(0) Scroll lite today because I will be attending a dinner to celebrate my daughter’s graduation with a Master’s in Social Work. Congratulations Sierra!
(1) SANFORD HONORED AT MO*CON. [Item by Chris Barkley.] On May 3, 2025 Hugo Award Finalist Jason Sanford (Best Fan Writer and Best Related Work) was the recipient of the Sara J. Larson Award at MoCon 2025 in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Mr. Sanford, the editor and primary reporter of Genre Grapevine, was honored by MoCon Chair and bestselling author Maurice Broaddus for “his continuing support of the Indianapolis science fiction community.”
The Sara J. Larson Award is named for a beloved member of the Indianapolis sf fan community and a enthusiastic supporter of MoCon, who passed away in March 2012. More information about the event is on Maurice Broaddus’ blog: MO*CON. All photos by Chris M. Barkley.
(2) NNEDI OKORAFOR’S WORLD SERVICE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The BBC’s World Service is a great early morning listen to on sleepless nights and last night was a joy with a programme on three writers, the third of whom was with the SF writer Nnedi Okorafor. Her interview revealed that during her youth she competitively played tennis facing occasional racial slurs on the court as some inferior opponents tried to put her off her game. However, her sports ambitions were curtailed during an operation to correct her scoliosis induced spinal curvature which left her (fortunately temporarily) paralysed from the waist down. It was this time that got her writing stories and then novels and then Marvel comics came calling. Her novels include Lagoon, The Book of Phoenix and recently Death of the Author.
“Becoming a writer was not the most straightforward journey for Nnedi Okorafor. Before her literary success she was a talented tennis player and dreamt of turning pro. However following a diagnosis of scoliosis, routine surgery to her spine left her temporarily paralysed. Confined to her hospital bed, Nnedi found solace in her vivid imagination and began writing for the first time. It was the start of a highly successful career as an author and led to a request from Marvel to write some of their comics. Over the years she has written characters including Spiderman, the X-Men and the Avengers. Nnedi is also the first woman to write the character of T’Challa – the Black Panther, as well as his tech-loving sister, Shuri.”
She was the last author covered so skip forward two-thirds in the programme that can be accessed here.
(3) AO3 MAKES NYT. “Did a TV Show Hurt You? ‘Fix-Its’ Offer Justice” – the New York Times explains how (story behind a paywall.)
This article includes spoilers for “Daredevil: Born Again,” “Severance,” “The Last of Us” and “The White Lotus.”
As a longtime player of the Last of Us video game series, Sam Gaitan knew the death was coming. Still, the brutal murder of Joel in a recent episode of the HBO adaptation hit her hard. It was already midnight when she went on Tumblr to read fan reactions. Then, in a fit of inspiration, she started writing.
“I was a wreck, and I needed to get those strong emotions out,” Gaitan, a tattooist and artist, said in a recent phone interview. By 5 a.m., she had written 3,761 words featuring Joel and Red, an original character Gaitan had previously created, and an alternative scenario that spares Joel from his onscreen fate.
Writing under the alias oh_persephone, she posted the story on AO3, an online repository for fan fiction and other fan-created art, and crashed until her dogs woke her up the next morning.
“It probably wasn’t the most coherent thing I’ve written,” she said, laughing. “But I figured other people could use it as much as I did.”
Gaitan’s urge to change the narrative is a familiar one among a subset of fans who write fan fiction, or fanfic, original stories that borrow characters, plots and settings from established media properties and are published mostly online, on sites like AO3, Tumblr and FanFiction.net.
Increasingly, these fans are taking matters into their own hands by writing “fix-it fics,” or simply “fix-its,” which attempt to right the perceived wrongs of a beloved work — and often provide some measure of emotional succor.
“The Last of Us,” which killed off its male lead surprisingly early in a hotly anticipated second season — a lead played, no less, by “the internet’s daddy,” Pedro Pascal — has proved to be particularly generative. Real numbers can be hard to track because of inconsistent labeling, but more than 50 “The Last of Us” stories tagged “Fix-It” were uploaded to AO3 in the week after Joel’s death, ranging from about 300 words to almost 80,000.
But if a TV writer can dream of it, a fan can feel betrayed by it: Fix-its have appeared in recent months for series like “Daredevil: Born Again,” “Severance” and “The White Lotus,” all of which contained whiplash-inducing plot twists….
(4) L J SMITH OBIT ON BBC RADIO 4. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The passing of the author L. J. Smith is one of those commemorated in BBC Radio 4’s Last Word. The author of the ‘Vampire Diaries’ series, she inspired girls to be determined and self-reliant. The Vampire Diaries were adapted into a CW Network series that lasted for eight seasons
You can access the programme here.
(5) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Lis Carey.]
Forbidden Planet film (1956)
By Lis Carey: In 1956, Forbidden Planet burst upon our movie screens. It’s considered one of the greats of early science fiction films, and rightly so.
Starring Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis, and Leslie Nielsen, it also features the first appearance of Robby the Robot. Robby was the first movie robot that was more than just a prop, with a real personality and an important supporting role. This was also the first movie set entirely on a distant planet, with no scenes on Earth or in our solar system, and no direct contact with Earth. They were truly isolated. It’s also the first appearance of an FTL ship.
It’s also a lovely loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
The planet was Altair IV, and the ship’s mission was to find out what happened to the ship Bellerophon, and the scientists it carried, twenty years before. When they arrive, Dr. Edward Morbius (Walter Pidgeon), one of those scientists, warns them off for “safety reasons,” but Commander John J. Adams (Leslie Nielsen), sees it as his duty to land anyway. Morbius tells them that all the members of the expedition were killed by “a mysterious planetary force, one by one, except for himself, his wife, and his daughter, Altaira (Anne Francis). Their ship, Bellerophon, was destroyed by that “planetary force” when a few remaining members of the expedition tried to use it to escape. His wife, he says, later died of natural causes.
Do I have to say that, even as a child, watching it for the first time, I found his wife’s death fishy as heck? In fact, I may have been thinking other words, words I was not allowed to say.
The newly arrived ship and its crew start to suffer attacks. When the engineer is attacked by this force while trying to repair communications equipment, we know something very bad is going on. It’s a tense, exciting story, which I’ll assume everyone has seen.
So I’ll talk about what this film means to me.
Being born a year after its release, I never saw it in a theater. I saw it at home, on our very first color TV. It was also the largest screen we’d ever had—do not be impressed. It was the 1960s, and it was, what? 27 inches? And I watched it with my dad.
My mother either stayed busy in the kitchen, or took herself off someplace, because she did not share our enthusiasm for Saturday afternoon science fiction movies, even when they weren’t featured on Creature Double Feature. (We were devotees of Creature Double Feature.) Mom occasionally pointed out that those movies were objectively bad, in a variety of ways. We said that was a lot of the fun, and made popcorn. She went out.
She did not believe us that Forbidden Planet was different, and actually very good, and that she would like the story. She banned any mention of Shakespeare in connection with a science fiction movie. (Admittedly, she had seen a couple of the Creature Double Feature offerings with us before she implemented her Never Again rule—maybe that’s why?) She refused to watch it with us—ever. We watched it every time it came on. Dad pointed out all the bits that showed this was an adaptation of The Tempest. We analyzed everything the characters would maybe have picked up on as clues if they knew they were in The Tempest.
And for the Creature Double Feature movies, we picked out every zipper in the badly made monster costumes, the places where you could see that those rocks were not rocks, re-used fake scenery from other movies. The cheesy dialog.
Either way, it was a lot of fun. A wonderful bonding experience with my dad, the only one in the extended family who didn’t think I was a little weird. Because, you know, he was, too.
Both Forbidden Planet, and Creature Double Feature’s masterpieces that would have made Ed Wood proud, are fond memories.
Rotten Tomato rating: 94%
(6) COMICS SECTION.
- Brevity knows the solution.
- Frank and Ernest complains about the weather.
- Free Range makes a prediction.
- Reality Check makes a brand.
- Strange Brew predicts the rise of correction.
- The Flying McCoys illustrates early dreams.
- xkcd depicts the problem.
(7) EARLY DAYS GAZE. “A Hubble scientist was urged not to take a risky cosmic image. He didn’t listen” at Mashable.
In the summer of 1995, Robert Williams, then director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, which manages the Hubble Space Telescope‘s research program, was paid two visits by the renowned astronomer John Bahcall, considered one of Hubble’s founding fathers.
Bahcall had, in hindsight, a strange request.
He urged Williams not to train the powerful NASA telescope into an uncharted region of space, where the school bus-sized observatory would stare for days in an attempt to observe profoundly distant, never-before-seen galaxies. It was a proposed endeavor to capture an unprecedented “deep field” view of the cosmos, allowing humanity to look back billions of years, near the dawn of time.
Though Bahcall believed Hubble would make many astronomical advances, he didn’t think it would observe any new, undiscovered galaxies — even in its lofty position above Earth‘s image-distorting atmosphere. Crucially, a failed attempt would bring more shame to a telescope that was already an orbiting object of ridicule: After launching in 1990, a flawed mirror captured blurry images in what was then the most expensive science project in history, requiring astronauts to visit Hubble and install a refrigerator-sized instrument to act as Hubble’s “correcting eyeglasses.”
So Williams knew the deep field was indeed a risk. Still, he told Bahcall he was compelled to take it.
“I told him that I’m willing to fall on my sword,” Williams told Mashable.
Soon after those meetings, Williams directed Hubble — which, in April 2025, celebrated its 35-year anniversary of launching — to peer at a seemingly empty patch of space for 10 straight days. The space telescope beamed home iconic imagery, a “cosmic zoo” of some 3,000 galaxies. It changed everything….
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]
