Tag Archives: David Lynch

Pixel Scroll 1/29/25 Take The Bits And Pixels, Put Your Old Phone Down

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(1) SPINRAD RETIRING ASIMOV’S BOOK COLUMN. Norman Spinrad today told his mailing list that his “On Books” column, which has appeared in Asimov’s since 1983, soon will end its run.

I thought it would be best to be the one to announce that “Speculative Literature?” will be the last “On Books” that it would be the last column to be published in ASIMOV’S magazine rather than have the editor Sheila Williams do it. First because I made the decision myself after almost half a century, not her or anyone else did it. 

Not fired for any economical reason or anything but literary reasons which I think anyone who reads my last two “On Books” will under[stand] why when they read them whether they agree or not.

Dona could not live to see “Speculative Literature?” published but she lived to read it, and it was the last thing she worked with me one way or another and something she told me was that most real true literature these days was seldom appreciated by the masses, it was only fully appreciated and moved by truly literary readers and that has always been so.

Maybe so, but literature was central to the creation of culture, and cultures without speculative culture sooner or later end in the tarpits.

(2) CORALINE MUSICAL PRODUCTION CANCELLED. In the UK, “Stage adaptation of Coraline cancelled after allegations against Neil Gaiman” reports the Guardian.

A stage version of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline has been cancelled after allegations of sexual misconduct against the author.

The musical was to have been staged at Leeds Playhouse from 11 April to 11 May before touring to Edinburgh, Birmingham and Manchester.

In a joint statement on Wednesday, the co-production partners Leeds Playhouse, Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh, Birmingham Rep and Home Manchester said: “We have decided our production of Coraline – a Musical will not proceed. After careful consideration, we feel it would be impossible to continue in the context of the allegations against its original author. Ticket holders have been contacted directly via email.”…

YouTuber MickeyJo Theatre devotes a 17-minute video not only to “Why the CORALINE musical is cancelled” but to considering why stage productions by or based on the work of Roald Dahl, J.K. Rowling – themselves now controversial – have gone ahead.

(3) WGA LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD. “David Lynch To Posthumously Receive Writers Guild Laurel Award” – Deadline has the story.

Screenwriter and director David Lynch, who died this month, has been named the recipient of the Writers Guild of America West’s 2025 Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement.

The guild says he was aware of the honor and accepted several weeks before his January 15 passing. It will be presented by his Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks star Kyle MacLachlan at the WGA Awards ceremony on February 15 .

The guild’s lifetime achievement award is presented to members who have “advanced the literature of motion pictures and made outstanding contributions to the profession of the screenwriter.”

(4) A LIKING FOR LYCANTHROPY. Doris V. Sutherland does a fine review of “Wolf Man (2025)” as part of “Werewolf Wednesday”.

… Where the 1941 film did much to codify the werewolf genre, the new film makes a point out of throwing away many of the conventions initiated by its ancestor.

This is not a story concerned with deadly silver, ghostly pentagrams or rhymes about the brightness of the Autumn moon. Having pared down the cinematic lycanthrope, does Wolf Man ‘25 bring any innovations to the table?…

(5) MAIL CALL. Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein analyzes another correspondence between two Weird Tales figures in “Her Letters to August Derleth: Everil Worrell”.

…In one, she describes a meeting of the League of American Pen Women, which concludes:

“At the end of this meeting, I found myself trying to give them a slight glimpse into the Cult of Chulthu [sic]! Although I was never much more than a “Square” observer on the C of C, I did my best—since there seemed to be a “Need to Know.” I’m more at ease with ordinary witchcraft, vampirism and demonology—perhaps. But, leave us all hang together. (And now I’m one of the Old Ones myself, chronologically speaking.)

N’Gai ? ?
—Everil Worrell to August Derleth, 12 Mar 1967”

(6) WRITING CONTESTS RESPOND TO LA FIRES. The Tomorrow Prize and Green Feather Award submission deadline has been extended to February 28. The competitions are open to LA County high school students – see full Submissions & Guidelines at the link.

(7) WALLY WEBER (1929-2025). Chair of the 1961 Worldcon Wally Weber died January 23 at the age of 95 reports Seattle Worldcon 2025. Entering fandom in 1947, he joined Seattle’s “Nameless Ones” group when it began around 1949.

Weber co-edited Cry of the Nameless, three-time Hugo nominee and winner of the 1960 Best Fanzine Hugo. (F.M. Busby, Elinor Busby, and Burnett Toskey were the other co-editors.)

He chaired the 1961 Worldcon, Seacon, held in Seattle. In 1963 he was voted the Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund delegate.

Above all he made fandom fun, sometimes at the expense of its more earnest practitioners as in this example from a 1963 issue of Cry: “The Farley File Menace, exposed by Wally Weber”.

…Bruce [Pelz] refers to the caper as, “Farley File on Fandom,” and describes it as a project in which information about fans is recorded on punched cards in such a manner that standard sorting machines (to which both Pelz and [Ron] Ellik are supposed to have access) can be used to pick out those fans included in the file who have whatever it might be the sorter is searching for. Suppose, for example, you live in New York and you want to write a letter to Bruce Pelz in Los Angeles, but after you have sealed the envelope you discover you don’t have a stamp. Before the age of the farley file you would have had to go out in the cold (assume it’s five o’clock in the morning and it’s snowing like crazy outside), find a place that is open where you can buy a stamp, and pay for one. But now, with the farley file in existence, you can avoid this. You just call Bruce on the phone (it will only be two o’clock in the morning in Los Angeles) and ask him for the names of the fans in New York who have an accumulated collection of stamps. Bruce then gets dressed, drives over to the UCLA campus, lets himself in the building where the sorter is located, goes back home to pick up the punched cards he forgot, remembers Ron Ellik had borrowed them to make duplicates to replace the set the FBI had taken from Ron, drives to wherever it is that Ron lives, breaks into Ron’s home since Ron is gone for the weekend, gets reported by the neighbors and captured by the police, and by the time he gets out of jail the weather has cleared up in New York, you’ve been able to obtain a new supply of stamps at your leisure, and the letter has been delivered to Bruce right along with his last paycheck from UCLA where he has been fired for not showing up for work for two weeks….

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

January 29, 1964 — Dr. Strangelove (premiered on this date)

By Paul Weimer: I had heard about Dr. Strangelove for years without ever quite managing to see it, in those early days before streaming took off. My family seemed lukewarm to the idea of me renting a videotape.  And so I read about it, heard about it and wondered about it. 

Finally in the late 90’s I got my chance. In the halcyon days of the early internet, I won a random contest for people who responded to an early column transplanted from the newspaper to the internet about movies that were less than two hours long. My comment won me a DVD copy of Dr. Strangelove.

Happy day, I could finally see the film. 

I was stunned by the interesting angles and cinematography. I also had had no real conception that the movie was in black and white–I figure all the stills I saw were taken with a B&W camera, but I didn’t realize that the movie itself was in monochrome throughout. And my conception of the plot was a little off, too. 

And then there was Fail-Safe. I had managed to see Fail-Safe and so when I saw Dr. Strangelove, I saw the similarities and parallels immediately. They are both extremely interesting movies, with different takes on the same question of Mutual Assured Destruction. But Strangelove I think is superior and that’s because of the humor. 

The humor!  It’s probably my favorite dark comedy of the period, and I had had heard it was darkly humorous but to see it on screen. Peter Sellers in three roles. George C. Scott. Sterling Hayden and his precious bodily fluids. Slim Pickens riding a bomb to glory and destruction. Mine shaft gaps. And on, and on.

And yes, it is in black and white, and the camera choices, angles, and cinematography are revelatory, powerful and considered at all times. The movie is one of the best filmed I’ve ever seen. Not quite as revolutionary as Citizen Kane, say, but that same sort of boldness. 

It was robbed at the Oscars. Can you even remember My Fair Lady, the Best Picture winner that year?

And in our day and age (I need not explain more, do I?), the movie is ever more relevant, funny and true.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) SEE IMAGINARY BOOKS. [Item by Steven French.] We’ve been here before but if any Filefolk happen to be in New York before Feb 15 or in San Francisco after March and have a hankering to see a reproduction of Death’s memoirs from the Discworld novels, then this is the exhibition for you: “Inside a Collection of ‘Imaginary’ Books” at Atlas Obscura.

ON A SNOWY SUNDAY AFTERNOON at the Center for Book Arts in Manhattan, Reid Byers is sitting in front of a group of students who have gathered for a very particular kind of book-making class.

Surrounded by the sturdy-looking tools of bookbinding—giant sheets of paper, a pegboard of hammers, a row of heavy book presses lining the windowsill—it’s easy to feel grounded in the materiality of the medium. But on the projector screen, a slide reads, “Collecting the imaginary”.

(11) THE CLAWS THAT CATCH. “AI haters build tarpits to trap and trick AI scrapers that ignore robots.txt” – Ars Technica really shares little about how it’s done in the article, but it does suggest where you could learn more.

Last summer, Anthropic inspired backlash when its ClaudeBot AI crawler was accused of hammering websites a million or more times a day.

And it wasn’t the only artificial intelligence company making headlines for supposedly ignoring instructions in robots.txt files to avoid scraping web content on certain sites. Around the same time, Reddit’s CEO called out all AI companies whose crawlers he said were “a pain in the ass to block,” despite the tech industry otherwise agreeing to respect “no scraping” robots.txt rules.

Watching the controversy unfold was a software developer whom Ars has granted anonymity to discuss his development of malware (we’ll call him Aaron). Shortly after he noticed Facebook’s crawler exceeding 30 million hits on his site, Aaron began plotting a new kind of attack on crawlers “clobbering” websites that he told Ars he hoped would give “teeth” to robots.txt.

Building on an anti-spam cybersecurity tactic known as tarpitting, he created Nepenthes, malicious software named after a carnivorous plant that will “eat just about anything that finds its way inside.”…

… “A link to a Nepenthes location from your site will flood out valid URLs within your site’s domain name, making it unlikely the crawler will access real content,” a Nepenthes explainer reads….

According to ZADZMO code, “It [Nepenthes] works by generating an endless sequences of pages, each of which with dozens of links, that simply go back into a the tarpit. Pages are randomly generated, but in a deterministic way, causing them to appear to be flat files that never change. Intentional delay is added to prevent crawlers from bogging down your server, in addition to wasting their time. Lastly, optional Markov-babble can be added to the pages, to give the crawlers something to scrape up and train their LLMs on, hopefully accelerating model collapse.”

Returning to Ars Technica:

…When software developer and hacker Gergely Nagy, who goes by the handle “algernon” online, saw Nepenthes, he was delighted. At that time, Nagy told Ars that nearly all of his server’s bandwidth was being “eaten” by AI crawlers.

Already blocking scraping and attempting to poison AI models through a simpler method, Nagy took his defense method further and created his own tarpit, Iocaine. He told Ars the tarpit immediately killed off about 94 percent of bot traffic to his site, which was primarily from AI crawlers. Soon, social media discussion drove users to inquire about Iocaine deployment, including not just individuals but also organizations wanting to take stronger steps to block scraping.

Iocaine takes ideas (not code) from Nepenthes, but it’s more intent on using the tarpit to poison AI models. Nagy used a reverse proxy to trap crawlers in an “infinite maze of garbage” in an attempt to slowly poison their data collection as much as possible for daring to ignore robots.txt….

Taking its name from “one of the deadliest poisons known to man” from The Princess Bride, Iocaine is jokingly depicted as the “deadliest poison known to AI.” While there’s no way of validating that claim, Nagy’s motto is that the more poisoning attacks that are out there, “the merrier.” He told Ars that his primary reasons for building Iocaine were to help rights holders wall off valuable content and stop AI crawlers from crawling with abandon.

(12) CONTEMPORARY COMBAT IMAGINED. “Robot dog battles drone in fireworks fight, sparking future warfare concerns”. (View the video on YouTube here: “Future of #war”.)

A robotic dog fighting an aerial drone is the future of warfare that one would expect in science fiction.

But a video depicting this real-life scene has gone viral on social media sites in China and brought up discussions about a future where machines engage in warfare and what it would take to become the ultimate victor.

Fighting with drones has gone from futuristic to a common theme in warfare. At the turn of this century, the US flew its first drones with wings as wide as 66 feet (20 m) and a cruising altitude of 50,000 feet (15,000 m), but it cost millions of dollars to build one.

In just over two decades, drones have become smaller, nimbler, and so inexpensive to produce that they have become dispensable.

Last month, the Ukrainian defense ministry confirmed that its armed forces used more than 1.2 million drones in 2024 during the ongoing Russia-Ukraine War. On its part, Russia has produced over 1.4 million drones as both sides deploy hundreds of drones in their attacks….

(13) WHEN “SF” STANDS FOR STICKY FINGERS. Collider chronicles “How the Only Star Trek Prop To Survive Two Movies Made Its Way to the Small Screen”.

It’s not uncommon for actors to take home a prop that holds special significance for their character once filming wraps, or for eager fans to snatch up iconic items at an auction. The captain’s chair from the Enterprise bridge might seem like a less obvious — and more unwieldy — prop for someone to take home, but hauling a large piece of furniture around apparently hasn’t stopped certain people from snatching up Captain James T. Kirk‘s (William Shatner) chair over the years. Only one captain’s chair ever made it from one Star Trek movie to the next without being stolen, and that same chair lived long enough to unconventionally grace the small screen.

In 2013, actor and stand-up comedian Darrin Rose starred in a car insurance commercial tied to director J. J. Abrams‘ second Star Trek reboot film, Star Trek: Into Darkness. The ad — also starring Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Blue Eye Samurai’s Maya Erskine — spoofed the frequent ship-to-ship battles for which the franchise is known. After an alien vessel bumps into a Federation starship, the crew prepares for a hostile battle. Instead, the other captain awkwardly apologizes for grazing them and offers to trade insurance information.

According to a dual post on Rose’s Facebook and Instagram, the ad used the same captain’s chair prop from Abrams’ 2009 Star Trek movie as well as its follow-up, Into Darkness. Because Abrams’ company, Bad Robot, produced the commercial, they automatically had access to the movies’ props, costumes, and makeup, and replicated a high-budget starship bridge — which makes the already clever tie-in commercial even funnier. As for how Chris Pine‘s Enterprise chair factors into the ad, Rose learned during filming that every other captain’s chair from previous Trek movies had met an unfortunate end….

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

Pixel Scroll 1/24/25 This Starship Is Bound For Glory, Every Pixel On Her Must Be Scrolly

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(1) THE SHELVES LOOK DIFFERENT THIS WEEK. The Guardian interviews Octavia’s Bookshelf owner Nikki High about how she’s aided her community during the Eaton Fire: “It was a town’s only Black-owned bookstore. It is now a refuge for those displaced by the California fires”.

… That night, the flames ravaged her neighborhood. “There’s about maybe seven or eight homes left on our street, including ours,” she says. The following day, she drove to Octavia’s Bookshelf to see if it was damaged. Although winds blew dirt into the store, her business was otherwise in the clear. In fact, her store still had power and wifi. An idea struck her: perhaps others in the community needed to get online.

“I wrote up something real quick on Instagram,” High says. “I just said, ‘Hey, I have wifi and power. If you need to come here to get online, I’ll be here all day.’” That small act of outreach became the catalyst for something much larger.

As people trickled into the store, they began asking for basic necessities. “Do you have any water?” one person asked. High turned back to Instagram, posting a call for water donations, which she received, plus more. By the end of the day, the bookstore had transformed into a full-fledged relief center.

“We packed up all of our books off the shelves and put them in the attic,” High explains. The books were replaced by the items people gave to victims of the fire. The donations poured in from as far away as Portland, filling the store with supplies like toothpaste, diapers, cat food and water. Volunteers from the community, including loyal customers, stepped in to help organize and distribute the items.

For those who came seeking aid, the store became a place of connection and solace. High remembers one customer who came in for diapers and wipes. “She told me she had donated to our original GoFundMe when we opened. She said, ‘I never thought in a million years I’d be coming here to get supplies after losing my home.’”…

(2) WHEN BUY BY ALMOST WENT BYE-BYE. “Bloomsbury UK Reaches Last-Minute Contract Agreement With Amazon” reports Publishers Weekly.

Charging that Bloomsbury UK failed to engage in good faith to reach a new contract agreement, Amazon posted a notice on its UK website late Thursday afternoon that as of midnight January 24, Bloomsbury UK print titles would no longer be available directly from its online stores in the U.K., Europe, and Australia. That takedown was averted, however, when the two parties reached an agreement in principle on a new contract 90 minutes before the last one expired.

In the initial announcement, Amazon stressed that Bloomsbury print book availability in Amazon’s U.S. store would have been unaffected by the action, but that its Bloomsbury’s Kindle editions would not be available for sale worldwide. According to the post, Bloomsbury UK’s agreement with Amazon expired last year, and the e-tailer had extended the deal for about seven months in hopes of reaching a new agreement.

The last extension ended at midnight on Jan. 24, and if no new contract had been signed by then, Amazon would have begun to pull its “buy buttons” from impacted countries. Customers would still be able to buy Bloomsbury titles from third-party sellers who use Amazon’s services. In practical terms, the dispute meant that, for example, Sarah J. Maas titles that are published by Bloomsbury UK would not have been available in affected stores, while Maas titles released by Bloomsbury’s U.S. subsidiary will still be available in the American Amazon store….

(3) WE HAVE HEARD THE CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT. “Thousands of romantasy fans make midnight dates with new Rebecca Yarros novel” and the Guardian cheers them on.

Rebecca Yarros couldn’t sell her first novel. No publisher would take it. But this week, 14 years later, legions of her devoted readers turned up to more than a thousand midnight-release parties held to celebrate the publication of her latest book.

In the UK alone, more than 180,000 copies of Onyx Storm, the third instalment of Yarros’s blockbuster Empyrean series, sold on day one of publication on Tuesday. Nearly 60 Waterstones branches held late-night parties or opened early on Tuesday morning to mark the occasion. And after some TikTok users posted videos showing that they had managed to buy the book in Asda ahead of its official release, other fans filmed themselves scouring their local branches trying to get their hands on early copies too.Along with Sarah J Maas, Yarros is at the forefront of the romantasy genre, writing stories that combine elements of fantasy and romance. The first two books of the Empyrean series, Fourth Wing and Iron Flame, follow 20-year-old Violet Sorrengail as she makes her way through dragon-rider training at Basgiath War College. Her enemies-to-lovers romance with Xaden Riorson is central to the story, and in the third instalment, her mission is to save him….

(4) KERFUFFLE IN BLAKE’S 7 FANDOM. Lena Barkin dives deep into “The War That Almost Broke a Classic Fandom” at Fansplaining — Blake’s 7 fandom to be precise.

…Media cons were new and fundamentally different because of screen divide. Literary fans were used to writers being fandom participants at cons—and assumed that’s why actors went, too. One Blake’s 7 fan postulated, “Isaac Asimov and Andre Norton go to cons because they love Science Fiction… These people, and many like them, do not charge fees for attending cons… Mostly they go for many of the same reasons we all have … to get feedback on their work; to have a chance to get on a podium and panel and sound off on favorite issues; to browse in the dealers’ room and art show; to discuss elements of SF into the wee hours; to party!” 

While fans could only speculate on the true motivations of the actors, the behaviors described were observed and accepted as standard. It’s also true that many successful sci-fi writers had risen up through the community, supporting this fan’s assertion that these writers “are a part of science fiction.” Science fiction literary fandom was like a really devoted writer’s group where successful writers could give back to the community that helped form them. 

But the entertainment industry had long had different ideas about the roles of its stars. From the beginning of Hollywood, female fans were instructed on how to idolize actors. In her book Movie Crazy: Fans, Stars, and the Cult of Celebrity, Samantha Barras posits that, “just as fans sometimes controlled Hollywood, Hollywood also controlled fans.” By redirecting ‘movie-struck’ girls from aspiration to emulation, Hollywood told fans how they could dress like the stars and collect autographs, but weren’t allowed to be stars. The divide between actor and fan had to be strict in order to maintain control of persona and image….

I was struck by the effort here to contrast media cons with the fandom of written science fiction in the Eighties. Barkin uncritically embraces the latter’s (written sf fandom’s) view of itself despite that being a wild oversimplification. Which I know because in the late Eighties that was the myth I believed until I had the experience of setting up the program for NolaCon II (1988) and talked to a bunch of writers who did not feel connected to fandom in that way, who were only entertaining the idea of attending the con because their agent urged them to for business reasons. Asimov’s and Norton’s and some others’ connection with fans was merely part of a wide spectrum of writers’ attitudes towards fandom.

(5) CARD SHARKS. But you don’t need to reach any farther back in time than a week ago if you’re looking for a fan kerfuffle. And there’s video of this one. “Fight breaks out over Pokémon cards at a Los Angeles Costco” reports the LA Times (behind a paywall).

A fight broke out at a Costco store in Los Angeles over Pokémon cards, according to a video circulating on social media.

The fight was captured at the Atwater Village Costco on Jan. 16, according to a video posted on X by DisguisedToast.

Wild footage captured shoppers at the Atwater Village Costco in Los Angeles fighting over large quantities of the coveted Pokémon cards on Jan. 16.

Two men fought over a Pokémon box set, with one of them elbowing the other in the face.

“Get the f— off of me bro,” one of the men said.

Police weren’t called to the scene and aren’t investigating the brawl, Los Angeles Police Department officials said….

(6) 31 FLAVOR. LA Times critic Robert Lloyd says it’s a matter of taste in “’Star Trek: Section 31 review: A diverting but frustrating first TV film” (behind a paywall).

… Originally conceived as a spinoff series from “Star Trek: Discovery” to star Michelle Yeoh as Philippa Georgiou, an agent of Starfleet’s secret black ops arm, the project was downgraded or promoted to a “feature,” officially the 14th in the “Star Trek” canon, and the franchise’s first “TV movie.” Even though this decision apparently preceded production, most everything about “Section 31” says “pilot episode,” as if whatever ideas informed the aborted series were still driving the starship, as characters are positioned for episodes yet to come — as if the film did not want to let go of the possibility of being a TV show…

… The backstory, which will drive the later plot, is meant to make her character tragic, but we came to know her well enough during her time on the starship Discovery, living among nice people, which had softened her considerably. She was practically lovable by the time she walked into that portal.

Perhaps you will be surprised, then, to find Georgiou sliding back into what looks like narcissism, running her version of Rick’s Cafe Américain in the borderlands outside Federation Space back in the 23rd century, using the alias Madame du Franc (and speaking a little French). Introductory narration, as at the start of a “Mission: Impossible” episode — an acknowledged inspiration — tells us that after her return from the 32nd century to 2257 she joined Section 31 for a time and then went missing. How this lines up with Georgiou having already been introduced as an agent of Section 31 in the second season of “Discovery,” which is to say, the agency she’s going back into the past to join, I’m not at all sure. Time travel will break your brain if you let it….

(7) CHILDREN OF THE SURVIVORS. Rich Horton introduces us to a new novel by a well-known fan: “Review: In Memoriam: A Novel of the Terran Diaspora, by Fred Lerner”

…It’s narrated by David Bernstein. As the novel opens, he’s finishing his final year of school before going to college. And he’s attending a performance staged by the alien race that is native to the planet on which he lives. We learn quickly that these aliens, the Wyneri, rescued the survivors of the Cataclysm, which wiped out humanity on Earth, a couple of centuries prior to this story. The couple of thousand who were rescued have been fruitful enough that the human population is about 30,000 — living in small chapters embedded among the Wyneri. The humans have been gifted one island, on which they have built a University, and to which they go once each year for the Ingathering. And this Remnant, as they style themselves, devote themselves to preserving as much knowledge of Terran history and culture as they can….

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

January 24, 1911 — C. L. Moore. (Died 1987.)

By Paul Weimer: A giant of the 1930’s and 1940’s science fiction and fantasy, I came across C L Moore’s work thanks to Heinlein.  It was the early 1980’s and I read Number of the Beast (which weirdly was one of the first Heinlein books I read, which might explain some things about me…). Anyway, early on in the book, Deity offers her collection of pulp magazines to Zeb…and mentions Moore and her characters Jirel of Joiry and Northwest Smith by name. Young brain went “Who are THEY?” (I did that a lot with Heinlein, it’s how I discovered artists like Maxwell Parrish and Rodin.)  I found Jirel of Joiry in a collection of the protagonist’s stories. Northwest Smith came, later, in a variety of anthologies of early science fiction. 

And I was off and running. Passionate, cerebral and very strongly defined characters in often amazing environments were what I associated with Moore’s work. Sure, a pulp writer, but Moore’s work was uplifted by the interior lives of her characters (consider the agony and the conflict inside of Jirel’s heart, just as one example of her writing at work).

C. L. Moore

When Moore met and started collaborating with Henry Kuttner, figuring out what pieces were hers, what was his and what were collaborations becomes a morass to untangle. I highly enjoy those stories, but they are really “all” collaborations in my mind. 

My favorite Moore works are two of her collaborations with her husband, and they are much more contemporary in her science fiction. “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” I had had the good luck to have read after reading Carroll, so I got the references and allusions immediately, and understood the weird time traveling nature of the futuristic kit and what it did to the child protagonists–and what it almost did decades earlier. It was a “whoa” moment of the power of not time travel of people, but of objects that affect history and people, and literature.

The other story is “Vintage Season”, and it is one of the dagger-to-the-heart endings and the sheer indifference that time travelers can have to the problems of people they visit in the past. When ST: TNG had a protagonist who purported to be from the future act like he was one of the “Vintage Season” time travelers, something clicked and I understood both the original story and the episode much better.  I also recently recounted the bit that the time travelers were off next to see Charlemagne in the year 800 to a medievalist friend of mine who is SF adjacent. He was much amused by the idea.

What a talent, in singular and in combination with Kuttner!

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) PAYING THEIR RESPECTS. Los Angeles Magazine takes us “Inside the David Lynch Shrine at Bob’s Big Boy”.

Shortly after the family of filmmaker David Lynch announced his death last Thursday morning, fans began gathering at Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank. Hundreds of them left something behind as a huge shrine to the visionary behind Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive took shape at the feet of the Big Boy statue on Riverside Drive.

As the tributes continued to pour in, the installation was being disassembled Wednesday afternoon by archivist and historian Kat Fox, who wrote her UCLA thesis on roadside shrines and spontaneous memorializations. Fox has previously studied temporary monuments to people lost from COVID, AIDS and 9/11. “Lynch doesn’t have a star on the Walk of Fame which is where these often crop up,” Fox said. “I’m very interested in the way L.A. chooses to memorialize and the way the community comes together in a place like Bob’s that has larger connections to the movie and TV industry,” she said. “It’s a cultural cornerstone and part of David Lynch lore.”

The landmark restaurant was a longtime favorite of the acclaimed director, who had a fondness for the lost world of 1950s Americana, and where he wrote and found inspiration. “I went there every day for seven years,” the director remarked after a film screening. “I would write on the napkins. It was like having a desk. You need paper and there’s a piece of paper and you write on it when you get ideas.”…

… Original drawings and paintings, poetry, and personal letters were mixed in with stuffed logs, real logs, donuts, Cheetos and keys to the hotel where special agent Dale Cooper stayed in Twin Peaks. “There’s half-drunk coffee and half-smoked cigarettes,” Fox said. “It’s like they’re sharing it with him.” An estimated 400 cigarettes, 45 cups of coffee, and dozens of donuts and pie slices were accessioned, documented and photographed before finding their way to the Dumpster….

Reflecting on what we’ve lost today.

— Schooley (@schooley.bsky.social) 2025-01-20T18:12:20.666Z

(11) DID DEFERENTIAL EPISTEMOLOGY LEAVE WITH THE ENTWIVES? [Item by Steven French.] In this Physics World essay, historian of physics and philosopher Robert P Crease argues that the best way to counter misinformation is to be even more melodramatic: “Why telling bigger stories is the only way to counter misinformation”.

If aliens came to Earth and tried to work out how we earthlings make sense of our world, they’d surely conclude that we take information and slot it into pre-existing stories – some true, some false, some bizarre. Ominously, these aliens would be correct. You don’t need to ask earthling philosophers, just look around….

…Humans gain a sense of what’s happening in several ways. Three of them, to use philosophical language, are deferential, civic and melodramatic epistemology.

In “deferential epistemology”, citizens habitually take the word of experts and institutions about things like the dangers of x picocuries and exposures of y millirems. In his 1624 book New Atlantis, the philosopher Francis Bacon famously crafted a fictional portrait of an island society where deferential epistemology rules and people instinctively trust the scientific infrastructure.

We may think this is how people ought to behave. But Bacon, who was also a politician, understood that deference to experts is not automatic and requires constantly curating the public face of the scientific infrastructure. Earthlings haven’t seen deferential epistemology in a while.

“Civic epistemology”, meanwhile, is how people acquire knowledge in the absence of that curation. Such people don’t necessarily reject experts but hear their voices alongside many others claiming to know best how to pursue our interests and values. Civic epistemology is when we negotiate daily life not by first consulting scientists but by pursuing our concerns with a mix of habit, trust, experience and friendly advice.

We sometimes don’t, in fact, take scientific advice when it collides with how we already behave; we may smoke or drink, for instance, despite warnings not to. Or we might seek guidance from non-scientists about things like the harms of radiation.

Finally, what I call “melodramatic epistemology” draws on the word “melodrama”, a genre of theatre involving extreme plots, obvious villains, emotional appeal, sensational language, and moral outrage (the 1939 film Gone with the Wind comes to mind)….

(12) VIDEO GAME BUSINESS. The Guardian asks “Can Assassin’s Creed Shadows save Ubisoft?”

It’s no secret that the video game industry is struggling. The last two years have seen more than 25,000 redundancies and more than 40 studio closures. Thanks to game development’s spiralling costs (blockbuster titles now cost hundreds of millions to make), overinvestment during the Covid-19 pandemic, and a series of failed bets to create the next money-printing “forever game”, the pressure for blockbuster games to succeed is now higher than ever.

It’s a predicament that feels especially pertinent for Ubisoft. Employing in the region of 20,000 people across 45 studios in 30 countries, its most recent big licensed games Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Star Wars Outlaws underperformed commercially. It has had two expensive, failed live-service experiments in the past year, Skull and Bones and X-Defiant. With Ubisoft share prices plummeting and investment partners circling like sharks, rarely have the fortunes of a massive games company relied so heavily on a single release. It has already been delayed multiple times, to ensure its quality.

Against this gloomy backdrop, I find myself roaming the glistening halls of Ubisoft Quebec for the world’s first hands-on of Assassin’s Creed: Shadows. The company’s series of historical action games is back after a two-year break, and this time it takes us to feudal Japan. This has been the most requested setting by fans, according to creative director Jonathan Dumont, but ironically some of those purported fans have turned on Ubisoft over the course of this game’s development….

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Ersatz Culture, 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 Randall M.]

Pixel Scroll 1/18/25 “All These Pixels Are Just For Us” Said Tom Clickishly

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(1) CLOCK NOT RUNNING OUT ON TIKTOK? Yesterday’s Deadline’s article “Supreme Court Upholds Law Banning TikTok In U.S.” initially reported —

…the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday upheld a lower court ruling that the app owned by China’s ByteDance must sell itself or be banned in the U.S. on January 19 due to national security concerns….

…Read the Supreme Court’s full TikTok opinion here….

…The ban would take effect under a new bipartisan law, the Protecting Americans from Foreign Controlled Applications Act, signed by President Joe Biden last year….

However, the incoming President said he will probably delay the ban: “Trump says he will ‘most likely’ give TikTok 90-day extension to avoid ban” at NBC News.

President-elect Donald Trump told NBC News’ “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker in a phone interview Saturday that he will “most likely” give TikTok a 90-day reprieve from a potential ban in the U.S. after he takes office Monday….

And Deadline subsequently added this update to its article:

TikTok’s CEO has responded to a Supreme Court ruling today that paves the way for the app to be banned on Sunday, thanking the incoming president. “On behalf of everyone at TikTok and all our users across the country, I want to thank President Trump for his commitment to work with us to find a solution that keeps TikTok available in the United States,” said chief executive Shou Chew in a video posted to the platform.

“We are grateful and pleased to have the support of a president who truly understands our platform, one who has used TikTok to express his own thoughts and perspectives, connecting with the world and generating more than 60 billion views of his content in the process,” he said. “As you know, we have been fighting to protect the constitutional right of free speech for the more than 170 million Americans who use our platform every day to connect, create, discover and achieve their dreams.”

(2) WHY WE FIGHT. CrimeReads’ fascinating analysis of “Pride and Prejudice and Nazis: On Aldous Huxley’s Wild Wartime Jane Austen Adaptation” teases out its threads of pre-WWII propaganda.

…But underneath its thick, saccharine coating; the film is something else: a contrived, convoluted morsel of political propaganda. Filmed by on American soil by Metro Goldwyn Mayer, this British adaptation shot directly after the French surrender to the Nazis, released during the Battle of Britain, and co-screenwritten by depressed British idealist Aldous Huxley, managed to transform that famous English book Pride and Prejudice into a partisan plug relying on Depression-era escapism, thematic idealization of a nationalistic Anglocentric tradition, the depiction of highly distracting romantic merriment, and a reassuringly happy ending to prepare and energize Americans for the inevitable: the United States’ joining the Allied Forces overseas to fight in World War II….

…Austen, Jerome, and Huxley place the same emphasis on class, however, in that all three versions have the same classless ending—Jane and Mr. Bingley marry, and Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy marry, despite their class and financial differences.  The concept of any Pride and Prejudice adaptation is that is possible to climb up a social ladder, because everyone is equal—or rather, everyone has the ability to be equal. Most of the characters belong in many social circles, and it is possible to find love or friendship somewhere else.  Perhaps this is the dominant reason why Huxley chose the Pride and Prejudice story for his anti-war-but-if-you-have-to-fight-then-fight-with-these-guys-esque opus instead of another classical novel (after all, many of other elements of the film Pride and Prejudice that make it jingoistic lie in plot alterations, or aesthetics —changes that could applied to any other story in the adaptation process): Pride and Prejudice is, at its core, a story about good, smart everyday people who make mistakes but learn their lessons just as much as it is a story about how important it is not to form judgments. Huxley nearly abuses this tone by exaggerating it in his own, though; any shred of mystery about the moral of the story is completely detonated throughout.  For example, in the film, Mr. Darcy comforts Elizabeth after Caroline Bingley insults her.  Elizabeth is shocked, and informs him, “At this moment, it’s difficult to believe that you are so proud.”  Mr. Darcy smiles vainly and answers back, “at this moment, it’s difficult to believe that you are so prejudiced.” Huxley spells out the main paradox of the story, killing the main thematic mystery – the only thing left for the audience to wonder is how they can get shipped off to fun, idyllic England.  Austen’s tone is inclusive, it’s happy, it’s insightful, and it’s open-minded—so now it fights fascism.

Of course, the aesthetics of the film Pride and Prejudice hide these anti-Nazi sentiments under tons and tons of poofy dresses and behind maypoles. For example, in the script, Huxley and Murfin manage to turn the extravagant Netherfield Ball into a garden party, which the film then turns into a frothy visual circus—where everything appears to be made out of cotton candy and wishes….

(3) LIU CIXIN MUSEUM. “Museum dedicated to sci-fi writer opens” from Chinadaily.com in October 2024.

China launched its first literary museum dedicated to Liu Cixin, a renowned science fiction writer and Hugo Award winning novelist, in Yangquan, Shanxi province, on Sunday.

While accepting the nation’s honor and unveiling the Liu Cixin Sci-fi Museum, Liu, author of the acclaimed sci-fi novel trilogy The Three-Body Problem who grew up in Yangquan, said that he hopes the museum can help the general public gain a better understanding of the sci-fi literature and develop an interest in the genre.

Located at a cultural park, the 700-square-meter museum educates visitors about Liu’s growth, his books and awards, and cultural and creative products derived from his works. Immersive projectors also create an atmosphere mimicking interstellar voyages described in Liu’s novels….

… Yan Jingming, vice-president of the China Writers Association, said that the establishment of the museum is not only an homage to Liu and his works but also serves as a beacon for China’s sci-fi writers and fans.

He said he hopes it will bring like-minded sci-fi novelists together and spark more inspiration and works.

The launch was part of a weeklong sci-fi promotional event in Yangquan that also included a symposium on sci-fi literature and real-world productivity, where Liu shared his thoughts on potential immigration to Mars.

“I would love to go to Mars if it were a round trip,” Liu said, explaining that a one-way journey would not suit him as he had work to do and family members to be with on Earth….

(4) WHAT’S THAT SMELL? Neil Baker returns with more horrible dino movies in “Prehistrionics, Part III” at Black Gate.

We’re off on another adventure filled to the brim with disappointment. 20 films I’ve never seen before, all free to stream, all dinosaur-based.

First on his list, last in his heart:

The Jurassic Dead (2017) Tubi

Just how bad is the CG? Rubbish.

Sexy scientist? Nope.

Mumbo jumbo? Reanimation, dinosaurs, zombies, asteroids.

Just in case you thought I might try to start the year on a high note, might I present this tripe. The premise is simple: a Herbert West type (complete with glowing green reanimating fluid and dead cat) loses his job and decides to destroy the world. Somehow he has a T-Rex, which he zombifies, and then he turns into Immortan Joe and sets off an EMP just as asteroids wipe out some cities. A crack, sorry crap, team of commandos based on 80s action figures must team up with a group of hugely unlikeable civilians to survive.

Everything ends in nuclear devastation. Effects-wise, the dinosaur is a cute, Walking with Dinosaurs puppet, but everything else is shockingly awful green screen composites. Just terrible.

3/10

(5) GAIMAN: ART AND ARTIST. NPR’s popular culture commentator Glen Weldon speaks as “One longtime Neil Gaiman fan on where we go from here”.

…While we don’t know whether these disturbing allegations are true, learning of them naturally leads to a deeply personal, complicated question: How do we deal with allegations about artists whose work we admire — even revere?

I should note: It’s a complicated question for most of us. It’s not remotely complicated for those who rush to social media to declare that they never truly liked the creator’s work in the first place, or that they always suspected them, or that the only possible response for absolutely everyone is to rid themselves of the now-poisoned art that, before learning of the allegations against the creator, they loved so dearly.

Nor is it complicated for those who will insist that a creator’s personal life has no bearing on how we choose to respond to their work, and that the history of art is a grim, unremitting litany of monstrous individuals who created works of enduring, inviolate beauty.

Most of us, however, will find ourselves mired in the hand-wringing of the in-between. We’ll make individual, case-by-case choices, we’ll cherry-pick from the art, we’ll envision ourselves, in years ahead, sampling lightly from the salad bar of the artist’s collected works, and feeling a little lousy about it.

Here’s my personal approach, whenever allegations come out about an artist whose work is important to me: I see the moment I learned of them as an inflection point. From that very instant, it’s on me.The knowledge of the allegations will color their past works, when and if I choose to revisit them in the future. It won’t change how those works affected me back then, and there’s no point in pretending it will. But my newfound understanding of the claims can and will change how those works affect me today, and tomorrow.

To put that in practical perspective: If I own any physical media of their past work, I feel free to revisit it, while leaving plenty of room for the new allegations to color my impressions. But as for any future work — that’s a door I’m only too willing to shut….

(6) HINT: IT’S ZELAZNY. Grammaticus Books asks is he “The MOST DISRESPECTED Science Fiction author of ALL TIME ???” How could you not click on that?

An indepth analysis of the works of science fiction and fantasy author Roger Zelazny. With a focus on his lack of recognition as one of the greats of the SF field. Worthy of mention alongside Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Frank Herbert.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

January 18, 1953 — Pamela Dean, 72.

By Paul Weimer: One of the legends of Minneapolis fantasy writing, Pamela Dean’s work first came to my attention in the same season that also brought such novels as War for the Oaks to my attention. From my perch in New York, work by people like Bull and Dean and Brust (among others) enlightened me to the fact that the Twin Cities was a hotbed of fantasy and science fiction writing. 

I started reading her with her classic Tam Lin, which I picked up not long after the aforementioned Bull novel. (I was on a kick to read novels set in Minnesota at that point, you seem, especially by this community).  It’s an excellent adaptation and exploration of the Scottish-English story. You know the one. Young man taken by a Queen or noble of Faerie, and the titular Tam Lin must thus be rescued by the love of his life, Janet. You can see the appeal, it is an empowering fantasy that puts a woman in a forward, protagonist position. Since the original reels and songs, it’s been adapted many times by many authors. Dean’s version has the story take place, predictably in Minnesota, setting it at Blackrock College. 

But it is the Secret Country trilogy that I think of as her best work, or at any rate my favorite. It’s a conceit that was not new to her, as far as I am aware, it dates back to Joel Rosenberg’s Guardians of the Flame series: the idea that a group of people, playing a game with and imagining a fantasy world, find themselves transported into the realm of the very game that they thought was fiction. The idea is the same, but the Secret country is on the brink of war, there’s a dragon afoot, and so there is far more urgency and threat to the realm than wandering about as in Rosenberg’s series. It is one of the classic portal fantasies into a realm you think you already known. 

I’ve gotten to meet Pamela Dean many times at local cons. She might even be able to pick me out of a line up. Happy birthday, Pamela!

Pamela Dean

(8) MEMORY LANE

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Six Million Dollar Man (1973)

Fifty-two years ago, The Six Million Dollar Man premiered on ABC. It was based on Martin Caidin’s Cyborg. Executive Producer was Harve Bennett, who you will recognize from the Star Trek films. It was produced by Kenneth Johnson who would later do The Bionic Woman spin-off and the Alien Nation film. 

Its primary cast was Lee Majors,  Richard Anderson and Martin E. Brooks. Majors had a successful second series shortly after this series was cancelled, The Fall Guy, about heart-of-gold bounty hunters. The Six Million Dollar Man would run for five seasons consisting of ninety-nine episodes and five films. The Fall Guy would run five seasons as well. 

Reception by media critics is generally positive. Phelim O’Neil of The Guardian says, “He was Superman, James Bond and Neil Armstrong all rolled into one, and $6M was an almost incomprehensibly large amount of money: how could anyone not watch this show?” And Rob Hunter of Film School Reviews states “The story lines run the gamut from semi-believable to outright ludicrous, but even at its most silly the show is an entertaining family friendly mix of drama, humor, action, and science fiction.”

It’s streaming on Peacock. 

(9) MEMORY LANE, TOO.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

The Demolished Man (1952)

Seventy-three years ago, Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man was first published in three parts starting in the January 1952 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. Although he had been writing short fiction since 1939, this was Bester’s first novel.

The novel is dedicated to Galaxy‘s editor, H. L. Gold, who made suggestions during its writing. 

Bester’s preferred title was Demolition! but Gold convinced him it was not a good one. Anyone know where the published title came from? Bester or Gold? 

The Demolished Man would be published in hardcover by Shasta Publishers the next year. Shasta Publishers was formed by a group of Chicago area fans in 1947.

Critics at the time really loved it. 

Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas in their Recommended Reading column for The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy said it was “a taut, surrealistic melodrama [and] a masterful compounding of science and detective fiction.” And Groff Conklin in his Galaxy 5 Star Shelf column exclaimed that it is “a magnificent novel as fascinating a study of character as I have ever read.”

As you know The Demolished Man would win the first Hugo for Best Novel at PhilCon II. It was also nominated for the International Fantasy Award. 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

  • Off the Mark has a frightening brand name.
  • Pardon My Planet knows you could explain this vampire’s problem.
  • Tom Gauld’s editor is like Cosby’s refrigerator light – “How do it know?”

My cartoon for this week’s @theguardian.com books.

— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld.bsky.social) 2025-01-18T10:35:58.069Z

(11) YOU HAVE TO BE EITHER OH-SO-SMART, OR OH-SO-NICE. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] In a twist, the words coming from the Merc with a Mouth are just fine. It’s what Nicepool said that Justin Baldoni finds offensive. And has filed a lawsuit over. “How Deadpool Entered Justin Baldoni-Blake Lively Feud With Nicepool” at The Hollywood Reporter.

Half a century ago, a defining question of the Watergate scandal was, “What did the president know and when did he know it?” Today, a surprising question has emerged in the Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni legal saga: “What did Nicepool say, and when did he say it?”

On Tuesday, a letter from Baldoni attorney Bryan Freedman to Disney landed in the hands of the media. Freedman’s legal hold letter to Disney CEO Bob Iger and Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige — in which he addressed them as “Bob” and “Kevin” — asked the studio to preserve any documents regarding Baldoni and the creation of Nicepool, a minor character in Deadpool & Wolverine that internet sleuths (and Freedman himself) say star-writer-producer Ryan Reynolds used to mock Baldoni….

… Freedman suggests work on Nicepool came as Reynolds’ wife, Lively, was in the midst of a contentious shoot with her It Ends With Us director-star Baldoni. She later filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against him, while on Thursday, Baldoni sued Reynolds, Lively and Lively’s publicist, Leslie Sloane.

So, how (and when) did Nicepool end up in the movie?

The character was developed before the rift between Lively and Baldoni, but sources tell THR that scenes involving Nicepool were shot late in the game following the November 2023 conclusion of the SAG-AFTRA strike.

“It was all added post-strike,” says one knowledgeable source of the shooting schedule, who says the scenes were filmed in the final days of principal photography, which wrapped up in January 2024. 

In other words, the scenes were shot during a high point of tension between Lively and Baldoni….

(12) WHAT WE DID IN THE SHADOWS. “U.S. Reveals Once-Secret Support for Ukraine’s Drone Industry” in the New York Times (behind a paywall).

The Biden administration declassified one last piece of information about how it has helped Ukraine: an account of its once-secret support for the country’s military drone industry.

U.S. officials said on Thursday that they had made big investments that helped Ukraine start and expand its production of drones as it battled Russia’s larger and better-equipped army.

Much of the U.S. assistance to the Ukrainian military, including billions of dollars in missiles, air defense systems, tanks, artillery and training, has been announced to the public. But other support has largely gone on in the shadows….

… Last fall, the Pentagon allocated $800 million to Ukraine’s drone production, which was used to purchase drone components and finance drone makers. When President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine visited the White House in September, President Biden said another $1.5 billion would be directed to Ukraine’s drone industry.

American officials said on Thursday that they believe the investments have made Ukraine’s drones more effective and deadly. They noted that Ukraine’s sea drones had destroyed a quarter of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, and that drones deployed on the front lines had helped slow Russia’s advances in eastern Ukraine….

(13) STARSHIP TEMPORARILY SUSPENDED. “F.A.A. Temporarily Halts Launches of Musk’s Starship After Explosion” reports the New York Times. (Behind a paywall.)

The urgent radio calls by the air traffic controllers at the Federal Aviation Administration office in Puerto Rico started to go out on Thursday evening as a SpaceX test flight exploded and debris began to rain toward the Caribbean.

Flights near Puerto Rico needed to avoid passing through the area — or risk being hit by falling chunks of the Starship, the newest and biggest of Elon Musk’s rockets.

“Space vehicle mishap,” an air traffic controller said over the F.A.A. radio system, as onlookers on islands below and even in some planes flying nearby saw bright streaks of light as parts of the spacecraft tumbled toward the ocean.

Added a second air traffic controller: “We have reports of debris outside of the protected areas so we’re currently going to have to hold you in this airspace.”

The mishap — the Starship spacecraft blew up as it was still climbing into space — led the F.A.A. on Friday to suspend any additional liftoffs by SpaceX’s Starship, the largest and most powerful rocket ever built.

The incident raises new questions about both the safety of the rapidly increasing number of commercial space launches, or at least the air traffic disruption being caused by them….

(14) BIG BOY REMEMBERS DAVID LYNCH? For some reason there’s a David Lynch memorial at the Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank – Patton Oswalt posted photos. (Is there some reference involved? Maybe one of you can explain it to me.)

The marginal details of the David Lynch memorial at the Burbank Bob’s Big Boy are what make it.

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt.bsky.social) 2025-01-18T19:55:32.073Z

Just saw this one earlier.

— Sam Ebbets (@samebbets.bsky.social) 2025-01-18T21:34:55.074Z

Hold the phone – John King Tarpinian sent me the answer.

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Retired Disney Imagineer Jim Shull tells how “Toy Story Land went from a one and done to a Disney- land built in four separate parks. How the toys were Imagineered is the subject in this episode of Disney Journey.” “Imagineering Toy Story Land”.

[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, 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 Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 1/16/25 Let’s Read Our TBR Piles, And Travel Mental Gigamiles

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(1) IS ANYONE STILL PUBLISHING GAIMAN? Publishers Weekly tries to track down whether Neil Gaiman has any works scheduled to come out — “How Neil Gaiman’s Publishers Have Responded to the Sexual Misconduct Allegations” – and discovers it is much easier to get answers from those that definitely haven’t any.

…Gaiman’s literary agent, Merrilee Heifetz at Writers House, did not respond to requests for comment by press time, nor did his public speaking agent, Steven Barclay of the eponymous agency, leaving it unclear as to whether either has dropped him as a client. On Gaiman’s website, a page called “Contacting Neil,” which had listed both agents alongside his Hollywood representation, is now down, although the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine indicates that it was live as recently as last month.

At present, it is unclear if Gaiman, the author of nearly 50 books that have sold more than 50 million combined copies worldwide, has any new forthcoming titles currently under contract, although some publishers have confirmed that if he does, it is not with them. On the trade book side, a spokesperson from HarperCollins, Gaiman’s primary publisher in the United States, told PW that it “does not have any new books by Neil Gaiman scheduled.”

A spokesperson for Norton, which released Gaiman’s 2018 book on Norse mythology as well as an illustrated version last year, confirmed to PW that “Norton will not have projects with the author going forward.”…

In the comics world, a representative from Dark Horse Comics, which has published a number of comics and graphic novel titles by Gaiman as well as the Neil Gaiman Library series, said that the publisher is currently working on a statement, but was unable to comment further. Marvel Comics told the New York Times that it has no books in the works with Gaiman. DC Comics, the publisher of Gaiman’s Sandman series and many of his other comics titles, did not respond to requests for comment; DC had previously announced plans to reprint a classic work by Gaiman in a new format in September….

The article also presents a roundup of recent terse social media remarks about Gaiman by Jeff VandeMeer, John Scalzi, Gail Simone, Guy Gavriel Kay, and Scott McCloud.

(2) FINDING THE ANSWER. Kameron Hurley analyzes “Why Great Art Connects Us Across Time and Space (Even with Monsters)”.

…When people burst into tears when they meet me at an event, it’s not because I write about giant bugs and exploding heads. Those things are cool, yes! But they react that way because they connected EMOTIONALLY with something I wrote. It’s that feeling like “OMG I’m not alone. I feel that TOO!!”

Art is, at its best, a way for humans to connect. We’re holding out a hand saying “I felt this way. Have you ever felt this way too?” And no, not everyone has, and thus those are not people who are going to be yours fans. But many HAVE. And if you’ve done it right, you connect with that person across time and space – and for one glorious moment, we feel less alone.

THAT is great fucking art. THAT is magic. It’s a magic every great storyteller has; heroes and villains alike. Perhaps that’s why we hate it so much when we’ve connected with art made by people who have done monstrous things. It makes us ask if we, too, are monsters.

I know the answer to that.

I connect emotionally with fictional monsters (and the work of people who’ve done monstrous things) all the time. We all do. We are human. We share the multitude of all human emotions and possible actions with the best and worst people in the world. That’s terrifying.

This is why the STORIES we tell ourselves are so important. I changed a lot of who I was by asking myself how the person I wanted to be would act in any given situation. FEELING a monstrous impulse isn’t what makes us monsters. It’s taking the ACTIONS of a monster. It’s being aware enough to choose….

(3) BENEATH THE JERSEY SKIES. “Steven Spielberg’s new UFO movie with Emily Blunt is filming in N.J., casting locals.” – NJ.com has the story. Well, isn’t that a coincidence.

…The filming will take place in March — not long off from Jersey’s brush with drone and/or plane-related, supposedly “unidentified” flying objects at the end of 2024.

The movie, which is as yet untitled — but reportedly (tentatively) titled “The Dish” — also stars Emmy winner Josh O’Connor (”The Crown,” “Challengers,” “La Chimera”), Oscar nominee Colman Domingo (”Rustin,” “Sing Sing”), Oscar winner Colin Firth (”The King’s Speech,” “Bridget Jones’s Diary”) and Eve Hewson (”Bad Sisters”)….

(4) FANTASY MAGAZINE SUBMISSION DATES. Correcting the information released yesterday, editor Arley Sorg says the revived Fantasy Magazine plans to open to submissions January 22-29, and specifically, Jan 22-25 BIPOC writers only, Jan 26-29 general submissions. See submission guidelines at the link.

(5) HOWARD ANDREW JONES DIES. Author and editor Howard Andrew Jones died January 16 of cancer. Known for The Chronicles of Hanuvar series, The Chronicles of Sword and Sand series and The Ring-Sworn trilogy, he has also written Pathfinder Tales, tie-in fiction novels in the world of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. He is the editor of Tales from the Magician’s Skull and has served as a Managing Editor at Black Gate since 2004.

In August 2024 he announced that he has been diagnosed with brain cancer––multifocal glioblastoma – and that, “People I trust––my doctors and my family––inform me it will be fatal, and we are deciding now on a course of action to make the most of the time I have left.” 

(6) DAVID LYNCH (1946-2024). Filmmaker David Lynch has died at the age of 78. Deadline says the family did not release the date of death. Never forget – Frank Herbert liked his film Dune.

…The four-time Oscar-nominated filmmaker [was] behind Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, Eraserhead, Wild at Heart, The Elephant Man and others [and] also created the ABC drama series Twin Peaks…

…In 2020, he received an Honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement at the Governors Awards….

…Lynch’s career took off during the 1980s. He followed up the success of Elephant Man with Dune, the 1984 take on Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi novel. While Dune was noted for being a financial bomb at the time, it wound up being the highest-grossing film on the auteur’s résumé with $31.5M worldwide….

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

January 16, 1948 — John Carpenter, 77.

By Paul Weimer: Where does one begin with the large and momentous oeuvre of John Carpenter? With the many-sequeled and rebooted but never equaled Halloween, perhaps? To start there means that we skip the strange and wondrously weird Dark Star. And it skips the gritty Assault on Precinct 13.  Do we instead focus on The Thing, one of the best SF/horror movies ever to be made? To do that would throw shade on The Fog, the amazing ghostly revenge tale in a Northern California town.  

Maybe you should start with Escape from New York, with a vision of NYC after its transformation into a prison that has been imitated (even by Carpenter himself!) but has never, ever been surpassed.  It IS the movie that helped cement the career of Kurt Russell, after all.  But to work there misses the soft wondrous Starman, an amazingly touching movie. 

Or maybe you should start with They Live, perhaps the best indictment of late 80’s trash capitalism that suddenly feels even more relevant, in this year of our lord 2025. Roddy Piper’s character doesn’t have a name, but he isn’t a faceless number, either. And it has one of the longest fights on screen. It’s a bit pointless fight, but it is fun that Piper got to do a whole wrestling match in a John Carpenter film.  But to mention They Live might mean you overlook the absolutely bonkers and fun Big Trouble in Little China. 

My favorites in the Carpenter oeuvre are none of these, although I love all the above movies.  My second favorite John Carpenter movie has to be Prince of Darkness, where an unlikely group of heroes led by Victor Wong (from Big Trouble in Little China) and Donald Pleasance (from Escape from New York) team up to try to stop the literal Devil, anti-God, from coming across from another dimension into our own. It’s a bottle of a movie set in an inescapable church, got dreams from the future, and is nicely tense.  The other one I like even more and is one of my heart movies, is In the Mouth of Madness. In the Mouth of Madness is the best cosmic horror movie, ever, in my opinion, as horror writer Sutter Cane writes extra dimensional monsters into our reality, with Jurassic Park’s Sam Neill as John Trent, insurance investigator, is in search of a book he really, really should not read. In 2018, when I found out that the striking church seen in the film was just outside Toronto, I had to go and visit it while on a vacation in Canada.

And did you know that Carpenter scored a lot of his films? His father was a music teacher, and his love of music led him to really be patient and exacting about the music. Be it Escape from New York, Halloween, Prince of Darkness, or many other of his works, that soundtrack with the heavy use of synthesizers that you are hearing are due to his own musical creation and scoring. His movies have memorable visuals…and sound as well. 

John Carpenter

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

January 16, 1995 — Star Trek: Voyager premieres  

 “Coffee – the finest organic suspension ever devised. It’s got me through the worst of the last three years. I beat the Borg with it.” — Captain Kathryn Janeway, Star Trek: Voyager’s “Hunters”. 

Need I say that I liked Janeway a lot? She was a much more rounded, more believable individual than Kirk ever was. Inthe pantheon of Captains, I’d rank her just behind Picard as a character. 

So on this evening thirty years ago on UPN, Star Trek: Voyager premiered. The fourth spinoff from the original series after the animated series, the Next Generation and Deep Space Nine which had my favorite Captain in Benjamin Sisko, it featured the first female commander in the form of Captain Kathryn Janeway, played by Kate Mulgrew. 

(She is seen again commanding the USS Dauntless in the animated Prodigy series, searching for the missing USS Protostar which was being commanded by Captain Chakotay at the time of its disappearance. It’s now streaming on Netflix.) 

It was created by Rick Berman, Michael Piller, and Jeri Taylor. Berman served as head executive producer, assisted by a series of executive proucers — Piller, Taylor, Brannon Braga and Kenneth Biller. Of those, Braga oil the still the most active with his recent work on the cancelled Orville.

It ran for seven seasons and one hundred seventy-two episodes. Four episodes, “Caretaker”, “Dark Frontier”, “Flesh and Blood” and “Endgame” originally aired as ninety-minute episodes. 

Of all the Trek series, and not at all surprisingly, Voyager gets the highest Bechdel test rating. 

Oh, and that quote I start this piece with in 2015, was tweeted by astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti International Space Station when they were having a coffee delivery. She was wearing a Trek uniform when she did so as you can see in the image below. 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) OCTOTHORPE. Episode 126 of the Octothorpe podcast, “I’ve Read Some Novels”, John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty read out your letters of comment, and then discuss all the things from 2024 that they think are worth a look as we go into award nomination season (and a couple of things they would probably avoid). Then they do picks, in case there weren’t enough opinions.

Get the uncorrected transcript at the link.

A picture of a Belgian waffle that looks like an octothorpe, on a white background, with the words “Octothorpe 126” above and “now with added waffle” below.

(11) DON’T THAT BEAT ALL. “A Frankenstein Filing Error: It’s Alive!” – the New York Times confesses.

…When he died in February 1969, The New York Times wrote of Karloff’s career in an article that featured a photograph of an actor, in costume as the monster.

One problem: The man in the makeup, with the bolts in his neck, wasn’t Karloff.

The image — a publicity photo, copyrighted by Universal Pictures — depicted the actor Glenn Strange, who had succeeded Karloff in the role, playing the monster in subsequent films, including “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein,” which was released in 1948.

At least one astute reader had spotted the mistake and sent a letter to The Times.

The photograph was seemingly mislabeled around 1948, the copyrighted date on the image, and incorrectly placed in a folder for Karloff, one of the millions of files stored in the Morgue, The Times’s subterranean clippings library. (The Times issued a correction, a copy of which is pasted on the back of the photo in the Morgue.)

Almost 20 years after the first misprinting, in March 1987, the same photo, though cropped tighter and tilted slightly, was used to accompany a letter to the editor that referenced Shelley’s “Frankenstein.” Again, the caption incorrectly identified Strange as Karloff….

…. Dr. Jane Bishop of Brooklyn, the same reader who caught the mistake in 1969, wrote to The Times and explained that she had lodged an identical complaint 18 years earlier.…

Some of you who read the File 770 birthdays must feel the same way…

(12) JUSTWATCH REPORT: SVOD MARKET SHARES (2024). As 2024 has come to an end, JustWatch has released its latest data report on market shares in the US. As usual, the report is based on the 17.2 million JustWatch users in the US selecting their streaming services, clicking out to streaming offers and marking titles as seen.

SVOD market shares in Q4 2024: In the final quarter of 2024, Prime Video led provider growth, taking 22% of the overall market. Netflix, its largest competitor, trailed Prime by only 1%. Hulu, Disney+, and Max make up 36% of the streaming market while Paramount+ and AppleTV+ both stayed below 10%.

Market share development in 2024: In Q4 2024, Prime Video and Netflix continued to lead the U.S. streaming market, each holding over 20% of the overall market, with Netflix slightly narrowing the gap between them. Hulu saw steady growth, challenging Max for third place, while Disney+ struggled to gain traction. Smaller platforms in the “Other” category experienced a noticeable rise, reflecting growing interest in alternative services.

(13) NEW GLENN LAUNCH TO ORBIT SUCCESSFUL. “Blue Origin reaches orbit on first flight of its titanic New Glenn rocket” reports Ars Technica.

Early on Thursday morning, a Saturn V-sized rocket ignited its seven main engines, a prelude to lifting off from Earth.

But then, the New Glenn rocket didn’t move.

And still, the engines produced their blue flame, furiously burning away methane.

The thrust-to-weight ratio of the rocket must have been in the vicinity of 1.0 to 1.2, so the booster had to burn a little liquid methane and oxygen before it could begin to climb appreciably. But finally, seconds into the mission, New Glenn began to climb. It was slow, ever so slow. But it flew true.

After that the vehicle performed like a champion. The first stage burned for more than three minutes before the second stage separated at an altitude of 70 km. Then, the upper stage’s two BE-3U engines appeared to perform flawlessly, pushing the Blue Ring pathfinder payload toward orbit. These engines burned very nearly for 10 minutes before shutting down, having reached an orbital velocity of 28,800 kph.

For the first time since its founding, nearly a quarter of a century ago, Blue Origin had reached orbit. The long-awaited debut launch of the New Glenn rocket, a super-heavy lift vehicle developed largely with private funding, had come. And it was a smashing success….

(14) DILBERT STARK’S STARSHIP. Elsewhere today – “SpaceX Starship test fails after Texas launch” reports the BBC.

The latest test of Space X’s giant Starship rocket has failed, minutes after launch.

Officials at Elon Musk’s company said the upper stage was lost after problems developed after lift-off from Texas on Thursday.

The mission came hours after the first flight of the Blue Origin New Glenn rocket system, backed by Amazon boss Jeff Bezos.

The two tech billionaires both want to dominate the space vehicle market.

“Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly during its ascent burn. Teams will continue to review data from today’s flight test to better understand root cause,” SpaceX posted on X.

“With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s flight will help us improve Starship’s reliability.”…

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

Pixel Scroll 4/8/24 Everyone I Know Is A Hoopy Scroll, Who Know Where Their Pixel Is

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(1) ANGRY ROBOT BRINGS ON ECLIPSE OF STORYWISE. [Item by Anne Marble.] Angry Robot Books announced a one-week open submissions period that begins April 22, and several posts down in their thread they also said they would be using a submissions portal named Storywise to help them sort through their submissions. In their image, they explain a little more and point out that it’s not generative AI.

Angry Robot provided more information about Storywise here: “Storywise and Open Submissions FAQ’s “ [Internet Archive copy]. It included information on how authors can opt out of Storywise being used in their submission.

For obvious reasons, people are worried. People are pointing out that the Storywise platform can have biases. (And because it’s software, you can’t see those biases.) While it’s great that it’s not generative AI, does that mean writers can still trust it? For example, how do authors known what Storywise will do with their submissions? Others think its fine because it’s not generative AI — it’s just AI being used as a tool. Some have pointed out that slush readers are often unpaid, so that this is not taking away jobs. (But does that apply to slush readers working for book publishers?!)

Here is a quote-tweet by Vajra Chandrasekera with lots of information about Storywise. (Thread starts on X.com here.)

Angry Robot subsequently removed the posts to social media about their open submissions, and walked back the announcement with respect to Storywise, saying they will resume using their inbox system.

Editor’s note: Adrian Moher has a good roundup about the controversy at Astrolabe Digest: 040824. (Moher provided the link in his social media.)

(2) ON THE WAY TO THE CENTERLINE. Rich Lynch snapped this photo of the view from Interstate 87, in the middle of Adirondack Park while on his way to witness today’s eclipse. (Click for larger image to read sign).

No pictures of the event itself, though. “I don’t have any eclipse photos on my iPhone.” But Rich says, “It very much did exceed my expectations, even with the sun having to burn its way through a thin cloud layer.”

(3) STOKERCON 2024 ADDS GOH. Rob Savage was announced today as StokerCon 2024’s fifth Guest of Honor.

Rob Savage initially gained attention at the age of 19 when he wrote, directed, produced, and edited the low-budget romantic drama film Strings (2012), he later became more widely known for his work in horror films and has since co-written and directed lockdown horror hit Host (2020), co-written and directed Dashcam (2021), and directed Stephen King adaptation The Boogeyman (2023).

The con also signal-boosted HWA’s Librarian’s Day.

This year’s Librarian’s Day on Friday, May 31, 2024, once again offers fantastic programming featuring the conference’s guest authors on timely topics and more. Librarian’s Day ticket holders ($60) will have access to the Dealers Room and other areas of the full conference throughout the day.  

(4) DETROIT FURRY CON VICTIMIZED AGAIN. “Motor City Furry Con evacuated for second straight year” reports Audacy.

For a second straight year Motor City Furry Con attendees were forced to be evacuated from their hotel due to a threat.

The nature of the threat was not clear, but officials with the convention confirmed Sunday the Ann Arbor Marriott Ypsilanti at Eagle Crest in Ypsilanti was evacuated around 9 a.m.

The “all clear” was given around 12:30 p.m. and the final day of convention activities resumed.

Sunday’s evacuation comes a year after attendees were evacuated from the same hotel due to an emailed bomb threat. Ultimately, there were no injuries or any explosives found last March.

The Motor City Furry Con is a convention for people who “appreciate the anthropomorphic lifestyle,” according to a report from The Detroit Free Press.

The Detroit Free Press article also noted, “Event attendee Scoops took to social media to celebrate the second year of being an evacuee.”

(5) SLOWLY WE TURNED, STEP BY STEP. “Caeciliusinhorto” has written an impressive perspective piece synthesizing all the news items that comprise “The 2023 Hugo Awards fuckup” for Reddit’s r/HobbyDrama.

… After much discussion, the general consensus seemed to coalesce around a combination of two or three explanations: firstly, active censorship by the Hugo administrators, possibly due to pressure from the Chinese government (national or local); secondly, incompetence; and perhaps thirdly, weird nominator behaviour (possibly including organised voting blocs). For a while things stalled there: the data was obviously wrong, the most plausible explanation seemed to be some combination of cock-up and conspiracy, and there was no prospect of anyone finding out anything more.

And then we found out more….

(6) SURE. MAYBE. DUNNO. ABSOLUTELY NOT. Nautilus asked six sff writers “Does Science Fiction Shape the Future?”.

Behind most every tech billionaire is a sci-fi novel they read as a teenager. For Bill Gates it was Stranger in a Strange Land, the 1960s epic detailing the culture clashes that arise when a Martian visits Earth. Google’s Sergey Brin has said it was Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, the cyberpunk classic about hackers and computer viruses set in an Orwellian Los Angeles. Jeff Bezos cites Iain M. Banks’ Culture series, which unreel in an utopian society of humanoids and artificial intelligences, often orchestrated by “Minds,” a powerful AI. Elon Musk named three of SpaceX’s landing drones after starships from Banks’ books, a tribute to the role they played in turning his eyes to the stars.

Part of this makes sense. Science fiction widens the frontiers of our aspirations. It introduces us to new technologies that could shape the world, and new ideas and political systems that could organize it. It’s difficult to be an architect of the future without a pioneer’s vision of what that future might look like. For many, science fiction blasts that vision open.

Yet these tech titans seem to skip over the allegories at the heart of their favorite sci-fi books. Musk has tweeted, “If you must know, I am a utopian anarchist of the kind best described by Iain Banks.” Yet in Banks’ post-scarcity utopia, billionaires and their colossal influence are banished to the most backward corners of the galaxy.

Recently, I interviewed six of today’s foremost science-fiction authors. I asked them to weigh in on how much impact they think science fiction has had, or can have, on society and the future….

The interview subjects are N.K. Jemisin, Andy Weir, Lois McMaster Bujold, David Brin, Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross. Here’s a quote from Stross:

Charles Stross: Yes, the entire current AI bubble is exactly that. The whole idea of AI has been turned into the centerpiece of a secular apocalyptic religion in which we can create superhumanly intelligent slaves that will solve all our knottily human intellectual problems, then work out how to liberate our pure soul-stuff from these clumsy rotting meatbags and upload us into a virtual heaven. And right now, some of the biggest tech companies out there are run by zealots who believe this stuff, even though we have no clear understanding of the mechanisms underlying consciousness. It’s an unsupported mass of speculation, but it’s threatening to derail efforts to reduce our carbon footprint and mitigate the climate crisis by encouraging vast energy expenditure.

(7) MONSTER BOX OFFICE. Godzilla x Kong rang the registers loudly last weekend reports Variety.

“Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” dominated the domestic box office again, looming large over newcomers “Monkey Man” and “The First Omen.”

Warner Bros. and Legendary Entertainment’s monster tentpole added $31.7 million from 3,948 theaters in its second weekend of release. Ticket sales dropped a standard (for a tentpole of its size and scale) 60% from its mighty $80 million debut and stand at $132 million domestically and $361 million globally.

First-time director Dev Patel’s action thriller “Monkey Man” nabbed second place with $10.1 million from 3,029 venues, while Disney and 20th Century’s supernatural prequel “The First Omen” trailed at the No. 4 spot with a muted $8.4 million from 3,375 locations….

(8) PEAK TELEVISION. “Twin Peaks’ Agent Cooper: How TV’s strangest detective was born” – BBC went right to the source.

… Writer Mark Frost told the BBC’s Late Show that part of the inspiration behind the character was the show’s co-creator and director David Lynch. 

“I tried to base that character on David to some extent,” said Frost. “A lot of his quirkiness and attention to detail, which are things that David has in great abundance, sort of came to the surface with that character. I guess his interest in people’s obsessions, and characters who are obsessed with something, are pretty common with other things he’s done.” …

(9) SMALL BUSINESS. And what is David Lynch working on today? “David Lynch Still Wants To Make Animated Movie ‘Snootworld’: Interview” at Deadline. Netflix said no – maybe someone else will say yes.

…“I don’t know when I started thinking about Snoots but I’d do these drawings of Snoots and then a story started to emerge,” Lynch told us in a rare interview. “I got together with Caroline and we worked on a script. Just recently I thought someone might be interested in getting behind this so I presented it to Netflix in the last few months but they rejected it.”

Lynch was philosophical about the reasons for that decision: “Snootworld is kind of an old fashioned story and animation today is more about surface jokes. Old fashioned fairytales are considered groaners: apparently people don’t want to see them. It’s a different world now and it’s easier to say no than to say yes.”

Thompson described the storyline to us as “wackadoo”: “It takes my breath away how wacky it is. The Snoots are these tiny creatures who have a ritual transition at aged eight at which time they get tinier and they’re sent away for a year so they are protected. The world goes into chaos when the Snoot hero of the story disappears into the carpet and his family can’t find him and he enters a crazy, magnificent world”….

(10) WHO WAS THAT MASKED MAN? “Star Trek Discovery’s Doug Jones Reveals How He Said Goodbye to Saru (And It Involves Whitney Houston)” – Comicbook.com listens in.

Star Trek: Discovery‘s long-awaited fifth season finally debuted this week on Paramount+, and it marks the beginning of the end for the series. ComicBook.com recently had the chance to chat with some of the show’s cast, and they opened up about saying goodbye to their characters in the final season. Doug Jones (Saru) revealed how he said farewell to the character he began playing in 2017, and it involves an iconic song…

“Oh yeah,” Jones said when asked if he was able to keep any part of Saru after the show finished filming. “I wasn’t gonna let that go. Yeah. My final time taking Saru off, I did not cut him up and throw him across the room at all,” he added, referencing the famous story of René Auberjonois throwing his Odo mask at the showrunner at the end of Deep Space Nine. “I held him on my hand and we were playing a Whitney Houston song and I sang ‘I Will Always Love You’ to him and somebody was recording it. So I hope that’s out there somewhere.”…

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born April 8, 1974 — Nnedi Okorafor, 50. Tonight we have Nnedi Okorafor, a truly phenomenal writer. 

She’s Nigerian, and has coined two words to describe her literary focus, Africanfuturism, and Africanjujuism. The latter word identifies the Afrocentric subgenre of fantasy fiction that draws on African spiritualities and cosmologies. Cool. 

Let’s start with some of her work as comic book writer.  The LaGuardia series that she wrote for was published by Berger Books. The collection won a Graphic Story Hugo Award at ConZealand, and her Black Panther: Long Live the King was nominated at Dublin 2019. She did other work in the Panther universe as well — Shuri in which Black Panther is missing and she has to find him (great story), Wakanda Forever and Shuri: Wakanda Forever

I started there as I love her writing in this medium. Now let me pick my favorite novellas and novels by her. 

The Binti trilogy is an extraordinary feat of writing and my favorite reading experience by her. The “Binti” novella which leads it off won a Hugo at MidAmeriCon II. Then came the “Binti: Home” novella which was nominatedfor a Hugo at Worldcon 76 and the final “Binti: The Night Masquerade” novella to date which was nominatedfor a Hugo at Dublin 2019. 

Lagoon is a deep dive in Nigerian mythology including Legba in the forefront here, in what is a SF novel as aliens and humans come together to form a new postcapitalist Nigeria. Neat concept well executed, characters are fascinating and the story is done well. 

(12) COMICS SECTION.

(13) IT COULDN’T HURT. “Fallout Moves To California For Season 2 With Big Tax Credit Award” – Deadline pencils in the numbers.

Just days before its debut, Fallout looks to be assured a second season thanks to a $25 million tax credit from California.

Officially, Amazon has not said yet that the Prime Video series is coming back, but, with some hints from executive producers Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan recently, it is pretty clear the money is doing the talking here. Receiving one of the largest allocations ever from the program for a relocating series, the LA-set post-apocalyptic drama is among a dozen shows awarded $152 million in incentives.

Primetime prequel NCIS: Origins, the Noah Wyle starring The Pitt, plus the Ryan Murphy executive produced Dr. Odyssey starring Joshua Jackson, and Grotesquerie starring Emmy winner Niecy Nash also were awarded credits through the California Film Commission run $330 million annual program – as you can see below….

… Of course, being awarded the tax credits, even big bucks like what Fallout has reaped, is no guarantee a project will go forward. The allocations are conditional on certain timelines being met, and a number of films and shows, like Season 2 of Amazon’s spy saga Citadel, have dropped out of the program after getting a green light….

(14) FILM CENSORSHIP. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Though not SF in itself, this half-hour radio programme, Screenshot, will be of interest to anyone over here in Brit Cit who are fans of fantastic films.  It explains how Britain ranks its films for age suitability. Those in the rebel colonies are not ignored as there is a section comparing Britain’s system with that in the US. It seems we get a better deal over here. Meanwhile, along the way Kim Newman (co-master of ceremonies at the 2005 Hugo ceremony) gets a name check.

As the British Board of Film Classification publishes its new guidelines, Ellen E Jones and Mark Kermode delve into the long, chequered history of film censorship and classification in the UK.

Mark speaks to BBFC President (and original Strictly Come Dancing winner) Natasha Kaplinsky about her role, and about her reaction to the new guidelines. And he discusses the Board’s controversial history, and some of its most notorious decisions, with ex-BBFC Head of Compliance Craig Lapper.

Ellen talks to director Prano Bailey-Bond about her debut film Censor, which was inspired by the ‘video nasty’ moral panic of the 1980s. And pop culture critic Kayleigh Donaldson talks her through some of the differences between the BBFC and its US equivalent, the MPA Ratings Board.

Half hour prog here: BBC Radio 4 – Screenshot, “Censorship”.

(15) THE ELEPHANT NOT IN THE ROOM. “US company hoping to bring back the dodo and the mammoth – but here’s why it won’t be like Jurassic Park” explains Sky News.

… “We’ve got all the technology we need,” says Ben Lamm, chief executive of the firm, based in Dallas, Texas.

“It is just a focus of time and funding. But we are 100% confident [we can bring back] the Tasmanian tiger, the dodo, and the mammoth.”

The science behind the project is simple: Work out the genes that make an extinct animal what it is, and then replicate those genes using the DNA of a close existing relative….

… So after around 4,000 years of extinction, when could we see the return of the mighty mammoth – a creature that fell victim to human hunting and the changing conditions brought about by the end of the last Ice Age.

“We are well into the editing phase,” says Mr Lamm.

“We don’t have mammoths yet, but we still feel very good about 2028.”…

(16) STAND BY FOR MANIACAL LAUGHTER. “Animaniacs in Concert” will be presented at Pepperdine in Malibu on April 19. Buy tickets at the link. Learn more about the show itself at their website: “Animaniacs – IN CONCERT”.

Join the leading voice cast of Animaniacs—the iconic animated Warner Bros. series created and produced by Steven Spielberg—for a “zany, animany and totally insaney” evening as they perform the world-famous songs backed by projections from the beloved cartoon TV series. The live show celebrates the creative inspiration behind the songs with lots of audience interaction and never-before-told behind-the-scenes insider stories shared by the show’s original Emmy-Winning composer Randy Rogel and iconic voice actors like Rob Paulsen (Yakko) and Maurice LaMarche (The Brain) to some of the most unforgettable characters in the history of animation. Special guest Nancy Cartwright joins for this performance. Nancy, of course, is Bart Simpson, a lead character in a “globally known property,”  as well as Mindy in Animaniacs, from “Mindy and Buttons.”  

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Warp Zone’s video “If the Star Wars ‘Cantina Song’ Had Lyrics” was first posted six years ago – but it is news to me! (Maybe you, too?)

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