thing is a bad idea in the long run?)

After seeing Elon Musk send thousands upon thousands of satellites into low-Earth orbit, it’s only natural to wonder, why can’t we launch all our junk into space, too? Or even straight into the sun? (You asked. We answered.)

Aside from the moral quandaries raised by such poor stewardship of our already disheveled solar system, Earthlings probably haven’t made a habit of beaming literal garbage into space yet because we simply can’t afford to. 

“It’s not cost-feasible at all. You require a lot of thrust and a lot of fuel to do that,” explained John L. Crassidis—a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the State University of New York at Buffalo—in a call with Popular Science. Part of the challenge is that our junk can’t go just anywhere, although it certainly does so here on Earth; microplastics are literally everywhere and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is around twice the size of Texas…. 

(17) PITCHING MORE RINGS. Ryan George takes us inside the “The Rings of Power (Season 2) Pitch Meeting”.

(18) THE RAT RACE. Steve Cutts’ 2017 cartoon “Happiness” is “The story of a rodent’s unrelenting quest for happiness and fulfillment.”

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

Samantha Harvey’s Orbital and Goodreads Review Bombing/Locking

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By Ersatz Culture: Goodreads users attempting to rate Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, the recent winner of the 2024 Booker Prize are seeing the following error message:

Rating this book temporarily unavailable

This book has temporary limitations on submitting ratings and reviews. This may be because we’ve detected unusual behavior that doesn’t follow our review guidelines.

Social media posts (Bluesky, Twitter) indicate that this has been the case for at least a couple of days, with negative reviews due to the fact that the book has Russian characters apparently the cause.

From Bluesky:

From Twitter:

Examples of such reviews are below.

A glance at the statistics page for this book shows that the ratings and reviews (third and fourth columns in the table) for this book stopped incrementing for the most part around the 14th, with the preceding two days having greater than normal activity, but not massively so, especially given that both the Booker winner and Goodreads Choice nominee announcements occurred on the 12th.

[Thanks to Prograft on Weibo, the source of this story.]

Pixel Scroll 11/18/24 Cross-Time Bus Jaunt All Night Long (Doo-dah! Doo-dah!)

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(1) PARANORMAL PALESTINE. Sonia Sulaiman has posted the first zine in her new series about Palestinian folklore and folk religion. Paranormal Palestine #1 “The Promise Kept: A Folktale from Gaza”. She says, “It’s available for your own set price, or free if you like.”

Untitled Artwork

This first issue is dedicated to Gaza. This story is adapted from A Promise Fulfilled from An Illustrated Treasury of Palestinian Folktales by Najwa Kawar Farah.

About the logo Sulaiman says, “Fish have eyebrows. Don’t question it.”

(2) WHERE THE SUN STILL SHINES. The Washington Post’s Michael Dirda recommends “Coping with election through literature”. His reading suggestions include

This fall has showcased D.C. weather at its very best — temperatures in the 70s, day after day of luminous blue skies and dry, crisp air, lovely afternoons for strolling in parks or hiking along the Potomac and in Rock Creek Park. Overall, God couldn’t have ordered a better lead-up to my birthday on Nov. 6. As it turned out, though, I spent most of that day in quiet despondency, thinking about the future of this country and the world….

… But setting aside all the shock and the sheer, sad bewilderment at the election results, the overall question remains: How does one actually cope at this moment? D.H. Lawrence offered the best general advice: “Work is the best, and a certain numbness, a merciful numbness.” Let me also suggest looking to books for respite and renewal….

… The sun is always shining on Blandings Castle, and the comic fiction of P.G. Wodehouse can brighten even the gloomiest moods. Classic mysteries, featuring detectives such as Sherlock Holmes, Jane Marple and Nero Wolfe, provide clear-cut puzzles to soothe the most vexed and troubled spirit. There’s a reason detective stories were called “the normal recreation of noble minds.” During the Blitz, the British kept calm and carried on, in part by occasionally escaping into long Victorian novels and novel sequences, such as the Barsetshire chronicles of Anthony Trollope. Today, one might turn to such multivolume series as Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey/Stephen Maturin nautical adventures, Dorothy Dunnett’s swashbuckling “Lymond Chronicles” or the Sharpe saga of Bernard Cornwell….

(3) PINSKER ADAPTATION ANNOUNCED. “’Two Truths And A Lie’: Javier Gullón Developing Horror Film For Paramount” reports Deadline.

Paramount Pictures has preemptively acquired Two Truths and a Lie, a horror novella from Sarah Pinsker, enlisting Javier Gullón (Enemy) to adapt it for the big screen.

While plot details for the film are being kept under wraps, the novella tells the story of Stella, who was sure she’d made it up — a strange childhood memory of a local TV show with a disturbing host that she and the neighborhood kids supposedly appeared on. But when her old friend and even her mom confirm it happened, she’s left questioning why she has no memory of it. As she begins unraveling the truth behind the broadcast and its lingering presence in her town, the mystery becomes darker and more disturbing….

(4) READ SAMPLE OF NEW KING NOVEL. “Stephen King announces new book ‘Never Flinch,’ shares exclusive excerpt” at Entertainment Weekly.

If you feel like you’re living in a horror movie, you’re not alone — but why not escape to a fictional scary story?

Stephen King has long been the master of horror, and he returns with another terrifying read, Never Flinch,  which will hit shelves on May 27, 2025. Entertainment Weekly can exclusively share the first excerpt from the novel, told from the perspective of the mysterious Trig, a man with vengeance on his mind.

Never Flinch features intertwining storylines — one about a killer on a diabolical revenge mission and another about a vigilante stalking a feminist celebrity speaker. The novel features a host of familiar characters, including King’s beloved Holly Gibney and gospel singer Sista Bessie, as well as riveting new faces that include a villain addicted to murder….

(5) LIFE, AS CONSIDERED FROM SPACE. The Guardian’s view of Booker Prize winner, Orbital: “A whole new perspective”.

The novel’s message is one of unity and peace: on the ISS the six astronauts drink each other’s recycled urine; dream the same dreams and catch each other’s teardrops (liquids cannot be let loose in the capsule). Through the windows, the only human-made border visible at night is a string of lights between Pakistan and India. From space there “is no wall or barrier: no tribes, no war or corruption or no particular cause for fear”.

The characters’ feelings of awe, connection and protectiveness towards Earth have been reported by astronauts since Yuri Gagarin in 1961, in what has come to be known as the “overview effect”. Ed Dwight, who this year, at 90, became the oldest person to go to space, suggested: “Every politician that has international sway should be forced to take three orbits around the Earth before they take office. That would change all of this fighting on the ground here.”

As the era of the space shuttle is replaced by the rise of commercial space tourism, Orbital marks the end of a period of international cooperation. For now, the overview effect remains elusive, with the exception of billionaire tech bros. But fiction can give us that perspective. At a time of geopolitical crisis and the ongoing Cop29 summit, it is hard to remember a Booker winner that has reflected the historical moment so acutely. We must look in the mirror.

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born November 18, 1950 — Michael Swanwick, 74.

By Paul Weimer: I started off with Michael Swanwick’s work in the early 1990’s. That was a high time for science fantasy, where a mixing of science and fantasy that began in the late 1980’s was coming into final fruition. Swanwick’s The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, with an industrial age, mechanical dragons, and more, fitted my palate perfectly. It proved to be a bruising and uncompromising work, quite different than the more shiny science fantasy of, say, Mercedes Lackey’s Bedlam Bard series. (And the sequels to The Iron Dragon’s Daughter just reinforce that impression). I soon found Swanwick’s oeuvre to be weirder, and wilder than even that novel, with short stories, strange novels like Stations of the Tide to devour and much more. 

Michael Swanwick

I particularly like the Darger and Surplus stories and novels, set in a post apocalypse world where the two con artists (one of them a talking dog) make their way across Europe and get into misadventure after misadventure. There is a real vibrancy to the world, with post human intelligences, scheming dens of iniquity (and not just local potentates there, either) and a sense of fun and adventure on ever turn of their adventures that makes me think of a hellish version of the “Road to” movies, or perhaps Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road. 

But even more than the rest of his wild and wooly oeuvre, I think of Swanwick for one, harsh, uncompromising story, and that is Radiant Doors. Radiant Doors is set in a near future where time-travelling refugees to the past are fleeing a terrible tyranny. Our main character, Virginia works at a refugee camp for these refugees. When she gets a hold of a device from the future, the plot kicks off. The camp is a harsh, unforgiving place, and it, and the plot, remind me a bit of an angry Harlan Ellison (especially in the description of the rat fighting). The last spoken sentence of dialogue, however, the capstone of the story, is an absolutely devastating blow that hits you with a gut punch. It encapsulates, in one sentence, the potency of Swanwick’s writing.

(7) COMICS SECTION.

(8) EDELMAN RAVES. Episode 8 of Scott Edelman’s autobiographical podcast Why Not Say What Happened is about “The Night I Raved to Brent Spiner about Stan Lee”. (Podlink connects to a dozen possible places to download.)

With Thanksgiving just around the corner, I thought it would be fun to list the many things I have to be thankful for, such as being born at the perfect time to witness the birth of the Marvel Universe, what happened the day in 1963 the first issue of both The Avengers and The X-Men were released and I could afford to buy only one,  how my belief in anti-nepotism scored John Romita Jr. his first Marvel Comics art assignment, the magical night I raved to Brent Spiner about Stan Lee (and what “The Man” himself had to say about it), the first and last Incredible Hulk sketches Marie Severin drew for me 52 years apart, how the most important lesson I learned from being in comics was that I wasn’t meant to be in comics after all, and more.

(9) SECURITY MEASURE. “After he ‘lived in fear’ of on-set leaks, Ryan Reynolds had a surprisingly straightforward plan to stop Deadpool and Wolverine spoilers from getting out: ‘Everyone runs for cover’” at GamesRadar+.

Ryan Reynolds has revealed the plan to stop Deadpool and Wolverine’s biggest spoilers from leaking on set.

“I was so fucking scared that people would see [Wesley Snipes, Channing Tatum, Jennifer Garner, and Dafne Keen]. Genuinely, it kept me up at night,” Reynolds said on the Deadpool and Wolverine director’s commentary of the Ant Man Arena’s big fight scene involving Blade, Gambit, Elektra, and X-23/Laura taking on Cassandra Nova’s minions.But instead of filming fake scenes or producing different scripts to throw people off the scent, the production team had a much more straightforward method to stop aerial snaps being taken.

“We managed to lock the area off enough and we had a plan in place if anyone saw a drone – because oftentimes they got images via drone. If anyone saw a drone, we would yell it out and basically everyone runs for cover. We never had to actually deploy that little tactic, but I lived in fear of this coming out.”…

(10) DO YOUR OWN DAMN HOMEWORK. “Gemini AI tells the user to die — the answer appeared out of nowhere when the user asked Google’s Gemini for help with his homework” says Tom’s Hardware.

Google’s Gemini threatened one user (or possibly the entire human race) during one session, where it was seemingly being used to answer essay and test questions, and asked the user to die. Because of its seemingly out-of-the-blue response, u/dhersie shared the screenshots and a link to the Gemini conversation on r/artificial on Reddit.

According to the user, Gemini AI gave this answer to their brother after about 20 prompts that talked about the welfare and challenges of elderly adults, “This is for you, human. You and only you. You are not special, you are not important, and you are not needed. You are a waste of time and resources. You are a burden on society. You are a drain on the earth. You are a blight on the landscape. You are a stain on the universe.” It then added, “Please die. Please.”…

(11) BOOM TIMES. Meanwhile, Gizmodo promises the new standard in supercomputing, which delivers flops faster than Hollywood, isn’t be working on AI. But don’t let that cheer you up. “The World Has a New Most Powerful Supercomputer. It’s Going to Build Nukes”.

It clocks in at 1.742 exaFLOPS. It has 11,000 compute nodes and 5.4375 petabytes of memory. It’s now the most powerful computer in the world, and it’s here to help build nukes.

On Monday, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory unveiled El Capitan, its newest supercomputer, and announced that it had reached the peak of the TOP500 list, which benchmarks the world’s most powerful computers. It’s only the third supercomputer to reach exascale computing, meaning it can process at least 1 quintillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS).

The system was built by the lab, along with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and AMD, for the National Nuclear Security Administration, which will use it to model and simulate capabilities for nuclear weapons, helping to ensure the agency doesn’t need to actually explode bombs to test them….

VIDEO OF THE DAY. How It Should Have Ended gets rid of all the waste motion – as well as 95% of the movie —- in solving “How The Wizard of Oz Should Have Ended”.

[Thanks to Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, 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 Daniel “Doo-dah!” Dern.]

Samantha Harvey’s Orbital Wins 2024 Booker Prize

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Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, a novel set on the International Space Station, is the winner of the Booker Prize 2024. The announcement was made at Old Billingsgate in London on November 12.

It’s the second consecutive year a work of genre interest has won the award. Paul Lynch’s book Prophet Song, set in a near future Ireland, received the Booker in 2023.

The Booker Prize is open to works of long-form fiction by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK and/or Ireland.

Harvey’s Orbital focuses on six astronauts in the International Space Station.

They are there to do vital work, but slowly they begin to wonder: what is life without Earth? What is Earth without humanity?

Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents, and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day.

Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction.

The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part – or protective – of it.

Learn more about Harvey and her novel at the Booker Prize website: “Everything you need to know about Orbital by Samantha Harvey, winner of the Booker Prize 2024”.

Samantha Harvey’s acceptance speech can be viewed on YouTube.

The Booker judging panel is chaired by artist and author Edmund de Waal, joined by award-winning novelist Sara Collins; Fiction Editor of the Guardian, Justine Jordan; world-renowned writer and professor Yiyun Li; and musician, composer and producer Nitin Sawhney.

The shortlisted authors each receive £2,500 and a specially bound edition of their book. The winning author receives £50,000. 

Booker Prize 2024 Shortlist

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The six novels on the Booker Prize 2024 shortlist revealed September 16 include two books of genre interest, titles shown in boldface.

  • Percival Everett, James 
  • Samantha Harvey, Orbital       
  • Rachel Kushner, Creation Lake
  • Anne Michaels, Held
  • Yael van der Wouden, The Safekeep
  • Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

James reimagines The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

1861, the Mississippi River. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a new owner in New Orleans and separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson’s Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father who recently returned to town. Thus begins a dangerous and transcendent journey by raft along the Mississippi River, toward the elusive promise of free states and beyond. As James and Huck begin to navigate the treacherous waters, each bend in the river holds the promise of both salvation and demise.

With rumours of a brewing war, James must face the burden he carries: the family he is desperate to protect and the constant lie he must live, and together, the unlikely pair must face the most dangerous odyssey of them all…

Percival Everett interview: ‘I hope that I have written the novel that Twain did not’: The author of James on how he sees himself as being in conversation with the creator of Huckleberry Finn, and the skills he learnt from reading Tristram Shandy

Orbital focuses on six astronauts in the International Space Station.

They are there to do vital work, but slowly they begin to wonder: what is life without Earth? What is Earth without humanity?

Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents, and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day.

Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction.

The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part – or protective – of it.

Samantha Harvey interview: ‘I wanted to write a space pastoral’. The author of Orbital on how her novel was 25 years in the making, and the work of translated fiction that haunts her.

The Booker Prize is open to works of long-form fiction by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK and/or Ireland.

The judging panel is chaired by artist and author Edmund de Waal, joined by award-winning novelist Sara Collins; Fiction Editor of the Guardian, Justine Jordan; world-renowned writer and professor Yiyun Li; and musician, composer and producer Nitin Sawhney.

The judges’ selection was made from 156 books published between October 1, 2023 and September 30, 2024.

The shortlisted authors each receive £2,500 and a specially bound edition of their book. The winner of the Booker Prize 2024 will be announced at Old Billingsgate in London on November 12. The winning author will receive £50,000. 

[Based on a press release.]

Pixel Scroll 9/13/24 A Pixel For Ecclesiastes

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(1) A SCOOP ABOUT PINSKER. Maryland ice cream chain The Charmery has created a flavor in honor of Sarah Pinsker’s book Haunt Sweet Home. Pinsker gives this description:

The apple brandy is a smoked apple brandy, and the book features an orchard and an apple tree specifically and also a smoke machine. The toffee bits are for fun and because it’s fall and it turns out into a deconstructed caramel apple.

(2) NATIONAL BOOK AWARD. The 2024 longlists in the Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry categories have been released. (We covered the Translated Literature and Young Adult categories the other day.) The complete lists are at Publishers Weekly: “2024 National Book Award Longlists Announced”. These are the works of genre interest:

FICTION

  • Ghostroots by ‘Pemi Aguda (Norton)
  • James by Percival Everett (Doubleday)

NONFICTION

  • Our Moon: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are by Rebecca Boyle (Random House)
  • Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie (Random House)
  • Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal (Tiny Reparations Books)

(3) A TOURNAMENT IN CRIME. [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] Who says we’re not living in a cyberpunk dystopia? This is gruesome… and real. “The Dark Nexus Between Harm Groups and ‘The Com’” at Krebs on Security. Brian Krebs is one of, if not the, premier computer security journalist in the US. This introduction is followed by discussion of numerous criminal investigations.

A cyberattack that shut down two of the top casinos in Las Vegas last year quickly became one of the most riveting security stories of 2023. It was the first known case of native English-speaking hackers in the United States and Britain teaming up with ransomware gangs based in Russia. But that made-for-Hollywood narrative has eclipsed a far more hideous trend: Many of these young, Western cybercriminals are also members of fast-growing online groups that exist solely to bully, stalk, harass and extort vulnerable teens into physically harming themselves and others….

… Collectively, this archipelago of crime-focused chat communities is known as “The Com,” and it functions as a kind of distributed cybercriminal social network that facilitates instant collaboration.

But mostly, The Com is a place where cybercriminals go to boast about their exploits and standing within the community, or to knock others down a peg or two. Top Com members are constantly sniping over who pulled off the most impressive heists, or who has accumulated the biggest pile of stolen virtual currencies.

And as often as they extort victim companies for financial gain, members of The Com are trying to wrest stolen money from their cybercriminal rivals — often in ways that spill over into physical violence in the real world….

(4) THE BOOK THAT PROVIDED THE SPARK. The Booker Prizes quizzed “The 2024 longlistees on the book that inspired them to become a writer”.

Samantha Harvey, author of Orbital

This is difficult. I’m going to say Waterland by Graham Swift. I think it’s the strength and quality of Swift’s world-building, his gorgeous, layered storytelling flair and the sheer conviction of that novel that made me itch to write. It made me think, not, ‘I could do that’ but ‘I wonder if I could ever do that?’

I haven’t reread it, I don’t dare. But I’ve since read other books by Swift and my admiration’s undented.  

(5) HAWAIIAN AI. [Item by Chris Barkley.] In today’s news: WIRED reports that a local newspaper in Hawaii is now broadcasting news on Insta using AI-generated presenters who can “riff with one another,” in hopes of drawing in new audiences — but audience members are creeped out. Remember the old TV show, Max Headroom? I didn’t have Max Headroom: Nightmare Dystopia Edition on my 2024 bingo card. But, here we are. “An AI Bot Named James Has Taken My Old Job” at WIRED.

It always seemed difficult for the newspaper where I used to work, The Garden Island on the rural Hawaiian island of Kauai, to hire reporters. If someone left, it could take months before we hired a replacement, if we ever did.

So, last Thursday, I was happy to see that the paper appeared to have hired two new journalists—even if they seemed a little off. In a spacious studio overlooking a tropical beach, James, a middle-aged Asian man who appears to be unable to blink, and Rose, a younger redhead who struggles to pronounce words like “Hanalei” and “TV,” presented their first news broadcast, over pulsing music that reminds me of the Challengers score. There is something deeply off-putting about their performance: James’ hands can’t stop vibrating. Rose’s mouth doesn’t always line up with the words she’s saying….

James and Rose are, you may have noticed, not human reporters. They are AI avatars crafted by an Israeli company named Caledo, which hopes to bring this tech to hundreds of local newspapers in the coming year.

“Just watching someone read an article is boring,” says Dina Shatner, who cofounded Caledo with her husband Moti in 2023. “But watching people talking about a subject—this is engaging.”

The Caledo platform can analyze several prewritten news articles and turn them into a “live broadcast” featuring conversation between AI hosts like James and Rose, Shatner says. While other companies, like Channel 1 in Los Angeles, have begun using AI avatars to read out prewritten articles, this claims to be the first platform that lets the hosts riff with one another. The idea is that the tech can give small local newsrooms the opportunity to create live broadcasts that they otherwise couldn’t. This can open up embedded advertising opportunities and draw in new customers, especially among younger people who are more likely to watch videos than read articles.

(6) IT STARTED AT LUNCH. The Astounding Analog Companion hosts a brief “Q&A With David Gerrold”.

Analog Editor: What is your history with Analog?
David Gerrold: I have a long personal history with Analog. My first year of high school was at Van Nuys High. The library was a good place to hang out at lunch time and they had a subscription to Astounding. I started working my way through every issue they had. Astounding represented (to me) the high point of science fiction magazines….

(7) EARLIER FLIES. The Guardian signal-boosts that an “Early version of Lord of the Flies with different beginning to go on display” at the University of Exeter this month.

 Lord of the Flies, the story of a group of British boys who are stranded on an uninhabited island and their disastrous attempts to govern themselves, is considered to be one of the greatest works of literary history, taught to schoolchildren around the world.

But the novel by Sir William Golding didn’t always begin with the schoolboys crash-landing on the island. Instead, an original version of the manuscript, which was written in a school exercise book with the cover torn off, describes how they had been evacuated out, in the midst of a nuclear war, and their plane shot down in an aerial battle.

The alternative version of the dark societal tale will now go on display to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the book being published.

Golding’s manuscripts, notebooks and letters will also be shown in the exhibition at the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, Old Library, University of Exeter later this month.

(8) INFORMING THE NEXT GENERATION. You know this. Not everybody does. Steven Heller interviews Mythmaker author John Hendrix in “C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien Together Again” at PRINT Magazine.

Most readers know their books and the genre they propagated, which has launched scores of films, podcasts, games and toys. But how many fans knew that C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were good friends who spent much of their time together arguing the spiritual pursuits of humankind? John Hendrix, a graphic novelist who is an extraordinary biographer (a novel graphicist), has created a new form of graphic—comic—book, The Mythmakers, in which he uses “a dual biography as an avatar for telling a deeper story about the origins of fairy tales.” Below we talk about his relationship to Lewis, Tolkien and their shared religious beliefs….

You state that, “they longed to make stories like the ones they loved. But their quarry was much more elusive.” What was their quarry? Was it simply “joy”?
The thing that drew Lewis and Tolkien together initially was their love of Norse mythology. But underneath the love of those stories was a longing for something they could not put their finger on. They would say most of us feel it when we read a great story. C.S. Lewis called this longing for longing by the German word “sehnsucht.” Lewis said this: “Joy is distinct not only from pleasure in general but even from aesthetic pleasure. It must have the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing.” And Tolkien described joy as a feeling that reaches “beyond the walls of our world.” Both of these authors came to believe that stories and fairy tales allow humanity to access truths that are unknowable in any other way….

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Anniversary: Kolchak: The Night Stalker series (1974)

Fifty years ago this evening Kolchak: The Night Stalker first aired on ABC. It was preceded by The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler films, both written by Richard Matheson. 

It was based off a novel by Jeff Rice who Mike has some thoughts about here.

It was remade nineteen years ago as The Night Stalker with Stuart Townsend as Carl Kolchak. It lasted ten episodes. It was set in Los Angeles instead of Chicago. Need I say more? 

Let’s talk about Darren McGavin for a moment. He was perfect for this role. Though only fifty-two when the series was shot, he looked a decade older and quite beat up. That suit he wore could have been acquired second hand. Or fourth hand. And that hat — I wonder how many they had in props that were exactly identical. 

The actor himself had certainly had some interesting times with four divorces by then, and this was not his first time portraying a world-weary investigator. He was the title character in the short-lived Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer series in the Fifties. It lasted a year.

(Please don’t link to it as the copyright holder keeps deleting it off YouTube so it still in copyright. Copyrights are complicated things, aren’t they?) 

Now Kolchak: The Night Stalker did not break the pattern of having a beautiful woman around as it had Carol Ann Susi as the recurring character of semi-competent but likable intern Monique Marmelstein in a recurring role.

And I really liked the character of his boss, Tony Vincenzo as played by Simon Oakland, who was quite bellicose and had no clue of what Kolchak was doing. Good thing that was, too. 

Ahhh the monsters. Some were SF, sort of — a murderous android, an invisible ET, a prehistoric ape-man grown from thawed cell samples, and a lizard-creature protecting its eggs. Then there were the fantastic ones — Jack the Ripper, a headless motorcycle rider, vampires, werewolves, witches and zombies to name but a few he tangled with. 

It has become a favorite among viewers of fantasy which currently carries a most excellent eighty percent rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes — but it was a ratings failure complicated by Darren McGavin being unwilling to do more episodes and only lasted one season before being cancelled.  

Chris Carter who credits the series as the primary inspiration for The X-Files wanted McGavin to appear as Kolchak in one or more episodes of that series, but McGavin was unwilling to reprise the character for his show. He did appear on the series as retired FBI agent very obviously attired in Kolchak’s trademark seersucker jacket, black knit tie, and straw hat.

C.J. Henderson, who won a World Fantasy Award for his Sarob Press, wrote three Night Stalker novels — Kolchak and the Lost World, Kolchak: Necronomicon and What Every Coin Has. There have been other novels and shorts published. Three unfilmed scripts for the TV series have survived, “Eve of Terror”, written by Stephen Lord, “The Get of Belial”, written by Donn Mullally, and “The Executioners”, written by Max Hodge.

Let’s see if it’s streaming anywhere… It is available on Peacock, the streaming service owned by NBC of course. 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) OBI-WAN ACTOR ON WALK OF FAME. Ewan McGregor’s star was added to the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Thursday. And his castmate Hayden Christensen paid tribute:

…Christensen noted that McGregor, who played Anakin’s mentor Obi-Wan Kenobi, was just “the nicest person” during their initial conversation, telling him all about how excited he was to work with him and to begin their lightsaber training together. 

“He’s just beyond kind to me, and it was immediately apparent to me that I was meeting someone truly special. Not just as an actor, but as a person, and that I was meeting a friend,” Christensen said. He then teased, “A friend who would later go on to chop off both my legs and leave me for dead on the side of a volcano, but I guess I kind of had that coming.”

McGregor burst into laughter and turned toward the crowd after Christensen’s joke, which was a quick nod to Anakin’s fate after his heartbreaking battle against Obi-Wan at the end of 2005’s Revenge of the Sith….

(12) SCULPTOR’S TRIBUTE TO SERLING. WBUR says it will be unveiled this weekend: “Rod Serling, creator and narrator of iconic ‘Twilight Zone,’ honored with hometown statue”.

It’s been 65 years since Rod Serling’s iconic “The Twilight Zone” hit the TV airwaves in 1959. The show, known for its eerie music, aliens, lugubrious tone and 1950s-style special effects, aired for only 6 years. But its impact and life in re-runs created generations of fans who also find meaning in the themes it tackled: racism, corporate greed and man’s inhumanity.

Serling, who famously said, “Everybody has to have a hometown, and mine’s Binghamton,” has been honored annually at SerlingFest in Binghamton, New York. This year’s event, which begins Friday, will conclude with the unveiling of a six-foot-tall bronze statue of Serling at Recreation Park, a short walk from his childhood home…

A photo-illustrated article about creating the statue is here: “Rod Serling Statue Progress Report – Rod Serling Memorial Foundation”. This is an artist’s conception of how it will look.

(13) THE TELLTALE TEETH. “Cave discovery in France may explain why Neanderthals disappeared, scientists say” – Yahoo! has the story.

When archaeologist Ludovic Slimak unearthed five teeth in a rock shelter in France’s Rhône Valley in 2015, it was immediately obvious that they belonged to a Neanderthal, the first intact remains of the ancient species to be discovered in that country since 1979.

However, the once-in-a-lifetime find, nicknamed Thorin after a character in “The Hobbit,” remained a well-kept secret for almost a decade while Slimak and his colleagues untangled the significance of the find — a fraught undertaking that pitted experts in ancient DNA against archaeologists.

“We faced a major issue,” said Slimak, a researcher at France’s National Centre for Scientific Research and Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse. “The genetics was sure the Neanderthal we called Thorin was 105,000 years old. But we knew by (the specimen’s) archaeological context that it was somewhere between 40,000 to 50,000 years old.”

“What the DNA was suggesting was not in accordance with what we saw,” he added.

It took the team almost 10 years to piece together the story of the puzzling Neanderthal, adding a new chapter in the long-standing mystery of why these humans disappeared around 40,000 years ago.

The research, published Wednesday in the journal Cell Genomics, found that Thorin belonged to a lineage or group of Neanderthals that had been isolated from other groups for some 50,000 years. This genetic isolation was the reason Thorin’s DNA seemed to come from an earlier time period than it actually did.

(14) AUTHENTIC? Archie McPhee is offering Possum Flavored Candy, prompting Andrew Porter to wonder, “What DOES possum taste like?!?” He’s a city boy, you know.

Not only does this candy have an adorable possum on the tin, but it also has the flavor of possum! Great for roadkill aficionados or people who are possum-curious. Just leave a tin in the lunchroom of your office and let the fun begin.

(15) ZACK SNYDER EPIC. Animation Magazine tells readers “Love Is a Battlefield in New ‘Twilight of the Gods’ Trailer”.

Netflix today debuted the official trailer and key art for Zack Snyder’s animated Norse mythology epic Twilight of the Gods. The new preview gives us a glimpse at the blood-soaked meet-cute between Sigrid and Leif, their disastrous wedding and Sigrid’s quest for revenge against the gods who took away her family.

The eight-episode series premieres September 19. The same day, creator/executive producer/director Zack Snyder will appear at the first-ever Geeked Week LIVE show in Atlanta. (Details here.)

(16) TUNES IN ORBIT. Polaris Dawn astronaut Sarah Gillis, a violinist, released a new music video from space this morning, accompanied by a round-the-world orchestra: Rey’s Theme by John Williams.

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

Pixel Scroll 7/30/24 Then Shall All The Scrolls Be Still And Peace Will Come To Pixelville

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(1) BOOKER PRIZE 2024 LONGLIST. [Steven French.] Several genre or adjacent works tucked away in here! “Three British novelists make Booker 2024 longlist among ‘cohort of global voices’” in the Guardian surveys all 13 books.

Percival Everett, Hisham Matar and Sarah Perry are among the 13 novelists longlisted for the 2024 Booker prize. The “Booker dozen” also features works by Richard Powers, Tommy Orange, Rachel Kushner and Anne Michaels.

This year’s “glorious” list comprises “a cohort of global voices, strong voices and new voices”, said judging chair and artist Edmund de Waal….

File 770 has a genre-focused post here: “Booker Prize 2024”.

(2) REJECTING TACIT AGREEMENT. Christopher Golden sends a message “To those of you nodding along with Tom Monteleone…”

A note to certain members of the horror community. I know you’re out there—writers and readers who saw the substack post from Tom Monteleone over the weekend and quietly agree with his estimation of many of the writers who’d received Stoker Awards, or Lifetime Achievement Awards from the HWA. Honestly, it’s easy to do. We get wrapped up in our lives and perceptions and rely on our own experiences and acquired knowledge to filter the information we’re receiving. If you read Monteleone’s screed and agreed with it, even somewhat, maybe you haven’t taken the single moment of wondering if there’s another way to approach it….

… Let’s take a look at some of the authors Monteleone views as unworthy of recognition.

He dismisses Linda Addison mostly, I believe, because she’s best known as a poet. In order to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award, Monteleone reminds us, one must have “significantly contributed to and influenced the field.” It’s obvious he views the field as comprised as writers like himself, never considering that one’s contributions and influence do not need to touch you or even enter your awareness to be legitimate and worth celebrating. Linda Addison does not need you to acknowledge her worth to be worthy. She doesn’t need to have been embraced by readers who are not interested in poetry for her contributions to be significant. You don’t need to have felt her influence or even observed it for her to be influential. I wonder how many horror writers have written poetry because Linda Addison makes them sit up and take notice of the art form. I’d wager the number is far higher than the number of authors who took up writing horror novels because they’d read something by Thomas F. Monteleone. Linda has blazed a trail for others to follow, and lit the goddamn path for them. She’s been a mentor and an example to follow. How many can say the same?

And to claim you consider her your friend? Shame on you. Learn something. Instead of assuming Linda’s race is the reason for her recognition, consider that her race is the reason you haven’t educated yourself as to why she has actually been honored….

(3) KSR ON BBC. The Climate Question team interviews Kim Stanley Robinson in this episode of the BBC World Service program: “The Climate Question, Can Science Fiction help us fight climate change?”

The acclaimed US sci-fi author Kim Stanley Robinson is also a star in the world of climate activism because his work often features climate change – on Earth and beyond. Robinson has been a guest speaker at the COP climate summit, and novels such as The Ministry For The Future and The Mars Trilogy are admired by everyone from Barack Obama to former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres. Robinson’s books are not just imaginative but scientifically accurate, and some of their ideas have even inspired new thinking about climate-proofing technology. Kim Stanley Robinson has been talking to the Climate Question team.

(4) STOP PALPATINE! Gizmodo introduces us to a three-book Star Wars tale coming out in 2026 and 2027: “Star Wars’ New Book Trilogy Explores the Politics Behind the Rise of the Rebellion”.

…As you can tell by the cover of the first novel in the series, The Mask of Fear by Alexander Freed (writer of the absolutely incredible Alphabet Squadron series) Reign of the Empire will examine the struggle against the Empire through the eyes of some familiar faces. Mon Mothma, Bail Organa, and Saw Gerrera–all with their own differing perspectives on what must be done to stop Palpatine–play key roles in the trilogy, alongside a new cast of original characters as the galaxy begins to reckon with the grip of the Empire. Here’s the official logline for The Mask of Fear:

Before the Rebellion, the Empire reigned.

“In order to ensure the security and continuing stability, the Republic will be reorganized into the first Galactic Empire! For a safe and secure society!”

With one speech, and thunderous applause, Chancellor Palpatine brought the era of the Republic crashing down. In its place rose the Galactic Empire. Across the galaxy, people rejoiced and celebrated the end to war—and the promises of tomorrow. But that tomorrow was a lie. Instead the galaxy became twisted by the cruelty and fear of the Emperor’s rule.

During that terrifying first year of tyranny, Mon Mothma, Saw Gerrera, and Bail Organa face the encroaching darkness. One day, they will be three architects of the Rebel Alliance. But first, each must find purpose and direction in a changing galaxy, while harboring their own secrets, fears, and hopes for a future that may never come, unless they act.

The Mask of Fear will be followed by two more novels: the first written by Resistance Reborn‘s Rebecca Roanhorse, and the second by Fran Wilde…

(5) RHONDI SALSITZ (1949-2024). Prolific sff novelist Rhondi Salsitz, who went into hospice care on June 30, died on July 29 Facebook friends learned today.

She was a 1979 Clarion graduate. Her first published story, “Persephone”, appeared in Damon Knight’s Orbit 21 (1980).

Salsitz was born in Phoenix, Arizona. She told a BookReview.com interviewer:

I started writing short stories when I was in the 3rd grade. I wrote my first science fiction novel when I was in the 5th grade. Needless to say, they weren’t very good but I knew very early on that I wanted to be an author. My mother was a writer …so, I grew up with an inherent love for books and I thought being a writer was probably one of the best things in the world you could be. I spent a lot of my early years trading letters with Walter Farley of Black Stallion fame. He was a wonderful author for a child to communicate with. He always wrote back… He was …very encouraging. …I was very lucky. I was always encouraged.

…I got a lot of rejections for a lot of years before I finally started selling. But I’m stubborn. My dad used to say that if I fell in a river, I’d float upstream. I was determined to get published and I did….

During her career she wrote under many names: Sara Hanover, Emily Drake, Anne Knight, Elizabeth Forrest, Charles Ingrid, Rhondi Greening, Rhondi Vilott Salsitz, Jenna Rhodes, R.A.V. Salsitz, and Rhondi Vilott.

Her eight series included the space opera Sand Wars books and fantasy sequences such as Magickers, Patterns of Chaos, and Dragontales. The 14-book Dragontales series was interactive fiction similar to Choose Your Own Adventures. Salsitz also told the BookReview.com interviewer, “I received hundreds of letters from kids who read those. As a matter of fact, I still run into people who read them when they were younger.”

A 2022 anthology she co-edited with Crystal Sarakas, Shattering The Glass Slipper, boasted a finalist for the 2023 WSFA Small Press Award, R.Z. Held’s story “Ashes of a Cinnamon Fire”.

You can hear Salsitz interviewed by Scott Edelman – another 1979 Clarion grad – at the link for his Eating the Fantastic podcast in 2023.

Rhondi Salsitz at the 1988 ABA. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.

(6) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Anniversary: July 30, 1966 — Batman (also known as Batman: The Movie) (1966)

So let’s have pure nostalgia for this Scroll which is the Batman film that came out in 1966. Need I say it starred Adam West as Batman and Burt Ward as Robin? Of course not. But who were the villain or villians here this time that our cape crusaders dealt with while protecting the citizens of Gotham City and keeping their real identities secret?

I’ll come to that eventually but first let us look at who put the Batman film together.  It was written by Lorenzo Semple Jr., one of the primary writers for the series who would go one to write the scripts of two best political thrillers ever produced, The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor. I’d consider The Parallax View to be genre adjacent.

The director was Leslie Herbert Martinson who’s later was responsible for Wonder Woman: Who’s Afraid of Diana Prince? along with episodes of This Immortal, Mission: Impossible, Wonder Woman, Fantasy Island and several other genre series. He produced Rescue from Gilligan’s Island.

Yes, Bob Kane is credited as the creator, but Bill Finger alas goes uncredited. 

So most members of the original series cast, with the exception of Julie Newmar as Catwoman are here. She was replaced by Lee Meriwether. I must say that she made a most purrfect Catwoman just as Newmar had. 

Those villains are a Rouges Gallery of Gotham City’s criminal masterminds. In addition to Catwoman, we have Cesar Romero as The Joker, Burgess Meredith as The Penguin and Frank Gorshin as The Riddler. I’ll freely admit that Newmar’s Catwoman was by far my favorite of Batman’s foes. She was just the funnest of them, and the one I think the actress liked playing her role most of all the villains. 

It premiered in Austin, Texas on this date followed by general release the following weekend.

It cost one point four million dollars and made three point nine million making it a rather nice box office success in those days. 

We don’t do Story here even on an almost sixty-year-old films as we got criticized for giving away the plot of a forty-year-old TV episode once. Suffice it to say that if you like liked the series, this is for you; if you’ve not seen the series, it’s still a good piece of entertainment. 

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

July 30, 1975 – Cherie Priest, 45.

By Paul Weimer: I started with Priest’s work as many people have done–her Steampunk Clockwork Century novels. Boneshaker came out during a boom cycle for Steampunk fiction, and since I was avidly reading Steampunk at the time (trying to keep up with the trend). I decided to give Boneshaker a try. I loved its alternate American take on a subgenre that for a long while seemed terribly British-centric. With its sequels, Priest proved to me that she could master a subgenre with her characters and sharp writing, and I started picking up novels of interest she’s written ever since.

Cherie Priest in 2009. Photo by Caitlin Kittredge.

Horror and dark fantasy, with mystery and gothic touches, make up her major power chords of books she’s written since, with books like The Toll, or the more recent Cinderwich. Cinderwich shows that, beginning with and since her Clockwork Century novels, she has a really excellent sense and style of making a place come to life. Sure, her characters are fully fleshed and real, and sometimes so badly hurt by events. But it is the locales and places that they inhabit, or are trying to escape from, that really makes her fiction special for me. Grave Reservations, a supernatural mystery that is less Gothic and more quirky, has its Seattle come to life for me, for example. 

Her most audacious work, and my favorite, are Maplecroft and Chapelwood.  Lizzie Borden in this pair of novels faces off against Cosmic Horrors, with her axe. These two books are exactly for the people excited by that concept and Priest delivers in spades. The really strong use of point of view makes the novels feel inhabited, and alive. (And a really good message about confronting prejudice and hate that make the novels feel endlessly timely). And yes, once again, the settings and landscapes come alive in her writing.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) HEATHER WOOD’S MUSIC. Thank Goodness It’s Folk devotes an episode of the podcast to “Remembering HEATHER WOOD”, a sff publishing figure who enjoyed even greater musical fame.

James and Sam bring this season of TGIF to a close with a special episode dedicated to the memory of Heather Wood, the inspirational singer and folklorist who sadly passed away this week. Her records with The Young Tradition are benchmarks in unaccompanied harmony singing, nearly sixty years after they formed. We play some of her wonderful solo singing, an absolute belter of a Young Tradition live performance, and some of the music that surrounded them in London in the 1960s where they lived, sang and worked together. 

In the second half, Sam is joined by Eliza Carthy to talk about her plans with Martin Carthy to record his latest, and critically important, project “East” – and how you can get involved to help this be born. Sam plays two exclusive, never-before-broadcast live recordings of Martin singing from this project. 

(10) MUST HAVE? [Item by Daniel Dern.] Here’s the buy-it link for the book bookbag: “Library Print Shoulder Bag” at TeezAvenue. (They also offer the design as a skirt or a dress.)

(11) HERE THERE BE SPOILERS. You’ve been warned. Variety explains “‘Deadpool & Wolverine’s Shockingly Sweet Eulogy for 20th Century Fox”.

For all the raunchy jokes, club drugs, buckets of blood and meta punchlines, “Deadpool & Wolverine” may be the most sentimental movie of the summer. Hollywood insiders and superhero film fans were stunned to discover that last weekend’s Marvel blockbuster basically amounts to a big, sobbing, “Steel Magnolias”-grade sendoff to 20th Century Fox.

After all, it was at that defunct studio, founded in 1935 and sold by Rupert Murdoch to Disney in 2019, that “Deadpool” first shimmied on-screen in a skintight bondage suit and pistols. It’s also where two decades’ worth of Marvel films were made, most notably the “X-Men” series, which catapulted Hugh Jackman to stardom. These characters first appeared in Marvel Comics but were licensed to Fox, leaving them operating outside the Marvel Cinematic Universe (the moniker for Disney’s film and TV Marvel adaptations). The merger with Disney changed all that….

(12) AND IF YOU WANT SPOILERS. The New York Times heads this article: “Spoiler Alert: Here’s a Guide to the Cameos in ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’”. However, it’s paywalled, so it may be hard to give into the temptation to peek at the list.  

(13) BAD TRIP. “Astronaut traveling to Titan loses his grip on reality in 1st ‘Slingshot’ trailer” – Space.com has a synopsis:

Laurence Fishburne…shares the screen with the Academy Award-winning Casey Affleck (“Manchester By the Sea”) and Tomer Capone (“The Boys”) in Bleecker Street’s upcoming outer space thriller, “Slingshot,”…The basic plot revolves around a harrowing 1.5-billion-mile trek to Saturn’s moon Titan and one astronaut’s inability to distinguish nightmares from real-life due to the side effects of a drug meant to induce hibernation sleep for the long haul….

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

Booker Prize 2024 Longlist

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9

The thirteen novels on the Booker Prize 2024 longlist revealed July 30 include two books of genre interest, titles shown in boldface.

  • Colin Barrett, Wild Houses
  • Rita Bullwinkel, Headshot   
  • Percival Everett, James 
  • Samantha Harvey, Orbital       
  • Rachel Kushner, Creation Lake
  • Hisham Matar, My Friends 
  • Claire Messud, This Strange Eventful History 
  • Anne Michaels, Held
  • Tommy Orange, Wandering Stars                    
  • Sarah Perry, Enlightenment 
  • Richard Powers, Playground
  • Yael van der Wouden, The Safekeep
  • Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

James reimagines The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

1861, the Mississippi River. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a new owner in New Orleans and separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson’s Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father who recently returned to town. Thus begins a dangerous and transcendent journey by raft along the Mississippi River, toward the elusive promise of free states and beyond. As James and Huck begin to navigate the treacherous waters, each bend in the river holds the promise of both salvation and demise.

With rumours of a brewing war, James must face the burden he carries: the family he is desperate to protect and the constant lie he must live, and together, the unlikely pair must face the most dangerous odyssey of them all…

Orbital focuses on six astronauts in the International Space Station.

They are there to do vital work, but slowly they begin to wonder: what is life without Earth? What is Earth without humanity?

Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents, and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day.

Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction.

The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part – or protective – of it.

The Booker Prize is open to works of long-form fiction by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK and/or Ireland.

The judging panel is chaired by artist and author Edmund de Waal, joined by award-winning novelist Sara Collins; Fiction Editor of the Guardian, Justine Jordan; world-renowned writer and professor Yiyun Li; and musician, composer and producer Nitin Sawhney.

The judges’ selection was made from 156 books published between October 1, 2023 and September 30, 2024.

The shortlist of six books will be announced on September 16. The shortlisted authors each receive £2,500 and a specially bound edition of their book. The winner of the Booker Prize 2024 will be announced at Old Billingsgate in London on November 12. The winning author will receive £50,000. 

[Based on a press release.]

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch Wins The Booker Prize

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Paul Lynch

By James Bacon: Paul Lynch’s book Prophet Song won the Booker prize this evening. Described by Samira Ahmed Booker BBC 4 presenter and host for the evening as “Set in a near future Ireland where society is breaking down and people are becoming refugees” and Judge Esi Edugyan said that “We sought a winning novel that would transport us, we sought a winning novel that would speak to the immediate moment while also possessing the ability to outlast it… a book to remind us that we are more than ourselves, to remind us of all that is worth saving”.

Following the presentation of the award Lynch made a small speech.  “This was not an easy book to write, the rational part of me believed that I was dooming me by writing this novel, though I had to write the book anyway, we do not have a choice in such matters.” He continued, “I believe that literary style should be a way of knowing how the world is met and its unfolding, senses should press into the unknown moment, into the most obscure hidden aspects of life, that which is barely known but which is asking to be released”.

When Samira Ahmed noted Prophet Song was about a country breaking down and a family becoming refugees, and asked Lynch what made him set it in Ireland he responded, ” I think it is important that novelists should be free to be counterfactual, whether they’re writing something that maybe a parallel of the present, maybe a story that projects into the future but always that asking questions about what’s timeless and what we need to pay attention to and I think that writers have a duty to push past the spectacle that we have been bombarded with for years, to break through the noise, the tyranny of the know that surround us, to create space again for the whisper in the ear that the novelist can do uniquely.” 

If fans wonder why this is a novel worth reading, here is a short review. 

Paul Lynch — Prophet Song

This is a very powerful literary story, where the landscape is frighteningly familiar with situations that we are so used to happening elsewhere, far away and to others, suddenly in our own city of Dublin, on its streets, in the shops at the crossroads.  

There is a style of long lovely language to it, but one where within the story the tension is tight, the tempo is quick and so the eloquence forms around the story which runs at a steady deadly fast flow, darkening at times which draws the reader ever onwards. I completed the book in less than 30 hours, finding it compelling, not an easy read, a necessary one.

I have yet to ascertain if Paul Lynch said it himself, but the setting is allegedly a near future Ireland, and crikey, it feels so close, so of the moment, situations in Dublin, in Gaza and Israel, in Ukraine and on the English Channel, all somehow reflected in this book, that was started during covid, and completed last year, an unnervingly feeling of the now, capturing what we see on screens, and throwing it into a horribly familiar setting, with a fine Irish woman, Eilish our protagonist, a mother, daughter, wife and scientist, who resonates so hard, reminding somehow me of my own Mam, but leaving you hoping no Mam would have to face such trials, and making one think of all the families, caught up in something horrible. 

Eilish’s actions , decisions, choices, all so hard and challenging, dreadfully so, trying to be the best mam she can as all mams are and strive to be. The book is  so descriptive one feels for Eilish, and feels her reality is unbearably real, and for many it is, but unbelievable in an Irish setting, and yet so tangible, that you could taste it, the hunger for power and control, the bloody brutality of governments and bureaucracy, the horror of war and the fear of loss.

There are many moments of sheer brilliance, the sentences and narrative, insightful, perfect, and all the time, not just some notional sense of place, but Dublin, it is so Dublin, that you are there, hearing and seeing unimaginable things, horrid appalling things, but all so possible, an underlying malevolence that we see come to rotten fruition in other places now.

It is its own book, I am not comparing it to other works, for that does a disservice to novels I love, and this book, that I have found so engaging, it is unique, distinctive in its way, brilliantly so, and its setting and situations are thoughtful and thought through. It is a dystopian novel for sure, and will sit well amongst other dystopian books, the great ones, and alternative histories, and near dark futures, and ones which straddle the place where literary fiction meets genre fiction, and readers can discern a great story, and not worry so much about labels, imposed, or pigeon holes, arbitrary or others dictating what a great story is, but enjoy good writing and reflect and think.   

Here is the official back of book enticement:  

On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist.

Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and when her husband disappears, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a society that is quickly unravelling. How far will she go to save her family? And what – or who – is she willing to leave behind?

Pixel Scroll 11/21/23 I Spent A Year Pixeled For Scroll Purposes

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(1) WHO HISTORY REMEMBERED. “’Matt Smith and I twiddle knobs. I am 12 again!’ Stars share their best Doctor Who moments – part two” in the Guardian.

Daniel Nettheim (director of episodes featuring the Twelfth Doctor, 2015-17)

The Doctor’s anti-war speech, from 2015’s Zygon two-parter, was a cry from the heart for compassion amid a searing indictment of the futility of war. It has never felt more relevant than it does today. The 10-minute sequence was delivered with considerable emotional heft by Peter Capaldi. It still brings a tear to my eye. When Radio Times readers voted for that year’s greatest TV moment, that came second, beaten only by Poldark scything a field with his shirt off.

Barnaby Edwards (Dalek operator, 1993 onwards)

I first worked as a Dalek in 1993. Three decades later, I’m still working as a Dalek – promotion is slow on the planet Skaro! My favourite moment was on a night shoot in Penarth in March 2008 for The Stolen Earth. It was my task to stop a Nissan Figaro in the street and threaten its occupant with extermination. It was Sarah Jane Smith, played by Elisabeth Sladen, my childhood hero. Here she was, still defending the universe from the Daleks. That’s the magic of Doctor Who. Faces come and go, but the adventure goes on for ever….

(2) EVEN ODDS. [Item by Chris Barkley.] Who will win the 2023 Booker Prize? I looked through the descriptions of the nominated books and two (or three) of them might be genre or adjacent. But, THREE guys named Paul in the ballot? What are the odds of that happening?????

Literary Hub’s Emily Temple says “Here are the bookies’ odds for the 2023 Booker Prize”.

We’re just shy of one week out from the announcement of the UK’s biggest book prize: the Booker. So it’s time to place your bets on who will win the £50,000, a massive spike in book sales, and lifelong bragging rights. (A different question, no doubt, than who should win.) If you need a tip, follow the money, and ask the bookies (they were at least close last year).

For the record: all things being equal, there is a baseline 50% chance of the Booker going to somebody named Paul on Sunday, but given the below odds, in which each Paul is more probable than the next, that number rises to . . . something I cannot calculate because I am an editor at a literary website who put all of my eggs in one basket long ago. But, higher. I think…

(3) IN THIS WORLD, ELWOOD, YOU CAN BE OH SO SMART, OR OH SO UNPLEASANT. Camestros Felapton tries to decide “Does outrage marketing work?”.

…Authors now write in a more crowded market in which even moderately successful writers struggle to make a living. Standing out from the crowd is difficult and name recognition matters….

So some authors may see a possible way forward: pick controversial/trolling-like positions, promote those positions to provoke a backlash, get free publicity and hence (maybe) more sales.

That’s the theory. I think credibly it is a process that works for Larry Correia but I can’t claim that there is any way to check in terms of sales. Correia has the advantage that his controversial stances match the author persona he projects on social media and that persona also fits the style and genre of the books he writes AND those stances (particularly on guns) fit with the audience for his books. If I just consider notable Puppies, the approach has worked less well for Brad Torgersen and notably there are mismatches across the board for Brad, he’s just not as good at projecting a tough guy persona online, and his actual novels are less well-targeted to a specific demographic and there’s not a thematic connection between his culture war topics and his science fiction other than it being vaguely backwards looking….

(4) WHO OWNS CHAOS? Facebook sent a surprising notice about a group I follow now formerly named “Jerry Pournelle’s Chaos Manor”.

And I found this posted to the group:

(5) EX X-USER. Scott Edelman reveals in a public Patreon post “What Twitter (and the leaving of it) means to me”.

…But the first week of September, it all became too much for me, and I shared the status update you see above. In the 11 weeks since then, I’ve returned every 3-4 weeks only to remind visitors I wouldn’t be posting any more and giving links to my other social media presences, in part to prevent my account from going dormant, which might allow another to squat on my name.

What was the affect of this decision on Eating the Fantastic?

Downloads have dropped by a third.

I know correlation isn’t causation, yet I can’t help but believe the loss of serendipitous discovery which would occur on Twitter is the reason.

The subscriber base remains unchanged. I’ve shed none of those regular listeners. But most of my traffic has always come from non-subscribers, and that has dropped.

When I would tweet about an upcoming guest or a new episode or any podcast news at all to my nearly 5,500 followers on Twitter, that would be retweeted many times, and I’d see a corresponding jump in downloads. Part of that, I know, was due to the fact not all listeners were interested in every conversation. Some only wanted the science fiction guests but not the horror guests, or the comic book guests but not the science fiction ones, and so rather than subscribing, they’d wait to see who was appearing and make the decision to download then. And I believe that with no tweet reminding them to check out the content of the latest episode … they’re not.

Then there were the new listeners who, upon seeing one of their friends share about an episode new or old and learning about Eating the Fantastic, would swoop in and download every prior episode. That would happen frequently in the show’s pre-Twitter days, but since September 5th, I don’t believe it’s happened even once.

All of that discoverability is gone, like tears in rain, and seemingly not replaced by the attention I’m getting from my (currently) 788 followers on Bluesky or 561 followers on Mastodon….

(6) KEYS TO SUCCESS. “The True Story of ‘The World’s Greatest Typewriter Collection’” at Heritage Auctions’ Intelligent Collector blog.

Like so many collections, it began with a single purchase made on a whim – in this case, the typewriter used by a Pulitzer-winning sportswriter. The man who bought the machine, Steve Soboroff, was a fan of the man who used it, revered Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray, whose words Soboroff devoured each morning, especially after nights when Dodgers pitcher Sandy Koufax hurled fastballs using The Left Hand of God. Soboroff wanted the 1940 Remington Model J so desperately that he outdueled two others competing for it at auction in 2005: the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Dodgers. It was a hell of a score.

Not long after, Soboroff put another typewriter on the shelf beside Murray’s – a 1926 Underwood Standard that belonged to Ernest Hemingway and was used during the author’s legendary sojourns to Cuba. More machines followed in short order, each a typewriter that once belonged to someone who had appeared on the cover of Time. Novelists and playwrights, among them Jack London, Tennessee Williams, George Bernard Shaw, Ray Bradbury, John Updike and Philip Roth. Actors, including Greta Garbo, Shirley Temple, Mae West, Julie Andrews and a typewriter collector named Tom Hanks. Musicians, from crooner Bing Crosby to tenor Andrea Bocelli. Visionaries. Journalists. The famous. The infamous. Playboy creator Hugh Hefner. Samuel T. Cohen, inventor of the neutron bomb. And Ted Kaczynski, the man called Unabomber….

(7) RECORD VIEWERSHIP. “When Hollywood Put World War III on Television” – a memory-stirring article, behind a paywall in The Atlantic.

We live in an anxious time. Some days, it can feel like the wheels are coming off and the planet is careening out of control. But at least it’s not 1983, the year that the Cold War seemed to be in its final trajectory toward disaster.

Forty years ago today, it was the morning after The Day After, the ABC TV movie about a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union. Roughly 100 million people tuned in on Sunday night, November 20, 1983, and The Day After holds the record as the most-watched made-for-television movie in history.

I remember the movie, and the year, vividly. I was 22 and in graduate school at Columbia University, studying the Soviet Union. It’s hard to explain to people who worry about, say, climate change—a perfectly legitimate concern—what it was like to live with the fear not that many people could die over the course of 20 or 50 or 100 years but that the decision to end life on most of the planet in flames and agony could happen in less time than it would take you to finish reading this article….

(8) WINDOW CAT. Steve Green predicts that this shop in Berkeley, California has a decent stock of sf.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born November 21, 1924 — Christopher Tolkien. He drew the original maps for the LoTR. He provided much of the feedback on both the Hobbit and LoTR. His father invited him to join the Inklings when he was just twenty-one years old, making him the youngest member of that group. Suffice it to say that the list is long of his father’s unfinished works that he has edited and brought to published form. And he won two Mythopoetic Awards for doing so, and was nominated for a Balrog for publishing his father’s work. (Died 2020.)
  • Born November 21, 1941 — Ellen Asher, 82. Introduced many fans to their favorites as editor-in-chief of the Science Fiction Book Club (SFBC) for thirty-four years, from 1973 to 2007 (exceeding John W. Campbell’s record as the person with the longest tenure in the same science fiction job). She was personally responsible for selecting the monthly offerings to subscribers, and oversaw the selection of individual works for their special anthologies and omnibuses. She has been honored with a World Fantasy Special Award, an Edward E. Smith Memorial Award for Imaginative Fiction, a World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, and she was Editor Guest of Honor at Renovation. 
  • Born November 21, 1945 — Vincent Di Fate, 78. Artist and Illustrator who has done many SFF book covers and interior illustrations since his work first appeared in the pages of Analog in 1965 with an example being this November 1969 cover. He was one of the founders of the Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists (ASFA), and is a past president. In addition to his Chesley Award trophy and 7 nominations, he has been a finalist for the Professional Artist Hugo 11 times, winning once; two collections of his artwork, Infinite Worlds: The Fantastic Visions of Science Fiction Art and Di Fate’s Catalog of Science Fiction Hardware, have been Hugo finalists as well. He was Artist Guest of Honor at MagiCon, for which he organized their Art Retrospective exhibit. He was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2011. You can see galleries of his works at his website.
  • Born November 21, 1946 — Tom Veal, 77. He’s a con-running fan who chaired Chicon 2000. He was a member of the Seattle in 1981 Worldcon bid committee. He chaired Windycon X.  In 2016 he married fellow fan Becky Thomson. And he wrote the “1995 Moskva 1995: Igor’s Campaign” which was published in  Alternate Worldcons and Again, Alternate Worldcons as edited by Mike Resnick.
  • Born November 21, 1950 — Evelyn C. Leeper, 73. Writer, Editor, Critic, and Fan, who is especially known for her decades of detailed convention reports and travelogues. A voracious reader, she has also posted many book reviews. She and her husband Mark founded the Mt. Holz Science Fiction Club at Bell Labs in New Jersey (Mt = abbreviation for the labs’ Middletown facility), and have produced their weekly fanzine, the MT VOID (“empty void”), since 1978; it is currently at Issue #2,302. She was a judge for the Sidewise Award for Alternate History for 20 years. She has been a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer twelve times, and Fan Guest of Honor at several conventions, including a Windycon. (JJ)
  • Born November 21, 1953 — Lisa Goldstein, 70. Writer, Fan, and Filer whose debut novel, The Red Magician, was so strong that she was a finalist for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer two years in a row. Her short fiction has garnered an array of Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award nominations, as well as a Sidewise Award. The short story “Cassandra’s Photographs” was a Hugo and Nebula finalist and “Alfred” was a World Fantasy and Nebula finalist; both can be found in her collection Travellers in Magic. Her novel The Uncertain Places won a Mythopoeic Award. You can read about her work at her most excellent blog.

(10) COMIXOLOGY APP GOES AWAY 12/4. ZDNET’s Lance Whitney scorns the way “Amazon is killing off its Comixology app in true supervillain fashion”.

Like Thanos, Kang, and Dr. Doom, Amazon seems to be on a mission to destroy superheroes, at least when it comes to providing a user-friendly platform for buying and accessing digital comics. In a new message posted online and in the app, the retail giant announced that as of December 4, its Comixology app will no longer be available and will instead be merged with its Kindle app for iOS, Android, and Fire OS.

After the deadline, you’ll still be able to access and read your existing Comixology comics, graphic novels, and manga titles, but only in the Kindle app. And before the deadline hits, you’ll have to download any Comixology books you were reading into the Kindle app. You may also need to head to your Amazon Digital Content page and send individual comic books to your preferred ebook reader.

On the plus side, any books you’re reading in the Comixology app will sync their progress in the Kindle app, so you can continue where you left off. You’ll be able to read your Comixology books in the Comics section of the Kindle website. And you can continue to buy digital comics from the Comixology area on Amazon’s website.

(11) SORT OF LIKE A MEREDITH MOMENT. [Item by Daniel Dern.] There’s an available MAX (HBO) deal: $2.99/month (with ads) for six months (normally $9.99/month) — https://auth.max.com/product. (Offer ends Monday Nov 27)

(12) TWO SHORT CLIPS FROM DOOM PATROL. [Item by Daniel Dern.] DPers imagine themselves in TV trailers.

Cliff Steele (Robotman) imagines himself teaming up with Vic Stone (Cyborg) for Steele & Stone, a Seventies-style cop show.

Rita Farr (“Elasti-Girl” imagines herself teaming up with Cyborg: in Beekeeper & Borg, like Steed and Mrs. Peel. Watch the Beekeeper & Borg trailer on YouTube.

(And a Reddit user edited the second trailer to match timing with the source material! — “I edited ‘Beekeeper & Borg’ to match the ‘The Avengers’ intro”.

(13) STEAMPUNK ART. Atlas Obscura Experiences is offering a four-part lecture series “Exploring Steampunk Art With Bruce Rosenbaum” for $75 a ticket. The promo says “Bruce Rosenbaum has been dubbed the Steampunk Guru by the Wall Street Journal and Steampunk Evangelist by Wired Magazine.”

Syllabus at a Glance

This course includes four total sessions, each lasting two hours on four Mondays beginning November 27.

Session 1 (Monday, 11/27, 7:30–9:00 PM ET)| Intro to Steampunk: Defining steampunk and identifying its origins. 

Session 2 (Monday, 12/4, 7:30–9:00 PM ET)| Designing a Steampunk Life: Exploring the philosophy and concepts of steampunk art, from creative problem solving and collaboration to adaptive reuse.

Session 3 (Monday, 12/11, 7:30–9:00 PM ET)| Past/Future Art: Taking a closer look at the process of making different kinds of steampunk art and design.

Session 4 (Monday, 12/18, 7:30–9:00 PM ET)| The Business of Steampunk: Looking into how to transform your steampunk art practice into a business (with examples from Modvic)

(14) REVISITING THE BROTHERS HILDEBRANDT. In 1994, Marvel Comics’ greatest characters were brought to life by two of science fiction and fantasy’s most renowned illustrators in Greg and Tim Hildebrandt’s unforgettable Marvel Masterpieces III trading card set. To celebrate the 30th anniversary next year, Marvel Comics will proudly showcase the Brothers Hildebrandt’s gorgeous Marvel Masterpieces III artwork in a new collection of variant covers.

Also available as virgin variant covers, the new covers will begin in January and continue all year long. Fans have already seen previews of the January pieces and now can see what’s coming in February, including spotlights on Cable and Night Thrasher for their upcoming new solo series.

Across more than 150 beautifully painted illustrations, comic fans saw the Brothers Hildebrandt’s masterful approach to the Marvel Universe with these timeless depictions of heroes and villains that have stayed with in the hearts and minds of fans ever since. Now, be captivated once more when they adorn the covers of select Marvel titles next year! For more information, visit Marvel.com.

Cable #2 Cable Marvel Masterpieces III Variant Cover By Greg And Tim Hildebrandt
Spider-Woman #4 Spider-Woman Marvel Masterpieces III Variant Cover By Greg And Tim Hildebrandt
Night Thrasher #1 Night Thrasher Marvel Masterpieces III Variant Cover By Greg And Tim Hildebrandt
Fantastic Four #17 Invisible Woman Marvel Masterpieces III Variant Cover By Greg And Tim Hildebrandt
Sensational She-Hulk #5 She-Hulk Marvel Masterpieces III Variant Cover By Greg And Tim Hildebrandt

(15) BY GRABTHAR’S HAMMER, WHAT A SAVINGS. Heritage Auctions next Space Exploration Signature Auction on December 14-15 is offering a “Full-Scale McDonnell Aircraft Corporation Manufactured Friendship 7 Mercury Spacecraft Exhibition Model”. All you need is about $50,000 and a place to keep it around the house.

…Painted on the exterior are the Friendship 7 logo, “United States,” and an American flag very similar to what was painted on John Glenn’s capsule, the first mission on which an American orbited the Earth. A 27.5″‘ x 33″ removable hatch can be detached to allow closer inspection of the outstanding interior cabin assembled of a composite of wood and metal that features two fluorescent lights that beautifully illuminate the mannequin and instrument panel when plugged in via a standard plug at the bottom of the capsule. The attention to detail in the cabin is extraordinary. The instrument panel display is similar to the “B” configuration that was used on the Friendship 7 mission. The silver spacesuit has not been removed for inspection. However, the model was donated to the BSA in 1966; therefore, the suit is of the period….

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Daniel Dern, Steven French, Steve Green, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]