Tag Archives: Dave McKean

Pixel Scroll 2/19/24 Pease Porridge In The Pot Nine Days Scrolled

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(1) LEAVING THE HAMC. Cheryl Morgan’s 7-point “Public Statement re the Hugos” at Cheryl’s Mewsings explains why she recently resigned from WSFS’ Hugo Awards Marketing Committee. It says in part:

3. As a member of the Hugo Awards Marketing Committee it was my duty to ensure that the results of the Hugo Award voting process were posted to the official website promptly and accurately, as they were supplied to us by each year’s Worldcon, including those from Chengdu. We had no authority to comment on or change those results in any way.

4. I am not, nor ever have been, a member of the WSFS Mark Protection Committee (MPC).

5. I am not, nor ever have been, a Director of Worldcon Intellectual Property (WIP), and have no financial stake in that organisation. WIP was created from the corporation that ran the SF&F Translation Awards (of which I was a Director), but no directorships carried over from the one organisation to the other, save for Kevin Standlee who is a Director of WIP because of his membership of the MPC.

6. I resigned from the Hugo Award Marketing Committee, primarily because I no longer wish to be held responsible for (including being subject to legal and reputational risk for) the actions of organisations of which I am not a member and over which I have no influence….

(2) DAVE MCCARTY SEXUAL HARASSMENT ALLEGATIONS. McCarty’s name is in the news because of the Hugos, but two people today shared other grievances at Bluesky.

Meg Frank said on Bluesky: “Dave McCarty is emotionally abusive, generally manipulative, and has sexually harassed myself and numerous others. I’ve spoken openly about this and made CoC complaints when possible. He is not a missing stair, he is a creepy handyman who has been using his previous community service as a shield.”

Jesi Lipp added, “I’ve never made it a secret that he groped me at a Smofcon in 2011 and it has always been largely treated as a non-issue.”

(3) AI COVER TRACED TO SOURCE. Cassandra L. Thompson draws attention back to the Gothikana AI book cover story on Threads

Thompson’s comment appears to be in response to a TikTok video by emmaskies.

@emmaskies

Replying to @be_kindful That didn’t take long. This is beyond lazy. I still can’t believe anyone approved the use of these really poorly AI-generated assets. Here’s a thought, if you can’t find good stock images to fit the creative vision HIRE AN ARTIST TO MAKE THEM. ???? #torbooks #brambleromance #gothikana #runyx #aiart #noaiart #bookcover #bookcovers #booktok #darkromance #emmaskiesreads

? original sound – emmaskies

(4) DRAWN THAT WAY. Novelist Kelly Link tells the Guardian “‘I was drawn to the monsters and half-naked women on fantasy covers’”. Here’s an excerpt from the interview.

The book that changed me as a teenager
I was a weekend lurker in the fantasy and science fiction section of my local bookstore, eager to spend my weekly allowance, but overwhelmed by the selection. I was drawn to the monsters and half-naked women on the paperback covers of Arthur Saha’s Year’s Best Fantasy anthologies, but too embarrassed for a long time to bring one up to the counter and pay for it. When, eventually, I got up the nerve, I found the stories uniformly enthralling, and the bookseller didn’t bat an eye. After that, I grew much more bold about what I wanted to read, regardless of how lurid the cover might be.

Kelly Link in 2016

(5) NEW TOU ARE DOA. Writer Beware’s Victoria Strauss reports “Outrage Over New Terms of Use at Findaway Voices Forces Change”. Pushback against Findaway/Spotify’s new Terms of Use succeeded in bringing about a substantial revision.

…Unsurprisingly, the new license terms generated a storm of criticism. Judging by what I saw on social media, and by what authors who alerted me to the new TOU told me, many rights holders took steps to cancel their contracts. Findaway/Spotify appears to have been caught completely flat-footed by the backlash.

… There’s still some vagueness (“otherwise use”) and I note the inclusion of “training” (AI training? It’s not clear, although I think the language following suggests not).

But it is a substantial change, and it does address the criticism of the original version. The license is no longer irrevocable or royalty-free. “Translate” and “modify” have been removed, as has the derivative works language. There’s no longer a moral rights waiver. And, pretty clearly in response to authors’ and narrators’ concerns, the final sentence rules out using audiobook files to create new works based on the original, or to create new machine voices, unless the rights holder gives permission (although, if I were a narrator, I might wonder whether “new” in that context creates a loophole for duplicating an existing voice).

There are two ways to look at what happened here. One is that Spotify tried an egregious rights grab, got called out for it, and did what greedy corporations sometimes do when challenged: walked it back, though not quite completely. The other is that Spotify did not anticipate the backlash, and whether because it recognized the validity of the criticism or simply saw that its self-interest was at stake, reconsidered and implemented the change.

Regardless, I do think that Findaway/Spotify deserves some credit….

(6) KERFUFFLE OVERDOSE. Maya St. Clair delivers “The last News from the Orb”.

This week, I took down that psychoanalytic take I did about Cait Corrain. Reception of the piece was positive, but I’d started to feel rankled and uncomfortable when I saw it on my page, like I needed a shower….

St. Clair’s explanation deserves a click-through to read. And I truly empathize with the next paragraph.

…As the Internet plunges its talons further into everybody’s brains, this kind of doom spiral is going to get harder to resist. The SFF, publishing, and book-reading communities have largely chosen their futures, and it’s more of this codependency: more controversies, more incidents called Something-Gate, more of that awful, druglike disgust that keeps one fixated. As writers, we could follow along: delve into endless Internet research, throw around receipts, assemble our alembics and phials and glass curlicues and try to distil the final Take on this week’s Cait Corrain. Or maybe we could think about literally anything else….

(7) THOSE WERE THE DAYS, MY FRIEND. Peter Wood discusses “The Pros and Cons of Nostalgia” at Asimov’s SF blog From Earth to the Stars.

Margaret Atwood  and I both grew up in large Canadian cities and our fathers ran summer camps in rural Ontario. Atwood’s father, a forest entomologist, took his family from Toronto into the wilds of Ontario to live with graduate students. As a teenager, Atwood worked as a camp counselor for three years.

I tell you this, because our family lived at the northern Ontario summer camp my Dad ran for the Ottawa Boys Club every summer until we moved to Florida. I worked for three years as a camp counselor in college. No need to cue the Twilight Zone music, but the settings of two of Atwood’s short story collections—Moral Disorder and Cats Eye—spoke to me because of her descriptions of rustic Ontario in the summer and cold dark winters in Toronto.

Like Atwood, I often use my own memories to embellish my writing. “Une Time Machine, S’il Vous Plait” has scenes in a summer camp in northern Ontario and sections in  the dead of winter in Toronto and Ottawa in the 1970s. Those scenes were some of the easiest in the short story to put to paper, because they are still vivid to me. Their impressions are much stronger than memories of much more recent events….

(8) DAVE MCKEAN Q&A. The Comics Journal’s Jake Zawlacki has a long, probing interview with Dave McKean. One question is about Midjourney. “’I Will Always Choose Reality’: Dave McKean, Retrospective”.

…It seems that AI may be soon having its day. Early in the book you tease a reason for Thalamus finally coming about and mention an “emergency final page.” When we get to the end, you offer a very honest experience with using Midjourney, and how you felt you needed to accommodate AI in your work, or quit. To start, how do you feel about someone typing in “Dave McKean style comic book cover” into Midjourney and using the result?

I had completed the book by June of last year, and had written that last page as a much more positive paragraph with walking anecdotes and bird pictures and a sense that I’d never felt more professionally fulfilled and personally happy as I did at the time, partly because I really enjoyed putting the book together and revisiting so much stuff that I determinedly had not looked back at for decades. But then the Midjourney thing happened and suddenly the book took on a whole other meaning for me, it was literally the end of my era, from now on my life is pre and post AI.

To start? I consider that action to be theft, the final image will be trained on my work without my knowledge, agreement, or any reimbursement. It’s fraudulent, because the user will consider it their work when my name is in the prompt, surely no simpler paper trail has ever existed for a fraud court case? So then it also makes a difference to me whether this is just one person at home having some fun with a new tech toy and not taking it any further, or someone selling that image, and there’s a greyscale of uses in between. The legal side is a minefield, and we really haven’t caught up with the implications. And finally, and most importantly in this case, the people I’ve talked to who are enthusiastic about AI actually believe this is a creative act. Typing a few words into a bot, and they will tell you how much they thought about the exact words to use, and tweaked the prompt 20-odd times, but this is essentially typing a few words into a bot and waiting a minute. This is such a denuded idea of what creativity is, they are only fooling themselves. There will always be artists who will use it as a tool and be very clear and thorough about staying on the right side of perceived moral lines, but I think they are hypnotized by the shiny new thing. They will be the Trojan horse that wrecks the notion of art, something which has carefully evolved over tens of thousands of years and helped shape the best of us, trashed by glorified predictive text. And you have no idea how sad it is for me to hear artists justify this work with the sort of evasive, relativist art-bollocks that has corrupted the contemporary gallery market….

(9) BISHOP REMEMBERED. Asimov’s editor Sheila Williams tells about her friendship with the late Michael Bishop and his family in “Cri de Coeur”.

…The 1992 World Fantasy Convention was held in Mike’s hometown—Pine Mountain, Georgia—and that’s where I got the chance to really get to know him. After spending time with Mike and his wife Jeri, they invited me, and a couple of other people, over to their beautiful home. They gave us a tour of their house, which I believe had been owned by Jeri’s family for a few generations. They also regaled us with stories about their son Jamie and daughter Stephanie, who were both away at college.

My oldest daughter was born in 1993, and I tentatively included a photo of her in a few of our authors’ holiday cards. Mike’s response to the photo and his sincere interest in my family encouraged me to continue to include these photos in cards and to expand on the number of people who received them. [I know some authors were perplexed, but I was delighted that eventually many started sending photos of their kids and/or pets back to me.] As I told Mike years later, I also tried to emulate the loving home life for my kids that he and Jeri had provided for their own children.

Mike’s ninth story in Asimov’s, “Cri de Coeur,” was our September 1994 cover story. This moving novella about the journey on a generation starship was also a finalist for both the Hugo and the Theodore Sturgeon Award. There was a twelve-year gap between Mike’s tenth Asimov’s story in 1996 and his eleventh in 2008. During that time, Mike and I mostly stayed in touch via holiday cards.

On April 16, 2007, Mike and Jeri experienced one of the most terrible tragedies that can befall a family. Their thirty-five-year-old son Jamie, now an instructor of German at Virginia Tech, was murdered in the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history. Mike’s next tale for us, “Vinegar Peace, or, The Wrong-Way Used-Adult Orphanage” (July 2008), was the painful story of a society that sends adults to orphanages after their last child dies. It, too, was nominated for a Nebula….

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born February 19, 1937 — Terry Carr. (Died 1987.) I’ll admit right now that I do not know Terry Car from any of his novels which are Warlord of Kor, Invasion from 2500 co-written with Ted White, and Cirque. I’ll certainly invite opinions on how they are. What I do know about him is from his most excellent and rather extensive work in the area of editing anthologies.

But first I must discuss his work as a fanzine editor, winning his first Hugo for the zine FANAC, co-edited with Ron Ellik, which they started in 1958. There were seventy-one issues (the last six were co-edited with his first wife, Miriam Carr). Read the first issue at Fanac.org. Terry would win a second Hugo for Best Fan Writer in 1973 at Torcon II. He would also be the 1986 Worldcon’s Fan Guest of Honor.

Terry and second wife Carol Carr, center, Jock Root and German literary agent Thomas Schlueck left, with Gary Deindorfer at far right, on the subway coming back to Manhattan from a gathering at Ted White’s house for TAFF delegate Schlueck in 1966. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.

His work on anthologies began in the Sixties on the first seven volumes of World’s Best Science Fiction with Donald A. Wollheim. I’m reasonably sure that I’ve read at least some of them as the contents are quite familiar. 

Also while working for Donald A. Wollheim at Ace Books, he was responsible for the acclaimed Ace Special series, bringing out R.A. Lafferty’s Past Master (1968), Ursula K Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and Alexei Panshin’s Rite of Passage (1968).

Now I know that I’ve read much of his next two anthology series as they were quite excellent. They came out almost out at the same time as the Seventies got under way, with Universe having an impressive run of seventeen volumes, and The Best Science Fiction of the Year with just a volume less. 

He also had an anthology series devoted to original fantasy only, New Worlds of Fantasy which published three volumes stating in the Sixties. He did five volumes in the Fantasy Annual reprint series starting in the late Seventies. 

His work would earn two Best Professional Editor Hugos (1985, 1987). 

Lastly, he published in his regrettably brief lifetime a reasonably large amount of shorter fiction, over forty pieces. The Seventies collection The Light at the End of the Universe is the only sole look at his short fiction to date. Subterranean Press, where art thou?

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • Thatababy apparently learns from Looney Tunes.

(12) WEB BREAKS. The Hollywood Reporter says it’s dead, Jim: “Inside Sony’s ‘Madame Web’ Collapse: Forget About a New Franchise”.

The trailer buzz was worrisome, advance ticket sales anemic. Then last week, the critic reviews for Madame Web were posted, and they stung deepest of all — Sony’s Spider-Man spinoff received the lowest average Rotten Tomatoes score (13 percent) of any major superhero film in nearly a decade.

“On Wednesday night, you could actually watch advance purchase sales declining in real time as buyers were refunding their tickets,” marvels a major theatrical chain insider. “It really says something when you’d rather have Shazam! 2 numbers.”

It marked one of the lowest starts in Hollywood history for a film based on a Marvel character. Domestic box office for the first six days in North America was just $26.2 million after opening midweek on Valentine’s Day. International tallied $25.7 million from 61 markets. Even the fan-friendly CinemaScore grade was poor (C+ — extremely low for a superhero title).

Like DC and the once-unstoppable Marvel, Sony is now finding itself in under the gun to reevaluate how it makes comic book movies….

(13) LEFT BEHIND. “Harrison Ford left behind a Star Wars script. It just sold for $13,600” reports Yahoo!

A draft script from the original Star Wars movie trilogy, left in a London home rented by the actor Harrison Ford in the 1970s, has sold for more than $10,000 at auction.

The fourth draft of the screenplay that became the epic 1977 film “Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope” was unbound and incomplete. But it included iconic scenes, including the one that introduces Chewbacca – the towering, hairy Wookiee who co-pilots the Millennium Falcon alongside Ford’s character, Han Solo – in a dimly lit tavern.

The script, dated March 15, 1976, and titled “The Adventures of Luke Starkiller,” sold to an Austrian collector for about $13,600 during a live-streamed auction on Saturday. The seller owned the home that Ford had rented while working on the film….

(14) SPIDER MAN. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] People have certain expectations of an Adam Sandler movie. They should throw them out the window before seeing this Netflix pic.

In Spaceman, Sandler plays a “dour, isolated, arrogant” astronaut whose marriage is falling apart “due to his own failings as a husband.” Then, as depression sets in months into his solo mission, he unexpectedly finds a companion—an “ancient mind-reading spider-like creature from the beginning of time.” “‘Spaceman’ Director Johan Renck on His First Project After ‘Chernobyl’ and Giving Adam Sandler His Most Un-Adam Sandler Role to Date” in Variety.  

… How did you get [Adam Sandler] on board? 

It was almost random, to be honest. I had a general meeting with him in L.A. a couple of years ago, because I’m a massive fan of his, and by the end of that chat, he was like, “Hey, what about this space film I hear you guys are developing, I’d love to read it.” We weren’t that far along but that’s how it unfolded. I remember going back up to my room and thinking: that’s pretty fucking brilliant. It was like an epiphany. But when it he said he wanted to do it, I was like, “the issue is that you’re a big name in the comedy circuit, but I’m just a little concerned about being able to pull up the financing for this with you in a dramatic role.” It’s a weird thing to say to one of the highest-grossing actors! But he’s not going to bank a dramatic science fiction film like George Clooney would. He asked how much we needed, and I said, “Well, it’s in zero gravity, one of the characters is CGI, so it’s gonna cost a bunch of money.” And he says: “I’ll get your money, I have a deal with Netflix.” And three weeks later we were shaking hands….

One similarity between “Spaceman” and “Chernobyl” was that you didn’t try to give your actors Eastern European accents. Adam Sandler sounds like Adam Sandler, Carey Mulligan sounds like Carey Mulligan.

I hate accents. They’re the most ridiculous thing ever. To me, if we want to suggest they’re speaking Czech, why is the best way to achieve that having them speak English with a really fake accents? Have you ever heard an accent in a movie work? 

(15) SLAUGHTERLESS HOUSE FIVE. “Lab-Made Meat? Florida Lawmakers Don’t Like the Sound of It.” The New York Times tells how the meat is grown.

…Start-up companies around the world are competing to develop technologies for producing chicken, beef, salmon and other options without the need to raise and slaughter animals. China has made the development of the industry a priority. In the United States, the Department of Agriculture has given initial blessings to two producers.

Now, a measure in Florida that would ban sales of laboratory-grown meat has gained widespread attention beyond state borders. The bill, which is advancing through the Florida Legislature, would make the sale or manufacture of lab-grown meat a misdemeanor with a fine of $1,000. It’s one of a half-dozen similar measures in Arizona, Tennessee, West Virginia and elsewhere.

Opponents of lab-grown meat include beef and poultry associations worried that laboratory-made hamburgers or chicken nuggets could cut into their business.

Supporters include environmentalists who say it would reduce animal cruelty and potentially help slow climate change. Meat and dairy together account for about 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the United Nations.

Other backers of the industry include advocates for space exploration, a subject particularly relevant to Florida, which is home to the Kennedy Space Center and the site of countless launches to the moon and beyond. Elon Musk, whose company SpaceX has its own outer space ambitions, has partnered with Israel-based Aleph Farms to research lab-grown meat on a Space X flight to the International Space Station that launched from Florida.

How’s this actually made?

Lab-grown meat, also called cultivated meat, is grown from cells that have been taken from an animal. The animals aren’t slaughtered. 

Then water, salt and nutrients like amino acids, minerals and vitamins are added to the cells, which multiply and eventually become minced meat….

(16) CAKE AND CANDLES. James Bacon volunteered to let me run the poem he composed to wish me “Happy birthday”.

Happy birthday to you Mike, 
We wish you cheer & delight, 
On your auspicious nice day 
Hoping your brother’s is a nice night. 

You report on the appalling news 
That’s giving us all the horrid blues 
Doubtful of when it might actually end 
With an apology, perhaps only if wills bend. 

We need to see your cheerful smile 
Defeating those who tried to defile 
Shining a light on where it went bad 
Finding reason to cease being sad 

A happy day is yours to enjoy 
What positives can we also deploy 
Looking forward upward bright 
Some cake and cheer on birthday night 

Ray Bradbury’s 89th Birthday Cake. Photo by John King Tarpinian.

[Thanks to Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Jean-Paul Garnier, James Bacon, Daniel Dern, Jason Sanford, Anne Marble, 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 OGH.]

Pixel Scroll 12/29/23 My Mother Did-A Tell Me That I Go Pixel Scroll, And Read All The File Seven

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(1) This will be a short Scroll because I am heading north today to attend the birthday celebration of one of my nephews. I’m looking forward to it.

(2) THE FUTURE OR ALREADY STALEDATED? The New York Times answers its own rhetorical question in “A.I. Can Make Art That Feels Human. Whose Fault Is That?”.

This was the year — ask your stockbroker, or the disgraced management of Sports Illustrated — that artificial intelligence went from a dreamy projection to an ambient menace and perpetual sales pitch. Does it feel like the future to you, or has A.I. already taken on the staleness and scamminess of the now-worthless nonfungible token?

Artists have been deploying A.I. technologies for a while, after all: Ed Atkins, Martine Syms, Ian Cheng and Agnieszka Kurant have made use of neural networks and large language models for years, and orchestras were playing A.I.-produced Bach variations back in the 1990s. I suppose there was something nifty the first time I tried ChatGPT — a slightly more sophisticated grandchild of Eliza, the ’60s therapist chatbot — though I’ve barely used it since then; the hallucinatory falsehoods of ChatGPT make it worthless for journalists, and even its tone seems an insult to my humanity. (I asked: “Who was the better painter, Manet or Degas?” Response: “It is not appropriate to compare artists in terms of ‘better’ or ‘worse,’ as art is a highly subjective field.”)

Still, the explosive growth of text-to-image generators such as Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and Dall-E (the last is named after the corniest artist of the 20th century; that should have been a clue) provoked anxieties that A.I. was coming for culture — that certain capabilities once understood as uniquely human now faced computational rivals. Is this really the case?

Without specific prompting, these A.I. images default to some common aesthetic characteristics: highly symmetrical composition, extreme depth of field, and sparkly and radiant edges that pop on a backlit smartphone screen. Figures have the waxed-fruit skin and deeply set eyes of video game characters; they also often have more than 10 fingers, though let’s hold out for a software update. There is little I’d call human here, and any one of these A.I. pictures, on its own, is an aesthetic irrelevance. But collectively they do signal a hazard we are already facing: the devaluation and trivialization of culture into just one more flavor of data.

A.I. cannot innovate. All it can produce are prompt-driven approximations and reconstitutions of preexisting materials. If you believe that culture is an imaginative human endeavor, then there should be nothing to fear, except that — what do you know? — a lot of humans have not been imagining anything more substantial. When a TikTok user in April posted an A.I.-generated song in the style (and voices) of Drake and the Weeknd, critics and copyright lawyers bayed that nothing less than our species’s self-definition was under threat, and a simpler sort of listener was left to wonder: Was this a “real” song? (A soulless engine that strings together a bunch of random formulas can pass as Drake — hard to believe, I know….)

(3) RICK AND MORTY. Animation World Network is there when “Adult Swim Drops First Sneak Peek of ‘Rick and Morty: The Anime’”.

Adult Swim recently took to YouTube to reveal a sneak peek for Rick and Morty: The Anime, the upcoming 10-episode 2D animated series following Rick as he encounters multiple versions of himself from parallel universes.

Based on the Emmy-award-winning adult animated series, the anime adventure will debut on Adult Swim and Max. Director Takashi Sano (Tower of God) previously directed two anime shorts, Rick and Morty vs. Genocider and Summer Meets God (Rick Meets Evil), which received widespread fan and critical acclaim upon release. The Anime was greenlit last May….

(4) BOOK QUESTIONS. An excerpt from “By the Book – Interview: David Mamet” in the New York Times.

What book would you most like to see turned into a movie that hasn’t already been adapted?

The only book not adapted to the screen is the phone book. I tried, but only got as far as the title: “Funny Names, No Plot.”

What’s the last book you read that made you laugh?

“The Berenstain Bears Get Cancer.”

The last book that made you cry?

“Bambi.”

The last book that made you furious?

“The Wealth of Nations.”

Has a book ever brought you closer to another person, or come between you?

My wife once threw a book at me.

(5) TIPS FOR TEAMING UP. “Sharing the Spotlight: 6 Tips for Collaborative Storytelling” by Hildy Silverman at the SFWA Blog.

Sharing story creation and developmental duties with a writing partner might seem daunting, given that we authors tend to invest a certain amount of ego (to put it mildly) into our work. Writing alone, we can be possessive of our characters and staunch in our plans for their adventures. Yet co-authors must be willing to let some “darlings” die in order to successfully create a truly collaborative work—otherwise, hurt feelings and anger could ruin a promising authorial partnership.

In a previous post on this blog, Gareth L. Powell addressed the nuts and bolts of working with a co-author. Rather than rehashing his excellent advice, I am going to focus on the challenges of collaborating, and provide suggestions on how to proactively avoid bruised egos and hurt feelings.

Tip #1: Try before you buy (in)

Whether the other author is a longtime friend or merely a professional colleague, make sure you know what you are getting into before committing to a collaborative project. Read two or more stories they have written previously to discover whether they have a compatible style with yours and the fundamental skills to write at a professional level. You don’t necessarily have to love everything about their style, but you should not be so turned off that you cannot imagine finding common ground to create something new. You definitely should not find their work a chore to read as you mentally correct their every mistake…

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born December 29, 1963 — Dave McKean, 58. So let’s talk about Dave McKean and let me state right upfront that I consider his most brilliant work to be his work with Gaiman on The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr Punch: A Romance. An absolutely stellar work — violent, horrifying, thrilling. But then Mr. Punch always scared me… 

Now let’s go back to the beginning of his career. Violent Cases with Gaiman was his first work back thirty-six years ago.  It was drawn in shades of blue, brown, and grey, but when it was first published by Escape Books, it was printed in black-and-white. Later editions have been printed in colour. 

Several years later, Grant Morrison wrote and he illustrated Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth (often called Batman: Arkham Asylum). It’s an absolutely brilliant look at Arkham Asylum, something neglected really in the comics. It’s considered one of Morrison’s best works. 

Remember Dustcovers: The Collected Sandman Covers? It was really fun to leaf through that work and look at the covers. 

He and Gaiman did four children’s picture books, of which I’ve enjoyed just two but of course your opinions will be different — those two were The Wolves in the Walls and Mirrormask. Now the children’s novels Coraline and The Graveyard Book are wonderful indeed. 

(Digression away from McKean for a moment. Gaiman narrates the telling of Coralline and need I say that it’s a magnificent reading indeed?  The Graveyard Book is now a full cast production with him as the narrator. End of digression.) 

I did not know ‘til now that he was a concept artist on the Neverwhere series. Very interesting. 

So he was the director of his Mirrormask film which Kurt Loder of MTV said of, “This one-of-a-kind fantasy film may be seen as a classic someday, possibly quite soon.” It garnered an eighty percent approval rating among audience members there. Nice. 

He’s been nominated and won far too many Awards to list them here so I’m singling out just these. He has been nominated five times for a World Fantasy Award and he won the award  once. His graphic novel Cages won a Harvey Awards for best Graphic Novel.

(7) POWER IN SMALL PACKAGES. CBR.com thinks you will be more surprised than will probably be the case when they roll out their list of the “10 Best Movies You Didn’t Know Were Originally Short Stories”. At least half of them are sff or genre-adjacent.

When the credits roll, it’s not surprising to see that a film was based on a novel. Some authors, like Stephen King, are prolific in writing books that go on to be adapted for the big screen. Something less common, however, is seeing a film that has been adapted from a short story….

10. Arrival

Arrival (2016) was adapted from the novella Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang, which appears in his collection, Stories of Your Life and Others. As most adaptations do, the film takes some liberties, like adding action in the third act, but beyond that, much of the main plot stays the same.

Arrival is a remarkably easy-to-follow story considering that the content follows a linguist learning an entirely new language from aliens and a physicist discussing refraction and mathematical theories, all mixed with the idea of non-linear time. Both versions of the story are heartbreaking in their own way and deserve to be appreciated in their respective forms.

(8) REMEMBER SF PROMISING FOOD PILLS? [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Well, here they come. Except, in reverse. OK, so the whole thing is still an idea in development. But it’s pig approved.  “This Vibrating “Pill” May Be the Next Best Thing For Weight Loss” reports Inverse.

Imagine a pill no bigger than a multivitamin vibrating in your stomach. If that’s got your mind in the gutter, better shift it to your gut: such tiny devices are very real and maybe the future of weight loss.

That’s according to research out of MIT, where engineers developed a battery-operated capsule-like device that’s supposed to make you feel full by stretching out your stomach using vibration. When the pill was given to pigs 20 minutes before a meal, the animals ate 40 percent less than they usually did, all the while their bodies released the usual prandial melange of hormones involved in insulin production and appetite suppression….

(9) FOR THE ANTIQUARIANS AMONG US. Mark Funke, Bookseller – mentioned here the other day in connection with the sale of the Dillon art for The Left Hand of Darkness – previously published a catalog – Science Fiction – to promote the sales of several dozen historic letters, documents and publications. The catalog is still online, though seems to have succeeded in its purpose of selling everything listed in it. Makes interesting reading.

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

Pixel Scroll 6/15/22 No! It Was Professor Scroll, In The Fifthorium, With An Appertained Beverage

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(1) SOME LIKE IT HOT. Gwenda Bond, to promote her novel The Date from Hell, got herself appointed the Mayor of Hell for one day. As Bond told told Facebook readers:

When I found out you can be Mayor of Hell, Michigan, for the day, my reaction was obviously: Hell yes. So consider this a celebration of the Match Made in Hell books being out in the world — with the @lexwritersroom fire happening the week before The Date from Hell released, I feel like I didn’t do enough to get the word out about it. So consider this ridiculous fun your excuse to go buy either or both the books and/or leave reviews somewhere if you enjoy them. Meanwhile, the Mayor must do some writing!

Coincidentally, today the Lexington (KY) Herald-Leader also published its interview with Bond about the tie-in novel she wrote about a popular TV series: “Love ‘Stranger Things’? Try out the series’ first official novel, written by Lexington author”.

…Her novel, Stranger Things: Suspicious Minds, evolved to tell the story of Terry Ives, the mother of Eleven, a protagonist in the Netflix series. Suspicious Minds focuses on the backstory behind why Terry became involved in the experiment with Dr. Brenner, the show’s main antagonist….

Returning to Hell, Michigan for a moment – the questionnaire on their reservation page shows how open-minded those folks truly are. They ask —

Is our upcoming Mayor: 

A Human

An Animal (dog, cat, lizard, etc.)

A Nonhuman (sock, stuffie, door knob, etc.)

(2) FACE-TO-FACE AT LAST. Asimov’s editor Sheila Williams’ editorial in the current Issue provides much more detail – and photos – about the 2020, 2021, and 2022 Dell Magazines Award winners. (See File 770’s report of the 2022 winner here.)

…After two years of Zoom ceremonies, It was a delight and a relief that the Dell Magazines Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing could once again be presented in sunny Orlando, Florida, at the annual International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA). The award, which is co-sponsored by Dell Magazines and the International Association for Fantastic in the Arts, and supported by Western Colorado University’s Graduate Program in Creative Writing… 

The finalists [who were able to attend IAFA] dined with returning Dell Award finalists Rich Larson, Kay Chronister, and Eleanor Griggs, as well as Joe and Gay Haldeman, Nick Wolven, Alan and Karen Smale, Gregory Norman Bossert, Stephen R. Donaldson, James Patrick Kelly, Suzanne Palmer, Walter Jon Williams, and editor/publisher Jacob Weisman.

(3) TOLKIEN’S ORIGIN STORY. John Garth told Facebook readers he’d received his contributor copy of The Great Tales Never End: Essays in Memory of Christopher Tolkien, edited by Richard Ovenden and Catherine McIlwaine for Bodleian Publishing. To be released June 24, the book’s other contributors include the late Priscilla Tolkien, Vincent Ferré, Verlyn Flieger, Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, Carl F. Hostetter, Stuart Lee, Tom Shippey and Brian Sibley.

Garth also shared a page from his own contribution, “The Chronology of Creation: How J.R.R. Tolkien misremembered the beginnings of his mythology”, which “establishes that he wrote his creation myth, The Music of the Ainur, in 1917 during recovery from the Battle of the Somme – two years before we thought.”

(4) PEEVED. Amanda S. Green tells Mad Genius Club readers “Rules are made to be broken” – or at least, not all advice about how to “win” at NaNoWriMo deserves to be followed.

… So, what had me reacting so strongly? It was one of those articles where “real writers” are asked for advice for those of us who struggle to finish writing projects. At least that’s the way the promo for the article is framed. But it really comes down to asking why less than 17% of writers who sign up for NaNoWriMo actually finish the challenge and what those 83% who fail to finish should do.

The first piece of “advice” give is to create “a comprehensive outline before you start writing.” 

Look at that again. Not only are you supposed to outline your book but you are supposed to write a “comprehensive outline”. Forget the fact you might be a pantser. Forget the fact that you might do a one-five chapter general outline, staying ahead of where you currently are on the project. Oh no, you MUST write a comprehensive outline before you even start writing the book….

(5) TO INFINITY. Chris Evans, who voices the lead role in Lightyear, an animated Pixar movie that features a female space ranger who marries another woman, does his best to tell homophobic critics of the movie to kiss off in this Reuters interview.

“The real truth is those people are idiots,” Evans said in an interview with Reuters Television ahead of the debut of “Lightyear”…

“Every time there’s been social advancement as we wake up, the American story, the human story is one of constant social awakening and growth and that’s what makes us good,” he added.

…”There’s always going to be people who are afraid and unaware and trying to hold on to what was before. But those people die off like dinosaurs,” Evans said. “I think the goal is to pay them no mind, march forward and embrace the growth that makes us human.”

…”Lightyear” was banned in the United Arab Emirates because it depicts homosexuality, and Disney has been unable to secure permission to show the movie in 13 other Middle Eastern and Asian countries.

(6) NO BONES ABOUT IT. Vanity Fair had a paleontologist review a bunch of famous dinosaur movie scenes. He said every one of them is 100% scientifically accurate. Okay, you got me, I lied.

How accurate is Hollywood when it comes to depicting dinosaurs on the big screen? Paleontologist Mark Loewen reviews dinosaur scenes from films including Jurassic Park, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Jurassic World, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Land Of The Lost, King Kong, Night at the Museum, and more.

(7) SASA NEUMAN (1952-2022). LASFS member Sasa Neuman died Monday, June 13 of a heart attack. Craig Miller who knew him since high school, wrote a tribute on Facebook.

Neuman joined LASFS in 1982 but I know he was networked with fans earlier than that because the 30 gallons of ice cream we served at the 1978 Westercone Ice Cream Social came from his Baskin Robbins franchise.  

Many more tributes are pouring in at Neuman’s own Facebook page.

(8) SHAMUS YOUNG (1971-2022). Shamus Young, who has written the Twenty Sided gaming blog since 2005, died June 15 of cardiac arrest at the age of 50. Young was a 2016 Best Fan Writer Hugo finalist, and was on the Rabid Puppies slate. He wrote a long post about his health challenges last year on his fiftieth birthday.

(9) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.

1955 – [By Cat Eldridge.] Sixty-seven years ago this day, This Island Earth went into general circulation in the United States, five days after it premiered in New York. 

It was produced by William Alland, and directed by Joseph M. Newman and Jack Arnold. It was written by Franklin Coen and Edward G. O’Callaghan as based on the novel by Raymond F. Jones, first published in Thrilling Wonder Stories as three separate novelettes, “The Alien Machine” in the June 1949 issue, “The Shroud of Secrecy” in the December 1949 issue, and “The Greater Conflict” in the February 1950 issue.  

The primary cast was Jeff Morrow as Exeter Faith,  Domergue as Ruth Adams,  Rex Reason as Cal Meacham, Lance Fuller as Brack and Russell Johnson as Steve Carlson. The last of course will be will known later as the Professor on Gilligan’s Island. 

It was made at a cost of around eight hundred thousand and made at least one point eight million in its first run. 

Critics in general loved it, it did very well at the box office but currently the audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes give it a not so great forty-four percent rating. 

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born June 15, 1910 — Harold Lawlor. April 1942 saw “The Eternal Priestess” published in Fantastic Adventures, his first sale. His first story for Weird Tales was “Specter in the Steel”,  May 1943. Over the next decade, twenty-nine stories by him would appear in Weird Tales. Alas I don’t believe his stories were ever collected and published. If I’m wrong, please do tell me. (Died 1992.)
  • Born June 15, 1939 — Brian Jacques. British author who surprisingly is not on the ISFDB list today. Writer of the exceedingly popular Redwall series of novels (I read a few of them, they’re excellent) and also of the Castaways of the Flying Dutchman series. He also wrote two collections of Alan Garner style fiction, Seven Strange and Ghostly Tales and The Ribbajack & Other Curious Yarns. (Died 2011.)
  • Born June 15, 1941 — Neal Adams. Comic book artist who worked for both DC and Marvel. Among his achievements was the creation with writer Dennis O’Neil of Ra’s al Ghul. I’m a DC fan so I can’t speak for his work on Marvel but he did amazing work on Deadman, Batman, Green Lantern and Green Arrow. All of this work is now available on the DC Universe app.  It should be noted he was instrumental in the efforts that resulted in Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster receiving long overdue credit and  financial remuneration from DC. (Died 2022.)
  • Born June 15, 1942 — Sondra Marshak, 80. Author of multiple Trek novels including The Price of the Phoenix and The Fate of the Phoenix, both co-written with Myrna Culbreath. She also wrote, again with Myrna Culbreath, Shatner: Where No Man…: The Authorized Biography of William Shatner which of course naturally lists Shatner as the third co-author. She also co-wrote the fandom reference book Star Trek Lives! with Jacqueline Lichtenberg and television producer Joan Winston. She was an important early promoter of Star Trek fan culture, and a publisher of fan fiction.
  • Born June 15, 1951 — Kirstie Alley, 71. She’s here for being Saavik on Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, her very first film. It was, errr, interesting reading the various rumors why this was her only Trek film. Her SFF experience otherwise was brief limited to being an uncredited handmaiden on Quark, and being in the Village of the Damned as Dr. Susan Verner.
  • Born June 15, 1960 — Sabrina Vourvoulias, 62. Thai-born author, an American citizen from birth brought up in Guatemala, but here since her teens. Her novel, Ink, deals with immigrants who are tattooed with biometric implants that are used to keep track of them no matter where they are. The Readercon 25 panel she was on, “East, West and Everything Between: A Roundtable on Latin@ Speculative Fiction” is available from the usual suspects as is all of her fiction. 
  • Born June 15, 1960 — William Snow, 62. He is best remembered as Lord John Roxton on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. (Yes, that’s it’s official title.) He also had the lead as David Grief on the Australian series Tales of the South Seas which had Rachel Blakey from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World as Isabelle Reed. It was definitely genre. 

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • Funky Winkerbean hasn’t suddenly gone genre, however, I can imagine fans having this conversation.

(12) NEW SERIES. [Item by N.] Scavengers Reign is on its way from HBO Max.

Looks like this short was the original pilot, or proof-of-concept.

(13) NOT QUITE WALTZING MATILDA. Tor.com’s Molly Templeton says “Emma Thompson Is a Terrifying Miss Trunchbull In the Trailer for Nextflix’s Matilda the Musical“, based on the work of Roald Dahl.  

…Matilda is the story of a clever little girl surrounded by idiot adults. School is no better than home; at school, she has to contend with Trunchbull, a nightmare headmistress who basically tortures students. Smart, bookish Matilda has only her teacher, Miss Honey, for support—until she discovers she has a way to fight back.

In 1996, the novel was adapted into a film starring Mara Wilson as an iconic Matilda and Danny DeVito as Mr. Wormwood. The musical debuted in 2010, and arrived on Broadway in 2013. The trailer for this new version is full of tiny children singing about being revolting, which makes me love them all; I wish to watch this film immediately….

(14) UP ALL NIGHT. Andrew Porter sent a link to a February announcement — “These Six ‘Beloved’ Restaurants Won the 2022 James Beard America’s Classics Award” – because one of the honorees has a fannish connection. Says Porter, “Ted White established a tradition of ending Brooklyn NY Fanoclast meetings by a trip, in the middle of the night, to go to Wo-Hop, either by subway, or, sometimes, by car.”

It’s officially James Beard Award season: Today, the Foundation announced the first winners of 2022. As in years past, six long-tenured restaurants have been named “America’s Classics.” Per the Foundation, the award “is given to locally owned restaurants that have timeless appeal and are beloved regionally for quality food that reflects the character of its community.” Over 100 restaurants have won the award…and winners tend not to receive other nominations for Beard Awards.…

Wo Hop, New York, NY: One of the oldest restaurants in NYC’s Chinatown, Wo Hop stands as a testament to the old-fashioned Chinese American cooking that is increasingly hard to find.

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Here’s a video interview with Dave McKean on illustrating the limited edition of The Gormenghast Trilogy. The Folio Society’s edition of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy is introduced by master of modern fantasy Neil Gaiman, illustrated by the extraordinary Dave McKean and signed by both contributors.

Award-winning illustrator Dave McKean provides the collection’s 142 original hand-drawn illustrations, as well as startling cover designs for each book and an exclusive art print of iconic villain Steerpike. Eschewing the traditionally gloomy and gothic, McKean’s concept has been inspired by the Gormenghast trilogy’s often overlooked sense of passion and colour. His renditions of Peake’s cast – from the enigmatic Countess Groan to the spidery manservant Flay – seethe with life and feeling, capturing the often stark surrealism of each book. Dave McKean has also created the hypnotic maze design that envelops the hinged collection case, bound in stone-grey Dubletta cloth and blocked in crimson metallic foil with the title screen-printed in black ink. Opening the case itself releases a burst of corvids silhouetted against the sky in silver ink.

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, N., Jan Vaněk jr, Steven H Silver, Daniel Dern, Aaron Pound, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Steve “Clueful” Davidson.]