24 A Pixel For Ecclesiastes

Posted on September 13, 2024 by Mike Glyer

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

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

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

FICTION

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

NONFICTION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Samantha Harvey, author of Orbital

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Anniversary: Kolchak: The Night Stalker series (1974)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Brester Rockit finds fault with kids’ fascination with glowing objects.
Heart of the City is surprised this character has a fan.
Off the Mark set a monster movie on Sesame Street.
Bizarro changes the station.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pixel Scroll 8/6/24 The Problem Of Scroll 13

Posted on August 6, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) S.O.S. FOR TARAL’S COLLECTIONS. Steven Baldassarra announced on Facebook that the late Taral Wayne’s apartment needs to be emptied of his collections and stuff, and his sister has offered them to friends.

I am posting this message out on behalf of Christine Miller, Taral Wayne‘s sister. Please spread this message out to those who knew Taral:

“If anyone is interested in his art, toys or fanzines, please reach out to me, Christine Miller. I have to get his treasures out of the building asap.

“When I last spoke to Taral about funeral arrangements (although he was convinced he would live forever), he wasn’t interested in one. His remains are being cremated and then he will be buried with our mother in North York. At the moment, I’m just trying to get his treasures out of his apartment and don’t have the band width to think much past that.”

Taral Wayne (1951-2024) died July 31.

(2) FINALIST VANISHES FROM DRAGON AWARDS BALLOT. For one brief and shining moment Cedar Sanderson’s cover for Goblin Market was a 2024 Dragon Awards finalist in the Best Illustrative Book Cover. Then it suddenly wasn’t. Sanderson appeared on the originally released version of the ballot, but hours later she was missing. No explanation has been given, and her publisher demands to know why.

Jonna Hayden, Production Manager for Raconteur Press, sent this email to the Rac Press substack/newsletter subscribers this evening: “Concerning the Dragon Awards”:

In an effort towards transparency, we have sent the following letter to the Dragon Awards team, via Dragon Con:

“I am the Production Manager for Raconteur Press, and our Lead Designer is Cedar Sanderson. Cedar was nominated for a Dragon Award for her work on our book “Goblin Market” and achieved a place on the final ballot in the category “Best Illustrative Cover” for 2024. Or so we thought. Several hours after the final ballot was announced (and we proudly shared the information) Cedar’s name was removed.

“We were surprised by this removal–there has been no explanation, no replacement name added to the list, and no comment of any kind from the Dragon Awards as to the reason behind it. Cedar has not been contacted, and multiple emails from many, many fans have gone unanswered.

“In their frustration, her fans have been emailing, messaging, and calling us, to see if we have any communication or information as to the ‘why’ of this. We are, unfortunately, equally in the dark. We’ve been referring them to the contact form on the Awards page, but no information has been forthcoming. The lack of any comment on the Dragon Awards’ part is now beginning to lead to speculation as to the integrity of the awards as a whole. In light of the recent Hugo issues at the China Worldcon, I would think your organization would be striving to maintain the utmost transparency.

“Is there any plan whatsoever to address this? Will there be a statement of any kind as to the reasons? I would like to return to my regular job of publishing great short fiction, and not be fielding the frustrated and angry messages of fans who nominated her in good faith.

“I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation, and sharing it will help.

“Please let us know what the the plan for this is going forward.

“Thank you.”

If you haven’t had your fill of speculation, see the comments here.

(3) THERE IS A SEASON, TURN, TURN, TURN ON THE TV. Abigail Nussbaum says, “In its second season, the already-excellent Interview With the Vampire became one of the best and most entertaining shows on TV. My review in Strange Horizons discusses how the show both honors and subverts its source material.” “Interview With the Vampire Season 2”.

Published in 1976, Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire has a fair claim to being one of the most influential novels of the late twentieth century. Wildly successful in its own right—spawning some dozen sequels, several related series of novels, and a myriad film and TV adaptations—it all but singlehandedly reshaped the popular perception of the vampire. Rice’s vampires are brooding, tormented beings, haunted both by the need to kill and the crushing loneliness of eternal life. They seek companionship—which is to say, thinly veiled homoerotic bonds—with fellow immortals, but these relationships often turn rancid due to the beloved’s similar tormentedness. It’s a portrait that slid into self-parody almost as soon as it made its appearance, and which later creators have found themselves pushing against (“People still fall for that Anne Rice routine,” a decidedly nontormented vampire quips in an early episode of Buffy). But the very fact that this pushback feels necessary speaks to the trope’s influence and reach.

AMC’s adaptation of Interview with the Vampire—which premiered in 2022, and whose second season aired earlier this summer—wears that legacy lightly, and even playfully…

(4) TIME ON THEIR HANDS. T.R. Napper arrives in Glasgow in time to exchange drolleries with George R.R. Martin.

35 hours. 17,000km. 5 flights (1 cancelled). Arrived, finally, at my first WorldCon. Thought I'd walk down and check out the venue early, ran into this guy. I said: "I didn't get any panels either mate!" He cackled. pic.twitter.com/1G0vS93NPm
— T. R. Napper (@TheEscherMan) August 6, 2024

(5) SEE DELANY SPEECH. Posted to YouTube yesterday: Samuel R. Delany at the Free Library of Philadelphia on June 15, 2024 in conversation with composer and library trainee Mark Inchoco: “How SF Dances to the Music of Time”.

(6) NOT TERRY’S GHOST. [Item by Ersatz Culture.] Private Eye is a long running British news/satirical magazine, that sells more copies than some UK national newspapers. In their current issue (#1629, dated 2nd-15th August, so should be available in shops throughout the duration of the Glasgow Worldcon), their books section makes some interesting claims about the authorship of last year’s Hugo Best Related Work winner.

In his 2014 collected non-fiction book, A Slip of the Keyboard, Discworld writer Terry Pratchett had some advice for anyone who saw a celebrity author at a book signing.

“Don’t pass comment if they spend a lot of time reading their book while they’re in the shop. It may be the first time they’ve seen it. Do not offer to help them with the longer words.”

Ironic, then, that the official Pratchett biography, A Life with Footnotes, was “co-written” by ghostwriter Giles Smith – and not, as advertised on the cover, solely by Rob Wilkins, Pratchett’s former assistant. Wilkins went on to collect, amongst other awards, a 2023 Hugo for the book he did not write – a prestigious bauble Pratchett himself never managed to secure.

Giles Smith’s page on the UK Simon & Schuster website states that “in the last ten years, he has been the ghost-writer for eight Sunday Times bestselling autobiographies”, although there is no mention of this work on his agent’s site.

Note: credit is due to Kári Tulinius whose Bluesky post is what brought this to my attention.

The books column also includes a section on the Neil Gaiman allegations, but given that the magazine was published last week, is out-of-date with the latest developments, and also has a slightly odd take (in my opinion), such as whether this will affect the number of books that Gaiman writes blurbs for.

(7) READERS’ INTEREST AROUSED. NOR IS THAT ALL. On romantasy and other literary erotica: “My weeks of reading hornily: steamy book sales have doubled – and I soon found out why”, Zoe Williams told Guardian readers.

I spent a fortnight reading nothing but smut and I don’t need to give you a reason. But since there is one, here it is: business is booming in the publishing world of love and sex. Aficionados draw fine distinctions – between romance and erotica; “steamy” and “smutty”; fantasy and saga fiction – and endlessly subdivide the genres, but the takeaway is that the stigma around what used to be called “books that women like” has gone. And, as the UK literary agent Alice Lutyens puts it: “The steamier the sex, the better the book does.”

I started two books simultaneously, which just happened to span the gamut, from the almost completely chaste The Stars Too Fondly, by Emily Hamilton, to the most pornographic thing I’ve ever read (and I’ve read De Sade): Heat Clinic, by Alexis B Osborne. So, I could give you a take on the difference between romance and erotica, but I would rather throw it to an expert. Leah Koch started the independent romantic bookshop Ripped Bodice in Los Angeles with her sister, Bea, in 2016 (they recently opened a second shop in New York). She says readers tend to assume erotica is sexier. “The technical definition is that, in erotica, character development happens from sexual situations. We stock both.”…

… if there is one thing that has come to pass, maybe through TikTok, maybe just by the march of time, it is that readers no longer care about respectability, literary or any other kind. They don’t care if they are reading an Omegaverse novel in public; they don’t even care if someone mistakenly thinks it’s furry pornography. They don’t care if what they are reading could be mistaken for YA and they are not young. They don’t care if the patriarchy thinks they are silly. Which means, in the publishing world of – yup, I’m still calling it this – smut, pretty much anything could happen.

(8) PRO TIPS. Charlie Jane Anders shares valuable insights in “Another Way To Think About ‘Conflict’ and ‘Stakes’ In Your Fiction” at Happy Dancing.

1) Conflict

Here is a story that contains plenty of conflict: “I was hungry. I really wanted a sandwich. So I got up and went to the fridge and made a sandwich. The End.” A situation is introduced, the protagonist has a need. They need a sandwich! What are they going to do? They’re going to make a sandwich. The conflict is resolved — we can all relax now.

Here’s another story that has a lot of conflict: “My friend and I were both hungry and there was only one sandwich. So we each had half a sandwich and it tasted really good, and I was happy to be eating a sandwich with my friend.” OH MY GOD. There was only one sandwich. But we figured it out.

What I’m trying to say is that conflict doesn’t mean antagonism. Nobody has to be baring their teeth or vowing bloody murder. Nor does conflict have to be massive and dramatic, with bodily fluids going everywhere and people snarling angrily. In fact, much of the time in real life, “conflict” is just people dealing with the challenges and frictions of being in the world.

And of course, stories don’t need to have any conflict in them at all. You can have a story where it’s literally just like, “My friend and I hung out and watched the sunset, and it was nice.” That’s a story with a beginning, middle and an end. That’s very satisfying.

But even if you want to have some conflict in your story, conflict does not have to mean a certain level of drama or horribleness. A conflict doesn’t have to be intransigent or insurmountable, or involve anyone chopping off anyone else’s limbs….

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Lis Carey.]

August 6, 1926 – Janet Asimov. (Died 2019.)

By Lis Carey: Janet Opal Jeppson earned a medical degree from New York University Medical School, completed a residency in psychiatry at Bellevue Hospital, and in 1960 graduated from the William Alanson White Institute of Psychoanalysis, where she continued to work, practicing psychiatry and psychoanalysis until 1986. She continued to practice and publish medical papers under the name of J.O. Jeppson, even after her marriage to Isaac Asimov.

Janet Jeppson and Isaac Asimov. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter

She started writing children’s science fiction in 1970, also published as by J.O. Jeppson. The other change in Jeppson’s life that year was that she started dating Isaac Asimov, after he separated from his first wife. They married in 1973, after the divorce became final.

Some of Jeppson’s solo science fiction included The Second Experiment and The Package in Hyperspace. Together with Isaac, she wrote the Norby Chronicles series, which ran to eleven volumes. However, Isaac is reported to have said that the work was 90% Janet’s, with him just doing a final read-thru and polish, but his name “was wanted on the book for the betterment of sales”.

She was married to Isaac until his death in 1992, from complications of HIV, due to a transfusion during bypass surgery in 1983. Based on symptoms, Janet suspected HIV, and pushed for an HIV test, but doctors resisted until he was extremely ill. They also pressured her to keep the results secret due to fear of public reaction, and so it was not revealed until ten years after his death.

Married to a strong personality, she kept her own space and her own career, while being a loyal partner, and a determined advocate for him in his final illness.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Moderately Confused shows good instincts.
Pearls Before Swine illustrates a traveling author’s problems with hostile critics.
Phoebe and Her Unicorn like sad movies.
Wizard of Id can’t see a problem.
Rose is Rose knows canon.
The Far Side remembers kinder, gentler Vikings.

(11) AUREALIS AWARDS OPEN FOR ENTRIES. The 2024 Aurealis Awards, Australia’s premier awards for speculative fiction, are for works created by an Australian citizen or permanent resident, and published for the first time between January 1, 2024 and December 31, 2024.

The administrators encourage publishers and authors to enter all works published already this year by September 30, 2024, then subsequent publications as they are released, so their judges have time to consider each entry carefully.

Entries for the special Sara Douglass Book Series Award close September 30, 2024.
Entries for the Aurealis Awards main categories close on December 15, 2024.
Entries for the special Convenors’ Award for Excellence close December 31, 2024.

Full Rules and FAQ are on the Aurealis Awards website.

(12) IT’S GONE, JIM. “GameStop Kills Game Informer Magazine And Takes Website Offline” – Kotaku has the magazine’s obituary.

Game Informer, the longest-running gaming magazine in the U.S., is officially dead and GameStop killed it. It began publishing in 1991 and has been one of the last remaining physical gaming magazines in the world, with cover stories that continued to share deep dives and exclusive interviews on the biggest games coming out, from Final Fantasy: VII Rebirth to Star Wars Outlaws. No more….

(13) A DAY IN THE DEATH. Brenton Dickieson sees a connection between Tolstoy and Lewis in “The Living Lie, But Dead Men Tell the Truth: The Screwtape Letters and Ivan Ilych” at A Pilgrim in Narnia.

In Leo Tolstoy’s brilliant novella, The Death of Ivan Ilych (1886), there is a curious pun in the English translation I use (Aylmer Maude):

“The dead man lay, as dead men always lie” (96)…

…Doctors who lie, friends who lie, dying in comfort believing there is the hope of life and separated from the danger of a sense of their true mortal conditions. There it is.

Ivan Ilych’s condition is not great evil-doing, but “contented worldliness.” Ivan has lived in wealth, fulfilling his ambitions, playing whist with adoring friends of the same class and intelligence, fulfiling the role of a clerk with precision, even if his roles of father, husband, neighbour, and justice-keeper are somewhat ignored. Even in his dying days, he cannot realize death in his own frame. And when he begins to suspect that the death rattle is near, he cannot accept that his life has been meaningless. Not just meaningless, but a slow descent in inverse proportion to his imagined rise to social acceptance.

This is, of course, precisely what Screwtape would want….

(14) (NOT JUST) FOR THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON. [Item by Daniel Dern.] “Power On The Moon? A Giant Tower Could Light The Way For NASA Astronauts” says HotHardware.

Space company Honeybee has proposed a 100 meter tall tower that will potentially light the path for future NASA Artemis astronauts on the moon. The LUNARSABER (Lunar Utility Navigation with Advanced Remote Sensing and Autonomous Beaming for Energy Redistribution) tower is a deployable structure that integrates solar power, communications, and more, all in one package.

As NASA and other space agencies look to begin building lunar bases, they will all have to overcome some obvious obstacles. Perhaps one of the greatest of those will be how to generate power where none yet exists. Honeybee, a company owned by Blue Origin, believes it has created a solution that will not only solve the lunar power problem, but also “shine light on new possibilities, increasing operating hours for human and robotic missions on the Moon.”

“LUNARSABER can turn night into day in the deepest craters on the Moon,” remarked Kris Zacny, VP of Exploration Systems at Honeybee Robotics. “It is truly a game-changing system that will pave the way for a lunar economy.”

Some may be wondering how on Earth Honeybee expects to get a 100 meter tall tower onto the Moon. Well, the simple answer is a technology called DIABLO (Deployable Interlocking Actuated Bands for Linear Operations). DIABLO utilizes a rolled piece of metal, and then bends it into a deployable cylindrical structure that can support heavy payloads, which then becomes the base for LUNARSABER.

In order to deliver power, solar panels will be deployed via one of two methods, depending on the tower’s location on the Moon….

(15) WAITING FOR GOLDBLUM. [Item by Daniel Dern.] “Netflix’s Kaos turns Jeff Goldblum into the all-powerful Zeus” – BGR has the story. “Jeff Goldblum’s new Netflix series Kaos is basically The Boys but about Greek mythology”

…Right away, the title of this eight-episode drama also gives you a little hint of what it’s all about. One of the animating principles here is that the world was born from chaos — and while Kaos is set in the modern era, it’s a sort of off-kilter, slightly askew version of it (thus, the modified spelling). In other words, there are no old men in the sky here wearing togas and hurling lightning bolts at Earth. What we get, instead, is a creepy Goldblum-as-Zeus laughing deliriously at his TV while watching scenes of devastation and commenting about how much he loves fire….

DPD, having watched the video, says “I’m not sure it’s ‘The Boys Go Greek’ and we’ll be waiting for it.”

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

Pixel Scroll 7/21/24 Did I Ever Tell You About The Man Who Taught His Pixel To Scroll?

Posted on July 21, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) FRANKENSTEIN UNBOUND. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] We have had an SFnal real treat over here in Blighty with a fresh take on the Frankenstein mythos in the form of a three-part audio drama, and through the wonders of the world-wide interwebby thingy, you can enjoy it too. Brian Aldiss constantly told us that the novel Frankenstein was the first true SF novel (with everything genre-related before that being ‘proto-SF’). And now BBC Radio 4 have aired a three-part audio drama that is a post-modern and an ultra-SFnal revamp of the story.

It is set in the future here a researcher creates an artificial intelligence (AI) based on the Frankenstein author’s (Mary Shelley’s) mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. Mary Wollstonecraft was herself well known for her book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman hence the title of this audio play, A Vindication of Frankenstein’s Monster.

Starting with Mary Wollstonecraft’s ground-breaking feminist text, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and moving into a radical re-imagining of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), through to the contemporary world of Artificial Intelligence, Linda Marshall Griffiths’ drama asks what would happen if a woman created a woman?

In the first episode of this three part drama, Lizzie walks through Mary Wollstonecraft’s world at the end of the 18th Century and she has questions. Tracing Wollstonecraft’s extraordinary life, she is challenged by her bravery, her incredible mind and her capacity to fall in love with the wrong men. But this is not time-travel, Lizzie is creating a Virtual Reality world at the centre of which is Mary Wollstonecraft. But as the ‘AI’ Wollstonecraft comes to life, trapped in her virtual world, she begins to question exactly what has changed for women more than two hundred years after the publication of her manifesto – have women achieved equality and freedom? And Lizzie, pregnant and recently diagnosed with an aneurysm, must decide whether to allow her life to be constrained by her health, her lover Max, her impending motherhood or whether to complete her work, following Wollstonecraft’s journey to Norway…

You can download all three episodes:

(2) WHO TAKES. Charlie Jane Anders’ June newsletter Happy Dancing has “11 Hot Takes About Doctor Who”. Here’s the first one.

1) Doctor Who has wasted some great story seeds from “Genesis of the Daleks”

Steven Moffat has mined this 1975 classic for story ideas at least twice: in “The Magician’s Apprentice”/”The Witch’s Familiar” and more recently in “Boom.” But there’s still some great material that nobody has touched. In particular: the Doctor’s suggestion that “many future worlds could become allies” because of the threat of the Daleks, and that something good could come of the Daleks’ evil… this is something I’d love to see dramatized on screen. (When Terry Nation wrote this line, the memory of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill joining forces against the Nazis was somewhat fresh, but of course that alliance didn’t exactly last.) Also, I’ve long been tantalized by the bit at the very beginning where a Time Lord warns the Doctor about a possible future where the Daleks have won — becoming the only surviving life form in the universe. It would be fascinating to visit that alternate future and perhaps see the Daleks trying to establish it as the main timeline.

(3) A PLUS FOR PHYSICAL BOOKS. “BookTok’s Latest Craze: Books With Sprayed Edges!” at Yahoo!

If you’ve stepped into a bookstore or scrolled Bookstagram and BookTok recently, you’ve likely noticed an increasing number of books with beautiful sprayed edges, or as book lovers call them, “spredges.” This is a design feature where the edges of the book pages are beautifully embellished with color or intricate designs. Sprayed edges might sound like a fun new bookish trend, but they’ve actually been around for centuries. Dating back to the 10th Century, books and sometimes Bibles often had detailed scenes painted on their edges. This practice was called fore-edge painting and now it’s having a renaissance! In recent years, books with sprayed edges have started adorning shelves everywhere, and their immense popularity is only growing. We talked to book pros about why readers are so drawn to this trend, what makes sprayed edges so special and more….

(4) SEE YOU IN THE FUNNY PAGES. The L.A. Breakfast club will host “Tales from the Comic Book Crackdown with Ben Dickow & Company” on August 14 from 7:00 AM – 9:00 AM. Tickets at the link.

Ben Dickow’s new musical Tales From the Comic Book Crackdown brings to life the dramatic Senate hearings on Juvenile Delinquency of April 21, 1954, which were designed to bring down the comic book industry as a whole. These hearings resulted in years of censorship and repression of the comic book industry.

One man stood up for comics and free expression: 32-year-old Bill Gaines, the most successful comic book publisher of his day, was the sole witness to come forward and testify on behalf of comic books. Despite his best efforts, the authorities carried the day, and Bill almost lost everything.

Mr. Beaser: Is there any limit you can think of that you would not put in a magazine because you thought a child should not see or read about it?

Mr. Gaines: My only limits are the bounds of good taste, what I consider good taste.

Sen. Kefauver [alluding to the cover illustration for Crime SuspenStories #22]: This seems to be a man with a bloody ax holding a woman’s head up which has been severed from her body. Do you think that is in good taste?

Mr. Gaines: Yes, sir, I do, for the cover of a horror comic….

You can listen to the music online: “Comic Book Crackdown”.

(5) THOUGHT EXPERIMENT. Sterling Ulrich asks “What if Faramir Joined the Fellowship in The Lord of the Rings?” at CBR.com.

One of the biggest additions to the extended edition of Peter Jackson‘s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers film was a flashback to the moment before Boromir set out for Rivendell. Denethor learned about the upcoming Council of Elrond and wanted to send a representative to ensure that the One Ring was used for the benefit of Gondor. Faramir offered to travel to Rivendell, but Denethor had no faith in his younger son and dispatched Boromir instead….

…On the surface, it seems Faramir’s presence at Amon Hen would have been beneficial. However, the Fellowship’s failures at the Battle of Amon Hen in The Lord of the Rings had consequences that were instrumental to Sauron’s eventual defeat. Merry and Pippin only met the Ents because they ran into Fangorn Forest after escaping their Uruk-hai captors. Likewise, Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli only met Éomer because they crossed paths with him while chasing after the Uruk-hai. Without these chance occurrences, Saruman would have had free rein over Rohan, leaving Gondor without help from its neighboring kingdom in the Siege of Minas Tirith….

(6) SUNDAY MORNING TRANSPORT. “Father Ash” by Rachel Hartman is July’s third free read from Sunday Morning Transport.

Remember, this month, we’re running an annual membership drive of epic proportions — so if you haven’t already, please consider signing up, and if you are signed up, please share this link with your friends.

(7) LYUBOMIR NIKOLOV–NARVI (1950-2024). [Item by Valentin D. Ivanov.] The Bulgarian speculative fiction community lost its doyenne Lyubomir Nikolov–Narvi (1950-2024) on Jul 20. He translated the famous trilogy of J. R. R. Tolkien into Bulgarian and gave the readers many pleasant hours. Nikolov translated from seven languages all together.

He was also an excellent writer on his own – The Tenth Righteous Man (1999) won the fandom award for the best Bulgarian book of the decade – that is, of the last decade of the twentieth century. This amazing novel describes a singularity of sorts – a sudden change in the physical constants gives every person immeasurable destructive power. Will the society survive this challenge?

Nikolov was active until recently – his latest novel appeared in 2022. Ne was known for introducing the game-books in Bulgarian – many kids have learned to read on them. He won an EuroCon (1987), a SotsCon (1989) and many other accolades.

Right now he is probably smoking a pipe in the writers section of Paradise, discussing the fate of Middle Earth with some other esteemed fellows.

More about him here (in Bulgarian, but Google is your friend).

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

July 21, 1948 – Garry Trudeau, 76.

By Paul Weimer: Trudeau as a cartoonist and as a creator has a number of wide ranging credits: Alpha House, where Republican Senators share a house, and hilarity ensues. Tanner, a satirical look at a fake presidential campaign. And many columns in many publications.

But you’re here, and I am here, for Doonesbury.

Cartoonist Garry Trudeau, the fifth Rathbun Visiting Fellow, delivers “Harry’s Last Lecture on a Meaningful Life.” By Linda A. Cicero / Stanford University News Service.

Doonesbury had been a fixture of comic strips in newspapers for as long as I was reading physical newspapers, from the 70’s all the way to around 2000 when I moved to California and finally stopped reading physical newspapers on a regular basis. (I would soon just read Doonesbury online) It felt scandalous, even transgressive for me to read and enjoy the comic, once I was old enough to figure out just what the comic was about, because its politics were very much to the left of the politics of my family. I suppose if my parents had paid more attention, they might have decried the comic’s politics, but they didn’t pay attention, and so I could read it in peace.

I was way too young for the Watergate series in Doonesbury, which of course was its first high water mark. Where I remember Doonesbury hitting a height for me was in 1989 and Tiananmen Square. I remember conversations with my older brother, who was enthusiastic that “China is going to become a Democracy!” in exultation. I was far more realistic, even pessimistic, and I have Doonesbury to thank for helping me get parallax, perspective and point of view on the events happening in Beijing that year. (And I remember that when the protests turned violent, the strip went into re-runs, and that really helped bring home to me how serious it all was).

Ever since, I’ve paid attention to when people complain or try to get strips of Doonesbury pulled or show anger against it. That’s when I know that such a venerable comic strip, from such a talented and abiding creator as Trudeau, has once again hit a sensitive mark. And his influence and inspiration to multiple generations of political cartoonists cannot be underestimated.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Reality Check sows confusion where there once was none.
Thatababy invites you to solve a maze.
The Argyle Sweater shows Dorothy’s Kansas optometrist is on the job.
Carpe Diem learns the limitations of the Dark Side.

(10) CLOSER TO THE SKY. If you’re ever near Cusco, Peru, Atlas Obscura says you shouldn’t miss: “Area 21 Cusco – Cusco, Peru”.

AREA 51 MIGHT BE BARRICADED by barbed wire and military guards, but this open-air exhibit welcomes all intrepid travelers. Signs that say Abducción Gratis (“Abduction Free”) and the looming figure of a crashed UFO greet visitors, encouraging guests to meet ET’s distant relatives. Situated atop a hill on the outskirts of Cusco along a winding path, visitors can pose with an assortment of extraterrestrials of all shapes, sizes, and home planets.

However, this is more than a kitschy roadside attraction or opportunity for an Instagram photo-op. The interactive art compilation, crafted by Tupaq Kamariy Candia, perfectly melds Peruvian culture and science fiction, illuminating Peru’s rich history with the cosmos….

(11) I’M DREAMING OF A WHITE CHRISTMAS. Buffalo NASFiC guests of honor Kaja and Phil Foglio took a stroll outside the convention.

So Buffalo seems pretty great– why don't we move here? This photo explains everything. No, the hydrants aren't wired into the internet, those aerials are there so that when the snow covers everything, it'll poke up enough that the snowplows won't hit them. That's a LOT of snow pic.twitter.com/cmM12vFmSJ
— Phil Foglio (@FoglioPhil) July 21, 2024

(12) REBEL MOON PODCAST PREQUEL. “Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon Announces Surprising Spinoff” at Comicbook.com.

Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon is getting a prequel. Netflix has announced The Seneschal, an upcoming narrative fiction podcast that will take audiences 500 years before the events of Rebel Moon to explore the origins of the robot knights, the Jimmys. The new podcast is set to debut with its first episode on July 29th with five additional episodes dropping weekly wherever you listen to podcasts.

“Now that you’ve met the Jimmys in the movie, I want to tell their story, their creation, and how they came to be,” Snyder said in a video teaser for the podcast. “I can’t wait for you to listen.”

The Seneschal will star Fallout‘s Ella Purnell as the voice of Raina, Naveen Andrews as Grigory, Alfred Enoch as Adwin, Peter Serafinowicz as Bartholomew, and Jason Isaacs as King Ulmer. You can check out the official description of The Seneschal below.

(13) ROSSEAU, LEWIS AND L’ENGLE. The Science Fiction Makers is free to view on YouTube.

The Science Fiction Makers: Rosseau, Lewis and L’Engle is a feature documentary that examines three integral writers who over the past century wrote within the Christian Science Fiction genre. Through interviews with scholars and current writers, reenactments, archival materials and excerpts from their works, we explore a genre that has been counterculture since its beginning. They were outsiders within the larger Sci-Fi genre and they would face harsh criticism, dismissal, and even hostility from all sides for putting their faith and imagination into their writing. In the end, Victor Rosseau, C. S. Lewis, and Madeleine L’Engle were pioneers of a sub-genre that would doggedly survive and continue to influence popular culture to this day.

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

Pixel Scroll 7/14/24 Petronius T Arbiter Says, I’m Currently Looking For A Door, Or, Even A Window, Into Winter, Which I Plan To Leave Open And Move My Bed Near

Posted on July 14, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) DRAGONS, CARE AND FEEDING. George R.R. Martin has a long exposition about dragons, and not only those of Westeros, at Not a Blog: “Here There Be Dragons”.

…Dragons need food.   They need water too, but they have no gills. They need to breathe. Some say that Smaug slept for sixty years below the Lonely Mountains before Bilbo and the dwarves woke him up.   The dragons born of Valyria cannot do that.   They are creatures of fire, and fire needs oxygen.   A dragon could dip into the ocean to scoop up a fish, perhaps, but they’d fly right up again. If held underwater too long, they would drown, just like any other land animal.

My dragons are predators, carnivores who like their meat will done.   They can and will hunt their own prey, but they are also territorial.   They have lairs.   As creatures of the sky, they like mountain tops, and volcanic mountains best of all. These are creatures of fire, and the cold dank caverns that other fantasists house their pets in are not for mine.     Man-made dwellings, like the stables of Dragonstone, the towers tops of the Valryian Freehold, and the Dragonpit of King’s Landing, are acceptable — and often come with men bringing them food. If those are not available, young dragons will find their own lairs… and defend them fiercely.

My dragons are creatures of the sky.   They fly, and can cross mountains and plains, cover hundreds of miles… but they don’t, unless their riders take them there.   They are not nomadic. During the heyday of Valyria there were forty dragon-riding families with hundreds of dragons amongst them… but (aside from our Targaryens) all of them stayed close to the Freehold and the Lands of the Long Summer…

(2) ETHICS OF SPACE TRAVEL AND ALIEN CONTACT. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Human beings are mucky creatures. As a bioscientist, and especially as one who engaged in germ-free and also specific-pathogen-free work in my gap year, I am acutely aware that humans are a home to a multitude of microbes and we continually shed them. (My work involved small chambers in which we kept an open agar plate on one side to ensure everything was clean; it was very bad news if ever we came in and something was growing as that meant that that particular experiment had to come to an abrupt end.) So you can guess my ethical stance as to the proposed human landings on Mars. Yes, I know we defeated the Martians before with microbes, but that was on our own home turf in Blighty: there’s no need for us to contaminate putative Martians on Mars before we have done as much as we can using robots. (Yes, I know that I constantly tell folk that the machines are taking over the world – though nobody ever listens – but, to be fair, I don’t mind them taking over Mars: I’m not that prejudiced.)

And even our bog-standard Lunar missions have seen us pollute our Moon. Just a few weeks ago, at the end of May, there was research published that we might have already significantly contaminated Lunar polar ice with water from Apollo lander exhaust and that the proposed Starship craft will further contaminate it to a far, far greater degree. This is going to make ascertaining the origin of Lunar water ice trapped in permanently shadowed areas quite difficult. (Already on Earth we have contaminated Antarctic ice with isotopes from atomic bomb testing which is why those of us looking at palaeoclimatology through ice cores define ‘the present’ as being 1950 – can’t use any ice since then [other than for cooling one’s gin and tonic (it’s a silver lining)]. Betcha didn’t know you lived in the future!)

So, this week’s BBC Radio 4 programme Siedways – the first in a four part series – on the ethics of the search for aliens and alien contact piqued my interest. (Even though the programme trailer mentioned ‘inter-galactic’ aliens… I’d settle for detecting interstellar techno aliens.) Anyway, you can decide how good the panel was for yourself… Access the programme here: “BBC Radio 4 – Sideways, A New Frontier, A New Frontier: 1. A Message to Ourselves”.

(3) TCA 2024. There are two genre shows among the winners of the Television Critics Awards 2024. (Complete list at the link.) The winners were selected by the TCA’s membership of more than 230 TV journalists from across the United States and Canada.

Outstanding Achievement in Family Programming: Doctor Who (Disney+)
Heritage Award: Twin Peaks

(4) PEACE IN SFF. “C.S. Lewis, Sci-fi, and the Normality of Peace” by Peter Jacobsen at the Foundation for Economic Education.

…One of the easiest ways to understand what Lewis is doing in Out of the Silent Planet is to look at the context in which he is writing. The book was published in 1938, when sci-fi works like H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds dominated.

In an article “Rehabilitating H.G. Wells: C.S. Lewis’s ‘Out of the Silent Planet,’” author David Downing argues that much of what Lewis was doing in the Space Trilogy was challenging sci-fi tropes he found objectionable. He says the novel started when “Lewis and his good friend J.R.R. Tolkien agreed that there simply were not enough of their favorite sort of stories available [in the sci-fi genre], so they decided to try their own hand at it.”

Lewis goes out of his way to point out his debt to Wells in the novel, but it’s clear he disagrees with many Wellsian takes on sci-fi. One disagreement in particular stood out to me. Unlike the violent, malevolent Martians in The War of the Worlds, the extra-terrestrials in Lewis’s book are peaceful.

Brilliantly, Lewis makes it clear that the characters, like the reader, share the bias in assuming the creatures will be evil. The protagonist, Ransom, in his first encounter with one species of extra-terrestrial called the sorn, is repulsed and flees the scene. It didn’t help that Ransom was taken by other humans against his will. In that sense he had some reason to fear the sorn. But the only reason he was taken was that the other humans feared the sorn. The sorn simply wanted to talk, but the humans believed it was demanding a sacrifice.

As a reader, this point dawned on me slowly. The natives call the planet that Ransom lands on Malacandra, and there are several rational and animal species on the planet. As I read through the novel, I kept wondering, “Which of these is going to be the bad species? Which alien is the antagonist?”

Ransom shares this thinking. As he continues on the planet, he befriends a different species known as the hrossa who teach him the planetary language. In interacting with the hrossa, he tries to uncover which of the species on the planet rules the others. Which species is in control?

He slowly discovers that things are not as he expected. It isn’t the case that one species violently controls the others. Rather, each one specializes in a few things, and cooperates and exchanges with the others. This seems so foreign to Ransom that he’s skeptical that this could be true at first. However, he slowly discovers that the only hierarchy is a willing submission of all three species to the divine order.

As we continue through the book, Ransom soon discovers that the planet Malacandra is actually what we call Mars. Again, Lewis makes the contrast clear between his own works and works like The War of the Worlds. Mars, despite having been named by humans after the god of war, is a peaceful place.

The Martians are not violent invaders. Ransom asks about violent conflict: “If both wanted one thing and neither would give it… would the other at last come with force? Would they say, give it or we kill you?”

The Hrossa can’t understand why that would ever be necessary. Why would they want something like violence or war?

It’s a beautiful reframing of the issue. Peace is normal….

(5) STREET-LEGAL FLYING SAUCER. Of course, as Jacobsen says above, not everyone is prepared to encounter peace-loving aliens. “A UFO car drove cross-country. Officers thought it was out of this world” – behind a paywall in the Washington Post.

Adam Carnal, a deputy in Crawford County, Mo., wasn’t sure what he would find when he pulled over a flying saucer on Interstate 44 late last month. The vehicle had committed a lane violation, he said, and he wasn’t sure if it was allowed to be on the road in the first place.

As Carnal approached, he recalled the top of the cockpit lifting to reveal two people sporting green, alien-like glasses. The driver raised a hand and gave Carnal a Vulcan salute, the famous gesture from the TV series “Star Trek.”

“I come in peace,” Carnal said the man told him.

The traffic stop was one of four that lifelong alien-enthusiast Steve Anderson experienced during his multiday drive from Indianapolis to the Roswell UFO Festival in New Mexico. After being pulled over twice in Missouri and two more times in Oklahoma, he said, he was also welcomed to Roswell by officers who knew he’d be arriving, awaiting his lunar landing in the parking lot of his hotel.

“I thought, how cool would it be to get to ride in a flying saucer?” he said. “So since I don’t have the technology to make one that flies, I built a driving saucer.”…

…Anderson bought a tiny 1991 Geo Metro and rang up Dennis Bellows, a mechanic friend who had built a few other cars for him. Anderson asked Bellows if he could transform the Geo into a flying saucer, like the kind in old sci-fi movies….

…The car’s bubble-shaped top — adorned with an antenna — took an extra bit of ingenuity. Bellows ultimately warmed pie slices of plexiglass to form the contraption….

… Anderson is used to being stopped by law enforcement while he’s driving the space cruiser — one of roughly 45 cars he keeps at his home in Indiana. He said he often hands over a gag driver’s license identifying him as “Al Ien” and tells officers that he’s from the planet Krypton, before handing over his real identification….

(6) WILL THEY DOUBLE UP OR DOUBLE DOWN? The media asks, “Between ‘Gladiator II’ and ‘Wicked,’ is the new ‘Barbenheimer’ upon us?” Despite CNN’s fervent hope and best effort, the pairing doesn’t click the same way – and is missing a lyrical handle.

This year, two disparate, big-budget films will share a release date: One, an R-rated historical epic stacked with a starry cast of Oscar hopefuls. The other, a musical based on a beloved property with plenty of pink and a Billboard-friendly soundtrack.

Sound familiar?

With “Gladiator II” and the first part of “Wicked” sharing a release date, days before Thanksgiving, movie theaters are nearing their truest chance at another “Barbenheimer,” a viral phenomenon that in 2023 drove audiences to the movie theater by the millions, leaving a massive mark in pop culture and at the box office.

But what will we call it? “Gladiator II” star Paul Mescal thinks “Glicked” (pronounced glick-id) is the portmanteau that suits the prospective double feature best.

“’Wickiator’ doesn’t really roll off the tongue, does it?” he said in a new interview with Entertainment Tonight. “I think the films couldn’t be more polar opposite and kind of worked in that context previously, so fingers crossed people come out and see both films on opening weekend.”

But maybe we moviegoers (and Mescal) are getting ahead of ourselves. Tom Nunan, a lecturer at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and TV and the founder of the production company Bull’s Eye Entertainment, isn’t fully sold on “Barbenheimer” 2.0.

… It should be noted that after the smashing success of “Barbenheimer” summer, no release weekends have seen the same double-feature draw, though musings of “Saw Patrol” and “Garfuriosa” pairings did make the rounds online. Those were more jokes about how two seemingly incompatible films could reach the same audiences than genuine attempts at creating a viral trend — in no world does the über-graphic “Saw X” pair well with the kid-friendly “Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie.”…

(7) SHANNEN DOHERTY (1971-2024). Actress Shannen Doherty, known in genre circles for Charmed, died July 13 of cancer at the age of 53.

…Doherty starred with Holly Marie Combs and Alyssa Milano in “Charmed” from 1998-2001, at which point her character was replaced by one played by Rose McGowan…

She was best known for her work on Beverly Hills, 90210 and its reboots.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

July 14, 1939 – Sid Haig. (Died 2019.) This Scroll, we come to honor not a performer who was known as a hero, one who was legendary mostly as a villain, Sid Haig, a role he played in fantasy, horror and SF.

His most well-known role was as Captain Spaulding in the Rob Zombie films House of 1000 Corpses, The Devil’s Rejects and 3 from Hell. Not for those easily offended, nor for those expected a storyline with a plot that make sense, the character is an icon of horror. SPOILER ALERT — Unlike Freddie Krugger, Rob Zombie has so far suggested this character is indeed dead. END SPOILER ALERT. Oh, and Spaulding is named for Groucho Marx’s Captain Jeffrey T. Spaulding character from the Thirties Animal Crackers film.

He had one major roles in SF, that being the evil Dragos on Jason of Star Command, the series James Doohan was. He appeared in every episode of the two seasons that series ran. Dragos, Jason’s main adversary, intends to rule the galaxy and it is up to Jason and the Star Command to stop him. Haig delightfully played him way over the top in the costume below.

He showed up in Star Trek in as First Lawgiver in “The Return of The Archons”. I’m reasonably certain everyone here has seen it but if not, the plot is that Enterprise is investigating the disappearance of the USS Archon on the planet Beta III, Kirk and his crew encounter an old-style Western community brainwashed and subservient to a sinister godlike figure called Landru. He was the First Lawgiver.

The final role that I’m going to was on Batman in two episodes, “The Spell of Tut” and Tut’s Case is Shut”, he’s a minion on King Tut, the enemy of Batman who created specifically created who was portrayed by Victor Buono as was this character, Royal Apothecary. As you can see, the costume that they gave was quite silly.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Heart of the City finishes her Sunday crossovers.
Lio also has a crossover.
Thatababy sees some exotic birds.
Rubes reminds us wizards have discriminating palates.
Tom Gauld encounters declining standards.

“How are your experiments going?” (My latest cartoon for @newscientist) pic.twitter.com/dwhGNwTxie
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) July 14, 2024

(10) TINY L.A. “He built miniatures of LA buildings for fun. Now, Guillermo del Toro is among his fans” at LAist.

Many transplants come to Los Angeles to chase a dream. Kieran Wright kind of just stumbled onto his.

The New Zealander moved to the city about 8 years ago, with the humble goal of soaking in as much of L.A. as he could.

“I wanted to connect with the city as a local would, and I had so much catching up to do,” Wright said. “I started building this picture of L.A. that was different to the one that I had imagined, it turned out to be in the best way possible.”

Those quests took him on drives far and close to places famous and offbeat. Wright was fascinated with the diner, one staple in the American movies and TV shows he watched before moving to Los Angeles. It was at an icon of the genre, Rae’s Restaurant in Santa Monica, where his love for the city, architecture, and Americana all came together to nudge him to try out a hobby — to build miniature replicas of L.A. buildings that are as beautiful as they are painstakingly faithful….

…One of his career highlights, Wright said, came via a purchase notice he got on Twitter. The buyer was filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, who would end up collecting several more pieces, including a mini replica of The Formosa Cafe, and The Jim Henson Company.

After Wright delivered the model to del Toro’s house, he asked the director to send him a photo of its final setting when he finds a place for it.

“Sure enough, a couple of days later, he sent me a photo of the miniature surrounded by everything in his house,” Wright said. “He’s got all sorts of interesting oddities and collectibles… and the art fits in there perfectly.”…

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A post shared by Kieran (@smallscalela)

(11) STARLINKS IN WRONG ORBIT. [Item by Jeanne Jackson]. Last night [July 11], I watched a Starlink launch on the usual Falcon 9 from Vandenberg Space Patrol Base right after logging off from my Thursday night writers’ group meeting. Although the thing was hard to see owing to an intense shroud of pea-soup fog on the launching pad, the bird got off just fine. Except for the ground visibility problem (frequent in S. California), everything looked normal. There was a good bit of uncustomary frost on the upper parts of the second-stage engine, but the Spaceflight Now commentator (independent journalist, not part of Space X) thought it was probably harmless. The first stage landed perfectly on its drone barge in the Pacific Ocean.

I went to bed last night with the erroneous idea that the launch was successful. The second stage had injected everything into orbit, and I’d never heard of Falcon 9 having any trouble with the later circularization burn, a 1 or 2 second shot upon reaching apogee. I entered the launch into the Log, sat down to watch two Perry Mason episodes, took Tillion (my dog) outdoors at midnight, and went to bed.

Today, I found out otherwise. The 20 Starlink birds had indeed made into orbit—the wrong orbit. Indeed, it was the worst orbit possible short of getting listed as FTO (Failed To Orbit). The circularization burn had not taken place as planned. Instead, there was what the astronautics trade euphemistically calls a “Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly” of the upper stage motor. In plain English, the confounded thing blew itself to bits.

Oops.

I’ve made some changes in my Space Flight Log entries for these 20 Starlink satellites, of course.

Independent sources tell me that the perigees of the twenty comsats were very, very low: mostly around 130-140 kilometers, with a few outliers around 115 and one up at 190. Apogees ran from 250 to 325 kilometers. This is not conducive to long spacecraft lifetime. 130 km is ~80 miles. It’s reported that Elon Musk ordered that the satellites save themselves by using their argon-ion maneuvering thrusters, but this is unlikely to be effective. It normally takes two weeks or more for these low-power, continuous-boost thrusters to move the satellites into their operating orbits, but the projected lifetimes of this bunch are probably measurable in days, if not hours. Each of them has a pair of solar panels giving a 30-meter wingspread, meaning gross quantities of atmospheric drag.

In other words, Musk’s order is like Jim Kirk ordering Warp 9 when all Scotty has online is a single impulse engine in dire need of repair. Unlike in Star Trek, it ain’t gonna happen.

I mentioned an anomalous frosty buildup on the 2^nd stage engine, upstream of the combustion chamber. The current online buzz has it that this probably came from a small liquid oxygen leak. The frosty buildup may have accumulated enough to clog lines in the 40+ minutes between initial cutoff and reignition for the circularization burn, causing an explosion. The explosion was apparently of insufficient destructive force to prevent satellite deployment.

This has never happened before on a Falcon 9—it certainly isn’t a design flaw. Most likely, somebody goofed at some point during assembly of that upper stage, and nobody else caught the mistake. Either that, or some subcontractor supplied Space X with a faulty part (this has happened before), and no one in Space X tested the part properly prior to installation.

Most likely, the underlying cause of the failure was doing things in a hurry. The only good things about this incident are that astronauts were not involved, and no customer was discommoded by it—Starlink is an in-house operation of Space X. Just imagine what the public outcry would have been, had the payload been a billion-dollar space probe, space telescope, or reconnaissance satellite, paid for by taxpayers rather than corporate stockholders. Never mind the noise had it been a human flight mission.

In the past year or two, Space X has been emphasizing faster and faster launch tempos. Up to now, they’ve gotten away with it, but this is likely to draw them up short for at least a couple or three months while they track down the cause and come up with a remedy for it. Space is a harsh, hostile environment, and rocket science is unforgiving of mistakes.

Faster, better, cheaper—pick any two. And do it right, not do it Tuesday—if you want to deliver a product which satisfies your customers.

(12) PENNY FOR YOUR THOUGHTS – MIND READING THE BRAIN. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] In this week’s Nature comes news of brain scans now being sufficiently detailed that we can identify a single language word. “Ultra-Detailed Brain Map Shows Neurons for Words’ Meanings”.

Ultra-detailed brain map shows neurons that encode words’ meaning. For the first time, scientists identify individual brain cells linked to the linguistic essence of a word…

To an extent, the researchers were able to determine what people were hearing by watching their neurons fire. Although they couldn’t recreate exact sentences, they could tell, for example, that a sentence contained an animal, an action and a food, and the order in which the words appeared…

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. How It Should Have Ended takes us to the Villain Pub to contend with “A Despicable QUIET PLACE”.

Fallout, The Last of Us, A Quiet Place – so many apocalypse stories! So what happens when a Ghoul, a Clicker and Death Angel walk into a bar and what do the other villains think about them?

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

Pixel Scroll 6/14/24 No Pixels For Old Men

Posted on June 14, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) ON THE FRONT LINES, AND THOSE WHO WROTE THEM. Through the lens of a letter by J.R.R. Tolkien, Brenton Dickieson explores the tension between two critics in a Twentieth Century culture war. “Great and Little Men: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Letter about C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot” at A Pilgrim in Narnia.

…Professionally speaking, Lewis was usually polite and firm when challenging Eliot in most of his literary criticism and theory. Sometimes the challenge is a bit more jovial, though there are a couple of moments of more pointed or heated criticism. Lewis was far more profuse in blame in his letters, where there seems to be a personal animosity toward Eliot–at least toward Eliot as a symbol. Twice, however, Lewis had a more personal opportunity to rethink his position and make a connection with another leading Anglican public intellectual.

The first of these was through Charles Williams, who was a close friend of both Eliot and Lewis. Indeed, Eliot and Lewis each described Williams in striking terms, admitting to Williams’ charismatic appeal and value as a poet and critic. Williams tried once, just a few months before he died, to bridge the divide between Eliot and Lewis. Just months before Charles Williams died, he arranged a meeting between Eliot, Lewis, and another Inkling, Fr Gervase Mathew, at the Mitre Hotel in Oxford. It was not a success….

(2) GLASGOW 2024 ADDS SPECIAL GUEST. Dr. Meganne Christian FRAeS (she/her) will be a Special Guest of the 2024 Worldcon. Dr Christian is Reserve Astronaut / Exploration Commercialisation Lead at the UK Space Agency, developing strategy on human and robotic spaceflight in the post-ISS landscape. Her full biography can be found on the Glasgow 2024 website.

In November 2022, she became a member of the ESA astronaut reserve, one of only 17 candidates selected from a pool of more than 22,500 applicants across Europe. Dr Christian holds a Bachelor of Engineering and a PhD in Industrial Chemistry from the University of New South Wales. From 2014 to 2023, she was a materials science researcher at the National Research Council of Italy and took two parabolic flight campaigns to test graphene coatings for thermal management in satellites.

Dr Christian has also undertaken two missions, including as a winter-over scientist, to the Concordia station in Antarctica, where she was a research scientist in charge of atmospheric physics and meteorology.

Looking forward to her appearance in Glasgow, Dr Christian said “I love science fiction, so I’m looking forward to soaking up the atmosphere with fellow fans and of course finding out the winners of this year’s Hugo Awards.”

(3) LAST-MINUTE SHOPPING IDEAS. A membership in Glasgow 2024 is one of the suggestions on the “STARBURST Father’s Day Gift Guide 2024” at Starburst Magazine. So is this:

Photo Creator Instant Pocket Printer

Another quirky gift choice is the Photo Creator Instant Pocket Printer. Again, aimed at younger folk, this is actually a very useful tool; it’s just that this set is very reasonably priced and comes with some good accessories. It’s a thermal printer that connects to your phone and can be used to print out silly pictures as well as actual photos. It comes into its own when you load it with sticky label thermal printer paper, turning this piece of childish fun into a useful and versatile label maker, as well as a way to create your own stickers. It doesn’t run out of ink (but needs special paper), fits in an everyday carry bag and is surprisingly practical.

(4) WRITING MASTER CLASS WITH GAIL CARRIGER ON JUNE 23. A one-day Locus Bay Area Writing Master Class with NYT bestselling author Gail Carriger is happening on Sunday, June 23, 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., at Preservation Park in Oakland, CA. The cost is $210. For more info and to sign up: Locus Bay Area Writers Workshop: Writing Master Class with Gail Carriger, June 2024. Learn more about Gail at gailcarriger.com.

Her engaging instructional style will keep you entertained AND informed. Her workshop topic will be On Career & Comedy — a two-parter covering all the things Gail wishes she had known when starting out her career, plus practical tips on how to use comedy in your writing, with a break in between to order in sandwiches and chat. Gail combines the expertise of a dedicated data-miner with a fun and personable style, and can speak to both trad and self-publishing success and craft skills.

Part I: Things I Wish I Knew FIRST

Learn all the things Gail wishes someone had told her when she first started out in publishing! She’ll explain pesky concepts and terms that established authors and book industry professionals take for granted. She’ll review industry standards and expectations of authors, both in traditional and indie publishing. She’ll help you determine which path is best for your book and career: traditional publishing, self publishing, or a hybrid of the two. She’ll cover the things she believes EVERY author should have set up BEFORE their first book launch.

Part II: Peopling Fiction with Comedy

Gail addresses how authors can analyze and source humor, the many different ways to inject funny into fiction, and why you might want to do so. Learn to bring character depth, narrative pace, and social subversion to fiction using comedy. This is also your opportunity to pick her brain!

(5) WATCHMEN REWIND. World of Reel readies viewers for “’Watchmen’ Trailer: R-Rated Animated Adaptation Produced by Warner Bros”.

Some believe Zack Snyder’s “Watchmen” was a botched adaptation of Alan Moore’s graphic novel, while others believe it to be an absolutely essential addition to the superhero genre. It’s a film that has spawned contentious debate over the years.

DC has decided to make an R rated animated version of “Watchmen” and maybe this’ll be a worthy effort. The adaptation is broken into two parts – one arriving in 2024 and the other arriving in 2025 (though no dates were provided by Warner Bros). …

(6) FIRST BITE, WRONG BITER. “The Early Vampire Novel The Vampyre was Falsely Attributed to Lord Byron” at CrimeReads.

One night in the rainy summer of 1816, at Lord Byron’s summer estate, Villa Diodati, in Cologny, near Geneva, Switzerland, Byron, and his friends Percy and Mary Shelley passed the time by telling ghost stories. The stories they created would lay the groundwork for future, publishable works…

However, there was at least another guest there, that night—one who is left out of Shelley’s recapitulation, likely because he was unknown as a writer. This is Byron’s physician-in-residence, John William Polidori, who contributed a concept that would later become his novel Ernest’s Berchtold; or the Modern Oedipus. But this novel not his most notable literary achievement, however—Polidori wound up expanding Byron’s vampire concept (several paragraphs of which Byron had actually written), churning out his own different short work on the same topic, entitled The Vampyre, that same summer….

…Polidori left Cologny in September of that year, and left his manuscript with his friend Countess Catherine Bruce, who lived nearby. Two years later, a London publisher named Henry Colburn received a manuscript in the mail, containing “outlines” of several stories—the gothic exercises developed and written by Byron’s houseguests in Cologny, and, apparently Polidori’s whole manuscript. Bibliographer Henry R. Viets, who comprehensively researched the publication history of Polidori’s text, claims that it is unknown how this material precisely arrived in Colburn’s possession. The outline for Frankenstein was in this bundle, but it had already been published, so Coulburn discarded it, and instead published, in his periodical called New Monthly Magazine, The Vampyre, attributing authorship to Lord Byron. He arranged for publication of the story as a book, shortly after. Polidori was shocked, upon seeing The Vampyre published, and under Byron’s name. Byron denied writing it, but it was almost too late—the story (in the magazine) was a triumphant success, and at least one literary edition was on its way….

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Compiled by Paul Weimer.]

Born June 14, 1949 – Harry Turtledove, 76.

By Paul Weimer. Doctor T. The Master of Alternate History. The Avtokrator.

And he earned and earns those sobriquets.

Once upon a time, there was a series of anthologies edited by Jerry Pournelle called There Will Be War. I loved these to pieces and bought each one as they came out. In the midst of that, I came across a different anthology, edited by S M Stirling called The Fantastic Civil War. In the midst of that volume there was, to my amazement, yet another piece by Turtledove called “The Long Drum Roll”, an excerpt from his forthcoming novel The Guns of the South. It was clear at this point that I needed to read it, and read more Turtledove.

And so I began to tuck in. After Guns of the South, I started to explore the Videssos novels, and was delighted with the “Byzantine empire with magic” setting and worldbuilding. Gerin the Fox, too, and his “edge of the Not-Roman Empire” was also a lot of fun. Agent of Byzantium, with a secret agent in an alternate Byzantine Empire? I began to devour his catalog and oeuvre with reckless abandon and then tried to keep up.

To say nothing of his giant series. Worldwar, with aliens versus the Allies and the Axis. The How Few Remain series, going from his alternate 1862 all the way to the 1940s? And several other series going to four and more volumes?

But, given his output, even to this day, he is an author hard to keep up with.

Dr T has also written a lot of single one shot novels, with a dizzying variety of alternate historical scenarios, with a wide range of divergence points. His Through Darkest Europe, reversing the fortunes of Dar Al-Islam and Western Europe in the Middle Ages, showing an inward looking, backward looking modern Italy, is chilling and all too plausible.

And if that wasn’t enough, Dr. T has also written a bunch under a variety of pseudonyms. His Turteltaub historical fiction novels, set in various periods are wonderful. His novel Justinian is NOT about the Justinian you are thinking of, but rather Justinian II, whose history and story is even wilder than the original. The novel reads like fantasy but it’s based strongly and accurately on real life events. It is almost literally unbelievable.

But my one favorite book of his might be a surprise. It would be a World of Difference. The divergence point is what if Mars was about twice the size of Earth, and so was able to hold an atmosphere, and some very strange life. Minerva (the renamed Mars in this verse) has intelligent life that is based on radial symmetry, and while the cold war politics might seem dated today, I wouldn’t mind if we had wound up with Minerva instead of Mars in our own solar system.

Long live the Avtokrator!

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Frank and Ernest visit a Homeric cloakroom.
Non Sequitur reveals the other ending.
Pearls Before Swine has concerns about letter writing.
Bizarro depicts an early punk band.

(9) THERE’S STILL ORE IN THIS ENEMY MINE. An update?The Hollywood Reporter says “’Star Trek: Picard’ Showrunner Terry Matalas Tackling ‘Enemy Mine’”.

Terry Matalas, the showrunner who steered the final season of Star Trek: Picard to new ratings and critical heights, has been tapped to write an update of the 1985 cult sci-fi movie Enemy Mine for 20^th Century Studios.

Set in a future where mankind is warring with a reptilian alien species, Mine starred Dennis Quaid has a human pilot and Louis Gossett Jr. as an alien who crash land on a desolate planet. Both have deep-seated hatred for one another, but are forced to overcome their prejudices to survive….

(10) THE PHYSICS GOES AWAY. “Wild New Study Suggests Gravity Can Exist Without Mass” at ScienceAlert.

What is gravity without mass? Both Newton’s revolutionary laws describing its universal effect and Einstein’s proposal of a dimpled spacetime, we’ve thought of gravity as exclusively within the domain of matter.

Now a wild new study suggesting that gravity can exist without mass, conveniently eliminating the need for one of the most elusive substances in our Universe: dark matter.

Dark matter is a hypothetical, invisible mass thought to make up 85 percent of the Universe’s total bulk. Originally devised to account for galaxies holding together under high speed rotation, it has yet to be directly observed, leading physicists to propose all sorts of out-there ideas to avoid invoking this elusive material as a way to plug the holes in current theories.

The latest offering in that vein comes from astrophysicist Richard Lieu at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, who has suggested that rather than dark matter binding galaxies and other bodies together, the Universe may contain thin, shell-like layers of ‘topological defects’ that give rise to gravity without any underlying mass.

Lieu started out trying to find another solution to the Einstein field equations, which relate the curvature of space-time to the presence of matter within it….

(11) HERE’S A REASON TO BUY NEXT YEAR’S CALENDAR. Physics World says “It’s official: United Nations declares 2025 the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology”.

The United Nations (UN) has officially declared 2025 to be the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology (IYQ). Agreed by its general assembly, the year-long worldwide celebration will highlight the impact and contribution of quantum science. It also aims to ensure that all nations have equal access to quantum education and opportunities. An opening ceremony is expected to take place on 14 January in Berlin.

(12) HOLD THE DOOR! “’Absolutely gutted’ — how a jammed door is locking astronomers out of the X-ray universe” – Space.com has the story.

…First, the good news: The telescope’s main instrument, a soft X-ray spectrometer known as Resolve, is working as expected. The slightly worse news: An aperture door covering Resolve has not opened. Multiple attempts to open the door — or “gate valve” — have failed. Despite reports suggesting JAXA and NASA have decided to “operate the spacecraft as is for at least 18 months,” Yamaguchi told me that “has not been officially decided.”

A NASA spokesperson confirmed “NASA and JAXA continue to hold ongoing discussions about the best path forward to operate XRISM; the current, leading option is to collect science for the next 18 months before making another attempt to open the gate valve, but the agencies will continue to assess alternatives.”

With the door closed, an intriguing “What If?” situation for mission specialists and X-ray astronomers presents itself. On one hand, the spacecraft is working superbly and showing it’s capable of delivering a heap of new, exciting data. Trying to open the door risks damaging the spacecraft. On the other hand, opening the door could fundamentally change our understanding of the universe….

(13) ANOTHER SPACE HARDWARE CHALLENGE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] A bit worrying this as I was always a bit partial to the Hubble Space Telescope… “Hubble telescope down to last gyroscopes, limiting science” in Nature.

Despite failing hardware, NASA has no plans to pursue a servicing mission to the aging, iconic instrument…

Hubble’s gyroscopes, which spin at 19,200revolutions per minute, are precise but frag-ile. To make up for failures, service missions have shipped 16 replacement gyros to the telescope over its lifetime. It is now down to the last two of the six currently onboard. In standard three-gyro mode, the devices help the telescope quickly establish and maintain a view with its fine guidance sensors, which lock onto specific stars.

(14) THE MOST IMPORTANT MEN IN SF…? [Item by SFF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Moid Moidelhoff over at Media Death Cult takes a look at the first, principal gatekeepers of SF, the magazine commissioning editors of the early 20th century, in a short 11-minute, video. Time to grab a mug of builders…

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Ed Fortune, Steven French, Teddy Harvia, Kathy Sullivan, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Peer. (But if there aren’t any, how do I continue the roundup?)]

Pixel Scroll 12/7/23 Warm Smell Of Scrollitas Rising Up Through The Air

Posted on December 7, 2023 by Mike Glyer

(1) OH WHAT A TANGLED WEB THEY WEAVE. Two days ago Xiran Jay Zhao cast a spotlight on reports that a debut author was on Goodreads dropping one-star reviews. Initially, they did not plan to name the person. Original thread starts here.

The person’s forthcoming book was reportedly getting good buzz of its own, and they have “a major social media following”.

Xiran Jay Zhao subsequently decided to share documentation supporting the identification of Cait Corrain as the author behind the one-star reviews. Thread starts here. Here are the “Review Bomb Receipts” they made available at Google Docs. Among the questions raised in the Receipts: “Why a Goodreads account confirmed to be theirs upvoted their book on the same ~37 obscure lists the fake accounts did”.

There has been an attempt to lay off these reviews on a different bad actor, saying it’s not Cait Corrain but a fan from her ReyLo fanfic.

Twitter user Natalie Lief did a roundup from the various social media involved. Thread starts here.

https://twitter.com/Natalie_Leif/status/1732544076439019711

https://twitter.com/Natalie_Leif/status/1732546178137686235

An immediate consequence to Cait Corrain is that K.B. Wagers withdrew a blurb provided for Corrain’s upcoming book. Thread starts here.

Meanwhile, @CaitCorrain has taken their Twitter and Instagram account private.

(2) AFI PICKS. The American Film Institute named its top 10 films and television shows of 2023: “AFI Top 10 Awards”.

AFI Top 10 Motion Pictures of the Year

American Fiction (MGM)
Barbie (Warner Bros.)
The Holdovers (Focus Features)
Killers of the Flower Moon (Apple Original Films/Paramount Pictures)
Maestro (Netflix)
May December (Netflix)
Oppenheimer (Universal Pictures)
Past Lives (A24)
Poor Things (Searchlight Pictures)
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Sony Pictures)

AFI Top 10 Television Programs of the Year

Abbott Elementary (ABC)
The Bear (FX)
Beef (Netflix)
Jury Duty (Amazon Freevee)
The Last of Us (Max)
The Morning Show (Apple TV+)
Only Murders in the Building (Hulu)
Poker Face (Peacock)
Reservation Dogs (FX)
Succession (Max)

(3) OCTOTHORPE. Episode 98 of the Octothorpe podcast, “Finally, Manitoba”, has “a stunt Liz in the form of Sandra Bond and a stunt lizard adorning Alison’s cover art. We discuss the fan funds, we discuss NASFiC, and we have an excerpt from Sandra’s TAFF report which is most excellent.”

Sandra Bond explains more clearly: “As I foretold, the first piece of my TAFF report is now available, dealing with Canadian adventures immediately after Pemmi-Con. Notably, this marks the first time ever (I’m pretty sure) that such a chapter has made its debut in a podcast rather than a paper fanzine — namely episode #98 of Hugo-nominee Octothorpe. The episode contains much discussion of fan funds, their nature, and their place in modern fandom, too.” Bond says the full chapter will also appear in a fanzine in due course.

(4) HOW DO THEY KNOW? Karen Myers has some interesting ideas about “Spreading the news offstage” in a post at Mad Genius Club.

All sorts of interesting things are happening to your primary characters. But what’s going on with the rest of the cast? How do they hear about the broad events in the lives of the main players? Do they pick it up from gossip? Do they read it in the news and discuss it among themselves?

If you want a bit player to show up on stage to sympathize with your hero in his travails, how does he even know about them? What about the cute shopgirl who’s just realized the hero’s available? Even the villains have to monitor their targets to track the progress of their plots.

Accounting for this offstage knowledge in the story without tedium is an art in its own right. Something as simple as “I heard about it from X” can illuminate the information trail, assuming that the speaker knows X and X has a plausible news source, too. That’s often the method used for groups of bit players, like servants in a household where gossip is presumed to spread….

(5) WHAT ARE SCHOOL LIBRARIES FOR? “Florida AG Says School Libraries Are for “Government Speech,” Not Free Expression” – Them/Us analyzes the AG’s amicus brief.

Florida’s attorney general is claiming that the state’s public school libraries are “a forum for government speech” and “not a forum for free expression,” in a chilling argument that appears to be gaining steam on the right.

In May, free speech and literary nonprofit PEN America filed a lawsuit against Florida’s Escambia School District. The additional plaintiffs in the case are Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, writers of And Tango Makes Three, a picture book depicting real-life gay penguins and one of the country’s most banned books over the past two decades. The plaintiffs allege that when Escambia schools removed Richardson and Parnell’s book from shelves this year, administrators were “depriving students of access to a wide range of viewpoints” and engaging in “viewpoint discrimination,” violating the First Amendment.

But Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody, a Republican who took office alongside Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2019, filed an amicus brief in August arguing the opposite. Though the state itself is not a named party in the case, Moody filed the brief on the grounds of “preserving the government’s authority to decide for itself what materials to curate” in school libraries.

“Florida’s public-school libraries are a forum for government, not private, speech,” Moody argues in the brief, comparing the removal of LGBTQ+ books like Tango to school policies against Nazi propaganda. Although Moody admits in the brief that appeals courts have “not yet addressed” the legal argument she makes, she cites semi-related precedents — such as whether a state can refuse to display a religious monument — to conclude that “the compilation of library materials is government speech.” For that reason, she continues, removing any library materials cannot constitute viewpoint discrimination….

(6) DATA CENTERS ARE LOOKING UP. [Item by Daniel Dern.] I’m curious what the job requirements list for (on-site) support for potential hires would include. (Also whether this is a Bond or other thriller movie waiting to happen…) “Project Cuts Emissions By Putting Data Centers Inside Wind Turbines” – via Slashdot.

CNN reports on a new German-based project called WindCORES that operates data centers inside existing wind turbines, making them almost completely carbon neutral.

Its solution was to bypass the ‘middleman’ (the grid) altogether, and instead, power IT servers from directly inside the large concrete wind turbine towers. Each tower is 13 meters wide and could potentially hold server racks up to 150 meters high.

(7) SIGMUND AND CLIVE. “’Freud’s Last Session’ Screenplay: Read Script Pairing Freud & C.S. Lewis”. Deadline provides comments as well as a direct link to the script: FLSNOV26.

…Both the play and movie are set on September 3, 1939, when the atheist Freud (Hopkins) and devoutly religious Lewis (Matthew Goode), two of the century’s greatest minds, meet and debate the future of mankind and the existence of God. It comes as Freud and his daughter have recently escaped the Nazi regime, and as he is nearing death with cancer.

The imaginary in-person encounter is peppered in the film with dream sequences, flashbacks and notable characters turning up including Freud’s daughter Anna (Liv Lisa Fries) and Lewis pal J.R.R. Tolkein (Stephen Campbell Moore). Jodi Balfour also stars.

“It’s a balance of the psychology of these two men and this thing that I think is within all of us: We’re all struggling with this human experience,” Brown told Deadline at the recent Contenders Film: Los Angeles….

(8) EXPANDED UNIVERSE. Radio Times agrees “Doctor Who’s queer representation is just what the Doctor ordered”.

… And, as we all know, the Doctor is capable of changing sex, having returned to being played by David Tennant from Jodie Whittaker. This becomes the central question of The Star Beast: how does the Doctor’s gender presentation impact his (her? their?) character and behaviour?

When the Fourteenth Doctor introduces himself to Donna’s husband, Shaun Temple, his psychic paper reads “Grand Mistress of the Knowledge” rather than “Grand Master”. “Oh, catch up!” he exclaims, hitting the paper on the wing mirror. It is an acknowledgement of how the Doctor’s gender is no longer presumed to be fixed, but instead something wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey itself….

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born December 7, 1915 — Leigh Brackett. (Died 1978.) I find tonight’s Birthday to be one that’s a real treat as I like both the person, Leigh Brackett, and the work that she did down the years. One of those individuals taken from the Universe far too soon, we can start with her writing the screenplays of The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye. Keeping in that vein, she worked on an early draft of The Empire Strikes Back, crucial aspects of which are incorporated in the movie; she never saw it as she died before it went into production. The film won a Hugo at Denvention Two.

The Vampire’s Ghost is her first screenplay. It was written with John K. Butler. The 1945 film is a true horror film as there really is a vampire to be staked and killed in it. It actually gets rated on Rotten Tomatoes with a thirty-three percent rating by audience reviewers.

Brackett was first published as a genre writer at the age of twenty-five when “Martian Quest” appeared in the February 1940 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. The Forties were definitely were her best period for short fiction, with nearly half of her roughly forty stories being written then. Her short fiction I think is quite excellent with it appearing in Astounding, Thrilling Wonder Stories and Startling Stories, as well as Planet Stories.

Some of it available from the usual suspects such as the Wildside Press collection of Black Amazon of Mars and Other Tales from the Pulps, and Baen Books claims to have published two ebooks of short stories but who know what happened to them as I can’t find them anywhere.

As you might know, her first novel was a mystery, No Good from a Corpse. The 1999 Dennis McMillan Publications reprint of this mystery also collected all of her crime shorts from the pulps in one volume, and included an intro by Bradbury, a young writer she befriended in the early Forties. This edition was limited to two hundred copies, so currently copies are costing over a hundred if you can find one.

(That publisher also did a limited edition of Frederic Brown’s Sex Life on Planet Mars. Really don’t ask what the price of a copy is currently.)

Speaking of Bradbury, when Brackett married Edmond Hamilton in 1946, he served as the best man.

Now moving on to her as a novel writer. The Long Tomorrow, her 1956 novel, saw her a finalist on the committee-created shortlist for the Best Novel Hugo Award, the first women who that got that distinction, and deservedly as she was a fine novel writer indeed. She wrote a lot of novels and all of the ones I’ve read were excellent. Shadow Over Mars published in 1944 won a Retro Hugo at CoNZealand. Do tell me which novels you really liked.

Eric John Stark, did you think I could forget him? Of course not. Brackett created Stark as a pastiche of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ best selling John Carter of Mars and Tarzan characters but gave him a dark skin appearance instead of the light skinned appearance they had. Not that the illustrators paid attention to that as the heroes of these stories were always blond haired white males of course.

Stark first appeared in a group of novellas published in Planet Stories which expanded were into the short novels of The Secret of Sinharat and People of the Talisman. Space operas and so much more at their finest, I enjoy them immensely. All of them are available at the usual suspects though figuring out exactly which are available is a bit difficult as far too many publishers, some legal and far too many not, are selling epubs of them now. Haffner Press is the one authorized by the estate of Leigh Brackett.

A final story, Stark and the Star Kings places Stark into the world of Edmond Hamilton’s Star Kings series, making it a collaboration between the two.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Existential Comics’ Corey Mohler has a lot of pretty strips featuring philosophers. Here are three more:

“Socrates Contests a Traffic Ticket” – with predictable results.
Wittgenstein having to tell the waiter when to stop with the parmesan – relevant due a recent GEICO commercial – “More Parmesan?”
In “The Emperor’s New Clothes”,Nietzsche and Wittgenstein debate how culture defines language when the issue is whether or not the king is wearing any clothes.

(11) SKILL TREE. From The Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University comes the latest episode of CSI Skill Tree, a series examining how video games envision possible futures and build thought-provoking worlds. This episode discusses Hypnospace Outlaw (2019), a game that plunges you into an alternate-history version of the 1990s internet.

The guests are Katherine Buse, assistant professor of cinema and media studies at the University of Chicago, and Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, the Ruth and Paul Idzik Collegiate Chair in Digital Scholarship at the University of Notre Dame. Buse and Dhaliwal are also co-designers of Foldit: First Contact, a narrative campaign mode for the renowned citizen science game Foldit.

Hypnospace is a compelling piece of alt-history SF, with themes around cyberspace, wearing technology (and its dangers), hacking and subversion.

(12) YEAR’S TOP YA. The Guardian’s picks for “Five of the best young adult books of 2023” include some genre novels. One of them is –

Island of Whispers
Frances Hardinge, illustrated by Emily Gravett (Two Hoots)
On Merlank Island, the Dead are dangerous; if they aren’t carried away by the Ferryman, their ghosts may linger, blighting the land and killing the living. Milo has never made the journey himself, but when his father, the Ferryman, dies suddenly, he must take his first cargo of souls to the Island of the Broken Tower, all the while pursued by the angry parent of a dead girl. Heightened by Gravett’s blue-white expanses and stark black bricks and timbers, Hardinge’s spare coming-of-age parable is laced with her trademark wisdom and subtlety. A grownup gothic fairytale, somewhere between short story and novella, this is ideal for 11+ readers who enjoy highly illustrated storytelling.

(13) RIPOFF ARTISTS. “The dilemma of terrible people” is Camestros Felapton’s analysis of Hbomberguy’s video about plagiarism linked here a few days ago. Here are a couple of his many interesting points:

Firstly, that most of the various creators (“creators” being a bit of a generous term) identified will probably still carry on stealing stuff. Some may lay low for a bit, some may rebrand but the underlying reasons why people do this will continue.
Secondly, there’s going to people out there who will watch this video and take it as a “how to” guide.

(14) AUSSIES IN SPACE. TechRepublic asks“Is Australia’s Deep Tech Future in Space?” (Cordwainer Smith would have said yes!)

As far as deep tech goes, Australia’s greatest potential might be to look to the stars. Compared to some nations, Australia’s space industry is comparatively small. However, it is not insignificant, and the government anticipates that it will end up employing around 30,000 people by 2030. In 2021, with about half that number, the sector generated $4.5 billion across more than 600 companies. In 2030, it’s expected to deliver $12 billion to the local economy, and that’s not accounting for all of the innovations that tend to spin off from deep tech innovation.

For example, as one academic working in space education noted, the innovations developed by the space industry will be able to assist Australia in managing bushfires, droughts and agriculture; protect endangered species; and develop climate mitigation strategies. It’s a field of STEM expertise that is going to have a larger impact on the country than many might be aware of….

(15) PILED HIGHER AND DEEPER. “A 27,000-year-old pyramid? Controversy hits an extraordinary archaeological claim”. Nature says “The massive buried structures at Gunung Padang in Indonesia would be much older than Egypt’s great pyramids — if they’re even human constructions at all.”

…Gunung Padang comprises five stepped stone terraces, with retaining walls and connecting staircases, that sit atop an extinct volcano. Between 2011 and 2014, Natawidjaja and colleagues investigated the site using several ground-penetrating techniques to determine what lies beneath the terraces.

They identified four layers, which they conclude represent separate phases of construction. The innermost layer is a hardened lava core, which has been “meticulously sculpted”, according to the paper.

Subsequent layers of rocks “arranged like bricks” were built over the top of the oldest layer. The layers were carbon-dated, using soil lodged between rocks obtained from a core drilled out of the hill. The first stage of construction, according to the paper, occurred between 27,000 and 16,000 years ago. Further additions were made between 8,000 and 7,500 years ago, and the final layer, which includes the visible stepped terraces, was put in place between 4,000 and 3,100 years ago.

[Flint Dibble, an archaeologist at Cardiff University, UK] says there is no clear evidence that the buried layers were built by humans and were not the result of natural weathering and the movement of rocks over time. “Material rolling down a hill is going to, on average, orient itself,” he says….

The original research paper is causing much debate… “Geo‐archaeological prospecting of Gunung Padang buried prehistoric pyramid in West Java, Indonesia”.

(16) MEANINGLESS DIFFERENCES. Also in Nature: “Is AI leading to a reproducibility crisis in science?” “Scientists worry that ill-informed use of artificial intelligence is driving a deluge of unreliable or useless research.”

During the CoVID-19 pandemic in late 2020, testing kits for the viral infection were scant in some countries. So the idea of diagnosing infection with a medical technique that was already widespread — chest X-rays — sounded appealing. Although the human eye can’t reliably discern differences between infected and non-infected individuals, a team in India reported that artificial intelligence (AI) could do it, using machine learning to analyse a set of X-ray images.

The paper — one of dozens of studies on the idea — has been cited more than 900 times. But the following September, computer scientists Sanchari Dhar and Lior Shamir at Kansas State University in Manhattan took a closer look. They trained a machine-learning algorithm on the same images, but used only blank background sections that showed no body parts at all. Yet their AI could still pick out COVID-19 cases at well above chance level.

The problem seemed to be that there were consistent differences in the backgrounds of the medical images in the data set. An AI system could pick up on those artefacts to succeed in the diagnostic task, without learning any clinically relevant features — making it medically useless.

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

Pixel Scroll 6/20/23 We Don’t Need No Pixelation, We Just Want Some Scroll Control

Posted on June 20, 2023 by Mike Glyer

(1) SETI CONNECTION TO MISSING SUBMERSIBLE. An international effort has been launched to find a submersible with five people on board that went missing Sunday on a trip to view the wreckage of the Titanic. According to CNN, a prominent Pakistani father and son are on board the missing sub, which turns out to be of genre interest.

…While the names of those on board have not been released by the authorities, British businessman Hamish Harding, Pakistani billionaire Shahzada Dawood and his son Sulaiman Dawood, and French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet have been confirmed to be on board the craft.

The fifth person on board is Stockton Rush, the CEO and founder of the company leading the voyage, Ocean Gate, according to a source with knowledge of the mission plan. Ocean Gate did not respond to CNN’s request for comment…

Shahzada Dawood is on the Board of Trustees of the SETI Institute, an organization whose scientists “are looking for proof – not merely of life elsewhere – but of intelligent beings in other star systems.”

(2) SFWA SILENT AUCTION INCLUDES JAMES E. GUNN COLLECTION. SFWA’s 3rd Silent Auction, which opened yesterday, includes an “Exclusive James E. Gunn collection”.

July 12, 2023, marks the start of James E. Gunn’s centenary. He died December 23, 2020 – one week after finishing his final story, which sold his final day.

Jim was a Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master, SF Hall of Fame inductee, first (with Jack Williamson) to offer SF courses in academia, former President of SFWA and SFRA, and “Science Fiction’s Dad” to the generations of authors, editors, and educators he mentored. Jim’s devotion to “Saving the world through science fiction” inspired us to reach higher, grow deeper, and become ever-more humane. His tireless dedication to what SF does was the essence of his magic, and why so many called him Dad. Our world is richer because of him.

For auction is a collection of Jim’s works, unread NOS.

Hardcovers of Transcendental, Transformation, and Transgalactic – his only trilogy, and his final books; two Easton Press leather editions: Gift from the Stars (signed first edition), and Kampus; his Hugo-winning illustrated SF history, Alternate Worlds (new, updated edition); volumes 1-4 of his essential anthologies-as-history, The Road to Science Fiction, with teaching guide; hardcovers collections Human Voices and Some Dreams Are Nightmares; new trade paper and early paperback of Jim’s classic collab with Jack Williamson, Star Bridge; hardcover and early paperback of The Dreamers; new trade paper of his best-selling The Listeners, which inspired Carl Sagan to write Contact and others to form SETI; plus a 1983 business card for his (first of its kind) Center for the Study of SF, SFWA Grand Masters trading card, and Transcendental bookmark.

Donated by the Ad Astra Institute for Science Fiction and the Speculative Imagination, spiritual successor of Jim’s original Center, run by his protégés Chris McKitterick and Kij Johnson.

(3) TRIVIA CONNECTIONS. [Item by Nickpheas.] Given the regular notes of Jeopardy! questions, here’s one from the long running BBC radio 4 show Round Britain Quiz.

Q8 (from Nigel Choyce) Which of these is the leader and how many are missing: A cosmetic company that might come calling; a Victorian actress who travelled in the Tardis; a school of Buddhism emphasising the value of meditation; the Baker Street detective aided by a Tinker?

The question can be heard at about 22.30 through the episode.

(4) READ BAEN MEMORIAL AWARD STORY. Brad Zeiger’s 2023 Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Award winning story “The Insomniac” is now available as a free read on the Baen Books website.

(5) “I KNOW.” NO, YOU DON’T. Phil Nichols and Colin Kuskie devote episode 30 of the Science Fiction 101 podcast to “The Secrets George Lucas Kept From Leigh Brackett”.

Phil and Colin dig into “Star Wars Sequel”, the unfilmed 1978 script by science fiction legend Leigh Brackett which became Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. We look at what made it into the finished film and what got junked, and consider whether Star Wars creator George Lucas was keeping his screenwriter in the dark!

If you’ve never read Brackett’s script, you can find two versions of it online. There’s a PDF scan of the original typescript, which shows all of her hand-corrections and notes – fascinating for its details, if you can make them out. Or there’s this transcript, which is a lot easier to read but loses some of the fun.

For a fascinating, in-depth discussion of how “Star Wars Sequel” developed into The Empire Strikes Back, sit back and watch this interview with screenwriter Larry Kasdan, who wrote the final draft of the film’s script.

(6) FATHOMING COPYRIGHT WHERE AI IS INVOLVED. Michael Capobianco has a post about “Copyright, Contracts, and AI-Generated Material” at Writer Beware.

On March 16, 2023, the United States Copyright Office issued a publication: Copyright Registration Guidance: Works Containing Material Generated by Artificial Intelligence. The full text can be found here.

The Copyright Office’s Guidance does not have the force of law and will change as the situation evolves, especially as legal precedents are created under US law, but, as of the time of this post, it is effectively the policy in force in the United States.

The main takeaway from the Guidance can be summarized thus: the only parts of a work that are copyrightable are the human-contributed ones, and the work is not copyrightable if an AI technology determines the expressive elements of the work and the creativity is not the product of human authorship. In cases where there are both AI-generated and human-authored elements, copyright will only protect the human-authored aspects of the work, which are “independent of ” and do “not affect” the copyright status of the AI-generated material…..

(7) U.F.O.S SOUND LIKE A N.I.C.E. IDEA. Ross Douthat tells New York Times readers that “This C.S. Lewis Novel Helps Explain the Weirdness of 2023”.

Recently I reread C.S. Lewis’s 1945 novel, “That Hideous Strength,” the last book in his Space Trilogy, and since I wrote about aliens last weekend it seems like a good week to talk a little bit about the novel’s contemporary relevance….

…The story introduces a near-future Britain falling under the sway of a scientistic technocracy, the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.), which looks like the World State from Huxley’s “Brave New World” in embryo. But as one of the characters is drawn closer to N.I.C.E.’s inner ring, he discovers that the most powerful technocrats are supernaturalists, endeavoring to raise the dead, to contact dark supernatural entities and even to revive a slumbering Merlin to aid them in their plans.

I’ll say no more about the plot mechanics except to observe that they boldly operate in the risky zone between the sublime and the ridiculous. But just from that sketch I’ll draw out a couple of points about the book’s interest for our own times.

First, the idea that technological ambition and occult magic can have a closer-than-expected relationship feels quite relevant to the strange era we’ve entered recently — where Silicon Valley rationalists are turning “postrationalist,” where hallucinogen-mediated spiritual experiences are being touted as self-care for the cognoscenti, where U.F.O. sightings and alien encounters are back on the cultural menu, where people talk about innovations in A.I. the way they might talk about a golem or a djinn.

The idea that deep in the core of, say, some important digital-age enterprise there might be a group of people trying to commune with the spirit world doesn’t seem particularly fanciful at this point. (For a small example of what I mean, just read this 2021 account of life inside one of the stranger tech-associated research institutes.) Although like some of the characters in “That Hideous Strength,” these spiritualists would probably be telling themselves that they’re just doing high-level science, maybe puncturing an alternate dimension or unlocking the hidden potential of the human mind.

Then, too, the book’s totalitarian dystopia is interesting for being incomplete, contested and plagued by inner rivalries and contradictions. Unlike in “Brave New World” and “1984,” we don’t see a one-party regime holding absolute sway; in Lewis’s story, we see a still-disguised tyranny taking shape but still falling prey to various all-too-human problems, blunders and failures that contrast with the smooth dominance of Orwell’s O’Brien or Huxley’s Mustapha Mond….

The novel’s emphasis on the limitations of any attempted secret government, finally, connects specifically to our peculiar U.F.O. discourse, where we suddenly have a government whistle-blower claiming knowledge of a 90-year conspiracy and, apparently, a chorus of anonymous sources encouraging belief.

I wrote a Twitter thread after my column, explaining why even independent of the likelihood of alien visitors or interdimensional encounters, I find it hard to imagine the kind of long conspiracy depicted by the whistle-blower: The secrets involved would be too big not to tempt would-be heroes of disclosure, the breadth of infrastructure would be too hard to hide, the political complexity and turmoil of the world would create too many opportunities for revelations (because you would need China, Russia and other powers to be in on it as well) and so on.

If there were an alien cover-up, though, I would imagine it would look more like the secrets held by N.I.C.E. in “That Hideous Strength.” …

(8) TAX-EXEMPT AT LAST. The Science Fiction Poetry Association informed members today that they have received the official confirmation from the IRS of SFPA’s 501(c)(3) status, which secures the organization’s federal tax exempt standing.

(9) RUSHDIE’S LATEST HONOR. Winner of “The 2023 German Book Trade’s Peace Prize: Salman Rushdie” reports Publishing Perspectives.

The board of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade has announced today (June 19) that Salman Rushdie is the winner of this year’s honor, “for his indomitable spirit, for his affirmation of life, and for enriching our world with his love of storytelling.”

…As is this award’s tradition, the honor will be conferred in a ceremony on the closing day of Frankfurter Buchmesse (October 18 to 22), at the Paulskirche, a program to be broadcast live on German public television (SDF) at 11 a.m. The award carries a purse of €25,000 (US$27,302).

(10) MICHAEL A. BANKS (1951-2023). Writer and editor Michael A. Banks (Alan Gould), a longtime member of the Cincinnati Fantasy Group, died June 19 of cancer. He was 72.

In the SF field, he is perhaps best known for nonfiction works about the genre (including Understanding Science Fiction, 1980) and his collaborations with Mack Reynolds. His first published story was “Lost and Found” (1978) with George Wagner. Banks wrote several novels to his credit, including The Odysseus Solution, with Dean R. Lambe. He also worked as an acquisitions editor for publishers, including Baen Books and Harlequin. He wrote dozens of nonfiction books.

(11) MEMORY LANE.

2016 – [Written by Cat Eldridge from a choice by Mike Glyer.]

So the Beginning this Scroll is from Claudia Casper’s The Mercy Journals.

She’s a Canadian writer who’s best known for The Reconstruction, about a woman who constructs a life-sized model of the hominid Lucy for a museum.

And now for our Beginning…

On October 15, 2072, two Moleskine journals were found wrapped in shredded plastic inside a yellow dry box in a clearing on the east coast of Vancouver Island near Desolation Sound. They were watermarked, mildewed, and ragged but legible, though the script was wildly erratic. Human remains of an adult male were unearthed nearby along with a shovel and a 9mm pistol. Also found with the human remains were those of a cougar. The journals are reproduced in their entirety here, with only minor copy-editing changes for ease of reading.

March 9, 2047 | My name is Allen Levy Quincy. Age 58. Born May 6, 1989. Resident of Canton Number 3, formerly Seattle, Administrative Department of Cascadia. This document, which may replace any will and testament I have made in the past, is the only intentional act of memory I have committed since the year 2029. I do not write because I am ill or because I leave much behind. I own a hot plate, three goldfish, my mobile, my Callebaut light, my Beretta M9, the furniture in this apartment, and a small library of eleven books.

March 10 | I sit at my kitchenette island in this quasi-medieval, wired-by-ration, post nation-state world, my Beretta on my left, bottle of R & R whiskey on my right, speaking to the transcription program on my mobile.

I was sober for so long. Eighteen years. I was sober through what seems to have been the worst of the die-off. Three and a half to four billion people, dead of starvation, thirst, illness, and war, all because of a change in the weather. The military called it a “threat multiplier.

You break it, you own it—the old shopkeeper’s rule. We broke our planet, so now we owned it, but the manual was only half written and way too complicated for anyone to understand. The winds, the floods, the droughts, the fires, the rising oceans, food shortages, new viruses, tanking economies, shrinking resources, wars, genocide—each problem spawned a hundred new ones. We finally managed to get an international agreement with stringent carbon emissions rules and a coordinated plan to implement carbon capture technologies, but right from the beginning the technologies either weren’t effective enough or caused new problems, each of which led to a network of others. Within a year, the signatories to the agreement, already under intense economic and political pressure, were disputing who was following the rules, who wasn’t, and who had the ultimate authority to determine non-compliance and enforcement.

Despite disagreements, the international body made headway controlling the big things—coal generators, fossil fuel extraction, airplane emissions, reforestation, ocean acidification—but the small things got away from them—plankton, bacteria, viruses, soil nutrients, minute bio-chemical processes in the food chain. Banks and insurance companies failed almost daily, countries went bankrupt, treaties and trade agreements broke down, refugees flooded borders, war and genocide increased. Violent conflict broke out inside borders, yet most military forces refused to kill civilians. Nation-states collapsed almost as fast as species became extinct. Eventually the international agreement on climate change collapsed completely, and the superpowers retreated behind their borders and bunkered down. The situation was way past ten fingers, eleven holes; it was the chaos that ensues after people miss three meals and realize there’s no promise of a meal in the future.

(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born June 20, 1947 — Candy Clark, 76. Mary Lou in The Man Who Fell to Earth which of course featured Bowie. She also was in Amityville 3-D, Stephen King’s Cat’s Eye and The Blob in the role of Francine Hewitt. That’s the remake obviously, not the original. Oh, and she’s Buffy’s mom in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Wiki being Wiki lists that as non-canon which makes absolutely no sense, does it?
Born June 20, 1951 — Tress MacNeille, 72. Voice artist extraordinaire. Favorite roles? Dot Warner on The Animaniacs, herself as the angry anchorwoman in Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, Babs Bunny on Tiny Toons and Hello Nurse on Pinky and The Brain.
Born June 20, 1952 — John Goodman, 71. Some may know him as the TV husband of a certain obnoxious comedienne but I’ve never watched that show. So I picture him as Fred Flintstone in The Flintstones, a role perfect for him. Mind you he’s had a lot of genre roles: voicing James P. “Sulley” Sullivan in the Monsters franchise, a cop in the diner in C.H.U.D., and he’ll even be the voice of Spike in the Tom and Jerry due out two years hence. And he’s in Argo, which is a thriller, but one in which the development of a fake sf movie is crucial.
Born June 20, 1956 — Ed Lynskey, 67. Mainly a mystery writer with five series comprising forty novels underway but he has written one genre novel, The Quetzal Motel, a handful of genre short fiction (uncollected) that appeared in Full Unit Hookup, Aoife’s Kiss, Maelstrom, and Three-Lobed Burning Eyed (fascinating titles, eh?) and somewhat more genre poetry.
Born June 20, 1967 — Nicole Kidman, 56. Batman Forever was her first foray into the genre but she has done a number of genre films down the years: Practical Magic, The Stepford Wives, Bewitched (I liked it), The Invasion (never heard of it), The Golden Compass (not nearly as good as the novel was), Paddington, and as Queen Atlanna in the rather good Aquaman.
Born June 20, 1968 — Robert Rodriguez, 55. I’ll single out the vastly different Sin City and Spy Kids franchises as his best work, though the From Dusk till Dawn has considerable charms as well. ISFDB notes that he’s written two novels with Chris Roberson riffing off his The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D film, The Day Dreamer and Return to Planet Droll.

(13) COMICS SECTION.

Bizarro has a (bizarre, of course) police lineup.

(14) STAN LEE WILL RING THE BELL. An animated Stan Lee will ring the opening bell of the NYSE on June 26. The event will stream live on Kartoon Channel. “Genius Brands Moves to NYSE, Renames as Kartoon Studios” at Animation World Network.

Genius Brands International, Inc. announced a name change to Kartoon Studios and plans to transfer its listing from the Nasdaq Capital Market (Nasdaq) to the NYSE American exchange (NYSE American). Under its new name, the company expects to start trading on the NYSE American exchange when markets open on Monday, June 26, 2023. That day the company’s common stock will begin trading under a new trading symbol, “TOON,” and a new CUSIP number, 37229T 509. It will continue to trade on Nasdaq under its current trading symbol, “GNUS” until the close of market on Friday, June 23, 2023.

An animated Stan Lee will ring the opening bell of the NYSE on June 26, an indication of the company’s plans to expand on its Stan Lee IP under its new moniker. The event will stream live on Kartoon Channel!

The company controls the post-Marvel IP of Stan Lee, which was initially brought to market with a 20-year license to Marvel and the Walt Disney Company, and brand initiative commemorating Stan’s 100th anniversary at San Diego Comic-Con in July 2023….

(15) THE PICTURES MOVE, THE CAR DOESN’T. Smithsonian Magazine brings us “The History of the Drive-In Movie Theater”.

On June 6, 2008 the flag flying over the U.S. Capitol commemorated the 75th birthday of a distinctive slice of Americana: the drive-in movie theater.

It was on that day in 1933 that Richard Hollingshead opened the first theater for the auto-bound in Camden, N.J. People paid 25 cents per car as well as per person to see the British comedy Wives Beware under the stars.

…He first conceived the drive-in as the answer to a problem. “His mother was—how shall I say it?—rather large for indoor theater seats,” said Jim Kopp of the United Drive-in Theatre Owners Association. “So he stuck her in a car and put a 1928 projector on the hood of the car, and tied two sheets to trees in his yard.”…

(16) UKRAINE/STAR WARS AGAIN. [Item by Susan de Guardiola.] Continuing the Star Wars spotting in the war: check out the chest patch General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief, is sporting here:

Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi. May the force be with you! pic.twitter.com/Xs1IzROLhC
— Inna Sovsun (@InnaSovsun) June 20, 2023

Tolkien and Star Wars, over and over in this war.

(17) NO AIR THERE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] It may be that the red dwarf star has blown away the closely orbiting planet’s atmosphere. See open access pre-print Zieba, S. et al (2023) “No thick carbon dioxide atmosphere on the rocky exoplanet TRAPPIST-1 c”, Nature.

Observations from the James Webb Space Telescope suggest that a second world in a seven-planet system lacks an atmosphere.

For the second time, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has looked for and failed to find a thick atmosphere on an exoplanet in on one of the most exciting planetary systems known. Astronomers report1 today that there is probably no tantalising atmosphere on the planet TRAPPIST-1 c, just as they reported months ago for its neighbour TRAPPIST-1 b.

SF² Concatenation previously reported on the innermost planet not having an atmosphere.

(18) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Not strictly TV as it was never broadcast but here’s Jon Pertwee as Doctor Who in a corporate film circa 1981. There’s a surprising … err … twist at the end.”

[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Jason Sanford, Nickpheas, Susan de Guardiola, 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 Ken Richards.]

Pixel Scroll 5/13/23 When Scrolls Collide

Posted on May 13, 2023 by Mike Glyer

(1) BLACKADDER GOES POSTAL. Guess who the Royal Mail has put on an issue of stamps? “Blackadder’s 40th anniversary celebrated with new stamps” at BBC News.

The 40th anniversary of BBC comedy series Blackadder is being celebrated with a special set of stamps.

The classic sitcom, which spanned hundreds of years of British history over four series, was first broadcast on 15 June 1983.

Four decades later the show, which launched the careers of some of the UK’s most recognisable actors, remains a favourite with British viewers.

Now some of its most famous scenes have made it on to eight new stamps.

… Writer Richard Curtis said he was “very amused and delighted” to see his creation on the stamps

“It’s a great relief for Blackadder to have his head on a stamp, instead of on a stake,” he added….

(2) MEMORIAL CELEBRATES 25 YEARS. Author Michael Ward shared photos on Facebook of a C.S. Lewis-related feature at Oxford.

It’s twenty-five years since the Addison’s Walk memorial at Magdalen College was installed to mark the centenary of C.S. Lewis’s birth. The then President of Magdalen, the late Anthony Smith, unveiled it, and the late Walter Hooper, Lewis’s editor and biographer, recited the poem engraved thereon to the gathered crowd. The event was preceded by Evensong in the college chapel, at which lessons were read by Jill Flewett (Lady Freud), who was an evacuee at The Kilns during the Second World War, and by the late Laurence Harwood, Lewis’s godson….

He posted a close-up of the commemorative plaque here.

(3) ACCESSIBILITY GROWING IN VIDEO GAMES. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] A number of game designers are giving more thought to adaptations for players with disabilities. The PBS NewsHour’s website takes a look: “Why developers are designing video games for accessibility”.

… “I think it’s still really early and we’re still learning and we’re still growing, so there’s so much more I think we can do,” Brennecke said. “This is the first iteration of a lot of these ideas and I think, over time, we’re going to continue to improve that as an industry.”

Disability advocate Zigmont believes this push for accessibility will ultimately benefit everyone who picks up a controller. She explained that when engineers design with disabilities in mind, it often leads to benefits for everyone. Adding curb cuts at a crosswalk, for instance, makes it easier for wheelchair access, but also for parents pushing strollers and workers moving items on a hand truck.

“If you build for the disability community, you make it better for the whole community,” she said.

(4) MAY THE FOURTH BE WITH MONTREAL. [Item by Danny Sichel.] From the MTL Blog: “The STM Redid The Montreal Metro Map With ‘Star Wars’-Themed Station Names For May The 4^th”. (STM = Société de Transport de Montréal. They run the metro and the buses.)

True, the puns work better if you’re familiar with (a) Star Wars in French, and (b) the normal Montreal metro map, but still….

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(5) JOSEPH P. MARTINO (1931-2023). A regular fixture of Analog in the Sixties, author Joseph P. Martino died July 29, 2022 (though File 770 just recently learned of his death.) The family obituary appeared in the Dayton Daily News. He is survived by his wife Nancy and twelve children and step-children.

…He served in the Air Force for 22 years. His duty stations included Air Force research laboratories throughout the United States, and a tour of duty in Thailand during the Vietnam War. Joseph retired from the Air Force in the grade of Colonel in 1975. After retirement from the Air Force, he joined the University of Dayton Research Institute as a Research Scientist and worked there for 18 years until his retirement from the University….

One of his better-known stories, “Pushbutton War” (1960), is available at Project Gutenberg. In addition to his fiction, he wrote several books on technological forecasting.

(6) MEMORY LANE.

1986 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Bob Shaw’s one of my favorite writers. I’ve read The Orbitsville trilogy several times and the Warren Peace books are equally enjoyable.

He would win Hugos for Best Fan Writer at Seacon ‘79 and Noreascon Two. His short story “Light of Other Days” was nominated for a Hugo Award, as was The Ragged Astronaut novel which is where our Beginning is from this Scroll. It did win a BSFA.

The Ragged Astronaut novel was published by Gollancz in 1986 with the cover illustration by Alan Brooks.

It is a Meredith Moment at the usual suspects.

And now for our Beginning…

It had become obvious to Toller Maraquine and some others watching on the ground that the airship was heading into danger, but–incredibly–its captain appeared not to notice.

‘What does the fool think he’s doing?’ Toller said, speaking aloud although there was nobody within earshot. He shaded his eyes from the sun to harden his perception of what was happening. The background was a familiar one to anybody who lived in those longitudes of Land–flawless indigo sea, a sky of pale blue feathered with white, and the misty vastness of the sister world, Overland, hanging motionless near the zenith, its disk crossed again and again by swathes of cloud. In spite of the foreday glare a number of stars were visible, including the nine brightest which made up the constellation of the Tree.

Against that backdrop the airship was drifting in on a light sea breeze, the commander conserving power crystals. The vessel was heading directly towards the shore, its blue-and-grey envelope foreshortened to a circle, a tiny visual echo of Overland. It was making steady progress, but what its captain had apparently failed to appreciate was that the onshore breeze in which he was travelling was very shallow, with a depth of not more than three hundred feet. Above it and moving in the opposite direction was a westerly wind streaming down from the Haffanger Plateau.

Toller could trace the flow and counter flow of air with precision because the columns of vapour from the pikon reduction pans along the shore were drifting inland only a short distance before rising and being wafted back out to sea. Among those man-made bands of mist were ribbons of cloud from the roof of the plateau–therein lay the danger to the airship.

Toller took from his pocket the stubby telescope he had carried since childhood and used it to scan the cloud layers. As he had half expected, he was able within seconds to pick out several blurry specks of blue and magenta suspended in the matrix of white vapour. A casual observer might have failed to notice them at all, or have dismissed the vague motes as an optical effect, but Toller’s sense of alarm grew more intense. The fact that he had been able to spot some ptertha so quickly meant that the entire cloud must be heavily seeded with them, invisibly bearing hundreds of the creatures towards the airship.

‘Use a sunwriter,’ he bellowed with the full power of his lungs.

‘Tell the fool to veer off, or go up or down, or …’ Rendered incoherent by urgency, Toller looked all about him as he tried to decide on a course of action. The only people visible among the rectangular pans and fuel bins were semi-naked stokers and rakers. It appeared that all of the overseers and clerks were inside the wide-eaved buildings of the station proper, escaping the day’s increasing heat. The low structures were of traditional Kolcorronian design, orange and yellow brick laid in complex diamond patterns, dressed with red sandstone at all corners and edges–and had something of the look of snakes drowsing in the intense sunlight. Toller could not even see any officials at the narrow vertical windows. Pressing a hand to his sword to hold it steady, he ran towards the supervisors’ building.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born May 13, 1937 — Roger Zelazny. Where do I start? The Amber Chronicles are a favorite (well the first story, not the second at all) as is the Isle of The Dead, To Die in Italbar, and well, there’s very there’s very little by him that I can’t pick him and enjoy for a night’s reading. To my knowledge there’s only one thing he recorded reading and that’s a book he said was one of his favorite works, A Night in the Lonesome October. No, I’ve not forgotten about his Hugos. Roger Zelazny would win his first Hugo for …And Call Me Conrad which would later be called This Immortal. It would be the first of six Hugos that he would win and one of two for Best Novel, the other being for Lord of Light. His other four Hugos would be for the “Home Is the Hangman” novella, the “Unicorn Variation“ novelette, “24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai” novella and “Permafrost” novelette. Very, very impressive! (Died 1995.)
Born May 13, 1945 — Maria Tatar, 78. Folklorist who if you’re not familiar with her you should be. She’s written, among several works, The Annotated Brothers Grimm, The Annotated Peter Pan and The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen which is reviewed here on Green Man.
Born May 13, 1946 — Marv Wolfman, 77. He worked for Marvel Comics on The Tomb of Dracula series for which he and artist Gene Colan created Blade, and the Crisis on Infinite Earths series in which he temporarily untangled DC’s complicated history with George Pérez. And he worked with Pérez on the direct-to-DVD movie adaptation of the popular “Judas Contract” storyline from their tenure on Teen Titans. (I’m not going to list his IMDB credits here. Hell, he even wrote a Reboot episode!)
Born May 13, 1949 — Zoë Wanamaker, 74. She’s been Elle in amazing Raggedy Rawney which was a far better fantasy than Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone where she was Madame Hooch. And she was Cassandra in two Ninth Doctor stories,” The End of the World” and “New Earth”.
Born May 13, 1951 — Gregory Frost, 72. His retelling of The Tain is marvellous. Pair it with Ciaran Carson and China Miéville’s takes on the same legend for an interesting look at taking an legend and remaking it through modern fiction writing. Fitcher’s Brides, his Bluebeard and Fitcher’s Bird fairy tales, is a fantastic novel.
Born May 13, 1958 — Frances Barber, 65. Madame Kovarian, a prime antagonist during the time of The Eleventh Doctor showing up in seven episodes in totality. Fittingly she played Lady Macbeth in Macbeth at the Royal Exchange in Manchester. I’ve got her doing one-offs on Space Precinct, Red Dwarf and The IT Crowd.
Born May 13, 1958 — Bruce Byfield, 65. No idea if he has academic training, but he certainly has a fascination with Leiber. He wrote Witches of the Mind: A Critical Study of Fritz Leiber which was nominated for a Locus Award for Best Non-Fiction, and many fascination sounding essays on Lieber and his fiction including “The Allure of the Eccentric in the Poetry and Fiction of Fritz Leiber” and “Fafhrd and Fritz”.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Six Chix has an idea about how it would look if the fantasy characters we read about were real.
Arlo and Janis show what not to name your car.
From Tom Gauld:

#portal #science
My cartoon for this week’s @newscientist pic.twitter.com/XU95u7otqx
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) May 13, 2023

(9) GOOD OMENS FOR THIS SUMMER. Comicbook.com lets us know: “Good Omens Season 2 Premiere Date Announced by Prime Video”. It’s July 28.

…The second season of Good Omens is expected to follow Crowley and Aziraphale living amongst the humans in London’s Soho. According to Amazon, things begin to get apocalyptic once again “when an unexpected messenger presents a surprising mystery.”

“Good Omens 2 just would not be the same without the astonishing Jon Hamm as Gabriel, everyone’s worst boss,” Gaiman said in a statement when the second season was announced. “The story that Terry Pratchett and I created all those years ago continues to take us from London’s Soho into Heaven and Hell. It’s a delight for me to bring back characters we loved (or hated) and bring in new characters, from the shiniest top floors of Heaven to the dankest basements of Hell, to love (or to hate, or to love to hate or hate to love). All of them are part of the strange and unusually beloved family of Good Omens.”…

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(10) WORLDS APART. [Item by Steven French.] Hugely positive review of M John Harrison’s latest in the Guardian: “Wish I Was Here by M John Harrison review – a masterly ‘anti-memoir’”.

…Throughout his writing life, Harrison has refused the generic, escapist iterations of fantasy and science fiction as “easy things to think, a waste of the power of the big visionary-apocalyptic machine”. It is central to his practice that novels be recognised not as immersive experiences, illusory spaces to inhabit, but for the artificial constructs they are. They aren’t alternative worlds, but the work of a writer in our own….

(11) THE ONE WITH THE BORG WHALES. [Item by Ben Bird Person.] Illustrator gravelyhumerus posted this sketch playing off the 1986 film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and the pesky Borg from Star Trek: The Next Generation, etc.

sketch request: assimilation #StarTrek pic.twitter.com/Ey75vRQXi2
— milly ???? (@gravelyhumerus) May 13, 2023

(12) CAN WE KEEP HUMAN FAILINGS OUT OF SPACE? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The prospect of settling the Moon, Mars and elsewhere requires urgent conversations about issues such as labor and reproductive rights far from Earth. “Ethics in outer space: can we make interplanetary exploration just?” – book reviews in Nature:

Off-Earth: Ethical Questions and Quandaries for Living in Outer Space Erika Nesvold MIT Press (2023)

Reclaiming Space: Progressive and Multicultural Visions of Space Exploration James S. J. Schwartz, Linda Billings and Erika Nesvold (eds) Oxford Univ. Press (2023)

…From Star Trek to Apollo 17, space exploration is often framed as humanity pushing collectively towards a better future. But those utopian visions probably won’t mesh with reality. The book Off-Earth explores the ethical implications of humans moving into outer space — and whether those who do can avoid bringing along Earthly problems such as environmental destruction and social injustice. Nature spoke to its author, Erika Nesvold.

Nesvold is a computational astrophysicist, game developer and a member of the team behind Universe Sandbox, a physics-based space simulator. Based in Severn, Maryland, she is also co-founder of the JustSpace Alliance, a non-profit organization that works for a more inclusive and ethical future in space, and co-editor of Reclaiming Space, a collection of essays that explores similar themes….

Why is now a good time to talk about ethics in space exploration?

A lot of people are talking about these topics because of the growth of the private space-flight industry. For decades, human space exploration was done by national agencies with different motivations, different rhetoric surrounding it and different levels of public participation. With private space flight, members of the public — if they get rich enough — can actually think about going into space….

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, Steven French, Danny Sichel, Ben Bird Person, Kathy Sullivan, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Cat Eldridge, 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 3/1/23 A Fifth! Dinner In Memison

Posted on March 1, 2023 by Mike Glyer

(1) WISCON 2024 HIATUS. There will be a WisCon in May 2023, but the signs point to there not being one next year: “WisCon on break in 2024 – A chance to recover and plan” at the WisCon Blog.

The Board of WisCon’s parent non-profit, SF3, and the WisCon ConCom have come to a consensus that we won’t be planning to run a WisCon as usual in 2024: our leadership bench is very thin, and with the ongoing pandemic and challenging political situation in the US, folks are getting worn out. We need some time to rest and figure out how we can continue WisCon in a sustainable way. If you want to be involved paving a path to the next WisCon, join us for a planning session this Memorial Day Weekend and make sure you’re subscribed to our newsletter, where we’ll be posting updates.

We’re still absolutely putting on a con this May, and we’re going to do our very best given the people and resources we have available! We know this is scary and a big change, but we believe it gives WisCon the best chance to continue in the long run. Huge thanks to everyone who has volunteered their time and donated funds to enable us to host WisCon both last year and this year!

If you haven’t registered for WisCon yet, now is a great time! Both of our amazing Guests of Honor, Martha Wells (she/her) and Rivers Solomon (fae/faer), are planning to attend in person, and so far we’ve sold about 200 in-person memberships out of our 600 person cap on in-person attendance. Register to attend WisCon online or in person and complete our Panel Interest Survey by 3/10 to tell us what kind of programming you want to attend at WisCon.

(2) KGB. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Scott Lynch and Elizabeth Bear on March 8 at the KGB Bar.

Scott Lynch

Scott Lynch’s debut novel The Lies of Locke Lamora was nominated for a World Fantasy Award and is now in its 36th US printing, sixteen years later. His shorter work has appeared in multiple anthologies, and he recently provided an introduction for the Tor Books reissue of John M. Ford’s The Dragon Waiting. His next works in the Gentleman Bastard milieu will be More Than Fools Fill Graves (novella) and The Thorn of Emberlain (novel). Scott lives in Massachusetts with his wife, SF/F legend Elizabeth Bear, plus four cats and a horse.

Elizabeth Bear

Elizabeth Bear is the Hugo, Sturgeon, Astounding, and Locus Award-winning author of more novels, articles, and short fiction than she likes to think about. Her most recent books are Machine and The Origin of Storms. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband, SF/F legend Scott Lynch, plus four cats and a very small horse.

Where: KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003 (Just off 2nd Ave, upstairs)
When: March 8, 2023, 7:00 p.m. Eastern.

(3) SHORT FICTION SPECIALTY. The Speculative Literature Foundation is taking registrations for “Writing the SFF Novelette” with instructor Alec Nevala-Lee, a Zoom class being held March 25 from 10:00 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Central. Max 30 students. Cost $60.

The novelette (between 7,500 and 17,500 words long) can be a challenging but rewarding form for SFF writers. As a novel in miniature, it requires authors to think about narrative structure in ways that differ from the specific requirements of the short story, with a more complex plot that frequently falls into distinct acts. Because a novelette can be written in a shorter timeframe than a full novel, it allows writers to develop and refine skills that will be useful for longer projects, while also providing a form that is deeply rewarding in itself. This workshop will focus on idea generation, structure, and editing with an emphasis on the novelette, as well as elements of craft that can be applied to fiction of any length.

(4) DOTSON READING. Space Cowboy Books hosts an online reading and interview with J. Dianne Dotson author of The Shadow Galaxy on Tuesday March 21 at 6:00 p.m. Pacific. Get your copy here. Register for the reading free here.

A mesmerizing first collection, THE SHADOW GALAXY features short stories and poetry spanning magical realism, science fiction, fantasy, horror, and Appalachian tales. With stories and poetry spanning three decades of work, the author taps into journeys both fantastical and deeply personal. Categories include Shadow Shores: Tales from the Sea; Other Futures: Tales of the Galaxy and a Place Called Earth; Into the Darkest Hollow: Tales of Horror; Love and Other Moments: Traces of the Heart; Far Appalachia: Tales from the Ancient Mountains; and Resonant Thoughts: Some Poetry.

(5) OLIVIER AWARDS. Genre leads the field this year: “‘My Neighbour Totoro’ Dominates Olivier Award Nominations” reports the New York Times.

A stage adaptation of “My Neighbour Totoro,” an animated Japanese children’s movie filled with fantastical creatures, emerged on Tuesday as the front-runner for this year’s Olivier Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys.

The show, which ran at the Barbican Theater in London and included numerous giant puppets, secured nine nominations for the awards — more than any other play. Those included nods for best comedy, best director for Phelim McDermott and best actress for Mei Mac as a girl who discovers a magical world near her home….

(6) COMING ATTRACTIONS. Mrs. Davis is a Peacock original that will begin streaming April 20.

“Mrs. Davis” is the world’s most powerful Artificial Intelligence. Simone is the nun devoted to destroying Her. Who ya got?

(7) CONTROVERSY OVER ATTEMPTED REVIEW OF HOGWARTS LEGACY. [Item by Dann.] Girlfriend Reviews is a YouTube channel that provides reviews based on the perspective of a girlfriend watching her boyfriend playing various games. Shelby and Matt received a free evaluation copy of Hogwarts Legacy which they used. When they attempted to review the game on their Twitch channel, activists brigaded the comments section. Additionally, they were reported to various platforms for promoting “hate”. In their video below, they state that they lost their Reddit group/subReddit. It looks as if that access has been restored since then.

The Girlfriend Reviews review of Hogwarts Legacy is really more about their experience with activists swarming their media streams with insults and false claims to get their accounts closed by the social media hosts. Shelby states that she has other concerns about Hogwarts Legacy related to anti-Semitism and that she should be free to interrogate those concerns without running afoul of other activists with other concerns.

A quote from the video:

…Nobody wants to be labeled pro-child labor for tweeting from their iPhone any more than they want to be labeled transphobic for downloading Hogwarts Legacy, especially if how they vote on Election Day says something different than how they vote on the PlayStation store. And then there’s me and Matt, two video game critics who received a review copy of Hogwarts Legacy for free. It is our job to appraise video games while providing commentary on any controversies surrounding them and if you’ve ever watched our show you should know that we don’t hold any punches when it comes to calling out injustice. This channel has always been committed to creating a safer space for women in The Gaming Community…

(8) MEMORY LANE.

1935 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man is a locked room mystery narrated by his investigator Gideon Fell. First published in 1935 by Hamish Hamilton in the U.K., it has the much reprinted locked room lecture in which Fell addresses the reader. He sets out the various ways in which murder can be committed in what appears to be a locked room or otherwise seemingly impossible situation.

Fell was the protagonist of twenty-three rather good novels. Carr was said to have modeled him upon G. K. Chesterton who wrote the Father Brown stories as his physical appearance and personality were similar to those of Doctor Fell.

All of the Fell mysteries are intensely descriptive of Thirties London with sharply drawn characters and fascinating stories. They were considered cozy crimes novels, a description I’m not quite sure I agree with.

Highly recommended.

Among our usual suspects, Kindle and Kobo have it, but not Apple Books. Seven have been made into audiobooks but alas not The Hollow Man.

And now the rather startling Beginning to The Hollow Man…

THE THREAT

To the murder of Professor Grimaud, and later the equally incredible crime in Cagliostro Street, many fantastic terms could be applied-with reason. Those of Dr Fell’s friends who like impossible situations will not find in his case-book any puzzle more baffling or more terrifying. Thus: two murders were committed, in such fashion that the murderer must have been not only invisible, but lighter than air. According to the evidence, this person killed his first victim and literally disappeared. Again according to the evidence, he killed his second victim in the middle of an empty street, with watchers at either end; yet not a soul saw him, and no footprint appeared in the snow.

Naturally, Superintendent Hadley never for a moment believed in goblins or wizardry. And he was quite right – unless you believe in a magic that will be explained naturally in this narrative at the proper time. But several people began to wonder whether the figure which stalked through the case might not be a hollow shell. They began to wonder whether, if you took away the cap and the black coat and the child’s false-face, you might not reveal nothing inside, like the man in a certain famous romance by Mr H. G. Wells. The figure was grisly enough anyhow.

The words ‘according to the evidence’ have been used. We must be very careful about the evidence when it is not given at first hand. And in this case the reader must be told at the outset, to avoid useless confusion, on whose evidence he can absolutely rely. That is to say, it must be assumed that somebody is telling the truth-else, there is no legitimate mystery and, in fact, no story at all.

Therefore it must be stated that Mr Stuart Mills at Professor Grimaud’s house was not lying, was not omitting or adding anything, but telling the whole business exactly as he saw it in every case. Also it must be stated that the three independent witnesses of Cagliostro Street (Messrs Short and Blackwin, and Police-constable Withers) were telling the exact truth.

Under these circumstances, one of the events which led up to the crime must be outlined more fully than is possible in retrospect. It was the key-note, the whip-lash, the challenge. And it is retold-from Dr Fell’s notes, in essential details exactly as Stuart Mills later told it to Dr Fell and Superintendent Hadley. It occurred on the night of Wednesday, February 6th, three days before the murder, in the back parlour of the Warwick Tavern in Museum Street.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born March 1, 1915 — Wyman Guin. Ok, occasionally doing these Birthdays results in me being puzzled and this is one of those times. In 2013, he was named as recipient for the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award at ReaderCon 24. When I look him up, I find that he wrote a single novel and seven stories according to the folks at ISFDB. I’ve not read him. So, was he that good? Should I seek out his novel, The Standing Joy, and add it to my reading list? His short stories are available at the usual digital publishers, but the novel still isn’t. (Died 1989.)
Born March 1, 1923 — Andrew Faulds. He’s best remembered as Phalerus in Jason and the Argonauts in which he was in the skeleton fight scene that featured model work by Ray Harryhausen. He appeared in a number of other genre films including The Trollenberg Terror, The Flesh and the Fiends and Blood of the Vampire. He had one-offs on Danger Man and One Step Beyond. Oh, and his first acting gig was as Lysander in A Midsummer’s Night Dream. (Died 2000.)
Born March 1, 1930 — Eddie Hice. One of the original Red Shirts on Star Trek. He appeared in two episodes, first as a Red Shirt in “The Day of The Dove” and then having the same role in “Wink of an Eye”. I don’t recall either episode well enough to remember his fate in those stories. He had an extensive genre history showing in Batman twice, including once playing The Riddler, he was in Get Smart nine times, six as an actor and three as stunt double (his career as a stunt double was much longer and extensive than his acting career), The Beastmaster and voice work on the animated Lord of The Rings. (Died 2015.)
Born March 1, 1938 — Michael Kurland, 85. His The Unicorn Girl was the middle volume of the Greenwich Village trilogy by three different authors, the other two being Chester Anderson and T.A. Waters. (And yes, they’re available from the usual suspects.) Kurland has also written genre novels including Ten Little Wizards and A Study in Sorcery, set in the world of Garrett’s Lord Darcy. His other genre novels are Ten Years to Doomsday (written with Chester Anderson), Tomorrow Knight, Pluribus and Perchance.
Born March 1, 1946 — Lana Wood, 77. She’s best remembered as Plenty O’Toole in Diamonds Are Forever. She was in The Wild Wild West as Vixen O’Shaughnessy in “The Night of the Firebrand” and Averi Trent in “The Night of the Plague” episodes. She was in both up the CBS televised Captain America films playing Yolanda, and she was still active in the genre as little three years ago playing a character named Implicit in Subconscious Reality.
Born March 1, 1950 — David Pringle, 73. Pringle served as the editor of Foundation during the Eighties and helped found Interzone durning that time. The Glasgow Worldcon committee gave Pringle a Special Award for his work on Interzone. With Malcolm Edwards and Ian Watson, he also edited Foundation: The Review of Science Fiction from the late Seventies through the mid Eighties. Besides his various guides to the genre such as The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Fantasy, I see early on that he did a lot of work on J.G. Ballard such as Earth Is the Alien Planet: J. G. Ballard’s Four-Dimensional Nightmare and J. G. Ballard: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography. I also note that he’s not published anything listed on ISFDB in the field of late. Any idea why?
Born March 1, 1952 — Steven Barnes, 71. Co-writer with Niven of the Dream Park series. I read the first two when they came over forty years ago, not bad at all. Their Heorot series is quite good too. I’ve not read him on his own so cannot say how he is as a solo writer. For TV, he’s done work for The Outer Limits, Andromeda and Stargate SG-1. His “A Stitch In Time” episode of The Outer Limits won an Emmy Award.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

The most recent xkcd mentions fandom and fan service…just not in the traditional manner.

(11) THERE ARE THUNDERCATS IN OUR FUTURE. [Item by Dann.] A trailer has dropped for the Thundercats movie that is supposed to be released in 2023. Henry Cavill is one of those actors that I could watch warm soup on a stove and be entertained. The trailer doesn’t reveal much about the plot of the movie but the graphics are good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmGQbiZSGY4

(12) IS THERE ENOUGH SCIENCE IN THE UNIVERSE TO MAKE THIS HAPPEN? “Back to the father: the scientist who lost his dad – and resolved to travel to 1955 to save him” – a science article in the Guardian.

Prof Ronald Mallett thinks he has cracked time travel. The secret, he says, is in twisting the fabric of space-time with a ring of rotating lasers to make a loop of time that would allow you to travel backwards. It will take a lot more explaining and experiments, but after a half century of work, the 77-year-old astrophysicist has got that down pat.

His claim is not as ridiculous as it might seem. Entire academic departments, such as the Centre for Time at the University of Sydney, are dedicated to studying the possibility of time travel. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is working on a “time-reversal machine” to detect dark matter. Of course there are still lots of physicists who believe time travel, or at least travelling to the past, is impossible, but it is not quite the sci-fi pipe dream it once was.

However, the story of how Mallett, now emeritus professor at the University of Connecticut, reached this point could have been lifted straight from a comic book. A year after losing his father, Boyd, at the age of 10, Mallett picked up a copy of HG Wells’s The Time Machine and had an epiphany: he was going to build his own time machine, travel back to 1955 and save his father’s life.

Mallett still idolises his dad, and thinks about him every day. He had been exceptionally close to Boyd, whom he describes as a handsome, erudite and funny “renaissance man” who would try to inspire curiosity in Mallett and his two brothers and sister. “When he passed away, it was like this light went out. I was in shock,” Mallett says down the line from his study in Connecticut….

(13) INSPIRATION POINTS. Will Higginbotham takes New York Times readers on a tour of “Where the Lion and the Witch Met the Hobbit” – Oxford.

…Is this where Lewis found inspiration for Narnia? “No one knows for sure, but the timeline makes sense,” Mr. Walters said. In the early 1940s, Lewis was a lay theologian, and he occasionally gave sermons in St. Mary’s, just a few feet away. “Perhaps he left one evening through the side door and walked straight out onto this,” Mr. Walters said, gesturing to what’s become known as the Narnia Door….

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Peter Pan & Wendy trailer.

“Peter Pan & Wendy,” a live-action reimagining of the J.M. Barrie novel and the 1953 animated classic, will begin streaming April 28, 2023, exclusively on Disney+. Check out the teaser trailer and key art for the original movie directed by David Lowery (“The Green Knight,” “Pete’s Dragon”), and get ready to experience the timeless adventure featuring the beloved characters like never before. “Peter Pan & Wendy” introduces Wendy Darling, a young girl afraid to leave her childhood home behind, who meets Peter Pan, a boy who refuses to grow up. Alongside her brothers and a tiny fairy, Tinker Bell, she travels with Peter to the magical world of Neverland. There, she encounters an evil pirate captain, Captain Hook, and embarks on a thrilling and dangerous adventure that will change her life forever.

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

Pixel Scroll 2/2/23 Out Fifthed The Web And Pixeled Wide; The Mirror Scroll’d From Side To Side

Posted on February 2, 2023 by Mike Glyer

(1) WRITER PROMOTIONAL TOOLS MAY BE INTERRUPTED. K. Tempest Bradford draws attention to this news:

Hey friends, this is bad. Really bad. Even if you are not a dev, you very likely will be affected by this.

Every service that offers cross-posting to or from Twitter will stop working next week unless the service pays whatever fee. All of your tweet schedulers? Broken.

???? https://t.co/W4gzxmTgTE
— Tempest is ????ing herself off of this site (@tinytempest) February 2, 2023

Even if you personally do not use these services or follow those accounts, you might still be impacted. Businesses rely heavily on auto-posters, cross-posters, schedulers, and social communication managers. Marketing departments are running around like their hair is on fire rn.
— Tempest is ????ing herself off of this site (@tinytempest) February 2, 2023

(2) HERE’S YOUR CHANCE. Publishers Weekly has put out a “Call for Info: SF, Fantasy & Horror (Adult) “ seeking pitches on sffh themes.

Deadline: Feb. 17. Issue: Apr. 17. For this feature, we’d like to speak with authors about creating non-human characters and cultures—aliens, monsters, A.I., and more. We’re also interested in romantic fantasy, Gothic horror, and class conscious, “eat the rich,” near-future SF. Pitches on other SFFH themes are welcome; please limit these to standalone titles and first-in-series books. Pub dates: Apr.–Sept. Adult books and new titles only, please; no reprints. Submission deadline: Feb. 17. Visit publishersweekly.com/ SFFHspring23 to submit your titles

(3) NOT JUST ANY BOT. Martha Wells guests on the If This Goes On (Don’t Panic) podcast. The next Murderbot book, System Collapse, will be released November 14. See the cover here.

In this episode, Alan and Diane chat with author, Martha Wells, about Neurodiversity, writing action scenes, the origins of ART (the sentient spaceship), developing humor in writing, and Martha’s new book.

(4) HARD SCIENCE. Jack Dann will be giving a talk for the Tucson Hard-Science SF Channel about the craft of writing, which will include what he calls “The Keys to the Kingdom” and “Writing As Cartography”. He says, “Basically, this will be a craft-based Jack Dann schmooze session relating to the insane joys and anxieties of becoming a writer and (Heaven forfend!) being a writer.” You’ll be able to find it here on YouTube on February 4 8:00 p.m. Eastern.

(5) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 76, the Octothorpe crew ask “Does It Matter What We Think?”

John Coxon is watching movies, Alison Scott is making games, and Liz Batty isn’t picky. The three of us celebrate Groundhog Day by talking about the Chengdu Worldcon again, and again, and again…

(6) WITNESSES TO FANHISTORY. Fanac.org has several more “FanHistory Project Zoom Sessions” scheduled in the months to come. Everyone who wants access should write to [email protected] to be put on the attendance list.

Schedule for Future sessions

February 11, 2023 – 4PM EST, 1PM PST, 9PM GMT London, Sunday the 12th at 8AM in Melbourne, AU – New York Fandom in the 70s with Moshe Feder, Andy Porter, Steve Rosenstein and Jerry Kaufman
March 18, 2023 – 4PM EDT, 3PM CDT, 1PM PDT, 8PM London, March 19 at 7AM in Melbourne, AU – Feminism in 1970s Fandom, with Janice Bogstad, Jeanne Gomoll, and Lucy Huntzinger
April 22, 2023 – 7PM EDT, 4PM PDT, April 23 at 12AM in London, 9AM in Melbourne AU – Wrong Turns on the Wallaby Track Part 2, with Leigh Edmonds and Perry Middlemiss

(7) EVERGREEN. Gary Farber pointed out the timeless timeliness of John Scalzi’s 2017 post “The Brain Eater” which deals with writers whose careers hit a flat trajectory and makes them easy to convince that somebody (not them) is to blame.

(8) BEGIN AS YOU INTEND TO GO ALONG. Slashfilm recommends these as “The 14 Greatest Opening Scenes In Sci-Fi Movies”. This favorite is on the list – but not as the final entry.

The Terminator

Okay, I know what you’re thinking. Why would anyone choose the intro to “The Terminator” over the opening battle in “Terminator 2: Judgement Day”? After all, “T2” has that famous shot of the T-800 stomping a human skull, better VFX, more action, and a smoldering, scarred John Connor (Michael Edwards) watching over it all. Is the original’s first scene really better than that?

The answer, of course, is yes, and it all comes down to tone. Sure, the “T2” scene is fun, and it does a decent job of introducing the myth of John Connor. However, at the end of the day it’s little more than an action scene. By contrast, the “Terminator” opening is exactly as bleak as the concept of the Future War demands. There’s no epic battle here, no heroic stand against the machines — only the charred rubble of Los Angeles, a sea of skulls, and a single, desperate soldier fleeing from the lights of the HK-tanks. More extermination than war, this scene establishes the rest of the movie’s hopeless tone.

The opening of “The Terminator” is then rounded off by what must surely be the greatest piece of expository text in the history of cinema: “The machines rose from the ashes of the nuclear fire. Their war to exterminate mankind had raged for decades, but the final battle would not be fought in the future. It would be fought here, in our present. Tonight …” How’s that for setting the scene?

(9) MEMORY LANE.

1952 — [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Our next Beginnings comes from Lis Carey who says C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, has the “best opening line ever” and she thinks “the rest of the paragraph lives up to it, but I’m not moving right now”. Fortunately it was easy to retrieve from Kindle.

This is the novel’s seventy-first anniversary as it was published in the United Kingdom by Geoffrey Bles in 1952. It is the third of seven novels in The Chronicles of Narnia series.

Like the other novels, it was illustrated by Pauline Baynes, and her work has been retained in many later editions.

THERE WAS A BOY CALLED EUSTACE Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. His parents called him Eustace Clarence and masters called him Scrubb. I can’t tell you how his friends spoke to him, for he had none. He didn’t call his Father and Mother “Father” and “Mother,” but Harold and Alberta. They were very up-to-date and advanced people. They were vegetarians, non-smokers and teetotalers and wore a special kind of underclothes. In their house there was very little furniture and very few clothes on beds and the windows were always open. Eustace Clarence liked animals, especially beetles, if they were dead and pinned on a card. He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born February 2, 1933 — Tony Jay. Ok I mostly remember him as Paracelsus in the superb Beauty and the Beast series even it turns out he was only in a handful of episodes. Other genre endeavors include, and this is lest OGH strangle me only the Choice Bits, included voicing The Supreme Being In Time Bandits, an appearance on Star Trek: The Next Generation as Third Minister Campio In “Cost of Living”, being in The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. (and yes I loved the series) as Judge Silot Gato in “Brisco for the Defense” and Dougie Milford In Twin Peaks. (Died 2006.)
Born February 2, 1940 — Thomas Disch. Camp Concentration, The Genocides, 334 and On Wings of Song are among the best New Wave novels ever done. He was a superb poet as well, though I don’t think any of it was germane to our community. He won the Related Book Hugo for The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of at Aussiecon 3, a critical but loving look on the impact of SF on our culture, and was nominated for a number of other Hugos for his short fiction. (Died 2008.)
Born February 2, 1944 — Geoffrey Hughes. He played Popplewick aka The Valeyard in the Fifth Doctor story, “The Trial of The Time Lord”. Intriguingly he was also the voice of Paul McCartney in Yellow Submarine which surely is genre. And he as Harper in Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased)’s “Somebody Just Walked Over My Grave” episode. (Died 2012.)
Born February 2, 1947 — Farrah Fawcett. She has a reasonably good SFF resume and she‘s been in Logan’s Run as Holly 13, and Saturn 3 as Alex. (Does anyone like that film?) She was also Mary Ann Pringle in Myra Breckinridge which might I suppose be considered at least genre adjacent. Or not. Series wise, she shows up on I Dream of Jeanie as Cindy Tina, has three different roles on The Six Million Man, and was Miss Preem Lila on two episodes of The Flying Nun. Well, she does fly. (Died 2009.)
Born February 2, 1949 — Jack McGee, 74. Ok so how many of us remember him as Doc Kreuger on the Space Rangers series? Six episodes all told. Not as short as The Nightmare Cafe I grant you but pretty short. I’ve also got him as Bronto Crane Examiner in The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas, as a Deputy in Stardust, Mike Lutz in seaQuest, Doug Perren in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and a Police Officer Person of Interest, to name some of his genre roles.
Born February 2, 1949 — Brent Spiner, 74. Data on more Trek shows and films than I’ll bother listing here. I’ll leave it up to all of you to list your favorite moments of him as Data. He also played Dr. Brackish Okun in Independence Day, a role he reprised in Independence Day: Resurgence. He also played Dr. Arik Soong/Lt. Commander Data in four episodes of Enterprise. Over the years, he’s had roles in Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, Tales from the Darkside, Gargoyles, Young Justice, The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, Warehouse 13 and had a lead role in the thirteen-episode run of Threshold.
Born February 2, 1986 — Gemma Arterton, 37. She’s best known for playing Io in Clash of the Titans, Princess Tamina in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Strawberry Fields in Quantum of Solace, and as Gretel in Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters. She also voiced Clover in the current Watership Down series. Really? Strawberry Fields? That original to the Fleming novel?

(11) COMICS SECTION.

The Week has a sardonic cartoon about the green comet.
Adam@Home celebrates the totem animal of February 2 with a pun.

(12) BUTTERWORTH POETRY COLLECTION. Tomorrow, February 3, Space Cowboy Books launches Michael Butterworth Complete Poems 1965-2020.

For more than fifty years Michael Butterworth, better known for his work as a writer, editor and publisher, has also been a quiet unobtrusive voice in poetry, with roots lying both in the small press poetry journals of the sixties and seventies and in New Wave of Science Fiction. His work is distinguished as much for the restless intelligence, wit and intimacy of his voice as a determination, shown in many of these poems, to paint metaphorical pictures of the perils we face due to our poor regard for the fragile biosphere in which we live. In other poems, he finds, within the events of an ordinary life, scope for the transcendent, and in still others his use of nonsense and absurdity playfully captures the moment, puncturing the illusions of the self. Across his work, elements are reiterated but endlessly transfigured –

The effect is at once familiar and yet profound, in language that has the confessional qualities and simplicity of early influences such as Sylvia Plath and the Beats, and the later influence of Zen poets such as Ryōkan. Occasionally the writing is startlingly radical – a reminder of the poet’s beginnings in the New Wave.

A collection such as this one from Space Cowboy Books is overdue, and Complete Poems: 1965-2020 brings to more deserving attention a less heard voice in modern poetry.

(13) PENNYWORTH DROPPED. “’Pennyworth’ Canceled After Three Seasons at HBO Max” reports Variety.

…The third season, officially titled “Pennyworth: The Origin of Batman’s Butler,” was the first season of the show to originate on HBO Max. The series originally debuted on Epix in 2019, with Season 2 airing on that channel in two chunks in 2020 and 2021. Season 3 launched on HBO Max in October 2022.

“While HBO Max is not moving forward with another season of ‘Pennyworth: The Origin of Batman’s Butler,’ we are very thankful to creator Bruno Heller and executive producers Matthew Patnick, Danny Cannon and John Stephens, along with Warner Bros. Television, for their brilliant, unique, gripping depiction of the origin of Alfred Pennyworth, one of the most iconic characters in the Batman world,” an HBO Max spokesperson said in a statement….

(14) I LOVE YOU. Entertainment Weekly made sure we heard that the “Valentine’s Day 2023 New Star Wars Funko Pops Have Arrived”. Use them when “I know” isn’t a sufficient answer.

… Whether this will be your first time buying Valentine’s Day-specific Star Wars Funko Pops or if you started collecting the special holiday Funko Pops last year and are looking to build up your collection, these figures are the perfect way to add a pop of romantic hues and swoon-worthy sci-fi charm to any room. There’s a Kylo Ren, Rey, BB-8, and Princess Leia figure, and each figure is entirely red, white, and pink and costs around $13….

(15) RANSOM TRILOGY DISCUSSED. The Pints with Jack podcast presents “’After Hours’ with Dr. Diana Glyer”.

Dr. Glyer returns to the show to speak in more detail about the book she edited, A Compass for Deep Heaven: Navigating the C. S. Lewis Ransom Trilogy.

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, John King Tarpinian, Joe Siclari, Chris Barkley, Andrew Porter, and Michael Toman for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day by Andrew (not Werdna).]

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Tag Archives: C.S. Lewis

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