(1) BRAM STOKER FINAL BALLOT. The Horror Writers Association released the 2024 Bram Stoker Awards Final Ballot today. Click through to see the complete list on File 770.
(2) NCAAP IMAGE AWARDS. The “NAACP Image Awards 2025 winners list” at Deadline features several works of genre interest.
Outstanding Costume Design (Television or Motion Picture)
“Wicked” – Paul Tazewell (Universal Pictures)
Outstanding Character Voice-Over Performance (Motion Picture)
Blue Ivy Carter – “Mufasa: The Lion King” (Walt Disney Studios Motion Picture)
Outstanding Original Score for Television/Film
“Star Wars: The Acolyte (Original Soundtrack)” – (Walt Disney Records)
Outstanding Performance by a Youth (Series, Special, Television Movie or Limited Series)
Leah Sava Jeffries – “Percy Jackson and the Olympics” (Disney+)
Outstanding Directing in a Drama Series
Rapman – “Supacell – ‘Supacell’” (Netflix)
Outstanding Short Form (Live Action)
“Superman Doesn’t Steal”
(3) LOST GENERATION? A Guardian writer sounds the alarm: “BBC radio drama is in grave danger. Without it we may lose the next generation of writing talent”.
The BBC’s output of new original and adapted drama has more than halved since 2018 – a cut that amounts to hundreds of lost hours, although precise figures are hard to come by. At a time when interest in audio content has never been higher – the number of existing podcasts is somewhere between 3m and 4m; a hit series is downloaded millions of times a month (The Rest Is History: 29m!) – the BBC’s audio drama output is at an all-time low. As a career radio dramatist, whenever I am gloomily dwelling on this fact, the football phrase “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory” comes to mind. Because in this new era of audio storytelling and podcast ubiquity, the BBC’s incredible track record in radio drama should have proved a fabulous advantage. Instead, we are facing the possibility of extinction.
It all began with the 60-minute Friday Play (decommissioned in 2010). This was followed by The Wire (Radio 3) in 2014. The 15-minute drama in Woman’s Hour was lost in 2021. Radio 4’s Friday afternoon play became 30 minutes rather than 45 soon after. Its 60-minute Saturday play – once a weekly event – has been steadily whittled down to 12 new original dramas a year. The latest cut – Radio 3’s Sunday night drama, the UK’s last remaining 90-minute slot – has generated some press, and a petition from the likes of Judi Dench and Ian McKellan, but it is only the latest in a series of losses…
(4) DAVE MCCARTY DISCIPLINED AGAIN. At Chicago’s Capricon earlier this month Dave McCarty reportedly ran an unauthorized room party which led to the loss of his membership. The committee did not respond to File 770’s question about the incident. One person has gone public about it on Bluesky, however.
(5) SLIPPING A MICKEY. [Item by Steven French.] Oscar wining Director Bong Joon Ho is interviewed about his upcoming movie, Mickey 17 a sci-fi ‘crime caper starring Robert Pattinson: “Bong Joon Ho: ‘I wish I had Ken Loach’s energy, but I’m just thinking about nap time’” in the Guardian.
… Mickey 17, which might best be described as a blackly comic, satirical sci-fi-crime caper. It stars Robert Pattinson as the dopey and desperate Mickey Barnes, who signs up to work a dangerous job on a space-colonising mission, led by a despotic ex-congressman (Mark Ruffalo) and his unhinged wife (Toni Colette). Then, whenever one of Mickey’s assignments results in his death – which is often – he is simply cloned, using “reprinting” technology and sent straight back to work. This is a notion Bong seems to find particularly discomfiting. “Y’know, there’s an HP printer right here in this room, as we’re doing this interview,” he says, eyeing the machine warily. “To think that, like, my head and my arms and legs would just be printed out of this printer, like a piece of paper …”
(6) VERTEX ARTIST REMEMBERED. Joachim Boaz celebrates “Adventures in Science Fiction Art: Rodger B. MacGowan’s Approachable New Wave Art, Part I” at Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations. MacGowan died February 22.
Rodger B. MacGowan (1948-2025), best known for his wargame art and design, passed away yesterday.1 Most of the memorial posts I’ve seen on social media focus on his later career paths in the board-gaming world. Thus, I thought it would be worthwhile to narrow in on his contribution to science fiction art. After graduating UCLA, where he studied art, motion pictures, and graphic design, MacGowan found work at an advertising agency and an opportunity to create art for one of their accounts, the short-lived Vertex science fiction magazine…
(7) BLOOKS. “These Books Are Absolutely Unreadable. That’s the Point” explains the New York Times (link bypasses the paywall) in an article about the Center for Book Arts’ exhibition “The Best Kept Secret: 200 Years of Blooks”.
A benign quirk of humanity is that we are delighted by things designed to look like other things. A bed shaped like a swan. A sauna shaped like a garlic bulb. A toilet brush shaped like a cherry. The designer Elsa Schiaparelli made fashion history with her acts of surreal mimicry, creating buttons in the form of crickets, a compact that looks like a rotary phone dial, a belt buckle of manicured hands.
The trick is hardly new. Medieval cooks molded pork meatloaf to look like pea pods and massaged sweet almond paste into hedgehogs. No matter the scale or edibility of the object, we’ve always relished a material plot twist — a one-liner in three dimensions.
Inclusion in the category requires design intention, so the “night stand” that is actually a pile of unread books by your bed doesn’t count, no matter how nicely it accommodates a pair of reading glasses and a jar of melatonin gummies. But how about a transistor radio painstakingly designed to mimic a leather-bound book? Or a hand-held lantern shaped like an open volume, complete with marbled exterior and gilt-stamped spine? Or a tiny dust-jacketed “book” with a functional cigarette lighter where the pages ought to be? Yes, yes and yes….
(8) CAS AWARDS 2025. Sff was sparse among the winners of the “Cinema Audio Society awards” reported by Deadline. However, CAS presented its 2025 Filmmaker Award to the Dune franchise’s Denis Villeneuve.
These were the winners of genre interest.
MOTION PICTURES – ANIMATED
The Wild Robot
Original Dialogue Mixer – Ken Gombos
Re-Recording Mixer – Leff Lefferts
Re-Recording Mixer – Gary A. Rizzo CAS
Scoring Mixer – Alan Meyerson CAS
Foley Mixer – Richard DuarteMOTION PICTURES – DOCUMENTARY
Music by John Williams
Production Mixer – Noah Alexander
Re-Recording Mixer – Christopher Barnett CAS
Re-Recording Mixer – Roy Waldspurger
(9) MARK R. LEEPER OBITUARY. Evelyn C. Leeper announced the death of her husband today, and permitted File 770 to publish the obituary she has written: “Mark R. Leeper (1950-2025)”.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
February 23, 1932 — Majel Barrett Roddenberry. (Died 2008.)
By Paul Weimer: “The First Lady of Star Trek”
Her contributions to Star Trek have been broad and varied. Shall we begin with Majel Barrett Roddenberry as the original Number One in the pilot episode (and seen in “The Menagerie”)? Perhaps having a woman as second in command was too much for 60’s television. So, she became Nurse Chapel and “the voice of the computer” for most of the Star Trek TV series up to her death in 2009.
I didn’t twig until the Next Generation who “that voice was”, when of course she showed up in several episodes as the irrepressible Lwaxana Troi, mother of Counsellor Troi on the Enterprise-D. What could have been a one-note one-time joke character developed into someone with real personality, drive, and spirit under her interpretation of the role. Hearing the computer voice and Lwaxana in the same episode, it finally dawned on me that they were both one and the same. I wound up trying to figure out a headcanon that would explain it, and never quite managed it.
My second favorite small role for her outside of Star Trek has to be as the robotic hard drinking madam of the brothel in the movie Westworld. The movie does have an inconsistency in it thanks to her. We see her swigging drinks from a bottle during the barroom brawl in between the chaos…but later at the end of the movie, when a different robot is offered water, it destroys her. Maybe she was one of the relatively few humans working in the park? (In which case, she probably died during the robot virus uprising). It’s never made absolutely clear, and of course, until they turn murderous, not being able to tell the difference between the robots and humans IS part of the point
But of course, she also appeared in one episode of Babylon 5 as the wife of the now dead Emperor. She has psychic powers and can foresee the future. And Londo, foolish Londo, spends a lot of resources and pull in order to get into her presence and get a prophecy from her. It’s not a great prophecy, and much digital ink was spilled early in the days of the internet trying to interpret just what she meant by her cryptic pronouncements. Oh, and of course announcing that both Vir and Londo would be Emperor.
She passed away in 2008. Requiescat in pace.
(11) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Remembering “Our Man Bashir” Episode, Deep Space Nine
Since Amazon now owns the Bond franchise and we know how lovingly they handled the Tolkien franchise, I thought I’d look at the time the writers of Deep Space Nine decided to riff off of James Bond with the “Our Man Bashir” episode in November of 1995 and got in deep shit with one of the holders of that franchise.
So deep that’s it’s been held by fans of the Deep Space Nine that the episode has never been aired after the initial airing as a settlement with one of the producers of a certain film otherwise they would’ve been sued by them. Rest assured that if you go to Paramount+ right now as I did, it’s there with the rest of the Deep Space Nine series.
It was directed by Winrich Kolbe from a story that originated with a pitch from Assistant Script Coordinator Robert Gillan which was turned into a script by Producer Ronald D. Moore.
Although the episode takes its title from Our Man Flint, a major inspiration for the story was the James Bond films. This obvious influence resulted in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer complaining to Paramount about it as they had GoldenEye coming out.
Though why they thought it would affect the success of the film is a mystery as it was the best Pierce Brosnan Bond film and the most successful of his films. And why they were concerned anyways that a SF TV episode would affect the box office of a major film makes no sense at all, does it?
It was well-received at the time and has not been visited by the Suck Fairy which I hold is true of the entire series. Charlie Jane Anders at io9 considers it one of goofiest Deep Space Nine episodes, and Keith DeCandido at Tor.com says “holy crap is it fun”.
From beginning to end, it’s absolutely fun. They sometimes didn’t handle humor wonderfully and as a result it came off as strained not here they had the perfect touch. And remember Bashir does become a secret agent in Section 31 of Trek in the novels though definitely not a Bond-style secret agent.
(12) COMICS SECTION.
- Between Friends thinks writer’s block isn’t all bad.
- Loose Parts forgot the switch.
- Nancy’s aunt organizes her books.
- Pluggers knows how to add to a story.
- The Argyle Sweater personalizes exercise goals.
- Wumo copyedits as badly as I do.
(13) ASTEROID MINING PRECURSOR. “Earth’s 1st Asteroid Mining Prospector Heads to the Launchpad” reports the New York Times (behind a paywall).
The dream of mining metals in deep space crashed and burned in the 2010s. AstroForge’s Odin mission to survey a potentially metallic asteroid is packed and ready to lift off.
A private company is aiming to heave a microwave oven-size spacecraft toward an asteroid later this week, its goal to kick off a future where precious metals are mined around the solar system to create vast fortunes on Earth.
“If this works out, this will probably be the biggest business ever conceived of,” said Matt Gialich, the founder and chief executive of AstroForge, the builder and operator of the robotic probe….
(14) BEWARE OF FALLING ROCKS. [Item by Steven French.] The world’s oldest Sunday newspaper opines about the possibility of an asteroid impact: “The Observer view: when an asteroid is hurtling to Earth, do you head for the pub or the church?”
How to feel about this lump of rock hurtling towards us at 38,000mph? To pinch from The Simpsons Movie, is it the pub or the church for you? (Faced with catastrophe, the patrons of Moe’s Tavern run from bar to church, while the congregation of the latter sprints in the opposite direction, desperate for a stiff drink.) Most of us will keep calm and carry on, whatever the percentages. Seven years is a long time: you’ll be a size 10 by then – that, or getting divorced.
The key thing about Armageddon is that it’s always in the future, as the followers of myriad cults have found to their cost down the years. Let us trust the experts – remember them? – to sort it out. A few years ago, Nasa significantly changed the orbit of an asteroid. The Dart spacecraft slammed into a 150-metre asteroid moon at speed, changing its orbital period by more than 30 minutes – a result that could be replicated, if planning began now.
A few, should the predictions get worse, may go full survivalist, filling their bunkers with tinned carrots. But their number will be small. The news cycle is hardly relaxing at the moment, the old order as frangible as digestive biscuits. A person has the capacity for only so much terror, and now may not be the time to start worrying what will happen to Birmingham if YR4 turns out to be West Midlands-bound.
The year 1998 came with its share of global calamities, but the notion of a world war seemed far away compared with today, which may be one reason why two big films about asteroids then played to packed cinemas.
In Deep Impact, a comet on a collision course with Earth hits, causing a tsunami that destroys the US east coast, a mission by the Messiah spacecraft having failed to alter its path. In Armageddon, a rogue asteroid is broken into fragments by a nuclear bomb that is somehow inserted into it by, among others, an oil driller played by Bruce Willis – though it’s not all good news: Shanghai is obliterated by another meteor strike along the way. No prizes for guessing which film did better at the box office….
(15) A BITING WIND. The “Author Forecast: Weather Worth Reading Kickstarter”, which offers “your local weather told using quotes from books”, is taking pledges through February 28. (But it’s a done deal – they’ve already raised 20 times their target amount.)
I wish I could say how many sff quotes are in the mix – this one from Dracula is alone among the samples shown in the publicity. You might find the product amusing anyway!
(16) WEDNESDAY. Netflix dropped a new “Wednesday Season 2 Trailer” this week.
Wednesday Addams’ preference for the color black has often been an important character trait in Addams Family adaptations, with Wednesday taking this quality to the next level as Jenna Ortega’s iteration requires a black substitute for Nevermore Academy’s purple uniform. Both Wednesday and Catherine Zeta-Jones’ Morticia wore only black throughout season 1 to pay homage to their characters’ iconic styles from past franchise entries, but Wednesday season 2 is making some adjustments to the Addams’s color palettes. Not only is Pugsley donning Nevermore’s purple jacket, but Morticia is seen wearing a dress that breaks away from her black-clad franchise history.
[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Daniel Dern, 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 Cat Eldridge.]
