24 Mission Of Impossible Gravity

Posted on January 18, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) LETTERS FROM THE EDITOR. C. E. Murphy shares her views about what kind of revision request letters work best: “Process Post: on edit letters” at The Essential Kit.

There was a discussion going on over on Bluesky about dealing with edit letters, and this truth came up: “Editors aren’t always right about the solutions, but they’re nearly always right about the problems.”

That thread went on to discuss how the person quoting it, who happens to be KJ Charles whose books I read all of last year and who is also an editor, approaches edit letters; her approach involves suggesting ideas to fix the problems, because it opens the writer’s mind to the possiblity that the book could have something different happen in that moment, and also it gives them something to reject/bounce off/spitefully correct. Which, like: that seems very valid.

That said, I have recently watched friends get SUPER LONG, to my mind, edit letters, 70%+ of which are ideas & suggestions as how to tackle problems, and I honestly think my brain would explode. My editors have VERY MUCH been of the “this is a problem, pls fix” approach, rather than the “let us brainstorm!” approach, and I think that works for me….

(2) NONSENSE OF TASTE. Camestros Felapton shared a couple of riotous sci-fi themed brew labels in “Thursday’s Sunday Beer”. I won’t steal his thunder – click the link to discover his selections — only thank him for introducing us to New Zealand’s Behemoth Brewing Company where literally dozens more comical labels can be viewed, including tap badges like these:

(3) SEATTLE 2025 STATEMENT ABOUT REGISTRATION. Seattle 2025 Worldcon chair Kathy Bond today made the following statement about their registration software, and a delay in the ability to upgrade to attending membership for Seattle Worldcon bid supporters and site selection voters:

Due to a last-minute change in our registration software, our ability to process registrations and upgrades to attending memberships for site selection voters and bid supporters has been delayed past our originally projected date. We apologize for the delay. Please be assured we will honor our initial registration rates for at least two weeks after we are able to make our registration system go live.

Thank you for your patience as we iron out the bugs.

(4) BRITISH LIBRARY CONVENES ONLINE PANEL ABOUT LE GUIN. On January 23, join Theo Downes Le Guin, Ursula’s son and literary executor; Julie Phillips, her biographer, and writer Nicola Griffiths (shortlisted for the 2023 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction) for an evening of appreciation and exploration: The British Library Cultural Events – “The Realms of Ursula K. Le Guin Tickets”.

Event: 7:00 pm UK/11:00 am Pacific
Tickets are £6.50, or £3.25 for Library members

This is an online event streamed on the British Library platform. Bookers will be sent a viewing link shortly before the event and will be able to watch at any time for 48 hours after the start time.

(5) THESE REBOOTS ARE MADE FOR WALKING. [Item by Cat Eldridge.] This could be good, it could be decidedly not. “’The Avengers’ Reboot Coming; ‘Industry’ Writers Pen StudioCanal Pilot” at Deadline.

There were rumors that the project was in with HBO, but this was denied last year. It is not clear where The Avengers reboot will land. StudioCanal declined to comment as talks continue….

Macnee starred as Steed, who fought off diabolical plots against the state with his trademark bowler hat and umbrella. He had a succession of high-fashion assistants played by the likes of Diana Rigg and Honor Blackman. They broke ground for being Steed’s equal, holding their own in brawls and delivering playful quips….

Steed’s first partner wasn’t a woman at all but medical doctor David H Keel as the series spun out of Police Surgeon where Keel played the same character who asked Steed to help on a case. It would feel like a uniquely different series than the later series as the tone, Steed’s personality and stories are markedly more grounded.

Nightclub singer Venus Smith played by Julie Stevens was next, just six episodes in duration. Now we have Cathy Gale played by Honor Blackman, an anthropologist. Of course we finally got the extraordinary Emma Peel as played by Diana Rigg, described as a “talented amateur agent”.

Linda Thorson ended the series as Tara King. An actual spy, enlisted at an early age in the Intelligence Service as a trainee, under the number 69. Would I kid about that? No, I would not.

So how do you reboot a beloved classic of British television? Personally I don’t think you can.

So before you ask, I prefer not to mention that film.

(6) CLIMATE ACTION ALMANAC. The Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University has launched The Climate Action Almanac, a free collection of fiction, nonfiction, and art exploring positive climate futures, grounded in real science and in the complexities of diverse human and physical geographies. The book is presented in partnership with the MIT Press and supported by the ClimateWorks Foundation.

The Almanac features 8 individual works of science fiction, with four authors contributing two stories apiece: Vandana Singh, Gu Shi, Hannah Onoguwe, and Libia Brenda. Overall, the collection features contributions from more than 25 writers representing 17 different countries around the globe, from Argentina, Norway, and China to Nigeria, Germany, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and more. On the science fiction front, there is also a dialogue between Kim Stanley Robinson and Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

(7) NOT OK IN OK. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] A certain Oklahoma state legislator might want to take advantage of any mental health benefits available in his medical plan. Representative Justin Humphrey apparently has a possibly-unhealthy obsession with Furries. Or, perhaps specifically, with the urban myth that Furries are being provided litter boxes by school systems. According to HuffPost, “An Oklahoma Republican Wants Animal Services To Remove Furries From Schools”.

A Republican legislator in Oklahoma who once said that transgender people have “a mental illness” introduced a bill this week that would allow animal services to remove students who identify as furries from school.

The bill, which was pre-filed ahead of Oklahoma’s legislative session, would bar students who “purport to be an imaginary animal or animal species, or who engage in anthropomorphic behavior commonly referred to as furries,” from school activities.

The legislation, sponsored by Republican state Rep. Justin Humphrey, may seem farcical. But the idea that schools accommodate students who identify as animals has its roots in a long-standing — and repeatedly debunked — conservative myth.

Republican legislators and candidates have for years claimed that schools are putting litter boxes in classrooms for students who identify as cats or furries. At least 20 GOP politicians peddled these claims in 2022, and used them as a way to sound the alarm over protections and accommodations for LGBTQ+ students, NBC News reported.

“What’s most provocative about this hoax is how it turns to two key wedge issues for conservatives: educational accommodations and gender nonconformity,” Joan Donovan, a researcher on media and politics at Harvard University, told the outlet at the time…

(8) GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN. Rich Horton sadly reports that “Bad Things Come in Threes: Terry Bisson (February 12, 1942 – January 10, 2024), Howard Waldrop (September 15, 1946 – January 14, 2024), Tom Purdom (April 19, 1936 – January 14, 2024): A Tripartite Obituary” in an obituary notice for Black Gate.

On the heels of Terry Bisson’s death I heard news that Howard Waldrop had died. And this morning I woke up to learn that Tom Purdom had also died. A profound 1-2 punch to the SF community, followed by a knockout. Bisson and Waldrop were two of the most original, indeed weirdest, SF writers; and if Purdom wasn’t as downright weird as those two he was as intriguing in his slightly more traditional fashion. All three writers wrote novels, but it’s fair to say they are all best known for their short fiction….

(9) PURDOM TRIBUTE. Michael Swanwick also salutes the late author in “Tom Purdom, Heart of Philadelphia” at Flogging Babel.

This is very hard for me to write. So please excuse its infelicities. I knew this man for a full fifty years.

Tom Purdom is dead. Not enough people will know what a loss this is. While he was as vivid and eccentric an individual as any of the rest of us, he absolutely refused to promote himself. I think he believed it was ungentlemanly. But those who knew him, cherished him.

Tom was the very heart of Philadelphia science fiction long before I came to town in 1974. He and his socially elegant wife Sara Purdom had monthly open houses where all the SF community was welcome–even rowdies like Gardner Dozois and myself. They two served as role models for Marianne and me.

His gatherings were as glittery events as our crew ever saw. I recall Milton Rothman discussing the physics of nuclear-powered aircraft, and I most vividly remember Jack McKnight (who machined the first Hugo trophies in his garage) pretending to steal our then-infant son Sean at one of these soirees….

(10) PETER SCHICKELE (1935-2024). The composer also known as “P.D.Q. Bach”, Peter Schickele, died January 16 at the age of 88.

Schickele won the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album four years in a row from 1990-1994. He also won in 2000 for Best Classical Crossover album. Once, he included in a concert program book an airsickness bag, labeled “For Use In Case of Cultural Discomfort.”

His catalogue of more than 100 works includes the score for Silent Running (1972).

He hosted the radio show “Schickele Mix” for Public Radio International. In 168 episodes, produced between 1992 and 1999, he explored the elements, concepts and techniques that make music work, illustrated with classical, jazz and rock recordings, proclaiming in his introductions that “all musics are created equal.”

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born January 18, 1953 — Pamela Dean, 71. So we come this Scroll to Pamela Dean, one of the writers I consider without equivocation to be one of the best fantasy writers ever.

She’s a member of two writing groups, of which the first was the Scribblies, with Nate Bucklin, Steven Brust, Emma Bull, Kara Dalkey,Will Shetterly and Patricia Wrede.

Then there was Pre-Joycean Fellowship. Love that name! It was a shared belief that was more or lesser seriously adopted by several writers to indicate that they value 19th-century values of storytelling. Steven Brust wrote that “it is in large part a joke, and in another large part a way to start literary arguments.”

Writers who are members include Steven Brust, Emma Bull, Kara Dalkey, Pamela Dean, Neil Gaiman, Will Shetterly, Adam Stemple and Jane Yolen. No idea when the Pre-Joycean Fellowship meet up for tea and biscuits, but they must, right?

Warning: this is my list of favorites, not a comprehensive overview though it comes close.

Tam Lin, based of course on that Child ballad, and set in the early Seventies at the fictional Blackstock College in Minnesota is just brilliant. It was nominated for a Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature. It’s certainly my favorite book by her.

Another Child Ballad, “Riddles Wisely Expounded”, is the root text of her novel, Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary. I relish a story with a house that shouldn’t exist and a character who speaks in riddles. Quite delicious indeed.

And for my reading pleasure, the final set of works by her is The Secret Country trilogy consisting of The Secret Country, The Hidden Land and The Whim of the Dragon. A Royal family in considerable turmoil, witches, unicorns — what’s not to like? Really it’s superb storytelling at its best.

She’s written but thirteen short stories and a poem, six of which and the poem were published in the Laivek tales that were edited by Emma Bull and Will Shetterley who created that franchise. Yes, I’ve read the Laivek tales and they are really great fantasy. Hers are among the best here. (The one here was co-written with Patricia C. Wrede.)

All of the novels I like are now available from the usual suspects. Oh and what I thought but now know having just checked the usual sources was a single Laivek story with Wrede is actually multiple stories as it’s available here as Points of Departure: Liavek Stories, all three hundred sixty-four pages of it!

I’m very glad to see these nine Laivek stories getting published like this, and I’m hoping more Laivek writers do the same.

(12) COMICS SECTION.

Reality Check explores a new Bat-fashion accessory.

(13) WATCH ON THE RHINE. The Governator ran afoul of German customs inspectors says the Guardian: “Arnold Schwarzenegger held at Munich airport over luxury watch”.

Arnold Schwarzenegger was briefly held by customs officers at Munich airport on Wednesday after allegedly failing to declare a €26,000 (£22,000) Audemars Piguet watch the Terminator star was planning to sell at an auction in aid of his climate crisis charity.

The Austrian-born actor and former governor of California, 76, was stopped at the airport for about three hours upon arrival from Los Angeles, according to the German tabloid Bild, which quoted customs officials.

Schwarzenegger was taken aside by officers who searched his luggage and found the watch, which the actor had allegedly not declared on his arrivals customs form….

A spokesperson for the main customs office in Munich said: “We have initiated criminal tax proceedings. The watch should have been registered because it is an import.”

(14) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 101 of the Octothorpe podcast “John Has Developed Precognitive Abilities”.

Alison Scott, John Coxon and Liz Batty get the year started off correctly. We give listeners a round-up of forthcoming conventions (mostly in the UK), give Keanu Reeves a frank talking-to, and discuss some hot new SF.

(15) UP AGAINST THE PRIZE WALL. This project is not being marketed as horror for some inexplicable reason: “Chuck E. Cheese Television Series Based on Restaurant Chain Now in Development” at Yahoo!

A Chuck E. Cheese reality television series is now in development.

Per The Hollywood Reporter, Magical Elves, a production company that’s worked on shows such as Top Chef and Project Runway, is now developing a reality television series based on the Chuck E. Cheese restaurant chain.

The description of the series reads, “The format will feature stand-alone comedic physical challenges where duos of ‘big kids’ (a.k.a. adults) will compete over supersized arcade games — including pinball, air hockey, alley roller, and the human claw. The top ticket-earning duo will get the chance to exchange their tickets for prizes off the massive version of the iconic Chuck E. Cheese prize wall.”…

(16) IT’S A GAS! Futurism reports “Astronomers Puzzled by Galaxy With No Stars”.

Astronomers have accidentally found an entire galaxy that appears to have plenty of gas — but no visible stars to speak of.

Their findings, which were presented this week at the annual meeting of the American Astronomy Society, may seem paradoxical on their face, but the discovery could provide a rare, possibly never-before-seen insight that challenges our understanding of how stars and galaxies are formed….

… The eerily empty object, called J0613+52, is located 270 million light years away, according to a Big Think writeup on the discovery, and at the very least appears to be a low-surface brightness galaxy (LSB).

As the name suggests, an LSB is significantly less bright than other glimmering objects that populate the night sky because the gasses it contains are so spread out that few stars are formed.

Still, this classification holds that such a galaxy would at least have some stars, and J0613+52, with seemingly none at all, could be something even more rare and elusive: a dark, primordial galaxy.

“This could be our first discovery of a nearby galaxy made up of primordial gas,” Karen O’Neil, a senior scientist of the Green Bank Observatory, said in a statement about the research….

(17) BARBIE’S DREAM HOUSE. Neil DeGrasse Tyson geo-locates Barbieland using visual details in the movie in this clip from The Late Show with Stephen Colbert as adapted by @EnigmaWorldOfficial.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/sBTr9REX7JY

(18) YOU’RE LOCKED INSIDE WITH ME. Isn’t that what Rorschach said was the inmates’ problem? There’s good reason to call this “The Creeptastic ‘Abigail’ Trailer”. The film arrives in theaters on April 19.

Children can be such monsters!. You just can’t ‘dance’ around the subject. If you need convincing, check out Radio Silence’s first trailer for the horror film ‘Abigail,’ featuring a very, very creepy kid. After a group of would-be criminals kidnap the 12-year-old ballerina daughter of a powerful underworld figure, all they have to do to collect a $50 million ransom is watch the girl overnight. In an isolated mansion, the captors start to dwindle, one by one, as they discover that they’re locked inside with no normal little girl.

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

Pixel Scroll 1/11/24 Scroll, Pixel, Scroll, Upon Your Mystery Ship

Posted on January 11, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) BITTER KARELLA (“MIDNIGHT PALS”) Q&A. The Horror Writers Association blog continues its “Nuts & Bolts” series in an “Interview With Bitter Karella, Creator of The Midnight Pals”.

The Midnight Pals microfiction series started as a simple but inspired running gag on Twitter. Storytellers gather around a campfire a la Nickelodeon’s Are You Afraid of the Dark?, except they’re real-life horror authors past and present — Stephen King, Clive Barker, Mary Shelley, etc.

Its author, Bitter Karella, has managed to find surprising depths in that premise, delivered almost entirely in dialogue. Midnight Pals features complex, interweaving storylines, recurring characters, and trenchant social commentary, all while remaining consistently hilarious….

Q: Humor aside, it’s impressive how Midnight Pals manages to convey entire narrative arcs using little but snippets of dialogue. Do you have any pointers on story-telling?

A: One of the most powerful parts of storytelling is leaving things unsaid. A well-timed pause or a deflection can say so much — about what a character is thinking, their emotional state, what they want to say but can’t for some reason, what inner demons they refuse to confront, what blind spots they’re not even aware of. These are the moments that really let the reader ponder what’s going on in a character’s brain and I think letting the reader try and figure out for themselves what is going on gives the whole affair a bigger impact than if the writer just spells everything out for them. Because we live in a social media world where we’re all understandably nervous about getting yelled at online, I think many writers today feel uncomfortable with the idea that a reader might misunderstand them and they feel compelled to answer every question before it’s asked. I struggle a lot with that as well … when I write a punchline, I want to write it so that there’s no ambiguity about what’s happening, so that everyone can get it. But sometimes the phrasing that hits best is also going to be the phrasing most ripe for misinterpretation or sometimes it’s just funnier (or more interesting) to leave something out. You just have to trust your reader to connect the dots for themselves, sometimes!

(2) AUTHOR BIO ADVICE. Nicola Griffith makes recommendations: “Author Bios: Saying the quiet part out loud”.

…Nobody really talks about about Author Bios. Consequently, when I was first asked to write one (in the late 80s, for Interzone, or maybe Iron Women) I hadn’t a clue where to begin. If I’d thought about them at all I probably assumed somebody else wrote them. After all, as my English, trained-to-not-blow-my-own-horn inner voice reminded me, If you have to tell people you’re important/interesting, you’re not. Looking back, I’m glad I was clueless about this kind of self-promotion. I might never have begun this writing thing if I’d had any idea how much being a working novelist depends on blasting out your own brassy fanfares all the time, about everything: not just social media but essays, interviews, panels, readings, think pieces, puff pieces, listicles, blog posts, podcasts… It’s a very large part of the job. And all those things rest on the bio—usually between 500 and 1,000 words for your own website (the Inside Bio), and anything from 25 to 200 words elsewhere (the Outside Bio)¹…

(3) LEARNEDLEAGUE. [Item by David Goldfarb.] Two SFF-related themed quizzes were featured this week on LearnedLeague. Here’s a link to “Spaceballs: The One-Day Special!” and here’s one to “The Sandman“.

I’ve actually never seen Spaceballs, so I didn’t take that quiz. Sandman, by contrast, I’ve been reading since 1988. I got 12/12 right on that one fairly easily (I did need the embedded hints in one question) but wasn’t in the winners’ circle because the scoring involves guessing what questions will be the hardest, and I failed at that. My old friend Tom Galloway got a perfect score, though.

(4) SHADE TREK. “Star Trek Series Erased From Existence By Sci-Fi Show, Is It Revenge?” asks Giant Freakin Robot.

Star Trek definitely exists in the universe of Ronald D. Moore’s Apple TV+ series For All Mankind, but does every show from the franchise exist? A recent episode has fans speculating that Moore is purposefully suggesting that Star Trek: Voyager wasn’t made in the For All Mankind universe.

If true, it seems like Moore would be throwing some slight shade toward screenwriter Brannon Braga, whom Moore had a falling out with, causing him to leave Voyager.

For All Mankind takes place in an alternate reality where there is a global space race, and one of the interesting aspects of the show is seeing the slight differences in the timelines from our reality. The Star Trek: Voyager theory popped up when a Reddit user pointed out that the character Danielle (Krys Marshall), the first African-American woman in space, sent a message to her stepson Isaiah about the birth of his daughter.

In the scene, Danielle says, “I know you hate Star Trek, but you better get used to it, because I’m gonna make sure my grandbaby is a full-blown Trekkie,” adding, “That’s right, we’re gonna watch all the series, all three of them.”

While that statement may seem innocuous enough, the scene takes place in 2003, when there were six series in the franchise, including The Original Series, The Animated Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise….

(5) SCRIPT OF THE UNMADE DUNE SEQUEL. Max Evry tells Ars Technica “I found David Lynch’s lost Dune II script”. That the 1984 Dune movie was low-earning and brutally reviewed is part of the reason it was lost.

… During the two years I spent putting together my book A Masterpiece in Disarray: David Lynch’s Dune—An Oral History, I had no luck uncovering Lynch’s script for Dune II, despite Frank Herbert telling Prevue magazine in December 1984 that he possessed a copy and was advising Lynch on it. “Now that we speak the same ‘language,’ it’s much easier for both of us to make progress, especially with the screenplays,” Herbert told the publication. Then, in July 2023, within the Frank Herbert archives at California State University, Fullerton, I came across a slim folder with a sticky note declaring “Dune Messiah script revisions,” addressed to the second floor of VFX man Barry Nolan’s office in Burbank where Lynch supervised the final effects shoots and editing on Dune….

… Of the many differences between Dune Messiah in novel form and David Lynch’s script, the biggest lay in the opening pages, which detail what happens in the aftermath of the scene in the first Dune movie when the Harkonnens bombed the Atreides’ fortress in Arrakeen, the capitol of the desert planet Arrakis. In the hallway where Duncan Idaho (Richard Jordan) was shot in the head, his shielded dead body still floats on the floor, humming and sparking.

From out of the shadows emerges a familiar face: the Baron’s Doctor (Leonardo Cimino). Thought to be the only speaking part created specifically for Dune by Lynch, we learn this Doctor was actually Scytale, a shape-shifting “face dancer” crucial to the plot of Herbert’s second book. Going back to Dune ’84, you may not have noticed Cimino’s Doctor accompanied Baron Harkonnen during the Arrakeen attack. The Doc is absent after that, even as the Baron yells creepily, “Where’s my doctor?” That’s because Doc/Scytale absconded with Duncan’s body. This Easter egg is Lynchian world-building at its best.

Scytale’s 12-year odyssey reanimating “dead Duncan Idaho” into the ghola named Hayt on the nightmarish Bene Tleilax world (mentioned by Paul in Dune) constitutes the entire opening 10 minutes of the script. Lynch calls the planet Tleilax “a dark metal world with canals of steaming chemicals and acids.” Those canals, Lynch writes, are lined with “dead pink small test tube animals.” Initiating Dune II with a focus on Scytale foregrounds him to primary antagonist, unlike Herbert’s book where myriad conspirators work against Paul….

(6) TURN OUT THE LIGHTSABER, THE PARTY’S OVER. And speaking of unmade sequels – which two famous producers did in The Hollywood Reporter interview: “David Benioff, Dan Weiss Reveal Their Star Wars Movie: The First Jedi”.

…On the Star Wars front, the duo confirm media reports from 2019 that they were looking at the early days of the Jedi, but added some details.

“We wanted to do The First Jedi,” Benioff says. “Basically, how the Jedi Order came to be, why it came to be, the first lightsaber …”

“And we were annoyed as hell when [Rian Johnson, the duo’s longtime friend and 3 Body Problem producer] called his movie The Last Jedi,” Weiss says dryly. “He completely destroyed the obvious title for what we were working on.”

Asked what went wrong, Benioff says, “[Lucasfilm] ended up not wanting to do a First Jedi story. We had a very specific story idea in mind, and ultimately they decided they didn’t want to do that. And we totally get it. It’s their company and their IP, but we weren’t the droids they were looking for.”

The duo were far from the only ones that had their Star Wars movie taken away. Lucasfilm also decided against making Star Wars projects from top creatives like Kevin Feige, Patty Jenkins and Damon Lindelof….

(7) BRITISH LIBRARY RECOVERY. [Item by Bruce D. Arthurs.] The British Library announced that some of their major services will begin to be available again starting next week, following last October’s crippling cyber-attack. “Restoring our services – an update”. There is still much work to be done.

As we begin a new year, I’m pleased to confirm that – as promised before Christmas – next Monday 15 January will see the return online of one of the most important datasets for researchers around the world: the main British Library catalogue of over 36 million records, including details of our printed books, journals, maps, music scores and rare books. Its absence from the internet has been perhaps the single most visible impact of the criminal cyber attack which took place at the end of October last year, and I want to acknowledge how difficult this has been for all our users.

When the catalogue returns it won’t be in quite the form that long-standing users will be familiar with. Most notably it will be ‘read-only’, so although you will be able to search for items as before, the process for checking availability and ordering them for to use in the Reading Rooms will be different. We’ll be providing more detailed information and practical guidance when the catalogue goes online on Monday….

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born January 11, 1961 — Jasper Fforde, 63. I, like most folk I suspect, first discovered the somewhat eccentric charms of his writing in the Eyre Affair, the first of his novels with Tuesday Next, the Special Operation Network, Literary Detectives (SO-27) who could literally enter the great and not so great works of English literature.

Bidder and Stoughton published it twenty-three years ago. I’d like to say the Eyre Affair was a much desired literary property but he says there were seventy-six publisher that he sent his manuscript to. I’m surprised there were that many publishers in the U.K. that would have been interested…

There would be six in the series in all — this novel followed by Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, Something Rotten, First Among Sequels, One of our Thursdays Is Missing and The Woman Who Died a Lot. I won’t say that they were consistently great as they weren’t and the humor sometimes wore more than a bit thin, but overall I like the series considerably.

Next up, and I wasn’t eggspecting to like it, yes I know bad pun there, is The Big Over Easy which is set in the same universe as the Thursday Next novels though I don’t remember any overlapping character twenty years after reading them. It reworks his first written novel, which absolutely failed to find any publisher whatsoever.

Its original title was Who Killed Humpty Dumpty? Errr, wasn’t there a novel involving a rabbit by almost that name? It had a sequel of sorts in The Fourth Bear. Both are quite more than bearably good.

I have not read his dystopian novel Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffronwhich is about a future Britain where everyone there is judged by how they perceive colors. Suspect someone with color blindness like myself wouldn’t be welcome there. A friend who did read it like it a lot.

His Dragonslayer series, also known as The Chronicles of Kazam, are a YA affair and a great deal of fun indeed.

He’s got several one-offs but I know absolutely nothing about them.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Hi and Lois shows high-speed communication doesn’t depend on the internet.
Brewster Rockit’s answer doesn’t suck. Or does it?

(10) STRACZYNSKI Q&A. “Hope and Strange: PW Talks with J. Michael Straczynski” at Publishers Weekly.

You’ve said before that, with established mainstream comics characters, you view your job as asking unlikely questions. Could you expand on that approach?

[JMS]: Spider-Man is a good example of that. For 50-plus years, we’ve known that Peter Parker got bit by a spider and got his powers. I like to look under the hood and say, oh, wait, hang on a second. The spider was irradiated—we know that part of it. But did the spider have the powers from the radiation, and therefore gave it to Peter, or was that spider bringing the powers to him in the first place, and had to get to him before the radiation killed it? Because the second question implies intent. And the moment you put intent into that equation, it changes everything. It opens up whole new possibilities of storytelling. Out of that one question came the Spider Totem idea, but also the Spider-Verse. All the things you’ve seen since then from the Spider-Verse, the characters and movies, and the animated stuff, all that came from that one unlikely question—that implied intent….

(11) UNCANNY MAGAZINE’S SUBMISSION SCORECARD. A little peek behind the scenes at a leading sff magazine.

(12) MORE AI FAKERY ON AMAZON. “Scammy AI-Generated Book Rewrites Are Flooding Amazon” reports WIRED.

When AI researcher Melanie Mitchell published Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans in 2019, she set out to clarify AI’s impact. A few years later, ChatGPT set off a new AI boom—with a side effect that caught her off guard. An AI-generated imitation of her book appeared on Amazon, in an apparent scheme to profit off her work. It looks like another example of the ecommerce giant’s ongoing problem with a glut of low-quality AI-generated ebooks.

Mitchell learned that searching Amazon for her book surfaced not only her own tome but also another ebook with the same title, published last September. It was only 45 pages long and it parroted Mitchell’s ideas in halting, awkward language. The listed author, “Shumaila Majid,” had no bio, headshot, or internet presence, but clicking on that name brought up dozens of similar books summarizing recently published titles.

Mitchell guessed the knock-off ebook was AI-generated, and her hunch appears to be correct. WIRED asked deepfake-detection startup Reality Defender to analyze the ersatz version of Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans, and its software declared the book 99 percent likely AI-generated. “It made me mad,” says Mitchell, a professor at the Santa Fe Institute. “It’s just horrifying how people are getting suckered into buying these books.”…

(13) ELFQUEST SCRIPT IS GO. “’Elfquest’ Animated Series Based On Comics In Works At Fox” reports Deadline.

Fox has given a script commitment to Elfquest, a one-hour animated drama series based on the epic fantasy adventure comic series created by Wendy and Richard Pini, from Rodney Rothman and Adam Rosenberg’s Modern Magic. Susan Hurwitz Arneson (The Last Amazon) will pen the series adaptation and serve as showrunner and executive producer.

Created in 1978, Elfquest, published by Dark Horse Comics, is a fantasy story about a community of elves and other fictional species who struggle to survive and coexist on a primitive Earth-like planet with two moons….

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Daniel Dern.] The fan-relevant part starts at 3:53 into the video, “Stephen [Colbert] Plays ‘Ick Or No Ick’ With Taylor Tomlinson, Host Of “After Midnight”. Listen through Colbert’s follow-up to Tomlinson’s response, until he closes with a plug for her new show.

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

Pixel Scroll 1/6/24 10 Pixels To Scroll, Number 9 Will SHOCK You

Posted on January 6, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) 2024 IS LAST YEAR KRESS AND WILLIAMS RUNNING TAOS TOOLBOX. Taos Toolbox, a two-week master class in writing science fiction and fantasy helmed by authors Nancy Kress and Walter Jon Williams, is open for submissions.

And as part of the announcement Williams told Facebook readers, “This will be the last year that Nancy and I will be doing this. Taos Toolbox may continue under new management (it’s under discussion), but Nancy and I won’t be running things.”

This year’s Taos Toolobox workshop will take place June 2-15, 2024, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Special Guest for 2024 is the creator of The Expanse, James S.A. Corey, in reality the writing team of Daniel Abraham and Ty Frank…

Special lecturers this year include Jeffe Kennedy, who currently holds the office of President of the Science Fiction Writers of America. She’s been widely published and has special expertise in indiepub, and owns her own press.

The second special lecturer is Diana Rowland, who at various times been an Air Force pilot, a Las Vegas card dealer, a detective for a sheriff’s office in Louisiana, and a morgue assistant, occupations that contributed to writing her Demon and White Trash Zombie series.

(2) MISSING ROYALTIES. Authors are the hidden victims of the cyber-attack on the British Library, which has prevented them receiving an annual rights payment. The Guardian explains: “Richard Osman among authors missing royalties amid ongoing cyber-attack on British Library”.

…In February 2023, those authors would have been paid thousands of pounds each from Public Lending Right (PLR) payments – money earned by writers, illustrators and translators each time a book is borrowed. But not this year.

Ongoing fallout from a massive cyber-attack means that PLR payments will not be paid as expected while the British Library, which manages the service, fights to restore its crippled systems.

Every time an author’s book is borrowed from a library, they get about 13p, capped at £6,600 a year. To authors like Osman and JK Rowling, whose first Harry Potter book was also on last year’s top read list, this might be a drop in the ocean, but for many authors whose books are library favourites it is a different matter….

The British Library was hit by a cyber-attack at the end of October. At the time, its chief executive, Sir Roly Keating, said that access to even basic communication tools such as email was initially lost. “We took immediate action to isolate and protect our network but significant damage was already done.

“Having breached our systems, the attackers had destroyed their route of entry and much else besides, encrypting or deleting parts of our IT estate.”…

(3) STEVE VERTLIEB MEDICAL UPDATE. File 770 contributor Steve Vertlieb was briefly hospitalized after suffering a mini-stroke on January 4. He told Facebook friends:

Well, there’s good news and bad news early in the new year. The bad news is, that while at needed physical therapy for my balance on Thursday afternoon, I began babbling unintelligibly. I knew what I wanted to say to my trainers but, when it physically left my lips, it became distorted beyond recognition, rather like mumbling incoherently in my sleep.

They called an ambulance and rushed me to nearby Nazareth Hospital where I spent the next twenty-four hours.

I continued complaining, while in the ambulance, that I simply wanted to go home but they drove me, instead, to the Emergency Room.

I began recovering once we reached the waiting hospital. However, to be on the safe side, they kept me overnight in a hospital room. I knew that I must have been returning to “normal,” however, when I began cracking jokes.

It appears that I must have suffered a “T.I.A,” or what’s called a “mini-stroke.” However, following that isolated assault on my sensory nerves, the seemingly isolated attack that apparently came out of nowhere somehow abated and I’ve recovered.

I had a single previous occurrence some eighteen months earlier on what was to have been my last night in Los Angeles. It’s frightening. I can tell you that. The wiring in your brain goes … you should excuse the expression … “haywire.”

I asked the doctors what I can do to keep this from happening again. They said “You’re doing it. You’re taking all the right medications. Just keep an eye out for trouble signs in future.”

What’s the good news, you may well ask?????????? Well, the simple answer is that I’m Home once more!!!!!!!!!! Unlike the esteemed Mr. Bond, I’m “shaken, yet stirred.” “Toto, We’re home …. We’re Home.”

(4) SFWA’S COPYRIGHT OFFICE RESPONSE. Following up SFWA’s October 30th comments to the Copyright Office, they had the opportunity to respond to some of the many other comments received. With over 9,000 responses, SFWA “focused on specific aspects of the conversation around fair use that we felt were not given due attention, as well as to raise concerns that are unique to our community.” Their 10-page response document can be downloaded from Regulations.gov at the link.

One topic SFWA discussed is the scraping of content that is offered free to readers by online sff magazines.

…SFWA acknowledges the problem of generative AI scraping pirated material published as copy-protected ebooks by professional publishers, but SFWA additionally has the unique position of representing many authors who have fought to make their work available for free for human readers. Over the last twenty years, many science fiction and fantasy authors of short fiction have embraced the open Internet, believing that it is good for society and for a flourishing culture that art be available to their fellow human beings regardless of ability to pay. That availability is not without cost; it is quite difficult to bring an online magazine to market, and being freely available has never meant abandoning the moral and legal rights of the authors, nor the obligation to enter into legal contracts to compensate authors for their work and spell out how it may and may not be used. But on balance, many writers and fans believe that freely sharing stories is a good thing that enriches us all.

The current content-scraping regime preys on that good-faith sharing of art as a connection between human minds and the hard work of building a common culture. The decision to publish creative work online to read and share for free is not guaranteed; it is a trade-off of many factors including piracy, audience, and the simple (albeit elusive) ability to make a living. In too many comments to enumerate here, individual authors have made clear that they regard the use of their work for training AI to be another important factor in that mix, and the ultimate effect on the short fiction marketplace and its role in our culture is far from certain. Bluntly, many authors do not want their work taken for this purpose, and that cannot be ignored.

“If my work is just going to get stolen, and if some company’s shareholders are going to get the benefit of my labor and skill without compensating me, I see no reason to continue sharing my work with the public — and a lot of other artists will make the same choice.” (N. K. Jemisin, COLC-2023-0006- 0521)

The developers of AI systems seem to believe that a green light to use scraped copyrighted work will result in a clear field for them to continue freeloading forever; we fear rather that it will result in large swathes of artistic work removed from the commons, locked behind paywalls and passwords to the detriment of all….

(5) AURORA AWARDS. [Item by Danny Sichel.] The Eligibility Lists for this year’s Aurora Awards are open. If you’re aware of any genre work produced by Canadians, submit it. (CSFFA membership required — $10 – to make an addition to the lists.)

(6) WESTERCON 2025 UP FOR ADOPTION. Kevin Standlee announced a “Committee Formed to Select Site of 2025 Westercon” at Westercon.org.

Because no bid filed to host Westercon 77, selection of the site of the 2025 Westercon devolved upon the 2023 Westercon Business Meeting held at Westercon 75 (in conjunction with Loscon 49) in Los Angeles on November 25, 2023. The Westercon 75 Business Meeting voted to award Westercon 77 to a “Caretaker Committee” consisting of Westercon 74 Chair Kevin Standlee and Vice Chair Lisa Hayes with the understanding that they would attempt to select a site and committee to run Westercon 77 and transfer the convention to that committee.

Any site in North America west of 104° west longitude or in Hawaii is eligible to host Westercon 75. There are no other restrictions other than the bid has to be for dates in calendar year 2025. All other restrictions in the Westercon Bylaws are suspended, per section 3.16 of the Westercon Bylaws.

To submit a bid to the 2025 Caretaker Committee to host Westercon 77, contact Kevin Standlee at [email protected], or send a paper application to Lisa Hayes at PO Box 242, Fernley NV 89408. Include information about the proposed site, the proposed dates, and the proposed operating committee. The Caretaker Committee asks that groups interested in hosting Westercon 77 contact them by the end of February 2024.

Should the Caretaker Committee be unable to make a determination for a site for Westercon 77 by Westercon 76 in Salt Lake City (July 4-7, 2024), and assuming that no bid files to host Westercon 77, the Caretaker Committee will ask the Business Meeting of Westercon 76 for additional guidance on how to handle Westercon Site Selection.

(7) MOVING FORWARD – AT OLD MAN SPEED. Tor.com notified those not reading Bluesky that “Netflix’s Adaptation of John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War Is Still In The Works”.

We first found out that Netflix optioned the rights to John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War over six years ago, back in December 2017. It’s not uncommon for things to get optioned but never get made (Old Man’s War, in fact, had been previously optioned by Paramount and Syfy without making it to the production stage), but it sounds like the Netflix movie adaptation is still moving forward.

Scalzi gave an update on the project over on Bluesky yesterday, where he said that work on it is “slowly but surely moving along.”…

(8) COPPOLA’S NEXT APOCALYPSE. Another long-awaited sff project finished filming last year and should actually get released sometime: “Francis Ford Coppola Says ‘Megalopolis’ Is Coming Soon” at Collider.

Francis Ford Coppola is renowned as the mastermind behind some of the greatest pieces of cinema in history but as all legends do, he refuses to rest on his laurels and he’s preparing to release his first film in over a decade with his self-funded star-studded sci-fi drama, Megalopolis. The film has been mired by a number of setbacks, but filming wrapped on the project back in March. And now, we won’t have much longer to wait for it to arrive, as Coppola revealed on the latest episode of The Accutron Show.

The film has an eye-watering array of talent attached, including Adam Driver, Forest Whitaker, Nathalie Emmanuel, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Chloe Fineman, Kathryn Hunter, Dustin Hoffman, DB Sweeney, Talia Shire, Jason Schwartzman, Bailey Ives, Grace Vanderwaal, James Remar, and Giancarlo Esposito.

All that’s known so far about the film so far is that it has a futuristic setting and that it will revolve around the idea of humanity attempting to build some sort of utopian society in the wake of a natural disaster. Other than that, it’s anybody’s guess, and Coppola isn’t up for explaining more quite yet.

(9) WAS THIS THE BEST SF OF 2023? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Every January the SF² Concatenation have an informal survey as to the best SF novels and films of the previous year. It is strictly informal and a bit of fun, enabling team members see what more than one of the others rate. The years have shown that this informal survey has form in that invariably some of the chosen works go on to be short-listed, and sometimes even win, major SF awards later in the year. SF² Concatenation have just advance-posted their selection for 2023 as part of the “Best Science Fiction of the Year Possibly?” post. Scroll down to see how previous years’ choices fared…

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born January 6, 1905 — Eric Frank Russell. (Died 1978.) So let’s talk about the British writer Eric Frank Russell. His first published piece of fiction was in the first issue of Tales of Wonder called “The Prr-r-eet” (1937). (Please don’t tell me it was about cats.) He also had a letter of comment in Astounding Stories that year. He wrote a lot of such comments down the years.

Just two years later, his first novel, Sinister Barrier, would be published as the cover story as the first issue of Unknown. His second novel, Dreadful Sanctuary, would be serialized in Astounding, Unknown’s sister periodical, in 1948.

At Clevention, “Allamagoosa” would win a Short Story Hugo. The Great Explosion novel garnered a Prometheus Hall of Fame Award.

Now let’s note some reworkings he did as I like them a lot. Men, Martians and Machines published in 1955 is four related novellas of space adventures at their very best.

The 1956 Three to Conquer, nominated for a Hugo at NY Con II is a reworking of the earlier Call Him Dead magazine serial that deals with an alien telepath and very well at that. Finally Next of Kin, also known as The Space Willies, shows him being comic, something he does oh so well. It was a novella-length work in Astounding first.

And then there’s the Design for Great-Day novel which was written by Alan Dean Foster. It’s an expansion by him based off a 1953 short story of the same name by Russell. I’m pretty familiar with Foster has done but this isn’t ringing even the faintest of bells. Who’s read it?

He wrote an extraordinary amount of short stories, around seventy by my guess.

(My head trauma means numbers and I have at best a tenuous relationship. I once counted the turkeys left over after we distributed them at a food pantry I staffed pre-knee injury. Three times I counted. I got, if I remember correctly now, twelve, fifteen and eighteen birds. I had someone else do it.)

Short Stories Collection is the only one available at the usual suspects. He’s an author who needs a definitive short story collection done for him.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

Free Range shows there are always lines.
Edith Pritchett’s cartoon for the Guardian recalls how “I climbed the tube station steps and entered another dimension.” Steven French adds, “Of marginal genre interest but having walked up those steps, this made me laugh!”

(12) PIONEERING WOMAN COMICS ARTIST RETIRES. BoingBoing pays tribute as “Aquaman, Metamorpho, and Brenda Starr cartoonist Ramona Fradon retires”.

Famed cartoonist Ramona Fradon is retiring at the age of 97, according to a January 3 announcement from her comic art dealer Catskill Comics….

An extremely long run, indeed. Her comic book career started in 1950, and her career highlights include a 1959 revamp and long run on Aquaman, the co-creation of DC’s offbeat superhero Metamorpho with writer Bob Haney in 1965, a run on Super Friends in the 1970s, and the comic strip Brenda Starr, Reporter from 1980-1995.

She also was a pioneer, as one of the only women working in comics during the first decades of her career.

Cartoonist and curator of the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco Andrew Farago wrote on BlueSky, “Ramona Fradon retires today at the age of 97, just a little shy of Al Jaffee’s retirement age of 99. Not sure if that means that cartooning keeps you young or if it just means that cartooning keeps you broke, but what a body of work she’s produced over the past eight decades!”…

(13) WHAT THEY WILL READ IN 2024. “’I want some light in my life’: eight writers make their new year reading resolutions “ – the Guardian’s collection of quotes includes a declaration from Sheena Patel.

‘I’m turning to sci-fi and dystopia’
Sheena Patel

I have a fascination with sci-fi that is purely theoretical. I often think about reading it but never make any attempt to go near such books because I am afraid of the imagination I will find there. Perhaps I haven’t felt I can really access the genre because sci-fi feels like what Black and Brown people can go through on a daily basis. We’re still in an age of empire, even though we are distracted from this knowledge.

I do love sci-fi films though. I had a true epiphany when I saw Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin at the cinema. It was so strange, the alien mixed with the mundane, documentary spliced with fantastical set pieces. Next year I think I will read the Michel Faber book from which the movie was adapted.

In 2024 I also want to tackle Frank Herbert’s Dune books. Earlier this year, I watched the film on my laptop maybe 50 times. At first, I hated it, but then I totally fell in love with it – the visual representation of different worlds opened my mind. Throat singing and nomadic desert tribes could be used as a mood board for the future, but this is already happening now in communities that are regarded as “primitive”. It is the future because it is eternal – such a beautiful thought.

We are fed so much dystopia that reading it in fiction feels hard – but, as the world burns, maybe it is a good idea to hear from artists about where we might be heading. So the other three titles I will try are classics: Octavia E Butler’s Kindred, Stanisław Lem’s Solaris and The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin. The present feels so bleak, and our vision of the future so foreshortened, it almost seems like tempting fate – but, without science fiction, how can we dream?

I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel is published in paperback by Granta

(14) HOOFING IT TO MOUNT DOOM. They say “One does not simply walk into Mordor,” but apparently they exaggerated. The Conqueror Virtual Challenges is a thematic program to encourage you to exercise by walking, running, and biking, with solo variations costing from $49.95 to bundles costing $299.95 and up. This link takes you to All 8 LOTR Conqueror Virtual Challenges.

Follow Frodo and Aragorn on an epic journey across Middle-earth with the ULTIMATE THE LORD OF THE RINGS Virtual Challenge Series.

Walk, run or cycle all the way from The Shire to Mount Doom in an epic adventure with one goal – destroying the One Ring. Complete this unforgettable saga by following Aragorn into battle and restoring peace to Middle-earth.

(15) CITY OF HEROES. “11 years after this cult classic superhero MMO was shut down, the original publisher has given its blessing to the community’s custom servers” reports GamesRadar+.

Despite the shutdown of the beloved superhero MMO City of Heroes over a decade ago, fans have been keeping it alive for years with a variety of custom server efforts. Now, one of those projects has just gotten the blessing of the game’s original publisher and license holder, NCSoft.

City of Heroes: Homecoming made the surprising announcement earlier today that “Homecoming has been granted a license to operate a City of Heroes server and further develop the game – subject to conditions and limitations under the contract.” The Homecoming project will remain free and donation-funded, and while there are a few changes to how the project is being managed, it doesn’t look like players will see any meaningful differences in the game itself.

“NCSoft has always had (and will continue to have) the right to demand that Homecoming shuts down,” as the announcement notes. “This agreement provides a framework under which Homecoming can operate the game in a way that complies with NCSoft’s wishes in hopes of minimizing the chances of that happening. We’ve had a really positive and productive relationship with NCSoft for over four years now, so we do not anticipate there being any issues.”…

…The question mark that currently weighs over the license for Homecoming is what this means for other custom server projects, like City of Heroes Rebirth. Today’s announcement notes that “other servers are out of scope” for this license, and the devs say that “our hope is that our license will help us consolidate our userbase with City of Heroes fans from other servers.” There’s already a bit of fear in the community that other private servers might start to disappear following this news, but only time will tell what will happen on that front….

(16) RECORDS BROKEN. Gizmodo tells why “Doctor Who’s New Streaming Home Has Been a Huge Success” – that is, for viewers who can accesss the BBC platform.

To celebrate Doctor Who’s 60th anniversary last year, the BBC made a huge, unprecedented move: for the first time, almost the entirety of Doctor Who, from episodes from 1963 all the way up to the then-airing anniversary specials, would be made available to stream in the UK in one place, on the BBC’s own streaming platform iPlayer. And it turns out doing so has helped the BBC break streaming records over the festive period.

The corporation has announced that Doctor Who—and most specifically Doctor Who episodes from 2005 onwards—were streamed 10.01 million times over the week between Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve, helping the platform break a previous record for streamed content for the week between January 2 and January 8, 2023, with 177 million programs being streamed in total….

It’s hard to say just how that success has panned out internationally, however. The BBC’s new deal with Disney to stream Doctor Who on Disney+ everywhere but the UK and Ireland only covers new episodes from the 60th anniversary onwards—other contemporary and classic Doctor Who access is spread out on various platforms elsewhere, such as Britbox for classic Doctor Who and Max for post-2005 Doctor Who.

(17) MY BLUE HEAVEN(S). [Item by Mike Kennedy.] So you know how astronomers are always using false color images to show this detail or that detail or what something would look like if it was only in the visible spectrum or some such? well, those can leave lasting misimpression.

New images showing color-corrected true-color likenesses of Uranus and Neptune show the latter ice giant—rather than being a dark blue—is only slightly darker than the former. “True blue: Neptune only slightly deeper colour than Uranus, say Oxford scientists” in the Guardian.

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kevin Standlee, Kathy Sullivan, Danny Sichel, 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.]

Pixel Scroll 12/9/23 To Seek Out New Files And New Pixelations

Posted on December 9, 2023 by Mike Glyer

(1) NEWS FROM ‘THE SECRET LIBRARY’. [Item by Steven French.] For those Filer folk who might be around Yorkshire over Xmas here’s a piece on the Leeds Library blog about their current exhibition, Fantasy Realms of Imagination, scheduled to run in parallel with the much grander affair at the British Library.

Having said that last bit, the British Library for all its architectural style, doesn’t have the Victorian grandeur of Leeds Central Library:

Our new exhibition, inspired by Fantasy: Realms of Imagination at the British Library opened in November and aims to bring a bit of magic to Leeds Central Library over the cold winter months, before touring to community libraries across the city.

The beautiful grade II* listed building with its winding staircases and heraldic beasts lends itself perfectly to the fantasy theme and this exhibition encourages visitors to embark on their own quest to explore parts of the library they may not have ventured to before.

(2) STEVEN BARNES PENS STAR WARS NOVEL. “’Star Wars: The Glass Abyss’ Revealed; New Novel by Steven Barnes Finds Mace Windu Honoring Qui-Gon’s Legacy” at StarWarsNews.net.

The Phantom Menace is celebrating its 25th anniversary next year. Therefore, cue Lucasfilm’s foolproof promotional strategy of new books. StarWars.com has announced that Mace Windu will headline a new novel titled Star Wars: The Glass Abyss. Coming August 6, 2024, the novel will be written by Steven Barnes, returning to the Star Wars-fold for the first time since 2004’s The Cestus Deception.

Taking place immediately after The Phantom Menace, The Glass Abyss will send Mace Windu on a mission to fulfill Qui-Gon Jinn’s final request. The twist? This request is specifically for Mace, only to be received after the fallen Jedi Master’s death….

(3) LAW TACKLES A.I. RISKS. “E.U. Agrees on Landmark Artificial Intelligence Rules” reports the New York Times.

European Union policymakers agreed on Friday to a sweeping new law to regulate artificial intelligence, one of the world’s first comprehensive attempts to limit the use of a rapidly evolving technology that has wide-ranging societal and economic implications.

The law, called the A.I. Act, sets a new global benchmark for countries seeking to harness the potential benefits of the technology, while trying to protect against its possible risks, like automating jobs, spreading misinformation online and endangering national security. The law still needs to go through a few final steps for approval, but the political agreement means its key outlines have been set.

European policymakers focused on A.I.’s riskiest uses by companies and governments, including those for law enforcement and the operation of crucial services like water and energy. Makers of the largest general-purpose A.I. systems, like those powering the ChatGPT chatbot, would face new transparency requirements. Chatbots and software that creates manipulated images such as “deepfakes” would have to make clear that what people were seeing was generated by A.I., according to E.U. officials and earlier drafts of the law.

Use of facial recognition software by police and governments would be restricted outside of certain safety and national security exemptions. Companies that violated the regulations could face fines of up to 7 percent of global sales….

(4) PODCAST-PALOOZA. [Item by Dann.] A bonus episode of The Reason Podcast recently featured Reason Editor Peter Suderman interviewing former Reason Editor-in-Chief Virginia Postrel and American Enterprise Institute Fellow James Pethoukoukis about the future and how we might get a better future. Mr. Pethoukoukis is the author of the recently released The Conservative Futurist—How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised.

The interview included a discussion of works by Isaac Asimov, Neal Stephenson, and Ian Banks. It also included some thoughts on whether sci-fi has changed modes from an optimistic vision of a future enabled by technology to a pessimistic vision of the future.

Author and Podcaster Paul J. Hale recently concluded his 7-part series comparing JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit with the Rankin/Bass animated movie as well as the recent trilogy of movies from New Line Cinema. The series starts here.

He has begun a new series comparing Robert Bloch’s Psycho with the Alfred Hitchcock movie of the same name. No idea about how many episodes there will be in the Psycho series. Thus far, two episodes have been released.

(5) OSCAR WORTHY BIRD AND BOT. Variety says these are “10 Movies Oscars Voters Should Watch”. They include The Boy and the Heron and Robot Dreams.

The Boy and the Heron

Animator Hayao Miyazaki is renowned for conjuring up dazzling cinematic worlds. And at 82, he hasn’t lost a step. His latest movie is a visual feast, filled with magical lands and creatures only he could dream up. It’s also a deeply personal tale, one that unfolds against the backdrop of World War II Japan, as a boy undertakes a perilous journey that helps him come to terms with the death of his mother. The first best picture nomination for a non-Disney animated movie would be worthy recognition for Miyazaki’s contributions to the medium.

(6) DOWN THESE FAE STREETS. [Item by Bruce D. Arthurs.] Douglas A. Anderson posts about Raymond Chandler’s few published fantasy stories, and his (unfulfilled) desire to write more in their vein. “Raymond Chandler’s Fantasies” at Wormwoodiana.

…In a letter written on 19 June 1956, Chandler wrote:

“I love fantastic stories and have sketches of perhaps a dozen that I should love to see in print. They are not science fiction. My idea of the fantastic story–possibly a little out of date–is that everything is completely realistic except for the basic impossible premise. Both of those I have mentioned are concerned with vanishing or invisibility. I have one about a man who got into fairyland but they wouldn’t let him stay. Another about a princess who traded her tongue for a ruby and then was sorry and it had to be retrieved. One about a young society novelist whose father was a magician and kept making a duke disappear so his son could make love to the duchess. I may add that the duke took it with good grace (a joke) although he was rather annoyed. That sort of thing. Quite rare nowadays.”

(7) GAIMAN Q&A. “Neil Gaiman’s Son Thinks His Dad Is in Charge of ‘Doctor Who’” – excerpts of the New York Times’ conversation with the author.

‘Doctor Who’

I loved “Doctor Who” growing up. In fact, the moment that I felt probably most like God was in 2009, getting to write my first episode. But the trouble with me having written a couple of episodes is that my 8-year-old is now convinced that I must be in charge of “Doctor Who.” He’ll come over to me and say, “Dad, this needs to happen.”…

Charles Addams at the New York Public Library

I remember discovering that if you went up to the third floor on the way to the men’s toilets there was a little room with Charles Addams cartoons on display. I would go there four times a year and the cartoons would be changed out. Then one day they were putting them away. It was explained to me that the artwork had been a loan by his ex-wife. But the agreement was that as soon as everything had been displayed, it was over. I still think that’s heartbreaking….

(8) THE TRUTH WAS OUT THERE. “Internet sleuths identify lost ‘X-Files’ song, solving 25-year mystery” reports the Washington Post. (Gift link to article.)

Lauren Ancona wasn’t really paying attention to the “X-Files” episode she had on her TV on Monday night. Then she heard the song. It played as a character walked into a rural bar, a lilting country track that set a soothing tone as a singer crooned: “In my memory you are moonlight, starlight …”

Ancona liked it. She paused the episode, rewound it and opened Shazam, an app that identifies songs, but it couldn’t find a match. Details about the track weren’t on an IMDb page about the episode either. Perplexed, Ancona searched for the lyrics online and found nothing — except forum posts from other “X-Files” fans asking the same question. Some said they’d been searching since 1998, when the episode first aired.

It was a mystery fit for Mulder and Scully themselves. Who was the songwriter behind the mysterious country tune with no name and no credit? And how had legions of “X-Files” fans failed to identify it in 25 years?…

(9) MARK SAMUELS (1967-2023). Four-time British Fantasy Award nominee Mark Samuels died December 3. The first pair of nomination came in 2004 for his short story “The White Hands” and for the collection in which it appeared, The White Hands and Other Weird Tales.

R.B. Russell has written a tribute for Wormwoodiana: “RIP Mark Samuels”.

…Mark was a member of the original Arthur Machen Society in the 1990s, and would later become active in its successor, the Friends of Arthur Machen, becoming Secretary for two different terms. He will be remembered from many meetings of the Friends (from annual dinners, to more ad hoc pub crawls), as great company; he was a knowledgeable and passionate advocate for writers such as Machen, Lovecraft and Ligotti, as well as enjoying, like Machen, good conversation, drink, food and tobacco….

…From the outset, Mark’s stories take place in a strange and decaying world—one that is often blighted, if not diseased. This gives his fiction a bleak vision and an intensity that has been admired by many readers as well as fellow-authors, since the first magazine appearances of his stories in the 1980s. Apart from in his own books, his stories have been published in such prestigious anthologies as The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, A Mountain Walks, and The Weird….

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born December 9, 1934 — Judi Dench, 89. Need I say Judi Dench is one of my favorite performers? So let’s look at her work in this genre, both as a stage and onscreen thespian.

So let’s look at her theatrical work. Her first professional role was as Ophelia in Hamlet . Not sure if we consider Hamlet to be genre or not, but her first genre role was a West African tour as Lady Macbeth for the British Council in the early Sixties.

In the Sixties, she was in a small role in a Sherlock Holmes A Study in Terror play.

She’d reprise Lady Macbeth at the Royal Shakespeare Company with Ian McKellen posing Macbeth. Now there’s a play I’d have liked very much to have seen!

In the early Eighties, she was to play Grizabella in the first production of Cats, but had to pull out due to a torn Achilles tendon. Even cats injure themselves. Don’t worry, she’ll get to be in the Cats film where she’ll play Old Deuteronomy where unfortunately she’ll get to play the very rare embarrassing performance of her life.

Now to her work in genre films. Her first was the Sherlock Holmes A Study in Terror in which she was Sally.

That was followed by the much better A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream where she was Titania. The one which also had as performers Ian Holm, Helen Mirren, Diana Rigg and David Warner!

She was cast as M in GoldenEye, a role she continued to play in the Bond films through to Spectre.

She’s Queen Elizabeth the First in Shakespeare in Love, one of my all time comfort films.

And she’s in Chocolat as Armande Voizin, Caroline’s mother. Sure that’s film is touched by magic as it’s about chocolate affecting an entire French village, no?

Back in the SF realm, she’s in The Chronicles of Riddick as Aereon, but verging back to fantasy, she’s a society lady in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.

I see she’s in Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express as Princess Natalia Dragomiroff. Speaking of Brannagh, he directed Artemis Fowl, where she’s Commander Julius Root.

She’s the medium Madame Arcati In Blithe Spirit.

So I was going to include Spirited here which a modern retelling of A Christmas Carol and a satire of the various adaptations since, but I don’t think she has much of a role in it as she appears it as herself. Who’s seen it?

That’s her for now.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

Bliss is an attempt at topical humor. Haven’t made up my mind if it’s actually funny.
Free Range however, is definitely funny.

(12) GREATCOATS. Sebastien de Castell’s next Greatcoats novel, Crucible of Chaos: A Novel of The Court Of Shadows, arrives February 6, 2024.

A mortally wounded magistrate faces his deadliest trial inside an ancient abbey where the monks are going mad and the gods themselves may be to blame!

Estevar Borros, one of the legendary sword-fighting magistrates know as the Greatcoats and the king’s personal investigator of the supernatural, is no stranger to tales of ghosts and demons. When the fractious monks of the abbey rumored to be the birthplace of the gods begin warring over claims of a new pantheon arising, the frantic abbot summons him to settle the dispute.

But Estevar has his own problems: a near-fatal sword wound from his last judicial duel, a sworn knight who claims he has proof the monks are consorting with demons, a diabolical inquisitor with no love for the Greatcoats, and a mysterious young woman claiming to be Estevar’s ally but who may well be his deadliest enemy.

Armed only with his famed investigative talents, his faltering skill with a blade and Imperious, his ornery mule, Estevar must root out the source of the madness lurking inside the once-sacred walls of Isola Sombra before its chaos spreads to the country he’s sworn to protect.

Pre-order from —

(13) BE ON THE LOOKOUT. “Thief in Australia Steals Truck With 10,000 Krispy Kreme Doughnuts” – a crime that made news in the New York Times.

… I’ve heard of stealing some dough, but this is ridiculous….

…The tale began at 4 a.m. on Wednesday in Carlingford, Australia, near Sydney, when a delivery driver working the night shift stopped his van to make a quick stop at a 7-Eleven.

Closed circuit footage of the scene shows a woman milling around the gas pumps at the attached service station — or “servo” to Australians — and then climbing into the unattended van and driving away.

What makes the story more compelling than a typical opportunistic vehicle theft is the van’s contents: 10,000 Krispy Kreme doughnuts. The treats were bound for shops in Newcastle, but instead have now disappeared to parts unknown.

As of Friday, the New South Wales police had not made any arrests, although they are, well, hungry to. The department posted an appeal for help from the public, next to items about a brawl in Warrawong and a missing man from Wagga Wagga….

(14) NUMBER PLUCKERS. “Quantum-computing approach uses single molecules as qubits for first time” in Nature.

Physicists have taken the first step towards building quantum computers out of individual molecules trapped with laser devices called optical tweezers. Two teams report their results in Science on 7 December, in both cases making pairs of calcium monofluoride molecules interact so that they became entangled — a crucial effect for quantum computing….

… Both studies used arrays of optical tweezers with one molecule trapped in each tweezer unit. Through laser techniques, they cooled the molecules to temperatures of tens of microkelvin, just millionths of a degree above absolute zero. In this state, the molecules were close to being completely still. Their rotation could be stopped, or they could be made to rotate with just one quantum of angular momentum, called ħ — the smallest rotational frequency they can possibly have. Both teams used non-rotating molecules to represent the ‘0’ state of their qubits, and rotating ones to represent the ‘1’….

Which makes me think of Tom Digby’s filksong “Little Teeny Eyes” (1966):

Oh we got a new computer but it’s quite a disappointment
‘Cause it always gave this same insane advice:
“OH YOU NEED LITTLE TEENY EYES FOR READING LITTLE TEENY PRINT
LIKE YOU NEED LITTLE TEENY HANDS FOR MILKING MICE.”

(15) TOMATOMETER: FRESH OR NOT? [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Holy leaping Dr. Smith! This saga gives a whole new meaning to Lost in Space. “Tomato lost in space by history-making astronaut has been found” on CNN.

Perhaps nowhere in the universe is a fresh, ripe tomato more valuable than on the International Space Station, where astronauts live for months at a time subsisting mainly on prepackaged, shelf-stable goods.

That’s why astronaut Frank Rubio became the central figure in a lighthearted whodunnit that has taken months to solve.

After Rubio harvested one of the first tomatoes ever grown in space earlier this year, according to the astronaut, he admitted he misplaced it.

“I put it in a little bag, and one of my crewmates was doing a (public) event with some schoolkids, and I thought it’d be kind of cool to show the kids — ‘Hey guys this is the first tomato harvested in space,’” Rubio said during an October media event. “I was pretty confident that I Velcroed it where I was supposed to Velcro it … and then I came back and it was gone.”

In the microgravity environment of space, anything not anchored to a wall is at risk of floating away — destined to spend eternity hidden behind a nook or cranny within the football field-size orbiting laboratory and its labyrinthian passageways.

Rubio said he probably spent eight to 20 hours of his own free time just searching for that tomato.

“Unfortunately — because that’s just human nature — a lot of people are like, ‘He probably ate the tomato,’” Rubio said. “And I wanted to find it mostly so I could prove like I did not eat the tomato.”

But he never found it.

Rubio returned to Earth on September 27 with the precious produce still lost aboard the space station.

It remained lost — until now.

During a Wednesday news conference, members of the seven-person crew remaining on the space station revealed they had finally located the tomato.

Rubio had “been blamed for quite a while for eating the tomato,” NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli said. “But we can exonerate him.”…

However, they don’t say where on the ISS it was found.

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The PBS Space Time YouTube channel is primarily all about physics. However, occasionally they do physics-adjacent science and sometimes stray into genre adjacent territory, this week being one such occasion when Matt O’Dowd asks whether our human civilisation could be the first technological civilisation on Earth or even visit our planet…

We’re almost certainly the first technological civilisation on Earth. But what if we’re not? We are. Although how sure are we, really? The Silurian hypothesis, which asks whether pre-human industrial civilizations might have existed…

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Bruce D. Arthurs, Kathy Sullivan, Dann, Steven French, Jennifer Hawthorne, 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 Jayn.]

British Library Exhibition: Fantasy: Realms of Imagination

Posted on November 5, 2023 by Mike Glyer

Fantasy: Realms of Imagination
The British Library Exhibition

27th October 2023 – 25th February 2024
St Pancras, London, Great Britain

By Jonathan Cowie: This new exhibition at the British Library explores the evolution of Fantasy. From ancient folk tales and fairy stories, gothic horror and weird fiction, to live action role-playing games inspired by Fantasy worlds, the exhibition celebrates the genre and its enduring impact…

First off, a word about the British Library. It is Britain’s national library and also one of the six British Isles copyright depository centres: Britain has had legal deposit of all published works at least as since 1610. This means that every book published in the British Isles (including the Republic of Ireland) that has an ISBN (International Standard Book Number) or magazine & newspaper that has an ISSN (International Standard Serial Number), among others, are deposited with the British Library (though much is stored in a depository in York).

As such, the British Library is the UK’s equivalent of the US’s Library of Congress and the two rival each other in size. Truth be told, no-one knows which is bigger, what is known is that the British Library holds the second largest collection of pornography in the world: the largest, of course, is held by the Vatican (you knew that didn’t you?).

The exhibition itself contained over a hundred items – including historical manuscripts, rare first editions, drafts of iconic novels, scripts and maps, film props and costumes – that offer rare insights into the roots and evolution of the genre.

The afore term, ‘rare’, is used judiciously as many of the exhibits are decades old: some centuries old. And so the exhibits are held in a windowless, basement floor. This gives visitors the feeling that they are going through some sort of dungeons and dragons set, but actually, there is purposeful functionality behind this. With some exhibits many decades old, some even centuries, some display items need to be protected from too much light and all the glass cases have temperature and humidity monitors.

The displays themselves were arranged within fantastical sets, beginning with an illuminated forest scene (Mythago Wood anyone?) and decorative lighting along with a welcoming, illuminated, introductory text display.

Having said that, many of the exhibition sections were well lit with appropriate, colourful backdrops along the walls.

Of course being the British Library – with the emphasis on ‘Library’ – there were plenty of books on display, including: Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, C. S Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, The Magic City by E. Nesbit, The Owl Service by Alan Garner and The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett.

Fragments of the late 10th/early 11th century Old English Beowulf re-bound.

One of the more rare exhibits was a book of text fragments dating from the late 10th to early 11th century of Beowulf. This classic Old English epic poem is set against a time of war. The story itself centres around the hero Beowulf who battles the monster Grendel, Grendel’s mother and a dragon. In his last fight, Beowulf, now an old man, over-reaches himself. In the fragment (see above), he kills the dragon but is himself mortally wounded.

The exhibition drew together a number of themes (more of which later) and connections. Here, with Beowulf, a line was drawn from that Saxon epic to The Game of Thrones TV series and book, with the Beowulf fragments being displayed in the same cabinet as a 2019 Folio Society edition of A Game of Thrones and a licensed replica of the sword Needle as used by Arya Stark who, across the series, transformed from a carefree tomboy to skilled assassin. I’m guessing George R. R. Martin would approve?

But it was not all books; there were costumes from TV, film and even ballet as evidenced by a display of Margot Fonteyn’s and Rudolf Nureyev’s The Sleeping Beauty costumes (Princess Aurora and Prince Florimund respectively) from their 1968 production of Tchaikovsky’s ballet. (This exhibit was kindly provided by the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London. See below.)

Beyond themes and connections from exhibits displayed together as well as side-by-side, the exhibition was also divided into sections. Visitors begin entering a section called ‘Fairy and Folk Tales’ that takes us from The Snow Queen to The Arabian Nights and Peter Pan to discover how different cultures shape their own, iconic legends. Highlights included items from the Angela Carter archive and maps by Lewis for Narnia.

From there it was straight into ‘Epics and Quests’, to meet heroes and villains from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to Xena, Warrior Princess, and explore how ancient tales have helped to shape modern Fantasy epics. On display was a version of Gilgamesh, which some say is the oldest known epic story as it is thought to have originated from the Akkadian empire some 4,000 years ago! Gilgamesh being a semi-divine, Sumerian king who abuses his gifts of strength and bravery to abuse his people. The gods therefore create the wild man, Enkidu, to challenge the king. After a long struggle, the two become friends. When Enkidu is killed, Gilgamesh tries to solve the riddle of everlasting life…

The cinematic dimension was further explored in a number of places, including in part of the exhibition’s ‘Portals and Worlds’ section. One of these was that of the world Thra portrayed in the film The Dark Crystal (1982) with Gelfing costumes designed by Brian Froud and concept artwork for the mystic urSkeks (sic) that were in turn brought to life by the puppeteer and the film’s co-director, Jim Henson.

The final section looked at fandom. It included short video interviews of fans in cosplay as to why they liked fantasy and what it means to them, as well as an example of a fantasy cosplay costume. This section recognised the creativity and innovation that fans have brought to the genre and included a look at fan fiction.

With over a hundred items on display it is only possible to barely skim the surface of this remarkable exhibition. Dare I say it, it’s even better than the Out Of This World Science Fiction exhibition the British Library put on with the help of the wonderful Science Fiction Foundation over a decade ago in 2011.

Much credit goes to the British Library’s Tanya Kirk (the exhibition’s lead curator) and her colleague Rachel Foss. They wisely sought out, and received guidance from a small advisory panel that included: Aliette de Bodard, Neil Gaiman, Roz Kaveney and Terri Windling. It was made possible with the support of The exhibition was made possible with support from Wayland Games and The Unwin Charitable Trust (Unwin originally published Tolkien’s The Hobbit), with thanks to The American Trust for the British Library and The B.H. Breslauer Fund of the American Trust for the British Library.

The exhibition, which runs to 25th February 2024 at the British Library, is accompanied by a series of events including author panels. (Check out the British Library website for details.)

For the rest of the world, the really good news is that later the exhibition will be going on tour after it closes at the British Library, the first confirmed tour venue is the Bowers Museum, USA, from October 2024 to February 2025 with more to be announced.

This article is based on a longer one that will, in due course, appear in SF² Concatenation.

Words Jonathan Cowie
Pictures Tony Bailey

Pixel Scroll 11/4/23 Pixels Of The Night, From Pixelated Pixelvania

Posted on November 4, 2023 by Mike Glyer

(1) APPRECIATING A FINE ANTIQUE. James Davis Nicoll has a new assignment for the Young People Read Old SF panel.

This month’s Young People Read Old Hugo Finalists features Bruce Sterling’s 1988 “Our Neural Chernobyl”. Sterling was, of course, a grand figure in science fiction at the time, being nominated and winning too many awards to list here. The Hugo was merely one of those awards….

Bruce Sterling’s early works are “old sff” now, but wow, where did the time go….

(2) SENIOR BRITISH DIPLOMAT ON MUSK AND SF. The author of “Does Elon dream of electric sheep?” at Medium is Julian Braithwaite, former Director General for Europe at the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, and past Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the UK Mission to the WTO, UN and Other International Organisations in Geneva.

One of the most interesting revelations from this week’s AI Safety summit in the UK was something I didn’t expect: the role science fiction plays in Elon Musk’s world.

Interesting to me at any rate, as a fan of the genre and what it says about each generation’s concerns and hopes for the future.

Musk is widely considered a voice of caution on AI, eloquently warning about the risks. The famous joint letter in March in which he and others called for a pause in the development of AI frontier models. His penchant for kill switches to shut down rogue AI.

So it was something of a surprise to find him sitting with Prime Minister Sunak on Wednesday, urging people to read Iain M Banks, the Scottish science fiction author, and his “Culture” novels.

Surprising for two reasons. First, because the AI depicted in these novels, the “Minds”, are incredibly powerful but benign partners for humanity, co-creators of a galaxy-spanning utopian civilisation based on individual freedom and superabundance. And second because, in the science fiction of AI, the benevolent Minds are very much an outlier….

(3) CHENGDU WORLDCON ROUNDUP. [Item by Ersatz Culture.]

How to access the online Chengdu Worldcon site from outside China

In Thursday’s Scroll, I wrote about how the con’s online site was no longer accessible outside China. However, the error message reported by the browser made me think that there might be a workaround, and with the kind assistance of parties who will remain nameless, I can document a process whereby other con members can also regain access.

There is one slight caveat: I’m a Linux user, and haven’t had to touch OS X for over a year, and Windows for several years, so I can only reliably provide instructions for Linux. I’m sure people who are more familiar with those other operating systems can provide addiitonal help in the comments. (As for iOS or Android, I have absolutely no idea if or how you might be able implement a similar workaround.) I’d also not be surprised if there is a more elegant solution to the problem than the one I’ve written up here; again, hopefully others can suggest things in the comments.

Basically, because DNS servers no longer have entries for online.worldcon.com to map it to an IP address, you have to add a manual override. On a Linux machine, you can edit /etc/hosts to add a line “121.29.37.164 online.chengduworldcon.com” (no quotes) as shown in the screenshot. You’ll need to do this via sudo, as that file should only be editable by the root user.

(Note that you can’t go directly to https://121.29.37.164/ in your browser; it just comes up with a “Forbidden” error.)

My recollection is that on current versions of OS X, you can do something pretty similar to the Linux /etc/hosts fix, but there’s perhaps some other faffing around you have to do to make sure the networking stack picks up your edits.

For the latest version of Windows that I was familiar with (10 I think?) the hosts file lived at C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts – whether that’s still the case, I have no desire to research into. You would also need to edit this file with Administrator privileges.

A couple of things to note:

Whilst this manual override should be fairly benign, if the DNS record is restored and the site moves to a different IP address, then you wouldn’t be able to access the site, until you remove the override. (And it should go without saying, you should be very wary about taking advice from random people on the internet about changing your network settings, without having a reasonable understanding about what the change actually does.)
Even when you get into the site and the “Live Planet” area where the videos reside, you might not be able to play the “Grasping the Future” video. This is because the link to the underlying video file is a http:// URL, which by default are blocked when being accessed from https:// pages. (Filers may remember a pretty much identical problem affecting Voter Packet downloads on the Hugo site…)
Related to the “bitrot” comments on that Scroll, just in case something similar happens to the other Chengdu sites, here are their IP addresses:
- 47.110.216.168 www.chengduworldcon.com # Chinese language site
- 47.110.216.168 en.chengduworldcon.com # English language site
- 43.132.64.28 hugo.chengduworldcon.com # Hugos

Con report published on Chinese government science site

This is quite an interesting con report, in that whilst it was published on a Chinese government science website, it’s clear that the author, Cao Wenjun, is a fan. She covers areas that are of more interest to File 770 readers than the majority of the Chinese media coverage I’ve seen, which focusses more on the showbiz and business aspects of the event. There’s a long section about what happened with RiverFlow, which is the first time I’ve seen any professional media mention that.

Some extracts (via Google Translate, with minor manual edits):

An insider told me beforehand that late-night snacking is the essence of all science fiction activities. This time I personally participated in them, and suddenly realized that this statement was true.

After the formal activities every day, groups of people in the science fiction circle always gathered together for late-night snacks. Sometimes groups of people who were working separately met each other in the hotel lobby or halfway, and they would gather together to form a larger late-night snack team, as if the stars in the universe attracted each other and converged to form a galaxy. In the circle, everyone was very familiar with each other, and those who have known each other from beforehand will treat each other as brothers. Occasionally, when a new face appears, everyone will get closer to each other immediately. After all, as long as you love science fiction, you’re part of the family. I had a busy schedule during the day and didn’t have much time to look for delicious food, so I experienced almost all the Chengdu delicacies during this trip at these late night snacks. At the late-night snack scene, I was fortunate enough to meet science fiction writers and critics such as Baoshu, [File 770 contributor] San Feng, A Que, Huihu, Xie Yunning, Jiao Ce, Wang Nuonuo, Wu Shuang, Qiyue, and Yang Wanqing [note: I corrected a couple of names there, but I’m sure others will have been mangled by machine translation]…

This international science fiction convention has many foreign writers and science fiction practitioners participating, and we often met them whilst having late-night snacks. Many domestic science fiction writers are also translators of foreign works. Inspired by the spirit of science fiction, everyone communicates smoothly and happily.

Probably because writers are often used to writing at night, even if they attend meetings all day long and eat late-night snacks until midnight, no one seems tired. Everyone raised their glasses and talked freely, congratulating the nominees, congratulating the winners, and congratulating everyone around them, and their drinking levels increased along with the mood. People talked about reading and writing, about work and life, and about the land, and the vast starry sky above their heads. During the night, rain fell, and the shopkeepers put up their awnings. The lights shone on the awnings stained with water drops and on the wet ground. The whole street looked like a spiral arm of the Milky Way, studded with colourful stars. The writers sat around the long table, surrounded by warm mist, chatting, laughing and clinking glasses, creating a dreamlike Chengdu night that will never be forgotten…

[After the Hugo ceremony] when I arrived at the hotel after returning from the hospital, I saw several people getting off the shuttle bus from the venue. One of them was Hai Ya, who was holding a Hugo Award trophy. The SF people who were at the door of the hotel immediately expressed their congratulations to him, and Hai Ya did not hide his happiness. But I could see from his heavy breathing that he was still in a state of shock beyond belief.

Everyone was sitting around the tea table in the hotel lobby, and the Hugo Award trophy was placed on the tea table, allowing us to watch, touch and admire it. Hai Ya didn’t sit on the sofa, but sat cross-legged on the steps next to it. At that time, I didn’t know that he was wearing his work attire; I just thought that the clothes fit him well, but sitting on the steps like this was a bit strenuous. Someone asked him how he felt at this time. He took a long breath and said that he had imagined this moment when he learned that his story had been shortlisted, but that was just his imagination. It had really happened, and he felt incredible. Someone told him that his real name and workplace had been posted online. Hai Ya shrugged, appearing a little troubled and helpless. He said that when standing in the spotlight, people always have two sides. When you receive an honour, you will also lose something. He mentioned that he always writes after work, so his level of output is not high, but it was just as a kind of adjustment and relaxation. In subsequent news reports, many media asked this question, and he responded in the same way, but it seemed that many netizens did not understand.

What I learned is that most science fiction writers are actually like this. They have their own day jobs. Some are college teachers, some are engineers, some are journalists, and they are from all walks of life. Writing is just their side job…

When asked about how he planned to take such a big and heavy trophy back on the plane, because it might not be allowed on board, Hai Ya said, “Let’s leave it to my publisher. I have to rush back to work first.” Several writers smiled understandingly on the spot, saying that they had taken a day or two off from work before they could attend the meeting, and they had to go back to work on Monday.

In my opinion, Hai Ya is not very familiar to many people in science fiction circles. He seems to have always fully separated his work life and hobbies, and protected them well. In the end, everyone took turns taking photos with him, including me. It was the first time I had taken a photo with a science fiction writer since attending the conference, and it also fulfilled a long-held wish…

At the venue, I spent some time observing the children who came to the venue. Some of them came with their families, and some came with their schools wearing their uniforms. They looked at everything in the venue with curiosity and excitement, stopped in front of every picture in the science fiction exhibition, and flipped through science fiction novels that they might not fully understand at the book signing counter. When it was getting dark, I saw a mother holding her child and saying she wanted to go home. The child moved reluctantly and asked: “Mom, can you come tomorrow? It’s so much fun here!”

My son is five years old and is very interested in everything related to science. I brought him along this time to let him experience the atmosphere of the World Science Fiction Convention. Like other children, he ran around in the open space on the first floor of the hall, interacted with people cosplaying science fiction characters, watched robots playing drums, experienced science fiction games in the theme exhibition hall, and received souvenirs and ribbons from each booth, looked at paintings drawn by other children, and watching the robot dog for a long time, without ever wanting to leave. When I was listening to a panel where Korean science fiction writers such as Kim Cho-yeop talked about Korean science fiction works, he also slipped into the venue at some point, wearing a simultaneous translator, and listened quietly for a long time. I asked him what he thought of science fiction conventions, and he shouted, “It’s fun!” …

In my opinion, science fiction needs to open its doors and let everyone participate, make it fun for children, and let the public play like children. Perhaps we don’t have to worry that the current science fiction traffic is concentrated on Liu Cixin, because his science fiction works are also an open door. Just like many science fiction authors and science fiction fans in the past started to get into science fiction from “Little Know-it-All Roams the Future”, Liu Cixin’s works are now the beginning of many people’s enlightenment on the road of science fiction, and they are also the future of Chinese science fiction.

What makes me happy is that after five days of reporting daily experiences to my circle of friends, many of them who hadn’t paid much attention to science fiction, began to ask me to recommend some SF novels for introductory reading. Other friends were very interested in telling me about the science fiction novels they had recently read. I feel that I myself have become a small window of Chinese science fiction, opening up with enthusiasm, calling to and embracing everyone around me.

Xiaohongshu image galleries

I suspect most of the items in this Xiaohongshu image gallery，have already been seen in previous Scrolls, but I don’t think I’ve seen too many of the stamps, which are based on some of the con reports, that were popular amongst kids.

Similarly this one has many familiar sights, but also photos of a wall of Post-Its (I think at the Three-Body Problem event) and some author handprints, neither of which I’d previously encountered.

And this post continues the theme, although there are more photos of the props and exhibits than I’ve usually seen. The accompanying note is a short report that’s also worth reading; here’s the nearly the entire text via Google Translate, with manual edits:

The science fiction conference was fruitful and I was very happy.

The World Science Fiction Convention was really fun. I really gained a lot from those days. I was lucky enough to get autographs from Liu, Sawyer and [German author Brandon Q.] Morris, and saw all kinds of interesting exhibitions… But when it comes to science fiction-related topics, I feel very happy. Especially when participating in the panels, I felt that the atmosphere was super good and everyone was very happy. After all, SF was a topic that everyone was very interested in but usually can’t find friends to discuss it with.

The volunteers working the con were are all very friendly students. Not only were they very interested in science fiction, but they were also very passionate. It makes people feel the vitality of young people in the science fiction convention, and also makes people feel the friendliness of the city of Chengdu.

The musical fountain at the weekend was also particularly good. It performed for half an hour after the Hugo Awards, and was really beautiful.

Although the entire conference did not feel perfect during the organization process, and the venue was indeed too far away. It still took two hours to get to the venue by bus and subway every day, but attending the con will remain an unforgettable memory

(4) CHENGDU CONREPORT BY NEXT YEAR’S GOH. Ken MacLeod, who will be a Glasgow 2024 Worldcon guest of honor, blogs about his experience at this year’s con in China: “Chengdu Worldcon: Meet the Future” at The Early Days of a Better Nation. The post includes many photos.

Last month I spent far too few days in China, at the Chengdu Worldcon, to which I was invited as an international guest. My travel, and accommodation for me and my wife, were covered by the Committee of the 2023 Chengdu World Science Fiction Convention, for which much thanks.

We had a wonderful time. The convention was a smashing success and easily the biggest, and most publicly celebrated, Worldcon ever….

…I took part in a couple of panels, one on Science Fiction and Future Science and one on cyberpunk, and was interviewed on video by an Italian documentary company and on voice recording for the Huawei news website. For two mornings I put in an hour or two at the Glasgow Worldcon stand. Never in my life have I been asked for so many autographs, or to pose with so many people for photographs. Nicholas Whyte, also at the stall, had the same experience, and others did too. Hardly any of the people whose notebooks and souvenirs we signed, or who stood beside us to have their photo taken, could have known who we were: that were overseas visitors with something to do with science fiction was enough. Among the few who did know us were some students from the Fishing Fortress College of Science Fiction in Chongqing. Our enthusiastic reception was nothing to that of Cixin Liu, author of the Three-Body trilogy and the story filmed as The Wandering Earth. His signing queue was like those I’ve seen for Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. Science fiction in China is taken very seriously and sincerely by its fans….

(5) WONKA BIG B.O. ANTICIPATED. [Item by Cat Eldridge.] Oh god, they made a third version! “’Wonka’: Timothée Chalamet Movie Eyes $20M+ Box Office Opening” reports Deadline.

Warner Bros‘ anticipated Paul King-directed feature musical Wonka has hit early tracking six weeks before its release on December 5, with box office analytics film The Quorum predicting a $20 million-$23 million opening. Note it’s still early in the campaign, so there’s potential for upside.

Unlike other tracking services that project three weeks before a movie’s release, Quorum is six weeks ahead.

In regards to Wonka‘s marketing campaign, there is material out there to move the needle: Two official trailers on the Warner Bros YouTube channel measuring at 31M and 9M views each, respectively; and lead star Timothée Chalamet will host Saturday Night Live on November 11 with the actor also on the cover of GQ. In addition, Warners has 17 one-sheets out there for the movie (in billboards, in-theater and online), and if there’s any barometer as to how much a studio is committing to a movie, it’s in the quantity of one-sheet posters….

(6) DOWNFOREVERYONE. “British Library Hit by Apparent Cyberattack” reports the New York Times.

On Saturday, the library was hit by what it is calling a “cyber incident.” Ever since, its website has been down and scholars have been unable to access its online catalog. The library’s Wi-Fi has also stopped working, and staff members haven’t been allowed to turn on their computers.

In interviews this week, seven regular users of the library — including the author of a forthcoming book on classical music, a University of Cambridge lecturer, two postgraduate students and a Shakespearean scholar — said that the library had essentially gone back to a predigital age.

Now, according to a staff member in the library’s “rare books and music” reading room, ordering a book involves looking up its catalog number in one of several hundred hardback books or an external website, writing that number onto a slip of paper and then handing it to a librarian who, in turn, would check their records to see whether the book was available. Books are only available if they are stored at the main library location.

Any incident at the British Library tends to be high-profile news in Britain.

Yet the British Library has issued only brief comments about the episode on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. On Tuesday, it posted a statement saying that the library was “experiencing a major technology outage as a result of a cyber incident. This is affecting our website, online systems and services, and some on-site services including public Wi-Fi.”

On Friday, a library spokeswoman said in an email that she could not provide further comment. She did not respond to questions on whether an attack had actually occurred….

(7) MICHAEL WHELAN ON AI-CREATED ART. “What Happens to Illustrators When Robots Can Draw Robots?” in the New York Times.

Michael Whelan has made a career painting aliens, dragons, robots and other fantastical creatures for books covers. While he finds A.I. tools useful for brainstorming, he is also concerned about its impact on younger illustrators….

The first time Michael Whelan was warned that robots were coming for his job was in the 1980s. He had just finished painting the cover for a mass-market paperback edition of Stephen King’s “The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger,” a gritty portrait of the title character with the outline of a tower glimpsed through the haze behind him.

The art director for the project told him to enjoy these cover-art gigs while he could, because soon they would all be done by computers. Whelan dismissed him at the time. “When you can get a good digital file or photograph of a dragon, let me know,” he recalled saying.

For the next three decades, Whelan kept painting covers the old way — on canvas, conjuring dragons, spaceships and, of course, robots for science fiction and fantasy giants including Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury and Brandon Sanderson.

Over time, Whelan forgot the art director’s name, but not his words. Now, he said, the day he was warned about is here. Robots have already started taking book illustration jobs from artists — and yes, they can paint dragons.

Over the past few months, users working with A.I. art generators have created hundreds of images in Whelan’s style that were slightly altered knockoffs of his work, he said, forcing him to devote considerable time and resources to getting the images removed from the web.

“As someone who’s been in this genre for a long time, it doesn’t threaten me like it does younger artists who are starting out, who I have a lot of concern for,” Whelan said. “I think it’s going to be really tough for them.”

While much of the discussion in publishing around generative artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT has focused on A.I.’s unauthorized use of texts for training purposes, and its potential to one day replace human authors, most writers have yet to be directly financially affected by A.I. This is not true for the commercial artists who create their book covers….

(8) FEARS OF THE FIFTIES. You can view “Atomic Attack”, an adaptation of Judith Merril’s novel Shadow on the Hearth, originally aired on The Motorola Television Hour in 1954.

In this sobering film, a family living 50 miles outside of New York must escape the fallout from a nuclear bomb dropped upon the Big Apple.

(9) MARVEL STUNTMAN DIES IN CAR CRASH. “’Avengers’ stuntman dies in car crash along with two children” at USA Today.

Taraja Ramsess will always be remembered by those who knew him best as a loving brother, a devoted father and a hard-working stuntman.

The “Black Panther” stuntman was killed alongside two of his children in a car crash on Halloween night on an Atlanta highway, according to reporting by local affiliate WSB-TV.

The 41-year-old was making his way back home with his children around 11 p.m. when he crashed into a tractor-trailer that had broken down near an exit on the left-hand side of the highway….

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born November 4, 1912 — Wendayne Ackerman. She was the translator-in-chief of 137 novels of the German space opera series Perry Rhodan, the majority published by Ace Books. She left Germany before WWII to escape anti-Semitism, working as a nurse in France and London. After the war she emigrated to Israel where she married her first husband and had a son. Following their divorce she moved to LA in 1948, and soon met and married Forrest J Ackerman. (Died 1990.)
Born November 4, 1917 — Babette Rosmond. She worked as an editor at the magazine publisher Street & Smith, editing Doc Savage and The Shadow in the late Forties. Rosmond’s first story, co-written by Leonard M. Lake, “Are You Run-Down, Tired-“ was published in in the October 1942 issue of Unknown Worlds. Error Hurled was her only genre novel and she only write three short genre pieces. (Died 1997.)
Born November 4, 1920 — Sydney Bounds. Writer, Editor, and Fan from Britain who was a prolific author of short fiction, and novels — not just science fiction, but also horror, Westerns, mysteries, and juvenile fiction. He was an early fan who joined Britain’s Science Fiction Association in 1937. He worked as an electrician on the Enigma machine during World War II, and while in the service, he started publishing the fanzine Cosmic Cuts. The film The Last Days on Mars (an adaptation of “The Animators”) and the Tales of the Darkside episode “The Circus” are based on stories by him. In 2005, two collections of his fiction were released under the title The Best of Sydney J. Bounds: Strange Portrait and Other Stories, and The Wayward Ship and other Stories. In 2007, the British Fantasy Society honored him by renaming their award for best new writer after him. (Died 2006.)
Born November 4, 1934 — Gregg Calkins. Writer, Editor, and Fan. Mike Glyer’s tribute to him reads: “Longtime fan Gregg Calkins died July 31, 2017 after suffering a fall. He was 82. Gregg got active in fandom in the Fifties and his fanzine Oopsla (1952-1961) is fondly remembered. He was living in the Bay Area and serving as the Official Editor of FAPA when I applied to join its waitlist in the Seventies. He was Fan GoH at the 1976 Westercon. Calkins later moved to Costa Rica. In contrast to most of his generation, he was highly active in social media, frequently posting on Facebook where it was his pleasure to carry the conservative side of debates. He is survived by his wife, Carol.” (Died 2017.)
Born November 4, 1953 — Kara Dalkey, 70. Writer of YA fiction and historical fantasy. She is a member of the Pre-Joycean Fellowship (which if memory serves me right includes both Emma Bull and Stephen Brust) and the Scribblies. Her works include The Sword of Sagamore, Steel Rose, Little Sister and The Nightingale. And her Water trilogy blends together Atlantean and Arthurian mythologies. She’s been nominated for the Mythopoeic and Otherwise Awards.
Born November 4, 1953 — Stephen Jones, 70. Editor, and that is putting quite mildly, as he went well over the century mark in edited anthologies edited quite some time ago. The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror accounts for eighteen volumes by itself and The Mammoth Book of (Pick A Title) runs for at least another for another dozen. He also, no surprise, to me, has authored a number of horror reference works such as The Art of Horror Movies: An Illustrated History, Basil Copper: A Life in Books and H. P. Lovecraft in Britain. He’s also done hundreds of essays, con reports, obituaries and such showing up, well, just about everywhere. He’s won a number of World Fantasy Awards and far too many BFAs to count.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal brings a robot to debate how people with emotions interact with people without emotions.
Tom Gauld’s x-ray vision finds the truth is out there.

A committee on extraterrestrial visits from @tomgauld. https://t.co/7w7iexhTmQ pic.twitter.com/xIxH5oKUPI
— New Scientist (@newscientist) November 2, 2023

(12) CATGPT? “’AI can teach us a lot’: scientists say cats’ expressions richer than imagined and aim to translate them” in the Guardian.

If an unexpected meow, peculiar pose, or unusual twitch of the whiskers leaves you puzzling over what your cat is trying to tell you, artificial intelligence may soon be able to translate.

Scientists are turning to new technology to unpick the meanings behind the vocal and physical cues of a host of animals.

“We could use AI to teach us a lot about what animals are trying to say to us,” said Daniel Mills, a professor of veterinary behavioural medicine at the University of Lincoln.

Previous work, including by Mills, has shown that cats produce a variety of facial expressions when interacting with humans, and this week researchers revealed felines have a range of 276 facial expressions when interacting with other cats.

(13) IMPACT FACTOR. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] This week’s Nature cover story is “Impact Factor”.

The cover shows an artist’s impression of the collision between the protoplanet Theia and proto-Earth about 4.5 billion years ago. It has been suggested that it was this ‘Giant Impact’ that formed the Moon, but direct evidence for the existence of Theia remains elusive. In this week’s issue, Qian Yuan and his colleagues present combined results from simulations of the impact and mantle convection to explain why two large regions in Earth’s deepest mantle differ seismically and could be 2–3.5% denser than the surrounding mantle. The researchers suggest that the two dense areas are the remains of Theia’s iron-rich mantle that sank and accumulated above Earth’s core 4.5 billion years ago, surviving there throughout Earth’s history.

Primary research here “Moon-forming impactor as a source of Earth’s basal mantle anomalies”

(14) MARVELOUS MINI-MOON. [Item by Steven French.] “Mini moon: Nasa spacecraft discovers asteroid orbited by its own tiny satellite” in the Guardian.

In one of the smallest, but still exciting, discoveries by Nasa in recent years, a spacecraft visiting a minor asteroid way out in the solar system has discovered that the chunk of space rock has its own tiny sidekick.

The spacecraft, called Lucy, was visiting asteroid Dinkinesh when it made the unexpected find of a moon companion.

The discovery was made during Wednesday’s flyby of Dinkinesh, 300m miles away in the main asteroid belt beyond Mars. The spacecraft snapped a picture of the pair when it was about 270 miles out.

In data and images beamed back to Earth, the spacecraft confirmed that Dinkinesh is barely a half-mile (790 meters) across. Its closely circling moon is a mere one-tenth of a mile (220 meters) in size.

Nasa sent Lucy past Dinkinesh as a rehearsal for visiting the bigger, more mysterious asteroids out near Jupiter.

Launched in 2021, the spacecraft will reach the first of these so-called Trojan asteroids in 2027 and explore them for at least six years. The original target list of seven asteroids now stands at 11.

Dinkinesh means “you are marvelous” in Ethiopia’s Amharic language….

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Matt O’Dowd over at PBS Space Time this fortnight takes a look at “How Will We (Most Likely) Discover Alien Life?”

The first discovery of extraterrestrial life will almost certainly NOT be when it visits us, nor when we visit it. It won’t be when we see its stray TV signals. It’ll be in the excruciatingly faint changes in the color of alien sunsets glimpsed hundreds of light years away. Today we’re going to talk about the first such hint, why it’s probably not aliens, and why there’s a tiny chance that it still might not not be aliens.

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Nicholas Whyte, Steven French, Cliff, Carl Andor, Lise Andreasen, Andrew Porter, Ersatz Culture, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Mark Roth-Whitworth.]

British Library Exhibition Explores Fantasy from Arthurian Legends to Manga

Posted on October 27, 2023 by Mike Glyer

The British Library’s Fantasy: Realms of Imagination exhibition opens today and runs through February 25, 2024.

The exhibition explores the evolution of Fantasy from ancient folk tales and fairy stories, gothic horror and weird fiction, to live action role-playing games inspired by fantasy worlds and celebrates its enduring impact.

Visitors will discover over a hundred items – including historical manuscripts, rare first editions, drafts of iconic novels, scripts and maps, film props and costumes – and will offer unique insights into the roots and evolution of the genre. They will journey through fantastical worlds imagined by writers, artists and creators over the centuries and across continents, from authors as varied as Ursula K. Le Guin, Neil Gaiman, Mervyn Peake, N.K. Jemisin, J.R.R. Tolkien, Susanna Clarke, Angela Carter, Terry Pratchett, China Miéville and Jeannette Ng to name a few.

Highlight objects include:

Unique manuscripts of Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, C.S Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, The Magic City by E. Nesbit, The Owl Service by Alan Garner and The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett

Ursula K. Le Guin’s drafts and drawings for her Earthsea novels – which are on display in the UK for the first time

Original sketches and outlines for Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake and Michael Palin’s notes for Monty Python And The Holy Grail

The costumes worn by Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev in the Royal Opera House’s 1968 ballet production of The Sleeping Beauty and props and costumes from The Lord of the Rings, The Dark Crystal and Wicked

Clips from iconic Fantasy film, television and video games including Princess Mononoke, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Pan’s Labyrinth, DARK SOULS and Skyrim

A playable mini-game by Failbetter Games designed especially for the exhibition, based on the Fallen London universe.

The exhibition begins by exploring the Fantasy archetypes that still fascinate us today in ‘Fairy and Folk Tales’ from The Snow Queen to The Arabian Nights and Peter Pan. Visitorswill discover how different cultures shape local legend and reflect on the conflict between destiny and choice, how frightening figures in Fantasy can both repulse and thrill us, and how transformation and metamorphosis can change not only the stories themselves, but also readers and viewers. Highlights include items from Angela Carter’s archive and costumes from the 1968 ballet production of The Sleeping Beauty.

Visitors will then enter the world of ‘Epics and Quests’, meet iconic heroes and villains from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to Xena, Warrior Princess, and explore how ancient taleshave helped to shape modern Fantasy epics. On display will be a version of Gilgamesh, the oldest known epic story, and there will be a rare chance to see items related to The Lord of the Rings, including J.R.R Tolkien’s notes for the 1955-56 BBC Radio adaption ofthe book. Visitors will also get to see Ursula K. Le Guin’s drafts and drawings for her Earthsea novels – which are on display in the UK for the first time.

The ‘Weird and Uncanny’ section focuses on iconic monsters, sinister landscapes filled with eerie edifices and the darkness at the heart of Fantasy. Visitors will discover the roots of weirder fantasies in works like Frankenstein and the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, learn how Piranesi’s Carceri etchings inspired the design of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, see how G.K. Chesterton visualised his nightmarish thriller The Man Who Was Thursday and understand how Fantasy presents twisted versions of our reality to reflect our greatest hopes and fears. They’ll also meet strangely sympathetic anti-heroes from Paradise Lost to Gormenghast.

Once they have encountered the strange creatures that haunt the genre, visitors will journey into ‘Portals and Worlds’ where they will discover the richly detailed world-building that makes Fantasy universes unique, and how the sub-genre of Portal Fantasy has shaped the history of children’s literature. On display will be a map of Discworld by Terry Pratchett, original manuscripts of Diana Wynne Jones’ The Dark Lord of Derkholm and Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, and costumes and props from The Dark Crystal. The exhibition concludes with a look at the impact of fan culture. It features live action role-play costumes, an exploration of fan fiction and filmed interviews with fans exploring what Fantasy means to them, recognising the creativity and innovation that fans have brought to the genre.

Accompanying Fantasy will be a display in the Entrance Hall of the Library, The Fantastical World of Mervyn Peake: Islands and Seas (November 24 – February 25, 2024) which willshowcase the richness of the Mervyn Peake Visual Archive. The archive was acquired by the British Library in 2020 and includes works from Peake’s unpublished Moccus Book (1929), as well as images from Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor (1939), Treasure Island (1949) and The Swiss Family Robinson (c.1950).

There will also be a season of in-person and online events inspired by the exhibition, such as a Late at the Library filled with musical performances and art inspired by the electronic music duo Drexciya and the fantasy mythos they created, with a live performance by Dopplereffekt and talk from Drexciya collaborator Abdul Qadim Haqq.

The Library will also be celebrating fantasy literary classics with Neil Gaiman and Rob Wilkins marking the 40th anniversary of Terry Pratchett’s first Discworld novel The Colour of Magic and Susan Cooper in conversation with Natalie Haynes on the 50th anniversary of her best-selling novel The Dark is Rising.

There will also be events exploring world-building in fantasy and the legacy of Dungeons and Dragons which turns 50 next year, alongside in conversation events with writers including Neil Gaiman, Philip Pullman, Susanna Clarke and R.F. Kuang and artists Alan Lee, Terri Windling and Brian and Wendy Froud. This is alongside an event series in partnership with Irenosen Okojie’s Afrofuturist festival Black to the Future, with more to be announced.

Ticket information at the link.

[Based on a press release.]

Pixel Scroll 8/24/23 And The First One Said To The Second One There, I Hope You’re Having File

Posted on August 24, 2023 by Mike Glyer

(1) BRITISH LIBRARY “FANTASY” EXHIBITION. [Item by Steven French.] For those who might be in London between October 27 and February 25, the British Library is putting on an exhibition about “Fantasy: Realms of Imagination”.

Set out on a legendary quest through the impossible worlds of fantasy.

Let our landmark exhibition cast its spell as we explore the beautiful, uncanny and sometimes monstrous makings of fantasy. From epic visions to intricately envisaged details, we celebrate some of the finest fantasy creators, reveal how their imagined lands, languages and creatures came into being, and delve into the traditions of a genre that has created some of the most passionate and enduring fandoms.

Journey from fairy tales and folklore to the fantastical worlds of Studio Ghibli. Venture into lands occupied by goblins and go down the rabbit hole. Travel through Middle-earth and into the depths of Pan’s Labyrinth. And discover how the oldest forms of literature continue to inspire fantasy authors today.

Gather your fellow adventurers and step through the British Library gates into the realms of fantasy as they have never been chronicled before. Who knows where your journey will lead…

Associated with the exhibition are a series of events including a discussion of some of Terry Pratchett’s ‘lost stories’ “A Stroke of the Pen: Terry Pratchett’s Lost Stories” on October 10 (also live-streamed on the BL platform).

And “The Dark is Rising and other stories: Susan Cooper and Natalie Haynes in conversation” on October 27 (also to be live streamed).

(2) BOOK HAUL. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] For those that follow young Moid Moidelhoff and his introduction to the cosmos of SF books (with the occasional sojourn into film and TV) on his Media Death Cult YouTube channel, there is a small soap opera dimension. Moid has an SF library in the room in which he shoots most of his videos and there are more books in the attic. Moid’s approach is to find books in good condition, second hand in the wild (buying brand new books is kind of cheating though he does occasionally do this too). This means he often changes books in his collection as titles migrate through various stages from tatty paperback to good condition hardback. Some of his Patreon followers also send him books and so, every other month or so he posts a “Book Haul” video in which he opens for the first time packages sent to him.

The long game plan had been for he and his wife to move to a bigger place where he could have a large library in his YouTube shooting room. And at last it looks like they are about to move. But there’s bad news. Apparently, their new place does not have the space to house all his existing library as well as all his attic-stored books in his new study. And so young Moid has taken the decision to stop posting “Book Hauls” on YouTube (though will still occasionally post some solely for his Patreon supporters).

Actually, I am a little saddened about this. I found it interesting to see what he was being sent and whether or not I had read the titles, or even have them in my own library. The festive December Book Hauls were particularly enjoyable as they conveyed the present-opening activities of Christmas Day. (You can see the 2021 Christmas Book Haul here).

I would tentatively (as there’s no reason for Moid to take notice of little old me) suggest that perhaps he might convert his new place’s loft into a larger library or, alternatively he might get an Alastair Reynolds type garden building in which to house the books Al Reynolds writes in his own garden study…

(As I have pointed out elsewhere – science journals and SF magazine articles – having a large library is environmentally friendly. Books lining a wall provide a thermal barrier so improving a house’s energy efficiency. Books also store atmospheric carbon. Books lining a wall saves on decorating costs, etc.)

Anyway, it looks like there will be no more fu¢k Alan Moore (it’s a running Book Haul joke borne of love for the man’s works, and not what you might initially suspect). You can see Moid’s last SF Book Haul YouTube video below. It is a long one with an interlude in which he, and his on-location cameraman, Charlie, visit Hay on Wye. For those on the other side of the Black Atlantic, outside of Brit Cit, Hay on Wye is a Welsh village where just about every other shop is a bookshop. If you are coming to CalHab next year for the 2024 UK Worldcon and are spending a week or so sight-seeing BritCit, then spending a full day (a couple of nights) in Hay on Wye might reward you with that long-sought after book edition you’ve been hunting for for ages… If you like hunting books in the wild, Hay on Wye makes for a full-blown safari. (Probably best to invest in posting the books you get back to your home country as opposed to taking them back on the plane if, like me, you have the moral breaking strain of a chocolate Mars bar and easily give in to temptation. This means you need to go on a weekday when Hay on Wye’s post office will be open all day.)

I digress… Moid’s last YouTube Book Haul below (it really is this time, honest)…

(3) OXENMOOT A WEEK AWAY. The Tolkien Society expects 350 Tolkien fans from 25 different countries will meet in Oxford next weekend to celebrate the life and works of J.R.R. Tolkien. This year’s Oxonmoot is the Tolkien Society’s 50^th Oxonmoot which coincides with the 50^th anniversary of Tolkien’s death.

The event, taking place at St Anne’s College, Oxford from Thursday 31st August to Sunday 3rd September, has sold out due to the increasing popularity of Tolkien’s works. The event follows the recent publication of The Fall of Númenor and the release of the Amazon TV-series The Rings of Power set in the Second Age of Middle-earth.

The event itself will include talks from leading Tolkien scholars – including Brian Sibley, editor of The Fall of Númenor, screenwriter of The Lord of the Rings radio series and biographer of Peter Jackson – quizzes, workshops, an art exhibition, a masquerade, a Hobbit bake-off, a party and even theatrical performances. The weekend concludes, as always, with Enyalie, a ceremony of remembrance at Tolkien’s grave in Wolvercote Cemetery on Sunday afternoon….

(4) TIL WE HAVE FACES. “Dragons Are People Too: Ursula Le Guin’s Acts of Recognition” are analyzed by John Plotz at Literary Hub.

Nobody would dare to boil down Ursula Le Guin’s marvelous writing—all that fantasy, all that science fiction, poetry, essays, translations—into one idea. But in a pinch I’d pick two sentences from her 2014 National Book Award speech: “Capitalism[’s] power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.”

Fantasy and science fiction never meant escapism for Ursula Le Guin. The dragons of Earthsea and the reimagined genders of The Left Hand of Darkness were always lenses, lenses she ground in order to sharpen her readers’ focus on everyday life. Indeed, for Le Guin, there was no difference between the stories she invented and everyday stories about the institutions governing our world. The dragons of Earthsea and capitalism are woven from similar material: it is imagination all the way down.

James Baldwin said not everything that can be faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed without being faced. The word for facing things in Le Guin is recognition, or you might even say re-cognition. Her characters—and readers—find themselves forced to think again. When they do so, what had seemed a fundamental truth about their universe turns out to be anything but….

(5) PALACIO Q&A. Here’s an excerpt from “Interview: R.J. Palacio” in the New York Times.

What book should everybody read before the age of 21?

“The Lord of the Rings.”

What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves?

I got very into the works of the original creators of the literary fairy tale genre a few years ago — the women, like Madame d’Aulnoy and Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de La Force, who wrote stories to entertain themselves and their friends in the salons of Louis XIV. These were very subversive tales that empowered these women and vented their wishful fantasies — often published in the literary gazettes of their day. I have five original Mercure Galant books from the 1600s in which some of these stories first appeared.

You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?

While I wouldn’t mind nerding out with Carl Sagan, J.R.R. Tolkien and Arthur C. Clarke, I’ll keep it to the living: Susanna Clarke, Margaret Atwood and Judy Blume. Can you guys arrange that?

(6) FUTURAMA. Gizmodo tells how “Odd couple Bender and Dr. Zoidberg join forces for holiday chaos in this peek at ‘I Know What You Did Next Xmas’”: “Hulu’s Futurama Exclusive Clip: Robot Santa’s Sci-Fi Christmas”.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born August 24, 1899 — Gaylord Du Bois. He was a writer of comic book stories and comic strips, as well as Big Little Books. He wrote Tarzan for Dell Comics and Gold Key Comics from the Forties to early Seventies.) He was one of the writers for Space Family Robinson which was the basis for the Lost in Space series. (Died 1993.)
Born August 24, 1915 — Alice Sheldon. Alice Sheldon who wrote as James Tiptree Jr. was one of our most brilliant short story writers ever. She only wrote two novels, Up the Walls of the World and Brightness Falls from the Air and they too are worth reading. (Died 1987.)
Born August 24, 1932 — William Morgan Sheppard. Best remembered I think as Blank Reg in Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future. Genre wise I’d add him being the Klingon Prison Warden In Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Merrit in The Prestige, the rather scary Soul Hunter on Babylon 5 and a Vulcan Science Minister in Star Trek. So have I missed anything for him, genre or otherwise worth noting here? (Died 2019.)
Born August 24, 1934 — Kenny Baker. Certainly his portrayal of R2-D2 in the Star Wars franchise is what he’s best known for but he’s also been in Circus of Horrors, Wombling Free, Prince Caspian and the Voyage of the Dawn Treader series, The Elephant Man, Sleeping Beauty, Time Bandits, Willow, Flash Gordon and Labyrinth. Personally I think his best role was as Fidgit in Time Bandits. (Died 2016.)
Born August 24, 1936 — A. S. Byatt, 87. Author of three genre novels, two of which I’m familiar with, Possession: A Romance which became a rather decent film, and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature-winning The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, and one I’ve never heard of, Ragnarok: The End of the Gods, but I’m actually much, much more fond of her short fiction. I’d start with the Little Black Book of Stories and Angels & Insects collections
Born August 24, 1951 — Tony Amendola, 72. Probably best known for being the Jaffa master Bra’tac on Stargate SG-1. He’s also had recurring roles as Edouard Kagame of Liber8 on Continuum and on Once Upon a Time as Pinocchio’s creator, Geppetto. His list of one-off genre appearances is extensive and includes Angel, Charmed, Lois & Clark, Space: Above and Beyond, theCrusade spin-off of Babylon 5, X Files, Voyager, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Alias, She-Wolf of London and Kindred: The Embraced. He’s also been a voice actor in gaming with roles in such games as World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor, World of Warcraft: Legion and World of Final Fantasy.
Born August 24, 1958 — Lisa A. Barnett. Another one who died way too young. Wife of Melissa Scott. Some of her works were co-authored with her: The Armor of Light, Point of Hopes: A Novel of Astreiant and Point of Dreams: A Novel of Astreiant. They wrote one short story, “The Carmen Miranda Gambit”. She won the Lambda Literary Award. (Died 2006.)
Born August 24, 1957 — Stephen Fry, 66. He’s Gordon Deitrich in V for Vendetta, and he’s the Master of Laketown in The Hobbit franchise. His best role genre wise is as Mycroft Holmes in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows though he made an interesting narrator in the film version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and not to be overlooked is that he’s the narrator for all seven of the Potter novels for the UK audiobook recordings. His best roles however are decidedly not genre — it was the comic act Fry and Laurie with Hugh Laurie, with the two also in A Bit of Fry & Laurie and then as Jeeves and Wooster. Bloody brilliant!

(8) COMICS SECTION.

xkcd is Tech-Geeky enough to qualify for an item, not to mention the hidden moral message.

(9) MOON PROBE SUCCESS. “India lands a spacecraft near the moon’s south pole, a first for the world as it joins elite club” – AP News has the story.

India became the first country to land a spacecraft near the moon’s south pole on Wednesday — a historic voyage to uncharted territory that scientists believe could hold vital reserves of frozen water, and a technological triumph for the world’s most populous nation.

After a failed attempt to land on the moon in 2019, India now joins the United States, the Soviet Union and China as only the fourth country to achieve this milestone. A lander with a rover inside touched down on the lunar surface at 6:04 p.m. local time, sparking celebrations across India, including in the southern Indian city of Bengaluru, where space scientists watching the landing erupted in cheers and applause….

(10) SMARTIE PANTS. “IARPA’s new pants will record your location” reports Nextgov/FCW.

Officials from the research agency said Tuesday that they had launched a program to craft performance-grade, computerized clothing that can record audio, video and geolocation data while retaining the wearability and comfort of normal fabrics.

The Smart Electrically Powered and Networked Textile Systems — SMART ePANTS — program emerged a year ago with a broad agency announcement seeking contractors to help deliver sensor systems that can be integrated into normal clothing like shirts and pants, or even socks and underwear.

Those sensors are part of a system that is woven into the textiles to make the garments more wearable and washable, but also able to “sense, store, interpret, and/or react to information from their environment,” effectively making them Active Smart Textiles, according to agency documents….

Daniel Dern quips, “This gives new meaning to ‘flying by the seat of one’s pants’ (and perhaps ‘No matter where you, there you are’).”

(11) ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AGES HEARTS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Your biological age – how old you are – is actually just one age you have. Various parts of your body – brain, eyes, etc – have their own age. If, for example, you are middle aged, you might still unknowingly have the heart of an older person and so be at greater-than-you-think risk of a heart attack.

Up to now, things like your over-all biological age, lifestyle, blood cholesterol and genetic predisposition (did anyone in your family die young of a heart attack) have been used to guess a person’s heart’s age.

What biomedical researchers based in London, Brit Cit, have now developed is an artificial intelligence (AI) that can tell how old is a person’s heart. They also were able to quantify heart ageing factors and some of the genes involved – five seem particularly important.

They used used computer vision techniques to analyse cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging in 39,559 participants of the UK Biobank to train their AI.

See the primary research Shah, M. et al (2023) “Environmental and genetic predictors of human cardiovascular ageing”. Nature Communications, vol. 14, 4941.

(12) VIDEOS OF THE DAY. [Item by Dann.] Stone Trek is a five-episode mashup of Star Trek and the Flintstones.

[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Daniel Dern, Steven French, Dann, Shaun Gunner, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Steve Davidson.]

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