Tag Archives: Christopher Tolkien

Pixel Scroll 11/26/24 The Sandmaid’s Tale

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(1) GREAT MARTHA WELLS PROFILE. Meghan Herbst’s “How Murderbot Saved Martha Wells’ Life” in WIRED is fascinating in so many ways. You’ll find reasons of your own. Mine is the revelation how many of the same events Wells and I were at in the 1980s – even an AggieCon — yet I don’t think we ever met.

MURDER IS IN the air. Everywhere I turn, I see images of a robot killing machine. Then I remind myself where I actually am: in a library lecture room on a college campus in East Texas. The air is a little musty with the smell of old books, and a middle-aged woman with wavy gray-brown hair bows her head as she takes the podium. She might appear a kindly librarian or a cat lady (confirmed), but her mind is a capacious galaxy of starships, flying bipeds, and ancient witches. She is Martha Wells, creator of Murderbot.

Hearing a name like that, you’d be forgiven for running for your life. But the thing about Murderbot—the thing that makes it one of the most beloved, iconic characters in modern-day science fiction—is just that: It’s not what it seems. For all its hugeness and energy-weaponized body armor, Murderbot is a softie. It’s socially awkward and appreciates sarcasm. Not only does it detest murdering, it wants to save human lives, and often does (at least when it’s not binge-watching its favorite TV shows). “As a heartless killing machine,” as Murderbot puts it, “I was a terrible failure.”…

…The young Wells dealt with her awkwardness the same way Murderbot eventually would: by immersing herself in far-off realms. She sketched maps of Monster Island, the home of Godzilla, and wrote fan fiction set in the worlds of Lost In Space and Land of the Giants. At the nearby bookstore, she gazed in wonder at the covers of books like F. M. Busby’s Zelde M’Tana, featuring a Black woman in a jumpsuit raising a gun. She picked her way through Phyllis Gotlieb, John Varley, Andre Norton. There was also Erma Bombeck, the witty writer whose local newspaper column on suburban family life, “At Wit’s End,” hit a vein with ’70s housewives. “That was my first real indication that being a writer was a real job,” Wells says….

(2) DEVOUT PARODY. Sister Boniface Mysteries, explains Wikipedia, is a spinoff from the Father Brown TV series that premiered in 2022.

…The series is set in England during the early 1960s. Sister Boniface is a Catholic nun at St. Vincent’s Convent in the fictional town of Great Slaughter in the Cotswolds. In addition to her religious duties at the convent, she makes wine and has a PhD in forensic science (although this is referred to as a MA (Cantab), in the The Forensic Nun episode of Father Brown) allowing her to serve as a scientific adviser to the local police on investigations….

A viewer told The Divergent Universe forum that in recent episodes “’Sister Boniface Mysteries’ does ‘Doctor Who’”.

“Sister Boniface Mysteries”, the less-than-serious and not-very-good “Father Brown” spinoff … has got into the habit of doing parodies of well-known series. There was an episode where a “Blue Peter”-type series was filmed in the village, an episode where an Ian Fleming-adjacent author was trying to cast a James Bond-esque movie role, and this week they hold a Doctor Who convention. Excuse me, a Professor X convention. No, it wasn’t even that, it was “Professor Y”. 

“Professor Y” is a tv series that, by whatever stage in the 1960s “Sister Boniface Mysteries” is set, has been cancelled but fans keep the spirit alive and are campaigning for it to be brought back. The police inspector and one of the nuns are big fans. Anyway, the clips of the series they show are actually not all that bad – certainly much less silly and far more credible than, say, Inspector Spacetime. Mark Heap was cast as the actor who played the Professor, and while his performance is perhaps closer to nuWho than 1960s DW, it’s not that bad. And the Dalek-type creatures look fairly good for Dalek-type creatures. The voice actor isn’t Nick Briggs but I thought was trying to sound like him.

Anyway, it gave us three days of DW in a row, sort of.

(3) DERN CHEEP STREAMZ: [Item by Daniel Dern.] Want to watch Dune: Prophecy (on Max), Ted Lasso, Foundation, etc on Apple+? Roku is having some great multi-month deals, “Up to 90% off on 25+ premium subscriptions” including Acorn ($0.99/month for two months, vs $7.99/month)(Murdoch Mysteries, etc) BritBox $3.99/month for two months, vs $8.99/month) (McDonald & Dodds, if nothing else) Max ($2.99/month for six months, vs $9.99/month) (Penguin; other DC flicks’n’shows) Paramount ($2.99/month for two months, vs $12.99) Star Trek; NCIS; The Daily Show, The Late Show etc. “Black Friday Deals | Premium Subscriptions | Roku”.

A Roku account itself is free.

I don’t think you need to buy/have a Roku player (“streaming stick” etc).

There’s a Roku (mobile) app, for your phone, tablet, and (possibly) “smart TV”.

We have/use a Roku player (streaming stick) (no cablebox these days, and the TV is old enough that it won’t, I think, let me add apps directly). — We have the slightly $$ Roku player, for the build-in Ethernet and other features, but the other models are inexpensive (and currently on Black Friday sales as well). (And a second, smaller Roku player&remote, for convenience during increasingly-rare travel.)

‘Nuff watched!

(4) RECOVERED WISDOM. “Ursula K. Le Guin — Book View Café: Navigating the Ocean of Story” is a page at the Ursula K. Le Guin website with a directory of links to 14 recreated copies of posts she wrote for BVC.

In 2015, a few months before the publication of the revised edition of Steering the Craft, Ursula began “an experiment: a kind of open consultation or informal ongoing workshop in Fictional Navigation,” which was hosted at Book View Café. She took questions about writing from readers, and offered generous answers.

These posts were lost in an update at BVC, but we’ve recreated them as best we could with the help of the Wayback Machine. Three other posts appeared only at BVC and not on Ursula’s own website’s blog; those are included here too.

(5) FUTURE TENSE. November 2024’s new Future Tense Fiction story is “A Time Between,” by Kevin Galvin, a story about augmented reality and detective work. It’s paired with a response essay by Jim Bueermann, founder and president of the Center on Policing and Artificial Intelligence: “The Long Arm of Law and Technology”.

…When used for policing, what does technology illuminate—and what does it obscure? Kevin Galvin’s “A Time Between,” a new short story published by Future Tense Fiction, explores these questions through the eyes of Detective Carberry, an older, somewhat disillusioned officer who prefers tangible experiences over the augmented reality technologies that now dominate his fictional universe—and his police department. Carberry is wary of how reality and fiction are becoming increasingly hard to distinguish, and his skepticism comes to a head when he’s tasked with investigating the death of a college freshman who supposedly fell from a dorm-room window, but whose body cannot be found….

Other news: There’s now a dedicated landing page for Future Tense Fiction on the website of their publishing partner, Issues in Science and Technology. You can find it here: https://issues.org/futuretensefiction. It will feature our new fiction and essays, selected stories from the Future Tense Fiction archives, video interviews with authors, and more.

(6) FAN HISTORY IS CALLING. First Fandom Experience’s editors are “Seeking collaborators for research and publishing on the early history of fandom”.

Fan history is replete with stories of individuals whose experience in fandom enabled them to create the foundations of the massive science fiction and fantasy industry we know today. The writings of these early fans also offer unique insights on the US and Britain during the Great Depression and the Second World War.

We hope to engage with students, historians and others with interest and intent to learn, understand and publish these stories.

In support of our work, FFE has assembled an extensive archive of fan material — fanzines, convention material, club ephemera, photographs, correspondence and others — all from the late 1920s to the late-1940s. The physical archive resides in the collections of David Ritter and Alistair Durie, each accumulated over decades. Our exclusive focus on this period also allows us to source supplemental digital material from other private, university and public sources….

 … FFE is prepared to facilitate access to the archive for individuals and organizations seeking to research and publish in this area of study. Please reach out to us at: info@firstfandomexperience.org

(7) A MUCH WIDER WORLD. Robin Anne Reid shares her talk “Tolkien’s ‘Absent [Female] Characters’: How Christopher Tolkien Expanded Middle-earth” at Writing from Ithilien.

… I said I’d be looking at how Christopher’s work on the posthumous publications expanded Middle-earth by including more female characters.

And then things just all came together in my head, including the four Éowyn posts I had made in my Substack earlier this year….

… This talk is the start of a larger project which will explore three related topics. The first is how the posthumous publications CJRT edited (from the 1977 Silmarillion to the 2018 Fall of Gondolin)¹ expand the number of female characters in Middle-earth and give us a unique view into alternate and contradictory ideas JRRT explored in his writing process. The second is how academic scholarship on his fiction is still, almost 50 years after the publication of The Silmarillion, overlooking most of the legendarium’s female characters except for a handful in The Lord of the Rings plus Lúthien.² The third is how those of us who are feminists can challenge that tendency by paying more attention to the messy, complex material about female characters in the multiple histories of Middle-earth and by acknowledging and incorporating the valuable work women and non-binary fans have been and are doing with the posthumous publications.³

This talk, and this project, exist in the current Anglophone socio-political context in which some critical theories, such as feminisms, have been dismissed as inappropriately imposing politics (and, the worst of all politics, “identity politics” which is apparently politics by anyone who is not a straight Christian white man) on literature since at least the 1980s. As Sue Kim argues in “Beyond Black and White: Race and Postmodernism in The Lord of the Rings Film”: “It is disingenuous to claim that certain modern politics apply (war, fascism, industrialization, conservation) and others do not (gender, sexuality, race), just as it is disingenuous to say that any one kind of reading necessarily discounts all other readings” (882).⁴…

(8) EARL HOLLIMAN (1928-2024). Actor Earl Holliman died November 25 at the age of 96. Fans know him best as the star of The Twilight Zone’s debut episode “Where Is Everybody?” which aired on October 2, 1959. The Deadline tribute details some of his genre work:

…Holliman had done several guest-starring roles on 1950s TV before making history as the focus of the first episode of The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling’s landmark anthology series that put ordinary people in extraordinary situations. The October 1959 episode “Where Is Everybody?” opened with Holliman’s Mike Ferris wandering in a deserted town, which appears to be populated — coffee is boiling, a jukebox is playing, a cigar is burning — but no one is seen. The unsettling scenario continues to build to a wildly unexpected climax that would be the still-loved series’ signature….

Prior to that he appeared in the Fifties sf film Forbidden Planet. And his career was bookended by a genre TV series:

…He would land a final series-regular role on the syndicated NightMan in 1997. He starred opposite Matt McColm, whose Johnny Domingo becomes the title superhero after a lightning strike. Holliman played his ex-cop dad who appeared in two dozen episodes before being killed off in the Season 2 premiere….

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born November 26, 1919 — Frederik Pohl. (Died 2013.)

By Paul Weimer: Frederik Pohl first came to my attention thanks to his multiverse novel, The Coming of the Quantum Cats. I saw the book in a bookstore, was attracted by the cover, hooked by the back matter, bought it and read it quickly and avidly. I had never heard of Pohl before, and if you’ve read these vignettes and have gotten any sense of who I am, you know I had to find more of Pohl’s work. If he could do multiverse novels, what else could he do? What else did he do?  Plenty it turns out.

Frederik Pohl as shown on the cover of his 1979 autobiography The Way The Future Was.

Next up came Gateway, the novel for which he is most famous, with its unusual structural style and tone, and a focus that frustrated me then…but now I find brilliant, unique, engaging and makes the book memorable.  From Gateway, I read a number of Pohl works and novels over the years. The Space Merchants with its criticism of capitalism that feels every more prescient as the years pass. The wide-ranging epic of the Eschaton trilogy, which brings a near future government agent into conflict with aliens who have orders and information from their far future apotheosis. There is his nonfictional collaboration with Isaac Asimov, This Angry Earth, which was an early 1990’s clarion call to deal with climate change. We did not listen, we did not hear, and now we are paying that price. 

And then there were a large number of short stories. A lot of them seem to be awfully funny, such as the subtle The Deadly Mission of Phineas Snodgrass, which I managed to read just before reading Lest Darkness Fall (which it references and I then wanted to, and did, read — and then immediately read Harry Turtledove’s The Pugnacious Peacemaker, which is his sequel to the classic).

The best of these is my favorite Pohl work (even more than The Coming of the Quantum Cats) — Day Million.  It tells the story of a typical day in the year 2739. It’s a future to give Rep Nancy Mace fear and loathing. The main character Dora is genetically male but biologically female, and forms a relationship with a starship flying cyborg, with whom she has virtual sex, among a variety of lovers of various kinds. The story is addressed to and written in a point of view addressing the reader in a challenging, direct way, saying that if you are repulsed by this, by this future, just think what Attila the Hun would think of you and your life. It’s a story that feels especially relevant in this year of 2024.

Frederik Pohl in 2008.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) BOOK REMOVAL LITIGATION UPDATE. “Summary Judgment Motions Filed in ‘Tango’ Book Banning Case” reports Publishers Weekly.

With discovery now complete, dueling summary judgment motions have been filed in a closely watched book banning case in Escambia County, Fla., over the removal of Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson’s 2005 picture book And Tango Makes Three.

In a filing this week, the authors, who first filed suit in June 2023, argue that the removal of their book—an illustrated book based on a true story about two male penguins who adopt and raise a penguin chick—was removed based on unconstitutional, anti-LGBTQ+ “viewpoint discrimination” and should be returned to school library shelves.

“Following Florida’s enactment of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and a challenge from a District teacher with a documented history of homophobia, Defendant removed Tango from District school libraries,” the filing states. “There is no dispute that Defendant did so because Tango depicts a same-sex relationship, a viewpoint-discriminatory justification prohibited by the First Amendment.”

In their own motion for summary judgment, lawyers for defendants Escambia County counter they should prevail because school officials have the authority to remove any book from library shelves for any reason, citing a common defense in several book banning cases now underway across the nation—that which books go on library shelves is “government speech” and thus immune from First Amendment scrutiny….

(12) DISNEY CLASS-ACTION SETTLEMENT EXPECTED. Deadline has learned “Disney Will Pay $43M To Settle Pay Equity Class-Action Lawsuit”. “Not even the cost of a slice of cheese for the Mouse,” opines Cat Eldridge.

We now know how much Disney is writing a check for to end the pay equity class-action suit that has loomed over the company for the past five years.

Set to address the up to 14,000 eligible class members of female Disney employees past and present from 2015 to today, the Bob Iger-run fun palace will be paying $43.25 million, according to papers set to be filed later tonight in Los Angeles Superior Court docket.

Far less than the $300 million it was estimated the case could balloon to once if was certified as a class action last December, the official compensation comes a couple of weeks after news broke of a quietly reached October settlement between Disney and the Lori Andrus represented plaintiffs. The whole matter was set to go to trial in May 2025….

… First filed in April 2019 over back pay, lost benefits and more by Disney staffers LaRonda Rasmussen and Karen Moore and heading towards a May 2025 trial, the suit accused the Magic Kingdom of not being so kind with its cash based on gender as opposed to performance. At its core, the suit claimed Disney has violated the Fair Employment & Housing Act and California’s Equal Pay Act in paying men more than women for the same work.

Seeking at least $150 million in lost wages initially, the suit saw repeated big push back from Disney over the year in efforts to have it dismissed and not certified. Exclaiming the whole thing was merely “highly individualized allegations,” Disney’s Paul Hasting LLP team sought to limit the matter to a small contingent of less than 10 women. There was also drama over documents and discovery, with the plaintiffs calling out the Mouse House as dragging their feet with data and paperwork….

(13) FURNISHED FOR ADVENTURE. If you’re ready to part with $295, GW Pens will happily sell you the “GW Dungeon Dice and Pen Set with Field Notes 5E Character Journal”. And the chest it comes in!

Ready to embark on a new dungeon crawl? Be sure to grab your chest of necessities before you go! 

This wooden box unlatches to reveal a dragon themed ballpoint twist pen with hand cast resin and Matching hand cast resin dice! The pen and dice are easily kept together in the pictured wooden chest, with faux leather lined insert to keep the dice edges safe from the metal components of the pen. The tray can lift out from the box for a small storage area beneath.

Also included with this set is a Field Notes 5E character journal, helping you track everything you need to know about your character from the first roll of the dice!

The included dice are dense enough to have a nice weight to them, offering true “rolls” and not just stopping on whatever side they land on. 

(14) OUR LOOKOUT. [Item by Steven French.] Astronomer Desiree Cotto-Figueora on defending the planet: “I defend the planet from asteroid collisions” in Nature.

There are hundreds of millions of asteroids in the Solar System, the majority of which are in the main belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. But some of these asteroids, either through collisions, or through gravitational effects or other processes, end up in new orbits that come close to or cross Earth’s orbit. Currently, astronomers think that there are more than 36,000 of these near-Earth asteroids, and at least 2,400 of those are considered potentially hazardous, because they could strike Earth.

I’m part of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Surveyor mission, which aims to detect and characterize 90% of near-Earth asteroids that are larger than 140 metres in diameter. The first step is to work out where they are, but it’s also important to characterize them and understand their fragmentation process so that scientists can design strategies for deflection and disruption, if needed.

Along with my research, I spend a lot of time teaching astronomy and organizing outreach events through my role as coordinator of the Astronomical Observatory at the University of Puerto Rico at Humacao. In this photo, I’m standing next to the observatory’s 14-inch telescope. Although it’s a lot smaller than the 42-inch instrument I use for my research, it’s a great tool for connecting people with the Universe. I love seeing how excited kids and adults get when they look through a telescope for the first time and see the rings of Saturn or the Galilean moons of Jupiter.

I’ve loved astronomy and watching space documentaries from an early age. In high school, I started an astronomy club and visited nearby observatories, including the one I work at now. I’m so lucky to have ended up doing work that I’m passionate about. Even now, I don’t think that high-school girl would ever have imagined that one day she’d be working on a NASA mission.

(15) EARTH CALLING THE HIDDEN CITY… “’We didn’t know what it was at first.’ NASA aircraft uncovers site of secret Cold War nuclear missile tunnels under Greenland ice sheet” – Space.com has the story.

NASA scientists conducting surveys of arctic ice sheets in Greenland got an unprecedented view of an abandoned “city under the ice” built by the U.S. military during the Cold War.

During a scientific flight in April 2024, a NASA Gulfstream III aircraft flew over the Greenland Ice Sheet carrying radar instruments to map the depth of the ice sheet and the layers of bedrock below it. The images revealed a new view of Camp Century, a Cold War-era U.S. military base consisting of a series of tunnels carved directly into the ice sheet. As it turns out, this abandoned “secret city” was the site of a secret Cold War project known as Project Iceworm which called for the construction of 2,500 miles (4,023 km) of tunnels that could be used to nuclear intermediate range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) at the Soviet Union….

…Construction on Camp Century began in 1959, but the base was abandoned in 1967 due to the costs and challenges of keeping the tunnels from collapsing in the ever-shifting ice sheet…

…The trenches were designed for a type of modified Minuteman IRBM missile known as “Iceman” that would be able to withstand the pressures of launching through the ice sheet. Project Iceworm was ultimately canceled and abandoned along with Camp Century, but the echoes of this era of the Cold War still reverberate throughout the Greenland landscape today…

For more details about the facility watch this “’Camp Century’ Restored Classified Film”.

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

Pixel Scroll 11/14/24 Pixel, Devourer of Scrolls

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(1) BEST OF NATURE FUTURES SF STORY NOW UP – OPEN ACCESS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] SF² Concatenation has just posted its third ‘Best of’ Nature short SF stories of the year. These are normally behind a pay wall, but SF² Concatenation has permission from Nature and the respective authors to re-post.

The latest story is “The Nana Inheritance” by Amanda Helms.

The deathbed of your beloved grandmother isn’t really the place where you should decide who inherits her brain, but that’s what we did…

SF² Concatenation will have one more – the final of the year – short story mid-December to hold you over the festive season. Mid-January will see its spring (northern hemisphere academic year) edition with a huge news page, articles, conreps and a stack of book reviews…

(2) BOARD OF THE DINGS. Repeat after me, the British Board of Film Classification knows best. Now spit. “British film censors re-classify Return of the Jedi” reports Irish news outlet RTE.

Star Wars Episode VI: Return Of The Jedi has been reclassified from a U to a PG in the UK due to its violence and a scene which shows one of the film’s heroes Han Solo frozen in carbonite.

The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) had given it a U rating upon release in 1983, but said “the detail and overall intensity” of violence in the film meant that it was changed to PG last year for violence and threat, despite this being “offset by humour and an emphasis on loyalty in adversity”.

A U rating means the film is suitable for audiences aged four and above and should be “family-friendly”, while a PG rated film contains some content that may not be suitable for children and parents or guardians are advised to be present while they are watching.

In its 2023 Annual Report, which saw the sci-fi film reclassified, the BBFC said of Star Wars Episode VI: “This sci-fi adventure sequel concerns rebel heroes who must rescue their friends before facing an intimidating enemy army.

“As well as laser gun fights, aerial dogfights, and fight scenes which include the occasional use of improvised weapons, a person falls to a presumed but unseen death, a villain tortures a character by repeated electrocution, and a hero severs a villain’s hand at the wrist in a scene featuring limited detail.

“A captor attempts to feed his prisoner to a monster, and there are other scenes of threat involving bombs, hostages and a hero being frozen alive.”…

… The BBFC said the sequences were “no longer within our standards at U” despite upholding the initial rating for video and theatrical releases in 1987 and 2008….

(3) YOU CAN CHECK IN ANY TIME YOU WANT. “Doctor Who’s Steven Moffat confirms Christmas special plot details – including ‘time-travelling hotel’” – Radio Times has them.

…Moffat has teased some further details about what’s to come in the new episode.

Speaking to BBC South East news, Moffat revealed: “I can tease something about the Christmas special. Imagine in the far, far future, imagine that a hotel chain got hold of the idea of time travel. What’s the first thing a hotel chain would do if they had time travel? They’d realise they had an opportunity to sell all the unsold nights in their own hotels in history.”…

(4) THE BOWERY’S UP AND HOGWARTS IS DOWN. “Two New York City bakers to compete on new Food Network show ‘Harry Potter: Wizards of Baking’” – a New York Times story (behind a paywall).  

A new competition baking show on Food Network is bringing the magic of Harry Potter to a grand scale.

“Harry Potter: Wizards of Baking” is a larger-than-life new baking show that fully immerses contestants in the Harry Potter universe. Hosted by James and Oliver Phelps (who play Fred and George Weasley in the movie franchise), the show blends legendary storytelling and fantastical edible creations all on the competition floor.

“It’s a baking competition, it starts off with 9 teams of two bakers who didn’t know each other before they got into the competition. These guys are professionals in what they do. They’re the best of the best in America,” said Oliver Phelps. “They’re going for the trophy of the Wizards of Baking Champions and each bake is based on a set from the actual studios in London, and they have to come up with some inspiration from that.”

“Wizards of Baking” pairs the competitors into teams of two and has them compete alongside each other throughout the duration of the competition. Each week, the bakers make grand, eye-catching creations based on different Harry Potter sets.

The show was shot at Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden in Watford, England, and to raise the stakes, contestants are given access to the actual film sets, including The Great Hall at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Platform 9¾, Gringotts Wizarding Bank and The Burrow. The winners will be awarded the first-ever Wizards of Baking Cup and will have the opportunity to appear in a new Harry Potter cookbook….

(5) SAD, RABID PUPPY STUDIES. Jess Maginity reviews Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right by Jordan S. Carroll for the LA Review of Books in “Whose Future Is It Anyway?”

…In his introduction, Carroll discusses the close proximity of science fiction to radical right-wing politics since the early 20th century. To some extent, popular culture was always a tool used by the Far Right. Theorists of the French New Right described intentional ideological influence on popular culture aimed at a distant political victory as “metapolitics.” As Andrew Breitbart summarizes, “Politics is downstream from culture.” Carroll describes this tactic, alluding to his focus on speculative genres, as “fascist worldmaking.” The ideology that structures fascist worldmaking is speculative whiteness: “For the alt-right,” Carroll says, “whiteness represents a matrix of possibilities more important than any actual accomplishments the white race may have already achieved.” There are five “myths” that constitute speculative whiteness: first, white people are uniquely good at speculating about the future and innovating in the present; second, nonwhite people are incapable of imagining the future and making long-term plans for the future; third, the true grandeur of whiteness will only be apparent in a high-tech fascist utopia; fourth, science fiction is a genre only white authors are truly able to produce; and fifth, speculative genres have the metapolitical potential of allowing a brainwashed white population to see their racial potential….

…Genres have no essential existence; people decide what they are. A categorical definition only makes sense when enough people agree with it. The science fiction community rejected the alt-right’s definition of speculative fiction. N. K. Jemisin, a primary target of reactionary fan hatred, won three consecutive Hugos for Best Novel with her Broken Earth trilogy. Chuck Tingle, who writes absurdist queer erotica, was mockingly nominated by the Rabid Puppies for several awards; he disavowed the nomination, tirelessly satirized the Puppies, and wrote Slammed in the Butt by My Hugo Award Nomination (2016) in response. He has since written two very successful queer horror novels, Camp Damascus (2023) and Bury Your Gays (2024). The Sad and Rabid Puppies dissolved after a few years of campaigning; they were primarily active from 2014 through 2016. The alt-right has also collapsed. After the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally, the alt-right as a movement effectively ceased to exist. That doesn’t mean that they just disappeared—some were absorbed by older radical right movements, others were absorbed into the mainstream, and a few became mass murderers in the name of a white future.

Carroll reminds us that our future is contingent. Fascists have a vision for the future that excludes most of humanity, but fascists can be defeated. The future is for everyone—if we make it that way….

(6) WHEN NEW WORLDS WAS NEW. The Spectator’s “Book Club” has a 43-minute audio interview with “Michael Moorcock: celebrating 60 years of New Worlds”. Listen to it at the link.

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the writer, musician and editor Michael Moorcock, whose editorship of New Worlds magazine is widely credited with ushering in a ‘new wave’ of science fiction and developing the careers of writers like J G Ballard, Iain Sinclair, Pamela Zoline, Thomas M Disch and M John Harrison. With the release of a special edition of New Worlds, honouring the 60th anniversary of his editorship, Mike tells me about how he set out to marry the best of literary fiction with the best of the pulp tradition, how he fought off obscenity charges over Norman Spinrad’s Bug Jack Barron, about his friendship with Ballard and his enmity with Kingsley Amis – and why he’s determined never to lose his vulgarity.

(7) CHRISTOPHER TOLKIEN CENTENARY. The Tolkien Society has released the schedule for its free online Christopher Tolkien Centenary Conference, being held November 23-24.

This November marks 100 years since the birth of Christopher Tolkien and the Society will be holding a two-day online event in honour of his life and legacy. You can register to attend the online Conference below.

“We seek to honour and remember Christopher. Although we know the enormity of the world that Tolkien created, we only know that thanks to Christopher’s work. He spent almost 50 years after his father’s death to bring Tolkien’s legacy to us all. His hard work and diligence has shined a light on the corners of Middle-earth that would otherwise be unknown to us. We all owe him a tremendous debt, and I hope this event goes some way in recognising Christopher’s legacy as much as his father’s.” — Shaun Gunner, Chair of the Tolkien Society

I don’t know about your house, but a lot of the participants are household names in mine — Christopher Gilson, Brian Sibley, Christopher Gilson, Carl F. Hostetter, Douglas A. Anderson, Ted Nasmith, John D. Rateliff, Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond, John Garth, Robin Anne Reid, Michael D. C. Drout, and Verlyn Flieger.

Where possible, talks from both days will be recorded and uploaded onto the Tolkien Society YouTube channel after the event. The event is free to attend. Register here: Christopher Tolkien Centenary Conference.

(8) CLARION WEST CROWDFUNDING CAMPAIGN. Through December 4, Clarion West’s Fall Fundraiser at Indiegogo is encouraging donations with perks like these:

Would you like to join an RPG session with award-winning science fiction writer Annalee Newitz? Experience a Seattle escape room with horror and dark fantasy writer Evan J. Peterson? Benefit from a consultation with Susan Palwick or Ben Rosenbaum?

And there are many more at the link.

Donations help cover programs and events, including all of the following: 

  • Instructors: All of our programs are taught by paid professionals in the field of speculative fiction. Clarion West pays our instructors an estimated $55,000 per year
  • Sliding scale tuition and application fees, reduced rates, free classes, and access seats: classes and workshops, travel, and time away can be a barrier to attending our programs. To reduce some of these barriers, we are committed to providing scholarships covering full and partial tuition to our residential workshops; discounts to reduce the cost of online classes; free events and programs for our community; and free seats in online classes for PGM/BIPOC writers. Clarion West covers  an estimated $25,000 in fees for these programs. 
  • Reader honorariums: Clarion West pays a dedicated group of application readers an average of $5,000 each year to help manage the application process. 
  • ASL interpreters and live captioners: Clarion West spends approximately $270 per event or $2,700 for live captioning services for live events and $350 for ASL interpreters for live events. 
  • Clarion West pays $4,200 annually for class and on-demand platforms 
  • Six-Week Workshop venues, such as university dorms range between $45,000-$90,000 for in-person years like 2024

(9) TIM SULLIVAN (1948-2024). Author and filmmaker Timothy Sullivan died November 10 of congestive heart failure in hospice in Newport News, Virginia.

His first published story, “Tachyon Rag”, appeared in Unearth in 1977. His short story “Zeke”, published in Twilight Zone, was a 1982 Nebula nominee.

Although mainly known as a writer and actor, his contribution to one of fanhistory’s most bitter fan feuds should not be forgotten. He and Somtow Sucharitkul split from the Washington Science Fiction Association during the exceptionally bitter Dunegate feud of the Eighties, nominally provoked by the way passes were distributed to a local publicity screening of David Lynch’s movie. They formed the Washington Alternative SF Association, and published the fanzine Dune Gate to prosecute the feud.

Later, Sullivan was cast by Somtow (along with other friends) in the film The Laughing Dead, a credit mentioned in The Hollywood Reporter’s tribute “Tim Sullivan Dead: Sci-Fi Author, Actor and Screenwriter Was 76”.

…He also wrote and directed Vampyre Femmes (1999) and appeared in such straight-to-video releases as The Laughing Dead (1989), Eyes of the Werewolf (1999), The Mark of Dracula (2000), Hollywood Mortuary (2000) and Deadly Scavengers (2001), working often with writer-director Ron Ford.

Sullivan wrote at least seven sci-fi novels during his career, three of them based on Kenneth Johnson’s V NBC miniseries and series in the mid-1980s about an alien invasion of Earth….

…He wrote dozens of short stories, including 1981’s “Zeke,” a tragedy about an extraterrestrial stranded on Earth that was nominated for a Nebula Award. His novels included 1988’s Destiny’s End, 1989’s The Parasite War, 1991’s The Martian Viking and The Dinosaur Trackers and 1992’s Lords of Creation….

…He also edited horror anthologies and handled book reviews for The Washington Post.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

November 14, 1961 — Cat Rambo, 63.

By Paul Weimer: First and foremost Cat Rambo is a beacon of teaching in the science fiction community. Her Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers classes are a wealth of information and education in how to write science fiction and fantasy that stand up as educational, fun and practically useful. (Disclaimer: I co-taught a class in the Academy on maps in fantasy novels with Alex Acks.). The best teacher is to practice and read others work, but if you want some formal instruction short of going to a Clarion or the like (or don’t feel ready for that yet), Cat’s courses may be the solution you are looking for. She has a swath of excellent guest teachers to give ballast to her courses. 

Besides her pedagogical pursuits, I enjoy her fiction. There is a coziness to a lot of her fiction, particularly the You Sexy Thing and its sequels, which are my favorite of her work.  It’s not that they are entire creampuffs of novels, but there is a sense of fun, playfulness and comforting adventure…plus food, and cooking and misadventures, that make the book page-turners for me. Rambo does do a really good job in what a lot of authors don’t get to do or don’t want to do–recapping a series so that I can better remember what was going on. In reading the latest of the series, over a year since I read The Devil’s Gun, the recap Rambo gave helped click the neurons and have a rush of remembrance about what I was plunging into with Rumor Has It. 

Given that this is an open ended and every complexifying series, I appreciate this service for the reader. It makes the work of trying to remember things less taxing, and allows me as a reader to focus on the fun of the books, and how she is layering plot and character with each successive novel. Reading and talking with Cat as to how she handles character growth and development brings home to me that her teaching, her classes really are reflected in her own novels, and vice versa. 

Cat Rambo

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) THE OTHER HANNIBAL. Even if that’s the character who comes to mind when you see that name, he won’t be playing Hannibal Lecter. “Denzel Washington: ‘Black Panther 3’ Will Be One of His Last Movies” reports Variety.

Denzel Washington revealed in August that “there are very few films” left for him to make at this stage in his Oscar-winning career, but now he’s revealing that “Black Panther 3″ is one of them. Speaking to Australia’s “Today” while on the press tour for “Gladiator II,” Washington said that director Ryan Coogler is writing him a role in the third “Black Panther” film. It will be one of Washington’s final movies along with a new Steve McQueen project and a film adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Othello.”

“For me it’s about the filmmakers. Especially at this point in my career, I am only interested in working with the best,” Washington said. “I don’t know how many more films I’m going to make. It’s probably not that many. I want to do things I haven’t done.”

“I played Othello at 22. I am about to play Othello at 70,” he continued, referring to the Shakespeare production co-starring Jake Gyllenhaal that opens on Broadway in February 2025. “After that, I am playing [Carthaginian general] Hannibal. After that, I’ve been talking to Steve McQueen about a film. After that, Ryan Coogler is writing a part for me in the next ‘Black Panther.’ After that, I’m going to do the film ‘Othello,’ After that, I’m going to do King Lear. After that, I’m going to retire.”

(13) UNSAFE AT ANY SPEED. The New York Times article “Take the ‘Death Stairs’ if You Dare” is paywalled, but the Facebook group “Death Stairs” is public and has lots of bizarre photos.

…No guardrails? Check. Carpeting that makes you lose your footing? Check. Steps of inconsistent depth and width? Check.

The more peril in the surrounding space, the better.

Do the stairs end in a dark basement? Excellent. Is the steep cement staircase guarded by rusting barbed wire on one side and open to a rushing dam on the other? Ideal….

Lane Sutterby, who lives in Kansas, had modest ambitions when he created the Death Stairs group in November 2020.

“I figured I’d have 10, 15 people join, maybe some of my close friends and a couple of random strangers,” he said….

…Some contributions to the Death Stairs Facebook page show how steep, rickety stairs are not the only risk. Distracting visual cues, inadequate hand rails and hard-to-see step edges are common….

(14) HOW CAN I GET THIS CAR OUT OF SECOND GEAR? [Item by Steven French.] Forget the jet packs, where’s my nuclear powered car?! “Visions of Nuclear-Powered Cars Captivated Cold War America, but the Technology Never Really Worked” in Smithsonian Magazine. Archival photos at the link.

In theory, nuclear-powered cars could run for thousands of miles without refueling, and some could even fly. But several problems remained. For one, nobody had developed a nuclear power plant small enough to fit into a car. For another, scientists calculated that an automobile with enough lead and other materials to shield the driver and passengers from radiation would weigh at least 50 tons, making it more than 25 times as heavy as the average vehicle. There was also the question of what to do with the nuclear waste.

These issues were never resolved, and the world quickly moved on. Still, the surviving prototypes offer a tantalizing glimpse of what might have been.

For one example, the Studebaker Astral.

(15) ROCKET TO THE MORGUE? Could it be dead, Jim? Futurism says “It Sounds Like NASA’s Moon Rocket Might Be Getting Canceled”.

NASA’s plagued Space Launch System rocket, which is being developed to deliver the first astronauts to the Moon in over half a century, is on thin ice.

According to Ars Technica senior space reporter Eric Berger’s insider sources, there’s an “at least 50-50” chance that the rocket “will be canceled.”

“Not Block 1B. Not Block 2,” he added, referring to the variant that was used during NASA’s uncrewed Artemis I test flight in 2022 and a more powerful design with a much higher translunar injection payload capacity, respectively. “All of it.”

To be clear, as Berger himself points out, we’re still far “from anything being settled.” Nonetheless, the reporter’s sources have historically been highly reliable, suggesting the space agency may indeed be getting cold feet about continuing to pour billions of dollars into the non-reusable rocket.

The SLS has already seen its fair share of budget overruns and many years of delays. In a 2022 interview, former NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver told Futurism that the project is simply “not sustainable.”

The rocket platform has become a political football, going well past $6 billion over budget and over half a decade behind schedule….

(16) NOT THE VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Disgusting, isn’t it? John Lewis’s shocking Christmas advert is actually about … shopping” – the Guardian sounds mighty peeved. Hopefully, they’re kidding.

Well, this is an outrage. There are just some things you shouldn’t mess with. Roast dinners. The national anthem. The John Lewis Christmas advert.

You see, the John Lewis Christmas advert has long operated on a perfect formula. Every November we are treated to a sumptuous mini-movie, the components of which have long since lapsed into tradition. It must be festive. It must have a slowed down piano ballad cover version of a nostalgic pop song. It must also be unfathomably sad, either because it’s about an old man dying of loneliness on the moon (2015) or a Christmas tree being banished to the garden because it’s a bit too excitable (2023).

But most importantly – most importantly of all – it must not be about John Lewis. The whole point of a John Lewis Christmas advert is that, if people watch it out of context and are subsequently asked what it is advertising, they should ideally reply ‘palliative care’ or ‘some sort of childhood trauma charity’. The point of a John Lewis Christmas advert is that a foreigner should be able to watch it all the way through and still have no idea what John Lewis is or why his kink is making people from Surrey cry.

But forget that this year. Because this year, John Lewis has thrown all that in the bin. This year, John Lewis has committed the unforgivable sin of literally setting its Christmas advert inside an actual branch of John Lewis. This is quite frankly unforgivable….

I kind of like it….

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

Pixel Scroll 9/30/24 Don’t Scroll Me – I’m Pixelectric!

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(1) CLARKE AWARD OPENS FOR 2024 TITLES. The Arthur C. Clarke Award today announced that submissions are now officially open for next year’s award.

The prize is now open to novels written in English by an author of any nationality, provided that the novel is published for the first time by a UK publisher between January 1 and December 31, 2024.

The deadline for submissions is December 31. This year’s judges are:

(2) IT IS THE END, MY FRIEND. Variety blabs: “’The Simpsons’ Series Finale Wasn’t Really Its Last Episode”. Beware spoilers.

“The Simpsons” kicked off its Season 36 premiere on Sunday with what the show dubbed its “series finale.” Hosted by an animated version of former “Simpsons” writer Conan O’Brien, the episode opened with “The Simpsons” characters and other notables entering a Dolby Theatre-esque venue (technically, the “Dolby-Mucinex Theatre”) to celebrate the show’s ending.

“It’s such an honor to be with you all for the series finale of ‘The Simpsons,’” O’Brien said in his opening monologue. “I knew I was the right man for the job because I’ve hosted the last episode of three of my own shows and counting… Well, it’s true. Fox has decided to end the Simpsons. This show was such a special part of my early career, so being here means the world to me. Also. I left a sweater in the writer’s room in 1993 this is the only way they’ll let me get it back….

“Now, not many people know this, but Fox has been trying to end it for years,” O’Brien added. “When the very first episode aired in 1989 the viewers agreed on one thing: It wasn’t as funny as it used to be, and their expressions of hatred could serve as a history of modern communication technology. Fox executives, unaccustomed to criticism of any kind, immediately caved to public pressure and decided to end ‘The Simpsons’ in 1990.”

O’Brien then showed what he said were the original cuts of scenes from famous “The Simpsons” episodes, such as 1990’s “Bart the Daredevil” and 2000’s “Little Big Mom,” in which Homer died for real. “Many now classic episodes were originally conceived as series finales,” O’Brien said….

(3) Q&A WITH GERARDO SÁMANO CÓRDOVA. The Horror Writers Association continues: “Latinx Heritage in Horror Month 2024: An Interview with Gerardo Sámano Córdova”.

…Time to daydream: what are some aspects of LatinX history or culture – stories from your childhood, historical events, etc — that you really want our genre to tackle? (Whether or not you’re the one to tackle them!)

I would love to read a horror book set during the Mexican Revolution. Such a complex time socially, politically, and ideologically.

Who are some of your favorite LatinX characters in horror?

Juan from Mariana Enriquez’s Our Share of Night is such a complex, vivid character, the Kentukis from Little Eyes by Samanta Schweblin (although I’m not sure if the Kentukis qualify as LatinX – or proper characters for that matter, regardless, the idea of them as voyeurs and masks is wonderful).

Who are some LatinX horror authors you recommend our audience check out?

Mariana Enríquez, Samanta Schweblin, Fernanda Melchor, Bernardo Esquinca, Monica Ojeda, Carmen María Machado, Gabino Iglesias, Amparo Dávila….

(4) CHRISTOPHER TOLKIEN CENTENARY CONFERENCE. The Tolkien Society will host an online “Christopher Tolkien Centenary Conference” on November 23-24. It’s a free event — register at the link.

Confirmed speakers (in alphabetical order):

  • Douglas A. Anderson — editor of The Annotated Hobbit
  • Nicholas Birns — author of The Literary Role of History in the Fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien
  • Sara Brown — lecturer on Tolkien, and Language and Literature Department Chair at Signum University
  • Sonali Chunodkar — researcher on secondary beliefs in Tolkien’s works
  • Michael D. C. Drout — editor of Beowulf and the Critics, and J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia; co-editor of Tolkien Studies
  • Vincent Ferré — Tolkien scholar, lecturer and translator, and editor of Dictionnaire Tolkien
  • Dimitra Fimi — co-editor of A Secret Vice
  • Verlyn Flieger — editor of Smith of Wootton Major, The Story of Kullervo, and The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun; author of Splintered Light
  • William Fliss — Tolkien archivist at Marquette University’s Raynor Library
  • John Garth — author of Tolkien and the Great War, The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien and Tolkien at Exeter College
  • Christopher Gilson — chief editor of Parma Eldalamberon and leading member of the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship
  • Nick Groom — author of Twenty-First-Century Tolkien
  • Peter Grybauskas — editor of The Battle of Maldon: together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth
  • Wayne G. Hammond — co-editor of The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien, J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator, The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion, The Art of The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, and Roverandom
  • Andrew Higgins — co-editor of A Secret Vice
  • Thomas Honegger — co-editor of Sub-creating Arda and Laughter in Middle-earth: Humour in and around the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien
  • Carl F. Hostetter — editor of The Nature of Middle-earth and Vinyar Tengwar
  • John Howe — artist who has illustrated covers for The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The History of Middle-earth
  • Yvette Kisor — researcher on medieval literature and the works of J.R.R. Tolkien
  • Kristine Larsen — writer and researcher on science and astronomy in Tolkien’s works
  • Alan Lee — artist who has illustrated The Lord of the Rings, The Children of Húrin, Beren and Lúthien and The Fall of Númenor
  • Ted Nasmith — artist who has illustrated The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales
  • Richard Ovenden — Bodley’s Librarian and co-editor of The Great Tales Never End
  • John D. Rateliff — author of The History of The Hobbit
  • Robin Reid — researcher on Tolkien fandom, fan fiction, and race in Tolkien’s works
  • Christina Scull — co-editor of The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien, J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator, The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion, The Art of The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien and Roverandom
  • Brian Sibley — author of The Fall of Númenor
  • Chris Smith — the Tolkien editor of HarperCollins
  • James Tauber — researcher on corpus linguistics and digital humanities for Tolkien’s works

(5) HORROR QUARTET. Gabino Iglesias reviews “4 New Horror Books Filled With Eldritch Terrors and Other Frights” in the New York Times: Laird Barron’s collection, Not A Speck of Light: Stories (Bad Hand Books); Hildur Knutsdottir, The Night Guest (Tor Nightfire), translated from the Icelandic by Mary Robinette Kowal; Richard Thomas, Incarnate (Podium Publishing); Sinophagia: A Celebration of Chinese Horror (Solaris), translated and edited by Xueting C. Ni. Behind a paywall.

(6) THANKS FOR NOTHING, GUV. “California Gov. Newsom vetoes AI safety bill that divided Silicon Valley” reports NPR.

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California on Sunday vetoed a bill that would have enacted the nation’s most far-reaching regulations on the booming artificial intelligence industry.

California legislators overwhelmingly passed the bill, called SB 1047, which was seen as a potential blueprint for national AI legislation.

The measure would have made tech companies legally liable for harms caused by AI models. In addition, the bill would have required tech companies to enable a “kill switch” for AI technology in the event the systems were misused or went rogue….

(7) STOP THAT TRAIN! “SpaceX grounds its Falcon rocket fleet after upper stage misfire” – breaking news at Spaceflight Now.

SpaceX’s Falcon rocket fleet was grounded for the third time in three months after a second stage problem occurred Saturday following the successful launch of a Dragon Capsule carrying two crew to the International Space Station. The suspension in flights comes as the company prepares to launch two solar system exploration missions in October with narrow launch windows.

SpaceX said the Falcon 9 second stage that launched NASA’s Crew 9 mission failed to correctly perform a firing of its Merlin Vacuum engine less than 30 minutes after releasing Dragon Freedom into a planned 117×128 mile (189×206 km) orbit.

The engine firing is designed to prevent the rocket body from becoming space debris by driving the stage into the atmosphere for a destructive reentry. Any debris was supposed to fall harmlessly into the ocean in an area previously identified in warnings to mariners and aviators.

“Falcon 9’s second stage was disposed in the ocean as planned, but experienced an off-nominal deorbit burn,” SpaceX said in a social media post, shortly after midnight EDT on Sunday. “As a result, the second stage safely landed in the ocean, but outside of the targeted area.”

The mishap has prompted an investigation from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) which oversees the company’s launch licenses. SpaceX is currently in dispute with the FAA over fines related to Falcon 9 activities at Kennedy Space Center and delays gaining authorization for the fifth test flight of its Starship vehicle from Starbase in Texas.

“The FAA is aware an anomaly occurred during the SpaceX NASA Crew-9 mission,” the FAA said in a statement issued on Monday. “No public injuries or public property damage have been reported. The FAA is requiring an investigation.”…

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Anniversary: Elvira, Mistress of the Dark film

Thirty-three years ago on this date, Elvira, Mistress of the Dark premiered. It was directed by James Signorelli from a script by Sam Egan, John Paragon, and of course Cassandra Peterson who is as you know the person behind the campy facade of Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. 

Elvira, Mistress of the Dark of course has a history. 

In 1981, six years after the death of Larry Vincent who was Sinister Seymour, host of a LA weekend horror show called Fright Night, the producers decided to bring the show back but with a hostess this time thinking she would have greater appeal to a male audience. So the station sent out a casting call, and Peterson auditioned and won the role. 

Producers left it up completely to her to create the role’s image. She and her best friend, Robert Redding, they designed, according to ScreenRant, “Elvira’s character after famous horror hostess Vampira, as well as Charles Addams’ popular character Morticia, and incorporating a Valley Girl spunk into their dark beauty after producers rejected her original idea to look like Sharon Tate’s character in The Fearless Vampire Killers.” 

About the use of elements of Vampira… ScreenRant notes, “Maila Nurmi, who had portrayed the iconic horror hostess Vampira for The Vampira Show in the ’50s, thought that Cassandra Peterson copied her character in creating Elvira. She promptly sent the production a cease-and-desist letter. Nurmi argued that both characters wore black skin-tight dresses, had black hair, heavily applied makeup, and even closed episodes with similar catch phrases.” The cease-and-desist letter was a failure as the lawyers successfully argued in Court that all the elements of Elvira were standard horror tropes. 

It took upwards of three hours to do her makeup and get her into that dress.  It, like the dress worn by Anjelica Huston in The Addams Family Values, was hideously uncomfortable. Keep in mind that she also wore six-inch stilettos as well. 

She’s really the only cast that matters here as this is Her Vehicle.  

Unfortunately for the box office the distributor went dramatically out of business without warning the day before it came out without having produced or distributed most of the prints, so it would only ever appear on five hundred screens instead of the twenty-five hundred that was intended, so it ended up losing a lot of money despite only costing seven-and-a-half million to produce. (Her costume was undoubtedly the most expensive thing in the film.) 

Some critics liked it with Anton Bitel of Little White Lies noting that “Elvira is all sarky, smutty sex positivity, making a prominent display of her two best assets: her verbal wit, and her ability to laugh at everything and everyone including, first and foremost, herself.” Other critics didn’t like it such as Steve Crum of the Kansas City Kansan who said, “There’s nothing dark about Elvira’s cleavage.” And then his review dissected its failure. 

Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes give it an excellent sixty-five percent rating.  

She would shoot a series of Coors Light commercials of which this is one.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) LOOK! UP IN THE SKY! Eh, no, it’s not Superman.

This Thanksgiving, Spider-Man makes his grand return to the streets and skies of New York City. Set to debut during Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade® on November 28, Marvel and Macy’s will premiere an all-new Spider-Man balloon, inspired by and in honor of the iconic art style of comic book legend John Romita Sr.

Spider-Man first debuted in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1981, later making his debut as Marvel’s first larger-than-life balloon in 1987. Spidey quickly became a favorite of Parade watchers and fans at other events for over a decade. After the original balloon was retired, Spidey made his return to the Parade in 2009, running as part of the Parade until 2014.

The 98th Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade will air Thursday, November 28th in the U.S. on NBC and stream on Peacock.

(11) DOUGH SHORTAGE. “Terry Gilliam Says He Doesn’t Have Enough Money to Make ‘The Carnival at the End of Days’” – World of Reel has the story.

Terry Gilliam has had such a hard time trying to fund his last few projects that he’s hinted about retirement. However, back in April, fansite Gilliam Dreams reported that the director was set to direct a new, maybe final, film, titled “The Carnival at the End of Days.”

This past May, Gilliam claimed he had found funding for ‘Carnival.’ We already know that Johnny Depp will play Satan and that the rest of the cast would be composed of Jeff Bridges, Adam Driver and Jason Momoa. A January 2025 shoot was being eyed. (via Premiere)

No surprise, five months later, Gilliam is now telling Czech media that he doesn’t have the sufficient funds to make ‘Carnival,’ and that he would have to creatively compromise his vision to make it happen (via Novinky)….

(12) THERE IS JUST ONE SCULPTURE ON THE MOON. So says Atlas Obscura. “There Is Just One Sculpture on the Moon”. And it is?

ACROSS THE MANY MISSIONS TO the Moon over the years, countless bits of flotsam and jetsam have been deposited on the lunar surface. From Soviet sensors to a couple of golf balls, there are roughly 800 manmade objects up there. There is, however, one of them that’s different than the others. In 1971, the crew of Apollo 15 left a piece of aluminum, 3.3 inches long, on the lunar surface. It is called Fallen Astronaut, and it is the first (and only) art installation on our closest neighbor. (The Moon Museum, a ceramic wafer etched with drawings by Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and others may or not have been snuck aboard Apollo 12.)

(13) GRIFFITH OBSERVATORY’S REFERENTIAL NOOK. The 42 Collective on Facebook shared this IRL homage:

 The Cafe at the End of the Universe. For when Milliways has too many options and you just want a coffee or tea.

At Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, CA, USA. -Timothy Transue

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

(14) AND THE WINNERS ARE… “’Flow’ and ‘La Voix des Sirènes’ Swim Home with Ottawa Intl. Animation Festival’s Top Prizes” – Animation Magazine has the complete list of award winners at the link.

Gintz Zilbalodis animated feature Flow and Gianluigi Toccafondo’s short La Voix des Sirènes (The Sirens’ Voice) were honored with the top prizes at this year’s Ottawa Intl. Animation Festival on Saturday.

An expansion of Zilbalodis’s student film Aqua (2012), Flow has been a festival darling since its debut at the Cannes and Annecy Festivals earlier this year. Janus Films/Sideshow will be released in U.S. theaters on Nov. 22. The beautifully crafted feature centers on a cat that is trying survive a water-drenched, human-free world with a few other animal companions. Latvia’s official entry in the Oscar race, it will be released by Sideshow/Janus Films in U.S. theaters on Nov. 22

A timeless film that uses a captivating mixed media approach, La Voix des Sirènes (The Sirens’ Voice) is the latest film from award-winning director Toccafondo. The short also picked up the top prize at Fest Anca in Slovakia earlier this year.

This year’s DGC Award for Best Canadian Animation winner, In the Shallows (dir. Arash Akhgari), showcased a unique combination of animation techniques, digging into the dangerous allure of mass media intoxication. Akhgari also receives $1000 CAD courtesy of the Directors Guild of Canada as a part of the award….

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

Pixel Scroll 11/29/22 Hush, Little Pixel, Don’t You Cry; Papa’s Going To Sing You A Scroll

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(1) FUTURE TENSE. The November 2022 entry in the Future Tense Fiction series is “Universal Waste” by Palmer Holton, a story about a small-town cop, a murder, and a massive futuristic recycling operation.

It was published along with a response essay, “The Laws of Thermodynamics Will Not Bend for Landfills” by Josh Lepawsky, a researcher on pollution and waste at Memorial University in Canada.

(2) WISCON 2023. Kit Stubbs, Treasurer of SF3, WisCon’s parent not-for-profit organization, rallies everyone with the hashtag Let’s #RebuildWisCon!

WisCon 46 in 2023 is happening!
We are thrilled to announce that Gillian Sochor (she/her, G is soft like “giraffe”, Sochor like “super soaker”) is joining Lindsey and Sherry as our third co-chair. This means we are going ahead with an in-person con for 2023!…

Finances
Thanks to everyone who donated and offered matching gifts last year, we were able to cover the cost of our 2022 hotel contract. We are now looking to raise $30,000 in this year’s annual fundraiser which will allow us to do all kinds of awesome things for WisCon 46 in May 2023, including:

Offset the cost of hotel rooms for members who need to isolate due to COVID-19 and who otherwise might not be able to due to the financial burden

Purchase more high-quality air filters for con spaces and masks for members

Expand the meal voucher program, introduced last year, which enables members in need to eat for free at local restaurants

Continue to offer CART services for transcription, now that the state of Wisconsin is no longer providing funds to offset that cost

And part of that $30,000 will go towards rebuilding WisCon’s savings after last year.

If you weren’t aware, WisCon can’t pay for itself with registrations alone. We try to keep the cost of registration down to make our con as affordable as possible. But what that means is that we’re counting on the members of our community who can chip in extra to do so! Please donate today to help #RebuildWisCon!…

WisCon Member Assistance Fund
This year we’re also looking to raise $3,000 for our WisCon Member Assistance Fund! The WMAF is a specially designated fund that can only be used to provide travel grants to help members attend WisCon. Please consider making a donation via PayPal.

(3) THIS COULD BE YOUR BIG BREAK! Daniel Dern says he won’t be covering Arisia 2023, and suggests I ask another Filer would be interested in getting a press credential to attend and reporting on the convention The upcoming Arisia will be held from January 13-16, 2023, at the Westin Boston Seaport hotel. Vaccination Verification required. If you’re game, email me at mikeglyer (at) cs (dot) com and I will put you in touch with the con. 

(4) GOTHAM AWARDS. Everything Everywhere All at Once, the multiverse-spanning adventure, won Best Feature at the Gotham Awards 2022 reports Variety. And cast member Ke Huy Quan won Best Supporting Performance.   I don’t know why I’ve never heard of the Gotham Awards before, but if they keep going to sff movies I’ll be talking about them in the Scroll again.

(5) NEXT YEAR’S LOSCON. Loscon 49 will be held over Thanksgiving Weekend in 2023. The theme: “Enchanted Loscon”. Guests of Honor — Writer: Peter S. Beagle; Artist: Echo Chernik; Fan: Elayne Pelz. At the LAX Marriott Hotel from November 24-26, 2023. More information at: www.loscon.org.

(6) ZOOMIN’ ABOUT PITTSBURGH. The last FANAC Fan History Zoom of 2022 will be on December 10, about the major fannish breakout in Pittsburgh in the late Sixties and Seventies. Write to fanac@fanac.org if you want to get on the list to see it live.

(7) THE BARD IS OPEN. CrimeReads hears from Mary Robinette Kowal “On Writing a New Take on The Thin Man, Set in Space”, about the experience of creating her latest novel.

…Science fiction and fantasy, on the other hand, are driven by the aesthetic. They are about the look and feel. The sense of wonder. They don’t have an inherent plot structure. 

This means that you can map Science Fiction onto a Mystery structure easily. 

When I decided I wanted to do “The Thin Man in space,” I needed to understand the structure of the Nick and Nora movies specifically. So I began by watching all six of the films. This was a great hardship, as I’m sure you can imagine.  Here are some of the beats that are in all of the films: A happily married couple and their small dog solve crime while engaging in banter and drinking too much. Interestingly, they also contain the element that Nick does not want to investigate and Nora really wants him to.  Nick almost always gets along well with law enforcement. He has an uneasy relationship with the wealth of Nora’s family. There’s always a scene in which he goes off sleuthing on his own and carefully looks over a crime scene. More than one murder. 

From there, I started building the world of the novel. THAT is the hallmark of science-fiction and fantasy. We engage in worldbuilding in which we think about how changing an element or introducing a technology has ripple effects. For this, I knew I wanted to be on a cruise ship in space. There’s a writing workshop that my podcast, Writing Excuses, runs every year on a cruise ship. I based my ship, the ISS Lindgren on the types of things that happen on those and extrapolated for the future…. 

(8) UNDER THE HAMMER: GRRM SIGNED MSS. Heritage Auctions is taking bids the rest of the day on “George R. R. Martin. Two Signed Early Partial Manuscripts of Game of Thrones”. Bidding was up to $10,500 when last checked.

George R. R. Martin. Two Signed Early Partial Manuscripts of Game of Thrones. Includes: 1 box, 384 leaves. Typed, dated November 1994. Boldly signed on the cover page in blue sharpie. [Together with]: 3 boxes, 888 leaves. Typed, dated July 1995. Boldly signed on the cover page in blue sharpie.

Two early drafts of the first book from A Song of Ice and Fire, the hit HBO series and international phenomenon.

The impact that A Game of Thrones has had on the fantasy genre, both as a novel and a television series, is almost impossible to exaggerate. Named to the BBC list of “100 ‘most inspiring’ novels” in 2019 alongside C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, Frank Herbert’s Dune, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy, it almost single-handedly cemented “grimdark” as a fantasy subgenre and helped inspire the likes of Joe Abercrombie and Marlon James, both masters of fantasy in their own right. The overwhelming success of the HBO show redefined fantasy for the general public and has been lauded by both authors and publishers as responsible for boosted sales in fantasy and science fiction….

…As is his typical process, Martin created five copies of each draft of Game of Thrones. Two were kept for his personal files; one was sent to his editor; a fourth was given to Texas A&M University where the archive of Martin’s oeuvre resides; and this, the fifth and final copy, was initially donated to a ConQuesT charity auction, held annually in Kansas City. Parris McBride, Martin’s wife, hoped the charity would get “a few bucks for them;” alas, no one bid on the items. They were then picked up by one of the original book researchers for A Song of Ice and Fire, and from there found their way to Heritage….

(9) AMAZING STORIES KICKSTARTER FINAL WEEK ANNOUNCEMENT. Amazing Stories is in the FINAL week of raising funds through its Kickstarter for “Amazing Stories Annual Special: SOL SYSTEM by Steve Davidson”.

Our annual special issue – Amazing Stories: SOL SYSTEM – a double-sized issue, both in digital and print, of Amazing Stories. It will be chock full of stories set in exciting futures within our solar system. The publication is set for April 2023.

We’re also planning an online convention for April 2023 to celebrate this issue as well. Most of the contributing authors will be there!

We’re really excited about this and we know you’ll love it. Backers of our Kickstarter can choose digital copies of the magazine, print copies, convention memberships, and many more bonus add-ons as well.

(10) THE WATTYS. The winners of Wattpad’s 2022 Watty Awards have posted. The Grand Prize Winner, worth $5,000, is Nichole Cava’s The Vampire Always Bites Twice.

There are also Category Award winners for Fantasy, Science Fiction, Horror, Paranormal, and Fanfiction, to name a few. The website’s format makes it hard to distinguish the shortlist and the winner – more work than I was willing to invest. If you want to try, they’re all at the link.

– Wattpad, the global entertainment company and leading webnovel platform, announced the 2022 Watty Award winners! With over 500 winners across nine languages, the 2022 Watty Awards were the biggest edition yet. This year’s USD $5,000 English-language grand prize went to Nichole Cava for The Vampire Always Bites Twice (55.1K reads), which follows a criminal necromancer and vampire private eye that unexpectedly team up to solve the case of a missing barista. 

In addition to cash prizes, 2022 Watty Award prizes included multiple publishing and entertainment adaptation opportunities from Wattpad WEBTOON Studios and the Wattpad WEBTOON Book Group. Among the more than 30,000 entries for the 2022 Watty Awards, these winning stories were selected…

(11) PYUN OBITUARY. Albert Pyun, director of Cyborg, Interstellar Civil War, Tales of an Ancient Empire,  the Saturn-winning The Sword and the Sorceror and the 1990 version of Captain America, has died November 26 at 69, after several years of dementia and multiple sclerosis.

(12) MEMORY LANE.

2007 — [By Cat Eldridge.] Dorothy and Toto in Oz Park (2007)

Fifteen years ago, a very special statue went up in Oz. No, not that Oz, but the park in Chicago, so first let’s talk about that park. It had been developed as part of the Lincoln Park Urban Renewal Area during the Seventies, and this park was formally named the Oz Park in 1976 to honor Baum who settled in Chicago in 1891 in an area west of the park. 

During the Nineties, the Oz Park Advisory Council and Lincoln Park Chamber of Commerce hired Chicago artist John Kearney to do all the figures for the Park. 

He first created a sculpture of the Tin Man which he fashioned out of chrome bumpers. It was his last such sculpture done that way as the bumpers of chrome were increasingly scarce and thus way too expensive.

Next came the Cowardly Lion which was cast in bronze. Take a look at the detail in the fur — quite amazing, isn’t it? 

Next is the rather colorful Scarecrow that is a seven-foot-tall sculpture, cast in an amazing twenty-two separate pieces in Kearney’s own foundry on Cape Cod.  

Now we come to the last statue, Dorothy and Toto. This final statue to be completed was Dorothy and Toto, using the so-called lost wax technique which you can see an example of here being done. Kearney added paint for the blue dress and the iconic ruby red shoes. The final statue was installed fifteen years ago. 

(13) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born November 29, 1910 — Kendell Foster Crossen. He was the creator and writer of the Green Lama stories.  The character was a Buddhist crime fighter whose powers were activated upon the recitation of the Tibetan chant om mani padme hum. He also wrote Manning Draco series, an intergalactic insurance investigator, four of which are can be found in Once Upon a Star: A Novel of the Future. The usual suspects has a really deep catalog of his genre work, and the Green Lama stories have been made into audio works as well. (Died 1981.)
  • Born November 29, 1918 — Madeleine L’Engle. Writer whose genre work included the splendid YA sequence starting off with A Wrinkle in Time, which won the Newbery Medal and a host of other awards, and has been made into a 2003 television film and a theatrical film directed by Ava DuVernay. She produced numerous loosely-linked sequels, including A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Many Waters, and An Acceptable Time. In addition to her fiction, she wrote poetry and nonfiction, much of which related to her universalist form of Christian faith. She was honored with a World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 1997. In 2013, Crater L’Engle on Mercury was named for her. (Died 2007.) (JJ)
  • Born November 29, 1925 — Leigh Couch. Science Teacher and Member of First Fandom. Active in fandom, along with her husband and children, during the 1960s and 70s, she was a member of the Ozark Science Fiction Association and one of the editors of its fanzine Sirruish. She was on the committee for the bid to host Worldcon in Hawaii in 1981. She was honored for her contributions as Fan Guest of Honor at the first Archon, the long-running regional convention which grew out of that early St. Louis-area fandom. (Died 1998.) (JJ)
  • Born November 29, 1942 — Maggie Thompson, 80. Librarian, Editor, and Fan who, with her husband Don, edited from the 1960s to the 90s the fanzines Harbinger, Comic Art, Rainy Days, and Newfangles, and wrote a column for The Buyer’s Guide for Comic Fandom. When this became the professional publication Comic Buyer’s Guide in 1983, because of their extensive knowledge of comics, she and her husband were hired as editors; after he died in 1994, she continued as editor until it ceased publication in 2013. Under their editorial auspices, it won two Eisner Awards and the Jack Kirby Award. Together they were honored with the Inkpot Award, and twice with the Comic Fan Art Award for Favorite Fan Writers.
  • Born November 29, 1950 — Kevin O’Donnell Jr. Writer who produced a number of genre novels and more than 70 short fiction works. He was chair of the Nebula Award Committee for nearly a decade, and business manager for the SFWA Bulletin for several years; he also chaired for 7 years SFWA’s Grievance Committee, which advocates for authors who experience difficulties in dealing with editors, publishers, agents, and other entities. He received the Service to SFWA Award in 2005, and after his death, the award was renamed in his honor. (Died 2012.)
  • Born November 29, 1969 — Greg Rucka, 53. Comic book writer and novelist, known for his work on Action Comics, Batwoman and Detective Comics. If you’ve not read it, I recommend reading Gotham Central which he co-created with Ed Brubaker, and over at Marvel, the four-issue Ultimate Daredevil and Elektra which he wrote is quite excellent as well. I’ve read none of his novels, so will leave y’all to comment on those. He’s a character in the CSI comic book Dying in the Gutters miniseries as someone who accidentally killed a comics gossip columnist while attempting to kill Joe Quesada over his perceived role in the cancellation of Gotham Central.
  • Born November 29, 1976 — Chadwick Boseman. Another death that damn near broke my heart. The Black Panther / T’Challa in the Marvel metaverse. The same year that he was first this being, he was Thoth in Gods of Egypt. (If you’ve not heard of this, no one else did either as it bombed quite nicely at the box office.) He was Sergeant McNair on Persons Unknown which is at least genre adjacent I would say.  And he even appeared on Fringe in the “Subject 9” episode as Mark Little / Cameron James.  I understand they did a stellar tribute to him in the new Black Panther film.  His Black Panther was nominated at Dublin 2019 for a Hugo but lost to another exemplary film, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. (Died 2020.)

(14) COMICS SECTION.

(15) CHRISTOPHER TOLKIEN PANEL. The 2023 Oxford Literary Festival will host “The Great Tales Never End: in Memory of Christopher Tolkien” on March 28. Tickets available at the link.

The Bodleian’s Tolkien archivist Catherine McIlwaine, writer John Garth and academic Stuart Lee discuss the role of JRR Tolkien’s son, Christopher, in promoting the works of his father and furthering understanding about them.

McIlwaine is co-editor with Bodley’s Librarian Richard Ovenden of The Great Tales Never End: Essays in Memory of Christopher Tolkien, while Garth and Lee have both contributed essays. Christopher was his father’s literary executor and published 24 volumes of his father’s work over four decades, more than Tolkien published during his lifetime. The collection of essays includes reflections on Christopher’s work by world-renowned scholars and reminiscences by family members.

McIlwaine is the Tolkien archivist at the Bodleian Libraries. Garth is an author and freelance writer and editor. He is author of The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien: The Places that Inspired Middle-earth and Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth. Lee is an English lecturer at the University of Oxford who lectures on fantasy literature with a focus on Tolkien. Discussions are chaired by Grace Khuri, a DPhil candidate at Oxford and the first Oxford postgraduate to write a PhD solely on Tolkien.

(16) HOW TO CONTACT THE CHENGDU WORLDCON. The Chengdu Worldcon posted this list of its “working emails”:

(17) DOING RESEARCH AND ASKING EXPERTS. Gideon P. Smith steers writers toward resources for “Writing the Science Right” at the SFWA Blog.

Getting the science right in SF can make the difference between writing cute stories and great science fiction. If you are a non-scientist writing SF and want to know how to do that, then this blog post is for you….

(18) LA ARTIST & WRITER. Some of you already know him, and All About Jazz invites the rest of you to “Meet Tony Gleeson”.

Tell Us A Bit About Yourself.

I’m an artist by vocation and a musician by avocation (I’ve played guitar all my life and picked up keyboards a couple of decades back). Music of all kinds has always been a major part of my life, but early on I made the choice to pursue the visual arts as my career. I spent my so-called formative years on the east coast, in upstate New York, Washington DC, and New York City. When I attended art school in Los Angeles, I fell in love with southern California and after a few years back in Manhattan, I persuaded my wife Annie to move there— quite an adventurous step for her as she’d never been on the West Coast. We’ve been Angelenos since 1977. We have three grown kids pursuing their own lives and adventures, but the house is hardly empty or still with our two cats, Django and Mingus, and our bird Charlie.

Annie’s been an NICU RN and I’ve run an illustration and design studio ever since we got here. I figure I’ve had around a thousand illustrations published: magazines, newspapers, book covers, catalogues and product illustrations. I’ve also done concept art for film, TV, advertising, and toy and product design.

I was a bookseller for several years early in the new millennium. I’m also a writer, with ten crime novels published in Britain and the United States. The most recent, A Different Kind of Dead, was released in the U.S. by Wildside in 2021. The new one, Find the Money, also by Wildside, is due for release before this year’s end. I’m kind of a polymath with a lot of interests (including film, baseball, classic mysteries, science fiction, and comic art) that tend to veer into obsessions….

(19) TAKEN BY SURPRISE, IN A GOOD WAY. “Slip Through Your Fingers: Thoughts on Andor” by Abigail Nussbaum at Asking the Wrong Questions.

Look, I was not expecting this. Two years and more than a dozen shows into the Disney+ experiment, I think we’ve all developed a decent enough sense of what to expect from the television incarnations of the two biggest entertainment franchises on the planet. And for the most part, these shows have been fine. Some fun moments. Some actors who are better than their material. Maybe a hint of a political idea. There was no reason for Andor—a prequel to a prequel whose original premise was already quite dodgy—to be any better.

And then it turned out to be good. Not just good for Star Wars, but just plain good. Best TV of the year good. I have to admit that I went a bit Kübler-Ross about this. First there was Anger—this show is too good to be Star Wars. No way does a story this smart, this thoughtful about the compromises of life under fascism, and the costs of rising up to resist it, exist only as a lead-in to a floppy-haired teenager doing an amusement park ride….

(20) FONT FOLLY. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] A memorable Saturday Night Live skit from 2017 poked a lot of fun at the “lazy choice“ of the font Papyrus for the mega-blockbuster movie Avatar. (You may not be familiar with the controversy, but it’s a real thing.)

The font designer — who was shortly out of school decades ago when he created the font — responded in good humor. Now director James Cameron finally has, too, and Slashfilm is there taking notes: “Avatar Director And Font Connoisseur James Cameron Finally Responds To SNL’s Papyrus Sketch”.

“Saturday Night Live” can be very hit or miss when it comes to their sketches, but it should come as no surprise that “Papyrus” will go down as one of their best. The bit features Ryan Gosling as a man who has disassociated from the world around him because he remembered that James Cameron’s mega-blockbuster “Avatar” used a variation of the Papyrus font for its logo. It’s the kind of thing you may think about for a second or two before moving on with your life, but the sketch from former “SNL” writer Julio Torres dedicates itself to making Gosling’s breakdown look as dramatic as possible.

Like the “Potato Chip” segment, it’s the kind of “SNL” bit that makes you laugh at how seriously everyone is playing their part with something so silly and bizarre. It’s just a logo, and yet Gosling plays it as if the material is worthy of a conspiracy thriller. Since the 2017 sketch, Cameron has given the “Avatar” logo a typeface facelift that gives the series more of an identity, although it’s not that different. It honestly looks as if the graphic designer took the modified Papyrus logo as is, and filled it with air.

The “Terminator 2” filmmaker can change the logo all he wants, but if the internet has taught me anything, it’s that it never forgets. For five years, Cameron has remained silent on the whole Papyrus conversation … until now. With the long-awaited “Avatar: The Way of Water” only weeks away, the blockbuster mastermind is finally breaking his silence.

In the January 2023 issue of Empire, James Cameron finally faces the logo demons that have been haunting him for minutes, as he jokes about how the graphic design choice got in the way of getting even more money. “Just think of how much we could have grossed if it wasn’t for that damn font,” says Cameron…

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Jeffrey Smith, Danny Sichel, Daniel Dern, Scott Edelman, Joey Eschrich, Cora Buhlert, Rich Lynch, Chris Barkley, Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]

Pixel Scroll 9/16/22 Scroll Down, You Click Too Fast, You’ve Got To Make The Pixels Last

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(1) AI IS NOT AN EXCUSE FOR CONTENT THEFT. Malcolm F. Cross wryly begins his email with this link, “I’m sooooort of pleased to announce that discovering another theft of my work inspired me to do a little art project. The theft in question was having some of my work added to the training data for a commercially used AI, and the result was this twitter thread.” The 26-tweet thread starts here. Excerpts follow:

(2) “PEOPLE’S JOKER” NEWS. Variety updated to its report about “’People’s Joker,’ Queer Movie Set in Batman Universe, Pulled From TIFF” with a statement by the filmmaker Vera Drew.

…In a statement shared with Variety on Wednesday evening, Drew promised that “everyone is going to get the chance to see this film.”

“I don’t respond well to bullying or pressure from faceless institutions,” said Drew. “It only emboldens me and what I was saying with this film. We’re looking for buyers and distribution partners who will protect us and make this film accessible to trans people and their families everywhere.”

Drew hinted at potential discord around the movie on Tuesday, ahead of her world premiere, posting a cryptic tweet: “I have no clue how today goes and my team wants me to say nothing of course so I’ll stay vague…but whatever happens in the next few hours, I want you to know…if you’ve been waiting and aching to watch our movie, ur going to get to soon. Stay tuned and stay with me. Need ur help.”…

Just before the movie rolled, The Globe and Mail reported that a title card was displayed stating that the film was protected under “fair use” laws.

“This film is a parody and is at present time completely unauthorized by DC Comics, Warner Brothers or anyone claiming ownership of the trademarks therein (eg. ‘Joker,’ ‘Batman, etc.),” read the title card. “Aside from licensed stock, all video and graphics featured in the film are original materials, often recreations of iconic comic book movie set pieces created by Vera Drew and a team of over 100 independent artists and filmmakers on three separate continents during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

“Any copyright or trademark infringement was not done intentionally. After consulting with counsel, the director believes in good faith that use of these names and characters in a autobiographical context of her personal coming-out story is protected by Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, which allows ‘fair use’ for purposes such as a relevant criticism, social commentary or education.”

(3) NBA LONGLISTS. The 2022 National Book Awards Longlist for Fiction announced today by the National Book Foundation includes two works of genre interest, a novel and a story collection.

Also announced were the Longlist for Nonfiction and the Longlist for Poetry.

(4) GROAN ABOUT. Dave Hook takes us inside another panel he participated in at the Worldcon in “Titus Groan and Chicon 8”.

…I found out that Chicon 8 (the 80th World Science Fiction Convention) would have a “Titus Groan” panel for their 1946 Project. The 1946 Project was their plan to celebrate 1946 and all things speculative fiction with panel discussions instead of doing a 1947 Retro Hugo.

I applied to be on the panel, telling the Programming Team with substantial fannish enthusiasm how great “Titus Groan” was, how I was prepared to answer the question of whether it was genre or not, and what I was prepared to do to get ready for a panel.

For unknown reasons, they selected me for the panel and made me the moderator. I did not have a problem with this; I thought I could do a great job. I had never been on any SF convention panels before. I thought I could do all of that, but I redoubled my preparations….

(5) RECALLING CHRISTOPHER TOLKIEN. “The Worlds of Middle-Earth: The Millions Interviews Richard Ovenden and Catherine McIlwaine”. Their book includes essays by Maxime H. Pascal; Priscilla Tolkien; Vincent Ferré; Verlyn Flieger; John Garth; Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull; Carl F. Hostetter; Stuart D. Lee; Tom Shippey; and Brian Sibley.

In The Great Tales Never End: Essays in Memory of Christopher Tolkien, Richard Ovenden, who serves as Bodley’s Librarian, the senior Executive position of the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford, and Catherine McIlwaine, the Tolkien Archivist at the Bodleian Libraries, have assembled a remarkable anthology about Christopher, who died in 2020…. 

Lenny Picker: What personal memories of Christopher Tolkien are your most vivid?

Richard Ovenden: I had the good fortune of visiting him at least once a year for about 10 years. Staying in the house, having long conversations. He looked quite like his father. I never knew J.R.R. Tolkien, but Christopher’s memory of Oxford really was quite profound. He was born there, grew up there, and lived there for many decades. But his memory of it is really kind of frozen in about the middle of the 1970s, when the family moved to France. And so having a conversation with Christopher about Oxford was like having one about the Oxford of when J.R.R. Tolkien was still alive. So it seemed to me almost like you were talking to J.R.R. Tolkien. And because he had this immense knowledge of his father’s work and his mentality, there was that sort of connection. Christopher also had a very great sense of humor—a very, very dry sense of humor. And he was a very funny human being. He also was a great reader; he loved reading fiction, Victorian fiction, in particular, Dickens, Trollope, were a great source of pleasure for him. So he was a very literary person, not just in his own field of scholarship.

(6) WHO SHOULD WIN FAN HUGOS? In the Hugo Book Club Blog’s post “The Gordian Knot of Fan Vs. Pro” they’re inclined to think the knot is just fine the way it is and that the current WSFS rules get the balance right. 

…Just three years [sic] after the Scithers constitution was introduced [in 1963], Jack Gaughan showed just how unclear the existing language could be, winning both the fan artist and professional artist Hugo Awards in a single [1967] evening. There was an outcry over this — why have two separate categories if the same body of work could win both? A clause was quickly added to the constitution to prevent this from happening again, but the language did not seek to clarify what was Fan and what was Pro, rather stating that “Anyone whose name appears on the final ballot for a given year under the professional artist category will not be eligible for the fan artist award for that year.”

Over the years, this question has resurfaced fairly regularly. Questions were raised over John Scalzi winning best fan writer in the same year that his novel The Last Colony was on the ballot. Two years later there was some slight grumbling about Fred Pohl — at that time one of only 25 authors to have won three professional prose Hugos — winning for best fan writer.

So in this context, a well-intentioned but problematic proposal (“An Aristotelian Solution to Fan vs Pro”) brought forward to this year’s business meeting provided an attempt to parse out this question….

(7) BROOKLYN SFFF. The Brooklyn SciFi Film Festival returns for its third season October 3-9 presenting 200 independent SciFi films from around the world. 

This year’s festival will feature online and in-person events including an evening of Japanese SciFi hosted at Stuart Cinema Cafe on Tuesday October 4th from 7:00 to 9:00 and selected screenings and recognition on Saturday October 8th from 6:00 to 9:00 at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Downtown Brooklyn.  All films streaming online at BrooklynSciFiFilmFest.com starting October 3rd.  Official Selections.

(8) SMOKE ‘EM IF YOU GOT ‘EM. Literary Hub introduces viewers to a 1982 BBC video about a writer at work: “Roald Dahl’s writing routine involved a shed, a sleeping bag, and cigarettes.”

In 1982, Frank Delaney of the BBC visited Roald Dahl at home for a long conversation that meandered from children’s literature to 18th-century furniture and making orange marmalade. During that visit, Dahl gave Delaney a glimpse at his writing routine, which consisted, at the time, of four hours a day spent in a writing shed on his property.

(9) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.  

1963 – [By Cat Eldridge.]

There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image, make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur, or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. We repeat: There is nothing wrong with your television set. You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to… The Outer Limits. — opening narration. 

Fifty-nine years ago this evening on ABC, The Outer Limits series premiered, created and executive produced by Leslie Stevens who had done nothing of a genre nature before. It was directed by far too many to note here. Steven’s would later do Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. 

In the unaired pilot, it was called Please Stand By, but ABC rejected that title, so the producers renamed it.

Two episodes, “Demon with a Glass Hand” and “Soldier”, were written by Harlan Ellison. Clifford Simak wrote “The Duplicate Man” episode. David Duncan penned “The Human Factor”. Eando Binder gets credit for the “I, Robot” episode.  

“Demon with a Glass Hand” won a Writers’ Guild Award. Later, Ellison’s “Soldier” script would allow him to sue Cameron over his Terminator script and win rather nicely. 

Season One combined science fiction and horror, while Season two was shifted focus to being more about what they called hard science fiction stories, dropping the “scary monster” theme of Season One. The network thought the monster were the villains of the week.

The original series lasted a mere forty-nine episodes. The second iteration, which started in 1995, would last much longer, going an amazing one hundred and fifty-two episodes.

It was very popular in the ratings the first season but was competing against Jackie Gleason in the second season and that got it cancelled halfway through. As I noted, it had a second life thirty years on which was quite successful. Variety reported last year that an Outer Limits reboot was in development at a premium cable network though they declined to say which network.

Neat piece of trivia: The “ion storm” from “The Mutant” episode here which was a projector beam shining through a container containing glitter in liquid suspension became the transporter effect in the Trek series. Also, the process used to make pointed ears for David McCallum in “The Sixth Finger” episode here was used to make Spock’s ears, and The black mask from “The Duplicate Man” episode here was used by Dr. Leighton in “The Conscience of the King”. 

It’s streaming on Pluto. Pluto? Huh? 

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born September 16, 1914 — William Bernard Ready. Can I include an individual for just one work? Well given it’s my Birthday list, of course. It’s the 1968 work, The Tolkien Relation: A Personal Inquiry, Ready foresaw the cultural value of Tolkien’s writings and, while at Marquette University, he managed to purchase a large selection of original literary manuscripts by Tolkien in 1956-57, including manuscripts of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. (Died 1981.)
  • Born September 16, 1927 — Peter Falk. His best remembered genre role is in The Princess Bride as the Grandfather who narrates the story. (The person who replaced the late Falk in the full cast reading of The Princess Bride for the Wisconsin Democratic fundraiser, Director Rob Reiner, wasn’t nearly as good as he was in that role.) He also plays Ramos Clemente in “The Mirror,” an episode of The Twilight Zone. And he’s Reverend Theo Kerr in the 2001 version of The Lost World. (Died 2011.)
  • Born September 16, 1930 — Anne Francis. You’ll remember her best as Altaira “Alta” Morbius on Forbidden Planet. She also appeared twice in The Twilight Zone (“The After Hours” and “Jess-Belle”). She also appeared in multiple episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. She’d even appear twice in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and played several roles on Fantasy Island as well. (Died 2011.)
  • Born September 16, 1932 — Karen Anderson. She co-wrote two series with her husband, Poul Anderson, King of Ys and The Last Viking, and created the delightful The Unicorn Trade collection with him. Fancyclopedia has her extensive fannish history thisaway, and Mike has her obituary here. (Died 2018.)
  • Born September 16, 1952 — Lisa Tuttle, 70. Tuttle won the Astounding Award for Best New Writer, received a Nebula Award for Best Short Story for “The Bone Flute,” which she refused, and a BSFA Award for Short Fiction for “In Translation”. My favorite works by her include Catwitch, The Silver Bough and her Ghosts and Other Lovers collection.Her latest novel is The Curious Affair of the Witch at Wayside Cross. Her collection, The Dead Hours of the Night was nominated for a Stoker last year — impressive! 
  • Born September 16, 1954 — Howard Weinstein, 68. At age 19, he was the youngest person to ever write a Trek script, selling “The Pirates of Orion” for use in the animated series. Though it would be his only script, he would go on to write quite a few Trek novels — thirteen are listed currently at the usual suspects — and comics. He gets a thanks credit in Star Trek: The Voyage Home. He wrote a script, “The Sky Above, the Mudd Below”, for the fanfic affair Star Trek: New Voyages, but it never got made. And it won’t given that there’s a comic book series already made with its plot.  Paramount wasn’t at all pleased. To quote Zevon, “Send lawyers, gun and money / the shit has hit the fan.”
  • Born September 16, 1955 — Amanda Hemingway, 67. British author of fantasy novels who’s best known for the Fern Capel series written under the Jan Siegel name — it’s most excellent. I’d also recommend The Sangreal Trilogy penned under her own name. Alas her superb website has gone offline. She is available from the usual suspects — curiously her Hemingway novels are much more costly than her Seigel novels are.
  • Born September 16, 1960 — Mike Mignola, 62. The Hellboy stories, of course, are definitely worth reading, particularly the early on ones. His Batman: Gotham by Gaslight is an amazing “What If” story which isn’t at all the same as the animated film of that name which is superb on its own footing, and the B.P.R.D. stories  are quite excellent too.  I’m very fond of the first Hellboy film, not so much of the second, and detest the reboot now that I’ve seen it, while the animated films are excellent.

(11) HEAR ABOUT “HUMAN EXCEPTIONALISM”. “Dean Koontz on His Vocation as an Author, Art and Meaning in Life, and Human Exceptionalism” in a downloadable interview at Humanize. (Note: I haven’t listened to it.)

In episode one of the second season of Humanize, Wesley J. Smith’s guest is the internationally famous novelist Dean Koontz. Dean and Wesley discuss how he came to be an author, how life is filled with meaning, his art, the importance of human exceptionalism, the problem with transhumanism, and how Dean uses humor to further his plots and character development. Dean recalls his upbringing in an impoverished household that did not have running water until he was 11, how a high school English teacher changed his life, and his love for the use of the English language. He and Wesley also discuss the beauty of the human/dog relationship and his philanthropic support for Canine Companions for Independence, a school that trains service dogs to help people with disabilities lead independent lives. Any reader of Dean Koontz and supporter of human exceptionalism will want to listen to this fascinating interview with one of America’s most successful and prolific authors…

(12) READY FOR MY CLOSE-UP. The Atlantic wants to know “Why Do So Many Kids Need Glasses Now?”

…In the U.S., 42 percent of 12-to-54-year-olds were nearsighted in the early 2000s—the last time a national survey of myopia was conducted—up from a quarter in the 1970s. Though more recent large-scale surveys are not available, when I asked eye doctors around the U.S. if they were seeing more nearsighted kids, the answers were: “Absolutely.” “Yes.” “No question about it.”

In Europe as well, young adults are more likely to need glasses for distance vision than their parents or grandparents are now. Some of the lowest rates of myopia are in developing countries in Africa and South America. But where Asia was once seen as an outlier, it’s now considered a harbinger. If current trends continue, one study estimates, half of the world’s population will be myopic by 2050.

The consequences of this trend are more dire than a surge in bespectacled kids. Nearsighted eyes become prone to serious problems like glaucoma and retinal detachment in middle age, conditions that can in turn cause permanent blindness. The risks start small but rise exponentially with higher prescriptions. The younger myopia starts, the worse the outlook. In 2019, the American Academy of Ophthalmology convened a task force to recognize myopia as an urgent global-health problem. As Michael Repka, an ophthalmology professor at Johns Hopkins University and the AAO’s medical director for government affairs, told me, “You’re trying to head off an epidemic of blindness that’s decades down the road.”

The cause of this remarkable deterioration in our vision may seem obvious: You need only look around to see countless kids absorbed in phones and tablets and laptops. And you wouldn’t be the first to conclude that staring at something inches from your face is bad for distance vision. Four centuries ago, the German astronomer Johannes Kepler blamed his own poor eyesight, in part, on all the hours he spent studying. Historically, British doctors have found myopia to be much more common among Oxford students than among military recruits, and in “more rigorous” town schools than in rural ones. A late-19th-century ophthalmology handbook even suggested treating myopia with a change of air and avoidance of all work with the eyes—“a sea voyage if possible.”

(13) “IT FLOATS.” Ivory Soap floats on its own. Limestone blocks need a little help. “A Long-Lost Branch of the Nile Helped in Building Egypt’s Pyramids” according to the New York Times.

For 4,500 years, the pyramids of Giza have loomed over the western bank of the Nile River as a geometric mountain chain. The Great Pyramid, built to commemorate the reign of Pharaoh Khufu, the second king of Egypt’s fourth dynasty, covers 13 acres and stood more than 480 feet upon its completion around 2560 B.C. Remarkably, ancient architects somehow transported 2.3 million limestone and granite blocks, each weighing an average of more than two tons, across miles of desert from the banks of the Nile to the pyramid site on the Giza Plateau.

Hauling these stones over land would have been grueling. Scientists have long believed that utilizing a river or channel made the process possible, but today the Nile is miles away from the pyramids. On Monday, however, a team of researchers reported evidence that a lost arm of the Nile once cut through this stretch of desert, and would have greatly simplified transporting the giant slabs to the pyramid complex….

(14) EVOLVING ANIMATION. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] Edward Vega of VOX looks at how the success of Spider Man: Into The Spider-Verse has shown animators an alternative to the photo-realistic animation of Pixar: “How ‘Spider-Verse’ forced animation to evolve”.

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Malcolm F. Cross, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 6/22/22 Heigh-ho, The Battling Throg, The Frog Down In Valhalla, Oh

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(1) HOW WRITERS GET UNPAID. Quenby Olson shows how a returned book costs her money on Amazon. Thread starts here.

Olson backed up the account with Vice’s article “TikTok Users Are Showing Readers How To Game Amazon’s Ebook Return Policy”.

A TikTok trend where users encourage others to purchase, read, and return Amazon ebooks within the company’s return policy window has irked independent authors, who claim to have seen dramatic spikes in their ebook return rates since the trend went viral.

The #ReadAndReturn challenge drew attention to Amazon’s Kindle return policy, which states that readers can “cancel an accidental book order within seven days.” But what’s been presented as a literary community “life hack” is hurting romance-fantasy authors like Lisa Kessler’s bottom line. 

“When you buy a digital book, if you read and return it, Amazon just turns around and gets the money back from the author, plus Amazon builds in a digital delivery fee and so Amazon is still getting that delivery fee but we get all the royalties taken back,” Kessler told Motherboard. 

Kessler, who self-publishes several book series, says that before the challenge, she would see on average one or two returns per month. But when she checked her Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) sales dashboard on June 1st, she says she was shocked to find a negative account balance….

(2) JUST A SECOND. The Fall of Númenor, a collection of Tolkien’s works about the Second Age of Middle-Earth, will be published by HarperCollins in November 2022. The book will appear after Amazon Prime releases the streaming series The Rings of Power, set during the Second Age of Middle-earth, in September 2022. “New Tolkien book: The Fall of Númenor to be published” at The Tolkien Society.

A HarperCollins press release included in the post explains that the volume is edited by writer and Tolkien expert, Brian Sibley, and illustrated by acclaimed artist, Alan Lee.

…Presenting for the first time in one volume the events of the Second Age as written by J.R.R. Tolkien and originally and masterfully edited for publication by Christopher Tolkien, this new volume will include pencil drawings and colour paintings by Alan Lee, who also illustrated The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit and went on to win an Academy Award for his work on The Lord of the Rings film trilogy.

J.R.R. Tolkien famously described the Second Age of Middle-earth as a ‘dark age, and not very much of its history is (or need be) told’. And for many years readers would need to be content with the tantalizing glimpses of it found within the pages of The Lord of the Rings and its appendices.

It was not until Christopher Tolkien presented The Silmarillion for publication in 1977 that a fuller story could be told for, though much of its content concerned the First Age of Middle-earth, there were at its close two key works that revealed the tumultuous events concerning the rise and fall of the island-kingdom of Númenor, the Forging of the Rings of Power, the building of the Barad-dûr and the rise of Sauron, and the Last Alliance of Elves and Men.

Christopher Tolkien provided even greater insight into the Second Age in Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth in 1980, and expanded upon this in his magisterial 12-volume History of Middle-earth, in which he presented and discussed a wealth of further tales written by his father, many in draft form.

Now, using ‘The Tale of Years’ in The Lord of the Rings as a starting point, Brian Sibley has assembled from the various published texts in a way that tells for the very first time in one volume the tale of the Second Age of Middle-earth, whose events would ultimately lead to the Third Age, and the War of the Ring, as told in The Lord of the Rings.

(3) BALTICON UPDATE. Balticon’s post-convention email dated June 17 included the following update about the Code of Conduct investigation that is addressing events reported by File 770 here, here, and here.

(4) LIBRARY E-BOOK RELIEF UNCONSTITUTIONAL. “In Final Order, Court Declares Maryland’s Library E-book Law Unconstitutional” reports Publishers Weekly.

In a June 13 opinion and order, Judge Deborah L. Boardman declared Maryland’s library e-book law “unconstitutional and unenforceable” all but ending a successful months-long legal effort by the Association of American Publishers to block the law.

“In its February 16, 2022 memorandum opinion, the Court determined that the Maryland Act likely conflicts with the Copyright Act in violation of the Supremacy Clause,” Boardman’s opinion reads. “Although neither AAP nor the State has moved for summary judgment on any claim, they agree a declaratory judgment may be entered… Therefore, for the reasons stated in the February 16, 2022 memorandum opinion, the Court finds that the Maryland Act conflicts with and is preempted by the Copyright Act. The Act ‘stands as an obstacle to the accomplishment and execution of the full purposes and objectives of Congress.’”

… First introduced in January 2021, the Maryland library e-book law required any publisher offering to license “an electronic literary product” to consumers in the state to also offer to license the content to public libraries “on reasonable terms.” The bill passed the Maryland General Assembly unanimously on March 10, and went into effect on January 1, 2022.

In response, the AAP filed suit on December 9, 2021 arguing that the Maryland law was pre-empted by the federal Copyright Act. Just days after a February 7 hearing, Boardman agreed with the AAP and temporarily enjoined the law. Boardman’s order this week now permanently renders the law enforceable….

(5) CENSORSHIP CASE IN VIRGINIA. Publishers Weekly also reports, “Lawyers Say ‘Defective’ Virginia Obscenity Claims Should Be Tossed”.

First filed in May by lawyer and Republican Virginia assembly delegate Tim Anderson on behalf of plaintiff and Republican congressional candidate Tommy Altman, the suits allege that the graphic memoir Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe and A Court of Mist and Fury by bestselling author Sarah J. Maas—are “obscene for unrestricted viewing by minors.” On May 18, a retired local judge found there was “probable cause” for the obscenity claims and ordered the authors and publishers to answer the charges, raising the possibility that the court could bar the books from public display and restrict booksellers and librarians from providing the books to minors without parental consent.

But in filings late last week, lawyers for Kobabe and her publisher, Oni Press, and Maas and her publisher Bloomsbury, along with lawyers for Barnes & Noble, told the court the suits as filed are defective and the remedy sought unconstitutional.

“The petition and show cause order are facially defective because [the Virginia law] does not authorize a court to declare that the book is ‘obscene for unrestricted viewing by minors,’” reads a joint filing by Maas and Bloomsbury, explaining that the Virginia law “cannot constitutionally be the basis for the relief sought by petitioner as a matter of law.”

In separate filings, Kobabe and Oni Press also argue the law in question is misapplied and the complaint defective. “The statute permits the challenge of a book on the grounds that it is ‘obscene’ to the entirety of the community of the Commonwealth,” reads the brief from Oni Press lawyers. “Petitioner here attempts to redefine [the Virginia law] to have book declared obscene as it relates to one subset of the Community: minors in the Hampton Roads and Virginia Beach areas.”

Furthermore, lawyers for the authors and publishers argue that the books in question do not come close to meeting the standard for obscenity as established by the Supreme Court, which requires that materials, even if they contain explicit material, be found to lack serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value. Thus, the relief requested by the plaintiffs would be “an unconstitutional restraint on free speech,” lawyers argue.

(6) THE MIGHTY NATALIE. “’Thor: Love and Thunder’: How Natalie Portman Grew Nine Inches Taller” — Variety divulges the answer at the link.

…“I definitely got as big as I’ve ever been,” Portman explained for Variety‘s cover story. “You realize, ‘Oh, this must be so different, to walk through the world like this.’”

Portman means that quite literally. Along with getting her arms and shoulders as swole as humanly possible, Portman’s Mighty Thor also stands 6 feet tall — nearly 10 inches larger than Portman’s actual height.

… To date, no one has figured out how an actor can safely elongate their body, so director Taika Waititi and his crew needed to figure out how to get Portman to the proper height for scenes in which she walked with her co-stars. Their solution proved to be about as low-tech as a Marvel movie can get….

(7) KGB. The Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series will be changing its schedule to the second Wednesday of the month. The date change begins on September 14, 2022. Both the July and August readings will be on the third Wednesday as originally scheduled.

After more than twenty years of being held on the third Wednesday of every month, the Fantastic Fiction reading series, currently hosted by Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel at the KGB Bar in Manhattan, will be switching to the second Wednesday of the month, beginning in September, for the foreseeable future. Previously, the series was held on the third Wednesday of the month.

During the Pandemic, when Covid cases in New York City were dangerously high, hosts Ellen and Matt decided to go virtual (via YouTube) for the safety of all. This virtual period lasted for more than eighteen months, during which time Ellen and Matt were able to bring in guests, many of whom were unable to visit New York in person, from all over the world, including Pakistan, Barbados, the U.K., Australia, South Africa and elsewhere.

During this same period a younger crowd less fearful of Covid began to congregate in person at the KGB Bar during the series’ usual third Wednesday. When the Fantastic Fiction series finally returned to the KGB Bar in person in late 2021 and early 2022, the KGB Bar saw a significant drop in income. Because of this, the KGB Bar owner has asked Ellen and Matt to switch weeks for this “big earner/younger generation” that they wish to accommodate on the third Wednesday of each month.

(8) EAR TO THE GROUND. CSI Skill Tree is a series from the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University.The latest event in the CSI Skill Tree series on how video games envision possible futures and create thought-provoking experiences will streamed on Thursday, July 7, from 2:00-3:15 p.m. Eastern. The event is free and open to everyone—here is the registration link.

In this event, speculative fiction author Tochi Onyebuchi and composer/sound designer Amos Roddy will discuss how sound and music in games contributes to worldbuilding, storytelling, and immersion. They’ll look closely at Inside (2016), a moody adventure game with environmental puzzles and grim, industrial aesthetics.

Roddy’s other sound work in games is frequently for science fiction titles (most recently, Citizen Sleeper), and Onyebuchi is an incredibly talented SF storyteller. 

(9) AN IDEA THAT WHIFFED. Galactic Journey knows exactly what the public in 2022 wants to hear about the Worldcon – which is nothing good, of course – and presents: “[June 22, 1967] The Stench Arising from the World Convention” by Alison Scott.

…Here we are in 1967, and Ted White, from his lofty position of power as chairman of NyCon 3, this year’s World SF Convention, has decided that the time has come to expand the existing Best Fanzine Hugo. I think that many of we actifans would welcome additional awards for Best Fan Writer and Best Fan Artist. However, the NyCon 3 committee – and I think we must assume this is mostly Ted – decided to unilaterally create a new class of awards, the Fan Achievement Awards, by analogy to the Science Fiction Achievement Awards, and to nickname them the “Pongs”, by analogy to the “Hugos”….

P.S. Even at the time almost everyone said they hated the idea. That’s why in the end the NyCon 3 committee actually did call these added fan awards Hugos.

(10) MEDIA BIRTHDAY. 

1925 – [By Cat Eldridge.] Let’s keep in mind that ninety-seven years ago when this first version of The Lost World premiered, A. Conan Doyle was very much alive. This is very important as he was involved in the film including writing the script from his novel and being involved in the production quite personally. Doyle said repeatedly that Challenger, not Holmes, was his favorite creation.

Directed by Harry O. Hoyt, The Lost World featured the amazing stop motion special effects by Willis O’Brien, the dinosaurs here being a great look at what he would do on King Kong in eight yers. Nine different types of dinosaurs were created including of course Tyrannosaurus. A very crowded plateau it was. Some of the dinosaur models made for this film were collected later by Ackerman.

It cost seven hundred thousand to make and grossed one point three million. Studios being relatively honest in those days, we can say it actually made money. 

Full early prints include an introduction by Doyle. Later prints removed this.  

The New York Times after seeing early reels of the dinosaurs said if these be “monsters of the ancient world, or of the new world which he has discovered in the ether, were extraordinarily lifelike. If fakes, they were masterpieces.” Contemporaneous reviews such as the LIFE one say the same thing: “In The Lost World, as it appears on the screen, the animals have been constructed with amazing skill and fidelity and their movements, though occasionally jerky, are generally convincing.” 

Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently have a sixty-nine percent rating for it.

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born June 22, 1856 — H. Rider Haggard. Writer of pulp fiction, often in the the Lost World subgenre. King Solomon’s Mines was the first of his novels with Allan Quatermain as the lead and it, like its sequels, was successful. These novels are in print to this day. Haggard by the way decided to take ten percent royalties instead of a flat fee for writing, a wise choice indeed.  And let’s not forget his other success, She: A History of Adventure, which has never print out of print either. (Died 1925.)
  • Born June 22, 1894 — George Fielding Eliot. ISFDB has scant listings from him and Wiki is not much better but shows “The Copper Bowl”  in Weird Tales in the December 1928 issue and notes that thirty years later he has “The Peacemakers”  in the Fantastic Universe in January 1960 edition. Stitching this together using the EofSF, I’ll note he wrote Purple Legion: A G-Man Thriller, a really pulpish affair. As Robert Wallace, he wrote “The Death Skull Murders”, one of the Phantom Detective stories, a series that came out after The Shadow and ran for a generation. (Died 1971.)
  • Born June 22, 1936 — Kris Kristofferson, 86. He first shows up in a genre film, The Last Horror Film, as himself. As an actor, his first role is as Bill Smith in Millennium which is followed by Gabriel in Knights, a sequel to Cyborg. (A lack of name creativity there.) Now comes his role as Abraham Whistler in Blade and Blade II, a meaty undertaking indeed! Lastly I’ll note he voiced Karubi in Planet of the Apes.
  • Born June 22, 1947 — Octavia Butler. I think her Xenogenesis series is her most brilliant work though I’m also very, very impressed by the much shorter Parable series. I’m ambivalent on the Patternist series for reasons I’m not sure about. Her first Hugo was L.A. Con II (1984) for her “Speech Sounds” short story and she also got a Hugo for her “Bloodchild” novelette at Aussiecon Two (1985). DisCon III (2021) saw Parable of the Sower: A Graphic Novel Adaptation with text by her obviously as adapted by Damian Duffy and illustrated by John Jennings pick up the Best Graphic Story or Comic Hugo. (Died 2006.)
  • Born June 22, 1949 — Edward M Lerner, 73. I’m here today to praise the Ringworld prequels that he co-wrote with Niven, collectively known as Fleet of Worlds which ran to five volumes. Unlike the Ringworld sequels which were terribly uneven, these were well written and great to read. I’ve not read anything else by him.
  • Born June 22, 1949 — Meryl Streep, 73. She’d make the Birthday list just for being Madeline Ashton in Death Becomes Her and her epic battle there with Goldie Hawn. She’s the voice of Blue Ameche in A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and a very real Aunt Josephine in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. She’s the voice of Felicity Fox in Fantastic Mr. Fox, based off the on Dahl’s 1970 children’s novel. She voices Jennie in a short that bring Maurice Sendak’s dog to life, Higglety Pigglety Pop! or There Must Be More to Life. She’s The Witch in Into The Woods. I think that’s it.
  • Born June 22, 1958 — Bruce Campbell, 64. Where to start? Well let’s note that Kage loved the old rascal as she described him, so I’ve linked to her review of Jack of All Trades. I personally liked him just as much in The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. and think it’s well worth checking out. I think his work as Ash Williams in the Evil Dead franchise can be both brilliant and god awful, often in the same film. Or the same scene. The series spawned off of it is rather good. Oh, and for popcorn reading, check out If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor, his autobiography. 
  • Born June 22, 1973 — Ian Tregillis, 49. He is the author of the Milkweed Triptych trilogy which is frelling brilliant. He’s contributed three stories to Max Gladstone’s The Witch Who Came in From the Cold, a  rather good serial fiction narrative (if that’s the proper term), and he’s got another series, The Alchemy Wars, I haven’t  checked out. He’s also a contributor to George R. R. Martin’s Wild Cards series which I’m beginning to suspect everyone has been involved in.

(12) COMICS SECTION.

Joel Merriner mashes up Gotham with Middle-Earth.

(13) THE READING LIFE. The Critic’s Paul Dean mourns the decline of the second-hand book trade in “Bookshops remaindered”.

At the Oxford Book Fair in April, the presence of a hundred exhibitors from all over Britain suggested that Covid had not killed off the antiquarian book trade. But those who buy antiquarian books are not necessarily interested in reading, any more than those who buy hundreds of cases of rare wines are interested in drinking.

The second-hand market — for immediate consumption rather than laying down — is a different matter, as Oxford itself sadly demonstrates. In the 1970s, Blackwell’s second-hand department occupied the whole of the top floor. By 2000, it occupied most of the third floor. Now it shivers forlornly in a few feet of the first floor.

Will Waterstones, Blackwell’s new owners, bother to keep it? One second-hand bookshop after another has closed in Oxford, leaving two admittedly excellent Oxfams, St Philip’s Books opposite the cathedral, a new small outlet in the Covered Market, and the ominously named The Last Bookshop in Jericho. Thornton’s and Robin Waterfield are much missed. The former still sells online, but, although I plead guilty to online buying, that is not the same. It is like eating the menu instead of the food….

(14) GETTING READY TO INTERACT WITH AI. “Soon, Humanity Won’t Be Alone in the Universe” says David Brin in his opinion piece for Newsweek.

…In 2017 I gave a keynote at IBM’s World of Watson event, predicting that “within five years” we would face the first Robotic Empathy Crisis, when some kind of emulation program would claim individuality and sapience. At the time, I expected — and still expect — these empathy bots to augment their sophisticated conversational skills with visual portrayals that reflexively tug at our hearts, e.g. wearing the face of a child. or a young woman, while pleading for rights… or for cash contributions. Moreover, an empathy-bot would garner support, whether or not there was actually anything conscious “under the hood.”

One trend worries ethicist Giada Pistilli, a growing willingness to make claims based on subjective impression instead of scientific rigor and proof. When it comes to artificial intelligence, expert testimony will be countered by many calling those experts “enslavers of sentient beings.” In fact, what matters most will not be some purported “AI Awakening.” It will be our own reactions, arising out of both culture and human nature.

Human nature, because empathy is one of our most-valued traits, embedded in the same parts of the brain that help us to plan or think ahead. Empathy can be stymied by other emotions, like fear and hate — we’ve seen it happen across history and in our present-day. Still, we are, deep-down, sympathetic apes.

But also culture. As in Hollywood’s century-long campaign to promote—in almost every film — concepts like suspicion-of-authority, appreciation of diversity, rooting for the underdog, and otherness. Expanding the circle of inclusion. Rights for previously marginalized humans. Animal rights. Rights for rivers and ecosystems, or for the planet. I deem these enhancements of empathy to be good, even essential for our own survival! But then, I was raised by all the same Hollywood memes….

(15) SPIDER-REX. “Spider-Rex Makes His Roaring Debut on Leinil Francis Yu’s New ‘Edge of Spider-Verse’ #1 Variant Cover” Marvel announced today.

The future of the Spider-Verse is here! Launching in August, Edge of Spider-Verse will be five-issue limited series that introduces brand-new Spider-heroes and redefines fan-favorites such as Araña, Spider-Man Noir, Spider-Gwen, and Spider-Man: India! Each thrilling issue will contain three stories crafted by Marvel’s biggest Spider talents including an overarching narrative by Dan Slott who will lay the groundwork for the epic conclusion of the Spider-Verse later this year. Edge of Spider-Verse #1 will see the debut of Spider-Rex in a story by hit Spider-Woman creative team, Karla Pacheco and Pere Perez. Fans can see this awesome and one-of-a-kind Spider-Hero in a brand-new variant cover by Leinil Francis Yu.

(16) WEIRD AL’S SONG FOR STAR WARS. There might actually be a few notes from it in this trailer, I’m not sure. “LEGO Star Wars Summer Vacation”, set shortly after the events of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, features the voices of “Weird Al” Yankovic, Yvette Nicole Brown, Kelly Marie Tran, Anthony Daniels, Billy Dee Williams, and returning cast members from previous LEGO Star Wars specials, and includes “Weird Al’s” new original song, “Scarif Beach Party”.

(17) CAT NOT SLEEPING ON SFF. Enjoy this entertaining trailer for “Puss In Boots: The Last Wish”.

This Christmas, everyone’s favorite leche-loving, swashbuckling, fear-defying feline returns. For the first time in more than a decade, DreamWorks Animation presents a new adventure in the Shrek universe as daring outlaw Puss in Boots discovers that his passion for peril and disregard for safety have taken their toll. Puss has burned through eight of his nine lives, though he lost count along the way. Getting those lives back will send Puss in Boots on his grandest quest yet. Academy Award® nominee Antonio Banderas returns as the voice of the notorious PiB as he embarks on an epic journey into the Black Forest to find the mythical Wishing Star and restore his lost lives. But with only one life left, Puss will have to humble himself and ask for help from his former partner and nemesis: the captivating Kitty Soft Paws (Oscar® nominee Salma Hayek).

(18) SHOULD BE WORTH MORE THAN TWO POINTS. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] This Rube Goldberg machine by Creezy has been viewed nearly 10 million times, but not on File 770! “The Swish Machine: 70 Step Basketball Trickshot”.

(19) REFERENCE DIRECTOR! [Item by Daniel Dern.] To help you decipher today’s Scroll title “Heigh-ho, The Battling Throg, The Frog Down In Valhalla, Oh” —

Throg is Frog Thor, The Frog Of Thunder, first introduced by Walt Simonson in 1986 (see “Thor Left Asgard’s Future to Marvel’s Strangest Thunder God”), although, Marvel being Marvel (sigh), there are now several variants and versions…

“Heigh-Ho etc” riffs on the Irish folk song “Heigh-Ho, The Rattlin’ Bog” popularized by The Irish Rovers and done by many others including Seamus Kennedy,

(20) AMATEURS DRIVING THE CHARIOT OF APOLLO. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] James Burke and John Parry tour an Apollo training facility, crash a “scooter” on the Moon and mispronounce “Houston” in this clip from the BBC show Tomorrow’s World in 1968.

(21) VIDEO OF THE DAY. This is buzzzzzare! “Best-Case Scenario, Worst-Case Scenario and One with Bees” from Late Night with Seth Meyers.

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Andrew Porter, Daniel Dern, Joey Eschrich, John A Arkansawyer, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 7/16/21 All Scrollnanas Make A Pixel, And So Do Many More

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(1) NEW PANEL FOR CORDWAINER SMITH REDISCOVERY AWARD. [Item by Steven H Silver.] Robert J. Sawyer and Barry Malzberg have retired as judges for the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award. A new panel has been created to select the honorees.  The new panel includes Rich Horton, Steven H Silver, and Grant Thiessen.  The new panel’s first selection will be announced at Readercon the weekend of August 13-15.

(2) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman declares “It’s pure pandemonium — peanut butter pandemonium! — with John Wiswell” in Episode 149 of his Eating the Fantastic podcast.

John Wiswell

Over the past year, you joined me as I’ve baked and shared homemade scones and pizza, or ordered takeout weiner schnitzel and sushi, my guests and I doing our best to seize those moments of community COVID-19 tried to steal from us. In this case, John Wiswell and I pretended we were sitting across the table from each other during the Nebula Awards weekend.

John Wiswell won a Nebula Award earlier this month for the short story “Open House on Haunted Hill,” which had been published last year by Diabolical Plots. He’s also appeared in Nature, Uncanny, Weird Tales, Fireside, Daily Science Fiction, Flash Fiction Online, Cast of Wonders, Podcastle, and Pseudopod. In an astonishing show of prolificacy, he managed to posted fiction on his blog every day for six straight years, which I find astonishing. I found his Nebula acceptance speech astonishing as well; it was one of the best I’ve ever heard.

John and I were supposed to enjoy specialty hamburgers together this time around, only … something went wrong, as you shall hear. Why did I end up eating a chuck roast, brisket, and short rib burger while John only got to nibble on ice cream and carrots? For the answer to that question, well … you’ll have to listen.

We discussed his motivation for giving one of the greatest acceptance speeches ever, how he learned to build meaning out of strangeness, the way writing novels taught him to make his short stories better, his dual story generation modes of confrontation vs. escape, why what we think we know about the Marshmallow Test is wrong, the reason we’re both open online about our rejections, how the love of wallpaper led to him becoming a writer, why we’ve each destroyed our early writing from time to time, what he learned writing a story a day for six years, and much more.

(3) GARCIA APPEARANCES. Chris Garcia will be doing presentations at two Mystical Minds convention gatherings in the coming year.

Mystical Minds is a new Pagan, Paranormal, and Metaphysical convention created to expand our minds as well as our networks! 

Witches, Pagans, Paranormal investigators, psychics, mediums, metaphysical practitioners, UFO experts, cryptozoologists, mystics, and other free-thinking spiritual seekers will come together in person this fall and spring for two conventions in the beautiful Bay area of Northern California! 

For the Fall Gathering / Mystical Minds convention this October in Dublin, CA he’ll present:

History of Paranormal Research in the Bay Area

Before Ghost Hunters, Most Haunted, or even Ghostbusters, San Francisco and the Bay has been home to research into the unknown. From occultists and de-bunkers in the early 20th century, to TV personalities in the 70s and 80s, to hard core particle physicists, research into the paranormal has happened here! Join Chris Garcia as he tells their stories! 

At the Spring Gathering / Mystical Minds convention next February in San Jose, CA he’ll speak about —

The Winchester House

An architectural marvel, containing a story of American eccentricity, and a debate over the potential paranormal aspects. We will look at the history of the House, the stories surrounding its building, the recounting of what people have experienced, and how development in the area may have something to do with all the fuss… both before and after Sarah Winchester showed up!  

(4) HARD DRIVES OF IF. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster, Designated Financial Times Reader.] In the July 16 Financial Times, Tom Faber discusses “interactive fiction” or IF, a genre between a video game and a novel.

After a few wilderness years (around 2000), IF re-emerged among a niche community of writers and intellectuals who organised around the annual Interactive Fiction Competition, founded in1995.  This renaissance as partially triggered by  progress in technology.  Writers developed methods for inactivity such as multiple choice as an alternative to the intimidating grammar rules of the text parser. New tools such as Twine, ChoiceScript and Inklewriter empowered those without coding skills to create their own games.  This contributed to a diversification of the creator pool, particularly encouraging queer writers who have broached provocative topics not tackled in the gaming mainstream, ranging from gender dysphoria to clinical depression to unconventional kinks…

…One of the most remarkable IF writers is Porpentine, author of the vivid story With Those We Love Alive.  On this tale of an artist enslaved by an insectoid empress, you roam an alien world of ‘glass flowers on iron stalks. Canopy of leafbone.  Statues sunk into the earth.’  Porpentine asks you to swap words out, wipe them away, and — most intimately — to draw symbols on your arm which represent emotional responses to the narrative.

(5) FREE DOWNLOAD FROM TAFF. Willis Discovers America and other fan fiction by Walt Willis is the latest addition to the selection of free ebook downloads at David Langford’s unofficial Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund site, where they hope you’ll make a little donation to the fund if you please. Here’s the download page.

An attempt to collect all Walt Willis’s short fan fiction, in the old sense of invented stories about real-life fans and fandom. This omits the long and much-reprinted The Enchanted Duplicator (1954 with Bob Shaw) and its sequel Beyond the Enchanted Duplicator… To the Enchanted Convention, both already in the TAFF ebook library.

The title piece is a wildly silly imagining of Walt’s first trip to the USA in 1952, written and serialized in multiple fanzines before he actually began the journey; the text used here is from the collected edition of 1955, which included a new preface and annotations explaining some of the more arcane in-jokes. Further items range from scripts for two recorded “taperas” or tape operas that had fans rolling in the aisles at 1950s conventions, to a 1987 recasting of The Enchanted Duplicator as a computer text-Adventure game. Most of this material has never before been collected.

Edited by David Langford, who has added a few more explanatory notes; research work by Rob Hansen and others; proofreading by Pat Charnock. Cover artwork by Bob Shaw, drawn on to stencil for the collected Willis Discovers America (1955). 45,000 words.

(6) YOU COULD LOOK IT UP. John Scalzi tweeted this response to an item screencapped here the other day:

(7) ELVISH. The On fairy-stories website interviews Elvish linguistic scholar Carl F. Hostetter, editor of The Nature of Middle-Earth, a new J.R.R. Tolkien book: “From Linguistics to Metaphysics”. The book proposal with many of the edited texts was seen and approved by Christopher Tolkien, who passed away last year.

In your opinion, why did Tolkien not develop completely the Elvish languages?

For much the same reason that he never completed The Silmarillion: at first, because things grew and changed in his imagination and their expression on paper, and then, after the intervention and completion of The Lord of the Rings, because he had to revise everything to make it consistent with the published book and the thousands of years of “new history” that the introduction of the Second and Third Ages required, a task he was never able to achieve. With the languages, this was because whenever he attempted to make “definitive” decision on some point of phonology or grammar, he would almost inevitably start revising the whole system, which makes sense since any language is a complexly intertwined system, such that a change in one feature or detail can and almost always does affect other aspects. Nor, I think, was it ever Tolkien’s intention to make the Elvish languages “complete” or “finished”: they were primarily an expression of his linguistic aesthetic, and its changes over time. Unlike, say, with Zamenhof and Esperanto, Tolkien had no utilitarian purpose in mind for his languages.

(8) THINKING ABOUT THE FUTURE. ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination has published the latest issue of Imaginary Papers, their quarterly newsletter on science fiction worldbuilding, futures thinking, and imagination. Issue 7 features a piece on The Expanse by science, technology, and society scholar Damien P. Williams, and a piece on “Sultana’s Dream,” a 1905 Bengali feminist utopian speculative fiction story, by musicologist and media scholar Nilanjana Bhattacharjya.

One of the most engrossing things about the small-screen adaptation of The Expanse is how viscerally it examines the human costs of life in space. After being exposed to a massive dose of radiation, starship captain James Holden gets a permanent anticancer implant, like a far-future successor of a Port-A-Cath. And from the first episode, we’re made to understand that the Belters—descendants of humans who have worked, lived, and started societies on asteroids or the moons of other planets in our solar system—have different physiologies than the humans who still call Earth home. Gravity weighs heavier on Belters: it constricts their blood vessels, strains their hearts, and cracks their bones….

(9) HENDRIX INTERVIEW. See Kevin Kennel’s video interview of author Grady Hendrix on Facebook.

Author Grady Hendrix (‘Horrorstör’, ‘We Sold Our Souls’ and more!) graciously took time out of his busy schedule for an interview with our very own library staff member Kevin Kennel, to discuss his new book, ‘The Final Girl Support Group’ and his experiences as a writer and author. …Please note: this video contains adult content and is an interview about an adult horror novel.

(10) VISITING UTOPIA. Kim Stanley Robinson explains the usefulness of “The Novel Solutions of Utopian Fiction” in The Nation.

… But in this world, we are never going to get the chance to start over. This was one of the reasons Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels objected to 19th-century utopias like that of Charles Fourier, the French designer of small communes living in perfect harmony: They were fantasy solutions that served only to distract people from the real work of politics and revolution. They were also in competition with Marx and Engels’s own ideas, so there was the usual left infighting. But it was a legitimate complaint: If utopia isn’t a political program, then what is it for?

The answer should be obvious. Utopias exist to remind us that there could be a better social order than the one we are in. Our present system is the result of a centuries-old power struggle, and it is devastating people and the biosphere. We must change it—and fast. But to what?

Utopias are thought experiments. Imagine if things ran like this: Wouldn’t that be good? Well, maybe…let’s live in it fictionally for a while. What problems crop up in this system? Can we solve them? What if we tweak things this way, or that? Let’s tell this story and then that story, and see how plausible they feel after we spend some imaginative time in them….

(11) STEPHEN HICKMAN (1949-2021). Famed sff artist Stephen Hickman died July 16 reported his friend and colleague Ron Miller on Facebook: “Lost one of my best friends, Steve Hickman, this morning and the world lost one of its best artists and finest human beings.” Hickman had over 350 book and magazine covers to his credit. He won the 1994 Best Original Artwork Hugo for his Space Fantasy Commemorative Stamp Booklet. He was a six-time Chesley Award winner.

(12) JUDI B CASTRO OBIT. Judi Beth Castro died July 15 of a sudden illness. She was 58. Her husband, author Adam-Troy Castro, announced her passing on Facebook.

The love of my life, Judi Beth Castro, lost her fight for life at 10:50 PM Thursday night. The illness was sudden, and she was always in critical danger, but between Tuesday night and Wednesday evening her numbers were improving at such a steady rate that we thought there was hope. Alas, the decline began on Thursday morning and by afternoon there was no doubt….

Her genre credits include Atlanta Nights (2005; a parody which she contributed to with many other co-authors), and the short fiction “Unfamiliar Gods” co-authored with Adam-Troy Castro.

(13) MEMORY LANE.

  • 1953 – Sixty-eight years ago, Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe premiered as a black-and-white movie serial from Republic Pictures. It was originally going to be a syndicated television series. It was directed by Harry Keller, Franklin Adreon and Fred C. Brannon as written by Ronald Davidson and Barry Shipman. Its cast was Judd Holdren, Aline Towne, Gregory Gaye and Craig Kelly.  It would last but one season of twelve twenty-five minute episodes. And yes, it was syndicated to television on NBC in 1955. Some sources say Dave Steven based his Rocketeer character off of Commando Cody. And there’s a clone trooper named Commander Cody who serves under Jedi general Obi-Wan Kenobi, an homage that Lucas has openly acknowledged as he watched the series as a child. 

(14) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born July 16, 1928 — Robert Sheckley. I knew that his  short story “Seventh Victim” was the basis of The 10th Victim film but I hadn’t known ‘til now that Freejack was sort of based of his Immortality, Inc. novel.  I’ve read a lot by him with Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming (written with Zelazny) being my favorite work by him. Sheckley is very well stocked on the usual suspects. (Died 2005.)
  • Born July 16, 1929 — Sheri S. Tepper. Nominated for an Austounding Award way back when, she had a long career, so I’m going to single out Beauty, The Gate to Women’s Country, Six Moon Dance and The Companions as my favorites knowing very well that yours won’t be the same. (Died 2016.)
  • Born July 16, 1951 — Esther Friesner, 70. She’s won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story twice with “Death and the Librarian” and “A Birthday”.  I’m particularly fond of The Sherwood Game and E.Godz which she did with Robert Asprin. She won the 1994 Edward E. Smith Memorial Award for Imaginative Fiction, for lifetime contributions to science fiction, “both through work in the field and by exemplifying the personal qualities which made the late ‘Doc’ Smith well-loved by those who knew him,” presented by the New England Science Fiction Association. She’s well stocked at the usual suspects. 
  • Born July 16, 1956 — Jerry Doyle. Now this one is depressing. Dead of acute alcoholism at sixty, his character Michael Garibaldi was portrayed as an alcoholic, sometimes recovering and sometimes not on Babylon 5. Damn. (Died 2016.)
  • Born July 16, 1963 — Phoebe Cates, 58. Ok, so her entire genre appearance credit is as Kate Beringer in Gremlins and  Gremlins 2: The New Batch. Yes, I’ll admit that they’re two films that I have an inordinate fondness for that the Suck Fairy cannot have any effect upon them what-so-ever. Update: I’ve discovered since I last noted her Birthday that she was in Drop Dead Fred, a dark fantasy. She also stopped acting six years ago. 
  • Born July 16, 1965 — Daryl “Chill” Mitchell, 56. Best remembered genre wise as Tommy Webber in the much beloved Galaxy Quest though his longest acting role was Patton Plame on the cancelled NCIS: New Orleans. 
  • Born July 16, 1966 — Scott Derrickson, 55. Director and Writer of Doctor Strange who also had a hand in The Day the Earth Stood Still (as Director), The Exorcism of Emily Rose (Director and Writer), Urban Legends: Final Cut (Director and Producer) and the forthcoming Labyrinth sequel (Director and Writer). 
  • Born July 16, 1967 — Will Ferrell, 54. His last genre film was Holmes & Watson in which he played Holmes. It won Worst Picture, Worst Director, Worst Screen Combo and, my absolute favourite Award,  Worst Prequel, Remake, Rip-off or Sequel. Wow. He was also in Land of the Lost which, errrr, also got negative reviews. Elf however got a great response from viewers and critics alike. He also was in two of the Austin Powers films as well. Oh, and he voices Ted / The Man with the Yellow Hat, a tour guide at the Bloomsberry Museum in Curious George.

(15) BANNED FROM ARGO. Larry Correia told Monster Hunter Nation readers that he’s gotten his “7th or 8th” 30-day ban from Facebook. He posted screenshots from his appeal to FB’s Oversight Board in “Fun With The Oversight Board -Or- Better Sign Up For The Newsletter Before I Get Perma-Banned” [Internet Archive link].

…Facebook is a time suck garbage site that exists as the propaganda arm of the DNC/Corpo-Uni-Party, to spy on you to sell to advertisers, and to steal everyone’s personal information. After bamboozling all the content creators to go over there to build “community” they now hold them hostage because the content creators are scared to leave because they’ll take a financial hit (The Oatmeal’s got a great cartoon about it)….

(16) WE INTERRUPT THIS PROGRAM. FOREVER. Hackaday memorializes the “End Of An Era: NTSC Finally Goes Dark In America”.

A significant event in the history of technology happened yesterday, and it passed so quietly that we almost missed it. The last few remaining NTSC transmitters in the USA finally came off air, marking the end of over seven decades of continuous 525-line American analogue TV broadcasts. We’ve previously reported on the output of these channels, largely the so-called “FrankenFM” stations left over after the 2009 digital switchover whose sound carrier lay at the bottom of the FM dial as radio stations, and noted their impending demise. We’ve even reported on some of the intricacies of the NTSC system, but we’ve never taken a look at what will replace these last few FrankenFM stations….

(17) SUSTAINABLE USE OF SPACE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] In this week’s Science:

Last month, at the G7 Leaders’ Summit in Cornwall, United Kingdom, the leading industrial nations addressed the sustainable and safe use of space, making space debris a priority and calling on other nations to follow suit. This is good news because space is becoming increasingly congested, and strong political will is needed for the international space community to start using space sustainably and preserve the orbital environment for the space activities of future generations.

There are more than 28,000 routinely tracked objects orbiting Earth. The vast majority (85%) are space debris that no longer serve a purpose. These debris objects are dominated by fragments from the approximately 560 known breakups, explosions, and collisions of satellites or rocket bodies. These have left behind an estimated 900,000 objects larger than 1 cm and a staggering 130 million objects larger than 1 mm in commercially and scientifically valuable Earth orbits.

(18) SUPERPRANKSTERS? Isaac Arthur’s video “Annoying Aliens” contends, “Fictional portrayals of alien invasion or reports of alien sightings and abductions often imply motives which on inspection make little sense… unless perhaps the true purpose was mischief.”

(19) DISCWORLD COMMENTARY. YouTuber Dominic Noble says he has finally overcome his “sense of loss and deep sadness at the tragically too early passing of the author [Terry Pratchett] due to Alzheimer’s disease” and  is planning to do videos on the Discworld books. He begins with this overview of Discworld and his appreciation for it and for Pratchett.

(20) POTTER IN PERSPECTIVE. YouTuber Eyebrow Cinema considers“Harry Potter – 10 Years Later”.

It’s been a decade since Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part Two arrived in theaters and brought an end to JK Rowling’s saga of witches and wizards. Like most 90s kids, I too read all the books and saw all the movies as a kid and teenager but have completely left the series behind since. Ten years later, how does Harry Potter hold up? In this video essay, I try to get to the heart of Harry Potter as while as examine my own relationship to the series.

No official works cited for this video, though I imagine my criticisms of Rowling’s transphobia will draw some ire. I have no intention of arguing the ethics or legitimacy of Rowling’s claims….

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Martin Morse Wooster, Joey Eschrich, Chris M. Barkley, Jennifer Hawthorne, Steven H Silver, StephenfromOttawa, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, N., Daniel Dern, JJ, Michael Toman, John King Tarpinian, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to contributing editor of the day Camestros Felapton.]

Pixel Scroll 3/10/21 If I Could Save Time In A Jay Kay Klein Bottle

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(1) A SECOND MEOW. Geoff Carter, in “Inside Meow Wolf’s immersive Omega Mart art installation in Las Vegas” at the Las Vegas Weekly, reports on the second Meow Wolf installation, “Omega Mart,” which opened last month in Las Vegas.  It apparently starts as a pretend supermarket and gets much weirder! Their first permanent space, in Santa Fe, is in an old bowling alley purchased for their use by George R.R. Martin.

Omega Mart is Meow Wolf’s second permanent installation—arriving after Santa Fe’s House of Eternal Return—and their second entry into Las Vegas; the group took over the Life Is Beautiful festival’s Art Motel space in 2017. If you were there, you have some idea what Meow Wolf has to offer: laser harps, portals to the unknown, room-size bowls of “ramen.” The collective has a unique talent for producing and soliciting works of maximalist art, collecting them in warehouse-size spaces with innocuous facades and tying all those artworks together through inventive visual segues and mystery-box narrative.

“Our work is for people that don’t necessarily go to art galleries and art museums, who feel like they want to see artwork and have it [as] an important part of their lives, but might feel a little alienated by the art world,” says Corvas Brinkerhoff, Meow Wolf’s executive creative director. “We’re trying to build a bridge to those people and say, look, art is valuable. And all this brilliant work that all these artists are making deserves to have a place where it can be seen, and where the artists can be supported in the process of making it….”

…Brinkerhoff notes that there are several giant stories unfolding within the space, including those of a shadowy corporation (Omega Mart’s parent company “Dramcorp”). Brinkerhoff says it’s “trying to save humanity from itself” by experimenting with what looks like alien technology. A zealous resistance group—shades of Meow Wolf’s beginnings here—is standing against these corporate overlords wielding what little it has.

There are RFID-accessed computer terminals and old-fashioned phones scattered throughout that yield clues to the mystery (Brinkerhoff says the phones mostly deliver recorded messages, though “you also might get a live human”), and videos that advance the story—about three hours’ worth of original footage….

(2) LEARNING FROM PRATCHETT. Ziv Wities’ project “Story Structure Lessons From The Discworld.” is a series of videos aimed at readers and writers, where he talks about “what structure is, how you spot it in what you read and watch, how you choose it and build it up in your own work.” Why Discworld? “The Discworld subseries aren’t just about different characters and different events. They’ve got different structures; they’re each built differently. So Discworld is a single series, but it tells many shapes of stories — which makes it a perfect example to learn structure from.”

Structure is fundamental to fiction. So often, though, we lack basic terms and ideas to talk about story structure. We have trouble getting past basic intuition. What *is* structure? What makes structure “good”? When one story is better-structured than another — what is the actual difference? To answer these questions, we’re using Terry Pratchett’s wonderful Discworld novels. Because one interesting thing about the Discworld is how it’s divided into sub-series — different books following different characters and different story arcs. Throughout these videos, we’ll see that the Discworld sub-series not only follow different characters — they follow different structures. By comparing and contrasting, we’ll understand what those structural differences are — and how to think about story structure in what we read, and in what we write.

(3) GET READY TO HAVE A BLAST. [Item by David K.M. Klaus.] Everybody who registered with TWA and PanAm for moon tickets back in 1969 has another chance. Another eight names will be drawn from a dimensionally transcendental (*) hat for a trip on SpaceX’s mis-named “Starship” (since technically it’s not a starship, but merely a spaceship) and there’s no initial mention of an age/health requirement so maybe even D. D. Harriman could go. Inverse has the story: “SpaceX Moonshot: How to win a seat on Yusaku Maezawa’s trip to the Moon”.

You can’t win if you don’t enter, and even if you wind up like the crews of Shuttle Orbiters Challenger and Columbia, you’ll still be part of Earth history not to be forgotten.  You will be remembered.

(*) Doctor Who reference, Tom Baker years

HOW TO APPLY TO GO TO THE MOON

According to the new video, the way to enter into the competition is not as straight-forward as putting your name in the hat, as it were. But it does start that way.

  1. Go to the dearMoon website, the site set up to release new information regarding the project.
  2. There, people are invited to preregister with the mission by giving their name, country of origin, and email.
  3. Entrants are also asked to upload an image of themselves.
  4. Entrants are also asked to select which of Maezawa’s many social profiles they follow, too.

“Everyone who pre-registers will receive an email about the selection process,” the dearMoon site reads. They will also receive a “crew candidate” certificate with their name and picture on it, according to the site.

(4) DOCTOR WHO MARKS THE DAY. “Doctor Who female stars discuss International Women’s Day 2021” – a Radio Times from March 8.

Mandip Gill – actor, Yaz Khan in Doctor Who

International Women’s Day to me is a day to celebrate women’s progression politically, socially and economically. It’s also a day for us as a whole to recognise the further improvements needed. Ultimately it’s about the celebration of women.

Doctor Who saw what most people could see, in that it wasn’t an equal playing field.  They absolutely took a stand in changing the space to one much more equal by having Jodie as the Doctor. This challenged things that were just a given and showed the audience why we should continually challenge these structures and roles.

From the first meeting I knew the significance of this change to Doctor Who history and knew I wanted to be a part of that change. You could feel the significance and positive energy of what was to come from my first audition with Jodie.

Personally, I love the weight of being a south Asian female companion and do hope young people take inspiration from my role in Doctor Who as I did watching the cast of Goodness Gracious Me.

(5) WORK V. ARTIST. Essence of Wonder with Gadi Evron discusses “Can We Read Their Books While Not Forgiving Them?” on Saturday March 13 at 3 p.m. Eastern. Register here.

P. Djèlí Clark, Stephen Llano, and Alan Bond will join Gadi and Karen to discuss the challenges faced by the community when considering problematic authors and how to treat their works.

(6) BEING PROFESSIONAL. [Item by N.] Show creator Owen Dennis offers insights about marketing and how creators have to keep mum about a lot of details regarding the future of their shows/projects in this Twitter thread.

https://twitter.com/OweeeeenDennis/status/1362526915555332098
https://twitter.com/OweeeeenDennis/status/1362526917249822721
https://twitter.com/OweeeeenDennis/status/1362526918843662338

The previous day he’d announced this –

https://twitter.com/OweeeeenDennis/status/1362112679045783553

(7) THROUGH ALIEN EYES (OR WHATEVER THEY USE). James Davis Nicoll isn’t surprised that most sff is told from a human viewpoint, however, it certainly isn’t limited to doing so: “Five Classic SF Novels. Written From an Alien Perspective”

Pride of Chanur by C. J. Cherryh (1982)

The Compact comprises seven technologically sophisticated species, each shaped by its own evolutionary history. In spite of sometimes profound communication problems, the seven coexist peacefully enough that violence is retail, not wholesale.

At Meetpoint Station, Tully, a hairless primate of a new, unfamiliar species , takes refuge in the hani trading ship Pride of Chanur. For reasons that made sense at the time, Pyanfar Chanur grants the furless, blunt-fingered alien sanctuary. In so doing, she offends the kif Akkhtimakt. In Akkhimakt’s eyes, Pyanfar has stolen Akkhimakt’s property. The kif do not forgive affronts. Pyanfar’s act of mercy makes her ship the target of a kif vendetta.

(8) MEMORY LANE.

  • 1981 — Forty years ago, Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-Earth by J.R.R. Tolkien won the Mythopoetic Fantasy Award. (From 1971 until 1991, they gave but one award for all fantasy literature. Starting in 1992, they expanded to this award into two: one for adult literature and one for children’s literature.)  It was published by  George Allen & Unwin Publication in 1980. This is yet another collection of tales edited by Christopher Tolkien. It would also win a Balrog Award from the Intentional Fantasy Gamers Society.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born March 10, 1891 — Sam Jaffe. His first role was in Lost Horizon as the High Lama and much later in The Day the Earth Stood Still playing Professor Jacob Barnhardt. Later on we find him in The Dunwich Horror as Old Whateley, voicing Bookman in Bedknobs and Broomsticks, playing The Old-Man in The Tell-Tale Heart, and in his last film, appearing in Battle Beyond the Stars as Dr. Hephaestus. John Sayles wrote the script for the latter surprisingly enough. (Died 1984.) (CE) 
  • Born March 10, 1918 — Theodore Cogswell. He wrote almost forty  science fiction stories, most of them humorous, and was the co-author of a Trek novel, Spock, Messiah!, with Joe Spano Jr. He’s perhaps best remembered as the editor of the Proceedings of the Institute for Twenty-First Century Studies in which writers and editors discussed their own and each other’s works.  A full collection of which was published during 1993 except, as EoSF notes “for one issue dealing with a particularly ugly controversy involving Walter M Miller”.  Having not read these, I’ve no idea what this entails. (Died 1987.) (CE) 
  • Born March 10, 1938 — Marvin Kaye, 83. Formerly the editor of Weird Tales, he has also edited magazines such as H. P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror and Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine. His Cold Blue Light novels with Parke Godwin are quite superb. The Fair Folk anthology which is most excellent and which he edited won a World Fantasy Award. He writes the “Marvin Kaye’s Nth Dimension” for the Space and Time website. (CE) 
  • Born March 10, 1958 — Sharon Stone, 63. Damn she’s the same age I am. She’s been in three genre films, her first being the original Total Recall where she played the deservedly ill-fated Lori Quaid. Her next was Sphere where she was cast as Dr. Elizabeth “Beth” Halperin, and last was in, errr, Catwoman where she was Laurel Hedare, an assassin. (CE) 
  • Born March 10, 1977 — Bree Turner, 44. She’s best remembered for her role as Rosalee on Grimm. She also starred in the pilot episode (“Incident On and Off a Mountain Road”) of Masters of Horror. She was in Jekyll + Hyde as Martha Utterson. Confession time: I got through maybe three seasons of Grimm before giving up as it became increasingly silly. (CE) 
  • Born March 10, 1979 — Fonda Lee, 42. Her Jade City novel was a finalist for a Nebula Award for Best Novel and won the World Fantasy Award. It’s sequel, Jade War, was published last year. And her Cross Fire novel was named Best YA Novel at the 2019 Aurora Awards for best Canadian speculative fiction. (CE) 
  • Born March 10, 1913 – Carlos Ochagavia.  Three dozen covers, a few interiors.  Here is A Scanner Darkly.  Here is Universe 8.  Here is The Best of Keith Laumer.  Here is Dream Park.  (Died 2006) [JH]
  • Born March 10, 1920 – Boris Vian.  Author of prose, poetry, plays, music, criticism; actor; translator; inventor, engineer.  Active in French jazz, among other things liaison for Miles Davis and Duke Ellington, commenter for Le Jazz Hot, trumpeter at Le Tabou (yes, that’s “The Taboo”); also, it seems, wrote the first French rock ’n’ roll songs.  Strange books, e.g. L’ecume des jours variously tr. as Froth on the Daydream, Mood Indigo (twice), Froth on the Daze; half a dozen ours, anyway; fifty shorter stories, still few available in English but «Le bons élèves» appeared 2010 as “Honor Students”.  Some fiction attributed to a fictitious Vernon Sullivan whom BV supposedly translated.  (Died 1959) [JH]
  • Born March 10, 1955 – Walter Riess, age 66.  Five dozen covers, mostly for Anticipatia (which is SF in Romanian, just as Anticipation was the 67th Worldcon in Montreal).  Here is The Einstein Intersection.  Here is A Time for Changes.  Here is The Demolished Man.  Here is the 1999-2000 Anticipatia Almanac.  [JH]
  • Born March 10, 1962 – Amy Casil, age 59.  One novel, two dozen shorter stories.  Studied at Chapman under James Blaylock.  Poem “Joshua Swims in the Ocean of Dreams” in Mythic Delirium.  Three terms as SFWA (Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America) Treasurer, including while John Scalzi was President and Mary Robinette Kowal was VP, hello, you two – or three: Amy, do you read this?  Outside our field, biographies of Buzz Aldrin and John Dewey.  Recent collection, The Instrumentality of Women. [JH]
  • Born March 10, 1972 – Lynette Mejía, age 49.  A score of short stories, three dozen poems, recently in Liminality.  Interviewed in Redstone.  “When I’m not working, I mostly read, think, and talk to trees.  Every once in a while, they talk back.”  Website – which, possibly because of her Louisiana connections, has a section “lagniappe”.  [JH]
  • Born March 10, 1975 – Claire Merle, age 46. Four novels.  Shadow Weaver won a B.R.A.G. (Book Readers Appreciation Group Medallion.  Be independent!  [JH]

(10) PLEASE, SIR, I WANT SOME MOA. Polygon finds a way to make your hunger pangs extinct: “Pringles releases Halo potato chips that taste like Moa Burgers from Halo Reach”.

Microsoft has teamed up with chip-maker Pringles for a new flavor of potato chip: Moa Burger. As in the Moa, the flightless bird indigenous to the planet Reach (and also the name of an extinct species of bird here on Earth), from Halo: Reach.

In the Halo fiction, Moa were a source of food on Reach, and were served in wing, nugget, and burger form. Pringles’ new Moa Burger aims to approximate what a quadruple hamburger made of ground space bird, plus cheese, pickles, lettuce, onions, and an unidentified sauce, would taste like. They are artificially flavored, naturally.

(11) GALAXY OF THE MONTH CLUB. Galactic Journey’s Gideon Marcus comes up with an eye-opening hook to begin his review of the latest – in 1966 – issue of Galaxy: “[March 10, 1966] Top Heavy (April 1966 Galaxy)”.

Stacked

For as long as I can remember, American culture has really liked people who have extra on top.  Whether it’s Charles Atlas showing off his wedge-shaped physique or Jayne Mansfield letting herself precede herself, we dig an up front kind of person.

So I suppose it’s only natural that this month’s issue of Galaxy put all of the truly great material in the first half (really two thirds) and the rest tapers away to unremarkable mediocrity (though, of course, I’m obligated to remark upon it).

(12) WANDAVISION DEBRIEFINGS. Two semi-dissatisfied customers tell what they think WandaVision’s shortcomings were. NATURALLY THERE ARE SPOILERS.

Abigail Nussbaum discusses “America’s Sweetheart: Thoughts on WandaVision” at Asking the Wrong Questions.

…It’s impressively weird, in other words, and as if that weirdness weren’t enough, every now and then, strange occurrences interrupt the domestic idyll and gentle comedy. Some of the Westview residents experience alarming fugue states. A voice on the radio urgently calls out to Wanda. Out of place items and people—a colorized helicopter toy; a man in a beekeeper outfit—appear with no explanation. The “show” is interrupted by sinister commercials with obvious relevance to the events of Wanda’s life—a Stark toaster that beeps ominously, like the bomb that took her parents’ lives; Lagos-brand kitchen towels with which to mop up blood-red liquid, a reference to her failure to prevent a Hydra bombing in Captain America: Civil War.

This glut of strange, disparate details is incredibly enticing, inviting audiences to parse references and spot easter eggs….

Film Crit Hulk’s “Watercoolering With WANDAVISION – Season One Finale” is a free Patreon post.

So. The finale, as a finale, does the things that finales are supposed to do. We wrap up our general story, we send some bad people to their respective fates, and we send some good people on their respective ways, all with a series of lessons seemingly learned. Because of this, I imagine that there are many who are satisfied with the overall experience. Especially as it did not make any egregious surface-level errors that have often plagued other finales (especially those that tend to treat their audience with more hostility). But Wandavision aimed for safety and it delivered on the base promises of the narrative itself. It even delivered on some genuinely nice beats in the process. And so, all seems well.

My personal feelings are little bit different.

Because my experience with the finale was one where I felt like I was constantly rocked back and forth between the positive and negative aspects of certain choices. Because of this, I want to take a different approach and single out the things where I was like “oooh, neat!” along with all the things where I really got tripped up. Because when you really, really look at some of those moments, something more problematic emerges….

(13) DIDN’T SEE THIS COMING. Vox Day’s own Castalia House blog reviewer likewise criticized WandaVision, calling it “acceptably mediocre,” prompting Day to write a dissenting post in which he said that what the other reviewer called shortcomings hadn’t affected his own enjoyment of the series — “In which I disagree” [Internet Archive link].

…While I always hesitate to share an opinion that is massively less-informed than a genuine expert’s perspective, what I think we have here is a distinction between an informed Marvel fan’s perspective and an uninformed non-Marvel non-fan’s perspective on the series. Unlike Dark Herald, I didn’t watch Wanda Vision from the perspective of someone who knew considerably more about the subject than having seen less than half of the MCU movies, most of which had only been viewed in order to learn how to write superhero movie scripts.

And at least from the ignorant, non-Marvel non-fan’s perspective, Wanda Vision was a surprisingly good, surprisingly powerful story about a woman wrestling with horrific grief. The alternative interpretations and possibilities that were not pursued are meaningless to me, because I didn’t know anything about the various historical storylines from the original comics, and therefore the production pyrotechnics with the evolving TV sitcom styles were presented were sufficiently intriguing to hold my interest in that regard.

There was, of course, an amount of the usual Marvel SJW nonsense, but it was minimal by today’s standards and did not conflict with the storytelling….

(14) A LOT OF LOTR. “Colbert and Andy Samberg Get Real Geeky About LORD OF THE RINGS” — Yahoo! previews the video clip.

…In keeping with his usual vibe, Samberg maintained a sense of humor about Colbert showing him up in Tolkien knowledge; likewise, Colbert copped bashfully to his proclivity for long-winded rants when it comes to these stories. All in all, the two comics enjoyed a fun nerd sesh about one of the nerd world’s favorite topics.

(15) JEOPARDY! Genre stumped two contestants again on tonight’s Jeopardy. Andrew Porter shares his notes.

Category: Characters in Children’s Lit.

Answer: When Wendy first meets Peter Pan, he’s flown into her room searching for his lost this.

Wrong questions: What is a thimble?; what is childhood?

Correct question: What is his shadow?

(16) SPACE COMMAND. Showrunner Marc Scott Zicree has made available Space Command Episode One – “Mira Furlan’s Last Great Role” – to YouTube viewers.

(17) SUPER RESULTS. The Late Show with Stephen Colbert featured a very positive report from the North Carolina bookstore owner featured in the show’s small-business counterpart to the kind of celebrity-laden commercials aired during the Super Bowl: “Sales Triple At Foggy Pine Books After Receiving The Colbert Small Biz Bump” – video at the link.

The “Colbert Bump” is real! Just ask the owner of Foggy Pine Books in Boone, North Carolina, who enjoyed a huge surge in sales after being featured on our Super Bowl special.

(18) OF COURSE HE GETS WET.  The original cast of the 1984 movie Gremlins is reunited to plug Mountain Dew. “Gremlins Mountain Dew Commercial: Gizmo & Zach Galligan Return”.

Gizmo’s all grown up and still getting into some mischief in Mountain Dew’s new Gremlins commercial featuring the return of our favorite furry friend and star Zach Galligan in the fun new ad.

[Thanks to N., John King Tarpinian, Michael Toman, Andrew Porter, JJ, Cat Eldridge, John Hertz, Mike Kennedy, Ziv Wities, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. This mashup title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Christopher Tolkien (1924-2020)

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Christopher Tolkien, son of J.R.R. Tolkien and the last of the Inklings, died January 15 at the age of 95 the New York Times reports.

For nearly 50 years after his father passed away in 1973, Christopher continued to edit and publish his father’s unfinished manuscripts, giving J.R.R. Tolkien’s literary output the benefit of two lifetimes’ work. Christopher assembled from pieces the epic Middle-Earth predecessor to Lord of the Rings, melding them into The Silmarillion (1977). In all, he edited or oversaw the publication of two dozen editions of his father’s works, many of which became international best sellers.

Along the way he produced 12 volumes of The History of Middle-earth, a compilation of drafts, fragments, rewrites, marginal notes and other writings that showed the evolution of J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendarium.

Christopher is also credited with creating the acclaimed 1954 map of Middle-earth.

During World War II, when Christopher was serving with the Royal Air Force in South Africa, his father mailed him parts of The Lord of the Rings for comment and editing.

After the war he studied English at Trinity College, Oxford, taking his BA in 1949 and his B.Litt a few years later. He became a lecturer in Old and Middle English as well as Old Icelandic at the University of Oxford. 

In 1945, he became the youngest member of the Inklings, a circle of Oxford writers and scholars started in the Thirties by C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and others, who met weekly in Lewis’s college rooms. Christopher was told in a letter from his father that the Inklings proposed to consider him “a permanent member, with right of entry and what not quite independent of my presence or otherwise.”

Dr. Diana Glyer, author of two books about the Inklings, including The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community, mourned his passing:

I must refer now to all the Inklings in past tense; the last of them has died. I met Christopher Tolkien, talked with him, corresponded from time to time. I have devoted my life to studying the Inklings. Today, they have slipped from solid, real, and tangible into the past, beyond reach. I no longer have the privilege of studying what is, only what was. Everything has changed.

J.R.R. Tolkien biographer John Garth ended his Facebook announcement of Christopher’s death with this fitting quote from the end of Lord of the Rings:

“Well, here at last, dear friends, on the shores of the Sea comes the end of our fellowship in Middle-earth. Go in peace! I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.”

Christopher is survived by his second wife, Baillie, his sister Priscilla, and three children, Simon, Adam and Rachel.

Pixel Scroll 11/24/18 Haikuna Pixelata! Or Cest La Scroll, As The French Would Say

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(1) DOCTOR WHO AT DUBLIN 2019 BLOG. Nicholas Whyte explains why it’s a challenge to write about “Doctor Who in Ireland”, then fannishly does so anyway —

23 November 2018 marks the 55th anniversary of the first episode of Doctor Who. It is a sad fact that not a single second of TV screen time on the show, or any of its spinoffs, has been set in Ireland. Indeed, the Doctor has spent more televised time in Hungary than on the Emerald Isle (special prize if you know what story I am referring to). A couple of confused characters do wonder if Gallifrey, the home planet of the Time Lords, may be in Ireland, but that’s as close as we get.

(2) A SHURI THING. Issue 2 of Nnedi Okorafor’s Shuri comics for Marvel was released November 21. This is one of the variant covers, by Afua Richardson.

(3) BUBBLES POPPIN’. Julie Andrews has reportedly performed a voice role in Aquaman (Entertainment Weekly: “Julie Andrews has a secret role in Aquaman”). Aquaman opens theatrically 21 December. Amazon Prime members will get a chance to buy tickets to advance screenings 15 December.

A member of Hollywood royalty has a secret role in Warner Bros.’ upcoming Aquaman.

None other than Oscar-winner Julie Andrews has a previously unannounced part to play in the superhero adventure, EW has learned exclusively.

The Sound of Music actress voices the mythic Karathen, an undersea creature that holds the key to Arthur Curry’s (Jason Momoa) quest to unite the Atlantean and surface worlds.

The casting is particularly interesting as Aquaman is going head-to-head at the box office next month against Disney’s Mary Poppins Returns[…]

Andrews hasn’t appeared in a film in nearly a decade, but has lent her unmistakable voice to other big screen projects over the last decade (such as Despicable Me 3 and Shrek Forever After) and appeared in the Netflix series Julie’s Greenroom.

(4) COUNTLESS BRICKS. Arrives in theaters February 8 — The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part. Here’s Official Trailer 2.

The much-anticipated sequel to the critically acclaimed, global box office phenomenon that started it all, “The LEGO® Movie 2: The Second Part,” reunites the heroes of Bricksburg in an all new action-packed adventure to save their beloved city. It’s been five years since everything was awesome and the citizens are facing a huge new threat: LEGO DUPLO® invaders from outer space, wrecking everything faster than they can rebuild. The battle to defeat them and restore harmony to the LEGO universe will take Emmet, Lucy, Batman and their friends to faraway, unexplored worlds, including a strange galaxy where everything is a musical. It will test their courage, creativity and Master Building skills, and reveal just how special they really are.

 

(5) CHINA STRENGTHENS PENALTIES ON BANNED CONTENT. Reuters news service reports “Ten years’ jail term for Chinese author of homoerotic novel sparks outcry”.

A Chinese court’s 10-year jail term for an author of a homoerotic book found guilty of profiting from selling “obscene” literature has been met with disbelief among some internet users who question how the crime could warrant so severe a punishment.

The author, surnamed Liu, was found guilty on Oct. 31 by Wuhu county court in eastern Anhui province after she self-published a book that “obscenely and in detail described gay male-male acts”, according to state media.

The court ruled that the strict sentence was enforced due to her having made 150,000 yuan ($21,600) by selling over 7,000 copies, the article said.

…Pornography has long been illegal in China, but in recent years, the Communist Party has intensified efforts to clear away what it sees as inappropriate content, introducing new legislation, rewards and punishments to help its aims.

Authorities on Saturday launched a campaign to “eradicate pornography and illegal publications” by offering heightened rewards of up to 600,000 yuan for reporting banned content to the police, starting from December.

The Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) is an independent agency of the U.S. government which monitors human rights and rule of law developments in the People’s Republic of China. It was created in October 2001. Their post on the topic asserts “Freedom of Expression in China: A Privilege, Not a Right”:

Chinese officials have stated that anyone wanting to publish their opinions may submit their article or book to a government-licensed publisher, but if they are unable to find a licensed publisher, then the only way they can legally exercise their constitutional right to freedom of publication is to “enjoy their works themselves, or give copies to friends and family.”

While homosexuality hasn’t been classified as a crime since 1997, same-sex relationships are still banned from the small screen and online streaming platforms. And the government seems to have a bone to pick with pornography, as authorities recently upped the monetary reward given to those who report such “illegal” content to a maximum of more than $86,000 (U.S).

The Hong Kong Free Press, in its story “China ups cash rewards to US$86,000 for citizens who report porn”, provides additional background about the government’s enforcement of internet rules:

… Starting December 1, people can rake in up to 600,000 yuan (US$86,000) for reporting illegal content, online or otherwise, double the 300,000 yuan under previous guidelines.

What counts as “illegal” content in China is broadly defined, but includes work that “endangers national unity”, “leaks state secrets”, and “disturbs social order” — umbrella terms that are also sometimes used when authorities punish or silence Chinese dissidents and rights campaigners.

… Earlier this week the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) said it had “cleaned up” 9,800 accounts on Chinese social media platforms which it accused of spreading “politically harmful” information and rumours.

(6) NEGATIVE FEEDBACK. The Independent details the impact of China’s newly-implemented “social credit” system: “China blacklists millions of people from booking flights as ‘social credit’ system introduced”.

Millions of Chinese nationals have been blocked from booking flights or trains as Beijing seeks to implement its controversial “social credit” system, which allows the government to closely monitor and judge each of its 1.3 billion citizens based on their behaviour and activity.

The system, to be rolled out by 2020, aims to make it “difficult to move” for those deemed “untrustworthy”, according to a detailed plan published by the government this week.

It will be used to reward or punish people and organisations for “trustworthiness” across a range of measures.

A key part of the plan not only involves blacklisting people with low social credibility scores, but also “publicly disclosing the records of enterprises and individuals’ untrustworthiness on a regular basis”.

The plan stated: “We will improve the credit blacklist system, publicly disclose the records of enterprises and individuals’ untrustworthiness on a regular basis, and form a pattern of distrust and punishment.”

For those deemed untrustworthy, “everywhere is limited, and it is difficult to move, so that those who violate the law and lose the trust will pay a heavy price”.

The credit system is already being rolled out in some areas and in recent months the Chinese state has blocked millions of people from booking flights and high-speed trains.

According to the state-run news outlet Global Times, as of May this year, the government had blocked 11.14 million people from flights and 4.25 million from taking high-speed train trips.

The state has also begun to clamp down on luxury options: 3 million people are barred from getting business class train tickets, according to Channel News Asia.

(The Global Times is a daily Chinese tabloid newspaper under the auspices of the People’s Daily newspaper, focusing on international issues from the Chinese government’s perspective. Channel News Asia is a pay TV news channel based in Singapore.)

(7) ROEG OBIT. Nicholas Roeg (1928-2018), director of The Man Who Fell to Earth and the Roald Dahl based The Witches; photographer on Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death and Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 — “Nicolas Roeg obituary: From tea-maker to director’s chair”.

‘His breakthrough came in 1964 when he worked as a cinematographer on Roger Corman’s film The Masque of the Red Death, an adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe short story, starring Vincent Price.

Corman was gaining a reputation for spotting and developing new talent and boosted the careers of other future directors including James Cameron and Martin Scorsese.

Interestingly the red-clad figure in the Corman film foreshadowed a similarly dressed character in Roeg’s masterpiece, Don’t Look Now.

He also worked on Francois Truffaut’s Farenheit 451, which was notable for the bright hues in which it was shot, and on John Schlesinger’s 1967 adaptation of the Thomas Hardy novel, Far From the Madding Crowd.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and JJ.]

  • Born November 24, 1882 – E.R. Eddison. Writer whose most well-known work by far is The Worm Ouroboros. It’s slightly connected to his lesser-known later Zimiamvian Trilogy. And quite frankly, having never read a word of his works, that’s all I can say. (Died 1945.)
  • Born November 24, 1907 – Evangeline Walton. Her best-known work, the Mabinogion tetralogy which retells the Welsh Mabinogi, was written during the late 1930s and early 1940s. The first volume came out in 1936 under the publisher’s title of The Virgin and the Swine, which is inarguably a terrible title. Although it receiving glowing praise from John Cowper Powys, the book sold quite awfully, and therefore none of the other novels in the series were published at that time. Granted a second chance by Ballantine’s Adult Fantasy series in 1970, it was reissued, with a much better title of The Island of the Mighty, and sold accordingly. The other three volumes followed quickly. Her Theseus trilogy was produced during the late 1940s. Witch House is an occult horror story set in New England, and She Walks in Darkness – which just came out from Tachyon Publications – is genre as well. I think that is the extent of her genre work, but I’d be delighted to corrected. She has won a number of awards including the Mythopoeic Award for Adult Literature, Best Novel, The Fritz Leiber Fantasy Award, World Fantasy Award, Convention Award and the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement. (Died 1996.)
  • Born November 24, 1916 – Forrest J Ackerman. It’s no wonder that he got a Hugo Award for #1 Fan Personality in 1953, and equally telling that after he was handed the trophy (at Philcon II by Asimov), he physically declined, saying it should go to Ken Slater, to whom the trophy was later given by the con committee. That’s a nice summation of him. As a literary agent, he represented some two hundred writers, and he served as agent of record for many long-lost authors, thereby allowing their work to be reprinted. Hell, he represented Ed Wood! He was a prolific writer, more than fifty stories to his credit, and he named Vampirella and wrote the origin story for her. Speaking of things pulp, which she assuredly is, he appeared in several hundred films which I’ll not list here, and even wrote lesbian erotica. Eclectic doesn’t begin to describe him. His nonfiction writings are wonderful as well. I’ll just single out Forrest J Ackerman’s Worlds of Science Fiction, A Reference Guide to American Science Fiction Films, and a work he did with Brad Linaweaver, Worlds of Tomorrow: The Amazing Universe of Science Fiction Art. Did I mention he collected everything? Well, he did. Just one location alone contained some three hundred thousand books, film, SF material objects and writings. The other was eighteen rooms in extent. Damn, if anyone needed their own TARDIS, it was him. In his later years, he was a board member of the Seattle Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, which now has possession of many items of his collection. If there was ever anyone who truly was the best in fandom, I believe it was him. So let’s toast him his memory. (Died 2008.)
  • Born November 24, 1948 – Spider Robinson. His first story “The Guy with the Eyes” was published in Analog February 1973. It was set in a bar called Callahan’s Place, a setting for much of his later fiction. In 1976, his first published novel, Telempath, was an expansion of his Hugo award-winning novella “By Any Other Name”. The Stardance trilogy was co-written with his wife Jeanne Robinson. In 2004, he began working to expand into a novel a seven-page 1955 outline left by the late Heinlein. The resulting novel would be called Variable Star. Who’s read it? Oh, he’s certainly won awards. John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer (1974; Hugo Awards for: Best Novella (1977); “By Any Other Name”; Best Novella (1978); “Stardance”‘ (with Jeanne Robinson); Best short story (1983); “Melancholy Elephants”; Nebula Award for: Best Novella (1977); “Stardance” (with Jeanne Robinson) 2008;  Robert A. Heinlein Award (for Lifetime Achievement) 2015; LASFS Forrest J Ackerman Award for Lifetime Achievement; Named a Guest of Honor at the 2018 World Science Fiction Convention.
  • Born November 24, 1957 – Jeff Noon, 61. Novel and playwright. Prior to his relocation in 2000 to Brighton, his stories reflected in some way his native though not birth city of Manchester. The Vurt sequence is a very odd riff off Alice in Wonderland that Noon describes as a prequel to those works. Look I’m not sure I’m the right person to explain these books so y’all should do so. Really go ahead, educate me. Same goes for all the other books he’s done such as Needle in the Groove.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) WHOVIAN COMPLAINT FORM. The popular meme has been given an update to include the latest gripes:

(11) LAST OF THE INKLINGS. Weekly Standard profiles “The Steward of Middle-earth”, Christopher Tolkien.

…Now, after more than 40 years, at the age of 94, Christopher Tolkien has laid down his editor’s pen, having completed a great labor of quiet, scholastic commitment to his father’s vision. It is the concluding public act of a gentleman and scholar, the last member of a club that became a pivotal part of 20th-century literature: the Inklings. It is the end of an era.

All of this would have come as a great surprise to 24-year-old J.R.R. Tolkien as he scrambled down the lice-ridden trenches of the Somme. Catching trench fever removed Tolkien from the front lines and probably saved his life. While on sick leave, he began a draft of The Fall of Gondolin. Now, 102 years later, it sits on the shelves of every Barnes & Noble in the country.

The first draft of The Fall of Gondolin was begun during the Great War; the final incomplete version is dated 1951. Both versions are included in the newly published book, along with fragments and working drafts. While the story itself is good, its true weight is as the final piece of the Tolkien legendarium, a project an entire century in the making.

It is work that has spanned Christopher Tolkien’s life….

(12) HISTORY OF DUDS. This BBC video highlights “The museum that embraces failure” – of mostly-tech ideas that didn’t catch on. My fellow vintage Filers will remember some of them.

(13) EGGSACTLY. Yahoo! Entertainment gets all the free-range references: “From ‘Frozen 2’ to ‘Star Wars’: Here’s your guide to all the Disney Easter eggs in ‘Ralph Breaks the Internet'”. BEWARE SPOILERS.

As the title suggests, the animated sequel Ralph Breaks the Internet finds everyone’s favorite fictional ’80s video game character, Wreck-It Ralph (voiced by John C. Reilly), careening through the online world like — what else? — a wrecking ball. But even as the new film lightly satirizes internet giants like eBay and Google, many of its best gags are aimed directly at its parent corporation, the Walt Disney Company.

(14) THE UNITED STATES SPACE PROGRAM CINEMATIC UNIVERSE. If the Marvel and DC Cinematic Universes are by design, there are others you might claim have been created by coincidence. Patrick Willems takes us on an idea-trip through some of “The Original Cinematic Universes.”

(15) FIRST FLIGHT OF ION-DRIVE AIRCRAFT. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] A remarkable machine propelled by ionic wind could signal a future with cleaner aeroplanes. Nature reports on “Flight test for ion drive”:

In February 1904, a short news item in Nature marked a monumental event. It recorded the achievements of the American brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright and the contraption that they had launched from a hill in North Carolina a couple of months earlier. “They now appear to have succeeded in raising themselves from the ground by a motor-driven machine,” Nature stated. It was, “the first successful achievement of artificial flight”. That first trip lasted barely 12 seconds.

Nearly 115 years later, Nature reports on another historic brief flight, which this time lasted 8–9 seconds. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge describe an aviation breakthrough that will draw inevitable comparisons to that wobbly and fragile first journey by air. The aeroplane is powered by a battery connected to a type of engine called an ion drive that has no moving parts.

You can watch the flight here:

Summary of the science at Nature here [PDF file].

Apparently, the inventor was inspired by the Star Trek shuttles.

Full primary research article here (you can access if you are either at an academic/research institution with a Nature subscription or if you are a subscriber yourself, otherwise it costs) — https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0707-9.pdf

(16) TIME’S UP. This item is more fun if you watch the video before reading Slate’s intro:

A project description said that Baas was inspired by “the many faceless men who sweep, clean and work at an airport in their blue overalls.” (Are there no female janitors at the Amsterdam airport?) Baas described the “Schiphol Clock” as “basically a big box hanging from the ceiling in Lounge 2,” adding that he decided to use “the most archetypical form of a clock.”

But he added a ladder and a door to create an imaginary path that his video janitor might have used to access the clock, just to heighten the surrealism. “He has a red bucket and a yellow cleaning cloth and he is cleaning up after the hands of time, after which he creates a new minute, every time again,” Baas said…

 

[Thanks to Chip Hitchcock, JJ, Cat Eldridge, Andrew, John King Tarpinian, Brian Z., Andrew Porter, Martin Morse Wooster, Mike Kennedy, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Carl Slaughter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Peer.]