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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do we do with the Oompa-Loompas?

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

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

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

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

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

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

This document includes:

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

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(8) COMICS SECTION.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pixel Scroll 11/25/23 The Pixelman’s Scroll is Half-Constructed

(1) OVERCOMING REJECTION. Her rejection slips are a key part of the display: “Malorie Blackman’s career honoured in British Library exhibition” in the Guardian.

“To my great embarrassment, I’ve just discovered that I have been holding onto your novel, HACKER, since February 1990”, read a letter to Noughts & Crosses author Malorie Blackman from the senior commissioning editor of Simon & Schuster, dated nearly two years later. “I’m afraid we are not publishing any teenage novels in the near future”. The printed letter, addressed to “Marlorie”, with the extra “r” struck through in pen, was one of 82 rejection letters the writer received before her first book was published.

Hole-punched and stored in a ring binder, the letter is now on display at a British Library exhibition about Blackman, who has gone on to write more than 70 books for children and young adults, including the million-selling Noughts & Crosses series. The rejections folder is one of the artefacts that the author is most excited for the public to see, she says. “I hope that does encourage people.”…

…The exhibition traces Blackman’s young adulthood: the Lewisham homeless shelter she lived in aged 13 is pictured; the comics she turned to as a “shield against the real world” are displayed. In the local library, which she says “saved my life”, she would read novels, including classic fiction – the likes of Jane Eyre. Later, at 22, she came across Walker’s The Color Purple – the first novel she had read that was written by a Black author and featured Black protagonists. “It had a profound effect on me,” says Blackman. “She was a Black woman author. They existed!”…

(2) MEDICAL UPDATE. Jane Yolen suffered a fall the other day and required surgery. Her daughter Heidi has been posting updates on Facebook and says the surgery went great.

(3) REVENGE IS A DISH BEST SERVED BY PROCESS SERVERS. “‘Squid Game: The Challenge’ Contestants Threaten Lawsuit After Claiming They Suffered Hypothermia & Nerve Damage During Filming” reports Deadline.

Squid Game: The Challenge contestants are threatening legal action against Netflix and producers after claiming they were injured during the filming of the game show.

A British personal injuries law firm is representing two unnamed players who say they suffered hypothermia and nerve damage while shooting in cold conditions in the UK.

Express Solicitors said in a press statement that it had sent letters of claim to Studio Lambert, the co-producer of Netflix’s Squid Game: The Challenge.

The contestants’ allegations concern their experience shooting the show’s opening game ‘Red Light, Green Light,’ in which players must evade the attention of a menacing robotic doll.

The game was filmed at Cardington Studios, a former Royal Air Force base in Bedford, during a cold snap in Britain. Netflix confirmed at the time that three of 456 players required medical attention.

Express Solicitors, which specializes in no win no fee claims, said its clients risked their health by having to stay motionless for long periods during the shoot as they attempted to stay in the competition….

(4) AUTHORS’ RIGHTS IN THE AGE OF AI. [Item by Francis Hamit.] The Authors Licensing and Collecting Society is the UK outfit that manages the Public Lending Right. I’ve been a member for several years and get regular payments for my photocopying royalties, something that does not exist in the U.S. 

The ALCS’ two-page white paper “Authors and AI principles” is the most sensible thing I’ve seen yet about AI and Authors’ rights. 

First on the list of principles:

1. Human authors should be compensated for their work and have transparent information of uses of their work – new technologies and types of uses should respect the established precedent that there must be fair payment for use and transparency regarding how works have been used.  

There should be no use without payment. While many systems of remuneration reflect the ways in which we consume media at the time, the principles of copyright remain: that authors should share in the enjoyment of their work, especially financially. Licensing continues to be an effective way to adapt to, support and remunerate a wide range of uses of original works. As authors works are often used in ways to develop AI technology, authors must also have transparent information regarding when and how their work has been used….

(5) DIY DALEK. Dr. Glyn Morgan pays tribute to fans in a post to the UK Science Museum blog — “Building for the Fans: Daleks and Doctor Who”.

…Fans are the lifeblood of any creative endeavour, but this is particularly powerful point for science fiction: were it not for the continued enthusiasm from fans then Doctor Who might have died never to be regenerated after initially leaving the air in 1989, or after the underperforming TV-movie in 1996 (starring the criminally underrated Paul McGann)….

…Along with the Doctor’s equally iconic TARDIS, the Dalek is a firm favourite construction project for fans and has been since they first appeared, inspiring people’s creativity and technical innovation at home. Indeed, building your own Dalek became such a recognised rite of passage for fans that the BBC issued official instructions on how to build your own as part of a Radio Times special issue celebrating the tenth anniversary of Doctor Who in 1973. The article suggested that the project would be particularly good ‘as an exercise for a well-equipped school, using the resources and facilities of several departments- woodwork, metalwork, art and so on.’ The practicality of the design was tested by students of London’s Highbury Grove School (now City of London Academy Highbury Grove): ‘With help from their staff, they produced [a] magnificent black-and-orange specimen in two weeks, at a cost of £12’, which is a considerable saving on the approximately £250 the 1963 originals cost: although the Radio Times models were designed to be static, not operational TV props. Either way, I suspect it would cost a little more now…. 

(6) HOW HAS THE LAST WHO ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL AGED? Very well decrees Gizmodo’s James Whitbrook in “10 Years Later, Doctor Who’s ‘Day of the Doctor’ Still Hits”.

For a show that is about the capability to be everywhere and anywhere, any period in time, Doctor Who is a show that is arguably burdened with context. Now 60 years old today, the thought of navigating any of its stories without an awareness of its place in that history is almost unthinkable. But every once in a while, in a very long while, Doctor Who wields that context to set itself free.

That’s the paradox—as well as the philosophy of John Rawls—that sits at the heart of “The Day of the Doctor,” Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary special that climaxed a blockbuster period of celebrations for the series 10 years ago tonight. It is, of course, almost impossible to think of “Day” outside of this context—metatextually, we now know so much of what almost happened during its production and ideation that it’s almost a miracle to revisit the final product and not deem it miraculous for simply existing. 

…And it is about the weight of context. The tragic heart of “Day of the Doctor” is John Hurt’s aforementioned “War” Doctor: the regeneration that took part in the Time War, an incarnation left to banished memories out of the shame of what he had to do to end the conflict between the Time Lords and the Daleks once and for all, one petrified to even call himself a Doctor for the hurt he wielded to do so. Following him on the eve of the final days of the conflict as he steals a weapon of mass destruction from his own people—the Moment, a weapon so powerful, so horrifying, it developed its own conscience to almost stop itself from being—the War Doctor’s arc is one about wrestling with the weight of his own personal history, a push and pull that haunts him, and is compacted when he comes face to face with his future: two further incarnations of himself that yes, still feel the pain of the Time War, a pain muted in some ways, but still, a future for himself that exists beyond the horrifying task he has burdened himself with…

(7) TODAY’S THING TO WORRY ABOUT. “Robot Takes Order at Wendy’s. It Catches an ‘Attitude’” claims the Daily Dot.

Wendy’s has started rolling out its new AI chatbot system that is supposed to be handling customer orders at the drive thru. However, according to one TikTok video, what was intended to be a seamless transition turned into a comical and frustrating experience.

The video, which was posted by Macey (@maceitrain) this week, kicks off with Macey already mid-order, requesting a Coke. The Wendy’s robot promptly responds with a simple, “Anything else?”

The TikToker then proceeds to modify her order. “Can I make the junior bacon cheeseburger Biggie bag a medium, please?” she says.

After each update to the order, the robot mechanically repeats, “Anything else?”

…The video has since accumulated over 944,200 views with over 550 comments. Some commenters were not overly impressed by the speed of the new ordering system.

“I feel like that took longer than having a human take the order,” one commenter said….

(8) MARTY KROFFT (1937-2023). Marty Krofft, who partnered with his older brother Sid to build a kids’ TV empire around shows like The Banana Splits Adventure HourH.R. Pufnstuf and Land of the Lost, died November 25. The Hollywood Reporter profile is here.

The Kroffts followed Pufnstuf with The Bugaloos (1970-72), the Claymation series Lidsville (1971-73), Sigmund and the Sea Monsters (1973-75) and Land of the Lost (1974-76)…

Indeed, the Kroffts’ style was so popular that McDonald’s copied it to create Mayor McCheese and McDonaldland for an early ’70s advertising campaign. The Kroffts sued, winning a reported seven-figure settlement in 1977….

…Marty joined his brother full-time in 1958 after Sid’s assistant left, and they opened Les Poupees de Paris, an adults-only burlesque puppet show that played to sold-out crowds at a dinner theater in the San Fernando Valley….

Les Poupees went on the road and played world’s fairs in Seattle in 1962, New York in 1964 and San Antonio in 1968. It featured 240 puppets, mostly topless women, and Time magazine called it a “dirty puppet show.”

After that, it was so popular, “we couldn’t even get our own best friends in the theater,” Sid said. It drew an estimated 9.5 million viewers in its first decade of performances….

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born November 25, 1926 Poul Anderson. (Died 2001.) Need I say that he’s one of my favourite writers? I’m reasonable sure that along with Heinlein, Bradbury and Le Guin that he was the first of the writers that I read extensively. And as Algis Budrys said in his Galaxy review column of February 1965, “we will all soon realize he has for some time been science fiction’s best storyteller.”

Poul Anderson

Poul was really, really prolific which will mean that I’m not going to detail everything he did here. Indeed, ISFDB list twenty-three novels and an amazing thirty-three collections of his short stories! So where to start? 

Well in my case, that is quite easy as my go to works by him when I want to be entertained at length by great storytelling is the Technic History stories with those of Nicholas van Rijn and Dominic Flandry being the ones I like the best. Not that other stories aren’t excellent in their own as they are. 

Now there’s the ever so fun Hoka novels (Earthman’s Burden and Star Prince Charlie) and the Hoka! short stories, a sequel to the first novel, that were co-written with Gordon R. Dickson. 

I’ve always enjoyed his Time Patrol stories as they’re some of the best such tales that were ever written. These of course, as are all of his short stories, to found in The Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson that NESFA published. All seven volumes are now available as epubs! 

What’s next?  Orion Shall Rise remains one of my most read novels by him. It’s part of his Maurai & Kith series, a most interesting future history. The short stories, also excellent, were collected in, not surprisingly, his Maurai & Kith collection. 

I was surprised to find that Operation Chaos and Operation Luna actually had a handful of short stories as well, six to be exact, one written by Eric Flint. I shall need to seek them out. Another set of novels that I’ve read several times. 

Let’s not forget The Unicorn Trade that he and Karen collaborated on. Such a wonderful collection it is.

Yes, there’s lots more, but I’m going to finish off with A Midsummer Tempest which is always a delight to experience. 

No, I didn’t forget he won seven Hugo Awards and three Nebula Awards. All well deserved. 

And if you go here, you get to hear the delightful story of Karen and her role role in filk songs. I’m told that Poul had a fine singing voice. I wonder if there’s any recording of him and her singing.  

(10) MONITORING WHO MEDIA. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] More from Beeb.  Alas you have to have a BBC Sounds account to download in this case… “Doctor Who: 60 years of Friends and Foes”.

As Doctor Who celebrates its 60th anniversary, Sue Perkins explores how the programme has reflected our social history across the decades both on and off screen. From advances in technology to politics, violence, gender and sexuality.

Featuring archive footage, interviews and new conversations with showrunner Steven Moffat, script editor Andrew Cartmel, former companions including Anneke Wills, Katy Manning and Janet Fielding, and the voice of the Daleks Nicholas Briggs along with Dalek Operator Barnaby Edwards. Also, there’s analysis from several academics who have published books on the subject.

Sue examines how progressive the show has been, questioning if our favourite time traveller has kept with the times.

Sue Perkins

(11) BEWARE SPOILERS. If you have already seen the newest Doctor Who special, or don’t care about spoilers, you’re a candidate to read this Inverse profile about the latest iteration of the sonic screwdriver: “54 Years Later, The Oldest TV Sci-Fi Hero Just Got A Massive Tech Upgrade”.

(12) CULTURAL CORNER. Lavie Tidhar tweeted a fresh humorous sendup of the classic poem.

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Tolkien explains on BBC how he started The Hobbit” is a brief clip from a 1968 interview.

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

Pixel Scroll 11/16/23 Mobius, Larryus, And Curlyus, The Three Time Stooges

(1) THEY’RE THE TOPS. Charlie Jane Anders’ picks as “The 10 best science fiction and fantasy novels of 2023” are live at the Washington Post. (Registration required.)

People sometimes say science fiction basks in optimism for a better future, while fantasy is about nostalgia for an imaginary past. But this year’s most notable fantasy books worked to uncover historical crimes, while science fiction warned of coming evils.

The good news? The best sci-fi and fantasy books of 2023 will give you hope and strength in the toughest times….

This is Anders’ favorite:

‘To Shape a Dragon’s Breath,’ by Moniquill Blackgoose

This remains my favorite book of the year. An Indigenous girl, Anequs, becomes the first person on Masquapaug island to hatch a dragon’s egg in generations, which means she’s forced to attend the dragon-rider academy run by the Anglish colonizers. If Anequs can’t learn to behave like a proper Anglish girl, her adorable baby dragon will be put to death. A fascinating alternate history of North American colonization and a nuanced investigation of who gets left out of “civilization” form a worthy backdrop to a coming-of-age story that is cozy and hair-raising in equal measure.

(2) NOW AN EX-X USER. John Scalzi told Whatever readers today, “Yup, Done With the Former Twitter”.

Elon Musk, the most unfathomably insecure and pathetic billionaire the world has ever seen, has gone mask-off antisemite, and that means that while I had already reduced my participation on the former Twitter, now I’m off it entirely. I’m keeping the account so that no one can swoop in and take a screenname that’s been associated with me for the last fifteen years, but no more posting, and no more participation. Until and unless the service is sold to someone who isn’t Musk (and possibly even then, depending), I’m out, I’m through, I’m done….

4. Leaving the former Twitter is also at this point more than a little bit of a relief. I’ve noted above that I restricted my use of it recently to just career news and updates, but even doing that has become an increasing depressing and unpleasant chore, like having a storefront in a part of town where the windows are increasingly soaped up and the sidewalks are full of trash, and there are a bunch of Nazis on the corner, leering at cars driving by. It was no fun, in a place where I used to have fun. It was, finally, time to go. So I’ve gone….

Best Fan Writer Hugo finalist Örjan Westin also announced today that Micro SF/F is off of X:

And Thomas M. Wagner of SFF180 : Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Reviews will drop off tomorrow.

(3) WHERE TO FIND NEXT YEAR’S VIRTUAL WORLDCON. The Glasgow 2024 Worldcon has announced what platforms they will use for their “Online Convention” experience.

… Our technical platform will be based on Hopin Events from RingCentral for video streaming and Discord for text interaction and community forums.

We will be providing more details on the platform in January 2024…

For those who will be attending the Worldcon in person, Glasgow 2024 also has posted their “Disease Mitigation Policy”. It’s too long and detailed for an excerpt to serve, so please click through to read the document.

(4) A BOLT FROM THE BLUE. “The quest for Zeus’ lightning begins in new ‘Percy Jackson and the Olympians’ trailer” at MSN. Premieres Dec. 20 on Disney+.

Adapted from Rick Riordan’s “The Lightning Thief,” season 1 of the new Disney series sets our demigods on their first big journey — and introduces Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hermes.

What do you do when one of the most powerful weapons in existence goes missing? If you’re the Greek gods of Olympus, the answer is simple: Have a bunch of kids go look for it….

Based on Rick Riordan‘s best-selling book series of the same name, Percy Jackson and the Olympians portrays a world in which the children of gods and humans gather at a sanctuary called Camp Half-Blood to hone their skills and learn how to defeat monsters such as the Minotaur, who makes its debut in the trailer. Season 1 will be drawn from Riordan’s first book in the series, The Lightning Thief….

(5) JMS Q&A. Gizmodo interviews “J. Michael Straczynski on Harlan Ellison’s Epic Sci-Fi Legacy”.

io9: How did you narrow down Ellison’s work for this collection? Considering how prolific and highly lauded he is, I’d think you couldn’t even collect his award winning stories without filling two massive volumes.

J. Michael Straczynski: It was a process. I started with the stories that won the most awards—and there are a lot of those. Then I asked, “What are the fan favorites?” and “Which were Harlan’s favorites?” Then, after aggregating all the material, I wrestled with the combination of stories that would provide readers with the best perspective on Harlan’s body of work. Because he wrote all kinds of stories, I think it’s important for readers to understand the breadth of his work. From the horror and bite of The Whimper of Whipped Dogs and I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, to the humor of I’m Looking for Kadak, to the gentle fantasy of On the Downhill Side, and the semi-autobiographical storytelling in All The Lies That Are My Life—they’re all there. I wanted the stories to serve as an entry point for readers who might not be familiar with Harlan’s fiction, and my hope is that these stories will drive readers to his other works….

(6) EXTERMINATE! IN LIVING COLOUR. “Doctor Who reveals first look at new colourisation of The Daleks” – and the Radio Times posted BBC images from the work.

… The original episode’s black-and-white visuals have been colourised for the new version and it will also feature a new score from composer Mark Ayres and new sound design.

The new colourisation will air on BBC Four on Thursday 23rd November – the date that marks six decades since Doctor Who’s first transmission….

(7) STEM SCHOLARSHIP CREATED. The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’  AIAA Foundation is partnering with Blue Origin’s nonprofit Club for the Future to provide a $10,000 scholarship each year to one high school senior who has demonstrated an interest in pursuing a career in aerospace engineering. The scholarship is known as “AIAA and Club for the Future’s Resilient Student Scholarship.” Students can apply here. Applications are due by January 31, 2024.

Any high school senior enrolling in a STEM program at a college, university, or technical institution who matches other qualifying criteria will be eligible. In addition to the $10,000 award, the recipient will be matched with an AIAA professional member to serve as a mentor. The scholarship will be offered to high school seniors who are AIAA members; high school membership in AIAA is free. The scholarship is specifically designed to empower and inspire students who have faced unique challenges, including but not limited to: students with disabilities; from underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds, gender minorities, or disadvantaged socioeconomic circumstances; and first-generation college students.

Students who apply for this scholarship will be asked to describe why they are interested in aerospace and write about their vision for their future career in the aerospace field. They also must submit a short personal essay on their values of compassion, tenacity, and resilience, and how they have used one or all of these traits to problem-solve or accomplish something in their life.

This scholarship follows other support for aerospace young talent development provided to the AIAA Foundation by Blue Origin’s Club for the Future, including a $1 million grant in 2021 for educational programs….

(8) ASIMOV’S AD. Is there a way they can deliver on this? Three of these four writers are dead.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born November 16, 1939 Tor Åge Bringsværd, 84. Writer, Editor, and Fan from Norway who co-founded Norwegian fandom. He and his university friend Jon Bing were huge SF readers in a country where SF publishing did not exist, so they founded, in 1966, the still-existing Aniara science fiction club and its fanzine at Oslo University. In 1967, they produced an SF short story collection Ring Around the Sun, which is known as the first science fiction by a Norwegian author. In 1967, they persuaded Gyldendal, the leading Norwegian publisher, into launching a paperback SF line with themselves as editors. Between then and 1980, this imprint released 55 titles which included the first Norwegian translations for many authors, such as Aldiss, Bradbury, Le Guin, and Leiber. He quit university to become a full-time SF writer, and since then has accumulated an impressive array of awards, including the Norwegian Academy Award, the Ibsen Award, and the Norwegian Cultural Council Award. (JJ)
  • Born November 16, 1942 Milt Stevens. Law Enforcement  Analyst, Fan, Conrunner, and Filer. Excerpted from Mike Glyer’s tribute to him: “Milt attended his first Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society meeting in 1960 at the age of 17. By 1970 Milt was President of LASFS – he signed my membership card when I joined. He was somebody to look up to who also became a good friend. Milt won the Evans-Freehafer Award for service to the club in 1971. He was on the LASFS, Inc. Board of Directors for a couple of decades, and was Chair for around five years. After the original LASFS clubhouse was bought in 1973 Milt dubbed himself the ‘Lord High Janitor,’ having taken on the thankless task of cleaning the place. Milt was among the club’s few nationally-active fanzine publishers and fanpoliticians. He put out an acclaimed perzine called The Passing Parade. He coedited and bankrolled later issues of my fanzine Prehensile. For many years he was a member of the Fantasy Amateur Press Association (FAPA). He was Chair of LA 2000, the original Loscon (1975), and later the 1980 Westercon. And he co-chaired L.A.Con II (1984), which [held] the attendance record. He was made Fan GoH of Loscon 9 and Westercon 61.” (Died 2017.) (JJ)
  • Born November 16, 1952 Candas Jane Dorsey, 71. Canadian writer who’s the winner of the Prix Aurora Award, and the Otherwise Award for gender-bending SF, for her Black Wine novel. She’s also won a Prix Aurora Award for her short story, “Sleeping in a Box”.  She’s one of the founders of SF Canada was founded as an authors collective in the late Eighties as Canada’s National Association of Speculative Fiction Professionals. At the present time, she appears to have little available from the usual digital suspects. 
  • Born November 16, 1952 Robin McKinley, 71. Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast was her first book. It was considered a superb work and was named an American Library Association Notable Children’s Book and an ALA Best Book for Young Adults. Rose Daughter is another version of that folktale, whereas Spindle’s End is the story of Sleeping Beauty, and Deerskin and two of the stories that you can find in The Door in the Hedge are based on other folktales. She does a superb telling of the Robin Hood legend in The Outlaws of Sherwood. Among her novels that are not based on folktales are SunshineChalice and Dragonhaven. Her 1984 The Hero and the Crown won the Newbery Medal as that year’s best new American children’s book. She was married to Peter Dickinson from 1991 to his death in 2015, they lived together in Hampshire, England where she still lives. They co-wrote two splendid collections, Water: Tales of Elemental Spirits and Fire: Tales of Elemental Spirits. I’d be very remiss not to note her Awards, to wit a Newbery Honor for The Blue Sword, then a Newbery Medal for The Hero and the Crown, a World Fantasy Award for Anthology/Collection for Imaginary Lands, as editor, a Phoenix Award Honor Book for Beauty and a Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature for Sunshine. Impressive indeed!
  • Born November 16, 1962 Darwyn Cooke. Canadian comics artist, writer, cartoonist, and animator. His work has garnered myriad Eisner, Harvey, and Joe Shuster Awards. He did the art on Jeph Leob’s Batman/The Spirit one-off, and did everything including the cover art on the most delicious Catwoman: Selina’s Big Score. Cooke adapted for IDW five of Donald Westlake’s Richard Stark penned hardboiled Parker novels. (Died 2016.)
  • Born November 16, 1976 Lavie Tidhar, 47. The first work I read by him was Central Station which won a John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. It certainly deserved that accolade! The next work by him I experienced was The Bookman Histories in which Mycroft Holmes is murdered and, well, everything of a pulp nature gets tossed into alternate history England. Both absolutely brilliant and completely annoying at the same time. Unholy Land is another of his fascinating alternate histories. The last work I read by him was Neom, a sequel of sorts to Central Station, which might be one of his best works, period. 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) SCION OF GAMERGATE. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] The man just convicted of assaulting Nancy Pelosi’s husband has blamed his initial radicalization on anti-feminist gamers on YouTube. “Man Who Attacked Nancy Pelosi’s Husband Says Anti-Feminist Gaming YouTubers Radicalized Him” at Gamespot.

David DePape, who assaulted former US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul, has stated that anti-feminist gaming content on YouTube led him to radicalization.

A report from KQED quotes DePape’s testimony on the third day of the federal trial against him, in which he described the process of his radicalization. DePape claimed that he once politically opposed Trump, until he began consuming right-wing conspiracy media. DePape was an avid gamer who encountered videos about the misogynistic harassment campaign Gamergate while looking up walkthroughs and tips.

DePape said, “I’d look up a [strategy to defeat a video game] boss, and it’d be a total different person, and these people would talk about how toxic Anita Sarkeesian is, over and over and over. I wanted to find out what was going on here. I wanted to get both sides of the story.”

This led to him consuming more and more right-wing internet content. DePape would listen to YouTubers and podcasters like James Lindsay, Jimmy Dore, and Glenn Beck for at least six hours a day, and even longer on weekends. While listening, he would play video games on mute in the Richmond garage where he lived without basic amenities like a bed and shower….

(12) USE THE TORT, LUKE. “Star Wars developer strikes back at class-action claim” reports Axios.

A class action complaint over a Star Wars video game’s missing content should be dismissed in part because the lead plaintiff already got a rebate, the game’s developer has argued in court.

Why it matters: The novel suit is seeking damages because a game maker didn’t deliver on the promise they offered when promoting their game.

Details: The case, Malachi Mickelonis v. Aspyr Media, Inc., revolves around the cancellation of the “Restored Content DLC,” a free update that had been planned for the 2022 Nintendo Switch re-release of beloved 2004 role-playing game Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II.

  • The update would have restored storyline content that was infamously cut before the original game shipped. Those missing bits have so far been available only on the PC version via a mod made by fans who salvaged the content from the game’s code.
  • Aspyr announced in June it was canceling the DLC, and offered download codes for other Star Wars games to compensate.
  • In July Mickelonis sued, saying he “felt completely duped” and sought damages over alleged violations of California consumer law. Late last month, the suit was modified to include 17 more plaintiffs.

Driving the news: Aspyr Media asked a court last month and this month to toss out the suit, according to court filings reviewed by Axios….

(13) AI SPEAKS FOR THE DEAD. The late French singer Edith Piaf will narrate her own biopic with a voice re-created by AI. The Piaf estate approved. “Edith Piaf AI-Generated Biopic in the Works at Warner Music” in Variety.

“La Vie en robots”? More than 60 years after her death, legendary French singer Edith Piaf will come to life in a new biopic that will use AI to recreate her voice and image.

Warner Music Group announced that it has partnered with Piaf’s estate for “Edith,” set to be a 90-minute film set in Paris and New York from the 1920s to the ’60s. (Piaf, known as the “Sparrow of Paris,” died Oct. 10, 1963.) The film will be narrated by an AI-generated facsimile of Piaf’s voice and promises to “uncover aspects of her life that were previously unknown.”

“Animation will provide a modern take on her story, while the inclusion of archival footage, stage and TV performances, personal footage and TV interviews will provide audiences with an authentic look at the significant moments of Piaf’s life,” the music company said in announcing the project….

(14) ARSENIC AND OLD PAGES. American Bookbinders Museum delivers a webinar about “The Poison Book Project” on November 18.

Dr. Melissa Tedone will discuss the discovery of arsenic in Victorian-era bookcloth and how this discovery influences our understanding of Euro-American bookbinding materials and manufacture. The Poison Book Project investigates the use of toxic heavy metals (including arsenic, chromium, lead, and mercury) in mass-produced 19th-century books. Come learn how and why toxic compounds were used in bookbinding and how the Poison Book Project is using crowd-sourced data to enhance our understanding of this aspect of book history. Melissa will also share how to identify potentially ‘poison books,’ tips for safer handling, and how interested bibliophiles can contribute to this research.

… Melissa is the lead conservator of the Poison Book Project, an investigation of toxic colorants in nineteenth-century Victorian bookcloth, and a founding co-chair of the Bibliotoxicology Working Group. “BibTox” is an international cohort of conservators, conservation scientists, librarians, and health and safety professionals who are developing best practices for the identification and management of historical bookbinding collections with potentially toxic components.

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Fanac.org has posted a video conversion of a Sixties fan film “Frankenstein…[a not so gory version]” produced in 8mm by the Delta SF Film Group.

This 1963 fannish production of “Frankenstein … [a not so gory version]” from the Delta SF Film Group, starts with a panorama across a mad scientist’s lab featuring “Entrails of Aldiss” and “bheer”. It’s an entertaining and complete story in less than 4 minutes, starring British fans of the day. You’ll be (un)amazed at the special effects, the pathos of the story and its shocking ending. It’s good fun, and Delta group went on to produce many more short films. Bill Burns, who provided this and other Delta Films tells us “The individual films date from 1963 to 1970, and were made on 8mm silent film to which a magnetic stripe was later added and the sound dubbed on. They were then shown mercilessly at club meetings and Eastercons, and suffered accordingly.” For more about the Delta SF Film Group, see the Fancyclopedia article and see the text of Bill’s talk at Manunicon (2016 Eastercon) at https://efanzines.com/Alien/indexd.htm

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

Toy Review: Exterminate! Exterminate! — A Dalek, Dr. Who

By Iain Delaney: Dr Who started in 1963 and ran until 1989. They revived it in 2005 and has been running (more or less) continuously ever since. The series holds the record for the longest running sci-fi TV series and is arguably the longest running TV series.

The Daleks appeared in the second serial of the first series, and have been the Doctor’s nemesis ever since. Their non-human appearance, seeming invincibility, and single-minded desire to destroy all other lifeforms, have made them the terror of children everywhere for almost 60 years. So, of course, there had to be toys of them.

This example is from 1975 and was made by Palitoy in England. It stands roughly six inches tall and is made of tough plastic. Two AA batteries that you place in a compartment in the base power the toy. (These are called ’HP7’ batteries on box; thank goodness for standardization!) 

You trigger the talking feature is by pressing the button on top of the Dalek. It will then say one of four phrases, “Exterminate! Exterminate!”, “Attack! Attack! Attack”, “You Will Obey”, and “What are Your Orders?” The sounds are very authentic; I suspect they copied them from the original soundtrack.

I’ve dismantled the talking mechanism so many times that I now have a thorough understanding of its workings. A stylus rides the grooves and converts the bumps in the grooves into sound, much the same way that the stylus on a record player works. Unlike using a piezoelectric crystal and electrical amplifier, the toy has a simpler mechanism to produce sound. The arm holding the stylus has a curved cross-piece that makes direct contact with the base of a small speaker. So the vibrations from the disk are transferred directly to the speaker in the same way an old gramophone works. It’s a very clever use of an old technology and like a lot of simple techniques, it stands the test of time. This toy from the 1970s still works, while some toys that use electronics that are less than twenty years old have failed and are impossible to repair.

The BBC Talking Dalek is long out of print but may appear on eBay from time to time.


Iain Delaney was born in the UK but moved to Canada at an early age. The UK heritage explains his fascination with British TV SciFi, including Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, UFO, and, of course, Dr. Who. After fumbling through high school, he fumbled through university, emerging with a degree in physics. With no desire to pursue graduate studies he discovered that a bachelor’s degree had little to no job prospects, so he took up a career in computer programming. In his off time he reads, watches TV and movies, collects toys, and makes attempts at writing. To that end he has a small number of articles published in role-playing game magazines and won two honorable mentions in the Writers of the Future contest. He is working on an urban fantasy YA trilogy and entertains delusions of selling it to movies or TV.

Pixel Scroll 6/1/21 Welcome To The Hotel Cthulhu: You Can Get Eaten Anytime You Like, But You Will Never Leave

(1) OCTAVIA BUTLER BIRTHDAY MONTH. The Los Angeles Public Library and The Huntington are commemorating Octavia E. Butler’s birthday throughout June in a joint celebration of her work, her legacy, and her community.

The virtual events listed below are all free, open to the public, and family-friendly, ideally for ages 10 and up.

  • Parable of the Sower Book Club Chat — Sat., June 5, 4 p.m. | Reserve
  • JPL & Octavia E. Butler — Sat., June 12, 2 p.m. | Reserve
  • Octavia Lab Tour — Fri., June 18, 4 p.m. | Reserve
  • Make a Zine Celebration of Octavia E. Butler and Juneteenth — Sat., June 19, 4 p.m. | Reserve
  • In Conversation with Author Lynell George — Fri., June 25, 4 p.m. | Reserve
  • Parable of the Sower Graphic Novel Creators’ Presentation — Sat., June 26, 4 p.m. | Reserve 

(2) CHAMBERS ON TOUR, AT YOUR COMPUTER. Becky Chambers is doing a virtual tour for her upcoming book A Psalm for the Wild-BuiltTor.com has information about it, including links to the independent bookstores hosting each stop on the tour. It looks like she’ll be appearing in tandem with different SFF authors on Zoom at each of the three “stops” — Martha Wells, Sarah Gailey, and T.J. Klune + Alix E. Harrow. “Join Becky Chambers on Tour for A Psalm for the Wild-Built”.

In A Psalm for the Wild-Built, it’s been centuries since the robots of Panga became self-aware and walked into the wilderness. When one walks right into the life of a tea monk named Dex, an entirely unexpected connection is formed. The robot wants to know what people need. But how can one person answer that question? As Sarah Gailey said, “This is a book that, for one night, made me stop asking ‘what am I even for?’ I’m prescribing a preorder to anyone who has ever felt lost. Stunning, kind, necessary.”

(3) POST-PANDEMIC BOX OFFICE. Variety reports “’A Quiet Place Part II’ Smashes Pandemic Era Records”:

…The movie business is breathing a little easier after Paramount’s A Quiet Place Part II roared to $57 million over the Memorial Day Weekend. It’s a sign that cinemas are back after more than a year of pandemic era closures, capacity restrictions, and skittish customers.

Deadline says, “That’s a number which isn’t too far from the $60 million which the John Krasinski-directed sequel was anticipated to do in its three-day opening pre-pandemic.” 

(4) REJECTION SLIP-UP. Remember, it’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you. Joe Vasicek lays out his evidence in “Short Stories, Author Blacklists, and Navigating Woke Science Fiction”.

Last year, I had a short story published in the anthology Again, Hazardous Imaginings: More Politically Incorrect Science Fiction. Not only was it one of my highest paying short story sales to date, but it also made it onto the Tangent Online 2020 Recommended Reading List with a *** rating, their highest tier. Only 13 out of 293 stories on the list received that honor—and making the list at all was an accomplishment!

But a funny thing happened after the anthology came out: for a stretch of several months, I stopped receiving personalized rejections for my short story submissions, and instead got only form rejections. Normally when I write a cover letter for a short story submission, I mention the last three markets that I was published in. For example: “My stories have recently appeared in Again, Hazardous Imaginings; Twilight Tales LTUE Benefit Anthology, and Bards and Sages Quarterly (forthcoming).” In a typical month, I’ll get maybe a dozen or so form rejections and a couple of personalized rejections, depending on how many stories I have out on submission.

Back in March, I started to notice that I wasn’t getting any personalized rejections. Suspecting that my publication credit in Again, Hazardous Imaginings wasn’t helping me, I decided to change things up and only list my publication credits for stories listed in Locus Magazine’s Year In Review issue. My thinking was that all of the Hugo and Nebula eligible markets give their yearly reports in that issue, and since all of the editors want to acquire stories that are likely to win awards, a publication credit in one of those markets is more likely to get them to pay attention.

Lo and behold, I started getting personalized rejections again….

(5) YOUNG PEOPLE. In the latest Young People Read Old SFF, James Davis Nicoll turns the panel loose on “The Longest Voyage” by one of my favorite writers, Poul Anderson.

… Anderson’s curious views of the narrative role of women at the time of writing surely do not pertain to The Longest Voyage because The Longest Voyage contains no women to speak of. As well, Anderson has chosen for the setting an Earthlike moon of a gas giant, perhaps the first plausible example of such a world I recall encountering. Perhaps this story highlights Anderson’s strengths in a way to which the Young People will respond?

(I can’t bear to look!)

(6) HIGHER-TECH CONEHEADS. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] Even Daleks, after a hard day of extermination, need to take an ice cream break!

(7) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.

  • June 1, 1984 — On this day in 1984, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock premiered. It was written and produced by Harve Bennett, and directed by Leonard Nimoy.  It starred William Shatner, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan. George Takei, Walter Koenig, Nichelle Nichols, Merritt Butrick and Christopher Lloyd. Critics generally loved it and thought Nimoy caught the feel of the series; audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give it a 61% rating. It would finish third at Aussiecon Two behind 2010: The Year We Made Contact which won the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo and Ghostbusters which came in second.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born June 1, 1858 – Frank Ver Beck.  Wood engravings; illustrations for Collier’sThe Ladies’ Home Journal,Scribner’s; superlatively, animals, sometimes in a style eventually called anthropomorphic.  Twenty books, e.g. A Handbook of Golf for Bears, and in particular Baum’s Magical Monarch of Mo.  (Died 1933) [JH]
  • Born June 1, 1914 — George Sayer. His Jack: C. S. Lewis and His Times which won a Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Inkling Studies and is considered one of the best looks at that author. He also wrote the liner notes for the J. R. R. Tolkien Soundbook, a Cadmeon release of Christopher Tolkien reading from excerpts from The SilmarillionThe Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings. (Died 2005.) (CE)
  • Born June 1, 1928 — Janet Grahame Johnstone, and Anne Grahame Johnstone. British twin sisters who were children’s book illustrators best remembered for their prolific artwork and for illustrating Dodie Smith’s The Hundred and One Dalmatians. They were always more popular with the public than they were critics who consider them twee. (Janet died 1979. Anne died 1988.) (CE)
  • Born June 1, 1940 — René Auberjonois. Odo on DS9. He’s shown up on a number of genre productions including Wonder WomanThe Outer LimitsNight GalleryThe Bionic WomanBatman Forever, King Kong, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered CountryEnterpriseStargate SG-1 andWarehouse 13He’s lent both his voice and likeness to gaming productions in recent years, and has done voice work for the animated Green Lantern and Justice League series. (Died 2019.) (CE) 
  • Born June 1, 1947 — Jonathan Pryce, 74. I remember him best as the unnamed bureaucrat in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. He’s had a long career in genre works including Brazil, Something Wicked This Way Comes as Mr. Dark himself, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End as Governor Weatherby Swann, The Brothers Grimm, in the G.I. Joe films as the U.S. President and most recently in The Man Who Killed Don Quixote as Don Quixote. (CE) 
  • Born June 1, 1947 – Adrienne Fein.  One of three Founding Mothers of CMUSFS (Carnegie Mellon Univ. SF Society).  Introduced Arthur Hlavaty to apas .  Known as a loccer (loc or LoC = letter of comment, the blood of fanzines) but no slouch as a fanartist, e.g this cover for Granfalloon 1 and interiors there, this one for It Comes in the Mail 18, interiors for Riverside Quarterly.  (Died 1990) [JH]
  • Born June 1, 1947 – Chris Moore, age 74.  Four hundred sixty covers, fourscore interiors.  Collection, Journeyman.  Here’s a cover for The Stars My Destination; one for The City and the Stars; one for Hexarchate Stories.  Here’s his story.  [JH]
  • Born June 1, 1948 – Mike Meara, age 73.  Nova Award for Best Fanwriter.  Administered the FAAn (Fan Activity Achievement) Awards at Corflu 32 (fanziners’ con; corflu = mimeograph correction fluid, once indispensable).  Fanzine, A Meara for Observers.  [JH]
  • Born June 1, 1954 — Michael P. Kube-McDowell, 67. A filker which gets major points in my book. See him with The Black Book Band here: “Back in Black”. And yes, I’m stalling while I try to remember what of his I’ve read. I’m reasonably sure I’ve read both of his Isaac Asimov’s Robot City novels, and now I can recall reading Alternities as well. God, it’s been twenty years since I read him. I’m getting old. (CE)
  • Born June 1, 1958 – Ian Gunn.  Seven dozen interiors in Banana WingsFocus, and like that; in Program Books for ConFrancisco the 51st Worldcon, ConAdian the 52nd, Aussiecon 3 the 57th; logo for The Frozen Frog; 10 Ditmars (one won by a story!), 2 FAAn (Fan Activity Achievement) Awards, 1 Hugo at last.  (Died 1998) [JH]
  • Born June 1, 1965 — Tim Eldred, 56. Author and illustrator of Grease Monkey, a most excellent humorous take on space operas and uplifting species.  As an illustrator alone, he was involved in Daniel Quinn’s superb The Man Who Grew Young. (CE)
  • Born June 1, 1994 – Caighlan Smith, age 27.  Two novels, two shorter stories.  Has read A Doll’s HouseLes MisérablesFrankenstein, two Gormenghast books (the third on its way).  [JH]

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) BIG BEZOS IS WATCHING. According to The Guardian, “Amazon US customers have one week to opt out of mass wireless sharing”.

Amazon customers have one week to opt out of a plan that would turn every Echo speaker and Ring security camera in the US into a shared wireless network, as part of the company’s plan to fix connection problems for its smart home devices.

The proposal, called Amazon Sidewalk, involves the company’s devices being used as a springboard to build city-wide “mesh networks” that help simplify the process of setting up new devices, keep them online even if they’re out of range of home wifi, and extend the range of tracking devices such as those made by Tile.

But Sidewalk has come under fire for the apparent lack of transparency with which Amazon has rolled out the feature, as well as the limited time available for users to complete the tricky process required to opt out. Other critics have expressed concerns that failing to turn the setting off could leave customers in breach of their internet service provider’s terms and conditions.

“Amazon Sidewalk is a shared network that helps devices work better,” the company said in a Q&A document for users. “In the future, Sidewalk will support a range of experiences from using Sidewalk-enabled devices, such as smart security and lighting and diagnostics for appliances and tools.”…

(11) CHAPTERS TAKES THE CASH AND LETS THE CREDIT GO? [Item by James Davis Nicoll.] I somehow overlooked Donna Scott’s Best British SF series, now in its fifth year. Went to Chapters Indigo to order it. Chapters credits the anthologies to various famous male authors.

(12) JDA’S SPORTS REPORT.

(13) REVENGE IS A DISH BEST SERVED OLD. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] “Ancient Athenian Curse Jar Contained Dismembered Chicken And List Of Intended Victims” at IFL Science.  I particularly love the article’s turn of phrase, “perhaps you need to lift your vengeance magic game.”

Have you ever hated someone so much you sacrificed a chicken in the hope its slaughter would empower a curse, then carved the targets’ names into the pot holding the chicken and buried it for more than 2,000 years? If not, perhaps you need to lift your vengeance magic game, because someone not only did that but also found 50 people they hated enough to score a place on the pot’s exterior. We don’t know whether the curse worked, but it must be conceded all the intended victims are dead.

The pot (or “chytra”) buried between 325 and 270 BCE in a corner of a building in the Athenian Agora provides insight into the uses of magic at the time. Almost a century after Socrates and Plato, the home of ancient reason and learning still had people practicing something mystical.

Having been dug up in 2006 from a corner of the Athenian Agora’s Classical Commercial Building, the chytra has finally been described by Dr Jessica Lamont of Yale University.

Under the wonderful title “The Curious Case of the Cursed Chicken”, Lamont has described her findings in Hesperia. The pot contained the head and lower limbs of a chicken, but this was no remnant of a meal. A large iron nail has been stuck through the underside, its wide circular head sealing the entrance, and a small coin has since fused to the nail head. “This assemblage belongs to the broader realm of Athenian binding curses, which, … aimed to ‘bind’ or inhibit the physical and cognitive abilities of its human targets,” Lamont writes. These were usually written on lead tablets, but the nail and animal sacrifices were common features.

More than 30 of the names are still legible, some of them familiar while others were previously unknown from Athens. The handwriting suggests at least two people carved the names, something Lamont says is “largely unprecedented in Greek curse tablets”. Other writing could include the actual curse and up to 25 names, but only scattered letters can be read….

(14) ON TOP OF OLD SMOKEY. The Pasadena Museum of History knows where you can find the humble artifacts left behind by a historic science experiment: “Lookout Mountain and the Speed of Light”.

The first lookout tower of the Angeles Forest was erected on Lookout Mountain No. 2 in 1913 and was active until 1927 when it was moved to Sunset Peak. Today, one will find on Lookout Mountain, in addition to a sign and a register, three in-line concrete blocks. The tallest of these, forty-two inches high, has a metal tablet marked “ANOTONIO 1922” and one of the smaller blocks, twenty-six inches high, has an unmarked survey point. If a sight is taken in a westernly direction over these two points, it will align to a spot on Mt. Wilson, marked on topo maps as “Michelson.” These blocks supported a mirror system for an exacting experiment by America’s first Nobel Prize winner, A.A. Michelson, in the years 1922 to 1926 to determine the speed of light.

The speed of light had been measured before, but never on such a spectacular scale or with as much accuracy. At station “MICHELSON” on Mt. Wilson; an octagonal mirror was mounted on a rotor that reflected a light beam to the station “ANTONIO” on Lookout Mountain, nearly twenty-two miles distant; then reflected back to another facet of the octagonal mirror, where it was reflected in the observer’s eye….

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “Honest Trailers: Army of the Dead” on YouTube, the Screen Junkies say this new Zack Snyder film has robot zombies, brain zombies, and “the awesome zombie-killing saw,” and a team of mercenaries that has six “damaged bad-asses,” “two fun-loving bad-asses” and “the world’s most obvious traitor.  But Snyder, free of studio control, still can’t figure out how to focus his film!”

[Thanks to John Hertz, Mike Kennedy, Nina Shepardson, James Davis Nicoll, Andrew Porter, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Michael Toman, John King Tarpinian, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to contributing editor of the day Peer.]

Pixel Scroll 4/17/21 Parsley Scrolls Are Filed In Thyme

(1) CLI-FI COMPETITION UPDATE. Grist’s “Imagine 2200” contest has received over 1,100 entries. They will be judged by authors Adrienne Maree Brown, Morgan Jerkins, and Kiese Laymon. These short stories “envision the next 180 years of equitable climate progress.” First prize is $3,000, second prize $2,000, and third prize $1,000. Nine additional finalists will receive $300.

(2) RAISED EYEBROW. I’m shocked, I tell you. WIRED reports“Turns Out, Spock Is Kinda Bad at Logic”.

Julia Galef, host of the Rationally Speaking podcast and co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality, is not impressed with the hyper-rational Vulcans on Star Trek.

“Spock is held up as this exemplar of logic and reason and rationality, but he’s set up, in my opinion, as almost a weak caricature—a straw man—of reason and rationality, because he keeps making all these dumb mistakes,” Galef says in Episode 462 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “That’s the show’s way of proving that, ‘Aha! Logic and reason and rationality aren’t actually all that great.’”

In the franchise, Spock makes confident predictions based on his superior Vulcan mind. Galef was curious to see exactly how often these predictions pan out. “I went through all of the Star Trek episodes and movies—all of the transcripts that I could find—and searched for any instance in which Spock is using the words ‘odds,’ ‘probability,’ ‘chance,’ ‘definitely,’ ‘probably,’ etc.,” she says. “I catalogued all instances in which Spock made a prediction and that prediction either came true or didn’t.”

The results, which appear in Galef’s new book The Scout Mindset, are devastating…. 

(3) MISTAKES WERE MADE, SHORTS WERE FRIED. Why do copies of this 1940 fanzine have a bit clipped out of one page? First Fandom Experience knows: “The Hole Story: Fake News and Parenting in Early Fandom”. John W. Campbell, Jr. is somehow at the bottom of it all! Scans of all the relevant zines and a complete historical narrative are at the FFE site.

… Campbell also kept an eye on leading fanzines. Fantascience Digest received a threatening letter from Street & Smith and promptly printed a polite retraction….

The Maine Scientifiction Association had also printed the offending story and had to hit the brakes!  

It appears that the MSA was in the midst of mailing issues of the January 1940 issue of the Bulletin when they became aware of the transgressionWhat to do with the fanzines they’d already printed? With an impoverished treasury, we believe the club elected to salvage the run by clipping out the offending article.

(4) YOU ARE NUMBER SIX FIVE THOUSAND. The site of many Lunacons, Star Trek conventions, comics conventions, the 1967 Worldcon, even Nebula banquets is about to get flattened: “So Long to the Hotel Pennsylvania” in Curbed.

…Eight years ago, Roth said that he was planning to renovate and turn it into something great, but we live in a different economic climate now, and the empty air above that giant site at 401 Seventh is apparently just too tempting to resist. A 1,270-foot tower, bearing the not-at-all-phallic name of PENN15, is its likely replacement.

There is inevitably, when a building of this age is about to come down, someone who wants to landmark it. Frankly, the Hotel Pennsylvania is a building that could be made handsome and appealing again, but it’s just not quite significant enough to fight over. Architecturally, it is like a lot of early-20th-century midsize hotels and office buildings around the city, only larger; it is surely a better-quality example from its period, designed by McKim, Mead & White, but it’s bulky enough that it already takes up a big bite of light and air, so you can’t make much of a case regarding scale. Even if you’re a hardcore preservationist, your energies might be better spent elsewhere….

Fancyclopedia’s entry focuses on the fanhistory made there when it was known as the New York Statler Hilton Hotel, and traces the names it went by:

It was opened in 1919 as the Hotel Pennsylvania of “PEnnsylvania 6-5000” fame and renamed the Hotel Statler in 1948. In 1954, Hilton bought it and renamed it the Statler Hilton, which is how it was known when its history crossed with fandom’s. Starting in the early 80s it went through various owners and names: The New York Statler, the New York Penta, and finally back to Hotel Pennsylvania….

(5) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born April 17, 1923 Lloyd Biggle Jr. He was the founding Secretary-Treasurer of Science Fiction Writers of America and served as Chairman of its trustees for many years. Writing-wise, his best known series were the Jan Darzek and Effie Schlupe troubleshooting team, and the Cultural Survey. His “Monument” story published in Analog was a finalist at Chicon III for a Short Story Hugo. I find it interesting that he wrote his own Sherlock Holmes stories from the perspective of Edward Porter Jones, an assistant who began his association with Holmes as a Baker Street Irregular. There’re are two novels in this series, The Quallsford Inheritance and The Glendower Conspiracy. (Died 2002.) (CE)
  • Born April 17, 1923 – T. Bruce Yerke.  Joined LASFS (Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society) in 1937, for a while its “perennial secretary”.  Recruited Ray Bradbury.  First editor of Imagination! which won the Best Fanzine of 1939 Retrospective Hugo.  Thought one of the best fanwriters of the 1940s.  Memoirs of a Superfluous Fan began 1944, never finished, reprinted 1991; see it and fandom of those days here (PDF).  More here.  (Died 1998) [JH]
  • Born April 17, 1924 – Gerard van Straaten.  Four dozen covers, as many interiors, for Dutch SF, like this; particularly the series Euro-5, about which Alex van Oostenrijk of Independent Software in Mozambique has written, with color images, in English, here. (Died 2011) [JH]
  • Born April 17, 1942 David Bradley, 79. It’s his Doctor Who work that garners him a birthday honor.  He first showed up during the time of the Eleventh Doctor playing a complete Rat Bastard of a character named Solomon in the “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship” episode. But it was his second role on the series as actor who was the First Doctor that makes him really worth noting. He portrayed William Hartnell in An Adventure in Space and Time, then played the role of the First Doctor again in “The Doctor Falls” and “Twice Upon a Time”, both Twelfth Doctor stories.  He is also known for playing Argus Filch in the Harry Potter film franchise, Walder Frey in Game of Thrones and Abraham Setrakian in The Strain. (CE) 
  • Born April 17, 1949 – Martyn Godfrey.  Five novels, one shorter story for us; three dozen all told; millions of books sold.  Bilson Award for historical fiction.  After his death the Young Alberta Book Society began an award in his name (2021 deadline extended to June 25th), see here.  (Died 2000) [JH]
  • Born April 17, 1958 – Carolyn Clink, age 63.  Five dozen poems in e.g. Canadian GingerImaginariumOn SpecStar*Line; two collections.  One Aurora Award.  Edited Tesseracts 6 with husband Robert Sawyer; here is her photo of him for Foundation 80.  [JH]
  • Born April 17, 1959 Sean Bean, 62. His current role that garners him recognition is his performance as Ned Stark in Game of Thrones, but he’s been in our area interest a long time.  His first genre role was in GoldenEye as the the antagonist of Bond, Alec Trevelyan (Janus).  Next he shows up as  Boromir in the first of The Lord of the Rings films. He played Dr. Merrick in the horror SF film The Island and was James in horror flick The Dark high purports to be based off Welsh myth. Following in the horror vein, he’s Chris Da Silva in Silent Hill (which gets a sequel later in Silent Hill: Revelation) and in yet more horror is John Ryder in the remake of the The Hitcher. (Was it so good that it yearned for a remake? I doubt it.) Black Death — yes more horror — and the character of Ulric ensued next. Finally something not of a horror nature in playing Zeus in Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief happened. I’m going to forgo listing the subsequent horror films he’s in and just finally note that he’s in The Martian playingMitch Henderson. (CE)
  • Born April 17, 1971 – François Roca, age 50.  Four covers for Michael Hoeye’s tales of a watchmaker mouse – thus titles like The Sands of Time and Time Stops for No Mouse.  [JH]
  • Born April 17, 1972 Jennifer Garner, 49. Back before there was the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there were Marvel Comic movies which have not been retconned into the MCU reality. Such was the case with Elektra and its lead character of Elektra Natchios. Don’t remember anything about the film anymore. She also had the same role in Daredevil which was at best an OK film though I’m fond of the Kingpin character. (CE)
  • Born April 17, 1973 Cavan Scott, 48. To my thinking, there’s somewhat of an arbitrary line between fanfic and professional writing. (Ducks quickly.) Which bring me to the world of fiction set in media universes where a lot of fanfic is set. This writer has apparently specialized in such writing to the extent that he has novels in the universes of Doctor Who (including the full blown subgenre of Professor Bernice Summerfield), Blake’s 7, Judge Dredd, Skylanders Universe, The Tomorrow People, Star Wars and Warhammer Universe. Judge Dredd?  Novels? Who knew? (CE)
  • Born April 17, 1985 Rooney Mara, 36. She first shows up as Mary Lambert in Urban Legends: Bloody Mary, a slasher film, followed by being Nancy Holbrook in the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street, and then Tiger Lily in Pan, a prequel to Peter Pan. Since then, she’s been M in A Ghost Story, and lastly is Molly Cahill in Nightmare Alley. (CE) 
  • Born April 17, 1991 – Ryn Katryn, age 30.  Two short stories (under another name), several hundred covers for us; other fields too.  Here is One Little Spell.  Here is Dim Glows the Horizon.  Here is Ashes of Chadanar.  Here is Humble Beginnings (showing Far Reach Space station).  [JH]

(6) NOT VERY NICE. ScreenRant nominates them as “The 10 Most Powerful Sci-Fi Villains Ever, Ranked”. Checking in at number 10 —

10 The Daleks (Doctor Who)

The Doctor’s oldest and most powerful opponents, the Daleks didn’t start out as intimidating as they would become. At the start, they were confined to their city on their home planet Skaro and were reliant on static electricity to stay alive.

From there, however, they overcame all their early deficiencies and spread out to create a Dalek Empire across space and time, to the point where even the god-like Time Lords were no match for them. If it wasn’t for their many terrible masterplans, their penchant for in-fighting, and how helpless they are against the Doctor, they would have subjugated the universe.

(7) WHEN IN THE FUTURE. At GeekTyrant, “The Sci-Fi Timeline Infographic Shows Us When Popular Sci-Fi Films and Games Take Place”.

We’re all used to seeing movies and games set in the future, but often the date can seem a bit abstract.

We’ve brought together some of our favourites to show yo the timeline and where they all fit. There were some surprises!

See for yourself, and decide if the writers got it right!

(8) DIVERSITY ONE OF THE GOALS. “NASA Picks SpaceX to Land Next Americans on Moon” says the NASA press release.

NASA is getting ready to send astronauts to explore more of the Moon as part of the Artemis program, and the agency has selected SpaceX to continue development of the first commercial human lander that will safely carry the next two American astronauts to the lunar surface. At least one of those astronauts will make history as the first woman on the Moon. Another goal of the Artemis program includes landing the first person of color on the lunar surface.

The agency’s powerful Space Launch System rocket will launch four astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft for their multi-day journey to lunar orbit. There, two crew members will transfer to the SpaceX human landing system (HLS) for the final leg of their journey to the surface of the Moon. After approximately a week exploring the surface, they will board the lander for their short trip back to orbit where they will return to Orion and their colleagues before heading back to Earth.

The firm-fixed price, milestone-based contract total award value is $2.89 billion.

(9) THE MARTIAN HOP. “NASA to Attempt First Controlled Flight on Mars As Soon As Monday” says the space agency.

NASA is targeting no earlier than Monday, April 19, for the first flight of its Ingenuity Mars Helicopter at approximately 3:30 a.m. EDT (12:30 a.m. PDT).

Data from the first flight will return to Earth a few hours following the autonomous flight. A livestream will begin at 6:15 a.m. EDT (3:15 a.m. PDT), as the helicopter team prepares to receive the data downlink in the Space Flight Operations Facility at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Watch on NASA Television, the agency appwebsite, and social media platforms, including YouTube and Facebook.

If the flight takes place April 19, a postflight briefing will be held at 2 p.m. EDT (11 a.m. PDT).

(10) TYRANNOSAURUS CENSUS. The Conversation wants to know “How many ‘Tyrannosaurus rex’ walked the Earth?”

During 2.4 million years of existence on Earth, a total of 2.5 billion Tyrannosaurus rex ever lived, and 20,000 individual animals would have been alive at any moment, according to a new calculation method we described in a paper published on April 15, 2021 in the journal Science.

To estimate population, our team of paleontologists and scientists had to combine the extraordinarily comprehensive existing research on T. rex with an ecological principle that connects population density to body size.

From microscopic growth patterns in bones, researchers inferred that T. rex first mated at around 15 years old. With growth records, scientists can also generate survivorship curves – an estimate of a T. rex‘s chances of living to a given age. Using these two numbers, our team estimated that T. rex generations took 19 years. Finally, T. rex existed as a species for 1.2 to 3.6 million years. With all of this information, we calculate that T. rex existed for 66,000 to 188,000 generations….

(11) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Redshirts Always Die invites fans to “Watch: DeForest Kelley read his poem for Star Trek’s 25th anniversary”. Starts at 4:23.

DeForest Kelley appeared at a Creation Entertainment convention in 1994, and the audience had the pleasure of listening to him read his final hilarious and poignant ode to the show, cast, Gene Roddenberry, and others who’d made the show possible. Kelley provided tongue-in-cheek updates on the actors’ lives in his Southern drawl. He even throws in a few snide comments here and there that make the poem that much better. (Especially when he’s talking about a certain green-blooded individual)

[Thanks to JJ, Mike Kennedy, Alan Baumler, Martin Morse Wooster, John Hertz, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Michael Toman, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day HelenS.]

Pixel Scroll 12/11/20 In And Around The Scroll, Pixels Come Out Of The File And They Stand There

(1) HUGO VOTING REQUIREMENT. You can nominate and vote in the 2021 Hugo Awards if you hold a supporting or attending membership in DisCon III by December 31st, 2020. Membership information is here.

(2) AVALANCHE AT THE MOUSE HOUSE. During Disney’s massive investor day presentation on Thursday, innumerable new projects were unveiled (see The Hollywood Reporter’s “Disney+ Plans 10 ‘Star Wars’ and 10 Marvel Series Over Next Few Years” for a bunch of them.)

Shaun Lyon let me run this summary of his notes:

This is a huge list of Star Wars stuff that’s just been announced this afternoon, all coming from Lucasfilm for both Disney films & Disney+:

  • Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, the next film, set for release Christmas 2023, and directed by Patty Jenkins (Wonder Woman); this is probably set during the Rebellion (Jenkins filmed a teaser video about wanting to make the greatest “fighter pilot film” of all time)
  • Untitled Star Wars film reportedly due in sometime around 2025, directed by Taika Waititi (Jojo Rabbit director & Mandalorian VO actor)
  • Andor, the live action series with Diego Luna and Alan Tudyk playing Cassian Andor & K2SO from Rogue One, set before that film; this is filming now and will be the next live action property to be released, sometime in early 2022 after the next season of Mandalorian (the cast features Stellan Skarsgard, Adria Arjona, Fiona Shaw, Denise Gough, Kyle Soller, and Genevieve O’Reilly as Mon Mothma; showrunner is Mandalorian director Deborah Chow)
  • Obi Wan Kenobi, a live action miniseries with Ewan MacGregor (Kenobi) and Hayden Christensen (Vader), set ten years after Revenge of the Sith; this starts filming in the first quarter of 2021. And yes, Obi Wan faced off against Vader again between Sith & A New Hope!
  • Ahsoka, a live action spinoff miniseries featuring Ahsoka Tano from The Clone Wars & Rebels (and played by Rosario Dawson in The Mandalorian); this could potentially be the continuation of the story from the end of Rebels, though not confirmed
  • Rangers of the New Republic, a live action series from Jon Favreau & Dave Filoni, set during the same period as The Mandalorian
  • The Acolyte, a live action series set during the ‘high Republic’ era (the upcoming Star Wars tie-in era, a thousand years before the films) created by Russian Doll co-creator Leslye Headland
  • Lando, a live action miniseries created by Dear White People’s Justin Simien; was announced without a lead actor, but ABC’s Good Morning America on 12/11 stated that Donald Glover was reprising his role as Lando Calrissian
  • The Bad Batch, the previously announced Clone Wars animated spinoff series, currently in production, set after that show with some of the clone troopers from that show who “take on daring mercenary missions as they struggle to stay afloat and find new purpose”
  • Star Wars Visions, an anime-style anthology miniseries with “10 fantastic visions from several of the leading Japanese anime studios”
  • A Droid Story, an animated film: this “epic journey will introduce us to a new hero, guided by legendary duo R2-D2 and C-3PO”
  • Plus the long-teased “Willow” series and another “Indiana Jones” movie.

None of that includes the other properties they announced including all the Marvel stuff and the “Alien” spinoff TV series.

The Marvel Studios segment had its own long list which you can read at Yahoo! – “Marvel drops bombshell announcement of Fantastic Four movie, War Machine and Nick Fury series, and more”.

The price of Disney+ will be going up – the subscriber response so exceeded predictions they figure the traffic will bear a bit more.

Disney also announced that the service’s monthly fee in the US will be going up by $1 in March to $7.99. Strong demand for Disney+ led to the company to boost its long-term subscriber estimates.

(3) LOOK AT LOKI. While we’re on the subject, Disney + dropped a trailer for their new series Loki.

(4) VIEWING WANDA. And there’s a new trailer for Marvel Studios’ WandaVision which starts streaming January 15 on Disney +.

(5) TRUE GRIT. Denis Villeneuve has a statement in Variety, “Dune Director Denis Villeneuve Blasts Warner Bros. Streaming Decision” where he bashed AT&T for its decision to show Warner movies next year in theatres and HBO Max simultaneously.

I learned in the news that Warner Bros. has decided to release “Dune” on HBO Max at the same time as our theatrical release, using prominent images from our movie to promote their streaming service. With this decision AT&T has hijacked one of the most respectable and important studios in film history. There is absolutely no love for cinema, nor for the audience here. It is all about the survival of a telecom mammoth, one that is currently bearing an astronomical debt of more than $150 billion. Therefore, even though “Dune” is about cinema and audiences, AT&T is about its own survival on Wall Street. With HBO Max’s launch a failure thus far, AT&T decided to sacrifice Warner Bros.’ entire 2021 slate in a desperate attempt to grab the audience’s attention.

…“Dune” is by far the best movie I’ve ever made. My team and I devoted more than three years of our lives to make it a unique big screen experience. Our movie’s image and sound were meticulously designed to be seen in theaters.

I’m speaking on my own behalf, though I stand in solidarity with the sixteen other filmmakers who now face the same fate. Please know I am with you and that together we are strong. The artists are the ones who create movies and series.

I strongly believe the future of cinema will be on the big screen, no matter what any Wall Street dilettante says. Since the dawn of time, humans have deeply needed communal storytelling experiences. Cinema on the big screen is more than a business, it is an art form that brings people together, celebrating humanity, enhancing our empathy for one another — it’s one of the very last artistic, in-person collective experiences we share as human beings.

Once the pandemic is over, theaters will be filled again with film lovers.

That is my strong belief.  Not because the movie industry needs it, but because we humans need cinema, as a collective experience….

(6) GHASTLY OVERSIGHT? Alexander Larman, in “A warning to the curious” on The Critic, explains why there is not going to be an adaptation of an M.R. James story and gives background on James and his work.  A link reveals a crowdfunded project to publish a collection of James’s letters.

…Like many great writers of the supernatural, James wrote according to strict rules. He suggested that his technique was a relatively simple one, saying in 1924 that, “Two ingredients most valuable in the concocting of a ghost story are, to me, the atmosphere and the nicely managed crescendo”, and that the reader should be “introduced to the actors in a placid way; let us see them going about their ordinary business, undisturbed by forebodings, pleased with their surroundings; and into this calm environment let the ominous thing put out its head, unobtrusively at first, and then more insistently, until it holds the stage.”

The spirits were invariably vengeful and terrifying ones (“amiable and helpful apparitions are all very well in fairy tales or in local legends, but I have no use for them in a fictitious ghost story”).

…It is hoped that a crowd-funded collection of James’s lettersCasting the Runes, reaches its target soon and that it will offer greater insight into the strange and brilliant man who wrote some of the most chilling ghost stories in the English language. 

(7) PAY THE ARTIST. At Literary Hub, William Deresiewicz contends “We Need to Treat Artists as Workers, Not Decorations” – a statelier approach to what Harlan Ellison ranted about in “Pay the Writer”.

Art and money: the great taboo. Art, we’ve been taught to believe, has nothing to do with money, must have nothing to do with money, is defiled by contact with money, is degraded by the very thought of money.

Those ideas, articles of faith today, are actually of relatively recent birth. In the Renaissance, when artists were still regarded as artisans, no one thought twice about exchanging art for cash. It was only in modernity that the notion arose that art and commerce were mutually exclusive.

As traditional beliefs broke down across the 18th and 19th centuries, art inherited the role of faith, becoming a kind of secular creed for the progressive classes. Like religion before it, art was now regarded as superior to worldly things, and you cannot serve both God and mammon.

As with art, so with artists, the new priests and prophets. It was modernity that gave us the bohemian, the starving artist, and the solitary genius, images respectively of blissful unconventionality, monkish devotion, and spiritual election. Artistic poverty was seen as glamorous, an outward sign of inner purity.

To these ideas, the 20th century added an overtly political and specifically anti-capitalist dimension. Art did not just stand outside the market; it was meant to oppose it: to join, if not to lead, the social revolution, which first of all would be a revolution of consciousness. To seek acceptance in the market was to be “co-opted”; to chase material rewards, to be a “sellout.”

Such ideas are as fervently held among laypeople as they are among artists—if anything, more so. We don’t want the artists we love to think about money, and we don’t want to think about them thinking about it.

…The number of the people I interviewed told me about having suffered, early on, because they had swallowed the myths about starving artists who never think about money and would rather die than compromise their vision for the suits. And because writers and other artists do create for non-material reasons, I was told by Mark Coker, the founder of the e-book distribution platform Smashwords, “these people are ripe for being exploited.”

That exploitation can take many forms: from outright theft, to self-sabotage, to the monetization of digital content without appropriate compensation, to the underpayment by arts organizations, including nonprofits, of the artists who work for them. But at its root is the perception that artists shouldn’t ask for money in the first place—that, as another of my subjects put it, “art should just be art.”

(8) THREE DAYS AGO’S DAY

December 8 — PRETEND TO BE A TIME TRAVELER DAY. The National Day Calendar offers these suggestions:

HOW TO OBSERVE #PretendToBeATimeTravelerDay

Act like a time traveler.  Choose your time period and decide whether you are traveling to the past or the future. Be overly shocked when someone says, “I’d kill for a double mocha latte right now,” or “That car is the bomb.” Misuse technology. When someone offers you earbuds to listen to a new song, sniff them to see if they smell good.

Do you need inspiration for your time traveling antics? We have 9 Books to Unleash the Time Traveler in You. Some of them are mentioned above, but this list will give you some insight to the stories and help you take the deep dive into the world time traveling for the true enthusiast.

(9) TODAY IN HISTORY.

December 11, 1929  — On this date in 1929, American fandom has its beginnings in New York City with the first meeting of the Scienceers who were the first local sf club in the United States. (Science Correspondence Club in Montgomery, Alabama is claimed by others as starting earlier.) It is worth noting that the first president of that Club was Warren Fitzgerald who was Black, a rarity in the early days of fandom, and they met at his apartment in Harlem. The group formed as a result of their correspondence in Science Wonder Stories which was edited by Hugo Gernsback. Timebinders has a history of that Club here as it appeared in Joe Christoff’s Sphere fanzine. “History of the Scienceers, the First New York City Science Fiction Club, 1929 – by Allen Glasser”.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born December 11, 1803 – Hector Berlioz. Graduated from medical school but never practiced; instead famed as a composer (and, during his life, conductor); also substantial author of music criticism, theory, memoirs.  Prix de Rome.  Legion of Honor.  Here for the Symphonie fantastiqueDamnation de FaustLe Troyens.  Star-rated Wikipedia entry.  Website.  (Died 1869) [JH]
  • Born December 11, 1904 – Marge.  Although M.H. Buell created Little Lulu, made LL such a national figure that LL was adopted as the Kleenex mascot, and retained artistic control during M’s life, in fairness to John Stanley the fantasy elements of LL, like Witch Hazel and Sammi the Martian, are JS’ work.  Here is M’s cover for King Kojo.  Here is The Wizard of Way-Up.  (Died 1993) [JH]
  • Born December 11, 1921 – Bill Terry.  A dozen covers for Imagination, three hundred interiors for Imagination and Imaginative Tales.  Here is the Jan 52 Imagination.  Here is the Aug 54.  Here is the Aug 55. Here is an interior for “The Voyage of Vanishing Men”.  Here is an interior for “The War of Nerves”.  (Died 1992) [JH]
  • Born December 11, 1922 Maila Nurmi. A Finnish-American actress and television personality who was the campy Fifties title character on Vampira. She hosted her own series, The Vampira Show for a year on KABC-TV and later in Vampira Returns. She’d show up in Plan 9 from Outer Space, and in The Magic Sword as The Hag / Sorceress. She played Vampira once more in the Horror Kung-Fu Theatre series. (Died 2008.) (CE) 
  • Born December 11, 1926 Dick Tufeld. His best known role, or at least best recognized, Is as the voice of the Robot on Lost in Space, a role he reprises for the feature film. The first words heard on Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea are spoken by him: “This is the Seaview, the most extraordinary submarine in all the seven seas.” He’s been the opening announcer on Spider-Man and His Amazing FriendsSpider-WomanThundarr the BarbarianFantastic Four and the Time Tunnel. (Died 2012.) (CE) 
  • Born December 11, 1940 – Fred Patten. This amazing astounding fan had an issue of his zine ¡Rábanos Radiactivos! in every distribution (weekly!) of APA-L from its beginning to APA-L 2280 – more than forty years.  Developing an interest in animé he co-founded the Cartoon Fantasy Organization; he became a scholar of anthropomorphic graphic art.  He edited his local club’s fanzine Shangri L’Affaires when it was a Hugo finalist; chaired Loscon XIV and Westercon 27; was Fan Guest of Honor at DeepSouthCon 9 and Loscon 33 (some use Roman numerals, some don’t).  My appreciation is here.  (Died 2018) [JH]
  • Born December 11, 1957 William Joyce, 62. Author of the YA series Guardians of Childhood which is currently at twelve books and growing. Now I’ve no interest in reading them but Joyce and Guillermo del Toro turned them into in a rather splendid Rise of the Guardians film which I enjoyed quite a bit. The antagonist in it reminds me somewhat of a villain later on In Willingham’s Fables series called Mr. Dark.  Michael Toman in an email says that “I’ve been watching for his books since reading Dinosaur Bob and His Adventures with the Family Lazardo back in 1988.” (CE) 
  • Born December 11, 1959 M. Rickert, 61. Short story writer par excellence. She’s got three collections to date, Map of DreamsHoliday and You Have Never Been Here. I’ve not read her novel The Memory Garden, and would like your opinions on it. She has won two World Fantasy Awards, one for her short story, “Journey Into the Kingdom”, and one for her short story collection, “Map of Dreams”. The Little Witch is the only work available from the usual digital suspects.  (CE) 
  • Born December 11, 1962 Ben Browder, 58. Actor of course best known for his roles as John Crichton in Farscape and Cameron Mitchell in Stargate SG-1.  One of my favorite roles by him was his voicing of Bartholomew Aloysius “Bat” Lash in Justice League Unlimited called “The Once and Future Thing, Part 1”.  He’d have an appearance in the Eleventh Doctor story, “A Town Called Mercy,” a Weird Western of sorts. (CE) 
  • Born December 11, 1965 Sherrilyn Kenyon, 55. Best for her Dark Hunter series which runs to around thirty volumes now. I confess I’ve not read any, so I’m curious as to how they are. Opinions? (Of course you do. Silly me. How could you not have them.)  She’s got The League series as well which appears to be paranormal romance, and a Lords of Avalon series too under the pen name of Kinley MacGregor.  (CE) 
  • Born December 11, 1971 – Laini Taylor, age 49.  Seven novels, five shorter stories.  Printz Honor, Bradshaw Award.  I heard she’d read Leviathan, but it proved not to be Hobbes’, it was Scott Westerfeld’s, so we don’t have that in common after all.  Days of Blood and Starlight was a NY Times Best-Seller.  [JH]
  • Born December 11, 1981 – Natasha Larry, age 39.  Three novels, two shorter stories.  Of herself she says “She has an M.A. in American History, making her a professional cynic…. curses too much….  DC comics fangirl, or fanatic.”  [JH]

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • Sally Forth has a friend who’s having no luck looking for a portal.

(12) SPOT FINDS A NEW HOME. “Hyundai takes control of Boston Dynamics in $1.1B deal”The Verge has the story.

Hyundai is officially purchasing a controlling stake in robot maker Boston Dynamics from SoftBank in a deal that values the company at $1.1 billion, the company announced today. The deal has been in the works for a while, according to recent a report from Bloomberg, and marks a major step into consumer robotics for Hyundai. Hyundai is taking approximately an 80 percent stake in the company while its previous owner, Softbank, will retain around 20 percent through an affiliate.

… Boston Dynamics started as a spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The company has created robots using DARPA funding, like BigDog, but is best known for the viral fame its robots have found online. Its two main stars have been Atlas, a humanoid bipedal robot that can run and do backflips, and Spot, a smaller quadrupedal “dog” that’s been tested in a variety of scenarios, from sheep herding to assisting health care workers during the pandemic

(13) BATWOMAN CONTINUES. The CW dropped a trailer for Batwoman season 2. Premieres Sunday, January 17.

(14) FIVE BOOKS. Elle collected “Alice Hoffman’s Book Recommendations”. Hoffman’s latest book is Magic Lessons, the prequel to Practical Magic.

…The book that…

…shaped my worldview:

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury. Every 12- or 13-year-old should read it. It’s magic.

…fills me with hope:

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. If you think you know what fate has in store for you, read this book.

(15) DEAR SANTA. Helen Thomas dispenses “Tips and Tricks When Writing to St. Nick” illustrated by plenty of classic clippings from the Library of Congress.

How do you get what you want for Christmas? Write a letter to Santa, of course! Combing through “Dear Santa” letters published in historical newspapers, you can glean tips and tricks on how to write a letter of your own.

A close examination of hundreds of “Dear Santa” letters suggests there are several approaches to writing Jolly Old St. Nick:

(16) EVERYBODY NEDS A HOBBY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] A video on YouTube called “Meet The Record Breakers: Rob Hull — Owner of the Largest Collection of Daleks” from the 2012 edition of the Guinness Book Of World Records, is about someone who is officially certified as owning more Daleks than anyone else – 571. There was a reference to this guy in the Financial Times and, as you say, it was news to me!

(17) BE THE MUSIC OF THE SEASON. Jingle Jangle is a holiday-themed fantasy on Netflix. You’re invited to sing along with the cast in this video.

Welcome to the Jingle Jangle Christmas Journey Global Sing Along. The cast, special guests, and fans alike to come together for this truly magical event. Get ready to hear some of your favorite songs like you have never heard them before featuring the stars of the film, some of the best singers on Broadway, choir singers from across the country, Tik Tok stars, and most importantly…YOU!

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, Mike Kennedy, John Hertz, Cat Eldridge, Brian Z., Martin Morse Wooster, Daniel Dern, and JJ for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Joe H.]

Pixel Scroll 11/4/20 With A Goldfinger In My Eye

(1) JEMISIN FEATURED. “2020 National Book Festival Highlights: N.K. Jemisin” has a video of her talk with a companion post by Guy Lamolinara, communications officer in the Center for the Book. (The video is also available on YouTube.)

Although N.K. Jemisin’s “The City We Became” (Orbit) is a fantasy novel set in New York City, its message is anything but a fantasy.

Jemisin says in her video recorded for the 2020 National Book Festival: “I think the thing that people will hopefully begin to take from the book, if they want to take anything from it, is that when people work together they are literally able to do just about anything — and that’s the struggle that we’re having right now as a country.”

(2) FINANCAL HELP NEEDED. Adam-Troy and Judi Castro say they have been “Wiped out by Identity Theft” and have launched an appeal for help through GoFundMe. At this hour, $15,990 of the $20,000 goal has been raised. Judi Castro explains:

Over the past year or so, Adam and I have been slapping out little embers here and there as our credit and debit cards were attacked. Usually little things that the banks quickly fixed.

The little attacks ended a few months ago.

Suddenly, large amounts were being transferred out of our accounts (multiple) seemingly as fast as they were deposited. We sat with the bank, took all the steps to protect ourselves. Reported to all the right agencies, filed reports with the authorities etc. We’ve changed accounts, banks and debit cards multiple times. But. They. Kept. Finding. Us.

Now the home has been taken and we are being forced to move.

It’s all been too much so we are turning to our friends and neighbors for help.

We thank you all for listening and will keep updates flowing.

(3) HUMBLE BUNDLE FOR SFWA. The new Humble Bundle campaign to benefit SFWA, Stars Of Sci-Fi & Fantasy By Open Road Media, is heavy on Shatner and Piers Anthony, but there are also many other authors including Jane Yolen, Tim Powers, Timothy Zahn, and Pamela Sargent.

(4) WHAT DO YOU RECOMMEND? James Davis Nicoll is looking for your sf suggestions – add them in the comments section of “Reviving a 15 yr old John Scalzi thread in modified form”.

(Modified because the thread is 15 yrs old):

Good, recent science fiction for people who don’t read science fiction.

A: Audience is adult, intelligent, and literate.
B: No YA
C: No books before 2010.
D: Book has to be primarily SF, not fantasy.
E: Recommend a book that you would actually recommend to someone.

(5) BOTH SIDES NOW. In The Press and Journal: “Lost letters: The friendship between JM Barrie and Robert Louis Stevenson”.

…And although JM Barrie and Robert Louis Stevenson never met, they developed a warm friendship, engaged in a long-distance exchange of letters between Britain and the Pacific Islands, and have left behind a treasure trove of playful and poignant missives.

… The latter is a particularly evocative piece because he had intended to travel to Samoa to meet Stevenson, only for the latter to suffer a fatal cerebral haemorrhage at the age of just 44 in 1894.

Yet, as Dr Shaw revealed, all this material had lain in an American library for decades until he carried out some detective work which was worthy of one of Barrie’s contemporaries – and cricket teammates – Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes.

…In one letter, Stevenson writes that Barrie had the second-worst handwriting he had ever encountered, but that’s as far as the criticism goes.

Elsewhere, the tone is, by turns, witty, competitive, enlightening, analytic and often highly personal in nature.

Dr Shaw said: “I was initially intrigued by the length of their letters, especially towards the end of correspondence and some of them run to around 3,000 words.

“Stevenson’s friend, Sidney Colvin, described one of them as a ‘journal letter’ which is a good description.

“I was also intrigued by Barrie including a playlet in four acts in one letter – where he imagines his visit to Samoa – and a humorous family tree, showing that his and Stevenson’s characters were related….”

(6) STOP HELPING. A trailer has dropped for the sff film Parallel.

A group of friends stumble upon a mirror that serves as a portal to a “multiverse”, but soon discover that importing knowledge from the other side in order to better their lives brings increasingly dangerous consequences.

(7) MEDIA ANNIVERSARY.

  • November 2006 In the Night Garden, the first volume of Catherynne Valente’s The Orphan’s Tales was published by Bantam Spectra. The novel and its sequel, In the Cities of Coin and Spice, would both win the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature. Both volumes are copiously illustrated by Michael Kaluta. She would also win an Otherwise Award that year. It would also be nominated for a World Fantasy Award. Both volumes are available at the usual digital suspects. 

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born November 4, 1897 Lionel Britton. Actor who’s best remembered for the “Spacetime Inn” play, a genre pub tale which, because one of the characters is Queen Victoria, was denied a UK theatre performance license. It was however performed by him playing all the parts in the House of Commons on the 10th of June 1931. Really. Truly. It’s the only play ever done there. (Died 1971.) (CE)
  • Born November 4, 1912 – Wendayne Ackerman.  Born in Germany, spoke French, German, Hebrew, Italian, and Spanish.  Dubbed Wendayne by husband Forrest J Ackerman (no period after the J; so far as I know, no United Kingdom or Commonwealth fan, where this punctuation mark has a different name, ever asked “Forry, where’s the point?”).  Taught French and German twenty years at East Los Angeles Junior College.  Translated many Perry Rhodan books.  With Forry, Fan Guests of Honor at Rhocon and Fantasy Faire VII.  (Died 1990) [JH]
  • Born November 4, 1917 Babette Rosmond. She worked as an editor at the magazine publisher Street & Smith, editing Doc Savage and The Shadow in the late Forties. Rosmond’s first story, co-written by Leonard M. Lake, “Are You Run-Down, Tired-“ was published in in the October 1942 issue of Unknown WorldsError Hurled was her only genre novel and she only write three short genre pieces. (Died 1997.) (CE) 
  • Born November 4, 1934 – Greg Calkins.  Long in FAPA, served a term as its President, succeeding Our Gracious Host.  Fanzine, The Rambling Fap.  Fan Guest of Honor at Westercon 29.   (I believe he died 2014-2015, but haven’t yet been able to confirm.)  [JH]
  • Born November 4, 1946 – Mike Shupp, 74.  Aerospace engineer.  Chaired Loscon 7.  Five novels. Biographers beware, he is neither the singer-songwriter MS nor the retired colonel of U.S. Marines.  [JH]
  • Born November 4, 1953 Stephen Jones, 67. Editor, and that is putting it quite mildly, as he went well over the century mark in anthologies edited quite some time ago. The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror accounts for seventeen volumes by itself and The Mammoth Book of (Pick A Title) runs for at least another for another dozen. He also, no surprise, to me, has authored a number of horror reference works such as The Art of Horror Movies: An Illustrated HistoryBasil Copper: A Life in Books and H. P. Lovecraft in Britain. He also done hundreds of essays, con reports, obituaries and such, showing up, well, just about everywhere. (CE) 
  • Born November 4, 1953 Kara Dalkey, 67. Writer of YA fiction and historical fantasy. She is a member of the Pre-Joycean Fellowship (which if memory serves me right includes both Emma Bull and Stephen Brust) and the Scribblies. Her works include The Sword of SagamoreSteel RoseLittle Sister and The Nightingale. And her Water trilogy blends together Atlantean and Arthurian mythologies. She’s been nominated for the Mythopoeic and Otherwise Awards. (CE)
  • Born November 4, 1955 Lani Tupu, 65. He had two roles on the Farscape series (arguably the best SF series ever done), one visible and one not. He was Peacekeeper  Bialar Crais  and the voice of Pilot as well. Genre wise, he also showed up on Time TraxThe Lost World and Mission: Impossible. He was also in the first Punisher film. (CE) 
  • Born November 4, 1959 – Alan Winston, 61.  Chaired Loscon 6.  Learned English Regency ballroom dance from J. Hertz, was one of the Avengers; moved to San Francisco Bay; taught (almost) JH Regency-style choreography “Mutual Promises” at a Playford Ball; active in that hobby.  Has been in every mailing of LASFAPA since the first, a commendable string of 529 months so far.  [JH]
  • Born November 4, 1960 John Vickery, 60. In Babylon 5, he played Neroon which is where I remember him from as he was a Right Bastard there.  His major Trek universe role was as Rusot, a member of Damar’s Cardassian resistance group, appearing in the DS9 episodes “The Changing Face of Evil”, “When It Rains…” and “Tacking Into the Wind”.  He also played a Betazoid in Next Gen’s “Night Terrors” and a Klingon in Enterprise‘s “Judgment” episode. (CE)
  • Born November 4, 1964 – Kerry Kyle, 56.  Daughter of David, the Man in the Red Jacket as he became in recent years.  KK and Brian Pearce run Red Jacket Press; you can see Dave’s fanhistory articles in Mimosa and get some of his and related books (his fine Pictorial History of SF and Illustrated Book of SF Ideas & Dreams are available, used, from Amazon and from Powell’s Books, as also shown here).  [JH].  
  • Born November 4, 1986 – Kristin Cast, 34.  A score of books, four novellas with her mother; three novels, two novelettes alone; a NY Times and USA Today best-seller.  Born on a U.S. Air Force base in Japan.  “Writing is the most difficult job I’ve had…. it all comes down to one person – YOU….  Read.  Read.  Read….  Think of each book … as a lesson….  I highlight words I love or don’t know, figurative language that inspires me….  I know … authors who don’t outline…. who handwrite their first drafts.  Outline, chart, crazy math equations, I’ve seen it all.”  [JH]

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) SAVE THE DALEKS? Comicbooks.com tees up the “Doctor Who Time Lord Victorious Trailer”.

Doctor Who: Time Lord Victoriousthe epic Doctor Who transmedia event, is in full swing. Titan Comics released a trailer for its part in the story. Titan’s trailer spotlights the Doctor Who: Time Lord Victorious graphic novel, collecting issues #1 and #2 of the Time Lord Victorious comic book that began the event. The comic features the most beloved Doctor, the Tenth Doctor (portrayed by David Tennant), for a story written by Jody Houser and featuring artwork by Roberta Ingranata. The tale is titled “Defender of the Daleks.” As the title suggests, the story finds the Doctor in a most unusual position: coming to the aid of his greatest enemies, the Daleks. 

(11) OUT OF THE PARK EXPERIENCE. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] Michael Clair, in “Seven Baseball Movies Perfect For a Midnight Marathon” on MLB.com, recommends seven off-trail baseball movies most of which combine the great game of baseball with fantasy and horror.  These include The Battery, in which a pitcher and catcher flee a zombie apocalpyse, and the anthology film Body Bags (1993), whose third segment, directed by Tobe Hooper, has Mark Hamill as a minor-league player about to be called up to the majors, except he has an accident and needs an eye transplant… and the eyes come from a serial killer!

SJWs will want to see Rhubarb, a 1951 film in which the owner of the Brooklyn Loons dies and leaves the team to his cat.  The film features a very early appearance by Leonard Nimoy.

Clair notes that Twilight, for some reason, has six minutes of baseball in it.

(12) SAD PUPPY LOCKED OUT OF HOUSE. Sff author, Sad Puppy, and Libertarian Party candidate Lou Antonelli has lost his bid for election to the U.S. House to represent Texas’ 4th Congressional District. He placed third in the general election on November 3, 2020.

(13) MANDALORIAN MATCH. “Quiz: Which Character From The Mandalorian Are You?” — the Star Wars blog invites you to find out.

I’m Greef Karga. (Hey, don’t look like that’s a bad thing!)

To celebrate the all-new episodes of the live-action Star Wars series, we’ve created a new quiz to help you determine your place in the story so far. Are you the hero of it all, masked and mysterious, with armor that conceals a heart of gold? A kid at heart no matter your age? Do you follow the rules of the Empire or stick to the bounty hunter’s code?

(14) PWNED TO KING FOUR. Deep Blue: Down the Rabbit Hole is an in-depth documentary on the Deep Blue versus Garry Kasparov computer chess matches of 1996-7

After an electrical engineer enters the field of computer chess, his creation captures the attention of the world as he attempts to defeat the world chess champion.

(15) MAG FORCE. “Not aliens: Mysterious burst of radio waves traced to a magnetar reports the LA Times.

…Scientists have known about these energetic pulses — called fast radio bursts — for about 13 years and have seen them coming from outside our galaxy, which makes it harder to trace them back to their source. Making it even harder is that they happen so fast, in a couple of milliseconds.

Then in April, a rare but considerably weaker burst coming from inside our own Milky Way galaxy was spotted by two distinct telescopes: one a Caltech graduate student’s set of handmade antennas, which included actual cake pans, the other a $20-million Canadian observatory.

They tracked that fast radio burst to a weird type of star called a magnetar that’s 32,000 light-years from Earth, according to four studies published Wednesday in the journal Nature….

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “All things Fall–3D Printed Zoetrope” on Vimeo is a 2015 interpretation by Mat Collishaw of a nineteenth-century form of animation. WARNING: Shows violence against women.

[Thanks to JJ, John King Tarpinian, Michael Toman, Dann, N., Lise Andreasen, Martin Morse Wooster, John Hertz, Cat Eldridge, Darrah Chavey, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel “Good as Gold” Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 10/28/20 No Mr. Bond, I Expect You To Scroll Pixels!

(1) FRENCH LOCKDOWN. Utopiales, the International Science Fiction Festival of Nantes (France), scheduled for this weekend, was cancelled following today’s announcement by the French president of a new nationwide lockdown.

BBC explains:

French President Emmanuel Macron has announced a second national lockdown until at least the end of November.

Mr Macron said that under the new measures, starting on Friday, people would only be allowed to leave home for essential work or medical reasons.

Non-essential businesses, such as restaurants and bars, will close, but schools and factories will remain open.

Covid daily deaths in France are at the highest level since April. On Tuesday, 33,000 new cases were confirmed.

Mr Macron said the country risked being “overwhelmed by a second wave that no doubt will be harder than the first”.

The Utopiales committee said:

…Maintaining a cultural offering is essential. That’s why we made a commitment to the end and if we had it do over we would do it again. However, everyone’s health is at the moment a top priority we must implement the decisions of the authorities.

(2) EXPLICATE!  Camestros Felapton created a photo gallery of “Some buildings that look like Daleks”

…So is it worth pointing out that the NZ parliament building has a distinct resemblance to a Dalek and surely that tells you a lot about that nation? 

(3) REVERSE THE POLARITY. Fast Company explains how “This incredible Google experiment lets you time travel to your hometown 200 years ago” – always assuming there was a there there two hundred years ago. Quite likely in 1820 there was nothing but bushes in my California neighborhood.

In the 20 years he’d lived in New York, Raimondas Kiveris had seen the city change immensely. “It was a completely different place, a different town,” says Kiveris, a software engineer at Google Research. This got him wondering what his neighborhood looked like even before that—before he’d lived there, before he’d even been born. “There’s really no easy way to find that information in any organized way,” he says. “So I was starting to think, can we somehow enable this kind of virtual time travel?”

Three years later, his attempt at virtual time travel is taking shape as an open-source map that can show, in both a bird’s-eye view and a pedestrian-level view, the changes that happen to city streetscapes over time. With a slider to control the year, the map displays a historically accurate representation of development in almost any U.S. city dating back to 1800. Automatically generated 3D models of buildings rise from the landscape as the slider moves forward through time. It can even show a rough estimation of what a city would have looked like from the pedestrian’s view, like a low-res Google Street View.

… The map was created using historical fire insurance maps, a rich source of information for the built environment that includes precise information about building ages, sizes, heights, roof shapes, and even materials. The map creates simplified 3D models of these buildings, and the time slider allows a user to see, for example, Washington, D.C.’s Dupont Circle nearly devoid of buildings in the 1870s and almost fully developed in the 1920s….

(4) CAMPAIGNING IN A SWING SHIRE. At McSweeney’s, Keith Rubin serves up a stack of “Political Fundraising Emails From Middle-Earth”.

Hi Bungo,

Have you heard the good news??? Will Whitfoot is SURGING in the latest polls! This is our chance to FINALLY elect a hobbit who TRULY loves banquets as Mayor of the Shire…. 

(5) HORROR TO TAKE YOUR MIND OFF THE ELECTION. The Washington Post’s Michael Dirda suggests some things to read over the next few days: “For Halloween: a critic’s pick of macabre treats for your library” .

…Consider, for example, “British Weird: Selected Short Fiction, 1893-1937,” edited by James Machin, which features not only classic stories — including Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows” and E.F. Benson “Caterpillars”— but also less familiar ones such as Mary Butts’s “Mappa Mundi.” As an extra treat Machin reprints Butts’s four-part 1933 essay, “Ghosties and Ghoulies: Uses of the Supernatural in English Fiction,” likening it to H.P. Lovecraft’s pioneering monograph, “Supernatural Horror in Literature.”

(6) DEATH WILL NOT RELEASE YOU. Despite the title, “Richard Lupoff: A Remembrance”, Ted White’s piece for the Comics Journal is mainly about his own place in fanhistory, and a chance to rehearse his unhealed wounds.

… Dick had typed up the stencils for the first issue of his new fanzine, Xero. At his request, I took the subway to Pacific Avenue in Brooklyn, to a warehouse business called Pace Paper, and bought the required reams of mimeo paper for Xero. The first issue of Xero was thin, compared to subsequent issues, and memory tells me that the Lupoffs wrote most of it. Certainly the centerpiece of the issue was Dick’s piece of comic-book nostalgia about “The Big Red Cheese,” the original Captain Marvel.

No one then realized the subsequent impact of that piece. It didn’t create comics fandom – which already existed – but it helped galvanize it. It sparked a wave of nostalgic interest in comics, mostly as relics of childhood, now fondly remembered, in SF fandom. SF fans had broad interests. Music was one, and comics turned out to be another.

In 1960, some of us had been comics fans for years. My friend Bhob Stewart created EC fandom with his fanzine, The EC Fan Bulletin. Bhob joined forces with Larry Stark and me to publish Potrzebie during the latter days of EC. EC fandom overlapped a lot with SF fandom, with some EC fans like Mike May becoming SF fans. Don and Maggie Thompson were SF fans who became comics fans around 1960.

This was the pot that Dick Lupoff stirred up.

I wrote the comics piece for Xero #2, “The Spawn of M.C. Gaines,” an overly broad overview of the creation of comic books and superheroes. (I totally rewrote it for its book publication, focusing only on Superman and Batman.) The comics pieces in Xero were published under the running head, “All In Color For a Dime” and the series took off, with many fans clamoring to write pieces about their childhood favorite comics. One of them was Harlan Ellison, who was living just up my block at the time.

I mimeographed at least the first three issues of Xero, and had at Dick’s request purchased the paper for the next issue when Dick did something I have never understood. Covertly, secretly, he arranged with friends living on Staten Island to mimeograph that and subsequent issues. I found out only when presented with a copy of the new issue.…

(7) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.

October 28, 1994 Stargate premiered. It’d be a runner-up at Intersection to Star Trek: The Next Generation’s  “All Good Things…” which won the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form. It was directed by Roland Emmerich and produced by Dean Devlin, Oliver Eberle and Joel B. Michaels. It was written by Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin.  Principal cast was Kurt Russell, James Spader, Jaye Davidson and Viveca Lindfors.  It was a box office success despite the critics generally not being overly fond of it. Currently it holds a rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes of an excellent 73%. 

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge ad John Hertz]

  • Born October 28, 1818 – Ivan Turgenev.  This great Russian master (most noted for Fathers and Sons) left a dozen short stories for us.  Even Tolstoy – who once challenged IT to a duel, but withdrew – left five.  See e.g. The Mysterious Tales of IT (R. Dessaix tr. 1979).  (Died 1883) [JH]
  • Born October 28, 1903 – Evelyn Waugh.  Two novels, a dozen shorter stories for us, by another author famous otherwise, possibly great.  Here is his own cover for Vile Bodies.  Here is his cover for a chapbook of “Love Among the Ruins”.  Was his best the biographies of Helena (248-330) and Ronald Knox (1888-1957)?  (Died 1966) [JH]
  • Born October 28, 1939 Jane Alexander, 81. She’s resistance fighter Virginia in Terminator Salvation, and has shown up in a number of genre series including playing C. on Elementary, Nora Morgan in an episode of Forever, and a recurring role as Klara on the intriguing sounding Tales from the Loop web series. She has several horror creds to her name as well, including Dr. Grasnik in The Ring and Sofi Kozma in The Unborn. (CE) 
  • Born October 28, 1951 Joe Lansdale, 69. Writer and screenwriter whose DCU Jonah Hex animated screenplays are far superior to the live action Hex film. Bubba Ho-Tep, an American comedy horror film starring Bruce Campbell, is his best known genre work though he has done a number of another works including The God of The Razor and Reverend Jedidiah Mercer series which are definitely Weird Westerns.  (CE)
  • Born October 28, 1952 Anne Potts, 68. Janine Melnitz in the still best Ghostbusters and in Ghostbusters II as well. She has a cameo as Vanessa the hotel clerk in the Ghostbusters reboot. She listed as reprising her original role in the forthcoming Ghostbusters Afterlife which I’ll freely admit I know nothing about but which apparently has most of the original cast. (CE) 
  • Born October 28, 1958 Amy Thomson, 62. Writer of four novels over a decade some twenty years ago including Virtual Girl. She won the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. She published one piece of short fiction, “The Ransom of Princess Starshine”, in 2017 in Stupefying Stories edited by Bruce Bethke. (CE)
  • Born October 28, 1962 – Jean-Jacques Chaubin, 58.  Jewelry stylist with Van Cleef & Arpels; then comics, video games (including the 1992 Dune), computer graphics; fifty book covers.  Here is The End of Time, and After.  Here is A Hint of Nothingness.  Here is Galaxies 5.  Here is The Armies of Daylight.  [JH]
  • Born October 28, 1967 – Christopher Ecker, 53.  Author, translator, teacher, critic.  For us two novels, ninety shorter stories, a hundred sixty poems.  Friedrich Hebbel Prize, Saarland Art Prize.  His thousand-page novel Fahlmann (not “the pale man”, it’s the protagonist’s name) is “one of the most excessive reading adventures that contemporary German literature has to offer” – the Hebbel jury really said exzessivsten, I can’t help it.  Ulrich Commerçon, Saarland Minister of Education & Culture, said Ecker wonderfully combines fantasy and a philosophical world view, not forgetting wit.  [JH]
  • Born October 28, 1967 Julia Roberts, 53. How can I resist giving Birthday Honors to Tinker Bell in Hook? Not to mention she was in the seriously weird Flatliners that I saw at a virtually empty theater. Of course, there’s the ever weirder Mary Reilly with her in the title role. For something more charming, she voiced Charlotte the Spider in Charlotte‘s Web. I’m going to skip her as a Smurf I think… (CE)
  • Born October 28, 1974 – Ruth Ann Nordin, 46.  Almost a hundred books by now.  “One day, while browsing through the library, it suddenly occurred to me that if I wanted to read the book I had in mind, I was going to have to write it.  I’ve been writing ever since.”  Mostly romances, Western, Regency, modern.  Ann’s Quest to Be Queen and sequels (she becomes queen of the distant planet Raz), and five others, are ours.  When RAN apologized “I did not do as thorough a job of editing as I do today with my editor and three proofreaders.  I can’t go back and edit those books … I lost control of them,” she drew a comment “As always, you underestimate your talent.”  [JH]
  • Born October 28, 1982 Matt Smith, 38. The Eleventh Doctor, my third favorite of the modern Doctors, and he’s also Alex in Terminator Genisys, a film I’ve not seen. He’s also Jim in the quite excellent Sally Lockhart Mysteries: The Ruby in the Smoke based off the Philip Pullman novels.(CE) 
  • Born October 28, 1989 – Heather Frost, 31.  Her Seers and two sequels are for us, plus a prequel in her collection Asides.  She owns two typewriters and holds Lord of the Rings movie marathons.  Mansfield Park and Harold and the Purple Crayon are two of her favorite books, so we agree there (not meaning the typewriters).  [JH]

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • The Far Side witnesses an alien spacecraft’s distress call.

(10) WHO’D HAVE THOUGHT? Leading off AbeBooks’ “Most Expensive Sales from July to September 2020” is a copy of Michael Crichton’s The Lost World – which went for $25,000!

An unread, as new first edition complete with its dust jacket. The book is signed by Steven Spielberg, special effects director Stan Winston, and 10 actors from the film adaption of this novel – Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore, Vince Vaughn, Pete Postlethwaite, Peter Stormare, Harvey Jason, Richard Schiff, Arliss Howard, Vanessa Chester, and Thomas F. Duffy. Published in 1995, the novel was the sequel to Crichton’s 1990 bestseller Jurassic Park. The Lost World was adapted for cinema in 1997.

(11) WINNING THE PLANET SERIES. I’m a lifelong Dodger fan (I remember hearing “We’re going to Milwaukee!” on TV in 1959) yet I never knew ‘til this morning that pitcher Clayton Kershaw’s Uncle Clyde discovered Pluto: “Clayton Kershaw Still Isn’t As Cool As His Great-Uncle” at Central Track.

…It was a hell of a moment for sure — a coronation fit for a king, and an accomplishment Kershaw’s extended family will surely brag on for generations to come.

On the other hand: Kershaw’s great-uncle Clyde Tombaugh is the astronomer who discovered Pluto in 1930, so maybe a World Series win isn’t such a huge deal in the great scheme of things for the Kershaw family tree?

For his part, and to his credit, Kershaw is quite proud of his ancestor’s achievement. After Tombaugh passed in 1997, Kershaw has used his considerable platform to celebrate his great-uncle’s discovery — and to keep championing Pluto’s designation as a full-on planet despite its 2006 downgrading to a “dwarf planet.”

Kershaw first publicly touted his familial connection to Pluto — and his dedication to its former status — in a 2009 online fan Q&A with ESPNLosAngeles. Then, in 2015, he discussed it during an interview on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, doubling down on his stance and even sharing a little insight into his family’s thoughts on the matter.

“It’s something that’s been a huge problem in the Kershaw/Tombaugh family for a couple of years now,” he said when Kimmel broached the subject. “My great uncle discovered Pluto. I know that sounds like a joke when it comes out, but it’s true. Clyde Tombaugh, [my] great uncle, discovered Pluto. And they took it away from us — said it’s a dwarf planet now. What scientists just decide to just get in a room one day and say, ‘Oh, you know, we’re out with Pluto’?”

(12) AIN’T EASY BEING MRS. GREEN. The Nerdist shows examples as “Artist Turns THE MUPPETS Into Famous Horror Movie Characters”.

The collection includes:

–Gonzo as Jason Voorhees, with Camilla as Mrs. Voorhees
–Fozzie as Freddy Krueger
–Miss Piggy as Carrie White
–Kermit as Norman Bates
–Beaker as Michael Myers, with Dr. Bunson Honeydew as Dr. Loomis
–Swedish Chef as Leatherface
–Animal as Buffalo Bill
–Rowlf as Hannibal Lecter
–Sam the Eagle as Pinhead
–Scooter as Chucky
–Electric Mayhem as Capt. Spaulding and the Firefly Family
–Statler and Waldorf as The Grady Twins

(13) GROAN UPS. Polygon’s Emily Heller knows what these books are about: “A Series of Unfortunate Events and the horror of adults being absolute dummies”.

…A Series of Unfortunate Events is often described as surreal and absurdist. Handler has listed Roald Dahl, another children’s author with a darkly whimsical style, as an influence on his work. But while the novels’ world is certainly weird, it’s important that it makes sense within kid logic.

When I was a kid, there were plenty of things that mattered so much to me, but adults just didn’t get it. There were also things that adults seemed to understand implicitly, but didn’t make any sense to me. I was fortunate to grow up in a comfortable, loving home, so those things were very low stakes, but they were very real — and frustrating and anxiety-inducing — in the moment.

A Series of Unfortunate Events reflects that dichotomy back to its young readers. The Baudelaires don’t understand why Justice Strauss can’t just adopt them and are frustrated when no one else seems to recognize Count Olaf under his obvious disguises. It’s an exaggerated version of the truth that every child eventually starts to suspect: adults may not always know what they’re doing.

Lemony Snicket lets children feel like they’re in on a secret. That allows A Series of Unfortunate Events to do what so much good horror fiction does — explore and validate our deepest fears. It also gives readers the tools to deal with that horrifying reality….

(14) UNSATISFIED CUSTOMER. “Kellogg’s Minecraft Creeper Crunch Cereal, Reviewed” at Serious Eats.

…For today’s video, I tried Kellogg’s Minecraft Creeper Crunch cereal. Not only am I old enough to have never played Minecraft, but I had no idea there was this much Minecraft merchandise and branded content. It appears, however, that kids are still crazy about the property, enough so that they’ll want to have a little Minecraft iconography with their breakfast.

The problem is that this cereal, cinnamon-flavored with marshmallows, is not good. It barely tastes like cinnamon, and the marshmallows are flavorless. If Minecraft is a video game about building with digital blocks, then this cereal is like eating those blocks except, I imagine, far less satisfying. These aren’t good as a snack, and the milk isn’t particularly good either. They are, as far as cereal goes, a total failure.

[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, Rich Lynch, Michael Toman, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, JJ, N., Andrew Porter, Mike Kennedy, Contrarius, Michael J. Walsh, and John Hertz for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Olav Rokne.]

Pixel Scroll 10/15/20 The People All Said Sit Down, You’re Rocking The Fabulous Riverboat

(1) BELTERS AND SUSPENDERS. Amazon Prime dropped The Expanse – Season 5 Official Trailer

The future of The Belt has begun as Marco Inaros wages Armageddon against the Inners for a lifetime of oppression and injustice.

(2) NEW MOON TREATIES. In the Washington Post, Christian Davenport says that the U.S. and seven other countries have signed the Artemis Accords which regulate conduct on the Moon including the role private businesses can play in mining and other enterprises: “Seven nations join the U.S. in signing the Artemis Accords, creating a legal framework for behavior in space”.

NASA announced Tuesday that seven nations have joined the United States in signing the Artemis Accords, a series of bilateral agreements that would establish rules for the peaceful use of outer space and govern behavior on the surface of the moon.

The rules would allow private companies to extract lunar resources, create safety zones to prevent conflict and ensure that countries act transparently about their plans in space and share their scientific discoveries.

… By law, the United States is effectively barred from cooperating with China in space. But NASA officials said that even if Russia and China are not signatories, the accords would be successful because they would create a baseline for the world to follow.

“Precedent is important,” said Mike Gold, NASA’s acting associate administrator for the office of international and interagency relations. “By embracing our values, along with our partners, we’re creating a track record, a norm of behavior that will influence the entire world to proceed with the transparent, peaceful and safe exploration of space.”

Signatories would agree, for example, to help provide emergency assistance in the case of an injured astronaut. They would also agree to protect historic sites, such as the Apollo 11 landing area. They would also agree to be transparent about their plans for space and share scientific data.

The accords would allow countries or companies to create “safety zones” so they could work to extract resources. NASA and China are both interested in going to the South Pole of the moon, where there is water in the form of ice in the shadows of craters.

Being able to operate there safely, without interference, will be critical if multiple nations are vying for the same resource in the same place, he said.

“The most valuable resource that I think any nation is going to be interested in is the water ice at the South Pole,” he said. “So if we get to a position where there is a competition for that resource that’s an area that we’re going to have to deal with.”

(3) TIME TO CAPITALIZE. DisCon III, the 79th Worldcon, officially began taking applications for the Capitalize! fan fund today — application forms are available here. The fund’s purpose is to “financially support fans, staff, and program participants from marginalized communities in an effort to lift voices across science fiction, fantasy, and fandom who have not been recognized in the past.” (More details in this post: “2021 Worldcon Launches Capitalize! The DisCon III Fan Fund”.)

Donations are requested so they can increase their outreach. Jared Dashoff says, “The Worldcon community can only gain by opening its doors and growing. Diversity benefits us all.”

(4) HEAR CORA’S STORY. Cora Buhlert’s short story, “Patient X-5” is now online in the latest episode of the podcast Simultaneous Times: “Space Cowboy Books Presents: Simultaneous Times Ep.32 – Cora Buhlert & Andy Dibble”. She says, “They did a great job with the production. There’s even incidental music and sound effects.”

(5) WHERE BRITISH TOWNSPEOPLE WANT TO SAVE A DALEK. Atlas Obscura looked on in fascination: “When Town Council and a Sci-fi Museum Went to War Over a Dalek”.

IT WAS A COLD JANUARY morning in 2019 when an unfamiliar car rolled into Allendale, a small village nestled within the North Pennines in Northumberland County, England. This wasn’t unusual; in the prior three months the village had seen a fresh influx of visitors, ever since the grand opening of “Neil Cole’s Adventures in Science Fiction: Museum of Sci-fi.” The family-run business, with a menagerie of pop-culture intergalactic friends and foes in an impressive array of classic movie and television props, costumes, and original artwork, wasn’t so much a museum as it was a loving ode to the genre. As odd a choice as the quiet, historically rich Allendale seemed for such a contemporary collection, locals had whole-heartedly embraced the attraction and welcomed the tourism it brought.

The passengers in the vehicle, however, had not come as tourists. “Three huge guys were banging on our door every 15 minutes,” recalls Neil Cole, the eponymous owner, whose personal collection of memorabilia populates the museum. “There was a car watching from across the street. This was the [Northumberland County] Council; it was the first we’d heard from them.” The men, officers from Highways Enforcement, had been sent by the Council to follow up on a complaint that had been lodged against the museum by a single Allendale resident.

Cole and his wife, Lisa, had been accused of defiling their historically listed property by installing a modern timber shed outside it, along the street, without planning permission. They were given 14 days to remove it. This was no ordinary shed: It was home to a life-size Dalek.

Bureaucratic wrangling countered by popular support have put matters on pause while the next round of drama is prepared.

… “The Council was meant to work with me to come up with a solution and build something else,” Cole says. “But when we contacted them, they just wouldn’t.” In early August 2020, the Coles finally dismantled the shed. The loss comes with a silver lining, as the shed will be donated to the village preschool, where it will live on as a play area for children. A weather-resistant steel Dalek is currently being built to take the place of its predecessor as the new museum sentinel, Council be damned.

(6) HANDLE WITH CARE. When picking up some old volumes, collectors might be taking their lives in their hands: “Poison Book Project”.

The Winterthur Poison Book Project is an ongoing investigation initiated in April 2019 to identify potentially toxic pigments coloring Victorian-era bookcloth.

Analysis of decorated, cloth-case, publisher’s bindings at Winterthur Library revealed starch-coated bookcloth colored with “emerald green,” or copper acetoarsenite, an inorganic pigment known to be extremely toxic. This pigment’s popularity in England and the United States during the Victorian era is well documented. While the colorant was known to be widely used in textiles for home decoration and apparel, wallpaper, and toys, its use specifically in bookcloth has not been formally explored. Successful bookcloths were a closely guarded trade secret during the nineteenth century, limiting our current understanding of their materiality and manufacture. Conservation staff and interns at Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library conducted a survey of bookcloth pigments in order to correlate the presence of emerald green and other potentially toxic pigments with specific publishers and date ranges. The project initially focused on the library’s circulating collection, which poses a greater potential risk to patrons, and then expanded to include the rare book collection.

In December 2019, the Winterthur Library data set was further expanded in cooperation with The Library Company of Philadelphia, which has significant holdings of cloth-case publisher’s bindings.

What differentiates this research project from others centered around arsenic-based pigments in library collections is threefold: first, the toxic pigment permeates the outer covering of Victorian-era, cloth-case publisher’s bindings; second, the large quantity of arsenic-based pigment present in bookcloth; and third, such mass-produced bindings may be commonly found in both special and circulating library collections across the United States and the United Kingdom….

(7) YOUTH MOVEMENT. In “Kids And Thrillers And Their Freaky Powers” on CrimeReads, C.J. Tudor recommends novels by Stephen King, Peter Straub, and Justin Cronin if you want to read books about kids with paranormal powers.

A Cosmology of Monsters by Sean Hamill

Noah Turner sees monsters.

So did his dad. In fact, he built a shrine to them, The Wandering Dark, a horror experience that the whole family operates every Halloween.

His mother denies her own glimpses of terror to keep the family from falling apart. But terrible things keep happening, including the death of Noah’s dad, the sudden disappearance of his oldest sister, Sydney, and his sister Eunice’s mental illness, not to mention the missing children from the town.

Then a huge supernatural creature that turns up on Noah’s doorstep one night . . . and Noah lets his monster in. 

(8) GIVE FEEDBACK TO THE WFC BOARD. Cheryl Morgan writes it off as “Another Year, Another World Fantasy Debacle”, however, she hasn’t ruled out participating on the program.  

…As it happens, although I thought I had confirmed my willingness to be on panel, no one from WFC has been in touch to explain about the change of panel description. So now I am not entirely sure whether I am still on panel. In any case, I am considering my position.

But Morgan does advise –

…This is your chance, fandom. You keep complaining that “They” should fix Worldcon, even though you know that there is no “They” with the power to do it, at least not in the short term. “They” should fix World Fantasy too, and in this case They exist. Here they are. They even have a convenient email address for you to write to….

(9) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.

  • 1966 — Frank Herbert’s Dune shared the Best Novel Hugo with  …And Call Me Conrad by Roger Zelazny. It would also win the Nebula that year as well, and a decade later Locus would pick it as the Best All-Time SF Novel. (Runner-ups for the Hugo were John Brunner‘s The Squares of the City, Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Skylark DuQuesne.) The first appearance of “Dune” in print, began in Analog with “Dune World”, December 1963 – February 1964 and then “The Prophet of Dune”, January – May 1965. 

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born October 15, 1919 E.C. Tubb. A writer of at least 140 novels and 230 short stories and novellas, he’s best remembered I think for the Dumarest Saga. His other long running series was the Cap Kennedy stories. And his short story “Little Girl Lost” which was originally published in New Worlds magazine became a story on Night Gallery. He novelized a number of the Space: 1999 episodes. (Died 2010.) (CE) 
  • Born October 15, 1924 Mark Lenard. Sarek, father of Spock, in the Trek franchise for showing up in that role in “Journey to Babel”.  Surprisingly he also played a Klingon in Star Trek The Motion Picture, and a Romulan in an earlier episode of Star Trek. He also had one-offs on Mission ImpossibleWild Wild West,  Otherworld and Planet of The Apes. (Died 1996.) (CE)
  • Born October 15, 1926 Ed McBain. Huh, I never knew he ventured beyond his mystery novels but he published approximately twenty-four genre stories and six SF novels between 1951 and 1971 under the names S. A. Lombino, Evan Hunter, Richard Marsten, D. A. Addams, and Ted Taine. ISFDB has a list and I can’t say I know any of them. Any of y’all read them? (Died 2005.) (CE) 
  • Born October 15, 1954 Jere Burns, 66. I’m giving him a birthday write-up for being on the so excellent Max Headroom as Breughel the organlegger who seizes the unconscious  Edison Carter after his accident. He also had one-offs on Fantasy IslandThe Outer LimitsSabrina the Teenage WitchFrom Dusk to DawnThe X-Files and Lucifer. (CE) 
  • Born October 15, 1955 Tanya Roberts, 65. Stacey Sutton in the fourteenth Bond film, A View to Kill. Quite the opposite of her role as Kiri in The Beastmaster. And let’s not forget her in the title role of Sheena: Queen of the Jungle. (CE)
  • Born October 15, 1969 Dominic West, 51. Jigsaw in the dreadful Punisher film, Punisher: War Zone. His first SFF role was as Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream which is the same year he shows up as Jerus Jannick in The Phantom Menace, and he was Sab Than on the rather excellent John Carter.  One of his recent latest SFF roles was as Lord Richard Croft in the Tomb Raider reboot. (CE) 
  • Born October 15, 1911 – James H. Schmitz.  Eight novels, fifty shorter stories; most and deservedly famous for The Witches of Karres; also Telzey Amberdon and the Hub.  He’s in Anne McCaffrey’s cookbook.  The Best of JHS was the first NESFA’s Choice (New England SF Ass’n) book, hello Mark Olson.  Independent and colorful, he never cared whether he was revolutionary or challenging, so naturally –  (Died 1981) [JH]
  • Born October 15, 1912 – Chester Cuthbert.  Six decades ago organized the Winnipeg SF Society.  Fiction in Gernsback’s February 1934 and July 1934 Wonder Stories.  Gave his collection to Univ. Alberta just before his death, two thousand boxes weighing 45 tons.  Even wrote letters of comment to me.  (Died 2009) [JH]
  • Born October 15, 1938 – Don Simpson, 82.  Building, carving, drawing, singing, marvelously and modestly strange.  Official Artist at Boskone 9.  Proud possessor of a purchase order from the Smithsonian Institution for “One (1) alien artifact”, which he designed for the Air & Space Museum.  Here is “Against the Battlemoon”.  Here is a star probe.  Here are a name badge and a calling  card (which, as you may know, is just the half of it).  Here is a sculpted garden.  Here is his design for three-sided dice.  [JH]
  • Born October 15, 1942 – Beatrice Gormley, 78.  Six novels for us, biography of C.S. Lewis; a score of other fiction and nonfiction books, including biographies of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Laura Bush, Marie Curie and Maria Mitchell.  After BG visited a Massachusetts school, a parent commenting on what impressed children observed “Wow!  A real writer who is paid real money has to rewrite!”  [JH]
  • Born October 15, 1955 – Emma Chichester Clark, 65.  A score of covers, a dozen interiors for us, maybe more depending how you count; what about a blue kangaroo?  ECC’s illustrations for Laura Cecil’s Listen to This won a Mother Goose Award.  Here is her cover for “The Wizard of Oz” as Told by the Dog (who naturally considers the real title is Toto).  Here is an illustration from her Alice in Wonderland.  Here is the cover for her Through the Looking-Glass.  Here she is with her companion Plumdog.  [JH]
  • Born October 15, 1971 – Guy Hasson, 49.  Short stories in English, plays and cinema in Hebrew, mostly.  Two Geffen Awards.  A dozen stories in English available here.  Journal (in English) of his three-actor two-location film The Indestructibles here.  Tickling Butterflies made from 128 fairy tales here.  [JH]

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) SOUL. Disney dropped a new trailer for Soul.

What is it that makes you…YOU? This Christmas only on Disney+, Pixar Animation Studios’ all-new feature film “Soul” introduces Joe Gardner (voice of Jamie Foxx) – a middle-school band teacher who gets the chance of a lifetime to play at the best jazz club in town. But one small misstep takes him from the streets of New York City to The Great Before – a fantastical place where new souls get their personalities, quirks and interests before they go to Earth. Determined to return to his life, Joe teams up with a precocious soul, 22 (voice of Tina Fey), who has never understood the appeal of the human experience. As Joe desperately tries to show 22 what’s great about living, he may just discover the answers to some of life’s most important questions.

(13) CREDENTIAL IN SPACE. “The Newest Star Of ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ Is A Cat Named Grudge” reports TrekMovie.com.

…Grudge is a pet of Cleveland “Book” Booker, a new character for Discovery season 3 played by David Ajala. During the Star Trek Day Disco panel Ajala gave a description of Book’s cat:

“I can say the Grudge is a queen. She is feisty. She is cynical, cautious, and wary of people. But when she embraces you and it takes you in, she takes you in. It’s tough love! I’ve had to work my way up the ladder.”

Leeu’s handlers say the 2-year-old Maine Coon has taken to his new role, calling him a “one-take wonder.” His new castmates also praised their new feline costar during the Discovery Star Trek Day preview.

The official Star Trek Twitter account made the announcement today along with this very cute behind the scenes video:

(14) SPACE OPERA, BLIP BY BLIP. The serial Only You Will Recognize the Signal begins October 29.

Experience Only You Will Recognize the Signal, a serial space opera from the creators of the world’s first Zoom opera All Decisions Will Be Made By Consensus and the digital surveillance opera Looking at You. The series will release weekly 10-minute episodes as part of #stillHERE:ONLINE, culminating in a final 70-minute viewing experience.

…The travelers aboard the Grand Crew, a very massive luxury emigrant craft, expected to remain in therapeutic hypothermia until arrival at their new home planet. Unfortunately, the technology has been compromised. Isolated in their pods, the unfrozen migrants find themselves entangled in a shared phantasmagoria that smells like sour gummi worms. They are stuck in mid-transition between planet A and planet B, between the end of the old life and the beginning of the new life, between memory and amnesia. They can’t finish the job of erasing the past, and they can’t move into the tenebrous future. Don’t worry: the ship’s computer, Bob, has a plan.

…The team redefines the serial form with weekly 10 minute live revelations over 8 weeks culminating in a 80 minute world premiere increments each Friday October 29 – December 17, culminating in a full live stream showing on December 17 at 7pm as part of our HERE@Home Series. Formally, the eight-episode serial builds on the compositional flexibility, performer autonomy, and unexpected comedy for which the creators have been recognized.

(15) NON-GENRE MOMENT. But you might want to know. “Coffee Mate Is Making An M&M’s Creamer And It’s About To Make Your Coffee Better Than Dessert” claims Delish.

Coffee creamers are having a momentttt right now. We’ve gotten creamers that taste like everything from Funfetti to Cinnamon Toast Crunch to cookies & cocoa to…coffee itself! You can truly try a new one every week and never, ever get bored. But Coffee mate is here to let you know that they’re not done innovating. In fact, they clued us into one of their most exciting drops ever: M&M’s coffee creamer….

(16) HALLOWEEN DONUT. Whereas you might not want to know when “Dunkin’ Spices Up Halloween with New Ghost Pepper Donut” – but it has the word “ghost” in it, so it’s my contractual duty to report it.

…Launching today at participating locations nationwide, Dunkin’s new Spicy Ghost Pepper Donut is billed as “a classic yeast donut ring, topped with a strawberry flavored icing that features a bold blend of cayenne and ghost pepper, and finished with red sanding sugar for a sizzling look.” In case you need the clarification, the ghost pepper is a former record holder for world’s spiciest pepper, and is still insanely hot despite Guinness’s current title going to the Carolina Reaper. And good news for spice lovers: Though the “ghost” tie-in is clearly aimed at Halloween, this limited time only spicy donut is here to heat us up for the rest of the year, sticking around until December.

…But if you’re more about tricks than treats, Dunkin’ is fine with that, too. In fact, the brand is encouraging people to surprise their friends with a Spicy Ghost Pepper Donut and post the reactions on social media using the hashtag #DunkinSpicySide. 

(17) KILLER TOMATO SOUP. AndGood Housekeeping chimes in with a Halloween food report of its own: “Heinz launches Cream of Beanz soup for Halloween and it glows in the dark”.

In a throughly horrifying announcement, Heinz has revealed it has created a hybrid of the brand’s iconic baked beans and its classic tomato soup.

Cream of Beanz Tomato soup is described as: “The rich tomatoey taste of the classic Cream of Tomato Soup, and brimming with delicious Beanz.”

…Calling the hybrid a “Monster Mash-up”, the brand has embraced the scary sound of the combination; not only by releasing in time for Halloween, but also by making the cans glow in the dark.

(18) PAIR OF CHAIRS. In the latest episode of the Two Chairs Talking podcast, Perry Middlemiss and David Grigg have fun talking about BIG objects in science fiction, from flying cities to spheres totally enclosing stars. “Episode 38: Big, bigger, biggest, bigly!”

(19) IF YOU WANT TO KNOW. Larry Correia told his readers today he’s “Back In Facebook Jail” [Archive link].

…Officially, the reason Facebook banned me was for a post on Oct 2 where I said “I try not to comment on violence or crime until all the facts are in… But in this case, whoever sucker punched Rick Moranis should be slowly fed feet first into a wood chipper.” EXCEPT Facebook already banned me for that last week for “inciting violence”, I hit the protest button and Facebook REVERSED the ban a couple hours later. (because it is obviously a stupid joke)

But then yesterday, right after I posted a couple of links to the forbidden New York Post articles about Hunter Biden’s goofy misdeeds (and me being me, the posts were super active, with lots of comments and shares), Facebook banned me for the Rick Moranis post AGAIN. Only this time, I’m not allowed to protest….

(20) THIS AUCTION IS LIT. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Let your childhood Christmas dreams take flight—along with the contents of your bank account. For a quarter mil or so you can give the Rudolph and Santa figures from the stop motion TV classic Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer a new home. And it’ll be just in time to save Santa from drowning as the last of the Arctic ice melts: “Rudolph and his nose-so-bright into auction will take flight”

Rudolph and his still-shiny nose are getting a new home, and it’s bound to be a lot nicer than the Island of Misfit Toys.

The soaring reindeer and Santa Claus figures who starred in in the perennially beloved stop-motion animation Christmas special “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” are going up for auction.

Auction house Profiles in History announced Thursday that a 6-inch-tall Rudolph and 11-inch-tall Santa used to animate the 1964 TV special are being sold together in the auction that starts Nov. 13 and are expected to fetch between $150,000 and $250,000.

Collector Peter Lutrario of Staten Island, New York, thought they might be the only items he would never sell, but when he recently turned 65 he thought about having something to leave for his children and grandchildren.

“I always said I would die with the dolls,” he told The Associated Press. “I’m just putting the family first.”

The figures were made by Japanese puppet maker Ichiro Komuro and used for the filming of the show at Tadaito Mochinaga’s MOM Productions in Tokyo.

They’re made of wood, wire, cloth and leather. Rudolph’s nose, after some minimal maintenance through the years, still lights up. The realistic bristles of Santa’s beard are made from yak hair.

(21) ANIMANIACS. John King Tarpinian says this is why people will want to subscribe to Hulu – all new episodes of Animaniacs starting November 20. They’re also bringing back Pinky and the Brain.

(22) HOLIDAY SPECIAL MULLIGAN. Yahoo! News promises a full pantheon of iconic Star Wars voices will be heard in this holiday special: “Kelly Marie Tran, Billy Dee Williams and Anthony Daniels to Reprise ‘Star Wars’ Roles for Disney Plus Lego Holiday Special”.

Kelly Marie Tran, Billy Dee Williams and Anthony Daniels are venturing back to a galaxy far, far away for “The Lego Star Wars Holiday Special.” The animated adventure will debut on Disney Plus on Nov. 17.

Tran (Rose Tico), Williams (Lando Calrissian) and Daniels (C-3PO) have joined the voice cast of “The Lego Star Wars Holiday Special” and will reprise their roles from the venerable film franchise. “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” actors Matt Lanter (Anakin Skywalker), Tom Kane (Yoda, Qui-Gon Jinn), James Arnold Taylor (Obi-Wan Kenobi), and Dee Bradley Baker (clone troopers) are also lending their voices for the special.

“The Lego Star Wars Holiday Special” sees Rey, Finn, Poe, Chewie, Rose and the droids as they celebrate Life Day, a joyous celebration on Chewie’s home planet of Kashyyyk that was first introduced in the 1978 “Star Wars Holiday Special.” Set after the events of 2019’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker,” the new 45-minute special follows Rey as she journeys with BB-8 to gain a deeper understanding of the Force. Along the way, she encounters characters from all nine Skywalker saga films, including Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, Yoda and Obi-Wan. It’s unclear if Daisy Ridley (Rey), John Boyega (Finn), Oscar Isaac (Poe) or Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker) are returning.

The upcoming Lego-fied version is loosely inspired by the universally panned special that aired on CBS over 40 years ago.

(23) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “Honest Game Trailers: Hades” on YouTube, Fandom Games calls the game “a retelling of Greek mythology that’s as awesome as it is totally unlike Greek mythology.”  Among the additions: machine guns!

[Thanks to Chris Rose, Kevin Standlee, Mike Kennedy, JJ, Michael Toman, John King Tarpinian, N., Martin Morse Wooster, John Hertz, Cat Eldridge, Danny Sichel, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]