Tag Archives: Dan Monroe

Pixel Scroll 1/5/25 Files Are A Burden To Others; Answers, A Pixel For Oneself

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(1) A YEAR OF READING. Joachim Boaz weighs in with “My 2024 in Review (Best Science Fiction Novels and Short Fiction, Articles/Podcasts, Reading Initiatives, and Bonus Categories)” at Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations. These are not works published in 2024 – they are what Boaz read in 2024. That’s why he can rank a book from 1981 as his number one novel:

1. Ignácio de Loyola Brandão’s And Still the Earth, (1981, trans. Ellen Watson, 1985), 5/5 (Masterpiece). 

A brutal dystopia written during an era of military dictatorship in Brazil (1964-1985), And Still the Earth charts the strange movements of a man who wakes up with a painless hole in his hand. This is a Brazil intent on erasing the past. A Brazil that holds onto fragments of knowledge via a complex system of oral signifiers. A Brazil hurtling towards ecological, political, and social destruction. Not to be missed if you’re of the predisposition to enjoy a dense, intense, and surreal shuffle towards apocalypse….

(2) WHY NOT SAY WHAT HAPPENED? Episode 13 of Scott Edelman’s Why Not Say What Happened podcast is now live — “How Joker Co-creator Jerry Robinson Predicted I’d Work in Comics”.

As I consider the way getting rejected by the Clarion Workshop in 1974 helped me break into comics and getting accepted by the Clarion Workshop in 1979 helped me break out of comics, I remember the writing schedule suggested by Harlan Ellison which proved impossible for me, the terrible comics-related advice I got from Damon Knight, Thomas M. Disch’s tips for building better characters, the questions Robin Scott Wilson wanted us to ask when critiquing short stories, the night Joker co-creator Jerry Robinson predicted I’d someday work in comics, the Barbie artist who painted me with tattoos and drew my portrait, the Robert Graves poem which explains why I had to quit writing comics, and much more.

Edelman speaks about the following artwork in the episode — a portrait of him drawn at Clarion in 1978 by his late classmate Barb Rausch, who went on from Clarion to become a Barbie artist.

And here’s where you can see all the possible places to download episodes of the entire series.

(3) FAAN VOTING BEGINS. Nic Farey today distributed The Incompleat Register 2024, the voters’ guide and pro forma ballot for the 2025 FAAn awards. Voting is open and continues until midnight (Pacific time) Friday March 29, 2025. The award recognizes work in fanzines.

The awards will be announced at Corflu 42 in Newbury, UK on April 13, 2025.

Voting is open to anyone with an interest in fanzines, membership in Corflu is not required.

(4) OUT OF DISNEY’S LEAGUE. “David Fincher on Failed ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea’ Take” at IndieWire.

There have been many potential projects that haven’t come to fruition for David Fincher, from his take on Aaron Sorkin’s “Steve Jobs” starring Christian Bale to his “Black Dahlia” mini-series led by Tom Cruise. But one failed vision people were clamoring for, perhaps above all others, was his adaptation of Jules Verne’s “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.”…

…“You can’t make people be excited about the risks that you’re excited about,” said Fincher. “Disney was in a place where they were saying, ‘We need to know that there’s a thing that we know how to exploit snout to tail, and you’re going to have to check these boxes for us.’ And I was like, ‘You’ve read Jules Verne, right?’”

In the original novel and its follow-up, it is revealed that Captain Nemo is in fact royalty who participated in the real-life Indian Rebellion of 1857, an act which led to the death of his family and him fleeing to the seas. Fincher wanted to center these details and make it a serious film, but Disney didn’t want it to distract from the fun, action/adventure piece they were hoping to produce.

“This is a story about an Indian prince who has real issues with white imperialism, and that’s what we want to do,” Fincher said he told Disney. “And they were like, ‘Yeah, yeah, fine. As long as there’s a lot less of that in it.’ So you get to a point where you go, ‘Look, I can’t fudge this, and I don’t want you to discover at the premiere what it is that you’ve financed. It doesn’t make any sense because it’s just going to be pulling teeth for the next two years.’ And I don’t want to do that. I mean, life’s too short.”…

(5) GOVERNMENT SUPPORT FOR WRITERS? Gareth Rubin pushes back in a Guardian commentary: “Impoverished authors are told they should do it for the love. Try saying that to a dentist”.

This week will be like A-level results week for authors, but with added economic jeopardy. For a good whack of the 100,000 writers and translators in the UK, finding out how many books they have sold in the run-up to Christmas will mean the difference between turning on the heating and sitting shivering through the January frost. Many in the latter camp will be forced to accept that life as a professional novelist, poet or dramatist is no longer sustainable. Time to close the book. The end.

Can it be so bad? Surely novelists aren’t really on the breadline? Well, given that the median income for professional writers fell from £12,330 in 2007 to £7,000 in 2022, you can see why most will be desperately hoping for a festive bump in earnings. A bohemian life in a freezing garret only sounds attractive to those who have never lived it.

In a country proud of its literary history, we’re at a tipping point when the number of books and plays written could soon collapse with the number of people who can afford to create them….

…Direct financial assistance is important, too. In the Republic of Ireland most income from writing and musical composition is tax-free – not because its government is staffed by Yeats-quoting aesthetes, but because it appreciates the hard-nosed business case. Writers and musicians spread a positive image of the country, attracting tourist euros and promoting soft power, which is far cheaper than the hard stuff: give a creative a tax break and bring in five times as much from American visitors. Something for the chancellor to mull while she glumly stares at the Treasury projections for 2025.

(6) DOES THAT WORD MEAN WHAT YOU THINK IT MEANS? The last time I heard about a “British invasion” it was a reference to rock groups like the Beatles. Now the label is being applied to a different channel of cultural influence: “Gobsmacked! by Ben Yagoda review – the British invasion of American English” – in the Guardian.

There is a scene in the 1999 British romcom Notting Hill that nicely illustrates the point of Gobsmacked!, a jolly account of “the British invasion of American English”. In it, Hugh Grant, a fully fledged adult, tries to scale a fence to impress Julia Roberts, and slipping, he exclaims “whoops-a-daisy!” As Britons know, “whoops-a-daisy” is a perfectly reasonable locution for an adult man to use, but it causes Roberts, an American, to bend double laughing. As it happens, “whoops-a-daisy” isn’t included in Gobsmacked!, but its collation of so many other ludicrous British terms – “kerfuffle,” “pear-shaped”, “boffin” – that have made inroads into the US will make the average Briton proud.

Ben Yagoda’s lexicon is a spin-off from his popular blog Not One-Off Britishisms, an unwieldy title for a fun experiment in which the professor emeritus of English at the University of Delaware tracks British usages in the US. Like all popular books about language, Gobsmacked! does several things at once: it offers a lot of “fancy that!” facts about the origin of popular words and phrases. (Did you know the word “cushy” derives from Persian and Urdu, and was a military term popularised by British soldiers during the first world war?) It also gives the broader historical context of why certain phrases took off at certain times. (A combination of Geri Halliwell and a single episode of South Park is blamed for the introduction of the pejorative “ginger” to the American lexicon – which Pagoda records Ed Sheeran among others lamenting.) Above all, though, it provides a starting point for pedantic language nerds to argue over the specific meaning and provenance of words (the section on “posh” is divine).

Gobsmacked! also offers a very specific and always welcome opportunity for Britons to roll their eyes at Americans. I can’t say I encountered this during my 17 years in the US, but, for example, it reports that Americans routinely use the British phrase “full of beans” – traced in one of its earliest usages to a letter by Benjamin Disraeli in 1875 – to mean “full of shit” rather than “energetic”. Ha!

As a study aid, Yagoda relies on something called the Google Books Ngram Viewer, which measures the frequency of words across millions of texts online. In a typical example, he cites the fact that, between 2000 and 2005, use of the phrase “run-up”, a British term to describe a preliminary period, increased in the US by 50%, largely in relation to the Iraq war. This is both a necessary measurement tool and also, on occasion, a means of dragging the book into the weeds. By the end, I was a bit sick of the Ngram Viewer, but it was worth putting up with for the sheer joy of the rest of the book….

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

January 5, 1978 — Seanan McGuire, 47.

By Paul Weimer: One really cannot discuss modern urban fantasy without discussing Seanan McGuire. 

While the likes of Emma Bull, Mercedes Lackey, and Laurell K Hamilton may have originated urban fantasy, it is Seanan McGuire, who writes prolifically and addictively (for readers) who holds Court in that space today. Take the 18 books of the October Daye series, featuring her half fae half human titular protagonist living in San Francisco and trying to navigate Fae courts and human relations at the same time. Or her Incryptid series, which may technically count more as SF than fantasy, with a variety of strange cryptid species living in our modern day. My favorite character in that series is the inestimable Sarah Zellaby, who is actually a telepathic ambush predatory wasp that just happens to look human. (She finally got full POV book of her own in the ninth book in that series, Imaginary Numbers). Did I mention that she was prolific within her various series (Incryptid is on book 14 of the series)?

Really, I don’t read McGuire for her rich worlds, or her clever and interesting plots, as much as those are wonderful features in her work. No, McGuire’s strength are characters, characters that you feel like you can know as well as a best friend or a sibling. Her (9 volumes and counting) Wayward Children novellas are one of the defining post-modern takes on portals and portal fantasies, but it is the characters, the children of Eleanor West’s school, that really make those novellas sing with joy, even as they often discuss very dark subjects. (McGuire doesn’t shy away from very dark and disturbing topics in her fiction). 

And this doesn’t even touch her more biological science fictional strain of books as Mira Grant. The Newsflesh (FEED) trilogy is particularly good, and particularly representative of her skills as a storyteller, and, once again,  creator of characters that make you feel. It is rather ironic that, if anything, given the reactions and memory holing of the Covid-19 pandemic, that if anything, McGuire’s trilogy didn’t go far enough in imagining some of the inanities and delusions of people confronted with the Kellis-Amberlee virus in reality. But, then, I think we all missed the boat on this one. (c.f. The movie Contagion). 

On a personal note, Seanan is a friend. We’ve had adventures together on multiple continents now, and I look forward to the hoped for chance of seeing her in her “home territory” of the Pacific Northwest this summer of 2025 during Worldcon. I’ve been told to bring my macro lens. 

Happy birthday, Seanan!

Seanan McGuire

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) ANOTHER HAPPY BIRTHDAY! The Sunday Morning Transport turns four years old this January. Hoping to tempt readers to subscribe, they offer a free read:

For our first story of 2025, we are delighted to welcome E. Catherine Tobler and her Martian dogsled team to the Transport, in a nail biting race to a distant polar ice cap. “First, Last, Oldest, True”.

(10) SECOND CHANCE? In “’The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim’: A Tokyo Take”, Animation World Network writer Andrew Osmond performs a box office autopsy before telling readers at least one theater in Tokyo sold a bunch of tickets to the movie.

Tokyo often feels a century or two ahead of the rest of the world (anachronisms like faxes notwithstanding.) And yet when I saw The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim in a Tokyo cinema, the Saturday after Christmas, I could have slipped a few weeks into the past.

After all, I’d read a heap of reports about how the Middle-Earth anime was DOA, at least on the big screen. In its first two weeks in U.S. cinemas, it failed to earn $10 million. By the time it opened in Japan, it had already gone to digital in America.

To add insult, a Variety report suggested Rohirrim’s American producers only made the film as a licensing maneuver. On this account, it had never mattered if Rohirrim made money or not. New Line Cinema and its parent Warner Bros. just needed a Middle-Earth film – any Middle-Earth film – so they could retain the rights to make “real” Middle-Earth films down the line.

From a corporate perspective, Rohirrim could have been Middle-Earth’s answer to Fantastic Four. Not the terrible ‘noughties Four films with Chris Evans and Jessica Alba, but the unspeakable shoestring 1994 film, never commercially released, which was made purely to keep a license.

Except that animation fans know there’s an older precedent with a Tolkien cartoon. The place was Prague, the year was 1967, and the animator was the legendary, Oscar winner Gene Deitch. He spent nearly a year developing The Hobbit painstakingly as a feature film. Then he was forced to rush out a barely-animated 12-minute short in a couple of weeks flat.

It was so his paymaster, William L. Snyder of Rembrandt Films, could retain the rights to Tolkien’s works – then sell them back to Tolkien for a fortune. Deitch’s account is online here; he also wrote about the experience in his online book, “How to Succeed in Animation,” published on AWN. You can see the film here….

(11) SUNNIER DAYS. “What Happened to Carter’s White House Solar Panels? They Lived On.” The New York Times tells the story (behind a paywall).

It was a novel idea at the time, but one that made sense: In 1979, President Jimmy Carter had 32 solar panels installed on the roof of the White House.

They were removed just seven years later, under President Ronald Reagan. But that wasn’t the end of their story. They were picked up at a bargain price by a small college in Maine, where they continued to generate power for years, and eventually ended up scattered around the United States and China.

When the panels were first set up on the roof of the West Wing, energy independence was a big issue in America. An oil embargo imposed by Arab countries in 1973, in part to pressure the United States over its support for Israel in a brief war that year, had sent shock waves though the American economy.

“This dependence on foreign sources of oil is of great concern to all of us,” Mr. Carter said at an event to introduce the solar array. “No one can ever embargo the sun or interrupt its delivery to us.”

It was a decade before the first congressional hearing on climate change. “There’s no doubt Jimmy Carter was well ahead of his time,” said Ernest Moniz, the energy secretary under President Barack Obama and now chief executive of Energy Futures Initiative, a nonprofit group focused on renewable energy.

In 1986, the Reagan administration had the panels removed during work on the White House roof. They were never reinstalled.

The rejected panels, which had been used to heat water in the White House, were shipped to the suburbs of Washington, where they languished in a Virginia warehouse for years. Then, in 1991, Peter Marbach, a director at Unity College in Maine, was trying to figure out how to dig the school out of a financial hole. He spotted a picture of the panels in a magazine and decided he wanted to bring them back to life.

“It was a combination of utter disbelief and anger that Reagan had taken them down, and a simultaneous crazy ‘lightbulb’ idea to get the panels and draw attention to Unity’s mission as an environmental college,” said Mr. Marbach, who is now a landscape photographer based in Oregon….

(12) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Dan Monroe wants to know “Whatever Happened to CLOSE ENCOUNTERS of the THIRD KIND?”

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

Pixel Scroll 12/25/24 Pixel At The Gates Of Dawn

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(0) Yes, I celebrate Christmas, and if you celebrated any holiday today I hope you’ve enjoyed yours just as much as I did. I spent mine hanging out with my brother’s family. (P.S. While it wasn’t an ecumenical decision, I did drink a Diet Pepsi last night.)

“Santa Mike” by Lynn Maudlin

(1) LOVELY CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS. Galaxy used to have an annual tradition….

(2) THE SCIENCE OF READING TO KIDS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The Christmas edition of the British Medical Journal is out.  One festive season story is whether or not reading bed-time fantasy (fairy tales) to children confers additional  health benefits…. “Good nights: optimising children’s health through bedtime stories”.

Healthy sleep is a public health priority, with at least a third of children and adults reporting insufficient sleep. It is essential for children’s growth and development and optimal physical and mental wellbeing. Consistent bedtime routines, with a calming activity before bed, such as a bedtime story, can promote healthy sleep. Some traditional fairy tales and classic children’s fiction that have soothed many a child to sleep may also include information about the benefits of sleep and the characteristics of sleep disorders, providing accessible and engaging ways for parents or carers, healthcare providers, and educators to discuss healthy sleep with children.

(3) IS THE 2024 2000AD ANNUAL WORTH IT? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] I don’t know if this is a thing in the US, but over here in Brit Cit, the pre-Christmas season sees the publication of comics’ annuals. These are large-format hardbacks featuring stories from the comics. 

2000AD used to produce them back in the late 1970s and early 1980s but have not done so for the past 24 years, instead they produce special, 100-page editions of 2000AD. However, this year they have gone back to form and produced an annual! (With two alternate cover desgns.)

Now, at £25 (about US$30) it might be a little expensive for some. However, die-hard 2000AD fans will be tempted. Here, while there are new Judge Dredd, Strontium Dog, Lawless and Rogue trooper (feature film hopefully coming this year), all the other material – Judge Anderson, Tales from the Black Museum, Mean Machine, more Rogue trooper and more Judge Dredd, is reprinted old material. So if you are a long-standing 2000AD fan – and, standing at over six feet, I am– then you will already have all these in your collection.

Yet, such is the length of 2000AD’s history (over 47 years) that many will have only come to Tharg’s (the editor’s) fold in recent years and so may only now get to see this reprinted material for the first time.

But fear not any fellow old Squaxx dek Thargo (2000AD fans), this year 2000AD are still producing their 100-page special Christmas edition of all new material as well. What joy! 

2000AD is available from all large, specialist SF bookshops that have a decent comics section or online at www.2000AD.com.

Splundig!

(4) MYSTERY REVEALED. From Atlas Obscura, a year ago: “How Christmas Murder Mysteries Became a U.K. Holiday Tradition”.

Christmas murder mysteries can be traced back to detective fiction’s golden age between World War I and II. Before World War I, Christmas short stories and detective fiction had been steadily growing in popularity throughout Victorian and Edwardian Britain, eventually developing into the more complicated mysteries of the interwar period….

(5) SPIRIT DU JOUR. [Item by Steven French.] And here’s a short selection of three recent tales and one old classic: “The best spooky stories for Christmas, from Victorian classics to contemporary creepy tales” in the Guardian.

This is a time for ghost stories. There’s a reason Shakespeare tells us: “A sad tale’s best for winter: I have one of sprites and goblins.” And why Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and its (superior?) muppets version have retained popularity.

Since pagan times, people have believed in the supernatural potential of the winter solstice. It’s a liminal moment, when the darkness retreats and the light returns, a hinge point where the door between the living and the dead can swing open. (Other liminal moments are considered supernaturally powerful, too. Midnight, for instance. And its opposite – The Apparition of Mrs Veal, sometimes described as the first modern ghost story, has its spirit appear at noon.)

So, as we approach the end of one year and the start of another, do enjoy some spooky stories. The list below features some suggestions beyond the Victorian classics, to give you a nice, contemporary creep….

(6) ES COLE (1924-2024). Fandom recently learned that Esther Cole, who co-chaired the 1954 Worldcon in San Francisco with her husband Les, died a month ago at the age of 100. Rich Lynch has written a tribute: “Farewell, Dear Lady — Es Cole (1924-2024)”.

(7) BARRY MALZBERG TRIBUTE. Jeet Heer praises the late Barry Malzberg, who passed away December 19, in “Novelist on a Deadline: Barry Malzberg, 1939–2024” at The Nation.

…Along with his peers J.G. Ballard, Samuel Delany and Philip K. Dick, Malzberg was a central figure in the movement of science fiction away from the external world of adventure fiction and outer space into the psychological torments and struggles of inner space. Technology, these writers all understood, is not something external to humans but changes how we think and how we feel: The registering of technological change in the realm of emotional life was their literary project.

Malzberg was a particularly kindred spirit to Dick, another speed demon—one who batted off books in a matter of weeks during amphetamine-fueled binge sessions at the typewriter. In an interview in the late 1970s, Dick said, “In all the history of science fiction, nobody has ever bum-tripped science fiction as much as Barry Malzberg.… he’s a great writer.”…

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

How The Grinch Stole Christmas (1966)

Once upon a Christmas season, there was a television show called How The Grinch Stole Christmas. A television show that explicitly had a message that Christmas was neither a celebration of the birth of Christ, nor was it something that comes in a box, but rather is a matter of remembering that we hold each other in our hearts. Warm, fuzzy, and aggressively secular. In 1966 no less!

Aired on December 18 on CBS, the short film, just 26 minutes long, aired on that network for 21 years; ABC has aired it starting 2006, and then Turner Broadcasting has been airing, well until now as you’ll see below. I just watched it after getting it off iTunes where it comes bundled with Horton Hears A Who. (Both of these would be made into films that were awful.) This animated version was written by Christine Kenne from the brief children’s book by Theodore Geisel writing as Dr. Suess; it was produced by him and Chuck Jones who also directed it rather brilliantly.

The animation style looks more than a little flat but that just adds to the feel of it being a folk tale about a villain in his lair high on the mountain, The Grinch, who decides he can’t stand all the noise and commotion of the Whos down in Whoville enjoying Christmas. Not to mention his disgust at them eating the rare roast beast. So he concocts a brilliant scheme to dress as Santie (sic) Claus and take a sleigh down into Whoville (his dog Max with an antler tied to his head being a poor substitute for a reindeer) and steal everything down and including a crumb of food so small that even a mouse wouldn’t eat it.

So up to the top of Mount Crumpet he rides waiting for them to all go ‘boo who’ when they discover everything is gone, but instead he hears them all signing out in joyful voices thereby providing the upbeat moral of this which I noted previously. Hearing this, his heart grows multiple sizes and he rescues the now falling load with ‘the strength of ten Grinches plus two’. Riding into Whoville, he grins ear to ear, and he, the now reformed Grinch, has the honor of carving the roast beast.

I watch it every year this as I really like it. I love the bit, used twice, of increasingly small Whos, once serving tea and the second time a strawberry to a small Who girl, by coming out of a series of covered dishes.

A final note must be devoted to this being I believe the last performances of Boris Karloff who both narrated it, voiced and made the sounds of The Grinch and of this tale which I noted above sung all of its songs save ‘You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch’ which was, though uncredited, sung by Thurl Ravenscroft, one of the booming voices for Kellog’s Frosted Flakes. Karloff won the only performance award he got as he was awarded a Grammy in the Spoken Ward category!

It’s one of the best Christmas shows ever!

It is streaming on Peacock now. So go watch it. The Suck Fairy says you really should.

(9) MORE MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Aurora Winter.]

The Lion in Winter (1968 and 2004)

In 1968 MGM Studios teamed up with James Goldman to adapt his play The Lion in Winter for the screen. At the time the play had been a flop, running for a mere eighty-three performances on Broadway two years previous. The movie was made and was not only a success, but also breathed new interest into the stage version. I first encountered the 1968 film in University and read the script.

The title, for those of you rusty with your English history, refers to King Henry II (the lion was his crest) being in the “winter” of his life. At this point in history King Henry II had a kingdom that stretched into France and was in need of choosing his heir. Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry’s wife, was imprisoned in a castle (thanks to Henry who was the key keeper). Goldman’s story is a fictional account of the Christmas court held to determine the future king. A complicated story this is, the wit in the script combined with the actors’ stellar timing make it worth watching again and again.

Seven characters, each tremendously important, make up the cast . . . and what a cast it is. The role of the fifty-year-old (quite old for 1183) King Henry is played by a mature Peter O’Toole. Katherine Hepburn was granted the role of the spunky and vivacious Eleanor of Aquitaine. The three sons up for the throne are: Richard (Anthony Hopkins), John (Nigel Terry), and Geoffrey (John Castle). Let us not forget Alais (Jane Merrow) either, the young girl given to Henry by the French king sixteen years before to one day be the bride for the chosen king. Beyond this it is useless to explain more of the plot as it is far too complicated.

I said that the timing was crucial to the success and enjoyment one can experience with this film. While some may not appreciate a film that finds its humor through fast paced, verbal, intelligent wit with little ‘sight gags’ and no slapstick, I adore it. Each scene seems half the length it actually is because these actors are so tight in their character that they can fire one-liners back and forth without ever seeming fake or forced. One gets the sense that these conversations might have occurred between Eleanor and Henry, Henry and Alais, Richard and Philip, John and Geoff.

The technical aspects of this film are quite impressive too, period costume more accurate than those generally seen in such films. The whole movie takes place within Henry’s castle in Chinon, a vast castle in the cold of December, and the production crew made sure we felt the draft from the open spaces and cold stone. The cinematography often mirrors the long walking shots that we now see all the time on West Wing, creating the feeling that we have been transported back centuries to drop in on this family crisis.

While this film does have some minor downfalls — Morrow’s Alais is a bit too whiney for my taste and a few gems were cut from the original text and replaced with extraneous muck (I’m still holding out for the version that leaves those gems in) — they are easily ignored and outdone by the beauty of the final work. It is no surprise that this launched Anthony Hopkins into stardom, or how so many see Hepburn (she did win the Best Actress Oscar for this role) and O’Toole as the definitive Eleanor and Henry. If, somehow, you have missed this piece of film history, go rent the DVD, sit back, and allow yourself to be transported back to 1183.

I am not a big fan of remakes when it comes to the film industry, especially when the original was so fantastic. But every now and then someone comes along and surprises me with a new-old movie that is as good, or better than the original. This was what I discovered after I watched the 2004 version of The Lion in Winter.

The script is still the same screenplay adaptation Goldman wrote for the 1968 film. The entire framework in the technical areas remained untouched. The actors were the key to bringing this new version to life. I should think it would be rather intimidating to attempt to play Eleanor of Aquitaine or Henry II after Hepburn and O’Toole. The director cast Glenn Close as Eleanor and Patrick Stewart as Henry and the choice could not have been better. Close and Stewart bring to the film a chemistry and wit that Hepburn and O’Toole never did.

With repeated viewings Hepburn’s Eleanor eventually struck me as being a little devoid of the true stoicism and sarcasm that I see the character as having. Close presents an Eleanor whose emotional indicators are much more subtle, the way the character reads on the page. Stewart, too, breathes new life into Henry’s role. He keeps up with Close’s pace and allows enough of Henry’s heart into view, rather than only his determined grip on power; we can stand by him rather than judge him too harshly.

Unfortunately, this film forgot that the story is really about the whole royal family, not simply about Eleanor and Henry. Because of this I think that the supporting cast was not really allowed to find their individual moments in the spotlight the way the play and original film do.

They also, for reasons unknown, decided to skip over the tension between Philip (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) and Richard (Andrew Howard). It is one of those little things that doesn’t seem that important to the overall piece, but really it is a massive turning point in the script and I think must be portrayed with that in mind.

Overall, the new version surprised me with just how good it was. As it turned out, my fears about the new version were unfounded, even though it was not without its own disappointments. Luckily, I can fully recommend both versions to anyone who might be interested in this little bit of fictionalized history. In fact, watch them both, one after the other in either order; you won’t be sorry.

[Reprinted from Sleeping Hedgehog.]

(10) TODAY’S ANNIVERSARY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Hercule Poirot’s Christmas (1938)

December 19th eighty-six years ago, Hercule Poirot’s Christmas was first published by the Collins Crime Club. In the States, it bore first the title of Murder for Christmas and later A Holiday for Murder when published in paperback. It was the nineteenth novel with him as the Belgian detective; it retailed at seven shillings, six pence. 

Critics generally thought it was one of her best mysteries. The New York Times Book Review critic Isaac Anderson said of it that “Poirot has solved some puzzling mysteries in his time, but never has his mighty brain functioned more brilliantly than in Murder for Christmas.”

The story was adapted for television for an episode of Agatha Christie’s Poirot starring David Suchet as Hercule Poirot, first aired in the UK on Christmas 1994. The BBC has produced it twice for radio with it first being broadcast on Christmas Eve 1975 with John Moffatt as Hercule Poirot. A second production was broadcast on Christmas Eve 1986 featuring Peter Sallis as Poirot. BritBox here in States is now where you can watch this series. 

ABE currently has a UK first edition the cover art below of course for a little over $8700 with this description, “A fine copy with one small neat contemporary date inscription to corner of flap. Some light sporadic foxing to preliminary pages (only). Covers are bright and have no bumping to corners or fading to spine. In original near fine price clipped dust jacket with some archival restoration chiefly to spine tips. An excellent copy.” 

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) EMMA BULL ON CHRISTMAS TAMALES. [Item by Cat Eldridge.] Emma Bull, who for a while lived with her husband Will Shetterly in Arizona, says “We have to have tamales on Christmas Eve. Fortunately, local tamale specialists La Loma make excellent ones, since I’m way too lazy to build ’em myself.We have to that ‘have tamales on Christmas Eve. Fortunately, local tamale specialists La Loma make excellent ones, since I’m way too lazy to build ’em myself.’ She added a bit later that the filling is, “Anything vegetarian: cheese and peppers, mostly, or tamales de elote, which are slightly sweet corn masa. Served with roasted garlic salsa and spicy guacamole. The one year Will and I made our own tamales, the filling included wild rice, which sounds weird but which was really tasty.”

(13) THE FIRST ONE IS FREE. Max is sharing the first full episode of “Creature Commandos Season 1” to entice subscribers.

Amanda Waller assembles the Creature Commandos — led by General Rick Flag Sr. — and sends them to Pokolistan to protect Princess Ilana Rostovic.

(14) TODAY’S THING TO WORRY ABOUT. Dan Monroe reveals the many ways in which the award-winning Peanuts classic differs from the version originally aired in “Whatever Happened to A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS?”

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

Pixel Scroll 4/27/24 Pixel, Pixel, Scroll And Stumble. File Churn And Cauldron Double

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(1) DEAD PLASTIC. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] What would you do if the world suddenly ran out of digital money?

With some parts of Worldcon fandom (such as publications policy increasingly becoming digital myopically to the exclusion of all else), this is a very topical subject.  Of course sercon trufans know that the current trend is to be abhorred: they’ve read the likes of Brunner, Gibson and Orwell).

The past couple of decades, SF has on occasion looked at digital privilege, monitoring and so forth, as well as social reactions against it (Max Headroom’s Blank Reg for example). So the new BBC Radio 4 drama series, that had its first episode this week, is timely.  It envisages a near-present day in which suddenly all debit and credit cards stop working.  The phenomena is not local, or national, but global….!

“Money Gone, Money Gone – 1. ‘Insufficient Funds’” (Episode 1 of 5)

Valentine’s Day 2025. The UK awakes to financial catastrophe and no one can access any money. Ross sees opportunity as the country descends into chaos, but Grace has picked the worst day run away.

A fast-paced satirical drama starring Robert Bathurst (Cold Feet, Toast of London), Charlotte Richie (Ghosts, Call the Midwife), Aaron Heffernan (War of the Worlds, Brassic) and Josette Simon (Wonder Woman, Blakes 7).

(2) HANGING OUT ONLINE. John Scalzi, in “One Year of Bluesky”, assesses the social media platform for his Whatever readers.

…Now, the flip side of this is you can’t just sit back and let Bluesky happen to you. You have to engage with it — actual engagement! Not the kind where an algorithm pokes you with a stick! — or you’re going to be bored. It’s not an endless TikTok firehose where all you have to do is put yourself in its path. It’s a spigot, and you control how much or how little you get. Everyone says they want that, but it turns out a lot of people kinda like the firehose instead.

The other aspect of Bluesky being algorithm-free (and still being relatively small; its user base currently sits at 5.5 million) is that it’s not great for being famous or being an influencer, or being a troll. I think the Bluesky technical and cultural schema confuses the famous and/or influencer and/or shitty people who come onto the service to be famous, or to influence, or to be shitty for clicks. You can’t game an algorithm to go viral, and the sort of marketing that works on other social media works less well on Bluesky, and even if it did work that way, there aren’t hundreds of millions of people to broadcast at. You can try to do all these things on Bluesky, obviously. But Instagram and TikTok and Threads and the former Twitter are all still there, and much easier to game and influence and troll. People who come to Bluesky to do those things don’t seem to stay very long.

Which is a feature, not a bug, for me, and comports with how I want to do social media….

(3) A FURRY APOCALYPSE. Maya St. Clair evangelizes for a comedy film in “Would You Survive HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS?”

…Humanity, thanks to industrialized agriculture and the highway, now possesses the upper hand. But underneath it all, one sometimes senses a vague, sublimated longing to return to more survivalist times. Plexiglass Paul Bunyans and the Giant Musky dot the landscape, standing in shared reverence to older struggles of brute force, consumption, survival. On the radio, Gordon Lightfoot reminds us that even the sunny Great Lakes are biding their time to kill us. And this year we have Hundreds of Beavers, a two-hour slapstick tour de force that gleefully revives the hairy, primordial struggle of the old Midwest. In Moby-Dick, Herman Melville chronicled the “universal cannibalism of the sea”; Hundreds of Beavers brings us, at last, the universal cannibalism of Green Bay, Wisconsin….

“Hundreds of Beavers Official Trailer”.

In this 19th century, supernatural comedy, a drunken applejack salesman must go from zero to hero and become North America’s greatest fur trapper when he loses his whole operation in a fire and is stranded in the wilderness. Now facing starvation, he must survive in a surreal winter landscape surrounded by Hundreds of Beavers – all played by actors in full-sized beaver costumes. Using nothing but his dim wits, he develops increasingly complex traps to battle the beavers and win the hand of a mischievous lover.

(4) RAY DALEY (1969-2024). Author Ray Daley died April 19 following a heart attack on March 28. His earliest sff was self-published beginning in 2012. His work included the collection A Year Of Living Bradbury; 52 Stories Inspired By Ray Bradbury (2014).

His first blog post in 2012 was charmingly frank:

…I can be a bit anal about wanting to be as factual as I can be, to the point where it actually gets in the way of the storytelling. I actually came across this problem when I wrote my first story I decided to sell.  I had a great idea but the facts ruined it so I had to go with my own reality on that occasion….

(5) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born April 27, 1963 — Russell T. Davies, 61. Let’s talk about the man who in large part made the revival of Doctor Who possible, Russell T. Davies. 

He was both the showrunner and head writer for the revival of the Doctor Who for the first five years. His last episode was the Tenth Doctor’s “The End of Time” which he wrote and executive produced. He wrote thirty-one episodes during his tenure.

But let’s go back in time to his earlier series. 

Russell T. Davies in 2008.

His Dark Season children’s series had three young teenagers in a contemporary secondary school who discover a plot by the villain Mr Eldritch to take over the world using school computers. The next three episodes focus on a new villain: the archaeologist Miss Pendragon who becomes a part of the ancient supercomputer Behemoth. The two distinct plot elements who later converge when Pendragon crashes through the school stage as Eldritch walks into the auditorium.

Following up on that would be Century Falls which tells the story of teenager Tess Hunter and her mother, who move to the seemingly idyllic rural village of Century Falls, only to find that it hides many powerful secrets. Something dark has happened here and it will take her to bring it out into the light. 

And then there’s The Second Coming which gave BBC the vapours (spelling there deliberately used) It concerns a video store worker by the name Steve Baxter, played by Christopher Eccleston, who realizes he is in fact the Son of God that has but a few days to find the human race’s Third Testament and thus avert the Apocalypse. It ran on Channel 4 with major changes from what Davies originally envisioned.

Torchwood was his first post-Who series and I think it was brilliant early on. From my perspective, the characters, the setting and the storyline was quite amazing. No, not every story was great but over the first two seasons were well-worth watching. Now keep in mind that of the first two series, Davies wrote only the première episode but was the showrunner with Christopher Chibnall. The last two series, “Children of Earth” and “Miracle Day” I cared not for at all. 

Then he would do the Sarah Jane Adventures, technically a children’s series but I saw it and it was lovely for everyone. A spin-off of Doctor Who with the companion Sarah Jane played by Elizabeth Sladen. He would be one of five, yes five, executive producers here. 

Now living in modern-day Ealing, London, she investigates extraterrestrial matters and protects Earth against alien threats with a group of teenage accomplices. It ran five series with a sixth planned until she passed on from pancreatic cancer.

Davies made a cameo appearance in  The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot. Haven’t seen it? What are you waiting for? 

So Davies has now returned as Doctor Who’s showrunner. He of course cast Rwandan–Scottish actor Ncuti Gatwa for the Fifteenth Doctor. Or was the Fourteenth Doctor originally? Only Davies knows. Or did a week later. Time is a cool thing. 

I’m reasonably sure that covers his genre work. 

(6) COMICS SECTION.

  • The Far Side proves even a Western showdown has a logical order.
  • Tom Gauld’s cartoon has a bit more edge than usual!
  • Nathan W. Pyle takes us to a lawn belongings transfer.

(7) FALLOUT UNSHELTERED. Inverse reveals “How Amazon’s Best New Sci-Fi Show Built Its Massive Post-Apocalyptic World”.

… Though this may be an entirely new saga, there is no question that it is set within the all-too recognizable world of the Fallout series. In fact, Nolan was committed to bringing this vast universe to life as faithfully and precisely as possible — and this daunting task fell on the shoulders of production designer Howard Cummings and costume designer Amy Westcott….

… And so, Cummings and Westcott dove into the vast world of Fallout. Neither being self-proclaimed “gamers,” this involved a mountain of research….

…The more he watched and listened to the fans, the more detail he discovered within the universe. “It all has such history. It’s crazy — I used to turn on my phone and just fall asleep listening to the history of Fallout.”

Cummings became so familiar with the look and feel of Fallout that Bethesda Games, the company responsible for the series, essentially “let [him] go” do his thing, he says. “But I had to go to them when we were creating new stuff, because I wanted to make sure it was right. I knew that fans would sit there and go through it all and find every friggin’ Easter egg!”

Bethesda collaborated with Cummings, helping him craft many new crucial pieces of Fallout lore — perhaps most excitingly, a map showing the locations of every single Vault in America. It is this mixture of ultra precise replication paired with thoughtful new creation that makes the design of the series a feat in world-building and a surefire hit with fans and newcomers alike.

(8) GAIMAN FILM PROJECT. “Neil Gaiman Teams With Graphic India For Animated Pic ‘Cinnamon’” reports Deadline.

New York Times best-selling author Neil Gaiman is teaming with Graphic India for the English-language animated movie, Cinnamon.

Based on a short story written by Gaiman, the screenplay is being adapted by the Coraline author and leading Indian animation writer and creator, Sharad Devarajan (The Legend of Hanuman; Baahubali: The Lost Legends) with Sarena Khan and Sujatha SV. Indian animator Jeevan J. Kang is set to direct.

Blurb for project: Born with pearl eyes that render her blind to the physical world, Cinnamon’s destiny is shaped forever when a mysterious talking tiger appears. Offering to lead her through the wonders and trials of the wild, Cinnamon begins a perilous adventure that will shape her path and test her resolve. She enters a hidden realm where the line between the mundane and the mystical is as thin as a whisper and where the ancient wisdom of India breathes life into a jungle thrumming with secrets….

(9) IMAGINARY WEALTH. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] OK, it’s mostly guesswork. But it’s still interesting to see these extremely rich fictional characters ranked and to see that none of them would be so rich as to be completely out of line in the modern world. Only the top 2 crack the $50B mark, leaving them way, way behind in the race for the richest person in the world (for which they’d have to be worth over 4 times that much). “15 Richest Fictional Characters Of All Time” at The Richest. The ladder runs from Jay Gatsby to Scrooge McDuck, with a surprising number of sff characters in between.

2 – SMAUG

Smaug’s Net Worth: $54.1 Billion

The Hobbit’s very own dragon Smaug never speaks a word, but has managed to invade the town of Dale, which happens to be sitting on a pile of gold.

Some sources have placed Smaug’s net worth as high as $62 billion dollars, with $54.1 billion deemed a “conservative estimate.”

(10) I DIDN’T KNOW IT WAS MISSING. Dan Monroe wants to know “Whatever Happened to the BLACK HOLE?”

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

Pixel Scroll 3/10/24 He Who Controls The Pixels Controls The Scroll

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(1) HUGO, GIRL! REVERSES PERMANENT RECUSAL DECISION. The Hugo, Girl! the Podcast team tells why they have changed their minds about permanently recusing themselves from the Best Fancast category in “Statement on the 2023 Hugo Awards”. The complete explanation is at the link.

Following the Chengdu Hugo Awards, we believed in good faith that we were the legitimate winners of the 2023 Hugo Award for Best Fancast. We subsequently announced Hugo, Girl’s permanent recusal from the Best Fancast category. We were honored and delighted by the win, and we wanted to make room for others to experience the same.

However, with each recent revelation about the administration of the Hugo Awards, we have become increasingly uncomfortable thinking of ourselves as legitimate winners. Viewing the nomination and voting data that others have meticulously combed through, analyzed, and presented in a thorough and digestible way, it initially seemed that Fancast was one of the less obviously suspicious categories. It did not appear that any of our Fancast co-finalists or entries on the long list had been mysteriously disqualified, as was the case in several other categories. That being said, Fancast is not free from strange numbers.

We became even more dubious once we learned that the Hugo Administrators had investigated and disqualified potential finalists* on the basis of assumed politics, queer and trans identity, and an imaginary trip to Tibet. We ourselves likely should have been disqualified under the same criteria. It does not escape our notice that as four white people, we may have been scrutinized less closely….

… For the foregoing reasons, we have decided to withdraw our recusal from Hugo eligibility, effective in 2025. We hope to have a future opportunity to participate in a fair, transparent Hugo Awards process, if voters decide to honor us again with a place on the ballot. 

(2) FALSE GRIT. Heard too much about Dune lately? Then your brain will probably explode in the middle of reading “Charles Bukowski’s Dune” at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

It had been a long day. The hot-shit new supervisor, who looked about sixteen and probably hadn’t even started shaving yet, had written me up twice. I’d crumpled both slips in front of him, thrown them in the trash.

On the way home, the 48-Arrakeen worm died at the base of the hill, and we all had to hop off into the sand. The thing was already starting to stink as I began the trudge uphill, bone-tired and thirsty….

(3) NO ARMY IS SO POWERFUL AS AN IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS COME. Variety reports, “SAG-AFTRA Chief: Chance of Strike Against Game Producers is ’50-50’”.

Issues around the use of AI in the production process is the big sticking point in SAG-AFTRA’s negotiations with the largest video game companies, SAG-AFTRA chief Duncan Crabtree-Ireland said Saturday during a wide-ranging Q&A at SXSW in Austin, Texas.

Crabtree-Ireland, who is national executive director and chief negotiator of the performers union, said he put the chances of union members striking against key game companies is “50-50, or more likely than that we will go on strike in the next four to six weeks because of our inability to get past these issues,” Crabtree-Ireland told Brendan Vaughan, editor-in-chief of Fast Company, during a conversation focused on AI….

… Some pushed the union to demand an outright ban on the use of AI in union-covered productions. Crabtree-Ireland said he know that was a nonstarter.

“We would not have succeeded, any more than any union ever in history has been able to stop technology,” he said. “Unions that try that approach, they fail and they give up the chance to influence how those technologies are implemented. “The fact of matter is, we’re going to have AI.”

Crabtree-Ireland emphasized repeatedly that the union’s position on AI revolves around “consent and compensation” for its members when AI engines use their work. “We want to make sure the implementation is human-centered and focused on augmentation [of production], not replacement of people,” he said….

(4) SFF WINS CANADIAN COMPETITION. The Québecois author Catherine Leroux’s The Future, in a translation by Susan Ouriou, has won the 2024 Canada Reads national competition. (Canada Reads is a television show. ) “’Canada Reads’ 2024 Winner: Catherine Leroux’s ‘The Future’” at Publishing Perspectives.

…The Future by Catherine Leroux, published by Biblioasis in Windsor, was named the winner of the weeklong series of elimination programs  from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s CBCbooks. The book is translated from French by Susan Ouriou and is a dystopian history of Detroit, a book the program refers to as, “a plea for persistence in the face of our uncertain future.”

(5) REID Q&A. Sff gets two callouts in this Guardian interview: “Taylor Jenkins Reid: ‘Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy are unbeatable’”. Taylor Jenkins Reid will be international author of the day at the London Book Fair on March 12.

The writer who changed my mind
I thought I didn’t like sci-fi until I discovered Octavia Butler. Kindred defies genre, but it taught me that I’ll go anywhere in a story if I trust the writer….

My comfort read
Whenever I want to read a book I know will be good, I go to Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Her genres are ever changing, her ability to take on a wild story each time is incredible. You never know what she’s going to do, but you know it will be a page-turner. I cannot wait for her next book, The Seventh Veil of Salome. Fifties Hollywood, two starlets, the role of a lifetime … what more could you want?

(6) FLATIRON STILL AWAITS ITS FUTURE. [Item by Ersatz Culture.] In a news item today on the BBC about America’s office market, there’s a passing reference to the former Tor offices:

The famous triangular Flatiron building nearby has been vacant since 2019. Last autumn, the owners said it would be turned into condos.

Way back in January 2009, File 770 reported that the owners originally had different plans:

However, the offices of Tor Books are housed in New York’s Flatiron Building, which an Italian investor has announced plans to convert into a luxury hotel. Reports say hotels take so long to construct that it might be a decade before the Flatiron Building comes online in its new capacity.

The departure of Tor and the wider Macmillan publishing organization was reported in the June 5th, 2019 Pixel Scroll.

(7) TEENAGE BROADBAND. “New Emotions Move in for ‘Inside Out 2’” – and Animation Magazine makes the introductions:

Disney and Pixar today unveiled the official trailer plus new images and poster for Inside Out 2, which welcomes new Emotions to now-teenager Riley’s mind. Joining Joy (voice of Amy Poehler), Anger (Lewis Black), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Fear (Tony Hale) and Disgust (Liza Lapira) is a group of Emotions perfectly suited for the teenage years: 

Maya Hawke voices Anxiety, the previously announced new arrival bound to shake up everything in headquarters and beyond. A bundle of frazzled energy, Anxiety enthusiastically ensures Riley’s prepared for every possible negative outcome.

Envy, voice of Ayo Edebiri, may be small but she sure knows what she wants. She’s perpetually jealous of everything everyone else has, and she’s not afraid to pine over it. 

Ennui, who’s voiced by Adèle Exarchopoulos, couldn’t care less. Bored and lethargic with a well-practiced eye-roll, Ennui adds the perfect amount of teenage apathy to Riley’s personality, when she feels like it.

Embarrassment, voiced by Paul Walter Hauser, likes to lay low, which isn’t easy for this burly guy with a bright blush-pink complexion….

(8) BILL WAHL TRIBUTE. Brian Keene is overwhelmed by the loss of another friend – Bill Wahl died March 6 — as he told readers of “Letters From the Labyrinth 371”.

…Bill, like me, was always blunt and spoke his mind. And he did indeed give Mary and I a TON of pointers and help in the setting up of Vortex Books & Comics. It is Saturday as I write this, in the bookstore, and it is not lost on me that he had planned on coming in here today, right about the time I’m typing this (2:31pm).

I guess maybe I wrote a eulogy after all. Maybe half-assed, but that’s still pretty good considering that I’m typing it amidst a car crash of mental, physical, and emotional exhaustion from which I may not be able to beat this time.

After 56 years on this planet, I finally know what it means to be tired…

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born March 10, 1918 — Theodore Rose Cogswell. (Died 1987.) Let’s consider Theodore Rose Cogswell. He was a member of the Minneapolis Fantasy Society and later noted that fellow members Poul Anderson and Gordon Dickson said that he should he should be a writer. 

He was in his thirties before his first work, “The Spectre General” novella was published in the June 1952 issue of Astounding. SWFA considers it one of our best novellas. 

Theodore Cogswell in 1955.

He would co-write with Charles A. Spano, Jr., Spock, Messiah. Prior to this novel, only one Star Trek tie-in novel intended for adult readers instead of YA readers had been published, Spock Must Die!, written by James Blish. Blish was supposed to do a Mudd novel but his death obviously prevented that. A real pity that. Though Mudd’s Angels would be written by J.A. Lawrence, Blish’s wife.

Back to Cogswell.

He wrote a fair amount of short fiction, some forty works, collected in The Wall Around the World, the title novelette here was nominated for a Retro Hugo, and The Third Eye.

Perhaps, his most interesting work was as editor of Proceedings of the Institute for Twenty-First Century Studies where such individuals as Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, James Blish, Algis Budrys, Arthur C. Clarke, Avram Davidson, Gordon Dickson, Fritz Leiber engaged in what is best described as a very long running written bull session. A copious amount of these writings was published as PITFCS: Proceedings of the Institute for Twenty-First Century Studies. Though NESFA distributed it, it was published by Advent Publishing. It was nominated for a Hugo at ConAdian for Best Related Non-Fiction Book. 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) NEW MARVEL UNLIMITED PROGRAM LETS YOU ACCESS INFINITY COMICS FOR FREE.  Marvel’s Infinity Comics: Start Scrolling became available starting March 7.  

It’s time to Start Scrolling! Today, comic fans will have even more access to their favorite stories spanning the Marvel Universe with the all-new Marvel’s Infinity Comics: Start Scrolling digital program. The new program, exclusively from Marvel Unlimited, allows readers to access select Infinity Comics for free.   
 
Marvel’s Infinity Comics: Start Scrollingwill provide instant access to select free comics, with no login required. Readers can experience over 100 issues of bingeable Marvel stories starring fan-favorites including the X-Men, Spider-Man, Jeff the Land Shark, and many more, by visiting Marvel’s Infinity Comics: Start Scrolling. With an extensive library of over 30,000 comics on Marvel Unlimited, fans can expect other free Infinity Comics to be rotated in throughout the year.  
 
Marvel’s Infinity Comics are a vertical format designed for phones and tablets exclusive to Marvel Unlimited. Since launching in September 2021, Marvel Unlimited has published over 1,000 Infinity Comics to date from over 300 top Marvel creators.  

(12) FOLLOW THE MONEY. Or the spice. The economic engine that drives Dune’s universe isn’t explained in the movie, but GameRant has volunteered for the job: “Dune: CHOAM, Explained”.

…The Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles is a monopolistic conglomerate that controls all commerce throughout the Dune universe. All material goods flow through CHOAM. All substantial wealth comes through interests in CHOAM. The CHOAM network runs through every other seat of power. CHOAM is under the Corrino Empire, the highest station in the universe, which oversees CHOAM’s board of directors. CHOAM was a publicly traded company. Shareholder profits could make any participant fabulously wealthy. Only the noble patriarchs of the Great Houses could become shareholders in CHOAM. The Houses fought for directorship positions, seeking to earn dividends and skim profit from their impossibly vast businesses. The Emperor reserved the right to revoke or hand out director positions, giving him the final say in any profit-seeking venture….

(13) CALLING SOLOMON! Space tells “Why astronomers are worried about 2 major telescopes right now”.

There’s a bit of tension right now in the U.S. astronomy community and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it has to do with telescopes — extremely large telescopes, in fact. Here’s what’s going on.

The National Science Foundation (NSF), a source of public funding that two powerful next-gen observatories have been banking on for financial support, is facing pressure to go forward with only one telescope. This is because last month, the National Science Board — which is basically an advisory committee for the NSF — recommended that it cap its giant telescope budget at $1.6 billion. This is a lot of money, but it’s just not enough for both. The board even says the NSF will have until only May of this year to decide which telescope gets the go-ahead.Yet, both telescopes are already in the middle of construction, both are equally important and both are actually supposed to work together to fulfill a wide-eyed dream for astronomers. Because of how utterly huge they’re meant to be, they’re expected to one-up even the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in many ways. That’s the gold-mirrored, silvery-shielded trailblazer sitting a million miles from Earth right now, finding deep space gems so quickly it’s normalizing us to seeing things humanity once couldn’t fathom seeing. Imagine something better….

… One of the big scopes is the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT). It’s taking shape as you read this in the clear-skied deserts of Chile, and it’s projected to cost something like $2.54 billion as a whole. The other is called The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT). That one’s location is a bit more controversial. It’s planned to decorate a mountain in Hawaii called Mauna Kea, but locals have protested the decision because this stunning volcanic peak that boasts low humidity and gentle winds (perfect conditions for astronomy) is extremely meaningful in native Hawaiian culture. It’s a fraught situation, as 13 other telescopes already live in the area and some local people say the facilities are  impacting the natural environment. In terms of cost, however, the projected amount is just about symmetrical to the GMT’s….

(14) WHAT’S THE MATTER? “Controversial new theory of gravity rules out need for dark matter” – and the Guardian tries to explain it to us. However, the last time I heard a doctor use the word “wobbly” in connection with anything about spacetime, his last name was “Who”.

…There are multiple lines of evidence for dark matter, but its nature has remained mysterious and searches by the Large Hadron Collider have come up empty-handed. Last year, the European Space Agency launched a mission, Euclid, aiming to produce a cosmic map of dark matter.

The latest paper, published on the Arxiv website and yet to be peer-reviewed, raises the question of whether it even exists, drawing parallels between dark matter and flawed concepts of the past, such as “the ether”, an invisible substance that was thought to permeate all of space.

“In the absence of any direct evidence for dark energy or dark matter it is natural to wonder whether they may be unnecessary scientific constructs like celestial spheres, ether, or the planet Vulcan, all of which were superseded by simpler explanations,” it states. “Gravity has a long history of being a trickster.”

In this case, the simpler explanation being proposed is Oppenheim’s “postquantum theory of classical gravity”. The UCL professor has spent the past five years developing the approach, which aims to unite the two pillars of modern physics: quantum theory and Einstein’s general relativity, which are fundamentally incompatible.

Oppenheim’s theory envisages the fabric of space-time as smooth and continuous (classical), but inherently wobbly. The rate at which time flows would randomly fluctuate, like a burbling stream, space would be haphazardly warped and time would diverge in different patches of the universe. The theory also envisions an intrinsic breakdown in predictability….

(15) GIANT SQUID. [Item by Lise Andreasen.] This is the last place I would look for characters from 20000 Leagues Under The Sea.

(16) NO PLANET FOR OLD MEN. Dan Monroe is determined to find out “What Happened to THE BOMB from BENEATH the PLANET of the APES?”

(17) WITH AND WITHOUT STRINGS ATTACHED. [Item by Carl.] “Here Come The Puppets” was a PBS special produced by KQED at the International Puppet Festival in Washington DC. It was hosted by Jim Henson and the Muppets, and features internationally known puppeteers. It’s NEVER been offered in DVD form. It can now be seen on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiwLNy24ak4

(18) VIDEOS OF THE DAY. “Watch: Rare Footage Of Leonard Nimoy Hosting 1975 Special Presentation Of Star Trek’s ‘The Menagerie’” at TrekMovie.com.

In 1975, Paramount produced a special movie presentation for syndication of the two-part Star Trek episode “The Menagerie,” hosted by TOS star Leonard Nimoy. The original Spock recorded introductions for each part of the episode as well as closing remarks for the special presentation. In the special, Nimoy explains how “The Menagerie” uses footage from the original Star Trek pilot “The Cage” and more….

There’s a nod to its Hugo win at the 4:51 mark.

…This morning, WJAR Channel 10 in Rhode Island posted a clip from their morning show with guest Leonard Nimoy from what appears to be around the end of the first season of the series. The actor talks about concerns the show will be canceled and the fan campaign to keep it on the air along with the origins of his signature Vulcan ears….

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Kathy Sullivan, JJ, Lori, Carl, Ersatz Culture, Lise Andreasen, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Joseph Hurtgen.]