Pixel Scroll 7/15/24 Frankly My Dear, I Don’t Scroll A Pixel

(1) GLASGOW 2024 UPDATE. Glasgow 2024 has sent draft program schedules to almost a thousand participants.

(2) AUDIBLE REVEALS NEW CALCULATION  FOR ROYALTIES. “Audible’s New Royalty Model: More Opportunities for Authors and Publishers”.  

…We are now rolling out a new royalty model that prioritizes equity, flexibility, and insight for creators—one that evolved out of ongoing conversations with authors and publishers, and that advances our creator-centric ethos. Under this model, creators are able to monetize more types of content, and listeners will get to discover more innovative storytelling.

Titles in all Audible’s membership offerings can now earn royalties: Audible’s new royalty model means new opportunities for small publishers and independent authors to earn across all membership listening activity. Now more titles—including those currently in Audible Plus, Audible’s all-you-can-listen offering—can generate royalty payments. Depending on the audiences that publishers and creators want to reach, there are new ways to monetize and promote content, which means more flexibility to reach listeners where they are….

How is the new royalty model calculated? Audible takes a member’s plan value (Plus or Premium Plus) and adds the value of any additional credits used, then divides that value among the titles the member listened to over the course of the month. That figure, multiplied by the contractual royalty rate, comprises a creator’s royalty payment….

Publishers Weekly’s coverage, “Audible Rolls Out New Royalty Plan”, observes that “the announcement comes after one of Audible’s most vocal critics, bestselling author Brandon Sanderson, reported in March that Audible officials had approached him to discuss ‘a new royalty structure they intend to offer to independent writers and smaller publishers,’ a plan that Sanderson said was ‘encouraging.’”

(3) BACIGALUPI Q&A. At Colorado Public Radio:“Exhausted by climate fiction, Colorado novelist Paolo Bacigalupi turns to fantasy”.

Sure he has won the biggest prizes in science fiction– the Nebula and the Hugo awards. But Paolo Bacigalupi found himself bereft of inspiration. Penning apocalyptic climate fiction, like 2016’s The Water Knife, had taken its toll….

…The Paonia-based author knew it was time for a change. Then the invitation came.

A wine-importer friend who knew Bacigalupi’s penchant for languages (he’d studied Chinese in college) invited him to Bologna for a crash course in Italian.

The answer was yes…..

…The real-life Bolognese setting inspired Bacigalupi’s new fantasy novel, “Navola.” It takes place in a city-state reminiscent of Florence or Venice during The Renaissance.

His protagonist, Davico di Regulai, is the son of an uber-wealthy merchant and banker. The boy has big shoes to fill, but very different feet, as it were. Armed with a preserved dragon eye that possesses magical powers, Davico struggles to be the man his father and community expect him to be….

Ryan Warner: How did you know it was time for something different?

Paolo Bacigalupi: Well, when you keep trying to write things and you keep failing to actually finish them, or even when you’re starting to try to write, it’s like sticking your finger in a light socket. It is sort of painful and damaging, you think ‘maybe I should do something different.’

Warner: And that’s how it started to feel in the climate change space?

Bacigalupi: Yeah. A lot of what I was doing, the news was bad, and then the stories that you’re trying to tell are extrapolations on the present day, and those are all terrifying. Then you find you’re in this space where your creative world and your regular life are all smashed together, and they’re all really negative and they’re all full of terrors, and it’s not a sustainable space to be. If you spend all of your imaginative time in anxiety, then yeah, it takes a toll and eventually you just break down entirely.

Warner: And if the writer isn’t enjoying it, how possibly could the reader?

Bacigalupi: Yeah. I think that a healthy writer finds pleasure in their work. I think there are unhealthy ways to go about doing good work, as well. The outcome can be good, but the damage internally is bad for the writer.

(4) KGB. Ellen Datlow has posted photos from the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading on July 10.

A.T. Sayre read and Nat Cassidy read and played his guitar for a very enjoyable evening.

(5) ERIN UNDERWOOD PRESENTS. The latest Erin Underwood videos take up Star Wars fanhistory, and test the relevance of Battlestar Galactica’s 2004 remake.

Star Wars: The Impacts of How Lucasfilm Built its Fan Base

Star Wars fandom holds a unique place as possibly the first ever nurtured fanbase built by a film studio. To understand the evolution of Star Wars fandom, I decided to explore its roots by inviting Craig Miller, former publicity executive at Lucas Film, and Garen Daly, Director of the Boston SciFi Film Festival, to discuss the early days of Star Wars fandom and its lasting impact on the film industry. Watch the video podcast discussion on YouTube and share your thoughts in the comments.

Battlestar Galactica (2004) Series Review – Does this Iconic Sci-Fi Remake Hold Up Today?

It’s been 20 years since they remade the 1978 version of Battlestar Galactica, and remakes often struggle to be relevant over time. From the story to the characters and the technology, how does BSG hold up 2 decades later? Watch my review of the full series and let me know if you think Battlestar Galactica holds up as well today … or even better!

(6) NEW FILM PLAYS ON CONSPIRACY THEORIES. “Note To Hollywood: Nobody Faked The Moon Landing” complains Inverse.

It’s getting exhausting calling out Moon landing truthers. Especially when a high-profile rom-com starring Channing Tatum and Scarlett Johansson makes a mockery of one of the greatest human achievements in all of history. This weekend, the new film Fly Me to the Moon hits theaters, telling the story of a 1969 advertising executive (Johansson) who is determined to film a “backup” version of the Moon landing in a studio, in case the real one fails. Tatum plays an astronaut, and the two fall for each other, in a silly movie about how the nature of love is a lot like flying to the Moon, or pretending to, or something. All harmless fun, right?

Well, no. While Fly Me to the Moon isn’t presented as a dramatic film purporting to unveil long-lost truths about the space race, it is built upon a frustratingly pervasive conspiracy theory that the Apollo 11 moon landing never took place, or in this case, that NASA would try to use taxpayer dollars to create a hoax. But, the historical and scientific evidence that we did, in fact, land on the Moon is overwhelming. And, because this movie is dredging up all those conspiracy theories again, it’s worth restating why we know the 1969 Moon landing was very real….

… But outside of heroes like Buzz Aldrin, there is plenty of objective evidence that the Moon landing occurred. In light of the bogus concept behind Fly Me to the Moon, and to get a contemporary reminder of Moon landing evidence Inverse reached out to Dr. Brett Denevi, a planetary geologist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, was a vice-chair of Lunar Exploration Analysis Group, is working on the Artemis program.

“There is a whole host of evidence to demonstrate the Moon landings occurred, including images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera,” Denevi told Inverse. As she points out this is a relatively contemporary camera, launched back in 2009. “The camera is used to scout new landing sites like we are doing for Artemis, so it was built to take incredibly detailed pictures.”….

(7) SONGS OF SFF. [Item by Rob Thornton.] This is six minutes of reverb-soaked electric guitar recorded in a bathroom and reminiscent of the banjo in the theme song from the BBC’s Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy. All the song titles are from my fave SF/F novels (see “Terminus Est,” “Burning Bright” and “Green Rapture.”). Bonus points if you know my musical nym! “Now And Always” by R Carnassus at Bandcamp.

(8) SDCC PROGRAM DROPS. “San Diego Comic Con Schedule: Best Panels in Hall H and More”. Variety has highlights at the link. Or you can browse the complete Programming Schedule on the Comic-Con website.

San Diego Comic-Con has rolled out its schedule for the 2024 convention this week, which runs from July 25–28. For the first time since 2019, SDCC will unfold without a virtual event, pandemic protocols or labor strike cancelations, marking a return to normal of sorts for the largest annual fan gathering in North America.

Several major franchises will make an appearance at the event, including panels for Marvel Studios, “Star Trek,” “The Penguin,” “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” the “Walking Dead” franchise, “Transformers One,” “Alien: Romulus,” “The Boys” and “Doctor Who.” Here are the highlights, with descriptions from SDCC and/or the panel sponsors…. 

(9) MEDICAL AWARENESS IN CANADA. CBC News led its post about tick-spread illnesses with the story of MaryAnn Harris, wife of sff author Charles de Lint: “Tick-spread illnesses are on the rise in Canada. Are surveillance, awareness efforts keeping up?”

One morning in Sept. 2021, MaryAnn Harris felt strangely tired. She told her husband, Charles de Lint, that she needed to lie down. Then more worrisome symptoms began cropping up, from nausea to double vision.

The Ottawa couple rushed to a local emergency department. 

At first, the cause of Harris’s ailment was a mystery. The ER team ran various tests, and after a few hours with no answers, they sent her husband home due to visitor restrictions put in place during the pandemic.

By the time de Lint came back the next day, his beloved partner of four decades was unresponsive and on life support in the intensive care unit.

“You don’t know what to think, what to feel,” de Lint recalled. “It was just utter panic.”

What followed was a three-year ordeal, as medical teams offered a battery of tests and treatments in hopes of bringing Harris back from the brink of death. She eventually regained consciousness, but by that point, inflammation in her brain stem had left her paralyzed. Harris never left the hospital and died in early June at the age of 71.

The cause of her devastating illness? A little-known virus that spreads through tick bites.

For years, medical experts have warned a rising number of Canadians are being exposed to ticks carrying an array of dangerous pathogens. Lyme disease is the most familiar — and by far the most common — but there’s growing concern about lesser-known threats as well, from various bacterial infections, to the rare Powassan virus that claimed Harris’s life earlier this year.

(10) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

1974 – Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia 

Fifty years ago, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia was published. (No, not on this day. Just this year.) 

Though it is often considered the fifth book of the Hainish Cycle, Le Guin in multiple interviews and her writings has stated that there is no particular cycle or order for what she called the Ekumen novels. 

And yes, I can say having read it more than once and those readings being decades apart that the full title does really make sense. Later printings would just call it The Dispossessed. No idea why the change and if Le Guin said why. 

It was by published by Harper & Row that year with a stunning wraparound cover by Fred Winkowski. I found only two first editions to be had online, the first $1200, the other substantially more, but that was signed. 

Le Guin in the forward to Ursula K. Le Guin: The Hainish Novels & Stories, Volume One which includes The Dispossessed says “The Dispossessed started as a very bad short story, which I didn’t try to finish but couldn’t quite let go. There was a book in it, and I knew it, but the book had to wait for me to learn what I was writing about and how to write about it. I needed to understand my own passionate opposition to the war that we were, endlessly it seemed, waging in Vietnam, and endlessly protesting at home. If I had known then that my country would continue making aggressive wars for the rest of my life, I might have had less energy for protesting that one. But, knowing only that I didn’t want to study war no more, I studied peace. I started by reading a whole mess of utopias and learning something about pacifism and Gandhi and nonviolent resistance. This led me to the nonviolent anarchist writers such as Peter Kropotkin and Paul Goodman. With them I felt a great, immediate affinity. They made sense to me in the way Lao Tzu did. They enabled me to think about war, peace, politics, how we govern one another and ourselves, the value of failure, and the strength of what is weak. So, when I realized that nobody had yet written an anarchist utopia, I finally began to see what my book might be.” 

So let’s now go on to note that I discovered that the novel has a story set before it, “The Day Before the Revolution” and the character in that story, revolutionary Laia Asieo Odo, is a major presence in The Dispossessed

But that’s not really why I’m bring the story to your attention. The story is included in the Library of America’s Ursula K. Le Guin: The Hainish Novels & Stories which has a short essay on what she was feeling after writing the novel which you can read here “Story of the Week: The Day Before the Revolution”. And the story is here “The Day Before the Revolution”.

Now where was I? Ahh it’s 1974, the novel has come out. Among us, it was widely acclaimed, and the Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation definitely was appreciative of this as her website lists them this way:

Winner of the 1974 Nebula Award for Best Novel
Winner of the 1975 Hugo Award for Best Novel
Winner of the 1975 Locus Award for Best Novel
Winner of the 1975 Jupiter Award for Best Novel

And yes, each link takes you to the proper Award site. Stellar webmasters whoever they are. Now interestingly, the Foundation doesn’t include the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award. I wonder why.  It was also nominated for a John W. Campbell Memorial Award but didn’t win. 

As near as I can tell, it has never been out of print in the last fifty years with multiple hardcover, trade and paperback editions. ISFDB lists far too many editions to really make sense of its printing history, so I can’t say definitively. 

What I didn’t see is it ever got the small press, lavish edition treatment, but then I’m having a hard time remembering if any of her works did. Come on Filers, help me out here.  

In 2019, The Folio Society published a hardcover edition with illustrations by David Lupton and an introduction by Brian Attebery.  

On November 17, Harper Perennial will publish a trade paper edition of the  book with a new foreword by Karen Joy Fowler. 

(11) SEND HIM BACK. “Mexico ‘cancels’ statue of Greek god Poseidon after dispute with local deity” says NBC News.

The gods must be angry — or just laughing at the hubris of humanity.

Authorities in Mexico have slapped a “closure” order on a 10-foot-tall (3-meter) aquatic statue of the Greek god of the sea Poseidon that was erected in May in the Gulf of Mexico just off the town of Progreso, Yucatan.

Mexico’s environmental protection agency said late Thursday that the statue, which appears to show an angry trident-wielding Poseidon “rising” from the sea a few meters from the beach, lacked permits. In the few months it has been up, tourists had gathered to take pictures of themselves with it as a striking background.

But it was symbolically “closed” Thursday — and could be removed altogether — after a group of activist lawyers filed a legal complaint saying the statue offended the beliefs of local Maya Indigenous groups who prefer their own local god of water, known as Chaac.

It’s always been dangerous for humans to get involved in battles between deities. But this one appears to be all about present-day humanity, combining “cancel culture,” social media storms, lawsuits and the one truly fearsome, overpowering force in today’s world: Instagram selfie-fueled tourism….

(12) RECAST BLACK PANTHER? Fandomwire says there’s a call to “’Remove Black Panther 2 from the timeline’: After Harrison Ford Replaces William Hurt as General Ross Fans Demand a New Black Panther in MCU”.

…And after witnessing Harrison Ford replace William Hurt as General Ross, the calls for recasting have amplified within the Marvel fandom, particularly in the instance of Black Panther. Portrayed by the iconic Chadwick Boseman, fans now want the MCU to remove the Oscar-winning Black Panther 2 from the official timeline to facilitate the character’s recasting….

…However, Ford’s casting has also triggered a wave of demand within the Marvel fandom: the demand for Black Panther recasting. Portrayed by the late Chadwick Boseman throughout the MCU until his tragic death, the actor’s portrayal has remained iconic and pretty much irreplaceable. Yet, many fans believe recasting him would not be a bad choice, but only add to the legacy of the character he so clearly loved and played.

The MCU has recast several characters throughout its run, with Bruce Banner and Rhodey being some notable examples. These recasting decisions have hardly received as much hate from fans, but instead have triggered the calls for a Black Panther replacement since Boseman’s untimely death in 2020….

(13) NOT SURE THESE ARE THE ROLLING ROADS WE’RE LOOKING FOR. [Item by Daniel Dern.] “FreightTech Friday: Japan’s proposed conveyor-belt highway” at FreightWaves.

In a recent meeting of Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, the group unveiled plans to combat its transportation and logistics sector labor shortages with construction of an automated conveyor-belt highway running over 310 miles across central Japan.

Known as the Autoflow-Road proposal, the ministry showcased its blueprint for building both aboveground and underground conveyor-belt roads running between Tokyo and Osaka 24 hours a day. According to the ministry, it could move the same amount of freight in a day as 25,000 drivers.

“Automated logistics roads are designed to get the most out of road space by utilizing hard shoulders, median strips and tunnels beneath the roadway. …Our study is examining the impact on road traffic, including on surrounding roads, and costs,” senior official to the ministry, Shuya Muramatsu, told reporters.

The proposal comes as an answer to Japan’s ongoing transportation and logistics labor crisis, as the country begins to cap trucking overtime hours this year.

(14) HOW CAN A FRANCHISE CALLED THE TERMINATOR NEVER END? “’Terminator Zero’ Teases Judgement Day in First Apocalyptic Trailer” at Yahoo!

The Terminator promised he’d be back – and he is. Netflix is teasing a tense apocalyptic return to this world with the first trailer for “Terminator Zero,” its upcoming animated series set in the “Terminator” universe that will premiere on Judgement Day, aka August 29.

This teaser debuts Eiko, voiced by “House of the Dragon” star Sonoya Mizuno, a resistance fighter who is sent back in time to stop Skynet’s impending attack on humanity. “You can’t see it yet, but you’ve been on a collision course your entire life. There’s no going back, not really. It will never, ever stop,” Eiko ominously says in the teaser.

As she gives her warning, the trailer jumps between creepy shots of terminators repairing themselves, explosions and gunfire. “There’s only one thing standing between you and him — me,” Eiko says in the teaser’s final tense moment….

(15) ANDOR RETURNS. Disney+ has dropped a trailer for Andor Season 2 (2025).

The wait is over! Dive into the highly anticipated first look at Andor Season 2 with this electrifying teaser trailer. Following the critically acclaimed first season, Cassian Andor’s (Diego Luna) journey continues as he navigates the treacherous world of the Rebellion. Set five years before the events of Rogue One and A New Hope, this season promises to delve deeper into the rise of the Rebellion against the oppressive Galactic Empire.

(16) THE END AND BEYOND. “’Stranger Things’ Season 5 First Look Revealed by Netflix” at The Hollywood Reporter.

…Maya Hawke recently told Podcrushed that the eight episodes in the final season of the sci-fi hit will feel like “eight movies,” and noted the episodes are “very long.”

“Our showrunners, Matt and Ross [Duffer], take a lot of responsibility,” she added. “They have an amazing team of writers, but they’re very involved. They write a lot and they are very intense and serious about the quality of the continued writing, and so it takes a long time to write each season, and a long time to shoot them.”…

…While season five is the show’s final season, there are additional Stranger Things projects in the works, including: Stranger Things: The First Shadow live on stage in London’s West End and an as-yet-untitled animated spinoff series….

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

Pixel Scroll 6/4/24 Cats And Pixels Like Snuggling Together

(1) RACHAEL K. JONES Q&A. Oregon Public Broadcasting interviewed awards nominee Rachael K. Jones: “Beaverton author is announced as finalist for literary awards”.

Marshall: This short story, “The Sound of Children Screaming,” drew inspiration from real life events, including one that involved you. Can you talk more about that?

Jones: It was one of the more scary experiences in my career in education. I’m a speech language pathologist, which is someone who works in special education with children who have communication disorders.

There was a lockdown at my school that happened during prep planning, which is the week before the school opens for children. All the teachers are in the building. We’re getting our classrooms ready and we’re getting the space ready for children. One evening I stayed late to finish building some Ikea furniture. While I was getting ready to leave the building you could hear weird sounds outside the school, little popping sounds.

The secretary called a lockdown of the whole school. It turned out that there was a shooting happening in the neighborhood. I went back and had to hide under my desk in my office with all the blinds drawn on a Friday night. I’m really grateful there weren’t any children in the building, but the most disturbing thing was that, because there were no children in the building, I knew it couldn’t be a drill. I was really scared.

It was one of those moments where we all tell ourselves stories in our own heads about what we would do in an emergency situation. With school shootings, you have a fantasy about how you’re gonna block the door, throw that stapler over there or tackle the guy and how you’re going to be this hero in your imagination. It was this really chilling moment to realize that this could be it. And what am I doing? I’m hiding under my desk and I’m not any more heroic than I usually am. I could die tonight on a Friday night at my job and that would be that, and there would be nothing I could do about it.

A lot of times I use my stories as a way to process strong feelings, I can’t really get out in any other way. For me, the story represents that kind of story where it says the things that are hard for me to say in any other way than fiction….

(2) TAKE THE AUTOBAHN TO THE CON. Cora Buhlert went to a German Masters of the Universe convention in May and posted a three-part con report with many photos. To get there required a three hour road trip:

…Last Saturday, I attended the 2024 Los Amigos Masters of the Universe fan convention. There are two big Masters of the Universe conventions in Germany, Grayskull Con and Los Amigos, plus at least two general toy cons which attract a lot of Masters of Universe fans and collectors.

Last year, I considered going to one or more of those cons. However, there was one problem or rather two, a)  I live in North Germany and most German cons, whether general SFF or specialty cons, are much further south and quite far away, and b) I had sick parents at home and/or in hospital and didn’t really want to leave them alone. Since point b) is no longer an issue, there was only point a) to consider.

Until last year, the Los Amigos convention used to take place in Hanau near Frankfurt, which is a four-and-a-half-hour drive away (or a one-hour flight to Frankfurt and then a train ride to Hanau). However, for 2024 the convention relocated to Neuss, a city in the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region, which is somewhat closer, though still roughly three hundred kilometers away, which means a three-to-three-and-a-half-hour drive, depending on traffic conditions….

…In fact, there were quite a few customisers were displaying their creations, sometimes for sale, sometimes not.  One stall offered a regular Origins Battle Cat customised to look like Battle Cat might have looked, if he had appeared in the 1987 live action movie (he didn’t, because the production team couldn’t make him work with 1980s tech). That Battle Cat looked great, but he was also quite expensive – 130 Euros – and there was so much to buy, so I passed on him. Besides, the Battle Cat was in Origins scale, but the movie figures Mattel is currently making are the bigger Masterverse figures, so the movie style Battle Cat wouldn’t fit in with my movie figure….

… I also learned that Tecklenburg has a castle ruin, as the name implies, and that bits and pieces of the castle have been integrated into buildings all over town. The ruined castle now houses an open air theater – the largest in all of Germany. The open air theater opened in 1924 and is hugely important for the town, since it’s a major tourist draw. The local handyman frequently builds sets and backdrops for them. The theatre used to stage everything from boulevard comedies to operas, but nowadays they most do musicals and children’s plays, because those are the most popular. They also host pop concerts on occasion. This summer, the open air theater Tecklenburg is staging Mamma Mia!Madagascar (based on the eponymous CGI animated kids film) and a musical version of The Three Musketeers. Personally, I’d prefer operas and operettas or regular plays (Shakespeare should be great on an open air stage in the middle of a ruined castle), but money talks and musicals are popular with people who’d otherwise never watch musical theater or otherwise set foot inside a theater….

(3)  HELP WANTED. Cora also has written a recruitment ad parody for the Evil Horde, which is one of the main villain groups in Masters of the Universe and a remarkably diverse bunch. Many positions are immediately open! “Join the Horde! Conquer the Universe! Sign Up Now!”

Are you dissatisfied with harassing peasants and raiding space tramp freighters? Are looking for a new challenge? Do want to see the galaxy and help to subjugate it? Do you want to become part of something greater? Then join the Mighty, All-Conquering Horde.

The Horde Empire is seeking, at the earliest possible date….

(4) KAIJU KORNER. Camestros Felapton is among those dialing up Netflix this week to see “Godzilla Minus One”.

…So firstly, if you are a fan of kaiju stomping and chomping their way through populated cities and military forces who foolishly think their puny weapons can stop the rampaging monster then this film absolutely delivers. Godzilla bites through warships, stomps on buildings and blasts all and sundry with atomic breath. Have no worries in this regard, if that is what you want from a Godzilla film, you should be satisfied. If you want Godzilla to be the misunderstood hero who battles a much worse kaiju, then no, you won’t get that but otherwise this is a solid entry in kaiju mayhem….

(5) MARYANN HARRIS (1953-2024). MaryAnn Harris, wife of Charles de Lint, who had been hospitalized and on a ventilator since 2021 after contracting Powassan virus, an extremely rare tick-bourne illness, died June 3. De Lint made the announcement on Facebook:

I’m so so sorry to have to tell you all that Mare passed away this afternoon, June 3, 2024. She fought long and hard to try to beat the awful state in which the Powasssan virus had left her but in the end she just didn’t have the strength to carry on any longer. She died peacefully in her room, surrounded by family, in the beautiful space that her friends and family made of what had been a sterile hospital room.

She touched the hearts of every one she met and we were all so blessed to have known her.

Lately I’d been wondering what this day would feel like. I’ve been on my own since September 2021 and feel that I started grieving at that point, but all that time did nothing to prepare me for how desolate I feel now that she’s actually gone.

Thanks to everyone who cheered her on through this journey, who sent her cards and little gifts, donations towards her care and all the love and words of encouragement. That did much to carry her forward with strength and determination until her body finally gave out on her.

Words can’t express how grateful we are for your support.

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Compiled by Paul Weimer.]

June 4, 1960 Kristine Kathryn Rusch, 64.

By Paul Weimer: For me, Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s diverse and large oeuvre, in my reading, runs along two main tracks.

Where I first discovered and encountered her work was in the boom fantasy period in the 90’s with her Fey series. The Fey novels were my first experience with a robust and expansionistic version of Elves. Up until reading The Sacrifice, The Changling and its sequels, my impression of Elves as I had read them to that point were Tolkienistic: hermit kingdoms, quietly holding their power, or slowly fading away, or looking for the chance to slip away and head west to somewhere over the sea. Elves “belonged” to a world that had passed them by. Imagine my surprise when I started reading the Changeling, and discovered a Elf-like race, the Fey, who were not retiring quietly. Instead, these Fey had decided to conquer the entire world with their battle magic. Sure, Blue Isle proved to be an insurmountable roadblock to those conquests, but the very idea of militant expansionist elves…well, I’ve read takes on it since then in various guises and authors, but Rusch’s Fey were the first time I had ever encountered the idea.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch in 2019.

The Wreck series was not quite as innovative for me, but it sits in a relatively unexploited portion of space opera: Space Archaeology.  Boss’ story, in Diving into the Wreck and its sequels, is the story of a character whom, when I met her, thought, “Hey, that would make a neat Traveller character– someone who plunders old spaceships for a living, especially for their history, as well as for the financial aspects of same.  I’d read McDevitt, and Modesitt, and other authors which explored Xenoarchaeology before running into Boss, but Boss was and is a one-of-a-kind character, larger than life. I can always tell that a character resonates with me when I want to make an expy of that character for a RPG. Boss and her adventures in the first couple of novels wanted me to do that.  I didn’t quite as warm to the other various characters, such as Coop, in the later Diving novels, but maybe that’s because Boss so firmly imprinted on me that she ate up the space for me to do so. 

But in the end, Rusch has a prodigious output, under a variety of pen names, in a wide variety of subgenres from tie-in novels to romance, and thus  is one of those authors you could lose yourself in her massive oeuvre and not come out for months or years. 

(7) COMICS SECTION.

  • Thatababy reports something that once was commonly known
  • Bizarro shows why they’re a perfect match.
  • Macanudo has an expert taster.
  • Pearls Before Swine wistfully remembers a social media platform. (Wait, it’s still here!)

(8) BASED ON AN OCCASIONALLY TRUE STORY. [Item by Cora Buhlert.] ROH Press published an interesting profile about the Italian adventure fiction writer Emilio Salgari (1862-1911), who created Sandokan, the Tiger of Malaysia, and the Black Corsair. Salgari isn’t very well known in the US, but I encountered his work via the film adaptations which were a staple of afternoon TV, when I was a kid: “Emilio Salgari: Master of Adventure”

…He claimed to have travelled throughout the American West where he met Buffalo Bill; he had explored the Sudan, lived at the Mahdi’s court, loved Indian princesses, sailed among the many islands of the Far East. Here was a man of action that had explored the world and lived many adventures, adventures he would use for the basis of his 80 plus novels and hundreds of short stories to captivate readers worldwide. At dinner parties he regaled his hosts with tales from his many voyages, guests to his home would often be shown artefacts acquired in far off lands. Throughout the 20th century illustrations of him on the back of his novels showed him clad in his captain’s uniform. His memoirs were filled with adventures in the most exotic lands. A remarkable life, envied by many.

Except that very little of it was true. He did meet Buffalo Bill, but at Sherman’s Wild West Show in Verona, not, as he claimed, while exploring Nebraska. He was knighted for his stories, that much was true; he founded the adventure genre in Italy, his tales captivating young and old, and inspiring many to take up the pen….

(9) NO SUCH THING. [Item by Cora Buhlert.] This is a year old, but it’s still a lovely remembrance of Manly Wade Wellman from Stephen Smith who was one of his creative writing students: “Manly Wade Wellman: Our Forgotten Man of Letters” in The Pilot.

…Wellman was fiercely proud of his stature as a writer. “Outlaws,” he called us, generously including his students in the designation, and he had the rare ability, from the moment he stepped into the room, to instill in each student the strong belief in self that made him a successful writer and a charismatic presence.

Each Tuesday morning that semester, I’d drop a story in the campus mail, and Manly would critique and correct it and hand it back after reading it aloud to the class. I was no doubt an annoyingly eager student, and on a couple of occasions I submitted two stories in one week. “You’re like the tiger who’s tasted blood,” Manly laughed — and in fact, I was spending entirely too much study time writing fiction. Not all my stories were keepers, but one was good enough to win a state-wide short story contest that earned me $100 and a magazine publication. When I met with Manly after winning the magazine prize, he asked what my major was. I told him it was sociology. “Change your major to English!” he barked. “There’s no such thing as sociology!”…

(10) WILL SPIELBERG ADAPT ANOTHER CHICHTON NOVEL? “Eruption: James Patterson finishes Crichton passion project” – and the BBC says now that it’s done Hollywood is abuzz.

Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton died from cancer over 15 years ago – now, his unfinished “passion project”, about a humanity-threatening volcanic eruption, has been completed by fellow literary giant James Patterson and is already generating heated interest in Hollywood.

Eruption takes readers on a thrilling journey through Hawaii’s biggest island, which, unbeknown to its residents, hides dangerous military secrets dating back decades.

There has been no formal screen auction yet – but Sherri Crichton, who discovered her late husband’s unfinished manuscript over a decade ago and controls his estate, told BBC News she was now in talks with Steven Spielberg about a possible big-screen adaptation.

(11) LE GUIN LOOKS IN THE MIRROR. B.D. McClay’s article “Ursula K. Le Guin was her own toughest (and best) critic” is behind a Washington Post paywall. If you have access, lucky you!

… What a pleasure it is, then, to open “The Language of the Night: Essays on Writing, Science Fiction, and Fantasy,” and discover someone vigorously disagreeing with herself on almost every page. To say that the Le Guin we meet in this book is argumentative, sometimes unfair, sometimes wrong and even self-contradictory is not to diminish her greatness. It is rather to rescue her from the dullness imposed on her by her canonization.

By her own account, Le Guin was an indiscriminate reader of books at a young age; she read science fiction, but with no particular devotion. As she got older, the genre did not seem to have a place in it for an adult. “If I glanced at a magazine,” she wrote in the essay “A Citizen of Mondath,” included in this collection, “it still seemed to be all about starship captains in black with lean rugged faces and a lot of fancy artillery.” She drifted off to “Tolstoy and things,” and it was only when a friend told her to read a short story by Cordwainer Smith that she went back to science fiction.

Smith — whose real name was the somehow even more improbable Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger — worked for the United States military; he was, perhaps, too close to war to fantasize about it. He drew imaginatively from other sources, like Joan of Arc and Chinese mythology. His work, which features psychic pilots and heroic space cats, is elastic, wild and, perhaps most importantly in seeing his influence on Le Guin, very funny.

For Le Guin, who was also uninspired by military aesthetics, similarly eclectic in her influences and would complain that nobody ever noticed when she was being funny, reading Smith must have been a shock of recognition akin to love at first sight. (“I don’t really remember what I thought when I read it,” she wrote, “but what I think now I ought to have thought when I read it is My God! It can be done!”) …

(12) JMS Q&A. Also behind a paywall (it’s not our lucky day!) is the Los Angeles Times’ interview with J. Michael Straczynski about his work preserving Harlan Ellison’s legacy: “Harlan Ellison’s books being reissued by J. Michael Straczynski” This passage talks about the façade of Ellison’s home dubbed “The Lost Aztec Temple of Mars”.

On a hilly street in Sherman Oaks, writer and producer J. Michael “Joe” Straczynski gestures to a row of gray gargoylesque heads mounted above an entryway. “If you look carefully, you’ll see they are the Watergate figures,” he says. “Nixon in the middle, surrounded by Mitchell, Dean, Haldeman, all of them.” He smiles, knowing that the mind that created this funky tableau belonged to none other than his closest friend, the eccentric author of speculative fiction, Harlan Ellison….

…. The Watergate grotesques form a small portion of the weird and sometimes wacky, but always carefully curated, world of Ellison. The largest portion of the facade features stone-intaglio pictographs that at first glance might be Egyptian hieroglyphs or Aztec sun symbols; closer examination reveals all sorts of imaginative creatures, from tiny robots to taloned divinities to monsters. Every piece of the house was carefully chosen by Ellison, and many pieces, including carved doors, staircases and even hinges and handles, were designed to his specifications. Next to the doorbell hangs a small framed sign: “Dig. Or split.” The author had no interest in catering to people who did not share his enthusiasms or worldviews….

(13) JUSTWATCH TOP 10S FOR MAY. JustWatch has shared their Top 10 streaming charts for the month of May.

(14) HOMEWARD BOUND FROM LUNA. “China moon landing: Spacecraft Chang’e-6 unfurls flag on far side of the moon”AP News has the details.

…The Chang’e-6 probe was launched last month and its lander touched down on the far side of the moon Sunday. Its ascender lifted off Tuesday morning at 7:38 a.m. Beijing time, with its engine burning for about six minutes as it entered a preset orbit around the moon, the China National Space Administration said.

The agency said the spacecraft withstood a high temperature test on the lunar surface, and acquired the samples using both drilling and surface collection before stowing them in a container inside the ascender of the probe as planned.

The container will be transferred to a reentry capsule that is due to return to Earth in the deserts of China’s Inner Mongolia region about June 25.

(15) WONDLA TRAILER. Animation Magazine is there when “Apple TV+ Unveils Trailer for Animated Sci-Fi Series ‘WondLa’”.

…WondLa centers on Eva, voiced by Jeanine Mason (Roswell, New Mexico), a curious, enthusiastic and spirited teenager being raised in a state-of-the-art underground bunker by Muthr, a robot caretaker, voiced by Emmy Award nominee Teri Hatcher (Desperate Housewives).

On her 16th birthday, an attack on Eva’s bunker forces her onto the Earth’s surface which is now inhabited by aliens, covered with other-worldly fauna, and no other humans to be found. In fact, it’s no longer called Earth, but Orbona. Otto, a loveable giant water bear with whom Eva shares telepathic powers, voiced by Emmy Award winner Brad Garrett (Everybody Loves Raymond), and Rovender, a cantankerous alien with a troubled past voiced by Gary Anthony Williams (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows) join Eva as she leads the team on a dangerous quest to find humans, her home, and her true destiny….

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

Pixel Scroll 5/30/24 Scrollfiler Park Is Melting In The Dark, All The Sweet, Green Pixels Flowing Down

(1) THE STEPS LEADING TO RWA’S CHAPTER 11. Her Hands, My Hands today published a thorough roundup about the causes of Romance Writers of America’s evaporating membership: “RWA goes bankrupt; it’s not DEI, it’s the bigotry and racism.”

If you are new here: at the end of 2019, the then-second-largest-in-the-world professional writers organization, shot itself in the eye due to the baked-in racism of the people at the top. Within three months, the membership had dropped to a third of what it was, and many of those leaving predicted at the time that the annual conference venue contracts for the following years would bankrupt the organization.

Even though COVID so-called lockdowns postponed it for a bit, RWA has finally filed for Chapter 11–predictably, it’s blaming one woman of color for that….

…So yes, a professional trade organization founded by women, with a membership made up disproportionately of women, was the second largest of its kind in the world, and for a couple of decades at least. The most likely reason RWA grew so big was the incredible misogyny of the industry: genre romance authors and aspiring writers had nowhere else to go for advocacy or support. The most renowned publishers and authors have always been quick to distance themselves from genre romance and its readers, even as they benefit from marketing to them; from the “we don’t publish that shlock” to “I don’t write that” sneer.

…Why, you may ask, am I going on about the membership numbers drop after the ‘nice’ white ladies shat the RWA bed? Because of this:

Because they want to claim that it was Courtney Milan talking about racism, and the ‘woke’ push for DEI that led them to file for bankruptcy (Bloomberg link; also see footnote 7)…

(2) STATHOPOULOS IS 2024 ARCHIBALD PRIZE FINALIST. Professional artist Nick Stathopoulos, a ten-time Ditmar winner for his genre work, has just been named an Archibald Prize finalist for the ninth time.

The Archibald Prize is awarded annually to the best portrait, “preferentially of some man or woman distinguished in art, letters, science or politics, painted by any artist resident in Australasia”.

The story behind Nick’s entry, titled “The last picture show”, is explained in the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ introduction to the piece.

Nick Stathopoulos was a finalist in the 2008 Archibald Prize with an irreverent portrait of distinguished film critic David Stratton fast asleep in a cinema.

Sixteen years later, Stathopoulos decided to undertake a smaller, intimate, more serious work, choosing again to paint the now-retired Stratton in monochrome, but retaining the deep red of his cardigan – a cinematic device used to dramatic effect in the 1993 film Schindler’s list. The title of the painting references Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 film The last picture show.

The sitting for this portrait proved to be a happy one. ‘It was a bright, crisp Blue Mountains day, and we sat on David’s back porch talking movies (what else?) as I sketched in the final details. It also happened to be his wedding anniversary, and his wife Susie was keen to point out that she had knitted the red cardigan 40 years ago,’ says Stathopoulos.

An Archibald finalist on eight previous occasions, Stathopoulos won the People’s Choice in 2016 with a portrait of Sudanese refugee and lawyer Deng Adut.

(3) THE MAN FROM UNCLES. Publishers Weekly celebrates bookseller Don Blyly, owner of the reopened Uncle Hugo’s and Uncle Edgar’s: “The Uncles in Minneapolis Celebrate 50 Years of Bookselling Perseverance”.

…Even though the Uncles are now located on a side street, instead of a major thoroughfare, Blyly maintains that one reason sales are up is that “we see primarily people who are interested in what we’re selling,” rather than “people walking in who could not even figure out it was a bookstore; they came in to cause problems or to use the restroom.” There is also a lot of cross-pollination among the different bookstores’ customer bases. “A lot of people who are into sci-fi and fantasy and a lot of other things automatically go to both stores when they are in the neighborhood,” Blyly said. “And we’re selling a lot more kids books than in the old location; there are more families here. Two things I’m not happy about: it takes me longer to get here from my home, and there’s no good Chinese carryout nearby. Other than that, everything else is better.”

The new location of Uncle Hugo’s in 2022.

(4) NEW ARGUMENT TO UNDERMINE COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT CHARGE. “Nvidia denies pirate e-book sites are ‘shadow libraries’ to shut down lawsuit” at Ars Technica. However, Ars Technica can’t explain that terminology, or how not being a shadow library helps the defendants.

Some of the most infamous so-called shadow libraries have increasingly faced legal pressure to either stop pirating books or risk being shut down or driven to the dark web. Among the biggest targets are Z-Library, which the US Department of Justice has charged with criminal copyright infringement, and Library Genesis (Libgen), which was sued by textbook publishers last fall for allegedly distributing digital copies of copyrighted works “on a massive scale in willful violation” of copyright laws.

But now these shadow libraries and others accused of spurning copyrights have seemingly found an unlikely defender in Nvidia, the AI chipmaker among those profiting most from the recent AI boom.

Nvidia seemed to defend the shadow libraries as a valid source of information online when responding to a lawsuit from book authors over the list of data repositories that were scraped to create the Books3 dataset used to train Nvidia’s AI platform NeMo.

That list includes some of the most “notorious” shadow libraries—Bibliotik, Z-Library (Z-Lib), Libgen, Sci-Hub, and Anna’s Archive, authors argued. However, Nvidia hopes to invalidate authors’ copyright claims partly by denying that any of these controversial websites should even be considered shadow libraries.

“Nvidia denies the characterization of the listed data repositories as ‘shadow libraries’ and denies that hosting data in or distributing data from the data repositories necessarily violates the US Copyright Act,” Nvidia’s court filing said.

The chipmaker did not go into further detail to define what counts as a shadow library or what potentially absolves these controversial sites from key copyright concerns raised by various ongoing lawsuits. Instead, Nvidia kept its response brief while also curtly disputing authors’ petition for class-action status and defending its AI training methods as fair use.

“Nvidia denies that it has improperly used or copied the alleged works,” the court filing said, arguing that “training is a highly transformative process that may include adjusting numerical parameters including ‘weights,’ and that outputs of an LLM may be based, at least in part, on such ‘weights.'”…

(5) BALTICON SUNDAY SHORT SCIENCE FICTION FILM FESTIVAL (BSSSFFF) 2024. [Report by lance ozko.] Audience scores were from 0 to 5, with sum of values divided by number of votes. 

  • Best of Show. A retrospective screening of “Troll Bridge” from a short story by Terry Pratchett won Best of Show, edging out the George RR Martin production of Howard Waldrop’s “Night of The Cooters”. GRRM provided a new introduction to Howard Waldrop’s work, mentioning 4 films currently. 
  • Best Animated Film went to “Triskelion”, a Stop Motion Celtic Fable from Belgium by Jessica Raes.

Noteworthy were: 

  • “Siren” a comedy from Estonia with a Mermaid. Directed by Katariina Škurinski.
  • “Splinter” a Twilight Zoneish Episode filmed during the Hollywood Strike. Directed by Marc Bernardin.
  • “Falling Forward into an Unknown and Dangerous Future”  based on a verbatim  transcript of an A.I. conversation. Directed by  Mike Ambs.

Several selections were withdrawn between Balticon 57 and 58, as the festival windows did not coincide with Balticon.  Overall 1,010 films were considered. 

Coming last was a Horror Alien Abduction.  Next year we will lean into comedies. Another Howard Waldrop short film “Mary Margaret Road Grader”  is penciled in for 2025. 

(6) MOANA 2 TEASER TRAILER. Entertainment Weekly says “’Moana 2′ trailer reunites Auli’i Cravalho, Dwayne Johnson”.

…The trailer showcases the now-older Moana reuniting with Maui on a mission to reconnect her people “across the entire ocean,” she says, meeting all sorts of oceanic creatures and obstacles along the way….

(7) COLUMBIA RELIC. “Astronaut’s diary found among fallen Columbia space shuttle debris added to National Library of Israel”Space.com has the story.

The handwritten journal pages of Israel’s first astronaut have been added to the country’s national library in Jerusalem, more than 20 years after they were found among the debris from the NASA tragedy that claimed his life.

Ilan Ramon wrote most of the diary while he was in orbit aboard the space shuttle Columbia, serving as an STS-107 payload specialist on the winged spacecraft’s last, ill-fated flight. The found pages document Ramon’s day-to-day life in space, from his hygiene routine to the research he performed on behalf of NASA and his home nation.

Also included were his notes on the Jewish practices that he was to demonstrate from high above Earth.

“Identified among the restored pages was the Friday night blessing over wine, with Ramon’s annotations. Apparently aware he was to broadcast the ‘Kiddush’ live from space, Ramon wanted to make sure he did not forget a single word,” read a release issued by the National Library of Israel on Wednesday (May 29).

(8) NEW SEASON OF UMBRELLA ACADEMY. Variety introduces “’Umbrella Academy’ Season 4 Trailer: The Hargreeves’ Final Countdown”.

Netflix has released the teaser trailer for the fourth and final season of its superhero series “The Umbrella Academy.” The footage, set to the tune of Europe’s 1986 song “The Final Countdown,” sees the Hargreeves siblings stepping out of their regular lives, prepping to band together one last time.

Based on the graphic novel series written by Gerard Way and illustrated by Gabriel Bá, the beloved series follows a family of adopted siblings with superpowers working to prevent the end of the world….

(9) DIGITAL HANDSELLING? The New York Times studies “How a Self-Published Book, ‘The Shadow Work Journal,’ Became a Best Seller”. (Note: this is a non-genre, nonfiction book.)  Link bypasses NYT paywall.

…The real creator of “The Shadow Work Journal” is Keila Shaheen, a 25-year-old writer from Texas with a background in marketing who self-published the book in 2021, and has since been crowned “the self-help queen of TikTok.”

After the journal blew up on TikTok, Shaheen went on to sell more than a million copies. Most of those — nearly 700,000 copies — were sold through the TikTok shop, and were marketed relentlessly by passionate influencers like Glay, who earn a 15 percent commission on each sale from Zenfulnote, Shaheen’s company.

Shaheen’s unusual path to bestsellerdom shows how radically book marketing and sales have been changed by TikTok. Over the past few years, publishers have frantically rushed to harness the power of the platform as viral videos and reviews by influencers have propelled sales for blockbuster authors like Colleen Hoover, Emily Henry and Sarah J. Maas.

But Shaheen is perhaps the first self-published nonfiction author to break out in a big way on the platform, a feat she accomplished by fully harnessing its potential not just for marketing, but for direct sales.

…“To think that she achieved a million copies sold in the United States alone, without a publisher, without any international expansion, without brick and mortar support, it breaks all the rules of what makes a best seller,” said Albert Lee, a literary agent with United Talent Agency, which represents Shaheen….

(10) MEDICAL UPDATE. MaryAnn Harris, wife of Charles de Lint, has been hospitalized since 2021 after contracting Powassan virus, an extremely rare tick-bourne illness. She has been dependent on a ventilator to breathe, and paralyzed except for a toe. Julie Bartel organized a Gofundme “de Lint Recovery Fund”. And the May 23 update begins by detailing further medical problems leading to a sad status report:

…However, all of this has taken a toll and MaryAnn is quite weak. As a result, her treatment has shifted since she returned to SVH, with a new focus on quality of life rather than full recovery. The palliative care team has been brought in, and there have been numerous conversations with MaryAnn about what comes next, and about concentrating on helping her feel comfortable and pain free.

Yesterday she had a desat that was bad enough that she is now on full oxygen again. Afterwards Dr. Kirby and one of the excellent palliative care doctors, Dr. Nick, explained just how fragile MaryAnn is and that her lungs may no longer be able to function adequately. They reiterated the need to focus on comfort and on keeping her as stable as possible and that’s what is happening now.

A very sad and difficult message to hear, but Lynn and Charles are confident the staff at SVH are doing all that they can to care for MaryAnn as well as possible.

We thought you all should know. Please keep MaryAnn in your thoughts, as she and Charles navigate the road ahead. As always, your love and support are a shining light during dark times.

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

May 30, 1922 Hal Clement. (Died 2003.)   

By Paul Weimer. If hard science and physics could be considered “characters” in science fiction, Hal Clement is certainly the person who was able to make them so. Mission of Gravity is the premier look at this, giving an extremely weird and strange, and yet possible high gravity world. Do the characters he populates this world with work as individual characters? Not really, but what you read Clement for is the puzzles and the logic behind the hard science that makes a high gravity-distorted world like Mesklin (the planet of Mission of Gravity) possible in the first place. 

Hal Clement at ConFiction (1990). Photo by Frank Olynyk. From Fanac.org site.

Another novel in this vein that doesn’t get much play or notice, but I ironically read before Mission of Gravity, is The Nitrogen Fix. In this book, Earth’s atmosphere has changed, radically, with the free nitrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere having combined into a toxic and unbreathable mix of nitrogen oxides, carbon dioxide and water. Did the aliens who have come to Earth change and terraform Earth for their own purposes? In the end, the transformation of Earth’s atmosphere is a puzzle that is solved, and makes sense, with a big heaping sense of irony to it all. 

Although shared worlds are not a big thing anymore, back in the 1980’s, they were all the rage. I didn’t mention it back when I wrote on Ellison (way too much to write about him) but even Harlan Ellison did a shared world, Medea. His shared planet had a bunch of writers very interested in building a realistic planet and solar system. Clement not only provided an essay on worldbuilding the astrophysics of  Medea in the book, but also contributed a story. 

Once again, hard science as a character in Clement’s work. That’s what it means to me. 

(12) COMICS SECTION.

(13) UNOBTAINABLE TIMEPIECE. Hamilton Watch put together a prop watch for Dune: Part Two. You can’t buy that one. At the link they have a couple of items you can buy which echo some of its design ideas.

Collaborating with Prop Master Doug Harlocker, Hamilton Watch assisted in bringing this uniquely hardwearing Fremen device to the big screen in “Dune: Part Two”.

While the “Desert Watch” is only available on Arrakis, the creative influence behind it was too strong not to bring into our own world.

(14) OUT, OUT, DANGED SPOT. Space.com says “That giant sunspot that supercharged auroras on Earth? It’s back and may amp up the northern lights with June solar storms.”

…The first hint of AR 13697’s sunspots came into view late on May 27, with the full region visible end of May 28. Making an entrance worthy of its earlier reputation, the active region produced an X2.9 solar flare. Despite triggering fewer large flares from the sun’s backside, Monday’s X-class solar flare asserts that the region is still capable of producing these more noteworthy events. 

The active region will continue to rotate across the sun over the next two weeks, providing a view of any solar flares from the region during this window. The light from any solar flares in this window will reach Earth, with the potential to produce short-term radio blackouts. These are temporary disruptions to radio-wave propagation on the sun-facing side of Earth, lasting only an hour or so. 

As we experienced in mid-May 2024, some flares may also trigger the eruption of a CME. Unlike flares, CMEs are directional, and their potential impact on Earth relies heavily on the location of its source on the sun. For a CME to have the best odds of reaching Earth, it would need to erupt from the slight right of the sun’s center. AR 13697 will reach this location of optimum Earth connection around June 4-6, around one full solar rotation (27 days) since the mid-May solar flares. Eruptions close to this window will have the best odds of producing a geomagnetic storm and enhanced aurora display here on Earth….

(15) BIG GULP. “SpaceX fuels Starship megarocket again to prep for test flight” at Space.com. Sounds like a lot.

SpaceX has fueled up its Starship megarocket again, ramping up preparations for the huge vehicle’s upcoming test flight.

The operation, known as a wet dress rehearsal (WDR), occurred on Tuesday (May 28) at SpaceX‘s Starbase site in South Texas. The company pumped huge quantities of liquid oxygen and liquid methane into Starship‘s first and second stages, which are known, respectively, as Super Heavy and Starship (or just “Ship” for short).

“Starship and Super Heavy loaded with more than 10 million pounds of propellant in a rehearsal ahead of Flight 4. Launch is targeted as early as June 5, pending regulatory approval,” SpaceX said today (May 29) in an X post, which also shared photos of the procedure….

(16) MINECRAFT GETS SERIES. “’Minecraft’ Animated Series in the Works at Netflix” reports Variety.

Netflix is developing an animated series based on the wildly popular sandbox video game “Minecraft.” The streamer will produce the project alongside Mojang Studios, the Swedish developer of the game.

Plot details are not yet known, but according to Netflix, the series “will feature an original story with new characters, showing the world of ‘Minecraft’ in a new light.”…

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

Lis Carey Review: Juniper Wiles

Juniper Wiles by Charles de Lint (Triskell Press, 2021) 

Review by Lis Carey: Juniper Wiles played teen detective Nora Constantine on a successful TV show, and then made some movies that weren’t so great. She decided to leave LA and go home to Newford. She’s living on her residuals, and pursuing the art she once set aside for acting. This has included reconnecting with her friend, faerie artist Jilly Coppercorn, and her interesting circle of friends in the artists’ collective, Bramleyhaugh. She’s happy, and doing well.

And then one day she’s sitting in her favorite coffee shop when a young man walks up to her, and asks “Nora Constantine” to take his case. He wants her to find the man who sold him the manuscript of a new Nora Constantine novel.

He thinks Juniper really is Nora Constantine. And he thinks the new novel is responsible for all the terrible things that have happened in Crescent Beach since the end of the TV show.

Juniper does not respond well, and chases this obsessed fan off.

The next day, the newspaper reports that his body has been found. His name was Ethan Law, and he’s been missing for a week, and dead for several days. Juniper spoke to a ghost.

Juniper is very, very reluctant to accept that this means she really has to take his case, but in the end there’s no avoiding it. Particularly after she and others get text messages from Ethan with more information on what’s happening in Crescent Beach, and a conversation with Emma Rohlin, author of the Nora Constantine novels, who had written a character called Ethan Law in an unpublished novel.

Oh, and she also learns that the magic stuff that Jilly talks about is not just talk or Jilly being Jilly. It’s real, and strong enough fictional worlds manifest in the otherworld. The people in them manifest as real people. They matter.

Juniper Wiles is starting to learn about a whole different side of Newford, her friends, and the world itself.

The characters are fascinating and convincing, and as always with de Lint, they’re worth spending the time with. They make me want to believe that Newford is out there, and I might visit sometime. This is a rich, textured, lived-in world.

Highly recommended.

I bought this book.

Pixel Scroll 12/22/23 Lot 97! One Child’s Space Suit, Never Travelled In

(1) FUTURE TENSE. The December 2023 entry in the Future Tense Fiction series is “Rigland,” by Suyi Davies Okungbowa. The story is about oil rigs and what we owe to our communities.

It was published along with a response essay by journalist Mia Armstrong-López: “What if Oil Platforms Belonged to the People Who Worked on Them?”.

…When I set out to report on Mexican women working offshore, I expected to focus on harassment, discrimination, and abuse and the grueling labor conditions that facilitate them. Women are in the minority on platforms—one interviewee was the only woman among dozens of men; others recounted being in groups of only five or 10 women on an entire platform, outnumbered 1 to 10 or 20. The conditions they face are often punishing: In Mexico, platforms are isolated with limited communication, living situations are dorm-style and sometimes coed, and many workers have short-term contracts with little protection. The work is dangerous—they’re exposed to heavy machinery, harsh weather, and hazardous chemicals.

I heard plenty of stories of these precarious conditions—women who were spied on while they showered or changed, discriminated against due to pregnancy, and verbally abused. But more often, women shared experiences like the fishing story. They wanted to tell me about spending hours carving tomatoes to look like flowers to make a meal feel more special; about coordinating workers to bring their favorite candies to stuff holiday piñatas so they would all feel less alone; about learning to teach yoga, helping their colleagues relieve the years of work-related pain and exhaustion their bodies had come to carry. They told me these stories not to excuse or brush over the other, darker realities of working offshore but to show me, Look what we’ve built, despite it all….

(2) ANOTHER DAY IN COURT. Michele Lundgren, charged as a Michigan fake Trump elector in July, was back in court on December 13 along with five other defendants to hear testimony before a judge who will eventually rule whether the Michigan Attorney General’s office has established probable cause for the felony charges to proceed to trial. “Michigan elections director says he contacted AG on false electors” in the Detroit News. Michele Lundgren is the wife of Carl Lundgren, a well-known sff artist.

Michigan elections director Jonathan Brater testified in court Wednesday that he contacted the Attorney General’s office after finding out about a certificate state Republicans signed falsely claiming Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election.

Brater’s revelation highlighted the first day of preliminary examinations in the criminal cases of six of the 16 Republicans whose names appeared on the certificate, which was part of an attempt to flip Michigan’s 16 electoral votes to Trump although Democrat Joe Biden won Michigan in November 2020.

Over about seven hours of testimony in Ingham County District Court, prosecutors from Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office and defense lawyers repeatedly clashed over what the importance of the false certificate was, Michigan election law and even who could be in the courtroom.

The examinations will continue Thursday with Ingham County District Court Judge Kristen Simmons eventually having to decide whether the Attorney General’s office has established probable cause for the eight felony charges it’s brought against each of the Republicans to proceed to trial….

(3) KEEP A HANKY READY. Camestros Felapton’s “Smith Rewatch: Vincent and the Doctor”. Maybe cue Judy Garland singing, “You made me love you / I didn’t want to do it….”

…Let’s make it potentially worse by adding in a writer against which Moffat’s attraction to twee Britishisms and romcoms looks positively restrained. Richard Curtis getting to write floppy haired Matt Smith as a surrogate Hugh Grant sounds like a recipe for disaster.

And yet, this is one of the most beloved episodes of Doctor Who — perhaps more with its general normy audience rather than die-hard Who fans but still one that is often pointed at. I think I went into this episode feeling cynical, I’ll concede the ending touched me but it felt messy to me at the time. On rewatch? I’ll confess that I started tearing up much earlier than the plot demanded. It is very sentimental but a good rule for Who is to always go a little bit extra with whatever direction the story is heading….

(4) THE NEW DOCTOR. [Item by Steven French.] In the run up to the Xmas special, Ncuti Gatwa on Xmas, family and Dr Who: “Ncuti Gatwa: ‘I know many a gay man who’s exactly like the Doctor’” in the Guardian.

 “We choose our families. And the Doctor is a lonely wanderer, looking for their next adventure … I know many a gay man, MANY a gay man, I could describe that way!” He laughs. “I think that’s a beautiful, beautiful theme Doctor Who has, because chosen family can be more meaningful, more supportive. That really can be the case, and it’s a theme that absolutely runs through the show.”

(5) ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES. “Can the Oompa-Loompas Be Saved?” The New York Times seriously doubts it, if the answer depends on finding a way to make them politically correct.  

What do we do with the Oompa-Loompas?

That’s a question filmmakers and writers have tangled with ever since the 1964 debut of the tiny, largely unpaid laborers in Roald Dahl’s beloved children’s book “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”

In Dahl’s original, the Oompa-Loompas were starving African pygmies, subsisting largely on a mash of green caterpillars and tree bark until “rescued” by Willy Wonka. He smuggled the entire tribe out of Africa in packing crates to live and work, and sing and goof and dance, in the chocolatier’s plantation, er, factory.

“It didn’t occur to me that my depiction of the Oompa-Loompas was racist,” Dahl said in a 1988 interview. “But it did occur to the N.A.A.C.P. and others.”

In the five decades since their literary debut, the Oompa-Loompas have undergone a series of transformations to shake their story from its colonialist roots. Some fixes have been transparently cosmetic (in subsequent editions of the book, illustrators simply made the tribesmen white). Others weren’t fixes at all: In the 2005 film “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” the director, Tim Burton, just shifted continents, moving the Oompa-Loompas out of Africa to someplace that vaguely resembles South America, as imagined by an adventure film director from the 1950s.

In the Warner Bros. prequel “Wonka,” which opens Dec. 15, the filmmakers address the colonialist aspects head on…

(6) WESTERCON. [Item by Kevin Standlee.] The official papers of Westercon as of the end of Westercon 75 (Loscon 49) have been updated and are available at Bylaws & Business – Westercon

This document includes:

  • Minutes of the Westercon 75 Business Meeting
  • Links to video of the Business Meeting and the Committee of the Whole on Site Selection held thereat
  • Bylaws and Standing Rules as of the end of Westercon 75 and the Draft Agenda for the Westercon 76 Business Meeting.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born December 22, 1951 Charles de Lint, 72. Need I say this is just my personal choices by an author I’ve known personally for over thirty years now? I think not.

Let’s start with Moonheart, the novel that Tamson House at its heart, a most amazing architectural wonder which may be at center of the universe. It amazes me with every page. I know that’s why readers I’ve talked to pick it as their favorite of his considerable writings. The sequel, Spiritwalk, is a patch-up novel and in someways a deeper, more interesting story, mainly because the characters are more flawed.

Moonheart is set in home city of Ottawa as are these three novels. Yarrow is an autumnal tale of a woman who has stopped dreaming, and the two Jack of Kinrowan novels, Jack, the Giant-Killer and Drink Down the Moon, involve the fey courts in Ottawa. If you like War for the Oaks, I think that you will like these novels. 

Charles deLint at 1980 World Fantasy Con. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.

Memory and Dream is his take on artists and their work with the usual magic thrown in. Lots of pre-Raphaelite influence here, I think if I remember correctly that he has an artist named Ruskin. Very interesting. 

Someplace to Be Flying is the first of two novels set in his city of Newford that I deeply, madly love. This one introduces the Crow Girls, immortal shape shifters who just want to have fun and eat sugar. Really they do. It’s got great characters, wonderful settings and a fantastic story as does Forests of The Heart which adds a large dollop of Irish music and the green man to boot to the Newford setting.

The Mystery of Grace which was his last novel for Tor for reasons that were interesting to say the least is a fantastic story of a motorcycle riding female mechanic who may have crossed over to the other side when the veils on Día de los Muertos grew too thin in the right, or if you prefer, wrong place. Stellar writing by him. 

The Cats of Tanglewood Forest as infused with lavish illustrations by his friend Charles Vess should be read by anyone who loves cats, Appalachian folklore or just a great story. Need I say the book itself is stunningly gorgeous?  Lillian here was the girl in A Circle of Cats, the children book done by him and again illustrated by Vess. Again recommended. Medicine Road will feature a grown up Lillian. 

His newest undertaking, in which Junniper Wiles is the central character, is a mystery series and a lot of fun. More light heated than some of his fiction has been, not a bad tack to take.

So how are his short stories you say? Extraordinarily good. For over a decade before he stopped publishing them, he sent me his annual Winter chapbook on Triskell Press, a perfect treat from him. 

If I was going to recommend but one collection to read by him, it would be an easy pick and that would be Dreams Underfoot. It has “The Moon is Drownimg While I Sleep”, maybe his best story ever, and other excellent stories such as “The Sacred Fire” which was produced as an episode of the The Hunger anthology television series hosted first by Terrence Stamp and then by David Bowie  and was first shown I some twenty-five years ago. 

He did a later collection as well on his new publisher, Tachyon Press, The Best of Charles de Lint. I’ll admit I’ve not looked at its content so let me do that now. Huh, it’s up but Tachyon Press didn’t do an epub edition so he did it himself.  I will recommend it as the stories in The Very Best of Charles de Lint are those of Dreams Underfoot plus a whole more of his later work.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

  • Carpe Diem continues its Star Wars and pets imitating their owners theme.
  • Eek! has the worst gift.
  • Eek! also has a silly demonstration of a bit of monster trivia many get wrong.

(9) TO DYE FOR. The Guardian pages back to the 19th century to explain “How a European colour revolution brought us the humble Christmas card”.

What would Christmas be without the humble Christmas card? It’s hard to think of a more quintessentially British seasonal tradition than propping up colourful bits of stiff paper on your mantelpiece, but in fact we wouldn’t be sending each other bits of stiff paper were it not for a feat of pan-European collaboration – and competition – cooked up in the mid-19th century. Many of our most familiar traditions percolated down from Britain’s royal and aristocratic families, who themselves had imported many of them from their German forebears. But it wasn’t until the widespread adoption of colour printing in the 1860s that Christmas cards, first commissioned as high-status, handcrafted items in the 1840s, became cheap enough for the middle and lower classes to get their hands on them.

Some of these early mass-produced cards are on show at the Ashmolean in Oxford, as part of their Colour Revolution exhibition. To the modern eye they are pretty elaborate affairs, dating from the 1880s, with beautifully coloured floral images, silk tassels and fringes, dyed vibrant shades of purple and orange. The cards may be small but they are part of an important story, one that the exhibition aims to tell in a detailed way. It concerns the almost incalculably formative influence of the mid-19th century “chromatic turn”, in which the Victorians’ obsession with admiring, analysing and then manufacturing colour in all sorts of areas – fashion, art, design, advertising – made itself felt across Britain, France and Germany, and indeed the rest of the world.

The Ashmolean exhibition is a brilliant and fascinating show, re-creating elements of the 1862 International Exhibition in London’s South Kensington, which showcased 19th-century attempts to reconstruct the original colours of ancient Greek sculpture (including Alma-Tadema’s fabulous painting Phidias Showing the Frieze of the Parthenon to his Friends), and some elaborate late-Victorian fashions, including a gruesome necklace made from dead hummingbirds.

The show’s key element may appear slightly dusty by comparison: a section outlining the development of synthetic aniline dyes, starting in 1856 with the invention of the strident purple known as “mauveine” by young British chemist William Henry Perkin, while studying under German professor August Wilhelm von Hofmann. Discovered accidentally as Perkin was trying to produce a malaria treatment from coal tar, mauveine – and its subsequent counterparts such as fuchsine (reddish-purple), and induline (bluish red) – were cheap to produce and had enormous commercial success as, for the first time, brightly coloured fabric became affordable for large swathes of the European lower and middle classes, allowing them to indulge in fancy dresses, hats, upholstery and, yes, Christmas card tassels….

(10) SECOND TO NONE. What is the exact time? Tom Vanderbilt learned why it’s hard to tell: “In Search of Lost Time” at Harper’s.

…The night before my visit, I’d opened time.gov, the very official-looking page—headlined official u.s. time—run by NIST and the U.S. Naval Observatory. The site features a map of the United States, divided into time zones, as well as a variety of subsidiary clock displays (Chamorro Standard Time, Aleutian Standard Time) that ticked, at the second level, in seeming synchrony. I noticed that my own watch—the Garmin Forerunner 935, a “premium running watch,” which generally gets its time from four of the thirty-one operational GPS satellites encircling the globe—looked to be a second behind. Why?

This was one of the first questions I put to Judah Levine, an eighty-two-year-old JILA physicist and one of “America’s timekeepers.” “The handheld guys are typically wrong by a second or a half-second,” Levine said. “That’s because the device’s display is not fast enough.” He said this with weary resignation. White-haired, with gold-rimmed glasses, wearing a blue flannel shirt, gray work pants, and sturdy black shoes, Levine reminded me of one of those somewhat cantankerous master craftsmen you still find in certain old quarters of Brooklyn. The shelves of his office were lined with physics textbooks, and an Oregon Scientific clock—which gets a radio signal from NIST—displayed the time in blocky liquid-crystal numbers.

In fairness to my watch, Levine explained that time.gov (which had informed me that the laptop I was using had strayed “+0.012 s”) was itself off by a noticeable amount. “It takes a while for the signal to transfer across the network, which we don’t control,” he explained. The actual correct time was on display in a laboratory adjacent to Levine’s office. It appeared as a string of red digits on a device that looked like a high-end stereo amplifier. This was a display of the official time, which is kept by a series of cesium fountain atomic clocks a few miles away, at NIST’s Boulder campus, and sent via satellite to JILA. Here was the seat of temporal power, the nation’s pulsing metronome. I watched the red LED seconds tick away, bathing in their implacable authority. It was then, however, that Levine introduced another complication. The time we were looking at might actually, a month from now, be deemed incorrect….

(11) THE DOORS, NOT THE DALEKS, WERE THE REAL NIGHTMARE. “Doctor Who: TV crew member recalls genesis of the Daleks” at BBC.com.

On 21 December 1963, some of the most feared characters in science fiction first appeared on screen.

The first episode of Doctor Who in which the dreaded Daleks appeared – The Dead Planet – was broadcast on BBC television.

While the rest of the country watched from behind their sofas, Sue Webb, from Winchester, was working as a producer’s assistant at the BBC’s Lime Grove studios in Shepherd’s Bush, west London.

Sixty years on, she has been recalling the recording of this landmark moment in TV sci-fi.

Ms Webb admits to being initially unimpressed about working on the BBC’s new science fiction drama for Saturday teatimes, based on an eccentric alien, played by William Hartnell, who time travelled in a police phone box.

“It was really just another programme and not what we were used to – we’re drama darling – we do play,” she says.

She recalls the studio being “actually a bit too small”.

“We had to fit in a petrified forest and a metal city for the Daleks,” she says, adding: “It looks like cardboard boxes covered in sheets.”

As for the metallic pepperpot-shaped aliens, created by designer Raymond Cusick, Ms Webb remembers rehearsals with actors “trolleying” around on castors in just the bottom halves of the characters that would become The Doctor’s nemesis.

She says: “Daleks were difficult creatures to move around. They got very hot and the actors were very uncomfortable inside.”

Actor David Graham, along with Peter Hawkins, spoke the Daleks’ lines in a booth off-screen. Graham later worked on Thunderbirds and Hawkins was the voice of Captain Pugwash….

…”The whole episode creaks – it just doesn’t look real at all – the actual surroundings would look terribly amateur.

“The real nightmare was the set with all those sliding doors – they were supposed to rise and sometimes they didn’t.

“You have got to rise above it and accept some things are dodgy, keep fingers crossed and hope for the best.”…

(12) LITERARY MOONS. “See the James Webb Telescope’s Stunning New Image of Uranus With Its Rings and Moons Clearer Than Ever” at Smithsonian Magazine.

…Nine of Uranus’s 27 moons can be seen surrounding the planet in the new image, shining like pearls. Individual astronomers discovered the ice giant’s five largest moons between 1787 and 1948. When Voyager 2 flew by Uranus in 1986, it discovered ten more natural satellites. Since then, the Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based observations have brought the total to what it is today.

The ice giant’s moons are sometimes referred to as the “literary moons,” because they’re named for characters in Shakespeare’s plays, along with a few from the works of Alexander Pope. Those in Webb’s close-up image, moving clockwise from 2 o’clock, are called Rosalind, Puck, Belinda, Desdemona, Cressida, Bianca, Portia, Juliet and Perdita. (A second, wide-view image shows 14 moons.)…

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

Pixel Scroll 10/11/23 We’re All The Children Of Pixels, Ancient Pixels Who Gave Birth To All Intelligence

(1) THE ROCKETS’ GREEN LIGHT. Early this morning in Los Angeles the last of two Space Shuttle Rocket Launch Motors made their way through Exposition Park to the California Science Center. Each is 116 feet long and around 12 feet in diameter.  

They are part of the “Go for Stack” project to move and lift space shuttle components for the future Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center. What is Go for Stack?

“Go for Stack” is the complex process of moving and lifting each of the space shuttle components into place for Endeavour’s upcoming, awe-inspiring 20-story vertical display in the future Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center, which is currently under construction. This technically challenging feat has never been done outside of a NASA facility. 

(2) ROBIN REID GUESTS ON TOLKIEN PODCAST. Episode 16 of Queer Lodgings: A Tolkien Podcast is a “Queer Anthology Interview with Robin Reid, Chris Vaccaro, Steven Yandell”.

We have a special treat for you this month – Leah, Alicia, and Grace welcome not one… not two… but three guests! They are the editors of the forthcoming edited anthology ‘”There Are Many Paths to Tread”: Queer Approaches to Tolkien’s Middle-earth’ from McFarland (due to release in 2025), and each is a well-known Tolkien scholar in their own right – Robin Reid, Chris Vaccaro, and Steve Yandell. Join us as we discuss the landscape of Queer and Intersectional Tolkien studies, why they’re important, and what these important and fresh outlooks can contribute to Tolkien scholarship.

(3) MALINDA LO ON BOOK SUPPRESSION. “My Books Have Been Banned or Challenged in 16 States” says Malinda Lo, and in this thoroughly-researched post the author explores many ways that has been done.

In the last two years, my books have been banned, challenged, or restricted in 44 cases in 40 communities across 16 states. Last Night at the Telegraph Club receives the most attention, but Ash, Huntress, A Line in the Dark and A Scatter of Light have also been targeted by book banners. The book bans have increased over time, and in the last couple of months I’ve learned about a new one almost every week…

In the spreadsheet, I’ve recorded 44 cases in which my books were targeted by right-wing activists. Those cases include: 

  1. Book bans, in which books are removed from school libraries and/or classrooms (either during an investigation of the challenge or completely);
  2. book challenges, in which a community member makes a complaint about a book to a school district or library (this may not lead to an outright ban);
  3. restrictions, in which a book is placed in a restricted section of the library or requires parental permission for access; and 
  4. instances in which a book published as young adult was moved to the adult section of a library. 

I have chosen to count more than straightforward book bans, and I include the challenges I have found even if the book is not ultimately banned, because I’m interested in tracking all the ways my books are targeted. This is a personal analysis of how book banning has affected my work, not a broader analysis of book bans in America….

Here’s an example of Lo’s detailed analysis:

…. When asked if they had read the entire book, the challenger wrote, “I read a summary and it told me everything I need to know.” What concerns them? “This book promoting a sexual agenda to young people.”

Since they didn’t read the book, you may be wondering where they found these summaries or sections that they object to. While I don’t know where these specific two challengers found their summaries, I suspect they may have used conservative book banning Facebook groups or websites like Book Looks (created by Florida-based Moms for Liberty) or Rated Books (affiliated with the Utah-based Laverna in the Library). I think that whoever made the entries about Telegraph Club for these websites has in fact read the book, or at least they have combed through it line by line hunting for excerpts that they believe prove their allegations of a book’s offensive nature….

(4) CHENGDU WORLDCON ROUNDUP. [By Ersatz Culture.]

New Worldcon logo

2023 Chengdu has changed its logo just before the con.  

Chinese-language article about the WSFS Business Meeting

The con posted an article to weixin.qq.com entitled (via Google Translate) “Everyone, please check the introduction of the 2023 Chengdu World Science Fiction Conference Business Meeting!”.  Most File 770 readers are likely to be already familiar with material about the WSFS Business Meeting – the article even has a section summarizing Robert’s Rules of Order – but there are a couple of interesting bits near the bottom of the page, as follows…

Who’s sponsoring the WorldCon?  Some answers

The October 9th Scroll pointed out that the list of Chengdu Worldcon sponsors in the Business Meeting Agenda did not match announcements at a June Brand Conference.  At the bottom of the page, there is what I believe is the first official confirmation of any sponsors on any of the Worldcon’s platforms.  There are four levels or types of sponsor, the information I’ve been able to glean so far is:

“2023 Chengdu Worldcon Starseeker”

  • China Telecom (the only sponsor confirmed at the aforementioned Brand Conference)
  • ICBC – Industrial and Commercial Bank of China

“2023 Chengdu Worldcon Stargazer”

  • Das Security – cybersecurity firm, apparently also known as DBAppSecurity, according to this article which states they were also a sponsor of the recent Asian Games alongside China Telecom and ICBC.
  • Starry Dome – I assume that this is the same company as 上海瀚海星穹网络科技 / Shanghai Hanhai Xingqiong Network Technology, but I’m still a bit unclear what exactly they do; websites that provide company data mention both technology and marketing.  This listing states (via Google Translate) that “Shanghai Hanhai Xingqiong Network Co., Ltd. was established in 2023. It is a technology company dedicated to brand management, game distribution, omni-channel operation and entertainment innovation. At the beginning of its establishment, the company determined that the derivative incubation of the “Wandering Earth” IP would be its main business direction, and it has actively explored and developed in this field.”

“2023 Chengdu Worldcon Specially Supporting Brands”

“2023 Chengdu Worldcon IP Cooperative Partner”

  • Three-Body Universe is a name I’ve seen a few times, but I never looked into.  Per a recent Reddit thread“Three Body Universe is the Chinese company behind most Three Body Problem IP like the Zhang Beihai season of the Three Body Minecraft animation, the TBP animation, the radio drama, etc…”

Note that the above list(s) include neither of the organizations named as sponsors in the Business Meeting Agenda document.

(5) ON WORLDCON WEEKEND PUTIN WILL BE IN CHINA, BUT NOT CHENGDU. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Reuters News reports “China to host Belt and Road forum in Beijing Oct 17-18” on the same weekend as the Worldcon – and guess who will be there.

China will host its third Belt and Road Forum next week, its foreign ministry said on Wednesday, a President Xi Jinping signature event that President Vladimir Putin is due to attend on a rare trip abroad….

Putin attended the two previous forums, in 2017 and 2019, and the Kremlin said in September he had accepted an invitation to the forum and for talks with Xi.

The Russian leader is not known to have gone abroad since the Hague-based International Criminal Court (ICC) issued a warrant for him in March over the deportation of children from Ukraine….

Overlaps Worldcon in time, but not in space by a few provinces and about 1800 km by road. It might inform someone’s decisions on when and where to sightsee.

(6) TOLKIEN SOCIETY SEMINAR. The Tolkien Society Online Seminar 2023 will be happening November 26, 2023 with the theme “Tolkien and Religion in the Twenty-First Century.” Complete information at the link, including a schedule of paper presentations.

… Although J.R.R. Tolkien deliberately excluded explicit religious references from his legendarium and rejected narrow allegorical readings of The Lord of the Rings, he made no secret of his devout Roman Catholicism and its importance to his sub-creative endeavor. From the creation myth of the “Ainulindalë” to the eucatastrophic destruction of the One Ring, Túrin Turambar’s doomed warrior courage to Frodo Baggins’s self-sacrificial humility, scholars have long examined the influence of Tolkien’s Christian faith and his abiding admiration for pre-Christian legends on the nature and history of Arda. Explorations of the legendarium from other religious perspectives or explicitly nonreligious perspectives have received less attention, however, as have studies of the reception of Tolkien’s work among (non)religious readers and communities….

(7) MYTHOPOEIC ONLINE EVENT. “Something Mighty Queer” is the theme of the Mythopoeic Society’s Online Midwinter Seminar 2024, to be held next year on February 17-18. The call for papers is at the link. The deadline to submit is November 30.

We invite submissions for an online conference that focuses on queerness in fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction or other mythopoeic work. This can be queer representation within the work or engaging with mythopoeia through queer theory. “Queerness” is an intentionally ambiguous term, demonstrating the diversity of queer experiences, and the necessity of situating queerness as a liminal, complex paradigm. Queer theory is wider than the study of gender identity or sexuality, extending to taking positions against normativity and dominant modes of thought, and engaging with the indefinite….

(8) FIVE-YEAR MISSIONARY. In an NPR interview “Patrick Stewart says his time on ‘Star Trek’ felt like a ministry”.

Martin: I talk to a lot of people about spirituality and about the value of spiritual communities, which I think are when people who have similar values gather together and have or seek transcendent experiences. And I think Star Trek, in all of its incarnations, represents that to a lot of fans. It is a spiritual world. They treat it with religious reverence. Have you encountered that? Do you get it?

Stewart: Yes. I see it very, very clearly and very strongly. It was about truth and fairness and honesty and respect for others, no matter who they were or what strange alien creature they looked like. That was immaterial. They were alive. And if they needed help, Jean Luc Picard and his crew, his team, were there to give it.

In a sense, we were ministers. And I have heard now so many times from individuals who have been honest enough and brave enough to tell me aspects of their life, of their health, of their mental health. And how it was all saved and improved by watching every week….

(9) SIGNATURE MYSTERY. [Item by Danny Sichel.] From the collection of the late Sylvain St-Pierre, Montreal fan, comes this autograph page from the souvenir program book for Nolacon II (Worldcon 1988). The top autograph is obviously from George Alec Effinger, but does anyone have any idea who the bottom one is from?

(10) MEMORY LANE.

2004 [Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Charles de Lint’s Medicine Road which is where our Beginning is from has an interesting backstory, or at least the lead characters do. Now mind you, we won’t be meeting either of them in the Beginning. Well sort of we won’t. 

There’s a minor spoiler here. Very minor. 

 There’s a number of stories that he did that are set within a place, a very rural Appalachian setting, roughly now though the year is never known to the reader. A children book, A Circle of Cats which Lis will be reviewing is where these stories began followed  by The Cats of Tanglewood Forest which she has already reviewed here.  

There’s a single story in this set of stories “Somewhere in My Mind There Is a Painting Box”.  And now we get to the YA Seven Wild Sisters where Laurel and Bess, musical twins, younger here than they will be in the adult Medicine Road where they are a folk singing duo, will get involved in the fey world of the region. Both of these will also be reviewed by her. 

And here’s our Beginning…

CHANGING DOG AND CORN HAIR

One night, not so long ago, Changing Dog and Corn Hair met up in Sedona, Arizona, to have a talk about an old bargain they’d made with Coyote Woman. It’s funny, thinking of the two of them together like that; I can imagine them doing pretty much anything except getting along. Most times they’ll argue the colour of the moon, or the taste of water, if they can’t find something better to disagree on. There’s nothing much they ever seem to settle on, except that the other’s wrong.

But this night Corn Hair wasn’t aiming for an argument. She had herself a camp there by Oak Creek, on the south bank where the water runs below Cathedral Rock. It wasn’t much, just her bedroll laid out in the sand under the sycamores, with her pack doubling as a pillow. Close by, she’d built a small fire on which she was boiling water in a tin coffee pot, the bottom blackened from all its years of use. She ground some coffee beans using a flat rock and another the size of her fist for a mortar and pestle, scooping them into the now-boiling water when they were ground to her satisfaction. By the time Changing Dog came ambling down from the red rock scars skirting the solitary butte that towered above the creek, the coffee was thick and black, ready to drink.

Changing Dog nodded hello and sat cross-legged near the fire. He was a rangy, copper-skinned man with a narrow face and long, chestnut hair that streaked to a dark tan at his temples and was kept tied back with a thin strip of leather. You hardly ever saw him dressing up. That night he was wearing a white T-shirt and jeans, dusty tooled-leather cowboy boots and an old brown leather jacket going thin at the elbows. He wasn’t a homely man and he wasn’t particularly handsome, but he had these eyes that would grab anybody’s attention, especially a woman’s. They were a vivid cornflower blue that looked violet in the right light, and there was always a promise in them–not that he’d necessarily deliver, but that whatever might come, it would at least be interesting.

He accepted the tin coffee mug that Corn Hair handed him and took an appreciative sip. Setting the mug in the sand, he pulled a tobacco pouch from his pocket and rolled them each a cigarette, lighting them with a twig from the fire. He left one hanging from his lips, offering the other to Corn Hair.

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born October 11, 1949 Sharman DiVono, 74. She was the primary writer of the Star Trek comic strip from a year in the early Eighties.  She’s written a number of other strips such as Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm, The Man from Planet X and Tarzan. She has written for three animated series — G.I. JoeBill & Ted’s Excellent Adventures and Star Wars: Droids. She’s written one genre novel, Blood Moon
  • Born October 11, 1960 Nicola Bryant, 63. Well known for her role as Perpugilliam “Peri” Brown, a companion to both the Fifth and Sixth Doctors. She also worked in “The Two Doctors” story so she appeared with the Second Doctor as well. Of course she’s done Big Finish Doctor Who audio dramas. Like so many, many genre performers, she shows up in the video Trek fan fiction playing Lana in Star Trek Continues.
  • Born October 11, 1964 Michael J. Nelson, 59. Best known for his work on Mystery Science Theater. He was the head writer of the series for most of the show’s original eleven-year run, and spent half of that time as the on-air host. Bad genre films were a favorite target of him and his companions. Not that they don’t deserve it. 
  • Born October 11, 1965 Sean Patrick Flanery, 58. I really do think that his best work was on The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and the films that followed. It certainly wasn’t as Bobby Dagen in Saw: The Final Chapter, a film best forgotten. (It gets a forty-one percent rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes, much better than I expected.) He appeared as Jake Greyman in Demon Hunter, another low budget horror film, and as John in The Evil Within. I see a pattern…
  • Born October 11, 1972 Nir Yaniv, 51. Author, editor, musician, and filmmaker.  He founded a webzine for the Israeli Society for Science Fiction & Fantasy.  Currently, he’s the chief editor of Chalomot Be’aspamia, Israel’s only professionally printed genre magazine. His short fiction has appeared in Weird TalesApex Magazine and The Best of World SF. He co-wrote The Tel Aviv Dossier with Lavie Tidhar. 
  • Born October 11, 1972 Claudia Black, 51. Best known for being Aeryn Sun in Farscape, arguably the best SF video series ever done, Vala Mal Doran in Stargate SG-1 and Sharon “Shazza” Montgomery in Pitch Black. She also had a recurring role as Dahlia in The Originals and starred as Dr. Sabine Lommers in The CW’s Containment series.
  • Born October 11, 1976 Emily Deschanel, 47. Temperance “Bones” Brennan in Bones which crossed over with Sleepy Hollow twice (she visited the latter once) and she had a bit part on Spider-Man 2. More notably she was Pam Asbury in Stephen King’s Rose Red series. Actually the forensic science on Bones is genre, isn’t it? 

(12) COMICS SECTION.

(13) PRODIGY COMES IN FOR SAFE LANDING. So says The Hollywood Reporter: “’Star Trek: Prodigy’ Moves to Netflix After Paramount+ Cancellation”.

Star Trek: Prodigy, the animated kids show that was canceled at Paramount+ with its second season still midway through production, has found a new home.

Netflix has scooped up both the previously aired first season and has committed to airing the sophomore run once that completes production. Season one will stream later this year, with the second batch due in 2024.

The Paramount Global-backed Paramount+ axed Prodigy in June when it became the latest streamer to take advantage of tax write-offs. 

Prodigy, though, was a particular surprise given the series is produced in-house by CBS Studios, where Star Trek captain Alex Kurtzman is based with a nine-figure overall deal…. 

(14) DISNEY SOLVES FOR X. At CBR.com,“Disney Celebrates the X-Men and Avengers’ 60th Anniversary With What If…? Variant Covers”.

Classic Disney characters will grace the covers of Marvel’s comics in 2024 to celebrate the Avengers and X-Men‘s 60th anniversary.

The Disney What If…? variant cover series will be a monthly program adorning select issues of Amazing Spider-Man. There are twelve covers, and they will be released monthly throughout 2024. They will feature Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy and other classic Disney characters in milestone moments from Avengers and X-Men history. Marvel revealed the first three covers, one recreating Avengers #1 with Peg Leg Pete as Loki, another with Mickey and friends as the original X-Men, and the third showing the iconic Disney characters assembling as the Avengers, even giving Goofy Captain America‘s shield and Pluto Thor’s hammer.

(15) 2 ARMS, 2 ARMS! The Heritage Auctions Blog promises “This Piece Will Hook You – T-1000 Arms from Terminator 2”.

When it comes to explosive sequels, few in the industry can make a more bombastic blockbusting entry into a franchise like James Cameron. Having taken audiences on a pulse pounding tour de force with his follow up to the critically acclaimed Alien and made a splash with the cutting-edge special effects technologies which brought to life his memorable creations in The Abyss, one would think that Cameron would be hard pressed to continue his upward trajectory as the king of Blockbusters. Then, on July 3rd, 1991, it happened. Like a nuclear blast from his harrowing future vision of a robotic apocalypse, he unleashed yet another pioneering action film with Terminator 2 . A sequel that not only raised the stakes presented in the original film but proved to be an even bigger critical success. Among the memorable characters and sequences, a particular liquid metal menace played by a then unknown actor, Robert Patrick, captivated audiences and the vast pop-culture consciousness, the T-100.

Flash forward 32 years, and I find myself typing this entry while sitting in a large warehouse. Don’t worry. It might be a little imposing, but a fallout shelter it is not. The world hasn’t been taken over by artificial intelligence (yet), and as a cataloger working on Heritage Auctions’ various upcoming auctions, I continually find myself in a movie memorabilia mecha. And though I’ve held pieces from iconic films spanning the history of Hollywood, very few pieces have made my heart race the way these prop T-1000 hooked arms have….

(16) COULD THIS KSR SCENARIO REALLY WORK? [Item by John A Arkansawyer.] A speculative article from the BBC on climate change uses Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future as a hook. Beware spoilers. “To avert climate disaster, what if one rogue nation dimmed the Sun?” at BBC Future.

…In Robinson’s imagined scenario, India’s rogue deployment of solar geo-engineering turns out to be broadly benign, and buys time to scale-up emissions reductions. But in the real-world, the idea that such a deus ex machina technology could ever be safely deployed remains highly speculative, with many risks and unknowns.

So if one rogue nation did decide to dim the Sun for real, what environmental and geopolitical consequences might unfurl? And is the safe deployment of such a technology even a conceivable goal? …

(17) PLAYING CHICKEN IN SPACE – AND LOSING. [Item by Steven French.] When worlds collide! (It’s kinda pretty…) “Afterglow of cataclysmic collision between two planets seen for first time” reports the Guardian. Photos at the link.

… After a detailed analysis of the observations, the astronomers concluded that the blast of infrared radiation came from a hot new object or “synestia” created by the collision of two planets nearly as large as Neptune. Based on the infrared readings, the vast spinning object had a temperature of more than 700C for about three years. It will eventually cool and form a new planet around the star.

According to details published in Nature, the star began to dim about 2.5 years after the afterglow began as a massive cloud of fine impact debris drifted across the face of the star.

“It’s the first time we’ve seen the afterglow from such an event,” said Simon Lock, another co-lead author at the University of Bristol. “We’ve seen debris and discs before, but we have never seen the afterglow of the planetary body that’s produced.”…

(18) BARBIE HALLOWEEN. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Part of an Utah neighborhood is transforming itself into Barbieland for Halloween. Each homeowner has picked a different theme related to the Barbie movie, Halloween+Barbie, etc. There’s the Barbie Dream House, a Barbie graveyard, Disco Barbie, and many more. Most of the houses are using pink floodlights, making the effect much more vivid at night. “Utah residents transform neighborhood into Barbieland for Halloween” at USA Today.

And the pink passion this season isn’t only in Utah. For instance, an Atlanta-area homeowner has decorated her front yard as the Barbie Scream House.

If you know of more examples of this trend, feel free to add links in the comments.

[Thanks to Ersatz Culture, John King Tarpinian, Steven French, Daniel Dern, Bonnie McDaniel, John A Arkansawyer, Lise Andreasen, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]

Pixel Scroll 5/14/23 Pixelberry Jam On Filer Buttered Scrolls

(1) BAFTA TV AWARDS. The genre cupboard was practically bare when the winners of the BAFTA TV Awards 2023 were revealed tonight. “Memorable Moment” — the only publicly-voted category – proved the exception, won by “’Platinum Jubilee – Party at the Palace’ – Paddington meets Queen Elizabeth II”. 

…Ben Whishaw was a part of Queen Elizabeth II’s Paddington Bear skit – as the voice of Paddington – which won an 2023 BAFTA TV award for most memorable moment, the only prize voted on by the public. The skit beat out Nick and Charlie’s first kiss in “Heartstopper” and the “Running Up That Hill” moment in “Stranger Things,” among other nominees…

(2) CRUISING. [Item by Cora Buhlert.] I took my Masters of the Universe figures out into the garden and posted another photo story: “Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre: ‘Adam’s Day Out’”.

“I just love getting out of the palace and enjoying the peace and quiet of the Eternian wilderness in springtime. And the Road Ripper really packs a punch. Too bad it’s only a one-seater, so I can’t take Cringer along. Or Teela…”

“Still, nothing beats racing across the plains of Eternia. No Prince Adam, no royal duties, no He-Man, just me and the unspoiled wilderness and… – Oh, raptor crossing!”

SCREECH!

(3) EUROVISION BOOK CONTEST. [Item by Cora Buhlert.] The finalists for the Eurovision Book Contest (like the Eurovision Song Contest, only with books) have been announced and there is at least one genre finalist, the German entry The Perfume by Patrick Süsskind, which won the 1987 World Fantasy Award: “Elena Ferrante and Marian Keyes among authors competing in Eurovision book contest” in the Guardian.

In March, the literary festival asked the public to submit their favourite fiction from any of the 37 countries that take part in the music competition each year. Suggestions could be of any genre and language but they had to have been published in the years since Eurovision began in 1956.

The final selection of one book from each country was chosen by an expert panel, who were aiming to come up with “an ambitious reading list” of books that will “inspire, examine and entertain”.

This also illustrates IMO the issue with that contest. The Perfume was released in 1985, i.e. it’s almost forty years old. The Irish contestant Rachel’s Holiday by Marian Keyes came out in 1998. That Georgian contestant is a novel written in German by a Georgian expat. Two finalists are graphic novels. The selection is just weird.

(4) A CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT. Connie Willis shared her delight in Charles’ coronation with Facebook readers.  

“What is the finest sight in the world? A Coronation. What do people talk most about? A Coronation. What is delightful to have passed? A Coronation.” — Horace Walpole

Saturday I got up early to watch Charles III’s coronation. It was the second one I’d seen. The first was Elizabeth II’s which I watched seventy years ago on someone else’s TV because we didn’t own one yet. It was an impossibly grainy image on a tiny screen of a Cinderella-looking carriage drawn by four horses. I was only seven years old, but I have a vivid memory of it, probably because I was so fascinated by fairy tales and princesses and queens and golden coaches made out of pumpkins.

This time my husband and I watched it in color on a much larger screen while talking on the phone to our daughter in California the whole time as she kept us updated with texts from her friends and comments on Tumblr. Now, seventy years later, I am no longer all that fascinated by princess and carriages, but I am fascinated by history, and in terms of historical events, a coronation simply can’t be beat….

(5) ROBOTIC ROBBERY. Lincoln Michel knows “The Endgame for A.I. Is Clear: Rip Off Everyone”.

…But let’s talk about the more specific ways companies plan to rip off writers with “A.I.” as the excuse.

A strong hint can be found in the current Writers Guild of America strike. A key sticking point is the use of A.I. writing. The writers aren’t asking for Hollywood to ban the use of A.I., rather they are asking that A.I writing not count as “literary material” or “source material.” This is technical Hollywood language related to the realities of how contracts work and how much money writers get. With the hard realities of capitalism and how corporations look to rip off writers.

The concern isn’t that ChatGPT can replace writers, but that studios will get chatbots to produce a crappy script then hire a writer at a lower rate to fix up the script into something usable. Fixing up a mess of ChatGPT vomit could take more work than writing a script from scratch, but cost the corporation less money.

I think this fear is completely justified and one that writers everywhere should take note of. Will websites and magazines start hiring writers or editors to “fix” chatbot outputs for less pay and no credit? Will book publishers decide they can feed an idea into ChatGPT then hire a novelist as a ghostwriter to rewrite it?

Again, the chatbots don’t have to produce good or even usable writing for this to be a threat. The threat is A.I being an excuse to rip off writers. If you hire a screenwriter to rewrite a chatbot script, you can pay them less. If you hire an author to rewrite a chatbot draft, you can avoid royalties. Etc ….

(6) FOUNDATION. GeekTyrant walks viewers through a “Thrilling New Trailer for Apple Adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s FOUNDATION Season 2”.

…Season 2 is set more than a century after the finale of the first season, “tension mounts throughout the galaxy in Foundation season two. As the Cleons unravel, a vengeful queen plots to destroy Empire from within. Hari, Gaal, and Salvor discover a colony of Mentalics with psionic abilities that threaten to alter psychohistory itself. The Foundation has entered its religious phase, promulgating the Church of Seldon throughout the Outer Reach and inciting the Second Crisis: war with Empire. Foundation chronicles the stories of four crucial individuals transcending space and time as they overcome deadly crises, shifting loyalties, and complicated relationships that will ultimately determine the fate of humanity.”…

(7) TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS AND WORKING OVERTIME. New Amazing Stories editor Lloyd Penney has been interviewed by Angelique Fawns for The Horror Tree, a website for horror writers and markets.

AF: What personal projects are you working on? What do you do in your spare time?

LP: Spare time? What is this ‘spare time’ you speak of? These days, I go into a publications office in Toronto’s east end twice a week to do the proofreader/copyeditor thing for one print magazine and two e-magazines. Then, I am the occasional editor for a British author’s long-time series of books, D.J. Holmes and his Empire Rising series of space adventures. And, for the past 40 years, I have been a regular correspondent and writer in the Letters Column for a long series of fannish publications, fanzines. I try my best to juggle all of this, and I hope not to drop anything. I have been an editor/copyeditor/proofreader for most of my working life, and I have always been an SF reader, so this is the first time I’ve been able to combine the two, and I have tried my best to run with it. I was told it should be fun, and it has been.

(8) PRO TIP. “Tim Dowling: my wife is gardening. I’m in my shed writing. It’s a risky situation”. The author is quoted in the Guardian saying —

“A long time ago I read a quotation in a book of advice, which held that the hardest thing about being a writer is convincing your spouse that looking out of the window is part of your job. I have never been able to track down the exact wording or the author of that quotation; when I look online the only source I can find for it is me, because I cite it so regularly. This is perhaps fitting, since my wife thinks I made it up.”

(9) ONE SUMMER TO A CUSTOMER. Jonathan Clarke investigates “Rod Serling’s Enduring Appeal” for City Journal.

…You might have guessed by now that in “Walking Distance,” Serling was telling his own story. He was 35 when the episode appeared, and he had come a long way from a charmed boyhood in Binghamton, New York. Like Martin Sloan, he had good reason to be tired, and good reason, despite his considerable success, to want to go home again. As his success grew, that desire would grow stronger, too.

It’s easy to forget now that television was once regarded as a creative nullity, good only for selling product. In the medium’s early decades, the programming was mostly quiz shows, Westerns, and police procedurals. Corporate sponsors had considerable creative control, and in tone and style, the industry was not unlike Madison Avenue, slick and a bit shameless. At the same time, because the medium was so new, conventions hadn’t yet hardened, and barriers to entry were lower, especially for writers. Serling, with his early work for two important live series, Kraft Television Theatre and Playhouse 90, became one of a handful of creators pushing television forward. Even so, he accepted that it was a second-rate form, inherently inferior to theater and film. Interviewed by Mike Wallace in 1959, shortly before The Twilight Zone debuted, Serling argued that he was writing “serious, adult” scripts, but he didn’t claim the privileges of an artist. “I’m a dramatist for television,” he said, by way of apology. “This is the medium I know.”

By then, Serling was the most recognizable writer in the country. The face he showed to the public was an appealing one, and very much an American face—principled but modest, industrious, courageous. Beneath that there was a different man: vain, self-indulgent, needy. And underneath that there was a sensitive artist, and a traumatized war veteran, and a young man who lost his father too early. The inmost Serling was perhaps ever that eager boy in Binghamton, standing on his tiptoes to be seen. (As an adult, he stood just 5’5”.) As a writer, he sought to integrate these different selves, to find the sense of coherence that evaded him in life. He would never quite feel that he had done so….

(10) GERALD ROSE (1935-2023). Illustrator and teacher Gerald Rose died May 5 at the age of 87 reports the Guardian. He was the youngest winner of the Kate Greenaway medal for children’s book illustration, in 1960.

…As well as the books with [his wife] Elizabeth, Gerald illustrated the work of many other authors, including Ted Hughes’s Nessie the Mannerless Monster (1964), James Joyce’s The Cat and the Devil (1965), Paul Jennings’ The Hopping Basket (1965) and The Great Jelly of London (1967), Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky and Other Poems (1968) and a number of Norman Hunter’s Professor Branestawm titles (1981-83). His own later picturebooks included the award-winning Ahhh! Said Stork (1986) and The Tiger Skin Rug (2011)….

(11) LAST FAREWELL. “RIP John Mansfield”, Kevin Standlee’s tribute to our friend, includes a link to the video of the service.

As most of you who follow me may know, John Mansfield, chair of the 1994 Winnipeg Worldcon and an important figure in Canadian fandom, passed away a few days ago after a long period of decline. His funeral service in Winnipeg was today, and was live streamed and recorded so that people (including me) who could not come to Winnipeg could attend virtually….

(12) MEMORY LANE.

1990[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Charles de Lint’s Drink Down the Moon which is where this Beginning comes from is one of my favorite novels by him. Published by Ace Books in 1990, it is the second novel of his Jack of Kinrowan series, one of his Ottawa set novels. 

I like them because they are tighter, less sprawling than the later Newford novels are. They have a simplicity that sometimes gets lost in those novels.

And here’s our beginning, complete with fey music…

He slipped through the darkness in the 4/ 4 tempo of a slow reel, startled an owl in its perch, and crept through the trees to join the quiet murmur of the Rideau River as it quickened by Carleton University. At length, he came to the ears of a young woman who was sitting on the flat stones on the south bank of the river. 

The fiddle playing that tune had a mute on its bridge, substantially reducing the volume of the music, but it was still loud enough for the woman to lift her head and smile when she heard it. She knew that tune, if not the fiddler, and yet she had a sense of the fiddler as well. There was something–an echo of familiarity–that let her guess who it was, because she knew from whom he’d learned to play. 

Every good fiddler has a distinctive sound. No matter how many play the same tune, each can’t help but play it differently. Some might use an up stroke where another would a down. One might bow a series of quick single notes where another would play them all with one long draw of the bow. Some might play a double stop where others would a single string. If the listener’s ear was good enough, she could tell the difference. But you had to know the tunes, and the players, for the differences were minute.

“There’s still a bit of you plays on, Old Tom,” she whispered to the night as she stood up to follow the music to its source. 

She was a small woman with brown hair cropped short to her scalp and a heart-shaped face. Her build was more wiry than slender; her features striking rather than handsome. She wore faded jeans, frayed at the back of the hems, sneakers, and a dark blue sweatshirt that was a size or so too big for her. Slipping through the trees, she moved so quietly that she found the fiddler and stood watching him for some time before he was aware of her presence. 

She knew him by sight as soon as she saw him, confirming her earlier guess. It was Old Tom’s grandson, Johnny Faw. He was a head taller than her own four foot eleven, the fiddle tucked under his clean-shaven chin, his head bent down over it as he drew the music from its strings. His hair was a darker brown than her own, an unruly thatch that hung over his shirt collar in back and covered his ears to just above his lobes. He wore a light blue shirt, brown corduroys, and black Chinese rubber-soled slippers. The multi-coloured scarf around his neck and the gold loops glinting in each earlobe gave him the air of a Gypsy. His beat-up black fiddle case lay beside him with a brown quilted-cotton jacket lying next to it. 

She waited until the tune was done–”The King of the Fairies” having made way for a Scots reel called “Miss Shepherd’s”–and then stepped out into the little clearing where he sat playing. He looked up, startled at her soft hello and sudden appearance. As she sat down facing him, he took the fiddle from under his chin and held it and the bow on his lap.

(13) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born May 14, 1929 Kay Elliot. The actress who shows up in “I, Mudd” as the android form of Harry Mudd’s wife Stella Mudd. SPOILER ALERT (I promised our OGH I’d put these in. It’s possible someone here hasn’t seen “I, Mudd”.) Need I say she ends getting the upper hand in the end? She also had appearances in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. as Miss Prendergast in “The It’s All Greek to Me Affair” episode and multiple roles on Bewitched. That’s it, but she died young. (Died 1982.)
  • Born May 14, 1935 Peter J. Reed. A Vonnegut specialist with a long history starting with Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: The Vonnegut Chronicles: Interviews and Essays that he wrote with Marc Leeds, and Kurt Vonnegut: Images and Representations with Leeds again. He also wrote a handful of essays such as “Hurting ’til It Laughs: The Painful-Comic Science Fiction Stories of Kurt Vonnegut” and “Kurt Vonnegut’s Bitter Fool: Kilgore Trout”. (Died 2018.)
  • Born May 14, 1944 George Lucas, 79. For better and worse I suppose, he created the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises. (Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade are fine. I adore the original Trilogy.) And let’s not forget THX 1138. My fav works that he was involved in? LabyrinthRaiders of the Lost Ark, The Empire Strikes Back and Willow. Oh, and and The Young Indiana Jones series. 
  • Born May 14, 1945 Francesca Annis, 78. Lady Jessica in David Lynch’s Dune, Lady Macbeth in Roman Polanski’s Macbeth. I know only two roles, but what a pair of roles they were! She also appeared in Krull as The Widow of The Web but I’ll be damned if I can remember her in that role. 
  • Born May 14, 1947 Edward James, 76. Winner at Interaction of Best Related Non-Fiction Book for The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction which he did with Farah Mendlesohn. A companion volume, The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, was also edited with Mendlesohn. He was the editor of Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction from 1986 to 2001.
  • Born May 14, 1952 Robert Zemeckis, 71. He’s responsible for some of my favorite films including the Back to the Future trilogy, The Muppet Christmas CarolThe WitchesWho Framed Roger Rabbit and the savagely funny in a twisted sort of way Death Becomes Her. So what’s your favorite films that’s he had a hand in? 
  • Born May 14, 1952 Kathleen Ann Goonan. Her Nanotech Quartet is most excellent, particularly the first novel, Queen City Jazz. Her only Award was given for In War Times which garnered a John W. Campbell Memorial Award. She’s wrote an interesting essay on the relationship between sf and music,  “Science Fiction and All That Jazz”. (Died 2021.)
  • Born May 14, 1955 Rob Tapert, 68. I’d say he’s best known for co-creating Xena: Warrior Princess. He also produced and/or wrote several other television series including Hercules: The Legendary JourneysM.A.N.T.I.S. and American Gothic. Tapert also co-created the prequel series Young Hercules which I loved more than the adult series. He’s married to actress Lucy Lawless. 

(14) COMICS SECTION.

  • Tom Gauld says this job is not that easy!

(15) KEEP A SHARP EAR OUT. You’ve still got 18 days to bid on some prime Star Trek: The Original Series collectibles available in “The Comisar Collection Platinum Signature® Auction” at Heritage Auctions.

(16) HUANG’S OUTLAWS. At Nerds of a Feather, Paul Weimer starts with history — “Review: The Water Outlaws by S. L. Huang”.

… In Classic Chinese literature, there are a number of canonical novels, core books that are the backbone of a strand of Chinese history, culture and society….

…The Water Margin is set in the Song Dynasty, the last native Chinese Dynasty before the invasion of the Mongols. The Water Margin is a story that in its 50000 foot level will be familiar to Western readers. A group of diversely outlaws in an inaccessible area, fighting against corrupt officials who are oppressing the people? Yes, in the most broad of senses, The Water Margin is the Chinese parallel to the story of Robin Hood. It’s bigger scale, (108 outlaws in all, much larger than Robin’s band), larger stakes–fighting against full imperial armies, and, sadly, ends in a tragedy, the heroism of the outlaws ending not quite in a happily ever after.

And it is The Water Margin that is the story that S. L. Huang retells in The Water Outlaws.

S. L. Huang puts us in a slightly different China right from the get go by giving it a more feminist approach, starting with genderflipping the main character, Lin Chong. In Huang’s slightly alternate China, women have a significantly better role and place in society, but not so much that sexism and oppression of women are still not huge obstacles. But as a guard captain, Lin Chong is certainly in a position she would have not had in our own history. In this way, The Water Outlaws invites for me, comparisons to Shelley Parker-Chan’s She Who Became the Sun, which has a genderflipped protagonist, but she is a character who hides her gender. And her story is at the end of the Yuan dynasty, a century or more after the events of The Water Margin. But the queer, feminist lens of Chinese history and the perspective that it brings is strong in both works.

(17) LUNAR ORDERS. Also at Nerds of a Feather, Alex Wallace’s hook “Murder, Monks, and the Moon! What’s not to like?” gets readers started: “Review: Poor Man’s Sky by Wil McCarthy”.

There’s something about the great black void above us that attracts a wide variety of peculiar people. In our world, we have the likes of Elon Musk (who promises settlements on Mars when not driving Twitter to implosion) and other billionaires with god complexes and more money than sense. This is a theme that runs through Poor Man’s Sky Wil McCarthy’s most recent novel, a sequel to 2021’s Rich Man’s Sky….

(18) TINY DANCERS. The New York Times takes readers “Inside the Big World of Small Objects” — “For over 40 years, Tom Bishop’s dollhouse miniatures show has been the gold standard for serious collectors and hobbyists alike.”

Moments before 10 a.m., a security guard thanked the crowd for being cooperative.

When the clock struck the hour, it became clear why: The doors of the Marriott Chicago O’Hare conference center opened, and hundreds of attendees, a majority of whom were over the age of 60, bee-lined as fast as they could to the booths.

Many had studied the color-coded map ahead of time listing each booth’s location and came prepared with a shopping plan — a scene that could easily be mistaken for a Black Friday sale. Instead, it was the Chicago International Miniatures Show.

Despite the gathering touting itself as “the World’s No. 1 Dollhouse Miniatures Show,” there aren’t many actual dollhouses. Attendees instead sift through thousands of tiny objects that fill these tiny homes: miniature sponges, chocolate fondue fountains, rocking chairs, barbecue sets, Tupperware containers or fly swatters.

“The largest miniature dollhouse convention” may sound like a silly distinction to some, but it is no joking matter for the sellers. For many, the Tom Bishop show is where they hope to make the bulk of their annual sales.

The Tom Bishop show, as many attendees call it, is considered by its founder, Mr. Bishop, to be the largest dollhouse miniatures event in the world. Numbers appear to support that claim. This year, over 250 vendors traveled from 21 countries and 35 states.

More than 3,000 people attended, filling three large conference rooms, with hallway spillover. The weeklong event, from April 24 to April 30, included ticketed workshops with themes like “Lobsterfest” (focused on making miniature lobster boil accouterments); trade shows; and three days of ticketed shopping for the public….

(19) FULL GROWN DANCERS. Boris Karloff narrated “The Peppermint Twist” on Shindig 1965.

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

Pixel Scroll 3/25/23 Pixel Is That Which, When You Stop Scrolling It, Doesn’t Go Away— Pixel K. Dick

(1) IA WILL CONTINUE LITIGATION. The Internet Archive announced they will appeal yesterday’s district court decision in favor of the publishers, ruling that IA cannot make and distribute entire digital copies of works still under copyright. “The Fight Continues” at Internet Archive Blogs.

Today’s lower court decision in Hachette v. Internet Archive is a blow to all libraries and the communities we serve. This decision impacts libraries across the US who rely on controlled digital lending to connect their patrons with books online. It hurts authors by saying that unfair licensing models are the only way their books can be read online. And it holds back access to information in the digital age, harming all readers, everywhere.

But it’s not over—we will keep fighting for the traditional right of libraries to own, lend, and preserve books. We will be appealing the judgment and encourage everyone to come together as a community to support libraries against this attack by corporate publishers…. 

Statement from Internet Archive founder, Brewster Kahle:
“Libraries are more than the customer service departments for corporate database products. For democracy to thrive at global scale, libraries must be able to sustain their historic role in society—owning, preserving, and lending books.

This ruling is a blow for libraries, readers, and authors and we plan to appeal it.”

(2) HEAD OF THE CLASS. John Garth shares research that will fascinate Tolkien fans: “Making an ass of yourself, with Geoffrey Bache Smith”.

…On the serious side, [Geoffrey Bache] Smith persuaded Tolkien to become a poet and was therefore truly instrumental in turning him into the author we know. Smith sent Tolkien a letter from deepest danger in the trenches of the Great War to declare himself a ‘wild and whole-hearted admirer’ of the first Middle-earth writings, and to urge him to publish them. One of the many ironies of that world war is that although Tolkien could find no publisher for his own poetry, he was able to edit Smith’s poems for publication (A Spring Harvest, 1918). You see, Smith had been killed on the Somme battlefield in 1916, and (as Dr Stuart Lee made clear in his conference paper) there was a demand for good poetry by dead soldiers….

(3) SFF IN THE UKRAINE. Borys Sydiuk shows there was a big turnout for a sff book event in Kyiv today:

Event marketing of the highest level. Max Kidruk, a rising star of Ukrainian Science Fiction, presents his book New Dark Ages: Colony in Kyiv on March 25, 2023.

(4) SUPPORT FOR OUSTING LUKYANENKO AS A CHENGDU GOH. On Facebook, David Gerrold encouraged readers to sign Polish fandom’s petition to remove Sergey Lukyanenko as a GoH of the Chengdu Worldcon: “Open letter to the Board of Worldcon 2023 / List otwarty do Organizatorów Worldconu 2023”. Gerrold’s appeal begins:

…I do not ordinarily share petitions of any kind, and I was reluctant to even share this one.

But, silence equals agreement, so I can’t be silent.

The petition asks the 2023 Worldcon Committee to withdraw their invitation to be a Guest of Honor at the convention to Russian author, Sergei Lukyanenko.

Now, ordinarily, I am against the withdrawal of any invitation. I am skeptical of any campaign anywhere to withdraw an honor, whether it is perceived as deserved or not. That is a situation where everybody looks bad, and I have expressed that thought several times in the past few years, even where I might have neither affection nor respect for the individual in the bullseye.

But there are circumstances where any kind of honor is so out of the question that voices must be raised.

Sergei Lukyanenko has made it clear that he endorses the war crimes that Russia has committed against Ukraine and is willing to endorse further war crimes.

That is so far beyond the normal range of fannish squabbles that I am horrified that the 2023 Worldcon committee has to even think twice on this….

(5) FAKE JOB OFFERS. At Writer Beware, Victoria Strauss issues a warning: “Alert: Scammers Impersonating Video Streaming Services With Fake Job Offers”.

About a year and a half ago, I wrote a post about a job offer scam in which fraudsters impersonated Acorn TV.

The scammers’ M.O.: they messaged writers on Twitter and Instagram, claiming to offer an opportunity to write stories for Acorn TV and earn an improbably large amount of money. If writers expressed interest (and why wouldn’t they), a two-part “texting interview” on Telegram followed, at the end of which the writer was offered a job agreement and description. Although I never heard from anyone who accepted, the presumed goal was to steal personal details, such as Social Security numbers and bank account information.

The same scammers are at it again. This time, they’re impersonating Minno, a Christian streaming service for kids….

(6) WHAT I SAY THREE TIMES IS TRUE. Karen Myers has advice about ways to help readers keep up with the story in “Failures of Memory” at Mad Genius Club.

…There’s no prize to be won by taxing the memory of your suffering readers — they won’t thank you for it. Make it easy on ’em, and you’ll have them in your hand for all the emotional and other effects you want to have, based on what you’ve told them.

Now, this takes some subtlety. The setting of the reminders has to feel natural rather than repetitive, worked casually into the general flow…

(7) FUTURE TENSE. Future Tense and Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination continue their series of short stories about how technology and science will change our lives: “The Preschool,” by Jonathan Parks-Ramage.

2042

Amanda sat at her desk, picking at the same $30 Little Gem salad she ordered daily, suffering a small burning sensation in her gut that was triggered either by acid reflux or the dying embers of her rapidly expiring conscience. Of course, it was standard procedure for her husband to demand that the security firm Dark Metal surveil potential new hires for any of his multibillion-dollar companies, but this was the first time Amanda had been involved in contracting the private intelligence agency herself. Seedlings is your venture, Reid had promised her, even though he’d named himself CEO. I want you to take the lead on this. Amanda was COO of Seedlings and reported to her husband, who dismissed Amanda’s concerns about the legal ramifications of their actions. Worrying about the law was something poor people did, Reid insisted. Besides, she’d never seen Reid do anything that nefarious with this type of information. He was a nice guy. Really….

Theo Zanto, a neuroscience researcher, follows with a response essay, “What can brain-computer interface technologies actually do?”

… Unlike time travel, cybernetics (which refers to the integration of our biology with machines) is one science fiction theme that is part of our experiential reality. We can already control machines with our thoughts—but only with simple commands, like those needed to move a wheelchair or play Pong. Cybernetic devices available today include (but are not limited to) pacemakers, cochlear implants, retinal prostheses, deep brain stimulators, and prosthetic limbs. Current brain-computer interface—or BCI—technologies have enabled us to use computers to decode information from our brains, such as what we have seen or heard, what we intend to say, and what we would like a prosthetic limb to do. With the continual integration of these technologies into our lives, 20th-century sci-fi writers would be surprised at how quickly humans are taking the evolutionary leap from primate to cyborg….

(8) PRETTY BATS ALL IN A ROW. The Guardian made me realize that somewhere not far from me is a movie history treasure house: “Batmobiles, Bugs Bunny and James Dean’s jeans: a day inside the Warner Bros top-secret archive”.

There is an actual Batcave in Los Angeles, where all the old Batmen live. I can’t tell you where: I signed an NDA. But in the most unlikely neighbourhood, in the most obscure location, lies a giant warehouse where Warner Bros keeps a century’s worth of treasures, including the best vehicles from its Batman films going back to 1989.

On a tour of this warehouse, which Warner Bros calls, with a slightly villainous air, the “Corporate Archive”, I saw nine Batmobiles, in a row, gleaming. Each one is a functioning vehicle with an engine, not just an elaborate prop. The most expensive cost close to $1m. It has wing-shaped treads on the tires, so it leaves little bats in its wake.

… Warner Bros, one of the original big five studios from Hollywood’s Golden Age, turns 100 on 4 April 2023, and as part of its centennial celebrations it’s letting reporters inside its secret treasure house. (You can search for the archive on Google: it’s not there.) Warner Bros has produced film or TV classics in every decade – from The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca and 42nd Street, to 2001: A Space Odyssey, to the Looney Tunes and Friends. The corporate archive is where its most infamous props, costumes and set pieces go to die – or rather, to achieve eternal life, watched over in chilled rooms by a team of dedicated archivists….

(9) MEMORY LANE.

2014[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Charles de Lint’s Seven Wild Sisters: A Modern Fairy Tale is part of his Appalachian stories. It was published by Little, Brown in 2014 as a sequel to The Cats of Tanglewood Forest with illustrations by Charles Vess.  It was later done in a limited diction by Subterranean Press with illustrations by again by Charles Vess, this time in black in white. Both are wonderful. 

The series started off in A Circle of Cats, a sparkling affair of a children’s book. Two of the characters in these books will show up in Medicine Road.

I’m writing this under a Vess signed limited edition print of fifty for the cover art for A Circle of Cats

Though Canadian, de Lint does a very nice job of capturing the feel of the Appalachian region. I know he’s a very good friend of Vess who lives in the Appalachian region, so I expect that at least part of his knowledge comes from him. 

I’ve read all of the works, no surprise as I love his fiction deeply. I think as books that they are more warm, more comfortable than anything else he’s done. And there’s nothing wrong with that sort of genre fiction once in a while, is there? 

And now our Beginning… 

There’s those that call it ginseng, but ’round here we just call it ’sang. Don’t know which is right. All I know for sure is that bees and ’sang don’t mix, leastways not in these hills.

Their rivalry’s got something to do with sweetness and light and wildflower pollen set against dark rooty things that live deep in the forest dirt. That’s why bee spirits’ll lead the ’sang poachers to those hidden ’sang beds. It’s an unkindness you’d expect more from the Mean Fairy—you know, the way he shows up at parties after the work’s all done.

‘Course there’s spirits in the hills. How could there not be? You think we’re alone in this world? We have us a very peopled woods, and I’ve seen all kinds in my time, big and small.

The Father of Cats haunts these hills. Most times he’s this big old panther, sleek and black, but the Kickaha say he can look like a handsome, black-haired man, the fancy takes him. I only ever saw him as a panther. Seeing yourself a panther is unusual enough, though I suppose it’s something anybody who spends enough time in these woods can eventually claim. But I heard him talk.

Don’t you smile. I don’t tell lies.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born March 25, 1916 Jean Rogers. Rogers is best remembered for playing Dale Arden in the science fiction serials Flash Gordon and Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars, both released in the Thirties. Kage Baker would’ve have loved them as she was a great fan of such cinema and wrote a series of essays for Tor.com that turned into Ancient Rockets: Treasures and Trainwrecks of the Silent Screen. (Died 1991.)
  • Born March 25, 1920 Patrick Troughton. The Second Doctor of who I’ll confess I’m not the most ardent fan of. The Fourth Doctor is my Doctor. Troughton had a long genre resume starting with Hamlet and Treasure Island early on before proceeding to such works as Scars of Dracula and Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell later on. Telly-wise, I see him on R.U.R. Radius playing a robot, on a Fifties Robin Hood show being that character, and on The Feathered Serpent. This is children’s series set in pre-Columbian Mexico and starring Patrick Troughton as the scheming High Priest Nasca. H’h. (Died 1987.)
  • Born March 25, 1939 D. C. Fontana. Though best known for her work on the first Trek series, she was a story editor and associate producer on the animated series as well. During the 70s, she was staff for such series as Six Million Dollar ManLogan’s Run and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. She later wrote for the fanfic Star Trek: New Voyages series. (Died 2019.)
  • Born March 25, 1942 Jacqueline Lichtenberg, 81. She was nominated at the second DisCon for Best Fan Writer, the year Susan Wood won, and Neffy (National Fantasy Fan Federation Speculative Fiction Award) for Fan of the Year thirty-four years later. She’s written a number of Trek works and more fiction in the Sime/Gen ‘verse. If you’re so interested in the latter, she’s extremely well stocked at the usual suspects.
  • Born March 25, 1947 Paul Levinson, 76. “The Copyright Case” novelette would garner him a much deserved Compuserve group HOMer Award. It was the first work in a series of novels and short stories featuring the fascinating NYPD forensic detective Dr. Phil D’Amato who first appeared in Levinson’s “The Chronology Protection Case” novelette. You can purchase it from the usual digital sources.
  • Born March 25, 1950 Robert O’Reilly, 73. Best known I’d say for his appearance in the Trek franchise for a decade in his recurring role on Next Gen and DS9 as Chancellor Gowron, the leader of the Klingon Empire. He made one further appearance in the Trek verse as Kago-Darr in the Enterprise “Bounty” episode. Other genre series he appeared in include Fantasy IslandKnight RiderIncredible HulkMacGyverMax Headroom and the first version of The Flash. I’ll let y’all tell me what your favorite films with him are.
  • Born March 25, 1958 Amy Pascal, 65. She gets Birthday honors for being responsible for bringing Hugo Award winning Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse to the screen. She also produced Spider-Man: Homecoming and Spider-Man: Far from Home. She is producing the forthcoming Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse sequel, Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse, and the Spider-Man: No Way Home as well.
  • Born March 25, 1964 Kate DiCamillo, 59. She is just being one of six people to win two Newbery Medals, noting the wonderfulness of The Tale of Despereaux and Flora & Ulysses. The first I’ve encountered, the tale of a swords mouse in making, the latter I’ve not. Her Mercy Watson series is about the adventures of a fictional pig, illustrated by Chris Van Dusen.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • Pearls Before Swine reveals something that was powerful enough to kill one character’s romance.
  • Shoe shows a writer attempting what could be called a kind of reverse engineering.

(12) JEOPARDY! [Item by David Goldfarb.] The March 21 episode of Jeopardy! had a whole category in the Double Jeopardy round called “Books: The Future is Now”. The contestants took the category bottom-to-top, so that’s how I’ll give them to you.

$2000: He saw 2024 as a hellish wasteland in his 1969 short story, “A Boy & His Dog” 

Nobody was able to respond “Harlan Ellison”.

$1600: Later editions of this author’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” moved the story from 1992 to 2021

Returning champion Melissa Klapper correctly responded “Dick”.

$1200: In 2025, game shows are to the death in “The Running Man”, written by Stephen King under this pseudonym

This was another triple stumper: nobody knew “Richard Bachman”.

$800: This 1925 novel about a futuristic city in 2026 became an art deco sci-fi silent movie by Fritz Lang

Melissa knew “Metropolis”.

$400: In Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy about colonizing this planet, humans first visit there in 2020

Brandon Anderson (presumably no relation!) knew this one.

(13) STARFLEET RECRUITING OFFICE. How could anyone ever tire of this story? Don’t answer that question. “William Shatner Explains How He Landed ‘Star Trek’ Role as Captain Kirk”.

William Shatner recalled how he managed to land the role of Captain James T. Kirk on the original 1966 Star Trek series.

During the actor’s keynote interview at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, on Thursday, Alamo Drafthouse founder Tim League asked Shatner about how he got his career-changing gig.

“Talent,” Shatner initially deadpanned, to audience applause, but then he told the story.

As all Trek fans know, Jeffrey Hunter was cast in the NBC show’s first attempt at a Star Trek pilot, “The Cage,” as Captain Christopher Pike. “Jeffrey Hunter, good-looking guy, he was quite a name,” Shatner says. “They presented the pilot to NBC and then there’s that moment when the gods — and, in this case, NBC executives — decide to buy or not to buy. To buy, or not to buy, that is the question! They said, ‘No, we’re not going to buy it, because we don’t like it. But we like the idea. So rewrite, recast and we’ll give you the money to do it.’ I’ve never heard of that happening before or since.” (To be fair, it’s actually happened many times since.)

“So they went around looking for a new captain,” Shatner continued. “I was in New York doing some work. They called me and said, ‘Would you come and see the pilot?’ With the idea of me being the captain. And I watched the pilot [and thought], ‘Oh my God, that’s really good. Why didn’t they buy it?’ Yet [the actors] were a little ponderous. Like, [soberly] ‘Helmsman, turn to the Starboard.’ You’ve been out five years in the middle of space, wouldn’t you say, [casually] ‘Hey, George, turn left’? ‘There’s a meteor coming!’… ‘Well, get out of the way!’ So I added a little lightness. Then it sold. And that’s the answer.”…

(14) A CASE OF THE VAPORS. The Guardian reports “Aviation chiefs rejected measures to curb climate impact of jet vapours”.

Airlines and airports opposed measures to combat global warming caused by jet vapour trails that evidence suggests account for more than half of the aviation industry’s climate impact, new documents reveal.

The industry argued in government submissions that the science was not “robust” enough to justify reduction targets for these non-CO2 emissions. Scientists say the climate impact of vapour trails, or contrails, has been known for more than two decades, with one accusing the industry of a “typical climate denialist strategy”.

While carbon emissions from jet engines contribute to global heating, research suggests the contrails formed when water vapour and soot particles form into ice crystals have an even greater impact. These human-made clouds trap heat in the atmosphere that would otherwise escape into space.

… Milan Klöwer, a climate scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said airlines were adopting a “typical climate denialist strategy” by overstating the level of uncertainty about non-COeffects. He said: “Even in the best case, they roughly double the effect of COemissions on the climate.”…

(15) LOOK OUT BELOW. Science reports a study showing “Earth at higher risk of big asteroid strike, satellite data suggest”.

Using a new catalog of high-resolution satellite imagery, James Garvin and his colleagues identified large rings around three impact craters and one probable one that are 1 million years old or younger. To Garvin, the rings imply the craters are tens of kilometers wider, and record far more violent events, than researchers had thought.

If Garvin is right—no sure bet—each impact resulted in an explosion some 10 times more violent than the largest nuclear bomb in history, enough to blow part of the planet’s atmosphere into space. Although not as destructive as the impact that killed off the dinosaurs, the strikes would have perturbed the global climate and caused local extinctions.

It’s an extraordinary claim, as Garvin himself admits. “We haven’t proven anything,” he says. Without fieldwork to back up the conclusions, impact researchers are wary of the circles Garvin and his colleagues have drawn on maps—especially because they defy other estimates of impact rates. “I’m skeptical,” says Bill Bottke, a planetary dynamicist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “I want to see a lot more before I believe it.”

Because water and wind quickly erase most impact craters on Earth, researchers estimate impact rates by tallying crater sizes and ages on the Moon. They also study the size of asteroids in orbit near Earth—potential future impactors. Based on those two methods, researchers estimate that an asteroid or comet 1 kilometer wide or larger hits the planet every 600,000 to 700,000 years.

The new study, however, suggests that in the past million years alone, four kilometer-size objects pummeled the continents—and, given that two-thirds of the planet is covered by water, that could mean up to a dozen struck Earth in total, Bottke says. Anna Łosiak, a crater researcher at the Polish Academy of Sciences, doubts the ringlike features identified by Garvin’s team are truly crater rims. If they somehow are, she says, “that would be very scary because it would mean we really don’t understand what’s going on at all—and that there are a lot of space rocks that may come and make a mess.”…

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

Pixel Scroll 3/18/23 Pixel’s Cat, Neither Scrolling Nor Not Scrolling, You Decide

(1) DE LINT AND HARRIS STILL NEED SUPPORT. The Ottawa Citizen profiled MaryAnn Harris’s illness and fundraiser in “A tick bite, the Powassan virus, and MaryAnn’s struggle”.

… “They didn’t know what was wrong,” said Charles, a popular author of fantasy novels, a three-time Aurora Award winner, and a member of Canada’s Science Fiction Writers Hall of Fame. “They assumed it was a virus of some sort. It looked like they had 70 little machines feeding her different kinds of antibiotics.”

Today, more than a year and a half after falling ill, MaryAnn hasn’t been back home. She still breathes with a ventilator and remains nearly paralyzed.

The culprit? A tick bite that transmitted the rare but increasingly common Powassan virus, a potentially deadly pathogen that caused encephalitis.

“We were never aware of the bite. We never even saw the tick,” Charles said. MaryAnn fell ill during the lockdown and the couple hadn’t travelled anywhere.

They figure she picked up the tick bite either in the yard of their Alta Vista area home or during one of their frequent walks around the community gardens in Pleasant Park. And it’s hardly the only question that can never be answered.

“If she was going to get sick,” Charles asks, “why did it have to be something so rare?”

Powassan virus was first identified in 1958 when it infected and killed a young boy in Powassan, Ont., on the outskirts of North Bay, 200 km northwest of Ottawa. Until 1998, there had been only 27 cases in all of North America. Since then, the numbers have been rising: 5-10 cases a year in the U.S. from 2010 to 2015; and 25-30 a year since. Since 2017, there have been 21 cases in Canada. Most infections occur in the northeastern U.S., Eastern Canada and the Great Lakes region.

…The couple — Charles is 71 and MaryAnn is 70 — have been together for 47 years and married for 42. With their guitar and banjo, they are well-known in Ottawa’s folk and bluegrass music scene.Charles’s novels, many of them set in the fantasy city of Newford, have a worldwide following. MaryAnn is his business manager, editor and illustrator. Her illness has left Charles with little time to write since he now spends five hours a day at Saint-Vincent Hospital, six days a week. He pays for a caregiver on the seventh.

Friends, family and fans have rallied around the couple. Musicians have visited the hospital to play for MaryAnn. A GoFundMe started to help pay for the many expenses they now face has topped $90,000. Fans have also subscribed to Charles’s Patreon account to help support his writing.

One fan, Julie Bartel, manages the GoFundMe and posts regular updates on MaryAnn’s progress on social media. Bartel, 52, grew up in tiny Orem, Utah, and as a teenager immersed herself in Charles’s fantasy novels….

The GoFundMe is here: “Harris – de Lint Recovery Fund”.

See also Julie Bartel’s File 770 post “More Information About the Harris / de Lint Fundraiser”.

(2) DOUBLE THE DISPLEASURE. Victoria Strauss gets busy in “One Week, Two Fakes: American Booksellers Federation and The Acquisitions Guild” at Writer Beware.

As you’ll know if you’re a regular reader of this blog (and from your own experience if you’ve ever self-published), we are currently in the midst of a tsunami of scam companies that aggressively solicit authors with out-of-the-blue emails and phone calls touting phony services–“endorsement” to Big 5 publishers or major film studios, “nominations” for representation at book fairs or other costly-but-useless PR strategies, and more.

These ripoff artists often seek to boost their credibility–and stroke writers’ egos–by naming some made-up organization or group that has recommended or otherwise validated the author’s book. The Guild of Literary Agents, Book Acquisitions Guild of America, Book Acquisition Society, The Literary Arts Organization, Affiliation of Creator Agents, Hollywood Database, Literary Review of Books…I could go on, but you get the picture. Despite the official-sounding names, none of these so-called organizations (which I’ve seen referenced in multiple scam solicitations) exist–as even a cursory websearch will confirm.

Scammers, of course, are counting on writers not to check. But writers have become much more savvy about solicitation scams than they used to be–partly because there are now so many of them, and partly because there are so many warnings about them. This has caused some predators to up their game, attempting to create credibility for their made-up endorsement organizations by giving them actual websites.

I ran across two of these this week….

They are the American Booksellers Federation and The Acquisitions Guild.

(3) ROWLING INTERVIEW PODCAST CONTINUES. The Hollywood Reporter covers episode 5 of The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling podcast under the headline “J.K. Rowling: Criticism of Trans Stance Hit Different Than Christians”.

J.K. Rowling says that when it comes to the backlash she’s received around her Harry Potter books and her personal stances on the rights and identities of trans people, criticism from her “allies” hit differently than conservatives claiming she was promoting witchcraft.

“If it’s coming from people that you would, well, you would have thought were allies? Yes, that’s absolutely going to hit differently, but I don’t hold myself —” Rowling said before The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling host Megan Phelps-Roper cut her off in the podcast’s latest episode. “I would assume we share certain values. So yeah, that hits differently. Of course, it hits differently.”…

The podcast’s fifth episode, titled “The Tweets,” dropped March 14 and is largely dedicated to Rowling expounding on the motivation behind her past social media messages and essay regarding her position on trans women as women and their presence in women’s spaces.

“It is very biblical language that is used of women who say, ‘You know what? I think any measure that makes it easier for predators to get at women and girls is a bad idea,’” Rowling said of critics, who have said her refusal to acknowledge trans women as women is “evil.” She continued, “There are plenty of women who don’t even … identify themselves as feminists who are very concerned about this.”

During the episode, various voices, including Phelps-Roper, repeatedly read unattributed tweets allegedly sent to Rowling. But speaking to her own initial tweet in 2019, which ultimately sparked the first major wave of criticism against the author over her support of a U.K. woman embroiled in an employment case around language and discrimination in the workplace, Rowling said she notified her team ahead of time.

“I drafted the tweet, and then I was considerate enough to phone my management team and say, ‘You cannot argue me out of this,’” the author explained. “And I read out what I was about to say because I felt they needed warning because I knew it was going to cause a massive storm.”

At another point, she added that she “absolutely knew” that people who love her books would be “deeply unhappy” with her, but that “time will tell whether I’ve got this wrong. I can only say that I’ve thought about it deeply and hard and long, and I’ve listened — I promise — to the other side.”

On the larger response to her public stances, the author describes “fury and incomprehension” on one side and “a ton of Potter fans who were grateful that I had said what I said” on the other after sharing her first and subsequent tweets. But Rowling ultimately questions the motivations of the Harry Potter fans who didn’t stick by her. “What’s interesting is the fans that have found themselves in positions of power online, did they feel they needed to take this position because they themselves had followers? Possibly, I don’t know,” she said….

(4) THESE FANS LITERALLY KEEP WATCHING THE SKIES. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] In Nature, “Fan astronomers show pros how to help in asteroid collision”. “Astronomy, like other scientific fields, continues to benefit from working scientists collaborating with amateur colleagues.”

When NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft slammed into an asteroid on purpose last September, many telescopes were trained on this one-of-a-kind celestial event. Some were operated by teams of amateur astronomers — skilled skywatchers for whom astronomy is not their full-time day job (or, more accurately, night job). Three such teams on France’s Réunion island in the Indian Ocean, plus one in Nairobi, managed to watch the impact in real time.

These skywatchers are among the authors of a study in Nature that describes how the asteroid, named Dimorphos, became temporarily brighter and redder as the spacecraft hit it. One of five papers about the impact published in Nature15, it describes a real-time view of a cosmic collision — similar to that when Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 slammed into Jupiter in July 1994.

(5) JERRY SAMUELS (1938-2023). Singer Jerry Samuels, died March 10. Under the name Napoleon XIV, he recorded the 1966 novelty hit “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!” Listeners to Doctor Demento are likely familiar with it.

(6) MEMORY LANE.

2018[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

For these Beginnings I usually prefer to use the first novel in a series, so why use the twenty-first of twenty-three novels published to date? 

Because RobicheauxA Novel, published by Simon & Schuster five years ago, thirty-one years after the first novel by James Lee Burke in the series, The Neon Rain, came out, has one of the best Beginnings of all. 

It won’t spoil much to tell you that the series center around Dave Robicheaux, a former homicide detective in the New Orleans Police Department. He now lives in New Iberia, Louisiana, and he works as a detective for the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Office.

I’ve read around half the books so far. It’s a quite brilliant series where the characters, both principal and secondary, continue to evolve as the series goes on, the stories are complex if usually quite violent and not for the squeamish. And the setting? The story goes often into the squalid side of New Orleans and other places just as disgusting. Need I say more? 

Oh, and Will Patton narrates the series quite amazingly in terms of giving each character their own unique voice. If you listen to books, you’ll really enjoy these.

Now here’s our very interesting Beginning…

LIKE AN EARLY nineteenth-century poet, when I have melancholy moments and feel the world is too much for us and that late and soon we lay waste to our powers in getting and spending, I’m forced to pause and reflect upon my experiences with the dead and the hold they exert on our lives.

This may seem a macabre perspective on one’s life, but at a certain point it seems to be the only one we have. Mortality is not kind, and do not let anyone tell you it is. If there is such a thing as wisdom, and I have serious doubts about its presence in my own life, it lies in the acceptance of the human condition and perhaps the knowledge that those who have passed on are still with us, out there in the mist, showing us the way, sometimes uttering a word of caution from the shadows, sometimes visiting us in our sleep, as bright as a candle burning inside a basement that has no windows. 

On a winter morning, among white clouds of fog out at Spanish Lake, I would see the boys in butternut splashing their way through the flooded cypress, their muskets held above their heads, their equipment tied with rags so it wouldn’t rattle. I was standing no more than ten feet from them, although they took no notice of me, as though they knew I had not been born yet, and their travail and sacrifice were not mine to bear. 

Their faces were lean from privation, as pale as wax, their hair uncut, the rents in their uniforms stitched clumsily with string. Their mouths were pinched, their eyes luminous with caution. The youngest soldier, a drummer boy, could not have been older than twelve. On one occasion I stepped into the water to join them. Even then, none acknowledged my presence. The drummer boy stumbled and couldn’t right himself, struggling with the leather strap around his neck and the weight of his drum. I reached out to help him and felt my hand and arm sink through his shoulder. A shaft of sunlight pierced the canopy, turning the fog into white silk; in less than a second the column was gone. 

Long ago, I ceased trying to explain events such as these to either myself or others. Like many my age, I believe people in groups are to be feared and that arguing with others is folly and the knowledge of one generation cannot be passed down to the next. Those may seem cynical sentiments, but there are certain truths you keep inside you and do not defend lest you cheapen and then lose them altogether. Those truths have less to do with the dead than the awareness that we are no different from them, that they are still with us and we are still with them, and there is no afterlife but only one life, a continuum in which all time occurs at once, like a dream inside the mind of God. 

Why should an old man thrice widowed dwell on things that are not demonstrable and have nothing to do with a reasonable view of the world? Because only yesterday, on a broken sidewalk in a shabby neighborhood at the bottom of St. Claude Avenue, in the Lower Ninth Ward of St. Bernard Parish, under a colonnade that was still twisted out of shape by Katrina, across from a liquor store with barred windows that stood under a live oak probably two hundred years old, I saw a platoon of Confederate infantry march out of a field to the tune of “Darling Nelly Gray” and disappear through the wall of a gutted building and not exit on the other side.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born March 18, 1888 Alexander Leydenfrost. As an illustrator, he briefly worked for Planet Stories before being signed by Life magazine where the money was better. But his quite brief tenure at Planet Stories is credited with the creation of the enduring cliche Bug-Eyed Monster as that’s what his illustrations showed. (Died 1961.)
  • Born March 18, 1926 Peter Graves. Star of Mission Impossible and the short lived Australian-filmed Mission Impossible which if you’ve not seen it you should as it’s damn good. I’m reasonably certain his first genre role was on Red Planet Mars playing Chris Cronyn. Later roles included Gavin Lewis on The Invaders, Major Noah Cooper on Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Doug Paul Martin in Killers from Space and Paul Nelson on It Conquered the World. It’s worth noting that a number of his films are featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000 series. (Died 2010.)
  • Born March 18, 1932 John Updike. It might surprise you to learn that there are two Eastwick novels, The Witches of Eastwick and The Widows of Eastwick, the latter set some three decades after the first novel ended. He wrote a number of other genre-friendly novels including The Centaur, Brazil and Toward the End of Time.  (Died 2009.)
  • Born March 18, 1947 Drew Struzan, 76. Artist known for his more than a hundred and fifty movie posters which include films in Back to the Future, the Indiana Jones, and Star Wars film franchises. In addition, he designed the original Industrial Light & Magic logo for Lucas. My favorite posters? Back to the FutureThe Goonies and The Dark Crystal.
  • Born March 18, 1950 J. G. Hertzler, 73. He’s best known for his role on Deep Space Nine as the Klingon General (and later Chancellor) Martok. He co-authored with Jeff Lang, Left Hand of Destiny, Book 1, and Left Hand of Destiny, Book 2, which chronicle the life of his character. His very TV first role was a genre one, to wit on Quantum Leap as Weathers Farrington in the “Sea Bride – June 3, 1954” episode. Setting aside DS9, he’s been in ZorroHighlanderThe Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of SupermanCharmedRoswell and the Enterprise series;  for film genre work, I see The Redeemer: Son of SatanTreasure Island: The Adventure Begins and Prelude to Axanar (yet another piece of fanfic). In addition, he’s done a lot of video game voice acting, the obvious Trek work but such franchises as BioShock 2The Golden Compass and Injustice: Gods Among Us. 
  • Born March 18, 1959 Luc Besson, 64. Oh, The Fifth Element, one of my favorite genre films. There’s nothing about it that I don’t like. I’ve not seen Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets and comments leave me disinclined to do so. The Transporter is not genre but I recommend it as a great film none the less.
  • Born March 18, 1960 Richard Biggs. Another way too young death. On Babylon 5 as he appeared as Dr. Stephen Franklin, and reprised the role in the final aired episode of Crusade, “Each Night I Dream of Home”. Other genre roles included playing Roger Garrett on Tremors, Hawkes In The Alien Within, An Unnamed Reporter on Beauty and the Beast, Dr. Thomson on an episode of The Twilight Zone and a Process Server in an episode of The Magical World of Disney. (Died 2004.)
  • Born March 18, 1961 James Davis Nicoll, 62. A freelance game and genre reviewer. A first reader for SFBC as well. Currently he’s a blogger on Dreamwidth and Facebook, and an occasional columnist on Tor.com. In 2014, he started his website, which is dedicated to his book reviews of works old and new; and which later added the highly entertaining Young People Read Old SFF, where that group read prior to Eighties SF and fantasy, and Nicoll and his collaborators comment on the their reactions.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

  • Tom Gauld is at it again.

(9) FALLING BEHIND. The New York Times reports on “How Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant Lost the A.I. Race”.

On a rainy Tuesday in San Francisco, Apple executives took the stage in a crowded auditorium to unveil the fifth-generation iPhone. The phone, which looked identical to the previous version, had a new feature that the audience was soon buzzing about: Siri, a virtual assistant.

Scott Forstall, then Apple’s head of software, pushed an iPhone button to summon Siri and prodded it with questions. At his request, Siri checked the time in Paris (“8:16 p.m.,” Siri replied), defined the word “mitosis” (“Cell division in which the nucleus divides into nuclei containing the same number of chromosomes,” it said) and pulled up a list of 14 highly rated Greek restaurants, five of them in Palo Alto, Calif.

“I’ve been in the A.I. field for a long time, and this still blows me away,” Mr. Forstall said.

That was 12 years ago. Since then, people have been far from blown away by Siri and competing assistants that are powered by artificial intelligence, like Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant. The technology has largely remained stagnant, and the talking assistants have become the butt of jokes, including in a 2018 “Saturday Night Live” sketch featuring a smart speaker for seniors.

The tech world is now gushing over a different kind of virtual assistant: chatbots. These A.I.-powered bots, such as ChatGPT and the new ChatGPT Plus from the San Francisco company OpenAI, can improvise answers to questions typed into a chat box with alacrity. People have used ChatGPT to handle complex tasks like coding software, drafting business proposals and writing fiction.

And ChatGPT, which uses A.I. to guess what word comes next, is rapidly improving. A few months ago, it couldn’t write a proper haiku; now it can do so with gusto. On Tuesday, OpenAI unveiled its next-generation A.I. engine, GPT-4, which powers ChatGPT.

The excitement around chatbots illustrates how Siri, Alexa and other voice assistants — which once elicited similar enthusiasm — have squandered their lead in the A.I. race….

(10) STAR TREK INSIGHTS. Rachel Stott is on to something here.

(11) VIDEO OF THE DAY. The Library of America’s panel “Back to the Future Is Female!” can now be viewed on YouTube.

From Pulp Era pioneers to the radical innovators of the 1960s and ’70s, visionary women writers have been a transformative force in American science fiction. For Women’s History Month, acclaimed SF authors Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Pamela Sargent, and Sheree Renée Thomas join Lisa Yaszek, editor of LOA’s The Future Is Female!, for a conversation about the writers who smashed the genre’s gender barrier to create worlds and works that remain revolutionary.

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

Pixel Scroll 3/7/23 Some People Call Me Morlock, ’Cause I Speak Of The Pixeltus Of Love

(1) RUSSIAN SF PODCAST. [Item by Nickpheas.] Mark Galeotti is a British expert on Russian affairs, with a podcast series “In Moscow’s Shadows”. He’s also an SF fan and roleplayer, having written for RuneQuest and self published a Mythic Russia game, all sadly out of print as far as I can tell.

One of his latest podcasts has a segment on themes in Russian SF and how they shed light on the thinking of the Putin regime. In Moscow’s Shadows 91: “Russian Fantasies – Putin’s address to the nation and the lessons from Russian science fiction”.

The SF bit starts about two thirds of the way in. There is obviously much to say about Kremlin infighting and the war in Ukraine first.

(2) GRIM AND BEAR IT. “Margaret Atwood on Loss and Storytelling” – an interview at Vanity Fair to promote her new story collection, Old Babes in the Wood.

Vanity Fair: While reading the collection, I was reminded of how many funny moments you weave into your writing, regardless of how grim the circumstances.

Margaret Atwood: In Nova Scotia, there’s a tradition of deadpan lying—so, to see if you can get people to believe you—but they have that kind of humor. I think it’s kind of Scottish. It’s not very puritan New England, particularly, although a bunch of the family came from there. Some of them came from Scotland, and some of them came from Wales, and some of them came from France because they were Huguenots who got kicked out of France in the 18th century. We used to laugh a lot as kids at inappropriate things, and maybe it comes from that. But I think a lot of people are actually like that. Things are grim, but they’re not completely hopeless.

Some of the grimmest circumstances can have an absurd bent to them, maybe.

Without a doubt. There’s a very thin line between the absolutely horrific and the slapstick comedy. Pie in the face. There used to be a form of theater called Grand Guignol, which was horror theater, but it was funny too. It’s funny if it’s not happening to you—or anybody you love. But I don’t know, there’s something about rich men in fur coats slipping on a banana peel that’s just funny. Of course, it’s different if it’s a poor person slipping on a banana peel. I think things that violate expectations—or, as somebody said to me long ago, in the English-seaside-postcard tradition, the wife hitting the husband over the head with the rolling pin is funny, but the husband hitting the wife over the head with the rolling pin, that’s a different thing.

(3) SHAPERS OF WORLDS KICKSTARTER COMING MARCH 14. Edward Willett, Saskatchewan-based award-winning author of more than sixty books of science fiction, fantasy, and non-fiction for readers of all ages, is launching a Kickstarter campaign on March 14, 2023, to fundthe fourth annual anthology featuring some of the top writers of science fiction and fantasy working today, all of whom were guests on his Aurora Award-winning podcast, The Worldshapers (www.theworldshapers.com). The Kickstarter campaign can be found here: “Shapers of Worlds Volume IV by Edward Willett”.

Shapers of Worlds Volume IV will feature new fiction from David Boop, Michaelbrent Collings, Roy M. Griffis, Sarah A. Hoyt, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Noah Lemelson, Mark Leslie Lefebvre, Edward M. Lerner, David Liss, Gail Z. Martin, Joshua Palmatier, Richard Paolinelli, Jean-Louis Trudel, James van Pelt, Garon Whited, and Edward Willett, plus reprints by James Kennedy, R.S. Mellette, and Lavie Tidhar. Among those authors are several international bestsellers, as well as winners and nominees for every major science fiction and fantasy literary award.

All of the authors were guests during the fourth year of The Worldshapers, where Willett interviews other science fiction and fantasy authors about their creative process.

Backers’ rewards offered by the authors include numerous e-books, signed paperback and hardcover books, Tuckerizations (a backer’s name used as a character name), commissioned artwork, one-on-one writing/publishing consultations, audiobooks, opportunities for online chats with authors, short-story critiques, and more.

The Kickstarter campaign goal is $12,000 CDN. Most of those funds will go to pay the authors, with the rest going to reward fulfillment, primarily the editing, layout, and printing of the book, which will be published this fall in both ebook and trade paperback formats by Willett’s publishing company, Shadowpaw Press (www.shadowpawpress.com). This year, there’s a special stretch goal: once the campaign reaches $17,000, $5,000 over the goal, the anthology will be illustrated, with a new black-and-white drawing for each story from Calgary, Alberta artist Wendi Nordell, who has illustrated numerous books for regional publishers including Edward Willett’s science-fiction and fantasy poetry collection, I Tumble Through the Diamond Dust. [Based on a press release.]

(4) HELP WANTED. Karl Kotas hopes you can remember a book title for him.

I am trying to recall a science fiction first contact novel, possibly by a woman writer, which I read some decades ago. Normally, I have had luck searching online via sites like substack and AskMetafilter but so far I have failed. 

So, let me cut to the chase and tell you what I remember:

The book began with a scene in Iceland or Finland — a man meets some children who claim to have found an elf, a very Nordic elf. The man meets this so-called elf and realizes he is not human.

As it turns out, this elf came from a ship in orbit with a strange matriarchal system system with an extreme sexual dimorphism where the females are giant and the males are tiny..

What came to my mind then are those deep sea  angler fish where the females are enormous with tiny tadpolish males permanently joined to them at the cloaca. 

Fairly fast, these matriarchs took a look at the ecological damage being done to the earth via overpopulation and relentless development and broadcast an ultimatum to the entire human race to shape up or else.

One of the results of this broadcast is no children were conceived or born thereafter for years. This was done via the broadcast or some sort of unexplained handwavium.

Later on the man is aboard the ship and observes the results. Cars and trucks have disappeared to be replaced by railroads and North America was rewilded back to the 17th century level with large herds of bison roaming the vast open plains.

Does this ring a bell to anyone here?

(6) MEMORY LANE.

2013[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

So let’s  talk about Charles de Lint’s The Cats of Tanglewood Forest which is the sequel to children’s children’s book he did with Charles Vess, A Circle of Cats. Without giving away anything, the themes are the same, just expanded to a novel length work.

I love everything that de Lint has done and this is no exception, though is is quite different from the urban fantasy work of his that you’re likely to be familiar with. This is based is the Appalachian myths that I assume he and Vess talked about. He sort of first used them in Someplace to Be Flying, but they were moved to Newford which was deliberately located nowhere. This story, and related stories are located in the Appalachian region.

Needless to say it too is illustrated by Vess. Oh is it. Illustrations beyond counting. Of Lillian, of cats, of other creatures, of the Forest. You get the idea. 

It’s warm, comfortable story with believable characters, human and otherwise. That’s all I’ll say. I is available from the usual suspects but I recommend you buy the hardcover edition instead as it’s a truly remarkable book, one that you’ll cherish. 

Now here’s its Beginning…

Once there was a forest of hickory and beech, sprucy-pine, birch and oak. It was called the Tanglewood Forest. Starting at the edge of a farmer’s pasture, it seemed to go on forever, uphill and down. There were a few abandoned homesteads to be found in its reaches, overgrown and uninhabitable now, and deep in a hidden clearing there was a beech tree so old that only the hills themselves remembered the days when it was a sapling. 

Above that grandfather tree, the forest marched up to the hilltops in ever-denser thickets of rhododendrons and brush until nothing stood between the trees and stars. Below it, a creek ran along the bottom of a dark narrow valley, no more than a trickle in some places, wider in others. Occasionally the water tumbled down rough staircases of stone and rounded rocks. 

On a quiet day, when the wind was still, the creek could be heard all the way up to where the old beech stood. Under its branches cats would come to dream and be dreamed. Black cats and calicos, white cats and marmalade ones, too. Sometimes they exchanged gossip or told stories about L’il Pater, the trickster cat. More often they lay in a drowsy circle around the fat trunk of the ancient beech that spread its boughs above them. Then one of them might tell a story of the old and powerful Father of Cats, and though the sun might still be high and the day warm, they would shiver and groom themselves with nervous tongues. 

But they hadn’t yet gathered the day the orphan girl fell asleep among the beech’s roots, nestling in the weeds and long grass like the gangly, tousle-haired girl she was. 

Her name was Lillian Kindred.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born March 7, 1934 Gray Morrow. He was an illustrator of comics and paperback books. He is co-creator of the Marvel Comics’ Man-Thing with writers Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway, and co-creator of DC Comics’ El Diablo with writer Robert Kanigher. If you can find a copy, The Illustrated Roger Zelazny he did in collaboration with Zelazny is most excellent. ISFDB notes that he and James Lawrence did a novel called Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.  No idea if it was tied into the series which came out the next year. (Died 2001.)
  • Born March 7, 1942 Paul Preuss, 81. I know I’ve read all of the Venus Prime series written by him off the Clarke stories. I am fairly sure I read all of them when I was in Sri Lanka where they were popular.  I don’t think I’ve read anything else by him. 
  • Born March 7, 1944 Stanley Schmidt, 79. Between 1978 and 2012 he served as editor of Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine, an amazing feat by any standard! He was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Professional Editor every year from 1980 through 2006 (its final year), and for the Hugo Award for Best Editor Short Form every year from 2007 (its first year) through 2013 with him winning in 2013.  He’s also an accomplished author with more than a dozen to his name. I know I’ve read him but I can’t recall which novels in specific right now. 
  • Born March 7, 1945 Elizabeth Moon, 78. I’ll let JJ have the say on her: “I’ve got all of the Serrano books waiting for when I’m ready to read them. But I have read all of the Kylara Vatta books — the first quintology which are Vatta’s War, and the two that have been published so far in Vatta’s Peace. I absolutely loved them — enough that I might be willing to break my ‘no re-reads’ rule to do the first 5 again at some point. Vatta is a competent but flawed character, with smarts and courage and integrity, and Moon has built a large, complex universe to hold her adventures. The stories also feature a secondary character who is an older woman; age-wise she is ‘elderly,’ but in terms of intelligence and capability, she is extremely smart and competent — and such characters are pretty rare in science fiction, and much to be appreciated.” 
  • Born March 7, 1955 Michael Jan Friedman, 68. Author of nearly sixty books of genre fiction, mostly media tie-ins. He’s written nearly forty Trek novels alone covering DS9Starfleet AcademyNext GenOriginal Series and Enterprise. He’s also done work with Star Wars, AliensPredatorsLois & Clark: The New Adventures of SupermanBatman and Robin and many others. He’s also done quite a bit of writing for DC, mostly media-ins but not all as I see SupermanFlash and Justice League among his credits.
  • Born March 7, 1967 Ari Berk, 56. Folklorist, artist, writer and scholar of literature and comparative myth. Damn great person as well. I doubt you’ve heard of The Runes of Elfland he did with Brian Froud so I’ve linked to the Green Man review of it here. He also had a review column in the now defunct Realms of Fantasy that had such articles as “Back Over the Wall – Charles Vess Revisits the World of Stardust”.

(8) HOBBLING THE HUBBLE. The New York Times reports “Hubble Telescope Faces Threat From SpaceX and Other Companies’ Satellites”.

Private companies are launching thousands of satellites that are photobombing the telescope — producing long bright streaks and curves of light that can be impossible to remove. And the problem is only getting worse.

study, published Thursday in the journal Nature Astronomy, reveals an increase in the percentage of images recorded by the Hubble that are spoiled by passing satellites. And the data goes only through 2021. Thousands more satellites have been launched since then by SpaceX and other companies, and many more are expected to go to orbit in the years ahead, affecting the Hubble and potentially other telescopes in space.

“We’re going to be living with this problem. And astronomy will be impacted,” said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who was not involved in the study. “There will be science that can’t be done. There will be science that’s significantly more expensive to do. There will be things that we miss.”…

(9) SOME GOOD NEWS ABOUT AI. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] An article on the Nature website explains how an artificial-intelligence model trialled in Chile’s Atacama Desert could one day detect signs of life on other planets. “Astrobiologists train an AI to find life on Mars”.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning could revolutionize the search for life on other planets. But before these tools can tackle distant locales such as Mars, they need to be tested here on Earth.

A team of researchers have successfully trained an AI to map biosignatures — any feature which provides evidence of past or present life — in a three-square-kilometre area of Chile’s Atacama Desert. The AI substantially reduced the area the team needed to search and boosted the likelihood of finding living organisms in one of the driest places on the planet. The results were reported on 6 March in Nature Astronomy…

….Ultimately, Warren-Rhodes says she would like to see a comprehensive database of different Mars analogues that could feed valuable information to mission scientists planning their next sampling run. Her team’s advance, she adds, might appear “deceptively simple” to anyone who grew up watching Star Trek explorers scanning alien worlds with a tricorder. But, it represents an important advance in extraterrestrial research, in which biology has often lagged behind chemistry and geology. Imagine, for instance, virtual-reality headsets that feed mission scientists real-time data as they scan a surface, using a rover’s ‘eyes’ to direct their activities. “To have our team make one of these first steps towards reliably detecting biosignatures using AI is exciting,” she says. “It’s really a momentous time.”

Primary research paper abstract here here.

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