The WSFS Mark Protection Committee, chaired by Donald E. Eastlake III, issued the following press release on February 25.
The World Science Fiction Society (www.wsfs.org, WSFS) is an unincorporated non-profit association whose activities include the annual awarding of the Hugo Awards via the selected World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) each year. WSFS, through its Mark Protection Committee (MPC), manages Worldcon Intellectual Property (WIP), a non-profit corporation that holds intellectual property on behalf of WSFS, which previously issued a Press Release on January 30 addressing some of these issues.
The WSFS MPC takes very seriously the recent complaints about the 2023 Hugo Award process and comments made by persons holding official positions in the MPC. In connection with these concerns, the MPC notes the following. There may be actions taken or to be taken that are not in this announcement.
Dave McCarty has resigned as a Member of the WSFS MPC. The MPC has elected Bruce Farr to fill the remainder of Dave McCarty’s term until the 2024 WSFS Business Meeting. Thereby Mr. Farr automatically became a voting member of the WIP Board of Directors (BoD).
Kevin Standlee has resigned as Chair of the WSFS MPC and Donald Eastlake has been elected Chair of the WSFS MPC. Notwithstanding his resignation as Chair of both the WSFS MPC and the WIP BoD, Mr. Standlee remains a WSFS MPC Member and WIP BoD Director.
The Hugo Award Marketing Committee (HAMC) of the WSFS MPC has been dissolved and its activities transferred to the WSFS Marketing Committee, an advisory board to the WIP BoD. At this time those activities include the management of the WSFS.org, Worldcon.org, TheHugoAwards.org, and NASFiC.org web sites.
To avoid any possibility of confusion, note that the “Tianwen Program” is not a part of WSFS and has not been approved or endorsed by the WSFS MPC or WIP.
Minutes of the special meetings of the WIP BoD held on January 28 and 30 and minutes of the meeting of the WSFS MPC on January 30 are posted here.
Please note that each year’s Worldcon is run by a separate organization which administers the Hugo Awards for that year. The Chengdu 2023 Worldcon has asked that any specific questions about the administration of the 2023 Hugo Awards be sent to [email protected]. The Glasgow 2024 Worldcon will be administering the 2024 Hugo Awards and can be contacted at [email protected]. For media enquiries on other topics related to MPC or WIP, you may contact [email protected].
“World Science Fiction Society”, “WSFS”, “World Science Fiction Convention”, “Worldcon”, “NASFiC”, “Lodestar Award”, “The Hugo Award”, the Hugo Award Logo, and the distinctive design of the Hugo Award Rocket are service marks of Worldcon Intellectual Property, a California non-profit corporation managed by the Mark Protection Committee of the World Science Fiction Society, an unincorporated literary society. You can contact the WSFS Mark Protection Committee at [email protected].
Ben YalowDave McCarty displaying the Hugo base in Chengdu. Chen ShiKevin Standlee and Don Eastlake III.
Worldcon Intellectual Property (W.I.P.) is the California non-profit corporation that holds the service marks of the World Science Fiction Society (www.wsfs.org) including the mark “Hugo Award”. In the midst of social media discussions about the continued viability of these marks, W.I.P. issued the following press release on January 30.
W.I.P. takes very seriously the recent complaints about the 2023 Hugo Award process and complaints about comments made by persons holding official positions in W.I.P. In connection with these concerns, W.I.P. announces the actions listed below. There may be other actions taken or to be taken that are not in this announcement.
Dave McCarty has resigned as a Director of W.I.P.
Kevin Standlee has resigned as Chair of the W.I.P. Board of Directors (BoD).
W.I.P. has censured or reprimanded the following persons, listed in alphabetic order, for the reason given:
Dave McCarty – censured for his public comments that have led to harm of the goodwill and value of our marks and for actions of the Hugo Administration Committee of the Chengdu Worldcon that he presided over.
Chen Shi – censured for actions of the Hugo Administration Committee of the Chengdu Worldcon that he presided over.
Kevin Standlee – reprimanded for public comments that mistakenly led people to believe that we are not servicing our marks.
Ben Yalow – censured for actions of the Hugo Administration Committee of the Chengdu Worldcon that he presided over.
Donald Eastlake has been elected Chair of the W.I.P. BoD.
The release also asks readers to note:
Each year’s World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) is run by a separate organization which administers the Hugo Awards for that year. The Chengdu 2023 Worldcon has asked that any specific questions about the administration of the 2023 Hugo Awards be sent to [email protected]. (For media enquiries on topics related to W.I.P. other than the specifics of the 2023 Hugo Awards, you may contact [email protected].)
[Based on a press release.]
Update: 01/30/2024: The membership of the WIP Board are the members of the WSFS Mark Protection Committee. Upon Dave McCarty’s resignation, the MPC elected Bruce Farr to fill that now-empty seat (which was up for election at the 2024 WSFS Business Meeting). Bruce was currently already serving as a non-voting Treasurer of the MPC and of WIP.
The members of the WSFS Mark Protection Committee as of January 30, 2024 are: Judith Bemis (Elected until 2026); Alan Bond (Appointed by Seattle 2025 until 2027); Joni Dashoff (Elected until 2026); Linda Deneroff (Secretary, Elected until 2024); Donald E. Eastlake 3rd (Chair Elected until 2024); David Ennis (Appointed by Buffalo NASFiC 2024 until 2026); Bruce Farr (Treasurer, Appointed by Board Resolution to fill vacancy until 2024); Alissa Wales (Appointed by Glasgow 2024 until 2026); Chris Rose (Appointed by Chicon 8 until 2024); Linda Ross-Mansfield (Appointed by Pemmi-Con/2023 NASFiC until 2025); Chen Shi (Appointed by Chengdu Worldcon 2023 until 2025); Kevin Standlee (Elected until 2025); Mike Willmoth (Elected until 2026); Nicholas Whyte (Elected until 2025); and Ben Yalow (Elected until 2025).
As if writers didn’t have enough to contend with, the past couple of years have seen a huge rise in scammers posing as literary agencies.
I’m not talking here about the imposters who “borrow” the names of real agents and agencies (though they are certainly part of the same problem)–but about scammers who set up entirely fake literary agencies as fronts for extracting money from writers.
Reputable literary agents do occasionally reach out to authors whose work they’ve seen to ask if the author is represented or to invite a submission. But this is rare. Reputable literary agents are buried in queries; they don’t have a pressing need to scout for more.
For scammers, on the other hand, solicitation is their main way of recruiting clients. There are so many solicitation scams these days that you should be extremely cautious of any out-of-the-blue publishing- or movie rights-related contact that isn’t directly traceable to a query you sent or submission you made.
Many fake literary agency solicitations are relatively easy to recognize because of how flagrantly bogus they are–demanding upfront fees of various types, selling junky PR services, shilling re-publication packages, and often laced with bad grammar (most solicitation scams come from overseas)–none of which is typical of real, reputable literary agents.
But what if you get a credible-seeming email like this?…
I’ll just be over here getting boggled at the SFness of this headline. Meanwhile, anyone curious about Pope Francis’s message on “Artificial Intelligence and Pease,” which was released on 8 December, may find it on the Holy See’s Web site: “LVII World Day of Peace 2024 – Artificial Intelligence and Peace”.
… We need to remember that scientific research and technological innovations are not disembodied and “neutral”, [4] but subject to cultural influences. As fully human activities, the directions they take reflect choices conditioned by personal, social and cultural values in any given age. The same must be said of the results they produce: precisely as the fruit of specifically human ways of approaching the world around us, the latter always have an ethical dimension, closely linked to decisions made by those who design their experimentation and direct their production towards particular objectives.
This is also the case with forms of artificial intelligence. To date, there is no single definition of artificial intelligence in the world of science and technology. The term itself, which by now has entered into everyday parlance, embraces a variety of sciences, theories and techniques aimed at making machines reproduce or imitate in their functioning the cognitive abilities of human beings. To speak in the plural of “forms of intelligence” can help to emphasize above all the unbridgeable gap between such systems, however amazing and powerful, and the human person: in the end, they are merely “fragmentary”, in the sense that they can only imitate or reproduce certain functions of human intelligence. The use of the plural likewise brings out the fact that these devices greatly differ among themselves and that they should always be regarded as “socio-technical systems”. For the impact of any artificial intelligence device – regardless of its underlying technology – depends not only on its technical design, but also on the aims and interests of its owners and developers, and on the situations in which it will be employed.
Artificial intelligence, then, ought to be understood as a galaxy of different realities. We cannot presume a priori that its development will make a beneficial contribution to the future of humanity and to peace among peoples. That positive outcome will only be achieved if we show ourselves capable of acting responsibly and respect such fundamental human values as “inclusion, transparency, security, equity, privacy and reliability”. [5]…
…WHEN I WAS A TWEEN, the studio was on one of its most remarkable hot streaks. Beginning with “The Little Mermaid” in 1989 and ending with “Tarzan” and “Mulan” a decade later, Disney animators turned out runaway hit after hit, pleasing critics and audiences with movies like “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Lion King” and “Aladdin.” For ’90s kids, each new release was a major life event. In the years before “Shrek” and “Minions,” Disney owned mainstream animation, and so you and your friends talked about seeing “the new Disney movie,” and everyone knew what you meant.
It’s probably no accident that the end of the hot streak coincided with the start of the evangelical boycott of the company, led by the right-wing American Family Association, Focus on the Family and the Southern Baptist Convention. They were protesting the company’s decision to extend benefits to employees’ same-sex partners and to allow outside groups to host “Gay Days” at theme parks. Hyperion, the publishing company owned by Disney, had published books like “Heather Has Two Mommies,” and Ellen DeGeneres, whose sitcom aired on the Disney subsidiary ABC, had come out as gay. The boycott lasted for eight years, less effective than the company’s opponents might have hoped (a poll found only about 30 percent of the Baptist organization’s members even observed it). But now the studio was part of the culture wars, a fracturing along ideological lines that would redraw American public life in new ways.
Kids in theaters couldn’t see it at the time, but that moment was the end of something we’d barely had time to know: a monoculture, an era of brand clarity for the Mouse. In 2006, faced with another household-name studio generating new legends, Disney acquired Pixar. In 2009, scarcely a year after Iron Man made his debut, the company added Marvel Entertainment to its slate. Three years later, Lucasfilm and thus “Star Wars” joined the family. Then, in a herculean move, Disney bought 20th Century Fox — one of the other old, grand studios in Hollywood — and redubbed it 20th Century Studios. What counts as “the new Disney movie” in this context?
Of course, all these new franchises meant great things for the company’s coffers. But the 21st century brought changes that would fundamentally reshape Disney’s place in American culture, as well as its ability to make new generation-spanning myths. The monoculture largely fractured, thanks to the internet, streaming and the digital era. On the web, the already deep culture-war divides grew sharper and more entrenched. The ideal that Disney promoted — a world where “people can come together,” as the chief executive at the time, Bob Chapek, said in 2022 — seemed more out of reach than ever. “My opinion is that, when someone walks down Main Street and comes in the gates of our parks, they put their differences aside and look at what they have as a shared belief — a shared belief of Disney magic, hopes, dreams and imagination,” Chapek explained. Which sounds, at this point, a lot like a wish on a star….
… Amazon-owned Goodreads makes little effort to verify users, and critics say this enables a practice known as review-bombing, in which a book is flooded with negative reviews, often from fake accounts, in an effort to bring down a its rating, sometimes for reasons having nothing to do with the book’s contents.
Review-bombing can devastate a book’s prospects, especially when the writer is little known or publishing for the first time.
“When a reader who is considering buying your book sees that you are controversial or your book is controversial, that’s going to make them shy away from it,” says writer and editor Lindsay Ellis. She says she herself was review-bombed because she had criticized author J. K. Rowling’s remarks about the transgender community.
Corrain’s downfall came after internet sleuths published a Google document detailing a number of Goodreads accounts praising Crown of Starlight and giving low reviews to works by other writers, many of them people of color….
… Goodreads relies on a team of volunteer “librarians” to ensure the accuracy of information about books and authors, but the sheer number of reviews the site publishes — more than 300 million ratings in the past year alone — makes it subject to abuses.
“Goodreads just makes it so easy to engage in that bad behavior,” [Jane] Friedman says.
One unusual feature about Goodreads is that it allows reviews to be posted before a book has been published, which helps generate early buzz. Many publishers even send out early copies to influential Goodreads users, hoping they will talk up the book.
Sometimes, reviews are published even before a book is finished.
George R. R. Martin’s seventh book in his phenomenally popular “A Song of Ice and Fire” series has already generated thousands of reviews. He hasn’t yet finished the sixth.
(5) WSFS BUSINESS PASSED ON. Donald Eastlake III, Chengdu Worldcon Business Meeting chair, has announced that the Business passed on to Glasgow 2024 has now been linked from the Rules of the World Science Fiction Society web page. Here are direct links to a PDF document and a Word document.
Championed by artists, scholars, and activists around the world, Afrofuturism offers a tool kit for a better tomorrow. This documentary explores the definition and activism linked to Afrofuturism and the ways this movement is informing dynamic discussion about social practice, politics, and the arts in the United States and around the world.
…What If…? looks at different universes, where events in the MCU played out differently, and how it created an entirely different world. The first scenario of the season will be “What If… Nebula Joined the Nova Corps?” The next episode will focus on another member of the Guardians of the Galaxy, “What If… Peter Quill Attacked Earth’s Mightiest Heroes?” Earth’s Mightiest Heroes is another name for the Avengers. Another notable episode of the season will be “What If… Happy Hogan Saved Christmas?” which will be released on Christmas Eve. The episode was teased in a trailer for the season, when Happy warned Darcy Lewis that Avengers Tower had been taken over. Captain Carter, a version of Peggy Carter who took the super soldier serum, will return in “What If… Captain Carter Fought the Hydra Stomper?” At the end of Season 1, Captain Carter learned that her version of Steve Rogers is still alive. The ninth episode will also feature the return of Doctor Strange Supreme, a character introduced in the first season’s fourth episode, which was one of the show’s most memorable episodes. Another notable episode is “What If… The Avengers Assembled in 1602?” A limited comic book series, Marvel 1602, ran from 2003-2004, which looked versions of the Marvel characters who lived in the year 1602….
(8) BEST PRIVATE EYE STORIES OF THE YEAR. A new “best of” anthology will take submissions of P.I. stories published in 2024, The Best Private Eye Stories of the Year will be released by Level Short, an imprint of Level Best Books, beginning in 2025. The inaugural edition will honor the best P.I. stories published in 2024.
Series editor Michael Bracken welcomes Matt Coyle as guest editor for the first volume and notes that Kevin Burton Smith will contribute “The Year in Review,” an essay looking at the year’s significant events in private eye fiction.
Matt Coyle is the Anthony Award, Lefty Award, and two-time Shamus Award winning author of the long-running Rick Cahill series. He was named the 2021 Mystery Writer of the Year by the San Diego Writer’s Festival, and he has received the San Diego Book Award for Best Mystery as well as a silver Ben Franklin Award for Best New Voice in Fiction. He has also been nominated for Barry, Derringer, and Macavity awards.
Only private eye stories published in English during 2024 will be considered.
Complete submission requirements are here.Learn more about series editor Michael Bracken at his website.
(9) TONY N. TODARO. President of the Greater Los Angeles Writers Society Tony N. Todaro passed away December 12. Earlier this year Todaro suffered a massive hemorrhagic stroke.
He coordinated GLAWS presence at several LA conventions in past years, including the 2010 Loscon for which I organized the program. Tony also was the Executive Director of West Coast Writers Conferences (WC2) which produced the Annual Greater Los Angeles Writers Conference, the Digital Author and Indie Publishing Conference, the Genre-La Writers Conference, Masters Workshops, and he BCX.
He is survived by his wife Lilly.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born December 17, 1944 — Jack L. Chalker. (Died 2005.) Jack Chalker, a true fan, was a member of the Washington Science Fiction Association and he founded the Baltimore Science Fiction Society along with two other friends. He attended every Worldcon but one starting in 1956 for thirty-nine years.
His fanzine Mirage which ran for a decade covering the Sixties was nominated for a Hugo at the first Discon. Interject, launched in the late Sixties would last for twenty years.
He also had Mirage Press, Ltd. which published nonfiction and bibliographic works concerning science fiction and fantasy.
He was toastmaster at ConStellation.
Jack L. Chalker
Award wise, he would win the Skylark Award, presented by NESFA. He was twice nominated for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. His second Hugo nomination (with Mark Owings), at MagiCon, was for Best Related Non-Fiction Book, The Science-Fantasy Publishers: A Critical & Bibliographic History. He was posthumously awarded the Phoenix Award by the Southern Fandom Confederation.
Now let’s get to his fiction. I won’t claim that I’ve read all of the Well World novels, as I haven’t, but all of the ones that I have experienced have been highly entertaining. (I certainly should consider listening to least the first one to see how it holds up almost a half century on now.)
I’ll admit that I wasn’t at all keen on the Four Lords of the Diamond series. I’m just not a fan of prison planet set fiction and this one no exception. Your experience of our see may be different.
Now theThree Kings trilogy is Chalker at his very best — great characters, fantastic setting and a superb story. Another fantastic series by him is Changewinds. For a one-off, his time travel spy novel Downtiming the Night Side is a lot of pulp fun.
That’s what I like for his long fiction though I’d really to read “An Informal Biography of Scrooge McDuck” he wrote and first published on Mirage Press. It’s one of just a baker’s dozen short stories that he wrote and I think I read most of them. And could someone please explain to me what “the Nalocon Visitation” was as it has more writers credited than I can possibly listed here. Eight of his thirteen short pieces are collected in Dance Band on the Titanic though not the Scrooge McDuck piece alas.
…Beginning with “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,” the Vulcan character Saavik emerged as an intriguing component of the franchise’s ever-expanding universe. Played initially by Kirstie Alley, and then, in the next two films, by Robin Curtis, her path seemed destined to merge with Spock’s. Leaving aside the Eddie Murphy of it all, the biggest departure from Meerson and Krikes’ screenplay was the omission of an exchange between Kirk and Saavik. According to Krikes:
“There was a scene with Kirk on the bridge of the Bird of Prey. They cut out five lines where Kirk says to Saavik, ‘Have you told him yet?’ And she says, ‘No. I’m taking a maternity leave.'”
That would’ve been a bombshell development in Trekland. “That’s why she’s standing with Amanda [Grayson, Spock’s human mother] when the Bird of Prey leaves,” said Meerson. “Because Amanda knows Saavik is carrying Spock’s kid. All they did was cut out five lines of dialogue, and you lost that whole thing.”…
(13) GOLDEN GLOBES 2024. The Golden Globes 2024 nominees came out December 11. See the complete list at the link.
Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie,” a feminist phenomenon that traces its origins to toy store shelves, dominated nominations for the 2024 Golden Globe Awards. Its 10 nods makes the movie the second most-nominated in the 81-year history of the show, tying it with “Cabaret.”
Here’s a holiday recipe you probably haven’t made.
First, pour two brightly colored powders into a bowl. Then add water and mix until a dough-like substance forms. Place that into an animal-shaped baking mold, remove it and put it inside a plastic oven. Set a timer for 90 seconds; when you hear a ding, open the oven. What’s inside? A smiling stuffed animal with large, pleading eyes. Squeeze it and you’ll find that not only is its plush body warm, but it also smells like cinnamon.
Such is the alchemy of Cookeez Makery, one of the stranger toys released ahead of the holiday season this year. Combining elements of Build-A-Bear and the Easy-Bake Oven, the toy has beguiled children and adults with its ability to seemingly transform a glob of mush into a warm, dessert-scented creature resembling a dog, cat, or rabbit….
From his tiny gem store in southern New Mexico, Robert Hanseck spends his days untangling chakra beads and answering questions about the healing properties of amethyst crystals. After four decades behind the register, he has met thousands of wellness-minded tourists eager to explore the hot springs that span the region.
But he almost never sees the type of traveler he was promised would transform his small town of Truth or Consequences: space enthusiasts.
“It’s been a flop,” he said of Spaceport America, a project that was conceived as the vanguard of commercial space travel — and that has been promoted by state officials for more than two decades as a launchpad for the local economy.
Less than a mile up the road, Arthur Burger, who owns an art gallery, recounted the moment in 2021, not long after he moved to town, when he watched in awe as a rocket plane soared into the sky beyond the nearby mountain range. He remembers the resounding boom.
After years of delays, Virgin Galactic, the anchor tenant at Spaceport America, had sent its founder, Richard Branson, and a team to the edge of space — evidence at last, many in the area thought, that New Mexico was a front-runner in the commercial space race.
“That week, people came in from London, from Taipei,” Mr. Burger said. “It was surreal.”
In this stretch of rural New Mexico, there are plenty of opinions about Spaceport, a futuristic structure on a desolate stretch of desert that has cost more than $200 million in state and local funds….
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Daniel Dern, Todd Mason, Bill Higgins, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
Chair Donald Eastlake III has posted a report of the Chengdu Worldcon Site Selection Business Meeting on Facebook. (The Business Meeting Agenda is online — download the English-language version here and the Chinese-language version here.)
SITE SELECTION. The Seattle bid for 2025 was announced as the winner. See voting figures, GoHs and links to their website and PR0 here.
The Glasgow 2024 committee spoke, as did a representative of the Los Angeles in 2026 bid.
Finally, Yasser Bahjatt spoke briefly on the “Cairo” (formerly Jeddah) bid which is now suspended because they cannot get permission from the Egyptian government.
CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENTS. The remaining proposals to amend the WSFS Constitution, including several which had been sent to committee at a previous session, were brought to the floor.
The initials/numbers (“F.10”) identify agenda items (see the full original English text here.)
F.10 “Best Game Category”.
It failed to pass.
F.5 “Best Fancast Not Paying Compensation”. Eastlake explains that it —
had been referred to the two Presiding Officers to adjust the English wording to more closely parallel the Chinese version originally submitted. They reported back that the last line of new text being added (point 2) should be “was a paid professional creation”. However it was pointed out that non-professional is already a requirement from the first line of Constitution Section 3.3.15 and it was voted to revert the wording to the original English wording in the agenda.
The motion was then passed for the first time.
F.7 “Clarifying Language Requirements” and F.8 “Remove Regional Limitation”. Both proposals had been referred together to a committee that reported back a single motion (see the committee report here).
The revised motion amends 3.4.1 by striking out “English” and replacing it with “the main languages of the countries of the administering and previous year Worldcons”.
The revised motion amends 3.4.2 by striking out “United States” in two places and replacing the first instance with “countries of the administering and prior year Worldcons” and the second with a similar phrase.
The motion was then passed for the first time.
F.9 “Establishment of ASFiC”. The motion to create an Asian counterpart of the NASFiC had been referred to a committee. They returned a majority report, “Establishing RSFiC”, proposing a mechanism for creating multiple Regional Science Fiction Conventions, and also a minority report to create only the originally proposed ASFiC. (See the 3-page committee report at the links: Page 1, Page 2, Page 3.)
The minority report was accepted over the majority Committee Report.
The motion to create an ASFiC was then passed for the first time.
CONCLUSION. The Business Meeting adjourned. On Sunday the WSFS Mark Protection Committee held their annual organizational meeting.
Minutes and videos of the meetings will appear later.
(1) LUKYANENKO NOT AT WORLDCON. There’s no sign of the Chengdu Worldcon’s Russian GoH Sergey Lukyanenko in social media coverage of the con. And the latest posts to his blog on his official website (devoted to anti-Israel remarks, and a report that his wife rescued a migrating woodcock in the backyard) suggest he’s at home. Although he made two other professional visits to the Far East earlier in 2023 he hasn’t mentioned Chengdu on his blog this year.
(2) 2023 HUGO BASE. This year’s Hugo base was debuted at the Chengdu Worldcon Opening Ceremonies by Hugo Administrator Dave McCarty. Here’s a screencap from the video. There are much better closeup photos of the base at his Facebook page.
(3) CHENGDU WORLDCON SOUVENIR BOOK. The “Member Guidebook” Member Guidebook for 2023 Chengdu World Science Fiction Convention has been released. It’s a publicly available download here (PDF).
The member guidebook for the 2023 Chengdu World Science Fiction Convention is available online. The guidebook consists of the welcome message from the co-chairs, an introduction to the main venue, notes for participants, an introduction to theme activities, a brief introduction of Chengdu, and an appendix.
(4) UYGHURS REMEMBERED. Andrew Gillsmith moderated a pre-Worldcon panel for the “World Uyghur Congress” which can be viewed on X.
(5) CHENGDU WORLDCON ROUNDUP. [Item by Ersatz Culture.]
Unofficial (?) Bilibili video of the opening ceremony
This seems to have been ripped from the stream, as it has a jump near the start where the video froze for me and others and audio glitches later on. It is mostly in Chinese.
I don’t think that opening ceremony video is complete; there was a section at the end where a bunch of the VIPs came up on stage to declare the con open. Most of that is in this 2-minute video, but it also has bits chopped out for some reason.
Donald Eastlake, Kevin Standlee, Chris M. Barkley and Nicholas Whyte are amongst several Western fandom figures pictured in this Xiaohongshu photo gallery.
Kevin Standlee and Don Eastlake III. Chris BarkleyNicholas Whyte
Longer fannish reports on Weibo
(Note: in the last couple of weeks or so, Weibo has added a “Translate content” link to posts, similar to what you get for foreign language tweets on Twitter. However, for long-form posts like these, it tends to time out, so you might instead want to use any translation tools built into browsers such as Chrome to read the following links.)
For those not keen on the more commercial or “mainstream” stuff in some of the prior links, Best Fan Writer and Fanzine finalist RiverFlow has a long Weibo post going over his activities today, which included meeting various fans and pros, and being on a panel about university SF societies.
From left to right: Hua Wen, Wei Ran, Bei Yu, RiverFlow (Best Fan Writer and Best Fanzine finalist), Tian Tian, San Ma, Dan Fan.(left) Best Fan Writer finalist Arthur Liu; (middle, in blue polo shirt) Ling Shizhen, who worked on the Best Fanzine finalist, Zero Gravity SF
SF Light Year aka Adaoli, who has commented here on File 770, has also posted some long reports on Weibo, such as this one.
English language promo video from Chengdu Museum
This 6-minute English language video is for the most part covers things that are more likely to appeal to general tourists, but is framed within a time-travel story featuring the Kormo mascot, and ends with the SF museum.
Xiaohongshu videos and photo galleries
As is to be expected with the con now underway, there are loads of these out there, and there’s a lot of repetition of material. These are a fairly arbitrary selection of the ones that showed up in search results:
Various panels, with a nice text summary of the poster’s impressions if you push it through browser translation tools
(6) LE GUIN VIDEOS. Available for viewing on Literary Hub, The Journey That Matters is a series of six short videos from Arwen Curry, the director and producer of Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, a Hugo Award-nominated 2018 feature documentary about the iconic author. Here are the fifth and sixth installments.
In the fifth of the series, Theo Downes-Le Guin introduces “Where I Write,” an intimate peek into Ursula’s study and her writing process.
…Recently I viewed an online video titled “I Tried Ursula K. Le Guin’s Writing Schedule,” one of many such links. The production was snappy and well-intentioned, but the writer-presenter lost me when she described preparation of a “fancy breakfast.” The fried egg, tomato, and rocket sandwich bore no resemblance to mornings in my childhood home. Note to content creators: if you geek out on someone’s routine, do your research. Ursula wrote an entire essay about how to properly soft-boil an egg. That’s what she ate for breakfast. Not fancy.
In the final installment of the series, Julie Phillips reflects on “He’s My First Reader,” in which Ursula and her husband, Charles, discuss how their division of household labor helped Ursula thrive.
…When Ursula Kroeber met and fell in love with Charles Le Guin, their meeting, on a ship bound for France, seemed to her almost magically improbable. “Obviously this sort of thing doesn’t happen,” she wrote him six weeks after they met. “I mean, conceivably you might exist, but you would never sit at Table 30 at 2nd sitting for dinner in tourist class on the Queen Mary on Sept 23rd 1953; I ask you, now would you?”
Charles felt the same, though he didn’t recognize true love quite as quickly as she. “I thought she was awfully snooty and shy the first meals; and she thought that I was British and very reserved. But after those first misapprehensions were displaced, we have scarcely been apart at all the last month,” he wrote his parents. “How do I tell you all this without it seeming silly or impossible? It is neither—not impossible because it has happened; not silly because it is too deep and too wonderful. Ursula and I are going to be married.”…
Lately I feel like everyone is talking about masculinity and what it means to be a good dude. The other day, I was on a panel at the Pride on the Page book festival with Jacob Tobia (Sissy) who was saying that we’ve spent decades expanding gender roles for women in mainstream society — women won the right to wear pants in the workplace (for now) — but meanwhile, most men remain trapped, unable to express healthy emotions or process all of their trauma.
As someone who was so successful at being a man that I actually graduated, I want to help!
So it’s a really good thing that science fiction and fantasy offer us so many excellent examples of guys who are secure in their masculinity and ready to do the right thing, even when it’s tough….
Take for example —
11) Henry Deacon (Eureka)
In a “town full of geniuses,” Henry Deacon might just be the smartest of them all — but when this underrated show begins, he’s working as a mechanic because he has ethical objections to the work that Global Dynamics is doing. Henry isn’t just the guy who steps in and fixes things when all the out-of-control science goes off the rails, he’s also the town’s moral center. (And eventually, he becomes its mayor.) Emmy-winning actor Joe Morton, who plays Henry, also plays a resourceful, kind alien refugee in the movie The Brother From Another Planet.
(8) LARA PARKER (1938-2023). Actress Lara Parker, age 28 when she was cast as Dark Shadows’ beautiful and evil witch Angelique Bouchard Collins, died October 12. She was 84. The Deadline tribute also mentions her writing career:
…In her later years, Parker turned to writing and teaching — her novels include Angelique’s Descent (1998), The Salem Branch (2006), Wolf Moon Rising (2013) and Heiress of Collinwood (2016). The books proved popular among Dark Shadows‘ still-devoted, conventions-attending fan base, as well as devotees of romance and horror genre novels.
(9) MEMORY LANE.
1992 — [Written by Cat Eldridge from a suggestion by Mike Glyer.]
So let’s talk about Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book which is where our Beginning is from this Scroll.
It’s a novel in her series about Oxford time-traveling historians, which consists of Fire Watch, Doomsday Book, To Say Nothing of the Dog, or How We Found the Bishop’s Bird Stump and Blackout/All Clear.
It was published thirty-one years ago by Bantam Spectra with the cover art being by Tim Jacobus.
The series has an extraordinary history when it comes to awards. Fire Watch started off with a Best Novelette Hugo at ConStellation, along with winning a Nebula and being nominated for Balrog. Next up was a BSFA nomination for this novel followed by a Hugo win (a tie with with Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep) at ConFrancisco and a Nebula as well as picking up Clarke and Mythopoeic nominations.
To Say Nothing of the Dog, or How We Found the Bishop’s Bird Stump at Last won a Hugo at Aussiecon Three and also picked a Nebula nomination too.
Blackout/All Clear got a Hugo at Renovation and Nebula, plus a Campbell Memorial nomination.
So now that we’ve got those out of the way, let’s turned to the Beginning….
Mr. Dunworthy opened the door to the laboratory and his spectacles promptly steamed up.
“Am I too late?” he said, yanking them off and squinting at Mary.
“Shut the door,” she said. “I can’t hear you over the sound of those ghastly carols.”
Dunworthy closed the door, but it didn’t completely shut out the sound of “O Come, All Ye Faithful” wafting in from the quad. “Am I too late?” he said again.
Mary shook her head. “All you’ve missed is Gilchrist’s speech.” She leaned back in her chair to let Dunworthy squeeze past her into the narrow observation area. She had taken off her coat and wool hat and set them on the only other chair, along with a large shopping bag full of parcels. Her gray hair was in disarray, as if she had tried to fluff it up after taking her hat off. “A very long speech about Mediaeval’s maiden voyage in time,” she said, “and the college of Brasenose taking its rightful place as the jewel in history’s crown. Is it still raining?”
“Yes,” he said, wiping his spectacles on his muffler. He hooked the wire rims over his ears and went up to the thin-glass partition to look at the net. In the center of the laboratory was a smashed-up wagon surrounded by overturned trunks and wooden boxes. Above them hung the protective shields of the net, draped like a gauzy parachute.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born October 18, 1917 — Reynold Brown. Artist responsible for many SF film posters. His first poster was Creature from the Black Lagoon with other notable ones being Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, I Was a Teenage Werewolf and Mothra vs. Godzilla. (Died 1991.)
Born October 18, 1925 — Walter Harris. He wrote a New Avengers novel, To Catch a Rat, and novelized Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Werewolf of London. ISFDB lists four more genre novels by him, The Mistress of Downing Street, The Day I Died, The Fifth Horseman and Salvia. (Died 2019.)
Born October 18, 1944 — Katherine Kurtz, 78. Known for the Deryni series which started with Deryni Rising in 1970, and the most recent, The King’s Deryni, the final volume of The Childe Morgan Trilogy, was published several years back. As medieval historical fantasy goes, they’re damn great.
Born October 18, 1951 — Jeff Schalles, 72. Minnesota area fan who’s making the Birthday Honors because he was the camera man for Cats Laughing’s A Long Time Gone: Reunion at Minicon 50concert DVD. Cats Laughing is a band deep in genre as you can read in the Green Man review here.
Born October 18, 1964 — Charles Stross, 59. I’ve read a lot of him down the years with I think his best being the rejiggered Merchant Princes series especially the recent Empire Games and Dark State novels. Other favored works include the early Laundry Files novels and both of the Halting State novels though the second makes me cringe.
Born October 18, 1965– Kristen Britain, 58. She is writing the Green Rider series of which Green Rider was nominated for the Crawford Award and Blackveil was nominated for the David Gemmell Legend Award. It’s now a dozen novels deep.
(11) COMICS SECTION.
The Far Side — This is mainly about Mrs. Frankenstein’s monster?
(12) THAT POPEYE FILM. Daniel Dern (as a longtime fan of the movie) encourages Filers to watch “Popeye – It’s Not THAT Bad – The Insane True Story Behind the Movie”. Interesting enough. One notable item early in: the initial leads casting offer went to Dustin Hoffman (for Popeye) and Gilda Radner (for Olive Oil).
The final selections were Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall, both delightfully great… but I would still love to have seen Radner’s take on Ms. Oil, particularly playing opposite Robin Williams.
(13) DOWNLOAD VECTOR’S “CHINESE SF” ISSUE. The British Science Fiction Association opens issues of Vector to the public after about two years. The 2021 issue on Chinese SF is now available to download here.
‘ Vector 293 is a collaboration with guest editors Yen Ooi and Regina Kanyu Wang. Yen Ooi introduces the issue as well as many of its recurring concepts, such as techno-orientalism. Regina Kanyu Wang takes us through the history of women writing SF in China. Artist and curator Angela Chan interviews Beatrice Glow about her work with colonial histories and the ability of science fiction to ‘tell truthful histories and envision just futures together’ through art. The conversation about history, futures, science fiction and art continues in Dan Byrne-Smith’s interview with Gordon Cheung. Chinese SF scholars Mia Chen Ma, Frederike Schneider-Vielsäcker and Mengtian Sun offer glimpses of their recent and ongoing research. Authors Maggie Shen King (An Excess Male) and Chen Qiufan (Waste Tide) interview each other about their recent novels. Feng Zhang introduces us to the SF fandom in China, while Regina Kanuy Wang brings us up to speed with accelerating Chinese SF industry. Dev Agarwal questions the maturity of the Chinese SF blockbuster as can be judged from Shanghai Fortress and The Wandering Earth (both available on Netflix). Virginia L. Conn explores Sinofuturism, while Emily Xueni Jin delves into the implications of translating a growing body of SF work from Chinese into English. We learn about the global perspectives on Chinese SF from an illustrious panel assembled at WorldCon 2019, and about transnational speculative folklore of the Uyghur people from Sandra Unerman. Niall Harrison completes the issue with an illuminating survey of Chinese short SF in the 21st Century.’
(15) TRAILER PARK. Beacon 23 – a series coming on MGM+. The series, based on a book by Hugh Howey, is set to premiere its first two episodes on MGM+ on Sunday, November 12 at 9:00 p.m. EST/PST.
Aster (Lena Headey) and Halan (Stephan James) are drawn to Beacon 23 and face an onslaught of threats. When an object called The Artifact appears, they begin to unravel its mysteries, and develop a deep bond just in time to face a deadly AI.
The recent “ring of fire” solar eclipse looked stunning across portions of North and South America and we now have a new view of the stellar event. The Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite created the image of the eclipse on Saturday October 14, depicting the mostly blue Earth against the darkness of space, with one large patch of the planet in the shadow of the moon.
Launched in 2015, DSCOVR is a joint NASA, NOAA, and U.S. Air Force satellite. It offers a unique perspective since it is close to 1 million miles away from Earth and sits in a gravitationally stable point between the Earth and the sun called Lagrange Point 1. DSCOVR’s primary job is to monitor the solar wind in an effort to improve space weather forecasts.
A special device aboard the satellite called the Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) imager took this view of the eclipse from space. According to NASA, the sensor gives scientists frequent views of the Earth. The moon’s shadow, or umbra, is falling across the southeastern coast of Texas, near Corpus Christi….
[Thanks to Ersatz Culture, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Lise Andreasen, Daniel Dern, Steven French, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter, for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Peer.]
(1) USE THESE EMAILS FOR SUBMISSIONS TO WSFS BUSINESS MEETING. Donald Eastlake III, Presiding Officer of the 2023 WSFS Business Meeting, announced that if anyone is having trouble sending email to businessmeeting (at) chengduworldcon.com, there is an alternative email address available for the submission of new business: ChengduNewBusiness (at) pobox.com.
The general deadline for new business is September 19, Chengdu time.
(2) GET IA TO TAKE DOWN YOUR BOOKS. From the Authors Guild: “Update: How to Tell Internet Archive to Remove Your Books”. “The court’s decision in the Open Library lawsuit made it clear that making full-text copyrighted books available for free without permission is copyright infringement. Here’s how any author can demand the Internet Archive take down any titles that are still on its website.”
In March, four major publishers scored a resounding victory in their copyright lawsuit against Internet Archive and its so-called Open Library program. The court decisively ruled that Internet Archive’s practice of scanning books and making them freely available on its website is copyright infringement and does not constitute fair use. While the Authors Guild was not a party to the lawsuit, we supported the publishers throughout the litigation and welcomed the court’s clear rejection of Internet Archive’s “Controlled Digital Lending” theory.
Following the decision, the court directed the parties to propose specific steps that Internet Archive must take to remedy its infringement. The parties agreed, in a proposed consent judgment, that Internet Archive should be subject to a permanent court-ordered injunction barring it from making the publishers’ books available online. We have heard from some authors who are concerned that the injunction is limited to books in which the four publisher plaintiffs hold copyrights and does not cover books whose copyrights are owned by the author or a smaller publisher. Unfortunately, this case was not a class action, and therefore only the actual parties in the case can be bound by the court’s order. We were surprised and disappointed, however, that the court adopted Internet Archive’s proposal to limit the injunction to books that the publishers have made available in electronic form. As we explained, limiting the injunction in this way fails to recognize that the author has the right to decide in what formats they wish to make their books available, and that the market for a print book can be harmed by an unauthorized electronic edition as easily as the market for an ebook can.
But regardless of the scope of the injunction, the court’s decision on the main legal issue remains in place: Making full-text copyrighted books available for free on the open internet without permission is copyright infringement. That is just as true for books owned by self-published authors and micro publishers as it is for the books owned by the publishers in this case.
We therefore expect Internet Archive to comply with demands by authors who hold copyrights in their books (e.g., self-published authors and where rights are reverted) to take down any titles that are still on its website….
A model takedown letter and full directions are at the link.
(3) IT MEANS MORE THAN SIMPLY NAMING A CRATER. BBC Radio 4 program “Seek the Light, Out of the Shadows” is available online for the next few weeks.
Singer, story teller and seven-times Radio 2 Folk Awards winner, Karine Polwart brings together her love of science, history and the natural world.
Karine looks up into the dark for a story of discovery, diversity and the righting of a historical wrong.
When young geologist turned planetary scientist Annie Lennox surveyed the night sky of her Aberdeenshire home, little did she realise that one day she’d be giving names to landmarks on our closest neighbours in the solar system. In 2021, while studying for her PhD, Annie discovered an enormous 50km wide crater near Mercury’s southern pole. An area that had never been seen in sunlight until until the Messenger mission of 2015.
The crater’s distinctive spectral colour and shape caught her eye. As the first person to see it, Annie has the honour of naming it. An accomplished singer and harpist, Annie named it ‘Nairne’ after the 17th-century Scottish poet and songwriter Lady Carolina Nairne.
All the craters of Mercury are named after famous artists, Burns and Pushkin are there along with Bach and Boccaccio. And it was this dominance of white men that Annie wanted to challenge. The International Atstonomical Union’s naming conventions around new discoveries have proven themselves inherently sexist and exclusionary and Annie felt compelled to do waht she could to rebalance it. In her lifetime, Lady Carolina Nairne was responsible for such staples of Scottish folk singing as ‘Charlie is my darlin’ and ‘Caller Herrin’, yet she’s largely unknown, publishing much of her work anonymously or under pseudonyms. Now there is a corner of the universe that will forever be a testament to her talents.
…A bugaboo I discovered when I began collecting the books published by the otherwise exemplary Haikasoru imprint has to do with the orientation of the book’s title on the spine of the book with respect to the text inside the book. In short, if the title on the spine is right way up, I expect the words on the page to be right way up when I open the book. Opening the text to discover I am holding it upside down kicks me out of the reading experience. Haikasoru eventually stopped orienting their titles in an idiosyncratic way, yay…but until then it was a distraction.
Don’t let that stop you from running out and buying every book in the Haikasoru line. The works themselves earned their places on my shelves….
Award-winning indie publisher Levine Querido is hosting an auction to stay open as book banning takes a toll on publishers. Unfortunately, Levine Querido is exactly the type of publisher most likely to be badly impacted by the rise of book banning across the United States. This isn’t only because it’s an independent publisher with less support and resources than major publishers like HarperCollins or Penguin Random House. It also has to do with the kinds of books LQ specializes in, which feature marginalized writers and artists….
…Now the government is proposing amendments to a law that could result in detention and fines for “wearing clothing or bearing symbols in public that are detrimental to the spirit of the Chinese people and hurt the feelings of Chinese people.” What could be construed as an offense wasn’t specified.
The plan has been widely criticized, with Chinese legal scholars, journalists and businesspeople voicing their concerns over the past week. If it goes into effect, they argue, it could give the authorities the power to police anything they dislike. It would also be a big step backward in the public’s relationship with the government.
Under the rule of China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, the government has been fixated on control — how people think, what they say online and now, what they wear.
In July, an older man on a bus berated a young woman, on her way to a cosplay exposition — where people dress up as a characters from movies, books, TV shows and video games — for wearing a costume that could be considered Japanese style. A security guard at a shopping mall last month turned away a man who was dressed like a samurai. Last year, the police in the eastern city of Suzhou temporarily detained a woman for wearing a kimono.
These episodes were related to anti-Japanese sentiment instigated by the Chinese government. But the confrontations go beyond that.
Last month in Beijing, security guards cracking down on expressions of gay pride stopped people dressed in rainbow-themed clothes from entering a concert featuring the Taiwanese singer Zhang Huimei, better known as A-Mei. Also in August, people filed complaints about a concert by the Taiwanese singer Jolin Tsai because her fans displayed rainbow lights and some of the male fans dressed in what was described as “flamboyant” female clothing. Just last week the police in Shenzhen scolded a man who was livestreaming in a miniskirt. “A man wearing a skirt in public, do you think you’re positive energy?!” the police yelled at the man.
If the proposed amendments, which are open to public comment until Sept. 30, are approved by the national legislature, such incidents could result in fines of up to $680 and up to 15 days in police custody.
“The morality police is on the verge of coming out,” a lawyer named Guo Hui wrote on Weibo. “Do you think you can still make fun of Iran and Afghanistan?” People posted photos last week of Iranian and Afghan women wearing miniskirts and other Western-style clothes in the 1970s, before their countries were taken over by autocratic religious rulers.
Many people are concerned that the proposal doesn’t specify what would constitute an offense. The language it uses — clothing or symbols that are “detrimental to the spirit of the Chinese nation and hurt the feelings of the Chinese people” — tracks expressions the foreign ministry and official media use to voice their displeasure at Western countries and people. No one knows exactly what they mean.
Without a clear definition, enforcement of the law would be subject to the interpretation of individual officers….
(7) LOSCON 49 SPECIAL GUEST. Loscon 49 welcomes Robert J Sawyer as a Special Guest. The convention will be held at the LAX Marriott from November 24-26.
Rob is one of only eight writers in history — and the only Canadian — to win all three of the world’s top Science Fiction awards for best novel of the year: the Hugo, the Nebula, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. A prolific author, his most recent release is The Oppenheimer Alternative.
(8) DISNEY’S LATEST WAY TO EMPTY YOUR WALLET (OR MAYBE YOUR BANK ACCOUNT). [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Disney has announced they are releasing a Blu-ray + digital box set of 100 films. What’s the price, you ask? Well, if you ask, maybe you can’t afford it. Pre-orders start at Walmart.com later this month at a cool $1,500. “Disney will release a 100-film Blu-ray collection that includes Pixar movies” at The Verge.
Disney is releasing a 100-film Blu-ray collection on November 14th called the Disney Legacy Animated Film Collection (via The Wrap). Preorders will start on September 18th at Walmart.com, and we regret to inform you it will cost $1,500, according to The Wrap.
The collection includes movies from both Disney and Pixar, all crammed into three volumes of discs that span Disney’s entire feature film history from 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves to this year’s Elemental.
What’s really impressive is how little filler this package seems to have. Scrolling through the list that The Wrap published, it has every single movie I’d have wanted to see, like all of the Toy Story movies, both of The Incredibles, The Black Cauldron, Frankenweenie, and Robin Hood, but very few of the mediocre direct-to-video snoozers the company produced so many of over the years…
Born September 11, 1856 — Richard Ganthony. Playwright of A Message from Mars: A Story Founded on the Popular Play by Richard Ganthony which is a genre version of Dicken’s A Christmas Carol. Really, it is. Published in 1912, it was filmed twice, both times as A Message from Mars (1913 and 1921) and I’m assuming as silent movies given their dates. It would be novelized by Lester Lurgan. (Died 1924.)
Born September 11, 1929 — Björn Nyberg. A Swedish writer known largely for his Conan stories which given that he wrote just one non-Conan story makes sense. His first book in the series was The Return of Conan which was revised for publication by L. Sprague de Camp. Likewise, they later did Conan the Avenger, Conan the Victorious, Conan the Swordsman and Sagas of Conan. The latter two are available at the usual suspects. (Died 2009.)
Born September 11, 1930 — Jean-Claude Forest. He became famous when he created Barbarella, which was originally published in France in V Magazine in 1962. In 1967 it was adapted by Terry Southern and Roger Vadim and made into 1968 film of that name featuring Jane Fonda, with him acting as design consultant. It was considered an adult comic by the standards of the time. (Died 1998.)
Born September 11, 1941 — Kirby McCauley. Literary agent and editor, who as the former who represented authors such as Stephen King, George R.R. Martin and Roger Zelazny. And McCauley chaired the first World Fantasy Convention, an event he conceived with T. E. D. Klein and several others. As Editor, his works include Night Chills: Stories of Suspense,Frights, Frights 2, and Night Chills. (Died 2014.)
Born September 11, 1951 — Michael Goodwin, 72. Ahhh — Alan Dean Foster’s Commonwealth series. I know that I’ve read at least a half dozen of the novels there and really enjoyed them, so it doesn’t surprise that someone wrote a guide to it which is how we have Goodwin’s (with Robert Teague) A Guide to the Commonwealth: The Official Guide to Alan Dean Foster’s Humanx Commonwealth Universe. Unfortunately, like so many of these guides, it was done once and never updated.
Born September 11, 1952 — Sharon Lee, 71. She is the co-author with Steve Miller of the Liaden universe novels and stories which are quite excellent reading with the latest being Neogenesis. The authors have won Edward E. Smith Memorial Award for lifetime contributions to science fiction, and The Golden Duck (the Hal Clement Young Adult Award) for their Balance of Trade novel. They are deeply stocked at the usual digital suspects.
Born September 11, 1965 — Catriona (Cat) Sparks, 58. She’s manager and editor of Agog! Press with her partner, Australian horror writer Rob Hood. Winner of an astounding sixteen Ditmar Awards for writing, editing and artwork, her most recent in 2021 for Best Collected Work for Dark Harvest. She also collected one for The 21st Century Catastrophe: Hyper-capitalism and Severe Climate Change in Science Fiction. She has just one novel to date, Lotus Blue, but has an amazing amount of short stories which are quite stellar. Lotus Blue and The Bride Price are both available at the usual suspects.
Born September 11, 1970 — Colson Whitehead, 53. Winner of the Arthur Clarke C. Award for The Underground Railroad. Genre wise, he’s not a prolific writer, he’s written but two other such works, The Intuitionists and Zone One. He’s written but one piece of short genre fiction, “The Wooden Mallet”. However he’s written seven other works including John Henry Dayswhich is a really interesting look at that legend, mostly set at a contemporary festival.
(10) IT PAYS TO PAY ATTENTION. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Even when it’s not something plot-essential, a lot can go by if you aren’t listening carefully (and know the territory).
Here’s an addition to the two callouts I caught in the final two episodes of The Flash (see Item 10 in the June 17, 2023 scroll)…
In the trailer for Gen V, the upcoming spinoff of The Boys, as potential supers (in a looks-like-Professor X’s School for Mutants) suggest power-related names, one student suggests “Coagula”. Which is the cape-name (or whatever we call these) of one of the late Rachel Pollack’s characters for her run on DC’s The Doom Patrol comics (after Grant Morrison’s run). (Here’s Coagula’s Wikipedia entry.)
In celebration of “Star Trek Day,” Scott Mescudi, AKA Kid Cudi, is joining forces with Star Trek in a one-of-a-kind collaboration reflecting the “optimistic and inclusive spirit of adventure, discovery, imagination, and most importantly, hope, at the heart of the cultural phenomenon.” The collaboration will launch Star Trek’s new “Boldly Be” campaign.
Mescudi lends his lens to music with an original song inspired by Star Trek, an interactive gaming component, and a bold fashion collaboration that will launch in October. More details will be announced later….
It’s not often that the jaws of Wall Street analysts drop to the floor but late last month it happened: Nvidia, a company that makes computer chips, issued sales figures that blew the street’s collective mind. It had pulled in $13.5bn in revenue in the last quarter, which was at least $2bn more than the aforementioned financial geniuses had predicted. Suddenly, the surge in the company’s share price in May that had turned it into a trillion-dollar company made sense.
Well, up to a point, anyway. But how had a company that since 1998 – when it released the revolutionary Riva TNT video and graphics accelerator chip – had been the lodestone of gamers become worth a trillion dollars, almost overnight? The answer, oddly enough, can be found in the folk wisdom that emerged in the California gold rush of the mid-19th century, when it became clear that while few prospectors made fortunes panning for gold, the suppliers who sold them picks and shovels prospered nicely.
We’re now in another gold rush – this time centred on artificial intelligence (AI) – and Nvidia’s A100 and H100 graphical processing units (GPUs) are the picks and shovels. Immediately, everyone wants them – not just tech companies but also petro states such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Thus demand wildly exceeds supply. And just to make the squeeze really exquisite, Nvidia had astutely prebooked scarce (4-nanometre) production capacity at the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the only chip-fabrication outfit in the world that can make them, when demand was slack during the Covid-19 pandemic. So, for the time being at least, if you want to get into the AI business, you need Nvidia GPUs….
…“They had AI do my versions of Disney characters!” he exclaimed in response. “I can’t describe the feeling it gives you. It reminded me of when other cultures say, ‘Don’t take my picture because it is taking away your soul.’”
Some of the AI-generated examples included Elsa from Frozen with a pale white face and wearing a black dress while standing in what appeared to be a haunted forest, as well as Aurora from Sleeping Beauty with a similar colored face but with stitches across her cheeks and lying in a long, dark dress.
While Burton acknowledged that some of the creations were “very good,” it didn’t take away from the less-than-enjoyable feeling he got from seeing his creative style imitated.
“What it does is it sucks something from you,” he explained. “It takes something from your soul or psyche; that is very disturbing, especially if it has to do with you. It’s like a robot taking your humanity, your soul.”…
Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro isn’t much worried about artificial intelligence and its impact on making entertainment content.
It’s people that keep him up at night, evidently. “People ask if I’m worried about artificial intelligence, I say I’m worried about natural stupidity. It’s just a tool, right?” the Pinocchio and Shape of Water director said during a keynote address at the Toronto Film Festival on Friday.
“If anyone wants movies made by AI, let them get it immediately. I don’t care about people who want to be fulfilled and get something shitty, quickly,” he said, arguing that AI would succeed or die based on what people did with it creatively to bring a personal vision to a screen.
“Otherwise, why not buy a printer, print the Mona Lisa and say you made it,” del Toro said during his appearance in Toronto, which was part of the TIFF Visionaries program sponsored by The Hollywood Reporter….
(15) A GIF TO HUMANITY. Here’s a Godzilla teaser. You can watch the complete commercial on Facebook.
(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. J. Michael Straczynski pointed Facebook followers to this is a dramatization of the Amazing Spider-man #36 that is about the terrorist attacks in New York on 9/11/2001: The Black Issue 9/11.
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Steven French, William S. Higgins, Daniel Dern, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
The 2023 Chengdu Worldcon committee tweeted April 24 that it has named Ben Yalow one of three co-chairs of the convention. They have also appointed Dave McCarty, Donald Eastlake III, Randall Shepherd as Vice-Chairs.
In addition, Bill Lawhorn has become a co-division-head.
A number of other overseas fans – Colette Fozard, Nicholas Whyte, Tammy Coxen, Pablo Vazquez, and Dave McCarty – were previously announced as part of the committee in a handout distributed at the DisCon III business meeting.
Here is the committee’s latest organization chart:
CO-CHAIRS
Ben Yalow, Hongwei He, Chen Shi
HONORARY CO-CHAIR
Haijun Yao, Xiaolan Liang
VICE CHAIR
Tong Xia, Yating Wang, Yao Chen, He Huang, Feng Yang, Zhenyu Jiang, Yue Sun, Zi La, Dave McCarty, Donald Eastlake, Randall Shepherd
ADVISER
Colette Fozard, Nicholas Whyte
INTEGRATED PLANNING AND COORDINATION DIVISION
Division Head: Yating Wang, Bill Lawhorn
ARTISTIC DESIGN DIVISION
Division Head: Yue Sun
MARKETING DEVELOPMENT AND BRAND BUILDING DIVISION
Division Head: Yuxi Tan
PUBLIC RELATIONSHIP DIVISION
Division Head: Tong Xia
MEMBER SERVICES DIVISION
Division Head: Yao Chen
TRANSLATION SERVICES WORKING DIVISION
Division Head: Shuang Liang
HUGO AWARD SELECTION EXECUTIVE DIVISION
Division Head: Zhengyu Jiang, Dave McCarty
BUSINESS MEETING EXECUTIVE DIVISION
Division Head: Xue Yao
2025 CONVENTION SITE SELECTION IMPLEMENTATION DIVISION
Division Head: Chi Yao
EVENT OPERATIONS DIVISION
Division Head: Liu Yang
PUBLICITY DIVISION
Division Head: He Huang
NORTH AMERICA, EAST ASIA, EUROPE AGENT
Division Head: Feng Yang
CONVENTION SERVICE DIVISION
Division Head: TBA
Many of the overseas committee members were part of the international array of visiting writers and Worldcon runners who attended the 5th China (Chengdu) International Science Fiction Conference in 2019, including then-DisCon III co-chairs Colette Fozard and William Lawhorn, then-Chicago bid co-chair Dave McCarty, plus Ben Yalow, and Pablo M.A Vazquez who was there as a winner of the Shimmer Program’s Two-Way Exchange Fund.
To Be Fair, I Was Left Unsupervised: A Disjointed Chronicle of 79th World Science Fiction Convention, DisCon III – December 19-20, 2021
By Chris M. Barkley:
DAY FOUR
(Author’s Note: As of this writing, I misplaced all of my notes for Day Four. The things I write about here may be a bit truncated, so please bear with me with this day’s events…)
I woke up relatively early (for a Worldcon), at around 8:45 a.m. Dapperly dressed in my Chelsea FC pajamas and socks, I decide to go down to the Information Desk for the latest Dis N’ Dat newsletter for the latest news and Programming changes.
Just as I exited the elevator, I encountered Laurie Mann and Dave McCarty in deep conversation. Mr. McCarty told me that he was on his way to the Site Selection Meeting and was particularly vexed because the contest between the Chengdu and Winnipeg bids was, as of this morning, in doubt.
This was a little peculiar because under normal circumstances, the identity of the winning bid would have been leaked the previous evening by unknown sources and would have been circulating among the parties last night.
But as I inferred from my earlier conversation with Ms. Mann and Mr. McCarty, this did not happen. By now, most of you may know that the statement from Kevin Standlee a few days earlier cast the election in doubt due to what was perceived by some as an infraction of the rules regarding the lack of valid addresses by those voting for the Chengdu bid.
To my understanding of the matter, a majority of the Chengdu voters used as email address because that is how they interpreted the use of that term in China
Mr. McCarty, who is associated with the Chengdu bid, had no idea whether or not the disputed ballots would be allowed or not this morning.
Quickly realizing that either history, a controversy, or both was about to occur, I bolted to my room, got properly dressed, grabbed a tea and a protein bar and raced down to the Palladian Ballroom for the reveal.
The Site Selection Meeting had been scheduled for 9:30 a.m. but that passed by as the room slowly filled with interested parties.
Dave McCarty (center) Jared Dashoff (right) Donald Eastlake III (partial)
Vincent Docherty (center) and other Members
(L-R) Jill Eastlake, Tim Szczesuil and Dr. Perrianne Lurie
Jared Dashoff, who had “NO COMMENT!”
Arrivals to the Business Meeting 9:30 a.m.
A Package of Cookies being Distributed by John Pomeranz at the Meeting
More Cookies!
The Business Meeting Podium, L-R, Todd Dashoff, Donald Eastlake III, Janice Murphy, Linda Deneroff
The DisCon III business meeting today voted to retain the Lodestar Award and Best Series Hugo category. Both were up for a re-ratification vote before being permanently added to the WSFS Constitution.
The Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book passed by an “easy majority”.
The meeting also passed a controversial resolution advising the Site Selection administrator that he reclassify as “No Preference” votes those ballots lacking any of four pieces of information specified in the motion.
The motion was signed by two leaders of the Winnipeg in 2023 bid, bid chair Terry Fong, and vice-chair Jannie Shea.
Short Title: Required Site Selection Information
Resolved, That it is the sense of the WSFS Business Meeting that any Site Selection ballot that does not contain a Membership Number, Name, Signature, and Address that meets the country of origin’s requirements should be counted as “No Preference.”
When it came to the floor, however, Site Selection administrator Tim Szczesuil said he was requesting the meeting’s guidance. He pointed to the relevant part of the WSFS Constitution, rule 4.4.1, and said it was “somewhat ambiguous with respect to what is required of the voter.” The rule reads —
4.4.1: Site-selection ballots shall include name, signature, address, and membership-number spaces to be filled in by the voter. Each site-selection ballot shall list the options “None of the Above” and “No Preference” and provide for write-in votes, after the bidders and with equal prominence. The supporting membership rate shall be listed on all site-selection ballots.
“The way it, to me, it could be read either as the ballot is required to have four items – I think it’s the name, the address, the signature, and the member number. Or it could be that the member has to include that information on the ballot.”
Potentially, the resolution can lead to ballots lacking any of the four items not having their preference for Chengdu or Winnipeg counted toward determining the winner.
Ben Yalow spoke against the resolution, saying he considered the rule “incredibly clear” that it was about the spaces for certain information which must be on the ballot, not what the voter must fill in.
The business meeting chair Don Eastlake turned over the meeting to another officer so he could go to the floor and speak in favor of the resolution, “I do not believe we should allow anonymous or semi-anonymous people who don’t provide enough information or don’t provide a name or haven’t signed [the ballot] to affect site selection…” Dave McCarty’s comment in support of the motion was that address information is needed “to be able to tell if they are real people.”
The site selection validation process doesn’t ever take time to test voters’ residence/mail address information and make a judgment about it. The two critical factors are that the voter must have a membership in the current Worldcon, and that the payment of the site selection voting fee must clear. However, a person could do everything required to become a member of the current Worldcon, DisCon III, and still fail a 2023 site selection voting requirement. For example, Eastlake pointed out a past practice that people who fail to sign their ballots do not get their votes counted, although they still get a supporting membership in the new convention.
The business meeting passed the resolution 47-30. Because it is a resolution, it is not binding. However, since he requested it, File 770 has asked Site Selection administrator Tim Szczesuil to comment how he will apply the resolution.
OTHER BUSINESS. Kevin Standlee reports on his LiveJournal that the meeting ratified all nine of the constitutional amendments passed on from last year’s Worldcon. “These amendments were initially passed in Ireland, then technically rejected and then re-passed in New Zealand, in order to evade the problem that hardly any WSFS members could actually get to the meeting in Wellington.”
Nearly all of the proposals to change the Hugos having been shot down yesterday at LoneStarCon 3’s Preliminary Business Meeting, only one was considered at Saturday’s Main Business Meeting.
The motion to transform the Best Fan Artist Hugo into something that could also be won by “musical, dance, jewelry and costuming artists” was rejected. Voters deleted the key phrase “any visual or performance medium” then passed the remaining changes that made explicitly eligible artists whose work has appeared in a “non-professional display (including at a convention or conventions).”
The intent seems to be adding to the black-letter rules something voters were already doing, considering the creators of work displayed in convention art shows. What “non-professional” means in this context is not clearly stated. Is that “Not For Sale” art, or is art offered for purchase okay too? Is the focus then on the artist — anything displayed in an art show is okay so long as the creator doesn’t work for a living as an artist? I expect that Hugo voters will be left to make up their own minds about this, as they are in so many other areas.
Two controversial motions governing World Science Fiction Society voting rights and the minimum cost of supporting memberships, 4.1.2, No Representation Without Taxation and 4.1.3, Keep Us Together, which had prompted Seanan McGuire and others to call for opponents to turn out at the Business Meeting, ended up being referred to a committee which will make recommendations at Loncon 3 in 2014.
Rachael Acks liveblogged the meeting and attempted to capture some of the arguments made on both sides, here.
The outcome of all the items on Saturday’s agenda is reported by Kevin Standlee here.
Meantime, Jo Rhett has criticized meeting chair Donald Eastlake’s handling of the YA Hugo proposal at the Preliminary Business Meeting in a post titled The preservation of White Male Privilege at WSFS. However, after seeing his post the alleged victim wrote on Twitter “I’m the lady in question from your entry, and my version of what happened differs significantly. Come find me, let’s talk.” And said in another tweet, “I’m just touchy because people are trying to use me as a symbol of #wsfs badness and I object to that.”
Also, Chris M. Barkley, who was sharply critical of the YA Hugo’s opponents generally, singled out Donald Eastlake for thanks in in an e-mail sent to a large number of people (and File 770) —
To all those you have harassed, cajoled and went out of your way to humiliate Amy McNally and squash her new YA book proposal,
“Opinions are at best provisional hypotheses, incompletely tested. The more they are tested, after the tests are scrutinized, the more assurance we may assume, but they are never absolutes. So we must be tolerant of opposite opinions or varying opinions by the very fact of our incredulity of our own.”
— New York District Court Judge Learned Hand to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, circa 1919.
We all have opinions on the viability of a YA or Youth Book Hugo Award but we will never settle such an argument convincingly without actually testing it.
It is my belief that such a test, of two of three years, would not harm the integrity of the Hugo Awards, would be welcomed by the readers who nominate and vote on the Hugos and the YA community at large.
Change, through either growth or attrition, is the natural order of things. The pursuit of change is the primary drive of the fiction we all love. Indifference or denial of change can only lead to the death of fandom as we know it.
I encourage journeyman activists who want to foster continued change in Hugo Award categories and the WSFS constitution to press on with their efforts.
I also want to personally thank Donald Eastlake and Kevin Standlee for going out of their way to form a committee on this issue. I hope that this can be resolved in a more civil and courteous manner from this point forward.
In the meantime, I call on the Loncon committee and the winners of the 2015 Worldcon bid to strongly consider using their constitutional Special Award clauses for a YA Book award.
