Barkley — So Glad You (Didn’t) Ask #89, A Column of Unsolicited Opinions

Posted on July 6, 2024 by Mike Glyer

SAVE THE RETRO HUGOS: A MODEST PROPOSAL

By Cora Buhlert and Chris M. Barkley.

Short Title: Save The Retro Hugos

Proposed by: Cora Buhlert, Seconded by Chris M. Barkley

THE PROPOSAL: Save the Retro Hugos

Moved, to amend the WSFS Constitution by altering Section 3.14.1 of the WSFS Constitution, to allow Worldcons to continue to give out Retrospective Hugo Awards at their discretion: Section 3.14: Retrospective Hugo Awards 3.14.1. 3.14.1. A Worldcon held in a year that is an exact multiple of 10 years after a year in which no Hugo Awards were awarded may conduct nominations and elections for retrospective year Hugo Awards for one such year with procedures as for the current Hugo Awards, provided that year was 1939 or later and that no previous Worldcon has awarded retrospective year Hugo Awards for that year. Trophies may be presented, but are not a requirement.

Commentary by Cora Buhlert: Though controversial in certain quarters, the Retro Hugos fulfill an important function of honoring works created before there were Hugo Awards. The Retro Hugos also offer the opportunity to rediscover older works and forgotten authors and can function as a corrective to received wisdom about the SFF of the past.

Finally, the Retro Hugos have also done a good job in the past of looking beyond the confines of American magazine science fiction to include finalists from further afield. We are aware that holding Retro Hugos means additional work for the Worldcon hosting them and the Hugo subcommittee.

However, it should remain at the discretion of every individual Worldcon whether they want to take on this extra work or not. Furthermore, there are only seven (potentially eight) years of Retro Hugos left to cover, namely 1940, 1942, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1952 and potentially 1957, which only awarded Hugos in three categories, all for magazines.

So, the Retro Hugos already come with a built-in sunset clause. Changing the years in which Retro Hugos may be held from an exact multiple of 25 years after a year in which no Hugo Awards were awarded to an exact multiple of 10 years after a year in which no Hugo Awards were awarded also means that it will not take another 25 years to get to the remaining Retro Hugo years, but that Retro Hugos can be given out, while there is at least a chance of some winners and their direct descendants being still alive to enjoy the honor.

Basically, the only change is to make it easier to give out Retro Hugos, so we don’t have to wait another 25 years to get to the last remaining years. Otherwise, the clause remains as it is with the addition that trophies are not required.

Commentary by Chris M. Barkley: In May of 1928, the year-old Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences came up with a nifty idea to help promote the institution, an annual set of “awards of merit” which eventually became to be called the Academy Awards (whose “Oscar” nickname was still several years in the future).

Since the production of films had already established itself as a cultural and entertainment touchstone with the public at large, it instantly became the gold standard of what Academy members thought were great artistic endeavors. And, of course, winning one became, and still is, the most coveted of all of the motion picture awards.

(Rant/On: And have I agreed with the choices of the Academy voters over the years? I’ll answer with this question; is there anyone out there who TRULY believes that Annie Hall was or still is a better film than Star Wars (now dubbed Episode IV) in 1977? My answer is HELL to the NO! And that’s just a TINY sample of my dissatisfaction with some of the Academy’s choices over the decades. Rant/Off)

There is a small but important subset of the film industry that thirsts year round for rumors, scuttlebutt or real information on what may be considered prestigious and important projects, possible candidates for nominations in all of the major categories. And if an actor, writer, producer, members of the craft divisions or studio heads tell you that they’re not dreaming about the possibility of ending up on the stage at the Dolby Theater some March evening, they cannot be believed by any stretch of the imagination.

Now let’s flash forward to the 11th Worldcon at Philcon II (in Philadelphia PA), in September 1953. The organizers, led by Chair Milton A. Rothman, came up with a nifty idea to help promote the World Science Fiction Society with an annual set of “awards of merit” award to honor the previous year’s best works of science fiction and to be voted on by sff readers. Although it was called a “one off”, they hoped it would become an annual tradition, which happened two years later.

And, much like its motion picture cousin, over time it became the gold standard of what the voting members of WSFS and subsequently, sff readers thought were great literary endeavors. And, of course, winning one became, and still is, one of the most coveted of all of the awards in SFF and literature in general.

Let’s skip ahead to the 1996 Worldcon in Los Angeles (L.A.Con III), which marked the inaugural presentation of the Retrospective Hugo Awards, wherein nominated works were from the year 1945.

When I first heard about the Retro-Hugos, I was very interested in seeing who the fans would nominate and who would win. Among the recipients were George Orwell for Animal Farm, Murray Leinster for his SFWA Hall of Fame short story “First Contact”, Isaac Asimov for “The Mule”, a barely novel length excerpt of his compilation novel, Foundation and Empire, a film version of The Picture of Dorian Gray and John W. Campbell, Jr. for Best Editor. More on him, soon.

Remarkably enough, there were three among those first recipients who were still living at the time; Hal Clement (for his short story, “Uncommon Sense” (Astounding SF, September, 1945) and William Rostler (for Best Fan Artist) and Forrest J Ackerman picked up a pair of Hugo Awards for Best Fan Writer and Best Fanzine.

I thought most of the choices fans made were fine at the time, but I cannot say that was so for some of the subsequent seven occasions the Retro-Hugo Awards were given. Furthermore, I came to the realization that very few of the recipient’s direct families or relatives were actually receiving these awards to appreciate and celebrate.

Having participated in the nomination and voting stages of nearly all of the awards since 2001 (I missed the first vote in 1996) and I have tried to be circumspect in my choices, particularly in making sure a number of women who were active in the field were present on the ballot.

After painstakingly looking through all eight of the previous ballots, I counted only five nominees who are women; Leigh Brackett (with two wins for Best Novel and Best Related Work) Catherine L. Moore (two fiction wins, in collaboration with her partner, Henry Kuttner), Myrtle R. Douglas (two wins for Best Fanzine, with Forrest J Ackerman), Anne Frolick (winner in collaboration with Orson Welles for the 1938 radio adaptation of War of the Worlds and Margaret Brundage (Best Professional Artist, 1945).

I was delighted to see overlooked writers like Brackett, Clement, Leinster, T.H. White, A.E. van Vogt, Orson Welles and others get their past due recognition. But I have been somewhat disappointed by some of the choices voters made in the fiction and fan categories.

Especially in the Best Editor category. Because my hesitation to support continuing the Retro-Hugo Awards is firmly rooted in that category.

The talley of major male recipients reads like a virtual who’s who of the Golden Age:

John W. Campbell, Jr. – 9 Hugos (Eight for editing, one for fiction)
Ray Bradbury – 6 Hugos (fan writing and fiction)
Robert A. Heinlein – 6 Hugos (one for the screenplay for Destination Moon:)
Forrest J Ackerman – 5 Hugos (fan related)
Virgil Finlay – 5 Hugos (Artist)
Bob “Wilson” Tucker -5 Hugos (fan related)
Isaac Asimov – 3 Hugos

Ray Bradbury's 2004 Retro Hugo for Fahrenheit 451. — Ray Bradbury’s 2004 Retro Hugo for Fahrenheit 451.

Did 21st century fans select the best sf and fantasy of that era? Taking a critical look at the works that won, I would tend to say no. But, you could fill (or write) a book of opinions on that subject, which I highly recommend someone do, someday.

John W. Campbell, Jr., who was, without a doubt and for the better, the editor that dragged sf literature firmly from its pulpy, bug-eyed monster, dime novel roots into the 20th century from 1937 to 1950, during some of the period the Retro-Hugos are trying to fill. Whether he was relevant to the field or not after 1950 is still being debated to this day.

I do not revere the man as much as others have in the past. And yet I won’t hesitate to say that he was an important figure in our branch of literature and that I own several of his classic anthologies in my library.

I was in the auditorium in Dublin five years ago when Jeannette Ng roundly denounced the Campbell Award name and the man it was named after in such a passionate (and profane) manner on the stage of the Hugo Awards Ceremony. Some people who were present were outraged and others cheered wildly with thunderous applause. I was in the latter group.

In the aftermath of this event, some speculated that this was some sort of act of spontaneous cultural combustion. I can assure you, it was not.

Campbell’s eccentric notions of science were well known during his tenure at Astounding/Analog magazine, as he was an initial disciple of Dianetics and a devotee of a bogus contraption known as ‘the Dean Drive”. What was not well known to most of the sf readers at the time was that he was a virulent racist.

These facts came to the fore most prominently in Alec-Nevala Lee’s 2018 non-fiction chronicle of the Golden Age, Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Numerous examples of his despicable philosophies and actions have been unearthed since then.

If Jeannette Ng hadn’t said so, someone else eventually would have done so. I say this because I and several other authors and fans openly discussed online how to petition the sponsor of the award, Dell Magazines, or the WSFS Business Meeting to remove his name from the award a good two years before Ng’s speech. Ng’s brave and emotional outburst was the lightning strike that did the job for us and for that, I and other like minded people were and remain, very grateful.

Campbell’s surviving family, who live just up the road from me in Dayton, Ohio, have bitterly denounced the removal of the name and the demise of the Memorial Award that was administered by the University of Kansas’ Center for the Study of Science Fiction, which formally canceled any further awards in 2022. And while I feel some empathy for them, I would remind them that neither I nor anyone is trying to erase John W. Campbell, Jr. from our collective history, but asking for a measure of accountability for the harm he did do to his contemporaries in fandom, writers and the publishing field.

Having said all of this, you may ask why am I supporting a continuance of the Retrospective Hugo Awards?

Well.

First of all, I am a student of history and I feel as though we are leaving some of it unfinished by not honoring works from 1940, 1942, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1952 and the unawarded categories from 1957.

The second reason is that I am quite hopeful that fans, readers and potential nominators are sufficiently enlightened to select the very best works to honor in these years sooner, in a fair and expeditious manner, rather than later.

The people who make up sff fandom, the fans, convention runners, artists, writers and editors, deserve a chance to look back and objectively (or subjectively) make their opinions and voices heard, whether I agree with their eventual choices or not.

And even if I have an ideological problem honoring John W. Campbell, Jr., I will not deny the opportunity to those who do. And in turn, I will advocate for Frederik Pohl, Anthony Boucher, Horace L. Gold, Geoff Conklin, Robert P. Mills and other worthy nominees from this period.

I don’t believe that history is just “one damned thing after the other” as historian Arnold J. Toynbee famously said. History is the slow, tidal compilation of things that happen every single day.

So, I suggest we continue making history instead of complaining about the established “fixed points in time”.

Let’s finish what we started.

Cora Buhlert is a fan writer based in Bremen, Germany and was the recipient of the 2022 Hugo award for Best Fan Writer.

Chris M. Barkley is a news editor and columnist for File770.com. He resides in Cincinnati, Ohio and was the recipient of the 2023 Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer.

Pixel Scroll 6/5/24 Call Any Pixel, Call It By Name

Posted on June 5, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) DEPICTING CULTURE. Kanishk Tantia discusses the difference between using set dressing and true engagement in the representations of a culture at the SFWA Blog: “Culture: Moving Beyond Set Dressing”.

… But perhaps we can do better. I hope I have been doing better. When I wrote “I Hear the Starwhale Sing”, which was published in Canadian SFF magazine Heartlines Spec, I was consciously possessed of the urge to write something truer to my experience, something more genuine than a list of Indian foodstuffs to convince the reader they were in a diverse setting.

What does “better” look like? Let’s draw out the issues with the Rajpur sample above, and contrast what better replacements could be used.

First, there’s the shallowness of the writing. The passage above does not need to be set in Rajpur, India. It could take place on Mars, or in London, or Atlantis. The setting exists only for flavor and can be quickly hot-swapped out without changing what we have seen of the story so far.

Next, the simple goodness, or stereotyping. It’s a dirty word, isn’t it? Even positive stereotypes can be harmful. In the paragraph above, I elicit color, food, and smell, all in a positive way. But these are flashy tricks, forcing my reader to imagine richness and depth by drawing on their own biases about India rather than trying to show them something new or deeper. That’s what stereotyping does; it simply pulls from a reader’s existing bank of experiences, without challenge or comment.

Most egregious are the loanwords. And there are indeed so many. Sari, kachoris, modaks, gulab jamuns, beedi, Diwali. These are all Hindi words, but they are given no real meaning and treated as arbitrary objects. The cultural impact of these words is lost entirely, because they exist only to fill space and create an illusion.

Can we do better? Perhaps. Here’s another sample….

(2) MANIFESTO DESTINY. WIRED eavesdrops as “China Miéville Writes a Secret Novel With the Internet’s Boyfriend (It’s Keanu Reeves)”.

… My next question to Mr. Reeves was an innocent “What do you make of China’s politics?” Did the Internet’s Boyfriend fully understand, in other words, that he was partnering with China Miéville here? “I don’t really know his politics per se,” Keanu replied. He knew exactly what China’s politics were. As any interviewer would, I waited. Keanu then told me he had recently read, “and enjoyed,” the Communist Manifesto.

Whether he meant the short text by Marx and Engels, itself a commissioned project, a tie-in of sorts for the revolutions of 1848, or China Miéville’s most recent book, A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto, about the same, I could not tell. The ambiguity made me giggle. Sensing it well up in me like a sneeze, I muted the phone just in time. I was forming my own speculative fiction: Keanu Reeves as communist, the Engels to China’s Marx. I suppose this makes perfect sense. Because science fiction—the kind China Miéville writes, but also, maybe, all of it, the entire genre—is, or so the great critic Fredric Jameson tells us, bent toward utopia. Possibly even a communist one….

(3) WHERE THE MOUNTAIN MEETS THE SKY. “Paramount, Skydance agree to terms of a merger deal” – CNBC has the details.

A Paramount special committee and the buying consortium — David Ellison’s Skydance, backed by private equity firms RedBird Capital and KKR — agreed to the terms. The deal is awaiting signoff from Paramount’s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, who owns National Amusements, which owns 77% of class A Paramount shares… [National Amusements has movie theaters in the U.S., U.K. and Latin America.]

The agreement terms come after weeks of discussion and a recent competing offer from Apollo Global Management and Sony Pictures.

“We received the financial terms of the proposed Paramount/Skydance transaction over the weekend and we are reviewing them,” said a National Amusements spokesperson.

The deal currently calls for Redstone to receive $2 billion for National Amusements, Faber reported Monday. Skydance would buy out nearly 50% of class B Paramount shares at $15 apiece, or $4.5 billion, leaving the holders with equity in the new company.

Skydance and RedBird would also contribute $1.5 billion in cash to Paramount’s balance sheet to help reduce debt.

Following the deal’s close, Skydance and RedBird would own two-thirds of Paramount, and the class B shareholders would own the remaining third of the company, Faber reported. The negotiated terms were reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal….

(4) SF IN SF. Science Fiction in San Francisco will host readings by Robin Sloan, Rudy Rucker & Clara Ward on June 23 at The American Bookbinders Museum, 355 Clementina Street, San Francisco CA. Doors open at 6PM – event gets underway 6:30PM. $10 at the door – $8 seniors and students. No one turned away for lack of funds. CASH PREFERRED. All proceeds benefit the American Bookbinders Museum.

(5) JOURNEY PLANET CALL FOR ARTICLES. For the August issue of Journey Planet, Chris Garcia and James Bacon are joined by Jean Martin for an issue featuring food and drink in sci-fi and fantasy stories.

Chris says, “A key part of worldbuilding is creating comestibles and libations that offer the audience an elevated sensory experience along with the characters. Share articles and artwork with us about your favorite made-up gustatory delights in novels, movies, etc. And if you know where to get them and/or have actually made them, let us know how they tasted!”

Submissions to [email protected]. Deadline – July 1.

(6) ONLINE FLASH SF NIGHT. Space Cowboy Books presents Online Flash Science Fiction Night with Eliane Boey, Jendia Gammon, and Jonathan Nevairon June 11 at 6:00 p.m. Pacific. Register for free tickets at the link.

Join us online for an evening of short science fiction readings (1000 words or less) with authors Eliane Boey, Jendia Gammon, and Jonathan Nevair. Flash Science Fiction Nights run 30 minutes or less, and are a fun and great way to learn about new authors from around the world.

(7) TAKING GAS. Cora Buhlert was on the autobahn and filled up at Dammer Berge, the “service station of the future” (in 1969). Her encounter is part of Galactic Journey’s roundup “[May 16, 1969] Strange Dreams (May Galactoscope)”. Cora makes clear that the cuisine is not a reason to visit:

The structure is spectacular, a beacon of modernism, though sadly the food itself was rather lacklustre: a cup of coffee that tasted of the soap used to clean the machine and a slice of stale apple cake.

Cora then goes on to review Zero Cool, a pseudonymous Michael Crichton thriller from 1969.

(8) BLOCKED. “Franz Kafka letter shows author’s anguished struggle with writer’s block” – the Guardian has details.

A rare letter written by Franz Kafka to his publisher shows just how anguished a struggle it was for the Bohemian writer to put pen to paper, especially as his health deteriorated.

The letter, which will soon be auctioned, coincided with Kafka’s diagnosis with tuberculosis, which would end up killing him and which, scholars say, very probably added to his sense of mental paralysis and helplessness.

“When worries have penetrated to a certain layer of existence, the writing and the complaining obviously stop,” he wrote to his friend and publisher, the Austrian poet Albert Ehrenstein. “My resistance was not all that strong either.”

Undated, the letter is believed by scholars to have been written between April and June 1920, when Kafka was being treated for his illness at a clinic in Merano, northern Italy. Writer’s block famously haunted Kafka throughout his life but was exacerbated by his poor physical condition.

Neatly handwritten in polite, legible German, the letter is thought to be Kafka’s response to Ehrenstein’s request for the established author to contribute to Die Gefährten (The Fellows), the expressionist literary journal he was editing at the time. He had recently seen new work by Kafka in print, possibly his short story collection Ein Landarzt (A Country Doctor), written in 1917 and published two years later. But Kafka quickly disabused him of the notion that he was actively writing….

(9) WILLIAM RUSSELL (1924-2024). One of Doctor Who’s four original cast members, William Russell, has died reports the BBC: “William Russell: Original Doctor Who cast member dies aged 99”.

…Russell played schoolteacher Ian Chesterton in the first two series of the BBC’s sci-fi show and was the Doctor’s first companion.

He left the show in 1965, but in 2022 he reprised his role and made a cameo in Jodie Whittaker’s final episode, The Power of The Doctor.

The actor broke a Guinness World Record for the longest gap between TV appearances.

In the first ever episode, An Unearthly Child, which aired in 1963, Russell’s character meets the Doctor, played by William Hartnell.

Russell’s character mistakenly calls him Doctor Foreman, before Hartnell then replies “Doctor Who?”…

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

June 5, 1928 — Robert Lansing. (Died 1994.) Let’s talk about Gary Seven, errrr, Robert Lansing.

For us, his most important performance was as the secret agent Gary Seven on Star Trek’s “Assignment: Earth” in which the Enterprise ended up in the Sixties. His companion was Teri Garr. He was sent there by an alien race on a mission that he’s now afraid the Enterprise will compromise. And then there’s Isis, a shapeshifter who’s a black cat in one form. Nice kitty.

Sources agree that this episode was designed at least in part as a pilot for a new series featuring Gary Seven and his mission. Trek was seriously on the edge of cancellation late in its second year, and Roddenberry hoped to get a new show going for the fall season, hence this episode. The first draft pilot script of November 14 of 1968 had no mention of Star Trek or its characters which suggests that this was not intended as an episode for this series at all.

Robert Lansing as Gary Seven in Star Trek.

Indeed, somewhere there’s a draft of “Seven” as it was titled before that was revised two years after the first outline of what would become “Assignment: Earth” written by Gene Roddenberry and Art Wallace in October of 1967. I want that script!

Garr was quoted in a Sci-fi article about this episode: “Garr feared (correctly) that Starlog wanted to talk Trek and had to be persuaded to chat so as to promote her new flick. Warren sat down with her on the balcony of her publicist’s office for an in-person session and from there, things went sour. ‘I have nothing to say about it,’ Garr declared of ‘Assignment: Earth’ in Starlog #173. ‘I did that years ago and I mostly deny I ever did it.’ Turns out she was glad the Gary Seven show didn’t go to series.”

Lansing did do some other genre work…

His major role was as Dan Stokely in The Empire of The Ants, he’s a charter boat captain in Fort Pierce, Florida. He’s a primary character here and is in almost every scene.

Following up on that fillm, he has the lead role of Elias Johnson in The Nest where a small New England town is overrun by genetically engineered killer cockroaches. Ants. Cockroaches.

So what next? Crabs, yes crabs. In Island Crabs, he’s Captain Moody nearly ten foot long land crabs created by a biological experiment gone horribly wrong are killing everything in sight.

Oh he has other genre and genre adjacent roles, but how can I not stop there?

Well just one more as it’s a significant one — he was Commander Douglas Stansfield in Twilight Zone’s “The Long Morrow” where before leaving on a decades-long solitary mission to another system he meets a woman and they both fall deeply in love. But what kind of a future can there be for them in the Twilight Zone when he returns?

(11) COMICS SECTION.

Mannequin on the Moon illustrates a different take on a classic
Pardon My Planet comes up with an elementary solution.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has an unusual but not cruel punishment.

(12) VANCOUVER COMICS FESTIVAL APOLOGIZES TO JEWISH ARTIST IT BANNED. “After backlash, Vancouver comics festival apologizes for excluding Jewish artist over IDF service” reports Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

A Vancouver comics festival apologized to a Jewish artist it had banned over her past Israeli military service and a Seattle museum announced it was recommitting to an exhibit on antisemitism that prompted a staff walkout, in two reversals of arts-world sanctions connected to the Israel-Hamas war.

Both the Vancouver Comic Arts Festival and the Wing Luke Museum had faced significant backlash over the actions they took because of pro-Palestinian activism.

“VanCAF has lost and continues to lose the trust of many we have sought to serve,” the Vancouver festival said in a social media apology late Sunday, days after announcing that it was banning American-Israeli comics artist Miriam Libicki following activist complaints over her past IDF service.

The festival didn’t name Libicki in either its initial statement banning her — which it quickly removed from social media following backlash — or its lengthy new apology. But the ban referenced Libicki’s previous IDF service, which she has turned into a comic, while the apology referenced another specific work of hers: “But I Live,” a collaboration with Holocaust survivors.

(13) FREE AT LAST. Here’s the complete article we linked in yesterday’s Scroll, except no paywall – yay! “Sci-fi pioneer Harlan Ellison’s L.A. Shangri-la offers a window into his complicated soul”.

… As Straczynski moves through the rooms of the house called “Ellison Wonderland,” his deep affection and respect for his friend remains evident. He points out the care with which more than 250,000 books are shelved, each hardback jacket fitted with transparent archival covers, the dust-free groupings of comic-book figurines, the room full of shelves specifically made to hold jelly glasses from the 1960s. He touches only the things he must, in order to make something visible, such as when in Ellison’s office proper he opens a tiny door in one of the Bram Stoker Awards given by the Horror Writers Assn. and takes out the mini plaque inside that holds the winner’s name and book title…

Harlan Ellison’s collection of books and awards

(14) VERBAL CATS. This article is paywalled, but you can enjoy the excerpt. “Written by Paw” by Kathryn Hughes in The New York Review of Books.

Cats were not, historically, great talkers (unless you counted Siamese). For much of their existence they had not needed to be. Consigned to barns, kitchens and alleyways for centuries, their main communication remained mostly among themselves. Apart from the unearthly wailing of queens during heat, or the involuntary screech of a tom scratched during a fight, cats conveyed their feelings by a twitch of the tail, a flattened ear, a crouch to the ground.

Only in the nineteenth century, once cats moved to the city and started to bump into humans more regularly, did direct communication become necessary with greater frequency….

… For the more suggestible owner, though, it was possible to imagine a darker side to this newfound articulation. For if the modern cat knew its name and could ask for food when hungry, who was to say that, when your back was turned, it wasn’t gossiping about you? If you added the cat’s well-known fondness for sitting on tops of piles of paper and books, it was quite possible to believe that it was reading your diary or browsing your letters. Worse still, perhaps it was at this very moment jotting in its own journal or cogitating a literary masterpiece—and, again, it might be all about you….

(15) SELLING BOOKS IS TOO MUCH WORK. “Costco Plans to Stop Selling Books Year-Round” reports the New York Times. (Story is behind a paywall.)

In a blow to publishers and authors, Costco plans to stop selling books regularly at stores around the United States, four publishing executives who had been informed of the warehouse retailer’s plans said on Wednesday.

Beginning in January 2025, the company will stop stocking books regularly, and will instead sell them only during the holiday shopping period, from September through December. During the rest of the year, some books may be sold at Costco stores from time to time, but not in a consistent manner, according to the executives, who spoke anonymously in order to discuss a confidential business matter that has not yet been publicly announced.

Costco’s shift away from books came largely because of the labor required to stock books, the executives said. Copies have to be laid out by hand, rather than just rolled out on a pallet as other products often are at Costco. The constant turnaround of books — new ones come out every Tuesday and the ones that have not sold need to be returned — also created more work….

(16) KAIJU STAR. The Guardian investigates “How Godzilla Minus One became a monster hit for Netflix”.

…Godzilla Minus One is by no means an artsy slow burn; like the other titles on the list of the highest-grossing foreign-language films in US history, it’s accessible and entertaining. It’s about reckoning with postwar survivor’s guilt, and it movingly challenges cultural notions of what constitutes honor, yes, but it’s also about the half-terrifying, half-exhilarating vision of a particularly mean-looking iteration of Godzilla laying waste to anything in his path…

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

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

Posted on June 4, 2024 by Mike Glyer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Cora’s Adventures at the Los Amigos Masters of the Universe Convention in Neuss or the Six Hundred Kilometer Roundtrip, Part 1: The Trip Out”.

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

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

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

“Cora’s Adventures at the Los Amigos Masters of the Universe Convention in Neuss or the Six Hundred Kilometer Roundtrip, Part 2: The Con”.

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

“Cora’s Adventures at the Los Amigos Masters of the Universe Convention in Neuss or the Six Hundred Kilometer Roundtrip, Part 3: The Road Home… and Tecklenburg”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Compiled by Paul Weimer.]

June 4, 1960 — Kristine Kathryn Rusch, 64.

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

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

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

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

(7) COMICS SECTION.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spector Creative Toy Controversy

Posted on May 1, 2024 by Mike Glyer

By Cora Buhlert:

INTRODUCTION: A current controversy in the toy collector world revolves around toy industry insider Scott Neitlich who worked for various companies and is now an independent consultant. He has a YouTube channel named Spector Creative and makes videos offering an inside look into the toy industry. He’s long been something of a controversial figure and his videos gradually tipped from interesting insights to increasingly bad takes and things which were just plain wrong. Then one day, the channel was suddenly gone from YouTube. Turned out he had been using random photos he found on the internet without permission, including stock photos which were watermarked.

Ethan Wilson, who runs an action figure review blog named The Figure in Question, found that Neitlich had been using his photos without permission or credit and submitted some copyright complaints to YouTube, who removed the entire channel. Neitlich contacted Wilson and begged for him to retract the copyright claims and promised to remove all photos once he regained access to his channel. So Ethan Wilson retracted his copyright complaints, whereupon Neitlich did not remove the photos and started badmouthing Wilson and sending his followers after him. It’s gotten steadily uglier and weirder since then.

SCOTT NEITLICH AND SPECTOR CREATIVE. Protagonist No. 1 is Scott Neitlich who runs a YouTube channel called Spector Creative. Neitlich is a toy industry insider who used to work for various toy companies, most notably Mattel. He was the Mattel brand manager in charge of the Masters of the Universe Classics and DC Universe Classics collector toy lines from 2008 to 2016. Neitlich championed Masters of the Universe at Mattel, when no one else did, and many of the names he gave to characters who never had any are still used in the various cartoons, comics, etc… to this day. However, Neitlich was a controversial figure among Masters of the Universe fans, because of quality control issues with some of the figures (one figure’s hips infamously shattered straight out of the packaging) and questionable decisions such as using the name a fan had given an obscure character for an action figure without crediting that fan, asking the design team to give a palace guard action figure his face and – most notably – inserting a Mary Sue character named the Mighty Spector that he had created as a kid into the Masters of the Universe line. That figure is so disliked you can still find it in stock at most collectible shops more than ten years later. Recently, a German collectible shop couldn’t even sell their leftover stock of Mighty Spector figures at fifty percent off.

After leaving Mattel (and there is some debate going on whether he left voluntarily or was asked to leave), Neitlich worked at a couple of other toy and merchandise companies and eventually started a consulting business for the toy and entertainment industry called Spector Creative as well as a YouTube channel. The YouTube channel offers an insider look at the toy industry and lots of background information on the Masters of the Universe and DC toy lines Neitlich worked on, which is how I came across his channel. The channel claims to be educational, but Neitlich also uses it to advertise his consulting business. One thing I noticed immediately is that the videos occasionally contained watermarked stock images, i.e. he had just grabbed those images without paying for the license which is a huge no no for anything you post in public. If you actually use your videos to advertise your business, it’s an even bigger no-no.

Neitlich also posted increasingly bad takes and flat out wrong claims. He claimed that Mattel was about to lose the Masters of the Universe license, even though Mattel actually owns the brand – the only rights issues involve some characters created for the 1980s He-Man and She-Ra cartoons. Neitlich seems to be quite bitter that the current Masters of the Universe toy lines are getting more corporate support than his Classics line did and keeps claiming these toy lines are about to be cancelled and doubled down on his claims, even after people told him that new toys were shipping and sold in stores. I think the thing which convinced me that nothing this guy said should be taken seriously was when he called the Nuremberg toy fair, which is only the biggest and most important toy industry trade fair in the world, “some obscure German con”. Because how can someone work in an industry for twenty years and not know the most important industry event?

In early February, the Spector Creative YouTube channel was suddenly gone. Neitlich posted on Twitter that he had no idea what happened.

Ten days later or so, the channel returned and Neitlich posted a video explaining that his channel had received more than thirty copyright complaints in the span of a week or so, which is why YouTube terminated it. He also claimed that YouTube found those complaints unjustified and that his channel and his livelihood, since he uses his channel to advertise his business, had been held hostage. (The video formerly could be viewed at this link, however, Neitlich recently set the entire channel to private, not just the contested videos.)

The Spector Creative channel never completely disappeared again, but there would be no new videos for a while and then Neitlich popped up again and said he had been getting more copyright strikes. He also claimed that the person submitting the copyright complaints, one Ethan Wilson, who runs a toy review blog called The Figure in Question, was blackmailing him.

(Two follow-up videos could formerly be viewed here and here.)

THAT JUNKMAN. Another toy and pop culture YouTube channel called That Junkman also got involved. I’d never heard of that channel before, but he posts a lot of right-wing culture war stuff along with talking about toys, which tells you everything you need to know about this person. He posted several videos directly attacking Ethan Wilson.

ETHAN WILSON. On March 8, Ethan Wilson posted his side of the story on his blog, complete with screenshots of his e-mail exchanges with Scott Neitlich: “About This Spector Creative Thing”.

Basically, Wilson ran across Neitlich’s YouTube channel and saw that Neitlich had been using toy photos from Ethan’s review blog The Figure in Question without permission or attribution and complained to YouTube. Wilson also went through the videos and found lots and lots of instances of his photos being used, not just one or two. There’s a screenshot of the initial thirty-two copyright complaints here.

The weirdest bit is that at least one of the figures, Hydron, is a Masters of the Universe Classics figure, i.e. a figure Neitlich worked on and that he owns, so he could just have photographed his own figure.

Anyway, Scott Neitlich e-mailed Ethan Wilson and begged him to retract his copyright complaints, so he could regain access to his channel. He also promised to remove the photos in question or credit Wilson. So Wilson retracted the claims and Neitlich got his channel back, only to do absolutely nothing of what he promised. He neither removed the photos nor credited Ethan Wilson. Instead, Neitlich claims fair use, because his channel is informational and educational (even though he is using it to advertise his business). He also claims that Ethan Wilson does not actually own the copyright to his own photos, because he did not register copyright. However, according to current US law, copyright is granted automatically from the moment of creation. Neitlich also claimed that Wilson couldn’t copyright the photos, because they were generic photos of licensed products trademarked by somebody else. Again, this is not how copyright works. And the fact that someone who spent years working in an industry where copyright and trademark law are very important, doesn’t have even a basic knowledge of how these things work, is very telling.

Ethan Wilson was interviewed twice on the Dad-at-Arms YouTube channel, which is a Masters of the Universe fan channel, focusing on interviewing people involved with Masters of the Universe, mostly with the cartoons and comics. Colt, who runs the channel, is a former journalist and another toy collector alerted him to the issue.

In the meantime, several other people have also come forward and said that Neitlich has used their photos, fan art, graphics, etc… without permission or credit, but they just didn’t bother complaining to YouTube. He’s never used one of my photos so far, though I’m not sure whether I should feel glad or insulted.

Neitlich once again lost access to his channel and posted a dramatic, “I’m losing my channel for good” post on the Community tab of his channel (which he apparently could access). (The post is no longer online, but was formerly available close to the top of the Community tab.

A bit later, he posted this tweet:

Note that the Ace of Spades is both the logo of his company as well as of his Mighty Spector character.

Pretty much the first response to that tweet came from the Twitter account of Griffin Newman, toy collector and the voice actor who plays Orko in Masters of the Universe: Revelation and Revolution:

Eventually, Neitlich regained control of his channel and posted yet another video complaining about copyright trolls blackmailing him and proved once again that he has no idea how copyright and trademark law work in the US. Neitlich also claims he got a lawyer, though Ethan Wilson claims he never received any letters from any lawyers.

CLOWNFISH TV VS. DAD-AT-ARMS. Meanwhile, Clownfish TV, a culture war focused YouTube channel also got in on the action. Clownfish TV has a long-running feud with Dad-at-Arms, because DAA called them out for blatantly untrue claims about Masters of the Universe: Revelation and for attacks on the creators of the show. As a result, the Clownfish TV people are angry that Dad-at-Arms got interviews with various people involved with the Masters of the Universe: Revelation and Revolution (producers, directors, writers and even a voice actor), while they didn’t get these interviews, even though they have more followers than he does. Gee, I wonder why people don’t want to talk to a YouTube channel that insulted and badmouthed them. Anyway, Clownfish TV interviewed Scott Neitlich, who professed to be a big fan of their channel:

On a side note, Scott Neitlich also recently self-published a Greek mythology based graphic novel named Myth War that he’s written. Neitlich does have some experience with writing comics, since he wrote some of the Masters of the Universe pack-in mini-comics. However – and here is the kicker – Neitlich used AI generated art for his graphic novel:

CONCLUSION. This is where things stand now: Scott Neitlich and Ethan Wilson are still feuding, Neitlich still uses other people’s work without permission and is slowly but steadily losing whatever credibility he still had.

Pixel Scroll 4/26/24 A Pixel Lives Forever, But Not So Files And Scrolls

Posted on April 26, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) NOBODY’S HOME. [Item by Steven French.] Extract from a new book in that old chestnut, where is everybody? Smithsonian Magazine asks “Where Is Everybody in Our Universe?”

…There is no doubt that the simplest answer to the questions “Why the Great Silence? Why don’t we hear any SETI signals?” is that we don’t hear signals because no one is sending them. There are a number of other explanations that have been put forward, and we can look at them briefly before taking William of Ockham seriously. Basically, the explanations can be divided into three categories:

1. They really are out there, but they’re not interested in us.

2. They really are out there, but they’re protecting us.

3. They really are out there, and we’re going to get it unless we mend our ways.

An example of the first category would be a race of extraterrestrials living in a Dyson sphere, happy as clams with their star’s energy and supremely uninterested in anyone else. Another possibility would be extraterrestrials on a rogue planet who can’t imagine a planet near a star being inhabitable. An example of the second item in the list is seen in the Star Trek series, where spacefarers obey the Prime Directive, which forbids them from interfering with the development of other life forms. The last category is portrayed in the classic 1950s film The Day the Earth Stood Still, in which an extraterrestrial visitor warns that Earth will be destroyed unless we control our use of atomic weapons:

Klaatu barrada nikto!” …

The authors’ conclusion makes for grim reading: there is no one out there and that’s because evolution produces warlike, aggressive species that use their newly developed scientific expertise to wipe themselves out, a fate that awaits us too.

(2) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES. Space Cowboy Books has posted episode 74 of the Simultaneous Times podcast with Eric Fomley & Tonya R. Moore. Stories featured in this episode:

“Control” by Eric Fomley; with music by Phog Masheeen
“Halfway House” by Tonya R. Moore; with music by Patrick Urn
Theme music by Dain Luscombe

(3) SHORT OF PERFECTION. [Item by Steven French.] When you’re looking for a disappointing utopia … “The Illustrated Map of America’s Worst Utopias” at Atlas Obscura.

THERE ARE MANY WHO WANT to believe that a utopia—a perfect society, an ideal world—can exist. Even in America.

Yet, as quickly as leaders eagerly build utopias, they often crumble in a glorious heaping mess. Some fall to sex scandals, others toil in hunger, while many are struck with bad luck. From nudist colonies to bioterrorist cults, we map and explore six of the most disappointing and unfortunate utopias in the United States.

(4) CORA BUHLERT VISITS 1969. Here are links to Cora Buhlert’s recent contributions to Galactic Journey, the blog that keeps track of the latest in science fiction – 55 years ago.

She reviewed The Face in the Frost by John Bellairs and Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Cora says, “I lobbied for the Slaughterhouse Five review, considering I actually knew people who survived the bombing of Dresden”: “[March 14, 1969 ] (March 1969 Galactoscope)”.

Cora also wrote an article about the non-Conan Robert E. Howard works that came back into print in the late 1960s in the wake of the huge success of the Conan reprints: “[March 28, 1969] Life Beyond Conan: The Other Heroes of Robert E. Howard”.

(5) GEORGE LUCAS, REAL ESTATE TYCOON. “Chicago’s Most Expensive Condo Being Constructed By Director George Lucas” at Chicago YIMBY.

“Star Wars” creator George Lucas, have expanded his real estate portfolio with the purchase of a $11.2 million 66th-floor penthouse in Streeterville’s 800 N Michagan Avenue building from Citadel founder Ken Griffin. They plan to merge this penthouse with their existing 65th-floor condo, bought in 2015 for $18.75 million, to create a 16,000-square-foot duplex penthouse. The total cost for this project is estimated at $33.5 million, setting a new record for Chicago’s most expensive condo. Architect Scott Fortman of Gibbons, Fortman & Associates is overseeing the design, which includes adding two new interior staircases and upgrading electrical and mechanical systems as reported by the Chicago Tribune.

(6) JUBILEE CHO (1998-2024). SFWA today posted “In Memoriam – Jubilee Cho”, honoring the author of the upcoming middle grade fantasy novel Wishing Well, Wishing Well who died on March 6 at the age of 25.

Cho grew up near Disneyland, enamored with stories of fantastical princesses. Yearning to see herself included in such tales, she wrote her own to help give new generations of children something she’d needed to create for herself. Cho planned a long writing career and wanted to use her platform to foster awareness about disability and mental health, and to share the beauty of trans joy with the world.

Author Kwame Mbalia who had reached out as a mentor says, “In the briefest of moments that I was able to interact with Jubilee, her desire to not only write, but to write for young readers about drawing upon their own identity and sharing that with others, was an inspiration. She is an inspiration, and her light is gone too soon, though its glow will live on in the hearts of those who knew her.”

Author E.D.E. Bell said, “Jubilee was a princess who wanted everyone to know that they too can be included in stories, in joy, in femininity, in Pride, in gathering, in any magic they desired. I hope children will find their own spirit in her lovely, hopeful story, and let it lift them to soar.”

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born April 26, 1945 – M. John Harrison, 79.

Paul Weimer wrote this Birthday.

M John Harrison taught me about the joy of inconsistent and contradictory worldbuilding.

For most writers of fantasy, for most works of fantasy, I am always looking for the consistency and the power of the worldbuilding. Inconsistent, and worse, lazy and weak worldbuilding, can catapult me right out of a story or a novel, permanently. This has happened for me as a reader just this month with a brand-new novel.

M John Harrison is the exception to that for me. My reading of his work is almost exclusively Viriconium. But it is precisely in Viriconium, Harrison’s carved out territory in the Dying Earth subgenre, that I learned that worldbuilding is not the be all and end all of fantasy writing. The contradictions, the inconsistencies, the lack of cohesion is part of the point of the dying world of Viriconium. Not being able to rely on previous stories and novels in the sequence to understand what is happening in a particular work is something that Harrison relies on, and it is something that I learned to accept, and even expect in the Viriconium stories.

Really, Viriconium’s world building is beside the point, and that is why Harrison writes it in a way that you can’t rely on it. Instead, to use modern parlance, Viriconium is much more all about the “vibes”, and what vibes! Vance and Wolfe may have perfected Dying Earth as a subgenre, but Harrison gives it a feel that few authors have managed to hit ever since. There are few authors I’ve read that have managed to embody the vibe of the subgenre they are writing in as well as M John Harrison has. And with such language and writing. On a sentence by sentence level, Harrison is one of the most talented writers I’ve ever read, of any genre.

A singular talent.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Free Range has a guest who’s forgotten it’s a talk show.
Close To Home has an ethical use of a time machine.
Off the Mark shows that patience is not unlimited.
Bizarro launches an alternate astronaut/
Macanudo might be a Zelazny reference. Or if not, then certainly Bradbury.
Rhymes with Orange discovers something about homemade phones.

(9) WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE MY NEIGHBOR? Eh, maybe not: “How Scientists Are Preparing for Apophis’s Unnervingly Close Brush With Earth” at Gizmodo.

In about five years’ time, a potentially hazardous asteroid will swing by Earth at an eerily close distance of less than 20,000 miles (32,000 kilometers). During this rare encounter, Apophis will be ten times closer to Earth than the Moon and scientists want to take full advantage of its visit….

…Private space companies like Blue Origin and startup Exploration Labs, or ExLabs, have come up with proposals for missions to rendezvous with Apophis before its anticipated flyby, SpaceNews reported. During a recent workshop at a European Space Agency center in The Netherlands, the companies pitched their mission concepts in an effort to learn more about the asteroid and other space rocks that could pose a potential risk to Earth….

…NASA’s OSIRIS-APEX spacecraft, formerly known as OSIRIS-REx, is already on its way to study Apophis and observe changes the asteroid may endure from its close encounter with Earth. After dropping off samples from the Bennu asteroid in the Utah desert, the spacecraft was repurposed for a new errand, having to carry out close passes to the Sun, as well as three Earth gravity assists, to reach Apophis in five years….

(10) NASA BRINGS HOME THE HARDWARE. “NASA Wins 6 Webby Awards, 8 Webby People’s Voice Awards”.

NASA was recognized [April 25] by the 28th Annual Webby Awards with six Webby Awards and eight Webby People’s Voice Awards, the latter of which are awarded by the voting public. The Webbys honors excellence in nine major media types: websites and mobile sites, video, advertising, media and public relations, apps and software, social media, podcasts, games, the metaverse, and virtual and artificial intelligence (AI).

Full List of NASA’s 28th Annual Webby Award Wins

NASA.gov
Webby Winner, People’s Voice Winner
Websites and Mobile Sites-General Desktop & Mobile Sites | Government & Associations
This is the fifth Webby Award and the 12th People’s Voice Award for the agency’s website

NASA’s Curious Universe: Suiting Up for Space
Webby Winner, People’s Voice Winner
Best Podcasts-Individual Episodes | Science & Education

NASA’s Immersive Earth
Webby Winner, People’s Voice Winner
Artificial Intelligence (AI), Metaverse & Virtual-General Virtual Experiences | Science & Education

NASA: Message in a Bottle
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Webby Winner, People’s Voice Winner
Advertising, Media & PR-PR Campaigns | Best Community Engagement

OSIRIS-REx Asteroid Sample Return (Official 4K NASA Live Stream)
People’s Voice Winner
Video-General Video | Events & Live Streams

NASA’s First Asteroid Sample Return Mission
Webby Winner, People’s Voice Winner
Social-Social Campaigns | Education & Science

NASA+ Streaming Service
Webby Winner
Websites and Mobile Sites-General Desktop & Mobile Sites | Television, Film & Streaming

Annular Solar Eclipse
People’s Voice Winner
Social-Social Campaigns | Events & Live Streams

Hubble’s Inside the Image
NASA, Origin Films
People’s Voice Winner
Video-Video Series & Channels | Science & Education

(11) CLIPPING SERVICE. Here’s a Heinlein photo from the San Pedro CA News Pilot, dated August 14, 1948.

(12) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George shares footage of “The Focus Group That Gave Us The Internet”.

[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Paul Weimer, Bill, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, and Teddy Harvia for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]

Pixel Scroll 4/17/24 Root/File; Droppixels

Posted on April 17, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) SECOND TIME AROUND. Rebecca F. Kuang brings us “The Poppy War (Becky’s Version)”. See the new cover at the link.

…I did the best I could for that book. I didn’t know how to ask for things. I made compromises. I knew I didn’t want the cover art to play into Orientalist tropes, and I knew I didn’t want a generic, European, epic fantasy cover, but I didn’t know how to communicate or negotiate something in between. I latched onto the first concept that wasn’t dreadful. I thought that if I said anything more, then I would hamstring my career before it had gotten off the ground. At twenty, I was scared of my own shadow.

We’ve grown a lot since then.

Last year, my editor asked me: if we could reissue The Poppy War again today, what would I change? How would the cover look? How would the interior art look?…

(2) THE SUMMER OF ’24. The Clarion West Writers Workship has announced their Six-Week Workshop Class of 2024.

(3) DOCTOR WHO REJECTS AND SALVAGE JOBS. Den of Geek discusses “Doctor Who’s Unmade TV Episodes”. Here are two examples.

…. In 1964 Victor Pemberton submitted ‘The Slide’ (in which the Doctor discovered sentient, mind-controlling mud) to the Doctor Who production offices. The story was rejected and so Pemberton adapted it for BBC radio. ‘The Slide’ was then adapted back into a Doctor Who story that swapped the mud for seaweed in 1968’s ‘Fury from the Deep’.

Donald Cotton, who wrote two Hartnell stories, submitted a third which contained the idea that the Loch Ness Monster was of alien origin. ‘The Herdsmen of Venus’ suggested that the Loch Ness Monster was in fact a type of space bovine, bred by the titular herdsmen, and raising the very real possibility of a space helmet for a cow. Cotton’s story was rejected by the a new production team who felt Doctor Who should be a serious show, though seemingly conflicting alien origins for the Loch Ness Monster would appear in 1975’s ‘Terror of the Zygons’ and 1985’s ‘Timelash’….

(4) THE BASIC UNIT OF SOCIETY. Joe Vasicek by no means styles himself a liberal thinker, however, it’s thought-provoking to read his explanation for this change: “Why I no longer consider myself to be a libertarian” at One Thousand And One Parsecs.

… Families don’t just happen. They take a lot of work to build and to maintain, and unless they are planted in a culture that nourishes them, they will wither and die. Libertarianism does not foster that kind of a culture, yet it depends on families in order to raise the kind of people who can make a libertarian society work. People from broken families often lack the mental and emotional maturity to take upon themselves the personal responsibilities that come with personal liberty—in other words, they lack the capacity for personal independence which libertarianism depends on….

(5) WHEN IT’S TIME TO RAILROAD. “The U.S. is exploring a railroad for the moon. It has a good reason.” – Mashable has the story.

… The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA — an ambitious federal innovations division — has begun collaborating with over a dozen companies on potential future lunar technologies, including a moon railroad. It’s called the 10-Year Lunar Architecture Capability Study, or LunA-10, and its mission is to find technologies that will catalyze a self-perpetuating lunar economy….

… DARPA recently chose the aerospace and defense giant Northrup Grumman to create the concept for the railroad. “The envisioned lunar railroad network could transport humans, supplies, and resources for commercial ventures across the lunar surface — contributing to a space economy for the United States and international partners,” the company wrote. They’ll aim to develop a railway that limits the human footprint on the largely still pristine lunar surface, and design a system that anyone could ride or load cargo on (such as with standardized, moon-worthy equipment that can withstand huge temperature swings)…

(6) CONAN IN 1969. Cora Buhlert is among the reviewers who contribute to Galactic Journey’s post “[April 16, 1969] The Men from Ipomoea (April 1969 Galactoscope)”.

Conan with a Metafictional Gimmick: Kothar, Barbarian Swordsman, by Gardner F. Fox

There has been an invasion at my trusty local import bookstore, an invasion of scantily clad, muscular Barbarians, sporting furry loincloths and horned helmets and brandishing gigantic swords and axes, while equally scantily clad maidens cling to their mighty thews….

(7) SOVIET NOSTALGIA? Gizmodo gripes and cheers: “The Greatest Sci-Fi Show You’re Still Not Watching Is Getting a New Season—and a Spinoff”.

The world of For All Mankind was forever changed when the Soviet Union arrived on the moon before the United States. That one event changed the course of the show’s alternate history, and now we’ll get to see exactly how it happened.

Apple TV+ has just announced that not only is For All Mankind coming back for a fifth season, it’s also getting a spinoff called Star City that will tell the story from the Soviet point of view, starting with them beating America to the moon….

According to Deadline:

…Apple is billing Star City is “a propulsive paranoid thriller” which will explore a key moment in the alt-history retelling of the space race — when the Soviet Union became the first nation to put a man on the moon. But this time, it will explore the story from behind the Iron Curtain, showing the lives of the cosmonauts, the engineers, and the intelligence officers embedded among them in the Soviet space program, and the risks they all took to propel humanity forward….

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born April 17, 1959 — Sean Bean, 65. Today’s Birthday is that of Sean Bean whose most well known role is either Lord Eddard “Ned” Stark in Game of Thrones or Boromir in Jackson’s The Lord of The Rings trilogy (though his scenes in The Two Towers are only available on the extended version.) I really liked him as Boromir in The Fellowship of The Ring which I’ve watched a number of times.

If you count National Treasure as being genre adjacent, and I certainly do given its premise, he’s Ian Lowe there — a crime boss and treasure hunter who is a former friend of Benjamin Gate, the character Nicolas Cage plays.

He’s James in The Dark, a horror film based off Welsh mythology with connections to the Welsh underworld Annwyn.

He’s done a lot of horror films — Silent Hill is his next one in which he’s Christopher Da Silva, husband of Rose, and it’s a haunted mansion mystery as its sequel. He played Ulric in Black Death. Guess when that is set?

Genre wise, there’s Possessor where he’s a mind jumping assassin. Hey it’s also listed as being horror! Then there’s Jupiter Ascending where he’s Stinger Apindi, Over there we find The Martian where he’s Mitch Henderson, and in Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief he’s Zeus.

More interestingly he was Inspector John Marlottin The Frankenstein Chronicles, an ITV series about a London police officer who uncovers a corpse made up of body parts from eight missing children and sets about to determine who is responsible.

Lastly I’ll note that he was in the Snowpiercer series as Mr. Wilford. I’ve not seen it. So how is it?

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Reality Check has bridge trolls in a new location.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal examines the value of learning.

(10) BURSTING BACK INTO THEATERS. Comicbook.com tells fans “Original Alien Returning to Theaters This Month for Alien Day”. (Check Fandango for Alien 45th Anniversary Re-Release (2024) Showtimes.)

Just in time to celebrate 45 years since its release, Ridley Scott’s Alien is coming back to theaters this spring. Coming on “Alien Day” — that’s April 26 — the movie will screen at theaters across the U.S. Over at Fandango, you can see where screenings are, order tickets, and browse other merch like an homage poster, collectables, books, apparel, and more. The screenings on Alien Day will also feature an exclusive conversation between Scott and Alien: Romulus writer/director Fede Alvarez….

(11) ANOTHER HELPING OF GOOD OMENS, PLEASE. Radio Times intercepts the signal as “Neil Gaiman confirms when Good Omens season 3 begins filming”.

…Speaking in an interview with Deadline about post-strike Hollywood, Gaiman reflected on his upcoming projects – and in the process, offered up a timeline for Good Omens season 3 production.

He said: “That being said, you know, Dead Boy Detectives comes out in 10 days. I’ve seen half of Sandman season 2, and it’s astonishing. I’m writing Good Omens season 3, and we start shooting that in January.”…

(12) CLOSING THE BOOKS. San Francisco Science Fiction Conventions, Inc. announces “Costume-Con 39, Westercon 74 Committees Discharged”.

At its March 16, 2024 meeting, the SFSFC Board of Directors discharged the standing committees previously established to operate Costume-Con 39 and Westercon 74. Both conventions have completed all of their tasks. This action means that both convention committees will close their financial books and turn over any remaining surplus assets to the SFSFC corporate general fund. Any residual responsibilities of these committees have similarly been absorbed by the corporation’s general fund.

SFSFC continues to maintain both conventions’ websites. Anyone with questions about either committee can still contact the organization through those convention’s general-information inquiry addresses or they can contact SFSFC directly.

(13) PET PUSHES THE BUTTON. This news item involving a dog continues a line of interest we began by covering Mary Robinette Kowal’s cat who talks using buttons. “Dog uses sound buttons to communicate with owner that she’s unwell” at USA Today.

A golden retriever turned into a doctor when he diagnosed his owner with an illness before she got sick.

Christina Lee, a software engineer from Northern California, taught her dog Cache to talk to her by pressing buttons on a communication device.

The device is pre-programmed with words such as “food,” “friend,” and “mom.” But when Cache pressed a button saying “sick,” Lee was initially skeptical as she felt fine. However, five hours later, she began to feel unwell.

“This is the first time that he’s predicted when I would get sick ahead of time,” says Lee. “I think he could smell it on me or something.”

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

Pixel Scroll 3/31/24 I Shall Name This Clever WordPlay After Myself, Said Tom Eponymously

Posted on March 31, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) WHY BARDON DECLINED A 2024 HUGO NOMINATION. Natasha Bardon has posted on Instagram her reasons for declining her Best Editor, Long Form Hugo nomination:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Natasha Bardon (@natashabardon)

Learn more about Bardon in this interview from 2020 – “An Interview With… Natasha Bardon” — and this news item from the Bookseller in 2022 – “Bardon promoted to publisher at HarperVoyager and Magpie Books”.

(2) WHAT’S ON THE BALLOT. Cora Buhlert analyzes all the categories in “Some Thoughts on the 2024 Hugo Finalists” which were announced at the UK Eastercon.

Here is Buhlert’s reaction to the voters’ picks for Best Related:

Best Related

I guess everybody knows my strong preference for well-researched non-fiction in this category by now, so I’m pleased that five of six finalists in this category are actually books.

The late Maureen Kincaid Speller was an always insightful critic, so I’m glad to see the collection A Traveller in Time: The Critical Practice of Maureen Kincaid Speller by Maureen Kincaid Speller, edited by Nina Allan, on the ballot.

Volumes 2 and 3 of Chinese Science Fiction: An Oral History, edited by Yang Feng, are the sequels to the first volume which was nominated in this category last year and most worthy they are, too.

All These Worlds: Reviews & Essays by Niall Harrison does exactly what it says on the tin. I haven’t this collection yet, but it’s exactly the sort of thing I like to see in this category.

A City on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith is an illustrated popular science book about how feasible it is to colonise Mars. I wasn’t familiar with this book at all, though again it absolutely fits into this category.

The Culture: The Drawings by Iain M. Banks is an art book collecting drawings that the late Iain M. Banks did of spacecraft, locations, etc… of his Culture series. Again, I had no idea that this book existed, but it’s most fitting finalist.

Finally, we have a podcast or rather videocast named Discover X nominated in this category. Discover X appears to be a collection of interviews with various SMOFs and SFF professionaly done by Tina Wong at last year’s Chengdu Worldcon.

Discover X was initially nominated in Best Fancast, but since it is a professional project, it was moved into Best Related. This isn’t the first time a professional podcast was nominated in Best Related. Writing Excuses was nominated in this category several times approx. 10 years ago. I’m not very happy with podcasts nominated in Best Related, but since there is no professional podcast (procast?) category, there really is no other place to put them. And podcasts are among the less edgy of the many edge finalists we’ve seen in this category in recent years.

There also was a withdrawl is this category, because Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood was nominated for a viral tweet promoting the Hugo-winning novella This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, which pushed the book up various bestseller lists due to Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood’s many Twitter followers. Now the Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood affair is a perfect example of how word of mouth works and can catapult a work into the stratosphere. Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood also appears to be a great person and it was very classy of them to decline a nomination. However, this nomination also illustrates why the Best Related Work needs to be reformed and the definition tightened. Because how on Earth can you compare a single tweet, even one which sold thousands of books, with a 400 page non-fiction book?

And even if we limited Best Related to non-fiction books and long essays, we’d still get a wide range of potential finalists as this year’s ballot shows….

(3) TAKEN FROM THE SHELF. Haven’t had enough Eastercon this weekend? Rob Hansen is prepared to immerse you in the 1956 edition — CYTRICON II – at his richly-detailed fanhistory site.

CYTRICON II, the 1956 UK national science fiction convention was held at The George Hotel in the town of Kettering over the Easter weekend, Friday 30th March – Monday 2nd April. Overflow hotel was The Royal, with The Swan Hotel hosting a further seven fans. Parties were held in both The George and The Royal. The con was organised by the London Circle.

Here’s a brief excerpt from a contemporaneous conreport.

ARCHIE MERCER:

At a quarter to four on Good Friday I staggered from the train at Kettering station, adjusted my two slung haversacks, took a tighter grip on my gramophone(in the right hand) and a parcel consisting mainly of records for same (in the left), and set my face firmly towards the George Hotel. About fifty yards ahead of me, Walt Willis stalked his proud and lordly way. About as far again behind me, I could discern the chatter of several more humans – if they too were fen, and if so who, I still don’t know. Besides I can’t say that it’s all that important.

Arriving at the George in good order, I was immediately caught up in a furious burst of misapprehensions by Joyce, the receptionist, who was practically insisting that I must have a car and wanted to know the number of it. I explained patiently that the nearest thing was the train I’d so carelessly abandoned down at the station and I hadn’t a clue as to its number. So she decided to humour me and let me in without it. I signed the book under Peter Reaney, moved within — and the Con was on….

(4) EX MACHINA REWATCH MOVIE REVIEW. [Item by Erin Underwood.] 2023 was AI’s breakthrough year, and as we move into 2024, I wanted to take a look back at one of the best AI films to see how it held up over the last decade. Check out my new rewatch review of Alex Garland’s groundbreaking AI film Ex Machina. Does the story and the technology hold up? Is it still the instant classic everyone thought it was back in 2014? “Ex Machina Movie Review – A groundbreaking AI film in 2014. What’s it like now?”

(5) BOOK PRESERVATION. Via WIRED: “This Woman Deconstructs 100-Year-Old Books To Restore Them”.

Author, educator and book restorer Sophia Bogle has nerves of steel: one slip of the hand and a century-old first edition book could be ruined. Come inside her workshop as she breaks down the amazing deconstruction, revitalization, and reassembly that goes into her history preserving speciality.

(6) READY FOR MY CLOSEUP. Forbes shares a look “Inside The Ambitious Plan To Broadcast The Entire Total Solar Eclipse”.

It’s nature’s most spectacular sight, but during North America’s total solar eclipse on April 8, the sun’s corona will only be visible for a few precious minutes from any one location.

However, totality itself will be viewed for a combined total of 100 minutes from a 115-mile path of totality stretching from Mexico to the Canada, via the U.S. So why not have cameras stationed all along the track and broadcast the entire thing as one continuous livestream?

That’s the thinking behind the Dynamic Eclipse Broadcast Initiative, a nationwide citizen science team armed with a $314,000 NASA grant, hoping to pioneer a unique new way to broadcast a total solar eclipse.

It’s as much about solar science as it is about broadcasting, however, with a new understanding of the solar corona the ultimate prize.

DEB is the brainchild of the team behind the successful Citizen CATE experiment from the 2017 total solar eclipse, the last to cross the U.S, which saw more than 60 identical telescopes equipped with digital cameras positioned from Oregon to South Carolina to image the solar corona.

The resulting images were then spliced together to reveal the plasma dynamics of the inner solar corona, which is 10,000 times hotter and dimmer than our star’s surface—and can only be studied in full during a total solar eclipse….

(7) VFX OSCAR WINNER TIM MCGOVERN DIES. Visual effects artist Tim McGovern died March 30 at the age of 68. He won an Oscar for his work on the 1990 film Total Recall. Deadline’s profile covers his other accomplishments.

…The Visual Effects Society recently recognized McGovern with the 2023 Founders Award for his contributions to the art, science, or business of visual effects and meritorious service to the Society.

McGovern was a founding member of Sony Pictures ImageWorks and ran it as the Senior VFX Supervisor as well as the SVP of Creative and Technical Affairs. After leaving Sony, McGovern continued as an independent VFX artist and filmmaker.

McGovern’s most recent film credits include Shazam! Fury of the Gods (2023), Jungle Cruise (2021), Men in Black: International (2019), First Man (2019), Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018), Dunkirk (2017), The Huntsman: Winter’s War (2016), and Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation (2015), among many others….

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born March 31, 1960 — Ian McDonald, 64. What works by Ian McDonald have I enjoyed so much that I’ve read them over and over, and then when they were available as audioworks listened to them several more times? That’s easy. The Desolation Road series, Desolation Road and Ares Express which I’m holding to be the best story ever set on Mars.

A town that develops around an oasis on a terraformed Mars with a cast of characters that are truly fascinating? What’s not to really like? Not to mention the Ares Express running across the desert. Damn I wanted to see that train!

(I do have a list of other works set on Mars I like — Kage Baker’s The Empress of Mars, Larry Niven’s Rainbow Mars, Arthur Clarke’s The Sands of Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy and Frederik Pohl’s Man Plus.)

Completely shifting his tone was King of Morning, Queen of Day. Multiple generations of Irish women might have the potential to bring the fey who are obviously quite dangerous into their world. That isn’t the best aspect of the novel — it’s the characters herein. He’s very skilled in his character crafting.

The Chaga saga set in Africa (Chaga and Kirinya) with its slow moving alien biological invasion is perfectly horrific; I’ve not yet read the short fiction set in the series.

I read both of the future India series, River of Gods and Cyberabad. I throughly enjoyed River of Gods but found Cyberabad less than interesting.

I tried the first of Everness series. No, not my cup of tea. Really not.

Which was not true of The Dervish House, my last choice. An alternative history of Istanbul set now, well it was twenty years in the future when it was written, though the changes there suggest a history that deviated a lot earlier. Loved the characters. Loved the technology he created. Loved the story. Brilliant all around.

(9) CREDIT GRAB? CBR.com explains why “Marvel’s New Addition to Wolverine’s List of Creators Draws Controversy”.

Marvel’s decision to add a new name among Wolverine’s creators in the upcoming film Deadpool & Wolverine has sparked controversy among fans and comic creators alike.

It has been revealed that Roy Thomas, former editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics, will be credited as one of the four creators of Wolverine. The other creators of the character include the late writer Len Wein, artist Herb Trimpe, and designer John Romita Sr. The news sparked a Facebook post from writer Bobbie Chase, who worked at Marvel in the 1980s and 1990s, asking others to discuss the true creators of the character as well as the implications for editors-in-chief to claim creation over other characters.

Chase also mentioned speaking to Wein’s widow about the changes, saying, “Recently my friend and Len Wein’s widow, Christine Valada, got a call from Marvel executive David Bogart, informing her that in the upcoming Wolverine & Deadpool movie, Roy Thomas will now be credited as the co-creator [of Wolverine], and David said it’s a done deal. […] Of course Christine is seriously concerned about Len’s legacy. Len was profoundly important to the comic book industry, and that legacy is being changed for the worse, six years after his death.”

Chase’s frustrations about this change stemmed from the fact that the other creators of Wolverine have all died, making it hard to dispute the authenticity of Thomas’ addition to the list….

(10) CLOWNS AND QUESTION MARKS. 13th Dimension called on fans to “Dig These 13 Great ‘Serious BATMAN’ Moments in BATMAN ’66”. Here’s one example:

The Joker Is Wild. Batman and Robin are nearly unmasked by the Joker after being momentarily grabbed by the villain’s henchmen. The heroes are engaging the villain while he hijacks a live TV performance of the opera Pagliacci – that is why Joker is wearing a white Pierrot clown costume. I think that this image is very much in the dramatic style and spirit of the amazing Norm Saunders paintings used for the 1966 Topps Batman trading card set, inspired by the series.

(11) TAKING IT OUT FOR A SPIN. Gizmodo says “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Incredible Musical Episode Is Getting the Vinyl It Deserves”. It comes out June 7.

Of all the highs Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ sophomore season pulled off—intense action, Vulcan drama, familiar faces, and plenty more—perhaps one of the most delightful of all was “Subspace Rhapsody,” its earnestly cheesy all-singing, all-dancing musical showstopper. And if you’ve had the soundtrack streaming non-stop since last year, we’ve got great news for you.

io9 can exclusively reveal that Lakeshore Records is going to release the complete 11-track score for the episode on a black vinyl record, with artwork inspired by the poster released for the episode at San Diego Comic-Con last year forming the cover….

(12) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Matt Mitchell says this is how it would sound “If Dune was Southern”. Y’all pay attention now.

(P.S. I’m told one of the references is to Tony Chachere’s spice.)

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

Pixel Scroll 3/17/24 Raindrops Keep Scrollin’ On My Thread

Posted on March 17, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) THE SOUND OF IRISH MUSIC. C.J. Cherryh put her readers in a holiday mood at Facebook. Read the full post there.

It’s an important holiday for me not because of the mythical snakes, but because of the pipers, and the fact I so love traditional Gaelic music and dancing….

… My ancestry’s a mess of people who spent a lot of time fighting each other—England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, up one side and down. But I don’t celebrate the old wars. I celebrate that we survived all of it, and can remember the songs and the dancing.

(2) THE FLIP SIDE. [Item by James Bacon.] The Irish entry into the Eurovision by Bambie Thug, “Doomsday Blue” is utterly brilliant.

Here is Bambie Thug talking about themselves before being on The Late Late Show.

Spotify song link and Eurovision video link also.

(3) KELLY LINK Q&A. We learn how “Kelly Link Is Committed to the Fantastic” in an interview with The New Yorker. “The MacArthur-winning author on the worthwhile frivolity of the fantasy genre, how magic is and is not like a credit card, and why she hates to write but does it anyway.”

… Is there a connection between your religious upbringing and the fantasy you write now?

What religion and fantasy have in common is that the reader knows, going in, that they’ll be asked to imagine that the world might be different from the way it is now. They’ll be asked to imagine the possibility of a world that is radically transformed. I salute and love the fact that fantasy is, in some ways, a frivolous genre. You read a genre book not necessarily because you feel you’re going to learn something. Sometimes it’s because the structure of a particular genre produces patterns that are pleasurable to engage with.

I didn’t expect you to say that the fantasy genre was frivolous!

It’s a story I have to tell myself when I’m working. That I am engaged in a practice which, on some level, is frivolous. I am imagining changes to the world that produce a kind of delight, not necessarily trying to describe the world in the way that it is.

It’s not that the fantastic can’t be used as a tool to do serious and pointed work. Plenty of genre writers do exactly that. But I am committed to the idea that there is something, aside from utility, in the excess and play of imagination that fantasy allows as a genre. I couldn’t write if I felt that I had something which needed to be said…

(4) FANTASY WHACKS SF AT THE BOX OFFICE! Oh, the embarrassment. (Er, I mean, “Oh, how great!” for you fantasy fans.) “Box Office: ‘Kung Fu Panda 4’ & ‘Dune: Part Two’ Fight For No. 1”. Deadline is keeping score.

SUNDAY AM UPDATE: The whole marketplace is coming in lighter than expected at $89M, which is -3% off from the same frame a year ago when Shazam Fury of the Gods did $30M. That’s exactly what the second weekend is for Kung Fu Panda 4 which is a great hold at -48%, rising to $107.7M stateside running total. Legendary/Warner Bros’ Dune Part Two isn’t far behind with $29.1M, -37%, for a running total of $205.3M. The domestic endgame on the sequel is expected to be around $275M….

(5) GAME MAKERS FACING HARASSMENT. WIRED covers the attempt to run back an ugly piece of the culture wars in “The Small Company at the Center of ‘Gamergate 2.0’”.

The accusations began around the release of Spider-Man 2 last October. More came when Alan Wake II hit a week later. They were all over the replies to the social media accounts of Sweet Baby Inc.: hateful comments, many of which hinged on the idea that the Montreal-based narrative development and consulting company was responsible for the “wokeification” of video games, recalls Kim Belair, the company’s CEO.

In the months following, the noise only increased. “You made this character Black, or you added these gay characters, or you ruined the story,” Belair says of the comments, the tone of which, she adds, never changed. Neither have the demands of the people behind them. “It’s usually, ‘leave the industry,’” Belair says, or admit there’s truth to wild conspiracy theories about being involved with investment company BlackRock. (Sweet Baby is not.) Or, more succinctly: “Die.”

Online, those clamoring for Sweet Baby’s demise are calling it Gamergate 2.0, invoking the online harassment campaign that erupted into a culture war a decade ago. Gamergate formalized the playbook for online harassment used by hate groups and the far right; it inspired figures who would later tap into that outrage and rise all the way to positions of power, such as chief strategist in the White House. The two movements do share a handful of similarities: harassment campaigns flooded with falsehoods and accusations bordering on conspiracy; attacks aimed primarily at women and people of color; the idea that video game culture for cis white men is being stolen from them.

“People want to believe that our work is surgically removing the things that they would have liked. ‘Change this line, make this line less racist,’” she says. “That’s just not the reality of it.”…

(6) MAKE YOUR MOVE WITH THE RED KNIGHT. You still have two days to bid on “Vlad the Impaler’s Red Armor” from the movie Dracula (1992) in the “Treasures from Planet Hollywood” event at Heritage Auctions.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Columbia, 1992), Gary Oldman “Vlad the Impaler” Red Armor Display Figure. Original reproduction armor made from molded fiberglass components covering a ribbed, cotton body suit with separate arm extensions. Armor includes full head helmet and corresponding plate guards. Display figure features a foam body with wire armature mounted on a wooden support platform for easy display. It measures approx. 71″ x 28″ x 11″ (wood base to mask horns). The figure is dressed in the iconic red armor that Vlad/Dracula (Gary Oldman) wore at the beginning of the Francis Ford Coppola film. Exhibits display wear, chipping in fiberglass pieces, detached components, cracking, discoloration and general age. Special shipping arrangements will apply. Obtained from technical advisor Christopher Gilman. Comes with a COA from Heritage Auctions.

(7) TIKTOK IS FOCUS OF PROPOSED LAW. A Pew Research Center daily newsletter reports:

The House of Representatives passed a bill March 13 with bipartisan support that would require TikTok’s China-based parent company to either sell the app or risk a ban in the United States. The legislation now heads to the Senate, where its fate is unclear. [The full story is behind a New York Times paywall.]

While a majority of Americans said in May 2023 that TikTok is at least a minor threat to U.S. national security, support for a TikTok ban fell over the course of the year, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. In fall 2023, 38% of U.S. adults said they would support the U.S. government banning TikTok, down from 50% who said the same in March 2023.

Overall, a third of U.S. adults (33%) say they use the video-based platform, and the share who say they regularly get news from TikTok has risen sharply in recent years, from 3% in 2020 to 14% in 2023.

(8) SCENES FROM THE AUTHOR’S EXPERIENCE. Cora Buhlert’s compelling photo narrative about the WWII destruction of Dresden follows Gideon Marcus’ (unenthusiastic) review of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five – newly released this month (which at Galactic Journey is March 1969, 55 years ago): “[March 14, 1969 ] (March 1969 Galactoscope)”.

…. I have never seen Dresden before 1945, though my grandmother who grew up in the area told me it was a beautiful city and how much she missed attending performances at the striking Semper opera house, which was largely destroyed by the bombings and is in the process of being rebuilt (The proposed completion date is 1985). However, I have visited the modern Dresden with its constant construction activity and incongruous mix of burned out ruins, historical buildings in various stages of reconstruction and newly constructed modernist office and apartment blocks and could keenly feel what was lost….

(9) PHOTOS OF THE STOPA FAMILY. With an assist from Andrew Porter, I rounded up a few more photos of Jon and Joni Stopa, and their daughter Debbie. All now passed away. [Click for larger images.]

Jon Stopa. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born March 17, 1926 — Peter Graves. (Died 2010.) Now Peter Graves is truly interesting. Paramount + has the Mission: Impossible series, so I watched all of it from beginning to end even before Peter Graves was James “Jim” Phelps of the Impossible Missions Force (IMF) for seasons two to seven. He was superb in the role which, like the series, held up very well when I rewatched it.

He would reprise this character during the writers’ strike. Now the producers couldn’t hire new writers obviously, so they literally went into the vaults for previously written material. Yes, they used scripts that were rejected the first time. Was the new Mission Impossible any good? I think so.

They did new characters even though the idiots at Paramount wanted them the original characters recast, and some of original characters showed up here. (The strike ended while they were still filming so they have fresh scripts.)

He refused to reprise this role (which would be played by Jon Voight) in the first film of the Mission: Impossible film franchise, after reading the script and discovering the character would be revealed to be a traitor and the primary villain of the film.

He did do a lot of genre films — Red Planet Mars which appears to a rather decent piece of early Fifties SF, Killers from Space (also known as The Man Who Saved the Earth) with Big Eyed Monsters and aliens, It Conquered the World with a Venusian alien, The Eye Creatures (alternatively shown as Attack of the Eye Creatures with, oh guess), Scream of the Wolf, oh look no aliens, Where Have All the People Gone? in which you can guess what happens, Addams Family Values which he narrates, he appears as himself in House on Haunted Hill which he dies in, MIB II as well, and finally he’s in a film (uncredited) that I wish I hadn’t seen, Looney Tunes: Back in Action.

Now let’s see what other genre TV he did other than Mission: Impossible. There’s two one-offs, The Invaders and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.

(11) FIRE CLAIMS ACTOR’S LA MANSION. “Cara Delevingne’s Los Angeles home destroyed in fire” – AP News has the story. Delevingne has a deep genre resume, including roles in American Horror Story, Futurama, Carnival Row, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, Suicide Squad, and Pan.

The Los Angeles home of model and actor Cara Delevingne was destroyed in a fire Friday [March 15].

One firefighter was taken to a hospital in fair condition with unspecified injuries, and one unidentified person from the house suffered minor smoke inhalation, Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman Nicholas Prange said….

…The cause was under investigation.

The 31-year-old London-born Delevingne became widely known as a fashion model in the early 2010s and later began acting, appearing in the 2016 DC Comics film “Suicide Squad” and director Luc Besson’s 2017 “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.”

(12) SHOW ME THE MONEY. At Deadline, “Billy Dee Williams Says “Pay Me A Lot Of Money” To Return To ‘Star Wars’ As Lando & Shares Thoughts On Donald Glover Taking On Character”.

…Williams said he has met Glover and shared the advice he gave the actor about taking on the role.

“I had a nice little lunch with him. He’s a delightful young man. Extremely talented. But I don’t see him… I mean, when it comes to Lando Calrissian there’s only one Lando Calrissian. I created that character,” he said. “I told him to be charming – two words! That’s all I needed to tell him. That’s all I could think of.”

Last year, Glover shared details of his encounter with Williams recalling that he gave him the “secret” on how to play Lando by telling him to “just be charming.”

“He’s right, Lando is charm incarnate,” Glover said in an interview with GQ. “He’s kind of a maverick, which I don’t think there’s a lot of anymore. It’s hard to be a smooth talker nowadays ’cause, where’s the line? But I think that’s also where the danger is. It’s like, how close can you get without tripping over it?”…

(13) UP ON THE ROOFTOP. The Guardian has a little different take on vacuum and space: “Cosmic cleaners: the scientists scouring English cathedral roofs for space dust”.

On the roof of Canterbury Cathedral, two planetary scientists are searching for cosmic dust. While the red brick parapet hides the streets, buildings and trees far below, only wispy clouds block the deep blue sky that extends into outer space.

The roaring of a vacuum cleaner breaks the silence and researcher Dr Penny Wozniakiewicz, dressed in hazmat suit with a bulky vacuum backpack, carefully traces a gutter with the tube of the suction machine.

“We’re looking for tiny microscopic spheres,” explains her colleague, Dr Matthias van Ginneken from the University of Kent, also clad in protective gear. “Right now, we are collecting thousands and thousands of dust particles, and we hope there will be a minuscule number that came from space.”’

(14) HOW FIT IS OUR GALAXY? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] In this week’s Science journal asks, “How massive is the Milky Way?”

It looks like our galaxy is a tad slimmer than thought???

The total mass of an isolated galaxy can be determined from its rotation curve, a plot of orbital velocity against distance from the galaxy’s center. Determining the rotation curve is difficult for the Milky Way because we are located inside of it. Ou et al. used a machine learning method to improve distance determinations for stars on the red giant branch, then used the stars’ velocities to extend the Milky Way’s rotation curve to 30 kiloparsecs from the Galactic Center. By fitting a mass model to the rotation curve, the authors found a lower mass for the Milky Way than was found in previous studies because of differences in the inferred distribution of dark matter.

Science journal coverage here — scroll down a little

Primary research here.

(15) SEND EELS TO OTHER WORLDS. In this week’s Science we have a brief report of a new robot designed to explore gas giant moons that may have a sub-surface ocean harboring life… “Snaking around extreme icy worlds”.

There is growing interest in the exploration of icy moons such as Enceladus because of the potential for these worlds to have liquid water that could support Earth-like life. However, obtaining samples is challenging because of environmental extremities on the surface or within ice vents. Vaquero et al. developed a snake-like robot named Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor (EELS) that was capable of autonomously navigating on icy surfaces. EELS has a perception head that contains a series of sensors and cameras to observe its environment, and its body has articulated segments for shape changing and a screw-like outer surface to enable motility. EELS shows potential for risk-aware autonomous exploration of complex icy terrains.

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Cat Eldridge.] View the unsold 1959 pilot for a Nero Wolfe series with Kurt Kasznar as Nero Wolfe and William Shatner as Archie Goodwin. The theme was composed by Alex North. This 26-minute pilot is in the public domain.

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

Pixel Scroll 2/5/24 To Boldly Scroll Where No Fan Has Scrolled Before

Posted on February 5, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) MCCARTY Q&A. Chris Barkley’s audio interview with Dave McCarty was published here overnight: “Barkley — So Glad You (Didn’t) Ask #81”. The audio recording is at Soundcloud. A transcript is here.

(2) SPARE CHANGE? The New Zealand Mint has a line of The Lord Of The Rings™ Collectible coins.

Set in the mythical world of Middle-earth, The Lord of The Rings fantasy saga follows hobbit Frodo Baggins, Samwise Gamgee and a fellowship of characters as they embark on a quest to destroy the One Ring. Considered one of the greatest works of the 21st century, its popularity has spawned numerous adaptions.

Return to Middle-earth with our limited-edition THE LORD OF THE RINGS™ coins. Made from pure gold or silver, they feature characters and landscapes from the epic fantasy adventure films. Crafted in fine detail with themed packaging, they make the perfect memento for any fan!

Famed Middle-Earth locations feature in these gold coins.

And the silver series includes one with Gollum. Heads he wins, tails you lose!

(3) LEST GRIMDARKNESS FALL. [Item by Anne Marble.] Sebastian Milbank, in an article for the British magazine The Critic (called a “contrarian conservative magazine”) refers to “grimdark” as “Grimdull” — and seems to think they are both “liberal” and “leftist.” (Umm, those are not the same thing.) The article also flings darts at Michael Moorcock and Phillip Pullman. And it calls Breaking Bad grimdark?! Boy, does this article ever make a lot of assumptions about the writers (and readers) of grimdark! And it uses a lot of words in which to do so.

For those unblessed (or uncursed) with an interest in contemporary fantasy, the phrase “Grimdark” may suggest the name of some 2000s era Goth club. It’s a recent coinage for an ongoing craze in “gritty” and dark fantasy settings, epitomised and popularised by George RR Martin, becoming the default tone for a whole range of feted fantasy offerings from Joe Abercrombie’s First Law series featuring a dark, brooding protagonist who kills a lot of people — and occasionally feels bad about it — to Mark Lawrence’s Broken Empire Trilogy featuring a dark, brooding protagonist who kills a lot of people — and occasionally feels bad about it.

It’s a genre with a number of consistent features. It’s generally in a mediaeval fantasy setting, but shorn of any romance. Characters are overwhelmingly cynical, and those few who exhibit nobility are treated as foolish or naive. Generally a chaotic war is happening, or about to happen. Religion features, but largely as a tool of social control, often portrayed (usually with some real effort given the baseline awfulness) as even more cruel and cynical than the secular world around it. Dark observations about human nature substitute for any moral drama, with characters seeking to outwit, manipulate or overpower one another in a kind of Darwinian struggle for dominance.

It’s a script born of vaguely liberal, vaguely radical, vaguely anarchic sentiments common to most contemporary creative “industries”. But fantasy, with its over escapism and heroic aristocratic setting, presents something of a problem. This is the inner tension of left wing fantasy — how can a genre defined by apparent escapism not end up serving reactionary ends?…

Grimdark author Joe Abercrombie has a very concise takedown:

For the definitive iteration you've got to go back to Leo Grin's 2011 Breitbart barnstormer, mind you. https://t.co/5zJ5MYMGvI
— Joe Abercrombie (@LordGrimdark) February 4, 2024

(4) ALERT FOR CONVENTION EMAIL RUNNERS. Andrew Trembley shared this alert on Facebook.

For y’all running conventions and running convention email, if you haven’t set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC, you need to do it yesterday. If you’re reading this on Monday, February 5, literally yesterday, because today is the day Google and Yahoo started refusing mail from many email services that have failed to implement SPF, DKIM and DMARC.

(ETA long version, did not include in the share)

I’m seeing people saying “Google is starting to block more non-Gmail senders.” Now they’re right from the perspective they’re looking at this from, but they’re not seeing the whole picture.

It’s not non-Gmail senders. It’s also not just Gmail.

So what is happening? Bear with me, this is long…

(5) MARY SOON LEE Q&A. Space Cowboy Books hosts an “Online Reading and Interview with Mary Soon Lee” on Tuesday, February 6 at 6:00 p.m. Pacific. Register for free HERE.

How-to astronomy poetry to answer vexing questions such as How to Surprise Saturn, How to Blush Like Betelgeuse, and How to Survive a Black Hole.

“Unraveling meaning from partial glimpses of the universe has preoccupied astronomers for thousands of years. Mary Soon Lee’s remarkable collection of poetry traces this journey, capturing the wonder of the celestial bodies that comprise our universe, the elegance of the rules that guide its evolution and the humanity of those who search to better our understanding.” -Andy Connolly, Professor of Astronomy, University of Washington

Mary Soon Lee is a Grand Master of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association, and has won the Rhysling Award, the Elgin Award, and the AnLab Readers’ Award. Her work has appeared in Science, American Scholar, Spillway, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and Strange Horizons. This is her second collection of science poetry, following on from Elemental Haiku: Poems to honor the periodic table three lines at a time. Born and raised in London, she now lives in Pittsburgh.

(6) FAN FALLOUT. The Seattle 2025 Worldcon committee answered a query on Facebook by saying that neither Dave McCarty nor anyone else from the Chengdu Worldcon team will be involved with their Hugo Awards.

(7) SALAM AWARD OPEN FOR SUBMISSIONS. The Salam Award, which promotes imaginative fiction in and about Pakistan, reminds Pakistani writers they have until midnight July 31 to submit entries for the award. See full guidelines at this link. Participants must either be currently residing in Pakistan, or be of Pakistani birth/descent.

(8) DANISH COMPLETIST. “Modstand og håb” at Superkultur is written in Danish, however, Lise Andreasen has provided an English translation in the first comment.

Niels Dalgaard is a patient man – not only in his persistent attempt to collect all the science fiction that has been published in odd corners of the Danish publishing world, but more specifically in this case in his project: to read through the approximately 250 novels that has been published in Danish, which can be placed in the category “youth dystopias”….

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born February 5, 1941 — Stephen J. Cannell. I have come this Scroll to talk of not cabbages and kings but a man who as a mystery writer showed up regularly playing poker as himself in the Castle series with Nathan Fillion as Richard Castle — Stephen J. Cannell. James Patterson, Michael Connelly, and Dennis Lehane were the other such writers here. I’ll talk about his work as a novelist later.

Nathan Fillion as mystery writer Richard Castle, playing poker with real-life authors Michael Connelly, James Patterson and Stephen J Cannell.

The Zorro rip-off, scripted in its one season by him, The Night Rider, described by IMDB this way, “A refined New Orleans gentleman becomes a masked crimefighter by night, both to uphold law and order and to find the men who murdered his family in order to get their silver mine” is genre the same The Shadow or Doc Savage is in that it’s pulp.

Between that series and what I’m about to note next, scripting shows, the good, the bad and the truly awful made him very wealthy. So he got to produce a series that he said was one he’d to do a very long time ago — The Greatest American Hero. You know the story of it so I want go into deep detail here, but suffice it to say that he was very happy with its success.

Veering way out of genre, I’m going to note he created Baa Baa Black Sheep (which was renamed Black Sheep Squadron for the second season for reasons unknown by the Powers That Be), a series I really liked.

I’ll note next 21 Jump Street which he created with Patrick Hasburgh which was about the cases of an undercover police unit composed of really great looking young officers specializing in youth crime. Definitely not genre, so why mention it? Because that featured Johnny Depp who would later do so many genre performances. And yes, he’d done one before this series as Greg Lantz in A Nightmare on Elm Street.

He loved making low budget horror films such as The Demon Hunter, The Fairy and Left in Darkness. All shot on all cheap budgets (and this is after he became very wealthy), shot on locations you wouldn’t go without security in armor and shot fast enough you’d suspect use of interesting drugs to keep everyone alert, there’s more than makes sense of these in his IMDB listings. Stephen, you devil. Possibly literally.

Now about that poker game on Castle. All four of those players are there because they are mystery writers. Cannell wrote a series of novels about Shane Scully who was a detective in the LAPD force. I don’t know if they actually played poker in those scenes but I suspect they did.

(10) SATISFIED FAN. Cora Buhlert heaps praise on a He-Man adaptation: “The Revolution Will Be Televised: Some Thoughts on Masters of the Universe Revolution”.

…So I watched Revelation and it turned out to be not just some nostalgic fun, but so much more. Here was the He-Man story I always wanted to see, a series which took the characters seriously in all their beautiful absurdity and found new depths in them and even managed to make me cry (something western animation in general very rarely does – crying is for anime), while also harkening back to the early 20th SFF which had inspired Masters of the Universe in the first place. Plus, the animation was gorgeous and finally looked as good as the Filmation cartoon looked in my memory, but never in reality, and the voice cast was stellar….

(11) GROUNDHOG DAY CAST REUNION. “Bill Murray celebrates ‘Harold Ramis Day’ Groundhog Day” at CBS Chicago.

This Groundhog Day, Woodstock Willie did not see his shadow — and thus said we should expect an early spring this year.

But at a ceremony in Chicago on Friday, a groundhog named Chicago Harry did not agree.

But first off, why is there a groundhog prognosticating on the trajectory of winter in Woodstock, Illinois? The answer, of course, is that in the 1993 film “Groundhog Day,” Woodstock stood in for Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania — home of Groundhog Day celebrations since the 1880s.

Ever since the movie came out 31 years ago, Woodstock Willie has been up there with Punxsutawney Phil in the real Punxsutawney among large-rodent long-range winter forecasters.

Members of the cast of the iconic film reunited for the first time at Navy Pier Friday, marking 31 years since the film was released. But Friday was also about honoring Harold Ramis and commemorating 10 years since his death….

…”I think it’s great that we’re here and, I don’t want to be too Irish, but it’s very nice of Harold to make it a very nice, mild day for today,” Murray said. “He’s up there stirring the clouds around, making that low pressure move out to Indiana and just drenching, ruining those people’s lives over there in Indiana.”

Ramis’ wife, Erica, was in attendance, beaming with pride as many spoke wonders about her husband. She even read a letter from former President Barack Obama encouraging people to enjoy the day as Ramis would.

The ceremony included re-enactments of Punxsutawney festival emcee Buster Green (Brian Doyle-Murray) knocking at the tree stump with his cane, where a groundhog named Chicago Harry made his prediction.

Ken Hudson Campbell (“man in hallway”), Robin Duke (Doris the waitress), Marita Geraghty (Nancy Taylor), Richard Henzel (the DJ), Don Rio McNichols (drum player), David Pasquesi (the psychiatrist), and Peggy Roeder (the piano teacher) were also in attendance.

And unlike Woodstock Willie, and Punxsutawney Phil, Chicago Harry saw his shadow — and predicted six more weeks of winter after all.

(12) GOING ROGUE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Just learned that the 2000AD strip Rogue Trooper film is at last moving forward. Director Duncan (Moon, Source Code) Jones teased about this back in 2018 and it now looks like a cast is being pulled together. “Duncan Jones’ Rogue Trooper Movie Cast Announced, Including Hayley Atwell, Sean Bean, and Matt Berry” at IGN.

The cast for Rogue Trooper, the upcoming movie from Moon and Warcraft director Duncan Jones, has been announced. The animated adaptation of the classic 2000 AD comic will be headlined by Aneurin Barnard, Hayley Atwell, and Jack Lowden, and will also feature a number of other well-known British stars such as Sean Bean.

Aneurin Barnard, who previously starred in The Goldfinch and Dunkirk, plays the titular Rogue Trooper, a blue-skinned, genetically-engineered soldier fighting on the toxic battlefields of a seemingly never-ending war. The sole survivor of a massacre that killed his squadmates, he’s on the hunt for the traitor that arranged their deaths. He does this with the aid of three of his killed-in-action squadmates, whose digital personalities still remain conscious after death and are uploaded into Rogue’s gun, helmet, and backpack….

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Science Futurism with Isaac Arthur this week took a look at Death Worlds. These are planets on which, once you land, they set out to kill you. Unlike most of Isaac Arthur’s episodes (other than his monthly ‘Sci-Fi Sundays’) which have a (highly speculative) science take, this one has as much a science fictional approach, starting as it does with the legendary Harry Harrison’s DeathWorld series of the 1960s. Along the way, he gives us a number of SFnal examples… So, pour a mug of builders and sit back for a half-hour episode (it won’t kill you)…

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

Pixel Scroll 1/15/24 The Hypoteneuse of the Squares Of The City Is Equal To The Fifths Of The Other Two Scrolls

Posted on January 15, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) BRINGING UP THE REAR. Cora Buhlert’s latest Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre story is “In Exile”.

… “And then I said, ‘With all due respect, Your Majesty – not that I think you’re due any – you can kiss my…”

“Malcolm, please tell me you didn’t tell the King to kiss your arse?”

“Oh, I was very polite. I said butt.”

“Sigh. Malcolm, you’re unbelievable.”…

Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre: “In Exile” https://t.co/xnth4KCcKP #MastersOfTheUniverse #MotU
— Cora Buhlert (@CoraBuhlert) January 15, 2024

(2) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES. Space Cowboy Books presents episode 71 of the Simultaneous Times podcast. Stories featured in this episode:

“Cynscout” by KC Grifant with music by Phog Masheeen

“The Almost-Activation of Ruby Valentine’s Catastrophe Machine” by Jenna Hanchey with music by Fall Precauxions

(3) A NEIGHBORHOOD OF DOCTORS. [Item by Steven French.] An interview with the 12th Doctor: “’The government has been too terrible to make fun of’: Peter Capaldi on satire, politics and privilege” in the Guardian.

…Capaldi became famous as the permanently angry spin doctor Malcolm Tucker in the BBC comedy The Thick of It, which ran from 2005 to 2012 and, after that, between 2013 and 2017, he played the sternest, least imp-ish Doctor Who in decades. In his new Apple TV show, a police procedural called Criminal Record, which Capaldi co-produced with his wife, Elaine Collins, he stars as an ageing detective: another scowler. Now, coffee in hand, he smiles affectionately. So, did he bump into any other Doctor Whos this morning? “David [Tennant, 10th Doctor] used to live in Crouch End, near me. Matt [Smith, 11th Doctor] lives around here. Jodie [Whittaker, 13th Doctor] is nearby, Christopher [Eccleston, 9th Doctor] too, I think.” But no, no encounters with his fellow alumni this morning, Capaldi says….

(4) CHENGDU WORLDCON ROUNDUP. [By Ersatz Culture.] A few recent-ish Chengdu-related items ahead of the release of the Hugo nomination statistics. NB: with a couple of exceptions, all of the links below are to Chinese language pages.

Chengdu con reports posted by Zero Gravity

A couple of days ago, RiverFlow posted updates to Twitter about the next issues of the Hugo winning fanzine, Zero Gravity.

https://twitter.com/heliu79457845/status/1745951117052453156

The total number of words exceeded 420,000, with 300 pictures or more. After finishing the typesetting of the first two issues (140,000 words each), I realized that there were still 42 articles that had not been typesetted.
— RiverFlow (@heliu79457845) January 12, 2024

fans write about each other, refer to each other, and also write about writers and salons, and this symmetrical perspective is interesting. I am sure that more than 50% of the important people and things of this conference have been recorded!
— RiverFlow (@heliu79457845) January 12, 2024

Several of the reports which (presumably) will appear in the upcoming issues have already been posted online. Whilst I don’t think there are any previously-unheard revelations, they do provide further insight into the varying experiences that domestic attendees had. In the order that they’ve been published online:

Chao Xia (children’s author, pen name that translates as “Superhero”). NB: this report suffers from some exceptionally bad machine (mis)translation on Chrome’s built-in translation functionality.
Shen Yusi (fan). This report was previously covered in the December 14th Scroll.
He Minghan (children’s author)
Sun Saibo (fan)
Mo Xiong (author, pen name translates as “Ink Bear”)
Dongfang Mu (author/editor, pen name translates as “Eastwood”)
Hong Peng (fan)
Xiao Xinghan (author and fan)
Kuntu (fan, president of a university SF society). Participated online
Bu Cunzai de Zui You Jie (student, pen name translates as “Non-existent Optimal Solution”)
Tian Tian (translator, fan)
Hualong (translator)

The last item isn’t really a con report as such; it’s more of an article about Brian Aldiss’ relationship with China. It has an interesting tidbit that in 1979 Aldiss was part of a British delegation that had an audience with future-leader Deng Xiaoping. This meeting was apparently captured on video, and the author ponders whether the recording might still be lurking in a vault somewhere.

The author on left with Ling Shizhen, co-editor of Zero Gravity in the middle.

WSJ China features science fiction in their review of the year

In December, the Chinese edition of The Wall Street Journal published the first of a series of articles about notable events in 2023, entitled “Recording the ‘Year of Science Fiction’: Is this year really a new starting point for Chinese science fiction?” It opens (via Google Translate, with minor manual edits):

In years to come, when people look back on 2023, they will surely notice the weight of science fiction in it.

Since the beginning of the year, there has been the popularity of the movie “The Wandering Earth 2” and the [Chinese, not Netflix] TV adaptation of “The Three-Body Problem”. “Journey to the West” with only a 2 million yuan [around $300k USD] budget unexpectedly earned over 60 million yuan [around $8.4m USD] at the box office. Phenomenal movies, topics such as the universe, the metaverse, and artificial intelligence continue to gain popularity. Science fiction themes in literary creation are experiencing a “big explosion” in China. People are increasingly talking about the impact of the Internet on everyday life. Consider the changes that the rapid development of science and technology has had on people…

This year, following Liu Cixin and Hao Jingfang respectively winning the Hugo Awards for Best Novel in 2015, and Best Novelette in 2016, there was once again a Chinese winner, Hai Ya, who won this year’s Hugo Award for Best Novelette. Winning [a Hugo] is highest honor for international science fiction writing.

People can’t help but wonder, did the golden age of European and American science fiction end in the last century? Has the secret to its resurrection been found in China today?

The core focus of the piece is the Chengdu Worldcon, and there’s a fair bit about the Chinese Hugo winners – although Enzhe Zhao is seemingly ignored – but the absence of any details or photos from the event makes me think that the author of the article was not in attendance. There’s also a fair amount about the wider Chinese SF publishing industry.

New Year’s Day run in the vicinity of the con venue

January 1st saw a “welcome run” take place in the grounds of the SF Museum that was the venue for the Worldcon, as reported on Weibo by the Sports Chengdu account. To the best of my knowledge, there have been no activities in the actual museum itself since the con – other than the Lukyanenko visit covered in a couple of earlier Scrolls – and no future events have been announced, other than the Chinese Nebula/Xingyun conference, previously covered in the December 12th Scroll.

(5) HOWARD WALDROP (1946-2024). Writer Howard Waldrop, creator of many brilliant short sff stories, died of a stroke on January 14 at the age of 77. Howard Waldrop’s classic “The Ugly Chickens” (1980) won a Nebula and World Fantasy Award. Waldrop was also recognized with a World Fantasy lifetime achievement award.

He was a wildly popular program participant at cons. His presentation “Howard Waldrop’s Condensed Cream of 1950s Science Fiction Movies” involved acting out key scenes from a lot of the movies. For 3-D movies, he hid under the table and threw wadded-up paper at the audience. He also was an unsurpassed live reader of his own stories.

Lawrence Person’s Waldrop obituary is especially recommended. However, there is no better introduction to Howard than the one he wrote himself for the now-shuttered SFF Net.

Are they science fiction? Are they fantasy? Are they alternate history? Are they from Mars or from Venus?

In the 1970s and 1980s, Howard Waldrop’s disorientingly strange/familiar stories made him a famous unknown writer.

They racked up best-of-the-year inclusions and award nominations, sometimes several stories a year in different categories. “Custer’s Last Jump” and “Mary Margaret Roadgrader” were nominated for the Nebula in 1977. In 1980, “The Ugly Chickens” captured both the Nebula and the World Fantasy Award, and narrowly evaded the Hugo. In 1983, “Ike at the Mike” was up for the Hugo. In 1986, two Waldrop stories, “Flying Saucer Rock and Roll” and “Heirs of the Perisphere,” were nominated for the same Nebula award, placing hardcore Waldrop fans in a schizophrenia-inducing double-bind.

Amid such celebrity, Waldrop himself continued to live below poverty level, volunteering for a top-secret study that helped determine the nutritional limits of using integrity as hamburger helper. As part of this historic experiment, he once pulled a story that had already sold to a big-bucks market in order to place it elsewhere for half the price.

Occasionally stories slipped through to higher-paying markets — Playboy, Omni, and the like. Howard compensated for these lapses of vigilance by selling his books only to very-high-quality small presses or to publishers who could be counted on not to distribute them.

Award nominations kept racking up: 1987, “The Lions are Asleep This Night,” for the Nebula. 1988, “Night of the Cooters” for the Hugo. 1989, “Do Ya, Do Ya Wanna Dance” for the Nebula, and 1990, “A Dozen Tough Jobs,” for the same.

And now, SFF.NET, bless its heart, has brought Howard Waldrop to the World Wide Web. So thanks to the wonders of cyberspace, to Howard’s uniquely contrarian marketing savvy, and to his inability to keep his stories off the awards short-lists, Howard Waldrop is now a legendary unknown writer.

Nor should it be forgotten that Waldrop wrote what became the Wild Cards universe’s origin story, “Thirty Minutes Over Broadway” (which I think of as “Jetboy’s Last Adventure”). Bradley Denton got Howard to tell how that happened in “Fifty Minutes Over Manchaca (now Menchaca) Road!”

…HW: You’ll recall in “The Annotated Jetboy,” where I talk about Danny Deck writing the biography of Jetboy? Danny Deck is the hero of Larry McMurtry’s novel All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers. And of course he writes Godot Is My Co-Pilot: A Life of Jetboy.

…Anyway, I was gonna do the Jetboy story about the A-bomb for Jessica Amanda Salmonson, and either Lew or Bud (sf authors Lewis Shiner and Walton “Bud” Simons, both Austin-based at the time, like Howard), I can’t remember which, said, “You should talk to George. George and that bunch in New Mexico have been playing a superhero role-playing game, and they’ve spent so much time and money on it that they’re trying to find a way to turn it into a book. You oughta tell him about this Jetboy thing, because it sounds like something that would fit in there.” If it was Lew I was talkin’ to, he told me to call Bud, and if it was Bud I was talkin’ to, he told me to call Lew. One or the other of ‘em knew more about it than the other one did, right?

See, I didn’t even know about this. George hadn’t mentioned it to me in a letter or anything. So I wrote to George, and I said, “I’ve got a story that might fit with whatever goddamn thing you’re doing. You should tell me about it.”

So he sent me the prototype Cut and Shuffle, which was all about what was going on in the Wild Cards world before anyone else even knew what it was. And I said, “Yeah, that sounds about right, I can work with that. But your timeline is all wrong.” See, they were gonna start it in the 1980s, with the world having gone on for thirty years.

BD: Oh, so they weren’t initially going to do an origin story? They were going to jump into the world of Wild Cards three decades on?

HW: Right, exactly. I said, “That’s all wrong! You gotta tell how all this came about!” So I got them to tell me all the stuff about Dr. Tachyon, and the virus, and the whole thing, y’know. And I stuck it sideways into the Jetboy/A-bomb story, and sent it to George.

And of course George says, “When we send you stuff, you should read it! You got all this stuff wrong!” I said, “Ah, that’s your job! You can fix that!”

And he did!

(6) TOM PURDOM (1936-2024). Tom Purdom died January 14. He was 85.

His first published short story, “Grieve for a Man”, appeared in the August, 1957 Fantastic Universe. His first novel was I Want the Stars (1964). His other novels include Five Against Arlane, and The Barons of Behavior. His literary memoir, When I Was Writing, appeared in installments in The New York Review of Science Fiction.

From 1990 to 2023 he had almost three dozen short stories published in Asimov’s.

He served as a Vice President of SFWA in its early years.

His wife, Sara, predeceased him in 2006. He is survived by his son, Christopher.

Filer Mark Roth-Whitworth knew him, and shared these memories on Facebook:

I’ve known the Purdoms since the late Sixties. He was a constant in Philly fandom. In the late seventies, he and his late wife Sara had house parties, as did Winona and her ex, Tom Smith and Viv, and later, when my ex (Morgan’s mother) and I bought a house in the area, we all rotated – was it every Friday but second (the PSFS meeting) having an open house. Michael Swanwick would show sometimes, and then there was the late David Sherman. Not sure when, but Tom built a small harpsichord from a kit.

And he was always there, his loud baritone… and now he’s gone.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born January 15, 1974 — Shaun Tan, 50. Australian-born and resident Shaun Tan’s one of my favorite artist and writers. Not just for his work which is extraordinarily wonderful, but for being a really nice individual. Tan was an easy choice for the Birthday for this Scroll.

His fiction is all YA. It’s all illustrations with words. Or not, sometimes. Think school libraries as where you’ll find it in Australia. Children love him. School librarians adore him just as much.

So now some selected works by him that I’ve enjoyed.

The Haunted Playground also known as The Playground would do Stephen King proud if King wrote children’s literature (I don’t think he’s written any, has he?) with one male encountering a larger group of males on a playground that are not what they seem to be. Truly chilling.

The Arrival has a man coming from a city that might or might not be in Eastern Europe to what might or might not be New York City. The city is awesomely depicted as steampunk. Did I mention that it has no spoken narrative?

The Lost Thing is set in the near future, a dystopian Melbourne. It’s is a story about Shaun, a kid who doesn’t quite fit in anywhere. And he found something that doesn’t fit in either. (SPOILER ALERT. GO AWAY FOR A AWHILE.) There’s a secret utopia out there. Really there. (YOU CAN COME BACK BACK NOW.)

It was adapted into a fifteen-minute animated short film which was directed him and Andrew Ruhemann and narrated by Tim Minchin. It won the Oscar for Best Animated Short.

One he didn’t do himself as creator is The Stray Cat, a tale of the supernatural horror by writer Steve Paulsen with rather macabre illustrations by him. The cat, a black cat of course, is scarily drawn.

Librarians have constantly praised Tan for understanding children and being willing to give generously of his time to meet with them.

Those illustrated works are an excellent representation of his works. Now let’s talk about his Awards. Usually I mention Hugos first but I want to note the Awards that the folks who in children’s books gave him.

No, I forgot an Award, what was it! Ahhhh that one. He won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award from the Swedish Arts Council, considered by everyone in children’s literature to be the major Award in the field.

In our community, he got the Hugo for Best Professional Artist at Aussiecon 4 (nice to win at home, isn’t it?), again at Renovation, nominated for two more at Anticipation and Denvention 3.

There were three World Fantasy Awards first Best Artist and another nomination. I can’t count the number of Ditmar Awards and nominations that he received. Seriously it’s that many.

Shaun Tan accepts Astrid Lindgren Award.

(8) IT IS THE END, MY FRIEND. “Peregrine moon lander and its cargo will likely burn up in Earth’s atmosphere” reports Engadget.

It looks like the Peregrine lunar lander’s final resting place will be back at home where it started. The doomed spacecraft, which experienced an anomaly shortly after launch and has been leaking propellant ever since, is expected to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, Astrobotic wrote in an update on X this weekend. The company plans to host a press conference with NASA on Thursday January 18 at 12PM ET to discuss the lander’s fate.

And when that happens, all the SFnal cremains aboard will burn up on re-entry. LiveScience lists the notables whose DNA is aboard: “Peregrine moon lander carrying human remains doomed after ‘critical loss’ of propellant”.

Controversially, the spacecraft is also carrying human remains, including those of science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke; Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry; Roddenberry’s wife, Majel Barrett; and Nichelle Nichols, James Doohan and DeForest Kelley, who played Nyota Uhura, Montgomery Scott and Dr. Leonard McCoy, respectively, on the classic sci-fi show. Stored alongside these remains are samples of DNA of the U.S. presidents George Washington, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan.

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

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