(1) SINKING THE NAVAL ACADEMY LIBRARY. The New York Times reveals “Who’s In and Who’s Out at the Naval Academy’s Library?” (Behind a paywall). “An order by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s office resulted in a purge of books critical of racism but preserved volumes defending white power.”
Gone is “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” Maya Angelou’s transformative best-selling 1970 memoir chronicling her struggles with racism and trauma.
Two copies of “Mein Kampf” by Adolf Hitler are still on the shelves.
Gone is “Memorializing the Holocaust,” Janet Jacobs’s 2010 examination of how female victims of the Holocaust have been portrayed and remembered.
“The Camp of the Saints” by Jean Raspail is still on the shelves. The 1973 novel, which envisions a takeover of the Western world by immigrants from developing countries, has been embraced by white supremacists and promoted by Stephen Miller, a senior White House adviser.
“The Bell Curve,” which argues that Black men and women are genetically less intelligent than white people, is still there. But a critique of the book was pulled.
The Trump administration’s decision to order the banning of certain books from the U.S. Naval Academy’s library is a case study in ideological censorship, alumni and academics say.
Political appointees in the Department of the Navy’s leadership decided which books to remove. A look at the list showed that antiracists were targeted, laying bare the contradictions in the assault on so-called diversity, equity and inclusion policies….
(2) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to wolf down lamb with Carolyn Ives Gilman in Episode 251 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.
Carolyn Ives Gilman was one of my earliest guests of the podcast, appearing all the way back on Episode 5. Nine years and two days later, the night she was taking part in the latest Charm City Spec, we decided it was time to chat and chew for you again.
Gilman’s books include her first novel Halfway Human, which has been called “one of the most compelling explorations of gender and power in recent SF;” Dark Orbit, a space exploration adventure; and Isles of the Forsaken and Ison of the Isles, a two-book fantasy about culture clash and revolution. Some of her short fiction can be found in Aliens of the Heart and Candle in a Bottle, both from Aqueduct Press, and in Arkfall and The Ice Owl, from Arc Manor.
Her short fiction has also appeared in Analog, Tor.com, Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Fantasy and Science Fiction, The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Interzone, Universe, Full Spectrum, Realms of Fantasy, and others. She has been nominated for the Nebula Award three times and for the Hugo twice. Gilman lives in Washington, D.C., and works as a freelance writer and museum consultant. She is also author of seven nonfiction books about North American frontier and Native history.
We discussed the way her ideas aren’t small enough to squeeze into short stories, how she shelved a novel she’d written because she felt her imagination at its wildest wasn’t ridiculous enough to match reality, whether our personal archives will be trashed or treasured, the reason she doesn’t feel she can teach writing, why authors need to respect what the story wants, why she’s terrible at reacting to writing prompts and how she does it anyway, how she generally starts a story not with character or plot but with setting, the ethics and morality of zoos and museums, how she manages to makes the impossible seem possible, our shared inability to predict which stories editors will want, and much more.
(3) TUTTLE BOOK REVIEWS. Lisa Tuttle’s “The best science fiction, fantasy and horror – reviews roundup” for the Guardian covers Sleeper Beach by Nick Harkaway; Some Body Like Me by Lucy Lapinska; City of All Seasons by Oliver K Langmead & Aliya Whiteley; Rose/House by Arkady Martine; and The Cat Bride by Charlotte Tierney.
(4) THE NEBUGO AWARD. When it comes to the Hugo’s novella category, Eddie believes in “Casting the net a little wider” at Borrowed and Blue. Or at least as widely as the titles on Eddie’s own list of faves of 2024. (And if nothing else, you might find something that belongs on your own TBR pile.)
…I shall now proceed to suggest that the collective wisdom of the Hugo jury this year was, in one meaningful way, somewhat questionable. The novella category for this year consists entirely of nominees from a single publisher, with all but one from a single imprint. That seems to me to be a rather myopic view of the field; I think we can look much more widely than that.
Without further ado, the Nebugo Awards Novella & Novel shortlists (commentary for the books that were on my favourite of the year list for 2024 is cribbed from there; comment for those which weren’t is new)….
(5) SLAN. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] When the eldest (a 90-year-old) member of our local SF group came to last month’s meeting with a suitcase of books, there were some interesting titles. I grabbed four including Slan by van Vogt. When I got home, I found I already had a copy on my unread bookshelf that had embarrassingly been there unread for nigh on four decades (I’m getting on a bit myself)… Anyway, waste not want not, I dived in and then after generated a review for SF² Concatenation which has been posted ahead of its next season edition due to go up next week.
Van Vogt’s Slan is his first novel and something of a minor SF classic. Minor, because it has not really stood the test of time despite winning the Retro-Hugo for 1941 in 2016 at the MidAmeriCon II Worldcon in Kansas City. ‘The Retro for 1941’ I hear you cry? Well, yes, because the novel was originally serialized in the Astounding Science Fiction over their September–December editions in 1940. But is it any good? Well, truth be told, opinion is divided. First, the story…
The review is here.
(6) SOUNDS LIKE A GREAT JOB. [Item by Steven French.] The Doctor’s new companion is interviewed in advance of the new season kicking off tomorrow: “’I can’t believe I’m paid to watch Ncuti Gatwa!’: Doctor Who’s boundary-pushing new companion, Varada Sethu” in the Guardian.
Most teenagers rebel against their parents in small ways: sneaking out, stealing a nip of Cointreau, arriving home past curfew. Not Varada Sethu, the Newcastle-raised actor who’s about to grace screens as new companion Belinda Chandra in the forthcoming season of Doctor Who. Her rebellion took on a go-big-or-go-home attitude befitting a future screen star: when she was 18 she entered, and subsequently won, the Miss Newcastle beauty pageant. “Oh my God, I thought that was gonna be buried somewhere!” she exclaims when I bring it up. The whole thing was “kind of an accident”, she explains: “My sister and I were walking around in Eldon Square shopping centre, and they asked us if we wanted to enter, and I thought: ‘Yeah, I’ll give it a go’ – I thought it might piss off my parents a bit!”
The decision to enter definitely caused “a bit of friction”, but Sethu’s parents didn’t raise a quitter. “On the day we had the rehearsals, I called my mum up and said: ‘I don’t want to do this, can you please take me home?’ And Mum was like: ‘Well, you’ve signed up for it, so you’re doing it,’” she recalls. “None of us expected me to win – the whole thing was a bit of a bodge job for me!”
Now 32, the beauty pageant world “doesn’t really align with” Sethu’s value system, and her chosen vocation is miles – galaxies, really – away from that world of tiaras and special skills. In recent years, thanks to a starring role in the acclaimed Star Wars series Andor and her forthcoming turn as Belinda, as well as a part in the 2018 BBC drama Hard Sun, she’s become known as a go-to British sci-fi actor. “You don’t often see brown people in space – well, you do more than in other genres, because they’re futuristic – but I don’t think I necessarily saw myself as part of the sci-fi world,” she says. “So I don’t quite know how I ended up here, but I love it, and I’m very, very happy to be here.”…
(7) THE MOUSE AND THE TARDIS. “Has Disney+ Changed ‘Doctor Who’? U.S. and U.K. Fans Discuss.” in the New York Times. Link bypasses NYT paywall. Perhaps a spoiler warning is a good idea here.
…So the stakes are high this season. Four “Doctor Who” fans from the United States and Britain spoke to The New York Times via video calls to share their views on Gatwa’s performance, on Davies’s return, and on how the show has changed since Disney+ got involved. Their comments have been edited for length and clarity….
Vera Wylde, 43. Vermont.
As a performer — and I do not say this lightly — [Gatwa] is the most charismatic person who has taken on the role. He commands the camera immediately.
I do have an issue, in that I feel like I don’t truly know him as well as I would like. The surface level is complete charisma, bright as the sun. I got that. What’s underneath that? I’m still working on that.
I had far, far more feelings about [Davies] coming back as showrunner than I did about Disney being involved. At a fundamental level, I am frustrated with him because I had hoped that he wouldn’t just slip back like it’s 2005 again and approach seasons in the same way — which is exactly what he did. It’s mostly standalone, and there’s a mystery box that is really blatant, and it ends in a two-part finale with the return of a classic-era villain….
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
April 11, 1963 — Gregory Keyes, 62.
By Paul Weimer: I started reading Gregory Keyes at the very start of my reviewing life. This was in 1999, and I was just started to test the waters of connecting with reviewers and publishers and talking about books to people I didn’t know (I’ve always talked about books to people I did know). In an electronic newsletter put out by Barnes and Noble in those days, they mentioned the forthcoming alternate history fantasy book by an author new to me, J. Gregory Keyes. (Aas Keyes styled himself, for these books).
The idea of an alternate world where Newton discovered the laws of Magic was instant catnip for me, and I got the book as soon as it came out, and the sequels as well. Come for the alternate history with magic and angels, stay for an alternate United States with Bluebeard as a founding father.
His oeuvre since has mellowed out a bit, with lots of big phat fantasy of the first water, the doorstoppers that he knows the minor and major keys and plays them well (The Briar King series, for example,The High and Faraway series, The Basilisk Throne, and even Elder Scrolls novels). He’s done a bunch of other tie-ins and novelizations, from Marvel to Godzilla to Star Wars).
I talk of mellowing out because I eventually went back to his first novels, before Newton’s Cannon…the Waterborn duology. And like Newton’s Cannon, they are inventive, strange and weirdly wild in a way some of his post-Cannon fiction is not. The world of the Waterborn is something you don’t see so much — a relatively young fantasy world, that hasn’t had the thousands of years of history in the past yet, but that future is definitely stretching ahead of it.
I can’t fault the fact that he has found success in more traditional fantasy novels, but I do kind of miss the author who had Goddesses of Rivers begging lovers to kill the river they emptied into, and the idea of Benjamin Franklin doing alchemy. (To be fair, The High and Faraway does capture a bit of that early wildness once more). Like the realms of faerie in many of his books, Keyes’ work has been somewhat tamed…but not quite completely. Not quite. But if I think of authors who write to fantasy doorstopper length, sure there is Martin and Williams and Jordan and Elliott…but there is also Keyes as well. He should always be part of that conversation.
I have not yet tried his latest novel, The Wind that Sweeps the Stars.
Happy birthday!
(9) COMICS SECTION.
- Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal proposes a cure that is more work than the syndrome.
- Bizarro is ready for tax season in Oz.
- Bound and Gagged needs more tech to solve this problem.
- Dinosaur Comics discusses titles.
- Dog Eat Doug complains about overpowered D&D characters.
- Ink Pen shouldn’t taunt.
- Pearls Before Swine has a friendship tip.
(10) BUTTERBEER OREOS. These started out as a viral fake. They might still be, although there’s a new wave of claims they’re really going to show up in stores.
(11) CHARITY AUCTION. [Item by Froonium Ricky.] Maureen Ryan, genre-loving tv critic and author of Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood, is currently holding an eBay auction (see “Moryanwatcher on eBay”) of various TV items, including a Star Trek: Strange New Worlds “Subspace Rhapsody” T-Shirt, some X-Files promo items, a “Warrior” hoodie, some Game of Thrones magnets, and a Farscape script and actual piece of the Moya set. All the proceeds go to various excellent Mo-chosen charities!
(12) GETTING TO THE BOTTOM. “3D scan of Titanic sheds new light on doomed liner’s final moments” at CNN.
A new documentary reveals the incredible results of a project to create 3D underwater scans of the doomed ocean liner RMS Titanic, which sank 113 years ago.
“Titanic: The Digital Resurrection” tells the story of how deep-sea mapping company Magellan created “the most precise model of the Titanic ever created: a full-scale, 1:1 digital twin, accurate down to the rivet,” according to a statement from National Geographic, published Tuesday….
… The 90-minute National Geographic documentary allows filmmaker Anthony Geffen “to reconstruct the ship’s final moments—challenging long-held assumptions and revealing new insights into what truly happened on that fateful night in 1912,” according to the statement.
In the film, Titanic analyst Parks Stephenson, metallurgist Jennifer Hooper and master mariner Chris Hearn walk around a full-scale reproduction of the ship, highlighting previously hidden details.
One key finding is a visibly open steam valve, which corroborates accounts that engineers manned their stations in Boiler Room Two for more than two hours after Titanic hit the iceberg.
This maintained the electricity supply and allowed crew to send distress signals, meaning the 35 men in the boiler room may have sacrificed themselves to save hundreds of other people.
The team also reconstruct hull fragments found scattered around the site, revealing that Titanic didn’t split in two, but “was violently torn apart, ripping through first-class cabins where prominent passengers like J.J. Astor and Benjamin Guggenheim may have sought refuge as the ship went down.”
The scan also helps to exonerate First Officer William Murdoch, who has been accused of abandoning his post. The position of a lifeboat davit, a piece of equipment used to lower the craft, corroborates testimony that Murdoch was, in fact, washed out to sea as the crew prepared to launch it….
(13) MIKHAIL TIKHONOV Q&A. [Item by Steven French.] As the man says, the possibilities are indeed vast … “Q&A: How to (theoretically) spot an alien” at Phys.org
Are we alone in the universe? The answer to one of humanity’s biggest questions is complicated by a basic reality: If there is life on other worlds, it may not look familiar. A sample of rocks from Mars or another planet almost certainly won’t have recognizable fossils or another similarly obvious sign of living organisms, said Mikhail Tikhonov, an assistant professor of physics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis who studies microbial communities.
But just because we might not recognize signs of life on a distant moon or planet doesn’t mean it’s actually lifeless. “There could be life forms out there that defy our imagination,” Tikhonov said.
Searching for life that we don’t understand may seem like an impossible mission. In a paper published in Nature Communications, Tikhonov and co-author Akshit Goyal of the International Centre for Theoretical Science in Bengaluru, India, propose a new idea. Instead of looking for particular molecules or compounds associated with life as we know it, scientists can look for telltale patterns of energy.
Tikhonov discusses his out-of-this-world idea in this Q&A.
(14) REACHING THE FINISH LINE. Mr. Sci-Fi, Marc Scott Zicree, gives his comments about the publication history of Last Dangerous Visions and the late Harlan Ellison in “The Book on the Edge of Forever Finally Arrives!”
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, N., Froonium Ricky, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, and Teddy Harvia for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel “Burma Shave” Dern.]
