Tag Archives: Dave Hook

Pixel Scroll 5/29/25 They Came And Took Our Spindizzy Away From Us

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(1) THE BAR’S MY DESTINATION. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Another “distraction” for GRRM fans to complain about: “George R. R. Martin’s Cocktail Bar Brings Ancient Apothecary Vibes To Santa Fe’s Drink Scene” says Tasting Table.

Milk of the Poppy logo

…The legendary author, whose literary works have incited television shows, fervent fandoms, and plenty of food- and cocktail-related tributes (including “Game of Thrones”-inspired drinking games), has recently set his sights on a new form of creative expression.

Based in [George R.R.] Martin’s current home of New Mexico, Milk of the Poppy is a cocktail bar named for a medicinal liquid referred to in the “A Song of Ice and Fire” book series, on which HBO’s “Game of Thrones” is based. The bar boasts medieval-inspired decor with an apothecary theme, ideal for patrons to live out their fandom fantasies and responsibly partake in various libations and food offerings.

Though there have been “Game of Thrones” pop-up bars here and there over the years, one of the most unique things about this establishment is that it isn’t simply another fan-run one-off. Conceptualized by creative director Al LaFleur, the bar has been in the works for some time, even before LaFleur left Los Angeles for New Mexico. If anything, Martin’s investment in this craft cocktail bar indicates a sort of “seal of approval” from the author, whose writing heavily influenced the bar’s robust food and drink offerings.

The dungeon-like feel of the bar is reminiscent of popular “Game of Thrones” scenery, giving patrons enough reason to explore the space for a first-hand (or first-sip) experience of what it would truly be like to eat and drink as one of their favorite characters. Having opened its doors in March 2025, the bar is still relatively new to the Santa Fe bar scene, testing the potent waters of combining fantasy food and drink with real-world applications.

With a menu featuring specialty-themed, potion-like drinks, beer, wine, and a bevy of delicious appetizers, this pop culture bar will hopefully be much more than a flash in the pan, going on to thrive and connect with New Mexico locals and travelers seeking it out. Its namesake drink is a vibrant green cocktail called MOTP Milk Punch that features white armagnac, quebranta pisco, matcha, melon, calpico, and allspice that appears to be worth the visit in itself.

Although fans may be quick to criticize the author for taking longer to complete the long-anticipated “The Winds of Winter,” it’s worth remembering that true art cannot be rushed….

Website: “Milk Of The Poppy”. It’s located in Santa Fe adjacent to GRRM’s Jean Cocteau Cinema and Beastly Books.

(2) MOST PURGED BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE TO NAVAL CADETS AGAIN. AP News reports“Most books pulled from Naval Academy library are back on the shelves in latest DEI turn”.

All but a few of the nearly 400 books that the U.S. Naval Academy removed from its library because they dealt with anti-racism and gender issues are back on the shelves after the newest Pentagon-ordered review — the latest turn in a dizzying effort to rid the military of materials related to diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

Based on the new review, about 20 books from the academy’s library are being pulled aside to be checked, but that number includes some that weren’t identified or removed in last month’s initial purge of 381 books, defense officials told The Associated Press….

…The purge led to the removal of books on the Holocaust, histories of feminism, civil rights and racism, and Maya Angelou’s famous autobiography, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.”

Others included “Memorializing the Holocaust,” which deals with Holocaust memorials; “Half American,” about African Americans in World War II; “A Respectable Woman,” about the public roles of African American women in 19th century New York; and “Pursuing Trayvon Martin,” about the 2012 shooting of a Black 17-year-old in Florida that raised questions about racial profiling.

The Navy on Wednesday could not confirm which books have been returned to the library or if Angelou’s book or the others will remain pulled from shelves….

Three sff works on the original list of 381 were Light From Uncommon Stars / RykaAoki; Sorrowland / Rivers Solomon; and A Psalm For The Wild-Built / Becky Chambers.

(3) AN AUGUST PRESENCE. A Deep Look by Dave Hook continues scanning the 1949 sff offerings with “’The Other Side of the Moon’, August Derleth editor, 1949 Pellegrini & Cudahy”.

The Short: The Other Side of the Moon, August Derleth editor, 1949 Pellegrini & Cudahy, includes 20 stories and an introduction by August Derleth. While I think Derleth’s definition of science fiction is somewhat different than mine, it’s mostly SF and all speculative fiction. My favorites include “Something from Above“, a novelette by Donald Wandrei, Weird Tales December 1930, and “The Earth Men“, a Martian Chronicles short story by Ray Bradbury, Thrilling Wonder Stories August 1948. My overall average rating is 3.57/5, or just below “Very good”. I recommend the twelve stories that were rated “Great” or “Very good”, but I would recommend The Other Side of the Moon itself only to those with a real enthusiasm for stories of the period….

(4) MY PRECIOUS. “PHD Students Bear the Brunt of Science’s ‘Gollum Effect’” reports Nature.

Almost half of the scientists who responded to a survey have witnessed territorial and undermining behav[1]iours by colleagues — most commonly during their PhD studies. Of those affected, nearly half said the perpetrator was a high-profile researcher, and one-third said it was their own supervisor.

Most of the respondents were ecologists, but the organizers suspect that surveys focusing on other disciplines would be similar.

The gatekeeping behaviours that the study documents “damage careers, particularly of early-career and marginalized researchers”, says lead author Jose Valdez, an ecologist at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research in Leipzig. “Most alarming was that nearly one in five of those affected left academia or science entirely.”

Valdez and his colleagues call the possessiveness shown by many researchers the Gollum effect, after a character in the book The Lord of the Rings (1954–55), whose one goal in life is to hoard an object of power for himself. The study was published in One Earth ( J. W. Valdez et al. One Earth 8, 101314 (2025)….

… Respondents described data hoarding, ideas theft by supervisors and defamation at conferences. “Collaborator has ‘reserved’ important research avenues,” wrote one respondent, “and is actively withholding data from our entire research group”. Another wrote, “I was told I wouldn’t be able to publish anything until the collaborator published their study, which has been in prep for over six years now.”…

(5) DISPUTING THE NARRATIVE. In the view of ComicBook.com, “Sandman Showrunner Sets Record Straight on Netflix Cancellation & Neil Gaiman Accusations”.

The Sandman showrunner Allan Heinberg said on Wednesday that the show was not actually canceled over the sexual misconduct allegations against Neil Gaiman. Netflix announced that this series would end with Season 2 back in January, and at the time, the accusations against Gaiman were just beginning to impact many of his adaptations. However, Heinberg told Entertainment Weekly that the streamer, the studio, and the creative team had decided to end the show shortly before Season 1 even premiered. He said that Season 2 was already in post-production when the reports about Gaiman began to circulate, so he doesn’t think it had any impact on the story or content of the new episodes. Still, he said that the announcement of the show’s ending came at “unfortunate timing, for sure.”

“It was a decision we made three years ago,” Heinberg said of the show’s cancellation. The reason, he explained, was actually the content of the original comic book by Gaiman, Sam Kieth, and Mike Dringenberg. The book often goes off on tangents about other characters, where Dream (Tom Sturridge) is only distantly involved. “There are some volumes where he just appears in two scenes,” Heinberg pointed out….

(6) MISSION CONTROL. Kotaku brings us “Mission: Impossible’s Most Impossible Missions, Ranked”.

…This past week we’ve ranked everything from Tom Cruise’s hair in each movie to the franchise’s most irreplaceable characters. In honor of The Final Reckoning dominating the Memorial Day Weekend box offices, we decided to take a different look at the Mission: Impossible franchise by ranking the movies based on the impossibility of the mission. So, before you scream about Phillip Seymour Hoffman being a better villain than any other Mission: Impossible bad guy, or how Tom Cruise didn’t risk his life falling backwards off a helicopter for Fallout not to be the best movie ever, remember, it’s all about the mission, even if you don’t choose to accept it….

The slideshow begins with Mission:Impossible II in last place, and Kotaku’s frank comment —

Not only is it the worst Mission: Impossible, it’s also the least impossible mission.

(7) A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Yesterday’s BBC 4 Good Read saw its first 10 minutes devoted to Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange. Panellist Adrian Chiles’ parents’ Croatian ancestry came in handy when it comes to the novel’s 21st century youth slang….

This week broadcaster and writer Adrian Chiles and musician and sound artist Marty Ware join Harriett Gilbert with their reading suggestions. Martyn nominates A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess which he says has influenced his career as a musician. He even named his band Heaven 17 from a reference in the book. If you can get past the brutality and violence it’s a novel that throws up many moral questions about the nature of good and evil. Both he and Adrian Chiles are fascinated by the use of Russian language throughout the book.

You can download the programme from here.

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

May 29, 2009 — 2081 film

So we have an interesting short film. And no, I had no idea it existed until now as one of my email newsletter had a note about a Kurt Vonnegut story being turned into a film, not completely unsurprising as one of his works did almost become an opera.  So we have 2081 which is based off of his “Harrison Bergeron” story and which premiered on this date sixteen years ago at the Seattle International Film Festival. 

The story was first published in the October 1961 in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and was in his Welcome to the Monkey House collection seven years later. Welcome to the Monkey House: The Special Edition has drafts of many of stories there. 

The cast is James Cosmo, Julie Hagerty, Patricia Clarkson, and Armie Hammer. 

The story is one where a future polity is attempting by any means possible to ensure that everyone is absolutely equal. Ruthlessly as the rulers of the 1984 society were doing. That’s a bit of a SPOLER I know. It’s not quite in keeping of the Vonnegut story and that’s something I’ll not say why. 

So what did the critics think of it. Well I didn’t find a lot of them who said anything but I really liked what Mike Massie at the Gone with The Twins site said about this half hour film cost that just a hundred thousand to produce: “’What are you thinking about?’ ‘I don’t know.’ The basic plot, adapted by Chandler Tuttle (who also directed and edited) from Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s short story, is sensational, serving as a warning and as pitch-black satire. The notion of equality taken to hyperbolic extremes is certainly worthy of cinematic translation, as are the various manifestations of crushing governmental control. True freedom requires disparity.” 

Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes really liked it giving it a seventy-five percent rating.

You can watch the trailer here. 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) KINGFISHER FOR THE ROCKET. Camestros Felapton’s Hugo reading / reviewing continues: “Hugo 2025 Novel: A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher”.

…Not unlike reading Alien Clay, I’m reading a book by an author I’ve read so often that I see her playing on repeated themes and elements in a new setting. Hester’s interest is the breeding of geese rather than gardening but she is very much a recurring kind of Kingfisher character, a smart, often wise, older woman who would like a peaceful life but circumstances prevent it. We are also in Kingfisher re-spinning a classic fairy tale, in this case the Brothers Grimm collected story The Goose Girl (Hester provides the connection to the geese but Cordelia is the titular girl)…

(11) ROBERT BLOCH IN THE FACE OF CHANGING TIMES. Keith Roysdon traces “The Evolution of Robert Bloch” at CrimeReads.

…Bloch, whose novel was the basis of one of the most classic of classic films, told the [Castle of Frankenstein] interviewer that he felt the same insecurities and frustrations of any writer. By the end of the 1960s, he confessed he had his struggles.

“Markets have changed. I will say quite candidly that in the past year, I’ve written five short stories – three of them haven’t been placed because the markets have changed for that sort of material. I would like to write a great deal more fiction, but there is the problem of market accountability. So I write to specification.” Bloch spoke about how things had changed since he wrote for Weird Tales and other magazines in the 1930s. “I feel the times have changed. And they change for every writer. There is no writer living who will end up 30 years later with the same market conditions and the same audience and the same media.”

Bloch was critical of himself: “I’ve always suffered from a shortage of talent. I’m very limited.” He cited his “inadequate” education and the challenge of keeping up with trends. 

“Empathy is the only strength I have. The ability to put myself inside the characters and understand their motivations.”…

(12) TODAY’S THING TO WORRY ABOUT. “Film and TV model maker warns skill may disappear” reports the BBC.

A visual effects designer who worked on award-winning films and TV shows has warned the art of model-making is at risk of vanishing in the coming decades.

Mike Tucker has worked with Discover Bucks Museum in Aylesbury on an exhibition of original models and props from British science fiction shows, such as Doctor Who.

The artist, in his 60s, said he hoped the displays could inspire a future generation of visual effects artists.

“A lot of the companies, like myself, have either stopped because they’ve not been able to compete with the CGI guys, or just retired out of the business.”

“The number of us who know how to do it is getting smaller and smaller with every passing year,” he added….

…The Beyond the Stars exhibition includes models and props the Oxfordshire resident has worked on, including 1980s’ Daleks, Marvin the Paranoid Android and a model of Starbug from Red Dwarf.

Originally from Swansea, Mr Tucker entered the industry via the BBC’s in-house visual effects department in the 1980s, which closed in 2005.

He recalled: “It had over 100 members of staff when I joined. By the time we closed down we were down to 14 people, because the numbers of shows that required our particular expertise was getting smaller and smaller.

“It’s not dead completely yet. If left unchecked there is going to be a gap in about 10, 15, 20 years’ time of just finding people who know how to do it.”…

(13) MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE AUCTION. Heritage Auctions wants the world to know about the June 5 “Masters of the Universe featuring the Artwork of Mark Taylor Action Figures & Toys Showcase Auction”.

Item predicted to fetch the highest bids — Savage/Wonder Bread He-Man Prototype First Shot 

Calling all He-Fans and She-Ravers! Whether you grew up shouting “I have the power!” or just recently fell down the rabbit hole of Eternian lore (blame that catchy theme song), now’s your chance to snag the treasures of a true toy titan.

Of the top three toy sellers in the resale market—He-Man and his colleagues in the Masters of the Universe are the toy that keeps on giving.The popularity of the brand—from a 1980s movie to the original cartoon and toy line, all the way to a new movie coming in 2026-speaks to the enduring appeal of these characters across pop culture, collectibles, and meme culture alike.

Our June 5 Masters of the Universe Showcase Auction is a love letter to the legacy of Mark Taylor—the visionary artist who gave us He-Man, Skeletor, Battle Cat, and a galaxy of unforgettable icons. This isn’t just a toy auction—it’s a trip through the nostalgia-fueled vortex of pop culture greatness.

Featured treasures include:

  • The Savage/Wonder Bread He-Man Prototype First Shot (AFA 80)—a brown-haired, rough-cut warrior straight from Mattel’s pre-launch experimental phase. With ties to a long-lost “Buy 3, Get 1 Free” mail-in offer and whispers of a doomed Conan toy line, this prototype is more than rare—it’s legendary. Graded AFA 80 NM and encased in a deluxe acrylic display with a COA from Tom Derby.

But the true magic? It’s in the art:

  • Original He-Man Concept Artwork by Mark Taylor – Before he became Eternia’s polished protector, He-Man was Torak, Hero of Prehistory—a barbarian bruiser in Viking armor. Taylor’s vision drew heavy inspiration from Frazetta’s fantasy epics, capturing He-Man’s raw, untamed beginnings.
  • Original Skeletor Concept Artwork – Inspired by a terrifying childhood encounter with what Taylor believed was a real corpse (seriously!), early Skeletor—also known as De-Man—was gaunt, ghostly, and haunting. With bare feet, shin guards, and echoes of a “King of Styx” motif, this is the villain as you’ve never seen him: straight from the sketchbook of madness.
  • Castle Grayskull Original Concept Sketch (1979) – The eerie, bone-like fortress came to life in pencil before it ever took plastic form. Signed and dated by Taylor, this haunting 24×19 inch sketch captures his dream of a fortress that wasn’t built—it grew. “I wanted it to be organic… like it’s starting to melt,” Taylor said. And you can own that vision.

Whether you’re a hardcore MOTU collector, a toy history buff, or just someone who knows a good barbarian-sorcerer rivalry when they see one, this auction is your portal to the past-and a future filled with bragging rights.

Explore the full catalog and preview all the epic lots: HA.com/49181

(14) RANKING ALL OF PHILIP K. DICK’S BOOKS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Moid over at Media Death Cult has set himself the Herculean task of ranking all of Philip K. Dick’s books….

It is not a competition but you can see whether or not you agree with him and how he tried to make some very difficult decisions….

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

Pixel Scroll 5/27/25 Everybody Loves Raymond Palmer (Both The Shaver’s Mystery Guy And The Size-Shrinking Superhero)

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(1) SO THIS HEINLEIN, IS HE ANY GOOD? View Sharon Lee’s acceptance speech for the 2025 Robert A. Heinlein Award in this YouTube video.

(2) FAIR PAY. Steve Davidson urges sff readers to commit to pay a fair price for short fiction in a post on Facebook. Davidson begins by telling what the market rates of the Thirties would translate to after factoring in 90 years’ worth of inflation. Then he makes this appeal —

…Authors need to LIVE in order to be able to write and, I’d venture to guess, authors who are not stressing over whether or not they’ll be living in their cars next month will write more and better than those who have no such concerns.

To put a finer point on it: magazines would have to pay a word rate of 67 cents per word if the sale of that one short story is to have the same economic power today as $150 bucks did back in 1930.

On the other hand….

I’m betting that readers actually DO value authors and their works (well, at least those readers who read anyways). And I’m betting that they are willing to step up IF they’re given the opportunity. Oh, maybe not quite yet to covering sixty-seven cents per word, but certainly more than 8 cents per word.

I think the evidence is all around us that they are. I mean – go look at what a paperback costs these days! Me, I choke whenever I see the cover price because my baseline is what it cost me to buy those first Heinlein novels from the Bookmobile back in 1968 – 45 cents to 60 cents. Those same books now go for $13 – or more!

Anyway, the point is this:

We KNOW you all are willing to pay something close to what modern science fiction is actually worth, because you’re already doing it everyday when you plunk down ten bucks for an ebook or fifteen bucks for a paperback (or forty+ bucks for a hardback).

Now all you have to do is extend that same calculus, that same perceptual handwavium when it comes to magazine issues and their close cousin companions, theme anthologies….

(3) LOCUS FUNDRAISER LOOKS TO FINISH STRONG. The “Locus Mag: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror 2025” appeal at Indiegogo has four days to go. It had raised $44,671 when I checked this afternoon. Among reasons for you to click over, the Indiegogo paid includes links to videos of Connie Willis, Daniel Abraham, and Tobi Ogundrian reading from their work.

We are incredibly grateful for every penny donated and we’ll put it all to good use, but this is a moment to be honest about the urgency of our fundraiser. We’re just 4 days from the close of this fundraiser and we haven’t raised even half of the money we need to keep Locus running. 

Being an indie non-profit press, we’ve been running on a skeleton crew for years. A larger budget means paying writers and artists a better rate, adding more short fiction and long form reviewers to cover all the amazing stories that are being written, and enough budget to cover all the amazing events out there and to stay connected with the community. Please help keep Locus alive, as the independent voice of the field and the guide to the world’s imagination!

If we don’t reach our funding goals, we will have to contract even further – you’ve seen your favorite magazines and newspapers shrink or disappear… There’s no part of what Locus does that we can imagine giving it up, reviews, interviews, cons, obits, the Locus Awards, the recommended lists – remembering people, pushing the news out, evening out the playing field. We don’t want to give any of it up. And we want to get back to a full schedule of writing workshops, reach more people on different platforms about our amazing genre, host readings… so much more. 

We’re particularly concerned about the loss of short fiction reviews. Locus is one of the only venues that reviews short stories and makes a concerted effort to cover the small and independent press. Locus wants to help level the playing field for emerging writers and everyone in general. Without those efforts it feels like the only SFF writers getting attention out there are NYT bestsellers…

(4) APPEALS COURT SAYS LIBRARY COLLECTION DECISIONS ARE GOVERNMENT SPEECH. “Full Court of Appeals Reverses Previous Rulings, Supports Texas Library’s Book Removals” at Publishers Lunch (behind a paywall).

A full en banc ruling from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has overturned both a lower-court decision and a Court of Appeals ruling that had found a Texas library’s removal of books was a violation of the First Amendment, in a 10-7 decision.

Last year, a regular three-person Court of Appeals panel ruled that the Llano County Library could not remove books based on their content, writing that, “Government actors may not remove books from a public library with the intent to deprive patrons of access to ideas with which they disagree.” The titles at issue included books about sexuality and racism, and “butt and fart books.” Eight of the original 17 removed titles were returned to the library.

Now, the court reversed that preliminary injunction and dismissed the free speech claims of the plaintiffs—seven library patrons.

In the decision, Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan writes that the right to receive information from “tax-payer funded library books” is not protected by the First Amendment.

“That is a relief, because trying to apply it would be a nightmare,” the decision continues. “How would judges decide when removing a book is forbidden? No one in this case—not plaintiffs, nor the district court, nor the panel—can agree on a standard. May a library remove a book because it dislikes its ideas? Because it finds the book vulgar? Sexist? Inaccurate? Outdated? Poorly written? Heaven knows.”

The decision also states that “a library’s collection decisions are government speech and therefore not subject to Free Speech challenge.” Judge Duncan asserts that libraries have always made decisions about what books to shelve, just as government-funded museums decide on which paintings to include.

“That is what it means to be a library—to make judgments about which books are worth reading and which are not, which ideas belong on the shelves and which do not.

“If you doubt that, next time you visit the library ask the librarian to direct you to the Holocaust Denial Section.”…

(5) LETTING THE DOGS IN. [Item by Daniel Dern.] In chatting with one of the (local) librarians about some catalog quirks (mentioning my not-yet-replicated search within WorldCat/OCLC showing a library/book location of “outer space”), they noted that the CountWay library in the (Harvard) medical center area had a dog in their catalog — a “library” dog, e.g., for “Read with a Dog,” “schedule cuddle time”…

I haven’t (yet) found actual catalog entries, but (as I already knew), “library dogs” are indeed a Real Thing, e.g., Therapy Pets | Countway Library (harvard.edu)

For many Filers, this, of course, immediately brings to mind the classic Eric Frank Russell story, “Allamagoosa” (here’s a Baen link to the story.)

(6) ORSON WELLES HELPS SELL A BOOK. A Deep Look by Dave Hook looks at another 1949 sf collection: “’Invasion from Mars: Interplanetary Stories’, Orson Welles ‘editor’, 1949 Dell (SFE says ghost editor was Don Ward)”

The Short: I read Invasion from Mars: Interplanetary Stories, Orson Welles “editor”, 1949 Dell (there is controversy about the actual editor). Including the 1938 “Invasion from Mars: A Radio Adaption” radio play adaptation, it includes ten stories and an Introduction. My favorite story is the well reprinted and superlative Ray Bradbury story “The Million Year Picnic“, a Martian Chronicles short story, Planet Stories Summer 1946. My overall average rating of the stories was 3.76/5, or “Very good”. I have mixed feelings about recommending it, see below. You can find links to the stories here.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

May 27, 1911 — Vincent Price. (Died 1993.)

By Paul Weimer: Vincent Price. My first voice and face of horror. But especially, his voice. 

I’ve mentioned WPIX many times in these birthday reminiscences and in comments at File 770. And so it was on NY’s movie station that I first encountered the work of Vincent Price. It was one of the Dr. Phibes movies, gory, weird and a lot of fun. That voice was unmistakable. Imagine my surprise when the very different looking Dr. Egghead (played by Price) showed up in an episode of the 60’s Batman cartoon. Although Egghead and Phibes couldn’t be more different, the voice was what keyed me, even with my amusia, that the same actor was at work here.  That oily, horror fueled voice. He was the voice of terror, of nightmares, of the dark descent. 

And that’s kind of how I kept running into him, by accident, again and again. For a while it seemed I could not escape the Master of Horror. Oh, here he is in a movie based on the “Pit and the Pendulum”. How very droll.  Oh, and here he has shown up randomly on an episode of Columbo. Oops, here he is again in a Roger Corman horror film. All with That Voice. Although I still think the Jeff Goldblum version is better, the haunting image of his version of The Fly, where a part of him is trapped in a fly’s body, caught in a web, with a spider coming to eat him, is enough to give me the chills. 

Even with all of his other work, again and again, what Price comes down to is the voice of horror. And so I ask you, who else could have been the narrator voice for the music video Thriller?

Vincent Price

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY, TOO.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

May 27, 1934 — Harlan Ellison. (Died 2018.)

By Paul Weimer: Harlan Ellison. No trademark symbols, if he wants to come back from the dead and harangue me, he’s welcome to do so. 

To talk about him as a broken step will be taken as read, it turns out he did behave very badly indeed, and that mars his reputation. Not being ever to finish the Last Dangerous Visions is another stain on his record, too. He seems to have forgotten his own maxims and advice on that one. He was a writer’s writer and an editor’s editor, and while he had the juice for the first Last Dangerous Visions, he never could see through to the last. 

My older brother had plenty of collections of his stories, so his stories, both genre and only near-SF was an early part of my reading. Included in those collections were both volumes of The Glass Teat, so along with lots of Ellison stories, I also got a healthy dose of his film and television criticism, and his unyielding personality. I may have never gotten to meet him personally, but his ferocious reputation by his writing was enough. When Heinlein has him show up in the end of The Number of the Beast as simply “Harlan”, I had read enough to know what Heinlein meant with that one word. 

Three stories of his always come to my mind and you can guess them.  “’Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” which for even though the titular Harlequin is captured and his rebellion ended, is still a story of hope, because his spirit of chaos cannot and will not be permanently stilled.  “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”, one of the most ultimate horror stories, with four people and a deranged computer at the end of the world.  And, “Paladin of the Lost Hour” which is the best “Rage against the dying of the light” story I’ve ever read.  When he wasn’t a raging a-hole, Harlan Ellison could and did write.

Harlan Ellison

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) DEADPOOL/BATMAN CROSSOVER. Wade Wilson has been hired for a job in Gotham City, but will the World’s Greatest Detective help him or destroy him? Entertainment Weekly today revealed Marvel’s Merc with a Mouth will meet DC’s Dark Knight this September in Marvel/DC: Deadpool/Batman #1, the first of two crossovers between Marvel and DC more than twenty years in the making. It will be followed by DC’s Batman/Deadpool #1 in November.

 Deadpool/Batman #1 will be written by prolific Spider-Man comics writer and co-writer for Marvel Studios’ Deadpool & Wolverine Zeb Wells and drawn by industry superstar Greg Capullo, an artist with an incredible legacy at both legendary comic book companies, with influential work on Batman and X-Men titles.

“After writing Amazing Spider-Man for 60 issues, I told Marvel I needed a break. Marvel told me I could do that or I could write a comic starring Deadpool and Batman with the best Batman artist of our generation. I no longer needed a break,” Wells shared with EW. “In Batman we’ve found someone who has even less time for Deadpool’s antics than Wolverine, but a city-wide threat from the Joker makes strange bedfellows (literally, if Deadpool had his way). It’s been a blast letting Deadpool loose in Gotham City and watching what happens.”

“Am I dreaming? This crossover is likely to be the high point of my career…and, I’ve had a great career,” Capullo added. “Some of my earliest work (many years ago) was on X-Force, so Deadpool and I go way back. More recently, I spent 10-plus years drawing Batman at DC. The idea that I get to do a crossover event with Deadpool and Batman…If I am dreaming, please don’t wake me!”

Check out Capullo’s main cover and stay tuned for more news about Deadpool/Batman #1 in the weeks ahead.

(11) WB WHACKS SCREENING OF SCHUMACHER CUT. “Studio Blocks Screening of Controversial Batman Forever Director’s Cut” reports CBR.com.

The fabled Schumacher cut of Batman Forever has hit a major snag as Warner Bros. has decided to scrap a planned screening of the hotly anticipated film.

A screening of the Schumacher cut was supposed to take place at Cinefile Video in Santa Monica, California. But according to The AV Club, the event was canceled following a legal request from Warner Bros. “Our planned screening of Batman Forever has been canceled,” the store said in an email to its members. “This follows a legal request from Warner Bros. regarding the rights to the version of the film we intended to show. While this was a free, members-only event meant to celebrate a unique piece of film history, we respect the rights of studios and creators, and have chosen to withdraw the event accordingly.”

The news came as a major blow for Batman fans as the Schumacher cut has long been considered a Holy Grail of sorts….

(12) FIRST OF THE LAST OF US. [Item by Steven French.] “The Last of Us science adviser: COVID changed our appetite for zombies” learned Nature.

The year was 2013, and the release of a hotly anticipated zombie-apocalypse video game was on the horizon.

The game, called The Last of Us, invited players to explore what then seemed a fanciful scenario: a world devastated by a pandemic in which a pathogen kills millions of people.

Unlike in many apocalypse fictions, the pathogen responsible wasn’t a bacterium or a virus, but a fungus called Cordyceps that infects humans and takes over their brains.

The writers at game studio Naughty Dog, based in Santa Monica, California, were inspired by real fungi — particularly Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, known as the zombie-ant fungus. The fungus infects insects and releases chemicals into the animals’ brains to change their behaviour. Ahead of the game’s release, Naughty Dog turned to scientists, including behavioural ecologist David Hughes, a specialist in zombie-ant fungi (he named one after his wife), to field questions from the media about the fungal and pandemic science that inspired the story. Hughes, who is at the Pennsylvania State University in University Park, has since moved to studying climate change and food security….

(13) BALTICON SUNDAY SHORT SCIENCE FICTION FILM FESTIVAL 2025 WINNERS. [Report by lance oszko.] Audience scores were from 0 to 5, with sum of values divided by number of votes. 

Best Live Action

  • Stephen King’s The Reach (2024) Italy Luca Caserta 167 points in 41 votes cast = 4.0731 * 

Best Animation

  • Dad in the Echo (2023) China Jacky Heng SUN  315 points in 82 votes cast = 3.8414 *  

Scores of all entries:

  • An Old Friend 2024 USA Nuk Suwanchote  198 Points in 57 Votes cast = 3.4736.
  • Akashic Spheres 2021 USA James Scott 150 points in 69 votes cast =2.1739
  • Invasion ’53  2024 Maryland Danielle Weinberg 304 points in 77 votes cast = 3.9480
  • Zerk 2024 Maryland Theo Jack-Monroe 193 points in 69 votes cast = 2.7971
  • Dad in the Echo 2023 China  Jacky Heng SUN  315 points in 82 votes cast = 3.8414  * Best Animation
  • Eunice 2018 UK Eric Garro 240 points in 74 votes cast = 3.2432  * Science History Discovery of Greenhouse Gasses.
  • M.T. Nestor 2023 USA John Schlag  250 points in 70 votes cast = 3.5714  
  • The Hairdo 2024 UK Catherine Ruby Yeats  205 points in 73 votes cast = 2.8082
  • Fire of God 2024 Belgium Yannick Mourcia  106 points in 40 votes cast = 2.6500
  • Frederic Brown’s The Hobbyist 2016 USA George Vatistas 161 points in 46 votes cast = 3.5000
  • Battle of LA 2024 USA Patrick Pizzolorusso 137 points in 46 votes cast = 2.9782  
  • Forever 2018 France  Donia Summer 115 points in 47 votes cast = 2.4468
  • Under Siege 2025 Greece Nikos Nikitoglou 107 points in 47 votes cast = 2.2765
  • Stephen King’s The Reach 2024 Italy Luca Caserta  167 points in 41 votes cast = 4.0731  * Best Live Action
  • The Faun of Healwood The Edge 2023 France Stephane Artus 116 points in 39 votes cast = 2.9743
  • In The Walls 2023  Argentina  Ramsés Tuzzio  63 points in 32 votes cast = 1.9687   (continuing trend of low scoring Horror)

*** last 3 had technical error in missing subtitle/captioning.

  • Leïla et Les Fantômes 2023  France Chiraz Chouchane  41 points in 19 votes cast = 2.1578 
  • Alcalyne 2022 France  MICHAËL PROENÇA  41 points in 24 votes cast  = 1.7083  * Lowest Score.
  • Howard Waldrop’s Mary Margaret Road Grader 2024 USA Steven Paul Judd  110 points in 30 votes cast = 3.6666.

(14) THEY KEEP WATCHING THE SKIES. “New evidence suggests our solar system has nine planets again” – Earth.com discusses a new candidate for number nine.

…Searching the far reaches

Researchers at a university in Taiwan believe a Neptune-sized object could be wandering roughly 46.5 to 65.1 billion miles from the sun.

Their fresh findings are based on two deep infrared surveys taken more than two decades apart, with equipment sensitive enough to detect a faint planetary glow.

Infrared data from 1983 and 2006 offered a rare chance to see if something moved slightly between observations.

A possible candidate popped up, and the group thinks it might take 10,000 to 20,000 years to orbit the sun….

…Researchers estimate that if this object exists, it could weigh between seven and seventeen times as much as Earth. That puts it in the ice giant category, similar to Uranus or Neptune, rather than a rocky planet like Earth or Mars….

(15) 48 CHALLENGE 2025. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Sci-Fi London Film Fest has just posted its latest 48-hour film challenge’s 10 finalists for 2025.

This challenge is where amateur film makers are given a line of script and told to include a particular prop (it could be anything from a top hat to a candle stick) and then they are given two days to complete a short SF film.

You can view the finalist shorts at the link.

Meanwhile, this year’s Fest runs June 19– 22, 2025 at the Picture House in Finsbury Park (just north of central London).

(16) ESA BLUE DANUBE BROADCAST TO SPACE, [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] To mark ESA’s 50th anniversary, ESA’s  Cebreros station will broadcast “The Blue Danube” to space on Saturday, May 31, 2025.

The Cebreros station has been used to communicate with deep space missions including: BepiColombo, Euclid, Juice, Hera, Rosetta, Mars Express and NASA’s Perseverance rover.

The Blue Danube was famously (for us SF buffs) in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The Cebreros station can, in theory, communicate with current-technology deep-space probes up to 1/3 light years away. However, it could communicate further with bigger dishes than those aboard current deep space probes and so in theory anyone listening around nearby stars should pick the microwave (S-band) broadcast up.

Details here: “European Space Agency will beam the famous ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ waltz out into the cosmos” in BBC Sky at Night Magazine.

The European Space Agency is planning to beam Johann Strauss’s ‘Blue Danube’ waltz out into the cosmos to celebrate a series of key anniversaries in the history of spaceflight.

2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the European Space Agency and its ‘Estrack’ satellite tracking network.

It also marks the 20th anniversary of its ‘Cebreros’ space antenna and, coincidentally, the 200th birthday of Johann Strauss II himself, composer of the Blue Danube.

And a reminder of the 2001: A Space Odyssey clip:

[Thanks to Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Daniel Dern, lance oszko, Paul Weimer, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Mark Roth-Whitworth for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 5/25/25 When You Get Caught Between The Scroll And Pixel City

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(1) A DISCWORLD TOUR. Olivia Waite picks “The Essential Terry Pratchett” for New York Times readers (link bypasses the NYT paywall.)

…Book by book, Discworld expands and deepens, pulling in elements from our world that Pratchett tempers in surprising ways: Shakespeare, vampires, police procedurals, musicals, Australia, high finance. Then come even bigger ideas: war, revolution, justice.

By the time we reach Book 29, “Night Watch,” Pratchett is writing comic fantasy the way Martin Luther offered theological critique to the Catholic Church: sharp and tough as nails, with a hammering moral force….

… Discworld is not about how to be good, but about how to do good, and why even the smallest acts of kindness matter. Empathy — like humor or creativity or hope — is a muscle. You don’t train for a marathon by running around the world: You start with small distances and work your way up….

Waite recommend this book as the place to start:

…If you find the flow charts daunting — and who could blame you? — “Monstrous Regiment” (2003) is your best bet for a stand-alone, as it happens far away from Ankh-Morpork or the witchy Ramtop Mountains. We meet young Polly Perks, from a small country forever at war with its neighbors, as she cuts her hair, dons trousers and joins the army in hopes of finding her missing brother. The troops are untrained, the fields are barren, and the government insists it’s treasonous to even ask which side is winning the war. The only authority is Sgt. Jack Jackrum, a jovial nightmare in a coat “the red of dying stars and dying soldiers” — as if Falstaff were reborn as a god of war.

Polly soon discovers she’s not the only soldier in disguise. Everyone has their reasons for fighting, and they’re being tracked by more enemies than they know. It’s trench humor at its blackest, and burns like a wound being cauterized…

(2) A RETRO REVIEW. A Deep Look by Dave Hook wishes he was going to be on a panel at the Seattle Worldcon to discuss “’Atomsk: A Novel of Suspense’ by Cordwainer Smith, 1949 Duell, Sloan and Pearce”.

The Short: I recently read Atomsk: A Novel of Suspense by Cordwainer Smith, 1949 Duell, Sloan and Pearce. It’s not SF, but today it would be called a techno-thriller, with an engaging story of USSR atomic bomb program spying and espionage. I enjoyed it and thought it was very good. It’s available in e-book format at a very reasonable price….

(3) SKILLS FOR MODERATING PANELS. Frank Catalano tells how to navigate the hardest easy job in public speaking in “A call for moderation (of panels)” at Franksplaining. He has 10 tips.

… I’ve moderated, conservatively, more than two hundred panels (I started as a teen at science-fiction conventions). Since those early nerdy gatherings, I’ve hosted professional panel discussions at events ranging from technology trade shows and summits to book and education industry conferences over several decades.

But being a good moderator requires a different skill set than being a good public speaker. Overlap? Yes. With a major difference: the audience’s attention should be focused on the entirety of the panel, not only the moderator….

… So, for the sake of a perky panel and a rapt audience, here are 10 things I’ve learned about being a good moderator (if you’re ever called to serve, for reasons personal or professional):

1) You’re the glue. Your mission as moderator is to create a coherent whole out of disparate, and sometimes feuding, parts. As a result, you should be the panel’s audience surrogate — even asking for definitions of terms and clarification of statements which a panelist may state as though everyone already knows. Many times, people attend panels to learn, so they may not….

(4) TEN YEARS LATER. The Daily Dot takes us back to “The 11 most important fandoms of 2015”. You were probably a fan of more than one of these. The list includes Star Wars, Max Max: Fury Road, and Back To The Future. Yet the most irresistible is the number one entry –

1) Hamilton

If you’d told us while we were writing last year’s top 10 list that another fandom—much less one for a Broadway musical—would unseat Star Wars in 2015, we’d have probably sent for the doctor to see if you were feeling OK. But if last year in fandom was the year of diversity powered by feminism and social justice activism, then it only makes sense that this year, the fandom that took everyone by shock and storm was one that took all those conversations to the next level—and several levels beyond.

Put simply, Hamilton is the story of a single founding father, retold through a modern lens with a cast mainly composed of black actors. Nothing about Hamilton is simple, though—starting with the music, a stunning, stirring hip-hop language that crams three times more text into its run time than the average Broadway musical. In addition to being inherently modern, Hamilton is also an inherently fannish text—a kind of AU (Alternate Universe) fanfic that also serves to critique its canon, which in this case is the historical narrative we’re all taught. That narrative all too frequently leaves out marginalized voices, and evades the messy politics of a revolution carried out by white men, many of whom distrusted urban industry and had no intention of freeing their slaves. Composer Lin-Manuel Miranda inserts his own viewpoint as a hip-hop fan born to Washington Height’s immigrant Latino community into that of Alexander Hamilton, who immigrated to New York in poverty from St. Croix. Hamilton typified the revolutionary spirit Miranda reclaims on behalf of #BlackLivesMatter and other current political movements.

Rarely has theatre seemed to loom as large over the cultural landscape as Hamilton does, but rarely has theatre managed to intersect so neatly with both the immediacy of current political issues and the constant cries for representation from fans who expect more from the media they consume. Hamilton began a season-long siege on social media upon the release of the long-awaited cast recording, taking over Tumblr and Twitter and ultimately winning a stint as the bestselling rap album in the country. 

Fans responded in legion forces, annotating hundreds of thousands of words on the show’s category on the lyrics website Genius, and churning out fanworks and critical analysis in droves. Renewed interest in Alexander Hamilton was so intense that the Treasury is now delaying his removal from the $10 bill. Additionally, Miranda’s social media savvy, his genius #Ham4Ham pre-shows, and his appearances all over pop culture from Colbert to Star Wars, have all made him an instant celebrity. And the fandom just keeps growing. History is still happening in Manhattan—all you have to do is look around, look around at the Hamilton movement to see it.

(5) SHARON LEE’S AWARD. Baen Books posted a photo of Sharon Lee accepting the 2025 Robert A. Heinlein Award Friday night at Balticon.

(6) TECHBROS DON’T GET FANTASY EITHER. The New York Times ponders “Why Silicon Valley’s Most Powerful People Are So Obsessed With Hobbits” (link bypasses the paywall.)

…How did a trilogy of novels about wizards and elves and furry-footed hobbits become a touchstone for right-wing power brokers? How did books that evince nostalgia for a pastoral, preindustrial past win an ardent following among the people who are shaping our digital future? Why do so many of today’s high-profile fans of “The Lord of the Rings” and other fantasy and sci-fi classics insist on turning these cautionary tales into aspirational road maps for mastering the universe?…

… A similar taste for kingly power has taken hold in Silicon Valley. In a guest essay in The Times last year, the former Apple and Google executive Kim Scott pointed to “a creeping attraction to one-man rule in some corners of tech.” This management style known as “founder mode,” she explained, “embraces the notion that a company’s founder must make decisions unilaterally rather than partner with direct reports or frontline employees.”

The new mood of autocratic certainty in Silicon Valley is summed up in a 2023 manifesto written by the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who describes himself and his fellow travelers as “Undertaking the Hero’s Journey, rebelling against the status quo, mapping uncharted territory, conquering dragons and bringing home the spoils for our community.”

Andreessen, along with Musk and Thiel, helped muster support for Trump in Silicon Valley, and he depicts the tech entrepreneur as a conqueror who achieves “virtuous things” through brazen aggression, and villainizes anything that might slow growth and innovation — like government regulation and demoralizing concepts like “tech ethics” and “risk management.”

“We believe in nature, but we also believe in overcoming nature,” Andreesen writes. “We are not primitives, cowering in fear of the lightning bolt. We are the apex predator; the lightning works for us.”…

(7) PETER DAVID (1956-2025). Acclaimed comics writer Peter David died May 24 after a long illness.  

AIPT Comics pays tribute: “Comic book legend Peter David dies at 68”.

Peter David is best known in the comics world for his legendary 12-year run on Incredible Hulk in the 1980s that fundamentally transformed the character. He is also synonymous with Spider-Man, and has penned other major heroes for both Marvel and DC, including Captain Marvel and Aquaman. Most recently, David wrote Symbiote Spider-Man.…

… David is survived by his wife, Kathleen O’Shea David, and his daughters Ariel, Shana, Gwen, and Caroline.

Thaddeus Howze has a long remembrance on Facebook.

… A prolific and versatile writer, David’s career began not in comics, but in prose and journalism. His keen wit and sharp storytelling earned him a position in Marvel’s sales department during the 1980s, a foot in the door that led to his first published comic story in The Spectacular Spider-Man #103 (1985). From there, his voice became unmistakable: funny, humane, and layered with deep characterization….

…His 12-year tenure on The Incredible Hulk is legendary, turning what could have been a simple monster book into a psychological epic exploring identity, trauma, and redemption. That run, frequently cited as one of the best in Hulk’s history, cemented PAD’s status as a master craftsman of serialized storytelling.

But his legacy didn’t stop with the Hulk. PAD’s fingerprints are on some of the most enduring titles and characters of the late 20th and early 21st centuries…

…David also ventured beyond comics, contributing to television, video games, and an extensive bibliography of novels—both original works and media tie-ins, including memorable Star Trek stories that made him a fan favorite across fandoms….

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

May 25, 1983 — Return of the Jedi

By Paul Weimer: As I have said before, Return of the Jedi is the first Star Wars movie I ever saw in a theater, and the second movie I ever saw in a theater, period. I don’t quite remember if it was opening weekend or a couple of weeks later that my brothers and I went to go see my first Star Wars film. I had only seen commercials, had some shared Star Wars Toys (I *still* have a stormtrooper bobblehead, I’m looking at it right now, the thing must be over 40 years old). But Return of the Jedi was my first time seeing a Star Wars film, in theaters or otherwise.

It was an interesting place to begin. I had vague ideas on what had happened in the first two movies (from cultural appropriation, such as it was, and my older brother).  So having an opening crawl…and then having the droids go to Jabba’s Palace…that was the first moments of Star Wars on a screen for me. For a long time, it held pride of place, even when I saw Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back on video, mainly because I had seen it first. It was “my Star Wars movie” for a very long time. Boba Fett, introduced, and thrown into a pilot. An imperial shuttle (I later had a toy). A whistle stop tour to see this Yoda person I had no idea what his deal really was. The terrifyingly incomplete and dangerous Death Star. My first exposure to Vader, to the Emperor, to our heroes of the Rebellion.

And of course the Ewoks. Yes, the Ewoks are for kids. But the Ewoks are terrifying. Sure their defeat of imperial forces en masse makes no sense (I immediately got a defensive like of AT-STs that would finally pay off when I saw Rogue One. But notice just how dangerous the Ewoks are to individual storm troopers, it’s clear they have been fighting them for years…and, well, yes, eating them. Those cute Ewoks are carnivorous and merciless. I couldn’t buy them defeating an entire garrison with rebel help, but bushwhacking lone soldiers for a meal? Yeah, that definitely was plausible.

Also, of course, Return of the Jedi was my first intro to Lando Calrissian and I had no idea the Falcon used to be his. So yes, the first Star Wars film I saw was Lando flying the Falcon.  Go figure. And, also, I saw the Han-Leia romance at its culmination.  So when I did see Star Wars, and saw Luke Kiss Leia, having seen it in Return of The Jedi…boy was I confused. But the dogfight into the superstructure is rather satisfying.

And of course the big space battle. If not for the Death Star, the Imperial fleet was clearly on the ropes. I took it to mean the Empire was vastly underestimating the rebellion. With their smaller and more nimble fleet, and better fighters, the Empire was a dinosaur compared to the Rebellion.  Maybe had I seen Star Wars I would have felt differently, but I started watching Star Wars when the Empire was ready to fall, not at its height.

I am not a fan of the retconning that has Hayden Christensen’s force ghost appear in newer versions of Return of the Jedi. It also goes to the whole problem of timelines and timeframes in the Star Wars universe. But the movie itself? Solid still.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

May 25, 1939 — Sir Ian McKellen, 86.

By Paul Weimer: Sir Ian McKellen came to my consciousness in his twin roles in the late 90’s: Magneto, and Gandalf. It was quite the coup for both Peter Jackson and for Sony to land an actor of McKellen’s magnitude and make it work so that I could watch him chew scenery with Patrick Stewart (each one of them the other’s equal) and then the ensemble cast of the best adaptation of Middle-Earth I will likely get in my lifetime. The idea that he was doing these two iconic roles, basically, at once, is amazing. 

Also, McKellen makes the Hobbit movies almost watchable for me. Almost.

And yes, while we have seen Magneto and Gandalf with other portrayals, other actors, other media, they feel like they stand as reaction, or preparation, to McKellen’s performances. That’s his power as an actor. People half a century now will study his takes, if only to do it differently.  

He doesn’t quite rescue the 2009 Prisoner remake from utter oblivion, although he does try. It is when he is so brilliantly affably evil. “Of course it’s a trap” that he really gets the role of Number Two right. But he’s saddled with a script and a setup that just doesn’t jell together. A pity.

I think his best genre piece outside of Magneto and Gandalf is one that is only mildly genre, and this is his adaptation of Richard III. It counts as genre because it takes place in a 1930’s version of Richard III, with the Wars of the Roses taking place as a conflict much more like the Spanish Civil War, between Royalists and Fascists. McKellen plays the title character, addresses the audience throughout, and is absolutely captivating in it. 

Sir Ian McKellen

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) DOCTOR WHO BARBIE. “Ncuti Gatwa Is a Barbie, Again” – Gizmodo has the story.

Not content with simply being Ken again after his guest appearance in the Barbie movie coincided with the news that he would be Doctor Who‘s latest Doctor, Ncuti Gatwa is going full circle with his very own 15th Doctor Barbie doll.

Revealed by the BBC this morning, Mattel Creations will release new Barbie dolls of the 15th Doctor and his first companion, Ruby Sunday. He’s Ken no more!…

… Gatwa isn’t the first Time Lord to be Barbie-fied–Jodie Whittaker’s 13th Doctor had that honor back in 2018–but Millie Gibson’s Ruby Sunday will mark the first time a Doctor Who companion has entered the Barbie world….

(12) MIRROR, MIRROR, THAT WILL BE ON THE WALL. “What are Time Mirrors? And Do They Exist?” The Daily Dot seems to think they do.

Time mirrors sounds like a concept straight out of a sci-fi film. But physicists confirm that time mirrors exist—and it’s not as mind-boggling as it sounds.

Instead of a regular mirror that bounces light back at the person looking in, letting them see their reflection, a time mirror is caused by waves reversing their flow in time. In other words, this reaction causes a signal to reverse, Earth.com reports.

To demonstrate, physicists attach a metal strip to an “electronic component” to create a “metamaterial.”

Then, by carefully adjusting the electronic component, a burst of energy flips the direction of the wave in time.

While it sounds complex to the layman, scientists anticipate that time mirrors could have tangible applications. No, not just for time machines.

According to Earth.com, this discovery may create new ways to transmit data or create advanced computers. However, the scientists note that further research and experiments are needed to figure out the limits of time mirrors….

(13) A BIG DUMP. “Giant ‘white streak’ appears over multiple US states as Chinese rocket dumps experimental fuel in space” explains Live Science.

A massive streak of white, aurora-like light recently appeared in the night sky above several U.S. states after a Chinese rocket released half a dozen satellites into orbit. The light show was triggered when the rocket dumped a new type of fuel into space before reentering the atmosphere, experts say.

The luminous streak appeared at around 1:24 a.m. ET on Saturday (May 17), hanging in the air for around 10 minutes before eventually fading away. It was photographed in at least seven states — Colorado, Idaho, Utah, Missouri, Nebraska, Washington and New Mexico — but may have been visible even further afield, according to Spaceweather.com.

Photographer Mike Lewinski snapped stunning shots of the streak from Crestone, Colorado (see above) and also managed to capture timelapse footage of the entire event….

(14) MORE BOGUS AI LEGAL CITATIONS. “Alabama paid a law firm millions to defend its prisons. It used AI and turned in fake citations” reports the Guardian.

…In 2021, [prison inmate] Johnson filed a lawsuit against Alabama prison officials for failing to keep him safe, rampant violence, understaffing, overcrowding and pervasive corruption in Alabama prisons. To defend the case, the Alabama attorney general’s office turned to a law firm that for years has been paid millions of dollars by the state to defend its troubled prison system: Butler Snow.

State officials have praised Butler Snow for its experience in defending prison cases – and specifically William Lunsford, head of the constitutional and civil rights litigation practice group at the firm. But now the firm is facing sanctions by the federal judge overseeing Johnson’s case after an attorney at the firm, working with Lunsford, cited cases generated by artificial intelligence – which turned out not to exist.

It is one of a growing number of instances in which attorneys around the country have faced consequences for including false, AI-generated information in official legal filings. A database attempting to track the prevalence of the cases has identified 106 instances around the globe in which courts have found “AI hallucinations” in court documents.

Last year, an attorney was suspended for one year from practicing law in the federal middle district of Florida, after a committee found he had cited fabricated AI-generated cases. In California earlier this month, a federal judge ordered a firm to pay more than $30,000 in legal fees after it included false AI-generated research in a brief.

At a hearing in Birmingham on Wednesday in Johnson’s case, the US district judge Anna Manasco said that she was considering a wide range of sanctions – including fines, mandated continuing legal education, referrals to licensing organizations and temporary suspensions – against Butler Snow, after the attorney, Matthew Reeves, used ChatGPT to add false citations to filings related to ongoing deposition and discovery disputes in the case.

She suggested that, so far, the disciplinary actions that have been meted out around the country have not gone far enough. The current case is “proof positive that those sanctions were insufficient”, she told the lawyers. “If they were, we wouldn’t be here.”…

[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Paul Weimer, Frank Catalano, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Rob Thornton.]

Pixel Scroll 5/18/25 Pixels Tickle When They Walk Through You

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(1) ZELAZNY-INSPIRED ART. Michael Whelan discusses the series of covers he created for “The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny” from the NESFA Press.

I rank Roger Zelazny as one of the best F/SF writers of his generation. One of my prime regrets is that I never got to meet him.

I was immediately intrigued when offered the chance to provide covers for a multi-volume collection of his works by NESFA Press, the publishing side of the New England Science Fiction Association.

While pitching the project, the publisher explained that Roger had said in an interview that he always wished to have me do a cover for one of his books; alas that it didn’t come to pass during his lifetime. But I was happy to show my respect for his legacy through my art….

…Upon reflection I settled on a blend of 1) managing elements of RZ stories that applied to tales within a particular volume, and 2) adding things ‘on the fly’ as a part of the process of doing the painting, using connections that popped up while adding details to the composition.

I’m not going to lie…it did occur to me that I could paint anything at random, knowing that a connection could be found between what I chose to depict and some narrative or thematic element in Zelazny’s writing.

That was liberating. I felt free to develop the composition from a “big design” standpoint since there was such a wealth of material to draw on to “populate” the image areas.

The idea of running one image across the spines of the seven books was discussed early on; I believe Alice Lewis, jacket designer on this project, was the one who originally mentioned it. The challenge of making it work seemed exciting, so I was drawn to that approach right away….

(Paul Weimer has reviewed the first five books in the series for File 770: “Paul Weimer Review: Roger Zelazny’s Threshold”; “Paul Weimer Review: The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny, Volume Two: Power & Light”; “Paul Weimer Review: The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny, Volume Three: This Mortal Mountain”; “Paul Weimer Review: The Collected Works of Roger Zelazny, Volume Four, Last Exit to Babylon”; and “Paul Weimer Review: The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny: Volume 5: Nine Black Doves”.)

(2) SEATTLE WORLDCON 2025 CONSULTATIVE VOTE IS OPEN. Seattle Worldcon 2025 is holding a consultative vote of WSFS members on two of the proposed Constitutional amendments passed on from the Glasgow 2024 Business Meeting. Voting runs from May 1 to May 31 and is accessed through the member registration portal in the same manner as the Hugo Award voting. More information is available on the Consultative Vote Webpage.

As previously announced, Seattle Worldcon is holding a consultative vote of WSFS members on two of the proposed Constitutional amendments passed on from the Glasgow 2024 Business Meeting to the Seattle Worldcon: the proposed revisions of the Hugo Award categories for best professional artist and best fan artist, and the proposed amendment to abolish the Retro Hugo Awards.

The purpose of the consultative vote is to test whether this type of vote is feasible, in case the practice is someday adopted as a formal part of the WSFS decision-making process. These proposals were chosen because they have clearly generated wide interest among the Worldcon community.

(3) ON THE WAY. “Frankenstein in the Age of CRISPR-Cas9” at Nautilus.

…[Mary] Shelley drew on a mythology of technology that goes back to the 6th century B.C. when the figure Prometheus stole fire from the gods and bestowed it to mankind. The “fire bringer,” is often associated with Lucifer, (literally meaning “light bearer”), who pilfered light from the heavens and brought it down to Earth. The “fall of man” implies an age when mortals are illuminated with knowledge. Immanuel Kant was the first to modernize the term, when he nicknamed his pal, Benjamin Franklin, “the Prometheus of modern times” for his nifty work with kites. In the early 19th century, Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus put the concept into terms of controlling biological forces. She not only arguably invented science fiction, but her novel offered a plot device for modern tales, including Flowers for Algernon, The Stand, The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Yann Martel’s short story “We Ate the Children Last.” We all understand the illusions. A scientist sets out to create a more perfect entity, only to have it backfire as the thing he creates gets out of control.

…By the early 1980s, Richard Mulligan at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology isolated genetic code and wrapped it up in a virus, returning it to humankind as a tool. In the same decade, companies such as Biogen and Genentech claimed the patents to control the first applications of genetic engineering. Scientists today are using the gene editing tool CRISPR to do things such as tinker with the color of butterfly wings, genetically alter pigs, and engineer microbes with potentially pathogenic or bioterror purposes. Last year, a group of 150 scientists held a closed-door meeting at Harvard Medical School to discuss a project to synthesize the code of a human genome from scratch using chemical techniques. As Andrew Pollack wrote in The New York Times, “the prospect is spurring both intrigue and concern in the life sciences community because it might be possible, such as through cloning, to use a synthetic genome to create human beings without biological parents.” In August, Shoukhrat Mitalipov at the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland reported using CRISPR to alter a human embryo….

…We are at the very start of the “industrial revolution of the human genome,” just as Shelley was writing at the start of the Industrial Revolution. Her essential insight is that science and technology can progress but will never achieve social control without a willful and ongoing abdication, or repression, of our agency. Shelley wants to tell us that what we seek from technology is based on our existential fear of being in control over our own lives, which have no ultimate solution, and which compels us to so eagerly pursue what psychologists call an external locus of control. But mythology is often first presented as a utopia, only to result in a dystopian reality…

(4) THE SF COLLECTION SOME OF US GREW UP WITH. “A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, Volume One & Two, Anthony Boucher editor, 1959 Doubleday & 1960 SF Book Club” features at A Deep Look by Dave Hook.

The Short: I recently reread one of my favorite SF anthologies as a much younger person, A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, Volume One and Volume Two, Anthony Boucher editor, 1959 Doubleday/1960 Science Fiction Book Club. It was available for purchase only as a two volume set when new. I am not aware of any other SF anthology that includes two novels and 10 pieces of short fiction, much less one that includes four novels and 20 short fiction works in the set. My favorite novel included is the classic The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester, and my favorite short fiction is the classic “The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff“, a novella by Theodore Sturgeon. My overall average rating is 3.73/5, or “Very good”. It was great to rediscover how great the John Wyndham novel Re-Birth is…. 

(5) GOING ROGUE IS RECOMMENDED. “Five Takeaways From Rewatching ‘Rogue One’ After ‘Andor’” at The Ringer.

…The makers of Andor have teased how transformative it can be to revisit Rogue One after the prequel-to-a-prequel’s conclusion. As of last week, Andor creator Tony Gilroy hadn’t rewatched Rogue since finishing Andor, but he hyped the practice anyway: “Other people around me have done it. So I’ve been reassured. And I’ve seen bits and pieces of it; it comes on, and you’re like, ‘Oh my god, holy crap. Look what that does.’” Diego Luna was even more insistent. “I urge people to see Rogue One right after the end of Season 2,” the actor who plays Cassian said. “They’re going to see a different film.”…

There follow five takeaways which, as you should expect, are full of spoilers.

(6) AS IMAGINED IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. [Item by Andrew Porter.] “When a president goes rogue: In these books, it already happened” at Salon. Discussion of several novels including The Man In The High Castle and Parable of The Sower.

…As the second Trump administration lurches into its third month, moving fast and breaking government, I’ve been studying what American writers have suggested would occur if a demagogue were elected president. A next step, in novels such as Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can’t Happen Here,” involves a direct attack on the Supreme Court if it declines to affirm a president’s agenda. Much the same forces are at work 90 years later. Alternative histories, particularly dystopias, reflect their societies’ radical pessimism, as  Harvard professor and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore suggested in 2017:  

“Dystopia used to be a fiction of resistance; it’s become a fiction of submission, the fiction of an untrusting, lonely, and sullen twenty-first century, the fiction of fake news and Infowars, the fiction of helplessness and hopelessness.”…

(7) INTERNATIONAL BOOKER THOUGHTS. [Item by Steven French.] A couple of genre related novels top the Guardian’s list of contenders for the International Booker Prize: “A Danish Groundhog Day or tales of millennial angst… What should win next week’s International Booker?”

What unites the books on the shortlist for this year’s International Booker prize? Brevity, for one thing: five of the six are under 200 pages, and half barely pass 100. They are works of precision and idiosyncrasy that don’t need space to make a big impression. Themes are both timely – AI, the migration crisis – and evergreen: middle-class ennui; the place of women in society. And for the second consecutive year, every book comes from an independent publisher, with four from tiny micropresses. Ahead of the winner announcement on 20 May, here’s our verdict on the shortlist….

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

May 18, 1962 — Twilight Zone’s “I Sing The Body Electric”

They make a fairly convincing pitch here. It doesn’t seem possible, though, to find a woman who must be ten times better than mother in order to seem half as good, except, of course, in the Twilight Zone. — Intro narration.

On this date in 1962, The Twilight Zone aired “I Sing The Body Electric”. 

It was scripted by Ray Bradbury and although he had contributed several scripts to the series, this was the only one produced. (His first script, “Here There Be Tygers,” was accepted but never filmed.)

It became the basis for his 1969 short story of the same name, named after an 1855 Walt Whitman poem which celebrates the human body and its connection to the universe. It was according to Whitman anti-slavery. The original publication, like the other poems in Leaves of Grass, did not have a title. In fact, the line “I sing the body electric” was not added until the 1867 edition.

Bradbury’s short story would be published first in McCall’s, August 1969. Knopf would release his I Sing The Body Electric collection in October of that year. It’s been included in least fifty collections and anthologies.) 

James Sheldon and William F. Claxton directed the episode; Sheldon directed some of The Man from U.N.C.L.E episodes; Claxton is known for Bonanza and Little House on the Prairie. I’ll confess to having seen a fair amount of the former but none of the latter. 

A large ensemble cast was needed as, minor spoiler alert, the primary cast here are shown at two ages, hence Josephine Hutchinson, David White, Vaughn Taylor, Doris Packer, Veronica Cartwright, Susan Crane and Charles Herbert all being performers even though the actual script calls for very few characters. 

Another spoiler alert. Perhaps I’m being overly cautious but we did get a complaint about spoiling a 50-year-old episode of a program by not noting that I was going to say something about that program, hence spoiler alerts for these programs.

Auntie, the organic one, caring for the children has decided they are too much of a burden and has decided to leave. So father decided to get a robot grandmother, a new fangled invention in their city. The mechanical grandmother after some resentment by one child is accepted by all after she saves one child from mortal injury and Serling says after that —

As of this moment, the wonderful electric grandmother moved into the lives of children and father. She became integral and important. She became the essence. As of this moment, they would never see lightning, never hear poetry read, never listen to foreign tongues without thinking of her. Everything they would ever see, hear, taste, feel would remind them of her. She was all life, and all life was wondrous, quick, electrical – like Grandma.

So this gentle tale that only Bradbury could write of the children who love her and the ever so wonderful mechanical grandmother ends with Serling saying the words scripted of course by Bradbury for him:

A fable? Most assuredly. But who’s to say at some distant moment there might be an assembly line producing a gentle product in the form of a grandmother whose stock in trade is love? Fable, sure, but who’s to say?

This was the year that the entire season of the series won the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo at Chicon III. Just my opinion, but I think of all the nominees that it was clearly the far superior choice to win the Hugo. Really superior. 

It is streaming on Paramount+. 

There’s also a boy in the family but I couldn’t find an image of all three children, the father and the grandmother that was as good as this one is.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) EXPECT A CODA FOR THIS SEASON OF DOCTOR WHO. BBC Doctor Who reveals: “Special episode of Doctor Who: Unleashed announced celebrating 20 years of revival”.

Travel back with David Tennant, Billie Piper and host Steffan Powell through a host of Whoniversal history…

As Season 2 comes to a climax, a special edition of Doctor Who: Unleashed is set to air on BBC Three, BBC iPlayer and BBC Wales. Steffan Powell is once again set to take a trip through the time vortex as he invites viewers on a journey celebrating the last twenty years since Doctor Who returned, and he will be joined by a host of cast and creatives that have played a part in bringing the show back into the Whoniverse.

Joining Steffan for the ride are some of the show’s most recognisable faces, including past Doctors David Tennant and Jodie Whittaker, former companions Billie Piper, Pearl Mackie, and Mandip Gill, ex-showrunners Steven Moffat and Chris Chibnall, the current Doctor Ncuti Gatwa alongside his newest companion Varada Sethu, as well as the current showrunner and the man who brought the show back in 2005, Russell T Davies.

As well as chatting with the stars about what Doctor Who means to them, Steffan will be revealing secrets from behind the scenes with interviews with those who work behind the cameras to bring Doctor Who to life….

 (11) PRECURSORS? Facebook’s group for David Attenborough Fans discusses the Silurian Hypothesis.

…The idea of the Silurian Hypothesis was inspired by an episode of Doctor Who, where intelligent reptilian creatures called Silurians awakened from 400 million years of hibernation due to nuclear testing. While this was a work of fiction, the hypothesis raised a profound possibility: What if there were once other advanced civilizations on Earth that have completely vanished?

Humans often think that their existence and their civilization are eternal, but history teaches us otherwise. Take ancient Egypt, for instance. For over 3,000 years and across 30 dynasties, Egyptians lived under the shadow of the pyramids, fished the Nile, and mingled with other cultures. To them, their civilization seemed everlasting, yet it too disappeared. Similar fates befell the Mesopotamians, the Indus Valley civilization, the Greeks, Nubians, Persians, Romans, Incas, and Aztecs. These great empires, once thriving with millions, left behind scant evidence of their grandeur.

Modern humans have been around for about 100,000 years, a mere blip in the hundreds of millions of years that complex life has existed on Earth. Given this vast expanse of time, it’s conceivable that other intelligent species might have risen and fallen long before us. Would we even know they had been here?…

…The Silurian Hypothesis suggests looking for markers of industrialization on a global scale. One key marker is changes in the isotopic composition of elements, which can be detected in sedimentary layers. For instance, human activities have altered the nitrogen cycle and increased the levels of certain metals like gold, lead, and platinum. Most notably, the burning of fossil fuels has changed the carbon isotope ratios in the atmosphere, known as the Suess effect, which is detectable in sediment cores.

Interestingly, a sudden global change in carbon and oxygen isotope levels was observed 56 million years ago during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). The PETM saw Earth’s temperature rise by six degrees Celsius over 200,000 years, with fossil carbon levels spiking. Some scientists speculate that a massive volcanic eruption caused this, but the exact cause remains unknown. Could it have been evidence of an ancient civilization? Probably not, but it does show how such an event could leave a detectable mark.

The Silurian Hypothesis, while not proving the existence of ancient civilizations, provides a framework for searching for them, not just on Earth but also on other planets. The Drake Equation estimates the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy, suggesting there could be anywhere from 150,000 to 1.5 billion. If intelligent life can arise multiple times on a single planet, as the Silurian Hypothesis proposes, it opens up exciting possibilities for finding civilizations throughout the galaxy….

(12) THE INSIDE (THE BOOKSHOP) STORY. [Item by John King Tarpinian.] The Howling (1981) Bookshop scene was filmed at the Cherokee Bookshop, which was on Cherokee just off of Hollywood Boulevard.  The wandering customer is Forry Ackerman.   

(13) PITCH MEETING. Ryan George takes us inside the “Thunderbolts* Pitch Meeting”.

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

Pixel Scroll 4/27/25 Pixel, If You Will, An Ordinary Man, Filing The University’s Ancient Scrolls

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(1) AUTHOR’S ADDITIONAL COMMENTS ABOUT HORROR PUBLISHING GRIEVANCE. Todd Keisling posted a follow-up message on Bluesky to yesterday’s complaint about his experience with Cemetery Dance publisher Richard Chizmar. In the new post he also takes the Horror Writers Association to task.

(2) WHEN THE DEAN OF SCIENCE FICTION WAS A FRESHMAN. A Deep Look by Dave Hook asks, “Was ‘The Runaway Skyscraper’ Really the first SF story by Murray Leinster?” Hook analyzes several rival candidates and explains why they are unpersuasive before agreeing with the canonical answer.

…Finally, we come to novelette “The Runaway Skyscraper“, Argosy and Railroad Man’s Magazine, February 22, 1919, which I also believe is the first SF story by Murray Leinster.

There are some first published stories by authors that are quite stunning and can be considered classics. I wrote about this at Dave’s Favorite First Stories of Science Fiction. I believe there are varying reasons for this, including learning one’s craft at non-genre publications under other names as one common example. “The Runaway Skyscraper”, the 58th story by Murray Leinster published that I know of, is not one of those.

I am not willing to say it’s a “Great” story, or even “Very good”, but I was entertained by it and I have no regrets on reading it….

(3) WEDNESDAY ON THE CALENDAR. Entertainment Weekly says that new cast members include Steve Buscemi, Joanna Lumley, Thandie Newton, Christopher Lloyd, and Lady Gaga: “’Wednesday’ season 2: Release date, cast, plot details, and more”.

…Netflix shared an action-packed teaser trailer for season 2 that highlights Wednesday’s return to Nevermore alongside her family.

“This is the first time you’ve ever willingly returned to a school,” says Morticia. “How does it feel?”

“Like returning to the scene of a crime,” Wednesday deadpans….

…Wednesday’s eight-episode second season will arrive in two installments. The first four episodes strut onto the streamer on August 6, and the last four land on September 3….

(4) MACE WINDU IS FEELING BETTER. “Samuel L. Jackson, Hayden Christensen surprise ‘Star Wars’ screening” reports Entertainment Weekly.

The Force was strong at the El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles on Friday.

Star Wars castmates Hayden Christensen and Samuel L. Jackson surprised fans when they showed up at a special 20th-anniversary screening of Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith.

Christensen first took the stage at the historic Hollywood cinema while wielding a red lightsaber, telling the crowd that he had “so many amazing memories of making” the final Star Wars prequel, in which Anakin Skywalker embraces the dark side as he becomes Darth Vader and aids Palpatine in his hostile takeover of the Galactic Republic.

“I see a lot of lightsabers out here,” Christensen said to the audience. “I see a lot of red lightsabers, which truth be told is my personal favorite lightsaber color.”

He was then interrupted by the voice of an unseen visitor. “Hold on, Skywalker,” Jackson said from off stage. “This party ain’t even over.”

Christensen then introduced his former costar. “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage Mace Windu himself, Samuel L. Jackson.”

Jackson seemed thrilled by the audience’s thunderous applause. “This is so, so, so awesome,” he said. “Twenty years later, I can hardly believe that we’re still as popular — as happenin’ — as we are. I haven’t seen Hayden in a while, but so, so, so happy to come back, see him, and see all of you at the same time. Thank you all so much. We had a great time making the film down in Australia. We were hangin’ out, doin’ stuff.”…

(5) IMPERIAL Q&A. Variety quizzes the actor: “’Star Wars’ Star Ian McDiarmid on ‘Revenge of the Sith,’ Playing the Emperor”.

How carefully mapped out was Palpatine’s arc when you were first re-hired to play him in “The Phantom Menace”?

It wasn’t mapped out at all, really. When I first got the part, I had no idea what the world was that I’d be in charge of as the Emperor. So it started off as a big mystery. I had no idea that Palpatine would figure [into the story so heavily]. But by then it so happened that I was young enough to play the younger Senator. When I first met George about it, he said, “Do you know anyone who wants to play an Emperor?” I said, “I think you know the answer to that question.” And then I got the script and realized that he was more than one character, which made it even more fascinating to play — an ordinary, everyday, fairly hypocritical politician with a monster hiding inside his body…

….This is a character who can turn on emotion when needed. What reality are you playing as an actor to be able to tap into those feelings?

Well, he’s a hypocrite, plain and simple — and a very good actor. He’s a performance. He’s only interested in one thing: absolute power. It sounds objective and black and white, but it’s extraordinary. If you think of people who have absolute power or pretty damn near it, you think that’s all they want, really — wealth and to be able to run people. But also, he was a Sith from way back. Now, I don’t really know what that means, but that particular personality is completely different from everybody else. He plays the human, but he isn’t one. Palpatine embodies the dark side. He relishes it. He thinks people who don’t enjoy it or don’t allow themselves to be drawn to it are stupid….

(6) CONQUEST OF SPACE. With ideas from a Willy Ley book with art by Chesley Bonestell, “70 Years Ago, A Forgotten Sci-Fi Failure Secretly Changed The Genre Forever” remembers Inverse.

When Paramount Pictures gave producer George Pal a then-sizable $1.5 million to make Conquest of Space, his idea was to create the most realistic film about space travel yet. Released in 1955, Conquest of Space followed several other sci-fi hits — including 1951’s Destination Moon and When Worlds Collide, and Pal’s arguable masterpiece, 1953’s The War of the Worlds — that established Pal as a purveyor of the kind of sci-fi spectacle that still puts butts in theater seats today.

With Byron Haskin, his War of the Worlds director, returning to the center seat for Conquest of Space, Pal went against standard Hollywood practice and eschewed hiring expensive stars for his movie. In fact, the opening credits don’t even list a single actor; the little-known ensemble, none of which distinguished themselves here, was relegated to the end credits scroll….

…Some aspects of Conquest of Space are accurate for the era, including the length of time it would take to get to Mars, and certain scenes still make an impact (the funeral in which a crew member’s body is released into space foreshadows a similar scene in Alien 24 years later). Real-life concerns about space travel are addressed (albeit with clunky exposition), and the scenes on Mars are also fairly well-conceived in terms of what scientists knew about our closest planetary neighbor… until it snows near the end, providing the astronauts with much-needed water….

(7) BERT TANNER (1933-2024). Artist Seabourne Herbert (Bert) Tanner Jr. of Maine died March 2, 2024 reports the Duxbury Clipper. His resume included 11 covers for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction between 1965 and 1973.

…Bert’s career centered on illustration, animation and working with major New York advertising agencies doing animatics and television test commercials. His earlier career focused on science fiction illustration, comic books, aviation and textbook illustration.

He was commissioned to illustrate the then future NASA lunar landing module and was an animator for the startup children’s show “Sesame Street.” He was a long-standing member of the Society of Illustrators. Bert’s wide range of interests included Crimson Tide Football, photography, music, video, film, kites, birds, meteorology, astronomy, hiking, beach volleyball, skiing, snorkeling, current events, and an extraordinary fascination with flight, specifically World War II aviation. To say he loved art is an understatement, he adored all art. He will be remembered for his wonderful creativity, curious mind and great sense of humor. Bert was drawn to the written word and was known by many for his witty poems and limericks. ‘pop’ loved his family and will always be missed for his creative cartoon cards to mark every family occasion…

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

April 27, 1922 — Jack Klugman (Died 2012.)

Only three individuals did four or more appearances on Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone and Jack Klugman was one of them. 

Let’s discuss his appearances. He was in “A Passage for Trumpet,” “A Game of Pool”, “Death Ship” and “In Praise of Pip”. 

In “A Passage for Trumpet” he’s Joey Crown, a hopeless NYC trumpeteeer with no money, no friends, and no job prospects due to being an alcoholic. He ends in Limbo talking to an Angel. 

Next he’s Jesse Cardiff in “A Game of Pool,” where we get told the story of the best pool player living and the best pool player dead. No points for guessing which he is. 

Now this episode was remade in the eighties Twilight Zone. That version featured Esai Morales as Jesse Cardiff and Maury Chaykin as Fats Brown. This version used the original alternate ending that Johnson intended for the original version. (Nope in keeping with the File 770 policy of not having spoilers if at possible, I’m not telling you what that ending was. After all it’s only been sixty years and some of you might not have seen it yet.) 

The next episode he’s in is definitely SF and based on a Richard Matheson short story with the same title, “Death Ship”. (It was first published in Fantastic Story Magazine, March 1953.) Matheson wrote sixteen episodes of The Twilight Zone including “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”. Only Serling wrote more. In this episode, a spaceship crew discovers a wrecked replica of their ship with their own dead bodies inside. Klugman plays the Captain Paul Ross.

The model used in this episode of the hovering spaceship is that of a C-57D Cruiser, a leftover prop from Forbidden Planet. It would also be used in the episodes “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” and “Third from the Sun”. The crashed ship is a model created for this episode.

The final appearance by him is in “In Praise of Pip” where his role is Max Philips,  a crooked bookie, who after learning that his soldier son has suffered a mortal wound in the Vietnam War, apparently encounters a childhood version of his son.

The Twilight Zone streams on Paramount +. 

Jack Klugman in “A Game of Pool”

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) ISSUES IN GAME HISTORY. “Fallout creator Tim Cain says he was ‘ordered to destroy’ his personal archive of the RPG’s development: ‘Individuals and organizations actively work against preservation’” at GamesRadar+.

With each passing year, game preservation grows more and more relevant, and you can add Fallout creator Tim Cain to the many voices calling for a more serious approach to saving video game history. Cain knows the struggle of actually preserving this stuff better than most – after all, he was ordered to destroy his own Fallout archives when he left developer Interplay.

“There’s a lot of organizations out there that demand to be the archive keeper, and then they do a terrible job at it,” Cain says in a new YouTube vlog. “They lose the assets they were in charge of keeping. This has happened multiple times in my career. When I left Fallout, I was told ‘you have to destroy everything you have,’ and I did. My entire archive. Early design notes, code for different versions, prototypes, all the GURPS code – gone.”Cain says that Interplay intended to keep an archive internally, but “they lost it. When they finally, a few years after I left, contacted me and said ‘oops, we lost it’ I thought they were trapping me into ‘we’re going to sue you if you say you have it.’ Turns out, no, they really lost it.”…

(11) SOCIAL LEARNING, BRICK BY BRICK. “What makes successful learners? How Minecraft can help us understand social learning” at Phys.org.

The ability to learn socially from one another is a defining feature of the human species. Social learning enables humans to gradually accumulate information across generations. And although we are able to build cities full of skyscrapers, send people into space, and collectively develop cures for diseases, most studies investigating social learning mechanisms focus on relatively simple, abstract tasks that bear little resemblance to real-world social learning environments.

As a result, little is known about how humans dynamically integrate asocial and social information in realistic, real-world contexts. To investigate this, an international team of scientists from the Cluster of Excellence Science of Intelligence (SCIoI), the Max Planck Institute for Human Development (MPIB), the University of Tübingen, and NYU developed a virtual foraging task programmed in the popular video game Minecraft.

In their study, published in Nature Communications, they found that adaptability (i.e. flexibly using asocial and social learning strategies, rather than fixed strategies) is the most important driver of success….

(12) HUBBLE BIRTHDAY E-BOOK IS A FREE DOWNLOAD. To celebrate Hubble’s 35th birthday (how time has flown!) NASA has released a free e-book containing some of the stunning images received over the years, and more! “Hubble’s Beautiful Universe” from NASA Science.

For 35 years, the Hubble Space Telescope has orbited above Earth’s atmosphere, teaching us more than we ever imagined we could know about our universe and place within it. In addition to Hubble’s extraordinary scientific value, its transformative views of space continue to inspire and shape how we think about the cosmos.

In celebration of this benchmark anniversary, we’re sharing a new, free, and downloadable e-book. Hubble’s Beautiful Universe takes readers on a journey through Hubble’s mission, from 1990 to today, with many of the breathtaking images of the cosmos it’s collected along the way.

This book unfolds Hubble’s long-ranging story decade by decade, highlighting each era’s contributions to astronomy. It showcases Hubble’s important “firsts” that changed the way we understand our universe, and also explains the groundbreaking scientific concepts that Hubble studies, like mysterious dark matter and our universe’s accelerating expansion.

From groundbreaking astronaut servicing missions, to record-shattering observations, to jaw-dropping peeks into the deepest reaches of space, Hubble has shown Earth a universe more beautiful and more mysterious than anyone could have understood before its launch. As the Hubble team anticipates more years of discovery ahead, Hubble’s Beautiful Universe offers an exciting overview of the first 35 years of NASA’s most prolific astronomy mission.

(13) 10 EXPECTATION DEFYING SF/F BOOKS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Book Pilled has an interesting life collecting and selling SF/F books. He is also an avid reader.  Here he reveals 10 SF/F books that defied his expectations in a 20 minute video.

[Thanks to Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, 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 Dan’l.]

Pixel Scroll 4/2/25 Oh, Pixelline, Why Can’t You Be True?

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(1) LOST BONESTELL LITHOGRAPHS COMING ONLINE FREE. You’ll soon be able to view thirty-two recently discovered industrial illustrations from Chesley Bonestell’s early career. Starting this Thursday, April 3, Michael Swanwick and Marianne Porter will be posting one new illustration every workday on Swanwick’s blog at Flogging Babel.

Most of these images have not been seen for over a century.

Chesley Bonestell was the most significant and influential astronomical illustrator of the 20th century. But before his rise to fame he worked as an architectural illustrator. In 1918, he was commissioned by the Army Corps of Engineers to document the construction of a wartime munitions plant and hydroelectric dam in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Bonestell created 32 large-scale lithographs, showing the construction of the plant, including meticulous records of both industrial interiors, the dam and railroad being built, and the surrounding countryside. They were all signed in the stone.

The munitions factory was never a particularly successful enterprise; it came on line only a few weeks before World War One ended. But the hydroelectric dam was the first in the Tennessee Valley Authority, the massive project that made possible the economic and industrial development of the American South.

The thirty-two lithographs were stored in the Packwood House Museum in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where only two were actually on display to the public. This set of prints are not numbered, and it is not clear if any other prints were made. The Museum was owned and operated by John Featherstone, and his wife, Edith Featherstone, an artist in her own right, and was intended to showcase her work, as well as central Pennsylvania arts and crafts. Eventually the museum was closed and its contents liquidated. The Bonestell lithographs seem to have been included in the collection because John Featherstone was the engineer in charge of the Muscle Shoals construction project.

The lithographs were purchased by Swanwick and Porter in an auction. When all of them have been posted online, a torrent will be created, making the complete collection available at full resolution.

Michael Swanwick is an award-winning science fiction and fantasy writer. His wife, Marianne Porter, is the editor and publisher of Dragonstairs Press.  The first image to be posted is attached.

Swanwick explained on his blog today how the lithographs came into the couple’s possession: “Chesley Bonestell’s Lost Lithographs”.

“I don’t know what they are, but I hope you get them.”

That’s what the lady at the auction house said when Marianne Porter told her that all Marianne wanted were the Chesley Bonestell lithographs. There were 32 of them in the lot, and it was clear nobody at Pook & Pook knew what they were….

(2) KENNY GRAVILLIS Q&A. “Movie Poster Designer Kenny Gravillis Aims to Leave You Asking Questions” at PRINT Magazine.

…Is it common within the movie poster design industry to bid against other studios for projects? 

Especially on really big films, there will be three to four different agencies. Just to give you an example, on Game of Thrones season two, there were like 11 agencies that worked on that. It’s super competitive. For independent films that don’t have that much money, they might only be able to hire one agency to work on it. But when you start getting into the Dunes of the world, then there are multiple agencies working on it. And they’re working on it until the end, by the way. You don’t even know if you’re gonna get the final post; it’s pretty wild….

…I also think successful movie posters can exist as standalone pieces in their own right, outside of their attachment to a movie. A graphic image or design that you might want on your wall or you find compelling simply because it looks good. 

100%. The thing is, every filmmaker cares about their poster. There’s not one filmmaker that’s like, “Whatever…” Because it’s the face of the film. As great as trailers are, they’ll probably be forgotten. Nobody says, “I remember the trailer for Rosemary’s Baby or the trailer for Alien.” They’re like, “Oh, my God, the Alien poster!” …

…The other thing I’d like to say is that it never gets old. The other day, I went to see Captain America, and our poster was in the lobby. Seeing the stuff that I’ve worked on out in the world just never gets old. If it ever does, I think I’ll call it a day.

(3) CAN IT BE? “Trump Tariffs Hit Vox Day” says crusading journalist Camestros Felapton, who has found a way to leverage today’s headlines into a sff blog post. (By which I mean, dang, I wish I’d thought of it!)

…A country that surprised some in getting high tariffs was Switzerland at 31%. That’s higher than the UK (10%), EU (10%) and South Korea (25%). Sure would be a shame if some obnoxious hyper-nationalistic Trump support had invested a lot of money in printing and binding hardback books for Trump supporting fanboys in the US wouldn’t it?…

(4) A FIRST IN THE FIELD. A Deep Look by Dave Hook chronicles “’The Other Worlds’, Phil Stong editor, 1941 Wilfred Funk: The First Speculative Fiction Anthology”.

The Short: As discussed below, I believe The Other Worlds (aka The Other Worlds: 25 Modern Stories of Mystery and Imagination, 1942 editions), Phil Stong editor, 1941 Wilfred Funk, is the first speculative fiction anthology. I am glad I read it, but it’s a mixed bag and I would only recommend it to a big fan of horror, science fiction and fantasy from 1925 to 1940. It includes three essays by Stong in addition to 25 stories. My favorite story was the great “Alas, All Thinking!“, a novelette by Harry Bates (known best for “Farewell to the Master“, a novelette adapted for the movie “The Day The Earth Stood Still“), Astounding Stories, June 1935. I am not really a fan of horror, which influenced how I felt about The Other Worlds. My overall average rating is 3.45/5, or a rather anemic “Good”. It is in print, and available online…

(5) FUTURE TENSE. March 2025’s Future Tense Fiction story is “Coda,” by Arula Ratnakar—a story about computation, genetics, and cryptography.

The response essay, “Computing Consciousness”, is by computer scientist Christopher Moore, whose research actually inspired the story!

(6) TIME TO NOMINATE FOR THE CÓYOTL AWARDS. Members of the Furry Writers’ Guild are eligible to submit 2024 Cóyotl Awards nominations through April 5.

Nominations are open to all members of the Furry Writers’ Guild, though awards may be given to any work of anthropomorphic writing demonstrating excellence regardless of membership. Please see the award rules for what makes an eligible work. For a non-exhaustive list of what’s eligible, see the recommended reading list.

(7) DOUBLE-HEADER. In the first video below Erin Underwood interviews Martha Wells about her Murderbot series, with a couple of questions about the adaptation that is coming to Apple TV in May. The second video is a review of In The Lost Lands, which is an adaptation of GRRM’s short story.

Exclusive Interview with Martha Wells: Inside The Murderbot Diaries

Join me for this exclusive interview with Martha Wells, author of The Murderbot Diaries, as we explore one of science fiction’s most popular series — now being adapted into a new Apple TV series. What makes Murderbot so compelling, and how did Wells create such a nuanced, unforgettable character? Come watch on YouTube to find out!

In the Lost Lands, Movie Review – Worth the Watch?

Paul W.S. Anderson’s In the Lost Lands brings George R.R. Martin’s dark fantasy to life, but does its reliance on digital sets and AI-driven cinematography elevate or undermine the experience? With Milla Jovovich and Dave Bautista leading the charge, this film raises big questions about the future of sci-fi and fantasy filmmaking. Join me on YouTube where I break it down.

(8) ON TARGET. “’Woke’ criticism of Doctor Who proves show on right track, says its newest star” in the Guardian.

Criticisms that Doctor Who has become too “woke” prove the series is doing the right thing by being inclusive, its new star Varada Sethu has said.

Sethu plays the Doctor’s latest travelling companion, Belinda Chandra, in new episodes airing next month. With Ncuti Gatwa returning as the Doctor, the pairing marks the first time a Tardis team will comprise solely people of colour.

Speaking about the milestone, Sethu told the Radio Times: “Ncuti was like, ‘Look at us. We get to be in the Tardis. We’re going to piss off so many people.’…

And the BBC has a long profile with the actor: “Doctor Who: Varada Sethu wants to inspire young South Asian women”

When new Doctor Who companion Varada Sethu first told her family she wanted to be an actress, there wasn’t immediate support.

“They had difficulty coming to terms with it initially,” she tells BBC Asian Network News.

Varada, who will be playing Ncuti Gatwa’s sidekick, Belinda Chandra in the upcoming series, feels going into acting is “sadly still not encouraged in the South Asian community”.

“There’s an element of resistance we face,” the 32-year-old says.

But Varada wants to change all of that, and says inspiring young girls to follow their dreams is one of her big goals.

“I want to be the person that these girls can point out to and say: ‘She made it and she came from a community that looks like mine’.

“So I think I’ve gone about this with the energy of, I can’t fall flat on my face,” she says.

But the actress, who has had roles in Disney+ Star Wars series Andor, 2018 crime drama Hard Sun and Jurassic World Dominion, says change comes with challenges.

A report by the Creative Diversity Network found in 2022/23 the percentage of on-screen contributions by those who identify as South Asian or South Asian British was 4.9%.

That’s compared with the latest census data, analysed by the UK Government, that found around 8% of people from those backgrounds are in the working-age population.

“It’s a constant battle of failure isn’t an option,” says Varada.

“Because, you know, your uncle’s daughter who’s six, who might wanna go into acting when she’s a bit older, won’t be allowed to, if I become the cautionary tale.”…

(9) STRANGE NEW TREK. Gizmodo says “The First Trailer for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 3 Is a Wild Trip”.

The new trailer immediately goes meta, detailing at least more than a few adventures where Strange New Worlds will take the crew of the Enterprise beyond the typical spacebound adventures and into some very meta territory–from murder mystery holoprograms, to a kitschy spin on the original Trek‘s ’60s production aesthetics. And that’s even before you get to Carol Kane’s Commander Pelia hooking up the whole ship to old-timey analogue phones!…

(10) VAL KILMER (1959-2025). Actor Val Kilmer, whose iconic genre roles included Batman Forever and Real Genius, died April 1 at the age of 65. The Hollywood Reporter tribute notes he was most famous for playing Iceman in Top Gun and Doc Holliday in Tombstone. And it also recalled some of his other sff work —

…Marlon Brando’s insane assistant in John Frankenheimer’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996); 

…He was married to British actress Joanne Whalley from 1988 until their divorce in 1996. They met while working together on Willow and wed months later.

…Kilmer starred as rockabilly teen idol Nick Rivers in the daffy spy spoof Top Secret! (1984) from Jim Abrahams and the Zucker brothers. 

…Kilmer also provided the voice of K.I.T.T. in a new version of TV’s Knight Rider in 2008-09

(11) MEMORY LANE(S)

[First piece written by Paul Weimer. Second piece by Cat Eldridge.]

April 2, 1968 — 2001: A Space Odyssey

By Paul Weimer: Did the “Blue Danube Waltz” play through your head just now? Or perhaps “Also Sprach Zarathrustra”?  Possibly both?  Even though I am not a music guy, both of those music pieces come to mind when I think of 2001. The music is the first thing I think of when I think of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

You know the story. Monolith uplifts Ape with the power of ultraviolence. Humans find the Monolith on the Moon, a ship heads to Jupiter to investigate where the signal went. Hal goes mad and kills most of his crew. David Bowman has an apotheosis. 

But 2001 is far more than the music and that plot. It’s visuals, really the first time I saw it, I felt that this could be what space would be like. Slow sedate visuals but one that felt accurate. (The jokes/conspiracy theories that the real moon landing was directed by Kubrick come from the visuals of 2001). Be it the apes scene, the casualness of the lounge in the space station, the investigation of the monolith, daily life on the Discovery, or the very very weird ending. I am still not quite sure I get it. But is it absolutely unforgettable? Yes. 

And that’s the fun thing about the movie. It is slow, very slow. But it doesn’t drag. It’s sedately and sedate in places, and then violently and suddenly. The movie seems to just know when to interrupt the quiet stately pace with a sudden action or point of drama. In any event, the movie holds my attention throughout. Every time I’ve started watching it, I’ve kept it on.  It is THE space movie for me. 

And it became clear to me that when I saw Star Trek The Motion Picture, just how much they tried to borrow from 2001. Maybe too much, for their own good. They learned the need for stately pacing…but not so much when to break it up.

By Cat Eldridge: Fifty-six years ago, 2001: A Space Odyssey had its world premiere on this date at the Uptown Theater in Washington, D.C., it would be nearly a month and three weeks, the fifteenth of May to be precise, before the United Kingdom would see this film. 

It was directed as you know by Stanley Kubrick from a screenplay by him and Arthur C. Clarke who wrote the novel. 

It spawned a sequel about which the less said the better. (My opinion, the critics sort of like it. Huh.)

It would win a Hugo at St. Louiscon over what I will term an extraordinarily offbeat field of nominees that year — Yellow Submarine, Charly, Rosemary’s Baby and the penultimate episode of The Prisoner, “Fallout”. 

It did amazingly well box office wise, returning one hundred fifty million against just ten million in production costs. 

So, what did the critics think of it then? Some liked, some threw up their guts. Some thought that audience members that liked it were smoking something to keep themselves high. (That was in several reviews.) Ebert liked it a lot and said that it “succeeds magnificently on a cosmic scale.” Others were less kind with Pauline Kael who I admit is not one of my favorite critics saying that it was “a monumentally unimaginative movie.” Humph. 

I was too young to see when I came out, but an arts cinema showed a few decades later which I saw it there, so I did see it on a reasonably large screen. It is extraordinarily amazing film. I don’t think the Suck Fairy would any problems with it even today

Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give it a most not unsurprising rating of ninety two percent. 

(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

April 2, 1948 — Joan D. Vinge, 77.

By Paul Weimer: It is fitting that The Snow Queen has her birthday just as we are getting out of winter and into Spring, and the treacherous Winters of the planet Tiamat are reluctantly getting ready to hand over the control of the planet to the Summers for a time.  The original Snow Queen novel and its sequels is where I began reading Vinge’s work. I picked it up for the same reason I picked up many books in the mid to late 90’s–it had been on an award ballot and I was filling in the gaps of my reading. (It won for Best Novel at the Hugos in 1981, and was a finalist for the Nebula the same year).  I found the worldbuilding of the novel most satisfying, and the titular Snow Queen and her grand plot to try and control the planet for its entire cycle by means of her clone I found to be a crackerjack story. 

Only after reading the story did I realize how much the story was influenced by both the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, and by Robert Graves (The White Goddess).  A re-read when I decided to read the entire series showed me that as much as I thought it has been rich and interesting, on a re-read the book was *even better*.  The Snow Queen is one of those novels that the more you know, the even cleverer and more intricately woven it appears to be. 

My favorite of that entire series is the standalone Tangled Up in Blue, which is really a noir mystery novel that just so happens to take place on the mean streets of Carbuncle. It’s a genre mashup that works even better than I hoped, and it works really standalone, too. You don’t need to read The Snow Queen to dive into Tangled Up in Blue. 

Besides the stories set on Tiamat, Vinge has written plenty of other stuff as well. Catspaw is a favorite of mine, although it is a case where I accidentally started with the second book in the series not even knowing there was a first book (Psion).  Vinge feels, like Julian May, like one of the last SF authors to really use and deploy telepathy in a major mainstream SF novel straight up. 

Finally, Vinge has also written a number of movie tie-in novelizations, including one (Cowboys and Aliens) that actually redeems that (IMO) very flawed movie.

Joan Vinge

(13) COMICS SECTION.

(14) DC COMICS HISTORY. BBC’s Witness History remembers “The wonder woman of DC Comics”.

In 1976, Jenette Kahn began one of the biggest roles in comic books – publisher of DC Comics, home to Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. She was only 28 and the first female boss.

(15) WRITING WHILE DISABLED. In the second audio episode of Writing While Disabled at Strange Horizons, hosts Kristy Anne Cox and Kate Johnston “welcome Farah Mendlesohn, acclaimed SFF scholar and conrunner, to talk all things hearing, dyslexia, and more ADHD adjustments, as well as what fandom could and should be doing better for accessibility at conventions, for both volunteers and attendees.”

There’s a transcript at the link, where you can also watch the full interview on video with close-caption subtitles.

(16) VIDEOS OF THE DAY. “Oh Jeez, Rick and Morty Will Return in May” reports Gizmodo.

April Fools’ Day is upon us, but this is no joke: Rick and Morty season eight hits Adult Swim May 25, with a first look to prove it. The news came as part of Adult Swim’s annual April 1 celebration, and also included a 22-minute special of favorite Rick and Morty moments re-interpreted in appropriately and unexpectedly freaky ways. Adult Swim described it as pulling from “absurd, live-action, theater-based genres,” and frankly you just need to watch it to believe it.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Paul Weimer, Erin Underwood, Michael Swanwick, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Mark Roth-Whitworth.]

Pixel Scroll 3/10/25 (SF/F Reference) + (Cultural Reference|770 Jargon) / Pun ~= (Scroll Title)

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(1) BULWER-LYTTON RIDES OFF INTO THE SUNSET. Last week Scott Rice told fans of The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, “Au Revoir, Noble Bulweriers!”

It is with deep regrets that I announce the conclusion of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.  Being a year and a half older than Joseph Biden, I find the BLFC becoming increasingly burdensome and would like to put myself out to pasture while I still have some vim and vigor!

When I initiated the competition in 1983, inviting entrants to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels, I never dreamed that we would receive thousands of entrants from all over the U.S. and the globe, or that the contest would survive for over four decades. 

​I am especially grateful to our entrants for keeping the contest alive and to our Panel of Undistinguished Judges who dutifully selected each year’s “winners.”  And, of course, I would like to thank my daughter, EJ, who has been indispensable the last several years of the contest.  It’s been 42 good years but, alas, all good things must come to an end. Rest assured we’re keeping the BLFC spirit alive by maintaining our archive for posterity so that generations and generations hence may witness your greatness!

(2) ERRATA REDUX. The UK’s SF Gateway bookselling site is having a little trouble identifying author “William Rotsler”, co-author with Gregory Benford of Shiva Descending. As Andrew Porter pointed out to them, this is a photo of Robert Silverberg.

It isn’t the first time something like this has happened to Rotsler. When he was the 1973 Worldcon Fan Guest of Honour, the designer of TorCon 2’s program book erroneously ran a photo of John Schoenherr instead of Rotsler. (Coincidentally, Robert Silverberg was the author of that 1973 bio!)

(3) DROPPING FAST. The Guardian reports “US added to international watchlist for rapid decline in civic freedoms”.

The United States has been added to the Civicus Monitor Watchlist, which identifies countries that the global civil rights watchdog believes are currently experiencing a rapid decline in civic freedoms.

Civicus, an international non-profit organization dedicated to “strengthening citizen action and civil society around the world”, announced the inclusion of the US on the non-profit’s first watchlist of 2025 on Monday, alongside the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Italy, Pakistan and Serbia….

(4) NEW DAVE HOOK POSTS. A Deep Look by Dave Hook praises “’Deep Dream: Science Fiction Exploring the Future of Art’, Indrapramit Das editor, 2024 The MIT Press”.

The Short: I recently read Deep Dream: Science Fiction Exploring the Future of Art, Indrapramit Das editor, 2024 The MIT Press. My favorites of the ten short stories were “Encore“, by Wole Talabi, “The Quietude” by Lavie Tidhar, and “Autumn’s Red Bird“, by Aliette de Bodard. The essays and art were great also. My overall rating was 3.88/5, or “Great”. Strongly recommended.

And for an encore, Dave Hook shares “My 2025 Hugo Nominations”. His list includes —

Best Related Work nomination:

I nominated “The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion“, Chris Barkley & Jason Sanford Author/Editors, File770/Genre Grapevine, February 14, 2024.

(5) FUTURE TENSE. February’s Future Tense Fiction story is “Mothering the Bay,” by Deji Bryce Olukotun—a story about AI, misinformation, and parenting, set on the BART public transit system in California’s Bay Area.

The response essay, “The Awareness Imperative”, is by educational technologist Babe Liberman.

 (6) PAGING CAPTAIN PIKE’S BARBER. “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 3 Character Posters” – there are 13 images in the gallery. The Captain looks like he stuck his head out a porthole while the ship was at Warp 3. I rather like the photo of Scotty, though.

Paramount+ reveals new character art for Season 3 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds!

The new character art features Anson Mount as Captain Christopher Pike, Rebecca Romijn as First Officer Una Chin-Riley, Ethan Peck as Spock, Jess Bush as Nurse Christine Chapel, Christina Chong as La’An Noonien-Singh, Celia Rose Gooding as Nyota Uhura, Melissa Navia as Erica Ortegas and Babs Olusanmokun as Dr. M’Benga.

In addition to the main cast, we have recurring guests Paul Wesley as James T. Kirk, Melanie Scrofano as Marie Batel, Martin Quinn as Montgomery ‘Scotty’ Scott, and Carol Kane as Pelia.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is based on the years Captain Christopher Pike manned the helm of the U.S.S. Enterprise.

Anson Mount as Captain Christopher Pike
Martin Quinn as Montgomery ‘Scotty’ Scott

(7) KAZUO ISHIGURO Q&A. [Item by Steven French.] With a 20th Anniversary special edition of his science fiction novel Never Let Me Go about to be published, Nobel prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro is interviewed by the Guardian and discussed his openness to speculative fiction, his own opinion of his prose style and the dangers posed by the increasing use of AI: “’AI will become very good at manipulating emotions’: Kazuo Ishiguro on the future of fiction and truth”.

Never Let Me Go had a long gestation period, as Ishiguro explains in his introduction to a new edition; for many years, it existed merely as thoughts and notes about a group of students whose lifespan – perhaps as the result of a nuclear accident – was markedly different from their peers. The breakthrough came via a combination of external factors and timing: societal interest in the potential benefits and dangers of cloning, at its most headline-grabbing in the shape of Dolly the sheep; and a shift in writing and publishing that made a place in so-called literary novels for the techniques and practices of speculative fiction.

“I gave myself permission to use what traditionally might have been called genre tropes,” Ishiguro explains. “And that wasn’t because I was being terribly brave or anything. I think the climate around me changed; the next generation of writers, people about 15 years younger than me, didn’t see anything weird about it, at least the people I happened to become friends with, David Mitchell or Alex Garland. They were taking their cues from all kinds of places and I really liked their work.”

(8) SIMON FISHER-BECKER (1961-2025). “Simon Fisher-Becker dead: ‘Harry Potter,’ ‘Doctor Who’ actor was 63” reports USA Today.

Simon Fisher-Becker, a British actor known for his roles on “Doctor Who” and in the first “Harry Potter” film, has died. He was 63.

Fisher-Becker’s death was confirmed by his agency in a statement issued to USA TODAY on Monday.

“Today, I lost not only a client Simon Fisher-Becker, but a close personal friend of 15 years standing,” the statement said. “I shall never forget the phone call I made to him when he was offered the part of ‘Dorium’ in Dr Who. He had been a fan of the show since he was a child.

“Simon was also a writer, a raconteur and a great public speaker. He helped me out enormously and was always kind, gracious and interested in everyone. My condolences go to his husband Tony, his brother, nieces and nephews and his legion of fans.”

Fisher-Becker portrayed the Fat Friar, a ghost from Hufflepuff, who appeared in 2001’s “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.” In the film, he comes through the floor of the Hogwarts dining hall as several ghosts arrive, including Nearly Headless Nick.

The actor also starred as Dorium Maldovar on the British sci-fi series “Doctor Who.” He played the role in the fifth and sixth seasons of the modern reboot opposite Matt Smith’s Doctor….

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Frederik Pohl’s Gateway wins the Hugo for Best Novel (1978)

Forty-six years ago at IguanaCon II, where Tim Kyger was the Chair, Harlan Ellison was the pro guest, and Bill Bowers was the fan guest, Frederik Pohl’s Gateway wins the Hugo for Best Novel. 

The other nominated works for that year were The Forbidden Tower by Marion Zimmer Bradley, Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Time Storm by Gordon R. Dickson and Dying of the Light by George R. R. Martin. 

It was serialized in the November and December 1976 issues of Galaxy prior to its hardcover publication by St. Martin’s Press. A short concluding chapter, cut before publication, was later published in the August 1977 issue of Galaxy.

It would win damn near every other major Award there was as it garnered the John Campbell Memorial for Best Science Fiction Novel, the Locus Award for Best First Novel, the Nebula Award for Novel and even the Prix Pollo Award for Best Science Fiction Novel published in France. It was nominated for but did not win the Australian Ditmar Award. 

It’s the opening novel in the Heechee saga, with four sequels that followed. It is a most exceptional series. I’ve read I think all of them. 

I’m chuffed that Pohl was voted a Hugo for Best Fan Writer at Aussiecon 4. Who can tell what works got him this honor? 

Gateway of course is available at the usual suspects. 

If I’m remembering right, there was talk of a film for awhile.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) THE NEXT DISRUPTION. The Guardian asks, “Are AI-generated video games really on the horizon?”

Another month, another revolutionary generative AI development that will apparently fundamentally alter how an entire industry operates. This time tech giant Microsoft has created a “gameplay ideation” tool, Muse, which it calls the world’s first Wham, or World and Human Action Model. Microsoft claims that Muse will speed up the lengthy and expensive process of game development by allowing designers to play around with AI-generated gameplay videos to see what works.

Muse is trained on gameplay data from UK studio Ninja Theory’s game Bleeding Edge. It has absorbed tens of thousands of hours of people’s real gameplay, both footage and controller inputs. It can now generate accurate-looking mock gameplay clips for that game, which can be edited and adapted with prompts.

All well and good, but in an announcement video for Muse, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer caused confusion when he said that it could be invaluable for the preservation of classic games: AI models, he implied, could “learn” those games and emulate them on modern hardware. It’s not clear how this would be possible. Further muddying the waters, Microsoft’s overall CEO Satya Nadella then implied in a podcast interview that Muse was the first step in creating a “catalogue” of AI-generated games.

But Muse, as it stands, can’t create a game – it can only create made-up footage of a game. So just what is this new gaming AI tool? A swish addition to game developers’ tool belts? Or the first step towards an era of AI-generated gaming detritus?…

(12) CLIPPING SERVICE. Filer Lise Andreasen says, “I made a joke!”

(13) MIND INTO MATTER. “Vesuvius Turned a Roman Man’s Brain Into Glass. Now, Scientists Reveal How the Extremely Rare Preservation Happened” in Smithsonian Magazine.

In 79 C.E., Mount Vesuvius erupted, burying the nearby ancient Roman city of Pompeii and the smaller town of Herculaneum under deadly layers of volcanic ash, pumice and pyroclastic flows. But the disaster that demolished the two settlements also immortalized them, preserving everything from the shape of victims’ bodies to frescoes in private villas and library scrolls.

Archaeologists even discovered the remains of a young man whose brain and parts of his spinal cord had turned into glass. Scientists had never seen a glassy soft tissue in nature before—and no one has found anything like it since….

…The recent study, however, supports the 2020 research claiming that the remains are indeed a brain—they found preserved neurons and axons, as well as proteins known to be common in brain tissue. They conclude the vitrification was caused by an ash cloud that arrived in Herculaneum before the pyroclastic flows from the volcano….

…But there’s a catch: “Conditions must have been very, very specific, because the organic tissue must have experienced a heating fast enough not to entirely destroy it (which is instead the most common occurrence) and then fast-cool to turn into glass,” Giordano says to Popular Science’s Andrew Paul.

To achieve those specific circumstances, the skull and spine acted as protective layers, shielding the soft tissue within from a bit of the heat. “The glass that formed as a result of such a unique process attained a perfect state of preservation of the brain and its microstructures,” the team writes in the paper.

Giordano tells Live Science’s Tom Metcalfe that they found charcoal fragments in Herculaneum that supported their idea. These fragments “experienced multiple [heating] events, and the highest temperatures were associated with the early, super-hot ash cloud.”

Benjamin Andrews, a volcanologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History who was not involved in the study, tells Science’s Collin Blinder that the team’s findings are “remarkable.”

“There’s a huge story, a huge wealth of information, contained in these little particles,” he adds.

Not everyone agrees with the new conclusions, however. For example, Alexandra Morton-Hayward, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Oxford in England who was also not involved in the research, is not convinced that the glassy material is indeed parts of the man’s brain. She maintains that soft tissue vitrification is “incredibly unlikely,” per CNN….

(14) LUNAR ECLIPSE VISIBLE FROM THE AMERICAS. Coming March 14: “Total lunar eclipse to mesmerise skywatchers in March” reports the Guardian.

This week, the moon experiences a total lunar eclipse, which although not as spectacular as a total solar eclipse is still a beautiful celestial sight to behold.

A total lunar eclipse occurs when the full moon passes directly behind Earth, through our planet’s shadow. Skywatchers first see the shadow of Earth creeping across the face of the moon. This is known as the partial phase.

Then, during the total phase, when the moon is engulfed by Earth’s shadow, the lunar surface turns a deep red colour. In the last phase, also known as a partial phase, Earth’s shadow slips off the lunar surface and all returns to normal.

It is a leisurely process, taking more than three hours to complete. On 14 March, the partial eclipse begins at 0509 GMT. The total phase begins at 0658 GMT before returning to a partial phase at 0731 GMT. This final partial phase then ends at 0847 GMT.

Unfortunately for European and African viewers, only the initial partial phase will be visible. Observers in North and South America, however, will be treated to the whole thing. Parts of Asia and Australia will then catch the final partial phase.

(15) FILK HISTORY. “Margaret Middleton – A Shaper of Modern Filk (Part 2 of 2), interviewed by Edie Stern” has been posted by FANAC.org on YouTube.

Title: Margaret Middleton – A Shaper of Modern Filk  (Part 2 of 2), interviewed by Edie Stern

Description: FANAC History Zoom: February 2025:  Named to the Filk Hall of Fame in 1996, and a long time officer of the Filk Foundation, Margaret Middleton has been instrumental in the shaping of modern filk, as well as a mainstay of Arkansas fandom. She’s published multiple fanzines, including Kantele, and was a founder of the first specialized filk convention, Filkcon 1.

In Part 2 of this 2 part recording, the conversation ranges from Margaret’s taxonomy of filk, to tips for busking at the Farmer’s Market, and to the effect of the internet on filking and the filk community.  We also learn about Margaret-when-she’s not filking, including her involvement in  the Civil Air Patrol, quilting and her professional responsibilities for “measuring piles of dirt and holes in the ground.” … It’s a wide-ranging conversation, and ends with barbershop quartets, the Ballad of Eskimo Nell (discussed – not sung),  the relationship of quilts to filk conventions and audience Q&A…For those interested in the history of filk, this 2 part interview is highly recommended.

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

Pixel Scroll 2/7/25 It’s Only A Pixel Scroll, Filing Over A Mimeo Sea

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(1) THE BLURB REVOLUTION. “Book blurbs: Authors hate them. Publishers love them. They’re often made-up” says Slate’s Imogen West-Knights.

Whip-smart, unputdownable, lyrical, dazzling, pitch-perfect. Taut, tender, a tour de force. A triumph. Unflinching, stunning, mesmerizing, evocative. You will have seen a book—probably many, many books—with some of these words, what one might call blurbiage, if one were being annoying, on its cover. Often, these quotes will be just that one word. But the process by which those single words are acquired is a fraught one. So much so that last week, one top editor at a major publisher, Sean Manning at Simon & Schuster, made an unusual and attention-grabbing announcement about them. In his eight years at the company, he wrote in an essay for Publishers Weekly, “it has been tacitly expected that authors—with the help of their agents and editors—do everything in their power to obtain blurbs to use on their book cover and in promotional material.” No longer. Under his leadership, authors won’t be “required” to spend “an excessive amount of time” getting blurbs for their books….

…Debut authors also told me that it had “taken over their lives” sending out “begging letters” for blurbs, and more established ones said their lives had been taken over by the barrage of unsolicited proofs to blurb that they were receiving. “A lot of publicists are probably paid too poorly to really sit and consider which authors might genuinely like which book,” one novelist said, “but I wish this meant they just sent out less requests in general instead of taking this scatter-gun spam-bot approach.”

So many book proofs are getting sent out, and authors are being pursued so relentlessly for comment, that it has become common enough practice to blurb a book without having actually read it. “I was really horrified the first time someone said I should just make something up for them to approve,” said one debut nonfiction writer, who had a book out last year. This happens all the time, people told me.

Much of the blurb game is built on existing acquaintances. There is enormous social pressure to blurb books for people you sort of know. So people either lie about liking a book, because they don’t want things to be awkward, or end up ghosting the requests, or blurb it positively because they are “blinded by affection,” one nonfiction author told me. “The only time I’ve heard of someone having the balls to say ‘I haven’t blurbed your book because I didn’t actually like it’ is Sarah Schulman,” she added. According to another novelist, “It turns the entire industry into this fucking Regency-era tea party, where we all just owe each other favors and there’s actually no meritocracy or peer review or even admiration going on.”…

(2) ALL THAT TROUBLE, SO ARE THEY WORTH ANYTHING? The New York Times has also reacted to the Simon & Schuster announcement in “What Are Book Blurbs, and How Much Do They Matter in Publishing?” (link bypasses the paywall.)

…Do blurbs really help sell books?

The truth is, no one can say for sure.

“I don’t know if blurbs have ever worked,” Manning said. “There’s no metric to tell.”

Victoria Ford, the owner of Comma, a bookstore in Minneapolis, said, “My initial reaction was that blurbs don’t matter at all.” She’d rather read a thorough summary on the back of a book, or a lively description on the flyleaf, than rely on a few beats from an established author who might have a personal relationship with the author in question.

As for her customers, Ford went on: “I have not noticed readers paying a lot of attention to blurbs, with a few exceptions. I’ve definitely sold books because a customer was browsing and saw a book Ann Patchett had blurbed. Readers trust her.”…

(3) COSTUME DESIGNERS GUILD AWARDS. The 2025 Costume Designers Guild Awards winners include two in categories devoted to sff, and a third in the Period Film category.

Excellence in Sci-Fi/Fantasy Film

  • Wicked; Paul Tazewell, CDG

Excellence in Sci-Fi/Fantasy Television

  • Dune: Prophecy; “The Hidden Hand”; Bojana Nikitovic

Excellence in Period Film

  • Nosferatu; Linda Muir, Costume Designer, Alima Meyboom, ACD; Anna Munro, ACD

(4) CLASSIC ELLISON SHORT FICTION CONSIDERED. A Deep Look by Dave Hook devotes its closest attention to “’Deathbird Stories’, by Harlan Ellison, 1975 Harper & Row”.

…Ellison starts by trying, perhaps to link this collection and its contents to literature and SF, with the quotation of a letter (I assume) from George Bernard Shaw to Count Leo Tolstoy, followed by quotes from Voltaire, Ovid, and Robert A. Heinlein. These are all about gods in some way.

He adds this Caveat Lector, a Latin Phrase for “let the reader beware“:

“It is suggested that the reader not attempt to read this book at one sitting. The emotional content of these stories, taken without break, may be extremely upsetting. This note is intended most sincerely, and not as hyperbole. H.E.”

I take this both ways, as an honest warning and part of his hyperbole….

(5) ALTERNATE HISTORY TV SPINOFF. “’Star City’: Anna Maxwell Martin Joins ‘For All Mankind’ Spinoff” reports Deadline.

BAFTA Award-winner Anna Maxwell Martin (Motherland) is set as a lead opposite Rhys Ifans in Apple TV+‘s upcoming series Star City, a spinoff from the streamer’s space race drama For All Mankind.

Created by Ben Nedivi, Matt Wolpert and Ronald D. Moore, Star City is another alt-history retelling of the space race – when the Soviet Union became the first nation to put a man on the moon. But this time, we explore the story from behind the Iron Curtain, showing the lives of the cosmonauts, the engineers, and the intelligence officers embedded among them in the Soviet space program, and the risks they all took to propel humanity forward…

(6) IN MEMORIAM. Steven H Silver’s list of members of the sff community who died in 2024 is available at Amazing Stories: “In Memoriam 2024”.

(7) BUT THE MEMORY LINGERS ON. Amazing Stories’ Steve Davidson at “Where Is It Safe To Host A Worldcon?” provides a new map of where he approves for the Worldcon to be held. Can you guess which country between Canada and Mexico has recently fallen off the map? Hint: It’s hosting the next two Worldcons.

…It it supremely ironic that one of the counter-arguments to the protest against the Chengdu bid was a stated belief that exposing the citizens of a repressive regime to the openness and diversity of Fandom would offer an alternative example and somehow inspire governmental change.  Instead, the repressive regime has now come to the home of Fandom, the United States, which will have hosted 59 of the 83 Worldcons held by the end of this year.  (Leeds excepted.)

It is, therefore, not just appropriate, but necessary, to amend the map that illustrates the relative appropriateness of Worldcon hosting.

This year, Worldcon will be hosted in a country whose government has enacted or intends to enact policies that are both repressive and dangerous to members of Fandom.  It will be doing so in the name of all of its citizens as it is a duly and legally elected government (for now), because that is how representative democracies work.

Owing to prior bidding, next year’s Worldcon will also be held in a country that is dangerous to Fans and their beliefs.  Three times in four years is a trend that I  don’t want to see continue.  I hope that the majority of Bid voters agree with me….

(8) MORT KÜNSTLER (1931-2025). [Item by Artie Fenner.]  Artist Morton (Mort) Künstler died. Mostly known for his Civil War gallery paintings today, he did plenty of painted covers for comics and men’s adventure magazines back in the day. Early in his career he and James Bama shared a studio and modeled for each other’s illustrations. The Daily Cartoonist paid tribute: “Mort Künstler – RIP”.

…Künstler would go on to paint about 4,000 magazine covers, movie ads and canvases for NASA, the U.S. Postal Service (a depiction of Black soldiers in the Indian Wars in 1994), institutions and private collectors. His paintings are in the permanent collection of more than 50 museums and his work has been featured in more than 20 books. He was the subject of an A&E documentary in 1993.

His specialty was images of the Civil War, and historians and art critics considered him the premier historical artist in the country — one known for his detailed research and accurate depictions of scenes from Colonial times through the Space Age. In 2006, M. Stephen Doherty, editor of American Artist magazine, wrote “Künstler is now known as America’s foremost historical artist” and since the late 1970s “has been recognized as a distinguished fine artist.”…

(9) MEMORY LANE. History.com remembers what happened on February 7, 1974: “Guests watch Mel Brooks’ “Blazing Saddles” movie premiere from horseback”. Guess which daily Scroll contributor whose initials are JKT was there! See photo at this link.

In one of Hollywood’s zaniest movie premiere stunts, Mel Brooks’ 1974 western spoof Blazing Saddles screens at the Pickwick Drive-In Theater in Burbank, California. Guests attend not in cars—but on horseback.

Attendees, many sporting cowboy hats, watched the movie from atop their steeds. Movie sound came through speakers attached to saddle pommels, and the studio set up a “Horsepitality Bar” where guests got “horse d’oeuvres.” Brooks, one of Hollywood’s most legendary comedic directors, was reportedly thrilled with the memorable publicity stunt, and wrote to Warner Bros.’ publicist, Marty Weiser, who came up with the clever idea. Its message: “You’re crazier than I am!”…

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

February 7, 1960 — James Spader, 65.

How can I not do the Birthday of James Spader, the performer who played Dr. Daniel Jackson, Egyptologist in Stargate? Yes, I’m really fond of him in that film. And yes, I am equally fond of Michael Shanks playing that version of the character in the Stargate SG-1 franchise.

His first SF film actually came as a starring role as Joey Callaghan in Starcrossed where an alien woman is running from a deadly enemy and tries to hide here. She meets a young mechanic (Joey), who helps her to go home and to be a freedom fighter there.

A decade later, his next role is in Stargate. I thought it was a great performance by him. And yes, the character as performed by Michael Shanks in Stargate SG-1 continuity is just as interesting, just completely different. His role I thought was more true to that of being an Egyptologist but the Stargate SG-1 continuity isn’t really concerned with the original premise, is it? 

If you saw Avengers: Age of Ultron, and I will readily admit that I have not, he not only voiced Ultron but did the motion capture for it. 

But his greatest role, and I readily admit that is not genre was in The Blacklist series as Raymond “Red” Reddington, a former US Naval Intelligence officer turned fugitive who’s maybe forced to become an FBI crime consultant. And I was surprised to learn that he was an executive producer for that series.  

It’s streaming on Netflix. 

James Spader

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) CIVILIZATION SHUFFLES THE DECK. Polygon tells us what they think about the latest iteration of a longtime classic video game: “Review: Civilization 7 embraces a new era”.

… Civilization 7 breaks with franchise tradition in a couple ways. The first is that your leader and your civilization are unrelated to one another. At the beginning of a game, you select a leader (say, Harriet Tubman) who brings certain capabilities with them (like a bonus to espionage actions). You also select a civilization, a group of people who your leader, well, leads. If you’re starting in the age of Antiquity, the oldest time period, these are civilizations like the Greeks, the Mississippians, or the Han. They are distinguished by specific traits and units that are unique to them. This whole process is inevitably a little weird to people who have played these games before, given that historically there was not a split between leaders and civs, but ultimately the vibes are the same when playing the game — you simply get to mix and match your people, even if it produces extremely weird combos like Machiavelli, leader of ancient Persia….

(13) SUPERSIZED. “Astronomers find the largest structure in the universe and name it Quipu” reports Phys.Org.

Is it possible to understand the universe without understanding the largest structures that reside in it? In principle, not likely. In practical terms? Definitely not. Extremely large objects can distort our understanding of the cosmos.

Astronomers have found the largest structure in the universe so far, named Quipu after an Incan measuring system. It contains a shocking 200 quadrillion solar masses.

Astronomy is an endeavor where extremely large numbers are a part of daily discourse. But even in astronomy, 200 quadrillion is a number so large it’s rarely encountered. And if Quipu’s extremely large mass doesn’t garner attention, its size surely does. The object, called a superstructure, is more than 400 megaparsecs long. That’s more than 1.3 billion light-years.

A structure that large simply has to affect its surroundings, and understanding those effects is critical to understanding the cosmos. According to new research, studying Quipu and its brethren can help us understand how galaxies evolve, help us improve our cosmological models, and improve the accuracy of our cosmological measurements…

…Astronomers have found the largest structure in the universe so far, named Quipu after an Incan measuring system. It contains a shocking 200 quadrillion solar masses….

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Jack Benny and Mel Blanc – The Man of a Thousand Voices” with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show.

[Thanks to Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Artie Fenner, Jim Janney, 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 Jim Janney.]

Pixel Scroll 1/12/25 Make Sure There’s No Pixelite Nearby

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(1) GENESIS OF SF ANTHOLOGIES. A Deep Look by Dave Hook turns its attention to “The First SF Reprint Anthology – ‘The Pocket Book of Science-Fiction’, Donald A. Wollheim editor, 1943 Pocket Books”.

…The Pocket Book of Science-Fiction was the first anthology of reprinted science fiction. Another important aspect of this anthology is that it was the first one with “science fiction” in the title.

Finally, it was probably the first paperback of science fiction. After first publication in hardback in 1933, Lost Horizon by James Hilton was published in paperback in 1939 by Pocket Books. I have not read it, but what I found suggested that it is probably more fantasy than SF. I could be wrong.

R. D. Mullen makes a great case for the importance of paperbacks to science fiction in Science Fiction Studies Volume 1, No. 3, Spring 1974 in essay “AN INDEX TO AMERICAN MASS-MARKET PAPERBACKS”…

… On this basis, I believe that The Pocket Book of Science-Fiction was important both for what it was and as a harbinger of easier access to SF by more people….

(2) HOW MICHAEL WHELAN GOT HIS START. [Item by Bruce D. Arthurs.] Michael Whelan writes interestingly about how he broke into professional illustration, along with pics of some of his early book covers. “1975: Year in Review”.

Ever since I can remember, it seemed natural to draw things that interested me. I just did it. I wasn’t aware of wanting to be an artist until the concept of a career impinged on my mind, but in any case I never thought of it as a serious option until my third year in college.

I had grown to think that I had to be something professional, and since I’d always had an interest in human anatomy, I was intending to become a doctor. In college I was able to separate what I wanted to do from what I thought was expected of me, and in the latter half of my junior year I changed my major to art.

After graduating from San Jose State University, I attended The Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. I enrolled hoping to acquire some mysterious quality of refinement I felt was lacking in my work.

I knew it would be a big mistake to attempt to find my first commission with anything less than professional-level work in my portfolio…

The rest of Whelan’s article tells why he was more surprised than anyone when sf publishers said his work made the grade.

(3) NOT HIS BEST VINTAGE. Jason Sanford’s latest Genre Grapevine devotes a long passage to justifying Erin Cairns’ disproven complaints against Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, in the process shading File 770’s post “Two Accusations Against Ekpeki Disproved”. Sanford refuses to account for the critical fact that Cairns made up two of the worst accusations in her “ODE Ethics Report”.

First, when Erin Cairns claimed that Ekpeki had left her name off the byline when submitting their co-authored story, she merely assumed that must have happened because it was a way she could make sense of how Ekpeki was responding to her, and how she was being ignored by the magazine’s editors. She didn’t know whether that had actually occurred when she made the claim. It wasn’t true. Her name was on the byline of the cover letter and the manuscript. I’ve seen the magazine’s archived copies.

Second, Cairns, a white woman, was distressed because she was under the impression the publication their story was submitted to was a “Black voices magazine”. Cairns emailed the magazine about her concerns and received no answer from them. Therefore, in her report she represented her belief about the magazine’s policy as a fact. It wasn’t a fact. Through contact with an editor of the magazine involved File 770 learned that it was not inappropriate for Cairns’ co-authored story to be submitted to the magazine, which has published a white author in the past.

Jason Sanford had exactly the same opportunity as File 770 to fact-check Cairns’ story. He did not choose to do it, instead devoting the Genre Grapevine for September/October 2024 to a Queeg-like exercise of geometric logic denying Ekpeki’s self-defense:

…In Ekpeki’s response, he essentially says the story was co-written by both of them and he submitted it without her name due to “miscommunication and misunderstandings and assumptions on both sides from two people in not great situations.” Ekpeki also says all the claims Cairns made were incorrect.

However, his argument doesn’t hold up for me. I see it as semantics and legalese, trying to rationalize away what happened. For example, Ekpeki said in his report that “As for her name not being on the bi-line, even if that were true (which it isn’t), it would not be theft, or even an attempt at theft, just an oversight, unless there was an intention to eventually publish it without her name on the bi-line.” And he then says that the magazine he submitted the story to wasn’t a Black voices publication because the magazine “caters to Africans and African diasporans. So there was no malfeasance there. She was eligible to be on the mag.”

That claim is absolutely wrong. As a white person born in South Africa, Cairns specifically said she wasn’t eligible to submit works to the magazine….

Sanford rejected Ekpeki’s statement that her name was on the byline. Yet it was. And about the magazine not being a “Black voices publication”, how did Sanford establish that claim was “absolutely wrong”? By the circular process of referring back to Cairns’ report. Not by pursuing third-party verification, through which he could have learned that it is Cairns’ claim that was wrong.

(4) MOONFALL. Slashfilm discovers there’s a new record-holder for “The Least Scientifically-Accurate Sci-Fi Movie, According To Neil deGrasse Tyson”.

Know that when celebrated astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson nitpicks the bad science commonly encountered in mainstream Hollywood blockbusters, he’s not trying to spoil anyone’s fun. He’s just being a nerd, and I think we can all respect that. There’s nothing shameful about possessing a lot of scientific knowledge, and pointing out the physics and astronomical errors in a movie can only, one might hope, encourage filmmakers to be more accurate next time….

… There are a few movies, however, that would strain the credulity of anyone. Michael Bay’s 1998 thriller “Armageddon,” for instance, is about a team of oil drillers and astronauts who fly to an oncoming comet to blow it up. On a 2024 episode of “The Jess Cagle Show,” Tyson pointed out several reasons why blowing up a potentially lethal comet is a bad idea. In fact, he once felt that “Armageddon” was the most brazenly unscientific sci-fi film ever made.

But “Armageddon” was recently supplanted by an even stupider movie. Tyson has some harsh words for Roland Emmerich’s 2022 mega-dud “Moonfall.”…

“It was a pandemic film […] — you know, Halle Berry — and the moon is approaching Earth, and they learned that it’s hollow. And there’s a moon being made out of rocks living inside of it. And the Apollo missions were to visit and feed the moon being.* And I … And I just couldn’t … I thought ‘Armageddon’ had a secure hold on this crown. But apparently not.”…

(5) TEDDY HARVIA CARTOON.

(6) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Batman movie (1966)

By Paul Weimer: Batman 1966 film, or some days you just can’t get rid of a bomb.

The Batman movie was, for me, just a long two-part episode of the Batman 1960’s TV series. I didn’t even know for years that it was meant to be a movie, I just thought it was a long episode of the second superhero show I remember watching. (The first is another story entirely).

Come back me to the days of the 1970’s and endless reruns. Among the reruns on Channel 5 (I swear, by the time I finish doing these anniversaries, you filers will know every nuance of TV in NYC in the 70’s and 80’s) was the 1960’s Batman TV show.  I’ll save my thoughts about the entire show for another day.

Today we’re talking about the movie. It’s the classic set up, have several supervillains (Catwoman, Penguin, Joker, and Riddler) team up for their greatest plot yet, which Batman and Robin must foil.  Sadly, Julie Newmar was unable to play Catwoman for the movie, and instead fell on Lee Meriweather.  I’m sorry, but Lee is a distant third behind Newmar and the last Catwoman, Eartha Kitt, in my book.  She’s not bad, but she doesn’t quite inhabit the role as the other two actresses do.   

The plot is silly but the movie has a lot of the extra tropes and gadgets that people associate with the entire series but were only in this movie or were much more prominent in this movie. The Batboat. Bat Shark repellent. Batcycle. Batcopter. Catwoman with a secret identity. Someone figures out a way into the Batcave! Lots of silly fights and chases.

And of course, the bomb. In trying to save some civilians, we are treated with Batman carrying a preposterous large bomb with a fuse, unable to dispose of it safely.  He becomes so exasperated by this that he utters the memorable line “some days you just can’t get rid of a bomb.”

The movie itself is not a bomb. Sure, Batman is a very different character these days. But the movie is pure fun, and it never takes itself too seriously, not even in the denouement.  

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

January 12, 1980 — Kameron Hurley, 45.

So I’ve been re-listening to Kameron Hurley’s space opera The Stars are Legion as I write this Birthday essay. A most excellent story indeed. 

Her time travel novel which I listened to recently, The Light Brigade, is one the best works in that sub-genre I’ve encountered. It was nominated for a Hugo at CoNZealand. 

Her first novel which I need someday to listen to (if it’s in audiobook format) is the start of her matriarchal Islam culture Bel Dame Apocrypha biopunk trilogy. Her term, not mine. 

The Worldbreaker trilogy which begins with The Mirror Empire I find delightful with its merging of hard SF underpinned by magic in a space opera setting. Now that shouldn’t work, should it? Really. But it magnificently does.

And let’s talk about her non-fiction. The Geek Feminist Revolution which garnered a BFA is a collection of previously published blog posts and none news essays written for here. One of the first, “We Have Always Fought’: Challenging the ‘Women, Cattle and Slaves’ Narrative” got a Hugo for Best Related Work at Loncon 3, and she also won a Hugo for Best Fan Writer.

Her exemplary short stories have been collected so far in Meet in The Future and Future Artifacts. Meet in The Future was nominated for an Otherwise Award. 

Of course, everything she’s written is available from the usual suspects. 

Mur Lafferty, Ursula Vernon, and Kameron Hurley at 2017 Hugo Award reception.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

  • Lio tries to be a good neighbor.
  • Off the Mark shows what cats are doing with Zoom.
  • Speed Bump reveals a surprising thing about a dog’s space suit that you probably don’t want to know.
  • Tom Gauld hypothesizes about why she’s a Sleeping Beauty.

The Sleeping Beauty- my latest cartoon for @theguardian.com

— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld.bsky.social) 2025-01-11T09:56:46.883Z
  • Tom Gauld wonders how to tell the difference between this trio.

My latest cartoon for @newscientist.bsky.social

— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld.bsky.social) 2025-01-12T12:29:45.769Z

(9) WARWICK DAVIS TO BE HONORED BY BAFTA. “Warwick Davis to Receive BAFTA Fellowship” – Variety has the story.

Warwick Davis, the British star best known for his appearances in the “Star Wars” and “Harry Potter” franchises, is to be awarded the British Academy’s highest honor, the BAFTA Fellowship.

Recognizing those who have made an outstanding and exceptional contribution to film, games or television, the honor will be presented at the BAFTA film awards on Feb. 16….

(10) TODAY’S THING TO WORRY ABOUT. The Week has learned “Florida condos sinking at ‘unexpected’ rates”.

For as long as humans have endeavored to build upwards toward the sky, they have also been forced to contend with inexorable laws of nature — ones that are not always so accommodating to our species’ vertical endeavors. In the modern era, that tension is perhaps best exemplified in Florida, where coastal erosion, sinkholes, and other environmental factors have become a constant challenge in the march toward upward construction.

Nearly three dozen structures along Florida’s southern coast sank an “unexpected” amount between 2016 and 2023, according to a report released this month by researchers at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science. All told, “35 buildings along the Miami Beach to Sunny Isles Beach coastline are experiencing subsidence, a process where the ground sinks or settles,” the school said in a press release announcing the results of its research. Although it’s generally understood that buildings can experience subsidence “up to several tens of centimeters during and immediately after construction,” this latest study shows that the process can “persist for many years.” What do these new findings mean for Miami-area residents, and our understanding of how to build bigger, safer buildings in general?…

(11) THE BULGE FINALLY CAPTURED. Live Science posted “Space photo of the week: The tilted spiral galaxy that took Hubble 23 years to capture”. See the image at the link.

Why it’s so special: This image of a spiral galaxy taken by the Hubble Space Telescope is a portrait more than two decades in the making.

Like most full-color images of space objects, it’s a composite of images taken in different wavelengths of light. What sets this image apart, however, is that the data used to create it was collected during observation sessions in 2000 and 2023 — 23 years apart. That’s one advantage of having a space telescope in orbit for so long: Hubble was launched from the space shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990, and its long service has enabled it to capture a huge amount of data about every corner of the cosmos.

But besides the prolonged methods used to create it, it’s also an unusual image on its face. Spiral galaxies — which account for about 60% of all galaxies in the universe, according to the European Space Agency — are, by chance, typically seen face-on when viewed from the solar system. That’s why spiral galaxies are typically associated with vivid spiral arms, which can only be seen from a face-on vantage. However, UGC 10043 is viewed edge-on, with its rings seemingly flattened into a line. This unique angle gives astronomers the chance to see how spiral galaxies are structured in 3D.

(12) HI-TECH PERCH. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Ars Technica finds“Three bizarre home devices and a couple good things at CES 2025”. See the cat tower/air purifier at the end of this article. Gloriously free of AI. 

This cat tower is also an air purifier; it is also good

There are a lot of phones out there that need charging and a bunch of gamers who, for some reason, need even more controllers and screens to play on. But there is another, eternally underserved market getting some attention at CES: cats wanting to sit.

LG, which primarily concerned itself with stuffing generative AI interfaces into every other device at CES 2025, crafted something that feels like a real old-time trade show gimmick. There is no guarantee that your cat will use the AeroCat Tower; some cats may just sit inside the cardboard box it came in out of spite. But should they deign to luxuriate on it, the AeroCat will provide gentle heat beneath them, weigh them, and give you a record of their sleep habits. Also, it purifies the air in that room….

[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Paul Weimer, Bruce D. Arthurs, 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 Mark Roth-Whitworth.]

Pixel Scroll 12/2/24 One Pixel, One Scroll And One Bheer

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(1) TERM FOR THE TIMES. The Oxford University Press announces the “Oxford Word of the Year 2024”:

Other candidates shortlisted for Word of the Year —

  • demure
  • dynamic pricing
  • lore
  • romantasy
  • slop

(2) TABLE TALK. The Seattle Worldcon 2025 Exhibits team is taking applications for the art show, dealers’ room, and fan tables through January 15, 2025.

Art Show

The Seattle Worldcon 2025 Art Show will feature science-fiction, fantasy, and other genre-interest art, including sculpture, jewelry, and models displayed in a gallery setting alongside work from one of our guests of honor, artist Donato Giancola.  

Sales are made by the convention on behalf of artists.

Visit our art show page to find out more and apply.

Dealers’ Room

The Seattle Worldcon 2025 Dealers’ Room team looks forward to bringing together a vibrant and diverse dealer’s room with a large and curated selection of merchandise and services that represent the best in our fandom community. Dealers staff their own tables or booths and sell their own merchandise.

Visit our dealers’ room page to find out more and apply.

Fan Tables

Worldcon offers no-charge table spaces to clubs, groups, conventions, and organizations that promote science, science fiction, fantasy, horror, costuming/cosplay, and other fannish pursuits. This table space is an opportunity to share your enthusiasm with Worldcon members who have similar interests. 

Visit our fan tables page to find out more and apply.

(3) VISIT THE MIDWAY. Also, the Seattle Worldcon 2025 website has added a “Fun Stuff” area with coloring pages, a Seattle playlist, a trivia game, free cross stitch patterns, links to their specially-designed fabrics, and more.

(4) THE HOWEY/ADAMS 2024 BEST VOLUME. A Deep Look by Dave Hook reviews “’The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2024’, Hugh Howey & John Joseph Adams editors, 2024 Mariner”. Here’s the TL;DR version (but you’ll miss a lot if you don’t click through.)

The Short: I recently read The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2024, Hugh Howey & John Joseph Adams editors, 2024 Mariner. Among the 20 stories, my favorite was the “The Long Game” by Ann Leckie, from The Far Reaches, John Joseph Adams editor, 2023 Amazon Original Stories. My overall rating for the stories included was 3.6/5, or “Very good”. I recommend it, but there were two stories that were “Did not finish ” for me….

(5) GET READY. BookRiot offers a list of ways to “Prepare Your Library Before January Arrives: Book Censorship News, November 22, 2024”.

… Here are some of the things that public libraries, as well as public school libraries where applicable, should be considering right now to prepare for the new administration. There are fewer than two months—and honestly, about one month with the holidays—to shore up your institutions to make them as strong and solid for the community as possible…

An example of their advice is:

Update Your Collection Management Policies

The thing that will protect your library collection the most is your suite of collection development policies. These policies might be one single policy with several sections or several policies that fall under the umbrella of collection management. These include not only the types of materials you acquire but also how you make those decisions—we know that books don’t simply appear on shelves. Explain the review sources you use and why they’re used, as well as explain where and how recommendations from the community and from the professional field come into consideration. Be as clear as possible about the difference between review materials used to make collection decisions and tools used to help in reader advisory. You don’t rely on reviews nor on recommendations from places like BookLooks or RatedBooks, created by Moms For Liberty and Utah Parents United and their cohorts respectively, as those are not professionally vetted sources. You don’t purchase materials based on reviews from Common Sense Media but you may utilize it in helping patrons find materials. It is annoying to get this granular, but that granularity is crucial. Most people don’t know how libraries select material….

(6) MEDICAL UPDATE. Moshe Feder told Facebook readers he went to the emergency room with abdominal pain on November 30, where the decision was made to have his gallbladder removed. The surgery was successful.

…My gallbladder was in much worse shape than they thought. I’m not sure how infected — white cell count was just a bit high — but I think it was beaten up by years of stones. It wouldn’t have come out neatly through the laparoscopic incision.

So they had to switch from the 20-minute robotic method to the old style 2-hour procedure with a much longer incision.

To say I’m sore is an understatement. I can barely move without aggravating the incisions, and I’m praying that I never cough or sneeze. Even mere belching hurts!

(7) OCEANS OF MONEY. The Hollywood Reporters hears the register ringing as “’Moana 2′ Sails to Record-Busting $225 Office Opening”.

Disney’s fantasy musical served up a mammoth holiday domestic debut of $225.2 million, according to final numbers (that’s up from Sunday’s estimate of $221 million). Smashing numerous records, the Moana sequel boasts the biggest five-day debut in history — besting The Super Mario Bros. Movie ($204.6 million) — as well as delivering both the top Thanksgiving opening of all time and the biggest Thanksgiving gross of all time by a mile, beating Frozen ($93.6 million) and Frozen II ($125 million). And its three-day weekend haul of $139.7 million is the biggest opening ever for a Walt Disney Animation title….

… Overseas, Moana 2 sailed to $165.8 million — Sunday’s estimate was $165.3 million — for a global start of $389 million to boast the biggest global launch of all time for an animated film after passing up Super Mario ($377.2 million)….

(8) UNPLUGGED. “Stephen King’s Maine radio stations will go silent for good on New Year’s Eve” reports AP News.

Stephen King’s raucous rock ‘n’ roll radio station is going silent at year’s end.

The renowned author and lifelong rocker who used to perform with the Rock Bottom Remainders, a rock band that featured literary icons, said Monday that at age 77, it’s time to say good-bye to three Bangor, Maine, stations that have been bleeding money. King kept the stations afloat for decades, and he said he and his wife, Tabitha, are proud to have kept them going for so long.

“While radio across the country has been overtaken by giant corporate broadcasting groups, I’ve loved being a local, independent owner all these years,” King said in a statement. “I’ve loved the people who’ve gone to these stations every day and entertained folks, kept the equipment running, and given local advertisers a way to connect with their customers.”

… King’s foray into radio began at age 36 with his 1983 purchase of a radio station that was rebranded WZON in deference to his book, “The Dead Zone.” That station went through a few permutations before closing, and then being reacquired by King in 1990.

The ZONE Corporation’s current lineup consists of WKIT-FM, which bills itself as “Stephen King’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Radio Station,” along with WZON-AM Retro Radio and an adult alternative station, WZLO-FM. They’ll go off the air on Dec. 31….

(9) LYNN MANERS OBITUARY. Longtime LASFS member Lynn Maners died December 1. His partner Carol Trible said that he was discovered in front of the TV by Maner’s ex-wife, Nancy Bannister when she went over to the house about 5 p.m.”

Maners held a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from UCLA, his thesis titled “Social lives of dances in Bosnia and Herzegovina”. He later moved to Tucson, AZ and taught at Pima Community College.

Whether at LASFS meetings in person, on the club’s Facebook page, or in recent years at its live meetings via Zoom, Maners could be counted on to highlight the occasion with interesting trivia, odd news stories, and linguistic curiosities.  

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born December 2, 1971 — Frank Cho, 53.

So we have Frank Cho. Surely many of you are familiar with the delightful genre Liberty Meadows strip which he wrote and illustrated with its cast of not-always-charming talking beasties and their resident therapist Brandy Carter, who Cho says is an artistic crossing between Lynda Carter and Bettie Page. It ran from ‘97 to ‘01 with some additional material for a few years after that.  Here’s a Liberty Meadows strip.

Only in The Dreaming Library does this idea really exist…

He stated his comic career working for Penthouse Comix along with Al Gross and Mark Wheatley. The three of them, likely after a very long weekend, thought up a six-part “raunchy sci-fi fantasy romp” called The Body, centering on an intergalactic female merchant, Katy Wyndon, who can transfer her mind into any of her “wardrobe bodies”, mindless vessels that she occupies to best suit her, ahem, mediations with the local alien races that she encounters while traveling the galaxy trading and trying to become wealthy. 

The story was never published for several reasons. Even Kathy Keeton, wife of publisher Bob Guccione, and the person at Penthouse who published the raunchiest comics I’ve seen this side of The Hustler wasn’t interested. 

There’s Jungle Girl Comics which was created by Frank Cho, James Murray, and Adriano Batista. Think a female Tarzan. Though she (mostly) stays on the ground in her jungle. 

Now Cho loves young females in bikinis that barely cover the parts that need covering. Or nothing at all. Both of these kept them on. His first title at Marvel caused controversy because he claimed that Shanna, the She-Devil, another jungle strip, was supposed to be fully nude. It turned out that he was right as Marvel was intending to launch an adult line of comics. They didn’t, and so history wasn’t made.

I’m not singling out specific title at either DC or Marvel as there’s really too many, and what you will like is very much a matter of personal taste. But one more note we part and that’s about his work at DC. 

His work there, well, other than the Harley Quinn covers which are decidedly on the silly edge of things, are more traditional in feel and the Green Arrow one I’ve chosen certainly is. Yes, I’m a really big Green Arrow fan, he’s one of my favorite DC characters, particularly the modern take on him.  Here’s a variant cover he did for volume 8, number 1 of that series. 

Name a character, Hulk, Spider-Gwen, Hellboy, Red Sonja, New Avengers, Batman, Harley Quinn, and Cho has likely had a hand in it. 

Cho is, without doubt, one of my favorite modern comics writer and illustrator. 

A very, very impressive amount of his work is available in digital form. Suitable for enjoying on an iPad as I do these days. 

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) FROM UNDERCOVER TO ON THE COVER. “CIA Officer’s Cover Was a Comic Book Author. Now, He’s a DC Writer” – Business Insider has the story.

To say that Tom King has had a varied career is an understatement.

As a little boy growing up in Los Angeles, King wanted to be a comic book writer. After honing his writing skills as a young man, his dream came true when he interned for Marvel in New York.

But the bubble burst when Robert Harras, the editor in chief of Marvel at the time, told him that “comics are dead” and he should find a real job. So, he studied philosophy and history at Columbia University, and worked at the Department of Justice for over a year after he graduated in 2000.

Then, 9/11 happened. King told Business Insider he felt a call to action, which led to another career move: joining the CIA….

… Things came full circle when he was given a cover for when he traveled abroad. He dismissed his boss’ suggestion and instead told border security interrogators that he was a comic book writer….

… After the birth of his first son, King left the CIA — partly because he didn’t want to give him “a fatherless life” — and returned to his first passion: comics…

… In 2013, he wrote for the Vertigo imprint, before his first work at DC Comics, “Nightwing” — about Batman’s former sidekick — was published in 2014. Since rejoining the industry, he has earned many accolades, including winning the best writer Eisner Award, considered the Oscars of comic books, in 2018 and 2019 for “Batman,” “Mister Miracle,” and “Swamp Thing.”…

(13) TODAY’S FAKE NEWS. “The Perfect Calvin and Hobbes Live-Action Series Already Exists (But Fans Will Never See It)” at CBR.com.

When someone thinks of the greatest and most influential comic strip of all time, it’s more than likely that Charles Schultz’s Peanuts is one of the first titles to come to mind. However, it’s also nearly impossible to leave Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes out of the conversation, especially considering the impact it’s had on not just American culture, but the entire world. Given said cultural impact, some may be wondering why the strip has never been adapted into a film or television series in the 40 years since its conception. The truth is, any kind of screen adaptation or official merchandising of the characters is something that Watterson has always been vehemently opposed to. While it’s more than likely that an actual TV or movie adaptation, whether live-action or animated, will never see the light of day, that certainly hasn’t stopped the imagination of its fans online….         

… As much as its creator may detest the idea, there’s no doubt that Calvin and Hobbes would lend itself to wonderful work of animation; but the wiki page of a hypothetical TV series is perhaps the closest anyone will ever get to making one of their own. According to the page on “Calvin and Hobbes the Series”, the fictional series first premiered on Nickelodeon back in May of 2016 and lasted an impressive run of 163 throughout 5 Seasons until 2021. While some of these fake episodes can be found online, as short fan fiction stories, “JaJaLoo” provided a full list of each episode and even went the extra mile of giving each one a name. They even provided an in-depth background on the show’s production, writing that the Nickelodeon series was actually a reboot that followed a previous attempt to adapt the strip by Cartoon Network titled “Calvin and Hobbes: the Animated Adventures”. This part of the page offers some rather confusing contradictions to the rest of the page, however, as it also claims that the reboot was done in live-action, despite previously claiming that it was also animated with voice actors like its predecessor…

… Some might be wondering why it is that Watterson has been so reluctant to approve any such adaptation or merchandising of his characters for these years, but his reasoning behind it actually isn’t all that complicated. He spoke about his reluctance in a 1987 interview (via Internet Archive), claiming that doing so would compromise the experience for the reader and would also result in cheapening his work.

“I think it’s really a crass way to go about it–the Saturday morning cartoons do that now, where they develop the toy and then draw the cartoon around it, and the result is the cartoon is a commercial for the toy and the toy is a commercial for the cartoon. The same thing’s happening now in comic strips; it’s just another way to get the competitive edge. You saturate all the different markets and allow each other to advertise the other, and it’s the best of all possible worlds. You can see the financial incentive to work that way. I just think it’s to the detriment of integrity in comic strip art.”…

(14) SUPER-ADULTING. “Superman & Lois Quietly Breaks an 86-Year Lois Lane Trend for the Better” says CBR.com.

…When Superman & Lois debuted, viewers discovered they had twins who were 15 years old. This small detail allowed both Superman and Lois Lane to become true adults in both their relationship and as parents of children nearing adulthood themselves. After being a representational figure for women for more than eight decades, Superman & Lois allowed her to do that again for adult fans.

While there are plenty of problematic portrayals of women in the Golden Age and Silver Age of comics, Lois Lane was always a bit different. From the first issue of Action Comics in 1938 through the decades that followed, Lois Lane was always a woman working in a field dominated by men, and she won their respect. While it’s true many stories feature Lois swooning over Superman and berating Clark Kent, she was equally concerned with breaking a good story, especially the Man of Steel’s true identity….

(15) STICKTOITIVENESS. Smithsonian Magazine reports “A 65,000-Year-Old Hearth Reveals Evidence That Neanderthals Produced Tar for Stone Tools in Iberia”.

When fire was invented, it changed the course of human evolution. It provided warmth, enabled cooking and facilitated the creation of more advanced tools. For instance, one pivotal tool, the stone-tipped spear, might have been assembled using tar and other adhesives. While early tar production remains largely a mystery, scientists have now uncovered a 65,000-year-old hearth that appears to have functioned as a small-scale “tar factory.”

In a new study published in Quaternary Science Reviews in November, scientists describe a 65,000-year-old hearth found in Gibraltar on the Iberian Peninsula. The fire pit was theoretically used to make tar—and if that conclusion is proven true, it also represents the first evidence of the use of the plant rockrose, Cistus ladanifer, for obtaining tar….

… Scientists already knew that Neanderthals made adhesives using other materials like ocher and naturally sticky substances to haft stone tips onto wooden shafts to create weapons. The newly described hearth in Gibraltar represents a “specialized burning structure” for tar production, the researchers write in the study…

(16) WAVING GOODBYE. Philip Plait describes “A new way black holes shake the fabric of the Universe” at Bad Astronomy Newsletter.

A team of astronomers has examined a potentially new source of gravitational waves, and discovered it’s possible — maybe — it could be detected with currently working instruments. The source would be the lumpy disk of material swirling madly around a black hole right after it forms*.

First things first: Gravitational waves were the last prediction made by Einstein’s theory of relativity that remained unproven, at least until 2015 (and announced a year later after a lot of analysis). The idea is that what we think of as space (or spacetime) can be warped, distorted, by masses in it. That distortion is what we perceive as gravity….

…If you accelerate a massive object, it not only dents space but also creates ripples in spacetime, called gravitational waves….Space shrinks and expands as the waves pass by, and if you had a very accurate ruler, for example, you could measure that oscillation.

Astronomers have built just such a detector, called LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory). I’ve written about it many times; it detected the first gravitational waves in 2015 (there are other observatories that are part of a global collaboration with LIGO, too, and ESA is building a space-based version called LISA that will be freaking amazing… and astronomers can even use pulsars in the galaxy to look for these waves, which is pretty metal). Now here’s an important thing: Any accelerating mass makes GWs (please accept that abbreviation so I don’t have to type it our every dang time), but they tend to be mushy, spread out and weak. The waves get much sharper and stronger a) the more massive the objects are, and 2) the harder they’re accelerated. That’s why almost all the GWs detected have been from merging black holes: they’re very massive indeed, and as they merge they are whipped around each other at nearly the speed of light….

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