Tag Archives: Doctor Who

Pixel Scroll 7/25/24 Dentist Savage, The Man Of Fluoride, By Les Doctor

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(1) CHRIS GARCIA ANALYZES THE AGENDA. In Claims Department 74 – “2024 Business Meeting”, Chris Garcia will be happy to tell you what he thinks about every proposal or amendment up for ratification at Glasgow 2024.

Welcome to another Claims Department, and this one is hella SMoFish, so if you got loins, you might wanna gird them….

There are things Chris is for, things he’s against, even one thing “I’m all the damn hell crap balls of the way for!” There’s another he disapproves of because “It’s clear to me that some people just hate fun”. And one piece of business he writes down with, “It’s garbage.”

However, all the commentary is substantial and well-informed.

The issue also includes a six-page Q&A session with Business Meeting Presiding Officer Jesi Lipp. For example, Lipp says about the items which are going to be confined in an Executive Session:

…I want to clarify a few misunderstandings that I’ve seen. First, if you are an attending member of WSFS, you don’t have to leave the room. Second, the rules around divulging what happens in executive session only apply to non-members. Any member at the meeting is free to discuss what happened with other WSFS members (so long as they do so in a way that does not also divulge the proceedings to non-members) because they also have an interest in the happenings of the society. Third, minutes are still recorded in executive session, they just don’t become a part of the publicly available minutes, but they will be retained and could be read at a future meeting (if that meeting was itself in executive session)…

There is no misunderstanding that the idea is to keep the transactions of the Executive Session from becoming known to the general public.

(2) HUGO BALLOT STORY HAS LEGS.  The Worldcon’s announcement covered here as “Glasgow 2024 Disqualifies Fraudulent Hugo Ballots” has been picked up by some mainstream news and popular culture sites:

(3) VINTAGE SAFETY. “Can a flight safety video be hilarious?” asks Abigail Reynolds. “Yup, especially if you like Bridgerton, Outlander, Pride & Prejudice, or Downton Abbey!” Will some of you be seeing this en route to the UK and Glasgow? “British Airways | Safety Video 2024 | May We Haveth One’s Attention”.

(4) TOXIC SPINES. “Old books can be loaded with poison. Some collectors love the thrill” – Yahoo! finds literary tastes can be a hazard.

As a graduate student in Laramie, Wyo., in the 1990s, Sarah Mentock spent many weekends hunting for bargains at neighborhood yard sales. On one of those weekends, she spotted “The Lord of the Isles,” a narrative poem set in 14th-century Scotland. Brilliant green with a flowery red and blue design, the clothbound cover of the book – written by “Ivanhoe” author Walter Scott and published in 1815 – intrigued Mentock more than the story.

“It was just so beautiful,” she says. “I had to have it.”

For the next 30 years, “The Lord of the Isles” occupied a conspicuous place on Mentock’s bookshelf, the vivid green sliver of its spine adding a shock of color to her home. Sometimes she’d handle the old book when she dusted or repainted, but mostly she didn’t think too much about it.

Until, that is, she stumbled upon a news article in 2022 about the University of Delaware’s Poison Book Project, which aimed to identify books still in circulation that had been produced using toxic pigments common in Victorian bookbinding. Those include lead, chromium, mercury – and especially arsenic, often used in books with dazzling green covers.

“Huh,” Mentock thought, staring at a photo of one of the toxic green books in the article. “I have a book like that.”

Mentock shipped the book – tripled-wrapped in plastic – to Delaware. It wasn’t long before she heard back. The red contained mercury; the blue contained lead. And the green cover that captivated Mentock all those years ago? Full of arsenic.

“Congratulations,” the email she received said, “you have the dubious honor of sending us the most toxic book yet.”…

(5) ACTORS UNION STRIKES AGAINST TOP VIDEO GAME PUBLISHERS. “SAG-AFTRA Calls Strike Against Major Video Game Publishers” Variety tells why.

SAG-AFTRA will go on strike against major video game publishers, the actors union announced Thursday, following more than a year and half of negotiations, with the main sticking being protections against the use of artificial intelligence.

“Although agreements have been reached on many issues important to SAG-AFTRA members, the employers refuse to plainly affirm, in clear and enforceable language, that they will protect all performers covered by this contract in their A.I. language,” SAG-AFTRA said.

The strike was called by SAG-AFTRA national executive director and chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland and the Interactive Media Agreement Negotiating Committee. It will go into effect July 26 at 12:01 a.m….

The video game companies included in the strike are: Activision Productions Inc., Blindlight LLC, Disney Character Voices Inc., Electronic Arts Productions Inc., Formosa Interactive LLC, Insomniac Games Inc., Llama Productions LLC, Take 2 Productions Inc., VoiceWorks Productions Inc., and WB Games Inc….

“We’re not going to consent to a contract that allows companies to abuse A.I. to the detriment of our members,” SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher said. “Enough is enough. When these companies get serious about offering an agreement our members can live — and work — with, we will be here, ready to negotiate.”…

(6) WE ARE NOT AT THE SINGULARITY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Nature’s cover story this week “Garbage Out” looks at artificial intelligence.  Apparently artificial intelligences (AIs) are really easy to induce to hallucinate if the AIs are trained by computer-generated data. One definition of a Singularity is that it is the point in time in which technology itself creates technology: such as robots building the computers and the computers programming the robots and themselves.  Such a singularity was popularized by the  mathematician and SF author Vernor Vinge….  The good news from this research is that humans are still key… (For now.)

The explosion in generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as large language models has been powered by the vast sets of human-generated data used to train them. As these tools continue to proliferate and their output becomes increasingly available online, it is conceivable that the source of training data could switch to content generated by computers. In this week’s issue, Ilia Shumailov and colleagues investigate the likely consequences of such a shift. The results are not promising. The researchers found that feeding AI-generated data to a model caused subsequent generations of the model to degrade to the point of collapse. In one test, text about medieval architecture was used as the starting point, but by the ninth generation the model output was a list of jackrabbits. The team suggests that training models using AI-generated data is not impossible but that great care must be taken over filtering those data — and that human-generated data will probably still have the edge.

The open access research is here.

(I do warn folk that the machines are taking over, but nobody ever listens…)

(7) DONATE TO DEB GEISLER AWARD. In honor of the late Deb Geisler, who died in March, her husband Mike Benveniste has established the Deb Geisler Award for Journalistic Excellence Fund at Suffolk University (where she taught) “to provide an annual stipend to a deserving student in the Communication, Journalism, & Media Department.”

Donations to the fund can be made online or by check: Link to give online: https://Suffolk.edu/Summa. By mail: Suffolk University, Office of Advancement, 73 Tremont Street, Boston, MA 02108. Attn: Kathy Tricca

(8) TOGETHER FOR A LUNCH “TREK” WITH THE FABULOUS NICK MEYER! [Item by Steve Vertlieb.] Together with the wondrous Nicholas Meyer on July 24, 2024. In addition to having directed the definitive “Star Trek” film … Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, as well as the last motion picture with the original television crew, Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country, Nick also directed the unforgettable romantic sci-fi fantasy, Time After Time, directed The Day After, the controversial telefilm predicting the devastating consequences of nuclear war, composed the screenplay for Star Trek: The Voyage Home, the teleplay for The Night That Panicked America (concerning Orson Welles radio production of “The War of the Worlds”) and authored The Seven Percent Solution.

He is a brilliant raconteur and conversationalist, as well as a charming and most delightful lunch companion. His newest Sherlock Holmes novel, Sherlock Holmes and the Telegram from Hell, from the Reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D. is enjoying critical success and brisk sales.

Had the pleasure of chatting with Nick once more on Sunday afternoon following a screening of Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country at the Aero Theater, and spent an absolutely delightful two hours over lunch this afternoon, enjoying more quality time with this sublimely gifted artist who I’m honored to think of as my friend.

Nicholas Meyer and Steve Vertlieb

(9) SHINING MEMORIES. IndieWire cues up the trailer for Shine On — The Forgotten ‘Shining’ Location”, a new Kubrick documentary.

Few movie sets in Hollywood history have generated more interest than the Overlook Hotel from Stanley Kubrick‘s “The Shining.” The fictional Colorado hotel provides the backdrop for Jack Torrance’s (Jack Nicholson) descent into madness, and Kubrick devotees have spent countless hours analyzing symbolism in the production design and the disorienting effects created by the hotel’s impossible floor plan. The hotel sets, hailed by many as some of the defining craftsmanship of Kubrick’s filmmaking career, now get their moment in the spotlight in a new documentary set to be released on the late director’s birthday.…

…The film will see the collaborators revisiting some of the last remaining studio sets from “The Shining,” which were thought to have been destroyed years ago….

“There have been so many rumors about some of the sets from ‘The Shining’ still existing at Elstree Studios, but to actually find them and walk around them was like discovering a holy grail of film history,” [Paul] King said in a statement announcing the film…

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

July 25, 1973 — Mur Lafferty, 51.

By Paul Weimer: The Mighty Mur Lafferty, to be truthful. Back in the early days of the modern SFFnal internet, when before even blogs were quite a thing, there was Mur Lafferty, doing audio versions of stories, doing her podcast (I should be writing) and being one of the early adopters and early heralds of the SFFnal internet. I came into the SFFNal internet not long after, and thus discovered her work, and her podcast, just when I was getting my own start in writing reviews and such (this was in 2008 or so).  I started with her Afterlife series and followed her career along. In those days, self-published work “didn’t count” for publication, which is why she managed to be a 2013 John C. Campbell  Award nominee and then winner (now the Astounding Award) for Best New Writer, which was odd, because I’d been reading her for half a decade.

Mur Lafferty in 2017.

And it is heartwarming that she remembers me from those early halcyon days.

But besides the Afterlife novellas, and the Shambling Guides, and her fun twitter threads of pretending to watch minor league Baseball in the guise of a lady of Westeros come to North Carolina, I’ve been listening to her podcast, interacting with her on social media, meeting her at cons for a good long time. She’s played the long game in honing her skills, craft and writing abilities. Mur Laffery is simply the embodiment of the “10,000 hours” school of writing, getting better by writing and writing and writing. Mur proves the grind can work.

I think her Midsolar Murders novels (starting with Station Eternity) are probably the best place to begin with her work. I find her voice as a writer quirky, comfortable, and relentlessly entertaining, Although Six Wakes, which really marks the start of her more recent career (and a Hugo finalist) is a good single novel to take the measure of Mur’s work, if you want to try it.

And yes, Mur, yes, as you say, I should be writing. Happy birthday my friend.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) POEM BY ROB THORNTON.

Greenwish

The city blooms
Solar flowers drink life
Unwood towers soar

The city glistens
Buffalo browse in
shade Commuters
step carefully

The city works
Nests of mage-makers
shape great info-dreams

The city pauses
Crowds shimmer
rainbow
Talk lazily in siesta

The city eats
Trini-Hunan tofu
and gorgeous greens

The city sleeps
Inhales waste
Exhales air and water

The city awakes and sighs

“Christ, what an imagination I’ve got.”

(13) WHO’S WATCHING? The BBC says they like the numbers the show is pulling: “Doctor Who praised by BBC in annual report as ratings continue to grow” at Radio Times.

The BBC’s annual report has praised the impact of Doctor Who – as ratings for the recently concluded season 14 continue to grow on BBC iPlayer.

The beloved sci-fi series was mentioned several times throughout the report, which spotlighted it as one of the shows driving the corporation’s “huge audiences”, while also mentioning its “economic impact” in Wales and across the UK….

… The 60th anniversary specials were also mentioned as one of the year’s “content highlights” alongside Eurovision coverage and the third season of Planet Earth.

The latest figures for the new season, as reported by The Times, now make it the highest-rated drama for young viewers (under 35s) across the BBC this year.

Overnight ratings for the season had been lower than is typically the case due to the show’s new release strategy – which saw each episode debut on BBC iPlayer at midnight on Fridays, several hours before the BBC One broadcast on Saturday evening.

But a spokesperson for the show explained that this had always been the expectation, saying: “Overnight ratings no longer provide an accurate picture of all those who watch drama in an on-demand world.

“This season of Doctor Who premiered on iPlayer nearly 24 hours before broadcast, and episode 1 has already been viewed by nearly 6 million viewers and continues to grow.”

(14) BY NO MEANS A DREAD PIRATE. “SpongeBob SquarePants Rings in 25 Years; Mark Hamill Joins Next Movie” and Variety is there for the announcement.

To celebrate a quarter century of “SpongeBob SquarePants,” Nickelodeon pulled out all the stops at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, starting with an epic Hall H panel.

Mark Hamill made a surprise appearance to reveal that he’d be voicing The Flying Dutchman in the upcoming fourth SpongeBob film, “The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants,” out in 2025. “He’s the most fearsome goofball pirate you’ve ever seen. The movie is more cerebral. It’s more thoughtful, intellectually challenging. No, I’m just yanking your chain. It’s inspired silliness from start to finish.”…

(15) NOT EXACTLY AN EXTENDED VACATION. “NASA says no return date yet for astronauts and troubled Boeing capsule at space station” – Yahoo! has the update.

Already more than a month late getting back, two NASA astronauts will remain at the International Space Station until engineers finish working on problems plaguing their Boeing capsule, officials said Thursday.

Test pilots Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were supposed to visit the orbiting lab for about a week and return in mid-June, but thruster failures and helium leaks on Boeing’s new Starliner capsule prompted NASA and Boeing to keep them up longer.

NASA’s commercial crew program manager Steve Stich said mission managers are not ready to announce a return date. The goal is to bring Wilmore and Williams back aboard Starliner, he added.

“We’ll come home when we’re ready,” Stich said.

Stich acknowledged that backup options are under review. SpaceX’s Dragon capsule is another means of getting NASA astronauts to and from the space station.

(16) IN SPACE, NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU. [Item by Steven French.] Maybe aliens are already nearby — they’re just small and quiet! “The Fermi Paradox May Have a Very Simple Explanation” according to Scientific American.

… The absence of evidence for aliens could be because they don’t exist or because our sampling depth is inadequate to detect them—a bit like declaring the entire ocean free of fish when none appear in a scooped-up bucket of seawater. Sampling depth refers to how thoroughly and keenly we can conduct a search. Fermi’s question is valuable because it narrows the possibilities down to two: either aliens are not present near Earth, or our current search methods are insufficient….

…From our privileged position in history, we know that advances in energy use often come with increases in efficiency, not simply increases in size or expansiveness. Think of the modern miniaturization of smartphones versus the mid-20th-century trend of computers that filled up whole rooms. Perhaps we should be looking for sophisticated and compact alien spacecraft, rather than motherships spewing misused energy….

(17) EYE ON AN EXOPLANET. “Webb images nearest super-Jupiter, opening a new window to exoplanet research” from Max-Planck-Gesellschaft.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a team of astronomers led by the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy imaged a new exoplanet that orbits a star in the nearby triple system Epsilon Indi. The planet is a cold super-Jupiter exhibiting a temperature of around 0 degrees Celsius and a wide orbit comparable to that of Neptune around the Sun. This measurement was only possible thanks to JWST’s unprecedented imaging capabilities in the thermal infrared. It exemplifies the potential of finding many more such planets similar to Jupiter in mass, temperature, and orbit. Studying them will improve our knowledge of how gas giants form and evolve in time….

What do we know about Eps Ind Ab?

“We discovered a signal in our data that did not match the expected exoplanet,” says Matthews. The point of light in the image was not in the predicted location. “But the planet still appeared to be a giant planet,” adds Matthews. However, before being able to make such an assessment, the astronomers had to exclude the signal was coming from a background source unrelated to Eps Ind A.

“It is always hard to be certain, but from the data, it seemed quite unlikely the signal was coming from an extragalactic background source,” explains Leindert Boogaard, another MPIA scientist and a co-author of the research article. Indeed, while browsing astronomical databases for other observations of Eps Ind, the team came across imaging data from 2019 obtained with the VISIR infrared camera attached to the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT). After re-analysing the images, the team found a faint object precisely at the position where it should be if the source imaged with JWST belonged to the star Eps Ind A.

The scientists also attempted to understand the exoplanet atmosphere based on the available images of the planet in three colours: two from JWST/MIRI and one from VLT/VISIR. Eps Ind Ab is fainter than expected at short wavelengths. This could indicate substantial amounts of heavy elements, particularly carbon, which builds molecules such as methane, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide, commonly found in gas-giant planets. Alternatively, it might indicate that the planet has a cloudy atmosphere. However, more work is needed to reach a final conclusion.

(18) ATOMIC CLUBHOUSE. [Item by Steven French.] “‘Every 14-year-old boy’s dream’: Cumbrian nuclear bunker goes to auction” in the Guardian. A must-have for the budding tech billionaire:

…It’s a property with no windows, no running water and no mod cons except for a phone line. But there is parking, the countryside is phenomenal and when Armageddon happens it could be perfect.

This week will bring the rare sale of a 1958 nuclear bunker in the Cumbrian Dales near Sedbergh…

(19) VIDEO OF THE DAY The YouTube channel Grammaticus Books has released another vintage SF video as part of the multi-YouTube-channel, Rocket Summer, event. This time his 9-minute review looks at the Robert Heinlein novel Tunnel in the Sky.

Tunnel in the Sky (1955).  Arguably not his best book – it is a young adult coming of age story – it does though reveal some of the themes that recur in a number of his works including societal structure.  This one has a bit of a Lord of the Flies feel: that novel came out the previous year. Grammaticus does pick up on something Heinlein does not openly convey but does hint at in a few places, is that the main protagonist is from an ethnic minority: remember, this novel was published in 1955 USA.

[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Paul Weimer, Rob Thornton, Steve Vertlieb, 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 Daniel “DD Not DDS” Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 7/21/24 Did I Ever Tell You About The Man Who Taught His Pixel To Scroll?

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(1) FRANKENSTEIN UNBOUND. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] We have had an SFnal real treat over here in Blighty with a fresh take on the Frankenstein mythos in the form of a three-part audio drama, and through the wonders of the world-wide interwebby thingy, you can enjoy it too.  Brian Aldiss constantly told us that the novel Frankenstein was the first true SF novel (with everything genre-related before that being ‘proto-SF’).  And now BBC Radio 4 have aired a three-part audio drama that is a post-modern and an ultra-SFnal revamp of the story.

It is set in the future here a researcher creates an artificial intelligence (AI) based on the Frankenstein author’s (Mary Shelley’s) mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. Mary Wollstonecraft was herself well known for her book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman hence the title of this audio play, A Vindication of Frankenstein’s Monster.

Starting with Mary Wollstonecraft’s ground-breaking feminist text, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and moving into a radical re-imagining of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), through to the contemporary world of Artificial Intelligence, Linda Marshall Griffiths’ drama asks what would happen if a woman created a woman?

In the first episode of this three part drama, Lizzie walks through Mary Wollstonecraft’s world at the end of the 18th Century and she has questions.  Tracing Wollstonecraft’s extraordinary life, she is challenged by her bravery, her incredible mind and her capacity to fall in love with the wrong men. But this is not time-travel, Lizzie is creating a Virtual Reality world at the centre of which is Mary Wollstonecraft. But as the ‘AI’ Wollstonecraft comes to life, trapped in her virtual world, she begins to question exactly what has changed for women more than two hundred years after the publication of her manifesto – have women achieved equality and freedom? And Lizzie, pregnant and recently diagnosed with an aneurysm, must decide whether to allow her life to be constrained by her health, her lover Max, her impending motherhood or whether to complete her work, following Wollstonecraft’s journey to Norway…

You can download all three episodes:

(2) WHO TAKES. Charlie Jane Anders’ June newsletter Happy Dancing has “11 Hot Takes About Doctor Who”. Here’s the first one.

1) Doctor Who has wasted some great story seeds from “Genesis of the Daleks”

Steven Moffat has mined this 1975 classic for story ideas at least twice: in “The Magician’s Apprentice”/”The Witch’s Familiar” and more recently in “Boom.” But there’s still some great material that nobody has touched. In particular: the Doctor’s suggestion that “many future worlds could become allies” because of the threat of the Daleks, and that something good could come of the Daleks’ evil… this is something I’d love to see dramatized on screen. (When Terry Nation wrote this line, the memory of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill joining forces against the Nazis was somewhat fresh, but of course that alliance didn’t exactly last.) Also, I’ve long been tantalized by the bit at the very beginning where a Time Lord warns the Doctor about a possible future where the Daleks have won — becoming the only surviving life form in the universe. It would be fascinating to visit that alternate future and perhaps see the Daleks trying to establish it as the main timeline.

(3) A PLUS FOR PHYSICAL BOOKS. “BookTok’s Latest Craze: Books With Sprayed Edges!” at Yahoo!

If you’ve stepped into a bookstore or scrolled Bookstagram and BookTok recently, you’ve likely noticed an increasing number of books with beautiful sprayed edges, or as book lovers call them, “spredges.” This is a design feature where the edges of the book pages are beautifully embellished with color or intricate designs. Sprayed edges might sound like a fun new bookish trend, but they’ve actually been around for centuries. Dating back to the 10th Century, books and sometimes Bibles often had detailed scenes painted on their edges. This practice was called fore-edge painting and now it’s having a renaissance! In recent years, books with sprayed edges have started adorning shelves everywhere, and their immense popularity is only growing. We talked to book pros about why readers are so drawn to this trend, what makes sprayed edges so special and more….

(4) SEE YOU IN THE FUNNY PAGES. The L.A. Breakfast club will host “Tales from the Comic Book Crackdown with Ben Dickow & Company” on August 14 from 7:00 AM – 9:00 AM. Tickets at the link.

Ben Dickow’s new musical Tales From the Comic Book Crackdown brings to life the dramatic Senate hearings on Juvenile Delinquency of April 21, 1954, which were designed to bring down the comic book industry as a whole. These hearings resulted in years of censorship and repression of the comic book industry.

One man stood up for comics and free expression: 32-year-old Bill Gaines, the most successful comic book publisher of his day, was the sole witness to come forward and testify on behalf of comic books. Despite his best efforts, the authorities carried the day, and Bill almost lost everything.

Mr. Beaser: Is there any limit you can think of that you would not put in a magazine because you thought a child should not see or read about it?

​Mr. Gaines: My only limits are the bounds of good taste, what I consider good taste.

​Sen. Kefauver [alluding to the cover illustration for Crime SuspenStories #22]: This seems to be a man with a bloody ax holding a woman’s head up which has been severed from her body. Do you think that is in good taste?

​Mr. Gaines: Yes, sir, I do, for the cover of a horror comic….

You can listen to the music online: “Comic Book Crackdown”.

(5) THOUGHT EXPERIMENT. Sterling Ulrich asks “What if Faramir Joined the Fellowship in The Lord of the Rings?” at CBR.com.

One of the biggest additions to the extended edition of Peter Jackson‘s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers film was a flashback to the moment before Boromir set out for Rivendell. Denethor learned about the upcoming Council of Elrond and wanted to send a representative to ensure that the One Ring was used for the benefit of Gondor. Faramir offered to travel to Rivendell, but Denethor had no faith in his younger son and dispatched Boromir instead….

…On the surface, it seems Faramir’s presence at Amon Hen would have been beneficial. However, the Fellowship’s failures at the Battle of Amon Hen in The Lord of the Rings had consequences that were instrumental to Sauron’s eventual defeat. Merry and Pippin only met the Ents because they ran into Fangorn Forest after escaping their Uruk-hai captors. Likewise, Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli only met Éomer because they crossed paths with him while chasing after the Uruk-hai. Without these chance occurrences, Saruman would have had free rein over Rohan, leaving Gondor without help from its neighboring kingdom in the Siege of Minas Tirith….

(6) SUNDAY MORNING TRANSPORT. “Father Ash” by Rachel Hartman is July’s third free read from Sunday Morning Transport.

Remember, this month, we’re running an annual membership drive of epic proportions — so if you haven’t already, please consider signing up, and if you are signed up, please share this link with your friends.

(7) LYUBOMIR NIKOLOV–NARVI (1950-2024). [Item by Valentin D. Ivanov.] The Bulgarian speculative fiction community lost its doyenne Lyubomir Nikolov–Narvi (1950-2024) on Jul 20. He translated the famous trilogy of J. R. R. Tolkien into Bulgarian and gave the readers many pleasant hours. Nikolov translated from seven languages all together.

He was also an excellent writer on his own – The Tenth Righteous Man (1999) won the fandom award for the best Bulgarian book of the decade – that is, of the last decade of the twentieth century. This amazing novel describes a singularity of sorts – a sudden change in the physical constants gives every person immeasurable destructive power. Will the society survive this challenge?

Nikolov was active until recently – his latest novel appeared in 2022. Ne was known for introducing the game-books in Bulgarian – many kids have learned to read on them. He won an EuroCon (1987), a SotsCon (1989) and many other accolades.

Right now he is probably smoking a pipe in the writers section of Paradise, discussing the fate of Middle Earth with some other esteemed fellows.

More about him here (in Bulgarian, but Google is your friend).

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

July 21, 1948 – Garry Trudeau, 76.

By Paul Weimer: Trudeau as a cartoonist and as a creator has a number of wide ranging credits: Alpha House, where Republican Senators share a house, and hilarity ensues. Tanner, a satirical look at a fake presidential campaign. And many columns in many publications.

But you’re here, and I am here, for Doonesbury. 

Cartoonist Garry Trudeau, the fifth Rathbun Visiting Fellow, delivers “Harry’s Last Lecture on a Meaningful Life.” By Linda A. Cicero / Stanford University News Service.

Doonesbury had been a fixture of comic strips in newspapers for as long as I was reading physical newspapers, from the 70’s all the way to around 2000 when I moved to California and finally stopped reading physical newspapers on a regular basis. (I would soon just read Doonesbury online)  It felt scandalous, even transgressive for me to read and enjoy the comic, once I was old enough to figure out just what the comic was about, because its politics were very much to the left of the politics of my family.  I suppose if my parents had paid more attention, they might have decried the comic’s politics, but they didn’t pay attention, and so I could read it in peace. 

I was way too young for the Watergate series in Doonesbury, which of course was its first high water mark.  Where I remember Doonesbury hitting a height for me was in 1989 and Tiananmen Square. I remember conversations with my older brother, who was enthusiastic that “China is going to become a Democracy!” in exultation.  I was far more realistic, even pessimistic, and I have Doonesbury to thank for helping me get parallax, perspective and point of view on the events happening in Beijing that year. (And I remember that when the protests turned violent, the strip went into re-runs, and that really helped bring home to me how serious it all was).

Ever since, I’ve paid attention to when people complain or try to get strips of Doonesbury pulled or show anger against it. That’s when I know that such a venerable comic strip, from such a talented and abiding creator as Trudeau, has once again hit a sensitive mark. And his influence and inspiration to multiple generations of political cartoonists cannot be underestimated. 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) CLOSER TO THE SKY. If you’re ever near Cusco, Peru, Atlas Obscura says you shouldn’t miss: “Area 21 Cusco – Cusco, Peru”.

AREA 51 MIGHT BE BARRICADED by barbed wire and military guards, but this open-air exhibit welcomes all intrepid travelers. Signs that say Abducción Gratis (“Abduction Free”) and the looming figure of a crashed UFO greet visitors, encouraging guests to meet ET’s distant relatives. Situated atop a hill on the outskirts of Cusco along a winding path, visitors can pose with an assortment of extraterrestrials of all shapes, sizes, and home planets.

However, this is more than a kitschy roadside attraction or opportunity for an Instagram photo-op. The interactive art compilation, crafted by Tupaq Kamariy Candia, perfectly melds Peruvian culture and science fiction, illuminating Peru’s rich history with the cosmos….

(11) I’M DREAMING OF A WHITE CHRISTMAS. Buffalo NASFiC guests of honor Kaja and Phil Foglio took a stroll outside the convention.

(12) REBEL MOON PODCAST PREQUEL. “Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon Announces Surprising Spinoff” at Comicbook.com.

Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon is getting a prequel. Netflix has announced The Seneschal, an upcoming narrative fiction podcast that will take audiences 500 years before the events of Rebel Moon to explore the origins of the robot knights, the Jimmys. The new podcast is set to debut with its first episode on July 29th with five additional episodes dropping weekly wherever you listen to podcasts.

“Now that you’ve met the Jimmys in the movie, I want to tell their story, their creation, and how they came to be,” Snyder said in a video teaser for the podcast. “I can’t wait for you to listen.”

The Seneschal will star Fallout‘s Ella Purnell as the voice of Raina, Naveen Andrews as Grigory, Alfred Enoch as Adwin, Peter Serafinowicz as Bartholomew, and Jason Isaacs as King Ulmer. You can check out the official description of The Seneschal below.

(13) ROSSEAU, LEWIS AND L’ENGLE. The Science Fiction Makers is free to view on YouTube.

The Science Fiction Makers: Rosseau, Lewis and L’Engle is a feature documentary that examines three integral writers who over the past century wrote within the Christian Science Fiction genre. Through interviews with scholars and current writers, reenactments, archival materials and excerpts from their works, we explore a genre that has been counterculture since its beginning. They were outsiders within the larger Sci-Fi genre and they would face harsh criticism, dismissal, and even hostility from all sides for putting their faith and imagination into their writing. In the end, Victor Rosseau, C. S. Lewis, and Madeleine L’Engle were pioneers of a sub-genre that would doggedly survive and continue to influence popular culture to this day.

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

NASFiC 2024 Third Day Photos

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By Rich Lynch:

THE OBLIGATORY DOCTOR WHO PANEL

(L-R) Bill Horst-Kotter, D.G. Valdron, Devo Spice, and Chuck Rothman

I was handicapped by not having seen many of the Ncuti episodes.  So here are a few random thoughts from the panelists: Jodie Whittaker era was mostly done in by lots of meh writing. The new Russell T. Davies era hasn’t “hit its stride” yet. “The Space Babies” episode was a lot of “okay” at best.  And everybody was really tired of episodes where the fate of the entire universe was at stake.  But hey, it’s still a great series!

SUFORD AND TONY – THEIR HOUR

Suford and Tony Lewis: It was a pleasant stroll through their many years in fandom.

IT’S ALIVE! IT’S ALI-I-I-VE!!

The fanzine lounge now exists.  After a long and at times strange journey, John Hertz arrived in Buffalo late last night, and today spent a couple of hours breathing life into what had been a cold, empty room.  Now all it needs is some convention attendees who are interested in fanzines to stop by.

THE “HOW I FOUND FANDOM” PANEL

(L-R) Jilibean, David Kushner, Tony Lewis, Daniel Kimmel, Jeanne Mealy, and D. Cameron Calkins

An interesting blend of recollections which we can probably all mostly identify with.  The most usual doorway still seems to be from being a science fiction reader, but science fiction on TV and in the movies seems not far behind.  How different things would be if Bjo had not taken it upon herself to start a campaign to save Star Trek.

THE CONVENTION’S NAME BADGE

Here it is. Mine is numbered “S 1329”, and when I asked the con registration folks what the “S” meant (everybody’s badge has that feature), nobody knew.

Also, I checked what the current registration totals were and found out there were 475 pre-reg and (as of this evening) 509 people in attendance.

Nobody was able to explain to me why my badge number is 1329.

PARTY TIME

Only one party last night (Montreal in 202-whenever) and it appeared to have run out of food after about an hour-and-a-half. Lots more options this evening. 

Here’s what the New Orleans CONtraflow DeepSouthCon 2025 had to offer.  Yum!

PARTY #2

The Capricon party also has lot of good stuff to eat, but next to nobody has figured out where it is yet.

NO TROUBLE AT ALL FINDING THIS PARTY

Minneapolis in 2073 had lots of good ambience, pretty good food, and friends to talk to.  Hurry up with those longevity drugs!

I may have to walk that “good food” comment back a bit… featured snack food is Peeps.

Pixel Scroll 7/19/24 The Doors Of His Cats, The Lamps Of His Reading Table

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(1) DRAMA. “JK Rowling Edinburgh Trans Rights Play ‘TERF’ Primed For Protests” reports Deadline. The play will be presented during the Edinburgh Fringe next month.

…Penned by Joshua Kaplan, a Hollywood writer whose credits include HBO’s Tokyo Vice, TERF imagines a confrontation between Rowling and the stars of Harry Potter over her views on transgender rights.

The production is topical given Rowling’s near-daily pronouncements and hardened rhetoric on how trans rights have come into conflict with women’s rights. Her posts on X (once Twitter) have put her further at odds with Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint in recent months, and Kaplan sees TERF as a “family conversation” between loved ones with differing views.

In the real world, there have been public exchanges between Rowling and the Harry Potter stars as recently as this year. In April, Rowling accused Radcliffe and Watson of being “cosied up to a movement intent on eroding women’s hard-won rights.” Radcliffe told The Atlantic that he was saddened by Rowling’s stance.

Staged by veteran Edinburgh Festival Fringe producers at Civil Disobedience, TERF (an acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminist usually deployed in a pejorative context) had to change venue from Saint Stephens Theatre to the Assembly Rooms amid concerns over the controversy the play was attracting.

Barry Church-Woods, the co-founder of Civil Disobedience, said that the team is now putting security and other measures in place for protests. He told Deadline that they anticipate audience members could attempt to disrupt the play as it is performed.

“We expect that most people, if they’re intending on disrupting what we’re doing, that will happen in the auditorium of the theatre. We have processes in place that are going to deal with that,” said the producer, who has previously worked on Edinburgh shows with the likes of RuPaul’s Drag Race star Courtney Act….

(2) GLASGOW 2024 PUBLISHES FINAL PROGRESS REPORT. This week the Worldcon published its sixth electronic Progress Report, which due to there having been a PR #0 is numbered Progress Report 5. Download the PDF here. Cover by Sara Felix.

PR5 includes news from all areas including:

  • A final update from Convention Chair Esther MacCallum-Stewart
  • A list of our 6,000+ registered members and ticket holders
  • Membership statistics and demographics, with 33 countries represented from around the globe
  • Practical information to help attendees arrive in and enjoy their time at the convention, from site maps to badge collection arrangements and discounted local travel passes
  • Full details and timings for our Special Events – including the Hugo Award Ceremony, Masquerade, Opera, Orchestra, theatrical performances, concerts, and dances
  • Updates on Volunteering, Accessibility and Childcare Services, as well as our approach to Sustainability
  • Our updated Code of Conduct, which all members and ticket holders are expected to abide by when attending the convention in person or online.

(3) DOCTOR WHO REPORT CARD. “’Doctor Who: Disney Deal, Ncuti Gatwa & Russell T Davies In Spotlight” reports Deadline.

Those lucky enough to attend May’s Disney‘s upfronts at the North Javits Center were treated to clips, teases and appearances from some of the world’s biggest stars.

In the spotlight from the Bob Iger-led Mouse House were hits from the Disney stable including The Acolyte, Welcome to Wrexham, Abbott Elementary and a wealth of ESPN sports shows. The combined budget must have been astronomical.

But almost completely absent from the upfront festivities was Doctor Who, the iconic British sci-fi series that Disney+ now co-produces with the BBC following what was undoubtedly one of the biggest global TV show deals of the past decade. Doctor Who was handed a minor bit of real estate at the North Javits, but its lack of front-and-center placement may spin a yarn about the series’ position in the Disney priority log nearly three years on from the deal being struck.

… Following the conclusion of the the first Disney-BBC Doctor Who season several weeks ago, Deadline has taken the opportunity to analyze its performance both locally and across the pond, its critical reception and just what the future has in store for the deal. Noises that it may not last beyond its initial two seasons are already reverberating around international TV circles, and one source close to the production tells us that they feel its future hangs in the balance already. Disney, the BBC, and co-producers BBC Studios and Bad Wolf all declined Deadline’s interview requests for this article….

(4) DOROTHY VAUGHAN DEDICATION. “NASA Johnson to Dedicate Building to Dorothy Vaughan, Women of Apollo”.

NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston will recognize legendary human computer Dorothy Vaughan and the women of Apollo with activities marking their achievements, including a renaming and ribbon-cutting ceremony at the center’s “Building 12,” on Friday, July 19, the eve of the 55th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing.

At 9 a.m. CDT, NASA Johnson Director Vanessa Wyche will begin with a discussion about the importance of Vaughan and the women of Apollo’s contributions to the agency’s lunar landing program and their significance to today’s Artemis campaign. Other highlights include a poetry reading, a recital by Texas Southern University’s Dr. Thomas F. Freeman Debate Team, and a “Women in Human Spaceflight” panel discussion….

…Following the program, the ribbon-cutting ceremony will begin at Building 12, which will thereafter be named the “Dorothy Vaughan Center in Honor of the Women of Apollo.” The dedication is a tribute to the people who made humanity’s first steps on the Moon possible.

(5) CAGE MATCH. “’Spider-Noir’: Li Jun Li Cast In Amazon’s Marvel Series” – Deadline has the story.

 Li Jun Li (Wu Assassins) is set as a series regular opposite Nicolas Cage in Spider-Noir, the upcoming MGM+ and Prime Video live-action series based on the Marvel comic Spider-Man Noir.

From executive producers/co-showrunners Oren Uziel and Steve Lightfoot and Sony Pictures Television, Spider-Noir tells the story of an aging and down-on-his-luck private investigator (Cage) in 1930s New York who is forced to grapple with his past life as the city’s one and only superhero.

Li will play a singer at the premier nightclub in New York. In addition to Cage, she joins previously cast Lamorne Morris as Robbie Robertson….

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

July 19, 1969 – Kelly Link, 55.

By Paul Weimer: Genius Grant recipient. Small Press Owner, Small Beer Press. Anthologist.

Oh, and just perhaps the best short fiction fantasist of our age. 

 No biggie, right? I think of her work, be it ”Magic for Beginners”, “The Faery Handbag” or “The Hortlak” or any of the numerous other stories she’s written, as being in an overlapping series of subgenres that are centered in magic slipstream realism. To this core central subgenre, Link ably adds elements of urban fantasy, horror, mystery, into this basic dough and bakes rather tasty treats of stories that linger in the mind and in the soul. 

Kelly Link

 I think of Link as a magic realist counterpart to Ted Chiang: her actual output of stories is not actually all that massive. She is careful with word choice and writing, shaping words and sentences to sublime effect. Link’s stories are never to be skimmed over, ever. You will, in the end, regret it.  Her work needs and demands attention, and sometimes, like the work of Liz Hand, I feel like as a reader I am “not in her league” and don’t always grok what she is doing in a story. (To be fair the kind of fantasy Link writes is stuff I do not commonly read besides her fabulous work.

But that’s really wrongheaded of me to make her seem inaccessible. In fact, like Chiang, I think of Link as an excellent ambassador for genre fiction in the worlds of literary fiction, luring readers from outside the genre into it, hopefully to stay. Certainly “Magic for Beginners” is probably the one story I would hand to someone who hasn’t read much or any contemporary fantasy and wanted to give it a try.

(7) COMICS SECTION.

(8) WHAT IF? Check out the next trio of covers in the monthly Disney What If? variant cover series, celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Avengers and X-Men.

The new covers see Goofy, Donald, and Daisy fill in for Wolverine, Captain America, and Black Widow for their iconic team-up in Uncanny X-Men #268; Mickey, Minnie and more enter the X-Men’s revolutionary Krakoan age that kicked off in House of X #1, and the gang assembling for one of the Avengers’ most pivotal moments, the “Disassembled” storyline, in Avengers #500. For more information, visit Marvel.com.

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #59 DISNEY WHAT IF? VARIANT COVER BY GIADA PERISSINOTTO

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #61 DISNEY WHAT IF? VARIANT COVER BY PAOLO MOTTURA

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #63 DISNEY WHAT IF? VARIANT COVER BY FRANCESCO D’IPPOLITO

(9) REMEMBERING H.R. PUFNSTUF. The LA Breakfast Club will host “Sid Krofft: 55 Years of Weird” on September 4. Tickets at the link.

CELEBRATE ALL THINGS KROFFT, INCLUDING PUFNSTUF’S ANNIVERSARY! On September 6, 1969, the world was introduced to the series H.R. PufnStuf and with it, the zany genius of brothers Sid and Marty Krofft! In the decades that followed, Sid & Marty continued to innovate TV, films, live shows and even theme parks with their signature style of puppetry, visuals and storytelling.

Join us on September 4th to witness Sid Krofft’s honorary initiation into The LA Breakfast Club! We’ll then join Sid on a rollicking discussion about the beloved projects that define his groundbreaking career.

Sep 04, 2024, 7:00 AM – 9:00 AM

The Los Angeles Breakfast Club, 3201 Riverside Dr, Los Angeles, CA 90027, USA

(10) IN A HOLE IN THE GROUND THERE LIVED… “A newly-discovered dinosaur may have spent part of its life underground” NPR has learned.

…Now there is a new dinosaur species on the paleontology block, Fona herzogae.

HAVIV AVRAHAMI: Small plant-eating dinosaurs – they were bipedal. If you took, like, a Komodo dragon tail and attached it to the back of an ostrich, that’s kind of what Fona would have looked like.

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

That’s Haviv Avrahami. He’s a Ph.D. student at North Carolina State University and was part of the team that identified this new dino. They published their research in the scientific journal The Anatomical Record this month.

AVRAHAMI: It was a small dinosaur. It was about 7 feet long, so probably would have been as long as Shaq would have been if he was laying down….

(11) HORRIFYING HUMOR. From Twilia’s Art: “Peter Lorre & Vincent Price being a chaotic duo”.

Vincent Price and Peter Lorre were in 3 Roger Corman films together, and the two shone as a hilariously odd couple. I would gladly watch their chemistry in any film! So here’s a compilation of all my favorite bits of them.

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

Pixel Scroll 7/18/24 Pixel Furry, Credential of S.C.R.O.L.L.

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(1) DOCTOR WHO’S SHORE THING. “Doctor Who spin-off gets update as ‘filming start date revealed’” notes RadioTimes. (It’s actually a short series.)

The long-rumoured Doctor Who spin-off, The War Between the Land and the Sea, is set to start filming in September, it’s been reported…

The information comes from the end of a long Deadline article about the series: “’Doctor Who: Disney Deal, Ncuti Gatwa & Russell T Davies In Spotlight”.

…All eyes now on the upcoming season, which is in the can and due to launch next year, along with a long-rumored set of spin-offs that comprise the new ‘Whoniverse’ including The War Between the Land and the Sea. Fans were delighted when this spin-off was alluded to in the ’73 Yards’ episode of the latest season and Deadline is told that shooting will commence in September.

One of our sources close to the production believes Disney will “need to make a decision” on its future relationship with the show soon after The War Between the Land and the Sea wraps, and this could have a bearing on how long the in-demand Gatwa — who will lead a West End production of The Importance of Being Earnest at the end of this year — remains Doctor. Although the next season has wrapped, this source predicts the final episode has been left open-ended, with the possibility remaining that Gatwa could regenerate into his successor if he chooses to exit. Gatwa’s agents hadn’t responded to Deadline’s request for comment by press time.

(2) WHAT’S THE MATTER. “Constellation and Dark Matter: the TV series that could change your view of quantum mechanics” in the opinion of Physics World.

… A fundamental principle of the many-worlds interpretation is that any contact between the different worlds is impossible. But a fundamental principle of popular culture is that it’s not, physics be damned. The beauty of using parallel worlds in fiction is that it can neatly exploit our human anxiety over the consequences of taking and having taken actions. In a sense, it reveals the God-like, world-shaping power of the human ability to choose and the depth of our innate desire to live our lives again.

As Brit Marling, co-author and star of Another Earth, told an interviewer: “Sometimes in science fiction you can get closer to the truth than if you had followed all the rules.”…

…Quantum-inspired fictional worlds are back in the spotlight after featuring in two Apple TV+ dramas this year – Constellation and Dark Matter. Both use superposition as a device for allowing characters to take forking paths. The former was cancelled after one season, while the latter finished its season in June. The two shows illustrate what’s problematic about the genre….

(3) JMS DEFENDS THE DISCLAIMER. J. Michael Straczynski says he’s gotten sharp criticism for beginning the new edition of Harlan Ellison’s Greatest Hits with this disclaimer.

“Harlan Ellison’s work epitomized and reshaped the speculative, science fiction, and horror genres across decades. Ellison’s stories and novellas have been an inspiration to subsequent writers, and his impact can still be seen in contemporary television, culture, and literature.

“However, while these stories are outstanding works across multiple genres, they may contain outdated cultural representations and language. We present the works as originally published. We hope that you enjoy discovering, or rediscovering these stories.”

The other day in a public comment on Facebook’s Harlan Ellison group JMS defended that choice (and others) in a long post of which this is an excerpt:

Several folks here have used terms like “disgraceful” and “shameful” to discuss the disclaimer at the front of Harlan Ellison’s Greatest Hits, and the decision not to use the original computer tape images in I Have No Mouth. Let me address these frankly, and in that order.

When the disclaimer was first brought up by the publisher, I bristled at it. (And that part is literally just one sentence inside of one paragraph.) But it was explained to me that having that one sentence in that one paragraph meant that nothing in the stories themselves would have to be changed or edited. The book could go out without so much as a misplaced comma. Just as importantly, it meant the book could be sold into high school and college bookstores, school and public libraries, and curricula without impediment.

The fellow who did the YouTube video posted twice here made the observation, on this topic, that he basically didn’t give a shit if the book was available to high schools and universities, even though most everyone reading this discovered Harlan’s work at around that age. All he cared about was having the book of stories he’d already read and owned be readily available in a bookstore so he could buy one more edition of it, new readers be damned. (And it’s nearly impossible to get enough copies into print to be in stores without being able to sell the book into schools, libraries and the like.) So yes, I pulled the trigger on that, and I’d do it all over again given how this has worked out.

Jumping to the computer tape issue…what folks need to understand is that while Greatest Hits is certainly a wonderful opportunity for fans to collect some of Harlan’s best work in one place, that’s not the primary target of this book. Everybody reading this already has all or most of those stories, in the original books and in some cases even the original magazines. It’s not one more fan service compilation.

Greatest Hits is a primer of Harlan’s work for newcomers. As such, the whole point is to make the book as accessible as possible to new readers, many of whom had never previously even heard of Harlan Ellison. It’s not so much that I wanted folks to want to buy the book, I wanted to make sure there was nothing that could prompt them to *not* buy the book.

The disclaimer was part of that decision. So was removing the computer tape image and substituting the actual words themselves, especially given the current technological state of things. Corollary: You’re watching the latest Dune movie, and one of the main characters goes to a highly sophisticated computer system to give it instructions on the next issue by loading in a mountain of 3 inch floppy disks. It would get a laugh.

Computer tapes, *outside of their original historical context* (about which more in a second), would have the same effect on a modern reader. It’s being offered as a story right now to a modern readership, at a time when such tapes aren’t used anymore, and folks either wouldn’t know what it was (and some say “well, let them do their homework” but that’s a self-defeating line of reasoning when the whole point is to get the work out to that new readership) or they would know and it would break the illusion and be considered laughable.

So yes, I pulled the trigger on that as well. Because again: this is a primer, by definition an accessible introduction to a writer’s work.

As a result of all this, at a time when so many writers are having their words altered, softened or otherwise bastardized in order to be allowed into the marketplace, Harlan’s stories went out intact.

…The first print run of the regular edition Greatest Hits sold out before it was even formally published. There was another print run of that edition, and two print runs of the exclusive edition.

As I write these words, there are now roughly *sixty thousand copies of Harlan Ellison’s Greatest Hits in print*….

(4) HELLO, DALI! “You can now ask Salvador Dali questions (sort of), as part of an AI installation” at NPR.

…The surrealist artist Salvador Dali was known for art featuring melting clocks, bizarre landscapes and dreamlike imagery. He died in 1989, but visitors at the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla., can ask him questions about his art or anything else. NPR’s Chloe Veltman reports that Ask Dali uses generative AI to bring the artist back to life.

CHLOE VELTMAN, BYLINE: The question – why are the clocks in your paintings melting? – provokes a long, poetical response from Ask Dali. Here’s a snippet.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

AI-GENERATED VOICE: (As Salvador Dali) My dear questioner, think not of the clocks as merely melting. Picture them as a vast dream caressing consciousness.

VELTMAN: Museum visitors just pick up the lobster-shaped receiver on a replica of Dali’s famous telephone sculpture to speak with him. The museum says the artificial intelligence Dali has responded to well over 30,000 questions since the installation launched in mid-April. People ask about things like the artist’s famous curling moustache…

(5) BEAR MAKEOVER. “’Drunk’ Disney bear cancelled over ‘derogatory and offensive’ name” reports Yahoo!

A drunk animatronic bear who was a Disney World fixture for over 50 years has reportedly been cancelled over concerns he could offend alcoholics.

Liver Lips McGrowl did not make an appearance when the “Country Bear Jamboree” – one of the final attractions designed by Walt Disney before his death – returned on Wednesday following a seven-month refurbishment.

The attraction, which features 18 animatronic bears performing country-style Disney songs, first opened its doors in 1971 and has been a mainstay of the theme park for decades.

Disney decided to cancel the character because the phrase “liver lips” could be offensive to alcoholics, according to the Disney Inside the Magic blog.

“The decision to remove Liver Lips McGrowl was driven by concerns over the character’s name. The term “liver lips” is considered derogatory and offensive,” it reported….

… The bear has been replaced by Romeo McGrowl, who looks identical to his predecessor – including his protruding lips – but sports a sky-blue jumpsuit and blonde quiff….

(6) BOB NEWHART (1929-2024). [Item by Mike Kennedy.] The one and only Bob Newhart is gone. A quick glance at his credits on IMDb might give the impression that his contributions to entertainment were modest. That would be utterly false. 

If you’re young enough to be unfamiliar with his work, I urge you to investigate not only his genre appearances, but his entire body of work. So much of it has what might be called sfnal sensibilities. For instance, the entire run of Newhart (his 1982–90 TV show) was just skew enough to our mundane world that you could be convinced it was deliberately set in an alternate reality. So, too, were many of the standup comedy routines he was beloved for before he ever set foot on a soundstage. 

His contributions to specifically genre media were also significant. They include: On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, The Rescuers and The Rescuers Down Under, The Simpsons (as himself), Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer: The Movie, Elf, The Librarian(s) series (3 TV movies & a TV series), and two appearances on Svengoolie (one as himself).

Rolling Stone’s tribute is here: “Bob Newhart, Groundbreaking Stand-Up Comic and TV Sitcom Legend, Dead at 94”.

…Understated in his delivery and physically small of stature — he looked like the former accountant that he was — Newhart nonetheless left a sizable footprint on comedy. His first album, 1960’s The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, was a blockbuster; featuring his trademark one-sided conversations, the album won multiple Grammys including Album of the Year and achieved the commercial success of a huge pop album….

…Some of his most popular bits — marketing executives advising Abraham Lincoln, the Wright Brothers and a harried driving instructor — were included on The Button-Down Mind. (“What’s the problem?” Lincoln’s publicist is overheard saying to him before the Gettysburg Address. ” … You’re thinking of shaving it off? … Um, Abe, don’t you see that’s part of the image?”)…

…He gained a new legion of fans after appearing as Will Ferrell’s tiny North Pole dad in Elf and he guest-starred in several episodes of The Big Bang Theory as Professor Proton, the host of Leonard and Sheldon’s childhood-favorite TV science show. Those appearances led to Newhart finally winning an Emmy in 2013 (for “Outstanding Guest Actor”) after seven previous nominations….

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

July 17, 1967 – Paul Cornell, 57.

By Paul Weimer: I came to Cornell different.  Not thanks to all of his excellent and groundbreaking work with Doctor Who (his DW novels were and are groundbreaking, and elements of those novels have made their way into multiple episodes of the rebooted shot. Nor was it for all of his work in television, from Coronation Street to Robin Hood, and much more. I didn’t even come to Cornell thanks to his extensive work in comics, from Captain Britain to Wolverine to Demon Knight. I was not aware of any of that vast oeuvre…at first.

Paul Cornell

I came to Cornell’s work first thanks to the SF Squeecast. SF Squeecast was one of the high-water marks of professionals being fans and doing fannish things that was a major source of controversy back in the early 2010’s. I remember the discussions at Loncon in 2014, whether such productions such as Squeecast should really be “eligible” for fan awards, since they were “Stacked with pros”.  But I knew, and personally knew, some of the people on the SF Squeecast, so I began listening to it, and discovering the work of people I didn’t know.  

Just like Paul Cornell.

So I got in on the ground floor when Cornell announced his Shadow Police novel, London Falling, and I gave it a try (and even managed to get an ARC). I enjoyed it highly. It was part of a trend of Magical London novels out at that time — Ben Aaronovich, and others explored this as well. I highly enjoyed London Falling, and its two sequels, and so my reading of Cornell began in earnest.  I started reading his Doctor Who work (The Discontinuity Guide in particular, was a revelation) and have continued to read him ever since. 

Cornell’s wide oeuvre and styles continue to amaze. I also particularly like his switch from urban London to the more pastoral rural fantasy of the Witches of Lychford novellas. And again here, like the London novels, he has counterparts in work such as that of Juliet McKenna. I like to think of Cornell’s work as an amplifier and booster of themes and subgenres and ideas, adding his voices to a chorus and making his work, and the subgenre he works in, stronger and better. 

Oh, and one last bit. For a number of years, Cornell came to Convergence, a local big con here in Minneapolis. Every year, Cornell had a special panel, where he would go out to a parking lot and teach us poor Americans how cricket works. These demonstrations were fun, entertaining, and I always came away feeling that I better understood the game. His absolute fun and joy in showing us the game is the takeaway and mental image I have of Paul.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) WHAT HAPPENED TO THE BATTLE OF ENDOR’S MOST COURAGEOUS WARRIORS? This October, Steve Orlando, Álvaro López, and Laura Braga’s Star Wars: Ewoks tell a new saga set directly after the events of Return of the Jedi. For more information, visit Marvel.com.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Ewoks’ continued adventures beyond the Star Wars films. The Ewok Adventure, also known as Caravan of Courage, followed up on the popularity of the adorable—but formidable—creatures who secured the Rebellion’s victory during the Battle of Endor in Return of the Jedi. To celebrate the anniversary and the Ewok’s mighty legacy, they’ll star in a new 4-issue limited comic series this October—STAR WARS: EWOKS!

A team of Imperial-led bounty hunters and scavengers arrive on the Forest Moon of Endor searching for a secret cache of Imperial weaponry! Are they prepared to face off against the battle-ready Ewoks who took down so many of their ranks? Who is the mysterious new warrior Ewok returning to Bright Tree village, and what is their connection to Wicket W. Warrick?

STAR WARS: EWOKS #1 (OF 4): Written by STEVE ORLANDO; Art by ÁLVARO LÓPEZ & LAURA BRAGA

COVER BY PETE WOODS

VARIANT COVER BY DAVID LOPEZ

ACTION FIGURE VARIANT COVER BY JOHN TYLER CHRISTOPHER

(10) UNHAPPY LANDING. “Halo Canceled At Paramount+ After 2 Seasons” reports Deadline.

Paramount+ has cancelled Halo.

The news comes a few months after Season 2 of the live-action video game adaptation premiered on the streamer in February. Amblin Television, Xbox and 343 Industries are currently shopping Halo in hopes of finding it a new home, Deadline understands….

(11) THE BUCKET WARS CONTINUE. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Red fuming nitric acid, um I mean popcorn “butter” is optional. Gizmodo says, “Step Aside, Deadpool & Wolverine, the Real Heir to the Dune Popcorn Bucket Is Here”.

(12) BACK IN THE CAN. Rather like what Warner Bros. has done to a couple of finished movies, NASA has done to a moon rover: “NASA cancels $450 million VIPER moon rover due to budget concerns” at Space.com.

NASA has cancelled its VIPER moon rover program due to rising costs. 

VIPER, short for Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, was a robotic mission intended to land near the moon’s south pole and spend 100 days scouting for lunar ice deposits. The rover was slated to launch in 2025 to the moon aboard an Astrobotic Griffin lander as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative (CLPS). Now, it appears VIPER will be scrapped for parts or potentially sold to industry. The decision to axe the VIPER mission was announced today (July 17) in a teleconference; cancelling the program is expected to save the agency an additional $84 million in development costs. NASA has spent about $450 million on the program so far, not including launch costs.

…At the time of its cancellation, the car-sized VIPER was completely assembled and undergoing environmental testing to ensure the rover could handle the physical stresses of launch and the harsh environment of space. 

NASA is now looking to “potentially de-integrate and reuse VIPER scientific instruments and components for future moon missions” Kearns said today, but will first ask both U.S. and international industry partners for any interest in using the rover as-is….

(13) YOU NEVER KNOW. “Signs of two gases in clouds of Venus could indicate life, scientists say” in the Guardian.

Hot enough to melt metal and blanketed by a toxic, crushing atmosphere, Venus ranks among the most hostile locations in the solar system. But astronomers have reported the detection of two gases that could point to the presence of life forms lurking in the Venusian clouds.

Findings presented at the national astronomy meeting in Hull on Wednesday bolster evidence for a pungent gas, phosphine, whose presence on Venus has been fiercely disputed.

A separate team revealed the tentative detection of ammonia, which on Earth is primarily produced by biological activity and industrial processes, and whose presence on Venus scientists said could not readily be explained by known atmospheric or geological phenomena.

The so-called biosignature gases are not a smoking gun for extraterrestrial life. But the observation will intensify interest in Venus and raise the possibility of life having emerged and even flourished in the planet’s more temperate past and lingered on to today in pockets of the atmosphere….

(14) BONES AWAY! “Stegosaurus skeleton, nicknamed ‘Apex,’ sells for record $44.6M at Sotheby’s auction” reports Yahoo!

A nearly complete stegosaurus skeleton sold at a Sotheby’s auction in New York on Wednesday for a record $44.6 million — the most ever paid for a fossil.

The dinosaur, nicknamed “Apex” — which lived between 146 and 161 million years ago in the Late Jurassic Period — was originally expected to sell for between $4 million and $6 million, according to the auction house.

Sotheby’s has said Apex is the “most complete and best-preserved Stegosaurus specimen of its size ever discovered.”

(15) KEEP WATCHING THE SKIES. “Rare ‘daytime fireball’ spotted as meteor falls to Earth over New York City” at Space.com.

A meteor crashed into Earth’s atmosphere over New York City yesterday (July 16), putting on quite the show for spectators throughout the region. 

The meteor created a rare daytime fireball that traveled west into New Jersey at speeds of up to 38,000 mph (61,000 km/h) according to NASA Meteor Watch.The American Meteor Society received several reports of a daytime fireball on July 16, 2024 over New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania. Dramatic fireball footage was captured over Wayne, New Jersey and Northford, Connecticut….

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George lets us eavesdrop on the “Independence Day: Resurgence”. As a commenter says, “Forgetting this movie existed was super easy, barely an inconvenience.”

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

Pixel Scroll 7/12/24 And It Seems To Me You Lived Your Life Like A Pixel In The Scroll

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(1) ALEC BALDWIN INVOLUNTARY MANSLAUGHTER CASE DISMISSED. CNN witnesses the moment when “Judge Throws Out Case Against Alec Baldwin”.

There were stunned faces across the courtroom as Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer abruptly started into her ruling on the motion to dismiss Alec Baldwin’s indictment….

…The judge began with an explanation that dismissing any case requires her to read through a formal and lengthy statement.

At that moment, members of the gallery — the general public, court officers and journalists — began to turn and look at each other in disbelief that a dismissal appeared imminent.

Looks of both shock and elation began to cross the faces of some of Baldwin’s family members and his guests in the audience as the judge detailed line by line why she was throwing out the case.

Baldwin’s sister Beth wiped her eyes with a tissue.

Members of the Baldwin family cried and embraced after the judge finished her order with, “Your motion to dismiss with prejudice is granted.”

Here are the issues that led to the judge’s decision:

…The judge in the trial of actor Alec Baldwin had halted testimony in the case and sent the jury home for the day before reaching her decision this evening to dismiss the indictment.

Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer had been considering a new motion by the actor’s legal team to have the case thrown out based on allegations of wrongdoing by investigators.

The motion stems from testimony given by a crime scene technician on Thursday about some ammunition delivered to the sheriff’s office after the conviction of “Rust” armorer Hannah Gutierrez Reed, which Baldwin’s team claims was not properly disclosed to the defense. 

Several rounds of ammunition were brought to the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office in March after the first trial concluded by retired police officer Troy Teske, a friend of the armorer’s father, crime scene technician Marissa Poppell testified. 

Teske allegedly told investigators he believed the ammunition could be associated with the “Rust” incident, Poppell said. However, the crime scene technician said the items were catalogued separately and were not included in the Rust inventory or tested to see if they matched the lethal round….

(2) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listers to savor a seafood pancake with Ai Jiang in Episode 230 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

Ai Jiang

We chatted with the Bram Stoker Awards ceremony a mere two days in the future, where she was nominated in the Long Fiction category for Linghun. And even though as you’ll hear she had doubts she had a chance of winning — she won!

And that’s not the only thing she won following our conversation, for a week later, her I am AI won a Nebula Award. I am AI is also currently on the final ballot for the Hugo Award, where she’s also up for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. But that’s not all when it comes to Ai Jiang and awards. She won an Ignyte Award for her poem “We Smoke Pollution,” received a Nebula Award nomination for her short story ““Give Me English,” was part of the Strange Horizons collective nominated for a semiprozine Hugo Award, and has been nominated for a British SF Association Award and Aurora Award as well.

Her fiction has also appeared in the magazines Fantasy & Science Fiction, Interzone, The Dark, Kaleidotrope, The Deadlands, Planet Scumm, and others, as well as in such anthologies as Fighting for the Future: Cyberpunk and Solarpunk Tales, Step Into the Light: An Anthology of Daylight Horror, and Mother: Tales of Love and Terror. Her short story collection Smol Tales From Between Worlds was published last year.

We discussed why being nominated for multiple awards may actually have made her Imposter Syndrome worse, what the Odyssey workshop taught her which helped her finish her first novel (and whether that book might be too ambitious a debut), the novels which made her want to be a writer, what makes us power on in the face of rejection, how writing is like competitive badminton, the secret to writing successful flash fiction, the book she was given which turned her from a pessimist into an optimist, what she learned from her “soul-draining” career as a ghostwriter, how an editorial suggestion turned Linghun from flash fiction into a novella, the most daunting aspects of revision, and much more.

(3) WHO, TREK SHOWRUNNER SUMMIT MEETING. “Comic-Con: Star Trek, Doctor Who to Appear at Joint Panel” reports Variety.

In a show of geek unity, the executive producers and showrunners of the “Star Trek” TV universe and the “Doctor Who” Whoniverse — Alex Kurtzman and Russell T Davies, respectively — will appear in a panel together at San Diego Comic-Con. The panel, which will be held on Saturday, July 27 at the largest fan gathering in North America, will kick off celebration of the first “Intergalactic Friendship Day” on July 30, an effort by the two franchises to foster greater connection and fellowship between their fandoms. (The celebration lines up with the International Friendship Day, created in 2011 to bring together people across the planet.)

Under the banner of “Friendship is Universal,” “Star Trek” and “Doctor Who” will headline a gallery experience in the Gaslamp Quarter of San Diego during Comic-Con, which will feature original costumes and props from both franchises, along with photo opportunities and friendship bracelet giveaways….

(4) SHIELD BEARER. Animation World Network rings the bell as “Marvel Drops ‘Captain America: Brave New World’ Teaser Trailer”.

The Cap is back in cinemas… finally! Anthony Mackie returns to “wield the shield” as Captain America in the upcoming superhero adventure from Marvel Studios. The Falcon, played by Mackie in previous MCU films, officially took on the mantle of Captain America in the finale of The Falcon and The Winter Soldier, which ran on Disney+ in 2021.

In the new film, after meeting with newly elected U.S. President Thaddeus Ross, played by Harrison Ford in his MCU debut, Sam finds himself in the middle of an international incident. He must discover the reason behind a nefarious global plot before the true mastermind has the entire world seeing red….

(5) HOBBIT ACTORS GO PUB CRAWLING. “Billy Boyd & Dominic Monaghan Talk ‘Billy And Dom Eat The World’”.

Billy Boyd and Dominic Monaghan’s food travelog series Billy and Dom Eat the World gave the pair a chance to renew their Lord of the Rings fellowship with Ian McKellen.

In the first episode of their six-part series from Dash Pictures and new distributor Abacus Media Rights, Boyd and Monaghan, who played Pippin and Merry in Peter Jackson’s movie trilogy, visit Gandalf — sorry, McKellen — at his east London pub The Grapes on the bank of the River Thames.

“It happened we were looking at London pub culture and it just so happens Ian McKellen has a pub,” Boyd told Deadline in an exclusive interview. “He told us why he ended up in that part of London, and what pubs mean to Britain.”…

(6) GET READY TO HEAR A DIFFERENT RING CYCLE. The Lord of the Rings musical will run from July 19-September 1 at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Steve H Silver notes that this is a heavily revised version of the Lord of the Rings Musical that premiered in Toronto and London in 2006.

(7) “CAN’T HE SHUT UP?” “Will Ferrell Says James Caan Told Him ‘You’re Not Funny’ on ‘Elf’ Set and Acting ‘Too Over the Top’; Caan Later Called Him ‘Brilliant’ After Seeing the Film” in Variety.

Will Ferrell revealed during an interview on the “Messy” podcast (via IndieWire) that his late “Elf” co-star James Caan was not a fan of his performance as Buddy the Elf until he saw the final cut of the Christmas movie at the film’s premiere. Ferrell said that Caan told him at several points during production that he just wasn’t funny, although Ferrell admitted to driving Caan “crazy” on set while playing the overenthusiastic Buddy.

“James Caan, may he rest in peace, we had such a good time working on that movie,” Ferrell said. “He would tease me. I like to do bits but I’m not like ‘on’ all the time. In between set ups, [Caan] would be like, ‘I don’t get you. You’re not funny.’ And I’m like, ‘I know. I’m not Robin Williams.’ And he was like, ‘People ask me: “Is he funny?” And I’m like, “No, he’s not funny.”‘ It was all with love but at the same time…”

Hear the complete podcast here: “MeSsy with Christina Applegate & Jamie-Lynn Sigler”.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

July 12, 1923 – James E. Gunn. (Died 2020.)

By Paul Weimer:  For me, James E. Gunn’s work falls into two distinct buckets.

Harlan Ellison and James Gunn in 1966. Photo by and copyright © 2013 Andrew Porter.

The first is his own fiction. When I think of novels like Transformation, or The Listeners, or Gift from the Stars (sadly, my reading of his work is far from complete), I think of his work as old-school High-Minded Science Fiction in the grand tradition.  Characters and sometimes even plot are secondary. But theme and ideas? That’s where Gunn’s work shines. There are a lot of Gunn novels and stories about contact, and often first contact with aliens, and it is the ideas and themes of those novels and story that resonate, and show power, from back at the beginning of his career, all the way to the end. The Big Damn Idea, and often, because this was Gunn, several of them intersecting together. Like in Transformation, which has transcendentalism running head-to-head against planetary sized AIs, in a space opera story that spans a good chunk of the galaxy in the process. That was Gunn’s power chords and he could surely play them.

The other half was his work as an educator, and his meta-science fictional interests. He wrote and anthologized in this mode to lengths and degrees perhaps only the likes of Silverberg or Dozois could match.  Where Gunn resonates for me in this best is his epochal and genre-defining series The Road to Science Fiction. It’s not so modest ambition takes the history and development of the field from Gilgamesh all the way to the present day of their writing. I had started with Volume Three, by pure chance and accident, and it was that volume that, for example, that I discovered authors like Joe Haldeman (yes, even before The Forever War, his story “Tricentennial” amazed me. I devoured that book, and searched far and wide to get volumes 1, and 2, and then later 4 five and 6.  I’ve lost copies over the years, and really need to recollect those volumes (the tangled rights mean that ebooks are never going to happen) so that I can have at a hand the breadth and selections Gunn made, as well as the interstitial and introductory manner that helped me understand *why* he picked those stories.  That legacy, even more than his own work, remains with me still.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) SF 101. Phil Nichols and Colin Kuskie review the short story finalists for the 2024 Hugo Award in “Hugos Where I Goes” in episode 44 of the Science Fiction 101 podcast.

(11) IT’S NOT IN CLEVELAND. It’s Metropolis, wink wink. “Filming for the new ‘Superman’ movie has been happening in Cleveland” and NPR is looking in.

It’s not a bird or a plane — it’s the “Man of Steel.” Filming is underway in Cleveland for a new Superman movie to be released in the summer of 2025….

… KABIR BHATIA, BYLINE: The Man of Steel was created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who met in Cleveland as teenagers at Glenville High School.

BHATIA: Filming for this latest Superman story started at a beach in a nearby state park. That’s where tents, a barracks and old Jeeps were used to create a retro Army base. Then the production moved downtown, to Cleveland’s Public Square. That’s where Will Tabar takes his daily coffee break.

WILL TABAR: Looks like they got Metropolis official park benches here in the middle of Public Square. We also have multiple new bus stops going in, replacing our RTA with the Metropolis MTAs.

BHATIA: It’s Cleveland in disguise as a 1980s version of the city where Superman and his alias, Clark Kent, lives and works….

(12) GEE-WHIZ. “Scientists design spacesuit that can turn urine into drinking water” reports the Guardian.

A sci-fi-inspired spacesuit that recycles urine into drinking water could enable astronauts to perform lengthy spacewalks on upcoming lunar expeditions.

The prototype, modelled on the “stillsuits” in the sci-fi classic Dune, collects urine, purifies it and can return it to the astronaut through a drinking tube within five minutes.

The suit’s creators hope it could be deployed before the end of the decade in Nasa’s Artemis programme, which is focused on learning how to live and work for prolonged periods on another world.

“The design includes a vacuum-based external catheter leading to a combined forward-reverse osmosis unit, providing a continuous supply of potable water with multiple safety mechanisms to ensure astronaut wellbeing,” said Sofia Etlin, a researcher at Weill Cornell Medicine and Cornell University and co-designer of the suit….

(13) MARGINAL IMPROVEMENTS. “Can artificial intelligence boost creativity? Yes — but at a price” NPR has learned.

…Oliver Hauser, an economist at the University of Exeter in the UK who studies artificial intelligence, wanted to try and answer the basic question of whether AI could increase creativity….

…To try and get some hard data on this squishy question of creativity, Hauser teamed up with Anil Doshi at the University College London School of Management. They recruited nearly 300 people, who Doshi says did not identify as professional writers. “We asked them to write a short, eight-sentence story,” he says.

Around one-third of the writers had to come up with ideas on their own, while others were given starter ideas generated by the chatbot ChatGPT 4.0. Those that got help were divided into two subgroups: one that got a single AI-generated idea, and one that got to choose from up to five.

Crucially, Doshi says, both the human-only and AI-assisted groups had to write the stories themselves….

…The results, published today in the journal Science Advances, found that stories written with AI help were deemed both more novel and useful. Writers who had access to one AI idea did better, but those who had access to five ideas saw the biggest boost — they wrote stories seen as around 8% more novel than humans on their own, and 9% more useful. 

What’s more, Doshi says, the worst writers benefited the most.

“Those that were the least inherently creative, experienced the largest improvement in their creativity,” he says.

So AI really does appear to make people more creative. But there’s a plot twist: When Hauser and Doshi looked at all the stories, they found a different effect.

“Collectively speaking, there was a smaller diversity of novelty in the group that had AI,” Hauser says.

In other words, the chatbot made each individual more creative, but it made the group that had AI help less creative.

Hauser describes the divergent result as a “classic social dilemma” — a situation where people benefit individually, but the group suffers….

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

Pixel Scroll 7/6/24 This Evening Jonathan Hoag Renounces His Unpleasant Profession

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From the Tom Baker / Doctor Who “The Android Invasion”

(1) CHAIN-GANG ALL-STARS AUTHOR Q&A. “Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah: ‘Satire is a way to make myself less depressed’” in the Guardian.

…His first novel, Chain-Gang All-Stars, now out in paperback and currently on the shortlist for this year’s Arthur C Clarke science fiction award (announced on 24 July), takes place in a future in which live-streamed combat between death-row convicts has become prime-time entertainment. [Nana Kwame] Adjei-Brenyah, born and raised in New York, was speaking from his home in the Bronx.

Where did Chain-Gang All-Stars begin?
I’d been working with this group to try to end solitary confinement in New York state, because it’s known pretty much universally to be torture. I actually got involved with them because they were trying to support my former school district – it was being mismanaged and children of colour were being treated poorly – but the group [Rockland Coalition to End the New Jim Crow] was also interested in the rights and outcomes of people who are incarcerated. I’m interested in systems that get us to buy into violence and trick us into stepping on each other’s heads – literally, metaphorically – and I view the prison system as a huge version of that. Ninety-nine per cent of people in prison are impoverished and suffering from mental health problems and diseases of addiction. The idea that you can put humans in cages only stifles our ability to respond to these systemic issues with compassion. Carceral solutions to serious human problems perpetuate those problems.

Why did you address the subject by writing a satirical dystopia?
The speculative nature of the story helped me feel more comfortable getting extremely specific about the brutal statistical realities of prison. I don’t deny I’m writing a dystopia, but dystopia is really just a point of view that depends on your proximity to violence.…

(2) SOMETIMES THEY DO GET WEARY. “Election result celebrated by David and Georgia Tennant with ‘amazing’ Doctor Who reference” – The Independent sets up the photo.

David and Georgia Tennant have celebrated the General Election results with an “amazing” Doctor Who callback.

After a night of humiliation for the Conservative Party, who were beaten in a historic landslide by Labour, Rishi Sunak, before falling victim to an embarrassing prank by a YouTuber, conceded to Keir Starmer, calling the result “sobering”….

(3) COMPANIONSHIP. “Doctor Who’s Russell T Davies explains how Varada Sethu’s cameo in ‘Boom’ led to her being cast as Ncuti Gatwa’s companion” at GamesRadar+.

“I think we might as well just be simple with this, because we’ve already said she’s not coming back as Mundy Flynn,” Davies tells SFX magazine in the new issue, which hits newsstands on July 10 and features Doctor Who on the cover. “It’s one of those very simple situations, like with Freema [Agyeman, who appeared in ‘Army of Ghosts’ before being cast as companion Martha Jones]: when you cast a great actor, you need a new companion.”Sethu played Mundy Flynn in ‘Boom‘, the third episode of season 1. Written by former showrunner Steven Moffat, it takes place on the wartorn planet of Kastarion 3, and Mundy is a marine who the Doctor and Ruby encounter after the Doctor steps on a landmine….

…”I was watching, like, the fifteenth edit of ‘Boom’, loving her,” Davies continues. “Every time I watch her, I think, ‘God, she’s brilliant’, I literally think she’s brilliant. I used to watch her thinking, ‘God, what a shame we can’t work with her again.’ I was thinking, ‘Should we go back to the 51st century, could we meet her again?’ and then I suddenly went, ‘Oh, let’s just cast her again. We’ve done that before. Lovely.’…

…Davies concluded by teasing what’s to come, claiming: “Good stuff ahead. Completely new character, again, a completely new story and that’s a great new story that will run across eight episodes.”

(4) FROM BRIDGERTON TO GALLIFREY. “’Doctor Who’ showrunner teases Nicola Coughlan cameo in Christmas episode” at Geo News.

Nicola Coughlan, who rose to fame after starring in Netflix’s regency era drama Bridgerton, has reportedly landed another role.

Steven Moffat, who is the director of Doctor Who, recently sat down for a confessional on Ireland AM, and weighed in on the Christmas special episode of the popular sci-fi series.

He also revealed the name for this episode, which is called, Joy to the World and continued to say, “Nicola is wonderful in it.”

“I’m not allowed to say anything about it. At least I think I’m not allowed to say anything about it so I’ll just shut up,” he also teased and added that Nicola “will break your heart.”

(5) OH-OH! Inverse takes us “Inside The Secret James Bond Reboot That’s Happening Right Now”.

…Written by Kim Sherwood, the novels Double or Nothing (March 2023) and A Spy Like Me (April 2024), tell a new kind of James Bond story, one that utterly reboots the canon of character and smarty, focuses on various new Double O agents. In doing so, Sherwood pulls off a radical pivot for the Bond franchise.

“What I’m doing I think is a structural shift where I’m turning it into an ensemble cast,” Sherwood tells Inverse. “Fleming was writing in this very traditional quest narrative structure where Bond was a kind of medieval knight. He’s given a mission and he sets out from the castle. He’s always on his own. But he’s part of a Double O section. He’s inherently part of a wider world.”

Tackling the wider world of 007 seems like something that should have already happened. And to some extent, it has. There were The Moneypenny Diaries in 2005, as well as a 2017 comic book miniseries about Bond’s CIA ally, Felix Leiter. But none of these spinoffs are quite as extensive or reboot-y as Sherwood’s Double O series.

“Growing up, I loved things like comic books or Star Trek, which lean into this idea of the extended universe and really big ensemble casts,” Sherwood says. “Those casts can be 25 characters deep, and every single one of them can carry the show. So that’s what I’ve grown up loving and being inspired by. That’s the direction that I’ve taken this expansion of Bond.”

Both of Sherwood’s “Double O” novels are masterclasses in world-building. The Double O section is now headed by Moneypenny, who, in this version of the timeline, rose through the ranks with Bond. A male version of M still oversees the Secret Service in general, but he’s a kindly grandfather figure who Sherwood says she modeled on Patrick Stewart. Meanwhile, the gadget expert “Q” (most recently played by Ben Whishaw in the films) is essentially an AI in this version, a quantum computer that assists MI6 with various intelligence gathering and tech problems….

(6) WHY THE WASP FACTORY WAS NEEDED. This is not the best week to lead with Neil Gaiman, but don’t hold that against Iain Banks. The Guardian has organized an anniversary tribute: “’An explosion of talent’: Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory at 40”.

[Neil Gaiman:] It was 1984, and the publisher Macmillan was holding a small event for booksellers, and had invited a tiny handful of journalists along as well. They would be announcing upcoming titles, trying to get the booksellers excited about them. I was one of the journalists, but I only remember one author and one book from that afternoon. The author’s editor, James Hale, was thrilled about a first novel, which Macmillan would soon be publishing, and which James had discovered on the “slush pile” of unsolicited manuscripts. The author had been asked to say a few words to the assembled booksellers about himself and his book.

The author had dark, curly auburn hair and a ginger beard that was barely more than ambitious stubble. He was tall, and his accent was Scottish. He told us that he had really wanted to be a science fiction writer, that he had written several science fiction books and sent them out to publishers without attracting any interest. Then he had decided to “write what he knew”. He had taken his own obsessions as a young man, his delight in blowing things up and his fascination with homemade implements of destruction, and he had given them to Frank, a young man who also liked blowing things up but went much further than the author ever had. The author was Iain Banks, of course, and the book was The Wasp Factory…

…Iain needed to write a book that would be published, and he did. A book that was unflinchingly readable, dragging the reader in and through….

(7) JON LANDAU (1960-2024). Film producer Jon Landau died July 5. Variety notes:  

…Landau, a longtime producing partner to James Cameron, was behind three of the top four highest-grossing movies of all time. Landau helped make history with “Titanic,” the first film to cross $1 billion at the global box office. He topped that movie’s record-breaking grosses twice, with 2009’s “Avatar” and its sequel, 2022’s “Avatar: The Way of Water.”

Before his death, Landau was deeply involved in the production of the “Avatar” sequels. Cameron is planning to fill his blockbuster sci-fi franchise with five movies in total, with the fifth tentatively coming out in 2031….

Landau’s genre producing credits include: Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989); Solaris (2002); Avatar (2009); Toruk: The First Fight (2016; TV movie); Alita: Battle Angel (2019); and Avatar: The Way of Water (2022).

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

July 6, 1927 — Janet Leigh. (Died 2004). Janet Leigh. Alfred Hitchcock. A perfect pair it turned out. And Psycho is all that I’ll be talking about. 

MAJOR SPOILER NOW. I MEAN IT. 

Yes, she was in Psycho. Forty-seven minutes into film, she is showering when a shadowy figure brutally kills her character Marion by stabbing her over and over so the blood runs copiously. 

Leigh receiving instructions from Alfred Hitchcock to film the shower scene in Psycho (1960). By Shamley Productions , Paramount Pictures.

It took a full week to complete from set-up to filming, seventy camera setups, using fast-cut editing of seventy eight pieces of film, and apparently a naked stand-in model for rehearsal (Marli Renfro who appeared in many men’s magazines of the days and appeared on the cover of the September 1960 edition of Playboy) in a mere forty-five second  impressionistic montage sequence, and both inter-cutting slow-motion and regular speed footage. (I say apparently but read on as to why that is disputed.) 

Hitchcock would later acknowledge that while Leigh’s face is seen that it is her, otherwise it is Renfro. And later contradicts himself in yet another interview. And then changes his mind yet again. 

Yet another individual, Rita Riggs, who was in charge of the wardrobe, stated that it was Leigh in the shower the entire time, explaining that Leigh did not wish to be nude and so she devised many things including pasties, moleskin, and bodystockings, to be pasted on Leigh for the scene. I must say this sounds quite silly. 

Now it has to be noted that in Psycho – Behind the Scenes of the Classic Thriller says all the actual shower footage in the film was of her and the only time Renfro was used was in an overhead shot that was eventually cut due to censors’ concerns. 

At this point, we’ll never know, will we?  Now keep in mind that Renfro is still alive and has continued to give interviews, insisting that it is she. 

The question is where is the unedited film? That is the question that goes unanswered though the likely answer it seems is that it no longer exists.

END OF MAJOR SPOILER, REALY IT IS. SO IT WAS ALL SPOILERS THIS TIME. 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) ASTRONOMY PHOTOGRAPHER OF THE YEAR SHORTLIST. Smithsonian Magazine makes it possible for us to “See Ten Awe-Inspiring Images From the Astronomy Photographer of the Year Contest” The photo gallery is at the link.

For generations, skywatchers and hobbyists around the world have admired the beauty of the cosmos.

The Astronomy Photographer of the Year contest channels that wonder into dazzling images, taken by amateur and professional astrophotographers as they vie for a £10,000 ($12,750) grand prize. The contest, arguably the biggest astrophotography competition in the world, is run by the Royal Observatory Greenwich in England and is in its 16th year.

…. The 2024 Astronomy Photographer of the Year shortlist, unveiled on Tuesday, includes an aurora shaped like a dragon, a total solar eclipse and a breathtaking shot of the Milky Way in a desert sky.

A panel of art and astronomy experts judges the contest. The overall winners will be announced on September 12….

(11) THE MOTION STOPPED – FOR ALMOST 30 YEARS. The New York Times knows “How Stop-Motion Yetis Emerged From Film Hibernation”.

Movies like “Dune: Part Two” and “Challengers” arrived in theaters later than expected because of last year’s actors’ strike, and Hollywood experienced significant production setbacks during the coronavirus pandemic.

But “The Primevals,” about a group of researchers who discover gigantic yetis and other prehistoric creatures, made those movie delays look minuscule when it was released in theaters in March.

It was filmed in 1994.

The live-action movie, which was delayed because of funding woes and then the death of its director, David Allen, incorporates a stop-motion animation technique in which puppets are painstakingly photographed and brought to life through a series of frames, as with a children’s flipbook. The retro look conjures up an earlier era of filmmaking, before computer-generated imagery took over visual effects.

“It’s like an archaeological find,” said Juliet Mills, who plays one of the movie’s researchers. “It’s like entering a time machine watching this film.”

Mills and the other actors had doubted that the movie would ever reach theaters. Even before Allen died, the film’s development had been plagued by outsize expectations and financial challenges….

… Allen had originally envisioned pushing the boundaries of what could be accomplished with stop-motion animation, Endicott said. In the decades since, however, computer-generated imagery had become an essential tool for animating films.

“By the time he was working on it in the ’90s, the movie became a comment that stop-motion still had a voice in a world of C.G.I.,” Endicott said.

Allen died in 1999. Despite his final wishes, the movie’s puppets collected dust in a storage unit for nearly two decades.

While rewatching an old version of “The Primevals” in 2018, Endicott recalled Allen’s directive and recommitted himself to releasing the film, even if it was an unfinished version. By this time, Band’s production company Full Moon Features had also become more profitable, so there were fewer funding hurdles. Endicott and a group of Allen’s friends and fans recreated some of the puppets and completed more of the animations, and Richard Band created an orchestral score….

(12) SPACE TRAVEL CONTMINATES MOON — WELL THEY SAID ALL THESE WORLDS WERE OURS EXCEPT EUROPA ALONE… [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Reported in this week’s Science journal comes the news that our visits to the Moon are contaminating its natural water ice trapped in permanently shadow areas…

Orbital spacecraft have observed thin surface deposits of water-ice in permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) of craters near the Moon’s poles. Any free water molecules hop across the lunar surface until they are either destroyed by sunlight or reach one of the PSRs, where they remain indefinitely. Rocket exhaust contains water, so Farrell et al. calculated how much water reaches PSRs from lunar landings. They found that the six Apollo landings contributed less than 1% of the surface water in PSRs, implying that most is natural. However, a single Artemis landing will increase PSR surface water mass by more than 20%, polluting the record of natural water on the Moon.

The primary research is here.

(13) DO ALIEN OPTIMISTS HAVE A FINE-TUNING PROBLEM? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Aliens are a key SF trope.  But I am fascinated when there is serious discussion in the academic literature.  Here’s the latest from Prof. David Kipping at the Cool Worlds Lab. “Crowded or Lonely? The Statistics of Alien Life”.

New research paper from the Cool Worlds Lab! Today we explore the implications of a classic result in statistics but applied to alien life for the first time. The result implies a startling conclusion, the cosmos is either teeming with intelligent civilisations, or we’re essentially alone. Join us today as explore how this works and what the implications might be.

(14) SOLARIS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Moid Moidelhoff  over at Media Death Cult takes a look at Stanislaw Lem’s classic Solaris. And for once we get a behind the scenes look at how Moid pulls these vids together. The 12-minute video is below….

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

Pixel Scroll 7/4/24 Trigger Scrollfile – Pixelman

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(1) JULY 4, 1939: Julius Schwartz ditched the last day of the first World Science Fiction Convention and went with Mort Weisinger and Otto Binder to see a ballgame at Yankee Stadium. Here’s what happened next: “On This Day In History 7/4”.

Three AWOL Worldcon members were in Yankee Stadium when this picture was taken.

(2) ORAL HISTORY OF XENA. The Guardian talks to the people who made the show: “’I was attacked by a bloody rabbit’: how we made Xena: Warrior Princess”.

… Steven L Sears, writer and co-executive producer: …People called Xena a sword and sorcery show, even though our universe had swords but no magic. There were mythological creatures and entities with powers, but those powers had restrictions. Most of the gods echoed the pettiness of mankind, with all their egos and desires.

Back then, the studio was very hesitant about suggesting Xena and Gabrielle were in a romantic relationship. They even objected to a moment in the title sequence where Xena is seen walking seductively towards the warlord Draco, because he was shot from the back and had long hair, so could be mistaken for a woman. But as time went on, they decided to look the other way and just let us get on with it. Somebody once asked me if Xena and Gabrielle ever had sex. I said: “It’s none of my damn business. They do social and domestic duties together, they have fought for each other and died for each other. If you’re defining the relationship just on sex, you’re really missing the whole point.”…

(3) IN AND OUT OF DISGUISE. “Superman, Frodo and Star Wars: the stunning life of Kiran Shah – the world’s smallest stuntman” in the Guardian.

It was 1976 when Kiran Shah saw the advert that would change his life. “It was a sci-fi film looking for a little guy,” he says. Shah turned up at Elstree Studios in Hertfordshire and was introduced to a nervous young man named George Lucas. “He said: ‘Can you get in that dustbin thing?’ I was a bit too tall for it but I got in, they put the lid on, and he said: ‘Can you look left, look right?’” Shah didn’t realise he was auditioning for the role of R2-D2 in Star Wars. He didn’t get the job – it went to Kenny Baker – but Lucas’s casting director liked Shah, and got him an agent, which set him on the path of an almost 50-year career as “the world’s shortest stuntman”…

There are very few blockbusters Shah has not been in. You might not recognise him – he is often doubling for another character or he’s disguised under prosthetics as a mythical creature. But he has played more Star Wars characters than he can count, doubled for every hobbit in The Lord of the Rings movies, did Christopher Reeve’s stunts in the Superman movies, and played every single child in Titanic (which is even more impressive given that he can’t swim)….

(4) THREE-BODY EFFECTS. “Imagine Engine Shares ‘3 Body Problem’ VFX Breakdown Reel” at Animation World Network.

Image Engine shared a VFX breakdown reel and case study for its work contributing 137 shots to Netflix’s sci-fi drama, 3 Body Problem. The studio’s attention to detail, from replicating the vastness of the Neutrino Observatory to breathing life into a photoreal chimpanzee animation, resulted in a world of remarkable visuals.

Beginning with the first episode, the studio’s craft is on display, when scientist Dr. Vera Ye enters the Cherenkov tank, walks out onto a platform, and jumps into a shallow pool of water below.

Compositing supervisor Matt Yeoman explained, “Vera’s plate element of her walking along a suspended walkway needed to be integrated into the Neutrino Observatory, which was a full CG environment render. The main objective of this shot was to create a sense of scale for her very unique and mysterious surroundings.”…

(5) OCTOTHORPE. In Episode 113 of Octothorpe, “I Realised Too Late What I Had Done” John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty discuss a variety of things, “including but not limited to: the country of Sweden; haggises; the processing of peaches; listener statistics; the way that Los Angeles is gearing up for the Olympics; and Scrabble. We also discuss something called a ‘Worldcon’, in a first for us.” An uncorrected transcript is available here.

Three stick figures run from Godzilla, who is depicted in the style of Godzilla Minus One. The words “Octothorpe 113” used to be at the top of the art, but Godzilla has knocked off the letters “O C T O”, is holding “H”, and is trying to eat “T”.

(6) DOCTOR WHO WILL TREAD THE BOARDS. Collider says watch the London stage in September: “Paul McGann’s ‘Doctor Who’ Is Making a Comeback — But Not the Way You’re Expecting”

Doctor Who is making its way to the stage for the first time in over 20 years. Last performed live in 1989, the Doctor will be appearing in front of a live audience in celebration of 25 years of audio adventures by Big Finish Productions. The live show will see Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor in a new live-recorded audio drama, titled “The Stuff of Legend,” written by Robert Valentine and directed by Barnaby Edwards. McGann will star alongside India Fisher as his companion Charley Pollard, who’s been around since the beginning of Big Finish’s Doctor Who dramas, in this exciting new venture for the Whoniverse. McGann and Fisher will be joined on stage by Alex Macqueen as the Master — who featured in the Eighth Doctor Adventures series Dark Eyes — and Nicholas Briggs as the voice of the Daleks.

The drama will be performed live to audiences for one night only, at London’s Cadogan Hall on Saturday, September 14, 2024, with a studio version of the same story releasing on the same day. Although this is not the first time that Doctor Who has been performed to a live audience, it is the very first time that one of the show’s audio plays will be performed on stage. The announcement comes just weeks after the end of Season 1 of Doctor Who’s Disney revamp, which saw Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor and Millie Gibson’s companion Ruby Sunday face off against classic Who villain Sutekh (Gabriel Woolf)….

(7) THE TARDIS RETURNS THE FAVOR. And Playbill lists “Thespians Turned Whovians: All the Broadway Stars in Disney’s Regeneration of Doctor Who”. Spoilers at the link.

Whovians and theatre fans, did you spot some familiar faces in this season of Doctor Who? The 14th season of Doctor Who has just concluded on Disney+, and a few Broadway stars made guest appearances. The BBC staple, which has been running for over 60 years, has always had a rich relationship with the stage. 

Many stars and guest stars of Doctor Who have connections to the theatre, including The First Doctor, William Hartnel, who was a prolific Shakespearean actor before ever stepping into the TARDIS. The 10th (and 14th) Doctor (played by David Tennant, who has been in countless theatrical productions) once landed his TARDIS inside The Globe to fight off witches with Shakespeare himself. That episode was filmed at Shakespeare’s Globe in London—where the current 15th Doctor, played by Ncuti Gatwa, starred as Demetrius in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2016….

(8) COMPREHENDING PKD. David Agranoff has written a highly interesting review of “Postcards from a Dying World: Philip K. Dick: Essays of the Here and Now David Sandner (Editor), Series Editors: Donald E. Palumbo, C.W. Sullivan III”. Here’s his comment about one of the articles.

…Umberto Rossi’s ‘From Soft Totalitarianism to TV: Philip Kindred Dick and The Tube,’ was of course an enlightening read. I am aware that David Gill believes Rossi’s writing on PKD to be some of, if not the most important analysis of the work. I admit I am late to get to his work, but this is an excellent piece.  I also had the weird experience of reading Rossi writing about the bible hypertext in The Divine Invasion while a woman on the plane (I was taking to the PKD fest) was reading the bible on her phone….

(9) ROBERT TOWNE (1935-2024). Best known for his Oscar-winning Chinatown screenplay, Robert Towne died July 1 at the age of 89. There’s some genre work among the credits listed in Deadline’s tribute.

…Towne also earned BAFTA, Golden Globe and WGA awards for Chinatown, the L.A.-set 1974 thriller starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway. It was one of three Writers Guild Awards he won during his career, along with Shampoo and the drama series Mad Men, on which he was a consulting producer during the final seventh season. He also was nominated for The Last Detail (1973) and Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1985). He was honored with the guild’s Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement in 1997.

Born on November 23, 1934, Towne got his start with his screenplay for 1960’s Last Woman on Earth before writing for … early-’60s TV series The Outer Limits, [and] The Man from U.N.C.L.E. He went on to work with Roger Corman on films including The Tomb of Ligeia (1964)… 

During the 1970s, Towne also did script-doctor work on Beatty’s directorial debut Heaven Can Wait.

Towne … wrote the screenplay for the 1984 Tarzan tale Greystoke, starring Christopher Lambert, with an eye to direct. But the poor financial showing of Personal Best led Warner Bros to hand the helming reins to Hugh Hudson, who was hot off Best Picture Oscar winner Chariots of Fire.

Towne was angered by the move and had his name taken off the Greystoke screenplay — opting instead to credit the script to P.H. Vazak, his sheepdog. It went on to score an Adapted Screenplay Oscar nom for Vazak, making him the only canine ever to be so honored. It also was the first Academy Award nom for any Tarzan film….

(10) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

July 4, 1996 — Independence Day film. We’re celebrating Independence Day tonight. Now not that one, but the film of that name which premiered twenty-eight years ago this coming weekend, but I thought it should be written up on this day. (Indeed, sites think it premiered today with more than a few individuals remember seeing it today.) 

So let’s talk about Independence Day. It came out twenty-eight years ago. Now it’s a franchise as Independence Day Resurgence would come twenty years later. Well, a franchise unlikely to see a third film, as Independence Day Resurgence was financial failure unlike Independence Day which, well, I’ll note later.

It was directed by Roland Emmerich, written by Emmerich and Dean Devlin. Now if you think that you know Emmerich and Devlin, that’s not at all surprising as both had a major success in a genre film as Emmerich directed Stargate and Devlin co-wrote that script with Emmerich. 

Ok, any Filer who has not seen should, well, skip to the rest of of the Scroll as I cannot avoid spoilers. I really can’t. SPOILERS. INCREDIBLY LARGE SPOILERS HERE.

Emmerich wanted to write an alien invasion on a massive scale rather than on the personal scale of the Fifties films, wreaking destruction those didn’t, and having the aliens hidden until they get revealed late in the film. 

Each ship is fifteen miles across! And he had those ships destroy entire cities, be it New York or London, though the destruction of the White House is one of my favorite scenes in the film. President Thomas J. Whitmore, the former fighter pilot and Gulf War veteran, as played Bill Pullman, is one of the best secondary characters here.

The primary cast is Will Smith as Captain Steven Hiller, a Marine F/A-18 pilot: Jeff Goldblum as David Levinson, an all-around technological expert; and Judd Hirsch as Julius Levinson, David Levinson’s father (the character was based on one of Dean Devlin’s uncles). All are stellar in their roles. Same applies to the many other characters such as Randy Quaid as Russell Casse, an, alcoholic former fighter pilot and Vietnam War veteran insists that he was abducted by the aliens, and Brent Spiner as Dr. Brackish Okun, the scientist in charge of research at Area 51.

Now let’s talk about creating the look at the film. I can’t possible cover everything that made this film look fantastic, and one might assume that since shows like Babylon 5 were made intensively using CGI that most of this film was likewise. There over five thousand special effects shots required to make this film but and over ninety-five percent were practical in nature. That’s a lot of models, a massive number, many of which are now in collectors hands. And they fetched very nice prices. 

So they built an actual White House, as Vogel Engel, effects supervisor, said in an interview, “Our pyrotechnician, the late Joe Viskocil, and our miniature supervisor Mike Joyce did a fantastic job in preparing a 15-feet wide and 5-feet high miniature of the building — basically a plaster shell attached to a metal body, with individual floors and a lot of furniture and other details on the inside.”  And then they blew it up in the desert outside Vegas with the press looking on with only one chance to get it right. And they absolutely did.

A outstanding script, a fantastic cast and special effects that are still considered cutting edge according to be among the best ever done. 

Next let’s talk what the critics thought. They mostly really liked it and Duane Bryge of the Hollywood Reporter is typical: “20th Century Fox’s Independence Day is a blast — a sci-fi disaster film about an alien force that attacks Earth on Fourth of July weekend. A generic juggernaut, as well as a story of appealing human dimension, Independence Day should set off box-office fireworks worldwide.”

So, want to know about well it did? Well, it didn’t cost that much to make back then, just seventy-five million. Oh, that was a good investment considering that it would go in to gross eight hundred and seventeen million. One knows that it went well over a billion with a secondary run, cassette and DVD sales, television and streaming fees. 

The sequel made as I note above half as much and Emmerich blamed that largely on the absence of Will Smith who declined to take part. Emmerich stated in an interview with Collider magazine that his originally intended script in which Steven Hiller was alive during the film was “much better” and that Smith’s absence from the film forced him to use an alternative script.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • Close to Home shows zombies who love a party.
  • F Minus has a strange idea about faithfulness.
  • The Argyle Sweater knows what happened to a premature invention.
  • Tom Gauld would hate to interrupt:

(12) HOW MANY HOLES DOES IT TAKE TO FILL THE ALBERT HALL. “Researchers Make Breakthrough in Study of Mysterious 2000-Year-Old Computer Found in Shipwreck” – Futurism has an update about the Antikythera mechanism.

Well over a century after its discovery, researchers at the University of Glasgow say they’ve used statistical modeling techniques, originally designed to analyze gravitational waves — ripples in spacetime caused by major celestial events such as two black holes merging — to suggest that the Antikythera mechanism was likely used to track the Greek lunar year.

In short, it’s a fascinating collision between modern-day science and the mysteries of an ancient artifact.

In a 2021 paper, researchers found that previously discovered and regularly spaced holes in a “calendar ring” were marked to describe the “motions of the sun, Moon, and all five planets known in antiquity and how they were displayed at the front as an ancient Greek cosmos.”

Now, in a new study published in the Oficial Journal of the British Horological Institute, University of Glasgow gravitational wave researcher Graham Woan and research associate Joseph Bayley suggest that the ring was likely perforated with 354 holes, which happens to be the number of days in a lunar year.

The researchers ruled out the possibility of it measuring a solar year.

“A ring of 360 holes is strongly disfavoured, and one of 365 holes is not plausible, given our model assumptions,” their paper reads….

(13) CLIFF NOTES. A commenter on the Daytonian in Manhattan’s post“The Cliff Dwelling – 240-243 Riverside Drive” tells us: “L. Ron Hubbard lived here 1939–40, writing — with a radically customized, continuous-feed typewriter beneath a low-glare blue lightbulb — several of his most celebrated stories before moving to Washington, DC.”

…According to The New York Times columnist Christopher Gray…, [the building’s designer Herman Lee] Meader “was intensely interested in Mayan and Aztec architecture and made regular expeditions to Chichén Itzá in the Yucatán and other sites.”  Meader’s fascination with South America melded with Palmer’s terra cotta interests to create a unique design.  Completed in 1914, the Cliff Dwelling was 12 stories tall and faced in orange brick.  Meader lavished his Arts & Crafts style structure with Western motifs like cattle skulls, spears, and mountain lions, and Aztec- or Mayan-inspired designs….

(14) SO, YOU WRITE SF. DO YOU GET WRITERS BLOCK? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] “Twelve Scientist-Endorsed Tips To Get Over Writer’s Block” in Nature gives tips to scientists facing writing block. Some of these may be transferable to fiction writers (?)….

  • Know thy enemy
  • Create routines
  • Clarify the message
  • Plan first
  • Eliminate the blank page
  • Visualise
  • Write out of order
  • Give yourself extra time
  • Embrace collaboration
  • Take the pressure off
  • It might get easier, but don’t expect it to get easy
  • Know you are not alone

(15) LOOKING FOR SOMEWHERE TO PARK. For those of you who feel your place needs more clutter, we recommend the “Optimus Prime Human-Size Statue” from the Spec Fiction Shop. Only $18,549!

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

Pixel Scroll 6/23/24 Raise High The Shadow Squares, RingWorld Carpenters

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(1) AGENT BAILS FROM SOCIAL MEDIA. Hilary Harwell of kt literary deleted her X.com account today after a wave of negative response to this tweet.

Steve Hill’s dry reaction was: “To those who are out there querying and receiving their fair share of rejections, take solace in the knowledge that an agent may like your concept enough to request another author to write it.”

A more typical response was this one:

(2) DOCTOR WHO FINALE. The British press is disappointed with the season-ending episode of Doctor Who. Spoilers, naturally.

Evening Standard: “Doctor Who – The Empire of Death on BBC One review: after all that, this is the reveal we get?”

The Independent: “Doctor Who episode 8 review: After all the hype and hoopla, this finale is a big let-down”.

Which isn’t to say they don’t simply adore the Doctor. From the Guardian: “Radiant charm, scene-stealing tears and steamy kisses – Ncuti Gatwa is the new golden age of Doctor Who”.

As his first series as the Time Lord draws to a close, it would be possible to write an entire piece about Ncuti Gatwa that was just a plea for his skincare regimen because, truly, it may be the most miraculous thing that has appeared on any season of Doctor Who. But this outing has also showcased deep wells of charm and talent that radiate from within. It feels fitting that Gatwa first came to the screen via David Tennant – as the series harks back to his fellow Scot’s pitch-perfect debut, which saw that superb combination of pathos and infectious enthusiasm….

(3) AI TREK. “The Roddenberry Foundation Announces Launch of $1-Million Roddenberry Prize for Early-Stage AI Ventures” – behind an LA Times paywall.

To boldly go where no man has gone before.

That’s the mission of the USS Enterprise — and arguably the aim of a $1-million prize being offered through a foundation created to honor the father of the “Star Trek” franchise.

The Roddenberry Foundation — named for Gene Roddenberry — said Tuesday that this year’s biennial award would focus on artificial intelligence that benefits humanity.

Lior Ipp, chief executive of the foundation, told The Times there’s a growing recognition that AI is becoming more ubiquitous and will affect all aspects of our lives.

“We are trying to … catalyze folks to think about what AI looks like if it’s used for good,” Ipp said, “and what it means to use AI responsibly, ethically and toward solving some of the thorny global challenges that exist in the world.”

The Roddenberry Prize is open to early-stage ventures — including nonprofits and for-profits — across the globe.

Each cycle, the focal point of the award changes. The spotlight on AI and machine learning arrives as recent strides in the technology have sparked excitement as well as fear.

Concerns abound that AI threatens privacy, intellectual property and jobs, including the work performed by this reporter. Although it can automate busywork, it may also replicate the harmful biases of the people who created it….

(4) MEDIEVAL TECH SUPPORT. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Wired magazine uses their “tech support” YouTube channel to answer questions about medieval times. Includes analysis of historical events that may have been woven into Game of Thrones. “Medievalist Professor Answers Medieval Questions From Twitter”.

(5) VISION OF FASCISM. “How Does Democracy Die? Maybe by Laser Vision” — link bypasses New York Times paywall.

What would fascism look like in America? A quote long misattributed to Sinclair Lewis says that it would come “wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” The comedian George Carlin said that it would come not “with jackboots” but “Nike sneakers and smiley shirts.”

“The Boys,” Amazon Prime Video’s blood-spattered, dystopian superhero satire, has another proposal: It would be handsome, jut-jawed and blond. It would wear a cape. And it would shoot lasers out of its eyes….

(6) MEMORY LANE.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

June 23, 1976 — Logan’s Run. Logan’s Run premiered forty-eight years ago on this date in the States though it wouldn’t have a British release until the last day of September. 

It was based off the novel of the same name by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, published nine years before the film came out. 

Nolan would write two more novels in this continuity, and of course you know him for other genre writings such as the Sam Space series and his non-fiction work on Ray Bradbury such as The Ray Bradbury Index and Nolan On Bradbury: Sixty Years of Writing about the Master of Science Fiction. 

George Clayton Johnson wrote scripts for The Twilight Zone (including “A Game of Pool”, “Kick the Can” and “A Penny for Your Thoughts”) and Star Trek’s “The Man Trap”, the premiere episode. 

Though the film uses two elements from the novels which are that everyone must die at a set age, and that Logan and his companion Jessica attempt to escape while being chased by another Sandman named Francis, the fact that everyone must die at thirty is not what the novel says, where the age is 21:

The man looked at his palm. The flower bloomed red, then black, then red. “Did you ever wonder if the Thinker makes mistakes, the same as people do? Because it doesn’t seem like I’ve turned twenty-one. It really doesn’t. It seems I turned fourteen maybe five years ago. That would make me just nineteen.” He said this without conviction. “I remember the day, when my flower changed and I was fourteen. I was in Japan, and it was the first time I’d visited Fujiyama. Wonderful mountain! Inspiring! Ever see it?

Undoubtedly it was a matter of not wanting to cast every performer as having to be in their teens, a wise decision, I think.  They also created the Carrousel for eliminating individuals.

The script was by David Zelag Goodman whose script of Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely is splendid indeed. He’s also did some scripts to the rather good Untouchables whose lead was Robert Stock as Eliot Ness. 

I should note that this is not the first time that the film was attempted to be produced. MGM’s first attempt to adapt the book led to development hell. In particular as George Pal’s attempt was troubled seven years earlier by bitterly clashing views of what the film’s story should be. 

So Pal told the studio that it would come out too late to enjoy the success off that of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes a year earlier. That wasn’t the concern of the studio however who thought his production would cost them far above what was budgeted. So they cancelled his in pre-production. 

The producer, David Saul, had an unusual history having worked at Bantam Books, starting as a publisher’s reader then advancing to editorial director and editor in chief. David left Bantam to work for Columbia Pictures , Warner Brothers and so on before ending up at MGM who produced this.

It starred Michael York, Jenny Agutter, Richard Jordan, Roscoe Lee Browne, Farrah Fawcett, and Peter Ustinov. Michael York was our Sandman, Logan 5 with Jenny Agutter as Jessica 6. As is my standard here, I don’t do spoilers. There might be at one Filer who hasn’t seen it. Queen Air and Darkness knows why, but let’s pretend that, ok? 

Now critical reception ranged from completely negative coming from Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune who gave the film zero stars out of four and says was  it “unquestionably the worst major motion picture I’ve seen this year” to, well I wouldn’t call it an ringing endorsement, Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times who says that “its visual razzle-dazzle  propels Logan’s Run past some foolish concocting, indifferent acting, slow pacing and uncertain toning.” 

It was a box office success making at least twenty-five million dollars on a budget of just eight million and is considered to have saved MGM from financial ruin. 

It was nominated at SunCon, the year in which no film was awarded a Hugo.  

Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give it a mediocre fifty- five percent rating. 

As you know, it became a series. CBS and the production company, MGM Television this time, paid Nolan nine million for the television rights for that series, Logan’s Run, starred Gregory Harrison as Logan. Poor ratings meant it lasted but fourteen episodes.

(7) COMICS SECTION.

(8) STILL WAKES THE DEEP. “Cosmic Horror Awaits Aboard a Perilous Oil Rig” – a video game review in the New York Times.

Christmas, 1975: an oil rig off the east coast of Scotland. Inside over breakfast, the chatter of possible strikes and crew members wolfing down baked beans, fried eggs and mugs of tea. Outside, the briny tang of windswept sea air, the North Sea swirling tempestuously below.

The teetering rig of the first-person horror game Still Wakes the Deep, which releases on Tuesday for the PC, PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X|S, is another delightfully offbeat and beautifully realized locale from The Chinese Room, a British studio.

Dear Esther, released in 2012, saw players exploring a moonlit Hebridean island, tromping through purple heather. Three years later, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture whisked them off to a quaint fictional village in the west of England, zigzagging through arable fields and well-ordered front gardens.

“It’s rare, still, for video games to venture away from generic-looking alien planets, abandoned spaceships or the trenches of past wars as settings for their stories,” said Simon Parkin, author of “Death by Video Game: Tales of Obsession From the Virtual Frontline.”

The towering metal architecture and claustrophobic halls of Still Wakes the Deep are less naturalistic than the studio’s previous game worlds, but certainly no less evocative. John McCormack, the game’s creative director, possesses an instinctual familiarity with the era.

“I can remember the texture of the carpets and the thin line of cigarette smoke that hovers halfway up a room, my granny’s slippers, what the ashtrays look like, how people talk — the slang of the time,” said McCormack, a Scot and a child of the 1970s.

At the game’s outset, the calm before the unleashing of a cosmic horror storm, the player explores homely cabins littered with the paraphernalia of private lives: comforting trinkets, family photos. Your colleagues have nuanced back stories and speak with the lilt and twang of the regions they grew up in (Barnsley, Belfast, Edinburgh).

(9) GOTH GARDENING ADVICE. NPR tells listeners “How to grow a goth garden”. They admit the first tip is rather obvious.

Trend watchers have pounced on goth gardening. Google searches for “goth garden” more than doubled over the past five years — with a pronounced spike after the heroine of the Netflix hit series Wednesday started finding comfort in a creepy conservatory filled with ghost orchids and carnivorous plants.

Want to make an atmospheric goth garden of your own? We have some tips.

Use dark plants (duh)…

(10) DON’T BE UNDERNEATH WHEN THEY FLY BY. [Verse by Mike Kennedy.]

Space junk keeps falling’ on my head
And that means that NASA‘s eyes will soon be turnin’ red
Th’lawsuit is from me
‘Cause I’m never gonna stop the junk by complainin’
What’s this I see?
NASA counter-sued me…

No counter-suit yet, but “A Florida family is suing NASA after a piece of space debris crashed through their home” at NPR.

A Florida family is suing NASA after a piece of metallic space debris belonging to the agency fell to Earth and tore through their Naples home earlier this year, leaving a hole in the roof.

The March incident was a startling rare instance of man-made material from orbit making its way back to our planet’s surface intact and landing in a populated area, and it raised questions about who is responsible when space debris causes damage on Earth….

…“NASA remains committed to responsibly operating in low Earth orbit, and mitigating as much risk as possible to protect people on Earth when space hardware must be released,” the agency said in April.

Worthy said NASA would be held responsible for damage caused by its space debris in any other country under the international agreement known as the Space Liability Convention.

But space law expert Mark Sundahl told NPR in April that the law is less clear when material belonging to NASA lands on U.S. soil, making it a domestic legal issue.

(11) FLAT EARTHERS VS. REALITY (TV). [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Gizmodo reports “Flat Earthers Are Getting Their Own Reality TV Show”. Will it expand their horizons?

…IndieWire reports that a new reality TV show is in the works that will pay conspiracy theorists money to pursue their beliefs that the Earth is shaped like a frisbee-like disc rather than the sphere that it is. The show, which is described as a “part docuseries, part competition show,” will supply conspiracy theorists with “$50,000 worth of resources” to conduct “research.” Ultimately, the contestants will present their findings to a panel of scientists, theologians, and cartographers. If they can convince a majority of the judges that the Earth is, indeed, flat, they will win a cash prize (they won’t)…

(12) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Another new Pitch Meeting about an old movie. “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom Pitch Meeting”.

PS:  RG had mentioned a while back he was stockpiling PMs to make his schedule a bit easier as he welcomed an expected new child. Or at least that’s my fuzzy recollection.

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

Pixel Scroll 6/22/24 A Multitverse Of Mikes Putting Out An Infinity Of Scrolls. Shall We Go Read Them? All We Need To Do Is Follow Pixel Through The Nearest Wall

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(1) YOU PAYS YOUR MONEY AND YOU TAKES YOUR CHANCE. The Sports Geek proves to be rather clueless in its attempt to set the “2024 Hugo Awards Odds, Predictions, Best Bets”. But it made me click, which is a win for them, right? Here’s one of their lines.

The following Hugo Awards 2024 odds are courtesy of BetUS:

Why wouldn’t the front-runner among bettors be Vajra Chandrasekera’s The Saint of Bright Doors, which just won the Nebula? But for my own prediction I’m going with Emily Tesh’s Some Desperate Glory, partly based on the buzz, and partly my having read the finalists. (Actually reading the contenders – that’s cheating, isn’t it?)

(2) META ONLY RESPONDS TO A CREDIBLE THREAT. Engadget reports litigation that ironically explains “How small claims court became Meta’s customer service hotline”.

Last month, Ray Palena boarded a plane from New Jersey to California to appear in court. He found himself engaged in a legal dispute against one of the largest corporations in the world, and improbably, the venue for their David-versus-Goliath showdown would be San Mateo’s small claims court.

Over the course of eight months and an estimated $700 (mostly in travel expenses), he was able to claw back what all other methods had failed to render: his personal Facebook account.

Those may be extraordinary lengths to regain a digital profile with no relation to its owner’s livelihood, but Palena is one of a growing number of frustrated users of Meta’s services who, unable to get help from an actual human through normal channels of recourse, are using the court system instead. And in many cases, it’s working.

Engadget spoke with five individuals who have sued Meta in small claims court over the last two years in four different states. In three cases, the plaintiffs were able to restore access to at least one lost account. One person was also able to win financial damages and another reached a cash settlement. Two cases were dismissed. In every case, the plaintiffs were at least able to get the attention of Meta’s legal team, which appears to have something of a playbook for handling these claims.

Why small claims?

At the heart of these cases is the fact that Meta lacks the necessary volume of human customer service workers to assist those who lose their accounts. The company’s official help pages steer users who have been hacked toward confusing automated tools that often lead users to dead-end links or emails that don’t work if your account information has been changed. (The company recently launched a $14.99-per-month program, Meta Verified, which grants access to human customer support. Its track record as a means of recovering hacked accounts after the fact has been spotty at best, according to anecdotal descriptions.)

Hundreds of thousands of people also turn to their state Attorney General’s office as some state AGs have made requests on users’ behalf — on Reddit, this is known as the “AG method.” But attorneys general across the country have been so inundated with these requests they formally asked Meta to fix their customer service, too. “We refuse to operate as the customer service representatives of your company,” a coalition of 41 state AGs wrote in a letter to the company earlier this year….

(3) TESTING FOR EMPATHY. [Item by Steven French.] “The Stormtrooper Scandal review – inside the Star Wars art sale that wrecked lives” in the Guardian is a review of a tv show that aired on BBC2 (available via iPlayer) about selling images of customized Star Wars Stormtrooper helmets as Non-Fungible Tokens and my eye was caught by the opening paragraph:

Here’s a tricky ethical conundrum – how much can you command yourself to care about the suffering of a monumental dickhead? Do you say a breezy “Not at all!” and move on with your day? Do you say “I have limited resources and prefer to expend them on non-dickhead entities, ta?” Do you say “No dickhead is all dickhead, just as none of us is entirely free of dickheadery ourselves – thus our common humanity demands of us always a degree of empathy and compassion?” Have a think, then test yourself again at the end of 90 minutes of The Stormtrooper Scandal. Send the results on a postcard to the usual address…

(4) DIGITAL LIBRARY PULLS DOWN BOOKS AS LITIGATION CONTINUES. “Internet Archive forced to remove 500,000 books after publishers’ court win” – Ars Technica is counting.

As a result of book publishers successfully suing the Internet Archive (IA) last year, the free online library that strives to keep growing online access to books recently shrank by about 500,000 titles.

IA reported in a blog post this month that publishers abruptly forcing these takedowns triggered a “devastating loss” for readers who depend on IA to access books that are otherwise impossible or difficult to access.

To restore access, IA is now appealing, hoping to reverse the prior court’s decision by convincing the US Court of Appeals in the Second Circuit that IA’s controlled digital lending of its physical books should be considered fair use under copyright law. An April court filing shows that IA intends to argue that the publishers have no evidence that the e-book market has been harmed by the open library’s lending, and copyright law is better served by allowing IA’s lending than by preventing it.…

… In an open letter to publishers signed by nearly 19,000 supporters, IA fans begged publishers to reconsider forcing takedowns and quickly restore access to the lost books.

Among the “far-reaching implications” of the takedowns, IA fans counted the negative educational impact of academics, students, and educators—”particularly in underserved communities where access is limited—who were suddenly cut off from “research materials and literature that support their learning and academic growth.”

They also argued that the takedowns dealt “a serious blow to lower-income families, people with disabilities, rural communities, and LGBTQ+ people, among many others,” who may not have access to a local library or feel “safe accessing the information they need in public.”

“Your removal of these books impedes academic progress and innovation, as well as imperiling the preservation of our cultural and historical knowledge,” the letter said.

“This isn’t happening in the abstract,” Freeland told Ars. “This is real. People no longer have access to a half a million books.”…

… Asked for comment, an AAP spokesperson provided Ars with a statement defending the takedown requests. The spokesperson declined to comment on readers’ concerns or the alleged social impacts of takedowns.

“As Internet Archive is certainly aware, removals of literary works from Internet Archive’s transmission platform were ordered by a federal court with the mutual agreement of Internet Archive, following the court’s unequivocal finding of copyright infringement,” AAP’s statement said. “In short, Internet Archive transmitted literary works to the entire world while refusing to license the requisite rights from the authors and publishers who make such works possible.”…

(5) GRIFTING FOR DOLLARS. Lucidity threatens “I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again”. God this is witty – and very informative!

The recent innovations in the AI space, most notably those such as GPT-4, obviously have far-reaching implications for society, ranging from the utopian eliminating of drudgery, to the dystopian damage to the livelihood of artists in a capitalist society, to existential threats to humanity itself.

I myself have formal training as a data scientist, going so far as to dominate a competitive machine learning event at one of Australia’s top universities and writing a Master’s thesis where I wrote all my own libraries from scratch in MATLAB. I’m not God’s gift to the field, but I am clearly better than most of my competition – that is, practitioners like myself who haven’t put in the reps to build their own C libraries in a cave with scraps, but can read textbooks, implement known solutions in high-level languages, and use libraries written by elite institutions.

So it is with great regret that I announce that the next person to talk about rolling out AI is going to receive a complimentary chiropractic adjustment in the style of Dr. Bourne, i.e, I am going to fucking break your neck. I am truly, deeply, sorry.

I. But We Will Realize Untold Efficiencies With Machine L-

What the fuck did I just say?

I started working as a data scientist in 2019, and by 2021 I had realized that while the field was large, it was also largely fraudulent. Most of the leaders that I was working with clearly had not gotten as far as reading about it for thirty minutes despite insisting that things like, I dunno, the next five years of a ten thousand person non-tech organization should be entirely AI focused. The number of companies launching AI initiatives far outstripped the number of actual use cases. Most of the market was simply grifters and incompetents (sometimes both!) leveraging the hype to inflate their headcount so they could get promoted, or be seen as thought leaders1.

The money was phenomenal, but I nonetheless fled for the safer waters of data and software engineering. You see, while hype is nice, it’s only nice in small bursts for practitioners. We have a few key things that a grifter does not have, such as job stability, genuine friendships, and souls. What we do not have is the ability to trivially switch fields the moment the gold rush is over, due to the sad fact that we actually need to study things and build experience. Grifters, on the other hand, wield the omnitool that they self-aggrandizingly call ‘politics’2. That is to say, it turns out that the core competency of smiling and promising people things that you can’t actually deliver is highly transferable….

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Compiled by Paul Weimer.]

June 22, 1947 — Octavia Butler. (Died 2006.)

By Paul Weimer: The first Octavia Butler story I encountered caused me not to read more of her work for over a decade afterwards.

The year was 1984. I was a young SF reader. Isaac Asimov’s SF magazine was one of the things I read as part of my SF education. June 1984 had a striking cover image for Octavia Butler’s story Bloodchild that drew my eye right away. I had to Know More!

But then I read the story itself. A hard-hitting Butler with an emphasis on biology, and the idea of human men becoming part of a life cycle of aliens’ breeding, I was, to say the least, a little traumatized at the idea of someone being a host for parasitic alien eggs! I got right away the parallels Butler was making and as a reader I was poleaxed.

I decided that Butler was Not for Me (or, Too Much For Me) and did not read her again for years. 

Finally, I was persuaded to give Butler another go, and I picked up Wild Seed. This experience was completely and rather different.  I was absolutely struck by the power and grace of her imagination, her consummate writing skill, and (yes) her ability to make me feel. I didn’t mind that I had started the series out of order, I was sucked in right away and was absorbed by the book, its pair of main characters, and the world Butler has made.

I then went on to other books in the Patterrnist sequence, the Parable novels, and in general, steadily consumed her oeuvre ever since. One of the best SF writers of all time? I don’t think that’s a stretch. Taken from us too soon? Absolutely yes, no question. (Recall that she won a MacArthur Award Genius grant, in addition to her SFF awards and nominations)

And yes, I have given Bloodchild another read…and yes, it STILL freaks me out. Some things never do change. 

While I think her Parable books are the most timely books for today (and the ones I would push into the hands of interested readers), my favorite Octavia Butler piece might not be a novel at all, but rather the short story “Speech Sounds”. It focuses on her biological SF concerns, describing the aftermath of a plague which renders nearly everyone unable to speak. For those who still can talk…life is not precisely pleasant in the post-plague Los Angeles. But the bonds and the character development and worldbuilding packed into the short space of the story show just what Butler could do as a writer.

For those interested, I recount in even more detail my experience with Octavia Butler and her work in an essay in the anthology Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler, edited by Alexandra Pierce and Mimi Mondal (Twelfth Planet Press, 2017). One of the weirdest things I’ve ever had as a SFF person is someone wanting me to sign my essay in their copy of the book. I attribute that to the power Octavia Butler has, not mine own modest talents.

(7) COMICS SECTION.

(8) JOURNEY PLANET. Journey Planet’s Issue 82 – “Be The Change” is out. Fortunately, Chris Barkley thought File 770 would be interested in knowing.

Paul Weimer, Allison Hartman Adams, James Bacon, and Chris Garcia bring you a look at WorldCons and what things might be done to bring positive change! There’s discussion of the Recent Hugo Controversies, about changed needed in governance, proposals that will be sent on to the WorldCon Business Meeting, and much more! 

(9) UNDESERVED DOOM, THAT’S WHO. CBR.com names “10 Doctor Who Characters Who Deserved Better Fates”.

…Doctor Who has a habit of giving viewers very sympathetic and likeable characters and then killing them off just as audiences have fully embraced them. This raises the stakes for Doctor Who fans, but it sometimes results in characters (particularly female characters) being killed in order to further the Doctor’s storyline and make them sad. Many of these characters got meaningful deaths, but there’s no denying that too often their deaths were more about the Doctor, or his companions or enemies, than truly about them….

Here’s one of the heartbreakers:

8. Chantho Never Got a Chance to Develop Past ‘Utopia’

Chantho (Chipo Chung) was an absolutely adorable alien woman. She had a fascinating quirk to her language where she had to say the first and last syllables of her name at the beginning and end of every sentence, and not doing so was like swearing to her. She and Martha (Freema Agyeman) bonded over this, and they could have had a great friendship if not for what happened next.

When kindly old Professor Yana turned out to be the evil Master, he killed the frightened Chantho with an electrical wire. She did, however, manage to get a shot off at him in her last moments, causing the Master to regenerate. It’s still a shame, however, that Chantho died, as Doctor Who has never had an alien companion like her before, and she could have been something intriguingly different.

(10) CHAPLIN, ALPERT, HENSON – WHO’S NEXT? Gizmodo alerts fans that “The Jim Henson Company’s Iconic Studio Is Now Up for Sale”. It’s a Hollywood property with quite a history. We hope it isn’t fated to be developed into another 600-unit apartment building.

According to a new report from the Wrap, the Jim Henson Company is selling its Los Angeles studio lot at 1416 La Brea Avenue as “part of a much longer-term strategy” to merge an undisclosed future location with its Jim Henson Creature Shop in Burbank, California. The building has headquartered the company since 2000, shortly after the release of the Sci-Fi Channel’s Farscape and Muppets From Space.

Before becoming ground zero for all things felt and googly-eyed, the historic lot served as Charlie Chaplin Studios from 1917-1953; it was then taken over by Red Skelton, whereupon it became the shooting location for multiple classic TV series, including The Adventures of Superman and Perry Mason. Grander still, the building went on to house A&M Studios from 1966-1999, where Nine Inch Nails recorded The Downward Spiral and U.S.A for Africa recorded charity single “We Are the World.”

(11) PLAYING TO SURVIVE. NPR witnesses “How a board game can help vulnerable communities prepare for catastrophic wildfires”.

As climate change increases the intensity of wildfires, experts are struggling to prepare vulnerable communities for potential catastrophes. One new approach is a community-wide board game that tests resilience….

KATHERINE MONAHAN, BYLINE: About 40 people are gathered in the Tomales Town Hall. They’re sitting around folding tables covered with giant maps of the region, and each map is a game board. The point of the game – to safely evacuate this remote area as wildfires threaten. First, residents calculate whether they start with a bonus or a penalty.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Do you have an evacuation plan?

MONAHAN: They add points for how prepared they are in real life, like by having a go bag of essentials or being signed up to receive emergency alerts on their phones. They subtract points for factors that could slow them down, like having extended family or multiple pets. Next, they choose their game pieces….

… MONAHAN: Maiorana says residents must think about these things ahead of time. It can mean life or death. Deadly fires have raged through California in recent years, including the Camp Fire, which killed 85 people in Paradise, another isolated town. Tiny, coastal Tomales has only two main roads in and out.

MAIORANA: My secret agenda with this game is actually to get people talk to one another….

(12) SPEAKER TO ANIMALS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] In this week’s Science journal there is an article by Carlo G. Quintanilla on how SF helped him become a better science communicator. He is a health science policy analyst at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. “Science and fiction”.

As I stepped out of the punishing Arizona heat and into the cool air-conditioned halls of the convention centre, I saw a sea of costumed attendees. Some wore elaborate steampunk attire; others portrayed their favourite Marvel or Star Wars characters. “Why did I agree to this?” I thought as I made my way to the room where I’d be giving a talk about the science behind the classic Dune books by Frank Herbert. I had been struggling for years to find new ways to communicate science to a broad audience. My hope was to inspire admiration and awe of what science can teach us about the world through the imaginative lens of science fiction. At first I felt like an imposter at this pop culture convention. Then I saw the audience’s excitement…

(13) LEST DARKNESS FALL. Henri Barde refutes the wonderful vision in “Space-Based Solar Power: A Skeptic’s Take” at IEEE Spectrum.

… Space-based solar power is an idea so beautiful, so tantalizing that some argue it is a wish worth fulfilling. A constellation of gigantic satellites in geosynchronous orbit (GEO) nearly 36,000 kilometers above the equator could collect sunlight unfiltered by atmosphere and uninterrupted by night (except for up to 70 minutes a day around the spring and fall equinoxes). Each megasat could then convert gigawatts of power into a microwave beam aimed precisely at a big field of receiving antennas on Earth. These rectennas would then convert the signal to usable DC electricity.

The thousands of rocket launches needed to loft and maintain these space power stations would dump lots of soot, carbon dioxide, and other pollutants into the stratosphere, with uncertain climate impacts. But that might be mitigated, in theory, if space solar displaced fossil fuels and helped the world transition to clean electricity…

…Despite mounting buzz around the concept, I and many of my former colleagues at ESA are deeply skeptical that these large and complex power systems could be deployed quickly enough and widely enough to make a meaningful contribution to the global energy transition. Among the many challenges on the long and formidable list of technical and societal obstacles: antennas so big that we cannot even simulate their behavior.

Here I offer a road map of the potential chasms and dead ends that could doom a premature space solar project to failure. Such a misadventure would undermine the credibility of the responsible space agency and waste capital that could be better spent improving less risky ways to shore up renewable energy, such as batteries, hydrogen, and grid improvements. Champions of space solar power could look at this road map as a wish list that must be fulfilled before orbital solar power can become truly appealing to electrical utilities….

(14) WHERE THEY’RE TUNING IN TO THE BOYS. JustWatch analyzed the reception of the latest season of The Boys to see how this release compared to the previous three seasons. They found that this season is the second most popular among global viewers, with season 2 ranking first in 89 countries on their Streaming Charts.

JustWatch created this report by pulling data from the week following the release of “The Boys”, and compared it to the previous three seasons. JustWatch Streaming Charts are calculated by user activity,  including: clicking on a streaming offer, adding a title to a watchlist, and marking a title as ‘seen’. This data is collected from >40 million movie & TV show fans per month. It is updated daily for 140 countries and 4,500 streaming services.

(15) OOPS-EL. “Billy Zane teases ‘Superman’ Easter egg in Marlon Brando biopic” – Entertainment Weekly has the story. (Watch the Marlon Brando as Jor-El Superman outtake at the link.)

Billy Zane is set to play Marlon Brando in a new biopic — and the actor tells Entertainment Weekly that the project will briefly touch on the legendary film star’s time playing Kal-El’s Kryptonian dad in Superman.

In a conversation primarily focusing on his Lifetime movie Devil on Campus: The Larry Ray Story, the Titanic star reveals that he recently shot a last-minute addition to Waltzing with Brando. “We added this one little Easter egg for the credit sequence that we just shot a week and a half ago. That’s being color-timed and slotted in as we speak,” he tells EW. “Literally, we just added a little outtake as Jor-El — of him doing outtakes during the filming of [Superman]. We found that [footage] online and thought it was the funniest thing.”

The footage in question is a flubbed line reading from the 1978 superhero film, wherein Brando says, “Develop such conviction in yourself Alal, Kal-El, Ralph, whatever your name is,” forgetting the name of his on-screen super-son as he performs a dramatic monologue.

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