Tag Archives: David Weber

Pixel Scroll 3/21/25 Listen: There’s A Hell Of A Good Scroll Next Door; Let’s Go

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(1) SLAIN ISRAELI HOSTAGE SFF COLLECTION UP FOR AUCTION. Going by the photo, there’s a lot of David Weber and other Baen authors in the stacks. “Tel Aviv store to auction slain hostage Nadav Popplewell’s sci-fi book collection” – The Times of Israel has details.

A collection of several hundred science fiction and fantasy books owned by slain British-Israeli hostage Nadav Popplewell is to go up for auction on Sunday, with the proceeds going to the families of hostages held in the Gaza Strip.

The collection is being offered in an online sale from the Green Brothers bookstore in Tel Aviv.

Ilai Green, who owns the store along with his twin brother Alon-Lee, told The Times of Israel that there are some 700 volumes in the library gathered by avid reader Popplewell.

A collection of several hundred science fiction and fantasy books owned by slain British-Israeli hostage Nadav Popplewell is to go up for auction on Sunday, with the proceeds going to the families of hostages held in the Gaza Strip.

The auction is to be held online via the Bidspirit website on Sunday at 7:30 p.m. Israel time, with a starting bid of $500. Proceeds will go to the families of hostages held by terror groups in the Gaza Strip.

Nadav Popplewell, 51, was kidnapped by Hamas terrorists from Kibbutz Nirim on October 7, 2023, along with his mother, Channah Peri.

His brother, Roi, was murdered the same day in the kibbutz during the Hamas-led onslaught, when over 5,000 terrorists invaded southern Israel, killing 1,200 people and abducting 251 to the Gaza Strip.

Channah was released from captivity six weeks later.

.. Green told The Times of Israel that a volunteer in the kibbutz recently contacted the store and said that Popplewell’s library was available. Green said he understood that the offer was being made with the blessing of Popplewell’s family and that the kibbutz needed to find somewhere for the books after it cleared out his home.

Under the impression that there would be no more than “a few crates of books,” Green described his surprise when the collection arrived.

“I didn’t know how many there were until they brought in crates and crates,” he recalled….

(2) MARCON COMES TO AN END. Dale Mazzola announced on Facebook today that Marcon is closing. Mazzola is chair of the nonprofit corporation, SOLAE, that hosts Marcon. The Columbus, OH sff convention, so far as available history shows, was last held in 2023.

Yes, The Marcon Science Fiction and Fantasy convention is closing.

I hated deciding that and writing that out really hurts. There were many reasons behind that statement. What the decision came down to was based off a couple of factors, Primarily, expenses, which included hotel, expenses, storage and supply costs have all gone up. Additionally, memberships are down across the board for fan run regional conventions.

SOLAE is a 501c3 that is the owner of the Marcon trade name, Marcon was/is an event organized through SOLAE. While we were still getting memberships to Marcon there were not enough to maintain it.

Going forth we are doing the following;

First, we are getting an inventory of our current assets and equipment looking towards offering it up for sales to other events and conventions. So, if you know of other events or conventions in need of equipment, please feel free to have them reach out to me at dale.mazzola@solaecons.org for inventory info.

Second, I will be reaching out to the hotels we have used in the past to work out any remaining bills we owe to them.

Third, if we are unable to reach an agreement with our creditors, I will engage with a Lawyer to see what our options are.

Regarding the Shed and its inventory, we will be able to maintain it until May 31st of 2025, After that we will see what happens. I’m hoping that we can get enough of the large equipment that is taking up about 50% of the space removed and we will condense down to a smaller unit.

(3) WRITER BEWARE. Victoria Strauss hears about “Author Complaints at Clear Fork Press” at Writer Beware. Full details at the link.

In early February, author Vanessa Keel published a long, cautionary blog post about her experience with one small publisher. It was not a happy tale: an absent editor, little marketing support, a non-standard wholesale discount that discouraged bookseller orders, problems with royalty statements and payments, and much more. The result: few sales, crushing disappointment, and, ultimately, a rights reversion.

Vanessa didn’t name the publisher, but she did mention the title of her book. So it was easy to confirm that the publisher in question was Clear Fork Press (CFP), a children’s book publisher that publishes under four imprints: Spork, Blue Whale Press (formerly an independent publisher, acquired by CFP in 2020), &MG, and Rise. Per Amazon, CFP has a catalog of around 150 titles, most released via the Spork imprint (though you’d never know it from looking at the CFP website–more on that below)….

… I don’t generally write about publishers based on one complaint: it can be difficult to know whether the complaint represents a pattern or a single bad experience, something that can happen even in the best of circumstances. I kept the 2018 complaint on file, as I do all complaints I receive, assuming that if there were wider problems, other reports would follow.

They did–though it took a while. Over the past few months, I’ve heard from multiple CFP authors and illustrators who report problems similar to those identified by the 2018 complainant and also by Vanessa Keel….

(4) ANOTHER UNEXPECTED MENTION OF PULP SF. [Item by Rich Horton.] This one is weirder and WAY less respectable than C. L. Moore!

Richard Shaver (yes, of “Shaver Mystery” fame, from Ray Palmer’s Amazing in the 1940s) gets written up in The Paris Review: “’A Threat to Mental Health’: How to Read Rocks”.

Richard Sharpe Shaver, born 1907 in Berwick, Pennsylvania, became a national sensation in the forties with his dramatic accounts of a highly advanced civilization that inhabited Earth in prehistoric times. An itinerant Midwesterner, he’d been employed as a landscape gardener, a figure model for art classes, and a welder at Henry Ford’s original auto plant. He gained public attention as a writer who asserted that descendants of those early beings still live in hidden underground cities, where they wield terrifying technology capable of controlling thoughts. Many readers agreed with Shaver, and a splashy controversy ensued.

Public fascination with his writings subsided during the fifties, but Shaver continued searching for evidence of a great bygone civilization. In about 1960, while living in rural Wisconsin, Shaver formulated a hypothesis that would captivate him for the balance of his life: some stones are ancient books, designed and fabricated by people of the remote past using technology that surpasses anything known today. He identified complex pictorial content in these “rock books.” Images reveal themselves at every angle and every level of magnification and are layered throughout each rock. Graphic symbols and lettering also appear in what he called “the most fascinating exhibition of virtuosity in art existent on earth.”

Frustrated that the equipment needed to fully decipher the dense rock books was lost to time, Shaver undertook strategies to make at least a fraction of the books’ content clearly visible. Initially, he made drawings and paintings of images he found in the rocks, developing idiosyncratic techniques to project a slice of rock onto cardboard or a wooden plank. Shaver also produced conventional black-and-white photos using 35 mm film, often showing a cross section of rock alongside a ruler or a coin to indicate scale. Sometimes he highlighted imagery by hand coloring the prints with felt pens. He attached photos to typewriter paper where he added commentary: he describes the rock books, interprets images, details his photo techniques, and expresses disappointment at the conspicuous lack of academic or journalistic interest in his findings…

(5) BUGS OR FEATURE? The Guardian’s Ben Child asks, “Is Hollywood really going to ditch the anti-fascist satire in its Starship Troopers remake?”.

If there is a modern day equivalent in Hollywood to Dutch director Paul Verhoeven, he or she must be hiding in the nearest underground space bunker, desperately praying that irony makes a comeback. Verhoeven arrived at a time when transgressive “video nasties” were just fading into irrelevance, a period in which filmgoers were just as likely to head to the cinemas for schlocky thrills as they were for biting sci-fi allegory. With films such as 1987’s RoboCop, 1990’s Total Recall and 1997’s Starship Troopers, Verhoeven managed to combine a high-energy, hyper-kinetic thrust that has rarely been achieved since. He remains one of the most subversive and controversial film-makers of his generation – which is why it’s so depressing that Hollywood keeps churning out substandard remakes of his best work….

… Studios have been trying to rework this thing since at least 2016. The latest attempt, according to the Hollywood Reporter, will see District 9’s Neill Blomkamp, once the coming man of sci-fi, taking the reins.

You might think that Blomkamp, with his flair for gritty dystopia and penchant for socially conscious sci-fi carnage, would be the perfect film-maker to reignite the spirit of gleeful nihilism that infected Verhoeven’s best work from the 80s and 90s. And you wouldn’t be far off, except that studio Sony, AKA Columbia Pictures, appears to have decided (according to reports) that the only way to bring this one back to the big screen is to jettison the subversive tone and instead lean in to the Riefenstahlian chest-thumping militarism of the original source novel by Heinlein.

Is this the legacy of Trump’s return to power infecting Hollywood boardrooms in 2025? Have the studios really decided that the smartest way to reboot Starship Troopers is to just go all in on the laser-soaked Nazi space opera vibes? Heinlein’s 1959 novel is all about a society in which people need to get battling the alien space bugs that are threatening Earth quick sharp or face a future without voting rights, basic human dignity or the faintest hint of a social safety net – because nothing says “civic duty” quite like strapping on a flamethrower and mowing down intergalactic cockroaches to prove you’re worthy of democracy. It’s hard not to imagine Verhoeven wondering how his cynical parody of militaristic nationalism ended up being remade as a sincere recruitment video for totalitarian space marines.

Moreover, why get Blomkamp involved if this is the plan? Is he really the right director to helm a fascist fantasy epic when his entire career has been built on scrappy, anti-establishment sci-fi that makes you want to riot against the nearest dystopian overlord? …

(6) SAY IT AIN’T SO! Grammaticus Books is highly peeved about the proposed remake for rather different reasons: “IS SONY Studios about to DESECRATE HEINLEIN?!?!”

A rant about Sony Studios plan to remake the Robert A. Heinlein’s seminal science fiction novel, Starship Troopers. For the first time since Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 film Starship Troopers, Sony will reboot the franchise with their new director Neil Blomkamp. But will they desecrate the memory of Heinlein by painting Starship Troopers as a pro-fascist book?!?!

(7) IF NOBODY SEES AN APPLE TV+ SHOW DROP… [Item by Steven French.] The Guardian also wonders: “Big stars, little shine: is anyone actually watching Apple TV+ shows?” Despite Severance, Apple TV is in trouble, apparently.

…According to the Information, TV+ is currently the only Apple subscription service that isn’t profitable. This is said to be down to a number of factors. The first is that despite having 45 million subscribers, Apple blows through a $5bn production budget every year. And when a lot of it is being spent on blockbuster movies that squander every scrap of their potential – like the $200m spy disaster Argylle – then all this expense starts to look like bad financial sense. The report claims Apple TV+ is losing $1bn annually.

Another factor is that despite all those subscribers, very few people actually seem to watch anything on Apple TV+. The Information reports that Apple shows constitute less than 1% of total US streaming service viewing. In other words, while an Apple subscription ($8.99 a month) might be half the price of a Netflix subscription ($17.99 a month), people still watch eight times more Netflix than they do Apple….

(8) SAFE HABOR DESTINED TO END? “Bipartisan Effort to Sunset the ‘26 Words That Created the Internet’ Is on the Way” reports Gizmodo.

Section 230, the linchpin law that has dictated how online platforms have been regulated for decades, appears destined to come to an end. According to The Information, Democratic Senator Dick Durbin and Republican Lindsey Graham are planning to introduce a new bill that will set an expiration date for the law and encourage tech companies to offer alternatives as to what should replace it.

Per The Information, the bill could be introduced as early as Monday, March 24, and is expected to have bipartisan support from Republicans Josh Hawley and Marsha Blackburn and Democrats Sheldon Whitehouse and Amy Klobuchar, who are reportedly ready to co-sponsor the bill. It’s also a modified version of a proposal made last year in the House by Republican Cathy Rodgers and Democrat Frank Pallone, Jr., so there is some juice for this thing throughout Congress. The proposal would effectively sunset Section 230, setting January 1, 2027, as a drop-dead date for the law that so many tech companies have leaned on to duck legal challenges.

The gambit that Durbin and Graham appear to be attempting is to force tech companies to the table and talk about Section 230 alternatives. By setting a deadline, the message is basically, “Come help us write the replacement law or lose this protection in its entirety.” The latter should be basically an intolerable outcome for tech firms, as it would leave them extremely exposed to legal challenges.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, as it stands, essentially grants companies legal immunity from being held legally liable for the content posted on their platforms by users. It is often referred to as the “26 words that created the internet” because it created a framework for user-generated content. But its legal protection of companies has come under fire from both major political parties for very different reasons.

Democrats have come after Section 230 for allowing Big Tech companies to be derelict in their duties to remove harmful and hateful content, falling short of the “Good Samaritan” standard of good faith moderation. Scrutiny from the left turned up during the COVID pandemic when misinformation was rampant on platforms like Facebook and some Democrats wanted the company to do more to address the issue. Republicans, meanwhile want Section 230 repealed because they believe tech companies have been overzealous in removing content and think their viewpoints have been “censored.” It’s here where you can see the cracks start forming in this bipartisan effort….

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

March 21, 1968 — Planet of The Apes film

On this day in the United Kingdom fifty-six years ago, Planet of The Apes premiered. It was directed by Franklin J. Schaffner. The screenplay was by Michael Wilson and Rod Serling and was based loosely upon Pierre Boulle‘s La Planète des Singes. 

It starred Charlton Heston, Roddy McDowall, Kim Hunter, Maurice Evans, James Whitmore, James Daly and Linda Harrison. Roddy McDowall had a long-running relationship with this series, appearing in four of the original five films (absent only from the second film of the series, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, in which he was replaced by David Watson in the role of Cornelius, no idea why as I can’t find the reasoning), and also in the television series. 

I never saw the TV series. I don’t know why as it must’ve been shown on reruns eventually. So how was it?  As good as the films?  Well, the early films. I didn’t think they held up that well as they went along.

It was met with critical acclaim and is widely regarded as a classic film and one of the best films of that year.  Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times said that it was “much better than I expected it to be. It is quickly paced, completely entertaining, and its philosophical pretensions don’t get in the way.” And Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times exclaimed that it was, “A triumph of artistry and imagination, it is at once a timely parable and a grand adventure on an epic scale.” 

It did exceedingly well at the box office costing less than six million to make and making more than thirty million in its first year of screening. One dollar in 1968 is equivalent in purchasing power to about nine dollars now, so that’s been a very successful film! 

Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes give it an eighty-six percent rating with over a hundred thousand watchers having expressed an opinion!

Most of the later Planet of the Apes films are streaming somewhere, on Disney + or Hulu mostly but not this. Nor Beneath the Planet of The Apes or Conquest of the Planet of The Apes which are out on DVD as it is. I’ve got a suspicion that streaming rights were never negotiated on these and apparently can’t be. 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) THE BIONIC WOMAN. “50 Years Ago, One Iconic Sci-Fi Show Sneakily Launched a Much Better Spinoff” at Inverse.

Today, the idea of secret cyborgs may sound like the set-up for the villains in a sci-fi show or movie, but in the 1970s, secret cyborgs were superheroes. Starting in 1973 with The Six Million Dollar Man, the titular hero was rebuilt with cyber-strength following a near-fatal NASA flight test crash. As former astronaut Steven Austin, Lee Majors starred as the titular man who was now worth $6 million thanks to all of his bionic enhancements. Based on the 1972 Martin Caidin novel Cyborg, the series was a hit for ABC. But, arguably, its best development didn’t come until two years later, when The Six Million Dollar Man launched a backdoor pilot for an even better cyborg show: The Bionic Woman.

Fifty years ago, on March 16, 1975, The Six Million Dollar Man dropped a two-parter called “The Bionic Woman,” which was destined to be its own ongoing sci-fi TV series. And, in terms of quality and staying power, the eponymous Bionic Woman herself, Jaime Sommers (Lindsay Wagner) became, over the decades, a much bigger deal. Mild spoilers ahead.

Just like her high school sweetheart Steve, Jamie also suffers a huge accident, this time involving skydiving, which leads to her bionic enhancements. Although these kinds of ‘70s and ‘80s soft sci-fi shows might seem fairly wholesome now, nearly all of them (like Knight Rider) had grisly origin stories for their heroes, which again, feels closer to supervillain origin stories in other contexts. Arguably, all of these tropes are deeply ableist now, but what made Jamie Sommers so important was that unlike other female-led action shows of the era (Charlie’s Angels debuted in 1976) she wasn’t a seductress, or scantily clad in order to be awesome…

(12) THE STARS MY PUNCTUATION. “Thunderbolts* Director Addresses What The Asterisk Means While Florence Pugh Reveals She Actually Knows” at ScreenRant. And at File 770 Mike Glyer reveals he doesn’t really care.

The mysterious asterisk in Thunderbolts* continues to dominate the conversation about the next MCU movie, and in the lead-up to its release, director Jake Schreier and actress Florence Pugh have teased what they know. It isn’t long before answers to all the mysteries surrounding Thunderbolts* are revealed as the movie nears its May 2 release date. Until then, fans can only speculate over how the titular team will deal with the challenge of the Void in the apparent absence of the comparatively more powerful Avengers…

(13) WHEN FAILURE WAS AN OPTION. “In event of moon disaster: ‘The speech that never was’”. The BBC’s Witness History tells about the speech that – fortunately – didn’t have to be delivered.

“Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.” 

These are the opening lines of the ‘In Event of Moon Disaster’ speech, written in 1969 in case the moon landing astronauts did not make it home. 

They were composed by President Richard Nixon’s speechwriter, William Safire, who died in 2009, at the age of 79. 

The speech continued: “These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.” 

Using archive from the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and NASA, Vicky Farncombe tells the story of “the speech that never was”.

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

Pixel Scroll 10/24/24 The Scroll On The Edge of Pixelver

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(1) EDITORIAL PRIVILEGE? Beneath Ceaseless Skies editor Scott Andrews has posted the text of his GoH speech given at World Fantasy 2024 on October 20. His message is: “Not Paying Editors Limits Range of Editorial Voices”.

… one way many indie zines afford all that [they publish] on a shoestring budget is that the editors take no pay.

I take no pay for editing BCS. I’ve put 25 hours or more a week into BCS, for 16 years. (Other than six First Readers, I do everything else: reading pass-ups, developmental editing, line-editing, producing the podcast, maintaining the website, posting social media. I clearly have delegation issues.)

If I was to be paid $10 an hour, 50 weeks a year: in order to fund that, BCS would have to more than double our current support, from Patreon patrons and donations and ebook sales, or cut half our fiction. Plus the time and hassle of doing that additional fundraising, which is considerable and exhausting.

I can afford not taking pay. But that approach of not paying editors means that many editors of indie zines in our field are people of financial privilege. And in our world, financial privilege often correlates with other privileges. So I think this practice of not paying editors of indie zines is limiting the range of editorial voices our field has.

Since I started BCS, our field has broadened vastly in the range of author voices: identities, backgrounds, areas of the world; languages. I believe we need to broaden the range of editorial voices too. To me, figuring out how to pay editors is a key step toward that.

I admit, I don’t have any answers. I’m not a business person. And I’ve got all I can handle just running BCS.

But I call this issue to your attention today because I think we need talk about it. We need ideas….

(2) BOOK AT BEDTIME. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (Sceptre – Hodder & Stoughton, £22, hrdbk, ISBN 978-1-399-72634-4) has been made in the past couple of week’s BBC Radio 4’s (formerly the BBC Home Service) Book at Bedtime.

In the near future, a disaffected civil servant is offered a lucrative job in a mysterious new government ministry gathering ‘expats’ from across history to test the limits of time-travel. Her role is to work as a ‘bridge’: living with, assisting and monitoring the expat known as ‘1847’ – Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed expedition to the Arctic, so he’s a little disoriented to find himself alive and surrounded by outlandish concepts such as the ‘washing machine’, ‘Spotify’ and ‘the collapse of the British Empire’. With an appetite for discovery and a seven-a-day cigarette habit, he soon adjusts; and during a long, sultry summer he and his bridge move from awkwardness to genuine friendship, to something more. But as the true shape of the project that brought them together begins to emerge, Gore and the bridge are forced to confront their past choices and imagined futures. Can love triumph over the structures and histories that have shaped them? And how do you defy history when history is living in your house..?

The BBC’s forthcoming TV adaptation (as opposed to the episodic audio book) of this novel has attracted a claim of plagiarism by those who made the Spanish TV series El Ministerio del Tiempo [The Ministry of Time].

The separate Spanish TV series El Ministerio del Tiempo won the 2016 Ignotus Best Audiovisual Production as well as the 2017 Award.

Irrespective of plagiarism claims (time travel is a fairly common, if not standard, SF trope and the commonality of title could be happenstance – the book has its differences) the BBC has the rights to make a TV mini-series, so it is likely they used the copyright permission for this to also make an episodic audio adaptation. Each episode is 15 minutes long so with 10 episodes that’s 150 minutes (or two-and-a-half hours in old money) of audio book.

Get episodes here: Episode 1; Episode 2; Episode 3; Episode 4; Episode 5; Episode 6; Episode 7; Episode 8; Episode 9; Episode 10.

(3) DEATH IS SUPER BAD. “I’m So Sick of the Death of Superman” declares Charlie Jane Anders at Happy Dancing. The latest iteration prompted her to go back and look at the first comic book death. Which wasn’t great either.

…There’s a funeral, and eventually four imposter Supermen show up — everybody can kind of tell they’re imposters, but they hang around for ages. At last, Superman comes back to life, but now he’s wearing a black version of his famous uniform, plus he now has a mullet.

That’s it, that’s the whole story. 

How does Superman come back to life? I honestly can’t say. I realized several years ago that I couldn’t remember how Superman was resurrected in what’s now packaged as The Death and Rebirth of Superman, so I went back and reread the original comics to find out. And now, once again, I can’t remember, because it’s that memorable. I know that Superman meets his human dad, Pa Kent, in the afterlife, and Pa Kent talks to him about why it’s generally a good thing to not be dead. I know there’s some more Kryptonian bullshit. But beyond that, it’s a bit of a blur….

(4) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 121 of the Octothorpe podcast, “All About the Vibes”, John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty discuss Grass by Sheri S. Tepper, which was a finalist for the Hugo Award in 1990.

This is Alison’s pick for John and Liz to read, and we go into some of the themes of the book and whether or not female authors are as well-remembered as men (spoiler: no).

There’s an uncorrected transcript at the link.

Three hippae stand on a landscape of alien grass and plants in blue, purple, red, teal, and orange underneath a pinkish sky. The words “Octothorpe 121” appear at the top and the words “Grass Sheri S Tepper” appear at the bottom.

(5) ANNOTATED SNOUTS. “’Fascinating’: Tove Jansson’s Moomins notes to be published for first time” – the Guardian has details.

As a cult series of 20th-century children’s books, the Moomins have sold up to 30m copies worldwide. Now, extensive humorous notes that their Finnish creator, Tove Jansson, wrote on each of her lovable trolls with hippopotamus snouts are to be published for the first time, 25 years after her death.

Eighty-nine handwritten pages that cast new light on the “small, friendly and adventurous” creatures with fur “like velvet”, have been rediscovered among hundreds of thousands of items in her sprawling archive.

James Zambra, her great-nephew and a director of Moomin Characters, which manages her legacy, said: “This was actually in one of her notebooks. It’s fantastic. Getting Tove’s own thoughts on the personality traits of the characters is fascinating.”…

(6) IS CHATGTP “FAIR USE”? NO, SAYS FORMER OPENAI RESEARCHER. Publishers Lunch reports “Former OpenAI Staffer Claims AI Training Is Not Fair Use”.

A former researcher at OpenAI has spoken out against the company’s use of copyrighted data in a detailed, publicly posted analysis, reported on further by the NYT (which is suing OpenAI for copyright infringement). Suchir Balaji left OpenAI in protest “because he no longer wanted to contribute to technologies that he believed would bring society more harm than benefit.”

Early versions of the company’s technology were treated as research projects, which meant employees felt free to train them on any data without worrying about permissions and usage, Balaji told the Times. But as ChatGPT-4 became a commercial product, OpenAI failed to meet the rules of fair use, he said. According to Balaji, ChatGPT’s outputs aren’t significantly different from its inputs — which are copied in whole — and the outputs directly compete with the copyrighted work that it used for training.

Further, according to Balaji, “As A.I. technologies replace existing internet services, they are generating false and sometimes completely made-up information — what researchers call ‘hallucinations.’ The internet, he said, is changing for the worse.”…

Suchir’s full analysis, including illustrative graphs, is at his “When does generative AI qualify for fair use?” webpage.

While generative models rarely produce outputs that are substantially similar to any of their training inputs, the process of training a generative model involves making copies of copyrighted data. If these copies are unauthorized, this could potentially be considered copyright infringement, depending on whether or not the specific use of the model qualifies as “fair use”. Because fair use is determined on a case-by-case basis, no broad statement can be made about when generative AI qualifies for fair use. Instead, I’ll provide a specific analysis for ChatGPT’s use of its training data, but the same basic template will also apply for many other generative AI products….

(7) ABOUT FRANK MILLER. A trailer has dropped for the documentary Frank Miller: American Genius.

Frank Miller: American Genius documents the unique journey of an unparalleled American artist. The film explores the near half-century career of the legendary comic book artist and writer. Made for his fans following a near death experience, the documentary delves into Miller’s radical and defining influence on art, storytelling and culture.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born October 24, 1952 — David Weber, 72

By Paul Weimer: Sometimes the subtext is the text. A lot of space opera has the subtext of being naval adventures in space, ranging from the original Star Trek on to the present day. It is no surprise, then, that David Weber decided to cut straight to the source and have actual naval style military adventures in the stars, with Honor Harrington. His books follow the rise of Harrington in a manner that Hornblower and O’Brian could recognize, and appreciate. 

David Weber

With all of the side books and ancillary books in the series, the amount of Harrington stories Weber has produced is staggering, but it is undeniably a gem of an idea he can and has taken advantage of for all it’s worth. I’ve not read all of them, but enough to get a good sampling. 

What I like even more is Weber’s Armageddon Reef series. The Safehold books take place on a colony planet where humans have fled after a genocidal attack, and have been forcibly reduced in technology in order to evade detection. So we have an alien planet, humans on it, and a lack of space flight. And so Weber adds 18-19th century style naval combat and technology to the mix. 

These books, I feel, have to be an even more explicit loveletter to Hornblower and company.  The conflict between technology and religion and the problems of separation of chruch and state do elevate these books, I feel, to a question that we face today. While Weber’s novels might be dismissed as just being fun naval and space adventures, there is that undercurrent and layer of engaging with societal questions that make them very worthy of attention.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) WHAT IF? MICKEY & FRIENDS AS THE FANTASTIC FOUR. Mickey & Friends will put a spin on classic Marvel covers in 2025 with new Disney What If? Fantastic Four homage variant covers.

Continuing the “What If?” theme, Mickey, Minnie, Goofy, Donald, and more take over as Mister Fantastic, Invisible Woman, Human Torch, and the Thing to recreate the team’s most memorable adventures.

Check out the first two covers, on sale January and February, that pay homage to Silver Age issues: Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four #3 and #51. For more information, visit Marvel.com.

(11) LITTLE PRINCE, BIG PRICE TAG. “Rare typescript of The Little Prince to go up for sale” reports the Guardian.

A rare carbon typescript of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince featuring extensive handwritten corrections by the author is going up for sale. It is one of only three known copies and marks the first time a typescript of the classic story has been offered for public sale.

The artefact features what is believed to be the first written appearance of the famous lines: “On ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux,” translated to mean: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.”…

… The typescript is priced at $1.25m. It will be showcased at Abu Dhabi Art, an annual art fair taking place at the end of November.

(12) TEDDY HARVIA CARTOON.

(13) GUT INSTINCTS. “H.R. Giger and Mire Lee’s Biomechanical Netherworld” depicted by Frieze.

‘Have you seen Schinkel Pavillon’s H.R. Giger show?’ has been the question of the month in Berlin. In fact, the exhibition pairs the late Swiss artist with the South Korean sculptor Mire Lee, a detail that has mostly footnoted ensuing conversations. Although it’s hardly a surprise. An obvious novelty factor accompanies this appearance of Giger’s sculptures, paintings, drawings, and prints which – due to their creator’s work on the Alien film franchise (1979–2017) – fundamentally impacted society’s collective imagination of the far-flung other. But interesting questions also arise from this hagiographic netherworld. Namely, whether the show participates in a meaningful conversation – about our erotic and paranoid relationship to the unknown, say – or just satisfies current nostalgic tastes, if not contemporary art’s populist drift.

With her best work having as much guts as Giger’s aliens, many of Lee’s sculptures are abject biomechanical masses, made from concrete, silicon and steel, and sometimes veined with ooze-pumping tubes. From beyond the grave, Giger has contributed Necroconom (Alien II) (1990) – a life-size sculpture of the infamous alien Xenomorph, who crawled on knees and fore-talons, as much like a purring pole dancer as a menacing hunter, its exoskeleton made from sexy black polyester….

…More affecting in its provocation of bodily and existential tremors is Lee’s Untitled (2021), a small conflagration of metallic and silicon cables, bound to a motor, which churns slowly in a spot-lit pool of its own broken refuse, on the floor of an eerie basement room, dark and tiled like an abandoned shower. Simultaneously invoking a disembodied machine component or body part, the piece harks back to classic existential concerns: the feeling of crawling through life, forever breaking apart, suspended between humanity and technology, and wondering why we even bother. Less effective were a number of Lee’s larger works, which gestured towards sensational corporeal impact, without quite delivering: The Liars (2021), a foreboding hanging mass made from towels, chains, fabric and silicon, suggested a horrific meat locker, without being all that horrific, while its companion piece, Carriers: Offsprings (2021), finds slime pulsing through masses of hanging tangled transparent tubes, like entrails simulated in a theme-park haunted house….

‘HR Giger and Mire Lee’, 2021, exhibition view, Schinkel Pavilion, Berlin

(14) COSMIC BANGERS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] An astrometric analysis of Gaia data identified two waves of massive runaway stars that have been dynamically ejected from the young cluster R136 in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

Researchers used data from the European Gaia Space Telescope to discover 55 high-speed stars launched from the young star cluster R136 in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. The young cluster R136 has launched as many as a third of its most massive stars in the last few million years, at speeds above 100,000 km/hr. Those stars travel up to 1,000 light years from their birthplace before exploding as supernovas at their end of life, producing a neutron star or black hole.

Primary research here: “Two waves of massive stars running away from the young cluster R136” in Nature.

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ms. Mojo made a list of the “Top 10 Things Only Adults Notice in The Wizard of Oz”. Number three is the unanswered question, “Where Are Dorothy’s Parents?”

“The Wizard of Oz” works on another level as an adult. Welcome to MsMojo, and today we’re counting down our picks for the wonderful, wizardly, and weird things about “The Wizard of Oz” that might have grabbed their broomsticks and flown over our heads when we were kids.

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

Pixel Scroll 11/24/22 On The Avenue, Second-Fifth Avenue, The Filetographers Will Snap Us, And You’ll Find That You’re In The Pixelgravure

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(1) TURKEY DAY. Following that overstuffed title it’s time to pay homage to another Thanksgiving tradition, one I’m sure you’ll immediately recognize.

(2) SIGNERS OF THE TIMES. “Bob Dylan Gets Tangled Up in Book Autograph Controversy” – the New York Times tells why.

Simon & Schuster sold 900 signed copies of the singer’s new essay collection, but superfans and internet sleuths noticed something wasn’t right with the autograph. Now the publisher is issuing refunds.

… So when Simon & Schuster, Dylan’s publisher, advertised limited-edition, hand-signed copies of the musician’s new collection of essays for $600 each, Bernstein was among 900 fans who went for one. Last week, he received his copy of “The Philosophy of Modern Song,” Dylan’s first collection of writings since he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, with a letter of authenticity signed by Jonathan Karp, the publisher’s chief executive.

There was only one problem.

Karp’s signature “looked more legit than Bob’s,” Bernstein said.

Bernstein was one of hundreds of fans who sleuthed their way around social media, reaching the conclusion that the supposedly hand-signed books had not, in fact, been signed by Dylan.

“I got the nostalgia bug,” said Bernstein, who already owned an unsigned copy of the book, as well as a Kindle version and an audio version. He added, “If he touches this book — he wrote it, signed it — it feels like the soul of Bob Dylan is with me.”

Instead, many fans suggested that the “autographed” copies of the book had been signed by a machine….

(3) OCTOTHORPE. “Just Nearly Froze to Death”, Octothorpe episode 71, is ready for listeners.

John is on the Holodeck, Alison is in the past, and Liz is at school. We discuss what Alison got up to at Novacon before chatting about a few other bits and bobs. Listen here!

(4) SMACKAGE. “Stephen King, Elon Musk spar: MyPillow will be Twitter’s ‘only advertiser’” on MarketWatch.

That was master of horror and bestselling fiction writer Stephen King riffing on the parade of advertisers including GM, United Airlines and Audi pausing or scrapping their marketing on the social-media platform since Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk took over…. 

…This is perhaps why Musk responded to King’s most recent tweet about MyPillow with “Oh hi lol.” 

Musk followed up by asking, “Is My Pillow actually a great pillow? Now I’m curious.” 

(5) DRAGONS DEFENDED. In “Weber & Correia on the mil-SF Dragon Award” – Camestros Felapton delivers lengthy excerpts from the two authors’ remarks delivered in the wake of the Dragon Awards deleting the Military SF category. Weber tries to justify the decision to his grumpy fan base, and Larry Correia upbraids “the people who are nominally supposed to be on my side” for their “black pilled doom nonsense.” If you care what Weber and Correia think about the situation, this would be the place to find out.

(6) PUSH THE PANIC BUTTON! SF2 Concatenation, in an Autumn 2022 editorial headlined “The 2023 Worldcon in China may be cancelled! If, that is, the UN COP15 Convention on Biodiversity (CBD-COP15) changes are a portent”,  is volunteering the Winnipeg NASFiC as the backup plan.

The 2023 Worldcon in Chengdu China has had its problems, not least political controversy due to its Guests of Honours’ support for political aggression, namely: China’s Uyghur policy, Putin’s war on Ukraine and apparent tacit support (being willing to share a platform with those of such views) thereof respectively.  However, these are not  the reasons the event may be cancelled.  China has a strict ‘zero CoVID-19 policy that has meant that as soon as a number of cases are reported in a city, then that city is put into strict lockdown: this has already happened a number of times this year.  So, for instance, following discussions with China, on 21st June (2022) the United Nations announced that the CBD-COP15 meeting would no longer be held in Kumming, China, but be held instead 5th – 17th December (2022) in Montreal, Canada.  The risk of the CBD-COP running foul of, or even itself causing – with the international influx of thousands of participants – a mini CoVID outbreak so triggering, a strict lockdown in Kumming was real enough for the UN to make the change: it was considered a non-trivial risk….

Meanwhile, following the above being written in July-August following the UN CBD-COP15 change, at the beginning of September (2022) 25 million people in Chengdu, China, have been put in lockdown.  This is a portent if ever one should be needed, irrespective with what has already happened with the UN’s CBD-COP15.

The crew’s vision for rescuing the Hugo Awards is a little shortsighted — “The rest could be arranged by those regularly associated with WSFS governance (the World SF Society being the body under whose auspices the Hugo’s are organised)” – because WSFS is not an administrative body, it is the members of the seated Worldcons. There’s no WSFS management to pull the plug on Chengdu, or to take funds from them to pay for award trophies. That would take the Chengdu Worldcon’s cooperation. And consider that the minimum requirements for the Worldcon are far more modest than a UN convention. What if Chengdu fell back on doing a virtual Worldcon, like CoNZealand?

(7) MEMORY LANE.

1993 — [By Cat Eldridge.] Tombstone 

The Old West has a significant impact upon the SFF genre, be it in video such as Star Trek’s “Spectre of the Gun”, Doctor Who’s “A Town Called Mercy”, The Wild Wild West series or, to note but two novels, Emma Bull’s Territory and Midori Snyder’s The Flight of Michael McBride. 

So I’m going to look at some of my favorite Westerns starting with the Tombstone which premiered twenty-nine years ago. 

It directed by George P. Cosmatos from a screenplay by Kevin Jarre. He was also the original director, but was replaced early in production.  It had three producers — James Jacks, Sean Daniel and Bob Misiorowski.

It quite possibly the most extraordinary cast ever assembled for a Western —  Kurt Russell, Val Kilmer and Sam Elliott in lead roles, and with Bill Paxton, Powers Boothe, Michael Biehn, and Dana Delany in supporting roles, as well as narration by Robert Mitchum. The Dana Delany appearance, though brief, I think was one of her best ever.

The film was screenwriter Kevin Jarre’s first job as director but he was overwhelmed by the job, failing to get needed shots and falling behind the shooting schedule. Biehn threaten to quit being his close friend but Russell talked him out of it.

I see no need for spoilers as likely you know the story as they really didn’t deviate that much from what has been told before. It’s how they told it that I find such a stellar story. Each of the principal characters is realized, a completely believable human being. And each is given enough lines to come to life in this story. If I had to single out one actor here in particular, it’d be Val Kilmer as the dying Doc Holliday. That is a performance for the ages. 

One of the actors gets much of the credit for what the final shooting script looks like. Russell worked endlessly with producer Jacks to ruthlessly cut to the bone Jarre’s originally vastly overblown script, deleting endless subplots and emphasizing the oh so important relationship between Wyatt and Doc. 

It is disputed to this day who directed the actual film. Russell claims that he and not Cosmatos did. He says that the latter was brought in as a “ghost director” because Russell did not want it to be known at the time that he was directing the film. 

Critics either really liked it or really, really hated it. The latter, all male I must note, thought it treated women badly. I didn’t. 

Box office wise, it was a fantastic success, making three times what it cost to produce. 

I’ve watched it at least a half dozen times. The Suck Fairy has equally enjoyed it each times she’s viewed it with me. She particularly liked the final scene with Kurt Russell as Wyatt Earp and Dana Delany as Josephine Marcus dancing in the snow in San Francisco. She does have a soft heart, you know.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born November 24, 1882 — E. R. Eddison. Writer whose most well-known work by far is The Worm Ouroboros. It’s slightly connected to his much lesser known later Zimiamvian Trilogy. I’m reasonably that sure I’ve read The Worm Ouroboros but way too long ago to remember anything about it. Silverberg in the Millenium Fantasy Masterworks Series edition of this novel said he considered it to be “the greatest high fantasy of them all”. (Died 1945.)
  • Born November 24, 1907 — Evangeline Walton. Her best-known work, the Mabinogion tetralogy, was written during the late 1930s and early 1940s, and her Theseus trilogy was produced during the late 1940s. It’s worth stressing Walton is best known for her four novels retelling the Welsh Mabinogi. She published her first volume in 1936 under the publisher’s title of The Virgin and the Swine which is inarguably a terrible title. Although receiving glowing praise from John Cowper Powys, the book sold quite awfully and none of the other novels in the series were published at that time. Granted a second chance by Ballantine’s Adult Fantasy series in 1970, it was reissued with a much better title of The Island of the Mighty. The other three volumes followed quickly. Witch House is an occult horror story set in New England and She Walks in Darkness which came out on Tachyon Press is genre as well. I think that is the extent of her genre work but I’d be delighted to be corrected. She has won a number of Awards including the Mythopoeic Award for Adult Literature, Best Novel along with The Fritz Leiber Fantasy Award, World Fantasy Award, Convention Award and the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement. (Died 1996.) (JJ )
  • Born November 24, 1926 — Forrest J Ackerman. It’s no wonder that he got a Hugo for #1 Fan Personality in 1953 and equally telling that when he was handed the trophy at Philcon II (by Asimov), he physically declined saying it should go to Ken Slater to whom the trophy was later given by the con committee. That’s a nice summation of him. You want more? As a literary agent, he represented some two hundred writers, and he served as agent of record for many long-lost authors, thereby allowing their work to be reprinted. Hell, he represented Ed Wood! He was a prolific writer, more than fifty stories to his credit, and he named Vampirella and wrote the origin story for her. His non-fiction writings are wonderful as well. I’ll just single out Forrest J Ackerman’s Worlds of Science Fiction, A Reference Guide to American Science Fiction Films and a work he did with Brad Linaweaver, Worlds of Tomorrow: The Amazing Universe of Science Fiction Art. Did I mention he collected everything? Well, he did. Just one location of his collection contained some three hundred thousand books, film, SF material objects and writings. The other was eighteen rooms in extent. Damn if anyone needed their own TARDIS, it was him. In his later years, he was a board member of the Seattle Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame who now have possession of many items of his collection. (Died 2008.)
  • Born November 24, 1948 — Spider Robinson, 74. His first story, “The Guy with the Eyes,” was published in Analog (February 1973). It was set in a bar called Callahan’s Place, a setting for much of his later fiction.  His first published novel, Telempath in 1976 was an expansion of his Hugo award-winning novella “By Any Other Name”. The Stardance trilogy was co-written with his wife Jeanne Robinson; the first book won a Nebula. In 2004, he began working on a seven-page 1955 novel outline by the late Heinlein to expand it into a novel. The resulting novel would be called Variable Star. Who’s read it?
  • Born November 24, 1957 — Denise Crosby, 65. Tasha Yar on Next Gen who got a meaningful death in “Yesterday’s Enterprise” after getting an earlier truly meaningless one. In other genre work, she was on The X-Files as a doctor who examined Agent Scully’s baby. And I really like it that she was in two Pink Panther films, Trail of the Pink Panther and Curse of the Pink Panther, as Denise, Bruno’s Moll. And she’s yet another Trek performer who’s popped doing what I call Trek video fanfic. She’s Dr. Jenna Yar in “Blood and Fire: Part 2”, an episode of the only season of Star Trek: New Voyages as Paramount was not amused. 
  • Born November 24, 1957 — Jeff Noon, 65. Novelist and playwright. Prior to his relocation in 2000 to Brighton, his stories reflected in some way his native though not birth city of Manchester. The Vurt sequence whose first novel won the Arthur C. Clarke Award is a very odd riff off Alice in Wonderland that he describes as a sequel to those works. Noon was the winner of an Astounding Award for the Best New Science Fiction Writer.
  • Born November 24, 1957 — John Zakour, 65. For sheer pulp pleasure, I wholeheartedly recommend his Zachary Nixon Johnson PI series which he co-wrote with Larry Ganem. Popcorn reading at its very best. It’s the only series of his I’ve read, anyone else read his other books? 
  • Born November 24, 1965 — Shirley Henderson, 57. She was Moaning Myrtle in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. She was Ursula Blake in “Love & Monsters!”, a Tenth Doctor story, and played Susannah in Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, a film that’s sf because of the metanarrative aspect.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • Eek! shows that even a successful experiment by a mad scientist can cause problems. (Or do they always?)
  • The Far Side shows the real reason they went extinct.

(10) I SEE BY YOUR OUTFIT. Radio Times is agog as “Doctor Who unveils new look at David Tennant as Fourteenth Doctor”.

…Fans were previously treated to a closer look at Tennant’s Fourteenth Doctor outfit at MCM Comic Con last month, where a special exhibit showed off the blue coat and white trainers that the Doctor will wear in the upcoming 60th anniversary episodes, which are set to air in 2023.

The exhibit also featured the striped jumper and green jacket worn by Catherine Tate, who will be reprising her role as the Doctor’s companion Donna Noble in the three specials….

(11) SHOCKWAVE WIDER. Nature shows how “Shock waves spark blazing light from black holes”.

Radiation from a jet of ultrafast particles powered by a supermassive black hole suggests that the particles are accelerated by shock waves propagating along the jet, making them shine with the brightness of 100 billion Suns!

Most of the 200 billion galaxies in the Universe are centred around enormous black holes that can weigh as much as one billion Suns. Many of these black holes are dormant, but some are still growing, devouring gas from their surroundings and releasing vast amounts of radiation. Even fewer of these active supermassive black holes are capable of launching powerful jets from their cores — ultrafast streams of particles that shine brightly, and can travel distances of up to 100 times the size of their own galaxy. But what provides the initial kick that enables these particles to release so much energy? Writing in Nature, Liodakis et al. report that the push comes from shock waves that are generated naturally…

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Andrew Porter, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Patrick McGuire, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, and JJ for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]

Pixel Scroll 9/3/22 I Have Come To Praise Your Furries, Not To Scroll Them

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(1) CHICON 8 ATTENDANCE UPDATE. Registration Area Head Elayne Pelz reported on Facebook that as of 11:15 a.m. Saturday there were 3,308 attendees present at Chicon 8.

(2) HUGO LIVESTREAM. Chicon 8 announced that the Hugo Awards ceremony will begin livestreaming September 4 at 7:45 Central on YouTube. This is the link: Chicon 8 Hugo Awards Ceremony – YouTube. (The ceremony will not be streamed on Airmeet.)

(3) IN GLORIOUS B&W. The Eaton Collection rounded up some of Jay Kay Klein’s photos from Chicon III, the 1962 Worldcon:

https://twitter.com/EatonVerse/status/1565868430602907650

(4) KEEPING THEM DOWN ON THE FARM. Cloudflare.com has done a 180 and kicked Kiwi Farms off the service: “Blocking Kiwifarms”. Kiwi Farms is a forum for discussing figures it deems “lolcows” (people who can be “milked for laughs”), and the targets of threads are often subject to doxing and other forms of organized group trolling, harassment, and stalking, including real-life harassment by users.

We have blocked Kiwifarms. Visitors to any of the Kiwifarms sites that use any of Cloudflare’s services will see a Cloudflare block page and a link to this post. Kiwifarms may move their sites to other providers and, in doing so, come back online, but we have taken steps to block their content from being accessed through our infrastructure.

This is an extraordinary decision for us to make and, given Cloudflare’s role as an Internet infrastructure provider, a dangerous one that we are not comfortable with. However, the rhetoric on the Kiwifarms site and specific, targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours to the point that we believe there is an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life unlike we have previously seen from Kiwifarms or any other customer before….

Vice explains the decision more fully in “Kiwi Farms is Down After Cloudflare Boots The Site As a Customer”.

…This comes just one week after Cloudflare defended the choice to keep the site as a customer.

In August, Twitch streamer Clara Sorrenti, known as Keffals, was the target of transphobic raiding and swatting—the dangerous internet harassment tactic involving prank calls to authorities that prompt police to send a SWAT team to someone’s home. Sorrenti alleges that Kiwi Farms members organized this attack, and has been campaigning for Cloudflare, the internet infrastructure company that protects Kiwi Farms from DDoS attacks among other services, to drop the website as a customer….

(5) BURKE RESPONDS TO B56 COC REPORT. Stephanie Burke posted to Facebook her reaction to the Baltimore Science Fiction Society’s Reports of the Results of the Code of Conduct Investigation Concerning Balticon 56.

I have been exonerated by Balticon for all of the bullshit that just happened. I feel that this letter to me is … I don’t know…more about them covering their asses and there still is no real apology to me or to the people who have been dealt with in this manner by the con before… It may be a bit of a reach but this is how I feel.

They say I can come back as a program participant but I am never going back. The thought of going back gives me the shakes and the start of panic attacks. I can never go back. I will miss a lot of my friends and family who are there, but I have to think about my mental health, the lies that were spread about me, and how I was treated. This could happen to anyone at any given time so I say everyone proceed with caution at cons. This was a life-changing experience for me and not in a positive way….

(6) NEW JMS B5 COMMENTARY. After J. Michael Straczynski’s full-length sync-up Babylon 5 commentaries have been offered exclusively on his Patreon page for a while, he releases them on YouTube. Here’s the latest, for “Point of No Return”, the middle of the Messages from Earth trilogy.

(7) ANTICI-PATION. JMS also revealed there is a completed Babylon 5 project that will debut next year at San Diego Comic-Con. Wait for it.

(8) THE HONORVERSE: WHAT’S AHEAD? David Weber has written a long post looking to the future of the Honorverse.

…So, by my calculations, that’s another 22 books I need to get written [with various collaborators] to wrap up my current series plans.

I’m 70 this October. I sold the first novel thirty-three years ago. Since then, I have published (or have currently turned in, awaiting production) 74 solo and collaborative novels, which works out to roughly 2.24 per year. That doesn’t count the anthologies, of course.

I lost roughly 2 years to the concussion, and about a year and a half to the Covid, so let’s call it 30 years, not 33, which brings the production up to 2.5 per year. And let’s assume that I write for another ten years, which (at the moment, and barring any anticipated encounters with mortality) seems entirely plausible. By my calculations, that comes to another TWENTY-FIVE solo and collaborative novels, in the process of which I will be working with some of my collaborators to establish them firmly in the existing universes going forward.

People, like the characters in Richard Adams’ PLAGUE DOGS, I’ll probably still be writing “when the dark comes down.” That means, obviously, that I won’t be “finished” when I leave, but don’t go around thinking that you’re getting rid of me next week!

(9) TAKEI. Look who’s reading the Unofficial Hugo Book Club twitter feed.

(10) MEMORY LANE.  

1977 – [By Cat Eldridge.] Doctor Who’s “Horror Of Fang Rock” (1977)

Doctor Who: “Why am I standing here wasting my time trying to work out its size? If Reuben’s seen it, he can tell us.’”

Leela: “That is what I thought, but of course I am only a savage.’”

Doctor Who: “Come on, savage!”

BritBox streams these so naturally I watched before writing this up. It was every bit as great as I remembered it. Ahhh the sacrifices I make for all of you here! 

This Fourth Doctor story with the much loved Tom Baker in that role, obviously, and Louise Jameson as Leela the barbarian. (See quote above if you think I’m disparaging her.) It was first broadcast in four weekly twenty-five minute episodes on BBC1 from the third to twenty-fourth of September forty-five years ago.

It was directed by Paddy Russell, she also did those honors for another favorite of mine, “Pyramids of Mars”. (Paddy, by the way, was a well-known and much beloved SJW.) In all, she directed parts or the entire of six Who serials.  It was written by Terrence Dicks, not at all surprisingly as this was the period in which he was heavily involved in the series.

HERE IN THE FOG BE SPOILERS! GO AWAY! 

The Doctor and His Companion land along the coast of England, find a dead body and a erratic light in, errr, a Lighthouse. He being he decides to investigate. One of the Keepers, Reuben, tells them about the Beast of Fang Rock (Britain is lousy with such folktales. Really it is.) 

Ahh but being the Doctor soon Aliens abound as they always do, don’t they? And more humans will die. What will the Doctor do? Well he will prevail in the end of course.

END OF SPOILERS. I THINK. MAYBE.

Now this serial was the only one of the original series to have been produced at any BBC studios outside of London.  

Dicks based his script off a poem, “Flannan Isle” written by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, which The Doctor quotes from at the end of the Story.

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born September 3, 1810 — Theodor von Holst. He was the first artist to illustrate Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus in 1831. The interior illustrations consist of a frontispiece and title page engraved illustrations.  To my knowledge, this is his only genre work. (Died 1844.)
  • Born September 3, 1943 — Mick Farren. Punk musician who was the singer with the proto-punk band the Deviants. He also wrote lyrics for Hawkwind. His most well-known genre work was the The Renquist Quartet about an immortal vampire.  The Renquist Quartet is available at the usual suspects.  Not at all genre, he wrote The Black Leather Jacket which details the history of the that jacket over a seventy-year span up to the mid-eighties, taking in all aspects of its cultural, political and social impact. (Died 2013.)
  • Born September 3, 1943 — Valerie Perrine, 79. She has uncredited role as Shady Tree’s sidekick is Diamonds Are Forever in her first film appearance. Her first credited film role is as Montana Wildhack in Sluaughterhouse-Five. She’s Eve Teschmacher in Superman and Superman II. 
  • Born September 3, 1954 — Stephen Gregg. Editor and publisher of Eternity Science Fiction which ran 1972 to 1975 and 1979 to 1980. It had early work by Glen Cook, Ed Bryant, Barry N Malzberg, andrew j offutt and Roger Zelazny. (Died 2005.)
  • Born September 3, 1959 — Merritt Butrick. He played Kirk’s son, David, in The Wrath of Khan and again in The Search for Spock. Note the very young death. He died of AIDS. Well, he died of toxoplasmosis, complicated by AIDS to be precise. (Died 1989.)
  • Born September 3, 1969 — John Picacio, 53. Illustrator who in 2005 won both the World Fantasy Award for Best Artist and the Chesley Award for Best Paperback Cover for James Tiptree Jr.’s Her Smoke Rose Up Forever. He’s also won eight other Chesley Awards. He was the winner of the Best Professional Artist Hugo in 2012, 2013, and 2020.
  • Born September 3, 1971 — D. Harlan Wilson, 51. Author of Modern Masters of Science Fiction: J.G. Ballard, Cultographies: They Live (a study of John Carpenter) and Technologized Desire: Selfhood & the Body in Postcapitalist Science Fiction. No, I’ve no idea what the last book is about.
  • Born September 3, 1974 — Clare Kramer, 48. She had the recurring role of Glory, a god, or perhaps demon, from a hell dimension that was the main antagonist of the fifth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She’s been a lot of horror films including The Skulls III, The Gravedancers, The Thirst, Road to Hell, Road to Hell, Big Ass Spider! and Tales of Halloween.

(12) COMICS SECTION.

  • La Cucaracha listens in as a character tells Trump why he needs to return a box of classified stuff.
  • Tom Gauld helps you enrich your vocabulary.

(13) SNAPSHOT. JJ sent along this photo of Cora Buhlert from her Table Talk yesterday at Chicon 8.

(14) THE BORED OF AVON. Mental Floss would like to acquaint you with “5 Writers Who Really Hated Shakespeare”. On the list is —

4. J.R.R. TOLKIEN

While a member of a school debating society in the early 1900s, a teenage J.R.R. Tolkien reportedly delivered a lengthy speech in which, according to his biographer Humphrey Carpenter, he “poured a sudden flood of unqualified abuse upon Shakespeare, upon his filthy birthplace, his squalid surroundings, and his sordid character.” Opinion is divided over whether or not Tolkien upheld these opinions as an adult, but his letters offer up a number of clues: In one, dated 1944, he dismissed reading and analyzing Shakespeare’s works as “folly,” while in another from 1955, he recalls that he “disliked cordially” studying his work at school. 

… In a 1951 letter to his editor Milton Waldman, Tolkien wrote that he had recently invented two new languages to be spoken by the elves in his novels, before adding in a footnote that he intends “the word [elves] to be understood in its ancient meanings, which continued as late as Spenser—a murrain on Will Shakespeare and his damned cobwebs.” 

(15) ELVISH HAS LEFT THE BUILDING. [Item by Soon Lee.] Mike Godwin (yes, *that* Godwin) tweeted an Elvis/h filk. And it is delicious. Thread starts here.

(16) INCURABLE. Anthony Lane confesses to having “The Hobbit Habit: Reading ‘The Lord of the Rings’” in a 2001 article from The New Yorker.

…I first took on “The Lord of the Rings” at the age of eleven or twelve; to be precise, I began it at the age of eleven and finished at the age of twelve. It was, and remains, not a book that you happen to read, like any other, but a book that happens to you: a chunk bitten out of your life….

(17) THE RINGS, OH LORD! Vice reports “Astronomers Are Freaking Out Over Bizarre Rectangle-Shaped Rings in Space”. Images at the link.

… In a photograph of the star WR140, as pointed out by citizen scientist Judy Schmidt who reposted the image from the automated @JWSTPhotoBot on Twitter, a spiral of rings and rays fan out from the star’s bright white center. The rings aren’t perfectly circular, but look more like rounded squares, and not even astronomers seem to know what to do with it….

(18) HELPING JOHN WILLIAMS CONDUCT. Some of my daughter’s relatives were at the Hollywood Bowl waving along! And they say during last night’s concert Williams even debuted a piece from the upcoming Indiana Jones movie.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Chris Barkley, Soon Lee, Daniel Dern, Andrew (not Werdna), Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, and JJ for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 6/4/22 Pixel Of Illusions

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(1) ANOTHER BURKE CO-PANELIST MAKES A STATEMENT. Shahid Mahmud, Arc Manor Books publisher, who was one of the panelists on “Diversity Readers and Why You Need Them” at Balticon 56, today told Facebook readers that he and Stephanie Burke “got into a heated discussion” but that Burke did “nothing that warranted her treatment” or expulsion from program afterwards.

…One of the panels that keeps getting referred to is a panel I was on with Stephanie, the one on Sensitivity Readers. Not only that, but I was also the one who got into a heated discussion with her on the panel.

As a fellow panelist (particularly one who got into that that discussion with her) I would like to, in no uncertain terms, make it clear that Stephanie NEVER crossed the ‘line.’ I found her charming, informative, and forceful (in a good way).

At one point I did turn to the audience and apologized for us having hijacked the discussion for the last few minutes and several of them pointed out how refreshing it was to hear different sides of the issue (a couple of them reiterating it after the panel as well).

After the panel ended, Stephanie and I did chat briefly and both of us indicated to the other how much we had enjoyed the discussion even though we disagreed with each other.

So, imagine my shock when I found out that she had been kicked off panels. Even more so, since no from Balticon bothered to contact me about the panel (and no one still has).

Anyway, as a fellow panelist on the panel that is being cited as the reason for her expulsion, I want to make it absolutely clear that Stephanie did nothing that warranted her treatment.

What I find incredulous is that someone at Balticon took it upon themselves to treat another person like that without even bothering to find out what happened or having any investigation of a any kind. Escorting someone out of a panel is pretty extreme. I do think Yakira (the Balticon Chair) is trying to set it right to the extent she can (she has publicly apologized and is now leading an investigation into the incident). I hope the investigation also focuses on Lisa Adler-Golden (the program chair, and I believe the person behind the expulsion) and her actions, motivations and suitability for participation in future Balticons.

David Weber responded at length in comments (here and here), saying in part:

…I’m waiting to see how this all works out, and I hope the con chair is able (and willing) to tell the world what really happened and issue a very sincere and public apology (if appropriate) based on the results of her investigation.

If, as I suspect from all I have heard so far, an apology IS appropriate, I think it should be accompanied with an invitation to return as a special guest and, particularly, for a panel on just how destructive this sort of thing is for the fan community as a whole, and not just for the pros/guests immediately affected by it. It’s an issue that needs to be dragged out into the daylight and confronted, without accepting it as long as it only happens to people WE don’t like, and without degenerating into fruitless rounds of whataboutism. This is goring ALL our oxen. It needs to stop, and I hope one response to this fiasco is that Balticon will tell us how IT intends to prevent it going forward….

Also in comments, Gregory Benford reminded readers why he was removed from the 2019 Loscon.  

(2) THE MESSAGE RECEIVED VARIES WITH THE READER. Jeff VanderMeer addresses the question if “Le Guin’s ‘The Left Hand of Darkness’ is a classic for its portrayal of gender, but is it also sometimes, for the modern reader, a climate change parable?” in  “Landscape, Change, and the Long Road Ahead” at Orion Magazine.

…Le Guin, in creating both this world and this situation, meant to interrogate the politics and logic of countries, and how societies deal with the outsider. Even the long, harrowing journey by Genly and his erstwhile friend from Winter, Estraven, across barren ice can be interpreted as a traditional Jack Londonesque extreme wilderness survival tale, rather than anything more modern.

Yet, the reader changes a book because the world changes, and so when I read of the “facts” of Genly being disputed in Orgoreyn, I could not help but think about the “disputed” facts and proofs of the climate crisis.  

Climate crisis is about extremes, and in The Left Hand of Darkness cultures are shaped by an immeasurably hostile physical environment. The coldness of the place, which forces adaptation to its conditions and discourages certain kinds of risk. The fact the nations of Winter do not engage in war constitutes one unique manifestation of this adaptation to an extreme environment. Full-scale conflict, as opposed to minor sorties, skirmishes, individual feuds, simply seems alien to the nations of Winter…. 

Genly describes war as “the opposite of civilization,” and this is literally true on Winter—if not on our Earth. The planet’s inhabitants cannot afford the destructiveness of war or risk Death by Planet, by diverting or destroying resources needed for survival. They do not have the luxury of surviving both the climate and war….

(3) ALMOST BREAKING EVEN. Despite having cancelled Arisia 2022 due to Covid and the small number planning to attend or be on the program, Arisia, Inc. reports they have made up their annual expenses from grants and donations.

…We have heard back from the grants from this cycle, and we’ve gotten quite a few of them.  A few were contingent on holding a convention and I’ll get into the disposition of each of those.

The big news is that we got $15,000 from the City of Boston!  This is $10,000 for COVID relief and $5,000 in general operating support.  We can use this money to pay organizational expenses such as rent, which comes to $15.600 per year.

We got a grant for $2,275 from SFWA for convention expenses and we can use this for expenses the convention had even though it didn’t actually happen.  We have easily enough eligible expenses to get the access grant and $2500 for organizations that did.  This appears to be what happened, as we were approved for $2500 for training.  We have heard back from the grants from this cycle, and we’ve gotten quite a few of them.  A few were contingent on holding a convention and I’ll get into the disposition of each of those.

…We proposed to use this general staff anti-racism training, and I also requested in the application to be able to use the money for board training, in case we get other funding for anti-racism trainings.  I believe the Anti-Racism Committee is working on specifics for this training.

We got $3000 for CART from the Universal Participation Fund and the expenses didn’t happen.  This is the grant that we qualify for because of Card to Culture.  I don’t know if the money can be repurposed, or if so how.

Speaking of Card to Culture, we had 12 people registered for A22 via Card to Culture, vs. 3 in 2021.  I am hopeful that we get even more in 2023.

Finally, we have gotten about $4,000 in donations, with one large donation pending in an unknown amount.

This is a total of almost $24,000 not including the access grant.  Our annual expenses are a little over $19,000 and the convention had $6,000 in expenses that can’t be passed on to Arisia 2023, plus one of the grants obliges us to spend money on training that we might not have spent otherwise.  So we aren’t quite square, but we’re pretty close….

(4) LAWSUIT GOING FORWARD. “Freedom to Read Advocates Sound Alarm as Obscenity Lawsuit Advances in Virginia” reports Publishers Weekly.

Library groups this week joined with booksellers, publishers, and public advocacy groups in sounding the alarm over a lawsuit in Virginia in which two popular authors and their publishers have been ordered to defend their works against obscenity charges.

The legal action was filed last month by Virginia Beach lawyer and delegate in the Virginia Assembly Tim Anderson (on behalf of local plaintiff and congressional candidate Tommy Altman), citing an obscure state obscenity law. It alleges that two books for sale in a Virginia Beach Barnes & Noble—Maia Kobabe’s popular graphic memoir Gender Queer (Oni Press) and A Court of Mist and Fury (Bloomsbury) by bestselling author Sarah J. Maas—are “obscene for unrestricted viewing by minors.”

…According to the Virginia Mercury, “the little-utilized state law allows ‘any citizen’ to ask a court to weigh in on books alleged to be obscene.” And in a development that has shocked observers, a local judge on May 18 found there was probable cause the books could be deemed obscene and ordered the authors and publishers to defend the books later this month.

According to the Mercury, the judge who issued the order, Pamela Baskervill, is “a retired Petersburg-area judge,” who is handling the case because “all other judges in Virginia Beach recused themselves.”

The court’s order raises the possibility that the court could issue a restraining order barring the books from public display and restraining booksellers and libraries from selling or loaning the books to minors without parental consent. In a Facebook post, Anderson hailed the judge’s order as “a major legal victory” and laid out the playbook for those seeking to restrict access to materials they find objectionable: “Suits like this can be filed all over Virginia,” Anderson wrote. “There are dozens of books. Hundreds of schools.”…

(5) HEAR FROM EUGEN BACON. Space Cowboy Books will host a free “Online Reading & Interview with Eugen Bacon” on Thursday, July 7 at 6:00 p.m. Pacific. Get tickets at the link.

(6) INSPIRATIONAL WOMEN. “Can a book change a young woman’s life?” Hear The Conversation with Nnedi Okorafor and Mel Mazman on BBC Sounds.

Can a book change a young woman’s life? Kim Chakanetsa talks to two women in the publishing world about the importance of writing stories that inspire and empower girls. 

Nnedi Okorafor is an award-winning Nigerian-American writer of fantasy and science fiction for both children and adults. Her books have strong female leads and draw inspiration from her Nigerian roots. Nnedi has also written comics for Marvel: she was the first woman to write the character of T’challa, the Black Panther, and she wrote a series about his tech loving sister, Shuri. She is a recipient of the World Fantasy, Hugo and Nebula Awards. 

Mel Mazman is the chief product officer at Rebel Girls, a franchise publishing books and digital content aimed at empowering young women. The company started in 2016, with a crowdfunding campaign for Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, a book featuring the stories of 100 inspirational women. Since then, they sold 7.5 million books in over 100 countries. Mel shares her insights on how the publishing industry is changing to cater for the needs and interests of younger generations of readers. 

(7) BREAKFAST WITH TIFFANYS. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] Jo Walton talks to Helen Zaltzman about what she calls “The Tiffany Problem, or how do you tell readers that the “anachronisms” they find in novels aren’t actually anachronistic.  “Tiffany” is an authentic 12th century name (ultmately derived from “Epiphany”) but use it in a historical novel and readers complain,  Walton discusses how she handles this problem in her novels. “The Tiffany Problem” at The Allusionist podcast.

(8) KEN KELLY (1946-2022). Prolific genre and album artist Ken Kelly died June 3 at the age of 76. He was particularly known for his sword & sorcery cover art. He depicted Conan the Barbarian, Tarzan and the rock acts KISS, Manowar, Sleepy Hollow, Rainbow, and Ace Frehley.

(8) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.

1982 – [By Cat Eldridge.] On this day forty years ago, my favorite Trek film by far, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, premiered. As I noted yesterday in my essay on the ending of the original series, there have been thirteen films so far — the good, the bad and the just plan forgettable. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is in my opinion stellar.

Now I’ll admit that the episode that spawned it, “Space Seed”, isn’t one of my favorite episodes, but the screenwriter for this film, Jack B. Sowards, who based it off a story by him and Harve Bennett, created a story here that is fantastic. Neither had any genre background so Bennett watched all of the original series after being hired by Paramount and decided to do a film off the “Space Seed” story.

Damn, they did a great job. From the Kobayashi Maru simulation (named after Soward’s neighbor) to the over-the-top villain that Ricardo Montalbán is here (far more than he was in “Space Seed”), there is nothing that is not completely entertaining here. Most of these Trek films have a spot or two where I want to say to the editor why is that scene in here, but not in this film. I loved it from beginning to end unreservedly.

(Roger Ebert in his review had an interesting point about Khan: “Khan is played as a cauldron of resentment by Ricardo Montalban, and his performance is so strong that he helps illustrate a general principle involving not only Star Trek but ‘Star Wars’ (1977) and all the epic serials, especially the ‘James Bond’ movies: Each film is only as good as its villain.”) 

(Some of them are entirely like that.) 

They were given a lousy budget, just twelve million, as Paramount really didn’t believe the film was going to do crap. It did as it made ninety million. 

What did the critics think? If they were Trekkies, they liked it. If they weren’t, they didn’t.

Kevin Thomas of the L.A. Times definitely liked it: “In this new film there’s no feeling that its makers are straining to compete with ‘Star Wars’ and other special-effects spectaculars, instead, they’re attempting to recapture the spirit of the beloved TV series. (It is, in fact, probably a plus that the film actually began production intended for TV.) The result is a brisk, handsomely designed film in which its hardware, sturdy as it is, never overwhelms its humanity.” 

Whereas David Khmer of the Chicago Reader wasn’t impressed: “In this second Star Trek feature (1982), the crew of the Enterprise confronts middle age in a plot that makes very little literal sense but is packed with pertinent life-out-of-death, Waste Land imagery: a 200-year-old heavy (Ricardo Montalban) living on a barren planet, a secret project code-named ‘Genesis’ that can turn deserts into tropical jungles, Captain Kirk wearing specs and rediscovering his long-lost family. If only director Nicholas Meyer had grasped the implications of his tale more fully and enthusiastically, this might have become a classic piece of cornball SF poetry, but as it stands the tepid acting and one-set claustrophobia take a heavy toll.” 

It was nominated for a Hugo at ConStellation losing out to Blade Runner. Rotten Tomatoes reviewers really like giving a ninety percent rating. 

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born June 4, 1951 — Wendy Pini, 71. With husband Richard, responsible for Elfquest which won them a Balrog. Over the years Elfquest has been self-published by the Pinis through their own company Warp Graphics, then Marvel Comics, then the Pinis again, more recently DC Comics and then Dark Horse Comics. Everything prior to 2013 is free online at the Elfquest Comic Viewer. Be prepared to spend hours lost in great reading! 
  • Born June 4, 1960 — Kristine Kathryn Rusch, 62. If you’ve not discovered the delights of her Diving Universe series, you’re in for a treat — it’s that good. Her Retrieval Artist series is one that can be read in no particular order so is great deal of fun no matter where you start. And her Spade / Paladin series of which the first novel just came out, Ten Little Fen, is absolutely delightful.  Oh, and she won the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. Her website is here; don’t miss her appreciation of A.J. Budrys. 
  • Born June 4, 1960 — Bradley Walsh, 62. His first genre was on The Sarah Jane Adventures as Odd Bob Elijah Spellman aka The Pied Piper in “The Day of the Clown” story. His major genre role video wise however is Graham O’Brien, companion to the Thirteenth Doctor. Now it’s worth noting that he has a lot of theatre experience that is genre having appeared in multiple versions of Aladdin, Cinderella, Jack & the Bean Stalk, Peter Pan and Snow White.
  • Born June 4, 1964 — Sean Pertwee, 58. Let’s see, where did I see him first? Oh, of course, playing Sheriff Hugh Beringar on Cadfael but that’s not genre, is it? Captain Heinz in “Trenches of Hell, Part 2 “,  on The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles which was his first genre role followed being Pilot Smith on Event Horizon and Macbeth in a UK film of that name the same year. He did a bit of low-budget horror playing Bradley Cortese in Tale of the Mummy and likewise in being Sergeant Harry G. Wells in Dog Soldiers. There were some fairly low budget SF as well, say Father in Equilibrium. Not to mention Brother Proteus in Ultramarines: A Warhammer 40,000 Movie which I dearly want to see! All of which gets redeemed by his Inspector Lestrade in Elementary, a stunning take on that character. And then there’s his Alfred in Gotham.
  • Born June 4, 1969 — Julie Gardner, 53. She was executive producer on the revival of Doctor Who and the spin-offs of Torchwood and Sarah Jane Adventures. She co-founded with Julie Tranter Bad Wolf, best known for the BBC TV series His Dark Materials and A Discovery of Witches on which she serves as an executive producer.
  • Born June 4, 1972 — Joe Hill, 50. I’ve met him once or twice down the years as he shows up here in Portland for signings at both book shops and comic shops pre-Pandemic. Really nice guy like his father. Actually the whole family is amazingly nice. Locke & Key is a superb graphic novel series and I’m fond of all of his short stories, particularly those collected in 20th Century Ghosts, and his collection Full Throttle. I notice that though he’s not yet won a Hugo, he’s won a fistful of Stokers, many BFAs, a World Fantasy Award and even an International Horror Guild Award.
  • Born June 4, 1975 — Angelina Jolie, 47. I really liked her two Tomb Raider films and thought Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was a really cool film with her role being quite magnificent. I never saw her early Cyborg 2 undertaking but think Hackers and her role as Kate “Acid Burn” Libby was rather good. I’ve not seen her Maleficent films. 
  • Born June 4, 1991 — Jordan Danger, 31. She is best known for her role as Zoe Carter on Eureka. (Now inexplicably renamed A Town Called Eureka in syndication but not on Peacock which is streaming it now along with Warehouse 13.) She also showed up in Ragin Cajun Redneck Gators which as horror is genre of sorts, plus the SF films, Higher Power and Beyond the Sky. And even a vampire film, Living Among Us. All low budget, all straight to DVD productions.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) COWL SCOWL. In “What Is Batman” the Pretty Much Pop podcast shares its taxonomical theories.

In light of the recent release of Matt Reeves’ film The Batman, we consider the strange alternation of darkness and camp that is Batman. Is he even a super hero? What’s with his rogues’ gallery? What’s with DC’s anti-world-building?

Your Pretty Much Pop host Mark Linsenmayer is joined by philosophy prof/NY Times entertainment writer Lawrence Ware, improv comedian/educator Anthony LeBlanc, and Marketing Over Coffee host John J. Wall, all of whom are deeply immersed in the comics, and we touch on other recent shows in the Batman universe.

(12) HUMOR IN THE DARKNESS. Death’s Intern by D.C. Gomez is the debut novel in the Intern Diaries series launched in 2017.

A talking cat, a boy genius, missing people, and an untrained Intern for Death. What could possibly go wrong?

Did that really happen?

There’s no way Death offered me a job. I’m a musician that makes her living as a waitress, with absolutely no training in the supernatural world. This is all a very bad dream.

But Bob has been kidnapped, and I can’t possibly lose the only friend I have.

Bob, you’d better be alive. Because if I just gave my soul to Death for nothing, I will personally kill you. Not to mention, it seems Death’s Interns have fairly short life expectancies.

God, don’t let me die.

D. C. Gomez was born in the Dominican Republic, and grew up in Salem, Massachusetts. She study film and television at New York University. After college she joined the US Army, and proudly served for four years. Those experiences shaped her quirky sense of humor. D.C. has a love for those who served and the families that support them. She currently lives in the quaint city of Wake Village, Texas, with her furry roommate, Chincha.

One of D. C.’s passions is helping those around her overcome their self-limiting beliefs.  She writes both non-fiction and fiction books, ranging from Urban Fantasy to Children’s Books. To learn more about her books and her passion, you can find her at www.dcgomez-author.com.

Available at Amazon.com and Amazon.ca.

(13) SCIENCE TAKES A HOLIDAY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] You don’t know what it has been like the past few days as you are a citizen living in a flawed democracy, conversely, I am a subject living in a full democracy kingdom. Anyway, our Queen has ruled that we must have four days celebrating 70 years of her reign. So it has been street parties, barbecue, coronation chicken and a right old national knees-up this side of the Pond. It is a tough life, but we Brits are used to it.

It has also meant that, with the exception of this morning, the library cybercafés have been closed, hence no science news until now.

“NASA’s Perseverance rover begins key search for life on Mars” in Nature.

More than fifteen months after landing in Jezero Crater on Mars, NASA’s Perseverance rover has finally begun its hunt for ancient life in earnest.

On 28 May, Perseverance ground a 5-centimetre-wide circular patch into a rock at the base of what was once a river delta in the crater. This delta formed billions of years ago, when a long-vanished river deposited layers of sediment into Jezero, and it is the main reason that NASA sent the rover here. On Earth, river sediment is usually teeming with life.

Images of the freshly ground spot show small sediment grains, which scientists are hoping will contain chemical or other traces of life. Poet William Blake’s “‘To see a world in a grain of sand’ comes to mind,” wrote Sanjeev Gupta, a planetary geologist at Imperial College London, on Twitter….

Meanwhile, the journal Science has been looking at Mayan astronomy and this features on their cover: “The Stargazers”.

The historic Maya oriented their lives by the heavens. Today, their descendants and Western scholars team up to understand their sophisticated astronomy

In the past few years, slowly converging lines of evidence have been restoring the clearest picture yet of the stargazing knowledge European colonizers fought so hard to scrub away…

(14) SHADOWPAW PRESS MAKES DUOTERO AVAILABLE AGAIN. Duatero by Vancouver author Brad C. Anderson, a searing far-future science fiction novel about the struggles of an abandoned human colony to survive on a hostile alien world, is back in print in a new edition from Shadowpaw Press after being orphaned by the closing of its original publisher, Bundoran Press.

Majstro Falchilo Kredo has devoted his life to protecting the abandoned Earth colony of Duatero from Malamiko, the indigenous ecosystem that makes their crops fail and whose contamination turns humans into mindless monsters.

But Malimiko is changing, becoming more dangerous, more aware, even as the ancient technology the humans use to combat it fails piece by precious piece. Kredo and his fellow soldiers must risk everything or see all they hold precious wiped away and forgotten.

Kredo is prepared to sacrifice himself—and anyone around him—to do his duty. But what if the price demanded is even higher?

“Duatero is a powerful work of science fiction that confronts issues of morality and survival head-on in a carefully thought-out and terrifying alien world,” said Edward Willett, editor and publisher of Shadowpaw Press. “It deserves to find many new readers, and I’m thrilled to be able to give it that opportunity.”

Duatero can be bought directly from the publisher or from most online bookstores in both ebook and print and can also be ordered through any brick-and-mortar bookstore. This handy URL provides links to multiple online sources:  https://books2read.com/duatero/

(15) SPELL TREK. “Harini Logan is the 2022 Scripps National Spelling Bee champion after a historic spell-off” reports CNN.

…This year’s host was LeVar Burton. The Emmy and Grammy-award winner hosted the semifinal and the final round of the event.

In a statement in December, Burton called the position “an honor.”

“Like a lot of folks, I look forward to the competition every year and am excited to be a part of this wonderful tradition that celebrates excellence,” he said….

(16) IT’S ALMOST TIME. Suspension by Andrea Faye Christians – “a time travel tale of epic proportions” — is Book One of the Time Binder Series.

When Carla Thompson falls asleep and doesn’t wake up, she is shocked to discover what destiny has in store for her. Suspended between two worlds, she meets Isambard Brunel, the legendary eighteenth-century civil engineer, who built the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, England, and who now serves as guardian of its secrets. Historical events intertwine with Carla’s current reality and along the way she discovers a murder, encounters a host of characters including Jamaican psychic, Matilda, and engages in verbal banter with literary legend, Ernest Hemingway. Her adventures lead her to a startling revelation about why she was chosen for her strange new role. In death Carla realises she has never felt more alive.

Andrea Faye Christians was born and raised in Swansea, South Wales. Following a successful career in British radio including the BBC, she moved to the southern Mediterranean island of Malta to pursue her dream of becoming a freelance writer. A decade later she bought a farm in the Madonie Mountains of Sicily where a menagerie of rescue animals found their way to her. With a son in Malta and a daughter in Sicily, Andrea has a home and her heart in both places, and she now divides her time between the neighboring islands.

The book will be released June 30 and is available for pre-order from Bookshop, Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.co.uk, Book Depository, and Barnes & Noble.

(17) PHILIP K. DICK WILL BE SORRY HE MISSED THIS SHOW. Matt O’Dowd on PBS Space Time dares to ask,“What If Physics IS NOT Describing Reality?”

Neils Bohr said, “It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature.” Well it turns out that if we pay attention to this subtle difference, some of the most mysterious aspects of nature make a lot more sense.

[Thanks to JJ, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Andrew Porter, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Tom Becker.]

Pixel Scroll 3/27/22 I Have A Master’s Degree – In Scrolling

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(1) WHO SAID THIS JOB WAS EASY? Bad Writer by greybeardgames boasts (?) a recommendation from one of sff’s leading names:

“The most depressingly realistic writer’s life simulation I ever experienced” Lavie Tidhar, author of Maror, Hood, By Force Alone, Osama, Central Station, and others.

You play Emily, a struggling writer, trying to make it in the big bad world of short story publishing. You walk around your house, getting ideas, and writing stories. Try not to get too distracted, or you will get sad that you hadn’t written during the day. Get too sad, and it’s game over. She gives up and gets a new job doing something far less fun and stressful.

The game was created by author Paul Jessup, creator of haunted fantasies and weird futures. Only $2.99! Many find they prefer playing it to writing. Oops!

(2) WISCON NEWS. WisCon has set an in-person attendance cap of 600 as a safety measure. They’ve also given a status report about their GoHs: “In-person attendance cap, Guest of Honor updates, and more”.

Regarding our Guests of Honor:

  • We’re thrilled to confirm that Sheree Renée Thomas will be attending WisCon 2022 in person and will also be available to participate in virtual programming.
  • Unfortunately, due to family commitments and the ongoing pandemic, neither Zen Cho nor Yoon Ha Lee will be able to participate either physically or virtually in WisCon 2022.
  • We have yet to receive confirmation whether Rebecca Roanhorse will be able to participate virtually (for the second time) or physically.

The post also discusses major changes they’ve had to make in response to Covid or in response to the limited time and energy volunteers have to run events.

(3) LEGOLAND ADDS STADIUM. The LEGO® SoFi Stadium is now open at Legoland California Resort.

(Click for larger images.)

SoFi Stadium has “touched down” in Miniland USA! An architectural marvel that took a team of 25 dedicated Master Model Builders more than 6,000 hours and more than 500,000 LEGO® bricks to build, the final SoFi Stadium model stands at more than 30 feet long, 15 feet wide and over 4 feet tall. It’s currently considered the largest LEGO® stadium in the world. The massive LEGO structure joins other top Southern California attractions featured in LEGO form, including Griffith Park Observatory, Hollywood Bowl and Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.

The LA Times has more coverage: “A record replica of SoFi Stadium arrives at Legoland”.

…More than a dozen members of the park’s model shop team completed the final installation of the model, which took place over the course of four days, park representatives said.

Inside the stadium, model makers re-created the L.A. Ram’s starting roster for Super Bowl LVI, which they won in mid-February over the Cincinnati Bengals.

The scene will include “Minilander,” or Lego versions, of this year’s Super Bowl championship team, park officials said. There will also be an “audience” of 3,000 Lego people inside….

(4) REPORTING ON LOCATION. “Friendship in the Time Of Kaiju: A Conversation with John Scalzi” conducted by Arley Sorg at Clarkesworld Magazine.

Are kaiju something that you’re into, did you grow up watching Godzilla?

Some of my earliest memories of television are the Japanese kaiju movies. When I grew up in Los Angeles, I’d watch channel nine and channel eleven. They were independent stations at the time, and they would fill up their Saturday and Sunday afternoons with Japanese movies where these big monsters would stomp on things. When you’re seven or eight years old, and before the Star Wars era, all of it looked startlingly realistic. It was like, “This could be happening! What the hell’s going on in Japan, how do they live?” I think anybody who was my age growing up watching these things, it just sort of seeped into your bones.

(5) VIRGIL FINLAY ART SALE CATALOG. Doug Ellis shares his Finlay auction catalog – get an eyeful, then buy a wall-full!

For fans of the great Virgil Finlay, here’s my latest art sale catalog.  This one is devoted entirely to the art of Finlay, with over 50 originals.  Note that none of these are published pieces, but instead are personal pieces (including abstracts) and a few prelims.  None of this material has been at any convention, nor has it been in any prior catalog.  This material all comes from Finlay’s estate, and I’m selling it on behalf of his granddaughter.

And if you like Finlay art, I’ll have a few hundred other, similar pieces for sale at this year’s Windy City Pulp and Paper Convention (May 6-8, 2022 at the Westin Lombard Yorktown center) that has not been shown in any catalog either.

You can download the catalog (about 30 MB) through WeTransfer here.

(6) A WINK IS AS GOOD AS A NOD. In the Washington Post Magazine, Jason Vest profiles Rob Poor, whose eyeball was used for a retina scan Captain Kirk had to undergo in Star Trek Ii:  The Wrath Of Khan.  The scan seems routine today but Vest says this was “one of the earliest digitized photo images of living matter used in a major film” and Vest described how it happened. “William Shatner’s eyeball double in ‘Star Trek II’ tells how it happened”.

…Poor’s story illuminates not just how far our technology has come in the past 40 years, but also how the effects wizards working on “Star Trek II,” in swinging for the fences, helped lay the foundation for something we take for granted today: the digital cameras of our communicators (er, cellphones). As such, I asked Poor if he would be willing to revisit the tale of his role in a pioneering filmmaking moment and technological advance — and one that has seen him achieve on-screen immortality, if uncredited, as … William Shatner’s stunt eyeball….

(7) PKD AT THE MOVIES. “A Scanner Darkly Is the Best Philip K. Dick Film Adaptation, Not Blade Runner” contends CBR.com.

…The look of A Scanner Darkly is the first noticeable difference that sets it apart from other adaptations and is a crucial decision to pull off PKD’s vision. PKD’s themes of warping identities, hallucinations and false realities are often difficult to capture on film, and Linklater’s return to rotoscoping — an animation technique that traces over live-action cels which he also used in Waking Life — is a spot on visualization of these themes.

This is evidenced in the very first scene, which shows a frantic Charles Freck (Rory Cochrane) dealing with an infestation of imagined insects. The fact that the bug hallucinations look identical to the real world drags viewers into the uncanny valley, creating a simultaneously lifelike and artificial setting where it is difficult to know what is actually taking place.

In addition to the look of A Scanner Darkly, the film also avoids the most common missteps that other films have made when adapting PKD’s work. Featuring heroics without heroes, action without resolution and romance without lovers, PKD worlds are perhaps too incongruous for film, especially the bombastic style found in this era of the Hollywood blockbuster.

(8) MEMORY LANE.

1992 — [Item by Cat Eldridge.] Thirty years ago, Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories wins the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature. The novel was published two years earlier and was his first novel since The Satanic Verses which as we all know resulted in that book being condemned by many Islamic clerics and Rushdie being condemned to death. Much of this novel can be considered a commentary upon what happened to him then. 

Haroun itself is “a sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad it had forgotten its name”. It will by the end of the stories have its name restored. A joyous event indeed. 

The New York Times review compared it to the work of Barrie, Beatrix, Potter and E. B.  White: “Salman Rushdie’s remarkable new children’s book belongs in this company. The only difference is that the experiences that lie behind ‘Haroun and the Sea of Stories’ are nearly as fantastic as anything in the tale. Before the fact, who could have believed that a world-famous spiritual leader would publicly exhort his millions of followers to murder a novelist in another country, and promise them eternal salvation should they succeed?”

The Kirkus review aimed at librarians was more literary in nature: “Memorable bedtime story targeted for an audience as large as a bull’s-eye on the side of a barn. The book is catalogued for January but will be shipped to bookstores in early November for Thanksgiving sales. Few readers will not find some tie between this story of a silenced father-storyteller and Rushdie’s death sentence from the Ayatollah Khomeini—but it’s a tie not stressed by the author. Perhaps the brightest aspect of the book is its bubbling good humor and witty dialogue, and then its often superb writing: ‘There was once, in the country of Alifbay, a sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name. It stood by a mournful sea full of glumfish, which were so miserable to eat that they made people belch with melancholy even though the skies were blue.’” 

Befitting the literary nature of the book and its use of multiple languages, it was made into an audiobook which is read by Rushdie himself. I’ve heard it — it’s an extraordinary work indeed. 

Haroun and the Sea of Stories was adapted for the stage by Tim Supple and David Tushingham. It had its stage premiere in 1998 at the Royal National Theatre in London. It was also an opera, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, written by Charles Wuorinen in 2001 with libretto by James Fenton, which premiered at the New York City Opera in Fall 2004.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born March 27, 1892 — Thorne Smith. A writer of humorous supernatural fantasy. He is best remembered for the two Topper novels — a comic fantasy fiction mix of plentiful drink, many ghosts, and sex. Not necessarily in that order.  The original editions of the Topper novels complete with their erotic illustrations are available from the usual digital sources. (Died 1934.)
  • Born March 27, 1942 — Michael York, 80. I remember him in Babylon 5’s  “A Late Delivery from Avalon” episode as a man who believed himself to be King Arthur returned. Very chilling. I also enjoyed him as D’Artagnan in the Musketeers films and remember him as Logan 5 in Logan’s Run. So what on his genre list really impresses you? 
  • Born March 27, 1949 — John Hertz, 73. He’s an active fanzine fan who publishes Vanamonde. He’s also an experienced masquerade judge, convention art show tour docent, and teacher of Regency dancing. Winner of the Big Heart Award at the 2003 Torcon. With the help of the HANA (Hertz Across to Nippon Alliance) fan fund he attended Nippon 2007. He‘s a three-time Hugo finalist for Best Fan Writer. Four collections of his fanwriting have been published, West of the Moon, Dancing and Joking, On My Sleeve, and Neither Complete nor Conclusive.  (OGH)
  • Born March 27, 1950 — John Edward Allen. One of the forgotten dwarfs of Hollywood, he stood but three feet and ten inches tall. English by birth and English in death as he was back there after an impressive career in Hollywood to die on his native soil. How impressive? Well given how hard it was for dwarfs to find work, pretty good as he appeared in Snow White Live, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Side Show (circus horror film), Under the Rainbow (see IMDB link here), Tales from the Darkside (as a goblin), Swamp Thing series (love that series), Superboy (as a carnival dwarf) and Snow White: A Tale of Terror. (Died 1999.)
  • Born March 27, 1952 — Dana Stabenow, 70. Though better known for her superb Kate Shugak detective series of which the first, the Edgar Award-winning A Cold Day for Murder is a Meredith moment right now, she does have genre work to her credit in the excellent Star Svensdotter space series, and the latter is available at the usual digital suspects.
  • Born March 27, 1953 — Patricia Wrede, 69. She is a founding member of The Scribblies, along with Pamela Dean, Emma Bull, Will Shetterly, Steven Brust and Nate Bucklin. Not to be confused with the Pre-Joycean Fellowship which overlaps in membership. Outside of her work for the the Liavek shared-world anthology created and edited by Emma Bull and Will Shetterly, there are several series she has running including Lyra (Shadow Magic), Enchanted Forest Chronicles and Cecelia and Kate (co-written with Caroline Stevermer). She’s also written the novelizations of several Star Wars films including Star Wars, Episode I – The Phantom Menace and Star Wars, Episode II – Attack of the Clones in what are listed  as  ‘Jr. Novelizations’.
  • Born March 27, 1969 — Pauley Perrette, 53. Though she’s best known for playing Abby Sciuto on NCIS, a role she walked away from under odd circumstances, she does have some genre roles. She was Ramona in The Singularity Is Near, a film based off Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Next up is the most excellent Superman vs. The Elite in which she voices Lois Lane. Let’s see… she had a recurring role on Special Unit 2 as Alice Cramer but I never watched that series beyond the pilot so I’ve no idea what that role was. 
  • Born March 27, 1971 — Nathan Fillion, 51. Certainly best known here for being Captain Malcolm “Mal” Reynolds in Firefly ‘verse, though the large viewing audience now know him as Richard Castle on Castle. An interesting case of just how much of a character comes from the actor I think. In both roles. In his case, I’d say most of it. He voiced Green Lantern/Hal Jordan in Justice League: Doom, Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox and Justice League: Throne of Atlantis, The Death of Superman and Reign of the Supermen. Oh, and he appeared in a recurring role in Buffy the Vampire Slayer as Caleb.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) BAFFLING HALT. “NASA Criticized for Ending Pronoun Project” reports Scientific American.

In a move that has been widely criticized, NASA leaders recently terminated a test project that allowed employees at the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) to display pronouns in their official agency identifiers. The decision affected more than 100 employees who saw their stated pronouns vanish from communication platforms.

…Organized by a handful of management officials within GSFC, the pronoun-inclusive effort was “a tech demo”—a prepilot program, a Goddard employee says, that was a first step toward addressing concerns that included issues with removing deadnames from the agency’s IT system. (A deadname is the name a transgender or nonbinary person had before transitioning.) In searching for solutions, the GSFC team spoke with NASA Headquarters, as well as legal departments and employee resource groups at the agency. In other words, “this wasn’t a bunch of people going rogue,” says a scientist at GSFC.

During that process, the GSFC team identified an option that would let employees add their pronouns to their display names, which are used in electronic communications, including e-mail, contact lists, instant messaging platforms and Microsoft Teams environments. Usually, those identifiers include “[Last name],” “[First name]” and “[NASA Center-XXX],” where the “XXX” would be replaced by a three-digit organizational code. But by filling in an optional field that is typically used for nicknames, employees could add pronouns after their names. It was an efficient and inexpensive way to make a necessary change, employees say, and did not require any additional coding or IT investments….

(12) SIGNAL CLOSE ACTION. Someone asked a question. Martin Wisse answered, “My rightwing guilty pleasure: Honor Harrington” at Wis[s]e Words.

If you’re on the political left, what is the most right-wing artistic work that you enjoy and appreciate (in whatever way you understand that concept)? And if you’re on the right, the reverse?

And my mind immediately went to David Weber and his Honor Harrington series. Doing Horatio Hornblower in Space! series is already a pretty conservative concept, but Weber took it up to eleven, especially at the start….

(13) IF YOU LOOK UPON A STAR. The story follows this introduction — “Fiction: ‘A Tranquil Star’” by Primo Levi in The New Yorker.

Italo Calvino once referred to the novelist and memoirist Primo Levi as “one of the most important and gifted writers of our time.” An Italian chemist and Holocaust survivor, Levi was the author of fourteen books, including “The Periodic Table” and “Survival in Auschwitz.” Since Levi’s death, in 1987, The New Yorker has published eight of his works of fiction and poetry. In 2007, the magazine excerpted the title story from Levi’s posthumous collection “A Tranquil Star.” The tale describes, in vivid, granular detail, the life and death of a star called al-Ludra, as observed through the eyes of various astronomers. But it’s also a story about the fine boundaries of the spoken word. … To compose a narrative about a star—and to make it as relevant as any depiction of a notable figure or close acquaintance—is no small feat. Levi balances the astonishing with the wonted, tracing the minute details of matter that appears immutable, and yet, like our own history, is ever changing….

(14) A CUT ABOVE. Star Trek: The Motion Picture – The Director’s Edition is streaming April 5 on Paramount+.

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] Max Headroom chats with BBC presented Terry Wogan in this clip from 1985 that dropped this week.

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

Pixel Scroll 2/19/21 Why, I Sweep My Scroll With A Geiger Counter Every Day, And Nary A Pixel!

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(1) DISCON III REACTIONS. Today’s decision by the 2021 Worldcon committee to remove Toni Weisskopf as a GoH (“DisCon III Removes Weisskopf as a Guest of Honor”) is being widely discussed.

Toni Weisskopf posted a concise response on Facebook.

The committee of Discon III approached me this week to discuss the allegations about Baen’s Bar that were posted at Patreon. Baen is conducting a thorough investigation, which we feel we cannot rush, and has taken down the Bar while we conduct the investigation.

I do understand the immediate appeal of Discon III wishing to act quickly to respond to their community. Today they informed me of their official decision to remove me as their Editor Guest of Honor.

While I strongly disagree with the committee’s decision, I will regretfully accede to their wishes.

These excerpts for the Scroll are primarily by authors who condemned the decision (except for the final one).

David Weber responded on Facebook.

So Toni Weisskopf has been formally disinvited by WorldCon and DisCon. Can’t say it was a surprise. I will however remind people of the personal policy I adopted years ago and reiterated in the case of ConCarolina and John Ringo. I will not attend a con which has disinvited a guest. You are always free to invite —or not—anyone you like. Any con which disinvites someone after the invitation has been issued and accepted, especially when they do so under pressure, however, does not deserve to be trusted by future guests.

He said more in the comments on his post, including —

Bob Eggleton made this comment —

Chuck Gannon also made a comment on Weber’s post, repeating one of his quotes linked here yesterday and extending it as follows:

…So Toni Weisskopf activated the most proactive, realistic option available to her: she closed the Bar, thereby ending any possibility that it might do further ostensible injury.

36 hours later, however, she was disinvited without any additional cause.

You will note, however, that no one asserted that she did not respond quickly enough. In fact, in disinviting her, there were no further/new discoveries added to those put forth in Mr. Sanford’s essay.

So what had changed? If the concom believes that 36 hours is enough time for her to resolve the matter completely, I once again point out that

a) any business person operating in the real world would *know* that is not enough time to conduct anything like a thorough review

b) in order to ensure that what Mr. Sanford reported could not expand or remain as a potential threat, SHE CLOSED THE WHOLE BAR DOWN.

If she had meant to stonewall, or not actually investigate the matter, she would not have taken the step of closing the Bar.

Do I repeat myself in this post? Assuredly so . . . because these are salient points which are being repeatedly, perhaps purposively, overlooked.

For anyone familiar with the musical Hamilton, cue “The Room Where It Happened” as we ponder “so what changed in 36 hours?”

Larry Correia shames the SMoFs in “An Open Letter To The Old Time Fans at WorldCon” [Internet Archive link].

…Then several years later, after the old controversy I caused had died off and most of us barbaric outsiders had said screw cheesy WorldCon and moved on with our lives, some of you still felt guilty for how you’d treated Toni, so you extended an olive branch. You offered her the Guest of Honor spot at your little convention. How nice. How fucking magnanimous.

Toni, being a far better human being than any of you could ever aspire to be, thought the offer over. She knew there was risks. She knew that she’d take heat from people on the right (and she has). Morons on my side of the political would call her a sell-out, quisling, traitor, boot licker, so on and so forth, and they did. She got attacked by the useless grifters on both sides, looking for hate clicks. But unlike you, Toni ignores the baying mob and always does what she thinks is the right thing to do.  She looked at your peace offering, and said fine, If you want to try and mend fences, okay, I’ll take the heat, I’ll be your guest of honor. She was the bigger person.

She talked to me about her decision. I told her I understood, I wouldn’t do it, but I respected her call, but that she’d surely get yelled at by the idiots on both sides. She already knew, but she thought it was the right thing to do anyway. Because unlike you, Toni actually has a moral compass. Your moral compass is a windsock. Her one mistake in all this was assuming that any of you old time Smofs would have a spine….

A very large number of people today are reaching for rhetorical flourishes to complain about what happened. RS Benedict made this connection. (If you don’t recognize Isabel Fall’s name, run a search here. Also let it be noted that Weisskopf has been removed as GoH, not banned from attending.)

https://twitter.com/benedict_rs/status/1362931391412006914

Mike VanHelder, an experienced conrunner, tried to understand the decision from a convention running perspective. As part of that he wrote this How It Should Have Ended scenario, in addition to other insights. Thread starts here.

(2) NO ONE TO FOLLOW. While we’re at it, let WIRED’s Angela Wattercutter tell you about “The Crushing Disappointment of Fandom”.

…When we really, truly admire someone, whether they’re an Avenger or Anthony Fauci, there’s a tendency to mimic their personality, even their morality. Media theorists call these bonds “parasocial relationships”; parents of kids with one too many Star Wars posters (probably) call it “over the top.” But the people in it, the ones who write fic and spend days making cosplay before the next convention, call it part of their identity, the fabric of who they are.

Until it’s not. Earlier this week, actress Gina Carano lost her job playing Cara Dune on The Mandalorian. The former MMA fighter had been facing criticism for months for her anti-science views on mask-wearing, mocking transgender-sensitive pronouns, and tweets about voter fraud. Then, on Wednesday, after she shared an Instagram story that suggested having differing political views was akin to being Jewish during the Holocaust, the hashtag #FireGinaCarano began to trend on Twitter. That night, Lucasfilm issued the following statement: “Gina Carano is not currently employed by Lucasfilm and there are no plans for her to be in the future. Nevertheless, her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.”

Carano’s comments are harmful for a lot of reasons, but they seem to carry an additional weight for fans. Cara Dune was a hero, someone who fought for people, a tough, competent female warrior in a genre often dominated by men. Fans looked up to Cara, and by extension Carano, but the actor’s comments on social media left one of those things harder to do….

(3) BY POPULAR DEMAND. The UK’s Daily Mail proclaims: “WandaVision: Fans CRASH Disney+ to stream latest episode”.

Viewers of WandaVision crashed Disney+ on Friday morning as the latest installment dropped on the streaming service.

There was a brief 10-minute outage in the early hours of Friday as episode seven of the Marvel Cinematic Universe-based series was made available, PEOPLE reports.

Fans expressed their frustration on social media after experiencing issues as they signed on in droves to catch the latest installment of Wanda and Vision’s Westview adventures.

(4) RECOVERED. Claire O’Dell has released a second edition of her award-winning River of Souls trilogy with new covers and updated text: River of Souls Series. The author blogged about the books here.

…Once Tor returned the rights to me, I decided to release a second edition, with new covers and updated text. I commissioned new artwork from the amazing Jessica Shirley. I badgered my long-suffering spouse into designing new covers. And I spent several months editing and proofreading the manuscripts. The e-books are now available at my on-line bookstore (here), individually or as a bundle, and will appear at all the usual vendor sites later this week….

(5) PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT. James Davis Nicoll helps us keep these two things straight: “Five SF Works Featuring Dyson Shells (and Not Dyson Swarms)” at Tor.com.

…There are at least two kinds of Dyson Sphere. The first—the one Dyson intended—is made up of a myriad of independently orbiting objects. While this presents an interesting traffic control challenge, the Dyson Swarm has the advantage that not only can it be built incrementally over a very long period, but the components are gravitationally coupled to the star in question.

The second option is a solid shell with the star in the middle….

Here’s one of James’ picks:

“Back to Myan” by Regina Kanyu Wang (2017)

Retrieved by the Union from certain extinction on the ice-encrusted world Myan, Kaya is somewhat less than entirely grateful. After all, the reason Myan was freezing in the first place was Project Saion, the Union’s vast energy-gathering structure blocking Myan from its star, Saion. While the Union did belatedly notice the Myan natives and rescue them, this didn’t come to pass until 997 out of every 1000 of Kaya’s species had perished in the cold. Still, the Union is very, very powerful, while the handful of Myans are not. There is nothing Kaya can do to save her home world. At least, that’s what the Union believes…

(6) GREG BEAR INTERVIEWED. Frank Catalano, who was SFWA Secretary back when Greg Bear was SFWA President, pointed out a good profile of Greg Bear in the Seattle Times today, including his thinking that his newest novel may be his last one, and the trouble he had in finding a publisher for it: “Lynnwood’s Greg Bear, stalwart of modern science fiction, starts writing his life story”.

The 69-year-old Lynnwood-based author and first-class raconteur still has a lot to say. He’s published four novels since aortic dissection surgery left him with a titanium heart valve six years ago and has plans for more. But he’s just not sure he wants to deal with the business of fiction publishing anymore after having a hard time finding a buyer for “The Unfinished Land,” eventually published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt imprint John Joseph Adams Books.

“If I had written it and no one wanted to publish it, what would I do right at that point?” Bear said. “I considered just retiring. And I think I’m still making that decision at this point.”

Catalano reacts: “It’s end-of-days when Greg Bear can’t find a publisher. Ack.”

(7) ENDLESS RIVER. “Doctor Who’s River Song Alex Kingston writes new novel” – Radio Times has the story.

… Alex Kingston is releasing a brand new River Song novel, taking the popular companion on a brand new adventure.

The book, entitled The Ruby’s Curse, promises to tell a thrilling story set in New York in 1939, featuring both River Song and her alter-ego Melody Malone. It is Alex Kingston’s first foray into writing Doctor Who fiction, following in the footsteps of Tom Baker, whose story Scratchman follows the escapades of the Fourth Doctor….

“Having absolutely no idea of the journey I would be taking with River Song when I first uttered those words, “Hello Sweetie,” I cannot begin to express how excited I am to be able to continue not only River, but Melody’s adventures on the written page,” she says.

(8) MEMORY LANE.

  • 1961 — Sixty years ago at Seacon in Seattle, A Canticle for Leibowitz, a fix-up of three short stories published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, written by Walter M. Miller, Jr. wins the Hugo for Best Novel. It was published by J. B. Lippincott. Other nominees that year were The High Crusade by Poul Anderson, Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys, Deathworld by Harry Harrison and Venus Plus X by Theodore Sturgeon. Surprisingly this is the only award this novel won.  

(9) BLACKBURN OBIT. Graphic designer “Bruce Blackburn, Designer of Ubiquitous NASA Logo, Dies at 82” reports the New York Times. He died February 1 at the age of 82,

…In 1975, NASA introduced the worm, a sleek sequence of winding red letters, and the logo quickly became a tangible symbol of a boundless space age that lay ahead.

“We did get what we set out to accomplish,” Mr. Blackburn said. “Anybody we showed it to immediately said, ‘Oh I know what that is. I know them. They’re really great. They’re right on the leading edge of everything.’”

But in 1992, a few years after the Challenger explosion, NASA dropped the worm and revived the meatball in a decision that was said to be intended to improve company morale.

Mr. Blackburn and other designers lamented the choice. “They said, ‘This is a crime. You cannot do this,’” he said. “‘This is a national treasure and you’re throwing it in the trash bin.”

“His design sensibility was offended by what happened,” his daughter said. “He thought the meatball was clumsy and sloppy and not representative of the future.”…

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born February 19, 1923 – Alan Hunter.  Fan and pro artist; founded the Fantasy Art Society (U.K.); fifty covers, three hundred fifty interiors, for Banana Wings, Dream, Fantasy Tales, Matrix, Nebula, New Worlds, SF Chronicle, Vector, the Millennium Philcon Program Book (59th Worldcon), the LoneStarCon 3 Program Book (71st Worldcon).  Artist Guest at Fantasycon 1981.  Here is the Spring 53 Nebula.  Here is an interior from the Mar 53 New Worlds.  Here is an interior from Dream.  Here is the Oct 86 SF Chronicle.  Here is Vector 112.  Here is Banana Wings 38.  Our Gracious Host’s appreciation here.  (Died 2012) [JH]
  • Born February 19, 1937 —  Terry Carr. Well-known and loved fan, author, editor, and writing instructor. I usually don’t list awards both won and nominated for but his are damned impressed so I will. He was nominated five times for Hugos for Best Fanzine (1959–1961, 1967–1968), winning in 1959, was nominated three times for Best Fan Writer (1971–1973), winning in 1973, and he was Fan Guest of Honor at ConFederation in 1986. Wow. He worked at Ace Books before going freelance where he edited an original story anthology series called Universe, and The Best Science Fiction of the Year anthologies that ran from 1972 until his early death in 1987. Back to Awards again. He was nominated for the Hugo for Best Editor thirteen times (1973–1975, 1977–1979, 1981–1987), winning twice (1985 and 1987). His win in 1985 was the first time a freelance editor had won. Wow indeed. Novelist as well. Just three novels but all are still in print today though I don’t think his collections are and none of his anthologies seem to be currently either. A final note. An original anthology of science fiction, Terry’s Universe, was published the year after his death with all proceeds went to his widow. (Died 1987.) (CE) 
  • Born February 19, 1963 — Laurell K. Hamilton, 58. She is best known as the author of two series of stories. One is the Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter of which I’ll confess I’ve read but several novels, the other is the Merry Gentry series which held my interest rather longer but which I lost in somewhere around the sixth or seventh novel when the sex became really repetitive. (CE) 
  • Born February 19, 1946 – Rosemary Ullyot, age 75.  Early member of the Ontario SF Club.  Fanzine Kevas & Trillium with Alicia Austin and Maureen Bournes.  “Kumquat May” column in Energumen.  Twice finalist for Best Fanwriter.  [JH]
  • Born February 19, 1957 – Jim Rittenhouse, age 64.  Founded Point of Divergence, alternative-history apa.  Guest of Honor at DucKon 12, Windycon 32.  Judge of the Sidewise Award.  Has read As I Lay Dying, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Suetonius’ Twelve Caesars, Adam Bede, Lolita, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.  “Why do I like fountain pens?  The smoothness and ease of writing, the clarity and solidity of the line, the profound coloring and the strong saturation of the ink.”  [JH]
  • Born February 19, 1964 — Jonathan Lethem, 57. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a weird mix of SF and detective fiction, is fantastic in more ways that I can detail briefly here. I confess that I lost track of him after that novel so I’d be interested in hearing what y’all think of his later genre work particularly his latest, The Arrest. (CE)
  • Born February 19, 1966 — Claude Lalumière, 55. I met him once here in Portland at a used book store in the the SFF section, and his wife wrote reviews for Green Man once upon a year. Author, book reviewer and editor who has edited numerous anthologies including two volumes of the excellent Tesseracts series.  Amazing writer of short dark fantasy stories collected in three volumes so far, Objects of Worship, The Door to Lost Pages and Nocturnes and Other Nocturnes. Tachyon published his latest anthology, Super Stories of Heroes & Villains. (CE) 
  • Born February 19, 1968 — Benicio del Toro, 53. Originally cast as Khan in that Trek film but unable to perform the role as he was committed to another film. He’s been The Collector in the Marvel film franchise, Lawrence Talbot in the 2010 remake of The Wolfman, and codebreaker DJ in Star Wars: The Last Jedi.  Let’s not forget that he was in Big Top Pee-wee as Duke, the Dog-Faced Boy followed by being in Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as Dr. Gonzo which damn well should count as genre even if it isn’t. (CE) 
  • Born February 19, 1970 – Victor Ehikhamenor, age 51.  Writer, visual artist including photography and sculpture.  Exhibited in the first Nigerian pavilion at the Venice Biennale (57th Biennale, 2017).  Here is I Am Ogiso, the King of Heaven.  Here is The Unknowable (enamel & steel), Norval Foundation, Cape Town.  Here is Hypnotic Lover.  Here is Wealth of Nations, Nat’l Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution.  Website.  [JH]
  • Born February 19, 1973 – Nikki Alfar, age 49.  A score of short stories.  Three Palanca Awards.  Manila Critics’ Circle Nat’l Book Award.  Co-editor, Philippine Speculative Fiction.  Interviewed in Fantasy.  [JH]
  • Born February 19, 1984 – Marissa Meyer, age 37.  Re-told Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, and Snow White in the Lunar Chronicles; the first, Cinder, MM’s début, was a NY Times Best-Seller; later Fairest, a prequel.  Heartless has the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland.  Half a dozen more novels, a dozen shorter stories.  Introduction to Yolen’s How to Fracture a Fairy Tale.  Has confessed to writing (under another name) twoscore pieces of Sailor Moon fanfiction.  [JH]

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • Lio is always bizarre – this time it’s even funny.
  • Non Sequitur chronicles the Alexa / Siri conspiracy.
  • The Flying McCoys reveals that Superman buys outfits off the rack! (When they’re in stock.)

(12) HE’LL BE REMEMBERED. Milton Davis reports the GoFundMe was successful and that the headstone and monument for Charles R. Saunders’ grave have arrived.  The grave of famous fantasy writer Charles R. Saunders was without a headstone until friends raised money for it.

(13) REPURPOSED AND FUNNY. [Item by rcade.] The paranormal fantasy novelist Richard Kadrey has been reading some obscure science fiction paperbacks from the golden age of the lurid cover. Authors include Supernova Jackson, Cliff Zoom and Brawny Magnum.

The titles of Kadrey’s novels in his Sandman Slim series would be right at home on a shelf with these classics. They include Kill The Dead, Aloha from Hell, Ballistic Kiss and King Bullet, which comes out in August.

He’s also the founder with cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling of the Dead Media Project, which sought to save obsolete and forgotten forms of media. But it died.

(14) NOT A FAN. Variety’s Caroline Framke is not amused: “’Superman and Lois’ Brings The CW Superhero Brand Back Down to Boring Earth: TV Review”.

…It makes sense on paper for a new show about Superman to fast forward through the stuff that’s been done to death in order to find some new way into the man, the myth, the legend. Why not make him a harried dad juggling apocalyptic threats with teenage boys, one of whom might have the same kind of powers as he does? The CW’s dads are already supernaturally hot, so hey, might as well lean into the brand. (Hoechlin, like Tom Welling before him, does not at all have a Christopher Reeve level of charisma to bring to the role — but to be fair, who does?)

But for all the logical storylines and character journeys that “Superman and Lois” includes, it nonetheless lacks the spark to make any of it very interesting. Despite solid efforts from Tulloch, Garfin, and especially Elsass to bring life to their stiff scenes, these Kents feel more stuck than striking

(15) DO YOU REMEMBER. [Item by Mike Kennedy.[ Hugh freakin’ Jackman does the “announcer guy“ voiceover for a movie teaser… Io9 points to “Reminiscence First Look: The Sci-Fi Mystery Romance Is Out 9/3”. The clip is in Hugh Jackman’s tweet:

[Thanks to Michael Toman, rcade, James Davis Nicoll, John Hertz, Danny Sichel, Jeffrey Jones, Andrew Porter, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, Steven H Silver, Frank Catalano, Cat Eldridge, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Chris R.]

Weisskopf, Correia, Weber Defend Baen’s Bar; Jason Sanford Subjected to Harassment Over His Report

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In the wake of reaction to Jason Sanford’s February 15 article “Baen Books Forum Being Used to Advocate for Political Violence”, a public post on Patreon, Baen publisher Toni Weisskopf announced a hiatus for the Baen’s Bar forum.

Toni Weisskopf today replaced Baen’s Bar — for the time being — with “A Note from Toni Weisskopf” (Baen.com)  [Archive.is link]

To Whom It May Concern:

What is it we do at Baen Books? We publish books at the heart of science fiction and fantasy.

Science fiction has traditionally been a unique kind of intellectual pleasure, a process of glorious intercommunication and inspiration, with ideas flowing from scientist and engineer to writer and artist, to reader and viewer, back and forth, in a delightful mélange of shared thoughts, wild speculation, cautionary tales, reality checks, and the sheer fun of playing with boundaries and ideas. It is not for everyone. But those who enjoy it, take great pleasure in the dialogue.

When the modern form of SF began, with Hugo Gernsback and the other pulp magazines of the early 20th century, the publishers fostered that interaction through letter columns in the magazines and by encouraging science fiction readers to organize in clubs and meet in conventions. Baen Books continued that tradition with Baen’s Bar, a kind of virtual convention and on-line conversation that has been around in some form for over 20 years.

The moderators are volunteers. The readers, editors, and writers post and interact on the Bar at their own desire. Some conversations have been gone over so many times, they’ve been retired as simply too boring to contemplate again. Sometimes the rhetoric can get heated. We do not endorse the publication of unlawful speech. We have received no complaints about the content of the Bar from its users.

That said, it has come to our attention that allegations about the Bar have been made elsewhere. We take these allegations seriously, and consequently have put the Bar on hiatus while we investigate. But we will not commit censorship of lawful speech.

It is not Baen Books’ policy to police the opinions of its readers, its authors, its artists, its editors, or indeed anyone else. This applies to posts at the Bar, or on social media, on their own websites, or indeed anywhere else. On the Bar, the publisher does not select what is allowed to be posted, and does not hijack an individual’s messages for their own purposes. Similarly, the posts do not represent the publisher’s opinion, except in a deep belief that free speech is worthy in and of itself.

Most sincerely,
Toni Weisskopf
Publisher

Jason Sanford tweeted an update thread responding to Weisskopf’s statement and contesting some of her claims. Thread starts here.

https://twitter.com/jasonsanford/status/1361816082261098496

He concludes:

https://twitter.com/jasonsanford/status/1361822257245487104

DisCon III, the 2021 Worldcon at which Toni Weisskopf will be a guest of honor, answered calls for a statement with this tweet:

Larry Correia defended his publisher in “Publishing House Baen Books Attacked by Cancel Culture” at Monster Hunter Nation [Internet Archive link].

He threw shade on Sanford’s reporting:

… It was lots of pearl clutching over regular people not toeing their arbitrary political lines, misquotes, errors, quotes taken out of context, and some flat out lies.

However, he declined to challenge any specific quotes cited by Sanford:

…I’m not going to talk about the moronic loser or go through all the nonsense in his ridiculous hit piece. Other people are going through it now and carefully cataloging his bullshit. In typical leftist fashion he’s already pretending to be the victim and claiming he’s getting death threats. Maybe he can get in touch with Anita Sarkesian and Arthur Chu for tips.

Correia urged readers to believe what is happening is a “coordinated attack,” that Sanford’s article is being used as the basis for complaints made to Baen’s internet service providers, and Baen’s Bar was temporarily taken down to “protect the rest of the company from being deplatformed.”   

…However, this was clearly part of a coordinated attack in order to materially harm our business, because immediately after the hit piece was released complaints were filed with the various internet companies Baen uses for services to pressure them into kicking us off the internet. This hit piece was presented as “evidence”. Without going into details the companies then contacted Baen about these “serious allegations” so last night Baen temporarily took down the Bar forum to protect the rest of the company from being deplatformed.

…However, lying hit pieces from lefty activists aren’t anything new. We’re used to those. The real issue here is the complaints to the internet companies so they’ll deplatform anyone who doesn’t fall in line. The woke left saw what Big Tech did to Parler and they learned from it. This is a new weapon in their arsenal to beat America over the head with. The nail that sticks up must be hammered down.

Correia then assured readers that Baen’s Bar did not deserve this attention.

…The Bar isn’t a hotbed of extremism. It’s not a hotbed of anything. It’s an old forum that was mostly kept around because of tradition. It was created at the dawn of internet forums. I haven’t used it in years (I had already built up my online presence elsewhere when I started writing for them). But that isn’t the point. Anything that can be a target, will eventually be a target. They’re coming for your business next.

As Rev. Bob observed in a comment here:

And naturally it took the MHI commentariat all of an hour to test the theory that Baen’s capitulated, reject that in favor of it being a coordinated attack by The Left (complete with the problematic content really being false-flag posts by Seekrit Leftist Infiltrators), assert that this is really about smashing Baen into nonexistence by denying them distribution, denounce such coordinated attacks as despicable lefty tactics, and finally call for a coordinated attack on Sanford’s Patreon account.

David Weber, widely regarded as Baen’s flagship author, came to their defense on Facebook. He offered these reassurances:

… But there is no way in hell that the Barflies, as they are affectionately known, are advocating for political violence. Opinions are expressed, especially in the politics forum, and tempers are running high on both sides of our current political divide, so there’s a certain degree of venting. And there are a surprising number of historians, who can be relied upon to summon up historical examples to back their points. And there are heaps of independent thinkers, who aren’t going to hew to any particular party’s line and can be trusted to step upon any sore political toes in the vicinity. And there are quite a lot of veterans, who know what violence is REALLY like — unlike the vast majority of people who are currently hyperventilating about it in this country — which means the LAST THING they would want would be to instigate violence that is anything except defensive.

… Baen Books is frequently characterized as a “right wing publisher.” That’s as stupid as the notion that the Barflies are plotting a violent coup….

To refresh readers’ memories, immediately after the January 6 insurrection  Baen author Tom Kratman made an extended comment on the next move in his Baen’s Bar author forum which began:

So where do Trump and the nation go from here?

He needs to do three things; start his own news channel, start his own party, and start his own well-armed militia as part of the party.

The militia – again, a _well_armed_ militia – is necessary to present a threat in being to the powers that be such that, should they use extra-, pseudo-, and quasi-legal means to try to suppress the party, the price presented will be far too high.  The militia will be heavily infiltrated; this is a given.  No matter; it will not be there for any purpose but to present a serious threat of major combat, and the shame of defeat, and the reality of death, to the tactical elements, police and military, that may be used against the party.

It ought to be made clear that, “I can start the civil war with a stamp of my foot.  I’ve refrained, so far, but you cannot count on that restraint under all circumstances.  And if I am infiltrated, you are even more so.”…

Today Kratman also left a comment on Correia’s post which begins —  

Jon Del Arroz, who has a Patton moment every time he sees there’s some attention he’s not getting (“An entire world at war, and I’m left out of it? God will not permit this to happen!”), also rushed to comment on Correia’s post. His efforts to horn in were recognized for what they were and Correia verbally flattened him. These excerpts are just one part.

Finally, here are other examples of the harassment being directed at Jason Sanford on Twitter. He has received more in direct messages there and on Facebook.

And with respect to the “helicopter ride” political murder meme:

Pixel Scroll 1/10/21 I’m The Pixel Of Hugos Past And I’m Here To Warn Mike Not To Use That Scroll Title

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DAVID WEBER OUT OF HOSPITAL. A good news post yesterday at the David Weber the Author page on Facebook:

Latest update from Mr. Weber:

It’s official. The paperwork needs to be processed, and that’s gonna take a while, but they’re gonna let me go home still tonight! Passed the walking test with no O2 and without ever dropping below 96%.

Yaaaay me!

A few hours later Sharon Rice-Weber announced “He’s home!” with a photo.

(2) DOWN BY THE OLD TV STREAM. “Epic fantasy to anarchic animation: the TV trends to look out for in 2021” –The Guardian’s list starts with epically expensive fantasy:

Pretenders to the Thrones

For the second year in a row there is a Game of Thrones-shaped chasm in the calendar: prequel House of the Dragon won’t launch until 2022. That presents an opening for deep-pocketed rivals. Netflix’s own medieval-tinged gorefest The Witcher is back for a second season, joined on the platform by sorcery saga Shadow and Bone (April). And Amazon Prime Video is set to launch two formidable fantasy franchises: The Wheel of Time adapts Robert Jordan’s hefty series of novels, with Rosamund Pike starring, while we might finally see its long-awaited The Lord of the Rings adaptation, set to be the most expensive TV show of all time at a cool $1bn.

(3) ARNOLD ON THE INSURRECTION. “Schwarzenegger compares attack on Capitol to Nazi violence” — the LA Times summarizes a video released by the actor and former California governor.

Arnold Schwarzenegger likened this week’s siege of the U.S. Capitol to Nazi attacks on Jews in Europe ahead of World War II in a scathing video in which the former California governor also called President Trump “the worst president ever.”

Schwarzenegger wasn’t yet alive when Nazis rampaged through Germany and Austria during Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, in 1938, attacking Jewish homes and businesses and taking thousands to concentration camps. He was born in Austria two years after World War II ended. But the trauma inflicted by the violent collapse of democracy — and the complicity of some of those close to him — shaped his childhood, he said in the video released via Twitter early Sunday.

“Growing up, I was surrounded by broken men drinking away their guilt over their participation in the most evil regime in history,” he said. “Not all of them were rabid anti-Semites or Nazis. Many just went along step by step down the road.”

Schwarzenegger said that his father would often come home drunk and hit him and other family members, which didn’t seem remarkable because their neighbor was doing the same thing.

“They were in physical pain from the shrapnel in their bodies and in emotional pain from what they saw or did,” Schwarzenegger said. “It all started with lies, and lies, and lies, and intolerance.”

Similarly, he said, Trump misled his supporters with lies as he sought a coup to overturn the results of the presidential election…

(4) WRIGHT. For more of the sort of thing Schwarzenegger is opposing, see John C. Wright’s Journal, “A Word of Encouragement” [Internet Archive link] from January 8, a lengthy appeal to religious faith for the belief that Trump will continue as President:   

…If I am wrong, I am a fool, and I have fooled others. But I will not be any more or less unhappy in that hour than wiser souls now weeping and gnashing their teeth. But if I am right, our enemies will be repenting and lamenting in jail, or slain at each other’s hands….

Over 200 comments follow.

(5) BALTICON. There is an unofficial discussion being carried on by commenters at the Balticon Discussions, A Safe Space (Unaffiliated, Privately Run) group (publicly visible) about the statement issued by the Baltimore Science Fiction Society and reported in a post here (“BSFS Reports Results of a Code of Conduct Investigation”).

(6) LUTZ OBIT. John Lutz (1939-2021) died January 9 after a long illness. Mystery writer, past President of Mystery Writers of America and Private Eye Writers of America. Edgar winner for the short story “Ride The Lightning” (1985), and twice winner of the Shamus Award. His “SWF Seeks Same” was adapted for the film Single White Female (Bridget Fonda, Jennifer Jason Leigh). 

(7) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.

  • January 10, 1967 — The Invaders premiered in television history. It was created by Larry Cohen and aired on ABC for two seasons. Roy Thinnes starred as David Vincent. Gold Key Comics published four issues of an Invaders comic book.  The series was a Quinn Martin production who was also responsible for A Twist in the Tale, an anthology series that did some SFF.
  • January 10, 1999 — Batman Beyond premiered on Kids’ WB. It was created by Bruce Timm. Will Friedle as Terry McGinnis, the new  Batman and you know who played the old Batman. It lasted three seasons and fifty two episodes. The actual origin episode for Terry is to be found on Justice League Beyond in the “Epilogue” episode. The episode was originally intended to be the series finale for Justice League and the DCAU in general but they got renewed for a third season after it aired as the second season finale.   

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born January 10, 1797 – Annette von Droste-Hülshoff.  Knew Wilhelm Grimm, contributed to the G brothers’ collection of fairy tales.  Schumann set a D poem to music.  Her poetical works “imperishable…. originality…. the works of a genius….  Germany’s greatest poetess” (Catholic Encyclopedia (1913)).  Many have supernatural elements.  (Died 1848) [JH]
  • Born January 10, 1883 – Alexei Nikolayevich Tolstoy.  Three novels for us available in English, two science fiction and one a version of Pinocchio; other fiction, poetry.  Everyone acknowledged his gifts, but since he first scorned, then embraced the Bolsheviks, he was thereafter scorned (by e.g. Nikolai Tolstoy, George Orwell) or embraced (two Stalin Prizes) politically; anyway a Russian-language SF pioneer.  (Died 1945; I give his patronymic to distinguish him from Alexei Constantinovich Tolstoy 1817-1875) [JH]
  • Born January 10, 1904 — Ray Bolger. Best remembered obviously as The Scarecrow In The Wizard of Oz. He also showedas the villainous Barnaby in Babes in Toyland, two appearances on Fantasy Island, and Vector In “Greetings from Earth” on the classic version of Battlestar Galactica.  He narrated a version of Peter and The Wolf which certainly is genre. (Died 1987.) (CE)
  • Born January 10, 1908 — Bernard Lee. He’s best known for his role as M in the first eleven Eon Productions-produced James Bond films ending with Moonraker. He also portrayed Tarmut the sculptor in Terence Fisher’s Hammer Horror picture Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell. And he appeared in several episodes of Danger Man. (Died 1981.) (CE) 
  • Born January 10, 1924 — Mike Butterworth. In 1965 he became the primary script writers at Ranger magazine where he was responsible for scripting the space opera The Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire which remains to this day one of the most popular boys’ adventure strips ever published in the UK. Between Ranger and later Look and Learn, it would have a very impressive run of 854 issues in total, divided between the two magazines. (Died 1986.) (CE)
  • Born January 10, 1924 – Aila Mariluoto.  Poet, mostly.  Well known in Finland.  Translated Goethe, Rilke, Shakespeare.  The Worldcon 75 Souvenir Book duly reviewed (in English) her SF novel Green Hair; thanks, Jukka.  (Died 2019) [JH]
  • Born January 10, 1937 — Elizabeth Anne Hull, 84. Widow of Frederik Pohl with whom she co-edited the most excellent Tales from the Planet Earth anthology. Not surprisingly, she later edited Gateways: Original New Stories Inspired by Frederik Pohl. She has been a member of the panel for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best SF novel since 1986. (CE)
  • Born January 10, 1947 — George Alec Effinger. I’ve read his Marîd Audran series at least three times  as it’s an amazing series in both the characters and the setting. I never read the short stories set in this setting until Golden Gryphon Press sent me Budayeen Nights for Green Man to review.  I really should listen to the stories soon to see how they work that way. (Died 2002.) (CE) 
  • Born January 10, 1948 – Roberta Lamming, age 73.  A dozen short stories for us, some under another name.  Poem in L. Tuttle’s horror anthology Skin of the Soul.  Note on writers’ workshops in Focus.  [JH]
  • Born January 10, 1959 — Fran Walsh, 61. Partner of Peter Jackson, she has contributed to all of his films since the late Eighties when she started out as co-writer of Meet the Feebles, and as producer since The Fellowship of the Ring which won a Hugo. Need I note the next two films won Hugos as well? Huh The Hobbit films did not win Hugos.  (CE) 
  • Born January 10, 1975 – André Vianco, age 46.  Novelist, screenwriter, film and television director, a million books sold.  A dozen novels for us.  Wikipedia tells his tale.  [JH]
  • Born January 10, 1984 – Tomohito Moriyama, age 37.  (Personal name last, Japanese style.)  Playwright, mostly.  One translation of his SF story “Two of Six” is published with English text followed by parallel text in Japanese and English for people who want to practice their Japanese.  A review of the story is here.  [JH]

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) THE DOCTOR IS IN. BBC News tells how this kid’s parents thrilled him on Christmas: “Doctor Who: Saxmundham superfan, 8, given Tardis door frame” (H/t David Gerrold.)

…The Tardis was created in the family garage over about four months by school bus driver Mr Tucker, while the family shielded during the coronavirus pandemic.

Mrs Tucker said: “Luke is Doctor Who mad and he said he would love a police public call box.

“We spent the first lockdown doing gardening but, as restrictions continued, this has really helped get Phil through the time at home while he has been furloughed….

“We all enjoy the show and Luke has really taken to it – he likes all of the classic episodes, too. He has a fez, bow tie and scarf – and about six sonic screwdrivers.”

(11) DOC OF THE EBAY. This is supposed to be the NECA Back to The Future Doc Brown Action Figure [Ultimate Version, Wrench, Flux Capacitor Drawing & Blueprint], but it looks more like Michael Sheen to me.

(12) WELL VERSED. A work of art from Bill left in comments.

I met a Filer from an antique Scroll
Who said — “Two vast and towering stacks of books
Stand in the bedroom … Near them, novels by Pohl,
And others of a Golden Age, whose frowns,
And uncracked spines, and sneers of cold control
Beckon toward the fan. They lay there waiting, and unread.
Worlds, though built, not yet explored by glance or looks
At pages filled with men of space, who from Earth have fled.
And on the nightstand, these words appear:
My name is Tsundoko, Stack of Books;
Look on my pages, Pixels, and Despair!”

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

Pixel Scroll 1/7/21 There Is No Pixel – Only Scruul

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(1) HOW TO KEEP GOING THE DAY AFTER. Sarah Gailey’s “Coup Self-Care” at Here’s the Thing has a long list of ideas for taking care of yourself (that begins after the following excerpt.)

…This kind of stress — the stress of a fucking coup happening in a big country that tends to be irresponsible with its feelings — is hard to weather. I’d wager I’m not the only one struggling with work today. Yesterday I didn’t struggle with work, because I have the luxury of being able to say “nothing is getting done today” when there’s a coup happening. So I didn’t struggle with work, because I didn’t even try to work — instead I watched what was happening, had phone calls with friends and family to process the domestic terrorist attack on the Capitol, and reached out to loved ones in an effort to remind all of us that we are not alone.

…What’s happening in America right now, for most of us, doesn’t feel quite so navigable as that. The coup isn’t something we can reach out and touch and change and solve. There are a ton of possible consequences and outcomes, some which we can predict and some which we can’t, and all of them will affect us, and none of them feel like things we can control. This shit is scary and destabilizing. It’s okay to feel scared and destabilized about the things we can’t control.

It’s also important to remember that the things we can’t control don’t take up the entire horizon. It’s easy to feel swallowed up by that sense of helplessness — but we aren’t helpless. There are things we can’t control, and there are things we can.

Let’s take a look at some things we can control. If you follow me on Twitter, you’ve probably seen some of this before, but look through anyway to remind yourself of the places you can stabilize. These might not all apply to you. This is intended to be a broad assortment of options, not a definitive list! Take what works and throw the rest in the trash….

(2) MARK HIM PRESENT.  John C. Wright says he and his family were in Washington DC yesterday “to show our support for Trump, but, more to the point, our support for curtailing election fraud.”“Regarding the Events of Jan 6”. Short post followed by a lot of comments from Trump supporters.

(3) DAVID WEBER UPDATE. Today on David Weber’s author page at Facebook:

Latest from Mr. Weber:

BP is under control pretty much completely now. Still watching for possible clotting issues, but that’s only a general precaution at this point. We’re doing fairly gentle in-room therapy, and the lungs are mostly clear now, but O2 absorption is still lagging. Got me up to the level where they want me, but it’s still taking 6 liters of pressure to keep it there. So we work to bring that down on a day by day basis.

(4) HOW WRITERS DON’T GET PAID. Renowned sf critic Paul Kincaid posted on Facebook about the exploitation of nonfiction writers:

…Ten years ago I found myself inadvertently reviewing for the Los Angeles Review of Books (a review I had submitted to SF Studies was passed on to the LARB instead). At the time LARB was a start-up, a new kid on the block, and when you wrote for them you got a screed about how they were a professional publication and how much they appreciated their contributors but how they were operating on a shoestring so if we would consider not taking money for the review it would help. And yes, I was happy to help on those terms, so I did review after review for them for free. Until I was made redundant and I needed some income. So on my next review I asked to be paid. And they coughed up, no problem, money came through without a hiccup. Then they stopped asking me to review. Critics are valued only so long as you don’t have to pay them….

(5) TOMORROW PRIZE. Still time to enter The Tomorrow Prize contest for short science fiction by an L.A. County high school student – the deadline is February 1, 2021. For further information visit the contest webpage.

The Tomorrow Prize showcases the best in creative, critical thinking, as well as great storytelling, by students from throughout Los Angeles. 

The Tomorrow Prize is free for students to submit up to two original short stories of 1,500 words or less. Prizes include cash prizes for First, Second, and Third, as well as a special prize for the best environmental conservation themed story! 

This prize, The Green Feather Award is co-sponsored by the LA Audubon Society. The winner will receive a small cash prize and will be published in the LA Audubon newsletter.

(5A) THIS SHOULD TIDE YOU OVER. Fanac.org now has available for free download two of the biggest fanzines ever published.

Bergeron’s Willis issue of Warhoon came out in 1978. In those mimeo days File 770 was brand new, and I helped Bergeron promote his project with a rider attached to issue #5.

(6) FREE READ. Some of the Best from Tor.com 2020 is available free, featuring twenty-four original stories published on the site in the past year. It’s convenient if you haven’t already read them on the Tor.com site. Download from your favorite vendors.

(7) KNIT UP THE RAVELED SLEAVE. Here’s another entry in the Future Tense Fiction series of short stories from Future Tense and Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination about how technology and science will change our lives.  “Dream Soft, Dream Big” by Hal Y. Zhang, “A new short story about science, startups, and a cultish online community.”

BECKER NGUYEN (NARRATION): Complete the sequence—the wheel, the printing press, the transistor … what’s next? What if I tell you the next revolutionary invention may already exist, but instead of being powered by coal or electricity, it’s powered purely by the most nebulous parts of our minds?

I’m Becker Nguyen. On today’s episode of Static Shock: how one man discovered something extraordinary about our dreams that could save the world, and what happened next that made it all seem like a nightmare.

It’s accompanied by a response essay by sleep researcher Kristin E.G. Sanders: “Can we convince the sleeping brain to process our problems?”

…In a recent study, my collaborators and I asked whether targeted memory reactivation could improve problem-solving. In evening sessions, participants attempted to solve brain teasers, each paired with a different music clip. Then, we presented some of the music clips while participants slept. In the morning, participants reattempted the same brain teasers they failed to solve the prior night. We were excited to find that participants solved more of the brain teasers that were cued overnight. Interestingly, unlike for Katia, the solutions did not come to them in a dream. And unlike Loewi, they did not awaken with the solution in the middle of the night. Instead, participants solved the brain teasers when they actively worked on them again.

(8) YOUR MIND’S EAR. [Item by Daniel Dern.] A message I just read on LinkedIn gave the person’s location as Dunedin, <State>.

My <brain or whatever> initially parsed (internally pronounced) it as:

Duned-in

at which point some other part of my brain went, “Wait, that’s not right,” called up the Tolkein reference cells, and burped up, “Du-ne-din”

Yeah, it’s likely the real pronunciation-influencer was my being on LinkedIn (which I pronouce/see as two syllables).

Can anybody think of other words with different pronounciations based on sf-or-fantasy PoV?

(9) A TREAT FOR THE EYE. Dreams of Space – Books and Ephemera has numerous scans of the excellent art in the Russian book Hour of Space (1962).

This book is a soviet history of spaceflight and text heavy. What is notable about it are the color plates and some of the chapter header illustrations…. 

Vladimir Lvov. Illustrated by V. Noskov. Hour of Space. Moscow: Publishing House of the Central Committee if the Komsomol. 206 p. 20 cm. 1962.

(10) ELLISON AT IGUANACON. Fanac.org has posted the first segment of a recording of “Harlan Ellison: Burning the Phoenix” from 1978.

IguanCon II, the 36th Worldcon, was held in Phoenix, Arizona in 1978. Guest of Honor Harlan Ellison held forth for hours in “Burning the Phoenix: Remarks, Dark & Light.” This audio recording, illustrated with images, is the first 40 minutes of that talk. Harlan tells a great story about Avon, talks about The Tonight Show, his script for Asimov’s “I, Robot” and about his plans for “The Last Dangerous Visions”. Harlan was a charismatic, funny, witty speaker, and at this event, he is talking to a large audience of his appreciative and enthusiastic fans.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws6kFq61DhE

(11) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.

  • January 7, 1934 — The first Flash Gordon comic strips of Alex Raymond were published by King Features Syndicate. The strip was subsequently adapted into many other media, from three Universal movie serials (Thirties Flash Gordon and Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars, and Forties Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe) to a 1970s television series and a 1980 feature film, Flash Gordon. 

(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz]

  • Born January 7, 1899 – Orlin Tremaine.  Noteworthy to us for years as editor of Astounding.  His editorial “Thought Variants” struck a spark.  At one point headed half a dozen Street & Smith magazines e.g. Air Trails, Cowboy Stories, Dynamic Adventures, Romance Range.  Published half a dozen stories of his own.  First Fandom Hall of Fame.  (Died 1956) [JH]
  • Born January 7, 1891 – Page Cooper.  World War II reporter.  Wrote books about horses and dogs including the fine Man o’ War.  For us she put eight poems in Weird Tales; two are quoted, more about her is told here.  (Died 1958) [JH]
  • Born January 7, 1912 — Charles Addams. Illustrator best known for the Addams Family which he first drew in 1932 and kept drawing until his death. Needless to say there have been a number of films using these characters of which The Addams Family is my favorite. Linda H. Davis’ Charles Addams: A Cartoonist’s Life is well worth seeking out and reading. (Died 1988.) (CE) 
  • Born January 7, 1924 – Col. Christine Haycock, M.D.  Nurse in World War II, first woman intern at Walter Reed Hospital, professor, graduate of U.S. Army War College, Fellow of the American College of Surgeons.  Olympic fencer, amateur radio, photography.  Married Sam Moskowitz; both were Guests of Honor at Disclave 9.  Treasurer of the Lunarians.  After SaM died, won the Moskowitz Archive Award.  American Medical Women’s Ass’n appreciation here.  (Died 2008) [JH]
  • Born January 7, 1926 – Graham Stone.  Leading Australian fan, being also, as is often included, a bibliographer, collector, small-press publisher.  Notes on Australian SF, Australian SF Bibliography 1948-1999 (rev. 2010), Vol Molesworth’s History of Australian SF Fandom 1935-1963.  Correspondent of Riverside Quarterly, SF Chronicle, SF Commentary.  Bertram Chandler Award.  See here.  (Died 2013) [JH]
  • Born January 7, 1948 – Jeannie DiModica, age 73.  Immortalized in Ginjer Buchanan’s “I’ve Had No Sleep and I Must Giggle”.  [JH]
  • Born January 7, 1950 — Erin Gray, 71. She’s best known as Colonel Wilma Deering Buck Rogers in the 25th Century series. Would it surprise you that she shows up in as Commander Grey in Star Trek Continues, one of those video Trek fanfic? Well it certainly doesn’t surprise me at all. (CE) 
  • Born January 7, 1955 — Karen Haber, 66. I fondly remember reading her Hugo nominated  Meditations on Middle Earth anthology, not to mention the three Universe anthologies she did with her husband Robert Silverberg which are most excellent. I don’t remember reading any of her novels but that’s hardly a certainty that I didn’t as even when my memory was a lot better than is now,  I hardly remembered all the genre fiction I’ve read. (CE) 
  • Born January 7, 1957 — Nicholson Baker, 64. Ok ISFDB lists him as having two SFF novels, The Fermata and House of Holes. The Wiki page him lists those as being two out of the three erotic novels that he’s written. Not having read them, are they indeed erotic SFF? I see that ESF say they’re indeed SFF and yes are erotic. H’h. (CE) 
  • Born January 7, 1961 — Mark Allen Shepherd, 60.  Morn, the bar patron on Deep Space Nine. Amazingly he was in Quark’s bar a total of ninety three episodes plus one episode each on Next Gen and Voyager. Technically he’s uncredited in almost all of those appearances. That’s pretty much his entire acting career. I’m trying to remember if he has any lines. He’s also an abstract painter whose work was used frequently on DS9 sets. (CE) 
  • Born January 7, 1966 — Heidi Elizabeth Yolen Stemple, 55. Daughter of Jane Yolen, sister of Adam Stemple who was the vocalist of Boiled in Lead which mother wrote lyrics for. She and mother co-wrote the Mirror, Mirror: Forty Folktales for Mothers and Daughters to Share anthology which I highly recommend for your reading pleasure. ISFDBsays they did two chapbooks as well, A Kite for Moon and Monster Academy.  (CE) 
  • Born January 7, 1968 – Georgi Gospodinov, age 53.  A novel and a shorter story for us; other short stories, plays, screenplays, four books of poetry.  Angelus Award, Jan Michalski Prize, six Bulgarian awards.  [JH]

(13) COMICS SECTION.

  • Herman has an alien encounter with a short order cook.
  • Bizarro shows one step in a witch’s purchase of a new home.
  • Get Fuzzy has a disturbing example of cat litigation….

(14) ARG! Rabbit Rabbit provides “A Game Designer’s Analysis Of QAnon” on Medium.

I am a game designer with experience in a very small niche. I create and research games designed to be played in reality. I’ve worked in Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), LARPs, experience fiction, interactive theater, and “serious games”. Stories and games that can start on a computer, and finish in the real world. Fictions designed to feel as real as possible. Games that teach you. Puzzles that come to life all around the players. Games where the deeper you dig, the more you find. Games with rabbit holes that invite you into wonderland and entice you through the looking glass.

When I saw QAnon, I knew exactly what it was and what it was doing. I had seen it before. I had almost built it before. It was gaming’s evil twin. A game that plays people. (cue ominous music)

QAnon has often been compared to ARGs and LARPs and rightly so. It uses many of the same gaming mechanisms and rewards. It has a game-like feel to it that is evident to anyone who has ever played an ARG, online role-play (RP) or LARP before. The similarities are so striking that it has often been referred to as a LARP or ARG. However this beast is very very different from a game.

It is the differences that shed the light on how QAnon works and many of them are hard to see if you’re not involved in game development. QAnon is like the reflection of a game in a mirror, it looks just like one, but it is inverted.

First characteristic on the list:

Guided Apophenia

(15) KARMA CHAMELEON. “Rutgers engineers have created a new type of light-reacting hydrogel” – SYFY Wire has the story.

Blending in with one’s immediate environment like the active camouflage technology used by the alien hunter in Predator would certainly have alarming applications in the real world, making the procurement of a free windmill cookie from the bulk food bin at grocery stores nearly undetectable.

But clever scientists and engineers at Rutgers University are eager to replicate that amazing invisibility ability by inventing a new type of 3D-printed stretchable material with the power to change color on demand. While the potentials for such shifting smart gels are limitless, the immediate goal is targeting an advanced method of military camouflage.

(16) SCREAMING HEADLINES. Here a high-definition re-upload of the late MF Doom’s supervillain-themed “All Caps” music video

(17) LOST WORLD, FOUND SFF. In “Revisiting The Lost World, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Rollicking Adventure Novel” on CrimeReads, Jon Lellenberg discusses why Doyle wrote The Lost World and explains his interest in sf. (Note: CrimeReads misspelled the author’s name which is Jon and not John.)

… In the end, Conan Doyle went in another direction, but did not lose his desire to write a “Rider Haggardy” novel. While he admired authors like George Meredith and Charles Reade and his own contemporary, Thomas Hardy, he preferred to write Romances and Adventures. Even being a doctor was a Romance to him, embraced in his “The Romance of Medicine” talk in 1910 at St. Mary’s Hospital, London, where his son Kingsley was a medical student. And the scientific consulting detective Sherlock Holmes’s investigations were Adventures as far as Conan Doyle was concerned, rather than Cases, or Mysteries.

By 1911, these tendencies collided with a regret over diminishing “blank spaces” on the world’s map. When a Lost World character remarks that “The big blank spaces in the map are all being filled up, and there’s no room for romance anywhere,” Conan Doyle was quoting himself anonymously, from a talk he’d given the year before at a luncheon honoring the Arctic explorer Robert Peary….

(18) WIRED FOR SOUND. Literary Hub introduces “Charlie Jane Anders Reads from Victories Greater Than Death” in the Storybound podcast. (“S3. Ep. 4: Charlie Jane Anders reads an excerpt from “Victories Greater Than Death”.)

Storybound is a radio theater program designed for the podcast age. Hosted by Jude Brewer and with original music composed for each episode, the podcast features the voices of today’s literary icons reading their essays, poems, and fiction.

On the fourth episode of the third season, Charlie Jane Anders reads an excerpt from Victories Greater Than Death, with sound design and music composition from Oginalii.

(19) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Spock’s Surprise Visit To The Carol Burnett Show” on YouTube shows a cameo that Leonard Nimoy made as Spock on the show in 1967.

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